Happy 100th birthday to Lily Renée

Today is the 100th birthday of Golden Age comic book artist Lily Renée, who was born on May 12, 1921.

Lily Renée Wilheim was born in Vienna, Austria to an upper middle class Jewish family. Renée had an interest in art & illustration from an early age, drawing as a hobby and visiting art museums. As she recounted in an interview conducted by Jim Amash in 2008 for Alter Ego from TwoMorrows Publishing:

“I drew clowns, ballerinas, tigers, and scenes that depicted what you would see in theatres. My parents took me to the theatre, where I saw some ballets, and I also went to dance classes. When I was older, I went to the opera twice a year with my school.”

In 1939 the 14 year old Renée was forced to flee Austria a year after the Nazis occupied the country in the Anschluss. Renée was placed by her parents on a Kindertransport (Childern’s Transport) ship which was part of the movement that helped thousands of children escape from Nazi-controlled Europe ahead of World War II. She arrived in Leeds, England, and went to stay with a family in nearby Horseforth whose daughter she had previously been corresponding with.  Unfortunately the family that took her in believed they were getting an unpaid servant. The next year and a half was a difficult period for Renée as she struggled to survive in a foreign country, not knowing if her parents were alive or dead.

Jane Martin in Wings Comics #35 (July 1943)

Finally in 1941 Renée received a letter from her parents explaining that they had escaped to the United States. She hoped to join them, but her efforts were hindered by the British authorities. By now World War II had broken out, and Renée was suspected of being an “enemy alien” due to her possessing an expensive camera that had belonged to her family. She attempted to sneak out of the country, but was caught; however an anonymous stranger intervened and negotiated her release, and she was able to travel to New York City by ship.

Life in New York City in the early 1940s was a struggle for the Wilheim family, who had been left completely bereft. Crammed into a small apartment alongside other refugees, they attempted to make ends meet. Renée took on various artistic odd jobs to help out, such as painting wooden boxes, illustrating catalogs for the Woolworth’s department store, and modeling:

“There was somebody named Jane Turner, a very well-known fashion illustrator, who liked the way I moved, so she asked me to model for her at home in a lovely townhouse. The clothes were sent from the department store, and I was dressed in all these elegant dresses while she would draw me. Then I would go home in my old, outmoded clothes, and that was weird.”

Jane Martin in Wings Comics #35 (November 1943)

Renée’s mother saw an advertisement in the newspaper from comic book publisher Fiction House looking for artists. Renée had no knowledge of or interest in comic books, but she applied for the position in order to help her family. It was low-paying, unglamorous work, and Renée was uncomfortable working alongside the mostly male staff of Fiction House, many of whom would make crude comments to her, but she stuck with it out of necessity.

Despite the fact that Renée understandably saw comic book illustration as a means to an end, a way to pay the bills and put food on the table, she nevertheless produced exceptional, beautiful work during her short career in the field. Her pages were also distinctive for the highly unusual layouts and panel shapes she utilized.

After starting out erasing pencil lines on inked artwork and drawing backgrounds, she began regularly illustrating the adventures of aviatrix Jane Martin beginning with Wings Comics #31 (cover-dated March 1943) from Fiction House. Another of the features Renée worked on was The Werewolf Hunter beginning in Rangers Comics #16 (April 1944):

“Eventually, they tried me out on a feature, which was one that nobody wanted to do: “Werewolf Hunter.” I made it into something else because I didn’t want to draw wolves. I talked to the writer and convinced him it should be about magic, where people change into other creatures, not werewolves. So we did that, and it became quite popular.”

The Werewolf Hunter in Rangers Comics #24 (August 1945)

Starting with Planet Comics #32 (Sept 1944) Renée also began drawing the post-apocalyptic sci-fi / fantasy feature The Lost World.

The character Renée would become most associated with was Senorita Rio, a glamorous Hollywood actress & stuntwoman who, after her fiancé was killed during Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, faked her own death so that she could become a secret agent for the Allied Forces, fighting against the Axis Powers behind enemy lines.

Introduced in Fight Comics #19 (June 1942), Senorita Rio was created by artist Nick Cardy. Renée began drawing the feature with Fight Comics #35 (Dec 1944) and she quickly established herself as the definitive artist at depicting Senorita Rio’s thrilling, exotic adventures combating Nazi spies and fascist agents throughout South America. Renée was the regular artist on the Senorita Rio feature for the next three years.

Senorita Rio in Fight Comics #41 (December 1945)

As she would explain in 2006 when interviewed by Trina Robbins for The Comics Journal, the Senorita Rio feature became a source of escapism for Renée from her difficult existence:

“And I just wanted to say with all these comic strips and also this name Senorita Rio, it’s sort of like a fantasy. Senorita Rio got clothes that I couldn’t have, you know, she had a leopard coat and she wore these high-end shoes and all of this and had adventures and was very daring and beautiful and sexy and glamorous and all of that.”

It was also cathartic for Renée, a beautiful young woman whose existence had been upended by Nazi oppression, to draw the adventures of a character who looked much like herself fighting against the scourge of fascism:

“I could live out a fantasy, if only on paper. It was a form of revenge.”

Due to her signing her work for Fiction House as “L. Renée” or “L.R.” for a number of years it was not known that she was one of the early female artists in the comic book field.

Senorita Rio in Fight Comics #50 (June 1947)

In 1947 Renée married artist Eric Peters, another refugee from Vienna who had fled the country after his political cartoons earned the ire of the Nazis. In 1948 Fiction House relocated outside of New York.  Finding work at St. John Publications, Renée and Peters worked together illustrating several issues of Abbott and Costello Comics. Renée and Peters proved very adept at drawing the comedic misadventures of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Regarding the division of labor between them, Renée explained:

“[Eric] drew the Abbott and Costello characters, and I drew the girls, and did all the inking.”

Renée also drew stories for the various romance titles published by St. John. It was at St. John that Renée began signing her work with her full name.

Renée left comic books in the early 1950s, moving into freelance illustration, textile design and jewelry design, all of which at the time were regarded as much more respectable fields. She wrote two children’s books. After her husband passed away in 1990, Renée began taking classes at Hunter College, which inspired her to write several plays.

Abbott and Costello Comics #6 (February 1949)

Renée’s work in comic books was rediscovered in the early 2000s when one of her granddaughters contacted comic book creator & historian Trina Robbins. In 2007 Renée was a guest at the San Diego Comic Con and was nominated to the Friends of Lulu Hall of Fame. An illustrated biography, Lily Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer, written by Robbins and drawn by Anne Timmons & Mo Oh, was published by Graphic Universe in November 2011.

Renée’s signature character Senorita Rio lives on, having been revived in 1985 by Bill Black of AC Comics to be one of the founding members of the all-female superhero team Femforce. AC has also reprinted a number of the Senorita Rio stories drawn by Renée. Fantagraphics reprinted several stories drawn by Renée in The Comics Journal #279 (Nov 2006).

The comic books published by Fiction House and St. John have entered the public domain and can be read on the Comic Book Plus website. The Grand Comics Database appears to have a fairly comprehensive listing of the stories Lily Renée drew. If you have not seen her beautiful, detailed artwork before then I definitely encourage you to view it online.

Lily Renée is a remarkable woman who showed great fortitude in surviving tremendous hardship during her teenage years. I am glad that she eventually was able to make a new life for herself here in the United States, and that she has lived long enough to see her beautiful comic book artwork be rediscovered to be appreciated by new generations of fans.

Frank Thorne: 1930 to 2021

Longtime comic book & fantasy artist Frank Thorne passed away on the morning of March 7th at 90 years old. Marilyn Thorne, his wife of many years, later passed away that afternoon.

Thorne’s career in comic books actually began back in 1948. He was a regular contributor to Dell Comics throughout the 1950s and 60s. From 1968 to 1972 Thorne was the artist on the Western adventure series Tomahawk published by DC Comics. He drew several comics for the short-lived publisher Atlas / Seaboard in the mid 1970s.

Red Sonja #9 (May 1978)

Thorne’s career entered what could be regarded as a “second act” in late 1975. Red Sonja, the sexy female barbarian created by Roy Thomas & Barry-Windsor Smith (inspired by the Robert E. Howard character Red Sonya of Rogatino), was given her own solo series beginning with Marvel Feature volume 2 #1, cover-dated November 1975. The first issue was written by Thomas and drawn by Dick Giordano. Paired with writer Bruce Jones, Thorne took over drawing Red Sonja in Marvel Feature with issue #2 (January 1976).

Thorne remained on Marvel Feature thru #7, the final issue. It was immediately followed by an ongoing bimonthly Red Sonja series written by Roy Thomas & Clara Noto. Thorne penciled, inked, lettered and colored the first 11 issues (January 1977 to September 1978), producing stunning and exquisitely detailed work.

Due to his striking rendition of Red Sonja, Thorne became very well-regarded and much in-demand for his depictions of beautiful women. He subsequently created a number of erotic fantasy series. Thorne’s sexy stories & artwork were also published in Heavy Metal, National Lampoon and Playboy.

Thorne’s book Drawing Sexy Woman, published by Fantagraphics in 2000, was an informal autobiography of sorts, with his recollections complemented by several dozen illustrations of lovely ladies drawn specifically for the book. It’s an interesting an offbeat look back by Thorne at his life and career.

The Hopefully Almost Daily Comic Book Coffee, Part Two

The challenge by Comic Book Historians group moderator Jim Thompson: Pick a subject and find a different artist every day for that subject until May 1st (if not longer).

I chose “coffee” for my subject.  From the work of how many different artists can I find examples of people drinking coffee?  I guess we will just have to see.  I posted these daily on Facebook, and I’m now collecting them together here on my blog.  Click here to read Part One.

6) Jaime Hernandez

Day Six’s superbly-illustrated page comes from Love and Rockets volume 2 #9 by Jaime Hernandez, published by Fantagraphics, cover-dated Fall 2003.

Brothers Jaime & Gilbert Hernandez have been writing & drawing their creator-owned series Love and Rockets since 1981, taking only a short break from 1996 to 2001.  Jaime and Gilbert both introduced interesting, well-developed, genuinely compelling casts of characters in their portions of the series.

One of Jaime Hernendez’s lead characters is Margarita Luisa “Maggie” Chascarrillo, a woman of Mexican American heritage who grew up in southern California.  Love and Rockets takes place in real time, and over the past four decades readers have seen Maggie progress from a teenager to adulthood to middle age.  “The Ghost of Hoppers” ran through the first 10 issues of volume two.  Maggie, at this point now in her late 30s, is an apartment manager in San Fernando.  A visit from her old friend Izzy is followed by Maggie experiencing strange, eerie visions.  In this chapter Maggie (who is nicknamed “Perla” by her relatives) pays a visit to the old neighborhood to see her sister Esther’s family.  Over after-dinner coffee Maggie hears the latest gossip about Izzy’s spooky old house, which naturally worries her, given recent occurrences.

Love and Rockets is a soap opera, but both Jaime and Gilbert have regularly ventured into magical realism with their stories.  The events in “The Ghost of Hoppers” are framed in such a manner that the reader can to decide if all of this weirdness is genuinely occurring, or if Maggie is merely imagining it all.

Whatever the case, “The Ghost of Hoppers” was another intriguing, moving installment in Jaime Hernandez’s long-running storyline.

7) Paul Pelletier & Romeo Tanghal

Green Lantern #66 by penciler Paul Pelletier & inker Romeo Tanghal, from DC Comics, cover-dated September 1995.

So, as someone who read these issues when they were coming out, I’ll put my cards on the table: No, I did NOT like that Hal Jordan went insane and destroyed the Green Lantern Corps, and no, I did NOT like that the new Green Lantern’s girlfriend Alex DeWitt was murdered and stuffed in a refrigerator.  Those two admittedly major things aside, I actually liked Kyle Rayner, and I felt that writer Ron Marz did a good job developing the character over several years.

After Alex’s death, Kyle moved from Los Angeles to New York City, renting an apartment in Greenwich Village, presumably pre-gentrification.  Kyle’s landlord Radu had a coffee shop on the ground floor, and Kyle was a frequent customer, since in addition to the super-hero thing he was a freelance artist, and between those two jobs he definitely needed his regular caffeine fix!

Kyle soon became involved with the former Wonder Girl herself, Donna Troy.  Nevertheless, being young and a bit immature, Kyle unfortunately still had a bit of a wandering eye, as we see here when he meets his neighbor, a model named Allison.

I’m not sure which one is stronger, Radu’s cappuccino or Allison’s approach to chatting up guys.  “You should invite me up sometime. Love to see what you do… you know, your etchings and things.”  Oh, man, that’s right up there with “It’s the plumber. I’ve come to clean your pipes.” 🤣

Pelletier is a good penciler.  I’ve always enjoyed his work, and thought he should be a bigger name in comic books.  As we see here, he certainly knows how to lay out a “talking heads” scene in an interesting manner.  Of course, it does help when one of your characters is a sexy gal.

8) Michael Lark

Gotham Central #6 by Michael Lark, from DC Comics, cover-dated June 2003.

Gotham Central, which was co-written by Ed Brubaker & Greg Rucka, successfully walked the line of being a serious police procedural in the vein of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels and the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street while being set in a city where a vigilante who dresses as a bat regularly fights a rogues gallery of insane costumed criminals.  I admired Brubaker & Rucka for deftly straddling genres during Gotham Central’s 40 issue run as it chronicled the saga of the Major Crimes Unit’s detectives having to deal with Gotham City’s myriad super-villains, the police department’s own rampant corruption, and the interpersonal problems that resulted from having such a stressful, dangerous job.

Issue #6 is the first chapter of the five part “Half A Life” arc written by Rucka and drawn by Lark, which sees Detective Renee Montoya’s life severely upended by the duality-obsessed villain Two-Face.  On this page we see Montoya, as well as Captain Maggie Sawyer, Detective Crispus Allen and Detective Marcus Driver.  That’s Maggie Sawyer with the coffee pot in hand, with Driver also having a cup of java.  After all, if you’re putting your life on the line in a crime-infested hellhole like Gotham, of course you’re going to rely on caffeine to get you through the day.

This is a nice page by Lark, with solid storytelling & characterization. He did superb work on this series. The dialogue by Rucka is really sharp, as well.

I own the original artwork for this page, and it can be viewed on Comic Art Fans.

9) John Romita & Mike Esposito

Hey, hey, the gangs all here… here being Day Nine’s artwork by John Romita & Mike Esposito from Amazing Spider-Man #53, published by Marvel Comics, cover-dated October 1967.

After co-creator Steve Ditko’s departure from Amazing Spider-Man a year earlier, scripter & editor Stan Lee took the series even more in the direction of soap opera.  This was a good fit for the book’s new artist John Romita, who had recently come off of an eight year stint illustrating romance stories for DC Comics.  Lee & Romita revealed the previously-unseen Mary Jane Watson, and began setting up a love triangle between Mary Jane, Gwen Stacy and Peter Parker. In the 1960s there was undoubtedly many a teenage boy reading Amazing Spider-Man who fell head-over-heels in love with Romita’s gorgeous depictions of Gwen and Mary Jane.

Effectively inking Romita on this issue is Mike Esposito, using the pen name of “Mickey Demeo” as he was still working for DC at this time.  Lettering is courtesy of longtime Marvel staffer Artie Simek.

Following a battle with Doctor Octopus at the science exposition, Spider-Man changes back into his civvies and heads over to The Coffee Bean with Gwen for a cup of coffee.  Peter and Gwen arrive to find MJ, Flash Thompson, and Harry Osborn already present, with even Aunt May and Anna Watson popping by to say hello.

You just gotta love that sign with the skull & crossbones-ish beatnik coffee bean with beret, sunglasses & paintbrushes, accompanied by the warning “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”  Sounds ominous… their espresso must be extra-strong.

10) Charles Nicholas & Vince Alascia

Break out your violins and hankies, because our next entry is from Just Married #113 from Charlton Comics, cover-dated October 1976.  “A Sacred Vow” is illustrated by “Nicholas Alascia,” the pen name for the long-time team of penciler Charles Nicholas and inker Vince Alascia, who drew numerous stories for Charlton.  Their style was well-suited to the romance genre, and they also worked on Charlton’s horror, war and Western titles.

Young, beautiful Anne is trying to make her marriage to Gordie Barton work, but doubts are beginning to creep in…

“When we were first married, Gordie planned to take night courses at community college. Why does Gordie have to be a bookkeeper? Kevin O’Shay, upstairs, is a commercial artist… he’s interesting.”

We can tell that Kevin is an “interesting artist” because he wears a foulard & black turtleneck, and has a mustache & long-ish hair.  Kevin must also be thinking about Ann, as one day when Gordie’s at work our resident artist is asking Anne if she’d like for him to pick her up something at the bakery, because there’s something he’d like to discuss with her.  Anne invites Kevin back to her apartment for coffee, where the artist, spotting her coffee pot, elatedly exclaims…

“Aahh… real coffee! I always use instant coffee and I hate the stuff.”

No, Anne, don’t do it!  Any man who’s too lazy to brew his own coffee is just not worth it!  Especially when he comes right out and admits instant coffee is awful!

Kevin asks Anne if she will model for him, offering to pay her $20 an hour.  Anne agrees, but keeps it a secret from Gordie, who she knows dislikes the artist because he feeds the stray cats outside.  A week later Anne models again for Kevin.  This time the artist begins putting the moves on her, declaring “You’re the most beautiful model I’ve ever had, Anne.”  And with that he grabs Ann in his arms and kisses her.  A shocked Ann pushes him away and flees.

Flash forward hours later and Gordie returns home to find Ann sobbing on the couch.  A distraught Ann confesses her activities, and Gordie admits “Oh? I knew you’d been in his apartment. I feel like sneezing… I am allergic to cats, remember?”  Anne realizes that, though she is attracted to Kevin, it is Gordie she wants to be with.  Realizing that she needs to voice her earlier doubts, she tells her husband “Darling, I’d like to go back to my old job… and then we’d both take courses at night.”  Gordie thinks this is a great idea.

As the story closes, Gordie casually mentions “If it’ll make any difference… I’ve seen O’Shay with at least three different girls this week! One woman will never be enough for him!”

So… Kevin O’Shay is a smooth-talking lothario who attempts to seduce married women and who is too lazy to make his own coffee.  On the other hand, he does feed the local stray cats.  Well, even Hitler loved animals, but we all know he was a huge @$$hole.

In all seriousness, it needs to be said that several decades ago romance comic books were a pretty big deal, and that a lot of young girls read them.  This is borne out by Just Married, which Charlton had been publishing since 1958.  However by 1976 the demographics of the readership had changed.  Super-heroes had come to dominate the medium, and the audience was now primarily boys in their early teens.  Just Married was a casualty of these changes, being cancelled just one issue after this one.

We can look back on these stories and mock them for their overwrought, melodramatic plots.  Nevertheless, at least back then there was an effort by publishers to appeal to more than just adolescent males.  Besides, if we’re going to be honest, if we look back on the superhero comics of our childhood years, we have to admit, a lot of those were overwrought and melodramatic, as well.

So the next time some idiot complains about female readers, just remember that for a long time girls and women did read comic books, and at long last they’ve returned to the medium.  That’s a positive, because we need a growing audience, especially with the comic book industry’s current financial crisis.

By the way, I bought Just Married #113 and a few other Charlton romance comics about a decade ago for my girlfriend Michele Witchipoo because she likes the artwork on those old books. She’s also a huge Love and Rockets fan, which resulted in my somewhat casual interest in Los Bros Hernandez turning into following the series regularly.

This is how the world ends: Doomsday + 1

Four and a half decades ago, at the small Derby, Connecticut-based Charlton Comics, the company’s main writer teamed up with a young up-and-coming artist to create a striking post-apocalyptic sci-fi series that, though short-lived, is remembered to the present day.  The writer was Joe Gill, the artist was future superstar creator John Byrne, and the series was Doomsday + 1.

About six months ago I located copies of the original six issue run of Doomsday + 1.  They were fun, enjoyable comics.  The first issue was released 45 years ago this month, on April 8, 1975, so I felt now was a good time to write a short retrospective on the series.  That, and for obvious reasons of late I’ve sort of had the apocalypse on my mind.

In the opening issue of Doomsday  + 1 the end of the world is touched off on April 7, 1996 by power-mad Latin American dictator General Rykos.  On the verge of being overthrown, Rykos is determined to take everyone down with him.  He launches a pair of nuclear missiles, one at New York City, the other at Moscow.  The United States and Russia each believe they have been attacked by the other, and before anyone can figure out who is actually to blame, both nations have launched their atomic arsenals at each other, wiping out human civilization.

Hours before Rykos starts World War III, NASA launches a small spacecraft into Earth’s orbit on a scientific mission.  The three –person crew of the capsule is U.S. Air Force Captain Boyd Ellis, his fiancée, radiation specialist Jill Malden, and Japanese physicist Ikei Yahsida.  As a result this trio are saved from the apocalypse, but are nevertheless forced to watch helplessly from Earth’s orbit as the human race is destroyed.

The capsule remains in orbit for over a month, the three astronauts waiting for the radioactivity on Earth to drop.  Finally running out of food, they bring the capsule in for a landing on the uninhabited Greenland, which has been mostly spared from fallout.  However the heat of the nuclear weapons has melted the Greenland ice cap, releasing from suspended animation several prehistoric mammals.  Also freed from an icy slumber is Kuno, a Goth warrior from the Third Century.  Jill, a linguist, is able to communicate with the man out of time, and soon the hulking hairy figure has become a valuable ally.

Over the course of the six issue series, the quartet explores the devastated Earth, hoping to find other survivors.  Along the way they have a series of strange adventures, encountering a mad Russian cyborg & his mechanical army, alien peacekeepers, an underwater civilization, human criminals, and visitors from a parallel universe.

There’s also a bit of what you might call a love triangle, or maybe a love quadrangle.  Boyd and Jill start out as a couple, prompting some jealousy from Ikei, who is also attracted to Boyd.  Kuno, upon meeting the group, is immediately attracted to Jill, and the two of them soon become involved, leaving Boyd and Ikei to then hook up, as well.

Joe Gill was an incredibly prolific writer who produced hundreds of stories for Charlton Comics.  He and John Byrne seemed to have a good creative rapport on this series, with Gill allowing Byrne a free hand to make changes to the scripts.

Looking at the art on Doomsday  + 1, it’s apparent that Byrne, in some of his first professional work, was already showing a great deal of potential.  Obviously he would get much, much better over the next few years, but already you can see his aptitude for dramatic layouts & storytelling, his ability to render both action & characterization.

On the last three issues the artwork is credited to “Byrne Robotics.”  Many years later Byrne would re-use the name for his official website & message board.  I posted there to inquire about the “Byrne Robotics” credits on Doomsday  + 1.  Byrne explained:

“I used Byrne Robotics when a friend helped me ink backgrounds. (She’d lost her job so I gave her a temp job.)”

I also informed Byrne that I would be writing this blog post, and I asked if he had any thoughts about Doomsday + 1 that he would be willing to share.   He kindly responded:

“Thems were some old time comic books! If they’d been published in the Fifties, they’d not have stood out much from the crowd.

“And they were fun. Joe Gill, the writer, gave me permission to change anything I wanted to, if I felt it improved the story. A real learning experience—like pretty much everything I did at Charlton.”

That is a common theme you hear from comic book artists who began their careers at Charlton Comics, that it was a really good training ground where they were given an opportunity to hone their skills, helping them gain the experience that later enabled them to obtain more high-profile, better paying work at other companies such as Marvel and DC Comics.

A few random observations about these six issues:

The scene on the cover to the first issue does not appear in the actual comic book.  No doubt it was Byrne’s homage to both the ending of Planet of the Apes and Jack Kirby’s cover for the first issue of his own post-apocalyptic comic book series, Kamandi.  Of course, there is a looooong tradition of artists utilizing the ruined Statue of Liberty as a landmark on disaster movie posters and on post-apocalyptic book covers.

Issue #4, the one with the underwater civilization, has some lovely artwork by Byrne & his assistants.  The look of the beautiful, graceful Amphibian woman Meri almost seems like a composite of Snowbird and Marrina, two of the characters Byrne would introduce in Alpha Flight a decade later.

There is one aspect of issue #4 which I feel has perhaps not aged well.  We are told that the Amphibians, due to their inability to live in the depths of the oceans, created a second race, the Gill-Men.  Over centuries the Gill-Men became more vicious & belligerent, eventually turning on the Amphibians.  Unlike the Amphibians, the Gill-Men are large, monstrous-looking beings.  If you read between the lines, you might come away thinking the Gill-Men were created to be servants or slaves, and that they rebelled against their masters.  If that is the case, having them as very clear-cut villains, and making them grotesque compared to the elegant, humanoid Amphibians, feels sort of, well, racist.

Then again, it could be I’m just reading too much into this!  After all, in issue #6, our heroes meet the inhabitants of an alternate reality Earth, a civilization of “Beautiful People” who have created a highly advanced utopia.  However we quickly learn that this apparent paradise only exists because these Beautiful People have raided other parallel Earths, abducting their inhabitants to serve as slaves.  So in this case the supposedly more advanced, attractive culture is very much the villain.

Looking at issue #5, our heroes are captured by a group of military prisoners who have seized control of an abandoned Air Force base.  Boyd and Kuno are tied up by the criminals, who intend to have their way with Jill and Ikei, the first women they’ve seen since the nuclear war.  Hoping to catch their captors off-guard, Jill and Ikei pretend to be compliant, going so far as to get dolled up in a couple of sexy outfits.  I noticed that the dress Byrne has Jill in resembles a couple of the outfits he would draw Colleen Wing wearing just a few years later in the pages of Iron Fist. (Yes, I do notice things like this!)

Doomsday + 1 was apparently cancelled on very short notice by Charlton, as there was a completed seventh issue ready to go when the ax fell in 1976.  Fortunately the story “There Will Be Time” did see print soon after, in black & white, in the 4th and 5th issues of the semi-professional fanzine The Charlton Bullseye.

At this point it appears Byrne was intended to take over as the full writer of the feature.  In “There Will Be Time” he lays the groundwork for a new direction, as the survivors encounter Stinson Tempest, a time traveler for the 40th Century who becomes stranded in the post-apocalyptic present.  It feels like there was a lot of potential to where Byrne planned to take the series, so it’s a shame it was cut short so abruptly.

Plus, y’know, it had dinosaurs.  Dinosaurs are always fun.

There is actually one other Doomsday + 1 story, although for many years it was believed lost.   Charlton Comics revived Doomsday +1 in 1978 as a six issue reprint title, picking up from the original numbering.  At first sales on the revival were good, and Charlton considered running new material.  Regular Charlton contributor Tom Sutton was commissioned to write & draw a story to appear in issue #13.  Unfortunately sales soon dropped, and the decision was made to once again cancel the book, with Sutton’s story never seeing print.

Years later the original unlettered artwork resurfaced, although Sutton’s script for it had gone missing.  Sutton passed away in 2002.  Eventually another Charlton veteran, the great Nicola “Nick” Cuti, working from Sutton’s art, wrote an entirely new script.  It speaks to both the clarity of the storytelling in Sutton’s artwork and to the immense talent of Cuti’s writing that this new script meshes almost seamlessly with pages drawn over three decades earlier.  “The Secret City” was then lettered by Bill Pearson and colored by Donnie Pitchford.  At long last it saw print in 2013 in issue #8 of Michael Ambrose’s excellent magazine Charlton Spotlight, published by Argo Press.

Looking at the artwork for “The Secret City,” it appears that Sutton’s original intention was to pick up after the events of Doomsday + 1 #6.  Cuti managed to work in references to the events of “There Will Be Time” in his script, definitely placing it after the survivors began working with Stinson Tempest.

As I’ve previously observed from my past looks at Cuti’s excellent writing on E-Man, he is really good at developing realistic characters & relationships.  We have no way of knowing how Sutton would have dialogued the series’ quartet, but Cuti takes the opportunity to add some realistic tension to the relationship between Boyd and Ikei.

Reading the original stories, Boyd is definitely a belligerent, trigger-happy individual, ready to start a fight at the drop of a hat (in fact Kuno the supposed “barbarian” often comes across as more careful & strategic-minded than Boyd).  In his script for “The Secret City,” Cuti has Ikei expressing disapproval for Boyd’s aggressive attitude, perceiving it as a perpetuation of the warlike mindset that recently led to humanity all but wiping itself out.  It definitely gives a certain subtlety & nuance to Sutton’s story, a pulpy affair that sees the quartet fighting against an army of Roman Legionnaire lizard men zipping around in flying saucers!

So, for those of you who are interested in reading Doomsday + 1, where can you find these comic books?  Since this was some of John Byrne’s earliest work, near-mint copies of the first six issues tend to be expensive.  However, if you don’t mind your comics being a bit dog-eared, you can find less pristine copies for lower prices.  Issues #7-12 are reprints, so they’re probably not as much in demand, meaning that may be another way to get these stories without forking over a lot of money.

There is also the seven issue miniseries The Doomsday Squad, published by Fantagraphics in 1986, which reprints the original six issues, as well as “There Will Be Time” in color for the first time.  Several of the issues feature brand new cover artwork by legendary artist Gil Kane, who provides his own unique interpretation of the characters.

As for “The Secret City” by Sutton & Cuti, head over to the Argo Press website and order a copy of Charlton Spotlight #8.  The issue also features a 2012 interview with Cuti about his Charlton work.

Also, since Doomsday +1 might be the public domain (no one seems to know for certain who, if anyone, currently owns the rights to it) sometimes you can find full issues of the original series posted on blogs & websites.  The complete first issue can be read on The Bronze Age of Blogs, if you are so inclined.

One last item: Several years ago John Byrne decided to re-conceptualize Doomsday + 1 from the ground up.  The result was the four issue miniseries Doomsday.1 published by IDW in 2013.  As Byrne explained:

“I’ve been thinking for some time that I would like to revisit a post-apocalypse kind of scenario, such as was seen in my very first ‘dramatic’ work in comics, but this time without the more obvious fantasy elements of that original series (mermaids, alien robots, frozen mammoths, etc.),” said Byrne. “When bits and pieces of this new series first started to percolate around in my head, I knew almost at once the shape that ‘revisit’ would take; something in the ‘All-New, All-Different’ vein. And the first time I doodled some images of my ‘crew,’ I knew I was there!”

Doomsday.1 sees the Earth ravaged not by nuclear war but by a devastating solar flare.  The crew of the International Space Station watches helplessly as nearly the entire surface of the planet is devastated, with billions dying.  Following the disaster, the Space Station crew makes their way back to Earth, to the small area within the Western Hemisphere which was spared the worst of the solar storm.  Their search for other survivors soon brings them into conflict with the worst of human predators.

This miniseries is extremely grim and downbeat.  I also think it’s one of the best things that Byrne has done in a number of years.  The somber subject matter very much suits the direction that Byrne’s artwork has developed in over the last couple of decades.  It also is a good fit for the darker sensibilities that he has shown in his writing since the early 1990s.  I’ve often felt that such material was not a good fit for mainstream super-hero series (I definitely was not fond of what he did to Donna Troy during his run on Wonder Woman) but it feels much more at home in his creator-owned projects such as this and Next Men.

I also appreciated the fact that Byrne writes the characters in Doomsday.1 as fairly intelligent & genre-savvy.  In other words, he doesn’t have them acting like idiots solely in order to advance the plot.

So in spite of the similar premises, Doomsday.1 is a very different book from its predecessor.  Nevertheless, I definitely recommend it.  It’s a genuinely riveting story.  It’s also an excellent way in which to see how Byrne has grown & developed as a creator, to look at how he depicted the apocalypse in 1975, and how he approached a similar scenario 38 years later in 2013.

Summertime with the Amazing Heroes swimsuit special

It’s the end of August and summer is winding down.  Yes, technically it doesn’t actually end until September 23rd.  However, the unofficial end of the summer season here in the States is Labor Day, which is only a week away.  Most people regard these as the closing days of summer.

So before all the kiddies return to school I wanted to end the summer with an appropriate post.  Let’s cast our eyes back to 1988 and the pages of Amazing Heroes #138, their second annual swimsuit issue.

For younger readers, Amazing Heroes was published by Fantagraphics between 1981 and 1992.  It featured in-depth articles and interviews on both mainstream comic books and the ever-growing independent scene.  For most of its existence Amazing Heroes was edited by Kim Thompson.

Amazing Heroes had a few swimsuit editions in the late 1980s and early 90s.  Unlike many of the comic book swimsuit specials that would follow from other publishers that were tacky T&A fests, Amazing Heroes approached theirs with tongue planted firmly in cheek.  A diverse selection of artists contributed to their specials.

The cover to Amazing Heroes #138 is penciled by the legendary Neal Adams and inked by Art Nichols.  It features four lovely ladies from Adams’ creator-owned Continuity Studios books.  I’m not familiar with the gals in the middle.  But on the left is Ms. Mystic and on the right is Samuree.  I always chuckle at this one.  In the Ms. Mystic series the title character’s costume is always rendered by Adams with zip-a-tone.  So the joke here is that, in lieu of a swimsuit, Ms. Mystic is wearing an actual sheet of zip-a-tone to the beach.

I got this autographed by Adams recently.  It’s a lovely piece by him, a playfully sexy pin-up illustration.  I hope one of these days Adams collects his creator-owned material into trade paperbacks.  I feel that is an often-overlooked aspect of his career.

Here’s a look at just a few of my favorites from the many great pin-ups featured in Amazing Heroes #138…

John Workman renders Big Barda of Jack Kirby’s New Gods in a bikini.  Workman is best known for his extensive work as a letterer, frequently working with Walter Simonson.  But Workman is also a talented artist.  As can be seen from this, he also possesses a great sense of humor.  This is a cute send-up of good girl art, simultaneously sexy and self-deprecating.  That “tapioca pudding” line totally cracks me up.

If you are Fantagraphics and you’re going to do a swimsuit special, certainly you’re going to ask two of your best artists, Love and Rockets co-creators Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez, to contribute a piece.  After all, both brothers are well-regarded for their depictions of the female form.  Of course, Beto and Jaime draw some good looking guys, too.  Here’s a jam piece by Los Bros Hernandez.  On the left is Israel by Gilbert.  On the right is Danita by Jaime.

This pin-up and a great deal of other material that had originally appeared in a variety of places was reprinted in the Hernandez Satyricon trade paperback.  As much as I love Gilbert & Jaime for their very compelling characters & intricate plotting it was also nice to have many of their beautiful pin-ups gathered together in one volume.

I really enjoy Fred Hembeck’s fun, cartoony artwork.  He is a huge fan of Silver Age comic books, especially the Marvel Comics work of Steve Ditko.  Hembeck has done quite a few loving Ditko homages over the years, including this one, “Surfing in The Ditko Zone.”  It brings a smile to my face seeing Doctor Strange, Clea and the dread Dormammu in swimsuits riding the waves in one of Ditko’s psychedelic alternate dimensions.

As I’ve mentioned before, my girlfriend Michele is a fan of Omaha the Cat Dancer by writer Kate Worley and artist Reed Waller.  I’ve never read the series, but Michele has all of the collected editions, so one of these days I’ll sit down and immerse myself in it.  Omaha is an exotic dancer / stripper, and the book is definitely for mature readers.  The series was partly created as a protest against censorship.  It perfect makes sense that Waller would draw Omaha as “Ms. First Amendment” here.  It’s a beautiful illustration.

In the late 1980s Eclipse Comics was publishing their revival of the Golden Age aviator hero Airboy written by Chuck Dixon.  The talented Bo Hampton was one of the artists who worked on it.  For this swimsuit issue Hampton renders Airboy / Davy Nelson III, the near-mindless swamp monster known as the Heap, and the femme fatale Valkyrie at the beach.  I always chuckle at the sight of the Heap in a pair of swim trunks!

IDW is currently reprinting Eclipse’s Airboy in a series of trade paperbacks.  I recommend getting them.  They contain excellent writing and artwork.

Here’s a great pin-up of the whole crew from Evan Dorkin’s irreverent creator-owned series Pirate Corp$ / Hectic Planet jamming at the beach.  It always amazes me at the insane amount of detail, as well as the just plain insanity, Dorkin always manages to pack into his artwork.  He draws a huge crowd of characters and successfully invests each one with an individual personality.  Dorkin is definitely one of the most talented and underrated comic book creators around.

In the late 1990s Slave Labor Graphics released three trade paperback collections of Hectic Planet.  You can find them on Amazon at affordable prices.  Again, I recommend them.  Dorkin did good work in those stories.

Bringing things to a close, here is a scan of the original art for a pin-up of Purity Brown and Nemesis the Warlock from the pages of 2000 AD drawn by Bruce Patterson.  As an inker, Patterson has worked with a diverse number of pencilers.  This piece demonstrates Patterson is also able to do extremely good work on his own.  Purity Brown of course looks damn sexy in her black bikini.  As for Nemesis, there’s comedy gold in seeing the alien chaos lord clad in a black Speedo holding a beach ball.

I won this on Ebay in the late 1990s.  Only a couple other people bid on it, so I got it for an amazingly low price.  I owned it for almost 20 years before eventually selling it to another collector when I had some bills I had to pay.  The art board Patterson drew on had warped a bit by the time it made its way into my hands, but it still looked great.  This is a piece that I feel, due to the subtle shading Patterson utilized, did not reproduce especially well on black & white newsprint.

Older fans often look back at the demise Amazing Heroes in 1992 as an unfortunate setback to serious journalism on the industry.  I think that’s a valid argument.  Even more so when you consider that following in Amazing Heroes’ footsteps was Wizard Magazine.  If Amazing Heroes was the New York Times of comic book reporting then Wizard was definitely the NY Post!

Many of the old Amazing Heroes issues can be found on Ebay for low prices.  They’re well worth picking up for the interviews and the in-the-moment examination of the dramatic changes the comic book industry underwent throughout the 1980s.  And, of course, you also had fun features like their swimsuit specials.

Comic book reviews: The Late Child and Other Animals

Sometimes when you read a book your initial reaction is uncertainty, and you ask yourself “How do I feel about this?”  Such was the case with The Late Child and Other Animals published by Fantagraphics.  I finished it almost three weeks ago, and it took me this long to think it over and finally feel that I could sit down and write about it.

The Late Child and Other Animals is written & colored by Marguerite Van Cook and drawn by James Romberger.  It is an autobiographical work.  The first two segments look at the life of Van Cook’s mother Hetty Martin in England during & after World War II, with the remainder of the book offering a view of Van Cook’s childhood & teenage years.

Hetty was a woman who had a difficult life, who had to find the strength to overcome numerous obstacles.  During World War II her husband, like millions of other young men from Great Britain, was drafted into the armed forces.  While her husband served abroad, back at home Hetty, her parents and her siblings were among the numerous civilians forced to endure the nightmare of the Blitz.  Van Cook & Romberger powerfully bring across how the horrors of the war existed alongside the mundane, how the British people strove to endure and go about their daily routines, never knowing when death might fall from above.

The end of the conflict brought little peace to Hetty herself.  Tragically her husband was killed while still stationed abroad, not in battle, but in an accident, when his truck drove off a bridge.  Now widowed, Hetty struggled to retain custody of a young child who she has recently adopted.

A few years later Hetty gave birth to a daughter, Marguerite.  The child was conceived out of wedlock, the result of an affair with a married man.  Hetty was forced to appear before a board of inquiry to plead her case, to convince the government that she should be allowed to keep her daughter.  Van Cook & Romberger render this sequence as a surreal nightmare, the middle-aged puritanical men of the Court morphing into a flock of ravenous crows.  The writing, art and coloring all work to evoke the psychological & emotional duress that Hetty endured throughout the hearing, a thinly-veiled inquisition.

From the perspective of 2015, it must be difficult to conceive of what Van Cook’s mother had to go through in order to convince the government not to take her child away.  In certain respects the pendulum has swung in completely the opposite direction.  Now it often is nearly impossible to remove a child from the most abominable examples of parents.

Having said that, the underlying forces and attitudes behind the ordeal Hetty faced definitely remain.  The moralizing, misogynistic judgments that she endured in that official hearing still exist in society, manifesting themselves in numerous other arenas.

The narrative The Late Child and Other Animals then shifts its focus to Marguerite, who grows up in & around Hetty’s hometown of Portsmouth.  Various facets of post-war British society are viewed through her young eyes.  Van Cook’s narration & dialogue is very expressive.  The art by Romberger, in conjunction with Van Cook’s coloring, evokes a variety of moods & atmospheres.  They very successfully bring to life this past era.

The jump to the final segment of The Late Child and Other Animals is unfortunately jarring.  Marguerite is now a teenager in France in the late 1960s.  She is living with her friend Catherine’s family in Paris, and she accompanies them to the northern coast of France for a lengthy summer holiday.  It is never explained how Marguerite came to be in France, how she knows Catherine, or what happened to Hetty.

While on holiday, Marguerite is given a pet rabbit to care for.  At the end of the summer, though, after having bonded with the rabbit, it is taken from her by Catherine’s mother Yvonne, who has it slaughtered right before Marguerite’s eyes.  I was left pondering the motivations of this seeming act of petty cruelty.  It was one of the aspects of the book that I’ve been continually thinking over since I finished it.

Marguerite had previously depicted Yvonne as a somewhat formal, rigid individual lacking in emotional warmth.  Was the French woman merely being hurtful by having the rabbit killed?  Or was she, in her brusque manner, attempting to teach the English teenager a lesson, to show her that life is not fair, that it will often be very harsh, as well as to demonstrate the transient nature of existence?  After this incident, the young Marguerite is contemplative…

“It seems that things must change. The adult world is barbarous. I began to reconstruct my romantic exclusive view of the world, though now I was a little less pure than when the season began.”

The incident prompts Marguerite to begin experiencing some of the disenchantment that many of us go through in our teenage years as we become more aware of the unpleasant realities of the world, the ones that challenge our youthful optimism & idealism.

Another aspect of this occurred to me.  Shortly before the rabbit was slaughtered, Marguerite had joined Catherine, her parents and her extended family in an enormous end-of summer feast, a culinary extravaganza containing numerous exquisite dishes and recipes.  All of this, when you think of it, came some somewhere; the ingredients did not just materialize out of thin air.

As the summer draws to a close, Marguerite has returned to Paris with Catherine and her family.  One autumn evening, Yvonne serves a stew that Marguerite finds “delectable.”  Asking what it is, she is informed that it is rabbit.  She then asks if it is HER rabbit, and the answer is yes.  Marguerite accepts this.  As Van Cook writes of her younger self, “And so it was I ate my pet and remembered all the fun times of the summer.”

Yes, this could be regarded as a rather blasé attitude.  But I recalled something that filmmaker John Waters wrote in his 1981 book Shock Value.  Reacting to viewers’ outrage that he actually killed a chicken during the filming of Pink Flamingos, Waters queried…

“Don’t most of the people who are horrified at this scene eat chicken? How do they think it gets to their plates? The chickens don’t have heart attacks, for Godsake!”

As with other elements of the narrative, I think that Marguerite’s actions and reactions here are somewhat open to interpretation, offering the reader food for thought (no pun intended).  There is a great deal of depth to the material that Van Cook & Romberger present in The Late Child and Other Animals.  This is one of those works that undoubtedly benefits from re-readings.  I look forward to finding out what impressions it leaves me with when I examine it again in the future.

Comic book reviews: Love and Rockets New Stories #7

Ever since Love and Rockets by Jaime & Gilbert Hernandez switched to the annual New Stories format, every issue has come out around September… until now.  September 2014 came and went, with no Love and Rockets.  Well we finally have a new issue, with Fantagraphics releasing New Stories #7 this month.  Was it worth the wait?  Yep!

Love and Rockets: New Stories #7 features a Jaime Hernandez cover.  That is such a typical Maggie Chascarillo image.  Ever since she started to become curvy in her 20s, Maggie has often stressed over her appearance, worrying that she was fat.  Jaime has always been brilliant at investing his characters with personality & emotion, and his illustration of Maggie speaks volumes.

The cover ties in very well with the interior stories.  Maggie and her long-time best friend Hopey Glass are meeting up for the first time in a number of years.  Back in the day the two were inseparable, and on several occasions they tried to have a romantic relationship.  But inevitably those attempts would implode, and leave both of them hurt & angry.

Maggie has been in a relationship with Ray Dominguez for the last several years, helping him recover from a severe brain injury.  Hopey married her girlfriend Sadaf, and the two of them had a child together.  Even though Maggie and Hopey have been on their separate paths for some time, now that they’ve met up for a reunion of their friends in Hoppers inevitably the old attraction between the two begins to simmer beneath the surface.

When Love and Rockets started out over 30 years ago, Maggie and Hopey were teens, which would make them now both in their late 40s, I should guess.  Jaime does excellent work is this issue showing how the two of them react to at the various changes to each other’s lives, and to their old home town.  Maggie and Hopey both begin to realize that sometimes you can’t go home again, both literally and figuratively.

Jaime peeks in on Ray from time to time.  It’s a measure of how much Jaime is able to make his readers care about his characters that I was genuinely relieved to see Ray on the mend from his injuries. Likewise, the anxiety that Ray feels is palpable.  As much as he knows that he and Maggie love each other, he also recognizes the feelings that Maggie and Hopey have.  It is understandable that he is genuinely worried he could lose Maggie.

We also check back in with Tonta.  Her and her dysfunctional siblings are still dealing with the fallout of her mother going on trial for killing her husband.  Even though their mother was acquitted, the rest of the family realizes that she actually did do it, and are struggling with how to cope with this.  Tonta’s sister Violet is very ineffectually trying to shield Tonta from it.  Fed up with the drama at home, Tonta keeps running away to hang out with her friends.

Finally, Jaime gives us an all-too-brief update on Angel Rivera, who is both Maggie’s friend and Tonta’s former high school coach.  Hopefully we will see more of Angel in the next installment.  She is a fun character, and I want to find out how her current difficulties resolve themselves.

In his half of New Stories #7, Gilbert Hernandez once again looks at the various members of his extended cast, taking a multi-generational journey through the decades.  Gilbert, like Jaime, touches upon the passing of time, of how people and places change.

Anchoring the story in the present day is Killer.  Through her latest trip to Palomar, we see how that community has both stayed the same and change.  On the one hand, there is the now-adult Theo, still gathering buckets of slugs to sell in the village, much as he did many years past with the late Tonantzín.  Theo even alludes to her, and seeing Killer in his company you are struck by the similarities between the two.

On the other, cell phones and iPads are now commonplace in Palomar, a place that only a decade or so in the past didn’t even have telephone land lines.  Witnessing one of the town’s teens watching a movie on a handheld device, Killer wistfully observes “My grandma used to have a movie theater here. Now you all watch movies that way.”  This she states while holding hammer in hand, standing in a manner very much like her grandmother Luba.

It is interesting that the character of Killer sees Gilbert moving his stories forward towards the future, chronicling the latest generation.  Yet aspects of Killer invariably evoke Luba, Gilbert’s iconic protagonist from Love and Rockets series one.  Killer appears to embody one of the central themes of Gilbert’s writing, the idea that while time inevitably marches on the events of the past will still continue to influence the present.

Inspired by her great-grandmother Maria and her great-aunt Fritz, Killer is still doing work as an actress, although for her it is just a hobby, something that is fun.  She really just wants to lead an ordinary life.  Consequently, Killer is very alarmed when, much like Fritz before her, she finds that she has gained a few extremely obsessive fans.

I wonder if Gilbert was influenced by his own experiences as an acclaimed comic book creator.  Obviously something like 99.9% of Love and Rockets fans are relatively sane, reasonable, well-adjusted people who understand & respect boundaries.  But then there’s that 0.1% you have to watch out for, the ones who probably lurk about eBay trying to find an auction for one of Gilbert’s half-eaten sandwiches that someone retrieved from the garbage at the San Diego Comic Con!

In my review of New Stories #6 I wrote “I never had too much sympathy for Maria in the past.  But thinking it over, I realize that Maria was a flawed woman who led a difficult life, and who did change over time.”  Gilbert returns to his examination of Maria, examining her gradual development over time via a series of moments set through the years entitled “Daughters and Mothers and Daughters.”

As we see Maria with Fritz, first when she was an infant and then a teenager, it is apparent that her Maria really did love her.  Maria made many mistakes, including when it came to how she raised Fritz.  But underneath it all, for all her stumbles, Maria did at least try with Fritz and Petra to be the mother she never was to Luba.

There is a brief scene, some years in the past, where we see Luba’s daughter Doralis, after moving to the United States, discovered Maria.  Doralis asks “Grandma, why don’t you want me to tell anybody in the family about you? My mama and my sisters and brother would love to know that I found you.”  With resignation, Maria responds “No, Doralis. I’m happy that you and I happened upon each other, but… no… it’s too late Doralis. Promise me you won’t tell anybody that we’ve met.”

This is a sad moment.  Maria genuinely believes that she can never repair the damage between her and Luba, make up for the hurt she caused by abandoning her daughter as an infant, and that the past is best left in the past.

Gilbert also devotes part of the issue to one of his movies-within-the-comic-book.  “The Magic Voyage of Aladdin” is one of Fritz’s B-movies, this one co-starring Mila, one of the women who married motivational speaker / con artist Mark Herrera after Fritz divorced him.  As always, I’m left wondering if there is some sort of hidden meaning and subtle subtext to Gilbert’s “movies” or if he’s just having fun sending up genre conventions.  Perhaps it’s a bit of both.

(For the full details of Fritz’s relationship with Mark, and Mark’s subsequent other disastrous marriages, I recommend picking up the High Soft Lisp trade paperback published by Fantagraphics in 2010.)

Interestingly, Jaime follows Gilbert’s lead with his own movie-within-the-comic-book.  “Princess Animus” is a pulpy, sexy space opera that turns out to be the movie that Maggie and Hopey have been attempting to catch a screening of in the early pages of the issue.

Once again clocking in at 100 pages, the latest edition of Love and Rockets: New Stories has a wealth of material from both of the Hernandez brothers.  Jaime and Gilbert continue to develop their large casts of characters and unfold numerous plotlines in an intriguing manner.  And the artwork from both of them is gorgeous.

Comic book reviews: Love and Rockets New Stories #6

This one’s a bit late!  Love and Rockets: New Stories #6 by Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez came out this past September, and Michele bought it right away.  I ended up procrastinating taking a look at it.  And then when I did want to read it, I couldn’t remember where the hell I’d put it!  Well, I finally found it a few days ago.  So here, at last, is a look at the 2013 edition of Love and Rockets.

Gracing the cover of New Stories #6 is Killer, the sexy granddaughter of Gilbert Hernandez’s longtime protagonist Luba.  Within his half of this issue, Gilbert successfully looks to the future, while at the same time acknowledging the past.  The fact that the teenage Killer is depicted clutching Luba’s iconic hammer is an apt symbol for how the young character successfully straddles present day and earlier years.  Killer divides her time between California and the Central American village of Palomar, and she has affection for each of these different worlds.  This is a very effective way for Gilbert to write about the next generation of his ongoing saga while maintaining roots with the older characters.

Actually, Killer is much more interested in the past than many of the elders of Palomar.  Killer is fascinated by the stories she’s heard about her late great-grandmother Maria.  Having found a surviving short sequence from a now-lost movie that Maria starred in decades before, Killer wishes to find out much more.  In certain ways she seeks to emulate her great-grandmother’s legend.  In contrast, Luba, who was abandoned as an infant by Maria, understandably could not care less.

Gilbert effectively illustrates how someone can be many different people, depending upon who they’ve known, and how they’ve acted, at various points in their life (reminding me of the song “Too Many People” by the Pet Shop Boys).  Through a few brief flashbacks, we even see Maria stating, or perhaps rationalizing, that Luba was better off without her.  I never had too much sympathy for Maria in the past.  But thinking it over, I realize that Maria was a flawed woman who led a difficult life, and who did change over time.  The Maria who gave away Luba is not the same Maria who years later did attempt, in her own imperfect way, to raise her other two daughters, Petra and Fritz.

Killer, as we see in New Stories #6, is actually a very fortunate individual.  Luba never really knew either of her parents.  Luba’s daughters each had varying degrees of difficulty in their relationships with her.  Killer, while her parents Guadalupe and Hector may be divorced, still has both of them in her life, offering her their love & support.  In a way, Killer is a glimpse at the woman Luba might have become if she’d had a more stable, loving upbringing.  Killer is confident and independent like her grandmother, but she is also, despite a seemingly impregnable exterior, much more capable of establishing friendships with and ties to other people.

Over in Jaime Hernandez’s portion of New Stories #6, the focus returns to Tonta, the teenage half-sister of Vivian “Frogmouth” Solis who was first introduced last issue.  As a reader, I felt that I didn’t really get to know Tonta all that well in her debut.  But, as I observed in my write-up of New Stories #5, just as it took Jaime time to develop Maggie, so too it was likely that it would also be a gradual process of witnessing Tonta grow as a character.  Indeed, she had a much stronger presence in New Stories #6, and I found myself becoming interested in her, invested in her story.

Last time I also commented that I hoped Jaime would bring Maggie’s friend Angel back, involving her in Tonta’s life.  Well, that is exactly what occurs, as Tonta is introduced to her high school’s new physical education instructor, Coach Angel Rivera.  And despite joining the hallowed halls of academia, Angel is still wild at heart, secretly moonlighting as a masked wrestler on the weekends.

We also get a close look at Tonta’s family life, meeting her mother and several of her other siblings.  And, oh boy, I’m starting to understand how Vivian turned out to be such a nut job!  Tonta’s family is so incredibly dysfunctional that they make Maggie Chascarillo’s childhood look like a portrait of sanity in comparison!  By the end of New Stories #6, I was really feeling for Tonta, as her already-screwy family splintered completely apart.  The teenager is left sadly wandering through half-remembered reminiscences of when she was a little girl, before everything in her life became horribly complicated by betrayal and insanity.

Those last few melancholy pages of New Stories #6 definitely left me wondering what’s in store for Tonta in the future.  At times like this, the annual format of New Stories is frustrating.  Part of me wishes that I did not have to wait until September for Fantagraphics to publish the next issue.  Of course, that is the mark of great creators, leaving you wanting to find out what happens next.  Jaime and Gilbert certainly possess that ability.

Actually, I find it interesting to compare and contrast the work of the two brothers.  There are, inevitably, certain similarities.  But there are also undoubtedly very distinctive qualities to each of their individual writing and art.  In a way, it is almost like looking at Kirby and Ditko side by side.  They were the two preeminent Marvel superhero artists of the 1960s, but in very different ways.  I’ve sometimes likened Jaime to Kirby, and Gilbert to Ditko, in regards to the sensibilities of their work.  Jaime is rather more straightforward in his plotting & scripting, and his artwork has a, shall we say, polished look.  Gilbert, on the other hand, often utilizes more offbeat, unconventional narrative structures, and his art style possesses a gritty, quirky mood to it.

Hmmm, okay, I am probably not doing as sufficient a job at articulating this as I want!  But hopefully you will get my point.  In any case, both Gilbert and Jaime do wonderful work in their own unique ways.

After thirty years of Love and Rockets, Los Bros Hernandez are definitely still going strong, creating engaging, thoughtful, moving stories with beautiful artwork.  This one is highly recommended.

Looking back at Love and Rockets series one

I have been meaning to re-read the first series of Love and Rockets by Jaime & Gilbert Hernandez for some time now.  The first time I read it was over a nearly decade-long period when I sporadically began picking up the 15 book trade paperback set published by Fantagraphics, which reprinted the contents of the initial 50 issue run.

I first picked up book one, Music for Mechanics, at the 2001 Pittsburgh Comic Con.  I had heard about Love and Rockets a number of times in the past, but had never tried it before.  The Hernandez Brothers were guests at the show, so I decided to start at the beginning with the first collection.  I immediately took a liking to Jaime’s “Mechanics” stories, but the offerings by Gilbert, “BEM” and “Music for Monsters,” were very bizarre, surreal pieces, and I just could not get into them.

It wasn’t until a couple of years later, in 2003, that I next read any more of the series.  St. Marks Comics was having a big sale on everything in their store, so I decided to give Love and Rockets another try.  This time I picked up book six, Duck Feet.  This was my first real exposure to Gilbert’s stories of Luba and the denizens of the Latin American village of Palomar, and I really enjoyed it.  Gilbert’s writing was full of character, containing a distinctive voice, his artwork imbued with real atmosphere.

As for Jaime’s half of the book, with the stories of Maggie, Hopey and friends in Hoppers, that was also enjoyable.  As much as I liked Jaime’s early works, I was even more intrigued by this material, where he had dropped most of the sci-fi trappings to focus on a contemporary setting and the everyday problems of young adults.  And I also thought that Maggie, as cute as she was as a teenager, became much more attractive & sexy when Jaime began drawing her in her twenties with longer hair & a curvy figure.  That image of Maggie from the back cover of Duck Feet is one of my all time favorite depictions of her.

About a year later, the Hernandez Brothers both returned to the East Coast, as guests at the Big Apple Comic Con in NYC.  That is a really mainstream show, so most of the fans that went were there for whatever Marvel, DC, and Image creators happened to be on hand.  Gilbert and Jaime’s table was not busy, so it gave me the opportunity to chat a bit with them, and to get a drawing by Gilbert in my Beautiful Dreamer sketchbook.  A couple of days after the show, the Brothers did a signing at the Forbidden Planet comic shop by Union Square, and that’s when all the long time readers showed up, lining up around the block.  After all that, I really started to get hooked on Love and Rockets, and so spent the next several years hunting down the remaining collected editions.

The final piece of the puzzle was when I started dating my girlfriend Michele, who has been reading Love and Rockets since she was a teenager, and is a tremendous fan of the Hernandez Brothers.  Finally having someone to talk to these stories about made them even more interesting to me, and offered up an alternative perspective on the characters & events.

For the last few years, once I had all fifteen books, I told myself one day I’d sit down and read them in chronological order.  Both Gilbert and Jaime’s characters age in real time, and there is a definite progression of events as their characters go through life.  Well, two months ago I started a temp assignment at the other end of the city, which meant I was riding the subway at least two and a half hours a day.  With all that time to kill, I thought it was an ideal opportunity to finally re-read Love and Rockets series one from beginning to end.  I decided to go through Gilbert’s stories first, and then return to Jaime’s.

For Gilbert’s contributions, I chose to literally take things in chronological order, first skipping ahead to book twelve, Poison River.  This prequel chronicles the life of Luba from infancy to her arrival in Palomar as a young single mother, with her childhood & teenage years recounted against a backdrop of organized crime and political corruption.  After Poison River, I went back to the beginning, with Gilbert’s first “Heartbreak Soup” tales set in Palomar.  Following Luba and the rest of the mammoth cast of Gilbert’s stories in order, watching them age & develop, was a very interesting, insightful experience.  I definitely got to know them much better this time through, both because I was following events in the order they occurred, and with the benefit of one or more previous readings of the stories to give me deeper insight into their lives & personalities.  Gilbert expertly crafted an almost epic tale that spans across a generation, giving us very real, flawed, dysfunctional characters.

One of my girlfriend’s favorite moments from a Gilbert story is contained in “Duck Feet.”  After Palomar’s nightmarish encounter with a lonely bruja (a sort of witch), Luba contemplates “Don’t know what’d be worse… losing someone where I could never be with them again… or having that someone always close by but having lost them just the same.”  It’s a very introspective moment.  This time around, I was left wondering if Gilbert intended this as a foreshadowing of Luba’s eventual estrangement from her daughters.

Jamie’s involvement with Love and Rockets is centered on Maggie, Hopey, their gang of friends, and their families.  Initially there are the aforementioned sci-fi elements, with Maggie working as an assistant mechanic repairing rocket ships and pining for the attentions of prosolar mechanic Rand Race.  These aspects are gradually phased out over the early books, and eventually Maggie and Hopey are very much grounded in reality.

There are exceptions, namely the bombshell Penny Century, who with her wish to become a superhero and her marriage to billionaire H.R. Costigan remains with one foot firmly planted in the fantastic.  There is also Izzy, the woman who first introduced Maggie and Hopey to one another, and who for many years was their close friend.  As with Gilbert, Jaime includes elements of magical realism in his stories, and this manifests in the apparent pursuit of Izzy by the devil, who has an infatuation with the unfortunate woman due to the guilt she carries over having gone through a divorce and an abortion.

I think that one of the key elements of Jaime’s stories is the process of growing up, of maturing, the struggle to become an adult and leave childhood behind.  Maggie and Hopey both have to face the choice of pursuing long-term adult relationships or continuing teenage flings.  A great deal of the tension revolves around whether or not they will continue to be lovers in a dysfunctional relationship, or if each of them will decide to walk away and set down roots in a stable relationship elsewhere.  Other characters face similar choices.  During the events of “The Death of Speedy,” we see the return of Ray Dominguez to Hoppers after several years on the East Coast.  Ray is alarmed to find his old friends, now in their twenties, still acting the part of wannabe gangsters and macho street hoods, unwilling to grow up, ready to start fights with rival gangs at the drop of a hat.  Ray despairs at this, having gained the maturity and worldview to recognize that his friends are on a path of self-destruction

A more humorous look at the struggle between adulthood and immaturity can be seen in the long running feud between professional wrestler Vicky Glori and her former tag team partner, Rena Titanon.  Vicky is Maggie’s aunt, and Rena becomes a close friend of Maggie’s.  Years back, Vicky turned on Rena and cheated (“She used the ropes!”) to take the world championship title from her.  Since then, neither woman has been able to forgive the other.  Much to Maggie’s dismay, each even seems ready to use Maggie as a pawn, with both trying to turn her against the other, leading Maggie to despair at “old ladies playing junior high school games.”  Certainly I can relate, having been in situations where people I’ve known in their thirties and forties still act as if they were teenagers, with all of the accompanying petty jealousies, backstabbing, and selfishness.

I think the relationship between the past and the future is actually a pivotal aspect to both Gilbert and Jaime’s stories.  In Gilbert’s final Palomar tales contained in Luba Conquers the World, Luba’s past comes back to haunt her, and she resolves to set out to close the door on the legacy of her youth.  In the process, she realizes she needs to leave the town of Palomar and move on with her life.  Her future lies elsewhere.  For Jamie’s two protagonists, however, the first series of Love and Rockets appears to end with them much as they began.  While many of Maggie and Hopey’s friends and family have realized it is time to grow up and move on to the next stage of life, the closing pages of Chester Square sees the two women contentedly reunited in the back of a police car, arrested for carrying on as if they were still juvenile delinquents.  For them, at least at this stage, they are happy to stay put and remain who they are.

Of course, both Jaime and Gilbert continued to create material after the conclusion of series one.  So this is certainly not the ending of Maggie, Hopey, and Luba’s stories.  In future series, especially in Jamie’s installments, time does continue to march on, something very much epitomized by the continuing developments of Maggie’s life, and those around her.  But that’s something to discuss in a future blog post!

So, re-reading these Love and Rockets books was definitely a rewarding experience.  I’m now looking forward to moving on to the later stories by the Hernandez Brothers, to once again see what happens next.

Comic book reviews: Love and Rockets New Stories #5

This year’s edition of Love and Rockets: New Stories, written & drawn by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, published by Fantagraphics, came out a few weeks ago.  Here are my thoughts on the 2012 installment of the Hernandez Brothers’ long-running series.

First off: a year is a long time to wait!  Yeah, I realize that each edition of Love and Rockets: New Stories clocks in at one hundred pages each.  But both Jaime and Gilbert have such amazingly well-written (and large) casts of characters, that there’s only so much each of them can cover in even that amount of space.  And each issue of New Stories always leaves me wanting more.  Especially last year’s New Stories #4, which Jaime Hernandez ended with Ray tragically suffering from brain damage after Maggie’s mentally-disturbed brother Calvin hit him over the head with a brick.  As a reader who has been invested in the relationship between Maggie & Ray for years, I desperately wanted to see what happened next.

In his half of New Stories #5, though, Jaime shifts the focus to the infamous Vivian “Frogmouth” Solis and her teenage half-sister Tonta.  The reason for Vivian’s nickname is that, despite looking absolutely gorgeous, she has a mouth like a sailor, and a personality to match.  Vivian is a tough character to get a read on.  I’d really need to re-read her appearances in Love and Rockets volume two in order to jog my memory, but she strikes me as the type who thinks she’s much more competent and invulnerable than she really is.  This leads her getting involved with all manner of people who are no good for her, including some genuinely dangerous individuals.  Especially in this issue, when she’s flirting with a married gangster.  She’s also hiding a handgun in her lingerie drawer as a favor for a street gang who want to murder the aforementioned mobster.  As a result, Vivian really gets in over her head, but she never seems to realize the seriousness of her circumstances, wandering around with self-centered blinders.

Her sister Tonta is presumably part of Jaime’s intention to introduce a new, younger cast of characters.  Since Love and Rockets takes place in real time, the characters age accordingly.  Maggie, Hopey, Ray, and their compatriots are now in their forties, I believe, so Jaime has been introducing a newer generation, first with Maggie’s young friend Angel (who I would love to see more of) and now Tonta.  It’s difficult from this one story to get a feel for Tonta.  In certain respects she reminds me a bit of a young Maggie, living the punk lifestyle, coming from what appears to be a dysfunctional family.  Tonta appears to be a bit more on the naïve side, though.  It did take several years for Jaime to develop Maggie into the multi-faceted character that she would become, so I don’t expect Tonta to blossom fully overnight.  Hopefully we will see more of her in the future, perhaps have her meeting Angel.  I have no idea if they’d become friends, but it would be interesting to see Jaime have his two new young female protagonists get to know each other.

The most heartbreaking part of Jaime’s half of New Stories #5 is a brief three page segment which sees Ray reflecting back on his long friendship with Doyle.  The story is literally drawn from Ray’s point of view, and periodically we get these black panels when his mind goes blank due to his brain damage.  As sad as it is, I’m glad that Jaime did briefly check in with Ray, Maggie and Doyle in this year’s issue, so that we could get a glimpse of what is going on with them.

Over in Gilbert Hernandez’s side of New Stories #5, we have another look at the younger generation, as the sexy Killer takes a vacation in the Central American town of Palomar.  And at long last I’ve finally figured out who exactly Killer is related to.  Her grandmother is Luba, and her grandfather is Heraclio, and so Killer’s mother is Guadalupe, the daughter Luba had after a one-time seduction of a then-teenage Heraclio.  Glad we have that sorted out, although my girlfriend, who has been a Love and Rockets fan for a lot longer than me, claims she knew it all along!  In any case, it was great to see all of the rich back story of Gilbert’s Palomar stories alluded to, and to catch up on the current state of the town & its residents, through the perspective of Killer.  The whole trip had a poignant quality to it.  It also offered Gilbert the opportunity to explore a different side of Killer, as we see her discovering her heritage.  Before this, she seemed a rather aloof, indifferent individual to me, but New Stories #5 shows a warmer, sentimental side to her personality.

Interspaced between Killer’s explorations of Palomar are scenes from one of her great-aunt Fritz’s B-movie art-house films, “Proof That the Devil Loves You.”  Set in a fictionalized version of Palomar, Fritz plays a character that is across between Luba and Tonantzin, the fried babosa vendor who killed herself in an act of self-immolation at the end of Blood of Palomar.  “Proof That the Devil Loves You” is actually produced by Pipo, who seems to be using the film to express her feeling for Palomar.  She holds a lot of ire towards town sheriff Chelo, who in the film is portrayed as a dictatorial brat who marches about barking orders and abusing her authority.

As with many of Gilbert’s movie-within-the-story sequences, there is a certain amount to “Proof That the Devil Loves You” that is nebulous and open to interpretation.  I sometime have an ambivalent relationship with Gilbert’s adaptations of Fritz’s movies.  They can be very thought-provoking and atmospheric works, and Gilbert often excels at exercising his illustrative & storytelling abilities in them.  On the other hand, attempting to discern the meanings of the surreal events of those narratives can be very frustrating.  The difference this time around in New Stories #5 is that Gilbert is drawing clear parallels between the “real” events of his story and the “fictional” occurrences of his film, making its meaning somewhat less obscured.  That said, I still feel that there is plenty that is open to interpretation, and (as always) additional readings may reveal further layers.

In any case, New Stories #5 has certainly made me more interested in the character of Killer, and I look forward to Gilbert exploring her further in future volumes of the series.

All in all, Love and Rockets: New Stories #5 was a solid read, with quality writing & artwork from both Jaime and Gilbert.  This time around, Gilbert’s contributions slightly edged out Jaime’s as my favorites, but I was satisfied with each of their efforts.  I’m looking forward to re-reading New Stories #5 again soon, to get a different perspective on it, and maybe I’ll take a look at the preceding editions of the New Stories beforehand, as well.  With both Gilbert and Jaime, often the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts, and reading several issues together will give you a much clearer focus on characters & events.

So, once again I now have to wait yet another year for the next edition of Love and Rockets.  Torture, I tell you, sheer torture!