So Marvel announced at the just-completed Comic-Con in San Diego that they’ve acquired the rights to Marvelman — and right now, I don’t think I can bother to be excited.

Part of the problem is that I don’t know that we can trust Marvel to do right by the character or its creators. When you read the convoluted publication history of the character, it becomes clear really quickly that, while the story itself is acclaimed, the history of the comics themselves have been a tawdry and embarrassing mishmash of conflicting legal claims. Marvelman was originally a 1950s British ripoff of DC’s Captain Marvel; when the title was cancelled in the ’60s, no one touched it again ’til the 1980s, when the great British comics anthology “Warrior” resurrected the character — they didn’t have the rights to the character originally, but assumed that no one would care if they used him. The new storyline was written by Alan Moore, who believed that all the necessary permissions were in order.

The series moved to Eclipse Comics, which changed the name of the character to Miracleman because Marvel Comics was threatening to sue (Oh, the irony). After Eclipse went out of business, Todd MacFarlane bought Eclipse’s back catalog — Neil Gaiman, who was, as far as anyone knew, the last person to hold any rights to the character, sued to keep MacFarlane from using the character. Gaiman eventually won the suit, but there was no expectation that the old Eclipse stories, which have always been considered the best, would ever be published.

But now Marvel has the rights to the character… but no one seems to be talking about what rights those are. Is Marvel limited to just writing new adventures about the character? If so, big deal — they can’t reprint Moore’s or Gaiman’s classic Miracleman stories, much less re-tell them, without facing another punishing lawsuit. If they do have the rights to reprint the older stories, that may be good for readers — Eclipse’s “Miracleman” comics are very rare and very expensive — but that may be bad for Moore and Gaiman, unless Marvel is going to do something DC has always avoided — pay the original creators some significant reprint fees.

And on a fanboy level, I wonder if Marvel is going to shoehorn Marvelman into their regular superhero continuity. In only the last few years, they’ve added Superman-level characters like the Sentry and the Blue Marvel — do they really need another nigh-omnipotent demigod running around their universe?

Marvel’s press release is pretty vague about their plans. I’d like to think they’ll pay Moore and Gaiman — and orignal creator Mick Anglo — a tidy sum, if only to stick it in DC’s eye. But will they? I really have no idea — but I don’t hold out a lot of hope. Comic history is filled from its beginnings with comics creators getting screwed out of their money by the publishers, and my pessimistic nature suspects that the same thing will happen this time, too.

Captain Britain and MI-13 #15

Siiiigh. Yet another outstanding comic book gets cancelled.

The final issue of this series also concludes the “Vampire State” storyline. Though Count Dracula and his vampire army have been thrown into disarray, they haven’t been beaten yet… but they’re a lot closer to defeat than they really expected. See, Pete Wisdom has been thinking about a dozen moves ahead of Dracula, most importantly about one little, important piece of misdirection — when Dracula destroyed the skull of Quincy Harker, the relic that kept all vampires out of England… he’d really only destroyed a fake. With Captain Britain battling Dracula’s pet necromancer, and Meggan showing up to sow dissent among the vampiric army, Dracula is completely unprepared when all his vampires start bursting into flame. He retreats to what he thinks is a safe position, only to get attacked by the S.A.S. and a whole bunch of guest stars. And it all comes down to Faiza Hussain, physician, superhero fangirl, and wielder of Excalibur, to take on Dracula in the final showdown.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Man alive, am I going to miss this comic. As always, beautifully created characters, fantastic plotting, so much wonder and excitement. The last three pages of this issue are the best farewell to the readers that I can imagine. Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk created an awfully fine comic — I wish they could’ve kept it going for much, much longer.

Power Girl #3

Power Girl ends up settling Ultra-Humanite’s hash pretty quickly in this issue — in fact, she accidentally roasts him like a hot dog. After that, she and Terra have to figure out how to set Manhattan back down without wrecking everything, and then PeeGee has to try to get Ultra’s ship down safely, without either wrecking New York or dropping into the ocean and causing catastrophic waves.

Verdict: I’ll give it a thumbs up, though the biggest feat is performed by Terra, a guest star… and I’m still a bit irritated that Ultra-Humanite is depicted as an over-the-top sexist. His best-known host, other than the giant albino gorilla, has been Dolores Winters, the fictional film star he transplanted his brain into during the Golden Age. And he’s always struck me as a villain whose primary prejudice was that he thought he was superior to everyone, and that only he had what it took to rule the world. He may hate women — but in fact, he hates them just as much as he hates men. Still, pretty good action and as always, excellent artwork by Amanda Conner.

Yet another five days down the tube, with just a couple days of downtime to make up for it. I don’t care what anyone says — it doesn’t seem fair, and it never seems like enough. Still we gotta do with what we got — and that means making the most of our weekends. And it helps to get things started right with a little FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

Man, I just can’t get enough of the “Marvex the Super Robot” stories from earlier this week. So much crazy and awesome, all in just a few short comic pages. So let’s head back to April 1940’s Daring Mystery Comics #3 by Hal Sharp, as Marvex takes on a spy named von Crabb.

Our dinner music tonight is a bit cliched, but still fits in pretty well with our general theme. Ladies and germs, give a polite round of applause for Styx…

It’s been a very busy month for zombies, what with DC’s “Blackest Night” and — well, I guess it’s mostly just “Blackest Night.” But still, it seems like a good time to hit a thematically-appropriate non-comics book review…

Zombie Haiku by Ryan Mecum

Published just last year by Ryan Mecum, a Presbyterian youth pastor in Cincinnati, the book is pretty much what you’d expect from the title — a bunch of 5-7-5 haikus about zombies. What makes this book so cool is its format — it’s told as a story, starting with an amateur poet writing cliched haiku in his writing notebook, advancing through the first day of the zombie apocalypse as our hero is bitten by a pack of zombies, dies, and rises from the dead with a taste for brains. Our poetic zombie ends up eating his way through his family home, a nursing home, a picked-clean city, several farmhouses, and an airport. And wrapped in among all the haikus are zombie polaroids, bloodstains, crude sketches of brains, and poems on torn paper “taped” into the book with duct tape. It’s beautifully illustrated, at least for those of us who love zombies.

Clearly, I couldn’t write a proper review of this book without including some samples of the haikus. So let’s start with our hero, still alive, on the run from the undead:

They surround the car
and are all moaning something.
Is that the word “trains”?!

In the early hours of his reanimation:

They are so lucky
that I cannot remember
how to use doorknobs.

In the process of eating everyone in the big city:

A man starts yelling
“When there’s no more room in Hell…”
but then we eat him.

And much later, during an assault on a farmhouse:

Nothing hurts me now.
Normally, the screwdriver
wouldn’t have gone there.

So basically: funny, gross, very imaginative, and messily drenched in modern zombie lore. And not too expensive either — the price tag on the cover is just ten bucks. Definitely a thumbs up from me.

Dethklok versus the Goon

Oh, mercy. Someone up there must like me.

Who do we got here? We got “The Goon,” Eric Powell’s crude, hilarious, hyper-violent, horror-noir pulp, and we got Dethklok from Adult Swim’s “Metalocalypse,” Brendon Small’s crude, hilarious, hyper-violent heavy-metal cartoon. It’s all written and illustrated by Powell, with Small stepping in to help. We start out with an evil plot to control the world using William Murderface’s inbred brain, combined with a brainwashed Dr. Rockzo the Rock and Roll Clown (He does cocaine!) trying to kill Dethklok. But things go improbably awry, leaving Dethklok’s gigantic headquarters Mordhaus stuck in the same dimension as the Goon’s Lonely Street. So the Goon and his pals initially mistake Dethklok for some of the new girls at the local brothel before some hijinx get started. Skwisgar does the nasty with Mama Norton, Rockzo introduces Franky to cocaine, Dethklok plays a concert, and the Goon slaughters untold multitudes of Dethklok’s henchmen.

Verdict: You gotta ask? Thumbs up. This ain’t deep storytelling, but if you love Dethklok and you love the Goon, you will love the bleeding screaming snot out of this. Powell is a lot better at drawing the Goon than he is at drawing Dethklok, but he’s absolutely got the cartoon’s brand of humor down perfectly. Tons of hilarious moments and lines here — I won’t spoil the best line in the comic, but you’ll know it when you see it. I also loved Murderface’s reaction after their manager questions the wisdom of promoting the band’s new album by shooting a thousand bald eagles out of a cannon and into George Washington’s face on Mount Rushmore: “Well, I’m sorry! I didn’t know you hated America!” And Dethklok’s concert is just brilliant, as is Franky’s critique of it — “What’s that sound?! It tells me my skin is alive and it hates me!”

Repeating for emphasis: LOVED IT.

Green Lantern #44

The Blackest Night has started, as one of the black rings revives the Martian Manhunter, who goes after Hal Jordan and the recently resurrected Barry Allen. Do they have a chance against a shapeshifting telepathic zombie Martian Superman? I wouldn’t bet on it. Meanwhile, the evil Guardian called Scar reveals to the other captured Guardians what’s going on — emotions are the cause of chaos in the universe, so she plans to bring order by extinguishing all emotions and killing all sentient life. And John Stewart is about to find out what happens when the black rings zombify an entire planet.

Verdict: Thumbs up. J’onn makes an excellent villain here — tossing buildings, shapeshifting, reading minds, and decisively knocking the stuffing out of a couple of DC’s heaviest hitters. The rationale behind Scar’s plot is good, too, and I’m looking forward to seeing what a Black Lantern Planet is going to be like. And yes, Doug Mahnke really is the perfect artist for this — he does great action, he does wonderful square-jawed heroes, and his monsters and zombies are the best in the biz.

The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft #3

H.P. Lovecraft is on the run — after saving Chesser from demonic squamous horrors from beyond our dimension, he’s actually been identified as the attacker. His aunts manage to hide him from the police, but he goes out anyway, intent on convincing his ex-girlfriend Sylvia to leave Providence to escape whatever disaster may be approaching the city. He also goes to a psychiatrist he trusts, hoping he’ll help him stay awake so the monsters won’t re-emerge. But he’s betrayed by the doctor, shot full of morphine, and locked in a cell in the asylum where his mother’s been imprisoned for years. Of course, the doc gets paid back for his treachery by eldritch forces, but that doesn’t improve things for Lovecraft — or for Providence — one bit.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Great suspense and a fun grasp of Lovecraft’s style of cosmic horror. I was expecting Tony Salmons’ impressionistic art style to wear on me by now, but it really does suit the story very well.

The Unwritten #3

Tom Taylor has returned to the castle where he grew up — coincidentally, the same castle where Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein.” As it turns out, there’s a small professionals-only horror symposium taking place there, featuring a half-dozen bad-horror-writer archetypes (Personally, I’m hoping the torture-porn writer gets killed good and hard). The mysterious Elizabeth Hexam is there, too, trying to get Tom to remember what happened to his father the night he disappeared. And as it turns out, Tom realizes that his father hid a safe in the house, figures out the passcode, and finds a couple of strange and seemingly useless items that his dad left for him. Will they be any use against the mystic assassin who’s closing in on Tom?

Verdict: Thumbs up. This really is an excellent series. Lots of fun, lots of mystery, lots of spooky stuff, all tied up in a “Harry Potter” wrapping that makes it all feel familiar and strange at the same time.

It’s been quite a while since I wrote anything on our semi-regular series on current and former Lubbockites who’ve worked in comics, cartooning, and animation. Today, let’s take a look at Jack Tippit.

Jack Tippit was a syndicated cartoonist whose work included the comic strips “Henry” and “Amy.” He also drew the comic strip “Dr. Bill” and a weekly panel called “Family Flak.”

He was born in 1923 and attended Texas Tech before transferring to Syracuse University, where he got his degree in Fine Arts. During World War II, he served in the Air Force for four years, doing 46 combat missions as a B-24 pilot in the Southwest Pacific. During the Korean War, he also served as a jet pilot.
 
His cartoons appeared over a 30-year span in magazines including The New Yorker, Ladies’ Home Journal, Look and The Saturday Evening Post.

Tippit helped found the Museum of Cartoon Art in 1974 and was its first director, serving until 1979. He also served on the National Cartoonists Society Board of Governors and was its general membership chairman, first vice president and president. He died in 1994 at the age of 70.

I understand at least some of his family members may still live in Lubbock.

Let’s take a quick look at two of the newest comics put out by Marvel to commemorate their 70th anniversary.

All Select Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1

This one has a number of stories in it — two of them new, two classic. Our lead story focuses on the Blonde Phantom, an unpowered Golden Age crimefighter. In a change from the previous stories in this series, this particular story isn’t set in the ’40s — it’s been updated to the present day. The Blonde Phanton, now retired from crimefighting to work as a legal secretary, learns of the murder of an old friend, comforts his wheelchair-bound widow, and resolves to track down his killer. She puts on the slinky red dress and domino mask she wore as a superhero and “interrogates” a bunch of lowlifes. And what she eventually discovers leads her to a very unexpected suspect.

Our second new story is by humorist Michael Kupperman — it’s about the very short-lived but very bizarre character called Marvex the Super Robot. Marvex is a robot from the fifth dimension who has a human-looking face and hair — but he’s very obviously made of gray metal. Despite this, he runs around in a suit like he’s got a real secret identity. He encounters beautiful women who express romantic interest in him, which he dissuades by telling them he can’t have anything to do with them because he is Marvex the Super Robot. Then he takes off his clothes to show them. And while this is augmented by a lot of goofball silliness about button-up socks and a villain named Ingrediento who was born of a sandwich, it’s still extremely true to the original “Marvex” stories…

…which are also reprinted here in all their utterly mad glory. How mad is it? Check out the final three panels of the very first Marvex story:

Marvex, the Lubbock Police Department would like to speak with you. Do you have your sexually oriented business permit?

And again, check out that final caption:

That’s just about the weirdest caption ever. The picture is odd enough, but the caption just pushes it to a whole new level of whacko. I love it.

Verdict: Thumbs up. The plotline and artwork for the Blonde Phantom story are just wonderful, the new Marvex story is entirely hilarious, and the two Marvex reprints are also great bonuses. Go pick this one up.

USA Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1

This comic focuses on an old character called the Destroyer. We follow a German reporter, loyal to his home country but opposed to the Nazis — just not opposed enough to do anything serious to stop them. He gets kidnapped by the Destroyer, a foreign spy captured by the Nazis and turned into a superhuman killer, who uses him as bait to kill more Nazis and goads him about whether he has the courage to stand up against evil. But why is the Destroyer keeping the reporter around at all? Why hasn’t he either killed him or released him? What’s his ultimate plan? All that plus another classic story from Marvel’s Golden Age.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Not as strong a comic as “All Select” but still very good. The reprint of the old comic is pretty good, too — it has an absolutely amazing two-page splash of an explosion.

I think I got time for a quick post this morning…

Marvel Divas #1

I wasn’t planning on picking this one up. J. Scott Campbell’s ridiculous cover made it look like it was going to be a nonstop cheesecake comic, and Marvel’s description of it as “Sex and the City with superheroes” didn’t sound a lot better. Luckily, it ended up being a good deal better than that. Our main characters are Patsy “Hellcat” walker, bestselling author and martial artist, Monica Rambeau, energy projector and former “Captain Marvel”, Felicia “Black Cat” Hardy, semi-reformed cat burglar, and Angelica “Firestar” Jones, fire-slinging mutant college student. For the most part, they all just hang out together. But they hang out very entertainingly.

Okay, there are quite a few similarities to “Sex and the City” — the main characters are four women, they all look gorgeous, and there’s lots of emphasis on their romantic lives. But for all that, I was entertained by this, and I was never entertained by “Sex and the City.” All four main characters have wonderful, fully-drawn personalities, even down to different, distinct voices. They’ve got their own problems, some shared, some separate, some trivial, some not-so-trivial. If I’ve got a complaint here, it’s about the art. For the most part, it’s all good, but it definitely hits one of my pet peeves about comic art — all the female characters seem to look alike, other than hair color and skin color. Eyes, eyebrows, noses, mouths, bone structures — most of them look like they were cloned.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s good fun, and I’d read more of it.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, big dawgs and kittykats, it’s been one holy guacamole of a week, and I think we all need a gigantic dose of the Wonderful, Wonderful Weekend to help us get over it. And what’s the perfect way to start the weekend? A healthy meal of eggs and lizard hearts? A high-speed jog around the Loop? Listening to Alfredo Gonzales lecture us about political ethics? I SAY THEE NAY! Everyone get your fightin’ togs on, ’cause it’s time once again for FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

Today, we’re heading back to October 1977 and Star Wars #4. This was Marvel Comics’ adaptation of some obscure art film no one’s ever heard of, with words by Roy Thomas and art by Howard Chaykin.

I’m pulling our musical accompaniment from a guy named Corey Vidal, who put together a YouTube video of himself singing four-part a cappella harmony about George Lucas’ luckiest break…