Second in a series.  Today’s topic is short and sweet:

What the Hell Happened to Kilian Plunkett?

OK, so here’s the short answer: he went on to draw a bunch of Star Wars comics and character designs for animation.

But, before that he illustrated the Aliens: Labyrinth series, written by Jim Woodring.  (Yeah, you read that right, Jim Woodring of Frank and Jim.)  But before that, though, he did a book called The 8th Wonder for Dark Horse and when I ran across this going through my old comics, I remembered really liking it.  The story was originally serialized, I think, in Dark Horse Presents starting in maybe ’94 and then, once the series was complete, it was issued as a 24-page one-shot.

If The 8th Wonder had come out a few years later, it would certainly have been labeled “steampunk.”  In ’94, though, just four years after The Difference Engine came out, this wasn’t a term known to most folks other than SF enthusiasts.  Maybe I’m way off-base here, but I can’t think of an earlier example in comics of something that one could accurately call steampunk before 8th Wonder.  The hyper-detailed but largely unreadable comics series Steampunk would appear a few years later in 2000 and of course The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen thereafter.

What neither of the above books, though, had was a visual style that really matched the feel of the story, and that’s part of what makes 8th Wonder such a good read.   This early incarnation of Plunkett, done just in black and white, shows a lighter, more fragile line, with spotted blacks applied mainly as color/design choice rather than as shading–both of which, when combined with some well-placed stippling, yield a very European “clear line” look that gives the book just the right combination of fragility and grit.

I don’t know how many of these I’ll have time for, and with what frequency I’ll wind up posting them, (I do have a baby due any day now, you know) but…

With the eminent arrival of the above-mentioned “infink,” I’ve had to clear out what was previously an extra room here in the Crackhouse. And among the formerly-out-of-the-way, and now-in-the-way items are my five giant boxes (“longboxes” as they’re known among the nerderati) of comic books. I’ve bought some drawerboxes to transfer them into, but am also going through them with the intention of dispatching a lot of my old comic books either via ebay or just via the ol’ recycling bin. But, in going through them, I’ve come across some interesting stuff that I really haven’t seen in a while, and in this case, some types of comics that don’t really seem to be well-represented. Today’s installment: Anthologies that Aren’t Boring.

There are some folk out there just plain hate anthologies–any anthologies and all anthologies. That ain’t me. I love a good anthology. In fact, I even like anthologies that aren’t good as long as they’re cheap. I also think that the anthology format tends to work best when the stories therein don’t attempt to be profound meditations on ennui or whatever. The 2-8 page format just isn’t well-suited to it. (Something like Mome, where the stories continue each issue, gets around this, though, but certainly it’s an exception among non-Manga anthologies.) I also feel strongly that price-point is a really important factor. To the extent that an anthology serves to introduce new talent–one of the things I most enjoy about them myself–the book needs to be a something that doesn’t represent a huge financial outlay. An anthology like this is a gamble; the stakes shouldn’t be high. Anyway, here are two that I stumbled on in the first longbox I’ve been going through:

Oni Double Feature (Pub. Oni, obviously)

I’m not sure how long this ran, but I’ve got the first nine issues I think. I remember really looking forward to each issue of this. As the name implies, each issue had two feature stories, along with occasional one-page strips on the inside covers. Here’re some folks featured in the issues I flipped through: Troy Nixey, P. Craig Russell, Dave Cooper, Tom Hart, Peter Bagge, Neil Gaiman and Jim Mahfood.

Not a bad lineup, eh? What I like about this lineup, and this book came out about ten years ago, is that it’s a nice mix of funny-ish indy folks, and more mainstream-ish artists doing non-superhero genre stuff. For me it was also a good mix of people whose work I knew (Bagge, Gaiman, etc.) and some who I didn’t know so well (Tom Hart, Dave Cooper) and at lest one I ‘d never heard of, but whose work I’ve liked ever since (Troy Nixey). Would the Oni Quintuple Feature work as a digest-sized quarterly anthology? I’d sure buy it.

I also came across:

Reveal (Pub. Dark Horse)

Here’s another one from roughly the same era (2002). I really enjoyed Reveal, and wish it had caught on. It was a notch up as far as production values go, but still within a reasonable price rang–the cover on issue one is $6.95. It’s all color interior and squarebound, rather than saddle-stitched. With a higher page-count and more emphasis on articles, this could have been the theoretical comics magazine that I’ve always thought would do well: editorially somewhere between Wizard and The Comics Journal, and with lots of actual comics in it. Alas, it was not to be.

This issue has stories by folks like Craig Thompson, Peter David, Scott Lobdel and Sean Phillips. Also, though, it’s got a centerfold featuring a Picasso etching that’s read panel-to-panel, as well as an interview with Mike Mignola and Guillermo del Toro about the then-upcoming Hellboy movie. Am I alone in thinking that something like this might have a better chance of catching on in today’s more indy/graphic novel-friendly environment, where it might get some shelf space at the local Borders? There’s a British magazine called Redeye all about the U.K. comics scene that looks like it’s maybe having a go at something similar to Reveal. Let’s hope it works and someone in the U.S. maybe takes note.