Pretty decent week this week -- nearly caught up with my work (order form due tomorrow), so, hopefully, "Around the Store" will begin again tomorrow...

2000 AD #1575
2000 AD #1576
2000 AD #1577
2000 AD #1578
ABE SAPIEN THE DROWNING #3 (OF 5)
ACTION COMICS #863
ALL NEW ATOM #22
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #555
AMERICAN SPLENDOR SEASON TWO #1 (OF 4)
ANGEL AFTER THE FALL #6
ANITA BLAKE VH GUILTY PLEASURES #10 (OF 12)
ANNA MERCURY #1 (OF 5) PAINTED CVR
ARCHIE #583
BETTY #173
BOY WHO MADE SILENCE #1
BOYS #17
BRIT #5
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #13
CABLE #2 DWS
CASANOVA #13
CLANDESTINE #3 (OF 5)
COUNTDOWN SPECIAL KAMANDI 80 PAGE GIANT
COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 4
DARK TOWER LONG ROAD HOME #2 (OF 5)
DARKNESS BUTCHER (ONE SHOT)
DC SPECIAL RAVEN #2 (OF 5)
DEAD SPACE #2 (OF 6)
DETECTIVE COMICS #843
DRAGONLANCE CHRONICLES VOL 3 ROBERTS CVR A #9 (OF 12)
EVERYBODYS DEAD #2
FOUNDATION #3 (OF 5) (RES)
FRANK FRAZETTAS DARK KINGDOM ONE-SHOT
HIGHLANDER WAY O/T SWORD #4
HOPE FALLS #5 (OF 5)
INFINITY INC #8
JACK STAFF #15
JONAH HEX #30
JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #269
JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED #44
KICK ASS #2
LOGAN #2 (OF 3)
LOONEY TUNES #161
LORDS OF AVALON SOD #3 (OF 6)
MANY HAPPY RETURNS
MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #38
MARVEL SPOTLIGHT IRON MAN MOVIE
METAL MEN #7 (OF 8)
MIDNIGHTER #18
MOON KNIGHT #17
NEW DYNAMIX #2 (OF 5)
NEW EXILES #4
NEW WORLD ORDER #3
NIGHTWING #143
OMEGA UNKNOWN #7 (OF 10)
OVERMAN #5 (OF 5)
PALS N GALS DOUBLE DIGEST #120
PROJECT SUPERPOWERS #2 Of(6)
PS238 #30
PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #18
SCALPED #16
SECRET INVASION #1 (OF 8)
SPIDER-MAN FAMILY #8
STUDENTS OF THE UNUSUAL GIANT SIZE MUSIC SPECIAL
SUPERGIRL #28
TRIALS OF SHAZAM #12 (OF 12)
TWELVE #4 (OF 12)
VINYL UNDERGROUND #7
WALKING DEAD #48
YOUNG AVENGERS PRESENTS #3 (OF 6)
YOUNG X-MEN #1 DWS
ZORRO #2

Books / Mags / Stuff
BATMAN GRENDEL NEW PTG TP
COMIC FOUNDRY MAGAZINE SPRING 2008
DRAGON HEAD GN VOL 10 (OF 10)
ESSENTIAL IRON MAN TP VOL 03
G FAN #83
GREEN ARROW 13 INCH DELUXE COLLECTOR FIGURE
HOLMES GN
HOWIE ACTION COMICS GN
HULK TP PLANET HULK
ILLUSTRATION MAGAZINE #22
JEFFREY BROWN LITTLE THINGS SC MEMOIR IN SLICES
JENNY FINN TP DOOM MESSIAH
JOJOS BIZARRE ADVENTURE TP VOL 10
JUDGE DREDD COMPLETE AMERICA GN
LOST OFFICIAL MAGAZINE #16 PX ED
MODESTY BLAISE TP VOL 01 GABRIEL SET UP NEW PTG (NOTE PRICE)
NEW AVENGERS HC VOL 02
PATH OF THE ASSASSIN VOL 10 TP
SECRET INVASION TP INFILTRATION
SHAZAM THE GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD TP
SPARROW ASHLEY WOOD HC VOL 02
STORMWATCH PHD TP VOL 02
SUPERMAN 3 2 1 ACTION TP
TAG CURSED TP
TOMARTS ACTION FIGURE DIGEST #164
TONOHARU GN PART ONE
X-MEN FIRST CLASS TP MUTANT MAYHEM
ZOMBIES VS ROBOTS VS AMAZONS HC


What looks good to YOU?

-B Click Here to Read More...

During my (admittedly short) time as a comic book critic, I've reviewed comics that made me happy, or sad, or violently ill; works by writers I can't stand, or admire, or wish would try just a bit harder because they're capable of so much more (you know who you are).

But there's one comic I've never talked about, and likely never will:

WATCHMEN.

To be totally honest, WATCHMEN intimidates me. It's too great a work for me to discuss, and it's such a central part of comics discourse that I doubt there's much I could say that hasn't been said before, by greater critics than myself.

And I'd be content to let sleeping dogs lie, except the comic I'm about to review can't be discussed outside the WATCHMEN context, and that puts me in a rather uncomfortable position. So I'm just going to take a deep breath and see where things go from here. More after the jump.

One of the perks of being a Savage Critic, aside from the company, is that we occasionally get advance copies of comics that have either just been solicited or, on very rare occasions, haven't actually been announced yet.

So when I got a PDF from DC Comics titled MINUTEMEN, I figured it was some colonial-era historical drama, perhaps with some dinosaurs and time-travel thrown in just so we wouldn't forget it was a comic book.

I certainly wasn't expecting a 48-page WATCHMEN prequel by Leah Moore and Dave Gibbons, due for release in July.

Needless to say, I ended up having some deeply conflicted feelings about this comic. So let's start with the positive aspects first: the most obvious pro, of course, is that this one-shot constitutes a return to a world that had been previously self-contained. Granted, it's a prequel, and Alan Moore had already covered most of this the first time around, but the effect on me as a reader is like opening a favorite book for the twentieth time and finding a whole new chapter that I'd never seen before. A sense of the new and the familiar, all the more powerful because WATCHMEN changed the way I read comics.

And Leah Moore delivers a good story, for the most part. Her previous project, ALBION, had left me rather indifferent, but here she really shows a knack for small, silent, understated scenes that drive a huge emotional spike through your heart: Ozymandias handing Mothman his first glass of bourbon with a knowing grin was absolutely chilling, because there's no dialogue, no narration, and yet you just know what Moore's trying to imply.

Obviously, it's the artwork that sells these sequences, and Gibbons deserves a huge round of applause here for sticking so closely to WATCHMEN's character designs. It contributes a lot to that feeling of connection I mentioned - that this really is an organic companion to its parent text.

However, I can't help feeling like the whole project is unnecessary on some level. Part of WATCHMEN's appeal is that it doesn't spell everything out, and we don't necessarily know every detail of what happened in that world Moore and Gibbons created all those years ago. We knew Silhouette and her lover were murdered - did we really need to see it happen? Doesn't that take away from the mysteries of the original, the things left in the shadows? A lot of what Leah Moore does is basically confirm, explicitly, the things her father left to our imagination: yes, Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis were lovers, and the Comedian found out, and Dollar Bill thinking about adding a cape to his costume comes with all the ominous foreshadowing you'd expect...

And when she does add to the mythos, the contributions are questionable at best - nothing in MINUTEMEN technically contradicts anything in WATCHMEN, but there's a hint of that familiar "everything you know is wrong" vibe that annoys me on principle these days (so you can deduce my feelings towards SECRET INVASION too).

Still, in lieu of the Great Bearded Warlock making a comeback, I could settle for this. In short, I'd give it an OKAY if it weren't an early April's Fools' joke.

...

...

Gotcha!

Labels: Diana

Click Here to Read More...

All Star Superman #10:


As expected, this issue starts to wrap things up for the series, and it's sort of a relief. I did like writer Grant Morrison's suite of confrontations between Superman and various doppelgängers, Our Hero pressing to understand himself on the road toward the end of all things (er, keep in mind, I'm the one who thinks the second Bizarro issue is the best of the whole series), but it's high time a little payoff should develop, and that's what happens here. Given that Morrison tosses in an amusingly brief encounter with yet another Authentic Man of Tomorrow, I think even he's gotten antsy.

Over the course of one big day -- events relayed out of chronological order for maximum impact -- Superman sets about accomplishing a lot of big super-challenges. He's very godly (in more than one way... more on that later), but he realizes that he needs to collaborate with others in order to affect lasting change: curing cancer, fixing every bridge in the world, getting the people of Kandor out of that bottle. When put together, the story forms a neat little sequence of Superman helping people out, from the lil' folk in the jar to The Only Girl With Facial Piercings in Metropolis, and getting helped in return, if sometimes in very removed ways. Wholesome fun, this.

Oh, and Superman's pretty sure he's gonna die soon, so he's also trying to prep humanity up for a world without him as much as possible; bathetic as the Girl w' Piercings part is, "You're much stronger than you think you are" is surely the key line of the issue. This leads to some odd implications.



Look! Up in the sky! Morrison may rank Superman highly, but he's revealed to be an impotent deity in important ways, one that needs the input of the not yet quite so powerful to really get things done. And that's nothing compared to the issue's loopiest twist: playing with the Infant Universe of Qwewq, seeking to create a model of what a world would be like without him at all, Superman creates... us.

Yes, Morrison presents Superman quite specifically as our God, the literal creator of each and every one of our human lives, thus handily topping the Superman-as-Jesus metaphor of Superman Returns, and taking his own admiration of the character to dazzlingly ridiculous heights. Ah, but Morrison isn't one for too much worship - not only does our God never directly help us, but the peeks we're granted into 'our' world only reveal moments when humanity looks to the best in themselves. As his Superman seeks diplomacy with others, Morrison emphasizes both how Superman is a man, and how we're all men together, regardless of sexual organs or funny jumpsuits or anything.

VERY GOOD work on this one, particularly considering that the whole Qwewq-as-our-universe idea is recycled wholesale from Seven Soldiers, just as the notion of lil' folk waiting inside us seems a nod to The Filth. The All Star books have always been homages to their own writers as much as their title characters, but it's to Morrison's benefit that he mixes the stuff back in with such intuition.

I suspect it also doesn't escape him that several tens of thousands of added readers will be around for this spin, much in the way that the first issue of Final Crisis will no doubt outsell every issue of Seaguy 2: Slaves of Mickey Eye combined. Yet the end of Superman (and the Crises) may mean more and newer ideas from different sources; speaks to the pleasure of frail mortality in comics series...

Labels: Jog

Click Here to Read More...

SUPER SPY and NEW AVENGERS #39. Below the cut lurk spoilers (well, a plot summary, really) for the latter. Hence, the cut. For those who care about such things.



Tom Spurgon wrote the other day in his you-must-go-read-it best-of-2007 roundup that " I have a selfish reason for wanting to bring more people to the conversation on [Matt Kindt's] Super Spy: I think the book is good, but I can't figure out how good, and I'd love to see a range of writers and thinkers muse on it in public to help me along. It's the most confusing book of 2007 to me, and for that one of the most compelling."

I read it at last yesterday, after it had been on my shelf taunting me for months, and... well, I'm confused too. I think it's Very Good, but that's kind of a split decision between the elements that work beautifully and the ones that don't work at all. It's one of the most formally grand comics I've seen in a while: 37 interrelated stories about espionage in World War II, each one written and drawn with its own distinct formal guidelines (not necessarily a specific style, but particular drawing and writing techniques, POV, etc.). They form one kind of story in the order they're printed, but that's not chronological order; they can also be read in chronological order by the "dossier numbers" printed at the beginning of each one. They're mostly black-and-white with a single tone color (which changes from time to time), except when they erupt into full-spectrum color in a few passages, generally for pastiches of old comic strips. But the whole book is actually in full color: its pages' blank space is mostly the mottled color of yellowed WWII-era newsprint, with crumpled corners and other marks of age and abuse. There are stories within stories (with the inevitable reference to the 1,001 Nights); there are hidden messages everywhere--everyone seems to be a spy, sending secret information and desperate requests to other spies while trying to act natural--and anything that looks innocuous in one story is inevitably revealed in another to be the vehicle of a hidden message. (A facial mole is actually the mark of an espionage mole: it's a dot of microfilm!)

Cool, yes? Yes, and as somebody who is inordinately fond of complicated formal structures in art in general, I do like it an awful lot. But the places where it falls down are some of the more old-fashioned, prosaic virtues, like character and figure drawing. The story is populated by a whole lot of characters, all of them spies trying to advance their personal and political agendas at any cost--but I found when I'd finished it that I only remembered the name of one of them, Sharlink, "the Shark," a classic femme-fatale type. The espionage material is standard-issue coded-transmission stuff, and characters are broad central-casting types; people discover that their lovers are spies for the other side and betray each other in a strangely facile way; an exotic dancer's desperate, unusual movements are Morse code: "my cover is blown, they're waiting for me, must escape tonight." (And he telegraphs a lot of the "secrets," too: one character explains how he's going to hide a message in every fifth word of a comic strip, and not only do we see every fifth word of the strip circled, but we subsequently see someone picking out those words.) Kindt's artwork is really lovely as cartooning-based drawing (line, tone, composition, abstraction), but it's a little bit off in the context of a story: characters are awkwardly different-looking from panel to panel, facial expressions are vague approximations. I definitely want to read his future comics, but like I said, I'm confused about what I think of this too.

NEW AVENGERS #39: Now, this is a Very Good and very interesting espionage-fakeout narrative--nowhere near as formally impressive as SUPER SPY, but a terrific piece of Bendis serial writing. The plot (SPOILERS like I said) is that Echo and Wolverine have a strange and slightly flirtatious conversation, and Echo heads to Matt Murdock's law office, where she encounters Daredevil; when she asks him a question he should know the answer to and he tries to cover up for the fact that he doesn't know what she's talking about, she realizes something's wrong--and Daredevil reveals himself as a Skrull, who attacks her. But Wolverine's followed them, and fights the Skrull, who gets away. The injured Wolverine explains that "if I was a Skrull looking to sink their claws into our little team, you'd be the one I'd go after," and Echo realizes that "they were going to kill me and replace me." Back at their HQ, Maya seduces Hawkeye; when she wakes up, she looks through her fingers at him.

There are three ways to read this story. The first is to take it at face value. The second, which I suspect is the case, is that Echo has in fact been a Skrull for a good long while--that she's already been killed and replaced, long since, and that her fight with the Daredevil/Skrull this issue is a game to clear her in Wolverine's eyes, since Wolverine is convinced that she's the most likely target. (And then what's going on with her and Hawkeye? Well, he's a Skrull suspect as an unlikely returnee-from-the-dead, but it's still a little confusing.)

And the third is that not only is Echo a Skrull, but Wolverine knows it but doesn't want to let on that he knows. (That "does he know about our past?" routine at the beginning of the issue may be the same kind of leading question as Echo's "Why did you send Captain America to me?" I know Echo and Wolverine worked together in the past, but can anybody who knows her history better than I do tell me if they were ever romantically involved?) Which means--after all the times in this series when Echo has responded to what someone's saying even though her back is to them--that when Wolverine's lying behind her and says "(She can't hear me...)," he knows she can hear him, and is saying it for her to hear and be deceived...

Or, you know, maybe everything is what it seems to be. But how much fun would that be? I have no idea how this will read once we see the whole story (Mack, certainly, is drawing much more straightforwardly and less inventively and attractively than he has with his other Echo material), but for now I'm delighted.

Labels: Douglas

Click Here to Read More...

I'm totally swamped, post-ComicsPRO meeting, plus have to get the order form done, and we're about to have our home bathroom remodeled, and I have to write the new TILTING, and then there's the jury duty coming up, and... well, dang, everything happens at once, doesn't it? I'll return to "Around the Store" as soon as I can, I promise!

In the meantime, here's a slightly late list of what's arriving this week at Comix Experience...

A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #78 (A)
ALL STAR SUPERMAN #10
AMELIA RULES #20
ANGEL AFTER THE FALL #1 4TH PTG
ARCHIE DOUBLE DIGEST #187
ARMY OF DARKNESS XENA WHY NOT #1 (OF 4)
AUTHORITY PRIME #6 (OF 6)
BADGER SAVES THE WORLD #4 (OF 5)
BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #15
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA ORIGINS #4
BERLIN #15
BLACK PANTHER #35
BLUE BEETLE #25
BUDDHA STORY OF ENLIGHTENMENT #1
CARTOON NETWORK BLOCK PARTY #43
COUNTDOWN LORD HAVOK AND THE EXTREMISTS #6 (OF 6)
COUNTDOWN SPECIAL ECLIPSO 80 PAGE GIANT
COUNTDOWN TO ADVENTURE #8 (OF 8)
COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 5
CROSSING MIDNIGHT #17
DAN DARE #5 (OF 7) LEACH CVR
DAREDEVIL #106
DARK 48 #2
DRAFTED #6
DRAIN #6
DUMMYS GUIDE TO DANGER LOST AT SEA #1 (OF 4)
FALLEN ANGEL IDW #25
FUTURAMA COMICS #36
GANGES #2
GARGOYLES #8
GRAVEL #2 WRAP CVR
GREEN LANTERN #29
GUTWRENCHER #2 (OF 3)
HELLBLAZER #242
HOUSEWIVES AT PLAY #18 (A)
HUNTERS MOON #5 (OF 5)
INDIA AUTHENTIC #11 HANUMAN
JACK OF FABLES #21
JSA CLASSIFIED #36
JUGHEAD #188
KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #137
KOLCHAK TALES NIGHT STALKER O/T LIVING DEAD #1 (OF 3)
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #40
LOVELESS #23
MARVEL ADVENTURES FANTASTIC FOUR #34
MARVEL ADVENTURES IRON MAN #11
MARVEL ATLAS #2 (OF 2)
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED PICTURE DORIAN GRAY #4 (OF 6)
MIGHTY AVENGERS #11
MS MARVEL #25 SII
NEW AVENGERS #39 SII
NEW WARRIORS #10
PHANTOM #22
POWER PACK DAY ONE #1 (OF 4)
PROOF #6
RAMAYAN 3392 AD RELOADED #5 (OF 7) (RES)
REICH #2
RETURN O/T GREMLINS #1 (OF 3) (RES)
ROGUE ANGEL TELLER OF TALES #2
SAVAGE DRAGON #135
SECRET HISTORY AUTHORITY JACK HAWKSMOOR #1 (OF 6)
SHE-HULK 2 #27
SONIC X #31
SORROW #4 (OF 4)
SPAWN #176
SPEAK O/T DEVIL #5 (OF 6)
SPIDER-MAN WITH GREAT POWER #3 (OF 5)
SPIRIT #15
ST TNG INTELLIGENCE GATHERING #3 (OF 5)
STAR TREK NEW FRONTIER #1
STAR WARS KNIGHTS OF OLD REPUBLIC #26 VECTOR PART 2
STRANDED #3
STRONGARM #5 (OF 5)
TAROT WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE #49
TEEN TITANS #57
TEEN TITANS GO #53
TERMINATOR 2 INFINITY #7
TRANSHUMAN #1 (OF 4)
TRON #5
ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #52
ULTIMATE HUMAN #3 (OF 4)
ULTIMATE IRON MAN II #4 (OF 5)
ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #120
ULTIMATE X-MEN #92
UNCLE SAM AND THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS #7 (OF 8)
USAGI YOJIMBO #110
WILDSTORM REVELATIONS #6 (OF 6)
WOLVERINE FIRST CLASS #1
WORLD OF WARCRAFT #5
WORLD WAR HULK AFTERSMASH DAMAGE CONTROL #3 (OF 3)
X-MEN FIRST CLASS VOL 2 #10
X-MEN LEGACY #209 DWS
ZOMBIE BROADWAY ONE SHOT

Books / Mags / Stuff
A WISH OF MY SISTER GN (A)
ADVENTURES OF LITTLE ARCHIE TP VOL 02
APOCALYPSE NERD TP
CLOUDS ABOVE GN
COMPLETE OMAHA THE CAT DANCER TP VOL 07 (A)
DADDYS GIRL HC
DARK WRAITH OF SHANNARA GN
EDISON STEELHEADS LOST PORTFOLIO
EDUCATION OF HOPEY GLASS HC
FIRST BORN TP VOL 01
FLIGHT EXPLORER TP VOL 01
FRITZ LANGS M GN
FUNERAL OF THE HEART TP
GHOST RIDER TP TRAIL OF TEARS
IRON MAN DOOMQUEST PREM HC
JACK KIRBYS FOURTH WORLD OMNIBUS HC VOL 04
JUSTICE LEAGUE AMERICA SER 2 BALANCED INNER CS
JUXTAPOZ VOL 15 #4 APR 2008
MARVEL FANFARE STRANGE TALES TP
MMW ATLAS ERA HC VOL 02 TALES ASTONISH
MOUSE GUARD TP FALL 1152
MPD PSYCHO TP VOL 04
NEW UNIVERSAL TP EVERYTHING WENT WHITE
NIGHTWING THE LOST YEAR TP
PREVIEWS VOL XVIII #4
PUNISHER MAX TP VOL 09 LONG COLD DARK
SHOWCASE PRESENTS BOOSTER GOLD TP VOL 01
SOULFIRE SC VOL 01
SPIDER-MAN PREM HC ONE MORE DAY
STARDUST KID VOL 1 TP (RES)
THAT SALTY AIR GN
ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN TP SPANISH COLLECTION
ULTIMATE X-MEN TP SPANISH COLLECTION
WIZARD MAGAZINE #199 SECRET INVASION CVR


Plus: from Baker & Taylor:

Rabbi's Cat 2 HC
Awkward & Definition TP


What looks good to YOU?


-B Click Here to Read More...

Between sickness, work craziness and deadlines for everything under the sun, it’s surprising that I’ve had any time to read comic books. Add in the fact that Brian Hibbs got me addicted to Death Note, and it’s even more surprising that I have anything to write about under the jump apart from “Light Yagami is messed up, dude.” And yet, commentary about superhero books await you if you click that “Click here to read more”...



AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #554: Now that we’re three quarters of the way through Brand New Day – it stops having that branding after all the writers have been introduced, right? – it’s worth noting that we seem to have established this quality level that could best be described as Okay And On Time. None of the BND issues have been stunning when taken on their individual merits, but there really is something comforting about the almost-weekly nature of the book and the fact that it’s not that bad, really. Bob Gale somewhat overdoes the knowingly-retro flavor in this issue (Overall, Marc Guggenheim’s been the most satisfying of the writers so far, but I’m hoping for more from Dan Slott’s second go-around, when he doesn’t have to introduce a status quo), and Phil Jiminez’s art just doesn’t really seem Spider-Man-ish enough for me, but at the same time, it swings by in a completely inoffensive manner, so it seems good enough, if that makes sense…?

CAPTAIN AMERICA #36: Call me irresponsible, but I’m really hoping that the reveal at the end of the issue lays groundwork for a return of Steve Rogers. Captain BuckyCyborg is a much more interesting character, and it’s a lot more fun seeing him try (and fail) to live up to the legacy of an icon than seeing the icon in action. Which is, in a way, my way of saying that this was a Good issue, and yet more proof that Ed Brubaker doesn’t need his characters alive to write compelling stories about them.

DEATH OF THE NEW GODS#7: There may be something wonderfully old school about the melodramatic “You didn’t expect this!” nature of this issue’s cliffhanger, but seriously, what actually happened at the end there? Starlin’s writing has a great old school crassness about it that really fits on this project, but his art just feels out of place – It doesn’t have either a modern look or the sheer graphic power of Kirby’s work – making this book even more of an oddity than it would be otherwise. It’s like a strange guilty pleasure, but the guilt comes from not really knowing why I’m enjoying it.

FLASH #238: Well, that’ll teach me to have high expectations for a book. As a big fan of Tom Peyer’s Hourman as well as his blogging, I was pretty excited about the idea of him stepping up to take over the Flash following Mark Waid’s too-soon departure. Finally, I thought, a writer who will be able to bring back the Silver Age weirdness of the book and also bring some humor with bite… and, to be fair, he’s done both of those things, but at the price of characters seeming out of character in service of plot, and jarringly so. Wally’s non-sequitur about feeling stressed because of lack of money to a reporter at a disaster site may have gotten the story moving, but was enough to stop the reader in their tracks in terms of “Doesn’t he, you know, know better?” Maybe there’ll be something later in the story to explain suddenly-grumpy Wally, but right now, this was a fun-but-flawed Okay first issue to Tom’s run.

FX #1: Hey, suddenly it’s 1986 again! Considering the incredibly generic script, the lazy John Byrne artwork (and, really, it’s very very lazy) and the pricetag, there’s really only one thing to recommend this Crap: John Workman’s lettering. Now there’s a creator who never lets you down.

TANGENT: SUPERMAN'S REIGN #1: Is it wrong of me to have really, really enjoyed this, especially Ron Marz’s back-up about the history of the Tangent world? There’s nothing particularly new about it, after all, and it’s not like DC isn’t already full of alternate Earths, but stil... Something (Perhaps Matthew Clark’s artwork, even though the series was trailed with Jamal Igle attached?) clicked for me, and I ended up wanting to read more to the point of almost buying the Tangent Comics trades. Luckily, I stopped myself before going too far, but still; who could’ve expected this to be so enjoyably Good?

This week? Man, if you’re not picking up the Fourth World Omnibus with remixed Hunger Dogs, then you hate life. It's that simple.

Labels: Graeme

Click Here to Read More...

I don't have anything interesting to say, but I noticed the other people who write for this site— they were all having busy weeks; I thought I'd try to chip in with some quickie reviews before work. Here’s what I’ve read lately…

Incredible Hercules #116: I was flipping through the latest issue at random-- I like Khoi Pham's art, so I was glancing at it for that when I noticed this issue has this sweet detail: the bulk of the action takes place on the Hellicarrier from the 24-issue Doug Moench Godzilla comic book Marvel published in the 1970's. Shit, man, I never even read those comics, but I just liked that detail so I read the rest of the issue.

It's a big ridiculous fight comic-- I guess the book shares the same creative team as World War Hulk, which also succeeded with me by focusing on things punching / getting punched. With this Hercules comic, I didn't really understand what people were talking about in-between punches but maybe more attentive fans found those bits pleasurable. Near the end it turns into some strange mythology thing; lessons are learned; morals are taught; Blossom learns why she's bleeding; etc. But I want to look on the bright side, and on the bright side? On the bright side, some guy grabs a missile from out of the sky and hits another guy with it. I approve.

It's a nice detail, the thing with the Godzilla Hellicarrier, though. I'll have forgotten 21 pages of this comic in a week, but that page where they mention the thing about the Hellicarrier is probably what'll stick with me. Its just a nice piece of nerd archaeology. It creates a sense of the "Marvel Universe" being its own place with its own history -- even the decommissioned hellicarriers rusting away in junkyards have a history to them!-- without being a "This will only make sense to you if you read issue #8 of DAZZLER (i.e. "Hell... Hell is for Harry") in 1981" type thing, like out of some DC comic. The rest of the issue doesn't depend on understanding the significance of the particular hellicarrier, at least that I could tell. For me, it's just marshmallows in a cup of hot chocolate.

Plus, it's a shout-out to one of the too-few series to star one of my favorite Marvel characters: Mr. Dum Dum Dugan.


He just seems violent! SHIELD is a massive international, multinational counter-espionage organization, outfitted with the most advanced technology, manned by the best and the brightest-- and one of the guys in charge is a violent Irish nonagenarian in a bowler hat...? I think that services a potent theme: all the fancy technology or well-trained people can get you so far, but you still need to have a couple guys handy who seem willing to kick some ass and wear hats while doing so. I think that’s a way better theme than the thing about responsibility or whatever—a better theme for practical living. Dum Dum Dugan – there’s just a lot of unrealized upside to that character.

Nijigahara Holograph: I re-read this scanlated manga the other day. I'm surprised I didn’t see Nijigahara Holograph end up on more best of the year lists; it was in the top 10 of that lengthy Journalista list; it was on mine and I didn't even like it that much last year. I guess a lot of people may not be cool with the whole scanlation thing though.

If you missed it, Nijigahara Holograph is a fractured comic that alternates between a group of young students and those students in their early adulthoods, both mired in a seemingly endless cycle of abuse and violence. The story unfolds like a puzzle. After my first read through, I'd mistaken a lot of the imagery for surrealism-- I don't really like surrealism so I didn't rate the comic as I highly as maybe I should have, though I was still very impressed with it for technical reasons, for the mood of it. But having read it again recently, I think my earlier reaction was wrong. There's more of an underlying logic to the series than I'd picked up on the first time through. I think I got more out of it the second time because I got to read it faster, so I was able to connect fragments that I'd missed before.

I feel like I've read essays by people who think comics can't be scary, because the static imagery of comics aren't conducive to horror-jolts, because the ability of the reader to control the flow of the comic undercuts the ability of a work to take over and frighten the reader, etc. But Nijgahara Holograph to me is ... it's at least spooky, though not because of some cinematic effect. If a comic tries only to recreate cinema or recreate horror literature-- it's leaving a lot off of what comics can do off the table, and spooky might be out of reach. What I think Nijigahara Holograph is a good example of... What's happening in the panels isn't scary-- but the choice of panels, the selection of images in the panels, and their juxtaposition, those all make me think, you know, "Who the hell is the guy that made this thing? What was going on with that guy? Why'd he draw this thing? What was going on that day that he put that image next to that image?" I think it's at least spooky when a comic gets you asking those questions. Why do I keep using the word "spooky?" It's altogether ooky.

What else... Ghost Rider and Iron Fist: I liked the latest issue of both of those. I thought both of those were fun. Art on both had good pages and bad pages, or good panels and bad panels, but … has Iron Fist ever punched Ghost Rider in the skull? I have no idea; I never really read either character’s book before on account of both characters being pretty crappy. I’m always confused when I read other people talk about Iron Fist, what they’re getting out of it since it seems like they’re getting more out of it than I am. It’s a nice kung fu comic—it’s pleasant to follow—there’s nothing wrong with it. I feel like other people are getting way more out of it than I am, though.

Oh, classic comics… I read Tintin in the Land of the Soviets a couple months ago—December? I thought I’d try reading all the Tintin books in order, but Tintin in the Land of the Soviets put the kibosh to that. That’s sort of Tintin before Herge had figured out what the hell he was doing. It’s not very good. Tintin wanders around a fake, propaganda version of Soviet Russia, and has an incessant number of dumb, improbable, and usually boring adventures. It’s a long book which overstayed its welcome-- I don't think it was intended to be read all at once. If you like seeing comics before they’re good, or artists before they figure out their style, it’s an option, I suppose, but I'm not sure what you'd get out of the experience. I also read a Carl Barks comic the other day, too. The Fantastic River Race from 1957. That was fantastic, but I don’t… you know, I just don’t have anything to say about it. This page was fun. The duck characters get in a steamboat race with the dog characters, and cause so much craziness that they lose the race but win the day…? How the hell do you review that? If you hate dogs or love steamboats, that’s the comic for you. I assume you don’t have an opinion on ducks. Who has an opinion on ducks? Well, to eat, I suppose—I don’t think duck is particularly tasty eating. I guess when I read a comic about ducks, though, I usually don’t think about what it’d be like to eat the main characters. Maybe I should. Maybe that’d make the reading experience more pleasurable. Couldn’t hurt.

Someone once told me they test jet engines by shooting ducks into them. I don't know if that's true, but I suppose you could have an opinion of that. I don't think Carl Barks ever made a comic about that, though.

So...

Oh, wait, I also read the new issue Iron Man: Is this arc still not over yet? It’s an extremely long storyline—I don’t dislike it but I’m just sort of surprised it’s still going. The latest issue is all about how Iron Man can built a fancy armor suit with repulsor rays in it, but he’s too cheap to put a camera in his helmet. So Iron Man has this fight last issue, but this issue, everyone’s like “We don’t believe that actually happened.” Iron Man doesn’t have one of those cameras (like the ones cops keeps in their cars) in his suit somewhere, or a webcam or …? Why didn’t he film that shit? He doesn’t even build a Kodak into that thing?? Most people have cameras in their cell phones; how is a cell-phone better than Iron Man armor? Maybe the camera got broke when Iron Man had the big fight with that one asshole, back whenever. I guess that would explain it. Incidentally, how is this arc not over yet? It doesn’t even feel half over! Maybe the plan is for it to never be over… This comic also featured Dum Dum Dugan, though, so again, points for that.

I like this page from Strange Tales #151—layouts by Jack Kirby, illustrations by Jim Steranko. I saw that the other day, though I didn’t read the issue. That’s early in Steranko’s career—the first issue of Strange Tales he did, the first Marvel comic he did from 1966. I guess I like the bit with the grenades. I think that makes the page for me. In real life, I don’t think that would work though. Please be careful with grenades. I didn’t read the issue though so I can’t really talk about it—sometimes, old comics are just for looking at and not for reading.

This comic also featured Mr. Dum Dum Dugan. Let’s start a fanclub.

Labels: Abhay

Click Here to Read More...

War is Hell: First Flight of the Phantom Eagle #1 (of 5):



I thought there was something odd about this book the whole time I was reading it. But it wasn't until I checked the credits box and saw Todd Klein's name that I realized what was going on:

There's no sound effects in this thing.

And the reason that feels odd to me is because prolific Howard Chaykin is doing the drawing, which naturally made me wonder how Klein might handle those famous webs and strings and walls of letters that Ken Bruzenak used to do with Chaykin back in the day, the ones various parties have provided since then.



Well, no luck.



There's plenty of possible reasons. This is a realistic, ostensibly hellish war comic from Marvel's MAX line, after all, and cutting out the sound effects has long been a handy comic book shortcut to sophistication. V for Vendetta is the most obvious example of this approach, although there were several works before it that took the same route, including Chaykin's own 1978 original graphic novel Empire, written by Samuel R. Delany and most eager to distance itself from the sequential arts pack.

Actually, Empire is also the earliest comic I can think of that devoted whole pages to horizontal 'wide' panels, so as to amplify the action, a technique that didn't become popular until decades later and is now impossible to escape. Ironically, Chaykin didn't seem all that comfortable with the style; it always struck me as a bit inert, like all of those solid images were kin to the novel and album covers Chaykin was illustrating around that time.

Which does bring me to another possible, maybe even simpler reason for the state of War: Chaykin is changing, for whatever reason. But it's not a sudden thing, when you look at it.

I mean, the Howard Chaykin of today is different from the Howard Chaykin of, say, Blackhawk (just to keep it in the air). Chaykin '88 could be counted on for a lot of specific visual acts; expanding our view from those letters -- which could always be counted on to act as fitting, oft-geometric design elements as per the page as a whole -- there was a certain compression to his pages, a tight-wound cohesion that had a way of holding the eye on the page and dragging it in the appropriate direction.



It didn't hurt that Chaykin was (and is) a wordy writer, which had a more obvious way of slowing things down, but the density of his overall visual scheme gave the reader pause in more ways than one. And sometimes he'd poke at elements of the form for specific effect, or just exploit his command of the form. I don't have pictures, but surely everyone who read Blackhawk remembers the bit with the empty word balloons, or the finale that ratcheted up the tension by dividing things into tiny panels, skipping from face to face to object to face etc., only to release the tension in a splash image?

Don't look for that in here.



But Chaykin began to decompress way before now. I'd say 1993's Midnight Men was the first of his post-American Flagg! works as a writer/artist to seem appreciably 'lighter' in style, although the 1990 graphic novel Wolverine/Nick Fury: The Scorpio Connection (written by Archie Goodwin) is also notable, maybe in suggesting a deliberately stripped-down approaching to working with another person's script, something he hadn't done much since the '80s began.

If anything, the big surprise is that there was little shift in style between 1996's Batman: Dark Allegiances and 2003's Mighty Love, despite Chaykin's lack of comics output in the interim. Following that, his visual works became increasingly airy, and fascinated with symmetrical or repeating page designs, and floating sound effects - lots of those. I think there is a difference still between Chaykin's recent work as a writer/artist and his art-only projects, in that the former exhibit (naturally!) a tighter command of the page. I'm not that interested in Chaykin's writer-only work; his 'writing,' to me, has always been primarily visual, his words read at least partially as their own especially intuitive visual elements.

Meanwhile, his increasing art-only works have become delighted with computer textures, hugging his increasingly haggard, grimacing character art; I suspect he works closely with his colorists. The sound effects have been gradually disappearing, as if all the panel-exploding might of one interest is fading against an in-panel fixation on clothing detail and tactile buildup. Moving inward.



Or hell, maybe the editors or someone shouted WAR COMICS ARE SERIOUS BUSINESS and he left the BLAMs out. I don't know.

Anyhow, this is an OKAY start for a WWI-set aviation thing. Garth Ennis is the writer (in case you were wondering), and, like a good math student, he's intent on showing his work. There's a lot of talking in his account of a worn-down RFC base and the booming Yankee hotshot that fakes his way in and accidentally doesn’t get massacred in the sky (yet) - period terminology and slang flows freely across several broad character types, like the American that tries awfully hard to act and sound British, or the drunkard Captain that stumbles right into a propeller and gets chopped to bits. I guess that's gallows humor?

Ennis does manage a fairly compelling take on the start-and-stop chaos of early air warfare, which covers a bit for the lack of character, as does Chaykin's extra-disheveled character art; the protagonist in particular is no more than a grinning, strutting symbol of American romantic adventurism all but begging to get crushed by reality. This is a mostly serious war comic written by Garth Ennis, so bank on the dark, killing heart of good, bleeding men to make an appearance later on. And expect more pale, silent air from Chaykin, continuing his own flight.

Labels: Jog

Click Here to Read More...

So, since it is the (spooky!) 13th day of this little experiment, let's go with something off the Horror rack?

I think I mentioned before that we also have a Licensed rack, and an awful lot stuff in "Horror" could fit there as well -- EVIL DEAD, Clive Barker comics, HALLOWEEN, and so on.

Ditto with today's pick -- RICHARD MATHESON'S I AM LEGEND. After all, it was originally a prose book (and, eventually, several different films as well).

IAL was originally published back in the day by Eclipse, and it was one of the first books that IDW "rescued" from Eclipse's backlist. It is adapted by Steve Niles, back in the days in which he was primarily known as an "adapter" than as someone doing original comics -- Niles also did most of the Eclipse Clive Barker comics, for example -- and while I can't say that I've read the original prose novel by Matheson, on a pure guess there's not a TON chopped out from the text. That is to say that there's a lot of words here, and there's a fair amount of caption-describing-the-art going on.

But, to a degree, that's a good thing, I think, in prose adaptations, because it seems to me that the value of the original work IS the original work itself.

The art is by Elman Brown, whom 15 minutes of internet searching isn't turning up a lot for -- he did work in other Eclipse/Niles horror comics (like FLY IN MY EYE), and, apparantly, he drew a few issues of PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL back in 1994, but the most recent credit I can find for him is an issue of TALES OF THE TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES in '96 -- so it's apparently been 11 years since he's drawn a comic.

That's a shame because I find his art very appealing -- there's a big Wrightson thing going on there, but he also has a really clear grasp on comics storytelling and mood, and is really terrific at capturing emotion.

All in all, I think this is a great comic, and certainly works better than any of the movie attempts (that I've seen, at least -- haven't seen the Will Smith version yet)

I'm going to go with a bonus here, because this isn't actually my favorite thing in my horror section, but the thing that IS my fave isn't a comic at all -- it is Max Brook's WORLD WAR Z: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ZOMBIE WAR, which is straight-up prose. This is one of the best "post-apocalypse" stories I've ever read (even if, y'know, humanity survives that one in the end; which I don't think is really a spoiler, since the title pretty much gives it away).

What I adore about this book is that it is incredibly thoughtful about the global nature of apocalypse -- it is as first-person recollections of "what happened" -- as well as insanely detailed-oriented about scope and ramification and incident. Every 2-3 pages the action shifts to another situation, WHOLLY different than the one before it, and each and every one makes you think (and go "Damn! never thought of THAT!")

You want a prose book that would make an amazing comic book adaptation? Here ya' go, kids.

That's today's pick(s) -- see you tomorrow!

-B

Labels: Around the Store, Brian

Click Here to Read More...

OK, so I've clearly lost the daily pattern we had at the start -- my apologies, it's been a rough and busy week. I SHOULD be able to do daily through Wednesday this week, but then I have to disappear again (ComicsPRO's annual in Vegas)

Matt Wagner is one of my favorite creators in the whole wide world. (Come by the store some day and I'll tell you the story of why I'm in comics, and why Matt is really the one to blame) You can tell if you look at the store, because I've got more than 20 pieces of original Matt Wagner art (most commissions) hanging around the store -- including an on-going series of JSA portraits (in fact, I even have two that I still haven't even gotten framed yet)

In most circumstances this would probably lead to a discussion of MAGE: THE HERO DISCOVERED, except that, well, it is OP from Image at the moment, and who knows when it is coming back into print? If it does, grab it.

But, since it is OP, let me relate another story here...

(This is where I would have put the jump, if it wasn't for the small fact that more than half of you HATE the jump. We're trying to figure out what to do in the long run, but I heard ya', at least)

This was early in the store's life -- probably about '93 or '94. A gentleman came into the store, and he was pretty obviously on his last legs with AIDS. He was weak and emaciated, had palsy and could barely walk. He had a few sores on his face as well.

He asks me if I have any comics about suicide.

...

Now, I'm seriously torn here. The guy's sick, and my assumption is that the reason he's asking is because he's contemplating killing himself. This is the first time (and the only time since) that I felt like I had to make a moral decision about selling someone a comic book, y'know?

In the end, I walked over to the rack and pulled off a copy of GRENDEL: THE DEVIL INSIDE, the story of the Brian Li Sung version of Grendel by Matt and Bernie Mireault.

This story aside, the is a great comic, told in fragment, by a fragmented mind teetering on the brink of extinction. Wagner hasn't, I don't think, really gotten his due as a writer, and the experimental efforts he had through the 90s. Sure, some of them failed pretty massively, but overall he's changed the way I approach a peiece of comics writing by his playing with technique and format. And Mireault's art is astonishing here, bubbling with madness and grief.

I never saw the sick man again, so I don't know if DEVIL INSIDE helped him or hurt him. I dearly hope it is the former.

-B Click Here to Read More...

100 BULLETS #89
A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #77 (A)
AFTERBURN #2
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #554
ANGEL AFTER THE FALL #5
AVENGERS CLASSIC #10
BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS #5
BETTY & VERONICA DOUBLE DIGEST #159
BETTY & VERONICA SPECTACULAR #82
BIRDS OF PREY #116
BOHDA TE #1
BRAVE AND THE BOLD #11
CAPTAIN AMERICA #36
CAPTAIN MARVEL #4 (OF 5) SII
CATWOMAN #77
CHECKMATE #24
CIRCLE #5
COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 6
DANGERS DOZEN #3
DARK IVORY #1 (OF 4)
DARKNESS VS EVA #1 (OF 4)
DEATH OF THE NEW GODS #7 (OF 8)
EVERYBODYS DEAD #1
EX MACHINA #35
FABLES #71
FEAR AGENT #19 HATCHET JOB (PT 3 OF 5)
FLASH #238
FOOLKILLER #4 (OF 5)
FRANKLIN RICHARDS SPRING BREAK
FX #1 (OF 6)
GENE SIMMONS ZIPPER #4
GHOST RIDER #21
GHOST WHISPERER #1
GRENDEL BEHOLD THE DEVIL #5 (OF 8)
GRIMM FAIRY TALES #25
GRIMM FAIRY TALES PIPER #1 (OF 4)
HACK SLASH SERIES #10 SEELEY CVR A
IMMORTAL IRON FIST #13
INCREDIBLE HERCULES #115
INVINCIBLE #49
IRON MAN #27
JUNGLE GIRL #5 PX ED
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #19
LOOKING FOR GROUP #3
MARVEL ADVENTURES AVENGERS #22
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED ILIAD #4 (OF 8)
NEW WORLD ORDER #2
ORDER #9
PROGRAMME #9 (OF 12)
PVP #39
RED SONJA #31
ROBIN #172
SCOOBY DOO #130
SHADOWPACT #23
SHOJO BEAT APR 08
SIMPSONS COMICS #140
SNAKEWOMAN CURSE OF THE 68 #1 (OF 4)
SPAWN GODSLAYER #7
SUPER FRIENDS #1
SUPERMAN BATMAN ANNUAL #2
SWORD #6
TANGENT SUPERMANS REIGN #1 (OF 12)
THOR #7
WAR IS HELL FIRST FLIGHT PHANTOM EAGLE #1 (OF 5)
WASTELAND #15
WITCHBLADE #116 SEJIC CVR A
WOLVERINE ORIGINS #23
WORLD WAR HULK AFTERSMASH WARBOUND #4 (OF 5)

Books / Mags / Stuff
AL CAPPS COMPLETE SHMOO HC THE COMIC BOOKS
ALL WE EVER DO IS TALK ABOUT WOOD GN
ALTER EGO #76
BACK ISSUE #27
BATMAN THE KILLING JOKE SPECIAL ED HC
BIRTH GN
CINEFEX #113 MAR 2008
CLASSIC COMIC BOOK CHARACTERS #8 GRENDEL
COMICS BUYERS GUIDE #1641 MAY 2008
COMICS NOW #2
DANGEROUS INK MAGAZINE #2
DUNGEON MONSTRES TP VOL 01
EARTH X TP TRILOGY COMPANION
FRUITS BASKET GN VOL 19 (OF 22)
HACK SLASH HC VOL 01 OMNIBUS
JACK THE RIPPER GN
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES IN 31ST CENTURY TP VOL 01
MAD MAGAZINE #488
MAINTENANCE TP VOL 2
MIGHTY AVENGERS PREM HC VOL 01 ULTRON INITIATIVE
MOON KNIGHT TP VOL 02 MIDNIGHT SUN
NORTH WORLD GN VOL 01
OVERSTREET COMIC BOOK PG VOL 38 MARVEL VILLAINS HC
OVERSTREET COMIC BOOK PG VOL 38 MARVEL VILLAINS SC
OVERSTREET COMIC BOOK PG VOL 38 STAR WARS SC
PAINKILLER JANE TP VOL 02 THINGS EXPLODE
PHOENIX TP VOL 12
PRINCESS AT MIDNIGHT GN
RED SONJA HC VOL 04 ANIMALS & MORE
REPO TP
SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE TP VOL 06 HOURMAN AND PYTHON
SPIDER-MAN REIGN TP
STRANGEWAYS MURDER MOON GN
TANK GIRL SC ARMADILLO & A BUSHEL OF OTHER STORIES
WITH THE LIGHT RAISING AUTISTIC CHILD GN VOL 02
X-FACTOR TP VOL 04 HEART OF ICE


What looks good to YOU?

-B

Labels: Brian, Shipping Lists

Click Here to Read More...

Gutsville #3 (of 6):



Glad this one's back in action.

It's an Image miniseries from writer Simon Spurrier and artist Frazer Irving; both 2000 AD veterans, the former was last seen in US comics via the recent Silver Surfer: In Thy Name miniseries, while the latter has provided distinctive visuals to projects ranging from DC's Robin to Marvel's Silent War. Issue #2 came out roughly half a year ago, the subsequent delay apparently owing to personal and familial illnesses on Irving's part. The remaining half of the series should be out in shorter order.

I like it so far, and this issue is a GOOD indicator of why. I don't think it's saying too much to note that Irving's art is the series' most immediate draw, nor does it even need be said that the book's concept -- an unstuck-in-time theocratic society planted in an enclosed world of strange magic -- allows for images that strongly recall Irving's work on maybe his most acclaimed project, the Grant Morrison-written Klarion the Witch Boy.

But Irving's work is better here. Perhaps the story's particular setting, the belly of some seafaring monster, has proven inspirational; his monochrome environments swirl and roll, backgrounds typically little more than fleshy patterns sunk with color, while his human characters bend and jut expressively, their clothing or mustaches typically carrying as much weight as their body language.



The occasional monster designs are more wrinkled & creepy, and much funnier - this issue has a long-clawed wraith in a wide-brimmed hat with a huge mouth and a long, drippy tongue plastered onto its stomach. Overall, there's a strong sense of place at work, not so much original as emphatic. Irving also has the habit of inserting a vivid glimpse of a dog's asshole into climactic splash pages of flight, which I consider worthwhile. Plus: the occasional pause for psychedelics.



All of this serves to deepen Spurrier's script, which is otherwise a simple enough piece of fantastical class/race/religious struggle, complete with forbidden affections between a noble-wed girl and the local ratcatcher/frustrated artist, and brewing revolution against the men that rule the belly of the beast. A serial(?) killer, weapons from the modern world I like it more for the details; exposition might be provided by a character, say, accidentally bumping into a book and reading several pages of background information to us, but there is wit to some of the characterizations, and a playful attitude exhibited toward the general concept. "Sodomitic puddle of cockpaste" is a good expression.

So right. Did I say GOOD? I said it again. About on the level I expect from a contemporary comic of the type. I don't think the other two issues should be hard to find, so try it out.

Labels: Jog

Click Here to Read More...

Two '70s throwbacks, of different kinds. Short version: the new Mighty Avengers is a very nice execution of a badly flawed premise, and The Last Defenders struggles with the idea behind what it's building on. More under the cut.





MIGHTY AVENGERS #10: I'm still really enjoying Brian Michael Bendis's attempts to give every issue of this series (and of New Avengers) its own plot and tone--it helps prevent the sense a lot of other series have that they're written for the trade and broken up wherever the plot allows--and I'm glad he's still doing the info-overload tricks (the thought balloons, the constant internal chatter from Tony's armor) that make this series read differently from its sibling. This issue: Iron Man and Dr. Doom, stranded in the '70s! (Well, in the comics of the '70s--when the issue plugged on pg. 2 came out, the band plugged on a T-shirt on the same page hadn't formed yet.)

But the first premise of this issue is that Iron Man is terrified of setting off some kind of "butterfly effect" in the past that changes the present. Fair enough--but they discuss their previous experience with time travel this issue, and Tony wasn't nearly as worried about changing history then. (I suppose there's a Marvel Universe precedent for being able to change history, which is why we have e.g. "Days of Future Past," but has there been a Marvel butterfly-effect story?) For that matter, if Tony had access to a time machine--and given the opening sequence of last month's Fantastic Four, we have to assume that his pal Reed Richards still has one--wouldn't the very first thing he would do be going back a few months to save Steve Rogers?

The second premise is that since Mastermind made everyone forget that Bob had ever existed, he can openly retrieve Reed's time machine without fear of changing history. This makes no sense at all--if Mastermind makes me forget where I left my keys, that doesn't mean they aren't where I left them.

That said, the execution moves so smoothly the plot problems almost don't get in the way. This is Mark Bagley in peak form--if Trinity looks this good, I'm going to be really happy. The production tricks are really clever, too: the little bottom-of-page ads for "on sale now!" comics, the "continued after next page" squibs, and the old-fashioned dot-screen coloring (anybody want to identify what the first comic to use that technique to indicate a sequence set in the past was? I'm curious) make the very contemporary verbal cat-and-mouse games between Iron Man and Dr. Doom seem weirdly anachronistic in a really appropriate way. (Doom's dialogue is just far enough off--"Okay. Yes" doesn't sound like him--that Tony's suspicions that he's a Skrull are reasonable.) Bendis can't quite channel '70s--the "It's bedlam on the street as New York's glitziest citizens run in mortal terror!" sequence is way cornier than Marvel comics of that era actually were--but as long as you don't stop to think about logic, the style and flow of the story are Very Good.

THE LAST DEFENDERS #1: I'm not quite sure what Joe Casey and Keith Giffen are getting at here. The joy of Steve Gerber-era Defenders, which is what this is pretty much a callback to, wasn't entirely that it was a team made up of second-stringers and characters who had absolutely nothing to do with each other except that they basically drank at the same bar; it was that Defenders was deliberately unimportant in the scheme of things, and Gerber could therefore do any bizarre thing he wanted with it. (A Trout In the Milk and friends wrote a series of very long posts on the dynamics of Gerber's Defenders--all the parts are linked here.)

This story, though, is about Nighthawk, the Very Most Boring Superhero of All Time, assembling a new group of Defenders (under the auspices of the Initiative), which is sort of like assembling a new group of people to drink at a bar that closed 20 years ago. They don't have anything to do with each other (the other three are She-Hulk, Colossus and the Blazing Skull); they fight some people affiliated with the Sons of the Serpent, which I always get confused with Kobra for some inexplicable reason, plus one of the Brothers Grimm refers to Nighthawk as "bird-man" the way the Hulk used to. Then there's an apropos-of-nothing flashback to the Ancient One turning the Son of Satan away 40 years ago, some tonal fluctuations toward goofiness (a caption reading "The Sons of the Serpent are getting their mystic ceremony on," the group smashing through a window as one of them yells "Defenders defenestrate!"), and finally a page on which Head seems to have drifted over from The All-New Atom (oh, fine, it's a Rigellian recorder) and Yandroth explains to him that the Defenders are actually incredibly important if they've got a lineup that... is nothing like the one in this issue and a lot like the Dr. Strange/Namor/Hulk-era one. This could be the making of an interesting story about fruitless nostalgia, especially since the title of the miniseries (and the title page) imply that it's meant to be the end of the line for the Defenders concept. But it seems to be an exercise in fruitless nostalgia instead, and the totally generic artwork doesn't help. Eh, I'm afraid.

*****

As long as I'm here, I might as well plug two not-comics-related projects I'm working on: Mincing Up the Morning is a collection of videos of musicians whose birthday it is each day, and Circle the Globe is a linkblog--just a bunch of interesting quotes and pictures and videos I encounter. Because, you know, everybody needs more stuff on the Internet to look at.

Labels: Douglas

Click Here to Read More...

So, this last week, I've been really into Conan and Octopus Pie, I guess...?

They're both sitcoms-- situational comedies? Somehow, sitcoms became a bad word among educated people, but they’re great in theory: characters get into situations, and then the comedy is seeing how the particular character chooses to get out of them. A comedy that arises out of the observation of character? Well, hell, that doesn't sound so bad.


On the other hand, Mama's Family.

Oh god, Mama's Family.

Why, Vicki Lawrence? WHY?


You don't put Mama below the jump. You don't put Baby in the corner, and you don't put Mama below the jump. That's just common sense.

OCTOPUS PIE:

Octopus Pie is an Odd Couple sitcom created by Meredith Gran, a 20-something year old Brooklyn animator, about a pair of barely post-collegiate Brooklyn women who somehow end up as unlikely roommates. (Barely Post-Collegiate was my favorite Hustler magazine). One is high strung and angry; the other is a pot-smoking nudist.

Swearing, pot smoking and topless women... Combine that with a proper dosage of 1970's Conan comics, in order to get your Ultra-Violence food group satisfied, and you have my Recipe for the Perfect Evening of Comics.

Serve chilled. Get it? Chilled, like Hey, let’s chill out, dudes, but also chilled like… nevermind. You just had to be there.

It starts out a little rough—a digression concerning a stolen bicycle throws off the momentum of an over-abbreviated first chapter. Both writing and art only begin to click together late in the third story, "Bake 'n Bake".

Linking to specific strips/jokes won't work for this review though because OP works like a sitcom-- a situational comedy only becomes funny once you grow to know and like the characters, rising and falling more on that attachment than the strength or weakness of individual jokes. (e.g., an awful lot of otherwise smart people claimed 30 ROCK wasn't funny after the first episode or that it somehow magically got better; it was funny from the beginning -- they just didn't know the characters yet). Anyways-- sorry, no linking.

But: Octopus Pie has a nice mix of drug jokes, funny drawings, dialogue jokes, absurdity and character humor. I don’t want to oversell it: I often find it funny, but sometimes it misses funny and lands at cute or with a thud (... same thing, maybe). A couple of the characters still feel like Generic Types maybe too-common to webcomics—the laid-back wise graduate student boyfriend, the angry incompetent boss, etc.

But the ingredients are there. The terrific "Natural Phenomenon" and the excellently-titled "Skate or Don’t" seem to have started moving the comic to a better, funnier, more specific place: there are small stabs at considering regrets; a very-slowly emerging theme of moving on from the past.

It’s PG humor with R-rated elements—there’s nudity and drugs, but the tone is extremely sweet and good-natured. If you're waiting for, like, the Jules Feiffer of webcomics or whatever, the cartoonist who'll eviscerate the neuroses and delusions and prejudices of all-grownsed-up adults ala the stuff that’s collected in Feiffer's SICK SICK SICK, say-- I'm just not familiar enough with webcomics to point you in the right direction or to know who that is, or if they exist, unfortunately. Anyone..?

On the other hand, one of the Octopus Pie strips had a lady with a bong staring at a cat:


I love the expressions in this comic. While Gran’s still growing as a writer, her strongest point seems to be knowing how much she can rely on a funny drawing.

It's encouraging, though, the number of genuinely funny lady cartoonists on the internet. Danielle Corsetto's Girls with Slingshots has a similar "two ladies who get up to the business" premise, but is a very different strip, also often funny. Gran, Corsetto, Dylan Meconis-- all of these creators (and more I probably haven't heard of) putting out funny comics, finding their comedic voices at the same time... I don't know: I just hope that's a trend that's receiving a proper amount of attention and encouragement. Apparently, Octopus Pie is getting some lately for this making-of video, so… that’s … swell?

But I hate all webcomics ever forever, for the awful interfaces! Awful! Clicking the Octopus Pie webcomic takes you BACKWARDS through the comic instead of forwards. Why? Am I doing it wrong?? Who reads comics backwards?? Answer: Merlin. Like way too many webcomics, Octopus Pie forces you to hunt the "Next" link down on the page, position your mouse over a tiny four-letter word, and click that. Dude, dude, dude: I just want to read a fucking comic during my lunch break, not test my hand-eye coordination.

I am not Merlin: I live in a one-bedroom apartment, and I read Conan comics! Help me out.

CONAN, WHO IS A BARBARIAN:


Conan has a similarly easy premise to grasp: there's this guy with a sword or maybe an axe, and he doesn't like shirts, and he just wanders around.

For the last year or so, I've been primarily reading the classic Marvel comics, the heyday of the 1960's and early 1970’s. And I realized I'd never touched the Conan comics. But they have a significant place in that history, right? It was my understanding that Marvel’s Conan was one of the more popular books of the wave of just-slightly-darker comics that happened in the 1970's with the loosening of the CCA restrictions in '71-ish(?). Popular thanks to Roy Thomas and, more importantly, a young Barry Windsor-Smith.

It's such a long-lasting character. Conan’s been around since 1932. 1932! Robert E. Howard wrote well enough, I suppose; on the other hand, he also used to write things like: “I don’t know whether an Oriental smells any different than a [worst word in English language] when he’s roasting, but I’m willing to bet the aroma of scorching hide would have the same chastening effect on his surviving tribesman.” That attitude filters into the short stories here or there, like in this excerpt of Conan dialogue from 1936’s Red Nails: "The pay was poor and the wine was sour, and I don't like black women. And that's the only kind that came to our camp at Sukhmet--rings in their noses and their teeth filed--bah!”

And yet from such shitty beginnings... Today, Governor Conan rules my state! There are videogames, two movies (one good), comics still published to this day, etc. It's this vast empire of sweaty ridiculousness, built from the toil of a suicidal racist mama’s boy. Okeydoke.

It’s not even that Conan’s a particularly interesting character. I read a fistful of classic Marvel CONAN recently, and I couldn't tell you a single fucking thing about Conan except he likes to rock it shirtless, he's got a mullet, and he's into broadswords. So: basically what I imagine in my head anytime I hear someone talking about Mobile, Alabama. Dudes of Alabama: please live up to my lofty expectations of you!

Conan's fictional biography is spelled out in the books and movies-- he wanders around, he becomes a king, etc., so what was left for the creators of the comics? In the issues I read, it seems like all they could do was put out a sitcom: "Here's the time Conan fought the Planet of the Apes underground." Or "Here's the time Conan fought a wizard." Or "here's the time Conan pretended to be gay in order to rent an apartment from the Ropers, but then there was a wacky misunderstanding."

The best issue I saw was Issue #4 by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor Smith. "Here's the time Conan fights a crazy fucking tower." Conan goes to a crazy fucking tower; Conan kills a spider; Conan kills an elephant-alien; Conan kills a wizard; then the elephant-alien eats the wizard's soul, and the tower blows up for no reason like an asshole.

The issue was nominated for a Shazam Award from the Academy of Comic Book Arts, but it got beat by a Swamp Thing comic.

5 years of experience and continuity later, here is the plot of issue #64 by Roy Thomas and Jim Starlin: Conan fights a giant; Conan drinks some water; he find out the water’s been poisoned by a Wizard; Conan sleeps with the Wizard’s girlfriend then goes to kill the Wizard; the Wizard traps Conan with the giant, but they team up and kill the Wizard; Conan dumps the Wizard’s girlfriend, and rides off on this awesome horse. The end. Not… not a lot of evolution, no.

(Tangent: as evidenced by Conan #64 and Warlock, back in the 1970's, Jim Starlin really thought skulls were the raddest thing ever, I guess. Does he still do that? I think that's adorable. End of tangent).

The whole Marvel approach of Fantastic Heroes with Human Failings or Internal Contradictions-- it's nowhere to be seen. They didn't even fucking try. Any classic Marvel soap opera? Nope. It was just PLONK-- here's a Jurassic-era Redneck, true believers. He's going to wander around; he's going to fuck shit up; GiddyUp.

Still: CONAN hit the spot for me this week. The 70’s Conan comics were an obvious influence on Punisher or Wolverine, but Marvel couldn’t leave it alone with those two; they had to tack on all the stupid whining—Wolverine’s “Boo-Hoo, my past, I don’t remember my past” or Punisher’s “Boo-Hoo, my dead family.”

There is no “Boo-Hoo” with Conan. Conan's just porno for skinny dudes—there’s no time for all that foreplay. PLONK: commence with the macho. Conan just gets on with it; he loves it and leaves it; he hires it out at $4,100 an hour the day before Valentine’s Day; he creepy-sex-metaphors it. I liked that feeling reading those comics, that it’s all battle-axes and no Hiroshima, no way of gussying it up or pretending it’s fancy. It’s take it or leave it. It's my way or the highway. It doesn't have to go home but you can't stay here. It's 110%, 100% of the time. It's... When the going get tough... San Dimas High School football rules...

THE INEVITABLE CROSS-OVER:

Where are the macho webcomics?

The Dumb-ass Retarded Macho Bullshit market is so thoroughly addressed by traditional comics that I suppose it’s extra-difficult for a webcomic creator to get attention with that type of material. Sure, there’s misogyny in webcomics; couldn't have comics without that for... God only knows what reason. Your Webcomic is Bad can point you to plenty of that. But what about machismo? What about Ricardo Montalban?


It has to be a tragic microcosm of SOMETHING how the 20-something year old ladies are putting out these webcomics where people are partying and smoking j’s and kissing and having fun, and 20-something year old guys are creating webcomics about sitting on their couch playing videogames by themselves.

I’m no anthropologist but I’m pretty sure that’s what it looks like when societies become sterile. I think it’s a warning sign, like the thing with the frogs or the thing with the bees or the thing where my dick no longer gets hard and sometimes it vomits blood.

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

It is for that reason I must conclude this review by urging the gentlemen webcomic creators to take a moment, pause, and pay heed.

Gentlemen, if I say I'm a comic book fan, you will agree. Gentleman, I urge you to read more 1970’s Conan comics and learn from their contents, learn what people not making comics on the internet refer to as “ALPHA MEN.” Strapping, hairy, brain-damaged alpha men, who punch things, and enjoy punching things, find transcendence in their punching, like Conan, like … perhaps you someday, perhaps even you. If I must put it to you in your own language, in your vernacular, then let me say that there is a value to alpha men that, indeed, may even be better than the value provided by Valve’s ORANGE BOX. See? I speak the lingo.

I urge you, I urge you: shut off the X-Box, grow a mullet, take off your shirt, stand on a street corner hollering at women, and let’s turn this society around, fellas, before it’s too late. Biological clocks are ticking.

Just close your eyes and think of Crom. Thank you.

Labels: Abhay

Click Here to Read More...

Page 65 of this week's ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY (the SNL cover)

Neat!

-B

Labels: Brian

Click Here to Read More...

Yeah, looks like "daily" is starting to peter out, what with having to retour schools and stuff thanks to the incredibly screwed up results of the SFUSD system for placing elementary schools...

Since I did a DC superhero comic last time, let's go with "Equal Time" and do a Marvel one this go round.

Find out what it is after the jump!



So, the real problem with a Marvel GN is that they don't exactly have their shit together in terms of keeping things in print, or at least in a format that I especially want to recommend -- I'm a little so-so on something like the MILLER BY DAREDEVIL COMPANION HC, when I'd rather tell you to buy DAREDEVIL BORN AGAIN or ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN. But you can't GET them separately, foo.

I thought for a moment about recommending ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, but that strikes me as far too obvious (even though, actually, super-terrific), but find something semi-obscure that is ALSO available is proving really fuckin' hard.

But, after thinking about it a while I found a good one -- and, oddly, one that I personally believe is only still in print because of Trade Dress.

See, when Marvel started their post-marvelcution TP program, they began with the premise that the characters were far more important than the contents or the creators, and they designed their spines accordingly.

My recommendation for today is the badly titled WOLVERINE LEGENDS v 2: HAVOK AND WOLVERINE: MELTDOWN written by Walt and Louise Simonson with art by John J. Muth and Kent Williams.

Nowhere on the cover does it say any of that, and all the spine says is "Wolverine Legends v2", which is sorta problematic if you want to sell the thing.

(v1 of the series is the Sam Kieth WOLVERINE/HULK, which is decent, but v3 is a Frank Tieri story, v4 is that awful Bruce Jones X-isle story, so it's not like "Wolverine Legends" as a brand name is a big mark of quality, in and of itself!)

This entry, however, is really swell stuff, from that late post-Dark Knight 80s period when Epic was alive, and Marvel was actually willing to experiment in form and function, and they were willing to put out fully painted abstract looking books.

This is just a big pile of spiffiness from page 1 to book's end, and is one of the best looking things that Marvel ever released.

Go. Find yourself a copy. You will not be disappointed.

-B

Labels: Around the Store, Brian

Click Here to Read More...

There's been just enough complaints about the "Click for more" feature that i'd like your input, please

Let's see if this little bit of linkery works...




-B Click Here to Read More...

OK, how about a superhero comic, since I've gone nine days without one...

This one is from our DC rack, and represents one of the best re-imaginings of a classic character that I think has ever been done.



The late 80s were a weird period for DC comics, still reeling from the impact of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. As I understand it, one of the various plans was that the entire "universe" was to be "rebooted", and started from scratch. This pretty much didn't happen in a satisfying fashion, with some books starting over, while others didn't. MAN OF STEEL revamped Superman, but Batman kept on being the "same old" BATMAN (barring, of course, BATMAN: YEAR ONE), and the less said about what was done with characters like Hawkman, the probably the better.

And then it was Wonder Woman's turn.

George Perez was the artist on Wonder Woman, and his first seven issues are collected as WONDER WOMAN: GODS AND MORTALS.

This is a nice retelling of the Wonder Woman origin, with a modern spin, as well as tying it deeply to Olympian myths.

What I like about Perez's WW is that she's a wide-eyed innocent, trained to fight, and savagely at that, but always looking for another way to solve the problem; that's really rare in super-hero comics. And there's a joy in seeing the world through her naive eyes -- one of my favorite sequences is the "Bullets & Bracelets" number, where a gun is fired at her for the first time, and its these four wonderful panels of her expression, all, "O! M! F! G!!!!"

Perez also gives WW a pretty strong supporting cast, stronger than she'd had in decades, and gave her real and tangible reasons to be around and to be what she is; ah, if only all revamps were as thoughtful as this one!

Great great stuff, and it is both exciting AND fun.

-B

Labels: Around the Store, Brian

Click Here to Read More...

There’s something to the way that your workplace reacts to someone having a heart attack in the middle of it, I think; whereas other, “lesser,” places than my dayjob would shrug off the sight of four medics asking questions of, and sticking all manner of IVs in, a near-comatose woman in the middle of the office, right now it’s like someone’s dropped a special Unnerving Bomb. Everyone here is freaked out and wondering when it’s going to be their turn.

Well, except for everyone who’s already been through that kind of thing. Not the most healthy of places, my work.

Anyway, comics?



CABLE #1: Yet another attempt by Marvel to redo Lone Wolf and Cub (Really, Nomad wasn’t enough?), this time with added cybernetics and the smallest baby in the history of the world. It’s almost as if Ariel Olivetti has never actually seen a real baby, but instead is working off some photos and a vague idea that “babies are small”. Storywise, this is pretty generic “I am in the future, it is bleak. I am a man. I have a mission.” stuff, but I’m sure that someone, somewhere, probably has never read this kind of thing before. Pretty Eh.

ECHO #1: I never read any of the Valiant comics, back in the ‘90s – There was something about them that felt as if they were the generic fill-ins for 1980s Marvel books, but that they were like that every single month – but the feeling I got from this new Terry Moore book was that it’s a Valiant revival in spirit if not name. It’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong about it (Well, aside from the pacing, perhaps, but I’m willing to let that slide), but more than there was absolutely nothing compelling or even that interesting about it. Sure, it’s not just another Strangers In Paradise, and therefore good for Moore, but on the other hand, Eh. Who cares about something like this?

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE NEW FRONTIER SPECIAL: Now this, on the other hand… Mmmm. Visual candy from start to finish, especially the design work on the back-up “And this is how we made the movie” pages. Which is good because, storywise, this was amazingly slight. It’s understandable, really; Cooke probably said all that he wanted to say in the original series, and so there probably wasn’t much more to add beyond the mix of injokes and references that pepper the plots of the three short stories herein, but at the same time, I’d kind of been hoping for something that had a little bit more meat to it in terms of writing (My favorite of the stories, in terms of writing, was the Wonder Woman/Black Canary short, which may be because it was the most intentionally comedic and throwaway). That said, even with the lightness of the stories, it was still Very Good indeed.

LOGAN #1: Brian K. Vaughan! Eduardo Risso! And it’s still just a Wolverine comic! I don’t know why I was expecting more, really; the clichés of Wolverine tends to overwhelm so many writers, so I don’t know why I thought Vaughan would get ‘round them… He didn’t, though, and so we’re left with a moderately interesting flashback story with pretty art. It’s Okay, and if you were in the mood for a Wolverine story, you’d probably enjoy the hell out’ve it. Me? I was expecting more, which was my problem.

STEPHEN KING'S THE DARK TOWER: THE LONG ROAD HOME #1: I don’t know if it’s the overly lush art (Jae Lee’s pencils, reprinted at the back of the book, are lovely. But adding Richard Isanove’s colors over them is like Phil Spector adding his special production talents to “Across The Universe”) or the nadsat dialogue, but I just can’t read these comics. I try, but my eyes glaze over and my brain shuts off. I can’t explain it, and I almost feel guilty for having no opinion about the what may be the biggest book of the year, but still…

YOUNG LIARS #1: This, on the other hand, is kind of awesome. Fast-paced and ridiculous, it feels unlike anything else Vertigo is publishing right now just because it feels like the Stooges to the Radiohead of the rest of the line (Well, aside from the Fables books; I haven’t quite worked out which band they are, yet). It’s almost a victim of its own stylings; if it doesn’t burn out and get cancelled within a year, I’ll almost be disappointed, but at the same time, it’s a Very Good first issue.

Next week: Very little of interest whatsoever, thankfully iving me the chance to purchase and finish off the rest of Death Note, my newest addiction... But what did the rest of you think?

Labels: Graeme

Click Here to Read More...

Comics, of course, aren't just an American thing (or just a Japanese thing, for that matter) -- there's tons and tons of really amazing work coming out of Europe.

Virtually none of it makes it to America, however, at least not at a price that most Americans are willing to pay. And probably 2/3rds of what DOES arrive in the states in Erotica.

This is a dire shame, really, because there's so much good material out there that could find an audience if only someone would publish it here.

DC tried and failed with the Humanoids deal (I think it was mostly overproduction of fairly mediocre material, at the same time they overproduced the CMX manga stuff), and Marvel is about to try a deal with Soliel (which I have a really hard time believing is going to work, as it SO far away from their "core values")

When I first opened the store, there was a reasonable amount of stuff that had been translated, but in today's climate most of the interesting material has fallen out of print, or isn't stocked by distribution (be it Diamond OR the "book" distribs like B&T)

I mean, it drives me fuckin' bonkers that there's exactly NO Moebius comics in print in the US at this point -- I had heard that the problems there were something about the rights to the work and who owned what and who represented what to whom and all that, and I don't know the real details, just that I could be selling a shitload of Mssr. Giraud's work, and I'm not because it isn't in print.

Anyway, here's a look at another Euro artist whose book IS for sale on my shelves, and I think is terrific, after the jump...



Lorenzo Mattotti's DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE is a astonishing piece of comics work.

Mattotti's art is like a fever dream, full of swirling, maddened colors and tone, which absolutely fits a story like DR/MR.

(You can find Mattotti's website right here, while Lambiek's page on him has some excellent and clear examples of his comics work)

Oh, since i was searching for links, here's one from Two sample pages from the book itself, yay.

I first saw Mattotti's work in FIRES, and was blown away by the style and verve that it displayed -- being expressionistic, but still firmly rooted on a comics page. He also uses his color palate in remarkable ways for comics.

It doesn't look like Diamond or B&T have it in stock, but NBM says they have copies in stock, so I think it is still in print.

Plus, I hadn't remembered until I started searching that this actually won an Eisner in '04 for best Foreign work.

DR/MR is an oft told tale, but this is a really revelatory presentation of it, and one that absolutely belongs on your bookshelf.

-B

Labels: Around the Store, Brian

Click Here to Read More...

Daylight Saving Time really kicked my slender white ass, I'm jet-lagged and behind schedule on a lot of stuff, regular posting probably resumes tomorrow...

2000 AD #1574
ABE SAPIEN THE DROWNING #2 (OF 5)
AMAZING SPIDER-GIRL #18
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #553
ANNIHILATION CONQUEST #5 (OF 6)
ARCHIE & FRIENDS #117
ARCHIE DIGEST #242
ASTOUNDING WOLF-MAN #5
ATOMIC ROBO #6 (OF 6)
AVENGERS FAIRY TALES #1 (OF 4)
AVENGERS INITIATIVE #10
BADGER SAVES THE WORLD #3 (OF 5)
BAOBAB #1 (O/A)
BAT LASH #4 (OF 6)
BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #14
BATMAN STRIKES #43
BOOSTER GOLD #7
BPRD 1946 #3 (OF 5)
COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 7
COUNTDOWN TO MYSTERY #6 (OF 8)
DEAD OF NIGHT FEATURING MAN THING #2 (OF 4)
DIARY OF NIGHT #1 (OF 4)
DIARY OF NIGHT #2 (OF 4)
DMZ #29
DOCTOR WHO #2
EVIL DEAD #3 (OF 4)
FANTASTIC FOUR #555
GAMEKEEPER SERIES 2 #1
GEN 13 #18
GOON #22
GOTHAM UNDERGROUND #6 (OF 9)
GREEN ARROW BLACK CANARY #6
GREEN LANTERN CORPS #22
GRIMM FAIRY TALES #24
GUTSVILLE #3 (OF 6)
HEDGE KNIGHT 2 SWORN SWORD #5 (OF 6)
IRON MAN ENTER MANDARIN #6 (OF 6)
JLA CLASSIFIED #54
LAST DEFENDERS #1 (OF 6)
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES IN THE 31ST CENTURY #12
LOCKE & KEY #2
LONE RANGER AND TONTO #1
MADMAN ATOMIC COMICS #7
MAINTENANCE #9
MARVEL ADVENTURES HULK #9
MARVEL COMICS PRESENTS #7
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED MOBY DICK #2 (OF 6)
MIGHTY AVENGERS #10
MINESHAFT #21
NEW EXILES #3
NEW TALES OF OLD PALOMAR #3
NIGHTMARES AND FAIRY TALES #22
NOVA #11
PALOOKA VILLE #19
PUNISHER #55
SALVATION RUN #5 (OF 7)
SERENITY BETTER DAYS #1 (OF 3)
SIMON DARK #6
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG #186
STAR WARS LEGACY #21
STAR WARS REBELLION #12
SUICIDE SQUAD RAISE THE FLAG #7 (OF 8)
SUPERMAN #674
SUPERMAN CONFIDENTIAL #13
THUNDERBOLTS #119
TINY TITANS #2
UN-MEN #8
WALKING DEAD #47
WARHAMMER 40K BLOOD & THUNDER CVR A #4 (OF 4)
WILDSTORM REVELATIONS #5 (OF 6)
WOLVERINE #63 DWS
WONDER WOMAN #18
X-FACTOR #29 DWS

Books / Mags / Stuff
30 DAYS OF NIGHT TP VOL 09 BEYOND BARROW
AVENGERS INITIATIVE TP VOL 01 BASIC TRAINING
CONAN TP VOL 05 ROGUES IN THE HOUSE
DAYBREAK GN VOL 02
DISCOVERED TP SCAD SEQUENTIAL ART ANTHOLOGY
DMZ TP VOL 04 FRIENDLY FIRE
EMPOWERED TP VOL 03
GENE SIMMONS HOUSE OF HORRORS #3
GUMBY TP VOL 01 (RES)
HARVEY COMICS CLASSICS TP VOL 03 HOT STUFF
HIGHLANDER TP VOL 02 DARK QUICKENING
HOW TO MAKE WEBCOMICS TP
INDIA AUTHENTIC TP VOL 02
JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL HC
LEES TOY REVIEW #185 MARCH 2008
LOBO PORTRAIT OF A BASTICH TP
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED LAST OF THE MOHICANS PREM HC
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED MAN IN THE IRON MASK PREM HC
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED TREASURE ISLAND PREM HC
MICHAEL RECYCLE HC
ORION 4TH ED TP
PRINCESS AI GN VOL 01 (OF 3)
REACTIVATED SER 4 SUPER SQUAD BATMAN AF
REACTIVATED SER 4 SUPER SQUAD HAWKMAN AF
REACTIVATED SER 4 SUPER SQUAD SUPERMAN AF
REACTIVATED SER 4 SUPER SQUAD WONDER WOMAN AF
SERVICE INDUSTRY
SHOWCASE PRESENTS PHANTOM STRANGER TP VOL 02
SNAKEWOMAN TP VOL 03 TALE OF THE SNAKE CHARMER
SPIDER-MAN FAMILY TP UNTOLD TEAM UPS DIGEST
SPIDER-MAN RED SONJA PREM HC
TOYFARE IRON MAN MOVIE CVR #129
VIDEO WATCHDOG #137
WORMWOOD TP VOL 02
X-MEN TP DIE BY THE SWORD


What looks good to YOU?

-B

Labels: Brian, Shipping Lists

Click Here to Read More...

Omega: The Unknown #6 (of 10):



This one's really found its level, I've gotta say. Even when it draws close to being too cute, it has a habit of slowly, cleverly backing away. Hell, it's got a Watcheresque character who doubles as a Harry Naybors-like in-story critic ("The Overthinker," haw), but it somehow comes off as more a playful tribute than anything.

This issue kicks off the second half of the series, and brings with it a few new locales and some character development, but what really caught my eye was a shitload of doubling going on.

Some of it is really obvious - in the first three pages, we've got two funereal splash pages, one for boy hero(?) Alex and the other for sly superhero The Mink, each of them helpfully bearing their own tone-setting title. Alex's ("Omega the Unknown, Chapter Six") is straightforward and dispassionate, while Mink's ("The Unparalleled Mink in: Night Hideous") is kitschy and overcooked, seemingly a put-on. Writer Jonathan Lethem ("with" Karl Rusnak) risks overstating some fairly obvious differences between the characters, but the dimension given to both does hold some interest; Alex can't function properly in front of grieving parents without telling lies, while artist Farel Dalrymple (with colorist Paul Hornschemeier) suggests a genuine rage inside Mink, in spite of his rampant playacting for ever-present cameras.

There's also one of those familiar sequences in which the action stops for a few comic-within-the-comic pages, rendered in a simpler style (here by Hornschemeier). I've read enough Alan Moore to kinda never want to see this stuff ever again, but this issue is clever enough to make the contemporary Mink superhero comic pretty moody and sexual -- moreso than the actual story! -- playing up the perceived absurdity of merchandise-ready costumed characters drinking heavily and leaving the bedroom unhappy, while also maybe revealing some things about Mink that the showman himself could never say in public. The fiction is silly for its misplaced maturity, but Lethem (with Rusnak) also positions it as potentially honest in a way that a more detatched, less embarrassing type of 'realism' can't manage.

Feel free to compare it to Alex's double-page splash of robot doodles, a second bit of art reflecting personal concerns. It also brings me back to last issue's neato fight scene, with onlookers trying to identify the participants from what comics they've read, and going so far as to extrapolate their intents. It's an old Marvel trope that the superheroes have their own comic books going, and its nice to see that stuff brought back in a thoughtful way (and it allows for Gary Panter to show up next issue!).

Of course, the nanotech plague is also spreading, which means Mink also gets compared to his own right hand, which has sprouted legs and is already acting far more superheroic than Mink himself, in that it commands the love of nanotech zombie hordes and shows some interest in bulking up for... a future issue. I'm trying to resist getting too far into my reading, since I suspect that a lot of things are going to be kept unclear until the very end (and, honestly, probably beyond), but I wonder if the zombies aren't acting as wicked forces of normalcy, joining Alex, Mink and taciturn Omega (who's kind of Alex's future, naturally) in their oddness? Even the book's world seems very anti-Marvel, with dramatic deaths taking place either off-panel or in an utterly unexciting way... will it face an incursion of action?

Er, anyway, it's has developed into a nice, low-key superhero/weird mystery series. I'm glad a lot of the scenery has shifted to university eccentricity, since Lethem (with Rusnak) seems a lot comfier with that than city high school bullies; a lot of that oppressed nerd material was too arch for me, and its dramatics mixed poorly with the series' tendency for understatement. But this issue is VERY GOOD, and I'm really looking forward to the rest.

Labels: Jog

Click Here to Read More...

It's nice to feel part of something larger, to be connected to others through a similar sensibility or predilection. And so, as I finished the last page of Logan #1 and groaned aloud, there was an element of pleasure in the groan, knowing that there would be others like me who had groaned aloud at the cheapness of the cliffhanger, and it was possible, almost, to imagine my groan joining others already in the air, mingling there in some luminiferous aether of fanboy disgruntlement.

After the jump, the spoiler, some snark, and a dramatic reduction in the hoity-toityness of the post's tone.



So, yes. Logan's in Japan at the end of World War II. He busts out of a prison, befriends an American soldier, tries to be the voice of reason, and then saves the life of a lovely Japanese woman who repays him by bedding him down. And on the last page, we learn this idyllic Japanese area he finds himself in is...Hiroshima.

Now, don't get me wrong. Do I want to see Logan stumbling around all Barefoot Gen, his flesh cooking off him and regrowing while he endures a visual tapestry of horrors? Hells, yes. But while fellow SCer Douglas rightly berates this cliffhanger as cheap, I found my groan came not as much from the cheapness of it, but that Vaughan, student of structure that he is, had found a quick and easy escape hatch to an nearly infinite number of Wolverine storylines which anyone can now exploit. In the interest of making the jobs of wanna-be-Ways and aspiring-Tieris even easier, allow me to extrapolate a few of the next nine hundred Wolverine miniseries:

• A routine Poutine delivery gone terribly wrong puts Logan in the center of the cauldron of Stalingrad. How will his mutant healing power affect the duel of two master snipers battling for supremacy of the city?
  
  
• Logan arrives in chaotic Uganda in early 1978 after his longtime wargame-by-correspondence opponent sends several frantic messages; upon further investigation, he discovers the man he thought was his friend (and fellow "Starship Troopers" afficionado) is none other than Idi Amin Dada! Hijinks!
  
  
• It's Logan and Deadpool competing to find the mythical Brewster's Millions in The Republic of Biafra at just the wrong time. Is Sabretooth involved?
  
  
• Logan has finally met Ms. Right and her name is Marlo Thomas! Unfortunately for Logan, she has also begun dating the very sexy, very influential politican Henry Kissinger. Who will win her love?

I think you can see where I'm going with this. Taking genuine historical tragedies and JephLoeberizing them so they become another big reveal and yet another way for the story to achieve some sort of impact it hasn't earned is distasteful and, yeah, cheap. It can also be kind of fun, frankly, and probably a legitimate venue of superhero stories from the first time, I dunno, Superboy spanked Benedict Arnold or something.

I mean, I'm just about to start in on the thirteenth volume of a Japanese sniper who, if the books are to be believed, has helped shape the history of the world through little more than his superb marksmanship and well-above-average penis. Why should I care if writers pitching a miniseries can now ransack through our atrocity exhibition in search of that perfect cock for Logan to punch? ("Hey, how about Leopold & Loeb? Two cocks!")

I wish I could tell you. I think maybe it, again, has to do with the cheapness (say what you will about Golgo 13, but it sure seems like they research the shit out of those stories) and maybe it has something to do with mutantkind's own Arthur Fonzarelli. Wolverine is, in my mind, a fascinating metaphor for Western Civilization and the Industrial Revolution as viewed through post-Industrial Revolution eyes: civilization has literally made him a piece of machinery, his sniktastic claws popping with the regularity of a piece of assembly line robotics. He is the little guy made powerful through that glory of industrialization, a regular job in which he's a specialist ("the best he is at what he does," etc., etc.). It's little wonder that Wolverine has ended up tied so closely with Japan, being as they took that industrial template to the next level.

And yet, although I appreciate the bathos and male self-pity that surrounds Logan whenever it's put in a Western civilization blue collar context (sitting in a honky-tonk, staring bitterly into his beer; weeping over his inability to understand his own past, befouled as it is by the arbiters of history), it bugs me that he'll be in Hiroshima, or Laos, or Biafra, suffering as they have suffered. Because although that is the nature of male self-pity--God, why must it always be all about me!--to subsume everything in its quest to bemoan itself, Logan should suffer as we have suffered (and, yeah, I mean, post-industrial, Western Civilization "we") and not as those onto which we have shoveled all our shit (and bombs, and toxins, and crappy snack crackers) have suffered. It rankles a bit.

On the other hand, the art is nice even if the price is a bit steep. I'm going with an above-EH, in a "I pray for my soul" kind of way.

Labels: Jeff, Logan, spouting off

Click Here to Read More...

Did I mention that I'm making this up as I go along? I don't have a list books that I'm covering or anything, I'm just wandering in the store each day and coming up with whatever suits my fancy that day.

I'm also trying to (in the end) cover each of the racks in the store -- some racks have 2-5 genres/authors on them (like the Miller/Moore/Morrison/Creating Comics) rack -- if I just do one book in each category as I have them at the store, then I'd be at like 28 books from just that.

Some of them are easier than others. For example, today I think I'm eyeing the "licensed comics" rack, and that's a pretty hard one in a lot of ways -- most licensed comics actually, um, kinda stink.

Generally speaking they don't put "A List talent" on licensed books, though every once in a while they do. On today's installment, they did. Find out what it is, after the jump!



(And just for the record, what I call "licensed" is anything that isn't NATIVELY comics -- something that started as a TV show or novel or movie or that kind of thing)

(We don't put all licensed comics in the licensed section, though -- for example something like HELLRAISER is in the "horror" section, while BUFFY would be on the "Joss Whedon" rack, and so on and so forth)

Anyway, A-list talents, etc....

Pretty much the last people you'd expect to see doing a STAR TREK comic were Chris Claremont and Adam Hughes (!), yet in the early 90s that's exactly what happened on STAR TREK: DEBT OF HONOR.

Set right after ST IV: THE VOYAGE HOME (thus: the best post-TOS period), DEBT OF HONOR is, at the least, the god-damn prettiest STAR TREK comic you've ever seen in your life. That Hughes kid shure can draw!

The book suffers a little bit from Claremont-itis, but there isn't any Psychic Rape at least, so that's a plus. On the other hand, there IS a sizable lift from ALIEN, but at least this is a milieu in which that works reasonably well.

Ugh, I'm crazy today, store's been insanely busy (I started writing this at 10:45 am, and it is now just after 6), and we got our School Assignments for Ben's kindergarten (didn't get even one of the seven schools we wanted, sigh), so, screw it, I'm going to leave it right there. There WON'T be one of these tomorrow (I *need* a day away from thinking about comics this week), but I'm going to try and get two up on Monday...

Sorry this one was so shitty and half-written. I still like the comic...

-B

Labels: Around the Store, Brian

Click Here to Read More...

BodyWorld:



Yeah, there may have been comics released on Wednesday, but I feel the urge to talk about this past Tuesday instead, since it saw the completion of Chapter Two of a VERY GOOD webcomic, Dash Shaw's BodyWorld. If you're an admirer of rampant drug use, sticky sporting events, eye-searing colors, municipalities of the future and extra-sweaty teenage hookups, you'd best be clicking that link forthwith.

Now, Shaw isn't a mysterious guy on the comics scene. He's already completed two longform comics projects -- Love Eats Brains: A Zombie Romance (Odd God Press, 2004) and The Mother's Mouth (Alternative Comics, 2006) -- a collection of short stories -- Goddess Head (Teenage Dinosaur Press, 2005) -- plus anthology contributions to MOME and Meathaus, along with an upcoming story in Marvel's alternative comics thingy and various other projects. This summer will bring a 720-page(!!) graphic novel from Fantagraphics, The Bottomless Belly Button. Obviously what he needed was more things to do, so he started a webcomic at the top of this year.

Those who only know of Shaw through the vigorous formalism of some of his earlier works may be surprised by how straightforward a comedic sci-fi soap opera BodyWorld is thus far. The plot more-or-less follows Prof. Paul Panther, a deeply questionable academic who's (allegedly) putting together an encyclopedia of hallucinogenic plants, or at least an updated edition thereof. He's a sorry, abrasive bastard, a romantic nostalgist and very much prone to harming himself. His misadventures take him to futuristic Boney Borough, where strange things are growing out by the local high school, and youth drama seethes inside among a wishes-she-was mature girl, the strapping athletic hero she's seeing, and the obligatory pretty cheerleader.



It's a fast-paced story, charged with Shaw's detail-prone imagination; you'd better believe the beloved local sport of Dieball -- a collision of lacrosse, a live-action tabletop game and a Double Dare physical challenge -- is presented with full gameplay instructions, just as Boney Borough itself is helpfully mapped. There's small mysteries, and odd folks wandering around. I can't say the main cast is thrillingly detailed yet, early in the story as we are, but Prof. Panther is a lot of fun, and the occasional awkwardness of Shaw's dialogue is offset by the ingenuity of his art.

Packed with distinctively outlined character art -- and I love how the older ones are literally sharper or more determinedly molded than his round, simpler youths -- Shaw's 'core' style sets white-heavy foreground elements against outline-free layers of color, sometimes vividly contrasted to affect the mood of a sequence. Arrows and sound effects often fill panels, while large portions of word balloons remain blank, lending a mannered, diagrammatic sensation to these hesitant characters' interactions, although Shaw is careful enough with subtle expression to give them some human dignity.



But this is a pliable world too, prone to launching into bold slashes of movement, bodies contorting with speed against suddenly abstract backgrounds. Note how the burning primary colors of the players below clash with the muted hues of the geometric crowd and their buzz of panel elements.



Meanwhile, one of Prof. Panther's flashbacks might adopt a monochrome, doodled elegance, befitting the cherished fuzziness of even his more painful recollections.



It really is an intuitive setup, smartly complimenting the artist's story - and it's great for emphasizing the body in Shaw's world. Nearly everything these characters do is related to physical sensation -- sports, drugs, climbing, kissing, bleeding -- the only refuge being Prof. Panther's memories, which fail to help him any. Every body is nearly a blank slate, all but demanding the marks and colors and letters of tactile sensation. Shaw has mentioned that psychic phenomena is soon to come to the plot (along with drama at the prom), and it will be something to see how this works in the context of this thought-through world.

Anyway, it's neat. And free. Updates each Tuesday. Go connect.

Labels: Jog

Click Here to Read More...

Let's get right in there, shall we?

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #12: Here's my $0.02 on The L Thing, from the perspective of a series-long fan. Do I believe Buffy would sleep with a woman? Yes, provided the woman is a Slayer - that was, after all, the subtext of her dynamic with Faith (especially in "Bad Girls"). However, I thought the execution here was a bit problematic for two reasons. Number one, as Chris Sims points out, the whole "post-coital reveal" really is a cliche these days. Number two, and this is something that bothered me a lot during the show's final years, there's no subtext or ambiguity in the Buffyverse anymore. That was a huge pet peeve for me, because the first three seasons were great at being subtle (ie: you never knew exactly what Angelus and Drusilla were up to behind Spike's back, which left your imagination running on overtime), and afterwards everything was in-your-face-with-a-can-of-mace (I'm thinking here of the near-rape in "Seeing Red" to name just one egregious "geez, what happened to my show?" scene). It could've been more interesting to be ambiguous about Buffy and Satsu, to drop teases and hints, rather than pull the old Wile E. Coyote anvil-to-the-head maneuver. I wasn't at all surprised to learn that Drew Goddard wrote that Season 7 episode when Spike's mother goes all Freudian on him, because that's exactly the kind of bluntness (which, in all honesty, could very easily be attributed to sensationalism) we get here. All that said, this is still a VERY GOOD issue, and Goddard deserves kudos for the abundant humor, to say nothing of the main reason I'm enjoying Season 8: new variations on canonical threats. The vampires in this issue are linked to an enemy Buffy's faced before, and that's precisely the sort of internal continuity mixed with innovation that makes the story even more interesting (and I didn't even like that particular enemy when he turned up).

CABLE #1: Cable, as a character, greatly benefited from MESSIAH COMPLEX: if, in earlier appearances, he either drifted around aimlessly or played at being Robo-Jesus, he's now a soldier with a clear mission and a nemesis who thematically parallels his own situation (after all, Bishop is also a soldier with a clear mission). What isn't apparent by the end of the issue is where Duane Swierczynski wants to go from here, big-picture-wise: is this series set in the New Jersey of 2043 we see here? Or will Cable and the baby be jumping through time with Bishop on their heels? It could go either way, and both options have potential (though I think we need a bigger supporting cast, because Cable monologuing as the baby cries could get old very fast), but we're off to a GOOD start. Special props to Ariel Olivetti for that look on Cable's face when he has to change the baby's diaper. Verily, a fate worse than death... and if this baby turns out to be Jean Grey, we can look forward to the inevitable argument where they both scream "I CHANGED YOUR DIAPERS!" at each other.

LOGAN #1: With Y: THE LAST MAN complete, I've been feeling the lack of Brian Vaughan in my monthly readings (don't ask about EX MACHINA). Now, I'm not a Wolverine fan. At all. But there's a handful of writers who can get me to check out anything they do, and Vaughan's one of them. (Carey's another, which no doubt explains why I feel like I've already passed my Wolverine quota for this year.) So imagine my disappointment when LOGAN #1 turned out to be a rather dull comic. Where is Vaughan's trademark unpredictability? Where are the twists and turns? This issue reads like WOLVERINE FOR DUMMIES, a standard (and standardized) fusion of stock tropes I've seen a hundred times already. EH, because I honestly don't care.

Postscript: The second I finished posting this, I saw that Douglas had beaten me to it.



I call the right side!

Labels: Diana

Click Here to Read More...

Pamphlets! Under the cut: LOGAN, NEW FRONTIER and YOUNG LIARS.



LOGAN #1: I realized after I'd bought this issue that it's cover-priced at $3.99, and for that money I expect more than 22 pages of story. And in fact I got more: it's 23 pages of story. (And a glossy cover; so what?) Eduardo Risso's in good form, but I expected much better from Brian K. Vaughan. The story is once again sending Wolverine to Japan (which was a really clever and refreshing idea when Claremont and Miller did it twenty-five years ago--yes, I am of the Paul O'Brien "oh Christ, not Japan again" school), and once again exploring a bit of his adventuring past so deeply forgotten it's never been referred to before. Although I suppose repeating oneself is the risk you run when you've got him appearing in at least half a dozen books a month. Also, Vaughan's cliffhangers tend to be much less cheap than this one. What's the exquisite, pastoral Japanese locale where Wolverine rescues and is bedded by a beautiful young woman in the waning days of World War II? Why, a little town he's never heard of called Hiroshima, of course! Knocked down to Awful for the price gouging.

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE NEW FRONTIER SPECIAL #1: Effectively a 48-page plug for the direct-to-video animated New Frontier movie, but hell, it's Darwyn Cooke--nine pages of the first story even have his signature at the bottom, distractingly enough. That story doesn't really add much to the original series--Superman and Batman have a misunderstanding and fight, and then Wonder Woman mediates a deal between them--but Cooke's artwork and design sense are the point here. The backup Robin/Kid Flash story is seriously incoherent (having Robin drag-race Wally Wood is a joke I wish someone would explain to me), and the Wonder Woman/Black Canary/Gloria Steinem teamup is just kind of a dopey joke. Good, on the strength of the lead feature's lovely Cooke art.

YOUNG LIARS #1: A new Vertigo ongoing by David Lapham, who spends the better part of his text piece wincing about the fact that he still hasn't finished Stray Bullets yet. So instead of Amy Racecar, we get a different all-id-no-superego antiheroine, Sadie Dawkins, who's come by her personality the Phineas Gage way--she's got a bullet in "the moral and emotional centers of [her] brain." I'm looking forward to hearing what Polite Dissent says about that one. This is apparently Lapham's take on youth culture, and specifically the New York music scene of the moment (the story happens literally yesterday, March 7, 2008), and he's really shaky on that stuff from the top of the very first page, where the credits appear on a cassette tape. Note: that date is 2008, not 1993. The supporting cast are broad but shallow caricatures--an anorexic ex-model called Annie X, an aging trust fund kid ("Daddy refused to pay the co-op. They're kicking me out tomorrow!"), etc. Lapham's stuffed this issue with temporal jumps and cutaways, and he seems to have some kind of master plan for the series. I could be convinced yet, but this is an Awful start.

Labels: Douglas

Click Here to Read More...

Look, I made it a whole week!

I like comics that make me laugh. I also like comics that are smart and teach me something new.

Even better when they do both!

More after that ol' jump!



EPICURUS THE SAGE is a clever little book. Set in Ancient Greece, in concerns philosophy, philosophers, and the Greek Gods.

Socrates is a jerk, Plato is a boob, and Epicurus tries to find a reasonable position based upon moderation. Throw in a young Alexander the Great, and quests from Hades and Hera and such like and you've got a pretty rich comic stew.

EPICURUS, by William Messner-Loebs and Sam Kieth was orignally published by Piranha Press, DC's attempt at an "eclectic" imprint in the early 90s. Looking back at it now, they really did produce a great deal of interesting material: GREGORY, BEAUTIFUL STORIES FOR UGLY CHILDREN, I think that both WHY I HATE SATURN and STUCK RUBBER BABY were also Piranha books. Really, a great imprint, and a shame it never went much further.

You're going to have your own opinion of which of Piranha's books were the best (I know many will vote for SATURN or GREGORY), but my heart is with EPICURUS THE SAGE -- its sorta really only in comics that you're going to find a satirical comedy based on Greek Philosophy, and Messner-Loebs turned in some home-runs of scripts that are both whimsical, educational and absolutely hysterical.

It also has some of my favorite bits of Kieth art, where he's doing super-zany big foot cartooning that's also insanely feathered and cross-hatched like a Wrightson drawing.

When Messner-Loebs ran into financial troubles, Wildstorm reissued the previous EPICURUS material (2 OGNs, plus a short story from the FAST FORWARD anthology) in a complete collection, with an all-new story as well. As much as I love charities like the HERO INITIATIVE, I also think its great when publisher's step up and actually bring those suffering creator's work back into print so everyone can enjoy it.

Anyway, this is terrific top-notch stuff, and if you never thought Greek philosophy could be funny stuff, you're in for an amazing treat here.

-B

Labels: Around the Store, Brian

Click Here to Read More...

So yesterday I did a "kid's" comic, let's go 180 degrees the other way today, and talk about something that's fully for adults.

With like screwing, and everything.

More after the jump, but if you're a prude, you should probably stop reading here.



Erotic comics are a difficult thing, a lot of the time, because you have to rate them both on how well they tell their story (when, that is, they HAVE one), as well as how "hot" it is. That latter is SUPER subjective.

I think most erotic comics really (no pun intended) suck. Especially these days. There were a couple of years were stuff of pretty decent quality was coming out, that was human-driven (instead of purely fuck-driven), where the art was luscious, etc.

But these days, it seems like erotic comics are largely of the "Rebecca" school, or of the hardcore Japanese erotic (epitomized by A-G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY) where all women are stupid sluts who once you warm them up they'll happily be humiliated in any number of subhuman and degrading ways, because all they REALLY are is a cunt (and mouth and ass...)

While (I suppose) there can be a few moments of hot fucking within that framework, that doesn't do a whole lot for me. I've even seen increasing elements of this in artists whom I think are incredibly amazing craftsmen, like, say, Milo Manara.

There's very little erotic comics in my personal collection, in fact, I only have two things in there. One of them is Coleen Coover's SMALL FAVORS, the sweet and funny lesbian sex comic, and the other is my actual subject today: Bill Willingham's IRONWOOD.

I've been a Willingham fan for a long time -- heck, I bought my copy of VILLAINS AND VIGILANTES (to tie it back to the gamer-geek post from a few days ago) because of his art. V&V had a module ("Death Duel with the Destroyers") that leads into Willingham's ELEMENTALS series, and ELEMENTALS pretty much led into IRONWOOD... Yes, role-playing games lead directly to pornography.

What I love about IRONWOOD is that is has (*gasp*) an actual STORY, which, sure, is heavy on the fantasy tropes, (and kinda ends awkwardly) but actually moves forward and does stuff.

Plus there's fucking. Always a bonus.

It's funny, it's pretty hot, it has a plot, and my memory of it is that it also has a diversity of sizes and shapes and things going into other things.

And can I tell you, the boy can draw. I wish he'd draw more these days.

So, yeah, that's my pick today: IRONWOOD, the only Sword-and-Sorcery Porno Comedy.

-B

Labels: Around the Store, Brian

Click Here to Read More...

Two quick periodical hits, since I'm standing in a pretty empty store today for some reason...

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #552: I'm just generally opposed to any character introduction where a seemingly normal junkie (Down to yelling "China white, we've got a date!") is able to evade Spider-Man through the streets of Manhattan. that's just sloppy lazy writing.

But what bugs me even more is two editorial lapses which just TORE me out of the comic. First off, on page 8 Spidey tears the ass in his suit. On page 10, the crowd comments about being able to see his ass. Page 9, which has got a fairly clear ass shot? Nothing.

(not that I WANT to see Spidey's ass, just saying)

But the bigger one for me is that "The Freak", takes a drug of some kind that literally makes him puke up his guts, on camera, which then swallow him up making a bloody organic cocoon. It's pretty gross and explicit. Then four pages later "Ox" picks up "the Bookie" and the caption at the bottom of the pages says "And let's cut it there folks, before it gets too gruesome for our all-ages comic!"

Uh, what?

This is the first arc of BND Spidey which I really really hated. Phil Jimenez's art makes things a little better, but there's a few really weird shots, like that one on page 7 where it looks like he's channelling McFarlane, with a leg that can't possibly be where it is. Plus that cover? What's wrong with Pete's arms. All in all, I'll say AWFUL.



UNCANNY X-MEN 496: First off, thank god for a comic set in SF where you don't see the GG bridge in every panel, and there's actually a pretty good representation of a Victorian "Painted Lady". But the "Previous in..." page at the start of the book says that the City has morphed into "a far out version of itself from the summer of '69"

Now, maybe this is splitting hairs, but its my understanding that by '69, the Haight was mostly boarded-up store fronts, and that speed and smack had long replaced weed and acid as the drug of choice. Apparently even by '67 the bloom was off the rose, and it was really like '65 and '66 that SF was "groovy".

'69 was Altamont, right?

Interestingly, the giant Eternal is still standing in Golden Gate park, though (cf: Gaiman's ETERNALS mini)... I never expected to see that referenced again, and I suspect that no one (even Neil) knows how that one resolves...

The rest of the book is fine, if a bit slight, especially coming off the Big Crossover, pretty much the textbook definition of an OK comic book.


DC SPECIAL: RAVEN #1: Other than not liking the comic at all, I really have to comment on the cover blurb "Finally in her own EMO series". O. M. G! AWFUL.



Alright, store is full of people again, I'm out...

What did YOU think?


-B Click Here to Read More...

If you're old enough, you might remember when DC comics had a slogan int he UPC box of their Direct Market-shipping comics that said something "DC Comics: They're not just for kids anymore!"

And, in general, the comic book industry has really followed that lead -- comics AREN'T for kids any longer (except for a very small number of titles)

To me this is kind of a shame. When I bring home the new week's books, and plop on the sofa to start reading them, I often have to chase Ben (now four-years old) away when I'm reading something even as supposedly as innocuous as SPIDER-MAN or SUPERMAN, because there's just so much violence and in them.

Unnecessary violence and blood, for that matter.

Some of my favorite fiction is "for kids" -- I can watch WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (Gene Wilder version) weekly, if I had to. I love reading Ben books like CHARLOTTE'S WEB or JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH or our current project of going through the Baum OZ books (man, there's some archaic language in those though -- I find myself "rewriting" them as I read them) -- and I'd say that the best kid's work really needs to have things that appeal to EVERYONE in them.

So today's pick is a GN aimed at kids, but also working very well for adults, too!

More after the jump...



There's a couple of easy and obvious choices for "Kid's" comics. It's hard to go wrong with a BONE or a Carl Bark's UNCLE SCROOGE comic, or even the first incarnations of the "DC Animated" comics (BATMAN ADVENTURES, SUPERMAN ADVENTURES), but I'm going to go with something a smidge more "obscure".

James Robinson & Paul Smith's LEAVE IT TO CHANCE.

The "high concept" of this series can be summed up as "NANCY DREW meets HARRY POTTER", (Well, though Robinson't intro to v1 calls it "NANCY DREW meets KOLCHAK THE NIGHT STALKER", but then, HARRY POTTER started in '98, and the introduction is dated '97) and its just tons of fun.

There's action, suspense, adventure, magic, and even a cute pet dragon, and its both absolutely wonderful for kids AND adults, just like it should be.

LEAVE IT TO CHANCE is one of those books that just doesn't turn very often (in fact, it might be the slowest sellers in our kid's section), but I'll continue to carry it until the day I die because I just like it so much. It is usually my number one suggestion to parent's looking blankly at the kid's section, but they almost always opt for something THEY've previously heard of.

Format might be working against sales, as well -- CHANCE is available in three oversized "European" laminated hardcovers, which makes it look more expensive than it actually is (and compared to a number of "real world" kids books, it's down right cheap)

Either way, the stories are a delight, never talking down to its audience, always crisp and fun, while Paul Smith's artwork is just drop-dead gorgeous.

Comics: They aren't just for adults. Read some LEAVE TO CHANCE and find out!

-B

Labels: Around the Store, Brian

Click Here to Read More...

I was going to write about a completely different book this morning, but then I saw the news that DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS co-creator Gary Gygax died on Tuesday morning.

The intersection between comics and games is often a pretty deep one -- our forms of geekness are different, but there's a lot of overlap between the two camps.

Back when I opened Comix Experience in 1989, it was de rigueur for comic book stores to carry gaming material. I opened my stores 4 doors down from San Francisco's best (and, today, only) game store, Gamescape, so that I wouldn't have to touch the things.

It's not that I'm not a gamer (I am -- dude, I was playing D&D when it was those three little booklets in the box), but I had a theory that it was better to do one thing really really well, then two things sorta half-assed.

But there are comics that are ABOUT gaming, and one of them is one of my favorite comics of all.

More after the jump!



KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE is an odd bird. It's typically (especially in the early days) just 6-8 static clip-art-style shots with lots and lots and lots of dialog.

Its also hysterical.

Some of it is kind of "insider baseball"-funny... a lot of the jokes might get lost on you if you don't game yourself, but I think that, for the most part, the gags are pretty universal if you have even the slightest awareness of gamings tropes.

There's a Rules Lawyer, a ground-down-by-real-life-so-he-needs-to-kill-imaginary-stuff-to-stay-sane hack-and-slasher, a hardcore roleplayer, and a dumb guy who goes along with his friends, plus their long-suffering DM, just playing games for 24 pages a month.

Some of the humor is just the absurdity of people so trapped in their world-view that they don't know how else to deal with things ("OK, coming over the hill, you see a gazebo." "A Gazebo?! What's that?" "I waste it with my crossbow!" "Fireballs coming on line, BA!" "um, guys...?"), and some of it is about mechanics of games, or tropes that gamers all take for granted, but it is pretty uniformly hilarious.

A quick look at the book might make you turn away from the crude "clip art", but the style will quickly grow on you, and sticking with it will give you one of the most consistently funny and whimsical "funny books" on the shelves today.

There are, as of this writing, something like 24 trade paperbacks reprinting the first eighty-something issues. Sadly, most of them seem to be either out-of-print, or at least unavailable from Diamond (and "real" book distributors, like Baker & Taylor simply don't stock them), but the series is currently on it's 136th issue, an astonishing and remarkable achievement by any standard.

I especially recommend the "Bundle of Trouble"s (that's what they call their TPs) around the v4 to 8 range -- they've found their voice by then, and worked out some of the kinks, and the "extra" stories in the backs of the BoT (typically, one reprints 4 issues, with another 30 or so pages of new material) like the "Bagwars" saga are amazing pieces of timing and humor.

Currently the series is a hybrid comics/game magazine -- there's 30-something pages of comics, and another equal amount of RP supplementary material. I almost always stop reading once the comics are done, but I still always feel like I've gotten my money's worth out of each issue.

I guess what I like the best about KoDT is that it is TOTALLY out of the mainstream of comics culture -- it's almost like the "Dev team" (KoDT is created by a team of writers, all switching back and forth each issue) fell backwards into the whole comic thing -- it's totally off the radar of most comics people, and yet its longer running and much much funnier than almost anything else running today.

There's not enough "funny" in the funny books these days, so I'd urge you to try and track down some KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE today.

Me, I've got to get back to prepping for this week's comics... and rolling a d20 salute to Gary Gygax...

-B

Labels: Around the Store, Brian

Click Here to Read More...

Was it just me, or was February a strange and full month that just overwhelmed everyone else with stuff? I'm used to January seeming like a hangover from the previous year, but there was something about February this time that seemed to take me by surprise. Those damn leap years, man. They take it out of you.

Reviews of last week's books under the jump, for those who want comics.



BATMAN #674: This is a strange book; you get the idea that Grant Morrison knows roughly where we wants to go with the character, but just can’t quite get there for whatever reason. Ideas that should be big and bright and interesting – the trainee Batmans gone rogue, Bat-Mite showing up – fall flat, as if they’ve been rushed out without being thought through, and without art that boosts their potential by dazzling us into submission. It feels oddly like Morrison’s X-Men run, which had moments of wow and genius but felt more and more bogged down in mental sludge as it went on. Okay, I guess.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #35: Over here, however, Ed Brubaker has used the new Captain America to regain focus on another book that seemed to be getting trapped in itself a little bit too much. I didn’t find the Winter Soldier to be that interesting a character, but there’s something about Bucky’s aspiration to be Steve Rogers – and the fact that he’s kind of digging trying, despite the legacy – that I really enjoy. Weird to see Butch Guice doing such a great Steve Epting impersonation, but you can’t fault a book that has such a stylish rotating art team where you can’t see the joins. Very Good.

CRIMINAL #1: Talking of Brubaker, the return of his noir collaboration with Sean Philips is, very simply, Excellent; the writing doesn’t miss a beat or waste a word, and Philips’ artwork manages to be realistic and appropriately melodramatic all at once. The done-in-one format works surprisingly well, given the previous stories’ sprawl, and while the last story lost me slightly with what felt like overdone cruelty, this short piece gripped me all the way through. Really, really good, and easily PICK OF THE WEEK, as we used to say.

DOCTOR WHO #1: Eh, I suppose? It’s a strange book, which comes close to feeling right in a few places, but then veers off to a more cartoony place (in writing as well as art) that is off for some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on. I didn’t dislike it, but I didn’t really enjoy it that much, either. I’d say that it wasn’t what I expected, but I’m not sure that I could tell you what I expected if you asked.

RASL #1: Getting back to what I said about consistency yesterday – This is pretty much not the subject matter nor the writing that you’d expect from the guy who gave you Bone and last year’s Shazam book, and it’s much the better for it (The art, though, is very Jeff Smith; that’s not a bad thing, mind you). Like some kind of karmic doppelganger to Casanova, the main character here is a dimension-hopping thief lost in an alternate dimension that it’s quite like our own, but the execution is different enough to make it its own book. What’s going to kill it, ultimately, is the schedule; this is a Very Good first issue, but I probably won’t remember enough about it when the second issue comes out in three months.

X-MEN: LEGACY #208: Surprisingly strong, even if I find myself far more interested in the flashback/X-Men Saga scenes than the current-day plot about Xavier’s stolen body or Magneto returning, again. Mike Carey definitely has both a love of, and a feel for, Xavier and the old characters, and John Romita Jr.’s art is beautiful work – with equally beautiful coloring – but I wonder just where this is going, if anywhere. For now, a highly Good first issue of the new run; here’s hoping it keeps it up as we go through the history of the team.

But what did the rest of you think?

Labels: Graeme

Click Here to Read More...

I'm not the biggest fan of most Japanese manga; largely this is down to the common tropes that comprise the majority of what's been brought over -- the big round eyes and so on.

But there's a handful of pieces of manga work that I think are utterly terrific.

My number one favorite series is after the jump!



I love me some DEATH NOTE.

Part of it is that it is largely unlike any other manga that I've ever read, the other part is is it unlike any Western comics that I have ever read, either.

First of all: there's very little action of any kind. There's plenty of suspense, and plenty of twists and turns, but almost none of it is resolved with "action" -- you're not going to find a lot of car chases or shoot outs or fighting or any of the things that most comics tend to revolve around.

Second: there's a whole lot of interior dialog. I haven't counted or anything, but there are certainly entire chapters which are exclusively, or almost exclusively, told in thought balloons; and, at a guess, nearly half of the comic is just people thinking stuff.

Because DEATH NOTE is about mind games... it is about trying to out-think your opposite number, like a delicate dance on a chessboard, trying to stay three and five moves ahead. There are rules. Lots and lots and lots of rules, and new ones get added each chapter, but never in a way that invalidates the previous ones. Instead they build and spread and grow with the story.

DEATH NOTE is an incredibly tight, thoughtful and suspenseful piece of comics work, and is very much like a bag of potato chips: once you start, you don't want to stop, you want to keep eating and eating and eating, seeing what new twist and turn is coming up next.

Western comics have larger eschewed the notion of thought balloons over the last decade or so (here is an excellent essay by Steven Grant from a few weeks ago [Edit: heh, no that one was from 2005, THIS ONE is from a few weeks ago that I was thinking of. Read both!] on the subject) There's been some small movement to retake the tool, lately, probably most notably Bendis' somewhat strange usage in MIGHTY AVENGERS, so to see a work not only use them extensively, but to utterly rely on them to move the narrative forward is an utter treat.

Above all else DEATH NOTE is smart and clever, and Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata really do an amazing job of keeping both the characters as well as the audience on it's toes. What's nice is that, even though the book is really about murder and death, there's really very little violence and gore to it. While the books are rated 16+, almost every bit of that is for thoughtcrime (as it were)

There's bits of it which are better and worse than others: the first three volumes are pure comics wonderfulness, it lags out a bit in 4 and 5 (that's the section with the evil corporation, right? I didn't like those parts), and roars back in six, but, even at its worst, the mind games on display are intelligent and utterly clever.

Just because I've wanted to say something about it for weeks, and haven't found a space, let me briefly mention the anime of the same that's airing on Cartoon Network. Do you remember those old Marvel cartoons from the late 60s which were like straight swipes out of Kirby Komics, but they'd animate one arm, or a mouth talking. The DEATH NOTE anime is very much like that -- it's only slightly animated, but it is always moving because they've got the camera moving around the drawing (and it is much better scored) The anime does a reasonably good job of adaptation, but if you've only seen the cartoon, and not read the books, the comparison might be LEAGUE OF EXTRA-ORDINARY GENTLEMEN versus, um, LXG (or as the ads called it: ELL! ECHS! GEE!) -- they're just not the same thing at all.

Anyway, even if you "don't like manga", this might be a series for you -- it is smarter in plot and scope than virtually anything else on the stands.

-B

Labels: Around the Store, Brian

Click Here to Read More...

Here's what Comix Experience is receiving this week -- another solid shipment!

2000 AD #1573
A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #76 (A)
ALL NEW ATOM #21
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #552
ANITA BLAKE VH GUILTY PLEASURES #9 (OF 12)
ARMY OF DARKNESS #7 LONG ROAD HOME
BETTY & VERONICA DIGEST #182
BOYS #16
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #12
CABLE #1 DWS
CARTOON NETWORK ACTION PACK #23
CASANOVA #12
CLANDESTINE #2 (OF 5)
COMIC BOOK COMICS #1
CORY DOCTOROWS FUTURISTIC TALES HERE AND NOW #6 (OF 6)
COUNTDOWN LORD HAVOK AND THE EXTREMISTS #5 (OF 6)
COUNTDOWN TO ADVENTURE #7 (OF 8)
COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 8
DARK TOWER LONG ROAD HOME #1 (OF 5)
DC SPECIAL RAVEN #1 (OF 5)
DEAD SPACE #1 (OF 6)
DETECTIVE COMICS #842
DOCTOR WHO CLASSICS #4
DYNAMO 5 #11
END LEAGUE #2
EXTERMINATORS #27
GREEN LANTERN #28
GRIMM FAIRY TALES #23
HALLOWEEN NIGHTDANCE #2 CUNNINGHAM CVR B
INFINITY INC #7
INVINCIBLE PRESENTS ATOM EVE #2 (OF 2)
JONAH HEX #29
JUSTICE LEAGUE THE NEW FRONTIER SPECIAL
JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED #43
LOGAN #1 (OF 3)
LOONEY TUNES #160
LORDS OF AVALON SOD #2 (OF 6)
MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #37
MARVEL SPOTLIGHT HAMILTON MARTIN
MIDNIGHTER #17
MOON KNIGHT #16
NEW BATTLESTAR GALACTICA SEASON ZERO #6
NEW DYNAMIX #1 (OF 5)
NIGHTWING #142
NORTHLANDERS #4
OMEGA UNKNOWN #6 (OF 10)
OVERMAN #4 (OF 5)
PAINKILLER JANE #5
PAX ROMANA #2 (OF 4)
PENANCE RELENTLESS #5 (OF 5)
POWERS #28
PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #17
RESURRECTION #3
RIDE DIE VALKYRIE #3 (OF 3)
SAVAGE TALES #6
SCALPED #15
SCUD THE DISPOSABLE ASSASSIN #22
STREETS OF GLORY #4 (OF 6)
SUPERGIRL #27
TEEN TITANS YEAR ONE #3 (OF 6)
TERRY MOORES ECHO #1
TRAILER PARK OF TERROR COLOR SP #8
TWELVE #3 (OF 12)
UNCANNY X-MEN #496 DWS
VINYL UNDERGROUND #6
X-FORCE #2 DWS
YOUNG LIARS #1
ZOMBIES VS ROBOTS VS AMAZONS #3 (OF 3)

Books / Mags / Stuff
ARAB IN AMERICA TP
BAREFOOT GEN VOL 5 TP
BAREFOOT GEN VOL 6 TP
BECK MONGOLIAN CHOP SQUAD GN VOL 11 (OF 19)
CABLE CLASSIC TP VOL 01
CHRONICLES OF CONAN TP VOL 14
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG #29 ROGUE
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG #60 SUPER SKRULL
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG #61 SPIDER-WOMAN #61
COLLECTED AND THEN ONE DAY GN VOL 01
FABLES 1001 NIGHTS OF SNOWFALL SC
FORGOTTEN REALMS TP VOL 06 HALFLINGS GEM
GRAPHIC CLASSICS VOL 15 FANTASY CLASSICS
GUMBY TP VOL 01 (RES)
HAWKGIRL HATH SET TP
HAZED GN
HIGHWAYMEN TP
JANES WORLD TP VOL 08
JUSTICE LEAGUE NEW FRONTIER ANIMATED MOVIE REG ED DVD (NET)
JUSTICE LEAGUE NEW FRONTIER ANIMATED MOVIE SPEC ED DVD (NET)
MIXTAPE HC VOL 01 JIM MAHFOOD ART
NARUTO TP VOL 28
PLEASE MISS YURI GN (A)
RED PROPHET TALES OF ALVIN MAKER VOL 1 TP
SIZZLE #37 (A)
STAR TREK YEAR FOUR TP
STAR WARS LEGACY TP VOL 02 SHARDS
STAR WARS REBELLION TP VOL 02 AHAKISTA GAMBIT
SUPERMAN THE MAN OF STEEL TP VOL 06
SWALLOW BOOK FOUR
ULTIMATE POWER HC
UNHUMAN ELEPHANTMEN ART OF LADRONN HC
WONDER WOMAN WHO IS WONDER WOMAN HC (RES)
X-MEN VS APOCALYPSE TP VOL 01 THE TWELVE


What looks good to YOU?

-B

Labels: Brian, Shipping Lists

Click Here to Read More...

The only letter I ever had published in a comic book was in Transmetropolitan. I don't remember the issue but I'm pretty sure it's issue #16, above--this cover of Spider as The Statue of Liberty rings some bells. Somewhere, Ellis had written about the '92 election race that was currently underway, and posited a pretty good theory about who gets to be President. (As I recall, the theory is basically, "Whoever wants it the most, gets it." Clinton, Ellis pointed out, wanted the Presidency in a way Bush I didn't.

I wrote back a response suggesting that, in fact, what we were seeing from Bush was petulance--the speed with which we devoured news media had changed, and what had been some very classic re-election gambits had fallen flat because of it. Consequently, Bush was upset and frustrated by having done everything right and still losing. Because I mentioned Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 of which Ellis is a fan (although is there anyone who reads that book who doesn't become a fan?), and maybe because I laid on the Transmet rah-rah thick at the end (hey, what can I say? I was a fan), Ellis ran the letter.

Last week, getting ready to leave Buenos Aires, I saw this Obama ad that repurposes dialogue from Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

Think these two bits of trivia--my letter in a comic book, and a political ad that takes language from a comic book--justify me writing about the Presidential election on a comic book blog? If not, don't follow me after the jump.



I suppose another connection between Presidential campaigns and comic books--superhero books in particular, I'm thinking--is the true and pressing need for character and continuity: just as Marvel and DC must make turn out dozens of stories a year about Batman or Spider-Man and make sure the heroes remain "in character," so too must the people running presidential campaigns create a "character" out of the running politician with which the public can identify (or at least consistently recognize), and tell dozens of stories about that character from one state to the next, from one puff piece to the next, from one debate to the next.

The stories a political campaign tells about a candidate are either variations on one story or smaller stories that reinforce a larger narrative, and while the details of the narrative may vary, but the point of every political narrative is the same: this politician has earned the right to hold the position they're running for, and their experiences will ensure they will represent the people in doing so. Because the point of the narrative is the same for every person running (and every superhero), the creation of character, the public's attachment to this character, and the degree to which the narrative's details resonate with the current concerns of the public, are what allows politicians (and superheroes) to survive and/or thrive in their respective arenas. These things distinguish them.

Consequently, the first move of the opposition is usually to point out areas of contradiction between the created persona and the actual person, pointing to incidents in the politician's past that do not gibe with the current persona; the opposition uses continuity to back up their condemnation of the politician, similar to the way an outraged fanboy might use continuity to condemn a current handling of a superhero as "out of character." If an opponent can't undermine the created persona, they might attack the candidate's narrative by trying to convince the public that their concerns aren't the concerns the narrative addresses.

My letter to Ellis all those years ago talked about how Bush's petulance stemmed from doing all the work to create a narrative for the upcoming election--that of a successful military commander who had led the country into and through a successful military operation--to no avail whatsoever. Unfortunately for Bush, the period of good will created by a small, successful military operation had been drastically reduced by the influence of CNN and the public's exposure to 24 hour news--the exposure meant a story's hook became stale more quickly, and Bush entered the election with the successful gulf war as "old news," and the troubled economy as what people really cared about.

Bush was also frustrated and petulant because the only successful weapon his campaign had against Bill Clinton--Clinton's infidelity--was checked by Bush's own profligate tendencies: the Democrats had info that strongly suggested Bush had continued, at least through his vice-presidency, to keep a mistress, and so the issue of morality never entered into the '92 election.

Bush had been handicapped by both his own indulgence and a change in the culture he couldn't have predicted. No wonder he seemed resentful, angry and dismissive during the '92 campaign, and no wonder he lost. His re-election narrative held no power, and the conflict between his public persona and his private character had left him unable to attack his opponent.

Now, although I'm an Obama man (with some reluctance) and have very little patience for Hillary Clinton, I find the "I Am Hope" ad more than a little depressing, not least because it highlights for me the degree to which Hillary, like Bush I, has had her narrative derailed.

I couldn't tell you for how long Hillary has been planning her campaign (I'm gonna guess it's been at least since '96) but I can tell you it was pretty obvious what her campaign narrative was going to be: her election to president was going to be a historic achievement--not for her, but for the country. Making her the first woman president would show how far the U.S. had come in gender relations. It was going to be an unavoidable sign of a new day in American politics, and it would imply a centuries long struggle between the genders was if not over, then at least at the beginning of its end. The goal from (let's say) '96 on was to acquire enough practical political experience to check the naysayers who would try to derail this narrative as so much glitter and happy hippie smoke.

However, just as Bush I was unprepared for 24 hour news cycle to erode gulf war good will, Hillary was unprepared for Barack Obama to enter the campaign and, essentially, usurp her narrative. Suddenly everything Hillary would've been saying about her campaign was being said by Obama; the only angle she really had was to fall back on was her practical political experience, and attacking Obama's narrative, suggesting that her narrative, not his, was the one that mattered most to the public.

The "I Am Hope" banner ad suggests how well that's going for her. Throw in her own character failings (from what I can tell, Hillary, like many lawyers, reserves her charm and grace for those she believes to be equals and superiors but isn't nearly as good with those serving under her--Washington is supposedly littered with secret service men who'll complain bitterly she turned them into baggage handlers and errand boys, dismissing their job duties as secondary to the chores she assigned them), and Hillary is now in the role of Choronzon, smug demonlord brought low by the prince of dreams. Considering all the years she expected to be playing the Morpheus role, I find it kinda painful, kinda like the way it's painful to watch the worst kid in acting class (who's of course convinced he's the best) see the casting sheet and realize he's not going to be playing the lead.

The Democratic race for the nomination isn't over yet, but it could be very soon. If it ends with Obama taking the nomination, will Hillary be able to re-craft her persona to make a suitable running mate? Will she be able to mesh her narrative with Obama's?

I wish I could take this entry the extra mile and bring Neil Gaiman's Sandman back into all this, but it's been too long since I last read the series and the books aren't nearby. But isn't Sandman about, among other things, the usurpation of narrative? I'm thinking here of the early arcs in particular where stories are never resolved by Morpheus in the way his enemies intend, and frequently open characters to a new understanding of their place in their universe. In Sandman, the loss of one's intended narrative and the revelation of one's true character is usually a beneficial thing. In presidential campaigns, it frequently is not.

Labels: Jeff, politics, sandman, transmet

Click Here to Read More...

There is, I guess, something to be said for consistency of vision. For example, that’s probably the best thing about KICK-ASS #1, which otherwise could be easily described as “everything you’ve already read by Mark Millar in one comic”. Never mind his by-now-traditional unrealistic dialogue that mistakes unpleasantness and swearing for realism; there’s actual thematic threads in here from his other books, not least of which is Millar’s favorite “watching lead character transcend reality, which is mundane and soul-destroying,” this time managed through the power of self-belief and beating up black guys (Am I the only person who got nervous that the first thing the character did as a superhero was go out, find three black kids and call them “homos”? I can’t tell if I was meant to take that as an example that the main character is a nervous white kid with issues or that the writer was one, to be honest).



It’s definitely the ultimate Mark Millar comic, in the same way that The Invisibles remains the ultimate Grant Morrison comic – Something that sums up, demonstrates and exaggerates all of his writerly fetishes and ticks, but without the self-awareness (or, perhaps, the demonstrated self-awareness) that Morrison brought to his series. It’s almost as if Millar sat down and tried to write some genetically-engineered mutant version of everything he’s done before: Want to see Chosen’s unassuming teen protagonist discover the great things that he’s unwittingly destined for, but for those great things to be laced with Wanted’s self-conscious depressive “grim and gritty realism”? Want to see the random pop-cultural references that made The Ultimates so up-to-the-six-months-ago (Seriously, what was with that “I say that as Buffy fan numero uno” scene? What kid anywhere would call themselves anything “numero uno”?)? Want to see the weird, naïve belief in the power of superheroes from Superman Adventures? It’s all in here! And it all plays together relatively well, but none of it is interesting – It’s all just dully nasty, like Michael Jackson had decided to remake “Fight Club,” but make it about super-heroes; we’ve seen it before and there’s no new here to make us care this time around.

(The art by John Romita Jr. is nice enough, but it’s almost too comic-booky for the story that they seem to want to tell – I can’t really buy into the idea that the beating is anything other than familiar cartoon violence, because it just looks like Peter Parker being beaten up really badly by one of his villains. Again, I don’t know if that’s intentional, or whether that confusion is acting against the idea of the book.)

Overall, though, how you feel about Millar will dictate how you feel about the book. If you love everything he’s done, then chances are you’ll love it. Otherwise, it’s just Eh.

Labels: Graeme

Click Here to Read More...

In which we reach nearly the same grade in very different ways, although even when the grade is the same, its never really the same, you know?

Batman #674: In which writer Grant Morrison is kind enough to provide an 'explanation issue' for most of what's been going on across his run. Honestly, he maybe goes a bit far with it - I sure could have done without Batman putting together the pieces of The Mystery of the Three Fake Batmen via captions and flashbacks, immediately followed by Commissioner Gordon and a beat cop repeating exactly the same information via dialogue, in case anyone didn't get it the first time around. I shouldn't complain, though - too often for me, this run has seemed less an actual story than Grant Morrison inviting me to flip through his notebooks, after which I think, "gee, this'll be pretty neat once he actually writes it!" For a lot of these chapters, everything about the comic has been interesting except, sadly, for the comic.



Still, there's been some fairly great moments (with one truly front-to-back fine release in #666), and issues like this leave me confident that things may yet gel in the end. There's dramatic build in this one, a little detective puzzling and narrow escaping, and a smart, minimally sketched look at villain Doctor Hurt, an Evil Creator seemingly straight out of Seven Soldiers, who accomplishes much mischief with his paranoia-fueled knockoff Batmen.

At this point, it's not exactly reading deep to see this run as a mirror image of Morrison's work on All Star Superman: the history of each series is marshaled, the prime threats are alternate versions of the main heroes, and hell - both are even going to climax with the title characters facing down death. And the second-most interesting thing about Batman is that Morrison is mostly throwing concerns for serialization and easy access to the wind in order to whip up a big, sloppy History of the Bat around Bruce Wayne's struggle toward the future, bedeviled primarily by The Gun-Toting Batman or A Knightfall-ish Batman But Also Bane, along with a son he never knew about, the result of a storyline he'd seemed to forget about. Aren't they all imaginary stories?

In contrast, All Star Superman is Morrison on his 'best' behavior, matching the goodness and light of Superman with easy-access, one-or-two-issue stories that often follow a template for confrontation and (mostly) peaceable resolution -- to a somewhat dulling effect, recently -- while keeping the narrative squarely on character interactions. It's a vastly less difficult superhero book, and maybe part of that's because Morrison isn't under the shared-universe gun.

Which brings me around to the most interesting about Batman: isn't it something that the out-of-continuity All Star Superman sees its kindly hero always striving to make good with his doppelgangers and bits of history, while the in-continuity Batman has its grittier struggling and bleeding against mostly the same forces, as if the crap from the past might yet rise up and ruin all he's done, transforming him (if only through substitution, a la Damian in #666) into something awful. This wouldn't be the first time Morrison's fretted metaphorically over where the shared-universe characters he works on will go once he's gone -- Seven Soldiers has an element of that, and even a creator-owned project like Seaguy touches on it -- but it's especially striking on such a high-profile book, with such a high-profile contrast running at the same time.

GOOD issue here, hopefully clawing its way up toward something really whole and compelling.

(and meanwhile, on the other side of Gotham...)

All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder #9: It's nice to see this series getting past its extra-long setup for a one-off issue; its strengths and weaknesses definitely stand out more clearly in the short form.

The plot is quite simple: cackling tricksters Batman and Robin(, the Boy Wonder) want to get the rest of the nascent DCU's superheroes off their back, so they confront Green Lantern -- who, by writer Frank Miller's take, is the dumbest, lamest, most ridiculous bag of nonsense ever to wear a superhero costume -- by painting themselves yellow from head to toe and inviting him to a talk in a yellow room, at which point they taunt him while drinking tall glasses of lemonade, eating what look to be corn chips, and reading comics featuring... wait for it... the Yellow Kid. It all goes well until the not-yet Wonderful Boy accidentally crunches Hal's throat, forcing everyone to break character and perform emergency surgery in the Yellow Room.



As usual, Miller's jokes range from corny gags to amusing throwaway lines to characterizations seemingly custom-designed to annoy large portions of the DC comics readership. It's also pretty self-indulgent in a 'writerly' sense, in that pages often groan under reams of words - bubbles, captions, newspaper clippings, etc. I wonder if the creative team has become acutely aware of this, though, since penciller Jim Lee is now detailing sight gags and the like, all in his hewn-from-marble approach with longtime inker Scott Williams. This density of visual information might also double as a way to compensate for the fact that over a third of the issue is splash pages of some type.

Aw, but All Star Batman wouldn't be itself if it wasn't so loud and gregarious, and somewhat nasty - the Dynamic Duo's 'daddy hits me because he loves me' interdependence is extra-queasy, although Miller's portrayal of early superheroes and supervillains trying out personas and playacting their way into legend is getting oddly compelling. OKAY, if you will.

And god, those last five pages where All Star Batman gets serious and Our Heroes cradle each other while shedding manly tears over all they've lost in life... has Miller been reading Kazuo Koike again?!

Labels: Jog

Click Here to Read More...

Our second book is one that I hadn't read in nearly 20 years before opening it back up yesterday. The book is extremely well known, but, at a guess, the vast majority of Comix Experience regulars have never read it. It is one of the oldest continually-in-print comics on the American market, too.

More after the jump!



art speigelman's MAUS is a very important book. I mean I know, "duh" and all, but it really is the best known comic in the "real world", having won the Pulitzer; but it's also entirely important as a piece of work, both as a piece of reportage and history, as well as a completely honest piece of autobiography.

Some people complain about the anthropomorphics, but I think the distance they create from the subject is a good and necessary one, because the book is as least as much of a story of Vladek Speigelman of the "now" (although he passes in the middle of the book) as it is of the atrocities of "then".

I had totally forgotten, in the 20 years since I last read MAUS, how much of the book is set in "now" -- it's a comic about the Holocaust, after all, and that's what it is "best known for"; but on this read, it was all the "current" auto-bio that struck me more.

art spiegelman is brutally honest in his relationship with his father and how he perceives him, and what his faults are -- modern Vladek is not portrayed as a wonderful human being in the slightest. He's racist, grasping, penny-pinching, inflexible.

And yet he's a hero. Everyone who survived the concentration camps is, but Vladek is portrayed as nearly super-human in his cleverness, thrift, trust of his fellows, and inventiveness -- he does things and survives situations which are mind-boggling to me, and is portrayed doing it nearly with panache.

Its the dichotomy of those two portrayals, and speigelman's honesty in his conflict about them that makes this one of the most powerful comics of the twentieth century. Had it "just" been about the Holocaust it would still be an important book, because it's important that we never forget the types of atrocity that man can rain on his fellow man, but it's the acknowledgment that even a heroic survivor like Vladek is just as human (good and ill) as the rest of us that's the real heart of the book.

MAUS is an essential book for any store to stock, and for any comics reader to read.

-B

Labels: Around the Store, Brian

Click Here to Read More...

Lewis Trondheim's diary comics are so good I'm actually posting a puke joke here.




My first exposure to Lewis Trondheim was Mister O, which is one of the funniest things I've ever read--the first time I looked at it, there were at least two or three pages that made me laugh so hard I was lying on the floor gasping--and I've been skimming bits of his enormous catalogue ever since, trying to find something I like as much. (The sequel Mister I wasn't anywhere near as good, and I'm sort of mystified by A.L.I.E.E.E.N.) Most of his hundred-plus books aren't available in English; if you're reading this and you know which of his books are worth seeking out in French, feel free to recommend some stuff in the comments.

Little Nothings is 120 pages' worth of his diary comics, which he posts every few days at his blog, and they're some of the best diary comics I've seen. They don't have the same kind of broad humor as other books of his, but they're perceptive, totally charming, and exquisitely drawn--he draws himself as some kind of bird (and everyone else as animals too, which means that every drawing of a character is a little sight gag). His artwork here is deceptively simple--pen-and-ink line drawings, shaded with watercolors--but the coloring gives a great sense of lighting, and usually underscores the jokes, too. Look at the puke joke again: the splotches of yellow capture the effect of late-night streetlights, direct the eye toward Trondheim and his friends, and quietly recapitulate the gag while they're at it.

What I think I like best about it is Trondheim's attitude toward himself, which is always tricky to negotiate when you're drawing your own immediate experiences and then showing them to the world. He's amused by himself, but not particularly self-important; he's sometimes the butt of his jokes, but there's never really a sense of self-loathing. The root of his humor is his awareness of how his own mind works. It's funny when he sits on a train, watching people run for it, and then bursts into a sweat, wondering "And me? Am I on the train? Did I make it on time?" But it's even funnier when he realizes that he asks himself the same question every time.

A good-sized chunk of the book can be read here, in reverse order, which may make some of Trondheim's running gags confusing. If you can read French (or just like his drawings), his current blog entries are here, and use the weirdest and funniest system for dealing with old entries I've ever encountered. It's definitely low-key--if you want ambition from Trondheim, there's the Dungeon series, which I've yet to read most of--but it's Excellent.

Labels: Douglas

Click Here to Read More...

I have a plan.

With the idea of having as much fresh content on the Savage Critic site as possible, I'm going to ATTEMPT to do a post-a-day for the month of March. These may not appear strictly every 24 hours, but I'm going to try.

I've decided the theme is going to be "31 classic graphic novels", trying to show the range and breadth of comics material that's available to a 21st century comics shop.

Please join me after the jump!



I opened Comix Experience in April of 1989.

There really weren't a lot of graphic novels available back then -- I think there were under twenty items that were in print and perpetually available at that point.

I still have a copy of my first order form that I placed right before opening the store, and on that order form DC offered for the very first time Alan Moore's SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING.

So, let's make that our first book.

It's tempting to say that SWAMP THING revolutionized comics -- certainly, it was the blueprint for Vertigo, and it showed you could do literate comics aimed at adults THAT WOULD SELL -- but what sort of amazes me is that twenty-four years later, the work really still holds up. There is plenty of "good stuff" from even ten years ago that I'll read and think "oh god, I liked this?!?" Not so with SWAMP THING -- this is still the shit.

Moore took a pretty incredibly two-dimensional character ("He's a monster that thinks he's a man!") and not only made it well-rounded and exciting, but built a new and innovative mythology that would last for another 150 issues (as well as 20 and 29 issues, respectively of follow up series), and would go on to influence many books and characters in the DC Universe "proper" (I'd say John Ostrander ran with the concepts the most, both in FIRESTORM and SUICIDE SQUAD), as well as creating a spin-off star in John Constantine whose HELLBLAZER just hit issue #241 this very week.

SWAMP THING showed that commercial comics could be "writerly", where omniscient-narrator captions could build mood and tone, and that they didn't just have to reiterate what was going on with the art (Like, say, the EC comics of the 1950s), but that they could counterpoint and embellish upon what you were seeing. SWAMP THING was also one of the first comics to strongly think in terms of pages, rather than panels, where words and phrases at the bottom of one page would lead you effortlessly into a completely different scene on the next page. That's a very common trick in today's narratives, but in 1984 it was a rare and wondrous thing.

I'm talking a lot about the writing here, but the art is equally wonderful -- Stephen Bissette, John Totleben (and, later Rick Veitch, Stan Woch, Alfredo Alcala, Tom Yeates, Shawn McManus, and others) brought mood and style, creeping horror, and transcendent joy to the page. Whether the subject was insane vegetable gods, demons that fed off and manifested as fear, or simple domestic bliss in the swamps, Moore's collaborators consistently brought their A-Game to the work. Vertigo went on to be known, by and large, as a "writer's imprint", but in these early days the art is at least as important to the bottom line, and it holds up wonderfully against Moore's expressive prose.

Also worthy of note is the lettering by John Costanza and Todd Klein where it is often clear who is talking JUST from the shapes of the speech bubbles. I know this sort of sounds silly in 2008, but it was really transformative in 1984, where very little of that was being done.

I should also single out colorist Tatjana Wood who did WONDERS with the limited color palette they had to work with back then. In particular, issue #56's "My Blue Heaven" (reprinted in SWAMP THING v5: Earth to Earth) which does astonishing things with extraordinarily limited tones.

SWAMP THING, I don't think, gets the respect today that it deserves in terms of the numbers of things it changed and impacted about modern mainstream comics; certainly for Comix Experience it sells just a tiny fraction of better known Moore works like WATCHMEN, V FOR VENDETTA, or LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN. Everyone has a hard-on for MIRACLEMAN, but that has an awkward start, and a really rough middle section, while SWAMP THING is nearly home-run after home-run -- even the weakest points of the narrative (the monster-of-the-month nature of "American Gothic", a chunk or two of the Swamp-Thing-In-Space section) show a verve and daring and love of turning things on their head with bold experiments that is missing from most comics today.

Next year is the 25th anniversary of Moore's SWAMP THING, and I really hope that DC does something special to capitalize upon it, and refocus people's eyes on just how good these comics really are. At the least, I'm hoping that an Absolute Edition is possible for these pre-digital comics.

There are six volumes of Moore's SWAMP THING available, comprising his entire epic, as well as three volumes (so far) of Rick Veitch's solo run on the book. Each and every one of them is worth your hard earned money.

-B

Labels: Around the Store, Brian

Click Here to Read More...

I had reasonably high hopes for this one, but the result is pretty much the definition of a bad movie pitch in the form of a graphic novel.



The premise of Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece's Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery is very loosely based on the experiences of Walter Francis White, the executive secretary of the NAACP from 1931 to 1955, who passed for Caucasian--he was blond and blue-eyed--which meant that he could collect information on the KKK and lynchings, at a great deal of personal risk. (White wrote what sounds like a fascinating book of reportage about lynching, with the hasn't-aged-well title Rope and Faggot; it's worth reading both some horrifying letters from Time readers about a review of it and White's deadpan response.) SPOILERS FOLLOW, got it?

The story, though, turns a potentially interesting premise into a bludgeoningly far-fetched potboiler. Zane Pinchback, the White stand-in here, decides to go out for one last lynching exposé to rescue his darker-skinned twin brother, who's been charged with murdering a white woman in Mississippi. (The story is set at a time that the narrator describes on the first page as "now, since the beginning of the '30s," but would appear to be before the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.) Zane heads down from New York with a comedy-relief friend who might as well be wearing a bright red shirt reading "I AM GOING TO DIE VIOLENTLY SOMETIME AROUND THE END OF THE SECOND ACT THANKS TO A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY," investigates, and discovers that things are Not What They Seem. The allegedly dead woman was actually his brother's lover, but actually the body dressed up in her clothes wasn't hers at all, but belonged to a sheriff's deputy who was actually a woman "pretending to be a man so she could live without limitations." It's all about the theme of Passing DO YOU SEE.

Also, at some point someone seems to have decided that, for a story in which color and skin tone are all-important, it would be perversely appropriate for the artwork to be black and white with no tones (and almost no cross-hatching to indicate shade). As it turns out, it's just perverse. It might work if Pleece were much, much better at drawing facial features, but Zane and Alonzo, who are supposed to be identifiably brothers but have very different skin colors, both have vaguely defined features and identical skin colors on the page. Johnson's dialogue is as creaky as his plot ("That weren't no angel. 'Least not the kind that comes from above"), and Pleece's artwork is much too stiff and brittle to mask the creaks. So, yeah, Awful, I'm afraid. But it's already been optioned as a movie, so mission accomplished.

Click Here to Read More...