Hanzo the Razor wrote:
I'd check out that Star Slayers one -- really fun stuff, at least aesthetically.
I've read about half of the Star Slayers he's posted and find it wildly entertaining. The awkwardness only enhances my enjoyment, you can feel the enthusiasm and love of the medium/genre popping off these pages!
Really great write-up here -- amazing that the original penciller was only in the
8th grade! I also love the hokey write-up at the beginning of the issues, they're great!
The original creator / writer reminisces about the series --
Matt Bucher wrote:
It was 1981. I’d been publishing fanzines for three years. I fancied myself a writer and had dreamt of producing an epic space saga. I hooked up with a young artist named Steve Brooks and we threw some ideas together. Both of us loved Star Wars and Jim Starlin’s cosmic tales for Marvel. Quickly we settled on an ambitious plan: Star Slayers would be a 15 chapter SF novel in comic form, published on a ridiculous every-three-weeks schedule. Everyone said I was nuts. There was no precedent for a fan-based comic book published on such an accelerated schedule. We began working, thrilled at how the early chapters were turning out.
Several issues in, Steve Brooks pulled out. I panicked. The schedule was so tight, I had to figure out Plan B overnight. Swiftly I assembled a squad of top caliber fan-artists to step in. And to my happy amazement, the book just got better. Willie Peppers penciled many chapters with his dynamic, John Byrne-like art. The brilliant Rick McCollum provided artwork and an uncredited story assist, injecting surrealism and near-poetry into my more conventional story. Ken Meyer Jr. contributed moody, kick-ass covers and back covers. Mark Heike and Steve Addlesee helped out. But the MVP was undeniably Bill Anderson, the fan version of Terry Austin, who worked tirelessly on the book from start to finish, churning out stunning work on a nearly overnight basis (bear in mind, most of us were just kids, doing this for free. By the 1990s, if not sooner, nearly all of these guys were working in the comics industry as professionals).
Okay, so we missed our original schedule by a few weeks. So what?
Halfway through I panicked a second time when I read that Mike Grell had a new book coming out called Starslayer. Yet he ultimately wrote me a very nice personal letter promising not to make a legal stink.
Ultimately The Star Slayers became my best-selling fanzine after Southland Distributors (a comic subscription service) picked it up and started ordering several hundred copies at a clip.
Here's one segment that really made me smile -- the fella with the eye patch is an assassin sent to murder the main superhero and quickly changes sides with little prodding.
This issue was drawn by Willie Peppers and I have to say, I really like his style despite some amateurish technical skills -- it's got that spark to it, IMO.
