I'm a simple man, that should be apparent. I prefer my Passion to be in a Cove, my Bedtime to be packed with Stories, and my Hotel's to be nearby some Erotica. So when Mr. Wolk fired off the "step up to the plate, ye lazy jackals" missive, I thought I'd respond by denying the Critics its Savage-ry, and provide a bit of the "Good Stuff", i.e., stuff I actually find enjoyable. In other words, this is "too many words that say too little" surrounding the old "look at sumthing kewl" comic book blog post. If this was a Pile, I'd tell you to Buy. (Two of three are out of print though, which is a bit of a scumbag move.)

Yes, there's something after the jump.

Monster vol 5, by Naoki Urasawa
Naoki Urasawa's Monster goes on a bit longer than necessary, but it's still an All Around GOOD in my book. And while Monster's conclusion includes a violent showdown that greatly pleases me, where men shoot men through chairs while occasionally throwing each other guns in the rain, the portion that stands out in memory is a quieter one that takes place in the fifth volume. It begins here, with Inspector Lunge (the Gerard to Kenzo Tenma's Kimble) examining a murder scene.


Twenty pages later, Tenma arrives at the same scene. Going through the same motions as Lunge, he also reaches the same conclusion, explaining Lunge's "hm" from earlier, and thus cementing the two's relationship that continues until the story's end. Tenma wants the truth. Lunge just wants Tenma. See, somebody died in this room--Tenma thought it was the man he's after, and Lunge thought the same.


They are both wrong.

In Tenma's case, that means he has to move, that he has to run. In Lunge's case, that means he's got to choose between truth and obsession. In a way, I spent the remainder of the series feeling like it was Lunge's choice--to focus on catching Tenma, despite the facts--to be a major part of why Tenma is able to remain as focused as he does. There's multiple portions of Monster where Tenma's goal of catching up with Johann (the ultimate villain of the story) is postponed longer than truly necessary. When he can stop and play good Samaritan, he does. When he can slow down and hide out in jail, he does. While Johann's evil schemes ultimately bring Tenma and Lunge to the 18th volume's final conclusion, Tenma's obsession is never as pure as Lunge's, so constantly at odds with his exhausted self-preservation, his fear of how things must end. Lunge, on the other hand, never moves on. He will catch the man he's after, and if it turns out that the man he's after isn't guilty, he'll decide where to go after that. From a meaner viewpoint, that's part because Lunge is never really defined too deeply--he's so much the dogged Terminator that he's even given an almost supernatural memory (one that is depicted by Urasawa as being controlled and accessed by the character typing his fingers in the air)--but that's not too unusual in a story this genre-simple. Without a Lunge to chase him, to force him to discover and expose the truth, Tenma has only to depend on his misplaced feeling of responsibility. Considering how many years pass, it's not hard to imagine that Tenma--a character that Urasawa endows with more realistic emotion than any other in Monster--would eventually give up, feeling he'd tried his best.

I guess Urasawa could've just had him repeat "With great power..." over and over and over and over again, but I think they frown on that in Japan. (I've never been!)

Domu: A Child's Dream, by Katsuhiro Otomo
One of the other comics that I've fallen head over heels with recently is the third volume of Domu: A Child's Dream. The first two volumes (serialized by Dark Horse in 1995) aren't bad, but it's when Everything Goes The Fuck Down in volume three that keeps sticking with me lately. Take a look at this:

She doesn't deserve that, if that matters to you. Neither does this guy, who dies just trying to help.

Domu's a pretty straightforward thriller--a couple of telekinetics go to war with each other in a gigantic apartment complex. Otomo spends the majority of the third volume tracing the carnage of their initial, vicious battle, which leaves a healthy portion of the apartment (and its tenants) destroyed. But then he flips it on the reader, with a short "pick up the pieces" interlude. After that little fake-out, the battle continues--only this time, the little girl is prepared for her elderly nemesis. The two sit--her on a swing, him on a park bench--and have a staring contest.

Neither speak, ignoring an "urgh" in the final moments, and with only one exception, none of the bystanders realize what's happening. It's a testament to Otomo's skill that the panels move the way they do--cutting back and forth, the viewpoint going up and down, with little bits of unrelated dialog spitting their way into the frames, accelerating and defining the rate at which the action is occurring. Little details--the way in which tiny shadows appear under pebbles as they race above the ground, a fragment of something slicing across the only onlooker's face--define the actual "action" surrounding the quiet center of the piece, the beating heart: a little girl with a determined (albeit blank) look on her face as she finishes the ugly job of exterminating a crazed killer. As conclusions go, it's EXCELLENT.

Another thing I like is punchlines, which you aren't supposed to ruin, but hey: this next one is from a few years ago and I don't care.

"The Groceries", by Kevin Huizenga
This story is from Or Else # 2, when Glenn and Wendy are unpacking groceries and daydreaming/fantasizing about their future child. Glenn's fantasy involves him getting too little sleep and eventually teaching the child to ride a bike. It's affectionate and brief, and Glenn is only broken from it when Wendy glances over at him and says "What's wrong with you? Come over here and help me." After he describes his thoughts, Wendy daydreams of a more boisterous, verbal future, one that concludes with the frightening image of a bowl being knocked off its high perch, falling directly towards the head of their child. Before you see the tragedy occur, Huizenga cuts to this drawing.

Then, when Wendy describes the dream to Glenn, Huizenga separates the concluding sentence, with Wendy's "And it falls but you catch it before it hits her" appearing on the next page.

The thing that gets me with this one: I don't believe that's what Wendy thought. It's not that she's explicitly lying to hide a gory conclusion, but that she aborted the fantasy at the moment of nasty, and then chose to make up a hero ending so as not to draw Glenn into darkness. Glenn seems to be the more sensitive one in the Ganges household--the obsessive one, the one more likely to stay up late over-thinking stuff (as he's currently doing in Ganges #1-3), and Wendy probably knows that she's better off not fueling the crazy. (Of course, Glenn begins obsessing despite her "you saved the day" ending, questioning whether he should move the bowl or not, mentioning that it's an antique, suggesting eBay, rethinking the conclusion of his own fantasy, with a car heading towards the kid--it's not difficult to imagine that, if Wendy had described the bowl braining the tyke, Glenn would've started...I don't know, crying, something like that.)

And that's what makes the joke--which, up until this point, has been pretty well disguised, so clever.

She ain't even pregnant. It's just a melon, which they're eating in the next panel.

Of course, few comics retain their humor when their pacing is broken up on the computer screen--it's understandable that this doesn't neccessarily work in scan-and-talk, but it's still a decent encapsulation of what I find so likable about Huizenga's work. Jog described his feelings about Ganges like this:

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Looks like there's been enough meat-y think posts on here since the last time I checked in. Too bad that they all keep being on comics you cats have all read, right? I thought I'd take a look at some of the 2009 small press stuff, and I totally started on that, and then I got distracted by the fact that a ball of aluminum foil can reflect light. I keep batting it around, but since it's not really round, I never know what direction it's going to go in. Here's three though. They're all in the Upper Echelon of the Ratings Scale, if you've got your computer turned on its side.


Jan's Atomic Heart

They're calling this one a graphic novel--it's got a spine, sure, but it's pretty short. Guy who did it is 20/21 years old? Name's Simon Roy.

It's GOOD.

One of the things I've enjoyed most in the last year or so was the opportunity to spend some serious time reading a bunch of Future Shocks stories from 2000 AD--it's a fountain of ideas, a place where guys like Moore, Morrison, Milligan and other dudes without M-names did all kinds of "get out the comics" work. While it doesn't share any visual sensibilities with the old EC Comics stuff, there's this sense of work that comes about when you're catching up on them en masse as opposed to the weekly installments, and that sense is one of the things I like about EC. 2000 AD and its sister-titles, that original EC stuff--that whiny part of my brain starts to shut down when I read them, because I can't stop thinking about how consistent they were/are with their content. It just kept coming, and in my estimation, EC had a pretty incredible Hit-To-Shit ratio.

Jan's Atomic Heart has nothing to do with EC, but it reminded me of 2000AD, Bilal's Memories, all those kinds of random one-shot tales of dirty, rusty futures. It's a science fiction story about a guy who ends up in a temporary robot body while he's waiting on his flesh-y one to recover from a car wreck. It has a great ending, which I'm not going to ruin, because it earns its great ending.

This is the first page. It's like Gipi drawing Otomo.

According to Roy's comments at CBR, he started the project as an "exercise in environment-building", and ended up turning out a story while in the midst of drawing stuff. I'd like to say it shows, because that's sort of what you want to read on a site with "Critics" in the name, correct?

Not really that dude, broseph. I hear tell that you can buy Ng Suat Tong's attentions with a box of Thin Mints, so look into that. I just liked this comic--I liked it before I found out it was a comic birthed out of screwing around with drawings of buildings and robots, and I liked it even more after that. In its fashion, it's an old school sort of story--a guy is coming out of the shock of a car wreck, upset because he can't fit his robot frame into any clothes but sweatpants, and he's starting to realize that things May Not Be As They Seem. There's a little of the old Lack of Faith on the part of Roy when it's time to draw the robot being surprised--he draws a halo of white to indicate "Hey!"--but it's made up for in the little throwaway panel where the character involuntarily rubs his eye, which, as a robot, he would have no reason to do. It's a clever, subtle reminder that the body is merely a temporary home, one that Jan wants only to understand, not be assimilated into. By the close, he's gotten all his answers, and I've got one of my own. I want to read more of this guy's comics. Hope college doesn't fuck his brain up.

Papercutter # 9

There's three comics here. The first one is by Aron Nels Steinke, who also gets cover detail. From what I've read of Steinke's work, this is more of that. I don't care for it, although I think that's probably just because I find a bit too much of myself in the lazy protagonist. He gets up late and calls his significant other and promises to start going to bed earlier, since she's already gone off to work like a regular person with values. Then he starts telling her about the dream he has last night, ignores her sweet reprimand to maybe stop, since she doesn't care. And then, she firmly says "Wait! Stop. I don't want to hear about this dream anymore." And he says "Oh I know...but you have to listen. Please." After he gets off the phone, he gets scared because he thinks there might be a ghost in the house.

Like--I sort of want to kill myself now? And sure, it's a comic, and you want to know if it looks good...hell, I don't know. There's some nice looking pages, but this is one of those small press comics where they draw dots on bare legs to indicate hair. Not my thing. Go ask Alice.

The second comic is a one pager made up of four gag strips, each of which are four panels in length. It's by Elijah Brubaker, who I quite like. I'd first come across his stuff when I was trying to find a copy of Monkey Wrench, an old anthology comic that featured Ed Brubaker. See, Elijah also has a comic called Monkey Wrench, so when you buy a comic book online sight-unseen called MONKEY WRENCH BRUBAKER, you might end up with the Ed one--which also features Richard Sala & Jason Lutes doing some of those Mega-Genius Comics you hear shut-ins talk about all the time--or you might end up with the Elijah one. Either way, you're a winner, although you shouldn't mention that to any of the people involved with the Brubaker/Sala/Lutes comic, because somebody somewhere said the contributors got kinda fucked over by the publisher.

Digressions? You know it. They keep my teeth yellow.

Elijah Brubaker's contribution to Papercutter, the gag strips: it would be real Iconoclastic and Shitty Critics to say that they're the best part of the issue. It'd also be a lie, because while they're quite good, there's a real Top Dawg Draw here. That little slice of heaven would be Diamond Heights: A True Story, by Hellen Jo. It's a short, beautifully illustrated piece, ten pages long. A couple of drunk kids--does Hellen Jo draw adults?--get accosted by a couple of barefoot Asian girls in the middle of the night. That's it, really. You'll see what's coming as soon as the girls arrive on the scene, it's made abundantly clear when a gasp turns into vomiting--and then it goes down, Streets of Gotham style. (You see that recent issue? Paul Dini's putting kids in cages and pulling the trigger on-panel. I ain't crying, but jesus man. Can't Batman punch somebody that doesn't put babies blood in their milkshake?)

Diamond Heights is similar to Steinke's ghost story--it's regular people encountering weird shit--but everything about the delivery system is completely different. There's no backgrounding to who these people are, and the fact that they're both drunk puts to question whether the two girls that descend upon them are supposed to be real people or not. It's brevity makes it that much more potent a story, the sort of anthology installment that is better served by being surrounded by items it doesn't share an author with--when (and it's hard for me not to dissociate myself from thinking of this, apologies for that) Hellen's work achieves "we can make a big hardcover of this" status, Diamond Heights will probably get passed by as a solid, but brief, idea. Here, it's a fucking story, and it's a VERY GOOD one. You know how they keep saying Blackest Night is supposed to be a Horror Comic? Man, that shit ain't scary. It's dark. It's violent. But being freaked out by freaky people when you're alone, just trying to make it home after getting stupid? That's scary. That shit happens all the time.

Reich # 6

Hey, I used to date this really gorgeous cokehead that was raised in this wacky Wilhelm Reich-ian commune! I don't know that her coke/cheating-on-me problems stemmed directly from being raised there, but the participants did have a tendency towards being naked around six year olds before the local government sent the cops out to shut 'em down, so here's a stolen Abhay colon: Highly Likely? But she was a real fox, one of those kind of ladyfriends that made it fun to go to bars, because everything turned into a sarcastic beer commercial with all the bartenders doing a fist-pump and mouthing "You da man, nine-year-old!"

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Every week, I go to a comic book store and pick out some comics that I want to read and then I read them and then I think about them and then sometimes I write about them. Sometimes I just read stuff because people on the internet say they are totally awesome and full of win.

Sometimes those people on the internet are dirty liars with bad taste.

Dark Reign: Hawkeye # 4

Some of the Dark Reign books have been pretty entertaining, and that's not really surprising--Marvel's got a lot of writers who would clearly prefer writing espionage/crime thrillers, and doing a bunch of short mini-series focusing on shlocky villain characters and hardcore action allows them to ignore the whole "good guy wins, makes speech about values" shit that morons find necessary. Of course, none of these books are going to fight with Asterios Polyp for a seat at the "I took a French class" card table, but fuck it, that doesn't make them bad comics.

No, what makes them bad is shit like this:



Oh, I see what you did there! Like we're inside Bullseye's head! Like that guy Solo--he's a real character from Spider-Man, but it's pre-marriage done gone Spider-Man, and all those people have abandoned comics from what I've heard--he's...wait a second. What's that guy doing? Is he supposed to be hitting you in the face, Bullseye? Because if he's hitting you in the face, why did the perspective change all of a sudden? Shouldn't the fist be going directly into your face, or directly towards the reader, since this is a POV shot? Oh, maybe he's just showing you his fist, like when they burned Gary Busey's arm in Lethal Weapon, like "Don't play the blues with us, Gary Busey's crazy." Hey pal, I don't need you to burn Gary Busey's arm, I already know Gary Busey's crazy. I watched the second season of Celebrity Rehab, that dude makes up acronyms all the time. "Freedom: Facing Real Exciting Energy Developing Out Of Miracles". Burning flesh don't mean shit, that guy eats bricks and shits victory.

Okay, bad panel, no big deal.



Are there any super-hero comics where the villain doesn't have an extensive security system that includes 8 to 10 video cameras in one room? They haven't shown a Joker hideout in a while, I bet he doesn't have video cameras. I realize it's standard practice for villainous characters to be hardcore snuff & torture film enthusiasts, so it makes sense that they'd want to videotape their exploits, but why, if you were in the process of explaining how you've been lying to some erstwhile wanna-be hero, wouldn't you turn off the cameras attached to the Room Of Explanation? Because the guy just left the room. And the room he just left is within walking distance of a room where he can go and watch you talk about betraying him from at least 8 camera angles.

And yeah, let me get this out of the way: "It's just a comic! Fuck you, it's just a comic! Fuck me, I liked this comic! Walls of televisions are cool to look at! They've been cool to look at ever since Sliver hit Showtime!" Yes, of course, it is just a comic, and fuck, like away: but the constant slide rule that gets whipped out is hard to keep up with. I could give a rats ass, a tight, sweet rats ass, about Peter Parker's dumbass wedding to dumbass Mary Jane Watson, but the irritation makes sense: because one day Marvel is saying "Need you to get on board with this idea, it's about the Devil at a swap meet, weddings on the table" and the next day saying "hey, just let it go man, It's Just A Comic, who cares about all the cameras that are in Bullseye's dads torture room". I can keep up without a recap page. I'd trade that for a checklist of which of the retarded devices I'm supposed to "suspend my disbelief" on that make it through whatever they call the editing process over at Goof Shoes Headquarters.

Stuff of Legend # 1

Ah, finally these fucking comics people have listened and given readers what they really want: a serious version of Toy Story. If there's one thing that was really missing in those art house Pixar flicks, it was solemnity. Thankfully, the creators knew a hardcore Indian In The Cupboard might not be enough, so they've gilded the lilly and thrown in an absent father who is off fighting in World War 2. I know what you're asking: did the guy storm Normandy or did he walk into a concentration camp and take off his helmet with a look of shock on his face?



There's more issues to come, I'm sure we'll get in a reference to the concentration camps soon enough: God forbid somebody be stuck reading a WW2 story that doesn't mention Normandy or Buchenwald.

This comic is supposed to be the new Mouseguard, or the new Chew, and if you're wondering what that means...well, good for you. Seriously, good for you. Because it means something shitty, and it means something sour, and it doesn't have anything to do with whether or not this comic is any good or not. It just means that it's been picked at random to become fodder for more attention than its derivative story deserves because there's potential for trashbag people to make thirteen bucks extra selling it the day after it comes out. Now, sure: this comic is rare and hard to find, but only if you have trouble remembering the part of the alphabet that starts after the letter R. Otherwise, you can find it under S, next to Sinister Spider-Man, which has a page where Venom eats a bunch of panels, a squirrel, all while alluding to raping an ex-girlfriend. That's where I found it, and now I know my community college degree was worth the dick I sucked to pay for it. I can spell.

Unknown Soldier # 10

The latest Unknown Soldier storyline started as a graphic expletive at celebrities visiting Third World troublespots, and it proposed the sort of late-night macabre "solution" that appeals to college students who stay up late at night coming up with macabre solutions to political problems while putting Jolly Ranchers in bottles of Zima. Due to the propensity Vertigo has for some seriously pat excursions into allegory barely hidden behind juvenile bloodsport, it was a pleasant surprise to see the main character decide not to murder his Angelina/Madonna hybrid. (Although the reasoning for it is the same kind of last-minute fictional luck nonsense that they used at the end of Training Day, where that Maori actor who plays both Iraqi revolutionaries and Latino ganglords finds out that Ethan Hawke had previously rescued his cousin from a rape, thereafter deciding not to shoot him in the mouth.) If Unknown Soldier had just ended there, it wouldn't have been much more than an interesting reverse-twist, where a Vertigo polit-comic decided not to go all cynical and mean--but then it had a solid little back-and-forth argument where the character spits out five solid directions in which to help the country, and the point of the comic kind of shone through. That's the thing about Unknown Soldier--the art seems mostly interested in making the lead character look cool to the detriment of all else, the situations said character end up in are rife with sentimentalized, predictable turns of fate, a huge chunk of the plot seems derived directly from The Manchurian Candidate--but the intent behind it is written on every page. This is a comic that wants to look at something more important than a super-hero comic does, it has another goal besides "sell well enough to make more". And shit, you can't really make fun of that: who doesn't sort of hate their job, and their life, when they realize that nothing they do will ever help all the suffering people in the world? Joshua Dysart did a lot of research, he fucking WENT to East Africa--and instead of using that information to just publish a bloodsport horror show comic, with page after page of Real World Atrocities as entertainment, he's shooting to make something that's got actual substance, and he's trying to do it in a marketplace that's proven, over and over again, that it likes its politics as Black Hat/White Hat as possible. If somebody says they like The Photographer, and they want more comics like that...well, what do you offer if they've already read Persepolis and everything Joe Sacco does? God forbid if they're interested in the New Release buckets.

Of course, intent doesn't mean that people should buy something, and it also doesn't excuse Unknown Soldier for being a kind of boring comic most of the time. But unlike most of the author-as-mouthpiece stories, Dysart's voice is the best part of the comic. If he was willing to give himself over to that sincerity--which he was doing for a good while at the Unknown Soldier blog--this comic wouldn't need any mulligans.

Then again, it's Vertigo. It also might help if there was more titty.

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Nah, this is just more of the Savage Critics ongoing coverage of Justice League: Cry For Justice #1. Never let it be said that I don't respond to a strongly worded memo from the desk of Mr. Hibbs. I know how to respond to memos.


Wolk's already covered the best possible Insta-Review you can give this piece of shit, Graeme's already nailed the comparison to that Secret War thing, Hibbs covered the whole "hey, that word looks like gay sort of" thing, and I'm betting the Savage ain't done with this dead horse yet. And make no mistake: this pony lacked a pulse on arrival, it's the equivalent of somebody pushing a wheelbarrow full o' carcass up to the starting line at the Belmont Stakes, saying "I think she's got one more in her. Put five on Luck Be A Lady!" Cry For Justice will probably do pretty well financially--it's got DC's "this one counts" push going for it, it's written by a guy a lot of people give a shit about, and the art is--sorry Brian--that sort of ridiculously overdone realism nonsense that turns people on. But it's bad, bad comics, and the only naked pleasures to be found in it, unless you like this gaudy art (geez Brian, I'm really sorry), is in reading it as a parody of other "serious" comics. The tools are laid out for you, it actually takes some serious effort not to pick them up. Does Hal flex his muscles at Superman while quoting Judge Dredd? Does Green Arrow talk like he's one of Bob Haney's "hep cats?" Do the two Atom characters use the patented Loeb/Meltzer color boxes to write each other mental mash notes?

Does Atom say "I want him to pay. Yeah....JUSTICE!"

Dude, all those things happen. This isn't "let's be sarcastic and exaggerate the failings of this particular super-hero comic book". Nobody is pulling a Photoshop Fast One. This is a real thing, that you can go buy at a store, and it's written by a real person, who gave it to another real person to draw, and they did something on a computer that was sort of like drawing (c'mon Brian, I'm not even sorry anymore, this art is terrible), and then some other very real people, people like your mom and your dad (but mostly like your uncle) they had it printed, and then it got sold in a store, and after that, those Real People, all of whom are adults, only a few of which can blame drunkeness, they said "Yes! We did it!" There were plans made, and those plans involved This Comic Book, and This Comic Book has a panel where Ray Palmer says "You have a LOT to say...You. Oodles", right before he tortures him, right before he says "Yeah. JUSTICE." That's all real. It's not made up, and it's going to sell a lot more copies than Criminal, and it might even get nominated for a Harvey Award, it just needs to get published on a website, or have worse art.

Of course, if it was just a bad comic, it would just be another bad comic. And it is, but maybe part of the reason it's worth looking at it is this...thing in the back. It's not really an essay, because it doesn't have anything to say, but it's not wholly p.r. bullshit, because it's got a bunch of random personal anecdotes in it. (And a veiled criticism for the Terminator series?) It's written by James Robinson, and he opens with this:

"It's hard sometimes to know if a miniseries is going to matter or not. By this I mean, irrespective of whether the writing/art is good or the story compelling, will it be something that will matter in the big picture of the comic book universe that you're writing for. I can think of many mini/maxiseries that, although well crafted and entertaining, vanished into the ether of yesterday, with the next wave of super-events that followed."

I love this. I love it because the intent of this comic, a comic that contains lines like "I am the law in space sector 2814. And that includes Earth." is now guaranteed. "Irrespective of whether the writing/art is good or the story compelling"--get it? Writing/art--totally fucking negligible! It's important to the people involved in its creation in a logistical sense, but the whole writing/art thing, you know, the whole thing that Makes It A Fucking Comic and not, like, cheese, or scissors--those things are completely secondary, because this is a comic book With Goals. The intent is for this comic book to "matter in the big picture of the comic book universe." Look, I'm not even sure what that means, for something to "matter" like that. It can't mean "i hope the fans like it", because that's completely fucking insane. So what does "matter" mean? Bigger than Zero Hour? More fondly remembered than Final Night? Stronger paperback sales than Millennium? Or does "matter" just apply to the spin-off designed-for-revamp-purposes category, meaning all this has to do is serve as being more worth your precious fucking time than Justice League Spectacular, or Midsummer's Nightmare, that it just has to read smarter than Extreme Justice? At the same time, you go back to the comic, you go back to the part where Congo Bill talks to himself by saying "A Smell! Beat. A Trail! Beat. His heart. What will stop his heart?" You read that, you look at the page that Wolk ganked that scan from, where the gorilla is crying--and you realize that It Doesn't Matter what "Matter" means. Because whatever magic thing that this comic is supposed to do, whatever importance it's supposed to have, this is how they plan to accomplish it! The dialog is going to quote Judge Dredd, a gorilla is going to weep, there's going to be exploitation style violence drawn in this hyper-realistic style, the Atom is going to act like Jack Bauer, and Green Arrow...aw man. Green Arrow is going to talk like this.

This comic is CRAP. Yes it is. But it's some of the most EXCELLENT CRAP that's available. Not in the sense that some might want, I don't think there's a case to be made for this being "everything that's wrong with super-hero comics". It's just hardcore pornography for train-wreck enthusiasts. It's a compilation of "i can't believe they said that" dialog panels mixed with the message board "why doesn't somebody just shoot the Joker" argument for plotting. And somehow, this is going to be one of the most important mini/maxiseries that DC has ever published.

Don't you dare apologize to me. Don't you dare, guy who looks like Alfred Pennyworth with a bad wig. I may not have gotten what you wanted to give, but I got something.

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In an ever-desperate attempt towards anti-relevance, I gave a kid some money, told the kid to grab comics out of the "read these eventually" pile, ordered them chronologically, and will now proceed as if they came out this week. Even though they didn't.


Zap # 4, Published by Last Gasp, 1969

"... the cartoon is ugly, cheap and degrading. Its purpose is to stimulate erotic responses, and does not, as claimed, deal with basic realities of life. It is grossly shocking, demeaning the sexual experience by perverting it...it is part of the underworld press--the growing world of deceit and sex, and it is not reality or honesty, as they often claim it to be. It represents an emotional incapacity to view sex as a basis for establishing genuine human relationships or as a normal part of human condition."

That's Judge Joel Tyler, talking about Zap #4. It's in the book A History of Underground Comics, written by Mark James Estren. I like that book, but I can't recommend it comfortably until Dan Nadel and Tom Spurgeon argue about it. But it sure seems alright to me.

My "get to these eventually" stack probably has quite a few more of these Important, Ground-Shaking reads in them, but finding them is just going to be dumb luck--I couldn't remember which issue it was of Zap that had Robert Crumb's "Joe Blow" story in it, so I'll admit to being pretty surprised that the exact issue fell into my hands during the random grab. Besides "Joe Blow", I'm guessing I have enough of these types of comics--Naughty Ones--to get me labeled a go-meet-the-neighbors pervert, which is probably something I should make sure my wife is aware of. For those who haven't read it, "Blow" is the cheeky story of an American family and the awesome sex they have with one another. Dad fucks Sis, Junior nails "the greatest mom a guy ever had", and the story closes with the two youngsters heading out into the world, where they will fuck and suck one another, as well as other people not related to them by blood. "Joe Blow" doesn't stand all alone on the cliffs of depravity, either: there's also a nasty piece of filth by S. Clay Wilson, where a couple of richie-rich types bang the hell out of the maid and end up shooting her with a musket ball that makes its way through her entire body before plugging up a guy's urinary meatus. Then there's science ficion fucking. After that it's--well, actually? Every story in here is about cocks, vaginas, semen, scabs, rape, incest, penetration, cunnilingus, homosexuality, heterosexuality, bestiality (with a happy little girl and her happy little cow), except for one, because it's a one-page Crumb-draws-black-people-as-monstrous-jungle-beasts story. So yeah, Zap # 4. This is 40 years old. It's still way further out there than anything that doesn't involve Josh Simmons. To be perfectly frank, a good portion of my time reading it was spent wondering what defense one might make to old Joel Tyler and his claims regarding this particular comic. Is it ugly? Yeah, I can see that argument being made about the subject matter, and except for when Mr. Peanut gets it on, the art isn't "pretty", no matter how much everybody in "Joe Blow" enjoys themselves. "Cheap and degrading" is a tougher sell for me--none of these cartoons have that sort of tossed off hack-ness that the Eros line pumps out. I don't know what to say to the idea that Zap #4 is designed "to stimulate erotic responses". I can see that being possible for some reader, sure, but there's a pretty long stretch of road between "some people might masturbate to Gilbert Shelton's drawing of a woman with eight breasts" and the conclusion "which is exactly why Gilbert Shelton drew it that way." From there, Joel just gets stupid: "[It] does not, as claimed, deal with basic realities of life." Yeah? Neither did Tommy Lasorda, and that man's belly was a thing of magic. Neither do those silly black gowns that judges wear. "Deal[ing] with basic realities of life" doesn't define the job of art, you dick. The job of art isn't a legal argument anyway, it's an aesthetic one, and aesthetics is supposed to be discussed during marathons of Tony Hawk Pro Skater the nights leading up to the final, or on blogs no one reads. "Grossly shocking" is another waste of time too--I'll admit to being a bit thrown by the whole musket-ball-in-the-meatus panel, but all it takes is one high-school girlfriend addicted to V.C. Andrew's Dollanganger series for incest to rapidly become something that's about as shocking as a lukewarm bath. I'd keep going, but it took me forever to decide whether or not to make a sarcastic remark about Jamie Reyes. Anyway, Zap #4: it's EXCELLENT. Just don't tell anybody that I own it.

Shade The Changing Man # 1, Published by DC Comics, 1977

Before you get into Ditko magic, here's case-in-point, example seventeen-thousand, why archiving every fucking comic in the world into a hardcover misses the point: Hostess Cupcake advertisements where Batman and Robin stop the evil Pigeon Person. It's the complete lack of inflection that makes this panel work. Exclamation marks are the sign of mental decay. This is what reading old comics are for. Not just because it's ridiculous, stupid, and worth a cheap laugh.

Never mind actually. I think just because it's ridiculous, stupid, and worth a cheap laugh.

The other thing they're for is just...well, reading old comics. I'm more turned on by the Milligan Shade, but the Ditko stuff in here is pretty great. It's a smart opener--whatever Shade's M-Vest allows him to do isn't fully explored in issue one, and that leaves Ditko free to teach by showing. It's the showing that jumps the most, the exaggerated arms that expand, the collapsing side of Rac Shade's face as his hair turns into a Spidey-signal against the wall behind him, grinning like a maniac all the while. Ditko's 4th World looking antagonist shows up to cause problems, so Shade assists in killing him with a feedback loop, and the whole plot probably takes place in about six minutes, following the initial World-Goes-Crazy opening. What's most interesting to me about Shade is that he doesn't have the personality normally attributed to the innocent-man-on-the-run type background. (If you haven't read it, Shade and a bunch of death row prisoners escaped the "Meta Zone" and a few have made their way to the "Earth Zone", only to find themselves hunted, U.S. Marshals style.) Shade's got the dogged "I'll find the guy who framed me" determination, he's probably going to try to reunite with his ex-girlfirend turned Tommy Lee Jones as well, but he's also a little bit crazy and mean. Regular people don't interest him, it seems, and he moves around them the way you might imagine Ditko does when he doesn't feel like explaining his politics or talking about Spider-man. This is a VERY GOOD comic. But they should make sure they include Pigeon Person when they reprint it. (Which they apparently have no plan to do, because God hates you.)

Vanguard Illustrated # 4, Published by Pacific Comics, 1984

Although it's the Steve Rude cover and continuing story of the world's most masochistic encyclopedia salesman--is it really worth selling a deluxe edition if you have to fight cannibal tribesman to do so?--that serves as the main feature of this issue of Pacific's anthology-by-way-of-fan-letters comic, there's a back of book story by Paul Neary and Mick Austin that really wins the day. A couple of pipe-cleaning robots meet on their way to blow up each others respective "zone", engage in a debate on the success rate of mutually assured destruction, only to be destroyed by their human overlords when the lil' devils realize that bloodthirsty general-types are rarely sane. The script is clever, but it's the art that kicks ass and makes this one worth the search. Apparently the success rate of Vanguard stories was determined by fans writing in and saying "more please", which is probably why we've never heard anything else about Quark, a young boy hero story that's about as compelling as fixing a water cooler. Still, for an anthology comic, Vanguard's a hell of a lot more interesting than that Marvel thing where they reprint Myspace stories.

Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man Annual #6, Published by Marvel, 1986

I got this for free. I was willing to go as high as a quarter, but when I asked the guy how much a beat up copy of a comic featuring a variant Purple Rain cover cost these days, he just sneered and said "i could care less. Get it outta here." I don't know that there's any point in saying "this comic is sort of a generic story", because it's an annual, and that's an accuracy across the board--annuals are shitty comics as a rule. There's exceptions, sure, but I imagine a back-to-back annual take down would collapse under the weight of overly long shittery around the 12th copy of "When Green Arrow fell asleep and dreamed he was Robin Hood." There aren't even credits in the comic, although there are a few "editors notes" explaining that the word "Joint" means "Jail", so apparently there was a human hand involved in the construction and not just a crappy Spider-man story generator. Half of the panels are either unfinished or some kind of weird homage to Patrick Nagel, although you can find a couple of worthwhile drawings of a guy on a motorcycle where the speed lines go completely berserk. The strongest page in it is some ad for Marvel's New Universe imprint, an ad that chooses not to showcase any of the New Universe titles or characters, just a gigantic bolt of lightning destroying about 35% of the globe. That's kind of interesting. Apparently even in the 80's Marvel didn't even need to worry about the content when it came to hawking their wares: Something IS COMING YOU BETTER BUY IT, you don't see that kind of campaign too often, unless you're an Apple freak, or...well, Marvel Comics, honestly. Oh, there's a story too, it's about some gangbanger who decides to go legit after meeting Spider-man and besting him in combat. (The gangbanger can shut down Parker's spider-sense and avoid punches, making for some of the worst fight drawings I've seen since...oh, I'll be honest, I saw some just as bad about three hours ago.) Anyway, the guy's mom dies. He leaves town. I have the worst radar for Spider-man comics, apparently. It's CRAP, in case you're wondering, although it probably deserves some credit for ganking the iconography of Prince.

Elementals #2, Published by Comico, 1984

Why this got sent to me, I couldn't tell you. Maybe because I don't like Fables? I have no idea why someone would send a stranger two issues of Bill Willingham's 1980's Elementals comic. I do not want one issue of Bill Willingam's 1980's Elementals comic. After reading it, I guess the person who sent this thought I would do something funny, or say something funny, or...I don't know why people do things. This is just a boring super-hero comic about boring super-heroes and, if I remember it at all, it will be because it had a panel featuring an old man in a no-secrets spandex outfit talking to a woman who is also wearing a NO-SECRETS spandex outfit, and the woman's rear end is the focus of the panel. That was the only panel in the entire issue that I looked at for longer than it took for my brain to grasp the information in the panel and continue with the narrative. In other words, cheesecake caught my eye, but I'm sure I would've stopped at a panel where there was a close up of an old man's firm buttocks too, because that is unusual and therefore worth my time. Otherwise, this comic reminded me of a rulebook for those old Palladium role playing games, where almost every page had a drawing of some generic super-hero with rip-off powers. I'm not even sure what these Elementals can or can't do. One of them looks like She-Hulk, but she's apparently an Aquaman type of character. Somebody whose name I forgot dies, but I've already thrown the comic out the window into the abandoned lot that I threw my broken microwave into, and I can't be bothered to go all the way outside with a flashlight to check. It's CRAP as well.

The Princess of Time, Published by Picturebox, 2007

This is silent comic, sort of like the first issue of The Many Deaths of the Batman cross-over, except that one was about Batman and it was drawn by Jim Aparo and this one is about Ashley Glasscock, Gordon Hammie and Barnabus Conrad and it was drawn by Jon Vermilyea who I know because I secretly like his mean installments of fighting breakfast dishes in MOME more than I like the serious comics that David B includes, because I am a philistine. Princess of Time, if I was going to be a stickler, doesn't seem to have a Princess in it, unless that warped monster creature that gets slit open Tauntaun style to reveal a smaller monster is a female, and the slit is supposed to be a vagina, but I'm pretty sure the title has an arty meaning that Jog understands. I liked this one, it's big and gross and funny and it's printed on newspaper, which makes me less inclined to treat it seriously than I imagine most of its fans would prefer, but again, I don't care, because I'm old enough that I don't need more friends. The whole printing comics on newsprint is sort of genius to me, especially if you read some of what the random asshole club says about that Wednesday Comics thing, i.e. "How will I have a mint copy of this", which is sort of like--really? Really. Do you wet the bed, dickboy? I'd like to run over your face with a truck, shit-for-brains. I'd like to make your mom into a mint copy. I'd like to...this really doesn't have anything to do with anything, but seriously: there's no words in Princess of Time, how the heckfire am I supposed to talk about the comic without the words, I need the words, I gotta have a plot to grab ahold of, otherwise it's just art and stuff, and I'm not that guy, katzenjammer. But yeah, mint copies. Fuck mint copies. Newspaper comics--oh, just imagine the stores, if everybody did newspaper comics. We'd all stand around like a bunch of 1930's types, hats and all, Seth would get called "trendsetter", they'd deliver them in satchels, there'd be twine everywhere. I'd write blogs on a mimeograph machine, you'd never hear from me again, it would be the sweetness and the light. Oh, and this comic is GOOD up until the last panel, and then it either becomes VERY GOOD, or EXCELLENT, or VERY EXCELLENT.

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My relationship with G.I. Joe as a toy, cartoon, enterprise, as an anything extends to one anecdote, which always gets the same reaction, in that the bored listener doesn't believe it and thinks it is a bad attempt at a tasteless joke. My brother and I had a couple of them until he took a hacksaw and sawed off Scarlet's breasts while holding the figure in a vice, which is harder than it sounds. Then he tried to flush the remaining carcass and limbs down the toilet. Even my dad, whose interest in children extended to attempting to learn some of our names, felt the need to tell my mother "There's something wrong with that one." From then on, we were a He-Man only household. Go figure.

Did you know that IDW was publishing trade collections of Marvel's old G.I. Joe series? Or that Marshall Rogers eventually contributed art to the series at some point?

Oh.

Well, I didn't, because I don't keep up with that kind of stuff. After a resident Savage said that the Warren Ellis written G.I. Joe Resolute cartoon wasn't totally awful, I thought I'd check it out and see if that were true. And no, it wasn't completely awful, but it didn't really change my Joe-opinions. Based off limited experience with the franchise, these are the Daves I Know: Snake Eyes is a mute ninja and is more interesting than everyone else by default, on occasion, "other stuff happens". I'd call what I saw of the Resolute series pretty CRAP, but I'm not a big give-a-shit about cartoons type anyway. It did lead me to poke around online, which is how I found out about these GI Joe reprints of the Marvel series by a non-Marvel company, and because it was late, I bought one of them for nothing, and then it showed up I had no idea what to do with it, it's not like I don't have actual comics that excite me sitting around waiting for me to be an elitist prick about. But hey, Savage Critics, I haven't been there in a while, let's take off our pants and have reading sex with the Brothers Joe! It will be righteous! We can even do it in a sort of capsule fashion, as is reader preference!

GI Joseph, Numero Uno
This is the story of how the team has to save a woman who has decided to blow the whistle on a world-annihilation project run by the US government, the Cobra team that kidnaps her, and the squadron sent in to rescue her. If "Dr. Adele Burkhart" is to be believed, the US government is hard at work on a secret weapon that, if set off, will destroy the entire population of the world. Which is...really? That's the US that G.I. Joe serves and protects? Now, let's not mince words: the Joe's don't just fully support the US in wanting to build that Apocalypse Bomb, they're totally disgusted that they have to go and rescue this weak-willed traitor--Snake Eyes even suggests that, in lieu of rescue attempt, they just bomb the shit out of the island they all know she's on, silencing her traitorous mouth while killing the Cobra Commander and the Baroness to boot. Mission? Successful.

Unfortunately for Snake Eyes and the Joes, that's not the way it plays out. No, it's all about following orders, and the Joes don't have a lot of time: if Cobra's experimental lady torture works, they'll suck national secrets right out of Burkhart's head, milkshake style, and end up in possession of the "Doomsday Project." What follows is, I guess, something a lot more hardcore than the G.I. Joe cartoon--I don't know the show that well, but I doubt that it included a lot of Secret Service agents getting shot in the face at point blank range while laying on the ground. Either way, it's relatively solid action, not too dissimilar from an 80's Chuck Norris movie with more explicit patriotism. I'd give this one an OKAY, mostly because of the portion where the Joes plan their attack by looking at what appears to be a model train set, complete with fake fences. It might need to get knocked back a bit because of Herb Trimpe's drawing of Scarlet's hand, which is apparently attached to an arm six feet long. (But it earns it back by having Cobra Commander ride around on a white horse inside a small compound for the purposes of delivering his Bond-villain threats.) All in all, it's neither an introduction to the team nor an introduction to their villains--which is actually an approach I sort of prefer, my wife's "I DON'T GET IT, WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE" refrain and all. After all, does anybody really care how Cobra came about? Does anybody (besides Daniel Way) read Daredevil and get pissy when nobody tells the origin of The Hand? I don't want to know where Evil Terrorist Organizations Bent On Destruction come from. I want to see them ride a pony inside a building, because I like the idea that low-grade Cobra operatives--the kinds that never get a cool name--are enlisted in horse cookie detail. Besides, if I wanted to get to know the hilarious ins and outs of terrorist organizations, I'd watch the Venture Brothers. On the Joe front, it's a similar thing--Larry Hama knows he's writing the four color adventure of toys, why would he waste his time giving the toys some kind of wrought-in-realism back story? It's G.I. Joe. They need to kill some Cobra. Cobra needs to kill some anything.Bubblegum? Really. I don't think Snake Eyes, a guy who prides himself on getting places quietly, is going to allow this doucebag to smack on some bubble gum. Also, wouldn't the bubble gum be hard to chew in the Arctic cold?

Let's move onto the day when Kirby robots arrived.

Labels: Tucker

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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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Mr. Claremont, you're a man of strong opinions. Who would you say your favorite Wolverine writers are, besides you?

"Len Wein. Archie Goodwin...[long pause]...well, he isn't a writer, but a creative force: Hugh Jackman."

[8 second pause at least, give or take when I actually started counting out of confusion at whether he was done talking]

"Oh! Larry Hama."

So I watched that X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie, and while I have to admit to being impressed that the popularity of overly wordy titles with colons has made their way from Batman Battle For The Cowl: Holy God In Heaven You People Will Learn To Like Hush to the feature film marquee--although I think we should still give credit to Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever--I can't honestly say that I really enjoyed the movie that much. Let's get back to that in a second. When we do, there will be spoilers.

Labels: Tucker, wolverine

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Still adrift in the sea of figuring out how to carve a niche for myself amongst the Savage Critics sea of talent, a task made that much worse ever since The Hibbsnation 2000 vetoed my proposed 27 part multimedia series "Fantasy Tales Involving Chris Eckert Coating The Chest Of Sean Collins in Warm Peanut Oil," but unwilling to break for the beckoning seas of non-participation, I, you're friendly Can O' Spinach, thought it might be best to just dive in and "punch the keys" as if I was a poor kid trying to get through private school on something besides my amazing free throw skillz. Lay down all your burdens, unbuckle your pants, throw on Japan's Adolescent Sex: this was the best single issue comic I read on March 4th, and it's going to take me about 9 paragraphs before I get to the point where I mention what it is.

Ed Brubaker's career of late hasn't, for my money, had a lot of misfires. His work on Captain America is arguably one of the tightest usages of long-range plotting currently available in any serialized comic, his collaborations with Sean Phillips have resulted in one of the most seamless storytelling partnerships in contemporary comics, and his willingness to keep his feet squarely planted in both creator-owned work as well as the corporate stuff that keeps his name in the minds of buyers point to a guy who knows what the hell he's doing with his career. (Unfortunately, he's been known to read this site, so it should be clear that, while I enjoy his work, I don't particularly like him as a person, because he wears a hat, and everybody knows that hat-wearers are inherently contemptible people deserving of disdain. Hats. Ugh. For peasants, really.)

Most praise, including any I might have given in the past, is usually focused on how his stuff is so tightly constructed, how the stories he tells--especially the genre ones--often spin through twisting, labyrinthine plots that consistently ratchet up the tension of while subtly tricking the reader into believing that a climax is right around the corner. It's the necessary trick of super-hero comics these days--the need to tell something strong, compelling, and yet never get around to actually playing out a true ending. With work like Captain America--a nearly 40 issue story that luckily dovetailed with the willingness of Marvel Comics to retire the Steve Rogers version of the character for a time--Brubaker found easy fans in people like me. I came to the book only because of my appreciation for his previous work on Catwoman, Gotham Central and Sleeper, and this, coupled with an absolute zero relationship with Captain America (ignoring that Amalgalm Age thing where they crossed Steve Rogers with Blue Beetle and Mannix), made for a willingness to buy into whatever he had to offer. Sure, it wouldn't have worked if I hadn't ended up enjoying the comics as well, which are a sort of combination of Steranko's Fury with the addition of a brutal, almost overwhelming sadness. But it does work, and it's damn good stuff on an aggregate basis.

Daredevil was a tougher one: it's a comic that's always been either wildly good or absolutely horrible, and its damn good runs include Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli's solemn Born Again saga, as well as the years of punishment wreaked upon the character by the previous-to-Brubaker team of Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev. Unlike Captain America--actually, unlike all the Brubaker stuff I've previously enjoyed--I do have some love for a few of the character's stories. I'm not coming at this one naked, covered in my mother's slime. I'm a...shit. Shit, I like this comic, don't I?

The rules for good Daredevil are pretty well laid out. Either bring something that's really hell-on-wheels intense, or watch it get filed alongside the goof-tastic retardation that was the period where Matt Murdock dressed like a Go-Bot while the Kingpin ate out of a trash can. And you know what? Brubaker's run has been a rough go at times. Daredevil's history is a tough one to manage, even when you only pay heed to the better stories--Matt's girlfriends are constantly getting lit on fire, murdered, or chucked into wells, Matt himself is about as broody as you can get before somebody brings up Young Werther and bad indie comics, and, with only a few exceptions (Kingpin & Bullseye) the rogue's gallery has a serious case of weak sauce.

It hasn't helped that the dude was saddled with the Bendis/Maleev climax, which, if you don't remember, was when the main character of a super-hero book got thrown into prison. (And if dealing with morons is your thing, it's notable that some people at the time were actually internet-style upset because that meant that they weren't going to see Daredevil wear his Daredevil costume. Apparently some people actually sit around flipping through comics angry when the people doing the punching aren't wearing spandex outfits more often than they wear cotton and linen based clothing.) Brubaker spent his time--more time than might have actually been required--tying off the various loose ends of the Bendis/Maleev run, successfully introduced his old Gotham Central partner Michael Lark as the new artist, and eventually got around to telling new stories. For whatever reason, those new stories read like remixes of the old ones--people went after the women in Matt Murdock's life, he defended an innocent man and worked to redeem hard-case criminals, Foggy was fat and whiny, crybaby sex was had, somebody got pushed in front of a train. Honestly, if it hadn't been such a tight art/story partnership, and if Brubaker had ever experimented with the current Marvel vogue of having their stock-serious characters wink their way throughout the silly repetition of it all, the comics wouldn't even be classed alongside the same team's previous work.

Anyway. March 4th comic, right? How long is this thing? Too long, right? Ah, whatever. You'll figure out who you should read out of the new Savage crew soon enough.

Michael Lark doesn't handle the art for Daredevil # 116. While he's missed, he's backed up by the extraordinarily good David Aja. Take a look at this, which reminds me of that Takeshi Kitano where he hangs out with the kid and never kills anybody:

And in case you're wondering if he did any of the sort of design work that helped the covers of The Immortal Iron Fist to stand out amongst the sea of B-list character comics that nobody with sense usually pays attention too, he did, and it looked like this:
First things first: Daredevil only shows up once in this comic, and only because he happens to be mentioned in brief. This issue is all Wilson Fisk, out trying to make good on the promise he made to Matt Murdock to "honor" the wishes of Wilson's deceased wife Vanessa, those wishes being...look, her dead lady specifics don't matter. She wanted Willy to stop killing people and being a monster, that's what he's trying to do, and he's trying to do it by brooding in some rainswept area in Spain after hanging out in Switzerland's graveyards failed to do the trick. He meets a lady, she has kids, she's not grossed out by the prospect of dating a beached sperm whale, he's able to keep himself from strangling the locals because she smiles at him...it's all well and good standard genre type stuff. Since it's a Daredevil comic, it has ninjas, and since it's a Brubaker comic, the ninjas actually kill people as opposed to not killing them. Yes, like most single issue super-hero comics, you can probably figure out the big ending yourself long before you get there, especially if you looked at the cover, which says "Return of the King Part One." Pat yourself on the head, you brilliant sage: you've figured out how serialized genre stories work. I bet you get upset when Dexter Morgan doesn't get caught during season finales.

But here's the thing about Daredevil # 116, or at least "here's the thing" as I see it: this thing is VERY GOOD. It's just a flawlessly put together comic, and even the stuff that we're all sort of sick of--like killing woman to teach a lesson, or the 400th Marvel comic to open by teasing the ending--is so clean, so well paced and coherent to the story it's telling, and the art is so attractive that those minor complaints become actual strengths. Of course the story opens with the ending. The story isn't about whether or not Wilson Fisk has to start killing again, that's something Brubaker knows full well can't possibly be told in a dynamic, tense fashion, and he doesn't feel like having to do the 800th version of that story anyway. It's a done deal: Wilson's a monster. Sure, he's also a complicated, complex man, a criminal with an extensive history, he's a person who's suffered emotional and physical trauma, but those days of complicated emotional problems, of who he is--those days are over, they're long gone. He's gone so far inside his own forest of pain, power and rage that the idea that he could live long enough to make his way out is absurd. Even the way Aja draws him accents it--this isn't a guy trying to climb his way out of something, it's a guy coming to terms with the realization that he's lived a violent life that's lasted so long that even learning to change is going to be impossible. This is a guy who's slumping his shoulders, because he doesn't know what he's supposed to do, because he doesn't know how to "do"anything. The Kingpin can't work as a story of hope, and there's no reason for a story of Kingpin to start from a place where hope seems possible. He's so bereft of motive and sense when he arrives on the scene that it takes the sarcasm of the soon-to-die woman for us to register how ridiculous he is. "I knew you could not actually be sneering at the ocean."

And yet, that's exactly what he's doing. He's a grown man, and he's scowling at the ocean. That's not what people do. It's what teenage poets and stunted growth 20-somethings do, because it's the type of random, selfish act only attributable to someone who is so consumed with their own confused emotions that they can't believe that other things beyond their feelings carry real weight. The Kingpin isn't a man trying to find his way out. He's a bored psychopath with nothing to occupy his lust for rage, and his brain is trying to figure out what to do with its time now that it isn't figuring out new ways to hire Bullseye to screw up Matt Murdock's life. He's been so comfortable in hate that it's the only thing he can relax in, the same way a newly recovered alcoholic doesn't understand how to deal with waking up without urine in their bed when they're still counting days. Feeling good, feeling depressed--anything is going to seem bizarre when you're somebody whose life has been defined by not feeling at all. So he acts like a child, a lovestruck boy, he teaches foreign languages to children, he bashfully agrees not to strangle idiots, and then, and then, and then.

Then he gets exactly what he wants, which is to come home and find that somebody else wants him to come and play Fight The Super-Hero again. And since David Aja is handling the ninja fight that ensues, it's brilliant to look at, and since it's Brubaker handling the words, the "i'm still a bad-ass" lines are delivered with appropriate levels of testicle-filling pizazz. "Yes....yes. Of course. Come on, then. Let us do this." No screaming, no contractions. He's finally at peace, and he's finally calm. He has people to kill again. He's good at one thing, and somebody woke him up and made it okay to do that one thing again.

That's it, really. It's a return comic, it's a get the band back together issue focusing on one man, and since Bullseye is relegated off to the 7th level of So Many Avengers! books, it's the return of the most compelling character that Daredevil comics has ever had. (Elektra can wear a hat, please.) Will the level of quality brought to bear here stay this high? Will that handshake sequence between Daredevil and Wilson previewed on the final page result in a long Harvey Pekar style conversation about the various ways in which men deal with the death of women who made the mistake of sleeping with them?

Man, I don't know. But the next issue could be half as good as this one, and it would still be ten million times better than fucking Kingdom Come.

Labels: Daredevil, Ed Brubaker, Marvel, Tucker

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I'm not sure how I got here either, so hey: we're in agreement, probably for the last time. Tucker Stone's the name, writing about random stuff at The Factual Opinion is the hobby, it turns into a profession at comiXology, and if you like to hold it in your grubby paws, grab a copy of Comic Foundry. If comics aren't your bag, and you want to brush up on your Italian, keep an eye out for upcoming issues of MUSE magazine. (I know!) Otherwise sister, the game plan is simple: I plan to write purely about sexism in comics, or maybe sex in comics, or maybe just some sex I had on top of a pile of comics--whatever the Hibbster says is most popular. Just in case you were wondering, I'll clear up a couple of your concerns: I'm not qualified to be here, my head is kept firmly up my rear end, I'm not as funny as Abhay, not as smart as Wolksie or the Jogster, and yes, most of the time I get finished with a comic and go "Huh, so it had pictures and words in it. They all like this?" But don't worry! Kissing is still your friend, and the Savage Won't Go Changing, until I get fired, which will be RADICAL.

Under the breaker: oh mama, hit the breaker! Hit it with your fist!


The best way to deal with reviewers in my estimation is never to base your decision to read them off whether or not they are smart writers, or funny writers, or interesting writers--"That's a Waste Of Time Right There", as my dad used to say about my existence. No, the best way is to read enough of their stuff to figure out if they are writing reviews that directly agree with your own personal taste. Reviews, and we all know this, are for backrubs and handclaps. When I peruse a review, my main question is always this: Do they have a Hal Jordan toy?

No?!

Then fuck THEM, what kind of "critic" doesn't have a Hal Jordan toy? With that, here's a breakdown of the Savage Critics scale of review, and how I plan to use it. It's provided for you, the Savage Critic fan, to determine whether you want to use your hacking computer skillz to edit the random "Tucker" posts out of your RSS feed. (And I know you know how to do that, cookie puss!)

If it's EXCELLENT, that means it's on the scale of that Gary Panter slipcase that Picturebox put out, which I finally got. I'll still probably burn it, because that's what I do with all my comics eventually, but Hey! Until then! Excellent!

If it's VERY GOOD, that means it could be a super-hero comic with plenty of punching and funny jokes, not jacked up in the coloring process and, because Hey, This Matters To Me, it's got the same art team from the beginning to the miserable end. (Which means all those comics that involve 4 inkers and "replacement" pages don't have a shot. Standards!) The only reason it doesn't hit EXCELLENT is because, and this is petty, but I like conclusions, and I need conclusions, and I don't really enjoy things as fully unless, you know, they have conclusions. Non super-hero comics can be VERY GOOD as well, obviously, but only if they aren't about white people complaining about something, because, and yes, this is petty too, I hate white people.

If it's GOOD, then you must be talking about Junior Bonner, which could have been VERY GOOD if Steve McQueen had been the one on the bulldozer, and if the script had more cursing. Still trumps The Getaway though, which is merely OKAY, because no, you're wrong, Ali McGraw is a terrible actress. (And yes, I told that to her face when she came to my Dynasty fan-fiction forum, held annually at the Tuskagee Holiday Inn. I told her to her dirty Lady Ashley Mitchell face. "You're awful," I said, "and I would know!")

If it's OKAY, then it's probably Optic Nerve. Adrian Tomine is kind of boring, right? Right? Get it? Because he's so boring. No, seriously. Dude makes boring comics. Except for that "Pink Frosting", which is my favorite curbing story that isn't the one that some guy told me about on my first day in high school, right before he punched me in the stomach. TJ! I miss you baby boy. Ever get your grill fixed? But yeah, OKAY will be pretty much reserved for comics that don't have any serious problems from a technical standpoint, but end up not being something I really enjoy because I don't have good enough taste to know what's good for me and am more than willing to chug a can of Pringles just to prove I can.

If it's EH, then it's probably Kingdom Come, because serious comics about Captain Marvel always make me want to cut little strips of skin off my leg to use as a bow on a Christmas present I give to homeless people. In March. Actually, just about everything Alex Ross does is pretty much EH in my book, but sometimes he can find somebody to include words that bring it down to good old fashioned AWFUL.

If it's AWFUL, it could be some "trying to hard" comics, which is pretty much a category that's totally PWNED by that old issue of Detective Comics where Robin yells at everybody for smoking the Floronic Man's magic marijuana concoction. He uses the phrase "Why would you want to 'mess up' your mind? Why would you do that?" To which no one responds "You're the one who fights crime in a red and green unitard, you stupid jerkoff." Most of the time, EH and AWFUL are where a lot of the comics I read live, because even the worst of the bunch can usually still be somewhat readable, and because I only buy comics that I don't like, because I'm a failure at life.

Is that how you use the word PWNED? I hate that word.

If I'm going to rate something CRAP--and I'll probably forget this eventually--it will be something that is made by people who shouldn't be working in comics, simply because what they make is completely incompetent work--sadly, this means most of the Big Two super-hero comics won't end up here, because they can at least draw things like hands and eyeballs that look like some kinda hands and eyeballs, even if it's on the low side of the Platonic "hands and balls" scale. Serial incompetence, is what I'm saying. For instance, the only Marvel thing I've read recently that would go in the CRAP column would be one of those Anita Blake comics, because that was the first time in a while that I'd read something that was actively unreadable, and not in the exaggerated "let's be mean" sense. I mean it was a comic that I was incapable of reading, that my body and mind actively screamed "Stop doing this, this is hurting you" by the middle of the book. (I asked my wife to review it.)

So there we go! Tried to keep it brief, but hey: that's why you aren't supposed to click "Read More" if you don't want to Read More. I'd love to promise you that this is going to be fun, because it totally is, but it's only going to be fun for me.

Labels: Tucker

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