Mr. McMillan also posted Wait, What 1.3 as an mp3 for those of you who requested it. So that's finally sorted out.

But do also check out our minicast--an episode I like to call "Graeme, Interrupted"--which, although cut short by Internet problems...



...has us both on one channel, improvements on the volume settings, and Graeme doing a really great squeaky voice there at the end.

And, of course, if you'd like to take a second and let us know what you think after you do, we'd appreciate it.

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, podcasts, Wait What?

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Capsule reviews! I still remember how to do 'em! Uh, kinda? They're sorta...long? Ish? And there's not...a lot of them?

Nonetheless. After the jump: BARACK THE BARBARIAN #1, BATMAN #687, FANTASTIC FOUR GIANT-SIZE ADVENTURES #1, and GREEN LANTERN #42.



BARACK THE BARBARIAN #1: Although the concept amused me, I doubt I would’ve picked it up if I hadn’t noticed Larry Hama writing it. Looking back on the legacy of G.I. Joe, there’s a case to be made that there’s no concept so silly Hama won’t try to finesse IT into something enjoyable.

And that’s essentially the case here, where Barack the Barbarian comes to a corrupt city and runs afowl of dark wizard Chainee The Grim, his assistant Red Sarah, and others. Although the joke is essentially at the level of a Cracked Magazine from 1974 and things suffer from an utter lack of personality on the part of the lead character, Hama’s crafted a surprisingly strong hook for his tale: it’s a legend being told by a shaman to children of his tribe, a legend that the shaman admits is of a time long-past, a time about which the truth could never be known.

Now I know I’m a sucker for this trope, it being a patented ‘70s Kirby dance move (that Devil Dinosaur story with Stone-Hand, Eev and the computer bank that becomes the Tree of Knowledge is the first, but far from only, example that comes to mind), but it’s used to particularly good end here. First, it adds a certain wit to the shaman’s understanding of this magical age of ours (people are able to communicate across long distances by consuming magic berries, dinosaur skeletons are shown pulling wagons, etc.)

But second, and more trenchantly, it’s a fine sideways commentary on how so much of our current political landscape is rooted in continual attempts to transform our politicians with the language of myth, and the accidental or intentional misunderstandings perpetuated in the media about our government does (or doesn’t) get things done.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got quibbles. As I said, the main character has no personality and is portrayed as something of a naif a characterization I doubt anyone would apply to Barack Obama, and the art, although effective in its storytelling, is crude and sketchy in a way classic barbarian comics are not. Worst of all, the likenesses are recognizable but lack the zeal or zing of caricature (which should really be one of the big draws for a book like this, don’t you think?)

Finally, to be honest, seeing a strong black ass-kicking barbarian my heart gave a distinctly non-ironic tug (apparently I was a bigger fan of Zula than I would’ve thought) and made me more than a little rueful: is this how we’re going to get strong African-American characters into our comics? Whisked in through the back door of parody by the promise of easy money? In a way, I wouldn’t mind if the whole thing didn’t seem so flimsy and likely to crash in around everyone’s ears in three months.

But quibbling aside…I liked it, I admit it. This is an OKAY book with the potential to becoming more (and the likelihood, alas, of becoming much less). I’ll be curious to see where it goes.

BATMAN #687: Worth noting because this is probably how Batman & Robin #1 would’ve read written by just about anyone other than Morrison. And, certainly, compared to Morrison and Quietly, it seems just this side of dull. But I appreciated how it talked me through the character motivations while managing to jam in enough action not to seem dull and to give you an end that moved boom-pow-punch forward while resolving Dick’s internal conflict.

I guess what I’m saying is that it looks like we currently have two different approaches to the new Batman storyline, and I really appreciate that: I’m on the hook for both and I thought this was a solid craftsman-like GOOD.

FANTASTIC FOUR GIANT-SIZE ADVENTURES #1: The Marvel All-Ages books continue to toy with their neither fish-nor-fowl status and I for one could be a bit happier about it. The long lead story in this issue is drawn in a more traditional style by Vicente Cifuentes whose work grapples with competence but looks like ‘traditional’ superhero stories. It’s followed by two stories drawn, with considerable skill and aplomb, by Colleen Coover and Dustin Weaver. Since all the stories are written by Paul Tobin, it makes it easier—although not entirely accurate—to attribute the success of each story to the strengths of the artists. The latter two stories—and I admit the last one is really just a fragment (a very charming shout-out to Hergé’s Tintin)—are such charmers, but also possessed of such talent and craft, I’m kinda wondering why I had to wade through so much mediocre art to get to them.

Now, I know there are lots of things going on behind the scenes that could explain such an arrangement: if Vicente Cifuentes is an artist in another country, he could be working for a much lower page rate that Coover or Weaver, for example. But I wonder if the Marvel All-Ages team is attempting to serve two masters at once—-those who want well-written, well-told stories, and those who want the characters inside the book to look like the bedsheets they just bought—-to the potential detriment of both. Whatever the case, I’m frustrated that so many Very Good bits and pieces still only end up to something that’s a middling OKAY, overall.

GREEN LANTERN #42: I dropped out back at the delightful blood-barf fest of Rage of the Red Lanterns, and am dropping back in to kind of gear up for the upcoming Black Lanterns storyline. So it’s little tough for me to tell how much of my confusion is due to coming in at the tail end of the Orange Lantern storyline, and how much is due to writer Geoff Johns surreptitiously positioning the storyline as a sequel to Space Jam. I mean, how else am I supposed to interpret a cover that positions a possessed Hal Jordan as the space-opera successor to Daffy Duck?





Or maybe I just have bad luck in terms of which colored lanterns I check in on? The Blue Lantern scenes seemed cool, and there was something that seemed sweeping and epic with that last scene where two Green Lanterns meeting an unhappy fate while looking for the corpse of the Anti-Monitor.

The issue left me with the impression the Orange Lantern was being played for both comic relief and some pathos, like a more irreverent take on Peter Jackson’s Gollum. While I don’t have any problems with that approach per se, either the tone is off or I’m really out of synch with it: it’s not that I have problems with humor in the middle of my big space epic, it’s more that the humor struck me as overly broad and flat. It reads to me like Johns is shooting for Pixar but ending up at Dreamworks, you know? Farting raccoons, and that kind of thing.

And there’s also some shortcutting that may be unavoidable but still strike me as terribly clunky—at this point, everything is happening on such a ginormous scale that Johns has captions with power percentages to create any kind of drama. “Oh no, my battery power is down to 823%!” That, along with teasers of which deceased character will end up in the ranks of the Black Lanterns, make this feel like an epic taking its dramatic cues from fantasy football pools.

And while such naked groping at populism might not be a bad thing at all—-by the time the White Lanterns roar to the rescue in their shiny hypertime NASCAResque light racers, Michael Bay might be slavering at coke-dappled jowls to adapt the whole damn epic—-I think it might be a shame if such a fine opportunity for something as grand as a handful of comic books telling a story was reduced to something as puny as a ready-made, billion dollar Hollywood franchise.

OKAY issue, though.

Labels: Jeff, reviews

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First off, if you enjoy the roguish way in which I stammer and hum on my way to making a point, you'll probably enjoy my first guest appearance over at the Fourcast!, Fourth Letter's podcast, wherein I chat with the charming and sensible David Brothers and Esther Inglis-Arkell about Mark Waid's run on The Fantastic Four, the differences between DC and Marvel, and (very, very briefly) about how Jack Kirby might've handled The Transformers. I really enjoy listening to the Fourcast!, especially the way David and Esther represent their Marvel and DC fan positions. It's kinda like sitting down to watch a cartoon dog and a cartoon cat battle it out, and seeing them approach things with humor, intelligence, and respect, instead of very large anvils--and so I was pretty gratified to show up and play the podcast's version of the always off-guard animal control handler who ends up cranking his head crazily around his neck trying to take it all in. My thanks to David and Esther for having me on.

Now, then. After the jump, a few words about the third (and second) volume(s) of Naoki Urasawa's 20TH CENTURY BOYS.



20TH CENTURY BOYS VOL. 3: There was a page from volume two--that page where Kenji loses his shit, yelling "Donkey!!!" and lunging at the guy who killed his friend--that literally almost knocked me out of the chair--Urasawa just perfectly paced the sequence leading up to that page, and then used this incredible combination of tricks to make Kenji's reaction as visceral as possible.



I'm cheating you and Urasawa a fuckton here because the pacing leading up to this page helps give this so much power, but still: look at that. First panel tight close-up, second panel medium shot, third panel another close-up (but not as close as the first panel). And each panel is from a different angle. But thanks to the continuity of the one panel and those fifty kajillion speed lines, it all feels unified: it's like a movie shot where the handheld camera shakes at just the right moment, giving a feeling of chaotic spontaneity, of all shit busting loose. (And check out how Kenji appears to be battling those speed lines in the first two panels--they're all but breaking on his body like water--and in the third panel they're behind him, pushing him forward.) Sweet Jesus.

Although Volume 3 didn't have a similar single page that knocked me on my ass in the exact same way, it has at least three showstopping suspense setpieces, two of which are stacked right on top of each other: Kenji finds himself face-to-face with the mysterious Friend in a packed stadium; a ticking bomb scenario plays out differently than you would think; and a gathering of people at a mini-mart has disastrous consequences.



(God, there it is again. Keep in mind how the page reads from right to left--see how the action of the last panel breaks out of the grid, showing how the pulling of the baby out of her arms is showing things literally going out of control?)

In each of these, Urasawa benefits not only from his insanely strong storytelling chops, but his ability to make you care about characters and then put them in breathtakingly tense situations. Because of the structural similarities to Stephen King's IT, the comparison between King and Urasawa comes pretty quickly to mind and I wholeheartedly recommend that anyone who enjoyed King's books to check this series out: to call Urasawa a world-class storyteller is actually an understatement.

And as a fan of both Urasawa's PLUTO and MONSTER, I'm fascinated by the way those books and this one is informed by the plot device of memory. Although not as much a keystone of PLUTO (at least as far as I've gotten into the story), both 20TH CENTURY BOYS and MONSTER revolve around characters who must remember their own past in order to avoid catastrophe. I'm curious as to what extent Urasawa uses this motif as simply a way to craft a story with maximum amounts of suspense (in such a story, the action of the plot unfolds in two different directions, with events in the present gaining sudden momentousness based on what's uncoverd in the past, and events of the past gaining poignance knowing what we do about characters in the present) or to what extent he believes such a motif to be a truism. For whatever reason, I'm more than happy (unfortunately) to consider Japanese creators within the context of their country's history, and I find it interesting to consider how Urasawa's tales take place in countries rebuilt after World War II in images seemingly markedly different from the images those countries held during the war. Whatever sympathies he might hold for those raised in and under those new images, to forget what occurred before is to invite disaster. I'll be interested to see how that might play out in later volumes of 20CB. As I said before, it's EXCELLENT stuff, and I hope you consider checking it out if you haven't already.

Labels: Jeff, manga, reviews

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Hey, you don't mind me writing about two Roger Langridge comics, one of which came out months ago, do you?

(If you do, don't click the link!)



FIN FANG 4 RETURN: I dug the original one-shot (from 2005? Fuck a duck!) but wasn't really sure if the characters were strong enough to merit a follow-up, frankly: not only are we lucky enough to see much more Langridge in the marketplace now than in 2005, but we're also seeing him on a licensed property to which he's almost perfectly matched. As much as I love the way Gray and Langridge handle Marvel continuity (it reads like it's written by someone who read everything Marvel published up until 1968, and then kept a pretty close eye on things until 1978, before finally saying to hell with it), all the initial juice for this concept, that of classic Marvel monsters re-emerging in modern times and trying to fit in, seemed used up in the first go-round.

And, honestly, the first twenty pages or so make a pretty convincing case for this viewpoint. The four main characters are re-introduced in an opening story that barely shows them together, and then rest of the issue is divided into short pieces for each individual character: it smacks of back-up pieces being reconfigured for a one-shot (r maybe just of an attempt to get another note out of a one-note concept. Although the first few stories have typical top-notch cartooning from Langridge (who gets more characterization out of Fin Fang Foom's eyes and lips than Salvador Larocca has managed to forcibly wrestle into his entire oeuvre), I was pretty bored.

Fortunately, the last three stories pick up the pace (and, probably just as importantly to me, the amusing continuity shout-outs) as Googam gets adopted by the richest woman in the world, Elektro the robot gets mistaken for the Spider-Man villain and ends up in the "S-Wing" of prison, and Fin Fang Foom fights Hydra for the fate of Christmas.

I'd like to think it's more than the dinner bell of Marvel continuity making my Pavlovian chops salivate: the Googam and Elektro stories have more than one gear to them, keeping moments small until the stories blow up big and crazy at the end, and the Fin Fang Foom story benefits from coming after these two smaller pieces. But if pressed, I'd also say that, yeah, having a Latverian nanny instruct Googam on all the many joys of her beloved homeland ("...Lake Doom was created in 1983 when ze Doom Dam was built as the ze mouth of Doom River...") or having Herbie the Robot act like a big douche really aided and abetted in my enjoyment of this book. Also, for what it's worth, I thought the colors by J. Brown were lovely throughout and exceptional on the final story, which takes place at twilight on Times Square--rather than playing up the Christmas angle, Brown pulls in purples, pinks and oranges to give the events a feeling of happening at dusk. Nice work, that.

So: it's not Langridge's Muppet Show, but I was won over by the second Fin Fang Four one-shot and would give it a GOOD, with the caveat that your love of anachronistic Marvel continuity may easily make or break this one for you.

MUPPET SHOW #3: Speaking of which...can I be a doomsayer for a minute and talk about why I'll be surprised if Muppet Robin Hood ends up working? It's not just that Boom! has found itself in the could-be-worse situation of having to do a follow-up to a miniseries (that has already found the perfect creator) with a team different from aforementioned perfect creator, it's that the Muppets themselves aren't nearly as enjoyable featured in long-form narratives as they are in bits and pieces. After the big origin story of The Muppet Movie, each movie goes on to feel a bit more uninspired until they fall into the position of having Muppets prop up public domain classics (and vice-versa).

The Muppets are at their best when encountered in bits and pieces, as on their show and Sesame Street, where they can quickly set up a situation, just as quickly blow that situation to pieces, and move on to the next situation before anything risks becoming dull. If there's one emotion I'd associate with the damn things (nothing is more humbling than typing Muppets twenty times in two paragraphs), it's delight, and delight, like Chinese food, works best when it's served hot and fresh: if left out long enough to get cold and cloying, one's impression of the whole experience suffers.

And this is--as if we're not all tired of reading and typing this--why Roger Langridge is so perfectly matched to this material. The third issue of this series focuses on the mystery of what, exactly, the Great Gonzo is (a subject that's been covered by other Muppet properties, as I recall) but what works is that this focus is given marginally more attention than the skits themselves, some of which focus on Gonzo (or on the theme of perceived identity) and some of which just have top-notch funny drawings. If you don't like a particular sketch, it's gone in a page or two; if you do like a particular sketch, your affection for the work carries you through the next sketch or two you might not like. It's more than the old "throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks" approach: Langridge mixes up pacing, panel placement, joke payoffs, all while throwing in regular two page routines from the show to keep the reader off-guard, all to heighten the surprise and, yes, delight.

There are very few people in the industry who've worked for so long to deliver their work in such variation as Langridge (although does it mark me as too much of a buffoon to say I'd love to see what Eddie Campbell could do writing the characters?) so I pity who tries to take on the Muppets next, no matter what the length they're attempting. But full-length miniseries? I hope the creative teams figure out a helluva good way to change up the tempo. A lot. The Muppets are damn demanding little dance partners.

(Oh, and VERY GOOD stuff, obviously.)

Labels: Jeff, reviews

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Don't think we resolved the stereophonic boondoggle, but the third part of our initial podcast is now available for your auditory delectation.

I'd like to have a follow-up review of LOEG: Century #1 to embellish some of the points made herein, but considering I've spent almost two full hours trying to catch up on overdue emails, it may come later rather than sooner.

Regardless, thanks for listening and let us know what you think!

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, podcasts, Wait What?

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It's been a busy weekend. Plus, we're trying to work on the audio quality a bit.

Plus, we did just enough trash-talking of Alan Moore, we're trying to figure out if we can post this without bursting into flames.

(Plus, Robert made us cry.)

But we're planning on having this posted--today, in fact--and I'll update accordingly when we do.

Thanks for your patience!

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, podcasts, Wait What?

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Thanks for those of you who took the time to comment on our first installment. Although this installment will have a little more of that angel/devil-on-the-shoulder stereo mix, we have dutiful drones hard at work to clear that up for our third installment, which we'll be posting Monday.

But, today: Graeme and I talk about the recent works of a certain Grant Morrison as well as how other critics affect our reading. (In fact, Graeme's analysis helps tiny-brained me think about some of the work at hand as we speak! You can all but hear the rice-krispyish popping of my befuddled synapses...)

Hope you enjoy it, and thanks for listening!

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, podcasts, Wait What?

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Okay, so I'm not particularly on top of the new-fangled technology, otherwise this would've gotten to you sooner and better, but Graeme and I spent a few hours last week talking about comics and put it into convenient podcast form for you. We hope you give it a listen and let us know what you think...

Some notes:

(1) the opening music is Track 18 from Nine Inch Nails' excellent ambient album Ghosts I-IV, because Trent Reznor, bless him, actually has a creative commons license for the work that allows us to use it.

(2) I think I sound like a bozo for the first two minutes or so. Just hold out until you hear Graeme get going--it's more than worth it.

(3) I'll be uploading Part 2 of the conversation tomorrow on Saturday and we should have Part 3 for you by Monday. Who says this isn't the Savage Critic age of Sonic Gratification?



And here is the rest of it.

Labels: Graeme, Jeff, podcasts, Wait What?

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Ooo, so far behind. On my comics reading, on my comics Internet reading, on my writing, you name it.

But! I did think I'd pass along two links that made my morning a little merrier.

They're behind the link, just because the images might be big enough to screw up the template...





I'm sure you already know--and have known since February--that Paul Grist has been serializing his Eternal Warrior comic online. I found out about over the weekend thanks to an old post on Shane Oakley's blog. There's about 28 pages there, which puts some meat on its bones, and it's fun looking at Grist take Moorcock ideas and Barry Windsor-Smith visuals and make them his own. And, of course, his compositional sense in black and white just always kinda knocks me back.



I'm not a torrenter in any sense of the word, which is why I'm always grateful when someone gets something like this out into the open air of the Web for however long: you can find a file containing pages from the first two issues of the infamous Air Pirates underground comics here. Yes, there's some Disney characters screwing, but I've been in awe of both Dan O'Neill and Bobby London forever and watching them (and Gary Hallgren! whose name was not on my radar at all) tear shit up was 100% delightful for me. I'm sure it's just my grumpy old man trick knee/fake nostalgia acting up, but this stuff seems to me 100% more loving and reverent of Disney material than the cookie-cutter corporate approved imagery we see nowadays. Maybe that's why some of the layouts right out of Krazy Kat fit in so well: The Air Pirates were tossing bricks, for sure, but they thrown with love. I'm incredibly grateful to Alan over at Poor Mojo's Newswire for bringing the link to my attention.

Labels: Air Pirates, Jeff, links, Paul Grist

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Part the last of my talk with Adam Knave, covering his webcomic, influences, and the 'speed of ludicrous.'

My thanks to Mr. Knave for taking the time to talk to me, and all of you for taking the time to read it (or suffer through it in silence, depending).

More jibbity-jab after the jump.



JL: So how long have you been doing comics then between this and…I’m assuming you’re pretty new to it between this and Legend of the Burrito Blade and the other webcomic whose name has dodged me [Things Wrong With Me]…

AK: I’ve only really been doing this for, good lord, probably less than a year, writing comics?

JL: That is not a very long period of time. Do you see your work changing over the course of the year?

AK: Oh, good lord, yes. I have a story which will hopefully be in Volume Four. And you know, I gotta say, I do love Popgun, if only because we don’t get our stories in any easier than anyone else. I’ve had stuff rejected.

JL: Really?

AK: Oh yeah. I have a story idea, I send it off to Anthony and D.J., who are editing Volume Four, and I’ll be their assistant again. And they were just like, ‘No, this doesn’t really work for us.’ Okay, so I tried again. It’s just as tough for us.

Comics is a whole new world. That’s part of why I’m doing things like Burrito Blade, because me and my artist---and I don’t know if you’ve looked at the comic at all—but he has, frighteningly enough, never drawn this many sequential pages of anything in his life. And you can see in the first thirty pages, his art is taking these weird leaps. Every three or four pages, he’s learning new tricks.

We just decided that this is a five year boot camp project, where I’m just writing script every few weeks—and that’s why I have an editor—and he’s just producing three pages a week, come hell or high water. And it forces you to up your game consistently, because there’s no waiting, there’s no second thoughts. It’s just, you write, and you get it back and you see it. And you go, ‘Wow, I could’ve done that better,’ and they you write more and you figure it out.



JL: I do notice that with Burrito Blade, that some of is his storytelling and some of it is your storytelling, but it almost feels like when you get on a ten-speed bicycle, and it’s not quite in the right gear at first, and then as you go in, there’s a sense of things being figured out. It’s good, because it does feel a bit like boot camp, and it’s sort of fun to read because of that, I think.

AK: And from where we are, because we’re neurotic, we’re something like four months ahead of publication. Because part of boot camp is, we both want to be in the industry more. I’m kind of edging close to it now, but that’ll only get you so far.

And part of it is not only being able to do the work but being able to hit the deadlines. And, you know, having an artist who is obsessive about deadlines is strange.

JL: Yeah, that right there is like, chain yourself to that guy.

AK: Renato is, hands-down…And, you know, again, I’m sitting here proposing to Matteo on the one hand and then leaving him from Renato over here—I’m a shameless hussy. Renato will do things like send me pages, and go ‘what do you think?’

And I will say to him, ‘this is not…this needs to be flipped, this needs to be here, here’s this old weird comic panel as what we’re trying to do, look at this for reference.’ And he’ll just go, okay, scrap the entire page, and re-draw it.

He’s never balked at anything, because he just wants to get better and hit deadlines and make this all work. So we’re all coming from this place so that, by now, we’re in the middle of doing—he just started actually drawing Chapter Four. Which they went about an issue—between twenty-one and thirty pages a chapter—because we’re making a graphic novel, and we set limits on it to try and hit those marks, for pacing issues and everything else. And by Chapter Four, the writing—just being able to see it when I get it back from my editor—the writing is tighter. There’s less of this, ‘I’ll spend a page when I should be spending two panels.’ And his art is getting better, just knowing how to move a camera.

JL: That actually brings a question for me about ‘Legend of the Burrito Blade,’ and I’m sorry to actually interrupt what I was asking you because I do want to hear about you and Renato, too. But it is very, very goofy for something that sounds so incredibly ambitious on your guys’ end.

AK: I can’t not do that. I love being able to go, ‘you know what? Today I want a muffin to explode.’ Just because that makes me laugh right now. I want to make a Real Genius float, just because…who doesn’t love Real Genius?

But at the same time, I want to do this deep, big story that’s very ambitious, and part of me has a little bit of fear there, where if we fail in the big ambitious thing, at least we still have the funny to lean on. Just being perfectly honest, that does exist there.

And the rest of it is, I’ve always personally love stories that are a lot deeper than they seem on the surface. So you’re not hammering the point—you can read Burrito Blade through the five year story we have planned, and never get any of the deeper stuff we’re talking about but hopefully still enjoy it.

[It’s too fine a point to being two things at once], but it’s just that’s kind of how I write, sadly.

JL: It’s funny because it reminds me—I just assume that you’re much, much younger than I am—but it reminds me of some of the weird ‘70s Marvel stuff. Definitely there’s a lot of Steve Gerber—

AK: Yes, there is. There is a lot of Steve Gerber in that. I will tell you—and D.J. can not like me for saying this—if we get the second Agents of the WTF story done [for Popgun Vol. 4], there is…people will who know Steve Gerber will just look at me and go, ‘you stole what?’ Because I had to, and sadly D.J. is not as big a Gerber fan as I am.



But I used to have a column, which I should really get back to someday, where I was going through every issue of Dazzler. Because, frankly, I love Dazzler. And looking back at it now, it was twenty years ahead of its time. And Bob Haney invented pop comics—and all that stuff…I have a theory about comics that really only two people have ever really ever nailed, which is that there is a speed of ludicrous.

Not the Mel Brooks’ ‘ludicrous speed,’ perhaps ludicrous is the wrong word to use then. But it’s really Bob Burden and Keith Giffen are the only people I know who nail this thing consistently, where you go just fast enough that all of the crazy just kind of happens, but not so fast that it blurs and you can’t keep up and you get confused, and not so slow that you can see the fact that it’s all crazy and it falls apart. There’s a sweet spot of ‘insane’ that things have to be able to move at.

And a lot of those old things, like, Gerber did it in a completely different way but he was doing the same thing with Howard the Duck and some of his Defenders work, god knows. And Giffen and Bob Burden live there. They kind of built the house.

And so every comic page I ever write is literally written for Giffen to draw. In my head, I write things with fifteen panels, and that’s how I want everything I ever do, drawn by Giffen…who will now take out a restraining order…



But yeah, that’s exactly where I live. That weird ‘70s Marvel, ‘let’s just be crazy and also tell a story’ place.

JL: And I wanted to ask you, actually: one thing that did strike me about the Burrito Blade, was even as I was reading it and I’m like, ‘yeah, these guys are still learning and putting things together,’ I was also like, ‘damned if you didn’t nail down, here’s the end of the page and here’s the event that happens at the page turn.’

AK: When I started writing, I told Lauren, ‘keep an eye on this editing-wise,’ because I had the weirdest job in the universe: three pages a week means that you read a page and the next day there’s nothing there. There’s no reason for you to show up. So every page has to give you a reason to want to come back two days later, every third page has to give the reader a reason to want to come back three days later, but it also has to read as a complete chapter, where all the chapters have to read as a complete volume, and all three volumes have to read as a complete god-damn story. So every single page has to play about four different roles. Those turn-points, there’s always a moment at the end of everything—it’s crucially important in my head because I always want people to come back.

It’s the old page 22 in Waid’s entire Flash run.

JL: Yeah, exactly! But each page definitely has a very strong intention to hit that beat, which I thought was interesting.

AK: Well, I’m glad it’s working.

Labels: Adam Knave, Jeff, Popgun

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Yesterday was the first part of my interview with writer/editor Adam Knave, wherein I did a terrible job of getting him to talk about the third volume of Popgun, out today. Today, I do a slightly better job, and although I'm still meager with the art, it doesn't look quite as tiny.

The interview should conclude tomorrow, with discussion about Knave's webcomic and influences.

Part II is after the jump.



JL: Anything else you want to add about Popgun?

AK: It’s awesome and you should buy it? It’s funny; my mother is mostly an editor and also a writer. My father was a writer first and would occasionally edit. And I grew up self-identifying—I’m not like one of those kids who was fifteen, ‘I’m a writer!’ But in my head, I’m always that guy who writes stuff, and never an editor.

And outside of D.J.’s story and the occasional thing, you know, work on websites and doing columns, I haven’t been an editor…until I got thrown into this. And it’s been an incredible learning curve. D.J. Kirkbride is one of the most amazing proofers I’ve seen in my life. The man has a gift. And the fact that Popgun comes out roughly every eight months? It kills me that anyone gets the book done. Just the amount of work, and how strong the book is. If you look at Book One or Two or Three, there really aren’t bad stories.

Part of why I agreed to the book was I was just a fan of it. Because anthologies traditionally don’t really sell, unless—and again Rantz is a god among men for pulling together Comic Book Tattoo—and let’s face it, he was kind of smart: yeah, put Tori Amos’ name on an anthology, it’ll sell. Yeah, that works.

But Popgun had nothing for it but ‘let’s make this incredibly good.’ And that’s kind of where we all sit when we work on it. It’s—I’ve been involved in publishing too long, I’ve seen too many teams of people who just really work together on a project for the money because they’re there today, and they think they’re supposed to be. But with Popgun, everyone involved in it is honestly just there for the love and are amazingly good professionals. And I think we end up with an amazing book full of people that produce…'Bastard Road.' Every chance I get I mention 'Bastard Road,' let me tell you. I am such a hardcore fan of that strip.

JL: That’s the [Cockfighter Blues]?

AK: Yeah. I actually told Brian I want the panel of “Giant Black Cock!” printed on velvet, and I will hang it framed in my living room. I’m not kidding.


Bastard Road: Cockfighter Blues by Brian Winkeler and Dave Curd

But it’s such a joyous thing. It’s that weird mix of everything comics can do, and a lot of Popgun is about that potential of comics. Don’t we all just keep hearing this, you know, ‘oh, well, comics. Just the superhero stuff is all that actually sells and nobody is really innovating anything…unless your name is Grant Morrison,’ unless you’re attacking Grant Morrison that day, in which case he’s not.

But you hear like three names of people who innovate in comics, and I’m telling you, we have like four hundred and seventy-odd pages of people who innovate in comics, hands down. These are people who are just doing incredibly new things with the medium. And it’s brave, and it’s just interesting to see from a production thing—hey, I get to read this stuff first—al of these stories that don’t always have anything in common, but you look through the book and you can feel this thread. You know, that music sensibility isn’t in every page. People aren’t going, ‘let me write a comic based on a rap song.’ But you do feel that sensibility of—before Top Forty Stations became huge and, you know, I grew up in New York, so I’m going to assume the rest of the world was like New York. You know, what became of Top Forty stations back in the early ‘80s played some really weird stuff. They were playing ‘Mercy Seat’ by Nick Cave on the god-damned radio, not a song you would actually get away with playing today.

But they would take these chances, and you had DJs who didn’t have orders to play these four records over and over, and you had people creating something interesting. Even if you didn’t like it, you had to respect it. And I think that’s really where Popgun lives. Because I don’t like every story in the book. I would be lying if I said I did, let’s face it. There’s too much stuff in there to love every story in the book.

But even the ones where I sit there and go ‘Really? This is--? Uh, okay,’ I consistently respect the craft that went into it, because everyone is at a really, really high level here. You have to respect the creators who push this stuff out, and you can tell they just kind of gave their all for it for, again, an Image anthology that—yeah, Volume One won a Harvey, and that’s awesome and well-deserved, I think. But I think it’s not going to buy these cats a car, you know? Let’s face it.

And I get mail, constantly, from people who are not unknown in the industry, who go, ‘I want to be part of Popgun.’ And that just amazes me. Not because, ‘Wow, they like us.’ But just that word is spreading and we’re becoming this place you go for the experiments, for the fun of it, for ‘let’s see what comics can do for a change,’ instead of being told what comics can do.


Vertex by Juan Doe

We tell people, ‘play. What’s the story you’ve always wanted to tell? Let’s see that one.' We actually just got a list of pitches from somebody whose name I can’t remember at all, who’s going to do a story for us, and he gave us these three choices. Here he is, a nice guy, he’s giving us options, that’s kind of awesome. ‘Which one do you want?’

And me, D.J., and Anthony all took a look at this list and we all universally, without talking to each other, went for the strangest, most experimental one in the batch. We’re just like, ‘we want to see you pull off that.’ Because no one’s done that yet.

And you don’t include that really unique, special weird thing unless it’s the one you really want to do. No one ever includes that in the list unless that’s the one they want. So that’s the one we’re going to go for. We want people to tell those stories that they really are fully invested in, because you can see that investment on the page.

Labels: Adam Knave, Jeff, Popgun

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Adam Knave is an assistant editor for the third volume of Popgun, out this Wednesday. He's also a writer of prose and a webcomic writer, and from what I can tell he works his ass off. Other writers and artists have projects they describe as "boot camp," for example, but Knave, along with artist Renato Pastor and editor Lauren Vogelbaum, are planning their webcomic to be a five year boot camp, one in which they're already significantly ahead of what they have posted.

I'm still learning the interviewer ropes so I apologize for the awkward breaks and pacing in the interview--I tried to keep this first part short then realized it was in fact too short. Part one is behind the jump.



Jeff Lester: Let’s start with Popgun, because that’s in theory the stuff that’s most important to get out on time here. When did you—let’s go for the big picture. How would you describe Popgun for somebody who’s never seen it or read it?

Adam Knave: The way it was originally pitched to me, when I first came on board, that it was the graphic mix tape. And that’s been their tag since Day One. And you know, you hear something like graphic mixtape, and you say it to people, and they go, ‘so they have music?’ You know, and then you realize you’re dealing with the slow people.

But it really comes down to, it is a graphic mixtape—they actually pull that off. You know, it has all the weird joys of a great mixtape: there’s a flow to it—we’re actually trying something slightly different with the flow in Volume Three than we have in the past.

JL: Oh, yeah?

AK: Yeah, we get to play with that. Volume Two was very much: here are these cool songs that go together. Volume Three, there’s a thematic flow. There’s more of a grouping of stories going on. Because I’m going to take you from one place to the other.

And there’s always an intermission in the middle of the book which…I don’t know if this is what they were thinking of when Mark and Joe first started the book, but it gives me such fond memories of cassettes and that’s the inset cover of the cassette. And so that’s awesome! Because it’s just like the flip to the cassette map! That just makes me smile. Every time.

I’m easily pleased.

JL: That’s good. Always helpful in this line of work.

AK: You know, everyone—everyone—has made mixtapes—or I suppose at this point, playlists—for friends. And that’s really what it is—trying to find established voices doing new things, as well as brand-new voices who just really should be bigger than they are right now. And just letting them play, and seeing where it all comes to and then finding a way to mix it all together, to get a finished product that reads like it was meant.

JL: So do you guys lay down any sorts of boundaries, as far as page limits or topics, or anything like that?

AK: Yes and no? There are some boundaries for content. It is an Image book. There’s never going to be outright porn. Past that? Mmm, not really. If it’s justified in the story, we’re usually fine with it.

Page count? I think the longest thing we’ve ever had is thirty pages. I know we have a thirty pager in Volume Three, and that’s the longest anything’s ever going to go. But we also have at least one one-page story. So we’re fairly free; it’s just we have so many people and so much material that we have to put a cap on it somewhere.

JL: I would think so. It’s a pretty big slice of comics.

AK: The great thing is both—I believe it’s Volume One and Two, actually—every volume so far has had roughly 100 pages of content that gets chopped out and pushed to the next volume.

You know, you’d think we’d already have a hundred pages, we’d stop. We don’t. And in Volume Three we actually hit the physical limit to keep the price point. We hit the physical page limit.

JL: How did the story that you end up co-writing in this volume end up happening?

AK: D.J. and I go way back. I don’t know if you remember—here’s a little slice of comic history for you—Too Much Coffee Man magazine.

JL: Oh, yeah.

AK: My first-ever, like, hard-print published journalism type stuff was in an issue of that. A website I ran, we interviewed Shannon Wheeler, and I kept in touch with him because I’m shameless. It’s how you get somewhere, you know?

And then just every now and then, I’d tell him, you know: if you ever need anything done, let me know. Glad to help out.

And one day he dropped a line and said, ‘I had this guy who was going to interview somebody for it me and then he dropped out. Can you do it?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ This was a Wednesday.

He said, ‘Okay. I need you to find someone who speaks Klingon and interview them.’

And I was reading this going, ‘You want me to—am I reading this correctly?’

And he’s like, ‘Yeah, find someone who speaks Klingon, interview, but we’re going to just present the interview in Klingon with no translation. And it’s going to be really funny.’

And I was like, ‘Okay.’ Again, this is Wednesday. He says, ‘All right. I need it by Friday.’

JL: So you actually had to transcribe—conduct and transcribe—an interview in Klingon in two days.

AK: I did it over email. I actually had a friend in Atlanta who knew someone they worked with who spoke Klingon.

God bless people who live near DragonCon. That’s really the secret.

But, no, I had to proof Klingon. Which, you know, I’m sitting with a book, going, ‘You need this extra apostrophe after this q.’ Just sitting there going, ‘what the hell am I doing?’

But I ended up on the staff of that for like the two or three issues before it went under. Which I still say had nothing do with me. And the last issue—which actually never came out—was Kirkbride’s first issue.

It was one of those things where he was now the new kid, and I was now the seasoned vet of like an issue and a half. So we were like, ‘let’s do something together!’ And we just found that we write together really weirdly well.

So when he was doing Popgun, I edited his story in Volume Two. And we said, ‘we should do something together.’ So we started doing all these stories. And finding artists—which, you know exactly the fun of that. Where you go, ‘It’s for Image. There won’t be any money! Because, well, it’s Image. So there’s no pay rate. So there might be money at the back end, but won’t you do this for free for now?’ It’s an eight page story, that’s why we get someone to say yes.

So we had a bunch of stuff in the works that we thought was going to end up in Volume Two. And nothing quite got done in time. We had an artist bail on us, and all the standard things that happen in life. And we ended up finding Matteo, who…I want to ‘art marry’ him.

He’s blindingly fast. And if you look at his work…he turned those pages around in something under a page a day.

JL: Good grief. Really.

AK: He’d sent us these sketches, and they were kind of very airy and all over the place. And we’re like, ‘there’s not going to be enough room! How is this going to work?’ And he says, ‘Oh no, those were just the sketches. I’m re-drawing them!’





And we’re like, “You’re going to…okay?’ You know, what do you say. ‘You go do the thing you do that frightens us, and we’ll be over here, screaming.’ And he just knocks them out of the god-damned park.

JL: That’s really amazing to know, particularly since the storytelling is really energetic—the angles and perspectives are all over the place, and everything’s always moving. You guys have just a few pages so of course it’s got to move, but there’s maybe half a panel where somebody isn’t screaming or running or flying.


AK: And I will admit, this is mostly my fault. I come from prose which, you know, that sentence makes it sound like another planet, and I guess in comics it is. I was at New York Comic Con talking to people, and I’d be like, ‘oh, did you want a copy of my book?’ Because I had my book with me (because I’m a whore, and I don’t mind that) and people were going, ‘It’s just prose? Why would you do that?’

So I hadn’t been writing many comics, because…when you grow up and you love comics, you want to write comics but you don’t know any artists, and after a while, you stop trying. So I hadn’t been really working in comics, so I was very much a wordy bastard. (As you might be noticing from this interview. It’s a curse.)

So the script kind of had these six pages that really should’ve been more like twelve. And it kind of forced ‘Teo to just make everything move that much faster. And when we saw it, we’re like, ‘Oh my god, you actually pulled this off. And we’re so sorry we did this to you!’

You know, we’re doing another one for Volume Four. Same characters. We’re doing a sequel. Not so much a sequel, as another story with these lunatics. We’re taking twelve pages and we’re writing about the same amount of script we did for the first one. Just because we figured we’d actually let him draw.


Tomorrow in Part II: More about Popgun, webcomics, etc.

Labels: Adam Knave, Jeff

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Is it fair to review a book about which I have very little to say? To you or to me?

Probably not. And yet, it seems necessary to write a little review of Grant Morrison's Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #1, if only because I and a million other people on the Internet were more than willing to record our impressions of G-Mo's Final Crisis each and every time an issue came out. Although I have nothing to support this theory, I've always assumed one of the conditions to Morrison's agreeing to do Final Crisis was that Vertigo publish the follow-up to his sublime but not particularly fiscally successful Seaguy.

And so, in my mind, while not fair to you or or to me, perhaps writing up my thoughts on this issue at this early juncture is more than fair to Grant Morrison, so that my second-guessing, half-baked theories, and if my flimsy, lazy thinking ends up being shown off in all its deluded, wearing-my-underwear-on-the-outside-of-my pants glory...then maybe so much the fairer.

You are welcome to join me in my fool's errand after the jump.



Let me begin by cataloging my sins. I purchased this issue and read it almost immediately, occasionally smiling while doing so. I then put it aside. Then, after a few days, when I realized things had remained relatively quiet on the Internets, I decided it might be good to see if I could start some sort of conversation on the matter. To do so, I did NOT go to my bookcase and dig out my Seaguy trade (it's all the way on the other side of the room!), I did NOT scrupulously re-read Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #1 (I spent about two minutes re-reading it), and I did NOT think through what I was going to say before I started typing.

As long as I am cataloging my acts of hubris, I should confess my nagging doubt that I have deeply misunderstood the first Seaguy limited series, if only because it seems to me one of the clearest and most straightforward pieces Morrison has ever written. Every time I read or talk to someone saying they enjoyed Seaguy but were pretty sure they weren't getting a lot of it, I realize my conviction regarding Seaguy's thematic transparency is more than likely that of the narcissist, the undeveloped child, around whom the world seems to revolve, and with whom the world communicates its system of odd, gnostic signs with perfect soothing clarity.

For me, the first Seaguy mini was a lovely, devastating meditation on the nature of corporate-owned characters and their lot in life: They traipse about in theme parks, immortal, carefree. As Morrison frequently does (and can often do so well), Seaguy is a look at how that life must feel for the character--the unsettled, subtle anguish of someone for whom everything is pleasant but nothing is good. The theme park in which they are an attraction seems to them a boisterous, capricious town eager to distract from what lies behind its manufactured facade. The characters never die, but their sidekicks do--but in order for everything to stay the same, the memories must be ripped from them, like a waxing of the forebrain, and although the mind aches from the loss, it doesn't know why.

And even better, this sort of haunted, ahistorical pleasantness was just a perfect god-damned snapshot of America--not post-9/11, but post-post-9/11, where my wife and I go out to dinner and shop along some lovely prefabricated spot like Santana Row, while non-chain stores sicken and die like poisoned children; where we sit at home and speculate about Lost, while the TV barely shows the war, now in its fifth year of grinding up the poor; and where I lie awake sometimes at night knowing that my distance from the true and terrible conflicts in this world (which I can sense thrashing about, coiling and uncoiling like a serpent fighting for its life, which I sometimes imagine being the cause of the flickering I can see on the night horizon from my window) is a luxury, a luxury for which I'll gladly suffer under the yoke of dull but steady employment, even while I idly wonder what it must be like to touch the scales of that furious beast. All of this I can feel in my life and see in the bright candy colors of the first Seaguy mini, in the pitch-perfect art of Cameron Stewart, looking like a one-page comic ad for the action figure you never bought, and, like I said, the whole thing doesn't seem baffling at all. It's as to-the-point as a ransom note.

And so I was never too riled up about seeing the sequel to Seaguy, although I rooted for the possibility and was gladdened by its announcement. For me, the perfect sequel of Seaguy would be exactly--and I mean exactly--the same three issues of Seaguy, just with Lucky El Loro in place of Chubby Da Choona. Failing that, it's probably for the best to have only the original miniseries and the the promised sequel never to arrive, so that a reader had no choice but to return to the original story again and again until they'd suddenly realize that the first volume of Seaguy was the sequel, and that they, the readers, were the true slaves of Mickey Eye.

But just as a child spends some time investigating outside their window and realizes with some degree of relief and no small amount of disappointment that the faerie messenger scratching and knocking furtively at the bedroom window was merely a newly displaced dangling branch, I come to tell you the the first issue of Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye is not a mere repeat of Seaguy's first issue, but a comic book all its own, a continuation of the fugue, but also an entirely new measure of it.

In Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #1, Seaguy is more unsettled, more aware that something isn't quite right in his world, and quicker to realize when he's being lied to. Where it last time took Seaguy the course of several issues to wander in over his head and lose his sidekick, here it takes less than twenty pages, leaving enough time for a quick asylum incident that recalls the end of Peter Pan and a rescue by the three chaps seen on the cover, whom I've nicknamed (for now) TeaGuy, ThreeGuy, and PeeGuy (although the colors and logos on the closing page and the cover don't match, so maybe Peeguy is really green and Teaguy is really yellow, I don't know).

Considering the rescue comes hot on the heels of evil Lotharius' order for "radical solutions," I think it seems likely the trio of Seaguy analogues may end up being tools to keep Seaguy from discovering the truth. It'll be interesting to see if Teaguy, Threeguy and Peeguy end up being Morrison's spoof on the growing tendency to give superheroes lineage make-overs, putting them as but one in a line of Fisty Riders or Green Flashes. It seems important that Seaguy consider himself inessential, when the behavior of everyone around him suggests that he is in fact crucial to the world around him. And, of course, doltish clod of a comic reviewer that I am, I only know begin to realize how Seaguy's scuba mask resembles nothing so much as an eye itself. It seems a very Morrisonian pun if 'Seaguy' is in fact 'Seeguy' and I wonder if he's going to end up having some unexpectedly close ties to Mickey Eye than might have already been established. (That last clause is a a somewhat slipshod way of confessing I don't quite remember what was revealed at the end of the last Seaguy by the time he ended up on the moon--butterflies? Mummies? Maybe I really should've dug through my shelves and re-read that trade?)

Oh, and the art on this, by the way, was superb. Stewart knows right where to put an unsettlingly realistic touch in the midst of things at their most unreal (there's a close-up shot of slightly misaligned bottom teeth that's just spot-on) and I love how none of the panels here are fully bordered--they manage to feel both claustrophobic and disquietingly open-ended, as if the characters inside are trapped, but something could still enter in suddenly and change everything.
And the colors by Dave Stewart? Also great--I really liked that greyish miasmatic feel he gives the first few pages.

So that's one rube's opinion: Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #1 is Very Good stuff, worthy of your time and attention and even that high-end Internet chatter that we only seem to break out for the big-money events. Ignore it at your peril.

Labels: Grant Morrison, Jeff, seaguy

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Because I follow several of the Alert Nerd people on Twitter, I had the head's up about their "what's your Scott & Jean?" event they were planning for March 30th. Unfortunately, because I'm still a waster with terrible time management skills and the world's worst book to re-draft, I didn't realize that March 30th would somehow end up being, y'know, today.

I think the question is relatively comprehensible to yr. average comics geek. As Sarah puts it in Alert Nerd's master post:

Said phrase means, essentially, “That is my geek sacred cow, the one topic I cannot discuss rationally because it makes me too insane/angry/scary-eyed.”

So what's my geek sacred cow? Let's find out together shall we? After the jump.



Being the "Raised on '70s Marvel" geezer that I am, my list of geek sacred cows back during that time would've been something like:

(1) Bucky stays dead;
(2) Gwen Stacy stays dead;
(3) Uncle Ben stays dead;
(4) Howard The Duck does not wear pants, and wears a hat too small for his head.



In the '80s, I think I would've added the following to the list:

(1) Jean Grey stays dead;
(2) Nobody but Frank Miller writes Elektra;
(3) You never learn Wolverine's origin;
(4) You can't break up Nightwing and Starfire (Hey, my entry point into DC was Wolfman & Perez's Teen Titans).



In fact, this may have been the true joy of being a young comic book geek: stepping out each fine morning and looking out an entire herd of geek sacred cows happily grazing before you--nobody but Kirk will command the Enterprise; the Man From Atlantis will never remember his origin; in the end, Godzilla never loses; you can't have a Planet of the Apes movie without Roddy McDowall; you never see the Human Fly's face. There's something thrilling about coming down from Mount Sinai with those two tablets of shall-nots and will-nots. Every parent will tell you about the phase their kid goes through where their response to everything is 'no!' But there's also something satisfying about these rules because you learn them, basically on your own. Unless you're reading a John Byrne comic, nobody would ever say, 'Reed can never cure Ben! Iron Fist will always love Misty Knight! Scott will only love Jean!' They're the things you learn on your own--that's why they're so powerful, something so similar to sacred.

But over time, as you get older, you watch most of your sacred cows get a bolt in their brain, hung upside down and bled, cut into parts. Then you are offered the chance to plunk down some cash so you can bite into that extra-thick and juicy hamburger formerly known as your sacred cow. And some of us bite deep into that burger just so we can complain knowledgeably about what a horrible waste, a sacrilege, a defilement of the divine, the burger's production is. And some of us realize the sacred cows were never grazing in our pasture, and we either stay because we like the view, or we split.

Or, you know, every so often, in mid-self-righteous mouthful,we find ourselves going, 'this is one damn tasty burger.' I was not a big fan of bringing Bucky back, but god-damned if Brubaker didn't grill that shit up and serve it to me with thick-sliced onions and a side of bacon. I was incredibly annoyed at how lame 'One More Day' was, but on the next-to-last page, I was a little bummed Gwen Stacy wasn't right there next to Harry Osborn--as long as you're gonna defile the church, people, fornicate on the altar, not in the pews.


(ugh, no, not literally.)

Now, it may be that I have some list of geek sacred cows that I am hiding from you--that I am, in fact, hiding from myself, so that I don't have to worry about saying them out loud and having today's writers go, 'Wow. That would blow everybody's mind if it turned out that Dick Grayson was gay, wouldn't it? Hmmm...'

Because in a marketplace that caters exclusively to the disciples, sacrilege sells. If you can sell the sacrilege in a way that stays true to the characters, then you've got a pretty good future in this business. But if you can't? Find the cow, man. Find it and kill it.

But I came to this meme to honor it, not to bury it. I'll give you two Scott & Jeans, in fact: a bugbear and a meta-bugbear, either of which I'll happily argue about until the [WARNING: STOP TALKING ABOUT FUCKING COWS!]... new comics come in.

Scott & Jean Number One: Lois Lane and Superman and Clark Kent must always be a love triangle.




Why? Because apart from his constant inherent goodness (which is only interesting now because no other hero is considered constantly, inherently good--fifty years ago, that was par for the course) it is the only fucking interesting thing about Superman, that's why. Nearly every other single interesting thing about Superman (Kandor, weird 'L.L.' fixation, lost civilization of Krypton, the Legion) is an odd external facet, some little idea that stuck and crystallized in a really interesting way.

But the fact that Lois loves Superman and Clark loves Lois, but Lois doesn't love Clark the way she loves Superman and so therefore Superman can't love Lois the way she loves him, comes from Superman/Clark himself, and not from any external geegaw or fifth-dimensional whatsit or from being exposed to some rare strain of Kryptonite that makes him peevish or capricious. You can spend a lot of time and energy thinking about why this weird dynamic exists (and believe me, I have) and you'll never get to the heart of it, but you can, like an actor, pick a reason that makes sense to you and craft stories that suggest your explanation.

The bizarre love triangle (or maybe it's better to say Bizarro love triangle, since it's not a triangle at all) is not only tied to the internal drama of the lead character and multivalent, it's also real. (In fact, it's better than real--it's super-real, in that "a wheel is a leg" kind of way.) Remember that person who liked you enough to hook up with you (repeatedly, even!) but always had some weirdo explanation as to why they couldn't be with you? Remember that person who adored you, and you realized all you had to do was adore them back and everything would be fine, but there was something--the way they slouched or the way they laughed, or your unrequieted love for someone else, or the fact that you were still five years away from realizing you were an emotionally damaged alcoholic who had to keep everyone at arm's length? Sometimes, later on, you figure out why things didn't happen, or maybe you never do and you think of that person--not so much the one who got away as the one you let go--and you accept it because that's the way things are, you guess: Lois loves Superman and Clark loves Lois, but Lois doesn't love Clark the way she loves Superman and so therefore Superman can't love Lois the way she loves him.

Scott & Jean Number Two (the meta-bugbear): Continuity matters.

Continuity is a noose. Continuity is a trap. I believe that, I really do. It's one thing to have continuity for five years or ten years in your superhero universe--maybe you can split your Earths in two, and you can double that. But it's like entropy--sooner or later it gets you. At a certain point, it renders the system useless as every transaction in the closed system is made and no other transaction can be made. A noose. A trap.

But even though I know that, continuity matters to me--without it, the idea that what happens now matters to what happens next, and what happened last month is important to what's happening now. The noose of continuity is what has raised superhero comics to such spectacularly successful heights. More and more, I enjoy the craft of a fine done-in-one, but that's because there aren't that many continuity driven stories I enjoy these days--maybe because I'm not personally invested in them, since there's either a good chance they'll be undone in the next two years or because they ignore some piece of former continuity, or the continuity they had to wipe in order for the story they had to have happen. But as much as I enjoy sitting around high on the drug of my choice reading Bob Haney Brave & The Bold showcases (and I'm enjoying it these days probably more than I should), I totally would've ditched comics when I was twelve or fourteen or seventeen if that's all there had been to it.


(Yes, really.)

I wish I had somewhere further to go with this point from there, but I don't think I do. This is where I have to remember that those cows don't belong to me--they belong to the guy next door, the one who assures me the cows are sacred to him, too. (You know, the guy running the slaughterhouse.) He's gotta make a living, or he closes up shop and there are no more cows. [HOW THE HELL DID I END UP ON THE FUCKING COWS AGAIN? STOP, STOP, STOP.] Maybe this is why I'm more vegetarian these days--18 volumes of Urasawa's Japanese mushrooms; Jaime and Gilbert's strange burrito joint with the tear-summoning hot sauce; stranged aged cheeses from the '40s and '50s. I dunno.

And, anyway, the stupid settlement says that Howard has to wear pants, so what are ya going to do, right?

Labels: Jeff

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Speaking of symbolists, I got an email just this morning from the McSweeney's people talking about their next book, Art Spiegelman's Be A Nose, "a triple dose of unexpurgated Spiegelman sketchbooks from years past—you get 1979, 1983, and 2007, all in actual-size hardbound editions and wrapped in a really neat ski-gogglelike strap."

They include a link to the trailer they've created to the book which you can see here. (I'd embed the sonuvabitch, but I'm afraid I'd break the formatting since we've got a width limit here on the blog). I thought you might like to check it out...

Working on a review or two, although they're staggering a bit much more than I'd like. They'll be up here sooner or later, I'd like to think.

Labels: Be A Nose, Jeff, Spiegelman

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Frank Miller has a small role in The Spirit, the movie he wrote and directed, playing a cop by the name of Liebowitz. Miller's character dies about ten minutes into the picture; his directing career follows suit ninety-five minutes later. Counting me, there were twelve people in the showing I attended and four of them walked out before the movie ended. (Another one snored audibly when I passed him on the way to the head.) Since Miller considers himself a provocateur in the comics world, I wish I could say the four that left stormed out furious, but no: they left with the resigned air of people cutting bait, already figuring which multiplex theater they'd stop by next.

Me, I was busy trying not to succumb to the myth of linear filmmaking--the first twenty minutes had me convinced I was watching the worst movie ever made, the middle hour was tedious, and the last twenty were basically competent although already scuppered by everything preceding it. It was tempting to think Miller had gotten better as things went on.

[More--by which I mean "more amateur Freud than you can shake your father's stick at"--after the jump.]



Although frequently dull, The Spirit never bored me: the pretty visuals, the constant shout-outs, and the fascinating smear of psychological subtext all kept me preoccupied. I guess that last is to be expected--most of my sub-rudimentary knowledge of Freud comes from Miller's own comics, where I inferred the Oedipal implications of Daredevil's origin by Miller's creation of a female character with a parallel origin named Elektra. (And let's not get into that sequence from The Dark Knight Returns where Bruce Wayne remembers the death of his parents in super slow motion, his mother's string of pearls slowly breaking apart in panels separated by shots of Bruce Wayne's horrified rictus--an evocation of ejaculation in the midst of all that death, the underlying childish Oedipal fantasy become nightmarish reality that causes the guilt that leads Bruce to punish himself with his heroic undertaking.)

So, I admit it. Until I'd seen the first leaked footage of The Spirit from SDCC, the trailers had me thinking Miller's adaptation would be a canny bit of transference: he would adapt the character best identified with Will Eisner--his artistic mentor, sparring partner, father figure--and savvily usurp it. I figured that was why there were so many Millerisms in the first trailer (so many, many Millerisms) and so few Eisnerisms. To put this even more crassly: if Eisner was the father of Miller's inspiration then The Spirit was the mother, and Miller was going to put it to Mom nice and good while all of Hollywood cheered him on. Either the movie would be a hit, and everyone would associate The Spirit--and The Spirit--with Miller, or the movie would be a flop, and the mother (and by extension, the father) would be ruined.

(Yes, yes. As Hibbs would say: "Lester, you have issues.")

But the footage leaked from SDCC made me re-think things: oh sure, The Spirit and The Octopus slugged it out in what appeared to be an overflow of liquid feces--nope, nothing Freudian going on there!--but the banter, the cartoon sound effects, the vaudevillian slapstick...it reminded me, however faintly, of Will Eisner. (Kyle Baker goes on to underline this much more emphatically, and amusingly, than I could ever hope to, here.)

Long before the movie came out, I began hoping that Miller was trying to update Eisner's Spirit for a modern audience and had tumbled to the idea that the closest analogue to Eisner's oddball mix of noir and vaudeville, slapstick and sturm-und-drang, melodrama and high yucks, that the audience might know would be...Frank Miller.

Miller's work--even his later work as a god-damned cartoonist instead of a writer/artist--isn't Eisner's, but you can see in the movie a bridge being made to carry Miller's moviegoing audience of today to Eisner's comic-reading audience of yesteryear. (That bridge, alas, snaps about ninety seconds in, and the remaining hundred and six minutes are watching the interesting shapes made by the wreckage splintering on the shoals.) For a guy who likes to have draw mustaches and Satanic van dykes on the faces of Jim Lee's DC Universe, Miller turns out to be a more dutiful son in the pinch than I might have imagined.

Well, at least as far as the father is concerned, anyway. The one fascinating bit Miller adds to The Spirit mythos, at least as far as I'm concerned, is The Spirit's relationship to women and his city. Although I'm not the best read Spirit fan in the world, I think Feiffer's explanation in The Great Comic Book Heroes (for all the superheroes of the Spirit's time) explains The Spirit's relationship to women nicely:

Our cultural opposite of the man who didn't make out with women has never been the man who did--but rather the man who could if he wanted to, but still didn't. The ideal of masculine strength, whether Gary Cooper's, Lil Abner's, or Superman's was for one to be so virile and handsome, to be in such a position of strength, that he need never go near girls. Except to hep them. And then get the hell out. Real rapport was not for women. It was for villains. That's why they got hit so hard.

Instead of just a modified version of this tack, Miller's Spirit is a man who is catnip for the ladies, but clearly can't help flirting back. While proclaiming to love Ellen Doran (Sarah Paulson)--here, a surgeon who keeps sewing his semi-invulnerable body back together--he is haunted by the lost love he shared as a teen with Sand Saref (Eva Mendes, not nearly as bad here as in Ghost Rider, although I should tell you I consider that one of the worst performances in movie history), but capable of flirting with rookie cop Morganstern (Stana Katic), while having visions of the mysterious and thanatic Lorelei (Jame King), and still finding time to make time with Plaster of Paris (Paz Vega), etc., etc. (etc., etc.).

Factor in The Spirit's voiceover referring to Central City, his city, as a woman that needs him, referred to alternately as his lover and, yup, his mother. The Spirit says he loves women, and I'm sure Frank Miller does too, but then why in this movie is embracing a woman equated with embracing death, and a mother is equated with a couple of garbage cans in an alley? Although Miller offers up his props to Sergio Leone in The Octopus's absurd sombrero in the opening (and the plaintive harmonica near the closing), the parts of The Spirit I enjoyed most--and were disturbed by the most--were when the movie played like Fellini's 8½ done as an episode of the Batman TV show.

There's shitloads of problems wrong with the movie, mind you: Miller spends so much time trying how to shoehorn Eisner's work into a modern context (and it's probably not a good sign that even though I could kind of imagine how the movie might play out on a comic book page by Eisner, I could imagine precisely how it would do so by Miller), he didn't bother to shoehorn a good story into that. But where else can you see stuff like Samuel L. Jackson playing one scene in blackface, or an African American actor and Jewish actress romping around in Nazi outfits (I still don't know what to make of the fact that The Octopus, delightfully jumping about and cutting henchmen in half for the hell of it, or dressing up as a Nazi or a samurai or a glam rocker whenever he feels like it, isn't evil so much as pure unbridled id) or the weird sexual anxiety in a scene where The Spirit loses his pants while dangling from the edifice of a building in the shape of ram's horns? (Yeah, where'd I get all that crazy Freudian nonsense from, anyway?)

That all of this still manages to be so dull and walk-outable is a testament to the world of difference between the pacing of a filmmaker, who must sculpt time, and a cartoonist, who must sculpt space (and then there's the cartoonist's use of their own chops as compared to a filmmaker's use of their actor's, which in the case of Eva Mendes is a very difficult task indeed, the woman being essentially chopless). While The Spirit is more or less terrible, it's interestingly terrible, and even shows promise. With time, Miller could maybe make a movie that could be enjoyed even without the use of vicodin and animal tranquilizers. Hard though it may be to believe, I genuinely hope that, like the title character of his movie, Miller's directing career is harder to kill than one would expect.

Labels: Eisner, Frank Miller, Jeff, The Spirit

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[Warning: I intend to spoil plot points from the movie Punisher: War Zone--to the extent anyone can spoil anything in a movie called Punisher: War Zone; also, technically it's misleading to call them 'plot points' since that suggests Punisher: War Zone has what one could call a 'plot,' so really I guess I should be warning you I intend on spoiling 'events' from the movie Punisher: War Zone--so if you really do intend on seeing the movie stop reading and go catch it now because it won't be in theaters more than two weeks, tops.]

I saw Punisher: War Zone the other day with my pal Robson and two friends we helped sneak in to the theater, Asahi Super Dry and Sapporo Premium. Possibly due to keeping such fine company, I enjoyed the movie as bad-but-entertaining, the type of flick that keeps the gunfire and gore abundant (reminding me of last year's grindhousey Rambo flick which was also bad-but-entertaining), and is clever enough to introduce a gang of parkour-using scumbags solely so one of them can be blown apart by a rocket launcher in mid-roof-to-roof somersault.

Ray Stephenson from Rome is Frank Castle, a.k.a. the Punisher, and Dominic West from The Wire is Jigsaw, a.k.a. Billy Russoti; and I confess I found their presences a little distressing, as if this flick was commissioned by another premium movie channel for the express intention of subliminally soiling HBO's reputation. In fact, although I suspect it's unintentional, Punisher: War Zone also made me think of The Sopranos: not only does West seem to be doing the longest Paulie Walnuts imitation ever committed to celluloid, but at about two-thirds mark, the horror gore, the crime cliches, and the very big can of beer I was drinking convinced me that Cleaver, the terrible movie made by Christopher Moltisanti in the final season of The Sopranos, would've been more than a little like P:WZ. In the context of the movie, West's performance works, and while I think Stephenson plays The Punisher as a sad guy who gets very, very angry when it should really be the other way around, I thought he was fine.

In fact, I feel like I had more faith in his acting than the filmmakers: although the Punisher works best as a stoic character, he says far too little in this film, and a lot of it variations on "I'm sorry," since part of the story's hook is that Frank, in taking out a gang near the beginning of the film, kills an undercover fed, tries to make it up to the surviving family (Stephanie Janusauskas, as the young daughter and Julie Benz, with her patented post-Angel gamut of angry defiant weepiness, weepy angry defiance, or defiant weepy anger, depending on what the situation calls for, as the widow), and then swears to quit being the Punisher--an idea the film takes seriously for little more than forty-five seconds. Sadly, there's next-to-nothing like the bit in the trailer where Stephenson says, "Sometimes, I think I'd like to get my hands on God," with muted anger and grief and conviction. I don't know if it's just because the filmmakers didn't have much faith in Stephenson's accent (which does indeed slide all over the place in some of his longer line readings) or couldn't be assed to cherry-pick Castle's better lines from Garth Ennis' run, but it renders this incarnation of The Punisher little more than a glum cipher.

(And as long as I've got my bitch on, I'm still baffled why every film incarnation of The Punisher insists that the character have the darkest hair possible--as if that's the character's superpower, or main visual motif--but it does Stephenson few favors: he looks very much like the older, grizzled vet Ennis' Max run makes him out to be until you notice the Reagan-colored hair on his head and then he seems silly and vain.)

But to return to my main point, which is one of general praise: rocket-launcher meets parkour jerk. Shotgun to a guy in a chair. Room of waiting bad guys introduced to a grenade launcher. A "one lives, one dies" choice where one does, in fact, die. Excellent lighting on a scene-to-scene basis, even if it doesn't hold together throughout the film. Proof of human cloning, as Doug Hutchison is a tiny, tiny replica of Frederic Forrest apparently grown from fingernail and hair clippings. Multiple beheadings. The woman behind me and Robson who laughed at every single line in the movie and also yelled helpful advice to the screen like, "Kill him!" Machine-gun pistols. Enthusiastic audio mixing, particularly when broken bones or snapped tendons are involved. The occasional Garth Ennis line. Mark Camacho, the poor man's Paul Giamatti. The scenes between Frank and the daughter.

Overall, Punisher: War Zone is executed with such craft and devotion to clearing the very low bar set for it that I can understand why Robson mistook it for a good movie, rather than a very good bad movie: it's easy enough to overlook that the movie throws in a plethora of characters to distract from the movie's go-nowhere story and lack of character arcs for all involved, that it sets up situations that make no sense even by its own logic, that it can't quite shake the tone of exhaustion from the silly stuff, and the sense of silliness from the world-weary stuff. The movie is all blown-up with nowhere to go.

Financial failure notwithstanding, Punisher: War Zone is more likely than not a snapshot of the current state of the American Action Movie, the production equivalent of Disney's It's A Small World: directed by a German, produced by an Israeli, starring three guys from the United Kingdom, and crewed by apparently the entire French-Canadian population of Quebec and Montreal. While not that a good Punisher movie--again, considering all the material Ennis has put into print about the character, it's shocking how truly far away from that goal the movie is--based on the weekend box office, Punisher: War Zone is probably going to be about as good as we're ever going to get. I give it an enthusiastic OKAY, particularly if you've got some beers in you and are looking for entertaining junk.

Labels: Jeff, movies

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Um. So, I wanted to talk about last week's Previews. More specifically, page 225:

CTHULHU TALES #12
by William Messner-Loebs, Jeff Lester, Jeremy Rock & Chee

Jeff Lester pens "Reunion Tour," what is probably our favorite Cthulhu Tale to date, a story melding rock and roll, age-old partnerships, unnameable beasts from the dimensions beyond time and space, and flight attendants! Also, William Messner-Loebs returns to Cthulhu Tales with a short story of chilling horror!

Honestly, as solicitation text for my comic book debut go, I couldn't be more fortunate...except for one tiny, nagging detail: my story isn't in Cthulhu Tales #12. It's been moved up to Cthulhu Tales #10.

And so, rather than an extended, perfectly planned and executed series of posts in which I woo you into purchasing my first story, I have to go with the last minute, flat-out shameless pitch: please purchase Cthulhu Tales #10, coming out in January. (You can use order code OCT083937.) Although it's long past the date for initial orders, if you go to your retailer, tell them you want a copy of the issue (and give 'em this code: OCT083937), they can proably still reserve you a front-row seat for my transition from "guy who talks too much on the Internet" to "guy whose characters hopefully don't talk too much on the printed page."

Here's the splash for the story (every time I try to bump the size a bit higher it breaks the page, so...):

From CE

I chose this panel because Chee, the artist, did such an amazing job with blacks, whites and particularly (what looks to my untrained eyes as) those grey washes, that the editors decided to run the story in black and white, and I hope you can at least see a little bit of that here.

This panel is also the closest I get to sounding like classic Lovecraft, so it may not be entirely representative of the story as a whole. The other stuff is a bit more like this:



So... you know. If you enjoy my writing on this site (as well as the humor stuff I've done over here), I think you'll dig this. You know your comics store better than mine, but most stores don't stock Cthulhu Tales in Avengers-sized quantities, so if you're interested, you might be better served by going to the retailer (with this code: OCT083937) and trying to get 'em to order a copy in advance from whatever amount over the initial orders Boom! printed.

Again: Cthulhu Tales #10. Order code OCT083937. Coming out in January.

Thank you. Apart from a brief notice the week the issue comes out, I promise not to do any additional shilling here.

(Oh, and speaking of last week's Previews, if you check out the IDW section, you'll see Hibbs has a second volume of Tilting At Windmills coming out. I'm hoping he'll talk here about that one sooner or later. We were amused we both had stuff in the same issue of Previews, though.)

Labels: cthulhu tales #10, Jeff, OCT083937

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Don't get me wrong--I'm not asking if, y'know, manga manga, that whole ginormous industry over in Japan is dying? Nor am I asking if, like, collections of Naruto or Bleach are sitting there rotting on the shelves.

But is the manga industry in America dying? I'm totally reluctant to ask such a question--not least because I'm totally in the dark about how something like, say, publication schedules in Japan can allow American publications to catch up (like with Sgt. Frog, I think) and all sorts of other mitigating factors.



It was one thing when the sixth volume of Yotsuba&! never shipped from ADV. And it was another thing when DMP announced it was cutting eleven publications from its monthly publication list and the fourth volume of Flower of Life would be coming out in May, 2009. Although frustrating, these events made a certain amount of sense to me because these were smaller fish in the manga pond, and maybe their ambitions had outstripped their ability.

Similarly, although incredibly pissed and frustrated that volume 13 of Beck Mongolian Chop Squad, originally promised for September 2008, is not listed for June 2009 on Amazon's website, I can similarly see how Tokyopop has been over-extended for some time now, and any number of short-sighted strategies are coming back to haunt it.



But, you know, where's that second hardcover of Tezuka's Black Jack? (For that matter, why did the first hardcover volume have an exclusive story but a non-updated table of contents?) Where's volumes 11 and 12 of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure from Viz, while Amazon still lists Vol. 13 as scheduled for release in April of 2009? Why are major publishers cutting huge corners, dropping titles from their publication schedule unannounced, if not because, you know, they have to?

I don't know. I guess I'm just pissed because if I had hopped on the scanlation train, I'd be long since finished with Beck by now.

So, what's the scoop? Is the great manga implosion happening? Or am I just pulling a big Chicken Little about the whole thing? As Hibbs would say: What do YOU think?

Labels: Jeff, manga

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Yesterday, in Part One of 'Jeff Lester Talks Too Much,' I occasionally let Strangeways writer Matt Maxwell get a word in edgewise, and talk about his book Strangeways: Murder Moon, the current serialization of the second book, Strangeways: The Thirsty, on Blog@Newsarama, and writing for comics.

Today, in Part Two, Matt talks about writing for comics, rewriting, self-editing, bad comics that are awesome, and awesome comics that are awesome. Like Part One, I talk too much, and the article should be cut into more than two parts. But I wanted to make sure this all went up before the weekend and not lose the momentum.

Behind the jump: Part Two.



JL: So, Strangeways. Where is it going, generally? The first one is werewolves. The second is supposed to be a turn on vampires?

MM: The second is a turn on vampires. I know what the third one is, I won’t tell you yet.



JL: I think that’s fair enough.

MM: Actually, I’m working on the page beats for that. That’s a slow process, though. That’s the most time-consuming part of this. Once you’ve done the page beats, the script pages go fast.

JL: How do you work that out?

MM: I bang my head against the desk until something comes out. Unfortunately—well, not unfortunately; it’s good that I’m busy—but I’ve been spending a lot of time doing lettering for the second story, getting the files ready to go up on the blog, and then I need to start doing marketing stuff before the book even comes out, and it’s still not even officially scheduled! I’m hoping for late next spring, or early next summer, and I’ve got to do a lot of legwork before that in terms of getting books to retailers and that sort of thing.

JL: Do you think that’s going to be easier this time around than the first time? Because you’ve got the product out and they’ve seen it?

MM: You know, I don’t know. In terms of people knowing what they get, I would hope that having everything out on Blog@ would certainly make that easier. When I was doing the book when it was going to go out of Speakeasy, I did ashcans and I sent them out to Jeff Mason’s indy-friendly comics store list. Which I assume bumped orders, because the book was solicited, and I’m assuming it was actually ordered even though it never shipped, which I still regret to this day.

JL: I think it would be a very interesting different path if that had happened for you. For better or for worse.




MM: Yeah. It would’ve been late, then. Unfortunately, the fourth issue would’ve been quite late, so maybe it’s better. And I thought I was doing having effectively two issues done before they were started being solicited.

JL: So what would you think be the sweet spot for that, seventy-five percent?

MM: I don’t know. The guys I work with in terms of art are generally consistent but I think there was some extenuating circumstances on that fourth chapter of the original Strangeways book.

But no, I need to spend some more time writing very shortly. And yes, there is a place for everything to be going, but I think the first few stories are going to be more probably action-focused. I’m hoping that a lot of character stuff came through. Depending on who you talked to, it did or didn’t.

JL: I thought the character stuff came through in the first book. I didn’t get as strong a resolution in the story upfront. In fact, what I thought was interesting was reading the back up story in the trade was great but it was vexing in that you saw the motivation for the antagonist, and I remember thinking that second part worked very, very well, but it was almost like you ended up bifurcating the narrative.

MM: Yeah. In some ways, that was an unintended side-effect of a, some would say, crazy plan of giving you more of the ‘bad guy’ side of the story. Like Lee Marvin said when asked by an interviewer, ‘How do you feel having played bad guys your whole entire career?’ He said, ‘I’ve never played a bad guy once. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve played strong characters who knew what they wanted, and did what they needed to get what they wanted, but none of them were ever bad.’ And I wanted to show that even the bad guy’s got his reasons for doing what he’s doing, other than just being a complete jerk, just because he’s a monster—in Rale’s case, literally.

JL: It was interesting to me, because it ended up such a strong narrative that it made me think I was—and I may well have been—missing something in the front end of the narrative.

MM: Probably not. It ended up being more Rale’s story than Collins, when you take it as a whole. When you’re doing a long narrative arc—and I have a long narrative arc planned out for Collins—but I can’t do too much of that, or pretty soon he stops being the character that ends up being these adventures in these places. So I don’t want to wreck the character just yet.



I plan on wrecking him, but not just yet.

JL: That’s good to know. It was just slippery enough—and I think the idea of when you’re doing a monthly book, it’s pretty easy for the reader to nail down the idea of ‘Oh, this character’s going to be back and there’s more that they’re going through.’ But I definitely put down the book going, ‘Wait, is that…it?’ It’s almost like the entire narrative was wrapped around something I couldn’t see, and I didn’t know if it was there, and knowing that Collins’ arc continues might open that up.

MM: Yeah, this was an introductory arc. I can give it away and you can read the last five pages of that story, and that’s the point. And the fact I even have to say that is kind of sad. Because that means I’ve failed. It’s like explaining a joke.

JL: No, no, no…

MM: If you have to explain a joke, then you didn’t tell it right.

JL: But there are some stories where it counts on you going back and re-reading it. And that unfortunately was my big regret is, somewhere in my apartment is the copy of Strangeways that I read and finished, but when I went to go back to it recently, I was inundated with a ton of other crap.

MM: Yeah, I see you’re reading comics again. I see that on the Savage Critics. Or at least that you’re writing about the comics that you read.

JL: Exactly. I really start feeling guilty when our site lies fallow, and it’s also a little bit of a dodge for me. I’ve finished the first draft of a novel, and I really need to do a second draft, and there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be fixed, and I don’t really know how to go about fixing it, and I don’t really know how to go about tackling it.

MM: Rewriting is never as much fun as writing.

JL: I think for me it’s just a vast mystery. I can only see the choices I’ve made. I have an infinite amount of ideas, but once I put something down on paper, though, it becomes set, and it becomes really hard for me to change it. I’m really good at looking at other people’s work, but I think the challenge is looking at your own and getting outside what you intend, and being able to see how it’s actually going to come across to new eyes.

MM: That’s not easy. But I’ve always been a ‘go with your own instincts,’ rather than overthink things. But I can go both ways. I can overthink anything. Occupational hazard.



JL: I think it’s an advantage. I think you seem well-placed if you can do both. Too many people fall into one or the other. I’m fascinated by watching someone like Bendis work, where I get the sense that he’s also a ‘follow his first instincts’ kind of guy, and it seems to have a lot of difficulty…if it doesn’t work out, he’s kind of like, ‘well, this is what you’re going to get and trust me, it’s great.’

And then there’s other people where you get the sense—I get the sense with Rucka, a little bit with Brubaker—that they come back, they finesse things as they go. Or even perhaps in advance before it starts coming out, they’ve got a pretty good idea where the turns are all going to go and they’re going to make sure that everything is placed right.

MM: Where I pretty much know where you’re going to get to at the end. I’ve got the A, where you’re starting, and I’ve got C, where you’re going to get to. But B? It’s all over the map. And that’s… not always a good thing.

JL: That is hard. You read screenwriting books, and inevitably Act Two is the one that kills the writers.

MM: If you’re following the formula, in Act Two you can have the most freedom because all you have to do is: rising action comes to a climax. Okay, well, great. Infinite flexibility is good and bad. If you don’t have discipline, then infinite flexibility is terrible.

JL: It will kill you off.

I did want to recommend for story beats, maybe, if you’re looking for something that may or may not make things easier: I ended up picking up this program Mindmanager, which is a visual mapping…

MM: I’ve been looking for a visual outliner. I can make outlines, I guess, in Excel, but it’s really easier to do them just long-hand. But I try not to do anything longhand, any more.

JL: There’s a free version I haven’t really messed with. The Mindmanager is a little costly because they’re trying to it as a…

MM: A big organizational tool?

JL: Yeah. So I dropped the coin on it when I was feeling pretty flush after the Sam & Max stuff, and it’s been great, but the price makes it really hard to recommend. But there’s a free, I think there’s a free online software program—that may or may not work for you. [Ed. note: Mindomo]

But what I found was great was being able to type down all the events of the story, and then I could drag and drop them to each of the pages, which really gave me a flow of how things were supposed to happen.

MM: What I really do is, I’ll just open up a new Word file and then—if I’ve already got the basic plot in my head—and I’ll just start writing this kind of bastard form. It’s not quite prose and it’s not a script, and it’ll end up being a paragraph of what I think will be on a page.

Now, that’s not always reasonable. It’s like, ‘oh yeah, that’s really four pages right there, and two of those need to go away. So, yeah. We need to fix that.’ And you just try to break it into page-sized chunks before you even start writing the script. And then I’ll…I say I’ll go back and refine it, but what I usually do is, I end up throwing it away and then redoing it, and it’s usually much closer to what I need for page breaks.



And sometimes that’ll have little bits of dialogue, and sometimes it won’t. Sometimes if there’s a line that I think will work really well, then I’ll try and throw it in. But a lot of the dialogue happens much later in the process.

And that just takes discipline, which I don’t always have.

JL: You really have to be able to lock yourself away from everyone and everything, because sooner or later, you’ll get so bored you’ll have to start working on it. I found that’s how it works for me.

MM: Only if you unplug the Internet first.

JL: Which I’ve had to do. Not so much for the comic scripts, because the comic script stuff is so formalistic for me. I mean, I’ve only done a ten page story and an eight page story.

MM: And at that point, you’ve got no room to deviate. You better be on what you’re doing, or you’re going to be in trouble.

JL: So I can be really plodding with that—to me, writing a comic script is like creating a crossword and doing it at the same time, in that sort of format. I’d be really curious to jump to a longer script where it seems like there’s so much freedom to breathe.

MM: You think that until you start realizing what you have to put in. Again, that’s why Strangeways ended up being so dense is—there’s stuff that I—probably ill-advisedly—added in when I was writing. ‘You know, we could use a little subplot here,’ and those ended up not getting fleshed out enough. Maybe they were interesting and engaging to read, but people walked off thinking, exactly like you did, ‘well, maybe I missed something with the connection between this character and this character here.’ I try not to insult the reader’s intelligence but there are times where I probably don’t give you enough of a roadmap. But that’s something that comes with time.

JL: That’s always the problem. Just getting a skeleton into the format seems miraculous enough, and getting it fleshed out enough to where people really care about the movie. So not only do you have to communicate it, but you have make people care about it. That’s where the challenge really comes in. It’s enough of a challenge just to tell a story in comics, which is something I do find fascinating about the form.

Having written a script, I really see why people screw this up left and right. It’s unbelievably easy!

MM: It’s not very hard at all to mess things up. It just isn’t. Even when you have an editor saying, ‘Hey, dude. You’re messing this up.’

JL: Exactly. Which—you’ve always worked unedited? It’s always just been you keeping track on yourself.




MM: Yeah, and there’ve been people, ‘You know, that’s not really a good idea, Matt.’

[pause]

I still talk to them.

But I don’t know too many comic book editors, and frankly I’m not in the position with the second one—the second one is going out as-is. It’s not in a point where I could fix anything. I’ll try and fix the dialogue, but the art I’m getting is what I get.

So if you’re going to do editing like that, you really need to do it at the script stage before any art gets worked on at all. And that’s not always possible.

JL: And then there’s the problem… I think the part that just would be sort of brutal would be, you write the script, the art comes back, something gets missed or misintended, and then you’re in the position of—I assume—not having limitless funds, you can’t turn around and go, ‘hey, by the way…’

MM: If I have the guys make a change, it’s because the change really needs to happen. If it’s ‘Oh, it’d be a little better if we did this?’ No. You better pick these battles. I’m paying these guys but I can’t pay them a lot. But I pay them and I pay them on time, but there’s some things that will have to happen with your story, and if they get something wrong then it’s gotta get fixed. There’ve been very, very few things I’ve even had to call them on, much less…And Luis especially has come back with a number of redrawn panels, months after he’d submitted the original. And the redrawn panel is not a big deal if he’s just tightening things up. That’s fine, I’m glad he showed the initiative to do that. But if he restructured a page, then I might get a little grumpy if I’ve already lettered it.

I don’t know. In some ways, I wish I could do more formal experimentation but I’ so concerned about my ability to tell the actual story that I’m pretty conservative when it comes to trying anything crazy and wild.

JL: I think you just have to hope that later on you will have the freedom and, by that point, you’ll know the basics.

MM: It’s the whole thing about learning the rules of grammar before you decide to go break them. You can’t just sit down and do stream of consciousness because Kerouac did it that way, or Joyce did it that way.

And, actually, Kerouac didn’t do it that way in the first place. My understanding is that the typing on the roll of the paper [for On The Road] was actually a myth, that there was an original manuscript and it was regimented by the page just like everybody else’s. Maybe there was a first draft where he just spit it all out.

JL: There’s always a stage where there’s a blank page and you have to sit down and attack it.

MM: The script stage is not the blank page for me. The script stage is where I’ve already done most of the work. It’s the page beat that’s the really intimidating blank page. That’s where the work is.

But a chapter of a novel is as long as however long it needs to be. You just paginate it.



JL: The novel process is freeing like that; you go through problems of too much freedom, depending on how much you want to indulge it. For me, I want to do the second draft so hopefully people can have the enjoyment of the experience that I had while writing the first draft. Because the first draft of the novel, you really do have the freedom to discover the beats of the story while you’re going around. And then if that takes a twist, that’s great.

A lot of people don’t work that way. A lot of people highly recommend if you want to get your book done, outline it and then attack it. And that seems great, but it just locks me up.

MM: Huh. Because the first novel I wrote was something called Blue Highway—which I may be revisiting—but it was originally I did it as a very bad screenplay. I mean, bad, bad, awful screenplay, which I wrote in like two and a half weeks, and then a few months later I started writing it as a novel and went through it pretty quickly—a six month draft process while working a fulltime job.

JL: Wow, that is quick.

MM: Although I was able to write at work, so don’t tell my boss.

JL: I’ll keep it between us.

MM: This isn’t going on the Internet or anything, right?

JL: No, no, no.

MM: Okay.

JL: Like I said, my hope is to type this stuff up, and then…

MM: Well, I haven’t worked there in years.

JL: I don’t think you’ll have worry about your ex-boss googling your name, and going: ‘Matt Maxwell: Thief!’

MM: No, I haven’t worked for that company in some time.

JL: What do you currently do, Matt? Just this, or do you have any other thing?

MM: I’m a dad. That’s far more work than any job.

JL: My understanding is that the pay and benefits are still a little on the lower end, though.

MM: Yeah, if you look at it by the hour? Boy.

Much like writing, you’re pretty deep in the hole if you parcel it out by the hour. But when you’re on the duty, it’s tough: I know there are guys like Jason Aaron, and I’m pretty sure he has a job too, in addition to writing. And I don’t know how he does it.

And he writes—I mean, if you aren’t, you should read Scalped.

JL: I gotta give it another go.

MM: It’s really, really good.

JL: I read the first few issues and I was like, ‘there’s no reason I shouldn’t love this, and there’s something that’s just not clicking with me.’ And I don’t know why. Because it’s all good, it’s all strong, it’s very lean, it’s not…

MM: It’s not indulgent or flabby.



JL: Yeah, it’s practically the opposite of indulgent, in that regard.

MM: No, it’s very disciplined.

JL: Absolutely. And yet for some reason… So I’m gonna pick up the trade in the hope that the single issues weren’t giving me enough…something?

MM: With single issues, I’m pretty cranky and demanding at this point. Unless it’s a done in one, it’s very hard for me to buy a story in serial issues. Even if I really like the story, it’s just a hassle. It’s a bother. I get to the end and I want to read more, and I get frustrated.

JL: I don’t have the problem too much, and I do feel it’s sort of… The problem with single issues is, it’s kind of like watering the lawn. It’s not as pleasant as it used to be, and it is a little bit of a chore. But unfortunately I also feel it’s a necessary chore, because the marketplace won’t survive if you don’t have somebody buying the single issues. And unfortunately, the more that—well, we’ll see where it goes.

On the one hand, what’ll happen you’ll get to a situation where—I almost feel like part of the reason is clogged with a lot of crossover big event junk is that, that’s what the people who’ve stayed in the single buying marketplace are buying. And everything else is treading water and waiting for the trade, and at some point that may or may not have…If you’ve got a publisher who is long-term enough, something like Vertigo looks at a title and thinks, ‘Okay, this title is not what we consider a profit, or used to consider a profit, but we’re going to keep at it because the return on the trades is good.’

MM: Yeah, there are a number of titles like that. Or, at least, that’s the conventional wisdom: I have not looked at the numbers, assuming the numbers are even reliable, to confirm that. And I don’t know about the bookscan numbers for books that are, frankly, that far down the list in terms of overall sales.

But evidently, the publishers are doing the tracking and they’re able to decide.

JL: It seems to work for everyone, but I do worry that as the market changes—particularly because I always feel like I’m the last guy to get the cellphone, if I feel like I’m always the last guy, and I stop buying the single issues, then what happens?

On the other hand, I currently have more stuff than I can review, and almost more stuff than I can read. I’m so far behind on so many titles. I’m dying to sit down and read Daredevil, but I don’t think I’ve read the last ten to twelve issues I’ve bought. And I either have to, or really admit that I should stop buying the singles and throw my money out into the street where I can at least know that I’m directly throwing my money away.

But there’s a lot of stuff. It’s like doing the reviews this last week. It was like, doing one and two, and then I started reading more, and I just didn’t have the time to do all the reviewing.

MM: And really, does most of the stuff merit a review?

JL: There’s plenty of stuff that, just looking at it critically, doesn’t. But there’s also times you feel obligated. Definitely my schedule has changed, so it’s not like I’m going to sit there and review every book that I read. But there are ways in which books that suck can be instructive, and it can be instructive to say why they’re sucking.

MM: And books can still suck and still be vastly entertaining.

JL: That’s why I feel bad about my review of Rage of the Red Lanterns. Because to me it’s so inept it’s practically entertaining. And I didn’t really convey in my review that, ‘wow, this is really terrible, but…’

MM: At the same time awesome?



JL: Yeah, you can’t believe you’re reading it while you’re reading it, and that too is part of the reason we come to comics, not believing that somebody is actually going to put this page.

MM: The Fletcher Hanks comics by any objective measurement of art quality are dreadful. But they are compelling, brutal. They demand attention.

JL: They really do.

MM: All that, and they’re batshit insane. They’re absolutely off the rails, even by the standards of the Golden Age comics which were off the rails.

[Art: from top to bottom--Page 6 from Strangeways: The Thirsty, art by Gervasio & Jok; Page 7 of The Thirsty by Gervasio & Jok; Page 8 of The Thirsty by Gervasio & Jok; a page, also by Gervasio & Jok, from an unpublished story which Maxwell hints may be appearing in a Strangeways anthology; a page from the back-up story in The Thirsty, art by Luis Guaragna; the cover to Strangeways: Murder Moon by Steve Lieber; the cover to Roberto Bolano's 2666, released just this week in English; the cover of Scalped #1, and interior art from Rage of the Red Lanterns #1.]

Labels: Jeff, matt maxwell, strangeways, writing

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I like Matt Maxwell. He strikes me as a good egg. He's a little on the Eeyore-ish side of things--a bit dour, almost glum, without seeming unfriendly--which I also like. And when I finally sat down and read Strangeways: Murder Moon, the OGN that Matt wrote and published, I liked it, too. It wasn't perfect, but I thought not only did it avoid a lot of rookie mistakes, it had a definite tone of voice to it--an understated one, which isn't what one would expect to find in a horror western.

Anyways. About a week-and-a-half ago, on the morning of APE, I sat down with Matt in a dim sum restaurant and tried to interview him about the evolution of Strangeways, his expectations of his serialization of Strangeways: The Thirst on blog@Newsarama.com, and any unforeseen results from that just-started experiment. I say I tried to interview him about those things, but because I'm a newbie interviewer (here's a tip: if you're going to be conducting and recording an interview, don't take the subject to a dim sum restaurant where people are walking by and talking to you every two minutes) and because, as I say, I like Matt Maxwell, I ended up piping up far too often with my own ideas, anecdotes, and opinions.

So what should've been an interview with Matt solely about all of the above, became more of a conversation between the two of us about learning how to write comics, with a dash of the other topics thrown. I picked up the check to make up for it. Hopefully, Matt, when I actually earn my interviewer wings, we'll do it again and I'll do it better. Double-ditto, for the art which Matt contributed: it's lovely unlettered stuff, and I'm such a lame-o, I don't really know how to create a subhead for it so I can caption it properly. I'll learn.

Anyway, if that sounds like your kind of thing, check it out after the jump. It is...not short.



Jeff Lester: What do you think of the reception to the first couple of days of Strangeways: The Thirsty, on Blog@?

Matt Maxwell: I don’t read the numbers, so I don’t know exactly what the readership is. I’m assuming that it’s more people seeing it—far more—than would be reading it on my blog which, to be mercenary, was the point. If you’re going to give something away for free with the idea of getting attention out of it, you don’t put in a corner that nobody walks through.



JL: No, and Blog@ does get the coverage, so you’d think—I’ll be kinda curious because most of the webcomic stuff I follow is super-short and not always sequential, so…

MM: Well, that’s the thing. That’s why I kind of hesitate to even call it a webcomic because I didn’t change any of the formatting. You’re getting a page a day: that’s how it works.

JL: Which I know…Girl Genius and—I haven’t actually been following Finder since it went to web so I don’t really know if… I’m sure they’re obviously looking at the traffic, there’s lots of people who can follow a page of comic a day…

MM: And keep it together, yeah. Personally, I like waiting for having a backlog of material and then I can go through and read a bunch and see how it flows together. It’s hard for me to…

JL: So you think for people like you—are you going to do any promos, like, ten pages in, or something like that?

MM: I’ll probably do that, and certainly when there’s a whole chapter collected, I’ll make a big deal about it: ‘Okay, go read the first chapter. You don’t have to wait for…’ At that schedule, it’s not even a bimonthly comic, it’s almost a quarterly.

JL: And I notice, is it—if I’m following what you wrote correctly—you flipped artists on this one?

MM: Yeah, the artist from the main story is doing the ‘back-up story’ and the others from the ‘back-up story’ in Murder Moon are doing the main story here. Part of that was because Luis, who was the main artist for Murder Moon, left the studio in Argentina, moved to Spain, and then Norway after that. I guess he’s following his heart, as it were.



So I lost track of him, but then found him after the announcement for Murder Moon went out, when the book was actually published. He tracked me down, so that worked out well.

But the artists in—you know, the guys at Estudio Haus, Gervasio and Jok—I’d known and worked with them, liked their art, so I didn’t see a problem with [their taking on the main story this time.]

JL: I actually thought the back-up was the stronger of the pieces in the book, in your first book.

MM: You’re not the only person to have said that, which isn’t surprising.

JL: Which I sort of attributed, looking closely at it, it seemed very much to me like the art choice s and the storytelling choices seemed a lot stronger.

MM: Yeah, that, and the first one was the first actual script I’d done for a comic. So I’d obviously picked up more [for the back-up]. I mean, I packed in too much on all of those pages on Murder Moon. Not quite as badly in the back-up story, but it certainly was there, especially when you compare it to the airiness of most mainstream comics today.

JL: It’s interesting you mention that because I’ve spent a lot of time—I actually sold my first short script to C’thulu Tales.

MM: Congratulations.

JL: Thank you. And that was, of course—I packed that with way, way, way too much…Even going by the rule of thumb about word counts per page…

MM: What’s the rule of thumb you used? Because I’ve heard different ones, many of them.

JL: I used the one that Alan Moore talked about that was sort of a modified Weisinger one, where it’s something like thirty-five words per panel based on a six panel grid. So the ceiling is about 210 per page, or something.

MM: Yeah, I had heard the Stan Lee rule was no more than forty in a balloon, and that’s probably restrained—even for Stan!

JL: Yeah, when you look at the other stuff, it’s obvious that those things change.

MM: You look at those early Marvel superhero texts and they’re so text-heavy compared to…I mean, the Weisinger Superman comics, you had narration but it wasn’t as heavy as Stan’s very purple…

JL: Yeah, very prolix. Well, and it’s kind of interesting because that’s one of the things I find fascinating in storytelling: you go back and look at that stuff—and of course I grew up on the stuff so it’s second nature—but I can definitely see when I go back and look at a bunch of it, it’s really dense, and everyone’s writing like they’re Stan Lee, so there’s a lot of verbal tics.

MM: Yeah.

JL: On the other hand, it’s so information-rich. I sometimes think that part of the success of the Marvel melodramas and the soap operas is that you can actually have this stuff progress--at the same time, someone can be fighting and thinking about Aunt May at the same time, so you get a lot with that density.

MM: And it’s all story-driven stuff. It’s not there just to be there, just to fill up a page.

JL: In fact, it’s almost the opposite. It’s got so much going on. And it’s interesting watching someone like Brubaker figure out how to get a similar story density in there when you can’t do that pacing.

MM: Yeah, you couldn’t turn in a script like that. You can’t. Even if you’re doing a ‘retro’ book like any of the Marvel Adventures—you read Jeff Parker’s script for many of the Marvel Adventures stuff he does and it’s still light, textually, compared to older Marvel material, but then it also has to reduce down to digest size, so you can’t crowd as much on. The original presentation is a standard 7’ by 10’ comic that—I understand they sell far better in digest than they do in the direct market.

JL: I would assume. I would hope.

MM: Yeah.

JL: So, when you started writing the first book and your first script, what kind of rule of thumb do you use for…

MM: [Laughs.] I didn’t. I tried to keep it to seven panels. I tried. I tried really hard to keep to seven panels a page. Because the first thing—the original presentation for Strangeways was going to be a twenty-two page monthly comic before I’d gotten the crazy idea to just go ahead and do the whole thing as a graphic novel. And even then, as a graphic novel, I was still dividing it in 22 page chunks, anyway.

JL: Which seems smart.

MM: But then the Speakeasy deal came along and I said, ‘Okay, well, now it needs to really work as a single comic.’ I’m not convinced of its success in that regard, but it didn’t need to.

I tried to keep to no more than seven panels a page. I often went to eight. I did have to boil down the dialogue. I’m doing my own lettering—which I highly recommend for anybody who’s writing comics if you have the opportunity to.

In some ways it’s tedious and mechanical, and in lots of ways it’s…I think it might have been Richard Starkings who said that ‘the letterer is the writer’s inker.’ And that’s absolutely true. If you can have a hand in how the words go on the page, then you may be a step ahead of the game, especially if you’re still a rookie like me, and you realize, ‘Oh yeah, that beat shouldn’t have gone there, it should go in the next panel,’ and then you have to jiggle the dialogue that follows on the page.

But I tried to keep things reasonable, and the common criticism, that I really can’t disagree with, is that there was just too much on the page. It was too claustrophobic.

JL: Although again, some of that was—I thought—how much you were packing in, and some of it was… I thought the artists in the back-up team even when handling a lot of density seemed to find some very elegant solutions to it.

MM: I found that—and maybe this is just my perception—a lot of, particularly, the South American comics artists grew up reading European comics and not American comics. They may have read them, but that wasn’t their mainstay. And you get a completely different sensibility working out of that. Not that one is better than the other, they’re just different. Particularly now.



I mean, I’m still trying to figure out, what’s the date of death of the thought balloon? It’s struggled back a couple times. Because I stopped reading comics in the mid-90s, right around the time Sandman ended. I was still reading Hellboy and a few other irregular series, but I wasn’t going to comic shops every week. And I remember, before that, you still had thought balloons. You came back after that, and it was, you know, it was night and day. You didn’t have much internal narration; if you still did, you would do it as captions rather than thought balloons. And I adopted the same—when I have Collins doing internal monologues, it’s as captions, not as thought balloons.

JL: I think it would be very hard to put in thought balloons as a new writer, as people would just assume that you’re not paying attention to the market.

MM: You’re not paying attention, and ‘well, don’t call us, we’ll call you.’

JL: I think Alan Moore, like so much else—he really helped take out the sound effect balloon in Watchmen, and then around the time of Swamp Thing, I think he switched pretty much right off the bat—I think he went to captions, and there’s no thought balloons in his work. And he’s the first one I can think of that kind of started that, and then the rest of the Brits…I don’t know, I don’t follow the 2000 A.D. stuff enough to know, but maybe…

MM: Yeah, I didn’t follow them in 2000 A.D., but all the writers who came over in the ‘80s and ‘90s—I’d have to look at Doom Patrol again, I’m trying to remember if interior narration like that, and I don’t think it did very much, I think it did captioning.

JL: I think, again, captioning. Very much so. I think it was sort of a Brit thing that killed that, that everyone adopted very quickly. Although, now that I think about it, I guess Dark Knight—Miller used thought balloons in Daredevil, and might have eschewed them totally in Dark Knight.

MM: Well, I think that was probably a Shooter edict. I was reading the collected Frank Miller Daredevil—which I’d read on the stands when I was a much younger man than I am now—but you don’t notice when you’re reading it month to month that there’s always the page of, ‘Oh, and I’m Matthew Murdock, and a tragic accident turned me into Daredevil and here’s my superpowers.’ And that’s great when you’re introducing people to the monthly serial, but when you read the whole collected chain of the story, it’s like ‘Oh, and here’s that page again. Okay.’ And usually you can see him getting it out of the way as fast as he could and moving on to the rest of it.

JL: Yeah, that was always his way of handling it. Which, I guess, was pretty much as elegant as you could get under the Shooter system.

MM: Yeah, he fulfilled his obligations to the editor and now, on with the story.

JL: It’s interesting how people handle recap pages now because they’re in most of the Marvel books and they’re—to me, for the most part—incredibly hard to read.

MM: Really? Do they have just a plain recap at the beginning? Because I haven’t read Marvel month-to-month, other than Daredevil and Captain America occasionally.

JL: You know, I’m thinking of Ultimate Spider-Man which has the recap in it. But I’m trying to think if there are other ones… Cable and Deadpool, of course, had a recap page where they did as a full page of comic art, and after that, honestly…I’m a little hard pressed to think of one now. Maybe they’ve dropped that and moved back to, ‘screw it, it’s a page no one cares about anyway. Like, if you really want to know, wikipedia it.’

MM: Yeah. Before, when you’re the lonely thirteen year old geek at the 7-Eleven, and you don’t have friends who read these comics to explain it to you, then you need that page to get you hooked into it.

JL: It’s interesting watching the marketplace consider how ‘open’ the book is or should be in order to actually work. I’m kind of fascinated by people like Morrison, who are ‘You know what? It’s more attractive if it’s almost impenetrable. And it’s this sort of mystery that gives the reader this sense that there’s a huge, sprawling, larger-than-life thing going on, and screw the recaps.’

MM: And to some extent, I can see that being true. When I was introduced to the Marvel cosmology—the legacy cosmology of the ‘70s and the ‘80s—it was like, ‘Oh, okay, there’s much more stuff going on than just what I’m reading in this comic,’ and that got you reading other titles in some cases. But you’re not going to read a bad comic even if you’re interested in a universe.

JL: Which is a rule that I wish comic publishers would learn.

[Pause.]

JL: So Strangeways, you started off shooting for a seven panel and sometimes bumping it up to eight…

MM: [Sighs] I know have some nine panel pages in there, but nine was the absolute limit. That’s kind of… Is it Fell that’s a sixteen grid? I don’t know how he does it.

JL: The thing that is shocking to me is when it’s done well… I mean, Watchmen is on a nine grid, I think.

MM: Yeah, Watchmen is a nine grid, even though he breaks it out in some places.

JL: Yeah, but you can always see where’s he’s snapping tightly to the grid. And they make it look incredibly easy. Both he and Gibbons make it look incredibly easy.

And I know that was my downfall walking into scriptwriting: ‘I’ll try and plot it out as a nine panel thing, it’s easy, it’s got a flow that brings the reader into it,’ and then, of course, you have to write more concisely for each panel…

MM: Yes, you do.

JL: And still the artist is like, ‘I can’t fit all this on one page.’

MM: I know I ran into that. I’ll send out the scripts, and I’ve got, say, thirty-forty words of dialogue, and the panel comes back and, ‘Well, that’s a mighty small panel!’ Not to fault the guys doing the art, because they’re doing the best with the script they’ve been given, but there are certain times it’s like, there’s no way this is going to work, and now I have to reconstruct what story value is going to put on the page.

Because it’s all about the single page. I mean, yes, you string it altogether in a story but if you can’t manage a page—which I’m not convinced I can yet, but…

JL: I don’t know. I thought that your pages worked. I was pretty impressed that I thought your story rolled at a pretty decent pace. I think as someone gets more experience under their belt, it gets easier to figure out how to change gears, I think. Just getting it into a decent rhythm is hard enough, and then trying to change it up a little bit is a whole different skill.

MM: I just wrote a column about this at Comics Waiting Room: It’s really the page beat that’s everything. I didn’t know anything about page beats before I came back into beginning to write comics and read comics in 2002-2003. And, if you remember, that was the ‘Epic Initiative.’ And they actually had page beats shown—an example of page beats written out in one of the—it might’ve even been the Epic comic, that really dreadful book. And I said, ‘Oh, okay!’ Because it never had really clicked for me before, that it was all about, ‘it’s one page at a time in a sequence.’ At least, that’s in the long form comic storytelling. You have different rules when you’re doing mini-comics, and I mean, you still have to pay attention to the page, but I think you have a lot of flexibility.

JL: But in long-terms stuff, the idea of trying to get a beat on the page and something at the turn. That’s the one where I really found myself going…

MM: That’s the thing. If you’re writing a six issue miniseries effectively, you can say, ‘Well, I’m not really writing six acts.’ But you are writing six acts. Or you’re writing seven acts, and you have half an issue of dénouement, instead of a whole issue, which I guess is better. I’m sure an entire issue of dénouement would be kind of dreadful.

JL: You think it would be, but every once in a while…I think part of the problem about learning to write for the medium, is you always remember the successes better than the failures. So you’re kind of like, ‘Well, yeah. Look at that classic issue of Avengers, where it’s after the big fight, and everything is wrapping up.’ Or again, something like Watchmen…

MM: You know, the thing with Watchmen—and this happened a lot, and still does—is people don’t love Watchmen because it was a nine panel grid, or because it was grim-and-gritty superheroes doing things that superheroes don’t usually do: people love Watchmen because it’s a great story. The nine panel grid is effectively a surface—I don’t want to say trick, it’s a lot deeper than that, certainly, in terms of setting up the rhythm of the story—but that isn’t why people love it.

JL: Absolutely. On the other hand, I think the brilliance of the nine-panel grid is that they were able to put so much information into each issue that I think if you tried to do Watchmen on a five panel grid, which seems really standard now…

MM: You couldn’t do it. All the story turns would be completely wrong.

JL: It would just feel mushy, unless you totally rejiggered…Even rejiggering the stories, I don’t think you would have enough event per issue, and you’d have to end up deeply compressing some of the storylines…

MM: Eventually, comics are going to have to get past the issue at a time format. We’re still trying, we’re still struggling with it. But that’s the format that a lot of people are used to reading, it keeps people coming back to the comic stores every week, but it does present a lot of difficulties for storytelling.

JL: Right.

MM: Or you’re just wired for it, and you can just crank stuff out.

JL: I’m not sure if that’s really true. Maybe there are, but I think if you look at most of the guys…both Bendis and Brubaker were cartoonists before they turned to writing, and that allows them a huge…

MM: And so was Moore.

JL: So was Moore. Morrison apparently did a lot drawing…

MM: I don’t know if he did much sequential stuff, but I mean for instance, he did almost all the design work for Doom Patrol, and probably does for whatever he’s working on.

JL: But Moore was an actual cartoonist, and I think that allows them a lot of confidence when it comes time to break a story down. This is sort of what I was bitching a bit about in a recent column about Grant Morrison and how much responsibility he might bear for ending up with not-so-great artists. He might be overpacking—his Batman stuff looks like it very well could be incredibly overstuffed, and his artist is just overwhelmed.

MM: I confess I read up until the Black Glove story, with the J.H. Williams stuff, and J.H. makes every script he touches look maybe even smarter than it actually is.

JL: I thought so in that particular case. I’m really convinced that first Black Glove story was very much the world’s best-looking case of lipstick on a pig.

MM: It was a ‘Ten Little Indians’ Agatha Christie mystery—which is generally a form I’m not fond of at all—with beautiful art.

JL: With absolutely stunning art.

[Art: from top to bottom--a page from Strangeways: The Thirsty, art by Gervasio & Jok; a page from Strangeways: Murder Moon by Luis Guaragna; a page from "Lone," the back-up story in Strangeways: Murder Moon by Gervasio & Jok; another page from "Lone" by Gervaiso & Jok; Another page from Murder Moon by Luis Guaragna; and another yet-to-be-published page from The Thirsty by Gervasio & Jok]

Tomorrow: Strangeways, screenplays, good days and bad days.

Labels: Jeff, matt maxwell, strangeways, writing

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Dude.

I'd like to say I've been off acting as an agent of chaos which is why I've been too busy to post, but the fact is I've been a victim of chaos: since SDCC, so many oddball opportunities and possible opportunities have come my way that I've been almost too busy to read comics, much less review them. All the while, possible epic posts keep taking up small bits of valuable space in my brain--I've got this idea for comparing/contrasting Bottomless Belly Button to Chiggers stemming from the way they both use sound effects--making me balk at just reviewing the damn things and getting some entries out in the world.

A real shame, because I think I'm more excited about online comics criticism than ever before: the recent Noah Berlatsky flap, the Tucker Stone interview, Abhay posting pretty much anything on the Internet, the guys at Mindless Ones, Funnybook Babylon, Jog as always...there's a bunch of truly interesting stuff out there and a number of comics reviewers who are producing the most consistently interesting criticism since the heyday of The Comics Journal. It's a great time to be reading, and it makes me all but itch with the desire to jump back in and be part of the dialogue.

But to do that, I'd have to read more books, and read them more closely than I should, and maybe read them in a more timely fashion, too. I mean, Bottomless Belly Button came out in, what? 1984? 1985?

Anyway, I started a mega-super post of stuff I've been reading, but Hibbs made a pretty good case (in his own special, quasi-socialized way) that it'd probably be better to chop that post up and get some kindling into this sputtering fire of a website than one big smothering lump of thick oak. If I work this right, I'll have an entry every day for the rest of this week...and some of the comics may even be from recent memory, to boot.

Behind the jump, my first two reviews, in alpha order:



AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #574: Does anyone remember that article Jan Strnad wrote for the Comics Journal, "My Brilliant Career at Marvel"? (Issue #75, according to Google.) In it, Strnad talks about the frustration of trying to craft a dramatic done-in-one for Daredevil (as I recall), where the big problem was...Daredevil. Every time Strnad brought in the guy in tights to whatever conflict he'd set up, it ended up seeming really, really dumb. Issue #574 is probably the first superhero comic I've read where I felt as Strnad must've: everything about this issue is pretty damn good, except the parts where Spider-Man appears, and then it's pretty damn stupid.

(Actually, that's not true. I love that cover, but then I've always had a weak spot for "omniscient giant-head Spidey.")

Honestly. Every time Spider-Man popped up (in isolated panels, as illustrations of where Flash Thompson finds his morale and courage during a firefight in Iraq), I cringed. Flash's story, while presented clumsily, is more than engaging enough on its own, but every few pages--to make sure the fans don't feel too rooked, I guess-we've got Spider-Man fighting the Kingpin or tackling the Sinister Six (OMG, just like the six guys pinning down Flash in a firefight!) and making the whole thing feel more cynical than it needs to.

I can see how you can make a case for it. As recounted on Stephen Wacker's editorial page, there are obviously guys fighting in our armed services who've been inspired by fictional creations like Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, George W. Bush, etc. But it's not quite as cut-and-dry as "I was in a killzone, and I wasn't afraid because Spider-Man once punched a fat, bald guy," and the inelegance of the presentation reinforces how jaded I feel about this whole enterprise. Because everyone involved at every level of this book undoubtedly believes they're providing a tribute to the hard-working men and women of the U.S. services, but this isn't a free issue--unless I missed some notice of donated profits, this issue is taking money from my pocket and putting it in the pockets of people at Marvel, just like every other issue. And every panel ol' web-head pops up in is a visual reminder of that.

If that doesn't come up for you, then you'll find this a pretty Good issue. It was better than any other "relevant" Spider-Man comic I've ever read, certainly. But next time, they should just leave Spidey on the cover, suck up any complaints from the fanboys, and let the story speak for itself.

BATMAN #680: 'Batman, R.I.P.' should really be the subject of one of some epic post from me, as my feelings about it are tremendously conflicted--it's the first thing I read on the weeks it's out, it's one of the few mainstream superhero books I'm at all current on, I think about it quasi-obsessively, and yet it feels like a perpetual disappointment. It reminds me, unfortunately, of my reactions to the first few times I saw pornography--how can I be so obsessed about something so appalling and kind of dull?

A clear sign I've all but checked out of the story was when I finished the end of this issue and then had to go on the Internet to see what happened. Yes, Jezebel Jet is clearly shown putting on black gloves; yes, there are those red and black falling petals; yes, there is the Joker's word balloon shouting (somewhat insultingly) "Now do you get it?" But, in fact, I didn't get it at all. Morrison isn't really insisting that I believe that Jezebel Jet--the dullest, dumbest and least convincing love interest ever set up for Batman--is actually The Black Glove, is he? I had to go online to see if that's what I was really supposed to believe. And until Batman #681 comes out, I guess it is.

Well, fair enough. If I'm being generous with Mr. Morrison (and like many comics reviewers on the Internet, I find it all but impossible *not* to be), my disappointment to this point with Batman R.I.P. may stem from poor Tony Daniels being so far in over his head, I can't think of him without imagining two cartoon feet waggling from a sump hole. Morrison is trying to tell a richly dark Batman tale and he gets a guy who fucks up the storytelling on a double-page spread and doesn't have time to correct it (I'm thinking here of the scene where Batman is crouching on the Arkham gate and the arc of the gate leads the eye to the next page, instead of to the panels below).

But when I'm not being generous, I remember that Arkham Asylum was a big, expensive bat-fart of a story that also failed to do the trick for me, and the artist on that was Dave McKean.

In fact, of all the major comic book writers, I'm hard-pressed to think of one that's had more consistent misfires with his artists than Morrison. He's done consistently great work with Quitely, Jones, Jimenez, arguably Mahnke--there was that Williams story on the first Black Glove story and in Seven Soldiers--and then after that, it seems the best you can hope for is competence. (Sorry, Richard Case and Doug Hazelwood.) At first, I thought this was just bad luck on Morrison's part, or perhaps a disinclination to personally woo top-drawer artists, but now I think it's a symptom of some essential dash-offedness to which Morrison subscribes (or succumbs).

That dash-offedness (and jesus, can't I come up with a better term than that?) is exactly one of the problems for me with Batman R.I.P. If Rucka had pulled a similar reversal with Sasha Bordeaux in his Detective Comics arc that Morrison does here with Jezebel Jet, for example, my heart would've been in my throat.

Maybe the end will be so utterly mind-blowing I'll change my mind about the whole thing, but I can't seem to get beyond OK, despite how obsessed I am with the whole mess.

[Oh, and in case you're interested: I believe it'll turn out to be Alfred as The Black Glove, but it'll be okay because he'll turn out to also be, much later down the road, the White Glove, and this whole thing is a complex shamanistic ritual of destruction and rebirth that only Alfred can administer because Batman's other attempts at purification (in 52 and in the drug trials that got him partially into this mess in the first place) have failed. But, if I'm right, it's gonna be a year down the road before we see any of that later stuff.]

Tomorrow: Brave & The Bold, Criminal, and Coraline.

Labels: Jeff, MIA

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My timing, as is typical, is atrocious: I've been meaning to write a review of this book ever since I bought a copy at SDCC. Since it just hit stores this week, I all but exhort you to dash out and buy a copy: not just because it's Love & Rockets and it's the Hernandez Bros., and not even because it's the Hernandez Bros. at what may be at the start of (yet another) period of sustained excellence, but because both Jaime and Gilbert give you, in their own way, their versions of Final Crisis and Secret Invasion and the comparison and contrast may soothe and intrigue you.

[More exhorting and coercing and hopefully avuncular rib-poking behind the cut.]







Although it starts as a typical Locas story, with Maggie at her apartment complex talking to her pal Angel about a mysterious tenant, "The Search for Penny Century" changes gears very early on, as Angel, finally alone, changes into costume and scales a roof:



Y'see, the core of the first issue of L&R: NS #1 is 50 pages of Jaime Hernandez doing superheroes, and it so openly and easily moves back forth between the silly and the stellar, it reduced me to a piece of gibbering fanboy protoplasm. And isn't that supposed to be the point of Final Crisis and Secret Invasion? (In fact, although I knew better, I approached Jaime at the table and asked if the story was meant to be a reaction of Marvel and DC's current addiction to big events. He was, thankfully, entirely gracious about it, and just said that he thought it'd be fun to do something with a lot of energy.)



I could go on to summarize what happens in the story, but I think that does it a degree of disservice. Let's just say that Jaime, like Grant Morrison, creates a ton of new characters in a short degree of time and yet, for me, does a much a better job of convincing me to care about them. This shouldn't be particularly surprising, of course: Jaime is, in the very best sense, a cartoonist, and cartooning not only allows for any number of narrative shortcuts, the shortcuts produce a feeling of delight when done correctly.

And this, by the way, is why my timing is so atrocious: If I'd written this review when I'd intended, my comparison of Jaime's story to Final Crisis would be more in a "huh, isn't this funny?" kind of way. Coming now on the heels of my review of Superman Beyond #1, the comparison seems more confrontational, and corrective, than I intend. On the other hand, if you want to buy a copy of L&R:NS #1 to apply the reasoning of my Superman Beyond review to it and show why I'm full of shit, I don't mind at all...as long as you buy a copy of this book.

It'd be a disservice, by the way, to suggest that Jaime's story is the only reason to pick up L&R:NS #1.



Beto contributes a story about a pair of Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis analogues that end up on an alien planet, getting superpowers, battling each other, and killing hundreds of aliens. Again, this neatly lines up with current trends and obsessions in current work-for-hire capes & tights, but it's also deeply goofy, hugely fun, and any resemblance to current superhero big events is probably entirely unintentional.

It's a much shorter piece than Jaime's, as Gilbert's peripatetic attention span sends him in several different directions at once. There's cartoon characters engaging in compulsive behavior:



and oblique, evocative non-narratives:



and a fun little story that Mario writes and Beto draws, and a story written and drawn by Beto--that reads a bit like if Vittorio De Sica and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had collaborated--that isn't particularly fun.

Anyway, this is far afield from my usual "blah, blah, blah" type of review, but I hope it nonetheless convinces you to at least pick up the L&R if you find yourself at the comic store this weekend. I thought the book was a knockout, and this is a great place to jump on-board if you never followed Los Bros before.

(Oh, and super-thanks to Fantagraphics for keeping a very well-tended Flickr stream. This review, quite obviously, would've been enormously different without it.)

Labels: Jeff, Love and Rockets

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I remember when I was a kid being entranced with model kits. It was a different time then, back before semi-autistic engineers could make themselves rich with their penchant for elegant complexity: instead of writing computer code, they wrote tactical charts for historical wargames, assembled model kits of cars, ships, jets, and rockets (and, occasionally, monsters and robots), and crafted massive model train sets in garages and basements. Painstakingly, they assembled private landscapes--usually based on an actual historic train route--stipling mounds of carved foam to create textured boulders; studying photographs to create detail accurate train yards; rigging lighting; recreating timetables. Until finally, the engineer was done: he'd remade a corner of the world to scale. It looked perfect, ran smoothly, and made you ache to look at it--because it was devoid of people. I never felt so sad as when I looked at a perfectly constructed model train set.

Whereas model trains made me sad, the model kits filled me with frustration. Even the simplest was well beyond the scope of my clumsy fingers and lazy soul. You had to snap and clip plastic parts off a manufactured lattice, then sand the barb from where the part connected with a lattice, glue the parts together, wait, paint them, wait, apply decals, construct the diorama in which to...I'll be honest, I never got past clipping the third or fourth part off the lattice. Part of it--most of it, actually--was shameful laziness, but some of it was the suspiciousness with which I regarded the model makers. After all, if I was supposed to do all that, why didn't I just carve the god-damned thing out of soap? It seemed to me they were taking advantage of my desires (and the abundance of industrial grade plastic at their disposal), turning a tidy profit by promising a completed product for which I would do the majority of the work.

I realized just yesterday, that those feelings of frustration and shame and suspiciousness, are my constant companions when reading most of Grant Morrison's work for the last five or six months. At some point, Morrison stopped writing stories, and began churning out mental model kits of stories, which only work if you take the time to snip them apart, study the instructions, and assemble them yourself.

[More in this vein, alas, behind the cut.]



I have theories as to why Morrison has turned down this path. Many, many, theories. The least generous theory is that Morrison is a brilliant manic-depressive who can cogitate like a motherfucker in his manic stage, falls back on his tropes when he hits his depressive phase (or just stops producing altogether), and is smart enough to make it all sound like it was one organic plan after the fact. So, for example, you get something like "New X-Men" that generates tons of new ideas in the beginning, hits a bad patch where it's all about Mutantbolik and his flying saucer girlfriend, then sprints through a "widescreen" finale (followed by a rushed two part epilogue that jams in all the stuff he never got around to).

A more generous theory is that while Morrison has the mind of a formalist, he's got the heart of an anarchist. If a storyline of his takes too long, he can't help but think of ways to fuck it up and make it more interesting, even if those new ideas invalidate the groundwork he laid. I'm thinking here, again, of his New X-Men storyline, but also The Invisibles, which mutated as it went along, ending far from where it started. Because Morrison constantly layers in allusions that work on multiple levels, it's easy for him to claim victory in the end by suggesting the level that didn't satisfy wasn't the one you weren't supposed to be paying attention to. In some cases (Sea Guy or The Filth, let's say), I believe that's absolutely the case and in some (Xorn, and the New X-Men run being characterized by Morrison as a conscious deconstruction of how the franchise defeats the author), I believe that's absolutely Morrison talking out his lipstick-smeared butthole.

But most generous of all my theories is that G-Mo has constructed a way to promote the work on the Internet that doesn't involve running a forum, or having a Twitter account, or keeping track of his Myspace friends: the individual issues aren't stories jammed with easter eggs, but easter egg hunts cordoned off by a ribbon of plot. The stories themselves aren't particularly difficult, but tracking the details of the plot through the thicket of detail can be, which is where all the online annotations come in handy. As Abhay pointed out in his brilliant recreation of a Marvel panel at SDCC, readers today don't really have any idea how a story works--they only want to know what will happen to the characters they follow, hitting Newsarama day after day to get the spoilers, with no real interest in the story that ostensibly explains exactly that. And companies and creators play along, spoiling stories to lesser and greater degrees so as to build buzz and heat from the resulting discussions and outcries. Morrison's brilliant and daring twist is to construct stories so people will hit the Internet not to discuss what will happen, but to figure out what is happening. Next to the way Mark Millar promotes himself on the Internet, it looks downright elegant.

Under this theory, the fact my enjoyment of Final Crisis didn't really start until I read Douglas' annotations, or that my enjoyment of Batman R.I.P. derives entirely from commentary of fine internet including (but not limited to) Mindless Ones, Funnybook Babylon, and our own critics and commenters, is all part of the plan. Indeed, even though I picked up the majority of the references in Final Crisis: Superman Beyond #1 covered by David Uzumeri's annotations, his willingness to analyze Morrison's intentions on the fly (particularly during that five page Monitor origin sequence) gave me a greater appreciation of the work, and even helped me uncover new layers of interpretation.



However, while they gave me the tools to appreciate the work, they didn't give me the tools to enjoy it which suggests that something has gone terribly wrong, either with me or this devious master plan I've capriciously attributed to the book's writer. Honestly, I'd be more willing to attribute this to me if I wasn't reading a comic book where five supermen board a yellow submarine to sail through the metaverse--and one of those supermen is a drugged-out Dr. Manhattan analogue. As Graeme McMillan so frequently says to me when discussing comics, "Come on! How can you not love that?" Honestly, it's such a direct descendant to batshit Steve Gerber stories from the '70s, I can see how I could love it. I should love this book.

And yet, I don't. I mean, I think I'd give it a high OK or something (particularly if you have stereoscopic vision and can take advantage of the 3-D glasses, which I don't and can't) because it's pretty and cool and brings back stuff from Morrison's Animal Man run.

And yet.... I dunno. It could be the model kit factor, where I'm a little frustrated that for $4.50 I get so much frickin' event and so little story. There's not really what you would call much of a plot revealed in all these pretty pages: Superman gets recruited by Zillo Valla (although no one uses that name until the last four or five pages and, at least in the case of Superman, it's not clear how he learns it), they board the Ultima Thule, things go wrong, they end up in Limbo, people make arbitrary decisions--honestly, at this point, it's not really too different from a Friday the 13th movie. You've got the bullying jock (Ultraman), the kind-hearted peacemaker (Captain Marvel), the druggie nerd (Quantum Superman) and the kid who dies the first time he has sex (Overman). If the second issue has Superman in a bra and panties running screaming around the perimeter of a lake while being chased by a chainsaw wielding Anti-Monitor, I won't be too surprised.

I don't think it's the model kit factor, in short. I think Morrison has fallen prey to the Model Train set mindset. Everything looks gorgeous, and the detail is planned out to a staggering level, but there aren't any characters in Superman Beyond #1: there are people with names, their basic character and that's all you got. While Morrison has used such deliberate flatness to extraordinarily good effect in All-Star Superman, I find it more disappointing here simply because there's not thirty-plus years of character identification with most of these characters, and the ones for whom there are--Captain Marvel, for example--get about three lines that aren't purely exposition. It's not surprising Morrison uses a musical motif to explain the travel through the metaverses: he's using the characters in this book (and perhaps in his others) like leitmotifs, thematic markers that gain complexity when contrasted with other markers.

It's a very smart way to deal with work-for-hire superheroes--you can't change them or develop them, after all, so half the traditional conception of what makes a story is out the window anyway. But it may be that I find I prefer the illusion of change and development to no development whatsoever, no matter how much room you clear up for phantasmagorical imagery once you chuck that illusion. For example, if Morrison recognizes that the character with the most depth in Superman: Beyond #1 is Merryman, the King of Limbo, he seems unaware of what this might mean. It's not that every character is too delightful to be consigned to Limbo, but that in innumerable universes where everything happens but nothing has any lasting impact, it's really no different to a single space where nothing happens--the former is just prettier than the latter, and it takes a little longer for boredom to set in there. But once it does, it doesn't matter how many times the trains trundle past their scale-model mountains. No one waits near the flickering waxy light of the station for them to arrive, and when the creator leaves the room, it's as if none of it ever happened.

Labels: Grant Morrison, Jeff, Superman

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I really liked David Brothers' '50 Things I Like' list he did recently over on 4th Letter, as well as some of the lists he reprinted and linked to as a result. And last time I saw him, David said, as we parted, "hey, you should do a list." Somehow that led to me not being able to sleep past 6 AM on a Sunday morning as I sorted and re-sorted the little sublists I'd do.

Anyway, post-jump: 50 things I like about comics, with hopefully just the right amount of commentary.



5 Great "Eras" for Publishers

DC in the late '50s, early '60s: A legacy that's like the pyramids in Egypt--lovely to look at, but I'm damn glad I didn't have to work on 'em. (Reading Weisinger-era Superman is like having dinner at the home of a wife abuser: you feel sick at your complicity but, you gotta admit, the pot roast is perfect.) The mix of genuine talent being ground under by fierce editorial formula, the considerable resources of the company, and an aggressive approach to creating IP (although at the time it was probably called something like "following the marketplace") paid off in a huge back library of material and properties that DC could reinvent for years to come.

Marvel in the early to mid-'70s: Of course, I'm going to pick this era since it was the era I fell in love with comics, but still: Marvel finally being able to publish as many titles as it wanted, combined with a ton of new talent inspired by Marvel's heyday who had absolutely no conception of what work-for-hire work meant. I mean, it's not just that you had more than twenty issues of a title called Man-Thing; it's that you had Howard The Duck, a character in Man-Thing so popular he got his own book.

Fantagraphics in the early '90s: Los Bros Hernandez were still doing Love & Rockets (at what could be argued was their most ambitious period, if it wasn't for the fact they've always been, and continue to be, outrageously ambitious); Peter Bagge was doing Hate; Clowes was doing Eightball. While none of these books were monthly, their publication schedules were such that if you kept coming to the comic book store every week, it seemed like one of them would pop every sixth visit or so.

Despite all the praise and accolades at the time, I think nobody--not the readers, not the publishers, not the retailers--realized how exceptional a line-up this was. I'm not a sports guy, but the closest analogy that comes to mind is when the 49ers replaced Joe Montana with Steve Young. Sure, we San Franciscans knew we were fortunate to have two great QBs in a row, but we didn't realize how unbelievably fortunate: we also believed that, hey, of course we got two great QBs in a row because the 49ers are the greatest football team in the world, and San Francisco is the greatest city in the world, etc., etc. I think that there was a similar feeling at Fantagraphics that, yeah, these guys are geniuses, absolutely, but when they start to burn out (or slow down), we'll have the next generation of geniuses ready to come up. And when they published the first issue of Acme Novelty Library #1 in 1993, it looked like that would actually be the case. But it wasn't.

Vertigo in the mid- to late-'90s: Preacher, The Invisibles, and (pulled over from the failed Helix line) Transmetropolitan. Also, the last great era of letter pages.

Viz, right here in the mid-'00s: This is my own opinion deliriously unmoored from anything like historical knowledge, but Viz strikes me as generally lazy and complacent, willing to write off its lack of hustle as a commitment to the long haul. So it took Tokyopop licensing and dumping materials cheaply on the shelves to get Viz to step up its publishing schedule, and it took Vertical publishing high-end niche materials to get Viz to dip its fiscally conservative toes into riskier waters. Whether my opinion is at all close to the mark or not, all I know is I've got Drifting Classroom, Death Note, Monster, Tekkon Kinkreet, Cat Eyed Boy, and thirteen volumes of Golgo 13 on my shelves. And I've got 20th Century Boys to look forward to in 2008. I feel exceptionally fortunate.

5 Creators I'd Kill To Make Documentaries About

Dave Sim: I mean, c'mon. I can't think of a better post-Crumb documentary subject.

Eastman & Laird: Counting them as one creator is a bit of a cheat, but I think cutting between, say, Eastman and his wife Julie Strain doing bondage photoshoots of models on their palatial estate to Laird handing out Xeric Awards in some half-empty convention hall, would be worth it.

Evan Dorkin: And it's a bit of a cheat not including Dorkin's wife Sarah Dyer in this category, since she's an interesting creator and cartoonist in her own right. But just Dorkin talking, talking, talking, while alternating between his detail-filled panels, and the more depressing views of Staten Island? How can than not half-fill a screening room at Opera Plaza for thirteen days?

William Moulton Marston: Again, a gimme.

Rob Liefeld: Kind of the rise & fall of the Image Seven, as focused through this one guy who, from what I can tell, has never been honest about a deadline a day in his life.

5 Perfect Comic Books

Boom Boom #2: David Lasky's retelling of Joyce's writing of Ulysses using pages rderawn from The Origin of Marvel Comics. Up there with Spiegelman and Moore as far as sheer formalistic brio.

: Featuring "Art School Confidential," "Chicago," and, yes, "Needledick the Bug Fucker." The first time I read this, I realized how people could talk about how reading Mad back in the '50s could completely change the way they saw everything.

Omac #1: If you had to pick one last superhero comic to read, this would be the one. Every panel of this is jammed with subtext and possibility. Even the rest of the Kirby issues aren't half as good as the comic series that exists in your brain after you've read this one issue.

Arcade #6: The first comic where I finally "got" Crumb, but it's also got Spiegelman's 'Malpractice Suite,' which still floors me. And S. Clay Wilson! And Bill Griffith! And Rory Hayes! And Mark Beyer! Pretty much bifurcated into Weirdo and Raw, both of which I loved, but never quite in the same way I loved this.

Sam & Max's Freelance Police Special #1: The inspiration for Hit The Road and one of my picks for all-time funniest comic book. Most of my perfect comic book picks were chosen by how many times I've read and reread them; this issue of Sam & Max has to be in the double digits by now.

5 Writers Whose Work For Marvel in the '70s I'll Always Adore

Steve Gerber: Yeah, that's probably a given.

Steve Englehart: Somewhere tucked away in my brain is an essay about how Englehart made comic contuity work in a way that fooled just about everyone into thinking it was an easy and positive benefit to superhero universes than it actually is.

Don McGregor: My goal for this year is to re-read Panther's Rage, which was pretty much my version of Watchmen when I was, I dunno, nine? And review it here, is the plan.

Doug Moench: Overwrought? All these guys were overwrought--it came with the territory. But Moench's overwroughtness also underscored the fact that he seemingly took every assignment seriously, be it Planet of the Apes, dialoguing duties on Rich Buckler's Deathlok, Godzilla, or, of course, Master of Kung-Fu.

Chris Claremont: Claremont was pretty much the last and latest of this generation and, of course, by far the most successful. For better or for worse, so many of the techniques (both strengths and weaknesses) of the '70s Marvel writers found their apotheosis in Claremont's work on Uncanny X-Men.

5 Portrayals of Comic Characters in Other Media I Love More Than The Originals

Buster Crabbe's Flash Gordon: I saw these serials when I was really young and they were perfect. I wish I could show you what I see in my mind when I think back on these.

Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark: Yeah, absolutely. Tony Stark of the comics is pretty much a whiny beeyotch, when he's not being painted as a great big tool. RDJ somehow transcends all of that, while remaining faithful to it? Like, how the hell did he do that?

Chris Evans' Johnny Storm: Kinda similar to the above. Never liked Johnny Storm until Evans gave him crack comic timing.

300 The Movie: Zack Snyder's 300 is so much better than Miller's 300, I think, in the same way Pierre Menard's Quixote is so much better than Cervantes' Quixote.

(I'm shocked I left both Heath Ledger's Joker and Bava's Danger: Diabolik off this list. But that speaks to how much I love the original material, I guess.)

5 More Perfect Comics, With Far Less Commentary

Acme Novelty Library #1: Barely edging out that one awesome issue where Jimmy, his Mom and Superman get stuck on a desert island (and mainly because I can never remember the issue number on that one).

Seven Soldiers: Frankenstein #1: Barely edging out Seven Soldiers #1.

Swamp Thing #32: "Pog."

Love & Rockets #4: the conclusion of the first Heartbreak Soup story and 100 Rooms.

Giant-Size Captain America #1: A collection of Lee & Kirby Cap stories that were just excuses for Kirby to draw fight scenes for six or seven pages at a stretch. True comic book crack: I didn't even have an opinion about it the first 15 times I read it.

Twenty Other Things I Like About Comics, Unsorted & Without Comment:

Paul Pope
Angel & The Ape
The Fortress of Solitude
Dr. Slump
"Tricky Cad"
Skull the Slayer
Those Giant Working Props (in Finger & Sprang's Batman?)
Analogues of corporate controlled characters
Letter pages by Ennis and Morrison
Ghost Rider
Guido Crepax
Snoopy's Doghouse
The Giant Gil Kane Heads o' Drama
Sgt. Frog
Bêlit
Kirby fingers
Golgo 13
The initials "LL"
Alan Moore's beard
The comics blogosphere

Labels: 50 things, Jeff

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As always, my timing sucks because I'm so happy Graeme's got a post up that I hate the idea someone might miss it with all the following hoo-ha I'm about to throw your way. So please make sure to see Graeme's post below! Thank you.

So it's time for the annual hillwide garage sale in Bernal Heights this Saturday: that means people all over the hill will be having sales in front of their homes and apartments. And it means that, once again, I will be out on Cortland Avenue with a table, a bunch of long boxes, and some embarrassingly low prices: after much consideration, I've decided to hold my prices to a quarter a book.

Google maps is being kinda dicky without map links, but here's one to my rough location: 515 Cortland Avenue, 94110.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&
geocode=&q=515+Cortland+Ave,+San+Francisco,+CA
+94110&sll=37.739601,-122.412007&sspn=0.007772,
0.019312&ie=UTF8&ll=37.74296,-122.413852&spn
=0.007771,0.019312&z=16&layer=c&cbll=37.739054
,-122.416435&panoid=HLCG6xVb0K-nW0iBtW78qg

The Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center, which organizes the sale, hasn't told me the exact location, but it's somewhere on Cortland between Andover and Moultrie.

Interestingly but probably unsurprisingly, in the year since I've stopped working at CE, the number of books I've bought has diminished significantly: this is probably because not having them right in front of me for eight hours at a stretch has made them easier to resist. I'd made it a point to try and spend less on comix when I left CE but I don't think that influenced things much--more of my spending has moved toward trades, archives, and manga than the actual floppy/pamphlet/single format. (Fortunately, I'm a notoriously poor bellwether for the rest of the industry, otherwise I'd be worried for future of the singles market.) So whereas in the past few years, I've had something like eight longboxes of books for sale, currently it looks like it'll be at most five.

That said, I'm looking to get rid of a lot of duplicates and stuff that has been traded (or at least in good-enough Essential/Showcase format) from across the range of my collection. Here's three quick pictures to give you an idea of what I mean:







Although it's still a work in progress. I mean, having just picked up the HTD omnibus, I really don't need all my issues anymore, so I pulled them and put 'em in the to-sell pile. But those issues have a particular hold on me--some of them I can remember what I was eating when I read them for the first time, or where I bought them, or the quality of light in my room as I reread them for the third or fourth time--and I'm finding myself skittish about letting them go. I was always a reader, not a collector or a speculator, but I find myself wishing now I'd been more of one (I was flipping through my copy of Hulk #181 today and, sure enough, I'd clipped the stamp like a good little Marvelite), just so that the filthy lucre could provide a tipping point in this tug-of-war between my past and my present. Strangely, it's the more personal stuff--like Howard The Duck--I feel more like letting go for a quarter. It's like returning an animal to the wild or something.

Uh, anyway, that's all a long winded way of saying there are going to be some very good deals. Depending on how manic or depressive I let myself get about all this, maybe some very, very good deals. If you're in the city this weekend, please think about showing up between 9 and 4 on Saturday on Cortland between Andover and Moultrie. Introduce yourself and I'll try to press a free comic in your hands or something. Feel free to drop me an email with any questions, or leave 'em in the comments link.

Labels: garage sale, Jeff

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Going through my stuff in preparation for my upcoming garage sale and came across this lovely number:



What amuses me about this issue of Comics Interview from 1987 isn't the boast that we'll be watching the Watchmen, but the corner claim about Alan Moore says farewell to comics "at least for now." No wonder Affable Al believes we live our lives over and over again!

Labels: Alan Moore, Jeff, Watchmen

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I don't know which one of the thousands of exhibitors brought the ray that speeds up time, but they've got it cranked to eleven down here in San Diego: I had enough time to walk one-tenth of the giant exhibition floor last night, said hi to no more than three or four people (but they were awesome people, I assure you) before joining the nerd diaspora and staggering through the streets of San Diego in search of a place to rest my feet and a liquid that cost less than a dollar an ounce.

So I'm posting this early Thursday morning instead of Wednesday, and I apologize for that. Nonetheless, if you're immune to the effects of the Speed-Up-Ray and are at SDCC and have time to peruse our humble blog, here's the schedule for the Savageites at SDCC (basically, this is the stuff Douglas presented at the end of his post, plus the rare appearance of Graeme on a panel):

Thursday, July 24

1-2: Douglas Wolk moderates The Future of the Comics Pamphlet, Room 32AB (with Joe Keatinge, Carr D’Angelo, Eric Shanower, and other luminaries to be announced)

2-3: Graeme will be schooling you on the Science Fiction That Will Change Your Life, Room 2, along with Annalee Newitz, Austin Grossman, Charlie Jane Anders, and Patrick Lee. Expect Graeme to do most of the talking!

6-7: Douglas Wolk moderates The Comics Blogosphere, Room 32AB (with David Brothers, Jeff Lester, Laura Hudson and Tim Robins)

6-7: Jeff Lester will be thinking of something clever to say on the above-mentioned Comics Blogosphere, Room 32AB (with David Brothers, Laura Hudson and Tim Robins, moderate by the mighty DW)

Friday, July 25

11:30, Douglas’ll be giving a talk called “Against a Canon of Comics” as part of the Comic Arts Conference in Room 30AB, and probably signing Reading Comics somewhere after it.

5-6: Douglas Wolk moderates Teaching Comics—Room 4 (with Phil Jimenez, Matt Silady, James Sturm and Steve Lieber)

Saturday, July 26

11:30-12:30: Douglas Wolk moderates Image Comics/Tori Amos—Room 6B (with Tori herself and a cast of thousands)

2:00-3:00: Douglas Wolk moderates Lettering Roundtable—Room 8 (with Todd Klein, John Roshell, Tom Orzechowski and Jared K. Fletcher)

4:30-5:30: Douglas Wolk moderates The Story of an Image—Room 4 (with Kim Deitch, Jim Woodring, Jim Ottaviani and Kyle Baker)

Hmm, looking at the schedule, I think Douglas is one who owns the Speed-Up-Ray...

So there you have it, and I hope to see you at the Con. If you catch me wandering about blankly, feel free to come up and say hi--I'm hoping I can defeat the effects of Time Disappearitis by meeting more quality people!

Labels: Douglas, Graeme, Jeff, SDCC, speed-up ray

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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

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Okay, let's finish this puppy up...

HATE ANNUAL #7: I'm probably being too meta about this, but I thought it was funny that the Buddy Bradley story is all about he and Jay running dueling junkyards and battling over potentially valuable scrap metal, and this issue seems, like the last few Hate Annuals, like a collection of Bagge's odd & ends from which he's trying to get a little more cash. (Scrap, in other words.) I felt weirdly nostalgic flipping through this issue overall, with pieces like Bagge's comparison of Seattle to New York being the kind of short, funny pieces all indy cartoonists used to do, and now it seems like only Bagge (and Crumb, I guess) is still putting out there. It's really not fair to Bagge because I haven't followed his career closely at all and maybe he's got some awesome advertising or reporting gigs lined up, but he feels like he's fallen between the cracks as the indy scene has moved into its more literary phase and that's a damned shame. If nothing else, that back page shows Bagge could do one helluva Dick Cheney graphic novel bio. I'd give this a high EH--if I could've gotten into the Bat Boy strips this time around, I probably could ignore the price point and go higher--but I do sort of worry Bagge isn't living up to his potential and/or that his time has passed.

LOVELESS #21: I picked this up, along with the other Vertigo titles this week, to see if I could make some snappy generalizations about where this line was at and maybe why sales have been moribund. Since I don't follow the online news boards and no longer read Previews, I thought I might work as a relatively good replica of a casual reader, the kind that apparently aren't picking up Vertigo singles currently.

So. Like DMZ, I haven't followed this book in quite a while; unlike DMZ, I don't think I ever made it past issue #3 of this title. And I can't really critique this issue, which is clearly the last part of a storyline, any more than I could critique a movie after walking in on its last 20 minutes. But it's worth noting I finished this and assumed it was the final issue of the book altogether.

I know Hibbs has put forward a pretty good argument about Vertigo training readers to wait for the trade, but I think maybe each title might benefit as well from a little bit of marketing TLC in its own pages. If I was a new reader and picked up this issue of Loveless and concluded it was the final issue, you'd think chances are good I would be less likely to pick up the next issue since I wouldn't be looking for it. Alternately, maybe if I picked up this issue cold and was intrigued by it to pick up the trade, it might be a good idea to let me know when it's coming out, or what trades are already out. Here, despite every internal ad (except for the half pager for the Full Sail School of Animation) page in this issue being for either Zuda or a Vertigo title, there's not one scrap of information about Loveless other than the last page of the story that says "Conclusion" at the bottom in big letters.

This, then, is my humble proposal: each Vertigo title should have its own bulletin page, which would tell you which trades are currently available (so the reader knows where to start), an ad for the new trade if you're picking up the last issue of a storyline, a next issue blurb, and maybe a quick marketing blurb for the series or the storyline.

I doubt Vertigo will actually do this, mind you, and if pressed, would probably say something like, "B-b-but, The Internet!" Or, "B-b-but the reader can just walk up to the counter guy of the comic store at which they're flipping through the issue, and ask them which trades are in stock." And maybe they're right, but I think a publishing line--particularly one like Vertigo where the majority of its monthly issues are chapters in larger storylines--should make it as easy as possible for readers to know where they stand with any title they're picking up.

Okay, end of rant. NO RATING, but based on the explosions and the imagery (who doesn't love a bride with a gun in her bouquet?) seemed like it could be at least OK.

NEW AVENGERS #37: Man, Leinil Yu seems over-extended and burnt out this issue, precisely at the time Bendis decides it's time to razzle-dazzle everyone with a full-issue fight scene between fourteen-plus characters (plus illusions, plus bystanders): if it wasn't for the colorist, I don't think the middle pages would've had any sense of movement or order to them at all. And Bendis obviously tried to give the fights a sense of ebb and flow with some pages reading nothing more than "Agh!" "Ha!" "Oof!" and some pages deliberately jammed with everyone talking at once, which also helped give things a sense of momentum. I wasn't razzle-dazzled but I was entertained, and the opening and closing sections with The Wrecker helped this issue seem like more than just all middle, so I'm gonna with GOOD, even though really the art and some of those "Ha!" "Oof!" "What?" "Yes." pages really make an OK rating the more sensible decision. But I enjoyed it, so there ya go.

NIGHTWING #139: I'm amazed I forgave Fabian Nicieza the inept use of the tired Mastercard meme on page three ("Following Tim Drake and Batman's son Damian from Gotham City to Ra's al Ghul hideout in Tibet: easy. Realizing that maybe Tim has been seduced by Ra's into joing the dark(er) side: costly. Having to fight the brother I came to rescue: priceless." Honestly, Fabian, what the fuck?), but I did. It's obvious everyone involved is making the best of a bad situation that entails Robin and Nightwing fighting because that's what it says on the editorial whiteboard. So the characters spend half the time half-heartedly laying the groundwork for why they should be fighting (even though it doesn't make any sense with unbelievable amounts of horseshit like, "You can't bring back one if you're not willing to bring back everyone." (Huh?) "And you can't bring back everyone so... don't start with one." (Wha?) "But in that case--since you know you can't stop all crime...then why bother stopping any at all?" (???)) and half the time half-heartedly fighting, and none of it is really relevant to the main thrust of the crossover whatsoever. Knowing that at least the creative team is trying bumps this up to AWFUL for me, but it's a shame how frequently these Bat-Family crossover events seem to suggest "Hey, we don't give a shit about this title except how it affects Batman and neither should you." Feh.

NOVA #9: Didn't read last issue, so it's probably not surprising this issue felt off-balance to me but a dicey writing decision (the issue's big bad is a cosmic entity sealed in a massive space coffin) made worse by a worse art decision (said coffin isn't even shown completely, so Nova's big dramatic struggle is essentially him walking over to what looks like an electrified wall and touching it) makes me think even people following the title might be incredibly underwhelmed. There's a mix of fun and big ideas (who couldn't love a telepathic Russian dog who's security chief for a research station built into a severed Celestial head?), as well as popular sci-fi tropes (Nova's larger battle is with what I guess are Borg analogues which seems really dull to me but probably pushes somebody's fanboy buttons), but the execution for this issue at least knocked it down to a very low OK for me. I'm curious if this issue is an anomaly in that regard or not.

PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #14: I don't know. It's got one good hook (Kraven has decided to start hunting and caging the Marvel Universe's almost infinite number of animal based characters) but in getting it, we have characters written at odds with their earlier appearances (there goes all that heavy duty Mary Sue-ing Ron Zimmerman did on Kraven's son; and I know I'm one of the last people to take the Mandrill seriously but it's a shame he talks like your average "bros before hos" frat boy now), characters/concepts that have been around the Marvel Universe for close to forty years destroyed on a whim (so long, Aragorn!) and a title character that appears for less than half the book (10 out of 22 pages). Writer Matt Fraction has done work I've really enjoyed elsewhere, but here he's just Frank Tieri with a better sense of humor and a deeper back issue collection. I know I've got my fanboy dander up, but I thought this was seriously sub-EH.

SCALPED #12: Luckily for me, a great jumping on issue as it's both (kind of) a done-in-one and a deliberate introduction to the characters, plot and themes of the series. What's weird is I'm normally a big fan of ultra-bleak noir stories (and this series is ultra-bleak) but this one is strangely off-putting and I don't know why. Maybe my liberal white guilt makes it really hard for me to enjoy nihilistic hijinks at the expense of a devastated culture? Although I've enjoyed other works--the movie Deep Cover comes to mind--where, as here, the undercover agent angle is used as a metaphor for the conflict of assimilation in people of color.

I don't know. This is clearly GOOD material--the writing, the art, the hook--but I honestly didn't enjoy it and am unlikely to pick up the next issue. So for me, personally, it's an EH. Considering this stuff is right up my alley normally, I'm not sure what the problem is, but if you like a good, gritty crime thriller, you should assume you won't have the same problem and check it out.

SPIDER-MAN FAMILY #6: The cover--Frog Thor on top of Spidey's head next to the phrase "What would you do if you only had One More Frog!?"--couldn't make it clearer we're in for wacky hijinks this issue but, unfortunately, I found them deeply sub-wack. Chris Eliopoulos' title story is a very sweet mash note to Simonson's "Thor as frog story" (with a much-appreciated intro page that explains the story and even tells you in which trade you can find it). However, stripped of Eliopoulos' usual light mockery, the story has no real laughs, some bad story shortcuts, and seemed a lot more fun to create than it was to read. Following that, there's a story by Tom "Belland" where Spidey catsits Zabu that seems more than a little forced (not only that Spider-Man has to catsit Zabu, but that Spidey is able to work out Zabu's emotional problems(?) and solve them by taking Zabu to a museum to see his stuffed ancestors(!)), two badly reproduced reprints, and a Spider-Man J story that leads me to further suspect Marvel is bullshitting everyone about the material being genuine material originally published in Japan. Overall, a sadly underwhelming issue, which not even Johnny Storm being dressed as a gay rodeo clown (in the Marvel Team-Up reprint) can save. Sub-EH.

STREETS OF GLORY #3: Mike Wolfer's art usually comes off as cluttered and chaotic to me, and his faces almost always seem unevoactive and off, like mannequin faces. But even if John Severin had been on art chores here, Ennis' all-middle of an issue would've left me pretty cold--most of this issue is people telling each other about the past, with a brief flash-forward to point out the entire story is something somebody is telling someone else, with a bit of manufactured conflict and a flash of blood and violence at the end. Still, the art knocks it down to sub-EH for me, and I can't imagine I'll bother looking for next issue. Maybe Ennis is better bringing what interests him about Westerns into his work rather than just doing Westerns? I dunno.

STORMWATCH ARMAGEDDON #1: I've heard good things about the previous Stormwatch series (from Johanna, I think?) so I thought I'd give it a try, but this issue was far from what you'd call a "jumping-on" issue. Operative John Doran is brought into the future by Wildcats character Void to discover what the cause of a coming cataclysm. Doran then goes on to discover one panel of information about what caused the cataclysm, and fifteen pages about what happened to him and the rest of his teammates. It's kind of like "Days of Future Past" if Kitty had ended up in the future and then proceeded to do nothing but go, "But what about Cyclops? What happened to him? Uh-huh. And what happened to Professor X again? Huh. And Beast?" I think even if I was a regular reader of the title, I'd find this underwhelming in every way. AWFUL.

SUPERMAN CONFIDENTIAL #10: Good news, everybody! DC's got an inventory issue it has got to get out of its vault and it wants you to pay $2.99 for it! I assume it's an inventory story, anyway, since it has The Forever People, Darkseid, Mantis, Infinity-Man and Jimmy Olsen but doesn't even try to pretend to reference Countdown, and doesn't serve any purpose whatsoever except to throw a bunch of characters into combat for eighteen pages without explaining who they are and what relation they have to each other. And Superman seems weirdly out of character as well, saying stuff like "What I said to the others goes double for you. Get out of Metropolis." and "That your best shot?" Considering this is by the guys who wrote the much-better Nova this week, I'm assuming something went seriously wrong here, and you know, God bless. Just don't ask me (or you) to pay for it. CRAP.

TALES OF THE SINESTRO CORPS ION #1: After enjoying Green Lantern #25 as much as I did, I found this tremendously unsatisfying. I mean, it does explain what's going on to the first-time reader and I do give it credit for that, but when each sequence (Kyle with the Guardians, Kyle and Sodam Yat, Nero and Kyle) each requires at least a full page of exposition, maybe there's something to be said for putting the pedal to the metal and dazzling us all with crazy shit. Also, the artist and/or colorist kinda blew the point of the big fight sequence--it took me a second read to figure out that Ion had taken Nero's creatures and converted them into his own. (And I only bothered because Marz, in true "explain everything in case the artist fucks it up" craftsman, explained it after I missed it.) Finally, the title makes me think this entire issue was just a solicitation fake-out so that people trying to glean the fallout of the Sinestro War from future solicits were going to be outfoxed. If so, is that the future of the direct market? A cold war between the Big Two and retailers & readers? Jeezis, I hope not. AWFUL.

UN-MEN #5: First issue I've read of this and the conclusion, I guess, of the introductory arc. It didn't do much for me, seeming both past its prime (are people still trying to get cash from the nouveau-freakshow movement?) and extraordinarily tepid (just about every third link on Warren Ellis' website is more outlandish than the stuff portrayed here) with only Tomer Hanuka's cover providing any kind of garish zing whatsoever. I guess it's great editor Jonathan Vankin could get his writing partner a steady gig, but I can't imagine this sub-EH material is gonna be the next Y: The Last Man.

WALKING DEAD #45: I like that everyone including the bad guy is running around in a panic with only the most half-assed of plans to see them through, but that's precisely when, according to zombie movie law, brains should start getting eaten. Maybe I'm being premature here, but even as the last few issues have heightened the conflict between the two groups of humans, the zombie factor has been shunted to the side. I hope that's because Kirkman wants us to forget about them and have 'em cause holy hell in the next issue or two, but it feels a bit like he's got his hands full with all the characters and their motivations at play. A highly GOOD issue, though, and I'm looking forward to the next.

WOLVERINE #60: That weird and gross Arthur Suydam cover--where Wolverine looks as surprised to be shown driving his claws through some dude's head as I am to be seeing it--doesn't really convey the warmed-over material herein. (I know I don't follow the character that closely, but does Wolverine ever end up in Japan and it doesn't end up entailing his former fiance and/or her family? And ninjas?) Oh sure, Wolverine fights ninjas in a Japanese toy store, and if Geoff Darrow had been drawing that, it would've been aces, but Chaykin's well past the point of showing off and uses the minimum amount of detail (and a shitload of diagonal composition) to pull us through. I can't really blame the guy--Chaykin, like Bagge, is a guy who seems to have fallen between the cracks for reasons I can't even fathom--but it doesn't make the book any less EH.

WONDER WOMAN #15: Very charming, I thought. I've always liked Wonder Woman as a warrior strong enough to be compassionate (remember when she used to take her enemies off to be rehabilitated through some light spanking and B&D?), and the mix of both multiple pantheons and gaudy pulp stuff here (nazis, talking gorillas) move the character away a bit from the Greek mythos I've found so stifling since WW's reinvention by Perez. The intro piece may be a bit clunky, and I was bit disappointed that out of an entire menagerie of imaginary animals, the nazis get attacked by what's either Kang or Kodos, but yeah, pretty GOOD stuff. I'd like to see more.

CRAWL SPACE XXXOMBIES #2: Finally, thanks to my poor alphabetization skills, we've got this little number which is rich in high concept (Boogie Nights of the Living Dead, basically), has all the sick, gaudy thrills Un-Men wishes it had, and has neither a sympathetic character nor a remote resemblance to reality anywhere to be found. It's OK, but, being as I'm one of those guys who preferred Death Proof to Planet Terror, not really my thing.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Gotta go with GREEN LANTERN #25--a really remarkable piece of heady, straight-up, continuity-rich, superhero whoop-ass.

PICK OF THE WEAK: COUNTDOWN ARENA #2, I guess, although the "comic book as toxic waste dump" approach of SUPERMAN CONFIDENTIAL #10 wasn't any great shakes, either.

TRADE PICK: I forgot to do this last week, which is a shame since there were a ton of contenders. (I would've gone with BECK VOL. 10, the crazy-ass BATMAN SUPERMAN SAGA OF THE SUPER SONS TPB, and the second POPEYE hardcover). This week, though, I'd go with Brubaker and Phillips' exceptional second trade from Criminal, LAWLESS. As with the previous arc, the art was luscious and the story satisfying, but I found the narrative tone and structure particularly exceptional. I hope it goes on to sell a bajillion copies.

NEXT WEEK: Maybe the whole "brevity is the soul of wit" thing will sink in!

Labels: Jeff, old school

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Last week, after reviewing 35 books, I swore I wasn't going to do that to myself again. So yesterday, I pulled the books off the rack, did a count before handing them to Hibbs, and realized I had 30.

I started flipping through them, having already weeded out stuff of which there were two copies or less on the racks, trying to figure out where I could cut. And after about ten minutes of heavy-duty consideration I got it down to...27. During my final weeks at CE, I was reviewing roughly 18, so maybe I won't hit that number. We'll see.

Again, thanks to everyone who was kind enough to pitch in with the comments and compliments. They were tremendously appreciated and helped keep me going during my normally seasonally affective disordered self.

And so it comes 'round again:

ANGELUS PILOT SEASON #1: Leave it to Top Cow to figure out how to bring the super-hero origin into the 21st Century: from what I could tell, Angelus is a superpowered chick who gets even more superpowers, and now uses her new superpowers to fight the people who helped her get her old superpowers. It's the same sort of "who says less is more when clearly more is more" philosophy the inventors of the fried twinkie gave us, and you have to kind of admire it. (I also admired the savvy business acumen of the people who put together the inside cover ad for Witchblade: The Animated Series: catching the title character in mid-examination of her right breast for pre-cancerous lumps shows that the series has a sensitive side.) The script, however, is cliche-ridden, the painted art frequently awkward, and the comic surprisingly credit-free--is that intentional? Something to do with keeping you from voting online for the creator and not the concept or something?--but I guess if you like comics where super-powered waitresses recover from flashbacks by standing in their underwear and exchanging exposition with their alter egos for five pages, you could do worse...I assume. AWFUL.

BAT LASH #1: I know enough about Bat Lash to realize this is apparently going to be an "Origin of..." miniseries, but don't really know the character at all. Based on this issue, he seems frankly anachronistic, a figure from those days when Westerns were filled with charming rogues because the Western by and large skimmed over historical underpinnings. Now, where the Western is fraught with the knowledge that the West was won by guys who shot each other only when they got tired of shooting Indians and buffalo, I'm not sure you can pull it off. You certainly can't pull it off in a book like this, where Bat Lash is asking a Comanche friend how things are, and the Comanche says stuff like, "How I been? Your people take the buffalo away...drive us to reservations...your girl's rich father is even...put[ting] bounty on Indian scalps!" To which Lash replies, "Yeah, Wilder's still trying to drive my folks off our land." (Hey, sucks to be you, Bat Lash! Also, what do you mean by "your" land, exactly?)

I think it's laudable that the Aragones and Brandvold did their research, and Christ knows John Severin's work is a genuine treat to look at, but when your next issue blurb is "Sheriffs and Ranchers and BEARS, oh my!" and your last page cliffhanger is a woman's impending rape, I'd say your project has conflicting goals that make enjoying the book a more difficult task than it probably ought to be. Art bumps it up to EH, but it's kind of a wreck.

BOOSTER GOLD #5: Kind of sad that the weakest point of Booster Gold's book is Booster Gold's creator, Dan Jurgens. Admittedly, I've never been a fan of the J-Man, what with his tepid layouts, his limited range of facial expressions, and his largely generic character designs--he seems like an artist for people who find Bob Layton too avant-garde--but giving him a time-travel story that intersects with The Killing Joke (some of the most beautiful artwork ever published by a mainstream comic company) really underscored that for me. This is the first issue of the book I've read, and while I find Booster to be a very likeable hero here and the time war conceit clever, the execution of things--not just Jurgens' art, but also the whole "you can change time, except where you can't! (Unless, of course, you can!)" attempts to keep the drama rolling--is pretty uneven. If I had to guess, I'd say Johns is helping break the story beats and Katz is writing the dialogue, and while (presumably) Katz does a pretty good job, he hasn't quite mastered the "these aren't the droids you're looking for" ability Johns has to keep you from noticing a really glaring plot hole. Despite the kvetching, I'd give it an OK, but your appreciation for Jurgens' art and/or DCU continuity noodling may have you bump that rating higher.

BOYS #13: Don't know if s Snejbjerg is inking Robertson or also contributing to the art chores, but the art here is looking seriously cartoony. Like, "hey, the big Russian guy looks a lot like Bugs Bunny in that panel" cartoony. While that might be the next natural evolution in Robertson's style--and probably a good one, frankly--it kinda messes with the tone of the book a little bit. I'm not sure I'm going to make it through an Ennis monthly where it feels like there's nothing at stake. Anyway, considering what I think these creators are capable of, it's OK. Compared to most of the other stuff on the market, it's in the GOOD category. You make the call.

COUNTDOWN ARENA #2: If you've always wanted a mentally disabled little brother that would play Mortal Kombat while constantly hollering horrible dialogue he's made up for all the characters, this is the book for you. CRAPtacular, even without the reconfiguring of Apollo as a Ray-analogue, not a Superman analogue. (Yeah, nice try there, DC Editorial.)

COUNTDOWN SEARCH FOR RAY PALMER RED SON #1: This comic book could be useful to future generations as a primer in how to spot rushed artwork: basic left-to-right storytelling mistakes; lots of blank-faced blobs drawn in long shot to cut down on details; conversations being held by characters with their back to the reader; disappearing backgrounds; absence of movement...The seven panels to a page average suggests that this was a ton of work in the first place, and I expect there were some iron-clad deadlines to meet, but the art tragically failed to meet the challenge. As for the story, although it jams a lot of material, characters, ideas and motivations into one issue, none of it means a god-damned thing unless you read Red Son, like, yesterday...in which case you'd probably be pissed at how this book uses those characters and situations but ignores any of the resolutions. AWFUL, awful, awful.

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 20: I'm not going to brat about how the DC Countdown team can't coordinate between their own titles (the Countdown Arena pages this issue get the dialogue right but completely blow the timing, for example) but rather brat about how the writers of this issue can't coordinate their own story in the same issue. On one page Jimmy Olsen is suddenly talking about how there's a little voice in his head telling him what he needs to do, and on the very next page he's talking about how he knows how to go through a maze he's never been through and attributing that to either "a run of luck" or "more weirdness." In fact, Jimmy's got a caption that goes "(Whew)...and I thought I" and the very next caption "This weird turtle shell I've become isn't helping in that department." (I'm gonna guess maybe the words 'smelled bad' dropped out?) I don't know what people are getting paid to work on this book, but I'm guessing it's not nearly enough to cover all the future therapy needed to put their shattered psyches back together.

And, of course, what adds insult to injury is that this is DC's second weekly annual series, which means that someone ignored nearly every lesson they should've learned from 52 and thought they could pull it off by sheer charm and force of will. AWFUL stuff, and tremendously disappointing.

DMZ #26: I don't know. I admit I haven't read this book in about a year, but it seems to me this issue couldn't have been structured worse. I think it's supposed to be a portrait of a photojournalist in the DMZ that's just died, constructed from several anecdotes during her time there, but all of the cues are messed up. One early scene starts off captioned "Two days earlier" and then we're never given a time transition again. So one would think that all of the scenes are more-or-less contiguous from that point on, except there's a scene where the character takes a picture and the narrator says, "She won an award for that photo. And caught a lot of shit about it, too." So...non-contiguous? Even if you don't find yourself frustrated about the time frame for the story, the concluding lines of the story, "We live in a world of fire and death and funerals. But Kelly made us feel alive," aren't supported by the earlier incidents of the story. How'd she make "us" feel alive? By being hungover during a firefight and puking? By sitting and drinking in a locked room, refusing to let people in? By abandoning crying children, and ignoring the orders of people protecting her? Maybe a case could be made that the creative team is trying to undercut the narrator's elegiac tone by showing the opposite of what he's insisting but there's not enough evidence to really support that. Realy, I'm not trying to be a dick here, but compare this issue to Lawless, the second Criminal trade, and how the narration there leads us through an unorthodox flashback structure, and I think you'll see what I mean. This didn't work, and I gotta give it an EH, at best.

FALLEN ANGEL IDW #22: I usually don't parse comic book dialogue emphases--you know, those bolded words that typically make everyone sound like they're out of breath from running, but the kid's last word balloon "And at least the war was over there..." really needs it since the meaning isn't 'the war was in a place that's not here' but 'the war was finished in that place that's not here.'

I dunno. That's all I got, I'm afraid. If I hadn't read the title previously, I wouldn't have had any idea what was happening or why I should care. Since I have read the title previously, the only stumper was why I should care. EH character, EH art, EH script--I guess I can safely call this an EH book.

FANTASTIC FOUR #552: The Thing hammers future Doom through six intrusive pages of ads (including that annoying double-page spread for the terrifyingly named "Out of Jimmy's Head," which sounds like a classic Cronenberg film and looks like the CN's desperate attempt to capture some of Nick Kids and Disney Channel's vital "pubescent chicks who dig feather-haired future date rapists" demographic) and then the future FF show up. A little sparse for my $2.99, although maybe it lands at an effective place in the larger storyline I'm not following. It wasn't bad, but skimpy, and the FF title seems trapped in a "But is Reed a dick?" conundrum the same way the Superman books were stuck in a "But would Superman kill?" trap for a few years--even he's not, the book is static and dull, if he is, I don't want to read the character any more--and I'm not sure if Millar and Hitch are going to make matters better or worse. OK, because McDuffie knows the characters, even if he doesn't know what to do with them.

GREEN ARROW BLACK CANARY #3: I'd be scared to party with Judd Winick. Based on his current storytelling m.o., it'd all be lots of fun and booze and laughs at the start, and then, after he's had enough to drink, pow! Suddenly there's a dead stripper on your hands. I mean, this issue was probably the best handling of the stupid "there are no refrigerators on Amazon Island, so naturally every female character in the DCU wants to go there and join them despite the stupid amounts of false jeopardy they must go through to do so" idea making its way through the DCU books, and the Cliff Chiang artwork is clean and light and expressive, and then---pow! Another dead stripper of a cliffhanger. I'll go with OK because it was an enjoyable read until then and it looked great, but, uh, maybe we should make sure Mr. Winick doesn't have any access to the hard stuff when he's plotting.

GREEN LANTERN #25: Holy fucking shit. I've read other comic books that clearly wanted to catch the "big summer blockbuster" vibe before, but this issue nailed that so well I was in awe. Johns and crew pack each page with so many ideas, character bits, riffs, and payoffs big and small, I almost wanted to cheer at the end--the same way I do at $200 million movies I won't remember three weeks later. The concluding "trailer" for "Blackest Night" (coming in 2009) only confirms such a crazy, inspired, deluded aspiration and I'm really and truly knocked out by the open-throttle "dare to be cheesy and awesome" ambition of the whole thing. I haven't followed the issues leading up to this, so I don't know if all the "spectrum" lantern thing had been previously teased out but I think it was smart of Johns to ramp right up from the yellow lantern Sinestro Corps to all the other colors so quickly--this may sound weird, but I think this is the first time since "The Anatomy Lesson" I've seen a character's basic concept opened up so dramatically and to impressive effect.

There are problems with the book, I gotta say--the artists had a hard time keeping up with everything, so that over half the book looks like Perez's discards from Crisis on Infinite Earths, and, despite Johns' way with the character arc, Hal Jordan still seems like the least interesting character in his own book (to say nothing of the fact that by the time Blackest Night rolls around, everyone in the damned DCU is gonna have a power ring, making the guy even less unique than before). But overall? Holy fuck, did this seem like a concentrated hot shot of mainstream superhero insanity. If that's the sort of thing that turns your crank (and I'm both surprised and relieved to find out it can still turn mine) I think you'll also find this astonishingly VERY GOOD. Good grief.

That'll get us started, I think. More later tonight or tomorrow...

Labels: Jeff, old school

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Oy, I'm such a dink. Not only did I screw up the arrival dates of the books (it's 12/05, not 12/06) but I totally forgot to open my previous post with sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to vote on what I should do for the site this month. I really appreciated janesmith3's vote since it looked like an ASCII cylon raider, but, honestly, I'm grateful to everyone who took the time to give me feedback, both there and just below.

Anyhoo, Part 2:

NIGHTMARES & FAIRY TALES #21: One of the things I regret about splitting when I did is never writing about the high weirdness that was volume 1 of "Make 5 Wishes," the deeply odd Avril Lavigne comic from Del Rey by artist Camilla D'Errico and writer Joshua Dysart: it's this book in which a lonely girl ends up with a demon that can grant wishes and the only one who can help her figure things out is her imaginary friend Avril Lavigne. It was one of those books you kinda can't believe you're reading while you're reading it and, while still not in the same league as, say, Fletcher And Zenobia Save The Circus, something so distinct you give it a pass on all of its shortcomings.

I'm tempted to do the same with Nightmares & Fairy Tales #21, since writer Serena Valentino and artist D'Errico are trying something similarly odd (Valentino describes it as a mix of Carnivale, Deadwood and H.P. Lovecraft) in this story of a traveling freak show, the heartless bastard who runs it, and a captive mermaid. Unfortunately, D'Errico's delicately sketched linework doesn't have the same impact without the lovely color work of Make 5 Wishes, and Valentino's script is relatively hackneyed; only the suggestion that the innocent-seeming mermaid might be even more inhuman and terrible than the main character gave me any inclination to pick up the next issue. I gotta go with EH, as much as I'd prefer otherwise, but I hope these creators continue to develop their chops here and elsewhere.

NORTHLANDERS #1: I'm really frustrated with myself on this book--while I really like a lot of the ideas Wood's playing with here (a story that takes echoes of Hamlet and turns them into almost a Norse version of Point Blank, a narration that subtly uses anachronisms to give the protagonist's concerns and thoughts an immediacy), I didn't actually enjoy any of it. Colorist Dave McCaig seems like he's working overtime in every panel to work some depth into Davide Gianfelice's art but it's not quite enough: the book didn't look spare as much as it did not-quite-finished. I'm gonna call it OK and let's see where it goes.

OMEGA THE UNKNOWN #3: Lethem continues to nudge this book toward its own concerns and between him, Dalrymple on art (and--Jeezis!--Paul Hornschemeier doing the coloring!), there's no denying there's a ton of talent tackling this book, but I'm still a little underwhelmed. One of the things that made the original Omega such a strange book was the clash between Gerber & Skrenes' unorthodox scripts and Jim Mooney's traditional art. And while Mooney,like John Buscema, liked working on non-traditional material, his work had enough associations and influences from his superhero work it made the material even more striking. Whereas here, Lethem and Dalrymple (and--Jeezis!--Hornschemeier!) alll seem too much in the same vein: it's a little too glib, too easy, and too superficial. What I'm trying to say is, maybe a book called Omega The Unknown would benefit from a little more not-knowingness, you know? I'm still on board, but the meter keeps moving toward EH, bit by bit.

SILVER SURFER IN THY NAME #2: Simon Spurrier obviously took the time to put himself through Silver Surfer 101. So even though I disagree with The Silver Surfer suddenly being able to astrally project himself (don't even get me started on how it messes with previous contuity, let's just agree the last thing The Silver Surfer needs is yet another vaguely defined power and move on), I'm not even gonna bother. Similarly, although Tan Eng Huat (and ace colorist Jose Villarrubia) aren't really anywhere close to following the moves from the Kirby/Buscema playbook, they're working their butts off. But even taking all that off the table, the book feels really cramped to me, making me think the Surfer is one of those larger-than-life characters who needs less panels per page than the relatively steady six-per-page we get here. I'm bummed I gotta go with EH here as well.

SUBURBAN GLAMOUR #2: It's great to get a big eyeful of Jamie McKelvie's work in color, and the story is blessedly direct. I'd be lying if I didn't admit I have quibblage--for an artist working from his own script, McKelvie occasionally stages things a bit more awkwardly than you'd expect, and there's one sequence that exists for no other reason than to eat up a bit of space--and yet I found it to be GOOD fun, overall. More, please.

SUPERGIRL #24: My first read garnered me an enormous "Huh?" In part, this was while the good people at Supergirl were kind enough to have a story-based recap page, the next few pages were so disorienting I wasn't sure if the recap had stopped. The second read made quite a bit more sense, however, and I guess it makes a case for why Supergirl's discontent that's a lot less gross than what we've seen previously. But unless the first issue (which I didn't read) is a lot more action packed than the first, all the wordless pages makes me wonder if this wasn't a single issue story expanded into two. On its own, I'd generously give it an EH (if I hadn't felt so rusty with this reviewing thing, I doubt I would've given this issue a second read-through and just dismissed it out of hand), but if the first issue is especially kick-ass or sets a tone that makes this pacing more valid, I guess you could bump it up to an OK, if you wanted.

THE SWORD #3: Didn't read the first two issues and maybe that's for the best because this issue moved like a MOTHERfucker, escalating things steadily so the final splash page simultaneously lets you catch your breath and tries to kick you one last time in the gut. I liked Ultra, and thought Girls was a huge ol' mess, but if these guys can keep their control of the material as strong as it is here, The Sword might just knock it out of the park. Very Good stuff, I thought.

ULTIMATE X-MEN #88: Haven't read an issue of this book since Millar left, so I'm coming into this very, very cold and, again, am impressed with the recap page. It wasn't a work of genius or anything but it did give me an idea of the bigger picture. This wasn't a terrible issue, I gotta admit--in fact, as a guy with a thing for girls with glasses, I'll go one step further and admit that last panel of Ultimate Emma Frost made me glad I picked it up--but Ultimate X-Men has clearly become the X-Men equivalent of Beatlemania, where all the greatest hits get trotted out one after the other, or even run together in a medley as needs dictate. For example, this issue alone has Ultimate Cable, Ultimate Bishop, Ultimate Emma Frost, Ultimate Psylocke, the return of Ultimate Beast, Ultimate Phoenix, a round of Ultimate softball out at Ultimate Xavier's Mansion, Ultimate Hellfire Club and a last panel of, I'll assume, Ultimate Apocalypse (though it'd be awesome if it were Penultimate Apocalypse or something). Oh sure, Ultimate Colossus is gay and Ultimate Cable is apparently Ultimate Wolverine from the future or something, but that doesn't seem to matter as much as you'd think. Ultimate Paul is playing and singing Paul's parts, and Ultimate Ringo is playing the drums just like Ringo. In this age of trade paperbacks and CD-Roms and experimental direct comics subscriptions and bit torrent and back issues--to say nothing of how many fuckin' X-Men books are still on the market--does anyone really need this apart from the company and creative teams' bank accounts? Ultimate Emma Frost in white corset and sexy black glasses aside, I'd say no. Sub-EH.

UNCANNY X-MEN #493: See? The regular X-Men books are doing perfectly fine all by themselves at taking all the old greatest hits and mixing 'em up. As for this issue, I read it and, as you would expect from starting a crossover at Part 6, I don't really have the necessary investment as a reader for anything in this issue to have much of an impact. I liked that we got to see someone in striped pajama pants fight the Sentinels, I guess. It all seemed coherent enough even if I didn't care, however, and that's a good sign. I don't know. Issues like this make me wish Paul O'Brien had Google Ads or something set up over at The X-Axis because reading books like this make me realize what an invaluable service he performs each and every week, and he should get paid for it. Because while I feel confident saying this was an OK issue, Paul can really tell you and, to the extent your opinions mesh with his, you can bank on it. That's a valuable god-damn service.

WORLD WAR HULK AFTERSMASH: No offense to the current creative team, but if Marvel put Greg Pak on Iron Man, I think they might be doing themselves a favor: apart from the shout-out to that insane issue of Marvel Team-Up where Hercules tows Manhattan back into place, the only thing in this weak sauce that really impressed me was how well Pak handled the (presently) complex character of Tony Stark/Iron Man. However, between the above-mentioned weak sauce and the price tag of $3.99 for a book that includes six pages of promo material Marvel couldn't even be bothered to color, I gotta go with Awful. I'll assume the rest of the event wasn't this lame.

X-MEN DIE BY THE SWORD #4: I can't really give a decent review of this book since I didn't read the previous three issues, but since Chris Claremont didn't give it a decent script, I'm okay with that.

...

I kid, I kid. If you're still reading Claremont at this point, you know what you're getting (a morass of characters and plots, quips and aphorisms so hoary they're probably on a motivational poster somewhere) and you obviously either want it or feel compelled to support it. I can dig it. It's a shame that a previously unsinkable franchise like The Exiles is getting rebooted as a result of all this, though, and that Claremont--like some fanboy Captain Ahab--is obsessed with being able to finally write The Fury (or the The Fury Prime, or whatever it's called) but those are my hang-ups. But I think some messy storytelling flubs (the weirdness with Longshot's knife and invisible Merlyn, the lack of a splash page at the end when the Fury emerges so Captain Britain has to tell you what the hell is happening) would bump this down a few notches even for you, right? So I'll go with Awful and you can go with _____, and we'll both go with God, okay?

ZOMBIES VS ROBOTS VS AMAZONS #1: Well, it's dumb. And expensive. But really, really pretty. And here's only one robot (so far). I'd go with AWFUL even though, again, it's really, really pretty. Keep in mind I'm so far afield of Ashley Wood's target audience--pot dealers who like to leave comic books out on the kitchen table so their customers have something to read, I'm thinking--I should not be considered fair counsel.

PICK OF THE WEEK: My memory's a little hazy. I think it's LOBSTER JOHNSON IRON PROMETHEUS #4 and/or THE SWORD #3.

PICK OF THE--ULTIMATES 3 #1!--OF THE WEAK: Sorry, couldn't wait.

NEXT WEEK: Maybe not as many books!

Oh, and make sure you don't miss Diana's post about webcomics below, okay? I'm hoping it's just the first article of several giving noobs like me the lay of the land.

Labels: Jeff, old school

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This is both caveat and invitation.

Six months ago, I stopped working behind the counter at CE and reading the week's releases as they came out. It feels like it's been fifty kajillion years, to be honest. I've only read one issue of Countdown, missed two wars (World War Hulk and the Sinestro Corps War), and let entire storylines I was kinda interested in finish up without me bothering (Action Comics, Wonder Woman, Justice League, Fantastic Four). I've continued to buy some monthly releases (everything by Brubaker, pretty much, Morrison's Batman, Blue Beetle) on which I am, with a few exceptions, completely behind. Since June, it's pretty much been Kirby Omnibuses (Omnibi?), some indy books, and a ton of manga.

I'd like to think this'll mean I'll bring "soft eyes" (as the people at The Wire would have it) to these old school big-ass round-ups. But what it probably means is you'll have to issue corrections-a-plenty in the comments field, and remind me that "Ben Grimm is The Thing, not The Hulk," "Norman Osborne is still alive and running Thunderbolts" and "Geoff Johns is only writing twenty comics a month now, and not forty."

Caveat/invitation (or cavitation, if you prefer) out of the way:

30 DAYS OF NIGHT BEYOND BARROW #2: Steve Niles and Bill Sienkiewicz have a lazy-off and we're invited! While I've never cottoned much to Niles' tin ear, he's at least trying to make things easier for his artist by setting the bulk of his scenes either inside a Humvee or in a snowstorm. Sienkiewicz, on the other hand, while turning in some lovely splash pages, can't even be bothered to make the book's single action scene slightly comprehensible. (If you've read Sienkiewicz's classic work, you know he's capable of doing it and getting all the neat splashy impressionistic effects he wants.) Didn't read the first issue of this; won't be reading the last issue of this. AWFUL stuff.

ABYSS #2: A sitcom version of Wanted, this works moderately well, with decent dialogue, great pacing, and a good change-up in the plot (also, a helpful, legible recap page which, since I didn't read the first issue, was a huge plus). I'm a little over books that use analogues to shorthand relationships (and provide for easy joke fodder) but that wasn't handled too badly. Highly OK and I wouldn't mind seeing the next issue.

ALL NEW ATOM #18: Didn't read the previous issue of this, but the priorities of the ending seem a bit off: what about Atom's date? Is Head dead? It's a bummer the big hero moments push away the small character stuff, but isn't that usually the way with Marvel and DC these days? On the plus side, having an angry mob burn Atom on a Foreman Grill is a funny spin on the classic Silver Age "Atom in Peril" scenes. If I was following this book regularly, it'd probably rank on the OK side of things for me. Since it's not really my thing, it got a high EH.

ALL STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN THE BOY WONDER #8: When a comic book opens up right after the Joker has finished making sweet love, you know it's gonna be weird. Although, actually, the rest of the book is relatively straightforward, slow-moving, and cameo-jammed; it's like it was written by Jeph Loeb on elephant tranquilizers. The only other notable bit of weirdness about it is Batman's interior narration concerning Dick Grayson, which sounds a bit like if you cast Marv from Sin City in the Adam Sandler role in Big Daddy: "Damn. This brat's starting to get to me. What am I doing, playing father? This is the dumbest move I've made in my whole life." Huh? Sadly, not insane enough to be more or less than EH.

ATOMIC ROBO #3: Every time I read that title and it doesn't say "Atomic Hobo," I die a little. The pacing falls apart a little--okay, a lot--at the end (there should at least be a "To Be Continued---?" or something before launching into the back-up story, and the back-up story has no real kick to it unless you know who Jack Parsons is), but writer Brian Clevenger has a nice, rambley way with the dialogue and Scott Wegner's art seems simple and clean without being lazy (although I might've felt differently if this book had been in black and white). Like Abyss, the high concept seems a little too clear to me--it's a robot Hellboy only much sunnier, basically--but, like Abyss, I can see myself picking up another issue if I come across it on the stands. Oh, and I also really appreciated the text page here, too. OK stuff.

AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE ANNUAL: With the possible exception of the guy who goes on military maneuvers in his wifebeater, this is all pretty intelligently crafted, less a typical Marvel annual than the sort of Secret Files thing DC was so big on not too long ago. What's weird to me, though, is how un-Marvel the approach to the Initiative is--with the possible exception of The Liberteens (an amusing Young Avengers style take on the Liberty Legion), these characters feel like they could be characters in the Wildstorm universe, or Shooter's New Universe, or half a dozen other generic superhero universes. Having the Avengers logo slapped on the logo only makes that stand out even more for me. It's highly OK at least, but it didn't instill me with the faintest desire to see the characters again, because I feel like I've already seen them twenty or thirty times before, and that's kind of a bummer.

BATMAN #671: I've been pretty underwhelmed with Morrison's run on Batman so far--that lovely work by J.H. Williams on the Black Glove story arc was the best case of lipstick on a pig I've seen in some time--but this issue makes me think I just shouldn't expect more than some clever jokes and a bunch of the good ol' kick & punch. Taken purely on that standard, this was pretty OK. In fact, considering it's part 4 of a 7 part inter-book crossover, it's really highly OK. It's still not kung-pao'ing my chicken, though.

BLACK SUMMER #4: First issue of this I've read, although I'm aware of the story's hook thanks to our pal The Internet. Juan Jose Ryp's art is always initially lovely but there never seems to be a lot of signal to go with all the noise, and while it makes for a pretty kick-ass street fighting scene, the following airfight sequence loses, rather than gains, tension as a result. Although I'd say this was mighty EH, it was also more interesting than the last three Authority reboots I read.

BLUE BEETLE #21: I tried to read this with an open mind, but guest writer Justin Peniston has still got a ways to go. He opens and closes the book with the old saying "there are no atheists in foxholes," but to do so, Jaime's father explains the saying means "you have to have faith in yourself" which couldn't be more wrong. Amusing ("And that's what the old saying 'never do anal' means, Jaime: you have to have faith in yourself"), but wrong. EH, but since this is normally one of my favorite books on the market, that's more disappointing than the rating would show.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #9: Wraps up a pitch-perfect little arc by BKV, and if he ever decides to do a Faith miniseries, I'll be front and center. I'm extraordinarily underwhelmed by Georges Jeanty's work, however: there's a few shots of Giles where he looks like a ginormous headed Martian (the purple coloring doesn't help, I admit). Overall, though, really Good stuff.

COUNTDOWN ARENA #1: Of course, I wasn't expecting this to be good or anything, but I was still startled by how god-damned stupid it was, even by its own "Contest of Champions meets Saw" standard. Wake me when they get around to doing "Secret Wars II meets Hostel," will ya? Craptacular.

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 21: Second issue of this I've ever read, and it looks less like an epic storyline (or even several) than an epic excuse to cram in every secondary figure of the DCU so as to get cash from their readership. I mean, OMACs, Jason Todd, Karate Kid, Donna Troy, Batman Beyond, and the Monitors, all in one issue, plus Granny Goodness on the cover? (The last of which, by the way, I think even Kirby was never foolhardy enough to do.) This isn't a comic book, it's a mating call! And yet, when one gets down to such uninhibited pandering (as in, say, porn), what's fascinating is how fickle and impatient those being pandered to really are: like any cheesy porn, Countdown is actually really dull because the viewer, encountering a world ostensibly created entirely for them, can't help but pick it apart. (In the case of porn: there's no story; these women are creeping me out; why isn't the sex hot? In the case of Countdown: there's no story; Jason Todd is creeping me out; why isn't the art any good?) It's tempting to give it an EH since it could be much worse than it is, but pandering rarely engenders good will, which is probably why it's easier to call it AWFUL.

DEATH OF THE NEW GODS #3: Seeing Jim Starlin finally write and draw a New Gods comic is a dream come true for me: unfortunately, it turns out to be that dream where Mr. Spock won't stop making unwanted sexual advances. Seeing the guy who created the second best rip-off of Darkseid (with George Lucas arguably creating the first) finally get his hands on Darkseid should be fun and exciting, but instead I kept noticing how everyone in this book looked like they had to poop. So much squatting! It's like Starlin decided to draw Kirby poses but show them from new angles to highlight how unnatural they are. There's also some bullshit about fighting artificially created parademons so the heroes can destroy indiscriminately without worrying about taking actual lives. Lame, lame, lame. It's like paying money to watch Eric Clapton cover a Howling Wolf blues tune and seeing him not only blow the melody, but shear off a fingertip on a guitar string. Depressingly AWFUL.

EXTERMINATORS #24: That faux Kurtz scene amazed me by transcending simple parody--there's a great panel of the character staring with a despair and horror that that tells more than just the exposition he's delivering--and using "Heart of Darkness" as a way to comment on how cruise lines continue the evils of colonialism is really sharp. But once the focus is changed from "colonialism" to "patriarchy," the theme, and the story, falls apart as you read it. (Like, why would the guy go onshore to get his whores and rock when he could stay on the ship?) One of the few times I've read a book and wished it could get a do-over: I think I'd like the next draft of this a lot more than I did this one. EH, in the end.

HOWARD THE DUCK #3: This has a lot going for it--Templeton's script, like classic Gerber scripts, is a mixture of social satire and sheer absurdity, and Bobillo's art is wonderful to look at, particularly in panels when Howard looks a duck version of Harvey Pekar--but also kind of misses the boat in some fundamental way I can't put my finger on. Templeton nails Howard's "only sane person in a world gone mad" positioning, but it's Howard's unique mercurial reactions to that position (angry, depressed, bemused, weary, self-pitying, resigned) that make the character who he is, and the Howard here is maybe a little better adjusted than that. (I also think that Howard worked better on the fringes of the MU, rather than so front and center). So I don't know how to rate it: It's OK, but it also feels a bit like a big mistake.

HOUSE OF M AVENGERS #2: As long as you can get over the creative team's utter misunderstanding of The House of M premise (if I remember correctly, Magneto isn't able to retcon all of reality, which is why Wolverine remembers the truth when he gets his memory back, and why Hawkeye flips out after reading the back issues in the Daily Bugle's morgue--it's a precarious half-universe Magneto and Wanda have set up and the history doesn't go very far back), it's pretty darn good. Mike Perkins' art is glossy but expressive (although occasionally very stiff), and Christos Gage puts a lot of depth into his B and C list characters. There's some plot-hammering, sure, and, depth of character aside, I'm not really sure why we're supposed to care about this alternate reality spin of events, but as a Marvel Elseworlds kind of thing about characters only me and a few other '70s nerds would care about, it's GOOD stuff. Baffling in a "why is this on the market?" kind of way, admittedly, but Good.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #15: Haven't bothered with the book since Meltzer left, but this issue at least, thanks in part to the art team and McDuffie's script, reads like Meltzer without all the Mary Sue date rapery ("Come on, you really like Red Arrow, don't you? Don't you? Come on...") which makes it both much more readable and less interesting. It would've been nice if there'd been at least one establishing shot to let me know where this was taking place since there was, at most, two panels with any sort of visible background in them at all, but whatever. Seemed like a pretty vacuous wrap-up but I didn't read the first three (or four?) issues setting it up so maybe I'm wrong. EH.

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #11: Might be the Alex Ross influence, or whatever nine million other deadlines he has going on, but Geoff Johns is usually better at having issues of his books read like actual issues and not just collections of cool scenes. I mean, we've got a cosmic treadmill sequence, the JLA and the JSA checking out Kingdom Come Superman, Power Girl crying, the JLA apparently fucking off because we never see them again, the JSA inspiring people by flying around like a Macy's Day parade float, we're introduced to Judomaster and three or four potentially embarrassing ethnic supervillains, there's a fight, Kingdom Come Superman thinks Judomaster should be arrested because she won't talk to people, Kingdom Come Superman and Power Girl have a touching scene together, then people find a body and Mr. America shows up. In the past, Johns was pretty good at traditional storytelling (something in the fight between Judomaster and those villains would make KC Superman realize he has to reach out to Power Girl) but this is frustrating in its "and then this happens to set that up, and this happens to set that up, and this happens because Alex wants an exploding Japanese fat man, and you can figure out why they're all in the same book." I'm loathe to call it AWFUL, but when I remember what this book was like in its previous run (particularly before issue #50 or so), I get very sad.

LOBSTER JOHNSON #4: I'll be picking up the trade on this. Hadn't bothered with previous issues since the Hellboy spin-off books usually don't do it for me (and I'm always suspicious of characters that sound like someone's nickname for their penis), but goddamn if artist Jason Armstrong and colorist Dave Stewart don't drive this baby to Awesometown. Mignola is also on his game here with a script that leaves plenty of room for big action moments, and he's got a nice way with the dialogue, so that when the villain says of this request for 369 dragons, "That will be the number of my army," you get that "hey, it's the pretentious-speaking bad guy" jolt without it just sounding like recycled Dr. Doomisms. VERY GOOD stuff and, like I say, I'll be getting the trade.

MIDNIGHTER: Some spiffy political subtext, brings back a character and ideas from Millar's run, filled with a lot of bloody violence, and has about the only plot hook (who was the Midnighter before he became the Midnighter) I can see being left to play with the character. Apart from a bad storytelling slip (Midnighter breaks the surveillance camera in his room, but a previous page shows that's he's being watched from multiple angles), there's not anything to bitch about. If Chris Sprouse was still on the book, I bet I'd even give this sucker a Good--but a combo of the art not doing much for me and being burnt out on the character puts it at highly OK for me. If you still like the character, however, you'll probably like this.

ROBIN #169: A real and ongoing problem with the bat-books--and with nearly all superhero books these days--is that the writers treat character motivations like switches they can turn on and off whenever they want. Not that I follow it that closely, but Tim Drake is fine with being an orphan except when he isn't; is the most level-headed member of the Bat-Family except when he's the most headstrong; and the least threatened by all the other Batman successors, except when he is. I'm okay with a gimme or two--Tim is obsessed with restoring Conner because he can't bring back his family, for example--but the conclusions Milligan comes to here about Robin's character seem like perfectly rational ones made by someone who hasn't bothered to read up on the character much. Which is all my long-winded way of saying: felt plot-hammered and I didn't care. EH.

ULTIMATES 3 #1: Weird and desperate even by Jeph Loeb's current storytelling standards, and I'm kinda shocked by the hubris at signing on to a book for which he has absolutely no affinity whatsoever. I read somewhere that Loeb had no interest in playing with political text and subtext as Millar did, but all that's leaves him with is making explicit the erotic bits and pieces Millar left more or less implicit, and the usual Loeb "here's a full page reveal of a surprise cameo" trick. The scenes are shittily paced (Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver leave the room and don't come back when something crashes through the wall five seconds later), the characterizations are off (the Ultimate Thor is using faux Shakespeare speak, Ultimate Wasp acts just like 616 Wasp, Ultimate Captain America is a sullen prude), and new characters are introduced without the slightest bit of characterization. It's all genuinely terrible stuff, but, amazingly, still not as bad as the overly dark, stilted, sketchy art. I mean, check out that first splash page where Thor is apparently punching himself through a wall, or where Valkyrie would be leaping off her winged horse if it wasn't thirty feet behind her, or that sequence where Quicksilver apparently chases a bullet after it's missed Wanda (rather than go after the shooter) and the bullet is beside him in one panel, behind him in another panel, and moving in a completely different direction in another. By the time Millar and Hitch were finished with their run, I had lost already lost interest in reading The Ultimates, and this issue still made me all but weep tears of blood. True CRAP, and an embarrassment to everyone involved. Yikes.

WET MOON, VOL. 3: Fetishistic plump girl cheesecake intermixed with ultra-banal dialogue--kinda like if Larry Clarke was into chunky girls instead of shirtless skater guys. And while Ross Campbell's work is formidably realized, with detailed characters and an ear for conversational nuance, it also felt aimless, obsessive, and incapable of insight (which is why I prefer, say, R. Crumb's and Dave Cooper's and Los Hernandez Bros' material as it rises above mere chunky girl obsessions). The craft makes it an OK book, and it wasn't an unpleasant read, but the unsavory onanistic qualities make it hard to really recommend.

***

Whew. I've still got another twelve books or so to go, but lemme get this out into the world and give my brain time to recharge, 'kay?

Labels: Jeff, old school

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A lot of things impressed me about Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, but what really caught my attention is how different it is from the previous volume, Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness: whereas vol. 3 is jammed with action (it's only 13 pages into vol. 3 before someone gets punched with a bionic arm) and veined with character interplay, vol. 4 grounds the humor and emotional relationships in the foreground and keeps the action sequences very short until the end: it's as assured in its pacing as volume three was messily ambitious, and there's nothing unresolved here that isn't clearly laying groundwork for a later volume. By the time I made it through the final thirty-plus page climax which neatly intermingles fight scenes and emotional confrontations, I felt vol. 4 was the best volume of Scott Pilgrim since the first.

That being the case, why did it take me a month to review it?

Back when I reviewed volume three, I wrote the book made me "wish O'Malley hadn't been staring down the barrel of a blown deadline so he could've taken the time to really fine-tune the material." Vol. 4 gives me that wish in quasi-Monkey's Paw-ish spades: the darn thing feels as tightly structured as a Hollywood movie, and that amazingly satisfying finale works the same way a finale works in really good action movie--with the final action sequence and the main character's emotional arc resolving simultaneously.

Unfortunately, as with many a good action movie, that satisfaction may come as a result of some potentially dishonest manipulation. "Oh, hey," Scott says at one point to an old friend he's showing around, "maybe I should have mentioned that my friends are retarded douchebags," which is sadly more-or-less true. Although Scott's friends in the past have had varying levels of patience for his general cluelessness, occasional whininess, and stretches of passivity, in SPGIT, they act less like friends than annoyed older siblings stuck taking care of a younger sibling. While it leads to any number of great lines (After Scott gets a job for doing little more than vowing to work hard, his friend Kim says, "Scott, if your life had a face, I would punch it. I would punch your life in the face.") and increases the drama of the final confrontation, it also adds a slightly unpleasant tone to the book. In the past, I've thought of Scott as a well-meaning but self-absorbed tool, and O'Malley goes to great lengths here to set me and others like me straight and show Scott for the genuinely sweet guy he is, but it comes at a bit of a cost. At one or two points during my first read-through, I found myself thinking, "Uh, am I the only one having fun here?"

I hope not, because the book is so filled with delightful tricks and jokes and charming details--eight bit captions and video game references, depleting thirst and pee meters, directional arrows, dotted paths a la Family Circus, panels of people laughing pulled straight from Charles Schulz's Peanuts, inventories of pockets and shopping carts, ellipses becoming a character's wide-eyed fear of speaking--one would like to think O'Malley had at least some fun in creating it.

[I've been casting about for a way to organically work in how much O'Malley's art has grown between volumes and I'm not having a lot of luck, but if you go to just about any page of SPGIT, you'll see how impressively rich in detail the work has become. The page that got me was the first one at Sneaky Dee's, where one panel has five main characters in a booth, five other clearly delineated bystanders, the Sneaky Dee's logo, and even clearly discernible food on some plates, a task I can't even contemplate accomplishing for a book published in digest size. And this richness in detail in no way clutters up O'Malley's clean and focused storytelling, which is doubly goddam amazing.]

But even if one does suspect O'Malley wasn't having oodles of fun working on this, this volume of Scott Pilgrim is a pretty massive win, the kind that would have Entertaiment Weekly titling their review, "Bryan O'Lee Malley Gets It Together." And if this volume's achievement comes at the cost of feeling a touch too professional--one tiny step closer to Scott Pilgrim's Well-Crafted Product--there's no way O'Malley can be faulted for that: in the course of giving us nearly 800 pages of material in a little over four years, it's only natural O'Malley's powers of craft will begin to catch up--and perhaps even exceed--his generous talents and ambitions. Whatever happens, Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together is absolutely Very Good work, and definitely worth your time if you haven't yet picked it up.

Labels: Bryan Lee O'Malley, Jeff, Scott Pilgrim

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A review for Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together should be forthcoming sometime soon but I keep coming up with new ways to put it off (if you download Sid Meier's Pirates from Gametap, expect at least five hours of your life to disappear in flash).

Like today, for example. There's no reason I couldn't sit down and organize my thoughts on the book, but instead I'm gonna review a few movies I saw rather than, y'know, being true to the purpose of this blog. I apologize. (On the other hand, it's probably foolhardy to try another comics-related post on the same 24 hour period as Jog's awe-inspiring Jademan essay, so maybe this will work out best for all involved.)

COMEDIAN: Accomplishes the more-or-less impossible task of making me like Jerry Seinfeld again. During the height of publicity for the "may be the Gone With The Wind of talking animal CG movies and I'll never know because I'd rather die than watch it" Bee Movie, I found myself wishing the guy would just...go away. Go far, far away. And that's part of what makes this documentary kinda interesting--despite Seinfeld's name and mug plastered all over nearly every inch of the DVD and case, the man's barely in it.

Oh sure, he's in it--the majority of the film focuses on Seinfeld building a new routine after retiring his old set and talking comedy with fellow comedians (with the remaining third or so of the film covering the counterpoint of young up-n-comer Orny Adams on the cusp of his career moving to the next level)--but it's not the smirking, bemused, low-key Jerry Seinfeld we're used to seeing (and, in my case, pretty damn sick of). No, the Jerry Seinfeld of Comedian is a glassy-eyed, queasy looking junkie, chasing the comedy dragon from nightclub to nightclub, working his material up from six minutes to fifteen to thirty, comparing notes after hours with other comedians who similarly look gassy and uncomfortable. At one point, after a less-than-stellar set, someone tries to reassure Seinfeld by saying, "Well, you looked like you were having fun up there," to which he tersely replies, "Yeah, that's the job." And although Seinfeld flies from gig to gig in private chartered jets, and spends time at his house on the Hamptons, it's clear his material possessions don't mean half as much as the strange, ephemeral high of making people laugh.

Although it doesn't go as far as one would want in showing how spectacularly fucked up and insanely neurotic stand-up comedians can be, Comedian nevertheless shows a world few of us are exposed to, and a flip-side to celebrity, without condescension or bias. It's highly OK, and certainly worth a rental.

DYNAMITE WARRIOR: The action setpieces and Tony Jaa's athleticism in Ong-Bak and Tom Yum Goong (released here as The Protector) impressed the hell out of me, but it was the out-of-control insanity of 2004's Born To Fight that made me vow to check out anything done by Thai production company Baa-Ram-Ewe. That movie--an astonishing mix of propaganda flick and Die Hard featuring athletes and poor villagers kicking the shit out of mercenaries and soldiers--stars Dan Chupong, a guy who makes the charisma-light performances of Tony Jaa seem positively Brandoesque in comparison. (On the other hand, Chupong spends so much time in mid-air you're convinced he lives there.)

Chupong is also the lead of Dynamite Warrior, but whereas Born To Fight is like a Thai John Woo flick (and Ong-Bak and Tom Yum Goong are like Thai Jackie Chan flicks), Dynamite Warrior is a Thai version of that other Hong Kong film staple, the batshit-crazy historical wire-fu flick.

Set at the turn of the 20th Century, Chupong plays a mysterious rocket-riding hero who appears out of nowhere and kicks the shit out of corrupt water buffalo rustlers and herders, looking for the man who killed his parents. He finds him, but of course the man is gifted with immense magical powers, as well as the ability to turn two of his henchmen into monkey and tiger-possessed strongmen. In order to defeat him, Chupong needs the menstrual blood of an evil wizard's virginal daughter (well, sure, who doesn't?) as well as the assistance of an untrustworthy hare-lipped tractor salesman.

I was willing to forgive Dynamite Warrior an endless number of sins (Chupong is an utterly binary actor, capable of only expressing determination or befuddlement, making his love scenes pretty hilarious; the plot makes even less sense than my summary conveys; and there's tons of not-particularly-funny broad, vulgar comedy) but for this: the action scenes aren't a tenth of what you'll find in Ong-Bak, Tom Yum Goong, or Born To Fight. There's a lot of the cheats you get from a wire-fu flick, with people flying halfway across a meadow at each other while dynamically pumping their arms, but additionally shots of blows being thrown are cut away at the moment of impact to show someone reeling backward.

I mean, it's not terrible if you like this kind of thing: even if they might be wire-rigged, Chupong does some truly spectacular flips and leaps, and the scenes where things go truly nuts (like when the tiger guy and the monkey guy start chasing a rocket-powered wagon) are enjoyable in a "Hey, you've got to come see this!" kind of way. But by the standard of previous Baa-Ram-Ewe flicks, Dynamite Warrior is pretty Eh--unlikely to be the sort of thing you and your friends will gleefully pass around.

DAN IN REAL LIFE: Oh, god. This is the sort of thing you go see with your wife on "Date Night," and afterward spend almost as long bitching about it as you did watching it. Steve Carell is Dan, a widower advice columnist with three feisty daughters. They go to the annual family reunion where, on his own in the nearby town, Dan meets cute and falls in love with Marie (Juliette Binoche), who he later learns is the new girlfriend of Carell's younger brother (Dane Cook).

The funniest thing about Dan In Real Life is the title, as the filmmakers--apparently test-tube specimens raised in a lab with only nutrient tubes and a copy of Final Draft to sustain them--have no actual experience with real life whatsoever. Dan's interactions with his daughters, the scene where Dan and Marie meet, and particularly every scene with Dan's family lacks any ear for dialogue or eye for verisimilitude one would expect from someone given money by investors to make an indie film romantic comedy. Dan's family, in particular, seem less like recognizable human beings and more like labrador retrievers wearing human skin, jumping up and down whenever anyone suggests an activity and running about the kitchen yelping indiscreetly.

Also, the tone is really, really off in the film, with topics like grief and death and familial betrayal being treated like the perfect jumping-off points for cheap one-liners and awful acoustic songs warbled by some indy folk dude who's clearly spent more of his professional career worrying about hair conditioner than chord progressions. It's as if the filmmakers were told that the film was going to be marketed overseas as Little Miss Sunshine 2 and to film accordingly.

I don't know what other romantic comedies are out there for people to go to on date night, but avoid the Crap that is Dan In Real Life and go see them instead. Honestly, even watching a calf get hit by a heavy mallet for forty-five minutes is a more enjoyable cinematic experience.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN: As a fan of both the Coen Brothers and of Cormac McCarthy, I couldn't be more pleased with this flick which adapts McCarthy's recent novel to the screen (I haven't read it). Not only is it a gorgeous, taut film packed with sharp dialogue, it feels to me like a culmination and canny distillation of many of the Coen Brothers' thematic obsessions--particularly in its portrayal of dead-eyed assassin Anton Chigurh (brilliantly played by Javier Bardem). If you've followed enough of their films, you know they usually include a terse, violent sociopath who enjoys inflicting pain (and they usually have a connotation of being foreigners as well--I'm thinking of The Dane from Miller's Crossing, Peter Stormare's Swede in Fargo, even the German anarchists from The Big Liebowski, as well as Goodman in Barton Fink, Tex Cobb in Raising Arizona, and M. Emmett Walsh in Blood Simple) but Chigurh overwhelms all of them with his awful haircut, his creaky voice, and his air-compressor M.O. Although efficient in everything he does, he's terrifyingly and hilariously incapable of understanding humanity, and humanity is similarly unable to understand him. (Also, he steals the coin-flipping gimmick from Two-Face, so you gotta love the guy.)

Like I said, I haven't read McCarthy's book but I assume Chigurh's horrific larger-than-life attributes come directly from there, as one of McCarthy's ongoing themes are the powerful forces capable of indiscriminately crushing all men, good and bad, strong and weak. Similarly, the very strange turn the movie takes in its final quarter strikes me as straight from McCarthy--not only does he refuse to treat people's mortality with any sort of sentimental escapism, but he's just as likely to end his stories with characters ruminating on visions and dreams that run the terminator between hope and despair.

And yet, again, what's great about No Country For Old Men is that it's very much a Coen Brothers movie, with the ending not unlike that of Fargo, where Frances McDormand's character, like Tommy Lee Jones', can do little more than ponder imcomprehensible evil while taking comfort in the ability to love and be loved by others.

Whether or not the end of the movie succeeds in opening the frame up on its genre conventions and pointing to their larger implications on life and civilization (it didn't entirely work for me), the first three quarters of No Country For Old Men is a remarkable crime-thriller, a violent game of hide-and-seek taking place across small towns and great plains, and absolutely unmissable. I still haven't seen Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, which a lot of people have recommended to me, but No Country For Old Men is Excellent stuff, and currently my pick for movie of the year.

Labels: Jeff, movies

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Howdy.

I've been thinking: my December is looking pretty open at the moment, and I thought it might be fun to sort of dig my heels in and post a little more frequently to the site, since I've been posting so infrequently here for the last few months. But I'm really torn on what to write, and thought you could help.

Even before some commentators mentioned it in threads, I'd been thinking the site hasn't had as much old-school "here's reviews of the 20 to 30 books I read this week" entries as we once had. I thought it might be fun to do that for December, despite my reservations that: (a) I don't work at CE any more, which means I'd have to set aside a chunk of time during my week to read all them damn funnybooks; and (b) I'm so behind on my reading of singles (even on books I follow!), the results could come off as pathetically out-of-touch.

Alternately, I could write longer reviews, one or two a week, of the stuff I have been reading lately--mostly manga, but a few other things as well. This is the stuff I should really be doing anyway, but haven't in many cases because I've been too lazy to shape my thoughts beyond the "Ugh, Jeff like!" stages.

Or I could try my hand at writing something more like a personal essay, something not unlike my response to Abhay's review of Dr. 13. I'm a little worried about this option, because the call-and-response nature of the earlier essay made it much easier to structure. Also, looking back at that essay, I realize I may have used up every unique theory about comics and their readers I ever developed. Because I'm really not sure how to tackle this angle, there might be only two (or three?) of them during the course of the month.

Finally, I could do nothing. After all, the revamped site seems to be picking up its second wind with some strong (and strongly challenged) reviews, and more comment threads turning into actual discussions. And December frequently looks low-key going into it, before it catches your sleeve in its gears--giving you just a split-second to realize how goddam fast everything's going--and spits out what's left of you on January 1st.

So, to recycle that terrible phrase, U-Decide! Should I:

(a) do weekly capsule reviews of the books on the stands;
(b) do reviews of stuff I'm reading currently, once or twice a week;
(c) do a longer comics-related essay or two; or
(d) do nothing, as the site is producing plenty of content anyway?

Please lemme know yr. thoughts on the matter, either in the comments below or by dropping me a line at pig[DOOT]latin[ATT]gmail[DOOT]com.

Thanks!

Labels: Jeff, u-decide, xmas

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I was at Kevin O'Neill's signing at CE Sunday night...with my camera...and asked the gracious and stylish Mr. O'Neill if I could take some photos...to which he graciously and stylishly agreed....and I barely took any photos at all. Because I am absurdly meek, and a FUGGIN' IDJIT.

Nonetheless:


Here's a shot of the man himself. (Obviously, I shoulda run it through some light adjustments on Picasa before uploading it.) We were shop number seven in four days on his tour, and the guy would do a sketch in anyone's Black Dossier if they wanted. Really cool.

I knew he wouldn't be anything like his drawings, more than likely, but I was still somehow unconsciously surprised he wasn't one of his terrifying lantern-jawed crazy men chortling "Hur, hur, hur!" while demeaning all of us.


I thought I could catch from this angle (behind and above him) the sort of casual charisma he radiated--it was like everyone in the store, even nearly all the people hanging out at the front all had their body turned toward him the whole time he was signing. Instead, all I really caught was that awesome infinity-loop bald spot he has--it's insanely better than the goose egg I'm sporting.


Another wuss shot by me--I thought it would be cool to catch him in mid-sketch as he draws Mina Harker in Sue Riddle's sketchbook (that's her work on the left page, I'm pretty sure). But, uh, nope.


We had a steady line the whole time I was there, as you can see. But I'm mainly putting this photo up so those who've never visited the shop can admire the lovely original Matt Wagner JSA portraits on the left, and the Mike Driggenberg original Endless portraits on the right. (Oh, and also because I didn't take enough pix of Kevin O'Neill, right?)


The first--but hopefully not the last--collaboration between Ian Brill and Kevin O'Neill: a commissioned sketch of Scott Pilgrim. Maybe we'll get lucky and Oni will release it as the "Oni Zombie" alternate cover to SP4 early next year...


Wow. See? That--that--is a perfectly shaped ear, right there.


Meanwhile, up at the front of the store...


No, but seriously. Go buy Black Dossier--it's even more filling than a 40 of MGD.


So, in conclusion: I promise to be better at taking photos in the future. Also, go to Comic Oasis and/or the wonder that is Ralph Mathieu's Alternate Reality in Vegas tomorrow night and experience the wonder that is Kevin O'Neill yourself. You won't regret it.

Labels: Jeff, not good ones, photos

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In a just world, the best way to review of Moore & O'Neil's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier would be type up a pastiche in which history's most famous and infamous literary critics team up: Dorothy Parker, Kingsley Amis, Harold Bloom, Alexander Woollcott, Edmund Wilson, Michiko Kakutani, H.L. Mencken, and Gary Groth all trot on panel to fight The League's attempt to collapse fictional and non-fictional reality (thus rendering critical thought--the border between fictional and non-fictional reality--impossible).

Of course, to be a true pastiche, the reader would have to endure--after a gripping opening--the repeated erotic couplings of Wilson and Kakutani, with only the occasional bit of thuggishness from Mencken or Groth to spruce things up (until each kills the other), and the pastiche finally becomes a free-falling history of the universe as told by the critics (wherein one only finds out in a footnote or two what happened with the group's original encounter with their adversaries) and that this universe is actually a pastiche of the true Platonic ideal of the universe. Reality, it would turn out, is literally a work of criticism.

To really to do justice to the book under consideration, however, the pastiche would have to be bogglingly brilliant. If you're the type to derive succor from technical brio and steely formalistic ambition, The Black Dossier is a veritable winter's feast, capable of plumping up your brain to survive many a long, dark day.

For much of my life, I considered myself exactly that type. But either I've changed over the last few years, or technical tour-de-forces don't quite kick me in the breadbasket they way they used to--even as parts of The Black Dossier made me grin in delight (The League running for their lives inside a giant Brobdingnagian vajayjay as a sky-blotting cockhead threatens to destroy them all was where I actually laughed out loud), I found myself wondering what, exactly, was the point.

Having finished it, I think there may be several points to The Black Dossier, ranging from the absurd (I mean, it's The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe by way of Gravity's Rainbow, for cryin' out loud!) to the sublime (is imagination, as represented by Mina and Queen Gloriana,a feminine force, and "reality," as represented by misogynistic Bond family, a masculine force, making Orlando,gender-swapping hermaphrodite, a representation of life as it is lived, according to Moore--sometimes one, sometimes the other, frequently both?)

To elaborate on that last point, the Black Dossier includes pure text as well as, in the collection of postcards with which the League sends back and forth and the various maps and diagrams, (near)pure image. Are comics, like Orlando, a combination of two interrelated opposites, and thus more able to capture a higher essence than either? (I mean, there's also a 3-D sequence at the end which is the meeting of two sets of images (and even in that sequence, sections where the images occupying the same space are not the same)). The Black Dossier is not only an alternate history story, but a history of alternate graphic story styles--gag panels, political cartoons, serialized biographies, Tijuana Bibles...

So. History as an alchemical wedding of imagination and reality, and comics as the formalistic application of same? I dunno. Of course, if you really want to know the point of an Alan Moore story these days, you need only go on the web and a much-interviewed Alan Moore will be along sooner or later, happy to tell you at precise and injudicious length his intentions. I'm probably alone in this but I've begun to think the lifespan of today's graphic lit would benefit from creators clamming the fuck up about a work's meaning. Although I'm sure it stems from both genuine relief at finally being taken seriously, and to correct the paucity of genuine knowledge endemic to comics' previous Dark Ages, the resulting pre-chewed nature of many of comics' big works may prevent them from looming larger in the cultural imagination than they otherwise might.

(Which is all my way of saying that my above theories probably stem from reading too many Alan Moore interviews, but I haven't read any of his interviews about The Black Dossier...yet, God help me.)

In a way, I wish this review could be more like Hibbs', and I could go on at length about what I thought of the various pastiches, since they--along with the delightful Easter Egg hunt of literary references--are the most enjoyable part of the book. I will say that, although no Shakespeare scholar, I found Faeries's Fortunes Founded pretty passable (although it reads more like early Shakespeare than the later Shakespeare it's presented as) and Sal Paradyse's Beat novel is pretty close to an utter disaster as it tries to imitate both Burroughs & Kerouac simultaneously and so badly bungles 'em both (this is assuming, by the way, that Dr. Sax is written in the bebop heavy rhythms Moore uses here--of Kerouac, I've only read some poetry and On The Road and the latter isn't half as absurd as the stuff we get here).

But overall, the delights here are many and varied--where else are you gonna find a Tijuana Bible based on Orwell's 1984?--and I regret I lack the language, both critical and otherwise, to praise Kevin O'Neill's amazing art in this. O'Neil's art (and stunning accompanying colors by Ben Dimagmaliw) is able to evoke all the various art styles on call while also remaining truly and clearly his own, and in a book that moves from postcards to paperback covers to subway maps, from Victorian literature to German Expressionism, from the dreariness of Orwellian England to the brightness of Dan Dare's Britain, it's hard not to see it as a crowning achievement. If Lost Girls had looked half this good, maybe I would've been able to actually rub one out to that damned thing.

Still, though, the most resonant moment in The Black Dossier comes when Allan and Mina, after sex, languidly flip through the dossier and Mina remark with light surprise and fondness upon finding the section on themselves, "Oh. Here, darling, look at this. It's us." It's the moment most familiar to anyone who enjoys reading--the sudden thrill of recognizing something of one's self in a work of fiction--and it's precisely that moment I found entirely absent in The Black Dossier: eternally young, beautiful, and seemingly unstoppable, Orlando, Quartermain, and Murray fight, flee and fornicate across nearly every fictional realm ever created, but there's hardly anything left in them with which to emphasize. Imagination isn't only a realm where we regale in our triumphs and strengths, but a place in which we peek at our failures, our frailty. I wish there had been more of the latter amongst so much of the former.

And so, while The Black Dossier is hardly the first technical triumph that fails to stir the heart even as it inspires awe, it's a measure of the regard in which one holds Moore that it feels nevertheless like a disappointment. It means that I can only give this Very Good book a rating of Very Good, despite the nearly consistent Excellence of its concept and execution. Get it; devour it; annotate it; but don't be surprised if you find yourself, all too soon, forgetting it.

Labels: Jeff

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"There is arguably no piece of the American Zeitgeist that was more dadaist, more bleak and more intimately allegorical than Schulz's Peanuts."

Catching the tail end of last night's American Masters on Schulz (and all the essays surrounding the recent biography) made me think of the tribute I wrote for the CEO newsletter back in 2000. It's brief, but seems very much in synch with the current appraisal of Sparky's impact.

Labels: Jeff, peanuts

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Flower of Life is one god-damned strange little book, let me tell you that. I picked it up based on the strength of Shaenon Gaerity's review, but by the time I'd gotten my hands on a copy I'd long forgotten nearly every particular of that fine review. In the store, looking at the cover, which features tousled-hair young men behind a foreground of brightly colored sunflowers, I was positive I was about to cross the border into Yaoiville, a hamlet that only a few years previous was little known but had now become a popular destination spot for peripatetic manga readers. Not only had I never read yaoi, I had read next to nothing about yaoi, and so my depth of knowledge was little bit like that panel in Scott Pilgrim where everything Scott knows about Rome has a question mark next to it. If pressed to guess, I'd have said that yaoi is a bit like slash fanfic? But without the licensed characters? Which means it's all about the rich characterization? And the, uh, sex?

So as I sat down and began to read Fumi Yoshinaga's story of a young man attending a new school after surviving a bout of leukemia, I was expecting, at any page turn, for some kind of groping to happen, or awkward crushes to be developed and tremblingly confessed, or....I don't know? Hazing? Spanking? Characterization-rich scat play? All I know is, for the next 170+ pages, absolutely none of that proceeded to happen.

In fact, reading Flower of Life, I got the impression Yoshinaga was deliberately playing with audience expectations (which I assume are more knowledgeable, and thus realistic and measured, than my own): when hot-headed blond Harutaro Hanazono (the leukemia recoverer) meets and clashes with reserved dark-haired Kai Majima, I figured it a done deal these two would be involved in a passionate embrace by the end of Vol. 1, but the characters barely have an ounce more respect for each other at the end than at the beginning; when it turns out two teachers are shown kissing, I expected a Brokeback Mountainy poignant "love that dare not speak its name" subplot to develop but Yoshinaga turns that on its head as well. Instead, the events of the first volume are all about Hanazono becoming friends with a chubby little dude named Shota Mikuni who is such the embodiment of good-natured kawaii he looks a bit like a baby seal with a backpack--a friendship about which Hanazono is so passionate, possessive and consumed by, I again assume Yoshinaga is teasing her audience. (On the other hand, again, I know bupkis about this topic, and maybe Super Chubby Boy Love Weekly is a hugely successful magazine in Japan or something.) Like Shota himself, this relationship is very cute, good-natured and--as far as I can tell--innocent, and pretty god-damned charming to read.

The other theme, plot, whatever you want to call it (I just thought of it as "more guys not getting it on in a book I assumed was about guys getting it on") in Flower of Life is about manga and otaku: Shota, Harutaro and Kai are in manga club together, and I'm sure it's no coincidence that Yoshinaga follows each scene of the boys sussing out how to draw manga with scenes of the teachers passionately groping each other. I couldn't tell you why precisely, but considering the twists the teachers' relationship takes, I think Yoshinaga is trying to make a point about manga and its rules. (Once you know them, you can break them, maybe?) Additionally, Yoshinaga's Kai Majima is a mercilessly dead-on (and yet affectionate) portrait of a particular type of socially clueless fanboy--he's a manga otaku, but I've heard that exact blend of blathering obsessiveness and quasi-Asbergerian obliviousness from gamers who will not shut up about their fifteenth level Paladin, from comic fanboys who have to tell you why Hulk is stronger than Thor, and from videogamers who will not rest until they recount why Sony screwed up this generation of video game consoles for everyone. (Don't get me started, but trust me--they did.)

Of course, Shaenon's review sums all this up (and more) so I have absolutely no excuse for being as pleasantly surprised by Flower of Life as I was. (After all, it was her write-up that made me order it.) And yet, my hope is someone might read this review, pick the book up, and also be pleasantly surprised: it's quite possible that Yoshinaga is so talented, and Flower of Life so charmingly light and good-natured that, no matter how prepared you are going in and how good your short term memory is, you'll still be delighted by it. If you come to it with an open heart, I think you'll also find it Very Good stuff.

Labels: Jeff, manga

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To say I'm on the late freight with regards to Hitshi Iwaaki's Parasyte is to drastically understate things: the Del Rey volume I'm reading shows the first Japanese volume was printed 'round 1990. And this isn't even the book's first go-round in the U.S., either: according to Wikipedia, the book was published by Tokyopop back when the company was known as Mixx.

I can see why American publishers keep making a go of it. Although the protagonist doesn't dress up in a costume and go out to fight crime, Parasyte is the closest thing to a manga superhero book I can remember reading. The story is about a teenager, Shinichi, whose right arm is replaced by a shape-changing intelligent parasite that failed to take over his brain. With the alien's consciousness and shape-changing powers installed in his right arm, Shinichi struggles to keep his powers hidden from his family and schoolmates, and discovers that with a great parasite comes great responsibility: other, more successful, parasites have landed all over Tokyo and begun feeding on human beings, and are usually intent on destroying Shinichi whenever they encounter him. More than once, I found myself thinking Parasyte, with very few changes, would've fit pretty seamlessly into DC's failed Focus line--the first few pages of Chapter 2 in particular have the pacing and storytelling I remember from, say, Kinetic. On top of that, Iwaaki adds two horror staples--"aliens are among us" and "something else is inhabiting my body"--and whips the whole mix into a wildly enjoyable froth.

But frustratingly, even though Parasyte is such a high-concept confection it'd be a perfect transition book for superhero readers looking to branch out a bit, I think it would prove to be a tough sell--I found the cover of the Del Rey edition pretty god-damn cheesy, frankly, with a logo that's a shout-out to the heyday of Patty Smyth & Scandal, and a cover that's less terrifying than enigmatic: a hand with eyes? How scary is that? Also problematic is Iwaaki's art, which has a delightfully grotesque wackiness whenever the aliens are involved (it reminded me of Jack Cole in a few scenes) but is crushingly generic otherwise--it someone were to tell me Iwaaki learned to draw by copying aircraft safety cards, I'd totally believe them. The book also falls prey to Del Rey's cautious publication schedule: six months between volumes? I'd have been pretty pissed if I'd gotten hooked on this when it first came out.

Regardless, if you can get past such trivial concerns--and they are pretty trivial in the face of the book's other strengths--the first volume of Parasyte is a dynamite little read, well worth the time and money. A highly Good piece of work.

Labels: Jeff, manga

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Reviewing Confessions of a Blabbermouth is a can't win situation--it's written by Mike Carey and his fifteen-year-old daughter Louise and illustrated by Aaron Alexovich for DC's Minx line, and I think it's not only excellent that DC is publishing a line for teen female readers, it's doubly excellent that there's a teen female writer involved in the line as well. So my instinct is to write something that would, in effect, praise all involved--in essence, give them a tickertape parade and the key to the city. Unfortunately, I found Confessions of a Blabbermouth a vexing read, so I would have to follow up that tickertape parade and key to the city with sticking them with the clean-up bill to and then riding them out of town on a rail. If I was smarter, I would just skip the review and let the whole thing go unremarked on, but, of course, I'm not smart. Also, apart from providing guidance to whomever might be thinking of picking this up, the review might allow me the chance to vent a bit about my frustrations with the Minx line based on this book and The Plain Janes.

(To be clear, I haven't read other books in the line--although Re-Gifters is lying around somewhere--and so criticizing a line of six books based on the two I've read puts me on pretty shaky ground. And yet, because Plain Janes' and Confessions' mistakes, although different, feel grounded in the same problem, I think it's worth the risk of looking foolish as well as ungracious.)

For me, the problem stems in large part from perception. DC's Minx line openly promotes itself as being for female teen readers and I think that's good: OGNs aimed at teen females is a market that's worth tapping into; the more teens, females, and female teens we get reading comics the better; and if a teen who wanders into a shop looking for the next Minx book ends up picking up, say, Jaime Hernandez's Locas, then, really, the whole thing is worth it. But by creating a book line with such a clearly defined target audience and a clearly defined goal, you're one step closer to creating books that are more product than art. And while I don't have a particular problem with that--I don't mind picking up a Minx book knowing it's unlikely I'm going to read some intense work of raw personal vision, the next Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner--I do think the closer a work comes to being product, the higher the expectation becomes that the product be of professional standards. I think this is how most of us who aren't trained in the mystic ways of the critical arts are able to tell if a genre piece of work is good or bad--if it's a comedy, is it funny? If it's an action movie, are the action sequences satisfying? Do the people making the cop movie know what a cop movie is supposed to deliver? Do they satisfy? (If so, then people usually say it's good.) Does it know what it's supposed to deliver and give it a unique twist? (If so, then people usually say it's very good.) This is also why the farther someone operates outside the realm of pure art and farther from the realm of pure product, the more we're generally willing to cut the creator more slack: I'm far less likely to complain about Sophie Crumb's problems with anatomy than, say, Whilce Portacio's.

I'd like to think this is why Plain Janes' "it's not an ending, it's a stopping" deeply annoyed me (and Abhay too, apparently): no one's thrilled to assemble a table and discover there's only three of the four legs. Similarly, pesky problems cropped up throughout Confessions of a Blabbermouth, the story of a teen blogger at loggerheads with the new man in her mom's life and his daughter, like "She's not a blabbermouth, she's a liar," "why does the blog look like a zine?" "why is [certain character] able to write a scathingly accurate satire of bloggers but then goes on to call them 'blingers?'" and "what kind of narrative feint in a high school social comedy is potential molestation and incest, anyway?" caused me a great deal of annoyance.

Let's take that last one: if, for example, the reason why Bridget Jones can't get together with Mark Darcy is she believes him to have encouraged the Rwandan Genocide, it's a great explanation for why the two characters don't get together, but it also knocks the reader/viewer out of the work. So when Confessions... looks like it's taking a turn into darker territory, it's certainly effective, but when the feint turns out to be something entirely different, the spectre of the previous topic still colors the conclusion of the work.

What I find most depressing about the Minx line at this point is that DC clearly wants to duplicate manga's success with the Minx line, but can't be bothered in the fucking slightest learn any of the simplest lessons from manga. Over at Sporadic Sequential lately, there have been some intriguing posts explaining the importance of editors in manga. Even before those posts, I knew that editors were heavily involved in manga's creation (it's something the authors are always very quick to mention in their own books). So why does the Minx line apparently have the same hands-off editing approach shared by the vast majority of the North American comics market? I assume that's why Plain Janes can get published with such a bumbled ending, or Confessions... can disastrously muck up its own tone. But does that really bode particularly well for the line?

The more professional and satisfyingly competent the work is, the better the chance it'll appeal to an audience outside its niche: I'm thinking here in particular of Pixar's films, that operate in a pretty narrowly defined range and yet appeal to just about everyone. Again, I'd like to think that explains how manga, comics created for acutely specific audiences in an acutely specific culture, are able to be read and enjoyed in such large numbers worldwide. Or why Looney Tunes can be enjoyed by kids and adults decades and decades after the work was produced.

I'm not calling for the return of Mort Weisinger or anything, but where the hell is our Maxwell Perkins? Or at the very least, where the hell is the person who's supposed to keep the creators from cocking up their own work?

Confessions of a Blabbermouth is an easy read, amusing in places, has some very nice turns of phrase, and the individual sequences are polished and strong. It comes from a group of creators I'd like to see do more work in the industry (as if Mike Carey could do more work in the industry than he is currently!). And yet, it's ultimately an Eh work that could've easily been much better than it is, and that's genuinely frustrating.

Labels: Jeff

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