NEW: Guide to Lady Death by Brian Pulido

I’m back, Crushers – and I’ve got a hellish new indie guide for Patrons of CK this Halloween! After months of adventures and misadventures too many to detail in this intro, a random YouTube stream appearance and a dig through my impressive stacks of back issues led me to dig into this much-needed guide. This indie femme fatale has over 30 years of confusing history across more than 60 in-continuity series plus dozens of pin-up issues and art books. No guide on the internet has ever explained her hellish continuity in perfect reading order… until now, thanks to my brand new Guide to Lady Death!

Guide to Lady Death

This guide is available exclusively to Patrons at this time!

If you have listened to any of my YouTube streams about comics, you know I love my 90s comics heroines – who were entirely synonymous with voluptuous cheesecake art. And, if there was one female anti-hero created in the 90s who was the utter epitome of the decade, it was Lady Death.

She has long been on my wishlist of potential hellish guides for the Halloween season. But, it wasn’t until appearing on a stream with Cliff On Comics a few weeks ago where I got into Lady Death quick drag live on camera that I was inspired to tackle her guide.

It was quite a task – no guide has taken longer to research in the 2020s except my Guide to the Green Lantern Corps!

Here’s why I ultimately decided to stubbornly dig and write a guide to this relatively little-known indie character: every single person I talk to about her assumes all of her comics are about sex.

To be fair, there’s some reasons to have that assumption besides the fact that the character has been scantily clad from the start. Her current comics are thinly-veiled softcore porn. And, she debuted as a wet dream of a serial killer, rewarding his quest for Megadeath with sex that was all in his head.

However, in the 20 years of comics between those two end-points, Lady Death was a serious bad-ass – a goddess of Hell who usurped the thrones from Lucifer himself, who traveled across dimensions and realities, who fended off multiple coups and pretenders, and who has had no less than six distinct periods of continuity each running at least two-dozen issues each.

What’s fascinating about Lady Death as a character is that her initial popularity was hard to maintain not just for the typical 90s reason of an intermittent release schedule, but because she was so darn powerful. After being introduced in the pages of Evil Ernie and garnering a pair of origin-focused mini-series, there’s definitely a sense that creator Brian Pulido never thought too far ahead of what he could do with an all-powerful Hell goddess who couldn’t set foot on Earth in the present day.

(To be fair, she was initially meant to be a figment of Evil Ernie’s imagination before she blew up on the strength of one Steven Hughes pin-up and her initial cameo appearances.)

Necessity is the mother of invention, and Lady Death’s over-powered beginnings have led to all of the most interesting developments in her comics.

First, Pulido sent her on a dimension-hopping trip to fight against other god-level threats. Then, he splintered the continuity of Chaos Comics so she occupied her own renewed version of Earth, where Len Kaminski and John Ostrander followed the Vampirella model of making her more sympathetic, vulnerable, and human.

Later, Pulido re-invented her as a less-racey medieval version, and then spun off not one but two additional continuities loosely based on her classic version, both with their own reasons to keep her off the throne of Hell and in the midst of action.

All of those comics are really fun reads. If you love characters like Vampirella or Witchblade, there are 20 years of hundreds of Lady Death comics with some genuinely fun stories and incredible artwork from Steven Hughes, Mike Deodato, Juan Jose Ryp, Marcelo Mueller, and more! I genuinely and without hesitation enjoy a lot of the mid-00s and early-10s material.

The problem is: how do you read them?

That’s a question with multiple meanings.

First, there’s the reading order.

Even if you had a perfect knowledge of which dozens of issues were pin-ups or previews with no story material, trying to read Lady Death in release order will break your brain. Series regularly overlap, sometimes across different continuities, with one-shots randomly peppered across their runs.

However, there is a clear and obvious order to read each of her eras of continuity. The problem is, no one on the internet has ever explained that correctly… until now. And, I can understand why… it took eternity to figure it all out.

Even if you have the reading order worked out, the next problem is finding the issues.

None of Lady Death prior to 2004 has been released digitally, and the majority of Lady Death prior between 1996 and 2016 isn’t collected. And, even if you think you know what individual issues to track down, they sometimes have unclear titles, volume numbers, or volume years due to her inconsistent publication history.

My Guide to Lady Death explains it all. Every issue with original story content across all six continuities in a suggested reading order.

I haven’t read every issue in this Lady Death Guide, but I read enough of them in my research to reaffirm the love I’ve always had for this character after reading just her first few mini-series back in the 90s. She’s everything I always thought she was – a tough-as-nails badass with infinite potential – and not the smutty character everyone else has suggested she has been.

(Well, at least, not until 2016. After that, all bets are off!)

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