Special Alan Moore Update : Rants and Comic Announcements

Welcome to a special news update edition of the Wayfarer folks!

Today we bring you some highly entertaining and some exciting news from the much-revered, ridiculed, confusing, scary, god-like but undeniably talented and legendary scribe you all know as Alan Moore. His series like Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell showed his literary power and made people start looking at comics more seriously - Watchmen still being among the top books recommended to new converts. He's also known for his remarkable re-imagining of established characters like Superman (For the man who has everything), Batman (The Killing Joke), Supreme, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, etc, etc... He even did a 3-part series called Lost Girls along with his wife that was pretty amazing, albiet skirting the very edges of artful vs. pornographic story-telling.

X-Men: The Animated Series - IN REVIEW!!

I found myself bereft of the world of Marvel’s cartoons as they did not feature anywhere on Cartoon Network, my premier portal to the world of cartoons. Then, one fine day, "Voila!" Channel surfing on a lazy Saturday Morning, I chanced upon episodes of Spider-Man: The Animated Series on the Fox Kids segment of Star Plus. And an hour later, I found myself watching X-Men: The Animated series on Star World, its companion channel. To be honest, I was never into X-Men in the comics – the three teams I was never able to wrap my mind around were Teen Titans, X-Men and the Legion of Super Heroes – mainly due to the team roster changing frequently and due to the large number of magazines featuring each.
Of course, it was the late nineties, but comics available in India were still stuck in the eighties – we had Marv Wolfman on Teen Titans, Paul Levitz on the Legion and Chris Claremont on the X-Men – which, in retrospect, were the best runs on the titles to date. No matter, the seventh or eighth grade kid in me couldn’t figure them out, so they were trash. More than Spider-Man though, X-Men changed my mindset completely.

Fantasising fondly of the "Fantastic Four" (1967 animated series)

When I was a kid in the fourth grade, one fine afternoon a routine bout of channel surfing gave me a completely new channel with a wonderful concept – they broadcast Cartoons right through the day. The channel was then called Cartoon Network, and they used to broadcast mostly Hanna Barbera stuff – which I was new to, back then. I saw a lot of classics I knew (Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes), new stuff I came to love (Scooby Doo, Huckleberry Hound) and a feature that looked too interesting for words – The Power Zone. I remember this part all too well as it was a two-hour programme that featured only action cartoons.

At the outset, I remember running home from school to thrill to the adventures of The Fantastic Four, The Centurions, Jonny Quest, Thundarr The Barbarian and Super Adventures – a gamut of H-B studio works, like Space Ghost, Birdman, Mightor, The Herculoids, Shazzan, Moby Dick, Dino Boy and the Galaxy Trio. These cartoons and the ones that followed – Swat Kats, Captain Planet, Sky Commanders, Galtar and the Golden Lance – inspired me to look for comics featuring action heroes, and to be honest I wasn’t reading a lot of foreign comics, so my action comics were limited to Indrajal Comics and Diamond Comics’ Mahabali Shaka, Agniputra Abhay, Fauladi Singh and Lamboo Motu. Only after viewing these did my interest in foreign comics, as well as in Indian publications featuring other foreign characters (IBH & Dolton both printed Indian editions of DC Comics long ago), and my chief inspiration was The Fantastic Four (1967)

Will the real Captain America please stand up?

Jack Kirby (& heirs) Vs. Marvel Comics

Yes, I am going there. But for all the right reasons. For a little while now, a court case has been under way to get back the rights or at least get royalties from Marvel Comics for the late Jack 'King' Kirby and his heirs from the 100s of millions made from creations which without Kirby would not exist, such as Hulk, Fantastic Four, and oh, that money spinner, X-Men. Every comic fan/reader must know about Kirby for it goes without saying, that he is as important to American/Western comics as Leonardo Da Vinci is to modern art and as Anant Pai was to Indian comics.