WORD OF WARNING, THIS IS GONNA BE LONG.
I make a point of not saying where I'm from, beyond pointing vaguely towards South America, but I want to sperg out about a local comic and that'll make my location obvious to anyone who knows it or looks into it. Still not gonna say it tho.
Anyway, there's this comic I grew up with, called Mampato by Themo Lobos, and partially by Óskar Vega. It's considered one of the of the greatest pop culture icons of the country, and its greatest comic book ever. That is, if you don't count a more famous, sometimes raunchy comic strip about a man with a bird head (which, incidentally, my grandfather was a friend of the author, and would sell him jokes for the strip), or a highly acclaimed series of European comics, written by a very famous, very deranged, multidisciplinary artist who is only half from here. But I digress.
It's about a kid who befriends an alien, who gives him a time machine in the form of a gizmo on his belt. With it, he visits the past, the future, space, history, and myth, and makes friends with many cool characters, like Ogú the caveman, or Rena the telepath from the future. It was educational and entertaining, and at times, surprisingly serious and epic. They made an animated movie about it but it fucking sucked.
Mampato has a difficult publication history. It ran from the 70's as serialized segments (of about 4 pages per issue) across irregular issues of an educational magazine of the same name, which also included many other serialized comics, some of them original, others adaptations of contemporaneous European comics, some just comic strips, etc. When the magazine ended, a short-lived spiritual successor called Ogú (after a Mampato character) continued the serializations, and after that, another magazine called Pimpín started, but didn't finish, publishing a couple stories (which would remain incomplete and eventually be published as prose with some illustrations).
Anyway, where's the sperging? Well, these magazines were very pulp, so the paper and printing quality wasn't great; not to mention they numbered in the 400s, not every issue had a Mampato segment, their educational aspect meant they had things you were meant to cut out of the magazine for school projects and such, and there wasn't a collector's culture at the time, so finding finding issues in good quality and not mangled is difficult (though some people did collect them; as a child I ended up in possession of a homemade tome, made by a friend of the family, collecting some of the storylines from the pages of the magazine). So the original publication didn't do justice to the Mampato stories.
Then came Cucalón in the 80's and 90's, a magazine that reprinted many comic series from the old magazines, in a bit higher quality, and eventually that magazine would be collected into 5 hardcover tomes. It's just the issues, but contained in a hardcover book; you could heat the glue on the spine and take them out to have them individually if you wanted, but why would you? This tome edition is how I came to read them; but to my shame I have only 4 of the 5, and the last one is unobtainable now.
BUT! Cucalón didn't collect all the existing stories.
Then, in the early 2000s, they started collecting just the Mampato stories on their own. They had several different editions, some with the original coloring, some completely recolored in beautiful watercolors, some hardcover, but they were all pretty good quality in terms of paper and printing. It was good
But they still didn't collect all the stories. Incidentally, I didn't buy any of these tomes at the time, and I greatly regret it. They're just not available anywhere anymore.
Around the 2010's, they did some new editions of these in the form of collections to sell on newspaper stands and such, but the quality was cheaper. I didn't collect those either, though out of curiosity, I've tracked a couple issues down, and yeah, not worth it.
Recently, a really cheap publisher made a deal with a newspaper, and started printing various comics, also for newspaper stands, like The Smurfs. Terrible quality, clearly printed from low res scans, shameful shit.
And of course they did it with Mampato. It's coming out now. It's trash. The quality is unacceptable. Cheap paper, shitty colors, and you can see what was on the other side of the page of the original scanned page. And yes, it's clearly printed from scans; scans that I have, because they were made by fans. I didn't participate in the digital preservation, but I've talked to the people who did. And these cunts just came and printed their scans, didn't even clean them or upscale them, they just went and sold them to people who don't know better.
AND THIS EDITION STILL WON'T INCLUDE ALL THE STORIES. The shame is that some of the stories never collected since the original magazine will be collected in this edition for the first time; and yet it won't include some of the most iconic stories, what the fuck, man. If it was shitty and complete it'd be one thing, if it was shitty and just a retread of what what collected before, that's another. But it's shitty, incomplete, and YET DOES CONTAIN MATERIAL NEVER SEEN SINCE THE MAGAZINE, FUCK!
And you know what's the worst? The insult of it? This is all about the Themo stories. I mentioned Óskar before. Well, there's some drama.
Óskar was the original author of the very first story, but Themo took over, and sometimes they'd work together. Óskar also got to do some stories on his own, for scheduling reasons, but they're considered inferior. And they are, gotta be honest, not bad but not as good as Themo's. And Óskar has a bad reputation, which he deserves, because in that original first story he straight up plagiarized art from Asterix. It's just Uderzo's art, traced into the story.
Despite that, Óskar was still an accomplished artist, and an excellent painter. Chalk it up to tight deadlines and the attitudes of the 70's: "who's gonna notice, and if they notice, what are they gonna do about it?"
Oh, right, the insult.
Themo's stories have been treated the way I said, published well but incomplete at best, absolutely mangled at worst. But (no doubt thanks to great efforts by his son) Óskar's stories got collected last year or so into these 2 beautiful, lovingly crafted hardcover volumes, complete, comprehensive, with excellent paper and print quality, gorgeous colors, even with sections dedicated to showcase other of his art pieces; just fucking luxurious. I bought them the moment I knew they existed.
And Themo gets garbage.
To be fair, and this is what prompted me to write this whole fucking novel, they just put out (and I do mean just, it was days ago as far as I can tell) an almost as high quality tome of some of the best and most iconic of Themo's Mampato stories. A beautiful (if a little old-fashioned) hardcover tome, good quality paper. But the print quality is a little less amazing. It's based on the watercolor version, which is great, but while some pages look perfect, some look a little washed out, others a little more red than they should be, and so on. Not perfect but the best effort these stories have seen in decades.
I can only hope this publishing house (which I believe is associated with Penguin, so there's some expectation of quality there) decides to keep crafting more volumes, hopefully with all the Themo stories this time.
Thank you for reading all this stupid old man bullshit, if you did.
TL;DR: classic comic from my country, has never been fully collected since the original serialized run from the 70's, every attempt has been incomplete, bad quality, incomplete bad quality, or straight up garbage.
But there's a light of hope yet.
