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Mars Will Send No More

~ Comic books, art, poetry, and other obsessions

Mars Will Send No More

Category Archives: crime

Indie Box: Darwyn Cooke’s Parker Adaptations

21 Monday Feb 2022

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime

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Tags

book review, crime, darwyn cooke, donald westlake, first issue, graphic novel, indie box, Indie Comics, parker, richard stark, the hunter

Reading The Hunter sheds light on how much Donald Westlake’s series of Parker novels influenced the ultra-gritty Sin City series by Frank Miller. It seems fair to say that the style of Sin City also influenced Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of its predecessor, bringing it all full-circle.

For example, Cooke sometimes fills a page with a single image and a column of narration on the side, something Miller often did, especially in the first Sin City volume The Hard Goodbye, and which John Byrne later parodied in She-Hulk.

Cooke also shows a fondness for the BAM sound effect rendered in blocky lettering when a pistol fires.

It’s a classic sound that brings to mind Miller’s iconic pages from the sixth issue of The Hard Goodbye where the sound effect becomes the frames for the action, and it reminds us that Westlake’s Parker and Miller’s Marv are cut from the same cloth.

If you crave stories with empowered women, then Parker isn’t for you. Parker’s world is a man’s world. Women are trotted onstage mostly for sex and betrayal. In Cooke’s four volumes, the woman with the most agency and initiative is Alma in The Outfit, since she sets up the heist while having her own secret plans. She wants to be a femme fatale, but her treachery does not end well for her.

Despite depicting a few variations on the female form, Cooke seems to have a default idea about what a beautiful woman looks like, and the faces of women in The Hunter often resemble faces he’s drawn before in his superhero comics. The face of the woman who betrayed Parker could easily be Cooke’s Wonder Woman or Catwoman, and that makes her feel a bit generic.

Oddly, that works for The Hunter, because Westlake built the story around characters who don’t run very deep—whether male or female. They are more like archetypal examples of the tropes of hard-boiled detective and crime fiction, as if they are so primal to the genre that they need little exploration. The Hunter is unconcerned with delving into what makes them unique, remaining entirely focused on the relentless advance of the revenge plot. If you want well-rounded female characters with depth and agency, go read some Greg Rucka or Gail Simone stories—because it ain’t happening in Parker!

This criticism didn’t stop me from being totally caught up in the story. What I love about Cooke’s adaptation of The Hunter is how he chooses when to tell the story wordlessly and when to deliver exposition. We get some narration and one brief line of dialogue on the first page, and then nearly twenty-five pages of story told without a single word or sound effect. But in those wordless pages, all the action is so clear, expressive, and compelling that it comes as a shock when words once again appear on the page.

I also love how Cooke’s stripped-down approach to visuals honors Westlake’s stripped-down approach to prose for Parker. Compared to Westlake’s more lighthearted Dortmunder novels, the sentences in the Parker series are much leaner and tighter. Cooke’s artwork echoes that with a kind of minimalism, a simplicity that only conveys the bare essence of details to create the mood and tell the story. Panels lack borders, and thick shadows and bright light do almost all the work of defining images without lines. Cooke might depict the ironwork on a bridge by only inking its shadows and never drawing the outline of the overall shapes. While I love the detailed linework of artists such as Juan Jose Ryp, Geoff Darrow, or Steve McNiven, Cooke creates compelling environments and people using light, shadow, and monochromatic midtones.

The Outfit relies entirely on purple, and The Score uses a warm, dirty yellow that suits the setting in a hot desert mining town. While Sin City did something similar in a few volumes, those colors were more like occasional highlights than Cooke’s creative midtones.

It would have been fun to see another volume in red. The end of the fourth volume did promise another return of Parker. Sadly, Cooke was taken from us by cancer in 2016 at only fifty-three years old, and we never saw a fifth Parker adaptation.

Volumes two through four had interesting moments. The Outfit abruptly interrupts the established visual style to insert a series of explanations about a series of crimes. We get a multi-page newspaper article about a casino robbery, cartoon guides to horse-race gambling and smuggling cash on airplane flights to pay for heroin, and several pages of how to operate an illegal “numbers” betting operation. Everything I previously knew about “numbers running” came from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, so it was interesting to get Westlake’s rundown on these vintage illegal enterprises.

The fourth and final volume, Slayground, traps Parker in an abandoned amusement park where he comes up with clever ways to use the environment against gangsters who want his money from a job he narrowly escaped. One of his ideas is spraying a blob of paint on every surface in the hall of mirrors, then luring someone in. I’ve seen so many hall-of-mirrors scenes in movies that I hoped to never see one again, but this was a brilliant take that restored my faith in reflective surfaces.

Slayground also delivers powerful moments of cinematic, wordless storytelling such as a four-panel page of a car we just saw lose control on the icy roads on the previous page, and now goes tumbling over our heads into the distance. You can almost feel the impact.

But of all four tales, my favorite is the first: a relentless revenge over a double-cross that made a heist go horribly wrong. It’s harder than hard-boiled and blacker than noir, a morally vacant tale about a repulsive protagonist who gets the job done with his hands.

It’s no spoiler to tell you that Parker makes it out of The Hunter alive. Westlake wrote twenty-four of these novels, and Cooke adapted four. At this point, you go into the series knowing the stakes are not life-or-death for Parker.

That does lower the dramatic tension. If you know the main character can’t be killed, then that lowers your investment in his success. In a series such as Sin City or Criminal, where individual stories are told out of order, a character might very well meet their end in any particular episode—and often does. Investment is high. You never know what’s coming next.

With Parker, we know he is unstoppable. The fun comes not from wondering whether he will live or die, but discovering how he bends circumstances to his will no matter what life throws at him. Parker’s world is a grim place, and he is not a role model nor even likeable. But he is enjoyable as an immovable object in a world of irresistible forces, or maybe the other way around. He possesses a singular focus and physical strength, and a superior insight into his amoral world of crime, lies, and power that helps him make it out alive—and, if he’s lucky, with a bit of money in his pocket.

Collector’s Guide: You can currently get the complete four-volume set of Cooke’s Parker adaptations in digital format for about $40 through Kindle/Comixology. Each volume was also printed in hardcover and paperback editions.

Indie Box: Criminal by Brubaker and Phillips

04 Saturday Dec 2021

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime

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Tags

crime, criminal, Ed Brubaker, Image Comics, indie box, Indie Comics, marvel icon, Sean Phillips

Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips has long been one of all-time favorite works of fiction in any medium, and the greatest crime is that I’ve never written about it since discovering it around thirteen years ago.

Things don’t end well for delusional and damaged desperado.

My first exposure to this prolific creative team was the Sleeper series, which was either the first or second time Brubaker and Phillips worked together. Set in the same “universe” as the WildC.A.T.s (created by Jim Lee) and featuring the villainous mastermind Tao (created by Alan Moore), Sleeper was an unsettling combination of the two main elements which gave rise to the superhero genre: crime fiction and science fiction.

But Sleeper had little use for superheroes, beyond guest-starring Grifter. Instead, it focused on the adventures of villains doing covert operations for shadowy organizations. Subverting the superhero genre, Brubaker treated Sleeper like a pulp crime story with a first-person narration by a deeply broken, hardboiled protagonist you would expect to find in a noir detective novel.

Things don’t end well for delusional and damaged dude who dukes it out.

When I discovered Criminal shortly thereafter, I was thrilled to see what Brubaker and Phillips could do with a pulp crime story without any of the superpowers and sci-fi. I joined the ongoing series around the time the first storyline was wrapping up, so I got a subscription and enjoyed the rabid, edge-of-my-seat anticipation of every new issue.

But it’s hard to say why I love this series so much. It’s hopeless, bleak, and downright depressing. Anything resembling a character’s redemption arc is sure to end in tragedy and tears. Everyone is either broken, or despicable, or both. Characters tend to be either victims of abuse, or abusers, or both. Any brief moments of happiness are either doomed, or illusory, or both. The world of Criminal is an inescapable hell that destroys everyone, even the most powerful and the most innocent.

Things don’t end well for delusional and damaged downtrodden dame.

Maybe my fascination with the series is related to that part of the human mind that can’t resist looking at a crash on the highway. That sick part of our monkey brains that slows down to see the carnage until the road is backed up with gawkers for miles. It’s probably the part of our minds that is responsible for slasher flicks and so-called “disaster porn”, the part that craves horror and violence even in otherwise well-adjusted people who normally avoid such things. Maybe Criminal channels that aspect of human experience into fiction where it’s safe, where no one really gets hurt. You can gawk at a fictional train wreck and not feel guilty.

Criminal is also a remarkable feat of storytelling. You can read any one of the self-contained stories on its own or, as Brubaker often says, in any order at all. The stories feature numerous recurring characters connected by the strands of their web of crime, and the stories are not delivered in chronological order. You might meet someone in one story, then discover their childhood in another. Someone who dies in one story might appear years earlier in another.

Through it all, narrative captions tend to focus on one character’s internal experience or monologue per issue, sometimes describing the action that appears in the panels, but more often a step removed from the story that Phillips tells visually, giving insight into what characters are thinking or feeling. You also see certain events from multiple perspectives—sometimes from issue to issue, and sometimes from story to story. This approach amplifies the feeling that all events are connected and inevitable.

Things don’t end well for delusional and damaged detective dude.

Criminal influenced my approach to storytelling when I started writing fiction, but the criminals I write about revel in their lawless lifestyles. They experience horror, but they mostly enjoy being on the wrong side of the law and doing what they do. They have fun!

Any fun that Brubaker’s criminals enjoy is a short-lived uptick on their downward spiral to despair and disaster. If you’re looking for happy endings or uplifting messages about the human condition, Criminal isn’t for you. The most fortunate characters end up dead, and the least fortunate keep on living, trapped in Brubaker’s sprawling saga of doom, degradation, and mutual destruction.

But the series is so well-constructed, so impenetrably dark, and so well-told that I find it impossible to avert my eyes from the wreck, and I have read and re-read each story many times. I think the saving grace, what makes it possible to wander into this cruel, noir world, is that so many of the characters evoke sympathy and empathy. Many of Brubaker’s villains tend to have some spark of humanity that makes them relatable. They are rarely evil for the sake of being evil, like so many poorly done “bad guys”. Instead, they have been twisted and morally deformed by the awful events of their lives.

Even a complete scumbag such as Teeg Lawless, who often beats and abandons his two sons, is shown to believe that in his own fucked-up way, he thinks he loves his kids. His deranged and damaged brand of “love” is not one I would wish on any child, but it’s consistent with the way that even the worst villains in these tales tend to think of themselves as some kind of heroes, even when they are so incredibly wrong.

Things don’t end well for damaged and delusional deadbeat dad.

That’s something we need to think about more often but has become increasingly rare. It is now easier than ever for delusional people to find similarly deluded people in Internet echo chambers and rally around causes that range from nonsensical to dangerous. It has become increasingly easy for people to embrace messages of hate in the name of love, to proclaim treason as patriotism, to promote lies they accept as truth, and to advance anti-social policies under the guise of freedom.

We could all use a bit of self-reflection to step back and ask ourselves whether or not our heroic stances are, in fact, villainous. When writing a good fictitious villain, the best authors know that the villain should be a hero in his or her own narrative about the world.

But that isn’t something that’s only true in fiction. It works in stories because it expresses something true about real people. I often look back on my life and am filled with regret for things I did and mistakenly thought were right at the time, only to realize later that despite being a hero in my own story, I was the villain in someone else’s, and things I believed to be right were so very, very wrong.

Criminal warns this is a universal aspect of human experience, and if there is any moral compass or lesson to be learned from Brubaker’s tragic tales, it is that we need to question our own ideas, assumptions, decisions, and sense of justice. If we don’t, then we will remain as trapped as the characters in Criminal, and nothing good can come from that.

Collector’s Guide: Criminal is spread out over the first ten-issue series, the second seven-issue series, the third twelve-issue series, the four-issue The Last of the Innocent, a single-issue Special Edition, a tenth-anniversary Special Edition, a standalone graphic novel, and the standalone Wrong Time, Wrong Place, for which I can’t seem to find a link. Various TPBs and “deluxe” editions have collected parts of it, and they range from easily found to difficult. I would love to see a definitive Criminal Omnibus collecting the entire thing in one or two volumes, but that has yet to happen.

indie box: Utopiates

27 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, indie, science fiction

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

black and white, bloodfire studio, drugs, indie box, Indie Comics, josh finney, kat rocha, utopiates

This week’s pick from the indie comics short box is Utopiates, a four-issue black-and-white series focusing on characters who take a drug that temporarily alters their personality and emotions, but with violent and disastrous results.

The first issue opens with a full page of Gen-X angst that sets up what, at first, appears to be a simple tale about a young man who takes a drug to escape the dull hopelessness of his life.

By the end of the first issue, it becomes clear this tale is not so simple. We learn that the drug is somehow giving people specific personality traits because it is composed of genetic material copied from specific people. I don’t buy that bit of pseudo-science at all, but playing along with this central idea of injecting genetics like drugs does make for some interesting developments. For example, the young man in the first issue starts killing people his drug dealer assigns to him, but when he injects some Jack Ruby DNA, he kills the wrong person. This doesn’t end well for him.

The second and third issue tell the story of a different young man who served in a war as part of a private military contractor’s invasion force. We learn that he and all the contractors were constantly hopped up on one of these genetic drugs to reduce their fear and increase ferocity.

This two-part story shows how the soldier does not adapt well to normal society after his contract is complete and he can no longer get his drugs. The robotic psych counselor the company forces him to see is useless, so the young man starts looking for a source of the drug. His path leads him to discover whose DNA he and his troops were injecting.

The fourth issue tells the story of another former soldier, a woman who becomes an assassin for hire much like the character in the first issue. It suggests that the mysterious drug dealer in all these stories is giving out these gene-drugs and manipulating people as an art form. I found that motivation a bit lackluster, but I suspect that if the series had continued, then writer Josh Finney would have given us more depth and detail about what makes the dealer tick.

I love the artwork in this series, with Finney collaborating with artist Kat Rocha to produce moody, dramatic pages that look amazing without color. I don’t know why the series ended, but it feels like it could be a treatment for an ongoing TV series with action, adventure, mystery, futurism, and a bit of social commentary. Finally, it’s possible that Finney took the name of the series from a 1964 book detailing research into why people take LSD. You can read a review and summary of that book in the University of Chicago archives.

The four issues of Utopiates make a fairly quick but thought-provoking read, and you can have them for about $2 a piece.

Collector’s Guide: Utopiates #1-4; Bloodfire Studio, 2006.

indie box: Queen & Country

20 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, indie

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big box of comics, black and white, book review, definitive edition, Greg Rucka, indie box, Indie Comics, Oni Press, queen & country, Tara Chace

This week’s pick from the indie short box of comics is the complete four-volume collection Queen & Country: The Definitive Edition. It’s also an entry in the big box of free comics series, because I wouldn’t have this collection if not for this blog’s readers. This espionage thriller featuring a British female spy comes from the mind of crime novelist Greg Rucka and an art team that changes with every major arc, giving each episode a unique look and feel.

The four volumes total nearly 1500 pages, which includes the entire single-issue series and three supplementary Declassified series, plus a slew of extras such as interviews, scripts, and sketchbooks. I loved it, with a few reservations, and it was maybe the third time I read the series.

Queen and Country Collection (9)

Years ago, I sold a complete collection, and you can see photos of the interior art and full-color covers in my old post about the collection. I had discovered a few scattered issues in a used bookstore and gradually pieced together the set before selling it. With the Definitive Edition, it was great to read it all again in chronological order.

Still, you will find a few a gaps in chronology. Queen & Country is also a series of prose novels, and the comic-book adaptations sometimes skip a novel. “These events take place after the events in [novel]” comes up at least once. But, you get enough context from each story to follow along anyway, and a helpful flashback or two fills in the important gaps.

With the Definitive Edition, you won’t get the full-color covers, though the black-and-white versions are high quality. The page size is slightly smaller than a typical comic book, which occasionally makes the lettering a little hard to read. It was not as bad as the Tintin collection, which practically required a magnifying glass. I only struggled in a couple of stories, such as the first one where Tara’s thoughts appear in a cursive script that didn’t fare well from being shrunk.

The black-and-white art of the original series still looks incredible at this size, though some of the edges of panels disappear in the gutter — unless you want to test the limits of how far you can force the book’s spine open. A wider blank space in the gutter would have been a good thing. But, each of the four volumes is a sturdy paperback with a solid binding and high-quality paper.

Overall, it’s an awesome way to enjoy the complete series, and way easier and more cost-effective than trying to hunt down all the single issues one-by-one.

The art and writing are top-notch, with a compelling lead character who does some bad-ass spy stuff but has way more interesting internal and emotional conflicts than, say, James Bond. Tara Chace has depth, and she changes over the course of the series, and her world is turned upside down more than once. She has a strong supporting cast, and several merit standalone stories as leads in their own right.

Toward the end of the series, reading it one weekend as I did, I noticed there were an awful lot of scenes of people talking in offices, and pages of people having discussions that made a point but didn’t really advance the adventure. These were interesting for a while in the beginning, but by the end I was way more more invested in what Tara was doing than what some guys in offices were droning on about, and I skipped a few scenes.

You’ll probably feel the same way about the leading lady, and your mind might be blown at the cliffhanger ending of the series, and you might even want to pick up some of the novels afterward!

Collector’s Guide: Queen & Country: The Definitive Edition, #1-4; Oni Press, 2007.

indie box: A History of Violence

06 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, indie

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Tags

black and white, book review, crime, indie box, Indie Comics, john wagner, vince locke

This week’s pick from the short box of indie comics takes us once again into the world of crime fiction. A History of Violence from John “Judge Dredd” Wagner and Vince Locke really puts the “novel” in “graphic novel”, telling a deeply detailed story in its nearly 300 pages. I read it years ago but didn’t see the film until this summer. The book was more satisfying, especially the ending, which is a visceral punch to the gut in print but completely re-written and watered down for the film.

So, let’s start at the beginning, because A History of Violence opens with murderous intent.

Pretty soon, the murderers stop for a bite to eat in typical, small-town America, where everything is quaint, peaceful, and family-friendly. But when they try to start trouble at the local diner, the dude at the counter decides homie don’t play that shit, and he totally destroys them.

Diner dude wastes these guys and becomes a local celebrity. There, the story gets bogged down with scenes of his resultant interactions with the yuk-yuks from Anywhere, USA as they fawn over him at little-league games and other scenes I could skip. But this shift in the hero’s calm, daily life gets kicked up a notch when the leader of a criminal organization recognizes diner dude in a newspaper article, and decides to visit.

This scene begins a gradual reveal of diner dude’s past, and how he came to be involved with the underworld in his youth and eventually assumed a new identity so he could live a pastoral life in Generic, USA. The middle third of the book tells that story as a flashback, and it’s almost as much fun as the part in the Godfather novel where we flashback to Vito Corleone’s rise to power in his youth.

The first time I read A History of Violence, I couldn’t put it down. But upon re-reading, I could have done without so many extended, dialogue-heavy scenes of regular folks standing or sitting around while having an interpersonal drama. It often feels like this could be a real barnburner of a tale if we could just cut some of the “normal folks chatting in a mild state of distress” scenes, and get into the absolutely fucked-up criminal world that really drives the plot and drama. And by “absolutely fucked up”, I mean pages like this:

Earlier, I implied I didn’t like the movie, but mostly what I hated were the changes to the ending. In fact, the film did a better job portraying the shoot-out on diner dude’s lawn where his son was involved, and the film had a somewhat tighter pace. Also, Ed Harris as the eyeless criminal guy totally rocks.

I’m a bit ambivalent about the art in this story. The panel layouts and the visual storytelling of both quiet conversations and brutal conflict are top-notch, but I can’t escape the feeling that that I am looking at a sketch of the story instead of the final version. The art is very scratchy, and while it has a visceral power, after a couple hundred pages I started wishing another inker would come along and tighten it up. On the other hand, this is a gritty and compelling story once you get into it, and a gritty visual style suits it well.

Fans of crime fiction should read A History of Violence at least once because, despite its flaws, it is a dramatic and emotional journey that not even the film could match, and it isn’t a story you will soon forget. The original edition is long out of print, but the 2005 reprint will run you about $20.

Collector’s Guide: A History of Violence; 2005 reprint edition, Paradox Press.

indie box: Down

23 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, indie

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Tags

down, Image Comics, indie box, Indie Comics, Tony Harris, Warren Ellis

Like last week’s pick from the short box of indie comics, this week features another crime story with a bad-ass female lead. Down is a four-issue series by Warren Ellis with art from Tony Harris and Cully Hamner, and its portrayal of a police officer infiltrating a violent criminal organization reminds me in some ways of one of my favorite films: The Departed by Martin Scorsese. Down isn’t quite as complex, as the fast pace and tight focus relentlessly blaze through the story up until the bitter end. But like The Departed, this story doesn’t end where you think it will.

Down puts our leading lady into the middle of a conflict between crooked cops and even more crooked gangsters, and every step of the journey takes her into increasingly questionable decisions about just whose side she is on. In her quest to get close to the criminal leader, she is forced to consider just how far she is willing to go to maintain her cover.

Down has a high body count and graphic violence, but I feel the real intensity takes place around just how much her experiences deform and re-define the protagonist’s conception of who she is and what role she wants to play in life. At some point, she realizes she has crossed a line she can never step back over and return to normalcy, and her only option is to choose a new path of her own design.

It’s one of my favorite of Ellis’ short works, and all the better because it doesn’t end with a big explosion, a convention he tended to over-use when he seemed to be cranking out a new series every week. It’s a fun read if you like crime fiction and bad-ass women, and you can get it for about $2 an issue.

Collector’s Guide: Down #1-4; 2005, Image.

indie box: Felon

16 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, indie

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

crime, felon, Greg Rucka, indie box, Indie Comics, top cow

Today’s pick from the short box of indie comics is Felon, a four-issue series from the mind of Greg Rucka, who is known for both his crime stories and his preference for writing female lead characters. I have a few other Rucka gems to share with you later, but they all feature a detective as the main character, and this one follows the adventures of a remorseless criminal.

She’s a bad-ass without being an over-the-top action hero, and even though we are sympathetic to her because her crew screwed her over, she isn’t exactly role-model material. She’s concerned about one thing, and one thing only, and this focus on her goal is apparent from page one. She is released from prison and only has three words to say:

She sticks to this simple, direct goal through three issues of violence, and the plot is pretty straight-forward, even when a new heist enters the picture. But the drive, the unrelenting focus she maintains, and her subordination of any empathy or morality to the intensity of her avarice made a huge impression on me. Felon influenced my own stories about an unrepentant female criminal who constantly smokes cigarettes and blasts anyone who gets in her way, so I owe Rucka and company a debt of gratitude.

But it’s the fourth issue that really blows my mind. The third issue brings an end to the heist story, and you wonder what’s next, but then Rucka turns the world upside down. The fourth issue introduces a female detective who is on the trail of our leading lady, completely switches to her point of view, and shows how her focus on the case destroys her personal life. Also, the first three issues are full color, but the fourth is black and white. The titular felon only appears in flashbacks related by other characters, such as a scene that recalls one of her robberies and demonstrates just how cold she can be.

Felon is a quick read but a fun one if you love crime fiction and bad-ass women, and you can get it for about $2 an issue.

Collector’s Guide: Felon #1-4; 2001, Top Cow.

indie box: Scene of the Crime

09 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, indie

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crime, DC Comics, Ed Brubaker, indie box, Indie Comics, michael lark, scene of the crime

This week’s pick from the indie box isn’t even indie, having been published by DC Comics, but it has an indie feel and showcases the talents of two future superstars. Scene of the Crime is an early collaboration between Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark, who would later do an amazing run together on Daredevil at Marvel.

Scene_of_the_Crime_01_c01

Scene of the Crime follows the adventures of a private investigator as he unravels an increasingly sinister and fucked-up story, and I wanted to love it. It would probably make a solid movie. But after the second issue, I was flipping through pages to see the big reveal. The narration in the captions starts in first gear on page one and never really accelerates, and the art is sometimes too clean when it could use more grit and grime.

Scene_of_the_Crime_01_p01
The rainy, gritty noir feeling on this page rocks my world, I almost expect Marv to show up.

Scene of the Crime faces a structural problem in that we as readers get hints that the investigator has some past tragedy, but we don’t get told what it is until the final pages. This makes it feel more like a postscript than something crucial to understanding the character’s motivations, and by the time we get there, the main story is basically over. So, did it really matter? It feels like it didn’t.

Scene_of_the_Crime_04_p19

Despite its flaws, Scene of the Crime is a glimpse into the early days of a writer and artist team who eventually crafted tightly wound, tense crime stories. The four-issue series shows the team has the ability to tell a complex tale of crime and mystery, and I see it as a stepping stone to later masterpieces such as the Brubaker/Lark run on Daredevil and Brubaker’s collaboration with Sean Phillips on Criminal, one of my all-time favorite works of fiction.

Collector’s Guide: Scene of the Crime; DC Comics, 1999

Interview with 4 Seconds creator Paul O’Connor

17 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, first issue, indie

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

4 seconds, Billy King, comic book scripting, concept art, digital comics, first issue, Indie Comics, interview, Karl Kesel, Paul O'Connor, think fast, thrillbent

Author Paul O’Connor joins us today for an interview about his newly launched digital comic book story 4 Seconds. You can read 4 Seconds for free at Mark Waid’s Thrillbent. Paul discusses with us the technical side of producing a story for Thrillbent’s unique reading platform, including how he invented a new scripting technique working with artist Billy King on the initial concept design and artist Karl Kesel on the final story.

Paul, what is 4 Seconds and how did it come about?

4 Seconds is an original comic story in digital form published at Mark Waid’s Thrillbent site. It is free to read right now, and I hope everyone will give it a shot. The story is self-contained and easy to complete in one sitting. It tells the tale of a petty thief who discovers she can see into the future… but only 4 seconds into the future! This proves to be just enough superpower to get her into trouble.

The story was born when I won Mark Waid’s open-microphone pitch contest at San Diego Comic-Con. I was super-excited for this job, because I am a big believer in the new way stories can be told at Thrillbent. There are dozens of stories at the site, many of them are free, and they all have something to say about how comic stories can be told beyond the printed page.

As someone who makes books, I’d love to hear about the technical side of creating 4 Seconds specifically for the Thrillbent digital format. What’s unique about Thrillbent compared to printed comics, or even other digital platforms?

Even during the pitch stage, it was important to me that I create a story best told (or perhaps only told) in the Thrillbent format. Thrillbent specializes in digital-native stories that expand the way comics stories are told. It is critical to understand that these are still comics stories. They aren’t motion comics, and they don’t have soundtracks or spoken dialogue. They are still words, pictures, and panels that the reader pages through at their own pace.

One way things are different is in the fluidity of transitions afforded by this platform. For instance, we can do actual fades, wipes, and pans, imparting a more cinematic feel to a traditional comics story. Likewise, this platform allows for new types of page architecture and panel borders, and new approaches to balloon placement and dialogue construction. In creating 4 Seconds, artist Karl Kesel and I tried to take full advantage of being in a paperless environment, and using this platform to tell our story in a more memorable way. 4 Seconds is built from the ground-up to be a new thing in familiar clothing.

Tell me how those possibilities came to life in creating a scene from 4 Seconds.

For example, we might have a “master shot”—say, a nighttime interior of the mansion of the villainous Anton Glass. Rather than show the entire shot at once, our story might reveal it in portions—first showing just that slice illuminated by the moody moonlight leaking through the floor-to-ceiling windows, then picking up the trail of bloody footprints on the floor, then finding the outstretched hand of a body lying just inside the shadows.

Across this, we place our characters, posing them for the critical moments of storytelling. And then we bring in dialogue balloons, captions, and sound effects. What Karl had to deliver were all the many individual panels, frames, and character poses that made up the story, which are then placed in the correct order for viewing via Thrillbent.

The results are equivalent to what might be many panels and pages in a paper comic, all playing out in the same narrative space using comic conventions of panels to parse time and focus reader attention on the sequential elements needed to tell the story. It’s still the same toolbox used in conventional comics, but there’s greater freedom of expression in how it’s used, particularly when it comes to isolating specific elements that you want the reader to see.

How was writing the 4 Seconds script different from comic scripts you’ve written for other media? Was it anything like a traditional comic book script?

This was a very different process. The Thrillbent format demanded that I take a new approach to scripting, and I also challenged myself to think in visual terms from the get-go. I deliberately went outside of my comfort zone of concentrating on dialogue and description and leaving everything else up to the artist. Instead, I wanted to provide a deeply thought-out visual blueprint for Karl, which he could (and did!) use as a springboard to make things even better in the penciling stage.

That meant I was doing scene-blocking and transitions—new things for me—and also figuring out how to break the rules as fast as I made them! To tie it all together, I invented a hybrid script form that offers conventional comics direction, dialogue, etc., but abandoned panels as the unit of storytelling in favor of frame advances. Determining how much information to add/change to each advance drives the pace of the story, and sometimes the challenge is as much about deciding what to retain from previous frames more than it is about what to add.

Thank you, Paul! 4 Seconds keeps the twists and turns coming right up to the very end. Revealing the story in frames like this means readers share Cassie’s experience of her world. They know something is coming in that empty space of the future, but they can’t see far enough ahead to be sure what it is. I found it drew me into the story and made me care that much more about what happened to her.

Read 4 Seconds for free at Mark Waid’s Thrillbent.

Privacy in Peril: The Private Eye

05 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, indie, science fiction

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

brian k vaughan, digital comics, digital rights management, indie box, Indie Comics, Marcos Martin, Muntsa Vicente, privacy, public policy, swans, the private eye

Privacy in Peril: The Private Eye and Recent Developments in Privacy, DRM, and Copyright

One of my classes this semester deals with telecommunications policy in the USA. Even though I am late to the party on The Private Eye, I spent an evening this week devouring all ten issues of the digital comic book series. I was pleasantly surprised to discover it deals with many of the concerns we discussed in the telecom class. Our first discussion centered around two articles on mobile apps that either lack adequate security or mine your device for your personal data and contacts.

tpeye_vol01_small

The Private Eye addresses privacy and intellectual property concerns not just in its content but in its form. It comes to us from author Brian K. Vaughan (who wrote such critically acclaimed series as Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina, and wrote for the TV show Lost for a time) with art from Marcos Martin and Muntsa Vicente. It is available at http://panelsyndicate.com/comics/tpeye as ten individual issues and now in two 150-page volumes which collect the complete story.

tpeye_vol02_small

First, the content of this science-fiction/mystery adventure deals with privacy and the Internet. It proposes a future where all the information people stored about themselves in “the cloud” was exposed through an event called “the flood”. Dialogue reveals that making people’s search histories public destroyed their lives. As a result, the Internet exists no more, and people are paranoid about protecting their privacy. Just as people do today in online forums and multi-player video games, people in this future use costumes and fake names to mask their identity and explore their fantasies, sexual kinks, and other aspects of identity they want kept private. Photographing people without their consent has become a crime, a crime the story’s hero commits for cash as a private investigator. The story’s villain wants to [spoiler alert] bring back the Internet.

tpeye_05_small

But besides the privacy conflict at the story’s center, the distribution of this series also ties in with concerns about copyright, digital rights management, and the ease of sharing content through the Internet. The series is only available digitally, and it is sold on a “pay what you can” basis. Readers choose their own price, even if that price is zero dollars. This addresses the sales problem of digital content: How do you get people to pay a specific price for digital content when it is so easily downloaded and shared among users? Here, there is no problem. If people cannot or do not want to pay, they can still get the series directly from the creators without skirting the law, and those who can afford to support the work can choose to do so.

tpeye_07_small

The download files, made available upon payment, are given free of Digital Rights Management, a system of protecting copyrighted and trademarked works which has proven problematic for users and courts. Recent headlines have shown how silly DRM takedown requests can get, with Forbes reporting in August that “Columbia Pictures, the studio behind the critically-panned movie Pixels, has succeeded in getting a number of utterly unrelated videos pulled from Vimeo — but the only actual footage from the movie to be taken down is Columbia’s own official trailer.”

DRM takedown requests have become the occupation of lawyers who can file them without any actual investigation, leading to such ridiculous outcomes as random videos that mention the word “pixels” in ways unrelated to the film having been forced offline. Headlines in August also revealed UK legislation which is so technologically mis-informed that it would criminalize making a back-up copy of your own mp3 music files library. The creators of The Private Eye have sidestepped this nonsense and made their files available without DRM restrictions on the files.

tpeye_02_small

The Private Eye, besides being an excellent and entertaining read, highlights the growing divide between how large, institutionally entrenched corporations are dealing with these concerns compared to the way independent creators are looking for new and more flexible solutions. This is taking place alongside a surge in advance sales (such as Michael Gira’s band Swans releasing limited-edition, handmade concert recordings to fund the production of upcoming studio albums) and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter which help secure funding before a project is finished rather than trying to control “piracy” after the fact. These solutions favor creators who understand the unique technological environment of our time and want to maintain creative control without resorting to the cumbersome and ill-advised measures favored by the industry giants, their lawyers, and our legislatures.

tpeye_08_small

To close on a visual note, I especially appreciate that The Private Eye is the first digital comic I have seen which looked awesome on my monitor due to the horizontally wider aspect ratio. Comics made at the right aspect ratio for print just never look as great on my screen. I usually need to zoom in to read the text, and thus can’t see the whole page at once, which is part of the joy of comics. The Private Eye fixes this beautifully and lends itself to creative page layouts that take full advantage of its aspect ratio. Go pick up the two collected volumes and pay what you can!

No DRM, no encryption, just plain files optimized for on-screen reading. Available in English, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese & French.

tpeye_01_small

Queen & Country by Greg Rucka

29 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, indie

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

collection, Greg Rucka, Indie Comics, Oni Press, Queen and Country

Queen and Country Collection (3)

We discovered Queen & Country on the Totally Top Secret Fifty Cent Rack last year. Someone blessed us by leaving about 2/3 of the series there, and it was easy enough to fill in the rest with VF/NM copies at about a buck a piece.

We have read many of Greg Rucka’s crime and detective stories before, but this is our favorite. Rucka made his mark at DC with his work on Batman in Detective Comics, among others. We prefer his indie short stories like Felon for Image/Top Cow, and Oni Press titles Whiteout and Stumptown. Queen & Country, also from Oni Press, proved as enjoyable as any of these, if not more.

Queen and Country Collection (4)

It takes a while to get into the series if you read it like a novel, due to Rucka’s insistence on action above introspection. We get right into the thick of things with the characters without much context as to who they are. Only as they begin to deal with the consequences of their spy operations do we begin to bond with them and see what they are made of.

Queen and Country Collection (5)

Told in chapters over five or six issues at a time, Queen & Country brings in a different art team for each chapter. Each dynamically different style gives us a new sense of the characters, too. We see them conceptualized anew with each new story arc. You might expect that to throw off the flow of the title, but it only deepened our enjoyment. Rucka’s scripts show us his characters more than tell us about them in exposition. Each art team shows in a unique way.

Queen and Country Collection (6)

You can find most of the series in stock as single issues and trade paperbacks. The Definitive Edition also collects these plus all the Queen & Country: Declassified spin-offs that delve into our secret agents’ past. It’s a great action/spy/adventure series we hope to read again!

Queen and Country Collection (7)
Queen and Country Collection (8)

Lili by Scooter Harris

12 Saturday Oct 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime

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art, Lili, painting, Scooter Harris, Studio Hadra

Original art by Scooter Harris of Studio Hadra, author of True Crime Theater.

lili by scooter harris

Jack Kirby Crime: Tomorrow’s Murder!

04 Friday Oct 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

crime, golden age, Jack Kirby, Prize

Prize published Treasure Comics from 1943-1947. It had all kinds of stories, from humor to adventure to fantasy. Lurking in the pages of the tenth issue you will find a crime story by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon: Tomorrow’s Murder! Kirby and Simon did not stay on the title for long but other greats like Frank Frazetta were also featured in it before its demise.

Collector’s Guide: From Treasure Comics #10; 1946



Strange Tales 71

13 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, occult, science fiction

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Joe Sinnot, Paul Reinman, Steve Ditko, Strange Tales

Strange Tales 71 -  (13)

Let’s set the time machine for 1959! Take a look this week at a stack of Marvel’s Strange Tales. You’ll find fast-paced science fiction stories with an occasional occult theme thrown in for good measure. (Strange Tales ran more horror in the early 1950’s, before the Comics Code Authority nonsense began.) Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby feature prominently alongside other masters of these classic short-form comics.

Collector’s Guide: From Strange Tales #71; Marvel, 1959.

“I Dared to Defy Merlin’s Black Magic!” with art by Steve Ditko; “I am the Man Who Will Destroy Your World!”; “When the Saucer Strikes!” with art by Paul Reinman; “I Fought the Man Who Couldn’t Be Killed!”; “I Am the Man Without a Face!” with art by Joe Sinnott.









Jack Kirby Crime: The Money-Making Machine Swindlers!

23 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

crime, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline. The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!






Jack Kirby Crime: The Capture of “One-Eye”!

16 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, golden age

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Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!
– From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline.



Your Move, Creep!

14 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime

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1993 Toy Island, action figure, light up visor, machine gun, robocop, weapon arm

robocop with machine gun sound and light up visor

Once upon a time, I had a job at a title company with a system that gave intercom access to the whole place via your desktop phone. When things got tense, depressing, or just plain boring, I put RoboCop on the loudspeakers. Held him up to the phone, pressed the button on his chest, and thrilled the entire staff with his “realistic machine gun sounds”.
Ratta-tat-tat, motherfuckers!

Of course, this was 1997. Getting your ass shot off by your coworkers hadn’t become a national hobby yet. Back in the twentieth century, a little RoboCop in the office made people laugh. Tension breaker. Stress reliever. Nothing but Good Clean Fun with a weapon arm, M-16, and an assault rifle.

robocop002

In the real world, you have a lot more to worry about than the choking hazard of small plastic parts. One of the first times my dad was on TV, he was the first police officer to approach the parked vehicle of a very disturbed man. The man had gone into his office and shot a bunch of people, did the high-speed chase thing, then blew his brains out in a parking lot. The only upside of making a to-do list like that for your day is that you won’t need to make any more to-do lists.

Well, this is what happens when people keep things bottled up day after day, year after year. Instead, they should stop once a day to let RoboCop do the machine gunning. Let RoboCop handle the assault rifle. His visor lights up when he rat-a-tats. It looks cool as hell, and no one gets hurt.

robocop001

robocop004

Jack Kirby Crime: The Phony Check Racketeers!

09 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime

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crime, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline. The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!







Jack Kirby Crime: Underworld Snob!

02 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime

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crime, Eddie Bentz, golden age, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline. The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!




Jack Kirby Crime: The Masked Killer!

26 Sunday May 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

crime, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline. The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!

Jack Kirby Crime: Gun Moll!

19 Sunday May 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, golden age

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

crime, golden age, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline. The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!





Jack Kirby Crime: The True Life Story of Alvin Karpis!

12 Sunday May 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, golden age

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alvin Karpis, crime, golden age, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline. The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!





Jack Kirby Crime: Alibi?

28 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, golden age

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Charlton comics, crime, golden age, Jack Kirby, Jack Kirby Museum, Police Trap

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s work on Police Trap has been well-documented at The Jack Kirby Museum. The collaborators watched their publisher fall to pieces, and they found Charlton was willing to help continue the title. Police Trap #5 was the first Charlton issue, but it would only last through #6.

Collector’s Guide: From Police Trap #5; 1955, Charlton



Jack Kirby Crime: Fight Fix!

21 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime

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boxing, crime, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline. The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!






100 Bullets: The Zen Guerilla Poster

19 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in crime, music

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Tags

100 Bullets, Eduardo Risso, Green Room, Ypsilanti, Zen Guerilla

One of these days we’ll tell you how much Azzarello & Risso’s 100 Bullets rocked our world. But today we remember something else that rocked our world: Zen Guerilla. What’s the connection? Check out this page from 100 Bullets. Right in the middle, on the wall outside the bar where this scene takes place, Risso includes a concert poster for the band Zen Guerilla.

That’s not just a clever name Eduardo Risso came up with. It’s a real band we had the pleasure of seeing several years ago in downtown Ypsilanti, Michigan.

The venue was a now-defunct coffee shop/concert venue called The Green Room. The Green Room was one of our favorite places. Most of our favorite local bands played there from time to time, and occasionally we would get avant garde visitors like Eugene Chadbourne. We also discovered the Northwoods Improvisers there, a fascinating acoustic modern jazz trio from Mount Pleasant.

The Green Room also hosted poetry readings, a scene we avidly took part in for many years. We met some really interesting cats there and made a few friends we still keep in touch with. The Green Room sat just across the street from The Elbow Room, a cool dive bar that featured local and touring hard rock bands, and which outlived the Green Room by several years.

One summer, circa 1998, we made one of many trips to the Green Room to check out a local band. It might have been Morsel, an Ann Arbor favorite with a dense, heavy, trippy sound that defied classification in just about any genre of rock.

Regardless, Zen Guerilla came as a surprise to us that evening. They unleashed a brain-smashing onslaught of super-heavy blues riffs at top volume. The singer – who, if we recall correctly, doubled on harmonica – rocked like a man possessed by atomic blues demons.

Don’t get us wrong. These guys didn’t play blues like Lightning Hopkins or B.B. King. The chords and song structures may have been similar, but the delivery was pure hard rock. We just kind of stood there with our mouths open for a few songs, dumbfounded by rock power. Eventually we made out way to the stage to whip our long hair back and forth in heavy metal tribute.

Afterwards, we bought their album. In fact, it was a cassette tape. It was lost many years ago, and the internet isn’t helping us identify it for you. But, you can jump to Amazon and see the Zen Guerilla Artist Page for a brief bio and some cool samples. Our tape never came close to matching the raw power of what we saw and heard on stage that night, but it was a performance we will never forget.

Thanks to the creators of 100 Bullets for slipping in this Zen Guerilla poster. It brought back some very fond memories of our years in Michigan, and reminded us how awesome it is to show up somewhere and have your mind blown by a band you never heard of before. Rock on!

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