Hi! Welcome to this new blog, wherein I’m going to read all the comics published by Comico the Comic Company (1982-1997). And then write a bit about each series.
As a teenager, I didn’t buy many books published by Comico. I got the Mage series (which I liked quite a bit), but very little else seemed to grab my attention.
Of course, not having money (teenagers are poor, man) was one factor, because I remembered being intrigued in general by the books. They had a very distinctive design, what with basically every book having a wraparound cover, and that grid at the top of the pages. (Futzing around with the design of this blog (while having a fever) was fun — I went with a mid-80s “let’s put a 1pt line around everything” and a “so you like grids? I’ll put a grid on your grid so that you can grid while you grid” combination.)
But looking over the comics they published, I’ve belatedly realised that I’m pretty interested in reading them now — it’s a slightly strange mix of oddball super-hero stuff, along with Japanese comics, licensed characters and humour stuff. I also like the mix of a few long-running series along with a whole lot of shorter series — that makes it easier to blog without committing too hard.
So over the last few months, I’ve been shopping, and I think I’ve now got all the comics they published. The comics are surprisingly cheap and easy to find. For instance, I got a 40 issue Grendel run for $40 on ebay. But that’s the case with the vast majority of these books — you can pick them up for cover price or less. Which I guess means that they’re in that Goldilocks zone if you want to buy and read them:
1) They sold sufficiently that there’s still a lot of copies out there and 2) none of them were super duper successful commercially long term — at least not to the extent that there’s still people out there clamouring to buy copies today.
The only exceptions are the first Grendel (1983) run, and some Primer issues, which were pretty expensive. Oh, and randomly — the final issue of Robotech The Macross Saga and the second-to-last issue of Robotech Masters, I think it was. But overall, I think I paid less for these comics, on average, than new comics cost today.
Comico didn’t actually publish an enormous amount of comics — about 400, so they fit into two shortboxes.
Comico had a kinda interesting story, though (which I’ll return to in more detail while writing about the comics), but in short: It was started by three guys mainly to publish their own comics — Az, Skrog and Slaugherman. None of which took off. Then Matt Wagner signed on, and they had a hit. So Bob Schreck and Diana Schutz came aboard, and all of a sudden the books looked a whole lot more professional. Gone were the black and white comics, and in was the cover grid. The company puttered on for the rest of the decade, and due to financial problems, they went bankrupt, and were then bought up by somebody else, and eventually the output concentrated mostly on porn. The end.
So buckle up, strap down, put your head between your legs: The Great Comico Read Starts Now! That is, in the next blog post! Which will arrive shortly! Probably!
(I think I’m aiming for a couple posts per week.)
Glad to see that you’re doing this. I think why they’re generally so available and affordable (besides what you said) is that there’s a lot of good stories and some decently well-known names, but very little of it is what they’re best known for and very few stayed for long. Comico somehow became a stepping stone for bigger and better things (or at least a longer run elsewhere).