Comic Books

I was in the comic book store the other day, my first time in probably twelve years, to order Femme Noir by Christopher Mills. While there I checked out some of the other offerings and bought a few. I was never a big comic book fan. As a teenager I read some, but probably never had more than 100 or so, and these were mostly Fantastic Four, Spiderman, and one or two war comics like Sgt. Rock and Ghost Tank. I also had a horror western one called Jonah Hex.

Later, when I first joined the Robert E. Howard group, REHupa, I bought a number of the Howard related comics like Conan and Kull. That was in the early 90s but that phase didn’t last long. Having been weaned on books, I always found reading comics rather irritating, frankly. You’d settle down for a read, and be done almost instantly. Five minutes tops for most comics. I quickly found the only way to enjoy them was to collect 5 to 10 issues and then read them all at one sitting.

This time I bought a few of the new Dark Horse Conan comics, and read them back to back, and a couple of “graphic novels,” which are essentially longer comics that give you a bit more of a satisfying read. For one of the very few times in my life I bought something primarily for its cover. It seems that there are a variety of Frank Frazetta comics coming out and I’ve always enjoyed Frazetta’s art work, particularly the stuff he did for the Karl Edward Wagner Kane paperbacks and the Death Dealer paperbacks. I picked up a comic with one of his “Kane” covers called Dark Kingdom, part 1. The story did not involve Kane, however, but a character named Red Morden. The tale itself was very typical but the art was nice.

I did, however, find a nice surprise in the store, a Jonah Hex: Origins graphic novel. This really took me back and I enjoyed it quite a bit since there was a meaty story to the work. How about you? Any comic book dinks out there? Have comics been at all an influence on your writing? I would generally say that they haven’t influenced my own work at all, most likely because of my limited exposure to them during my formative years.