Kull The King!

I've always liked Kull. Robert E. Howard's other sword and sorcery hero, the prototype to the much more financially successful Conan is at once the same and different from his more famous glowering brother-creation. He is a King, and with that comes age and maturity and a greater comfort with the supernatural than Conan ever displayed. Conan as King of Aquilonia is familiar with dark magic but it still makes him bristle, while Kull battling black magic always was opposed but never quite dismayed by it. Kull was a bit more learned perhaps than Conan, at least I always imagined it so. Kull's Atlantis was less barbaric by a small bit than Conan's Cimmeria maybe.



When Conan became something of a hit for Mighty Marvel they of course looked for more of the same. The published comics featuring Gullivar of Mars, Thongor of Lemuria, and even a few Brak the Barbarian stories. But far and away the most successful second banana to Conan was Kull who helmed his own series for several years, though it was a tough slog.


Kull debuted in Creatures on the Loose #10 in a short story adaptation featuring some luscious artwork by Berni Wrightson. Off that he got his own title with scripts by Roy Thomas and art by Ross Andru and Wally Wood. But that team didn't last as Thomas stayed a bit but the art was taken on by the brother-sister act of Marie and John Severin. Marie offered up some muscular pencils in the brawny Marvel style while John inked them in a way that evoked more classic comics like the work of Hal Foster and others. The synthesis of these two was remarkable and made for good comics. Gerry Conway took over for Roy after a short time (as he did on almost all the comics at some point) and Kull rumbled along with a hiatus here and there. The sale weren't great so a reboot was done bringing in Mike Ploog, but eventually even this lost momentum and Kull became a sidebar in the B&W line.


Dark Horse is now putting out those vintage Marvel comics and I've long wanted a good trade version of the great Serverin issues to sit alongside my Conans. And this one does that, though I have to say the artwork was not as clean as I'd have hoped. Maybe it's the original materials but the work seems a bit muddy to me compared to the other volumes Dark Horse has reproduced. The stories are still great though, and they offered up many fine moments of pleasure and dallied with the trade for a few days.

Good read, and recommended.

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A Spirited Read!

This is maybe my favorite cover-inside-a-cover image. Timmy the Timid Ghost is quite frightened it seems by the second issue of Ghostly Tales, at the time a new title for Charlton. Great bit of cross promotion here.

The Timmy cover is by Jon D'Agostino and the Ghostly Tales cover is by the great Rocke Mastroserio.

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Prince Valiant 1937-1938!

Magnificent!

That's all I can say. I've taken a nice long leisurely stroll through the original Prince Valiant pages by Hal Foster from 1937 and 1938, guided by Brian Kane's Prince Valiant Companion, and I've enjoyed it immensely. Kane's guide allowed me to read the series not as a endless sequence of pages but as discreet stories within the larger epic. Some are long, some are shorter, but all have an internal integrity that makes the reading experience rich indeed.

This fist volume from Fantagraphics makes use of orignal materials stored at Syracuse University to give us the finest reproduction yet for these classic comic strip adventures. The book's size allows the reproductions to really communicate a sense of the original. I really an jealous of those who were there at the beginning to read these as they unfolded week after week. It's no wonder this strip has endured for decades.


When I came to Prince Valiant he was married and his son Prince Arn was the adventurous one. Valiant was not then a man I could connect with really in the same way. But seeing the young Val going through his trials and tribulations to win respect and love and honor, I gain a greater understanding of what the whole concept of the series was and is.

These are nicely priced and exquisitely produced volumes and I anxiously await the next one this spring.

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The Black Edition -- Boris Vallejo!

When Ballantine contracted with Neal Adams to do a gallery of new Tarzan covers for their paperback reprints of ERB's classic hero, they apparently also contracted with Boris Vallejo to do the same thing. What happened is that we have two of the great artists of the time doing Tarzan covers at the same time. I'll be blunt and say that I don't like Vallejo's covers nearly as well. In fact most of Vallejo's work leaves me a bit cold. He is often compared to Frank Frazetta, who clearly insipred him, but Vallejo is all about surfaces while Frazetta and to some extent Adams are all about interiors. They capture a feeling, a mood, a notion while Boris Vallejo merely illustrates and paints brawny men and voluputous women in motion. There's something missing.

That said, these covers are still fairly early in his career and he hadn't lost that certain something that first made him a so interesting. Later though that little bit of magic gets lost as an obsession with the human form overwhelms all else.

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The Mighty Steranko!

Here are some great paperback images by the incomparable Jim Steranko. He draws a world that doesn't exist, but it looks so very dang cool.

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Captains Incorrigible!

I don't think there has ever been a movie star with the allure and romance of Errol Flynn. He was dashing, handsome, and communicated a sense of devil-may-care that illuminated any room he walked into. Errol Flynn might well have been the greatest "movie star" ever. Of course part of that fame is really the infamy of his personal life which is the very stuff of Hollywood legend.

I am in a Flynn mode right now having gotten several of his flicks on dvd. I spent some time this past weekend watching both Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk. It's interesting to watch these two flicks back to back. I've always preferred the later Sea Hawk to the earlier Captain Blood but I think I've changed my mind.

Captain Blood was Flynn's debut movie, and a magnificent one it was. The character of Peter Blood as portrayed by Flynn is at once noble and selfish. Blood is a great vehicle for the viewer into the battle for freedom. He just wants to be left alone, but is drawn into the war because of his ethics and finds no one in leadership possessing any ethics. He is what we'd call today radicalized by his imprisonment and harsh treatment. I can't help but think of Guantanamo Bay and the men the U.S. might've turned into revolutionaries by careless treatment. Certainly villains exist and must be dealt with, but just as doubtless men are made enemies by what they see around them. Injustice is blind to a flag.

The Sea Hawk is a rousing war film, a neat allegory for the tenor of the times when the Axis powers were threatening all Europe and strong backs and stiff necks were needed to stem the tide. Geoffrey Thorpe, the privateer played by Flynn in this one is more of a rascal than Blood, a hardened soldier and patriotic but not as open to feeling as Flynn's earlier pirate.

There's a high romance to Captain Blood that I find very attactive today, a greater feel of escapism. The action and the characterizations seems more natural and the fighting more exotic. The look of The Sea Hawk is much more lavish, but has a constricting feel to it compared to the earlier film. And as much as I like him in other roles, I find Henry Daniel as the main villain a bit weak in the face of Flynn's heroism. On the contrary while he's not on screen much Basil Rathbone in Captain Blood is amazing, both wild and memorable.

Both of these movies are wonderful flicks, but I find now that the saga of Peter Blood the outsider speaks to me more than the loyal man of the state Geoffry Thorpe these days. Doubtless it says more about me than the movies.

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On Target With PAM!

"PAM" is one of the more mysterious names in comics. Pete Morisi worked in comics for decades, mostly for the Charlton operation. He was a full-time policeman, and that profession didn't permit moonlighting, so he hid his identity under the enigmatic "PAM" appelation for many years. It would be many years before I knew the name of the artist I much admired as a boy.

He himself admired George Tuska's work and tried to evoke Tuska's feel, but Morisi took that basic approach and distilled it into his own special style. Morisi pages have a spareness to them that make them leap out of the comic compared the typical material of the day. They seem ultra-modern in their sleekness. Morisi's work had a way with design. That can be seen in the covers above which make use of a target image to focus the eye. Comic book covers are (or were) built to attract the eye and these by Morisi do just that.

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