Author: larsmagne23

Sex Index

Holy SEO, Batman! Making an index page for the Elementals sex specials even though there are just five of them?

Yes, sure, sure, got me there…

But mainly I just wanted to point out what a strange turn of events it would be for most super-hero titles to end up with this many specials featuring the words “sex”, “swimsuit” and “lingerie” in their titles (and some with several of these words). But with Elementals? Eh, not that surprising, really — right from the get go there was something a bit skeezy about the title. (Or as the creators would probably say — “mature and controversial and real” etc.)

What did surprise me was how little sex there is in these specials. They were released between 1991 and 97, and by that time there were a whole lot of porn comics being published and distributed through normal comics stores. (Eros Comics, NBM/Eurotica, etc etc.) But these books feature no explicit sex, and indeed little nudity at all.

Misc Index

As I’ve covered in the previous indexes, the majority of the books Comico published fall into three categories: Licensed properties, Elementals and books that had originated at other publishers.

So this index is about the rest of the books, which (at most other comics publishers at the time) would be the largest section: I.e., books that creators dreamed up, and then took to a publisher. But it’s a pretty small list here, eh?

Except for Mage (15 issues) and Grendel (46 issues) (and both from Matt Wagner), these “normal” books had short runs. Slaughterman/Az/Skrog were from the original publishers who then stopped doing comics. Evangeline’s and Next Man’s creators had a public fall-out with Comico.

It’s not until we get to 1988 we really start to see normal books start arriving at Comico, and that’s apparently due to editor Diana Schutz managing to entice creators to publish with Comico: Ginger Fox, The Maze Agency, Ribit!, The Amazon… These are all solid comics, and not initiated from within the company office walls.

But we’re talking less than a couple dozen issues in total of “normal” comics.

So I’ve been wondering while reading these comics over the last half a year whether Comico’s main problem was just that they didn’t have enough contacts in the comics world. They were located in Norristown, Pennsylvania, which isn’t exactly a hotbed of comics business, to put it mildly. Perhaps that had something to do with it?

Transfer Index

Comico was a pretty peculiar comic company, and one of the odd things was how many comics took a pit stop at Comico. That is, there were a number of comics that had been published at other companies (and several self-published ones) that went to Comico, and then when Comico got into problems, continued publication at other companies.

Company hopping isn’t unusual in itself, but it’s striking how many times this happened with Comico. Comico did have one thing going for it, though — they published in colour only, so certain indie creators would see going to Comico as a “step up”. I guess you could see this as a win for creators’ rights.

Elementals Index

About a third of all the books Comico published were Elementals comics or Elementals spinoffs, so I guess you could say it was successful.

But it’s also just such an odd series of books, and much of the oddness comes from the way it was made.

Bill Willingham introduced the team in a Justice Machine annual (at a previous company), and then took the series to Comico. Right from the start, Willingham had problems with the publishers. He was apparently paid late for the first couple of issues, and went gung ho to the offices to get his money… but then they made up, and Elementals appeared regularly for a while, with Willingham sometime doing the artwork (very nice artwork, by the way) and sometimes just writing the plot.

The Comics Journal #278, page #77:

DEPPEY: Now, you stated that you really didn’t
have a concept for The Elementals. You really
didn’t have an idea of what the book was about
in any kind of specific way when you first started
working on it. Did that just develop on the fly, or
did you sit down at some point and say, “OK,
I’m going to do a book about this and it will
have this bubbling in the background”?
WILLINGHAM: I suspect it was a little of both. I
mean, literally, when I sent out the sample
pages, I only came up with group just to have
an excuse to show that I could draw page-by-
page sequences of someone. So that’s all I
knew. It’s like, “OK, I need a group, a super-
hero team, how about the four elements?”

He introduced a lot of characters, and so many different conspiracies — but then seemed to lose interest, and Jack Herman would take over the writing — and those issues would introduce other, new things, and nothing would ever be resolved.

So you can easily understand why nobody has published a collected edition of this stuff. I mean, it was a popular series, so you’d expect somebody to at least attempt to get it back into print. But reading the books is just frustrating, because nothing comes of anything.

Anyway, this went on for many years until Andrew Rev bought the Comico after a Chapter 7, and then Comico would just put his name on things without him actually contributing anything:

So… Reading Elementals is a frustrating experience because any given plot strand is always left hanging.

But there’s some entertaining issues here and there, and when Willingham does the artwork, the books are nice to look at, too. But even when Willingham does the book, his primary storytelling instinct seems to be to shock the reader — but without much thought behind it. So whenever a reader writes in to say “err, that’s pretty skeezy”, Willingham would respond with a page of calling the reader stupid, moronic and evil. The funniest example of this is with the first Elementals special, where he did an issue about child sexual abuse and sent it off to a person who works with sexually abused children to get a guest editorial, obviously fishing for something like “ooh, this is such a deep, important work”, and that person responding with (and I paraphrase lightly) “GET AWAY FROM ME YOU FUCKING FREAKS”. (Willingham, of course, responded to that with a butthurt page of text.)

I’m just saying — we’re talking about a pretty ridiculous series, even the best stretches. But, oh, how awful it got once Willingham left and Jack Herman took over the writing completely…