Dark Horse’s ambitious reprint program for the Marvel Comics’ books based on the works of Robert E. Howard has been one of my favorite things about living in the Golden Age of Reprints. The Chronicles of Conan (19 volumes to date) have proven that nobody wrote a better Conan comic than Roy Thomas. The last five volumes of the Chronicles series have not featured any Thomas scripts, and they’ve been purchased because I’m a completist and for the John Buscema art, and certainly not for any reading pleasure. I’m gonna be brutally honest: J.M. DeMatteis’ stories are terrible, and Bruce Jones and Michael Fleischer have no understanding of what makes Conan an epic character, nor do they have any grasp of the Hyborean world. I actually gritted my teeth buying volume 19, and two months later I still haven’t finished reading the eight stories (about 200 pages) within. By comparison, I read those 500 page Savage Sword of Conan reprints in one sitting, or eight beers.

This week’s release of The Chronicles of King Volume 1 didn’t even last two beers, and I couldn’t be happier. Roy Thomas script + John Buscema/Ernie Chan art = Conan brilliance. REH only wrote one story in which Conan was a king, and it does not appear in this book. That frees Roy from re-telling a story the hardcore fans already know and love, and allows him and Big John to flex their own creative muscles. OK, this early in the run (issues 1 through 5), Roy was adapting pastiche novels written by L. Sprague De Camp, Lin Carter and Bjorn Nyberg, who each have their problems as storytellers but are all essentially conversant in the pulp format (strangely, the solicitation for this volume on Dark Horse’s website claims “King Conan is based on a series of five short stories by Robert E. Howard, originally published in Weird Tales,” despite the credits obviously proving otherwise.) They were all students of REH, which means no Cimmerian Olympics or medieval English towns doubling as Cimmeria, a la Bruce Jones.

Instead we get a 50-something Conan, father of three and faithful husband, crossing half the world with his oldest son, Conn, to slay the evil wizard Thoth-Amon. Not having a King Conan comic available for the past 20 years, I had forgotten how enjoyable the father/son dynamic was between Conan and Conn. Conn’s eagerness to impress his father (and his hero), his stubbornness and his naiveté (both of which echo that of the younger Conan we all know and love from the first two years of the book) are balanced by Conan’s grim experience, his lovable hard-headedness and his unabashed pride in his son. The image of a bloodied Conan armed only with a cudgel walking into Hyperboria to save Conn is not something REH wrote, but it’s something he could have written. The same goes for the ending of that particular story, in which Conan loudly corrects his vassal, Prospero, that the Hyperboreans were not just fighting him, they were “fighting me and my son, Prospero. AND MY SON!” There’s the defiant, battle-mad barbarian and proud father I know and love.

All of this has me very excited for the impending creative switch on Dark Horse’s Conan title. Roy Thomas is slated to take over scripting the book, which will jump forward in Conan’s career; Hopefully, we get a Conan book that’s not re-doing REH’s stories, but features Roy writing new tales in the style of REH. I’ve enjoyed Timothy Truman’s work on the title, but I don’t want to see another version of “Queen of the Black Coast,” not by anybody. In fact, if it was up to me, I’d have Thomas writing and Truman doing the art for this new Conan; Truman, more than anyone since Big John Buscema, has captured the primal essence of everyone’s favorite Cimmerian. His art on Conan: Songs of the Dead is my favorite “modern” depiction of the character, and I’d love to see Truman take over the monthly art chores. Especially with Roy Thomas scripting.

-Paul

This particular week was arguably the finest haul I’ve pulled in months, not because everything is so great, but because so many of them teetered back and forth on the precipice of greatness. I think that’s a realistic goal for comics; they’re not all going to be New Gods, or whatever it is you feel is the pinnacle of the art form. But to have a sizable pile of weekly titles be just a shade under brilliant, well, that’s a healthy development.

Having said that, both the second installment of Marvel Masterworks’ Silver Surfer series and Dark Horse’s first volume of King Conan reprints (originally Marvel) came out this week, and those two books are so far on the other side of brilliant that they’re exempted from this exercise and will most likely be dealt with in separate posts — that King Conan is the way and the light as far as Dark Horse’s current Conan series goes.

You know what else is brilliant? Jonathan Hickman’s Fantastic Four #582. We’ve got future Franklin and future Val helping Nathaniel Richards (Reed calls him daddy) kill off the last of all the other time-jumping Nathaniel Richardses (SPOILER ALERT: College-age Victor von Doom totally kills a guy with a mace, and that is like catnip to this comic kitty) and some table-setting for the impending death of The Thing. Oh, it’s not definite that Ben Grimm is the one getting whacked, but I’ve begun mentally preparing for the worst. Ben has been portrayed as nothing more than borderline useless comic relief for the past six months, and I’ve formulated a whole list of reasons why he’s the minus one in Fantastic Three (bottom line: he’s the only non-blood relation in the FF family, and Jonathan Hickman wants to make me cry). There’s a subtle hint dropped that it may be Johnny, but I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it, because I’m a pessimist. If you’re not reading FF right now, I highly recommend you pick up this month’s issue so you’re hooked before the “big run” begins next month; that way you can say you were there when Jonathan Hickman killed a part of my childhood. OK, that sounded much more negative than I intended, but hey — pessimism. This is the best superhero book going right now, but it’s going to tear my guts out in three months, and I’m still excited by it.

Green Arrow #3 is surprisingly good this month. I like the whole “Ollie Queen is a radical liberal who wants to help common people” thing that’s been a hallmark of the character since the O’Neill/Adams run in the late 60s, but in the past decade that’s been nothing more than window dressing. He’s a billionaire! He’s a bad father! He’s a better father! He’s a leader of some sort of weird arrow team! He’s the mayor! Well, now he’s nothing but a Robin Hood dude in this mystical forest that erupted in Star City that’s really a bad metaphor for Hurricane Katrina/New Orleans, and after two bland issues, we’re seeing actual forward progress in the area of plot. I could do without the aforementioned metaphor, but if J.T. Krul and Diogenes Neves are really serious about Ollie teaming up with Sir Galahad (yes, really!), well, I’m officially intrigued to see where this is going. There’s still some exceptionally stock character and plot points going on (there’s a shadow version of Ollie that he fights in a hallucination — or is it? *mouth fart*), but I’ll allow it in the interest of curiosity.

Speaking of stock characters, Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden’s Baltimore: The Plague Ships gives us a hard-bitten, burly guy who fights supernatural creatures of Germanic origin with his fists, some guns and moxie — let’s save the suspense and just say “We’ve seen it.” Artist Ben Stenbeck is no Mike Mignola (or Guy Davis, for that matter), and I firmly believe Mignola’s stories stand or fall on the basis of the art; if it ain’t Mignola doing the art, it’s gonna be uphill. However, I am not immune to the lure of a pulp story told well, and Mignola has a feel for pulp. There’s some excitement, some mystery and electrified vampires in a Zeppelin — I liked just writing that sentence, imagine how much I enjoyed seeing it depicted. For a first issue, pretty good.

Garth Ennis wraps up this cycle of Battlefields: Motherland with this week’s issue, and I was surprised by both the hopeful tenor of the ending and one particular page of dialogue. Russian fighter pilot Anna Kharkova is up against the Nazi invasion of her homeland, the machinations of the Secret Police and her own tentative emotional awakening for her commanding officer. Complex, right? Comic books are awesome in the right hands. But anyway — in one page, Colonel Golovyachev lays out the insanity of war, the unquenchable hope of desperation, humanity’s need to find love no matter how bad things look, the compelling power of patriotism and the price of sacrifice. “If we survive (the war), our hearts will break. But I believe we’ll win,” he tells Anna.

Alan Vega, the singer for the band Suicide once said, “We wanted to call the band ‘Life’ but nobody would come see us.” I think Garth Ennis had the same suspicion about this book, and so he named it Battlefields just to confuse the simple-minded, because this book is more about the value and glory of life than it is about the glory of war.

If Battlefields is the bright center of the comic universe this week, Tank Girl: Hairy Heroes is the planet that it’s farthest from. Crass, stuffed with firearms and senseless violence, not above cheap jokes and general depravity — yes indeed, writer Alan C. Martin and the impeccably-named Rufus Dayglo have not just revived Tank Girl, they’ve restored her to glory. Dayglo packs each page with sight-gags and in-jokes, Martin continues to spin absolutely ridiculous stories about hundreds of Tank Girl clones overrunning a tropical island, and TG and her mutant kangaroo pal Booga escaping a tight situation thanks to the tiny bazooka in Booga’s pants. This is pure, unadulterated anarchy writ large, and there’s never enough of that in comics, or in the world for that matter. Sure, I want deeply-textured character development and sweeping plots from my comics, but I also want to laugh. Maybe it’s just the tail end of a tough couple weeks in the real world, but nothing delighted me as much as Tank Girl. Easily the best thing I read this week, and the fact that the title of the story only makes sense when you see the art on the title page (stashed at the back of the book, of course), well, this is exactly the sort of perverse (*wink*) trick at which Martin and Dayglo excel.

I think I’m in love.

-Paul

As I write this, during the aftermath of the massive sale we had this weekend, I realize that I haven’t really had time to process anything big in the pop culture universe that Star Clipper is apart of. What, with all the preparation for the Japanese Festival and the awesome sale, I just haven’t had the time. But as I sit here, typing…stalling… It finally hits me for what I want to talk about. And what I want to talk about is Junji Ito!

Now, some of you, who frequent our manga section, might recognize that name from the books that have weird covers on them. You might also have noticed that it’s hard for us to keep his work in stock. The man’s work goes out of print like clockwork. But that didn’t stop me from picking up some of his anthology sets. In particular, I picked up the Museum of Horror Volumes 1 & 2. These are the entirety of Ito’s “Tomie” stories. You’ve heard of Tomie right? It’s the one about the girl who drives dudes crazy, then they hack her to pieces, only for her to come back from death… Again and again and again… You’d think that the stories would get old after the first few, but no. They don’t. And as you work your way from the older stories to the newer ones, the imagery just gets creepier and creepier. At one point in one of the stories, there was a clusterfudge of a situation in this old guy’s house. You see, the original owner had been locked away in a cage or something, while this other dude pretended to be the old guy. The “fake” old guy was running experiments on young women with Tomie’s cells, which mostly resulted in the girls turning into another Tomie. However, the “real” old guy’s daughter was experimented on and I guess she died… Kinda… The girl became an onryo (like the ghosts in The Ring or The Grudge) but her body became a massive mess of various Tomie bodies merged together and I guess, a giant worm. So… yeah, the house had an angry ghost, a mindless beast, a couple of hostages, an insane guy, and Tomie. It was awesome.

I think it’s safe to say, that I am now officially a fan of Junji Ito. However, it would appear that I’ve waited way too long to become his fan. Like I mentioned before, a lot of his work tends to go out of print. I recall a buddy of mine, Raymond, was telling me to read Uzumaki for like… I don’t know, ten years… I just couldn’t imagine what was so scary about spirals. But, after reading the Tomie stories, I’m sure the guy figured out how to make them scary. But I also long to read Gyo. I saw a toy that was based off of what was probably a major spoiler in the book, but it looked so freakin’ cool. So, I’m on a quest now. I WILL hunt down Ito’s translated work, and I WILL read it. I’m also waiting on a box set of movies based off of his work as well. Apparently, playing the role of Tomie is a coveted role for Japanese actresses, so… There’s gotta be something about his work that’s appealing for everyone, right? That’s it for now, see ya next time.

-Fleet

Hoo-boy. The Marauders were kind of a breath of fresh air when they appeared way back in Uncanny X-Men 211. Here were all-new villains with new powers and unknown capabilities, and hey, is that an Eskimo throwing harpoons?

It is.

Yeah, that air didn’t stay so fresh. These guys were essentially an update of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, with a perhaps too-generous helping of racial insensitivity.
But still, Scalphunter, the unfortunately-named Native American of the bunch, actually had a rather cool innovation: His outfit was covered with the components to make any sort of firearm from a dinky little handgun up to a sizable cannon. His mutant power allowed him to whip up the right gun for the job lickety-split, which he then used with ruthless efficiency. Well, he killed some Morlocks at any rate.

What makes him interesting — aside from the fact that the Marvel database claims he’s 6′6″ and 175 pounds, which are scarecrow-type proportions — is that his clothing is the gun, or the raw materials for the guns if we’re being picky. It makes me wonder why he didn’t maximize his clothing potential, with a hat and scarf — the more he wears, the more heavily armed he becomes. Look at those boots he’s wearing — it’s not like he’s a slave to fashion.

Also, Scalphunter represents the leading edge of the “firearms appearing in the X-Men, and comics in general, with regularity” trend. Sure, the Hellfire Club’s minions were all armed, but they were cannon fodder — this held true throughout comics for a long time. Nobody who wanted to be taken as a seriously threatening super villain grabbed a gun and went after a superhero; you needed a superpower to challenge them. Scalphunter kinda-sorta changes the game a little bit. There was an element of superpower to him, but when it came right down to it, he was willing to face off against Cyclops not with superspeed or invulnerability, but with a regular old hail of lead. We’re so very close to Cable and all those other gun-swinging mofos when we get to Scalphunter.

And just like at every other point in American history, the Native American — the original — gets bumped to the shadows while a white man takes center stage.
Go ahead, Scalphunter — shoot Cable in the ass next time you see him.

-Paul