The GIfted Season 1 DVD Showcase

Skywald's Nightmare Issue 7 reprint by Gwandanaland Comics

 

TITLE-Nightmare issue 7
SOURCE-Gwandanaland Comic TPB

Nightmare was one of the 3 b/w magazine sized horror comics that Skywald published in the early 70s. While the art and stories were not always at the level of the Warren mags,like Creepy and 1984/1994,Skywald was a good second place in the B/W Horror Comic vein. Thankfully Skywald forgot to put a proper copyright notice on their magazines. Which means they are all Public Domain. So Gwandanaland Comics,a publisher that specializes in PD comic collections,a few years ago started reprinting all the Skywald mags. What I have here is cause I didn't read the description closely. I had already ordered a few volumes of Scream,another Skywald Horror Mag,and wanted to get some issues of Nightmare. I didn't read the description on Amazon closely. So instead of ordering a TPB that reprints 4 or 5 issues of the magazine,what I got is a thin TPB that reprints issue 7 of Nightmare.

In this issue we get 8 stories and one article. The article is on Dracula in cinema. And mostly talks about Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee.

The first story is The Penitent,wrote by Ed Fedoryi and the art credited to Ferran Sostres. Never heard of either creator. The story is told to us by a man with a long white beard. He is in prison and claims to be innocent. From what he tells and shows us it appears that this Prisoner lives in a world full of fantasy elements like dragons and Lizard-men. But like the Pre-Code horror comics these stories were inspired by we get a twist ending. Sadly it is a twist that sucks.

Group Jeopardy ,Script by S.F. Starr art by Amador,is up next.A group of people with various mental issues are at a place way out in the woods. And their doctor is trying to help them with their issues. But there is a mad killer on the loose who kills using a brutal bear hug. Thankfully the twist in this story is way better than the one in the first story.

Our third tale is The Giant Death Rat. At a wharf a group of rats are trying to get on a cargo ship that is headed to the new world,AKA North America. A few weeks after the ship is out in the ocean someone in the kitchen sees one of the rats. The captain gives an order to find the rat or everyone on board will die of the Plague. They don't find the rat,but not long afterwards one of the sailors comes down with a deathly illness. By the end of this 7 page story all but a few of the sailors are either dead or dying from the plague. The ship is set on fire to prevent the plague from spreading. And we go back to the wharf. The rats tell us how they are glad they didn't go on the ship since one of the humans aboard had the plague. Decent twist ending on this one and great art.

Batting clean up,aka Fourth,is GASP! A 3 pager that feels like a story rejected by every horror publisher so far. The twist at the end is just dumb. This one has art and script by Donald Brown. And yea the art isn't good and the story sucks.

After the 4th story is the 6 pager on Dracula in Cinema. Nothing in here any horror fan didn't already know. But I'm sure back when this came out and we didn't have as easy an access to info this article might have been pretty good.

5th story is The Alter of Blood. Which has the best art of story in this issue. That gorgeous art is by Pablo Marcos and Bob Kirschen is the writer. The story sadly isn't as good as the art. A demoness in Hell is trying to take over all of Hell. This 6 pager I am betting was aimed at the teenage boy audience that wasn't old enough to buy Playboy but could buy a horror comic.

A Father's Lament is our 6th story. Script by Ed Fedory and art chores are handled by Frank Cueto. A father and his son are off hunting in the woods. They find a body of a man. This man has a large ax in the middle of his chest. In the body's pocket they find a journal. Learning that the man was hunting a werewolf.  A werewolf that killed his family.  After what appears to be years of hunting this killer werewolf the man gets the upper hand and burys a silver ax in the chest of the lupine monster. This is where we learn the werewolf is the son. Our father and son team of hunters are shocked by this story they read. And the father let's his greed get the best of him. He removes the ax from the body's chest. Planning on selling the ax since it's head is silver. The son tells him to not do this since it is cursed. But the father ignores his son. And the story ends with the hunters talking about how hard it must have been on the father to kill his son,even if he is a killer werewolf,and off in the distance we see the werewolf alive again and about to attack the 2 hunters.

Lucky number 7 is Artifacts. A Sci Fi short story I have seen done many times before. A new World War happens. Most of mankind dies. The small band of survivors leave some sacred artifacts hidden in a cave. A few hundred years later some aliens that look like Vaughn Bode Lizards land on Earth. Go into the cave and find these artifacts. One of which is a metal disc. This is opened and inside they find a reel of 35mm film. The Bode Aliens rig up a projector and we see that this film reel is a Looney Tunes short!!  Script and art on this one are handled by Dennis Fujitake. Loved the art and the story was decent,even if I have read/saw variants of it for decades.

Our final story  is scripted by Al Hewetson with TORRENTS handling the art. I do wonder who TORRENTS is. This is a Sci Fi story heavily inspired by the mythos of HP Lovecraft.  And while it has some really nice looking art the story is crap. Like the Alter of Blood story this is one where you are better off looking at the art and making up your own story to go along with it.

Now with any Gwandanaland Comic you have to remember all they do is either find scans of the comics or get the comic and do the scans themself. They do not touch up the art or alter it in anyway. With their Skywald stuff the only thing that is changed is the ad pages and some of the text pieces are removed. This reprinting a single issue of Nightmare means it has 70 pages. IIRC it was like 8 bucks on Amazon. The bit of looking I have done on Skywald stuff is any issue of their horror comic mags in decent shape will run you way more than 8 bucks. So this reprint from Gwandanaland is a great deal.

The art in almost all the stories is really good. With GASP! being the only one with what I would consider bad art. Out of the 8 stories in the issue 3 of them I found to be pretty damn good. The others went from readable to Skip the story and just enjoy the pretty art level.

If you enjoy horror comics. And have read all the Creepy and Eeries stuff give one of the Skywald collections from Gwandanaland Comics a try.

The Saga of the Victims TPB from Gwandanaland Comics

 

TITLE-The Saga of the Victims
SOURCE-Gwanadanaland Comics #2420

Off and on for the past 20 years I have heard about "The Saga of the Victims". This was a 6 chapter comic serial. Appearing in issues of Skywald Publishing's Scream horror magazine. Scream was a clone of Warren's better known Eerie and Creepy

 

Josey Foster and Anne Adams are college students. Going to a fancy private college. Then one night their dorm gets invaded by demonic looking beings from below the Earth's surface. They learn that the leader of these dwellers from below is the Head Mistress of their college. Using their brains and a bit of luck our two college ladies escape. But end chapter one in a room where a man with no skin has just walked in.

And with this first chapter ,running 20 pages of gorgeous B/w art from artist Suso,establishes the forumula we would get in the next 4 chapters. Each starts off with "the Victims" escaping a cliffhanger from the last chapter. They run into something even more odd and creepy. End up about to die and chapter ends.

Like how they end up on a pirate ship full of zombie pirates. Josey and Anne are made to walk the plank. They fall into a shark infest sea. But a giant squid grabs them and drags them deeper into the sea.

But wait that Giant Squid is actually a submarine. Captained by a midget Nazi,who goes around the world in his Squid-Sub terrorizing various seaside towns and cities.

Just when I thought the writer,Alan Neweteon,couldn't top a Midget Nazi who piloted a Squid-Sub he strands the Victims deep in the darkest jungle. Where they get captured by a tribe of cannbials lead by a giant man who got a masters in psyhcology from Harvard

In the final chapter in this trade,Chapter 5,our leads faced all kinds of insane deathtraps

Before being put into a odd looking spaceship. Being taken to a huge castle.

Which in the final panel takes off into space. All through out the 5 chapters we keep being told that someone/something is torturing the Victims and will keep doing it till they two ladies give up. In Chapter 5 they strongly suggest that in chapter 6 we will learn who/what this ringleader is. And why they chose Josey and Anne to be the Victims.

Now I have hinted that this TPB doesn't contain every chapter of this sadly forgotten batshit insane comic serial.And there is a major reason for that. See Scream was a magazine sized comic that got published by Skywald. Skywald never put a proper copyright notice in their comic mags. Which means they are all public domain now. The issue of Scream that Chapter 5 ,issue 11 aka the Winter of 75 special,was the last issue of Scream to be published.

So what about the final chapter? Well from what I can find it has been published 2 times now. Once was in a horror comic that was published in Spain. This version is of course in Spanish. Then in the early 2000s there was a small print run of a hardcover collection. This collection has ,IIRC in color,all 6 chapters of The Saga of the Victims in English. This hardcover is long out of print. I keep checking a few used book sites and never find a copy for less than 200 bucks.

Honestly even with the story being incomplete this collection is worth grabbing. All of Gwandanaland Comics can be found for sale on Amazon. Or you can buy direct from Lance,the guy who runs Gwandanaland. If you buy direct from him you can get the volumes a slight bit cheaper but have to pay for shipping. Either way you get them they are made by Amazon's print on demand service. I think for the cheap price this volume is worth it. 

Trouble by Mark Millar and Terry Dodson or Is it as bad as Fanboys have said it is?

 

Since about 2005,closing in on 20 years almost,I have been seeing fanboys online and in person bitch about how horrible Trouble from Marvel was. I figured it was a combo of how many hate Mark Millar now and well the plan to have this 5 issue mini series being a "origin" for Spider-Man,more than likely the Ultimate Universe version of Spidey.

I never saw the issues in the cheap bins and until 2011 there wasn't a hardcover release. Then last year at a Books a Million I found 3 of the 5 issues for a buck each. Figured what the hell and took a chance. Read the first issue and knew then I had to have a nice collection of this series.

Terry Dodson does some amazing art. While the style of the art is modern it fits into the late 60s/mid 70s era the comic is set in. If I recall correctly Dodson's first published artwork in comics was the Rod Stewart issue of Rock N Roll Comix.

Now onto the Mark Millar written story. Mary and May are two 17 year old friends who go to work at a resort in the Hamptons one summer. There they meet Ben,the older brother,and Richie. May is the wilder of the two young adult women and starts dating Ben. Mary is more reserved and ends up quickly in love with Richie. Many years ago a fortune teller told the two girls that "No one will call you Mom" directed at May and "If you sleep with a man before marriage you will be a mother before you are 20" directed at Mary. This more than likely pile of garbage causes the two women to act very differently.May ends up sleeping with Ben,while using protection each time. But Mary lets Richie know early on that she "isn't that type of girl". 

Richie is ok with this and the quieter slightly nerdy Ben is very happy with this. Then after some rich assholes treat May bad one day at work Richie and May have sex. Which turns into them having sex often. They don't really like each other,but they appear to enjoy having sex with each other.

May thinking she will never be a mother doesn't use protection when she is with Richie,and she turns up pregnant. She refuses to abort the child,she knows her father will be physically abusive to her and her mother if he learns. So May runs away. Ends up living with an abusive piece of trash. When May reveals to Ben she is pregnant he lets her know that he is sterile.

Skip ahead a bit. Mary and May get back in touch. And Mary offers a solution to all the mess.Mary will take the child and raise it with Richie. 

And so if you believe that May is the Aunt May of Spider-man fame well that means that Peter Parker's dear elderly Aunt May is really his birth mother. 

For me,well I like this reveal. Sure there is a few things in the comic and Spider-Man's continuity that makes this story not work fully. Like how in the 616 Marvel Universe Aunt May is suppose to be many many years older than Peter Parker's parents. But then in the 616 comics I seem to remember at least a few times it being said that Uncle Ben and Aunt May were not able to have children which is one of the reasons why they were so happy to raise lil Peter Parker. 

The story really reads like a modern take on one of Marvels many 60s thru early 70s romance comics. I have read at the most 10 issues of the old Marvel Romance comics and this really feels like a expanded version. Instead of 22 pages we got 5 times that much.

Dodson's art to me looks like classic Romita Sr romance comic art mixed with modern Adam Hughes. The colors are bright and look great on the high gloss paper used in the hardcover.

And how is the hardcover? It is nice. the dustjacket has some really nice Dodson art on front and back. The interior pages are the issues,plus all the covers. Including the second printing of issue 1's cover. Which has some great Frank Cho artwork.

Since it appears this hardcover had way more printed then there is demand for you can find new old stock copies for under 10 bucks with a bit of searching. I am very happy with what I paid for this.

Trouble Hardcover is a good read with nice art. So instead of just believing what a bunch of whiny fanboys wrote online,go grab a cheap copy and read it and make up your own mind.

Disney Frozen Issue 2

 

TITLE-Disney Frozen Issue 2

PUBLISHER-Peachtree Playthings

It was last year in the early spring that I discovered Disney had a line of 4 monthly comics. These comics were exculsive to the Dollar Tree chain of stores. Cost a buck an issue and have 22 pages of story. 

This second issue of the Frozen title contains 2 stories. "Just When You Weren't Looking" and "Travel Arendelle"Both stories are credited to Georgia Ball on the writing side and a combination of Benedettta Barone/Michela Cacciatore/Grafimated on the art side.

Heads up I have so far managed to not see either of the Frozen films. Not really avoiding them just haven't seen them.

The first story has two brothers who are cooks and feuding. So Elsa talks to the rest of the village to get the feud to stop. Nothing amazing storywise but the art and colors looks really nice.

Elsa,Anna and Olaf got camping and hiking in the second story. But a avalanche takes out their canoe and tent. So the three have to survive and make their way back home. This story was a bit better than the first one. And has the same nice art and coloring.

Now sure I'm not the target audience for this title. And even with that I still feel like I got my buck's worth of entertainement out of this title. 

Rock N Roll Comix Sex Pistols Issue Flipthru