Giant Ogreon Carnivora Sighting



Here's some minor but unexpected -- at least by me -- publishing news. Back when Bud Plant ads played the role the entire comics Internet plays today, there were basically three fantasy comic book series in which superhero readers dabbled: Cerebus, Elfquest and Jack Katz's 13-year mythological fever dream First Kingdom. Not sure what ever happened to the first two, but the third is now being released in multiple volumes by an outfit called Mecca Comics. I have no idea how modern readers of comics are going to react to something like this, although I suppose few will get to see it. It mostly just scared the crap out of me back when I was a kid.

Bob Levin's introduction to Katz's career is one of the best essays in his volume Outlaws, Rebels, Freethinkers & Pirates, a book I recently edited for Fantagraphics. Here's an apt first reaction to Katz' work.

"Katz drew every panel -- 2500 seems about right -- not with the stripped down pen of a Charles Schulz or Cathy Guisewite, but with a consciousness that seemed to feel that the innermost circles of Hell were reserved for those who did not fill every square millimeter of their allotted space and an imagination fired by the most garish effluvia 6000 years of myth and pulp could generate -- clashing armies and storm-wracked galleons, contesting gladiators and dueling reptilian behemoths, exploding inter-galactic rocketry and silent, shadow-shrouded temples, placid, Edenistic pastorals and bee-hive busy, visionary metropoli -- leaving readers sitting there, shaking their heads, thunder-lightening-booster thrust-struck, going 'Wow!'"

Jack Katz: a comics original.
 
posted 6:40 am PST | Permalink
 

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