This one's for  mkaz

I was pleasantly surprised to find an incomplete run of Mike Kazaleh's Adventures of Captain Jack while housecleaning (lost all my comics in a cross-country move years ago). This was my gateway drug into furrydom and an amazing piece of comic book storytelling. Let me tell you why.

Introduced in 1985, the series starred "Happy" Jack, captain and owner of the spaceship Glass Onion; strapping android hunk Adam Fink; diminutive schlemiel Herman Feldman and his alter ego Beezlebub ("Bub"), an invisible imp. The book is a showcase for Kazaleh's incredible sense of design, his virtuoso brush inking, and his love of the pop culture of the 1950s and '60s -- the music, movies, cars, and comics that underlie the book's zany, stream-of-consciousness gags.

The characters have their roles: Jack, inveterate gambler and con man, tries and consistently fails to make an honest dollar as a freelance space trucker; horndog Adam is the fall guy for Bub's pranks; Herman stays on everyone's good side while Bub loves to fuck shit up. Then, after four issues of cosmic pinball machines and interdimensional laundromats, things#

Issues 5 and 6 are set on an isolated rural planet, where six characters play out a chamber drama about loneliness and denial. Farmer's daughter Janet Ringtail falls in love with Herman, culminating in a sex scene that earns the comic a "mature" rating on all subsequent covers. There's a remarkable, wordless ten-page dream sequence, and Jack, for the first and only time, takes a genuinely noble action. You now get the sense that the characters, not the author, are dictating where the story goes.

I'm missing issue 7, where Janet meets Bub; issue 9, featuring Jack's cross-dressing showdown with pool hustler Saturated Fats; and issue 10, where the crew makes it back to Earth and we bid farewell to the Glass Onion. By now, the book had a passionate, hardcore fan base -- but not a large enough fan base. The final issues, set in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of (late 1980s) Detroit, are a reckoning. Jack betrays his only friends, and is effectively written out of his own comic. Nice guy Herman finally blows his top and accepts the truth about himself. A mostly wordless, fifteen-page ending has just a few, painful goodbyes for dialogue.

There's a lovely coda to the series: Critters #42 (1989) features "The Clichés of Fiction," an eighteen-page story in which Janet and Herman, dead broke, look for work and refuse to give up hope. A forty-page one shot, A*K*Q*J, followed in 1991; it gets the band back together in a quasi-medieval fantasy full of romance and corny jokes.