Cover by James O’Barr. Stories and art by Kyle Garrett, Jim Kesler, Gary Reed, Randy Zimmerman, Charles Marshall, Greg Cravens, Susan Van Camp, Kirk Jarvinen, Guy Davis, Mark Bloodworth, Kevin Van Hook, Vince Locke, Mark Winfrey, John Dennis, Ken Landgraf and James O’Barr. Christmas-themed stories featuring some of the popular Caliber series, including Deadworld, Baker Street, The Realm, The Aniverse, and even The Crow.
The Adventurers was a well-produced sword and sorcery title from writer Scott Behnke and Peter Hsu. It draws heavily on fantasy/role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons in creating its world of fearless adventurers, strange magics, horrible monsters, and lost treasures.
The tale begins when eight adventurers are recruited by Tarrus the One-Eyed to recover a magical key from the lost city of Tecumeth. This city had been considered the home of great evil for generations—and with good cause. The adventurers’ quest would be one of constant peril, with the party facing dangers both living and mystical. Although the adventurers have more than their share of differences, they would need all their skills if they were to have any hope of survival.
In this future, it is possible to obtain robot assassins out of vending machines at the cost of 3 Franks. After terminating their target, the robot self-destructs for easy clean-up. During his first mission, the Scud we follow sees his self-destruct warning in a mirror during an 18-page fight scene. Programmed for self-preservation for the sake of winning fights, Scud doesn’t want to die, so only wounds Jeff bad enough to be put on life support at a nearby hospital, ensuring their mutual survival.
The main plot of Scud: The Disposable Assassin follows Scud’s career as a freelance mercenary and assassin, working to pay off Jeff’s medical bills.
The initial storylines were close adaptations of the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles television series, but by the fifth issue the creators handed the series over to Ryan Brown and Stephen Murphy. In their hands the comic immediately diverged from the cartoon series into unique new story arcs, often incorporating social, environmentalist, and animal-rights themes. It also introduced several new characters of various races and backgrounds, including humans, mutants, aliens, and other anthropomorphic creatures. Additionally, the series added new layers to established players such as April O’Neil, who began training with a katana, and the Shredder, who gradually revealed a sense of honor. The stories were often seen as ‘deeper’ and more ‘serious’ than the cartoon. As the new tales and characters were explored, original antagonists Krang, Bebop and Rocksteady were eventually phased out early, making later appearances during stories involving alien worlds. Shredder would remain a recurring adversary.
Set in an alternate near-future Japan, a young woman codenamed “Kabuki”, acts as an agent and television law-enforcement personality for a clandestine government body known as “The Noh”. In the first volume of the series, The Noh’s nature and background is explained.
The Noh is controlled by a renowned World War II Japanese military man known as the General, who has achieved much power and status for being a brilliant military tactician during his many years of service. The agency itself exists as part of Japan’s strict police state, which hunts down and brutally executes criminals for their misdeeds under the veil of keeping the peace. Secretly the Noh also acts to maintain the balance of crime and order that ultimately benefits the national economy on both sides of the law and thus targets politicians, businessmen and certain underworld kingpins whose actions threaten this balance. Kabuki herself is one of eight masked assassins whom perform these secret executions under the General’s orders.
Bone is an independently published comic book series, written and illustrated by Jeff Smith, originally serialized in 55 irregularly released issues from 1991 to 2004.
Smith’s black-and-white drawings were inspired by animated cartoons and comic strips, a notable influence being Walt Kelly‘s Pogo: “I was … a big fan of Carl Barks and Pogo, so it was just natural for me to want to draw that kind of mixture of Walt Kelly and Mœbius.” Accordingly, the story is singularly characterized by a mixture of both light-hearted comedy and dark fantasy thriller: Time has called the series “as sweeping as the Lord of the Rings cycles, but much funnier.” The series was published bimonthly with some delays from June 1991 to June 2004. The series was self-published by Smith’s Cartoon Books for issues #1 to #19, by Image Comics from issues #20 to #28, and back to Cartoon Books for issues #29 to #55.
Bone has received numerous awards, among them ten Eisner Awards and eleven Harvey Awards.
Penthouse Men’s Adventure Comix was the first spin-off of the popular Penthouse Comix, and most of the stories were done by well known comic professionals.
Released in 1994, this figurine was sculpted by Jeff Smith/Randy Bowen. It is limited to 3000 pieces of which this is #2001. Also included is a limited edition Bone print. Figurine is still sealed in the original bag and box.
The plot picks up right at the end of the film, where the wizard of Army of Darkness goes to Ash’s times to tell him that he’s still not in his right time and that he arrived moments before he left to the wood in the first Evil Dead. Now he once again faces the evil in the woods and encounters his self from the true present, and along with the Wizard sends him to the past where the events of The Army of Darkness took place. While trying to destroy the book that caused all the events of the trilogy to take place, the two travel to Egypt, where the wizard is killed and Evil Ash is resurrected, in a final battle Ash is able to destroy Evil Ash and his army with the help of the medieval warriors of Arthur’s court from the 3rd film and once again encounters Sheila, after the end of the battle everybody goes to their respective timeline but Ash leaves the book behind, forgetting to destroy it.
Cullen Bunn returns to the world of Empty Man with artist Jesús Hervás in this new ongoing series. The nation is in the grip of a terrible pandemic. The so-called Empty Man disease causes insanity and violence. Government quarantines are mandatory. One of the afflicted is Melissa Kerry, and the next step should be to quarantine her—but those who enter quarantine are never seen again. Melissa’s family won’t let that happen. All they have to do is care for her, keep her worsening condition a secret—and they’ll do anything, trust anyone, to keep her safe.
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