The Black Coat Returns!

A few years ago I stumbled across an intriguing comic book from Ape Entertainment titled The Black Coat. The arresting cover showed what seemed to be a Revolutionary era hero wearing a mask and acting not unlike The Phantom or Zorro. But there were monsters!

I took a glance and was fascinated by the artwork of Francisco Francavilla, a guy who had a rough style but one that played with shadow and was suited perfectly to the material at hand. I picked up the few issues I could find and fell in love with the hero, the setting, the side characters, the whole shebang.

Ben Lichius is the guy who came up with the hero and he was designed by the aforementioned Francavilla, an artist who went on from Black Coat to take on Dynamite's Zorro. When Francavilla left the book I despaired, because the original four-part story left us with a cliffhanger of sorts. One issue of the sequel, another proposed four-parter appeared but then nothing, for a very long time.

A few months ago I stumbled across the second installment, beautifully packaged with the first chapter of the second art added for good measure. A new artist, Dean Kotz was on board to finish up the story and he is a worthy successor to Francavilla. A few weeks later I found the third part and just yesterday I got hold of the fourth and final part of the second storyline. It's fantastic!

The Black Coat is a fun book full of historical figures of the American Revolution like Nathan Hale and Ben Franklin. It's got robust adventure with submarines, mysterious formulas granting eternal life, seductice entranced Gypsy assassains, flying stone Gargoyles, and a mysterious League that seeks to create violence for its own ends in the colonies. This is such a large landscape that the stories we see of the Black Coat and his loyal men and women seem significant but just a part of the greater picture. Grand stuff!

I highly recommend it. Here's a link with more.

The BLACK COAT WEBSITE

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Santa Claus Conquers The Martians!

I've never watched this "classic" all the way through. I've seen snippets here and there, and the general concept of the movie I'm familiar with, but I've never actually seen it. So today, I plan to correct that weakness in my character. Wish me luck!

It's just barely possible I have a ramshackle copy of the comic book around here somewhere too, but I despair finding that right now. Sadness.


[LATER] I just finished it. It's not nearly as dreadful as I've been told. The story is a whimsical bit of froth, but harmless. The notion that the Martians want, nay need to reestablish fun as a part of their daily lives is logical and the decision to go and kidnap Santa to accomplish that is misguided but understandable. Santa in this one is a bit of a goof, but his unflagging good nature wins the day, despite hardbitten Martians who want the status quo of grimness. The outbreaks of laughter seem a bit mad, that I'll grant. Likewise the "humor" seems a bit daft, but overall this is a complete story that holds itself reasonably together. There is the dropped plot thread of the Earth astronauts who pursue the Martians, but otherwise I found few true gaffs. Now is it logical? Not a bit, but it's fun, though just a tad long. Worth my time it was.

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The Next Issue Project!

I don't buy much Image. But I made an exception a few years back when the debut issue of "The Next Issue Project" hit the stands. The idea is a clever one, put out a new "next issue" of a defunct Golden Age comic book. Get top-name creators to contribute and give the whole shebang a modern ironic twist. Sounds like fun.

The first issue was the next issue of Fantastic Comics, a Fox publication starring Samson and filled with backup features like Clip Carson, Sub Saunders, Captain Kidd, Stardust, and Space Smith. It was cleverly done, oversized as a Golden Age comic would be. Some of the pages were toned to imitate vintage pulp paper and the whole thing looked snazzy. The stories were uneven, with some offering fun spins on classic concepts and others being downright incomprehensible. The Stardust story by Mike Alred was pretty keen, as well as Tom Yeates spin on the Golden Knight.

The next issue just hit the stands, nearly two years later and it was the "next issue" of Silver Streak Comics starring Daredevil, The Claw, Captain Battle, and Silver Streak. This one was oversized too, but slimmer with fewer features, but I'll have to say they were more enjoyable. None of the stories was impossible to understand, and most were well crafted. The stories were frothy and light, almost too much so, but with talents like Alan Weiss, Erik Larsen, Paul Grist, and Michael T. Gilbert, the contents were professional. My favorite story featured The Claw of today, a corporate figure lost in the requirements of the modern world and the reality of older age.

It takes a long time for these to come out it seems. And that's good, as I don't know that I'd get them much more often than once or twice a year at most.

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A Movie Of Awesome Good!

Yesterday I watched the dvd of the vintage movie Heavy Metal. I've been on an animation tear of late, and when I found this classic at my local Wal-Mart for a mere $7, I jumped on it. I have the VHS that came out a decade ago as well as the lame sequel. But to get a dvd with commentary and the extras on this disk is well worth it.

The movie is of its time for sure. The attitudes about sex and drugs are right out of the 70's. The use of rock & roll songs in the soundtrack is fundamental, but I was struck on this viewing how little those songs really contributed for the most part. 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 book was is an open question, but the artwork was lush and published on bright paper really sizzled off the stands. I won't even pretend I got it all. The drug references often were lost on me, and much of the material hailing from Europe just sailed right over my benighted noggin.


But it was different and compelling. The movie gives us work derived from 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 include the Neverwhere of the ultra-muscular Den and the outer space of the morally bankrupt Captain Stern.


The behind-scenes commentary which is actually keyed to a preliminary print of the movie which 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 its pretty interesting in its own right. The movie is probably most famous today for the parade of voluputous women who take off their clothes but there's more complexity to this show than that. The EC story about 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. Rotoscoping is used quite a bit in the movie, and to mostly good effect.

Also on the dvd 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.

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The Ghost Of Outer Space!

Bah Humbug!

That's what I say to the TV show Space Ghost - Coast to Coast. It took an awesome hero, a mysterious man of bravery and audacity and transformed into a post-modern irony-drooling goof!

Space Ghost was the perfect pitch hero rendered by the late great Alex Toth and quickened by the animation of Hanna-Barbera. He was a truly enigmatic superhero who nonetheless cared for two orphans, like a big brother and a father to boot.

He was the very essence of sci-fi adventure. The comics about him have been mixed bags for sure, with the early efforts catching the flavor of the cartoons, but not the magic. I'll admit I've never read the elusive and expensive Gold Key one-shot, but I've seen the other H-B Gold Key outings. Then Steve Rude gave us both in his wonderful Comico one-shot. Then we had Archie getting into the act when they held the H-B license for a short time. And more recently DC gave us an "origin" for the cartoon superhero, one that seemed not to have the right tone exactly to match the mystery. It answered questions, but in a context that raised more hackles than it should have.

I've got hold of the original cartoons, and the holidays seems the perfect time to bust them out and give the original run a heady viewing.

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Warped!

Back in the 80's, when comics and I were much younger, the Independent market erupted with a vigor and a panache that made fans shudder with anticipation. New companies were popping up and new titles and characters were showing up on the stands every week. A lot of it was nonsense, but some of it was great material by pros who knew what they were doing and were just waiting the chance to strut their stuff.

Warp from First Comics is such a comic. It was the debut effort for First, which soon followed with an E-Man revival, Mike Grell's Sable, Howard Chaykin's American Flagg, and more. But Warp was the first, and it was a distinctive and well-crafted comic by Peter B. Gillis and Frank Brunner. It adapted a trio of plays which had made an impact in the 70's, and sought to bring the brash energy of the comics to the stage. The designs for the play had been done by none other than comics maestro Neal Adams. So when Brunner took on this task he was playing on ground he knew well. Blending his best Doc Strange weirdo-dimension chops with his very humanistic quasi-realism he was the perfect choice to enliven the smart Gillis script that adapted the plays. The way it's credited, I imagine Brunner broke down the story and Gillis supplied the words, a hyper-Marvel style approach, but that's speculation on my part.



The story deals with a young man named David Carson (mistakenly called "John Carter" at one point so the similarity will not be missed, the one too-too moment in the initial run) who discovers he's the lost god Lord Cumulus of Fen-Ra, a fifth-dimensional cityscape led by Lugulbanda a wizard and protected by Sargon a warrior woman, as well as some robots dubbed "Facless Ones". Soon enough Cumulus falls into the clutches of his brother Lord Chaos and his minions, a treacherous man-ape named Symax and a seductive insect queen named Valeria.


The story is divided into three three-issue arcs, each arc presumably adapting one of the three plays. In the first arc Cumulus battles Chaos, in the second they team up to battle Xander an ultra-predator brought to their world by Valeria for revenge, and in the final arc they fulfill their destiny by blending into one being called Ego, a female figure who battles Infinity and beyond.

It's high-falootin' stuff indeed. And making head or tails of it calls for complete attention. I haven't read the story in decades, but many months ago I found a pile of old Indy titles for tiny money and grabbed up a bunch. The run of Warp was in it. I read the first nine issues by Brunner which adapt the plays. The series continued for a time, but really loses its way after that initial push.

If you can find, I'd recommend them. They've not been reprinted or collected. And frankly they'd make a pretty decent package. Such extended storylines are all over these days, but back then they were still a relative rarity. And for such a coherent story by such strong talent to languish as it has, I can only assume the publishing rights are the problem.

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Spidey And "The Man"!

Here's a photo of Stan Lee reading his own work. This collection brings together a few stories by Stan and John Romita when Romita first took over for Steve Ditko, and more importantly gathers together the three stories by Stan and Gil Kane which helped bust the code with the use of a drugs in a storyline.

Of course this is staged, but it's nonetheless a great image, capturing a surprisingly vital Stan in the heyday of his fame. These days I admit I wince when I see Stan in movies or on TV, his self-conscious palaver plays too thick I think. But back in the day, when a little went a very long way, his heavy-handed methods worked much more effectively. Still, despite all his naysayers, he was "The Man" as surely as Kirby was "The King".

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