THE LIONHEART STORIES
CRITTERS #17-18
Polar Bear Hunt
A straightforward if overly familiar
plot: nice guy has incriminating tape, bad guy wants it. Nobody
seems to know how to make copies of a tape, here or in Hollywood.
Lionheart and his Polar Bear pal outwit slow-witted hit men with
bad accents. The setting of a Polar Bear Convention is based
on the annual Polar Bear migration in Churchill, as seen on PBS.
Not much to say here; the plot is simple, the characterization and dialogue was the focus here. Hardly a visual stunner, but I'm proud of the script. The cover came out swell, though, one of my few acrylic works. It was good enough to get a swap for an original Stan Sakai, so I must've done something right!
aggravating
extra space
crap
CRITTERS #23
Christmas
Lionheart, grumbling over Christmas commercialization, meets a group of young carolers. At first charming, their repertoire expands to include Rapping, Heavy Metal and Techno. Then I run out of pages and the story ends.
The first Christmas story
I'd ever done that wasn't darkly cynical and comically violent.
How could it be, when you're quoting and honoring Walt Kelly?
Deck Us All With Boston Charlie, indeed.
A damned rare issue due to an all star roster and a real record
inside, from Alan Moore and the Sinister Ducks.
CRITTERS #25-29
Fourth Estate, Fifth
Column
As has happened too often, Lionheart
stumbles into a huge story when his morning jog is interrupted
by a two-headed dog that walks on all fours. He becomes the target
of Quasi Norse, the weepy-eyed head of a shadowy government agency.
The whiny Marine's conspiracy to jump-start the Cold War involves
Russian defectors, cartoon and theme park magnate Walt Whimsy,
the drug-addled Dr. X, and genetically altered rats, to name
but a few. The adventure veers wildly from the dark corridors
of the Secret Government, to the lobby of a fast food cannibal
franchise, and finally to the Whimsiest Place On Earth .
The pop-culture blender was
set to "puree" and the story nails everything from
Bat-Mite to The Next generation, though peripherally.
While my strips almost always have some political message, this
is the most overtly political story in the Lionheart library.
Blame Reagan. The Iran Contra affair and it's parade of bitter
old billionaires, flag-draped scumbags and spin doctors just
made me physically ill and furious. As it did Anthony Smith,
who cowrote the incredibly dense and ambitious storyline. We
should have done 200 pages to do the material justice, but we
crammed it into 50.
As much as I like this story, I wish I'd done a better job of
translating Anthony's multi-leveled and clever ideas into images
- I was unable to make them as funny on paper as he did in story
conference. It's the major peril of collaboration for me; when
I work from my own scripts, I do major revisions in the layout
process to properly time and stage the humor.
Curiously, the Whimsy World sequence predates my first visit
and subsequent addiction to Walt Disney World. Otherwise, the
parody might've been more elaborate. Look to Critters #46 for
a story set in Whimsy World that comes much closer to the real
theme park experience.
