The Little Aimless Library: The Cosmic Book by various

I know, I know. I said literally one Little Aimless Library ago that I wasn't gonna cover serialized comics, and then I come back with a standard magazine-sized floppy with “issue one” right on the cover. This sucker isn't a fragment of an ongoing story, though: it's an anthology comic that ran for all of one issue. It ran me four bucks and costs only a little more online, so it's not like I'm asking much of anyone I might inspire to seek it out. All my qualms about comics are void in this case.

And how could I not talk about something with this cover art? Jesus Christ, it's a thing of beauty. Artist and co-editor Pat Boyette didn't have to go half this hard; remember, this is issue one of an unproven comic in an unpopular genre from a publisher who seem to have barely existed. There are plenty of reasons to wish industrial society had never progressed past its sunny optimism phase, and for me art like this is a big one. I miss when space felt like our glorious, inevitable destiny, when we didn't know jack about it so we imagined the strangest vistas possible awaiting us around every corner. 

On this single sheet of paper one can witness a spaceship (or maybe some kinda high-tech tower or lighthouse?) shaped like a purple kerosene lamp, traditional spaceships of both the rocket and pie-pan varieties, a bug-eyed Viking whose helmet has even buggier eyes, a lovely crater-pocked planetoid, a tiny ninja rendered in just two colors and the weirdest goddamn dog anyone has ever painted. Every one of these creatures lingers just below a logo I can only describe by saying it wouldn’t look out of place on the flyer for a local rock show. How many of the characters on the cover actually appear in the pages of The Cosmic Book (great title for a sci-fi comic BTW)? Most pressingly, who cares? If I somehow came into Jeff Bezos money the very first thing I'd do is airbrush this shit on the side of at least a hundred vans. 

The back cover is fun, too, if disappointingly tidy and focused. It features a sub-Boschian knight with a weirdly well-defined ass riding a horse on the beach. To either side of him are a pair of gargantuan rusted suits of armor, who appear to have met their end through shooting volleys of massive holes through one another. Art like this is the reason we invented the word “gnarly”. And we've got plenty more of that to come. 

The Book's creators and editors Fred Hime and Pat Boyette are both Golden Age veterans who’ve assembled a crew of men with similar tastes and talents, including two other fellow legends of their field. This is a rare artist-first mag, every story is both written and illustrated by the same creator according to their respective credits (save the penultimate story, written and illustrated by Hime but colored by Steve Weed. I will probably repeat this fact later on because I love his name). These are all singular visions and, frankly, mostly excuses to draw cool shit. Artists can often feel held back by having to draw other peoples’ scripts. Giving them the reigns is an exercise in artistic liberty that’s almost always interesting.

The stories are of a respectable standard. The style of prose will be familiar to anyone who's read a pulp sci-fi comic from the 70s or 80s, albeit with kind of an emphasis on humor. Our first foray into The Cosmic Book is a two-page snippet courtesy of Wallace Wood, who was in poor health and poorer spirits at this point and sent it to the book's editors shortly before ending his life. Instead of the expected unfinished snippet of a masterpiece tragically cut short, this is a complete story and a darkly funny epilogue to Wood's impressive body of work. 

The art is fantastic, as one might expect. Old-school pulp perfection, all bubble-canopied space colonies, brightly-colored rocket ships (also with bubble canopies!) and a generously proportioned woman taking up a good chunk of page two. These kinda hilariously unexplained red-gold orbs are floating around her, conveniently censoring the R-rated bits (although the ones “censoring” her nipples are, well, round and kinda fleshy-colored and right where her nipples would've been). The conceit of this story is as ‘60s as the art, sexually explicit and darkly humorous. Basically, some guys come to invade a planet and their would-be victims provide them with prostitutes, apparently in the name of being courteous hosts. The invaders waste no time getting their rocks off and immediately die of an STD. The narration informs us that “the women were the first line of defense” as we peer into a ship crewed by fully skeletonized men. Good shit.

Then there's Tonango's Folly, a longer piece by Boyette that's damn near as awesome as his cover art. We're in the year 3000. Man is all over space, but an energy crisis has rendered many of us poor. The men dress like Dust Bowl vagabonds, the singular woman dresses like… I don't really know how to describe what she's wearing. The heeled winter boots over black-and-orange striped knee socks is only like, her second or third funniest fashion decision. Everyone's clothes are charmingly kitsch and dated, which actually goes some distance to sell the story's impoverished future. Much more genuinely cool are Boyette's spaceships. The pirate ship at the start is long, sleek and menacing. It blows up in a pleasantly over-drawn explosion, the excessive black lines implying a kind of molten shrapnel. After defeating the pirates, our hero Tonango meets the man he'd just saved: a treasure hunter on the search for a cure for the galaxy's energy woes. He gifts Tonango a piece of the potential profits as thanks for saving his life (which is funny in its own right, maybe funnier to me than the actual punchline). 

Years pass and in the meantime there's a lot of dialogue that side-steps any specific name for the energy we're talking about here, though from context it's obviously a physical object like crude or coal. I thought this was bad writing because it was sidestepping basic worldbuilding out of laziness, but it turns out it's actually clumsy writing in that naming the energy source too early gives the game away, or the author thought it might I think he was being over-cautious. In any case, it turns out the planet Tonango owns a stake in is a land of a thousand lakes of pure high-grade gasoline (yes, gasoline, not crude oil - did you expect a book that opens on weaponized space prostitutes to have good science?). He celebrates by breaking out the champagne and lighting a cigar. It's a great punchline, but hey, how did their gas-powered ships manage to land without igniting the atmosphere in the first place?

And speaking of bad science, Perts Vs Experts is a three-page illustrated rant against the scientific establishment. “Perts” are what the writer, the legendarily bitter and just plain legendary Alex Toth calls laymen. Ex-perts are those who were excommunicated for flagrantly disagreeing with the common sense of the perts. Specifically, the common-sense belief that UFOs are real, and that we've been interacting with them for millennia. The UFO experts would deny the existence of UFOs even if they saw one with their own eyes, apparently, even though every UFO expert I've ever met has tried to sell me a book about ancient aliens within an hour of conversation. Surely the term he's looking for is, like, astronomy experts. This segment is dumb for obvious reasons, though the art is charming in that vintage UFOlogy way. I love the zeppelin UFO above the pyramids on page one. 

Part of me thinks that, as a short, chatty non-fiction section by a well-known creator, Perts Vs Experts may have been planned as a recurring segment. Every magazine's gotta have one; quality alone ain't enough to establish brand loyalty especially when you're too small to ensure quality creators will come to you. Getting your readers hooked on a fun segment with a memorable host does more than you might think. If that's true, I'm especially bummed this magazine never panned out. The idea of a science fiction mag with a recurring segment dedicated to aggressively lambasting scientists is really funny to me. Like sure it ain't that uncommon to find UFO conspiracy stuff in pulp mags, but this level of hostility toward science on the whole is rarer and more precious. I also think it's really amusing that, of all the things legendary artist Alex Toth could've contributed to this free-for-all of a book, this is what came out of him.

Following that is Fatal Evolution by Mike Himes (presumably a relative of Fred’s? Like Steve Weed later on, he doesn’t appear to have done much of anything and I imagine he was a hobbyist of some description brought in by Fred). This is an entirely wordless story presented in sketchy lines and soft, runny watercolors. There are some great panels, I really love the title page, though I did find the nature of the art got in the way of the story once in a while. This kinda sketchy style benefits from a little narration, I think. Not that the story here is complicated by any means. A UFO grants laser guns (and presumably higher intelligence) to a group of baboons and they blow up a Middle Eastern town. It's solid stuff, not entirely to my taste but I could never bring myself to say anything bad about any piece of art in which watercolors are used to depict heavily armed baboons. It’s interesting, if nothing else, for what it represents. Fred, Pat, Wallace and Alex are all established guys with big bodies of work, and Steve Weed was just a colorist. This is the book’s only foray into completely unproven, off-the-beaten-path artistic talent. It stands out, it’s the one work in here that doesn’t feel like a well-polished tribute to the past. This is rough and contemporary, and the book is better for including it.

A Mystery! is another conspiracy theory segment of the sort you could find in any number of UFO books. It's maybe a better candidate for the recurring feature, actually, since it was done by editor Pat Boyette. Which does mean it has some of the book's best art, especially given its subject matter. Comfy, pulpy cavemen (have i ever mentioned how much I love vintage caveman art?) are presented with narration insisting primitive man was more advanced than we give them credit for. Which is actually pretty progressive for 1986, that is the direction much of modern anthropology has gone. It's not done particularly well here, one panel insists that “In some unknown way, he was able to straighten the curved tusks of the mammouth to fashion effective spears!”. We knapped rocks, Pat.

This is all in service of setting up the titular Mystery - a bison skull in Moscow with what appears to be a bullet hole in the forehead. “Appears to be” is an old, corny chestnut for these types of conspiracies but I'm willing to give it a pass because of the final panel. A cowboy stands alone amidst a prehistoric landscape as the narration asks the reader to ponder who the mysterious man was who lived among the cavemen with a rifle. I wish Boyette had cut out the pseudoscience and just drawn a comic about a cowboy teaching cavemen to shoot guns. In the timeline where he'd done that, The Cosmic Book #1 would've gone down in history as the zenith of pulp literature and we'd surely have seen a second issue.

Boyette ain't done yet, up next is a vertical two-page splash depicting red-eyed pirates looking menacing and harassing a fairly nonplussed damsel in distress. This is a depressingly ambitious teaser for issue 2 and also one of the only fantasy segments in the book. Pat does fantasy well. It looks cool as hell, even if the no doubt lavish paint work doesn’t translate half as smoothly to cheap interior paper as it did to the cover pages. Even through the fuzz you can see the vision, what could’ve been. Sad nothing came of it but on the plus side this comic is cheap enough that I wouldn't feel too bad about buying a second copy so I could rip these pages out and hang ‘em on my wall. Wife was talkin about redecorating a little…

Our penultimate story is Fred Hime's Empire… and Other Ways to Get By. Great title, and he cleverly works it into the narration. This is the one colored by Steve Weed, and by god did the man do some great work here! Strangely good, seeing as he doesn’t appear to have done literally anything else based on a cursory Google search. Another what-if to ponder, I suppose. Page one is set on the mean streets of New York in 1939, the whole thing is rendered in black and white. A Mob tough has been backed into a corner by a mob of tougher men, and just when he thinks he's about to meet his maker he meets a door instead. 

The light emanating from the door on page 2 is the comic’s first color, a pleasant fluorescent yellow. This is our obligatory pulp portal fantasy story. Our hero is transported into a sorta Land of the Lost-type environment rendered in lavish and aggressively bright colors, where he's accosted by some impish tribal stereotypes and promptly saved by a soldier of Imperial Britain. Yeah, this fantastical realm is a colony of Her Majesty. Our protagonist's savior has no way back home but still insists on enslaving these people, segregating them by skin color, forcing them to learn English, and sending them to fight wars of conquest on behalf of a nation he will never see again. Apparently the people of this once Edenic world made a habit of abducting people from less fortunate planets, and never ran into any problems until the British showed up. Tale as old as time. It gets out that the new guy is a former hitman and one of the natives asks him to assassinate the leader of the British. 

He's uncertain until he falls in love with the only human woman on the planet, who happens to be black and is promptly killed in the middle of a page of awkward softcore. The Brits reiterate a line from earlier about segregation and thus the hitman's mind is made up. The punchline here being, once the Brits are out of the way the only thing that changes for the natives is they call their oppressors the Family instead of the Empire. This one charmed me, despite the caricatured natives. It's another darkly funny one with a clearer morality play at its center, the art has a great kinetic quality somewhere between cartooning and animation, Steve Weed's coloring is top-notch. My only issue is, the dialogue is terrible. The mobster and Brit both communicate entirely through cliche phrases, shockingly the most stereotyped group of people in this story are the white people. I don't think either of them say anything that a character like them hasn't said before.

And speaking of overfamiliar, we're winding down with a fairly traditional sword-and-sorcery tale by Boyette, Of Gods and Bondage. Another great title, more great art, unfortunately weak script. The noble King Pringle, illustrated an awful lot like the Pringles mascot, journeys to the castle of a ferocious demon to smite him and plunder his loot. The demon appears at the gate offering Pringle pleasure beyond imagination, and in a show of goodwill removes his mask to reveal he's actually a Chinese stereotype. This convinces King Pringle to go into the demon's castle, which stinks horribly of rotting flesh. All his apprehension melts away when he's gifted another generously-proportioned pulp fantasy lady (I understand that objectification is bad and all but it is honestly refreshing to go back to older comics like this that are more honest about the medium's smutty origins. I've got a long-ass rant in me about this, which I'll spare you from for the time being). 

He's placed under a spell and promised eternal youth so long as he keeps dicking this woman down forever.  I have some questions about the logistics there, but the story moves past that in a flash. Not before we get another page of awkward softcore, though, including one panel where the coloring around the girl’s mouth is sloppy enough to give her a straight-up Joker smile. 

Apparently all it takes to break the spell is his right-hand man knocking on the door and asking if he's okay. Harsh reality kicks in as he realizes he's been doing it with a corpse. He stabs the demon, whose uses his dying breath to keep the king and his companion locked up forever, guarded by this hideous dragon-looking thing. His companion buzzes off, convinced that nothing but paranoia is keeping the once-great king locked up. The fella is immediately attacked, his headless corpse chucked into the wilderness beyond the castle. His still living head returns to the dungeon and we hit a fairly good punchline. 

Two men, who mused on page one that the king slaying the demon was actually bad for the peasantry in some fashion, find the corpse and loot his few possessions. They have a chat about how the presence of a body to scavenge is a sign that the demon may have returned, that good times may be returning. I think the idea of a demon who unwittingly does good by chucking the corpses of well-off men in the general direction of peasants is really funny, and IMO should've taken more of the focus than the generic two-fisted sex and violence. And despite the mostly generic story, and some generic art, there are some excellent details on hand. The clothing is bright and intricate, every character’s digs practically tell a story in their own right and including an elephant among Pringle’s army was the best possible decision. Pat’s really sellin me on his fantasy illustrations.

And that's a wrap on The Cosmic Book! I expected a standard pulp mag with an exceptional piece of cover art but the amount of late-period work by Golden Age icons and the total creative control they had makes the whole book a worthwhile artifact. Wallace Wood's final comic alone is worth the price of admission. The best work overall was that of the editors, suggesting this mag could've had a strong future even if they failed to attract much talent. Getting this magazine to at least two or three more issues doesn’t seem like an impossible feat. 

It offers forty pages of talented guys doing whatever they want, telling the stories they want to tell and drawing their worlds their way. It was published in 1986, just ahead of the indie comic boom that was driven by that very philosophy (and it did so with much more readable results than later ‘artist-first’ company Image Comics! They have the same 'just some dudes messin around' energy, but Cosmic Book accomplishes that without the pretension and tryhard edginess of early Image). In contents it's a nostalgic tribute to the sci-fi of yesteryear, yet in some respects it was ahead of its time. Maybe that's romantic. I dunno. I just know I had a fun time reading this thing. It's the rare comic store bargain bin gem and it was a great way to ring in the new year.