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Sunday, May 15, 2005
Nostalgia Can Only Take You So Far...
I just read that Jack Katz's comic book epic The First Kingdom is being reprinted in four volumes. I can't help but think, Why bother? In this day and age, who the hell wants to read The First Kingdom - for that matter, who wanted to read it when it was first coming out?
This is completely unfair, of course. The series is one of the first major independent comics and one whose scale and ambition set the bar for those who'd follow afterwards, such as Dave Sim's Cerebus. Anybody who cares about the history of comics would do well to at least be familiar with the series and the kind of storytelling it attempted.
Myself, I have two distinct memories of The First Kingdom.
First, I remember somehow getting an issue of it back when I was first trying to expand my fanboy horizons. It was a heady time for me, I felt like I was becoming a true conossieur of quality comic books by realizing the medium wasn't just superheroes. (Remember the Steve Gerber / Val Mayerik two-part satire about television censorship and occult rituals, first published in the original Eclipse magazine? For some reason, I still fucking do.) I don't recall how I got my hands on a copy of The First Kingdom, most likely I got it used or at a convention or something. And I can't remember what issue number it was, not even if you put a gun to my head and told me to take a wild guess. But if memory serves correct, it was an oversized comic and looked a lot like an extended black-and-white Prince Valiant strip done by the staff of EC Comics in its sci-fi / horror prime... that is, if they were forced to take hallucinatory drugs and had to tell a story in several hundred pages and not just eight. I remember paging through that comic in secret, since it had naked female breasts, and being completely lost about what was going on and who these characters were and what it all meant (because clearly, something this grandiose had to mean something). In other words, it wasn't a reader-friendly, jump-in-anytime kind of book. Given the intensity of the art and the cosmic nature of the storyline, I didn't think it could afford to be.
The second thing I remember is many years later, when the internet was relatively new and I was doing freelance work as a comics reviewer, how a fellow comics journalist once told me that whenever he encountered Jack Katz at convention panels or whatever, he'd make sure to say the man's name fast so it'd sound like "jackass".
Anyway.
I hope the folks at Mecca Comics make back their investment and that there's enough interest from older fans to sustain the project through all four volumes. If I find myself with enough spare money and morbid curiosity, I may even pick up Volume One and see where it takes me.
This is completely unfair, of course. The series is one of the first major independent comics and one whose scale and ambition set the bar for those who'd follow afterwards, such as Dave Sim's Cerebus. Anybody who cares about the history of comics would do well to at least be familiar with the series and the kind of storytelling it attempted.
Myself, I have two distinct memories of The First Kingdom.
First, I remember somehow getting an issue of it back when I was first trying to expand my fanboy horizons. It was a heady time for me, I felt like I was becoming a true conossieur of quality comic books by realizing the medium wasn't just superheroes. (Remember the Steve Gerber / Val Mayerik two-part satire about television censorship and occult rituals, first published in the original Eclipse magazine? For some reason, I still fucking do.) I don't recall how I got my hands on a copy of The First Kingdom, most likely I got it used or at a convention or something. And I can't remember what issue number it was, not even if you put a gun to my head and told me to take a wild guess. But if memory serves correct, it was an oversized comic and looked a lot like an extended black-and-white Prince Valiant strip done by the staff of EC Comics in its sci-fi / horror prime... that is, if they were forced to take hallucinatory drugs and had to tell a story in several hundred pages and not just eight. I remember paging through that comic in secret, since it had naked female breasts, and being completely lost about what was going on and who these characters were and what it all meant (because clearly, something this grandiose had to mean something). In other words, it wasn't a reader-friendly, jump-in-anytime kind of book. Given the intensity of the art and the cosmic nature of the storyline, I didn't think it could afford to be.
The second thing I remember is many years later, when the internet was relatively new and I was doing freelance work as a comics reviewer, how a fellow comics journalist once told me that whenever he encountered Jack Katz at convention panels or whatever, he'd make sure to say the man's name fast so it'd sound like "jackass".
Anyway.
I hope the folks at Mecca Comics make back their investment and that there's enough interest from older fans to sustain the project through all four volumes. If I find myself with enough spare money and morbid curiosity, I may even pick up Volume One and see where it takes me.
