This is a song about Louisiana and some of the people in it. Or outside it. Or nearly anywhere in these United States as the 1950s approached, and superheroes declined as charismatic rogues stood tall, proud like they knew we'd miss them once fatedly laid low. It's a nostalgic record.



Let it play. Can I offer you a drink?



This is Hadacol.

***

Twelve Percent True

(Being a second and updated version of a post of January 31, 2010, amended to include exciting superhero art and duly expanded/adjusted text and formatting.)

***

Hadacol was a popular 'patent medicine' of the late 1940s that transformed into a full-blown national fad as the century's midpoint arrived. "A Dietary Supplement," as you can see, Hadacol was supposed to be taken four times per day -- once after every meal, then right before bed -- as diluted in water, half a glass for one tablespoon. A typical bottle retailed for $1.25 (over $11.00 today), chock-full of vitamins B1, B2, and B6, with Niacinamide, Iron, Manganese, Calcium, Phosphorous, and sweet sweet honey.

And... diluted acid hydrochloric, which the product's Wikipedia page happily informs us (without citation) was intended to open the body's arteries to facilitate better absorption of the Hadacol health mix, including its 'preservative' - 12% alcohol, roughly as much as in a typical bottle of table wine.

By literally every account I can track down, Hadacol was absolutely disgusting, which probably didn't matter: it was healthy! Sort of! At least, enough so to circumvent the legal/moral/religious concerns of 'dry' communities across the land, while giving even the most saturated household a special license for consumption. Plus, it was fun, the ballyhoo of it all, much grander than that behind the boozy potions of earlier American miracle vendors, dating back to before the revolution. A new, modern, postwar country needed a contemporary elixir, and Hadacol cured just what ailed 'em.

Dr. James Harvey Young provided a detailed overview of the Hadacol phenomenon in his 1966 book The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America (rev. 1990, free online), so I'll just run down the highlights. Hadacol was the brainchild of one Dudley J. LeBlanc, a Louisiana politician, entrepreneur, and quintessential Colorful Character from Down South prone to boasting that he got the inspiration for his bottled success in 1943 by way of swiping an injectable prototype from out of a doctor's office after the nurse had left the room. It wasn't LeBlanc's first patent medicine endeavor; one earlier project, Happy Day Headache Powders, in fact ran afoul of the Food and Drug Administration. Apparently not one to lay down and accept defeat, LeBlanc compressed the name of his former Happy Day Company into Ha-Da-Co-L, the 'L' being his own last name.

But if this time it was personal, LeBlanc didn't show it - mostly, he liked to say that he hadda call his product something.

I bet that's not the first time you've heard that joke. Hell, it's not even the first time today if you listened to that song like I asked you. But don't go thinking the lore of Hadacol entered into song and jest unassisted - it's said that LeBlanc himself commissioned Everybody Loves That Hadacol, licentious subtext and over-the-top claims and all. I mean, did that guy grow new toes?! Hadacol sounds scary.

Did the song end? Here, try this.



LeBlanc started out hawking Hadacol in French to Louisiana's Cajun population, to which he belonged, but it didn't take many years for the earthy nostrum to build its way up to the level of a genuine south-to-midwest consumer craze, aggravated by aggressive advertising tactics and lavish spending prompted by the possibility of tax write-offs. Mad culmination manifested in 1950, in the form of the Hadacol Caravan, a massive traveling spectacle accessible to the consumer only with the presentation of two Hadacol box tops (one for kids). Plenty more would be available inside, as the caravan wasn't a particularly new idea - it was a medicine show, of a type rapidly withdrawing into antiquity. Leblanc's affair was way bigger and far more monied than avarage, but it was essentially traditional, and I can't imagine some happy Hadacol purchasers didn't grasp the implication as to the, er, palliative qualities of the medicine accordant to such shows.

Ann Anderson's 2000 study Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones: The American Medicine Show positions the Hadacol Caravan as effectively the last great example of its folk entertainment kind, though poorer docs continued to wander into the 1960s. The form went out with a bang: among the Caravan's features, albeit not at the same time, were Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, George Burns & Gracie Allen, Jack Dempsey, Jack Benny, Sharkey Bonano's Dixieland Band, Bob Hope, Carmen Miranda, Dorothy Lamour, Rudy Vallée, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney, Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante, a chorus line, clowns, acrobats, vaudevillians, beauty queens, prizes, fireworks, and, of course, LeBlanc himself, cruising up through the venue in a white Cadillac. While he was serving in the Louisiana state senate, mind you. By the show's 1951 season, audiences ballooned to number in the tens of thousands.

Interestingly, Anderson's description of the show's over-the-top disposition -- purportedly adorned with unsubtle nods toward the star concoction's primary ingredient and winks at an aphrodisiac quality -- falls right in line with the awfully tongue-in-cheek tenor of the extended jingles we've already heard. Writer Jeremy Alford's account is similar, presenting some of the Caravan's action as approaching a prolonged and elaborate in-joke between Dudley J. LeBlanc and interested personages in Dry America:

A clown dressed in a police uniform stumbles around on stage and makes his way into the audience. A spotlight follows the ensuing folly as every time the clown takes an energetic step, an oversized bottle of Hadacol nearly jumps out of his pocket. He reaches quickly for the tonic and helps himself to a healthy swig. His massive glasses glow in the evening shade with each pull on the bottle. It's obvious that this is one drunken clown, and he's soon joined by another inebriated fellow whose nose lights up when he takes sips. The crowd ' children and adults ' loves it and screams into the night air.

Now, make no mistake, this is hardly the first instance of 20th century advertising adopting a fairly sardonic posture in re: the product at hand. Witness this 1932 marvel, fronted by a pair of New York City brothers that everybody reading this site has heard of:



And that's for Oldsmobile, as opposed to the most noxious libation this side of Jeppson's Malört, one that would be drained damned dry almost as soon as the '51 Caravan was through. Yet people often still think of mid-century advertising as goofily forthright in its glosses and fibs, even while the Fleischers long ago poked at the virile promise of automobile ownership, and LeBlanc, decades later, sometimes giggled openly at the carnival pitchman's shamelessness of his own endeavor; this was a man with the trickster's spirit enough to stand on stage with an inter-party political rival and, at one point, switch his address to French so as to excoriate the man next to him to the delight of fluent attendees, as the target smiled.

Needless to say, he also got into comics publishing.

One comic, as far as I know. A superhero comic.

About a superhero that gets his powers from an authentic, eminently purchasable health product of dubious medicinal value, 24 proof.



That treasure took seventeen hours to find, because Captain Hadacol is smashed. And that's because the secret to his powers is booze. VITAMIN BOOZE.

I don't actually own this comic, nor do I know who wrote or drew it. All scans to follow come courtesy of the Deborah LeBlanc Collection, which informed me that Captain Hadacol -- whom I'd only known of by barest reference in product lore -- is a Superman-Popeye hybrid character, a plain man granted enormous temporary powers through imbibing the sponsor potion (available now, just $1.50). This came as a relief, since Cap looks strikingly like a 'vitamin'-addled normal guy who perhaps only thinks he has powers. Also, his costume looks like stuff he found. Then again, it probably does take a hero to successfully navigate in over-the-knee flat boots; I hope Marvel is taking notice for its upcoming Heroic Age, 'cause those Napoleonic puppies are back in style.

Just look at that wholesome, concerned face, bedecked with the same deadly squint promotions connoisseur Chris Ware sometimes uses for his Super-Man, which puts me in dire fear for Twelve Percent Lad's health. I just made up a superhero name right there; the proper name of that boy on the cover is "Red Reddie," whose family appears to have some firm connection to "John," the top-secret bespectacled identity of Captain Hadacol. "Comic Book No. 2" sees the Reddie family and their blonde chum cutting loose down on the ranch:



Now if you're like me, your first thought is "gee, nice colors!" It's not unlike the anonymous, popping fresh style that does a lot to compliment Fletcher Hanks' (earlier) work. But the more you get into this comic, the more you notice its odd stylistic tics, like how four out of its nine story pages utilize the same motif of an expanded center panel, bordered on one side with a smaller column of panels and capped top and bottom with two thinner panel rows. Two additional pages utilize an even wider midsection, giving the comic an eccentric expanding and contracting feel.



Then there's the in-panel art, prone to a curvy sort of caricature, with scenery elements that border on the expressionistic - dig that wiggly drawer balancing the composition! Anyone who knows me is fully aware that I'm literally the worst worst person at spotting Golden Age art in the whole of North America's comics readership, so maybe this is some phenomenally well-known talent cashing a Hadacol check anonymously, but it's also possible that a local illustration hand put this thing together in the spirit of just having a go at the form.



Use as directed, kids! Actually, Anderson's book describes a totally different Captainn Hadacol -- possibly the contents of the otherwise elusive issue #1 -- in which Our Man entreats a boy to slam eight consecutive bottles of Hadacol for immediate super-strength. "The alcohol in eight bottles of Hadacol equaled a pint of bonded whiskey," Anderson notes. And while that's coincidentally where my powers come from too, apparently in this issue the power of Hadacol has expanded sufficiently to charge a man up 'by the label,' in addition to changing his clothes, which suggests a brand of humor doubtlessly better suited to the Hadacol Caravan.



Here's another iteration of Artist X's layout style, with the interrupted big panel now up top. You're not missing any story reading along in this abridged manner, by the way; it's a totally uninspired genre short, propulsive mainly from its heavy breathing page compositions. Quite a thing for shadows too.



I mean, wow - Captain Hadacol's ready to kick some ass up there! I pretty much came out of this story hoping that nobody else discovers the secret of Hadacol, given what it does to you!

So, in that apparently everyone is a superhero by way of Hadacol's intervention, I can only conclude that the premise is broadly the same as that of The Boys. And sure enough, Captain Hadacol has the same basic superman look as the Homelander, as well as similar military-corporate interest superheroes from Marshall Law or Power and Glory, down to that faintly Aryan appearance beloved by talents eager to tease Fascist implications from superhero characters, as it takes only a few modifications to go from flat boots to jackboots.

Captain Hadacol isn't a fascist, of course; indeed, while I may be stretching, there's perhaps an interesting ethnic specificity to his costume, its cape seemingly patterned after the blue and white of the Hadacol box, but its overall blue, white and red-striped color scheme, with a single point of gold in the belt buckle, very loosely approximating the colors on the flag of Acadia, from where the Cajun people came (this is not to be confused with the present, similarly-colored Louisiana-specific Acadianan flag, which was not designed until 1965). Given that the costume itself appears to be slipped over a normal dress shirt and slacks, I wonder if Captain Hadacol 'himself' didn't make any promotional appearances at local events?



This is the back of the comic, listing the real treasures boys and girls can discover with Hadacol's aid; this whole 'comic' 'story' business is plainly secondary. In teeny tiny type at the bottom, it also lists a possible date of publication, January of 1951, right at the roaring height of the craze. We can accept Captain Hadacol as a rhetorical forerunner to all those crafty satiric superheroes, selling stuff to the public from the out the seat of authority, though most of us know that superheroes weren't really so idealistic at birth, certainly not the murderous ones sprung from the pulp tradition (say, Batman).

Still, comics are older than superheroes, just as medicine shows were older than Dudley J. LeBlanc. The most recent (39th) Overstreet guide contains no mention of Captain Hadacol -- given that the issue at hand is #2, there was presumably at least a #1, unless LeBlanc was pulling the contemporaneous comic book stunt of starting a run at a higher number to create the illusion of demand for nonexistent early issues -- although its lovely Promotional Comics section does mention that comics relating to patent medicine date back into the mid-19th century, much like the American medicine show, a fellow promotional entertainment. The two are thereby historically linked.

And look at the differences! If the Hadacol Caravan -- at least from the scattered historical record available to me -- seemed awfully wry and rightly sophisticated in its rib-poking promotion, Captain Hadacol the comic occupies a promotional area where LeBlanc wasn't kidding around - simple entertainment for kiddies, if enlivened by oddly emphatic art, and forthright appeals to Mom and Dad. Behold:



It'd probably be in the Hadacol spirit to make a beer muscles joke here, but instead I'll observe that the promotional comic, as opposed to the promotional live jamboree, operates on these pages as appropriate for a naïve form. As the song goes:

my ex she lives near Bayou Blue

and she could not read or write

she just reads comic funny books

every day and every night

but then she took some Hadacol

and it gave her quite a thrill

'cause now she's teaching high school

she's the best in Abbeville

-from Everybody Loves That Hadacol (Cajun Version), as posted above

Ha, you see? Comics are stupid! Adults who read them are STUPID! They're for little kids, everyone knows this, you can reference it in a song and everyone will get the joke! That's why it's the perfect means for kids to deliver these urgent testimonials to their parents - how could a dumb, childish art form like this lie? It's on-the-nose advertising, and in an inappropriate venue for the arguably more mature posture of the more colorful Hadacol hype. In case you can't see the small text:

--

I must express my honest and sincere thanks to you and the people who discovered the remarkable HADACOL. My little girl, Jean, 7 years old at last birthday, has been weak and underweight since birth. She ate very little at lunch and supper and went to school without eating breakfast. Regardless of how much I coaxed or begged, she just wouldn't eat, was pale and listless. Always complaining, I was afraid to let her out to play because she cried from nervousness. Some of my friends recommended HADACOL. At first, I didn't pay much attention but she grew worse and something had to be done, or, else, she would have to miss school. So she now is on her third bottle of HADACOL. Already my husband and I can tell the world of difference. She eats breakfast and is gaining in weight. She is as spry as a cricket. I cannot praise HADACOL enough. I shall continue to use HADACOL as long as it is sold.

--

My little daughter, Brenda Sue Miller, had been rundown and had a very poor appetite. She took two bottles of HADACOL. She has been eating better, and she feels better. She is very glad she is taking HADACOL. She is ten years old.

--

I have given my little five year old girl HADACOL and it has helped her so much. She would not eat much, but after taking two bottles of HADACOL, she eats everything. So, I will keep on giving her HADACOL and I will try some myself.

--



And, you know, comic books were immature at that time, though superheroes were rapidly hibernating by 1951, in favor of crime and (increasingly) horror comics. And Disney comics and Archie comics, yes, but the nasty stuff caught the attention of society's guardians, terribly concerned for the well-being of susceptible youth.

No worries of this sort from Dudley J. LeBlanc - like Wu-Tang, nearly half a century later, Hadacol is for the children:

--

I have a little son, 7 years old. He was thin and delicate. He would have one cold after another, had no appetite. Early this Fall, I began giving him HADACOL. I have given him three large bottles. Now, he goes to school regularly and eats twice as much as he did before, sleeps much better, and he has gained weight. I'll continue to use HADACOL and recommend it to others. I can't praise HADACOL enough. I think it is wonderful for both young and old.

--

I can't praise HADACOL enough, for what it has done for my little girl Melba Jacobs, who is 10 years old. She started taking HADACOL. She was nervous, and rundown, and, didn't have any appetite, and didn't feel like going to school, and she couldn't rest well at night. Since taking HADACOL she eats well, sleeps well, and feels better in every way. Thanks to HADACOL. Her little playmate is taking HADACOL also, after I told him about it.

--

I can't praise HADACOL enough. My little six year old girl was weak, nervous and rundown. I heard so much about HADACOL and decided to try it. It seemed to help her more than anything. She now eats and seems to enjoy eating. Anyone that has a poor appetite should try HADACOL. I cannot praise HADACOL enough.

--

My daughter, Marilyn Sue, is 5 years old, and for some time lacked energy, had a poor appetite, was generally rundown. Since giving her HADACOL, we have noticed wonderful results. She has a much better appetite, eats everything on the table, and doesn't seem tired like she used to. Incidentally, she likes to take her HADACOL too.

--

My little boy is 10 years old and had always been nervous and he didn't sleep well. He has taken 3 bottles of HADACOL, and now he sleeps much better and feels like going to school. He eats like he'll never get enough. I can never praise HADACOL enough.

--


Man, this is a lot of testimony! How about another song?



Feel free to do the Hadacol Boogie along at home (or an especially liberal workplace), although I think it might be a euphemism for sex. Hey - where do you think the kids come from?

--

Sometime ago, our little boy, James Edgar was so weak. We had to give him liver, and all kinds of food that would build blood. He couldn't run and play. Also, his food hurt him. I heard about HADACOL. I decided to try it. Before I gave him many bottles, I could tell a great difference. He has taken fourteen bottles. He is eleven years old, weighs 92 pounds, plays on the school ball team, rides his bike, runs and plays like other boys, and feels grand, sleeps all night, without waking. I can never praise HADACOL enough. I have recommended it to all my friends and got them to take it. They are thrilled over finding such a fine formula.

--

I want everyone to know what HADACOL has done for my little six-year old girl. She was weak and rundown. She was so easy to take a cold. So, we decided to try HADACOL on her, and I can't praise it enough. We have given her about ten bottles and are going to give it to her the rest of this winter. She is going to school. I am enclosing a photograph of my little six year old girl, Ruth Munsey. HADACOL has done so much for her.

--

We have a son, Philip Oren Wood, eight years of age, who became very nervous, and due to this we had to take him out of school. He had no appetite, and could not sleep at night. We were advised to give him HADACOL. He has been taking HADACOL for about two months. He has again entered school, he has a good appetite, and is beginning to sleep as he should. We are thankful for this wonderful discovery.

--

My little boy, 8 years old, was thin, rundown and was so weak he could not run and play without lying down and resting 2 or 3 times during the day. He would not eat like he should. And, then, I heard about HADACOL for children. So, I began giving him HADACOL. Now, after the first bottle, he eats better, sleeps better and is so full of vim. Just feels fine and plays all the time. I will always keep a bottle on hand.

--

But she wouldn't have much time to do it. In late 1951, LeBlanc sold his interest in Hadacol to investors up north. Six weeks later, they discovered that Hadacol was in fact in tremendous debt, and distribution soon collapsed amid FTC complaints and mounting criticism of the product's unique not-all-that-healthy approach to diatary supplementation. LeBlanc was saddled with a hefty tax bill, and never again realized that level of success; a non-alcoholic vitamin drink, Kary-On, proved unpopular. However, despite unsuccessful bids for the U.S. Congress and the governorship of Louisiana, he remained popular enough in his home district that he died in office as a state senator, 77 years old in 1971.

In 1952, the year after the end of the Caravan and the fall of Hadacol, a comic book titled Mad debuted from the increasingly notorious comics publisher EC. Under founding editor Harvey Kurtzman, it would bring a skeptic's eye to comics books, something typically reserved for newspaper or magazine cartoons, or more favored species of the comics form, devoting itself to cracking the codes of superheroes and advertisements and gala shows and everything else.

And in 1954 the Comics Code Authority was formed, and then comic books couldn't speak ill of judges. But, you know, the seed was planted.

As for Captain Hadacol himself, indulge me this advertisement of my own:

***

HELP ME. I AM RUNDOWN AND LACKING IN VIM, AND THE ONLY CURE IS INFORMATION. IF YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT CAPTAIN HADACOL -- WHO WROTE OR DREW IT, HOW MANY ISSUES WERE PUBLISHED, WHERE OR HOW THEY WERE DISTRIBUTED OR SOLD -- PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT OR SEND ME AN EMAIL.

***

Hell, maybe all my half-formed and tenuous ideas as expressed here will change with a little more Hadacol context. Maybe the discovery of future rip-snortin' Cap'n Hadacol adventures will yet boast a texture unique in promotional funnies; its creator didn't seem the type to leave any ballyhoo hanging in the air without the special grin of a born gamer. But as it stands now, Captain Hadacol is more an oddball exhibit of neat visual qualities speaking to a sophistication that comic books, in their stories and their society, could not embody, and so the joke could only be on them.



Let me sum it all up with a story that appears in nearly every Hadacol-related text, starting with Martin Gardner's 1952 omnibus expose Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, which I have not read. Accordingly, I'll print the legend.

It so happened that Dudley J. LeBlanc, as Hadacol boomed, was being interviewed by Groucho Marx, whose brother Chico had played/would play the Caravan, which, all things considered, probably provided a nice payday for hard-working performers transitioning away from hot stardom.

At one point, Marx turned to LeBlanc and asked what Hadacol is good for.

"It was good for five and a half million for me last year," LeBlanc replied.

***

- One million thanks to the Deborah LeBlanc Collection for the wonderful scans and information.

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Orc Stain #1: This is a VERY GOOD Image comic about orcs and stealing and penises and conquest. It didn't come out this week, but I didn't get hold of a copy until Saturday, which is okay by me; this is a perfect comic to find, to turn around in your hands and marvel at how 32-page all-story comics still exist at $2.99, in color, out of the front of Previews, embodying in their small confines a pure worldview, like the underground genre comics of 40 years ago, and their 'alternative' children going all the way forward. These days $2.99 feels like underground pricing too.



Tradition is highly pertinent to the case of creator James Stokoe, still in his mid-20s, I think, and probably best known right now for his two-volume Oni Press series Wonton Soup (2007, 2009), a high-spirited fusion of comedic sci-fi and cooking manga, presented in those 200-page b&w packages that will probably connect Oni to Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim until the sun has consumed the Earth.

However, Stokoe is best compared with a former studiomate, Brandon Graham, whose own King City is also ongoing from Image and gets a place of honor as this comic's one and only advertisement. In-story, meanwhile, artist Moritat gets a shout-out; he's been the primary artist for Richard Starkings' Elephantmen series at Image, which as of late has served as something of a focusing point for some artists in this Image/Oni-centered group, particularly Marian Churchland, whose graphic novel Beast was also released by Image last year, to some acclaim.

And while these projects aren't all very similar -- King City is digression-prone urban sci-fi relationship drama paced like popular manga (and initially released in 2007 as an OEL manga from Tokyopop) while Beasts is as politely contained a literary comic as one can imagine -- they do reflect an embrace and intuitive parsing of international comics-as-comics styles, apparently disinterested in provincial aesthetic concerns or old-timey genre biases, instead basing creative decisions on the personal impact of diverse older works.

This isn't so different from other periods of comics activity, ranging from the '60s underground through the 'alternative' comics era, but now the solitude of the American, Franco-Belgian and Japanese scenes has faded, stretching the plane of influence to true IMAX proportions, to say nothing of non-comics influences like gaming or animation or graffiti art - indeed, what sets these artists apart from Ben Jones & Frank Santoro of Cold Heat or C.F. of Powr Mastrs is the comparable absence of 'fine' art in the mix, although Graham was also part of the same Meathaus group as artists like Dash Shaw, and anyway was publishing with manga-friendly North American outlets as early as the mid-'90s. I think the best times will arrive when ill-informed future historians concoct the Meathaus vs. Fort Thunder rival schools kung fu narrative.



Orc Stain is cognizant of all of this, but especially drawn toward that earliest American period for comics like this: the underground era. The presence of Vaughn Bodē can be felt as much as the whimsi-mythical creature designs of Hayao Miyazaki (let's say), or the pulsing ultra-detail of Euro-fed seinen manga from decades back; it's maybe also helpful to think of Cobalt 60 as a touchstone, although I don't know if Stokoe ranks it himself, since its mid-'80s Epic Illustrated origins brush against many of these aspects.

The story is airy and fairly simple, as happens in a lot of these current comics: the powerful Orctzar is in search of a "god-organ" that will bring him domination over all the highly fractious and dick-obsessed orc planet, and prophecy provides that a one-eyed soul can hook him up. Fitting the bill is a young thief up north, a dissatisfied master at cracking organic locks, making money by robbing the graves of the great orcs of the past, the only personages allowed names, which are really only numbers.

Summarizing the plot does this comic little good, though; much of it is spent on looming sights and explorations of how those sights function, like how to best crack open a monument to a fallen hero, or create a foreign language potion (by locating a creature that speaks the language, roasting it, bashing its skull open and pouring water through the hole and out its mouth, as you might have guessed). Such visually swollen work is really very fitting for Image, founded on art and artists chasing their desires - work like this both brings that impulse into the present while sitting it in a historical context, although these days all of history seems to exist at once, in the way that Stokoe's interest in near-parodic manly combat virtue by way of bodily function seems both linked to Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit and the old anatomic detail of Richard Corben.



I realize I'm going on a lot about history and interrelated artists here. That's because this is frankly a comic that leans heavily on experiential factors for its value; to study it best is to know how fun and lovely comics can still crackle with new energy, even while evoking old comics books, in a rather old format. It's not random that orcs have ruled their planet for countless years without accomplishing a lot, or that young orcs don't have names anymore, or that the best money is in working smartly on the legacy of the older and richer. All the orc world is open to artists and thieves now; knowing fulfillment is knowing where to hammer.

***

Army of Two #1: Ah, but what of the living legends? Peter Milligan could hardly expect to co-write one of my favorite comics of all time -- that'd be Rogan Gosh -- and expect me not to follow him down every odd road he finds. And man, these days I can hardly keep track of him - our own Douglas Wolk had to clue me in on the very existence of this project, the first output of EA Comics, a joint venture between IDW and Electronic Arts, aimed at dedicated proliferation of video game-licensed series. Have you heard about Orson Scott Card co-writing the Dragon Age comic? First comes Peter Milligan and Army of Two!

Unfortunately, the best I can say of this book is that I think it's supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, and I say that knowing that Milligan himself has described it as more or less a character piece, on which terms it unequivocally fails as a compelling introduction. But really: it's a sequel to the original game, which I haven't played (although I hear it's the kind of thing where your character plays air guitar on his weapon after a particularly awesome accomplishment, so I'm thinking it's not entirely serious itself), following a pair of highly bad dudes that sadly live in a time where you can't just rescue the President from ninja, you've got to bring down your corrupt private military company from within and form a new PMC with the two of you as apparently its sole agents.



This issue begins a ripped-from-the-headlines story about drug gangs in Mexico, following a hapless young lad recruited into a world of violence while our hockey mask-wearing heroes charge into an inter-gang hostage situation, only to discover that the hostages have already been shot. Then they pause and wonder if they should have tried to negotiate, but it turns out that hostages were actually dead a long time ago, so it turns out only harder and nastier lethal action is the answer! There's also a Mexican army major that brings up the culpability of the U.S. drug market in funding such activities, but then the villains shoot him to death and the Army of Two shoot back, remarking "Who needs drugs when you got this kinda rush?" There's also a green recruit that provides pathos via getting shot to death, covering his entire projected character arc in the space of the first issue.

In other words, it's Peter Milligan writing, basically, a Mark Millar comic. He's hampered on two major points: (1) artists Dexter Soy (pencils) & José Marzan, Jr. (inks) work in a proficient, unemphatic style that'll probably pass a technical spot check but adds virtually nothing to the dialogue beyond the illustrative qualities of who's going where or who's talking, even sometimes garbling that as characters lose detail in longshot; and (2) Milligan's "visible writing" -- i.e. his dialogue and the basic scenario -- are subdued to the point where it depends on the art for visceral or funny or dramatic impact, be it a function of "invisible writing" -- script directions to the artist dictating mood, panel layouts, etc., which obviously aren't invisible on the page, they just can't be attributed to the writer without looking at the script itself -- or simple trust in the artists' burden.

The result is a comic that totters uneasily between winking at hoary conventions and simply adopting them in a dryly self-evident manner; as guitar rock simple as its premise might seem, it's actually a bit more overtly demanding on the story-art blend than a more literary, writerly thing. Case study, this. AWFUL place to be.

***

Neonomicon Hornbook: But what happens when we do have the script in front of us? This is a $1.99 preview of Avatar's new Alan Moore/Jacen Burrows project due out later this year; note that it's Moore's first totally original script for the publisher, as opposed to an adaptation of a story or poem, or a project reprinted or continued from another source. The solicitation promised design sketches and an interview with Burrows, but the final product is simply nine pages of completed art from issue #1 paired with Moore's original script for four of those pages, with an unidentified splash page I presume is a cover preview. That's fine by me; I like reading Moore's scripts, and I'm thinking Avatar is very interested in showing off the all-new, all-Moore state of the writing.

The Magus himself has proven less forthcoming about the project, at one point remarking "I don’t know about my story, it might be a bit black, I don’t know, you know." He then went on to heap praise on Burrows, who also drew Avatar's 2003 The Courtyard, a Moore prose adaptation (formatted for comics by Antony Johnston) that serves as the inspiration for the current project. And while not all of the publisher's Moore adaptations have been successful as comics, the Courtyard benefited from a very simple, prose-specific concept: disguised as a police mystery, the story is really an avalanche of H.P. Lovecraft references, culminating in the big idea of Cthulhoid language as a drug, which serves as a metaphor for the addictive, lingering influence of Lovecraft himself, as embodied by the story entire.

Bringing this to comics actually opens it up nicely, in that language (magic) is of such paramount importance to Moore that placing it all in a visualized locale gives the basic plot a grounded feel absent from the source material. Burrows was a good choice for that; as currently on display in Crossed, his specialty is taking smooth, animation-ready characters and contorting them into horrible states in open, chilly spaces.



But how do you read a comic like this - a comic and script? I mean, if you don't like script excerpts you save your two bucks, but since I do I find myself reading them in tandem, interested in correlation. I know the comic is supposed to be the only real part of the story, but 16-page books like this compel me to accept all the information as dual parts of the content (particularly when two bucks are on the line). I realize this doesn't always do the artists many favors, since working full script often requires picking and choosing representations from "the shimmer of murky possibilities" accordant to some prose, in the words of biblical translator Robert Alter, evaluating Robert Crumb's The Book of Genesis Illustrated.

Moore doesn't much benefit from scriptural ambiguity of concision; a 47-line block of text, excerpted above, is followed by "OKAY, I THINK THAT'S PRETTY MUCH IT FOR THIS OPENING IMAGE," after which there are eight more lines before the dialogue begins. Yet Moore's script is remarkably demanding, and slick to boot - he isn't just telling an artist what to draw, he's building parts of a rather self-sufficient story in all that text. Describing the contrast between one character safe in a cozy car and another acting agitated outside in the cold, Moore presents what I suspect is a synecdoche of their dynamic as an opening flourish.

That's lovely, but it's demanding too, benefiting from the evocation of language so that only superior visual nuance could fix it in full as image. This isn't Burrows' strength; his figures aren't so much expressive as liable to be dramatically twisted, while environmental effects (or the disparity between environments) don't tend to register on his cool, clean planes. Yet reading Moore's script doesn't reflect all that badly on him, partially because I think even the most uncharitable reader knows it's rhetorical dirty pool to count the absence-on-page of each and every one of Moore's voluminous stage directions against him, but also because Moore's writing is often so close to 'proper' prose it sometimes begs for its own comics script adaptation; it's like when I read Voice of the Fire and I decided it was better than most of Moore's comics, and then I frowned a little.



Oh, what? How's the comic? Well, I'm afraid it mostly resembles The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier from this segment, specifically the early bit with Allan & Mina washing up while rolling out an awful lot of stilted exposition; it was like Moore couldn't wait to get the characterization out of the way so he could launch into Ideas, which is the appeal for some readers, granted, but I'm starting to think the all-lecture final issue of Promethea is going to end up as the representative success of the writer's late period, a 'success' based in part on dispensing with characters and plot altogether.

And I loved that issue of Promethea, but Neonomicon does appear to have a plot and characters, and unlike the self-contained Black Dossier we're being asked to only read the setup for now, wherein characters uneasily banter about debilitating personal problems and at one point devote a panel's worth of conversation to summarizing what happened on the prior page. Then there's a final panel reveal that doesn't offer a lot of clarity on its own, but at least restates the Courtyard's worldview-in-a-package outlook in a manner not entirely at the mercy of language. Ironically. OKAY for the sum of it, but if all you want is the comic, it's probably best to wait.

***

Starstruck #5 (of 13): Here's a different take on comics and prose as an ongoing comic book, with the added benefit-burden of being a genuine series rather than a preview item, albeit a series that's up to its fourth incarnation of some of this material. Good news, though: five issues in, and it's becoming clear that IDW's Starstruck is a nearly Chris Ware-caliber feat of creative reconstitution, poking and prodding and expanding and clipping writer Elaine Lee's & artist Michael Wm. Kaluta's stuff into something that seems born for funnybook serialization.



Not that it's transformed into a lightning-quick read, oh lord no - like the aforementioned alternative genre comics of today, Starstruck isn't so much concerned with brisk plotting as enjoying the sensation of being in its detailed world. Unlike those comics, Lee accomplishes this through wildly info-dense, time-skipping story bursts that don't betray any immediately obvious story goal; as the old Epic house ads used to say, "It's not just a comic book. It's an entire universe."

IDW's series exploits this universal state of being by envisioning each issue as not so much a story in the way we expect to see 20-22 pages of comics inside a 32-page book but as a collection of materials: some of it comics, some of it text, and much of it narrated by totally different characters, addressing different points on the series' timeline. Most of the text is placed in between comics segments too, forcing the question of its inclusion as part of the story. You don't have to read it, but it always compliments the dizzy style of the comics segments, which devout fans know will not reach a climax upon issue #13 - the characters will have barely been introduced by that point, again highlighting the grab bag nature of the whole.

It'll read differently as a collected book, sure, but that's the collection's concern. This is comics.



Anyhow, this issue's main comics bit sees hapless Molly Medea -- the future space legend Galatia 9, if you've been reading the text segments, or any of the series' prior incarnations -- advanced to age 21 and her art terrorist phase, despite not being much of an artist or a terrorist. Her struggle with wicked half-sister Verloona Ti lands her in a perfectly absurd prison break situation with a muscular cellmate, foreshadowing future adventures with fellow quasi-protagonist Brucilla the Muscle, who's still a little girl in the issue's backup comics section.

Shot through it all is Lee's fascination with interactions between women in an allusive, often parodic sci-fi universe. Verloona may not deal in, say, genetically engineered sex slaves that die after their virgin use, but she does run a chain of beauty outlets exploiting women's fascination with men's fascination with those things, thus furthering the series' complex interest in notions of sexiness, which can be misinterpreted as sexism or exploitation, because it refuses any simple pro-cleavage/anti-cleavage categorization. Too expansive a universe for that. VERY GOOD.

***

PunisherMax #3: But in the interests of ending this on a more traditional high note, since I am a traditional man, here's a GOOD current ongoing series from Marvel, where Jason Aaron's and Steve Dillon's story and art function in lovely concert, and that's the whole show.

A different Marvel-published writer, Kieron Gillen, also of the Image series Phonogram -- and perhaps more pertinently, the fine gaming news and criticism site Rock, Paper, Shotgun -- recently suggested that writers-on-comics refrain from bifurcating attribution of "innovation" to any specific member of the creative team, in that the writer usually dictates some aspect of the visual presentation (my "invisible writing," as seen above), while the artist inevitably affects the writing with any given choice in page layout, panel-to-panel storytelling, etc. The point is, the terms 'writer' and 'artist' are somewhat vaporous in the realpolitik of comic book creation; Gillen's suggested alternative is to treat the creative team as a "faux-cartoonist," i.e. an even more illusory single person, so as to more effectively address the totality of a work.

I'll go even further than that: we also labor under an illusion in merely accepting the names in the credit boxes, particularly in collaborative Marvel/DC comics, because an editor certainly could have directed some of an issue to put it in line with the wider continuity, or the writer might have fallen ill and asked a friend to put together some stuff, or the artist might be utilizing an uncredited background artist to get the work together in time, or maybe just one panel was inked by a more established artist as a gift or a favor and that panel happened to turn out especially well. But we typically don't address these possibilities because we need a calm, steady space in which to position our analysis, even if it's less 'real.' Mind you, Gillen obviously isn't suggesting that his offered paradigm is somehow more 'real' -- I mean, faux is right in the fucking name -- but rather a more agile mirage, capable of phasing out rhetorically troubling zones.

So I'm fine with that, though I don't think it's a cure-all; there's a lot of forms of writing-on-comics, and some of it rightly ought to hone in on a single member of a creative team. To use one of Gillen's examples, it is no doubt useful to look at a Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely comic as a work by a faux-single entity, yet there's little use in denying that Morrison tends to draw some power from referencing and questioning and building upon his own, real-single body of work, which of course stretches across multiple separate collaborations; indeed, All Star Superman functions as much as a continuation of Morrison's DC meganarrative as a discreet look at the Man of Steel, urging some isolation of themes and plot qualities. Moreover, if you're looking at Detective Comics right now, I obviously consider some study of J.H. Williams' work across his own career instructive on how the book does and does not succeed, although surely you can't credit every bit of the visuals to him (or Dave Stewart).

The question you have to ask is: what kind of criticism do I want? What do I want to talk about? How can I accomplish that without making things up, unless it's a really good joke?



This is all a long way of saying that Jason Aaron (lettered by Cory Petit) and Steve Dillon (colored by Matt Hollingsworth) can very easily be taken as one person, so unified is their drive. Mind you, this is a mid-story bit in a series somewhat famous for flowing more as a segmented book than as chapters, so it doesn't have the same kick as some of the comics covered above, but it is progressing nicely.

The primary theme at work is family, covering the ruined crime families Wilson Fisk is playing off for the sake of his own family, driven by the broken family of his older days, much in the way Frank Castle himself shoots away the ghosts - a nice bit of mirroring panels in issue #2 summed this up, concluding with Fisk stepping into the arms of his son and the Punisher hovering in a doorway in shadows. This issue introduces a super-assassin character from a plot-convenient extreme Mennonite sect that also struggles to preserve his home, a delicate thing indeed in this series.

Garth Ennis' set of themes were similarly bleak, and this new run continues to beg comparison by revisiting the scene of a famous prior set piece. But this new entity-featuring-Steve-Dillon is gradually demonstrating how different it is in the same setting, replacing the Dillon-drawn comedy of early Ennis issues with a more wicked lightness of being, as an arm's length Punisher wipes out every obstacle in the MAX Universe proto-Kingpin's way, and the delight isn't just the reader's but his. As established by Ennis, Aaron continues: the Punisher is gross, so the most fun to be had with his efforts is by the most wicked character around. There's your returning artist's pictures slightly shifted by a new writer's words, like he's a new man, fake or not.

Labels: Jog

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(Being part 2 of 2 in a series; part 1 is here)

***

III. JAPAN, HIDE YOUR WOMEN!

I'll ask it again, this time with feeling - what the hell is manga? Or more specifically, what the hell is manga today, in comparison to Western professional print comics?


(from Hanshin, as presented in The Comics Journal #269; art by Moto Hagio)

There's matters of presentation and distribution, of course. I've mentioned that before. Manga is digest-sized paperback books, usually serialized far away from Western eyes in terms of venue -- anthology magazines, usually -- and often time, in that even the most popular current series have to wait several months for translations to finish or licensing terms to play out. This contrasts with the typically larger, bookshelf-ready originals of the West's dominant Franco-Belgian and American traditions, or U.S. pamphlets swiftly collected into fatter tomes.

Moreover, narrowing our focus to North America, manga is also the stuff that takes up the most space in big box bookstores, as opposed to the books that line most shelves in the Direct Market. Manga usually reads right-to-left, as it's been for as long as it's taken up the aforementioned space in your Borders and Barnes & Noble, while North American comics should ideally go left-to-right, barring some formal experiment and/or deadline catastrophe; the split doesn't get any smoother than that. Hell, if superhero comics are an especially large subset of popular action comics, then popular action manga can even be seen as a bulwark of 'cartoony' artwork against the preference for 'realism' in so many Marvel/DC series, though obviously these designations aren't absolute.

What is of paramount importance, however, is the word popular. If there's anything I hope I've established by now, it's that manga isn't monolithic, that many styles and approaches exist, that manga is big - enough so that an anthology like Manga could effectively excerpt a nation's comics output in the early '80s so as to arrive at something similar to what was preeminent in North America around the same time, possibly as a stratagem for presenting an unfamiliar, foreign kind of comic as not very different from Western funnies at all, except with samurai and stuff. 'Cause it's Japan!

Today, everybody knows something deeper about manga, if only that manga is a deeper something. It's big and present; it might not show on every Best of Decade list from every visible North American media outlet, but you can bet your ass a disclaimer will be provided upon request begging off coverage for lack of familiarity, because manga will not simply be ignored. You see manga everywhere in a way you don't with other professional print comics, like Fort Thunder-inspired bookshelf collections or superhero pamphlets for kids.

Ha - I bet you can already see how I'm comparing segments of the North American comics scene to a whole nation's output, covering decades of time. In my defense, I'll say that some types of manga remain far more prolifically translated than others -- long form pop comics for boys and girls, generally, followed by a little bit of stuff aimed at older men and a smattering of projects for mature women, with individual publishers specializing in 'classic' or 'art' or 'dirty dirty smut' manga -- though surely the picture presented ten to thirty steps away from your local Seattle's Best caffeine counter hews closer to what's actually most visible in Japan than what was seen in Manga-the-anthology, very far away indeed from the shōnen style evidenced in those 2,850,000 copies of One Piece Vol. 56 on new release day, or the attitude that would prompt an Eiichiro Oda to declare a triple-digit intent for a comic weighing in at 200 pages per compiled pop.


(from They Were Eleven; art by Moto Hagio)

That leads us to something else, something only partially intended by anyone in charge, I think. Here in 2009, in North America, manga functions as a full-blown alternative mainstream of comics; not the 'real mainstream' Oni Press or AiT/Planet Lar pondered earlier this decade -- i.e. something akin to entertainments or artworks popular outside of the comics sphere -- but a 'pure comics' mainstream positioned apart from the English-language way of things, with its own set of values and tropes and genres; a setup where foreignness can be a virtue.

With a few years of that kind of development behind it, manga has become the Other. Having made its incursion on North American territory (European too, though I'll stick to what I know in person), the rhetoric surrounding manga in North American comics-focused circles is now often defined by the void manga has filled in the domestic comics scene.

Manga is comics for women.

Comics for teenagers.

Comics for homosexuals.

Comics for everyone North American comics could have reached but didn't, not in a hugely broad money-making way at least, because obviously there are some North American comics aimed at all of those groups, and women and teenagers and gays that enjoy reading North American comics, but Japanese comics brought lots of them close to the comics form and into the bookstore or onto the websites and sold them many, many things they wanted.

This isn't a zero sum game. Naturally, you can read as many comics as you damn well want; plenty of people in North America read Japanese comics and American comics and whatever UK comics that float in and poor old European comics, which have their own storied history and culture but, high-profile exceptions aside, couldn't be less popular domestically right now if they were printed on the H1N1/09 virus and had to be read with a microscope, which is still an improvement from a decade ago.

But in the commentary, the debate, the Big Picture, the mind's eye of the uncertain observer, the comic book fan who hasn't read a lot of manga, standing in the middle of a male-dominated pop comics culture - manga seems so deep, so complicated, like a foreign language somehow in English, demanding of study, aimed at a different demographic, no part-timers aloud, Your Life Required, signed in blood on the dotted line or don't even open your fucking mouth, fanboy, because you'll just get it all wrong, ducking to avoid manga swung like a club against the shortcomings and weaknesses of North American comics, despite its own troubles, its own failings, its complexities, its accidents and strokes of luck.

The overlap of Japanese and North American comics can get lost. I have no doubt that most of you reading this right now can immediately cite someone, Naoki Urasawa let's say, as a mangaka whose work isn't a million miles away from a good spread of Western comics in aesthetic approach. That's fine, very true. Japan has a bigger comics industry than ours, and some of it, as Manga-the-anthology struggled mightily to show, isn't so different in style from ours.

Yet in manga's multitudes stir popular comics that are very separate indeed, and Manga hid it all away for the early '80s, including the revolution of female artists from just a few years before, the women that set the stage for manga's reign today and inevitably swept off most early outliers, the accidental pioneers we're surveying now.



This is the closest Manga came to a segment drawn by a woman: Schizophrenia, by Yôji Fukuyama. That's because Fukuyama was good friends with shōjo manga pioneer Moto Hagio in high school.

Seriously, that's as close as we're gonna get.

On the other hand, the entry does offer a glimpse yet another breed of mangaka still obscure in English translation: the dedicated short form artist. Fukuyama has had numerous collections of short comics published in Japan, with three larger, dreamy projects translated to French and published by Casterman, the longest of them taking up two volumes. Tellingly, the only example of Fukuyama's art I can find in an English edition besides this one is his guest drawings in the French-born artist Frédéric Boilet's 2001 autobiographical romance Yukiko's Spinach (translated in 2003 by Fanfare/Ponent Mon):



Fukuyama drew the lil' angel. The lovely Japanese woman is, inevitably, Boilet's.

Schizophrenia, meanwhile, is a sort of philosophical sci-fi/comedy thing about a man who builds a time machine to whisk him away to the better world of the past. Unfortunately, his invention only takes him ten minutes into the past, just as he's walking into the room. The two hims then try to activate the machine again, which leaves them only seconds away from where they were before, with their bodies now (then?) fused with the bodies of two more versions of themselves. This continues until the man is a shambling, hideous mass of Him, arms and legs everywhere, at which point they all agree to stay inside and watch television.



It's a cute (and gross) fable, and oddly precognitive - the doubling motif also appears in one of Fukuyama's recent forays into a different art form, Doorbell, a short anime film he directed in 2007 for the Studio 4°C theatrical anthology project Genius Party. And like all fables, there's a helpful moral: a person can try to change their environment and thereby themself as much as they want, but it's futile. You'll always remain basically the same, if amended by fragmentation to a weird and grotesque degree.

Couldn't that be true of an art form as well? For Manga, where "[n]othing would give us greater pleasure" than to enhance the Western understanding of Japan itself, as per Executive Managing Director Ookawara on the back cover? Maybe as per the unknown desires of Editor X, whom I'll identify soon enough? I mean, we've seen plenty of art so far, but definitely nothing like this:


(from The Rose of Versailles, as excerpted in Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics; art by Riyoko Ikeda)

Huge, dewy eyes. Sparkles. Petals. A collage-like page construction. Big ol' close-up of a ribbon at the bottom. That's '70s shōjo manga, comics that grabbed the form by its collar and wrung it loose. It was the work of women, the Year 24 Group, named for the year many of them were born (Shōwa 24 or 1949, giving rise to an alternate North American title, the Magnificent 49ers), a wave of female artists entering the girls' comics scene and forcing its evolution from a staid, often Tezuka-derived style to a dynamic, panel-bursting thing more in line with what 'manga' looks like today on casual glance, ready and willing to accomodate experimental effects and new subject matter. And shit blowing up:


(from They Were Eleven; art by Moto Hagio)

That's from a quintessential shōjo story of the era, Moto Hagio's They Were Eleven, published in 1975 and subsequently adapted to television, stage and screen. I'd say it's the most exciting looking image I've posted so far, and possibly the most confusing. It also looks nothing like any mid-'70s North American comic I can think of, mainstream or underground. It's totally uninhibited - not in the manner of S. Clay Wilson's seething panoramas or Jack Kirby's gesticulating figures, but in how the panel-to-panel storytelling runs screaming down the page, loud and fast so that the unseen activity in between panels registers as just as hyperactive as what's actually drawn. The character art signals its era, yes, but the narrative design is startlingly modern.


(from Toward the Terra; art by Keiko Takemiya)

None of this is to downplay the efforts of male shōnen artists of the time or the alternative comics talents working in magazines like Garo or really anyone else -- the '70s are often considered a Golden Age for manga all around -- but female artists like Hagio and Riyoko Ikeda and Keiko Takemiya were working toward what amounted to a popular avant-garde, big-selling comics that pressed firmly against what 'comics' were capable of, drafting a new iconography for new layouts that married pulsing fast reading to pages that stood as self-contained expressions of their characters' psychological states while getting the story told.

And that's to say nothing of subject matter, including the mid-'70s development of shōnen-ai, "boys' love," aestheticized same-sex desire which begat the more explicit yaoi of the self-published dōjinshi scene.


(from Disappearance Diary; art by Hideo Azuma)

As you can see, the heavy female presence in fandom toward the end of the decade was not without opposition. Girls and their fanfic and their slashfic; sometimes I get the feeling that some North American funnybook readers see 'manga' (or anything that looks like it) as the Twilight of world comics due mainly to its visible female readership, or maybe just its feminine aspect, emphasized by the relative absence of women reading a wide swathe of North American comics. Which means more money for woman-targeted manga, which means more poppy shōjo on the shelves; it should be noted that josei manga, aimed at mature women, has had a harder time getting a foothold in North America.

Anyway, it's no surprise then that Manga-the-anthology put its fingers in its ears and shut its eyes to the very presence of female comics artists upon its early '80s release, to say nothing of the influential visual experiments they conducted - the prior decade had not been a Golden Age for North American comics, with the underground scene witnessing a distribution meltdown and neophyte mainstream artists expressing belief that they'd be the final generation of comic book artists. The Direct Market was still young by the time 1980 rolled around, and while woman-targeted, woman-drawn and/or woman-appealing comics existed, they were niche in the niche that comics already were, and good business perhaps suggested that they and their formal tricks were best kept obscured from a foreign anthology's window view unto Japanese culture.

Instead, we got this:



God! An old fashioned space-faring yarn with a gorgeous woman looming over a rogue adventurer and his manly facial hair while he ponders his latest tight spot! I love this vintage pulp story type of comic, and I bet artist Yukinobu Hoshino (credited as Yukinori Hoshino) loves it a hundred times more. In the tradition of fantasy-variants-on-old-stories from comics and magazines past, The Mask of the Red Dwarf Star transposes a Poe classic to the sea of stars, as con man Roscoe finds himself captive on a luxury vessel dedicated to carting rich old folks in cryogenic slumber all over the universe, thawing them out for only the rarest and most novel sights, like an imminent supernova



Hoshino draws in a stately, handsome manner; if Manga was aiming to be an irregular Heavy Metal for Japanese comics this is the entry that sells the notion completely, packed with bleeding rich color art reminiscent of Howard Chaykin's work on Cody Starbuck around the same time, but with an evident 'realist' manga approach to the character designs. There's wit along with the gloss - the story's colors are derived from the seven rooms identified in The Masque of the Red Death, with the red dwarf hanging in the void as illustrated above standing in for the red light bathing the black and final room, the chamber of death presented as icy, lifeless space.

The artist was part of a male manga generation that debuted in the mid-'70s and adopted a Western, often European approach to page design and in-panel detailing; the best known of these artists in North America is probably Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo, and while I don't know of any direct influence of his on Hoshino's work, his time of the latter's arrival on the scene plugs him in with that faction, although Jason Thompson, in his Manga: The Complete Guide, argues that Hoshino is more in line with an older artist, infamous Crying Freeman/Sanctuary super-realist Ryoichi Ikegami, a Garo alum that blazed a Neal Adams-influenced trail through the post-gekiga/seinen Manga for Men arena for most of the 1970s, with a few memorable layovers in boys' comics like the official '70-71 Spider-Man manga.

Hoshino's visual disposition made him ideal for Manga-the-anthology, and attractive to an early manga-in-English industry that valued artists like Otomo and Ikegami for their Western approach. VIZ published Hoshino's 1984-86 hard sci-fi story suite 2001 Nights as pamphlets in 1990 and 1991, and then as three collected volumes in 1996, while presenting an abridged edition of his 1987 story collection Saber Tiger in 1991 as part of its short-lived Spectrum line of oversized softcover books of heavy-detail art, along with Natsuo Sekikawa's & Jiro Taniguchi's Hotel Harbour View (which is awesome) and Yu Kinutani's Shion: Blade of the Minstrel, (which is not awesome in the slightest, but makes for a great trivia answer).

Later, Dark Horse published Hoshino's 1993-94 manga adaptation of James P. Hogan's The Two Faces of Tomorrow as a 13-issue miniseries in 1997 and 1998, then didn't collect it until almost a decade later in 2006. By that time, Hoshino's type had almost vanished from North American manga publishing, like they were wiped out by a supernova blast as filtered through a ruby crystal into a laser beam aimed at a spacecraft, in the hoary pulp SF tradition.



Hoshino remains active in manga today; he just won an Excellence Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival last year for his episodic 'manly professor of folklore solves mysteries, maintains mustache' series Munakata Kyōju Ikōroku (Case Records of Professor Munakata), ongoing in some form since 1995, anticipating the release of a twelfth collected volume next month, and currently enjoying its own exhibition at the British Museum until January 3, 2010.

We may yet see more of him in English, though his type of comic doesn't make the kind of money from the target audiences that 'manga' as a live concept embodies these days. You look at his art and it's pretty and skilled, but it embodies the spirit of a dashing space cowboy zipping out of danger with a freshly-rescued hottie at his side, still bound and gagged, regarded with a friendly enough leer.



Aw, don't sweat it babe. He'll cut you loose when he knows you're ready.

IV. WE'RE ALL JUST ANIMALS

And speak of the devil: Katsuhiro Otomo!



Yep, the man himself is among the Manga artists, his entry probably composed while he was working on Domu: A Child's Dream, the esper action epic that honed his skills for the Akira project. Otomo was actually a prolific creator of short, often experimental comics prior to that, though this large body of work is nearly unknown in North America. I can only think of the 1992 Epic one-shot Memories, which presented a short story later adapted to theatrical anime form in a 1995 anthology of the same title (though a 1995 Random House Australia release also titled Memories boasts over 200 pages of Otomo shorts in English for those willing to hunt and pay).



The Watermelon Messiah makes for a tricky-cute seven pages, similar in outlook to Otomo's opening to the anime anthology picture Robot Carnival from 1987, in which the film's title -- literally a clattering, smoking, gigantic ROBOT CARNIVAL -- goes parading through a hapless village and wrecks the place with entertainment or just the promise of such. It's a first world story, anxious about progress at a time where Japan in particular seemed primed to take on the world.

Otomo's story in Manga is more about unity, but just as downbeat: in a series of long vertical panels, a gigantic watermelon zooms through space toward a ruined, ragged civilization of scavengers among fallen skyscrapers. The space melon strikes the ground and splits apart, and a final splash depicts tiny people crawling all over it like ants.



Stripped of our technology, our progress (and our comics industries, no doubt), we're tiny and similar in our helplessness, every color and creed as pathetic as the next under the eye of an uncaring god, to flaunt a Western idea. Japanese comics - taste the sensation!

Here's another trick, a story titled Midsummer Night's Dream, conceived and drawn by Keizo Miyanishi and written in English by Lee Marrs, the project's lone female participant and the only Westerner granted a story credit above the expected English adaptation work. The plot is simple: Hikaru Genji, ice-cold negotiator with a most literary name, stops to admire a Yugao flower while on a journey and finds himself duly confronted with the splitting image of his beloved dead mother, accompanied by a beautiful Lady. Genji hits it off well with the Lady, but their night of passion ends with her disappearance: ah, the women were just spirits in disguise, playing a trick so as to unlock Genji's sensual warmth for his own good! Captions assure us he later hooks up with a neighbor's daughter. THE END.



The allusions to Shakespeare and Lady Murasaki are obvious. Mono no aware is absent, replaced by an 'in praise of love' outlook that seems to apply the English drama's faerie-tamper'd romance as a salve to the crueler fates witnessed in The Tale of Genji, where "Yugao" was a perfectly human woman who died from her own encounter with a spirit, sent by another lover of Genji, the Shining Prince.

You can catch some approximation of that Heian beauty in Miyanishi's character art, which seems mildly evocative of Yamato-e narrative painting, a tradition dating back to Murasaki's era. Thus, the primacy of the Japanese half of this mash-up rests in the visual aspect, undercut by Marrs' Western dramatic citations in her story. It doesn't add up to a lot as a comic -- 'Genji as a short story with a happy ending' sounds a bit like a joke about an American version of the tale -- but its give-and-take between literary traditions mirrors some of the struggle between English and Japanese-based comics traditions going on inside the Manga project.

And isn't it striking that we've got another departure from the North American comic style here - once again, as it was with Hiroshi Hirata's work, given an apparent pass by the exotic, easily-identifiable look of the work?



The trick is, Miyanishi's classicism isn't mainstream in manga at all. He's actually an alternative cartoonist, far more underground than anyone else in the book, slated to appear again in English soon as part of Top Shelf's Ax: A Collection of Alternative Manga. But even around the time of Manga, he more prone to images like this, from a 1979 book cover:



He wasn't a prolific alternative cartoonist, however (although Midsummer Night's Dream did later show up in a 1990 collection of his short stories); he seems frankly better known online as mastermind behind the music act Onna, accompanied by images like:



But if you look close at his Manga disguise, you can see untoward detail about the eyes and lips. A Renée French fuzz. A lust beckoning undirected release from tradition. This can go several ways.



There's an issue that crops up sometimes in discussions of manga: whether 'manga' is really 'comics.' Some think not! As you can tell from my free usage of 'manga' and 'Japanese comics' and 'funnybooks' and the like, I'm naturally disposed to thinking otherwise. They're all words and pictures, right? Like how people are all the same, breathing the same air, bleeding the same blood. All ants, all specks, when you pull back enough. Fragile creatures; who has the time for conflict?



Why drive wedges between us? I was raised Catholic, so that's the kind of nerd I am. You can't go in with a lot of preconceptions though, if you want it to work. You can't think of 'comics' as 32-page floppy books in color. Or anything beholden to genre. You must accept that writers don't have to be in charge, that the whole idea of a "comic book writer" might be an anomaly, a sub-specialty in an art-driven storytelling. It doesn't have to be that way, it never has to be; values will compete, opinions may vary, but comics never have to be limited. Anyone of any age can read comics; any subject matter can be approached. You don't even need storytelling, because comics hide a 'fine' art aspect, a gallery art relationship in spite of or energized by its history of mass production, not that comics even need to be mass produced.

Does manga stand for all that? No, god no, but to stand that far from particulars is at heart to prepare yourself to know comics from any angle, to delve with the eye for permutation, energies old, slow or new in a whole cosmos.



God help me, the further I go the less I'm comfortable with that. Sometimes I think maybe manga isn't comics. Moreover, it shouldn't be.



What is comics? What's your history with comics? Should comics exist in the world? If so, as works of art, they have some cultural force, muted or smothered as it may be. Inevitably, this force will be specific to the culture, even if the signal is so weak it only covers the culture of comics publishing.

When the book titled Manga entered the culture of North American comics publishing, it was not in a form representative of the words & pictures called manga. Instead, intentionally or not, it matched the culture of North American comics in the early '80s as best it could: a magazine-sized, Heavy Metal-looking publication full of richly detailed art, sometimes of an authentic but stereotypically "Japanese" flavor. No formal advancement was present beyond what was known to North America. No demographic were pursued beyond the cultural norm. Manga was comics then, because it accepted the terms of the culture.

To call manga 'comics' today, don't we impliedly accept those terms again? Maybe we want to, but let's say we don't - is it wise for a North American comics reader to accept manga as 'comics,' when the terminology suggests the former can only become part of the latter, melding an insurgent popular mainstream into a smaller, older one in a way that flatters received wisdom? I'm talking semiotics here. Manga as manga has a strength that manga as just comics doesn't; in rejecting the aesthetic terms of comics, in suggesting 'comics' become more like 'manga,' don't we preserve and emphasize the progressive aspects of the Japanese form for better, deeper comparison, now that manga has gained the capitalist muscle around here to take a few swings?

Doesn't conflict make things stronger?



The burden there, I think, is not to excerpt so much. I've been going on and on about popular comics and popular manga, but what of the virtue of unpopular things?

In the macro sense, you can view comics as among the least popular iterations of North American pop culture, which arguably puts it in a unique position to offer cultural resistance. Certainly U.S. comics don't export like U.S. film or U.S. television, or fast food or soft drinks; indeed, a symptom of comics' stature is that manga has managed to build its presence as much as it has. Can you imagine Japanese pop music holding an equivalent position in the United States of America? Part of the thrill I get from comics is that it seems so pliable right now, so rich with potential. So under-studied, so unburdened with financial expectation yet so fucking young!

It'd be a mistake to overstate manga's influence in Japanese culture -- there's plenty of trouble in the air with declining circulation and competing forms of entertainment, stretchy pirates notwithstanding -- but it's plain that manga enjoys an enhanced status as a mass entertainment medium. And, as happens with mass media, money has gone in and formulae have gotten tight; the big circulation youth comics have become very editorially guided, their ingredients laid out in order as law, at least when not subject to the whims of reader response surveys maximizing consumer satisfaction.

It's said that there's little in the way of an 'art' comics scene in Japan, though the sheer size of the industry and the breadth of its history assures that Western readers won't be left hungry too soon, if the publishers remain willing and viable. Even then, manga artists seem distinctly less taken with the specifics of the comics form, instead focusing on tone or sensation or shock or drawing; use of the form as a mechanism. The closest I've seen a mangaka get to Asterios Polyp is Shintaro Kago, and his formalist mindfuck comics are both an awesomely extended sick joke and only part of his oeurve anyway.

There always seems to be less fretting about manga in manga, and I wonder if that isn't due to the comparatively smooth evolution it's had across the 20th century; PTA struggles and a lack of highbrow respect, sure, but nothing like the Comics Code Authority or the industry crash of the mid-'90s. Could it be that manga as an industry isn't as hungry for validation as comics, that artists may be hungry but must be content with remaining sort of small, while comics is small enough that the idea of 'literary' comics has materialized prominently in our midst? Is manga the better pop comics? It it best as only pop comics? Can I really say a single worthwhile goddamned thing about a popular culture inaccessible to most of us and in a language I can't even read, half-visible in translation financed by the gaps it fills in my pop culture's shortcomings and soured, biased in that way?

Gah! Catholic angst at its best! Give me something to pluck from the comics cosmos! Some worl manga insight! Just tell me something about my life, funnies! Harrow my soul! Prepare me for death!



It's a march, the perception that is manga in North America. Manga-the-anthology wasn't adept enough to reproduce and it probably didn't influence much of anything, but the conditions it existed in remained present as manga slowly grew. The big three manga publisher Shogakukan shelled out the money to form Viz Media in 1986, teaming with Eclipse Comics the next year to release manga pamphlets: Sanpei Shirato's ninja comic The Legend of Kamui; Kazuya Kudo's & Ryoichi Ikegami's mutant power-like esper serial Mai the Psychic Girl; and Kaoru Shintani's jet fighter action series Area 88, which was actually very much cartooned.

Within, without. The same year Viz was established Canadian-born writer and cartoonist Toren Smith -- who had helped coordinate the Eclipse deal and worked on some of the publisher's early English adaptations -- formed Studio Proteus, a freestanding entity that would acquire licenses from Japan with the approval of a North American comics publisher (usually Dark Horse, as it would pan out) and provide flipped (left-to-right), translated comics for distribution. It'd be totally wrong to say that Studio Proteus only worked on bloody sci-fi and action comics, but I don't think it's off the mark to say that those Katsuhiro Otomo and Masamune Shirow and Hiroaki Samura releases are well-remembered by readers of my age.



All the while, there was anime, which should not be underestimated as a force in drawing eyes toward manga. It's funny that Japan's animation industry is so male-dominated and increasingly focused on milking every last drop of money out of its harder-than-hardcore otaku base, because anime in the U.S. became an open thing as VHS tapes gave way to Sailor Moon airing on television in the mid-'90s, slowly building more of an audience of girls and women that later bought the Sailor Moon manga from Mixx, which later became Tokyopop, which personified the unflipped, digest paperback manga that made history when the bookstores picked it up.

Every bit of that -- manga for girls, direct-to-bookshelves, right-to-left -- had been tried earlier. But as the 21st century crept forward, manga assumed its new identity, and the old experiments and comic book-friendly standbys didn't always find a place. They were as much manga as anything else, but what manga is had to change.


(prior seven images from Phoenix: Karma; art by Osamu Tezuka)

Let me tell you now about the editor of Manga: Masaichi Mukaide, the first mangaka published in English in the Direct Market era.

V. I WAS BORN, BUT...

You'll remember that Mike Friedrich served as Manga's consulting editor. Friedrich's pamphlet-format anthology series Star*Reach, launched in 1974, was a noteworthy 'bridge' comic between the underground stylings of that just-passing era and the genre-hungry territory of a mainstream still hobbled by content restrictions. They called 'em "Ground Level Comics" back then, playing on under-aboveground terminology and presenting themselves as stop #1 in the new comics future.

In his publisher's note at the top of Star*Reach #7, released in 1977, Friedrich highlighted the international flavor of the issue, including a contribution by two talents from Japan: writer Satoshi Hirota and artist "Mukaide," only one word. This was one year prior to the initial English-language release of portions of Keiji Nakazawa's Hiroshima bombing-themed serial Barefoot Gen, leaving only made-in-the-USA oddities like 1931's The Four Immigrants Manga known to me before it. I will admit, however, that the story Hirota & Mukaide created -- The Bushi, six pages -- may not have been published prior to its Star*Reach appearance.



As you can see, Mukaide drew the piece in a very American-looking style, giving me the impression that he might have been a dōjinshi artist or small press guy aiming to break in with U.S. comic books. I can find no record of any Japanese-only comics he drew, nor can I find the slightest mention of writer Hirota working in comics or manga anywhere again. Friedrich is credited with "additional dialogue," hinting that he might have eased the script into English, if that was the language it was initially written in - no translation credit is given.



Hopefully some answers will turn up in a letters column somewhere since Mukaide became a minor fixture in Friedrich's comics at the end of the '70s, illustrating stories for the aforementioned Lee Marrs and Steven Grant in issues #15 and #18 of Star*Reach, and showing up in half the six-issue run of sister series Imagine (#3, #4 and #6), working again with Marrs in issue #4 but writing his own work otherwise.

I haven't gotten hold of any of these other comics, just Star*Reach #7. Mukaide's art isn't the kind you stop to notice; you look at his story of a samurai fighting a demon only to pass the test to become a demon himself (ha ha ha ha haaaa!) and you imagine a 1977 comics reader blinking a few times and going "huh, Japan," having maybe seen some televised anime before or communicated with fellow enthusiasts preparing to ramp up first generation fansub operations. You'd have had to physically go to Japan to encounter any other manga at that point.



By the time Mukaide edited Manga his draftsmanship had gotten noticeably better, very design-oriented with stylish use of blank or toned space. His story was titled The Promise, concerning another samurai's encounter with a spirit. Poor Kwairyu is a survivor of a lost war, only looking for a place to rest his war-weary bones for the night, but his companion winds up frozen solid when they enter the home of a pure white woman. She takes pity on Our Man, but warns him that he's as good as dead if he ever tells a soul what he's seen.



This is an old tale, an encounter with a Yuki-onna, a spirit first brought to English in Lafcadio Hearn's 1904 folkloric tome Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, which saw its version of the story adapted to the screen by director Masaki Kobayashi in his 1964 anthology film Kwaidan. I first encountered it as the basis for the Lover's Vow segment in Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, which may not have the same cineaste cachet, but also added gargoyles, so it totally balances out.

It was a poetic choice for Mukaide, suggesting an early meeting of East and West through Hearn's study, charging his editorial duty with metaphor. We can get fancy with this. Kwairyu begins to thrive after his chance meeting with the white woman, as does Mukaide, his writing partner Hirota frozen after their own early encounter with Western comics. Manga was the biggest, most complicated campaign he ran, full of striking forces in effective dress. The end was already drawing near.



Did I forget to define mono no aware earlier? It's a literary concept that came up in study of the Tale of Genji, then grew to become a vital trait of Japanese art in general, like a deep dream image suddenly given words to describe it and thereby made memorable while awake. Put simply, it's the idea that nothing is so lovely as when it is fleeting - an appreciation of the ephemeral qualities of living. A tiny pang, an ache at seasons passing, of romance quieting, of sweet youthful rituals put away, sakura suspended in mid-air, and, most profoundly, the scent of yellowing paper wafting up from an open longbox.

Kwairyu meets a wonderful woman. They marry. She swoons and her breasts are shown for the reader. Mighty Kwairyu comes upon the ruins of that snowy home from years ago. His wife lays nude on a black swipe across the top of a page. Foolish Kwairyu tells her of the spirit, which is of course her. It begins to snow indoors. Time is changing.



I don't know when Manga was published. I don't know where it was sold. I don't know how well it sold. I don't know what happened to Executive Managing Director Tadashi Ookawara. I don't know if I'll ever see half these artists in English again. But they were here. I know what Manga was.



And Masaichi Mukaide, to the best of my knowledge, was never seen in English again.

***

(This post is dedicated to the memory of my beloved personal copy of Manga, which cracked its spine and ceded its glue as I scanned the above images, scattering its pages, boldly giving its life for the proud cause of illustrating internet blog posts here at savagecritic dot com. Our time together was so short, but oh how we burned, you at my bosom, vintage manga comic book. Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem. Amen.)



(198X-2009)

Labels: Jog

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Batman and Robin #6: Oh yes, I'm feeling like an old-fashioned omnibus review post tonight.



It's entirely possible the above image might just say it all, but I still feel obliged to point out that the image of Batman & Robin to the right is supposed to be what the people in the inset panel to the left are watching on their monitor.

I haven't been quite as upset with penciller Philip Tan's work this storyline as some folks -- his shortcomings are roughly similar to those of Tony Daniel, who didn't attract half as much disapprobation with his Grant Morrison collaborations, despite something like R.I.P. needing a steadier visual approach far worse than this thing -- but there's no denying his awkwardness with visual humor, which also causes some trouble with this issue's much-hyped villain Flamingo. He's a joke character, basically, a flamboyantly-dressed super-glam superkiller ("I was expecting scary, not gay," muses Damian) who nonetheless communicates entirely in grunts and RRRs and cackles - the exclamation point at the end of writer Morrison's three-issue statement on cool and dark characters attempting to muscle out our reformed, uneasy Dynamic Duo.

Tan (with inker Jonathan Glapion) doesn't get much out of this sizzle/steak disconnect - that's more cover artist Frank Quitely's bread 'n butter (given one image, he immediately takes the opportunity to quote Purple Rain). Moreover, portions of the issue seem especially hurried, with some panels approaching Igor Kordey's "famous" issues of New X-Men in tortured posture. Pages seem to fade in and out of a richer, sooty look (and the character art seems to shift a little in style), suggesting that Alex Sinclair may have colored some parts directly from the pencils; the finished work ends up looking vaguely like a Hong Kong action comic with assorted panels painted for effect, but sloppier.



The troubles don't end there, however. One of the better ideas behind Batman and Robin as a series is that it takes the 'everything is canon' approach of Morrison's previous Batman run and applies it to a new Batman & Robin so as to strike out a fresh tone - a kind of fun-bloody romp through oddball villains and skewed team dynamics. The irony, naturally, is that Batman himself needed to be removed from the story in order for "Batman" to get on with forward-looking stories, as opposed to confronting his past all the time.

But Morrison tends to work best with grand summaries of superhero themes, which his doomy Bruce-as-Batman were inclined toward. Now that we're into the new Batman and the new Robin, we get... er, a story about whether Batman is dark enough and how really cruel superhero characters are kinda nasty, which is not only an old superhero concern -- even one of this issue's Batman-specific jokes on the 1-900 Kill Robin fiasco mostly reminded me of Rick Veitch's take in Brat Pack 19 years ago -- but something Morrison has done several times in the past; the struggle between creative forces of wise evolution and corroding grit was central to both Seven Soldiers and Final Crisis, just to name two big ones, and it's almost always been done with more depth and panache than present here. This series, however, keeps trying to be a sleek, fun superhero read, yet it remains so fixated on old themes it seems less light than shallow, as if Morrison was building up a Bat-apocalypse toward a new morning, then didn't quite know where to go once the sun was up.

The fact that the struggle between Dick Grayson and Jason Todd to follow Bruce Wayne fits neatly into this old scheme doesn't make the execution any more interesting; Batman's been around long enough that I'm well aware of how the shape of Bruce Wayne leaves a void that can't be filled. I mostly find myself thinking to Morrison's comments in interviews, about how Gotham City should have the most amazing arts scene in the world and stuff, and how nice it'd been to see those stories. This stuff - it's like build build build to Batman's death, then a new status quo that gets right on to build build build to Batman's return, since that's the implicit focus of a story like this. I know: big-ticket superhero comics in 2009. Maybe there's just nothing else to do. AWFUL.

***

PunisherMAX #1: In which Marvel finally kicks off its proper longform follow-up run to Garth Ennis' fine tenure on the Mature Readers Punisher book. And make no mistake - this may be a relaunch, and yes, it's sporting the silliest alternate spelling of a familiar brand since they started calling the devourer of worlds "Gah Lak Tus" in the Ultimate line, but this absolutely is a sequel to the Ennis run, which is paid all due specific homage via dialogue. So where does writer Jason Aaron take it? It's kind of hard to say; this is more of a prologue issue than anything, full of characters setting things up in between a few obligatory scenes of punishment. Pretty low key, as if it's just the next issue after Ennis left, and thus begging for a direct comparison between the writers' starting points.



Still, it's interesting to see how Aaron tries to set himself apart, despite the able-as-ever presence of artist Steve Dillon, a man not unfamiliar to Ennis' readers. There's no Frank Castle narration, for one thing, which tosses the narrative focus right over to the criminals; Ennis spent a lot of time with the supporting cast too, but he usually planted us inside Frank's head to an extent that everything we'd see almost seemed filtered. Aaron plays a bit with our distance from Frank, depicting him coldly as a torturer, and declining to even show most of this issue's big firefight.

On the other hand, I caught a few worthwhile similarities to Ennis' own debut MAX story, In the Beginning. There a bit more gore than usual, as if the series is again stretching out to enjoy the relative freedom of the Mature Readers designation. There's also an interest in exploring Marvel U characters: Microchip in Ennis' story, the Kingpin in Aaron's. It's mostly a hook to attract readers from the wider pool of Marvel interest, I suspect, and striking in being cast out again for the relaunch, particularly in that the MAX line hasn't actually used that technique all that much in its development. Aaron's take on the Kingpin is a good one so far, acknowledging the absurdity of the Master of All Crime type sitting in a tower by having it exist mostly as an idea for Frank Castle (always the MAX series' most unrealistic man) to pursue over the mundanity of a real, cunning Wilson Fisk in the realistic-save-for-the-Punisher MAX world. Makes sense that it starts out as chit-chat, then! GOOD.

***

Starstruck #3 (of 13): I've written about this series before, at least concerning its prior incarnations as an off-Broadway play, a Heavy Metal serial, a Marvel Graphic Novel, an Epic Comics series and an expanded, b&w Dark Horse series. This is IDW's new release, with Michael Wm. Kaluta's art somewhat reconfigured from the Dark Horse expansion, freshly recolored/colored-for-the-first-time by Lee Moyer. Various Charles Vess-inked back-up strips are included too, some of them previously unseen and some of them straight out of The Rocketeer Adventure Magazine. You'll note that the publisher is also slated to present a recolored edition of The Rocketeer itself pretty soon (colors by Laura Martin), albeit as a collected edition rather than a new pamphlet series.

In some ways, this expanded-and-expanded again Starstruck seems slightly perverse in pamphlet form. Its 14-t0-18-page bites of the 'main' story ensures that the detail-heavy plot moves at a stately pace; this issue is marked by the birth of one of the series' main characters, while another is still a little kid in the back-up material. Even if you didn't already know that Starstruck is an unfinished series -- and that this particular incarnation should approximate the run of the Dark Horse issues, which itself only made just past the start of the Epic issues, roughly 1/3 of the way into the intended megastory -- you'd probably still get the feeling that a lot more space will be demanded for the already pretty damn large cast to play out its space drama.



Yet Starstruck-the-pamphlet still seems oddly right, entirely because it's so nicely conceived (the editor is Scott Dunbier). It's no secret that the series has picked up a reputation for being 'difficult,' and almost everything in these $3.99 comic books seems primed to keep you oriented without holding your hand. Writer Elaine Lee provides new (in-character) introductions focused on the history of the series' universe, and encyclopedia entries keyed to each issue clarify exactly enough of the finer points before launching into additional digressions and odd jokes. Best of all, the story segments make great use of natural break points in Lee's fragmented narrative so you can linger on all those packed-in details. It works well enough that pages now getting their fourth English-language version give up new information, carefully shading Lee's vision of diverse femininity along the fringes of a future with more such peripheral room. VERY GOOD.

***

Hellboy: The Wild Hunt #8 (of 8): Quick quiz, what's Hellboy's main superpower? He's the best listener in the whole damn world!



Aw, that's just a little joke from a compulsive Mignolaverse patron; I buy Hellboy comics like Tucker buys Batman. And I think the going estimate is that Our Man has spent a solid 65-70% of his 44 issues so far listening to folk tales and personal histories and ill omens and such, usually before kicking something's ass. I've always felt that formula grew out of the strong appeal creator Mike Mignola's art had for so many readers - his characters have always looked so fine peeking out from opaque shadows that long stretches of mood-setting seemed workable, and then monsters! and fighting! - he could do that too.

Mignola has since stopped drawing the series (mostly), though his stories have begun pouring out through many Hellboy universe projects, a unique shared-universe situation for the front of Previews in that every book demands a fairly high level of visual quality; granted, having Dave Stewart color almost the whole line and keeping A-level talents like Guy Davis and Richard Corben in the pool is bound to make an impression, but even the smallest of Mignola's series -- and he has a writer's credit on almost everything, with Scott Allie as constant editor -- seem bound by a mandate for technical aptitude that keeps the qualitative average remarkably high. Some of these comics can get bland and formulaic, sure, but shockingly few of them are ever really awful, which stands in sharp contrast to most other genre comics labels around.

The main Hellboy series remains a little bit apart, though, in that it is still primarily a visual spectacle. Oh, there's a plot, characters - shit, I can't even keep track of all the characters anymore, but the funny part is I also never feel like I need to. The Hellboy backstory has gotten almost insanely complicated, but it inevitably winds up offering only more scenic routes to vivid sights and massive fights, not to mention near-comedic levels of portent, which I suppose will climax with something, eventually. As it is it's nearly a meta-commentary on the superhero propensity for perpetual anticipation of Earth-shaking events and bigger, badder threats, always transformed into the largely visual experience that Marvel and DC comics usually can't provide.



So here we've got the end of the new 'present day' Hellboy story, which has even more unique demands for an artist. Corben does a lot of work on Hellboy proper, say, but his past-tense stories allow for him to mostly do his own thing with Hellboy himself kept on-model. Duncan Fegredo, however, Mignola's most direct heir, is doing a genuinely eerie job of capturing Mignola's own cadence, the way he slices our perspective away to skulls on a shelf or a soaring bird; he does the heavy shadows too, but in his own way, and anyhow that was never all Mignola was about - his was a total vision on the page, always scanning the place for evocative images, sequence barely hanging on.

And despite all I've just said, Mignola's also about a bit more than just pretty pictures. This storyline is titled The Wild Hunt, which seems odd at first since the Hunt (for undead giants) ends in issue #2 and the story winds up building to yet more revelations about Hellboy's lineage... on his mom's side! But Mignola pulls a trick - the big unavoidable fight scene with the giants is cut to bits and then scattered through the rest of the story as flashbacks, all the better to hit on what has to rank as the most substantial bit of the title character's development since the 1990s: his realization that he really, truly, deeply enjoys having massive, violent fights, and that violence perhaps inexorably draws out the dark potential of his destiny as a son of Hell.

This is clever, and really kind of ballsy for a series so totally steeped in action as release; casting every ass kicked as one step closer to the throne of pandemonium has a way of signaling finality like nothing else for this series. Mignola then goes on to elaborate by cutting back constantly to the series' ex-elf shrunken giant warthog antagonist Gruagach, a hapless villain first introduced in 1996, doomed to start shit so much bigger than himself, his true origin told in a characteristic-to-the-series folk tale manner smoothed down to two and a half pages and hammer-blunt with fairy story cruelty, then his history with Hellboy summarized as a life-ruining encounter that clearly didn't mean so much to the guy talking with his fists; Hellboy's tough-guy line "Where's that baby?" is repeated so that it takes on a malevolent tone, which is surely the point.

It's true that this literary content probably didn't need eight issues of comics to go through, but the visual content feel like it did. Trees bursting into flame, spirit bodies constantly switching from fleshy to skeletal form, still-amazing page-to-page, panel-to-panel and in-panel contrasts in color - this is Hellboy's identity, and one that seems all the more assertive now that the basic, necessary parts of the plot are as liable for toying as the complicated decoration that is the title character's family saga and list of friends and foes. Who cares which magic sword he's drawn - how's he gonna use it now? Keep listening with your eyes. GOOD.

Labels: Jog

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Detective Comics #858

Here we have the fifth issue of the "Batwoman in..." iteration of this title, and the first chapter in a three-part Origin of Batwoman story. Writer Greg Rucka is on for the duration, as far as I know, but be aware that artist J.H. Williams III will be absent for a while following issue #860; Jock steps in as guest artist for issues #861 through #863, while #864 should see Cully Hamner, artist of the series' backup feature starring the Question, take that character up front while an unspecified artist (maybe Jock, maybe Williams) does a Batwoman backup. After that, issues #865-#869 should round out Williams' involvement with the series, god and schedule willing.

I don't know if Batwoman will stick around much after that, but I think Williams' departure might mark the 'end' of the run anyway for a lot of readers. Most eyes are on him right now as bringer of the book's identity, which isn't so common with superhero comics these days; even artists working in hypothetical collaboration with colorist Dave Stewart and letterer Todd Klein -- both surely on top tiers up front in Previews -- tend to register as secondary to writers. But Williams isn't a common superhero artist, and he seems to get less common with every new project.

I mean, go all the way back to Innovation's Hero Alliance Quarterly #2 in 1991 and sure, you'll find a novice artist, inked by one Ray Kryssing, parsing a pretty traditional superhero short concluding in a pretty traditional superhero fight, commonly awkward as first-time pencillers are.



From our comfy seats 18 years later, sorting through our official J.H. Williams III longboxes, maybe we might say up front that plain superhero action doesn't fit him well. That's totally flawed reasoning -- how many first-time superhero artists look good at all? -- though for some reason, maybe Chuck Dixon's scripting or the presence of toner Barb Kaalberg, or just the content, Williams seems more apparently suited to drawing NOW Comics' The Twilight Zone #4 in 1992, a few months later.



Ha ha, the first use of multiple art styles on one page! You wouldn't guess at the time what that kids' drawing anticipates. You could guess that Williams' shadowed, nervous characters would be suited to more explicit thrills, and you'd be right. Go forward, and you'll see him become a grounded horror artist, with an Eternity-published, Full Moon-approved Demonic Toys miniseries in 1992, drawn with Larry Welch and inked in part by Dave Lanphear.



And if that's a little slick for you, 1993 brought an abortice project at Faust homebase Rebel Studios: creator/writer Michael Christopher House's Empires of Night, only one issue published (along with a short story in Raw Media Mags #4), with Williams providing pencils and inks himself.



By 1995, Williams had broken in to DC, following Michael Avon Oeming as regular penciller on the American publisher's ill-fated domestic edition of Judge Dredd. He also did some scattered Milestone Media work, most prominently a miniseries starring an ultraviolent supporting character - Deathwish. It was an odd project, gun-toting costumed vigilante content subsumed into writer Adam Blaustein's bloody, bombastic tale of art and murder and transsexuality; such issues didn't start with Batwoman, you know. Williams began to transform, even beyond the obvious effect of teaming with inker Jimmy Palmiotti -- a semi-regular Williams cohort in the mid-'90s -- and painter J. Brown; his layouts began to take obscure yet oddly fitting forms.



Horror remained in his blood. It's easy to forget, but he seemed to be the Horror Guy. When he drew a story in the Annual-but-we're-not-calling-it-that Wolverine '95, the X-Men went to hell. Thought they didn't it that either.



Of the three inkers assigned to that story, one was Mick Gray. He and Williams were soon a devoted visual team. By 1996, they were taking on a fill-in issue of Batman (#526), a fine, dark superhero for dark, developing artists.



You can see how sturdy the figure work has gotten. You can sense how Williams & Gray would soon transition out of terror-type works into a broader space of moody superheroics. Williams' layouts would eventually become more decorative. But one final element needed to be firmly established, and I place its full arrival at the release of The Flash Annual #9, later in '96.



It's not unlike that kid's scribble six pictures up and four years prior - an item in a story, depicted as having different visual properties than the story itself. But here the emphasis is on total contrast: light with dark, simple figures with heavy ones. Williams was less than five years into his professional career, and there was the first real sign of a chameleon's trait. From there you can fill in the next 13 years, Chase and Promethea, Gray's departure and Williams' decision to only ink himself, Seven Soldiers and Desolation Jones. I haven't been close to comprehensive here, but the highlights add up, taking us to where Williams is now: the superhero artist as high goddamn formalist.


(From Detective Comics #854; Batwoman pt. 1)

You see, somewhere along the line, a ways after the turn of the millenium, Williams' interest in design and his aptitude for adopting wildly varied visual styles evolved into a detailed usage of elements of the comics form, where his storytelling began resisting the value of simple, efficient guidance of the reader from one panel to another as an ultimate goal. His page layouts and panel innards began to draw specific attention to themselves, in that they took on specially and intuitively coded meanings, or violating the steadiness of tone typically demanded by 'realist' superhero art.

Williams's figures remain heavily realist, granted, but you can't quite say that of his art - look at the huge floodlight behind Batwoman in the top-most panel above. Look at how her skin is so white that her body is nearly a light source. Look at how the Bat-symbol that is the bottom-most panel doubles at Batman's POV, upsetting her by literally poking down at her head. Any one of these techniques could slip in and be welcomed in most realist-styled superhero comics, but all of them together upset reality itself. And Williams is just getting started.


(from Detective Comics #857; Batwoman pt. 4)

This is a fight scene. One where the center figures don't actually move - a typical trap for realist superhero artists is leaving their detailed (perhaps photo-referenced) characters posed instead of moving in fights. Williams steps around this by stepping around the figures, trapping the action inside red bolts of PAIN. But there's more; remember the brightness of Batwoman, the backing floodlight and white skin. By this point of the story, Williams' visuals have established that Kate Kane is playing a role, that becoming Batwoman changes her.

We know, because Williams simply changes his art, so that bright, simply laid out domestic scenes of Kate out of costume contrast wildly with the sprawling layouts and burnished colors of her superhero life, prone to glowing red as markers of thrilling, visceral violence, a real horror idea first steadily used in Desolation Jones. Moreover, Williams shows one style bleeding into another at times, so that stepping into the superhero zone melts away one world, and that aspects of that superhero 'world' -- its special, unique art style -- can silently comment on the character's state of mind merely by appearing.

In this way, Williams' art tells a story in tandem with but also independent of Rucka's words. It's free to run ahead of the plot, giving away secrets or even undercutting the dialogue for a deeper total effect. To say that Williams' art is merely good-looking or well-designed is to deny how truly unique it is, not so much inhabiting narrative space as invading it, pushing the words around, probably, I expect, with Rucka's assent - it's easy to attribute the words of dialogue to Rucka, and the individual visual elements to Williams, but surely the approach to individual scenes comes partially from both of them, the writer discussing the art and the artist directing the writing. It's easy to credit the whole visual display to Williams (and Stewart, and Klein), but reality likely isn't so simple.


(from Detective Comics #854; Batwoman pt. 1)

This is the tidy, domestic style, albeit with Kate's & her dad's psychological trauma lurking behind them. The splotchy watercolor effect becomes very important to the visuals; here in the first issue it's 'defined' as anxiety and inner hurt. Now go back up one image: it's soaked into the background of the fight. Back up another: it's all over, mostly in the center panels, most obviously around Kate as she notices Batman is looking at her, and then around Batman, though half-transitioned into a proper background of overcast Gotham skies. It's all over, and it all stems from that image in the center of the page just above, and this issue is where we find out what it all means.

Which isn't to say the issue's composed in that style. Oh no, that'd be too simple. I'm gonna start spoiling the plot now, by the way.


(from Detective Comics #858; Batwoman pt. 5, which is the present comic I'm reviewing now, not that I'd blame you for losing track, I mean how many pictures is this? 12?)

Here's lil' Kate and her twin sister Beth, twenty or so years ago. Crisp coloring -- and really, Dave Stewart is doing top-notch work on this series every issue -- not totally unlike the domestic scenes set in Kate's present. But there's something about this character art. Something familiar... like another Batman book... from twenty or so years ago...


(from Batman: Year One)

Oh shit, it's David Mazzucchelli! My god, Williams must have found him at a rare con appearance or talk and touched his exposed skin and took his power! I wonder if he'll ever get to kiss Gambit? Hang on, Batman's Marvel, right?

No, I checked. That answer's no. Maybe I need a more detailed refresher here.


(from Detective Comics #855; Batwoman pt. 2... the story isn't called "Batwoman," btw, I'm just trying to put the whole run in sequence)

The bright young thing above is, apparently, Kate's sister Beth, as the Religion 'o Crime villain person "Alice." Or, that's what she told her in issue #857. I believe her, since the comic's visual storytelling, in retrospect, has been hinting at this for a while. This is a double-page spread detail, in which Kate's "Alfred" -- her military dad -- comes to her rescue. Note the red-border pain box on the far left, marking a point of foot-to-gun impact. Now see how the same pain box appears on the far right, apparently to highlight Alice's vision for no reason. This is a hint, a double meaning; she's pained to look at this man, because this is where she realizes it's her father.


(from Detective Comics #857; Batwoman pt. 4)

Here we are at the top of last issue, after Alice has kidnapped hers and Kate's father. Right on the first page (and on the cover, actually), Williams' layout reveals that the two are twins. We don't know until this issue that Kate has an actual twin sister, so the visuals are free to spoil while only seeming to trigger more basic concerns for duality - Alice is a painted Joker to Batwoman's Batman, both with white skin in the classic two-sides-of-one-coin conception. While Kate prefers pants and suits and 'masculine' clothes, Beth is almost a parody of frilly femininity. The dualism motif continues throughout the issue, until a segue at the end.


(Id.)

All tone is ripped from the image as Batwoman processes Alice's revelation of their true relationship. Next issue, this issue:



A reversal, as the b&w soccer ball comes toward lil' Kate, in her own memories.



It looks like Beth has taken after her mom, given her Alice persona's hair. Kate has short red hair when grown, like her dad. The body language of those kids is great; Williams is no simple impersonator, even leaving aside his own statements that Alex Toth went into this look along with Mazzucchelli. His craft is on high enough a level that he can take on a total visual persona, and work it smoothly into the series' overall visual display.

For example, as I mentioned above, the 'flashback' domestic scenes share various properties with the 'present' such scenes: clean, bright colors, placid panel layouts, etc. Now here's another part of this issue's flashback.



The visual difference between this and the image above it is obvious; the storytelling difference is that Kate isn't actually remembering this part, it's her impression of what her father was doing when she was a child, a memory of a memory. So, we get this excellent patriotic background and a bright-colored, heavy detailed visual display (just look at all the work in those shadows! that grass!), somewhere between the cleanness of Kate's adult life and the drama of her superhero life, well-organized panels simply tilted to the side. It's a continuum Williams has established, built up over close to 100 pages now, broad enough to accommodate semi-specific homage while maintaining a keen logic whereby every aspect of the page -- line, panel, color -- has a metaphoric charge that can be read and felt, and extrapolated from.

Or, to give a recent example, it's essentially what David Mazzucchelli does in Asterios Polyp. Like Williams, Mazzucchelli began in comics as an odd duck stylist staking a claim on the genre landscape. He matured, attained some mastery, and then became interested in elements of form as wittily literalized narrative items. For Mazzucchelli, though, the lattermost only happened after he departed from genre comics. I can imagine Williams vanishing one day too, only to return years later with a fat book of comics all his own. For now, however, Williams' own formalism is tethered to 'realist' interests, which include realistic figure drawing and reactions to (or subversions of) realism itself. It's telling that his Mazzucchelli style is kept the most distant from the story's living present, full of weighty, muscled people.


(from Daredevil: Born Aga... wait... no, from Asterios Polyp)

Mazzucchelli himself, meanwhile, has tapped into stripped-down cartooning -- and he's doing all the letters and colors and writing himself -- so his hand is more free. An entire world of allusion looks ready for access, anything, anything capable of being visualized. Still, this approach is not reserved for literary comics, and its study needn't be restricted to non-genre works. Even as writer-driven a type of funnybook as today's superhero comic can address the form, and wring psychological depth and emotional power from the stuff of the page. That this most venerable DC title hews close enough to expected realist superhero visuals cannot prevent it from wielding the make-up of those visuals in a self-conscious, clever manner.

Which then raises the inevitable question: to what end? We're not talking abstract comics here. There is a minority opinion as to Mazzucchelli's comic, a dissent, holding that it's little more than busy prettifying of a banal, shallow story, the most ado ever about Doc Hollywood or Pixar's Cars, a dazzling display of craft that leaves hapless critics swooning from such sheer fucking bravura, cataloging every fresh swoop of the line or canny citation while failing to evaluate whether it adds up to anything soulful, or truly demanding or insightful, or really just damn anything beyond the egotism of aptitude just recited.

The key, I think, is in the reader's own willingness to draw pleasure from formal traits, to soak in the metaphoric power these books deal in, as related to their plots, to see the shades of character revealed not through psychological inquiry or even mere statement, but through the self-evident interrelation of elements of comics, icons against icons on a more basic level, defined and electrified and set loose among the icons-as-people that populate our picture stories. I've never found Chris Ware to be chilly either, cloudy as that makes the issue, I guess.


(I suppose you're wondering about the backup story, huh? The Question? Its own first storyline ended this issue, and nobody has mentioned it all that much. Unfortunately, there just isn't much to say - as with every chapter beyond the first, this one sees Montoya evade a fix she's gotten into and investigate a location, this one bearing a plot climax and an opportunity for hero to vanish before the happy supporting characters can thank her. It's total superhero detective boilerplate, and while Rucka & Hamner don't do anything particularly wrong, there's nothing to distinguish it from hundreds of similar stories sitting around in just the past 800+ issues of Detective to say nothing of superhero history itself.)

Of course, none of that's to say Asterios Polyp and Detective Comics succeed in equal measures. Mazzucchelli's book leans very heavily on visual traits, taking its story into its heart like a power core, which gets its place and figures and letters and everything contorting to marvellous effect. Detective Comics actually promotes a more even balance between writing and art. But that's the problem.

I like the image just above. That's in the middle of this issue, a detail from the second of two double-page spreads that cuts Kate's flashback in half. It neatly allegorizes the growing break between Kate's private life and her Batwoman performance - Williams even sets up the bright 'domestic' scenes in square television screens that mock the staid, squares 'n rectangles layouts of those portions of the series. Kate is growing apart from that now, the vivid detail of her Batwoman body now making her seem especially hurt and tired, performing her detective work in a detective comic.

Yet there's no escaping that this remains a deeply typical superhero detective story, one with the tremendous benefit of such visual inspiration running along side it, but when you really look hard, it often only comments on Kate Kane's psychology, or anticipates some typical everything-in-its-place origin story twists, or plays with a Batman/Joker duality Alan Moore's had sitting in the freezer since the twilight of the Reagan administration.

Rucka is a skilled writer, but so far here he's neither deep nor subtle; the cut off point for the first half of this issue's flashbacks is no less than the doomed Kane twins and promising they'll always be together, accompanied by a dramatic fade to white (which could be Williams, mind you). As the obligatory tragedy that will set Kate on the winding path to superherodom draws near, irony is squeezed out as the girls misbehave, only for their demands to lead their poor mother right into danger, and pathos. Never mind the general three-act arc of the story, introducing a villain with a secret connection to the hero (pts. 1-4), leading into the revelation of the painful secret origin (pts. 5-7) and probably, I'd guess, culminating in some clash that sets up a status quo while not entirely foreclosing on future developments in the same vein (pts. 8-12, not counting the Jock and Hamner stuff).

Because the writing and the art run close, one can't pass the other by much, and to me there's always some dissatisfaction. I'd still call it GOOD, though folks more tolerant than me of some blunt, familiar genre mechanics will rank it higher, I'm sure. And this grade tries me, because seeing J.H. Williams III & co. at work in this way assures I'll look to them in the future, which I can't say of everyone. Mazzucchelli too, obviously.


(just guess, huh?)

The two becoming one, the basic frameworks, the archetypes among archetypes becoming something greater and more shaded or sturdier through communication, feeding on each other's energy, enjoying one another's heat. Bits of form becoming fuller, getting -- eek! -- more realistic as characrers. You can go far with this.

And as for Kate Kane.



I don't know if you can even see it on the screen. It's better on paper. It's the last panel in the comic. She's just seen some bad stuff. Her white skin is no longer pure. In her arms, the watercolor splotching is present, very slightly. She's down the path of transformation just a tiny bit, that which will transform and delight her, but it's born from pain. The motif gains in meaning. No words are spoken. Her eyes tell a story, but there's more to a panel than that. Some artists know.

Labels: Jog

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Grandville



***

[FEDERAL DISCLOSURE NOTICE: It is with great pride and not inconsiderable pleasure that I hereby certify to having procured the consumer product applicable to the consumer product functionality report ("review") presented hereafter through a genuine and recognized commercial exchange of the common merchant-consumer practice, facilitated by monies obtained via the efforts of mine own labor, or, to seek the recourse of metaphor, that dolorous transubstantiation of sweat and blood into the liquidity which itself ferries the oxygen of the body capitalism. The reader is hereby assured that my subsequent analysis of said consumer product's satisfactory or unsatisfactory operation is free of that influence or partiality, however potential, as might be assumed from incidental exposure to the siren's call, again metaphorical, of similarly conceived consumer products provided sans economic consideration ("review copies"), an effect counteracted in affixing the present seal of due consideration duly conveyed. By way of further disclosure, the reader is cautioned that the below analysis was, regrettably, not composed in isolation of, non-exclusively: marketing efforts related to the consumer product; offhanded opinions and hearsay testimonials by persons rhetorically and/or physically conjoined to the consumer product or its development; unrelated affairs and/or communicable diseases and/or weather conditions and/or nightmares prevalent to my daily life; alcohol; and, in light of the specific makeup of the consumer product, the pernicious and relentless lobbying efforts of the European Congress of Liberated Anthropomorphics and Independent Rascals ("ECLAIR"). By way of further disclosure, the reader is advised that the following text was composed in large part by my unpaid assistants, Dennis and Maribelle, as has been a significant majority ("all") of my writing of the prior financial quarter. By way of further disclosure, I am not engaged in sexual relations with Dennis and/or Maribelle, whom, in good faith satisfaction of understood curiosity, are both nominally above the age of majority, by virtue of my firm belief in a respectful and healthful work environment, however unpaid, although, incidentally, I do suspect Dennis and Maribelle are engaged in sexual relations with each other, as evidenced by their bold, shimmering teenage eyes, unashamed, virile, fertile, which I am wont to gaze into, albeit covertly, following those hard days of labor which happily result in uncompromised analyses of consumer products, one example of which is imminent. Should the reader remain unconvinced of the impartial and dispassionate fibre of this analysis, she or he is gladly referred to a print-format evaluative body, august and trustworthy so as to be exempt from necessary oversight, such as Wizard Magazine.]

***

Grandville is a comic about funny animals that have adventures and shoot things.



Well, all right, it's not just that.

This is actually a pretty tough book to write about, in that much of its appeal is tucked away in not only how the story itself plays out, but how its packaging and marketing and author's comments have been underplaying exactly what the bloody thing is. And I mean bloody - I was pretty startled by how violent a comic this was, particularly given how everything I'd heard about it emphasized the adventuresome funny animal aspect of the work. Although I suppose that's one aspect of the book connecting it to prior works by that ever-restless living legend of British comics, Bryan Talbot: few seemed to know what the hell 2007's Alice in Sunderland even was before reactions started trickling in, and 2008's Metronome didn't even carry Talbot's name upon its initial release. Expect the unexpected, eh?

So let me say this up front, before I start giving the game away: Grandville, in spite of its odd disposition, is probably the most straightforward action-adventure book Talbot has ever produced, although it's still best taken by those who felt what Blacksad really needed was steampunk and 9/11. See what I mean?



Now, the cover art above doesn't lie or anything, no. This is indeed a "scientific-romance thriller" starring Detective-Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard, a hulking b&w badger with the brains of Sherlock Holmes and the drive of Jack Bauer, knocking the provincial coppers dead in the Socialist Republic of Britain, until a strange "suicide" case sends him and his nattily-dressed rodent adjunct Ratzi off to Grandville, aka Paris, the biggest city in a world 200 years past the Napoleonic War, in which the French Empire conquered all of Europe. It's only been 23 years since Britain was liberated from French rule -- a giant bridge still connects it to its former ruling power -- and two years after the terrible September day when British anarchists flew a dirigible into Grandville's Robida Tower, although LeBrock doesn't think all the pieces add up.

But on Talbot's list of influences (helpfully provided on-page), below caricaturist J.J. Grandville and illustrator Albert Robida, Frenchmen both, their impact already evident on (respectively) the characters and setting of the work, is filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. As the story plays out, it becomes clear that he's not just there due to the Mexican standoff panel or the big ear cutting bit -- although all of that's in here too, post-9/11 allegorical funny animal steampunk style -- but also for the artist's love of reference. Talbot himself headed the book's design, in homage to the European children's books of years ago, and there's a distinct mid-20th century Franco-Belgian adventure comic decoration to the innards, extended (unnamed) Spirou cameo included.

Several art and illustration history nods crop up as well, but it seems mainly from the children's works that Talbot draws his fanciful take on comics sci-fi, citing later robot concepts and furry characters -- Omaha the Cat Dancer!! -- to establish a continuum that might lead to his violent, conspiratorial characters. Not that they're perfectly serious about their position; in the good Tarantino style, Talbot works in vivified archetypes played straight in the way that can only quite be done in an absurd universe that supports them. As a result, DI LeBrock is never is never short of opportunities to haughtily inform others of his superior mind, nor does it seem at all odd when a stimulating evening of reading a book on Vidocq while pumping iron with huge dumbbells carried at all times in his travelling case is interrupted by a summons to a comely lady badger's boudoir, at which point Talbot threatens to sail the book down the waterfall of full-blown furry action, only to switch away to an exterior and leave the reader with the exhilaration of, in the language of Herzog, being shot at unsuccessfully.

And, you know: violence, shadows, secrets. It gets droll, leaving it up to the reader to take what they want from a stone-faced dramatic moment in which Tintin's own Snowy relates through an opium haze the sad tale of the day his life was ruined by witnessing a murder.



Yet, to what end is all this done? Kids' characters put in a booming, bleeding political caper? LeBrock torturing his funny animal fellows, at one point cracking a (ha ha) froggy's ribs until he expires, following up with the line "Damn. He's croaked"? The allegory is obvious: Grandville may be geographically French, but it's really American, playing up the wonder and size of a U.S. population center while toying with oft-voiced American perceptions of Britain as 'socialist' with a dangerous connotation. That's the most timely piece of satire, really: the rest of it is a simple enough embracing of Truther nonsense for genre comic plot fodder -- and I'm okay with that; it's certainly been the best stuff to come out of Garth Ennis on The Boys -- with a big ol' dollop of Bush administration revenge impulse.

I'm not conducting a close reading here, by the way. Part of the climax has Our Man struggling with Donald Rumsfeld as a muscular rhinoceros onboard a robot-piloted flying machine.

This doesn't automatically lend itself to a tremendous amount of depth, frankly, and the somewhat stale, vengeful nature of Talbot's plot leaves it teetering on the edge of embarrassing-silly instead of fun-silly. The artist isn't as adept with his genre/tonal mixes as Tarantino, often leaning on the simple dissonance between his animal characters and their activities for kick, which admittedly has its effect, given the wide, often placid badger eyes of DI LeBrock, humans drawn in a serviceable ligne claire approach while the critters remain very much Talbot's, his coloring (mostly with flats by Jordan Smith) reminiscent of 1999's Heart of Empire look with Angus McKie, if shinier and more overtly digital.



Moreover, while some readers might accuse Talbot of trafficking in tired old children's characters-gone-grim 'n gritty shocks for the purposes of a bemused, not-terribly-shaded conspiracy thriller cum revenge fantasy on America's expired Presidential administration, there's a virtue, I think, to the build of the damn thing. I mean that both in terms of concept and culmination. Concept in that this is, at its center, by its design, a type of children's fantasy, which perhaps encourages a sort of simplistic approach as catharsis, now for an adult robbed of much sense of overt justice in the world, as Talbot seems to feel. Culmination in that Talbot's execution piles killing atop killing, violence upon violence, until -- shades of Inglourious Basterds, which I doubt the artist had time to see -- until patches of the fantasy start to go rotton on even LeBrock, haunted eyes gazing on a real terrorist's fire.

That too is nothing fresh -- a genre piece chasing its tail -- yet Talbot's basic skill with comics storytelling affords eveything a real joy of tale-telling: the pace is quick, the settings are often witty, and I can't deny the novelty of a miniature Iron Giant repurposed as a heroic suicide bomber. It's a master's fancy, this, and Talbot is already at work on a second volume, which will hopefully join Detective-Inspector LeBrock's search for the Prime Minister's longform birth certificate. I'm GOOD with that.

Labels: Jog

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(Being part 1 of 2 in a series; part 2 is here)

***

What is manga?


(from Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga; art by Koji Aihara & Kentaro Takekuma)

Japanese comics, right? Maybe a collection of recognizable icons - big eyes, speed lines, etc. Flowers in the background, cartoony art. Except when it's not.

How about format? It's dozens of little books on the shelves of Borders. Naruto. Nana. Death Note. Pluto. A Drifting Life. A different world, an alternate reality - a foreign industry where comics are more popular and more prolific, escapism of an extra-narrative type. More comics for women, more comics for kids, more comics, beholden to their own traditions and biases, maybe intimidating, maybe interesting. Maybe a precognition, if you're feeling irrational: a new funnybook behavior, an example for America or insert-your-nation-here to follow. Or at least a steady-promised stream of comics of a type becoming cozy. Manga has fit right in for a while now, looking broadly at books.

But that's the present and the future. What about the past? What about manga the way it used to be taken in North America, the answer to the very same question if asked a quarter of a century ago. What is manga?

Well, there's one easy response:



Yeah, that's it! Says so right up top! Manga, objectively, is a robot woman vamping in the sunrise while casually failing to grit her teeth. A red cocktail dress is hiked up over her hips so as to model the stainless steel panties that are apparently welded to her loins. An arrow has been discreetly cast onto her left leg, so as to assist the confused or inexperienced viewer. Her upper body is an official selection of the Venice Film Festival, and her thin visor evokes an even hotter iteration of Robocop. She was there first, though. She's why law enforcement needed a future. Vice law, for a sexy future. There's an arrow.

As is sometimes his way, the artist -- famed illustrator Hajime Sorayama -- appears to be joking around. A pin-up model's body is matched with a distinctly inhuman face, almost bemused with how the viewer must be eyeing her. This isn't his flesh-and-steel Gynoid work, it's all gloss and chill; pin-ups can be son unrealistic, and this one makes it obvious. There's no lock on that chastity belt - that's why she's showing it off, as a joke. The punchline is: "you cannot access the robo-booty, hu-man."

Er, manga!



This is on the back cover. Manga, you see, is a book: a perfect bound, magazine-sized softcover. Its one-word title is the first part of its explanation for itself, and the above image is literally all the rest; no cover price is provided. It's 88 pages, in b&w and color. Ten artists are showcased, with absolutely no further explanation provided. Just their names. There isn't even a date of publication; in the Jason Thompson-edited Manga: The Complete Guide, veteran editor Carl Gustav Horn narrows the possibilities to anywhere from late 1980 to 1982, though I've seen sources online placing it as late as '84. Horn also provides the ISBN for easier searching -- 4-946427-01-5 -- and cites one of his sources as Mike Friedrich, editor & publisher of the famed "ground level" comics anthology Star*Reach, one of the noteworthy bridge works between the old underground funnies and the 'mainstream' of the mid-to-late-'70s.

Friedrich also served as Manga's consulting editor, even though it was a Japanese-published book, from "Metro Scope Co., Ltd." of Tokyo. There was a Japanese editor, of whom more will be said later. It was still intended for American readers (despite a Japanese release that charmingly played peek-a-boo with the cover art), however, and I suspect Friedrich's participation might have been due to his yet earlier role in bringing Japanese comics to North American readers, which I'll get into later. Comics writers such as Larry Hama and Steven Grant were brought on board as "adapters" to work the scripts into fit English. Connections in the rapidly-growing Direct Market were presumably sought, although I don't have the slightest idea who carried the damned thing. "Damned" is a most appropriate word.

And, crucially, though it has nothing to do with the book directly, though it seems to fly in the very face of that back cover statement of Executive Managing Director Tadashi Ookawara (of whom I can locate no record whatsoever of subsequent involvement in manga in North America) that this hand-selected "reflection of Japanese society" was purposed "to give the non-Japanese reading public a visual taste of Japan and the creative talents that exist here" and maybe even "boost the cultural understand [sic] in the west about Japan" - in spite of all that, cover artist Sorayama provided a rather famous image for that very important 'bridge' comic, Heavy Metal, in late 1980.



The timing couldn't have been more perfect. The implications will soon become clear. Manga isn't what it used to be, but that old, obscure place, that 1980-84 says a lot about Japan and America, and Japan's view of America, and which particular aspects of Japan should best be reflected in America's direction through these crazy mirror things called comics.

So let me modify our first question.

***

What Was Manga?

***

I. THEY SAY HE GOT JEDI FROM JIDAIGEKI

The very first story in Manga-the-anthology is by probably the most experienced and acclaimed of the artists roped in with the project: Hiroshi Hirata.



Sure: there's worse ways to start an anthology. I think this is how Kramers Ergot 1 kicked off. Ben Jones, how you've changed.

And it makes perfect sense to get those swords swingin' and helmets clashing as fast as bloody (and bloodily) possible in a book of this type, because Japanese period pieces have proven so frequently successful in the West, and also as unusually fertile ground for cultural influence. The Magnificent Seven from Seven Samurai; bits of Star Wars from The Hidden Fortress. From Le Samouraï to Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Comics would be no different; around the arrival of Manga, one of the most popular artists in the field was already flaunting his Japanese influence in an extremely prominent manner.


(from Ronin; drawings by Frank Miller, color by Lynn Varley)

In 1983, Frank Miller began serialization of his miniseries Ronin at DC; the influence of the aforementioned films of Akira Kurosawa and the samurai comics art of Goseki Kojima was noted, though Kojima's and writer Kazuo Koike's seminal Lone Wolf and Cub wouldn't see release in North America until 1987, in pamphlet form despite its 28-volume length. Miller provided cover art, an introduction and miscellaneous seals of approval as if to cement the work's value for the skeptics. That was a big year, '87 - the same month that served up First Comics' release of the Koike/Kojima manga saw the publishing debut of the mighty VIZ, then in association with Eclipse Comics, armed with their own damn swordfight manga, The Legend of Kamui, from genre godhead Sanpei Shirato.

It's easier now to appreciate the place of these artists in the greater history of manga. Both Kojima and Shirato were noteworthy practitioners of gekiga, the "dramatic pictures" cooked up by artists who wanted the postwar "whimsical pictures" of Osamu Tezuka to grow up with them. Shirato in particular proved to be a major figure, his popular Marxism-informed ninja sagas providing a valuable popular hook (and even the title) for the famous 'alternative' manga anthology Garo. Kojima likewise became known for intense period work, the 'jidaigeki' of cinema, novels and theater perhaps becoming jidaigekiga, which might not be a real word, I admit. But back then, artists made it up as they went along, like Lone Wolf writer Koike, who advocated creating complex characters as paramount to comics writing, enough so that stories could often just happen.


(from Samurai Executioner; art by Goseki Kojima)

It's ironic, then, that Hirata arrived in North America first. On first glance his work might seem more appealing than Kojima's, with muscular, detailed figures ripping across mighty panels hosed with testosterone and whisked with manly tears. Even the MAD Magazine-style "we're not a comic oh no sir, those are for babies" robot typeset lettering can't detract much from the rippling power of Hirata's compositions, professionally engineered to drive a reader wild with appreciation for these impossible deeds of awesome he-man samurai gods.



That Ralph Steadman-ish lettering above is there to approximate a specific flourish of Hirata's: rendering the most crucial of his characters' titanic exclamations and/or blood oaths in rich, classical calligraphy. When Dark Horse set about translating Hirata's Satsuma Gishiden (1977-82) in 2006, it opted for the unique option of subtitling those whopping images, so vital to Hirata's style. So firm in the historical period. Same thing.


(from Satsuma Gishiden; art by Hiroshi Hirata)

Yet that five-book series remains the only other 'pure' Hirata work released in English -- he also provided the art for a 1987 (that year again!) East-West project Samurai, Son of Death (Eclipse Graphic Novel No. 14), written by Sharman DiVono and lettered by Stan Sakai -- and it sold poorly enough that Dark Horse pulled the plug after vol. 3.

Part of that failure, I expect, is due to Hirata's writing. Very little of Shirato's work has been made available in English-speaking environs environs either -- VIZ has two out-of-print volumes of The Legend of Kamui floating around, although the old Eclipse pamphlets go a bit further along than those collections -- but what's available belies an instinct for tucking the political/philosophical content into a sugar cube of rip-snortin' ninja action. And Kojima, for his many North American-released work, always had Koike, who's never encountered a crackpot digression or sensational plot twist or perverse character wrinkle he wouldn't embrace.

Hirata, in comparison, and admittedly going by what's available, is a truly ponderous writer, offsetting the over-the-top fury of his combat scenes with long historical explanations and almost compulsively detailed depictions of political intrigue. Following their introductions his characters rarely waver from their place on his most-to-least scale of masculine honor, positions set by electric words and blood drawn for ritual or warfare, the lifeforce of Old Times.

His contribution to Manga is self-contained and quintessential (as far as that goes, given how little of his work is available), focusing on two friends ordered to duel to the death at the pleasure of a warlord; the act will both reveal the greater fighter and seal his devotion to unquestioning obedience. Yet one of the men hesitates, and the other slices off his arm, after which the warlord allows both of them to serve as his personal guard.

But alas, years later an arrow plunges into the warlord's eye. In shame, the one-armed man jabs his own eye out, yet the warlord is unmoved, ordering the man's still-whole friend to kill him. It is only then that the unmolested man reveals that, in sorrow for never hesitating in that terrible duel, he urged the warlord to allow his maimed compatriot to serve. Incensed, the proud one-armed, one-eyed fighter declares that friendship is alien to the warrior's creed, and that they must duel again, beyond hesitation or pity! In a sickly whirlwind of skin and steel, the samurai collide in a for-the-books bonanza of dismemberment that oh, dear readers, leaves them literally torn to pieces, each man killed by the other's hand!!



And if you're thinking, "hmm, those wives don't look all that upset over the carnage up in panel #1, notwithstanding the caption to their immediate right," know that such things are really the point of Hirata's manga. The violence of those times was terrible, and modern society has its perks, yes, but boy - all that bleeding man honor was goddamned amazing, you've gotta give it up. The fans, revered author and code of honor devotee Yukio Mishima among them - they knew. And it traveled. Except when it didn't.

II. ARCHIE GOODWIN IS A SUGAR MERCHANT OF LICORICE LIES

It likely wasn't just Hirata's intent immersion in Sengoku overload that did in his American prospects, however, ironic as it might be to witness a body of art spoiled in its crossover potential as a historical work for being too steeped in history. No, there's also the simpler fact that 'manga' in 2006 was very different from the exotic and pliable concept of the early '80s. Kojima & Koike continued to sell, having been established for years, but the wildcard macho art of Hirata didn't look a damn thing like One Piece or Fruits Basket, and it didn't have a scrap of the art comics cache necessary to survive outside the 21st century manga bubble. For the older, harsher works, the Satsuma Gishidens drawn in the late '70s, there is little hope.

Ah, but with Manga, anything was possible! A "reflection of Japanese society," remember! Why, I don't see any language promising coverage for all of society, do you? It could be anything anyone wanted, a whole visual culture shifted just a step or two to one side, for the purposes of landing the work on foreign soil. Samurai would work then; everyone knows about them, and Hirata has a good, strong visual style. Appealing. Realist, and thereby less likely to seem weird or confusing to the untapped readership.

There were a few alternative perspectives around, mind you. The Winter 1980 issue of Epic Illustrated -- issue #4, the last quarterly edition -- featured an illustrated profile of the great Shotaro Ishinomori, written by Gene Pelc and the magazine's editorial director, Archie Goodwin. Ishimori was a great figure in boys' manga history, creating the famed Cyborg 009 series in 1963 and designing the beloved tokusatsu television hero Kamen Rider in 1971. His art beamed with all the popular style of the time.


(from Epic Illustrated #4; art by Shotaro Ishinomori)

Which is to say, you can draw a rather short, straight line from Ishinomori to Osamu Tezuka; the former even assisted on the latter's Astro Boy. Such work is closer to the source of postwar manga, the status quo that gekiga developed to answer.

And it wasn't just fun frolics for boys that were drawn in the manner - Keiji Nakazawa's semi-autobiographical Barefoot Gen, a saga of a young survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, can be startling in how firmly it's planted in the male youth tradition of shōnen manga, loud and bright and cartooned. A few volumes were nonetheless published in the early '80s, clearly in regard for its weighty subject matter, and an excerpt appeared in Frederik L. Schodt's landmark 1983 study Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics.


(from Barefoot Gen, as excerpted in Manga! Manga! The Art of Japanese comics; art by Keiji Nakazawa)

Schodt made note of Manga-the-anthology in his book as "carefully edited," which might carry a double meaning depending on how you take 'editing.' In his 1996 follow-up, Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga, he makes reference to the early '80s manga-in-English mini-proliferation of, among short stories, English-learning aids and anime tie-ins, "vanity press" books "by Japanese artists hungry for international attention." One is reminded of Lead Publishing's ill-fated 1986-87 attempt to break Takao Saito's Golgo 13 into the North American market by sheer force of will and glossy production values, but Schodt might as well be referring to Manga.

But for a vanity tome, they did have some keen presentational ideas. Remember that Heavy Metal cover above? Same guy that did the cover for Manga? The years just about match up so that the connection might not be a coincidence. Indeed, Carl Horn mentions in the Thompson book that Manga gives off an impression not unlike that of Heavy Metal; I agree, and would actually go farther to speculate that the book -- while not a magazine, just sized like one -- might have been planned as the first of a series of Japanese answers to Heavy Metal's solidly French line-up. Or at least they saw success in action and opted to look like it.

Hell, they even threw in an illustrator's profile section, spotlighting one Noriyoshi Olai, a painter of book and magazine covers who'd just completed some poster artwork for The Empire Strikes Back. In the proper Heavy Metal tradition, special emphasis is lavished on his brooding images of horror/sci-fi stuff or lavish depictions of women wearing little-to-nothing above their waists. It's universal: French, Japanese, American - we all like stuff like this:



Oh don't deny it.

It'd be a mistake, incidentally, to pretend that no French-Japanese exchange had happened around the time of Manga. The artist Moebius hadn't just taken off in North America; his inspirational reach in Japan would eventually inspire the visual approach of Hayao Miyazaki's fantasy manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind when it started up in 1982. That's probably a bit late for Manga, but the scent was in the air earlier.



A French influence can be picked up in this, a no-panels three-page story by Yousuki Tamori, who had recently (in 1979) begun work on his most popular creation, the fantastical PoPoLoCrois, later to be adapted to various anime series and role-playing video games (the first of which to see release in North America was the 2005 edition for the PSP). The very title of that work reflects Tamori's international flair, with "popolo" being Italian for "people" and "crois" being French for "crossing." People crossing, cross-culturally. Very neat, but I know of no other manga by the artist to see translation for English reading.

Likewise, it'd also be wrong to invoke Tezuka without acknowledging the obvious impact of vintage American animation on his own artistic development, the Disney features and Fleischer Brothers. And for the occasional shit Miyazaki has slung at Tezuka for damning Japanese anime to the limited animation cellar of sweatshop television schedules, a peek at Tezuka's short animation work -- recently collected on R1 dvd by Kino -- reveals several works that don't look a damn thing like anime at all.



There's a small batch of animation-informed strips in Manga, wordless pieces by Masayuki Wako, about whom I know nothing, under the banner title of Cat in Animation. They're cute little jokes about the comics form, icons taken literally and stuff; sometimes they're not all that clear in delivery. But they do sort of touch on this formative Western influence that seeded 'modern' manga, reliant on Tezuka's application of cinematographic principles to the comics page, not to mention his adoption of the Disney big eyes. Wako, for his effort, was not to my knowledge seen in American comics again.

Picking up a pattern? Several? It's true that many of the artists showcased in Manga would not become well-known later on. In fact, all of them -- even one particular former white-hot superstar whom I'll be addressing soon enough -- are either unknown or diminished in today's North American manga-in-English scene. That could well be related to another pattern: Manga-the-anthology's cherry-picking of certain artists influenced by certain phenomena (or just working in a salable genre) that made them seem Western.

"Although solidly adapted into English, what strikes the contemporary reader is how little the pieces of Manga resemble popular notions of manga itself," remarks Horn, but it's not just that - it's how much the pieces of Manga seem tuned to look like comics a newsstand Metalhead or a patron of the still-sparkling Direct Market might regularly encounter, only more polished, just a little bit different. Friendly. Unless it's something really obviously Japanese in the exotic sense, like samurai. Cutting each other to pieces over HONOR! The length of the magnificent manga series doesn't strike me as a factor; this was mostly new, commissioned short work, and a great amount of Japanese editorial control over the collection's look and feel can be presumed.

Again, if you're looking to present an appealing comic to a foreign market, it seems to make economic sense to erase the Tezuka aspect, the weird underground stuff and frankly most of the popular youth looks from the cultural landscape, as you're presenting it. Moreover, the early '80s also saw a genuine wave of Western influence in manga art, spearheaded by Katsuhiro Otomo and likeminded semi-realists. It wasn't the whole story, but it could form a whole story, with only 88 pages to fill.



Just look at this. It's from a 12-page contribution by Noboru Miyama, who died very recently, in 2007. His story, The Great Ten, is filled with images just like this: detailed machines and steely environments, with humans reduced mainly to faces beholding the wonder of setting. That's good, since Miyama's human figure work isn't so strong; this was among his earliest published stories, unless it actually is his first published solo work, since most sources cite 1981 as the year of his pro debut. Prior to that he'd worked as an assistant to Satoshi Ikezawa, creator of a mid-to-late '70s racing manga titled Circuit no Ohkami.

This story too is a racing manga, boiled down to its essence. Carlin is the greatest jockey ever to race in the deadly 3-D Derby, a cube maze that kills. His shocking series of wins delights the betting public, until they tire of how his excellence prevents big payouts and thrilling death lunges for 1st. He's too good, and thus hated; and while the kindly fellow in the pace car tries to warn him that he's playing with fire, Carlin can't help but go for a big 10th win, unaware in his ambition that the game is now fixed against him.



Lots of well-drawn tech, some fine action. And a message about pushing yourself as hard as you can go - not an unfamiliar sentiment for the youth manga that Manga didn't show. But there were other things, revolutionary things the book didn't show, that would broker no great similarity to this boyish activity, that nobody could have believed would have flown with Manga's laser-honed American target audience. Something was hidden.

***

(Forward to part 2)

Labels: Jog

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Dark Reign: Zodiac #2 (of 3):



Superhero decadence! I love it! You love it! Do you love it? Do you love me? I love you! Even though I disappear for weeks at a time doesn't mean you aren't always in my heart! I've gotta follow my bliss, babe! Gimme a kiss. Right up to the monitor. Your boss isn't watching. Or your spouse, housemate. Whatever! Where was I?

Right: superhero decadence. Some say all the shared-universe cape comics are decadent, in that they're made self-absorbed, genre-absorbed from the rigors of the shared universe, the frequent crossovers. Others identify it as superhero comics with a lot of bloody violence, and often some gross sex but never with much nudity, because that's dirty. Or maybe it's more of a designation of an era than a type of genre work - these are the days of decadence, like a society primed to collapse from its idle care and disparity. It's not 'decadence' in the proper literary sense, but then superhero comics have rarely been considered proper literature.


(mosaic provided in-comic, true believer!)

Maybe we just need a GOOD comic to poke through as a handy aid. And you can hardly get more acutely self-referential than a three-issue Dark Reign series dedicated to reviving a supervillain team that Wikipedia tells me has undergone four prior incarnations since 1970, the most recent hailing from 2007. Writer Joe Casey does the honors, and, on first blush, it doesn't seem like a very deep concept results. A callow young man calls himself Zodiac, dresses in a suit and puts a bag over his head, and goes around recruiting D-list or relatives-of-supervillain allies, basically for the purposes of killing the shit out of loads of people and beating up the Human Torch.

But that's not all that's happening. Casey isn't just indulging his affection for wayward super-concepts -- Whirlwind! The Circus of Crime! -- but providing a platform on which marginal bad guys can be defined philosphically. Really! The 'plot' of this book is thin so as to become secondary; what's more important is the purpose of Zodiac's mission, to establish forgotten supervillains as agents of the irrational in face of the muted villainy and conspiratorial motives of the Norman Osborn as Director of National Security concept. Indeed, the series isn't so much part of a larger story as a pocket of resistance in which seemingly inapplicable characters take on necessarily reactionary roles.

And if Zodiac's take on life seems reminiscent of a certain grinning agent of chaos as depicted in a certain recent not-from-Marvel blockbuster superhero movie, it's nonetheless interesting as directly applicable to the 'real world problems, kinda' stance of so many Marvel events. Why so serious?



Mayhem ensues, crucially as drawn by Nathan Fox in a style that may seem heavily reminiscent of Paul Pope's -- and the presence of frequent Pope colorist José Villarrubia helps that right along -- but works just as well to marry wrinkled, stylized human figures to some old-fashioned Marvel kick. I can't say the storytelling is always as clean as it could be, but the feeling is always visceral, and that's necessary to keep Casey's story from seeming academic. The words might tell us about why Zodiac is faking a new arrival of Galactus -- for the hell of it, to cause trouble, to force the institutional villains to lose their shit coping with something as irrational as a purple guy from space that eats planets -- but the pictures carry the enjoyment, the sick thrills of being horrible.

They blow up a hospital at one point. It's mostly superheroes that survive. "Well, that's all part of the dance, isn't it?" replies Zodiac. He knows superheroes aren't going to die (or stay dead if they do). He knows the contours of the world. But in his headquarters, decorated with the mounted heads of all prior Zodiac members -- that's decadence! -- he still plans a means of taking on the status quo, which itself is a challenge against the favored ways of writing supervillain characters in the crowded universe. Old ideas, new contexts. Call it an essay story, as much as Warren Ellis' & Marek Oleksicki's Frankenstein's Womb from Avatar this week, a walking tour of modernity's precognition.

This, on the other hand, is an imagining of super-stories. Aren't they all?

The Boys #33:



Yet superhero decadence needn't be restricted to shared-universe stuff. Now, you might be thinking this particular series is a satire, I know, but really it's as on-the-ground as your typical genre piece. That's where it functions best.

The Boys, you see, takes place in a world where all superhero metaphors are made literal. So, when a patriotic superhero appears, ostensibly to remind us of the appeal of martial-themed characters, he's literally presented as having fought in a war on behalf of the United States. Except, he hasn't, since superheroes are typically full of shit in this Garth Ennis-written place. And indeed, superheroes didn't really fight in WWII, the obvious point of reference -- they're not real, after all -- so the bloody punishment handed down to the character gets that extra whiff of righteousness.

And taken on its face, this is very shallow commentary, ignoring, say, the appeal of superhero characters to servicemen in WWII, possibly the all-time high of superhero popularity, to say nothing of the subversion of the patriotic trope in god knows how many prior, less mouthy superhero comics from decades back. All the shading, then, is added by the comment's positioning in the comic's 'world,' where the whole idea of heroism has been essentially co-opted by corporate-political interests, in the form of corporate superheroes. From that angle, we can see that the contemporary idea of the throwback patriot superhero is presented as inherently propagandist, divorced from a genuine wartime conflict and thereby toxic in its nostaliga for killing. It also helps to know that the primary two fighters of the superhero-slappin' cast of the Boys have different opinions on 'supes,' which form an internal conflict on Ennis' part in regards to the subject matter.

Oh, and it's way funnier if you're reading this stuff right now, in the pamphlets, with all of these unfortunately placed Project Superpowers house ads chock-full of glowing Alex Ross images of the greatest generation of superhumans. Yikes!



Anyway, it's also worth mentioning that this commentary is only part of the issue, which mainly builds up to next issue's finale of the current 'superheroes fight back' storyline, while nudging the various subplots forward a bit. Those vary a lot in quality: the bits with lead supe the Homelander growing tired of corporate constraints are pretty good, particularly if you're reading the series in conjunction with its current spin-off miniseries, Herogasm - the effect is basically having the series go bi-weekly, with the stories jumping back and forth in time; it's clearly been planned to work out this way, since events in one title seem to correspond with what's going on in the other without giving away too much information. Meanwhile, the continuing exploitation of good girl superheroine Starlight leans weakly on routines about skimpy costumes and superhero storytelling attitudes toward rape (conclusion: they're gross).

More immediately, you'll notice the fill-in artists now have fill-ins of their own, with Herogasm's John McCrea & Keith Burns flown in to replace Carlos Ezquerra, himself filling in for cover-credited co-creator Darick Robertson. Ironically, this makes the series seem all the more like a real superhero comic of today, planting it in the nitty-gritty of ongoing genre work. I actually like the McCrea/Burns work this issue; Ezquerra (who just did fine work with Ennis in The Tankies) didn't seem to mesh well with the series' disposition, while these artists are with it enough to draw anti-hero Butcher exactly like Frank Castle in certain panels (see above), preserving a little of the old all-Ennis concordance. OKAY, as it tends to be.

Absolution #1 (of 6):



On the other hand, some comics just don't warrant a lot of attention. Writer Christos Gage, while previously experienced in film and television scripting -- I've only seen director Larry Clark's 2002 made-for-cable Teenage Caveman, which I remember liking -- first came to the attention of a lot of comics readers through his 2007 revival of an old Wildstorm property, Stormwatch: P.H.D. This is an original work, published by Avatar, but it still feels like a revival, specifically that of a Marvel MAX-type work from 2003 or thereabouts. I'm talking straight-shot hard 'R' superhero stuff, directly crossed with some other genre that might withstand spandex trappings.

Here that other genre gets especially specific: the cop drama wherein some particular cop has crossed the line and started doling out justice outside the system. Superheroes are usually outside the system, granted, so Gage posits a world where superheroes are essentially a special police division, possessed of fantasy powers yet restricted by many of the same basic rules of conduct and procedure; it's almost a one-for-one swap of 'cops' for 'superheroes' in the plot, with gory throwdowns in place of shootouts. All the while, our John Dusk is haunted by visions of the many atrocities he's seen men commit, a bit like Rorschach's cracking up as stretched to scenario-length.



It's all played out exactly as you'd expect so far -- Dusk even has a non-super detective girlfriend who just might be catching on to his killings -- with almost no distinguishing characteristics. In fact, almost nothing even happens in this issue that wasn't already established in the 11-page issue #0 from a while back, save for the introduction of a few nondescript superhero teammates and the suggestion that Dusk's oozing, quick-hardening blue mist abilities might be starting to lash out as much from his subconscious desires as anything else.

The art is by Roberto Viacava, whose character designs fall somewhere in between Paul Duffield and Jacen Burrows in the Avatar cartoon continuum; colorist Andres Mossa gives some of it a decent sun-faded candy coat, but he can't help the stiffness of a lot of the action or the cast's general inexpression when not confronted with imminent violence. As a whole it fits in that it's as bland as everything else, down to Our Man stumbling into a blood-spattered rape chamber in which the monster in charge was nonetheless thoughtful enough to drape a blanket over the breasts of the victim in the immediate foreground. Now there's superhero decadence like we all can recognize. AWFUL.

Labels: Jog

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Conquering Armies



This is a softcover book from 1978, perfect bound and b&w and 64 pages for your post-bicentennial $4.95.

It's big, as in "big as Paul Pope's old oversized books, like Buzz Buzz Comics Magazine or THB Circus," or almost as big as that new Seth book, George Sprott (1894-1975), or that recent hardcover he designed, The Collected Doug Wright. You know, the one with the infernally gleaming red cover? Hold that thing up to an adequate light source and you can transform an ordinary bathroom into a scene from Flashdance. Of course, that's how my bathroom is already, but, like Seth, I'm an old-timey kinda guy.

To wit: 1978, big ol' softcover comic, big like the European albums, big in a way that seemed right for A Heavy Metal Book, just as they were new and hot, and the likes of Moebius' Is Man Good? and Lob & Pichard's Ulysses rolled off the presses. The world indeed seemed ripe for conquest, but this lost tome proved cautionary in more than its mere eventual obscurity. Battlefields may seem huge, barks the metaphor, but conquerors are thus necessarily small.




Conquering Armies is a suite of five short comics first seen in the pages of Métal Hurlant, and quickly brought to English via early issues of Heavy Metal. Obviously a lot of people believed in these stories, which weren't lacking in pedigree: the writer was Jean-Pierre Dionnet, Hurlant's co-founder and editor-in-chief, working with an artist he'd known for nearly his entire comics writing career, Jean-Claude Gal.

Granted, Dionnet's comics writing career had only just started in '71, with Gal following a year later, both teamed in the pages of the venerable Pilote, the growing pains of which would give way to Howling Metal just a few years later. Fast times, sure, but those virginal pages of 1975 looked like they had something to prove.



This is just a detail, mind you, as is every individual image in this post. You should see it in person. The stuff looks big in magazine form, but once you've witnessed those collected dimensions -- which I presume match a '77 French album of the same material -- you'll never settle for less. Gal wants to assault you with scope, much in the way he intimates violence toward those tiny soldiers, toy-like against their rocky scene so that magnified panels are necessary to track a man down the stairs, only then humanized.

And that's no basic establishing vista you're seeing; the grandeur of Gal's scenes is the very heart of this work, these linked stories, all of which seek to smother the ambitions of armies in the magnitude of greater existence. The first tale even stretches to literalize this notion, with a mighty vanguard rushing into a massive city that exacts a terrible psychological toll on the men, particularly as folks begin vanishing or falling over.



Heavy realism, that, at least in terms of character art. But Gal still emphasizes the scale of the room with his wide panels, pivoting to stretch the gulf between the characters and then zooming in to associate space with death. There's a tremendous amount of detail in these panels, but it never becomes overwhelming until Gal wants it to, as a means of aggravating the story's dread. When there comes a time when no detail at all would be better, the opportunity is taken.



All of this comes from a man three years into his professional comics career, although he'd been a drawing instructor for years prior. Yet remarkably little of the work suffers from the 'frozen' feeling illustrators sometimes bring to comics, or the sedate atmosphere of some older French adventure comics in a realist style, and I think much of that is due to the almost despairing sense of diminution Gal foists on his mighty warriors.

It's very different from the world-building majesty of Philippe Druillet and his mad architectures and psychedelic combats - Gal is drawing 'real' people, and his real, big places are going to kill them, or at least foreshadow their doom via the looming presence of matters greater than martial accomplishment.



Very little of Dionnet's comics writing has been translated to English, but what I've seen places him firmly in the political area of Hurlant's approach to fantasy. There are no wild visions in here (or the Enki Bilal-drawn Exterminator 17) devoid of evident purpose, all of it rueful in facing the human condition.

All of the military adventures in this book are doomed, always by something out of the control of the powerful, be it chance or disease or magic. Or metaphor. There is no explanation as to why the city in the first tale destroys the occupying force; the men of violence merely vanish as we see them growing humanized, chatting with locals or abandoning their posts, worn down by time and seemingly absorbed by the enormity of Gal's scenery. It's not sorcery, really, but the symbolism of the huge city as the endeavor of occupation, or colonization, beating the materialism of combat by just sitting around it.

Subsequent stories proceed in much the same way: violent, material desire is thwarted by elements beyond the control of the sentry, always with a special emphasis on titanic locales. Simplistic, yes, but diabolical - there isn't one action scene or bit of daring in this book that isn't coated with irony or in active anticipation of the hero's downfall. Just look at this:



Vintage newspaper serial stuff, from probably the book's weakest tale. The encounter with the tiger leaves one brother maimed and the other scarred; the latter sets off on a journey to find an old mystery man who knows healing magic, his lair fittingly large and horrible, and filled with beasts to fight.



Our Man kicks his quota of ass, but alas - the magician's spell causes his brother's fingers to grow uncontrollably, and anyway he'd been captured by the magician while the hero was busy, and now his fingers will be cut off again and again for all his life, ha ha ha ha haaaa!

Still, even a story as silly as that benefits from Dionnet's distaste for genre heroism, and especially Gal's devotion to selling the both the occasion of the action and the constant visual metaphor of ambition dwarfed. Even one of Dionnet's more lackadaisical plots, concerning an ambitious commander ruined by a random local boy carrying the plague, becomes somewhat straightened by Gal's recurring motif of homes and tents as vessels for surrounding, burning death.

Again, though, this stuff's probably best taken at its most visceral.



Two soldiers away from battle, one attempting to sell the other into slavery for financial gain. Whoops - the seller winds up on the same ship as his erstwhile item, and combat breaks out again. Here it's chance that fucks pride up, the coincidences that happen in expansive spaces. Still, Dionnet has a soft spot for the enslaved, and just as a fresh army rushed in to re-take the haunted city from Story 1, a new master is again overthrown by ex-soldiers, ex-merchant & good, only equals at the bottom.



The conquest of Heavy Metal would reach its end too, and comics of this size would soon get less viable for direct English localization. You might be able to find a copy online for not too much money, though - they did seem to print a lot of these things, in the flush of early victory.



Dionnet kept working with Gal into the '80s, with the dark fantasy albums The Vengeance of Arn (1981) and The Triumph of Arn (1988); he left his editorship with Hurlant in 1985, two years before it suspended publication. Gal later began work on a color album with writer Alejandro Jodorowsky, La passion de Diosamante, which saw publication in 1992. From what I've seen, color takes away from Gal's power; the rawness of black and white underscore the power of his buildings and mountains, while color mutes it all into decoration.

He wouldn't get the chance to refine it. Gal died in 1994, at the age of 52. The second volume of Jodorowsky's series wouldn't appear until 2002, drawn by artist Igor Kordey, in the very thick of New X-Men and the whole Jemas thing at Marvel. Speaking of the folly of men's struggle.



I don't know of any other Jean-Claude Gal books in English. There might be a story or two lurking somewhere in that Heavy Metal back catalog. I wonder how else his heavy realism became the weight of powers beyond accomplishment, sneering at mortal effort? Or did it? Comics triumph gave us this much, buried to dig up; our little resistance against obscurity's campaign. It was all in here, from the man who saw how it worked, and delivered his urgent transmission:



Shit does happen.

Labels: Jog, Old English

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Ashen Victor



Here's a question that comes up every so often: we hear plenty about North American cartoonists inspired by the energy and style of manga, but are there any mangaka crazy about cartoonists from the West?

To my knowledge, the answer is "not a ton." It seems there's some pretty specific, dominant ideas in Japan about how comics are supposed to 'work,' with a strong emphasis placed on visual mechanics. Put simply, Western comics just don't look right, and to the extent there's much of a Western comics presence in Japan at all, it tends to dwell on highly individual stylists as self-contained aesthetic forces. Yet some manga artists draw fabulous inspiration from that area.

This book is one result of that inspiration. I may have obtained it at tremendous monetary cost, but it's no big deal - I do it all for you.

And Yukito Kishiro? Looks like he did it for Frank Miller; I have no evidence, but it could be he devoured every volume of Sin City and still wasn't satisfied.

So he made his own.



Ah, never mind my melodrama. VIZ may not exactly have shied away from Miller comparisons when it published Ashen Victor -- first in 1997 as a four-issue pamphlet miniseries, then in 1999 as a collected book -- but the work itself is thoroughly Kishiro's. Indeed, it's actually a short prequel work to his expansive Battle Angel Alita (aka: Gunnm) saga, a massive sci-fi series that initially ran for nine volumes, 1990-95, and then saw its artist discard the original ending in 2001 and revive the series as a still-ongoing concern (Battle Angel Alita: Last Order) current up to vol. 13 in Japan and vol. 11 via VIZ's English translation.

Ashen Victor appeared between the two major Alita series in Japan, in late 1995; it was definitely not a sprawling opus, in that it consisted of only one volume and focused on the noir-like goings on in the violent armored racing sport of Motorball. It's also conspicuously the only piece of VIZ's Kishiro catalog not currently in print. Maybe some licensing trouble got in the way. Maybe the story seemed too odd for the bookstore-friendly Alita reprint push. Hell, maybe the damned thing looks too American for the market these days. That'd be a laugh.



But truthfully, Kishiro doesn't venture too far out into foreign waters. He certainly ramps up the high-contrast in good Sin City style, and deliberately avoids typical character stylization for a Japanese comic of this sort, yet there remains a suppleness to his backgrounds, a traditional scenery that Miller would strive to dissolve into a thousand scratches surrounding inky gobs. In other words, Alita fans might still admire their familiar world as recognizable, despite the curious perspective imposed on them. It's possibly as much a franchise concern as stylistic one; two reasons for not going too far over the top.

Why, Kishiro even has a spiky-haired hero we all can root for. God, he looks a little familiar, though...



That's right, sports fans: not only is this a Japanese Sin City homage set in the world of ultraviolent cybernetic racing, but one that features a lead gore-spattered cyborg racer modeled after Dream of the Endless. That is brilliant.

Or, at least that's what it looks like; I mean, he does draw in the eyes in a bunch of panels, and hair like that isn't exactly unknown as a boilerplate manga design trope, and I certainly don't have an interview or anything in which Kishiro states "oh, Morpheus, right; great guy, lovely eyes," but the resemblance is simply uncanny.

And it makes perfect sense too, well beyond the Sin City's an American comic, Dream's an American comics character, why not level. I can hardly think of a more perfect example of a writer-driven book than The Sandman; it had some consistent art toward the end of its run, sure, but it largely built its reputation in spite of its irregular visual quality. In the midst of the Image Revolution, it was a beacon of the scribe's victory over fulsome splash page aplomb, and, to my circle of 13-year olds, evidence of trust in the writer over the artist as the true mark of the connoisseur. It was the American way!



Call it projecting (because you could be right), but that's why the Dreamy protagonist of Ashen Victor seems so awesome to me - it's dealing with Sandman on a strictly visual level, ripping out that excellent character design and working the pale flesh and black hair and sunken eyes into the especially black & white contours of Kishiro's pseudo-Sin City, a clever application of visual elements that's indicative of the manga emphasis on the art as the storytelling base. That doomed complexion, that spur of danger... Dream can be noir as fuck!



The plot of Ashen Victor, meanwhile, is a gurgling broth of Miller-approved tactics and general noir notions, like 'fixing the races' and 'fighter bound to throw the match.' Snev (our Dream King) used to be a Motorball prodigy, able to glide between opponents on the track with ease to deliver the ball to the goal. But 17 matches into his pro career and he's best known as the Crash King, the "storm of self-destruction," famous for wiping out in violent, dismembering style in literally every match, to the point where his not inconsiderable fanbase adores him strictly for the spectacular show his body provides while ripping itself to shreds.

It's ok: Snev kinda likes it too, that weird pleasure of his artificial body falling to pieces; it's the fatalism of these stories literalized into an in-action motive. His teammates hate how he cheapens the sport with such circus hi-jinx, even though the best of them, Dolagunov (the semi-Marv design, here a villain) is doped to shit on designer sensory boost Accel, which a pharmaceutical corporation is trying to promote via racing victory. Granted, Snev used to believe in victory too, until the urge to self-destruct rose in his very first pro match, when some guy ran onto the track, and Snev was too far into winning velocity to move away, and:



I think that was a deleted scene from A Game of You.

Anyway, Snev is also good friends with Beretta, one of the city's various angelic-yet tough prostitutes (oh yes), who winds up getting him into a heap of trouble when she swipes a Very Important Briefcase off of Snev's team manager, resulting in her murder and a violent race to discover the dirty secrets behind tomorrow's sports entertainment. And a scene in which a dude who looks like a boyish manga version of Dream of the Endless punches a cyborg until his brain squirts out the back of his head. Comics!



It's a fast-paced thing, probably not as tightly plotted as it could be, but consistently diverting. The real fun, though, is seeing Kishiro cook up increasingly showy visual tricks, balancing the obvious Miller influence with alternate approaches. You'll note, for instance, that all of the book's female characters are drawn in a more classically big-eyed style; this becomes a means of asserting their otherworldly beauty in the city without pity; talk about on a pedestal.

Other moments see the artist break his pages apart, glorying in the arrangement of panels for purely emotional effect.



And occasionally the art simply erupts into slashes of pain, obliterating fixed representation entirely in favor of the sensation of Snev's total immersion in the ecstasy of racing.



It all comes down to a final showdown on the track, naturally, where Our Hero must either live up to his self-made expectations or ruin everything that makes him a viable talent by succeeding for once; more complex than the average Sin City yarn, probably, but appropriate for a book in which an artist fresh off a big, successful series wanders around some striking, hopefully personally satisfying territory at some risk of alienating readers. He's made it his own.

You can probably see it for yourself, even if VIZ isn't keeping it in print. Online used bookstores tend to reward searches for lost manga nuggets like this one, and the rewards won't stop with finding a $1.30 library copy. This is eager, restless stuff, international yet so much of its birthplace. The kind of manga publishers used to hope for, an East-West 'bridge' to ease readers in. Those aren't common anymore; in time, you can't win for losing.

Labels: Jog, Old English

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Perramus: Escape From the Past #1-2 (of 4)



Q: God, what the hell am I going to do with all these old foreign comics I bought in that April research binge? That was addressed to you, God.

A: This is a new series of short posts about old English translations of foreign language comics, probably still obtainable through back-issue and/or used book resources. There will be lots of pictures, as per God's advice.



And we might as well start with a veritable legend of sinking into oblivion, Fantagraphics' late '80s/early '90s magazine-sized pamphlet translations of Euro-by-way-of-South-Americomics. The publisher's five-issue, 1987-90 take on Carlos Sampayo's & José Muñoz's Sinner is probably the most prominent of the bunch, but there was a later, odder release in the same format: Perramus: Escape From the Past, a four-issue, 1991-92 release of work by writer Juan Sasturain and artist Alberto Breccia.

It was a curious release, not least of all for being a formidable bait-and-switch; all cover-sourced close-up skull imagery and "the horror is real" and POLITICAL HORROR CLASSIC notwithstanding, Perramus actually isn't a horror comic by most standards. There's horrific sequences, in which the art gleefully trades in terror comic visual tropes, but this is mainly in the service of genre-comprehensive allegorical adventure serial, prone to marshaling all manner of cultural stimuli in the service of confronting recent, awful political history.



Perramus was first published in 1984, serialized in the Italian anthology series Orient Express. Its first collected edition appeared in Europe in 1985, and subsequent editions continued along until 1991. It's a four-volume series, although most European editions compile vols. 1-2 in a single album, resulting in three books. Fantagraphics' four-issue English-language release, despite kicking off the year the work was completed, does not correspond to the four volumes of the original work; rather, every two or so issues collects one volume, which means the series halted around the end of vol. 2 (or, the first of the common European albums). I'm equivocating since I only have the first two issues, which definitely cover the first original volume, since they end on an Epilogue at a natural stopping point.

But maybe it's fitting that such a work stretches across so many odd, international forms; perhaps it could only really be at home in Argentina. Breccia (who died in 1993) was a giant of Argentine comics, who specialized in fantastical horror comics of a more traditional sort. Indeed, English edition editor Robert Boyd suggests in a much-needed back-of-issue #1 biographical essay that Breccia gradually moved deeper (if never completely) into a literary horror emphasis -- Poe, Lovecraft adaptations -- as a means of evading the hazards of Argentina's increasingly brutal political situation in the 1970s. His frequent writer, Héctor Germán Oesterheld, "disappeared" in 1976 as the duo prepared a comics biography of Che Guevara; is there any more appropriate response than horror?



Argentina's military junta relinquished power in 1983, and Perramus began almost immediately thereafter from a script by Sasturain, a novelist and poet. The story begins with an unnamed man fleeing the dead-of-night approach by a (literally) skull-faced death squad, dooming his revolutionary compatriots left behind, still asleep. In a daze, the man wanders into a teeming nightclub where he's offered his choice of three prostitutes: Rosa, for luck; Maria, for pleasure; or Margarita, for forgetting.

The man opts for Margarita, and surely does awake a while later without the slightest idea of who he is, or what he's done. Dressed in a patchwork uniform left from johns of many nations, he derives his identity from what's closest to his heart.



What follows is a freewheeling series of events, chopped up into 2000 AD-sized chapters, seeing Perramus and a growing band of companions through various satirical encounters. Conscripted by the death squads to body-dumping detail aboard a ship, Our Man and one Washington Sosa -- possibly an allusion to a sidekick character from one of Breccia's earliest adventure comics -- escape to an island where a local dictator justifies his existence with an annual trotting out of society's Enemy (a downed foreign airman), who's recently begun a campaign of civil disobedience by refusing to escape.

Then there's a run-in with an equally dictatorial film company that only makes trailers, although their enforcers are fortunately well-trained enough to fall down and play dead when you pretend to shoot at them. Less playful are Perramus' old cohorts at the Volunteer Vanguard for Victory -- not the ones he got killed, mind you -- who don't recognize him personally but do understand the revolutionary potential he carries. History seems to be repeating, along with visions of Margarita, who appears to be somehow present in every escapade in the form of a different woman; and she's not the only one he'll be seeing again.



Recurrence is an important theme in this work, along with development. Surely the visuals seem to be redolent with Breccia's own evolution; any given panel seems hell-bent on packing in as many mixed-media flourishes as possible without sabotaging readability, although the sheer richness of these images can nonetheless seem overwhelming. Lavishly caricatured figures share space with environments ranging from suggestive swirls and dashes of ink to photographic collage. Supine corpses are covered with a gauze of light against deep shadow -- respect for the dead -- while death squad skulls hide additional skulls in their hats, symbolizing the authoritative facet of their personal killings. Often the human figures will recede into silhouettes, left small and alone against the mayhem of clashing textures that is Breccia's South America, a world of sufficient unreality arranged to register as nature, and sometimes be beautiful.

Yet persona and politics is fundamentally a construct, as the titular runaway learns late in issue #2 as part of a titanic team-up with Argentine literary lion and in-story secret agent Jorge Luis Borges, ready to encode messages in the poetry of 15th century Spanish satirist Francisco de Quevedo (and still alive at the time of the material's early publication). Sasturain & Breccia make mention of Borges' 1942 story Funes the Memorious as a sort of mirror to their own story; Funes also met Borges, but his talent was to remember everything, to the point where his command of detail undercut his capacity for abstract thought. In contrast, Perramus meets Borges unable to recall a thing about his past life, which renders him sheer abstraction, fortuitously wandering a continent of abstracted political and societal ideas, fastidiously rendered by Breccia in multimedia splendor.

Does it go deeper? Down to the literary Funes' Uruguayan heritage, same as Breccia's?



Ah, but even Borges himself is part of the plan, recontextualized like a good frequent literary character into an avatar for sheer artistic skepticism. In this world, the real Borges' politics needn't matter so much as his art's capacity for inspiration. This mixes well with Breccia's self-reference, his horror images positioned in society now explicitly in the form of repression, rather than as a response to such. There's plenty more where that came from - I sincerely doubt you can grasp the totality of this work without a serious command of Argentinian politics and culture, which I don't have. Still, as the might of Breccia's art is obvious, so is the broadest contours of his and Sasturain's story, looping Perramus back to the mystic nightclub for the volume's end, where the prostitute again offers what's expected: his desire. Will he have learned for next time? Will his country?

There's a little bit of an answer in these two Fantagraphics issues I have, and obviously more in the other two, although the other half remains obscure. I can't imagine a comic of this sort did gangbuster business in the US in '91, to the point where I'm mildly surprised that the issues we've got exist. Maybe the future holds something more for Breccia, but until then it's another story from another longbox, undeniably out there.

Labels: Jog, Old English

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(being the final installment of an 18-part series of posts concerning each and every book released as part of the DC/Humanoids publishing alliance, 2004-05; index of posts here and here)

JM: Hello all! This is Jog, speaking in the exotic dialect of italics.

TS: I'm Tucker, I roll with No Formatting. This is where Jog and I will talk about the Chaland anthologies, the school of the clean line, diacritical markings, and how it's fun to google By The Numbers and find out the only other person who talked about online happens to be Evan Dorkin.

JM: All right, I'm getting the hang of it. Talking to other people, I mean.

TS: Portions of this were written while I was waiting to download a pornographic version of Silence of the Lambs. If I seem unduly excited about Yves Chaland, that's why.



I. Associated Humanoids

TS: My first question is "Why do all these books, Jog?" You were the one who came up with the idea, although there was a sort of weird coincidence in that Matthew Brady (not the Matthew Brady Jodorowsky yelled at, the Warren Peace one) and I were having a little debate about whether or not it mattered if comics companies make good business decisions, and DC/Humanoids was stuck in my head as proof positive of what can happen to good material when it's horribly mismanaged. But yeah: all of them? What's up with that?

JM: Two reasons spring to mind right away:

1. I love starting big projects and only finishing after extravagant delays. It's a fetish, a physical thing, and for that I thank you.

2. It's a strange window, this Humanoids thing. You know? Like, the publisher's status these days; it's mainstream, mostly. It's a mainline publisher, putting out populist books, and we don't see all that many of those in North America. Not from France; manga, sure, but that's tapped into a desire for popular entertainment of a different stripe than what was readily available before. French-language comics haven't done that, but there's obviously interest in the 'art' comics world, so I think there's a hovering notion of French-reading Europe as a haven for arts-first comics, but some of that's just what we can see through the framing of language, of publishing activity.

I mean, obviously you can argue the French-reading environment is more amenable to certain genuses of sophistication, sure, but then you've got the Heavy Metal problem. That was the first germ of this idea for me. Christ, germs and problems - I'm a psychological ruin, Tucker. What's it like watching a man come apart via Google Docs, by which I mean face-to-face communication that's totally real?


(From The Metabarons: Alpha/Omega)

But yeah, Heavy Metal. It's around every month, on your friendly local chain bookstore newsstand, right next to Classic Rock Presents: Prog or The Best American Penthouse Letters 2008, and you look inside and *holy shit* it's French comics! Album-length French comics, most months, sometimes twice in a month if it's a special, and a lot of them aren't art comics, you know? But there present all the time, and obviously they're coming from somewhere; it's a somewhere we don't see, but it's not inconsiderable.

And Les Humanoïdes is special in that regard; that's the place Heavy Metal came from -- in that Métal Hurlant was the inspiration -- which also served as a focal point for the French mainstream. Moebius, Druillet - those guys were actually interested in pushing boundaries in more than just the "extra blood; naked" sense. There was more violence and nudity, yeah, but there were metaphorical, philosophical, improvisational aspects too; I really really don't want to oversell their influence, but they were part of something, which was on the a cutting edge of the form for a while, visually, literarily, etc. There were ideals and longings.

Time passes, then - the publisher survives, changes hands, the scene changes, everything changes. Humanoïdes is part of the mainstream. Heavy Metal is part of the mainstream (they were always owned by different people, the National Lampoon people at first, but bear with me), a North American mainstream that it played a part in too, since it arrived right in the bridge period between underground comics and 'alternative'-comics-as-a-force, in the young Direct Market. Come 1999, and Humanoids is founded as a North American concern. The environment is totally fucking different, nobody is fucking involved in comics in 1999 that doesn't want to be there because it's a complete mess, it's hard to get a foothold; it's totally new, but new in a way that Humanoids' French counterpart had a tiny hand in. And the French stuff is different too; like, The Metabarons isn't The Airtight Garage, you know?

So there we have history looking to repeat itself, but it's really two brands of mainstream that don't match. It's pamphlets vs. albums, and a hundred other things. Humanoids goes through all these ideas to fit in (when less than a quarter of a century prior they just waltzed in and picked partners) - releasing pamphlets, breaking storylines up, carrying some albums over wholesale, multi-album trade paperbacks, new 'modern' coloring, hiding all the dangerous bits of the body that take me to Bad Time, reviving a magazine in comic book form and calling in people from around the world... they tried everything!

Suddenly, 2004: oh my god, it's DC! And Mainstream A tries to partner up with Mainstream B, and suddenly the window breaks open, and we can see a huge glob of what Humanoids became. Or, it was possible to see, at least, since there wasn't a ton of press and they put out a shitload of stuff, more than anyone could probably keep up with, so the bigness of it ironically wound up hurting its visibility. Some people were talking -- Warren Ellis and Matt Fraction (I'd link but artbomb seems to be dangerous these days, per Google) were on top of the Metabarons, the Bilal stuff -- but despite the internet being around there wasn't a lot of comprehensive coverage, not like you'd find for every DCU title. I'm counting myself in with that, by the way - I was blogging, writing about comics, and I covered exactly one of those books (François & Luc Schuiten's The Hollow Grounds).


(From The Hollow Grounds)

By 2005 it was gone; the deal was sunk. Humanoids vanished until this year, teamed up with DDP. That's five years, and I was looking around, you and me were talking, we'd wanted to work together on something. I think our second best option was doing the first 20 issues of The Savage Dragon, using Olav Beemer's letters to Erik Larsen as holy writ, an involuntary third critic reporting from 1993, for our reaction - time-travel criticism!

Then you started mentioning Yves Chaland; I'd looked at some of his stuff, Humanoids had released some, then DC/Humanoids reprinted it and put out more, and I'd written him off totally as a nostalgist bore, and you got me to actually read further than the first one and a half stories, and whoops - he's kind of a genius! And the type of genius with one foot in the early days of Franco-Belgian comics, and the other in the early Humanoïdes days; it was perfect, and it really provoked me, and I wanted to see what else was hiding away in the DC/Humanoids catalog.

There was something going on about criticism too. I don't think it's unfair to say a lot of online comics criticism is devoted to pamphlet-format serials/ongoing series, which isn't illogical, since the steady output of stuff facilitates discussion and commentary, new topics, new questions. But I think that also marks the conversation as perpetually current, which spills over to talk about standalone books and things. And the internet doesn't have to do that, in my opinion, because it doesn't have to answer to investors or subscribers or sponsors, and there's no risk of someone picking you up off the stand and going "holy hell, these Penthouse letters are all from 2004, I'm not turned on by John Ashcroft anymore, sheesh," which I think is maybe the expectation of a print publication, unless it's specifically dubbed a forum for reflection or whatnot. Or, you know, maybe there's a 'old times' slot, but even then you've got space to worry about; if you're running a zine, there's spatial concerns, getting it out to people.

On the internet, there's none of that. Ideally, people can easily access a huge amount of content, which there's space for. Yet I couldn't find a lot of work related to even something sorta-mainstream like DC/Humanoids (maybe more hybrid-mainstream, which arguably defeats the whole 'mainstream' idea) and I thought: hey! Times have changed! These books are pretty cheap, used, so they're untethered from the financial constrainst of new releases (which is another topic entirely), and there ought to be something going on with the whole sick crew. There's stuff here. Interesting stuff.

And since you'd gotten my mind on the topic, I realized it was the perfect idea for our collaboration. I know you have a history with these books too.

TS: I would hate to read blogs if it was all just up-to-the-minute "this just happened" kind of coverage. The internet provides this forum where there's a mentality that everything needs to be talked about by everybody, and I just can't be bothered. Sure, it might give me the opportunity to write about The Bad Girls Club, which I really enjoy doing, but the idea that everybody needs a Flash: Rebirth review within a week of it coming out--really? Why? You can taste it when somebody is online and feeling like they "have" to have an opinion because all the big sites/bloggers are expressing one. Like that Marvel Divas cover thing, or whether or not the single issue sales for DMZ are accurate: I don't have an opinion, and just because there's a forum to put one out there doesn't mean I need to take part. I don't walk down the street and jump into every fucking conversation I see strangers having, and I don't talk about the movies I like with the people in my office who won't shut up about Hotel For Dogs. There's got to be a reason to talk about something, or else it's just not going to be interesting to read about.


(From The Nikopol Trilogy)

Doing something like this--a silly, labor intensive slog through a bunch of great-to-awful comics, all of which aren't quick throwaways--there's got to be a real desire to do it. Otherwise you're not going to finish it, and if you do, it's going to be unreadable. When you brought it up, my first thought was "That's going to be difficult", not just because the style, story and quality had quite a range even in the portion I'd already read, but also because there's this mystique (that I subscribed too, although I'm not so sure I believe it anymore) that European comics were just categorically "deeper" than the stuff I normally write about. I think that stems a bit from the way they get treated in America, that they're first and foremost foreign material, material that comes from a different type of publisher and artist relationship than the one I've spent years immersed in.

At the same time, I don't think I came to this with the sort of background you have--I don't know that I've ever really paid much attention to Heavy Metal, my initial experience with Moebius probably was that scene in Crimson Tide, and I'd always thought of Jodorowsky as a filmmaker, first and foremost. But as when we got into it, I realized that was sort of an interesting point: most of the people coming at this work, or at least a good portion of them, would have explored the Humanoids line the same way when DC started releasing the books. They probably knew more than I did, most people do, but it wasn't like these reprints were showing up because of reader demand. Also, I knew in advance you were going to handle The Incal, and I found that book particularly intimidating to talk about.

My history with these books, which I touched on a little bit when I reviewed Bilal, was pretty simple: I saw The Horde and Hollow Grounds, and I liked the idea that I was finally going to get to see some non-Tintin/Asterix European stuff. I wasn't a blogger person then, so I had more free time to jack off to weird shit. I just signed up for the series on a whim, and I stuck with that for a good six months at least, maybe longer. I'd go into the comics shop, they'd have a Humanoids trade pulled for me, I'd take it home and read it or not. Some of these--the conclusion of Son of the Gun for one--I had never made the time for, and the only ones I'd ever even played at writing about was a sarcastic "go fuck yourself" with The Technopriests. At the time, and even more so now, I was struck by how out of touch it was to label all of these under one tent. Even with the scattered selection DC made, there was such a wide ranging variety of books, books like The White Lama that were really smart boy's adventure pulp stories (with tits, gore and Buddhism), books like The Hunting Party or The Nikopol Trilogy that stretched my own perception of what kind of comics I liked (I never expected to read a political dialog comic that I'd enjoy as much as Hunting), and of course, the doldrums of terrible that I put Sanctum and Transgenesis in. Comics--Europeans can put sand in my panties as easily as Americans!

What are your favorites of the Humanoids stuff you read? I'm firmly in the camp of hating-on-some-new-coloring for the Incal, although I do quite like it in the original version.

JM: Jeez, that takes me back to the avant-garde-gone-mainstream idea. Like you mentioned about Jodorowsky, you probably think of his movies first, and the prevailing opinion on that seems to be 'weird.' That's not set in stone, of course, but anyway - then you look at The Incal, his big splash, his big first long Moebius thing, and wow, it's pretty subdued. It's got a point of view, themes, right - it's not a three-act structure sort of comic. But it's way more of a straight-up adventure than anything Moebius was doing on his own at the time! It's one of the biggest projects the artist had done under the 'Moebius' name, but it's also pretty... normal. In comparison.

And I think there's something to that, the guiding of Moebius back into a more traditional style. It's funny, when you get the real AA+ level guys with Jodorowsky, the Girauds and the François Boucqs, he cools them down. They collect themselves into serving the story. While with, say, Georges Bess or Juan Giménez, he pushes them past where they'd been. He's like a star. Not a star writer (that too, though), but something that inspires orbit - quite a personality! All the odder that he writes these comics by meeting with the artists and basically relating the story to them rather than providing a script. Matthew Craig mentioned that he's got a little Stan Lee in him, and I agree.

TS: One of the things I didn't really grab about Jodorowsky's work until after doing this back and forth was how good the guy is at working with his artists. I'm so used to the serialized American comic, where the actual cohesion of give-and-take is completely random, that it was really striking to see him work with these guys in such different fashion. It's still fun to point out the rampant incest in the Jodorowsky books, regardless of what the plot is about, but I love how the dialog and pacing doesn't apply across the board. The bad guys in White Lama don't sound or act like the bad guys in Son of the Gun, and the Incal reads like neither. It's not that Jodorowsky doesn't take the reins, I almost wonder how much MORE involved he really is--it's that there's a true relationship between the story and the creative team. My top shelf out of the one's we read would be the Metabarons for pure raw entertainment, the Woman Trap portion of Nikopol for the "holy shit, this is big deal art" value, and the Chaland anthologies. Throw Hunting Party in there too, no matter how bad our US coloring might be, and you've got my favorites.

JM: I really fucking liked the Chaland stuff. Which we'll get to in a minute. I thought the Metabarons was the most perfect expression of Jodorowsky's worldview I've encountered, and enthralling for that. And the NogegoN portion of The Hollow Grounds, for being sad and strange and show-offy in all the best ways, love and humanity down before the eyes of god, but even god can't see everywhere. Rats live on no evil stars.


(From Different Ugliness, Different Madness)

TS: I think my least favorites are probably obvious--I thought Olympus was just terrible, whereas I found that Transgenesis thing to be as near to unreadable as anything could be possible. That's to be expected though-I can't imagine anybody looking at the entirety of the Humanoids/DC line and loving everything in it--but those two just stood out in their complete lack of purpose or passion.

JM: We had different Transgeneses, and I didn't read yours - oddly, your review didn't prompt a burning desire for purchase! No, mine was just dull and obvious. El Niño all but put me to sleep too. But really, I didn't think any of these books were straight-up horrible. I didn't read all the books you did, so maybe I'd dislike those as much as you, but there's a real lack of total incompetence here, although I suppose Humanoids maybe knew not to let the really bad stuff get out. On the flip side, I should also say that I totally appreciate the efforts of 'literary' comics publishers in getting the presumed cream of the crop out there, and yeah, I don't think the DC/Humanoids line had its own David B.'s Epileptic, like a serious best-of-decade contender in terms of North American releases. Although I know some might slip the Nikopol Trilogy in there, actually.

But hey, let's not get too conclusive; we've got two guys left to read.

TS: I feel confident in my belief that Olympus was the worst piece of shit in the bunch. Prove me wrong, ligne claire!

II. Yves Chaland is Dead



TS: Ah, the clean line, the "ligne claire"...how I recall the nights resting at my father's knee, "Tucker," he said to me, "Never forget the ligne claire, pioneered by Hergé in his many Tintin adventures."

JM: 'Ligne' and 'claire' were my third and fourth words as a child. 'Mama' placed tenth.

TS: So what were the first two? Miller and Mazzucchelli?

JM: Anyhow, Yves Chaland got a meaty two books dedicated to him in the DC/Humanoids adventure, the Chaland Anthology vols. 1 and 2. Book 1 covered three albums, 1981's The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon, 1984's The Elephant Graveyard and 1986's The Comet of Carthage. Book 2 sported two albums, 1988's Holiday in Budapest and 1990's F.52, the latter of which was published the year Chaland died in a vehicular accident. He was 33 years old.

TS: Why did you think Chaland was a "nostalgist bore"? I'll admit that I was mostly into him for the comedic value at first, although I was pretty sold on the look immediately. Correct me if I'm wrong: it was the comet story, right?

JM: The comet story (the third one) was what turned me around. It was the very first story, The Will of Godfrey of Bouillion, that put me off, in that I put the book away after reading it and didn't go back until you advised me to do so.

TS: Huh. I liked them both at first blush, but I'm a sucker for funny shit sometimes, and my relationship with the clean line was so limited at the time--they both worked for me pretty quickly. I don't know when else I'll get the chance to bring it up, so here's my favorite gags from The Will of Godfrey of Bouillion:

1: Freddy's Constant Scowling. Chaland always makes the guy go straight from normal to seething rage filled hate. He rarely follows through by vomiting acidic blood, but he always looks like he's on the verge.



2. The dream sequence reminded me of when Moonlighting would do dream sequences, where all the actors would show up as various 20's era gangsters and what not. Best joke would be "Stop groaning Freddy! It's annoying!" coming from Sweep the bowman to Freddy's "I'm not groaning! Who are you, anyway?"



3. Drunk Freddy arguing with a statue about the weather. Kills me. Kills me stone dead.



JM: Ah, I probably should have been more open-minded. Background, maybe? With me, the answer's always yes.

You see (you, reading this, not Tucker), the Chaland Anthology books were unique among DC/Humanoids projects in that they specifically set out to collect various and sundry short works by a single artist - one of the Bilal books, Memories, did that also, but that was only one book among various themed collections. Like I mentioned above, Humanoids put out a big oversized hardcover of the first volume in 2003, and then the DC deal had it reprinted as a standard-sized softcover, with a second volume following.

Those two books were the only ones released before the DC deal fell through, and they happened to collect all of Chaland's work with this character called Freddy Lombard, who was named for the old Belgian publisher Le Lombard, which published Tintin and The Smurfs and a lot of classic series; it was a statement of intent. There were two other Chaland Anthology books in France, and our most valued commentator Pedro Bouca -- and seriously, we've got to thank Pedro right now for giving us great feedback on every portion of this series -- tells us they contained some very strong material, really sharply satiric work criticizing the racist, paternalistic aspects of early Franco-Belgian comics by adopting their visual style and cranking up the ugly themes 1000x.

Which is something latent to Chaland's style, I've since come to realize. He'd been a cartoonist since 1978, with a lot of earlier fanzine work behind him, and he'd done some 'realistic' work, but he became famous as one of the guys who brought the ligne claire back into the public eye. Joost Swarte was also on that; he actually coined the term "ligne claire." But Chaland's take wasn't just emulation; it was called the "Atomic" style, a meaningful appropriation of an aesthetic charged with a specific social quality of its time, an idealism and sense of boyish adventure, which Chaland contrasted with particular, difficult subject matter to bring out some criticism or special evocation. Like, using the look of Tintin to poke at what went down when he visited the Congo.

TS: Oh, I love what I've seen of Joost Swarte. Is that cool? Does that make me lame? I don't care. Please continue.

JM: One day that big Swarte collection really will be released by Fantagraphics, and oh the birds will sing.



There's a lot of sheer visual pleasure to the stuff. Chaland became really popular, for illustrations as well as comics, if I recall correctly. But I wasn't so sure of that back when I read the first Freddy Lombard story in the first Chaland Anthology, which didn't contain any context or historical info or anything. It's just adventure guy Freddy Lombard and his crew -- bald, irritated Sweep and headstrong Dina -- getting mixed up in a search for treasure in the mountains, and then there's a really fucking long dream sequence set in a Peyo-like Dark Ages slapstick palace, and then the story kind of runs around.

TS: Goddamnit Joe, the guy gets drunk and argues with a statue about the weather. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. The water tastes of baby. That shit ain't freely available.

JM: The trick is, we're not told right away it was an experiment. It was like 'automatic drawing' for Chaland, a whole album he finished in 30 days, just blowing through a page a day until the story looked done, which naturally accounts for the extra-long dream. His head was full of old-timey comics! It just came out! But I didn't know that until the historical stuff included in the back of the Chaland Anthologies vol. 2; it just seemed misshapen as a story, really old-fashioned, almost winking slapstick. I didn't see any point, given the man's reputation, which I did know about, at least!



Here's something: do you think not having immediate context really hurts this stuff?

TS: I definitely came back to the story with a different mindset after reading about the "automatic drawing" stuff, but I wouldn't say it changed my initial enjoyment of the comics themselves. The backmatter, where Chaland describes the "automatic" proces made me respect the stories more from an experimentation aspect, if you know what I mean. I definitely responded to the artist behind the comics differently after I read that stuff though. Chaland... man, I really wish there was more of his stuff out there. Here he was, from his own notes: "I believe in treating the reader badly..." I wish that kind of honesty was more widely available. All the constant "let's talk to our fans" "I'm so glad you liked it" "I wish i could win an Eisner, aw shucks." Fucking Chaland had gigantic testes, full of man milk. They totally should have put that quote on the cover.

JM: DDP, are you reading? There's two of these things left! No pun intended.

TS: That kind of frank, open behavior--I don't know, maybe it's just me, but every time I ever read cartoonists mentioning the "lack of respect" comics get from high art types, I just wish they'd shut the fuck up. Chaland knew he was an artist, he didn't need somebody to argue it for him, or write a book about why it was true. He was an artist, he made art, and fuck you if you thought comics were for kids. It hurts that there's not more of him to read. Died too young, too soon.

JM: Right. I'd have probably had a different reaction myself if I'd actually read deeper into the first anthology. The second album in there, the Elephant Graveyard - that's a diptych of stories, one of which sees Freddy & co. (and one of the things I like is that they're total mooches, just hanging around wherever until adventure beckons) ship off to Africa at the behest of a wacky collector who really wants a rare photographic plate for his horde. Conflict against natives results, and we're assured that Our Heroes have brought utter chaos to a region that's been peaceful for a quarter of a century. The second story is much darker, concerning murders among white African explorers at home in Paris, with a connection to poaching and violence on the continent years back. You've mentioned having some problems with the material on first blush?



TS: Yes, his depiction of black people in the Elephant Graveyard story threw me off. It did then, and I had always skipped that stuff on the re-read until the team-up. So yes, Pedro Bouca, our comment resident expert on Humanoids: I will freely admit that I was one of those overly-sensitive American readers offended by the garish stereotype, because I didn't do any research. After finishing this re-read, talking a little bit with you, reading the back-matter and, for the first time, looking into the guys work, I found out that it was purposely done that way as satire.

JM: Uh huh; the two stories in the album sort of compliment one another, although they're both pretty critical; the first one casts all of this violence as a goofy, repugnant game between these dumb arch-collectors of nonsense, while the second refuses to even leave Paris while all these muscular French he-man explorers are murdered, despite that jaunty title: The Elephant Graveyard! Plus, Chaland wants the book to feel like an old Lombard production, so there's sincere laffs and shit, which probably jars even worse.

TS: The thing that I think hurts this a bit is that I came at this first volume--which doesn't have any backmatter, and the blurb description on the back doesn't indicate any of Chaland's intentions--as a non-blogging, non-wikipedia reading, non-googling type. I just bought this at a comic store and read it, and if I'd never joined the dark forces of "write shit on the Internet" club, I don't know when that feeling would have changed. One of the things I see as a consistent complaint online is that attitude that people shouldn't dislike something, or be offended by something, without getting the context. In some cases, I can agree with that--David Brothers put up a couple of panels from a Garth Ennis Hellblazer story once, the "Don't call me whitey, nigger" panels--and some people pointed to that as racist despite not knowing anything about the comic that surrounded that panel. There, I'm on the side of the publisher, the writer: read the comic first, don't make this into some Aryan maternity test. But in the case of Elephant Graveyard, I think that it's a strange choice to have a 134 page trade collection without any acknowledgement or mention that the reason the natives are big-lipped Booga Booga types is because Chaland was being ironic on purpose.



You mentioned the possibility that putting this alongside the first story was the "tell" that Elephant Graveyard wasn't supposed to be standard racist depiction done for racist reasons. And while yes, I'm more inclined to agree with you now, that isn't something that I think is explicit enough to be clear to the majority of the American audiences. If we were dealing with something like Tintin in the Congo or Robert Crumb's "Nigger Hearts," a comic that is easily surrounded by an existent discussion of the imagery, if we're talking about the Mamie character in the Walt & Skeezix reprints, were Chris Ware says "Look, we know how bad this looks, and we agree, it's kind of fucked up," that's one thing.

But these Yves Chaland reprints from DC/Humanoids? This isn't something that has a lot of peers for American readers, they barely got this stuff into bookstores, which means you're stuck with one potential audience: the direct market reader. I don't think it was the right choice to put this out there and just optimistically expect everybody would get it. A change in the back cover text--just the addition of the word "satire," maybe the type of disclaimer that Chris Ware puts in the front of those Walt & Skeezix books... shit, I don't like this anymore than anybody else does. It's veering pretty close to hand-holding, I know. But these aren't huge selling comics where they can just cockily write off the portion of the audience that would see those Booga Booga types and get upset. When you're dealing with these things, which I think Brian Hibbs once said got pre-orders of less than 5000, every potential buyer matters.



I don't know, I feel bad about making a big deal out of this, I didn't intend to. I love these two collections of Chaland's stuff, I really do. I don't have any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that American readers were upset by the drawings. I just want more of this stuff available, and I really hope the reason that there isn't is just because American readers suck at buying good comics, and not that some American readers were offended by what they saw here. Because this is one of the times when I think there wasn't enough context freely available for them to make an argument otherwise.

JM: Sure, I totally understand.

And then, after that - oh man, the comet one. The Comet of Carthage. That's the big leap, right there; it's where I should have kept reading until, because I know it would have knocked me on my ass.

TS: The Comet of Carthage--and I'll admit, I'm counting a bit on you to explicate this--it's just about a perfect comic. I have a lot of affection for all of the stories contained here, despite my P.C. concerns as well as finding the first story in the second collection, Holiday In Budapest, to be a bit long-winded. But I've got zero complaints with Comet Of Carthage, and when it comes to being disappointed at the loss of a guy who wasn't even 33 when he died, it's the fantasy of more stories like Comet that motivates that feeling.



JM: How to describe it? I'm sure some of the shift in style comes from Chaland picking up a co-writer, Yann Lepennetier, who'd go on to work on every freddy Lombard story (so, three in total), but... it's like being slapped in the face. It's like Gilbert Hernandez stumbling on a lost Eddie Campbell Deadface script circa Doing the Islands With Bacchus -- I should mention right now that The Last of the Summer Wine, from the 1988 Harrier Bacchus series issue #2 is one of my favorite comic stories of all time -- and editing it in the smash-cut style of Love and Rockets at its most fevered. And, you know - Tintin references! Freddy Lombard 'n pals wandering around this unstuck-in-time place, a comet bearing down, scenes just barely connecting, mythological allusions everywhere, a mad professor in a submarine, a strange women in sunglasses - probably Nouvelle Vague too, actually. I loved this. LOVED it. The last page destroyed me.

It's funny, because none of it's 'realistic,' like even in the sense of evoking a '50s comic or anything. There's huge, huge word balloons and just... it somehow works? It's like an organic evolution of these comics into something that interacted with developments in French popular culture without shifting in pure surface aesthetic, like a crazy superfan's dream... does that make sense?

TS: Oh, I think I see where you're going with this. The timing of the whole thing, the way it delivers all the necessary tropes--the greasy scary guy with his mustache, the coming crisis of environmental destruction, the sultry seductress of mystery, the May-December romance--how it's all mashed up into one concise story? I'm terrible with France, my knowledge begins and ends with Godard and Ionesco. I think I have maybe two albums of popular French music, and both of them are terrible.

Those pages where "A princess" falls into the sea for Freddy to find her--I was knocked out by every little thing about it. The crash of the suitcase, the initial desperate grab for the picture of her and her sister, the why Chaland changed the direction of the rain to show how much worse the storm was getting, her scream of "NO" when the rocks started to fall...jesus, I'm not even looking at the comic, it's just nailed to my brain.

And yes, of course--the final pages of the comet coming down, even though we know it's not going to hit the Earth or something, the way it just punctuates this massive collapse, a tidal wave, an octopus...and then the sun comes up, and all that's left is wreckage.



JM: Then we get to Holiday in Budapest (the start of the DC/Humanoids vol. 2), and, naturally, it's different once again. I think more than anything else in the series it fulfills maybe the 'expectations' for a project like this, in that it's a logical, 'mature' version of a 1950s Franco-Belgian comic, which Chaland mentions as his intent in the back - it's like a comic of the period, but tackling unrest in that part of the world, with the goofy heroes agreeing to take some kid back home to the city to be a man and fight the Russians, and antics totally goddamned ensue. It's not quite on-the-level, I don't think, in that I haven't read a ton of comics from that period (like most English-only Americans; my French is seriously as good as that of mold in an apartment in Paris), and there's some 'spicy' stuff I suppose, but I don't see a lot of irony to it. It's 'mature Tintin,' basically.

TS: Not to be too sarcastic, but I'd say you're right, and that's probably why I preferred F.52, no matter that it had a little mentally handicapped girl that everybody calls retarded. My favorite thing about Holiday In Budapest was watching Sweep get laid--the cutesy whining socialist and his misadventures wore me out. I just kept hoping somebody would stick a grenade in that kid's mouth. What an irritating little twat.



JM: Oh, the sex scene is totally the best part. I really dug how it's mostly this increasingly improbably series of slapstick antics that Sweep gets into, but you know, the essence of slapstick is physicality, and she just keeps watching his body going through these absurd routines and getting more and more excited - it's great.

TS: Definitely! If you read Holiday In Budapest and just skip anything with or about the kid, you end up reading this really great comic about Sweep and his asshole pal, Freddy Lombard.



JM: So what about F.52? It's a 'chaos on a plane' children in peril special, terror at however many thousands of feet, little girl running from crazy people in an enclosed space, with a tear-off-the-roof ending (not literally). I liked it when Freddy murders a woman and starts screaming NO! I DIDN'T MEAN TO DO THAT! or something, 'cause that's not supposed to happen! Much!

TS: F.52 doesn't have the same emotional punch to it that Comet did, but it's still pretty fucked up and insane. The violence in it is so brilliant--when the female part of the crazy couple beats the shit out of Dina, and the next time you see her there's just all kinds of gore hanging off her face--so amazing, and so out of nowhere. Or when the cabin crew brings the mentally handicapped girl back to the Jodie Foster stand-in (what was that movie called? Flightplan? Not Without My Daughter?) and she starts saying "This isn't my daughter" and then she fucking SHOVES the kid about 10 feet into a bunch of people? That's some pull-no-punches cruel comedy, it's like the Eastbound & Down of the ligne claire.

In some ways, I think F.52 wraps up Yves Chaland's Freddy work even better than Comet of Carthage. Now, I don't mean I like F.52 more, but I think this might be more of what he was going for with these Lombard adventures--clear antecedents in the "throw my characters in crazy circumstances to showcase what they do best" kind of plotting, the over-the-top, borderline juvenile humor, the somewhat obtuse addition of characters with weird motives and proclivities, and an overall tempo that just forces you to pump through the comic at whatever speed he dictates. On the other hand, Comet is a story that seems more direct and mature, a story that almost seems a little beyond the type of involvement Freddy and his pals provide. They seem--and this isn't so much a complaint or criticism--outclassed by the story surrounding them. In F.52, they couldn't be more at home: this is what they should be doing. Getting the holy fuck kicked out of them and accidently murdering people, all while wearing funny outfits.

JM: You've gotta wonder where he was going to take it from there. With this one he's adding graphic violence -- it's far and away the bloodiest of the Lombard stories -- to a sort of typical adventure setup. He mentions in the back that he liked the look of the aircraft. Very 'atomic,' which I'm sure sparked a lot of interest, although there was also a Tintin story set around a plane - Flight 714. They don't get on it until the end, though.




You're right; it's a good ending. The iconography of the final bit is powerful, and not just because of the circumstances surrounding Chaland's death that year (sadly, you can't escape that): nice vintage automobile, speeding into the air and falling gracefully into the sun. There goes the old style. There goes Yves Chaland.

III. Stanislas (Or the Decline and Fall of the '70s Avant-Garde)



TS: I'm really curious to what you have to say about Stanislas & Rullier's By The Numbers, since I don't think that's one you and I have talked about at all the way we did about Chaland, Bilal, Jodorowsky. Without knowing in advance, i'll take a plunge and say that I liked this one as well, although I think it goes into different territory completely than Chaland does, despite it sharing a similar "look". For one, it's more direct in its ambition to be a comic about French people in Vietnam--I think there's even something in the end notes where the writer talks about how he wished there were more comics out there about the subject, but I didn't get a specific reason beyond that. He just wanted there to be comics set in that time period.

JM: It is a very straightforward historical adventure piece, isn't it?

For all you who may not know -- which is to say, possibly everyone besides Evan Dorkin -- By the Numbers is a series of books released between 1990 and 2004 by writer Laurent Rullier and artist 'Stanislas' (Barthélemy). There's actually only four of them, the first two of which were collected into the DC/Humanoids edition, although the supplements suggest there's probably been a number of revisions made to the material across various printings. As it is, the DC/Humanoids edition ends on a logical stopping point, although it's obvious the story isn't entirely over.

The books focus on this guy, Victor Levallois, who narrates the various stories from 1968, where he's a middle-aged balding guy with a lot of experience behind him. Most of the books are actually flashbacks that follow his life's path, from being a mild-mannered accountant in the late '40s to finding himself mixed up in money-making schemes in Saigon, and eventually falling in with a mixed crew of revolutionary opium smokers, not entirely ex-Nazis, action-starved volunteer French soldiers and a whole lot of grifters and rich kids who enjoy the notion of sex with 14-year old prostitutes. There's an apparently popular scheme going on at the time, exploiting legally-controlled exchange rates of currency, allowing for francs and dollars and piastre to get passed around for big French profits. Most of the dollars wind up going to anti-French forces in the area, but not a lot of folks seem to care - they're totally amoral in that regard, and Victor (an accountant!) comes to profit as well as the years go by. And he falls in 'love' with a young woman, of course, who's got a thing for gambling, and then the tides of history come in to wash it all away, etc. etc.



I was pretty startled by the depictions of morality in the book - I think that sets it apart as more 'novelistic' (oh god, there's a trap I've stepped into) than comics or movies or whatnot often art, in that there's a lot of nuance going on. Like, 14-year old prostitutes... that's fucking awful, there's all these terrible conclusions to draw from that, yet otherwise sympathetic characters are depicted as taking part of this type of vacation from morality. It's a real playground of paternal profit, as depicted, and the book really does an effective job of showing Victor's sort of conflicted delight in that world... he enjoys making money, Stanislas always draws him smoking that smart cigarette - what an ass!

TS: Yes, there's a definite paternalistic quality to this whole thing--while Victor doesn't behave atrociously or anything, and I'd imagine he's probably depicted a bit nicer than your standard "emigre with superiority complex," the entire relationship between him and his Vietnamese lover comes across as being a sort of "I look after you and your gambling problems, you dumb native chick, you'll love me whether you want to or not" kind of attitude. I'd bet there's some accuracy to that, romanticized as it might be.

JM: What did you make of Stanislas? His art? I think he added an extra layer of depth, in that he drafts all these rather unadorned 'just living' scenes without a lot of judgment as to the moral situation. There's the great bit early on with Victor carrying a little kid through a yard and into a house; it's not detailed art, but it's so lived-in, really evocative stuff without resorting to 'show your work' type of historical detail overload. It's really nice.

TS: It's interesting how the entire "feel" of the story's time and place were defined (to me at least) by those party sequences. Just a bunch of lazy French-types hanging around and drinking too much in some really precious attempts at beatnik lifestyle. It worked well when things start to get nasty, when they run out of money and the Vietnamese gangster types start turning against them. The portions on the ship, the shoot out at the dump--that stuff is all well and good, but I didn't get a sense that was specific to Vietnam or France. It was just a shoot out at a dump. But when you see those cocky pricks and their hammocks, with their stilted arguments about politics and their gross behavior towards the locals--that locked it into something out of The Quiet American.



Stanislas doesn't seem to have the same blowing-up-the-spot kind of art that some of these cats do, although I think there's some moments of real excitement in By The Numbers. When I think about the collection--of which DC/Humanoids only released one, although the title "Volume 1" makes it seem like more was coming--the stuff that stood out the most for me was that war page in the second story, where most of the violence is shown through all red panels with the word "Bom" while black shadows shoot guns. Except for the "oops! sorry." dialog, there's just that one line at the end, "It lasted all night". That was a pretty tasty page.



JM: He also manages to put together the occasional 'awesome' bit - the part at the end of chapter 1 with the fellow who's been sitting around (possibly all night!) with a gun trained on a guy's head - I liked the meshing of the story and art there, in that there's a sort of unassuming (and thus awful; frightening) 'no big deal' quality to guys getting shot.

TS: Oh, yeah, that part also had my favorite piece of dialog in the whole comic. Right before he shoots that guy, Mr. All Nighter says "I used to know an oberleutenant who got his throat slit by a 13-year-old girl!" That's the way he distracts him? It's such a random interjection. And then he shoots him from a seated position with a machine gun. Like you said, it's totally unassuming and awful--the guy just blows the dude to pieces from point blank range in the middle of the day. While sitting down. No negotiation, no "is there another way", he just kills him and leaves, so he can go to bed.

JM: Here's something - I tend to associate Stanislas' art more with, say, Dupuy and Berbérian and that kind of latter-day cartooning look, even though I suspect that the period setting of the series associates it with the clear line. What do you make of that?

TS: Oh, I'd definitely agree with the Dupuy/Berbérian connection. By The Numbers may be clear line, but it's a contemporary clear line. It's also almost universally a thinly lined comic, everything in here looks like it's not far removed from the type of layouts you see whenever a company publishes a cartoonists style. There's none of the type of brushed in depth you see in Chaland, where thick lines are added to Freddy's face to define his mood. By The Numbers is a really tightly boxed comic too, sort of the way Moebius laid out the Blueberry stuff I just read. Some of these pages have 20 panels, the only reason it doesn't smother the story is because they're all so clean to look at.

JM: Yeah. There's probably a bit less to talk about with a story like this in that it just sort of darts forward - I did think it kind of starts to lose impact once the shit really hits the fan by the end and Victor goes bananas trying to find his lover -- and period-psychological accuracy or not, I'll cop to never, ever being much of a fan of the old-school 'headstrong woman who dooms her man through his intense love and winds up a whore dying in agony, one presumes for her sins' character type; I do think the work buys into those genre (historical fiction genre) elements a bit -- where he's falling in and out of occasion in various locations, dodging death. I think the observational qualities got a bit lost there, even though there's still some skillful character bits. It's a very neatly composed work. Sure do wish we'd get the second half.

TS: The thing that I found interesting about his pursuit of the girl was that, whether it was intended or not, I never got the sense he loved her. Victor treated that girl like property, and his pursuit of her read like another version of Victor pursuing something that doesn't belong to him, but that he's laid claim too, the same way France treated Vietnam: we give a shit because we've decided we know better. Victor spends a good portion of the first volume chasing some money that doesn't belong to him so he can pretty much steal it himself, and then he spends the second half chasing a woman who he doesn't love so much as he believes she belongs to him. France in Indochina--they screwed around for a while and then America turned it into a blood-soaked debate on communism. Either way, it was white people just saying "We know better" to a bunch of natives. Victor, for all his qualities, isn't much different.



JM: There's more than one type of historical quality present too. The first of these books came out in 1990 - exactly the same year Stanislas co-founded the famous French alternative publisher L'Association with Jean-Christophe Menu, David B., Killoffer, Lewis Trondheim and Todd McFarlane. No, wait... Mattt Konture. And Mokeït, who stopped releasing work almost right after he started, thus forever branding him the Whilce Portacio of French comics. For me.

TS: Somebody should review every Wetworks related comic at some point. That would make for prime time reading.

JM: And it's funny, because L'Association wound up raising the banner of the avant-garde that Les Humanoïdes used to wave. That's totally a rough statement, granted - if anyone wants to learn more, I 100% recommend Bart Beaty's very fine book Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s, which should fill you in on a lot of the stuff going on. But there's... I think Jodorowsky ruined my brain, because I'm thinking in such odd ways, but there's an odd symbolism to Humanoids releasing this work from the year L'Association opened, out into the midst of this broken effort to re-introduce the publisher's material to a North American audience, doomed to failure while it's the children of L'Association itself that finds such purchase, as far as the cultural perception of 'Eurocomics' goes. It's like their world, even though they're not 'mainstream' at all - the cultural capital is great, though. Maybe the exchange rate it better, like back in Indochina in the '40s.

IV. Howling Disaster

JM: Tucker, why do you think DC/Humanoids failed?

TS: Here's the thing: it isn't that the Humanoids Publishing empire is somehow better as a whole than any other publishing company.

JM: Gosh no; this is some alternate dimension shit, a 'real mainstream' apart from our reality.

TS: They put out crap, so does everybody else, and the lens for that crap is going to get focused even tighter by the basic stumbling block that the DC/Humanoids deal wasn't designed with any real aesthetic methodology behind it. DC picked the books they thought they could sell, they shoved them out on a ridiculous publishing schedule that was, regardless of who came up with it, indefensibly stupid, and they didn't back them up with any real marketing or ambition beyond turning to the internet for some token press releases--which the internet is already drowning in. They picked books that were demonstrably successful in other markets, including some that Humanoids had already brought to American market, they picked ones that were new and vaguely relatable to bookstore friendly graphic novels, but they did it in a haphazard, stupid fashion. What was Different Ugliness, Different Madness supposed to compete with in a comic book store? The Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics books that those stores didn't carry or have an audience for? What was the point of re-releasing the Metabarons, the Nikopol Trilogy, White Lama, Sanctum and the Technopriests when the Humanoids versions of those titles had been released just a few years earlier and failed to crack the market? What was the point of a unified production design, one that matched the also-botched 2000 AD reprints, if the books were going to lack a unified content as well?



JM: Ha, the unified book design was almost all DC did in that regard; it took the million formats of the old Humanoids's Direct Market efforts and ordered them into a standard line. God rid of the blankets over the nudity too. And yeah, they had the Rebellion deal going on at the same time (somebody take this excessive reviewing baton and run!) - interesting on the similar format. Like all the foreign stuff goes in the same place, except for manga. Ah, but I'm sure they only wanted to make them easier to sort, or sell.

TS: Oh, I'd agree that it was a good bookstore choice, but it's also not something that can make magic happen. I like that MOME and the new Love and Rockets, House, Jessica Farm are all the same size, and I like that all my Humanoids are the same size, but come the fuck on: you can't just do that and some email bombing and call it a day. Grow the fuck up.

JM: I agree, I agree.

TS: It's one thing to publish a bunch of Humanoids reprints that focus on science fiction, which was the rough majority of DC's choices, and it's another to split the difference and throw in a black & white 30's 'feelings' comic, a short throwaway script Geoff Johns came up with in the weeks prior to when his DC-exclusive contract took effect, and a couple of compilation albums of satirical ligne claire work that looks like Tintin by way of chain smoking sarcasm. That's not a publishing imprint. That's vomiting books out, and it's no surprise at all that it couldn't crack a direct market--the store where I picked up many of these books on the release dates had no idea what or how many to order, they were completely dependent on the sort of people who read the monstrous Previews catalog, and while it's a debate I'm not wholly invested in, I do think the idea that the consumer should read through fucking Previews to find comics is completely fucking ridiculous.

DC/Humanoids, like DC and Marvel always seem to do, expected stores and consumers to trust them, to just order and order and order away, to just suck it up and build a new shelf for a bunch of comics a bare minimum of customers realistically knew existed. The intent was obvious enough--if DC could get the Tintin audience with Chaland, Rulliers & Stanisals, they'd have a foot in the door in a way that the adventures of Supergirl couldn't crack, if they could get the Palookaville and Alex Toth sketchbook audience with Different Madness, if their stand-alone science fiction sagas and epic Jodorwosky tales could do this, so on, so forth...the mentality was solid, that makes sense. The Humanoids books offered something that Vertigo and DC Universe titles didn't, still don't, and probably never will. (Unless something changes, I can't see Vertigo publishing stuff like Different Ugliness while Marvel MAX puts out the Metabarons, Soliel reprints notwithstanding.)

I think these things had a chance, and while I don't know if Devil's Due is the right home for them--I never know how much one should rely on that crazy Lying In The Gutters guy, but he's nailed that company for non-payment a few times--it's just ridiculous to me that something like Bilal, or Jodorowsky, comics that have huge exposure and name recognition amongst a swath of non-American readers besides Pedro Bouca. Tintin sells here: so could Chaland. Bad science fiction comics sell here: so could good science fiction comics. Huge epic kill-fest comics sell here: so could Metabarons.

I work in advertising, and I hate it when idiots just say that the solution is "marketing," so I won't just say that. But NOBODY EVEN TRIED with the DC run. They just chucked them out non-stop! It's not like there's a business decision that I can pick apart here, because DC didn't even come up with a business decision, beyond the actual format, which is honestly the only thing I think they got right. I can understand the criticisms against it from a purely comics-as-art standpoint, nobody wants to be forced into a specific size. But the Humanoids/DC line wasn't showing up with a huge amount of fanfare, and making some kind of "however the artists wants it" decision probably wouldn't have been the right call. (Bill Watterston didn't demand control over his Sunday pages in the first year of Calvin and Hobbes, he did that when he had the clout to pull it off.) Unified production design isn't the most attractive thing in the world, but if these books had made it to bookstores in a more expansive way, it would have made them more attractive.

But really, I'm just spitballing random opinionated specifics. If there was a business plan in place for DC/Humanoids, it was a completely mysterious "hope for osmosis and cold fusion" one. I can criticize what I think it was and brainstorm rough drafts of what I think it should have been, but the simple truth is that they didn't try anything at all beyond the physical printing of material. So here's the simple answer, which I should have put before all these paragraphs: They didn't do anything. They should have tried something.



JM: That's very well put. When I look at these things, I'm really taken with the futility of struggling against history. Because the last time Humanoïdes found themselves introduced to the North American comics audience, there also didn't seem to be much of a plan besides trusting the National Lampoon people with making a nice magazine -- and if you look at some of Jean-Pierre Dionnet's comments, some of them felt their trust was misplaced, in an aesthetic sense -- which, if you really look at those early issues, turned out to be some ferociously newcomer-unfriendly shit! There'd be whole issues composed of nothing but middle chapters of serials and pin-ups, there was no fucking context or artists' statements or recaps or anything, just 'look at all this cool shit, it's great!' and there really was a positive reaction. Yeah! That is great!

It was a different time. Print magazines were still a solid concern; National Lampoon was very popular. American comics and comics readers were really hospitable to that kind of work. The maturation of the form seemed to match up at that moment, in the US and France, which is funny, since France & Belgium used to lag behind a bit in the '50s compared to the US and Japan - I bet if we ever see a lot of examples of the gekiga Yoshihiro Tatsumi works on in A Drifting Life, it wouldn't be a thousand miles off from the baby steps taken by Charles Biro's crime comics. But Japan made a choice to keep going forward, and the US found itself acting differently, from political, social pressure - many factors. Heavy Metal was witness to a new instant of international union, dramatic as that sounds. Odd things came in; they always do at those times.

There'll be more times like that, although who knows what it'll involve. Certainly that wasn't the case with Humanoids, with or without DC. They contorted, cut, capered and cried for access, and they got it - too much. What barking madness, eh?

TS: The best thing that can be said about DC's failure, the way I see it, is that I don't think anybody with any sense would see what they did and use that as evidence that there's no audience for what guys like Bilal, Yves Chaland or Alejandro Jodorowsky have to offer. These things may have sold miserably--by all accounts, that seems to be true--but it seems just as obvious that was more because anything would fail when presented with this little intent and design. One of the things you touched on in your own review of Bilal's The Beast Trilogy was that he was an artist who regularly sees another "push" to get him over here. You go on Amazon right now, or eBay, you find people offering and selling copies of his work for insane prices--these guys aren't going anywhere.

And the thing is, as much as I want the artists I like to succeed while still alive enough to enjoy it, some of these guys won't feel it until they, like Tatsumi, hit 70, and some of them won't hit it until after they're dead. They didn't all make books that have those kind of legs, but some of them did, and I want to believe that the good will out, and that someday down the line you won't have to bust your ass and break into your savings just to find out how great The Woman Trap is.

JM: These artists, though - maybe their fame right now is all they want. The North American comics industry can pretend that where it goes follows the world, but honestly? I don't think many people do that anymore. I think most of us that know these names know of the respect that a lot of them already have; what's ours but icing? Gravy? Brown icing? Another revenue stream? Another 10,000 copies sold, atop Bilal's 400,000? Jodorowsky didn't sound like he needed sound like he needed attention from our neck of the woods on Newsarama.

But yeah, what about the discovery? For North American readers, English-only? It's hard to even talk about some of these books, given that some of them have already become so rare and costly; speaking of lessons learned on this trip!

It's not over. Humanoids is still around. Cracks are still visible in the taped-over window. Comics are better and worse than they were half a decade ago. And something's gonna happen again. We don't need another five years to tell you that.

Labels: Jog, Tucker

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The Politics of Smurfing

This is the story of the day the Smurfs became terrorists.



***

In 1965, the comics album King Smurf (Le Schtroumpfissime) was released to French-reading audiences. It was drawn by 'Peyo' (Pierre Culliford), the artist and animator who had created the Smurfs (Les Schtroumpfs) in 1958 as impish supporting characters for his Johan et Pirlouit medieval adventure series. It was written with Yvan Delporte, editor-in-chief of Le Journal de Spirou, the Belgian comics magazine in which the story had been serialized.

In 1978, the Belgian publisher Dupuis licensed an English translation of the album to Random House -- sans its original back-up story (Schtroumphonie en Ut) -- for simultaneous release in Canada and the United States. As evidenced by the back cover of the U.S. edition, an entire line of English-language Smurfs books had been released (or at least planned) by that time, although the franchise's prolifigate merchandise had only just begun to materialize stateside, its longstanding smash success in Europe not quite yet gone supernova.

In 1981, the animation studio Hanna-Barbera Productions introduced its wildly popular television adaptation of the Smurfs, which ultimately ran for 256 half-hour episodes, until 1990. It was a cultural force. Most of you reading this can still whistle that damned theme song. Yes you can. R1 dvd box sets began appearing in early 2008, although I suspect many viewers were not aware that the little blue characters were approaching their 50th anniversary, or that it all used to be a comic, or that the comic used to be political, sometimes, owing to its time and place.

King Smurf was adapted into an episode of the animated series in its first season. The edges were smoothed down considerably. But then, the Smurf Village is a secret place, and I expect the comic book Smurfs would rather keep a few things to themselves.

***

Our tale begins on a beautiful night in Smurf Village. Papa Smurf, who is totally not a Communist, is up late cooking up some alchemical thing for a no-doubt beneficial purpose.

But wait! Papa is fresh out of the suggestively-named herb "Euphorbium," which is crucial to the success of his project! We're never told what exactly Euphorbium does, or how it ran out, but my current theory connects it to the community service obligations that required Papa's appearance in Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. Anyway, it's obvious this little ritual to Glycon won't work without it.



I do think the whole explosive materials in the lab deal is what's known as 'the pistol in act one,' just a heads up.

As such, Papa takes off the next morning to fetch some herb on "the other smurf of the mountains," where I presume the police helicopters cannot navigate. He asks his Smurfs to "be very smurf" while he's gone, at which point a Smurf smurfs in to suggest a round of smurf, but then Brainy Smurf smurfs in like a smurfwit and starts demanding everyone work on restoring a bridge and shit (smurf). The gang isn't terribly enthused about addressing Smurf Village's longstanding infrastructure problems.



Oh right, "go to smurf," yeah! Did you think me and your elementary school classmates were the only ones to play the 'replace ass with smurf' game? No, I kind of expect that possibility occurred to Peyo approximately three seconds after he and fellow cartoonist André Franquin came up with the Smurf (Schtroumpf) language over dinner, and may indeed have made up the majority of the Schtroumpf-related interactions for the remainder of the week.

You do know the Smurf language, right? And how the different Smurfs have different characteristics, even though they look pretty much the same? Brainy Smurf is slightly more complicated, in that he's both a brain and a total dipshit who's usually wrong about things. He's actually a really good, funny character in this particular comic, a very specific-seeming caricature of (pseudo)intellectual elites as social conformists, trusting in the status quo to reward them for their blustering support while remaining totally clueless to anything outside of their frame of reference.

Naturally, Brainy expects to be hailed leader of the Smurfs, more or less because he figures it's his turn, just for being as brainy as him. This (again) doesn't go over well with the other Smurfs, who eventually opt for their first-ever display of "universal smurffrage." A few kinks in the plan quickly emerge.



The philosophical profundity in the bottom left corner comes from Grouchy Smurf, who boasts one of the more iconographically questionable origins in comics history, having been a sunny Smurf who was bitten by a bug that turned his skin black and made him violent and sour; more and more Smurfs were bitten and made black, until Papa managed to expunge the blackness from Smurf society, although Grouchy was still grouchy afterwards. This all went down in 1963's The Black Smurfs (Les Schtroumpfs Noirs), not available in English.

Getting back to the story, a lone anonymous Smurf soon arrives at a startling revelation: if he promises people stuff, they'll vote for him! So, when Brainy Smurf finishes boring some other Smurf to tears via assertions of his Papa-approved greatness, Our Smurf zips in and promises to pass a law outlawing bores - success!

Soon Lazy Smurf is promised a Right-Not-to-Work Bill, Harmony Smurf is promised a position as first trumpet in the Big Smurf Band and Vanity Smurf is complimented on his immense physical beauty. Smurf Prime even makes sure to urge Dopey Smurf to vote for Brainy, trusting that he'll somehow screw it up. Speaking of Brainy, the niceties of the political process seem to have escaped him.



Before long, Smurf (and yes, it's always just VOTE FOR SMURF, since it could be anyone in his position, you see) is having parades in his honor, and delivering hot campaign speeches before inviting the lads out for drinks while Brainy babbles on and on about his status as virtual incumbent to an audience of Grouchy, who hates drinking.

Election day arrives. It's a real nest of vipers, chock-full of thrown-out ballots and rampant fraud; thank heavens there's no appeals in Smurf Village, or we'd still be awaiting the results.



In the end, Smurf-Just-Smurf emerges winner of the farce, with Brainy receiving votes from only himself and Dopey Smurf, who is so phenomenally stupid that he managed to screw up fulfillment of Smurf's intent for him to screw up, paradoxically arriving at the correct result for possibly the first time ever. The total voting population of Smurf Village, by the way, is exactly 100, counting the absentee Papa. I only ask that you dedicate your next trivia night victory to me.

***

If you really want to understand the Smurfs-in-comics, though, just take a look at their feet. Fat, oval lumps, real dinner rolls.

Oh, I'm sure there's some longstanding precident for that look, and it's obviously been used in many places subsequent. But I always associate it with Belgian comics of that period, specifically the tight-knit "Marcinelle school" of Belgian cartooning, named for the town surrounding Dupuis, aesthetically headquartered in the Spirou anthology and bound by blood (and marketing) to always oppose Le Journal de Tintin, home of Hergé and the style that would become known as the ligne claire, the "clear line," after some Dutch guy cooked up a sufficiently catchy name in the '70s.

The Marcinelle school was different, focusing broadly on vigorously cartooned forms and the illusion of movement. Granted, there were several individual departures, including, ironically, the "school's" founder, Joseph "Jijé" Gillain, who eventually developed a distinct oscellation between a clear line-inspired cartoon approach and a polished 'realistic' style, a dichotomy later replicated by his noteworthy pupil, the Frenchman Jean "Moebius" Giraud. But the core identity of the style was nonetheless firm, perfected in the works of André Franquin, the great cartoonist who headed Spirou's flagship series, Spirou et Fantasio, in its mighty golden age.

However, almost nobody in the U.S. has heard of Spirou et/ou Fantasio, whereas everyone over the age of 15 has heard of the Smurfs, and so they are the sealed-in-amber conclusion of the Marcinelle school for many American eyes. And while Peyo was no Franquin, there's something about the uniform chubby roundness of the lil' blue devils that suggests a summary at work, a distillation of accrued cartooning tropes into factory-ready icons, every one perfect, and perfectly ready to adopt specific, isolated attributes: Brainy, Lazy, Grouchy, etc. After all, if you're not going to tend toward realism, as the Tintin school did, you might as well plunge into sheer iconography, the sure symbol of Smurf society.

But that's no secret; it's as plain as your eyes, regardless of your personal awareness as to Papa's seat in Belgian comics history.

No, the mystery is provided by Delporte, who lived until 2007 and wrote a ferocious amount of comics, not to mention his share of scripts for the Smurfs cartoon show. As stated above, though, the Saturday morning iteration tended to be sedate, in spite of the slapstick, while Delporte's Smurf scripts for comics took on an often satirical edge. They were children's comics, sure, but keenly aware of their place in a society owned and operated by adults.

Take, for example, 1973's Smurf Vs. Smurf; I haven't read it (since it's never been translated to English), but Wikipedia's summary suggests that it's a fairly pointed lampoon of the strife between the Dutch-speaking northern region of Belgium (Flanders) and the French-speaking South (Wallonia), as translated to an ongoing Smurf Village argument between the verb-dominant Smurfs (ex: I wanna smurf you like an animal) and their noun-dominant brothers (I wanna fuck you like a smurf). All-out war in the streets soon erupts, leaving Papa to restore peace via the conclusion of the hit comic book and motion picture Watchmen.

I'm serious; the story ends in almost exactly the same general manner as the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons classic, with Papa fabricating a threat by villain and gourmand Gargamel so as to pretty much scare the warring Smurfs into a state of peace. I sure hope Wikipedia isn't pulling my leg, since there's even apparently an ambiguous ending suggesting that the harmony may be short-lived! No word on whether Grouchy Smurf narrates from a journal kept of the story's events, or if any right-wing publications discover it in the end.

***

But oh, dear readers, trouble soon arrives in the fair Smurf municipality. The freshly-elected Smurfy Smurf hustles into his room to change into a little something he'd obviously been working on for a while: a brand-new footy pants 'n cap combo, forged from pure gold. Or, colored in that manner, unsuccessfully.



Undeterred, Our Man declares that all shall henceforth refer to him as King Smurf, resulting in highly respectful peals of laughter. No matter: when Harmony Smurf pops into the His Majesty's office to collect on his Big Smurf Band promise, King Smurf gives him a really fancy title (First Chief Head Spokesman), outfits him with a drum, and sends him out to announce that all Smurfs will respect and obey, or face terrible consequences.

This prompts Hefty Smurf (who is strong) to bust into the King's room to kick his ass. But King Smurf knows what desires lurk in a powerful Smurf's heart.



In mere minutes, Hefty has lined up an honor guard of fellow Smurfs, armed with deadly blades. Brainy can't believe he wasn't picked. Tiring of his shabby digs, King Smurf decides to put the rest of the village to work building him a rightly awesome palace. Sensing another authority figure whom he can leap behind, Brainy takes up his tools while the guards round up the rest of the Smurfs. The reign of terror has begun.



Yes, forced labor is the new rule of the day! Smurfs now live as slaves, worked to the bone under threat of death! The rule of law is useless too, and inequality reigns supreme; poor Jokey Smurf gets hauled before His Eminence for pulling off one of his knee-slapping 'exploding gift' tricks on a guard, and comes face to hideously singed face with the new double standard.



Sending a man to jail for innocently detonating a bomb in someone's face in the name of fun is step #5 or #6 down the road to totalitarianism, as I've personally mentioned to several magisterial district judges, so you can imagine the uproar in the Smurf community following Jokey's arrest and detention. But a march on the palace only leads the Smurfs to be held back at speartip, and the crowd is soon dispersed. Is there no hope left in this town?

Under the cover of night, a shadow falls across a mushroom house. A cloaked figure evades the evening patrol. He knocks on a door, whispers a password, and enters. Then descends. There's friends waiting, under the earth.



La résistance! De weerstand! A regular White(-Hatted) Brigade! Smurfs should not fear their government - the government should fear its Smurfs!!

No time at all is wasted. The Secret Smurf Society drugs a guard, busts into the prison and runs like hell to the woods beyond the village. Brainy Smurf, no doubt anticipating a change in the winds, happens to be with them, and also manages to be the only one caught. For the remainder of the comic, he'll occasionally get a one-panel cut to his prison cell, in which he'll ponder when his friends will be around to break him out and hail him as a hero. Nobody will ever come.

That's probably the most powerful lesson a young person can take from the Smurfs: don't be an asshole.

***

The politics of King Smurf in particular -- or at least its deep-seated distrust of political mechanisms -- likewise had some probable correlation with the adult life of Belgium surrounding its creation.

After all, both Peyo and Delporte were born in 1928, positioning their individual comings-of-age directly against the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, in which many citizens were shipped away for use as forced labor in the Nazi machine. It's extraordinarily easy to see those rebel Smurfs' covert activities as reminiscent of the many factions of the Belgian resistance, often squirreled away in the woods, spiriting away downed pilots and evading capture to subvert another day.

However, this reading seems insufficient, since neither Belgians nor Smurfs elected Adolph Hitler, who was not specifically a king. No, Belgian had a king of its own, Leopold III, a controversial man in those days of struggle. It had been less than three weeks since the German invasion of May, 1940, when the King of the Belgians announced the nation's surrender, without the approval of the legislature. Compounding the difficulty, Leopold III chose to remain in Belgium under the occupation, while the civil government eventually repositioned itself in London, outside the village of mushrooms, although unsuccessful overtures were made to construct full occupational governance in Belgium.

This resulted in a duly anarchic state of affairs, with the Belgian monarch and legislature-in-exile declining to entirely recognize one another's authority, neither body cooperating with the Nazis and their military government, and various aspects of the resistance -- necessarily separated by language, remember -- sometimes operating to their own ends.

Interestingly, though, from this chaos grew the might of the Marcinelle school, the home of the Smurfs. Imported comics became inaccessible, leaving gaps to be filled; Jijé drew a considerable amount of Spirou's content in those days, including a few off-label episodes of the American comics the magazine was running at the time, like Superman. By the time the war ended, Jijé had the authority to appoint younger artists like Franquin to fill slots, thus seeding the future of Spirou in the trodden dirt of war. Peyo followed several years later, having met Franquin & company as a teenage animator during the occupation.

Still, formative an artistic age as it was, it couldn't have been the best time for instilling pride in civic coordination in a pair of young men, to say nothing of respect for His Majesty, who was deported by the German military government in 1944, and, following the end of the war, settled in Switzerland while the returned Belgian government set about determining whether he was a literal traitor (A: no). His eventual return to the domain in 1950 was marked with violence and civil disoedience, particularly in the Wallonia region, and he abdicated the throne in 1951.

Yet while it's probably not a stretch to position Peyo's & Delporte's vision of governance-as-free-for-all as purely a product of the domestic upheaval which, in its way, brought them to the place they were, there were separate breakdowns going on as the comic itself was drawn, farther away, but still close.

***

King Smurf is on edge after the jailbreak, and his enforcers are attentive to even the slightest departure from the usual. Still, Smurfs sometimes manage to slip away from the village, trusting that their faith won't get them killed by their exiled brothers out in the trees.



Serious shit those Smurfs are into. Covert activities have been sowing the seeds of discord in the village too:



Yes, they're threatening to kill him. Or, I dunno, maybe "Smurf to King Smurf" means "Voter Recall to King Smurf"; I don't even know how you read those things. Is it subtle shifts in the handwriting? A perfect in the 'S' the difference between libel and reverence? Oh the debates I have with my anime hug pillows!

Regardless, King Smurf clearly gets the message, and opts to put a crack forestry investigatory together the only way he knows how: by appealing to everyone's basest instincts.



I really do truly love that this comic is aimed squarely at kids. There's no respect for anything at all in here. Not military service, not heads of state, not the fundamentals of democracy... it's great! It's awesome, noisy slapstick paired up with bizarre fits of witty sophistication, all in a crispy pretzel cone of rampant anti-authoritarianism. How could the cartoon get so fucking saccharine? Smurfs have teeth! Shit out in the woods? It bites you.

So, King Smurf leads his decorated fellows out into the forest to smoke out the rebels. What results can best be described as a rib-tickling military quagmire (aren't they all?), with people falling into holes, getting soaked with water and opening strange gifts in the middle of nowhere to unhappy conclusions.



The campaign is a disaster. King Smurf and his men turn tail and retreat as the rebels laugh and jeer. Defections are evident. Still defiant, King Smurf declares that all Smurfs shall now join the military or face jail. A wall is erected around the Smurf Village. Nobody gets in or out.

A message from the other side is delivered.



Abdicate, Your Highness, or draw your sword. The King of the Smurfs opts for the latter.

It's time to get down to some serious killing.

***

Belgium's colonialist disposition was in for a shift as World War II ended. For our purposes, some symbolism can be dragged from the work of Hergé, whose Tintin in the Congo contained several unconcerned references to the colony's status as such in its 1931 initial printing, which were removed by the artist in an extensive 1946 revision.

Outside of comics, pressure for Congolise self-government was building as the '50s moved forward; riots erupted in 1959 upon Belgian prohibition of a meeting by the increasingly formidable ethnic association ABAKO, resulting in some allowance for Congolise participation in governance, and the subsequent formation of dozens of political parties.

Events passed with tremendous speed. Plans to transition the colony into independence compressed, and free elections were held in May of 1960. The Mouvement National Congolais-Lumumba performed well, and the formal handover of power occurred on June 30, 1960. However, not a week later, a mutiny broke out against remaining foreign military officers, leading to the entrance of the Belgian army and, by August, the secession of two areas -- the mining-rich province of Katanga, still close to Belgian industry, and the region of South Kasai -- and the intervention of the United Nations. This situation (and I'm wildly simplifying here) also led to prime minister Patrice Lumumba requesting aid from the Soviet Union to press into Kasai, after which strife exploded in the parliment and army chief of staff Joseph Mobutu, with support from the American CIA, ultimately took power in a military coup.

The struggle continued through the 1960s. In 1964, the year King Smurf began serialization, violent rebellions broke out, which again saw involvement by Belgium and the U.S. In 1965, the year the comic was published in a collected edition, Mobutu (who had previously suspended the parliment) launched a second coup and prohibited all political organizations save for his. This was the backdrop for the story's creation and release, in addition to the bloody division of Ruanda-Urundi into Rwanda & Burundi. The motif of elections leading to conflict seems perhaps informed by such current events.

Naturally, the comic's satire isn't directly on point. I speculate. And frankly, a noxious reading is possible from that perspective, a clucking of the tongue at those silly Smurfs thinking they can run things without the undemocratic wisdom of Papa around - my god, can names get any more paternalistic than "Papa"?

Yet maybe I'm wrong to look to the Smurf's feet for their secrets. Maybe the answer to everything is on top of their heads.

Those wilted cone things aren't their skulls, you know; they're Phrygian caps, and I'm not talking gallbladders. I mean headgear of antiquity, used in ancient Greek art as a symbol of foreignness, and in Roman culture as an accoutriment of freedom, worn by freedmen. Sometimes there was a martian connotation; if you should even encounter a Smurf running at you quoting Horace in Latin at the top of his lungs, the meaning will be clear. The caps were later adopted by the American and French Revolutions for their long-built association with liberty. The red cap was preferred, but putting Papa and his Smurfs together gives you something cumulative: the colors of both lands, red, white and blue.

And if indeed the Smurfs, as icons, as drawings, as mentioned above, are a distillation of accrued cartooning tropes, perfectly molded identities upon which endless human characteristics can be imprinted, the widest exposure of the Marcinelle school, grown from the dirt of World War II and wearing liberty caps and fighting in the midst of a democratic collapse in a time of post-colonialist democratic collapse, then - isn't their uniformity especially and awfully human? Isn't there a metaphor at work in these blue gnomes born it seems with freedom atop their brows?

Doesn't everyone want to be actualized? To be in control of themselves? And don't we still fall into groups, communities of desire or necessity, to our benefit and peril?

That's the real conflict of Smurf village, illustrated in King Smurf. To long to stand for yourself, but for individuality to be your downfall, and to become a collective, all again for freedom; resistance, rebellion, subjugation. Liberty atop the brow, all Smurf underneath, just lose Brainy's glasses and shave Papa's beard.

Er, and there's Smurfette, I guess, but she's not in this comic, and that's another story.

***

Thus:



What more needs to be said?

Do note, though, that while the Smurfs hold clubs and rocks and spears and things, and sometimes bite one another's asses, most of the actual warfare goes on via the not-very-deadly tomato, which Peyo nonetheless uses for maximum graphic detail, red on white. It's an impressive balancing act, maintaining an appropriateness for children while getting the point across without a lot of obfusication. I mean:



As the battle rages, some hot-blooded patriot gets the bright idea to raid Papa's lab, which we've long ago established contains a lot of explosive materials, no doubt stockpiled for the revolution Papa won't be heading, in that he is not a Communist. The bomb is lit, and chucked into the palace, and in a glorious flash of victory the walls of the oppressor come falling, mostly around Brainy Smurf, who was still locked inside. Ah, he's a big guy, he can take it.

Before long, the war's conclusion is certain. The final press is made. No quarter given. We're gonna see what color a Smurf bleeds. This had to happen. This is how you water a society.



And then, Papa walks in, before anyone's head seriously loses track of its shoulders. He's unhappy to an extent that even a green sack full of Euphorbium cannot counteract, not that he'd ever try that stuff.



I like the pike driven through the red-stained home on the left; they should have ended more episodes of the Get Along Gang with images like that.

Yep, with Papa back in town, order is soon restored. King Smurf volunteers to clean up the village all by himself, but soon every Smurf is jumping in to help. Everyone is happy, and democracy is rightfully relegated to the scrap heap of bad ideas. I mean, nobody comes out and says that, no, but it's not left unclear that Smurf Village probably won't be seeing another election day for a quite a while; what's the need, with Papa back? I mean it: the comic concludes with the heroes rejecting democracy and it's a happy ending.

All right, ok, but what are the Smurfs? Politically? Like, isn't this a weaselly ending, the whole book talking all sorts of shit about the perils of authority and then spinning around and having the Smurfs just agree with whatever Chairman Papa says?

Jesus, 'Papa' does have that paternalist bite.

Which makes sense, because, on the surface, not as icons, not symbols or allegories, without thinking about it too hard - the Smurfs are children, in the way their audience is children. And surely children need to listen to their parents when it's time to go to bed.

But that's the only authority this comic nods toward as valid. The parent, calling an end to playtime, and scolding the kiddies for acting like "human beings," which we might as well call adults, specifically the adults a child witnesses beyond their parents' adoration. Don't grow up to be like them. Don't make their mistakes.

Someday they'll be old enough to know their parents hold some responsibility. Until then, you know what they can do with the shit stupid robes of those awful motherfuckers?



Sadly, this wouldn't be the final conflict to bedevil the good Smurf Village.

***

In 2005, a certain commercial for UNICEF aired on European television.

Produced with the agreement of the family of Peyo, who died in 1992, the short piece depicted happy, dancing Smurfs and their delightful music annihilated by aerial bombing, their shouts of terror giving way the the squeals of Baby Smurf, a future bomb-thrower, an anticipatory gunman aimed, in potential, toward the next village, the next nation, sitting in the center of a heap of blue corpses, their faces blackened in that Marcinelle manner.

Witnessing this terrible scene, it is not difficult to imagine the tiny Smurfling growing to find a mask and wear it, and hide among the trees. This time it won't be tomatoes, and there's no Papa left to stop it.

The ad campaign was initiated to raise money for the rehabilitation of child soldiers in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the former colonies of Belgium.

And history's great burden is that it never does end.

***

Nothing ever seems to end.

Labels: Jog

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The Zombies That Ate the World #1 (of 8)



All right! Early aughts nostalgia, coming in fierce! Some of us do still pine for those bygone days of Les Humanoïdes Associés publishing in English, even if our (by which I mean 'my') reading wasn't nearly as extensive as it should have been, and even after that ill-fated partnership with DC.

These days it's Devil's Due releasing the stuff, and they're keeping things pretty conservative - not only are they breaking albums up (and shrinking them down) into $3.50 pamphlets, but they're focusing keenly on material front-loaded with noteworthy North American talent. Indeed, for now (with this and the John Cassaday-drawn I Am Legion), they're devoting their energy to stuff DC started publishing but never got around to finishing. Still, I can't help but pray my dreams of an English-release of that last volume of The Metabarons might finally be coming true.

Until then, there's always stuff like The Zombies That Ate the World, which does boast the participation of Guy Davis, who's maybe head of the class among prolific, idiosyncratic cartoonists working in front-of-Previews genre comics today (John Romita, Jr.'s the only comparable talent I can think of offhand). The project started off as a one-shot deal for the 2002-04 revival of Metal Hurlant, but eventually expanded into four albums' worth of material (and a short animated film), released through 2008. I'm not sure if later volumes form book-length storylines, but this particular issue covers part of the first album, which collects a bunch of the Metal Hurlant stories; as a result, there's no pacing problems from the conversion to the pamphlet format.

Problems with the stories themselves are a different matter. The writer (and letterer) is Jerry Frissen -- also creator of the Image-released Lucha Libre series -- whose premise sees the walking dead more-or-less normalized into human society in the far future. Sure, the occasional bit of flesh still gets chewed, but zombies mostly just amble around looking rotten, powered by whatever instincts they'd developed prior to their deaths; they're perfect prey for the series' anti-hero zombie hunters, deluded nerd Karl and his oafish sister Maggie, who'll procure or dispose of any former human for any seemingly any damn reason, so long as they pay's good.

Social satire is the narrative result, in just about the most unsubtle manner possible - it'll come as no surprise that political correctness comes under fire ("life-impaired," ha!), or that consumerism is duly indicted. Hell, George A. Romero himself contributes a cover blurb! But Frissen's chief humans don't really struggle against anything, which admittedly is sort of the point - Karl and Maggie are just useful cogs in a capitalist machine that's inched ever closer to literal dehumanization by transforming ex-humans (parents, etc.) into burbling items that can be collected or tossed away for a fee.



Frissen underlines this point over and over again, then puts it in bold and repeats it often - see a middle-class fellow spewing quasi-liberal nonsense while obsessing over his zombie father-in-law breaking expensive stuff on the way to living creamtion! Look! Here's a rich guy with a thing for sex with undead models and actresses, women finally within his reach! It's simplistic, shallow stuff, although I'll give the writer a bit of credit for his willingness to let his protagonists be genuinely repulsive at times - Karl in particular has no qualms about diverting a freshly transformed woman to his own bedroom, and Frissen is rightly unsparing in showing the amoral state of his titular zombie/consumerism-eaten world. It's too bad that the scatalogical, infantile and very wooden conversations between Karl and Maggie lack the zest needed to add some real lived-in heft to his emphatic concept.

But that's where Davis comes in, to make it all OKAY. This comic is a classroom-ready example of how inspired visuals can enliven a so-so script, with Davis' impeccable character designs adding a sweetly vulnerable dimension to Frissen's unsparing world. Coupled with Charlie Kirchoff's colors -- warmer and earthier and than Dave Stewart's excellent work in B.P.R.D. -- Davis' drawings reveal a latent humanity to even the meanest human, and afford all those decomposed zombies a hapless air.

It's funny work, but there's pathos too, and it goes a ways toward counterbalancing the script's barking tone, investing it with more believability than such noise would otherwise elicit. It does make me want to see more of this stuff; I haven't read the later Metal Hurlant chapters since they first came out, so I don't recall if the writing settles in, but it certainly might. Good thing we'll get to see the whole span. Here's hoping this latest iteration of Les Humanoïdes in English gives more projects the time to show us how cross-cultural talents can (or cannot) gel.

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Oh Naoki Urasawa, how many thousands of comics did you move while I was out for coffee? You all know what I'm getting at, right? I think we're at the point now where most readers of this site have at least a passing familiarity with the Urasawa name, a font of manga megahits since the mid-'80s - no less than 100 million copies have been sold, which Japan's Daily Yomiuri helpfully notes is terribly close to one book for everyone in the country.

But just four years ago, Urasawa was nearly unknown in the US; the first I'd heard of him was through an essay by our own Abhay Khosla, who surveyed the artist's works through the still-growing 'scanlation' scene of 2004. All that was legitimately available of Urasawa's stuff back then was a lone out-of-print VIZ compilation of the 1985-88 sentimental comedy/action series Pineapple Army, which Urasawa illustrated from scripts by Kazuya Kudô of Mai the Psychic Girl. It wasn't particularly representative of his body of work.

No, Urasawa had long ago become synonymous with longform suspense manga aimed at a slightly older audience - many forget that even his breakthrough 1986-93 sports manga, Yawara! A Fashionable Judo Girl, was serialized in Big Comic Spirits, a weekly anthology aimed at adult men, and home to the diverse likes of Junji Ito's Uzumaki, Taiyō Matsumoto's Tekkon Kinkreet and Kazuo Koike & Ryoichi Ikegami's Crying Freeman (not to mention the food opus Oishinbo). Urasawa eventually began exercising more authority over story concepts, initiating his 'mature' period with the debut of the cliffhanger-crazed 1994-2002 thriller Monster, which eventually became the first of his works as a writer/artist to appear in English, again courtesy of VIZ, in 2006.

Urasawa hasn't slowed down at all in Japan. His new series, Billy Bat (launched just this past October), turned some heads by pretending to be a full-color funny animal comic for its first two chapters, before revealing itself as the story of a Japanese-American funny animal cartoonist in the 1940s. Heaven knows when a mangaka has released his own rock album in the past year he's well and truly beyond anyone telling him what the hell to do, an attribute that apparently extends to English-language releases of his work - it was allegedly the artist himself that disallowed VIZ from releasing any of his newer works before Monster was published in full, so as to prevent a more experienced version of himself from 'competing' for reader attention.

However, it seems attitudes have relaxed, since VIZ has recently released two of Urasawa's newer series to bookstores. Direct Market retailers will have them on Wednesday.

20th Century Boys Vol. 1 (of 24): Friends



Do note that the "of 24" I inserted above is inexact, I admit; the last two volumes of this 1999-2007 saw the title change to 21st Century Boys, with vol. 23 dubbed vol. 1 and vol. 24 serving as vol. 2. Many sources treat it as a discreet 'sequel' series, although it appears to be simply the conclusion to the main series, set off by a hiatus in production. I'm just treating it all as a single 24-book series. Hopefully VIZ has licensed those last two volumes; I suspect we won't want to miss anything.

Lingering fan qualms about its finale aside -- I haven't read it, so don't ask -- 20th Century Boys is generally considered to be Urasawa's magnum opus. It remains visible in the public eye today; the second installment of a six billion yen live-action movie trilogy from director Yukihiko Tsutsumi opened at #1 in Japanese theaters two weeks ago, and an in-joke comedic story-in-the-story just ran in Big Comic Spirits (again the serializing anthology), presumably in support. For a while it was quite the hot item on the English scanlation circuit, and I suspect its readily available breadth did wonders for establishing Urasawa among English readers in the know as an artist to watch.

But even from this very, very introductory 216-page book -- $12.99 with fancy softcover flaps, that kind of release -- the ambition is obvious. Chapter one alone features sequences set in at least four separate decades, with short additional segments possibly taking place adjacent to longer scenes, or maybe dozens of added years in the future or past. You'll turn the page and not even know what country you're in; that kind of sprawl. There's a huge cast that obviously isn't even fully introduced, with many characters appearing in multiple time periods at different ages. The series' title is taken from the T.Rex song, which get covertly played over a lunchroom's speakers in 1973, in the series' opening pages, the first rock music heard by most of those kids.

And it's surely no coincidence that Urasawa, born in 1960, was just the right age to hear that song, in that lunchroom, at that very time. Though conceived with a collaborator (editor Takashi Nagasaki), 20th Century Boys stands with the unmistakable poise of an author aiming to address his generation, to take stock of where people his age have been, and where they're going as the age passes. It's a millennial work, heavy on cloudy portent and shaking from cataclysm nerves, but also a grand, funny human story about growing up and then preparing, futilely, to grow old, a personal evolution no less scary than any 2000 A.D. apocalypse. It's also an unabashed pop comic, entertaining as all hell and weird and thrilling and everything.

The more-or-less 'main' character is Kenji, an ex-guitarist (hmmm, know any mangaka who put out a late-blooming rock album?) who's settling in to minding the family store -- not to mention his absentee sister's infant child -- now that he's staring down middle age in 1997 - and god, how many genre comics can you name with a cast that's mostly pushing 40? There's weddings to attend and small regrets to nurse, along with a heaping helping of flashbacks to Kenji & co.'s youth in the 1960s. But strange things are beginning to happen: a troubled boy-turned-science teacher commits suicide out of the blue and high tech professors and students go missing or turn up dead. Nasty disease crops up in foreign locales, and dodgy religious leaders are knifed in public.

Most crucially, a certain symbol starts popping up. It's oddly familiar to Kenji, but we readers are allowed more access than him - it seems someone has literally started a cult around the miscellany of childhood in Kenji's part of Japan, with Kenji's circle of friends. Indeed, the mystery cult leader is addressed by acolytes as only My Friend -- and maybe it's better the series came out this late, so as to skip 1001 John McCain jokes -- espousing wisdom centered around the US moon landings and reciting manga-fed childhood vows to always protect the world. And through the magic of flash-forward, Urasawa reveals that something really did threaten the world, and, moreover, that someone really did save it. Still, you know what they say about manga - it's always the journey more than the destination.

This is a VERY GOOD one, so far. Urasawa's visuals are as clean and appealing as ever, with great little character touches - you'll never mistake this manga for something else. Despite juggling one million characters over a timeline spanning half a century, the storytelling never confuses, although VIZ kindly includes a character chart up front as a courtesy (skip it 'till you've read the story, though!). Even Urasawa's semi-infamous tendency to mash emotional buttons like next week brings the bathos prohibition is kept mostly in check - sure, at one point a childhood outsider can only prove himself to the gang by saving them from certain death, but in this work it seems more a fitting expression of heated childhood emotions -- the impulse to vow to save the world, say -- which grows to a fire in adult retrospect.

Such is the core of Urasawa's work here. You can probably draw some comparison to Stephen King's It or something, wherein childhood trauma forces adults to band together to confront a danger, but the childhoods glimpsed here aren't much more traumatic than usual. It's what people do with the stuff of their childhood that matters, and Urasawa duly presents many views of potential lost, prominence gained, dreams faded and ideals kept alive, even to the point of bringing the most absurd elements of a J-pop childhood to life, even past the threshold of sanity.

Perfect stuff for a comics artist determined to speak for and of his generation, and I can't wait to see how it plays it out.

Pluto Vol. 1 (of 8)



Note too that the "of 8" above is an estimate; the Japanese vol. 7 is due to arrive next week or so, and the series is technically still ongoing (in the biweekly Big Comic Original), although it's set to conclude in April, unless something changes. That'll make it Urasawa's newest completed work (2004-09), and easily the shortest of his 'major' projects. But then, it's an odd duck in other ways.

Pluto was initially cooked up in 2003 as part of the celebrations surrounding the in-story birthday of Astro Boy, Osamu Tezuka's famed creation. It's a wildly expanded, thoroughly modified adaptation of a single popular storyline from Tezuka's original, The Greatest Robot on Earth (available in English through Dark Horse's Astro Boy vol. 3), starring a marginal character from the original, who encounters updated, more 'realistic' versions of All Your Favorites. Given the year of its debut, I don't think it's out of line to call it Ultimate Astro Boy - the similarities are many, and I said as much when I did a longish review of a big clump of chapters back in 2005; there's spoilers in there, although some of my guesses at future plot points turned out to be inaccurate. Anyway, I stopped following the scanlations after a while.

I think some damage was done, though. Reading a huge chunk of scans -- like, two and a half volumes' worth -- gives you a very different experience than sticking to the collections (or a serialization for that matter). If you follow that Abhay link above, you'll notice that he didn't think much of Pluto at the time (2004). Frankly, if I'd only had the seven chapters presented in this book (200 pages, $12.99), I wouldn't have gotten a much better impression; I was a bit shocked at how poorly the stuff holds up on limited re-reading.

Now, granted, some of that effect is probably due to my knowing a whole lot of story twists ahead of time, but I was still struck by how slowly Pluto builds. The premise -- with editor Nagasaki now credited below Urasawa as a full-blown co-author (co-writer, I presume), a rather material fact I certainly don't remember seeing in the scans! -- concerns humanoid robot Gesicht, a detective based out of Urasawa's beloved Germany, who takes on an odd murder case that seems to be connected to something much bigger: the systematic destruction of all the world's most powerful robots, a list he's on!

A devil seems to be on the loose, an impossible being that cares not for human laws or robot rules against killing humans, so Gesicht sets out to check up on many mechanical parties of interest, ranging from the mad, murderous Brau 1589 -- impaled-yet-alive like St. Sebastian, imprisoned-yet-dangerous like Hannibal Lector -- to the surviving remainder of the world's strongest robots, including a certain mighty Atom from Japan.

That's really all that goes on here, but the journey isn't nearly as fine as with 20th Century Boys. In fact, if the prior project seemed to somehow keep Urasawa's soppier tendancies down, this one's proximity to Tezuka's special brand of unbridled humanism appears to have driven the artist hog wild, culminating in a 76-page side-story about a blind composer who was abandoned as a child and can't compose and his new robot butler is a war machine that only wants peace and to play the piano but the composer hates him at first and abuses him and the robot goes away and the composer's garden starts to die, but then there's mommy issues and growing friendship and forgotten tunes of childhood innocence and TRAGEDY STRIKES AT A CRUCIAL MOMENT, OH CRUEL CRUEL FATE, OH ROBOTS AND HUMANS AND MUSIC AND DREAMS!!

It's the type of head-spinning melodrama that rarely manifests without the direct participation of Lillian Gish, pushed straight to the brink of camp by the fact that the robot butler has a face like a luchador mask and wears a cape to hide a torso made of knives and guns. Wait, am I making this sound awesome? Eh, I guess it is kind of awesome, taken that far (it'll be something to see how Urasawa tackles the ending of this fucking thing, oh my god), and like I noted back in '05, the artist's sheer skill with visuals is often enough to keep things vivid - a page setting bursts of piano playing against rhythmic panels of robot fighting is a standout.

But I've read a lot of Tezuka since 2005, and I can't help but feel Pluto may be missing something vital about the master's work. Always, even in the most emotionally-charged moments of his most 'important' work, Tezuka had a way of inserting rude, loud humor, brassy slapstick that never failed to accentuate the lightness of being - humans, robots, lions and everything else was connected in that manner, as part of the God of Manga's cosmology of whimsical pictures, the manga (translated literally) he invented.

Pluto, in contrast, is a self-serious work about how serious things are for fantasy robots from children's comics. Tezuka's children's comics were damn serious too, at times, but never only serious. At risk of projecting my Western funnybook perspective too brightly, it all seems especially like certain American superhero comics (maybe even some Ultimate issues) where everyone glowers all the time so as to demonstrate how important and serious the superhero genre can be. Here, Shōnen Manga is Serious Business too, with frowns on nearly every face when tears won't do, and any fleeting smile set against a hopeless, inevitable doom, which is so totally odd for a book with Osamu Tezuka on its cover.

Again though, my reading is skewed. I didn't get anything better than an OKAY impression from this book, although the craft is solid and I readily concede that the shock of the new might give you a better experience. Plus, I'm confident (having not re-read it, ulp) that Pluto does really start to cook very soon, when the suspense mechanics have warmed up and Urasawa gets to unveil his Big Idea for the series - Tezuka's war/peace, man/machine struggle set against the United States' continuing conflict in Iraq!

That's right, get ready to relive all those wonderful memories of weapons inspections and such with Astro Boy and all of his friends! It's still stone-solemn, and prone to some of Urasawa's worse creative instincts, but it has a way of growing on you. I hope it gets under my skin all over again.

Labels: Jog

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Oishinbo A la Carte Vol. 1: Japanese Cuisine



Yeah, you've heard it a hundred times by now: 'manga' as often seen in English -- a youth thing, a bookstore thing, a shōnen/shōjo thing -- is only a fragment of what manga really is. There's always a few non-porn exceptions, sure - most of them take the form of action or fantasy pieces For Mature Readers, with the occasional history of cup noodles or oddball art project slipping through. Astro Boy once filled us in on the story of Anne Frank, so there's always that. But it's still so hard to really get that old joke in Koji Aihara's & Kentaro Takekuma's brilliant satire, Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga, that one day there'd be manga for everything in Japan, up to and including train schedules. That's how omnipresent the stuff is.

So here's VIZ's latest exception, a 276-page, $12.99 peek into the secret world of mainstream manga for adults. And believe me when I say 'mainstream' - Oishinbo (The Gourmet) has been an ongoing series since 1983, and is currently up to vol. 102 (one hundred and two) in Japanese collections. Now, mind you, this English-language release isn't chronological or comprehensive; it's based on a separate Japanese repackaging, the A la Carte series, which itself has racked up 45 volumes since 2005 by sorting various stories from the series' run into themed collections. The very basic theme of this debut English volume (actually vol. 20 of the Japanese series) is Japanese Cuisine. Did I mention it's a comic about food?

Not that big a surprise, I guess - there's been a few English-translated manga involving chefs, your sheer shōnen Iron Wok Jan or the older teen shōjo of Antique Bakery. I've heard a few jokes about the sheer amount of food-related programming on Japanese television (including a 1988-92 Oishinbo anime, which ran for 136 episodes); Iron Chef apparently doesn't scratch the surface. So hey, why not some similar subject matter for an art form that's built up as much mass appeal as television? There's been golf manga and gambling manga, sex tips manga and religious cult manga - many with their own strata of legends, their masters of the form, heroes and inspirations little known outside of Japan.

Oishinbo is the work of writer Tetsu Kariya and artist Akira Hanasaki; neither have been published in English before, save for a few chapters of Oishinbo showcased in the semi-legendary 1990-97 'learn Japanese through comics' magazine Mangajin, although Kariya might also be known to my fellow obsessive compulsives as co-creator with Ryoichi Ikegami of the '70s schoolyard tough guys classic Otoko Gumi (Gallant Gang), which is supposedly more-or-less the ur-series behind Cromartie High School.

Hanasaki's visual style is a slick 'n staid approach that matches photorealistic (and, in all likelihood, photo-traced) backgrounds/items with the sort of airy, arch-mainstream cartoon character designs which, ironically, only ever seem to be glimpsed in North America through 'alternative' works that reference mainstream manga - think the pretty girl drawings in Hideo Azuma's Disappearance Diary, or the 'normal' framing sequence in Takashi Nemoto's Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby. It's certainly not very heavy on tilted panels or speed lines -- though both are present -- and may come off as oddly Western to some readers. Don't be fooled - it's just another aspect of manga!

The plot is the very essence of simplicity giving way to unlimited potential. Young Yamaoka Shirō is a newspaper reporter cum archetypal salaryman's fantasy character: frequently snoozing at his desk or plotting his next trip to the track, but always respected in the end for some superior attribute or another, here specifically an all but peerless taste in food pounded into him by his hated, brutal artist-foodie father, a man of such unflinching standards he worked Yamaoka's dear mother right into her grave and just didn't give a shit.

Now, Yamaoka has been ordered to assemble the "Ultimate Menu" for his paper's 100th anniversary, a quest that'll lead him to do basically nothing but enjoy hundreds of delicious, impossibly high-class meals all around the nation (just like real newspaper reporters!), while pushing him ever-closer into the arms of his lovely partner Kurita -- whom he'll eventually marry (this being a rather long assignment) -- and uncovering the occasional mild peril that's rarely more than one eating-related idea away from resolution. But watch out, Yamaoka - a rival paper is planning their own, cleverly titled "Supreme Menu," and they're staffed exclusively by sneering villains, and their project, dear reader, is headed by none other than Yamaoka's wicked father!!

Naturally it all comes down to consuming lots and lots of presumably expensive food -- money is almost never mentioned, as that would get in the way of the escapism -- in self-contained short stories roughly 25-30 pages in length. This VIZ edition is one of the nice ones with the flaps; it sports a pair of recipes and an extra-long translator's notes section as supplements, so you'll be double-damned sure you know the various cuts of tuna. The stories themselves are a little scattered, perhaps owing to this volume's vague theme, covering everything from rice preparation to sashimi slicing to the value of not smoking. There's stuff to learn, although I couldn't call it educational - most of the pieces are structured like little suspense thrillers, often pitting Yamaoka against his dad in battles of foodstuff wits that'll leave most readers horrified at the prospect of visiting Japan and subsequently being humiliated in public for wrapping rice in seaweed the wrong way.

But, you know, I found this book to be very interesting, not really because the stories are especially thrilling or impressive, or even for any reason directly related to food - no, I was fascinated by the comic's relationship with elitism.

Everything in this manga revolves around characters with incredibly developed taste, and every solution to every problem involves uncovering a superior presentation/preparation of food. Yamaoka may loathe his father, but he's hardly above correcting someone who's "enjoying" their food the wrong way, or standing up at a table to dismiss a meal as insufficient. This is no slobs vs. snobs saga - there's snooty antagonists that get taken down a peg, yes, but only because their hubris has somehow led them to advocate for something less than excellent. Sometimes Yamaoka is bested by his father -- any time Our Hero starts going on about gathering some showy arrangement of "the best" ingredients he's headed for a fall, since Japanese cooking is an unfailingly subtle art -- and while he scowls and pounds his fists it's always with some respect for how correct the old man is.

In other words, the series' stance can be summed up simply: it's best to be elitist, but try not to be too much of an asshole about it.

And you know what? Being an asshole is still better than being mediocre.

Gosh, that's not a sentiment you hear much of in North American comics. You can pick up traces of it in plenty of shōnen action titles - how many young men have raised their hands to the sky and vowed to be the very best there is? The cast of Oishinbo is a bit like that, if less childish - their Ultimate Menu quest is ultimately one of discovery, and even the worst setback, like, say, Yamaoka's father dismissing them all as unworthy to even dine in the presence of a truly great chef for getting their chopsticks an inch and a half too damp, only leads them to vow a greater level of achievement next time. As in, one character goes running off at the end of the story with a ruler, just to make sure.

Why is this? Is everyone mad? Is this a horror comic? Do I ever want to eat in front of other people again?

Quite simple, I think. At their bottom, these stories aren't just about eating or elitism - they're about patriotism. They're about discovering all aspects of Japanese cuisine, and drawing out the gorgeous simplicity and minute sympathies that make Japan itself a wonderful place, of wonderful, rich culture.

Do note the time when this series launched: 1983. The bubble economy was growing so much bigger, and Japan was getting noticed all over the world, especially in the United States. Oishinbo, aimed at older male readers, thus takes a position of intense pride, of showing how Japan deserves to be seen as excellent, to stand with the best.

One story sees a US senator of Japanese descent visit the old country; all the lush meals and local pomp mustered by bigwigs (as neat as it must seem for salaryman readers!) cannot compare to the gentle excellence of the best green tea, prepared beautifully in an aesthetically rich setting, "as if a breeze from a mountain stream has just blown through my body," the soul of Japan. Another sees a young girl raised in France ashamed of eating with chopsticks; she learns that the gentle caress of a meal is far less 'barbaric' than stabbing it with a metal skewer. A famed critic bloviates about the superiority of foreign procedures, but he goddamned learns some respect. And oh, you can just guess what happens when a crew of Benihana-style American-learned chefs-as-performers rolls out; it's not pretty.

Too bad that VIZ couldn't include some information on when these various and sundry stories were first published; I'd have liked to savor the subtle shifts in flavor after the bubble burst and Japan was reaffirmed as only human after all. But, fittingly, it would have to be subtle - there's no ferocious shifts in this taste, this cooking, this kind of mainstream. No, be quiet, and thereby be loud. Eat proud. Eat GOOD.

Labels: Jog

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Final Crisis #6 (of 7):



Oh no, he's come for my interest in this series!

Hang on - let me run for a bit. Get that blood flowing. A little Speed Force never hurt! If there's one thing about this issue that really stands out to me, a Grant Morrison tragic, it's how the Doomsday Singularity and its accordant collapse of Earthly reality has resulted in a quantity of infinite Morrisons.

Look! The Atoms are shoving off on an emergency trip to a new reality not unlike the Atom 1,000,000 story in the old DC One Million 80-Page Giant, and the Marvel family is pulling off a depowering stunt not unlike that from the Black Adam climax of 52! You know about Batman this issue, right? His little throwdown with Darkseid evokes both The Invisibles and JLA: Rock of Ages, all while rolling around in Seven Soldiers references (visual and otherwise) and literally concluding Batman: R.I.P. - it's the heart of the storm, after all.

There's a great little joke(?) in that; if R.I.P. was a dark version of Morrison's All Star Superman, the shared-universe Gotham to a fabulously aloof Metropolis, then it's very fitting that Batman's *GASP* *CHOKE* violation of his twin vows against killing and discharging firearms outside of an authorized target range should recall the finale of a crucial All Star influence, Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, in which what happened to the Man of Tomorrow was that he killed a reality-crushing threat and then had to scrub his confirmed capacity for murder away with fast-acting Gold Kryptonite. Morrison's Batman is darker to the end, shooting the essence of evil and dooming himself to a succession of hopeless lives-within-life.

Well, until he gets out. And he will - Morrison says so through a separate allusion: Darkseid's chamber as the Dark Side Club. Final Crisis itself has always functioned as something of a mirror image of Seven Soldiers -- transformed from a set of songs about superhero renewal to an all-out black alert of evil creativity remaking the world into shit and struggle -- so why not have Batman relive (and relive, and relive) Mister Miracle's run-in with the Omega Sanction? Shit, we know he's coming back now, because Mister Miracle is standing around elsewhere in the issue! His whole 'not really dying' thing was the last image of Seven Soldiers! You're wrong - Batman (and Robin) will never die!! It's Lex Luthor's stifled yawn at Final Crisis #1's roast of the Martian Manhunter on a cosmic scale, the enthusiastic shrug of Writers and Time Tailors midwifing the Fifth World from the stuff of innumerable alternate numbers.

Is that guy on the skis still behind me? Oops, shouldn't have lo



There's fundamental problems with Final Crisis #6. Mainly, it's sort of boring and the art isn't very good. It's probably a decent model of how a supercompressed comic can go wrong, devoting mannered attention to uninteresting plot devices while sapping the immediacy of the work's flow. Morrison, for his part, has already promised that the final issue will zip beyond supercompression into something that's "almost a new style." Channel-zapping comics, apparently fit for the televisions surrounding Nix Uotan’s head.

I hope that happens. I certainly thought the frenzied second half of last issue was as good as the series has ever been, with Morrison and his rapidly expanding art team really starting to cook all the DCU's clashy superhero concepts and their planet-spanning peril into a bubbling stew of absurd glee. To switch metaphors, it was very loud and very layered, and merrily discordant in the way a collage of diverse metahuman properties probably ought to be when thrown together by a dire threat. It's the patchwork coat of Seven Soldiers facing an especially tough wash cycle, one that threatens to soak out all the ill-fitting superhero style, all the idealism of the construct. Decadence! Anti-Life!

Unfortunately, this is neither last issue nor next issue, and it isn't terribly keen on universe-shattering metaphors rendered in broad genre strokes, or even much in the way of cacophonic style. In fact, it's the very picture of aesthetic conservatism in Event comics, a deeply formulaic plot-resolution-through-hitting piece, the kind of thing that settles on lining up the subplots and knocking them off with a minimum of fuss (if a maxiumum of space, since there's a lot of field to plow). It could have worked too, I guess, had the series been particularly effective at building up subplots in a traditional manner.

But earlier issues focused Morrison's density of content mainly on burbling, doomy mood, with dozens of flavors of corruption arriving to sour the good world, slowly. Superman's specific plight, for example, was never all that well-tuned as a plot point -- an explosion hits the Daily Planet juuust right, sending Lois Lane into a near-death state that only Clark's frequent attention can preserve, at which point he's whisked away to a tie-in -- but that didn't quite matter, because it mainly functioned as the concept of heroic self-sacrifice fading in luster as a distraction from endemic problems. And when Anti-Life struck, the results tossed the series and concepts into disarray, sometimes strikingly so.

Here, however, the series primarily hones in on specific resolutions to the conflicts facing specific groups of superheroes, few of which prove to be interesting. I imagine the Tattooed Man summoning the mark of Metron to his face in resistance to Anti-Life is supposed to be rousing, but there really hasn't been much done with his character save for a bog-standard redemption arc in a tie-in, to say nothing of the Green Arrow/Black Canary conflict, which leans entirely on the reader's preexisting investment in the characters for even the slightest resonance.

I mean, I'm 12 years old, so I laughed at Talky Tawny ripping a mean tiger's guts out and straightening his bow tie, sure, but the final fate of Bad Mary Marvel amounts to little more than Freddy Freeman puzzling out a (pretty obvious) means of depowering her, then goodness restoring itself via a decent pair of slacks. There's hardly any impact, partially because we're now up to six credited artists, some of which appear more rushed than others and none of which manage much panache in the midst of keeping the story information straight, but also because few of the subplots have to foundation to withstand the focus they're given. It all seems like a lot of flying around over nothing; pages filled up, maybe some pieces being put in place for future storylines.

It's not all dreary, no. Sometimes the flavor creeps though. I liked the first three pages a lot, a perfectly Morrisonian slice of silly high science synching up with superheroic wonder; the feeling it engenders manages to overcome the glaring absence of a pertinent tie-in issue, late in true Final Crisis fashion. These things have power. Style has power. Form. This issue seems so beholden to typical concerns, just far enough off from the series' poise to knock the whole thing down.

I wonder if it can get up? Maybe I can still escape the Black Racer. Maybe I'll think of Batman, and live by his example. Ah, but how am I supposed to embrace the poetic resonance of Bruce Wayne shooting a god with the very bullet that caused the series' first murder, the very kind of weapon that moved Batman to begin, when it's conveyed through a plot apparatus that requires all the legions of Darkseid to have somehow forgotten to check the Caped Crusader's utility belt for dangerous items in all the time he'd been held captive? Kind of a synecdoche for the whole series, that. What kind of asshole world conquerors are these?! Maybe the whole series is really a critique of governmental mismanagement? A little realistic. Let's get going to the next plane. EH.

Labels: Jog

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The Winter Men Winter Special



God, The Winter Men. Where did this thing start publishing? Atlas/Seaboard? Was issue #1 published on the date of my birth? Be this my destiny to write a spoiler-packed internet review of the final issue? Is this really the final issue? Two and a quarter years after the last one?

I mean, that's pretty remarkable. That it's here, I mean. A lot of things happen in 27 months - plans change, publishers shift gears. The WildStorm of 2009 is very different from the WildStorm of 2006, far less inclined toward supporting a self-contained quasi-superhero book, or really much of anything that isn't a shared-universe title or some media tie-in thing. Oddly enough, one of the few exceptions has been the 2007-08 Peter Milligan/C.P. Smith series The Programme, which dealt with the deadly return of a hidden legacy from the Cold War, much like The Winter Men, although all 12 of its issues were released within the gap between this Winter Special and its direct predecessor.

But at least the new comic is here. And 40 pages long! With no ads! A real ending, just as promised! It's a rare thing for a seemingly dead series to even get such a chance, and rarer yet that it's not only VERY GOOD, and a very logical, satisfying part of a whole, but oddly contemporary too, as if it somehow had to show up in 2009, even as it bears the marks of earlier times. Doesn't the 'Winter Special' designation seems like a wink at the old seasonal specials WildStorm used to run every so often? Actually, the Wildstorm Winter Special came out in late 2004, back when this series was still cooking, though not yet published.

Here, let me explain.



As far as public knowledge goes, The Winter Men was initially intended as an eight-issue Vertigo miniseries. The creators were writer Brett Lewis -- best known at the time for his contributions to Bulletproof Monk, a 1998-99 Flypaper Press production for Image that later got adapted into a movie, albeit without credit to the comic's working-for-hire creative team (which also included artist Michael Avon Oeming) -- and artist John Paul Leon, working in collaboration with colorist Dave Stewart and letterer John Workman. A two-page sample of the upcoming miniseries appeared in the April 2003 Vertigo X Anniversary Preview, a promotional pamphlet that the reader was given the privilege of paying 99 cents for; neither Stewart nor Workman were credited in that excerpt, and both the colors and letters would change when the pages later appeared in the series proper.

And as it went, those two pages were the only Winter Men material actually published by Vertigo; by the time issue #1 appeared in August 2005, the series had become part of the short-lived WildStorm Signature Series line of creator-owned works (with DC Comics retaining the applicable trademarks), although Vertigo senior editor Will Dennis shared an editing credit with WildStorm's Alex Sinclair on issues #1 and #2, suggesting that the switchover came a good ways into production.

(tangentally, the Vertigo X preview also featured coverage of another famously troubled work, Garth Ennis' & Steve Dillon's perpetually forthcoming 'literary' comics opus City Lights - "there's no stopping us now," declared Ennis, inaccurately)

When it eventually arrived -- and I'll confess I only picked that first issue up when I heard people enthusing about it online -- The Winter Men already seemed a bit like something from years earlier, a 'superhero' comic wherein the superhero elements were pushed as far to the back as possible, as was the trend among several of Marvel's early 21st century projects under the tenure of president Bill Jemas.

Yet it sure didn't read like a Marvel comic of that time, or 2005 for that matter - loaded with narration and labels and dialogue and tight, buzzing panels, the first issue seemed the very antithesis of decompressed 'widescreen' comics, with Leon's modulated linework (thick 'n inky up close, scratchily cartooned in longview) blending with Stewart's muted palette and solid hues to create a tone more akin to some handsomely understated European album than nearly any North American super-comic. The plot was both intricate and enigmatic; Lewis' density of scripting focused mainly on detailed scenes redolant with offhanded cultural references and carefully metered dialogue, as if to evoke a very intuitive translation of something originally in Russian. Bits of story progression were sometimes only sprinkled among chit-chat about the Moscow power grid or the web structure of Russian organized crime.

The primary narrator and key anti-hero was Kris, a former Spetsnaz man and self-styled poet who was once a member of Red-11, a Soviet-originated team of specialists clad in flying armored suits, nominally for use in dangerous missions but really to act as a check against the nation's potentially dangerous superhuman program, which was centered around a near-legenday propoganda figure known as the Hammer of the Revolution. All of these competing forces were known collectively as the Winter Men, even as they were tasked by design with destroying one another for power's or suppression's sake - draw your own USSR metaphor.

But it wasn't superhumans that killed the Red-11 squad. They suffered a crushing defeat in Chechnya -- presumably the First Chechen War, with all accordant symbolism as per the troubles of the post-Soviet Russia -- and the haunted Kris was left a man between useful seasons, doing odd, dirty jobs for judges and the mayor of Moscow. This frozen state led him to a confrontation with Drost, a lifelong soldier for something or another and a fellow ex-Red-11, who agreed to swap a quick resolution to a nagging criminal-political matter (in the series' privatized Moscow, a free-for-all among rival gangs and governmental bodies, crime and politics are pretty much the same thing) for a no-win murder/kidnapping case involving a young girl who got a black-market liver transplant from what turned out to be a Very Special Source: a potential superhuman.



Needless to say, the plot then spread to include approximately half the population of northern Eurasia, with a special emphasis on three of Kris' four surviving Red-11 teammates: Drost, the aforementioned soldier; Nikki, the gangster; and Nina, the bodyguard. A mystery teammate known only as "the Siberian" remained off-page.

Kris travelled to America to infiltrate the Russian mob and crack its organ trade. He faced off with the CIA, and raised an army in Western Asia with a handful of money. He murdered trusting friends in cold blood, got lambasted for never moving forward, got a mafiya tattoo urging him (specifically his fist) to move forward, and never saw his wife leave him. Hell, he even rescued the little girl at the end of issue #3, although it soon became clear that the saga was far from over.

All the while, writer Lewis structured each issue as a discreet unit, with each chapter's action broken off from the others by time's passage and shifts in location (hardly a trait of decompressed superhero comics!). And even within each issue, small segments would bump Kris forward in time -- months and months pass in issue #2's America alone -- as his narration doled out pertinant trivia and background information. Often, while sinking deeper and deeper into the international conspiracy, Kris would opine as to the obsessive-compulsive nature of the old Soviet intelligence, never prone to allowing for coincidence - it sometimes came off as Lewis trying to cover for his less tenable plot contortions, just as all that lived-in detail occasionally seemed like heavy research getting plopped onto the page.

Also in issue #3, as he waited to brief CIA operatives on his mission, Kris mused that "I'll have to leave out some small other things too -- and with what's left -- the story becomes difficult." That later became very important.

Issue #4 of the series didn't arrive until April 2006. Scott Dunbier had become the editor, and suddenly, according to the cover, the miniseries was only going to be six issues. All that despite the issue itself posing as an Interlude (one suspects for the halfway mark), focused on Kris & Nikki driving around town, picking up protection money, restoring citizens' power, discussing the plot, drinking heavily with strangers and shooting a man in the head at the behest of a local judge.

I think that was when I realized that the series was truly something, a crime comic matched perfectly with a vividly drawn foreign locale, and warm and authentic friendships (and very crisp dialogue) contrasted harshly with moments of amoral cruelty, the former informing the tolerance of the latter. The superhero content acted as strict, potent metaphor, the dangerous days of a world superpower recalled with wonder and fear, and the people left scrambling for dangerous shards of that old Communist power in a post-super world, after the big times ended. Even the romantic/terrible grit of lawless Moscow was real enough to work; when Nikki the gangster mentions good times of dealing in Ninja Turtle toys, it brings to mind that old interview Kevin Eastman did with The Comics Journal (issue #202; read it here), in which he mentions signing with a Turtles sub-licensing agent and possible gangster on a deal to truck toys into Russia - the copyright/trademark would be defended with his fists.

Then the series vanished for a while. Issue #5 landed in October, its solicitation announcing that there'd be eight issues again, and its final page happily noting that it was the final regular issue, with a special edition forthcoming to resolve everything. Plot points were hustled through with considerable speed; some content promised in issue #4's Next Issue box simply didn't appear. Hints and suggestions appeared. "Your endgame is rushed," an elderly architect noted to Kris, who later ended the issue's narration with an even more telling line: "And wouldn't that have been a good ending?"

Do you think?



So this is the real, 100% authentic final issue of The Winter Men, may it trade and multiply forever, and I think it's safe to declare it a choice example of 'supercompression' in North American comics, akin to Casanova and the later, crazier bits of Seven Soldiers in poise (if not tone). There may be two issues' worth of space in this comic, but Lewis packs in three or four issues worth of stuff; that doesn't quite make up the difference, mind you, since the each issue of the series typically included the stuff of two, but it's still noteworthy.

The supercompression approach serves both creators well. Leon -- still with letterer Workman, although frequent collaborator Melissa Edwards has replaced colorist Stewart, to a slightly washed-out effect -- is perfectly adept at packing small panels with minutely-carved detail, while Lewis builds upon the self-aware and 'self-contained' style of earlier issues to advance the plot forcefully in the same bursts of action that marked earlier issues, although this time (probably) to the effect of leaping over material he can't otherwise hit from space constraints. As a result, the series reads shockingly well as a whole, given the endless problems it encountered during production. Not to mention its narrator's tendancy to say things like "I will just tell you the good parts..." - hey, it's just Kris being Kris by now.

It's not just plot-plot-plot either. Actually, I'd suggest that a trait of the supercompressed comic (among straightforward genre works, at least) is that it doesn't just stuff in shitloads of plot, but layers on digressions and backstory and flavor, as a means of making the work especially rich. I don't think there was any particular need for Kris to enjoy a two-page sexual idyll with his separated wife, but I'm extremely glad it's there for the dimension it adds to Kris' character, which Lewis then cannily exploits three pages later when Our Hero cuffs a girlfriend in the face to scare her away from the dangerous life of the Red-11.

There's also a sudden resurgence in the fantastical elements of the story, with a trip to a 'former' Gulag featuring a flame-spewing cyborg guard, and a train ride to Siberia seeing Kris & Nina facing off with a flying armored suit, itself prompting a flashback to the Red-11 calamity in Chechnya and some awesomely clunky mecha designs. Granted, the dark secret of Kris' trauma turns out to be somewhat pat -- he was once in love with Nina, but left her for another female teammate who died when Kris froze, maybe due to equipment malfunction, maybe due to sheer stupid terror -- but it does explain why Nina is so lightly characterized compared to Drost & Nikki. This is Kris' story, told by him, and subject to his edits and biases, and he adores Nina as a perfect element of a happy, lost past; there's a fight sequence in issue #5 where Nina kills the hell out of oncoming forces and Kris' narration just stops for a full page until she's done and she gazes straight at the reader in close-up and Kris simply declares "Nina -- the barricade girl." And it all becomes so weirdly romantic the second time through.

The Siberian also comes into play this issue, probably the most bloodied from the series' abridgement. You can all but see his journey from the Gulag to civilization doled out through issues #6 and #7 (or maybe some earlier version of issue #5, since issue #4's Next Issue thing promised his involvement), building him up as a consummate badass armed with info that even his teammates aren't aware of, and noting his secret connection to the man behind the whole crazy affair, the chessmaster moving the pieces. As it stands he remains something of a puzzle, if given exactly the detail needed to explain his motivation for taking on the Hammer of the Revolution.



That's right. Lewis eventually reveals that the Hammer, the legend himself, was behind the whole deal, scheming extravagently to erase any weapon that might kill him, and hopefully getting different weapons to destroy one another. He's quite a charged figure, blue and glowing in his true form as an obvious evocation of a certain temporary anti-Communist from another DC-released comic book; the timing couldn't be better!

But Lewis' marvel of science isn't nearly as prone to transcendence. He's like the glowering spirit of revolutionary impulse, his origin tied to the Tunguska event of 1908, so close in proximity to the 1905 Russian Revolution. Stalin couldn't control him, though, so the Soviet state roiled itself into finding ways to both mimic him and counter him, creating a mad rush of competing interests that eventually broke down totally into the web of gross desires that runs the streets.

He tells Kris of the collapsar -- a notion first brought up by a schemer in issue #3 -- where both of them are, chess pieces on the same space, superman and rocket man set by politics to erase one another, somehow despite the collapse of the State itself. Revolution Means a Circle, as the issue's title proclaims, and it does seem that nobody, least of all Kris, has moved forward. Need I mention that the Hammer was posing in the mayor's office as an architect -- amusingly, the same one that delivered the above-mentioned line alluding to the series' lack of space -- whom Kris once told to 'go build something,' that very wish repeated with a different connotation as part of this issue's all-action climax? The promise of a beautiful, revolutionary future spoiled?

Everything seems inevitable by the end, as if there really aren't any coincidences. The Hammer was present in issue #1, in disguise. Reading the series over again, I noticed all sorts of little hidden aspects, like a traitorous gangster character from issue #3 hanging around in the background of issue #2, or little hints that Kris' girlfriend is going to begin an affair with Nikki. In issue #4, Nikki is already showing Kris bits of the Winter tech he'll use in the endgame. The Hammer is eventually brought to his knees by Drost, the man who was supposed to head the whole damned investigation to begin with before he traded off with Kris at the top of the first issue.

Through it all, some flaws remain evident - for all its oft-stated claims of being unlike your typical Western action tale (yeah, like everything, that's mentioned in-story), the whole thing does build to the old-as-the-hills trope of the (sympathetic) villain offering the (anti-)hero the chance to work with him and Our Man turning him down to set up the final throwdown. Which leads to another problem, one common to supercompressed works - the action just doesn't have a lot of room to build up power on its own, so three pages of Kris strapping on a cobbled-together approximation of the ol' armor to fulfill his purpose seems less mighty than pat from lack of space, like it's something he just had to do to gild the circular lily.

Yet, in the end, The Winter Men is about people and a society going in circles; its title refers to competing, mutually destructive forces crated for the 'good' of a state, and its depiction of Russia is full of the echos of a lost superpower, and most of its poorer traits as made even worse. From there comes the crime and the mystery. Good thing it's a strong, well-made genre piece, deeply clever and strangely immediate, given its own life of struggles. At least something moved forward to a conclusion! It even has the cheek to nod in the direction of a sequel, so maybe a Winter Men Spring Spectacular will show up in 2012, along with Big Numbers #3 and City Lights #1. If I can go by what's here, it'll seem like no time has passed at all, its heavy approach given the tenor of good conversation and a keen sense of skipping around and honing in on what's important. Like Kris says:

"...and it is what you leave out that makes the story."

Labels: Jog

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Final Crisis: Secret Files:



Ha ha, well, turns out the real secret here has been 'what the hell is in this thing?' And anyone trusting in DC's original solicitation for "Art by Frank Quitely and various" are gonna be pretty steamed when they notice it's all various, no Quitely on the inside. Nor is alleged co-writer Peter Tomasi anywhere to be found, although there is some interior content by Greg Rucka & Steve Lieber, who are not credited on the cover. The best I can say is that it all somehow seems too bona fide haphazard to qualify as a bait 'n switch - I really do wonder what the original idea for this thing was.

Anyhow, the vast majority of what your $3.99 will get you is a 24-page Origin of Libra comic, in which character co-creator Len Wein effectively remakes his original 1974 Justice League of America Libra story -- which I do believe was just reprinted this past July in DC Universe Special - Justice League of America #1 -- with artist Tony Shasteen in place of the late Dick Dillin. There's also some added background details, and a crossover-appropriate through line to bring us right up to the present, which sort of suggests that the character's mysterious nature won't be playing much of a role in Final Crisis proper at all.

That's a shame, although it doesn't reflect too much on Wein's script, which I thought was actually charming at times in its old-fashioned 'supervillain has a story for YOU' style; I liked Darkseid's grandiloquence ("Or are you so foolish as to tell me that, for even an instant, you would dare to forget DARKSEID!") and I loved that last page. Shasteen's visuals do a decent enough job of squaring away the '70s origins of the stuff with the glossy realist Final Crisis style set down by J.G. Jones. But the irony of this expanded Libra's motivation -- a man seeking the power of the cosmos to escape his ugly family situation, only to fall happily into the thrall of the ultimate Anti-Dad -- don't have much of the resonance of conclusion, since this is a crossover tie-in and we can't really end the arc here. I do understand now what Grant Morrison saw in the character, though, even while I suspect I might have gotten the same effect from reading that reprint half a year ago.

The rest of the comic is filler of various types: Morrison himself presents a one-page mini-essay on the Anti-Life Equation that falls somewhere in between a recap of past storylines and an answer he might have been saving for an interview at some point in the future; Rucka & Liber have an excerpt from the Words of Lilith, which I presume ties in with Final Crisis: Revelations, and is otherwise too oblique to have much value; and then, since there's four pages left, we get stuff that was apparently left out of the Final Crisis Sketchbook, in much the same captioned designs format (this is the basis of J.G. Jones' cover credit, by the way), honing in on the Final Crisis: Superman Beyond supporting cast, various Anti-Life figures, and, er... Aquaman. Because... he's there?

Hmmm, maybe that says something about the comic as a whole. Deep, deep EH, although your feelings will probably be lower if you're already up on Libra.

Punisher: War Zone #4 (of 6):



Now here's some happier dissonance: a movie tie-in that has absolutely nothing to do with the movie it's tying in with, save for the presence of the title character. And I'm pretty fine with that! More than anything, this weekly series has behaved as an amusingly early opportunity for writer Garth Ennis to return to his signature corporate-owned comics character and show 'em all how a toss-off storyline gets goddamned done, even though I secretly know that Santa isn't real and the script has been sitting around completed for over three years, by Ennis' own admission (as to the script, not Santa).

It's been a good time, but what's striking is how much Ennis' pacing is aided by the miniseries' weekly schedule; what occasionally seemed a little too deliberate in monthly form (I can't be the only one who stockpiled issues of the MAX series before reading them) comes off as nicely needling when you know it's only a few days until the next part. Granted, that's all academic if you're just planning on reading this in trade form -- which is probably what Ennis is really pacing for, and arguably what more people will opt to buy since these weekly suckers are $3.99 a pop -- but it's nice to have a smoother experience for those who can't wait or like pamphlets and/or hate money or something.

And what's even more nice is that Ennis is skilled enough a writer to maintain a high level of accessibility for a plot that's essentially a chain of callbacks to the writer's 2000-04 Marvel Knights version of the character, in particular the character-reviving Welcome Back Frank storyline; frequent cohort Steve Dillon again provides the art. This particular issue sees Frank and witless mob underling Schitti (yep) still on the tail of the alive and seemingly omnipresent family boss Ma Gnucci, despite having already killed her multiple times this miniseries alone; little does Our Man know that a deeply odd supervillain team-up is happening behind the scenes!

Now, admittedly that's nothing you didn't know last issue - the plot is in 'inching forward' mode right now, and while Ennis has drawn the best comedy of the series out of steely police lieutenant Molly Von Richtofen and her increasingly horrible obsession with her roommate/lover, the level of zany antics in this particular issue (including a two-page fantasy sequence!) smacks a bit of padding. But few can bide time quite like Ennis, and Dillon always seems to tease out something a little better onto the page. OKAY as an issue, but you can bank on the whole being better.

Incognito #1 (of 5):



I don't know if Criminal has set my expectations too high by this point or if there's just so damn many superhero comics around that it's harder to be striking, but I wasn't very piqued by this new Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips creation from Icon, despite my bottomless love for the term 'science-villain' and a general fondness for rough, pulp magazine-informed costumed adventure folk. This is a sort of supervillain noir piece set in a dim urban setting, with one-half of the infamous Overkill Brothers, our narrator, planted uneasily into witness protection.

But on a more immediate (if superficial) level, it's remarkably similar to Mark Millar's & J.G. Jones' Wanted, featuring an angry man with awesomely violent potential skulking around a boring work life, filled with loathing for everyone who pisses him off and half the people who don't, suddenly gaining the means to taste the power and freedom of amorality. There's a dead super-relative in his past, a mad science mentor and a shady organization that's wormed its way behind the operations of society, keeping the human sheep in the dark.

It's close enough that I wonder if this introduction isn't intended as a deliberate takeoff; certainly Brubaker is less fussy about the concept than Millar, letting us and his narrating character in on his wicked past right at the top. The dead relative is a twin brother and the mentor is also the 'father,' carrying through Brubaker's usual theme of family. Heaven knows Phillips and colorist Val Staples are far away from the slick glamor of Jones and Paul Mounts. And interestingly, the shady controller types are the heroes -- Jess Nevins presents a short backmatter essay on The Shadow, who wasn't exactly a paragon of active democracy -- while Brubaker cleverly has his villain blow off his newly re-powered steam by becoming a superhero, in the classic leaping down and socking muggers manner.

The thing is, all I'm seeing right now is potential, coursing through some fairly bland sequences of misanthropy and worldbuilding. Brubaker tends to a character-focused writer anyway, so maybe he just needs to get some added science-people into the picture to get the thing crackling, but for now it's mostly Phillips & Staples heating up the violence (outer and inner) with color and grit to keep attention. And even then, they're working in tight panels that mainly serve to muffle the science-action impact and draw attention to the former Overkill's psychological strife, which just isn't terribly interesting in its longing for freedom of the fists and skies.

OKAY in terms of possibility and technical chops, but it hasn't gotten me itching for the next issue like the better of this team's work.

Labels: Jog

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Hellblazer #250


(art and color by Rafael Grampá & Marcus Penna; there's also captions in the actual comic)

John Constantine, how long has it been? Just over 20 years since this thing started up? Almost 25 since The Saga of the Swamp Thing? That's a lot of Silk Cuts, a lot of magic. A lot of politics - there was once a whole goddamned issue (#3) on the Conservative election victory of 1987. But there's some enduring character to this Alan Moore, Stephen R. Bissette & John Totleben creation too; I often wind up thinking of Eddie Campbell's parody version in Bacchus, who had the poor barmaid climb all the way to the top shelf, only to make her climb back down bottom to fetch the same label. "It's 'cos I'm a vicious bastard, ennit." Soon thereafter he burned his own head off lighting a smoke, fortuitously before his lawyer could arrive.

Campbell wrote a handful of proper Hellblazer comics too (#85-88), and he's now returned for this 48-page, $3.99 anniversary special. So has the artist from his run, Sean Phillips (now of Criminal and others). So has the fellow who wrote the 1987 election episode, Jamie Delano. It's not often you see an old-and-new-faces 'landmark' issue for a series like this; it's really a superhero thing. Often a tedious, self-congratulatory superhero thing at that. But just as Hellblazer started out as something among the superheroes, yet different, its #250 uses its commemorative status as a means of exploring different aspects of John Constantine, whose many adventures have indeed seen various sides of him emphasized.

The results aren't all good, but it makes for a decently-paced package. I'd have liked to see a far stronger opening story, though; aside from writer Dave Gibbons' amusing decision to cast the piece as a sequel to his last Constantine tale, an illustrated prose story from nine years ago (in Vertigo: Winter's Edge #3), there's almost nothing that seems particularly attuned to the strength of Hellblazer. It's just John Constantine chasing after a bad guy who's stolen a magical sharp thing to slaughter a baby and become immortal.

And sure, Constantine interrupts some rich people having a party, and he saves the day by kicking someone in the balls and a pretty girl shows up and a cork pops off a champagne bottle in a suggestive manner in the final panel, but that's all fairly generic low-down supernatural action hero stuff; it does work for Hellblazer -- it's not inappropriate -- but it doesn't offer anything striking for the curious reader, save for the visuals of the aforementioned Sean Phillips (with frequent colorist Val Staples). Those are as crisply-laid and glowingly dingy as ever, although I wonder that large, distracting white space on his first page was supposed to hold the credits at some point.

A better two-fisted Constantine story is later in the issue, from veteran writer Brian Azzarello and Rafael Grampá (he of Mesmo Delivery), one of the better two-fisted action artists to get attention lately. That's one of Grampá's panels up top (printed noticeably darker on the page, mind you), and I think it nicely summarizes his utterly gleeful approach to the project, loading his pages with nimbly caricatured faces and funny details, even as handles the moment-by-moment of Azzarello's barfight-with-a-demon scenario with fine precision. Even the coloring (from Mesmo cohort Marcus Penna) comes off as a very broad take on the stereotypical Vertigo palette, all rusty and muddy browns and blood soaking into white and grey.

It mixes nicely with Azzarello's script, actually a poem presented via captions, chronicling Constantine's trip to Chicago to lift the Curse of the Billy Goat from the Cubs. Of course, Our Man can easily summon a demon, but it's up to the people to eventually take responsibility for their own shortcomings, so "our battered dreams and hope" might bloom better in the spring. Feel free to look for metaphors where applicable!


(art & color by David Lloyd)

Other stories are quieter. Jamie Delano & David Lloyd (of The Horrorist) offer Constantine the Observer, divining the sad histories of combatants in a holiday poker match. An element of human exploitation is present, as it often is with Delano, but he remains as sure in the compassion of regret as Lloyd is with his effortlessly lovely art, the present lit as if from a maze of roaring, off-panel fireplaces, and the sad past getting more icy and blue as things slide closer to hell.

Meanwhile, debuting series writer Peter Milligan has Constantine encounter ghosts and politics in a low-key investigation that ties a personal haunting to Our Man's own troubled past, if not in a melodramatic way or anything. It seems abrupt at only six pages, wherein the stewing emotions of the piece's focus don't have a lot of time to cook. Campbell provides the visuals here, and while he draws a wonderfully aged and worn and tired Constantine, his work doesn't gel much with Dominic Regan's shiny digital colors, which add a distracting sort of body to Campbell's characters, trampling whole sequences with gloss. Oddly, two of Campbell's panels are presented beneath the book's table of contents in a black, white and blue style, which I thought was more effective.

But then, Jamie Grant (of All Star Superman) is also a very shiny colorist, and his work mixes better with Giuseppe Camuncoli (breakdowns) & Stefano Landini (finishes) in the book's fifth and final story, maybe because the duo have a rounder, sleek style going - their Constantine carries a whiff of manga along with the tobacco. Prose novelist China Miéville seemed like a good fit to write the material when announced, and he proves to be as adept as expected with a vivid, funny social justice adventure, playing up the series' tendency to mix social ills with droll supernatural society. Hell, he even pulls out the demonic yuppie, hell-as-corporation idea born in the '87 election issue - this really is a journey through the years!

It's the last thing in the book, and probably the most broadly entertaining. A company spits poison dust into the streets, where children play. Their work is literally evil -- as in, they're trying to manufacture it -- and Constantine is retained by demons pissed that perdition's exclusivity is in danger. Phantoms rise and angels act in less than beatific ways. John Constantine, ahead of them all, urges tomorrow's adults to wage supernatural war on the sins of salt mines and cocaine plants. Not a bad way to leave him after a GOOD enough party; he might be making crazy wishes, but reaching issue #250 seems a little crazy on its own, yet here we are.

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Criminal Vol. 2 #7



And so another tale from Ed Brubaker (writin'), Sean Phillips (drawin') & Val Staples (colorin') crashes to its close, as does another run of Criminal itself. It's going on hiatus until May 2009 or so, while the team works on the creator-owned supervillain-in-witness-protection series Incognito, although it won't relaunch or anything once it's back (so, next issue will be vol. 2 #8). In case you're getting tripped up by the pamphlets/trades numbering, vol. 1 of the Criminal pamphlet series covered the first two trade paperbacks (Coward and Lawless), while the newish The Dead and the Dying trade hits issues #1-3 of the second pamphlet series.

I like the pamphlets, myself; if you're gonna charge $3.50, it helps to be 36 pages, ad-free and stocked with little bonus essays on the crime genre, on top of being rather nicely designed. These things look nice sitting around in a pile, which is usually how I've got them arranged, since I rarely read them as they come out. I guess that's a little irony there - a series I like having as individual comic books that I wind up reading in big, 'collected' chunks anyway.

But that's how I've found they work best, now that we're up to the fourth storyline - it's all structured nicely enough as chapters, but the real big impact demands at least an all-at-once re-read, and even then maybe a quick skim of past storylines, since Brubaker isn't even limiting himself to individual trades. No, this is a huge, sprawling intergenerational saga at heart, with the big, beating theme of family -- both a driving force and a font of poison -- keeping steady time from its center.



Anyway, this issue ends the sad saga of Jacob Kurtz, that very troubled author of the series' surreal daily newpaper detective comic, Frank Kafka, P.I. The strip first popped up in issue #1 of vol. 1, so little connections have been present for a while - Jacob is a former counterfeiter, and old friends with Tracy Lawless (of Lawless), whose thoroughly awful father (of The Dead and the Dying) used to pal around with Jacob's own dad.

Jacob also used to be married to the niece of local syndicate head Sebastian Hyde, which got him into all sorts of trouble after the woman vanished without a trace, and Jacob got branded her murderer by the law and the media. He was abused by the police and crippled by Hyde's men, although after his wife's body was found and the death deemed an accident the boss did offer Jacob a lifetime job drawing his Frank Kafka comic, thus evoking the old tale of Krazy Kat's endurance at the behest of William Randolph Hearst, except with severe beatings. Drawing comics is hard, as the insomniac Jacob knows, but he's pretty close to his character, by which I mean he literally sees him standing around and urging him to take tough-guy action when he really shouldn't.

Laying it out this way makes it seem obvious that Jacob, also the story's narrator, might not have the most trustworthy point of view. The beauty of this storyline is that Brubaker has let this implication lay low, allowing his story to proceed for much of its length like a typical Criminal storyline -- it involves a forged FBI badge, a heap of Chinese triad money, a femme fatale, her boorish thug boyfriend and a police detective who still can't let go of Jacob's presumed guilt, particularly since the artist has been totally busting his balls in his comic -- then suddenly kicking the whole thing into a mess of subjectivity that not only messes with the plot but gently pokes at the kind of plots this comic has been working with so far.

This issue's the one that kicks, and it puts some weight behind it. Even the structure of the storyline gets knocked around, as Brubaker basically stops the plot at two points to back up and present scenes from the point of view of the detective and the femme fatale, with an omniscient narrator suddenly provided to free them from Jacob's skewed perspective. In less assured hands it could have come off as a clanking mechanism for filling out the backstory, but Brubaker seizes the opportunity to present these characters as slightly more complicated than the simple archetypes Jacob (who hears the voice of a fictional noir detective in his head, remember) has fit them into via the plot that is his life. Too much time alone drawing crime funnies, I think!



Eventually the truth is revealed, and earlier sequences take on new connotations. The comic drifts a little over the top. Criminal does that sometimes, but while Coward launched itself into guns-blazing one man army nonsense, to its detriment, Bad Night is strippers-in-the-mental-ward good, a real nightmare party of ruinous perception, with a nice crack-up scene and the best atmosphere of doom the series has yet managed. I'm not mentioning much about Phillips & Staples here, since they're mostly working from the same level of quality as before (although Jacob's tortured body language deserves note), but be assured that they compliment Brubaker's writing as nicely as expected.

I'm glad I read this all in one shot; it's even worth reading again after that, since there's a subtlety to Brubaker's characterizations that only comes out once everyone's motives and desires are at hand. This bolsters the story's affirmation of its primary cast as error-prone people, longing for affection (since the 'family' here is most emphatically that of romantic partners) or pursuing a kind of virtue, if generally in the worst ways. It also empowers the onrushing horror of the tale's conclusion, with one person demanding emotional truths from another, and the reader getting the sinking impression that there's no way of knowing what's authentic anymore, not in a story told like this, and just when it's most important. VERY GOOD.

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Drop your cocks and grab your socks, irregardless of anatomy! I'm taking you on an old-fashioned sleigh ride through today's seasonal Marvel comics, just like Grandma used to do back in the '60s, when she posted comic book reviews on the internet via heroic doses of hallucinogenic substances. Those were some good comics, or good hallucinogenics.

Moon Knight: Silent Knight #1:



One thing I've gotta say: I do like that Laurence Campbell & Lee Loughridge art, and there's 32 pages of it in here (for $3.99, mind you), so that's something. They're also the current artist-colorist duo on The Punisher MAX, where some fun stuff is going on with heavy, angry blacks and hot & cold colors - there's a thing at the end of #63 where the Punisher is literally vanishing into a bush, just scraps of face and white skull, and it does an awful lot to bolster the mood for writer Gregg Hurwitz, who's mostly working from a stock 'Punisher agrees to help folk in need; encounters awful villain' scenario.

Their work isn't quite as vivid here, since the action is mainly kept to chilly city exteriors, but I appreciated how snowflakes are used as a sort of static, really aggravating the action into worse violence, and even giving peaceable scenes some visual overload. There's some kitchen interiors too, which Loughridge washes over with a sick green tone, which adds an extra queasiness to the rather plain 'superhero love interest is upset' caption monologue writer Peter Milligan has going.

Yes, Milligan! That's why I always read the solicitation copy for these one-shots - you never know who might pop up! Unfortunately, the best that can be said of this comic's writing is that it's sturdily adequate in its workmanlike approach. The story sees Moon Knight hunting killers for the holidays, with Khonshu (I think; I don't read the ongoing) acting as demonic comic relief a la Ryuk from Death Note (just the first example that pops to mind). It's pretty tough being a superhero -- innocents die because Moon Knight just wasn't fast enough -- but it's also a bother being a superhero's longtime lover, as a subplot with Marlene indicates from its lack of shared turkey and wine.

A tiny little beam of light shines through on occasion, like a fantasy panel with a monster leaping out of Marc Spector's skin, or Khonshu commenting on the racial dynamics of Moon Knight's hunt. But this is mostly dead-typical costumed angst, with no more compelling narrative drive than its lust to remind us how being a Marvel superhero is the apparently the most difficult thing ever, and really bad when it's a holiday. And while those visuals make it crueler than usual, in a good way, they're not the type to overcome a story like this on their own merits. 'Tis the greatest EH of all.

The Punisher MAX X-Mas Special #1:



This, on the other hand, climaxes with a blood-drenched shootout in a manger at the birth of a boy, so it pretty much has the contest won right there.

I might have expected that. The writer's Jason Aaron, who's proven to be pretty good at these one-off issues (this one's 34 pages of story for your $3.99), and here he strives to present an extra-special Christmas wonder: the beloved story of the birth of the Christ, as a Frank Castle adventure in mob slaughter.

Really! A dreaded boss sends a horde of gun-toting thugs into a hospital to shoot every baby in the nursery to death with large automatic weapons (one guy's pretty unsure about the whole thing!), but they miss the also-evil Mary and Joseph characters from a rival gang. There's little the Punisher can do to miss a good birth (cue 'Nam flashback!), so he winds up protecting the trio from three kings of the East... kings of murder, that is!! There's even a street thug named Shepherd who wants to find the baby for the purposes of ransom. He and a cohort:

"You know how much smack a million dollars would buy?"

"A lot, I bet."

Anyway, the Punisher kills the bad people for the baby's sake, because there's nothing good around save for the fragility of innocence; the only savior around him is potential, and even that counts as a holiday miracle.

The focus isn't quite on all that, however - Aaron is more interested in having a wise man enter the nativity scene with a blazing gun, only to get kicked in the head by a nearby animal. It's all deeply silly -- almost proud in how obvious it all is -- and probably would collapse into rubbish with an even slightly more ponderous approach (or something more blatantly slapsticky, in the Garth Ennis Marvel Knights manner), but the right aesthetic of total scriptural irreverence and nonstop movement is thankfully struck.

I haven't seen artist Roland Boschi's work with Aaron on Ghost Rider, but I like how Daniel Brown is coloring him in a very similar manner to Goran Parlov's work (especially on similarly comedic The Punisher Presents: Barracuda), almost as a form of visual continuity. If I'm gonna compare, Boschi isn't as strong an artist - there's a strange distortion to some of his character work, like faces are bending a little, which I find more distracting than evocative. But he serves up the gory enthusiasm with just enough of a straight face to keep the script on the level, which is most crucial. GOOD all around.

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Unknown Soldier #1



This is the newest ongoing series to come out of Vertigo, a reimagining of the Robert Kanigher/Joe Kubert concept as a saga of violence in Uganda, circa 2002. It's bloody, tense and not a little pulpy, something a bit more bombastic than what we've been getting lately from the publisher. It does bring to mind an older Vertigo project, though, and I'm not talking about the 1997 Garth Ennis/Kilian Plunkett take on the same property.

No, this thing really brings to mind Congo Bill, as in the 1999-2000 miniseries from writer Scott Cunningham and artist Danijel Zezelj. It was also an Africa-set revival of an old adventure comic -- specifically the late '50s/early '60s Congorilla iteration of the older Congo Joe jungle feature -- also filled with guns and toughness and grit and suspense and angst and people who kill. Hell, both projects even sport Richard Corben cover art, although he's on variant duty this time, I think only for issue #1; the very welcome Igor Kordey provides standard covers.

I sort of liked Congo Bill; it was one of those comics that, through its black ops storyline, sought to say things about violence and politics. Granted, it was also one of those updates of a fantastical comic wherein the fantasy elements are avoided as much as conceivably possible, and treated mainly as elements of a charged metaphor - I think colonialism and its legacy was an active concern, though it's been a while. There was a grudging feel to the series' eventual use of the Congorilla tropes, like everyone probably could have come up with a neater means of getting the point across if not beholden to using the stuff of older corporate holdings, although some work is done to fit it all in.

This new comic is far more direct. It's got a guy with a messed-up face who hates the abuse of human rights and fights alone, so far. It's probably going to try and go deeper - after all, one of this issue's key distinguishing features is a backmatter essay in which writer Joshua Dysart frets madly over the implications of his updated concept:

"As for the rest of it, well, any way you slice it, there's something inherently immoral about crafting a sensitive, exciting, anti-war piece of pop entertainment that claims a love for a people while using the worst aspects of their lives to create drama."

Or, more to the point:

"Sometimes I feel like a socio-political Russ Meyer, aiming my 'camera' at the giant tits of atrocity (atrocititty?)."



I enjoyed Dysart's work with Mike Mignola on the recent B.P.R.D.: 1946; it teased out some of the human suffering inside the Hellboy world's Nazi-fighting roots, explicitly raising notions of horrible experimentation behind all those horror and sci-fi devices, without overwhelming the flavor of the thing.

Here, the real-world connections are necessarily firmer. Lwanga Moses is a doctor whose parents managed to flee Uganda in the closing months of the rule of Idi Amin Dada. He returned in 2000 to aid the distressed and displaced, though he's plagued with violent dreams, which often seem to conclude with his snapping the neck of his beloved wife.

Much background is doled out as the issue moves forward, and soon Our Pacifist (Ha!) Hero is leaping into action to defuse a terrible situation, one that prompts visions of himself as a shirtless, wild-eyed, blood-spattered macho man super-killer, plus a voice in his head urging him to use his deadly talents to murder the hell out of some nasty people. Blazing gunfire, mutiliation and an ongoing comic book series ensue!

Not a novel setup, fusing the classic trope of a peaceful man... pushed to the edge with that of the mild-mannered man... with a dark and forgotten past so as to create a sense of inevitability; it kind of saps the drama, really, since Dr. Moses winds up coming off like something was bound to set him off eventually. But then, the nearly off-handed presentation of the moment of truth that sets our man to action suggests that Dysart realizes this; as a result, the book becomes full of potential energy, as we wonder how this poor guy came to be. A creation of strife? Politics? Might his American upbringing figure in? Could violence possibly beget more violence? Signs (and conversations! and dreams!) point to yes on that last one!

It's OKAY as an introduction, full of little suggestions tucked away inside decent-enough thriller mechanics. Artist Alberto Ponticelli (with colorist Oscar Celestini) does a fair job of establishing settings and making the violence hurt, although I couldn't say much stands out. It's straightforward work for a straightforward setup, with the real interest coming from deft bits of writing like Moses' encounter with an American celebrity humanitarian, prone to couching Ugandan issues in US concerns.

Dysart's 'soldier' is from both places, as much as he considers humself "fully, wholly Ugandan," and how he'll act behind blurry lines of combat forms the most intriguing unknown among this comic's shadowy pasts and killer instincts; I hope this issue forms less a status quo than an action comic skeleton to support more confident inquiries, or maybe a set of bandages to be peeled off, so that we might see the face of the matter.

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Crossed #1 (of 9)



I wish I was 12 again so I could beg my beloved great aunt to buy me this comic solely on the basis of its cover. She'd go "oooh, that's a scary one," and purchase the hell out of it, because that's just how we rolled in that wing of my semi-immediate family. One of the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics she bought me was the start of the Michael Zulli run, where Splinter is puking up mystic rock totems and having a psychic war with Shredder while the Turtles -- snarling, indistinguishable monsters all -- literally rip Foot ninjas to pieces left and right. Sure beat Saturday morning.

But I am older now, and I have my own money to spend however I see fit. Careful, mature considerations go into my every purchase, subtle tumblings of value that led me, perhaps inevitably, to a different economic decision, befitting an adult of my age and social position:



It looks like a boy being thrown out the door at first, but then you can open the comic and see all the things happening on the rest of the airplane! Note the young child being hanged from an oxygen mask cord way in the back; it's the little details that win my variant cover dollars, provided nobody's doing anything silly like charging extra money. I'll settle for the axe under those circumstances.

Anyway, this is the start of the new Garth Ennis/Jacen Burrows series from Avatar, in case the covers weren't clear enough on that. One thing might be tricky, though - despite that issue #1 marking, the true beginning of the story actually showed up in a shorter and less expensive issue #0 from a while back, as is Avatar's current practice.

That actually led to a decent little visual trick: the colorist for issue #0 -- depicting the start of a mysterious, zombie-like onslaught of smirking living people with cross-shaped scars on their faces, relieved of any sense of morality or restraint -- was Avatar mainstay Greg Waller, who depicted everything in his characteristically shiny manner, with the gore in particular taking on a too-bold H.G. Lewis sort of Grand Guignol texture. In contrast, issue #1 is colored by 'Juanmar,' who (which?) takes a much dimmer approach, rendering all the world as in perpetual sundown and all the blood as mucky and browner; even the flashback bits are faded, like issue #0 and Waller got to be the shock of the new, and all the rest of color could do was respond.

I don't know if that was planned, but it's there, you know?

Unfortunately, there's not a lot else of interest going on in this comic. I do think Burrows is good for the material; he has this uninhibited passion for the grotesque that he matches with a cartoon-clinical visual approach in a manner that borders on droll. It's fitting for a comic about lots of people going nuts in a world that still sort of has the facade of ours, and Ennis tosses in a recurring motif of people staring at things from a distance for that extra touch of detachment.

It also means, however, that the comic isn't much for immediate shocks; a bit with a scary woman popping up on one side of a fence is about as dispassionate as I can imagine (granted, Ennis doesn't help by having the character spout some dialogue before going "WAAAAHH!!"). Burrows also lacks distinction in his character designs - the main characters are fine, but the various grinning hordes have a way of looking less like people with similar facial expressions than people with similar faces, if you catch my drift.

Still, what's really indistinct right now is Ennis' plot, which is almost entirely a by-the-numbers survival horror-styled zombie(ish) thing, relayed to us via many narrative captions by an observant good-man-hanging-on sort of writer character. It's middling setup stuff (there's no medical services! life is hard! unafflicted survivors must band together, personality clashes be damned!) spiked only by the writer's total disdain for frilly mysticism and nerd naiveté; when a huffing fantasy gamer pops up ("Dungeons and Dragons, do you even know what you're talking about? It was Magic the --") the page all but drips with contempt, and the story goes on to show what awful things happen to such losers and all the doomed fucks that rely on his bullshit in a hard, dark world.

It's a particularly nasty gore scene that takes that one, a double-page spread given Burrows' full, chilled attention. I notice that the book takes some pains to avoid depicting genitals or sexual penetration, this in spite of panels like that of an infected woman being squished under a truck's tires, guts spilling out as she screams "JESUS I'M FUCKIN COMIN" from a mouth pouring blood. Funny that you can see the invisible threshold beyond which the book would maybe have to go in a plastic bag or get racked way beyond where my great aunt would have ever bought it for me, external signals meaning everything.

EH right now, though all the cross images (and, er, the title) suggests that Ennis may be gearing up for another look at the old religion; I don't know if that'll be any more intriguing, but it'll at least add another element on top of literalizing the bottomless hunger within that's plain from most any surface look at the zombie subgenre, to say nothing of the foibles of packed-in survivors.

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All Star Superman #12



This is the last issue of this series, barring future specials or two-issue story bursts from writer Grant Morrison and various unknown possible artists - regardless, it surely is an ending. A GOOD one, as a single issue, if sapped of immediacy by Morrison's rigorous prior explorations of his themes, in more interesting single issues (I'm thinking #10). Frank Quitely & Jamie Grant do keep the pace nicely -- which means some fine physical poise and a few helpfully low-detail clouds of dust in various backgrounds -- although this isn't so much a grand finale as a concluding step off the ledge into inevitability.

But then, the issue is titled Superman in Excelsis, so maybe a bit of godly distance is appropriate. And Morrison's approach to the Superman mythos is nothing if not Catholic! Allow me go into some detail, thus ruining all surprises forever.

This is a capstone issue, one covering the top of Superman's tomb. Yes, he does die - sort of. He 'dies' in that he has to leave humanity to their own devices by becoming a prolonged temporary part of the sun -- poisoned by Solaris the Tyrant! -- thus joining fully with the source of his powers and literally shining his radiance down on Earth.

It's fully the end of Morrison's take on the character, one that saw him face down his mortality by confronting various doppelgängers and alternate visions of himself, to the eventual effect of his preparing humanity to take the next step without him; Morrison is maniacal in his enthusiasm for the character, gleefully pushing him in ever more heavenly directions, at one point having him literally create our universe -- presumably after this 'death' he rises again as Superman Prime, as per issue #6 and Morrison's own much-referenced Old Testament of JLA: One Million -- but his is a theology that realizes the day-by-day is utterly left to people, who have the potential to be like gods themselves.

But Superman knew that before he knew it, you know? As Our Hero noted way back in issue #2, concerning the gates to his mighty Fortress:

"One day some future man or woman will open that door with that key.

"When they do, I want them to know how it felt to live at the dawn of the age of superheroes."

Knowing all we know now, the obvious suggestion is that superheroes will stop dropping from the sky into the heartland and start rising from the grass itself. Which isn't to say that no mortals at all can fly in the present:



I like that Morrison has characterized Lex Luthor as the world's most pompous skeptic -- because it's funny -- but I like even more that it isn't the skepticism that makes Luthor wicked - it's his unwillingness to use his obviously formidable talents to do anything but stroke his own persecution complex. As Quintum notes at the end of this issue, without a Superman to tangle with, Luthor simply fades away.

Oh, did anyone else think Quintum was somehow Luthor in disguise for most of this series? I sure did - that was my big secret theory. But I think Morrison has done something more interesting; if Luthor is Superman's most profound mirror image, then Quintum is ultimately Luthor's, being a mad genius who struggles to accomplish things ("...the measure of a man lies not in what he says but what he does," as the series' first collected volume opines), and generally needs Superman to haul his sorry rainbow ass out of trouble. He's completed a journey by the end of the series too, his similarities to Superman's foe finally representing humanity's progress in the post-Superman era, where a statue stands in a park like in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, although Morrison's story doesn't turn on any loss of powers from this world - just the opposite.

All of this, granted, doesn't make for so much a pleasing issue of a comic as an assurance that notions raised in prior issues would reach completion. Issue #12 itself is actually a pretty low-key thing, with nearly half its space given to an elegiac cruise with Jor-El over an erupting Krypton (cute reversal of the famously concise destruction sequence from issue #1), and a mostly plain Superman/Luthor final throwdown in a dim Metropolis (we don't see the deadly blue sun until the end); I wish there'd been less orthodox superhero hitting and more of Luthor's gradual awareness as to the nature of the universe due to his artificially heightened intellect.

In the end, he can only weep from the human enormity of it all; fascinatingly, Morrison then has Superman make the cynical (if not unfounded) assumption that Luthor is merely realizing how he's been outsmarted again, allowing some gentle ambiguity to linger regarding both icons' positions as Greatest Good and Greatest Ill. It does make sense from this series' point of view, dealing in archetypes but unwilling to let any character sit quite still in his or her prescribed roles (and feel free to insert your favorite enlightenment-through-drugs-in-a-Grant-Morrison-comic joke here).

I look forward to reading through this whole series again, carefully, from start to finish; I'm sure there's plenty of variations lurking around, not to mention one million allusions to other works that I've missed. Yet I also think it's a very simple story, one that certainly doesn't need every last image to be puzzled over and indexed. Quintum's final stroll may lead to a colorful solid wall on that last page, but I think it's plain enough that whatever's behind it will be the new humanity, the people to lift the half-million ton key, the genetic mix of man and superman that will be the true descendants of the man of the title, sometimes peeking their heads back into the past, in that undying spirit of aid. Inspired.

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Kick-Ass #4 (of 8)

Say, did any of you hear about that one comic book writer and the video he put out? I did too, and I've thought of absolutely nothing this week other than creator-owned comics by popular Marvel/DC writers. No wonder I lost all that money at the casino - I need to concentrate to get those random number generators on my side. I was obsessed, readers, and it soon became plain that the only way out was to conduct an investigation into an actual, real-live creator-owned funnybook by a top superhero scribe.

And this very week had not only one of those, but no less than the current best-selling creator-owned pamphlet-format series in the Direct Market:



I've actually been following Kick-Ass -- that bloody saga of a young man in a 'realistic' world who sets out with a costume and a dream to become an authentic goddamned superhero -- since issue #1. A lot of people didn't like that first issue much at all, but it gave me a smile. Granted, I'm the sort of person who would smile at a teenage superhero being electrocuted through his testicles, so I guess I'm part of the target audience, but even beyond that I found myself enjoying the little asides and bits of conversation.

I might have made a mistake there, though - I'd thought stuff like the lead character's out-of-touch pop culture referencing or his decision to kick off his crime-fighting career by picking a fight with random black kids spray painting a wall were indicators of his cluelessness. It really seemed to me that his actions had a way of undercutting his narration (insisting that he's a completely normal young man!), thus reinforcing the comedic insanity of dressing up like a fantasy character to fight crime in the real world. Even then it was sort of like pointing a cannon at a barrel of fish, but it did have penciller/co-creator John Romita Jr., inker Tom Palmer and colorist Dean White putting together an attractive cartoon world for everything to take place in, and it was all pleasantly unpleasant enough.

Now we're up to issue #4, casting news concerning the upcoming movie is all over, and the comic has gotten progressively less realistic to the point where I wonder if 'realism' itself wasn't the primary joke here. I got an email on Thursday declaring that Millar had ruined the series with this issue, which has Our Hero's low-ambition adventures bumping into the work of two actual superheroes, or at least gangland assassins with a thing for dressing up in costume and leaping across rooftops under the cover of night. They're cruel, violent and prone to shouting things like "Where the hell are you going, asshole? Off to phone your lawyer? Hoping someone cares about your underprivileged childhood?" at weeping, unarmed targets, which I presume is supposed to make them horrible yet appealing to the forbidden desires we all share, this being a Mark Millar comic and all. Relatedly, they also might be manifestations of the dark side of the lead character's superhero dreams, the ugly implications of running around outside the law made flesh and steel.

The problem with all that? It transforms the book into an especially typical superhero thing, with its idealistic young protagonist forced to consider the existence of those who've gone too far as well as more obvious antagonists; Millar does not use the fact that all of this occurs in a world where superheroes shouldn't exist at all to any interesting effect. Really, he seems more interested in the contrived comedy of the lead character pretending to be (ulp!) gay in order to get closer to the object of his teenage affection, which strikes me as bolstering one type of familiar contrivance (the superhero type) with another (the teen romance type) in hopes that something multifaceted will result.

And it doesn't help at all that the particulars are so dull - I'll grant that the generic mobster villains are maybe supposed to be uninteresting, given the story's milieu, but ultraviolent Hit Girl and Big Daddy are unadorned character types straight out of the Frank Miller playbook, and giving the former a dirty mouth and a specifically young age doesn't do much to burnish her - this kind of lil' lady killer character is also present in The Boys, where she isn't much more interesting, but at least Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson play up the alien nature of such a creature of contradictions, if only by having her sleeping on a table or something during the talky parts. Millar's version just seems more calculatedly vulgar, and therefore, in theory, funny.

But then, Millar does know his market, and keeping a project of this type nice and close to what's familiar in shared-universe Marvel/DC works, with added gore 'n cussing and a sprinkling of realistic grit... yeah, a little bit more of what the company-owned books can't quite offer has a simple, compelling logic to it, especially when dealing with a writer who's helped to define what today's superhero books feel like. For me, the series' progression has steadily devoured nearly everything I've found interesting or amusing about it. I should add that the art continues to be very nice, with colorist White adding a delicate texture to the mayhem with his washy hues (I particularly like when he adds a reddish sheen to characters' noses in close-up), which does drag this up to an EH, and it might even keep me reading long enough to see where this storyline winds up.

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Faust Vol. 1



Boy, Tim Vigil sure has changed.

No, no wait - this is something else, in every sense of the phrase.

Faust, just to get one thing out of the way right up top, is not primarily manga - it's an irregularly published Japanese literary journal, albeit one with a comics section, founded in 2003 by editor-in-chief Katsushi Ōta and published by book giant/Big Three manga publisher Kodansha. It's fashioned as a squarebound 'mook' -- a supple book with the glossy design and continuing features of a magazine -- and runs anywhere from 500 to 1200+ pages per volume. Vol. 7 was just released in Japan a few weeks ago.

The particular item we're looking at today is Vol. 1 of the English edition of Faust, a 432-page, 7.1" x 4.8" softcover, published by Del Rey at $16.95, with one eye doubtlessly fixed on the project's promotional quality. Here's another thing I'd best mention quickly - over 100 pages of this book's total space is spent on portions of prose projects that Del Rey plans to release in full, later on down the pike. They're largely self-sufficient portions, mind you, but still materials you'll be paying for again if you like them enough to continue.

Don't let that cloud your thoughts too much, though - this edition of Faust does function pretty well as a cohesive aesthetic endeavor. There's no credited editor (I think Del Rey's Tricia Narwani serves in that capacity), but Ōta's introduction sets the tone so neatly that he seems present throughout - everyone involved is very proud and enthusiastic of their mighty work, seemingly every contributor is a genius and a revolutionary that has already set the Japanese literary world aflame, and there's a grand, unifying theme at work, "that feeling of self-consciousness in early adolescence," transmitted through "an avant-garde crossover in which Japan's manga, anime, and video game-based pop culture collide, tempestlike, with the hottest young writers on the Japanese literary scene."

Then again, Ōta has elsewhere described the series as "escapist reading for young men without jobs, money, or girlfriends," so you never quite know.

Now, for longtime J-pop dead-enders like myself, the mere positioning-of-influence of 'manga' and 'anime' is going to raise an eyebrow. That's because manga is a very large, egalitarian thing, far greater in scope than the boy and girl-targeted samples that rule the day in North America (although that material does top the charts in Japan too), and a genuine force in the national reading of a people that's noted for such.

Anime, in contrast, is more of a marginal thing, overwhelmingly male-dominated and increasingly fixated on servicing the harder-than-hardcore otaku fanbase that can be relied upon to make the dvd and merchandise purchases necessary to push most productions into the black. There's exceptions -- Miyazaki being the most obvious example -- but an awful lot of it leans heavily on formula, panders frantically to fandom peccadilloes (like the dread moé) and writhes under the constraints of low budgets and ruthless schedules that sometimes render these alleged animations barely mobile. There's still good stuff, though. There always is.

But that leaves this project in an odd position; if you're seriously dealing with something as small and insular as anime-at-large, it's inevitably going to exert the most influence on things, simply by being so damned particular. And, sure enough, Faust is crammed to bursting with heavy-duty urban isolation, beautiful and menacing women exerting scary-but-not-unpleasant power over milquetoast young men, sci-fi/fantasy/horror concepts slamming head-on into arrested romantic development, and miscellaneous philosophical presentations presumably adding weight to the whole business.

The trick of Faust, and it's a pretty good one, is that it takes that lattermost trait especially seriously, and sometimes takes a few extra steps back to specifically consider the function of genre tropes in the midst of actual genre pieces, some of which (by the way) are actual franchise tie-ins or preexisting works that share in the anthology's concerns. Most of the stories are in the style of 'light novels' -- fast-reading prose fiction illustrated in a manga/anime-informed manner, often serialized in anthologies -- all the better for shoring up those pop cultural connections. They vary in quality, as you'd expect them to, but there is nonetheless a shared vision at work, one not so much present in the other light novels I've gone through.

Emblematic of the anthology's approach is The Garden of Sinners: A View from Above, one of ths volume's five long works and among its two 'excerpts,' deemed noteworthy enough that a bonus interview with writer Kinoku Nasu and illustrator Takashi Takeuchi is included in the back. Oddly, I'm not sure if the material ever appeared in the Japanese Faust - while there's some background info provided with every story, mostly author's bio tidbits and the like, there's rarely anything about where most of the material was originally published.

Still, it's made clear that the piece is chapter one of a seven part series, published online in 1998 to little reaction. It was only after Nasu & Takeuchi formed the amateur software group TYPE-MOON and authored the hit porno computer game ("eroge") Tsukihime that the material (included on a bonus disc and subsequently self-published for convention sale) took off, eventually becoming a smash seller for Kodansha (and COMING SOON FROM DEL REY) and spawning an anime adaptation in the form of an honest-to-god theatrical serial. Old-school too, with episodes running 50 or so minutes as self-contained units! It's currently up to episode 5 (of 7), unless the internet is whispering lies.

All of this background makes it especially interesting to read the 'part one' included in here, because it's such a fucking odd little thing. It's not particularly well written, lurching from one narrator to another with little warning and slathering every perspective with the same heavy narrative voice. It's pretty orthodox in plot, with a mysterious girl waking up after a two-year coma with the ability to see strange things, and the occasion to stab them with a trusty blade. There's a nice, bland reader-identification guy who's her friend and potential romantic partner, and a spooky/smart mentor-benefactor, and a tragic ghostly antagonist (for this chapter).

Yet Nasu is singularly uninterested in story beats, burying these very typical tropes under long, ponderous dialogues and night-wandering narrations that seek to render everything in sight a metaphor for young adult detachment, from the image of staring down from a skyscraper to mechanics of a floating body splitting away to haunt the living. Everything else is elliptical to the extreme - I think a major character is kidnapped at some point, but the act occurs between paragraphs, and is only even acknowledged by a passing comment made by the heroine before a climactic clash with the piece's antagonist, a conflict that ends with virtually no fuss or struggle.

I mean, I can't call this a good story, but it does throw itself into its themes with an admirable lack of inhibition - I've seen the corresponding anime serial episode, which cleans up the storytelling, dials down the chit-chat, explodes that one fight scene into a rooftop-jumping action set piece and modifies the heroine's personality into a more fan-friendly tsundere-type thing, thus making the tricky cerebral nature of the original stand out more.

The other of the book's excerpts is a short story from a xxxHOLiC tie-in book (COMING SOON FROM DEL REY) written by "NisiOisiN" -- best known in North America for another franchise novel, Death Note: Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases -- and blessed with a grand total of one double-page illustration by megastar creators CLAMP. It's a supernatural mystery story in which supernatural elements and a mystery steadfastly refuse to appear, leaving the series' nice, bland reader-identification guy and its spooky/smart mentor-benefactor character to discuss the balance humans maintain between happiness and anxiety, while some time is spent in the head of a young woman prone to screwing up her life at crucial moments; those latter bits are pretty effective, very particular and seemingly lived-through, enough to charge up the tale a bit. The story was actually adapted into an episode (#17) of the xxxHOLiC television anime; I'm not sure if many of its plots are like this. Regardless, it fits in neatly with the Faust approach.

The remaining three 'long' stories adopt similarly distanced/contemplative stances. I presume F-sensei's Pocket by one "Otsuichi" (with a few illustrations by Death Note's Takeshi "name value" Obata) will prove to be the book's crowd-pleaser, being a decidedly simple story about a proudly bitchy tattletale high school girl and her manga-loving girly nerd sidekick who discover various wonderful items from the classic manga Doraemon in the real world. It's all fun and games and fourth-wall breaking comedic asides (you can just feel the characters popping into SD mode) until the latter uses the magic technology to take revenge on everyone that ever picked on her, leading to a pulse-pounding showdown, tearful affirmations of the value of friendship and a nod toward the power of manga in informing people's worldviews. Somehow, this takes 60 pages to play out.

Even less impressive is Outlandos d'Amour, by Kouhei Kadono of Boogiepop and Others and the Jiken series of fantasy/mystery novels (COMING SOON FROM DEL REY). Its plot involves a nice, slightly less bland reader identification guy with the strange ability to see when other people are in grave danger, and the occasional tendency to summon lightening from the sky. He's wildly neurotic about his shy, beloved wife -- who may or may not be a Saikano-style girl weapon -- and spends time wondering if his abilities might be reined in to prevent him from hurting her, even if it means causing pain for himself. It feels incomplete, like a pitch for a larger project that didn't get accepted.

But then, as luck would have it, there emerges one genuinely startling work, a special little ditty called Drill Hole in My Brain. The saga begins with teenage narrator Hideaki Kato calling his mother a piece of shit, which is understandable considering that her spurned lover-on-the-side has just burst into Hideaki's home with an assortment of bladed weapons, slaughtered most of his family, and driven a screwdriver into his head. As Hideaki lays bleeding, he finds himself inside the head of alter ego Makoto Muraki, a junior high superhero with a hole in his head who fights aliens and humans made seemingly at random into superpowered enemies bent on destroying the world, which appears to be more-or-less like Hideaki's world, save for the phallic screwdriver tower jutting up from the ground. This will be the story's most subtle symbol.

Makoto, you see, is wildly in love with his first-ever girlfriend, Akana, who has a unicorn-like horn sticking out of her head - the two have sex via Akana sticking her horn into Makoto's hole, which doesn't actually give Akana a lot of pleasure, but Makoto doesn't try anything else due to anxiety over the size of his penis in comparison to her horn. This causes a rift between them, which is only made worse on the day the art club's vice president becomes an enemy and gets the desire to eat Makoto's hole out, accessing the world she believes is alive in his brain (not Hideaki's world, mind you - that's another one), although she eventually settles for fisting his head hole in front of the entire class.

This causes several important things to happen, including Makoto's realization that sex isn't a particularly special thing hardwired to True Love, just as Akana also becomes an enemy and threatens to obliterate the world, all while Hideaki tries to steer Makoto into finding the alternate version of himself (Hideaki) that also must live in this parallel world, in hopes of sorting everything out. Also: Makoto's penis falls off and is replaced with a flower-shaped super-clitoris that causes him to vomit bubbles, all while sinister government forces prepare a head dildo machine to keep Makoto in line, since a young boy so often is ruled by base bodily pleasures, much to the dismay of the older, wiser Hadeaki, who's stuck experiencing the trauma and angst and sexual confusion and dirty naiveté of adolescence all over again, in dramatic shōnen action form.

I don't know who the hell writer/illustrator Otaro Maijo is, although I'm pretty sure he's seen a lot of Gainax anime, since FLCL and Neon Genesis Evangelion loom large over his story. But he goes much farther into the broil of emerging sexuality than either of those works dared, allowing bluntly pornographic elements to seep in and mark boyish fantasy clashes as a prolonged struggle with the onset of all-consuming erotic desire, something that won't necessarily calm down as a boy grows. It's wonderfully funny, lively work (the translator is Andrew Cunningham); hell, we could use more comics like this, but as a story it carries out the Faust mission splendidly.

And there's other, smaller aspects of that mission in this book. Several shorter stories and essays are included, many of which (interestingly) take a concerned look at extreme isolation, as if knowing a segment of the otaku audience will be attracted to the project's features. There's also some comics, mostly high-gloss visual poems (see: Robot), three out of four of which are presented in a glossy color section, then repeated in tones immediately thereafter. The fourth sees NisiOisiN team up with artist Yun Kouga of Loveless (the manga, not the Vertigo series) for a story about a man interrogating a brilliant, imprisoned weapons designer; it all turns into a metaphor for longing to be the best while lacking the supreme natural ability some are born with, a concern that's surely popped into the head of many readers of boys' comics. Shit, did you expect anything less?

So, while I can't say this material is much better than OKAY on the whole, it's a peculiarly forthright, coherent type of OKAY, one that'll probably hold some extra value for readers who've had their attention piqued. It does take its pursuits seriously, mining the culture and accoutrements of visual media for personal revelations from the inside, and occasionally striking something affectingly immediate and perverse, gold enough to pay off the sluggish and pretentious that I suppose will have to come up as well.

Labels: Jog

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The Punisher MAX #60



I think it's useful to compare this comic -- the last of writer Garth Ennis' run on the series -- with another thing Marvel released this week: The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe, a reprint of material from 1995. That was Ennis' first work on the character; he was 25 years old, though already a professional comics writer for over than half a decade.

It's not a very good comic. The What If...? type concept is that Frank Castle's family is accidentally killed in the middle of a superhero battle (instead of a gangland firefight) and the opening pages do have some nasty kick, with various Marvel superheroes standing around in their rainbow-hued spandex regalia, annoyedly discussing the collateral damage caused by their adventures, the implication being that wifes and children and such get unwittingly killed in many of those happy adventures you (the reader) so enjoy reading. The same idea is present in Ennis' current The Boys, but the Punisher comic does benefit from having all those famous characters standing around, being irritable, until Frank Castle empties a gun into the crowd without warning.

The rest of it's a below-average Marshal Law storyline, and a fannish one at that; it's bratty fanishness, yes, focusing on superheroes getting killed, but that's still not substantively different from Batman Can Beat Hulk Because, and it grossly undercuts the meanness of those first pages of the comic, the critique inherent.

But it is there, and The Punisher MAX