Who's Who In The CBU Update 2009

Who are... Park and Barb?

Barbara Lien-Cooper and Park Cooper, are the owners of Wicker Man Studios and of Gun Street Girl, its flagship project created by Barbara and artist Ryan Howe. Barbara has written for many websites, and served a one-year stint as Managing Editor of the multiple-Eisner-award-winning print magazine Comic Book Artist. Park is the Editor-in-Chief of indie comics company Septagon Studios, and of Comics Bulletin's sister-website MangaLife. Together, they also co-wrote the graphic novel Half Dead, published by Dabel Brothers Productions and Marvel Comics, and later picked up again by Desperado Publishing, and the New Media project The Hidden for manga publisher Tokyopop. They both also adapt manga and edit manga and comics for various companies.

100 pages of DC Superhero Sports Stories In Digest Form All For A Dollar

By Park Cooper

I guess I was inspired by SBC staffer Regie because this week I fill you in on my past in comics--the far past, that is.

Battlestar Galactica Issue #2. My dad bought me this from the drugstore. That’s not something he did often. I guess he gave it a shot. I wasn’t very appreciative. I liked it well enough, but it said “to be continued” at the end and I was so young I didn’t get it. All I’d ever seen were self-contained comics-- Richie Rich, Spider-Man Annuals, Casper, Archie, Christian comics, Archie Christian comics. (Why’d they have to freak me out with Archie and his gang like that? Surely Casper and Hot Stuff, that Little Devil, would have been better vehicles for exploring Christian theology?) I didn’t get that this was the wave of the future: stories that continued for 2, 3, or four issues... or in the case of LSH or Astro City or the Flash, forever. I was like “Hey dad, where’s the next part? It says ‘to be continued.’ You got gypped or something.” Duh. Here was this great thing he did, and I think I drove him off it forever. Positive reinforcement was what was really needed.

Let’s see. Then my older cousins had comics. Aunt Mary’s sons Cliff and Roy were Marvelheads. Cliff still is, a little. At their places I read lots of Spider-Man, the final Marvel Team-Up, etc. They even bought Darkhawk for a while, that was scary.

Then there were comics hidden at Uncle Bob’s house. He’s got three sons but to this day I don’t actually know which of them it was that read comics. Now, in the front room, where they kept stuff for kids that visited, they had some Children’s Digests, which were dumb (too low for my age/brain level) BUT they had Herge’s Tintin serialized in the back. What a great thing. That blew my mind. I think they were in black and white, which is odd, I mean so much of Herge is about the color, but it was still great. There were a few Spider-Men in the closets, but there was also one issue of DC’s Arak. That was an eye-opener. Not only an exposure to DC at a crucial Pre-Crisis era, but awareness that there were post-little kid comics besides superheroes (and Tintin).

In that same house was also a Doonesbury collection, that was freaky. I mean, I’m reading this collected book of comic strips, like it was a Garfield book or something, and there’s talking cigarettes and marijuana and Uncle Duke and naked chicks. The only other time past present or future I saw nipples in a comic strip was one time when there was a mermaid in Hagar the Horrible (and I understand how that saw print even less, frankly). These were crucial Uncle Duke years, setting me up nicely for Transmet in the future.

There’s this camp in southwest Texas called Bloys camp where they have church three times a day every week and it’s sort of a camping trip with God. I didn’t care, because one could read books and climb the small mountains and stuff. And the food was decent. Trees to climb, you get the picture. So anyway this one other boy who was there had some comics. The DC 100 page Sports Stories Digest. Someone (probably Julie) decreed, “Kids like superheroes, kids like sports. Everyone go write me some weird stories with superheroes and sports and stuff.” And lo, it was weird, but great. All the DC superheroes are doing sports-related feats for charity... Supes playing tennis against himself via super-speed... when they’re all teleported away by the great married supervillain couple, Tigress and the Sportsmaster (was this Earth-1?). The Sportsmaster for gosh-sakes, a guy with a Grifter-style purple mask and a crossed hockey stick and baseball bat on his chest or sumthin’ like that. Wild, man. So he and she have this bet against each other, and so they decide to use the heroes as their players. You get the idea. Then there was another story with this kid who hears that thunder in the mountains and recalls that the folktale is that it’s the dwarves playing ninepins (bowling). He goes hiking up there and meets a dwarf with his foot stuck under a fallen tree branch or something. He helps the dwarf, who takes him back to his village, and sure enough, bowling dwarves. He says anything I can do to repay you? And the kid, not expecting miracles, says, I wanna play that... make me good at that. So the dwarf says, okay, from now on, you’ll be great at bowling. But you must never use it to show off or anything. The kid says yeah yeah. He runs home, finds his friends, takes them bowling. His first ball is a gutterball... but the invisible dwarf kicks it back out for a perfect strike. So he’s got a perfect game, 299, with the dwarf’s secret help, and his friends are impressed, and he tosses a ball at the last spare... and the dwarf kicks it out of the way. Sad kid. Reminded me later of the Guardians not letting Hal remake Coast City... hey, and they were little short guys, too... Okay, so this was a stupid story, but it stuck in my head all these years... the whole thing was so filled with Silver Age Goodness, which I always say, now, that I hate, but it’s valid, I hate it when we try to recapture it NOW, I like the originals just fine.

Then at my younger cousin Kaleb’s home town there was apparently a good store for comics nearby because he had some amazing stuff for a little Texas town... I read the issue of X-Men where old Kitty comes back from the Sentinel/Nimrod future to stop the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants from assassinating that senator, putting herself into her past body... that was eight kinds of weird. He also had Marvel’s Contest of Champions #1. It all started here, folks.

So I collected comics in junior high for a while, mostly Marvel... Avengers, X-Men... I found Power Pack amusing for a while. Then I got out of the habit. But my second semester of college, nursing boredom (and I didn‘t have a television that year... I missed most of the Gulf War), I thought I’d get back into it. At the Dallas Fantasy Fair (Texas’s biggest comic convention that I know of, which isn’t saying all that much) I saw many things in their infancy. There was this guy Jim Lee whose autograph and a sketch I could have gotten, but I’d never heard of him. He seemed like a nice guy, though. But, while I was in line for someone else’s autograph, there was a line of goths next to me, which seemed odd. I asked them what was up in comics with them. They told me about the Crow and all, but what really excited them was this comic by this new guy, Neil Gaiman. One of them showed me his copy of something called A Doll’s House he was going to get signed. That’s nice, I thought, some sort of comic book adaptation/revamp of Ibsen. Later I picked up some Sandman at the comic shop, but for two or three months, didn’t see anything that quite seemed like a jumping-on point. Then I found one, got into it, started buying Vertigo, started buying more DC, then started buying more DC than Marvel, then met Barbara and... well there you go.


This column is dedicated to my Dad (not that anything’s happened to him) and to Roger Zelanzy, who I went to see at one of those DFFs. Roger was a great reader of his own stuff-- I know, because he even made The Black Throne sound good. When I tried reading it on my own, the life had gone out of it, and a few months later the life unfortunately went out of him.