Heavy Metal - A Step Beyond Science Fiction!

Heavy Metal is absolutely a movie of its time. The attitudes about sex and drugs are right out of the 70's. The use of rock and roll songs in the soundtrack is fundamental, but I was struck on this viewing how little those songs really contributed for the most par to the storytelling. The soundtrack was very quiet, and often disappeared as I focused on the stories. Heavy Metal of course purported to offer more "adult" themes and images to a comic audience looking for some fresh material. How "adult" the magazine was, is an open question, but it sure wasn't for kids. The artwork was lush and published on bright paper really which sizzled off the stands. I won't even pretend I grokked it all at the time. The drug references often were lost on me, and much of the material hailing from Europe just sailed right over my benighted parochial noggin.

But it was different, and it was compelling. The movie gives us material derived from the works of Rich Corben, Berni Wrightson, Angus McKie, and the late Dan O'Bannon. The Loc-Nar, a green globe/gem is pure evil, and its incarnate voice tells of times and places when man fell victim to its evil. Those times included the "Neverwhere" of Rich Corben's ultra-muscular and over-sexed Den, and the outer space of Bernie Wrightson's morally bankrupt Captain Stern. The voices are to a great degree supplied by Second City comedy actors like the late John Candy who plays Den, and Eugene Levy. John Vernon's voice shows up. 

The behind-scenes commentary which is actually keyed to a preliminary print of the movie is made up of early animation attempts, storyboards, and whatnot gives a lot of great info about the movie and its development. For instance, the contributions of Mike Ploog, Howie Chaykin and Neal Adams are identified. I didn't know Adams had anything to do with this movie.

There's also some stuff that got cut out of the original, and it's pretty interesting in its own right. The movie is probably most famous today for the parade of voluptuous women who take off their clothes but there's more complexity to this show than that. The EC story about a WWII bomber that is overcome by zombies is a great little tale, as is the adventure of Tarna, a silent woman evocative of Clint Eastwood's Man-With-No-Name who seeks revenge and justice for a fallen society.

The old-style animation is fun, and in our modern world of computers it's always refreshing to hear how they solved these problems in more hands-on ways. Rotoscoping is used quite a bit in the movie, and to mostly good effect. Also, on the disk is a gallery of Heavy Metal covers and lots of production art as well as a behind-the-scenes documentary. All in all, a good movie, and a very excellent DVD, especially for less than the price of a modern movie ticket.

To get a glimpse of the Den section of the movie check out this link.

More on Rich Corben's Den tomorrow. 

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Creepy Presents Richard Corben!

Richard Corben was unique. I'm not aware of anyone who created art that looked like his, and to be honest I cannot fathom what his inspirations were. The earliest artwork from the pages of Creepy and Eerie in this tome are classic in style, but feature Corben's distinctive flair for anatomy which compressed the world in oddball ways. The later examples though showcase some of the most mind-blowing artwork produced in the Bronze Age, art with a lush three-dimensional quality which was unseen in any other venue at that time.

(This is my favorite Corben cover for obvious reasons.)

Corben also drew some of the most voluptuous people ever committed to the page. His women are wet dreams, big and gifted with full an ample bosoms and equally ample asses and are often quite willing to run about in such a way as to maximize the reader's ability to see that ampleness. But Corben was rarely sexist in that his men were likewise extreme examples of virility, often portrayed with manhood which beggared belief. This unaffected celebration of the human body, and the bizarre exaggeration of it makes Corben's work singular. This is the largest of these single-talent collections to come from Dark Horse and it offers some fascinating stories, all with art that dazzles. Above is my absolute favorite Corben image. To read and enjoy Corben's very first story for Warren titled "Frozen Beauty" check out this link. 

Here are some more of Corben's Warren covers contained in this collection. 

This is just the beginning. There is more great Corben to come. 

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Atlas-Seaboard Magazines - 1975!

Jeff Jones

Boris Vallejo

Ernie Colon

Neal Adams

Pujolar

George Torjussen
In addition to the avalanche of color comics, Atlas-Seaboard rolled out several B&W magazines during that hectic year of 1975. Tales of the Macabre and Devilina were straight up horror books in the tradition of Warren and later Marvel. Thrilling Adventure Stories was a bit different, a book featuring a range of stories as the title suggested of a more broadly adventurous nature. Tiger-Man debuted in TAS before getting his own color comic book. There are good stories by Frank Thorne, Jack Sparling, Jerry Grandenetti, and even a wonderful story by the Manhunter team of Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson.

The covers for the Atlas-Seaboard comic magazines were a pretty scattershot affair. There is the superb Jeff Jones piece for the debut of Tales of the Macabre followed by a solid Boris effort on issue two, in that early part of his career when his textures were still interesting.


Devilina sported a debut cover by some guy named Pujolar which had later did service as a Vampirella cover some years later (an ironic switch for sure) and then for the second issue a George Torjussen effort that really tore up the expectations. That cover is sexy and weird at the same time. Torjussen has expressed a low regard for this cover, but I think it's fabulous.

Ernie Colon's artwork on the first issue of Thrilling Adventure Stories was decent and necessarily muddled, but Neal Adams really showed up strong on the second issue. There sure is no effort to affect a house style with these covers. I had to gather these up years later, as the magazines slipped by me during the summer of 1975 originally. They are worth the effort.

Harryhausen's Cyclops by Greg Theakston

Doctor Zaius by Greg Theakston

Phantom of the Opera by George Torjussen

The Thing by George Torjussen

I gathered these Atlas-Seaboard gems up many years ago. As Famous Monsters of Filmland knockoffs go, these are really good ones. The first issue bears a December date and might well be the first Atlas-Seaboard publication, though that's suspect.

Greg Theakston, he of Pure Imagination Publishing fame and creator of the process of "Theakstonization" for cleaning up smudge and dirty comic pages, turns in two really evocative images for issues one and two. I especially like the Cyclops, the misbegotten but very memorable monster from Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad epic.

George Torjussen though really knocks it out of the park with his two paintings, especially the final one featuring The Thing from Outer Space. That's a fantastic image, and Torjussen has related how he had to watch the movie on late night television to remember what The Thing looked like. He sure did though, giving us a real insight into the shadowing invader.

I'm closing off my current look back at Atlas-Seaboard with these last two publications, neither of which I have nor have ever seen in person.

Above is Gothic Romances a one-time only magazine that hoped to add women to the Atlas-Seaboard reading audience, despite all the content appealing to boys and men they published otherwise. It features a fantastic painted cover by Elaine Duillo, artwork used again on a novel entitled The Conservatory written by Phyllis Hastings.

There are a few bits of spot artwork by Howie Chaykin, Ernie Colon, and Neal Adams in this book, but it's really not a comic book, though a collectible for diehard Atlas-Seaboard fans for sure.

My Secret is another magazine, more recently identified as part of the Atlas-Seaboard cache, but this despite its evocative Marvelesque cover image has no comics content whatsoever according to reports.

And that wraps up my year long look back at the summer of 1975, when a new kid showed up on the block, but who quickly got knocked down because of a combination of poor management and a weak economy. Though the Atlas-Seaboard material shows up in foreign formats sometimes, the rights to it still remain locked up as far as I know.

The stuff is still pretty cheap on the back issue market, save for a few gems like those above. But this material like the stuff from Tower Comics and Skywald Comics would make for some great reprints, and I suspect might well find an audience today.  

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Atlas-Seaboard Comics - October 1975!

We have reached the end. Atlas-Seaboard, a fledgling company with veteran publishers, veteran talent, and at least early on a hefty pocketbook, made a big impact in 1975. They offered all kinds of titles in all kinds of genres, but by the end of the year they would be gone. There is only one book with an October date.

PHOENIX THE PROTECTOR #4 is an ironic choice as Atlas-Seaboard's final publication. The final Phoenix story is another attempt to revise the original, and it's not a very good effort really. The artwork by Ric Estrada and Frank Giacoia is perfectly okay, but lacked the edgy spontaneity of the Sal Amendola work that had graced the first three issues. The story by Gary Friedrich offers our hero in a fit of despair attempting to kill himself by flying into the air and overloading his spacesuit. Before his desperate plan can work, aliens (not the Deiei, other aliens) known as The Protectors beam him aboard their spaceship and his wounds are attended to by a gaggle of lovely space-chicks. His wounds bandage and his face transformed, he confronted by a tribunal of overly-dressed aliens (all more or less humanoid, though the script at times seems to suggest otherwise) who inform Ed Tyler the Deiei worked for them, and now that they have failed the Earth problem has defaulted to them. (For the record there are two short scenes that tie up apparent loose ends from the previous plot line, but it's not clear if we're supposed to see Ed's wife and boss again.) Our hero has been chosen it seems to salvage the Earth's behind by doing his hero thing, and to help him they outfit him with new gimmicks and a new outfit. After his new gear is on, but before he's had a chance to test-drive it, he's beamed to a battleground of some sort where he confronts a cyclops. After a slow start, he eventually beats his opponent and proceeds to take on this new task as savior. The final panel shows our hero, renamed the Protector, staring out toward the reader, his face in calm repose, accepting of his fate.

And that's it.


The Atlas-Seaboard company disappears into the comics mist alongside Fawcett, Fox, Tower, Centaur, Skywald and so many others. The company was an oddball blend of hubris, experience, and striking naivete. I remember wanting more than anything for them to succeed, but by the end I was ready for it to be over. The promise was wasted, and the books had drifted far from their original concepts. Thanks to those who have followed me down this particular memory lane to this point. 

But we're not quite done yet.  I'll be taking a few glimpses at the Black and White line-up from Atlas-Seaboard this month and put a bow on the proceedings.  

A bit more to come later today. 

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Octobris!

This October has turned into celebrations of two great talents. The first is Rich Corben who started out his career in the underground of comix but soon migrated to the more respectable (if not necessarily better) comic books and comic magazines when his talent became obvious to one and all. Currently Dark Horse is reprinting his famous Den saga and this month I will examine the first four volumes as well as other vibrant Corben offerings. That includes some more traditional Corben horror set up as Halloween itself nears.

The second great talent is Fritz Leiber, a grandmaster of science fiction and the creator of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (that's them in the bottom right corner), the most urbane and sophisticated "heroes" in an extraordinarily weird world in the sword and sorcery genre. We'll take another long look at the complete bizarre saga.  I love this mismatched but exceedingly dynamic duo, and I have to make a journey to Nehwon every so often, just to remind myself of its splendid quality.  And I'd love to slip in a few other classic Leiber novels if I can get the chance. 

Also on tap is Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John or John the Balladeer, created by Wellman for the pages of Weird Tales. I've long wanted to read these strange and dark stories of the man with the silver-stringed guitar, and will get my chance this month, with the short stories. These are tasty supernatural tales set in the mountains of Appalachia, an environment I was reared in. Very much looking forward to these yarns. 

The Jim Henson Company is most famous for The Muppets of course, but I'd like to take a gander at two of the company's darker creations, the fantasy films The Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. Both of these films were made when movies were still mostly done on the stage or in camera. 

Warren Magazines created a batch of truly weird heroes. One of the most successful was Hunter and the sequel Hunter II. Jim Warren's outfit was responsible for getting some work from across the pond published for the first time in the United States, albeit with some changes. Hope to get around to some of those such as El Cid and Dax the Damned. Some of these have been collected by Dark Horse over the years. 

The Web of Horror was a short-lived magazine during the heyday of other horror mags like Creepy and Eerie. A lot of great young talent broke out in these pages. The magazine ran just three issues but four were prepared and finally Fantagraphics has reprinted them with lots of extras. I've been waiting all year to dive into this tome, and now is the month. 

That leaves time for a few other items to toss in, such as wrapping up my year-long look at Atlas-Seaboard. The company which burst onto the scene with so much promise and vigor gave up the ghost before the chill of the year had settled in. The last few comics and a look at their magazine line-up as well.

Also, I haven't forgotten about the great Neal Adams who I have been celebrating all year long. Look for some outstanding stuff from him a as this Halloween month shambles along. I've jammed in all sorts of surprises. 

Look for lots of creepy things, stuff with a sword and sorcery tilt. It's not so much traditional horror this year at the Dojo, but something a bit different. And who knows what else I'll find a way to fit in. It's a celebration of the weird and the unusual. And that's got Halloween written all over it. 

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