Blade: Black and White

Blade: Black and White
Marvel Comics, 2004

In 2004 Marvel Comics decided to capitalize on the release of the film Blade: Trinity by taking material previously published in the mid-70s in its Curtis line of black-and-white comic magazines, and packaging it - along with some 90s one-shot comics - as a trade paperback compilation titled 'Blade: Black and White'.

There are two main entries in 'Black and White'. One is the two-part story written by Marv Wolfman, and illustrated by Tony DeZuniga, that appeared in issues 8 and 9 of Vampire Tales (December 1974 / February 1975).

Also in the collection is 'The Night Josie Harper Died' , with story by Chris Claremont and art again by De Zuniga, from Marvel Preview No. 3 (September 1975).

Rounding things out is a six-page strip, 'Into the House of Terror', from issue 8 of Marvel Preview (September 1976); a short strip, 'Into the Tomb', from Marvel: Shadows and Light No.1 (February 1997); and a longer tale, 'Crescent City Blues', from the one-shot Blade No. 1 (March 1998).

The entries from the 70s magazines are disappointing. As was the custom of the 'Marvel Method' at the time that they were published, the scripts for these comics took precedence over the art, and as a result, they are severely over-written, with an excessive number of panels so overcrowded with speech balloons that it's often difficult to tell exactly what is going on. 

It also doesn't help matters that the reproductions in 'Blade: Black and White' are very poor. It looks like Marvel didn't have access to the original artwork, and instead made scans of the printed magazines.......?!

It goes without saying that the depiction of Blade in these comics is nowhere near the depiction of the character as portrayed by Wesley Snipes in the feature films; in these 70s comics, Blade looks more like a nerd than a superhero. As well, the vampire-killing action is rather restrained, considering that the black and white magazines were exempt from the Comics Code.

Of the 1990s Blade comics presented in this compilation, 'Into the Tomb' (1997) is probably the best, due to the artwork by Ladronn, which shows a Jack Kirby - inspired visual style.

The 1998 entry, 'Crescent City Blues', has a good script by Christopher Golden, who nowadays does a lot of writing for Dark Horse comics and its Hellboy-related titles. However, 'Crescent' is undermined by mediocre artwork from Gene Colan, who - in his later days as an artist - tended to produce hasty, half-finished work in an effort to maximize his output. 

Summing up, even if you're a dedicated Blade fan, it's hard to recommend 'Black and White'. While copies of those old issues of Marvel Preview and Vampire Tales are getting more and more expensive as the years go by, they probably are a wiser investment than this compilation.

Judge Parker and Zip-A-Tone

Judge Parker and Zip-A-Tone

Zip-A-Tone (aka Zipatone) was a widely used technique in graphic art, including comics, in the days before software-based art composition became commonplace. 

It required the user to cut out pieces of adhesive-backed plastic sheets, with different patterns to each sheet, and pasting it into the comic page of interest.

It wasn't at all unusual to see Zip-A-Tone effects in black and white comics of the 70s and early 80s, as it was a way to impart eye-catching textures to a given panel or panels, as this impressive splash page created by artist Paul Neary for a 'Hunter' story in Eerie No. 55 (March 1974) shows:

So I was startled when, perusing the ever-shrinking comics pages in recent deliveries of The Washington Post, I saw that the strip 'Judge Parker' was employing Zip-A-Tone....!!!!

Each panel (scanned originals, above) measures only 5" long by 2" wide - a sad fact of how tiny the comics have become in today's newspapers - so the Zip-A-Tone effect is comparatively subdued. However, given the infantile state of current comics art, it deserves some notice.... and even praise ! 

I'm guessing that 'Judge Parker' artist Mike Manley used a software app to render the Zip-A-Tone, as I'm guessing few, if any, sheets are still available.

It's open to question as to how many contemporary comics readers will even be aware of what Manley is doing with the strip. In my workplace of > 300 people, I am the only employee who brings a newspaper in to work........ With more and more comics being relegated to the 'online' version of national newspapers, I can foresee a day when comics simply are absent from printed newspapers.

Book Review: Killerbowl

Book Review: 'Killerbowl' by Gary K. Wolfe

5 / 5 Stars

‘Killerbowl’ (162 pp) was published by Doubleday in hardback in September 1975; the cover art is by Steve Marcesi.

[A mass market paperback version was published in 1976 in the UK by Sphere Books.]

Author Gary K. Wolf (not to be confused with sf essayist Gary K. Wolfe) wrote several sf novels in the 1970s. His 1981 novel ‘Who Censored Roger Rabbit ?’ was the basis of the hit 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit ?

Blogging about sf and fantasy books published during the interval from 1968 – 1988 occasionally allows me to discover an overlooked, rare gem of a title, and ‘Killerbowl’ is one of these.

Although ‘Killerbowl’ came out the same year as the movie Rollerball, which also examined a near-future USA in which blood sport was a carefully crafted corporate tool for ensuring a compliant populace, ‘Killerbowl’ is not a derivation, but rather, a more satirical treatment of the themes of American sports, its superstars, TV coverage, and the viewing habits of ‘Joe Six Pack’.

As ‘Killerbowl’ opens, its New Year’s Day, 2010, and within an eight-block area of downtown Boston, the Street Football League’s Super Bowl XXI is about to begin.

The city center has been temporarily evacuated, save for the two, 13-man teams of the San Francisco Prospectors and the New England Minutemen, the referees, and a small army of cameramen.

For the next 24 hours, the two teams will battle through the falling snow and freezing temperatures for the Championship of the SFL (the descendent of the NFL). In the SFL, violence is not only an expected part of the game, it’s encouraged. The act of tackling an opposing player includes the use of long-bladed knives and blackjacks, and if a player is killed, there are no substitutions.

The populace watching Super Bowl XXI has been beaten down by decades of the Energy Crisis and attendant economic dislocation that started in the early 70s. With little hope for the future, the citizenry are content to consume bread and circuses, in the form of the SFL, handed out by the corporations and their political allies. With over 90% of the population of the USA tuning in to Super Bowl XXI, it’s an unprecedented display of the International Broadcasting Company’s dominance of American social and political life.

For aging veteran T. K. Mann, quarterback for the Prospectors, Super Bowl XXI is personal. His Minutemen counterpart, the arrogant, self-centered, sadistic Harv Matision, has risen to stardom based on publicly humiliating Mann and murdering Prospector players. For Mann, it’s less about winning the game and more about exacting revenge on Matision.

But the IBC wants the highest rating possible, and to that end, the entire season has been rigged in favor of Matision and the Minutemen. Things aren’t going to change just for the Super Bowl, either. For the IPC wants Matision and the Minutemen to win the game….and kill T. K. Mann in the process……………….

‘Killerbowl’ works very well as both a page-turning action novel and as a social satire, something that many sf novels try for, but rarely accomplish. Author Wolf uses a clear, declarative prose style – never a given for an sf novel published during the New Wave Era – to lend a documentary-like quality to the violent proceedings of the SFL season and the Super Bowl. 

As well, the book is spot-on in terms of extrapolating the depressed, entropy-laden zeitgeist of the mid-70s forty years into the future: the 2010 version of the USA described in 'Killerbowl' is a very logical projection, given the state of the USA in 1975.

The major problem with ‘Killerbowl’ is that it’s long out of print, and copies in good condition are quite pricey. If you can find an affordable copy in the shelves of your used bookstore, don’t hesitate to pick this novel up !

Heavy Metal inaugural issue April 1977

'Heavy Metal' magazine
April 1977
Issue One

April, 1977, and on the radio, Glen Campbell's Southern Nights is playing. And a new magazine, unlike anything previously seen in American comic book publishing, is on the news stands.

As related at the Heavy Metal magazine fan page, Matty Simmons and Leonard Mogel, the co-owners of the magazine publishing firm 21st Century Communications, were intrigued by the French comic magazine Metal Hurlant. On a visit to France in September 1976, Mogel met with the 'Humanoids Association' - the coalition of artists and writers who published Metal Hurlant - and secured an agreement to publish a U.S. version of the magazine.

It's not clear if Mogel was aware that the Humanoids Association previously had approached Marvel Comics about reprinting Metal Hurlant in the U.S. According to a 2000 interview with former Marvel president Jim Shooter, posted to the cbr.com website, 

.........before the publication of Heavy Metal, Metal Hurlant came to Marvel seeking an American publisher. And after they did their presentation, we had a talk and Stan [Lee] thought that the stuff was too violent, too sexy and that good ol' sanitized Marvel couldn't do that. We thought he was crazy. But he was afraid that Marvel would get bad headlines, too violent, all that.

So it turned out that the people who published National Lampoon ended up with the American version of Metal Hurlant, which was Heavy Metal. And was phenomenally successful. Which made us grumpy.

[ There is limited information on Leonard Mogel available online; his birthdate is listed as October 23, 1922, and he evidently is alive and well as of 2017. He is listed as the author of a large number of books on magazine and book publishing at amazon.com. I found a black-and-white photograph of Mogel taken in 1968, when he was the publisher of Weight Watchers (!) magazine ]

Leonard Mogel, 1968

The inaugural issue of Heavy Metal features a striking cover illustration by Jean-Michel Nicollet and a back cover by Philippe Druillet. It's printed on 'slick' paper and features comics and illustrations in color, with quality separations and high resolution - things never before seen in the world of American comic books.

And, of course, the inaugural issue has plenty of tits, and ass, and frank nudity.......... 'European' stuff, rarely seen in American comic books, including the black-and-white Warren magazines. 

Stoners are intrigued.

I was only 16 when the inaugural issue of Heavy Metal hit the stands. I remember seeing it, but buying a copy was out of the question; I preferred to save my meagre supply of dollars for DAW books and other sci-fi paperbacks. It wasn't until November, 1978, when I had my first job and some reasonably plentiful spending money, that I bought my first Heavy Metal.

(Sadly, used copies of issue one in good condition fetch exorbitant prices. Maybe the current publishers of the magazine will re-release the inaugural issue as a special publication; otherwise, getting hold of a copy is best done by searching for the .cbr file on the internet)

Needless to say, the content of those early issues holds up very well 40 years later. The inaugural issue had some really great stuff: an installment of 'Conquering Armies' by Dionnet and Gal; a dialogue-free but memorable 'Arzach' tale from Moebius; and 'Selenia' by Macedo.

Also in the first issue was the offbeat story 'Space Punks', by Jean-Claude Mézières, the illustrator of the immensely popular Franco-Belgian comic (bande dessinee) 'Valerian'.  

'Space Punks' is posted below.

Hawkmoon: The Jewel in the Skull issue 2

Hawkmoon: The Jewel in the Skull
First Comics, 1986
Issue 2 (July 1986)
art: Rafael Kayanan and Rico Rival, story: Gerry Conway

(Issue 1 is available here).

Issue 2 of 'Hawkmoon: The Jewel in the Skull' saw Alfredo Alcala depart as inker, but he was ably replaced by Rico Rival, another talented Filipino comics artist, who previously had worked in the Planet of the Apes Marvel / Curtis black and white magazine in the 70s.