Today in Comics History, May 26: Happy birthday, Stevie Nicks!

Born on this day: singer/songwriter Stevie Nicks, one of my favorite artists! They say women, they will come and they will go, but she is like a cat in the dark and then she is the darkness.

Stevie in the comics? Of course! Starting with this cartoon illustration:


from Boys' Life (Boy Scouts of America, September 1980), creator unknown



Stevie doesn't appear, so to speak, in Marvel's Master of Kung Fu, but she does play a major part in the life of newly-inducted MCU star Shang-Chi!. He's a fan of Fleetwood Mac, listening here to their self-titled 1976 LP!


from Master of Kung Fu #54 (Marvel, July 1977), script by Doug Moench, pencils by Jim Craig, inks by John Tartaglione, colors by Phil Rachelson, letters by Joe Rosen
(Don't nobody tell Stevie that Shang-Chi liked Christine's song best.).


Months later, after his break-up with girlfriend and BFF Leiko (not Awkwafina, 'coz she's awesome, both of them play the Mac's 1977 follow-up LP Rumours to wallow in their sadness, because the Smiths weren't invented yet.



from Master of Kung Fu #61 (Marvel, February 1978), script by Doug Moench, pencils by Jim Craig, inks by John Tartaglione, colors by Phil Rachelson, letters by Peter Iro
That's Stevie's song "Dreams" they're both playing over and over and over again. Well, better'n Dan Hill's "Sometimes When We Touch."



Shang-Chi also seems to enjoy the Mac's "The Chain." Maybe a little too much.


Now, this ain't a comic book, but it shows us how Stevie Nicks could have become Batgirl by learning these self-defense high kicks in the pages of Bob Jones's 1983 self-defense manual.


from Hands Off (Bay Books, January 1983), by Bob Jones
WHOA THOSE SHOES! Those'll take your head right off.


I bet her superheroine name is the "White-Winged Dove."


Here's Stevie in a comic strip, the mostly-forgotten The Rock Channel (1984-1985), about antics at an MTV-like music video TV channel. Those names above the strip may strike a familiar chord: Guy and Brad Gilchrest, who did the whimsical The Muppets comic strip and then burned Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy strip down to the ground so severely that Olivia Jaimes was brought in to go back to the basics. (Seriously, I loathe the Gilchrests' Nancy strips, even when they were attempting to charmlessly ape Bushmiller in art and structure.) Walker is Greg Walker, one of the many sons of Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois.

(The Stripper's Guide blog has a good overview of the strip with several more examples.) Excuse the poor quality of this image, I got it off Pinterest, which does for image search what Guy and Brad Gilchrest did for Nancy.


the from The Rock Channel (Register and Tribune Syndicate, July 17, 1984 — probably the third day of the strip's publication), by Guy and Brad Gilchrest and Greg Walker
To conclude, here's the only real comic book appearance of Ms. Nicks I could find, and it's a doozy!:



from "What Price Love?" in Peter Bagge's Other Stuff (Fantagraphics, May 2013), by Peter Bagge
I honestly did not expect that her sole comic book appearance would end with Nicks doing the standard comic plop!


Happy birthday, Stevie, and keep on rockin'!


from The Dreaming: Waking Hours #6 (DC/Black Label, March 2021); script by G. Willow Wilson; pencils, inks, and colors by Javier Rodríguez; letters by Simon Bowland