Before The Tomb of Dracula. Before the Darkstalkers. Before The Forever People . Before DC's horror anthologies , Joe Kelly and Doug Mahnke's Justice League of America , Mike Zeck's Captain America , Alpha Flight , the West Coast Avengers ( or Avengers West Coast ), the Great Lakes Avengers and Kurt Busiek and George Perez Avengers, heck, even before my post on Peter David and George Perez brilliant adult readers mini series SACHS AND VIOLENS I wanted to write a post about HARDWARE.
But because I did not have a lot of original art and could not find the corresponding pages in colour I opted to write the SACHS AND VIOLENS post instead. Well, Halloween is finally over, the year is slowly coming to an end so I am looking over the new posts I have written this year to see which ones I didn't get to write. But most importantly since I have found a lot original art pages from Milestone Comics as well as the much sought after pages in colour we can finally write the big bad HARDWARE post.
Good things come to those who wait.
And all of my faithful followers had to wait a lot because as always I had so many behind the scenes things to do. With a whopping eight new posts I wrote last month I didn't have time to include all of the usual videos in every post so there was the usual after Halloween work to be done. I don't know how it is for other people but with the preparations I do before Halloween, the posts I write in October and all the work that needs be done afterwards Halloween usually last three months for me.
On top of that Halloween came early to TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN but most importantly all its readers. Kind of. Which sounds contradictory but let me explain. As regular blog visitors know I had found a YouTube channel with the first eight seasons of Baywatch and not only in good quality but they were also free to include in your posts. So as an avid fan of Baywatch - but especially many of the incredible sexbombs the show featured - I naturally included all the videos I could in my posts. Which took a lot of blood, sweat, tears as well as other bodily fluids I am not going to mention, time and hard work but in the end it was worth it.
Well, as with most videos on YouTube they were eventually taken down which was a hard pill to swallow. Anyway, the good news is that not only all of the videos are back but they also uploaded seasons 10 and 11 - a.k.a. Baywatch Hawaii in Germany - which means that all of the videos I had included in my old posts are back again and can be enjoyed by all my readers. The bad news is that I tend to go over my old posts quite a few times and since the Baywatch videos had disappeared I cut them in a lot of posts. So I spent a few days going over all my unfinished posts to see which episodes were still in my posts ( and include them in a list so I don't post any videos twice ), which episodes had been cut and which episodes I could re - upload. For the moment being I am not going to continue it and rather include Baywatch episodes on a day to day basis.
Good things come to those who wait.
So that is what I have been doing this month and also the reason why we start the month November on TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN on the 15th.
But let's get to Milestone Comics and especially HARDWARE since I am not sure if all of my readers are interested in this kind of stuff. And to be honest, as a white, caucasian albeit with a spanish background male I was not very interested in Milestone Comics output for the longest time because - like a lot of comicbook afficionados - I made the erroneous assumption that Milestone Comics was a company of black creators who made comics for black readers. And to nip all the cries of racism in the bud I am not using the term " black " as a derogatory term but because it takes too long to write " afro american " every time. Also not all people of colour are afro american. To assume that is just racist. Also as I found out much later Milestone Comics goal was not only to create comicbooks that featured black characters prominently - which is something that didn't happen a lot with the big two comicbook companies at that time and which is done more now but only as window dressing without any real substance - but to provide a more racially diverse universe set in a more real life setting for all readers who are interested in such a thing.
And right about now you are probably wondering when I did find out all of this. For that we have to go back to the far away year of 2016 when Marvel Comics - or more accurately the Disney corporation - started raising prices for some of its comicbooks to five bucks. Which sounds strange now because - as I predicted - it has become the standard price for any Marvel Comic without any extra pages or extra material added.
Which for me was an absurd price because back then since almost all of the independent comics were sold for 3.99 dollars which was more than one buck less and they often had better writing and better art than what was offered by the big two. For me it was a huge opportunity the other publishers wasted by not starting a big campaign to make comic readers aware of the fact. Be that as it may, as my way to bring more attention to this I wrote about some recent comicbook hauls where I had ordered a lot of issues online where the prices ranged from 3.50 bucks to 10 cents and less. Granted, none of these issues were what you would call key issues nowadays but they don't have to. The whole idea was to illustrate a point as you can get a lot of books that you would not otherwise read as well as some where you may fill gaps in your collection. I know that there are currently a lot of comicbook afficionados who warn about buying a lot of cheap books because you amass a lot of books that you may not need in your comicbook collection but I urge anybody to if not do some bargain bin diving at your local comicbook store than at least to order some bulk comics from some online fire sale for the experience of getting a truckload of comics for a ridiculously low price. If anything in the least it will male spending 5 bucks on a regular comic more difficult.
I wrote three posts about my adventures with ordering cheap books, the first one about some issues from Valiant Comics that I bought - which back then came in handy to fill some gaps in my collection - plus some hardcovers , one about the issues I got in the 3 to 5 dollar range with a few selected trades and hardcovers thrown in that go a bit beyond that and the last and final one where I paid less than 20 bucks for 42 issues that included the very first Milestone Comics issues I bought : issues 2, 3, 4, 5 and 16 of HARDWARE and issues 1, 3, 4, 25, 27, 33 and 34 of ICON.
Now I won't lie, the reason why I bought theses issues - besides the very low price point - was that I was already familiar with the creators since the issues of HARDWARE were written by Dwayne McDuffy who besides his work on many comicbook titles was one of the main writers on the animated Justice League series and pencilled by Denis Cowan amongst whose ouvre are such eclectic books like DC Comics GREEN ARROW, AMETHYST or THE QUESTION and Marvel Comics DAMAGE CONTROL or DEATHLOK. As for the issues of HARDWARE they were also written by Dwayne McDuffy with art by Mark D. Bright whom my regular visitors already know from my many posts about Bob Layton's runs on IRON MAN.
I always intended to get back to the Dakotaverse but the universe had other plans for me. And I really question why I didn't buy more Milestone comicbooks since besides Denys Cowan they had artists like Humberto Ramos on the book and covers by big name artists. I remember that there was a month were John Byrne did all the covers and another one where Walter Simonson did the covers for the zero issues. Heck, they even got french comic legend Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moebius to do some of their covers and it's not easy to find US comics with Moebius covers.
But it's already getting late and I feel a second part to this coming on since I have enough material for a few posts about Milestone Comics.
So it's time to wrap up the comicbook part of this post ( as I still have to include the usual links and videos ) but before we get to the original art I have selected for this post - which is all from issue 4 of HARDWARE - I should give my readers who have never heard of Milestone Comics the main premise of the book which could be summed up with black, angry Iron Man. The origin story of the main character is the typical bad guy origin which is that a genius inventor gets taken advantage of and so decides to get even. But where most characters in comicbooks turn to a life of crime because of that - especially if they are black - this person decides to fight crime. First it's all about getting his revenge on the people who wronged him but during the course of the series he has an awakening and decides that it can't be only about revenge and makes it about getting justice for those who can't. Anyway, that's all for this part as we will delve deeper into Milestone Comics - in our next instalment.
hardware store
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