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By | Thursday, November 25, 2010 | 12:48 pm | 10 Comments | Blog > Essays

Note from the editor: Here’s something a little special. The following was sent to me by my mother and I’m posting it under an account I’ve created in her name. We don’t always share much.

While she wasn’t the type of parent to actually throw out a kid’s collection, she has had trouble understanding just what it is I take so seriously about my hobby.

I was touched that she had a story to tell about her own experiences with comics and that she took the time to email it to me.

She’s given me permission to share it here with you guys. That’s her (on the left) and her friend Mara in 6th grade.
Happy Thanksgiving! -Ian

Penny Pitching For Comics

Move back in time to the period between 1961 and 1965, while we, young boomers, were in elementary school. Then you could buy comics for 10 cents new, or 5 cents used, or win them by penny pitching.

As the years flew by the prices rose to 15, 25, and eventually 35 cents. By then some of us moved on to fantasy and science fiction, and junior high, and passed on our collections.

Jay and Mark were avid collectors, and I suppose readers, of comic books. Somehow I remember the collecting more than the reading.

They had stacks of Marvel and DC comics.

In our gang Superman, Superboy, Batman and Robin, and Spiderman were the ones that I most recall. But we also collected Wonderwoman, The Flash, any of the Legion of Superheros, the Fantastic Four, and issues of Archie and Ritchie Rich.

I too had a few, but was not one for accumulating this kind of ‘stuff’. Boys seemed to be the ones with more ‘stuff’.

The girls seemed to spend more time chatting and playing with each other rather than engaged with things. Although we did tend to collect Barbies and their clothes.

I also spent a lot of time day dreaming.

Along with my friends I did read comics, especially the Superman series where Lois Lane and Lana Lang were featured. I was fascinated by these female archetypes, their clothes and demeanor.

Wonder Woman seemed cool, but was intimidating in her buxomness. I and my girlfriends also seemed to gravitate to the Archie series. Cute characters, humor, a peek into a fantastic world of teens and relationships, as opposed to a focus on action, fighting, and the dark villains of some comic series.

Winter and nasty weather days we’d gather in each other’s apartments with our ‘stashes’ to read and trade amongst ourselves. Jay, Stu, Mark, Sheryl, Steven. Maybe Karen, Penny, Judy, and Risa. Any one that lived in our section of the buildings on Gale Place, the Amalgamated, the Bronx, or were connected to it via a basement labyrinth. Mostly we hung out at Jay’s.

PS 95 Bronx, NY. Mrs. Lynch’s Class, 1960

Spring and summer were special times where we grabbed our stacks and headed to the Big Playground. It was easy to get to as the sidewalks were continuous from the front entrance of our building, 130 Gale Place, L-shaping along Van Cortland Park to the playground set up on a hill. It was on this hill that a lot of action took place. Kids came out with suitcases of comics, some in series wrapped in rubber bands. Some were lugged in little red wagons.

We laid out the stacks in displays usually 4 or maybe 5 rows high, and a few wide. Mark loved to command a post atop of the displays and hawk the opportunity to win a special edition or collection with the pitching of a quarter or two.

For the most, comics could be had for a penny landed on the smooth and often shiny surface of the cover. A few comics stacked together could command a nickle.

As they were slanted on the rise, getting a penny, nickel, or quarter to stick on top of the stack did require both skill and luck.

Aim true and you had a chance, but often the change could easily glide off the edges onto the grass.

Scooped up by the hawker, the change would add up over the course of a few hours or a day. This could be saved for ice cream money or a chance to pitch for a competitor’s collection.

Stevie had an admirable technique. He used to spit on the penny to ensure it would not slide off!

Those selling would arrange the difficulty according to whether they really wanted to part with their prize collections or how seriously they were bent on ‘earning a few’ . They would draw the pitching line close or far depending on age and size.

Little kids were always allowed to be closer to even up the competition. Girls also were at times given this advantage, though some of us prided ourselves on our aim and throw, and wanted to play evenly with the guys.

If the set up was too easy, the game was no fun , and there was no pride in winning.

We girls got to hawk our wares too, or even ‘man’ the collection for our comrades. We’d all save pennies over the course of the year for these occasions.

I never figured out how word got around to know when there would be penny pitching contests. Maybe it was partly the weather, a weekend, and a few kids together deciding to head out to the Playground with their stacks. Others seeing them probably made impromptu decisions to go get theirs, find their stashes of coins, and come back out to play.

It was like a mini-festival, a kid-version arcade on a much simpler but more satisfying scale.

It was community, and of course budding consumerism and learning a bit about business and sales.

Fast forward – Mark is a lawyer, Jay’s a millionaire. I’m no Veronica, but we’ve managed to stay connected.

And what happened to the comics?

Jay tells me his grandfather handed them out to the kids in Harlem from his butcher shop.

– Alison Myra Ozer
November 2010


Ed: Myself (second from left), my mother, and little sister (on her lap), and cousins, 1990s
On one of these same Bronx playgrounds.

Enjoy your family time everyone!

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By | Thursday, November 25, 2010 | 9:34 am | 0 Comments | Blog > Database Updates

After seeing some feedback about the multi-use share button (which I still like, since there’s no way I’m putting in individual buttons for every crazy service people use out there.) I decided to take some time to put in a little share box containing some of the most common tools.

This box won’t show up on the home page or blog archive view, but if you want to use it just head to any individual blog page or (and this was a bit harder to do) reading order page! So you can now easily share or bookmark any reading order, character, to creator, or series.

Blog posts have also gotten the larger badge style buttons at the bottom. It frustrates me that they don’t all quite line up vertically, but at least they’re not too intrusive in terms of contrast and color scheme.

My personal favorites here are Reddit (for the community and discussion) and Stumbleupon (for the novelty), but I admit that I use everything here. Facebook and Twitter are more timewasters than anything else and I try to avoid them (often failing), and Delicious is more of a personal thing than a sharing thing. Digg I honestly don’t have much experience with, but apparently a lot of people use it, so in it goes.

Anyway, hope this is useful to you.

Along with this update I tweaked some minor design errors and moved the next and previous post links to the bottom of the post from the top. I feel like the top is more widely used, but it felt like there was too much in between the title of the post and the content. Since there wasn’t really anywhere else for the byline and the date, I just decided to move that little strip of links to the bottom – so if you’re confused about where it went, just scroll down.

I’ve done some other book database updates, but I’m working down a list so I’ll just save the details for my next update post when I’m done with that set of books.

Hope everyone is having a wonderful thanksgiving!

I’ll be posting a few more times today I’m sure – it’s just me and the cats, since I couldn’t afford to go back home or along with Beth’s family.

No tears, dear readers. I’ll have a happy productive day off from my day job!

Plus, I love my cats and I’m sure Beth will give me a call. :D

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By | Wednesday, November 24, 2010 | 11:17 pm | 11 Comments | Blog > Reviews
Find This Book At:
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Includes Issues: Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo 1-5
Issue Dates: August 1993 – December 1993
Creators:
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This review contains light spoilers. Skip To The Verdict? »

Continuing our travels through DC’s westerns, we come to our next take on Mr. Jonah Hex.

We’ve previously looked at Jonah Hex’s early adventures in black and white and color, courtesy of the Showcase Presents and Welcome to Paradise volumes. Now we’ve come to trade collecting Joe R. Lansdale and Tim Truman‘s 1993 Vertigo miniseries.

Lansdale is a writer with a fair amount of experience with Westerns, and Truman is well known for grim and disturbing art.

They would seem to be a good match for Hex, and I was fairly excited about this moderately hard to find book, spurred on by the three five-star reviews on Amazon.

In his introduction, Lansdale talks about how his childhood memories always suggested a supernatural element to the Jonah Hex stories, which upon reinvestigation, he discovered was not explicitly there.

I’ve actually mentioned this previously, so it’s a fair reading – the Hex stories are just strange enough to suggest something weird, but most of it is really just Hex himself, and perhaps some suggestion of his name.

What Lansdale hoped to do was bring these elements to the forefront, writing Hex into a real spooky tale, dark like he remembered (explicitly this time) for grown fans of the older westerns.

For this he’s recruited Truman, excellent at rendering gore, whose character styling is firmly at home in a weird world of post-R-Crumb edgy comics art.

Together, they’ve put together an ultra violent story of their version of Jonah Hex designed to bring the scarred cowboy to Vertigo’s audience.

Here’s the twist: I didn’t like it.

I had two major problems with the book. First, it just didn’t feel like Jonah Hex to me, not the guy I’d been cheering on since the first short story in his Bronze Age collection. Second, I found the book boring. I couldn’t wait for it to end.

It’s possible that the book just wasn’t written for the person who appreciates my Jonah Hex.

Again in his introduction, Lansdale espouses his love for Texas and even though “Hex was not a Texan. But hey, Texas is as much a State of Mind … I felt the origin story didn’t suit Hex. In Fleisher’s story he was the son of a plantation owner, somewhat privileged and educated. I never got that impression from the Albano stories, and I related better to those. I concluded – based on what Albano had done – due to Hex’s attitudes and the way he talked, that he was from what today would be called blue-collar roots. Those are my roots and that’s the route I pursued.”

Personally, I always saw Hex as a true gentleman whose life had taken a horrendous turn, leaving him scarred physically and emotionally, bringing him down to the bottom and leaving him there.

His greatest moments were, when looking out of that pit, he still saw light and truth and honor, his roots were always there lending him strength.

Perhaps my last 6 years living in Savannah, GA are biasing me (I’m a damn Yankee born myself), but I saw that this suthun boy still struggled to live by his upbringing. He had class under all that dirt. Somewhere.

Lansdale didn’t remember the same thing, apparently, because he leaves all that behind (plus, for someone basing this characterization on dialogue, he seems to completely change everything about Hex’s vocal mannerisms.) What we’re left with is a story about a man with almost no morality, killing practically indiscriminately. He seems to make some friends (with anyone who saves his butt) but almost too quickly – making his attachment to them feel quite arbitrary.

In short, he loses some of what makes him unique. One of the more threads is the ongoing joke about the origin of Hex’s scar being something relatively benign, but besides that and people recognizing/fearing him because of it, there isn’t much else to separate Hex from any other badass roughneck cowboy. He’s a good shot and kind of a jerk, but cares about his pals. There are hints of his honor between bloodshed here and there, but like I said, something is off. There is one attempt to give him another side, but it’s totally overblown

[Spoiler: There was one panel of Hex crying in an older comic (a single tear for an old friend, as he rode off, townspeople behind him calling him cold as stone). It was well placed and moving. Here, he’s streaming for at least a page for someone he just met a couple pages earlier – who wasn’t much of a nice guy either.]

Sure, Hex was plenty violent in the original stories, but something just seems off about it here. The direction they decided to go with for the character design just compounds this – there are way too many earrings on these cowboys. Look at that picture up there – champion rendering, but seriously what era is this? I’m not sure where this came from. Maybe this is factually researched? Kinda doubt it, everyone looks like a pirate.

Hex with long hair I might be able to understand, based on his predicament, but this just doesn’t feel like him.

Of course, plenty of people went through some bad fashion days in the 90s.

Truman’s rendering of the gunslinger also suffers from some continuity problems, obvious most at the end where Hex’s face shape seems quite different then it did at the start of this book. While the artist has a definite style, which could work in a lot of situations, I just found it hard to get into based on my frustrations with the story.

Besides the rickety portrayal of the lead character, the rest of the plot just didn’t catch me. A flimflam man with some possible magic power is raising the dead, or just mind controlling near dead people. He learned this power in Haiti of course. This villain spends more than his fair share of pages telling us of how he got his power, what ingredients he uses, how he recruited his deadliest subjects, and so on. I just did not care. The way the magic (or supposed magic) is dealt with here is a cookie cutter affair.

I guess it worked for one thing: I sympathized with Hex’s heartfelt desire to shut the little chatterbox up. Permanently.

Not that Hex was any better. Much of the book is burdened by a surprisingly mundane internal monologue. I don’t think I’d ever read a Hex story with his thoughts bared like this, which I’m glad of if they were always this boring. I think that all of it could have been completely taken out without leaving any holes in the story.

My last major complaint is that many times I felt forcefully confronted with a lack of creativity concerning the dressings of a Western story. If a battle in the Civil War is needed, we’re going to hear a mention of Gettysburg. Would Hex have even been there? Indians? Apache. Famous cowboy? Wild Bill. Like I said, boring. Felt lazy.

I reckon that’s enough tearing this book apart. There were moments when it was satisfying to see someone get shot. There was one character (Slow Go) that was enjoyable, if forced upon us. There are many times where I felt Truman could really rock out some art, if only I could really appreciate it.

Guess this Hex just wasn’t for me.

Verdict:
2 out of 5. There’s something here that people like, which I can see a hint of, but it’s not the Jonah Hex I enjoy, and I felt the rest of it was boring as well. A lot of action, but none of it particularly satisfying.

Aside from some of the character designs, there were times when I felt like I could really dig the art, though, so 2 stars for that.

Essential Continuity:
Nope. Might actually get in the way. In fact, most people seem to consider this story, along with the other Vertigo minis that are uncollected, to be in a separate continuity. You can chose for yourself if you want to take it or leave it.

Read first:
I think it would be a serious disservice to yourself to read this comic before Showcase Presents: Jonah Hex (still my favorite, although Welcome to Paradise is a good color option.)

Read next:
For Jonah Hex, the next collected stop is Jonah Hex Vol. 1: Face Full of Violence. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m personally hoping the creators are fans of Hex’s original subtleties as a character. Based on Brian‘s review, I’m pretty excited.

For myself, I’m following the DC Reading Order down to the next western title, the Brian Azzarello penned El Diablo miniseries.

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By | Wednesday, November 24, 2010 | 8:23 pm | 11 Comments | Blog > Reviews
Find This Book At:
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Includes Issues: Concrete 1-5; Stories from Dark Horse Presents 1, 8, 10, 150; Dark Horse Presents Annual ’99: DHP Junior; Dark Horse Maverick Annual 2000; Streetwise
Issue Dates: 1986, 1987, 1999, 2000, 2005
Creators:
,

This review contains light spoilers. Skip To The Verdict? »

It’s amazing how a work can be considered legendary (according to this collection’s cover) and obscure at the same time. Paul Chadwick‘s Concrete is a character who has been appearing in publication since I was born (in 1986), yet I only heard of from a friend I met in a History of Sequential Art class in 2009 – while discussing lesser known creations that deserved wider readership. On his advice, I saved an ebay search and managed to get all 6 volumes of this lovely Dark Horse reprint series.

Last night, I finally set aside a moment to read the first book, Depths. When I woke up, I was greeted with the serendipitous news (published two days ago in an excellent interview by Guerrilla Geek) that there would soon be another Concrete series running. With only one volume of exposure, it was still the most exciting thing I’ve read all day.

I admit, I’m already a fan. I’m not particular surprised. Concrete is exactly the kind of comic I enjoy – a deconstruction of the superhero, a lovingly crafted character study with semi-autobiographical elements, an adventure story, and something more slow, subtle, at times mesmerizing.

This volume contains the creation of a character immediately familiar, a man monster with obvious parallels to mainstream favorites like The Thing, but also closer to actual readers in his world and motivations.

Some of the stories here have been collected before, in the confusingly named The Complete Concrete and Concrete: Complete Short Stories – these books are probably collector’s items, and are thick, meaty volumes, but the Dark Horse reprint series is more extensive, running 6 volumes strong at this time. Chadwick’s tales are collected in roughly chronological story order (according to author’s intention, it’s not always exactly chronological, as the author’s writing style includes many flashbacks, character told stories, and jumps in time to allow exploration of a specific concept or idea.)

From the first page, we’re introduced to one of the main supporting cast, aspiring writer Larry. Indirectly, we’re also introduced to Concrete himself, through branded clothing and shopping bags carried by people walking by – he’s obviously famous, a celebrity fad of some sort.

This early sequence sets the mood wonderfully – Terry has an awkward interaction with a potential date and an ex-roommate. He answers a want ad for a typist, and wanders off, his story intersecting with Concrete’s apartment through their shared listening of a radio segment on the stone man.

We find Concrete pacing in his apartment, displeased with his portrayal, while a pretty young woman, Maureen, listens to him, writing on a desk (next to some hypodermic needles.)

Concrete lets drop that his civilian career was as a speechwriter, introducing another of the main players, his senator friend and mentor.

This is page four, and while packed with information, it flows much more organically than my description, giving away much without tilting any hands. While it’s the building story that will grab you, I saw something extremely profound here – everyone is writing.

Our three main characters are introduced, one is an ex-speechwriter, the other a hopeful novelist now acting as a reporter for the first, and the third we soon learn is a biologist journaling her own reports about Concrete’s unique body. This desire to create, record, tell your story, tie your story to great events around you – the human desire for some kind of meaning in life – it’s a constant theme here, one perhaps easy to overlook alongside the more graphically expressed stories of survival, of coping when separated from those around you by your own form.

It’s obvious that Concrete, and to an extent every character, is an extension of Chadwick himself. Like any enjoyable fictional being, the exact boundaries are never clear (where Concrete ends and Chadwick begins, what memories they share, how much is metaphor and how much based on some kind of real life event.) But by the end of the volume some shared memories and motivations are undeniable – the last story, “Vagabond” is actually an autobiographical short, but it flows almost seamlessly from the Concrete content – up until the last page, I didn’t quite realize that this wasn’t a story of Concrete’s past, but the author’s.

There is a shared respect and admiration (between the author and his creation) for the adventurous writers of ages past.

Both for the prestige that comes with exploring the unknown and pushing limits, but also the opportunity for reverie and self discovery that such journeys bring. There are things a man will discover about himself when on the edge, when faced with mortality.

And for Concrete, now existing in a near indestructible rock-like shell, the journeys are extreme and far reaching – he is a fan, for example, of long distance (like an ocean!) swimming and deep sea diving, though his heavily form makes it extremely dangerous to him.

Of course, some of the book’s drama comes in the form of danger to his companions, easily at greater risk due to their squishy bodies – leaving some room for super-style-heroics. But this isn’t a story overly concerned with spandex origins and super powered villains.

Concrete’s foes are familiar, mundane – jealousy, greed, ego, fear, bad decisions, childhood trauma.

As a man who can hardly feel, cannot taste, Concrete has become focused primarily inwardly, though he expresses this through a push for his life to mean something, challenge something (beyond his obvious physical existence as a curiosity.)

In a slight twist, one of his senses, vision, has been increased drastically. Though perhaps it’s simply an extension of the author’s own existence as a visual person, it may also be the motivation for our protagonist to keep moving forward, resist becoming a rock in truth. He can see what’s out there, see what’s coming.

Having mentioned Chadwick’s visual nature, we must discuss the beautiful art in this book. Like many independent comics, the work here was originally published in Black and White, just as it’s found in this reprint.

We’ve mentioned that some of the colorless Showcase and Essentials collections fare rather well, but this book is a shining example of what can be accomplished with ink and just the barest minimum of gray tones.

Many pages, especially those featuring underwater exploration, have spectacular displays of lovingly detailed life, acutely conveying the sense of wonder that can accompany exploration of the unknown.

Every character is full of life and expression, recognizable and iconic. Terry, bearded and bespectacled, reminds me of myself and many other aspiring creatives. Maureen, lovely and sharp, is a stand in for my fiance and every beautiful, smart woman. Concrete is all of us – especially when we feel uncomfortable or apart from humanity. Each of them is uniquely themselves.

It’s a strength of the medium. With the right amount of lines, not too many, not too few, characters are recognizable in every panel, their emotions and history plain on their faces, but still imprintable. On related note, I think many readers often find it necessary to identify superheroes by hair color when out of costume – without color here, self-projection becomes easier and Chadwick’s recognizable characters are even more impressive.

The art flows with the text. Shifting perspectives, dynamic layouts, plenty of small references to art history and sides jokes flying by in the background.

It all comes together to create stories capable of evoking eerie horror, humor dark and light, tenderness, laugh out loud moments, and disgust. A human story, in every aspect.

Absolutely brilliant work.

Verdict:
5 out of 5. A story about a human trapped in a strange body, moved to adventure. And a story about the human desire to have their story told, to be known and understood. A subtle, intriguing work, with too many layers to discuss in one sitting.

Considering that these books seem to be constantly available new and lightly used for about 2 dollars each on Amazon, you have little excuse for not giving Concrete a try. I’m sorry that I took so long to get to it myself.

Essential Continuity:
For Concrete, I’d say this book is essential – start here and read through the Dark Horse editions by the numbers on the spine.

Read first:
This is the first book in the Concrete series.

Read next:
The obvious next step is Concrete Vol. 2: Heights. I didn’t think that this book was too much, but I’ve heard that Chadwick can get a little heavy and/or preachy in this series, but only enough that it’s sometimes advisable to not read all the books back to back. I unfortunately don’t have time to do that anyway but I’ll let you know if I feel that’s the case as I read through the series.

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By | Tuesday, November 23, 2010 | 7:05 pm | 12 Comments | Blog > Reviews

Find This Book At:
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Includes Issues: Showcase 76; Bat Lash 1-7; DC Special Series 16; Jonah Hex 49, 51-52
Issue Dates: October 1968 – September 1981
Creators:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This review is spoiler free! Skip To The Verdict? »

This was the first book we ever reviewed on this site. Now that I’m going through the DC timeline and have reached the westerns, I wanted to take the opportunity to rework this post, mainly to add some images to what was once an entirely image-free review. Which was totally boring, right?

Showcase Presents: Bat Lash. Lets get the facts right outta the gate: It’s small for a showcase volume, weighing in at 240 pages, which is about half of your average Showcase. On the flipside, it’s cheap – only 9.99 meaning you can probably find it for around five dollars.

I’ll say right at the top that I think it’s worth your money, be it full price or used. It’s an enjoyable little Western romp, nowhere near as brutal as Jonah Hex, good for quick evening’s read or a few short stories caught in your free minutes during the week. I won’t lie, I read it in the bathroom between all the other things I’ve been up to lately.

Each story, except for the last few, stands fine completely on its own – like most Pre-Crisis DC. However, being primarily Bronze Age material, it does build on itself and Bat Lash grows on you.

This might be surprising, because he’s not particularly fleshed out – written in that hamfisted catch phrase spouting way. In any given story, he’s going to either pull a flower from his hat or put one into it, or both. He’s going to admonish some roughneck for exposing him to violence, because he hates it, and then either kill them or beat them senseless. He’s going to kiss a lady and leave her standing there thinking about what a rouge he is… in that dashing way.

He’ll do all this with a smile on his face and greed in his heart and somehow remain likable, for a misogynistic bastard. Similarly, though the book is chock full of ethnic stereotypes and terribly written women, it somehow slides by because at 40 years old it’s practically a historical text. As a reader, I just had to smile and nod. “Yup, comics are awful. But fun.” It’s not as bad as plenty of its contemporaries – not to mention some really slimy stuff that would come years later.

There are some weird moments. Because the volume collects stories written over a large time range, the latter stories feel very different from the earlier ones. Bat Lash is less of a wanderer and more of a gambler in the last three – he’ll have the same phrasing and flower, but the rest of him somehow feels off. I think I prefer the earlier work, mostly by Sergio Aragones, to the stories written by Len Wein.

The art, however, doesn’t feel dated at all. The styles are obviously that of their era, but the work is excellent!

It doesn’t feel lacking for being black and white. In fact, the crisp linework is downright enjoyable. Nick Cardy rocks it out with expressions that are full of life and humor and the inked art never falls flat.

In fact, I was sometimes surprised by dynamic layouts and some very interesting artistic choices. I shouldn’t have been, seeing as many of the contributors were also featured in MAD Magazine. I was often reminded of some of my childhood favorites from that publication.

It’s not quite as rough as DeZuniga’s work in Jonah Hex, which makes sense – Bat Lash is a more cartoonish character – a dapper dandy compared to Hex’s tortured gunfighter.

To sum it up, the book was both what I expected and a pleasant surprise. I knew I was going to be reading a western, so I was prepared for a white-male-centric ode to violence, but the text on the back didn’t prepare me for the slapstick action and frolicking pacing.

Verdict:
3.5 out of 5 – Good! Not as deep or well written as the Jonah Hex stories, but reasonably priced and worth buying new. Don’t take it too seriously.

Essential Continuity:
No. Bat Lash isn’t ever a big character much elsewhere, and I’m pretty sure his presence doesn’t need much explanation.

What Should You Read First:
This volume stands fine on its own. It works as an introduction to DC Westerns of the period and doesn’t feature any characters from prior publications. I’d say it’s an excellent companion to Showcase Presents: Jonah Hex. The two shared publications at times and together represent a good sampling of the Bronze Age.

What Should You Read Next:
Probably the modern interpretation, Bat Lash: Guns and Roses, which I’ll be getting to soon as I work my way through,  or of course, Jonah Hex. Bat Lash does show up in later volumes.

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