Now this does not come as a surprise since I already announced that I was planning to write this post in my new CrossGen Comics overview post last month. As I mentioned then this could be part of a Marvel Comics themed month since while many see SACH & VIOLENS as an independent comicbook series technically speaking it was published under Epic Comics new HEAVY HITTERS label ( which also published Joe Kubert's TOR, Howard Chaykin's MIDNIGHT MEN, Ron Lim's DRAGON LINES and THE TROUBLE WITH GIRLS by Will Jacobs, Gerard Jones and Brett Blevins and longtime blog followers may remember the last one because I made a special spotlight post casting hasian 44D - 25 - 35 blow up sex doll Yaya Han as the villainous bigbreasted asian men milking machine Lily Lee a.k.a. the Lizard Lady way back in February 2023 ) which is one of the reasons why so few people read it and even fewer remember it.
Back in the day Marvel Comics created Epic Comics to publish creator owned series and keep all the good talent from immigrating to other comicbook companies which offered more freedom and creative control.
It also was a way for creators who didn't want to deal with the regular Marvel guys - for whatever reasons - to still work with Marvel Comics.
And while Epic Comics was without a doubt successful during the 90s iMage Comics was kicking everyone's collective asses where sales are concerned and thus Marvel Comics tried to out - image iMage Comics since all of the founders of that new company had previously worked for them. And their plan was to do it via Epic Comics but to give it more of a push to create the label of HEAVY HITTERS that would publish them all.
There was only one problem : Marvel Comics didn't really want to do creator owned comics. True, they didn't want all of the best creators to work for other companies - or even worse create their own companies like the iMage founders - but that doesn't mean that they liked giving them creative control and let them retain the rights to those characters.
Marvel Comics much more preferred that all those superstar writers and artists have exclusive work for hire contracts so that Marvel could get rich from exploiting their creations. But with the rise of so many other comic publishing companies that offered much better conditions than they got at Marvel Comics they had to do something if they wanted to keep the best creators working for them and so created Epic Comics.
So while on one side they started the HEAVY HITTERS label to go up against iMage Comics on the other side they were not too keen on publishing creator owned material and didn't do much promotion. There were no big announcements, no press conferences and as far as I know the only promotional efforts were some articles in MARVEL AGE - which was primary directed at the readers who were already reading Marvel Comics - and some in house ads in various Marvel Comics publications.
Which is one of the reasons why not many people read SACH & VIOLENS.
Another factor was that because of the subject matter the series was geared towards mature readers. Granted, it is not what one might label as pornographic but it does have nudity and some of these scenes might be gratuitous because they are clearly there because George Perez did want to draw them. That said they are always done in a classy way and not as graphic as they could have been. There also is a lot of violence ( no pun intended ), blood and gore but I guess that was less of a problem because US audiences have no problems with depictions of violence no matter how graphic as long as there are no exposed nipples or any other dirty parts. So as an outsider there I can only speculate about how much the violent and nude content helped or hindered selling the comicbook.
But before we come to the glorious George Perez art I have selected for this post ( and there might be a few pages that I have posted before but I don't have the energy to go through all of my George Perez posts right now and also I think I would be doing both Peter David and George Perez a great disservice by eliminating the best pages ) you might ask yourself if this is going to be a Marvel Comics month - but with a twist - or a George Perez month. And also why this is the first post this month as Today is already the 26th and so we are almost ready to wrap up May.
Well, my first idea was to continue the independent comic theme this month through the backdoor with the first post being this one and the next one was supposed to be about Milestone Comics which was its own independent company but which was still published through DC Comics.
And I found a lot of original art pages - especially from the HARDWARE series - but as far as the accompanying colour pages there is nothing to be found on the internet. It seems DC Comics not only has restricted the internet access to all of the Milestone books to their Infinite application but they have also erased all material from other websites. So either I will have to wait with writing that post until I can find those missing coloured pages or do a BLACK AND WHITE post that is split up between the original black and white pages and other material that is in colour.
As for what I have been up to this month so far, for the most part I have been working on my unfinished posts. At first I found a lot of great films that I wanted to put on the blog before they get deleted so I went over all of my unfinished posts to see where I hadn't included a movie yet or where I had but that movie was deleted since then and for which I had a replacement that was as good or even better. That took quite a while and after that I found a YouTube channel with a lot of spanish music and as frequent blog visitors know that is something I always struggle with.
Having lived 50+ years in Germany I don't know as many spanish singers or groups as I would like and from those that I do know it is not always easy to find good material. As longtime followers know only all too well I tend to skip these spanish singers for other international artists who are also successful in Spain or for some balkan beats when I come across something I want to put on the blog ASAP but I much prefer to showcase spanish talent. So I have been going over my unfinished posts a second time - starting with the newest posts - to add more spanish music to my posts and starting with those where I also had an episode of Siempre Estrellas where said singer or musical group did a live performance.
Which I interrupted last week as I came across a website that has full episodes of wrestling shows from the 80s and 90s in good quality and not only from the WWF and WCW but also from smaller wrestling companies.
But Yesterday I decided to take a break from all of that and start this post because I was not making any headway and we are almost at the end of this month. Well, that's enough of an introduction for this post and we will see what our next post will be since that should be another Marvel Comics post but I have also prepared my George Perez WONDER WOMAN just in case that I want to turn May into a George Perez month.
it is epic
