Comics Other Than DC – September 2013

Reviews, commentary, general reactions, and random notes on comics by publishers other than DC that were released during July (mostly) that I received near the beginning of August. Caution: Spoilers ahead! [Link to previous month] [Link to this month's DC Comics]

Buck Rogers #1 of 4 (Hermes Press)

They say that a functional definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. I may fit the bill. I have never cared for the writing of Howard Chaykin – and yet I have tried various of his comics over the years thinking that if he's as great as everyone thinks he is maybe I'll like this one. His art I actually kind of like, and in fact think it fits very well for something like we have here, the retro-flavored attempted revival of a beloved quasi-pulp character who deserves much more modern exposure. But I find myself invariably put off by the generally politically-charged revisionism that he usually imposes on such projects as he undertakes, which is invariably pretty much diametrically opposite to my own values. Add to that my belief, based on various things I've read and heard about him (seemingly confirmed in an about-the-author blurb appended to a two-page interview here, that “[h]e has a terrible reputation among fans for profanity, limited patience with nonsense, and spite”) as well as from him (see below), that I would not like him very much as a person, and I can't give you a good reason that I keep giving him repeated chances. But I do. Almost invariably with the same result as here – visceral revulsion.

Armageddon – 2419 A.D. (1928) and The Airlords of Han (1929)

Oddly enough, this cover to Amazing Stories
for August 1928 depicts not “Buck Rogers” but
rather E. E. “Doc” Smith's The Skylark of Space.

By Philip Francis Nowlan (originally published in Amazing Stories, August 1928 and March 1929, reprinted many times since, usually together)

I was a huge fan of the “original” Buck Rogers as a child, my parents having given me a huge coffee-table sized collection of almost random comic strips, both dailies and Sundays, The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century (1969) 'round about 1970 or so. It was without a doubt the very first collected comic material that I ever owned. And I loved it, spent many glorious hours reading and rereading it, until the big, heavy door-stop of a book (which I still have) nearly fell to pieces. (The first few years of the dailies are available here.)