We met at where the cable cars turn around on California at Market, Hibbs and Paul and Anina, Graeme and myself. As it turned out, we ended up talking and leaning against the small monument built there for Robert Frost, the poet who so famously wrote about roads not taken and miles to go before you sleep, and etc., etc. An hour earlier, I'd sat by myself behind the ferry building, staring at the Bay Bridge, and tried very hard to think about Rory Root being dead at fifty.



I've lived long enough to know I don't process death in anything like an efficient way: I've looked down at the dead bodies of close friends and death is still an abstraction to me, something I understand intermittently. It's like two thrashing sides of a severed power line that only occasionally touch and connect and when they do, I realize this thing that has haunted me through my life--the idea I shall end--is something that has happened to people I know and I'll never see them again. But mostly, the idea is too large for my simplistic worldview, and while I'm not happy with that, the experience of losing people close to me has forced me to accept it. I grieve when those wires connect and the realization comes through, and when they don't connect I think of that person just as someone I haven't seen in a while, out there about in the world, talking, laughing.

It seemed important, though, on that beautiful summer day to look at the Bay Bridge and think of Rory Root being dead, to try and measure and see if it was a weight against which I could judge the fairness and unfairness of things in the world. It seemed unfair, for example, that Rory could be dead on such an impossibly lovely day--a day where San Francisco weather had called in sick, and Texas weather had shown up to fill in, the clouds vertiginously high and the breeze as warm on one's neck as a lover's breath. It seemed outrageous to the point of blasphemy that Rory would not see this day. And because the wires weren't connecting, I thought about the outrageousness of all the people who had died who would never see a San Francisco day like this, and how I, out of some odd parsing of the lots, could, and could also sit on a bench and think about exactly that because for some reason I was still alive.

At the cable car turnaround, we went underground and caught BART over to Berkeley. Although the platform where we waited was cool and breezy, BART itself felt like someone stoked a fire under us with the intention of slow-roasting alive everyone inside. We sweated and swayed as the train wavered on the tracks like a heat mirage, and Graeme and Brian talked about what might happen with Dan Didio and DC.

As we came out into the pungent Berkeley afternoon, Graeme said to me, "You know, I never make it over to Berkeley as much as I should. And when I do, I can never decide if Berkeley is great or skeevy. Or both." The man with four teeth in his head and the piss-yellow beard went on to underscore Graeme's point by insisting we give him money. And the more I thought about what Graeme had said, the more I realized how much that point resonated with me. I didn't make it over to Berkeley as much I meant to, either, and it wasn't just the convenience of living in San Francisco, that roguishly charming impersonator of a world-class city. Something about Berkeley set me on edge, but I couldn't say what it was. So I thought about it as we moved up to the entrance of Comic Relief, where people stood out on the walk, talking and drinking and smoking. The memorial had begun at 5, the testimonial for Rory's at 6, and we had shown up a little after 7, to see all these people on the sidewalk, making pleasant small talk and shaking hands and hugging one another. Hibbs stepped up to immediate greetings. Graeme and I stood to the side of the doors, looked at everyone and then went in to hear people talk about Rory.

The store had trapped the heat of the day, as well as all the people inside, and it felt even hotter than the BART ride over. A woman wearing Rory attire (black hat, black t-shirt) with Scandinavian features stood behind the back issue counter and talked--not quite loudly enough--about Rory and his love of Swedish meatballs. I assumed at the time but never confirmed that it was Rory's sister, and this is something you should keep in mind about my recounting of this night: my mind still refuses to confirm or deny the identities I assigned to each person. I can't say for certain it was Bob Wayne who talked travel benefits with Anina Bennett, or Shaenon Garrity, heart-stoppingly elegant in a gorgeous green dress, who walked quickly out of Comic Relief with tears in her eyes. But my mind continues to tell me it must've been, there was no one else it could be. Mortality had rendered everyone at Rory's memorial important and mysterious and fragile and powerful, and I guess some part of me refuses to negate any part of that with something so trivial as knowledge. The very obvious (but no less true for that) analogy would be picking up a superhero comic for the first time, and trying to infer how all the colorful characters related by what they said to one another, how they reacted, and even with the occasional assistance of a blatant bit of introduction. Even people I knew seemed somehow strange and new, and so I can make no true claims for people's identity that night, not even my own: I wandered about, watchful and sweaty and silent, not quite sure I recognized myself.

While the people outdoors laughed and smoked, the people with the too-quiet voices continued to stand and speak about Rory (underneath a poster of The Inifinity Man, Jack Kirby's strangely impassive hero, the one who resembles an Aztec Warrior crossed with a '56 Chrysler) and all the things Rory loved: Swedish meatballs, military histories, his customers, comic books, bad puns, talking. "He loved, well, he loved just about everyone," one speaker said, and the way she said "everyone" caused a surprisingly fresh wound of anguish in my heart.

For a moment, those interior power lines snapped together before slicing apart and putting me outside myself again, making me again someone sweaty and uneasy and out of place. And yet I was filled for whatever reason with the hubris that if I got up and spoke, I could say what none of the speakers had yet to say. I could say something that could put everything in context, that could be notable for its candor but without cruelty, forthright and yet gentle.

Because this is the other thing I've learned about myself in seeing friends and family and casual acquaintances die over the years: I've come less and less to care about the love. It is well and fine, of course, and it is in fact very, very important for us to talk about how we love the person who is gone and how that person loved us. But for the most part, talking only about love and laughter and bravery and success renders the person who has passed as flat as a pop song. The older I get, what makes people alive for me is everything we usually don't talk about at a memorial--a person's failures, the prickly edges of their angers and resentments, the resonant tones of their shortcomings and pains. And this is what kept me from standing up and saying anything at Rory's service and what makes me feel uncomfortable and creepy as I sit here typing this, because one of the things that makes Rory Root most alive to me in my mind--both as he lived and now that he's dead--can be summed up in this question: why did someone so kind and loving and prominent in his field seem so lonely and in such terrible health?

Later, outside in the night, watching Joe Field hold his two daughters close and smile and nod, I saw a woman march determinedly through the crowd, her eyes on the ground in front of her. She was about Rory's age--fifty--and she clutched to her chest two hardcover books so throroughly marked with blue post-it notes they seemed feathered. Watching her pass, I finally figured out the discomfort I felt in Berkeley.

If you live in San Francisco, you deal with a lot of people who went to U.C. Berkeley. Frequently, they are people who seem to command a certain amount of money and prestige and seem entirely comfortable with it. And even if they don't take that path, they have both a knowledge and a network--whether they want it or not--that seems to keep them from, say, attending a political fundraiser without bumping into someone with whom they went to school.

But Berkeley is like a low-grade singularity--objects of sufficient speed can hurtle right by with only the most minor change in trajectory, but some objects get caught and swept in, and the last you see of them is right at the point of an event horizon from which they'll never return. These are the people who stick in your mind when you go to Berkeley, people who went there and never escaped, who found some passion that overwhelmed them, outweighed their trajectory. You see them dressed in second-hand clothes, clutching a rare edition of Goethe's letters in which they've made notes in three languages. You spot them sitting at cafes, one leg jiggling like a telegram key while they pick out their change with unwashed hands, calculating the cost of a refill. Their teeth are a mess. They have an impressively substantial mole or perhaps a single long white hair that juts from their eyebrows and sways in the corner of their vision.

I have no reason to fear these people. I don't even have any reason to pity them--who am I to say that their life, empty but for a dizzily powerful passion, is worse than mine? Isn't it just as likely that whatever wild passions and commitments they carry make their lives better, richer? But, with a childish superstition, I fear staying too long in Berkeley because there's not nearly enough distance between myself and those men and women, their tiny apartments stacked with sour-smelling books, as I would like. I fear staying in Berkeley because of the fear that I am them already, and just haven't realized it yet.

And so it is for me with Rory Root, a man I could not have loved so much if I did not in some way fear, a man who I could not have respected so much if at some level he did not make me ashamed. Because Rory was in such poor health the entire time I knew him it never failed to tap a tuning fork of dread in my heart. Rory was in such poor health that one of the things that shocked me about his passing was that I was shocked, and this I think is one of the real reasons why, unlike in so many other memorials and testimonies about the deceased, talking about all the many ways Rory loved and was loved by people is not only necessary but vital: Rory's love and knowledge and compassion and generosity transcended every way in which his poor health terrified me. To say talking with Rory moved me from fear to compassion is both cheesy and, fortunately, untrue: the generosity with which Rory spoke, and the gentle, cheerful knowingness with which Rory spoke, moved me from fear to something like religious awe. It can take the power of being born to them to make our love for our parents conquer the frustrations we might have with them in later life, or transcend the horror of the agony with which their old age might bring. For me, all it took with Rory was about ninety seconds of conversation. It is a tremendously old cliche (and annoyingly new-agey) but I can think of no other way to say it: Rory Root was a lifeforce, someone who conveyed to me so much of what it meant to be alive, almost entirely (but not entirely) for the better. My memories of him seem more vivid to me than they do of other people, as if they were shot with a larger lens on better film. And the love he brought to his life was so all-encompassing, I knew whether I stood outside the shop ignoring the testimonials, or pilfering a few too many oreo cookies for the ride home, or idly straightening the comics on the new comics rack--it was all too easy to imagine him encouraging me to do so.

It's funny. That night I asked Charles Brownstein if he had given a testimonial and he shook his head. "Let's face it, those things are almost always either therapy for the speaker or just self-aggrandizement," he said, to which I agreed emphatically and with relief. But having reread what I have written until now, I cannot say I've done any better and may have done far worse. And I'll be honest: I started with the idea of linking the singularity of Berkeley to the singularity which is the comic field, in the hopes of finding some clear link between Rory's loneliness and poor health and some facet of the comics field I figured I would nail down in the course of writing. (The hard-knock life of retailers who've been in the field since near the beginning, maybe.) But I've reached the end here, and not only do I still not know what it is, I doubt I could fairly make that conclusion. It is very easy and satisfying to take the single context in which one knows a person and suggest that context is the reason for everything about what they do and will do and have done. It is also, I suspect, usually wrong.

Robert Frost wrote a sonnet entitled "On A Bird Singing In Its Sleep," in which the poet meditates on a bird that sings in the night. One interpretation of the poem is that Frost at first draws a comparison between a bird and its song (and its seeming frailty) and human beings and the poetry we create (and our frailty), but by the end of the poem he rejects that comparison ("It could not have come down to us so far/ Through the interstices of things ajar/ On the long bead chain of repeated birth/ To be a bird while we are men on earth / If singing out sleep and dream that way/ Had made it much more easily a prey.")

And so I reject my initial half-hearted thesis, easy and satisfying though it might have been to make it. At one point during the night, Brian looked the length of Comic Relief to the far end where Todd Martinez, the store manager who Rory had made owner, rang up customers. And Brian said, "I really want to talk to Todd about his plans for running this place. I think the best way we can honor Rory is to make sure Comic Relief always stays open." Although he only said it around Charles Brownstein and myself, I have no doubt nearly every retailer who'd made an appearance that night, having traveled from many distant cities--Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, Missoula, among others--would've agreed with him.

And in fact, right before I left at around eleven or so, I saw Hibbs talking to Todd in the back by the coolers, flanked by Charles Brownstein and Larry Marder. Todd sat, exhausted, while Brian knelt next to him, and Charles and Larry flanked Todd's opposite side, their heads bowed. I wasn't fooled by the coolers, the sweat stains, the crenulated pans of aluminum and their cooling tides of barbecued beef: the positioning of the people was precisely that of a classical painting where the elders of a court advise a boyish new king on the kingdom he must run. The old king had passed, and now the new king held sway. And I saw in the postures of these men an imperative, a tradition, in which one can (I hope) find a solace that no bird singing in the night could ever begin to understand. Perhaps these traditions--these communities--can help all of us, by means large and small, as we make our way toward the dark destinations our hearts hold forth as inevitable.

Labels: Brian, Jeff, Rory Root

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From time to time, it's been suggested in our comments that we post follow-up reviews of story arcs after reviewing them in issue-by-issue fashion for so long, as a way to see whether or not the whole thing came out in the wash. The Inventory doesn't quite do that but it's close: I'm so far behind on my non-manga reading that I thought I might review a batch of purchased issues of a single title at one go and see how they shape up.

First up, The Immortal Iron Fist #10-#14, plus The Immortal Iron Fist annual.

As you may remember, I've been a fan of Iron Fist from way, way back (like back when Claremont and Byrne first worked on the character) so I was delighted when writers Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction, and artist David Aja tackled the character by crafting a story arc that re-examined the character's origin and took it as the jumping off point for an epic story that spun backwards in time even as it moved forward.

Part of what thrilled me about that it was unabashedly such a classic piece of Marvel storytelling: when I was growing up, Marvel characters were always having their origins re-examined, the gaps of believability being grouted over with more backstory and, whenever possible, more continuity. (The examples that stand out the most for me are both from Steve Englehart: his sprawling storyline in Avengers that revealed the true history of the Vision; and that great Captain America story that puts the Captain America of Marvel's '50s comics in continuity.) That stuff will probably always resonate with me, but never more so than when I was at the age where I was starting to figure out the underlying cause and effect in the world around me. There comes some point when it really sinks in that everything existed before you came into the world, and that everything has a history, and the effect is a little bit like those Marvel epics: even as you're moving forwards, this epic backstory of the world is spinning out before you simultaneously.

The first six issues of The Immortal Iron Fist have Danny Rand, the current Iron Fist, meet Orson Randall, the previous Iron Fist, and discover the true nature of his origin. At the end of it, he's whisked away to the magical city of K'un L'un where he was raised, so he may fight in the Tournament of Heavenly Cities. Issues #7-14 show that tournament, re-introduce us to K'un L'un and the political struggle behind its facade, introduce the other Heavenly Cities which are tied to K'un L'un, as well as the champions of those cities, fill in the backstory with Danny's dad and Davos, the villain of the first arc, and, in the end, set the warriors of the tournament and the warriors of K'un L'un against the forces of Hydra.

It's all audacious as hell, jammed to the gills with characters and action, cool fights and finishing moves. Even with the wit and insouciance of Fraction's dialogue, these issues of Immortal Iron Fist feel like Scott Pilgrim's deadpan cousin: Hong Kong movies from the '80s and '90s, video games, and Marvel comics all hold equal sway over the proceedings. At its best, the book becomes almost operatic while still being cobbled of out of little more than thirty years of beloved pop culture detritus.

Yet, weirdly, by the time I'd plowed through issues #10-14 (and the Annual, must not forget the Annual), I found myself simultaneously satiated and hungry, pleased and grouchy, content and unsettled. While comics have many, many advantages over movies and videogames, several of the biggest differences can work to their disadvantage: neither movies nor video games are assembled in a linear fashion, and the work on the slam-bang finale can be the first task undertaken. Also, comics both benefit and suffer from being the product of a much smaller team of creative personnel--when a member of the team takes a powder or loses interest, the change in the product is noticeable.

All of which is a fancy-dan way of saying that in issue #10, artist David Aja contributes fifteen pages, and Kano contributes five. By issue #13, Aja contributes three pages, Kano contributes six, and Tonci Zonjic the other eleven. And in the big finale, Kano does five pages, Clay Mann does five, Tonci Zonjic does the remaining twenty, and Aja is nowhere to be seen. (Unless he did the cover--why the hell aren't they crediting the cover artist on these books?)

Now, Zonjic has a clear, clean style--and Matt Hollingsworth's colors (which are so superlative throughout the entire series he deserves to be counted as one of the key creative personnel) help provide a visual unity with the preceding issues--but Aja's work gains its power from fluidly moving from elegantly simple linework to byzantine detail, and often in the same panel, in a way that underlined the ambitions of the book: Immortal Iron Fist similarly swings from the simplicity of a big, gaudy kung-fu fight book to a richly backstoried epic in almost as short a span. And so the big final issue, with all of the legendary warriors fighting side-by-side in Zonjic's clear, clean style, has a flattened feeling to it, just because a dimension has visually dropped out.

Additionally, the "Seven Capital Cities of Heaven" arc manages to more or less forget about the main character entirely, which is something Marvel's '70s epics never did. While some of this is because Brubaker and Fraction are too dutiful to succumb to mere hackwork--after setting up the reader's expectation that Iron Fist will fight against six other awesome kung-fu adversaries in the Tournament of Heavenly Cities, they have Danny lose his first match and remove him from the action--I can't help but feel, despite the writers' insistence in interviews, Brubaker and Fraction don't have much interest in Danny Rand.

Indeed, the real center of the piece turns out to be Davos, who starts off as a villain in search of vengeance, and ends up conflicted, torn between his self-righteous anger and the opportunity to truly act righteously. Issue #14 of Immortal Iron Fist really turns on that choice, and it's the resolution of his story that gives the arc tremendous power. It's kind of like if Lucas had done Star Wars right, and we really had started the story thinking it was about Luke Skywalker and finished it realizing it was actually all about Darth Vader.

And yet: couldn't the arc have also been about Danny Rand? As much as I appreciate that Brubaker and Fraction make Danny a genuine hero, noble and self-sacrificing and kind, I'm sort of frustrated they are either unable or unwilling to figure out what to do with the character apart from discover his origin. As Claremont and Byrne did before them, they surround the character with the flashiest supporting cast around. By the end of the arc, it's not enough that Danny already has an ex-girlfriend who's a detective with a bionic arm, a best friend who is a steel-skinned superhero, and a good friend who's partners with the bionic-armed ex and has been trained as a sword-wielding samurai--he ends up accompanied to Earth by the five other champions from the Tournament of Heavenly Cities. Danny Rand, Brubaker and Fraction seem to be saying, is basically a kung-fu Richie Rich from a magical city: after you've spent a story or two on that gimmick, you've got to bring in Robota and Dollar and Jackie Jokers, all of whom also come from magical cities, but who have an endless number of cool finishing moves that are fun to think up and splash across action panels. You have to keep attaching cool geegaws to hide that the center is dramatically inert. And that may be the case, but I didn't get the sense the creators were trying very hard to see if that was actually true or not. (That the creative team is pulling up stakes so soon after the conclusion of this story lends some weight to that suspicion.)

And so, if I had read and reviewed each of these issues on their own, they would've ranked along the spectrum of the Very Good rating (apart from the Annual, which I thought was shockingly close to Awful--all geegaws and nearly no point) but, read as whole, I would rank the storyline as highly Good, maybe a little more than that. Issues #10-14 of The Immortal Iron Fist are ambitious, clever, and the high points are, really, everything I want in a superhero comic. But the formidable skills of the creators may not be enough to conquer the realities of the marketplace, where a fastidious artist can become overwhelmed. Indeed, the skills of the creators may not be enough to outweigh their own creative passions, which may be drawn to places darker than a unambiguously good man may be able to take them. These issues of Immortal Iron Fist are certainly worth buying and worth reading. But they're also worth considering for their negative space, for the areas where they cannot, or will not, reach.

Labels: Iron Fist, Jeff, The Inventory

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The fourth and final volume of Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus suggests the editorial staff at DC are either far ballsier, craftier, or more ignorant of the material than I thought: although printing four titles in the order of their publication (instead of grouping them by title) did a superb job of initially highlighting Kirby's protean imagination, reading the first 250 pages of the fourth volume is like watching the weakening death throes of a formerly-powerful animal: it's awesome in a truly depressing way.

The schema had been problematic before Volume Four: the arrangement strips the first seven issues of Forever People--basically one sprawling epic on its own--of any momentum, putting seventy pages of material between one cliffhanger and another. But considering the second volume, where this frustrated the most, also showcased a creator working at arguably the highest and final peak of his long career, the frustration was easier to dismiss. And although the problem disappears entirely in the final volume--both the Forever People and New Gods end in the first seventy-eight pages, leaving the final six issues of Mister Miracle to run consecutively--a far worse one takes its place: I would rank those final six issues of Mister Miracle as among some of the worst things Kirby's done.

Now, a statement like that requires a buttload of caveats--not only is there a ton of Kirby material I haven't read, but I'd rank the worst Kirby material as far above the worst material other writers and artists have produced in the field. Indeed, taken on their own, the issues reprinted consecutively in this Omnibus have a ton of charm. One of the pleasures of late-period Kirby is recognizing the familiar formulas while still being surprised by whatever crazy-ass shit the man decides to throw in there--it's a lot like watching a great blues guitarist tackle a classic piece. So, for example, I initially was delighted by Mister Miracle #14 where Mister Miracle and Oberon go walking in the woods and randomly encounter a crazed Satanic cult. It follows a standard pulp plot of "high-tech crooks posing as supernatural forces to scare off trespassers" but Kirby cranks the whole thing up past 11: Satan gets mentioned as often as three times a page in the first half of the book, the cultists wear impressively grotesque masks, and until Mister Miracle does his patented next-to-last page reveal of his face (and a panel or two of P.R. man Ted Brown smoking a pipe), the most normal looking person in the book is Oberon the dwarf. The whole thing is a bit like someone had tricked Fellini into directing an episode of Scooby-Doo.

Unfortunately, just three issues later, Mister Miracle, Big Barda, and protege-in-tow Shilo Norman check into a mysterious hotel after their car breaks down and what follows hits most of the same beats as issue #14. Considering that issue comes on the heels of a story where Jack uses the infamous "it was all a dream--or was it?" cliche, the middle stretch of Omnibus Vol. 4 reads like a talented but inattentive creator running out the clock. And even before then, I'll admit Kirby had already turned Mister Miracle into pretty rote stuff, despite tossing in first Big Barda and then the rest of the Female Furies as a supporting cast. Every issue opens up with Mister Miracle performing a trick while everyone around him freaks out, and nearly every fight scene features a moment focusing on on a villain performing a can't-miss killing move on M.M. only to then look around in dismay when the smoke has cleared and there's no body to be seen. (And later issues have variations on the same panel where Scott Free removes his mask at the end and we see the circuitry he's built into it--it actually looks more like Scott has sneezed up pieces of a mother board to me). In my long-ago review of Vol. 1, I'd suggested that Mister Miracle represented a dream image of Kirby himself as creator and freelancer--"a man raised in the violent war-state of Darkseid's brutal society who is not himself violent or brutal and who supports himself and enlightens others by freeing himself again and again" is the way I put in my review. If so, perhaps it's not wrong to see in those final issues a frustration on Kirby's part with the Mister Miracle concept as the cancellation of his other Fourth World books revealed that self-image for the dream it was: in each issue Mister Miracle's victory feels a little more hollow and far-fetched ("I suppose you that you have a gimmick that opened a slit in its hull!" is one of the more detailed explanations given for a deathtrap escape, to which Mister Miracle helpfully clarifies, "That's how I escaped!") until in the last issue he doesn't really win at all. The last issue of Mister Miracle--and what Kirby must've thought was to be the last issue of the Fourth World Saga--ends with Darkseid summing up (the issue and perhaps the entire saga), "It had deep sentiment--yet little joy. But--life at best is bittersweet!" All things considered, it's actually a pretty cheery take on things from a man helpless to stop his epic vision from being cut short. And if that had been the end of things, the end of the Omnibus, this review would go on to chastise DC for cynically choosing the publication format they did, for frontloading the great stuff at the beginning and sticking the bad stuff at the end and keeping readers from having a real choice as to what material they could buy.

But, of course, that wasn't the end for the Fourth World Saga. In 1984 and '85, Kirby was given the chance to come back and create an ending in the form of The Hunger Dogs, an original graphic novel, along a forty-seven page prelude titled "Even Gods Must Die!" that bridged the original stories and the graphic novels. We get apologies for the material both in the front with Paul Levitz's intro ("[F]or if the Hunger Dogs is neither the ending Jack originally hoped to do nor crafted with the same sure hand as had a decade earlier, it is still noble to try[.]") and Mark Evanier's afterword ("Jack gave it his all. Jack gave everything he did his all but he really put his heart and soul into this one, and ordinarily it would have been more than enough...but with all the problems, especially the short page count, it wasn't enough," as well as "Finally, The Hunger Dogs was published. I wish I could tell you that it was everything Kirby fans had been expecting by way of a Fourth World conclusion, but it really wasn't that. For one thing, the Fourth World wasn't concluding. For another, Jack still didn't have the thousand or so more pages it might have taken for him to build his story to the kind of climax he'd imagined.") It's safe to say the current take on this final work is not favorable.

And that's a shame. Because I found those final hundred-plus pages to be absolutely brilliant, some of the most stunning stuff Kirby's ever done. I've had The Fourth World Omnibus Vol. 4 for maybe three weeks now, and every night for the first two I'd read those last 100-plus pages again and again.

It's probably because I didn't follow Kirby after he left Marvel in the late '70s, but "Even Gods Must Die!" shocks me in its departure from earlier Kirby work: It's brasher, bolder, nearly a caricature of itself, but Kirby reframes action in ways I hadn't seen in his work since the '40s and '50s: circular inset panels, arrhythmic action scenes with arrows, confrontations where the panel borders run diagonally, making the tension of the scene literally explicit. Months ago, when reading Tezuka's Buddha, I found myself in awe of Tezuka's willingness to experiment with a page so late in his career and wondered if doing so made him a better artist than Kirby. Here, if only for a few pages, is Kirby breaking his patterns, moving finally from the blues to jazz.

Even better, the change suits the story: the circular panels reinforce the circularity of the story as Orion finally brings the battle to Darkseid, and father and son battle as a prophecy has foretold. The characters themselves are encased in circular panels, at many points appearing trapped, just as they're stuck in the cyclical nature of myth. This is something Kirby nicely underlines in his writing--in the early chapters of the New Gods, Darkseid is likened to a tiger, but in "Even Gods Must Die," that same comparison is made about Orion. If Mister Miracle was Kirby as he imagined himself to be in the '70s, the Orion of the Omnibus' final pages is the man Kirby finally realized himself to be: a man incapable of giving up, powered by a terrifying, inexhaustible anger, an anger that allows him to claw his way to the truth.

What really killed me was the scene in which Darkseid, after watching the behavior of the revivified men he's gained the power to resurrect, says to a lackey, "They don't fully return...do they?" If you think about it, that's a tremendously ballsy thing for an author to put in a story he's finishing after a decade-long absence. Kirby is speaking to the audience through Darkseid and openly telling them: "You know what? This doesn't work." In that regard, what seems like every other faux-Stan Lee title you've ever read, "Even Gods Must Die!" is in fact an apt summation of the story's point: Things are supposed to end. For most of us, that's a hard-earned truth. For a superhero comic, that's heresy.

Like "Even Gods Must Die!", The Hunger Dogs is a victory stolen from the jaws of defeat and loss, and the irony is this victory is accomplished by open acknowledging defeat and loss. In The Hunger Dogs, Darkseid sees his coming obsolescence in the face of The Micro-Mark, the digitized destroyer that is the brutal male successor to the kindly Mother Box. In a staggering page, Darkseid listens to the Micro-Mark's inventor crow about the passing of Himon and wordlessly realizes that his own time has also passed. "His day is over, great Darkseid!" the collaborator boasts. "Regard him as a pitiful, harmless object! This is Micro-Mark's hour! There's no need for intrigue or great strivings--the cosmos lies open to button-pushing babes!"

(Oh, and by the way? Holy. Fucking. Shit. It's one thing for writers, artists, photographers, and musicians these days to complain about the digital age having opened doors in their fields at the cost of lowered standards. It's another thing entirely to do it in nineteen-eighty-fucking-five. Fans of the prescient will also appreciate how both Darkseid and Lightray use suicide bombers to take out their enemies, the planet-destroying dirty bombs planted surreptitiously on New Genesis, and how Highfather turns such a terrorist attack back in on itself.)

I was raving to Graeme about all this the other day and he put it best: The Hunger Dogs is the work of an old man, possessing an old man's wisdom and an old man's sorrow. (I don't want to give away the identity of the Micro-Mark's creator, but I will say it's pretty easy to see past the origin presented and infer disgust on Kirby's part at the way the baby boomers--his beloved New Gods--grew up and sold out.) And while Kirby may have dreamed of an epic finish to his epic saga (the conclusion he sketches out here has to settle for evoking Moses leading his people out of Egypt), I found the climax to The Hunger Dogs more satisfying, truer to life: some things change, and many things don't. Although we're told Darkseid takes control of Apokolips again, our last glimpse of him is a figure made lonely and small by distance and time: even through the anger, the scorn, and the violence, Kirby evinces pity for the most horrible of his characters.

It's a good lesson to take from the Fourth World Omnibus, for although these four volumes are a tremendous achievement and will occupy a prized place on my bookshelf, it's meaningful they sit below Buddha, the three thousand page epic Tezuka created at roughly the same time in the manner the artist wanted, at the pace he preferred (collected in hardcover in America, it should be pointed out, before The Omnibus). It achieves very little to focus only on the shame of such a thing. And yet, to look at the whole of Kirby's achievement and see only the wonder, and not the warning, would only compound the shamefulness further: the compromises presented in the final volume of The Fourth World Omnibus mirror the compromises a reader must suffer in seeing such Excellent work simultaneously transcend, and fall victim to, the paucity of its era.

Labels: Fourth World Omnibus, Jeff, Kirby

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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

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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

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It's been said by much smarter men than myself (Jules Feiffer and Gerard Jones being but two) that Judaism is perhaps the real secret identity at the heart of the superhero experience--one doesn't have to look much farther than Lieber and Kurtzberg, who built Marvel comics under the pen names of Lee and Kirby, to make a case for it.

Of all the many things I've thought about Steve Gerber--and believe me, I've thought about him a lot since learning of his passing earlier today--what sticks with me is that Gerber was the hero without the mask, the guy brave enough to forego the secret identity. I grew up in whiter-than-white Humboldt County and even I could tell that Gerber was Jewish: his stories were always of outsiders (outsiders even by Marvel's standards) and usually focused on defiant, frequently angry, guys who viewed with both bemusement and amusement the world surrounding them. By the time I got to high school and started reading Malamud (a little), Bellow (embarrassingly less), and Roth (a whole shitload), I could see how Gerber and his work belonged as much to their tradition--that of the soulful shit-stirrer--as to Stan's patented mix of soap opera and winking carnival barker.

The term "patented" is almost more than cliched hyperbole, by the way. What makes eulogizing Gerber difficult--and it will be even more difficult when other writers of his generation pass on--is that his most substantial work was done while stylistically imitating someone else. Every writer passing through Marvel in the '70s had to write in Stan's house style and now that styles and mainstream tastes have finally progressed, I find it's a bit of tough sell to convince younger readers--and more than occasionally myself--that there's good writing buried underneath all the labored rhetoric, and the expository diatribes and the "Dear God, no!" melodramas, and those last panel captions that read, "And somewhere, in the distance, comes the gentle weeping...of a clown."

One of Gerber's achievements--and I'm not sure if someone who doesn't know the period can really appreciate what a strange achievement it is--was to develop his own voice while immersed within that of another: within the Stanisms were the Gerberisms, the things you found only in Gerber's work, that held their own spell, bdspoke their own worldview. Cults popped up regularly in Gerber's work; so did supporting characters who would get fed up and leave the story; plots would expand out and then suddenly collapse in. The rich tapesty of the multiverse would unfold but always in the periphery: in the Florida everglades, in the park on a quiet day, over the Cuyahoga River burning at midnight. And at these places, you'd find an angry but decent guy--Richard Rory or Jack Norris or Howard the Duck--aware of his relative powerlessness, frustrated and bitterly amused at that powerlessness. As I said, I recognized that guy in Bellow's Tommy Wilhelm, in Roth's Portnoy and Zuckerman. (With Wilhelm, the recognition was semi-literal: when I read Seize the Day for the first time, my mental picture of Tommy Wilhelm was Colan's interpretation of Howard the Duck as a human man.)

Another Gerberism was the keystone for the idea of superhero as Jewish myth: Superman. At Marvel, Gerber created Wundarr the Aquarian, the superhero who is rocketed to Earth from a dying planet--except Wundarr arrives on Earth full-grown, with the intelligence of a child. With Mary Skrenes, Gerber created Omega The Unknown, a character that riffs equally on Superman and Captain Marvel--Omega is a hero come to Earth with a strange bond to a boy orphan. Later, Gerber went on to do several offbeat Superman projects. My favorite was the final issue of DC Presents where Gerber packed his entire pitch for Superman into one baffling Hail Mary: an insane Mr. Mxyzptlk destroys Argo City such that Metropolis is layered with a fine mist of kryptonite, and Superman, his power reduced, must live in pain and discomfort whenever he's Clark Kent, treading over the kryptonite impacted sidewalks of the city.

In fact, at the heart of Gerber's best work is Superman and Clark Kent: the powerlessness lurking in the heart of the powerful and, equally as important, the power lurking in the heart of the powerless. (After all, it's usually Rory and Norris and Howard who are the tipping point in the battle between good and evil.) Such paradoxes transcended the two scoops of ego gratification and bathetic male self-pity served up in the work of Stan Lee and most of his successors. While far from immune to such weaknesses (Gerber's worst work is like reading Harlan Ellison at his most histrionic), the duality of power-in-powerlessness and powerlessness-in-power which Gerber returned to thematically was a genuine belief in the world, founded on the way he saw it work: cults and corporations collapsed under their own weight; the little guy, though screwed, could still wrest victory from the jaws of defeat if he just kept at it.

I could type another ten thousand words and not get at the power of these and other achievements. (I didn't even start in on that awesome Daredevil storyline where the villain is an intelligent malevolent baboon whose pheromones make every woman his slave and who slugs it out with our hero on the roof of the White House, to say nothing of Starhawk, the first transgender superhero, Angarr The Screamer, the showgirl and the ostrich, KISS, Doctor Bong, etc., etc.) But what I should say is, Steve Gerber kept at it. He kept at it after Cat Yronwode (I believe) wrote an editorial about how his work no longer moved her; he kept at it after Jim Shooter cruelly (and inelegantly) mocked him in the first issue of Secret Wars II; he kept at it after Nevada was unceremoniously dumped, after Hard Time was canceled, after Marvel published Lethem's Omega The Unknown miniseries over Gerber's initial objections. Steve Gerber kept at it six days before he died, working in the middle of the night working on his current assignment, Doctor Fate. I'd like to believe in an afterlife, and Steve Gerber is there, keeping at it, seeing his stories end the way he wanted them to, when he wanted them to. If such an afterlife exists, it would be a world Gerber never spent much time considering, a world he never made--which would bring him, I hope, both bemusement and amusement, even if it meant he was finally the angry outsider no longer.

Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored,
adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He,
beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that
are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.

Labels: Jeff, Steve Gerber

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My superhero nerd upbringing demands I love this picture: I always feel like if I just squint hard enough I'll see Daredevil and Bullseye (as drawn by Miller & Janson) bounding from one level to the next.

Yes, a judicious use of vacation time from my workplace means that Edi and I are once again in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this time for the month of February. The flight down was long (thanks to a layover in DC going from two hours to five) and mildly arduous, but it's great to be down here, basking in the hot summer air.

So you may not hear from me for the next month, maybe? I may post as I make the rounds of the various comic book shops, and/or if I feel cocky enough to write reviews of books I read before leaving that aren't with me now. But, on the other hand, it seems slightly more likely that the missus and I will be too busy soaking in the sun and porteno culture for me to spend too much time on the blogger interface. So far, the only fun bit of comix knowledge I can relate is that the girl on our flight down had a lovely tattoo on her arm that was a panel from Goodbye, Chunky Rice. Perhaps that's an omen, and I'll find more comix related material down here than I'm planning on.

Anyhoo, I'll be reading, if not posting, and spending my time looking at the rooftops, daydreaming...

Labels: buenos aires, Jeff

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Not really a review or anything, just a bit of (very late) Monday morning quarterbacking: in finishing up the first three issues of "Brand New Day" and finally reading the last issue of "One More Day," it struck me J. Michael Straczynski is either a far more gracious man--or a far more thick-skinned professional--than I could ever hope to be. Despite the last issue of "One More Day" being dedicated at the very end to JMS, and a back page filled with hosannas by fellow professionals, the two-page recap of Spidey's status at the end of the first part of "Brand New Day" suggests a company eager to sweep eight years of the man's stories under the rug.

I mean, I can't imagine Grant Morrison co-writing a last issue story arc on New X-Men that would remove Xorn, the Midwich Cuckoos, Mutant Town, Cassandra Nova, and the destruction of Genosha. Yet JMS's final story on ASM not only removes Mary Jane as Peter Parker's wife, but retcons away anyone knowing Peter's secret identity, and brings back the mechanical web-spinners. That last one in particular struck me: I wasn't a big fan of the Spider-Totem idea, but if it's waved away with some fancy-dan Mephisto hand magic, the bulk of JMS's run is removed. No Ezekiel storyline; no mystical wasp queen; no "The Other." Considering the emotional highpoint of JMS's run--Peter revealing his identity to Aunt May--is mooted by the removal of anyone knowing Peter's secret identity, and it's hard to see what's left. That 9/11 story; Norman Osborne's "o" face; that gamma radiation gangster; and maybe the lame Molten Man impersonator who burnt down Aunt May's house (except she's back to having her house, so maybe not). It's not "putting the toys back in the box," so much as "throwing most of the toys into the fire and watching 'em shrivel up and blacken."

(And not that it's pertinent to this discussion, but is the end of "One More Day," where Mephisto talks about the daughter Peter and Mary Jane could have had but will now never have and will never exist, some sort of swipe at the Spider-Girl title? If so, I only wish I had the chops to examine what might've been running through Editorial's head when that went in.)

Mind you, I'm not upset that a lot of this material is taken off the board: I don't think this retcon invalidates the enjoyment I got from the issues I read, and there was stuff (a lot of stuff) in JMS's run I felt screwed pretty strongly with the iconic appeal of Spider-Man. But I find it all very strange. Maybe when Straczynski first came on and made it clear he wasn't interested in having editorial vet his work, he and Marvel editorial had an explicit understanding that everything he did could (and probably would) be undone. And, of course, any savvy freelancer toiling for the big two is aware their work can be retconned, invalidated or turned on its head whenever Editorial sees fit. But as a way to handle a heavyweight creator with whom one would want (I would think) to continue a working relationship, it seems like very, very odd behavior: "Thanks for all the great work, Joe! It'd mean a lot to us if you'd put your name on this story that invalidates the vast majority of it! If not, we're gonna do the story, anyway. Love ya!"

You know what? I'll break my thoughts about "Brand New Day" into a different post, so as not to dilute my point: J. Michael Straczynski, you got what looks like a raw deal to me.

Labels: Jeff, Spider-Man

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Happy New Year, everyone! Kinda got a couple things on my plate but I did want to direct your attention, in case you missed it, to the recent launch of io9.com, a sci-fi blog run by some of CE's favorite people--Annalee Newitz, Charlie Anders, and Wassisname McMillan covering comics. Mr. Ellis didn't like it too much, nor did Mojo, but I think it's a fun little nerd culture blog that promises to feed me some thoughtful stuff to go along with my fix of "wait, Tyler Perry is in the new Star Trek?!" news.

In other news, I'm just getting over that stomach flu that's been going around, and recommend if you get a chance to watch the first season of Dexter while reading Tezuka's Buddha and running a mild fever, I totally recommend you do so. The completely fucked up dreams make it more than worth it.

And finally, while shopping the other day in a Target, I came across this relatively amazing Marvel shirt:



As a Kirby fan and an old-school Marvel dude, I was pretty impressed. I mean, there are *four* Inhumans on there, as well as...is that Sgt. Fury or Wyatt Wingfoot? To say nothing of the Kirby Falcon...

And there's something in the layout that kinda rings a bell for me: didn't Foom come with a sheet of stickers or something, that might've been the original template for this? I doubt it's an exact match since Foom was finished by the time Byrne was drawing Wolverine, but it still seems awfully familiar.

Anyway, I was hoping someone might know something about this shirt, because I'm sorta mystified by it. Feel free to drop any info and/or crazed conspiracy theories into the comments...

Labels: Jeff, Kirby

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Wow. Thank goodness things picked up there at the end.

MARVEL HOLIDAY SPECIAL: This year's story by Andrew Farrago and Shaenon K. Garrity had some really cute moments, like the jingle noises on Santa's Sentinel, but seemed forced in a way last year's story by them (the AIM holiday party) did not; the Loners story by C.B. Cebulski and Alina Urusov made me interested in characters I've never read about previously (and had really lovely art to boot); and the Mike Carey and Nelson story about a reporter asking Marvel characters about the meaning of Christmas was, like the Hembeck reprint and the Irving pin-up, well-intentioned filler. It's high EH, particularly at that price point, but it doesn't make you feel like a total chump for indulging in nostalgia and buying it.

MIGHTY AVENGERS #6: It's amusing to pick up a title you dropped six months earlier and notice you've only missed two issues, although probably not as amusing for Brian Bendis, Tom Brevoort and retailers: crafted to be a quick-read of an oversized adventure, the ending wouldn't have felt as lame, I think, if it'd come out on time. And it'll probably be pretty decent as a trade. But disconnected from the momentum of the story, watching a hairy guy play Fantastic Voyage, then the shock-ending from six months ago makes this extraordinarly EH. If I hadn't quit on the title first, I'd probably drop that even lower as these are the kind of hijinks that actually punish readers for buying periodicals and not waiting for the trade.

SHADOWPACT #20: First issue I've read since issue #2 (which I didn't much care for) and thought it was highly OK. Kieron Dwyer's art looks crude (deliberately so, I think) but always has a lot of vigor and the storytelling is clear. It's particularly well-suited here, as the Shadowpact are trapped in a grimy, devastated landscape. I also liked Matthew Sturges' economical script which set up situations (Jim's lack of faith in himself, Blue Devil's cliffhanger) and then resolved them neatly. The characters are straightforwardly drawn--maybe a little too much so--but if the book always has this much forward momentum, I could see its appeal. Like I said, highly OK, particularly for a new reader.

SUPERMAN #671: Had me at that first Superman scene, which I thought was a fine updating of the Silver Age "Superman does cool show-offy shit for charity" trope, and the rest of the issue had a similar "how can we take classic bits and update them?" vibe to it. I'm fussy, so I can't give it more than a high Good, but I thought it was quite fun.

SUPERMAN BATMAN #44: Not perfect, but I thought this issue did a nice job of setting up an interesting story in a dramatic way, and it even involves an event that previously happened in the title. I'm more than a little leery--I'm not 100% onboard with the characterization, and there's a lot of stuff you have to take on say-so because the DCU's history is now about as stable as Lindsay Lohan's electrolyte levels--but considering I picked up this issue with genuine dread and I'm now curious as to where the story may go next, I think it's deserving of a high OK.

THE ORDER #6: First issue of this I've read (although I picked up the first five issues the other week and haven't read them) and Kitson's art and Fraction's dialogue make for an appealing book. I'm kinda shocked nobody thought the black band running behind the interview panels wouldn't screw up the way people would read those first two pages (ditto for the panels at the bottom of that tidal wave spread, now that I look at it), but, y'know, it happens. It may be paced a bit too quickly--I'm not sure if I really like anybody, except the character interviewed in the first few pages--but that's far from a sin these days, and I assume the back issues will flesh the characters out. I'd call this pretty GOOD.

UMBRELLA ACADEMY APOCALYPSE SUITE #4: Not particularly big on action, but this issue was well-packed with great visuals, a brisk wit, and a ton of charm. As a bonus, the editorial page lists Rocketship owner Alex Cox and Cade Skywalker as heroes (I think Cox is a far bigger hero than Skywalker, even if Skywalker wasn't packing a hair-metal mullet). I may be falling under the sway of the book's brio, but I'm gonna go with VERY GOOD and hope the miniseries lives up to its potential.

WOLVERINE ORIGINS #20: Having not kept up with this title, I read the text page intro and, wow, what a weird metastatement Wolverine's origin has become: "The mutant Wolverine has spent a century fighting those who would manipulate him for his unique powers..." If you think of "those who would manipulate him for his unique powers" as the creators who are always retconning more convoluted backstory bullshit into his history, you could maybe make the case that Wolverine is an utterly post-modern superhero, a figure whose struggle outside the comic--to retain his iconic power and relevancy (his identity) no matter what is foisted on him--is more or less the same one he faces inside the comic. For that matter, that struggle taking place outside the frame is the same one faced by every superhero with more than twenty or so years under his belt.

Hmmm.

Anyway, in this issue, Captain America clenches his teeth and beats the shit out of Wolverine just like he did the last time I read this lousy fuckin' book. AWFUL stuff, and apparently how Steve Dillon wants to make a living which I find horribly depressing.

WORLD OF WARCRAFT #2: It makes sense. World of Warcraft has something like an estimated nine million subscribers: if you can get 1% of that base reading your book, you've got a very healthy 90,000 readers. But I can't imagine these people want to read about Walt Simonson's characters any more than I wanted to hear about somebody's fourth level Halfling thief back when I was playing D&D. I would think an illustrated "World of Warcraft for Dummies" where the "story" like a fancy, tip-filled walkthrough for noobs and munchkins, would probably have a better chance at gaining that audience. As a fantasy book illustrated in the Rodney Ramos manner, it's highly EH. As a tie-in to one of the great gaming successes of our times, I think it probably ranks far lower.

X-MEN FIRST CLASS VOL 2 #6: If the proportions of this were reversed, and it was a sixteen page story with Marvel Girl and Scarlet Witch illustrated by Colleen Coover and a six page "to be continued" story with depowered X-Men and attacking Sentinels, I would've given this sucker a high Good: Coover's work has so much charm, and Parker really seems to enjoy working to her strengths. Sadly, I gotta go with OK because I find Roger Cruz's art very dull and it's the larger part of the book.

****

And since this week has (nearly) all of my favorite manga:

DRIFTING CLASSROOM VOL 9: Just when I thought this book was getting a little off-track with its creepy mutants, it brings back the Lord Of The Flies backbeat and gives us some underage knife-fights and senseless life-taking territory wars. And, just because it loves us, there's also an appendectomy performed without anesthesia and giant carnivorous starfish. I read this at a breathless clip and think its VERY GOOD material in its startling, go-for-broke way.

GOLGO 13 VOL 12: Probably my favorite volume so far, as it's got Golgo versus his Russian counterpart in the first story, and a nifty piece of Southern exploitation trash ("Shit, they make you a Colonel for fryin' chicken down there.") in the back-up. GOOD stuff, although it looks like we won't be getting any of the truly batshit crazy stuff in this collection.

NAOKI URASAWAS MONSTER VOL 12: Like the previous volume of Beck, the only drawback for me is that the length of time between volumes means a longer time for my involvement with the material to ramp back up. While I appreciate the recaps and character flowcharts Viz uses here, it's just not the same: I can't imagine how engrossing it would've been for this stuff to unfold on a weekly basis. VERY GOOD material, though.

OTHER SIDE O/T MIRROR VOL 1: Jo Chen's artwork is so lovely, I had to pick this up. And while there are dozens of effortlessly sensual illustrations, both the narrative flow and the story itself are pretty amateurish stuff. It's not so much the lack of drama--on the contrary, for a few pages, it almost seemed like we were going to get Barfly as drawn by Ai Yazawa and I was downright giddy--as much as Chen doesn't have the chops to bring any depth to her lead characters and so give their struggles any resonance. I hope her talents continue to develop, but this deeply EH volume suggests she's still got a way to go.

PICK OF THE WEEK: IMMORTAL IRON FIST #11 and/or UMBRELLA ACADEMY #4. Good work by new(ish) talent. That's encouraging, isn't it?

PICK OF THE WEAK: I only brought down the CRAP hammer on FOOLKILLER #3, but that may be because I'm building up a slight immunity to Countdown related events.

So. Since next week's books come in on the 28th, and I work both the 29th and 31st, I think this will be my last "what the hell is he thinking" mega-roundup for the month. I'd like to figure out a proper way to work this kind of thing into my schedule, but posting may be a little spotty for the next month or two as other parts of my life get busy. Again, lemme thank everyone for taking the time to read these and throw in their two cents, and sorry I didn't get a chance to respond to everyone who commented in the detail they deserve (particularly in that thread where there were many fine comments from old-schoolers like gvalley and Heinz Hochkoepper). Hope everyone has a fine ol' set of holidays and, should I not get back to here before 12/31, a most excellent New Year!

Labels: Jeff, old school

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I mean this in the least Chicken Little-ish way possible, but Good Lord, this marketplace is glutted. I'm not sure how big or small a week retailers would consider this to be, but there are 80+ items that came into CE this week under the classification of "comic book" (and an additional 35+ items under books, mags & stuff). No wonder Hibbs talks in his latest Tilting about his newfound "I see dead trades" superpowers and how to best use them for the good of his store. The big two have their furnaces open wide and are shoveling terrifying levels of product onto the market, which may be fine for them--in the non-returnable market, they're at least making their money back--but I would think it would get harder and harder for retailers to make what could be considered profit. I mean, I'm not a retailer (and I'm not at all good with money, in fact) but how is a retailer supposed to take home any cash when each invoice grows bigger than the last? It's tough because the titles I like from the big two are frequently considered marginal titles (like Blue Beetle) to say nothing of all those lovely reprints they're putting out, but I find the situation as a whole is troubling.

Or maybe I hide my grumbling about how many comics I have to review in the guise of worrying about the direct marekt. I dunno.

ARMY @ LOVE #10: Veitch's pacing is top-notch; he's moving his characters along on their personal arcs at a decent clip; really, the only complaint is that now that he's put forward his themes of how warfare and entertainment are dovetailing, and how the corrupt boomers and the self-absorbed Gen X and Y'ers are each responsible for it, I'm not sure if he knows where to go with it. For a work of satire, it doesn't seem angry or outraged or, despite the every issue's naked boob, particularly titillated. It's GOOD work but I feel it's missing the potential to become something greater, to take the sort of risks a more impassioned--and less mature--artist might make.

BATMAN & THE OUTSIDERS #3: I can kinda/sorta see the rationale for the issue--two of the more prominent members of the old Outsiders team are now in the Justice League so have them show up here for some insta-conflict--but the results are the standard "we're going to talk/now we're going to fight/well, we're back to talking, we're all on the same side, aren't we?" set of scenes that make me think all superhero comic book writers grew up with alcoholic parents. Julian Lopez's art is pretty (and keeps the cheesecake out of the fight scenes, which is a plus) although the characters' acting is a bit broad. I guess if you can swallow the conceit of the issue--which I couldn't, frankly--you could go with a low OK. Me, I'll take the EH road.

BIRDS OF PREY #113: Apart from the last three pages where Superman acts like a judgmental dick for no good reason, I liked this: I can't really tell if Nicola Scott can do action scenes yet, but her characters look great and "act" well, and McKeever has all the main characters' voices down. The ending was overwrought, and a re-read shows that maybe the page-turns were a little forced, but I'd go highly OK for this, despite the ending. I'd like to see next ish.

CAPTAIN AMERICA CHOSEN #5: I feel sorry for David Morrell here--whatever reason he had for this mini, it seems utterly moot in light of the current Cap storyline. The whole thing looks and feels like something that was supposed to come out in the John Ney Rieber/Cassaday "relevant" era (if you can eight months an era). Although, honestly, I wouldn't have liked it then, either. I'll go sub-EH out of pity (and respect for a guy who's written some bitchin' action novels) but it's not good at all.

CATWOMAN #74: That cover hurts my neck just to look at it. Seriously, Adam Hughes, if you're going to put Audrey Hepburn's head on Pamela Anderson's body, at least pretend there's a spine connecting them. Inside, the action scenes alternated between dynamic and a bit confusing, the plot has a few bits I can't buy, and Calculator's whole "if I'm not back at my computers in an hour, the city will lose power!" scheme for protecting himself is pretty lame (and plot-convenient). I wasn't crazy about the ending either, so I think I'm going with a high EH on this one. It had its moments, though.

COUNTDOWN ARENA #3: That bit where bald Superman grabs the heat vision of Dark Knight Superman and Red Son Superman and uses it to clonk their heads together (because the heat vision is still coming out of their eyes) is such a dramatic misunderstanding of how a particular power works--it's like if you read a Fantastic Four book and The Thing pulled rocks off his body and threw them at people--I was rendered giddy at the dopiness of it all. Most of this train wreck isn't nearly as entertaining (although there is one panel where one Wonder Woman appears to put her foot through another Wonder Woman's uterus), just mindless and messy in an AWFUL early 90s Image book kind of way. However, I hold out hope that next issue someone will grab the speed lines coming off the Flash and garrote somebody else with them.

COUNTDOWN RAY PALMER SUPERWOMAN BATWOMAN #1: A story so intricately constructed it needed two writers, four pencilers, and six inkers: The Challengers go to a planet where everyone's gender is reversed and Wonder Man and his army of amazons get their asses kicked for twenty pages. That's it. And while refreshingly free of cheesecake, isn't that the only thing that would've made this interesting? There's something dishonest about making a planet where all the DC Heroes are Heroines and not then fucking with a fanboy's complex internal relationship with his or her favorite superhero (I'll admit I thought female Aquaman was really hot, for what it's worth). I mean, what's the point otherwise? To point out how ragingly sexist the power line-up of the DCU actually is?

To be fair, there was something almost Silver Age about this issue's execution--it finds each new iteration of reversed gender fascinating for its own sake, the way a Mort Weisinger book would--and that's kinda charming. But because this book exists for absolutely no other reason than to bilk money from the Countdown completist, it's really just a cynical cash grab which is an AWFUL thing to be.

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 19: I gotta give it up for colorist Pete Pantazis--he assigns a pallette to each set of characters which makes it easy for the reader to follow the scene changes quickly. Also, I think the reason I initially thought the art was the best in this issue I'd seen was the extra little touches in the scenes with Piper and Trickster (Piper's glowing eyes, the light reflected in the water). Apart from that, the only thing that struck me about this issue is that maybe Paul Dini's secret goal on Countdown is to make the second season of Lost look tightly constructed by comparison. Certainly, I cared for the characters in Lost for a lot longer than any of the characters here. Mr. Pantazis brings this up to a proper EH.

DETECTIVE COMICS #839: In most of the panels, Batman looks like his lower jaw is unhinging so he can swallow a field mouse. Also, there's a great few panels where Rolbin and Nightwing are up on a cliff watching Batman fight and Nightwing says, "Everyone's concentrating on Bruce and Damian, but those monks need help, too. Alfred...?" And the next panel is Alfred with a "what the fuck am I doing here?" face beating on a Ninja and saying, "Say no more, Master Dick!" Comedy. Gold. I can only wait for future crossovers where everyone sits back and has the hired help do everything. ("Hey, Alfred, we wouldn't Bane to make off with the Star of Carpinthia, would we?" "Say no more, Master Dick!") I'm sorry, but I thought this was AWFUL.

EX MACHINA #33: I gave up on this title quite some time ago so I have no idea if every issue is as crazed as Mayor Hundred receiving an exorcism from the Pope even as Russians are trying to force him (the Mayor, not the Pope) to commit murder. But if so, I'm picking up the back trades pronto. And that double-paged spread of Hundred's religious vision bumps this issue up to a high GOOD all on its own. I worry that maybe Vaughan's lost control of his book's tone, but considering I found that tone pretty dull, who cares?

EXILES #100: Although very, very, very cheap, there's something kind of clever about having the last issue of Exiles reprint the first issue of Exiles, which ends on a cliffhanger so the dutiful reader can then pick up the second issue of Exiles, and keep the wheel of comic book nerd turning and turning...As for Claremont's story in the front of the book, it does pretty much what you'd expect and writes out all of the original characters (except Morph) so he can regale us with cross-omniversal slash fanfic featuring all his favorite characters. I'm going with AWFUL, because Claremont's story was a mess and the reprint is actually a punishment to the faithful reader/collector who's been following the book since the beginning. Sad.

FOOLKILLER #3: Foolkiller takes place in on Earth Max, a world exactly like ours in every detail except people have no bones whatsoever, and a guy with a sword as thin as a riding crop can slice off a man's arm with no exertion whatsoever. You know this book is going to end up in a quarter bin somewhere and eventually end up being read by an impressionable eight year old and scarring them for life but, apart from that, this book serves no good end whatsoever. CRAP.

IMMORTAL IRON FIST #11: Continues to blow my mind with its mix of clever dialogue, quality characterization, crazy-ass ideas and gorgeous art. VERY GOOD stuff and I hope the team stays on this book for as long as possible.

INCREDIBLE HULK #112: As you probably know if you've been following me through December, I missed World War Hulk altogether, and based on this issue, I'm sorry I did: I liked the characters of Amadeus Cho and Hercules (although Herc looked great but sounded like Keanu Reeves in a few too many places); thought the mix of classic mythology and modern continuity was pretty keen; and the art was just really damn lovely. But there's another element to this issue that makes me wonder about WWH--the big ol' bait and switch. I mean, this issue is not a Hulk comic at all, unless (and, frankly, even if) you count the presence of a supporting character that's been in the title for less than a year.

Weirdly, although I've never given two shits about comic book completists, those guys who shell out money to have every issue of a book's run no matter whether they read it or not, I feel they're being horribly mistreated by the direct market as it stands. Their reward for their character's recent popularity (and Greg Pak's reward for steering the character so well) is to have to buy issues of the book that have nothing to do with the character they're collecting, while Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness relaunch the character in another title that they'll also have to buy.

Anyway, it's a GOOD issue, but it's a crap way to treat customers and retailers, and sooner or later they're going to stop sticking around for it.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #16: The first story is a big lead-in to another book you have to buy for this book to make any sense, and the back-up story has no impact unless you remember two Teen Titans stories and is a lead-in to another book you have to buy. See what I mean about mistreating customers and retailers? At least the book allowed me to coin a new term: the "done in none" where one issue is self-contained but serves no purpose other than to sell you other books. AWFUL in that regard, but EH overall.

Okay, that's the first part. I'll be back tomorrow (or sooner) with the second.

Labels: Jeff, old school

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I like "best of" lists, particularly before the holidays when people have a bit of cash and trying to figure out what to get loved ones. So I'm gonna do one even though (a) I've been more than a little out of the loop since I left the store in May; (b) my brain is still like well-chewed taffy after writing this week's reviews; and (c) my tech karma just took a massive hit, with my external hard drive unresponsive, my alphasmart wiped, and my image search for book covers (because everyone loves images) hit a snag when a page tried to install a fuckin' trojan horse on my laptop. (Oh, and what's up with our sidebar?) So I'll try to make this as quick and coherent--and as non-crabby--as possible for all our sakes. Sorry about the lack of graphics. Maybe next year, provided my laptop isn't too busy sending out Jamaican porn spam.

In sloppy alpha order:

AMERICAN ELF VOL. 2: These two years of James Kochalka's cartoon diaries may be so brightly colored they'll make your eyes water, but they're also funny, sweet and profane. I hope we continue to get book collections of these even though Kochalka's cartoon vault is now open online.

AZUMANGA DAIOH OMNIBUS: I read and loved all four volumes of Kiyohiko Azuma's comic strip tales of a batch of high school girls, and hope this collection of the four volumes finds all the new readers the series well deserves. ADV Manga didn't really put themselves out throwing this omnibus together--the translation notes from vols. 3 and 4 don't reflect the new pagination, for example--but the price break and convenience of having them all in one spot still make it a great buy. Plus, it's an excuse to re-read everything all over again, which I did, and I enjoyed them just as much the second time around.

LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN BLACK DOSSIER: Black Dossier probably suffers by dint of authorial over-ambition, publisher politics, and audience expectation, but it's still a helluva book. Even though it failed to move me emotionally, I frequently took delight in the clever formalistic shenanigans, and Kevin O'Neill does landmark work. Plus, you know, a Tijuana Bible version of Orwell's 1984--how can you knock that?

BUFFY SEASON EIGHT VOL. 1 TPB: Joss Whedon brings the Buffyverse back for a TV season on paper, and it's a delight for those of us who still carry tremendous affection for the characters. While I worry the "unlimited budget" of comics may keep Whedon away from the limitations on TV he ably turned into strengths, or that the work will get farmed out the more other projects occupy Whedon's time, the first storyline was a tremendous amount of fun on its own, and a great gift for a Buffy fan (if you can find one that doesn't already have this, of course).

CRECY: I think this may be in the top five things Ellis has ever done, if not the top three--a dark, smart, rowdy educational history lesson where the author's predilection for technical knowledge and street-smart narrators meshes perfectly in showing us the battle of Crecy and its impact on how cultures make war. It's as perfectly executed as it is conceived, tremendously engaging and deeply enjoyable. Great stuff.

CRIMINAL: COWARD and CRIMINAL: LAWLESS: Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips produce two exceptionally strong stories that nail the grit, seedy glamor and understated desp all great crime stories have. Phillips' extraordinary knack for visual characterization enhances Brubaker's ability to bring exactly the right amount of information to a scene; I can't think of a current writer-artist team who play to each other's strengths nearly as well as these two.

DR. 13: ARCHITECTURE & MORTALITY TPB: Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang's playful metafiction tackles current comic book policies, the nature of belief and disbelief, and is a gorgeous-looking repudiation of what superhero books can and cannot do. It'll make you think, but it'll also make you laugh--a lot.

DRIFTING CLASSROOM: Kazuo Umezu's manga classic about an elementary school transported to a hostile dimension is bracing in its bleakness, touching in its melodrama, and masterful in its cartooning. It is also, in the very best sense, ape-shit crazy. Imagine if Lost starred the Little Rascals and somebody was dying or suffering gruesomely every fifteen minutes, and you get a slight idea of Drifting Classroom's ghastly, loopy charms.

EXIT WOUNDS: Rutu Modan's extraordinary graphic novel about a young man in Israel trying to discover the fate of his father is still the book of the year for me. The cartooning is great--detailed and evocative and open--but the writing is extraordinary, deepening the characters and the situations on every page. I really loved this book.

FLOWER OF LIFE, VOLS. 1-3: Fumi Yoshinaga's witty story of high school students and manga fans is always moving in directions you won't expect, but, really, it's the mix of light comedy and deep characterization I find so compelling. Like Yotsuba&! or Azumanga Daioh, this stuff makes me happy when I read it--it's heartwarming, which is something I'd never thought I'd enjoy in my reading material, but when it's done as well it is here, I'm helpless to resist.

FOURTH WORLD OMNIBUS, VOLS 1-3: Near-masterpieces of presentation, these collections of Jack Kirby's classic Fourth World material choose to reprint the work in order of publication. And while that has its drawbacks, particularly in the Volume Two where an extended storyline in The Forever People loses momentum as issues are spaced eighty pages apart, it pays off in Volume Three where Kirby begins to pull the threads of his stories together, and brilliant sequence after brilliant sequence begin to follow each after the next. Stunning.

KAMANDI ARCHIVES VOL. 2: In fact, reading the second volume of the Fourth World Omnibus, Marvel's Devil Dinosaur collection and this second volume reprinting Kirby's Kamandi stories in a row rendered all other comics completely uninteresting for about two weeks there. Whereas part of the delight of the Fourth World books is seeing how someone as distinctive and as regimented as Kirby was during that period still brings subtly different rhythms to each book, Kamandi entertains because it is constantly moving, keeping the title character (and the readers) from one crazy situation to the next. As far as I know, it's the closest Kirby ever got to the breakneck pacing of the great newspaper strips, and it makes for an intoxicating read. I really hope DC gets around to collecting all of these.

KING CITY VOL. 1 TPB: Speaking of intoxicating reads, King City by Brandon Scott Graham is, like Kirby's work, fast-paced and jammed with ideas, and unmistakably the work of a single idiosyncratic creator. It's deeply, deeply goofy, more than a little cocksure, and lord only knows when we'll see Volume 2, but this book reminded me of the first Scott Pilgrim book in its ability to take disparate influences and effortlessly marry 'em. I was so impressed with this book, I bought three copies to give to friends and lend out.

MISERY LOVES COMEDY HC: Somehow, by compiling the first three issues of Schizo--letter pages and all--under one cover and including an introduction from his therapist, Brunetti made me look at his comics in a new light. I already thought they were brilliant--Brunetti embodies every cliche of the unhappy indie cartoonist and transcends them through talent and fearlessness--but here they seem even more impressive, a radically brave act of self-expression. Plus, it's all funnier than hell.

MONSTER: Naoki Urasawa's sprawling suspense story is a deeply satisfying page-turner. Kinda reminds me of Dickens in its sheer narrative drive, and Urasawa's cartooning also has a love of expressive caricature. These can't come out fast enough for me.

PARASYTE VOLS. 1 AND 2: The first two volumes of Hitoshi Iwaaki's Parasyte remind me of both DC's Focus line and Marvel's Ultimate Spider-Man as a teen gains great power via the alien creature that's replaced his right arm. It might be a good book for superhero fans looking to branch out; it's certainly a great book for those of us who already have.

THE PROFESSOR'S DAUGHTER: Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert's turn of the century farce about an animated mummy king on the lam with the professor's daughter is everything you'd want in a graphic novel--funny, action-packed, beautiful and surprisingly moving.

SCOTT PILGRIM GETS IT TOGETHER: The fourth volume in the series, and arguably the strongest since the first. Creator Bryan Lee O'Malley gets it together even more than Scott, taking his storytelling and his cartooning to a new level, and giving us a perfectly paced and satisfying book.

ANYTHING BY TEZUKA PUBLISHED BY VERTICAL: In the space of a week and a half, I read Apollo's Song, Ode to Kirihito and MW, and was dumbstruck by Osamu Tezuka's utter genius. MW is a crazed crime novel in which a homosexual crossdressing crime lord matches wits with the priest who is his lover with the fate of the human race at stake; Apollo's Song is a psychedelic coming of age novel in which a potential psychopath is taught the power of love thanks to cross space/time scenarios, and Ode to Kirihito (published late last year) is a surreal world-spanning medical thriller that reads a little bit like if Jodorowsky had directed a Dr. Kildare movie after Dostoyevsky did a pass on the script. They're all brilliant and insane, buoyed up by Tezuka's wide-ranging mastery of the cartoon medium and open-armed embrace of melodramatic directness. I enjoyed Ode to Kirihito the most, but I loved all of them. I guess I'm finally ready to tackle Buddha.

YOTSUBA&! VOLS. 4 AND 5: Like Azumanga Daioh and Flower of Life, a light comedy I find both heartwarming, well-observed, and mostly perfectly timed. I never thought I'd champion a cute kid comic book, but Yotsuba&! has exactly the right amount of cute, avoiding the all-too-standard saccharine crud that usually comes with it.

STUFF NOT ON THE LIST BECAUSE I (STILL) HAVEN'T READ IT: Alice in Sunderland, Pulphope, other stuff I'm sure you'll point out.

STUFF I REALLY ENJOYED THAT DIDN'T MAKE THE LIST BECAUSE I WAS EITHER TOO LAZY OR THERE WERE MITIGATING CIRCUMSTANCES: Jason Shiga's Bookhunter (brilliant but a bit pricey for me); Rick Veitch's Army At Love Vol. 1 (enjoyable but uneven); Empowered Vol. 1 (I thought Vol. 2 was disappointing enough to taint Vol. 1 for me); Iron Man: Hypervelocity TPB (great fun in the singles; haven't checked to see if it holds up in the trades); The Escapists HC (ditto); Devil Dinosaur Omnibus (too pricey); JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (not for everyone; haven't I mentioned enough manga?); Brubaker's Captain America and Daredevil TPBs (I'm behind); Sgt. Frog (not enough volumes this year); Beck Mongolian Chop Squad (wait between volumes hurts the pacing; otherwise brilliant); Fart Party; probably many others I'm forgetting.

Anything that came out this year (in trade format) I missed?

Labels: best of lists, Jeff