I bought my first issue of Paul Pope’s THB more than ten years ago. It was THB #1 v2, Pope’s midstream revamp of the first issue. I bought it because it was big, cheap, and didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before.

(THB ran five issues, then, during the gap between 5 and 6, Pope revamped 30-some pages of that first issue and re-released it. Then he published about 300 pages of other stuff, and then released THB 6 as a 4-issue suite. It was like the CAMELOT 3000 #12 of comics nobody but me and Dharbin cared about.)

As fun as the comic was, there was a... I dunno, 10 or 12 page editorial up front that was almost more remarkable. Written in 8-point script, it rambled about THB, comics, Pope's life, his reasoning behind reworking the thing... what restaurants he'd been eating at, what his girlfriend said to whom, and on and on.

It was as though Pope decided rather than wait for the rest of the world to catch up with the kind of comics scene he wanted to live, he'd just go ahead and make the books such a scene would make inevitable. I felt like, Jesus, what the hell comics have I been reading? What the hell is in the water up there in Columbus?

It was like a Bullpen Bulletin, written by one of us, somehow, selling not THOR or MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE but Diesel jeans, espresso and clove cigarettes, and going home with the wrong girl. Or the right girl. Really, just going home with a girl, pretty much any girl, was very important. And it only hinted at where Pope’s persona was going to go...

(That THB intro seems positively modest compared with the editorial content of something like GIANT SIZED THB or, my favorite, THB CIRCUS... which I took to France with me over, you know, French-English phrase-books or, y’know, maps...)

At a time when most mainstream comics were a brutal embarrassment, garishly drawn and written at subliterates, all reacting to an explosion that was, at that point, half a decade old, there came this Jagger-mouthed and Ashcroft-cheeked madman from Ohio, wearing girl’s jeans and running his own photographs and drawing goofy inkbursts and loping left-hand comics from Mars. Literally and metaphorically.

(I understand now, looking back on things and having launched a career of my own on the back of a lot of loudmouthed braggadocio and make-believe persona stuff, that there must’ve been some part of him TERRIFIED to be telling the jokes he was telling-- and I think maybe his career path sees that out as he very clearly began dialing all that stuff so far back as to turn it off for a few years now...? I dunno. Who can say?)

THB had that Velvet Underground vibe, that whole-- like, there was the explicit understanding that washed over me the first time that I was... I'd connected with something far cooler than I had any right to connect with; that this was, in fact, something bigger and better than I knew what to do with. But I'd hold it close. Pope’s let’s-play-make-believe thing as a Barnum-esque superhipster worked.

And the work itself was fucking divine.

One of my favorite moments of HeroesCon this past year came at, like, 9:32 Friday morning, as dealers and creators were setting up and greeting the first of the show's three days. Word spread that Pitzer had a something like a half-dozen PULPHOPE books, fresh from the printer, available only to earlybird friends and family.

(I suspect that, really, anyone that asked could've had a copy if he had them to sell, but making it sound like there was some kind of special exclusive friend of a friend deal going on makes me feel more special, exclusive, and friend of a friendy. So suck it.)

Anyway so there it is, along with some free Pope stickers, a 228-page slab of ego and avarice, CV as rock-poster, everything that everybody always loved or hated about Paul Pope writ gloriously, glamorously large. (The cover is HIM, slopped in INK!) Pope and Pitzer have really outdone themselves-- this book is pure sex.

(There’s a goddamn CENTERFOLD! Pope-porn x100,000.)

All the back-matter, front-matter, cover-matter, side-matter, and matter-matter that's been so woefully absent from his recent DC work is here. It's like he's been saving it all up for this massive ego-volcano. I've missed Pope-the-Dandy, Pope-the-Rock-Star, the Paul Pope that never once believed out loud in public that he wasn't making the comics he wanted to make in precisely the world he wished to be making them in.

Welcome back, art hero. Welcome home.