Coming from a Xerox near you ...

Title's a little misleading, though ...

(Read more ...)


As I have posted here before, labels are often like that. The things I'm referring to that came from a copier did so the mid- to late-1980s. I don't know the proper term, but they were really (AFAIK) the predecessor of " 'zines " -- which, of course, were the predecessors of what we're doing now.


These little mags were comics -- hand-drawn and lettered, black-and-white, and -- by industry standards, anyway -- amateurish. But they were really dark, so full of a wild style of their own, a kind of black-gloss Glamorama with a touch of banned substances (OK, "performace-enhancing" materials) in the mix. OK, no real banned substances that I know of -- just that when you say "on steroids" these days, people tend to take you literally. So, I guess I mean "as if on steroids" ... .


Anyway, these 80s amateur comics, well, some of them were pretty good. And even the ones that weren't sometimes had their moments. And it started a little movement. And the movement took force and shape and moved overseas and stayed underground for years and years and ...


Then there was Angel: After the Fall. Those who find this new comic by IDW a little odd-looking may not remember or ever saw its ancestors that came from the underground and onto some plate glass, and after a couple of glow-glows later, they came to you "for, like only a nickel, dude!" (That's when you had to have the right kind of fade and the left kind of piercings and the down-the-middle mohawk, dudes!)


No, I'm much too old and stodgy (even when I wasn't too old) to have done anything like that style. I just (described many posts ago) worked in a record store (when they still sold records, dudes) where some Black-Flag-lovin' , mohawk-wearin', multi-pierced young folk also worked (and hung out when they didn't). Goth didn't appear (around me, anyway) until years later. So, where I was, the "hardcore" scene was it.


And these new Angel comics bring back memories of experiences I never had -- but only wondered (sometimes aloud) how the kids who did managed to survive them.


And no, they never let me in the Milestone Club, either. (Actually, I was too chicken to try ... .)


(return) 

... all of mine are!


LJ orig.: Jan. 16, 2008