The Gosh! Authority 08/09/10

If you’re bemoaning the grey skies and craving some colour in the dying days of Summer then Gosh! Favourite Brendan McCarthy’s Dr Strange story Spider-Man: Fever is just what your eyeballs need. It’s psychedelic insanity in a comic with a “trippy and spooky Tim Burtonesque vibe” says the man himself in an interview I linked to earlier this year when issue #1 landed.

“I tried to keep a classic Ditko feel to the look of the characters, as an anchor to the bizarre imagery of the new dimensions that are featured. I think that the staging of the story is generally more theatrical than filmic. Maybe that’s because I’m British. Some landscapes are very spare, others more phantasmagorical… A Dr. Strange comic should always convey an atmosphere of ‘glamoury’, of androgynous Baudelaire-Berlin sexual enchantment. A hint of kink.”

Here’s a preview of the first issue if you missed it and a review too. Also, Comicbook Resources have an interview with him only the Robot6 corner of their site isn’t currently working. Neil Gaiman probably linked to it and it collapsed (sort of famous for writing stuff, mostly famous for routinely breaking the internet). It might work by the time you read this. I will link to it regardless, with wide-eyed naïve faith in the magical internet gods and their ability to make things better.

Also out is Mark Millar’s new magazine CLiNT #1 (geddit?) which features the foul-mouthed comedian Frankie Boyle, Turf’s Jonathan Ross and Tommy Lee Edwards, Jim Muir and more. The WARNING: CONTAINS COMICS on cover is no lie – it’s mostly comics with various articles and interviews here and there. You’ll get eight pages of the new Kick Ass 2, plus reprints of Turf #1 and Nemesis #1. There’s a review over at CbR and an interview with Millar at Den of Geek.

There’s a few newspaper strip collections out this week that deserve a mention. There’s the latest Complete Peanuts Box Set (1975 – 1978) for starters, and the first volume of the new Dark Horse collection of Conan Newspaper Strips in hardcover, reprinting the black and white dailies from September 1978 to April 1981. Roy Thomas, Doug Moench, John Buscema, Ernie Chan, Alfredo Alcala, Rudy Nebres, Pablo Marcos, Alan Kupperberg, and Tom Yeates are all here. You can preview it over at the Dark Horse site.


Then from IDW’s handsome Library of American Comics imprint we’ve got X-9: Secret Agent Corrigan Volume 1. It reprints the 1967-69 run by Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson whose tenure was widely considered to be the best of the series and continued until 1980 (reprints of the rest to follow, no doubt). The secret agent/private eye investigator was created by Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) and Alex Raymond (Rip Kirby) back in 1934 when he began as the unnamed Secret Agent X-9 but there have thus far been no collections of their work barring a single volume by the now defunct Kitchen Sink Press. Maybe one day. You’ll get a full run-down on the history of the series in an essay by Bruce Canwell featured in this first volume.

The comics version of the very camp and melodramatic supernatural classic TV series Dark Shadows is out this week in hardcover, the first collection of a planned five. Not only are you getting the long-unavailable work of Donald Arneson and Arnold Drake (he of Doom Patrol and Deadman fame), Hermes Press are also beefing up the page count with poster art, pin-ups and essays about the history of the show itself. Expect vampires, werewolves and all that brilliant nonsense.

This one’s brand-spanking new but harks back to a similar era as the last few I’ve mentioned. Weird War Tales #1 is another of DC’s war-themed one-shots I pointed out in last week’s blog. This one features the work of Gosh! Favourite Darwyn Cooke, Ivan Brandon, Jan Strnad, Nic Klein and Gabriel Hardman. You can see many of them talking about it here which I also linked to previously. Still to come are:

Our Fighting Forces, by B. Clay Moore and Chad Hardin
Star-Spangled War Stories, by William Tucci and Justiniano
G.I. Combat, by Matt Sturges and Phil Winslade

Shout if you want ‘em on your order.

Cuba My Revolution is a hardcover graphic novel based on the real life experiences of first time author Inverna Lockpez, illustrated by the very excellent Dean Haspiel (Opposable Thumbs, The Quitter). “From the moment Fidel Castro captures Havana in 1959, 17-year-old Sonya believes in the promise of the Cuban Revolution. A medical student who dreams of becoming a painter, she joins the militia and finds herself caught between idealism and ideology.” Haspiel’s art is coloured solely in black and red by José Villarrubia (Mirror of Love) and you can preview it over at the Vertigo blog. Haspiel was interviewed at CbR last week but the site is still broken as I type this so who knows what they’re talking about. I’ll assume it’s this and blindly point you towards it.

Also undoubtedly war-themed in part is Comic Art Propaganda by Fredrik Stromberg which examines all sorts of politically charged comics over the last 100 years. Here’s a review and here’s a smaller one with more pictures.

This week sees the revival of the 2005 Western-inspired series that paired Eric Powell with artist Kyle Hotz (The Zombie: Simon Garth) – Billy the Kid’s Old Timey Oddities & Ghastly Field of London #1 which is even features a Goon back-up story. Powell fills you in on the details over at CbR. "I think, more so than the first series, this story will really begin to establish what kind of world this book is set in. If we don't get a couple of 'Oh, sh*t' moments out of the readers, we've failed."

And finally, there’s a whole new book from Kevin Huizenga on the shelf and as usual it looks lovely. It’s more Glenn Ganges stuff so will undoubtedly be about everything and nothing all at once. There’s a review here and a PDF preview courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.

And that’s your lot. See you Thursday.

-- Hayley