Comix

Today one of the last living legends of the Golden Age of Franco-Belgian comics, the Italian Dino Attanasio turned 100. To celebrate, let’s take a look at what was his most popular series here in the Netherlands: Johnny Goodbye.

Chicago in the roaring 1920s. Prohibition is law but widely flaunted in this lawless city ruled by gangsters like the notorious Al Capone. The mayor, judged and the entire police force are corrupt and turning a blind eye to the wave of crime swamping the poor city. The whole police force? No, there are still two honest coppers, two decent men fed up with crime: Johnny Goodbye and his best friend, Howdy Duizendpond. They decide to quit the police force to become private dicks, but not before they arrest Capone for illegal parking and sent him to Sing-Sing. Cue forty pages of Al Capone trying to avenge himself on the pair and failing miserably.

Johnny Goodbye is a classic bignosed comedic adventure series, with the action in this story very much driven by Capone’s increasingly desparate attempts to murder Goodbye and his friend. It’s written by Martin Lodewijk, one of the Netherlands most prolific and well loved comics writer/editors. The series started because Attanasio wanted to do something with gangsters and told this to the editorial staff at Pep magazine, which was already publishing his earlier series Spaghetti and Modeste et Pompon (Ton en Tinneke in Dutch), which he had taken over from André Franquin. Martin Lodewijk was asked to provided the scenarios and he would write the first five stories, before Patty Klein and others took over. The series would run from 1969, first in Pep, then in its successor Eppo from 1975 to 1992.

What makes the series in particular and Attanasio in general so great is that he’s a bit of a stylistic chameleon, as is on display in the panel above. Goodbye and co are all done in that traditional Belgian bignosed style, while the Untouchables showing up at right are clearly modelled after the actors from the then current television series. And while Attanasio largely stuck to humour series or comedic adventure series, he also was the first artist on Bob Morane one of the pioneering Belgian straight adventure series.

As a story Gangsters in Chicago clearly shows it was originally serialised in four page weekly installments. Once Capone is released from prison there’s no real overarching plot, just one attempt after another on Goodbye’s life, followed by Goodbye and Duizendpond investigating Capone’s criminal enterprises, by tagging along with one his crews demolishing one speakeasy after another. None of this matters because it’s all such great fun. Caricatures and stereotypes abound, Goodbye is clever and a bit dull, Duizendpond is your typical strong but dim sidekick and there’s a Black shoeshine boy called Washington that actually manages to save Goodbye from sleeping with the fishes at one point. Note that while Washington isn’t quite as bad as say the Spirit’s Ebony and speaks in proper Dutch, he does have caricatural thick red lips; European comics of that era weren’t shy of that sort of racist stereotype I’m afraid…

If you want to write a n article on how toxic fans are silencing comics pros, maybe don’t use Roy “I stole the credits for Wolverine from Len Wein’s barely cold corpse” Thomas:

Roy Thomas, a fan-turned-pro who went on to become an industry legend, cordially declined participating in the comic. “I received quite a bit of toxic hate beginning last April when it was announced that I’d be credited in Deadpool & Wolverine as co-creator of Wolverine,” he wrote to me. “It made me determined…[to avoid] a con where I might find myself in the company of the people who had attacked me.” He’s written an article about the ordeal for an upcoming issue of his own magazine, Alter Ego #194.

This soft-spoken, erudite, 84-year-old man has been bullied into silence. And because of that, the rest of us are missing out on a treasure of stories and knowledge. There aren’t many Bronze Age creators left, every day we lose some of that history.

Criticism isn’t toxic, nor can you silence someone who has his own fanzine. Roy Thomas stole the credit for creating Wolverine from Len Wein, Herb Trimpe and John Romita once all three were safely dead and unable to object. It’s a sad attempt to inflate his own ego from somebody whose career is important enough to not need it. Of course it provoked a storm of criticism, especially when he then wrote an op-ed arguing his name should’ve come first. Just completely maidenless behaviour.

Using this as the sole example in your article about social media driven toxic fandom completely undermines its argument. Anybody who isn’t Roy Thomas can clearly see this is sour grapes on his part, not a genuine example of how toxic fans can behave. It’s a pity none of the other people cited in the article provide any concrete examples; Ann Nocenti comes closest by talking about gamersgate offshoot comicsgate. I’m sure the author meant well, but having Thomas abuse their good intentions this way means it became worthless. There is a discussion to be had about fan entitlement and how that can drive interactions with pros, but this isn’t it.

If you’re a fan of Dave Gibbons, you own it to yourself to get a copy of this book.

In the introduction Gibbons mentions Dark They Were and Golden Eyed, a legendary science fiction bookstore that was my first association when I saw the name of its publisher, Dark and Golden Books, who as they put it, are dedicated to charting a less travelled course through the history of British comics, finding and celebrating mislaid and forgotten classics for the audience of today in new high-quality editions. (The bookstore I’ve never visited, I just knew it from the ads in the back of sf zines and British comics).

With both Early Gigs and the Brett Ewins / Peter Milligan collection I got at the same time, Dark and Golden Book has succeeded in bringing back in print some very obscure comics, stories that have been mouldering in long forgotten fanzines for literally decades. The Gibbons collection especially is a blast, each story introduced by the man himself, describing the circumstances in which it was made and for what purposes. Leaving through it the occasional preview of what would be the Dave Gibbons you know from Watchmen is already present, but you can also see how much of an influence Wally Wood was on him, as he himself acknowledges. For me this is also a peek at a world I barely know anything about, other than through Bryan Talbot’s Brainstorm collection of a few decades ago, a peek into the early seventies world of the UK underground.

Brett Ewins / Peter Milligan collection too is a treat, containing their first collaboration, “Rooney’s Lay (1980), with their adaptation of Kafka’s “Int he Penal Colony” (1991) more than a decade later. Each of these stories is introduced by Peter Milligan, Brett Ewins sadly having passed away a decade ago. Both volumes are proper comics, as all of Dark and Golden Books projects seem to be, with cardboard covers and decent, thick paper.

Lori wakes up one morning to discover that not only her foster parents, but almost everybody else has vanished overnight. The only other person still elft is Annette, cheerful, naive and optimistic where Lori is cynical and expecting the worst. How will they survive in a post-apocalyptic world that now also has two alien giants living in it?

High concept wise, this is the young adult version of Thomas M. Disch’s The Genocides which has a similar incomprehensible alien invasion (?) destroying civilisation, with humanity reduced to agricultural pests surviving in the niches of their new, alien world. The aliens themselves, giant red and blue figures towering over the landscape, of course have to remind me of Jack Kirby’s Celestials.

The story is uncomplicated. Lori and Annette have to scavenge for scraps to survive in a world depopulated not just of humans, but seemingly most other mammal life, where the only food left seems to be tinned. There’s a gang of other survivors who they try to avoid because they would enslave them. It’s an encounter with the gang that leads to Lori and Annette discovering the giants as well as, Beatrice, an elderly woman who saves them from the monstrous wolves that suddenly turned up in the middle of their flight from the gang. She leads them into the ‘home’ of the red Giant, which seems to be a safe place avoided by the wolves.

All of which is setup for the meat of the story, which is about Lori getting over her habitual mistrust of everybody to accept the kindness of the red Giant. Whereas Beatrice and Annette quickly accept the Giant’s protection, Lori remains skeptical until circumstances leaver her no choice. It’s only at the end of the story that she finally can let go of her suspicions and accept the Giant’s kindness as real, that it is possible for people to act without ulterior motives.

We Called Them Giants is therefore very much Lori’s coming of age story, in which she learns how to take off her armour of self protective cynicism and learns to accept people for who they are. Gillen’s writing isn’t subtle about this: there’s a message here and he will make sure you understand it. Whether it’s convincing is another matter entirely. For me it wasn’t. Maybe I’m just too old for this sort of stroy but I didn’t mesh with it at all. I could see what Gillen was doing and I resented being manipulated into accepting his conclusions here. As Jao said on Bluesky:

It’s very adolescenty and not necessarily in a bad way. It’s just very…. obviously a vehicle to help process certain kinds of thoughts and a developing worldview.

What remains is Stephanie Hans’ gorgeous painted art and that more than made up for the slightly iffy story. A good present perhaps for a bookish young teen in your family.

Looking for an old pal, a homeless lesbian stumbles unto an underground city of sapphic women, promptly seduces their queen and in the process foils a military coup. All in a day’s work for Dōlo Rômy

Written and drawn by Karen Platt, The Adventures of Dōlo Rômy in the Underground City of Women came out in 1989 from Dōlo Blue Graphics in Minneapolis, as a black and white, magazine sized 40 pages long book, with cardboard covers. I could discover very little online about either this book or its author, who I don’t think is this Karen Platt. It feels and reads like something that was self published, outside of the regular comics markets. More a book you’d see alongside punk and anarchist zines than in your local comics store’s alternative section. Though I did indeed got it there, as a curiosity, but how they got it I have no clue.

Unlike Dōlo Rômy, Karen Platt herself is featured in the Grand Comics Database, having work listed on Dykes Delight and Dark Horse’s The Mask, of all things. She was apparently also featured in the 2012 Fantagraphics anthology No straight Lines, an overview of queer comix history and the subsequent 2021 documentary that spun off from it.

The story has Rômy finding the underground city of women, look around it for a few pages looking for her old gal pal before deciding to fuck it, have a drink in a night club and hook up with one of the locals. Who tells her the city was founded in 1973 as a new Lesbos, just underground and that there are now 60,000 women living there. Before they can get physical, Rômy is arrested by the police, who take her to the queen who will decide on her fate. Luckily, this turns out to be one of her old flames, they have sex but once again Rômy is interrupted, this time by the coup. She escapes, gets a couple of like minded gals to help her and in the end successfully launches a counter coup and finds her old friend. Who, it turns out, may have inspired the coup because she needed a few dames to provide her with the luxuries in life. All’s well that ends well and Rômy does get to finally enjoy both the first woman she got lucky with as her old pal the queen. A drifter at heart, Rômy and friend leave the underground city at the end of the story to roam the streets of Bush’s America again.

The art is rough, with lots of heavy blacks and zip a tone, which works well for this story. The writing is fun, this is basically a b-movie as even Rômy herself acknowledges, but it moves along with a bit of humour. The sex scenes flow naturally from the story, don’t feel gratuitous, nor that titillating if I’m honest. I’m not sure if there was every anything else of the adventures of Rômy published. The back cover promises she would return in Set a Bad, Bad, Bad Example but I haven’t seen anything about this online. The way this story also feels like it was the sequel to something, but again if it was, I couldn’t find anything about it.