Due to the Shooter news, today I will re-read some of my favorite Defiant and Broadway comics.
Here is an art by Fiffe I commissioned some years back of one of my favorite Defiant characters, Lorca from Warriors of Plasm - created by Jim Shooter and David Lapham.
View attachment 86026
Man, that rocks! David Lapham is a favourite of mine, i need to keep reading Stray Bullets.
Oh Jesus, you just unlocked a memory on that one. I entirely forgot about that bizarre story until just now, somehow.
"And you'll never guess that it's all the same guy!"
I went down a weird rabbit hole last night of reading through digital scans of Black Belt magazine which was unintentional comedy and cringe gold, then somehow ended up on Savage Sword of Conan as one does, I guess. Read through the first five original issues or so, the story adaptations of the actual Howard written stories were fantastic of course; I particularly liked the Mistress of Death adaptation from the first issue, 'Curse of the Undead-Man'. The original story was unfinished by Howard himself (it was finished by another author), so they took a lot of liberties with it to say the least. Neither Red Sonja or Conan were in the original story, and they both replace the actual original main character of Dark Agnes de Chastillon who I only learned about a few weeks ago in a strange sort of coincidence. The Dark Agnes stories only got published in the 70's, 40 years after Howard's death, so makes sense why I'd never really heard much of them. Anyway, the story as an adaptation is pretty bad considering it's barely one, but that Buscema art? Hell yeah.
View attachment 86459View attachment 86460
If you like Buscema's work, there's a Hulk story done for Marvel: Shadows and Light in full black and white, one of his last works and one of his best. Buscema in Conan (with or without Alcala's inks) is always a delight, but i have a soft spot for the old Kull the Conqueror title published by Marvel, drawn by John and Marie Severin and sometimes by Bernie Wrightson (who did the adaptation of The Skull of Silence, originally a Conan history). The Severin's are a hell of a team, and a very underrated one considering that both are an important part of comics history. As for Jim Shooter, i remember when Chris Claremont told him the idea for Marada the She-Wolf (originally planned as a Red Sonja graphic novel) and Shooter told him that the idea was too good for Sonja, encouraging him to use a creator-owned character for the project. The man was a complex one, full of lights and shadows, but personally i'm eternally gratefull for giving the keys of Daredevil to a young man from Vermont called Frank Miller.
I am surprised Vertigo does not get more love, though I reckon Dark Horse acquired some properties?
I love everything Vertigo publishes. I can barely stand kids comics anymore, Dark Horse is cool tho, much more real with regards of the Human Condition even when it comes to "Super Heroes".
Vertigo was huge in his time, but the last comebacks done in this century where nowhere near as good as the classic era of the imprint. Dark Horse has an imprint called Berger Books, directed by the ex-EIC of Vertigo Karen Berger, who publish new titles like The Seeds (by Ann Nocenti and David Aja) and republish cult classics like Enigma (a must-read by Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo) and Air. More info here:
Dark Horse Comics is the third-largest comics publisher in the U.S., known for such titles as Aliens and Hellboy.
www.darkhorse.com
Back in the day, Vertigo published many miniseries (Strange Adventures, Weird War Tales, Flicnh) and one-shots like the Vertigo Visions or Vertigo Voices, there's great stuff in there (Doctor Occult: A Waltz of Scream, Prez: Smell like Teen President and The Geek: Corruption of the Innocent are my favourites), it's really a world to explore, full of great writers and artists.
Originally Vertigo was meant to be published by Disney in a imprint called Touchmark, but the project was cancelled and many of the comics planned where published by Vertigo (like The Extremist, another Milligan comic that i love).
