You know, while I was ill I decided to TRY to do a little comic reading. I went through Pekka A. Manninen's Kapteen Kuolio books which were a joy -yes, in Finnish but still a joy. I then read through the complete Dancing Elephant Press and Image Comics run of Paul Grist's Jack Staff and Burglar Bill and those, equally, were fun.
I even read a couple of old French BD from the 1970s.
But do you know where I got my best read? Super Adventure Stories. "What? What the hell is that?" you may ask. Well, let me tell you.
The superb Super Adventure Stories was published by Michael Gibas –which gave us classics such as Johnny Kurzman’s “Red Dragon”,whose saga was great fun and pre-dated both my own and Grant Morrison’s [Zenith]Red Dragon. The saga concluded in a one off full issue story in no.5 if I remember rightly.
And Gibas gave us the D-Riders (Panda included) which was a sort of psychedelic super hero/adventure series. Lots of conspiracy and even some European based action.
Okay, these late 1970s treats may not have been drawn the "Marvel way" but they were fun and even re-reading them, uh, "many years on", they are still fun. The strips were "of the age" but do you know something? I would love to see Red Dragon collected into a one off book and the D-Riders, too.
Unusually for the age, SAS included colour posters and some colour pages.
These titles take pride of place in my Small Press collection (actually, they are in a stone shrine) and I still hope that the impossible dream of collected books might appear one day.
Gibas. Kurzman. Where-ever you are these days PLEASE consider re-publishing!!
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