Comrade Bullski

you what????

High time Dazzler dabbled in... rock.

Eh.

Eh?

Eh?

such a strange issue! so strange I even did it on the channel!

Look into how Dog Man became the best-selling comic in America, it's entirely due to offline marketing. I have no idea what a Scholastic Book Fair is but apparently they are brutally effective compared to say putting up teasers on bluesky or twt.

Even worse, people who actively use bluesky, twt, mastodon or whatever to look for comics recommendations are almost all already comics diehards, who don't NEED to be marketed to.

Yeah, I've never understood the belief that social media is a viable marketing strategy. Even at its peak comicstwt was a tiny pond with most comic book buyers either inactive on social media or just not on them. You could tell by sales figures. And bluesky is a fraction of that fraction.

The series was "fine" but as with every Dazzler revival, they tried to tie it close to the X-Men overarching plot and goals and that just never works.

They have betrayed us but we shall never surrender.

Yeah my bad, I should have specified.

Yeah having a comic that published the Punisher, Judge Dredd, Hellblazer and Cat Claw is kind of funny.

It actually published every AXA strip in existence. The final issue talks about the cancellation of the strip and the hope of a revival (that never came).

It ran for a long time! A whole decade of barbarian boobs and slicing up giant lizards and robots.

Donne Avenell passed away in 1997 and Romero died in 2024 with neither ever seeing the adaptation or revival of AXA they had both hoped for.

As it is, it lives only as a relic of a bygone era inspired by the exploitative fantasy/sci-fi boom of the 70s and 80s.

AXA was a mainstay for many teens growing up in Sweden in the 80s and 90s and the funniest thing is that some Swedish kids' comics also advertised MAGNUM. Like the Swedish He-Man/MOTU comics had ads featuring Axa in her full glory towards the end. Quite a leap in content and style.

(Not sure if @johnfreeman.bsky.social knows about that wrinkle)

Other strips that were considered appropriate to MAGNUM were JUDGE DREDD, THE PUNISHER, CAT CLAW (a story for another time), AKIRA, JEROME BLOCH, STEVE CANYON, ZENITH, BRUNO BRAZIL and many others. It saw a handful of KNIGHTS OF PENDRAGON issues published, a rare case of Swedish Marvel UK comics.

In Sweden AXA was one of the flagship strips of MAGNUM, an oversized black and white anthology comic which featured strips a little too mature for kids, but not of the cerebral maturity that most of the "comics for adults" magazines wanted. An interesting in-between category.

Of course the punchline here is that AXA has some ties to my native Sweden. The strip's scripter, Donne Avenell, was a prolific writer for the Swedish Phantom Comics (as part of Team Fantomen), though his Phantom offerings never got as lurid as his work on Axa, for understandable reasons.

AXA was unceremoniously canceled in mid-story in 1987 and Romero would have to wait until 2012 to even conclude that arc and then only in his native Spain. AXA at its heyday was published all across Europe and even had a complete reprint in the US by Eclipse Comics, tho they are long out of print

It's JUDGE DREDD meets RED SONJA with most of the action seemingly inspired by things like Dredd's Cursed Earth. The closest to AXA's energy in US comics would be "mature" comics like GHITA OF ALIZARR by Frank Thorne (possibly Thorne's RED SONJA work inspired Axa)

As far as story goes, Axa is a woman living in a post-apocalyptic future inside a domed city but she craves excitement (and gratification) and so she demonstratively strips out of her clothes and runs off into the wasteland to become a sword-slinging, bikini-wearing (at most) heroine.

It may seem surprising to learn that AXA ran in many newspapers across Europe and was originally published in the UK's THE SUN'S comics section, but nudity in comic strips was considerably less taboo in Europe at the time, and even now. AXA was still provocative, sure, but it wasn't ban-worthy.

MODESTY BLAISE under Holdaway had certainly been a strip full of fanservice, but Romero took it to a different level, with modesty depicted in increasingly provocative poses and skimpy outfits. Romero's AXA pushed his art even further and featured lots of nudity and sexual situations.

Though largely unknown in the US, AXA was a pretty big part of the European comics scene in the 1980s. Enrique Badia Romero had made his name as the replacement artist for Jim Holdaway on the classic MODESTY BLAISE newspaper strip and his art was soon famous for the amount of cheesecake it packed

Giving everyone a voice also includes the worst person you know, unfortunately.

holy shit

🕸️ Don't miss the All-New Secret Hospital Halloween TV Special, starring the Amazing MJ Watson!

#maryjanewatson #mjwatson #spiderman

Fusili

It took a lot of effort

No he is an entirely normal individual with extremely normal ideas about relationships and who writes wonderful depictions of women.