Az (1983) #1-2 by Phil Lasorda
This is the third and final of the original series by the Comico founders, so I guess it’s a good opportunity to blather on a bit about Comico (so far) in general. But first, let’s look at some Az.
Well, that doesn’t look so bad…
And Lasorda has gone to town with his toothbrush, spraying ink all over this filthy cityscape. And ultraviolence!
It’s not the worst way to start a series? And this seems to have nothing to do with the Az piece in Primer #1? Which is good news.
OH MY GOD
FOR THE LOVE OF
OK, this is pretty bad. It’s so bad that it’s hard not to wonder whether the artwork is bad on purpose — I mean, it’s funny? But the storyline doesn’t really seem to go for humour much otherwise?
What would Captain Ockham say?
Well, Lasorda has his priorities when rendering things…
This really looks like something a teenager would have cooked up, but I think all the Comico people were, like, 23 when this was published? Of course, this could have been drawn years earlier, but…
The shifts from “gritty” ultraviolence…
… to oddball comedy seems very much like what an easily distracted teenager would do, I think.
And then the series ends, never to return, with the traditional indie comics “to be continued” sign off.
The artwork’s inept, and so is the storytelling, and the plot (if you can call it that) seems to be going nowhere. So, like the two other “ongoing” series from Comico, this is a pretty bad comic book.
But bad comics are nothing new — there’s a lot of them out there, and publications like this usually get a response of “well, it’s rough around the edges, but it shows potential!” and so on. But reading contemporary reviews of these books, there’s a palpable sense of hostility towards them that you rarely see in the comics press.
And I think some of the reason is the apparent delusions on display here. All three of these series had the same editorial, so they had to have been proud of the ridiculous verbiage here (with dubious grammar). And it’s obvious that this would rub reviewers at the time the wrong way: Instead of judging these books as fannish amateur books by some hapless almost-teenagers, this editorial line professes that these are part of “dynamic professional” line of comics.
Comico blanketed the comics press with ads for these books, which means that Comico had money to spend, which perhaps further alienated people — as in “they had money to spend? ON THIS?!?” Somebody described these comics as “ugly comics with ugly names”, which is accurate — comic shops ordered a lot of copies of these books based on the ads and the solicitations (that were done without much in the way of artwork samples), and the reactions when they received the books were probably along the lines of “and what are we supposed to do with this shit, then?” People didn’t see them as another charmingly amateurish book, but as somebody trying to swindle them.
It’s not surprising that Comico then pivoted to publishing other people’s comics, because nobody were going to order further issues of this stuff.
The Telegraph Wire #10, page #6:
COMICO
Beginning with the fourth issues of
SLAUGHTERMAN, AZ, SKROG, and GRENDEL.
Comico will be publishing its entire line
with the exception of PRIMER in full colour.
According to these new publishers, the pur-
pose of the change is to “put Comico in the
comics limelight.”
This didn’t happen.
Full page ad in The Buyer’s Guide.
The Slings and Arrows Comic Guide #2, page #55:
AZ.
Comico: 2 issues 1983
Dear, oh dear, oh dear. Az is large pink alien (an Azonian),
who is captured by the evil monocled Baron Stroker. There
are a few nice ideas, like a cigar-smoking fish, but you
can’t sympathise with our pink friend as he’s a violent
bugger. The abysmal art only made matters worse. This is
sub-standard fanzine level at best, so who would
have thought Comico would grow into a respected
publisher.~HY
Oh, Lasorda had planned on outsourcing the artwork.
DAK: What’s interesting about Comico
is that you don’t give the impression of
having analyzed the market and said,
“Well, superhero groups are selling well,
so let’s do superhero groups.” You really
have taken a chance, with characters like
Az — a fat pinhead wearing a raincoat…
PHIL LASORDA: I designed him after
my father.
BILL (COOCH) CUCINOTTA: Wait
’til he reads that!
PHIL: I had a psychology teacher in
college analyze AZ for me, and he said
for women it is a penis gratification, and
more women are going to like the char-
acter than men. He felt Az would have a
certain tendency to sexually excite women.
GERRY GIOVINCO: Personally, Phil,
AZ changed my life.
PHIL: I just have penis envy. Only
kidding! Az is really weird. When I first
created him, he was really primitive. I
was into the “love” thing. And when I
first came up with AZ, I pictured it as a
child’s book, with pastel colors. On his
planet, there is no such thing as killings,
or hatred — there is a lot of love and
butterflies and that sort of stuff. But his
planet was destroyed, so he curses every-
body for that. Yet every now and then, he
has that love inside him, that desire to
help other people. His whole mission now
is, “to make more Azonians.” Rumor is
that there’s another one out there, and he
just has to find it.
DAK: I thought that was a unique
motivation, too. Not the old, “My parents
were killed, so now I’ve got to stop
crime!”
PHIL: Well, see, he is only here for a
little bit of time. He goes from planet to
planet. He is going to be on an old-age
planet, in the fifth issue. The cover is him
in a wheelchair.
My brother is a physical therapist, and
when I was in college, in order to earn
extra money, I worked with him in an old-
age home, a nursing home. I talked to
people and saw how they felt about lone-
liness. I decided to bring that into the
book and incorporate Az to show how he
deals with older people.
Az goes through these different ex-
periences and different emotions. A reason
I left his eyes blank was that I wanted to
get other people’s feelings into Az. I want
them to picture themselves in Az. Every-
one picks on you, everything happens to
you, you feel like an Az . . . A-Z, not the
other one.
Is that how Az from Vokes/Rankin would have looked?
Comics Interview #83, page #16:
PAT: I’m going to tell you a secret: I was
the managing editor of COMICS
SCENE when the first Comico titles
came out and we were running a column
called “Pick Hits,’ in which I chose what I
thought were the best titles coming out.
When I saw the first set of Comico titles
– with the possible exception of yours; I
don’t remember if it was in there – I
turned to the editor, Bob Greenberger,
and said, “Gee, I wish we had a ‘Bottom
of the Barrel’ column.”
What’s the one I remember – Adge,
or something like that?
MATT: AZ – that was done by Phil
Lasorda, the owner.
PAT: So, it was surprising, four or five
years later, to see Comico doing material
that anyone actually wanted to buy.
There’s even less written about Az than Slaughterman and Skrog…
I genuinely loved this!Comic absurdity at its finest.
I think this had better art and story than the first Vol (2 issues) of Grendel, like hands down! (I love Grendel btw).Phil Lasorda could have taken the adventures of the AZONIAN “AZ” and the floating fish “Detective Doggman”, to similar levels of success, at least judging by these stories.
Hey, there’s an entire Progressive Ruin post about Az:
So basically I’ve had an interest in amateur work like what you see here in Az, a sort of unfettered approach to putting your imagination on paper and getting it out there for people to read, without the constraints that could be put upon the project by larger publishers. It’s rough around the edges, I’m not sure about the setting for the story (more on that in a sec), there’s a full page drawing with a waitress in the foreground whose nipples are very carefully delineated beneath her shirt which is — a choice…like I said, unfettered.
Aside from that last bit about the nipples, which, honestly, that was out of nowhere, this isn’t a terrible comic. It sets up the premise, introduces our hero, tells its story…not polished in the slightest, but retains a measure of charm anyway.
Well, I have certainly read worse than Az — I mean, a lot worse — but this seems overly generous.
Anyway — the next post will hopefully be about an actually good book.