The original Caliber Presents anthology title was one of Caliber Comic’s inaugural releases in the 1990s and featured predominantly new creators, many of which went onto successful careers in the comics’ industry.
Caliber Presents (1989)
Category: Independent
Murder Incorporated (1948)
Murder Incorporated would’ve been an obvious title for a hard-hitting true-crime comic book in 1948. The real-life Murder Incorporated, the infamous hit squad of New York City organized crime had been shut down by the early 1940s, but their legend lived on in other media. This Fox Feature Syndicate series was true to its title as it featured true crime tales with a focus on mob killers and other notorious murderers. Murder Incorporated‘s notoriety was such that the series was mentioned by both Fredric Wertham in Seduction of the Innocent, and Geoffrey Wagner in Parade of Pleasure, and it landed on countless municipal government ban lists around the country in 1948, along with much of the rest of Victor Fox’s comic book line. An interesting series in the context of both comic book history and from a true-crime perspective.
Optic Nerve (1995)
Optic Nerve is a series by cartoonist Adrian Tomine. Originally self-published by Tomine in 1991 as a series of mini-comics (which have later been collected in a single volume,32 Stories), the series has been published by Drawn and Quarterly since 1995.
Tomine’s style and subject matter are restrained and realistic. Many are set in Northern California. Many of his stories for Optic Nerve feature Asian American characters, including “Hawaiian Getaway,” “Six-Day Cold,” “Layover,” and “Shortcomings.” Adrian Tomine is Asian American and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Many topics of his stories are at least partly autobiographical.
In the initial self-published issues, as well as the first eight Drawn & Quarterly issues (1995-2001), Optic Nerve was typically a collection of short stories. After an extended hiatus, Tomine resumed the comic in fall of 2004 and began his first multi-issue storyline, “Shortcomings,” with #9. The most recent issue, #13, was published in July 2013.
The Prisoner – Titan Comics (2018)
In the modern day, MI5 agent Breen is tasked with breaking into The Village in order to extricate a fellow spy. The information she possesses is too valuable to fall into the hands of the mysterious Village, so Breen must engineer his own defection and capture, reduced to a mere number. Yet nothing can prepare the new Number 6 for the bizarreness that awaits him inside the Village…
Scream (1973)
Scream is an American black and white illustrated comic magazine of the horror anthology genre. It was published by Skywald Publications and ran from August 1973 to March 1975, spanning a total of eleven issues.
Rai – V1 (1992)
Rai (pronounced “rye”) appeared in books published by Valiant Comics. Rai was the first original hero created by Valiant and had its beginning as a flipbook back-up feature in Magnus Robot Fighter issues #5-8. The popularity of the flipbook back-up story later led to an ongoing series. Valiant Entertainment is the current owner of Rai and the rest of the original Valiant Comics characters.
In his original incarnation, Rai is the spirit guardian that protects the nation of Japan in the 41st century. It is a mantle passed down from father to son through the generations. As such, the series chronicled a number of protagonists.
A new Rai ongoing series was launched in April 2014 by the creative team of writer Matt Kindt and artist Clayton Crain, selling out of its initial print run.
Magnus Robot Fighter – Valiant
In 1991, Jim Shooter obtained rights to three Gold Key characters: Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom; Turok, Son of Stone; and Magnus, Robot Fighter. He intended to use those characters to launch his new comic book line, Valiant Comics. Several months later, the company launched Magnus, Robot Fighter.
The series began where the original one left off. The artists took great care to replicate the setting and trappings of the original stories. But as the new series progressed, it began to deviate from the original concept.The term “Freewills” appeared in the Valiant run, introducing the concept that the rogue robots seen previously were not simply the product of random malfunctions, but were the result of a common phenomenon which allowed robots to become sentient. While some of them are malevolent, others merely want to be free. It was also learned that 1A is a freewill. With Magnus’s help, a colony of benevolent Freewills is established called the “Steel Nation.” At the same time, Magnus becomes disgusted with North Am’s elite. He journeys to the lower levels of North Am and befriends a group of social outcasts known as Gophs.
Love and Rockets (1981)
The Hernandez brothers self-published the first issue of Love and Rockets in 1981, but since 1982 it has been published by Fantagraphics Books. The magazine temporarily ceased publication in 1996 after the release of issue #50, while Gilbert and Jaime went on to do separate series involving many of the same characters. However, in 2001 Los Bros revived the series as Love and Rockets Volume 2.
Love and Rockets contains several ongoing serial narratives, the most prominent being Gilbert’s Palomar stories and Jaime’s Hoppers 13(aka Locas) stories. It also contains one-offs, shorter stories, surrealist jokes, and more.
Palomar tells the story of a fictional village in Latin America and its inhabitants. Its vibrant characters and sometimes-fantastic events are sometimes compared to the magical realism literary style of authors such as Gabriel García Márquez. The series is also sometimes referred to as Heartbreak Soup, after the first story set in Palomar.
Hoppers 13 follows the tangled lives of a group of primarily chicano characters, from their teenage years in the early days of the California punk scene to the present day. (Hoppers, or Huerta, is a fictional city based on the Hernandezes’s home town of Oxnard, California.) The series is also often called Locas (Spanish for “crazy women”) because of the many quirky female characters depicted.
The Rocketeer Adventure Magazine (1989)
Starring Dave Steven’s classic Pulp-inspired character The Rockeeter (later made into a big-budget Hollywood movie). Guest-stars other clasiic Pulp Characters (The Shadow, Doc Savage, etc.) and Bettie Page. Beautiful art & a thrilling storyline. Includes “Brucilla The Muscle: Galactic Girl Guide” by Elaine Lee & Michael Kaluta as a back-up feature.
Vampirella – Harris (1993)
This story picks up after the end of “Morning in America” with United States Senator Adam Van Helsing using his political power to wage war against the world-wide forces of the Cult of Chaos and Vampirella and her friend Pendragon serving as his foremost shock-troops. Vampirella and Pendragon travel to Europe where they discover that Chaos’s tendrils reach to the highest level of the European Union’s leadership, and that their old foe Dracula is poised to seize control of the Continent on behalf of the Mad God he serves.
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