BECAUSE PATREON DEMANDED IT! Network all-stars Rob, Shag, and Paul are joined by Tom Panarese to discuss their favorite independent comics of the 1980s and 1990s!
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I didn’t think I would have much to say on this topic, which is why I didn’t ask to be part of it, but the more I listened, the more little indy books I remembered.
For the first couple years that I read comics, I would only pickup what I saw at the local grocery store, or sometimes a Walden Books, and it was all Marvel and DC. I didn’t start going to an actual comic shop until a new one opened up a couple miles down the street from my house and I could ride my bike there. Before long, I was “old enough” to ride my bike to three different stores that sold comics, but anyway… That was 1991, I think, that Fantasy Comics opened up; I think they were only open a couple of months before Image Comics launched.
The reason I’m mentioning this is because that store framed how I thought of independent comics. Fantasy Comics was a small store. One wall was lined with a bunch of longboxes of back issues. Two walls had shelves with the new-ish releases. And then they had two long folding tables in the middle of the store. That week’s new comics were laid out on those folding tables, each title stacked with however many copies they got. And a lot of the Image and Dark Horse comics got almost as many copies as the Marvel and DC (aside from X-Men, Spider-Man, and Batman, naturally). So I never thought of Image and Dark Horse as indy publishers. Smaller and newer than Marvel and DC, yes, but just as popular from what I could see.
And there were months or years that I bought more Image and Dark Horse than the Big Two. I was there at the ground floor for Image, and yet I never read more than the first issue of Spawn, Savage Dragon, and Youngblood. Those didn’t interest me, but I liked WildC.A.T.s, Wetworks (when it came out three years late), Stormwatch, and later books like Gen 13, and the Maxx, and Kieth Giffen’s Trencher. I definitely leaned more toward Jim Lee’s Homage Studios imprint that he eventually sold to DC. I got tons of Dark Horse Comics, like Star Wars, Aliens, Hellboy, Sin City–probably the fact that they had so many licensed comics from popular movies I watched helped Dark Horse feel bigger and more legitimate to me. From them I also read Propeller Man, The Black Pearl, and Zombie World.
From the smaller tier, actual independent publishers, I read Poison Elves, though infrequently, and Poe, both published by Sirius Comics. SCUD the Disposable Assassin, and sometimes Zen, the Intergalactic Ninja. When I could find it, I read Creed, written and drawn by Trent Kaniuga, published by Lightning Comics, after I met him at a convention in Chicago in 1996. I always liked the look of the Valiant superhero comics, but never got into any of them. Don’t think I even tried many/any of them.
But you guys were right that independent publishers, Image in particular but not exclusively, are putting out some of the best comics today. Saga, Something is Killing the Children, all of Ed Brubaker’s titles like Criminal, Fatale, Fade Out; along with Jeff Lemire’s Gideon Falls, Essex County, and Black Hammer. Plus the current Conan the Barbarian by Titan books. The new Dick Tracy comic is really good. And for licensed ’80s nostalgia, Skybound (an imprint of Image) has their whole Energon Universe of connected boy properties including Transformers, G.I. Joe, M.A.S.K. and Rom, Spaceknight, all linked to a new book called Void Rivals, which is not based on a 1980s cartoon but seems like it should be. And those books are all really, really good. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series that’s been going for almost two decades now is really really good, too.
Now this was a great episode, especially given the sort of time capsule look at indies. You are all at or around my age so the experiences ring true. So my tale …
For me, at least back in the 80s, independent comics had three things. One was where you bought them. They were only at comic stores, not convenience stores. Second there was content. They were more ‘mature’ whether in theme or nudity or culture, they weren’t what Marvel or DC was selling. Lastly, they had to be independent in their story-telling. I wouldn’t consider Comico’s Robotech or Dark Horse’s Aliens were independent because they were beholden to the IPs. For sure Harmony Gold and Fox had some say in what those stories could be.
I back-pedaled into independent comics. I read Howard Chaykin’s The Shadow in 1986. I was taken by the story and art. I was just starting to follow creators and not just characters. So I went to the comic store and asked about him and was pointed to American Flagg. I bought a brick of back issues that day and read it through. It was just what a young teen wanted – counterculture, sex, humor, cynicism! I ate it up with a spoon. Flagg rules. (On a side note, that same store owner said ‘you like Chaykin, try this’ and handed me Black Kiss ……’)
That led me to try other indy creators and the one I grabbed on to the most was Ted McKeever. Plastic Forks, Metropolis AD, Eddy Current. That stuff is mind-altering.
I feel that DC’s other imprint Pirahna Press tried to grab that Indy book zeitgeist and I tried a bunch of that stuff too with Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children being the biggest hit for me.
Since then I have gone out of my way to try the classic stuff especially Mage. And I love Somerset Holmes.
Great discussion.
I listened to this episode as I made the 90 mile drive to my LCS (I know, 90 miles isn’t exactly local, but it’s the price I pay for living in the sticks). As soon as I picked up my new books I went straight to the “A’s” in the back issues and grabbed the only issue of Anything Goes! that they had, #5. Ryan sold it so well that I’m going to put it on top of my unread back issue pile.
Comico kept getting mentioned in the episode, so I was a little surprised when no one brought up Jonny Quest. A lot of great artists (Joe Stanton, Wendy Pini, Steve Rude…to name a few) drew issues and the stories kept much of the flavor of the cartoon, while elevating the content to a slightly more mature level.
My favorite independent book ever is probably Guy Davis’s punk Sherlock Holmes series, Baker Street. I wish I could say I bought them new, but I didn’t discover Davis until Sandman Mystery Theatre, so I bought the 10-issue series as a set at a convention in the mid-90s. Davis made a couple of appearances at the Chicago Comicon in the early Vertigo days, and he had a stack of pages for sale. Rather than buying a SMT page, I went for Baker Street ($35, if I remember correctly). Guy apologized that all the pages with Sam were already sold, but I was happy to get a Harlequin page.
Another Caliber book that I got into, albeit right around the time that it ended, was Oz. I think I bought the last four issues and have only found a few to fill out the series in the last 30 years (in fairness, I haven’t looked all the hard for them). As I remember it, it was kind of Game of Thrones set in the wonderful world of Oz.
And now I’m off to add some titles from the show to my already way-too-long back-issue shopping list.
I was slow to get into indies. Thanks to Mikes’ Amazing World I can verify that my first was as early as possible, with the Phil Foglio adaptation of Myth Adventures which came out around the same time as the Baxter Legion and Titans books, which made me seek out an actual comic book store. But nothing else grabbed me for about a year, when I started getting Cerebus, and beyond that it would be another long gap before I started following writers to their Indie books like Moore’s Miracleman or Miller’s Sin City and Give Me Liberty. I also discovered Matt Wagner around that time.
But I didn’t get into wider Indie comics until following Moore’s contributions led me to the anthologies Taboo and A1, introducing me to a bunch of other creators.
To mention a few great books that you didn’t mention, Puma Blues was beautiful and finally got an ending in the recent collection, Bacchus/Deadface did everything several recent Wonder Woman runs did first and better, and I always have had a soft spot for Hepcats. Oh, also Tyrant.
One of those Indie comics universes did succeed:Wildstorm.
Defining indie comics is tricky, especially when the meaning changes per generation. My barometer is: who owns the characters? Vertigo might publish indie-feeling stuff, but they’re owned by a corporation. Dark Horse was a scrappy publisher who landed globally recognized IP and grew from there; now they’re owned by a video game company.
Comico did it all — creator-owned and licensed work — but were always a small operation. Fantagraphics, too, luckily they’re still around. Image might *feel* mainstream, mostly because it has bona fide hits to its name, but it’s still individual contractors running their own mini-businesses.
Like I said, tricky! But it’s good to still talk about the books on the verge of being forgotten. I’m all about the DNAgents / Crossfire mentions.
I’ve got almost every title you guys discussed, except for Somerset Holmes.
The way I discovered a lot of indie books was the Amazing Heroes Preview Specials, until I found a store that carried them in depth.
Anything Goes was done to pay for the Fantagraphics lawsuit Mike Fleischer filed over comments by Harlan Ellison concerning the final fate of Jonah Hex.
There are some issues of Whisper that were colored by pre-BTAS Bruce Timm.
Warriors of Plasm #0 was in Capital’s Advance Comics catalog.
I could mention a huge stack of titles that it seems no one but me remembers: Hepcats, Very Vicky, Action Girl, and so many others. I even have a signed copy of Purgatory USA, Ed Brubaker’s first published comic.
My favorite indie comics of all time have to be Matt Howarth’s Those Annoying Post Brothers and Savage Henry They started at Vortex, who was best know for Mister X, then went to Rip Off and some other smaller publishers.. I would love it if he would re-release them.
Because of geography and lack of a car in college, I wasn’t able to regularly visit a comic shop until the mid-90s. I bought all my comics from the local newsstand from 1976ish-1987ish and they were DC, Marvel, and Harvey. I did have a few issues of Justice Machine from Comico and an issue or two of American Flagg. I knew about several of the big indie names from back in the day due to Amazing Heroes, Comics Scene, and the like which were available on magazine racks at our local grocery store.
These days, I probably read more indie books than anything else. Mad Cave has a really good Flash Gordon and Defenders of the Earth along with Gatchaman. Gargoyles is over at Dynamite with Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, ThunderCats and The Herculoids. Original independent properties that I loved but have now concluded are Black Hammer, Lumberjanes, Giant Days, The Great British Bump-Off, and Atari Swordquest.
Over at Image, there is the Energon line that Ryan Daly mentions and the Ghost Machine imprint from Geoff Johns, Peter Tomasi, Gary Frank, Francis Manapul, Ivan Reis, and others. My current favorite book, Redcoat, is part of the latter. My wife and I also really enjoy Feral from Image.
Speaking of my dear wife, she is a fan of Monstress, Saga, Velvet, Lady Mechanika, and a few others. And Gene Luen Yang has an entire catalog of fantastic graphic novels including Boxers and Saints, Dragon Hoops, American Born Chinese, and Lunar New Year Love Story. There is March, the multi-volume John Lewis autobiography. And if I can plug a project near and dear to me, Andrew Aydin (who co-wrote March w/ Congressman Lewis) put together an anthology called Islands in the Sky. Yang, Steve Orlando, Brian Michael Bendis, Matt Fraction, Greg Pat, and others team w/ survivors from Hurricane Helene in Appalachia to tell their stories.
I still read some DC books and a few Marvels, but it’s all the other stuff that gets me really excited nowadays. Thanks for this show. It was fun.
Oh, yeah! Great topic!
My first indy comic is one that’s so obscure I’m sure none of you have ever heard of it: Ismet, published by Canis Publications. If anyone’s interested in more details, I wrote about this mostly-forgotten book at very great length a number of years ago at another site. If you don’t want to bother, I’ll just say that a by-product of my introduction to that series was the discovery of my first comic book shop – fortuitously just a few months before Pacific Comics launched its line. So I was on the ground floor for that, picking up Captain Victory, Starslayer, Silverstar, Groo, Ms. Mystic (just the first issue) and several others. To this day, when someone mentions indy comics, I always think of Pacific first and foremost.
By the way, Rob, Somerset Holmes was reportedly optioned for a film, but then fell into development hell. Otherwise, if you ask Jones and series co-creator/-writer April Campbell, the movie was in fact made, as they have both claimed that the (quite excellent) Geena Davis film The Long Kiss Goodnight plagiarized Somerset Holmes.
Still listening to the episode, but ya’ll cover so much ground, I already feel like I’ll need to listen for a second time. As much as I love podcasts covering the Big Two, there’s such a dearth of coverage beyond them. But also, when I do come across such things, there’s a lot of airs being put on, and I never much cared to sniff farts. I was always more of an Amazing Heroes guy than a Comics Journal one. I like hearing from people who I like, trust, and relate to covering less mainstream material, so this episode is the most exciting thing from The Fire & Water Network for me in some time. It sounds like the four of you made it to everything you would have wanted to cover, but I’d love for another group of All-Stars offer up further editions.
One thing that prompted a quick response is that I wanted to conform that you were both right about Plasm #0. Yes, it was told through a collectible card set, but it was also an actual comic bound into the Previews catalog. Specifically, Vol. III, No. 6, June 1993, and I can speak with the certainty that comes with holding it in my left hand to read the spine as I type. It’s the one with an original Kelly Jones Knightfall wrap-inside cover and a perforated AzBats decorative image. It should have been a wraparound, but I think Marvel had a lien on the back cover, promoting X-Men 2099. Also bound-in are a game card promoting X-Men on Sega Genesis, a glossy NOW Comics circular promoting Mr. T & the T-Force, cut-out Comics Greatest World Golden City bookmarks, a Deathmate (Orange?) Preview comic, and cut-out Spawn “Spogz.” To me, it is a month of peak bursting-bubble hubris, and I think it may have been polybagged with even more worthless junk. The whole trading-card-as-comic was basically the worst of both worlds, as readers had no interest in packing out cards to complete a single comic book issue costing something like $50, and card collectors didn’t want a bunch of hard-to-read comic panels instead of character spotlights & stats. Also, pretty much everyone but the Tribe set cheated with actual comic book versions of the card stories. I have a podcast partly recorded on Majestic Entertainment’s catastrophic efforts in this area, but I haven’t had time to finish it.
From working on Terminator NOW, I can pull receipts on Rob’s claims that they were constantly screwing over– pretty much everybody, actually. I think that history of non-payment and broken contracts is how Steve Miller was able to reclaim the copyright on Rust, for whatever that was worth. I remember one creator was offered a pallet of unsold Astro Boy comics in lieu of actual payment. But they also burned printers, distributors, creditors– no one was safe. Majestic got up to similar, but weirder shenanigans, which I’ll get around to talking about eventually.
Another thing I hope to get back to on Comic Reader Resume was finally if briefly getting regular comic shop access in 1987, but I don’t recall actually buying any indy comics then. I was exposed to early TMNT through the few friends I made in Nevada, and then I found another comic shop in 1989 when we moved back to Texas. They had a lot of B&W and color bust books in their quarter bins, so I feasted on scraps. While I prefer color, I’m not prejudiced against black & white, so I sampled a lot of wild stuff (and wilder still when we moved to Colorado in 1991.)
In ’89, I sampled one of the worst issues of Grimjack, then started picking up Starslayer, where I discovered much better John Gaunt material in the back-ups. I was never wild for non-DC Mike Grell stuff, so his Pacific issues and his First Jon Sable stuff didn’t grab me. It was the John Ostrander material, especially once joined by Tim Truman, that powered me into becoming a devoted Grimjack fan with a complete set. That book was formative, and the reason I grew out my hair for the first time (and thanks to Jim Twilley, stumbled into a mullet.) Mike Gold had a very warm editorial voice across the line, and I loved their educational pieces on comics history and preservation. I sampled almost everything in their line at some point, but nothing remotely stuck the way Grimjack had. Regardless, I have a lot of affection for First, my second home after Marvel at the time. I was bummed out when I visited Chicago a few years ago how little trace I could find of First. I think it was just an amateur window painting that incorporated Grimjack.
I also liked the vibes at Eclipse Comics, particularly Catherine Yronwode and Dean Mullaney’s editorials, and that sick colophon (why didn’t McFarlane use that for his stupid “Spawnverse?”) My main issue with them was that all their books felt like the stuff the creators couldn’t sell to a bigger publisher, at a time when Epic, Heavy Metal, and Warren were still lucrative options. I didn’t have much access to Sabre in general, but especially not the Paul Gulacy issues, so I just bought Slash Maraud or Six from Sirius instead. I did catch an issue of his Valkyrie mini-series (hummina-hummina,) and have since collected both trades. Airboy looked like old man comics to me. I resented Tim Truman for leaving Grimjack for Scout, especially because he simply wasn’t the writer Ostrander was. I only ever read an issue or two of Zot, but I have a color collection from Kitchen Sink Press on my shelf. I bought an issue of Somerset Holmes out of prurient interest that didn’t not serve the intent, but it was a nice looking story that I’ve since skipped. I sorta liked ESPers when I got a cheap Epic trade of the mini-series. Next Wave, Freedom Project, and DNAgents (“Mini-O,” like the actor Sal Mineo) all looked off-brand to me, and I never saw a Miracleman in the wild back then. In recent years, I have put together runs/sets of Eclipse Monthly, Airboy & DNAgents to read someday, and I skimmed a lot of stuff when I finally read the risible Total Eclipse a while back. That tenth anniversary project did conclude, but none of the proposed spin-offs/reboots surfaced, and it helped kill Airboy. The project did not help their financial situation, but the 1986 flood was a cancer that slowly ate them up. They actually lasted six more years, though as a pale shadow of their former self.
I’m sure like a lot of people, I got into Evan Dorkin through Milk & Cheese, and have had refrigerator magnets up for about thirty years now, plus I had a t-shirt until it was destroyed (“Gin Makes A Man Mean! Everyone Booze Up And Riot!”) Before outgrowing their brand of mischief, that led me to Instant Piano, and the crown jewel, Dork! The Dorkin library is one of those things I keep re-buying, as trades, then hardcovers, and that recent softcover omnibus. I do the same thing with the other two-thirds of my grunge age slacker holy trinity of Peter Bagge’s Hate and Bob Fingerman’s Minimum Wage (which I’d argue holds up the best.) In the ’90s, when I finally had ordering catalogs and a little disposable income, I made the Fantagraphics/Drawn & Quarterly/art house rounds. Mary Fleener, Terry LeBan, Chester Brown, Julie Ducette, Dan Clowes, Dame Darcy, Jim Woodring, Roberta Gregory, Bob Burden– I gave every name a turn. One of my favorite, super-crude but insightful micro-press books was True Swamp by Jon Lewis, about an existentialist frog. I also really loved Jason Yungbluth’s extremely incorrect caustic satire Deep Fried, before he got lost in that lame Weapon Brown post-apocalyptic Peanuts crap.
I actually bought the first few issues of Scud, but it didn’t hold my attention. Neither did the first issues of Evil Ernie, Reid Fleming, or Too Much Coffee Man. I probably should have held on to that Evil Ernie, instead of trading it back to the shopkeeper that had recommended it. I loved Cry for Dawn so much. Linsner & Monks were on fire with that, and neither were as good once they decided that they hated each other’s guts. The edgy contemporary horror delivered for me in the way I was promised Clive Barker would, but never hit me the same way. I also snuck the occasional issue of Faust out of a shop, even though it was way too extreme for me to enjoy in any sense. The Tim Vigil art was extraordinary though, which is why I sprung for that Black Mask hardcover, and hope I don’t ever have to be sprung out of jail for possession of it.
I did my time trying to get into manga. I still idolize Ryoichi Ikegami, even if the stories his art served bored me. I was a bit into Vampire Princess Miyu, but more the anime. I collected Manga Vision into at least the second volume, but the only part that really stuck with me was Rumic Theater. I still look for the trade collection when I visit Half Price Books. Mostly though, Japanese storytelling doesn’t hold my attention, and I generally prefer less exaggerated character designs than are common in manga. I do like some hentai artists, but I think that’s too spicy for the Fire & Water Network. Ditto European erotica, like Milo Manara and Horacio Altuna. Plus, those guys are huge internationally, so it strains the definition of “indie.”
You can’t be a long time comics reader from the ’80s with any kind of open mind without crossing paths with Dark Horse. For some reason, I never vibed with their editorial, as even in the early days, they had a bit of corporate stink about them. Once they became the Chromium Age Dell and started making mostly insipid movies, it only got worse. I appreciated their rescuing the Baron/Rude and Grendel stuff from bankruptcies (plus they were home to Marshal Law for a while.) Like Rob, I want to enjoy Nexus far more than I’ve ever managed to, and I’ve struggled with Matt Wagner as well. Most of my Dark Horse exposure is the licensed stuff, and the lousy Comics Greatest World maxi-series. At least they supported Black Hammer.
Terry Moore is local, and yet he rarely turns up at Houston area conventions. He’s more of an Austin guy, I guess. I have a couple of Strangers in Paradise trades, and tried individual issues, but it just doesn’t do anything for me. Sadly, my favorite Moore thing ever was his cover to Lady Supreme #1, and that was no great shakes. I picked up The Crow in the three book prestige format Tundra reprints, and being unable to locate any Caliber issues (as seen in Comic Shop News.) That’s also where I first discovered Mike Allred and Madman.
I really love dead super-hero mini-universes, so I’ve been working on sets for titles like Hero Alliance, Justice Machine, Ex-Mutants, and Elementals. I’m still toying with putting together a Continuity Comics collection, and at least have a set of Samuree and a lot of cheapie bin finds. Samuree was the only one I bought new in the ’80s, at the only location outside the mall (a Circle K) where I could find them. I mean, it had Tom Savini and zombies and provocatively posed ninja girls. What’s not to love?
Okay, I’ve been typing for over an hour. I could go on for another one.
Oh, what a trip down memory lane this was. It made me realize how many comics I’d actually followed outside the mainstream.
A college buddy introduced me to Cerebus, leading me to get the first 4 phone books, and start collecting individual issues overlapping half of that fourth book, and kept buying all the way to 300. All I’ll say is he kept some parody going, and some cringy takes, and truly finished the series. I did also read my buddy’s normalman from Aardvark-Vanaheim, but I didn’t get it myself.
The other thing was Cerebus had backups was samples from other independent creators, which introduced me to Bone. I will say on record, it’s my favorite comic series. Period. Astounding with how much I love superheroes, but there you go.
Here’s some hot takes, trying to stay within the 80s and 90s:
Liberty Project: Huge love for that far too short series.
Dirty Pair: I bought every mini series I could get, and am still following Adam Warren’s work to this day.
Tales of the Aniverse: Funny animals in semi-serious sci-fi settings. Another soft spot in my heart.
Ex-Mutants: I think you’ll also find it was an early project for Ron Lim.
Hero Alliance: Another Ron Lim independent book, attempting to do what Miracleman accomplished. Interesting but not as successful.
Grendel: I hadn’t read the previous stories, but was on the ground floor for the ongoing series.
Warp Graphics: Remember they also did Myth Adventures, adapting the Robert Asprin novels with art by Phil Foglio, another creator I still follow. And that’s Elfquest’s company, and believe it or not, the Pinis have still put out comics with them until 2-3 years ago, but I dropped off after the second mini-series.
Ghost and X were my faves from Comic’s Greatest World, and I collected most of their series. Also, The Mask: World Tour was a mini-series where he jumped to the universe of CGW and met all of the players there before returning home.
Zot!: Yes, the B&W collection does recreate the experience of reading the comic with the intervening letters page. McCloud even notes in that collection how many angry letters he got about that issue from people who never turned the page to see the *actual* ending!
Rob’s comments about Anything Goes and Crossfire/Mark Evanier: To solve the mystery of where he talked about it before, it was this year on my podcast, Outcasters: Under Siege! We were talking about comics that came out that same month in 1986, and a “Crossfire & Rainbow” comic started his train of thought. It was just as much fun to hear then as it was this time. https://wrightonnetwork.libsyn.com/website/outcasters-under-siege-episode-4-opening-strike
If I keep thinking, I could probably come up with more, but if you’ve read this far, you’ve suffered enough. Thanks for a great episode, guys!
Circling back again, someone referenced Verotik comics. When I was a retailer, the first shop that I was permanently employed by gave substantial discounts to high purchasing customers, including at least one guy who was a dealer at shows getting something like 40% off. That would have been unwise with Verotik, because I think our own discount on such a small publisher was probably 35%, which would be selling at a loss. Anyway, he only bought “edgy” material that he could specialize in at comic shows. Former Misfits singer/songwriter gone solo Glenn Danzig set up Verotik to sell explicitly sexual and violent riffs on EC horror anthology and ’70s Warren-style dark fantasy, plus he was the U.S. publisher of Go Nagai’s Devilman. He was the primary employer of “metal” guys like Simon Bisley for a while there, and brought characters like Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer to comics. Mostly, it was gross, horny stuff that I was sometimes deeply disturbed by, but as a free speech advocate and a lackey, I dutifully sold the stuff. In fact, I sold enough that the biggest chain in town, Bedrock City, offloaded some of their unsold stock on us, since we had a market for it. We were lucky nobody ever narc’d on us, because their books were often caught up in police busts, with at least one shop being federally charged with obscenity. They even eventually released a movie in 2019, Verotika, that is sincerely and without hyperbole a candidate for the most incompetent and unbearably boring films ever produced.
It’s funny how I presumed that you guys wouldn’t get into adult stuff, and of course Shagggoon went there. I feel like something like Cherry Poptart is more head comics-adjacent (pun unintended) than “independent” comics. For me, I tend to make a distinction between “independent comics,” “indy comics,” and “small press/art house.” I consider anything not owned by a corporation as “independent.” As a result, I don’t consider Dark Horse, IDW, Oni Press, or BOOM! to be independent, and I think it’s something of a stretch to apply the label to Image. It’s a partnership of several millionaires, including a toy manufacturer employing foreign sweatshop labor. An outfit like Zenescope, Antarctic Press, Devil’s Due Publishing, and maybe Dynamite Entertainment would be considered “independent” of a large, publicly-traded backer, venture capitol, or whatever. Most “back of Previews” publishers of mainstream commercial material would be both “independent” and “small press.” “Indy” is more of a vibe, which would apply to a small press publisher of artsy material like Drawn & Quarterly or Fantagraphics. Cherry’s prurient interests and commercial intent I feel skews toward the stoner sub-genre, which is kind-of “indy,” but I’m not sure has the full artistic merit to qualify as “artsy.” But then something like Phil & Kaja Folio’s Xxxenophile isn’t a head comic (phrasing!) but also isn’t arty, but is certainly not mainstream independent, either. Splitting hairs, clearly. By the way, I understand Cherry comics are nigh-impossible to find in high grade condition (a-hem) and extremely costly collectibles now. The few I still have are… well-worn (YEEEEAAAAHHHHHH!!!)
I picked up a bunch of issues of the Cerebus reprint series in the early ’90s out of quarter bins and enjoyed it as a Conan pastiche. I tried to follow it new a few years later around the time of the Zero issue and the countdown to #300. By that point, Dave Sim had lost his mind and disappeared entirely up his ass, so it was this ponderous pseudo-intellectual slog that I gave up on after a few issues. In recent years, I picked up a coupled of the remastered phone books, and got a few issues into the second one. I hope to return to it someday, but it kind of pisses me off that I could get that far and still apparently be well short of “the good stuff.”
I’ve read some Concrete, including the first of the digest-sized trades that I ended up gifting to a friend. I like it, but it also strains against being a comic book. If Chadwick had gotten his start a few years later and a different publisher, it probably would have been all regular humans at an art house.
I knew Miracleman by reputation, but even if I could find an issue, I felt like I needed to read it from the beginning. I did have the trade collection of the Apocrypha short story anthology, which did nothing for me. I did buy the Marvel omnibus edition, and read a few trades worth of material, which I found very of its time. Not bad, but prototypical to so much grimdark that it didn’t raise a pulse. Probably didn’t help that I was getting into the Chuck Beckham and Rich Veitch stuff, when I really needed Gary Leach and Alan Davis to help me along.
I hesitate to call anything out of Epic “independent,” but I did read their (re)publishing of Elfquest, Groo, and Fish Police for a time.
I’ve seen issues of Anything Goes on occasion, but never bit. However, Don Simpson recently reprinted In Pictopia in the treasury format, and I was waiting to hear Rob podcast on it. That and Giant-Sized Kung-Fu Bible Stories, the !mpact Who’s Who of Treasurycast. It’s funny and a lot sad to read Simpson rage about Alan Moore letting him reprint the story, but not capitalize on his name in doing so. It’s one of those Don Simpson and “The Writer formerly Known as Prince” things, so it was little noticed when it came out a few years ago.
I was a little surprised nobody brought up Hepcats. It was very well loved in its time among the Cerebus and Omaha crowd. I read it for a few issues, but they were few and far between. Lovely art, sophisticated stuff, but Martin Wagner notoriously ripped off a bunch of “subscribers,” never completed the work, and has aggressively disowned his entire comics career.
Okay, I think that’s all I’ve got, without scouring my bookshelves and otherwise getting obsessive about it.
Hey, guys. Long-time listener, first time commenter.
Other than a very quick, joking reference near the end of the episode, I can’t believe nobody mentioned Neil Adams’ Continuity Comics or any of its titles, like “Armor”, “Megalith”, and “The Revengers”. While they were incredibly inconsistent in their publishing schedule (the first run of Megalith printed 9 issues over the course of 5 years, and Armor printed 13 issues over 8 years), I always felt they were some of the most interesting and best drawn comics during their run from 1985-1994.
I know I’m late to the party, but did anyone mention the Tick? I enjoyed the silliness and fun of the many ’90s issues, after missing the start in the ’80s. Of course, it’s had a cartoon and two live action TV series. SPOOOOOOONN!!!!!!!!!!!