Scientists have long theorized that the desire to publish comic books is built into our DNA. Children arrive in the world with the fully-formed need to fill comic book racks with little stapled booklets filled with 28 pages of... well, what's inside the comic doesn't matter all that much, as long as it's the right size and is floppy in the right places, it satisfies those mysterious evolutionary urges. At least that's how the theory goes, and this week's example certainly defies all other possibilities.
Carnival spin-art meets the cotton candy machine and it's a blurry, whirling new art form designed to confuse. On the other hand, it has friendly puffy lettering in the title. And it's the first issue, so that means yet another deep-rooted evolutionary trigger is being pulled, the primal need for comic book collectors to buy every #1 issue of everything forever.
What am I? I'm an independently published black and white comic riding the last gasping wave of that 1980s black and white comics boom right into the early 1990s. I'm also a robot-man with no memory drawn by someone who really prefers to draw my full front view face staring right at the reader.
If what you wanted out of comic books was the blank goggle eyes of a robot staring at you while he talks to groundhog-men in a forest, well today is your lucky day!
Sure, we COULD give you views of this character that aren't flat full frontal views, but we know what you want, and what you want is flat and staring right at you.
There's something relaxing, almost hypnotic about this simplistic image repeated in panel after panel and page after page.
Oh geez, now we've got a human-being character with a recognizable human face. What does this mean for our heretofore uninterrupted parade of head shots?
Why, it means an uninterrupted parade of human being faces staring at us, panel after panel. Great to see "Tink" changing it up here.
Human, robot, human, robot, human and groundhog-man, robot, robot.
Here "Tink" is mixing it up with a 3/4 view of Old Guy Face. Is this allowed?
A robot and an old guy discuss the local comic book shop and how it is like a chick desert in there, man
And then there's this.
NICE
But let's get back to the real story, which is heads, staring heads, yelling heads, black, soulless robot lenses staring out into the void.
Whoops! "Tink" is mixing it up here and instead of panels and panels of heads, it's panels and panels of hands! Robot hands, furry hands, grasping, holding, handing. Hands.
Here on page 21, the full panoply of comic art comes into play - human figures in various poses moving through space, backgrounds that are both black, white, and a mixture of both, and a variety of angles entertaining the reader and refreshing the eye. Too bad this story is only 22 pages.
Bwoom! And it's "to be continued" for Tink, like so many other ambitious black and white comics of the black and white comics boom, firmly convinced that their artistic vision and still-developing work habits would allow them to continue their no-doubt amazing story, and yet fated to peter out ignominously. Hey, let's be fair here, "Tink" lasted five whole issues. Can you imagine? Four more comics full of the staring blank goggle eyes of Staring Robot Man?
Don't be left out! Go down to Kinko's and photocopy these two heads fifty or sixty times, paste them at random onto a few sheets of paper, and you'll have the full "Tink" experience at your fingertips!
Of course one of the best things about the black and white comics boom of the 80s (and 90s, I guess) is that it created legions of wannabe Stan Lees all excited to be Comic Book Publishers with all the power that entails, legions of new publishers who are convinced that what America's comic book reading public wants are long, involved editorials describing every part of the process that brought these comics to life. And "Tink" is no exception.
Here the editor and publisher of Greater Mercury Comics, of which Venusian Press is an imprint, details how his previous comic book companies went out of business due to no fault of his own and how he cannot worry himself over the childish tantrums of people who worked for his previous comic book companies, and how he is poised to bring his entire universe of amazing comic book characters into a shared universe that will benefit from his dramatically increased standards for artwork. Greater Mercury Comics will be here for decades!
But while we wait for the impending paradise of Greater Mercury Comics to be detected at dangerous levels in our metaphorical bloodstreams, let's check out the helpful check list of previously published Silver Wolf/Greater Mercury comics that our publisher has generously made available for purchase because he just happens to have a garage full of the things.
Now's your chance to buy "Eradicators" #1 for only $35, "Fat Ninja" #1 for the bargain price of $25, or "Grips" #1 for only $150! OR - high rollers only - "S.W. Bulletin" #1 with the first appearance of "Grips" for a mere $450! Or you can check out the fifty-cent bins at your local comic shop and pick up every one of these comics for the price of a hamburger, because comic book speculation is for idiots.
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