Adventure Faces!

Initial publication date: May, 1968
Publisher: Pow!erful Comics
Lasted: 1 issue

Brian Panderson might be one of the finest comic creators of the twentieth century, but he’s had his fair share of failures. Few writer/artists could fill the back-issue bins with so many one-shot wonders, not to mention those titles cancelled before they began. Even legends of the comic book industry have stories snuffed out before they could even hit the stands. Adventure Faces! is one of the more notorious of these latter titles. Pow!erful Comics was a small operation based in Queens, with its small talent pool drawn from embittered cast-offs from the big end of town. Panderson owed E-i-C Charlie Gutzman a favour, and in his words “dug out the first goddamn thing I found in my reject drawer and slapped some words in all those bloody balloons”. The one and only title for the doomed publisher was based around three pals known as the Adventure Squad. Cap’n Freddy Face was an English boat captain with two peg-legs, super-science-telescope and a literal heart of gold. Buzzer Golightly was a helicopter-piloting nun from outer space, while the Esparanto-speaking Ginger Biscuit was the former ship’s cat who had gained the power of human speech after an encounter with mutating cosmic rays from Dimension W.

In a 1996 interview with The Comics Journal, Panderson admitted that he had developed the title and the cover’s tag line (“Face… Adventure!!”) before the story proper. It was a moot point at any rate; the story never made it to the spinner racks. Printers noticed that the tired Panderson had, during the painstaking process of lettering the front cover, accidentally titled the #1 issue as Adventure Feces!. The run was scrapped, with only a few dozen copies surviving the printers’ purge. A second print, with a corrected cover, was ordered but never finished before Pow!erful Comics folded.

In Men of Tomorrow, author Gerard Jones claimed that the short-lived publishing imprint had only ever been intended to be hypothetical in nature, and was in fact created as part of Charlie Gutzman’s increasingly eccentric efforts to evade tax. Gutzman’s autobiography, published posthumously after his untimely death in 1986, stated that he had instead fled New York following a threat on his life by a rogue Mossad agent. The truth remains, undoubtedly, somewhere in between.

Brian Panderson Vs. Utilitarianism

Yes I’m goddamn back, want to make something of it? Thought not.

Now, I don’t often go off script here. This is the story of my life in comics, most times anyhow. That’s why you’re all goddamn here, isn’t it, to find out which celebrity inker ol’ Brian clocked back in ’83? What convention I was kicked out from, and why I’ll never stay at Best Western again? Whose body they dredged out of the waters near Puget Sound, whose lipless, gaping, brine-soaked face I see staring back at me when I close my eyes?

Time for a diversion.

Back in ’76 it was, I think. Damn 1970s give me a headache. I was all over the place, geographically and metaphorically. Best of times, worst of times, damn near weirdest of times if you ask me. Or close enough to, if you don’t count that Glass Spider misadventure in the late ’80s. Crazy times for sure though. I was riding my success with Tomorrow Comics if I recall right, but I’d gotten in a fight with Julius Schwartz. I owed him for bringing me on, y’see, but that didn’t mean that ol’ Panderson anger wasn’t still there, just under the surface, like that body off Puget Sound.

Anyhow, so one particularly bad encounter with my editor and I was off, slamming the door behind me, searching my grimy pockets for enough bucks to pit me far away from Julie.

The train station was a few blocks away. A Panderson doesn’t cool down after a walk of that length – no sir, my blood was still up. I slammed down my screwed-up dollar bills on the ticket office counter and demanded they send to as far as they could goddamn take me.

And that, humble readers, is how I ended up in San Francisco.

Frazer Irving

Okay, we really, really need to talk about Frazer Irving. Or, sure I should say ‘Frazer Irving’? Did you hear those goddamn quotation marks? Damn right you did.

You may believe that Frazer Irving made his debut in comics in a short little number titled ‘The Last Supper’, in 2000 AD #1205. You may also have heard that Mr Irving moved to the American market shortly thereafter, making a name for himself via collaborations with wunderkind Grant Morrison.

Everything that you know is a carefully constructed lie.

Barry Windsor-Smith

Barry Windsor-Smith

25 May 1949 –

First professional appearance (excluding pin-ups): ‘The Rage of Blastaar!’, X-Men (1969).

Claim to fame: worked on the X-Men family of characters over four decades, most famously in Marvel Comics Presents… Weapon X.

Most famous Panderson collaboration: Windsor-Smith and Panderson collaborated in the late 1980s on a planned mini-series starring Marvel Comics’ Machine Man, entitled ‘Man=/=Machine’. Inspired by the early works of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, ‘Man=/=Machine’ was lauded for both its intricately detailed panels and its heartfelt depiction of life in a dystopian near-future. The AV Club, in their retrospective of modern comic books, described it as “a hidden gem of a tawdry decade… where other so-called geniuses merely reimagined the superhero, ‘Man=/=Machine’ reinvented the visual language of comics. The team-up of Windsor-Smith and Panderson produced something like Umberto Eco and Chris Ware designing The Matrix, and if that doesn’t excite you then we don’t know what else to say.”

Did you know… despite drawing condemnation for using many of Panderson’s original concepts without his permission, Windsor-Smith was one of the most prolific of the ‘Spartacus Pandersons’ of the late 1990s. Windsor-Smith has occasionally published  works in the 2000s under other Pandersonian pseudonyms, possibly as an elaborate form of apology for the earlier intellectual theft.

“One of the finest artists of his – or any – generation, but I’m still too goddamn angry at him for ‘Weapon X’. That was a Lord Whistlepig story through and through, and Barry bastardised it by inserting Wolverine into it. How could you, Baz?”

Mort Weisinger

Mort Weisinger

April 25, 1915 – May 7, 1978

First professional appearance: ‘The Riddle of the Crying Clown!’, More Fun Comics (1941).

Claim to fame: editor of Superman during the innovative, and some would say defining, 1950s and 1960s.

First appearance in Brian’s memoirs: posing as an apprentice waiter at Irwin Donenfeld’s celebratory dinner at National Comics, Brian pissed into Mort’s soup. The relationship went downhill from there.

Did you know… he once appeared to Roy Thomas in a fever dream in which Mort rose from the ocean as a fleshy and tentacled monstrosity. Roy is still haunted by that image and has never visited the beach or eaten calamari since that night.

“Look, Mort was a prick. Simple as that. On one hand, he treated some of my personal heroes like trash. On the other, he could goddamn edit a comic and did a lot of good weeding out the schmucks that constantly threaten to clog up the gears of the funny book industry. But his wife Thelma treated me nice and always made a great pasta bake.”

Are you there, Gerard? It’s me, Brian.

The first thing I need to say is that a Panderson knows when he’s wrong and I wronged you. So here I am, writing you another letter. You see, I wasn’t sure if you got the last one, so I gave you a call. Okay, several calls. The number isn’t important. In any case, I apologize wholeheartedly for what occurred next. Let’s not get hung up on how I managed to track down your hotel room’s phone number. What you need to know, what you must understand, is that I went a little off the rails. I’d like to say that I don’t know what came over me, but I do. Cheap booze and a lifetime of regrets ain’t a good combination at my age, and sometimes it all comes out a little more colorful and angry than I intend.

I’ve read some of your books. They’re good, I’ll give you that. A little limited in scope, but you don’t have the decades of experience and screw-ups that shape character like mine. You need to remember that the graphic arts you dabble in should bring pain and joy, anger and love. For most readers, the medium instinctively returns them to adolescence, a time where we didn’t all have bulletproof hearts, a time where every bold delusion and creeping insecurity is writ large and open across the soul. Comics takes all those memories of growing up, all that confusion and happiness and terror wrapped up together, and paints it boldly across the page. Hell, true comics elevate the reader, with every emotion taking form like a scrawled cave-painting to a pagan supergod. Our art – because it is goddamn art – takes you back to a past you never knew, then wraps it up and shines a burning light into the future.

You’ve got some others talents too. I’ve heard a bit of that band of yours, and someday you might even go places. You’re off to a good start because – as Brian Panderson always says – if you want to really know how to write or draw comics, you need to listen to music. And I mean, really listen.

An open letter to Gerard Way

Concept albums? Listen son, don’t get me started on goddamn concept albums.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, the mere thought of a hyperstylized rock musical or multi-media narrative would have stirred my loins. I would have high-fived you as we talked about beat poets, laser-fast cars, jumpsuits and aliens from outside of time. I would have leaped at the chance to translate your vision of post-apocalyptic pop metal opera to the four-color world, with accompanying cartoon and goddamn breakfast cereal. But now? You can make me listen to My Chemical Romance’s long-player, show me your video-clips starring Grant Morrison, and point to Becky Cloonan’s fabulous art in Killjoys… and I’ll just sadly shake my head. Those days are behind me now.

What could make Brian Panderson so sad? It’s a long story, a deep cut, filled with the raw sexual energy and Shakespearian tragedy that one can expect from my life. No, don’t back away son, you’ll be better for the tale’s telling.

Deus ex Kryptonia

You know what should sit at the heart of all superhero stories? Not the goddamn spandex, that’s for sure. Not the silly codenames, asinine motivations and juvenile team-ups. No, the heart of all superhero stories – correct that, all good superhero stories – is awe. Superheroes take the best of humanity and kick it up to 120%. All the good deeds that we mere mortals do in everyday life – and we do a lot of them, there are plenty of inspiring stories out there – are but a dust-mote next to the amazing feats that a superhero can perform. A good superhero story moves us, gives us a model of what it truly is to be strong, brave and bold. Characters like these are legends. Super-human, super-real.

I’d crafted the ultimate Superman story. Clark Kent, apparently dead of a broken heart. Four heroes – copies and imitations, to be sure, but imperfect reflections of true greatness still remain fantastic – arise to take Superman’s place. A villain from outside space and time, a twisted mirror of our true hero, threatens to bring the entire world under his control. The heroes fight, the heroes fall.

And then like a miracle, the Last Son of Krypton returned to save us all. 

Shia, JGL and me

Before we get into this week’s installment, I just want to clear the air a little. Look, I feel terrible for Dan Clowes and the hoo-ha about Shia LaGoddamnBeouf that recently erupted. I was the person who put Dan’s comic into Shia L(g)B’s clammy hands twelve months ago, and I can’t help but feel a little damn responsible about what’s happened since. Not as bad as I did with that mess with Phil Spector, but responsible all the same. Oh, and that news about Joshua Gordon-Levitt and the Sandman movie? Don’t count on it, Gaiman. JGL has had the rights to Brian Panderson’s Centaur Sam: The Manliest Horse In Town all sewn up for the best part of three years, and I haven’t seen one goddamn page of a script, not a single frame of film.

Anyway, enough topical talk. On with the show.

Death… death to the Supermen!

Storytelling is about conflict. Superhero comics, even more so.  We readers of comic books love a good fight scene, and like nothing more than the iconic heroes sparring – whether verbally or physically – with loathsome villains. When designing a villain, their grotesque morals are often externalised – comics are, after all, a medium where your hero can battle Evil Incarnate and no-one would bat an eye. The Joker is as much of an icon as Batman; his hideous features just as much a mask as that worn by Bruce Wayne. The Red Skull reflects the monstrous death-urge at the twisted heart of fascism. The Leader has a distended head to demonstrate that he is brainier than the typical schmoe, while Sinestro relies on a sufficiently wicked name – and mustache – to demonstrate his untrustworthiness. Character traits – whether they be good or bad – are writ large and obvious in comics.

I had assembled my four Supermen. Jheri Curl-el, the jive-talking Metropolis Kid. Man of Yesterday’s Tomorrows, bouffant and radiant. The Mohawk of Steel, with the blood and spit of evil-doers upon his knuckles. And of course the Last Lion of Krypton, flying through the sky powered by Jah and upfulness. What they needed now was a cause to unite them.