Reg Bunn and Ted Cowan’s The Spider
Love Bunn’s spidery lines.
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ya don’t see this type of guy too often these days
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Went to a comic shop I had never been to before, and now will almost certainly return to again to grab the remaining issues of Furlough.
Also grabbed a Remy Boydell comic to convey that I am a classy trans furry…plus I wanted it for a while, of course. But sometimes purchases need to be aesthetic.
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i had one issue of furrlough as a teen, one of the stories was a comedy set during the french revolution called here comes a candle. i really liked it, but the trade paperback version was already long out of print, hard to find, and super-expensive.
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I found the one non-furry comic that radio comix published in a dime bin decades ago, and was always curious if it had more issues. Was about a street wizard and her pet giant cat.
I’ve been reading this huge collection of old comics by EC
and last night I got to the story Judgment Day, which originally ran in Weird Fantasy #18 in 1951.
In 1956, EC was being forced to stop publishing all of their comics because of the “Comics Code.” What would end up being the last issue of their last remaining comic (before they switched entirely to magazines) was Incredible Science Fiction #33. However, a judge decided that the last story in it violated the comics code (you can see it here if curious).
So EC decided to replace that story with a reprinting of Judgment Day. The judge also said that story couldn’t be printed, however. Not because of violence or anything else explicitly defined in the Comics Code, though. If you read the story, you can probably guess what the judge had a problem with. EC ran with it anyway.
Side note: Ray Bradbury wrote to EC after the original 1951 printing of this story:
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Wow. From Wikipedia EC Comics - Wikipedia :
Murphy demanded, without any authority in the Code, that the Black astronaut had to be removed.[citation needed]
As Diehl recounted in Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives:
This really made 'em go bananas in the Code czar’s office. “Judge Murphy was off his nut. He was really out to get us”, recalls [EC editor] Feldstein. “I went in there with this story and Murphy says, ‘It can’t be a Black man’. But … but that’s the whole point of the story!” Feldstein sputtered. When Murphy continued to insist that the Black man had to go, Feldstein put it on the line. “Listen”, he told Murphy, “you’ve been riding us and making it impossible to put out anything at all because you guys just want us out of business”. [Feldstein] reported the results of his audience with the czar to Gaines, who was furious [and] immediately picked up the phone and called Murphy. “This is ridiculous!” he bellowed. “I’m going to call a press conference on this. You have no grounds, no basis, to do this. I’ll sue you”. Murphy made what he surely thought was a gracious concession. “All right. Just take off the beads of sweat”. At that, Gaines and Feldstein both went ballistic. “Fuck you!” they shouted into the telephone in unison. Murphy hung up on them, but the story ran in its original form.[20]
Feldstein, interviewed for the book Tales of Terror: The EC Companion, reiterated his recollection of Murphy making the request:
So he said it can’t be a Black [person]. So I said, “For God’s sakes, Judge Murphy, that’s the whole point of the Goddamn story!” So he said, “No, it can’t be a Black”. Bill [Gaines] just called him up [later] and raised the roof, and finally they said, “Well, you gotta take the perspiration off”. I had the stars glistening in the perspiration on his Black skin. Bill said, “Fuck you”, and he hung up.[21]
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EC comics of this era were truly the best
comics have never really returned to this level of excellence
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Wow, Max Cannon’s Red Meat is still going.
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I got a hankering to read Delicious in Dungeon and not on a screen, so I mosied over to the Forbidden Planet website. wow they have a sale, £5 for all sorts of crap. here I come, minimum spend for free shipping
all the stuff arrived first week in June, except for Delicious in Dungeon. which arrived this week
Elden Ring: The Road To The Erdtree
joke manga, very bad. weird smooth ‘realistic’ anatomy looks like fava beans in a bag
because the protagonist is bad he doesn’t wear armour, so you get page after page of this assaulting your eyeballs. skip imo
One-Punch Man Volume 1
wonderful. I never read the webcomic so it’s all new to me
(everything from here on is discount Titan comics)
Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard (Vol 2)
a Redwall-esque mice spin-off from Mouse Guard proper, frame tale in a tavern, each done by a different guest contributor. the frame art is boring, all the mice look the same.
first contribution is from Stan Sakai so (am biased) A+
Axis & Atlas
really bloodthirsty furry Asterisk and Obelisk. too dumb to make any serious points, light pandering. very fun
Thrud the Barbarian
makes Axis & Atlas look positively intellectual in comparison. this used to run as black & white in 80’s White Dwarf, and has been redrawn & coloured to suit Carl’s modern style. very careful palettes (that a lot of people hated)
and the jokes are purely what would be funny to a teenager from the midlands (puns and sight gags and aggressive ignorance ruining any chance of success). love it
The Wrath of Fantômas
I never read a Fantômas story before. the adaption is smooth, plenty of jokes and ludicrous violence and shocking twists. exceptional pacing across the three chapters. great art. would have bought this at full price
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Did another run at the shockingly close by comic shop that’s been there for decades I’ve never checked out in the seven years of living here.
You can tell which issues of these have Stan Sakai stories in them because the price tag jumps up a lot. These are two of the first wave of furry comics that were hitting before like, furries as a thing had fully crystalized in it’s modern form.
This also means the art is a lot more diverse, and better, than in like, Furrlough. You can also tell it’s better because it tells you to read Love and Rockets in the backmatter of albedo.
Also albedo had a part of this as a backup story? I’d literally never heard of this before. Stan Sakai’s medieval fantasy comic.
Really happy to finally have some of these in my comics collection, and continue my plan of like, buying these piecemeal over time.
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please keep posting about them too
That Atlas and Axis cover is an homage to something right? It’s on the tip of my tongue—is it Bone?
this looks good! thanks for posting about it, i always wanted to read some of the original fantomas books but never got around to it, not even the one with two nuns shooting at each other on the cover
comicswise i recently got a copy at last of daria tessler’s cult of the ibis, which is fantastic, the kind of really dense but cartoonily strange art style i could look at for hours broken up by like enjoyably hucksterish fragments of an in-universe alchemist magazine selling diy kits and dubious supplements
i read richard sala’s in a glass grotesquely which i remember thinking was pretty slight when i first read it online but which works a lot better as a physical book, all those big square single-panel pages of looming masked figures shooting at people have a new force to them. there’s a part where super-enigmatix murders the supreme court with a gun called “the dissolver” and also sprays a law enforcement complex with poison gas. really missing sala these days.
the other thing i read of late was imiri sakabashira’s “the box man” which is like 20% travel narrative through a strange warehouse world, 40% a long wordless set of full page drawings of various tokusatsu monsters tormenting people by putting them in wrestling grapples and tickling them as a horrible wizard guy watches, and the last part is a long and crazy scooter chase sequence as those two sections overlap. i think its the only sakabashira book in english and while i loved the other one of his i read even without being able to understand the dialogue, i’m very glad i was able to read the punchline this one ends on.
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Boxman is great indeed. Kappa at work is even better, but afaik it’s been translated only in Italian.
Thanks for the advice related to Cult of the Ibis, I will search it!
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yeah kappa at work was the first thing i saw of his and loved it, even just looking at the drawings and trying to imagine myself what the narrative was… that was a really nice experience but after reading boxman i’m wondering what parts of it i missed entirely that way!
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The japanese books deserve looking at even without understanding them, Maze Of The Throat’s my favourite of the one I’ve read (Box, Kappa, that) but his uncollected stuff’s also worth checking out.
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Where can I find Maze of the throat, even in Japanese?
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Amazon.co.jp has it in paperback, for payment and shipping it should work to buy it via a reshipper like tenso.com
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