This was such a fun digest; at the time it was published, I did not have any of the comics featuring the Archie gang as superheroes, so this was a treat. Eventually, I did collect those appearances in the various titles, but this digest always brings back fond memories.

In the continuing reading of the 1985 Kirby Award nominees...Marvel Graphic Novel #14, aka Swords of the Swashbucklers.  

This book just perplexes the shit out of me.  Not just how it got nominated for "Best Graphic Album" (because it's by far the weakest of the 4 that I've read), but what the thought process was in green-lighting this in the format in which it was published.  Because this is not a book that in any way deserved the "graphic novel" treatment.  

Essentially what we have is a old fashioned space opera where "space pirates" from outer space who fight the "Colonizers" come to Earth through intense serendipity and end up saving the planet and saving the pirate queen Captain's shirt-tale relation who is turned in to a super-hero...because...science.  Ultimately not a lot is settled because this is just set-up for a later Epic comics series.  

I'm willing to give some on the plot silliness because this is unabashed space opera and that's generally a very silly genre.  But the scripting is pretty universally awful, even for Bill Mantlo, who would always be on the lower end of my "marginally acceptable" Marvel writers.  Even leaving aside the pirate lingo, the Earth humans speak nothing like normal people speak.  And it's jarring.  Jackson Guice's art is generally okay.  It's occasionally pretty good, particularly when it involves space scenes.  But the printing honestly doesn't do it any favors and I feel it would have looked better on newsprint. 

If this were the first three issues of a fairly forgettable attempt by Marvel to produce something besides super-heroes it would be fine for what it is.  But as a $5.95 ($15.00 in today's money) graphic novel it pretty much fails.  And if it's one of the five best Graphic albums of 1984, that year was more dire than I remember.  

After listening to Crimebuster 's and tartanphantom 's podcast on Jon Sable, I revisited the first six issues of the book (and for good measure, fished out Starslayer #1-6 from the longboxes too).

Grell was already a popular artist at the time, thanks to his work on Legion of Super-heroes but mostly for his creation of Warlord; he had also done good work on the Tarzan Sunday supplement, which he had taken over from Gil Kane. I really liked Grell. His starting creator-owned series at Pacific and First made a lot of sense.

Jon Sable presents itself as more grounded than your typical comic-book; it's not a super-hero nor even a super-spy series, and it tries to remain realistic (or realistic-looking). Something that I think helps a lot in that regard is Grell's frequent use of actual photos of cityscapes, probably using the old technique of photocopying a postcard, then photocopying the copy, then copying that copy until a certain blurriness is obtained; the result is pasted onto the page. It makes backgrounds look real without giving that jarring effect resulting from pasting a cartoon onto a crisp colour photograph. (Later artists would painstakingly draw cityscapes by hand, but that is never as convincing).

Sable has a specific face; he's not Oliver Queen or Travis Morgan without a goatee. That adds to the verisimilitude of the strip. Other details like Sable's girlfriend being taller than he is are also things that are not required by the plot, but add to the richness of its make-believe world.

Plotwise, I could have done without the odd conceit of a mercenary moonlighting as a very famous and successful writer of children's books (complete with a secret identity, a wig and a fake moustache); it strikes me as the kind of complication no real person would want to impose on themselves. If Sable really wants to keep his two careers separate, he could still use a pseudonym but abstain from making public appearances for promotion's sake (I doubt Dr. Seuss owed his own success to marketing campaigns forcing him to make multiple public appearances).

The series is set in the early '80s, and it can be now seen as a period piece. Politics and world history play an important role in the overall tale, and one couldn't imagine the same Jon Sable running around today (like all other super-heroes still do), pretending that past references to the 1972 Olympics or the rise to power of Rober Mugabe don't matter anymore; they are an intrinsic part of the story.

One other aspect really sent me back to those days of my youth: villains turn out to be old Nazis (they're almost all dead of old age, now) and when a group has to be used in the role of the beleaguered underdog, it is often the Jews in general or Israelis in particular. That made a lot of sense when the Kippur war was still fresh in everyone's memory, but a generation later it sounds oddly off; history has moved on. The mag's 1980s world politics struck me as even more out of date than old cars, mentions of the Concorde, rotary phones or appearances by Ronald Reagan. Not in an unpleasant way, mind you; to me, the 1980s is still the "real" world, but in the sense that it does read like a story firmly set in the past.

The origin story told in #3-6, is a very, very good one. Just the right pacing, just the right ratio of pathos/action; it really hooked me on the character (something the first two issues would have failed to do, had I read them first).

One thing I noticed about Grell the writer : in most of his issues, whether it be in Sable, Warlord or Starslayer, he manages to drop a memorable bit of dialog. Here are a few examples (from memory) : in an issue of Warlord, amazed that a magic mirror could show him something he needs to know for plot reasons, Travis Morgan is told by his daughter the sorceress "People usually see what they want in a mirror". Oooof! Good one. Here, it's an exchange between Sable and Elise, his future wife (she's an Olympic athlete who won a medal in '68 but not in '72; he's an Olympic athlete who didn't win any medal). She goes : "don't you mind having dinner with a has-been?" and he replies "not if you don't mind having dinner with a never-was". I wish I was that quick-witted!

I don't have that many more issues of Jon Sable, but the ones I have would definitely prompt me to get more if I found any at a decent price someday. 

Well, it fell outside the scope of our podcast, but after recording these episodes I dug out the 2007 Jon Sable: Ashes of Eden mini-series, which is one of two mini- series he did in the 00's. Grell decided, in fact, to just have all the cast be the same ages they were when he stopped the book almost 20 years earlier, rather than age Sable up into his early 60's. So he detached everything from its specific timeline and gave it kind of a sliding Marvel style timeline, without actually getting specific about that. 

Personally the mini-series didn't really work for me. It was sort of a re-introduction to the characters and cast, but in a way where I'm not sure it would have meant anything if you weren't already familiar with the series. And if you were, like me, it felt weird trying to do the mental gymnastics to figure out why nobody has aged or progressed in 20 years, especially since the plot was another case of it being specific to the time period - in this case, about the Iraq War. So it felt neither here nor there, and I'm not sure who it was for. 

I decided to continue my recent digest kick, so I pulled outt this one, Golden Comics Digest #32 (1973) - highlighting Woody Woodpecker's summer fun...

Back when I was a kid and went through a funny animal phase, I only read a very few of the comics based on characters from the Walter Lantz Studios, one or two Andy Panda books and maybe one Woody Woodpecker one, but I'm not entirely sure about the latter. They didn't have the same attraction for me as the Disney comics, esp. the Disney duck stories (most of which I later learned were done by Carl Barks), and now I can see why. None of these stories here are bad, but they're very much kiddie fare in every way. They just lack the spark or broader appeal of something done by say, Barks or Walt Kelly.

Murder by Remote Control (Janwillem van de Wetering & Paul Kirchner)



Weak mystery, but I didn't buy this for the story.



8/10