	I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, was a late adopter of Twitter and left when it turned fascist, and always declined to adopt Facebook. He was a fairly early adventurer into the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

The Great Comic Read Through

Part Nine

Razor, Reacto-man, Real Ghostbusters, Real Girl

28 June 2026

Some semi-random indie comics this time, from the box which includes some or all of the letter 'R'.

Razor

Razor is in my collection because it's a first issue, and I pretty much grabbed all first issues as a matter of course. Since I was working at Mile High Comics for much of the time I was collecting, this was pretty easy to do. Razor falls into the general category of 'what if Wolverine had boobs and was even more violent?' comics. The first issue features lots of people get chopped up in anatomical detail. I clearly didn't care for it, since I didn't get any further issues. I stand by that. The first issue is just sort of black and white, cheesecake, splatterpunk. (Or maybe not strictly speaking splatterpunk, but I digress.) Apparently it had some success, with a movie in the works at the time of writing. This is not going in the keeper box.

Reacto Man

From there, the next alphabetically is 'Reacto Man,' from 1987. One thing that strikes me about some of this indie titles from the 80s and 90s is that a lot of them fill a similar niche to that of webcomics these days. They are usually small print runs, and often labours of love. I think what really hits me is that there's a similar DIY aesthetic. Or perhaps that's just me.

Anyway ...

Reacto Man is aggressively retro both in style and artwork. Even the publisher has a retro-vibe - B-Movie Comics. It's reasonably good fun, with a Golden Age feel. Science accident leads to super-powers, science friend makes suit to help control powers, bad guys start to pop up. It ran for three issues, and was clearly intending to continue since it stopped mid-story. I can't find out much about what happened, but it looks like the publisher went under. They only published six comics, total, between March of '86, and June of '87 with Reacto Man #3 being the last. The comics don't appear to be particularly valuable, although it does like the Oak Ridge Associated Universities Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity has the first issue in their collection.

I actually might prefer the backing story which runs in all three issues. Called 'The Man in the Moon,' it's another Golden Age-y series, where a police detective gets some nifty high-tech gear from a scientist who is gunned down before his eyes. (Sound familiar, or just clich&eaccent;?) But I like the art and design. He's got an opaque, fishbowl helmet - like a moon! - and a bulletproof outfit. A very pulp feel to the whole thing.

The Real Ghostbusters

Next up is 'The Real Ghostbusters' #1, by NOW Comics, from August 1988. If you were wondering what the deal was with NOW Comics, the other titles they had on sale at the time were Astro Boy, The Terminator, Speed Racer, Racer-X, and Rust. All except the last are, obviously, movie or TV spin-offs. This almost certainly showed up in my box as a first issue. Friends, it is ... not good.

I mean, first, it's based on the animated series. There was some copyright hijinks going on with the name, hence the 'Real' part. In any case, so that makes this a copy of a copy, and as anyone who has copied VHS tapes can tell you, something gets lost. In this case, it's any of the charm the movie had. I never watched the tv show, so I can't speak to that directly. It's a two-part story, involving time travel, dimensional ... stuff, and so on. It was set up to conclude in issue #2, which I didn't bother to buy. Oddly, it looks like it might be selling for sixty or eighty quid.

Real Girl

The last comic in this group is Fantagraphic's 'Real Girl' #5, 'The Sex comik for all genders and orientations, by cartoonists who are good in bed.' The first question, of course, is why issue #5 only? At this remove, I can only take a guess or two. One possibility is that the print run was extremely limited and so the shop didn't get any copies of issue #1. (Or maybe even the first four issues?) Another possibility is that we did get some copies in, but they were all spoken for or purchased by someone else. By 1990, I think I was signed up for all first issues, and was getting all sorts of strange things in my reserve box, so something must have gone awry if I didn't get the first one. It looks like it ran until issue 9, but I've only got #5, so either I didn't care much for it at the time, or the run was limited enough that we didn't get those issues either. A mystery.

In any case, the book is a collection of shorts and articles, five or six of them, including Gertude Stein and Alice B. Toklas paper dolls! They all feature queer characters and themes, and some were later reprinted in the Fantagraphics collection 'No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics.' The cover is by Jamie Hernadez, most famous for 'Love and Rockets,' which Fantagraphics published between 1982 and 1996, a pretty good run. Trina Robbins, who is an important figure not only in alternative comics, but in comics in general, did the paper dolls. The other stories are by creators who were active in the underground scene in and around San Francisco, and includes a lot of people involved in LGBTQ rights and causes.

The stories are pretty good. Short, punchy, and interesting. The sensibility is similar to a lot of the early counter-culture comics, and I find it to be quite appealing. I think I probably found it appealing thirty years ago, too, but I honestly can't remember.

So a couple of interesting books, and a couple which are not. None will be keepers.

NB - if anyone reading any of these is interested in any of the 'non-keeper' comics let me know. We might be able to work something out ...

Comic Read Through Part Eight

The Aspiring Luddite