BURIED TREASURE | 13th Dimension, Comics, Creators, Culture

Dec04

BURIED TREASURE: Strnad and Fujitake’s DALGODA

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Dec 4, 2025

BURIED TREASURE: Strnad and Fujitake’s DALGODA

A doggone good time… By PETER STONE In the early ’80s, there was an explosion of unique comics. Some were generated through the Big Two, but many were published by a series of new comics companies like Eclipse, Comico, First Comics, Pacific Comics and the company I’m going to reference today, Fantagraphics. Love and Rockets was their first major hit, but there were plenty of others — including the seminal interview magazine The Comics Journal — but especially a standout series called Dalgoda. Written by Jan Strnad and drawn by Dennis Fujitake, Dalgoda was an eight-issue series that debuted in 1984, about an alien who traveled to Earth seeking help against an invading army. (It was followed by other appearances, as well.) Dalgoda, the main character, is a biped with the DNA of a canine. In other words, he’s a dog-man. His people have discovered an alien race who appear as a series of sentient bubbles and whose only function is to gather and disseminate information. They let the dog-people know of The Nimp, a race focused on domination. The Nimp plan to invade Dalgoda’s world — Canida — with their bloodthirsty desires, so off he goes to Earth. However, as we all know, making a deal with another society for weapons or aid can be very difficult. Despite the machinations, Dalgoda is a wonderfully simple story about an alien struggling to save his planet. He becomes fast friends with a stalwart Navy man named Posey, but political forces who don’t want to help the Canidans send killer robots and deadly cyborgs after the pair. But Dalgoda’s not a muscular, threatening canine/man who could easily defeat humans like some sort of K-9 war dog. He’s actually last in his class of astronauts, and only through an accident does he become the savior of his people. There are moments of political intrigue, but many more of touching humanity between two species. Dalgoda is a lovable hero as well as a loyal friend to Posey. Strnad, a well-known writer for decades, created a very tight and complex universe to play with. The dialogue is clear and clean, while the twists and turns are unexpected. In my mind, Dalgoda could have run for years. Space battles, betrayals, gunfights, and love stories all drift through the storyline. Fujitake’s art is heavily influenced by...

Nov11

BURIED TREASURE: Archie Goodwin’s BLAZING COMBAT — 60 Years Later

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Nov 11, 2025

BURIED TREASURE: Archie Goodwin’s BLAZING COMBAT — 60 Years Later

For VETERANS DAY… By PETER STONE Occasionally, there is a period in the comic book timeline that produces some truly exceptional work. The mid-’80s brought us Watchmen, Batman: Year One, The Killing Joke, The Dark Knight Returns, Daredevil: Born Again, Swamp Thing, Miracleman, V For Vendetta, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and The Man of Steel. The late 1940s through the 1950s gave us EC Comics with talents like Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Harvey Kurtzman, Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson and so many others. The ’60s and Jack Kirby gave us Marvel Comics. The ’70s boasted Neal Adams’ genius and the ’90s exploded with Image Comics. There was a brief moment, however — less than a year and only four issues — when some of the best (if not the very best) war comics were published, in a Warren magazine called Blazing Combat. The editor and almost sole writer was Archie Goodwin, one of the best to ever sit down at a typewriter. His stories were humanistic and focused on the personal toll that war played on a soldier instead of the shoot-em-up kind of adventure yarns. Launching 60 years ago in the summer of 1965, and published quarterly with a page count of 64 pages and a cover price of 35 cents, Blazing Combat featured easily the best stories and art being produced at the time. In many ways, the series was a spiritual descendant of EC Comics’ war books more than a decade earlier, with an incredible battery of artistic talent, including John Severin, Joe Orlando, Wally Wood, Al Williamson, Russ Heath, Frank Frazetta, Reed Crandall, Alex Toth, Gene Colan, Angelo Torres, George Evans and Gray Morrow. Heath’s “Give and Take,” written by Archie Goodwin, may be the best thing the artist ever did. While Toth, Colan, Wood, and Williamson all had their own styles, Heath took photographs for every panel, which brought a realism to the story rarely seen before. The “camera” is all over the place: When the hero is caught in a hail of gunfire, the camera is on the ground, looking up at him. He staggers, then is shot in the leg before falling to the ground, completely out of control. It’s a beautifully tragic three panels and shockingly well-drawn. If you look carefully at the faces, you might notice they’re very similar. The reason?...

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