Out of the Vault - MythAdventures

I'm gonna' ride this Foglio train till it falls apart, apparently.

So when I did my post on D'Arc Tangent, I mentioned that the format was inspired by Elfquest, from WaRP Graphics. Well, not too long after D'Arc Tangent faded away, Foglio was back in another book in the same WaRP-style format. It was MythAdventures, published by (of course) WaRP Graphics.

MythAdventures started off as an adaptation of Another Fine Myth, by Robert Asprin. Foglio wrote and penciled the adaptation, which was inked by new talent Tim Sale (who would later come to prominence on both Batman and for his work onf the TV series Heroes) and lettered by M. Lucie Chin.

The story concerns a young magician's apprentice named Skeeve, whose teacher is killed moments after summoning a fearsome demon. It turns out that the "demon" is actually a dimension-traveling magician named Aahz. Aahz (who has lost his magical powers in the summoning) takes on Skeeve as his apprentice, and together the two battle against the evil wizard who killed Skeeve's master in a plot to take over the dimensions.

The books are breezy fun, full of fast action, witty dialogue and truly awful puns. Foglio added a layer of cartoonish action in his adaptation. For instance, in this dialogue scene, Aahz pulls a Bugs Bunny-style costume change.



Some have taken issue with the liberties Foglio took with the story, but how boring would it have been to read a comic story that adapted everything word for word?

After 6 issues, MythAdventures changed format from magazine size to a regular-sized comic book. Foglio left the book after 8 issues, finishing the first novel adaptation. The art was then taken over by Jim Valentino. Valentino's art didn't have the same verve that Foglio's did, and the book faded away after four more issues. Years later, Valentino left his job at Marvel to become one of the founders of Image Comics, so he made out all right, although the rest of us suffered.

Okay, okay, I know what you're thinking. You're saying, "But Fraze, what I really want to know is, did Foglio hitchcock in this one?"

Did he ever. While the book is bursting with little in-jokes and cameos--including a Lawgiver Robot from Buck Godot, along with Buck himself, Godzilla and the elves from Elfquest (to name a few)--Phil and Dixie and little Growf the dragon are featured in a subplot that runs across two issues during a visit to the Bazaar at Deva.

Out of the Vault - Dynamo Joe #8

Since I've been on the Foglio kick, and was planning to revisit Dynamo Joe sooner or later anyway, I decided to just go ahead and do it this week.

Dynamo Joe was a giant-robo adventure inspired mainly by the Mobile Suit Gundam series. In the far future, the human race is part of a confederation with the alien Tavitans and the Imperium, a spin-off of humanity who are all descended from a single immortal ancestor. They battle the Mellenares, a race of telepathic alien microorganisms with a hive mind, who can link together to form monstrous creatures.

Joe's adventures, plotted and drawn by Doug Rice and scripted by John Ostrander, first appeared as a back-up feature in the series Mars by Mark Wheatley and Marc Hempel. The back-up was apparently popular enough that Joe was brought back as a feature in the First Adventures anthology series before getting his own four-issue limited series in 1986.

The next year, Joe became a regular series with issue 5 (continuing the numbering from the limited series). The one major change--Ostrander was no longer scripting the book. Phil Foglio was (Rice was credited with "Special Thanks" in one of Foglio's Buck Godot stories before he started writing Joe, so there was apparently a history there).

Taken as a whole, the series is pretty good space opera. The aliens are formidable. The stories range from small encounters to huge battles. The extended cast works pretty well together. It was a competent book all around, but it never jumped the spark gap from "This is fun," to "I gotta' have this book and tell all my friends about it!"

In issue 8, though, something unusual happened. Phil Foglio did some guest art. Here's the story.

Pomru, Joe's Tavitan co-pilot, has been making some highly unauthorized changes to Joe, including an experimental "absolute zero super-cooled computer" (don't ask me how a computer can process data at absolute zero, m'kay? The tech is all standard manga-magic). He goes out for a test flight, but something goes wrong. There's an explosion that opens a hole in Joe's hull, allowing a cloud of Mellenares inside.

Once inside the Mellenares read Pomru's thoughts to determine what form they should take. As Pomru is thinking, "I'm my own worst enemy" at the time, the Mellenares form a green gremlin whose shape mimics Pomru's. And the battle is on.





That's Foglio drawing the alien, finally getting to indulge in a little of his own cartoony style in an issue dedicated to Bob Clampett. In the end, after a series of slapstick encounters straight out of old cartoons, Pomru manages to defeat his telepathic enemy and succeeds in accomplishing what no one in the entire war has managed to do--take an enemy prisoner.

Ironically, although Joe's increasing popularity took him from back-up feature to anthology feature to limited series to regular series, he didn't last very long as a monthly book. The series was canceled after 15 issues (and as I discovered on New Year's Day, my run ends at issue 14--AAARRRGGGHHHH!!!). Part of it may have been due to Rice's difficulty in meeting a monthly schedule; Joe ran a back-up feature for several issues, cutting the lead story to 16 pages, and still needed Ben Dunn to do fill-in pencils for a couple of issues.

But for those of us who'd caught the anime bug and couldn't get our fill of the real thing (since anime and manga were still slow in coming here back in those days--kids today don't know how good they have it, consarn it!), Dynamo Joe was a fun jolt of giant robot action.

And now I've got to hunt through some back-issue bins for #15.

Out of the Vault - D'Arc Tangent

So since I've been reading Girl Genius lately, I decided to devote this week's Vault visit to an earlier Foglio work, the one-shot D'Arc Tangent.

D'Arc Tangent #1 was published in 1982 by ffantasy ffactory, a company formed by Phil Foglio and Freff (hence the doubled 'f's in the name). Following the example of Elfquest, it was an independent comic, black-and-white on magazine-size newsprint with a quarterly release schedule (in theory, anyway).

Foglio by that time had already made a name for himself among sf fandom as a fan artist, and among gamer geeks (like me) for a strip in Dragon Magazine called What's New with Phil & Dixie (available on the web here). Connor Freff Cochran had also published as both a writer and illustrator (you can see sample pages from issue 2 on Freff's site).

Between the two of them (with the help of SF author Melissa Ann Singer as publisher), they concocted an ambitious tale of star-spanning romance. In the first issue, we were introduced to a huge interstellar empire, a mysterious would-be conqueror, an enormous city built on an ancient artifact that dwarfs Ringworld, a grieving alien widow, and a medieval French nobleman whose personality is imprinted upon a robot, which in turn begins to develop an emotional bond with the widow.

The story was planned to run 16 issues.

It lasted one.

It wasn't a problem with either the art or the story; though neither were perfect, they were solid, with the promise of great improvement over the full run of the tale. It wasn't necessarily a problem of low sales or of the implosion of the black-and-white market that doomed so many other small-press B&W books in those days.

Nope, Foglio and Freff simply split up due to creative differences.

What creative differences, you might ask? Well, here's a clue. When the editorial page in the first issue features one creator screaming at the other to finish the damn book already, you can assume that there's friction in the partnership.

Looking at a sample of the book in question might help explain a bit more. Here's a portion of a typical page below. It appears that penciling duties were split between the two. Foglio obviously drew the shorter Frenchman, as well as the unmasked robot, while Freff appears to have penciled the taller Frenchman and the alien babe Avari T. But from the editorial cartoon, it seems that Freff was doing all the inking, and just look at the inks on this page: lots of cross-hatching, multiple flavors of zip, and a hell of a lot of black. Now multiply that through the entire book, and you can see why they had trouble making a deadline.



All that work was not wasted, however. The next year, Foglio drew a rather long science-fiction tale featuring Buck Godot, Zap Gun for Hire (released in 1986 through Starblaze Books), and the character of the Pistol Packin' Polaris Packrat featured a very familiar profile.