Hembeck: The Best of Dateline: @!!?# [Hembeck Series] #1

History

Fred Hembeck developed his signature 'bigfoot'-style cartoony artwork — characters drawn with distinctive curlicues at the elbows and knees — after failing to break into mainstream superhero comics fresh out of college, basing it on an illustrated-letter persona he'd used with friends. He began the 'Dateline: @!!?#' strip in late 1977, sending comedic superhero 'interview' strips to The Buyer's Guide for Comic Fandom, where they became a popular recurring feature. Eclipse Comics first collected the best of those strips in March 1979; FantaCo Enterprises — an Albany, New York comic store and mail-order operation founded by Thomas Skulan in 1978, which had just branched into publishing in 1980 — reissued the book in December 1980 with eight new pages added, launching what became a seven-volume Hembeck Series that ran through 1983.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Originally published by Eclipse Comics (March 1979); the FantaCo Enterprises edition (December 1980) is a reprint augmented with 8 new pages, making it a distinct expanded edition rather than a straight reissue.
• Collects Fred Hembeck's 'Dateline: @!!?#' satirical interview strips, which first appeared in The Buyer's Guide for Comic Fandom beginning in late 1977 and also ran in Comic Book Profiles and Comic Book Artist through 2003.
• Launched FantaCo Enterprises' Hembeck Series, a black-and-white magazine-format line that eventually comprised seven volumes (1980–1983), published by the Albany, NY shop/publisher founded by Thomas Skulan.
• Hembeck appears as a character throughout, conducting comedic 'interviews' with superheroes in his signature style — functioning as both author avatar and recurring narrator across all the strips.
• The issue's character roster spans both Marvel and DC universes plus obscure Golden and Silver Age characters (Forbush-Man, Ultra the Multi-Alien, Herbie Popnecker, Brother Voodoo, Fighting American, and many more), an unusually broad cross-publisher range for a single publication of the era.
• Firestar (Angelica Jones) is indexed as appearing in this December 1980 issue — notable because the character's animated debut on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends was 1981, making this listing a subject for further bibliographic scrutiny (see Flagged).
• All seven FantaCo Hembeck volumes, including this issue, were later reprinted in The Nearly Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus (Image Comics, May 2008), a 912-page collection with a foreword by Stan Lee.
• Hembeck's 'Dateline' strips — and this collection — served as his calling card to both DC (who featured him in their 'Daily Planet' house-ad pages, 1979–1981) and Marvel (where his strips ran regularly in Marvel Age magazine throughout the 1980s).

Cast · 40 characters

Full credits

Full plot ⚠ may contain spoilers