As much as I can, I’m trying to keep up with the best comics in the field. I don’t normally gravitate to the sad tragedy inherent in family drama, so I had started and stopped Marvel’s 2015 Vision series a few times. That’s a statement about me rather than the 12-issue masterpiece by Tom King, Gabriel Hernandez Walta, Jordie Bellaire and Clayton Knowles. The series is a brilliant science fiction tragedy.
Rod Serling is famously the creator and voice for The Twilight Zone, but as I recently discovered in a new graphic novel by Koren Shadmi, Serling was an influential creator at the dawn of the television age. Courtesy of Humanoids Press, I got an advanced copy of Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television, a graphic novel biography of Rod Serling. The publisher description reads:
We recognize him as our sharply dressed, cigarette-smoking tour guide of The Twilight Zone, but the entertainment business once regarded him as the “Angry Young Man” of Television. Before he became the revered master of science fiction, Rod Serling was a just a writer who had to fight to make his voice heard. He vehemently challenged the networks and viewership alike to expand their minds and standards — rejecting notions of censorship, racism and war. But it wasn’t until he began to write about real-world enemies in the guise of aliens and monsters that people lent their ears. In doing so, he pushed the television industry to the edge of glory, and himself to the edge of sanity. Rod operated in a dimension beyond that of contemporary society, making him both a revolutionary and an outsider.
I’ve got some exclusive excerpt pages to show you below, and some examples of the depiction of Serling’s military time.
Two weeks ago, I blogged about my reread of Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Looking back on it, I’ve been consuming comic book history for about the last year.
After having my appetite whetted by Chabon for a bit more of the Golden Age of comic books, I pulled Ron Goulart’s Great History of Comic Books off my shelf and really enjoyed my evening reading. It’s a history book published in 1986, so while it has the disadvantage of being out of print (unless you buy second-hand books on Abebooks.com — I saw copies for $7), it has the advantage that Goulart himself started collecting in the early Golden Age in 1938 and spoke directly with many of the early creators to source this book.
It isn’t often that comic books are a legitimate topic in works of literature, or that when they are, the book in question wins a Pulitzer. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon, is such a novel. It was published in 2000 to near universal acclaim. It tells the story of two Jewish cousins from 1939 to 1953.
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It’s wonder to be living not only in a golden age of prose science fiction, but in a golden age of comics. The only downside is that it becomes nearly impossible to keep up with every title that ought to be read.
Case in point, I just watched the Hugo awards in Dublin. It was a great set of winners, voted from an impressive ballot. Pretty much any nominee could have won without shocking anyone. I left Dublin resolved to do my best to read the works I’d missed. But first, I had to make more progress in my comic book backlog.
I get a lot of my comic news through podcasts, which means that (a) they’re mostly interview-based and (b) it may take me a month or two to get to them. But on a recent road trip, TKO Studios, a new comic book company, was advertising on a couple of my podcasts and had interviews as well. They sound different. Let me go through the things that caught my attention.
First, the company releases all its first issues for free digitally, for anyone to download. This feels very savvy to me because comic books are expensive. Being able to try some for free really reduces the barrier to engaging. You can download the first issue of each of the four first series right here.
In my four or five years blogging for Black Gate, readers have probably become used to me interviewing comic creators and editors, reviewing new comic books and webcomics, small press and large, as well as revisiting classic comic runs and discovering new podcasts that dig into how the sausage is made.
It was becoming increasingly obvious to me that it was time for me to ante up and join the game rather than sitting on the sidelines. And it is a lot different than writing short stories and novels! But, in the last year, I had two 16-page comic book stories published by Markosia Press in the UK.
Gorillas in the Ring (with artist Wendy Muldon and letterer Ian Sharman) appeared in the anthology FLIP (Dec 2018), and Frankenpuppy (with artist Trevor Markwart) will appear in the anthology FLIP 2 (Jan 2020), although our story is being released digitally as a stand-alone preview to the anthology and is at Comixology now for $1.99.
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** Explicit Sexual Language and Stuff (Obviously!) If you’d prefer something less sexual, check out my interview with Plaid Klaus of Image Comics’ Void Trip right here **
I often dive into the first issues and first trades at Image to taste test new series, new voices, new art styles, new genres. I also find it interesting to look at pairs of series as foils to one another.
It isn’t that one series is created in response to another, or that they’re even in the same genre, although often the are; it’s sometimes cool to read across themes.
Recently, I read The Pervert and Unnatural from Image. I was intrigued by what the series were saying about sex and sexuality, not only individually, but when taken as a pair of works.
After having reread Marvel’s The Defenders from issue #1 to about issue #125, my interest started to flag. The glory of The Defenders was in the rearview mirror and it didn’t feel like the weird series I’d fallen in love with before and was reintroduced to by Brian Keene and Christopher Golden’s podcast Defenders Dialog (blogged about here).
I’m enjoying the Waid and Saiz 2018 run (Doctor Strange in Space), I liked the movie (The Doctor is In), obviously loved the Ditko-Lee run (Dr. Strange Part I) and the Marvel Presents series (Dr. Strange Part II), but I was hankering to continue my progress back through the Bronze Age. Other than the first five issues of Doctor Strange, which I have as a collected edition, I hadn’t read my old Doctor Strange series in probably 20 years. It was time to go back
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In 2018, Mark Waid and Jesus Saiz launched a new Doctor Strange series at Marvel. I’ve been a fan of Strange since I started comics (issue #34 was one of the first four comics I ever read). He was my gateway to Lovecraftian cosmic horror, The Defenders and Steve Ditko.
The series premise is pretty simple. Strange, the Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme, starts to have difficulty with his magic. As time goes on, his ability to perceive magic vanishes. Things like the Eye of Agamotto and the Cloak of Levitation become common objects to him, baubles of no apparently specialness. He scours the Earth for some solution, but finds none.