Epic Magazine

After spending my occasional allowance my grandparents used to send me on D&D and $.25 video games, there wasn't anything left over to buy magazines or anything else. Still, I used to pop into a convenience store now and again and thumb through copies of Epic magazine, which had awesome adolescent male appeal. The sex content was toned down from the similar Heavy Metal magazine, kept the occasional psychedelics reference, but amped up the storyline. Whenever I see an old copy today, it takes me back.

I've done a search here on F:AT for references to Epic, but haven't seen any. Did anyone else ever used to read it? Does anyone else include it as part of the AT cannon?

I was a big fan of the Metamorphosis Odyssey storyline in the early issues of Epic, but that was just a shadow of the better Dreadstar stories that came later, like The Price, or the first couple of years of the Dreadstar comic. Otherwise, Epic was very hit-or-miss, and the bad stuff was really bad. I probably still have about 20 issues in a box somewhere.

There was a great issue I had with an alien VD and a cool short piece about a guy getting persistently killed and patched by this freaky soldier/nurse automaton. There was some great stuff in EPIC and I always preferred it to HEAVY METAL, actually.

jeb wrote:

There was a great issue I had with an alien VD and a cool short piece about a guy getting persistently killed and patched by this freaky soldier/nurse automaton.

That sounds like maybe Flytrap and Cholly. Yeah, they were hilarious.

There was actually a Shadowfist card based on a short feature in Epic: Johnny Badhair. He was punk dude who went all-out hand-to-hand against an oppressive coke machine.

I was kind of intrigued by the recent blog post about AT subculture. It suggested there's a shared cultural heritage, and that if you are conversant in a significant amount of it's jargon, you might properly be considered to be a part of that culture.

So, I'm going to suggest that a good part of the AT culture is familiar with Heavy Metal magazine and/or the movie from that era. In retrospect, the original HM movie isn't very good, but I liked it well enough at the time, and in any case it is iconic, sufficiently so that South Park did a spoof on it (and by my reckoning, a very good spoof).

But I'd also like to throw out there that, although Epic is less familiar, it actually had the better content. I say it's part of the cannon. That is, it "belongs" in AT, even though I wouldn't expect everyone to be as familiar with it as HM.

Chasch wrote:

Did anyone else ever used to read it?

Every issue ... well, pretty much. I missed some here and there (since filled in through the magic of eBay).

Coincidentally, I recently embarked on a re-reading tour; I'm enjoying my old favorites and picking up on some stuff I was too young for the first time around.

Overall, an excellent effort from Marvel ... if, perhaps, wildly inconsistent at times.

Johnny Badhair:

Nice catch, Shellhead!

I had piles of issues of Epic and Heavy Metal back in the day. They were both pretty formative in my development as a cartoonist and gamer (I ran a GURPS campaign that was a mashup of a dozen or so Heavy Metal stories). My favorite serialized story that bridged the two magazines, first appearing in HM before being collected by Epic Comics, was Starstruck , by Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta. Thomas Pynchon meets L. Frank Baum and Frank Herbert at the far end of the galaxy. Best science fiction comic yet written, imo.

Is that Bruce Campbell's chin there on Johnny Badhair? I collected Epic, though it's been quite a while since I've dredged them out of storage. I was always more of a Heavy Metal fan but I do remember that Starstruck series Lutes mentions. Great stuff there. One highlight with Epic, if you're interested now, is that it tends to pop up in comicbook dealers' "quarter bin" because it's often seen as a "failed marvel experiment" compared to something like Heavy Metal or one of the other more adult "comix" series. But, the comments about inconsistent quality are worth keeping in mind. You can hit a real run of complete dogs if you're buying casually/randomly.

Chasch wrote:

In retrospect, the original HM movie isn't very good [...]

Did we watch the same film?