Barbalien Emerges!

Does the name "Barbalien" ring a bell at all?

It appeared again today in a Bleeding Cool article about an upcoming Dark Horse comic book by writer Jeff Lemire entitled Black Hammer. Here's what that's about:

The series follows the former heroes of Spiral City — Abraham Slam, Golden Gail, Colonel Weird, Madame Dragonfly and Barbalien – as they work to escape from the small farming town they’ve been trapped in for a decade.

The article displayed a number of variant covers drawn by Lemire himself, including one which featured that very character.  That's the one below.

This idea had been conceived in 2007 or so and eventually scheduled for a late 2014 release. However the artist suffered an illness, causing significant delays. But it's apparently on its way now.

There is no blatant, or even subtle, Canadian content as such. But reading about Barbalien again recently raised an eyebrow. That was the name of the character that Lemire was going to use in the second volume of True Patriot. When asked, in late 2013, by Comic Book Resources what he would bring to the True Patriot table, Lemire provided the following teaser:

My contribution will involve a new superhero I'm creating called Barbalien. He's -- well, he's an alien barbarian. He crash landed on Earth in the '60s and posed as an RCMP officer by day, fighting crime in the north by night -- sort of a mash up between Dudley Do-Right, Martian Manhunter and Conan.

Judging from the rather neat "Who's Who" style fact sheet below, there isn't much cause to think that the RCMP portion of that is still in play, but who knows? There is nothing to definitively identify Spiral City, or the farming town the characters are trapped in, as American either from the small sampling of preview material I've seen. Maybe Lemire will sneak in some Canadian goodness.

The Sasquatch Known As "Big".

Global teams are often a good place to look for a Canadian character. Failing that, if a team features a Sasquatch on its roster, there's a very good chance that (s)he is from this fine, fine country.

Such is the case with The Perhapanauts, the creation of writer Todd Dezago and artist Craig Rousseau. A rather eclectic bunch, the big hairy dude on the team draws the eye a bit.

I searched and searched for some background on that character until I finally found it...On the book's official website. Why didn't I just start there??

"BIG" has been at BEDLAM actually since before there was a BEDLAM. Captured in 1973 in the Northern Corridor section of British Columbia, Big was captured and held for several years by Project Entua, a clandestine government program designed to retrieve and study cryptozoological specimens from around the world. 

... 

An already strong creature, Big was soon displaying feats of immeasurable strength and dexterity. But it was the incredible emergence of intelligence and subsequent accumulation of knowledge that astounded the Doctors and BEDLAM Staff alike. Not long after, Big was a colleague rather than subject...

The first two limited series, entitled First Blood and Second Chances, were published by Dark Horse between 2005 and 2007, I believe. Subsequent books have been published by Image Comics. The team is still quite active, having recently concluded a Kickstarter campaign successfully.

The Image books are available digitally on Comixology as well, while the earlier Dark Horse material does not appear to be. But if I can track them down in a comic store, I just might have to. This book looks like a blast.

Halloween Reading: Mr. Monster Origins

Who better on Halloween than Mr. Monster?

I actually got this book a few weeks back, read about half of it, then decided to save the final part for tonight. Man, I LOVE this book.

Looking into Mr. Monster earlier, without having read any issues in nearly 20 years, I was somewhat mistaken in a prior blog post about his Canadian identity having been stripped away. Jim Stearn was identified as Canadian in his most widely-known appearance, from Super Duper Comics #3 in 1947, which is reprinted within Chapter 2 (of eight) of Origins. The retelling is done in an interesting way; we read the "real" story of what happened while one of the supporting  characters reads the comic book version.

Origins adds that, in order to avoid taking over the role of Mr. Monster, a young Jim Stearn left Stearn Manor and moved to Canada to earn his medical degree. I believe Stearn Manor is in New York state, so Stearn would be a Canadian citizen but likely not Canadian born.

The present-day version of the character is his son Strongfort "Doc" Stearn. So Strongfort is sort of half-Canadian and half...huh...well, you really should read this book.

I believed that the book would focus on Strongfort's upringing and training, but that's not the case. He's actually not born until the end of chapter four. The early issues detail Jim Stearn's career and the senior Stearn remains involved in the later issues as the story begins to look into creepy little Strongfort's early childhood.

Extra treat: As pointed out by Jim B in a comment to my previous post, there is another Mr. Monster appearance which tends to be overlooked. The Jim Stearn(e) version's origin was told in Triumph Comics #31. The story is displayed in this book, however its seven pages are copied onto two, making them quite small. Still, it's nice, not to mention logical, to have it in an Origins package.

By my limited recollection of the other Mr. Monster books, they were quite different in tone; more of a quirky humour, cartoonish style. It may be that the darker tone of Origins was more appealing to my personal tastes, but the character is interesting regardless and I think I'll be collecting more of his adventures down the road. Hell, maybe I'll make it a Halloween tradition for as long as there is material with which to do so.

TSOG Team-Up #2: Mr. Monster and Ghost Woman

Mr. Monster's inclusion among the Canadian characters listed in the International Heroes page some time back came as something of a surprise. Michael T. Gilbert, by far the man most closely associated with the character, is American. I owned a few issued of the book and could not recall any mention of Mr. Monster being Canadian (and he certainly didn't "look" Canadian).

As the page linked above indicates, the original version of Mr. Monster is the creation of Canadian Fred Kelly. It seems the character only appeared in one book, Super Duper Comics #3 in 1947 but that adventure indeed took place in Canada. If you're interested in checking it out, you can download/preview it here.

After coming across a copy of that book in the early 70's, Michael T. Gilbert modernized the character, making his version the son of the original and adding loads of back story. That Mr. Monster only saw the light of day in Vanguard Illustrated #7 in 1984, but quickly developed a following in the mid and late 80's. The bulk of Mr. Monster's material was published during those years by Eclipse and Dark Horse and the latter included the character in its "Dark Horse Presents" book as recently as last year.

Now Ghost Woman's status is a bit more murky, but it appears to have certain similarities. Here is a page from Star Studded Comics #1 (1945) which displays the character.

Her appearance in the above is said to be her only one, and the story's conclusion does seem to indicate that there was no intention of using the character again in the future. But once again, it appears as though a character's single appearance inspired an American creator decades later.

This isn't solid.  It is only an unsupported mention on Wikipedia's page about Ghost Woman which I have not been able to confirm to this point.  Here it is:

The first publication to use the name was published in 1945 by Cambridge House Publishers, and featured Captain Combat, Comandette, Red Rogue, Ghost Woman (the inspiration for the later Dark Horse Comics character, The Ghost), and several other characters.

Really now?

The Dark Horse Ghost is most certainly not Canadian, having first appeared during that company's "Comics Greatest World" launch in 1993 and being based in a city called Arcadia. Much of the storyline revolved around the main character's attempts to piece together details of her past.

After a decade or so of inactivity, Ghost is currently appearing in Dark Horse Presents, the same book in which Mr. Monster resurfaced last summer.

Both being occult-based characters, presently published by Dark Horse and with a history of cross-overs (Mr. Monster with Airboy, Ghost with The Shadow, Hellboy and even the Cassandra Cain version of Batgirl), there would appear to be very few roadblocks in making this happen. It wouldn't technically be Canadian characters meeting, mind you, but apparently two characters with little-known Canadian origins.

As a final note, Ghost Woman was brought back briefly in the unfinished Northern Guard series from Moonstone.  She is second from the left in the picture below, but her role was minimal in the two issues that were published.

Lastly, I want to draw attention to something pretty damn great that Mr Gilbert is said to have done for Mr. Monster's creator Fred Kelly.  How cool is that?