THE MAXX was a strange but compelling comic by Sam Kieth that came from Image back in the ’90s. It was about a homeless man who became a superhero in a place called The Outback, which might just be imaginary. He’s helped in this by a social worker named Julie Winters, and the comic was very, very odd. Then MTV made a cartoon out of THE MAXX which was just as odd and just as good. (Jesus, remember when cable TV took chances?????) Anyway, now MTV.com is streaming the series, and from what we’re hearing, they hold up pretty well. Since it isn’t on DVD, we recommend you go take a look.

’90s NOSTALGIA!

Yesterday, the comics internets burst with the news that Pádraig O Méalóid, aka LiveJournal user glycon, had acquired and posted a set of xeroxes of the complete long lost BIG NUMBERS #3 by Alan Moore, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Al Columbia. Planned to run 12 issues, had it been completed, it would be fairly unique in Moore’s oeuvre– a contemporary story about real people, albeit with heavy duty science fictional trappings. It would be interesting to see how it would have been ranked by Moore admirers, but we’ll never know — he has no interest in completing it and it appears that many of its ideas will be incorporated into his long-simmering novel, Jerusalem.

According to Méalóid, he acquired the xeroxes via an eBay auction from someone who got the copies from someone who got the copies probably from someone who had worked at Tundra. Since the script for #3 was available, an unknown party went ahead and lettered the art.

Obviously there are a lot of missing steps here. A few pages of the art has previously been published in a magazine called Submedia, but it’s quite noteworthy that the missing pieces of such an important project from such a noted creative team had been floating around for nearly 20 years and just now got restored. (It’s a bootleg to be sure, but Moore has given his blessing to the posting.) It’s sort of like someone finding the lost tracking shot from the last reel of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, or Charles Dickens’ notes for the ending of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

At any rate, it’s fun to live in a time when oddities like that can still be discovered–despite our media saturation, there are still mysteries to be solved, and that’s half the fun of it.

Eddie Campbell has some very noteworthy commentary on the discovery:

this is an important event. I don’t know the whole story of who did it yet, but the entire unpublished third issue of Big Numbers has been cobbled together. I recall asking publisher Kevin Eastman at the time why, even though the 12-issue series was abandoned, he couldn’t put out the existing third issue. He looked at me as though I was daft. Who would want a third issue if they knew there wouldn’t be any after that? Given the number of unexplainables he had already published, and the millions of dollars squandered, I couldn’t follow his logic.

He also mentions this:

Another thing I remembered, and I don’t think I ever mentioned it to Alan, but I always felt a certain resentment that Billy the Sink got Big Numbers and blew it while i was stuck drawing Jack the bloody Ripper for ten years (I once described it as a penny dreadful that costs thirty five bucks).

Eddie, we think you may have had the last laugh.

We haven’t read the third issue yet — we have to find our copies of BIG NUMBERS #1 and 2, which we haven’t read in, oh…20 years or so. For a refresher, here’s Frank Santoro’s take on the book:

Okay, wait, I take that back. It’s an inspired work, but there is this lack of motion, of movement that adds to the density. Beyond the incredible glass shattering sequence in the first issue, it’s basically a quiet European film of a comic. I’m sure Moore’s script was pretty intense and Sienkiewicz does a decent job of mixing and matching talking heads and word balloons with these formal devices that “open up” the page and let it breathe a little. But again because of the photographic sources, there is always this middle ground focus where every character is shot from the waist up, gesturing. There will be two pages of dense talking head panels and then some sharp detailed sketch within a scene (like above) that is very focused, not only in technical articulation but in feeling. They show great restraint and balance and then release into sketchy memory. The pages are clean in their black white and grey purity but somehow the palette only adds to the gloomy claustrophobia of its rigid structure and square format. Big Numbers, just plods on and on formally like this and ultimately feels like a straight-jacket.

BIG NUMBERS may just be the most checked out comic in the Library of Imaginary Books — a companion piece to FROM HELL and LOST GIRLS as one of the projects Alan Moore launched when he left DC in the late ’80s, two issues, with art by Bill Sienkiewicz, were published by Moore’s own Mad Love imprint (distributed by Tundra.). As opposed to his other, more period and fantasy-influenced tales, this would have been contemporary fiction in a slightly more traditional vein, if you consider Philip K. Dick traditional. The story was inspired by fractal numbers and chaos theory and was at one point called The Mandelbrot Set.

Sienkiewicz left the series after the second issue and Al Columbia took over as artist. What happened next depends on who you ask. What all agree on is that Columbia also withdrew from drawing the book, perhaps after destroying an entire issue’s worth of art.

Some Sienkiewicz art for #3 did exist at some point, however, and an LJ user aptly named Glycon has just posted them:

In any case, everything I know leads me to believe that this is a copy of the unpublished third issue of Big Numbers, and I genuinely didn’t believe it existed, and certainly never expected to actually see a copy, led alone own one. Even Alan Moore doesn’t have a copy, to the very best of my knowledge, which in this case is considerable, as I decided to specifically ask his permission before I posted this here. He is happy for it to be made available to the world, so here it is.

Get ‘em while their hot!

Via Gavin Jasper

But…The circle of life!

“We have a President-Elect who’s a Spider-Man fan! It’s like I’ve been saying for years, people who grew up reading comics are moving into positions of power in media, in business, and now in the Executive Branch of the federal government. Is that cool or what? I don’t know about you, but I’m very happy that the next President of the United States knows that ‘in this world, with great power there must also come — great responsibility!’”

- Comics scribe Roger Stern, from an interview with Zack Smith at Newsarama.

…

“I arrived in America [in August 1992] shortly before Bill Clinton was elected and I watched the joy that my friends had when he was elected, and then I watched six months later as that joy turned to grumbliness when they realized they elected a politician. I had a thought that I would write them the kind of president they obviously seemed to want, and I got to do it by grabbing an old, forgotten DC Comics character called Prez, the “first teen president of the United States,” and it was so much fun.”

-SANDMAN creator Neil Gaiman, from a retrospective interview at the L.A. Times’s Hero Complex blog. Love that word “grumbliness!” And the Silver Age Prez (created by Captain America co-creator Joe Simon) is a true riot:

Whether that chapter of SANDMAN will strike the same chords in 2009 remains to be seen, but earlier in the interview, Gaiman reminds us how much has changed in the world of comics since 1992:

“For example: Graphic novels these days, the collections of comics tends to harbor around eight issues. That was something that began really with “The Sandman” No. 1. When I explain to people that the reason that the first story, “Preludes and Nocturnes” was eight issues long was because back in those days DC Comics didn’t like canceling things before they gave them a year because it made them look bad. So they used to give things a year — which meant that I was pretty sure that I would be getting my phone call at issue eight letting me know, “No, we aren’t going to be doing this, the book is canceled.”"

Posted by Aaron Humphrey

While we were out of it, we should have just posted this single link which should have kept everyone busy for a whole day: Part Six of Jay Allen Sanford ’s lavishly illustrated history of comics in San Diego. In this episode:

1 – The Birth of Image Comics

2 – Pacific Comics: The inside story of a legendary local comic book company (including a history of indie comics and the Creator’s Rights revolution)

3 - RIP Dave Stevens, famous former neighbor who created the Rocketeer

4 – Don’t Fear the Funnies: A history of censorship in comics

5 - The New Kids On The Block VS Revolutionary Comics - illustrated by Superman/Supergirl artist Stuart Immonen

Sanford was the publisher of Rock and Roll comics back in the day, and he has a pretty ground-level view, even if some would dispute parts of it. Well worth a thorough read.

§ 90s Nostalgia! Laura Hudson looks back at Wizard in the 90s:

§ It’s generally impossible for an interview with Alan Moore not to be awesome, and this one at Forbidden Planet by Pádraig Ó Méalóid is no exception:

It seems, at least in the case of Lost Girls, there is now an existing piece of erotica or pornography which people, in the debate upon obscenity or pornography, can now point to and say, “What about Lost Girls?” Now if that is all that it’s done - and I don’t think there’s going to be a huge rush of publications like Lost Girls in the very near future because both me and Melinda are very good at what we do, and it took us sixteen-eighteen years, so I doubt there’ll be very many people queuing up to do anything quite like Lost Girls - but, at the same time, Lost Girls exists. It’s a kind of benchmark. I’m not expecting, I don’t know, all of Richard Desmond’s vast array of smutty periodicals to suddenly clean up their act overnight and become aesthetic and intellectual works of art, but, Lost Girls exists.

§ Newsarama presents a roundtable whichlooks at how the current bad economy might affect web comics.

Newsarama: In your opinion, are we heading for another Internet boom or bust? Does the slowing economy have any effect on webcomics at all?

T Campbell: “Another Internet boom and bust?” You mean, like eight to ten years ago, when there were crazy overvaluations for dozens of companies with zero revenue, followed by a rash of bankruptcies? I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

I do think there are some hard times ahead. Webcomics’ low expenses mean they’ll probably weather the storm better than print media. But merchandise might be a tougher sell than it was. We are working off people’s disposable income.

§ Chris Butcher discovers that Diamond doesn’t always list books as being in stock:

It took me until today to realize that I should just contact their book market distributor and see if it was, you know, actually available, or if the copies I saw in New York for the Inoue signing were the end of a print run, or a fluke, or perhaps a mirage.

“Yes, both of those are in stock and available,” says the nice lady at Simon & Schuster.

“Huh.” says I. “I’ll take 10 of each.”

“Confirmed, you’ll have them next week.”

So there you go. A company that has gone exclusive with Diamond for the direct market (meaning: me, the manager of a comic book store), and Diamond is not only not stocking their full line, but has specifically not offered some editions of their work, and is putting out the false signal that the work is out of print.

§ Chris Butcher is on a tear this week, first with a calling-a-spade-a-spade . post

So yeah, most of the 3300 graphic novels released in 2007 sucked. Godwin’s Law Sturgeon’s Law is that 95% of everything is crap, and that’s about right in this case. Of course, the fact that there’s a “Godwin’s Law” “Sturgeon’s Law” at all should tell me that this is no surprise to any of you, but I just feel like someone had to come out and say it: There are a lot of awful, awful graphic novels coming out these days. Whoever’s guarding the gate, be it retailers, journalists, “journalists”, whatever, I beg you; be discerning in your praise, don’t pass along PR without having vetted the project yourself, stand behind your recommendations and, if you can’t, own up to your mistakes.

He followed it up with a post where is picked up the spade and did some digging to put his money where his mouth is:

That said, I just read the new Amazing Spider-Man, #552, and it’s awful. That’s no surprise, I read about 20 comics this week and half of them were pretty bad, but this one is written by Bob Gale, who wrote Back to the Future. Why is that important? Other than the failure of the writer on this one, there’s the failure of the editor as well for hiring him… This is the same Bob Gale who wrote Daredevil #19-25 (current series). A story-arc so mediocre that they didn’t even bother to collect it in trade paperback, and considering Marvel was collecting nearly everything at that point, including every Daredevil story, that’s saying a lot.

§ HARBINGER, a long ago title from the great Valiant Age of comics may get the movie treatment courtesy of director Brett Ratner. Ratner had fun with X-MEN 3, but now he wants his OWN comics movie franchise to get rolling. The deal was negotiated via the Valiant Entertainment Group, a privately financed company headed by CEO Jason Kothari and chief creative officer Dinesh Shamdasani, both of whom will be co-producers on the film. Apparently more Valiant comics and movie deals are on the way.

§ SLG head Dan Vado presents his March line-up in this slide-show webcast. The internet makes all things possible.

§ Marvel EIC Joe Quesada’s popular feature Cup O’ Joe in which he takes on fan questions will be returning as a regular feature at MySpace:

Every week, Quesada will tackle questions posed directly by True Believers on the world’s most popular social network in this brand new weekly feature on MySpace Comic Books. Like a might Marvel team-up, the online community known for connecting legions of fans with the most exciting creators, projects, and events in the industry comes together with the leading comics publisher to present your chance to get inside the mind of one of comics’ most popular personalities.

Cup o’ Joe was long a regular feature at Newsarama, but word on the street has it that Marvel and the comics news giant had a falling out over a broken embargo.

§ Via the Vanity Fair blog (!) comes a little piece of comics history we had just forgotten about. Radio host Joe Franklin’s appearance at last week’s MOREOLD JEWISH COMEDIANS event was a burying of the hatchet — and not in someone’s back:

That Franklin was in attendance at all, let alone getting laughs, was a big surprise to a number of people at the party, given that, in 1984, he sued Friedman for $40 million after the cartoonist published a hilarious comic strip called “The Incredible Shrinking Joe Franklin” in Heavy Metal magazine. The case was dismissed because the comic strip was an obvious parody, and almost 25 years later Franklin has apparently gotten over his anger. Friedman emailed me this morning to let me know that one of the highlights of his party was when Franklin walked up and embraced him.

Franklin was clearly an early adapter in the cartoon legal battle derby but it’s great to see old feuds left behind in the dustbin where they belong.

Over at his Boneville blog, Jeff Smith has started a series of posts looking back at the self-publishing movement of the 90s:

It’s been 15 years since I met Larry Marder, who introduced me to Dave Sim. Who in turn introduced me to Colleen Doran. Soon, along with James Owen and Martin Wagner, we created a limited edition print featuring all our characters to sign and give away to comic book store retailers.

We did this at a 1993 Diamond Comics Distributors retail show - - a few months after the industry was stunned by the announcement that six of Marvel’s top artists were forming their own company called Image Comics. The resulting rumors that we might be planning to form our own super group was irresistible. This was the beginning of what would be called The Self-Publishing Movement.

With Smith, Terry Moore and Dave Sim all launching new titles this year, it seems like a profitable time to look back at what the movement meant and where it’s gone. Back then it was all about a lone cartoonist writing, drawing, publishing, promoting and touring. It was a grueling one man (or one woman) show that proved to be too grueling for most people. The good news is that the current economics of comics allow publishers from stalwarts Fantagraphics and D&Q, to newer specialized houses like Buenaventura and Picturebox to pick up the business end of things while still allowing near-absolute creative freedom. The internet and shows like SPX and MoCCA — not to mention distributors like Sparkplug — have allowed an even greater blossoming.

The difference is that the pioneering generation was based around the pamphlet economy — putting out a regular COMIC BOOK was the goal. Nowadays it’s all about the collection. Young cartoonists can get on the map with a single mini-comic story instead of a planned 10 year epic story. Many of the 90s creators were more genre-tinged, as well. It would be just as profitable, perhaps, to look at how the economic switch has changed creative goals and processes.

And yet, see our earlier posting on the genre-more-than-tinged CRIMINAL. Brubaker and Phillips are pretty much doing things the old fashioned way — albeit in a “team” situation, not the lone cartoonist model — and getting a book out this time around involves a publishing deal with Marvel, promotions on a social network owned by Fox, and interviews with comics-loving celebrities. The hard work seems to be paying off — the second CRIMINAL collection debuted at #10 on the Diamond graphic novel initial order chart, a strong showing for a creator-controlled property. We’ve come a long way, baby.

Anyway, this series of postings at BONEVILLE — which will include guest blogs by Colleen Doran, Larry Marder, Paul Pope, Terry Moore, Charles Brownstein, and others — should be good reading.

Oh man, we can just imagine the internet chatter about this lengthy profile of Rob Liefeld in the OC Weekly:

To this day, Liefeld is described as “controversial”—it’s one of the first things you’ll see on his Wikipedia page—but he isn’t quite sure why. “I ask people, but no one really has a good answer,” he says. “It’s just one of those things, like, ‘I’m controversial!’ I’ve never gotten out of a limousine without my underwear on. I haven’t been pulled over for any DUIs. . . . I think the success that I had when I was young ticked a lot of people off because they eventually told me so.”

Pages and pages more. Fun for everyone, and the author’s email is at the end!

The recent deaths of past and preseng comics execs Steve Massarsky and Richard Goldwater have a bit of online commentary. Marv Evanier discusses Goldwater here. Masssarsly so was instrumental to the face of early 90s comics via his involvement with Valient/Voyager, was a more controversial figure, as comments in the Newsarama thread and this Comicmix obit show. Tom Spurgeon has a more comprehensive look at the Valiant years, including Massarsky’s battles with Jim Shooter.

Over on his blog, Jeff Smith recently announced some impressive sales figures for Scholastic’s BONE reprints:

I received some astonishing sales figures from Scholastic - - the paperback edition of BONE 6: Old Man’s Cave, which just shipped last month, is in its third printing for a total of 260,000 copies! The combined hard cover & paperback sales for the series to date: nearly 2,000,000.

An imposing figure to be sure, but not one that surprises me. Kids like comics. Kids like fantasy. When both are done as superlatively as BONE, success should be sure to follow.

I learned that back in the day when I worked at Disney Adventures magazine, where Bone was serialized for about a year. I’ve often been given credit for reprinting BONE in the pages of DA, but to be honest, it was Marv Wolfman’s idea at first. After Marv left, I picked up the mantle, and continued the color reprints. There was even an all-new 8 page Bone story whose reprint history I’m sadly unaware of.

DA’s recent demise gave me (and many others) pause for thought. DA started back in the early 90s. It was the idea of Michael Lynton (who now runs Sony Pictures). Hyperion Books was also his idea — some how or other Lynton introduced Disney to the idea of publishing non-Disney books and magazines, and also comics. (The brief career of Disney Comics was also Lynton’s idea.)

(more…)

Here’s one of the subjects we really need to read up on: the legal tangle surrounding the return of Valiant comics. It seems the tangle has already caused one problem: Diamond will not be distributing the HARBINGER reprint due to legal concerns:

In the latest development in what has seemingly become a quagmire of intellectual property rights and legalities over the former Valiant characters took another twist this past week. The Harbinger: The Beginning hardcover, originally due to go on sale this Wednesday from Valiant Entertainment, LLC. collecting the original 1990’s Harbinger #0-7 along with an all-new “Origin of Harada” story by Harbinger creator Jim Shooter, has been cancelled in the Direct Market. Retailers who have called their Diamond Comics Distributors representatives to inquire about the availability of the hardcover have been told that the item was canceled Friday due to “legal reasons.”

More in the link.