You youngsters may not know who Fred Hembeck is, but anyone over the age of 30 who’s been reading comics their entire life will recognize his name. The man responsible for destroying the Marvel Universe (pre-Millar) and warping the minds of DC Comics readers in the 70s has a monstrously huge collection of his non-denominational Dateline:@#$% strips on the way from Image this upcoming February.

Come February, 2008, Image Publishing will be gearing up to release THE NEARLY COMPLETE ESSENTIAL HEMBECK ARCHIVES OMNIBUS, featuring over 900 (!) pages of material written and drawn by cartoonist Fred Hembeck (who, in this particular instance of shameless self-promotion, is the actual individual typing in these very words), culled from the past three decades.

And all of this fun stuff will cost you (get ready) LESS THAN TWENTY FIVE BUCKS!!

(A single solitary penny less, true, but still, I’m thinking, a pretty gosh-darn good deal!…)

So, what exactly do we have to offer you in this massive volume?

Well, how about every single Dateline:@#$% strip EVER?

That’s how this whole thing started out, y’see–my old buddy (and veteran comics embellisher) Al Gordon’s suggested I put together a collection of each and every one of those old cartoons, including all the ones that had never been reprinted in a more permanent format previously. Al then proceeded to get his pal–and Image Publisher–Erik Larsen interested in the notion, and once things got rolling along, Erik encouraged me to expand the scope of the book to include a wide variety of additional material as well, some of which had never been seen before and some of which had turned up only in the most obscure of places.

You can read the entire Hembeck release here.

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