Broken Frontier

This week sees the eagerly-awaited The Nearly Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus from Image Comics - a monster collection of Hembeck goodness from the last thirty years! Fred gave Broken Frontier these exclusive thoughts on a selection of the strips...

The Nearly Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus is an over 900-page collection of the various strips I've done for a wide array of fan publications and related magazines over the past three decades. Included are all seven collections issued by Fantaco Enterprises ("Bah, Hembeck!", "Abbott and Costello Meet The Bride of Hembeck", et al.) back in the early Eighties, as well as each and every "Dateline:@#$!" strip, plus a bountiful selection of spot illos, unpublished strips, holiday cards, and even three pages of nature art! I've chosen a few representative pages to share with you here so as to give potential readers a better idea of the contents of this massive volume.

We start things off with a section devoted to "Little Freddy", subtitled "Growing Up In The Silver Age Of Comics With Fred Hembeck", which pretty much describes the strip in a nutshell! Chronologically, this feature came along later in my career -- the early Nineties -- but by its very nature, it seems to function nicely as an origin story of sorts for the tome's main character (that would be ME, folks...), so I slotted it in the leadoff position. Created for a revival of The Comic Reader that never actually happened, it was my attempt to satisfy the editor's request for a regular feature focusing on comics while not simply doing another version of my long-running "Dateline:@#$%" strip. Having long admired Dennis The Menace, Little Lulu, and Little Archie -- and having thoroughly enjoyed coming up with my own variation for Marvel a few years earlier, "Petey, The Adventures Of Peter Parker Loooonng Before He Became Spider-Man", I came up with the notion of reliving my earliest days as a comics fan utilizing a similar format. This is the opening of the four-page introductory episode.

My very first few "Dateline:@#$%" strips consisted of Cartoon Fred interviewing various comic book characters -- Spider-Man and the Flash being the first two -- staged in a handful of otherwise starkly empty panels. When it came time for a Q&A with Dr. Strange however (in a strip that was later featured in my first collection, "Hembeck: The Best of Dateline@#$!"), I hit upon the idea of setting our conversation against a mystical background oh-so-familiar to devotees of Marvel's mage. And storywise? Well, in those long-ago days before the Internet, photos of Doc's talented -- but highly reclusive -- artistic co-creator, Steve Ditko, were just nowhere to be found! This entry's punchline has the good doctor sharing a strangely familiar snapshot of the artist with curious Fred...

One of the all-new pages from my second, half-new, half reprint collection, "Hembeck 1980" (below left), took a very simple premise, and then proceeded to run it into the ground: if the legendary Harvey Kurtzman signed his name by substituting a visual representation of a man at the tail end of his signature, how then in turn would the likes of, say, Curt Swan sign HIS? Or Gil Kane? Or Chic Stone? Or -- well, you get the idea...

During the Eighties, Fantagraphics published Amazing Heroes a sort of more mainstream oriented companion magazine to The Comics Journal, and each year, there would be an entire issue devoted to pin-ups of various comics characters dressed in swimsuits. Each of my annual contributions are featured in The Omnibus, with this one (above right) being my personal favorite. Now, one COULD get all high-falutin' and say that I was making a sociological point about the over-sexualization of under-age models with this drawing, but the truth is, I just thought it would be a funny way of allowing several of the female leads of my favorite kids strips to logically appear with smokin' hot bods in beachwear -- nothing creepy about THAT, right? RIGHT?...

Around the turn of this most recent century, I had embarked on a very specific series of "Dateline:@#$%" strips for The Comics Buyers Guide. My goal here was to have Cartoon Fred interview a series of characters, characters that, over all the years I had by then been doing the strip, I had nonetheless mostly ignored -- AND to do these illustrated interrogations in alphabetical order! Sadly, I never quite made it all the way through the alphabet before I parted ways with CBG (amicably, I hasten to add), but while I never got to quiz J'onn J'onnz's old pal, Zook, I DID get to chat with the likes of (among others) Odin, Herbie, Dennis the Menace, Medusa, Kickers Inc., and, representing the letter "N", The Doom Patrol's Negative Man, AND the T..H.U.N.D.E.R. Agent known as NoMan. I've always particularly liked this strip because, in its own lame way, it’s sorta clever. Y'see, Cartoon Fred does pretty much ALL the talking, with each of his long-winded queries eliciting a simple "no" from NoMan and "negative" from Negative Man! Hey, I know it ain't rocket science, but still, it makes ME proud, okay?...

With all the yakking I do in my strips, sometimes the visuals get shunted aside. With this particular entry, I tried to get my point across with a few comparatively terse word balloons, and allow some breathing room for my art. Cartoon Fred is explaining how, after being blissfully mesmerized by Jack Kirby's work co-creating the Marvel Universe during his formative years, he never quite felt the same passion for The King's "Fourth World" as a teen-ager. Mainly, though, it gave me the rare opportunity to draw a couple dozen members of that colorful cast -- and drawing ANY Kirby character is big-time fun, even without the deep emotional attachment I may've had for some of his earlier creations!

I could probably put together an entire book of my Classic Cover Reinterpretations (and who knows? If there's a sequel...), but aside from just a few representative selections, the redrawn covers in this collection are simply the ones that appear alongside my skewed commentary on various "Dateline:@#$%" pages. And then there are a select few that are more than simply redrawn versions of old Silver Age covers, they're covers given the ol' Switcheroo, like the pair here. Justly famous in their own right, I took the cover featuring "The Death of Superman" and switched it with the also celebrated "Spider-Man No More" cover -- and vice versa! If you look closely, you'll notice that J.Jonah Jameson isn't NEARLY as broken up as his analog, Daily Planet editor Perry White, is as part of the original scenario! Kinda says it all, don't it?

Here's one of those straight redos of mine, though not of an actual cover, but instead a vintage Sixties era Spider-Man pin-up originally done by my all-time favorite artist, Steve Ditko. Truth is, I get a special little thrill whenever I redraw one of Ditko's many masterpieces, and few of his Spider-Man pages are more magnificent than this one! Y'know, it never actually occurred to me before, but as I write this up, I realize that, in many ways, I'm Steve's polar opposite: he's gone further out of his way to shun personal attention than any other successful cartoonist of the last half-century, and me? Well, that's what almost all my comics are about -- ME! Plus, my characters have squiggles on their knees and his don't...

That's only the smallest sampling of what's contained within The Nearly Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus, but that should give you at least the hint of an idea of its contents. As for what's up next, I can't rightly say for sure, but among the several projects I'm mulling over is a "Little Freddy" graphic novel. That'd certainly be fun to do. Well, you can always keep up with my current doin's by visiting my website, Hembeck.com, regularly -- see you there!

The Nearly Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus is published by Image Comics (ISBN 1582408726).