La Zona Muerta

I had intended, many, many moons ago, before I discovered THAT OTHER PEOPLE ALSO HAD THE INTERNET, to write a blog about funny comics in my preposterously Brobdingnagian collection. God help me, I even went out and bought ringers for said collection; New Kids on the Block comics, a comic about Billy Ray Cyrus (!), yes, all sorts. To wit; I had actually prepared a number of prospective reviews and perhaps had drawn some little things to go with them.

Sounds familiar, yes? Not a mile from what we’ll eventually do here.

About a year ago, either a lightning strike or some other malady struck my neighborhood, imperiling a transformer (not the fun, robots in disguise kind, the power line kind). The resulting power outage apparently killed one of my hard drives (one where I had all sorts of digitized wrestling mags, video game roms (all perfectly legal, of course) and a variety of other things, including my old work for this prospective comix thing. I could PROBABLY send it away somewhere to get someone to attempt to recover the files but… I dunno. I’m not THAT precious about my old work and I had some of that stuff backed up anyway…

…but apparently I did not have the little article I wrote about the seeming bait and switch nature of Marvel’s ALF Annual #1, published somewhere around the summer of 1988.

I’m no Tegan O’Neil, the finest ALFheologist online (and please, follow her on socials and on YouTube; she’s endlessly entertaining despite her ALFlove), but you want to know a secret about the Marvel ALF comic?

Despite it’s origins in an insipid TV show, the comic is good, and occasionally great. Fifty plus issues of cartooning from the likes of Dave Manak and Marie Severin. I mean… that ain’t too bad, chief.

Now, the trade dress there indicates that this annual is a part of the Marvel summer crossover of 1988, the Evolutionary War. In brief, the High Evolutionary (if you aren’t familiar with him, he might have been in the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie? I don’t keep track of the movies any more) had a zany scheme that was to result in mankind growing big heads or summat.

No, I’m not being funny.

To a dumb kid like me who had only been reading comics for roughly a year or so, this ad was like catnip. Not one published issue of the crossover is as cool as this ad, sadly.

At any rate, Marvel go cute here and include roughly two? three? panels where the High Evolutionary sees that there’s a Melmacian (ALF, of course) on Earth and warns him not to interfere with the GREAT PLAN unfolding across the other Marvel annuals of the summer, available now at your local comic book store. ALF has no intention of interfering, obviously and goes to summer camp (it’s a summer annual, after all) instead. The head of the High Evolutionary shows up again at the end of the comic, as well. Er, that’s it.

Pictured; an artist’s rendition of the HE enjoying an ALF mag. I drew this sometime in 2005 or 6, “inked” it by sending the pencil drawing thru the fax machine at work (!), setting the fax to be received by my computer workstation and then colored it in MS Paint. All while I was earning the princely sum of sixteen dollars an hour, so suck it, corporate America. None of my old work for the old comics blog thing survived, but somehow, this did

So, obviously, Mighty Marvel does it again, scamming innocent kids collecting the Evolutionary War crossover out of a buck seventy five, or at least that’s what I thought as a nine year old in the summer of 1988. Honestly, it’s not nearly that nefarious or wrong… it’s just a dumb, cute tie in. Such a self-possessed, serious child I was, I couldn’t see that, but adult me thinks this was a cute, little idea. Y NO HEATHCLIFF ANNUAL IN 88 MARVEL?

All of this background was largely an excuse for me to show this:

My rip off attempt at drawing the cover to ALF’s first album, “Stuck on Earth.” His sleeves are pushed up and it looks pretty awesome. You don’t know how hard it is to draw that weird head shape and every little hair on his chinny chin chin until you do it yourself. God bless the guy who designed the ALF puppet, which is actually pretty expressive. Didja know that ALF has a series of albums in Europe (not ALF based albums but weird compilation albums with 80s and early 90s hit singles with his likeness on them)? Now ya do.

So, anyway, if you see an issue of ALF languishing in a back issue bin, thumb through it; you may be surprised. Do NOT watch Shout Factory’s 24 ALF stream on YouTube, though, unless you watch it en Espanol, where it’s only marginally funnier.