Out of the Vault - Rust #2

Another of the dozen or more small comics publishers with big dreams who crashed and burned in the 1980's was NOW Comics. NOW tried to establish themselves as a profitable company in the same way that others, like Comico, had tried before them: by producing comics based on licensed properties. In the case of NOW, they produced comics based on Speed Racer, The Terminator, and even Married... With Children.

But they also tried their hand at original properties, which is where Rust comes in. Rust, scripted by Fred Schiller from an "original story" by Steve Miller and Bill Harrison, tells the story of Scott Baker, a cop who is the victim of an industrial accident involving toxic waste or something. It coats his body with rock-hard "skin" and makes his touch toxic. And between his own misadventures and the machinations of the evil Benzodyne Corporation, which was apparently the origin of the toxic waste in question, his life goes downhill rapidly. He was kind of a low-rent cross between Swamp Thing and Concrete.

That's what I'm gathering from the second issue, anyway. As the issue opens, Scott gets a visit from a group of good-hearted street people, at least one of whom is a Vietnam vet. Scott then decides to go for a walk, where he seems to levitate some aluminum cans (?) while opining about how everything he touches either rusts or dies. At which point a couple carloads of gang bangers drives up and decides to hassle the freak. First they try pounding him with a baseball bat, and when that does nothing, they pull out guns and shoot.


Six guns fire, and seven guys die from the ricochets. It's seriously idiotic.

Anyway, there some other nonsense about the homeless people being people and not freaks, and there's some sort of subplot where Benzodyne is offering a reward for information about Rust. The homeless folks vow solidarity with their bud Scott, but $50,000 bucks is a lot of money.

Meanwhile, Scott's being broody in his trashed-out house, so he tosses his teddy bear Rupert into the river.


There's a few more pages of boring filler featuring the Chief of Police taking orders from Benzodyne and more soul-searching from the homeless about the reward. And then we see Scott playing with Rupert, who is looking seriously trashed and nasty after his float in the river or canal or whatever it was. No explanation about why Rust took him back.

So Scott's conteplating suicide when some folks from issue one show up--Sherm and Jessica, the former owners of a diner that got burned down, along with their daughter Cheryl, who thinks Scott is the greatest. They're homeless now (it's a theme, apparently) and need a place to stay. And since Cheryl thinks Rust is neat, they ask to stay in Scott's nasty hovel.


There's a review here of a later issue in which the reviewer thinks Cheryl is retarded or something, but I think it's just that Fred Schiller can't write little girls, because seriously. Toxic zombie teddy Rupert is not going to be enthusiastically received by any little girl.

The art is by John Statema who made a career out of filling in for better artists on books like Evangeline, Grimjack and Prime. He was also the subject of an odd on-line death hoax. Inks were by Bob Dvorak with muddy, muddy colors by Cygnet Ash.

Rust ran for seven issues, although you can probably tell from my comments above that I didn't stick around for them. And unlike other characters who went on to be revived at other companies or on-line, Rust never returned.

Out of the Vault - The Scorpion #3

In the mid-70's, Marvel Comics founder Martin Goodman started up a new comics company called Atlas Comics. The company attracted a lot of big-name talent thanks to generous rates, secured nationwide newsstand distribution and put out a flurry of interesting, if derivative, titles. It folded within a year, with most of its 23 titles running fewer than 4 issues. You can read the entire story here, if you're interested.

But one phenomenon occurred as the company was flailing: what is referred to on Wikipedia as the "Third Issue Switch."Basically, publisher Martin Goodman demanded that several titles be changed to become more like Marvel, because he knew that Marvel titles sold well. The issue pictured here, The Scorpion #3 cover-dated July 1975, is one example of the switch.

You see, the Scorpion, as created by Howard Chaykin (who has made appearances in Out of the Vault before, and will again), was a 30's era pulp-style man of action, an immortal hero-for-hire named Moro Frost who fought crime with fists and pistols. But Chaykin left the character after two issues and a new team was brought on board.

Writer Gabe Levy and artist Jim Craig begin their mission to modernize and Marvelize the character by killing him off on the first page. Moro Frost is shot down by Nazis over Italy, though no body is ever found. Thirty years later, The Artist Formerly Known as Moro Frost is now crusading journalist David Harper, editor and publisher of the Daily Times. By night, he fights crime as The Scorpion!

Having explained away the changes on page one, Levy and Craig begin the story proper on page two, as a rabbi and his daughter prepare for Sabbath. But suddenly, armed intruders break in, wearing very familiar outfits.

Yeah, I know the caption says "the familiar Gestapo uniform," but the uniforms themselves look more like agents of Marvel's Hydra. But even that is not what prompted me to scan this panel. The daughter's face on the right is rendered in a very familiar style, and it's not that of Jim Craig, whoever he is. That is totally a Jim Mooney face; his style is unmistakeable (Mooney was a long-time comics artist who worked on, among other things, Omega the Unknown, featured in the very first Out of the Vault). Mooney apparently inked the issue without credit.

The Nazis, led by a Red Skull-type figure named the Golden Fuhrer, kidnap the rabbi with the intention of forcing him to resurrect the dead leaders of the Third Reich. The rabbi protests that even if he could, he would refuse to help Nazis. So the Nazis go back and kidnap his daughter to pressure the rabbi into helping them.

Why not just kidnap both at once? Because then the daughter, who just happens to be a reporter for the Daily Times, would not be able to bring the Scorpion into the story. Before she is kidnapped, Sara pays a visit to David Harper, who is wrestling with the state of the world.

A little historical perspective: President Richard Nixon had just resigned the year before as a result of the Watergate investigation. And because the President had used the CIA to facilitate the cover-up, the CIA itself fell under increased scrutiny, which brought more disturbing details to light over the next couple of years.

So having David Harper fume about the "fascistic" CIA was just lazy shorthand for "he cares deeply about the state of the world." Although you have to wonder, if he's powerful and important enough that he can just have his secretary call up the President on the spur of the moment, why is he wasting his time putting on tights to fight crime?

Then again, we don't ever see him actually talking to the President. Maybe the President won't take his call. Maybe he's just thought of as a muckraker or a crank. Maybe he's simply delusional to think he can just give the President a stern talking to and suddenly, the CIA will be fixed.

But for now, he listens to Sara's story about Nazis and advises her to let the police handle it. He also plants a tracking device in her purse to keep tabs on her in case she ignores his advice. She returns home, having fulfilled her plot function, and is promptly kidnapped by the Hydra-Nazis, dropping her purse.

Meanwhile, the rabbi, who really can't resurrect the dead, decides that his only option is to play along and pretend to resurrect the men, while actually using his magical powers to summon forth a golem he's been building in his basement (he's been worried about neo-Nazis, you see, and he was right).

Back at the paper, David Harper checks his tracker to see that Sara is at her home. He decides to drop by in costume anyway, and we get our first glimpse of the new Scorpion in action. Does this remind you of anyone?

The Scorpion arrives at Sara's house to find her purse on the pavement outside. After briefly comparing his bugging skills to those of the bungling Watergate plumbers (yes, again--what can I say? this was just part of the national consciousness then), the Scorpion wonders how to find Sara and her father when the golem bursts out of the house. The Scorpion tries to stop the thing, but it is too strong, and soon, he is helpless in its grip. But instead of killing him, the golem transmits an image into his mind, of the sewage to energy converter in the basement of the World Trade Center (which was also fairly new at the time, the second of the towers having been completed only four years before). The golem then tosses the Scorpion aside and takes the subway tunnels to the WTC complex.

The Scorpion races ahead and starts fighting Hydrazis as the Golden Fuhrer rants ineffectually. When the golem shows up, controlled by a mental link with the old rabbi, things get messy.

These panels illustrate what's good and bad in the art for this issue. On the one hand, the figures in the bottom panels are stilted and the layout's a little off. On the other hand, I really like the panels at top right where the Golden Fuhrer's being dragged away. I love Mooney's inks on that outstretched arm.

Anyway, the Golden Fuhrer, about whom we learned nothing interesting, dies not with a bang nor a whimper, but a splat. And then the golem smashes open the sewage pipes, causing the underground complex to flood. The Scorpion saves the rabbi and his daughter and then swings away to spend one panel contemplating intolerance. A note at the bottom of the panel says to look for the next issue on June 1st (newsstand comics generally came out a couple of months in advance of the cover date), but it was not to be. This was the Scorpion's final adventure.

But in an irony to end all ironies, the character survived in another form. Not the generic Batman-Spiderman clone created to make the character more like a Marvel comic, but the original 30's adventurer created by Howard Chaykin. Chaykin renamed the character Dominic Fortune and took him to, you guessed it, Marvel Comics. At around the same time as the Scorpion's final issue was coming out, or not long after, Dominic Fortune made his first appearance in the black-and-white magazine Marvel Preview.

Out of the Vault- Scorpio Rose

In the late 70's, DC Comics introduced a character named Madame Xanadu in a book titled Doorway to Nightmare. I never read any Madame Xanadu stories, but according to Wikipedia, she functioned something like the Hulk in his late 70's TV series. Each issue she would help a different person with their problems, with the bulk of the story devoted to the guest stars. When DC entered the direct market, they decided to give her her own title, Madame Xanadu, written by Steve Englehart and pencilled by the late Marshall Rogers.

Then Englehart and DC got into an argument over payment for a Superman/Creeper story (which found its way to Eclipse and morphed into Cap'n Quick and the Foozle). Englehart left DC and took his stories with him, so Madame Xanadu was cancelled after one issue.

Shortly thereafter, in 1983, Scorpio Rose #1 was published by Eclipse, once again featuring the Englehart/Rogers team. And like Cap'n Quick, Scorpio Rose was basically a reworking of Englehart's planned Madame Xanadu tales with an original character. Only since "Flashdance" had just come out to enormous success in April of that year, the magical Ms. Rose wore a leotard with one shoulder bare and leg warmers.

In the first issue, we learn that Scorpio Rose is a three-hundred-year-old sorceress whose mission it is to keep evil magical artifacts out of the hands of bad guys. She fights off a gang of guys trying to steal a magical tome called the Book of Fleshe and retreats to her home, where she is visited by a guy named Igor Gravesend.

Flashback 300 years to when Scorpio Rose was a young gypsy dancer whose camp was visited by the same Igor Gravesend. The sexy young Rose throws herself shamelessly at the city slicker, who keeps telling her he's not interested and to stay away from him. But that just makes her more determined, so she leads him out of camp, ostensibly to show him a "short-cut to St. Petersburg," which in the Romany tongue is apparently code for "Scorpio Rose's vagina."

Before they can get busy, though, Rose's jealous boyfriend Zachariasz shows up. He's kind of a douche.

A douche with a knife, which gets Scorpio all hot and bothered.

At which point Ms. Rose learns that, before you promise yourself as the spoils to the victor (Igor Gravesend, in this case), you should make sure he isn't actually some super-demon in disguise.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the demon-rape wasn't exactly the way it would have appeared in DC comics. Anyway, the rape breaks her soul, leaving her immortal. Left with time to kill, she goes out and learns magic and becomes the protector of good for 300 years, until Igor shows up again, having been sent by his boss to retrieve the Book of Fleshe. Igor warns Scorpio that he will be forced to return in his demon form, so she'd probably better make herself scarce.

She flees, pursued by the demon, but finally manages to escape by using a magical tarot card to flee into Purgatory. Where she runs into Zachariasz. Who's still a douche.

In issue two, Scorpio flees with the shade of Zachariasz into Hecate's realm to ask for help. Of course, Hecate tells her to take a hike. So after another run-in with Igor the demon, she flees to a sort of alternate dimension or something, where she decides it's a perfect time to make out with the 300-year-old spectre of her douche ex-boyfriend.

Meanwhile, Igor has returned to human form and uses a magical amulet to try to break free of the control of his evil masters. At which point he suddenly awakens in the suburban kitchen of this woman...

Sorry, wrong story. I meant, this woman...

And since this is a Steve Englehart comic, the appearance of a beautiful woman with the incredibly annoying verbal tic of constantly referring to herself as "This One" can only mean one thing: she's the Celestial Madonna, a character concept Englehart originated with a character named Mantis in Marvel's Avengers, then carried over to DC's Justice League of America (where he called her Willow), and has now ported over to Eclipse as Lorelei. And it turns out that the powers Igor works for want to use the Book of Fleshe to create an Anti-Christ to Lorelei's Celestial Messiah-son.

Which leads us to issue 3, in which... well, there was no issue 3. The entire story (including the lost issue 3) was apparently reprinted by Image in Coyote Collection 1, but I probably wouldn't read through it again even if you bought it for me. I've never been much of a fan of Englehart's writing, and though Marshall Rogers's art was really nice in places, Tom Palmer's muddy zip-filled inks and colors made the book hard to follow at times. Neither the rape-origin nor the Cosmic Anti-Christ plot really did it for me, and several pages are just jammed with overblown exposition disguised as dialogue. Speaking of "The Matrix," imagine a comic in which everyone talks like Morpheus or the Architect, all the time. Jeez.

No more for me, thanks. I'm full.

Out of the Vault - Walter: Campaign of Terror

I had originally considered doing this as a Halloween entry due to the title and the grotesque nature of the main character, but after rereading the book, I decided to just concentrate on the stripper-witches and save this for after . So...

In 1996, John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke, the creative team behind The Mask, having turned their premiere character over to other (and lesser) creative teams following the success of the Jim Carrey movie, made their final foray into the world of their bizarrely violent main character with the spin-off miniseries, Walter: Campaign of Terror.

Who's Walter, you ask?

Walter was the Mask's arch-enemy, a giant hulking mute brute, super-strong and nigh indestructible. Imagine a cross between Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, only smart enough to figure out how to make a profit off his violent inclinations by becoming a Mafia hit-man. Walter had battled various wearers of the Mask off and on through three previous miniseries, but had ultimately failed to defeat its power completely.

As the miniseries begins, Walter is hiding out in a ratty slum apartment when the cops arrive to arrest him, having been tipped off by the super. Things don't go well for the cops at first...

But it turns out they've brought a freaking tank for support, so Walter surrenders.

Walter is put on trial, represented by a beautiful and ruthless female lawyer named Anna Hamel (her services provided by one of the deep-pocketed Mafia characters around town who still wishes to retain Walter's services). However, even though the evidence against him is circumstantial, the Mayor is desperate to have Walter convicted so he can prove his anti-crime bona fides and get re-elected. The D.A. assures him the case is strong, and the judge is also playing on the Mayor's team. Things look bad for Walter.

Meanwhile, with Walter in jail, there's a hit man vacuum, which is filled by a spooky weasel named Mahlon.

In court, Anna Hamel is banging her head against the wall, trying to get the crooked judge to make any rulings in her favor. Suddenly, a man bursts into the courtroom with an automatic rifle and begins shooting up the place. Everyone dives for cover except Walter, who is not pleased that the man ruins his suit by putting a bullet hole through it. So he breaks the guy's arm, thus saving the lives of the judge and jury.

Next thing you know...

Walter's a hero. Which gives somebody an idea.

Hence the title. But Walter's campaign goes nowhere until he returns to his old apartment to pick up some stuff. While there, he beats up the apartment super who ratted him out in full view of a television camera. However, the camera also filmed the super throwing out a destitute single mother, and the footage is edited to make Walter appear a champion of the oppressed.

Suddenly, Walter is the people's hero, which convinces a desperate mayor to hire Mahlon the hit man to off Walter. Hilarity ensues.

The series was as well executed as a series starring a homicidal maniac could be. It was a satirical look at the sleazy political machines running the city, in which Walter emerged as the hero only because he was at least honest about what he was. It was like Bonfire of the Vanities, only with a Hamlet-style body count.

The art by Doug Mahnke and Keith Williams was excellent, too. It was one of the few comics I've read, though, where there were pages I would have liked to see without any coloring, just because the inking was so dense and detailed that the colors sometimes seemed to detract rather than add.

Dark Horse continued to create Mask projects, but Arcudi and Mahnke were done with the property. Another of Arcudi's Dark Horse projects, Barb Wire, was also made into a film, and more recently, Arcudi has been working on B.P.R.D., a spin-off of Mike Mignola's Hellboy. Meanwhile, Mahnke has been drawing up a storm over at D.C., illustrating the adventures of the Justice League, Superman, and Green Lantern.

Out of the Vault- Voodoo

So here's our final Halloween edition of Out of the Vault for this year, on the fifth Saturday of the month (which is apparently very rare in October, so enjoy it). And appropriately, it's written by the guy who revolutionized horror comics with his reinvention of Swamp Thing at DC Comics in the early 80's.

The comic is Voodoo, a four-issue miniseries published by Image Comics in 1997, written by Alan Moore. And in keeping with our theme, it stars a stripper-witch.

It opens at the bus station in New Orleans, where two men--Attibon and Carrefour--have a civil, seemingly friendly discussion, though it seems apparent that they can't stand each other. And then a woman appears to ask directions, and goes on to offer, totally unprompted, "My name's Priscilla, or you can call me by my stage name if you want. That's Voodoo."

The dialogue is efficient, but clunky. In fact, it may be the clunkiest dialogue Moore's ever written, which says to me that he was phoning this one in (and if you need any evidence that I'm an expert in clunky dialogue and phoning it in, tune in tomorrow).

So Carrefour leaps to his feet, offering to help her find work, and Voodoo explains that she's an exotic dancer (because that stage name thing she said two seconds ago was obviously too subtle). Carrefour takes her to a club called the Midnight Lounge, run by a dude named Christian Charles.

Christian's being accosted by the boyfriend of one of the dancers, who has gone missing. So Christian sends the boyfriend up to his office to find out what happened to Angel, while Voodoo gets up on stage to audition.


Voodoo then meets one of the other dancers, a petite blonde named Purity, and learns that the club used to be a church that was built on the site of former slave shacks built over a burial ground, and holy shit, could you pick a more ominous location? Was the church also perhaps running a puppy mill out back, right next to the illegal abortion clinic/opium den? I mean, geez!

And just in case all that has been too subtle for you to realize the place is evil, we get this in the middle of issue two.


No, Voodoo doesn't realize anything's wrong. She's an idiot.

So Purity takes Voodoo to the boarding house that Christian runs for his girls. Now that Angel has gone missing, maybe Voodoo can crash in her room. Only the cops have found Angel's body and declared her room (covered with arcane symbols) to be a crime scene, so Voodoo's out on the streets again, in the rain, where she runs into Attibon from the bus station.

He takes her to another boarding house, run by a kindly old ex-hooker named Freda. Only it turns out that Attibon and Freda, along with Freda's other roomers--Saturday and Mr. D--are in fact manifestations of the loa Papa Legba, Erzulie, Baron Samedi and Dhamballa. Oh yeah, and of course, it's Christian who's killing his own dancers, as we see dancer Crystal being taken up to his office and locked in a hanging cage (shades of old Aurora Snap-Together model kits!) where her blood is then released to pour down over Christian.

The rest of the book goes pretty much as you'd expect (see "phoning it in" above). It involves Christian's ancestor, a preacher-turned-evil-voodoo-guy who was killed by an angry mob. The mob burned down his church (now the Midnight Lounge) and his home (an old gutted ruin which had been the boarding house where Voodoo stayed just the night before). Now Christian is performing blood sacrifices to gain enough power to bring back the Reverend's spirit, with the help of Carrefour, who is apparently a really super-bad powerful evil spirit when he's not trolling bus stations.

In the process, we get to see Voodoo possessed by Erzulie during her first official act on-stage...


It all leads up to a final confrontation in issue four with Voodoo, Purity, and a police detective facing off against Christian and Carrefour, where we learn this...


What the wha'? Apparently, Voodoo was character from WildC.A.T.S. by Jim Lee and Brandon Choi, an Image title I had never read, and this throwaway line in the final issue is the only acknowledgement of that (or so it seems--looking back through the earlier issues, we do see that Voodoo has an odd outfit that Purity describes as belonging at a Star Trek convention, which prompts Voodoo to mention a gig she used to have). Oh, and the book was printed in Canada, by the way.

But remember, Voodoo is not a superhero in this comic. She's a stripper-witch, which means she must defeat the villain using the power of sexydance. Seriously. After Christian has finally succeeded in summoning the spirit of Reverend Charles from beyond to possess his body, Erzulie rides Voodoo again, compelling her into a sensual dance which leads the Bad Reverend back to the gutted boarding house, where the scary-ass Damballa (pictured here on the awesome Adam Hughes cover of issue four) blows him up good.

So Voodoo, having been used as the unwitting tool of the loa to defeat the Christians, decides to study voodoo for real. And there are so many levels of muddled and conflicting symbolism in all this that I don't even want to start discussing them, because in the end, once again, Alan Moore + Voodoo = Phoning It In.

So that's that. The Cavalcade of Stripper-Witches is done, and now only one thing remains before Halloween is over and a new year begins (I'll explain that last bit in a couple of days). See you later.

Out of the Vault - Willow #0

So continuing our Halloween-themed cavalcade of stripper-witches, we come to Willow #0. Just to answer the question of what's more collectible than issue #1?

In this case, the zero designation was a little silly, though. Previously, the only times I had seen issues numbered zero was when a series had been going for a while, and they decided to put out some kind of promotional prequel. At that point, the zero designation made sense, because there was already an issue #1 that they couldn't duplicate, so the issue meant to come before had to be numbered zero.

In the case of Willow, though, the series hadn't come out yet. Willow #0 was in fact issue #1 with the number filed off.

But what about the comic itself? Well, first things first: this witch named Willow has nothing to do with Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. In fact, it came out the year before Buffy's series debuted. This Willow also has nothing to do with the George Lucas-Ron Howard film.

It was published in 1996 by a company called Angel Entertainment (seriously, Willow and Angel? Was Joss a fan of this comic or what?) and was put together by Dave Campiti's Glass House Graphics. I've mentioned Campiti before; he's been involved with a bunch of different comics properties including Banzai Girl. The comic was written by Mary Ann Evans and pencilled by Michael Dutkiewicz. I've tried to find anything else that Mary Ann Evans has written, but all I find are references to George Eliot, the pen name of the woman who wrote Silas Marner (whose real name was Mary Ann Evans). Which leads me to wonder if perhaps this Mary Ann Evans is in fact the pen name of a male writer (maybe Campiti himself, who is credited with creating the character along with someone named Mark Jones).

Issue #0 opens with Willow doing some sort of magical ceremony involving her wearing a robe and kneeling on a pentagram, surrounded by cobra-shaped censers. She stands up and starts peeling the robe off, and it is revealed that she is actually on-stage in a strip club, performing. Meanwhile, the narration tells us about the power inherent in sexuality, and that unfulfilled sexual desire can be the most powerful of all.

It's the kind of masturbatory pretension you see all the time when a writer thinks they're better than the material. I mean, the reason Willow is a stripper is that the book is intended to sell to teenage boys. But Mary Ann Evans (or whoever) wants to make it seem like stripping is a much more significant and empowering act than it really is. I say this with no insult intended to strippers; I'm quite fond of the business in many ways. But it becomes pretty obvious that Evans has little actual knowledge of the way the business works.

Dutkiewicz does, though. For instance, he shows some pretty convincing pole work in this sequence (basic pole work, but still...).


Although this points up another curious fact about Willow. The nudity is kept strictly PG. Willow spends five pages topless with nary a nipple in sight. What's even weirder is that this issue was released with a variant cover that apparently does show Willow topless. I wonder if the interior art was also more explicit? I doubt it, but then, what's the point?

Once she has the crowd warmed up, Willow rubs herself with "special ointment" and then transforms into an owl on-stage and flies away. A patron in the crowd is so excited by this that he runs backstage to see the manager of the club, who is... Willow, in a sensible suit.

The patron, a Mister Pucci, says he's in show business and offers to manage Willow's career and turn her into a big star. He's a seedy character, so she refuses. He storms out angrily, promising that she'll be sorry.

Later, Willow dons a black velvet dress for a Sabbath celebration. She leaves the house with her familiar, a black cat named Eddie. Pucci follows them to a field where several other vehicles are parked, including a helicopter. Willow and Eddie meet several other women in a sacred grove, where Willow starts the ritual, which is fairly convincingly Wiccan (which is to say, it seemed to be based on real research to me, but I know little about Wicca, so I could be entirely wrong). And with each step of the ritual, Willow mentions that the Goddess will provide.

Meanwhile, Pucci is hiding in the shadows, snapping photos of the ritual. He intends to publicize the photos in order to ruin Willow's career, since she won't be able to perform anywhere once the public learns that she has performed a Satanic ritual. Putting aside the standard Wiccan objection that Wicca does not equal Satanism, his plan makes no sense, given that 1) we've already seen that Willow owns her own club, so it's not as if she'll be fired, and 2) we've already seen her do a ritual on stage as part of her act, so it's not as if it's a big secret.

Doesn't matter, anyway. Eddie the cat leaps on Pucci, flushing him into the clearing, where he is caught by the witches and dragged to the altar.


Poor Mister Pucci. He was a sleaze, but he didn't deserve to die.

A few days later, we see Willow in the club again, where she announces to all the girls in the dressing room that the club is making so much money that she's going to pay them each an extra $250 a week, which is stupid on so many levels, I can't even start to unpack it. And then she goes out on stage with a new "dance partner."


And on the one hand, yeah, ha-ha, he wasn't killed, just humiliated by being turned into a goat. Big twist.

But on the other hand, it's such a big misfire in so many ways. I mean, okay, it takes a special kind of audacity to take the Old Testament tale of Abraham and Isaac, about as representative of old-line patriarchy as you can get, and turn it into a tale of Wiccan woman-power.

But on the other hand, this raises so many disturbing questions. The ceremony clearly implied a human sacrifice was going to take place, but instead they turned Pucci into a goat? I mean, what's the point of that? Do they do that at every Sabbath, lure some loser to the grove and then turn him into a goat? Wouldn't that create a whole hell of a lot of goats? Are there actually any natural-born goats, or all they all the byproduct of Wiccan ceremonies around the world?

More to the point, are we supposed to admire Willow for this? She's still basically taken the guy's life away, not to mention the effect on any family or friends he may have, and for what? Because he was a sleaze?

And of course, most disturbing of all, what the hell kind of stripper act is she going to do with a goat?

Anyway, there's a brief epilogue where she gets some evil artifact in the mail that's supposed to carry us into the plot of issue #1, but who cares? I'm still mad about poor Mister Pucci. And apparently, the readers agreed with me, because Willow only lasted for two more issues.

Then again, we're still talking about mostly unknown (and perhaps pseudonymous) creators working for a tiny independent publisher. What happens when a powerhouse publisher like Image and a top-flight writer like Alan Moore decide to do a comic about a stripper-witch?

Find out next week.

Out of the Vault - Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose #18

So after having written about Vampirella, the vampire-stripper, last week, I figured I'd just run out the string through Halloween with more cheesecake stripper-witches. First up: Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose #18. She's not technically a stripper, I guess--at least, no strip club appears in the two issues I own--but she spends most of every issue nude, so that's got to count for something.

Anyway, I saw the issue in my comics store several years ago, and I was bored with all my usual stuff and I thought the cover illustration looked hot, so why not give it a try? Right?

This issue is a fill-in between whatever plot point happened before and a four-issue story arc that would begin next issue, so nothing consequential happens. But the inconsequential stuff is crazy.

It opens with a bunch of fairies stealing the diaries of three of the series' characters--Tarot, Raven Hex, and Boo Cat--in hopes of reading titillating secrets, as revealed by clumsy, insufferably "cute" dialogue.

Tarot's diary excerpt is up first, where she tells us how she became a sword maiden of Wicca, a ritual that requires her to be nude except for a horned fetish mask. She goes forth to battle a familiar-looking enemy.

From the fiery eye comes forth a huge-breasted demonic enemy called, I shit you not, a "Gal-rog." And as Tarot fights, the captions go on and on about how this fetish fight is actually a symbolic struggle against prejudice or some such preachy bullshit.

Even the fairies are bored, so they switch to Raven Hex's diary, in which she describes the trials and travails of having big tits. Which sounds like a feminist cry for understanding and acceptance and a condemnation of artificial standards of beauty which damage girls' self-esteem, but is mainly an excuse for Jim Balent (the writer-artist) to draw several pages' worth of big tits--as if he needed one, since that's apparently what the entire series is about--which leads to this heart-warming self-affirmation.

"With these great breasts comes great power..."

It's high drama worthy of Flaxen. Anyway, the fairies are still bored, and so turn to the final diary, and at this point, I'm wondering what other tiresome, preachy feminist sentiment Balent can cheapen with gratuitous nudity.

But no, there's no preaching in this one. Instead, it's wacky hijinx as the flighty lesbian Boo Cat relates the tale of how she first met Tarot.


And this is really interesting, because it's a guy writing a female character indulging in the kind of drooling behavior that, if the character were a man, would be depicted as creepy or pathetic or simply gross. But since it's a female, the ogling and innuendo are supposed to be flirty and funny and fascinating.

That night, Boo Cat follows Tarot home and molests her in her sleep, even bringing her to a "full purr." And again, if the character were male, this would be rape...

And in the end, the fairies and I are disappointed with the stories. But I did buy another issue, just because I figured fill-ins are always a let-down, and maybe once the proper storyline got back on track, it'd be better.

It wasn't. It wasn't as bad as it would eventually get, but it wasn't good enough to bring me back for a third issue. Although unlike most of the comics I cover in Out of the Vault, this one is still going. And it would be bad form not to mention that Balent's art is decent, although I'm guessing that colorist Holly Golightly's digital painting is what makes this comic a continuing success. Her work is really quite nice. She's also hot, which never hurts.

Next week, the cavalcade of Stripper-Witches continues with Willow.

Out of the Vault - Vampirella #52

Once when I was a teenager, I walked in my room to find my mom standing in front of my open closet door, reading one of my comics. I was probably thirteen or fourteen by that time, starting to explore my sexual curiosity, as well as thinking about more mature subject matter. So I had decided to try an issue of Vampirella.

After all, who could resist that cover? I mean, look at it. The painting is credited to a guy named Enrich (listed here as Enrique Torres), and it's awesome.

But that was the last thing I was going to say to my mom. And all she had to say was, "Pretty vulgar, isn't it?"

And I had to admit, she was right. Actually, I had been really disappointed in the issue, but I had kept it because a) I keep everything, and 2) LOOK AT THAT COVER! That cover painting really does compensate for a host of ills.

I had, of course, been curious about Vampirella for years. I didn't read much Creepy or Eerie, but I had occasionally read both, as well as Famous Monsters of Filmland, and they all advertised in each other. So I had seen plenty of black-and-white thumbnails of various Vampirella covers, including the early Frazetta ones. I even had the Aurora Snap-Together model of Vampirella at one time. But I had never actually bought an issue.

Until #52. And boy, was I disappointed. Vampirella the character features in the first two stories, and they're both written by Bill DuBay, who is just as bad here as he was later in 1984.

The first story has Vampi and her mentor Pendragon visiting a Gothic mansion in the Rocky Mountains, which serves as a sort of Hogwarts/Xavier's School, only for carnies. Apparently, it is Pendragon's alma mater, and he speaks of it in loving terms in this bit of classic Bill DuBay dialogue.


But all is not well. There is a freak show on the grounds, and the freaks are really disgusting. It turns out that the school has been taken over by a mad scientist named Dr. Wrighter, and the freaks are all the results of his experiments. The big twist is that they have all volunteered to be made freaks in order to make big bucks in the carnival trade. I don't think you can find any more apt illustration of 70's economic malaise than this.

Upon meeting Vampirella, Dr. Wrighter immediately thinks of all the things he could do with her body, and unfortunately, they're none of the things the rest of us would do with her body. Instead, he plans to switch her head with that of his freakish hunchbacked assistant, then try to get the mismatched duo in the movies with the help of a Hollywood friend named Flashman. He drugs Vampi and has her on the operating table when the rest of the freaks discover that he's jumped her to the head of the job line and start beating on Wrighter like a bunch of SEIU thugs at a tea party rally. So Vampi kills them all. It's a mercy, really.

In the second story, Vampi and Pendragon have gone to Hollywood, where they appear on a morning TV show and we learn that Vampi's not just a vampire. She's also a stripper.


It just so happens that the show is seen by an assistant producer who has been tasked with finding a beautiful, innocently evil girl to costar with an actor named Flashman Howell (yes, the same Flashman that Wrighter was going to send Vampi to) and is pitched ideas for two movies. One is a heartwarming story about interstellar love that ends with the hero contracting space VD and being consumed by worms, and the second is a non-stop orgy of torture and rape (which the woman, being an empowered and liberated sort, of course enjoys). Vampi is so creeped out by the pitch that she immediately assumes these dweebs aren't actually moviemakers at all, but servants of the mad god Chaos. So she bites them.

Both stories are awful, filled with crappy dialogue and a non-stop parade of grotesquerie that made them really unsuitable as wank material. And yet, that seems to be the only purpose of the stories. The plots are slivers of nothing, merely excuses to allow Gonzalo Mayo to depict Vampi in a series of erotic poses (see above). If they had a Dictionary of Terms That Hadn't Been Coined Yet in 1976, you would find this issue under "Fan Service."

The remaining stories are unrelated one-shots, mainly aimed at showing women in bras or lingerie, being terrorized and tortured...


Oh, and one story that has neither women nor titillation in it at all, but it does have vampires. I did end up buying another issue a couple of years later, though I don't know why. It was even worse than this one. The lead story was another awful DuBay/Mayo production, and the back-up stories were just as substanceless. But this one didn't even have a hot Vampi cover. I honestly can't remember why I put out a dime for it.

Oh yeah, two other items of interest in issue #52. The very first thing in the issue after the table of contents is a full-page ad asking for information about counterfeit issues of Eerie #1.


And in the back, as in all Warren magazines, was the advertising section, where Warren sold tons of fannish crap. I've spoken before about the way fandom has subdivided and specialized since the 80's. For a fan in the 70's, this type of thing was typical.


Sunday newspaper comics from the 30's, 8mm reels from 60's and 70's films, Burroughs pulp paperbacks (with Frazetta covers!), and recordings of old radio shows from the 40's. Seriously, back in the day, you took what you could get, and you panned through a lot of stuff to get to what you wanted (of course, nowadays, I like all that stuff--I even own those two Flash Gordon books).

Out of the Vault - Scary Tales #3

As I've mentioned before, horror comics back in the days when the Comics Code held sway contained little in the way of actual horror, and therefore had to find alternate stories to tell, usually in the form of poetic justice fables featuring monsters preying on bad guys (but with no gore). Charlton's Scary Tales #3, published in 1975, is yet another example, and like the previous Charlton horror comic I've featured, is more interesting for who worked on it than for its stories.

The first story is titled "Distress," written by Paul Kupperberg and drawn by a young Mike Zeck. Kupperberg has written about a zillion comics since then, including the mostly forgotten Arion, Lord of Atlantis (a book I remember liking back in the day; it remains in the Vault, but I hope to cover it at a future date), and was also senior editor at Weekly World News for a while, according to Wikipedia. Zeck, of course, was the penciller of Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars, as well as a long run on Master of Kung Fu.

The story is rather silly. A medieval warrior wanders into a strange town where the people shy away from him in fear. He is approached by an old man in a tavern, who tells him the wizard in the castle on the cliff keeps the villagers terrified and has even kidnapped the old man's daughter. When the warrior turns down the offer of "mere gold" to rescue the girl, the old man basically pimps his daughter out. Next thing you know, the warrior is climbing the cliff with his fucking lance strapped to his back.

And a good thing, too, because after he loses his sword fighting off bat-winged demons during the climb, he needs the lance to run through a creepy dwarf.


It's obvious that this was published in the days when the Comics Code's power was waning, given the sexual suggestion and the clear intimation that the lance has run the poor little dude completely through. Of course, once the warrior finally reaches the chamber where the girl is being held prisoner, he is frozen in place by the evil wizard (who just happens to be the old man from the tavern), and oh yeah, the daughter is a vampire. TWIST!

The next story is titled "Satan Weeps," written and drawn by an uncredited Steve Ditko. and it's introduced by the busty Vampirella wanna-be from the front cover, only she's also holding a whip. Why? Cause it's sexy, I guess. It has nothing to do with the story or her character.

The protagonist of the story is Arnold Printz, a guy who thinks the small town where he lives is boring, so he decides to liven things up by worshiping Satan. Since the jocks put him down, he decides to take revenge by casting a voodoo-style spell to cause abdominal pain to the star of the football team, then invites the guy over to his house to make the pain stop.

His plan somehow involves having the jock sell his soul to Satan, only the jock tells him to stuff it, and in the ensuing struggle, Arnold's statue of Satan is broken. And then...


Seriously, what the fuck? I have no idea what that ending is supposed to mean, and every explanation I come up with is stupid. There aren't even any decent Ditko hands. Then again, 26 years later, we got Devil May Cry, so it wasn't a total loss.

Ditko follows this up with a two-pager titled "The Vengeance of the Canoes," which distills all the tropes of the standard Comics Code horror tale down to the bare essence. Poor natives row out to a luxury cruise liner to sell hand-made native goods. A tourist offers fifty cents for a carving of a war canoe, which the native has priced at two dollars. The native, desperate and hungry, accepts, and the tourist laughs at him for being a poor salesman. Then as the liner is leaving, it swamps the canoes, causing the angry native to call down the "curse of the canoes." The tourist then decides to toss the carving overboard, since it won't fit the decor in their New York penthouse. The canoe grows to giant size, and the huge warriors sink the cruise liner full of greedy tourists. Moral: don't be greedy or else cheap, crappy knickknacks will kill you.

Next comes the bane of young comics readers, a text feature. And it's a really weird one. It's a ghost story titled "House for Sale," in which a real estate agent is tasked with selling a haunted house. He decides to fix it up before selling it, though, which the ghost apparently likes, and the agent likes the house so much, he wishes he had the money to buy it himself. Next thing you know, the agent inherits a lot of money (a little more than he needs to buy the house), and falls in love with the beautiful lawyer who comes to inform him of the inheritance. And they all live happily ever after. That's right. It's a ghost love story.

The final story is "The Card of Death," starring Countess Von Bludd, the Vampirella wanna-be. She is bored, stuck in her drafty old castle, so she takes off to Monaco or someplace, where she can find rich, evil men to eat. Her first meal is Golden Gus Fogarty, whose evil, we're told "emanated from his pores," though we never find out exactly why she judges him evil.


Anyway, she kills Fogarty, then kills an evil old sheik, then saves a whistleblowing Mob accountant from a hit-man before heading back to her castle again to rest up from her vacation. There's really nothing exciting here, just a series of panels showing the Countess in a series of mod, low-cut outfits, neither very scary nor very racy. And despite the title, there is not a single card in the story (okay, one panel does show the Countess at a gambling table apparently holding a card, but it's a throwaway panel and the card is not significant). It mainly takes place in a casino, though, so I guess that's close enough.

Now you understand why the 80's were such a giddy time in comics. Because we'd been mostly stuck with crap like this for over 20 years.