An exception to our rule! ragic Nerds guy Chris Wart here. We don’t usually promote independent books ’cause there’s nothing in it for us, but Mad Dog Murderboy’s amazing Road-Killa art (along with his persuasive letter) convinced us otherwise! Buy his book, please! And now your letters!
T
Yo Dudes of Whizzerdom, I read every issue of your mag from cover to cover and there’s so much stuff in it that the great thing is I don’t really have the time or need to read any actual comic books anymore! I’d rather read your coolness anyway! But the other day I went and snatched up a new issue and took it to my crib to enjoy many pages of greasy looking women with those big perfectly round breasts like you would see airbrushed on the side of a rockin’ van, dozens of kickin’ scowling heroes with crazy eyes and those wicked cool teeth that go all around their heads, and what do I find? It’s like half black and white and there’s all these weird ads and columns and stuff about really old comics and so I checked the cover and it’s totally like not even Whizzer! It’s some Comics Buyer’s Guise deal, man! They are totally ripping you off, man! You should sue them or something cause a lot of your readers are going to get really cheesed off when it happens to them! SEXY BLOODSAW FENTON shreddingduderuler@hotmilk.com
SBF! We tell our readers again and again, “You got to read the title!” And further, if it ain’t in a plastic bag and a bunch of useless s--t doesn’t fall out when you open it, it ain’t us! Whizzified Ones, Where are the fart jokes? I read your whole mag and couldn’t find a single one! What gives here? You guys are slipping! KENT FIGURE Bohunk, Duh
Kentington! Check the cover and make sure it was Whizzer you bought. Ugh, just a second... (BRUMMMMPH!) That was a good one. Wish you could get a whiff! Better? Whizzadocious Wildmen, Your magazine is the greatest thing going! I wouldn’t know what to buy without it. However, I do notice that you never seem to mention TwoMorons, Gallstone, Dark Hoss, or any other publishers but Mangle and BC. Is there a reason for this? Are there no other comics or comics-related magazines worth our time and money out there? TY MALONE Socio Path, Ill
No—and we never even heard of those companies you mentioned. They must be really small and insignificant or we would know about them. We only bring you the stuff that counts and that we know is great. See their big ads all over every issue of Whizzer! That’s how you know they’re good! Dear Whizzer, I wanna end your letters column! I just wanna fill up the space you have at the bottom of the page and I’ll do anything you want for the chance! Please! SELMA BODY Anything, OK Y.I. OTTA, Nyuk, Nyuk, NYUK
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WHIZZER 666
Dang! You almost made it, but this line’s the bottom. Sorry!
WRITER: Crank Filler ARTIST: Crank Filler As the comics community continues to flounder about for some relevance, Crank does what Crank does best! He delivers good old sex and violence, and sales are soaring for first editions of his Skin City knockouts! Crank’s books are presented in glorious black-and-white and are easy to read, have no big words or complicated stories, and have lots of sexy babes and big tough gritty guys who cuss and bleed like crazy! Slab some of these quick, gang!
WRITER: Bob Burgerbiter ARTISTS: Bob Burgerbiter and his Mom It’s the end of the world! Yeah, again. And what do you think? Why, the Living Dead go out and stumble around like always. But not ZOMBIE MILKMAN who just keeps trying to deliver this sour milk. He doesn’t know what else to do—he’s dead, okay? This rare gem comes from the hottest artist in the HOT COW stable, Bob Burgerbiter, and they are flying off the shelves, so better get yours before the price gets even higher!
WRITER: Derek Potcalling ARTISTS: Stiggy Kettleblack
WRITER: Stephen Kink ARTIST: Alex Tooth
The British Invasion rides again as rock and rollers who take too many drugs break through to another dimension. Don’t miss this super-hot import! It even comes with a little packet of some kind of white powder stapled on and seems to have three or four pages printed right on top of one another on each page. It’s incomprehensible, but if you use what’s in the packet, you won’t care!
They laughed when Classics tried to foist this one on them back in the Stone Age Sixties, but it’s been rediscovered in a warehouse—a box of unsold copies are now available and going fast! Better hurry because the convention season is coming and the word is out on these limited super-rare masterpieces of inspired commercial madness! This is the rarest of all Classics and rather a mystery since it was done before the author even wrote the story! Wooooooh!
WRITER: Brainy Marshall Bender ARTISTS: Tempura Shrimpe & Hamfist Schlock
WRITERS: Tim Barton and The Studio ARTISTS: Tim Barton, Rich “Spindly” Heimlich, and Goth Anorexia
The rebooted X-Men/Hulk Hybrid series with the special Variant cover—where the artist wasn’t sure if the big guy in the foreground was supposed to be the Beastie or Woolyverine, so he kind of fudged and made him a little of both—is one of the hardest of all comics to find! A very small number of these were printed and the prices are skyrocketing. The even rarer version where Marvel Hulk Girl has a moustache is now completely gone! Don’t waste another moment without this one, wise investors!
WRITER: Jamal Zimbabwe Dillingham ARTISTS: Chili Dogg Jones and Da Hoodwinks YO YO YO! It’s da Pantha in da Hood doin’ his thang like you always knew he should. No jive-ass Vibranium Bling and electric jungle bullshizzle. Jamal and Chili promised to keep it real and that’s the deal! This one’s so hot we have to put copies in asbestos bags, homies! That Black Pantha is one bad mamajamma straight up! Unh. Yeeyuh! Prices are already on the rise so you better recognize! Black Pantha Represent! B’lee dat!
Barton’s first entry into the comics field is dynamite. He even sketched the idea for the cover on a napkin and showed it to his team—his only actual contribution—but somehow the Barton magic comes through! (While lensing his remake of The Wizard of Oz, when the house fell on the Wicked Witch and only her stripe- sock clad legs were showing, the crew was horrified to find that it was Barton himself under the house! Thank God he lived or NOBODY could afford a copy!)
WRITER: Howard Shakin ARTIST: Howard Shakin Whole lotta Shakin goin on with this one! Hot babes and really cool designs for chairs and cars and stuff! Sound effects and outstanding lettering for days! This one’s so hot we can hardly get copies bagged and boarded before greedy speculators swarm in and grab them all up! Don’t miss the notorious lube job scene! A number of parental complaints surround this baby so you KNOW it’s the one to hoard!
WRITER: Jake Herbie ARTIST: Jake Herbie
WRITER: Alvin Moose ARTIST: Dave Meatandpotatos Giblets
When the kids play baseball on the harsh world of Epoxylips, they don’t mess around! Read TAKE ME OUT AT THE BALLGAME! Don’t miss this key issue from Herbie’s celebrated Fourth Whirl in the comics biz. See how great he was before certain evil snaky bastards in the company showed their true colors. Those would be green and yellow, as in jealous cowards!
Leave it to those wacky Brits to re-invent our superfolks and turn them into something new and generally highly disagreeable! But boy do they sell! Especially the reinvention of Kal-Hoon, the ACTION hero that started it all. The first issue of this groundbreaking run goes for $1K in CFGC NM! Get it ASAP or be SOL!
WHIZZER 666
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Sergeant Saltoposuchus! hit the floor and gimme fifty push-ups if you don’t remember him!
AbOve: The issue that started it all! RighT: A Joke hubert guest cover!
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Comic Book Meatmarket 187
November 2004
THE WAR THAT TIME WISHES HAD HAPPENED! But we got to see it anyway! by Jennifer N. Cognito
I
n the early 1960s, as interest began to wane in the previously popular genre of war comics, Rational Periodicals came up with a unique twist on the now— tired subject matter. Always keen to keep up with the readers’ interest in the latest fads of the moment, Rational created a brilliant new line of comics which featured not only our fighting forces, but combined them with nothing less than dinosaurs; a favorite subject of kids everywhere! The exciting mix of soldiers and saurians gave us one of the best series of comics ever produced: Star Spangled
Dinosaurs! What sane kid could resist the fabulous depictions of machine guns ripping through million-year-old monsters or G.I.s roasting them with flame-throwers? Glorious stuff! Right from the start, the clever pairing proved a smash success as the books flew from the racks! Month after month we were treated to the spectacle of fearless WWII fighting men stranded on various Pacific atolls lost in time and engaged in furious battles with the giant prehistoric monsters that once ruled the world! We were treated to what is truly a high water mark in the history of comics. Let us celebrate it once again in these pages...
Other books were rushed into production to cash in—but with less success.
November 2004
Comic Book Meatmarket 187
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SHUT
UP AND
Dear Silver Sage: Gramps “Grisly” Tingles is a legend in the field of horror comics, perhaps the unquestioned master of the macabre. But so little is known about the history of this reclusive genius; can you clue us in, and tell us where he is today? X. Post Facto Walla Walla Bing-Bang, Wash. (Well, yes and no, X. Tingles’ first published work was for Mortician’s Hi-Jinx, an obscure trade magazine designed to cheer up workers in funeral parlors, in 1942. It seems the die was cast for the sullen teenager even then as he was dismissed by Crackly Grimpenmire, the publisher, after only a few of his dreadful cartoons saw print. In World War II, he illustrated propaganda for the Army, designed to repulse and demoralize the enemy. It must have worked as the war ended shortly after he enlisted. He returned to the United States and found work in comics, moving from company to company until he finally found his niche at Gill Baines’ Enterprising Comics (EC). His work was featured in Hideous Psycho Science, Ugly Terror Horror, and the Vault of Nausea, and those books are where he made his indelible mark on the comics business. Tingles is a notorious recluse and few people ever knew him personally—or wanted to! I'd like to bring you some exclusive tidbits about our horrendous hero, but his whereabouts are now unknown! Recently something came to my attention which, although surely a twisted joke or hoax, will nonetheless be of interest to Tingles’ fans one way or another! It seems a packet was forwarded to the CBG offices by the State Mental Hospital at Sefton, Massachusetts, which contained a spiral notebook crammed with essays and articles on comic books, some interviews with veterans from the EC days, and an odd crumpled photograph which was paperclipped to the book. Since the cancellation of Comic Book Meatmarket, publisher Rust Cockroach has been missing from the comics fandom scene. I was sorry to hear of his troubles, for it was in fact his journal that I received. The pertinent data has been carefully transcribed from his crisp handwriting. Here then is the story of Rust Cockroach and his visit with Gramps “Grisly” Tingles; a little thing we might entitle The Call Of The Crackpot, or The Notebook From The Institution.)
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Comics Buyer’s Guise #8,832,948 • June 2006
OCT. 25 Received a letter from Dimswitch today! YES! I have finally found Tingles! Further he has invited me to visit him in his home and conduct the first interview with one of the most reclusive and private creators in the industry. I expected a reply, if I ever received such, to come in an ancient yellowed envelope bearing archaic stamps and sealed with blood red wax bearing an imprint of something not altogether a bat nor an octopus impressed into its glossy surface, stuffed with parchment of disturbing texture and covered with crabbed spidery characters warning me to stay away if I valued life and sanity.... but no. It was a small crisp envelope, with an Easter Seal stamp, and a brisk, neatly typed note inviting me to his domicile and providing directions thereto! I am sure matters will become more sinister as the day approaches, for the day is none other than Halloween! OCT. 29 The time draws near... I shudder with a mixture of dread and eagerness which swirls in my fevered mind. To what den of damnation am I being drawn, lured by my own mad desire to meet the man responsible for so many nightmares! OCT. 30 Tomorrow will be the day I set forth into the wild Massachusetts hills in search of I know not what! Perhaps I should reconsider while there is still time. I have pored over the written directions and unassuming hand-drawn map to shadowhaunted Dimswitch! Yet no distant howling assails my ears this night, no fevered scratchings and
Comics Buyer’s Guise #8,832,948 • June 2006
fumblings at my door disturb the calm fall evening. Everything is disappointingly still and prosaic if the truth be known. But tomorrow, ah, tomorrow I shall embark into the realm of mystery! NOV. 1 Back home again... still stunned at the tale I must tell... but let me relive the day... I set out at noon for the four PM meeting, motoring briskly up the new Turnpike past cornfields and shops selling fresh homemade cider, the cool air making my nostrils stick together unpleasantly until I rolled up the window. Surely when I reached the deceptively named Blossom Hill Road turnoff the sky would begin to cloud and darken... the road would narrow as it wound into the hills and great swollen trees loomed suffocatingly close on all sides and icy wine-dark streams which had never seen the sun flowed like sluggish cold blood in the veins of a vast slumbering monster... but no. The road was pleasant and dotted with fast food emporia and neat newly-built houses with bicycles and basketball hoops bespeaking happy burgeoning families within. No strangely deformed cats or dogs darted across my path, no brittle monstrous unknown fungi or vegetation waved eerily in the breeze. Nothing. At last I came to the intersection of Happy Valley Glen, doubtless renamed from Gibbet Way or Unwholesome Path or something like that. Surely, I thought, this road, as I made the left turn indicated by the map, would lead through a dank reed-choked swamp where gnarled branches of stark leaf-stripped trees reached toward the gray pitiless sky begging for mercy, for release from the visions which stalked through their dark alleyways when the sun sank like a wan old hag into a quicksand bog... but no.
(Above) Examples of Gramps’ work for EC. When told his cover for Hideous Psycho Science was unfit for children, he changed it to the rendering shown below. Poor Grisly! It’s possible these experiences led to his seclusion.
(Previous page) A Grisley self-portrait.
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“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” Test Now we know what you’re thinking: This is one of our smartass articles designed to belittle you. Well, of course it is! If that bothers you, skip the whole thing and continue to thumb through this issue looking for something you might actually be interested in, and won’t feel stupid reading. There isn’t anything like that, but you can look. The fact that you bought this magazine indicates some non-idiot potential. You may know the major publishers hate us so much they won’t talk to us, so we are not likely to have news most idiot comic readers give a s--t about. But sometimes we can start fights or spread juicy rumors and get people mad at each other and then print their letters and threats while they’re flying fast and furious. That’s fun and everybody likes that. We at The Comics Urinal have had our genius cognoscenti (mainly Harry Growth and Kim Thompthon) devise this little twenty question test for you. Answer these questions as honestly as your ego will allow, to determine if you’re an idiot or not. 1) Do you lose time from work due to reading comic books? ❏ Yes ❏ No 2) Do comic books make your home life unhappy? ❏ Yes ❏ No 3) Do you read comic books (as opposed to real books) because you need pictures to hold your attention? ❏ Yes ❏ No 4) Does comic book reading and talking about comic books on the Internet take up more than twelve hours of an average day? ❏ Yes ❏ No 5) Have you ever spent so much money on a comic book that you had to lie to your family about it? ❏ Yes ❏ No 6) Have you ever turned down sex because you wanted to finish reading a comic book first? (Skip this one if you’ve never had sex.) ❏ Yes ❏ No 7) Do you turn to lower companions and an inferior environment, such as a comic book shop or convention, while looking for ever more comic books? ❏ Yes ❏ No 58
8) Do you go crazy on holidays when the weekly comic book shipment gets pushed back a day? ❏ Yes ❏ No 9) Have you ever dressed up like a comic book character (after the age of ten)? ❏ Yes ❏ No 10) Do you read comic books while crossing streets? ❏ Yes ❏ No 11) Do you crave a comic book first thing in the morning? ❏ Yes ❏ No 12) Does comic book reading cause you to have trouble sleeping because you’re afraid you'll miss an issue of an extensive crossover? ❏ Yes ❏ No 13) Have you ever bought all versions of a comic book with “variant” covers? ❏ Yes ❏ No 14) Are any of your comic books “slabbed”? ❏ Yes ❏ No 15) Do you read certain comics books like a duty, even if you don’t like them? ❏ Yes ❏ No
16) Do you read comic books alone? ❏ Yes ❏ No 17) Have you ever had a complete loss of memory as a result of a comic book? ❏ Yes ❏ No 17) Have you ever had a complete loss of memory as a result of a comic book? (just making sure you’re paying attention...) ❏ Yes ❏ No 18) Has your physician ever treated you for reading comic books? ❏ Yes ❏ No 19) Have you ever tried to read a comic book while driving a car? ❏ Yes ❏ No 20) Have you ever been to a hospital or institution as a result of reading comic books? ❏ Yes ❏ No
Done? Want your score? It doesn’t matter; if you even took the test, you are an idiot. But if you buy only Fancygraphics books for a year, you may be able to hide it better.