Random Thoughts

Mister X Special (1990) #1
by Pete Milligan, Brett Ewins and others

This is billed as “Special no. 1”, which probably means that there was a bunch of Mister X specials planned, but this one was the only one published. It’s a 24-page black and white book, but with cardboard covers, and what was probably a scandalous price for its time: $3.

And they have the nerve to do a Lorem Ipsum text on the inside front cover. Anyway, let’s read the first three pages.

So this is about Mister X inventing a machine to allow himself to dream, and he dreams of his mother, and insects, and….

And then it turns out that the reason Mister X never sleeps isn’t because there’s so much to do and so little time to do it in, but because he doesn’t want to sleep, perchance to dream, because it turns out that he was SPOILERS sexually abused as a child.

*sigh*

You have the infinitely intriguing Radiant City concept to play with, and this is what you come up with? Could it be more dreary? Could it?

Well, I guess it could, because Ewins’ artwork is kinda fun. Sure, collages have been done, and these aren’t particularly inventive, but it could certainly have been worse.

I think this story was included in the Mister X: The Brides of Mister X and Other Stories collected edition from Dark Horse?

I couldn’t find any reviews of this story.

This blog post is part of the Into the Vortex series.

Badlands (1990) #1
by Steven Grant, Vincent Giarrano and others

So this is the second ambitious series Vortex launched early in 1990, and like Doc Chaos, it’s also 32-page (well, 28-page), has shiny paper, colour, and lasted one issue.

“A Red Fist Production”. Well, the design here isn’t up to Vortex’ usual standards… Anyway, let’s read the first four pages.

So we have a psychotic hired killer, Kennedy, Texas… Pretty standard stuff. Giarrano’s artwork is attractive, but not particularly interesting. The demonic look on the psycho in the final panel is pretty special, though.

It turns out that the psycho used to rape this guy in jail, too, and the rest of the issue is basically the psycho pressuring this guy into a life of crime, going as far as paying off half the town not to hire him. The question is, of course… does this makes sense? I mean, either dramatically or … any other way? Of course not, which makes this all rather…

My left eyebrow was raised throughout reading this. It’s a puzzling comic. Is it just ineptly written or is it going somewhere?

The only this that this book has going for it is really the colouring by Richard Ory. He uses colours in a striking way, and he seems to be doing the highlights by scribbling over the colours with whiteout or light-coloured er… crayons? I’m not an artist! Get off my back!

Anyway, it looks really, really good, I think.

Heh… Those prices are … odd? $80 for the second issue of Post Bros?

I guess that wouldn’t have been a solid investment.

ANYWAY.

Badlands seems fine, but it’s a pretty weird book for Vortex to be publishing. I mean, it’s so… normal? There’s nothing really that makes it stand out in any way, and Vortex did have an eye for the unusual.

Somebody writes in Amazing Heroes Preview Special #11, page 16:

This is something completely different: a real
crime comic, in the sense that it deals with
criminals, not merely a mystery or an
espionage thriller. Badlands is about the real
assassin of John E Kennedy. Theretare no
spandex costumes, no hard-boiled detec-
tives, and whodunnit is clearly and carefully
explained. This is about criminals, and is set
in 1963.
It seems that all those theories are right:
Oswald didn’t kill J.F.K. Of course, he wasn’t
originally going to be the guy who took the
fall, eithet In fact, he warrants only a cameo
appearance in Badlands.
Steven Grant says that this book is in the
same sort of spiritual milieu as Jim Thomr
son. Basically, the book is about a young
Chicano car thief who manages to get
himself manipulated into performing the
assassination of the president. His name is
Conrad Bremer. The book involves actual
aspects of the alleged conspiracy to kill
Kennedy. Grant did a lot of research on the E
subject so as to be as accurate as humanly
possible.
Although the book deals with a complex
subject and will be nearly as convoluted as
all the J.F.K. conspiracy theories, Grant notes
that the book will still be easier to follow than
Whisper, his acclaimed non-ninja series for
First.
The book contains a lot of what Grant calls
his own “holy triumvirate”—sex, violence,
and politics.
Publisher Bill Marks notes that the book
has been scheduled for a slick paper format
to make full use of colorist Richard Orry’s
palette.

Heh. There’s an appearance in one of Amazing Heroes’ swimsuit issues:

Dark Horse published Badlands as a graphic novel:

In the grand tradition of crime fiction, it features a main character who can’t seem to make a good decision, along with corrupt oil men, a nymphomaniac daughter, and a scary, scary hired killer. The really scary part, of course, is just how plausible it all seems.

People seems to like it:

Steven has written an in-depth and compelling crime comic here, one that will sink its hooks into people right away and hold them throughout the story.

This blog post is part of the Into the Vortex series.

This blog post is part of the Into the Vortex series.

Doc Chaos: The Strange Attractor (1990) #1
by David Thorpe and Stephen Sampson

Based on the name alone (“Doc Chaos”), I assumed that might be a book by Peter Milligan or somebody like that. If there are anybody like that. I mean… Freakwave… Paradax… Doc Chaos…

But it isn’t. It’s a bit hard to read, but this seems to be a project from David Thorpe? And there’s supposed to be thirteen issues of this series, but there’s been previous incarnations:

Thorpe’s next work of note was Doc Chaos (1985–1990). Doc Chaos was a commissioned TV series, two comics series, and a novella. Limehouse Productions commissioned scripts, which were co-written by Thorpe with Lawrence Gray. A comics version achieved a cult following. The first series was serialised by Rob Sharp’s AntiMatter Comics, then collected into books by Paul Gravett’s Escape. In North America it was published by Vortex Comics, with cover designs by Rian Hughes. The scripts were adapted into comics by artists Phil Elliott, Duncan Fegredo, and Steve Sampson.

A novella, Doc Chaos: The Chernobyl Effect, was published in 1988 by Hooligan Press, with illustrations by comics artists Simon Bisley, Brian Bolland, Brett Ewins, Duncan Fegredo, Rian Hughes, Lin Jammett, Pete Mastin, Dave McKean, Savage Pencil, Ed Pinsent and Bryan Talbot. An e-book version, with an added story: Doc Chaos: The Last Laugh, was published in 2012 by Cambria Books.

Well, OK then! This is gonna be awesome! Let’s read the first four pages.

Uhm… er… So we’ve got a pretty standard evil biotech company, and a pretty standard anarchist-ish good guy, and we’ve got… a very non-standard artist. I kinda like it? Or is it horrible?

Is this super-refined, super-arty artwork (a la Pushwagner cough cough), or does Sampson just not know how to draw a human being?

It’s either shockingly bad or shockingly good. It’s bleeding shocking, is what it is.

But I think pages like this kinda dispel the mystery: It’s just kinda amateurish. The storytelling is muddled and uneven. Even word balloon placement feels random.

But I do love these wild, wild colours. It shouldn’t work, and perhaps it doesn’t. but I still love it.

OK, it’s impossible not to like this panel.

Somebody writes in Amazing Heroes Preview Special #11, page 37:

Dave Thorpe’s satirical allegory of present-
day Britain continues with a look at two
British youth cults in issues #3 and #4. The
College of Unlimited Ecstasy is a hedonistic
cult run by the svengali-like Jock McLeod
while another youth group is more anarchic-
ally minded, wearing large spikes on bald
heads implanting music directly into their
brains. “That’s a dig at dependence on the
material world,” said Thorpe, “with the
theory that the more people use machines
the more they merge with them. A person
who uses ther computer a lot will gradually
merge with the computer and a person
working in a sweat shop will gradully begin
to merge with their sewing machine.” The
merge is initiated by a virus. Attempting to
induce all the various youth cults back into
labor is The Ministry of Leisure, once better
known as The Ministry of Employment.
With mayhem raging all around, Tito is
now being mistaken for Doc Chaos, and is
being hunted by the police. He in turn
suspects Eve of being an agent of Doc
Chaos, and it’s business as usual while
everyone is looking for Doc Chaos.
Thorpe has planned the first dozen issues
as self•contained stories with ongoing plot
threads as part of an overall story titled “The
Strange Attractor,” and issues #5 and 6
concern the Gene Police. They’re technolog-
ically advanced dog catchers with hermetic-
ally sealed suits and a large van into which
they throw all mutants en route to Centre For
Genetic Rehabilitation. It’s a pleasant little
place where Doctor Bedlam gets to perform
unspeakable experiments on the mutants,
who’re not the cuddly super-powered types
found over at Marvel. That story is titled
“Splice My DNA.” Well, it made me laugh.

Apparently more issues were made? But never published?

I can’t really say that I’m surprised.