BLOG TO COMM

COMIC BOOK REVIEW! THE NEW TWO-FISTED TALES #'s 1 AND 2 (Dark Horse Comics, 1993, 1994)

When this limited Two-Fisted revival hit the comic book collectors consciousness-razed readership mindswell a good quarter century back, I could just tell it was gonna be a masturbatory cash in on old accomplishments gussied up for the new and improved comic book readership! Well, either that or at the least a quickie cash in aimed at the few dozen old nerds who still took comic books seriously during the closing days of the twentieth century.

As you all know we can't go home again, and if we try to revive the past it's gonna be cluttered up with modern-day styles and values that totally wash away anything that's made these old efforts so engaging in the first place. And with this grave-digging effort the tenor is immediately set by the not-so-surprise appearances of some of those comic book professionals who praise the EC lineage to the hilt yet took only their worst aspects to heart, as well as by the general tone of these stories which come off just like every other post-mid-seventies comic book that was attempting to break the trammels of past cliches, only to create even worse new ones in their wake.

The fifties might have been the era that saw the birth of a whole slew of "new" comics, "new" comedy, "new" forms of expression and a whole lotta "new" things that might have shocked the previous generation bred in the twenties and thirties, but by now it's nothing but a huge sack of sagging offal that has permeated every form of once-cool entertainment and dare-I-say "art" to the point of meaningless. Really, what have all those "hip" and "innovative" comedians from Ernie Kovacs, Lenny Bruce (a guy who really got the relevance ball rollin') and even Steve Allen given us but today's scolds who come off more or less like the spiritual successors to D.W. Griffith's reformers only in hip garb? The bold and daring moom pitchers of those days should be destroyed if only because what they eventually led to are more concerned with the pummeling of pious pronouncements that excoriate middle Amerigan values to the hilt yet fail to combat their own vices of a far-more enormous nature. And let's forget that primitive and feral rock 'n roll music which, other'n via a few handy crazed connoisseurs and the like, has generally lacked even the thinnest shred of vitality! Or it has especially since the great punk rock attempt to breath life into the rotting corpse and look how much respect those pioneers got!

And comic books, and especially THE NEW TWO-FISTED TALES, follow suit pretty handily. Trying to be a brave and noble update on the original kinda/sorta "anti-war" title that had more'n a few armchair protest kiddile gaping in wonder, the stories to be found in this regurgitation fail on a number of levels. First off, NONE of the sages to be found have any of the spirit of early-fifties bared-wire comicdom, that special ingredient of "intelligence" that made the entire EC line stand out to the point where even more established companies like Atlas were copying the form with fairly good results. The plethora of Vietnam-era tales tend to lend a notion to the idea that the people who were involved in these (major comic biz names I never heard of) are still re-fighting the old peace 'n love fight long after the fact because...well, "we were so noble" and all of that back-patting rot. And frankly, haven't we had enough baby-boomer myopia these past forty or so years?

Not only that but the entire results end up as one big glop of cheap cash in on past innovation without any true innovation to be found. It's sort of if as someone had revived the Pierce Arrow automobile line but designed the new effort to look like a VW Rabbit.

The art is just as low-level feh as anything to be found in the new slick-paper era of new comics breaking out of old patterns into new vistas of bland, and as for the stories... Sheesh, most of this reads just as bad as any of those eighties-vintage SGT. ROCK tales which tried (and succeeded) in showing the men of Easy Company as a bunch of sensitive and touchy-feely doofs. Not that the characters found here are for that matter, but they sure come off one-dimensional and generally unsympathetic in a genre that perhaps deserves a little more'n the standard World War II-era comic book filler cheese.

The reprints from the original TWO-FISTED TALES filling out these issues not only come off subpar in this company, but make me realize that maybe the entire EC adventure line wasn't as hotcha as I once believed. When I was in my early teens, reading sagas like "Big If" from FRONTLINE COMBAT in the pages of Les Daniels COMIX history wowed me just as much as the next guy. Nowadays it all seems so calculated and cloying. Transform the attempts to awe and inform with the nineties-era socially conscious Civil War tale in issue two and its all washed away by a good hunk of SO WHAT!...as if we can still find any sympathy for the characters or somehow be affected by the surprise endings like we were oh so long ago. (And still can be, if only people could do things right anymore.)

I'll bet this 'un earned a few industry awards. I mean, why NOT? And I'll also bet that this was, despite calls to the contrary, a sad way for comic book great Harvey Kurtzman to go out on. But I'll bet the entire farm that the writers and artists (including Spain Rodriguez, perhaps my least fave underground cartoonist) are still basking in the knowledge that they were involved in this effort which stands as a beacon in a field filled with all those other beacons that are basking in the supposed fact that comic books ain't those simpy funnypage things for Saturday Afternoon Barbershop Kids to pour over anymore. There ought to be some sorta pretentiousness award for that in the industry, eh?