Random Thoughts

Open Season (1986) #1-6,
Open Season (1989) #7 by Jim Bricker

Hey! I remember this series from when I was a teenager… well… OK, you got me: I just remember having about half of the issues, but I don’t remember anything about the contents. Except it being kinda… like… sitcom-ish? Or was it more drama-ish? Let’s read the first three pages together and find out:

Oh, yeah, definitely more sitcom-ish. The artwork has a nice kinetic thing going on, but the chops basically aren’t there much, so it’s just basically hard to tell what’s going on here.

And… if you happen upon a drunk guy — is your first impulse to drag him into the bathroom and run cold water over his head? Is that a thing that people do? I mean, outside of sitcoms?

So it feels like a book made by somebody very young. But I’m aboard.

Some of the jokes are kinda… you have to imagine that this could be funnier if what he’s saying made any sense. Why would these women let themselves be blindfolded and then be hickey-ed by… an unknown? And are these supposed to be in college?

I KNOW! I’m overthinking it. It’d work better as an actual sitcom, because then it moves on without giving you time to ponder the complexities of the gag. (So to speak.)

So we’ve got a classic sitcom setup: The jock, the nerd and the bitch. (Don’t blame me! That’s what the jock calls her.) With lots of over-the-top slapstick violence every other page.

“He looks as necessary as…” Necessary? See, there’s a joke here, but it needs some work.

Bricker ads a credits crawl to the end to emphasise the sitcom connection, I guess.

I guess people don’t do these kinds of performative domestic violence bits in humour comics any more? (She’s angry with the nerd because he spilled coffee over some of her papers thereby somehow “ruining” her research. I know, I know. It’s almost there; it just needs some work.)

In every issue, we get a bio of one of the characters.

We get Reagan Dreams as the back-up feature. It’s a riff on Little Nemo in Slumberland, and Slave Labor did an issue of this stuff.

Bricker tells us that there’s three issues planned, and then they’ll see…

Oh, haven’t seen that ad before. It’s for Holiday Out, which I’ll cover later in this blog series…

The second issue is a lot more coherent. Bricker somehow manages to tie all the three characters into a plot involving a heavy metal band, and hi-jinx ensue.

I had assumed that Bricker was very young, but this take on What The Kids Today Listen To kinda smells middle-aged…

Bricker’s artwork is so basic that it’s nice that he labels these caricatures… of the three easiest people in the world to draw. That’s supposed to be Hitler, Khomeini and Stalin.

The storytelling is mostly pretty straighforward, but when Bricker tries doing something non-standard, even something as simple as a double page spread, it doesn’t really work — it’s not easy to guess that you’re supposed to read this across the spread until you’ve read it the wrong way first.

Instead of keeping the sitcom thing going, we suddenly go to drama.

There’s a lot of development over the first three issues, and Bricker basically develops these three characters to same way most sitcoms do over a few seasons: He starts off with three very distinct, not very sympathetic characters, and then he blanderises (that’s a word) the characters. So the bitchy woman becomes all touchy feely, the insensitive jock becomes all sensitive, and the nerd… still keeps on being a nerd.

So sensitive!

Bricker announces that they’re putting the book on a hiatus after the third issue due to the uncertain market situation. This was during the black and white boom (and subsequent bust), so he talks about bringing the book back when things settle down a bit.

I’m not sure that’s the smartest plan…

So, half a year later we’re back, and things carry on much as before…

… but the humour seems to have dissipated further. We’re now in total drama mode.

They moved to North Beach! What a dump! At Union and Grant… Oh! By Cuitus Tower…

The sixth issue, “The Black Issue”, is 40 pages long (but for the same low price), and doesn’t continue the storyline.

Instead we get this look back into the pre-history of the strip (I’m guessing this is an older attempt? Or is it?).

Chuck Austen illustrates a story which isn’t much more than an excuse to have Chuck Austen draw some young women…

… and we get this story from the jock’s past, but it looks newly drawn? It’s a pretty odd thing to do, but perhaps Bricker was just fed up with the storyline? But why 40 pages (instead of 24, like the previous issue)? Everybody had to lose money on that…

He does sound fed up. The first issue sold 10K copies, and that was during the black and white boom. The fourth issue (long after the bust) sold… 2K copies! Ouch! So I guess taking half a year off between issues wasn’t a solid commercial plan, anyway.

So it’s all over, except for the letter writing.

But then! Strawberry Jam publishes #7! paul Stockton explains how that came to happen. And I love the list of Strawberry Jam employees.

So we get a recap, and then we continue on from issue five. Cool, cool.

But… while the storyline does progress somewhat, we mostly get the jock’s father telling him that he’ll lose his inheritance unless he gets married within a couple of days, and that’s such a random (but well-used) plot wrinkle that… I think Bricker indeed had lost interest. But it’s a shame he didn’t at least try to bring some sort of resolution. I mean, it’s not like there was a lot of plot going on, but…

It wasn’t.

Half the issue is illustrated by Doug Gray (of Eye of Mongombo fame) and… I love that guy in the top left panel, but that’s it. Eye of Mongombo is a gazillion times better than this. Sorry!

Bricker talks about continuing Open Season as a comic strip, but using the jock character and dumping the other characters.

Derek McCulloch tells us of his plans to bring out a 100 page special night life issue, and that would have a continuation of Open Season, too. But that didn’t happen, either.

*sigh*

Those were tough days for publishing comics.

(I should do a blog series on Strawberry Jam — I remember night life as being really good, and To Be Announced as being hilarious. But it’d be a short blog series.)

Jim Bricker went on to do some Disney comics…

It’s mentioned in the final issue that they were thinking about doing a stage version of Open Season, but as Wikipedia says:

A stage play based on the series was produced in 1989.[citation needed]

These comics have never been reprinted, but you can pick them up pretty cheaply:

Uhm…

I hope so, too.

Somebody writes in Amazing Heroes #172, page 13:

OPEN SEASON BEING ADAPTED FOR THE STAGE
Jim Bricker’s realistically-humorous
comic book Open Season is being ad-
apted to the stage by Magic Lightning
Productions of Berkeley, CA.
Strawberry Jam Comics has pub-
lished several issues of Open Season
which follows the lives of three room-
mates and their various friends and
lovers. Bricker describes the comic as
“the struggles of maintaining one’s
sanity in the mire of relationship hell.”
Bricker is writing the script for the
play.
Magic Lightning Productions is
headed by Daniel H. Fogel and
Thomas G. Vernale, both of whom
have worked in comics. They say they
chose to produce Open Season be-
cause of its accessibility and relevance
to an audience beyond comics fans.
“This is the first straight adaptation
of a comic book series to the stage,”
Fogel said. “No singing, no dancing,
no camp. We respect our audience’s
intelligence too much to bastardize
what Jim’s already established in the
comics. It is exciting both artistically
and historically.”
The play is scheduled to premier in
November at the American Zephyr
Studios in San Francisco,

Bricker writes in Amazing Heroes #174, page 104:

JIM BRICKER
San Jose, CA
Credit Mhere It’s Due
Thanks for your cwerage ofthe Open
Season play on page 13 in your Octo-
ber issue. I wanted to direct your at-
tention to one thing if I might.
Renegade Press was the original
publisher of Open Season with issues
#1-6, from ’86 until April
’88. Strawberry Jam Comics has pub-
lished only one issue of O.S. to date
(issue #7, August ’89) and plans still
remain for them to publish the re-
mainder of the series.
I bring this to your attention, not to
rub your noses in an error, nor belittle
Strawberry Jam, but to simply give
Renegade Publisher Deni the
credit she is due.
And thanks for revieving Doug
Gray’s Eye Of Mongombo. Having
seen it develop from his desktop in
Royce Hall, I know it’s damn funny
stuff. I hope he gets the audience he
so richly deserves.
So when does Open Season get re-
viewed?

Heh heh.

Somebody writes in Amazing Heroes Preview Special #11, page 88:

OPEN SEASON:
THE PLAY
Written and illustrated by JIM BRICKER
es; $200 (first issue: 99
Six.issue mn-seties; 24
cents); fromavE LABOR GRAPHICS
Jim Bricker’s slice-of-life comic-book series
about a group of roommates was made into
a play last year—so here we come full circlet
with the comic-book adaptation of the play.
Not much to say about it, except that Neil
Gaiman has written the introduction to the
first issue, which sells for 99 cents, and we
assume the two events are not linked in
some subtle way. (Actually, it’s 99 cents
because the first issue is just 16 pages long.)

This was never published, and I’m unable to google as to whether the play actually happened or not.

I’m impressed with the amount of ads Renegade placed for Open Season in Amazing Heroes (and Comics Journal). I guess Loubert thought the book had legs… and so did I. It’s very readable, and with just some tweaks could have been pretty memorable.

But there’s apparently no reviews of the book in either magazine, which is pretty unusual.

I’m unable to find any talk about the series on the Internetses, either.

This blog post is part of the Renegades and Aardvarks series.

Revolver Annual (1986) #1 edited by Robin Snyder

Robin Snyder’s Revolver anthology had been coming out at a steady clip at Renegade — under various names, but with basically the same kind of content: Some Ditko material as the meat of the issue, and then some Henry Boltinoff, and then whatever people had lying around, apparently.

This is thankfully the final issue, and while the Alex Toth cover is pretty amazing, my hopes for this issue is pretty low.

We start with a text piece from Wally Wood (!), illustrated by Ernie Colón. I expected this to end with a cynical joke… and it didn’t. So thumbs up for that. Perhaps this isn’t going to be as awful as expected?

Hey… Snyder printed this apparent introduction to a series that never happened in a previous issue of Revolver. It sucked the first time around, too! (The Romeo Thangal artwork’s fine, though.)

Here’s a newcomer? “Chad”? Like Cher?

Instead of a dire one-pager by Henry Boltinoff, we get a dire two-pager. Above you have the brilliant punchline. I’ll just wait here until you finish laughing; go on.

Then we get a two-page appreciation of Boltinoff. Oh, right — Boltinoff did those amazingly unfunny filler pages at DC… and buried on this page we get the reason why: Murray Boltinoff, his brother, was an editor at DC. But that’s not why he got the gig; no no of course not.

We’re told, with a straight face, that Boltinoff has no favourites among the characters he created for DC. I guess the rest of us can fight it out amongst ourselves: Of these household names, which ones are our favourites? Is it Private Pete? Is it Ollie? Is it Shorty? Is it Lem ‘n’ Lime?

I was going to include a picture of Lem ‘n’ Lime here, but a google image search brings me zilch.

I”M SHOCKED I TELLS YA SHOCKED

Robert Kanigher and Hasen bring us this two pager, and I’m not quite sure I want to even take a stab at guessing what the punch line here is supposed to be.

Doug Moench and Ernie Colón bring us a little ditty that’s kinda fun — it plays around with conventions of the medium… I mean, it’s not hilarious or anything, but at least it’s something.

And finally — the reason why at least dozens of people bought this comic: A Ditko piece, and this time Ditko goes for humour. It’s not actually funny, but it’s satisfyingly chaotic, and it looks like Ditko put more effort into this than usual.

Snyder threatens us with more Boltinoff material unless somebody stops him.

I’m not sure Snyder actually says what the name of the book would have been — he’s very communicative. “Impact”? “In Principle”? If so, comics.org says they didn’t happen.

This blog post is part of the Renegades and Aardvarks series.

Eternity Smith (1986) #1-5 by Dennis Malonee, Rick Hoberg and others

This is Renegade’s first (and I think only) colour book. And it’s a kinda-sorta super-hero book (well, it’s got a guy running around in leotards who has (augmented) powers, so I think it counts).

Both are unusual things for Renegade to be publishing… and it’s also a strange time to be launching a series like this, as it’s in the middle of the Black and White Boom period.

But perhaps things will become clearer after reading the first three pages:

The text seems to hint at this being a continuation of something? Which is seldom a good way to start off a series like this… and it isn’t, I think?

The “artwork” is by Hoberg, but the “rendering” is by Tim Burgard. I guess that’s a roundabout way of saying that Burgard is the inker?

The colours (by Janice Cohen) are competent and professional-looking, but the artwork looks rather basic.

“D-daddy?” Hm.

“And you are a man. I can see that.” Is she saying that his leotard is a bit tight in the crotch? I’m just saying that this father/daughter banter is really odd.

But everything here is odd.

“That woman seems a likely candidate for physical abuse.” I’m with that guy: “What?”

The lines seem like they’re coming from an alternate dimension where everything is weird and awkward.

“You are vermin!. All of you!”

So this series had originally been a pitch to Eclipse Comics, and reading between the lines (you have to use a microscope), I’m guessing Dean Mullaney passed on it? So somehow Deni Loubert ended up with it.

But Eclipse did publish Champions, also written by Malonee, and it sucked.

Note to people who want to add a mystery to their books: So we’ve been given that this mysterious Tesseract character is a woman, so it has to be one of the female characters in this book. There are exactly three of them: Smith’s daughter and wife, and the wife of his arch nemesis. So it’s obviously either his wife or his daughter coming from the future to save them.

Here’s the note: Add more plausible suspects for more mysterious mysteries.

We get a bunch of essays on various sciency things, and they’re not bad. But the first one is kinda milketoastey.

I can’t stress how bizarre this book is enough. So the arch nemesis is using his own wife as a hostage… and then Smith calls his bluff… and the nemesis goes “You’re of use to me now!” to his wife.

Oh, and the black bodyguard is called “Kung”.

What? “Running boards”? This is a running board:

She’s standing in the middle of the seat there, isn’t she? What? What?

… Oh, he’s saying that she would have preferred to stand on the running board instead of “among […] her crew”?

…

What?

Well, OK, so that’s kinda amusing? But it means that Tesseract has to be the daughter.

The mystery revealed next issue!

Er… Oh daddy?

OK, paper dolls.

What the fuck is this.

Hah! Tesseract is the daughter! I’m so smart S M R T.

*puke*

A sixth issue is announced, but was never published. But, as you can see, it was meant to be the final issue at Renegade, and then the series would go to a different publisher… which turns out to be Hero Comics. Somehow I’ve bought a couple issues of that (but not the first one, which I surmise finished up the first storyline). This is a blog series about Renegade, but I might as well take a look at the Hero Comics issues I have:

Wow. It looks totally different! Did they swap out everybody?

But no, it’s just a new inker, E. R. Cruz (and a new colourist). It definitely looks like Cruz has redrawn everything, and it’s now in a Spanish lush style. Looks great.

…

They don’t actually fuck, though.

Cruz is gone the next issue, so we’re back to the normal barely competent rendering.

So: Eternity Smith is really, really odd, and while it’s not totally without qualities, it’s pretty bad.

Hero Comics published nine issues. It looks like a reprinting was attempted in 2017, but was abandoned after two issues?

Mark Waid writes in Amazing Heroes #98, page 46:

According to Hoberg, Eternity Smith
was originally pitched to DC Com-
ics. “I would like to have worked
with them on this, and they said they
wanted to option it, but, after talk-
ing with Deni [Loubert, Renegade
publisher] awhile, we hit it off real
well. We decided to go with Rene-
gade, and now we have total creative
control.”
Hoberg and Mallonee had been
planning to do something together
for many years. “We’ve known each
other for quite a while, and it just
happened that when we got to do
something together last year, which
was an Iron Man story, I found that
we were just terrific together. We’re
an odd couple at best—we have com-
pletely different personalities and
beliefs, but we jell wonderfully on
comics.” They decided that they
wanted to collaborate, and made
time for a brainstorming session that
went outstandingly well.

[…]

“The basic genesis for this idea
is one that I’ve been interested in for
quite a while and Dennis likes it too:
What if a character like Buck Rogers
came back to his own time and had
to pick up his old life?”

Somebody writes in Amazing Heroes #144, page 83:

Eternity Smith is one of those books
that goes in cycles. It started out as
a well put-together project, nicely
written and nicely drawn, with a
fascinating» concept behind it. The
first six issue run, readers were never
sure when (or if) an issue was going
to come out, from what company, and
whether the quality was going to stay
consistent. By the time the sixth part
came out, finishing off the first story,
I had lost interest, and couldn’t
remember what was going on.

[…]

This issue Tesseract, who may or
may not be the incarnation of Skylark
Smith (Ethan’s daughter) in the
future, returns to the past, seemingly
intent on killing her father. To make
matters worse, Skylark herself seems
intent on committing incest with
daddy, who is only slightly older than
she is!

[…]

The scripting of the issue is fairly
tight, although the dialogue tends to
be a little stilted at times. Perhaps
what is most bothersome about the
book is the incestuous nature of
Skylark Smith. This issue she sings
a specially written love song to her
father, while caressing his chest.
Everyone is unnerved (rightfully so),
and I got a sense of deja vu of the
Champions. Mallonee acknowledges
sexuality in his world (something
most writers and companies won’t),
but doesn’t anyone in his world have
a normal, healthy sexual relationship?
The art is weak in places, although
functional as a whole. Burgard and
McClellan do seem to have a problem
with facial structure that could be
worked on. Their anatomy and
scenery are fine, but their faces are
a little distorted at times, and Archie-
like at others.

Russell Freund writes in The Comics Journal #112, page 43:

Want to see what happens when a renegade
tries to run with the pack? Pick up the first
issufe of Eternity Smith, now available from
Renegade press. Other Renegade titles are
black-and-white and pricey; Eternity Smith
is in full color, priced to sell at a buck and
a quarter. Most Renegade titles are small
press projects, hard to classify; Eternity Smith
is costumed action/adventure with zap guns
and ‘bots, and other kiddie sci-fi stuff. It’s
the kind of thing First does all of the time,
but First’s books usually have some kind of
flair. Eternity Smith is just barely compe-
tent.

[…]

I admit that this isn’t the sort of book that
appeals to me much, even when really well
done. But this book is so flat, predictable,
and ordinary that even if it were an example
of the sort of book I loved, I wouldn’t like
it. For one thing, Skylark Smith is ridicu-
lous. She is supposed to be the leader of
some sort of all-purpose assault squad. As
a cover, they book themselves into clubs as
a pop music group. Great idea. Undercover
agent, seeking anonymity, becomes pop star.
I suppose it could be played for comedy,
with the crack team of agents working as
a sleazy, incompetent lounge act, but Eter-
nity Smith is the kind of kiddie book where
the heroine has to be absolutery great at
everything, so we get to have her touchy-
feely song lyrics quoted to us at length, and
we get pictures of people in the audience
having movements in their souls, and pic-
tures of Skylark, mike in hand, as • ‘she
glories in the raw emotion Of the song…
and, once on stage, she loses herself in it,
and in the adulation of the throng.” If
you’ve always wished you could leally buy
all of the Dazzler’s records, or if the idea of
Sheena Easton finishing up a set and dash.
ing off to thwart nuclear terrorists sounds
plausible to you, then this might be just
your cup of weewee.

[…]

As for the art, those of you who just can’t
get enough of Rich Buckler will be thriled
to know Rick Hoberg’s still working. Actu-
ally, Hoberg has his virtues. He presents the
essential action in each panel cleanly and
clearly, and he varies the angle and point
of view from panel to panel with admirable
fluidity. But his drawing and composition
have the familia’r cheerful blandness of the
modern hero book. It’s not bad work, and
it certainly isn’t amateurish, but it’s sterile
and it’s tame, adjectives I would never
dream Of applying to a Kirby or a Ditka.
It has no personality beyond the chipper
efficiency of the mid ’80s costumed adven-
ture book, available at newsstands every-
where.
But isn’t that what’s intended? I get the
feeling this book turned out exactly as Rene
gade wanted it to. Eternity Smith is a totally
commercial product born of the coldest
calculation. Look, the Renegade people
have ambitions too. like to own
houses, nice cars, take swank vacations.
Why should they be content to squat in the
9mall press ghetto, sending out little stacks
of quirky books, to an audience that may
or may not be there? We are living in the
haveit.all ’80s. Let ’em get a little fun out
of life.

I was unable to find anybody on the interwebs that discussed Eternity Smith.

This blog post is part of the Renegades and Aardvarks series.