If Madame Xanadu seems annoyed, so am I: I can't figure out where I read this one before; which means I probably have another copy somewhere. I wonder if I didn't like it then, too. From 1981,
Madame Xanadu #1, "Dance for Two Demons" Written by Steve Englehart, art by Marshall Rogers. Slightly-altered cover by Michael Wm. Kaluta.
A junkie breaks into Madame Xanadu's store, but his heart really isn't in it: Xanadu probably doesn't need powers to see right through him, he wants to get clean but can't. Xanadu steers him into rehab, then the next day is visited a young woman from South Dakota, who says her aunt had known a Madame Xanadu...forty years ago! She wanted advice, since she had got into said aunt's old witchcraft stuff after being told not to, and after swiping a spellbook her aunt's house burns down, with her in it. She may want reassurance more than anything, that it was a coincidence and not her fault, but gets really defensive when Xanadu doesn't immediately take her side. Their conversation is interrupted by the return of the junkie, who gave rehab a day--well, a few hours--but that wasn't working, did she have anything else? The junkie and the yokel are immediately smitten with each other, and I wish Xanadu took the old EC tradition and let them hang themselves; they were terrible. But, they keep digging in, dragging the neighborhood into a masked ball that summons Ishtar and Tammuz, which would grant them a foothold in this realm; but Xanadu manages to convince them the real magic was inside themselves. Xanadu isn't as showy as a Strange or a Fate, or even Constantine: she works in a way like God, leaving you to wonder if she really did anything?
Also this issue: "Falling Down to Heaven..." Written by J.M. DeMatteis, art by Brian Bolland. On an alien planet, an alien finds a crashed human, and takes him home to tend to him. His ailing wife hates the humans for the deaths of their children, and thinks her husband should kill him then and there, but probing the human's thoughts, he realizes he hadn't had an easy time of it, either. He had protested the treatment of the aliens, and was left alone to monitor the planet as punishment. This is just a little 7-page number, that wouldn't have been out of place in
2000 AD, but Bolland draws the hell out of it.
4 comments:
Yes, yes he does. Just read on it readcomicbooks.com and it was a hell of a story with plenty of emotional punch for just a simple 7-pager. Hell of an ending. Definitely feels like commentary that could be applied to both military vets & regular private citizens doing the 9-5 thing in thankless jobs.
BEAU-TI-FUL art by Marshal Rogers, which just reminds me that he's dead & gone, meaning we'll never get any new art from him that would be just as good, if not better than he was here. Just as beautiful is the cover by Michael Kaluta. SO damn good. Decent story all the way around.
She's probably annoyed because this is the third time they've solicited Madame Xanadu #1, with that very cover. She really doesn't seem to have much luck with getting her series off the ground, does she? It's probably for the best that she ended up mostly guesting in other books then.
I’d have to say at the risk of sounding insulting, she makes a better supporting/side character than a main one able to carry her own solo title. If DC’s already tried thrice during different time periods & it still doesn’t work, then there’s your sign.
It's not that it didn't sell- it never made it to the newsstand. Every time they tried to launch her title, there was some sort of problem that meant cancelling and/or merging a bunch of series. The first time was going to be during the period that became the DC Implosion- that should tell you something. If I remember correctly, this did pretty good numbers when it finally did come out but the fatigue of the whole process is what did it in. What inventory they had left was used up in other supernatural anthology books.
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