indies

By which I mean, I utilized a chicken or two.

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[SPOILERS for Concrete: The Human Dilemma and Concrete: Stars over Sand #1…and Insane #2, I suppose.]

So over the last few weeks, inspired by the recent release of Concrete: Stars over Sand #1, Paul Chadwick’s newest Concrete thing is many a year, I’ve been rereadeding old Concrete comics. Read all the Dark Horse Presents shorts, several of the mini-series, stuff like that. I mentioned my doing this on Bluesky, getting a reply from a pal there of “okay, smart guy, what about this?” And that “this” being…


…Insane #2, a late-1988 parody comic released by Concrete‘s publisher, Dark Horse Comics. As you can see on that cover there, a Jim Bradrick drawing of Cement, the comic’s take-off on you-know-who.

I did not own this. Therefore, via means both fair but mostly foul, and perhaps even fowl, I obtained my own copy of said classic comic, just to ensure my Concrete collection remained complete.

Now, the parody inside was…okay, I suppose. Bradrick did a reasonable job emulating the art style of the original comics, and the script by then-publisher, now former publisher Mike Richardson was…well, it got a bemused smile from me once in a while, but Not Brand Echh it ain’t. It was pleasant enough, I guess.

But there is something quite notable about it, at least in my mind.

Concrete first appeared in Dark Horse Presents #1 in the middle of 1986. Thus the character had only been around for a couple of years…well, let’s be fair, it had made a pretty good splash and gathered quite the following in short order. And on the last page of the “Cement” story were these concluding panels:


Yes, a good 18 years, more or less, before Chadwick introduced the idea of Concrete’s ability to reproduce, there were Richardson and Bradrick giving it their own spin, presenting a humorous twist on what would eventually be played straight in the original work:


Yes, I know it was perhaps just an obvious punchline to a gag strip, but it’s still amusing how one presaged the other.

“Get one for your lil sugar too!!”

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So Thursday afternoon I acquired a small pile of underground comics from a person selling off a late relative’s collection. It was some of the expected stuff…lots of Robert Crumb comics, including a full run of Mr. Natural, some Freak Brothers, even some Zippy mags. However, in the middle of all these was this odd item that I’d never seen or heard of before:


…Wolfman Jack Comics, a digest-sized 28-page staplebound black and white publication. Obviously it was available through the mail, based on the label (which I obscured) on the front cover there.

A search online turned up very little about this item, save for an approximate publication date (around 1970) that I found on some ancient Wolfman Jack fan page that I’m not linking here as it will automatically forward to porn ads. I haven’t dug deep into any ‘zine collection directories yet, so maybe I’ll find something there, but I haven’t found this on eBay, or in the usual comic databases, and it’s not even in the Fogel underground price guide. (I haven’t been able to check the older Kinney underground guide yet.)

Thus, in order to provide future Wolfman Jack fans with some details on this comic via a (mostly) non-porn site, here we go!

The outer covers are color, and here is the back:


The cartoons inside are…okay, maybe not the most polished artwork you’ve ever seen, but there is a charm and childlike energy to it.


The stories revolve around Wolfman Jack and various supporting characters getting into shenanigans, including a surprising amount of family-friendly nudity:


And I’m posting this sequence with the Wolfman in a tank because I like it:


There’s an activity page, where you can dress up Wolfman Jack as you please…this is just the top half:


And there are ads, like the come-on for the Wolfman Jack fan club:


…and this page of merch (who wouldn’t want to take a swig of Wolfman Whiz?):


Here’s what some of those goodies will set you back:


Did I just do a search (unsuccessful, alas) for Wolfman Whiz on eBay? I’m not saying “no.”

“Koffman and Berenson” are the only credited names here. Aaaaand…that’s all I know about this thing. If anyone out there has more info, let me know or where to find it and I can add it to this page for later scholars to track down. And if you go searching and find a page titled “wolfy1” — that’s the site that throws up the porn ads, don’t click! Unless you want porn ads, you do you, friends.

EDIT: big thanks to Matthew in the comments for using his superior Google-fu (or Bing-fu, I won’t judge) to find the site of one of the creators of this publication (Dan Koffman), who still has copies to sell!

The Brinke of Greatness.

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So I had one of the above comics show up in a collection the other day, a copy of 1994’s Brinke of Eternity autographed by actress and writer Brinke Stevens. And judging by context clues from other items in the collection (price tags and such) there is a very good chance this came from a signing we had at my previous place of employment.

Now at that shop, one of our regular customers was a friend of Brinke’s (and in fact would later script the movie Hybrid in which she was featured) and helped set up the event. Brinke showed up in costume, brought a bunch of photos ‘n’ such to sell, autographed a boatload of comics, and was just as nice as could be. And when I ran into her two or three times in the years after that, she continued to be just an absolutely delightful person.

So the end result was that there are plenty of signed copies of this book floating around out here in Ventura County and surrounding environs, with the usual attrition that happens to many comic collections after thirty years (water damage, dog ate it, stolen by aliens, y’know, the usual). I mean, I’m supposing there are, since I haven’t seen too many over the decades. I’m assuming everyone’s just hangin’ onto them.

There was only one issue for Brinke of Eternity, but the follow-up endeavor Brinke of Destruction in 1995 ran three issues:


Pictured is the first issue with the Boris Vallejo cover. Interestingly, the third issue contains illustrations/pin-up pages by Stan Sakai and Sergio Aragones, with the latter featuring…Groo the Wanderer? Hoo boy, it’s off to eBay for me, I guess.

In 1997, issue #1 was re-released with an audio cassette:


…and, try as I might, I couldn’t find it on YouTube. Either I’m not typing in the right search terms, or somehow the Copyright Cops actually managed to keep it from being uploaded. I’m mostly curious as to the credits…did Brinke herself do any of the voicework?

The next original comic in the “Brinke” series is Brinke of Disaster in 1996:


…and this is surprisingly the only one with a photo cover, featuring Brinke as “Brinke,” and Cynthia Johns as “The Blonde Avenger.”

The final entry in the Brinke Saga — so far — is another iteration of Brinke of Destruction in 1997:


…which was another one-shot, featuring new material and not reprints from the previous Brinke of Destruction series.

So there you go, the Brinke Stevens comics collection. A nice little selection of comics created and/or inspired by a very nice person.Maybe she’ll get back to them someday…may I suggest “Brinke of Ruin,” named after her favorite long-running comics blog, of course?

That’s the first appearance of Mogo, friends, a Hot Key Investable Issue!

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So I done dood it…I got myself a copy of the nigh-legendary Time Beavers graphic novel by Tim Truman, published by First Comics in 1985. Now I haven’t had the time to read it yet, but read it I shall, oh yes. I’m just a tiny bit miffed with myself in that copies of this were just all over the place at my previous place of employment. I mean, I could have bought one of these from there on the day of release, but alas, I thumbed my nose at Time Beavers and headed straight to the rack to grab Green Lantern #188 with its Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons back-up instead. Thus, I have to resort to the eBays and other nefarious means instead.

Anyhoo, there were plenty of comics I had easy access to back then, but didn’t think about acquiring until, oh, say, ten-something years after I stopped working there and three years after that shop closed. Ah, well, What Can You Do™? I’ve got my Time Beavers now, so my decades-old oversight has been corrected. I’ll get it read soon and let you Dingbats of ProgRuin Street know what I think.

• • •

Some interesting news from DC Comics over at the 2025 Comicspro event, such as:

  • Krypto: The Last Dog of Krypton by Ryan North and artist Mike Norton, which sounds amazing. No thought balloons here, North promises, but if you’ve ever seen Norton’s artwork, I suspect there’ll be expression enough from the Dog of Steel.

  • Supergirl written and drawn by Sophie Campbell…good, there should always be a solid and accessible Supergirl title on the stands.

  • Action Comics, which isn’t a new ongoing, obviously, but the new regular team of Mark Waid and Skylar Patridge will be effectively making it into a new Superboy series with a young Clark Kent. After years and years of DC either not having “Superboy” in Clark’s history after the Byrne reboot, and then kinda sorta waffling about it over the last decade of in-flux continuity, it’ll be interesting to see a modern take on the “Adventures of Superman When He Was a Boy.”

  • Batman by Matt Fraction and Jorge Jiménez – YAY! Restarting the main Batman series with a new #1 – BOO! I saw a news site state that “this is only the fourth time the Batman series has been renumbered,” and c’mon, that’s like five times too many. Batman will sell just fine without renumbering. Yes, we’ll get a boost in sales for the first few issues, which is the reason they do this, but then it’ll be back to its normal sales level soon enough. …I mean, the comic sounds good, I’ll definitely be reading it, I’ll just sigh heavily every time I look at the issue number.

I didn’t see any new Swamp Thing comic news, so all this Super/Bat stuff will have to do.

Yes, I know about that History of the DC Universe drawn by Pérez.

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So pal Nat has published via About Comics the complete Dalgoda Omnibus:


Featuring all the comics by Jan Strnad and Dennis Fujitake and others, starring your favorite space dog. Also includes images of promotional artwork, retailer posters and signs, and mag covers. Of note…I helped a very tiny bit with this publication, providing a scan of a magazine cover for the book’s art gallery. I’m thanked in there and everything.

So anyway, if you want copies, they’re out there for sale…and I’ll have ’em for sale at my shop, too. If I run out, I’ll just give pal Nat a ring-a-ding and get some more!

(I wrote a bit about Dalgoda here as part of my Final ’80s Countdown series on fave indie comics.)

• • •

Okay, I was maybe a little too harsh on my assessment of Marvel Saga, that company’s attempt at retelling the history of their shared universe via panels and sequences from their long history of publications, with additional text filling in the gaps. Like so:


A couple of you in the comments there expressed your appreciation of that project, which made me rethink my opinions on it. I may have come at it from a retailer perspective, looking at unsold copies sitting in a bin and so forth.

But I forgot what it’s like to be a fan, new to all this nonsense, not having immediate access to Everything That’s Come Before in the comics you were just starting to read. It reminds me a bit of a certain Mr. Roynaldo Thomas and his work at DC Comics in the early 1980s, particularly this series:


…where I, a kid who didn’t have a full run of every Golden Age superhero comic ever printed, could learn about DC’s past characters in stories set in a time from which they originally came into existence. And then there was the America Vs. The Justice Society mini, with its copious footnotes detailing the decades-past stories referenced during the main plot.

I devoured this stuff. I loved learning about DC’s Golden Age via these new comics. As it turns out, I find them somewhat hard to read now…just kinda overly dense and clunky in a way I don’t have patience for. Which isn’t to say I don’t still have positive feelings towards those comics and how they helped fill in some comic knowledge gaps when I was a young and eager fan.

And so, there’s Marvel Saga, presenting the breadth of the Marvel Universe, a relatively stable and consistent setting compared to DC’s own superhero setting which had at that time (and several times since) been recently reset. Plus, this particular format (previously used for the Super-Villain Classics retelling the story of Galactus) made a recent appearance in the similarly-purposed History of the Marvel Universe from just a few years ago:


I take back my initial dismissal of Marvel Saga and acknowledge its use as a guide through the company’s continuity, especially for those folks who could use the introduction or the refresher. There can be a steep learning curve for folks trying to get a handle on a superhero universe’s fictional setting, and books like this help. Sure they could use Wikipedia, but it’s more fun through the comics themselves.

Lust, beavers, and Stiggs.

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Chris V sez

“My only contribution to this discussion would be that Alan Moore did eventually write American Flagg for a limited number of issues. While I agree that the quality of the series did seriously drop after those first twelve issues, I’m sure that Moore’s name gave the book another bump in popularity for those few issues.”

I think Moore’s involvement may very well have given the series a little push, I’m not sure. But I do remember that those stories (illustrated by Don Lomax) which ran as a back-up in six issues of the series before culminating in the full-length #27, may not have had the most positive critical response. Now, I may be remembering just one specific contemporary review from, say, Amazing Heroes or Comics Journal, but that person’s opinion has colored my perception of this particular story for decades.

American Flagg! had always had a sexually-charged element to the stories…I mean, it is a Howard Chaykin creation, after all. And it was always within the, let’s say, PG-13-esque levels most of the First Comics kept around, sans naughty words. This Moore/Lomax story is more centered around the erotic shenanigans of the series’ setting (including a frisky Krazy Kat parody involving Flagg!‘s Raul the Cat. It kinda pushed the limits of what First allowed in their books, but I’m still surprised the story wasn’t collected into a single volume to sell with a big “BY ALAN MOORE” above the title on the cover.


So some of you folks had some bemused responses to the tip sheet’s comparison of a book’s potential to that of Time Beavers, the 1985 First Comics original graphic novel written and drawn by Tim Truman. Now, I have an unfortunate confession, that, despite being a Truman fan, despite absorbing all those Grimjacks he worked on despite having plenty of opportunity to pick a copy up for myself…I never read it.

YES YES I KNOW, don’t yell at me, I just bought a cheap one off eBay and I’ll read that when it comes in. Not that I needed yet another item to throw onto the enormous “hurry up and read this already” pile. But I’ll skip this one to the front of the line and try to give you some kind of review in the near future.

Tom W lets me know

“And, having read the Utterly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of OC & Stiggs they’re clearly an inspiration for DR & Quinch but largely dissimilar; there’s a shared argot and sense of unrestrained mayhem, but not much else is copied across. Certainly little of the 1970s misogyny…”

That’s good to hear that it was more a case of “inspiring” and not “outright plagiarism.” I wasn’t sure myself, having heard about the connection multiple times over the years. The similarity between the features’ names didn’t help. My exposure to O.C. and Stiggs is almost solely from the 1987 film adaptation directed by Robert Altman, which I bought from a closeout video tape bin in a movie rental shop. Not the greatest movie I’ve ever seen, but I’m pretty sure I got my three bucks worth.


I mean, Martin Mull and Jane Curtin? Dennis Hopper? Gotta be worth at least a look, right? I may want to rewatch it myself, with all that free time I obviously have.

Marvel will just have to publish their own facsimile of Power Pachyderms.

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Smichal smasks

“You get to curate a big chonky omnibus from the post-TMNT black-and-white indy boom. Roughly 1,000 pages. What’s going in it? (Choices do not have to be animal-related.)”

Oh Smichal, Smichal, Smichal…you say the choices don’t have to be animal-related, but friend, there’s only one choice for such an omnibus. And that choice is ALL THE TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES RIP-OFFS:


Most of these are pretty short runs, like the three issue run of the above. That would leave more room for the knock-offs that had slightly longer lifespans, like the Hamsters books:


I feel like some kind of more permanent record is needed to remember a lot of these books, especially since the Overstreet Price Guide has declined to list several series from the 1980s black and white boom.

Some decisions will have to be made regarding comics like Aristocratic Extraterrestrial Time-Traveling Thieves:


…which apes the title style but doesn’t quite feel like the a Turtles rip-off (and in fact changes its name to X-Thieves down the line).

Or does Miami Mice make the cut?

Or even the dreaded…


Some editorial decisions would have to be made, clearly. Anyway, you can see a selection of TMNT-inspired books here.

I feel like this would be a solid collection, particularly if it included supplemental text pieces providing some historical context and background information. We’re getting farther and farther away from this period of time and it shouldn’t just be up to blogs to remember the madness of the times.

So to sum up…either a big book of Turtles knock-offs, or a complete collection of every GRIPS title.

“Making a splash…of BLOOD!” I mean.

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Hi pals…gonna continue trying to have some fun here on the site, but wanted to acknowledge that, well, things didn’t quite turn out as we hoped here in the States. It’s going to be rough, especially for women, minorities, and the LBGQTIA+ community, so let’s all look out for each other and do our best to get through this.

• • •

So anyway, let’s shift gears a bit and talk about EXTREME VIOLENCE, at least as represented by a specific indie comic from the 1980s.


I’m sure I came across references to Grips in the “Coming Attractions” section of the Amazing Heroes ‘zine at the time, but my earliest specific memory of the title is from a comic book convention I attended in the mid-1980s.

This was at a monthly Los Angeles comic con, that had the usual assortment of Special Guests and upcoming movie presentations (inexplicably, my friends and I sat through a preview of the Garbage Pail Kids, for which members of our little group won a movie poster and free passes to see the film — which went unused, might I add). But there were also rows upon rows of dealer tables, and up and down the aisles there was a young gentleman, meandering equidistant from the displays on either side, calling out “Grips! Who’s got Grips! I’m looking for Grips!” over and over again.

And he wasn’t the only one. Well, okay, he was the only one doing specifically that, but I heard other folks asking dealers for Grips and talking about Grips and I believe I recall seeing copies of Grips on display there with very optimistic pricing.

Grips was not a comic I recalled seeing at my local comic shop (the same one I would be employed at a small handful of years later). I did ask my former boss the other day as i was prepping for this post if he carried it, and he said “absolutely,” noting that first series sold very well for him. I can only presume that I missed it on the shelf (or it sold out before I got to the shop for my weekly visit), or that it just didn’t register with me.

And I suspect it wouldn’t have registered with me, as, despite the fact that I was always looking at what small press comics were being offered, Grips did not appear to be up my alley.

Okay, okay…as the Firesign Theatre could’ve said, “What Am Grips, Anyway?” Well, the opinion I sort of formed way back when I first learned of it was that this was about a fella trying to out-Wolverine Wolverine, then the mainstream comics gold standard of A Violent Character. Look, he even had the claws an’ everything. The controversy-courting appeal of the title was its Extreme Violence, and if you don’t believe me, take the Overstreet Price Guide’s word for it:


That’s…kind of an unexpected bit of editorializing from Overstreet there, but when you get down to it that appears to be the main selling point of the comic. And was it violent? Sure, a bit…here’s a slightly disarming panel giving you a minor example of the gory delights within:


This, and other incidents in these early issues, are certainly more gruesome than what you’d find in your standard issue of a superhero comic (despite the companies sometimes giving it the ol’ college try), even if they look crude and amateurish today.

And, well, maybe “amateurish” is a little harsh, given that these are the early works of Tim Vigil, a artist who would achieve fame and/or notoriety for the highly detailed artwork for the violently and sexually explicit series Faust and a mildly less-explicit short run of Badger.

In fact, despite all the demand for the book back in the ’80s, it’s pretty much forgotten now. If it’s remembered at all, it’s remembered solely because it is early work by Vigil. Any high prices they may have commanded once upon a time have slipped away to nothing. Even the Hot Comics App has these as “Non-Keys” at a typical price of about three bucks apiece. (A look at eBay shows somewhat more adventurous pricing, and I suspect the truth is, as usual, somewhere in the middle.)

Speaking of pricing, my Bluesky pal Steve contributed some grist for the Grips mill here, as he was a collector of the title and offered this up for me:


That’s a price listing for the various Grips titles from the publisher, with stories ripped from today’s headlines, apparently. Issue #4 has “High Violence!” Another issue has “Grips infected w/AIDS!”

You may notice, if you looked closely, that there are ea whole lot more Grips comics in this price listing than in the Overstreet Price Guide scan I posted up there. Well, Overstreet only listed the first mini, probably because of the Vigil connection. Otherwise, the Guide tends to not bother with most books from the 1980s black and white boom era, when anyone who could hold a pencil and find his way to the local print shop put out a comic hoping to be the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There was plenty of good stuff that came from the boom, but there was a whole lot of dreck as well, and Overstreet preferred to just not devote the space to it.

In the case of Grips, in addition to that initial four issue run, there was a second series sans Vigil that ran 12 issues, and 8 issue run of Gurps Adventures (which I totally want to be the “Kid-Friendly” version of Grips à la Batman Adventures, and the one-shot Grips Special. It was one of these later comics that got me on this whole Grips kick in the first place, what with a stray issue #7 from the second Grips run turning up in a collection the other day:


Would you like to see a page from the inside? Of course you would, why wouldn’t you:


To be completely honest, I’m very surprised there hasn’t been an attempted revival of Grips in all these years since it vanished off the stands. Of the output from Silver Wolf/Greater Mercury, Grips was the comic that made the biggest splash, despite it being mostly out of comic fans’ minds today.

It was a weird and crude book, one borne out of an exciting and interesting time when it seems like just about anyone could get a title out on the stands, unhampered by an editorial hand that would tell them “no.” I’m not going to sit here and tell you it was, y’know, “good,” but more power to the Silver Wolf/Greater Mercury folks for putting together this amateur press empire for however briefly it breathed.

And just because Internet Pal Steve sent these pics my way, here are a couple more comics from his collection, some Grips variants:


Collect ’em all, kids!

Or maybe those were parodies of Wolveroach from Cerebus.

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So, alas, I’ve been going through the collection of a late customer of mine…a longtime customer, in fact, going back to the early days of my toil at the previous place of employment. Probably about 30 years or so…when I opened up my shop, he followed me over, which I always appreciated.

He passed away last year, and his brother brought me most of his collection then, but this week brought me several more boxes. I took a first pass through them and pulled out some items of interest…and he was a huge Lobo fan, so he had lots of Lobo ‘n’ related comics, including one I haven’t seen in decades. I thought I’d present a few of them here today.

From the “Lobo-related” category, here are a couple of parodies, starting with Spoof Comics Presents #9, featuring “Hobo: Patricide.”


The title is a parody of the 1992 DC Comics mini Lobo: Infanticide, a title I still can’t believe actually made it to the stands. Anyway, like many parody comics of the period, part of the joke was gender-flipping the characters, so we get a Lady Lobo here. This Is A Fetish for Someone™, as a very wise and stunningly handsome person once said.

Speaking of which, there was a later one-shot by the same company titled Wolverbroad Vs. Hobo…Wolverbroad being a parody of, oh, I don’t know, the old Legion of Super-Heroes character Timber Wolf I think.

In the non-gender-flipped category of parody was this comic, somewhat surprisingly from Eclipse Comics in 1992. It’s Loco Vs. Pulverine #1:


…Pulverine, of course, being a parody of, oh, I don’t know, Puck from Alpha Flight I think. This comic had an amusing wraparound cover, inspired by the similar cameo-filled cover on the famous Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali treasury.

Here’s the back cover:


…where you can see such luminaries as Hagar the Horrible:


…and here is celebrity power couple Krazy and Ignatz from the classic Krazy Kat strip.


Plus, here’s a special note from creator Gary Yap:


Last but not least is the comic I was shocked to see in this collection…well, okay, not shocked that in was in this collection, given the preponderance of Lobo stuff, just shocked that I’ve finally seen it again after all this time. It’s the infamous The Wisdom of Lobo one-shot from 1992:


I last wrote about this on my site in 2011 in these two posts, in which I noted I hadn’t seen it in forever even back then.

To recap, this came in a slipcased set, with the slipcase featuring an image of Lobo’s face. The books inside were Lobo’s Greatest Hits (a compilation of early Lobo appearances from Omega MenLobo mini-series, and this Wisdom of Lobo thing. We sold a lot of these sets, and demand for Lobo was high enough that we even broke up some of these sets and sold the components individually.

I mentioned in one of my earlier posts that the Grand Comics Database included a note on the Wisdom book that retailers were annoyed by the gimmick (in that the 64 pages inside were blank, you see), but that note seems to be gone now. But as I said then, it didn’t really annoy us, and when pricing out the components of the slipcased set vis-à-vis its retail price, the Wisdom book was essentially free.

I didn’t remember then what we sold the Wisdom comic for on its own, but the copy from this collection still had the old shop’s price tag. For a mere $1.50, you could have had this Lobo-branded sketch book for your very own.

To continue repeating myself from those older posts, I’m surprised that I haven’t seen more of these over the decades. I know we sold a ton of those slipcased sets, I figured eventually some would make their way back to me. It took 32 years, and the unfortunate passing one of my favorite customers, but here it is, filling in that little gap in my remembrances of comics retail past.

Thanks, Dale, for the opportunity to see these weird Lobo things again. I’ll find good homes for them.

Just add this to all the other dumb hills I’m dying on.

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As anyone who’s been reading this site for a while knows, due to the various eyeball issues I’ve had over the last few years, I fell behind on my comics reading, and I’m still behind even ’til today. While things have improved healthwise in regards to my eyes, I do read a little slower than I used to, and comics ain’t comin’ out any less quickly, so the backlog continues apace.

As such, sometimes — well, usually — I don’t read comics the very week they come out, which is even more sad considering that with the new distributors in play, I often get the new books a week ahead of their official release and I still don’t read ’em until a week or three later.

Which is a long way of me telling you “I just read the last couple of issues of John Constantine Hellblazer: Dead in America series.” Specifically, I wanted to talk here about issue #8 by Simon Spurrier and Lisandro Estherren, in which these panels appeared, with John complaining about the Demon saying his name wrong:


…and a little later, here’s the Demon mocking John by deliberately mispronouncing the name:


YESSSSSS. The battle, once conceded by me when the musician Sting, the inspiration for Constantine, pronounced the name with “-teen,” rages once again thanks to this beautiful, beautiful creative team.

The first salvo was fired back in 1988 in Swamp Thing #73 by Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala:


So the war is back on! Take that, too many media adaptations getting his name wrong! Yes, this is the hill I’m dying on.

• • •

Speaking of being behind on reading, I finally got around to a couple of graphic novels. First up was Palooka-ville #24, the latest in Seth’s volumes of comics and photography an’ such.


The series started as a standard black and white comic book in 1991, transitioning to a small hardcover with issue #20 in 2010. If you’re looking at the years and issue numbers there, yes, the publication is very sporadic, with the previous issue coming out in 2017.

This issue came out July of last year, and I just got around to reading it now, in case you’re wondering just how far behind I am on things. So, you know, it’s probably good it took several years for this come out. Now I’m ready for the next issue in, say, 2031.

With all this time passing just with the most recent volume, I’d forgotten details about it from when I originally ordered it in February 2023. I was reading the first part of the book, with Seth relating stories of his teenage employment at a small inn, in which he mentions someone recognizing him because of his “funny voice.” That had me thinking “huh, I wonder what Seth’s voice sounds like, I wonder if I can find a video with him talking and hear it for myself.”

Then I get to the next feature of the book, which is a series of photographs showing some behind the scenes stuff for the short film of Seth’s puppetry, included as a DVD in this book.

I’d completely forgotten there was a DVD. It’s been well over a year and a half since I ordered it, and over a year since I obtained it, so yeah, no duh I forgot. But I just thought it was amusing that I started the book with the thought “what does Seth sound like?” and then discovering that right here in the book is a way for me to hear what he sounds like.

This short film is good, by the way. It’s essentially one of Seth’s melancholy strips brought to life. And Seth’s voice sounds perfectly fine, not funny at all.

The next book I finally got to was Grendel: Devil by the Deed Master Edition, which is a new 200 page expanded retelling of the original Grendel by his creator Matt Wagner (and colored in a black, white and red palette by his son, Brennan).


Now this book came out last November, so it hasn’t been quite a year yet. And, being a very longtime Grendel fan, I went for the signed and numbered slipcased edition, with a tipped in autographed plate featuring a new Grendel illustration.

At 200 pages, it is something like five times the length of the original “completed” version of this story, the one that ran as back-ups in the first Mage mini-series. The extra pages, I believe, incorporate events from the various comics about the original Grendel, Hunter Rose, that were published after the Devil by the Deed story, though I’ve not read those in a while so beyond some vague memories I can’t say for certain.

This new version continues the conceit of the previous one, taking the format of a book examining the double life of Hunter Rose after his death and the revelation of all his secrets, via blocks of text accompanying illustrations. It’s not a traditional panel-by-panel, dialogue-and-captions, comic book, putting the reader a step removed from the story’s events. Which, I think, is an effective tactic, adding to the mystery and mythic weight of the proceedings.

Speaking of mystery, there is a point in the book where the “author” notes that some pages were removed from Grendel’s journals regarding a particular event. Enough detail of the event is given that I seem to recall it from one of the other, later stories, but I need to check (and actually have pulled out the comics themselves to look when I have a chance). If I recall correctly, this involved some supernatural elements which do exist in the Grendel milieu, but I’m guessing Wagner wanted to keep those to a minium in this mostly-grounded initial story. Argent, the wolf-like monstrous “hero” of the story, the counterpoint to Grendel’s elegant and attractive villainy, remains as the one outright fanciful aspect of this crime story…outside the guy in the costume leaping around the city, natch.

I still wonder what would have happened if Wagner had been able to finish the very first version of the story, intended as a six-issue mini-series but cancelled after three. It was…crude, but energetic, with what I still think are striking covers. It was told in the traditional comic book style, and it would have been interesting to see what story elements from the later retellings would have had their origins in the unseen chapters of this original comic. It’s hard to imagine the depth of the later twists and turns being conveyed quite as well with the standard comic storytelling, Wagner’s youthful abilities aside.

I’ll tell you one thing, though…the book ends with an “author’s credit” for the fictional writer of this tell-all of Grendel, who is the star of the first story of the 1986 series. Which of course made me want to pull those out and reread them. Sigh. And that’s how your pal Mike got even more behind on current comics, because he keeps wanting to look at his old ones again.