Monday, July 10, 2023

A boy's best friend is his tiger (model).

Hey, when I previously mentioned this, I thought it might take a year to get around to it. And it was only...like six months? That's progress, right? From 1992, Grave Tales #3, featuring "Role Model" Written by Jeff Bailey and Marty Golia, art by Joe Staton.
There's throwing one's self into your hobby, and then there's mixing your own blood in with the paint; you can guess where young Calvin er, Bradley falls on that spectrum. But, it does inadvertently turn his Hobbes Tiger-Man model into a voodoo murder machine, which he should definitely stop. Right? I have to wonder if Bill Watterson ever caught wind of this one.
Staton has another story this issue, "Dog Gone" with John Cochran, as well as a nice bio feature. There's also Geoffrey Blum and Sparky Moore's adaptation of the Saki short story Sredni Vashtar, and some time-travelling trouble in "Cycle of the Vampire" (Story by Jack C. Harris, art by John Heebink.) But this was the last issue of this series from Hamilton Comics. I'm not positive what year they stopped making comics, but they don't have a Wikipedia page, even though they had the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers license briefly.
Posted by googum at 5:00 AM
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3 comments:

Mr. Morbid's House Of Fun said...

They had the Might Morphing Power Rangers comic book license and STILL went under!? Looks like they deserved it to me, because back then that was a license to print money. Literal money.

Idk, I'd like to think ol' Bill would've gotten a kick out a nice little parody/homage of his work. Maybe not, but it didn't seem mean-spirted to me.

Never heard of this Sredni Vashtar until today but I'm an instant fan. Definitely has elements of Harry Potter to me, as far as nice kid who's abused by his familial caretaker, except Harry never went dark like that, but should've.

6:48 AM
H said...

I don't think people even knew there was a Power Rangers comic (or at least there wasn't enough overlap between comics readers and MMPR fans)- there were about half a dozen companies that gave it a try, and most of them didn't make it past the third issue. It was all about the action figures and stickers and video tapes back then.

From what I've read, Bill's not exactly curmudgeonly but he doesn't really care for all the parodies and panels being taken out of context. He's not going around making a fuss about it (partially 'cause he's usually not too social) but there are a couple interviews here and there and he's not too complimentary of any of it in them.

11:43 AM
Mr. Morbid's House Of Fun said...

@H: Oh yeah, DOZENS of companies had that license, I want to say TOPPS, the trading card company that briefly went into publishing comics, also had the license at one time. I guess you're right, the majority of kids just wanted the figures video games, & other merch rather than having to read comics, I get it.

9:10 AM

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