Greetings boo believers! Here in the swamp it is cold and wet, and the provisions in the basement are running low. I’m going to have to trudge out into the cold and face the hordes of penguin warriors again just to be gawked at as the lone swamp ghoul in the local supermarket. In spite of the dearth of groceries, we have a stockpile of dollar bin finds and small press sundries we’ve amassed over the last two months, welcome to the Weekly Haul Dollar Bin Safari! Let’s see what’s in the stash this week, shall we?
As you can see above, Mr. Jackson is posing handsomely with our small press picks from February. Your Black Friend by Ben Passmore has been staring at me from countertops and spinner racks up and down the east coast for months now, and I finally grabbed it. The illustrations are excellent, Passmore has an incredible style that pops right off the shelf, and the comic is a well needed open letter to white people about aggressions both macro and micro. Doing some follow up research, I found that Passmore is a Philadelphia native, and during the years I ran small smuggling operations through there, he and I were regulars at the same comic shop! You always have to support your local indie creators, kids, whether you realize you’re doing it at first or not!
On an unseasonably balmy day in early February, I got in my 1978 lime green Chrysler Goblin and drove over the hills and far away to break into what I thought was an abandoned NASA Centrifuge to steal some vintage lab equipment. When I arrived, however, the place was crawling with sweaty nerds clutching plastic bags for a comic and toy convention. This really made stripping the control room more of a hassle (didn’t stop me though) but when you find yourself surrounded by dollar bins, why not look around. While I was there I found the Savage Conquest: Beyond Boundaries sketchbook. Savage Conquest is an upcoming fantasy comic from writer/ illustrator Chris Faccone (check him out here) that I needed to have the minute I laid eyes on this guy’s work. His art reminds me a little of Philippe Druillet, and a little of Genndy Tartakovsky, but he has a wirey, kinetic style all his own that crackles with energy. And the design this guy puts into spooky castles and monsters is just gorgeous, so keep an eye out for this book when it makes it to the printed page, Because I damn sure am.
In another end of this dusty convention haunting the bones of a G-force simulator room, I found a half mile of quarter bins of comics. That’s my bread and butter, boils and ghouls, and you bet I dug through bin after bin of garbage before I found all but issue #1 of Freedom Force by Eric Dieter and Tom Scioli. This was a comic book tie-in to a 2002 video game of the same name, which inhabited a silver age comic book world patterned after Jack Kirby’s style and the Marvel and DC archetypes of the early 60’s. The comic was a solid read, I had to dig up the first issue online somewhere but I read the whole stack while doing my evil laundry. It reads like a video game tie in, with a few moments of genius (an ice-powered soviet super villain named Nuclear Winter at one point exclaims “Now is the winter of your dismemberment”), but the art is excellent. You heard me wax rhapsodic about Tom Scioli last week , and you can see him further represented in the picture above by recently purchased issues of Go-Bots, Transformers vs G.I. Joe, and Gødland, but I truly can’t get enough of this guy’s work. In Freedom Force he is in full swing of his faux Kirby style which starts as a more static, deadline-meeting B+ early on, but quickly crackles with energy as the series gears up. He seems to gain momentum in the latter issues and really have fun on characters like the Time Master. All in all it’s a fine, forgettable comic with great art and some excellent character designs, the Doctor Syn/ Ghost Rider inspired Tombstone doesn’t show until the final issues but left me wishing he had his own book.
Mr. Jackson is seen here cleaning his claws next to some finds from the Old Trading Post of the northern swamps. Counter-clockwise from the top, we have Batman Annual #21 by the uncommon and uncanny creative team of Doug Moench and J.H. Williams III. This comes out of 1997’s Pulp Heroes run of summer annuals which all had vaguely puppy plots and gorgeously pulpy painted covers. This story in particular had some great kung-fu magic and monsters as Batman goes up against an immortal Wizard who runs a club in Gotham’s China Town, it’s an ideal dollar bin find. Beneath that is X-Force #8, not something I’d normally go out of my way for, but this issue, save for the book end sequences by Rob Liefeld, was drawn mostly by Mike Mignola. The art is solid, 90’s Mignola, and the story is a confounding and unreadable mess, even if I am a sucker for a good “flashback to the future” story, which the X books are riddled with. On the bottom right we have Spawn #9. Spawn was a book my brother Blackwolf followed for the first few years, and I remember loving it at the time, though almost every detail has long since slipped my mind. Two things I remember enjoying the most from that book were the Medieval Spawn, and Angela, the warrior Angel with a winged valkyrie headdress and Native American-esque war-paint. I found out a few years ago when Angela popped up oddly in Marvel comics (still not exactly sure how she crossed over in story terms) that she was able to appear in another publisher’s book because she and the Medieval Spawn were created and owned by none other than the frilly-cuffed master of smart-but-not-self-important comics, Neil Gaiman. It figures that the two most lasting impressions I had of this book were written by Comics’ beloved English uncle. The issue re-contextualizes the on-going story by showing us the Hell-Spawn of 1193, and how similar his circumstances are to our current day protagonist, and then introduces the idea that these Hell-Spawn are ritualistically hunted by blood-thirsty Angelic warriors who’s modern day organization has adopted a particularly bland 1993 corporate structure. It’s a very English story and it’s pretty great, I mean, it’s Neil Gaiman, it’s going to be good.
There is, in the weird, between-the-cracks world of comic book dollar bins, just as in used record bins all around the country (I defy you to dig through the nearest record shop’s basement bins and not find a single Kris Kristofferson or Barbra Streisand album) certain books you will always find. Everyone bought them at some point, and at another, they all got rid of them. For a relevant example, see above for X-Force and Spawn. And then there are the unforeseeable strange tides of availability that come and go. Certain books that are ubiquitous in the bargain bins everywhere you go disappear with the moon over night, and others that were scarce previously, come in with the new tide. Following this odd cosmic sea-change, for whatever reason lately I’ve hit a wind fall of Amalgam Comics. Amalgam was Marvel and DC’s mash up project from the late 90’s, which as far as I have read was an interesting and usually fun experiment. And in the last several weeks I found in New England corner stores, Pennsylvania comic cons, and Tennessee garage sales, Super Soldier (Superman/ Captain America) by Mark Waid and Dave Gibbons, Dark Claw (Batman/ Wolverine) by Larry Hama and Jim Balent, and Doctor Strangefate (figure that one out yourself) by Ron Marz and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. Of these, I have only read Dark Claw when it came out originally, I’m saving the whole stack for a rainy day, and I’ll save Super-Soldier for last, that creative team sounds the most promising.
Rounding out the recent Amalgam acquisitions we have one of the most unlikely crossovers, Bullets & Bracelets (Steve Trevor/ Punisher and Wonder Woman/ herself) by John Ostrander and Gary Frank, Iron Lantern (Green Lantern/ Iron Man) by Kurt Busiek and Paul Smith) and Bat-Thing ( Man-Bat/ Man-Thing) by Larry Hama and Rodolfo Damaggio. Of these I am most interested in Bullets & Bracelets, because the cover is a real head scratcher for me, but it’s written by Ostrander and it’s the earliest Gary Frank art I’ve ever seen, and Frank is one of those artists that I keep on my radar these days.
That’s it for this week, boo believers! In the time it took me to write this little installment between the grizzly business of my average day to day, I’ve already amassed another 20 or 30 books I’ll have to catch up to in a future installment! But I hear the Widow calling me right now and it’s time to head back to my life of crime and general spookery. Until next time, fear readers!
-Grim Doin’s
The Cyclops Lanterns 