Elephantmen #32

Written by Richard Starkings
Art by Axel Medellin

In a lot of ways, Elephantmen is the ultimate vanity project comic.  With this issue, Richard Starkings decides that it's time to do a tribute to the Conan comics he loved as a kid, so he does just that.  In fact, I think that this whole 'Man and Elephantman' arc has existed just so he could create the book-ending Elseworld-style issues.

In the comic, both Hip Flask and Ebony Hide have now experimented with the drug mirror, which causes very believable hallucinations.  When Hip did it, in the Man and Elephantman one-shot, he believed he was human, and that conceit lasted for the entire issue.  In this comic, when Ebony tries it, he envisions himself a barbarian king, who sleeps with vampires, and does battle with dragons in a desert oasis, alongside a busty woman in a chain-mail bikini named Vanya (Red Vanya?).

Because the reader already knows what's going on, this sequence does not take up the whole comic, and is instead used to move the plot forward incrementally, as Ebony's colleague LAPD Lieutenant Trench discusses his own struggle with the drug.  Behind the scenes, we learn more about the illegal ivory trade, and are introduced to a murder case that is probably going to drive the next story arc.

One could complain that this issue is wasted, story wise, but Axel Medellin's pictures are so nice, and the story is enjoyable enough that the comic still works.  In the back matter, Starking provides an excerpt from his book on lettering to show how the old Conan comics influenced his work.  I found this section very interesting, and I also enjoyed the Charley Loves Robots back-up.  Most surprising, though, was seeing that my review of Man and Elephantman was printed in the letters page.