It’d be interesting to read a rundown/overview of the whole Sword&Sorcery/Barbarian craze that was big during the seventies to early eighties (from Marvel’s Conan up to Thundercats, I think?), could even tie it in with Blackstar coming out on dvd!

The DC Hercules was actually a very cool book. It was the adventures of Hercules, but set in a post-World War III world, an Earth-after-the-disaster, Mad Max kind of setting. Ran 12 issues, and you can find the last two reprinted in the trade paperback "The Art of Walter Simonson," along with a lot of other cool oddities and early work Simonson did for DC. That's out of print too but marginally easier to find than back issues of Hercules, I imagine.

I actually did a partial overview of the sword-and-sorcery stuff in the third or fourth column I did at the old site, you can find it in the archives here: "Friday in a Fantasy World." But it might be time for a full-on survey of the stuff.

Really though, the craze was confined to Conan. Every knockoff died in fifteen issues or less, and many didn't even make ten. That was more the focus of the column -- why do we eat the stuff up everywhere BUT comics? There's a huge overlap in the audience, a lot of comics people are also into Tolkien and Howard and Burroughs and D&D and so on, but they don't want comics about any of those things. It has always struck me as odd since so many of those attempts -- Tarzan, Kull, etc. -- have been good to out-and-out great. But if it's not Conan, fans aren't buying.

It'd be interesting to read a rundown/overview of the whole Sword&Sorcery/Barbarian craze that was big during the seventies to early eighties (from Marvel's Conan up to Thundercats, I think?), could even tie it in with Blackstar coming out on dvd!

...and Joe Kubert on Nick Fury is one of the best ideas I've heard in a long while. I'd buy it.

Maybe he meant it was a waste for Marvel to keep publishing...

No, that's not why. It's just that I think it'd be really cool to see them do characters like Spider-Man, X-Men, FF, Cap, Ghost Rider, etc.

And it just blows my mind how GOOD his current stuff is, with Fax from Sarajevo bein' on top of the heap. Very moving. Very scary. Feels true.

How so? "Because Marvel comics are more realistic"? That's a lousy excuse...

Technically you're right. But in writing these columns I often find myself going for the shorthand version. Usually I will just say "comics" rather than "mainstream superhero comics," "art by" rather than "pencils and inks by," and so on. Sometimes it gets me into trouble.

Really what the book is, as far as I can tell, is the most accurate adaptation Joe Kubert could make of the story Ervin Rustemagic told him by fax. Many of the faxes are reproduced in the book, there's an end-notes section at the back of the book for each chapter with photo reference... So really you'd call it "A comics adaptation of Erwin Rustemagic's epistolary account of the war in Bosnia and how he and his family lived as refugees for over a year as they tried to escape Sarajevo."

There really isn't a good word that sums that up quickly, so like we usually do in comics, I stole one from movies. "Docu-drama" doesn't have enough power, it sounds like a Lifetime Original woman-in-jeopardy thing. "Biography" didn't seem quite right either and there are a zillion comics biographies, anyway... I wanted something that had some real power to it, that conveyed the uniqueness of the work that Kubert and Joe Sacco are doing and had that in-your-face, war-torn horror, news-correspondent vibe. And "documentary" just seemed like the right word, it wasn't as dry as "non-fiction account."

So yeah, Jordan's right. But I did have a reason for calling it that, I didn't just pull it out of a hat.