2009: The Year without a Best-Of -- I'm not entirely certain, but I think this is the first year in all my online comics writing that I won't be posting a best-of-the-year list. I think A Drifting Life (Drawn and Quarterly) is the only book that comes immediately to mind as really deserving any kind of call-out as the year's best effort, so I do encourage you to read my review if you haven't already, and read the book for yourself, as it is quite an accomplishment.

I did read a lot of comics I liked this year -- as far as floppies go, Buffy (Dark Horse), Conan (Dark Horse), Godland (Image), Criminal (Marvel/Icon) and The Umbrella Academy all entertained me mightily, but I never seemed to find the time to write about any of them. New League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Top Shelf) by Moore and O'Neill did get my keyboard cooking, and I loved the hardcover reissues of Captain Canuck (IDW) and Alan Moore's Swamp Thing (even despite DC's monumental goof on the most important page of Vol. 1), and of course Fantagraphics continued to make life better with its ongoing Complete Peanuts collections, and their Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 1 was also one of the treasures of the year, filled with tons of the master's weird and wonky comics. (IDW's Art of Ditko also rocked my world).

I also loved but have not yet found the time to write about Top Shelf's two astonishing late-in-the-year hardcover collections, The Complete Essex County and Alec: The Years Have Pants. Two awe-inspiring bricks of great comics that should be on everyone's shelves, and both also available in more affordable softcover editions if you're so inclined.

But my absolute best entertainment of the year was not found in comics in calendar 2009; Star Trek, directed by J.J. Abrams, knocked my socks off in ways I no longer even thought possible. It recaptured the wonder of Trek in ways I haven't felt since The Next Generation's Best of Both Worlds Part One, and was so thrilling and entertaining that it even eventually won over my Trek-hating Star Wars-obsessed 14-year-old son Aaron. Him finally breaking down and watching it with me on DVD (after refusing to see it in the theater with me and truly breaking my heart just a little bit) and actually loving it was literally the best moment of my year. So thanks to J.J. Abrams, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and all involved for giving me back something very important and personal that had been missing from my life for quite a few years.

Well, I said I wasn't going to write a best-of, and technically I don't think I have, but I did want to share with you my thoughts on the year in comics (and Star Trek) as I experienced it, and there you have it. I hope you and yours are enjoying a happy and healthy holiday season, and I wish you all the best in the year ahead.

Labels: real life, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 9:18 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
AMC's The Prisoner Mini-Series -- Here's a remake I've been waiting most of my life for. I started watching Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner when it was running in late night on, I think, CBS back in the 1970s. Its rich mix of science fiction, espionage and paranoia wrapped around questions of power, control and identity made it probably my all-time favourite TV series, and a show I think is still ahead of its time some 40 years after it was first broadcast.

It's been vastly influential, echoing in forgotten series like Nowhere Man, popular ones like Lost, and probably a dozen more I could list if I thought about it for a couple of minutes.

There was simply nothing like it on TV before, and nothing ever reached its dizzying heights after; not every episode was perfect, but most were at least very good, all were interesting, and a few were transcendent in the way they involved the viewer in Number 6's struggle for individuality and freedom.

And now it's been remade as a six-episode mini-series for basic cable channel AMC. Starring Jim Caviezel as Six (the "Number" prefix has been dropped in all cases here) and Ian McKellen as Two, the mini-series is inspired by the original but does not seem to be a direct sequel or a by-the-numbers remake. New explanations for the existence of The Village are hinted at, and new shadings are added to the psychological mix, including issues of sexual identity that actually make for a thoughtful addition to the heady brew of social and political issues that the original tackled. Weird new post-Lost elements are added, some compelling (the holes that seem to be appearing in reality) and some not so much (the pigs that are touted as the solution to the holes -- yeah, you definitely have to see it to believe it).

There are some really first-rate performances here, especially from McKellen as Two (and especially Un-Two, a Leo McKern-worthy performance) and Jamie Campbell-Bower as his son, 11-22. There is a mountain of subtext in the relationship between the two, and that aspect is probably the most vital of the series.

Unfortunately, the entire endeavour is hobbled utterly by a lifeless and nuance-free lead actor in Caviezel as Six. McGoohan brought anger, passion and purpose to the original Number Six, but Caviezel brings absolutely nothing to the lead role here. He is very good at playing stunned and confused, as in when he first awakes on the edge of The Village, but I felt nothing at all for his character as he confronted Two and his schemes and conspiracies. One episode features Six recruited by Two to teach surveillance at a school in The Village, but I never felt sucked into his deals with Two in the same way one understood why Number Six would go along with Number Two's plots in the original. At no time in the entire series did I root for Six, an essential element of McGoohan's series -- one never necessarily felt his Number Six was a nice guy or even a hero, but he was always sympathetic and one always wanted to know how he was going to try to get out of whatever dilemma Number Two had thrown him into in any given episode.

The elements that comprise AMC's Prisoner remake are so close to perfect that I truly am sad that it falls so short of the mark. The cinematography is intriguing and occasionally beautiful. McKellen and Campbell-Bower give all they have to their roles. The music is fantastic. But time and again, watching all six episodes, as I continued to feel a gnawing ambivalence for the entire affair, I kept coming back to the weakness of Caviezel's performance, and also the fatal error of spending a good deal of every episode in flashbacks (or possibly forwards? The Lost influence is fairly powerful) to Six's life outside The Village. These sequences spend a lot of time on Six's alternate life as Michael, but really tell us nothing about him as a person, or why we should care that he is trapped in The Village.

Like the original, the final episode ends in metaphysics and scenes open to multiple interpretation. Unlike the original series finale, though, it is torpid and vague and lifeless and will not prompt viewers to ponder the meaning of the mythology for decades to come. Finishing the six episodes, I said to my wife "I don't know how to review this thing, other than to tell people to watch the original." Patrick McGoohan created a timeless epic that still feels fresh, unusual and relevant to our lives. AMC's remake feels like a faint echo of something meaningful, a well-intentioned effort that fails to escape the powerful shadow of its far superior inspiration.

A copy of The Prisoner was provided by the network for the purposes of review.

Labels: reviews, The Prisoner, tv

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 8:28 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 2 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Lovecraft Tales -- In many ways, the writing of H.P. Lovecraft is autobiography.

I don't mean that he believed in Cthulhu, or Nyarlathotep, or the Great Race that steals your body and casts your mind back to a vast, ancient, Cyclopean prison that serves as a library of all the knowledge of the cosmos, past, present and future. There are people who believe Lovecraft really believe in what he wrote about, or at least say they do, but that's not what I'm talking about. The writing of H.P. Lovecraft is autobiographical in exactly the same way it is resonant for me as genuinely reflective of the universe as I've experienced it. Lovecraft, born in the late 19th century but fascinated and in some ways trapped far earlier, felt the universe was far vaster than we knew, and far colder than we want to believe. Virtually every story of his, the most effective ones, especially, are grounded in the idea that we are all insignificant motes of dust in a momentary ray of light shining through a monstrous reality filled with old and illimitable powers playing out baroque scenarios our minds cannot comprehend without descending into gibbering madness.

Lovecraft's way of crafting words is very nearly viral, which is why he had such a profound effect on writers ranging from his own contemporaries, through to Alan Moore and others not yet born. Hell, I never use the words "illimitable," or "gibbering," but I bet both are to be found many times in Lovecraft Tales, a massive and entirely essential hardcover collection from The Library of America.

I bought the book somewhat on a whim, and under circumstances Lovecraft would have found familiar. He was an antiquarian, fascinated with the past and also in love with "weird fiction," which (and about which) he wrote quite eloquently and passionately. I was browsing a mammoth bookstore in New England (really, I was) when I spotted the dark, foreboding cover with the slightly eerie author photo. It seemed to raise genuine, half-remembered thrills and the promise of wonder. As I saw Lovecraft's name on it, I remembered reading some of his fiction in my very early teens. I remember gray paperback book covers with hints of distorted, mind-warping biology and rotting, dilapidated houses. "Lovecraft," I thought to myself. "I've read him before, but it was a long time ago." The volume promised to be a near-definitive collection (it's not complete, but it's completely fantastic and brilliantly edited by horror writer Peter Straub), and as I browsed the untold piles and shelves of books in this New England bookstore (all right, it was in Vermont, not Boston, or Arkham, but still, it was New England), I was (I really was!) gripped by the desire to, after all these decades, re-immerse myself in whatever dark wonders Lovecraft had led me into as little more than a child.

Digression: There is a small, dreary village half-hidden in a strange corner of Saratoga County. A hundred and thirty years ago, it was a bustling factory town. Then the factory left and the community was devastated, but the people never left. One consequence of my early immersion in Lovecraft is that every time I have heard his name in the past thirty years, I have thought of this small, lifeless village and its boarded-up windows and joyless residents and the sense that as I drive through (only to experience this feeling, for no other reason), eyes are watching me from hidden corners and behind bolted doors I dare not approach. I know now, after reading Lovecraft Tales, that this weird, recurrent experience stemmed from half-remembering the story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," with it's genetically questionable village full of the descendants of people who made a nightmarish deal with beings better left undealt with.

Reading the stories in this volume, every one a dark delight, made me realize just how deeply Lovecraft's shadowy vision is woven into the fabric of our modern fiction. He was inspired by Poe and other pre-20th century writers of strange tales, but, beginning to write his own fiction before he was even 10 years old, Lovecraft's ancient fascinations and sense of alienation combined with a sharp mind to allow him to generate, over the course of his writing career, a vast tapestry of madness and the unknown that self-refers again and again. The earliest tales here seem like avatars of ancient days, but as science and knowledge expanded rapidly in the early 20th century, Lovecraft's mind expanded with them. Quantum physics in general and relativity in particular lent his work more, not less, verisimilitude, even as greater life experience and exposure to the ideas of others seem to tamp down his earliest, most immature and frequently racist touches. The oldest stories in the book seem like stories that could have been told to (or by) precocious children by the fire in the late 18th century; more expansive (in length and ideas) stories near the end, particularly the masterworks The Shadow Out of Time and At The Mountains of Madness would not have been conceivable without Lovecraft's exploration of the then-burgeoning body of knowledge about Earth's true place in the great scheme of the cosmos. How strange, in fact, to experience this book as a whole and note the introduction, over its course, of the automobile becoming commonplace, or of Einstein being named and his theories hinted at as possible explanations for the existence of other dimensions and perverse, forbidden journeys made possible by the very different physics and thought-processes of the elder gods.

Lovecraft's work is prose. Essential, addictive prose that gripped my soul as a child and has excited and recharged my imagination as an adult. More than any other writer I've read, I think he inspired Alan Moore, though it should be noted that Moore was inspired by Lovecraft in the way Moore wishes he had inspired others: fired by Lovecraft's ideas, not slavishly devoted to imitating them; in love with Lovecraft's use of language, but not reproducing it whole and claiming it as his own. You couldn't imitate Lovecraft, after all. Not really. In the same way that Charles Schulz's depictions of his characters are nearly impossible to reproduce, Lovecraft's characters, settings and scenarios are all the unique product of his life experience. Others have played in his sandbox, but no one could ever hope to match the singular and unique voice he cultivated in his years as a writer. Lovecraft Tales is a true treasure of dark delights, and a book literally full from beginning to end with stories worth re-reading, pondering over, and hoping never, ever come true.

---

Buy Lovecraft Tales at Amazon.com.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 12:56 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Abstract Comics: The Anthology -- It seems almost beside the point to say that yes, here's a book you can judge by its cover. But other than the introduction by editor Andrei Molotiu and some notes about the individual contributions at the back, the cover image -- chaotic, mysterious, and hinting at hidden dimensions of meaning -- describes the experience of reading the book pretty succinctly.

Needless to say, one could study the art found within Abstract Comics: The Anthology (published by Fantagraphics Books) for months, or one could flip through the entire thing in five minutes, and the conclusions one could draw from either experience of the volume could easily be justified as informed and insightful. Here are hundreds of pages of inexplicable lines, colours and visions, at best open to interpretation and at worst inviting John Lennon's definition of Avant Garde, "French for bullshit."

Having now lived with it for a couple of days, I can't say I love Abstract Comics: The Anthology, but considering that it includes contributions by R. Crumb and James Kochalka, two cartoonists I hold in the highest esteem, and considering that their works are among the best-realized and most thought-provoking in the book, well, I can't dismiss it out of hand either.

Some artists challenge more than they enlighten. Alexey Sokolin's, murky, hairy panel progressions seem to emulate comics form without speaking to it. On the other hand, the images by Elijah Brubaker, Geoff Grogan and Janusz Jaworski use the panels and pages to create a sense of meaning and movement that invite multiple readings.

Just creating panels and putting stuff in them is not always successful, though -- Jason Overby does just that and the resulting images reminded me of nothing more than marginal doodles from an 11th grader's math notebook; diverting for the artist but not necessarily as rewarding for the rest of us.

Mike Getsiv's "Shapes," defines space with lines and colours inside irregular panel borders in a manner that appeals to the eye and is not wholly unsimilar to James Kochalka's stylings. Both use the tools at their disposal to suggest passion and emotion, and Getsiv's striking images are worthy of a collection all their own.

I really liked former Galaxy contributor Derik Badman's rambling, dream-like creations, too, suggesting partially obscured views into a world unseen, unknown and unknowable.

In a sense, there's a lot of art in Abstract Comics: The Anthology and almost no real comics per se. I was blown away, however, by my son's recognition of a Sentinel (a giant mutant-policing robot) from Marvel Comics' X-Men in a page by Noah Berlatsky that the artist says is abstractly based on images originally created by the late Dave Cockrum. I studied the page for quite some time and could not see a damned thing other than amorphous shapes and lines, but when I told my son (who was curious about the book I was reading) that the page I was on was originally based on the X-Men, he casually blew my mind with his comment "Oh, yeah, there's one of those giant robots, what are they called? Sentinels?"

If that isn't proof that meaning is in the eye of the beholder and that the work within Abstract Comics: The Anthology isn't absolutely open to interpretation by every single reader that encounters it, and that every opinion it generates has some validity, than I don't know what else to tell you. I still can't see a frigging Sentinel on that page.

---

Learn more at the Abstract Comics blog. Noah Berlatsky kindly provided a link to both the original Dave Cockrum page and his own abstract interpretation of it, which you can see here.

Labels: art, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 10:43 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 2 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Glourious -- This started off as just a link, but I discovered, hell, I have something to say.

The link: Jog takes along, nuanced and well-written look at Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.

Now, I don't agree with Jog's overall assessment of the film, finding it much more successful than he does at what it wants to do, but there's no denying he explains his reasons for seeing the film as he does very well indeed, and that's why I'm linking to it. You should see the movie, then read his review. I went Friday night, because I have had enough of a blast at every Tarantino film I've ever seen that I need to see him on opening night.

I'd need to see Inglourious Basterds again at least once (and I will) in order to really coagulate my feelings about it in any sort of detail; but I think I'm with Roger Ebert on this one. Tarantino's brass balls never clanged louder for me than while I was watching this movie, and I thought he'd already hit that peak with Death Proof, which I realize some people disliked but I thought was a brilliant summation of QT's love of moviemaking.

Inglourious Basterds is far ballsier, and its most amazing scenes -- the opening life-or-death poker game between a French dairy farmer and a Jew-hunting Nazi, or the face in the smoke, or, Jesus, that David Bowie scene, holy shit! -- they're all better than anything Tarantino has ever committed to film before, and who the hell thought that was still possible after Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown?

So, I respect Jog's views and I enjoyed reading his thoughts (always do), but I absorbed Inglourious Basterds more the way Ebert did, like a force of nature. If a tornado lifts you up into the air, you don't argue with it about gravity, man, you just go along for the ride. That's what I did Friday night, another unforgettable night at the movies courtesy of Quentin Tarantino, who has given me more than any other director in my lifetime.

Labels: movies, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 7:31 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Stitches -- In this autobiography, David Small's family members are bleak and nasty in ways Chris Ware never thought of, scarring Small (literally and metaphorically) for life in ways that would have sent Jimmy Corrigan off a rooftop.

For reasons we never entirely know (because Small himself only gets hints after his childhood is over), his mother and father are critical, mean-spirited people who seem to provide the bare minimum of physical necessities to him as a child, and far less of what any child needs emotionally. Dinner time is a thinly-veiled battlefield, and the next crushing blow to his psyche is always one misstep away.

There's no getting around the fact that Small's parents do monstrous things to him, either with the best of intentions or out of their own selfish needs and inadequacies as human beings. Despite that, the parents (the mother, especially) is given a bit of three-dimensionality through what Small eventually learns of her life, and if the information he shares is scant, it's no less real for its resonance with the way we learn about our parents in shadowy vignettes that never quite reconcile into a whole human being we can understand, relate to, or even like.

There's a narrative symmetry here that would seem forced and unreal if this were fiction, but the role Small's father's career ultimately plays in the events of the author's life become more terrifying the more you think about how easily any parent could make the same mistakes in some other, modern manner.

The novel is like a map of a destroyed adult's inner child, which makes it slightly miraculous that Small is a successful children's book author and apparently is happily married. He somehow rose above the horrific events of his life to make a better path for himself, and I suppose Stitches could be seen as a cautionary tale, when it's not being seen as a compelling life story or emotionally ravaging autobiography.

Small's art is urgent and elegant, with echoes of Frank Santoro's Storeyville scene-setting in some spots, and hints of the frenzied line of Jules Feiffer in the more emotional passages.

The places Small takes us in Stitches are not fun; the tension is high and the mysteries are many. The cruelty that defined his early life will stay with you long after you finish the story, but the true wonder is that David Small lived and thrived enough to bring his story out into the world. It demands to be read and reflected upon, and if you're a parent, I warn you: you'll never think the same way about your responsibilities after seeing how Small's parents handled theirs.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:43 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 2 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Casanova, Fraction, Moon and Ba -- Warning, this is a ramble, not a review, no matter what the tag says.

Almost done reading through the 14 issues of Casanova now. Two complete storylines, #1-7 exquisitely drawn by Gabriel Ba, #8-14 well-drawn but not exquisite, by Ba's twin brother Fabio Moon. The first arc reads like a cross between Steranko and Ellis's Nextwave: Agents of HATE. The second arc is dirtier, the art kind of Eisner/TenNapel-like; the comparison is Ba is Jaime to Moon's Mario.

The narrative is packed; they're 16-page issues like Fell, and like Fell feel longer. Reading the back matter (what we used to call "text pages," which actually I think there are far too few of these days) Fraction is a little too full of himself, but not quite to the Brian Wood degree. His website, on the other hand, is worse than fucking useless. Better to have none at all than the one he has.

Anyway, the comics are better than good, less than great. The first arc is the keeper. Gabriel Ba is pretty much The Shit. Casanova #1-7 and all of The Umbrella Academy's two minis are some of the most gorgeously drawn genre comics I've seen in some time.

All my exploration of the Moon/Ba axis came out of reading their pretty great Comics Journal interview in the most recent issue. I love it when an interview is so well-done that it convinces me to sample writers and artists whose work I haven't read before.

Fraction seems to have been co-opted by Marvel for the time being, so who knows if there'll be more Casanova in the near future. I'm sure they'll say there's more in the works, but lucrative trademark maintenance always trumps groovy creator-owned comics, right?

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 10:09 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 11 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Uptight #3 -- This comic book made me nuts. Go look at the info and ordering page at the Fantagraphics website. Look how goddamned beautiful that cover is. Jordan Crane is selling prints at his website. Gorgeous.

That cover illustrates the first part of a new story Crane is working on, "Vicissitude," and Holy Jesus it is one of the best stories I've read this year. I'm a tough sell when it comes to out-and-out fiction in comics, but the unbelievably compelling artwork totally drew me into this fantastic story.

Then it ends after just a few pages -- a satisfying start, to be sure -- and the rest of the issue (right to the back cover) is concerned with the characters from Crane's great graphic novel The Clouds Above.

But I don't want that, I want more "Vicissitude." And I apologize for being so unreasonable, but damn if that cover and those first few, tantalizing pages aren't like some new, more addictive form of crack cocaine you ingest through your eyeballs. By looking at this comic book.

God DAMN, I want more "Vicissitude."

Don't let another day go by without making sure you're getting Uptight #3.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:55 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 4 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Captain Canuck -- I can remember finding my first issue of Canadian superhero series Captain Canuck (probably #9) on the stands of a 7/11 in St. Augustine, Florida at the time of its original publication (1978 or '79). It looked like the superhero comics I was used to, but it wasn't published by DC, Marvel or Charlton, the three publishers I was used to buying superhero comics from at that time.

The art, by George Freeman (colours by Claude St. Aubin), was gorgeous and dynamic, if not quite as polished as what I expected from artists like John Byrne, George Perez or Gil Kane. But what it lacked in polish it made up for in enthusiasm.

IDW has published a hardcover collection of issues #4-10 (the first half of the Freeman era, basically -- earlier issues were drawn by creator Richard Comely, who also does some art in this collection, but not much), and it is spectacular. In the introduction, Comely says that he was able to scan the original art for the re-release, and I can believe it -- only the covers look like they were shot from the actual comics and not the art itself. The reproduction throughout is extraordinary, given the age of the material, and the paper stock and presentation are ideal for this sort of project.

The stories are about as I remember them -- energetic, Canada-centric (that's a good thing, mind you) and with very engaging and promising art by Freeman and vivid, way-ahead-of-their-time colouring by St. Aubin (Comely talks a little about the colour process in his introduction).

I was lucky enough to score a copy for less than ten bucks on eBay, but even at full, $24.95 cover price, this book is a no-brainer for anyone interested at all in the history of superhero comics and especially the momentous, oddball era in which Captain Canuck was originally released, the same era in which Elfquest, Cerebus and The First Kingdom were also blazing their own trails. I'm thrilled to have these stories in my possession again, and I'm salivating over how good this Freeman/St. Aubin art looks. Congratulations, and thanks, to IDW and the creators for bringing this material back to light, and I look very much forward to the next volume.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 2:41 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 2 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Star Trek -- For a long time it seemed we had lost Star Trek in a slow leaching off of what made the original 1966 series special. From the high points of its second life (Wrath of Khan; the TNG episodes Best of Both Worlds Parts One and Two) it was all an agonizingly slow downward spiral. The series finale of TNG was a great, emotionally satisfying tribute to the unlikely success of the first sequel series, but instead of leading into a brilliant new movie era featuring Picard and company, it was the last real gasp of creative honesty in the 1990s for "the franchise."

Generations had an awesome opening 15 minutes followed by tedium, bad writing and the worst mistake in Trek history, the ham-fisted death of James T. Kirk. Not that Kirk necessarily shouldn't have died on-screen, but the unconscionably bad writing of his death scene (and the even worse writing of the earlier draft, available for viewing on the Generations DVD) should have been a signal to all involved that they had traveled far down the wrong road and needed to rethink the entire journey.

Despite that, director Jonathan Frakes managed to make the next cinematic outing, First Contact, into a fun adventure movie that demonstrated moments of genuine wit and human insight (mostly in the Cochrane storyline; the Picard-as-Ahab metaphor is as heavy-handed and tedious as any Roddenberry conceit one could name). The less said about Insurrection and especially Nemesis, the better. The latter was literally the worst Star Trek entertainment ever produced, with less creative spark and more embarrassing moments than the worst of the Gold Key comic book series. And like Generations, it goes not boldly but wrong-headedly down the same stupid path of creative immolation by killing off Data, probably Roddenberry's last great contribution to Star Trek entire.

And oh, the other sequel series; Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise all have something to offer despite their enormous flaws (Colm Meaney's acting, the Holographic Doctor and all of Season Four, respectively), but compared to the '66 and '87 iterations of Trek, they demonstrate the slow death of an idea. In 1964, when Roddenberry conceived the series that would be refined and redefined by the other writers brought in (Fontana, Ellison, and dozens more), the series was about exploring both space and what it means to be human and alive. By the time Voyager launched, Star Trek had literally become a series about Star Trek. Enterprise grew a pair in its final season, but by then the fact that the franchise had been in the wrong hands for many years was crystal clear. Berman, Pillar, and the rest were the bad guys as far as I was concerned. They had taken away Star Trek and replaced it with a very poor substitute.

And now J.J. Abrams and company have given it back.

I don't remember how Roger Ebert justified his 2.5 star review, and I don't care enough to go look and grab a link. You're good with the Google and I trust you to know if you need to see for yourself. But for me, the new Star Trek is 3.5 to 4 stars of greatness from beginning to end. It has everything I love about the '66 series, from laughs and melodrama to the costumes and pageantry of Starfleet as a vision of the best humanity (and other races) have to offer.

Is it perfect? No. The performances of the actors playing Sulu, Chekov and (yes) Scotty all wander over territory ranging from cipher to parody, even if their individual charms still won me over. Does the plot make sense? Is the science sound? Probably not. Is that really Spock, though, being played by Zachary Quinto? Is Chris Pine really Kirk? Hell, is Bruce Greenwood really Captain Christopher Pike? Yes, yes, and much to my amazement, yes.

Is it too shiny? Yes, the lens flares are a distraction and will look as goofy in ten years as the ones in Ellis and Hitch's Authority comics do now. But the passion with which this story is told, and the little character moments that pepper it throughout, feel more true to the essence of what the original series accomplished than any moment of Trek since The Wrath of Khan first reminded us that Star Trek was fucking loaded with the potential for great storytelling, hammy actors and bad special effects be damned.

Leonard Nimoy's first scene as Spock is astonishingly well-acted, drawing upon the actor's 45 years of experience playing the character. Quinto makes Spock his own, but at no time does the new version feel discordant with Nimoy's lifetime of contributions to the canon. The moment when Spock materializes on the transporter pad and realizes what he has lost on Vulcan is one of the most powerful in the character's history, twisting some of the most beloved moments of the original series into a new form and setting the character on a new path. And it never feels like anything other than honestly-won drama that works on every level.

Chris Pine completely inhabits the ideal of Kirk as a character and as a legend-in-training. He doesn't feel like a Luke Skywalker-type Hero with One of a Thousand Faces, but rather he comes across powerfully as a new, divergent path for the character Shatner portrayed for decades, struggling to get where we know he belongs, on the bridge of that ship. And Pike is a special case for me: I have been obsessed with the original pilot's captain (and actor Jeffrey Hunter's performance) for over thirty years. The first time I saw The Menagerie (the episode that wove footage from the original, Kirkless pilot with a new Kirk/Spock story), I was fascinated by the idea that the ship had had another captain before Kirk, and even more riveted by the question of what the series could have been like with Pike, not Kirk, at the helm. Bruce Greenwood does an amazing job of making Pike his own, and having a new story on film involving this great, semi-lost Trek character feels to me something very much like a gift.

The movie throbs. It shines and sparkles and shakes with energy and movement. It propels you through its story and leaves you so, so ready for more Star Trek. Personally, I want to see more of the world Nimoy's Spock comes to this movie from (see the IDW comic book prequel Countdown for a hint), but if all we ever get is more of this new type of Star Trek, I'll be very happy. It's a brave new canvas Abrams and company have created, and Trek hasn't felt so filled with potential since Spock's coffin landed on the Genesis Planet all those years ago. For the first time in a long time I am asking the essential storytelling question, what happens next?

I can't wait to find out.

Labels: reviews, star trek

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:14 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 10 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
A Drifting Life -- I finished Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life yesterday, and have been wrestling with what to say about it.

I really, really enjoyed reading it, but there's almost no extraordinary moments in it at all for me to point to. Virtually the entirety of the narrative is concerned with Tatsumi's transformation from a fan to a professional comics creator and the development of his own offshoot of Manga, a genre he dubbed Gekiga ("dramatic pictures.").

In the few moments where the book is about something else, it is either Tatsumi's sometimes tense and difficult relationship with his brother, or more fascinatingly and frustratingly, a couple of truly weird sequences in which we get a glimpse of the author's awkward sexual awakening. I would have loved to learn whether Tatsumi's timid, shame-faced encounters are culturally based or came out of his own upbringing and point of view. I suspect the former, but we never find out and once the minor thread is dropped, it is never even hinted at again.

A Drifting Life's title really does define what it is about, and I realize that telling you that it's 800 pages of passivity that is really interesting to read seems like a left-handed endorsement, but it's not intended that way at all. Tatsumi has an enormous canvas upon which to paint his life story, and he uses it well. It's broken up into discreet chapters, which makes it easier to tackle from a reader's perspective, but don't come into it expecting shocking moments or artistic revelations. There is an epic feel, but its effect is cumulative rather than something that sweeps you along through the author's personal history.

Tatsumi is one hell of a draftsman, and his depictions of life in Japan are amazing to see, and give one a tactile sense of the life he has experienced. So the fact that the book really does drift, that Tatsumi has no grand statement to make (except perhaps at the very end), is not a criticism at all, merely an observation; perhaps a suitably passive one to match the author's viewpoint for much of the story told here.

As a reader born in North America and steeped in its mostly intellectually arrested comics-creating traditions, I guess I am programmed to look for the grand point, the big theme. So I admit that I spent much of my time reading A Drifting Life in perhaps the wrong mindset. Either because of a lack of knowledge of what came after the point the story stops, or maybe even differences in cultural cues I should have picked up on, the book really does feel like it just stops rather than reaching any real kind of climax or conclusion.

There's a moment of, let's say, energy near the end, followed by a strange epilogue and a final panel and statement that were more baffling than anything else. And yet despite that, I am glad I read it and think anyone interested in Manga, Tatsumi or artcomix should read A Drifting Life and will likely find it rewarding and enriching, as I did. It's possible an interview with Tatsumi (as his other works released by Drawn and Quarterly have included) might have provided better context with which to comprehend and absorb what Tatsumi shows us (and for that I highly recommend Jog's review), but you know what? It's his life, and this is how he wanted us to learn about it. It drifts, but it is profoundly worthwhile, and you ought to read it.

Buy A Drifting Life from amazon.com.

Labels: manga, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:57 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Who Botches The Watchmen? -- Anyone who's stopped in here a time or two knows I love and respect Roger Ebert's writing a great deal, so I find myself in the somewhat unusual position of siding with comics critics like Tom Spurgeon and Tim O'Neil in not really much liking the film adaptation of Watchmen, while Ebert loved the film so much he has already written about it twice, once in a formal review and again in his more personal online journal.

Watchmen is a graphic novel I hold in pretty high regard, despite the oft-mentioned weakness of its ending, somewhat analogous to the ultimate revelation of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane: both works are so entertaining, engrossing and (most importantly) formally ambitious that they represented paradigm shifts for their respective artforms, film for the better, comics usually for the worse. When I interviewed Alan Moore a few years ago for an NPR-affiliated Public Radio station, he mentioned that he felt somewhat responsible for the dire turn superhero comics made in the wake of Watchmen. To be certain, that phenomenon is not Moore's responsibility, no matter how much he regrets the end result of the book's influence. Director Zack Snyder, like all the awful superhero comics writers that have aped Moore's superhero masterwork, sees the surface but barely comprehends the underlying complexity. More urgently, Watchmen's imitators in comics can create all the dark, grim, moody, crappy murder mysteries they want -- from Meltzer to Straczynski, from Johns to Bendis, none of the superhero writers who've tried to tap that vein have ever demonstrated even a tenth as much understanding of the medium of comics as Moore possesses, or a hundredth of his imagination.

Snyder's film is virtually all about grabbing the facile elements of the book and pretending to be much better than it ultimately is, kind of like an eight year old dressing up in Dad's clothes. They don't fit well and the kid can't figure out how to tie a tie, but at least the shirt's on top and the pants aren't backwards.

Which is to say, as I did on Twitter immediately after seeing the film, "Sort of like a live action trailer for the book. OK, but doesn't capture the beauty of Moore and Gibbons's collaboration." Many moments were fun to see up on the screen, like Rorschach and his end-is-nigh sign, or Rorschach eating Dan's beans, or Rorschach...well, you get my point. I did think the actor playing Dan did a great job of conveying the innate schlubbiness of the character, but the choice of going supercool-Matrixy with the costumes instead of staying true to the material cuts the guts out of one of the main themes of the story, that putting on a costume doesn't changes your essential nature, as much as you might want it to. Just as, I guess, getting the job of turning Watchmen the graphic novel into Watchmen the motion picture into a movie doesn't mean you'll necessarily get it right, as much as you and a million nerds might want you to.

Someone said that the movie is probably the best adaptation that could have been made from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's work, and that might actually be true. But the point only serves to highlight the stone-cold fact that, as a movie, Watchmen is most of all irrelevant. The book represents a high-water mark for creative ambition in its native medium, an achievement unlikely to ever be matched or exceeded, especially in the superhero genre. The movie represents two hours I spent one Saturday in a theater, and nothing more. If Snyder wanted to translate a few cool scenes from the comic book onto the big screen, well, he did that. If he wanted to demonstrate why people still read, analyze and adore the comic book 25 years after its debut, he could not have failed more completely.

Labels: movies, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 3:00 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 4 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The Saga of the Swamp Thing Book One HC -- I've been patiently waiting for the beginning of the "archival" hardcovers of Alan Moore, Steve Bissette and John Totleben's Swamp Thing to hit stores, and now they have. I picked up the first volume Friday night after work, and was amused/disgusted to note that the slimmer-by-half All-Star Superman Vol. 2 hardcover -- which I also picked up -- weighs about twice as much. If you see the Swamp Thing book, pick it up and I think you'll be amazed at how little heft it has. DC went for the el cheapo newsprint-style paper stock on this, similar to the stock used for the Jack Kirby's Fourth World volumes.

Now, I guess it's slightly less galling here, because the Swamp Thing book, at $24.99, is half the price of the Kirby volumes. But when compared to the heavy, nigh-ideal white paper stock Marvel used for its recent Daredevil: Born Again hardcover, well, DC looks pretty cheesy. Fact of the matter is, this Swamp Thing series should be the ideal presentation of some of the best comic books ever published (Swamp Thing is in the same league as Alan Moore's other great works like Miracleman, Watchmen and the cream of the America's Best Comics titles, if not quite in the greatest-graphic-novel-ever territory of From Hell), and this shitty, easily-damaged paper stock is quite at odds with the meant-to-be-elegant design of the book itself.

The dustcover is also an odd case. It has the tacky feeling of not-quite-dry paint, and I kept checking my fingers to see if the black was coming off the book and onto me. The actual cover art is simple but quite nice, a (new, I believe) profile shot of Swampy by Bissette and Totleben.

Strange that the essay Alan Moore wrote for the trade paperback collection of this material is replaced by a new essay by Swamp Thing co-creator Len Wein. Deliberate slap at Moore, nice gesture to Wein, or maybe Moore's essay is no longer timely? I haven't checked yet to see. It is definitely a good thing that for the first time, DC is including Moore's actual first issue of Swamp Thing, #20's "Loose Ends." It may tie up the previous storyline, but it's integral to where Moore went with #21's "The Anatomy Lesson," and has nice art by Dan Day to boot.

The presentation here is far from perfect, as I've noted, but these are vital comics that anyone with an interest in the artform should own, read and even study. Moore was discovering a lot of his own processes in this run, and if his prose runs more to the purple than it does in his work of the last decade or so, it is also lyrical, poetic, and richly entwined with the art it accompanies. I wish DC had bothered to do it better, but I suppose it's a miracle they did it at all, and I'm more grateful than not to have the book on my shelves. If only it could be joined by a hardcover collection of Moore's Miracleman...

Buy The Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book One from amazon.com.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 7:21 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 8 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910 -- Well, golly, it's good to have a new Alan Moore comic book in my hands at last. Better still to have that comic book be in the form of a new issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which with artist Kevin O'Neill's wonky, angular visual contributions is among the finest works in Moore's oeuvre.

At one point in this first chapter of "Century," a planned three-part series in the LOEG saga, Mina Murray says "Do you know, for the first time in my life, I feel stupid." Moore's visceral, brilliant use of language often leaves me feeling the same way; my first try reading his extraordinary prose novel Voice of the Fire, for example, left me feeling quite dumb and inadequate. When I revisited it with a couple of years more life experience, I found it a breathtaking, wild ride through history and the power of the imagination to change the world. I've said this before, but if you find an Alan Moore story unrewarding, the chances are very, very good that it's you that is the problem, not Moore's writing. He's always been ahead of his time, and the impact of that can be quite disorienting.

I felt a bit of this effect early on in the story, because it's obvious that Moore uses many, many references to historical and fictional people and events, and in such a breakneck manner that I sometimes feel overwhelmed by just how much information is being processed in any given panel, on any given page. But no matter how many references, in-jokes and allusions you do or do not pick up on, there's no question that no more baroque and diverse intelligence has ever written for comics, and after years of mistreatment and abuse by DC and Marvel, frankly we're lucky to have him writing any comics for any company at all. Better still, he's now writing them for Top Shelf Productions, known for visionary projects and extraordinary production values.

Being out from under DC's corporate thuggery allows Moore and O'Neill wide latitude to ply their trade as they truly see fit, so the language and violence found in this story are ramped up a bit from what came before in this series. LOEG was never children's fare, but Moore and O'Neill both seem a little freer in their imaginings than previous volumes might have suggested. The overall effect is one of added maturity, narrative depth and creative freedom. Additionally, using Bertolt Brecht lyrics throughout establishes a brutal Greek Chorus effect that culminates in a disastrously marvelous conclusion to the issue, and one that, despite the story being set a century in the past, seems devastatingly current in its observations and implications for our modern world. I doubt very much this is coincidence.

Like the previous release in this series, The Black Dossier, LOEG: Century 1910 feels like a departure from what went before. Some familiar faces are present, at least for a time, but some are gone and some are changed from how we last saw them. There's an exciting sense that the world Moore and O'Neill have created is a living thing, ever moving away from its own past and its own status quo, and speaking as someone who likes his comic books to reflect actual life experience rather than emotionally stunted fantasy, I find this element quite satisfying. It's good to catch up with old friends, but far more rewarding to share new adventures with them than stagnantly reflecting on old victories. No one feels safe or comfortable in Century 1910, and there's a feeling that anything can happen. New characters and ideas, like The Prisoner of London and a certain sea captain's righteously vengeful daughter, infuse the story with a power and immediacy that makes the long wait for this new release well worth while. LOEG: Century 1910 is everything this series has led you to expect: Fast-paced, visually dense and wildly imaginative. It feels to me like having comics back again, in all their unkempt glory. The League is back, and so are Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. I haven't read anything better so far this year, and I urge you to lose yourself once more in this extraordinary series.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910 will be released in April, 2009 by Top Shelf Productions.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 2:47 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 1 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Jumbly Junkery #6 -- The latest mini-comic from L. Nichols comes as a refreshing reminder that whatever the state of the economy, or whatever Diamond Distributors tries to do to limit the market to junk superhero funnybooks, artists compelled to make great comics will continue to make them.

As I mentioned in my review of Jumbly Junkery #4, Nichols trades mainly in observational and autobiographical storytelling, a genre that when well-done (as it is when practiced by Nichols) is as addictive as heroin to me. Nichols starts off the issue with a one-page observational strip about a cat who loves boxes, and if it's a minor note on which to enter the issue, it brings a smile of recognition at the bizarre behaviour our pets indulge in and refuse to explain.

Another brilliant-rendered one-pager then gives way to the show-stopper of this issue, "Quantum." Mining somewhat of the same territory as the sci-fi shorts Dash Shaw has been creating in Mome of late, Nichols depicts a time-traveler who has seen a future where science has cracked the very secret of the human soul and used it to facilitate true love in all its myriad forms and allow people of all types to find their true calling in life. "Quantum" is loaded with subtext and resonance for anyone willing to see it, a piece of perfectly-realized fiction laying bare its authors real-life hopes and dreams. It ends with a wondrously realized comment on choosing to create art and what it means.


There's tons more good comics in here, other one-pagers and a longer piece called "Stasis" that is arresting in the empathy it creates for a stranger who may or may not be all alone in the world. Nichols at her best has a way of reaching very deep into herself to show the reader the world we all share, and "Stasis" asks us to just think about that world for a minute.

The drawing throughout Jumbly Junkery is outstanding, thick and thin lines meeting at the place where art meets the real world, gloriously chunky in spots and spare and silent in others. Nichols in one hell of an artist and a gifted young cartoonist, and you should be following her stuff. She creates some of the most rewarding and delightful comics being published today, and the economy and Diamond's half-assed monopoly be damned. You want to see the future of comics? It's Jumbly Junkery and all the other passionate comics waiting to be found out there, created not because they might create a revenue stream, but because their creators have to make comics.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 8:34 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For -- Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For is the manner in which cartoonist Alison Bechdel presents dozens of sexually and racially diverse characters as nothing special at all, just everyday average people. And among this large and fascinating group of individuals, all of whom are breathtakingly individual and startlingly human, Bechdel never seems to play favourites. Mo seems to me to most closely reflect her creator's sensibilities (not to mention appearance), but no one is ever really celebrated in the narrative as being any wiser, or better, or more perfect than any other. It's almost like they were all created equal, or something.

Bechdel is perhaps better known these days for her rightly-celebrated graphic novel Fun Home, which after all garnered "Book of the Year" honours
from Time Magazine, without so much as being afflicted with a "Graphic Novel Category" distinction. And make no mistake, Fun Home was just that good.

And damn if The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For might not be even better. Dykes has an advantage bestowed by time: Bechdel has been working on the strip for over twenty years, and she knows her characters, all of them, inside and out.

There are hundreds of strips reproduced in this absolutely essential collection, and while Bechdel picks and chooses (not every strip is reprinted, although most seem to be), each page, representing one strip, has its own purpose, pacing and impact. Cumulatively, the end result is a knock-out blast of amazingly well-told stories and well-constructed characters. Collected all under one cover, it's a vastly rewarding tapestry that reveals itself over time, as in the minor flirtations that surface from time to time, only to blow up into life-altering passions. Just like in real life, see?

I took great delight in how Bechdel organically imbues the strip and its characters with a political consciousness. Whether examining the equal marriage rights some of her characters struggle for, or skewering the hypocritical relationship between NPR and some of its largest corporate underwriters, Bechdel convincingly and smoothly imparts a sense that both she and her characters live not only on the world, but in it. Their political awareness, and their frustration at the slowness of changes over time, jibes precisely with the world as I have experienced it over the past two decades. Not all the characters are progressives, though. Some want merely to live their lives in peace and relative anonymity, and one, Cynthia, wants to forward a conservative agenda even as she begins to live her life as a young lesbian adult. Bechdel plays fair with virtually every point of view in the book, and it's all the more readable for that virtue. Some of the characters may hit people over the head with their beliefs, but Bechdel is far more subtle.

The twenty-year arc of the collection also allows for the full breadth of human experience. While some of the women herein remain hardcore in their devotion to their sexual orientation, others find fulfillment in a wide range of partners and experiences. It's almost impossible to imagine a reader -- any reader -- not finding people they know within the pages of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, and recognizing the all-too-human weaknesses, zealotry and flaws that we all contain within us. Dykes is a vastly entertaining work, but it's also a humanizing and reassuring one. Whatever your orientation, whatever your beliefs, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For presents you with real people and challenges you to find them anything less than human. God help you if you can't find joy, love and compassion within these pages. And God help us all.

Buy The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For from amazon.com.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 1:25 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
JLA Deluxe Vol. 1 -- The Justice League as a concept was worn out and creatively bankrupt at the time Grant Morrison and Howard Porter came along and reinvigorated the series, starting with a new #1 and the simple idea of bringing back the original seven team members, which seemed novel at the time simply because it had been so long since anyone had done so.

"Novel" is what Grant Morrison is about, at his best, and he brings just enough of his imagination to the party to make these stories vibrate with nervous energy. Nostalgia for the simpler time these seven characters represent is not invoked by the creators, but perhaps imbued by readers familiar with their earlier eras. Morrison first throws weird, even somewhat perverse opponents at the League in the first storyline, and re-reading the stories in this new collection I was struck by how cleverly he managed to both hide their true identities and make it obvious in retrospect. Clues abound, but they come so quickly that they're easy to miss. Of course these issues blew readers' minds: Morrison was actually trying to create good and inventive stories, something rarely done with the JLA.

The best story in the book comes in the standalone fifth chapter, reprinting the series' fifth issue. "Tomorrow Woman" tells the tale of a mysterious new heroine who joins the League to battle against an implacable, unstoppable foe. She comes at a time when help is sorely needed, but she has a secret. The secret is kept from the JLA, but not from us, and Morrison has some fun with the true villains of the piece. Their final line is priceless, and as close to nostalgia (the poison in the well of most present-day superhero comics) as Morrison's scripts ever get.

Artist Howard Porter is a fascinating conundrum to me. His work here is awkward, static and oftentimes outright unappealing, when considered apart from Morrison's words. Morrison is a writer whose work, from Animal Man to New X-Men to the current Final Crisis is often compromised by the presence of less-than-ideal artistic choices. On the surface you might think Porter would qualify for that description; the two chapters here drawn by Oscar Jimenez are clearly visually superior. But somehow they lack the urgency and sense of modernity that Porter brings to the other stories in the book. Howard Porter, somehow, was the perfect choice for Morrison's JLA, and a decade on these stories still, in their own paradoxical way, look exciting and fresh despite Porter's deficits as artist qua artist.

The biggest compromises, then, in JLA Deluxe Vol. 1 are not artistic. Rather, they are the same compromises that plague corporate superhero comics year after year.

As the book begins, Superman has long hair and his traditional blue, red and yellow costume. Why does he have long hair? A few chapters later, he is made of electricity and is blue and white. Not just his costume, his entire body. Morrison does some hand-waving with a line like "We live in interesting times," but only longtime readers like myself will even remember the reason for this and other strange differences from the current DC Universe. Why is Green Arrow so young? Why does Green Lantern have a crab on his face? Later on, in chapters in future volumes in this series, Wonder Woman's mom will take over for her for a while. Wonder Woman's mom.

It's not that these inconsistencies, all born out of "big events" happening in other titles at the time these stories originally saw print, hurt Morrison and Porter's narrative. Morrison is a strong enough writer that these tales hold up despite the compromises forced on the creative team. But it's a good example of why series like Morrison and Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman seem so much more inventive and timeless. Writers and artists should be free to tell the stories they want to tell, in the way they want to tell them. Having to dump The Electric Superman or Wonder Woman's Mom into the middle of your otherwise meticulously-planned narrative really looks kinda stupid ten years later when your stories are collected in a deluxe hardcover.

Despite all that, though, these are JLA comics that deserve the upscale treatment. They are as close as you'll get in printed comics to the creative heights reached by the Justice League animated series, which is the very best use of these characters in any medium (and highly recommended if you've never watched the series). Morrison and Porter's run on JLA (it should take another three or four volumes to reprint the entire series) was a blast, and it actually gets better from here, with storylines bringing back The Injustice League and, oh, the end of the universe, if you haven't heard. It gets much wilder from here, but this first volume lays a strong foundation for what is to come, with unpredictable adventures that make good use of some of the most well-known superheroes in the world.

Buy JLA Deluxe Vol. 1 from amazon.com.

Labels: corporate comics, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 3:39 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 5 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The Black Glove -- The three issues comprising "The Black Glove" storyline by Grant Morrison and JH Williams are three of the best issues of Batman since, at least, Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli cranked out Batman: Year One fifteen or twenty years ago.

Over the course of the three issues, Morrison and Williams play with Batman's decades-long mythology, creating an eerie and nuanced murder mystery that is visually stunning, the equal -- perhaps even superior -- to Williams's work on Promethea with writer Alan Moore. "The Black Glove" as a story is pure superhero comic book magic.

Unfortunately, DC turned what could have been an elegant hardcover collection into a massive failure by padding it out with four thematically dissonant and visually incompetent issues (another storyline entirely) drawn by Tony Daniel. It sounds like sour grapes, but having paid real money for the book (half the cover price, yes, thank you Borders Bucks, but still, some of my cash was involved in the transaction), I'd like to spend the rest of this review telling you how I would have preferred DC to present the good material from this volume:

* Option #1: Ideally, The Black Glove's three sublime issues would have been presented in a standalone hardcover, preferably oversized, anywhere between the dimensions of the new deluxe JLA hardcovers and Kramers Ergot #7 would be fine with me. Thicker paper, a sketchbook section, interviews and essays could have padded it out if the three issues worth of material weren't enough.

* Option #2: Less ideally, the second half-plus of the book (which were wasted on the Daniel-drawn issues) could have been blank. "Draw your own sequel!" That would have been less desirable than Option #1, but still preferable to what we got.

Well, I'm out of options. Most important to note, though, is this: I would have been much happier paying full price for this volume if it just contained the Williams-drawn Black Glove story-arc and nothing else. It would have been a better value for the money. Pairing it up, as DC does here, with the four-issue Daniel-drawn storyline implies quite strongly that not only are these two stories thematically compatible, but roughly equal in quality. They are neither. "The Black Glove" is superb superhero storytelling, among the best things Morrison has ever written, or Williams has ever drawn. The other stuff -- over half the book, I'm very sorry to say -- is perhaps competently written, but drawn by an artist -- Tony Daniel -- who can draw a comic book but has yet to demonstrate the slightest bit of artistry in anything I have ever seen him draw. Note, for example, a panel in which someone has the barrel of what is supposed to be a gun pressed against their head; the "barrel" is a generically-drawn cylinder resembling a Thermos more than the barrel of a gun.

In sum, JH Williams is an artist working in comics, who always gives more than is required by any assignment he receives. Daniel is a subpar superhero illustrator whose work suggests a lack of artistic training or inspiration, and whose inclusion in what could have been a prestigious and elegant volume results, rather, in an infuriating and narratively incoherent overall package. If no other point gets through here, at least know that I seriously thought about whether the book would be improved by using an X-Acto knife to slice out Daniel's pages. The fact that that thought seriously spent time in my mind is what caused me to write this review.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 7:37 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 8 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Solanin -- "Every band has its story, I suppose." So says Meiko Inoue, the lead character in Inio Asano's Solanin. Substitute "family" or "group of friends" for "band" in that quote, and you begin to see how universal Solanin is, as it tracks the lives of the members of the band, their dreams and hopes, and where those dreams and hopes intersect with everyday reality.

The universal sophistry of youth is its belief in its own invincibility, and at least some of the members of the band possess that in spades. Coupled with the restlessness of people in their early-to-mid 20s, you can see how a group like this would be drawn together by their common love of making music. Whatever it is that brings people together, there's almost always forces aligning to force them apart, and of course those forces are at work in Solanin. The bittersweet tone of much of the book comes from where those opposing forces -- coming together and falling away from each other -- collide in the smallest moments of their lives. Meiko is living with her boyfriend Taneda, who is really the glue that holds the band together. The domestic scenes of their relationship ring familiar and true, as does the vague need for something else -- for more -- that threatens to dissolve their relationship.

The bulk of this 400-page graphic novel (part of Viz's Signature series) is the story of Meiko and Taneda and how they relate to and inspire the rest of the band members, but my single favourite moment in the entire story is an almost superfluous vignette involving the drummer, Rip. His day job is clerk at a pharmacy, and almost every day he deals with an elderly man who mistakenly thinks a frog statue in front of the store is a mailbox. The one chapter about the two of them brings enormous humanity and nuance to the story. Even if Rip doesn't get another moment to shine like he does in this one brief incident, that's okay. What we get in this little glimpse into his character is more than enough.


"Every band has its story," Meiko supposes, and at its heart Solanin is about Meiko coming to grips with her own story, and re-writing the band's. In its themes of aimlessness and looming maturity, Solanin certainly echoes Bryan O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim, and will appeal to readers who enjoy that series (like me). But Asano's approach is entirely different from O'Malley's, with meticulous images of the streets of Tokyo, and occasionally arresting glimpses into Meiko's secret heart. Solanin is about dreams, and life, and trying to bring the two together into a whole tapestry. In some places, Meiko succeeds. In some, she fails. The joy is found in-between, in the quiet moments Asano shows us that make up her life. Where she's been, and where she hopes to go in the future.

Buy Solanin from Amazon.com.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 6:43 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Nicolas -- On the day that I found out my mother had died, I remember shedding a tear or two in disbelieving sadness that came nowhere near touching the center of my being. Months later, lying in bed at night with my wife, we were debating the pros and cons of moving into a bigger apartment now that our second child was on its way. A fleeting thought appeared, like quicksilver through my mind, that I should call my mom and ask her what she thought of the idea. That thought was quickly followed by a freight train of grief reminding me that she was dead, and most crushingly of all, I would never get to ask her advice about anything again, ever. I still catch myself momentarily thinking her still alive, from time to time. The same with my beloved cat Spot, who was put to sleep around the same time. It's almost impossible to truly teach your brain that they are gone.

My older brother died a few weeks ago. Upon finding it out, I felt next to nothing. A strange sense of my own aging and mortality, but my memories of the man are so few and far between that grief has yet to well up inside me, and I doubt it ever will.

We are all unique in our responses to death, but we are all the same in the fact that we must experience the deaths of those we know. Slowly, in our youth, but as the years pile into decades, there are more and more names. I think of Jerry Shepard, a radio sales executive who I often describe as "the only man I ever knew." Raoul Vezina, a gifted cartoonist who also manned the cash register at FantaCo, the greatest comic book store in my personal memory. I never really knew him, but I was in awe of him, and I know that the grief caused by his death is still felt by his friends all these decades later. John Hart, a country music DJ who once helped me change a tire in 20-degree below zero weather. So many lost relationships, so many names.

Nicolas is the name of Pascal Girard's younger brother. Nicolas died very, very young, and because it happened so quickly, Pascal never got to say goodbye, and has lived with the fact of his brother's absence ever since. Pascal Girard's grief does not seem typical, as he maps it out over the course of the graphic novel that bears his lost brother's name, but it does seem unique and all his own.

Here are Pascal and Nicolas fooling around with a cassette recorder. A small moment's entertainment, one I remember doing myself with my own brother. But it becomes huge in Pascal's memory, a gift from the past that helps him process the ongoing grief that will always be a part of him.

Girard's style is simple and to the point, in the way of Jeffrey Brown's cartooning, with stylistic nods to names as diverse as Schulz and Kochalka. It's a basic and appealing visual narrative that is also open and airy, where Brown can sometimes seem closed and claustrophobic. Girard uses borderless panels much the same way Chester Brown does, and that's another positive connection. Brown, Kochalka and Schulz are all imminently readable cartoonists, and so is Girard. No trick layouts or dazzling technique get in the way of what he wants to tell you: What he has learned about coming to grips with loss, sometimes with selfishness and arrogance, and sometimes with silence and, finally, wisdom.

Wisdom is the ultimate lesson that death has for those who open themselves up to it. The wisdom to accept that death touches us all, and the widom to accept that we all not only can, but must, come to grips with it in our own way. Girard does so with humour and a bracing honesty that makes Nicolas a treasure to experience.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 7:51 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 4 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Ghost World Special Edition -- Speaking of his landmark graphic novel, creator Dan Clowes says "It is the only I've been involved with that is ever discussed as its own thing, on its own terms, without mention of a creator -- to such an extent, in fact, that I've come at times to question my own existence." All who create fiction should aspire to generate such powerful icons as Enid and Rebecca, the lead characters of Ghost World, although Clowes's frank admission of how it feels is rightly unsettling.

Look, Ghost World is one of the most vividly realized and compelling graphic novels yet created. Clowes has done more complex (David Boring) and more inventive (Ice Haven) works, to be sure. But Ghost World's perfect storm of tortured entitlement and lost horizons captured a moment in amber, and that moment is as wonderfully revisited with every re-reading as it was viscerally experienced upon first ever cracking open its pages.

That is to say, few works in comics form are so deserving of the sort of presentation Fantagraphics gives Ghost World in this special edition. Enid and Rebecca's relationship and its slow dissolution remains a wondrous and funny and heartbreaking story that is beautifully constructed and never takes a wrong step. It is so well-structured and compellingly crafted that it inspired a film great in its own right that doesn't even find particular value in sticking to the details of the original story.

The book and the film remain two of the greatest joys in my life, and this new hardcover special edition is a great summation and celebration of all that has gone before: you'll find the original graphic novel, plus the screenplay, and seemingly every single piece of art that Clowes ever created for anything relating to Ghost World, including CD inserts, advertisements, dolls, and other merchandising offshoots.

Because Enid and Rebecca inspire such interest and passion to those who experience their story (in any medium), it seems somehow right to assemble for their fans every document and piece of evidence relating to their existence within the pages of this book. Moreover, though, it seems to me a paradoxically personal attempt by creator Dan Clowes to somehow reclaim these two girls, these portions of his personality that he gave to create this work, to somehow find a way to wrap his own brain around the phenomenon that came from his giving Ghost World to all of us. In a way, the Special Edition gives Ghost World back to Dan Clowes, and as such it's a perfect book for those of us who love this story, and a perfect gift of acknowledgment and thanks to its own creator.

Buy Ghost World: The Special Edition from Amazon.com.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 8:38 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The Alcoholic -- There's a feeling of rote recitation at work in this new graphic novel written by Jonathan Ames and illustrated by Dead Haspiel; "My name is Jonothan A. and I'm an alcoholic," the narrative starts off, and from there Ames tells his (presumably autobiographical and sometimes non-linear) story of a life made sometimes bearable, sometimes horrific, by drinking.

The story is frustratingly well-structured; the seams of Ames's technique are at times distressingly visible, like the ratty sportcoat a drunk might wear to an AA meeting. The whole thing feels like an AA meeting, in fact, except one that goes on for hours and only features a single speaker. All that is moderately redeemed by the fact that at least Ames spins a good yarn, and uses that skill to create some amusing scenes.

His relationships with his childhood best friend and his great aunt loom largest in the tale, although a late-in-life love affair also provides some insight into Ames's psychopathology. At the root of it all is an American man who has trouble navigating relationships and finds it easier to numb the pain with drugs and alcohol. There's nothing out of the ordinary about that at all, really, and Ames and cartoonist Dean Haspiel (who delivers the same solid cartooning here that he did for Harvey Pekar's The Quitter) really don't ever make a case for this story being particularly special or unique.
At times Ames seems like a wounded child, at others a narcissistic jerk. Mix the two, add some booze, and there you have, well, almost every adult male I have ever known. Ames has some modest skill with words and does manage to make The Alcoholic hold together as a narrative, but the total effect feels more like an Afterschool Special than I am sure the creators intended. The Alcoholic aspires to art, but never quite reaches that level, and its indeterminate ending ending suggests either the verisimilitude of life, or the arrogance of lessons unlearned, depending on how charitable you might feel as you turn to the final page.

Buy The Alcoholic from Amazon.com.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 8:17 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Abandoned Cars -- Tim Lane's fascination with what he calls "The Great American Mythological Drama," comes along at the perfect time, the beginning of the end of the automobile era. The title Abandoned Cars couldn't be more resonant. I abandoned mine three years ago, although I still rely on my wife's for trips of any length. The arrival of the peak oil phenomena and gasoline prices unthinkable to comfortably numb Americans has begun to make Lane's title truer than it would have been even a year ago. Have you noticed how many more people are bicycling or hoofing it these days? Lane's romanticism for American Mythology, therefore, arrives at just the right time.

My childhood memories of family trips smell of cheap diesel fuel at roadside truck stops. They're painted in the gaudy primary colours of worn-out convenience stores, and there's a peeling South of the Border bumper sticker slapped on them. I can't remember the address of the first house I lived in, but I can vividly remember the day my parents (and dozens of other drivers) bought bad gas on a highway in the south and had their vehicles break down less than a mile from the gas station. Lane would have liked to draw the sight of all those inconvenienced Americans bewildered by their suddenly disabled motor cars. Turns out there was water in the gas. The gas station's parent company ended up buying my parents (and dozens of other drivers) new cars rather than replacing the destroyed engines in all those, well, abandoned cars.

Abandoned Cars is a thrilling collection of short stories infused with the elements of Lane's obsession: Elvis, old cars, beat-up diners and sleazy bars. Lost loves, hobos, boxcars and crushing regret. Almost-pretty girls using every drop of their sexual power for the brief season they possess (and are possessed by) it. The book is flanked by haunting duel images: Skinny Brando and Fat Brando; no more evocative summation of the American Catastrophe is needed, or even possible. Lane's America has gone to seed. Its better days are far behind it, a promise that seemed always on the horizon until one day we noticed it was long, long past. Irretrievable; gone, baby.

Lane's strongest visual influence is Charles Burns, but you'll find a little Daniel G. Clowes in the way he sets a scene with detailed portraiture. Burns and Clowes both are quintessential chroniclers of America's losers and victims, and so Lane's evocation of their styles seems a good fit. He owns what he's doing, here, though, building on his influences and allowing his themes to suffuse both his words and pictures. There's a little bit of the feel of EC Comics to Abandoned Cars, too, like Jack Kamen could have turned something like this out, if he really had anything of his own to say in his comics work instead of merely illustrating Gaines and Feldstein's ideas. I can't help but think that if Harvey Kurtzman had been at the top of his creative power right now instead of when he was editing Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, he would have admired the hell out of Tim Lane's work and dedication to a single subject.

The game is up and America is fucked, and although we've known it was coming for years, the moment now is obviously and undeniably upon us like a hurricane on the gulf coast, or a sub-prime meltdown on the housing market. Abandoned Cars shows us both the appeal of, and the monumental fraud at, the heart of the now-ending American era. At one point, in one of these stories, one of Lane's characters longs to "Jump a train -- any train moving." Lane takes us back to a time when it was still possible to do that, before our current era when the trains, and planes, and automobiles are all coming to a halt and the options are running out. But unlike the news media, he knows it's a false romanticism and that all the chips have long ago been cashed in. As the same character later realizes, "Maybe I've had it all wrong...the wrong idea about everything." In these two sequences, Lane sums up the entirety of the American experience. If only our leaders spent as much time pondering the powerful myth and tragic errors of our nation.

Buy Abandoned Cars by Tim Lane from Amazon.com.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 3:53 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard -- There will not be a more inventive or funnier comic book released in calendar year 2008 than The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard by Eddie Campbell and Dan Best, published by First Second. And by "calendar year 2008," of course, I mean, "The 21st Century."

Holy hell, Eddie Campbell still has the ability to surprise me, and does so on almost every page here, defying my expectations for this work and making me laugh out loud quite a few times.

Monsieur Leotard is a fraud, first and foremost, but a most sincere and earnest one, who is bade farewell by his dying uncle's last, unfinished wish, "May nothing occur -- " which fails to come true again and again in the most astonishing, breathtaking manner over the book's 128 pages. Campbell, who writes and draws, and Best, who wrote some too, demonstrate that a deep literacy and love of language and history can stand side by side on the page with a boundless sense of humour, willing to make any joke, no matter how silly or profane, as long as it is funny. Take, for example, the saga of the bearded pirate, which winds its way through the story and ultimately -- well, that would spoil it for you. Instead, contemplate the brilliant cameo appearance from one of Campbell's most noted co-creations, as Monsieur Leotard crosses over Crisis-style with -- no, goddamnit, I won't spoil that either.

If you love great comics of almost any genre -- and The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard sits comfortably within most of them -- you will love this book. You will love rediscovering the joy of a wild adventure comic that you can't stop reading. You will love laughing at each inevitable change of fortune that makes Leotard's life so amazing, so remarkable. If you've ever loved any Eddie Campbell work, from the Alec stories to From Hell and everything else he's done, you will love once again letting Eddie (and Dan Best) take hold of your consciousness and imagination and turn them inside out and upside down on the wildest ride you'll find in comics this year, and very probably this century.

Buy The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard from Amazon.com.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 6:48 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The Red Star: Sword of Lies #3 -- I remember reading the original Red Star trade paperback collection years ago; if I recall correctly, it was published then by Image Comics. It's not anymore, now it's published by Archangel Studios, which both forgets to put a price anywhere on this comic book, and lists the publisher's city of residence in the indicia as "North Hollywood, Clifornia."

Because this is the third issue of a series apparently recounting "the origin story of the Red Star saga," I am late to the proceedings, having not read anything since that initial collection many years ago. I remember that it contained many full-page images of people and machinery, the people shouting, or grim, and the machinery large. Having read this new issue, I recall now that at least some of the machines use human souls as fuel. I don't believe there's such a thing as a soul, distinct from our earthbound biology, so already my baloney detector is going off. The people still seem grim. There are ghosts, and a Darth Vader-like guy who tears someone's soul out of them. I guess that would be bad, in the same way it was bad for Austin Powers when Dr. Evil stole his mojo. (See what I did there? I don't believe in mojo, either; actually, I believe people possess mojo more easily than I believe they possess an immortal soul, so, Austin Powers 1, Red Star: Sword of Lies #3 0, I suppose.)

(And no, at no time in thinking about writing this review did I think at all about Austin Powers, it just organically developed out of the writing process.)

Coming in to the universe of The Red Star this late in the game, with little interest in the previously established stories and even less in the origin of how they got there, I have to confess that clearly The Red Star: Sword of Lies #3 is not the funnybook for me. I feel a little bad about that because A) A lot of effort clearly goes into the creation of these very serious and portentous comic books and B) The woman at Archangel Studios who asked me to review this issue was both very nice about asking and very prompt in making sure it arrived at my house in a timely manner. But like someone with no interest or background in Freemasonry walking into a ceremony for experienced devotees of that tradition, I have no idea what is happening and can only note that everyone involved seems very committed to their work, although no one seems to be devoting any time whatsoever to making sure outsiders can understand or appreciate what is going on.

So, if like me you come into The Red Star: Sword of Lies #3 with no recent experience of the series, here is what you will find:

* Large machines that apparently use human souls as their fuel. I suppose this is a metaphor for the effect of Soviet governance on its people.

* A sequence involving stolen liquor that I think is supposed to be both funny and sad. Upon reflection, it recalls Captain Kirk calling down to Scotty in engineering on the original Star Trek, more than anything. Scotty liked a good, stiff drink, and was an engineer, and talked to his captain over the intercom, just like you see here. The engineer even looks a bit like mid-period Scotty with his big, gray mustache. And fondness for liquor.

* Someone being operated on in an operating room with one panel that looks like Alex Ross, the rest like full-colour manga.

* Soviet-style soldiers standing stoically in the snow.I suppose this is a metaphor for Soviet soldiers, who often had to stand in the snow being stoic.

* A guy who looks and acts like Darth Vader, or maybe Baron Karza.

* A lot of unmemorable and static painted-looking art.

* A giant red lady with a sword. She seems regretful, or resigned, or determined.

* Two people kissing. The girl seems not to have any nostrils.

The Red Star seems to be some sort of sci-fi pastiche/homage to the days of the Soviet Union. I have no idea if prime mover Christian Gossett was born there, or if his family is from there, or if he just thinks soviet-style costumes and saying "Komrade" a lot are just super-cool. From the available evidence, it could be any of those things, but there's so little to go on that I am forced to guess. I am sure one could craft brilliant historical fiction or historically-informed science fiction based in some way on the events or legends of Eastern Europe and its peoples. The Red Star: Sword of Lies in no way reflects that possibility. I apologize if Mr. Gossett has a genuine, profound and/or personal interest in the Soviet era, its people or symbols. If he does, I wish any of that translated to these comic books, which seem overblown, self-important, impenetrable, and deadly dull.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:50 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The Dark Nihilist -- The new Batman movie The Dark Knight works on a number of levels -- as a superhero movie, it makes almost all that came before, from Superman to X-Men and everything else, including its own predecessor, Batman Begins, seem hopelessly juvenile. As filmed adventure/fantasy fiction, it is as compelling and ambitious as some of the better superhero(y) movies of the past few decades, including The Matrix and Dark City.

Unlike most cape-based films, it works as a movie, with an epic scope and fantastic sequences firmly, even boldly grounded by its attention to character and genuinely first-rate acting by Morgan Freeman, Christian Bale, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Aaron Eckhart and especially, the very heart of the movie, Heath Ledger as the first, full-on believable Joker, a thing never before seen on film, and rarely seen in the comics. You want to spend time with this Joker the way you wanted to spend time with Hannibal in The Silence of the Lambs or Dexter on Dexter, or Vic Mackey on The Shield. They're mad, they're murderous, they're the life of the party with lampshade-on-head and razor blade in hand.

And because of Ledger's fully-committed, fearless willingness to explore the both the depths of nihilism and the heights of anarchy, the movie works as a nuanced and powerful commentary on the state of our world right now. Make no mistake about it, Ledger's Joker is both living terror and living terrorism, the manic, horrific spirit of the 9/11 bombers skull-fucking Hannibal Lecter in hell after their 72 virgins failed to show up as expected. The Dark Knight's Joker may very well have infected Ledger's soul and driven him to an early end; as "The War on Terror" has shown America the gaping hole at the center of its vapid, self-destructive militaristic-consumerist ideals, so too does Ledger's cheap, terrible and unknowable clown drive his enemies -- Batman and all of Gotham's would-be knights, from Jim Gordon and the tragic Harvey Dent to the very everyman on the street (in a marvelously constructed sequence involving game theory set on two boats, one filled with "good people," the other filled with hardcore criminals) to the very edge of their own personal ethics and beyond. "Any Gotham resident who sacrifices freedom for personal safety," it might be said "deserves The Joker."

Yes, more than anything, The Dark Knight speaks directly, violently to our post-9/11 world of paranoia and sacrificed liberties. Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox is every compromised American as he lets Bruce Wayne convince him to invade the privacy of literally every citizen in Gotham in his fevered zeal to bring down his enemy. Sure, Bruce Wayne means well when he abuses and misuses the technology at his disposal to battle the terror that is waging war against him; the Bush administration claims it means well, too, when it engages in illegal wiretaps and surveillance of a compliant and complicit populace. Batman means well when he tortures The Joker for information; he's trying to save the love of his life, freedom and the safety of us all. See also Jack Bauer. See also, America. What's left of it.

Heath Ledger goes dark like Chris Carter's Millennium or Trent Reznor's The Downward Spiral went dark. Down deep, shuffling and giggling and picking scabs and demanding all in his quest for nothing, for nihilism, for lost hope and bad jokes and shaggy dog stories by way of Dog Day Afternoon; call it Shaggy Dog Day Afternoon and there you have The Dark Knight. Watch it and you'll see what I mean.

The movie is about heroism like Bush's war is about righteousness; the fact is, both are about arrogance and mindless violence pretending to be about greed and torture and terror. Ultimately The Dark Knight is only about the black, empty hole inside Heath Ledger's Joker like The War on Terror is only about the black, empty hole inside George W. Bush and his fellow war criminals. And that is why the movie, and the war, fail on an epic level.

Both are filled with murder and mayhem and good guys and bad guys and supposed good guys who act bad and very, very bad guys who suppose they are good. The failure of Bush's war is obvious and needs no explanation; it has literally destroyed the US and Iraq and thus is a perfect storm of nihilism disguised as imperialistic idealism. The movie's failure is less distinct and comes, actually, very late in the proceedings. At the exact moment Batman leaves The Joker hanging instead of cutting his throat and letting him die, the movie betrays itself and its own dedication to exploring the darkest holes we all contain. The Silence of the Lambs was an artistic success because Hannibal not only got away at the end, but got away and obviously was going to eat his own nemesis, Dr. Chilton, for dinner. Think back to the glee you took as the camera pulled back to show Chilton being followed into a crowd by Hannibal, breezy and as determined as a lion stalking his prey, his bloody, frenzied victory never in doubt.

No wonder Ledger couldn't live with what he had created; obviously neither could Warner Bros., Christopher Nolan or the people who go to see this movie. The truth of it is too much to live with, and so Batman lets the Joker live and it all falls apart. It's a marvelous, invigorating ride to the very end, but in failing to succumb to the fact that all we've seen leads only to one, dead-end conclusion and yet does not, the movie ultimately falls flat and fails to embrace its own themes and fails to answer truthfully the questions it asks. The prisoners on one boat and the innocent on the other prove the value of humanity in their final choices, and the end of The Dark Knight by all rights and very obviously should have proved and justified the death wish of Ledger's Joker by allowing Batman to take his revenge and murder the clown; it would have been fitting revenge for the death of Rachel Dawes; it would have guaranteed a safer Gotham City; it would have shown Batman his true face and his true purpose. The Joker would have found it the funniest joke of all, but because Nolan and Batman fuck up the punchline, The Dark Knight fails to be the pinnacle of art being true to itself and its own inner logic.

It's a wild and imminently watchable ride. I just wish it had the courage of its convictions.

Labels: movies, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 2:20 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 3 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Ralph Snart Adventures #1 -- Ralph Snart has apparently been around since 1986, but this is my first exposure to the character, and I hope, my last. I'm stunned to see in the ads in the back that there are multiple trade paperback collections of earlier stories. Is there a possibility that those stories are somehow more nuanced than the overblown, one-note vapidity I found in this issue? Is it possible that people actually love this stuff enough to spend money on it? Repeatedly?

Marc Hansen is a serviceable enough cartoonist with a style somewhat reminiscent of Evan Dorkin. But this issue contains not one joke I found funny, or one sequence I found entertaining, or one panel that held my attention. Ralph is a stupid alcoholic who becomes famous (on "UTOOB," which is as sophisticated as the yocks get here, folks) and goes to Hollywood and drinks and goes to jail and becomes someone's bitch. Ralph says "I'm your bitch, aren't I?" His cellmate responds, "Yeah, pretty much." At one point Ralph observes "My butt itches." Hey, if that sounds TEH AWESOME to you, go buy some Ralph Snart Comics.

Ralph Snart Adventures #1 is all hysterics, all the knobs set to 11, apparently intended to be satire, but with no wit and really not even an apparent target; society at large, I guess. Waterboarding is mentioned on the back cover, as if at the last minute Hansen decided to get political and topical, but it's a throwaway reference in a comic that, at my house anyway, actually will be thrown away.

I don't mean to be a prick, and if this character has fans, they're free to enjoy all the Snart they can get with my blessing. But I am about as far from the target audience for this comic as it is possible to imagine.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 4:59 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 10 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 

Femme Noir: The Dark City Diaries #1 -- I was about 2/3rds of the way through this issue when I realized I was having the same kind of fun I have when I read a new issue of Brubaker and Phillips's Criminal. That's entirely because of the creative team. Writer Christopher Mills, whose Gravedigger a few years back also grabbed me with its hard-boiled noir stylings, is here paired with Joe Staton, who is at the very top of his game in depicting the Eisnerian rain-soaked streets of Port Nocturne, home to the mysterious and vengeful Femme Noir.

This first issue involves the question of who, exactly, the blond crimefighter actually is, and if I again invoke Eisner and The Spirit, it's only in the very best sense. Femme Noir herself could be any one of three suspects, each one given a powerful origin story while moving the plot along nicely. Like Eisner, Mills and Staton create a completely believable environment as a backdrop for their sometimes dark, sometimes pulpy morality plays. The rain is a brutal, oppressive force of nature that hammers down on the guilty and the innocent alike, never playing favourites, soaking the city in a palpably wet and unforgiving atmosphere.

Joe Staton has been a favourite artist of mine since I first saw his work in E-Man in the mid-1970s. If you only know him from work for DC like Scooby Doo, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the dramatic staging and level of detail he brings to Femme Noir, with help from inker Horacio Ottolini. From the inner chambers of a gangster's mansion to a filthy warehouse populated by card-playing hoods, Staton brings Mills's story vividly to life, and colourist Melissa Kaercher gets the muted palette just exactly right -- not the murky browns and grays so much comic art is swallowed whole by these days, but a sensitive and thoughtful application of downbeat colours that are effectively offset by highlights in the rain, or the eerie green glow of a lunatic scientist's "super-science invention right out of a dime pulp magazine." I knew Staton had this sort of work in him -- parts of E-Man were incredibly dark for the time and the intended audience, but it's great to see him working in this style again. He hasn't lost a thing, and in fact his style seems more bold and confident than ever, the very opposite of photo-realistic, but altogether thrilling to immerse yourself in as a reader.

I can't tell you how many comics I've read in the past ten years that have tried and failed to achieve the sort of storytelling and atmosphere that Femme Noir gets just right. It's about as good as crime comics get these days, fine competition for my other favourite crime comic Criminal, with the added bonus that its tone and style are completely different. The Spirit may provide a bit of the inspiration for this series, but Mills and Staton take that inspiration and make something both new and familiar, something gorgeous to look at and wildly entertaining to read.

---

More information is available at the Femme Noir website.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 7:31 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 3 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
American Splendor Season 2 #4 -- Latecomers to the world of independent and autobiographical comics could be forgiven for thinking that being in its "second season" means American Splendor is a relatively new comic. DC/Vertigo began publishing Harvey Pekar's everyman autobio series in the wake of the brilliant American Splendor movie, but rest assured, Harvey's been doing this for decades, and his writing is as sharp and insightful as ever.

I first read American Splendor in the late 1970s or very early 1980s, back when Harvey was publishing the title himself while he toiled in his day job filing at a VA hospital. That era provided him with plenty of stories about the weird and wacky people he encountered every day, but latter-day Harvey has retired from that job (as seen at the end of the film), and his comics these days often involve his daily routine, his health, and the people he meets as a result of the interest in the man and his writing that followed the movie's release.

These Vertigo issues (of which there are now eight, four each in two "seasons") don't have the same rough-hewn, streets-of-Cleveland feel to them that his earliest efforts did. Harvey's settled down and happily married, now, and while the artists chosen to illustrate his scripts these days generally don't have the brilliant artistry R. Crumb brought to the earliest issues, they do generally all tell his stories well and occasionally add genuine artistry to the proceedings, as with the story in this issue drawn by Rick Geary, one of the artform's greatest living cartoonists.

Transmetropolitan's Darick Robertson draws a story in this issue, his style actually fitting quite well with Pekar's story; it's one of those familiar tales where Harvey makes a small mistake with big consequences and is bailed out by unexpected decency and humanity from a stranger. Unlike his work on Transmet or The Boys, Robertson actually brings a real and welcome underground vibe to the tale, which could easily have fit in any one of the first half-dozen issues of Harvey's original, self-published comic books.

I should mention that this really is a great issue of American Splendor not just for longtime readers, but also for anyone new to the series (or the genre of autobiography) and wondering what it's all about. In an unusual narrative choice for this series, the entire issue is kind of a "concept album," with different artists (among them Ty Templeton and Dean Haspiel, in addition to the ones already mentioned) taking on different chapters, but one idea holding the entire thing together. Being Harvey Pekar, the high concept is nothing out-of-this-world, just a thoughtful writer applying an idea to his art and seeing it through with pleasing and entertaining results.

Being "only" a writer, Pekar has never really been acknowledged as a superstar of alternative comics, although most people with even a passing interest in the artform have certainly heard his name or sampled his work in some way by now. But his choices of collaborators have always been intriguing and wise, and his entire body of work is one that should be respected, explored and enjoyed. This issue is a fine example of why.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 9:02 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 2 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Lucky Vol. 2 #2 -- Gabrielle Bell seems to open up a lot more in this latest issue of her mostly autobiographical series than she did in the collected Lucky Vol. 1, which I reviewed a couple of years ago. Bell's character even admits at one point that she doesn't "feel interested in anything...[doesn't] feel engaged in anything." This is an improvement over that Lucky collection (both it and this series are published by Drawn and Quarterly), in which Bell's character at times seemed disinterested and unengaged and didn't seem to know it. Even this small admission lets the reader into her world, making this issue seem more vital and interesting, as Bell recounts her days on the road in the Pacific Northwest, and at home in Brooklyn.

The standout story takes place in Brooklyn, as Bell brings her laptop into the shop for repair. Learning she has to leave it there for two days, she feels the powerful pangs of internet withdrawal, which leads to some genuinely insightful self-examination and some universally applicable observations about why some people feel the constant need to check their email for new messages: "So I've concluded that what I'm really looking for is love and money," she says, and she makes a good case. Bell's visual mapping of her MySpace experience is both funny and brilliantly to-the-point.

Bell's cartooning consists of almost exclusively medium-distance depictions of her characters and their situations, which does give her work a somewhat detached air; after reading her recounting of a robbery at gunpoint that she experienced, ask yourself how any other cartoonist might have zoomed in on certain moments or otherwise manipulated the images for maximum impact and drama.

The technique has the positive effect of allowing the reader to make their own judgments about a lot of what Bell depicts, but it also makes it harder to get a sense of her as a character, never mind the other people she depicts. You'd be hard pressed to describe their features no matter how many times you read these stories, and if you can't see people's faces except from a distance, you lose a lot of information about their expressions and therefore their state of mind. It's obviously a conscious choice Bell makes, and I don't know if it helps or hurts the reader relate to her comics, but it's impossible not to notice.

I do find the majority of Bell's stories interesting, but I'm addicted to autobiographical comics. How you feel about the genre, I think, will largely decide your feelings about Gabrielle Bell's work. But this issue is a good place for you to introduce yourself to it, if you haven't already. Her stories aren't like a lot of what you find in comics, autobiographical or not, and that alone is a good reason to give Lucky a look.

---

Lucky is published by and available from Drawn and Quarterly.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:50 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Thunderbolts by Warren Ellis Vol. 1: Faith in Monsters -- I wonder if Marvel was thinking of Warren Ellis's Stormwatch when they chose him to write this particular incarnation of Thunderbolts? The set-up of a group of somewhat unhinged loners trying to cohere together as a team reminds me of Ellis's work on that title for Wildstorm, back when it was still part of Image Comics. Of course, the idiosyncratic members of Stormwatch were mostly well-intentioned, while the new Thunderbolts, formed in the wake of the Civil War, are mostly serial killers and lunatics.

One of the prime movers that contributed to my Fan-Fiction Age of Superhero Comics Theory was the revival of Norman Osborn; he was brought back, believe it or not, as a fix to Spider-Man continuity and as an end to the Spider-Man Clone Saga, a story that threatened to consume the entirety of the 1990s. You see, I saw Norman Osborn die, and to me he'll always be dead, like Uncle Ben and Batman's parents are dead -- but I have to admit that Ellis's Osborn, given a second chance by America's alcoholic war-criminal President (perfect!) and drawn by Mike Deodato to look exactly like Tommy Lee Jones, is something of a guilty pleasure, and probably the most entertaining thing overall about this volume.

The least entertaining is the amount of previous continuity you need to fully understand what's happening. If you haven't read any previous Thunderbolts series, or Civil War, you may feel a little lost. Ellis wastes not a lot of time with the whys and wherefores, but rather just drops us right into Osborn putting his team together and sending them out to wreak havoc. A lot.

The nihilism inherent in characters like Venom, Bullseye and Penance (formerly Speedball) is offset to a degree by the humanity Ellis infuses in the unregistered, rogue superheroes the Thunderbolts are assigned to hunt down. Third-rate also-rans like Jack Flag, The Steel Spider and American Eagle are given enough time and and space to lend a real sense of the injustice, inhumanity and obscenity that is Norman Osborn's Thunderbolts unleashed. I don't know if any or all of the superheroes Ellis and Deodato call up to fight off the Thunderbolts ever even appeared in print before; they have the same patina of believability you'd find in the iconic characters created by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson in Astro City, and that's vital in making these stories more than just an excuse for Venom and Bullseye to murder and maul people.

Actual Thunderbolts like Songbird, who was on the team pre-Osborn (and pre-Ellis), try to temper the damage wrought by her new and horrific teammates, and the effort comes off as noble, but the issues reprinted in this collection (#110-115, plus a bunch of crap at the end that you can skip, which Marvel acknowledges by shoving it all in the back of the book even though it takes place before and during the events of #110-115) represent only the first part of Ellis and Deodato's run on the series, so no one will be surprised to learn that by the end of the book (the good part of the book, that is to say -- the stuff from #110-115) much remains up in the air and Songbird's efforts remain, so far, mostly ineffectual.

I was entertained enough by Faith in Monsters (again, excepting the naff filler after Ellis and Deodato's stories, which the book would be far stronger without) that I will read the rest of Ellis and Deodato's run as it's released in collected form; since Ellis's last issue is #121, I assume that means Vol. 2, to be released later this year, will wrap up the run, collecting #116-121.

Thunderbolts is far from Ellis's very best work, but he clearly takes joy in letting his version of Norman Osborn out to play, the result being something like if Stormwatch's Henry Bendix had always obviously been off his rocker, and it is fun to read.

Deodato brings little to the proceedings other than a workmanlike professionalism, a photo-realistic style that evokes what you might get from a disinterested Alex Ross working in ink instead of paint. He tells the story and doesn't get in the way at all, but there's little of interest for readers who like some art with personality and spark in their superhero comic books. Towards the end of the issues reprinted here, Deodato seems to introduce a bit of an impressionistic Gene Colan approach, which adds some energy, but the real appeal of this volume is watching Warren Ellis play with a group of, as noted above, mostly serial killers and lunatics, with the oppressed humanity of the hunted heroes adding nuance and interest. One of them even gets the book's best line, almost certainly Ellis's reflection on the real-life condition of Los Estados Unidos circa 2008 CE: "Just get me out of this country. There's nothing here I want."

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// posted by Alan David Doane @ 7:05 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 2 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Caffeine Dreams #3 -- This awful anthology says it's "for mature readers" right on the cover, but you'll find little of interest if you have the maturity of the average 10 year old or better. It's got three stories in it, all of them awful, and all of them infected with the most gawdawful font choices in the sometimes near-unreadable lettering.

"Shooting Dogs" is the lead story, and has the worst lettering, almost impossible to read. I made the effort so you won't have to, though. A Quentin Tarantino-style three way handgun standoff, terribly drawn and reproduced from the terrible pencils, seems to stem from a severed ear. The story eventually involves two severed ears, as someone seems to take some eye-for-an-eye-type revenge at the story's end, and calling it a story is a kindness.

"The Axe" has above-average amateur art from someone named Aposcar Cruz, who is too good for a sub-amateur offering like Caffeine Dreams.

"Once Upon a Time in the Dark: My Favorite Weapon," the last tale here, is drawn by SOJJ, who the text informs me "hopes [I] enjoyed" the story. I didn't. It's about vampires and werewolves and looks like it was drawn by someone dying after being attacked by both.

House ads in the back promote other titles offered by the publisher, DWAP Productions, which demands that I mention them in the press release that accompanied this wretched apotheosis of excess cash and deficient talent. I'd say to save your money, but you're smart enough to know to avoid a comic like this. I have faith in you.

I tried to find a scan of the cover, but there's nothing online about #3 that I could find, and the art from #s 1 and 2 might deceive you into thinking what you'll find in #3 is better than it is, so no images with this review. If someone from DWAP (the sound a wet turd makes as it lands in my mailbox, I suspect) wants to send me a scan of the cover or art from #3, I'll happily post them.

I can't tell you how depressed it makes me that this review alphabetically is now first in the C section of my reviews archives page. Someone do a comic book called Cabbies or Cads or Cadbury Creme Egg Funnies and send it to me quick. I don't care how bad it is, it has to be better than Caffeine Dreams #3.

Oh, and confidential to DWAP Productions: The link to your MySpace page on your website is seriously screwed up. You would know that if you bothered to click the link after you created it. It's the little details like that, that matter.

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// posted by Alan David Doane @ 4:37 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Good-Bye -- Some of the most soul-crushing sequences ever put to paper can be found in the pages of Good-Bye, the third collection of manga by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, edited by Adrian Tomine and published by Drawn and Quarterly. Despite that, the book feels like a crowning achievement.

And it is: When D&Q announced this series, I had never heard of Tatsumi. After reading the first volume, The Push Man and Other Stories, I knew I wanted to read as much Tatsumi as I possibly could, and readers seemed to agree. The series has sustained an audience through three hardcovers, and The Push Man has even gone into multiple printings.

Tatsumi's work feels familiar and welcoming to my eyes in a way that a lot of manga does not. Each volume collects several standalone stories of varying length; you don't need to know any backstory from previous volumes, or even much about Japanese culture, to appreciate each story, and each volume. Tatsumi's emotions are universal, even if their origins are sometimes unique to the Japanese experience; his emotions are raw, conflicted, embittered, sad, frustrated and hopeful in varying degrees. The way he makes them evident to the reader is a miracle of storytelling. The stories in these three volumes may date from the late 1960s and early '70s, but they feel fresh and new. Through Tatsumi's gift for attaching new heights and depths of emotion to his story construction, he invites and indicates powerful areas of comics storytelling that he alone seems so far to have explored.

If I make him sound like a genius, well, I kind of think he is. The sort of violent explosion of pain you'll find in "Good-Bye," the final story in the book it gives its name to, reminds me of the sort of thing Will Eisner wanted to evoke in A Contract with God, but only began to reach. Tatsumi gets the reader exactly where he wants him, in the guts, in the balls, and in the back of the head all at once. And not out of the creation of some clever supernatural creature or the depiction of wild, impossible events. No, Tatsumi devastates with the basest and most familiar of human emotions, lust, and twists it with its retarded cousins, jealousy and rage. "Good-Bye" is a mean motherfucker of a story, based on Tatsumi's real-life observations and extrapolations, and all the more agonizing for it. But I defy you to deny its power.

"Hell" is similar in its nihilistic ability to reveal human truth, if totally different in tone and subject matter. Like "Good-Bye," it is based on a uniquely Japanese experience, but no one will fail to recognize the basic human arrogance and venality that lie at its heart. I could see "Hell" easily fitting into one of Harvey Kurtzman's 1950s EC war comics, although the twist the story contains feels more like something Gaines and Feldstein would have cooked up. Tatsumi's handling is more skilled and nuanced than any of those folks could have managed, though I think they all would have recognized his gift for storytelling.

"Sky Burial" is perhaps the most uplifting tale in Good-Bye, although Tatsumi's visions of hope are not quite what you might expect. There's some despair and darkness to be found in it, but also a perhaps visionary observation about how nature never relinquishes its realm for long, despite what people might allow themselves to believe is the permanence of civilization. The story also features some very different techniques from Tatsumi from what we've seen in the other stories D&Q has published, especially in the awe-inspiring opening sequence -- Tatsumi's skill as an artist should be in doubt by no reader after experiencing this book.

Drawn and Quarterly are to be congratulated for seeing this three-volume project through, and thanked even more for promising us a huge, autobiographical work by Tatsumi next year. When you hear people talk about what a boom time this is for great comics, the availability of the works of Yoshihiro Tatsumi is a key part of that. Good-Bye and the two volumes that preceded it are elegant collections of complex, mature comic book storytelling, among the very best comics I've read in nearly 40 years of reading comics, and I want to read much more of the man's work.

Buy Good-Bye from Amazon.com.

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// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:53 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Happiness is a Warm Puppy -- However many hundreds or thousands of books Charles Schulz was responsible for in one way or another, the inside front cover flap of Happiness is a Warm Puppy informs me that this was his first. Dating from 1962, it's a collection of minimalist aphorisms on the left-side pages and a full-page illustration of each concept on the right.

I remember having a copy of this book when I was a very young child, but like the majority of books I've owned in my life, I'd be damned if I could tell you whatever happened to the original copy. Most likely I outgrew it and some other child, my younger brother or a friend, maybe, ended up with it. I first spotted this reissue, from Cider Mill Press, on the shelves at Borders many months ago. Every time I would look at the section it was in, the one with Calvin and Hobbes collections and books by comedians like Lewis Black, I would pick it up and flip through it. Finally, a week or two back, I decided I should own it once again, now three decades or so on since the last time I had a copy.

It's a slight book -- in fact, its cover price of $5.95 is at least part of the reason I bought it. If I could not stop thinking about it and reflecting on whether I needed to own it or not, six bucks is a cheap price to stop that slight buzzing it was creating in the base of my skull. There are perhaps 40 or so concepts visited by Schulz over the course of its orange, pink, red and brown pages, and of course the reader will agree with some and wonder at others. "Happiness is sleeping in your own bed," is one that rings solidly true for me, and the illustration of a content and smiling Linus lost in the comfort of the deep slumber one can only achieve in the peace of one's bed strikes me as both simple and profoundly true.

"Happiness is some black, orange, yellow, white and pink jelly beans, but no green ones," seems bizarre to me. I'd take the green and gladly ditch the pink or black ones. Was Schulz telling us his own preference? Was it a random assortment of colours? Either way, he knew what he was doing when he drew the picture, which shows both Charlie Brown digging into the bag of candy, and Linus patiently waiting his turn. Friendship and shared pleasure are shown only through the picture, not the words, and I'm struck by Schulz's ability to introduce nuance even in a book seemingly meant for children, seemingly universal to anyone who might read it.

I suppose it's possible that the pictures in this book were harvested from existing strips, but I don't think so. They seem bold and purposeful, Schulz working his magic during the very best decade of his cartooning career to create illustrations filled with charm, loving portraits of our longtime companions at their very best. Even Lucy manages to control her crabbiness throughout, playing nice with her brother at home as she helps him remove a sliver, and with Patty and Violet in the sandbox. It's nice to see Violet and Patty here, although I note with sadness that Shermy wasn't invited to take part anywhere. I'm always sad when Shermy is absent. He had such potential...


"Happiness is one thing to one person and another thing to another person," Schulz finishes up with, showing Linus and Lucy each enjoying their own, separate, things. Filled with gentility, tolerance and wisdom, Happiness is a Warm Puppy is something that will bring happiness to anyone who opens themselves to its simple messages and lovely cartooning. I like this little book a lot, which is funny, because I really don't care much for puppies, warm or otherwise. Allergies, you see.

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// posted by Alan David Doane @ 12:53 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Silver Star -- Jack Kirby's latter-day work could be wildly uneven, but Silver Star holds more than a little of the brilliance that informed New Gods and the other Fourth World titles, and his earlier Marvel work.

Silver Star himself is one of a number of members of a new species, Homo Geneticus, specifically designed to live through and beyond a nuclear holocaust. Man's headlong rush toward self-destruction was obviously weighing heavily on Kirby's mind as he developed this idea (which originated in a movie pitch, included at the end of this beautifully-realized Image Comics hardcover, released in 2007), and given the current state of the world, it seems Kirby, as always, was way ahead of his time.

Silver Star's suit is designed to prevent the fantastic energies that he possesses from escaping and destroying his body; his opposite number, a failed, previous experiment in creating Homo Geneticus, is Darius Drumm, who longs to bring about mankind's end a little sooner than on man's own timetable. Norma Richmond is Silver Star's love interest, but also his equal, and an unpredictable firecracker in the Big Barda tradition.

Kirby's story unfolds over the course of the six issues collected in the book, and it has a definite beginning, middle and end, something somewhat rare in Kirby's career. The narrative almost never takes a breath -- things seem to happen between the panels, so much so that when, late in the story, Kirby takes the luxury of three silent panels to depict a military leader making a decision, the sequence is as arresting as Kirby no doubt intended it to be.

The artwork in Silver Star is not the prime Kirby of his latter-day Fantastic Four, but neither is it the unsure and outsider-art look of The Hunger Dogs graphic novel that was Kirby's last word on his Fourth World stories. It reminds me most of Kirby's last go-round on Captain America -- looser and less weighty than his very best work, but still solid and confident with occasional flashes of his glory days.

The closest you can get to new Kirby nowadays is Casey and Scioli's Godland, and a lot about Silver Star, especially the villainy of Darius Drumm, will be pleasingly familiar to Godland readers. Drumm's fate is pleasingly reflective of the thought that Kirby gave to the true nature of man, no simple super-battle to bring things to a close, but a genuine insight into the urge to self-destruction and the ways in which it might be tempered.

At $35.00, the Silver Star hardcover is not for a reader who is unsure of their level of appreciation of Kirby's work. But for those of us who remain entranced by his work and the intellect that propelled it, Silver Star is a pretty wild ride, and one you might wish had continued further, at that.

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// posted by Alan David Doane @ 9:44 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko -- There came a point in reading Blake Bell's excellent biography and artbook about Steve Ditko that I had to laugh at the irony; I had come to the first time that Ditko felt disaffected and betrayed by someone in fandom that had gone against his wishes. I laughed because I realized Bell probably fits that description now, and hell, by writing this review, I probably do too. It's almost impossible not to imagine you're displeasing the man if you choose to write about him.

I'm genuinely sorry that Ditko's fame has made him a fair subject for historical, biographical and critical writing. And I mean that, I'm really sorry for him that the course of his career so often has made him unhappy or uncomfortable or angry. It's clear throughout Strange and Stranger that Ditko was, from very early on, an extremely sensitive artist who had trouble coming to grips with the inevitable loss of control an artist must have once his work is out there for the world to see. After reading Bell's book, one is left thinking Ditko could only have been happy if he had created his work in secret, and shared it with no one. And of course, that would have been a sad fate, too. Ditko truly is trapped in a world he never made.

Or, perhaps, he could have been happier if he had worked in an industry that was fair to its writers and artists. If he had been properly remunerated and allowed creative control over his work, perhaps he could have been less frustrated, more able to take joy in the work he created, which, after all, has given millions of people untold joy now for decades.

But A is A, I remember, and I realize that this is the world both Ditko and I live in. "It is what it is," as people like to say when they have nothing to say. Ditko never had a problem finding something to say, but in his comics work, there was a definite sweet spot of expression and form, and Bell hones in on that pretty brilliantly as he talks about the earliest days when Ditko's Ayn Rand/Objectivism fixation influenced but did not consume his work.

It began with an issue of Blue Beetle that focused on art criticism and probably culminated with the early-1970s release of a Mr. A one-shot, independently released and violently iconoclastic in its content and impact. Bell recounts how poorly the book sold, and how West Coast comics retailing innovator Bud Plant bought up the remaining copies. Thank God, that's where I got my copy, by mail order, in the early 1980s.

As a teenager, I knew and loved Ditko's style, but was too young to fully process his single-minded determination and focus on his, and Rand's, beliefs. Mr. A did directly lead me to read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and even some biographies of Ayn Rand herself. If half of what most histories of her life contain is true, she was batshit out of her mind, and hardly the type of hero she demanded others be. Ditko would probably dismiss such examination of her life as either lies or irrelevancies, but if you've read much about Rand and Ditko, you kind of think he better met her standards than she herself did. Sadly, it seems to have cost him a far better career than the one he ended up with in this world.

It's hard not to feel sadness and pity for Ditko, as Bell's narrative wears on into the 1980s and 1990s and Ditko ends up illustrating Transformers colouring books and meeting again and again with industry figures like Dick Giordano and Stan Lee and yet is unable to ever again find a place in the corporate comics industry that he had a key role in creating, and that his most well-known creation has had a large part in sustaining. But Ditko doesn't want our pity, and he seems to have navigated even the lowest points of his comics career on his own terms, prideful and determined to meet his own rigid demands, which only occasionally bent, it seems, and hardly ever broke.

Bell's chapters in Strange and Stranger are all discreet packets of important segments of Ditko's life, and they do create as complete a picture of the man as is likely to be created, barring some unlikely latter-day autobiography, which probably would not be be truly self-examining in any case. But what stands out are the weird little twists and decisions Ditko's career was built and then dismantled on; most noteworthy, perhaps, his battles with Stan Lee over the direction and scripting of Amazing Spider-Man. Most telling, perhaps, a scene (reprinted in the book) of Peter Parker angrily dismissing participants in a 1960s college campus protest. Ditko's real self, his real values, came more and more to the surface of his work, and for a few years, as Bell notes, that combination of stoic self-expression and his unbelievably fluid and trippy artwork resulted in some of the most beautiful and memorable comics ever created. Not only late Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, but his bold, innovative black and white Warren work, often done in stunning inkwash, and his truly underrated Blue Beetle, Question and Captain Atom work for Charlton.

I said above that Ditko truly is trapped in a world he never made, and I believe he is. But based on the available evidence -- say, the Jonathon Ross BBC special from a few months back -- he at least lives out his days now in the way he has chosen for himself. Many people -- most people -- don't understand his need for privacy or his desire to be left alone. Blake Bell's Strange and Stranger may or may not be one more violation of his wishes, but for anyone who approaches it with respect for Ditko's art, it's a more or less balanced and even kind look at the transformational life's work of a very difficult, and perhaps very troubled, man.

And it goes without saying that the art on display is mind-blowingly beautiful and complex and almost impossible to fully process. John Romita Sr. admits in the book that he could never draw like Ditko, when he replaced him on Amazing Spider-Man, and no one else ever really could either. Much like his only peer in superhero comics, Jack Kirby, Ditko's mind and thought process and the visual expression of all they contained were a universe all their own. Ditko's art is a wonder to behold in the way very few other visual artists could ever even approach, in or outside of comics. It is at once utterly alien and strangely familiar, and the vast majority of Ditko's work was, whatever the era and whatever the circumstance, uncompromising and utterly arresting. Strange and Stranger captures, in words and pictures, as much of Ditko's world as it is possible for us to understand. It breaks my heart to think how unhappy he might be to hear how much I loved this book about him and his work.

---

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko is published by and available from Fantagraphics Books.

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// posted by Alan David Doane @ 4:21 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 5 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Under the Radar's Protest Issue -- Indie/alt-rock magazine Under the Radar sent along their Protest Issue, which has a lengthy and informative section on politically-leaning bands and artists like Modest Mouse and Michael Stipe discussing their politics and how they navigate the minefield of being celebrity advocates for political causes they believe in. That section is fascinating and well-written...but it's not why they sent me the issue.

How disappointing, then, that the reason they did -- is on page 74, "Tights and the Good Fight," an article about what they call "political comics." It's a full-page, utterly bankrupt puff-piece featuring mostly toothless mid-level hacks suckling at Time-Warner's teat (plus one corporate comics temporary refugee selling to Image a title DC and Marvel likely rejected, but still not likely to be very good -- or politically significant) and passing it off as, gag, "political."

The three writers are:

* Brian K. Vaughan, who rarely creates a comic book I can stand and has changed the world not at all with his superhero book Ex Machina, the first issue of which was more than enough for me.

* Brian Wood, who has only held my attention with his most political work, Channel Zero (which he dismisses here as preachy and amateurish without acknowledging its immediacy and power), and with his least, Demo. The Under the Radar piece focuses on DMZ, which like Ex Machina, lost my interest before its first issue had concluded.

* And Mark Millar, who, Jesus, are his comics political? I like the guy as a human being and I love his Superman Adventures a lot, but any political message in his comics is usually buried in his wiseass self-satisfaction, and in any case the message is always lost in the joke he's made of himself over the years with his arrogant, desperate self-promotion. What was the political message of The Ultimates? The images that remain in memory are Captain America kicking a mentally ill monster when he's completely and utterly down, and Ant-Man assaulting his wife. Will War Heroes have anything valuable to say about the state of the world? Do you think I give a shit? Wake me up if it gets George W. Bush on the stand for crimes against humanity in the world court, or even calls for that to happen. (I will acknowledge that, published by Image, it's at least possible that could happen -- Time-Warner would sooner make Bruce Wayne a flaming homo for reals before they'd let Millar, or Vaughan, or Wood say anything true about our war criminal commander-in-chief.)

Fuck this shitty article on faux-political comics that utterly ignores vital comics with something genuine to say, like World War III Illustrated, The Filth, Shirtlifter, Diary of a Teenage Girl, Fun Home or even fucking Cerebus. This article might have had its origins in the best of intentions, but it's a slap in the face to comics creators who actually have something to say, and value that over the steady paycheck and ready promotional departments of two of the biggest comic book publishers in North America. Jesus Christ, they couldn't even include Garth Ennis in this sorry lot? Of course not, he might have said something true about something that matters.

It's amazing to me that a magazine that so obviously mines the most obscure labels and artists in rock music to find the gems contained in its music reviews pages, settles for the most facile, obvious and frankly shitty "political" comics to highlight in an otherwise excellent and important issue about the life and death issues of our time. No apparent effort was made to investigate the many political views of all stripes that can be found in mini-comics, alternative comics, artcomix or even goddamned Doonesbury.

But then again, maybe I shouldn't be so surprised at the tribute that Under the Radar pays to the most mediocre of corporate superhero comics and creators -- after all, look at the picture. Variant cover, anyone?

The rest of the magazine was fantastic. But it's not why they wanted me to cover it.

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// posted by Alan David Doane @ 9:16 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 3 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Obsession -- William Rees writes and Jeff Clemens draws this new graphic novel published by Heavy Proton. Neither the writing nor the art rises to the level of professional, and the story is lurid and wildly scattered, but there's an unusual sense of commitment and ambition to the telling of the story that I don't see much of, and that alone propelled me through the book.

The story is about a 16-year-old girl, Clarissa Case, who is trapped at home, having to help her handicapped mother, who seems to have been driven mad with pain. The girl encounters what the script seems to want us to believe is a handsome older man, but who kind of looks like an ape, or a hobo. She falls immediately for this "George Simmons," but perhaps the meeting was not as coincidental as Clarissa might think, dot dot dot.

The overall plot is outrageous but not entirely unbelievable for the sort of gothic melodrama Obsession aspires to be. Rees's dialogue is frequently absurd ("Well, now, you sure are a ripe tomato." "Sigh. Well, I guess I can trust you not to kill me!"). It falls apart in the details, though, such as the ridiculous diary entries and fantasies Clarissa entertains throughout the story.

Note to all comic book creators, from the very worst amateur to Alan Moore and Grant Morrison: I don't ever, ever read huge chunks of text purporting to be the character's diary or some article relevant to the story when they are plopped onto the comics page as part of the narrative. And I suspect I am not alone. Sorry, I'm reading comics right now, I seem to say to myself as my eyes glaze over and I move on to the next panel. And that happened a lot in Obsession. I couldn't be bothered to read Clarissa's diary entries or the segments where she imagines herself a nurse and George a handsome doctor. And I don't feel bad about that, because if these narrative elements were compelling and well-done, I'd have had no choice but to be compelled to read them and realize how well-done they were.

I mention that Obsession is lurid, and it is, in both the script and the art, the latter of which seems to be a perfect melding of Doomsday+1 era John Byrne and an attempt at aping Graham Ingels, EC's premier gothic horror specialist. Clemens, who the text at the back informs me attended the Joe Kubert School, clearly has a little potential but a long way to go before he gets there. And I'm not sure, but it seems to me that the full-page spread of the 40ish and quite grotesque George Simmons having sex with 16-year-old Clarissa might be illegal in some places, what with all the concern about the violation of young, fictional girls. It's just kind of an icky scene.

There's not much to like about Obsession; at 93 pages, it's over ten times longer than the EC horror comics I kind of think it wants to evoke. If it had been seven pages, written by Bill Gaines and drawn by Jack Kamen or the aforementioned Graham Ingels, it might still not be a very good story, but it would at least have caught the eye of Dr. Wertham. The only good thing I can say about it is that it possesses obvious ambition. It's clear its creators want to make comics and have the energy and desire to do so. I just wish they'd created a comic book that I could recommend.

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// posted by Alan David Doane @ 6:56 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
We Can Still Be Friends -- Is there anything more emotionally agonizing than to be a young man with a crush on someone who doesn't feel the same way? That's the focus of the entirety of We Can Still Be Friends, a graphic novel by Mawil published by Blank Slate Books.

Mawil's loose, kinetic cartooning gets across the enthusiasm for life felt by youth at large in the world, combining the spontaneity of Lewis Trondheim with the confidence and charm of Michel Rabagliati. The story is told in vignettes broken up by Trondheim-like borderless panels of the author entertaining his pals over beer, as he recounts the cute girls he liked a lot and never managed to win.

His visual style is wide and generous enough to convey both the energy of a highrise full of adolescent squatters having a beer party and the arresting elegance of youth and beauty -- some of the panels of the girls Mawil recalls are startling in their ability to convey his passion for them to the reader in just a few strokes of his pen. Especially memorable is one early panel in which he passes the girl he is smitten with as they line up to pick dance partners at school. All the characters in the panel are gray except Mawil and the girl, who is turned away from us but directly toward the author, just for a second. It's an amazing panel that will stay with you even once you're done reading the book.

There's a full-page image of Mawil and various boys and girls seen from above enjoying each other's company that plays with the reader's experience of the scene, and demonstrates pretty definitively that Mawil thinks a lot about how his pages work, what their effect is on the reader as they are experienced.

The back of the book has quotes from cartoonists Joe Matt and Jeffrey Brown, and anyone who enjoys their autobiographical comics will certainly be entranced by We Can Still Be Friends. I like Mawil's cosmopolitan flair for depicting all the places he goes and the people from various cultures that he meets in his travels. The graphic novel feels heartfelt and genuine in its emotions, and sophisticated and wise in the unfolding of the narrative. The ending isn't necessarily what you'll hope for, but it certainly feels true and real in the way it carries across how these things usually go, until they go some other way.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 12:01 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Swallow Me Whole -- Nate Powell's longest single story to date is also his best. The creator of Walkie Talkie, Please Release and other very good comics delivers an eerie, mysterious tale of that most everyday of subject, a family and their home.

Ruth and Perry are teenagers driven by hidden demons and the living ghost of their not-quite-dead grandmother. Each lives in their own haunted world, but they care about each other and ponder over the strangeness and possible madness that surrounds and infuses them.

Despite (or because of) her troubled nature, Ruth gets a job in a museum that, far from relieving the weirdness of her life, seems to immerse her even deeper into herself and her oddly comforting torment. Events begin to spin out of control in school as Ruth defies ignorance and bigotry, and finds that the nail that sticks out, gets hammered. Or perhaps pulled out of the wood altogether, as the surreal and yet inevitable ending descends upon the proceedings.

You may or may not have heard of Nate Powell -- my first exposure was through his outstanding four-issue small press series Walkie Talkie, and he's only gotten better ever since. He started publishing through Top Shelf with Please Release, and Swallow Me Whole is further confirmation that Powell is one of our most thoughtful and boundary-expanding cartoonists. It's a lush, if shadowy world he creates for his characters to find themselves in, and for you to lose yourself in. Ultimately, Powell knows that the shadows can swallow us whole if we're not careful, and sometimes even if we are. The question this graphic novels seems to ask is, should we fight it, or surrender to the dark? I suspect there are as many answers to the question as there are people to consider it.

---

Buy Swallow Me Whole from Amazon.com.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 9:53 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Trains are...Mint -- For all those who dismiss autobiographical comics as trite, facile, samey, whatever the complaint -- here's the high concept of Trains are...Mint. The author, Oliver East, goes for walks from train station to train station near his home in Manchester, England. He sketches what he sees. The end.

For anyone with a little more sophisticated understanding of what is possible within the artform of comics, East's debut graphic novel is a modest, monumental achievement, a kind of British version of Jiro Taniguchi's The Walking Man.

The immediate appeal of East's book is the watercolour and pen and ink artwork with which he depicts his environment. The simplicity of his line favourably recalls John Porcellino's King-Cat Comics (as does his overall narrative tone, it should be mentioned), but every once in a while he astounds with a sharply observed brick wall or the perspective he conveys in his drawing of a fence, or a row of townhouses. His watercolour technique is subtle and lovely, with the same quiet brick-to-the-head revelatory power Frank Santoro brought to Storeyville.

Like Santoro, East experiments with the way his words interact with the images on his page. A frequent technique here is the conveyance of information through what at first appears to be a sign, or graffiti, or a poster on a wall. It's an arresting stylistic choice, one that really forces attention to what East is doing, and what he is saying. There's an almost inexplicable effect that arises from the way he utilizes this technique, something that makes an unnameable third element out of the cobination of words and pictures.

Click to enlarge image
Alan Moore believes his hometown of Northampton is the center of the universe, and his belief likely stems from the fact that A) He is a keen observer and B) He turns his observations on his own surroundings. Oliver East does the same thing in Trains are...Mint, delivering a microcosm of the graffiti and detritus that infuse these train stations and their environs, unpacking his observations into a universal map of the land we all make our way through every day of our lives.

Trains are...Mint is the first release from UK publisher Blank Slate Books, which is run by a couple of the owners of the legendary Forbidden Planet chain of comic book stores. As you might expect with that pedigree, the book is a thing of beauty not only in what it contains but in how it is produced. It's a compact, strikingly-well-reproduced hardcover that is a tactile joy to experience. And a perfect delivery system for Oliver East's comics.

East's style evokes Porcellino, as I mentioned above. It also recalls for me a little Kevin Huizenga here, a little Lynda Barry there, and a whole lot of Eddie Cambell Alec-sized whimsy and wonder. I have no idea if he actually is influenced by any of these folks, though -- his style feels sui generis in large part, and Trains are...Mint feels fresh and new, a shot across the bow to anyone thinking whatever can be done in comics form already has been done. This is something new, something you can lose yourself in, something you'll want more of.

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Trains are...Mint is published by Blank Slate Books.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 12:01 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 2 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Me of Little Faith -- Comedian and actor Lewis Black's new book is not the in-your-face yockfest I was expecting. It's funny and profane in places, to be sure, and written in the unique voice I've come to expect from his always-welcome appearances on The Daily Show, but Me of Little Faith is about religion and spirituality, informed by a number of Black's own true-life experiences and containing more nuance and room for cosmic possibilities than one might expect.

Religion can be a sensitive subject -- in Comic Book Galaxy's earliest days, my arrogance and refusal to acknowledge that fact cost the site one of the best writers it ever (briefly) had, Johanna Draper Carlson. Maybe it was because of that incident that I learned to be more tolerant and a little less knee-jerky on the subject. But the fact is, I am an atheist, despite years of religious instruction at Southern Baptist schools in Florida. Or yes, perhaps because of that schooling. But that's not the whole story when it comes to me and the possibility that there's more to the cosmos than we are able to see with our immediate five senses, as I tried to explain in an essay back in 2000.

I've never linked to that piece before, and I don't really love the way it's written, but I swear every word in it is as true as I could explain at that time. And what made me think of that time, and the weird shit that seemed to be happening to me on a regular basis back then, are the extraordinary experiences Lewis Black recounts in some of the chapters of Me of Little Faith. As the book takes you on a tour of major moments of Blacks life (both as a child and as an adult), he occasionally drops a bomb on the reader about seeing what seemed to be a genuine halo around the head of a religious commune leader, or the fact that one of his best friends has what seem to be genuine psychic abilities and often calls to advise him or let him know about an important event about to happen in his life.

And skeptic I am, my initial impulse is to think Black is having some fun with his readers, or more cynically, just fuckin' with us. But the short, funny and revelatory chapters of this book build on each other until Black's comedy, sincerity and life experience come together to create a quite extraordinary explanation of one man's lifelong experience with both the utter baloney of much of organized, rote religion and the utter sublimity of first-person experience with the fact that there is much more to the universe -- and possibly beyond -- than any one of us could ever hope to understand.

And there's no question that the idea of God and the power of spirituality are attractive concepts, no matter what your beliefs. As I often tell my children, "Just because an idea isn't true doesn't mean it doesn't have power." Which has helped me to understand something as gigantic as George W. Bush's cynical manipulation of religious conservatives, or something as odd as my profound reaction to seeing Jack Kirby's astonishing portrait of Moses in the 50th issue of The Jack Kirby Collector. That picture struck others with its presence, as well; Fred Hembeck did an amazing drawing inspired by the very same picture in TJKC at the convention I met him at last weekend. Recognizing religion and mythology are seemingly hardwired into our brains, and that recognition can give enormous comfort or cause monumental disaster depending on how the ideas are delivered and for what reason. It's a complex subject, one Black seems to relish delving deep into.

Me of Little Faith offers up a lot of stories from Lewis Black's life, and the philosophy he's evolved along the way. There are funny stories about staying with hippies on a commune, and genuinely moving sections about his career and the events and people that have shaped it. Lewis Black may be an angry comedian (most of the shit he's angry about pisses me off too), but he's also a thoughtful human being, and he's a very good writer, and if you like his comedy or are interested in an unusual look at spirituality, this is a book that will get you thinking even as it gets you laughing.

Labels: real life, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:59 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Gødland #19-23 -- I caught up with Joe Casey and Tom Scioli's Gødland this evening, having read the first three trade paperbacks a few months ago. It's to Casey and Scioli's credit that I could pick the story up easily (three metacosmic weirdos are destroying Las Vegas while Archer and Crashman are trapped inside the Infinity Tower by General Brigg and the government).

Scioli mentioned in a recent interview with Tom Spurgeon that he's been evolving his style, and that is wildly apparent in this run of issues; the Kirby stylings are all but gone (as even the unnamed letters-page author admits), and I missed them, but I gazed in wide wonder, to quote a phrase, at the wild leaps and bounds his visual style has made. The brutal and bizarre battle of Archer and Maxim the cosmic dog versus the three oddballs -- Ed, Supra and some joke on the word "ego" or another -- is a fantastic blend of Scioli's pop art fundamentals with what looks to me like mid-period Frank Miller Moebius pastiche, right down to what I think is an homage to a scene from Ronin. An homage that shows just how far this title has come in a visual sense.

Casey's writing continues to be a pleasing mix of comic book basics with tossed-off bits evoking Moore/Morrison detours into strange dimensions; an editor really is needed to catch the minor typos here and there, from the misuse of the apostrophe-d version of "its" to small, niggling errors that momentarily took me out of the altogether psychedelic (if not psychoactive) goings-on. But the plot and the dialogue are sterling examples of just how damned good Casey can be at his best, and the most recent issue concludes with a deliciously traditional sci-fi take on the cosmic reset button and the nagging sense that things ain't quite what they used to be.

Don't deny yourself the vast world of comics pleasure that is Gødland; you can probably enjoy any single issue about as much as any other, but taken altogether, to date the series is 23 issues of the most spectacular 21st century (if not 22nd) superhero comics storytelling you can possibly imagine. With a Journey gag that just won't quit in one issue, to boot. "Escape," indeed.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 11:26 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975 -- One of my pet peeves is comic book readers of a certain age who dislike the term "comix." If you can't parse the important difference between comics and comix, then you really ought not even be trying to talk about either in public, because you're simply not qualified.

Patrick Rosenkranz, on the other hand, is supremely qualified to write about underground comix, their genesis and significance to the artform, and he does so in the gorgeously illustrated new edition of Rebel Visions. His qualifications come from having lived through the era close to the heart of the action, and in fact many of the revealing photos of key underground creators are credited to Rosenkranz.

The narrative isn't limited by the author's memories and perceptions, though. Much of the prose consists of quotes from creators like R. Crumb, Trina Robbins, and many others who founded and perpetuated the underground comix movement. The narrative occasionally jumps back and forth in time, as it moves from creator to creator in retelling their firsthand experience, oral-history-style.

It's frankly a thrilling story that Rosenkranz recounts; the coming-together of the various houses and factions of underground comix creation was almost an accident of destiny, and the resulting explosion of comix spans the spectrum from the most hackneyed of crap to some of the most sublimely brilliant and mind-expanding stories ever told.

Rosenkranz allows the cartoonists plenty of room to relive their memories and share their theories, and the oversized dimensions of the book allow the reader to be immersed in the amazingly diverse examples of art from the era.

The underground comix are a far clearer antecedent to the artcomix movement of today than most modern-day readers probably realize. Fans of Geoff Johns or Brian Michael Bendis would be hard-pressed to find stories from any underground title that would interest them in the slightest, but readers who follow creators like Joe Matt, Chester Brown, Phoebe Gloeckner, James Kochalka or Roberta Gregory would certainly find lots to love about the undergrounds, and will absolutely find much of interest in Rebel Visions, one of the greatest historical recountings ever dedicated to the artform of comics. I mean, comix.

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Rebel Visions is available from Fantagraphics Books and in better comic shops and bookstores.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 12:01 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Reinventing Collapse -- My wife doesn't like to hear about the forthcoming end of the world, and I have a couple of otherwise intelligent friends at work who don't like to think about the fact that the American way of life is barreling over a cliff at 90 miles an hour, either. Most of the discussions I've had with them are based on my readings of James Howard Kunstler's work. Kunstler recommended Dmitry Orlov's Reinventing Collapse on his blog recently, and now having read it, I know I probably shouldn't discuss it with my wife or my friends at work, because Orlov's detailed comparisons of the collapse of the Soviet Union with the impending collapse of the United States (the SU and the US, as he symmetrically notes) are far, far scarier than the pictures Kunstler has painted to date.

Orlov was born in the Soviet Union and witnessed its dissolution first hand. He sees both the similarities and differences in the two cultures, and in the way the SU disintegrated and the US is disintegrating. Most impressively, he details how the citizens of the former Soviet Union coped with collapse, and how Americans are likely to respond to similar exigencies: "We should definitely not expect any grand rescue plans, innovative technology programs or miracles of social cohesion," he notes, bluntly.

Orlov speaks in very plain English, with sometimes biting humour, about how the soft, entitled people of the US are unlikely to be able to adjust to a quickly-changing lifestyle. Russians were used to the privations of the Soviet regime, he notes, but most Americans will not know what to do when consumer goods are no longer available, when gasoline is largely or entirely unavailable, or when justice is something that you and your family and community will have to decide for yourselves.

Orlov's book is not meant merely to frighten readers, capture media attention and drive up sales, however. It is essentially a guide that anyone can use to figure out the best way to survive the forthcoming changes the world is facing. Orlov's advice is customizable in the sense that he urges the reader to prioritize for themselves what they need to continue to live when society has broken down and irrevocably changed. It's not a workbook and there are no forms for you to fill out, but you'll be far better prepared for The Long Emergency once you've read Reinventing Collapse. As he points out, the only true necessities in life are air, water and food. Clothing, shelter, companionship, work and other non-necessities are likely to be difficult-to-impossible to come by in the areas hit worst by the collapse of the US society and infrastructure.

And if you're a victim of, as Kunstler calls it, "the psychology of previous investment" -- that is to say, you somehow still believe that gas prices will go back down, we'll always have centrally air-conditioned shopping malls, we're winning the war against Iraq (or at least, might not lose it) and a dollar will always be worth a dollar -- well, Orlov's prose is highly readable and wildly entertaining, so there's no reason not to give Reinventing Collapse a read. If you like to read before bedtime, though, do it now, while you still have lights by which to read.

Labels: end of the world watch, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 7:19 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 7 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Superior Showcase #3 -- One of the year's best comics stories appears in this issue, published by AdHouse Books.

It's not Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca's Street Angel, although that story is the reason I picked up SS #3, and its horror-manga-inspired story of young Jesse struggling against evil while hospitalized (don't we all?) is a welcome return for one of my favourite comics characters. I hope we see more Street Angel soon, and I wish whatever market realities prevent an ongoing title from, well, ongoing, would set themselves straight soon.

The issue also includes an adventure of Kid Medulla by Dustin Harbin, exactly the sort of mischievous snark that my 12-year-old son lives for on Nickelodeon, as a young kid with mental powers causes a lot of farting and other embarrassments to revenge himself on a world he doesn't quite fit into. Fun stuff.


But, the story that really makes Superior Showcase #3 a must-buy for lovers of great comics is "Freaks," by Laura Park. The story starts with a violent schoolyard brawl that moves to a walk home by the victor and his older sister, who makes him a snack and tries her best to talk to her angry young brother while watching out for her family's overall needs. As the story progresses, quietly and with great narrative power, Park shows us the reasons the kids are considered "freaks," and reveals with great nuance what that means to the young people suffering under that label.

Park's artwork is stunning, from her evocation of a walk through the neighbourhood to the empathetic way she depicts the kids, to the stunning bedtime scene where the children's "powers" are revealed to the reader. "Freaks" is realistic in its handling of home life for modern-day kids, but optimistic and ultimately loving in the way the brother-sister relationship is explored. "Freaks" is about the importance of kindness and family and understanding and taking the time to just care, and it's one of the most moving comics stories I've read in a long time.

In just ten pages, Park creates a whole world and history for the brother and sister of "Freaks," one I'd love to see more of. Her bio on the inside front cover says she is working on her first book of comics (there's a little bit of info and a link to a lot of her art here). I'm definitely ready to see more. Hurry up already.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 7:43 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 

Jumbly Junkery #4 -- This new mini-comic is the creation of cartoonist L. Nichols. The concerns are mostly observational and confessional, which you might glean from strips titled "An Observation" and "Confessions." It's mostly autobiographical, and Nichols is a hell of an artist, so I enjoyed the issue a lot.

As they often are in autobio comics, some of the observations are minor -- the difference between waking to a new day in the winter versus the spring, for example -- the significance of such a strip lies therefore in the execution. Like Roger Ebert says, it's not what it's about that matters, but how it is about it. Nichols uses a button-eyed avatar to fill in for herself, and that took a little adjusting, but it's fair enough in this sort of work. If James Kochalka can be an elf, or Dash Shaw can present one of his characters as a frog, why not a button-eyed ragdoll?

A lot of ground is covered in the 32 pages of Jumbly Junkery #4, ranging from sexism to depression, and from a whimsical gag involving lions to a serious, three-page summation of Nichols life and developing self-image (one of the stronger pieces, it should be noted).


I liked this comic a lot, and would love to read more work by Nichols. Some random things that stand out for me:

* I love the gold overlay on the drops of rain on the minimalist cover; it's a touch you only see in quality mini-comics, and it says something about the intentions of the artist.

* I like the way Nichols draws cats, and sinks, and pens and paper.

* I like the wide variety of subjects, all held together with a single creative vision and point of view.

Jumbly Junkery is the most promising mini-comic I've read in quite some time, the sort of thing that always makes me hungry for more.

---

You can purchase comics (and a felt alligator with button eyes!) by L. Nichols by clicking here.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:53 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Rex -- Danijel Zezelj's new graphic novel, from Optimum Wound Comics, reminds me of nothing so much as it does the sort of testosterone-fueled, ultra-violent comics for grownups that Richard Corben used to create for what were then called "ground level" comics, in the 1970s and '80s.

Ground level was a term created to distinguish titles like Hot Stuf', Star*Reach and others (even Cerebus, Elfquest and The First Kingdom, in their earliest days, if my memory holds true) from underground comix and superhero comics. The ground level was where you might find top-level creators like Corben, who weren't interested much in creating underground comix focused on drugs and sex (although Corben's comics certainly contained at least one, and likely both of those), but whose work was too "mature" (read: swearing and boobies) for Marvel and DC to ever (at that time) consider publishing.

Danijel Zezelj's Rex has swearing and boobies to spare, as well as a level of brutality that might not even fit in today at DC's Vertigo imprint, although it might fly with Marvel's MAX or Icon lines. Rex, the character, is a former cop on a mission of revenge in a world where everyone has seemingly done him wrong. Zezelj's artwork is dense, bold and confident in its ability to bring the hyper-reality of the story to life. The style evokes Corben in its photorealistic tendencies, and in places also reminded me of the style Cary Nord utilized on his Conan run for Dark Horse. In fact, if Nord had illustrated a comics version of the Lee Marvin movie Point Blank, we might get something very much like Rex.

Rex creates a dark, violent world for you to spend some time in, and creator Danijel Zezelj proves a surprisingly capable host for your visit. From the work I'd seen in the past for DC, it's no surprise that he draws the story exceptionally well, but it's a pleasing revelation how good a writer he is as well.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:26 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 2 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Yam: Bite-Size Chunks -- Top Shelf is looking to give young Owly fans something else to read, and Yam is an engaging and beautifully drawn incursion into that demographic.

It's super, super , SUPER-cute stuff, but the mini-adventures the little guy gets into are visually interesting and inventive enough to hold the interest of an older reader too.

I was most impressed by the cartooning. Corey Barba's ink line is confident, crunchy and a little addictive. I couldn't stop looking at how he shades and defines the objects and creatures he depicts -- a little Rick Geary noodling here, a little Jim Woodring hatching there, it all adds up to something gorgeous to look at.

And like I say, it's fun, too. If you can't count your age using just your fingers, the stories may or may not stick with you, but Barba's art is well worth looking at for comic art fans of any age and inclination.

Yam: Bite-Size Chunks is available from Top Shelf Productions.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 8:31 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Bottomless Belly Button -- Dash Shaw's mammoth new graphic novel is a sweeping tapestry of a family in crisis. It's sad, it's thoughtful, it's dirty and funny and hesitant and right in your face. It's about the adult children of a divorcing couple gathering at their parents' beachside home to come to grips with reality and with each other.

It's a large, heavy book that is hard to hold up but rewarding to do so, kind of like a real family, and that and other resonances make me wonder just how brilliant Dash Shaw is. Another example: Bottomless Belly Button comes with one of two covers, a mom cover and a dad cover, the divorcing mom and dad of the book. And you have to choose one.

Years ago, I said "I'd love to see how Shaw grows as a writer and artist," and I guess now I know. Bottomless Belly Button is loose but fully-formed, rambling but always aware of its destination. For every discrete moment -- Peter's awkward first date, Jill's humiliating experience with her friend's boyfriend, or dad being given a bath -- Shaw is in complete, if intangible, control of where the Loony family is going. The events at the beach house unfold with the natural rhythm of real life, with all the digressions and messes that implies.

And most gratifyingly, Shaw is content to let us learn to like all of these people. Some are weirder than others, or more uptight, or more distant, but each is human and alive and entitled to some measure of understanding, and Shaw utilizes the length of the book to give us access to the hidden corners every one of his characters possesses. My very favourite panel comes near the end, a shot of the mother in the shower; yes, she's old, "wrinkly," as she says, but the look on her face, even possibly in tears, is one of strength and determination, and also enjoying the heat of the shower. Shaw conveys pages of information in this one masterful panel.

The drawing itself is impossible to separate from the narrative -- Shaw's line is powerfully emotive and organic, simple when it needs to be but sometimes detailed and diagrammatic. Lists sometimes drop in and out of the reading, like an obsessive cataloging of types of water or sand, such as a troubled child might keep as a distraction from ongoing turmoil.

Shawn's been doing some complex, excellent work in MOME recently, and Bottomless Belly Button even further establishes his credentials as a cartoonist you should be paying attention to. You find a lot of him inside his new book, but you'll find even more of yourself.

---

Bottomless Belly Button is available from Fantagraphics Books.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 7:41 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Shirtlifter -- Steve MacIsaac's Shirtlifter has had two issues released so far, the first issue mostly fiction, the second issue, funded by a Xeric grant, mostly non-fiction. Both are unblinking, unapologetic looks at the lives of gay men. I'd like to say both are excellent, but #1 is only good. Shirtlifter #2 is spectacular.

I apologize for playing favourites, but I've always been upfront about my preference for well-done autobiography over any other genre in comics, and Shirtlifter #2 finds MacIsaac growing immensely over the intriguing first issue. The difference is such that, although I think discerning readers will want both issues, I can't recommend #2 strongly enough.

Be warned that MacIsaac is refreshingly frank about his sexuality. There is nudity and sex, although the thoughtful approach and the ultimately rewarding reading experience are such that Shirtlifter is about as far from pornography as one can get. Porn wants to get you off, period. In Shirtlifter #2, MacIsaac wants to tell true and revealing stories about himself and the people in his life, his lovers, family and friends. It is fascinating reading throughout the 10 stories.

MacIsaac's style lies somewhere between Harvey Pekar and Adrian Tomine, with the added bonus of a wonderfully-realized colour palette being utilized for most of #2's stories. I was sorry to see that MacIsaac plans to go back to fiction in his next efforts, but that doesn't change the fact that Shirtlifter #2 is an extraordinary accomplishment in comics, and I urge you to see for yourself.

Buy Shirtlifter#1 and Shirtlifter #2 from Amazon.com.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 11:29 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Look Out! Monsters -- This 2007 Xeric Award winner will be arriving in comic book stores in September, and if you like experimental artcomix, or even just monsters, you definitely want to give your retailer a heads-up to order this for you.

Arriving in an oversized, tabloid-sized format, Look Out! Monsters is a work of collage that celebrates comic art by remixing images from old comics, newspaper sheets and images of Frankenstein's Monster. It's kind of like creator Geoff Grogan took Brian Chippendale's Maggots, a month-old New York Times, a random issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland and an issue of Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four, tossed them all in a blender and created a visually stunning smoothie of comics genius.

There is some storytelling at work here, and a great, witty final image, but I can't tell you what the hell it all means, other than that Grogan has a lot of love for pop culture, and a brilliant visual style. Look Out! Monsters is an amazing artifact of art and comics that invites multiple readings and interpretations, and the hope that Grogan intends to do more, and soon.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 2:02 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
2 Guns -- Steven Grant's crime comics are always well-constructed and entertaining, so I ordered the collected 2 Guns through my comic shop after learning Diamond didn't have all the single issues in stock.

The plot involves two criminals who are each not quite what the other thinks, and there's plenty of double-dealing, reversals of fortune and, toward the end, moments of revelation that were solidly planted in earlier chapters.

The art by Mateus Santalouco is somewhat problematical -- there's a good design sense throughout and the colouring has that Hawaiian Dick feel to it; but Santalouco's actual individual panels tend toward the undercooked much like the work Ryan Ottley does for Image's Invincible, including a lack of backgrounds and an unfortunate tendency toward xeroxed panels. Grant's story is solid enough that you're drawn through to the end despite these flaws, and also a couple of disastrously mis-applied word balloons -- you'll definitely know those when you see them.

I've never seen the original comics, so I can't say for sure, but it seems like this Manga-sized collection is smaller all around than the comics probably were, with no adjustment made for the lettering, so it's a little hard on the eyes, and some panels feature an awful lot of dialogue. If you're going to go smaller than the originals were printed at, it's definitely worth redoing the lettering so that it's not quite so hard to read.

2 Guns was my first plunge into buying Boom Studios product, and I did so solely based on the strength of Steven Grant as a writer. His work here is fine, but the art, reproduction and lettering all needed a little work to make a more perfect product. If you like crime comics, like me, you'll probably forgive these weaknesses, but they don't make me anxious to spend more money on future Boom Studios releases without seeing what I'm getting myself into ahead of time.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 4:16 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
MOME Vol. 11 and Amor Y Cohetes -- Here we have two collections packed with fantastic comics, both excellent examples of why Fantagraphics remains the best comics publisher in North America.

* MOME Vol. 11 is the Summer, 2008 offering of the company's anthology of new and established cartoonists. This time out we get excellent offerings from Tom Kaczynski (a truly riveting tale about corporate immersion, one of his best stories yet, and he's always interesting), Dash Shaw (an outstanding story about art and jealousy and fakery and self-deception), and an amazing text piece (illustrated, yes, but mostly text) by Paul Hornschemeier. Hornschemeier also contributes another chapter of his ongoing "Life with Mr. Dangerous" serial (actually the most intriguing outing yet), but the text piece, "The Guest Speaker," is a real stretch, a prose exploration of a single character that feels like Hornschemeier's creative voice, exploring new boundaries of his storytelling.

Gary Groth interviews lettertype cartoonist Ray Fenwick (coinciding with the release of Fenwick's new Fantagraphics release Hall of Best Knowledge, and the result is a fascinating look at his process and creativity.

Oh, I almost forgot, Al Columbia is in here with four pages of mood and colour that are worth the price of admission all by themselves. All this, and a lot more; MOME is your best artcomix value every time out, and this really is an exceptional example of its breadth and worth.

* Amor Y Cohetes is the final (for now) volume of the most recent Love and Rockets reprint series, closing out the entirety of the series first fifty issues in seven compact, amazing volumes. This one is an odds 'n ends catch-all, but it's far from optional if you love the cartooning and storytelling of Los Bros Hernandez. "BEM," Gilbert Hernandez's wild first longform saga, is in here, as is his take on brother Jaime's characters. Lots of short pieces, some political pieces by brother Mario (who seems EC-inspired, to my eyes), and perhaps my favourite thing of all, a plethora of Gilbert panels that remind me strongly of Steve Ditko's work (many of them in the aforementioned "BEM").

If I felt like dicking around with my scanner, and possibly damaging the book, I'd post some examples. But grab a copy and turn to page 39, panel 4; page 10, panel 2; page 14, panel 3; page 24, panel 5; page 178, panel 3. The Hernandez Bros have a number of influences that are especially evident in their early work (which "BEM" surely is), but for some reason seeing Gilbert's Ditkoesque stylings really made me love this book even more. And there's so much stuff in Amor Y Cohetes that you can pretty much open to any page and just start reading another wild, stream-of-consciousness tale. Oh, and would Tesla Strong have existed without Rocket Rhodes as an inspiration?

Get Amor Y Cohetes and take it to the beach, keep it in the car, read it on the train -- it's a great companion for the summer ahead, and like all L&R volumes, absolutely indispensable to any reader who loves great comics.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 6:52 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The Education of Hopey Glass -- There's probably not a more perfect comics reading experience than immersing yourself in a Love and Rockets collection; they're all representative of the very best that comics can aspire to be, and The Education of Hopey Glass stands out as a premier example.

The book collects over a dozen short stories by Jaime Hernandez, stories that originally appeared in the now-complete L&R Vol. 2 (Vol. 3 will be an annual series of graphic novels). The focus in the first half of the book is mostly on Maggie's on-again, off-again lover Hopey, and the second half of the book is given over to the misadventures of Ray as he falls into orbit around Vivian, AKA "The Frogmouth."

Every story in this volume is sublimely rewarding and narratively fulfilling. By now Love and Rockets really is like going home for longtime readers. The characters have, decades after their creation, become as much a part of the reader's life as any friend or family member, with all the hope for their well-being and amusement at their foibles that that suggests. Much is unsaid about Hopey's attractions and aspirations, but by watching her actions, at the eye doctor, at home, at work, learning to drive -- we love her as Maggie does. How could you not?

Ray is more challenging a character than Hopey, because he's not as honest with himself or others as she is. But ultimately he's easy to relate to because his frustrations and desires mirror our own. Both the Ray/Frogmouth and the Hopey stories feature Angel, a sexy, full-figured young woman who is the focus of the best story in the book, a four-pager about her tossing a ball around with her dad and talking about her hopes and the unfair limitations she's facing.

The effect of Love and Rockets, as any individual book or as a decades-long experience, is always a cumulative one. I read these stories when they were serialized in periodical form, and I loved them. Taken together, re-worked into one long story broken up into chapters focusing on the various characters, a different focus reveals itself and I appreciate them even more. Most comics aren't as good the second time you read them, but Love and Rockets stories are always better with repeated exposure -- like spending time with loved ones you cherish and adore. Just exactly like that, in fact.

The Education of Hopey Glass (Love & Rockets)

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 11:10 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Kirby: King of Comics -- Author Mark Evanier mentions at one point in this generously illustrated biography that one could have filled ten such volumes full of Kirby's art, and of course that's true. I don't know if anyone has ever estimated how many pages of art the man born Jacob Kurtzburg produced in the seven or so decades he drew comics, but it's safe to say it was more than nearly anyone else of his time. Or any time.

Virtually every one of those pages was dynamic, and packed with a powerful sense of emotion. More importantly, almost from the very beginning, every page Kirby created was uniquely Kirby. There's a page in this wonderful book that shows covers featuring three different Kirby creations (The Demon, Machine Man and Captain America, I think) in strikingly similar poses. And unlike lesser artists who slide by on a limited skill-set, Kirby's stock images still arrest the eye with their drama and immediacy.

Mark Evanier was friends with Kirby from the time he was a teenager; he was there for the humiliations (Marvelmania, DC doctoring his artwork to conform to the house style) and the triumphs (Jack finally getting his art back; Jack finally getting his due, albeit from the animation industry, not comics). Kirby's vision and contribution to the comics artform so transcend normal boundaries of accomplishment that even his most cherished and sought-after victories in life tend to seem pyrrhic. Yes, he got his art back, but how many hundreds or thousands of pages were first stolen from Marvel's warehouses? Yes, he lived to know that he was truly respected as the King of Comics (and how he got that title and what it really meant to him is wondrously told by Evanier over the course of the entire book); but was it ever enough? Did Jack Kirby get his due?

From most readers of comics, I'd say he did. From the comics industry, the debt owed Kirby could never really begin to be repaid. His imagination, and perhaps more importantly his work ethic, were too staggering and too constant. Comics could never keep up with him, from the publishers, to the sales outlets, to the readers. From almost the birth of the artform as we understand it today, Kirby was always decades ahead of his time. Look at the recent, successful repackaging of Kirby's Fourth World work as a series of expensive hardcover omnibus editions. Kirby knew before the original comics were even created that this was their ideal form. It took over 30 years for readers, comic shops, bookstores and publishers to "get with it."

As I say, Mark Evanier spent a good portion of his life as Kirby's friend and colleague. No one save his wife Roz probably had more of Jack's trust and understanding. And Evanier even admits there's still aspects of Kirby he is trying to understand today, over a decade after we lost him.

Kirby: King of Comics. The book is a treasure, a celebration of the greatest superhero artist who will ever live and one of only five or so true geniuses of the comics artform entire. Kirby: King of Comics. The title reminds me of the first time I heard Evanier's name, watching the Tonight Show one night, as Johnny Carson read a letter from Mark Evanier (Carson said his name wrong) explaining why Jack was "the King of Comics," a title Carson had mocked on an earlier episode because he thought the title was referring to comedians, and Carson had never heard of Kirby the comedian and so made fun of the very idea.

Mark Evanier set Johnny Carson straight about Jack Kirby that night, and I've been a fan of his ever since. Mark's done a lot of things in life aside from set people straight about Jack Kirby, but there's nothing more noble he's accomplished that I know of. In words and pictures, Kirby: King of Comics is the official record of the life and work of one of the greatest, most unique minds to ever grace us with its workings. Evanier lets us understand Kirby to the extent that understanding is possible, and in its way, that is as remarkable as Kirby himself.

Kirby: King of Comics

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 7:25 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Reviews I Agree With: The Black Diamond -- Larry Young sent me the seven issues of The Black Diamond (seven counting the "on-ramp" zero-style issue) along with a note saying he was interested in what I thought of the series.

My thoughts are reflected pretty well in this review of The Black Diamond at Pop Matters. In a nutshell: great premise, lousy execution. Which is a shame, because I really liked the on-ramp issue.

From the creator of Astronauts in Trouble, I can only hope for better things next time.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 12:56 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 1 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 

Lifelike -- Dara Naraghi's been writing small press comics for about as long as I have been writing about comics, and he finally gets a chance in the spotlight with the beautiful hardcover collection Lifelike.

Naraghi writes all the stories in this anthology, with a strong collection of up-and-coming artists illustrating his vision. Some, like Steve Black and Tom Williams, are welcome, familiar names; others, like Jerry Lange and Tim McClurg, are new to me. But they all bring their best work to Naraghi's scripts, resulting in a book that is visually diverse but beautiful to look at, and held together by the strength of Naraghi's writing.

From reading his earlier comics, it's no surprise to me that Naraghi loves to write; in fact, it comes through in everything he does. The stories in Lifelike span a variety of genres, from autobiography to EC-style suspense (the excellent "Double-Cross at the Double Down" with artist MP Mann). But virtually everything here has the spark of genuine creativity and the power to entertain. The final story, "Repair," is visually stunning thanks to the confident, Euro-stylings of artist Shom Bhuiya, and the sense of place and emotion Naraghi's script brings to the piece ring true.

IDW has delivered superb production values for this volume, packed with good comics in a gorgeous hardcover for just twenty bucks. Naraghi's a name you'll be seeing in comics more and more in the years ahead, so Lifelike seems like an obvious bargain to me. It's twenty bucks you won't regret spending in the least, and if you're new to Naraghi's writing, a very good entry into his world.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:21 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 

Johnny Boo -- James Kochalka has created a 32-page story that is as kid-friendly as they come. Kochalka has said that he consulted with his young son Eli as he worked on this story, to make sure that it was working on the intended audience. Since Eli is about 3 years old, and I am 42, it's hard for me to be sure, but it seems likely to me that very young children will enjoy having Johnny Boo read to them.

This is not the same children's book style Kochalka worked in for Pinky and Stinky or Peanutbutter and Jeremy; artistically, Johnny Boo is closest to Kochalka's adults-only team book Super-F*ckers, with primary colours all over the place. Where Boo is unlike Super-F*ckers, other than a lack of profanity and gross-outs, is in a lack of scope. Super-F*ckers always feels like a wild ride with a million things happening at once, but Johnny Boo takes place entirely within the same grassy field that it begins in. If the characters ever move more than a few feet at a time within the story, it's not apparent.

Given that, Johnny Boo is probably going to mainly appeal to only the very young; but for pre-schoolers like Eli, this slight tale of ghosts, ice cream and monsters may seem enormous in scope, and it certainly has enough conflict and burping to keep them interested until the very end. And hopefully as they get older they'll be tempted to further explore Kochalka's growing library of graphic novels, which by now seems to have something for every age, and every interest.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 10:41 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 

That Salty Air -- Tim Sievert's first graphic novel, published by Top Shelf Productions, is a parable of frustration, rage and grief, told in a style that echoes alternative cartoonists such as Charles Burns, Craig Thompson and Richard Sala. There's a strong and confident use of black ink that defines the ocean that creates the "salty air" that the protagonist, Hugh, professes to love -- but the blackness of the ocean hides depths of despair and resentment, in addition to the wondrous creatures of the deep that seem to hover around the edge of Hugh's consciousness.

It's a tale told at leisure -- at 110 pages, Sievert could have told it in a quarter of the space he chooses to fill. But like the ocean, there's room to explore, and Sievert uses it well to dig into the hidden nooks and secret crannies deep in Hugh's soul.

Two letters arrive, from the same person, on the same day. To tell you what they are or who they are from would spoil your experience of the book, so I won't. But the letters forever alter Hugh and Maryanne's understanding and occupation of the space they live in. For one, the world gets vastly more large; for the other, the ocean is reduced to a small pool of unlimited fury.

I mention Charles Burns, and I think you'll see his influence in the strangeness of the deep, the creatures so alien to our everyday experience of life, and yet as much a part of the world as we are, ourselves. Sievert's story becomes ever more stranger, the more it unfolds, and the unknowable oddness of the deepest undersea life is a fine metaphor for the ways in which we are unable to process the most profound and unwelcome moments of our life, such as the moments Hugh has to come to grips with out there on the ocean.

But there are sweet moments in life that are hard to describe and harder still to come to terms with, and deep in Hugh's falling apart, Maryanne introduces him to that truth; the ultimate question is whether he can navigate the new seas his life has revealed to him, so rich with paradox and so full of promise. That Salty Air concerns itself with Hugh's choices and his ultimate decision, and is a very good first graphic novel from a very promising young talent.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 10:20 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 

10 Things I Love About The New Mome -- The tenth volume of the Fantagraphics comics anthology Mome is in my hands, and to celebrate its tenth volume, here are ten things I loved about it:

10. Dash Shaw's mind-fucking backward/forward robot war tragicomedy "Look Forward, First Son of Terra Two." FANTASTIC.

9. The textures in the Jim Woodring piece; the story (continued from Vol. 9) is up to the usual Woodring standard of psychedelic excellence, but the textures on display in the neighbourhood scenes are astonishing.

8. The final panel in the Woodring story: study it carefully. How long have these kids been weeping, and what are they mourning? A lost world of wonder? Their own ability to function in a universe they no longer understand?

7. Tom Kaczynski's interview, conducted by Gary Groth. Groth is one of my personal heroes, whatever his perceived flaws, and no one can doubt his ability to paint fascinating portraits of the people he interviews, virtually every time out. Kaczynski is no exception -- his life story is interesting stuff, and his inclusion in Mome has improved it measurably.

6. No surprise, then, that his story in this volume is one of the highlights. He takes the Clowes/Tomine ball that he references in the Groth interview, and he runs off in unexpected directions with it.

5. Kaczynski's portrait of The Lizard bursting out of Spider-Man's costume is worth noting all on its own.

4. Ten volumes in, and no price increase.

3. The Sophie Crumb full-page portrait right at the front of the issue. I am finding her strips a little out of place in Mome and I wish we'd see more of her solo series Belly Button Comix, but this is a nice piece of art and a stretch from her usual Mome offerings.

2. John Hankiewicz's "Success Comes to Westmont, IL" is a change of pace for the cartoonist, a little more direct than his usual fare, but also using stylistic change-ups to add depth and nuance to the narrator's bitter complaint.

1. Al Columbia's cover -- there are cat people and dog people, and I am a cat people. The front and back covers are both cat portraits by Al Columbia, and both are extraordinary and chilling in very different ways. I think the thing I love the most is the phantom claw just barely visible on the right side of the image; is Columbia showing us a bit of his process, or suggesting the speed with which cats move, or both? Also of note: This is the first original cover the series has featured, instead of a blown-up image from the interior. I liked that idea, but I love Columbia's cover more.

Labels: art, recommendations, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 9:44 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 6 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Yearbook Stories 1976-1978 -- Top Shelf co-publisher Chris Staros became well-known in comics thanks to his Staros Report, an engaging and highly personal fanzine/checklist of his favourite comics that he published in the 1990s. In addition to his reviews and commentary, he also included some value-added autobiographical comics which were fun to read. The material collected in Yearbook Stories, which originally appeared in the 2001 SPX Anthology, are as much fun as his previous efforts.

There are two tales, one longer one illustrated by Bo Hampton in lush black and white, and a shorter one drawn by Rich Tommaso. "The Willful Death of a Stereotype," the Hampton-drawn story, is about Staros attempting to reinvent himself by running for 6th grade class president. Of such stuff are Afterschool Specials made of, but thanks to Hampton's brilliant artwork and Staros's forward-driven narrative, "Willful Death" becomes something special. Great, truthful little moments and a genuinely reflective conclusion leave the reader with real insight into Staros's personality -- hell, even into his inclusive vision of comics. Good autobio comics tell you something about their creator while they entertain you, and "Willful Death" does both.

"The Worst Gig I ever Had" is the pleasant after-dinner mint of the book, a short story about the weird things that can happen to high-schoolers who form a band. Tomasso illustrates the story in an inky sort of Paul-Grist-Meets-Kevin-Huizenga groove, and it ends on an amusing note that would shock and awe the Staros found in the previous story.

Top Shelf has priced Yearbook Stories at a hugely reasonable $4.00. It's a nicely-formatted slightly-larger-than-digest-sized pamphlet that will make for a good stocking stuffer for anyone you know who's into comics, or just a fun and thoughtful addition to your own reading pile. And given that it's subtitled "1976-1978," I hope there may be more issues to come. I'm sure Staros has more stories in him, and we could use more comics like Yearbook Stories.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 6:17 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
ADD's 2007 Year in Review -- Let's look back at a great year for comics. First up:

THE BEST of 2007

* Crecy, Warren Ellis and Raulo Caceres (Avatar) -- This one took me by surprise, and ended up being by far one of my favourite comics of the year. The way Ellis uses the lead character's narration is pretty unique in comics, and adds a layer of comedy and depth to the true story of a crucial historical battle. This is one you have to experience to really appreciate how accomplished it is. [Full Crecy review].

* Criminal, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Marvel/Icon) -- Although I didn't review any single issues of this in calendar 2007, it was still my favourite monthly read and a more entertaining and well-crafted title than any other five comics you could name from either Marvel or DC. The second story arc, "Lawless," just wrapped up, and it was one of Brubaker's best pieces of character work ever, with Phillips contributing his usual amazing artwork -- he's the very best artist currently creating monthly comics, no question. [Criminal #1 review].

* Marvel Zombies: Dead Days and Marvel Zombies 2, Robert Kirkman and Sean Phillips (Marvel) -- Nothing captures the real spirit of Marvel's heyday better than this perverse reimagining of their core characters, which has become a franchise unto itself. Stick with the books by Kirkman and Phillips, and know you're in for a grand time. [Marvel Zombies 2 #1 review].

* I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets, Fletcher Hanks (Fantagraphics Books) -- Junky and presumed-forgotten comics by one of the artform's weirdest minds were recontextualized by Fantagraphics and editor Paul Karasik into one of the must-read collections of the year. You may never look at superheroes the same way again, and never have as much fun reading them. [I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets review].

* A Treasury of Victorian Murder: Saga of the Bloody Benders, Rick Geary (NBM/ComicsLit) -- This was one of the finest and most fun original graphic novels of the year. You don't hear much about Geary on the comics news sites, but he quietly has become one of the most unique and dependable storytellers in the entire medium. [Bloody Benders review].

* Please Release, Nate Powell (Top Shelf) -- If there's a more thoughtful and interesting artcomix practitioner than Nate Powell, I don't know who it would be. He's someone you'll be hearing a lot more about in the years ahead, and the stories in this collection are a good indicator why. [Please Release review].

* Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (Marvel) -- I didn't review this, but I don't think there was a better value for your superhero dollar than this 99.9 percent perfect collection of possibly the greatest superhero comics of all time. The misspelling of Steve Ditko's name on the last page is the only flaw I could detect, but Jesus, what a flaw to have in an otherwise exquisite presentation of these essential comics.

* All-Star Superman, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (DC) -- The most fun I've had since, well, any other Morrison and Quitely project you could name. One of the greatest, most entertaining teams working in corporate comics.

* Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly) -- Any other creator delivering a novel this dense and entertaining would probably be hailed in every corner of the blogosphere, but the excellence of Shortcomings is by now expected, and therefore possibly not as thrill-generating. But rest assured, this exploration of race and relationships is Tomine stretching, even if just a little bit, and that makes it more than worth your attention. [Optic Nerve #9 (Shortcomings Chapter 1) review].

* The Complete Peanuts, Charles Schulz (Fantagraphics) -- This series is well into the most glorious era of the best comic strip ever, and you should definitely be reading along to see how the magic happened, day after day, for half a century. I recently reviewed David Michaelis's Schulz biography, Schulz and Peanuts, as well.

* Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Joss Whedon and Georges Jeanty (Dark Horse) -- I don't know if this title will bring any new readers to comics, but if you were ever a fan of Whedon's TV work, this is the most note-perfect adaptation/continuation you could possibly have asked for. Even writer Brian K. Vaughan's arc is keeping me entertained, and that's quite an accomplishment considering his stuff usually not only leaves me cold, but makes me throw up a little in my mouth.

* Spent, Joe Matt (Drawn and Quarterly) -- I suppose this is the sort of story anti-artcomix folks are talking about when they damn all artcomix with the "navel-gazey/autobio/masturbation" accusation. Fuck them, I love Matt's stuff. [Peepshow #13 (Spent Chapter 1) review].

* The Boys, Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson (Dynamite) -- Anyone who dismisses The Boys as mere foul-mouthed satire is missing one of the wildest and best superhero rides around. The book just gets better with every passing issue. [The Boys #8 review].

* Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, Bryan Lee O'Malley (Oni), and Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill (DC/Wildstorm) -- All right, I haven't read these yet because they come out today. I admit it. But by this time tomorrow I will have likely read both, and based on previous volumes in both series, I have no doubt they belong on this list. If I'm wrong, I'll happily come back and edit this post. But I don't think I'll have to. Related: As much as I miss Moore's ABC line, I am pleased as punch for him that he's out from under his indentured servitude to DC, a company that has gone far out of its way to shit on him time and time again. And I look forward to supporting every project he chooses to create with any other publisher. DC really, really fucked up when they decided (multiple times) to alienate the best writer ever to work in comics, and they will likely lose hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in future revenue as a result of their petty, vindictive bullshit. Fuck anyone who had a hand in Moore's decision to separate himself permanently from the company.

And now, because there was just a lot of it, here's some of:

THE WORST of 2007

* Martha Washington Dies, Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons (Dark Horse) -- I don't know what I was expecting from this, but having really enjoyed the original series back when it debuted, this came as something of a shallow, pointless kick in the teeth. [Martha Washington Dies review].

* Green Lantern Sinestro Corps Special #1, Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver (DC) -- Noogies. Fucking noogies. Who does Geoff Johns have pictures of, and what farm animal are they sodomizing, exactly? I can't believe anyone would even have to ask if Geoff Johns still sucks, but there it is. He sure as fuck does. [GLSCS #1 review].

* Tales from the Crypt #1, various (Papercutz) -- Very possibly the worst idea of the year, if not ever. [TFTC #1 review].

* Thor #1, J. Michael Straczynski and Oliver Coipel (Marvel) -- "How mightily it fails to impress," I said, proving just how pervasive Thor's pseudo-Shakespearean dialect might be. This was one big, malodorous turd in the mighty small punchbowl that is "what I expect from Marvel these days." [Thor #1 review].

* The Highwaymen #1 (DC/Wildstorm) -- The creators of this exercise in generic tedium were shocked when the title was canceled after a handful of issues. I sure as hell wasn't. [The Highwaymen #1 review].

LOOKING AHEAD

What am I looking forward to in 2008? Hopefully more surprises like Crecy and I shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets, and more expected excellence like Criminal, All-Star Superman, Scott Pilgrim, anything by Rick Geary, and The Boys. And I really hope Dark Horse collects (in hardcover, goddamn it!) Kurt Busiek and Greg Ruth's Born on the Battlefield, one of the most compelling Conan stories ever presented. I'd also like to see Barry Windsor-Smith's Paradoxman collection from Fantagraphics, and see Marvel get its head out of its ass and release BWS's Thing graphic novel.

Labels: lists, recommendations, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 12:46 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 1 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Michaelis and Schulz and Peanuts -- Over the weekend, I finished reading David Michaelis's Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography; I'd like to say I came away from it knowing which side is right in the controversy over the book, but Schulz was too complex a subject with too large a life to make it as easy as declaring his family to be right or wrong in their displeasure with the book.

It's undeniably well-researched, and Michaelis obviously talked to many different people from all the eras of Schulz's life to get a picture of who he was. But Michaelis admits late in the volume that he never personally met Schulz, and ultimately the picture painted of the man feels like it lacks some vital elements. We learn a lot -- or at least, a lot of times -- about Schulz's stoic distance from others and his inability to give and receive affection in the way most of us understand and process it. But this seems highly at odds with the clear fact that the man had five children, two wives and numerous relationships ranging from lifelong friendships to brief flirtations and everything in-between.

What ultimately resolved itself for me in the pages of the book is a portrait of Sparky Schulz as a master manipulator of people's emotions and actions. Michaelis, deliberately or not, creates an image of a not terribly palatable human being who uses his own melancholy and neediness to get everything from sex to recognition of his genius as a cartoonist. It seems like revenge is what motivated Schulz from very early in his life -- revenge for the death of his mother and the abyss that created for his ego, and revenge for all the slights he received along the way from being a fan of the newspaper comics to becoming the artform's most gifted and sublime practitioner.

Having read Peanuts for virtually the entirety of my life, it's extraordinarily difficult for me to process the contradictions inherent in believing that a comic strip so rich with human feeling and insight could have been created by someone as wretched as Michaelis's book ultimately suggests Sparky Schulz could be. But the long record of interviews Schulz left behind suggests that he did, indeed, have a difficult time coming to grips with how much his work was loved. I suppose it's no big leap to assume he could have had an equally hard time accepting love in his private life, for all the years that he lived.

Moreover, Michaelis presents many comic strips to back up his assertions throughout the book, and it's unlikely anyone who reads the entire book and the accompanying strips will ever quite be able to perceive its totality the same way again. Peanuts ultimately may have been far more autobiography than anyone could ever have known, perhaps most depressingly Schulz's first wife Joyce, who it seems would have had a far greater understanding of her marriage and her husband if she had just bothered to read the funnies every day.

Sometimes Michaelis's research seems to drive the narrative in ways that lend little or no insight into his putative subjects; the occasional list of performers at the ice hockey rink Schulz's wife championed, or a list of licensed Peanuts merchandise, finally reveal nothing more than that they are, in fact, lists. We all know Snoopy and Charlie Brown and the rest of the cast of the comic strip was merchandised and licensed ad infinitum. Such moments highlight what I think is the book's greatest flaw, especially given that the title is Schulz and Peanuts: Michaelis tells us nothing about a fifty-year run of comics that doesn't support his Citizen Kane theory of Sparky Schulz's life.

Michaelis seems to know virtually nothing about comics. At one point, Schulz is quoted saying something about the quality of his linework; over the course of this biography, Michaelis offers no insight at all about Schulz's art past some very facile observations about big, round heads and tiny little bodies. Reference is made to how the interior of Charlie Brown's home was based on the home the Schulz family lived in, but readers will learn nothing much at all about Schulz's ability to depict space and time in black and white on the comics page, about what made his art so very different and unique from what other cartoonists were creating at the same time. That Schulz's art was unique may be granted by Michaelis, but he seems to lack a critic's ability to explain and explore it.

If you come into Schulz and Peanuts thinking you will learn anything at all about what it takes to create comics, especially an unprecedented success like Peanuts that revolutionized an artform, think again. You will learn that Schulz went to his studio with great, even obsessive, discipline. But you will learn virtually nothing about what went through the man's mind as he sat at his drawing board for hours on end, every day of the week. Perhaps, in the end, he was driven by nothing more than a need to get away from other people and a need to reinforce his own sense of melancholy; that's what Michaelis supposes, but I choose to believe the author makes that choice not because it's all there is to know, but rather because it supports his thesis.

Charles Schulz, in Michaelis's interpretation, spent his life suffering from, reacting to, and living inside his own pain. Pain stemming mostly from the death of his mother. "'Rosebud,' Schulz sighed, and then he died." Michaelis's research and interviews are valuable, and the book is worth reading, but the Citizen Kane model of Schulz's life does not explain everything that made Peanuts a comic strip that will endure as long as there are books, and people to read them.

Schulz and Peanuts tells us a lot of facts about Schulz, and some analysis of Schulz as a man. But it seems to leave out a lot about Schulz, suggesting he was either as simple as the public record suggests, or unknowably complex. And we learn painfully little about Peanuts. There's still a book out there waiting to be written that will open up all our perceptions about what only Sparky Schulz could do with comics. I hope someday to read it.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 12:54 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 4 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Marvel Zombies 2 #1 -- Kirkman and Phillips pick up where they left off (albeit 50 years later) without missing a beat. Of course, 50 years isn't so long when you're a zombie, or possess a devoured portion of the Power Cosmic, or both, so most of the gang from the first series is back, some in surprising and gratifying ways.

Sean Phillips's art seems rougher than the previous series, or that he's delivering for Criminal, but his crunchy, neo-old school stylings are always a joy to see on Marvel characters, especially zombified ones.

Yes, zombies are a worn-out trend in comics, but in Marvel Zombies the gorgeous art and tongue-in-cheek (or protruding through cheek?) pathos provide non-stop entertainment.

Keep all your Wars, both Secret and Civil -- I'll take as much more Marvel Zombies as Kirkman and Phillips have to deliver. Beware shoddy spin-offs, one-shots and what-have-you by other creators (both past and future), but Marvel Zombies as envisioned by Kirkman and Phillips is some great superhero comics that walk a fine line between (ha!) biting satire and genuine superhero melodrama.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 6:05 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Squa Tront #12 -- I first encountered John Benson's Squa Tront in the 1980s, most likely in the pages of Bud Plant's paradigm-shifting catalog of comics, graphic novels and artbooks. What's amazing to me all these years later is that, as much as has changed in the past 20 or 25 years in the industry and artform of comics, Squa Tront hasn't changed at all. It's focused solely on cataloging as much of the history of EC Comics as possible, and is one of the most valuable comics-related magazines ever produced.

This issue is mostly interviews, generously illustrated as always. Artist Jack Kamen reminisces about his EC days and we learn that he did quite well for himself in advertising art and investing after he left comics (his son Dean is noteworthy for creating the Segway personal transport device, although this interview doesn't mention that, having been conducted some years back). Kamen tells an amusing anecdote of EC publisher Bill Gaines accusing Kamen's monsters of all looking like fish, and despite a page of panels designed to prove otherwise, you know, a lot of them do look like fish.

Possibly the highlight of the issue is a decades-old interview with Harvey Kurtzman, who pulls few punches in talking about his frustrations while at EC; he especially despised Lyle Stuart, and lo and behold, we also find an interview with Stuart in which we find the feeling was mutual. Given Kurtzman's description of Stuart's belligerent manner while a guest in Kurtzman's home, I'll side with Kurtzman here. Especially since Stuart, in his interview, also fails to recognize the genius of Bernard Krigstein, and makes it clear that he felt the best comics were the ones prepared for the least amount of money. So Stuart comes off as a bit of a jerk and with zero capacity for art in his soul, but as is usual for Squa Tront, his interview is still required reading for anyone interested in EC.

This issue has two spectacular covers -- a horror-themed painting on the front by Johnny Craig, and perhaps best of all, a Kurtzman-illustrated portrait of the entire EC bullpen, hats in hand and looking quite contrite. A lengthy article inside explains the whys and hows this piece was deemed necessary to create, yet another amazing piece of previously-unknown EC history.

Production values on Squa Tront are unquestionably gorgeous, thanks to editor John Benson and designer Greg Sadowski (author/designer of two fantastic books on the afore-mentioned Krigstein). For a mere $9.95, Squa Tront provides hours of fascinating reading about one of the most unique and interesting comics publishing houses in the history of the artform. Along with The Comics Journal and Comic Art, it has to be said that Squa Tront is a treasure trove of information and entertainment for people who love to read about comics as much as they love to read them.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 10:20 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Warren Ellis's Crécy -- It's entirely possible Crécy is the perfect Warren Ellis comic book.

It's profane, it's violent, and it's extremely British. It's also funny, smart, and will teach you things you probably already ought to know (and most likely do if you were schooled in the UK or France).

Most relevant to my theory that it might be the perfect Ellis comic, not a page feels wasted or compromised in the way his Marvel and DC work sometimes evinces. As with the best of Ellis's work at Avatar (Dark Blue, the current Black Summer), his imagination runs at feverish full speed even as his writerly instincts retain primacy to create a controlled and quite compelling story. And Crécy even offers up something else: It's written in a manner quite unlike anything Ellis has created before.

First and foremost, Crécy is history. It's about a specific moment in time when the English and the French had a decisive confrontation that has informed, we're told, many (if not all) battles that followed and defined how the two nations see themselves and each other politically and culturally. It's narrated by a blunt, coarse and hate-filled archer named William of Stonham who speaks directly to the reader in a third-wall breaking monologue that occasionally intersects with the action in real time. Other comics may have featured this technique in short segments or stories, but Ellis utilizes this unusual stylistic choice to great effect, drawing us right onto the battlefield and making us sympathize with the cause and motivations of our foul-mouthed protagonist. It really is extraordinary, just how effectively this allows Ellis to communicate to us the enduring importance of this historic battle.

Artist Raulo Caceres is a fine fit with Ellis's script, delivering illustrations heavy on mood, atmosphere and most essentially, a sense of place. Maps and widescape vistas give a solid sense of Crécy as a real place in space and time, and his depiction of the requisite uniforms, weaponry and horses -- all difficult and research-heavy items to have to illustrate, to be sure -- come off as convincing and natural. His style could be described as EC-era John Severin meets Bernie Wrightson, influences altogether appropriate for Ellis's tale, which could easily have been placed in Two-Fisted Tales decades ago, were it not for a generous use of profanity and violence.

But what, most of all, may make Crécy the perfect Warren Ellis comic is its final panel. After all we've seen and all we've learned, Ellis ends on one last bit of business that is both profanity and information all tied up in one unforgettable visual punchline. I'd guess, and I don't know either way, but I'd guess that the entire reason for Crécy's existence may stem from Ellis's desire to comment on the legendary gesture that closes out the story. It's witty and subversive and uniquely Warren Ellis, and more to his credit (and his publishers), it's neither censored nor explained. You either get it or you don't, and it works either way.

It's a perfect moment in a great graphic novel that rises to the standard of other great, idiosyncratic historical works in comics like Chester Brown's Louis Riel, Rick Geary's Victorian Murder series or Jack Jackson's Texas histories. As history, as comics, and as evidence of Warren Ellis's gifts as a writer, Crécy is essential stuff.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 3:32 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Two to Get in San Diego -- I won't be at the San Diego Comicon this year (my unbroken streak continues!), but two graphic novels spring immediately to mind as worth recommending to you if you're going and you see them up for sale.

* I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets (Fantagraphics Books) -- This big collection of truly freaky superhero comics by Fletcher Hanks is edited by Paul Karasik, and includes an illustrated comic-style afterword about how the project came to be. Hank's talents combine the rubbery stylings of Basil Wolverton interpreting the twisted scripting of Michael Fleischer, with a singleness of purpose to each and every script that at first seems like laziness or a lack of imagination, but by the end of the book will have you realizing in its own way, this one-track mind of Hanks's may have been his greatest gift to comics. He apparently wasn't a very nice guy, if you believe Karasik's afterword (and there's no reason not to), but in his own way his comics seem like a distillation of everything that is possible in superhero comics, and everything that is utterly retarded. This is one of the essential books of the year, without question.

* Spent (Drawn and Quarterly) -- The four issues collected here seemed somehow more monumental when I was buying them in single issues over the years they took to come out, but Joe Matt's latest collection is still, in some ways, his most personal and interesting. The intimate details of his repugnant private life when he was living in Canada are all on display, and no doubt many who knew what he was up to may be glad he's living back in the States now. Matt, Seth and Chester Brown (the latter two are characters in the book) all make up a sort of mini-movement in artcomix, and I find just about everything all three do to be revealing and progressive comics that move the artform forward no matter what their individual tics and foibles. I can't say you'll like the guy once you close the covers of this very well-designed hardcover, but if you're like me you'll find it impossible to stop reading and even admire Matt's ability to depict his own worst nature with what appears to be brutal, if elegant, honesty.

* San Diego Bonus -- Here's Christopher Butcher's Five Favourite San Diego Memories; tell him I said "hi" if you see him there, would you?

Labels: linkblogging, recommendations, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:52 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Nothing Better Volume One: No Place Like Home -- I'm somewhat astonished to realize it's been five years since I reviewed Tyler Page's first graphic novel. I still think of him as just getting started, but he's been busy working on his craft: Nothing Better Volume One is substantially better than Stylish Vittles, which was a fine debut in and of itself.

But in that debut volume, Page displayed some arty mannerisms that detracted from his storytelling. I still vividly remember the lengthy sequence that prompted me to write "a journey through the cosmos to arrive at the college after many, many pages is a bit much," but I also remember the pleasure I got from reading the book, which had me noting in the same sentence that "on the whole I found the novel engaging and irresistible."

So how has Page improved? He does still cover much of the same ground -- the tenuous connections formed in new relationships, grappling with young adulthood, and questions about the existence of God -- but his storytelling is far more direct. In Nothing Better, Page creates a variety of characters with a variety of beliefs and personalities, and at no time does he seem to favour one over the other. Jane and Katt are as different as two young women can be, but both of them are likable and appealing -- sexy, even -- but they are complex characters who can both delight and infuriate with their actions.

Page's exploration of early college life is flawlessly convincing, too. A moment when a character returns home and is shocked to learn her parents expect her to follow her high school curfew feels expertly observed, as do many other moments.

I am not a religious person, and I wondered when the book's intentions came into focus if it was going to turn me off. But Page plays completely fair with both his characters and their beliefs. One character, known as "Jesus Gene" to Katt, Jane's atheist roommate, seems creepily insistent on dogma over intelligent inquiry, but it's not like there are not people like that in real life. And other characters who do believe in one religious philosophy or another don't do so to the exclusion of every other element of their lives, just like most religious people. These aren't extremists, they're just people. They believe what they believe, and some of them ask questions, and all of them are growing up and finding their own way. Page's depiction of their journey is fun and compelling to read, and his characters are impossible not to root for. This first volume does not conclude their story, but it does have a very nice final sequence that leaves the reader both satisfied, and ready for more.

In fact, you can read more -- the three chapters that follow the events of Volume One, as well as all of Volume One -- are available for reading at Tyler Page's website.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 2:47 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Martha Washington Dies -- The final chapter in the life of the dystopic war hero created by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons has been released as a single issue comic book, and it strikes me as pretty symptomatic of the ongoing transformation of the comic book industry from a floppy, periodical-based enterprise to a graphic novel-centered business. It undeniably wraps up the saga and will, probably, make for an acceptable "final chapter" in the eventual collection of the entire series; but as a standalone comic book, it is less satisfying than half of a Pringles potato chip at snack time.

For $3.50 USD, readers get acolytes and followers of a now-ancient Martha Washington sitting around the fire listening to one last, lengthy inspirational speech. Gorgeously illustrated by Dave Gibbons, all you need to know about the contents of the issue are found in the title: Martha Washington Dies. Is Frank Miller yet again thumbing his nose at his longtime readers? More likely, again, Dark Horse just needed a final chapter. But as a single issue, this one feels like it's worth about $0.35 USD, not ten times that.

I'll admit I've long since given up on the idea that Frank Miller can write a comic book I will enjoy on a purely visceral (or any other) level. His tics and tropes, at this late date, seem as automatic and uninspired as his early Daredevil work seemed energetic and unpredictable. Clearly this was a comic meant to inspire, and if it's writer had remembered to give us a story to care about, it might have.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 8:21 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 1 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Alive -- I love the surge in comics reading that has happened in North America as a result of the manga revolution, but I have to admit that few multi-volume series have personally engaged me as a reader over the long haul. Probably the longest I stuck by a particular series was Battle Royale. I loved the first volume of Battle Royale, and bought maybe the first eight or nine volumes. But I loved the concept enough to want to see the film (both the manga and the movie were inspired by an original novel, I believe), and when a friend sent me the movie on DVD, I was thrilled. I enjoyed the hell out of the (demented and wild) movie, but it compromised my ability to be patient through the eventual 14 or 15 volumes of the manga series (I "knew how it ended," basically), and I dropped the title from my pull list. Bad critic; bad, bad.

My taste in manga seems to run more to short stories and single volumes. If you were to ask me what the most essential manga in my graphic novel library is, I'd immediately say the works of Yoshihiro Tatsumi collected by Drawn and Quarterly, The Push Man and Other Stories and Abandon the Old in Tokyo. Those aren't generally the manga I see teenagers gobbling down in the stacks at my local bookstores, but Tatsumi and I are both older than they are. I bet eventually some of them will see the same depth and power in his stuff that I do, weaned as they have been on an international and cosmopolitan worldview of comics (something I am glad, indeed, to have lived long enough to see come to pass).

Alive is a new series written by Tadashi Kawashima with art by Adachitoka; it's published by Del Ray Manga, and it reminded me a bit of Battle Royale: Both series feature likable teenage protagonists revolting against an insane, deadly set of circumstances. Alive is more humanistic in its approach, though. It takes less glee in the gore, and therefore the violence it does contain seems somehow more consequential.

There's the usual teasing sexuality, one panty shot being oddly intersected with a moment of horrific despair, and another moment in which a sister flashes her brother, to apparently bring him out of a funk (and apparently it works). I don't know that I'll ever fully understand the differences in our two cultures, not that I am casting aspersions one way or the other. I just thought it was worth noting -- the feeling of not quite being in a world you understand is inherent in even the most pedestrian of manga, and I'm not altogether certain that isn't one of its appeals, if not one of its greatest strengths.

The world (not just Japan, that's clearly spelled out) has been caught up in the grip of what some believe is a "suicide virus" (the term is in big bold letters on the back cover, so, this is not a spoiler), causing some people to just suddenly off themselves for no apparent reason. The strangeness of this turn of events is brilliantly captured in the extended sequence depicting the first suicide we see. The tone of the scene is both sublime and horrible at the same time, wondrously captured through words and pictures.

Another sequence stands out in my mind as one of the best in the book, and its one that takes full advantage of manga's ability to parse out a single moment over the course of many pages. The protagonist, Taisuke, attempts a rooftop rescue of a beautiful young girl as his actions are contrasted with his older sister witnessing a separate suicide attempt. It's a brilliantly-paced sequence that had me in a completely arrested state of suspense.

There are a couple of genuinely eerie scenes depicting the apparent initiation into the suicidal state of mind that is enveloping the world's peoples, moments that force you to stop reading as time stops for the characters involved.

Alive is pulpy stuff, with the feel of a story that is meant for serialization. I'm okay with that, though. It's off to a compelling start, and I want to read the rest of the story. Then I'll find out if there's a movie.

Labels: manga, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 1:29 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Tales From the Crypt #1 -- Papercutz revives the EC horror title in name only in this debut issue, which has a lot more wrong with it than right. To spoil the suspense, I'll say up front that Kyle Baker's cover is the only element that gets it entirely right, and even that is ruined with an ass-ugly word balloon.

A text piece promises two 20-page stories in each issue, "in the EC tradition," but the EC tradition is actually four stories five to seven pages or so in length. This gave EC's stable of writers and artists a narrow window with which to grab the reader's attention, and a lot of the time they did just that, creating at worst, lurid but entertaining pulp fiction, and at best, some of the most enduring masterpieces of comic book art ever.

The lead story here is called "Body of Work," and the script carries you along just fine up until the nonsensical non-ending, which demonstrates pretty definitively that the writer, Marc Bilgrey, has no grasp at all on story structure or dramatic payoff. The story does seem to be building to something, then it just ends in a manner that suggests Bilgrey was making it up as he went along, and either lost patience or ran out of pages. But there's no logic or irony to what happens, and both are essential if you are laying claim to working "in the EC tradition."

The art in "Body of Work," by "Mr. Exes," initially put me off; it looks quite a bit like Evan Dorkin's comedy work, actually. But, as inappropriate as the style seems for a comic called Tales From the Crypt, it works far better than Bilgrey's script ultimately does, and if the script had risen to a higher level than it ultimately does, the art could have worked despite being 180 degrees away from anything at all like what you might expect from an EC homage.

The second and final story in this debut issue is "For Serious Collectors Only," and I have to note that its writer, Rob Vollmar, is a longtime friend of mine. His story, about a rabid action figure collector, holds together better than "Body of Work," with some nice character moments and a compelling, if inside-baseball-ish script likely to appeal most to comic book nerds. But the ending, frankly, isn't much better constructed than Bilgrey's was, and if you're going to call your comic book Tales from the Crypt, man, your stories better have some fucking snap in their endings.

With four stories in every issue, the original EC Comics could get away with one or two clunkers; in fact, rare was the issue that had four uniformly excellent stories all in a row. With only two stories per issue, the series needs an editor and creators working overtime to make sure those two tales meet the standard you're setting yourself up for when you call the book Tales From the Crypt.

That, I think, is the main failure of the title. The 1950s Tales had a strong, unwavering (even heavy-handed) editorial mandate and oversight from William Gaines and Al Feldstein. There's little evidence of any editorial guidance here at all, from the top-level failure to make the stories as strong as possible, all the way down to the truly wretched lettering that is slapped onto both stories.

I'm all for a revival of EC-style comics, and I'm not so closed-minded that I think a new version has to necessarily be a rubber-stamp of the styles and techniques of Gaines and Company's work. But as someone who has a great love for the best EC had to offer, I'm actually offended by the lack of respect or comprehension this first issue demonstrates for what was special about EC Comics.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 9:36 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Crooked Little Vein -- "Crime and sex are inextricably linked, I have found." So says one of the plethora of bizarre and sordid characters private detective Mike McGill meets over the course of Warren Ellis's first prose novel. Readers of Crooked Little Vein will find crime and sex are bound up in each other, in ways most of us probably are only peripherally aware of.

But we're more and more aware of the strangeness of the world, thanks to the internet and its ability to provide instant information to anyone who wants it and can score access to a computer hooked up to the web. Humans have been doing weird shit to themselves, others and farm animals since probably before spoken language was even codified, but we never knew how widespread sexual strangeness could be, or how much of an audience it could muster, until the internet came along and shattered all our illusions. Ellis -- and better him than me, I must say -- has spent years prowling the web for the worst of what is out there, and Crooked Little Vein works as both a gripping mystery novel and a more-or-less true-life travelogue of the perverse.

If you've read any of Warren Ellis's comics work, especially Transmetropolitan and Desolation Jones, the first few pages of Crooked Little Vein might seem familiar. Mike McGill is an embittered but ultimately good-hearted private eye -- an admitted "shit magnet" -- who is tasked with uncovering a hidden truth that goes to the very heart of American culture, and is set-upon by vile and outrageous obstacles. A rat pisses in his coffee. A cutting-edge cell phone is introduced. A young woman with tattoos and many lovers of both genders comes on the scene. It's not, as I say, unfamilar, at least to devotees of Ellis's comics writing (of which I am one, it should be noted). But it's also entertaining and even enlightening stuff. I had a hard time putting the book down, honestly, and that was a pleasant surprise.

So if you're familiar with Ellis's comics work, try to see past your initial instinct that this will be more of Ellis plowing the same Pete Wisdom/Spider Jerusalem/Richard Fell kind of character that he does so well, or at least so often, and give yourself over to a particularly delicious ride.

Ellis teaming up his curmudgeonly bastard with a hot bisexual young woman is not the plot of the story, anyway -- it's merely the setup for what unfolds. And even the setup, once underway, is an amusing bit of business. What makes it work is the honest humanity Ellis injects into private detective Mike McGill. Utterly charming is the way in which McGill comes to grips with his relationship with Trix, his unpredictable and straightforwardly lusty partner in his investigation. What happens between them doesn't seem entirely likely in the real world, but the way Ellis sketches out the dynamics of Trix's personality, it becomes not only possible but logical. There's a real energy in their interplay, and their scenes together are a uniform delight. Crooked Little Vein's hidden depths lie in the growth Trix forces on McGill, and in his struggles with having his eyes opened to more than just the bizarre antics he keeps stumbling into.

Over the 276 pages, Ellis takes McGill and Trix on a journey through America's not-so-secret perversions, which are recounted in excruciatingly convincing detail. If the saline solution sequence made me squirm in discomfort, well, it was meant to, and I have a feeling that every weird sexual practice we learn about has a firm basis in reality. You'll come away from Crooked Little Vein knowing perhaps more than you ever thought you would about what people are doing to themselves and each other out there in the world, and while some sequences are definitely over-the-top -- the confrontation on the Roanoke Ranch, for example -- Ellis has a hell of a lot of fun with McGill's resigned sense of horror, and even more with the shenanigans of the White House Chief of Staff, who gets many of the book's best lines.

McGill and Trix are surprisingly rich in their characterization, adding an unexpected but altogether welcome level of nuance. You may wince here and there, if you haven't been paying attention to what has become mainstream in American sexual life, and you may find this sequence or that just a tad convenient, broadly drawn or didactic (a funny word to use, given what we're being educated about). But the book is never boring, and the lead characters honestly earn our interest and even concern. Crooked Little Vein ultimately delivers on its promises, rewarding readers with a bizarre and twisted adventure story.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 8:06 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
MOME Summer 2007 -- So we've had two years of MOME now, and every volume (this is the eighth) has contained a critical mass of good, forward-looking comics, enough so to make each one worth recommending to anyone interested in where comics is at, and where it's going.

Eleanor Davis is the star this time around, contributing a cover, incidental drawings sprinkled throughout the volume, an exceptional 12-page story and the subject of an interview with Gary Groth, one of the inventors of comics journalism and one of its finest practitioners (as well as the publisher of MOME, it should be noted).

Davis's story leads off the issue, and it is a gorgeous lesson in formalist seduction. "Stick and String" explores the primal intersection of like and not-like, and visual metaphors abound: male vs. female, dance vs. music, primitive vs. well, less-primitive. It's also a simple story about a sexual encounter, and it's hard to imagine any adult not finding meaning and resonance in it.

Tom Kaczynski's "10,000 Years" reads like the superintelligent bastard child of Adrian Tomine and Wally Wood, perhaps what comics would look like today if the Comics Code had not put EC Comics out of business in the 1950s, and the superhero had remained one genre among many in the '60s, '70s and '80s.

"Young Americans" by Èmile Bravo sticks its dick in your head and makes a milkshake of your mind's expectations, and is a dark highlight of the year in comics. To say any more would spoil the current volume's greatest moment.

There are two contributions from Sophie Crumb this time out, a one-pager that is a minor delight and a multi-page story that kind of makes me sympathetic with those who wish MOME were a Sophie-free zone. I do think her work would be better served in her own series, but I don't know if more Belly Button issues are planned. And maybe it's my bias toward autobiographical stories, but her dream comics (and those of most other cartoonists as well, it should be noted) tend to not interest me much.

Paul Hornschemeier closes out the issue with another chapter in his "Life with Mr. Dangerous" serial, which is a pleasure to read but difficult to assess on a semi-annual basis and may read better once collected under one cover.

Al Columbia, Lewis Trondheim and others also contribute, making for a good mix of established masters and progressive newcomers.

I kind of understand why Christopher Butcher wrestles with what MOME is, exactly. Each issue offers up a lot -- a lot of good work by great cartoonists. The next volume promises work by Jim Woodring, so there's no question that it's one of the most significant and even fun anthologies of comic art today. But each issue feels like another piece in a puzzle rather than a discreet comics event suitable for regular periodical placement on the magazine rack at Borders, maybe between AdBusters and ArtForum. With tweaking, MOME seems to me poised to be a real presence in the growing real-world interest in what is possible in comics. As it stands, MOME seems aimed at the already-converted artcomix lover, and I am without question in that camp.

I love MOME, but I feel like the world could love it too, if it didn't feel so much like something you needed to get in on the ground floor to fully understand and enjoy. I'd like to see Fantagraphics apply some knob-twisting to make each new volume feel like an event unto itself, with maybe one or two more articles complimenting the interviews, and perhaps less serialized pieces and more standalone works of genuine wonder, like this issue's "Stick and Stone" by Eleanor Davis.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 2:11 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 1 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Reading Comics -- This new hardcover by Douglas Wolk is probably more a book you'd want to sample from your local library before you decide to lay out real cash for it. I think his intentions are probably sincere, but the ultimate product seems more like an opportunity to profit from the current and growing interest in graphic novels than any kind of paradigm-shifting insight into the artform.

Wolk's tastes are pretty close to mine when it comes to what he likes in comics, so I was surprised by how often I found my contrarian hackles were raised by his writing. I found his occasionally awkward or bizarre phrasing a genuine annoyance, and I don't think the book at all rises to its stated goal of explaining "how graphic novels work and what they mean." There's definitely room for a prose version of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, I think, but Reading Comics is not it.

Fully half the book is reviews of specific works, a lot of which is reworked from previous publications -- as if there just wasn't enough stuff in his head to fulfill the book's stated remit, so the "best-ofs" get dragged off his hard-drive to pad out the second half of the book. And a lot of those essays are worth reading, but they get in the way of what the book sets out to do.

I was a bit disgusted to see how fully involved Wolk was in the ridiculous "Jess Lemon" fraud that was perpetrated on the comics internet a few years ago. He goes into painful, self-satisfied detail about that sorry incident. Not that the fanboys Wolk and Heidi McDonald were tweaking didn't have it coming, but more that there was an opportunity there to enlighten some truly ignorant superhero comic book readers, and instead they just fucked with some pathetic fanboys to their own amusement. I hadn't known Wolk was in on it, but I have had pretty much zero respect for Heidi McDonald ever since, and now Wolk can join in that rarefied number.

Most off-putting of all is the marketing of the book as "The first serious, readable, provocative, canon-smashing book of comics criticism by the leading critic in the field." It's none of those things other than readable (pretty much the baseline for what you'd expect from any book, no?), and most exasperatingly, Wolk is very, very far from the leading critic in the field. Tom Spurgeon, R.C. Harvey, Bob Levin, Chris Allen, Christopher Butcher, Rob Vollmar and Jog all come immediately to mind as far better writers and more nuanced critics of comics and graphic novels. There are probably more good and persuasive reviews of comics in any single issue of The Comics Journal from the past three years than in the entirety of Reading Comics.

There are portions of the book that make it worth a read, but overall it feels undercooked and over-hyped, and I had hoped for far better. If you're interested, proceed with caution and prepare to be underwhelmed.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 11:16 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 1 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Nine Graphic Novels to Read Before You Die -- It can be daunting, browsing your graphic novel collection in, say, your 40s, and wondering where they'll go when you die. In my head, I know which ones I would like my daughter to have, and my son. And which ones I would like send to which friends, and which ones I hope my wife will finally take a look at.

I've been reading comics since 1972, and the first time I acquired what we would now call a graphic novel was just six or seven years later. I'm brutally selective in what goes on my bookshelves, which is why I only have about 700 graphic novels at the moment, despite at one time or another probably owning five times that many.

If I read it and am certain it will be a lifelong joy to revisit its pleasures, onto the shelves it goes. If I read it and don't find much -- or any -- value in it, chances are it ends up in someone else's hands sooner, rather than later.

Few graphic novels have been so godawfully egregious that I actually throw them away -- books called "Tozzer" and "Americanjism" come to mind as ones that I despised and was certain no one else would find of value, either, so in the trash they went. But usually I am certain someone will get some pleasure out of even most books I don't much care for, which is why I end up giving away, trading or selling books that don't make the cut into my permanent graphic novel library.

I don't know if you're like me. I don't know if you have given this much thought into which graphic novels you own or have read. But I do know this: There are nine graphic novels you should indisputably read before you die. And here they are.

* The Filth. As recently as yesterday, I noticed an article on a popular comic book website claiming this -- one of Grant Morrison's very best and most mind-expanding works -- is "difficult to read." Bullshit. Start at the top left of page one, and make your way to the bottom right. Repeat until you're finished. It's fucking brilliant, and worth the time it takes to let it immerse itself into your consciousness.

* We3. Getting all the Morrison right out of the way up front, We3 is a gorgeous and thoughtful rumination on man's relationship to, stewardship of, and abuse toward our fellow inhabitants of Earth.

* Book of Leviathan. You'll find a lot of intelligent comics critics recommending this one, even though you may very well never have heard of it. Once you read it, you will never forget it.

* David Boring. Much more than the oddball mystery it appears at first glance, David Boring is one of Clowes's most dense and rewarding stories, and also paradoxically one of his most straightforward. You just have to pay attention.

* Diary of a Teenage Girl. If I could ask you to read only one book on this list, this is the one that I'd ask you to read. It will change the way you think about relationships and sexuality, and also demonstrate just how powerful comics can be as a storytelling medium.

* Fantastic Butterflies. James Kochalka says he probably won't do more longform graphic novels like this one, which is sort of an extended version of his American Elf daily diary comic strips. It's also one of his most entertaining and impressive graphic novels.

* Jays Days: Rise and Fall of the Pasta Shop Lothario. Jason Marcy is one of the most blunt and insightful autobiographical cartoonists alive today, and this is the book of his that you should read, if you only try one.

* The Journal Comic. Drew Weing was my favourite webcomics cartoonist during the time he was producing these strips. I wish he'd kept it up.

* The Ticking. Renee French contains multitudes within her talent, from eerie mindfucks to sincere and graceful children's books. The Ticking is her most definitive work (so far), and a true masterpiece of comic art.

There are graphic novels that are more accomplished, beautiful or in some other way more outstanding than at least some on this list, but these are nine books that I honestly think are under-appreciated, under-read and under-discussed. All of them deserve your time and attention, and I'd be surprised if you didn't enjoy all of them a great deal. If you decide to sample some of the books on the list, please e-mail me and let me know what you think of what you find within their pages.

Labels: lists, recommendations, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 10:21 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Thor #1 -- At least two moments in the opening pages of this first issue will remind you of Mark Waid and Alex Ross's Kingdom Come, but in all fairness to the creators of this new attempt to make a comic book about the Norse god of thunder work, Waid and Ross stole Ragnarök from Norse mythology more than Straczynski and Coipel are stealing from Kingdom Come.

Of course, Ross's best artwork had the proper sense of majesty to convey something of the enormity of a war between gods (or god-like beings), while Coipel's generic craftwork conveys precisely the fact that Marvel has a monthly series about Thor again, and here's an issue of it.

Any reader who rankled at the mystic hooey in Straczynski's dire Amazing Spider-Man run will be surprised only at how much further said hooey is ratcheted up in Thor #1. You'd think the character and milieu would easily accommodate such baloney, and perhaps it might, if it were not of the vague variety Straczynski hauls out to coax Thor from out of the narrative mothballs he's been in for the past however-long-he's-been-"dead." Lots of mumbo-jumbo between Thor and (I guess) Don Blake as they stand amidst the generic swirly-stuff of the void (Mr. Coipel, you're no Gene Colan when it comes to generic swirly-stuff) chit-chatting about how Thor has freed himself from the cycle of Ragnarök and is now free to rock out with his hammer out all the live long day, and by the way, all your presumed-dead supporting characters friends are just waiting for you to wish them back out of the cornfield.

Once Blake and Thor return to Earth, Straczynski shows us how clever he is by having a woman Blake rents a room from note that "Weatherman says we're expecting a thunderstorm." Blake grins and says "I wouldn't be at all surprised." Yikes. The era in which Straczynski was able to create genuine tension and humour in his characters -- around the second and third seasons of Babylon 5, frankly -- seem far, far away from what he delivers here. Well, a straight-to-DVD B5 release is pending; maybe he saved his good stuff for that.

The final page of this debut issue (with "to be continued" on it and everything) has to be the least-compelling cliffhanger I think I have ever seen in a superhero comic. No stakes are raised, no mysteries are offered, and unless one has been powerfully seduced by this most average of stories, it's almost impossible to imagine anyone saying to themselves "Man, what happensnext?"

Varying eras of Thor have risen and fallen in quality, as is true of any corporate superhero franchise unwinding over decades. The best-written was almost certainly also the best drawn, when Walt Simonson was following his bliss on the title in the 1980s. But Dan Jurgens's stories a few years back were serviceable, and certainly Mike McKone and Tom Raney delivered much better art than the thunder god enjoyed since Simonson's storied run ended so long ago.

This first issue delivers none of those pleasures, though -- both story and art feel uninspired and painfully, joylessly mediocre. Despite the sales figures of their other recent Marvel work, ultimately neither Straczynski or Coipel are much more than slightly-above-average talents when it comes to the creation of corporate superhero comics circa 2007. So you'd have liked to think they would have brought their very best efforts to the table in re-launching a key Marvel series, with the added bonus of a more-or-less blank slate upon which to make their mark. Instead, they deliver a run-of-the-mill effort that is impressive only in how mightily it fails to impress.

Labels: corporate comics, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:41 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special #1 -- You won't find a slicker, more vapid superpeople comic on the stands this month than this one. It's created by Geoff Johns, Ethan Van Sciver, and -- this gives me pause -- Dave Gibbons, who I would have hoped could find better things to do with his gifts than this. Johns and Van Sciver, I expect this sort of thing from. And in fairness to Van Sciver, his style here -- aping George Perez more than his previous style of aping Brian Bolland -- seems to find him more comfortable. The work reads as more of a natural outflowing of his talent. It's just too bad it's all in service of such garbage.

Oh, dear. Where to begin? Oh, that's right, I remember -- Johns said it all for me, right on page one:

"We live in a place rotting with hedonism and chaos. A place untamed and morally devoid. A place of darkness."

Johns's writing always reminds me of an 8-year-old playing in the tub, making up stories with his action figures as he neglects to wash his ass. Here, Geoff brings his entire collection of abused DC trademarks -- action figures, from the Anti-Monitor and the Reverse Flash to -- of course -- Superboy Prime. Yes, kids, if Infinite Crisis wasn't a big enough waste of time, money and mis-allocated creative effort, here's pretty much the direct sequel. This death-obsessed continuity porn is all that's left of the goddamned DC Universe proper, isn't it?

Ach, the plot.

Sinestro wants revenge, or something; a bunch of power rings are flying through the universe, which always seems a small -- tiny place, in the hands of unimaginative writers like Johns; the "secret of the 52" is invoked, and I discover my goosebumps-generator must be on the fritz, 'cause I got nothin'. What else? Hank Henshaw The Evil Cyborg Superman Fooled Ya Folks is back, in the custody of The Guardians of Oa, who were all far better off dead. All the GLs we all love so much get together for a family picnic. Here's Hal, John, Kyle and Guy, all hanging out and even giving each other noogies. I bet you think I'm making that up, don't you? One supposes Johns writes such scenes and thinks he's developing character.

Anyway, during the big picnic all of a sudden "We got a sniper!" and it's the grassy knoll all over again for the Green Lantern Corps. All your favourite Lanterns get a moment in the "spotlight" and then "OH SHIT EVIL SUPERBOY PRIME HAS ESCAPE THE TUB -- I MEAN, HIS 'SCIENCELL!'" What will happen next?!?

Well, as you may recall from the abominable Green Lantern: Rebirth, YELLOW IS THE COLOUR OF EVIL and also PEE. And bananas, this shit is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s. Now Kyle Raynor is all Parallaxed (FANGASM!!!111!) up, and then Dave Gibbons draws a Johns-written back-up story that is far more readable than it has any right to be, based solely on the power of Gibbons' artwork and the goodwill far better stories than this have earned his work.

Just to compare two spectacular corporate superhero events taking place this summer, World War Hulk went a ways toward mending my loathing for the current state of the Marvel Universe by telling a tight, logical story that intrigued me enough to want to read the rest of it. Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special #1, on the other hand, is a ham-handed, undercooked bunch of baloney that obviously took a great deal of misplaced effort to create. If I had one wish for corporate superhero comics, it would be that Geoff Johns's mother had never let him take his action figures into the tub.

Labels: corporate comics, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 6:47 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 2 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The Boys #8 -- Nuance isn't a word that immediately comes to mind when pondering The Boys, and yet this issue has plenty. A seemingly minor character bit about Hughie's distaste for Butcher's use of anti-gay terminology pays off later in the issue with a sequence that tells us a great deal about the two characters (and the series in general). The Boys is wicked fun, yes, but it's also Ennis and Robertson thoughtfully exploring the characters they've populated the title with.

Even the Tek Knight seems sympathetic to a degree here; he made his debut last issue with a disgusting and outrageously funny personal problem that was getting in the way of his superheroing; in this second part of that story, we see the mystery of his distress deepen, even as we witness the funniest "Superhero's Butler Gives His Notice" scene that you will ever see. You've never, ever look at Jarvis or Alfred in quite the same way.

It's gratifying that Ennis and Robertson are able bring so many emotions to the story -- it's clever and witty and dirty as hell, yes, but the superhero avatars resonate strongly and breathe all on their own. They're satire, but they ring true as characters, and that makes the world of The Boys a deeper and richer reading experience than I had expected when the series first debuted. The storytelling is confident and bold, and the more I get to know these people, the more effective the overall narrative becomes. The Boys, published by Dynamite Entertainment, is probably the best team superhero book being published at the moment. A moment in which, perhaps not coincidentally, Marvel and DC have mostly abandoned readers looking for quality in their superhero comics.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:08 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
A Cappella -- Texas cartoonist Christine Pointeau has created two issues of A Cappella, which aims to explore the self through the intersection of whimsy, surreality, and mythology.

There's an irksome pomposity to the proceedings, an earnest and obvious belief that this is important stuff. And while such aphorisms as "open your heart to people," "thoughts create form," and "never apologize for love," might seem profound, they can also seem trite; and here, out of the mouth of a talking turtle lecturing Pointeau's cartoon avatar on her areas in need of improvement, they seem most of all like leftovers from Yoda's Book of Do, Things You Should.

Each page of both A Cappella: When Are You Coming Home and A Cappella: Open Heart is a full-page image, so the cumulative effect is more storybook than comics. There are arresting techniques here and there, but overall there's a wearying sameness to the depictions of our wandering heroine in her various ethereal environments. And to paraphrase Huxley vis a vis God and beetles, Pointeau seems to have an inordinate affection for drawing feet. Which, at least, puts her ahead of Rob Liefeld.

In the end I didn't much care for these efforts, although a reader with more appetite for whimsical fantasy elements than I might find value in them. If you crave the comics of Jennifer Daydreamer or those found in the Flight anthologies, A Cappella might work for you.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 7:42 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The Highwaymen #1 -- Perhaps sensing what a creative loss it is for the excellent series Planetary to be mostly over (writer Warren Ellis says the final issue is written, but it's allegedly a PS to the already-concluded main story), Wildstorm inflicts this shoddy effort upon the world.

Conspiracies abound and a droll old guy in a white suit leads an effort to uncover the hidden BS that will be far less interesting than anything Ellis cooks up for the final issue of his far superior series. Highwayman guy in white suit, I knew Elijah Snow; you, sir, are no Elijah Snow.

An image here or there echoes Frank Quitely -- the lumpy visage of President Bill Clinton looks swiped straight from Quitely's first issue of The Authority, but for the most part the art here is rubbery and unimpressive and as dull as the story. Check out the fourth page from the end's final panel for the most blatant Planetary nod.

I found nothing to like about this first issue at all, from the generic cover art to the painfully forced "banter" between Elijah -- I mean, the white-suited Highwayman, and his reluctant partner. It all takes place in the future, at the request of long-dead President Bubba via video file, and it all has been done far better before. Save yourself the three bucks and re-read any random issue of Planetary, or even Planet Terry. You'll thank me.

Labels: corporate comics, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 6:50 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
A Treasury of Victorian Murder: The Saga of The Bloody Benders -- The Benders were a family of alleged German immigrants who may or may not have been named "Bender." In fact, they may not have even been family.

What they were has been outlined in delightfully brutal detail by cartoonist Rick Geary, in the latest volume of his superb Treasury of Victorian Murder series of graphic novels for NBM Publishing.

Geary's ongoing library of bloody 19th century mayhem is one of the quiet treasures of modern-day comic-making. Each volume is meticulous in its research, and Geary's sui generis art is a sublimely effective blend of subversive, sardonic observation and rich, organic linework.

Geary varies his subjects from volume to volume, sometimes covering something as historically significant as Jack the Ripper or the Lincoln assassination, but Geary brings as much drama and inventiveness to his coverage of lesser-known horrors.

The Bloody Benders is one of those. I had never heard of this bunch, who seem like a 19th century mashup of Laura Ingalls Wilder's family and The Manson Family.

The scheme was this: The Benders established a small inn/grocery store right on a prominent, much-used trail in a Kansas that was just now being opened up in the wake of the Civil War. Geary doesn't say if he thinks The Benders planned what happened from the very beginning, and we'll never know for sure given how their story ended, but it seems like a brilliant criminal enterprise that was apparently headed up by a beautiful and seductive member of the "family" called Kate. "Ma" would make dinner for travelers stopping by (often with large sums on their person, as they were out on the plains to make their fortunes and begin new lives), while Kate would charm them during their meal, and "Pa," well...Pa had a big mallet and a great hiding place.

In those days, information didn't travel very far, very fast, and crucially, the whole serial killer phenomena was not the topic of bestselling novels and hit movies. So it took a good, long time for the victims' relatives and the local citizenry to put together the pieces of the puzzle, even though behaviour as strange as that displayed by The Benders would certainly send up red flags far earlier in our more "enlightened" age.

Geary's storytelling, as always, is informative, appealing, and addictive. From the quiet but sprawling beauty of the Kansas plains to the ominous depths of the family well, all is presented with a sense of dread and an offbeat tone that makes Geary totally unique in the pantheon of great cartoonists. A Treasury of Victorian Murder: The Saga of The The Bloody Benders is highly recommended, as are all the other volumes of this wildly entertaining series.

Preview The Bloody Benders at NBM's website.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 7:39 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 1 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Black Summer #0 -- One weekend sometime about a decade ago, I stopped in to a couple of Albany-area comic book stores and found then-complete runs of the first seven or eight issues of two titles I had been hearing some good buzz about, The Authority and Planetary. Both were written by Warren Ellis, a writer I hadn't encountered before, and both exceeded my expectations in being exciting and entertaining adventure comics.

The Authority, especially, found the writer blending a surprising mix of violence and politics. Surprising not because they worked so well together (which they did), but because the book was published by one of the two biggest corporate comics publishers in North America. If Wildstorm parent company DC eventually stepped in and destroyed the quality of the title (which they did), it was thankfully long after Ellis and artists Bryan Hitch, Paul Neary and Laury Martin created an enduring set of 12 issues that are pretty much the best superhero comics to be published in the last ten years.

Ellis is mixing the kicking and 'sploding with the political again in Black Summer #0, a brief, bloody and blunt introduction to a series that is far more violent and far more political than not only The Authority, but any other title Ellis has written. Seven more issues are to follow beginning later this summer, and thankfully we can be certain neither the violence nor the politics will be moderated by anyone other than the creators involved (primarily Ellis and artist Juan Jose Ryp), because the title is published not by one of the corporate publishers, but by Avatar Press. Avatar has been criticized for reasons ranging from scheduling delays to the content of their titles, their variant cover policies and other issues, and I'll acknowledge all of that (full disclosure: I have in the past sold work to Avatar myself), but I'm relieved Black Summer is at Avatar because 1. I liked this debut issue very much and more importantly 2. Ellis and Ryp will get to tell this story their way.

I want to suggest why I liked the issue without going too much into detail. You may already have heard what the plot involves, but you won't hear it from me and if you haven't learned about what kicks things into action, I'd advise avoiding any spoilers until you can read it and judge it for yourself.

As with Fell, the extra material in the back is both entertaining and informative, and in this case probably a necessary element for Ellis to outline the origins of his story and the reasons it came to be. I'll try to moderate my own ongoing outrage and disgust at the realities that fuel Ellis's creativity, and say that after all these years, it's nice to see someone in comics (or anywhere) making the points that Ellis makes through Black Summer's protagonist, John Horus.

If Horus goes too far for some readers, they would do well to remember that it is the place of political fiction to fuel debate and motivate the reader to think and judge and act for themselves. Political debate and conscientious action are things that have been missing from the United States for years, and in my opinion there's only one truly fictional moment in this entire issue. John Horus's actions may be fantasy, but his reasons, and his specific complaints, all look like a concise, truthful summary of the 21st century to date, as I have experienced it, and obviously as Ellis has observed it.

Things have gone beyond the disgrace of pre-9/11 U.S. politics and well into a surreal era of obscene violence and greed that can all be squarely and fairly blamed on an entire nation that did nothing as its ideals and laws were plucked away like the bottom-most pieces in a game of Jenga. Anyone who has opposed the events of the post-Clinton era has been marginalized or worse, and if it's energizing to watch Keith Olbermann in real life or Alan Shore in fake life (on Boston Legal) remind us what America should be about, well, any change is coming too slow to stop the ongoing death toll nearing three-quarters of a million human lives that have been lost because of the U.S.-created nightmare that is current-day Iraq.

To say nothing of the contempt the U.S.'s own people have increasingly enjoyed from those who have seized power.

Hmm, I said I wasn't going to go into too much detail, and here I am invoking Keith Olbermann and James Spader. Well, all politics is local, and their spirit of outrage and justice is present in Black Summer #0. John Horus's actions are horrific, but they are to the point, and they both beg debate and suggest a powerful piece of political adventure fiction lies before us. Ellis has told enough good stories in this vein in the past that I trust his instincts and creative gifts, and I find myself really, really looking forward to watching this series progress. Ryp's artwork is tighter and in more full focus than I have ever seen him work. And it's more than just the colouring that makes the storytelling so clear -- perhaps the artists feels as passionately about the subject as the writer.

And I'll paraphrase Roger Ebert in pointing out that what matters is not what Black Summer is about, but how it is about it. Ellis and Ryp are making big statements about important things here, things that really matter. I'm open to it as a violent, well-told superhero story, but I'm far further gratified that it's also saying true things about the disastrous state of the world as it exists right at this moment.

Visit the Black Summer website.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:45 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 1 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The Three Paradoxes -- There are comics about what it feels like to be alive, and there are comics about comics. The paradox I found in Paul Hornschemeier's new graphic novel is that it is both of these at once.

The Three Paradoxes is published by Fantagraphics Books, and you can see the cartoonist's fascination with process right on the wraparound cover, seven distinct panels playing with time, mood, and perception. Further investigation of the dustcover -- that is to say, taking it off -- further uncovers Hornschemeier's techniques, as the hardcover beneath the dustcover rolls back time to an earlier, unfinished, blue-pencil and ink version of the cover. It could just be a talented book designer having fun with his newest project, or it could be a statement about his intentions for the work and its effect on the reader. Or, it could be both, and probably is.

Throughout his cartooning carrer, Hornschemeier has played with form and content far more deeply than most of his peers. Only Seth and Chris Ware come to mind as fellow travellers of Hornschemeier's, always conscious not only of the impact of plot, dialogue, art and design, but further journeying into the unknown country that is the tactile, almost quantum effect on the reader by manipulating such seemingly invisible elements as paper stock and binding. Hornschemeier seems to invest his efforts into an almost obsessive control over the finished product's look and feel, which is why later issues of Sequential and all of Forlorn Funnies (his two forays into periodical publishing) feel as much art objects as they do funnybooks.

When I interviewed Hornschemeier a few years ago, he expressed some dissatisfaction about his graphic novel Mother, Come Home, and I'd have to guess that he feels The Three Paradoxes addresses some of his concerns. A single story broken down into separate sections and techniques, it still feels more natural and graceful than Mother, Come Home. And while Mother, Come Home impressed me as an ambitious and well-done book, I have to admit the richness and variety in The Three Paradoxes suggests a work I will be pulling off the shelf more often, to revisit its subtle mysteries and marvel at its artwork.

If you've read Hornschemeier's work before, you may be familiar with his blue-line pencil work or his fascination with making some of his images look old, discarded. All of that and much more is on display in The Three Paradoxes, the actual story of which is quite simple: A young artist named Paul visits his parents while he works on some comics and prepares for a first meeting with a woman he met online. It sounds much simpler than it is, though, as Hornschemeier weaves all his above-mentioned obsessions -- time, mood, perception, comics -- into a rich, rewarding tapestry that makes The Three Paradoxes his finest, most complete and forward-looking work yet.

Flashbacks and flights of fancy are demarcated by a number of artistic styles that echo various periods and artists throughout comics history, suggesting influences as diverse as Charles Burns and Hank Ketcham. Where another artist -- or even this one, earlier in his career -- might have presented such work as well-intentioned but scattered, Hornschemeier is in full control of what he wants to say and how he wants to say it. This allows the reader to fully immerse in the cartoonist's technique without ever losing sight of the main point of this or any other story -- the theme. In The Three Paradoxes Hornschemeier unpacks his growing and impressive toolbox to reflect on his life, what he has learned, and where he is going.

The reader is not bashed over the head with obvious roadsigns, and neither are they forced to guess at Hornschemeier's intentions. Rather, the graphic novel unfolds its ultimate goal one panel at a time, one page at a time, the cartoonist in perfect tune with his art, saying what he wants to say, how he wants to say it, and in a way that is both a delight and a wonder to experience. The final panel suggests much about what is to come for Paul as a character and as a comics creator, and it says even more about the journey he has just allowed us to take with him.

The very best comics creators put their lives and minds right there on the page and invite the reader to observe, analyze, even judge. The Three Paradoxes is, as I said at the start, both about what it feels like to be alive, and about the process and wonder of creating comics. It's visually arresting, emotionally resonant work. On every page of The Three Paradoxes, Hornschemeier is telling you about his history, his fascinations and his future. This is a book by a cartoonist getting better all the time, and the best example yet of why Paul Hornschemeier is among the most vital and promising creators working today.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 7:16 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Please Release -- A few years ago, an excellent self-published alt-comix title called Walkie Talkie impressed the hell out of me with its attention to craft and devotion to setting a mood in its individual stories. It lasted four issues, and I wish I had raved more about it at the time. Consider this an apology.

Walkie Talkie's creator was Nate Powell, who has now created a tighter and even more appealing anthology of four short stories called Please Release, published by Top Shelf. All the stories take place during a period from 2002-2005 in which Powell, working as support staff for people with developmental disabilities, seems to be struggling with two goals. One, to be an ethical force for the betterment of the people under his care, and two, to determine his place in the world (the world of comics, and just, the world) as he enters early middle age, a period he sharply brings into focus when he says (quoting song lyrics, I think -- there's a lot of that mostly to good effect) "I never felt brand new, just half-done and one-third through." It's a mindset I think most adults who've emerged alive from the hot flush of adolesence are familiar with, wondering what the passions of youth and early adulthood will be replaced with, fearing the answer is "nothing much."

Not all the stories focus directly on Powell's support staff role, although the sense of dignity and thoughtfulness he brings to the job informs every panel in the book. Walkie Talkie was the work of a younger man, and though both young and somewhat-older Nate define themselves by a punk aesthetic, in Please Release, Powell is found reflecting on the use of that definition as boundary markers for his own existence, not so much questioning its usefullness as its shelf-life, or at least its half-life. The artwork is uniformly striking, both loose and highly focused, staking out territory intersecting somewhere in the lovingly illustrative neighbourhood of Farel Dalrymple and Jim Rugg.

So, yeah, Nate Powell as depicted in his own comics is a reflective guy, and Christ knows right now the world needs more people asking themselves questions about their own motives, deeds and ultimate goals. Society -- the one I live in, anyway -- has come to be defined not by the good deeds you do, but by how many people you can convince that your deeds are good, despite their blatant harm to others, and to the world. Powell spends his time in these four elegant, meandering stories trying to be better, trying to help, trying to share. In fact, counseling a troubled young man upset by a relative's illness, Powell says others "have felt the same things as you, that's why sharing is important." Another symptom of the sickness so rampant in my part of the world right now is the demonizing of others, the shutting down of sharing and the opportunistic destruction of those who've been demonized and marginalized and made other. So I'd guess at the very top of my country's food-chain, humanistic storytellers like Nate Powell would be defined as dangerous, if not outright "enemy combatants" in a war of lies against our fellow humans.

Powell comes off as decent in Please Release, and we currently live in indecent and obscene times. All the more reason to read Please Release and listen to what Powell is trying to tell us. Pass on what you've learned, cherish human dignity, and from time to time luxuriate in the wonder that comes with being more fully alive.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 9:18 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Recommended Reading, Comics Foundry and Cold Heat -- I was hoping some folks would at least read what I had to say in the previous post, but it's wonderful to read the comments people have posted. Thanks, everyone, sincerely.

And for anyone who may be wondering what I am reading and enjoying these days...

* Garth Ennis's PUNISHER MAX and...
* Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips's CRIMINAL. -- The two best things Marvel is publishing right now. Both crime books, both created with a sense of wit, style and intelligence that is altogether lacking in corporate superhero comics at the moment. And while the rotating artists on Punisher vary in quality, Criminal's look, courtesy of artist Sean Phillips and colourist Val Staples, is visually arresting each and every issue. The graphic novel collecting the first five issues has just been released, too, so make sure you pick it up.

* John Porcellino's KING CAT CLASSIX. -- Honestly some of the flights of fancy and dream comics in this thick hardcover from D&Q don't do it for me, but the honesty and emotion evoked by Porcellino's autobiographical material more than makes this must-reading. It's comics for the ages, and belongs in the library of anyone who loves comics as an artform and wants to explore the outer edges of what is possible in words and pictures.

* THE COMICS JOURNAL. -- I've been telling people to read TCJ since I started writing about comics, so this is no surprise. But the magazine continues to be a highlight of my comics-related reading. There was a long stretch of years back in the late '80s and early '90s where the ONLY thing I bought in a comics shop was The Journal, and even after nearly 30 years of reading it, I still can't imagine ever getting tired of its excellent comics coverage.

* Craig Yoe's ARF FORUM. -- The third volume in Craig Yoe's exploration of the intersection of comics and art, from Fantagraphics. Joy and wonder on every page.

Also, while I have your attention...

I notice that the latest Diamond controversy is the monopolistic distributor's decision not to carry a print edition of the defunct online comics magazine Comics Foundry. Most people seem to want Diamond to carry the magazine, and while I am sympathetic to the idea that Diamond should let the marketplace determine the viability of publications like this, I have to say that I'm more or less in Diamond's camp. Prime Mover Tim Leong is clearly a YouTube whiz and has tons of energy and enthusiasm, but that never translated to a cohesive or even very entertaining online iteration of the CF idea. I doubt in print it would be any better. Leong seems to me to be another in the never-endiong line of people who REALLY, REALLY want to say something to comics readers, and yet really have nothing much to say once they get the chance. If this weren't the case, the CF online magazine would have been a lot more popular than it was.

On the other hand, on a related matter, Tom Spurgeon has reported that Cold Heat has suspended floppy publication after four issues and will be released instead as a graphic novel once it's completed. Diamond had originally declined to carry publisher Picturebox's publications. I'm sorry I won't have more Cold Heat coming to me on a regular basis, because it is surreal but high-quality comics fun. But in the current reality, a graphic novel makes much more sense. Floppy comics are not a dying medium, they are a dead one, with only loyal comics-shop zombies keeping the corpse animated. No one will ever remember the four issues of Cold Heat that were released, but if the rest of the story holds up, the graphic novel may very well still be inspiring awe and wonder a century from now.

Labels: industry, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 9:46 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Monday Meanderings -- Since last Thursday I have seen Spider-Man 3 twice and I have to say, it's probably the best film of the three. Even having three villains (four if you count a certain one-armed scientist), it all flowed together well, and the special effects blew away any other superhero movie I've seen.

Also, Tony Millionaire sent along a pilot DVD screener for "The Drinky Crow Show," which I think will air on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. It is everything Maakies fans love, and more. Must-See TV, indeed. Don't miss it!

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 3:03 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 1 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Bachelor Week -- Since last Friday night, my wife and kids have been vacationing in North Carolina with her parents and other family members, while the cat and I have been holding the fort in upstate New York.

Despite the fact that it is spring, it has snowed twice, the heaviest storm being last night and this morning, when five inches or so of heavy, wet snow dumped itself on our region. On my way to work this morning, I was making a right turn into traffic with my window open for better visibility, when a passing 18-wheeler threw a softball-size load of slush right into my face. That was fun, and reminded me once again of my desire to see it made illegal for anything bigger than a mid-size sedan to be on the roads when the weather is anything other than sunshine and 70 degrees.

Last night was probably the biggest event of Bachelor Week, and certainly the most expensive -- I finally scored a copy of the enormous hardcover Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson Omnibus. I own two others in Marvel's Omnibus series, Fantastic Four Vol. 1 and Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1, and I have to say that while it is nicely designed as a book (I got the variant black-and-red version), it is a bit sloppily produced compared to the other two I have. The binding is quite tight, and no allowance was made for the reformatting, so a lot gets lost in the gutters of the book. It doesn't lie flat when reading it, so a good deal of force is needed, and I refuse to ply it back far enough to crack the spine, as that seems a bit stupid to do to a book this big and expensive.

Some of the features, like the reprint of a great Miller/Janson interview from the ancient Fantaco Chronicles special are shot from the printed book rather than re-done, so that seems a bit cheap and the pages a bit blurry, instead of the sharp blacks the outside design would lead you to expect inside.

I'm not sorry I got the book, just surprised that something that would have been so easy to get perfect was done a bit on the cheap. The lack of some stories, like the second Miller What If...?, wherein Elektra lived and Miller was delightfully inked by Terry Austin, makes me wonder if a second volume is planned. It could include:

• Born Again (Miller/Mazzucchelli)


• The Man Without Fear (Miller/Romita Jr.)


• Bizarre Adventures (Miller's solo Elektra story)


• The Elektra Saga (at least the extra pages done for the re-working of DD #168-190)


• Miller's one-off DD issue with John Buscema


• What If Elektra Had Lived?


• Spectacular Spider-Man (the two Miller-drawn, DD-guest-starring issues that came before Miller was assigned to Daredevil)

That's gotta be around 18-20 issues worth of material, plus there's DD-themed covers Miller did for Amazing Heroes and The Comics Journal, and I'm sure other stuff I am not thinking of.

I wonder if Marvel got anyone's permission to reprint those Fantaco Chronicles pages whole? Did they ask folks like George Perez if it was okay to reprint his spot illo that illustrates the piece? I wonder if Roger would know? He used to work at Fantaco...

Update: Roger says the issue is complicated, and has promised to write about it on his blog soon. Looking forward to that, thanks, Roger!

Anyway, again, the book is not perfect, but I am glad to have it. I'd give it a B- or maybe even a C+ if I thought much more about the quality of some of the reproduction. Quite a surprise given how sterling the FF and X-Men Omnibus volumes were.

Back to Bachelor Week...today is my last full day, the gang should be back tomorrow night sometime. This is the longest I have ever been separated from my kids, and I miss the hell out of them.

Labels: real life, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 12:01 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 1 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The Monday Briefing -- Looks like a lot of great comics are coming out this Wednesday, and I definitely wanted to give you a run-down of titles to look out for.

MARVEL/ICON
CRIMINAL #1 (MR) $2.99 -- Ladies and gentlemen, after months of anticipation, creators Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips bring you the best new crime comic of the year, and a contender for best new series in years. Much more information at A Criminal Blog.

DC COMICS/VERTIGO
AMERICAN SPLENDOR #2 $2.99 -- Any new work from Harvey Pekar is reason to celebrate, and the first issue was a genuine delight and wonderful sampler of Pekar's gift for realism in autobio comics.

FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS
COMPLETE PEANUTS VOL. 6 1961-1962 HC $28.95 -- The eleventh and twelfth years of the greatest comic strip in history, and Schulz was in classic form. Reading this last week, I found myself highly tuned for the increasingly rare appearances of mostly-forgotten characters like Shermy and Violet, and sadly wondering each time if that was the last time they would show up. There're a lot of pre-Woodstock birds hanging around Snoopy's doghouse, and Miss Othmar returns, married and vexing Linus over his habit of bringing his blanket to school. This reprint series is in its prime now, and will be for another five years at least -- don't deprive yourself (or your children) of these classic strips, entirely worthy of the claim and as fresh as the day they first appeared.

PREMILLENNIAL MAAKIES 1ST FIVE YEARS HC $24.95 -- If you've loved, as I have, the hardcover widescreen reprints that Tony Millionaire's strips have enjoyed in recent years, you'll (like me) appreciate this re-packaging of the original softcover collection from five or six years back. That this and a Complete Peanuts volume are coming out on the same day certainly says something about the diversity and quality of the material Fantagraphics publishes -- from the most traditional, humanistic and subtly subversive strip of all time to the most perverse and nihilistic, all in two gorgeous, durable hardcovers worthy of the comics within. Gary, Kim, Eric, and everyone at Fantagraphics, seriously, on behalf of everyone who loves comics, thank you.

MQP
SWEETER SIDE OF R. CRUMB HC $30.00 -- I already posted my review of The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb, and I urge you once again to pick it up. Great stuff, recontextualized in a fascinating and genuinely charming manner.

And one more time, gang, CRIMINAL #1 COMES OUT WEDNESDAY. DO NOT MISS IT.

Enjoy your Monday.

Labels: monday briefing, reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 6:04 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
12 Reasons Why I Love Her -- A heady confection of conflict and romance is found in this new graphic novel published by Oni Press. Written by Jamie S. Rich and illustrated by Joelle Jones, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her is told in a non-linear fashion that convincingly immerses the reader in the reality of a romantic entanglement, with all the tension, joy, passion and sorrow that accompanies any longterm love affair. Jones has a confident, playful line and gives rich texture to the story, parsed out in 12 individual chapters. Each chapter has its own theme, mood and emotion, and any one of them provides an excellent standalone story.

Together, the 12 chapters of 12 Reasons Why I Love Her feel like time you've invested in your own love life, imperfect but exquisite experiences with someone you love and who you hope loves you. Rich and Jones perfectly encapsulate the frustrations of young adult romance, the paradoxical blending of needs and desires with the profound inability to ever really become one with each other.

I liked the characters here, and found myself pulling for them and their relationship. More importantly, I found myself sympathizing with both of them -- Rich makes this possible not through artificial narrative tricks but just by allowing both his lead characters room to breathe and the space to explore who they really are. Each of them does something stupid or unwise at some point, but you never feel that those mistakes are anything other than the unavoidable act of a human being, being human.

The final chapter of 12 Reasons Why I Love Her is the most telling -- whether the relationship between Gwen and Evan ultimately survives is not as important as that final image, the one moment in their lives when they were more one than every before or ever since. Long after the present passion fades, long after, even, you've ended it and perhaps painfully moved on, there's always that one moment that will always be a part of you.

This is a story told out of time because, ultimately, each of us has one of those moments in our lives, and we live in it forever, outside of time. The rest of it is what we call the relationship, but that one moment is the hinge around which the rest of our days will turn, and even if we never admit it out loud, we know there's nothing that can change that. Rich and Jones capture that electric transcendence in 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and that's all the reason you'll need to lose yourself in its wonders.

Note: 12 Reasons Why I Love Her will be released October 18th, 2006

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 12:30 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb -- Leave your sense of irony at the door, folks. While the title may recall Dave Berg's long-running Mad Magazine satire strip "The Lighter Side of [fill-in-the-blank]," this beautiful new hardcover collection from MQP is serious about offering up Crumb for those who might be intimidated or turned off by the self-confessed "nasty, negative misanthropic sex pervert" (as Crumb calls himself in his droll, confessional and explanatory introduction). Mainly, it seems, it's aimed at women, and if the pastel flowers and kitty-cat on the cover weren't proof enough, Crumb comes right out and says it in his introduction: "If I were a woman, I probably wouldn't like my work either." But MQP and Crumb and his wife Aline assembled this volume anyway, and perhaps being a bit too doubtful of his own appeal, Crumb says if the approach to female readers doesn't work, at least "maybe they'd be able to stomach it enough as a gift for their boyfriends."

Crumb is without question one of our finest living cartoonists, and beyond the targeted marketing and tongue-in-cheek self-doubt evident in the introduction, The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb is a welcome new assemblage of beautiful, vital drawings alive with the interest and respect Crumb clearly invests in his life-drawing subjects. There are a few strips, often about the early years of daughter Sophie, but the pieces that impress and arrest the eye are the mind-boggingly detailed French streets, the lovingly rendered family members, and yes, even a few pretty girls. If a nipple is evident here or there, there is nothing in evidence that would offend anyone to the left of "The Reverend" Fred Phelps, so the book actually is gift-worthy for any man, woman or child in your life, especially those with an interest in art in general and cartooning in particular.

Thankfully, Crumb's personal history pervades the collection, and I was stopped in my tracks by the portrait of Crumb's brother Charles as a young man. I defy you to study the image and not be immersed in the sense of love, respect, affection and lost potential Crumb conveys in the drawing. It is, in its way, Charles Crumb's tragic biography, rendered in a single, masterful image by the man who knew him and loved him best -- heartbreaking and awe-inspiring, all in one single drawing. I think it's the eyes that contain the heart of the drawing, but you must judge it for yourself.

Other people that have touched Crumb's life are rendered herein, from his first wife Dana and their son Jesse to second wife Aline and their daughter Sophie (and later on, it seems, a few of her friends). A smattering of hotel room still-lifes, advertising art and musician portraits are also included, but to me the most compelling images in the volume are always the people and places that have defined Crumb's life. He is, finally, one of the greatest reporters of his own life in cartoon form, a foreign correspondent from an unknown country of unique life experience that he generously, compulsively shares through his art. There's no greater proof that comics are art than the life's work of R. Crumb, and The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb is a wonderful and wondrous showcase for that art.

I suppose it might seem cynical, creating a book to market to women like this. If Crumb's self-effacing introduction doesn't eliminate those concerns, then let this: The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb may be the least-perverse, most accessible book the cartoonist has ever issued. But it is still 100-percent Crumb, and that makes it
absolutely essential.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 6:38 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Jonah Hex: Face Full of Violence -- This collection of tightly-written standalone stories is a welcome revival for DC's oddball outlaw western hero. I don't think I've read a single Jonah Hex story since Michael Fleischer had him stuffed and mounted way back when, but here he is again, alive and well. And if he's being sarcastic at one point when he tells a man he's "The spirit of vengeance, come to collect your soul," that doesn't mean he's far wrong.

Writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray give Hex plenty to avenge in these stories, as each finds Hex falling into treachery and double-dealing. Probably the best sees him getting involved in the dire consequences of a young woman's rape, and if the twists and turns of the narrative aren't altogether unexpected, Palmiotti and Gray still make the journey sharply entertaining.

I suppose writing an authentic western story at this late date almost precludes an ability to inject the unexpected, short of bringing in supernatural or science fiction elements (which Gray and Palmiotti thankfully do not), but for me what was unexpected was just how well-done the stories in Face Full of Violence are.

Artist Luke Ross illustrates five of the six stories, and brings both realism and a welcome western romanticism to his stories. Hex co-creator Tony Dezuniga takes the art reins for one story, showing an undiminished gift for visceral, violent storytelling. A number of popular creators try their hand on cover art, and those pieces are nicely reproduced without logos or other distractions, and at full size. Among those are Frank Quitely, Howard Chaykin and Brian Bolland, all demonstrating an affection for the character in excellent cover designs.

I think the format of these stories best suits Hex as a character -- he's fascinating to observe, and Face Full of Violence shows him as an excellent vehicle for solid storytelling in a genre that, as this volume proves, is still quite vital when tackled by creators excited about telling good stories.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 6:36 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
The Best American Comics 2006 -- Probably the best single volume of anthologized comics since the beautiful hardcover McSweeney's #13, The Best American Comics 2006 is edited by American Splendor's Harvey Pekar and thankfully is informed by his understanding and appreciation for autobiographical comics.

Not every strip in here is autobiographical, but Pekar instinctively chooses stories that carry the ring of truth and the patina of lives lived, even if they are about, say, Paul Bunyan wistfully reflecting on his secret dreams, or superhero Onion Jack's eventual fulfillment of a lifelong dream that does not involve beating the hell out of evildoers in tights.

Ah, yes. The tights.

Pekar seems a little behind the curve in his defensive explanation for not including any superhero stories in the book's 250-plus pages. One could argue superhero status for Onion Jack or Paul Bunyan, but both stories are so far above what you would generally consider "real" superhero comics that it's hardly worth the bother. No, Pekar may be trying to ride the fence between the twin readerships the book is likely to attract -- "real" book readers vs. the customers of your local superhero convenience store -- but Harvey, relax: The battle's been won. That this book even exists is proof of that.

Houghton Mifflin assembling an annual collection of the artform's best stories, and allowing someone with some understanding of what might actually constitute quality, is not the start of a revolution, but rather the most recent, obvious victory in a war that has been settled for at least a couple of years now. The public knows about comics as an artform, and while this volume is likely to further confirm the inherent possibilities, it really won't come as much of a surprise to anyone that it exists. It will mainly be bought in stores like Borders or name-your-local-indy-bookshop, not in comic book stores -- but I am sure the 50 or 60 actual, honest-to-Christ real comic book stores will carry this as well. You know, the ones that already have everything else with Pekar's name on it.

And yes, it is a good and particularly readable collection; in some ways, it is superior to the McSweeney's hardcover Chris Ware assembled a year or three back. Not in design, surely, but in that it is entirely comics. No need for high-falutin' essays to drawn in wary non-comics readers. And if there's no Dan Clowes in here, there are peers like Crumb, Ware, Jaime Hernandez and Joe Sacco.

Like the McSweeney's, some of these I've read before. But of course, I am not the ultimate, intended audience for this: The Best American Comics 2006 will make a wonderful gift for your literate friends who are curious about comics or have already dipped their foot in the pool and found the water to their liking.

Standouts in an almost flawless selection of stories include Jesse Reklaw's Thirteen Cats of My Childhood, which entirely delivers on the promise in its title and also manages to provide painfully canny insight into the makeup and eventual disintegration of an American family; one that happened to intersect over time with a baker's dozen of cats, each of which it wittily and engagingly provides biographical sketches of. Excellent.

I had previously dismissed Joel Priddy's Onion Jack story when it appeared in an AdHouse Books Free Comic Book Day release. I must have been in a bad mood that day, or perhaps it was a matter of context. Coming just pages after Pekar's introduction, it seems to serve as both a celebration and indictment of superhero comics as a genre, and worse yet as an avocation. The spare, almost non-existent artwork plays wonderfully against the rich, portentious script. It is a masterfully crafted dish of delicious irony, and serves as a rock-solid anchor to the book's intentions.

A panoply of styles and subjects throughout make for a heady, refreshing collection of comics. Each piece is followed by something utterly different, so anthology fatigue does not set in as it sometimes does when a single theme serves as anthology overlord. Each story is a palate-cleanser: Anders Nilsen's visual haiku offset from the chunky reportage of Kim Deitch; the fussy, detailed faux-realism of Jonathan Bennett giving way to the elegant line of Jaime Hernandez. Summing it all up, the street-level crazy-family reminiscences of Crumb, who finds refuge in remembering long walks and talks with a brother so troubled that he could not stand to stay in this world. Walkin' The Streets is as good as Crumb gets, and therefore as good as comics gets, and therefore utterly suited to close out this volume, a wondrous bookend to the Onion Jack story that led it off.

You might not think that two comics stories could be more dissimilar, but their unifying presence is a reminder that Pekar was the perfect man for the job of assembling this book's final form. No one alive today knows more about what is possible in the artform of comics. Harvey Pekar virtually invented the genre that represents the artform at its best, and as I say, if these stories are not all 100 percent true-to-life -- and clearly, they are not -- each and every one of them reflects the real life experiences, thoughts and perceptions of their creators. Each of their creators has allowed themselves, by their career choices, the freedom to tell the stories they want to tell, in the way they want to tell them. The Best American Comics 2006 is an elegant and entertaining showcase for their very best works, and a genuine signpost on the road to the now-obvious future of comics as an artform. Yes, there's a superhero story in here, but even that one is good, and therefore welcome.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:32 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Lone Ranger #1 -- I don't know that anyone is crying out for a new comic about The Lone Ranger, but Dynamite Entertainment has released a first issue that entertained beyond my expectations. The gorgeous John Cassaday cover created an expectation of quality that was not destroyed by the interiors. Interior art is by Sergio Carriello with colours by Dean White, and if the art isn't quite at the level cover artist Cassaday operates at, it still is far beyond most comics of this sort, with an obvious love for the material and a great deal of effort in making it look as good as possible (here's a good sample interior page).

Beginning with the second issue Cassaday is even credited with "art direction," and if it seems like I am putting a lot of emphasis on Cassaday's involvement, well, the first thing I thought of when I saw the cover was, "Cassaday's drawn some damn neat western-style scenes in Planetary." And the second was, "If this series looks as good as that work, I could actually see myself being a regular reader of The Lone Ranger," which I found a strange thing to be thinking, and yet: I could actually see myself being a regular reader of The Lone Ranger.

The story hits the beats needed to explain how a Texas Ranger lost his family and became The Lone Ranger, with nice opening sequence that, while it recalls Frank Miller's scene of Matt Murdock's childhood, still manages to explain the characters with economy and maybe even a little grace. Writer Brett Matthews deserves a good deal of credit for making this first issue so readable, even if the only reason I cracked it open was the Cassaday cover. Come for the Cassaday, stay for the comics: Not a bad way to kick off the first issue of any new series. I'll be checking out future issues, in hopes they are as entertaining and attractive as this one.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 6:41 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
All-Star Superman #5 -- Wow! Every once in a while Morrison (like Moore) takes a few issues to grab me, and this is the one for ASS, a title I had rapidly been losing interest in.

An issue-long meditation on the Lex/Superman relationship, nothing but dialogue and brilliantly staged action that comments on the divide between Lex and Superman. And finally, the art looks worthy of the title.

If you've grown weary of ASS, do give this one a shot; if you liked JLA: Earth 2 by Morrison and Quitely, this is exactly the comic you've been waiting for for the past six years.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 5:35 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 1 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
My Best Sweet Potato -- Now, here's something I am genuinely excited about: My Best Sweet Potato by "Rainy Dohaney," better known in comics circles as Renée French. If you're not familiar with French's work, her Marbles in My Underpants is absolutely essential comics reading, and under her own name she also published The Soap Lady and The Ticking (one of the very best graphic novels of this year to date, and unlikely to be knocked out of the top ten in the months remaining) through Top Shelf.

This is Rainy Dohaney's second children's book, following up on the utterly charming and beautifully illustrated Tinka (here's my review).

Whether you have children in your life, or just appreciate French's highly personal storytelling and lush, gorgeous artwork, My Best Sweet Potato is a must-buy release. It should be available in most bookstores, oh, right about now. (Thanks to The Spurge).

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 1:12 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Sloth -- Gilbert Hernandez's new graphic novel (published by Vertigo) paints a rich portrait of identity, gender and relationships, combining the graphic confidence of Hernandez's Palomar with the challenging narrative complexity of one of the better David Lynch movies -- Lost Highway, say, or maybe Mulholland Drive.

Miguel is a teenage boy who grows up in a small town, is raised by his doting grandparents, and one day wills himself into a year-long coma. A year later, he wills himself out of it and despite being a little shaky on his feet, more or less resumes his previous life, including his relationships with his best friend Romeo and his girlfriend Lita. And no, it wouldn't be entirely out of order to wonder what they're been up to over the past year, especially given the best friend's name, but I'm not telling you, you'll have to read the book and find out for yourself.

Miguel emerges into his new post-coma world a changed young man. More thoughtful, slower -- slothful, one might say. Sloth is also the name of the rock band made up of Miguel, Lita and Romeo, and Miguel's new approach to life extends into his music-making, a fact sorely at odds with the direction Romeo wants Sloth to take. Of such conflicts can be born great musical partnerships, like Lennon and McCartney, or Mick and Keith. Perhaps Sloth will rise to such heights, if they can overcome the other central conflict in their midst.

While Miguel's year-long coma and reintroduction into his own life is interesting plot material, the character that interested me the most was the girlfriend, Lita. Anyone familiar with Hernandez's work knows that he excels in creating unique, individual characters and that his women are always sharply realized, fascinating creations. Lita is pretty, but not overwhelmingly so, and her relationship with Miguel (and another guy in the story, not necessarily who you're thinking) seems drawn on reality. If the resumption of their romance (more like a friendship with sex than a fully-realized relationship, which perhaps provides a clue to the heart of the full story's ultimate resolution) is dealt with a little quickly, Lita's fascination with urban legends can be said to have filled the gap in her life while Miguel was comatose. Miguel, certainly, is drawn into the mysteries that so occupy Lita's imagination, and before long Miguel, Lita and Romeo are involved in more than one mystery, and the revelations that follow cause us to reevaluate every single thing we have seen and been told from the first moment of the story.

After the decades Gilbert Hernandez has spent as one of North America's most gifted cartoonists and premier storytellers, it's no surprise at all that Sloth is a beautiful book, told with the skill of a master. What may surprise you is how complete Sloth feels, of a piece with Hernandez's Love and Rockets work but independent of it in all but spirit. It's a single story with a definite beginning, middle and end, but with worlds created (quite literally) in its telling, Sloth will reward a second reading, and perhaps a third. It is, after all, the tale of three young people filled with hopes, desires and dreams.

Especially dreams.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 8:21 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Monologues for the Coming Plague -- I'll be damned if I can tell you what to make of Anders Nilsen's comics. There are times, such as a lot of his stuff in Mome -- when I find myself staring at it incomprehendingly and flip past it hoping something "better" -- read, "more comprehensible" -- is next. I can remember standing in The Beguiling last year and being a bit stunned to hear Christopher Butcher tell me he thinks Nilsen's stuff is genius. Respecting Butcher's opinion as I did (and do), I figured I was just being dense and missing the forest for the trees, and besides, the specific book Butcher was talking about (Dogs and Water), I still have not read.

I did read the next issue of Nilsen's Big Questions that came out after that conversation, though, and if I understood not everything I read (BQ is an ongoing narrative, apparently much of it from the point of view of birds, which Nilsen seems to adore drawing), at least I came away from it with a respect for Nilsen's aesthetic sensibility -- spare, gentle, bewildering.

"Bewildering" is a good word for Monologues for the Coming Plague, which from the outside seems deliberately designed to look like something you'd be assigned to read in your sophomore Literature class. "Deliberate design" is a concept I thought about a lot while reading Monologues -- did Nilsen deliberately design the book so the spine must be cracked while reading it? A note at the end confirms Nilsen had a deliberate purpose in using two different paper stocks over the course of the book. He seems to think a lot about design and the tactile nature of reading a book, which, while common in artcomix (at least the ones I like), is always an added pleasure, given how little thought goes into the presentation and quality of most entertainment, from movies and music to comics, books and everything else.

What about the comics? Sloppy, strange, mannered, elegant, brilliant? I'm not altogether convinced you couldn't have drawn any picture in the book. And yet, you haven't, and Nilsen has, and there's an undeniable net effect akin to awe. Awe that his brain works in this way, awe that Fantagraphics finds this worth publishing, awe that I enjoyed it all the way through. Awe, perhaps, that I don't ever enjoy reading Nilsen's stuff as much I think I should, but always more than I think I will.

Nilsen raises big questions about narrative, art, philosophy ("Yeah, I have a philosophy, but I'm not sure what it is.") and existence. He doesn't seem to answer any of them in his comics, but I hope one of his punchlines here will also describe this review for you:

"Thank you, that was actually very helpful."

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 6:27 PM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Incanto -- Writer/artist Frank Santoro also drew Cold Heat #1 (both are from Picturebox Inc.), and his art on that title seemed to me deliberately rough and unfinished, but with an obvious skill and good colour sense. Incanto is in many ways a very different book, more experimental, and I think more likely to satisfy artcomix followers.

Despite having been issued from a professional (if new and mostly untested) publisher, Incanto looks and feels like a self-published mini-comic. The moments Santoro depicts are conveyed with a minimum of visual information -- sometimes what we're seeing is spelled out for us in scrawled text, such as "sky," or "reaching for lover not there," but intriguingly, usually, you'll be able to tell what it is you're looking at anyway. The technique is an arresting variation on comics being composed of words and pictures, and an effective counter-argument to the truism that the words on the page should never duplicate what the reader can see in the images.

The use of colour -- a bright orange and a shade of blue I would call "dark turquoise" (although art school grads probably have a better name for it) arrests the eye, and the four colours in evidence -- white, black, orange and that shade of blue -- create whole worlds of emotion and space on the page. One masterful sequence has two panels on the left page featuring shock and revulsion highlighted by the methodical removal of colour, only to be powerfully echoed and enforced by a wall of nothing but orange on the facing, right-side page.

By now you have a sense of whether Incanto is something you'd like or not, which is what I see as my primary job here. I can't say it's going to be for everyone -- it's experimental, non-traditional comics in the extreme -- but at the same time, it is wildly intriguing, like a beautiful dream, and there are moments and images inside that indicate Santoro is a powerful new voice in comics, and that Picturebox is, whatever Diamond thinks about them, a new comics publisher the artform needs, even if the industry seems destined to resist it at every turn.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 7:44 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE

 
Cold Heat #1 -- Somewhere between Chester Brown's Underwater and David Lapham's Stray Bullets lies Cold Heat, which seems to be more than the amateurish effort it wants to appear to be, and yet is so impenetrable that one is left little doubt why Diamond would not want to bother with it.

Critics of any artform have a duty to look beyond the base financial motivations of a company like Diamond, a virtual monopoly within that part of comics that is primarily concerned with selling floppy periodical adventure comics to 40-year-old men who enjoy seeing Superman and Batman's minds placed in the bodies of Power Girl and The Huntress (see? I keep up!).

In the greater, recently-expanding world of comics and graphic novels there has been new room made for stories told in comic form. In many bookstores catering to all ages and genders you can find graphic novels about growing up lesbian with a closeted gay father, or dealing with cancer, or coming to grips with what it means to have left your youth behind. These books, and the people who are finding them, out there in the world, are very likely the future of comics. Not because they don't have superheroes, but because unlike most current superhero comics, they tell human stories that resonate deeply with concerns greater than "Hulk smash." The audience is out there for great stories in comic form, and more and more it is finding them.

Cold Heat, published by Dan Nadel's Picturebox Inc., doesn't seem to me to be a great story, although it seems to want to be. The art seems unfinished, but not unaccomplished -- think of Frank Stack's work on Our Cancer Year. The colour palette is limited, but deliberately so, giving it the look of a child colouring with only two crayons, one pink and one blue. It's not an unattractive effect, and in a few places the extraordinary application of colour and art betray the simplistic style being used; the artist knows what he's doing.

I didn't like Cold Heat #1, but not because its creators aren't telling a good story. I didn't like it because I couldn't tell what story it is they are telling, which is why this review is short on plot details. There's an apparent suicide, and a gathering, a martial arts lesson and a dream, but how or why it all fits together remains a mystery (Derik Badman read it multiple times and has a better summary here).

This is a year for comics in which many great stories have been told by master storytellers, and also many superhero comics have been sold, one having nothing to do with the other. The point is that there's a wealth of comics out there right now, no matter what you're looking for. It's no surprise to me that Diamond couldn't be bothered with Cold Heat, because the superhero-fixated Direct Market isn't going to have any use for it, and casual artcomix followers might not be willing to buy twelve issues of this thing to see if it's going anywhere, or if it's just a pretty-coloured mess.

Critics of the comics artform are likely to support Cold Heat because it's different and might turn out to be extraordinary. But that's far from reason enough to recommend you invest five dollars in it. Unless you're a comics critic, or extraordinarily curious about the outer edges of alternative comics circa 2006 CE.

Labels: reviews

// posted by Alan David Doane @ 6:59 AM [LINK TO THIS] | 0 COMMENTS | E-MAIL ADD | SUBSCRIBE