After the break, check out the latest episode of Comic Books Are Burning In Hell!
COMMUNITY. That's our message this week. MATT SENECA visits TCAF and reports on the scene. JOE MCCULLOCH buys a stack of 1997 Avatar Press comics and gazes across the tides of history. CHRIS MAUTNER reads a Junji Ito's Fragments of Horror and ponders the nature of art and authorship. COMMUNITY. I don't need to explain this metaphor. TOGETHER WE CANNOT BE BROKEN. Please consult the comments for factual corrections.
ENTER: THE THRILLING WORLD OF ERRORS:
1. When I say First Comics started in a comic shop, I mean Pacific Comics.
2. The annus mirabilis of the Bad Girl era is not 1993, as I state, but 1992; that was the year of the Kurt Busiek/Louis Small Jr./Jim Balent Vampirella revival, along with the formal debuts of Everette Hartsoe's Razor (which I think had a small test release in late 1991) and Mike Wolfer's Widow - both of those latter two characters would eventually be published by Avatar. In addition, Lady Death did not enjoy her own solo series until 1994; I think I overestimated the age of Evil Ernie, which didn't actually begin until late in '91.
3. I didn't think to mention this -- since most of the fun of finding old comics for me is hunting through stores or fucking around with online merchants -- but the difficulty of finding older Avatar comics can be *greatly* lessened by simply contacting the publisher; Comic Cavalcade is still around online (NOT IN PERSON; god, can you even imagine a comic book store stocked with noting but Avatar variants?), and poking around via search engine reveals close to the entire catalog. Bear in mind, though, the items seem to be priced by virtue of scarcity... as you might expect...
Posted by: Joe McCulloch | 2016.05.26 at 21:12
You guys mentioned talking about Sir Alfred -- I missed that -- what episode was that in?
Posted by: Jeet Heer | 2016.05.26 at 22:18
Jeet - It's in an episode we've recorded, but not yet released... Matt and I did it on our own, and the audio quality apparently isn't great. Still, it'll show up in some form before long...
Posted by: Joe McCulloch | 2016.05.26 at 22:37
4. I should also add that Avatar did publish some more Silent Rapture stuff, albeit two years later: a seven-page segment in Threshold #17 (June '99). Not a story - it feels like completed content for the promised issue #0, ending mid-scene. My Threshold collection is far from complete, so maybe there's more somewhere...
Posted by: Joe McCulloch | 2016.05.26 at 22:41
Oh man, did this episode trigger flashbacks. I lived in Champaign, Il during most of the '90s, and I shopped at Comic Cavalcade when it was--briefly--a brick-and-mortar store. I remember buying some of the Kitchen Sink FROM HELL floppies there. (CC/Avatar is still located in Rantoul, a town about a half-hour from Champaign that was very hard hit when their Air Force base closed in 1993.)
Hart Fisher's Boneyard Press was also active in Champaign at around this time--but I was a Fanta/D&Q snob and didn't hang out much with Fisher or William Christensen.
You mention Avatar's policy of producing and selling variant-cover comics for other publishers, and I suspect that's how Christensen got to know Alan Moore. Avatar did variants for all of Rob Liefeld's Maximum/Awesome comics, including Moore' SUPREME...
Posted by: Craig Fischer | 2016.05.28 at 11:27
If we're just talking introductions, I'm pretty sure Avatar's founders interviewed Moore in their capacity as Wizard freelancers in the early '90s... but yeah, I do presume Comic Cavalcade's work in exclusuve variant covers built a lot of connections with companies like London Night & Awesome, before they started working with those companies' artists and characters (London Night's prime character Razor was also briefly at Avatar, though, like Lady Death, she is now back with her creator, viable again through the intercession of crowdfunding)...
Posted by: Joe McCulloch | 2016.05.28 at 12:51
(And, of course, Avatar was working directly with Warren Ellis as early as 1999, so they had credibility/connections in terms of prominent UK writers too...)
Posted by: Joe McCulloch | 2016.05.28 at 12:58
Great show! Any plans to devote some time to KE9?
Posted by: A | 2016.05.30 at 16:17
I'll have my review up at the Comics Journal soon, "A"... or should I say, MY EDITOR!!!
Posted by: Joe McCulloch | 2016.05.30 at 16:31