the greatest cat-themed pop singer crimefighter of them all

[davemerrill]

Stupid Comics proudly presents the first in a two-part look at Night Cat, the real life pop singer who's actually a Marvel Comics super hero!



Yes, it's Night Cat, who poses on rooftops, entertains the masses, and uses her vaguely defined cat powers to smash the evil drug pushers. We can't have drug use in the entertainment industry, after all! Catch the Night Cat - if you can - at Stupid Comics!

Comments

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

Who did the art on that? It kinda looks like Simonson inked by someone not in tune with him.

I kinda like the big hair. Sue me. :)

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

I think the interior art is by Denys Cowan, who has improved a great deal in the intervening years. Here it's kinda like what Kyle Baker was doing on "The Shadow" at the time, only without Baker's flair. Also it's pretty obvious a lot of hands were working on this, "fixing" and "tweaking" and "screwing up because this is one of those designed-by-committee things that's doomed to failure."

It is not surprising that Marvel would declare bankruptcy, throwing its weight behind inane dead-on-arrival projects like this.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

So no credits? Oh, Comic books. :)

I recall really loving Cowan's work on 'The Question' way back when, and I seem to recall he had a book under the Milestone label that was interesting.

but yes, as you state, even I, with zero actual art training, can see that many hands were in that mix.

Know what I miss? Those B&W mags Marvel cranked out in the '70s. I uncovered a stack of Marvel Preview featuring Star-Lord! Oddly enough, not at all like the recent giant money movie that everybody loves... :)

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

There are credits, but I didn't include them in our coverage. If I can't say something funny I generally don't feature it; and while I do sometimes feel like I should be giving a complete rundown on who did what, I err on the side of staying funny. For one thing, I would feel bad if these people vanity-searched their names and found us being mean to their old work, and for another thing, that's what Scott!!1! Shaw!!1! did all the time in his makin'-fun-o-comics feature and it just killed things dead.

I picked up one of Marvel's UFO B&W magazines as a possible Stupid Comics feature, but it was so tedious... so overwritten... bad, but not in a funny way.

I had only the vaguest notion of who Star-Lord was. Kept getting him confused with Starhawk. I was never big into the Jim Starlin cosmic-war comics to begin with, really.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

Star-Lord is...strange. It doesn't seem to be 'owned' by any one writer. Moench, Claremont, Englehart all had a shot or two in the mags I have, so I have no idea about who actually created him.

In many ways it seems an archetype that Baron & Rude used in creating Nexus (a comic I really love, one of the few).

Ah, here. Remember when comics had editorials and stuff? Looks like Star-Lord was a Marv Wolfman creation, Englehart then fleshed it out. Bill Mantlo is also involved somewhere. So sez Archie Goodwin in 1976.

I don't think this version of Peter Quill, Star-Lord has any relevance to today's Marvel Comics. Purged. Discarded.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

I liked Steve Rude's artwork, and the Nexus characters were good characters, but I always got the impression he had no idea what to DO with them, in terms of story.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

You might be right (and that might be on Mike Baron), but I can't help but wonder if it's a problem of conflicting thoughts (tell stories vs. dealing with consequences of back story and continuity), the concept (It's Space Ghost fer reals!) and over the past 15 or so years, the sheer uncertainty of will the comic even get published? Because, you know, if it's not DC or Marvel the stores don't give a crap. And Diamond don't wanna talk to you if you can't promise at least 5k, right?

I guess I shouldn't blame the comic shops too much, they do have to deal with the s**tton of crap churned out by the Big Two, all of which is deemed 'essential' for the customers, plus the nonsense stuff like the statues and junk. That leaves very little open-to-buy for marginal product. Honestly, I have no idea how comic shops even survive in this day and age of expensive 'cheap disposable entertainment'.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

I want to say Steve Rude was, like Dave Stevens, not the fastest artist around. Rude got involved in some kind of legal trouble a few years back; that ate up a bunch of his time, I guess. He's been doing work for DC recently.

I'd love to read a good article asking surviving comic shops how they stay in business. A lot of them sell a lot of toys and 'collectibles' and serve as a Diamond catalog showroom for their regulars. Some shops, like The Beguiling, moved heavily into the graphic novels/books market and do a lot of business with libraries (while still selling periodical comics, manga, etc). Silver Snail downtown is almost wholly toys now, but they are in a prime tourist walk-in traffic location full of people visiting the big city looking for stuff they can't get at home.

From what I read on the internets, store owner blogs, etc;, they have to keep a close eye on what sells in terms of trade paperbacks (some titles like "Watchmen" are constant sellers) and be very careful about ordering store copies of periodicals. I don't believe stores are doing what they did in the 80s, of over-ordering to have copies in the back issue stock. People still buy back issues from the 80s and older, but anything newer than that is a tough sell. At least those are the books I see in the cheap bins; 1995-newer back issues.

It would be a fascinating retail experiment to run a comic book store. I'd probably go out of business, the only question would be 'how fast'.

[(Anonymous)]

eh, Marvel bankruptcy...

When people ask me why I keep defending Jim Shooter, I tell 'em he was like a certain Italian dictator. So long as the trains ran on time, as a fan and a guy who spent about half of his disposable income on Marvel comics, I could care less what he was like personally. And, yeah, about when he got fired, the whole line went back to crap.

RWG (he was always great to me, for what that's worth)