Anthologies of Serial Exposure

They come and go, get canceled without notice, sometimes only get released once a year, and move to digital publication. This is the way of serial comic anthologies.

Serial comic book anthologies used to be the most popular comic books on news stands. Publishers like Marvel and DC would use them to introduce new characters and gauge fan response to those characters. Collecting stories linked by genres such as horror, crime, talking animals and action, publishers like EC Comics specialized in anthologies filled with short stories created by legends such as Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman and Joe Orlando. Despite being so popular, these anthologies began to dwindle in production after Dr. Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, a book that included comics in the blame for juvenile delinquency.

Werthem's book prompted the creation of the Comics Code Authority, an organization that began policing comics with its own sense of acceptable standards in 1954. These standards eventually made it impossible for publishers like EC to continue publishing anthologies with so much violence, partial nudity, and blood. Another reason anthologies seemed to go away is because many of them turned their covers over to the most popular character featured in its pages. Even with the CCA seal of approval on it's cover, Marvel's Tales of Suspense would become Captain America and Tales to Astonish would become The Incredible Hulk. This change would leave characters with story-lines in those books to either get their own titles –if they were popular enough– or stay in the cannon for safe keeping.

By the mid 1960's, comics had became focused mainly on the exploits of a single character or the adventures of a team, regardless of genre. But, underground comics of the 1960's and 1970's were just around the corner. This new-wave of comics would bring together short stories by the likes of R. Crumb, Diane Noonin, Kim Deitch and Spain with popular anthologies and their publishers, Print Mint, Last Gasp and Rip-Off Press would make several printings of them.

By the 1980's, the underground comics movement would shift into something focusing on creator driven comics like Love and Rockets and Cerebus. Still, the serial comic anthology survived. Dark Horse Presents, Papercutters, Negative Burn, Kramers Ergot, 2000 AD, and dozens of others kept anthologies on shelves while single-story comics and graphic novels grew to become the big draw for  readers. Now, in the 2010's, serialized comic anthologies may be making a come back with Heavy Metal (published since 1977), Amazing Forest and Island offering some of the best variety in comics.   

Now eight issues in, Island has tied together a wide range of artists, genres, styles and ideas to create an anthology with a focus on new and underground talent. These forces come together to question the idea of what belongs in a modern anthology comic. Most issues open with either splash pages or short stories to introduce readers to a new world. Sometimes a city, sometimes a landscape, mostly wordless, these new environments start off each issue by bringing reader into an unfamiliar world. This sense of the unexplored plays on the title of the book and the way it doesn't always contain what readers would expect from a mainstream comic.

Though it's sold in comic shops, Island comes with prose stories including sparse illustrations. Some stories come in the style of classic zine articles, with handwritten text and black and white images with a xeroxed appearance. Add occasional photography, interviews and essays, and you have something that distances itself from traditional comics. This is all part of Island's charm; it doesn't limit itself to just being a comic or publishing stories that necessarily fit together. It doesn't try to make thematic issues, though the theme of world-building does seem to reappear. It simply gives an audience whatever Brandon Graham and Emma Rios think deserves a spotlight.

In issue six, Onta's “Badge of Pride” takes the lion's share of the pages to tell a furry story dealing with a character figuring out his own sexual identity. In the same issue, there is a splash page where one fashionably dressed woman is reaching to strangle another fashionably dressed woman wielding a knife. This scene is by Katie Skelly (Nurse Nurse) and does a great job at parodying photography ads with a list of merchandise used in the photo along with the prices of the items.

With plenty of one-off stories, Island also takes on long-form stories that get split up between issues. Published in the first two issues is “I.D.” from Emma Rios. Creating the story of a groups of people that swap bodies for various reasons, Rios hits on topics of gender politics, race, personal identity and bigotry in an Orwellian future that is written as well as it is drawn. While the story is based around a science fiction concept, it uses its genre well to take on serious topics without being undermined by usual tropes in a way similar to “Badge of Pride.”

The way Island blends together genres, styles and photography make it an exciting roll of the dice when you pick up each issue. The looseness of the comic also makes it possible to pair those types of stories with what someone might expect from Brandon Graham after reading his work. In “Habitat,” Graham collaborator Simon Roy uses robots, class war, mutiny and ancient forces to play with ideas of what it means to be on the right side and what the right side is. Taking place on a green planet filled with technology, stone houses and Aztec-like ruins, readers meet Cho, a new recruit. After Cho finds a mysterious object, he is set on and adventure that will change the history of his people. Though Graham's own contribution continues his work in the Multiple Warheads universe, something similar to “Habitat” happens as both stories are very much concerned with adventure and taking readers through the imagination and excitement of exotic spaces.

Six months after Island hit the stands, Amazing Forest, an anthology published by IDW, came out. Six issues in, this monthly title contains short stories written by the creative team of Erik Freitas and Ulises Farinas. Unlike Island, with it's water color introductions and photography, Amazing Forest has has nothing so art-housey found between the covers. What makes this anthology unique is the creative process where the team of writers handle all scripts and assign different illustrator to each story. By giving over the scripts to a different artist, the writers not only get more hands to put the book together on time, they get to create stories that take on different visual tones. This variety gives the audience an introduction to a range of artists and self contained stories while turning each issue into its own independent document.

With each month's different set of stories and artists, the issues go in and out of genres like fantasy, science fiction, and fairy-tales. This open form gives the writers the opportunity for a humorous homage to Fletcher Hanks's super hero, Stardust. Each issue's different roster of illustrators creates a diversity that leaves readers not knowing what they're getting into when picking up the next issue. And this is a good thing! The covers may have one story being reflected on it, but when you're dealing with characters you've never seen before, it's difficult to know exactly what it's foreshadowing.

In issue three, Job Yamen's fine lines and water colors form the world of “Ben Franklin, Dragon Hunter,” a story that portrays Ben Franklin as an immortal dragon hunter. This lush but gritty alternative reality gives a short history of dragon hunters and explains Franklin's connection to it. While the story works well, ending in time to make the reader's mind continue to turn with its own theories, "Ben Franklin, Dragon Hunter” could only be better if it went on for more pages. “Edith And The Murderbot,” from issue four, is another example of the writing team pairing a great artist with the right script. Using Jelena Djordevic's expressive faces and masterful crosshatching, the story creates an uncomfortably paced story with an equally eerie plot twist to makes for a great macabre suspense story.

The two writers even go into super hero territory. In “Villain's Friend,” Jack Forbes uses a Miracleman-esque character to answer the question: what would happen if a villain beat all the heroes? In a world where the last living super hero is enslaved, Freitas and Farinas get the chance to make jokes about super heroes. With a villain ruling the planet, tropes get flipped on their heads to make belly laughs and show people what would happen in a world where all the heroes lost.

It's not just occasional jokes that lighten up the stories in Amazing Forest. With a good amount of humor coming from the writers, the stories don't always take themselves too seriously. On these occasions, the artists chosen tend to have more of a cartoony aesthetic, which showcase the creators ability to use good judgment and find good talent to create a fresh take on serial comics anthologies.

In publication for the better part of 40 years (more if you count the magazine it was originally translated from), Heavy Metal isn't new at all. For quite a while it has specialized in rounding up and serializing some of the best European and American comics artists working with fantasy, barely clothed people, science fiction, erotica, sword and sorcery adventures, horror, and did I mention sex? Heavy Metal has been showcasing selections from artist portfolios, taking chances on new talent, and exposing North America to the great comics scene in Europe since before publishers like Catalan Communications made it their goal to collect and translate great works from across the Atlantic. The only difference is that Heavy Metal is still around while Catalan Communications sadly became defunct. What is new about Heavy Metal is the presence of Grant Morrison as the Editor-In-Chief.

With most serialized stories from previous issues almost wrapped up, Heavy Metal #280 shows the taste and talent of Grant Morrison building the index of the institutional publication with the following course:

“This, out rebirth issue, features my first gleaning from the bulging Heavy Metal submissions drawer. Presented with hundreds of stories – I mean literally, honestly, hundreds or more, possibly thousands, or millions, or even fifteen, who can take the time to count these days? - I started the selection process with this lot.”

If that's the true way he went about picking stories or not, Morrison manages to put together one of the most diverse collections out there. The nudity in this issue either plays to a story where the characters are savages, shooting arrows in a bizarre loop of unrequited love (Massimiliano Frezzato's wordless “The Key”), or in a naked, not nude, representation that works with the uncomfortable nature of memories, trauma and what happens in the mind's eye in Anna Laurine Kornum's “Mind Bomb.” With Kornum's story, dark colors surround characters with big black eyes. The nameless main character takes readers through her childhood, where she was obsessed with the atomic bomb and visited by what she thinks is an angel of death. The dark eyes and way Kornum plays with bright whites and dark shades makes powerful visuals that compliment a story that concerns itself with how mental health is effected by suppressed memories that can explode at any moment.

Aside from the continued stories of Erike Lewis, J.K. Woodward and Enki Bilal, the newest issue of Heavy Metal shows it will go on to show contributions with the familiar Heavy Metal feel. “Goddess,” by Ryan Ferrier & Hugo Petrus is one of these stories. When a mysterious girl is found, she is invited into a town of very friendly people that want to help and feed her. The only problem is that the girl is constantly seeing images of animals being slaughtered… and that she isn't really a little girl at all. In “Goddess,” fine lines, attention to detail and a green palate use a style of realism that echoes Heavy Metal stories of the past and compliments the pastoral story of Flidias, an Irish goddess that protects animals and nature. Another staple that remains is the art section. Century Guild art Gallery selects some of its favorite art nouveau silent film posters and oil paintings for issue 280. One of them is Gail Potockiose's beautiful “Botanical No. 23,” which is also used as an an alternative cover.

Filling his debut issue with stories that go through genres of horror, fantasy and lore, Morrison finds room for comedy with Aladin Saad's absurd “Boring Sequential Story.” References to Batman, Tintin and Little Nemo build a typo-ridden, self-aware misadventure of Galileo and his enchanted telescope. While it's hard to actually read through its typos and broken grammar, Saad's goal is to disregard rules of storytelling as he breaks the fourth wall to mix pastiche and irreverence. The other good laugh in Heavy Metal is Morrison's own contribution, the first part of “Beachhead,” a tongue-in-cheek story about violent aliens taking over the galaxy told with a 2000 AD visual look.

Morrison's most interesting and nontraditional picks is the story “Salsa Invertabraxa,” a six part story that will run through his first year. With hyper-detailed digital panels depicting the world of insects, artist Mozchops narrates the habitats and life-styles of invertebrates. In “Salsa Invertabraxa,” each panel is paired with a simple rhyme scheme narrative caption. By uses this poetic device, Mozchop makes his comic sometimes come off as a children's book, something more Eric Carle than Erik Larsen. Using a story with a form as quirky as “Salsa Invertabraxa,” Morrison starts to challenge the idea of what a comic is. He also keeps his readers on their toes wondering what he'll throw at them next.

Anthologies of the past and some of the present have a tendency to bunch together a type of story, whether it be books of the golden age that grouped stories by genre, or the annual collections of today that build books on independent artists or autobiographical stories. With Heavy Metal, Amazing Forest, and Island, three different types of books are being published. Each has a different vision and creative focus. Each brings together and uses different talent in a different way to build a title. But what they do the same is what makes them something to look forward to every month. They all mix it up. Most importantly, they ask you to trust to the editors. Trusting the people that put these books together is one of the few ways to get exposure to new and foreign talent that are asking what comics are and challenge the possibilities of what they can be.