The Collected John Law!

The folks at Hard Case Crime have given us a real treat in The Collected Will Eisner's John Law. All of the John Law material is now easily available between two handsome covers. This is material created by Will Eisner and his team back in the 1940's when he was briefly considering starting his own line-up of comics for the newsstands as well as more modern material fashioned by Australian artist Gary Chaloner which takes many of Eisner's noir fragments and cements them into a fascinating and quite spooky whole. 

When the project failed to come together, Eisner took the elements of the stories and refashioned into stories for The Spirit Section. Four Spirit stories developed from this material, including the seminal two-part Sand Saref tale. 

I first became aware of these John Law Detective stories when Eclipse Comics was able to put together a one-shot comic at the same time that Kitchen Sink was rolling with The Spirit reprints. I was fascinated even then to get a glimpse behind the scenes of how comics can come together. 

Eisner was pitching all kinds of books and formats for these characters as well as others which never saw the light of day such as Melba Girl Detective. Originally Nubbin the Shoeshine Boy was to be the headliner. 

But then Eisner switched gears, and the beefy, one-eyed John Law took the lead. His similarity to The Spirit is evident, making the shift over to that series relatively simple to do. (I'll have more to say on these Spirit stories tomorrow.)

In the early 2000's Gary Chaloner was put into contact with Denis Kitchen by way of Kurt Busiek and it turned out that Chaloner was handed the keys to the Crossroads kingdom when he was given the okay by Eisner himself to continue the John Law adventures. 

Chaloner wisely chose to take the character and give him an even darker tone, adding a modern noir gloss to the already heady environment. Since the stories had in many ways become part of The Spirit mythos, Chaloner took steps to make the character distinctive replacing and adding to keep the structure if not all the details. 

In two collections (Dead Man Walking and Angels and Ashes, Devils and Dust) Chaloner added both Lady Luck and Mr. Mystic to the Crossroads universe. Crossroads is supposed to be a stand-in for Los Angeles just as Central City seems very much like New York City. This change alone gives the stories a fresh feel. The stories are hard-edged with the supernatural a regular aspect of the goings on. From the first collection we get "Meet John Law", "The Opal Skull" (originally a Spirit story intended for Dark Horse and later reconverted to same) and "Law, Luck and a Dead-Eye Mystic". And the remaining stories are "What Nubbin Knew..." and "The Half Dead Nubbin Butts", and a story I title "Law's Spook Squad". 

In a new story for the Hard Case Crime collection, we get a glimpse at what Chaloner had planned for Law, a team of detectives made up of Eisner alumni from all over. We get Harry Carey from the pages of WoW Magazine! from 1936, "Hammer" Donovan from Detective Picture Stories #4 from 1937, Melba Chase P.I. from the unpublished "Tab" The Weekly Comic from 1947 and Lieutenant Oren Grey from a couple of Spirit stories appearing in 1947 and 1948. It was a rich cast with plenty of villainy on display from the likes of corrupt cop Detective Reznick, gunman Ray Hades, and Law's boyhood friend, the gangster Enzo "The Angel" D'Angelo. 

This collection is highly recommended, not only for just fans of Eisner or The Spirit, but for fans of good noir crime stories. 

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Mr. Mystic!

The Spirit Section was never just the adventures of the Central City protector. Also included in the package were the misadventures of Lady Luck and our focus today -- Mr. Mystic. As far as I can find out, only the first five Mr. Mystic adventures have ever been collected and that was way back in 80's when a slender comic from Eclipse slithered into the comic shops of the time. 

The highly underrated Bob Powell was the artist behind this Will Eisner creation. Mr. Mystic was just one of a cavalcade of magicians who wandered across the comics landscape. Mandrake the Magician by Lee Falk had become a success in the newspaper comics years before and being a magician was an easy way to explain "super-powers". The writer Eisner and the artist Powell use the name "W. Morgan Thomas" on his work for Mr. Mystic. 

"The Origin of Mr. Mystic" June 2, 1940

This story is a crushed version of the movie Lost Horizon...sort of. Americans are fleeing invading armies and a diplomat we only know as "Ken" insists that a Professor Padewski take his seat aboard the overcrowded plane. Ken then finds a plane, but crashes. He is scooped up by a sect of monks called "The Council of the Seven Lamas" and almost immediately given vast magical powers by the act of putting a brand on his forehead. The Lamas disappear and Ken now gifted with almost limitless power to create and transform objects hears a voice which tells him he will be "Mr. Mystic". A tuxedo, cape, and turban appear and he's on his way to save Padewski yet again. 

"Karoly Gore, the Dictator of Europe" June 9, 1940

This yarn sees our hero go to capture a notorious dictator for a million dollar reward he will use to ease the suffering caused by the dictator. Gore himself proves to be a weak man, easily defeated, but the woman named Elena is much more dangerous and has powers of hypnosis she uses to opposed Mr. Mystic. In the end of course Mr. Mystic wins the day. 

"The Slave Traders" June 16, 1940

Mr. Mystic finds a woman near death in the desert. Just before she dies, she tells him of slave traders who had captured her. Mystic marks her grave with a tree which shall never die then off he goes to stop the slave traders. He stops the trade and saves a woman named Wooding, using a flying carpet in the process. 

"The Zombies of Dr. Gung" 23, 1940

Elena returns from seeming death to battle Mr. Mystic again. This time the action is in Hong Kong where a Dr. Gung is busy creating "zombies" by using rays to rob men of their ability to reason. Mr. Mystic was given a necklace by the Lamas which gave him supreme power and Elena spots it and covets it immediately when he follows her trail to Gung's place. 

"The Burch Gang Smugglers" June 30, 1940

Mr. Mystic comes to America for the first time in the series, and just in time to save two young lovers named Bill and Shamrock from the clutches of smugglers. Mr. Mystic walks on water to save these two and to stop the gang. And in classic pulp hero fashion, he disappears before he can be thanked by the couple. 

Mr. Mystic looks from this small sampling to be a rather typical magician-superhero type of the time. He's very similar in many ways to Yarko the Great created by Eisner and others for the Iger Studio when Eisner was a part of that operation. It's surprising that a Mr. Mystic collection of greater breadth hasn't been done in all these decades. 

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Destroyer Duck Day!

Steve Gerber was born on tomorrow's date in 1947. Gerber made his fame with his creation of Howard the Duck in the pages of Man-Thing for Marvel. Howard was a sensation in the mid-70's, even putting forth a satirical run for President. (I prefer him to the mope currently malingering in the office.) Gerber famously sued Marvel for some financial considerations for Howard's success when the company attempted to get into the movies. This effort was supported by other professionals, lead among them Jack "King" Kirby who was having his own battles with the House of (Mostly His) Ideas. 

One of the grand comic books of the 80's was the totally in-your-face satire named Destroyer Duck. The comic started out as a method by which like-minded talents (Jack Kirby, Alfredo Alcala, Mark Evanier, Joe Staton, Sergio Aragones, among others) donated their time and talents to produce a story written by Steve Gerber who at that point in time was in a legal dispute with the Marvel machine over the ownership of Howard the Duck.

The debut story is about that struggle directly and hilariously as we meet Duke Duck, an ally of the "Little Guy", a small duck who gets sucked into a distant dimension where he is exploited and killed by Godcorp. Duke ends up going to this other world and kicks Godcorp butt. After this one-shot though it was deemed smart to do more Destroyer Duck stories and Gerber and Kirby and Alcala kicked out four more issues before seven issue series was taken over by Buzz Dixon and Gary Kato. Duke has showed up  a few times since, in the pages of Total Eclipse in the late 80's and the Image one-shot guest-starring with Savage Dragon in the late 90's. Surely there's an audience for these bizarre tales of the "Marauding Mallard of Vengeance".

But that's not all. 


Above is the envelope featuring the great artwork of Jack Kirby and Alfredo Alcala. This holds some dandy artwork. Here's a description from the website The Gerber Curse:

"In 1982, Dave and Deni Sim published a portfolio called "F.O.O.G.", which stood for "Friends Of Old Gerber," to help raise funds for Gerber's legal battle. The project, which was initiated without Gerber's knowledge (he says he hadn't even met Dave and Deni Sim), featured 10 black and white plates (11" x 14") by Bernie Wrightson, Mike Kaluta, Charles Vess, Wendi Pini, Jeff Jones, Barry Smith, Marshall Rogers, Frank Thorne, Gene Colan, and Dave Sim, which came in a Duke "Destroyer" Duck envelope illustrated by Kirby and Alcala."

Below are some scans of that artwork. I am lucky to have one of these portfolios. It's a real bit of comics history. Note that the scans are pretty much as is, and do not expand much when you click on them. Sorry about that.

Dave Sim
Barry Windsor-Smith
Mike Kaluta
Gene Colan
Berni Wrightson
Marshall Rogers
Jeff Jones
Wendy Pini
Charles Vess
Frank Thorne
Hubba Hubba!

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Zot! Day!

Scott McCloud was born on yesterday's date in 1960. McCloud is most famous these days for Understanding Comics, his insightful tome which deconstructs how comic stories function and how they interface with the reader. But my first brush with McCloud was in the pages of Zot!, a comic book from Eclipse Comics. 

I don't recollect when I first saw or bought Zot! by Scott McCloud, but I for sure had several issues of the Eclipse comic's color run which started in the mid-80's. But when I moved away from the Independents to focus on Marvel (driven by the need to conserve finances for my growing family) I lost track of the character and made no effort to follow the series as it moved through the decade into the early 90's, even when it lost its color and shifted to black and white storytelling. 

I was intrigued when I chanced upon a very cheap 2007 collection which gathered together most of the black and white run of the series. It looked like a handsome volume, well worth the small money and frankly I was intrigued. I'm pleased I bought the book. It is great, not only offering up some dandy stories told in McCloud's Japanese-inspired pristine style, but the connecting material putting the stories into context really open up the themes of the book.

The beginning of the black and white run with the eleventh issue was seen by McCloud as a reboot for the series and so beginning there is no problem for the novice. We meet in the the first two issues our protagonist Jenny of our Earth who has a "boyfriend" named Zot who is a superhero of sorts on an Earth in another dimension which resembles ours but feels more futuristic and idealistic. Jenny thinks her humdrum life of a broken home complete with pesky brother and a school life full of the boredom that can engender would be improved by shifting her load to Zot's world. In these first two stories we meet a steampunk villain named Bellows who proves to be a blustery but ineffectual baddie for our hero who dispatches him with smiling aplomb.

The next three issues offer up a more intense trilogy detailing the struggle against a computer named Zybox who in its quest for a soul ends up enslaving Zot's world and seems interested in ours. Zybox is a terrific foe who like the famous Tardis is bigger on the inside which allows the devious computer to toy with his victims as he looks to complete himself.

In a light-hearted one-shot we meet the Devoes, luddite-minded kooks who use advance technology to reduce the world to primitive apes when man was not slave to his machinery but lived ideally in the trees.

One of the scariest Zot villains is Art Dekko, a madman who suffering from cancer had his whole body slowly but surely replaced by various bits of technology. His madness is a threat to the world, or at least he imagines it so.

(Note: Issues nineteen and twenty of the series were art fill-ins by Chuck Austen which went on sale in the same month and are not included in the collection I read. McCloud still thinks highly of them, but I can offer no opinion.)

The Blotch is a baddie who worships greed and who practices a loathsome and unrepentant capitalism which attempts to reduce all of the world to merchandise and all people to employees. That's seen as a bad thing in Zot's world, or at least it is eventually just as in ours.

Perhaps Zot's most dangerous foe is 9-Jack-9, an electric assassin who travels through electronic equipment to seek out his victims. He's been around for decades and never fails, even challenging the seemingly perfect record of our hero Zot. This villain points to a coldness which perhaps suggests the nature and arguably origin of evil.

After these various super-heroic encounters the series does a shift as Zot and Jenny become stranded on our Earth. 

Zot gets stranded on Jenny's we get a series of touching low-key character driven tales which McCloud dubs the "Earth Stories".

It begins with a weird two-part story which first shows us a day-in-the-life of Jenny Weaver as she struggles with home and school, both worlds full of commonplace strife that many teenagers face. That is counterpointed with a similar story from Zot's perspective which shows how difficult fighting crime can be in a world which while filled with crime seemingly lacks the clarity of good guys and bad guys.

Then we get a portrait of Jenny's mother who has been little seen in the series to this point, but unlike the father who is all but absent in a family which is undergoing divorce, and never focused on. Here we get a story from her perspective which is about the nature of adulthood and the compromises and regrets which often accompany that journey we all must take-- if we're lucky. It's a sweet story and a thoughtful one.
 

Following that we get some tales introducing us to some new supporting characters. We meet Ronnie, a young black comics fan who is isolated in the almost exclusively white suburban community and his friend "Spike" who is the artist for the fan comics Ronnie writes. Both are young men trying to find out how to fit in.

Perhaps more tragic is Ronnie's girlfriend Brandie who is a supreme optimist but who struggles against enormous financial pressures and more in a family which suffers the damage of an alcoholic mother.

We get fresh insights into Terry, a longtime character who is revealed to be struggling with her sexual identity at a time and place where such things were far from typical, although as the story suggests in its very title absolutely normal in the broadest possible sense.

Woody is another longtime character who has had a crush on Jenny and finally has to move on when it's clear that Zot is the one she truly cares the most for, though it is difficult for everyone.

One of the most peculiar issues is a simple conversation, halting and confused, but certainly frank between Jenny and Zot as they discuss what it means to their relationship if they move beyond their friendly romance into a sexual relationship. What they decide will intrigue all readers.

And the series wraps as all the characters don't necessarily find full resolution, as life doesn't work like that, but they do get a glimpse of one possible future the access to Zot's world is reopened in time for everyone to have another visit.

This charming series wraps up full of heart and clearly McCloud is no longer interested in just telling superhero yarns, but wants to create comics which plow new territory.

The nature of how that works is the very next thing McCloud would work on as just after he finished Zot he turned his attention to the groundbreaking Understanding Comics.

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