Remembering The First Kingdom by Jack Katz

"Our choice: the caves or the stars…”

Jack Katz

The First Kingdom is very special to me.

I remember discovering a copy of The Fist Kingdom: Issue One in the newsstand rack at the old Shinders that used to be on the corner of Block-E in downtown Minneapolis. It was snowing, close to Christmas-time, and I pulled the slightly crinkled copy of this weird comic/magazine thing from a box of back-issues and discount stuff. The cover was garishly colored and hyper-detailed. It caught my eye right away--I knew that this was something special. When I opened it up, I was disappointed, at first, that it was all in black-and-white. I had grown up reading ratty-edged four-color comics at the barbershop in Princeton, and I only bought color comics from Harold's Poke & Tote in Zimmerman. Here I was in the Big City and I wasn't going to buy scruffy old black-and-white junk. But I did. You see, like many another comics-nerd before me, I made the glorious mistake of actually reading the words interspersed amidst the incredible artwork of Jack Katz. There was a story to all this complicated, hybridized science fictional/sword & sorcery pageantry. A big story. One that encompassed and spanned millennia of drastic disasters, incredible marvels, and the struggles of human beings to become more than just opinionated savages. It was awesome, heady stuff. Intoxicating. It opened up vistas previously unimagined and totally unsuspected to my tender young mind. I wanted to know more.

So I added The First Kingdom to my pile which included a copy of The Fantasy Quarterly that included the very first appearance of Elfquest, some Famous Monsters of Filmland back-issues, and a copy of W. Paul Ganley's Weirdbook, which  I had only been able to get via the mail prior to that trip. My first sale of an illustration was to the very kind and considerate Mister Ganley only a year or two before. He opened the doors to a whole underground world of small-press publishers, 'zines and all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff that ran parallel to the comics, comix and stuff like Ackerman's FMOF. It meant a lot to me. It got into my blood. It still has a hold on me to this day. Thank all the gods.

 The First Kingdom was awe-inspiring stuff. I managed to collect eight or nine of the issues before it just wasn't available outside of mail-order sources and as money tightened-up as I neared High School and beyond, choices had to be made and Omni & FMOF won out over Elfquest and Eerie won out over The First Kingdom, but mostly because of the availability of Eerie down at the Zayre's in Coon Rapids, or Omni being always ready to go at the corner drug store in Elk River. For a while I subscribed to the Ackerman-zine. But, beyond a handful of tattered and fraying copies that I guarded jealously, The First Kingdom eluded me. It may have eluded my grasp, but it haunted my mind and echoed over and over again in my brain the way that something truly unique, original and wonderful does when you're a kid and you've encountered it for the very first time.

Jack Katz influenced my way of looking at things as much or more than Jack Kirby did. Not in the sense of imitating them, but in digging into the same rich source matter and seeing what I could do on my own, in my own style. I spent hundreds of hours trying to draw creatures, monsters, machines, and characters that I could make distinctly my own, the way that Katz & Kirby were able to do so effortlessly (I thought naievely). It would never do to imitate them, to do what they did. That would be just plain wrong and completely stupid as well as totally missing the point of what they did in their work. They were original. They were creators. They didn't copy--they invented. I took that to heart at an early age and have followed the path illuminated by that lamp ever since without looking back.

“Had I been permitted to continue my New Gods series, both [Jack Katz] and I would be galloping neck to neck in regions still unexplored by the average storyteller. However, the task has fallen to Jack, who is wading through a wealth of early dawns...exotic and sensual characters fill his pages with a ritualistic muralism, a pantheon format which reminds one of stately gatherings carved in stone by Grecian sculptors.”

Jack Kirby

From the introduction to

The First Kingdom #10

“The First Kingdom is an essential old-school treasure, one of the first works of art to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that comics could be for adults. It also proved that comics, like humanity, must accept no boundaries in achieving its ultimate potential.”

Treasures of the Old School

From Stone Age to Starships:

Evolving Comics with The First Kingdom

By John R. Fultz

 The First Kingdom is one of those anomalously-weird Seventies experiments with the whole notion of what a graphic novel might eventually become or look like. As far as I know, it was the first. Unique and utterly original, The First Kingdom broke new ground on a number of levels, not the least of which was having to negotiate the maze of the underground comix scene just to get distribution. There just wasn't any other way to get this serialized novel featuring loads of artwork out to the masses outside of the underground comix channels. Thankfully Bud Plant saw the gleam of genius in The First Kingdom and picked it up and tried to get it out there.

The First Kingdom is a close relation to Elfquest in that it bravely blazed an eccentric, unconventional and idiosyncratic trail out beyond the accepted boundaries of mainstream comics publishing. In Elfquest (http://www.elfquest.com/) Wendy & Richard Pini explored a Non-Tolkien-esque Fantasy that dared to include such things as sexuality, honest emotional depth, real character development (Rayek actually becomes more than just an a**hole, eventually...), family-ties, loyalty, and more. In The First Kingdom, Jack Katz explored post-cataclysmic attempts to rebuild civilization, slavery, definitions of humanity, ethics, eugenics, and a host of the sorts of things that you almost only ever find in Olaf Stapeldon novels. The concepts dealt with in The First Kingdom were complex, very deep stuff, full of thorny contradictions and philosophical implications. It required the reader to think, to engage and to look deeper, past the boobies and little monsters in the margins. It was a grown-up work of art and literature that masqueraded as a comicbook tart. It remains unchallenged in terms of the sheer scale of the story, the lush details of the art, and the overall unmitigated ambition of the one man who wrote it, drew it, and independently published it all on his own, back in a time before anyone had ever really attempted anything of the sort other than maybe William Blake. And I think that you can actually make a case for some similarities in the way that Blake and Katz approached their respective projects. Not exactly in terms of content necessarily, but definitely in quite a number of compelling ways that perhaps some scholar of the funny books might someday tackle seriously in academia.

Not only did The First Kingdom go where no one had gone before comics-wise, it managed to accomplish something that few have ever come close to matching ever since--Jack Katz spent 12 years of his life assembling and illustrating and writing his magnum opus which comprises a set of 24 over-sized black-and-white comics. Here's a sample image of one of the pages from The First Kingdom that was featured at Madinkbeard's blog:

 Wow! There are so many 2-page spreads throughout the entire run of the series that it sometimes resembles a coffee table artbook split-out into a serialized 'zine format.  The level of detail rivals the work of George Perez, but in a style that is distinctly all its own. The jam-packed panels are intense and almost give you carpal tunnel just looking at them. It is an incredible tour de force of virtuoso originality that remains a landmark in the history and development of the graphic novel as an adult and serious artistic medium. To state that The First Kingdom was groundbreaking is an understatement, it opened doors and blazed a trail that has since become increasingly well-traveled by those who have come after Mr. Katz.

No one had ever before done what Jack Katz did. He abandoned mainstream comics and devoted himself to completing what many consider to be the first real graphic novel, bringing out two issues a year until the entire series was complete. He did this independently, in a semi-underground manner. Indeed, The First Kingdom was distributed for years by Bud Plant, the foremost mail-order source for underground comix there was during the Seventies & Eighties.

The mainstream just wasn't ready for The First Kingdom, at least not in 1974.

"The function of genius is to furnish cretins with ideas twenty years later."

Louis Aragon,

"La Porte-plume,"

Traite du style, 1928

As far as many of us are concerned--I am hardly alone in this sentiment--Jack Katz was, and is, a genius.

Jack Katz Links

• The Obligatory Wikipedia Entry for Jack Katz (artist)
• Sub-section on The First Kingdom
• 6 Pages of Comic Art by Jack Katz at Wikipedia
• Official Jack Katz site
• Bio of Jack Katz
•  Jack Katz at the National Cartoonist Society
• Jack Katz at Lambiek
• The Complete Skywald Checklist--details stories/publications in which artists like Jack Katz were not credited...a practice that was all too common back in the day...
• Jack Katz was awarded the Inkpot Award in 1982
• Jack Katz created the Coraknot, which is included at the Xoology site of cryptozoological critters
• A great review/overview of The First Kingdom at Madinkbeard's blog
• A brief Bio for Jack Katz at the Marvel Wikia, including a page tallying the issues Katz did Pencils for and those he Inked while working for Marvel
• Jack Katz at Museumstuff...including a wonderful section on his Early Life & Career, a good overview of The First Kingdom, a brief note on his Later Life & Career, a section on his Awards, and a fairly decent Bibliography
• Styleskilling features Jack Katz & The First Kingdom
• Bid and if you're lucky, you might pick up some original Jack Katz artwork from the Comic Art Fans gallery & auction site
• The First Kingdom at Albris--very sparse and no pictures or details--maybe someone can fill things in a little bit better one of these days?
• This issue of Alter Ego (March, 2010) features an interview with Jack Katz...a few choice excerpts can be found here.
• The Top Ten Alternative Comic Book Series by Thom Young over at the Comics Bulletin site
• Jack Katz comics at the My Comic Book Shop site
• Scoop features Jack Katz' Legacy graphic novel
• The First Kingdom at Atomic Avenue
• The First Kingdom at Sir Real's Underground Comix Classix
• Another online Bibliography for Jack Katz at the ComicbookDB site
• Story Search results for Jack Katz at the Grand Comicbook Database site

You can purchase autographed copies of various publications by Jack Katz via the official JackKatz site, including the first two (of the four planned volumes) of the collected anthologies of The First Kingdom produced by Century/Mecca Comics.

Single copies of the original series of The First Kingdom can be purchased from Mile High Comics - or you can take your chances on eBay -- but how long these old school treasures will remain available is unknown.

Law & The Multiverse

Ever thought about the legal ramifications of some of the more off-the-wall antics of your friendly neighborhood superheroes? You know you have. When bullets ricochet off of Superman's invulnerable chest or the Health & Human Services folks look into that little matter with the kid in a birdy suit that Batman runs around with, or Homeland Security wants to discuss illegal immigration and/or a green card with a certain amazon princess--what would happen? How would this sort of stuff play-out in the Real real-world?

Well now we can finally find out. Two lawyers, James Daily (Missouri), and Ryan Davidson (Indiana) have teamed-up to create the Law & The Multiverse blog. Both are actual-factual practicing attorneys who have taken it upon themselves to sort out the various and sundry legal implications faced by various comic book superheroes on a regular basis. It's an incredibly cool look into just what would happen if this stuff were actually taking place here and now--and that makes it an incredible resource for Writers, Editors and especially Game Masters who are running scenarios for Mutants & Masterminds or some similar superhero RPG.

To quote from the Law & The Multiverse About Page:

"If there’s one thing comic book nerds like doing it’s over-thinking the smallest details.  Here we turn our attention to the hypothetical legal ramifications of comic book tropes, characters, and powers.  Just a few examples: Are mutants a protected class?  Who foots the bill when a hero damages property while fighting a villain?  What happens legally when a character comes back from the dead?"

Here are some sample posts to give you an idea of what these guys are doing:

• Supervillains and Insurance: Who's Gonna Pay for That?
•  Shapeshifting and Trial Testimony
• Superhero Privacy Rights (Part One)
• "Gadget" Superheroes and Federal Arms Control Laws

Very cool stuff. And as you would expect from a blog done by a pair of lawyers--it comes with a legal disclaimer:

On this blog we discuss fictional scenarios; nothing on this blog is legal advice.  No attorney-client relationship is created by reading the blog or writing comments, even if the authors write back.  The authors speak only for themselves, and nothing on this blog is to be considered the opinions or views of the authors’ employers.

These guys need to be on the speed-dial of every comics writer & editor (and publisher) in the business!

Mighty Samson

Mighty Samson
No longer blonde & no eye-patch,
but still kicking post-apocalyptic butt
...sort of...

Mighty Samson isn't as well known as Magnus: Robot Fighter, but he is a major-league pugilist par excellance whose stomping grounds are the irradiated and jungle-infested ruins of N'Yark some 500 years hence, give or take a millennium or whatever now that the title has been re-booted by Jim Shooter, just like Turok, Magnus and Doctor Solar have been Re-Shooter-ized.

To quote from the Dark Horse site:

Five hundred years after the end of the world, amid the ruins of a once--great city scourged by mutated monsters, marauders, and savage subhuman predators, the primitive N'Yark tribe ekes out a meager, fragile existence. But from among them rises a champion, gifted with prodigious strength--a warrior who can strike dead the most fearsome beast and stand alone against an army. Singlehandedly, he holds at bay the ravaging barbarian hordes of Jerz, thwarting the dark ambitions of beautiful, ruthless Queen Terra. At stake is the future of the world. Mighty Samson is the last, best hope of humankind.

For the first time in a quarter century, Mighty Samson returns to comics, reimagined by legendary writer Jim Shooter and illustrated by Patrick Olliffe (Untold Tales of Spider--Man, Spider--Girl, 52).

* This bonus--sized first issue includes the very first Mighty Samson story from 1964!

Publication Date: December 15, 2010

Format: FC, 48 pages

Price: $3.50

You can find the online version of the first issue of Mighty Samson (from 1964) at the wonderful Gold Key Comics blog. Yeah, it is kind of dated in some respects, but it is a lot of fun and it predates Thundarr, Kamandi, and most of those other post-apocalyptic Neo-Barbarians by a comfortable margin since Kamandi appeared in 1972, and Thundarr was an Eighties-thing. And it's a lot of fun, mostly because it doesn't take itself too seriously. At least the original series didn't waste time on such things as quasi-Biblical allusions like the re-boot does. But then, Mighty Samson always was a title that has been plagued from the get-go with cliches, thread-bare tropes, and dialogue that would make Ed Wood wince. But the painted covers were always kind of cool and very much in keeping with the Gold Key Aesthetic. And the core idea of a circus-style strongman running around in the weird wastelands of a post-apocalyptic world is just begging to be realized as something more than a parody of some mentally-stunted buffoon with Steve Reeve's biceps and none of his acting ability. Ouch.

Unfortunately, the new and not-so-improved Mighty Samson does not feel all that improved. Jim Shooter did a decent job on the recently rebooted Magnus, but with Mighty Samson it feels jumbled and rushed and confused. It could have been so much better, and Shooter really could have brought this character to life similar to how he has recently handled Turok, but instead this time out it looks like he dropped the ball.

And that's a damn shame.

Unlike most modern post-apocalyptic (post Mad Max, really) settings & stories, Mighty Samson wasn't a cynical anti-hero. He was a powerful force for right that backed it up with his considerable might. Mighty Samson was about a noble not-so barbarian who was trying to make the impossibly screwed-up world he inhabited a better place. He helped people. He defended the weak. He was a one-eyed Lone Ranger in a loincloth, eye-patch and without the revolver or even the horse. A D&D player would easily recognize Mighty Samson as a paladin. And he was a good example of how a paladin would operate in the post-apocalyptic nightmare world that is so often the domain of rogues, thieves, cut-throats and mutants.

The original Mighty Samson reminded me a lot of Andre Norton's Daybreak 2250 more than any other literary source. Though there are some major differences, the two works had a similar feel to them. Very clean-cut, very Fifties-esque. Most definitely: Safe For The Workplace.

Norton's protagonist mostly had to worry about mutant rats. Mighty Samson had an incredibly varied menagery of mutant creatures to fight each issue, and many of them didn't even have any tentacles.

My advice is to skip the reboot. Go back to the original. It wasn't broken, so much as it was--and is--very much a product of its time and probably ought to stay that way. Not everything is suited to being updated.

Look Ma--no tentacles!

Some Mighty Samson Links

• Mighty Samson at Dark Horse (So you can order direct, if necessary...)
• More Mighty Samson details at the Dark Horse blog
• A less than ecstatic review of the New Mighty Samson at Comic Book Resources
• Classic Mighty Samson Comics at Newkadia
• Newsarama had this to say about the relaunch of Mighty Samson back in September
• Classic Mighty Samson Comics at the MyComicShop site
• Classic Mighty Samson at Comic Vine
• All the Mighty Samson posts at the incredible Gold Key Comics blog (there's a lot of them!)

Hmmm...blue-skinned flying winged-people...Almuric? Nope. It's Mighty Samson.

...An Age Undreamed Of...

“Hither came Cthulhu, the Vhoorlian, be-tentacled, swollen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer and a dreamer, with cyclopean melancholies and gargantuan girth, to tread the jeweled thrones of Earth under his slimy pseudopodous feet.”

H. P. Lovecraft, The Squamous Sword of Cthulhu (unpublished), 1933.

Atlas Unified...Let's Hope It Works...

This Recent Article over at The Scoop makes the new Atlas Unified cross-over mini-series sound really interesting...
http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/public/default.asp?t=1&m=1&c=34&s=265&ai=113290

So far, I've been very disappointed with the slow pacing, clunky dialogue and sense of never really getting anywhere that has dogged the new Atlas titles...but I still hold out hope that things will start to pick up as people find their rhythm, the characters re-find their voices, and things develop some momentum. This crossover might be just what they need to get it all to start really working...

Has Anyone Seen This?

It's a graphic novel based on Edgar Rice Burrough's mostly forgotten/overlooked classic The Outlaw of Torn. Dark Horse is bringing it out, it's $12.99 soft cover & $49.99 limited edition hardcover. We love the Burroughs-ouvre and this sounds cool, but we'll wait until we can see it before we plunk down any money.

Has anyone already seen this thing? What'd you think?

Links to the original story by E. R. Burroughs:

• Project Gutenberg
• Archive.org cheated and gave us the LibriVOX stuff
• Many Books has The Outlaw of Torn
• Audio-version at LibriVOX
• Free Library has a copy for you
• The Literature Network has The Outlaw of Torn
• ERBlist also has a version of The Outlaw of Torn ready to go

The story is in the Public Domain. It's on our ERB Reading List, right after we finish the Moon Maid trilogy.

The Herculoids Next Door

The Herculoids Next Door - Work Sucks - watch more funny videos

The Stars Are Right

It's Alive

Cthulhu Ate My Comics is becoming Has Become

its own glow-in-the-dark

Cthulhu & Comics abominablog.

Old School Heretic will now resume its irregularly scheduled abnormal programming.

CamC: Cross-Gen Revived

This just in from Scoop:

Marvel Launches Crossgen Imprint in March
Marvel Comics will launch a new imprint, Crossgen, in March 2011, with two four-issue mini-series, Ruse and Sigil.

Mike Carey (Age of X) and Leonard Kirk (New Mutants) will be the creative team on Sigil #1, and Mark Waid (Stan Lee’s The Traveler) and Mirco Pierfederici (Tron: Original Movie Adaptation) will kick off Ruse #1.

You can read the rest of the Marvel Launches New Cross-Gen Imprint article at the Scoop site.

ABC News covered this matter, So has ComicsNexus, and others will no doubt get vocal as the March debute draws near. This is a fairly big deal as it involves a defunct publisher's relic-IP being zombified resurrected (and Marvel-ized! for your protection & comfort) by Marvel through the back-door of its corporate parent-company Disney. One look at this story and it is apparent to anyone with more than two functional brain cells currently in simultaneous operation that this is a very low-risk test-case scenario for Disney-Marvel. What other old, defunct, gobbled-up properties are there to be re-discovered and trotted out from deep wtihin the recesses of Disney's manifold corporate corpus?

It feels as though Disney/Marvel has been on the verge of becoming the IP-equivalent of Shub Niggurath spewing forth Revised, Revamped, Rebooted, Reconfigured, Ret-Conned and Regurgitated versions of various defunct and assimilated properties for a while now. They have been dipping into the older Atlas stuff that they inherited to develop the intriguingly off-beat quasi-Noir Agents of Atlas, they've reprised and extensively ret-Conned the Invaders (mostly to good effect, though Blazing Skull is NOT Ghost Rider...he's a Tulpa, DUH!) and there are other examples of this sort of thing, too many to fully catalog. DC is doing the same things with Red Circle (which they've assimilated after dropping the Impact line), etc. Maybe it's a competition? Could it be some sort of strange comic book arms-race of obscure and defunct titles/characters being resucitated and sent out to compete in the marketplace-arena of modern comics fandom. It's also a very old, time-honored and integral practice within comics publishing. As one publisher absorbed the defunct, stunned or stone-dead husk of another publisher, they have rebooted and incorporated any of those older characters into the 'current' line-up as they saw fit. Consider Fawcett's characters like Captain Marvel, or Charlton's Blue Beetle or Captain Atom in the DC universe. Look at how DC has brought back a DC-ified relaunch of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. It's an absolutely fascinating ongoing process of tulpa-like evolution and memetic-exchange and re-discovery. Heck, the Blue Beetle had already been handed-off between at least three different publishers before he landed at DC, so at least he's used to this sort of thing.

Shared universes aren't all that new of an idea, and the comics industry has been exploring some rather interesting approaches to reconciling the collision and assimilation/integration of parallel universes and inherited characters for decades now.

What I find most compelling and intriguing about this ongoing cycle of integration and amalgamation is the way it is all managed and directed and driven by market forces, not the creative process. This is a blatant intrusion of economics into the mythosphere and we've pretty much all just taken it for granted. Ho hum. So some obscure nitwit in tights used to be featured in stories put out by this company or that now-defunct publisher and now they're the property of some other company. Yawn. Who cares? Maybe someone ought to care. Like Rupert Murdoch did for news, a few megacorps are swallowing-up the remnants of the past and while they are at it, they are making substantial land-grabs of otherwise Public Domain characters. Older, neglected and lost characters are getting revised by the corporate titans so that they can establish and defend a trademark on characters that they have no more claim to than you or I...but once they have Their Trademarked Version of these characters, it effectively puts a major chill on anyone else's use or devleopment of them. It blocks other expressions, other versions, and makes the process of using these legacy properties/characters more of a mine-field than is ethical, reasonable or right. These are often the same people who preach the gospel of the so-called Free Market and Nonintervention by 'Big Government', despite their lobbying for extensions, protections and special treatment any time it looks like the Copyright Law might finally apply to them. But we can let the rhetoric/non-politics hang. There's work to be done, opportunities to go develop and Amazingly Cool Things to Do.

Companies that have built their fortunes upon the Public Domain ought to respect the source from which their wealth has come and respect the Public Domain. But Disney absolutely does not respect the Public Domain, despite having pilfered it ruthlessly and often from the very beginnings of Walt's non-union shop. It is just plain wrong to base your work on the Public Domain and then prevent anyone else from doing the same in return to your works. I'll refrain from invoking Steamboat Willy. This is a topic that used to get me steamed. Now it's something that I find engages my problem-solving tendencies along fun and potentially productive avenues. Why get het-up when you can do something about it? Look at what Dynamite is doing with Public Domain characters in their incredible Project Superpowers projects like at this Squidoo page, Wikia, or Wikipedia. Things are far from grim. If anything, there's more opportunity to delve into the Public Domain in a really big way now, more than ever before. Besides, time is on the side of the Public Domain. Even Disney will one day find it no longer cost-effective to legally game the system. But that's a tangent, and we can come back to it another day.

Getting back on track with the whole CrossGen/Marvel thing, this reminds me of how DC has been integrating a lot of their inherited properties of late, like the Phantom Lady and Uncle Sam. Over at Wikipedia, you can find a list of Quality, Fawcett & Charlton Characters Who Have Not Appeared in DC Comics Yet. Consider it a checklist that DC editorial will no doubt be examining for ideas soon enough.

It isn't just DC and Marvel that ahve been mining the Obscure and the Forgotten-- Moonstone, Boom! , AC and Dynamite have been bringing back older, often forgotten characters. Some of these are more successful than others, such as the enjoyableThe Last Phantom series from Dynamite. Despite the 'Last' in the title, maybe there's a chance we'll finally see a black Phantom before the next millennium? Who knows. There's a black Heimdall in Thor, so maybe some measure of progress is taking place after all...after a fashion...so to speak...

DC has also incorporated Eisner's The Spirt, Doc Savage, and The Shadow into their universe. Which is not new, either, as both Marvel and DC (as well as Gold Key, Street & Smith, Skylark, Millennium & Dark Horse) have done their own comic book re-interpretations of both Doc Savage and The Shadow over the years. It can get confusing, but there is a wonderful flowchart that maps out how things migrate from Copyrighted to Public Domain that might help out a little. If you care. Which I do.

So. CrossGen is coming back. More or less. This is akin in many respects to the Return of Atlas. Maybe it's a trend? Nah. It's busienss as usual in the Comics Industry, and that makes it all the more interesting and just plain weird all at once. Do petty godlings sit around boardroom tables discussing the relaunch of previously Ragnaroked universes? They do in the Comics Biz. Regularly and often.

What Once Was...

And What Will Be...

and...

Some CrossGen Links

• CrossGen at MyComicShop
•  A site featuring a ton of CrossGen covers
• Crossgen Comics site ...which appears to be just a placeholder. Maybe Marvel-Disney need to get their digital ducks in a row, or perhaps they let the domain lapse. I wonder if they'll make an offer or send in the lawyers?
• CrossGen at the Big Comicbook Database
• A nicely nostalgic article on the Pre-Marvel/Disney CrossGen
• Former CrossGen creators speak out
• Marvel Exec Tom Brevoort: Marvel to reimagine CrossGen properties
• CrossGen Picelist at Top Shelf Comics, for an example--watch those prices now that a new and Marvelified CrossGen is coming...just like how Atlas has seen a slight bump in collector-value...

Jess Nevins is a Superhero

Jess Nevins is a Scholar. He's the type of Bibliophile & Pop-Cultural Scholar that would be right at home in Riskail, and I mean that in the best possible way. His work in Annotating various comic book series such as Kingdom Come led into his compiling a series of in-depth Annotations for Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neil's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which in turn led to the publication of his annotations (plus some essays, a great introduction and an interview with Alan Moore as well) as Heroes & Monsters . A second volume, A Blazing World, was likewise compiled from Nevin's erudite annotations and informed ruminations concerning the League's Second Series. He has also gone on to annotate The Black Dossier in his Impossible Territories, and Century: 1910, which is an on-going project that you can find here.

If you want a quick idea of just how formidable a task it is that Nevins took on in annotating the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, take a look at this list of the literary characters appearing in these 'funny-books.'

But that's just one example/project. Jess Nevin has also compiled a very thorough and eminently readable & enjoyable essay on Timely Comics, the shop that became Atlas and then Marvel. He has also expanded upon that essay with a number of follow-up essays on many of the classic and criminally neglected Timely Comics Characters such as The Blue Blaze, The American Avenger, Dakor The Magician, The Invisible Man, Hercules, The Thin Man, The Black Widow, Merzah The Mystic, The Black Marvel, and even Sub-Earth Man. Whew. And there's more. Like the 3Xs, but that's enough for now. Fascinating stuff. The Thin Man isn't Nick Charles, he's a super-scientist from a happy valley in the Himalayas who can turn himself super thin to get into places ordinary guys can't. Oh and he has a beautiful assistant named Oalla who helps him out. Likewise the Timely Comics' Black Widow isn't a Russian spy who bears an uncanny resemblance to Scarlett Johanssen, but rather is the "...strangest, most terrifying character in action picture magazines - the Black Widow. You've heard of the black widow spider - that evil creature whose bite spells doom. Now start the adventures of another black widow - a human tool of Satan whose very touch means death." Yeah. You read it. They wrote it. This is a character that I definitely want to learn more about, and probably would never have learned about at all if it hadn't been for Jess Nevins--Superhero Scholar and Librarian of the Lost Antiquities of Pop Literature. Ah the Golden Age of Comics, the more I learn about it, the more I come to realize just how short-changed we've been thanks to corporate myopia and greed...but that's a topic for another day, another post.

But there's much, much more. Jess Nevins has also done a great deal of research and annotation involving the Golden Age Superheroes and the Pre-Fantastic Four #1 Superheroes of Marvel Comics (The comics Giant that grew out of Timely above...).  He offers you a glimpse into the forgotten and buried secret history of the Blazing Skull, Dynamic Man, The Eternal Brain, KaZar (before he became a hippy), and Vagabond & the Fighting Hobo (Both of whom sound like off-beat heroes that you might meet in The City), amongst many, many others. (Some of whom overlap with the aforementioned Timely characters, being in fact direct continuations or revisions of those earlier superheroes--comics, especially older comics, are more than a little cannibalistic as well as incestuous.) There is even a page devoted to the Lost Generation of Marvel heroes active prior to the Fantastic Four's fateful (and all-too-often-and-Badly-RetConned) rocket-trip. You can find more details on the Lost generation characters here.

He has also has contributed some rather intriguing things to the Wold Newton Universe community such as the priceless You Weren't Nuthin' But A Hound Dog essay that really throws the WNU to the dogs by speculating on the canine descendants of a bitch irradiated by the meteor that set all of the WNU into motion in 1795. You can find a set of links to Nevin's WNU essays here. The essays on The Carters of Virginia: A Tragedy and Reach For Yuh Genealogical Charts, Stranger are really well-done. It is especially weird and wonderful to consider the implications of John Carter (Warlord of Mars) being related to Randolph Carter (the Silver Key wielding Dream-master from HPL's tales).  It certainly is one way to make a Statement. Nevins is also a contributor to the Win Scott Eckert edited anthology of P. J. Farmer WNU-focused parascholarship Myths for a Modern Age.

Have you ever heard of Captain Mors aka der Luftpirat? You can find out about this forgotten hero of the German Dime-Novels of the Early Twentieth-Century. In some respects he gives a German spin on Verne's Robur the Conquerer (with some Robin Hood style quasi-socialism) and might even be considered a distinct predecessor to Perry Rhodan. His adventures were far-ranging to say the least, extending out unto the rest of our solar system and possibly beyond in at least 165 installments, most of which remain in German. The dime-novel series featuring Captian Mors was very possibly the first Science Fiction magazine, but that's an argument for Scholars to settle with their swords. In the meantime, you can check out one of the two E-Text versions of Captain Mor's adventures here, thanks to Jess Nevins (and Justin Gilbert who translated it over from the German). Like Perry Rhodan and Dray Prescott, there is a great deal of this stuff that is trapped in German language just begging to be translated and unleashed upon an otherwise unsuspecting English-reading audience...

If you are at all interested in doing research into Literature, Art, Books, Comics, Maps, Medieval Stuff, History, or Role Playing (amongst many other things), Jess Nevins provides pages upon pages of links and references for you to make use of including his exceptional list of Reference Texts. And yes, I realize that his page of Role-Playing links is a bit out of date, but with all the stuff this guy has going on, that's perfectly understandable, and besides, it's still a very extensive list that is worth investigating. The Anarchy & Espionage page is perhaps my favorite of the bunch, but that's because it is the most appropriate to the next few Riskail posts. You can find a directory-list of Jess Nevins assorted Bookmarks here. It's quite a lot of resources, so you'll definitely want to bookmark it yourself.

Nevins has also built an Online Directory to Golden Age Heroes that offers a listing of just about every known Golden Age Hero from 1935-1949, all arranged from A to Z and navigated via the little box on the upper left. This is an incredible treasure-trove of obscure, esoteric and mostly forgotten information sure to help others in their research efforts. It's a handy reference for digging back through the accumulated data-debris in order to look up or locate obscure old characters that might have fallen not only into obscurity, but the Public Domain. Alternative sites in this area include The Mystery Men & Mystery Women Encyclopedia, Hero Goggles' Golden Age Superhero and Villain Encyclopedia, Cash Gorman's Golden Age Encyclopedia, Mikel Midnight's Golden Age Directory, and others whom I hope to get to in the near future. And of course there is Jeff Rovin's amazing Encyclopedia of Super Heroes. You might also want to check out Lev Gleasons' Comics Page for a bunch more Golden Age links.

If you're a fan of the classic superhero Lee Falk's Phantom then you might want to check out these posts over at Nevins' No Fear of the Future blog: Painted by Pygmies, and The Color Purple (as rendered in black newspaper ink).  He also maintains a Livejournal that is simply fascinating, if you are interested in the market shares of the old Pulps from back in their hey day, which I actually am. All those numbers came out of the process of assembling The Pulp Magazine Holding Directory, which is about as rampant a bit of nerdistry as you can shake a stick at, but it's damn cool...to anyone really, really interested in the Pulps.

You can also find a wonderful article at io9 by Jess Nevins that details the development of Science Fiction from out of the Pulps.

And if you are interested in the Pulp and Adventure Heroes of the Pre-War Years then you need to go here. Right now. No fooling. Jess Nevins has compiled another incredible collection of Heroes dragged from the cold wreckage of the earliest days of the Pulp and Adventure magazine days, all of it alphabetized, annotated and presented as a wonderful jumping-off point for really diving into this are of the Pop Cultural Underworld/Wasteland for days on end.

Then there's the vast amount of Fantastic Victoriana stuff that Jess Nevins has likewise compiled, annotated and converted into an Encyclopedia of the Fantastic Victoriana. The site offers you a wealth of incredible, well-researched and fun essays that range from A to Z.  He has also included at this site a detailed list of links for researching the Fantastic Victoriana all for yourself--a true gift to every would-be steampunk and Victoriaphile out there.

Is this the end for Jess Nevins? Not by a long shot. But it is the end of this post.

Heavy Metal Thunder on the Horizon

Thor looks like fun. I admit to drastically lowered expectations going into this, but step by step that they've raised the bar a bit each time I've read about the pre-production process, and I've gone from a very reluctant 'let's get it over with,' to actually wanting to see this movie. I wasn't worried whether or not they'd ever get the character 'right,' just that they'd make the movie actually interesting and worth watching. Thor, the Marvel Comics Thor, is a character that has had a lot of false starts and been plagued by a lot of bad creative choices or just plain uninspired mishandling. This trailer seems suitably mythic and epic and heck, they've even tossed-in the Destroyer, so it will have at least one really good fight, one hopes...

Flash Grell?

Mike Grell has signed-on as Editor-in-Chief for Ardden Entertainment.
Just imagine what Mike Grell might do with Arrden's refurbished reboot of Flash Gordon...if anyone in comics today has a clue about what to do with a property like Flash Gordon, it'd be Mr. Grell.

Mike Grell's reinterpretation of Alex Raymond's classic Witch Queen of Mongo would be awesome.  I'm just saying.

Plus, as Editor-in-Chief, Mike Grell now has the entire Atlas roster to work with and revitalize.  Now that's exciting news to anyone who cares about them funny books.  It's alsoa majorly encouraging sign that Ardden has added The Destructor, Tiger Man, Scorpion and some other classic character's names/logos to their Atlas page, so those characters might just have a shot at getting revised, rebooted and released just like Phoenix, Grim Ghost and Wulf.

Wow.

It doesn't get any cooler than that, does it?

Yeah it does--We could be writing the new Destructor comic.

That'd be even cooler...

Tin Tin in Innsmouth

(As you can see, version 2-B has effectively won...unless a lot more votes suddenly appear...)

Tin Tin is a much-beloved Belgian comics character who has been all around the world on various adventures for decades now.  Peter Jackson is working on a Tin Tin movie.  Everyone in the world knows about Tin Tin except maybe most of the population of the United States, which is weird.  Tin Tin is cool.  If you don't know Tin Tin, take a few minutes to check it out.

Here are a few quick Tin Tin links:

• The Official Tin Tin site
• Wikipedia on the various flavors of Tin Tin and on the Character of Tin Tin
• Wikipedia on The Adventures of Tin Tin
• The Tintinologist Fan-site
• Lambiek on Tin Tin
• Some thoughts on the Tin Tin movie from a dedicated fan (includes pictures from Empire magazine)
• A blog devoted to the Trailer of the Tin Tin movie--markerters & publicists have funny jobs
• A site that is better at presenting information on the Tin Tin movie than the above graphical pile of Tin Tin-esque vomit

You can also look up Tin Tin or Search Amazon.com for tintin, or consult Google Books, and the usual sites.  And that's cool, but it's not this:

Grim Reviewer shows off a few more of these wonderful Tin Tin/H. P. Lovecraft mash-ups at their blog.  You can also cut to the chase and go right straight tothe artist Murray Groat's site and see what else he's up to...besides paininting some of the most awesome Comics/Graphic Novel covers for stories taht we may well never see...Tin Tin in Rlyeh is very cool and Tin Tin At The Mountains of Madness really cracks me up.  You can see some of the covers here at ComicsAlliance.  My personal favorite has to be:

Now if only someone would actually write these stories to go along with these great covers...

Which do you prefer?

Since we've been doing a lot of research into comics as part of the last few month's workload, we've decided to make that sort of stuff easier to find/avoid as you will.  One step towards this effort is establishing a regular feature: Cthulhu Ate My Comics, wich will kick-off later this week.  Below are two versions of the header image for the new feature.  Which one do you prefer?  We'll set up a poll along the righthand sidebar to collect reader votes.

Version One (No Seafood):

Version Two (Extra Tentacles):

Or The REVISED Version 2.B:

So, which one do you prefer?

Bela Lugosi is Dead, and Monsterverse Has Him...



Bela Lugosi's Tales From The Grave

You can hear Peter Murphy crooning sinisterly in the background, or at least you could if you clicked here or hit the play button down below to the left a bit.  Ah Bauhaus.  The good old days.




Monsterverse is a fresh new alternative comics publisher that is reviving and resurrecting the genre of old school Horror Comics like EC, Warren and a lot of other Pre-Comics Code publishers used to crank out long ago and far away.  You can find out a bit more about them here, Read their blog, or watch a Preview or a teaser-clip for the recently released Bela Lugosi's Tales From the Grave, which is available here.  Issue one features a beautiful portrait of Lugosi as Dracula by Basil Gogos himself.  They also feature Reprints of Famous Monsters of Filmland on the Monsterverse Store-page, which is very cool.

Bela Lugosi died August 16, 1956 after a memorable career in the movies that hit its peak with Tod Browning's Dracula in 1931...and arguably hit its nadir with his involvement in Ed Wood's gloriously terrible Plan Nine From Outer Space, though that point could be argued by hardcore Lugosi-fans, depending how they feel about some of the other less than awesome roleshe had to take on in order to make a living. It is Lugosi's performance in Dracula for which most people remember him, and this is for good reason.  Just watch the classic trailer:



Some Suitably Macabre Bela Lugosi Links
Bela's page at Findagrave
Bela at Findadeath
Bela Lugosi Bio at the NY Times site -- Full Biography is here, a filmography is here
A nice Fan Site for Lugosi, including another filmography, just in case
Lugosi at the International Movie Database site
The obligatory Bela Lugosi Wikipedia entry
Lugosi at AllMovie
Lugosi at the Internet Broadway Database
Info on the Stage Production of Dracula at the IBD site
More info on Lugosi at a site that is mostly in Hungarian
Biofile page on Bela Lugosi
Lugosi at Rather Grim Tales
Lugosi at Netflix
Some Bela Lugosi Quotes
Lugosi at The Pit
Lugosi Bio at the Who2 site
Bela at NNDB

"I have never met a vampire personally, but I don't know what might happen tomorrow."

Bela Lugosi

2-Minute Call of Cthulhu

OMG--now no one will ever have to read the actual story--maybe that's a good thing...
(Insert maniacal laughter here)

This is a wonderful re-telling of the classic tale--I can't wait to show it to my daughter.  She'll probably roll her eyes in disdain/disgust.  Fifteen is like that.

Running a little bit late on the current crop of posts, but since they've taken a while to put together, there's no sense in rushing things now.  One or two more days won't hurt anything.  Unless the stars suddenly go all right and all R'Lyeh breaks loose.

Humor and HPL: A Sampling of YouTube Madness from Inmate93

http://penderghastasylum.blogspot.com/2009/08/getting-started.html

Humor and the, oops, that's The Mythos do not mix--or so some people have declared, ranted and proclaimed.  Plush Cthulhu, Kovalic's My Little Cthulhu, the Little Gloomies Carl Cthulhu are all seen by some as a sort of sign of an impending HPLocalypse or something I guess.  Several folks have decried such things as somehow trivializing the Great Old Ones or diminishing the horror-quotient of the squishy-gellid-squamous blasphemies from beyond time and space.  Maybe they just don't appreciate the paradoxical juxtaposition of horror and humor, but all that is required is to hear a lunatic laugh and all becomes quite clear and cogent let me assure you.  It's nowhere near as paradoxical as it might seem on the unspeakable face of it.  HPL wrote about the fears lurking in the heart of an uptight xenophobic racist ultra-conservative prude who feared modernity and lusted after sterile, dessicated quasi-Victorian hyper-intellectual fabrications of How Things Ought To Be (but aren't ever going to).  He was the sort of guy who might well have masturbated over (the personal acquisition i.e. conquest of) rare books, with gloves, with the lights off.  Then he'd eat a big bowl of ice cream and get back to writing another long, long letter with the same hand, though he would probably remove the glove. Probably. I won't even get into the asexual versus homophobe/repressed gayness argument, though the whole squishy tentacle-faced squid-beast lurking under the sea symbolism fairly speaks for itself, even if you find Freud more freaktacular and weird than HPL.  Hillbilly-cultists babbling prehuman blasphemies ain't the only pervert in-breeders, you know.  Ick.  The horror of it all...

"I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me."

The Tomb, by H.P. Lovecraft

Honestly, how anyone can take the horror-fiction of HPL seriously is beyond me, but the Mythos as a shared sandbox we can all mess about in to our various respective black-heart's delight, like a passle of disrespectful alley-cats in the moonlight, that is frikkin' awesome and a lot of fun.  Trying to bring the scary back into HPL's stuff is a good challenge, but few have managed to pull it off.  Most of the time things simply descend into gross-ness and puerile nonsense.  A lot of it is funny without meaning to be, and in this age of sparkly vampires and well-groomed domesticated-lycanthropes maybe HPL's miscengenation tales and pre-Unabomber technoloathing fables have lost a lot of whatever charge they once carried...maybe.  But maybe not.

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

I double-dare you to say that three times fast...with a straight face...

In a Mythos dominated by a blind, idiot god writhing at the center of the universe surrounded by the patron saints of couch potatoes and reality programming, humor definitely has a place in The Mythos.  But what is that place exactly?  Is it quite what we might imagine it to be, or are we being lulled into a false sense of security?  Is it really funny, or is the laughter more of a nervous release, the kind that occurs when confronted by terrible things that just cannot be processed, let alone accepted by the conscious mind?

It's an interesting, even intriguing notion...

Here are a few of my favorite HPL-spoofs and Lovecraftian Parodies from YouTube:

• The Love Craft.  A short spoof of the classic Seventies TV-show The Love Boat, only now with Cthulhu as the special guest star.  Asenath Waite as the Cruise Director was a stroke of genius.  And it has Charo.  Cthulhu+Charo=Priceless Soul-Shattering Horror.
• Elder Sign.  Absolutely one of the best Lovecraft-spoofs ever done at YouTube.  The Plumber's matter-of-fact delivery is spot-on and the whole mock-ad is definitely quite a bit funnier than anything the old gent ever wrote himself.  It's a classic, like the phony Myth-Os cereal-ad, both of which have been around for a while, but are worth a chuckle.
• Carol of the Old Ones.  Wow.  Absolutely one of the best HPL-spoofs ever committed in the name of the Old Ones--and it's just one of a whole slew of blasphemous carols collected together on a CD available via the HPLovecraft Historical Society.  This just went to the top of my Must-Get List.  A couple of other examples: Death To The World, Awake Ye Scary Great Old Ones, Freddy The Red-Brained Mi-Go...
• Reanimator Versus Sin City.  Incredible editing work turns clips from these two movies into one very creepy faux-trailer.  It really gets you thinking about what Frank Miller might do with some of HPL's stuff...and this guy's mash-up of Herbert West taking on Ash of the Evil Dead movies is also pretty well done, though the Herbert West: Benny Hill clip is a little funnier...
• Cthulhu's Clues.  Blues Clues meets the Mythos.  Yeah.  What can you really say?  It was apparently a reaction to the Cthulhu Lego clip.
• For the HPL-inclined Troma-fans there is LoveCracked: The Movie from Biffjuggernaut...which looks equal parts gross and funny...in a decidedly Troma-esque manner, which is obviously an acquired taste, like cannibalism sudoku puzzles.  This is a fun project that thankfully doesn't take itself too seriously and deserves a bit wider distribution beyond Innsmouth, Arkham and points East.  If you like the trailer enough, you can get a copy of the whole thing via amazon.  It's cheap.  Take that however you will...
• The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu.  Ouch. Funny, well-done, but you can hear HPL turning over in his grave...which reminds me of My Little Cthulhu and Cutethulhu...which brings this particular list to an appropriate end, with the Old Gent himself beating his skull against his coffin-lid in disgust.

Some people prefer to debate the merits of humor and whether it has any place in the, ahem, The Mythos?  Apparently it most certainly does, whether anyone approves of it or not. It's all around us.  Practically ubiquitous. You could say that it squirms around like slimy tentacles behind the scenes all over the place, lurking and waiting for the opportunity to spill forth inappropriately or grotesquely, in some of the weirdest, strangest, most unlikely places.  Whatever one's personal opinion on the matter, Mythos-derived/inspired  humor is a reality, a fact of life. Just as HPL deftly skewered the old tropes and conventions of Horror and developed his ambiguous, anomalous, squamous and insidious modern mythology to replace the out-moded and tawdry remnants of lingering folklore that once actually frightened grown-ups (consider the cases of Peter Plogojowitz or Peter Stumpp, or Urban Grandier, for examples), now, in turn, his own tropes, conventions and so forth are showing signs of wear, tear and the stretchmarks associated with having to adapt to radically different social conditions than anything HPL imagined as likely or possible. 

Or is that really the case?

Stop for a moment and consider this; the proliferation of spoofs and parodies rooted in HPL's synthetic mythology may really be more of an indication that we've passed the threshold he feared, that we've entered into the End Times predicted by Dread Cthulhu's demented prophets and inbred cultists alike.  Didn't the old Gent himself write that:

"The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return."

The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft

Where once serial killers were inextricably wound-up in the folklore of Lycanthropy, which they may or may not have inspired, a man who has knives jutting from his hands isn't just the latest incarnation of the boogeyman anymore, he's also a psychopathic superhero and one of the most notorious real-world serial killers of all time was himself a clown.  A clown.  Who says that humor has no place in The Mythos?  We can laugh all we want at the octopus in the room, but in the end, Cthulhu laughs last and loudest because, like a literary STD, HPL's Mythos has managed to infect just about every and all aspects of our popular culture and that is the most pervasive, insidious, and all-too-real horror of them all.  It kinda makes me want to laugh...