The Warrior's Comic Book Den: Eclipse Comics

Showing posts with label Eclipse Comics. Show all posts

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Halloween Horror #1: "Ultimate Destiny"

Download Halloween Horror #1

Happy Halloween! Here's some pre-code horror to get you kiddies in the mood for trick or treating!

Monday, October 25, 2010

Mr. Monster's Weird Tales of the Future #1

Download Mr. Monster's Weird Tales of the Future #1

Basil Wolverton is one of the few comic book artists whose work can legitimately be called unique. Although he created such serious adventure features as Spacehawk, he's best remembered for such non-serious and nonsensical inventions as Powerhouse Pepper, Mystic Moot and his Magic Snoot, and the grotesqueries he later drew for Mad and Plop!

While Spacehawk's adventures did somewhat parallel those of the pulp and newspaper strip science fiction, there was nobody else who had encounters quite like this! He met the oddest aliens and creatures and experienced the strangest interplanetary adventures of any spaceman.

One of the major appeals of Wolverton's space opera was the artwork. He was very good at gadgets, especially the kind that require lots of nuts and bolts. His spaceships had the bulk and feel of ocean liners, the control rooms were as cluttered with pipes and dials as an apartment-house basement.

This collection published by Eclipse Comics, which I ordinarily keep stored in my Horror collection but am tempted to create a "Just Plain Weird" genre just for it, reprints "Brain Bats of Venus," "Man From The Moon!," "Escape To Death!," "Flight To The Future!," and Nightmare World!"

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Beautiful Mick Austin Cover Painting

Download Alien Encounters #8

Michael J. "Mick" Austin is a fine artist who lives and works in the UK. Initially a comic book artist and illustrator his painterly style led to him leaving this genre and concentrating on fine art in 1996.

Mick Austin started his artistic career in 1981 for Marvel Comics producing cover art and a very brief 'Timesmasher' (written by the then editor Paul Neary) series and also Blakes Seven before moving onto Warrior mainly painting cover art for which he won an Eagle Award in 1982 for his Marvelman cover. He then drew both Judge Dredd and Judge Anderson for 2000 AD between 1989 and 1995. He also drew the computer game based strip Urban Strike during this period, various Tharg's Future Shocks and the featured strip in Doctor Who Magazine during this period.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Saga of Swamp Thing #32: The Greatest Comic Book Story Ever Told?

Download Saga of the Swamp Thing #32

I once gave up on my beloved comic book collecting hobby for girls in my teen years. After I graduated from high school, I became curious as to the state of the comic book medium and Swamp Thing had been an old childhood favorite. So, I snapped up an issue of Saga of the Swamp Thing off the racks in a liquor store. If not for this fortuitous encounter enabling me to discover the genius of Alan Moore, I might not have had a second love affair with comic books—at all. I mean, how many bad comics, such as Saga of Crystar and ROM: Spaceknight, can one take? Those were horrid, wretched magazines, to be blunt. However, by the time I read the excellent Swamp Thing #24, I had been hooked on my collecting hobby all over again. Things hadn't changed: one simply had to look for the good stuff as Sturgeon's Law is impossible to escape.

There was no doubt that Moore deserved a reputation as a master wordsmith, which he soon went on to earn. While I thought that most of Moore's work on Swamp Thing had been very good up to that point, this particular issue deserved to be called a masterpiece. Simply put: it was a work of creative genius that was unparalleled in quality. Perhaps the only comic book story that rivals this one in quality is a Warpsmiths of Hod story published in the British magazine Warrior, which was reprinted in Axel Pressbutton #2 by Eclipse Comics called "Cold War, Cold Warrior." The beautiful art was by guest illustrator Shawn McManus and the entire thing was a brilliant pastiche of Walt Kelly's Pogo.

I have decided to add the Warpsmiths stories I mentioned above in this post, which includes the stories "Cold War, Cold Warrior" and "The Yesterday Gambit" by Alan Moore. The Warpsmiths are fictional aliens in several science fiction comics created by Alan Moore when he was a teenager for a small publication by an arts lab in his native Northampton, England. He and artist Garry Leach expanded on the characters for the UK magazine Warrior, and figuring into a fictional timeline and universe developed by Alan Moore and Steve Moore (no relation), the Warpsmiths only appeared in two stories before the end of Warrior. The first appearance of a Warpsmith was in the 1982 'Summer Special'. Leach retained ownership of the characters, and lent them to Moore's series Miracleman (which Leach had illustrated earlier in Warrior) in which they became a major part of the story, with art by John Totleben based on Leach's designs. In 1989 Leach began a new anthology title, A1, the first issue of which included the Warpsmith short story "Ghost Dance," which was written by Alan Moore. Subsequent issues would feature stories by other writers.