Lay back and picture a strange magazine that looks like nothing else on the shelf. It isn't very large or bombastic. In fact, it's rather small for a magazine, roughly the size of the average 6"x9" paperback. Handy. The cover art is insane though, a mashup of multiple comicbook imagery, with the colors a bit off, making it look more like a pop artist's fever dream than anything that might actually exist for real. The title on the thing suggests something science fictiony, or potentially supernatural? It certainly implies that there are secrets to be divulged, knowledge to be discovered.

Upon cracking this mysterious publication open, you discover that its guts are comprised entirely of comics. But there's something peculiar about the curation: the UFO Robot Grendizer installments from Japan are followed by a self-contained 6-page Thor comic from America. That one is followed by a 13-page Spiderman comic (a complete adventure!), which is then followed by a 7-page Fantastic Four comic (Jack Kirby era!). You're only midway through the magazine now. You continue to flip through and you find a Human Torch comic. What might follow that one? Another Marvel bit or perhaps bring it back to Japan? No, no, they give you a Charlton comic. Space: 1999 to be precise. And finally, they finish off with a little something from Europe, something more grounded, a dense ligne-claire war comic. Pretty straight, save for the super-jet which makes the strip somewhat akin to Firefox, the Clint Eastwood flick from 1982.

"What in hell's name you smoke this morning, Ganzeer?"

What if I told you that such a publication did in fact exist?

"Now you've really lost it."

Behold.

Look at that madness. Non-existent are the boundaries or rivalries between different comics-producing companies. Non-existent are the narrow definitions of genre classifications that wouldn't allow for a varied range of comics to exist in the same space. Non-existent are the cultural boundaries defined by nation states even.

This publication, at once hefty in "content" but flimsy enough to roll in your back-pocket, isn't just another adventure mag, but rather a strange encryption that contains within it a collection of signals from several distant worlds! A generous slab of weird and wonderful culture(s) obtainable for just the change in your pocket.

The date on this is marked 1982, but I only came across these publications at some point in the early-to-mid 90s after having already encountered American comics in their original form (I note that this could never exist today. Marvel now owned by Disney would be hellbent on preserving their brand identity including in foreign markets, and the entire Charleton catalogue now owned by DC means that it can in no way co-exist in a publication containing comics by Marvel, and that's if DC was interested in doing anything with the Charleton stuff at all). My love for the standard American comicbook certainly lived on, but these curious collections offered in Arabic I think played a huge part in helping form a more fluid understanding towards culture and probably in regard to genre as well. By the simple act of gathering all these stories in a single science fictiony package, they became science fiction. Reading the Spiderman or Fantastic Four comics in their original formats put out by Marvel around the same time didn't read like science fiction at all, but like straight superhero comics. It would of course be entirely unfair to blame this "feeling" entirely on the package, it partly had to do with the material itself. After all, the Fantastic Four, Spiderman, Ironman, and the Hulk were all originally conceived as science fiction comics because DC/National was the same company that distributed the much smaller, scrappier Marvel and didn't want to distribute comics put out by another company that would've directly competed with their own, so they put a condition on Marvel: Eight titles only, and no superheroes. It was only much later that Marvel superherofied their material more and more until it became the color-by-numbers approach to storytelling that abiding by genre conventions typically results in. Ironically, DC's original stuff wasn't conceived of as superhero comics either. It is well-documented how Superman, the world's first superhero, was in fact Siegel and Shuster's strange attempt at a science fiction strip, inspired more by pulps like Amazing Stories and newspaper strips like Flash Gordon than anything else. Without that science fiction outlook, you don't have Superman's most captivating tale of all, his origin story; the one involving the death of a planet called Krypton and the catapulting of an alien baby into deep space by his parents in the hopes he might land somewhere safe and habitable. The similarities of course to certain older myths are obvious. This is what you get when you do away with the boundaries of genre and allow your obsession— whatever their sources may be— to cross-pollinate. One thing is certain though, without science fiction, the superhero would've never been born.

Batman on the other hand was intended as a crime comic, inspired by the mob activity in Chicago and more famously the pulp stories of The Shadow (Bruce Timm's iteration of the Batman is precisely genius for retapping into that aspect of the character). Unlike comics elsewhere, American comics owe much to the American pulps that came before them. So much so that both major comicbook publishers had their beginnings as publishers of pulp magazines (as detailed in the fantastic MEN OF TOMORROW and the not quite as fantastic MARVEL: THE UNTOLD STORY). Jack Kirby famously drew inspiration from the old pulps well into the 80s and Alan Moore would later utilize concepts from the pulps as the seeds for his entire ABC line (seeds that would inevitably sprout and grow into mad, unforeseen and very relevant directions). I sometimes wonder how varied all the material produced by Marvel and DC would become (be it in comics or film), were they to entirely drop the confines of the superhero genre. There's a world where Ironman can have a little something from Verhoeven's Robocop, and the Fantastic Four can be approached as the fiction of Paul McAuley through the lens of Spielberg, and Ghostrider could be John Carpenter's answer to Easy Rider.

Flipping through one of these eclectic translated-to-Arabic collections recently, it dawned on me that the influence they had on me may in fact be manyfold.

Notice the varied printing specs. Conceived as a way to keep costs down while also keeping the publication colorful, you only have a handful of full-color pages with the remainder printed in a variable duotone: black and another color. The other color sometimes being orange, blue, or green. For you to be reading a comics story only for the color scheme to change with the turn of a page for no apparent reason has such a strange and peculiar effect. Almost akin to how Kill Bill suddenly went black and white in the extra bloody fight scene set in Tokyo.

Now look at this:

There's this thing I do in THE SOLAR GRID where I change the color scheme and visual style according to when and where the scene takes place. Granted, the visual changes employed do have a narrative purpose, but still the end result is widely varied visuals within the same package. I may not have had these Arabic collections in mind at the time of conceiving this approach, but it's hard not to see their influence in hindsight.

The other thing this publication may have inspired in me is breaking the rules of the known universe, or at the very least bending them. At a certain age and particular degree of geekdom, any reader of American comics will understand that there are rules; Marvel characters don't exist in the world of DC characters and vice versa (let us not discuss the Marvel vs. DC gimmick of the mid 90s), and Charlton (prior to being purchased by DC) isn't supposed to exist in either and all Japanese manga is certainly several universes removed. And while collecting them all in a single publication doesn't necessarily mean they all exist in the same world, it's certainly enough rule-bending to make you go: Wait a goddarn minute! You can do that?!

And once you realize you can, your inclination to bend the rules— all rules, any rules in life— may just follow you wherever you go under any circumstance until the day you die. I'm not sure there's a project I've ever undertaken where I didn't bend the rules, even just a little. Take my bit in THE BIG BOOK OF CYBERPUNK for example. All stories in the book follow a strict template: two columns. That's the book's format. Simple enough rule, right? No, I had to come in with my bullshit: 

For more rule breakage, see how I turned a book's dustjacket into a protest poster (and the cover-wrap underneath into a record sleeve).

Another bit of influence I would attribute to these publications is probably my disdain for nationalism. Or any isms for that matter. You may think this is a stretch, but hear me out: There is no mention on any of the strips, before them or after them, of where they were sourced from. No context. None. Just comics. So, if you're picking this up at a very young age, you don't know what's originally Japanese from American or European nor do you care. It's just all awesome, imaginative, far-out comics! No other context! No artist credits even! No writer credits! No Stan Lee shoving his cult of personality in your face at every which turn! Nothing at all except the comics delivered straight! I kinda love that.

Okay, the lack of creator credits is deeply problematic, yes, but I gotta say, there's something really great about not letting anything distract from the work itself. Like the carvings on a temple wall, you never know who the author is. It's just passed down knowledge. In fact, there was a time between 2011-12 when I made it a point not to sign any of my own work at all. It seemed however to upset enough collectors off that I eventuallyhad to cave. 

My disinterest in adopting national identifiers though, that still persists. As does my disinterest in tainting my output with any kind of identifier, be it in regard to race, sexuality, or political leanings. But people are obsessed with identity politics, especially in America (you gotta be a thing and all your work must be about that thing!), and getting slapped with some kind of label (in a talk, article, interview, review, or what have you) is usually unavoidable, even if you disagree with it. I don't like to make a fuss about it though, I prefer to just move on and get to discussing the work.

To attribute all this to how a mere comics publication was packaged says a lot about the power of the package. However unintentional or unbeknownst to the licensees, I'd argue that the end result of their efforts was nothing short of revolutionary.

Ganzeer
Houston, TX
27.07.2024