UsDudes

Most people are familiar with the dot com bubble bursting I guess. People who read comics and who followed the ups and downs of the American comics industry at the time should be familiar with something similar happened in the 1990s. Speculation was rife back then. After seeing how much comics from the Silver Age and Golden Age of American comic books were fetching on the auction block, bloody everybody started buying comics for the sake of investment, and the industry just fed into this speculation by creating demand. Lots of #1 issues, crossovers, ‘major’ changes in fan favourite characters and really really gimmicky stuff like multiple covers, holograms, foil covers, etc. It’s a bit hard to describe for somebody who isn’t in the loop, but so much of it was really bad.

What’s interesting is how this effected comics fans overseas. Specifically, here in Singapore.

They apparently ate it all up.

I’ll admit to being young and foolish back then. My taste wasn’t as sophisticated, I hadn’t read enough to make intelligent judgements, but even I felt that some of the publicity stunts the big companies were pulling were a little bit ridiculous. But here we are. Komics Kreations was a comic shop and a comics publishing company that operated out of a small shop in Kembangan. They published three comics at least, and the length of their print runs are a little dubious. I got the premier issues (yeah, starting at #0, another nineties trend and signed, no lack of grandiose dreams here) and they were mediocre at best, I guess. Ken Ju and Aerie were run of the mill but they weren’t awful, but our particular focus here is their title Earth Enforcers.

Look up there at the first image, the cover of Earth Enforcers #0. The art’s not very good as it is, but take particular notice of the hand of the girl on the left. What is up with that? I mean, is that even possible?

The thing seems like a badly written and illustrated joke. Get this. These guys? The ones posing while the world is in peril? Their names are Silverjak, Nico and…

Yes. The character’s name is Armani.

And the villain of the issue is named Santino (or is he???). And the lack of imagination in the naming of characters extends itself to the lack of plot. There’s a bomb. And an evil apparently demonic mastermind. So the military or something sends in these three guys (named Silverjak, Nico and Armani) and… they’re apparently shocked that their opponent (the demonic mastermind’s lackey) is some sort of undead beast.

Who bears a striking resemblance to Spider-Man’s nemesis Carnage. It’s really quite laughable how much of a rip this comic is, and to paraphrase the great Mr. T, I don’t hate Komics Kreations, but I pity the fools. I mean, I wasn’t even in my teens when these came out. I had to imagine that people who had a few more years on me, read more comics probably and had enough acumen to start up their own business didn’t have enough in the way of taste to weed out bad ideas when they saw them.

Something I only realised (or noticed before but had forgotten) recently. It doesn’t seem like the artist (or the writer, or the editor) understands the actual mechanics of hanging a human being. If the noose is loose enough to go around his neck, it couldn’t possibly be tight enough to kill him, let alone pull him to the top without a peep at that.

Something both Farhan and I are fond of is a series that ran in the Sunday Times in the early 1990s, when they were pushing for more local cartoonists in the papers. It was called Huntsman (Farhan still refers to it as Line in the Sky because that was the name of the storyline running at the time) and the art and storyline were simple but effective and highly entertaining. Simplicity meant that artist Lee Hon Kit could push the envelope a bit more with interesting use of perspective and an almost cinematic scope. This sci-fi action-adventure mini movie running weekly in the local papers proved to us that, well, Singapore had talent. As far as I know creators Lee Hon Kit and Melvin Yong haven’t done anything in the comics genre beyond a pseudo sequel in the pages of a pretty decent but short lived anthology called Xene published by Eyeball Soup Designs, now available on eBay! If their early work were to be available once again I’d really like to see whether the actual product lives up to childhood memories.