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The Unfinished Monument: The Steranko History of Comics

The Unfinished Monument: The Steranko History of Comics

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The Steranko History of Comics, Volumes One and Two, front covers

Imagine Mount Rushmore with only one president on it. Picture a Washington Monument that’s only 185 feet tall instead of 555. How about a Statue of Liberty missing two arms and a head? No takers? I don’t blame you; there’s nothing more frustrating than a great beginning that remains incomplete.

Take The Steranko History of Comics, a work that was intended to fill six volumes. The first two came out in 1970 and 1972… and then, nothing. It’s been fifty-four years now and I don’t mind telling you, I’m starting to lose hope.

Certainly no one was (or is — he’s still with us at the age of eighty-eight) more qualified to write a history of comics than Jim Steranko. Active in the industry as an artist and writer since the late 50’s, he did his most famous work for Marvel on their Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. title. Charging through the door that Jack Kirby had kicked open, Steranko created some images (especially his Nick Fury covers) that have become icons of the psychedelic 60’s as essential as anything by Andy Warhol or Peter Max.

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 4: The Hunter

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 4: The Hunter

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Parker’s first appearance: The Hunter (Pocket Books, 1962)

What is it?

Parker begins!

He’s angry. He’s determined. He’s out for blood. And he’s got big hands!

He’s walking across the George Washington Bridge into New York, scaring motorists who glimpse him out the window as they drive by.

Later he will decide he wants the money that was taken from him. At the moment, however, he just wants revenge.

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David C. Smith & Robert E. Howard, Part Two: Red Sonja

David C. Smith & Robert E. Howard, Part Two: Red Sonja

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Red Sonja by David C. Smith and Richard L. Tierney (Ace Books, December 1981 – May 1983). Covers by Boris Vallejo

In addition to his Black Vulmea and Bran Mak Morn stories, David C. Smith collaborated with Richard L. Tierney (1936 –2022) on six novels in a series about Red Sonja. Though often described as Robert E. Howard pastiches, that label is not completely accurate. Red Sonja (spelled with a J), is not a Howard character, although she is based on a couple of female swordslingers Howard did create, particularly — it seems to me — on Valeria, from the Conan story “Red Nails.” (A very similar character named Valeria appeared in the first Conan movie — Conan the Barbarian.)

Howard did create a character named Red Sonya (spelled with a “y”), who appeared as a secondary character in one historical tale — “The Shadow of the Vulture,” from the collection Sowers of the Thunder. She had red hair instead of blonde like Valeria, but otherwise is less reminiscent of Red Sonja than is Valeria.

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 3: Why Can’t Anyone (Except Darwyn Cooke) Get Him Right?

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 3: Why Can’t Anyone (Except Darwyn Cooke) Get Him Right?

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Payback (Paramount Pictures, February 5, 1999)

In the first two installments of this series, we looked at the master criminal known as Parker, and at his creator, Richard Stark, the pseudonym Donald E. Westlake used when writing spare and stark but hard-hitting prose.

Now let’s look at some of the many attempts to bring Parker to a wider audience.

The novels are extremely popular with a segment of the population, and so studios and directors have come calling from time to time, with attempts to adapt the character and his stories to film.

But they never quite get Parker right.

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A New Beginning: Bowling With Corpses by Mike Mignola & Dave Stewart

A New Beginning: Bowling With Corpses by Mike Mignola & Dave Stewart

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It all started because I wanted to draw a kid bowling with corpses

Mike Mignola

Maybe it was John Fultz who mentioned them on Facebook. He’s always mentioning things that lead me to acquiring more books. Maybe it came to me in a dream. I’m not really sure. Either way, I discovered that Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, the World’s Greatest Paranormal Investigator ®, had drawn and written (colored exquisitely by Dave Stewart) two collections of dark fantasy stories; Bowling With Corpses (2025), and Uri Tupka and the Gods (2026). I bought them almost at once.

Bowling With Corpses is a collection of stories, some fairytale-inspired and some detailing the setting’s complex cosmogony, opens with the following dedication:

For all those who transported me to lands unknown way back when — Howard, Smith, Lovecraft, Dunsany, Leiber, Moorcock, Lee and Kirby. And so many others. I realized now this book was inevitable.

From the first page all those influences are apparent, though I think Dunsany’s dreamlike stories such as those I reviewed from At the Edge of the World. Some follow fairytale logic, and others, dream logic. Mignola’s dark and shadow-filled art brings them to life, or death, as the case might be. In the later years of Hellboy, Mignola’s art took on a very stylized look. His work here has stepped back from that towards the more detailed style of his older work. In the afterword, Mignola describes himself as semi-retired until he realized:

“The hell with this. I love drawing comics so I’ll just keep drawing comics.”

 

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 2: Parker the Barbarian!

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 2: Parker the Barbarian!

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Richard Stark’s Parker by Darwyn Cooke

Last time we discussed the character of Parker, Donald E. Westlake’s master thief and heist planner.

This time, we’ll look at why we’re talking about Parker at all, here in the hallowed spaces of this fine magazine.

Parker might seem like an odd fit. Allow me, however, to draw some parallels that will help to illustrate how and why the master criminal Parker fits in with classic sword and sorcery characters like Conan the Barbarian. For these two gentlemen have far more in common than one might guess.

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The Real Superheroes of the Comics

The Real Superheroes of the Comics

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USS Stevens March 1943

If I say “comic book superhero” who do you think of? Superman? Iron Man? Batman? Wonder Woman? Spider-Man? Captain Marvel? (The real one please, and don’t give me any of this “Shazam” crap.) Those and many others are all perfectly legitimate choices, of course, only they’re not really heroes — super or otherwise — are they? They’re adolescent daydreams, and no matter how dark or gritty they have gotten in the years since their shiny Golden or Silver Age peaks, they’re still characters with “secret identities” running around in silly costumes doing things that no actual person could ever do — or probably would even want to. (In the words of the immortal Will Eisner, “I never understood why the hell anyone would run around fighting crime.”)

That’s not a knock on the members of the Justice League or the Avengers, and when I was a kid, I loved superhero comics; in fact, I still do, but then I love all kinds of comic books — science fiction, humor, horror, romance (Patsy Walker, anyone?) — back in the day, I read them all.

One of my favorite genres was war. Now, with all due apologies to Sergeant Fury and his Howling Commandoes, I was a DC guy, which meant that during my Silver and Bronze Age heyday, I was reading stories that were somewhat more realistic than what Marvel was offering at that time, even taking the Haunted Tank and Dinosaur Island into account. (“Comic book realism” is a tricky term, as we all know.)

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 1: The Master Criminal

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 1: The Master Criminal

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All 16 original series Parker Novels by Richard Stark in 15 paperbacks (Avon and Berkely editions). Deadly Edge is a double volume also containing The Sour Lemon Score

This week we kick off an occasional new series of reviews of the Parker crime novels by Richard Stark.

If you know Parker, you understand. If you aren’t familiar with him, trust me: You are in for a treat.

In installment two, I’ll explain why he’s worthy of being discussed in this august forum.

But first, let’s chat a bit about the character, his creator, and why he matters.

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Saved by the Panther: Jonathan Maberry on storytelling, books, and how the Black Panther changed his life, Part Two

Saved by the Panther: Jonathan Maberry on storytelling, books, and how the Black Panther changed his life, Part Two

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Jonathan Maberry

Read Part One of this interview here.

Our wide-ranging interview with the legend Jonathan Maberry continues as the award-winning author discusses how Black Panther not only changed his life, but led to one of the most rewarding opportunities any writer could ask for.

I was chosen to write Black Panther because of my childhood and what happened with that.

I grew up in a really terrible neighborhood in Philadelphia called Kensington. If you look up the worst neighborhoods in Philadelphia, it’s still the number one worst neighborhood of Philadelphia.

If a black family moved into Kensington they would be firebombed. That’s the kind of neighborhood it was. It was appalling. My father ran the local chapter of the KKK and that was the environment I was born into. It was an early issue of Fantastic Four when they introduced T’Challa the Black Panther that began splitting me away from my father’s viewpoints and made me question all the things that he said Black people were incapable of doing.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Marvel Goes Noir. And NAILS It!!!

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Marvel Goes Noir. And NAILS It!!!

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”
– Raymond Chandler

Spider-Noir is the best thing to happen to Marvel streaming since…well, Daredevil: Born Again. So yeah, not that long ago. I’ve only watched the first three – of eight – episodes so far. Because this is too good to binge. It should be savored. It may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but I LOVE that it’s an homage to hardboiled Pulp and Noir. Which you might know I blog about once in awhile…

No spoilers here (if I can help it). I just wanna talk about the Noir vibe a bit. I’ll do a full blown post after I watch it all (and when some spoilers will be okay). These folks absolutely know their source material. And I’m talking about Pulp, not Marvel.

A little Spider-Man Noir history first. The character appeared in a short comic book run in 2009, which I had certainly never heard of. But I’m not a comic book guy.

Then, back in 2018, the first of the animated Spider-Verse movies came out, with Miles Morales as the main Spider-Man. In the same scene with Spider-Ham (he still cracks me up), Peter and Miles meet a Nicholas Cage-voiced Spider-Man Noir. He has a few scenes after that.

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