Mail Call For 12.27.22

Someday has arrived, and so what I said I would get around to doing someday in my last Mail Call post has become something I did do, as can be seen in this week’s Mail Call.

Behold:

I don’t remember how many of the 10 issues of E-Man I had back when I got that big pile of Charlton comics, but looking through them now, I’m fairly certain I at least had 1, 2, 8, and 9, and possibly 4.

In any case, I have them all now. Next step may or may not be picking up the remainder of E-Man’s appearances in comics from other publishers.

Along with E-Man, I also got these in the mail:

These I got mostly for a sense of completion, as I’d picked up the first three issues from my comic shop, but then neglected to pick up the remaining two issues which were no longer available when I got around to trying to do so.

Thus, Mail Call. I didn’t particularly enjoy what I’d read in the first three issues, but the sunk-cost fallacy dictated that I finish it off. These covers were the ones that stood out to me as the best options.

Ablaze is a relatively new publisher that I first became aware of for their work in publishing translated Conan comics from Europe, where the sullen-eyed barbarian has fallen into the public domain, leaving publishers free to adapt the original Robert E. Howard stories.

Here in the USA, where the Howard estate still holds copyright, the translated stories can be published, but they can’t say “Conan” on the cover, and as a result, those books have been published under the title “The Cimmerian.”

Those adaptations have been pretty hit-or-miss for me – mostly miss – but this offering caught my attention as it featured Howard creations but wasn’t an adaptation, and it was written by singer/songwriter/musician Max Bemis.

Like I said, I didn’t particularly enjoy what I read, but I still wanted to finish it off.

That’s it for this Mail Call, but there will be a couple more coming soon..

Born and raised in the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Jon Maki developed an enduring love for comics at an early age.