A longtime showbiz journalist and fan's thoughts on comic books, movies and other cool stuff.

Tag: Howard Chaykin

The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones (Marvel) #1-34

In the past month, as promised, I’ve read the entire run of Marvel’s The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones (Jan. 1983-March 1986). I completed reading the run in time to brush up on Indy’s past in 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and the brand-new feature Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I’ll start off by saying that Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my perfect movies. I love it unconditionally, and have since I first saw it at the Westmount Cinema in Edmonton in the summer of 1981. At the time, Alberta’s movie ratings system required a parent or guardian to attend with kids under age 16. So, I had to talk my Mom into taking me the first time. She expected to be bored stiff, based on the title, but thanked me afterward for making her see the movie. I saw the movie at least a half-dozen times that summer — sometimes by buying a ticket for Superman II and then sneaking in to see Raiders. Sometimes, I got caught, and sent back to watch 10 minutes or so of Superman II before re-sneaking in to Raiders.

Marvel Super Special #18: Raiders of the Lost Ark. Cover art by Howard Chaykin.

Unlike Star Wars, Raiders didn’t inspire a flood of merchandise. I don’t remember there being any Raiders toys, though I did have some action figures from Clash of the Titans, which came out around the same time. There was a novelization, which I read and enjoyed, and Marvel Super Special #18, which adapted the movie. The really enjoyed this adaptation, which was written by Walter Simonson, penciled by John Buscema, and inked by Klaus Janson — all under a terrific painted cover by Howard Chaykin.

I stopped reading comics shortly thereafter. I was 11 going on 12, about to enter junior high school, and toys and comics were giving way to hockey, rock music, and secret crushes on the girls in my class. So I missed Marvel’s continuation of Raiders, which started in the fall of 1982 and roughly spanned the period in my youth when I didn’t collect or read comics.

Somehow, over the years, I acquired the full Marvel run, but had never sat down to read it until now. The series is wildly uneven, and mostly unremarkable. It never really achieves the kind of high points that Marvel’s Star Wars found, even with plenty of top-notch creators involved.

The difficulty in doing an Indiana Jones comic in 1982 was apparent right there in the first issue, which featured a story and layout by superstar John Byrne, who also contributed a plot and layouts to the second issue before leaving the title to make room for Alpha Flight. Byrne’s story is quite talky — more like a Sherlock Holmes story than anything.

David Michelinie had the longest run on the title, taking over with issue #4 and writing most everything through issue #23. This was roughly concurrent with his run on Star Wars, which produced some of the best Marvel issues set in a galaxy far, far away.

But Indiana Jones was a tougher nut to crack. For one, the character operated in a more realistic world than most comics. It was difficult to find distinctive villains that weren’t retreads of the Nazis. And it was more difficult to create plots where a “finder of rare antiquities” could play the hero. And incorporating the pulp fiction-style supernatural elements was even more difficult.

For most of the series, Indy went on missions for his pal Marcus Brody on behalf of the National Museum, based at Marshall College in Connecticut. Marion Ravenwood showed up and Marcus hired her as a publicist for the museum, assigned to tag along and document Indy’s adventures to promote the good work the museum was doing. At least she did until issue #25, when she abruptly left the series and never returned. This was around the time Temple of Doom, in which she didn’t appear, was released. Short Round made a brief appearance in one issue, but that was it.

The style of action Raiders delivered also was difficult to recreate on the comics page. The workhorse artist of the series was Herb Trimpe, a true comics journeyman who brought a more conventional style of art to the character.

But nothing really works. Even when artists like Chaykin and David Mazzuchelli contributed to the series, it was flat and dull. The covers from Terry Austin, Chaykin, and Michael Golden were the best part of the series,

Sometime after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was released in 1984, there was a shift at Lucasfilm that affected both the Indy and Star Wars comics. Interest seemed to evaporate, with both titles eventually being demoted to bimonthly publication for their final year before cancellation.

The later issues of Indy’s comic, however, were some of the better ones. Linda Grant took over writing the series, and Steve Ditko drew a number of the later issues. The results were more entertaining, though still falling short of anything that inspired further reading or required the continuation of the series.

I think Indiana Jones definitely could work as a comic. It takes so much inspiration from the serials of the 1930s, which in turn took inspiration from the pulp fiction mags that preceded comics and the great adventure comic strips of the era. Terry and the Pirates is as close to a blueprint for Indiana Jones as you’re ever likely to find. Tapping into Milton Caniff’s approach would seem the obvious way to make good Indiana Jones comics.

I know Dark Horse published many Indy comics in the 1990s and beyond. I think I’ve only ever read one of them, and it must not have made any impact on me as I never read any more. If there’s a good one I missed, let me know.

Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Back to the movies to wrap this up: My friends and I bolted out of school the Friday Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom opened to get in line for a screening at the Paramount Theater on Jasper Avenue in Edmonton. We’d heard about the bugs scene, and one pal brought a pack of Goodies candy to toss from the balcony during the bug scene. I don’t remember being able to see any kind of reaction, but it was fun.

I still love the Temple of Doom. It’s not as good as Raiders, but I love the freaky energy, the pulpy thrills, the strangeness, the dark plot, and even the tension with Willie Scott and the friendship of Short Round.

I’m not as thrilled with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which I saw opening weekend with my girlfriend at the time in Scottsdale, Arizona. Temple of Doom had been roundly criticized as being too dark for kids, inspiring in part the creation of the PG-13 rating. So Last Crusade played it safe, following the pattern set by Raiders for its plot, and injecting some humor with Sean Connery arriving as Henry Jones Sr. It should have worked, but it played more like this was a character brought in to prop up the ratings in the third season of a TV series that was running out of gas. I felt pandered to, at least a little bit.

Sean Connery and Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

I know I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull when it came out, but remember only the chase sequence at the start of the film and Indy’s silly hiding in the fridge to avoid being nuked scene.

Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett in
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

So, that brings me to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. I’m a bit predisposed to liking it because I have interviewed director James Mangold and came to enjoy his work: Copland, Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma, The Wolverine, Logan, and Ford v. Ferrari. I liked the movie a lot — it’s not as good as Raiders, and probably not quite good enough to knock out Temple of Doom as my No. 2 favorite, but it has enough style and nostalgia to feel like a real Indiana Jones movie. And in this day and age, that’s enough.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Harrison Ford in
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Thanks for the thrills, Indiana Jones!

Indiana Jones and the True Believers of Marvel Comics

Not a bad title, eh? I’d watch that movie.

Raiders of the Lost Ark movie poster.

I was 11 going on 12 in the summer of 1981. I loved movies, but knew nothing about Raiders of the Lost Ark until some friends of mine who’d seen it told me how great it was. I pestered my Mom into taking me and a friend to see it at a matinee, which was required by Alberta’s movie ratings system of the day. She thought it was going to be a boring movie about Noah’s Ark or something, and I didn’t know enough about the movie to tell her otherwise.

So me, my friend, and my Mom all headed to the Westmount cinemas in Edmonton one summer afternoon in 1981 to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark. We all loved it. I mean loved it. My Mom said after: “Why didn’t you say it had Han Solo in it!” I really didn’t know.

Seeing Raiders was a big deal that summer. I think I saw it six times in movie theaters — most of them requiring me to buy a ticket for Superman II, which started 10 minutes before Raiders, and then slipping into the other theater. I got caught once or twice, sent back to Superman II, and then usually slipped back into Raiders.

Marvel Super Special #18 cover.

Unlike Star Wars, there wasn’t much in the way of merchandise for Raiders. I read the novelization, but preferred the Marvel Super Special adaptation, which Marvel later split up into three standard comic book issues the same way they had done with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The magazine-size edition had a great painted cover by Howard Chaykin, whose name I recognized from Marvel’s adaptation of Star Wars.

I wasn’t reading comics in 1982 when Marvel finally launched its new series The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones, and it took more than 20 years for me to come back around and collect this 34-issue run. Even then, I don’t know if I read them all. Some of them seem familiar, others not.

Unlike Star Wars, Indiana Jones struggled to adapt to comic books, which seems strange in retrospect given how much Indy borrows from comics classics like Terry and the Pirates.

For me, Indiana Jones is a frustrating movie franchise, in a way. I consider Raiders of the Lost Ark to be a perfect movie. I can watch it anytime and each viewing is as thrilling and as fun as the first.

From there, it’s a direct downhill slide.

My and friends stood in line to see on opening day Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom at the Paramount Theater on Jasper Avenue in Edmonton. It’s not as good as Raiders, but I still find its freaky energy entertaining and original. I love that it’s gross and dark and weird —  qualities major movie franchises no longer have.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a further step down. If Indy was a TV series, this would have been a fifth-season episode that proved it was time to wrap it up. Sure, Sean Connery is great (I met him once), but this movie plays it very safe, with imitations of Raiders and goofy comedy bits that would be more at home in a sitcom.

I know I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in the theater, and I have a copy on DVD somewhere, but I can’t remember much about it save an early sequence where Indy locks himself in a refrigerator to protect himself from an atom bomb test.

I’m looking forward to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. I overall like James Mangold’s films — in particular Cop Land and Ford vs. Ferrari — and enjoyed interviewing him for the DGA magazine at his office when Logan came out. (He had a large blown up poster of Marc Silvestri’s art from the cover of The Uncanny X-Men #251 on the wall, and a huge collection of classic vinyl albums in his office at Fox.) But we’ll have to see if Dial of Destiny can defy the downward spiral after so many years away.

I’ve been re-reading the old Marvel series and will try to post some highlights here in the lead-up to the new movie. Based on the early issues, it may be rough going, but we’ll see if we can find some comics treasure in this largely forgotten comic serial.

Cover to Battlestar Galactica #22

Comics Letters Pages, Part 1

In the days before the internet, comics letters pages were important to fans. It was one of the few places you could connect with other fans and read what they thought about recent issues, the art, the quality of the writing, etc.

Letters pages also gave most fans their first insights into how comics are made and who made them.

I first read the letters columns in Marvel’s Star Wars comics starting sometime in 1978. Those comics were for a while one of the few Star Wars products available, and the only official new stories. I read and re-read those comics — and re-read them again.

I specifically remember reading the first arc with Archie Goodwin as writer and editor. It was issues #11-15 (May-Sept. 1978). The art was by Carmine Infantino and Terry Austin. I bought each issue as it came out and loved it. It was the first time I read an extended story over multiple issues of a comic book and I was hooked.

Eventually, I noticed the letters pages, and read those, too. It was then that I began asking questions like, “Who’s Archie?” “Who’s Carmine?” “What’s an inker?” Discovering the credits finally clued me in that there were actual people writing and drawing these comics. And they were different. I had read the previous issues by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin, and I probably was even vaguely aware of having seen their names in the book. But it wasn’t until seeing the completely different outcome that Goodwin and Infantino brought to the comic that it became clear just how much impact the writer and artist had on a comic book.

Putting pen to paper

I remember only once writing a letter of my own. It was after reading Star Wars #26 (Aug. 1979), which had this really cool sequence where Luke Skywalker flies a stolen TIE Fighter into the gas giant Yavin to take out a hidden Imperial base. The story ruled, but Infantino’s art had become increasingly abstract. I’d looked at other comics with more conventional art styles and wanted the characters and ships in Star Wars to look a little more like they did in the movie.

Cover to Star Wars #26
Star Wars #26 (Aug. 1979). Cover art by Carmine Infantino and Bob Wiacek

I have since changed my mind about Infantino’s art on Star Wars and love it unconditionally.

Being that into Star Wars at the time meant I was really down for Battlestar Galactica. In Canada, the pilot was shown in theaters months before it aired on TV. I saw it several times and was excited for it to become a TV show that would air every single week.

Of course, it also became a comic. A friend had the treasury version that came out with the movie release, but Marvel re-adapted it for the first three issues of its monthly comic series. The next two issues after that saw Walter Simonson draw an adaptation of “The Lost Planet of the Gods,” and it was better than the show. I read that comic for the next two years — long past the show’s cancelation — and in particular loved the issues Simonson drew. He later started to write the book as well, and it somehow got even better.

It was at the time a special thing for me — almost like the show hadn’t really gone away. Of course, that didn’t last.

I read on the letters page of Battlestar Galactica #22 (Dec. 1980) that the series “isn’t much longer for this world. Next issue will be the last.” I was bummed. And the next issue, #23, was indeed the last.

Battlestar Galactica #22 letters page.
This letter in Battlestar Galactica #22 (Dec. 1980) is how I learned the series was being canceled.

Shortly after that, I stopped reading comics — and letters pages — for a few years. When I resumed reading and collecting comics in the mid-1980s, the letters pages were still there to inspire.

More on that next time.

Comics Wandering: From Gold Key Star Trek, to Howard Chaykin and more

Wow, time sure flies when you’re too busy to read comics. What have I been doing? Well, I’ve got a toddler, a new puppy, I did a lot of interviews and wrote a lot of articles for the just-concluded awards season, tried brewing beer, and I’ve been focusing on learning to play the guitar well enough that it doesn’t sound like a chainsaw cutting through a chain-link fence. I also made a guitar from a kit — a Lake Placid Blue Telecaster style that, after much tweaking and adjustment, is at last starting to play well.

And I have been reading comics, when there’s time and comics I want to read. It’s just been very inconsistent reading and a bit of an oddball selection compared to the weekly superhero habit. I am finding the overall comics habit is very hard to break, if not impossible for me to break at this point in my life. I admit to slipping back into some old habits, but I’ll elaborate on that in a bit.

I admit it: My name is Tom and I’m a comic-holic. I especially still love single issue comics. The collecting part of the hobby remains one that I find satisfying in a way that reading a collected edition is not. This isn’t true for everything, but it is for things like superhero comics, which are still written and drawn for the serial comic format, no matter how quickly they got to collected editions.

So, what have I been reading? Lots of Image comics, which for all the variations in the quality of its output, remains the only dependably creative publisher of mainstream superhero, adventure and genre comics.

I’ll just run down some of the cool stuff I’ve read and liked since my last, long-ago post to this blog. I will be unsurprised if no one is reading or still checking this blog, but just in case there’s a few of you out there, thank you! If you’re new, please be sure to check out my book, Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen, available in print from Amazon and on Kindle.

Last summer, I had two comic book pursuits, both inspired during a trip to the excellent Queen City Comics in Cincinnati, Ohio. First was completing my collection of Gold Key Star Trek comics, which I now have done. I have been a Star Trek fan ever since I first saw the show in the fall of 1975, when ITV began re-running the series weekdays at the perfect hour for me to catch it after coming home from a hard day in Grade 1. As a kid, I remember buying a few issues of the Gold Key series off the stands, but it never impressed me very much. I thought the stories were silly, such as issue #46 (Aug. 1977), in which aliens gave Spock a giant brain and he became slightly villainous before Kirk talked him down.

I got into Trek comics much more seriously in the late 1980s, when DC started publishing its second ongoing Star Trek series and launched a regular series for Star Trek: The Next Generation. On TV, The Next Generation was really kicking into high gear and I just fell right into being a pretty serious Trek fan for the next seven or eight years. In addition to collecting all of the DC output from that point on, as well as the Malibu Star Trek: Deep Space Nine stuff, I collected all the previous DC series, the Marvel series and made a pretty good start on the Gold Key series. My interest in Star Trek peaked by the mid-1990s, and Marvel’s second round of Trek comics just was not very good, in my opinion. (Remember the Star Trek/X-Men crossovers? Yikes.)

Cut to about 10 years ago, when a friend of my Dad’s had come across a large collection of comics from his parents‘ old book shop and set about sorting them and selling them on eBay. He reached out to me right at the start because he knew nothing about comics, so I helped him with the basics about getting an Overstreet guide, conventions and what to really expect from eBay sales. In thanks, he let me pick out some stuff when I was over visiting and came across a near-complete set of the Gold Key Star Treks. These were easily accessible and time was short, so I took them as compensation and was very pleased. I still had a few holes, though, and would every once in a while fill one in when I came across an issue I needed in a shop or convention.

But this past summer, when I hit Queen City Comics, they had pretty much all but two or three of the issues The prices and conditions where great, so I bit the bullet and bought them. That lead to me heading onto eBay to fill in the last two or three issues I needed, and finally the last issue — #9, with the photo cover of Spock from the episode “Amok Time” — arrived to complete the set. These are cool comics and I really dig them now in a way I did not twenty or so years ago. Yes, they’re goofy and at times completely contradictory to the show itself, but they have a unique energy and the art is often terrific. Plus, I still enjoy the tactile experience of reading an old comic printed on slightly yellowed newsprint.

My second summer comics pursuit involved the works of Howard Chaykin. This pursuit also started at Queen City, where I found mint condition copies of both Time2 graphic novels and the Epic collected edition, The Complete Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, which I had never even heard of before seeing it in the bin. All were cover price, and I scooped them right up. I also found a few other 1970s Chaykin bits, including the Monark Starstalker issue of Marvel Premiere (which I wrote about last summer) and a couple of Dominic Fortune tales. Chaykin’s art has always been a joy, especially when he’s doing painted work printed on high quality paper.

Along with this came The Art of Howard Chaykin, written by Robert Greenberger and published by the nice folks at Dynamite! (As an aside: Greenberger used to edit the DC Star Trek comics and printed a couple of my letters way back when. I always thought, based on his thoughtful letter columns, he was one of the most professional and likable editors in the business.) I worked my way through these books and really enjoyed them, following them up with a few digs into the archives for some other Chaykin stuff from the 1990s, such as Midnight Men and Power and Glory.

The Time2 books were especially fascinating. I found the plot a bit hard to follow on my first read, even though I thoroughly enjoyed everything else about the books. After reading the Greenberger book with Chaykin saying it was heavily influenced by his interest in jazz music of the 1930s, it made a lot more sense and my second reading was even more enjoyable.

During my one convention visit last year, to the Long Beach Comic Con, I stopped by and chatted with Chaykin — who I had met a number of times over the past ten years — and chatted with him about the books. The Stars My Destination is a really interesting adaptation. I had read the novel years and years ago and remembered a bit about it but it hadn’t made the deep impression on me that Frank Herbert’s Dune or Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End had. I enjoyed (and surely understood) much more of the book as an adult, and really dug Chaykin’s interpretation of it. You can’t go wrong with a couple hundred pages of painted Chaykin art from the late 1970s.

And then, there’s Black Kiss 2. I waited until all six issues were out before sitting down to read this and was happily surprised with how great it was. It’s been a long time since I read the original Black Kiss (I have it in single issues and a collected edition — somewhere) but I remembered enough for this to make sense. It’s both a prequel and a sequel to the original, and it jumps around through a lot of different time periods that allow Chaykin to draw all the stuff he likes and/or is good at — cars, cityscapes, men’s fashion, jazz musicians and, of course, lots of dirty, dirty sex. All in crisp, beautiful black and white! I don’t know if the climax of the book was as satisfying as it could have been, but the ride was definitely worth it.

I haven’t read anything in the past year from DC’s The New 52 because it just plain fails to interest me in any way. I liked a few of the series at the start, but the way series suffered sometimes radical, unexplained, and usually arbitrary changes in tone, premise and creative teams debunked any true creative rationale for the relaunch. It made for a great jumping off point, and I’ve not missed any of those comics or characters. I keep hearing how great Batman is these days, and I am sure it is good because they do have some good creators on those books and Batman is far and away DC’s best character. But I still find myself uninterested. Having read so many good (and bad) Batman stories, it’s almost like my brain has no more room for Batman comics unless they’re truly outstanding, i.e. true classics in the making, on a par with Batman: Year One or the great Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams collaborations of the now-distant past.

I was always more of a Marvel fan, so my feelings for Marvel in general and the X-Men in particular are much more complicated and deserving of a post all its own.

A few more comics I’ve read and liked include Saga, Thief of Thieves, Grant Morrison’s Happy!, Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons’ The Secret Service, Harbinger, The Massive, the new Star Wars ongoing from Dark Horse, John Byrne’s new sci-fi series High Ways, The End Times of Bram and Ben, Star Trek: The Next Generation — Hive, and my favorite new comic in the last year, Joe Harris and Martin Morazzo’s Great Pacific. I’ll try to go into more detail on those in another post.

Here’s hoping it won’t be six months until I write it. Cheers!

Comic of the Day: Howard Chaykin’s Marvel Premiere #32 (1976)

Marvel Premiere #32 (Oct. 1976)

I’ll be heading down to the comics shop today to pick up Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss II #1, which I’m sure will be worth the effort. I’ve been on a bit of a Chaykin kick lately, so today I’ll offer a quick look at an oldie I picked up on a recent trip: Marvel Premiere #32 (Oct. 1976), featuring Monark Starstalker!

This is an early effort by Chaykin as both writer and artist, and it unfortunately shows. The good stuff is the artwork, which is sleek and well-designed. It’s pretty unusual stuff for Marvel at the time, though the style seen here would become more familiar with both Chaykin’s later work and Frank Miller’s style on his original Daredevil run. The individual panels and pages are well-designed and look decidedly un-comic-book-y for the era. Chakyin goes heavy on the blacks and it looks most like Chaykin’s work on Star Wars #1. (I believe Roy Thomas stated in an issue of Alter-Ego that I don’t have handy to confirm that it was this issue that prompted the Lucasfilm folks to specifically request Chaykin draw the Star Wars comic.)

While this looks great, it’s a complete mess to read. The story nominally involves a guy named Monark Starstalker, who’s a kind of bounty hunter pursuing a target on a remote planet. It’s a simple premise, but it gets bogged down in clunky exposition intended to inject a sense of reality into this world. The character is a prototypical Chaykin hero: hard-boiled, tough and irresistible to the ladies.

This book is also awfully murky looking — the heavy inks just didn’t translate well into the printing processes used for comics at the time. It’d be nice to see this done on better paper that could present the images more sharply and vividly.

The Joy of Anthologies: Why ‘Dark Horse Presents’ Rocks

One of my favorite reads each month is Dark Horse Presents, which was relaunched this past summer after a more than 10 years of being out of print and a few years running as an early digital comics title on MySpace.com. It’s an excellent reminder of the value of anthologies and of the rewards (and perils) of sampling material you most likely never would have tried.

I rarely read the original DHP, which had a long run as the publisher’s flagship title from 1986-2000. The original series was, as I recall, a normal size black-and-white comic book that helped launch everything from Paul Chadwick’s Concrete to Frank Miller’s Sin City and John Byrne’s Next Men. I did, however, enjoy other anthologies, including the occasional issue of Negative Burn and, being a big 1980s Marvel fan, Marvel Comics Presents, of which i own a complete set of all 175 issues. (And before anyone asks, I somehow completely missed Action Comics Weekly and have yet to read an issue. I’ve never heard anyone talk about it or recommend anything in it.)

The new DHP deviates from the comics anthology norm by being in color — the market for black and white these days appears limited to folks well-established in that format such as Jeff Smith and Terry Moore — and being extra thick, with most issues clocking in at 80 pages. That makes each book nice and thick — you could line up a nice run of these on your bookshelf and they would look pretty cool — and continues the prestige format of the 1980s that I still like quite a bit.


The content, though, is the real reason to buy this book, and I say that acknowledging right off the bat that not everything in here is good or even things that I like. But any book that serves up new Concrete short stories as well as new serials from the likes of Howard Chaykin, Neal Adams and Jim Steranko is worth a look. Of those, I like Concrete the best because I think the character works very well in that format and Chadwick always produces thoughtful material. Chaykin’s “Marked Man,” a pulpy tale of a thief hiding in plain sight, also is a good read. Adams’ “Blood” is, however, a mess to read with really nice art — very much like Batman: Odyssey though not as out of place here as it is on that iconic character.

A lot of that stuff I would probably buy and read even if it was published on its own. So when the books also include entertaining series I’m only somewhat familiar with, like Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder,  Michael Gilbert’s Mr. Monster and Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson’s Beasts of Burden, it’s a real bonus. And then there’s some completely new stuff that adds even more to the mix, my favorite so far being Eric Powell’s one-off short “Isolation” in issue #5.

Again, not all the features are to my liking, but skipping over a story every now and then is a lot easier when it’s one of 10 or so stories in the book. And getting 10 or so stories, including a few brand-new serials or one-shots each issue, is a much cheaper way to try new material or read up on new creators than buying a couple full issues of just about anything else. The joy of anthologies comes in finding new things you didn’t expect and liking them. I’m having the same experience with prose, working my way through for the first time Harlan Ellison’s original Dangerous Visions volume on my Kindle. I’m enjoying that experience for many of the same reasons. The other thing I like about this kind of anthology is it will get you eventually in on the ground floor of something cool, some new comic that will debut in the pages of DHP and go on to be a hit on its own, either as a comic or something else.

I hope DHP sells well enough to be around for a long time — and that its success prompts more publishers to put some of their weight into projects like this that allow for the kind of experimentation comics desperately needs to stay a vital and interesting medium.

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