What can the penultimate issue of ‘Epic Illustrated’ tell us about comics?

A few weeks ago, my retailer — who always has interesting old stuff in his store — had a box full of “bigger-sized” comics — ones that don’t fit in a regular long box — and a dude and I were looking through it. I picked up the Marshall Rogers adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s Demon with a Glass Hand and Jerry Bingham’s Beowulf, and I also got issue #33 of Epic Illustrated, Marvel’s sci-fi/fantasy magazine from the 1980s. Why did I get it? Well, it looked cool. That’s really it. I don’t own any of the other issues, but I thought it would be fun to check this out.

Issue #33 is the second-to-last issue, due to low sales, of course, but also production costs. Epic Illustrated, even at this late date, is an impressive publication. Technically, the final page is listed as 98, but there are advertisements and such, so story/text pages (I’m counting the letters, because they’re interesting) give us 93, which is still a big chunk of comics/interesting text for … wait, $2.50? TWO DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS, AND SALES WERE POOR?!?!?!? Sheesh, people, come on. I know that was a chunk of money in 1985 for comics and I know inflation exists, but that still seems like really good value for your money. Oh well. Let’s take a look at it, shall we?

Is Epic Illustrated #33 the greatest magazine ever produced? Not really. It’s fine — the stories are much more impressive for their art than the stories, but the stories are fine. John Byrne’s “Last Galactus Story” is the headliner, and Byrne never got to finish it because of the magazine’s cancellation (it was eventually published in a Byrne FF Omnibus in 2013, and why Marvel didn’t just pay Byrne to finish it is beyond me). I mean, it’s Byrne doing Galactus, so it looks like you’d expect, with only the final page really doing something cool, as Nova discovers a black hole inside a giant construct that she’s entered. Ken Macklin has a few gags strips with his character, Dr. Watchstop, which are slight but funny. Macklin’s painted artwork is gorgeous, though, so that’s nice. Tim Conrad gives us paintings of the four elements represented by Greek goddesses — there’s Iris, Athena, Gaia, and the sirens — and they’re very pretty plates. Following this, we get a short adaptation of the Grimm’s “Briar Rose,” darkly and depressingly painted by Kent Williams. Conrad is back with the final chapter of his serial, Toadswart d’Amplestone, a strange fantasy story that might hit better if I read the entire thing, but also seems like it has narrative problems beyond me jumping in for the last installment. The writing is a bit overwrought, but Conrad’s gorgeous black-and-white Corben-esque art is pretty darned keen. Mike Baron, taming the bag of cocaine-fueled, horny cats that is his brain for a bit, gives us a straight-forward sea monster story, which John Totleben* draws with his usual exquisite touch (his reveal of the sea monster is an epic double-page spread). Next, Patrick Mason writes a story about a nerd who reads too much, falling too easily into romantic fantasy and bemoaning the fact that he can’t get a woman, but unlike a 21st-century incel story, this one has a happy ending! P. Craig Russell draws it, so of course it looks amazing, but I do love how the “nerd” looks like a Greek hero, because Russell is physically incapable of drawing someone ugly, so it undercuts the story just a little (I mean, it’s just a short story, so I don’t care at all because we get several pages of stunning Russell art, but it’s still funny). Kent Williams is back with a six-page story that’s pretty to look at but which I just don’t get. There are … medieval warriors? monsters? in the snow, wielding swords, and … one of them leaps onto a house for no reason? What the heck? Anyway, it’s pretty, but incomprehensible (there are no words, which makes it harder to figure out). Kevin Duane and Mark Bodé bring us a gag strip with a robot floating through space telling a joke, which is a bit grim given that the robot is, you know, floating through space (it’s also wearing a bow tie and straw hat, because why not?). Doug Moench writes a script from a story by Gene Day which is about a knight fighting a wizard for a woman’s life, and it has your typical Moenchian purple prose (I like Moench, but the dude can let the purple prose flow far too easily!), which might put you off, but it features staggering art by Dan Day, so that’s nice. Finally, that fellow on the cover, Johnny Badhair, gets a weird story beautifully painted by Phil Hale in which he runs around being angry. Come on, Johnny, chill out, man! That’s it for the actual comics. Some pretty good, some mediocre, but all with darned good art, which is nice. A usual issue of Epic Illustrated, from what I can tell.

* “Totleben” — how do you pronounce it? The dude at my store said he’s always just thought it was pronounced “total-bin,” but I said “tote layben,” which is the German words for “dead” and “living” put together, so that’s how I thought it was pronounced. I can’t find it online, and I was just wondering what you think!

There are also text pieces, which are interesting. Archie Goodwin, the editorial director, has a two-page piece in the front in which he writes briefly of the cancellation and then tells us a bit about the comics stories in the issue and the creators behind them. Jo Duffy then has a review of An Edge in My Voice, a collection of Harlan Ellison essays, which she liked … but she also said it was hard to read in big chunks, because Ellison is so caustic that it started to wear on her. She also wrote about the Time-Life collection Enchanted World, which was about various mythologies and folklores and had produced 5 volumes (of the eventual 21) when Duffy was writing (man, Time-Life books … now that’s a flashback!). She also briefly mentions how much fun The Protector, with Jackie Chan, is. I haven’t seen it, but I’ll take her word for it! Dennis O’Neil has a column lauding videotapes and VCRs, which is fun. He writes about the declining ratings of network television (which people are still gnashing their teeth about, 40 years later) and the declining numbers of people who go to the movie theaters (which people are still gnashing their teeth about, 40 years later) thanks to the rise of home video. O’Neil likes the convenience, but he does make some interesting points about the familiarity of movies when we can own them — will it make them less special because it’s no longer an experience to go out and see a movie? This is something people are still grappling with, and I think we can assume that O’Neil was right — the idea of a community is less and less evident these days (no matter what that community is) and is therefore more special because of its absence. It’s a reason I still go to the comic book store every Wednesday and buy physical copies of comics — the community does matter, and it’s a shame that we don’t have more of these “community” events, no matter what they might be. There’s also an odd text piece by John Robert Tebbel and Martha Thomases abut self-hypnosis. It’s just … weird. Let’s move on! The letters are, as you might expect, interesting, well done, and regretful about the cancellation. I’ll get back to them, particularly the one by famed letterhack Jim Burke (the inestimable T.M. Maple), because it’s more about what Epic‘s cancellation means, and Maple was always an interesting dude to read.

Epic Illustrated was kind of the last gasp of the Big Two trying to something different with the format of comics, rather than the contents of the comics themselves, and they haven’t really tried anything like it since, although I guess DC doing some of these Black Label books in a larger format is an attempt to go that way, although they’re still just superhero comics starring proven intellectual properties, so it’s not as radical as it seems. In the 1970s, the two companies tried magazine formats for reasons which I’m sure our educated readership can elucidate far better than I can, but I imagine it was due partly due to wanting to get around the Comics Code and due to the poor newsstand distribution system. Marvel was more successful with the magazine format than DC was, but DC also did some of the “giant-sized” formats, such as the Superman/Mohammed Ali book, that showed they were willing to do some different things. I imagine, although I don’t know, that the rise of specialty comics shops helped kill the magazine format (T.M. Maple certainly thinks so, as we’ll see below), as the Comics Code was no longer as viable as it once was because comics weren’t just lying around at a newsstand where any impressionable kid might pick them up, so Marvel and DC could do edgier content in their actual comics instead of reserving it for their magazines. They also probably realized that they could make more money targeting the superhero audience instead of trying to lure in a pure sci-fi/fantasy crowd and, in consequence, having to pay creators for their creations rather than just recycling through stuff that Kirby, Ditko, Kane/Finger, and Siegel/Shuster created and had no rights to. Epic was printed on nice paper — this issue is actually a combination of the glossy paper we see in these kind of higher-end magazines and a slightly rougher newsprint — though not as rough as standard Marvel and DC comics — seemingly inserted at random spots. I’m really not sure how they chose where to put the glossier paper or even why they did — cost-cutting, I assume — but it’s a bit odd. Anyway, the Big Two were beginning to use the glossier paper in their actual comics, and once they figured out they could raise the price a bit, use better paper, and still get the regulars to buy their superhero stuff, the magazine format went the way of the dodo. In his letter, T.M. Maple makes some of these points. He writes:

“[T]he passing of a quality-reproduction magazine-format comic publication is to be regretted. Once, not so many years ago, magazine-format comics were seen as the salvation of the industry, allowing access to the larger newsstand market. However, ironically, with the growth of the direct market, anything that doesn’t “look like a comic book” (i.e. is not the size of the traditional four-colour ones) has trouble in getting displayed properly and in being accepted by fandom …”

Maple was always erudite, and his comments here cut right to the heart of things. It’s frustrating that DC and Marvel retrenched in the early 1980s, and while they have put out some superb comics since then, of course, they became much less inclined to experiment outside of the traditional comics format. They do anthologies, of course, and some of them are excellent (despite my initial reservations about it, Solo from DC turned out to be a triumph), but only DC with Wednesday Comics has even thought about doing something a bit different with the way their comics are presented, and, as we know, that featured characters from their own stable of IPs, not new, creator-owned work.

The only company doing anything even remotely like Epic Illustrated is Titan with their revamp of The Savage Sword of Conan. The differences are many, of course — SSoC is exclusively reserved for Robert E. Howard creations, and Titan is much more interested in appealing to the nostalgia of fans for those 1970s Marvel mags than in pushing things forward, but it is a larger format, it does feel a bit more “mature” than your standard superhero comic, and it gives creators who might be slower than a monthly serial allows or who are a bit disillusioned with superhero comics a chance to flex their creative muscles in another genre. Plus, it does mix comics with prose, which doesn’t show up in Epic Illustrated #33 but was in other magazines Marvel published. In the latest SSoC issue, #8, we have a nice pin-up by Doug Braithwaite to begin the issue. Then we get Chris Burnham, who ought to get more work with DC or Marvel because he’s a terrific superhero artist but might be a bit too … quirky? for regular titles, drawing a story in which Conan fights a giant female worm monster. Like you do. Dennis Culver gets to do a bit more “mature” stuff, Burnham gets to draw a hideous monster with a bunch of boobs, and everyone’s happy! This is followed by a pin-up by Adam Gorham, then a letters page! None of them rise to the level of T.M. Maple’s, but that’s probably to be expected. It’s still a letters page! Next, we get Fred Kennedy’s story about Conan escorting a young girl home, and it’s also more “mature” in that Kennedy touches on themes of child sex slaves, although he’s not too explicit about it. Marco Rudy, who is definitely slow and definitely a bit too odd these days for regular superhero stories, draws this almost as a fever dream (which, to be honest, is what a lot of his comics look like these days — not a bad thing, but definitely something!), and it’s intense and beautiful. Then there’s a Gabriel Rodriguez pin-up, followed by essentially a double-page spread pin-up by Dan Panosian with a short poem by Jim Zub. The Cormac FitzGeoffrey story by Zack Davisson and Max von Fafner is next, and it’s nice to see a Crusade-era story in among all the sword-‘n’-sorcery (although, of course, there are swords in this story, because it’s set in the Crusades!). Jonathan Wayshak gives us another nice pin-up, and then a Tom Raney pin-up is placed in between the two pages of a Conan prose story by John C. Hocking. Finally, Liam Sharp, who also seems like a relatively slow artist and someone who also doesn’t really fit in with traditional superheroes, does his Conan story, and we finish the issue with a pin-up by Juan Alberto Hernández. If we count the pin-ups and the letters page, that’s 61 pages of content for $6.99, which is still not a bad value at all. The paper is far rougher than even the rough-ish paper found in Epic Illustrated, but Titan is, as I noted, going for a nostalgic thing, and using this kind of paper is probably more cost-effective but also probably allows them to appeal to the nostalgic bone in the people who buy this. Plus, unlike Epic Illustrated, it’s all in black and white, another cost-effective/nostalgia solution to a price problem. Savage Sword of Conan is a very cool comic/magazine, make no mistake about it, but it’s not really pushing anything forward. Heavy Metal, which just relaunched with a massive #1 issue, is the standard-bearer for the kind of things Epic Illustrated was doing (and, of course, Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant did it first), and I guess 2000AD counts as well, but as far as magazine-format comics easily available in the U.S., the pickings are slim.

Does this mean anything? Can the demise of Epic Illustrated tell us anything about comics? Well, it seems like it can tell us that the drivers of the industry, at least in the States, decided that they would retreat from experimentation and try to hold onto the readers they already had like grim death. This is not a new idea, but it feels like around the mid-1980s, DC and Marvel decided that their best bet going forward would be to make the readers they already had buy everything they published instead of trying to bring in new readers. And it worked, I guess, because creatively, at least, the mid- to late-1980s were very good for both companies, and DC, at least, had a creatively amazing 1990s, while Marvel … well, did not (I mean, they tried, but not much worked for them in the Nineties). It is a shame, though, because the magazine-format stuff the companies — especially Marvel — was usually of very high quality, and it gave creators who otherwise might never have worked for them a chance to show off their skills, and it probably introduced readers to a lot of creators they might otherwise not have known. In the four decades since Epic Illustrated shut down, Marvel and DC have done a lot of very cool things. But it’s been almost completely already-fans focused, which is too bad. They figured out a business model that worked, but it seems like it drove comics a bit deeper into a ghetto, from which they haven’t really emerged, despite superhero movies and kids reading manga and all the other positive things about recent comics history. But they made that choice. Such is life! Still, it’s fun to consider what might have been, had Epic Illustrated and its ilk been a bit more successful!