Sorry for the lack of updates this week; it seems that SPACE took all the energy we had. We are regrouping, though, and will have a humdinger of a new page for you next week. Stay tuned!
SPACE is almost upon us! And by SPACE, I mean the Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo, held every year in Columbus, Ohio. This year SPACE will be held on April 28 and 29 at the Northland Performing Arts Center. Admission is FREE!
My whole family has been working hard to get comics ready for SPACE. We’ve got The Electric Team #7 ready to debut at the con, which we’re very excited about. It looks like this:
and tells the story of Jaxula trying to save space and time from the wicked machinations of Dr. February and Larzipan, while the rest of the team fights the Decapus.
Meanwhile, my five-year-old son Jackson has completed his comic Super Tooth. I helped him with it, but he made up the story, wrote the dialogue, and drew all the pictures. All I did was letter the dialogue and draw panel borders for him. And by the end he was drawing some of the panel borders and word balloons, because he is an ambitious and talented man. The cover looks like this:
It was Jackson’s idea to charge $6 for the comic, which might seem a bit steep, but don’t worry, we’ll be offering a discount at SPACE. Here’s one of my favorite panels from the comic:
Abi, meanwhile, has been working on her Swann Castle comic. You may have seen Swann Castle in the pages of The Electric Team; that’s where the team is right now, in fact. Abi started this comic many months ago, but then lost the pages she had drawn. Fortunately she found them again recently, and finished the comic Wednesday night. The cover will look like this:
Again, I helped out by doing the lettering, but by the end it was clear to me that I was no longer needed. The next comic she does, she’s going to letter herself.
Here’s a sample panel:
The Super Tooth pages have been copied and collated, thanks to my amazing wife Alice, and just need to be stapled. Swann Castle, sadly, still needs to be copied. Hopefully we’ll get everything done in time so that we don’t end up at the copy shop at midnight the night before SPACE, as has happened to me so often in the past.
Whatever the case, three new comics to debut! It’s going to be a big show for us!
Today’s installment, page 223, wraps up our “Heroes Vs. Nazis” sequence. Sam did a great job, and I’m very happy with how it turned out. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been looking forward to the Nazi fightin’ scene for months. The Electric Team is a fantasy comic set in a fantasy world, so you might not have been expecting Nazis. So why did we go out of our way to bring them in?
First of all, I’ve been a comic book fan since I was 6, and the first time I read about World War II was in a comic. Actually, the first time I remember seeing the word Nazi in print was in a Captain America book I got at a school book fair when I was in, I don’t know, third or fourth grade.
Here’s the book:
That’s not an image I found online, that’s a picture I just took of my actual copy from that book fair in nineteen-eighty-whatever. It’s in surprisingly good shape. I read this book over and over, and it might have been my introduction to the work of Jack Kirby–maybe? It’s got the first Cosmic Cube story, and Avengers #4, and I deeply love both of those still. Anyway, the book’s introduction looks like this:
So there was (I think) the first time I ever heard of Hitler. Another one of my earliest comics was an issue of All-Star Squadron, which was set during World War II. Even though I grew up in the 80’s, I still had plenty of pop culture exposure to Nazi villains. Oh, and Raiders of the Lost Ark came out. From a young age I knew that one of the important things heroes did was fight Nazis.
At some point, Nazi fighting grew passe. I know in the 90’s many comic book fans started to see Nazi villains as a cop-out, like you were just going for an easy villain, a villain all good folk hated, instead of something with some depth or ambiguity. But then, in recent years, there has, unfortunately, been an upswing in real life Nazism in the United States. Nazi villains are relevant again. I liked heroes punching Nazis before, but now it has an added depth of meaning. Granted, having our hero punch a Nazi in the face isn’t a complex sociopolitical message. We don’t even normally focus on messages; here at Electric Team headquarters, we’re more concerned about entertaining stories. But we also know that kids read the comic, and since I learned about the evils of Nazism from comics, I feel like I should pay it forward to today’s youth. Hey, kids, check it out — Nazis are bad!