Argosy's Blazing Comics!

The Argosy comic book line (if you want to call it that) is one of the most bewildering I've ever come across. We begin with the Blazing Comics G-8 and his Battle Aces #1 featuring the story of "Grun the Primeval". There is never an explanation why Grun is primeval or why he's green. This is a flip comic with a Web-Man back up story on the reverse. 

The cover is by Tim Truman and is an homage to an issue of G-8 and his Battle Aces from 1940 titled "The Green Scourge of the Sky Raiders", and having not read that issue I can only assume Grun is original to that book. I don't remember buying this one, but no doubt it was because of the interior artwork of Sam Glanzman. The story is by Chuck Dixon. This team produces both stories in this issue. 

(Sam Glanzman)

What we have is a twenty-one-page story in which G-8 and his allies battle Grun and injure him. He is then sent by his superiors to work with a mad scientist named Krueger who has invented a lightning gun which Grum makes use of once before it is destroyed by G-8. Surviving his plane crash, Grun is captured by G-8, but then escapes in a mindless fog and returns to the scientist's lair. There Grun wanders through a time machine and disappears for a moment or two much to Krueger's chagrin. When he returns his wits (such as they are) have returned but now he has no memory of the events which have just taken place or where he went in time. 

It turns out that Grun traveled through time to the then present day of 1991 and confronted Web-Man, a superhero spun off from Argosy's very violent The Spider. The Spider's Web starring Web-Man is the title of this section. The story is titled "The Web of Time". Web-Man is really a young man named Rick Worth and his friends with Eva Zane who happens to be the daughter of the scientist Dr. Leonard T. Zane. Zane figures out that Grun is from the past and works to return him while Grun shows up and takes Eva hostage, but is saved when Web-Man fires his "Weblee" gun which disgorges sticky webs. Grun has disappeared in a flash of light (to return to the past) and while trying to free Eva, Rick brushes her breast which embarrasses him but she seems to enjoy. The almost kiss when her Dad shows up. 

We would have to wait two years until 1993 for the sequel which is titled Web-Man #1 (and Time Warrior as the back up on the flip side). Chuck Dixon returns as the writer, but the artist is Greg Luzniak, who draws in the wildly popular (at the time) style of Image Comics. The lead story has two big villains, a French masked man named Vermillion and Dr. Kraken, a villain who has deadly tentacles. Rick Worth is on the outs with Eva but still has hopes and she for her part is partial to Web-Man. In the course of their crimes Vermillion and Kraken capture Eva but she is saved when another "hero" named Blue Steel shows up. He seems to be a Punisher rip-off just as the creators are trying to make Web-Man as much like Spider-Man as they can. The two villains escape but their plot is foiled. 

The back up story for a series titled Time Warrior is titled "The Face of Time" and begins with Grun back in the skies of WWI where he encounters a man who looks much like him save for the green skin. This turns out to be a story Grun is telling his psychiatrist who looks a lot like Freud. Grun is grounded and sent to work with Dr. Krueger who sends him to meet up with Albert Einstein. Later two characters named Stahlmaske and Razorfist, the Scourge of the Cossacks show up at Krueger's lab and confront Grun before getting sent into the time machine. This seems to send Grun into time as well, but as the story ends we are not sure. And sadly we will never learn more, but it does set up the premise that Grun now can travel through time whenever he encounters a big electrical charge. 

The next comic in the Argosy series doesn't show up until later that same year but now Web-Man is called The Spider and the comic is drawn by Gray Morrow. A new writer named Jason Daly takes the helm. The cover is by Greg Luzniak and Bob Wiacek who also produced a two-page "super action" poster inside the issue. The title seems to be The Spider Presents Quiver. 

(Gray Morrow)

"Quiver in the Night" begins with the Spider in the morgue where he confronts to villains before finding Eva on a slab as naked as the day she was born. How she got there is unexplained. The Spider takes Eva with him and in the car offers her an old Web-Man outfit to cover her nakedness. She puts that on, including the mask and the Weblee gun for some reason as well. Then we enter her dream where she is confronted by a killer named the Pumpkin Man who turns people into pumpkins. She awakens and feels the need to summon Web-Man and with a strange green light in her eyes goes on the prowl. Pumpkin Man kills a few more people such as television cook, a mugger, and two newlyweds before he is tracked down by our new heroine. She snaps out of her trance and lets him go. The comic closes with several page of Luzniak art from the earlier Web-man issue and has a back cover which names our new heroine "Quiver", though the story never actually does that. 

Now we skip forward to 2002 and a book titled A Gene Colan Film Starring The Spider. This is a weird wordless graphic story developed from Colan's pencil art which takes us into the subways of NYC where the Spider encounters a strange Bat-Man creature and attempts to stop him with blazing automatic firepower. He fails but as the segment ends does manage to snag the flying creature with a line and is whisked down the subway tunnel. Meanwhile a subway car appears with trapped people and it seems to be operated by The Spider's foe The Kraken. 

(Gene Colan)

And that's pretty much it. There are two pages of Gray Morrow artwork featuring a fetching babe which doesn't seem to connect to anything, and we get a reprint of first chapter of the Spider story "Death Reign of the Vampire King" which apparently is the source material for Colan's work here. (I'll have more on this novel in a later post.) The story is credited to Jason Daly though there is not a single word uttered in this page yarn other than the girl saying "Gasp. Hang on!". This is one of the weirdest books I own but it's not without its charms. Gene Colan was a master, and this sequence showcases his ability to tell a story. 

Also out about this same time was The Spider #1 Sneak  Preview Webman which features a Gene Colan cover with a redesigned Webman along with the Kraken and Vermillion. Beneath this cover though is a reprint of the Dixon and Luzniak story from 1993. 

These are strange comics spread over several years but they are near totality of the output for Argosy Comics save for some material produced in the last ten years which I don't have. I bought all of these in the second-hand market and it wasn't for the story. Artists like Glanzman, Morrow, and Colan always get my attention, even on bizarre material like this. I don't recommend these really, but they are strange enough to hold the interest. 

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