Do you know something? I honestly didn't believe I would ever write this post. I do generally have quite strong self-discipline, but even I didn't think that I'd write anything between 800-1600 words about comics every day (excluding, of course, the days I took to thinking of as Show And Tell days - the artist spotlights, the copied covers posts and the YouTube entries). I really thought that I'd get about a dozen or so days in, then miss one, at which point of course the whole thing would be pointless because it's not one hundred days if you don't do it every day for one hundred days.
So, here we are, then. One hundred days on from that first post, what have we learned?
Comics are rubbish
Since I started this blog, Civil War finished. It was a diabolically poor final issue, only beaten in the terribleness stakes by the last issue of its companion title, Civil War: Frontline. In fact, it was so awful that I almost gave up reading comics entirely because of it - if I hadn't kept reminding myself that there were a lot of things about comics that rocked (or at least that interested me) then I think it could have been the end of 15 years of comics reading. As it is, I just culled about a dozen or so books from my regular purchases, all of which (surprise!) were Marvel and DC titles. Many people who are more erudite than I am have written at far greater length about their dissatisfaction with mainstream superhero comic books, and if you're a fan of comics at all, then you probably have exactly the same kinds of complaints. However...
Comics are great
...that's not to say that there aren't some splendid mainstream books out at the moment. The various series which made up Marvel's Annihilation event were absolutely first class (and I'm inordinately psyched about the upcoming Nova ongoing), Darwyn Cooke is doing Will Eisner's memory proud each month on The Spirit, Peter David's X-Factor is excellent every time, Vertigo look to have a truly essential new series in the form of the "Sopranos-on-a-reservation" book Scalped, and Paul Dini is knocking out some great Batman one-shots in his Detective Comics run. Outside of the Amazing Adventures of Pants-Man/Sweary Vertigo Stuff school of comics literature, there are plenty of smashing indies being published at the moment (some of which even have superheroes in them). Invincible, Elephantmen, the Goon, Casanova, Criminal (yes, I know, but it's published under the same business model that Image use, so it's not proper Marvel), Castle Waiting, and plenty of others. That's not forgetting the backlist of great books that aren't being published any more, but which live on in trade paperback - the spectacularly ambitious and intricate superhero puzzle of Seven Soldiers. The none-more-extreme road movie of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's Preacher. The "what if Hunter S. Thompson lived in the world of Blade Runner" stylings of Transmetropolitan. Then there are all the great graphic novels that are coming out all the time - American Born Chinese was one which I really wanted to write about, but I ran out of days.
Regrets, I've had a few
Mainly in the form of things I wanted to write about but didn't. Nova. Marvels. Steve Ditko. The Ringmaster and the Circus of Crime. Hopeless Savages. Awesome Andy. Lenore. The Constrictor. The Amazing Screw-On Head. Terry Austin's Cloak and Dagger run. Duncan Fegredo. Pants Ant. The Slingers. Thanos's chin. The list goes on and on. I briefly considered keeping going on a daily basis, but I really have to quit while I'm ahead, I think.
There are also a couple of posts that I wish I'd thought harder about before I titled them. The one about the Spider-Man album was called Sing When You're Slinging, instead of the obviously far better Songs For Swinging Lovers. I'm certain I could have come up with something a little more imaginative than Those Robot Toy Car Things for the entry on the UK Transformers comic. Carrie has just suggested the Suede-riffing Dog/Man Star for the entry on John Jameson, which would have been better than I'm The Urban Spaceman, Baby.
That's Carrie, my incredibly patient girlfriend, by the way, who thought up most of the best punny names. She gave us The Tragically Hippo, Bulletproof/Monk and Aiming High, amongst others. She's done very well to not ban me from either using a computer or reading a comic ever again, but it's going to be good to be able to get our evenings back (besides, we just got Final Fantasy XII for the PS2, and it won't play itself).
Recommendations, I've got a few of them an' all
If you're one of the at least two people whom I know who may be reading this who don't know anything about comics (hello mum, hello Rabia), here is a by no means exhaustive list of the names of some comics creators whose work is generally good and worth reading (I've put writer/artists under the writers category):
Writers - Alan Moore. Grant Morrison. Brian K Vaughan. Jeff Parker. Dan Slott. Garth Ennis. Christos Gage. Adam Beechen. Darwyn Cooke. Bryan Lee O'Malley. Michael Avon Oeming. Evan Dorkin. Linda Medley.
Artists - Pasqual Ferry. Skottie Young. Niko Henrichon. Frank Quitely. Josh Middleton. Rian Hughes. Jim Cheung. Steve McNiven. Jim Mahfood. Gabriel Ba.
(No recommendations of people whom I know, because that's a bit iffy. But you should check out comics made by Antony Johnston, Dan Evans III, Mario Boon, Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matt Fraction and Jim Massey anyway.)
I'd also like to mention that my esteemed friend and colleague, video games journo James Lyon, has decided to take up the Hundred Day Challenge and start a new blog, One Hundred Days of Games. He'll be kicking off on Friday, and you'll be able to find him here.
Also, don't go and see Ghost Rider, it's rubbish.
If anyone wants to get in touch and say hi, I'm at alistair.kennedy@gmail.com.
Thanks to everyone who's read the blog, and who's enjoyed it, and even those who haven't enjoyed it but have read it anyway. I leave you with the traditional Aloha of the greatest living American.
One last thing I need to talk about. Tomorrow's going to be a wrap-up, but there's one topic which I haven't raised yet, but which I mentioned back on Day One. I've talked a lot about my favourite comics, inasmuch as I've banged on a bit about Runaways and New Warriors and Sergeant Fury etc. I've not talked about my all-time number one comics fanboy fave, though, although if you know me at all you've probably got a good idea of what it is.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Marvel loved to just grab onto passing fads and turn them into comic books. Disco hitting big? Why not create a disco superheroine, in the form of Dazzler? Evel Knievel and stunt-biking getting kids excited? Maybe you should make a biker superhero, Marvel! Then thirty years later, Nicolas Cage can star in a really dreadful film about him. Star Wars hit big? Maybe you'd better come up with Star Lord, guys! Two of the big cinema crazes of the '70s were by no means exempt from this magpie appropriation, and Marvel was quick to cotton on to them.
Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree, Melvin Van Peebles, Ron O'Neal and others were leading lights in the world of blaxploitation movies, which had a definite cool cachet. Marvel's answer to characters like Shaft was the tiara-wearing muscleman Luke Cage, who had been framed for a drug crime he didn't commit and sent to prison. There he volunteered for an experimental procedure which granted him super-strength and bulletproof skin, and he subsequently escaped from jail and set up shop above a cinema in New York's Times Square, offering his services as a 'Hero for Hire'. Cage was almost a parody of the heroes of the movies he was designed to cash in on, and his euphemistic battlecry of "Sweet Christmas!" and his open-to-the-navel yellow shirt placed him squarely between traditional superheroes and the truer tropes of blaxploitation. He was the first black hero to star in an eponymous solo series (first known as Hero for Hire and then Luke Cage, Power Man), and although his rogues' gallery may have been pimptastic and some issues may have struggled under the purple prose of Don McGregor, on the whole it's a distinctly funky book.
At around the same time, the other big cinematic cult following belonged to kung fu and martial arts movies, particularly those starring Bruce Lee. Marvel already had Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu as their approximation of Lee, but the TV show Kung Fu had given the world the pyjama-wearing Kwai Chang Caine, and Marvel were quite happy to double-dip. Thus Marvel Premiere #15 saw the first appearance of Daniel Rand, the Iron Fist. Danny was an orphan whose parents had been murdered before his eyes while on a trip to Tibet. Danny found his way into the legendary city of K'un-L'un (a sort of Brigadoon full of kung fu religious order sensei types). Honing his skills over the years, the adult Danny eventually fought and defeated a dragon by the name of Shou-Lau the Undying, and gained both a funky tattoo on his chest and the ability to channel his mental and spiritual energy into a thunderously powerful punch from which he took his superheroic moniker - the Iron Fist.
Alas, no fad lasts forever, and the Power Man series and the Iron Fist series were both scheduled to be cancelled. Marvel instead took the opportunity to merge the two titles (retitling Cage's book), and team the characters up. It shouldn't have worked, but it did.
Power Man and Iron Fist have since become one of the B-list keystones of the Marvel Universe. It's the classic buddy movie scenario - Cage is a black guy who came from a disadvantaged background, and who has a criminal record. Rand is a blond, white fella with an inherited fortune who's appropriated aspects of an Asian culture. Their natural antagonism made for great stories - it should go without saying that the first time they met, they fought before they teamed up. They weren't always in synch agenda-wise after that, either, but their mismatched fighting styles and personalities meant that Marvel had, quite by accident, created a classic pairing.
Throughout the rest of the 1970s and 1980s, Power Man and Iron Fist remained a mainstay of Marvel's publishing schedule, with a dedicated fanbase for what was, to be honest, a very strange concept. The creative teams read like a who's who of great classic creators of the period - writers on the title included Chris Claremont, Denny O'Neil, Archie Goodwin, Christopher Priest and a very young Kurt Busiek, and the roster of artists is equally impressive, with such greats as Dave Cockrum, Frank Miller and Denys Cowan taking their turns to lay down some pencils. Alas, everything good has to end, and in 1986 the book was cancelled in order to free up space and talent to work on the incoming New Universe books. The final issue was #125, and in a shock ending, Iron Fist was apparently killed, with Cage being framed for the murder.
You can't keep a good team down, though. The characters lay fallow for a few years, but in the early 1990s Cage was granted his own series again. Ditching both the Power Man name and the vest/tiara/chain belt combo, the book saw Cage relocating to Chicago to start over. It wasn't terribly good (and that's being charitable), and was cancelled after 20 issues. Crucially, though, at around this time John Byrne was the writer of the then-current Namor book, and as he had been one of the first people ever to work on Iron Fist, he felt some understandable attachment to him. He wrote a series of Namor stories which brought Rand back, and crafted a needlessly complicated story involving alien doppelgangers to explain why ol' Danny wasn't really dead. Even though it was a bit of a round the houses, left at the traffic lights kind of solution, it did mean that for the first time in six years both Iron Fist and Luke Cage were alive and active in the Marvel Universe.
It took until 1997 to get them back together in their own ongoing series, the self-explanatorily titled Heroes for Hire, by John Ostrander and Pascual Ferry. This was, quite honestly, a cracking little book, and the fact that it only lasted for 19 issues was criminal. Unfortunately, at the time of publication Marvel were in severe financial dire straits, and although Heroes for Hire was making a profit, it evidently wasn't making enough of a profit to justify its existence. Since then, Cage has starred in his own (pretty racist) miniseries, which turned him into a severely stereotypical gangsta thug, and Iron Fist had a couple of late-1990s miniseres himself, followed by an abortive six-issue (theoretically) ongoing in 2004. It was all looking a bit poor for our heroes, with nobody really fond enough of the pair to want to do anything significant with them.
Enter Brian Michael Bendis. At this point, Bendis was the biggest writer at Marvel, and was able to throw his weight around in whatever direction he wished. Fortuitously, it seems that Bendis is a bit of a Cage/Rand fanboy, and inserted either or both characters wherever he could - Alias, Daredevil, Secret War, you name it, they were there. They've just hit the zenith of their personal success, both currently being members of Marvel's biggest-name superteam, the New Avengers, of which Cage is currently the leader. At the same time, Danny's been given his own ongoing book again, by hot-property writers Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction and artist David Aja (with guest pages by the legendary Russ Heath), and there have been rumblings about a new ongoing starring Luke.
So why is it that they're so great, then? Specifically, why do I love them so much? I think it's because they're so completely chalk and cheese that their bizarre pairing leads to great banter between them, and the fact that they've always been shown as being real friends, bickering just as often as bonding, falling out and falling in, getting each other's backs up and getting each other's backs. Add the fact that they've got a pair of pretty funky costumes (even though Cage hasn't worn the yellow in years) and their demented collection of villains, and you've got a rare thing: a cash-in that outlived the fad that birthed it.
Tomorrow: one hundred days. What have we learned?
When you look back at how much comics used to cost, it's frightening just how big the increases in price have been. In the late 1970s, you wouldn't expect to pay more than 25 cents for a regular-sized issue. Nowadays, the going rate is about $3. Sure, there's inflation to factor in, but even so, the vast majority of the steep increases in cost have happened over the last ten or so years. It used to be that a new comic would set me back about £1.25. In today's market, you're looking at something more like £2.15 for an ordinary issue, more if it's a special or one-shot.
Back in the mid-1990s, Marvel decided that they would be well-served by putting out a line of comics which would retail for 99 cents apiece. Some of these - like the desperately gritty Over the Edge and the laughably poor Professor Xavier and the X-Men - were a case of Marvel coming up with a good idea but not wanting to pay top talent to do comics which weren't going to bring in a huge return for them. One book, though, stands up today as one of the best comics of the 1990s to involve a certain wall-crawling friendly neighbourhood character - Kurt Busiek's Untold Tales of Spider-Man.
The basic concept was quite a smart one. Busiek was writing old-school Spider-Man stories which were told in their entirety, soup to nuts, over the course of one issue. At a time when the awful and seemingly endless Clone Saga storyline was running in the main Spider-Man titles, Untold Tales was a refuge for those readers who weren't prepared to put up with rubbish villains, stories that went nowhere, terrible artwork and diabolically bad writing. Untold Tales was set during the early days of Spidey's career, with each issue slotting in between existing issues of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's original run on the character.
Busiek's stories have a lot to offer. They're unashamedly modelled on the classic 1960s Spidey tales, where Peter has cash problems, school woes and worries about his aunt's health. At this point in the character's history, he was forever running into bad guys who would beat him soundly, before he figured out how to stop them and came back fighting. There were no clones, no symbiotic costumes, no spider-armour or supermodel wives or Avengers memberships. It was just all about the essence of the character, with wisecracks and acrobatics and ingenious methods of defeating villains.
Joining Busiek on the book was artist Pat Olliffe (now most well known for his long run on Spider-Girl), whose art style managed to get across the gawky, uncomfortable side of Peter Parker without slavishly aping Ditko. His rough-edged figurework was in direct contrast to the over-rendered, anatomically improbable, cross-hatch-a-go-go style that had become so prevalent in the years following the establishment of Image Comics. There was also a special one-off turn by Mike Allred in the 1996 Untold Tales annual, which was a smashingly fun story about one of Spidey's early encounters with Namor and the Fantastic Four.
All in all, the art side of the equation matched the intent of the writing side - these weren't flashy, go-faster comics with nothing but empty calories behind them; they were, first and foremost, great stories. They also linked explicitly into Marvel's then-current continuity, notably by introducing a villain by the name of Sundown in the 1997 Untold Tales annual who then turned up (subjectively) years later in the 1997 Amazing Spider-Man annual. It's a bit of smart use of continuity which helped negate one of the most often-heard complaints about books set in a character's past - that they can't possibly have any bearing on the character, because what are they going to change? We already know how the character's life turns out. Untold Tales got round that by showing us that there were other facets of Spidey's past that we just hadn't been exposed to before, and that a story didn't have to "change Spider-Man... forever!" to be worthwhile.
Unfortunately, Untold Tales was cancelled after only 25 issues and a couple of annuals. Luckily, the issues themselves aren't that hard to come by, and if you wanted to read them you could probably pick them up pretty cheaply. Even if you're not enamoured by the thought of raking through back issue bins trying to pick out Untold Tales issues from the mountains of Web of Scarlet Spider or Funeral for an Octopus, all is not lost - Marvel have begun releasing trade paperback collections of the series under the brand name of "Spider-Man Visionaries: Kurt Busiek". If you're fed up of terrible, stunt-driven stories which completely miss the point of the character of Spider-Man (and let's face it, that's just as likely today as it was in the mid-1990s), you'll find a lot to love here, and it won't break the bank either.
In 2000, I moved from Scotland to France, where I was to spend the next year. I got a copy of Good-Bye, Chunky Rice, a graphic novel by writer/artist Craig Thompson, and read it while I was there. I ended the book in a little puddle of un-manly tears. Comics aren't often thought of as being a medium which can bring out such strong reactions in a person - I don't imagine many people have ever been brought to boiling rage by Fantastic Four, or have had the urge to get up and dance brought on by an instalment of Sinister Dexter. Some rare comics manage to engage those mental media centres and start up an unexpected emotional engine (mainly, it has to be said, indie comics, although that's not always the case - Webspinners: Tales of Spider-Man #12 was another, but you don't want to hear more than one True Tale of Sequential Sobbing). Good-Bye, Chunky Rice is one of those.
The story's not exactly plot-driven. Chunky Rice is a little turtle who likes to get on down to his favourite motown records, and who lives a carefree endless summer of a life in a little town down by the seaside. His best friend is a big-eyed mouse by the name of Dandel, and together they build sandcastle towns and go camping. One day, though, for reasons unstated, Chunky Rice realises that he has to leave home. He never says why - it's just that his quiet hometown isn't the right place for him to be any more. He implores Dandel to come with him, but Dandel knows that she has to stay where she is; it's no more right for her to leave than it would be for Chunky Rice to stay. Equally, Dandel knows that there's no use fighting it, and encourages Chunky Rice to forge his own path out in the world.
Once out in the wide world, Chunky Rice meets a strange group of people, including a ship's captain who misses his late wife and a couple of women who are conjoined at the head. Back at the town, Dandel spends her days writing letters to Chunky Rice and throwing them into the sea in bottles, and the reader gets to know a simple man who is trying to atone for a past misdeed which robbed him of his closest friend by proving his friendship's worth to a bird he's named Merle. Each of the cast is yearning for a close companion and a best friend, even the conjoined twins (who you would think wouldn't be able to be alone if they wanted to). Chunky Rice's ship sails on, through ever more dangerous storms and high seas, but the only thing that can hurt anyone in this book is the heartfelt ache of loneliness.
Thomson's art is reminiscent of classic underground cartoonists but with a twist of children's illustration mixed in, like a cross between Mike Kazaleh and Julie Doucet working on a Doctor Seuss story. Its use of strong black areas and heavy shading surrounding everything helps to subconsciously reinforce the feeling the characters have of being separated from the ones they love, and the strange designs of the characters makes the reader warm to their strange lives rather than being weirded out by them. Even the simplicity of Thompson's figures (particularly Chunky Rice) helps to open them up to the reader and makes us feel empathy towards them. Of course, that's helped by the beautifully sad script which Thompson uses to yank brutally at the heartstrings - nobody could fail to be touched by the sight of Dandel throwing another bottled message into the sea, saying "And yes! This one says 'I miss you' too! When will I think of something else to say?".
Good-Bye, Chunky Rice was Thompson's first graphic novel, and although his follow-up (the cow-stunningly thick Blankets) is more well-known, it's an antsier and less sympathetic read than Good-Bye, Chunky Rice, and altogether more self-indulgent with it. Good-Bye, Chunky Rice is a work which will hit home with anyone who's ever lost a friend, who's ever had to leave home, who's missing a beloved pet, who's been bereaved... pretty much everyone. It's sad without schmaltz, and poignant without pretension. It's something very special. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got something in my eye...
One of the nice things about having this little bully pulpit is that I get to recommend comics which are made by people whom I'm friends with. I've already plugged Jim Massey's great comedy Maintenance on this blog (just before New Year, in case you were wondering), but here are two more books which I recommend you check out.
First off, for those of you who are young adults (of all ages), writers Antony Johnston and Dan Evans III have a nifty little creation which is just about to ship its debut issue to stores. It goes by the name of Texas Strangers, and is what I'm sure Hollywood types would call a High Concept - it's a cowboy series for kids and teens, with lots of extra added goodness in the form of magic, elves, ogres and mysterious interlopers.
Texas Strangers is the story of a pair of teenage twins, Madara and Wyatt, who are on a mission to return an artefact - a knife - to its rightful location in Texas. En route, the kids are surprised to find that their quest will not only prove dangerous to their health, but may reveal to them secrets they never knew about themselves. In a nice bit of role reversal, it's Madara who's the pugnacious, scrappy one, while Wyatt is more content to swot up on his magic and rely on his sister to (literally) fight their corner on a more physical level. Their world is one where Christopher Columbus discovered America with the aid of an on-board wizard and Mexico has a large indigenous orc population, and it's a world that's being unveiled to kids this month.
Johnston is no stranger to comics, having worked on titles such as Queen & Country, his own ongoing Oni Press series Wasteland and the graphic novel adaptation of Antony Horowitz' Stormbreaker. Evans, on the other hand, may be new to comics scripting but has years of experience under his belt in the field of TV, where he has worked on shows such as Transformers: Beast Machines and Digimon. Together with artist Mario Boon, they've put together a story which fills a gap in the market - an ongoing children's book from a major publisher which doesn't feature superheroes or cartoon characters. Texas Strangers looks to be set to give comics-reading kids a continuing action-adventure series to call their own for the first time in donkeys' years. Each individual story is set to run over two issues for maximum reader-friendliness, and if you're interested in checking it out - and I hope you are - there's an 11-page preview of the first issue here, and it won't cost you one red cent.
If you don't reckon all-ages comics are your cup of tea, though, you might want to try out Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's current Image comics series Phonogram. Following the story of one David Kohl, a distinctly unlikable indie chap, Phonogram posits the theory that music and magic are intrinsically linked, and phonomancers like Kohl can use the former to effect the latter. Kohl is a misanthropic fellow who's out to get what he can from whoever is willing to let him take it, but one day he finds out that Brittania, the symbol of Britpop and Kohl's patron goddess, is in trouble. At that point it all starts to go a bit wrong for him, and he's deputised on a mission to save both her and himself from rival phonomancers who are trying to tape over his memories and identity.
Gillen's been a writer for many a year, and is regarded as one of the top video games journalists around (he was responsible for creating a new style of review called New Games Journalism which focussed on subjective experience of games, which many saw as good sense and others were less enthused by. The debate continues to rage and no doubt amuses Gillen no end). He's also written for and co-edited the British small press anthology Commercial Suicide and writes a strip entitled Save Point for Official PlayStation 2 Magazine. Gillen's writing style is one which you have to work at (there's no easy way to articulate complexity without sacrificing at least some meaning) but is always rewarding once you wrap your head around the Big Concepts (which, ironically, often can be articulated easily - music is magic. See?). His David Kohl is a complicated guy, who seems at first glance to be the kind of guy you get in every scenester hangout and whom you would generally try to avoid, but he's got more in common with Hellblazer star John Constantine than the fact that they're both morally reprehensible magicians in comics - they're both also guys who will do the right thing as often as the wrong, even if you don't like their methods.
Art is provided by Jamie McKelvie, who comes from the flaming eight-balls, skulls and dice school of art. He excels at drawing attractive punk girls, but luckily his range also extends a lot wider than that too. He has a super-cleanline style reminiscent of Steve Conley and Steve Rolston that could, in lesser hands, make for a pretty posed-looking comic, but McKelvie manages to give characters a subtlety of facial expression and body language that adds a sense that these characters have weight and presence. He's got an original graphic novel called Suburban Glamour out this year which, unsurprisingly, features some attractive punk girls, but it's hard to begrudge them that when he certainly draws them well.
Like Texas Strangers, Phonogram has a preview online (at this location) which covers the first ten pages of the first issue. Unlike Texas Strangers, Phonogram is definitely not all-ages, so don't click through to it whilst unprepared for swearywords.
There you go. Two comics by my mates, easily sampled online. Whether you choose to go into the West with Texas Strangers or turn on and tune in to Phonogram, it'll be worth your while. Plus, y'know, it'll help to make my friends richer, and they might buy me drinks. So everyone wins! Hooray!
Okay, one last artist I want to cover in this blog before we hit the end (and, excitingly, I know what each day between now and the end is going to be now, which is more than I've done before). Previously, most of the artists I've highlighted have been guys who've got a bit of work behind them, but my great joy in telling the world about them is in the fact that their best days are doubtless still to come - they're all pretty young. Not so this fellow, unfortunately.
Seth Fisher was an American artist who settled in Japan, which he grew to call his home (his wife, Hisako, is Japanese). He was known for his delightfully crazy artwork, which merged influences of Frank Quitely and Brendan McCarthy to give an incredibly detailed and totally bonkers view of the world. His linework was painstakingly delicate, and managed to deliver George Perez levels of detail while never being over-busy. Instead, the reader's eye is drawn to individual aspects of each picture he produced, every square inch having as much to appreciate and savour as an entire page of many artists' output. He was nominated for an Eisner award for his superb work on Flash: Time Flies and Vertigo Pop!: Tokyo, and worked with writers like J.M. DeMatteis and Dan Curtis Johnson on DC titles. His Fantastic Four/Iron Man miniseries, Big In Japan, was possibly the most beautifully crazy thing he had done to date.
On the evening of January 30, 2006, Fisher fell from the roof of a seven-story hotel/nightclub in Osaka and was killed. The trade paperback of Big In Japan was released posthumously. Fisher was 34 years old when he died.
By now we're inured to comics legends passing away - most of them are pretty old. In creative terms, Fisher had only just begun to hit high gear, and he surely would have continued to hone his skills and produce ever better works. Below is a sample of some of his work - really, though, the monitor can't do it justice (you really, really have to click these and expand the images to get the full effect), and you should head out and get yourself some of his work in hardcopy as soon as you can. If you've enjoyed any of the artists I've tried to highlight while I've been writing this thing, you should pick up their stuff too, and write to the comics companies they work for and tell them you'd like to see more of it. Appreciate the good ones we've got while we've got them.
