Mooned around the apartment for a while.
Went out to Trabant and worked on Rita. Didn’t get the next page done yet; my queue is slowly emptying again. After skittering away from it to poke at the web instead for a while, I finally realized that I needed to hash out some things that weren’t quite right about the next few pages I have roughed out. So I fixed that. Which involved adding another page to this chapter – but I’m still pretty damn close to the end of this book.
Then I went to the comic shop. Got some of the usual stuff, and, on a whim, browsed the quarter bins. In them, I found a couple treasures: a color Konny & Czu story by Howarth, and this crazy, crazy thing from 1989 called “Gammarauders”. It’s from DC, based on some wacked-out TSR boardgame about people piloting cybered-out giant animals in a comic post-apocalypse world. It is loud and garish and everything DC’s current comics are not, and I was immediately in love.
I mean, look at this craziness. It’s just so pop. All the full-bleed panels in an American sized comic book give it a real immediacy when it’s in your hands; I’m gonna have to experiment with this someday. And you can tell the artist is having a blast doing this.
Some research at home revealed that it ended after ten issues. Hunting up a torrent let me see the sad disintegration of it; after the first three issues, the original penciler started getting substituted for by someone with a much more normal DC style every other issue. And the original penciller’s pages started slowly looking more generic-DC, as well. Which is very sad because this “Martin King” guy had a really fun style that sat somewhere between American comics tradition and the Japanese action cartoons that were starting to become a cultural force over here; every page was just bursting with energy and craziness. The scriptwriter stayed the same for every issue, but the dreadfully sane art for half the books really dragged the whimsey down.
Martin King is kinda hard to find on the net, what with being overshadowed by Martin LUTHER King Jr. He seems to have drifted through DC fairly quickly; in addition to six issues of Gammarauders, a DC wiki credits him with all of five other comics, two of which are Who’s Who and thus probably just have a couple illos by him somewhere in them. If he’s done anything else for any other comics presses, I have no idea.
Anyway, now that I’ve read the entire run of this obscure piece of madness, I think it’s bedtime.