Browsed by
Category: Comics

Blogging Marvel’s Dracula Lives – Part One

Blogging Marvel’s Dracula Lives – Part One

Comments 0 Comment

dracula-lives-smallDracula Lives was Marvel’s black and white companion title to the award-winning Tomb of Dracula monthly comic. As a magazine, Dracula Lives was exempt from the strictures of the Comic Code Authority, allowing for more violence and adult themes than would have been possible in the comic at the time. From the magazine’s launch in 1973 with a stunning Boris Vallejo cover displaying voodoo imagery and undead nudes, readers knew they were in for something decidedly different.

Issue #1 gets underway with the excellent “A Poison in the Blood.” Gerry Conway’s contemporary tale of Dracula in New York, suffering from withdrawal after drinking the tainted blood of junkies easily measured up to the high standard set by Marv Wolfman in the monthly comic series. Assigning the monthly’s art team of Gene Colan and Tom Palmer the artistic chores for the story only reinforced the fact that what was to follow would be every bit as good as the award-winning parent series. More importantly, “A Poison in the Blood” began the Cagliostro story arc which would weave its way through history in subsequent issues.

Roy Thomas’s “Suffer Not a Witch” is the first historical tale and also the first Dracula story to team Thomas with artist Dick Giordano. The pair would later embark on a celebrated adaptation of the original Stoker novel. “Suffer Not a Witch” steers the series into Nathaniel Hawthorne territory with the Lord of Vampires visiting 17th Century America and becoming embroiled in the conflict between hypocritical Puritans and the persecuted witches.

The first issue concludes with Steve Gerber’s “To Walk Again in Daylight,” illustrated by Pablo Marcos. This 18th Century tale set in Vienna is well done, but the central concept (Dracula is seeking an alchemical cure from vampirism) contradicts the established continuity for the series and flies in the face of Marvel’s portrayal of the Lord of the Vampires as a truly Satanic unrepentant figure who embraces evil for his own sake.

…

Read More Read More

A Brief History of Comics, Animation, and Video Games with Christy Marx

A Brief History of Comics, Animation, and Video Games with Christy Marx

Comments 4 comments

christymarxThis title is not the least bit tongue in cheek. Many of you might not think you’ve ever heard of Christy Marx.

Think again. She has had a long career developing content for a wide array of media and is rightly considered one of the most powerful and influential women in video games and comics.

Currently employed at Zynga, she began developing content for video games before the title “video game developer” even existed. Her first games were for Sierra Online, including Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail and Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood.

763653She’s also written scripts for animated shows including GI Joe, He-Man, and Jem and the Holograms (remember them? Christy created them.) She’s also written scripts for live-action TV shows including Babylon 5 and Twilight Zone.

But she got her start writing for comics, bringing strong women to life frame by frame with works that include The Sisterhood of Steel.

Her current series, Amethyst, will have another issue out in the next few days.

…

Read More Read More

Red Sonja 2

Red Sonja 2

Comments 1 comment

red-sonja-2-coverHonestly, I’ve tried twice to summarize “The Demon in the Maze,” and I just can’t figure out how. It’s a psychedelic mess of gonzo insanity. It reads as if co-writers Roy Thomas and Clara Noto just switched off writing pages without any idea of where the story was heading or how it would end. The whole thing is plenty of fun; but at the end, I still can’t figure it out.

It starts with Sonja finally reaching Venzia (which she’s been heading towards since Marvel Feature 6). The first thing she sees when she’s in sight of its famous canal is two trading ships crashing into one another and sinking. Even though the ships are less a minute’s swim from shore on either side of the canal, none of the sailors survive the crash.

Sonja doesn’t really have time to consider this mystery before she happens upon a woman being attacked by three bandits. She easily kills the trio in less than a page, but a fourth bandit, hiding in the shadows, knocks her unconscious and drops her to an underground mirror maze. The mirrors mess with her head to the point where she first hallucinates herself as a withered old woman (rendered only a little hilarious by the fact that she’s still wearing the chain mail bikini), then watches as her arms transform into snakes that begin to strangle her. Realizing that it’s an illusion, Sonja calms down and lets her mind “go limp,” at which point a passage out of the maze opens up. She leaves the maze and walks into the plot of the story.

An old man (who is never named) lies dying on the ground and explains that the underground chamber is the prison for an evil wizard (also unnamed) who wants to rule the world. Apparently, the chamber is also the prison of a demon (once again, unnamed) who can only be freed by a human hand. But not any human hand (otherwise, his cell-mate the evil wizard would just free him). The demon can only be freed by a human of exceptionally strong will (translation: the evil wizard is a wimp). The demon created the mirror maze as a test: anyone with a will strong enough to see through its illusions would have a will strong enough to free the demon. The fact that the maze is littered with bones implies that a lot of other women have been trapped down here.

…

Read More Read More

Red Sonja 1

Red Sonja 1

Comments 4 comments

red-sonja-1-coverFinally, after four years of guest appearances and Marvel Feature auditioning, Red Sonja gets her very own title. And judging from the cover, it’s going to be some opening story. We’ve got a wizard, a giant snake that’s about to bite her leg (even though its head’s already been cut off and guts are spilling out of its neck stump), a giant dead spider, some little gray goblin-looking guy in the background, and a unicorn. And Sonja herself is walking past her own title banner, seemingly ready to step out of her issue, bloody sword in hand, to kill YOU. “To the death” is always a good bad-ass line for an action hero, so we’re ready to see everything on this cover that isn’t Red Sonja dead by issue’s end.

Well, first of all, there’s no giant snake. There’s no giant spider. There’s no goblin. It’s just a mean-looking wizard and a unicorn. Just so you know.

The story begins with Sonja having to kill her horse after it breaks a leg. She’s still feeling pretty bad about it a few hours later when she stumbles on a group of men with torches surrounding a horse, apparently intent on killing it. Coming closer, she realizes that they’ve cornered a unicorn. Seeing a mob abusing a “helpless proud creature” bothers her to the point that she starts cutting through a dozen men to free it. Jumping on the unicorn’s back, the two of them ride away. During the struggle, the unicorn’s horn was broken off, so that it just looks like a horse with a head injury; but Sonja’s quite happy to have the beast as her companion.

So, for those who are reading Red Sonja on a subtextual level, the woman who’s sworn a vow of de facto chastity rushes to help the mythic representation of purity only after its phallic symbol is removed. Of course, there’s no reason to read any symbolism in a naked woman and a symbolically castrated beast bathing together, sleeping together, or leaning against one another in a picaresque sunset. And there’s certainly nothing about the nervous creature growing a new horn, “even more beautiful than the other,” as it gets to know Sonja. Nor is there anything to the bitter old man inciting ignorant villagers into a fury over the unnatural union of Red Sonja and the unicorn.

…

Read More Read More

Ridiculous Sale on Stuff You Want at TwoMorrows Publishing

Ridiculous Sale on Stuff You Want at TwoMorrows Publishing

Comments 0 Comment

write-now-16-smallI was going to write a thoughtful and probing blog article on an urgent topic tonight. That’s all the detail I can give you, because the moment I sat down at my desk and saw the e-mail about the big sale at TwoMorrows Publishing, I forgot everything else.

Let’s review. TwoMorrows Publishing, publishers of the Jack Kirby Collector, Alter Ego, Back Issue!, Rough Stuff, Write Now!, and other fine comics publications, is selling much of their overstock at 70% off.

That includes over a dozen issues of Rough Stuff and Write Now! for two bucks each, and books including Comics Introspective: Peter Bagge (marked down from $16.95 to $5.09), the Wallace Wood Checklist (was $5.95, now $1.79), and Best of Write Now! (was $19.95, now $5.99).

The sale runs for exactly one week, until December 16. Some items are nearly sold out, so act fast.

As a special bonus, most print edition purchases come with a free digital edition. TwoMorrows Publishing does an excellent job with their PDF conversions, preserving the layout and the copious artwork on every page in crisp detail.

Check out the sale at www.twomorrows.com. Click on the banner at the top of the page to see the full clearance list. While you’re there, have a look at some of their other catalog items, including the Comic Book Artist Ultimate Bundle — every in-stock issue of the excellent Comic Book Artist magazine for just $54.00 — The Best of From The Tomb at 15% off, and much more.

DeMatteis and Muth’s Moonshadow

DeMatteis and Muth’s Moonshadow

Comments 6 comments

The Compleat MoonshadowThere was a time in the 1980s when it looked like Marvel and DC Comics might slowly evolve into something like mainstream book publishers: publishers who gave creators fair deals respecting copyright, and who lived off of the publication of new titles rather than the exploitation of intellectual property from decades previous. That hasn’t really happened, so far as I can see. Both companies dabbled in various kinds of creator ownership, but both appear mostly to have retreated to the relative safety of work-for-hire deals in recent years. Vertigo, a DC imprint featuring better deals for creators, seems to have become more strict in their contracts, and the recent departure of their founding editor doesn’t seem promising for the imprint’s future. Epic, Marvel’s attempt at a creator-owned line, largely faded away in the 1990s (though Marvel does still occasionally do some creator-owned work through their Icon imprint). Before it died, though, Epic published what might have been the best comic series in the 1980s to be printed with a Marvel Comics logo, up there with Walt Simonson’s run on Thor: J. M. DeMatteis and Jon J. Muth’s twelve-issue series Moonshadow. Later reprinted by Vertigo, with a slightly changed conclusion, Dematteis and Muth also created a sequel, Farewell, Moonshadow, now reprinted along with the original series in a paperback collection of the whole work, The Compleat Moonshadow. It’s a weird, heady mix of science fiction and fantasy, of fairy tale and scabrous parody. I want to talk a bit about it here.

Moonshadow is a curious coming-of-age story. A hippie named Sunflower is abducted from Earth by smirking balls of light called G’l Doses, who have the power of gods and utterly inscrutable motives; one of them impregnates her, and their child’s named Moonshadow by his mother. The book is his story, told by an aged Moonshadow recalling his youth. He remembers his growing up in the G’l Doses’ ‘zoo’ before his exile in company of his mother, his cat, and a faceless furry humanoid named Ira who’s all id: sex drive and scatology. They kick around the universe, and Moonshadow becomes orphan and outcast; alternately soldier and nanny, confidant of kings and outcast untouchable. He grows older, encounters sex and death and things of the spirit. It’s picaresque on a grand scale, the plot loose, characters fading in and out, recurring and being abandoned.

…

Read More Read More

DC Comics Announces Harlan Ellison’s 7 Against Chaos

DC Comics Announces Harlan Ellison’s 7 Against Chaos

Comments 3 comments

harlan-ellison-7-against-chaos-smallA few months ago, I wrote about Samurai 7, a terrific sword-and-science retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (with killer robots).

It seems this classic tale still has some play in it, if DC Comics’ upcoming Harlan Ellison’s 7 Against Chaos is any indication. Ellison has partnered with artist Paul Chadwick — creator of Concrete, which Blastr calls “One of the most important independent comic series of all time” — to create an epic SF adventure with a familiar theme:

In a distant future, Earth is in grave danger: The fabric of reality itself in unraveling, leading to catastrophic natural disasters, displaced souls appearing from bygone eras, and sudden, shocking cases of spontaneous combustion. The only hope for Earth’s survival is a force of seven warriors, each with his or her special abilities. But can these alien Seven Samurai learn to get along in time to find the source of the gathering chaos and save all of reality?

Ellison, who announced he was dying two years ago (only to change his mind and say he was “feeling somewhat better“), has openly acknowledged his inspiration, saying:

This is 21 years of work finally come to fruition. It is The Magnificent Seven, The Seven Samurai in space, it is the dream fulfilled.

Harlan Ellison’s 7 Against Chaos will be released under DC’s regular brand (i.e. not as a part of the more adult Vertigo or Wildstorm lines) in Summer 2013. Get all the details at DC Comics.

The Black Gate Christmas Gift List

The Black Gate Christmas Gift List

Comments 11 comments

a-guile-of-dragons[Apologies in advance for not being politically correct enough to call this the Black Gate Holiday Gift List. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, kindly ignore this post. Or use our suggestions to buy something for yourself, we won’t tell anyone.]

If you’re a Black Gate fan, we already know a lot about you. You’re almost certainly a fantasy devotee, well-read, with impeccable taste, and accustomed to the natural adoration of your peers. Pretty close, right? And you’re probably also a procrastinator who puts off Christmas shopping until the last minute, and ends up buying Wal-Mart gift certificates on December 24.

You can do better than that. In fact, we’re here to help you. Here’s a handy list of the best fantasy books, movies, games and comics of the season, with a link to a recent review, courtesy of the editors and staff of Black Gate magazine. We have gifts for every price range, from $5 to $150. Good luck, and happy shopping!

  1. A Guile of Dragons, James Enge ($17.95)
  2. The Bones of the Old Ones, by Howard Andrew Jones ($25.99)
  3. American Science Fiction: 9 Classic Novels, edited by Gary K. Wolfe ($70)
  4. Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection ($149.98)
  5. Lords of Waterdeep, Wizards of the Coast ($49.99)
  6. The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer ($39.99)
  7. Epic: Legends of Fantasy, edited by John Joseph Adams ($17.95)
  8. A Throne of Bones, Vox Day ($4.99)
  9. Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone ($24.99)
  10. Books To Die For, edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke ($29.99)

    11. …

    Read More Read More

Marvel Feature: Red Sonja 7 (plus Conan the Barbarian 66, 67, and 68)

Marvel Feature: Red Sonja 7 (plus Conan the Barbarian 66, 67, and 68)

Comments 4 comments

marvel-feature-7-coverSo the next issue blurb at the end of Marvel Feature 6 was just a bit misleading. After you went back to the comic shop (or newsstand or drug store or wherever people went in 1976 to get comics), paid your thirty cents for Conan the Barbarian 66, and got the issue back home, you would discover that it wasn’t a continuation of the story from Marvel Feature 6 at all. No, “Daggers and Death-Gods!” instead told the story of Conan and Belit docking in Massantia to trade some “honest loot, freely plundered.” After some tense negotiating, they are told of a missing page from the Book of Skelos being kept in the Temple of a Thousand Gods. There’s a hefty reward being offered by an unknown client (who works through a middleman) to anyone who can steal the page from the temple. Conan and Belit make their way through the temple and, after nearly killing eachother, thanks to a caretaker’s spell, they find the page … and Red Sonja. So issue 66 actually tells a story parallel to the one we just finished, with the promise that the next part will, for real this time, be told in issue 67.

Well, we’ve already invested sixty cents into this story, so we might as well invest another thirty to find out where it ends. Issue 67 opens with four pages of re-caps to the stories we read in Marvel Feature 6 and Conan the Barbarian 66. After the recaps, Sonja and Belit have exactly one panel of dialogue before Belit draws her sword and tries to kill her. Red Sonja called her a serving wench and that was all it took because, as Belit is fond of reminding us, she’s actually the daughter of the death-goddess Derketa (Belit believes this because Belit is crazy). The fight lasts for three panels before Belit concedes that Red Sonja is a better swordswoman and throws her sword aside. But she hasn’t conceded the fight, only changed weapons. Apparently, Belit (like all crazy girlfriends) carries a knife. At this point, Red Sonja probably realizes that Conan has enough problems with his delusional knife-wielding girlfriend, so she opts instead to grab the page, slice through the torch that lights the chamber, then flee under cover of darkness. Because Red Sonja only has crazy delusions of grandeur after watching her entire family murdered. For Belit, it’s a lifestyle.

The rest of the issue is Conan promising Belit that he’ll track down Sonja and the page, then getting sidetracked when he discovers an old friend has been imprisoned for murdering one of the town guard (which he’s done so many times, you’d think he’d be surprised to find that some people actually get arrested for it). After killing a half-man/half-tiger (honestly, no one’s even surprised by this sort of thing any more), he frees his friend and discovers that he was locked in the cell next to the man who originally stole the page (small world, Roy Thomas, awfully small world). He meets back up with Belit and they take in this new bit of information just as Red Sonja races past them on horseback. We’re told that the story will be continued in Marvel Feature 7.

…

Read More Read More

Marvel Feature: Red Sonja 6

Marvel Feature: Red Sonja 6

Comments 4 comments

marvel-feature-6-coverSo this issue touches on a pretty sensitive topic for me: book vandalism. Working in libraries, on and off, for most of my adult life, I’ve had to deal with this problem over and over. Some people just swipe whatever reference page they want, rather than using a photocopier. After all, why pay a dime for your own copy when you can steal the information from generations to come for free? Some people just don’t like the fact that certain information is freely available to the public and take it upon themselves to censor library materials. For instance, every single copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves had pages ripped out (and if you guessed they were in the chapter on women’s sexuality, you understand the mind of a censor). Some people just want to write down a phone number or a grocery list and rip out the page of a book that they don’t see any value in. Honestly, write it on the back of a receipt.

Anyway … Red Sonja spends the first four pages of Marvel Feature 6 beheading a pair of jackal-men, which is not much different than any other typical afternoon for her. But when she runs across Karanthes, a priest of Ibis, he explains that those weren’t just two run-of-the-mill half-man/half-jackal bandits, but special agents sent by a priest of Set to kill Sonja before she could meet Karanthes. It seems that Set and Ibis are two gods locked in an endless struggle with one another (Edith Hamilton says different, but that’s neither here nor there) and the priests essentially carry out their struggle on the earthly plane. Karanthes wants to hire Red Sonja to retrieve a document that he believes will help tip the struggle in his god’s favor.

So our mystic doodad of the month is a page torn from the Book of Skelos. We’re told that the Book of Skelos “contains the most fearsome magic-lore on Earth,” although frankly that gets said about a lot of books (including Our Bodies, Ourselves, apparently). While the book is closely guarded, apparently someone managed to tear out one of its pages and make off with it. Now, we never find out what’s on this page, if it contains a spell or a table of contents or just a dedication. (“To my wife, Sheb Niggurath, my most ruthless critic, my most tireless supporter, my everything. I love you, forever.”) And Red Sonja doesn’t really care either, as long as she gets paid.

…

Read More Read More