WILD SPACE

I’ve been looking forward to this book for months. It’s a collection of odds and ends.

Back in the 70s and 80s Marvel UK reprinted Marvel US comics. They generally did so in black and white on a weekly basis instead of monthly, and hence used up more of the material than was being produced.  For Spider-Man and the Hulk and the other heroes, there was a ten year backlog of comics, and so this wasn’t going to cause a problem any time soon. For Star Wars though, there was a problem, and so Carmine Infantino got to work pencilling, with two inkers alternating to get the stuff produced more quickly. The result was that uniquely, Star Wars Weekly was printing the stories before they were appearing in the US comics. The Marvel US comics are the reprints.

By the time The Empire Strikes Back movie was released in 1980, there were a good few stories that were just dropped from the Marvel US schedule. I didn’t realise the extent , and was surprised that so many are therefore seen as obscure.

Also from Marvel UK are a series of original comics produced in the UK by creators such as Alan Davis, Alan Moore, Steve Moore, John Stokes, etc. Some of these were already reprinted in the 1990s by Dark Horse in colour, and are presented as such here. With these stories, original covers like this one by Alan Davis aren’t included in the book.

A cheeky thing to note is that although Dark Horse are not hiding altogether that these are Marvel Comics, they have gone to the trouble of whiting out “Stan Lee Presents…” from the start of every chapter and replacing it with “Lucasfilm Presents…”

Of note too are Blackthorne’s 3D comics, published between the 1986 cancellation of Marvel Star Wars and the 1991 Dark Horse series starting up. All three are here, starting with the “Tenth anniversary” #1. The 3D effects have been done away with, and it’s nice to look at these for the first time in 25 years without straining my eyes. I do miss the effect Blackthorne created for the camouflage net on these pages though.

A lot of nice curiosities here, nice to have the Pizzazz magazine stories by Howard Chaykin and Tony Dezuniga, and Gary Erskine’s art is good clean fun too.

I MADE WALLPAPER

Not computer wallpaper.

Thirty-two actual-sized colour scans from pages of 60s, 70s and 80s DC and Marvel comics.

Comics piled alongside comics in this fashion are an overpowering sight.

Do you recognise any of them?

NEW INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMIC ART

The new edition (Volume 15, number 1) of The International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA) is out now. It has a couple of articles by myself in it. One is a report on a Dundee Comics Day 2011, and the other is on "Dredd at Dundee Contemporary Arts "in 2012.

Here are my photos which are reproduced in black and white in the article:

Paul Gravett with Jack Kirby backdrop.

Robbie Morrison with Nikolai Dante backdrop.

At the Dredd at DCA event, a looped slideshow of comics ran before the movie. I preferred them to the movie.

More details of IJOCA can be found here.

OBLIVION

I watched a ten minute documentary/advertising show on Tom Cruise’s latest film Oblivion. It’s a science fiction movie, during which Cruise runs around holding an unwieldy gun. The film looks alright, I’ll probably watch it when it comes on telly. During his interview on the show, he mentioned that they were able to go much deeper into the story than in the graphic novel.

 "I don’t remember that graphic novel", I thought to myself. But that in itself isn’t overly strange. There are too many comics coming out all the time to be aware of them all. And it’s certainly possible that if I saw some solicitations for comics that looked like the promotional images for this film, they are exactly the kind of things I might ignore.

There are also lots of comics chugging along in movie development hell right now completely unbeknownst to me. But by the time that Tom Cruise or similar has attached his name to a film based on a comic, one can’t help but continually be told about it online. So it was a bit strange I’d seen the posters of Tom on bus shelters before I’d heard of this comic.

But then I read an article online that points out that Oblivion was never a comic. Director Joseph Kosinski pitched a brochure with concept art and an outline of a story as a graphic novel. As graphic novels are seen as goldmines to base movies on, it seems that calling your pitch booklet a graphic novel is enough to get you in. Tom Cruise will sit on TV and state outright that Oblivion is a graphic novel. He doesn’t know any better. This is the level of real interest that Hollywood has in comics. They don't even know what they are.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN VINTAGE ANNUAL

The latest edition of The Avengers comic comes with a surprise free gift: The Amazing Spider-Man Vintage Annual. 

I think it was a surprise to the producers of The Avengers comic too. The cover of the issue boldly states "Free Plasma Pistol! With super-sticky darts!" This piece of plastic tat is nowhere to be found.
Instead, what we are given is this collection of Stan Lee/Steve Ditko stories – the origin; the first issue; first story with the Lizard (probably because he was in the latest movie) and the Sinister Six story from the first annual, which is a favourite of mine. There’s also a couple of comics articles by the pair; ‘The Secrets of Spider-Man’ and ‘How Stan Lee and Steve Ditko Create Spider-Man’.

The book is printed on glossy paper, all made to look aged – the same brown marks repeatedly show up throughout.

Meanwhile in the Avengers comic – the Micronauts appear!

The Micronauts were a fun and well-drawn comic by Michael Golden in the late 70s based on toys. I was surprised to see them appear here as I would assume the rights had reverted back to the manufacturers or somebody or other years ago (similar to Rom, whose guest appearance in The Hulk in the 1980s means that there’s a chapter missing in the latest collection of the green one’s exploits). And sure enough, although the characters are all still there with names intact they now refer to themselves as Microns.

Anyway, if you want a nice hardback book of Lee/Ditko goodness for a good cheap price pick this up while it’s still available.