The Crow: Wild Justice (1996) #1-3 by Jerry Prosser and Charlie Adlard

When will the hurting stop… OK, just two more Crow miniseries to go before I sleep.

Hey, this looks kinda cool.

But as usual, it starts off with some guy killing another guy and his family, and at this point, it’s just hard to pay attention.

Each Crowish Avenging Spirit gets their own makeup pattern? Like band members in Kiss, I guess.

Hey! This isn’t doing the usual plot! The killer asks for forgiveness, and then the Avenger gets all discombobulated? No fair!

Wow! They’re sold out of the lighters!

But you can buy as many CD-ROMs of background material from The Crow movie as you want. For only $40.

Actually… this creative team have done something quite different with the Crow formula. Instead of one revenge story over three issues, we basically get the same time period told three times: One from the point of view of the guy who’s been killed, one from the point of view of the killer (shown above) — who turns out to be a stand up swell guy, who everybody likes.

(Except for the killing people bit.)

And the third and final issue is from the point of view of the cop trying to investigate the mess.

It’s… dare I say it… a pretty good series? I like the artwork, which shifts between the scratchy mode in the opening pages and this more chunky mode, with solid blacks. And the storytelling is pretty much on point — nothing much to get annoyed by.

My expectations for this series were well below nil, so it may just be my relief at not having to read the same shit all over again, but I’d say this is rather OK.

Indeed:

This was good and different. The art is by Charlie Adlard of Walking Dead fame, and we don’t have nearly as much of the confusing stories and art we’ve sometimes seen in the past. Worth a read for sure.

This is the two hundred and third post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

The Crow: City of Angels (1996) #1-3 by John Wagner and Dead Ormston

Wow, those are some ugly covers. Especially the first one — it’s not even all that legible what it’s supposed to be. Is he getting a really vigorous golden shower or something?

(Reading this comic, I guess it may be the guy appearing out of the water… which is yellow for some reason…)

So this is an adaptation of the (flop) movie, which I may have seen back in the 90s, but remember nothing of. Did they really introduce the concept in a way like this in the movie? As if it were a TV episode? But I guess Buffy was big at the time, and they had a voiceover at the start of the episodes, so why not.

There’s 24 story pages per issue, so they only have 72 pages to do the entire movie. So things get a bit choppy.

Wat. That’s supposed to be Iggy Pop? He played the eeevil henchman in the movie, but that does not look a lot like Iggy Pop. Was this drawn before the movie had been cast? It takes a while to draw a comic book, but surely it takes longer to make a movie than to draw 72 pages…

Ormstom’s artwork is quite attractive. It owes a lot to Mike Mignola when it comes to rendering, and to Ted McKeever when it comes to figures and poses, I guess? It’s pretty cool.

Except when it goes all The Jokes.

Heh heh. That’s the guy they got to do the Avenging Spirit role this time around? Is he broody enough, though?

Sorry about the reflections… Anyway, what I wanted to mention here is that this comic reaches levels of ridiculousness never before seen in a Crow book. And they’re pretty ridiculous! The Avenging guy shooting himself in the head, just to impress some two bit punk he’s gonna kill three seconds later anyway? Sure, why not.

Yeah. Think about it.

This shit is deep.

The book mostly reads like a recap. I guess if you’ve seen the movie, you can go “oh, there’s that scene”. But reading the comic book now, there’s no mood, no excitement, no nuthin. It’s really, really bad storytelling.

One thing they do retain from the original Crow comic is all the pretentious quotations. But where O’Barr was able to get some goth nerve going, at least, here it’s the most basic, normie, boring things. It’s just literally un-believably bad.

Yeah, it’s not like Love Will Tear Us Apart Again.

Indeed:

A poor adaptation of a bad movie, The Crow: City of Angels is an incredibly disappointing follow-up to James O’Barr’s epic graphic novel.

And here’s part of what drove Kitchen Sink to the brink of bankruptcy — this stuff didn’t sell. Kitchen Sink had been surprised by the success of the first Crow movie, and were unable to capitalise in its success (beyond printing hundreds of thousands of copies of the trade paperback). They weren’t going to get caught flat-footed again, and had a huge amount of junk I mean valuable merchandise made in time for the premiere of the second Crow movie — which bombed.

In addition, Denis Kitchen had done the morally right thing in going exclusive with Capital City Distributors (in its fight with its dominant competitor, Diamond), and had expected to get some backup from other people in the comics publishing industry, but nope: They preferred to remain on the fences. As a result, Capital City went under, and was sold to Diamond. And this was happening right as Kitchen Sink was trying to shift this merch — but orders were missed or mis-handled, and even the stores that wanted this stuff couldn’t get it. (The previous deal with Capital City was that stores couldn’t buy stuff directly from Kitchen Sink, and most assumed that that still applied (which it didn’t), so they didn’t even try to order things directly from Kitchen.)

So: One bad bet (on the success of the Crow movie), one unsuccessful gambit (supporting Capital), and unfortunate timing of the two led Kitchen Sink to almost go bankrupt (again).

We have a handful more blog posts to go before we get to what happened next.

This is the two hundred and second post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

R. Crumb’s Carload O’Comics (1996) by Robert Crumb

This collection was originally published in 1976 by Bélier Press, but the fourth printing was co-published by Kitchen Sink in 1996, so I’m covering it on this blog. Besides, I wanted to read this collection. I mean, I’ve read Fantagraphics’ Complete Crumb collection, but that was not a very satisfying presentation of the material, so I was curious to how other collections might read.

The introduction (by J B Rund) is the most forthright introduction I’ve ever read, in my entire life (and that’s pretty long) in a collection of comics. Instead of giving us the hard sell (like “the best comics ever by comics genius R. Crumb”) he explains the selection criteria very clearly: These are comics that were not included in any of the previous collections (like The Apex Treasury), and does not include any Fritz or Zap stuff (because collections for those were already planned), does not include any stuff in magazine ratio, and avoids reprinting any comics in full (because that would sabotage the sale of those comics).

So it’s a collection of odds and ends of previously published comic-sized comics. But! Includes one new 14 page piece. (That we’re reassured will be published separately later, anyway.)

It’s been updated for the 1996 edition — but just to note that they’ve changed the binding, basically.

It’s so far from being a hard sell that it makes your head swim. (And the introduction has a running gag, too.) I love it.

None of the really famous older pieces are in this collection.

One slightly frustrating thing about thing about this collection is that we’re not given any dates for any of the strips (or where they originally appeared). I guess the dates are what I’m most interested in — and it seems we’re talking mostly 1970-1972, with some stuff from 73 and 74.

The thing is… it reads remarkably well. It should feel like a random jumble of randomness, but the sequencing works well. They have wisely not gone for a chronological presentation, but skip around, having a variety of stuff — some absurd little thing next to one of Crumb’s infamous outpourings of, er, stuff.

There are a couple of pretty well-known pieces in here — I think “The Adventures of R. Crumb Himself” is often presented as being particularly revealing of Crumb’s feelings (but I’m not so sure myself).

There are very few autobio strips here — I think this is the only one? (There’s other strips that feature an R. Crumb character, but they’re more clearly fictionalised.)

There’s quite a few of these trippy stories — I guess they’re not usually included in anthologies, because they seem pretty slight it you’re not high, I guess. And I think Crumb started doing them after he felt burned out in the early 70s?

And a couple of his most infamously misogynistic pieces are included (which are often excluded from anthologies, too), like “Underground Hotline”…

… and the most infamous of them all, “R. Crumb vs. The Sisterhood”. It’s been a while since I’ve read this one, and I didn’t quite remember that it started off this way — it’s almost as if Crumb planned on doing something quite different in this strip, but as his approach to cartooning is usually quite improvised, he seems (to me) to work himself into a lather, change his mind, and then we end up here:

It was the last straw for many people, understandably enough.

“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” aims at satirising hippie cult leader types, but when it ends on a pile of dead women like this, you gotta go “hm”.

*adjusts eyebrow down again*

One of the weirdest, and most dreamily pleasant stories in here is “A Gurl”. It’s got a dreamlike quality, and *gasp* has no violence towards any women. It’s quite exceptional.

The book ends with the new 14 page story, and it’s unfortunately not one of Crumb’s most inspired, but the cartooning is fantastic and it has a happy ending. Yay!

So… that’s a great book! It’s thoughtfully put together, and the format is perfect (slightly bigger than comic sized, printed on thick, matte paper with nice binding (as the introduction stressed over many words)). There’s so much stuff in here that you get a feeling of having a cornucopia on your hands, and the sequencing mixes stuff up so that you don’t get the same thing repeated immediately (because Crumb returns to the same themes quite a lot).

A+ no notes.

Except for the ads in the back. Pages and pages of product. But whatevs.

I also somehow have an insert included with Cheri magazine. I think I bought that by mistake on ebay, and I was quite nonplussed when I got it.

More about the binding, so I’m guessing this was written by the same person that wrote the other introduction.

Curiously enough, they include the long “Sisterhood” strip here, which is an odd choice. I mean, I’m guessing that Cheri was a porn magazine? There is indeed some sex in that strip, but it’s mostly about killing feminists, so… But perhaps that’s the point?

I’m unable to find any reviews of the book, but here’s one of the insert:

The stories inside are quintessential Crumb, but all of the (several) copies I have of this comic book are identically weak in one aspect: the color printing is not of good quality. Which is a shame. It’s not that the coloration is bad, but that the printing is actually blurry, which makes it less than ideal to linger on the exquisite penmanship of Robert Crumb.

This is the two hundred and first post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

The Crow: Flesh & Blood (1996) #1-3 by James Vance and Alexander Maleev

Huh. James Vance? Well, I guess it makes sense on one level — he’d worked for Kitchen Sink before. But he’d done serious stuff like Kings in Disguise, and putting him on a spin-off from The Crow seems like an odd fit. But let’s see how he does.

The original Crow series, and the J. O’Barr-plotted first sequel both had a sort of feverish, miasmatic quality to them: They were nightmarish and somewhat non-traditionally told. This, on the other hand, is very, very straightforward.

I do wonder, though, why they went through with a monthly serialisation of all these three issue mini series (this is the second of five of these series) instead of just publishing them as trade paperbacks. The original Crow collection sold several hundred thousand copies, so publishing more in the same format as that seems like a no-brainer to me. (But then again, I know nothing about comics publishing… just doing my thirty-years-later backseat driving ruminations…)

There’s some stuff like this, which don’t make that much sense — it seems like he’s going to strangle her with that rope, right? But he didn’t.

But then they blew up the house she was in a month later?! But why.

So this time around, the Crow has selected a woman to be the avenging spirit. I mean zombie. Whatever. That’s something new, at least.

But there’s so much here where the only possible response is “wat”. She shows up at her lover’s apt. and his immediate response is to run out (ok) and gets a gun from his pickup (wat) and then shoots her (wat).

So I’m thinking, the only way this could make sense is if there’s a twist ending where it turns out that her lover is her killer or something, and he’s just trying to kill her again, but nope.

OOPS SPOILERS

Instead she wants to have sex with him, and now that she’s dead “we can do anything you’ve ever wanted” because she can’t be hurt anymore.

Wat.

I think my initial suspicions were correct — Vance just isn’t good at this genre stuff.

Wow, those are awful, bobble-headed statues. Only $400!

O’Barr kept things pretty vague, which is a good idea. Because when you start spelling out the rules like this, it just makes things more boring.

But I’ve been so busy being exasperated by the story that I haven’t bitched about the artwork, right? Maleev’s rendering is quite impressive, but the basics are often pretty weak. I’m guessing he works a lot from photo reference, but he often gets the sizes and positions of people wrong. I guess this makes sense if the smoking guy is in front of the other guy (since he looks too big), but that doesn’t really make sense, since we’re seeing the old guy from below, but the smoking guy straight on.

It’s just a random collection of snapshots oddly superimposed into the same panel.

Or to take another example — she’s like two meters tall there? I guess it makes sense from a dramatic point of view to have her enter the room freakishly big, but in the next panel, she’s normal sized and five meters behind the other people.

Etc etc.

So of course Maleev won the 1996 Must Manning Most Promising Newcomer award.

*gasp* Moral ambiguity!!! Vance comes through with the deepness.

This book was a pain to read. The previous mini, Dead Time, was really confusingly told, but at least it was entertaining. This is very straightforward. And lethally dull.

Heh. I noted with the previous mini that they had surprisingly little in the way of merch. Well, doik! Even lighters, for when you want to fire up your cigarette in a dark alley while brooding.

Too bad the movie they were betting all this money on was pretty much universally reviled:

It didn’t do well at the box office, and Kitchen Sink was apparently left with a barn full of merchandise, which led to their next bankruptcy.

But we’ve got a few more blog posts to go before that, so I’ll cover that more in depth later.

Let’s see what people thought of this comic:

Alrighty. This was short, rambling, hard to follow, and seemingly pointless.

Indeed:

This was decent enough but ultimately felt like it was trying too hard to replicate the feel of the original and just really missed the mark with the writing in particular. I did like the art a lot though and that’s probably most of what saved this for me, that and the fact that I’m always here for a female Crow. Although I hate that it always seems to be related to the woman’s dead child. Between this and the woman from the TV show [which I really did love] I’ve got to roll my eyes a bit that male writers don’t seem to be able to see a role for women seeking revenge beyond dead children.

But opinions differ:

Author James Vance does an impressive job at developing the characters and uses the crow remarkably well to show the inner turmoil that Shaw goes through as she comes to terms with her situation and chooses her course of action.

This is the two hundredth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.