Big Box of Comics: Conan Chronicles 1 to 3

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big box of comics, Conan, conan chronicles, Dark Horse, Dark Horse Comics, Marvel Epic Collection

Thanks to this blog’s readers, I was reunited this year with one of my all-time favorite comic book runs: the first fifty issues of the Conan series by Dark Horse. These stories have been reprinted in so many formats and mini-collections that you might want to throw up your hands in despair rather than try to collect them all in chronological order. But before you give up hope, the Conan Chronicles comes to the rescue.

Despite the Marvel banner across the top, the first three volumes are high-quality reproductions of the Dark Horse series, complete with the original covers, variant covers, sketchbook pages from the artists, and the original forewords and introductions by authors and artists from the collections. There’s a fourth volume to the series, too. It continues into the next phase, when the title changed from Conan to Conan the Cimmerian after issue fifty.

These editions also include pages that reproduce the unique wrap-around covers from the various mini-collections. That’s a thoughtful bonus, even if the original cover size did get reduced to fit on one page. It would have been fun to also see the comic strips about the life of young Robert Howard that appeared on the original letters pages, but that’s a minor nitpick in a flawless and beautifully designed collection.

Also, these reprints do not include the recalled cover that showed full frontal female nudity. The only bare boobs you will see in this collection are Conan’s, since he rarely wears more than a loin cloth and a pair of moccasins while decapitating and dismembering his way through brutal, blood-soaked battles on every other page.

Conan is like the male flipside to the hyper-sexualization of women in mainstream superhero comics. He flexes and poses through the most insane adventures, nearly naked the entire time, and he’s got a totally ripped, massively muscular body it would take a regular guy 100 lifetimes of body-building, cosmetic surgery, and laser hair removal to come close to matching.

That’s part of the fun of the character. Everything about Conan is over the top and larger than life, from his physique, intellect, and attitude, to the landscapes and enemies he encounters. There’s nothing small or timid about this hero. He isn’t your average dork with tedious concerns trying to live a normal life. He starts off as an all-around bad-ass who wants to see the world and plunder her cities, and he charges headlong into trouble just because he likes a fight. Though he often succeeds or at least survives, his arrogant attitude constantly trips him up.

Throughout the stories in the first three volumes of the Conan Chronicles, he learns many lessons the hard way. By the end of those volumes, Conan has matured from a careless, hot-headed youth into the kind of man who can unite and lead a kingdom. Along the way, he kicks the most ass I’ve ever seen kicked in a single series—from demons and wizards to hordes of undead soldiers and anyone who ever messed with him in a tavern.

Collector’s Guide: Conan Chronicles; Marvel Epic Collection, 2019. 

Although these volumes reprint the Dark Horse series, they were published by Marvel, continuing the back-and-forth publishing deals the two companies have had with Conan licensing for many years. Note: Don’t confuse this series with The Chronicles of Conan, which was Dark Horse reprinting the 1970s series by Marvel!

indie box: Next Men TPB

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2112, big box of comics, collection, comic books, Dark Horse, indie box, John Byrne, M4, Next Men, Next Men TPB

Once upon a time, I had the complete Next Men series, except for the Hellboy issue. Though I read the series three or four times, I’ve missed having it around ever since I sold it. This month, thanks to this blog’s readers who use my affiliate links to find books, I earned enough store credit to get all six of the 1993 trade paperback collections. Reading the series again reminds how much the series blew my mind the first time through, and as a bonus, it includes the Hellboy issue with pages drawn by Mike Mignola.

Hellboy’s appearance in issue #17 makes it the most expensive one to collect. It’s easy to collect all the other original, single issues for less than $3 each, but #17 will cost as much or more than all the other thirty issues combined. That’s not a problem with the collected paperback.

Hellboy might be part demon, but he is a far cry from the absolute evil of the series’ main villain. Sathanas is the remnants of a mutated energy vampire who kills people by draining their lifeforce, and since so much of him got blown up, he survives in a mechanical suit. Despite his silly name, he’s among my favorite John Byrne villains.

Despite the fun of the paperbacks, they have three disappointments, possibly because they were made more than a quarter-century ago before TPBs became so popular. These days, we expect the TPB to include all the original covers and, if any, all the variant covers. But the Next Men covers get treated terribly, reduced to about 1/6 of the page size and combined in a “gallery”. It’s an odd design choice, considering that there’s a useless page between each “issue” that just splits the words “Next Men” across its front and back. That would be a lovely place for a cover!

Second, the story is so intertwined with the short graphic novel 2112 that the original Next Men series isn’t complete without it. This oversight is forgivable, since the events of 2112 get summarized by one of the characters.

What’s unforgivable is the omission of the entire series of “back-up” stories, M4. These were short episodes with characters who, at first, seemed only tangentially related to the main series. But the stories intersected eventually, and the M4 characters were essential to the finale and resolution. Leaving out the M4 pages makes these characters appear to pop out of nowhere in the main storyline, which makes for utterly confusing plot developments for unfamiliar readers. Plus, M4 had its own covers, featured on the back of the single issues where it ran, and the TPBs have none of them.

For the completists: When IDW reprinted the series in color in 2009, they included M4 but not 2112. IDW’s 2011 reprint series (“Classic Next Men”, in three TPBs) includes both M4 and 2112, and it’s also in full color. I’ve only ever seen it in stock on Amazon for around $40 per volume in paperback, but you can get them for $10.99 each for Kindle and Comixology, and as a set with the sequel for a total of $43.

Even with these omissions, I loved re-reading this imaginative and intricately plotted series that features some of Byrne’s most humanized and fully realized characters. Consider what he does with three wordless pages to show Jasmine’s emotional state as she flees from an attack in underground tunnels. Her old, perfect life was taken from her, and she’s not adjusting well to reality, where trauma awaits her at every turn. Without a single line of expositional captions or thought balloons, Byrne portrays her fragile condition in these pages.

Big Box of Comics Part 1: Concrete

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big box of comics, comic books, Concrete, Dark Horse, Indie Comics, Paul Chadwick, review

This post is part of a series about what was inside this month’s big box of free comics.

Concrete is just as good as I remember, except for the Fragile Creature series in which Chadwick experimented with a Moebius-influenced line story that is less beautiful than his other artwork on the series and lacks the physical weight suggested by a heavy character like Concrete. Plus, I found the story boring compared to the 10-issue series and the six-issue Think Like a Mountain.

Mountain features one of my favorite scenes: Concrete walks underwater along the Pacific Northwest coast. He encounters a shark swarm, a hidden octopus, and a horrific “ghost net”: a fishing net lost at sea that traps fish, birds, seals, and other animals in its inescapable tangle until they die.

Like Mountain and the story about building a sustainable farm, the six issues of The Human Dilemma focus on Chadwick’s ecological concerns, which he discusses in more detail in supplementary articles and responses to readers’ letters. Chadwick does a remarkable job of giving his characters opposing viewpoints to argue and question, so that even if some characters are preachy, it doesn’t feel like the storyteller is preaching.

Instead, the stories reveal the complexity of taking action or even reaching a solid conclusion about environmental concerns (and everything else in life). Characters reach a decision then find reasons to doubt they made the right choice. They change their minds. Characters make bad decisions and suffer the consequences, or even suffer for their more noble actions. Besides telling a damn good story, Concrete invites readers to question, ponder, and re-evaluate.

Chadwick’s art is a delight. Although I liked the full-color art in Mountain, Concrete shines brightest in black & white printings that show off the compositional beauty of every page. Chadwick uses creative points of view in many panels, such as in Dilemma when we see a character through a wine bottle that distorts his image, which is perfect for a scene in which the character’s emotions are out of control and leading him to make a poor decision.

The first six issues of the original series were collected, in pairs, in three slim paperback volumes. The first two paperbacks are worth getting for the additional pages of story Chadwick had room to include in those editions, pages which are not simply “deleted scenes” but enhance the story. I got all three paperbacks and the original single issues because the reprints do not include the original back covers I am so fond of.

I was surprised to find the final two issues of Dilemma were not in the big box. But this is a mistake that turned out well. When I went to MyComicShop.com to order them, I found my missing ninth issue of the original series had become available. Yes! Into the shopping cart! (I even had just enough store credit remaining to pay for them and their shipping. Bonus!) I did not replace some issues of odds and ends, nor the Killer Smile limited series I don’t recall being thrilled with; but aside from the hard-to-find second volume of collected short stories, I’m happy to once again have a Concrete collection that includes the best of the best.

Collector’s Guide: From Concrete #1-10. The paperback reprints of the first six issues are: Land and Sea. A New Life. Odd Jobs. All ten issues are reprinted in Complete Concrete or the Concrete TPB series. Other recommended volumes include: Concrete: Think Like a Mountain, also in TPB; Concrete: The Human Dilemma; Concrete: The Complete Short Stories.

demo 1 by brian wood and becky cloonan

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becky cloonan, black and white, Brian Wood, Dark Horse, DC Comics, demo, dreams, first issue, indie box, Indie Comics, vertigo, waking life of angels

These page come from the beginning of the first issue of DC/Vertigo’s Demo series by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan. AIT/Planet Lar published a twelve-issue Demo series in 2003-2004 before Wood and Cloonan began with a fresh number one at Vertigo in 2010. DC/Vertigo published both series in two Demo paperbacks, and Dark Horse put them together in a single Demo Complete Edition which is 464 pages softcover.

We love Becky Cloonan’s black and white artwork and how she brings to life this dramatic first issue where dreams and reality intersect. Brian Wood is the author of DMZ, one of our favorite series. We did not feel like the target audience for the romantic drama of Wood’s New York Four and New York Five, but we have seen a few issues of Northlanders which interested us, and we enjoyed the three pointless but punk-rock issues of Pounded.

Samurai Executioner paperback: Volume One

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Dark Horse, Dark Horse Comics, Goseki Kojima, Indie Comics, Kazuo Koike, Lone Wolf and Cub, manga, Samurai Executioner

Our enthusiasm for Lone Wolf & Cub knows no bounds, so we grabbed a copy of Samurai Executioner the first time we saw it. This little paperback from Dark Horse looks and feels like one of their Lone Wolf books, also by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima. In some panels, our protagonist even looks just like Itto Ogami from Lone Wolf, and he pretty much has the same job. But without young Daigoro and the evil Yagyu clan defining this book, the creators can indulge their love for a good samurai tale with different kinds of plot lines.

This creative team’s productions draw on Japanese history and culture from before the time Tokyo was established. At the time of these stories, that city was Edo.

This paperback collects five sequential “issues” of Samurai Executioner in more than 330 pages.

Koike and Gojima seem to delight in wringing the maximum emotional drama from each scene. No one in these stories merely has a rough day. One can easily see how these manga classics affected Frank Miller’s approach to comics with their over-the-top intensity, excessive violence, and no-holds-barred confrontations with total trauma. Take the opening sequence, for example.

Our main character begins the tale in a sexual interlude with a prostitute. They share a tender moment, and we learn he has to execute someone the next day as a kind of job interview. Guess who they bring in to get the old slice-and-dice? That’s right. The woman our samurai was just mating with the night before. Ugh.

See, we told you nobody here just has a rough day.
 
Our samurai mans up and chops her head off, but he whispers to her that the execution has been cancelled. She breathes a sigh of relief, free from any more worry or suffering. And then CHOP! This moment of mercy irritates the guys at the job interview, who remind him that suffering is part of the punishment he should mete out for them. What dicks!

Compared to that job interview, the samurai executioner’s first day on the job doesn’t seem so bad. He gets dispatched to deal with some raving lunatic who has taken a nice young girl hostage. Koike and Gojima take us inside the madness in rather disturbing scenes where the captor forces his hostage to sustain him with her urine. They also gave us horrifying urinations in Lone Wolf, when the poisoner routinely drank the urine of the drug-addicted whores in his employ.

Now, we’re not really big fans of drinking pee, but a human could reasonably chug a shot of it without much emotional trauma. But in Samurai Executioner, it’s pretty much your worst nightmare in hell, an act performed at the hostile mercy of some psychotic sicko. Maybe they need to consider adding a chaser!

So between the decapitated hookers and the pee-guzzling antagonists, between the merciless mayhem and mandatory mutilations, Samurai Executioner managed to completely blow our minds. Even knowing the story doesn’t prevent us from some amount of shock every time we re-read it.

If you want some light-hearted, family-friendly entertainment, this is not the book for you. If you get your kicks from action movies with hardcore heroes and utterly twisted villains, buy Samurai Executioner in paperback! Or, see if you can grab the new Samurai Executioner Omnibus in May 2014 from Dark Horse! The first omnibus will collect the first three paperback volumes!