The Massive Baltimore Axe Cop… I Love Comics Too!

If I query my memory banks for my first impressions of Dark Horse Comics, I start to conjure up dimly lit images of the now extinct Friendly Frank’s Comics of Hobart, IN. Friendly Franks had these home-made comic shelves and the Dark Horse comics were at the back of the bottom shelf and took the most amount of effort to reach for.  For me Dark Horse was the forbidden fruit of comics. It seemed like every single one of those damn things had a ‘Mature Readers’ label on it. So imagine me, a husky kid, bending over and contorted my body to reach out for a ‘Mature Readers’ comic book at age 8. That image alone would have prevented my conscious from letting me buy Dark Horse Comics until I was about 27. Thankfully, my grandparents bailed me out of that embarrassment by picking me up my first Dark Horse comic, Batman vs Predator #3 (1991) at age 10.

Dark Horse started as a small indie publisher in 1986. In an age where intellectual property was still primarily owned by the publisher, Dark Horse has always been pro creator-owned. In 1994 Dark Horse let top creators John Byrne and Frank Miller create an imprint labeled “Dark Horse Legends”, where Dark Horse would support creator-owned comics. Following the Legends imprint, in 1998 Dark Horse created an imprint labeled “Dark Horse Maverick” that gave some of the best writer/artists in the industry an opportunity to create and/or port their own creator-owned intellectual properties under the Dark Horse umbrella. Frank Miller, Matt Wagner, Stan Sakai & Mike Mignola have done and continue to do some of their best work for Dark Horse Comics. Outside creator-owned and new properties, Dark Horse is most likely more popular for their successful procurement and adaptations of some of the best sci-fi and horror movie, tv and video game franchises out there. Dark Horse has taken the likes of Alien, Predator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mass Effect & Star Wars and created a medium that further creates, explores and expands these fan favorite universes.

Today Dark Horse is home to some of the best creator-owed work in the industry including Mike Mignola‘s Hellboy, Frank Miller‘s Sin City, Eric Powell’s The Goon, Tony Moore’s Fear Agent and Gerard Way’s Umbrella Academy just to name a few. It’s Dark Horse’s dedication to these creators, source material & most notably to the fans, that has led me to be a 20 year fan of Dark Horse Comics and all that it stands for.  With that being said, I’d like to share a few of my current favorite Dark Horse reads.

Baltimore

Baltimore: The Plague Ships #1-5

Baltimore: The Cruse Bells #1-5

Baltimore: Dr. Leskovar’s Remedy #1-2

 

 During WWI, Captain Lord Henry Baltimore is leading a squad of men during a night battle when his entire squad gets slaughtered. Baltimore wakes to find vampire-like bat creatures feasting on his fallen comrades. Fighting off one of the creatures attempting to feast on him, he permanently blinds the creature in one eye. Baltimore survives the encounter, minus his left leg, which is amputated and replaced with a wooden one. Upon returning home, Baltimore finds that his family has fallen victim to the plague that is sweeping all of Europe. The plague is revealed to be vampirism. Baltimore comes to learn that the source of the vampirism is Haigus, the same vampire that he wounded on the battlefield. Vowing to avenge his family, Lord Baltimore sets out to pursue and destroy the creature at all costs.

Mike Mignola can do no wrong in my book. I can never get enough of his paranormal-occult historical fiction that he graces the pages of Hellboy, B.P.R.D., Witchfinder, Lobster Johnson and now Baltimore with.

The Massive

 The Massive Vol 1 #1-4

 

“What do you do when a cause you truly believe in, one to which you’ve devoted your entire life, suddenly becomes irrelevant?”

The Massive follows a group of environmentalists that struggle to survive in what Brian Wood has deemed a ‘post-crash’ landscape, where ‘post-crash’ refers to several catastrophic environmental disasters which have lead to economic and social disorder world wide. The main characters are aboard a sea shepard type ship named the Kapital, while they search for their missing much larger sister ship The Massive. With world economies crumbling, major international sea ports become barter towns, while local merchants establish mob rule. The ill-equipped pacifist crew has to deal with pirates, mob rule and lack of supplies, while they try to uncover the mystery as to the Massive’s last where-a-bouts.

Brian Wood pulls out all the stops as he attempts to wrench out all the storytelling capability of a 32 page comic book. He leverages inside front and back cover space to fill the reader in with additional back story regarding the environmental disasters and in other cases CIA type background files on crew members. The Massive is a fantastically paced suspenseful action thriller where the relationship of crew members are played out as they attempt to deal with their precarious future.

Axe Cop

Axe Cop: Bad Guy Earth #1-3

Axe Cop: President of the World #1-3

 

Axe Cop follows the exploits of… wait for it… wait for it… Axe Cop! Axe Cop is a major macho cop guy that wields an axe and pals around with his pet Wexter (a giant T-Rex w/gatling gun arms) and best friend/partner Dinosaur soldier (yes literally a dinosaur soldier), as they defend earth from the most bizarre super villains and catastrophic events that you have ever seen.

Axe Cop is the brainchild of… well… of a child. The writer Malachai Nicolle is 8 years old. His older brother Ethan Nicolle, a professional artist, came up with the idea of using his younger brother’s Axe Cop character in a web comic. The two would run around and play for hours, developing the stories. The web comic was an overnight success and soon after Ethan and Malachai had accepted an offer from Dark Horse Comics to publish a comic book version of the their stories. You can still catch Axe Cop weekly via their web site axecop.com.

What really makes this entire thing work, is Ethan’s literal take on his younger brother’s words. Reading this book is both entertaining and heart felt. It’s as if I was having a conversation with my 5 yr old and then illustrating literally everything he said. It totally touches my heart and tickles my funny bone a the same time.

UNTIL NEXT TIME… Today Dark Horse Comics is the third biggest comic book publisher. This is sorta interesting seeing as Dark Horse doesn’t have it’s own universe/continuity. What does this mean for us, the readers? No mega-super-year long-cross-over extravaganzas! Winner winner, chicken dinner! Outside of the occasional alternate cover, Dark Horse doesn’t go out of its way with crazy marketing ploys to convince readers to buy comics. They let the creators, characters and stories do that for them. Refreshing. I love comics too.