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Post by rberman on Sept 12, 2019 18:07:15 GMT -5
A Distant Soil #1 “Immigrant Song” (June 1991)
 The Story: It all begins with a bang. Siblings Jason and Liana, aided by their telepathic and telekinetic talents, escape from the Martin Institute which has been their home since childhood.  Jason is recaptured – not by regular Institute flunkies with handguns, but by someone more powerful with energy beam weapons.  Liana falls in with some friendlier-than-average street punks (with great hair) and an over-protective neighborhood policeman.  Just when things are looking up, some spacemen show up in battle armor to threaten our heroes…  Backup story “Season of Spring”: The home life of Aeren the spaceman, his lovely wife (unnamed), and four children: Jason, Liana, Cari, and Tiar. Four year old Liana displays surprisingly strong telekinetic powers during a kitchen spill, prompting her parents to privately deliver exposition about the lengths to which they are going to hide their family secrets from the world of mundanes.  My Two Cents: As often seems the case with indie and creator-owned works, A Distant Soil has a convoluted back story all its own. Writer/illustrator Colleen Doran began an Aquaman fan-fic as a teen. It evolved into a kitchen-sink story combining her loves, which like many children her age, meant a combination of space opera and fantasy. Beginning in 1983, nine issues were published by WaRP Graphics, home of indie B&W darling Elfquest. But WaRP attempted to assert ownership of Doran’s work when she tried to leave. Doran restarted the series from scratch, retelling the story in color for Starblaze Graphics, but that too ended in a lawsuit, and Doran took the story back to B&W under her own Aria Press before moving it to Image Comics, where it has remained ever since. See codystarbuck’s extensive write-up here. In retelling, the story elongated and gained a back-up with flashbacks to the childhood of the protagonists. Note that the characters most prominent on issue #1 of the original run (below) are not even a part of the story in the new issue #1.  What distinguishes Doran’s art? Well, I mentioned the hair earlier. Never have I seen such a set of glorious male manes. For an issue named after a Led Zeppelin song, it’s not surprising to see Robert Plant-style locks gracing the many slim, chest-baring men populating this story. Or a Labyrinth poster on the wall of a child’s bedroom.   As you might expect from a creator owned-work (or at least hope), Doran spends time making the art looking terrific. The leisurely publication schedule (initially advertised as six weeks per issue, but in reality nowhere near that) no doubt helped as well, but then again she's doing ink as well as pencils, not to mention writing.  Index of hotlinks: "The Gathering" arc #1,2,3,4, 5,6,7,8,9, 10,11,12 "Ascendant" arc #13,14, 15,16,17,18,19, 20,21,22,23,24, 25Images of A Distant Soil (pin-up issue by guest artists) "Aria" arc #26,27,28,29, 30,31 "Coda" arc #32,33,34, 35,36,37,38 The rest so far: #39,40,41,42 (of a projected 50 issues)
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shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,860
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Post by shaxper on Sept 12, 2019 20:24:36 GMT -5
I own a few of these issues entirely for the Panda Khan backup features. Never really paid attention to the A stories. I'll be curious to finally learn about them here.
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Post by rberman on Sept 13, 2019 7:10:47 GMT -5
A Distant Soil #2 (February 1992) Story #1 “Immigrant Song”: The story picks up with the scene of peril from the end of the previous issue. Two more spacemen with awesome hair arrive and strike both the heroes and their assailants unconscious.  Liana recovers and recalls having made telepathic contact with Rieken, the taller, white-haired stranger, in the past when her mind was roaming space. The good guys all decamp to Sergeant Minetti’s house. After a few moments of misunderstanding, it’s time for a giant exposition dump from Rieken. His spacefaring race, the Ovanon, conquered many worlds, including the home of his small, dark companion (and lover) D’Mer. Their race’s chief power is a being known as the Avatar, who in turn is controlled by a seven-person Hierarchy.  Then follows the secret origin story of Liana’s father Aeren, a fugitive Ovanon who exhibited an unusual “hands of death” ability. This explains the destructive power that Jason exhibited last issue during the escape from the Martin Institute. Aeren was said to have fathered five children, though we only saw four in the back-up story last issue. Liana has Avatar-power and is thus a rival of the currently reigning Avatar; this is why she is hunted. If she’s not taken off of Earth, the whole planet is in danger.  Story #2 “Season of Spring”: Continuing the flashback backup story from last issue, we follow Aeren to his job as a high school biology teacher, in which Mary Jo Duffy is one of his students. Another student has been doodling sexy drawings of him in her notebook, while A+ student Amy Cowen bombed a quiz for some reason. A fellow teacher wants to talk about Aeren’s twin kids Cari and Tiar, but we’ll have to wait until next month to find out what the situation is.  Story #3 “Souvenir” by Jo Duffy, art by Coleen Doran: This is a dialogue-free short (four pages) about a woman who buys a pair of distinctive earrings, gives one to her boyfriend who’s leaving on a trip, and keeps the other for herself to remember him. It’s not connected to the story of Liana.  My Two Cents: Genre Films often spend half an hour getting the protagonist into a bewildering predicament, before some sage (Obi-Wan Kenobi, Morpheus, etc.) shows up to explain the backplot. Doran opts to get the exposition out of the way unusually early, which is probably wise for the original serialized form of this story; readers weren’t going to keep coming back month after month for a story whose parameters they didn’t understand. But if this had been a graphic novel originally, spreading out the exposition would have been a more elegant solution. On the plus side, readers now clearly understand the stakes: Liana will have to go into space and defeat the Avatar of the Ovanan in order to protect herself and her planet.  This issue is all about Rieken and D’Mer. Not just because of Rieken’s paragraphs and pages full of exposition dumping. Doran also makes the two male aliens physically and emotionally intimate. To call this unusual in an early 80s sci-fi comic would be a massive understatement. (And even in the early 90s when this re-do came out.) It seems to me that in genre stories, men are more likely to write about female homosexuals than male homosexuals. I don’t have a large data-set of female-written comics to choose from, but A Distant Soil is one piece of evidence that the converse is true as well.  Here is Doran’s own explanation of why she redrew the first 300 pages of this story after leaving WaRP Graphics:
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Post by brutalis on Sept 13, 2019 8:36:50 GMT -5
Ah the artwork of Doran! So sleek, slick and stylish. You can readily tell her fascination with anime and yet while inspired and fueled with such visions she doesn't ever copy the anime style, instead it only enhances and highlights her own individuality as an artist. I was grabbing up any issues of Distant Soil I could find back when it was originally released. Such gorgeous, elegant and scrumptious art of men and women and kids. Sheer delight for the eyes.
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Post by Jesse on Sept 13, 2019 10:11:34 GMT -5
Colleen Doran's artwork is beautiful.
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Post by codystarbuck on Sept 13, 2019 13:30:01 GMT -5
I have an Arthurian print from her, with moe flowing hair. That is also an element you see in manga, from female cretors. Starblaze put out some nice books; but, the company, itself is another matter.
Doran was one of the interview subjects for The Comic Book Rebels, a book that came out in the late 90s (I think); she has some interesting tales of a lot of people trying to take advantage of her, both professionally and personally. The one constant is don't anger a red-headed Irishwoman! She will fight.
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Sept 14, 2019 2:15:16 GMT -5
Oh, hey, I read that! (Or the first collection.)
I don't remember much, and it wasn't my favorite thing ever. Sorry I'm not more helpful.
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Post by codystarbuck on Sept 14, 2019 6:50:41 GMT -5
It featured interviews with Todd McFarlane (a selling point, since Image was recent, Stephen Bissette, who co-authored, and his own experiences with censorship, on Swamp Thing, and Doran and her tales of being a teenager and a woman, in comics. There is also some coverage of the Undergrounds, with Crumb and Pekar. Doran's interview was the one that stuck with me the most, with her trials with Richard Pini and Starblaze, trying to undermine her rights or outright steal her work. The other part was the amount of sexual harassment she dealt with, even as a minor. She spoke of either a publisher or an editor who booked her into his hotel room, at a comic convention, and sleeping in the hotel lobby instead. She was routinely harassed by fans and pros at conventions, and started to bring her mother along, to help put a damper on it and they harassed her, too.
I still recall someone challenging her on her letters page about what she knew about a minority experience and she fired back about being a woman, in a profession dominated by men and the history of Irish immigrants. She don't take no s@#$!
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Post by rberman on Sept 14, 2019 7:08:41 GMT -5
#3 (January 1993) Story #1 “Immigrant Song”: Jason awakens on Siovansin, the crystalline Ovanan spaceship which is orbiting earth in search of his sister Liana. The lady of the house, Sere, gives him a tour and a baloney story about being peaceful etc. His doubts are proven true. She gives him drugged wine. She drinks it too, to allay his suspicions, but then quickly takes an antidote. Treachery!  Down on Earth in Sergeant Minetti’s house, the spacemen Rieken and D’Mer announce their intent to recruit more allies among humans. They’ve also stolen a pile of cash from an ATM to finance their work.  Story #2 “A Season of Spring”: In the flashback story, Aeren has three conversations. First, a teacher colleague opines that Aeren’s twins Cari and Tiar need to be sent to different schools so that they will socialize more normally.  Second, his son Jason got into a serious altercation at school for looking "pretty" like his dad. Jason has rendered a schoolmate unconscious. In real life, this event would definitely trigger at least a conference with the principal, not just a note home.  Finally, Aeren endures a tirade from his wife, a professional artist who is frustrated with the incompetence of the publishing industry. Could it be that Doran is writing a tiny bit of her own experience into the story?  This issue also includes an autobiographical editorial that speaks for itself.  My Two Cents: The most interesting bit of this issue is the extended tour of Siovansin which Jason receives courtesy of Sere, before she Mickey Finns him. There are some zombified servants and a whole lot of lovely crystalline architecture, perhaps inspired by Richard Donner’s Superman movie. Colleen Doran worked on DC’s mid-80s fantasy series Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld series as well, so crystals are a good fit for her. Guys with awesome hair too.   There’s one terrific page on which Jason, just awakened, assesses Sere mentally and feels like a songbird caught by a rope of thorns. A good picture really is worth a thousand words. 
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Post by codystarbuck on Sept 14, 2019 17:03:57 GMT -5
Boy was that true about Donning. I saw A Distant Soil and Elfquest at Waldenbooks; but, they were usually just spined out, in the scifi/fantasy section. Some of the coloring was a bit weird, especially Elfquest. They also tried some illustrated books, with comic artists, including Mike Grell illustrating Howard Pyle's The Merry Adv. of Robin Hood and Mike Kaluta illustrating Thea Von Harbou's Metropolis. Both were exquisite; both were books I stumbled upon elsewhere, having never saw them in any kind of store, book or comic.
May be reading too much into things but the jobs she describes, with Nazis and blouses ripping, sounds a great deal like Bill Black's AC Comics. Lot of amateurs and rookie artists worked there and that sure sounds like the average plot of the Femforce. Sad thing is, Doran could have probably written and drawn a Femforce comic that would have been a classic. The Nazis would have al had big, fluffy hair and be thin and ripped.
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Post by rberman on Sept 15, 2019 7:12:16 GMT -5
#4 (February 1993) Story #1 “Immigrant Song”: Members of the Ovanon Hierarchy gather to see Sere’s prisoner Jason, who has been strung up nude as depicted on the cover. It seems Sere has accidentally given him a fatal overdose of sedative. Oopsie.  Back at Sergeant Minetti’s house, Liana has a problem: her medicine bottles broke during her escape from the Martin Institute. We’ll later find out that her medicine is the anti-epileptic drug Phenobarbital, which in reality comes in pills, so she should be OK. But according to this story it’s a liquid, so she’s in trouble. Anyway, Brent Donewitz the street punk offers to accompany her to the pharmacy to procure a refill.  The final page takes a strange left turn, showing a whirling spiral of energy connecting our modern world to the medieval times of Avalon, where a warrior kneels in a snowy wood. What can it mean?  My Two Cents: In order to get the issues out at a rate quicker than biannually, Doran scaled back the contents for now. No backup stories, but some pin-ups, a lettercol, a list of prices for pages of her original art, and a “coming appearances” page fill out the rest of the issue.   I suspect that the original nine issue run zipped through the plot more briskly. Doran takes her time with this iteration, with plenty of conversations that aren’t very interesting to summarize for you but are good for character development. The complication with Liana’s broken medicine bottles will provide a pretext for her to venture out and get into trouble rather than stay safely home as she was instructed to do. We ought to give a moment to understanding the title of this series. It’s lifted from Henry David Thoreau’s poem The Atlantides, which compares the quest for friends to the extreme efforts required to discover the New World during the Age of Discovery. Thoreau first published this poem embedded in his essay collection “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (1849):
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Post by beccabear67 on Sept 15, 2019 12:21:35 GMT -5
I had the first bunch of WaRP magazines sized issues of this, and then a couple that were comic-sized with Panda Khan in the back. I remembered Dave Garcia (and his wife) from some fanzines. I had no idea and would never have guessed the Distant Soil idea started from Aquaman though!
The hair styles have really dated for me. In fact some of these men and their clothes and hair make me say blech frankly. Those styles really puts me off, men who spend that much time on their looks and current fashions just not my type I guess... I'm not sure it was so pronounced (or perfect) in the original version, which she says she ended up hating (and bizarrely losing ownership of, which was crazy beyond anything I could've imagined from the Pinis, good grief). I didn't care for much hair metal or U.S. soaps, so I would've been repelled had I been around for the '90s relaunch. I had ideas for sf stories so much like this though it's embarrassing. Yes, she's a good artist, but I liked the less perfect earlier one, it had more life/expression for me and this is more Terry Beatty Ms. Tree where people come off as posed mannequins. It's funny, there was a similar progression with others like Teri S. Woods (Wandering Star), and Lea Hernandez (Kendra) who had female Mary-Sue main characters in sf settings, and early versions that were more cartoony than later versions. Also I remember a local artist who did some Elfquest work, Janine Johnson (she was involved with Steve Sadowski somehow too), was also very into Led Zeppelin.
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Post by codystarbuck on Sept 15, 2019 19:01:37 GMT -5
I had the first bunch of WaRP magazines sized issues of this, and then a couple that were comic-sized with Panda Khan in the back. I remembered Dave Garcia (and his wife) from some fanzines. I had no idea and would never have guessed the Distant Soil idea started from Aquaman though! The hair styles have really dated for me. In fact some of these men and their clothes and hair make me say blech frankly. Those styles really puts me off, men who spend that much time on their looks and current fashions just not my type I guess... I'm not sure it was so pronounced (or perfect) in the original version, which she says she ended up hating (and bizarrely losing ownership of, which was crazy beyond anything I could've imagined from the Pinis, good grief). I didn't care for much hair metal or U.S. soaps, so I would've been repelled had I been around for the '90s relaunch. I had ideas for sf stories so much like this though it's embarrassing. Yes, she's a good artist, but I liked the less perfect earlier one, it had more life/expression for me and this is more Terry Beatty Ms. Tree where people come off as posed mannequins. It's funny, there was a similar progression with others like Teri S. Woods (Wandering Star), and Lea Hernandez (Kendra) who had female Mary-Sue main characters in sf settings, and early versions that were more cartoony than later versions. Also I remember a local artist who did some Elfquest work, Janine Johnson (she was involved with Steve Sadowski somehow too), was also very into Led Zeppelin. interesting about Woods. I had some of the early Wandering Star; but never got to see much of the later parts of it. Even in the early stuff, how loose she was seemed to vaey with characters. Loved her cartoon stuff, in Amazing Heroes. |
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Post by rberman on Sept 16, 2019 6:16:01 GMT -5
#5 (June 1993) Story #1 “Knight of the Angel”: In medieval Avalon, the Arthurian knights Percival and Galahad horse around with a snowball fight until Galahad’s father Lancelot shows up. The three knights chat about the Sidhe forest spirits and about a premonition that something dire will happen to Sir Bedevere.  The good guys have an army that’s handily winning a battle against a bad guy army, until a huge swarm of evil ravens intervenes, with a black-helmed warrior appearing as the enemy champion…  Story #2 “Seasons of Spring”: Aeren and Jessica Scott discuss the parenting issues raised thus far in previous installments of this backup story. Liana is still sleeping off the initial manifestation of her telekinetic ability. Jason has gotten his family in legal trouble by fighting a classmate. As for twins Cari and Tiar, the problem seems more their teacher’s than theirs. But maybe something can be done to placate him. The twins overhear this part telepathically and are not pleased.  Bonus: Doran also includes a doodle by her colleague Jeff Smith, author of the award-winning indie comic Bone. Smith missed issue #2, which contains all the exposition needed to unlock the story.  My Two Cents: It’s quite a left turn into Prince Valiant territory. One has trouble imagining a larger publisher approving this turn of events, and Doran herself would later admit that shoehorning this medieval material into her space opera was not such a hot idea in retrospect. The leisurely pacing of this series feels like a Sunday adventure strip, with just a snippet of a much longer story in any given installment, and no attempt to manufacture an artificial cliffhanger at the end of every issue.  Each issue has a synopsis page catching new readers up with the story in progress. This issue’s synopsis chooses to explain Liana and all the other present-day characters who do not appear in the main story. It also erroneously calls this issue Part II of the “Knights of the Angel” story, when in fact it’s Part I. Or maybe it means that "Knights of the Angel" is the second story, continuing what began in "Immigrant Song"? If so, that's a confusing use of "Part II." The home of Aeren and Jessica contains a “Help Wanted, no Irish need apply” sign above a doorway. This detail (and, I bet, the room as a whole) comes from Doran’s own home, as she explains in a subsequent issue: 
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Post by rberman on Sept 17, 2019 5:52:46 GMT -5
Issue #6 (late 1993; see below) Story #1 “Knights of the Angel, Part I (?)”: The evil Lord Raven matches swords with Arthur’s knights in front of a mystical gateway. Bedevere is slain. Galahad is sucked through the gate into who-knows-where. Lord Raven turns into a bird and flees, and without his leadership, his army his routed.  Liana and Brent are unable to get a refill on her Phenobarbital seizure medicine without a doctor’s prescription. After Liana departs, the pharmacist remembers seeing a missing person report on Liana and calls the tip line.  Rieken and D’Mer hit the Norfolk Mall in their quest for allies. Rieken is quite taken with a punk rocker on a magazine cover and shifts his own appearance to match it. But whom should they recruit? How about Serezha Kirov, an expatriate Russian novelist? Sure, why not… (Note the poster for Frank Miller’s Ronin in the background.)  Lettercol: Doran scorns an idea that she publish through Dark Horse Comics. “This letter gave me a good laugh. Give up self publishing? Work for DARK HORSE? NOT!” Seems that Dark Horse rejected the “Souvenirs” short story that ran in issue #1. Sore subject! However, by the end of 1994 Doran and Dark Horse had kissed and made up, and Doran would provide a four page story for Agents of LAW #3. My Two Cents: The overall plot is still moving slowly, but at least all the balls are kept in the air, with Liana, Rieken, and Galahad each getting meaningful movement on their plots. How will the teleportation gateway bring Galahad into the main story? We’ll see.  More printing errors. The indicia at the bottom of the synopsis page claims that this is “A Distant Soil #4, February 1993” and contains “Knights of the Angel, Part 1.” The erroneous publication date has propagated across various web indexes of this series, and no one seems to know what month this issue was really released, but it was probably sometime in the second half of 1993.
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