I'm finally showing some signs of recovery today. I felt good enough this morning that I wanted to try to go to work but my wife stopped me. She is wise. An hour later I was absolutely miserable and would have had to come home anyway. Still, I am making some progress. I even felt good enough to read a few issues of Groo the Wanderer that I recued from a local dollar bin a couple weeks back. This stuff is golden. I got into Groo only recently but as a kid Sergio Aragones was one of my favorite Mad artists. That guy can tell the most wonderful, human stories with little or no dialogue. I'm no expert on the ins and outs of Groo, but the basic schtick is that he's a dunderheaded nincompoop who also happens to be an unstoppable killing machine. He wanders a vague pseudo-Hyborian fantasy world, getting into lots of trouble. In other words, he acts a lot like pretty much every D&D player character I've ever met. Issue 37 pictured above is pretty much a one joke story, but Aragones spends 22 pages slowly and lavishly telling it. It's glorious.
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The writer of Groo, Mark Evanier, is a pretty interesting guy. If you haven't checked out his blog, I'd highly recommend it: http://www.newsfromme.com/
ReplyDelete"Groo" is doubly funny to the Spanish speaker. A lot of the place names are common words in Spanish; I recall one comic wherein two towns were called Carpeta and Alfombra, both of which mean "rug"; one issue, which dealt more than usual with Groo's appetite, featured a town called Almuerzo, which is a Mexicanism meaning "lunch".
ReplyDeleteSly!
I'm surprised you hadn't been aware of Groo before - given your interests and tastes, that would have been the first comic I would have recommended to you. I've loved those since I was a kid, not only for the humor, but also for Aragones's manic doodling in the backgrounds - you can look at those panels for an hour and still miss stuff.
ReplyDeleteIt's also responsible for adding the phrases "It is to laugh" and "What do you mean, slow of mind?" to my sister's and my vocabulary.
BTW, I'm down with a sinus infection this week, so I feel your pain.
ReplyDeleteDevin's observations are quite correct, as any fool can plainly see.
ReplyDeleteI adore Groo, and have nearly every Marvel Issue from 2 - 120 odd.
ReplyDeleteSA is one cool artist and writer, very satirical
Groo remains the #1 source of my interest in fantasy. The two cats I had as a teenager were named Mark & Sergio ...
ReplyDeleteMy best friend and I in high school had a "slow of mind" running gag mirroring the one in the comic, and we'd stretch it out by more hours every time, until eventually we'd wait days to deliver the line. If I ever see him again, it remains my hope that I'll be the first one to do the new round :)
To correct Rob Rogers a little: Mark didn't actually write a Groo story of his own until "The Death of Groo" graphic novel. He did write many of the later issues, but not all. He _scripted_ every issue, adapting (and in some cases working editorially with Sergio) on the story. The question of what he did on the comic was a running gag in the early years, but he was a combination scripter/story consultant who later (once things were going strong in the Epic line) took on more of an actual writing partnership with Sergio.
At this very moment I have my Chakaal wallpaper up, and I still have my 25mm Groo lead figs around (although I no longer have Mulch).
I can plainly see that.
ReplyDeletewhat do you mean, slow of mind?
ReplyDelete