If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I love old, campy B-Movies. If there’s another thing you should know about me, it’s that I particularly enjoy making fun of them. It’s the reason shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000 appealed so much to me, and the reason I can and do enjoy 90% of Hollywood’s releases these days. Zing!
Anyhow, the other thing I love is a good indie comic with a fun concept, it’s something I’ll always read any day over the infinite milieu of any X-Man or League of Justice member, or lately even any Avenger. Sure superheroes are fine and dandy, but there’s nothing quite like a well done, perfectly simple and entertaining comic miniseries. Enter Titan comics, who have managed to combine two of my favorite things into one with their upcoming book, IT CAME! Which is a title for a book so wonderful and subtlety suggestive a retailer could stock it on shelves entirely unaware of the hidden double entendre of its meaning. Or perhaps I just have a filthy mind. Regardless, the press release for it sounds great, as follows:
[quote] “Titan Comics is pleased to announce the launch of the brand-new creator-owned series, IT CAME! – a four-issue, 1950s B-movie style mini-series by Dan Boultwood.
Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 will love this hilarious romp, a knowing throwback to the heyday of low-budget Sci-Fi cinema! Trundling through the 1950s British countryside, unthinkingly misogynistic space scientist, Dr. Boy Brett and the suitably chaperoned Doris Night pop into a quaint village pub for a cheese ploughman’s… But waiting for them outside is a most unwelcome visitor: Grurk, an indestructible, rampaging robot from outer space, on a mission to harvest the British Blitz spirit for energy!
Pursuing Grurk in their Morris Minor, will Boy and Doris be able to save the British from a life without stiff upper lippedness, or will Her Majesty’s Kingdom be forever resigned to an eternity down in the mouth?
Creator Dan Boultwood says, “IT CAME! can be summed up by calling it a 1950s comedy B-Movie pastiche from a studio that never was. Which, coincidentally, is also how I sum up my everyday life, but with less giant space robots. Only a little less, mind you.”
“We’re incredibly excited to welcome Dan into the Titan Comics fold,” says, editor, Mark McKenzie-Ray. “IT CAME! is a wonderfully witty and fabulously fanciful tribute to the greatest 1950s B-movies, with all the charm and relish of a freshly brewed cuppa. Dan’s artwork is absolutely gorgeous and so different from anything out there right now. IT CAME! represents everything our new imprint is all about.”
Dan Boultwood was a long-time collaborator with award-winning writer, Tony Lee, having worked together on the Eagle award-nominated, Hope Falls, The Baker Street Irregulars and Prince of Baghdad for weekly British children’s anthology comic, The DFC. Now, Dan Boultwood makes the leap from critically acclaimed illustrator to all-round creator in this splendidly spiffing comic series.
Quaff that hair, knot that tie and keep your notions of gender equality dialled back sixty years – for the sake of the planet!
IT CAME! #1 will hit comic stores on Aug 7, 2013. ” [/quote]
For those who have seen it, the book looks like a sister companion piece to 2001’s The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra, which was a modern movie made with the similar B-Movie pastiche as this book. If you haven’t seen The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra, I highly implore you to seek it out and watch it, as it’s probably one of the funniest films I’ve ever seen. With that, this book appears like it’ll be in exactly the same vein, and easily looks exactly like the kind of movie they’d riff on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I’m looking forward to reading the first issue come April.
Grizzly Bomb 