If you've read any of my previous entries in this series, you know I'm a much bigger fan of the indie studios than I am the mainstream DC or Marvel books. Not because I'm trying to lodge my hipster comic reader status in everyone else's cerebellum, but because a great portion of my love for the comics industry comes from the history of the off-brand, the weird, the down-on-their-luck, and the success stories which come seemingly out of nowhere.
Last year, I did a post commemorating the birth of Dark Horse, with Dark Horse Presents #1 on its anniversary in July. This year, we're going to look at another plucky little small press startup who is now celebrating its thirty-fifth birthday. I'm talking, of course, about Antarctic Press.
Note: all images in this article are scanned from my own source.
Everybody has his or her own definition of a 'key' book. Some people collect those golden and silver age books, hoping to turn a high profit. Others look to variant covers, limited runs, autographs, or other special editions to bring the collection together. Me? I'm more reader and historian. For me, a key book isn't just a first appearance, or something commanding high money that I paid cover price or less for back in the day. Key books in my collection have as much to do with the history of the medium as they do the stories they contain. And with that in mind, there's very little in my personal key book list that can compete with this first issue of Mangazine.
On first glance, this book looks like a complete joke. The interior pages barely rate above newspaper quality. The cover, while slightly thicker, is still so cheap the colors get swallowed into its awful matte darkness. In a day and age where DC and Marvel comics sported 75-cent price tags for full-color interiors, this one has the audacity to charge almost double that for black-and-white artwork. The company even misspells their own name, multiple times, as "Antartic Press" throughout the book.
Plus there's that title.
"Mangazine".
Nowadays everyone knows manga: bookstores and comic shops stock shelves of the stuff, and you can buy digital editions direct from your favorite publisher to read on your phone. But in 1985, only die-hard Japan-o-philes had any idea what "manga" was (which is why Ben had to explain it in the editorial page at the back of the book). A first impression from most western readers would be the company meant to call the book "Magazine" and slipped an extra 'n' in there by mistake. Its a book that manages to scream both 'small press' and 'incompetent' at the top of its lungs to anyone looking at it.
God, it's a thing of beauty, ain't it?
What publisher/owner Ben Dunn set out to do was emulate the sort of manga serials Ben and his brother Joe had been exposed to during their early years, when their family lived in Taiwan, for an American audience. To do this, Dunn partnered with Marc Ripley to create Antartic (they'd later remember to fill in the missing 'c') Press as a way to print and distribute their creation. Serialized manga was nothing new in Asia, but the US market had never seen anything like it.
This first issue collects six separate stories within its 40 pages. Opening the book is "Tiger-X", Ben Dunn's alternate history tale where Soviet scientists develop an armored battle suit mecha in 1993, which gives them military superiority over much of the planet. In a Red Dawn-style scenario, Europe falls to the Russian juggernaut, and the Kremlin sets their sights on the United States. Two weeks later, it's all over: the US is split directly down the middle as the Soviet occupying forces claim the entire central part of the continent, and everything between northwestern Idaho and the south-eastern tip of Louisiana now flies the Russian flag, while the remaining states, cut off from support from the rest of the world, scramble to launch a counter-offensive and re-take their country.
Up next is "The Adventures of StickFigureman: The Menace of Dr. Evill!", a superhero parody written by Randy Stukey and Robert Gibson, with artwork by Mike Cogliondro. StickFigureman is literally that: a guy who looks like a child's stick figure drawing who lives in a world which more or less resembles our own reality. This amusing story reveals the origin of StickFigureman, but also posits a villain savvy enough to understand the genre tropes.
Longtime readers of AP books will recognize the name "Herb Mallette", who will one day become the studio's Editor-in-Chief, but he'll get there from quite humble beginnings if his contribution to the book, "Robbery on the Streets", is any indication. Much like StickFigureman, this one-page gag rips on a superhero trope, this time the one of a masked man confronting criminals harassing an innocent bystander in an alleyway. It doesn't end the way you expect it to, and it's worth a couple of chuckles.
Frank Castillo's "Mark 2 Squad" is the first chapter of a military sci-fi adventure story set in outer space, with Star Wars-style dogfights, aliens, battle suits, and an interstellar conflict which gets too close to Earth for comfort.
Next up, Mike Cogliondro gives us another taste of his artwork and sense of humor with "Fast Food Tripper". We've all had dreams of blowing away the idiotic mascots and unintelligible speakers at the drive-up window, right? Well, Mike's one-page strip shows why it's probably for the best you've never done that. It's not awful, it's not amazing, but it's still worth a grin.
Closing out the book is a publisher collaboration between Marc Ripley (who wrote the story) and Ben Dunn (who did the artwork) in "Frank Gidden: What's in a Face?". This short piece has kind of a neat premise: is there room in the 22nd century for Chandler-esque hard-boiled pulp detective types? The answer may surprise you, as gumshoe Frank Gidden pursues his nemesis: Changeor, an alien capable of taking on the form and characteristics of virtually any being it desires. Dunn takes a full page to have plenty of fun with this idea, having Changeor adopt the form of a number of recognizable faces from the era, such as Captain Harlock, Golgo-13, Doraemon, Lupin III, even Lum from Urusei Yatsura and Danger Mouse.
This also serves as a contest of sorts, as the closing editorial page, "The Antartic Blast", offers up autographed issues and t-shirts as prizes for the first twenty people who correctly identify all fifteen of Changeor's incarnations on that page, which is a neat way of drumming up letters and getting people wondering about all those different characters at the same time.
The book closes with hints at new titles, contributors, and books yet to come. Some, like Ben Dunn's own Mighty Tiny, and creators Sam De La Rosa, Fred Perry and Joe Wight, become staples of Antarctic Press's lineup in later years. Others, like Earthstrike and Extremely Silly Comics, either fail to materialize until later (2010 in Earthstrike's case) or don't leave much of a mark.
It's absolutely incredible to think that, from this impossibly-amateurish start, Antarctic Press would eventually become one of the largest and longest-running creator-owned imprints in all of Western comic-dom. Ben Dunn's Warrior Nun just received its own Netflix spin-off television show this year. Fred Perry's Gold Digger is the single longest-running independent title in US comic book history, starting off in 1992 and continuing to this day. The company has been the springboard for dozens upon dozens of well-known creators over its thirty-five years. Even Dark Horse would emulate Mangazine's technique with their own anthology house book, Dark Horse Presents, one year later.
Who would have guessed we could have history in the making back in 1985, for the price of two issues of X-Men or Batman? Not me, that's for sure. I acquired my copy of this years later, well after titles like Ninja High School and Warrior Nun Areala cemented my status as an AP fan.
There are a lot of books in my collection which I consider 'key'. But this knocked-together sub-amateur press publication just might be the key-est of them all. Thank you Ben Dunn, Joe Dunn, and everyone else at AP for thirty-five years of laughs, heartbreaks, and most important of all, memories. You only get those from reading the books though, so don't get so caught up in the collecting and speculating that you miss out on the best part of the hobby.
Shout-out to 