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Jan Strnad On Riding Every Available Coattail to Success – Gil Kane, Kevin Nowlan and Mainly Richard Corben

Published Sun, 18 Aug 2019 12:00:23 -0500

Jan Strnad writes;

I learned two things early on in the comics writing business.

1. It's an artists' medium.

2. But not if you're a really great writer like Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman.

Well, I am not Alan Moore nor was meant to be. I'm pretty good (in my own estimation) but if I was going to get anywhere, I needed to partner up with great artists.

And I did. Gil Kane on Sword of the Atom for DC. Kevin Nowlan. And mainly, Richard Corben.

I got in early on Richard's career. Back around 1970, I was publishing a fanzine called Anomaly and this guy subscribed at a convention where I had a table, and though I missed him in person, when I got back home there it was, a subscriber card from Richard Corben with his address. I'd seen other fanzine work that he'd done and I knew I had to somehow inveigle him into contributing to Anomaly.

I wrote to him asking for a contribution. Over the next two issues he kindly provided illos and a cover and a painting and we collaborated on a story titled "A Brief Encounter at War." Thanks to Richard, Anomaly was a hit in the fanzine market.

We went on to work together during the brief existence of the underground comix, did a story called "Bowser" for Warren Publishing's magazine Creepy, which they kind of screwed up by printing the pages out of order－a harbinger of things to come－and we created some limited series together, Mutant World and its sequel, Son of Mutant World and for Heavy Metal magazine, New Tales of the Arabian Nights, later retitled The Last Voyage of Sindbad. We did a few other stories here and there as our career paths crossed and parted, crossed and parted, and I enjoyed a heady ride on Richard's coattails.

I left comics to embark on a fifteen-year stint writing cartoons for television, most of which were for Disney, a far cry from the underground days.Richard's is a big mucky-muck comics artist now－Grand Prix winner and President at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2018, the third-largest comics convention in the world (add 50,000 people to San Diego Comic-Con and you'll have Angoulême), honored this year with a 250-piece exhibit of his work, a page exhibited in the Louvre, another page in the traveling Guillermo Del Toro exhibit "At Home with Monsters," and so on－and I'm technically retired, but through it all, we've remained pals.

I was gazing at my bookshelves one day and thinking how much I'd love to see a nice, hardbound edition combining Mutant World and Son of Mutant World perched there, and I came to the realization that such an item wasn't going to spontaneously appear no matter how many stars I wished upon.

I had to publish the book myself.

Honestly, I love just sitting on the sofa and watching bad old s-f and horror movies and farting around on Facebook. But dang－I wanted that book.

So I presented the idea of a Kickstarter project to Richard and he agreed, but he wanted to hire his daughter, Beth Corben Reed, an artist in her own right, to re-color Son. Done and done, and last week we launched the combined hardcover deluxe edition of a book we call Mutant World and Son of Mutant World. (Hey, we're both from the midwest－we're plain-speaking people.)

There's a story about the origins of Mutant World.

Back in 1978 Richard was just an aspiring artist who'd sold a series to Warren's upcoming science fiction magazine, 1984. He's pitched the series and had begun illustrating it when he found himself over his head. He had pictures and notions in his mind, but notions do not a story make.

So he called me. Would I write the rest of the series for him? "Hell, yes," I said. And so was born Mutant World.

1984 debuted with Mutant World running as a color feature in the first issue, and we were horrified. This was when editor Bill DuBay was changing everybody's stories around, mixing up panels like those little refrigerator magnets you arrange to write a poem, altering dialogue to some adolescent idea of what "mature dialogue" sounded like, and royally pissing off every creator involved in the magazine. Including us.

As a result, when Warren asked our permission to publish Mutant World as a graphic novel, we said… well, I'll say we said "pass" and leave it at that.

Richard and Catalan Communications published the graphic novel, panels and dialogue restored, in 1982. It's been out of print since then.

We followed Mutant World with a sequel in 1990, Son of Mutant World. Richard published it in a series of five underground comics where the art was printed on paper that soaked up ink like a Bounty towel. Though the original art was stunning, the printed result was a murky mess.

Son of Mutant World was never collected as a graphic album in the United States. Which was a shame because, like Terminator 2, Aliens, and The Bride of Frankenstein, the sequel notches up the action and drama of the original and is generally considered the superior work.

So now I'm neck-deep in a Kickstarter campaign and all that that entails: Computing shipping costs to Europe, pricing mailing boxes and bubble wrap, setting up a publishing company－Anomaly Publications－filing a DBA, opening a business checking account, passing credit checks, and a host of other details that are keeping me away from yet-another viewing of The Brain that Wouldn't Die.

It's going to be a handsome book with some bonus material, though, and I'm especially excited to see Son of Mutant World receiving the treatment it deserves.

Interested parties can check out the campaign here.

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