The year of the comics

It’s Jerry Grayson’s fault. He knows all these people with opinions about comics and culture, and as the geek social fallacies would advise, said, “Hey, if I get all my friends together, they’ll be friends too!!” Which actually worked this time, for a jam let’s-all-try-it discussion for his own 1972 Project.

Kill, kill, kill

Art by John Hotchkiss

I jumped back into role-playing with gusto in late 1985, armed with Champions 3rd edition and a handful of enthusiastic friends. Before too long I was meeting lots of others playing the game, in person and through The Clobberin’ Times, and I got a good look at how plenty of people expected to play their heroes. How was it? Easy. In a word, they were killing all over the place.

Exhumed, still lovely my dear

Ah, boxes and boxes of trans-Atlantic stuff, you have at last yielded your layered secrets unto me, into my hands!

Two villains

In the one-step-removed setting of the original Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, the president of the United States is the geriatric Richard Nixon in 1985, evidently president-for-life. In one respect, it’s not as fantastic as it seems: Ronald Reagan (born 1911) was actually older than Nixon (born 1913), thus “this geezer in the White House” as depicted in the comic – set in 1985, published in 1986 – was literally happening.

Elementary

As I heft the pile of issues and drift into a reverie, to see how Elementals fits in my mind, it emerges as a brilliant disaster. But I want to apply some historical perspective on why I might see it that way, maybe to consider it differently.

Two women

It’s the late 1980s – chosen as a transition from one set of codes, meanings, confrontations, confusions, and stereotypes regarding American black people during the mid-late 1970s to another set which settled hard into place by the mid-1990s.

Ollie ollie oxen free

Politics and autobio sing a duet in this post! This title was central to my big dive back into comics, in the flush of First, Comico, Eclipse, and specifically Dark Horse, itself on the heels of the now long-forgotten “black and white boom.”

Who is Coyote

Here’s the follow-up post to What you mean “we?” and probably a lot more emotions and memories than you care to deal with.

What was the question again?

This is the second in a series of dialogue-posts by me and Steve Long about vigilante characters in comics, mainly during but not completely restricted to the 1980s. More 80s TMI about me too!

It is unwise to annoy cartoonists

One does not discuss superhero comics without considering John Byrne most seriously.

Go to hell and burn

During my senior year of college, I was 22, reading a story about a man drinking alone on his 50th birthday, visited by the ghosts of those he’d killed, presented with no particular interest or revelation concerning whether they’re “real” or not. I sit here now just after my 51st birthday and the story is as good today.

The orgasm that saved the world

In which John is upstaged

Fair warning: I’m about to say some really inappropriate things.