Let's Incite Snoring On A Sunday Afternoon

 

I hate boring people so let me just point out that the 35 Year Rule used by Skinn re Marvelman was used widely in British comics going back to the 1940s (although it was not called such back then).

If you have seen any paperwork contracts between L. Miller and Son and Mick Anglo let me know -if you have copies. Long boring story.

Jerry Siegel created and wrote a lot of characters during the 1960s. He had what one might term a "bad experience" with a company over one of his characters once. Can you guess which one?  Certain characters from the 1960s in British comics are clearly his.  I know for sure that The Spider involved a contract with Amalgamated Press and as Gil Page put it "Everyone was excited that the man who created Superman was working for us".  Even after 46+ years with Amalgamated, Fleetway, IPC and Fleetway again, Page had seen few contracts as "everything was considered what the Yanks call work for hire".

A lot of documentation may have been transferreed to the secret warehouse the company kept for storing art, etc. but I was told (Page plus others at Fleetway in the 1990s) "apart from financial records you'll bve hard pressed to find anything else" -sell off after sell off made that all very easy.  One thing you had to do as a writer with Fleetway was send in two copies of your script. I once asked why two?  "To prove to accounts someone had genuinely done the work" and the stories that followed that statement were an eye opener!

I should note that even though I own my characters I put in writing, going back to 1988, that the artist OWNS their artwork and can sell it or whatever (just not make a comic out of it).

Even sales figures were, uh, "adapted".  Rather like the "sell or return" scheme arranged with distributors -it was a massive tax dodge.

If anyone out there has examples of contracts (not invoices) with any UK company from 1939 on please let me know because as a comic historian I am interested and 40+ years od f searching I have not come up with any and I recall the late Denis Gifford responding to my quest with "Oh, good luck on that one!"

Characters -It Seems To Be My Night for Notes!

 There is a two part strip (the whole work would have been six parts) that no one other than three tight lipped people have ever seen. It is, however, legendary: Outlaws of the Urban Forest.

It was created in the early 1980s and set in the 21st when a mystery disease had wiped out a lot of the world's population. Yeah, I saw Covid 19 coming if you didn't😎 basically the world had fallen back to a near Medieval period. Later parts of the story would flash back to "The Red Star" and Middle East wars which led to the total breakdown of society.

In England one man's life was almost following the legend of Robin Hood. A resistance (as in rob people with wealth for your own purposes) formed around him and so the story progressed. I mention this as someone asked elsewhere how modern comic creators would treat characters from myth and legends. Almost all the ideas were very -VERY- derivative of TV shows and movies and one wasliterally The Dark Knight storyline featuring an old pulp character.

For me the fact that thses characters are legends or myths means that is all you need to know. "Hey, these characters were loved in the 1960s so let's bring them back -just change them so they are not what made them popular!"  The UK and US have prime examples of this. You should know what I am talking about. The same things apply to cult movies and TV shows.

Heracles is Heracles and Thor is Thor. Gilgamesh is Gilgamesh and these, and many others, have had their stories last thousands of years and they are still popular. Put them in super hero suits .... no.  You can feature these characters in stories without messing them up -Gilgamesh turned up for a cameo in Return of the Gods -as did the Monkey King. Really, each writer should have a good enough creative brain to be able to adapt such characters to modern events.

Rather like British Platinum, Golden and Dark ages comic characters I do not suddenly make them cold, dark killers or having dirty secrets.  I just add to their historic stories and in some ways it really works well. Take Krakos the Egyptian; I never found his origin story but I read all of the strips (Swan the publisher could not even remeber him) and gave his back story. Twenty or so years later (actually more than 30 years!!) I found the original story and it tied in so well with what I wrote that it was claimed that I must have seen the origin story!

I read as many Iron Warrior strips as I could and buying the albums featuring the stories cost a lot of money but I was correct based on what I had learnt before that, far from Alan Moore and other 'knowledgable' comic writers claims; Rodney Dearth the IWs creator was not a "son of the empire" out to suppress native peoples and gain as much wealth as possible -in the strips he is the complete opposite.

You need to know your characters and stay true to what they have always been while introducing them in new stories.  

Marvelman -some notes

 

I've had some conversations with a few old comic peopl;e about Marvelman/Miracleman since my last post on the subject. It does not really matter sincle Miracleman is NOT Marvelman and I think that was part of the deal betyween Anglo and Marvel. His pure fun character was not to be this nasty dark character.

As it is written in the comic history books when National (DC) sue Fawcett over Captain Marvel (Shazam) and the character's likeness to Superman Fawcett stopped publishing Leonard Miller and his son, Arnold, were in a bind since the Captain Marvel comic was a good seller. What they did was ask Mick Anglo to create a similar character to take over. Now contracts in comic companies were few and far between -Gil Page when starting out at Amalgamated Press was excited to be carrying a copy of the contract with Jerry Siegel who created The Spider for them and even in the 1980s no contracts were given out). Anglo designed and created Marvelman and that was it.

Now, when Anglo was getting out of comics he was known to have sold the character (I am not getting into an argument on British comics and copyrights!). I was told Samuel Assael (John Spencer) "was said to have purchased the character" -interesting since Samuel (rather like Gerald Swan) was not keen on comics which is why my deal with him was quick and cheap.  Others thought Alan Class (Class Comics) might have purchased the character but he only dealt with US reprints and had no interest in new material.

The best company that seemed far more likely because of their publishing output was Top Sellers. I was told in the 1980s that they had "agreements" with Anglo but never specified what exactly -it was why, when I saw Warrior magazine in a newsagents I asumed it was a Top Seller book.

Really, it comes down to Marvel purchased (contract not specific) Miracleman from Anglo. Unless you were in a company at the time when Anglo "sold" Marvelman, in which case I would love to hear from you, the actual goings on will never be known.

The Origin of D-Gruppe

 https://dgruppe.blogspot.com/

 According to my DNA test I am 52% German (who would have guessed?) and 16% French which makes me more German than English and more French than English (don't tell the immigration service!).   I was living on a farm in Dalborn -a tiny village somewhere between Lemgo and Detmold, Lippe- as a kid and that is where D-Gruppe originated. 

Externsteine

 Back in the mid-1980s when I finally got the first published story of Germanys first super hero team into print I was happy (only a momentary happiness but then -it was the 1980s!). I was far -far- from happy with my artwork. I had been drawing since "a toddler" I was told and never stopped drawing and later at Secondary school I taught others who wanted to try their hands at drawing comics just as a bit of fun. However, as D-Gruppe had been with me since I created them in the tiny village of Dalborn in the 1960s I wanted their first published adventure to look good.

Ben Dilworth looking over my newer pencils on one of his visits to Bristol offered to ink the pages. That was an offer I was never going to refuse!

And so was drawn The Revenge of the Ice Queen / Die Rache der Eiskönigin. There was a brief art preview in Zine Zone before the strip was published in the new comics talent comic Preview -which got a few UK creators their comic breaks. From there the strip was later published in Chris Dohr's Watcher publication in Germany which looked at pulps, TV, movies and comics -it has never been a secret that I hated the re-texting as even a national monument -Externsteine- was miss-spelt but comics is comics.

There is a secret about what D-Gruppes aircraft design was based on and I will tell you now..it's staying a secret!

As it turns out the Ice Queen was probably not responsible for "The Externsteine Incident" that took many lives and that was revealed during The Trial strip as featured in Black Tower Super heroes.  At one point the German company Bastei Verlag were very interrested in developing the D-Gruppe comic and I put in a lot of work and even had the vastly under-rated John Erasmus draw a full colour Deutscher Michael strip.

The final words of Klaus von Happe the diminuitive leader of D-Gruppe that they needed far more power in their ranks was where the story ended. The intention was to add characters in over the following stories but by the time Bastei had expressed their interest Ben was off to Japan and one after another "new talent" fell by the wayside or decided that having to draw more than five pages a month too exhausting and not what they expected (it involved work).

One thing the editor at Bastei wanted was a back-up strip and that was where multi-billionaire LeCorbeau came in. His life had been saved when Pete Forrest and Geni got involved in tackling the Crimson guardian (way back in the first Small Press run of Black Tower Adventure) and LeCorbeau decided that he wanted to set up national groups to deal with super threats (novel idea, right?) and so he went about setting up a new Task Force Europe after its betrayal by Mastermind and then came the South Asian Task Force and smaller versions in Europe combining into the world-wide Special Globe Guard. Anyway, before it gets too confusing, LeCorbeau wanted to set up Tasl Force Germany and Enrique and Santiago Ruiz produced some pages.

 Then Egmont purchased Bastei and...wave goodbye to a year's worth of work!

And so I set to work on drawing everything myself because there is only so long that you can keep things in your head before said head explodes. That meant that all the new members were introduced in a new story -Zeitgeist which had been drawn in the 1980s but what the heck.

To my mind something was always behind the events in Zeitgeist other than the entity calling itself that. But we got to see heroes from other parallels and some nice action scenes before the climatic ending (see D-Gruppe 1-4 or The Collected D-Gruppe). Once the story was redrawn and new text added and then published it was out of the way. Or so I thought.

I then woke up after...a ten minute long sleep (nothing new there) not feeling too good and I said outloud "Zeitgeist isn't dead!" Which is how I realised that my brain had once again been hiding things from me and thus proving that I was correct and not paranoid!

This time the action started below D-Gruppes HQ and we finally found out just what Zeitgeist was -"Maupassant" is a BIG clue! But even more was later revealed in The Green Skies as the story unfolded and I realised that several characters in unconnected books all had links to the menace involved. It's annoying when you sit there and think "I drew that years ago and its linked to this?!"

But before The Green Skies Ben Dilworth had returned to some D-Gruppe stories such as a one off Evangeline story, one involving David Holmes (the British lawyer now a dual British-German national and fighting crime as the Owl); one based in Earth Parallel 667 in which that D-Gruppe investigate a large "object" in space and then the much acclaimed "The Grandfather Paradox" and who knows whether he might return to our German heroes?

However, before the first adventure was published I had planned for the rather dark ending -alluded to by various characters including the Gipsy Sorceror Tarot. It is said that the first meeting between von happe and Waldmeister was "orchestrated" but by whom? In the last published D-Gruppe story von Happe is given an item and while everyone else is mind-swiped he knows what the item is for and when to use it.

In The Green Skies it is clear that Holmes and others suspect something is going on. That the predicted "Days of Darkness" are coming.  But von Happe vanished along with other team mebers while pursuing a UFO in The Return of the Gods so who knows what to do? And can whoever does know actually do what needs to be done when it means killing a member of their own team and a close friend?   

Black Tower Super Heroes 2/1: Werewolves

 

86pp

A4

Black and white

£10.00 UK 

https://www.lulu.com/shop/terry-hooper/black-tower-super-heroes-werewolves/paperback/product-84wwge7.html?page=1&pageSize=4

The Prof, investigator of the paranormal, encounters two werewolves in Castle Park...and Devilina who has a "sort of" message for him. Kotar, Sabuta, Lady Silana, Tarot and others deal with new werewolf activity and Dr Lycaon is granted access to the labs at the HQ of the explorer/adventurer group The Questors. Lycaon believes he is close to a serum that will cure the curse of lycanthropy but someone or something is trying to stop him. Meanwhile in space Freelancer delivers justice to the Central Galactic Council after its betrayal (see The Green Skies) and on Earth the equally treacherous Council of Light meets its fate. Will Lycaon succeed with his cure or does the increased werewolf activity even in the halls of one of the UKs most secret buildings indicate that the cure is too late?

Black Tower Super Heroes 2/2 -The Ultimate Game

 

Story Terry Hooper-Scharf

Art Terry Hooper-Scharf, Thorroe Prey, P. Beard, Tomas Scharf

Pages

188

Binding Type

Paperback Perfect Bound

Interior Color

Black & White

Dimensions

A4 (8.27 x 11.69 in / 210 x 297 mm)

£15.00 UK  see online store for outside UK price

https://www.lulu.com/shop/terry-hooper/black-tower-super-heroes-the-ultimate-game/paperback/product-95d9z68.html?page=1&pageSize=4

 The mystical traveller of the realms, The Thinker, meets a stranger while travelling along the Path of Counter Actuality. But this stranger is a different type of traveller: he is Illuyanka and he has been charged with on sworn duty –to destroy specific Earths in the multiverse.

Finding that Illuyanka is partial to gambling the Thinker risks all by challenging him to a cosmic game pitting heroes against various challenges: they lose then their Earth dies. The Thinker has no doubt that with all of his knowledge he can win. But Illuyanka is not what he seems.

A story that throws in as many super heroes and villains as you could ever want plus an Earths parallel crossing storyline that will have you wondering who the real bad guy is!

The Creeping Flesh | Christopher Lee Horror Movie |

 

Special Globe Guard 1

 

32pp

A4

Black and White

£10.00 UK -online store will list international prices

https://www.lulu.com/shop/terry-hooper/special-globe-guard-1/paperback/product-957ejq8.html?q=&page=1&pageSize=4

The Special Globe Guard (SGG) a world-wide network of super heroes and adventurers who can be called upon whenever an overwhelming threat -Global or local- rises. The UK section is headed by war veteran Captain Samson Tornado and apart from a few over boisterous members to contend with everything seems to be as quiet as it can be.

Out of the blue Spellcaster appears and warns of a hostile fascist take over of a parallel Earth. Not something the SGG would deal with but in this case it is claimed that the Dark Lord Kaos has resurrected two of Tornado's war time enemies and they are planning a massive attack on the SGGs Earth.

Determined to deal with his old enemies Tornado heads off for the war torn Earth with Spellcaster and a small team... but everything is not what it seems.

This volume contains a preview of Black Tower Super Heroes vol. 2 No. 2: The Ultimate Game!

Laterne Laterne

 

A blacklight, also called a UV-A light, Wood's lamp, or ultraviolet light, is a lamp that emits long-wave (UV-A) ultra violet and very little visible light. One type of lamp has a violet filte material, either on the bulb or in a separate glass filter in the lamp housing, which blocks most visible light and allows through UV, so the lamp has a dim violet glow when operating.Blacklight lamps which have this filter have a lighting industry designation that includes the letters "BLB". This stands for "blacklight blue". A second type of lamp produces ultraviolet but does not have the filter material, so it produces more visible light and has a blue colour when operating. These tubes are made for use in "bug zapper" insect traps, and are identified by the industry designation "BL". This stands for "blacklight".

What has this to do with Schwarze Laterne? Nothing.

The character is based on a number of things -in Germany as a kid I saw a lot of the fairy tale and myth TV shows for kids (in the UK they were billed as Tales From Europe -The Singing Ringing Tree for one) and I took the idea of a man with a magic lantern from one of these but as that was over 50 years ago don’t expect the story title!

I then started reading various UFO magazines and books where they mentioned “solid light phenomena”-we’ll avoid the fakery and lies behind this but just say that it was an interesting idea. A man with a magic lantern that created solid light phenomena of a sort. But I then thought that every magic or otherwise lantern uses light so why not a “black light” -the lantern was magic after all.

The Schwarze Laterne was created in the mid 1970s so long before DC Comics did its storyline where their lanterns split between yellow and green and red -not sure if they had a black lantern but black is a negative not a colour, Anyway I lost interest in DC at around that time as the reboots were so regular that it made their titles unreadable.

I think I gave the Schwarze Laterne a Deutsche Michel cap originally. Seemed a bit lame. So the origin.

Ulrich Meier was 10 years old when he went off to explore the nearby forest as usual. He practically knew the forest like the back of his hand so it came as a surprise to find and old and very spooky looking cottage in amongst the tree. From behind him a croaky old voice spoke his name and he turned to find a red haired old woman who introduced herself as Katharina Henot. I ought to point out that there was a Katharina Henot or Henoth (1570 – 19 May 1627) who was probably the first German post master and an alleged and an alleged witch who was burned at the stake for sorcery in Koln (Cologne). She is one of the best-known German victims of the witch hunt, and the best known case in Cologne but whether there is any connection…? You can read more about her here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharina_Henot

On with the story. Ulrich had no fear of Katharina for some reason so when she invited him into the cottage for some cake and soda pop he followed. Once inside he was almost excited by glass jars ful of various trinkets as well as the fact that the interior looked like a drawing of some old witch house. He became drawn to a black lantern on the table where he sat eating cake and Katharina spoke:

“You are drawn to the lantern, aren’t you? It seems to have guided you here” and Ulrich excitedly asked whether he could touch the lamp and was told “Yes, you may. But be warned young Ulrich it is no oil lamp. This is a lamp of magical black light and it belonged to Schwarze Erich long ago.”

As Ulrich inspected the lamp he was told that Erich had lived long ago in the days of Charlemagne and was a renowned sorceror but that he had died when trying to use the lantern to attack a local priest for what he considered an insult. As Katharina explains all of this a solid black smiling face appears from the lamp and though taken aback Ulrich shows no fear. The face says (its mouth not moving) “This is the one. He has no fear of the Black Light. Teach him” and then the face vanished. Ulrich is asked by Katharina if he wishes to learn how to use the black lantern but warns him that if he agrees to learn then he much selfishly dedicate his life to helping not just the people of Earth but all of its life forms. Ulrich agrees.

After leaving the cottage, having agreed to return next day, Ulrich arrives home and explains what has happened to his elderly adoptive parents. His father (Federlin) lit his pipe and told Ulrich “If your mother says yes then you may go back. If she says no then I will go and speak to her sister” Ulrich is puzzled and his mother (Walpurga) explains that she is a witch and Katharina her sister whom she has not seen “for many a year” but that she is “one of the Old folk” (like druids almost) who are tasked with finding people worthy of magical knowledge and gifts. At which point Ulrich is almost explosive in his excitement as on his Earth (EP 56765) events in the 17^th century caused witches to no longer be hunted and executed but respected as they had worked together to find a cure for The Blue Death that swept though Europe. Ulrich is sent to bed and his mother tells Federlin that she will go and speak to her sister.

On waking next morning Ulrich finds his parents smiling widely and his mother tells him “You may go to see my sister. You are to become the first Schwarze Laterne in 400 years!” From that day and then every other for the next ten years Ulrich is taught how to use the lantern and on his 21^st birthday he is not greeted by Katharina at the cottage door but a beautiful young woman with long red hair. Ulrich is immediately attracted to her and they end up sleeping together but as he wakes he hears the words “Thank you. I have your seed” and he sits up to find himself… in the forest. The cottage has vanished. Telling his parents about this his mother says that if the cottage and her sister are no longer there then he is now truly qualified to be the Schwarze Laterne. She adds “My sister always did have an eye for young men with raven hair” (the intimation is that the young woman was Katharina which left things very open for later stories). His mother goes to an old chest tht he had never noticed before and takes out the clothing he will now wear as Schwarze Laterne but to protect the secret of who he is she also gives him a domino mask.

One day while trying the lantern’s power a tree speaks to him. A conversation then ensues about how trees can communicate with each other even if they are on other worlds -some having been taken from Earth by alien explorers centuries before. Ulrich is told that the lantern can not just let him fly but if he wants to, and knows the location, he can travel to another world far better “than the blundering Munchhausen”. On that day Ulrich was told of a distant world and an image appears in his head of a binary star system and one particular planet and Ulrich is pulled up into the air before finding himself in space and from there is on the alien world in minutes.

Over the next 15 years Schwarze Laterne becomes a familiar visitor on other worlds and on one trip he is encased in the black light for three days. Once he is freed from the black light he finds the beings on the planet in a state of shock. Telepaths are in comas due to a great psychic wave that came from Earth. Ulrich returns to Earth as quickly as he can but finds utter devastation with only a few surviving humans -the Zeit Geist had devastated his Earth =killing billions including his wife Erica and their two children, Hans and Liselotte. His parents now appear (having not aged in the decades and usher the survivors through a magical portal to a safe world. His mother tells him that he must now pursue Zeit Geist to save other worlds and that he can never return home -this is the curse of the black lantern. His mother opens another portal leading to the next world Zeit geist is attacking and as he enters this his mother says “Goodbye”.

From here on Schwarze Laterne meets heroes on other devastated worlds until they finally arrive on Earth 664 just before the start of events depicted in The Trial.

Schwarze Laterne was in at the end of Zeit Geist and since that time has become linked with the German super team D-Gruppe.

After being told by Rotkäppchen of her encounter with an alien in the Black Forest Ulrich has his curiosity piqued and so checks D-Gruppe’s extensive archives and learns that a UFO supposedly crashed in the Black Forest in the 1930s. “But that was long ago” he thinks. That night, as he sleeps on a church steeple (well you do, don’t you?) he has a vivid dream of the young red-headed woman from years before on his Earth, She tell him that he must go to the Black Forest and find the alien ship which is still there but hidden as it could destroy the world. Ulrich wakes and determines that he will go to the Forest and find the craft.

This leads to the story Schwarze Laterne - Schwarzwald - Schwarzer Tod (Black Lantern Black Forest-Black Death) or as it was going to be sub-titled “An Honourable Way To Die”.