by Kay & Mike Reynolds (Writers) & Collen Doran (Illustrator) Publisher: Starblaze Graphics (1987)
Softcover, 64 pages
Continuing
with my obscure 80s throwback series here we have Fortune’s Friends: Hell Week, the first in a planned three graphic
novel series, of which only the first has seen the light of day. This is the
origin story of a spunky young lady, who could have gone into a much more
lucrative line of work but wanted to make it on her own terms, joins a low rent
P.I. firm and spends much of the time at the beginning forcing her male co-workers
to take her seriously.
For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.
Sound
familiar? It’s basically the structure of every drama centered around a female
protagonist in the 1980s, 90s, and so on. If it wasn’t for the somewhat
interesting mystery, the intelligent way it’s resolved, and the other gay P.I.
(I guess that makes her the hag) then there would be nothing to recommend this
book. This wasn’t a bad comic, it just wasn’t really a breakthrough one. The
art by a young Colleen Doran doesn’t help much. It’s okay, maybe a shade
amateurish, but she definitely has come a long way. This isn’t Troll Bridge art, it’s the first issues
of A Distant Soil.
The
publisher, StarBlaze Graphics, went out of business about a year after this
book’s publication. They were celebrated in some circles with printing the collected
color versions of Elfquest, Myth Adventures (if you were into RPGs
in the 80s then you must’ve stumbled across this at some point), and
illustrated Thieves World stories
from the shared world books of the same name. They went out of business after various
artists sued for the company claiming to have greater rights over their (what
was believed to be) creator owned content. The whole shebang went down in
flames in 1989.
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