1995: Elementals

Elementals (1995) #1-3 by Jack Herman, Tony Daniel and others

This was apparently going to be COMICO 95’s centrepiece title: A new ongoing Elementals title. The first three issues are subtitled “Birth of a Supernation”, and then there’s a triangle box on the cover, kinda reminiscent of Superman titles some years before, kinda?

But the most important thing here is that the first issue comes polybagged with a collectable card.

*gasp* I opened it! Now it’s worth nothing!

But this is the only one of these cards I’ve seen — COMICO 95 launched this as a new Magic The Gathering thing, I guess? I haven’t actually done any research, but I have to assume that it failed completely?

OOOh! I’ve got a “rare variant”! I’m so lucky!

Well, while I’m here I could just do some research… yes, that’s the description of the game…

OK, people on Ebay are apparently trying to sell cards from this game for real money…

… and.. That’s it, basically? I can find no chatter about this game at all, but perhaps my Google-fu is just bad. Or Google is bad. But I’m going to go ahead and conclude that my guess about this game was correct: The Chrysalis game flopped bigly.

I think somebody at Comico had just discovered the ™ key on their keyboard: Saker™, Shadowspear™, Oblivion™…

And with that much recapping, surely the story will just start without any further ado?

Huh, that’s not the art style I was expecting at all. The cover of #3 says “Tony ‘Spawn’ Daniels” (sic), so I thought this was going to look all Image-ey… instead these faces kinda look like they were drawn by Joe Sacco.

And, no, despite all the recapping, we do more recapping in the story. However, there’s some pretty good jokes in here, eh? So it’s not all bad.

But it is an odd way to launch a new series — this would all be incomprehensible (and not very interesting) to new readers.

Seldom seen angle!

But at least they encounter some monsters and something happens…

And the next issue is mostly a long fight scene, and then the monsters just… go away. So a typical Elementals plot development: New characters are introduced, they disappear, and aren’t really referred to in any meaningful way afterwards. (Except perhaps in a speech balloon while doing some infodumping, seven years later.)

Meanwhile, the teenage now-not-Monolith-anymore has created his own nation state for all super-heroes — which is kinda like X-Men’s island thing a decade before? Er… Genosha? I had stopped reading X-Men by then, so I’m not quite sure when that happened, but it was before this thing, at least.

The editorial of the third issue announces that Elementals has been cancelled already, but there’s going to be several Elementals mini-series. Including something called “Elementals Babes: A Photo Multimedia Bikini Special #1 (of 3)”. Fortunately, that never happened? I hope!

Oh Google AI… never stop being you. That is an hallucination, I hope?

Yup.

That’s a very Jack Herman line, especially since she’s talking to a fifteen-year-old.

I can’t really convey how tedious it was to read these three issues. Herman keeps laying on the verbiage, and none of it is interesting in the least. It’s just moving these paper thin non-characters around on a board, and nothing of interest happens.

Not even Tommy being killed, once again.

Hero Illustrated #22, page #88:

That “Tony Daniel stuff” is, in fact,
the long-awaited return of The
Elementals. The series returns this July,
continuing work Jack Herman and
Daniel created during Comico’s break
(effectively issue #27 of the old series).
Azzarello insists that reading issue #1
shouldn’t be like jumping on in the mid-
dle of something. “Nobody’s going to
get that sort of impression. There’ll be
an intro, probably extensive. More than
likely it’ll be more than a 32-page
comic, though we’re not going to up the
price on it.”
Fans might more easily connect Tony
Daniel, the artist for the series, with
Marvel’s X-Force. Comico was the
company that gave Daniel his first big
break in comics. Friends at a Chicago
comic shop showed Daniel’s work to
Comico in 1992, and the artist soon
found himself being asked what title
he’d be interested in working on. “And I
said of course I wanted to do
Elementals,” Daniel said. “I ended up
getting that job and working for them for
a little bit over a year. I did maybe 10
issues of Elementals.”
Daniel wants to make sure everyone
knows it’s his early work. “I’m not
ashamed of it, ” he says, “but it was a
big learning experience for me. You can
see the improvements issue by issue,
you can see when I learned something.
So people that want to see where I
came from and how I started out, they’ll
get to see my early work [at the same
time as] my newest work.”
This series will wrap up the long-
running “Oblivion War” story line, that
originally started several years back
when Marvel and DC began the annual
summer crossover trend. “Bill
[Willingham] wanted to do that with The
Elementals Universe,” Herman says.
“He wanted to do basically a 24-issue
story line [with a] mega-war that had a
long impact on the universe.
Unfortunately, about halfway through
the actual plot line, the old Comico of
course went under.”

It sounds like Tony Daniel did the artwork for this a long time before it was published? Which is what the editor said in an interview — that they’d been collecting inventory while being on hiatus — but I assumed that was a lie. Oops! I guess I was wrong?

Overstreet’s FAN #1, page #74:

Just like you remember them… sort o
Now, the news you’ve been waiting
for… Elementals is returning as an ongoing, mont
Jack Herman will again be scripting the adven-
ture of Earth’s mightiest paranormals. (Doesn’t thi
guy sleep???) With art being supplied by Tony
Daniel, former penciler of X-Force and current
artist on Spawn: Blood Feud, Elementals is sur
to once again capture the interests of comic fans
everywhere.
The Elementals first appeared in comics way.
back in 1984, as a back-up feature in Texas
original appearance was part of the Villains &
co-designer. Bill Willingham wrote a couple of
adventures for the game which were basically the
rough draft of the Elementals Universe). Not long
after, they got their own series, from Comico.
“I began scripting the book along with Bill start-
ing in issue #4 of the original series,” says Herman
“So other than Bill, I’ve been with Fathom,
Morningstar, Vortex, and Monolith the longest. I’ve
got a certain affinity to the bunch.” That affinity is
shared by Daniel, “I’m proud of my work on The
Elementals. I really enjoy drawing those charac-
ters, and I think it shows.”
“Tony’s completed the first seven issues,” says
Allen, “You won’t believe the quality of the work.
The Elementals have never looked better.”

Overstreet’s FAN #1, page #40:

What are some of the other projects you have done?
I did maybe 9 issues of Elementals which are going to come out later this
year. Other than that, X-Force was my big break in terms of people seeing
Elementals, was just drawing comics and someone giving me a check.
That was it. No one else saw it or anything. I know they are going to relea
all my old stuff, which looks like my old stuff.

Back Issue #24, page #86:

Not long afterwards, Leeke accompanied Willingham to the DC offices so
the writer could drop off a proposal with Leeke attached as artist. “At the end
of the day, Bill stopped at Valiant Comics to catch up with Janet Jackson,
who’d once colored Elementals.” This led to Leeke showing his portfolio to
editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, which in turn led to a phone call from Shooter,
wondering if he’d like to work for Valiant. “I immediately left Comico,”
happily becoming the penciler for X-O Manowar and leaving Elementals with
#24. “My worries were over. I breathed a lot easier after that.” Tony Daniel,
later to pencil X-Force, Spawn, and The Teen Titans, took over the penciling.
Meanwhile, Willingham had his own challenges with Rev. When it
came time to sacrifice some of the Supernature, Rev vetoed Willingham’s
ideas. Willingham’s carefully crafted plans were forced to give way to Rev’s
merchandizing intentions for potential toys and movies. With Willingham’s
control over the Elementals’ destiny now gone, he sold the property to Rev,
leaving Jack Herman to write the book.
Leeke enjoyed working with Herman for their brief time together. “Jack
Herman was the heir apparent to write The Elementals,” Leeke says.
“Amazingly, Bill and Jack have similar styles of writing and the ideas that Jack
had for the Elementals seemed to be a natural continuation of what Bill was
doing, so it’s almost seamless. If you were reading the book, you’d never
know that there was a change in the writing.”
One of the conditions of the sale required Willingham to produce what he
calls in his F.A.Q. at Comicon.com “an exhaustive bible on how to continue the
series to its logical conclusion. This document, filling two of the largest three-ring
binders made, was very probably the largest, most complex series bible ever
produced for a single comic-book title.
“The last time I had any occasion to visit the Comico offices, one of the
volumes of the series bible was being used-very effectively, I have to admit-
as a doorstop.”