Meatmen, Vol. 12 [Paperback]

Publications Leyland (Author), Winston Leyland (Editor)

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Leyland Publications; 1St Edition edition (December 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0943595290
• ISBN-13: 978-0943595290
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,461,470 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Vol.12: SCI-FI Edition!, April 14, 2005

By 

Henry R. Kujawa ("The Forbidden Zone" (Camden, NJ)) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Meatmen, Vol. 12 (Paperback)

This volume of MEATMEN stands out from most for 2 reasons: it has fewer & longer features, and all have a sci-fi theme.

THE highlight of the book is "HOT PURSUIT", a 40-page opus by artist Stephen Lowther & writer Howard Stangroom (once a member of comics-a.p.a. KLORDNY). Heavy on plot, action & drama, the art is very much in the style of many 1970's Marvel comics, while having it broken into chapters was common among many early-1960's Marvels. Lowther also did both color covers, and alone his contributions would have made a terrific "Annual" in the old days.

"PROJECT EXODUS" is another epic, this one 31 pages in length, but made entirely of full-page illustrations by "Mike". I like his "clean" linework, but his distorted anatomy does little for me. The story of a future Earth about to be abandoned far outshines the visuals, and this may be the best thing I've seen from him.

"CRYOGENICS" seems to have predicted the pilot episode of FUTURAMA by quite a few years, with its hero accidentally frozen, only to awake in a very different world-- where everyone is homosexual! There's been 2 sequels so far, in Vols.15 & 19. "Farraday"'s layouts & storytelling continue to impress me, but I think he'd be better off either improving his drawing, or teaming with a better illustrator to do his stories more justice.

"MASTER OF MASTERS" is something different from "Sean", whose excellent work has appeared in Vols. 1, 2, 6, 10, 12, 14 and 16-21. This time it's all full-page illustrations, which allow much more detail than usual. As I suspected, these "pulp"-style pages originally accompanied a story serialized in LEATHERMAN'S WORKBOOKS Vols. 2-8 (many MEATMEN features are reprints that appeared elsewhere, earlier). Some of the HOTTEST art in this book, these work even without the text!

Gerald Donelan contributes 10 of his always-delightful cartoons; Jeffrey A. Krell's humorous JAYSON has an adventure on another planet; Greg Garcia's "BIG BANG" involves black holes in space; and Kurt Erichsen's "ROBOT LOVE" involves a salesman trying to turn the tide away from mechanical sex BACK to the "organic" variety.

Definitely less sex than usual this time, but absolutely readable throughout.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars To VERY Boldly Go..., November 27, 2005

By 

William H. Morgan (London, England.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Meatmen, Vol. 12 (Paperback)

This volume of the Meatmen series is arguably the strongest, in terms of story content, of the entire series, and while I may be accused of bias - in that my frequent collaborator Stephen Lowther provides much of the interiors, it isn't quite that simple; bear with me.
At the time I (under my original name of Howard Stangroom) and Stephen were commissioned to provide the chapter-work "Hot Pursuit" for Meatmen 12's "Sci-Fi Special", we'd plotted the main beats of the story, and then, after two chapters were written, personal problems prevented me from writing more of the series. Stephen really rose to the challenge, and I don't think you can see, as a reader, the problems we were having. It's still a good, fun, romp, which we approached from two different angles; Stephen was looking at it as an affectionate homage to the old Stan Lee & Jack Kirby sci-fi tales where some clean-limbed square-jawed hero takes on all manner of alien marauders, crosses the galaxy, and still gets home for tea, whereas I regarded it more in the vein of DC's Adam Strange - except the lovely Alannna this time is rather better-endowed than traditionally...
Looking at the rest of the content, though, it's not just Stephen who rose to the challenge; the pseudonymous `Mike', whose work I normally dislike, provides "Project Exodus", a quite charming and lyrical story about Mankind's final farewell to planet Earth. I'll still never be a fan of the artist's oddball perception of anatomy, but the story's easily his best so far, and effectively poignant.
`Farraday', another Meatmen regular whose contributions I usually don't care for, throws in a clever scene with a horny accountant at a cryonics depot doing a Captain America and being re-awoken in a future that's strange... but exciting. Again, the art is haphazard at best, but the dialogue's snappy and engaging.

And those are just the contribs from folks I dislike; when you get onto the good stuff, it's even better!

Sean's "Master of Masters" is a series of detailed and evocative tributes to the old sci-fi pulps, quite removed from his usual style of story; Greg Garcia's imaginative "Big Bang" has an explorer couple heading out to the event horizon for the Biggest Bang of all time; Jeff Krell's "Jayson on Planet 69" has our hapless hero's knack for sabotaging relationships used, in a bizarre way, to save a planet; Kurt Erichsen's "Robot Love" has a future games designer trying to sway the public away from automated sex and back to the good old-fashioned fleshy kind; and even the Gerard Donelan cartoon reprints are much more thematically consistent than usual.

There is less explicit sex in this volume than in many others - though there's still quite a bit, and nudity a'plenty - but there's a huge amount more content than the average, to make the reader laugh, think, and yes, sidle off to a quiet room for some "alone time".

The Stangroom & Lowther story, "Hot Pursuit" is now collected in full-colour (and featuring an extra chapter not printed in Meatmen 12 - COMPLETIST ALERT!), in the "Prime Cuts" paperback from Germany's Bruno Gmunder, also available on Amazon, but the rest of the book is still, by some margin, the most entertaining of the series, with every contributor, even the weaker ones, having considerably `raised the bar' for this volume.