Dynamite's Dark Shadows: Year One condenses the 19-week television storyline into six issues and, I must admit, does a pretty good job of it, eliminating most of the meandering soap opera storytelling. It is not, however, canon. What writer Marc Andreyko and artist Guiu Vilanova have done is to take the same characters from the 1795 storyline and reshuffle them into an almost entirely new alternate vampire origin story, one that doesn't take a full 48 hours to experience in its entirety. [Similary, MPI Home Video has also condensed those same 19 weeks into a 210-minute "movie" (titled The Vampire Curse) by eliminating all sub-plots except the main one. Still, three and a half hours of unrelenting vampire plot is a lot. I watched the whole thing straight through once, but I probably never will again.] The difference between the Dark Shadows: Year One comic book and the soap opera is similar to the difference between The Walking Dead comic book and TV show (except in that case, the televised version came first). In other words, in either case, even if one is familiar with the original version, one can still experience the alternate and still be surprised.
Dark Shadows: Years One ends with Willie Loomis releasing Barnanabs Collins from his coffin in the "present day"...
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Grimm's Ghost Stories-- #13, I think-- featured a story set in Ancient China. The colourist(s) could not decide whether to use comic-book Caucasian for the characters' skin or that ridiculous lemon-yellow that so often designated Pacific Asian skin-tones in comics far longer than it should have. So character's skin-colour would change between panels, and, in at least one panel, someone had differently-coloured hands and face.
Update (#13):
Almost exclusively, the colourists did the lemon-yellow. But the shifts are there.
That character looks as if he's wearing latex gloves.
I am in the process right now of re-reading all of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon. Ming the Merciless, and all of his race (including Flash's good friend, Prince Barin) were initially colored with bright yellow skin. Believe me, the "lemon-yellow" pictured would have been a distinct improvement.) Later in the run, it becomes more human-looking.
At least Ming and company were supposed to be aliens, even if they were essentially Space Asians (an unfortunate trope that ran through pop-SF for decades, through to the original Klingons and Star Wars' Trade Federation). That bright yellow appears in several older comics to depict Asians, including the Chinese characters in the first appearance of Green Lantern.
A Chinese-Canadian friend of mine once said that he could excuse Alex Raymond, because he was the product of a racist era. But he found Lucas's Trade Federation aliens inexcusable. We should know better now.
You're right: we should know better. Not to provide an excuse for Lucas, but maybe (maybe) he was (ill-advisedly) paying "tribute" to the pulp/serial "roots" of Star Wars...?
Wait... was the Trade Federation a Chinese stereotype or a Jewish one?
I always thought that the Traders were a Japanese stereotype. Watto was the Jewish stereotype.
Ah, yes. It all comes back to me now. (I perhaps should have said "Asian" stereotype.)
Right-- Watto wasn't part of the Trade Federation, and a member of an entirely different stereotype, I mean, species.
...and then there's Jar-Jar.
I prefer to keep a lid-lid on his existence. But yeah, there was a lot of dubious racial stereotyping with the Gungans.
I'm pretty sure this is the issue of Dark Shadows I bought on vacation when I was a kid. I don't recall the comic being at my local drugstore, but I picked it up at the Paper Peddler bookshop in Avalon, NJ.
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