Still piecing together CRACK COMICS 63.

Whereas FANTASTIC COMICS ended at 64-pages and a great lineup of characters--CRACK COMICS wasn’t quite so sweet. I’ve ended up picking up a few issues of CRACK COMICS from various points in its run to put together a decent lineup and I’m in the process of lining up appropriate talent.

I was pleased as all hell to have Herb Trimpe agree to write and draw a SPITFIRE story for CRACK COMICS!

Herb is one of the guys that got me excited about comics back when I was a kid. The Incredible Hulk 156 was the first comic book I ever bought with my own money and Herb was in top form therein. I knew Herb was a big fan of old airplanes and SPITFIRE seemed to be a natural. When Herb agreed to take it on I was as pleased as punch (and you all remember how pleased punch is, don’t you?).

Needless to say, CRACK COMICS 63 is coming together beautifully!

Holy crap.

Dave Stevens just passed away.

Another comic book creator--another amazing talent--is gone.

I never met Dave.

Regardless--I was totally floored by his stuff--I was a big fan--I loved the Rocketeer--I thought the guy was just an amazing talent and I really wished he’d done more work because all of it--ALL of it--was outstanding.

What a terrible loss.

He was one of those guys that made the rest of us mere mortals shudder and think, "I hope to god this kind of work doesn’t catch on and become the industry standard or the rest of us are totally screwed."

I knew Dave was sick but I was told not to say anything so I kept it quiet. Just the other day we were pasting up a Stevens cover for the final issue of the Thomas Jane-penned miniseries "Bad Planet"--and now he’s gone.

Sigh.

Dave’s passing reminded me that I haven’t gotten around to composing my thoughts about Steve Gerber’s death.

I met Steve and worked with him once. Steve Gerber had been writing the comic book Codename: Stryke Force for Marc Silvestri here at Image and in it he had attempted to revive Destroyer Duck. The duck was trapped in robotic armor and Steve was setting up the big reveal but at the last moment somebody in the Top Cow camp balked. While they had robotic talking animals--and that was fine--Duke was a REAL duck--an actual talking animal--and somehow--that didn’t jibe with the reality they were trying to create over there.

I don’t quite recall how I ended up in the picture but I did.

Somebody had probably told Gerber that I might be an easier sell (I suspect it was Mark Evanier or lawyer-to-the-stars Harris Miller but I’m not sure) and the two of us got connected and we decided to put together a Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck one shot.

As luck would have it--Gerber was asked to write a Spider-Man/Howard the Duck yarn at just that time. At that point Marvel was maintaining a kind of illusion the Howard the Duck was "his" much the way they pretended that the Silver Surfer was "Stan’s" and Elektra was "Frank’s." Of course Marvel, being Marvel, was quick to toss out those implied contracts as soon as the opportunity to further exploit those characters arose but I’m getting ahead of myself.

In any case--Steve talked to me about the timing of it all and I suggested a non-crossover crossover. The idea being, "wouldn’t it be funny if those two stories tied together in some way? Maybe they could bump into each other in a dark room or something."

Steve thought that sounded like a lot of fun and he made some phone calls and Marvel seemed up for it.

Then Steve went about figuring out the plots for the two stories.

And here’s where it gets sad.

You remember how I mentioned that implied ownership thing? Y’see--for a while there they let Stan be the only one to write solo Silver Surfer yarns. Sure, he might show up as a guest star in another book from time to time but if he ever was on his own--Stan would be the guy writing it. Ditto Elektra. For a while the powers that be at Marvel let her stay dead--and let Frank Miller’s word on her be the final word. Same deal with Gerber and Howard.

But that changed.

Steve called me up and he sounded very upset. Howard was going to be in other comics and Steve wasn’t going to be the writer--he was going to star in a Christmas special--and Steve wasn’t asked to write that. The implied ownership agreement had vanished.

And Steve didn’t know what to do.

He confessed that he didn’t think he could write the Spider-Man/Howard the Duck team-up yarn and the Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck story.

But hell--I was a shit disturber. And I was a devious guy--and I lived for this kind of thing--and it occurred to me in a flash how to resolve this situation in a way that would have Steve keep his commitments and feel good about doing it.

I suggested a rescue mission.

"What if," I suggested, "you had Howard the Duck get rescued from the Marvel Universe by Dragon and Destroyer Duck and swapped in a clone or something?"

And that’s all it took to get the gears turning.

Steve took the cue and ran with it. He wrote a brilliant yarn wherein he had Howard and his girlfriend get relocated in the Image Universe and he had them get disguised as part of a witness protection program--meanwhile he swapped in another fowl to take Howard’s spot in the Marvel Universe (Steve had replaced Howard’s familiar "Waugh" at the end of his Spider-Man tale with a "Quack" and he was beside himself that nobody at Marvel noticed).

A happy ending for all. Gerber kept his commitments, his dignity and his duck.

I’d talked to Steve a short time before he passed away. We had released Kirby’s Silver Star is a deluxe hardcover edition and I had talked to Steve about doing the same with Destroyer Duck, which he had done with Kirby. He was very excited about the idea and he was very much looking forward to a complete Destroyer Duck collection.

And then he was gone.

A great guy. A terrific talent. A guy who fought the good fight.

Gone.

And that had me thinking about Mike Wieringo.

Sometime after my One Fan’s Opinion column about his passing went up I was at a wake for him in Baltimore.

It was not as somber an affair as you might think. We got up and said our piece and generally speaking it was a pretty pleasant time as fans and friends remembered the life of a terrific cartoonist. But what struck me then--and strikes me each time a talented creator passes away--is how it sometimes, tragically, takes a person’s death for people to sit up and appreciate a person’s life.

Mike had done this book for us--Tellos--and we’d just done a big, oversized hardcover collection of the series. The initial orders were not especially strong and when Mike heard what the initial numbers were, he had asked, in a voce which clearly showed his disappointment, "is that all?"

And it was.

We over-printed, of course, and Mike was overjoyed with how the book turned out but it wasn’t until Mike passed away that suddenly everybody and their brother decided that they had to have the Tellos collection. A book, which would have lasted years had Mike Wieringo lived, sold out in a matter of days.

There’s something wrong there.

And it’s not that we shouldn’t remember those that have died--I’m not suggesting that--because that’s fine--we should remember those that have contributed so much to our field.

But would it hurt to remember a few of these folks while they were still alive? So they could know that their work was appreciated and their contributions valued?

Is that too much to ask?

Yikes. Just got a copy of CRACK COMICS 62--the issue before our upcoming Next Issue Project issue and--it's not pretty. The art fell off--the format is slim--and insubstantial.

Ouch.

The Captain Triumph story is--pretty forgettable. The other stuff--not too interesting. Looks like we'll be mining the older issues a lot for our continuation of this once-mighty mag.

And that's coming together, by the way.

Okay--so FANTASTIC COMICS 24 is out (or soon will be--I've had my copy for a few days now and I can't stop looking through it). The next book to get updated/continued is CRACK COMICS.

So, the big question is--do we continue the same format that we used for FANTASTIC COMICS 24 or do we follow the format used in CRACK COMICS when it ended?

Y'see--comics that started in the late '30s/early '40s were full Golden Age dimensions (a hair taller than modern comics and about an inch wider) while books that lasted well into the '40s and up into the Silver Age were slightly less wide (although still wider than modern comics) and quite a bit shorter when it came to page count. Comics in the early days were 64-pages in length-- later on they were 48-pages and then 32-pages. Some books even bounced around from one page count to another. I have a run of "Captain Marvel Adventures" and it bounces back and forth from 32 to 48 pages once it ditched the 64-page format.

In any case--CRACK COMICS was a longer running title than FANTASTIC COMICS. It even changed its name and continued as CRACK WESTERN and later JONESY--but we're ignoring all that. We'll be picking up the numbering from where it switched from CRACK COMICS (62) to CRACK WESTERN (63). But by the time the title switch was made--CRACK COMICS was the the narrower format and 32-pages in length.

So... do we keep our series of books consistent or should we adhere to what these titles became when they ended?

In the case of CRACK COMICS-- my gut tells me to say, "screw it" and make it a wider 64-page book. If we did that, we could fit in a lot more characters hand-picked from the book's run and it would be a better companion magazine to FANTASTIC COMICS 24 but this isn't an isolated incident--there are plenty of other books, which ended in a multitude of other formats.

In some cases--romance, western, science fiction, horror and jungle books were never 64-pages long. They started out as the slightly narrower dimensioned 32-page comics. so--do we make those titles slightly narrower than our other NEXT ISSUE PROJECT titles and 32-pages or should we make the entire "series" consistent?

I don't think I want to even address the Golden Age enthusiasts out there who are champing at the bit to add these books to their already-existing runs and want them to fit exactly with what came before.

We're already playing somewhat fast and loose with the format. These books are on far better paper and have vastly superior production values than true Golden Age books. But what to do... what to do...

I imagine we'll just do 32-page books for the titles that started later and were never 64-page books. The horror books in particular followed a pretty rigid format of four tales per book. It might be pretty weird to break that format.

But I dunno.

I don't much like the idea of the actual dimensions of the books being inconsistent. It would be nice to have there be some consistency with these books.

But there's something awesome about that original Golden Age format. FANTASTIC COMICS 24 with its massive logo and wide cover is just eye-catching as all hell. It would be nice to have all these books be the same height and width and paper stock if nothing else.

I guess--at the end of the day--I'll just use my best judgement.

We just got in copies of FANTASTIC COMICS 24 to the office-- the very first of the NEXT ISSUE PROJECT titles and it is the most jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring comics I have ever been involved with.

The faux-Golden Age coloring on some pages--the authentic dimensions of the book--the awesome art by Bill Sienkiewicz, Mike Allred, Jim Rugg, Andy Kuhn, Tom Sciolli, Fred Hembeck, Tom Yeates, Ashley Wood and...uh...me--it's just mind-blowing. I'm at a loss to describe just how cool this is.

Seriously.

This is one that I'm particularly proud of.

It goes on sale 2/13/08.

Buy it.

Christ almighty this issue is taking forever.

It seems I'm led to distraction. A lot of things here and there take up too much of my time until suddenly I look up and--crap--a month went by and I didn't manage to pound out another thrill-packed issue--son of a bitch!

Anyway--this issue features Prism a character created by my buddy Al Harris. Al created Prism years ago and he appeared in the first issue of Graphic Fantasy. As you may or may not know, the first (kind of) published appearance of the Savage Dragon was in the 72-page first issue Graphic Fantasy. That comic featured a Dragon story plus full-length stories featuring Prism and Iron Hawk. The Dragon story was reprinted in a comic book called Savage Dragon: Archives-- The other two stories--both inked by me--were never reprinted.

My thought was to reprint the Prism story in Savage Dragon 135 (and don't worry--this will NOT effect the cover price) since this issue features the return of Prism to print (after 25+ years).

Al Harris still has all of the original art to the Prism story from Graphic Fantasy 1--it could be re-scanned from the original art and actually look better than it ever has. I was actually contemplating coloring the pages 'cause Savage Dragon is a color book and we always wanted to have Graphic Fantasy be colored but I couldn't make it happen on my shitty tabletop press but I did a test and it really took away from the crazy crude quality of the original so I'll be running it in black and white.

It's tempting to go in and tweak it here and there but other than fixing a couple fuck ups that both Al and I have been pissing and moaning about for the last 25 years I'll be running it pretty much "as is."

Thanks to Al for keeping the original art all safe in his garage all these years and letting me borrow them so that I could play show and tell.

"Honey, Valentines Day is on its way and I thought I'd give you something that will mean a lot to you now and years to come."

"Oh, really?"

"Yes--I names a STAR after you!"

"You what?"

"You know those 'star registry' ads we keep hearing on the radio? Well, I took the plunge and plunked down my money and now there's a real star with your name!"

"You're kidding."

"Nothing says 'I love you' quite like that. Surprised?"

"Very."

"So...what do you think...?"

"What a complete waste of time--and money."

"Huh?"

"Nobody care--it's not like astromomers will be referring to this stupid star by my name--nobody's going to even know about it, you stupid knucklehead--why didn't you buy me some candy or at least a goddamn card..."

"But..."

"Christ, you're an idiot."

"But I thought that..."

"No, you didn't think--I thought that stupid commercial was ridiculous. You might as well have flushed money down the toilet!"

"Aw, honey...!"

"What am I doing with you?"

Okay--this is weird--somehow or other I've managed to get a pretty nasty case of poison oak! Dunno what the deal is with that but I have the crap all over my hands and here and there all over my body! I even got a nice patch right around my eye! I went to the doctor and he hooked me up with some pills that are supposed to speed up the healing process but I'll be damned if I can figure out how I got into contact with the stuff in the first place.

I haven't exactly been hitting the hiking trails or anything and my cat is an indoors cat so it's not as though she dragged in some of it.

I dunno.

I look like I have a black eye. I was thinking now might be a good time to mock up a fake Image Comics ad that parodied those old cigarette ads with the "I'd rather fight than switch" slogans--me with a shiner, holding an Image comic book-- but most readers are too young to get the reference so I think it would be lost on them.

Ah well--I'll tough it out.

Just finished coloring Joe Casey & Bill Sienkiewicz's contribution to FANTASTIC COMICS 24. Bill saw that I made my yarn look all old and crappy and he wanted the same treatment.

So--it's finally done--everybody's stuff is in and so--at last--the first of out Next Issue Project books can finally go on sale.

Next up: CRACK COMICS!

Several people have asked about my Grandpa. I wrote a One Fan's Opinion column about him a couple years back after he'd turned 100. Well, the guy passed away recently at 102. He was pretty much sound as a dollar up until the end. He got a little wacky in the last couple months but for the most part he was mentally alert for the whole ride.

My dad told me that the last things he said to him were "remember to take the coal in from Minot" and "Never vote Republican."

Like I said--he was as sound as a dollar up until the end.