Jog - The Blog

THIS WEBSITE IS FIVE YEARS OLD TODAY

2009-07-14T18:50:00.001-05:00

*That doesn't sound right, but god help me it is.

I was 22 years old when I started this site. You could actually count the comics internet back then, as in 'rattle off the sites.' I had my bookmarks list filled with favorites. Sometimes I left comments on Comicon and the Comics Journal board. The name 'Jog' was older than that. I'd been reading comics seriously again for just over two years. I was between school terms, and I'd just written a long, rambling post at TCJ on Dan Clowes' use of color in Eightball #23. Alan David Doane was asking for essays on that issue, so I expanded the post and sent it to him. Eventually I'd write stuff for him, and for Dirk Deppey, the guy who moderated the Journal's board.

But right then, at that time, I posted that thing on my own, new site. After a quick post on which new comics I'd gotten that week, of course, a feature that quickly mutated into a weekly deal on which new comics looked good coming up. Some things never change. That first post also contained reviews of a new Grant Morrison comic, DC Comics Presents: Mystery in Space #1, and a new Garth Ennis comic, The Punisher MAX #9. Ditto. "Guilty pleasure city," I wrote of the latter. I'd get better.

After that came the first proper review; it's sloppy, nearly aimless, and the third paragraph is 572 words long. The title, fittingly was "Endless Rambling - OUR PURPOSE STANDS REVEALED!" My craft has improved, but I think the ideal remains, eh?

Given history's benefit, I can now see I arrived near the end of a wave of internet writers on comics, emphasis on the internet - folks awash in the simplicity and accessibility of online publication, and bound to stand alone within a loose community. And the ideal was publication, at my end; I never saw the internet as a diary, or an 'answer' to print, or a revolution in short-format communication. The virtue for me was anyone could use it, for their purposes, and that the created work could exist before millions, not as an audience but as a potential, hanging within reach of the omnivorous and the curious, beyond print's binding and the smothered access of economics and physical distribution.

There were limits, sure -- internet access, searchability, etc. -- but they seemed small to me then, and it seemed enough to make things that would exist and hover, a blink from corporeality in a billion places.

I used to update every day, but I don't anymore. Can you believe they make you work for money after you graduate?! And moreover, the comics internet is different; how much is '5' in online years? Today I write for two sites besides this one; the first is a large group blog, and the second is a 'formal' website to which I file a proper column on a fixed schedule. Both of those kinds of sites existed on the comics internet five years ago, I know, but now they're far more dominant. Voices kept coming and coming; the community grew from a small town where everyone sort of knew one another to a modest city wherein citizens of like-minded dispositions hang around together and hit their favorite spots. Some people can give you a rough map, but few have memorized the phone book. Consolidation was inevitable, I guess.

The writing got a lot better, though. Maybe half a decade's build just does that, but I think there was some drive, some extra push in the conversation to go a little higher, to meet good works with better commentary as the world seemed to expand, the bookstores and the manga, and the press and the movies. A while ago Dick Hyacinth asked for the Best Of recent years, and I told him 2005 was a deathmatch between Epileptic and Black Hole for most acclaimed among the outlets I'd known, and then Tom Spurgeon told me it was a futile comparison because the state of coverage just three years later was so considerably different. He was right.

At least I know I got better. First it was writing and publishing every day that helped me, then writing every day and publishing when I was ready. It's hard to take the internet too seriously, I know, but I also know I did a lot of writing in school and I do more writing at work, and when I get home I write too, and it refines my impressions so that it blooms into my voice, aloud, and all of that is of my person. So funny as it sounds, I think this site made me a better person. I know it.

And thank you for reading; I couldn't have burned off this youth with anyone better.

New Tezuka Week: A Good Week Indeed

2009-07-13T23:10:00.001-05:00

*What came before -

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Herbie Archives Vol. 1 (of 3) (from the pages of The Comics Journal, a review of Fat Fury Deluxe)

Wednesday Comics #1 (of 12) (oversized superpower, weekly)

Plus!

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (the 1971 Ron Ormond anti-Communism Christian horror picture, as taken with the comics work of Jack T. Chick)

At comiXology!

*One man's always bound to be on top, when he's around -

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

Swallowing the Earth: Ah, new Osamu Tezuka! Never the wrong time. This particular joint hails from 1970, marking one of Tezuka's first attempts at a gekiga-informed 'adult' style - a cruel seductress connives to throw society into chaos as penance for its exploitation of women, and only a stone-dumb alcoholic sailor can stop her! No doubt worthwhile to watch the God of Manga grapple with sex and sexism; the former looks great, and the latter should hopefully tease out an aspect of Tezuka (a girls' comics innovator, remember!) we haven't really seen in his English releases, which betray little idea of what to do with female characters at all. From DMP; $24.95 for 520 pages, with an introduction by Frederik L. Schodt. Big preview here.

All Select Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1: Yet another of Marvel's commemorative $3.99 pamphlets, matching new stuff with old. But this one deserves special dispensation for the presence of an all-new Michael Kupperman short, starring Marvex the Super-Robot. Worth a flip at the very least; All Kupperman interview and preview here.

IDW: The First Decade: Ha ha ha, holy shit! It's a $75.00, two-volume slipcased hardcover package published by IDW... about IDW! Looks pretty comprehensive too, with testimony and chats by/with/between various founders/editors/artists in vol. 1 and every cover to every book ever published by IDW through 2008 in vol. 2. Also: a delightful bonus comic book with contributions from Ashley Wood (new Popbot!), Ben Templesmith and others. But y'know - this'll be some well-designed self-indulgence.

Captain Britain by Alan Moore & Alan Davis Omnibus: The title's probably a little misleading on this one, a $99.99, 688-page hardcover that actually collects all of Marvel UK's 1981-85 Captain Britain revival stuff, from the pages of Marvel Superheroes, The Daredevils, The Mighty World of Marvel and Captain Britain, including pre-Moore writing by Dave Thorpe and a big stack of latter-day scripts from Jamie Delano, in some of his earliest comics work.

Still, there's no doubt the feature presentation is the Moore-powered Jaspers' Warp storyline, the Magus' first extended superhero narrative to reach completion; it still reads pretty fine today, its unstoppable kill-creature and early bare-handed ultraviolence leavened with a lighter tone than what would soon come after (if anything, all that dimension-hopping and alternate selves recall Moore's ABC work). Plus: a 1985 Michael Carlin & Paul Neary piece from Captain America #305-306 and a pair of 1986-87 Chris Claremont & Alan Davis stories from New Mutants Annual #2 (1st appearance of Psylocke OMG) and Uncanny X-Men Annual #11.

Lost Girls: And in other expensive Alan Moore reprint news... well, actually this new edition of the much-discussed 2006 Melinda Gebbie-illustrated literary smut fable is a good deal less expensive than prior versions (it's $45.00), if decidedly less lavish to match (one-volume, 320 pages, hardcover w' dust jacket). Still, if you've been holding off, Top Shelf's got your number. Peek.

Dan Dare Omnibus: Being the return of the always-most-likely survivor of Virgin Comics, a 2007-08 Garth Ennis/Gary Erskine revival of the seminal British space hero, now collected into a $19.99 softcover from Ennis specialists Dynamite. This wound up being a pretty unique project for Ennis, marshalling the elemental military sci-fi of the franchise into an old-fashioned saga of virtuous warfare, battlefield gallantry and mighty shipbound clashes, albeit on the sea of stars; it's by far the least critical, most irony-free war story the writer has ever told, perhaps owing to the distance provided by green space villains of weighty vintage. Good reading for those interested in some straight-arrow Ennis. Samples here.

Preacher HC Book 1: On the other hand, if you prefer your Ennis 'classic' rather than 'classicist,' well... you probably already own this in some form. But the tender and curious have never had a better chance to test the hype and hop onto this 1995-2000 Vertigo bookshelf mainstay, illustrated primarily by Steve Dillon, concerning God and America and Men and everything else primal to the writer. Your $34.99 gets you 352 pages of stuff, covering the first dozen issues of the series and a suite of bonus images from later on. Tiny little sample here.

Spider-Man: Torment: Oh shit, this is that one Todd McFarlane story they launched a whole series for. Like, I think Spider-Man spends 40 pages or something rolling on the ground listening to drums, and the Lizard's in it? And it sold 2.5 million copies of issue #1? Relive the magic of 1990 in this $19.99 hardcover.

Creepy Comics #1: Sure, Dark Horse brought Creepy back! Why not? Now it's 48 pages and $4.99, still b&w, on a quarterly schedule, with one classic reprint per issue to set off the new work. Angelo Torres and Bernie Wrightson participate. Eerie's coming soon too! Preview.

Blackest Night: Tales of the Corps #1 (of 3): Ha, that's a little comedy there in the title. DC is also launching the main Blackest Night series this week -- in which Geof Johns, Ivan Reis & Oclair Albert relate the rising of the DCU dead in some Green Lantern-related form or another -- but I feel compelled to note the presence of artist Chris Sprouse somewhere in this $3.99 companion anthology miniseries, along with Doug Mahnke, Jerry Ordway and many others. Preview. Admirers of the always-welcome Sprouse will also want TwoMorrows' Modern Masters Vol. 21: Chris Sprouse, a $14.95 softcover devoting 128 pages to discussion with the man and appreciation of his work.

Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?: Wait, hold off on that 'goodnight, stack of dollars' joke you're planning; this may be a $24.99 hardcover titled for a 60-page hooray-for-Batman-comics Batman comic, one which, at its crescendo, achieves levels of preciousness heretofore unseen outside of laboratory conditions, but be aware that there's other Neil Gaiman-written Bat-stuff tucked away too, like that one Riddler story he did with Bernie Mirault, Matt Wagner and colorist Joe Matt(!!) in 1989's Secret Origins Special #1 (an early lament for the Silver Age within the post-Dark Knight Batman world). Also: further '89 work with Mark Buckingham from Secret Origins #36 and a Simon Bisley teaming from Batman Black and White #2 (1996). Gaiman also did some framing stuff with Mike Hoffman & Kevin Nowlan in that Origins Special, but I dunno if that'll be in here.

RASL #5: Jeff Smith; more.

Incognito #5 (of 6): Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips & Val Staples continue the flight of a (domino-)masked man between vile villains and possibly-worse crime-stompin' pulp avengers. This is probably where the plot starts to go crazy.

Young Liars #17 (of 18): Not that it was planned to be 18 issues, but a countdown never hurts.

Wednesday Comics #2 (of 12): Gonna be nice to pick this up, charm to burn and lots of good feelings in the air, but let's face it - if we're up to week 7 and it's obvious that three-quarters of the content is DC Annual back-up fodder drawn in blown-up traditional styles, the bloom's coming off the rose really damn quick. But I have faith.

Well, I got up to seven in my daily posts.

2009-07-13T11:00:00.001-05:00

*Surely a week isn't that bad? For a failure.

*Oh! But something is ready now, yes - new column at comiXology. This one deals with one of my oldes and most beloved obsessions, the comics of Jack T. Chick, as paired up with the 1971 Ron Ormond picture If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? It's not hard to find, and it really, truly is a Chick tract in movie form. Compulsively devourable too. I'm told the music outfit Negativland sampled bits of the audio for their Christianity Is Stupid track, and yes, I titled the piece after words of wisdom from renowned theologian Regina Spektor, whose applicable song I've already heard several hundreds of times too many.

I don't get into this in the essay, but Ormond and writer/star Estus W. Pirkle made a second film in 1974, The Burning Hell, which doubles up on familiar Chick motifs: the 'rough' guy being saved in the face of polite society and the tolerant true believer disarming a pair of new age types -- who complain about the fear tactics of fire 'n brimstone evangelicism! -- with the True Facts About Damnation, after which one of them is not saved and dives straight into the Lake of Fire. Ormond, mind you, is 'nicer' than Chick, in that the mean new ager gets killed and nice one lives, although he also tosses in a decapitated head and devotes an inordinate amount of screen time to people lolling around in Perdition, rocking back and forth and begging and screaming.

However, in the end it's just not the assault on the senses that Footmen is, though; a Bible story bit in the middle kinda slows things down in particular, much in the way that Chick's straighter Gospel adaptation stuff gets draggy. Still totally worth watching, of course. The third and final Ormond/Pirkle spectacular, 1977's The Believer's Heaven, is excerpted in one of my YouTube links. Sorry if Blood Feast grossed you out, but hey - the guy warned you.

The new endeavor.

2009-07-11T01:25:00.001-05:00

*Oh Jesus Christ.

The links and the bullets.

2009-07-09T18:45:00.005-05:00

*God, when was the last time I did a post like this?

*Addendum Dept: I should have got this on my own, I really should have, but... well, here's the good Dr. Geoff Klock on the not-very-secret basis of Kyle Baker's "we flap" narration in yesterday's Wednesday Comics #1. Yep:

On the plus side, I'm now all the more convinced Baker is going somewhere less-than-straightforward with his serial, even if it might be toward basically the same joke as Special Forces. Or the whole thing might vanish next issue. More readers to enjoy it in a DC issue #1 anyway! Hawkman!

Geoff's whole post is worth reading, btw; it's one of the only middling-to-negative reviews of the comic I've seen set down in a formal manner, though I think it eloquently captures a lot of qualms I've seen scattered around on message boards and the like. I'm probably more inclined toward leeway, given that it's only issue #1 right now, but Geoff does leave the possibility of rapid evolution open too. Plus: thoughts on the gentle breeze of dissatisfaction drifting through Batman and Robin thus far. Go on.

*Hmm, you should probably just presume none of my links are safe for work from here downward.

*Home Video Dept: I've seen this in a few places, not the least of which was before the internet presence of Chris Mautner, but in case you haven't heard: Kino is publishing a R1 dvd compilation of Osamu Tezuka's short animations, The Astonishing Work of Tezuka Osamu, for a July 28 release. It's 13 works, 1962-88, some of which weren't actually directed by Tezuka -- Tales of the Street Corner, for example, was helmed by Eiichi Yamamoto, soon-to-be Star Blazers writer and Tezuka's co-director on Cleopatra: Queen of Sex -- but nonetheless remained redolent with the man's vision. A bonus 1986 interview with Tezuka will be included.

Granted, you've probably seen most of this stuff online -- iTunes has stocked Tezuka stuff for months now -- but I'm not objecting to a nice, easy home video collection. Legend of the Forest in particular is a grabber, an eco-fable that traces the history of world animation through its shifting visual style (with key animation by Madhouse mainstay Yoshiaki Kawajiri, among others).

Now if only we could get some Mushi Pro features around here...

The superhero comic.

2009-07-08T23:59:00.006-05:00

Wednesday Comics #1 (of 12)

Oh, I bet you've heard of this one. It's just about Thursday right now, so I suspect a good 50% of the comics internet has already weighed in, and you might be feeling some fatigue. I'm personally tempted to just pack it in early and declare the thing an unqualified success based entirely on the strength of the Sgt. Rock page, whereupon Joe Kubert draws nine giant panels depicting: (1) Sgt. Rock being punched in the face; (2) Sgt. Rock, having recently been punched in the face; or (3) Nazis leering at Sgt. Rock's face, punched.

It's absolutely wonderful, exactly what I bought this thing hoping to see, and it probably should have been in Kramers Ergot 7 as a standalone piece. The hell with serials.

And I'm sure that's not the last Kramers mention you'll hear in reference to this comic, DC's new weekly series; it's a 16-page color newspaper, folding out to devote most of its space to one-page, 14" x 20" chapters of 15 continuing superhero stories. It's the brainchild of editor Mark Chiarello, the art-inclined mastermind of prior DC anthologies Batman: Black & White and Solo (and, lest we forget, the very first Hellboy colorist); some folks have even been calling it Chiarellos Ergot, given its generous dimensions and the varied, lavish visual approaches of its contributors.

But that line of comparison obscures one of the special pleasures of Wednesday Comics, I think. This comic might be $3.99, but it's disposable. Delicate, even! Maybe I just wasn't paying attention, but I hadn't realized this thing was a newspaper-newspaper: no cover stock, no staples, just a pulpy stack of folded-over comics, like Paper Rodeo. Leave this little number by the wrong window long enough and it's actually gonna toast; shit, my copy looks worse for wear after nothing more than scanning in a few images. I wasn't around or anything when the Diamond box opened this morning at my local retailer, but I imagine speculators burst in early to rush their take to the acid-free snugs like EMT personnel spiriting an inattentive bicyclist down to the emergency room.

That's great, isn't it? Not because I've got a beef with speculators or whatnot -- shoot, eBay to your heart's content, be my guest -- but for being such a very fine extension of one of my favorite aspects of DC's first contemporary stab at a weekly series, 52.

That project had its share of problems, definitely, but it always seemed primarily functional as a pamphlet. Not a chapter of a book (though it told long stories), or a free-floating continuity locus (despite its function as a back story gap-filler), but a weekly comic, best suited to consume quickly, every single week. It was like something charmingly out of time for DC, paced to allow the reader to ponder its storylines for a few days only; even its haphazard visual approach seemed to mark it as fast-eatin' funnybook stuff.

Wednesday Comics takes this same feel and applies it to a look-at-this candied drawing spectacular, printing all those pretty pictures on big flimsy pages.

I was briefly reminded of another famous DC-published pamphlet, Promethea #32, in which that lovely, ad-free story urged you, the reader, to physically destroy it, to literally pull the comic apart and glue it together again to form a new, different, equally readable version of the tale it told. And pamphlets are endangered things, we realize, and they keep getting brighter and prettier, more like design objects, all-considered, super-specialized - to urge the reader to do actual transformative violence to the comic's body is to demand they break free of obeying the form, and I'll be goddamned if it didn't soothe me strange. First time that 'magic' stuff worked for me.

Then the moment passed, and I relized there was a different, more obvious connotation to this thing: it's nostalgic as fuck.

It's titled "Wednesday Comics," and everything is formatted as a Sunday newspaper feature; it's romantic and longing. Don't mistake this for a PictureBox newsprint production; besides the paper quality being a little higher, there's an acute sense of self-awareness at work as to its medium. It's wistful, even a tiny bit melancholic, way down deep - it trades the old pamphlet format for the much older newspaper strip style, as if to relive the glory days of when comics were the strongest thing going, where like rainbow tints in the spray were the hues that splashed and poured from the cylinders of the New York World, like how life with like then, and then now, for now.

I presume this series is supposed to be old-fashioned yet forward-looking; indeed, even trying a format like this in today's market could be taken as an indication that the future remains open. Yet there's undeniably something to the fact that so many of these 15 debut chapters position themselves as throwbacks, ranging from Dave Gibbons' & Ryan Sook's '30s or so adventure strip spin on Kamandi to an excellent, Clowesian saga-of-multiple-strips approach to the Flash by Karl Kerschl, Brenden Fletcher, Rob Leigh and Dave McCaig.

Even as unique a stylist as Paul Pope -- colored by the always-welcome José Villarrubia -- sets his Adam Strange in a decorative Rann of smooth curves and barked educational factoids, leaning back elegantly, but pronouncedly. In here it's organic, mind you; a man in the midst of a theme, aware.

Of course, it could just be that vintage-informed art happens to exploit the format in a more pleasing way. John Arcudi's & Lee Bermejo's bronzed, painterly Superman episode is arguably old-timey in that illustrational Alex Ross way, but it runs through its superhero-on-creature fight scene plainly, with a stiff Man of Steel failing to sell the action en route to an unappealing plot setup in the final panel.

And while the 100 Bullets team of Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso craft a decent enough Batman opening, I can't say it looks much different from your typical page of comics from the pair, except wider on the sides and apparently trusting in the larger format to make things look better on its own. They're right, granted; only Sean Galloway seems to really suffer from the format on a generally clumsy Teen Titans page, cramming characters into indistinct time-lapse layouts and tossing them against blank or toned backgrounds as they fight. Others, like Brian Stelfreeze on a Walter Simonson-written Catwoman/Demon piece, just do their thing, in neat layouts, a little larger than usual.

Some even take the chance to pay tribute to earlier comic book periods, perhaps in the spirit of a generally nostalgic forum. I can't say much for the Metal Men page from writer/executive editor Dan DiDio -- dressing funny superhero characters up in 'wacky' '60s/'70s clothes to go out in the real world is about as cloying as these things can get, regardless of some nicely chunky art by Juan Luis García-López & Kevin Nowlan, with colorist Trish Muluihill -- although anything that moves Neil Gaiman to attempt what may be a full-blown Bob Haney homage (on Metamorpho!) can't be all bad.

That one's got art by the Madman Atomic Comics crew of Mike & Laura Allred and letterer Nate Piekos, which offers its own strange texture; somewhere along the way, and I don't know where, Madman stopped being a story evoking groovy-cool comics style drawn in a highly individualistic manner -- one that owed as much to the alt comic likes Jaime Hernandez as anyone else -- and started taking on the groovy-cool aspect merely by looking like itself. Despite its departures, it came to embody its subject matter in a way that overcame the niceties of plotting, and its that aspect it brings to the table here.

Part of the might of visuals, folks; it's something an art-focused superhero project like this can make use of, powerfully, given the expanded format. I can't help, however, but wish more of these starter pages dove deeper into their use of space, of the production values at hand.

I think it's one of the more divisive pieces, from peering around online, but I found Ben Caldwell's Wonder Woman page to be a little closer to what I could have fallen harder for in a project like this (barring further Sgt. Rock punchout parties, which could a new anthology by itself), a sort of neon-drenched anime smash-up of the dead basic Wonder Woman concept and a Winsor McCay dream strip. It doesn't work perfectly, no -- Caldwell's layout expands and contracts from big panels to clusters of tiny ones, leaving some of the action confusing while stuffing in exposition where it can fit -- but it effectively transforms Wonder Woman into something that seems native to this newspaper, something a little retrospective, if never really like Little Nemo in Slumberland, yet emphatically modern as well.

Don't let me understate the fun of this comic, though. It's a sturdy whole in spite of its faults, and its presentation has charm to burn. I'm really looking forward to seeing it around every week, and watching its stories develop. Even while some of them seem simple, others are harder to place with certainty.

Kyle Baker, for instance, brings this terrific, befuddling Hawkman page, starting off with a huge, distorted close-up of a bald eagle, apparently narrating the story. Hawkmen can communicate with birds, you know, and the bald eagle sings his praises as an improbably diverse flock joins him dangerously in the sky.

"We flap," the bald eagle intones, not for the last time, as Hawkman bursts into action right toward the reader in a massive center image, sword drawn and mace swinging. The narration builds in portent as the legion approaches an airplane, the pilots with guns to their heads. The birds flap onward.

"Our master knows his place in the universe. He is a leader."

And the next issue slot screams BATTLE AGAINST TERROR!

Shit, this sounds pretty wry. And big, loud and muscular! The latter's my first impression, and the former will need space; its tone will be serialized. It's the last thing in this issue, and as good a grace note as any.

The print repost.

2009-07-07T20:30:00.001-05:00

Herbie Archives Vol. 1 (of 3)

(first published in The Comics Journal #295, Jan. 2009; the formatting and some wording differs, as do the pictures)

This is another one of those pricey ($49.95) Dark Horse Archives collections, which I haven't really kept up on; shrink wrap does that to the compulsive flipper. I do, however, recall the restoration quality varying a bit from project to project, particularly in terms of color - some of the books employed flat, solid tones obviously meant to approximate vintage colors via digital means but often laid too opaque for my tastes, leaving the line art overwhelmed.

I'm happy to report that this one's different; the digital restoration, credited to Aren Kittilsen, preserves the aspect of inexactness present in all those evident dots from the '50s and '60s, albeit likely made slightly more respectful of line borders, and definitely left whiter (sometimes slightly bleached) from the cleanup. I'm no restoration expert, but it strikes me as a good effort, given the comics involved.

(dots aren't crazy for scanners like mine, though)

After all, the foundational visual appeal of those works is Ogden Whitney's juxtaposition of chilly commercial draftsmanship with jarring instances of disrupted reality; when a dog lifts his paw up to point a human-looking thumb backward -- as typical a cartoon gesture as can be -- it's funny because it's genuinely a freakish thing to see in Whitney's square world. The uncertainty of period coloring processes only underscores this feeling, giving all those suited men and their hats an extra old-timey boredom while latently suggesting a universe prone to coming apart at the seams whenever a fat kid should suck on the right lollipop and walk off into the air, plain as day.

Anyway, this book collects the first five issues of the American Comics Group's 1964-67 Herbie series, plus 75 or so pages of earlier shorts (1958-63) from Forbidden Worlds, along with a miscellaneous Unknown Worlds story in which the character appears briefly. It's stuff you've probably seen fêted for years, and it's good that there's a big new collection out, but be aware that it's still a mostly repetitive kids' comic -- being the adventures of the corpulent title lad, hated at home yet actually an unlikely powerhouse adventurer -- in spite of writer/editor Richard E. Hughes' likeably nastier-than-usual sense of humor (Herbie on your not buying the next issue: "Only means blood, fractures, teeth scattered around. Not nice.") and Whitney's askew visual constructions.

Still, it's fine in small, period-appropriate doses, and armed with an accomodating page presentation, less lolly-solid than cinnamon-spread.

The weekly feature.

2009-07-06T23:59:00.003-05:00

*Hmm... two reviews last week, both of them focused on artists that absorb characters into their backing environments. Didn't plan that at all.

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Children of the Sea Vol. 1 (the North American debut of Daisuke Igarashi in a book all his own; atmospheric fantasy like a child's daydream on a humid afternoon)

Plus!

Conquering Armies (a heavy realist, Heavy Metal classic from 1978, in which Jean-Pierre Dionnet & Jean-Claude Gal lay waste to heroic accomplishment by way of sheer, cruel scope)

At The Savage Critics!

*What I did plan, however -- and the plan's still on -- was to do 10 posts in 10 day, one after another, each one taking on an interest/recurring feature of mine. I haven't done any daily blogging in a long while either, and I'm eager to see if I can keep it up. Might even get some stalled projects running - who knows?

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

Asterios Polyp: If you're going to be listening to talk about comics in the second half of 2009, you'd better prepare to hear about this, off and on, over and over; the superlatives are getting thrown. Being the grand return of David Mazzucchelli to comics, a $29.95, 344-page Pantheon hardcover tracking the escape of the titular architect & teacher from the present strictures of his life when a bolt of lightning destroys his apartment, all while the past hovers and interjects, and style commands all perception, self-evidently, from the progress of time to the cadence of speech. Moreso than usual, I mean. Aw, just check it out when you see it, and you will see it.

Everybody is Stupid Except for Me and Other Astute Observations: Peter Bagge, in contrast, hasn't been gone for nearly so long, but it's still good to see a new book. This one's a 120-page Fantagraphics softcover, collecting 10 years' worth of comics-format op ed stories for Reason, archived online here. It's $16.99. Preview here; slideshow and wallpaper here.

Wednesday Comics #1 (of 12): The front-of-Previews item of the week, for sure. And it's pretty special even setting aside the specifics of the format: a weekly, folded-over 14" x 20" color pamphlet, 16 pages for $3.99 featuring 15 one-page serials, evoking post-WWII Belgian comics magazines (some of those features never got collected!) as much as the Sunday funnies of yore. No, I'm taken by something simpler - DC is launching its new every-week comic slot on the might of art, of visuals, which is a considerable swing of the pendulum away from 52, a subtext of which inadvertently turned out to be "visual flair doesn't matter, get it out, it's fine." Like, I agree with the notion that one of the charms of the series was witnessing the writing staff bump their individual styles against one another, but it's noteworthy that the artists didn't get the chance to build anything like that, filling out Keith Giffen's breakdowns in a sometimes strained manner, clashing with no logic. Trinity went a ways toward changing that, but now - you're surrounded by drawing.

And in this place, that's something. Features: Kyle Baker, Paul Pope, Ben Kaldwell, Adam Kubert & Joe Kubert, Neil Gaiman & Mike Allred, John Arcudi & Lee Bermejo, Dave Gibbons & Ryan Sook, Jimmy Palmiotti & Amanda Conner, Walter Simonson & Brian Stelfreeze, Kurt Busiek & Joe Quiñones, and many more.

100 Bullets Vol. 13 (of 13): Wilt: And if one page isn't enough, here's the final $19.99 softcover collection of a much bigger work by the Wednesday Comics Batman team of Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso. Collect 'em all.

Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?: Oh no, Watchmen is coming out on dvd in two weeks! What's a publisher to do?! Ah ha - how about a spanking new $24.99 hardcover collection for writer Alan Moore's various beloved super-stories? Note that Action Comics Annual #11 (For the Man Who Has Everything) and DC Comics Presents #85 (a Swamp Thing encounter) are in here too, although the title saga is obviously the main draw.

I've always found that story's renown as a three-hankie pre-Crisis Superman farewell to be a little odd; to me, it's among Moore's most distanced superhero studies, pluck pluck plucking at old school Superman tropes with the steadied hands of a researcher manipulating volatile materials. Surely the era-ending catastrophe Superman faces is mainly the result of undue logic applied to those story elements -- Bizarro seeing mass murder as the inverse of a vow against killing, villains just blowing Clark Kent's clothes off on the air, a capricious imp simply deciding to be maleviolent rather than silly -- causing the action to tumble forward with all the inevitability of a mathematical formula scratching across the chalkboard.

Granted, it's been suggested that this is part of the point, that applying the slightest feather's weight of a skeptic's logic to Silver Aged ideas sends the whole world crashing into bedlam, and ain't it a shame, but - that seems awfully simplistic, particular compared to some of Moore's other superhero works. Casting Superman's classic, non-killing ideals as unable to sustain a Super-world in the face of big '80s thinking seems less like insight than spiting the present by walling off the past, and if it's all just supposed to be a simple appreciation of The Way We Used to Be, it's very much a fond gaze cast through a museum's glass, before moving on to the business of the active, present superhero world.

Then again, Moore didn't really have a choice on the whole 'walling off the past' thing, but hey - an experiment is always affected by the conditions under which it's conducted! Helpful souls they are, DC is also offering issue #1 of All Star Superman this week as a $1.00 special, for further reading. Plus: Tom Strong #1, also for $1.00, should you elect further Moore.

Marvel Masterworks: Warlock Vol. 2: But then, there are earlier sagas to pursue. My sitemate Douglas Wolk went deep into this formative '70s cosmic superhero material in Comic Art #8 (and later his book, Reading Comics), but for our purposes here I'll only mention that it's safe to ignore the "vol. 2" in the title, since this tome starts right up with the arrival of Jim Starlin in 1975's Strange Tales #178 and follows his form-flexing revival of the Adam Warlock character through the resumed Warlock series and into the deathly double coda of Avengers Annual #7 and Marvel Two-in-One Annual #2. Plus: a bonus Spider-Man/Warlock story by Bill Mantlo & John Byrne from 1977's Marvel Team-Up #55. Restless, determined philosophical space pulp, as you like it. It's $59.99 for the whole deal in hardcover.

Prince Valiant Vol. 1: 1937-1938: Or shit, go way back. This is a newly restored Fantagraphics series, presenting the Hal Foster classic in 10.5" x 14.25" hardcovers. This debut fills 120 color pages, supplemented by a vintage Foster interview from The Comics Journal. It's $29.99; samples here.

RASL Collector's Edition Vol. 1: And in other hardcover repackaging news, if that big softcover collection of the first three issues of Jeff Smith's ongoing sci-fi thing wasn't good enough, how about a $50.00 edition with Smith's signature and 16 bonus pages of sketches and script? Limited to 3000 copies. Note that Smith's Cartoon Books also has its 13th printing of the all-in-one $39.99 Bone brick this week. Ha ha, the 13th printing is the unlucky one; I bet it takes several additional months to sell out!

The Nobody: A new Vertigo original hardcover, 144 b&w pages for $19.99, in which Jeff Lemire (of the much-acclaimed Essex County stories from Top Shelf) transposes elements of H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man to a sleepy fishing village, raising all the expected 'small town' concerns in the process -- paranoia, prejudice, teen alienation, outcasts, symbolic butterflies, etc. -- in pretty much exactly the manner you'd expect. Still, Lemire's got a firm point of view, a visual sensitivity that brings out a human softness and bucolic prickle lacking in other such high Vertigo stories-from-old-stories, and it may well gaze deeper next time; I'll post a link to my full review once it's available for online access. Preview; video.

B.P.R.D. 1947 #1 (of 5): The second new Mignolaverse series in as many weeks, although this one's set as a sequel to last year's pretty great B.P.R.D.: 1946, starring Prof. Trevor Bruttenholm, 'father' of Hellboy, as he inspects the occult aftermath of the Nazi reign. Co-writer Joshua Dysart returns, now with artists Gabriel Bá & Fábio Moon, which should prove interesting. Looks juicy from here.

Pixu: The Mark of Evil: More Moon & Bá! More more more!! Okay, Dark Horse also has this hardcover collection of their two-volume, self-published urban complex horror tale created with Becky Cloonan & Vasilis Lolos. With bonus sketchbook content; $17.95. Preview.

World War Robot Vol. 2: Another 48 oversized (12" x 12") pages of color canister conflict from artist Ashley Wood. As always, IDW publishes; $11.99.

From the Ashes #2 (of 6): Woah, Peter Bagge and Bob Fingerman in one week! All we need now is a new issue of Cud... anyway, this is Fingerman's IDW series about the little concerns of the post-apocalypse situation. Peer.

I Am Legion #4 (of 6): DDP/Humanoids, continuing.

The Zombies That Ate the World #4 (of 8): Ditto.

No Hero #6 (of 7): More superhero mutation from Warren Ellis & Juan Jose Ryp. Last issue was fun, although begging comparison to The Boys didn't work in its favor; the series' agony comes off best when it's tactile, not social. Approaching the endgame should offer some focus. Also, if your store didn't get the new Crossed last week (mine didn't, so I'm guessing Diamond missed the east coast), expect that too.

Elephantmen: War Toys: Yvette: It's not like most issues of Elephantmen aren't already displaced vignettes from a teeming world edging slightly through time -- or that the current 'storyline' isn't a suite of one-offs dealing with otherwise periphery characters, to the extent that anyone in this series has primacy for long -- but since we're bouncing way back in time to focus on a character that died in the War Toys miniseries, this is a special issue rather than just the next issue, although it's basically that too. All-combat action from the days when giant talking animals fired guns and swiped swords at China's military across the disease-ridden ruins of Europe, in color this time, pencilled by returning series artist Moritat; preview here.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Shinji Ikari Raising Project Vol. 1: Ah, good ol' Eva, the gift that keeps on giving to publishers that happen to have a hand on the license when the franchise rustles itself into activity yet again. This manga, however, has nothing to do with the new Rebuild of Evangelion series of anime movies -- Neon Genesis Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone is floating around North American events now, while Neon Genesis Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance just opened in Japanese theaters a week and a half ago, and a concluding double-feature finale is still forthcoming -- although I'm sure the release timing is no coincidence.

No, this is an ongoing Osamu Takahashi series started in 2005, currently up to vol. 8 in Japan, based on the 2004 'life simulation' PC game (a la Princess Maker) in which you the player raise Eva's titular boy non-hero into something hopefully worthwhile, all in the confines of an alternate universe set up in the notorious final episode of the original 1995-96 television anime series, in which a new life for Shinji was glimpsed as the star of -- ha ha -- a totally different anime formula series, the high school love comedy. But wait, you say, wasn't there already a manga based on that half-minute glimpse into a new universe? Close! You're thinking of the 2003-06 manga series Neon Genesis Evangelion: Angelic Days, which was actually an offshoot of a different video game set in that secondary world, the 2005 'visual novel' Neon Genesis Evangelion: Iron Maiden 2nd (aka: Neon Genesis Evangelion: Girlfriend of Steel 2nd), itself a non-sequel to the 1998 visual novel Neon Genesis Evangelion: Iron Maiden (Girlfriend of Steel), which was an in-continuity bonus story set in the main Eva universe.

So, just to get it all down in one shot, this manga is a spin-off of a computer game based on an alternate universe from the anime series which spawned an additional computer game and accordant manga series that act as an parallel universe to the alternate universe. And none of this, by the way, is to be confused with the official ongoing Eva manga adaptation, which original character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto has been working on since 1995. Oh, and they're all published in North America by different entities: VIZ for the official manga; ADV Manga for Angelic Days; and Dark Horse for the present volume, $9.95 for 184 pages, which you can preview here. It's probably crap.

P.S. - THESE ARE NOT THE ONLY EVA MANGA.

I dunno, maybe the all-new Rebuild ending is gonna be like Primer?

The old Eurocomic.

2009-07-05T23:59:00.003-05:00

*New column up at The Savage Critics, on the topic of Jean-Pierre Dionnet's & Jean-Claude Gal's early Heavy Metal story suite Conquering Armies. I toyed with the idea of posting exactly the same material labeled as a review of Justice League: Cry for Justice #1 (of 6), and subsequently insisting the contents were exactly that, but I decided the confusion would be more trouble than the joke was worth (nothing whatsoever). Enjoy.

The mainline manga.

2009-07-04T22:48:00.002-05:00

Children of the Sea Vol. 1

This will be out very soon from VIZ. It's a $14.99 softcover, with 320 mostly b&w pages.

It's also the first release in the publisher's new SigIkki sub-imprint, combining the preexisting VIZ Signature line of 'prestige' releases with Japanese publisher Shogakukan's Ikki Comix line of alternative-flavored contemporary manga. Ikki is also Shogakukan's monthly serializing print anthology for many of these works -- the title refers to countryside uprisings against feudal lords, which strikes me as gilding the lily a bit for a Big Three anthology -- but VIZ plans to use the brand primarily as a means of serializing 'mature' manga for free online before offering deluxe print collections at the aforementioned premium price point.

And make no mistake: this is a fairly lovely production, attuned to presenting mostly lovely visuals. Artist Daisuke Igarashi enjoys a renown among North American manga obsessives well beyond his scant official catalog in English, which, prior to this, consisted entirely of one short story in Fanfare/Ponent Mon's Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators; I strongly doubt many will find this production terribly lacking in its role as the first 'major' Igarashi release in English, even given their free access to the guts of it online.

But it's still worthwhile to note that this volume is also the most traditional adventure manga I've seen from this artist, one who isn't exactly a bleeding edge provocateur to begin with. Hell no - at heart, Igarashi's a popular fabulist of the Miyazaki style, albeit a modified variant that slashes away the antics and sentiment to isolate all those wonderous and creepy strains of mystic-bucolic mythmaking.

For example, the artist's 1994-96 story suite Hanashippanashi (and his similarly-styled Fanfare short) bombarded readers with weird visions of extra-normal creatures, so dominant as to suggest surrealism through devout force of their taximony, though the experience was always grounded as human observation of presences in a known, familiar world; Teratoid Heights it wasn't. Likewise, the 2003-05 series Witches (Majo) positioned its eruptions of ancient power as undercurrents to historical (metaphorical) contexts, with a passion for delineating pagan resistance to newer societal structures that recalls nothing so much as early (or proto-)Vertigo comics.

Children of the Sea presses this outlook into even gentler, more straightforward territory; at times it could almost pass for shōjo manga, what with a surfeit of mysterious, aestheticized pretty boys centering its story of a 'typical' girl dropped into an exciting plot wherein her marvelous secret powers are revealed. Perfectly nice, sure, but it signals a certain prudence on VIZ's part; they might be spelling comics with an x on the end, but they're making damn sure their base readership doesn't take that as a "Keep Out," which possibly goes a ways toward explaining why they're launching the imprint with an ongoing one-collection-per-year monthly series, only up to vol. 3 in Japan, from an artist whose bibliography is littered with one-or-two-book projects prime for easy release.

Still, if there's any current (to English) manga this project recalls from its particulars, it'd have to be Yuki Urushibara's Mushishi, and not only because Urushibara and Igarashi place a similar visual emphasis on detailed, enveloping backgrounds and swirling mark-made blasts of glowing phenomena; both of their stories guide wide-eyed people, often young, through a hidden aspect of the natural world, something that affects their being in a way that nonetheless can be taken as the primal, pre-societal way of things, with 'danger' present mainly as the individual's lack of due study, or simple ignorance. Heck, Igarashi even tosses in a teacher/shaman/scientist figure who's picked up a few tricks (and a lack of social grace!) on his travels.

Yet Igarashi's work aims to saturate far more than Urushibara's rather literary approach; he's a considerably stronger visualist, first and foremost, with a special talent for integrating his scratchy character designs into their surroundings and stretching moments to let his narrative eye linger on otherwise fleeting experiences, like a bug landing on your shoulder or a seagull swooping parallel to your bike.

It's not a perfect performance, no - setting aside localization concerns like the English lettering never quite blending with the artist's fine lines (and my personal editing pet peeve of inconsistent chapter title translations between the table of contents and the text proper), Igarashi's grasp of vivid, extended moments doesn't always extend to fluid character movements or nuanced 'acting,' and a few of his attempts at multi-panel lyricism of stillness simply don't work, like a bit where the story suddenly goes sideways for one splash, distractingly. But these aspects never entirely upset the wash of the artist's approach, one part plotting and three parts atmosphere, surrounding the reader with the beauty of his world, and all of its accordant mystery.

In other words, if we walk beside helpful Ginko in Urushibara's series, listening to his many episodic lectures on What This All Means, Igarashi places us in firmly in the role of the affected citizenry, wandering in amazement and concern through their own extended saga. And you can bet your ass it's kids that are affected, and adults can't entirely help, caring as they can be; so it frequently goes in those Miyazaki spectaculars!

Indeed, in spite of its T+ rating, Igarashi's plot unfolds like a fit-for-children adventure for all ages, if unusually prone to staring off into poetic space; it's even situated via prologue as a story being told by one of its now-adult participant to an eager child. Ruka is a moody, anti-social young girl whose deep hunger to fly doesn't preempt earthly concerns, like sending a classmate to the hospital after she stomps her foot on the handball court. Exiled from summertime club activities, Ruka pisses off to Tokyo for the day, where she runs into Umi ("Sea"), a curious boy with a major connection to the ocean.

Is it chance, or does it all have something to do with Ruka's own attraction to sea life, and her memory/dreams of seeing a ghost at the aquarium where her father works? Before you know it, Our Heroine is whisked away into a wish-fulfillment fantasy of living in a fun environment (said aquarium) with a far away divorced parent (said father), filled with kindly adults ready to teach her snorkeling and magical friends like Umi and his distinctly bishōnen pal Sora ("Sky"), who can't stay out of the water for too long, and know of the burning souls in the sky. All the while, rare fish school to Japan as speckled specimens vanish from captivity across the world; global shit is going down, as Igarashi indicates via to-the-reader testimony from witnesses across the world, which does admittedly jumble the subjective storytelling motif.

Try not to sweat the details, like how a major aquarium keeps supernatural young kids swimming around in the tanks and treated at local hospitals without any discernible media attention; Igarashi certainly didn't. Rather, his emphasis is on people as elements of spaces, and his children just that: children, of the natural parent, the environment, glimpsed through contorted time and countless blinking glances at place, the artist's subject and the true basis of his story. All else is finally supplicant, and from this we become like kids ourselves, seated agog at roiling waves and starscapes below sea level as summertime passes slowly. It may not be experimental, but the experiential has virtues all its own.

Ready for another killer tomorrow.

2009-06-29T23:50:00.003-05:00

*Fourth of July should be nice.

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Detective Comics #854 (J.H. Williams III: more than just a pretty draw)

Plus!

Batman (that's right, just "Batman" - it's the 1943 movie serial that gave the character his silver screen start and drained the blood from pundits' faces for decades after)

At comiXology.

*No Gotham for seven days at least. I have a medical restriction.

THIS WEEK IN JOURNALS FIXATED ON COMICS!

The Comics Journal #298: Man, only two issues until the big Siege of Asgard prelude. Until then, we'll have to make do with the always-fine Bill Randall's feature essay on the alternative manga anthology AX, coming soon in cherry pickin' anthology form courtesy of Top Shelf. Interviews this issue concern Fábio Moon & Gabriel Bá, Nicholas Gurewitch and Trevor Von Eeden (artist of DC's Thriller!). Plus: selections from Percy Crosby's Skippy, a preview of Jirô Taniguchi's A Distant Neighborhood (upcoming from Fanfare/Ponent Mon) and oh so much more.

And -

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

Far Arden: The debut graphic novel by Kevin Cannon of Big Time Attic, a $19.95, 400-page(!) Top Shelf hardcover that got its start as a wildly ambitious battery of monthly 24-hour comic drawing efforts -- albeit often not 24 hours all in a row -- forming a massive, improvisation-heavy 288-hour comic (the results remain online), and later expanded yet further for print publication. It's a tale of adventure, with a grizzled sea dog questing toward the promise of an island paradise. Preview here; interview with Tom Spurgeon here.

Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays: Yeah, "picto-essays" means "comics," just so you know. Your big publisher lit comics project of the week, a Villard anthology of new "memoir, history, journalism, and biography," edited by Brendan Burford, King Features Syndicate comics editor and self-publisher of three prior editions of the series. Nice lineup, including Paul Karasik, Nate Powell, Nick Bertozzi, Dave Kiersh and more. A $16.95 softcover, 160 b&w pages.

Greek Street #1: Nice! A $1.00, 40-page first hit of writer Peter Milligan's new Vertigo ongoing, a repositioning of bloody sexual Greek tragedies in contemporary London, with artist Davide Gianfelice of Northlanders. Extended advertisement here.

Voice of the Fire: Golden Age of Reprints... FORM OF PROSE!! This, of course, is Alan Moore's 1996 prose novel, newly reprinted by Top Shelf in softcover form at $14.95; it's one of the Magus' very best works, a cycle of 12 stories spanning nearly six millenia of history in Moore's home town of Northampton, following mystics, patsies, madmen, witches, frauds, nobles and severed heads as they navigate the eternal flux that is the pursuit of the true nature of this human life. People will tell you otherwise, but I'd recommend you read each story in order; Hob's famous Bronze Age dialect might slow you down up front, but there's a rewarding effect to teaching yourself to read again -- to see the world again for the first time, at Moore's dawn of time -- that resonates through the rest of the work. Samples are online, including Neil Gaiman's full Introduction and a few of José Villarrubia's color plates.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: The Complete Newspaper Dailies: Vol. 2 1930-1932: But as far as comics go, how about a big ol' 9" x 11.5" hardcover chunk of ye olde sci-fi funnies, six complete stories for $39.99, with an extensive Introduction by Ron Goulart. From Hermes Press.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time: Being the official one-off manga prequel to director Mamoru Hosoda's 2006 anime feature film about a silly girl who gets limited time travel powers and runs into steady-building emotional trouble; it was sort of nice, maybe? Woah, woah, wait a minute - didn't this come out in English the other year? No, you're thinking of CMX's two-volume release of A Girl Who Runs Through Time, a 2004 shōjo manga take on Yasutaka Tsutsui's original 1967 novel, which Hosoda's anime serves as a sequel-but-mostly-a-remake to. So yeah, this is the tie-in manga to the anime, a prequel to a sequel that's a remake, the whole affair spanning three mediums. Art by Ranmaru Kotone, whom I've never heard of. From Bandai, $10.99 for 200 pages. But if it's a prequel, does she even leap through time at all?!

POP Wonderland: Thumbelina: Ahhhhh ha ha ha ha, holy shit it's the Moetan guy! Er, POP is a guy, right? I read somewhere that he was. Oh boy, you see... Moetan started out in 2003 as this zany series of English study guides aimed at Japanese otaku, adorned with all the cute lil' gals it takes to make the money. The whole thing quickly got out of control (seriously: this is a commercial for English study books), spawning audio CDs, video games and a 13-episode anime television series in 2007. Now Dark Horse brings us the super-slick flavor of POP in wholly kid-friendly storybook form, with writer Michiyo Hayano adapting beloved fairy tales to serve the illustrations. This is just the beginning; there's six of these in Japan. It's $16.95 for 32 pages. Gaze!

Witchfinder: In the Service of Angels #1 (of 5): Only the latest Hellboy universe project from writer Mike Mignola, this time delving back into the 19th century for some occult mystery with Sir Edward Grey. The artist is Ben Stenbeck, of last year's origin one-off B.P.R.D.: The Ectoplasmic Man. Preview.

The Muppet Show #4 (of 4): Concluding this widely-enjoyed Roger Langridge miniseries with a focus on Miss Piggy, as expected. Don't lament the series finale too hard; a second four-issue run from Boom! is due in short order. Preview.

Batman and Robin #2: Morrison & Quitely, keeping it regular. Peek.

Crossed #6 (of 9): Well, nothing horrible happened last issue, so they're probably saving it up.

The Boys #32: Spoilaz in here. It's probably going to be interesting to see how this series deals with notions of 'death' and the threat thereof; Ennis pretty explicitly cast the idea of mortality into doubt early on in the book, just as a basic element of superhero worldbuilding. You can die, but that doesn't mean you won't come back in at some point, whether you want to or not, in an especially degraded form. This is part two of the "oh shit, game is changing" just-past-the-midpoint storyline, so Dynamite also has vol. 4 of the collected softcovers this week, We Gotta Go Now, covering that X-Men story and its direct aftermath from issues #23-30 for $19.99.

Brat Pack: Or, you can always head back to one of the fonts: Rick Veitch's 1990 wallow in the dumb, dirty world of the grim 'n gritty. No niceties in this friendly old classic; Veitch presumes up front you've grasped the essence of late '80s 'mature' superheros, and indeed how gross and doltish it got, and thus seizes the style by the neck and attempts to mash it so far down into the manure that maybe it'll pop out the other side, Loony Tunes style, into a better place. Marvel over 176 big pages of a horrible superhero quartet subjecting their hapless kid sidekicks to countless atrocities, in detail, all in the service of running the most head-slapping carryovers from old superhero times through the dark paces. Often repulsive, arguably reactionary, but not without a sense of humor, and strangely endearing at times; unlike The Boys, this is very clearly the product of affection, if more for the ideas behind superheroes than the stories and industry around them, a tone that comes through better in the work's subsequently published prequel, The Maximortal. From Veitch's own King Hell Press; this new softcover edition sports an original cover and a $19.95 price tag. The entire first chapter is here, featuring the famous death of Jason Todd parody. They really don't stay dead, huh? Wait - Jesus Christ, that actually was a motif in Brat Pack too! Like, specifically so! Huh...

Savage Dragon #150: Gosh, look at that. One hundred and fifty from Image founder Erik Larsen. The first issue of this I owned was #3 from the initial Malibu-handled miniseries, 1992. I was 11 years old then; my great aunt bought it for me, as my unwitting induction to the Image Revolution. She passed away recently. A few months back. Bought me my first comic, actually, a Mickey Mouse thing with Floyd Gottfredson reprints, back when Gladstone had 'em. Boom! has 'em now, if not necessarily Mickey; they don't publish that anymore, for all the properties shuffle and reconfigure. Yet here's Erik Larsen and his Dragon, that last smooth strand from here to now. For Image that seems improbable, given what happened, but the kids expected miracles back then, feats and immortality. She always had taste.

Buckle up old chum, THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE FOREVER.

2009-06-29T11:00:00.002-05:00

*My newest column is up at comiXology, orbiting the infamous silver screen debut of the Caped Crusader, 1943's 15-chapter serial Batman. Topics include: vintage comics reprints; saggy tights; the films of Louis Feuillade; WWI; WWII; that superhero history book Grant Morrison is writing; those two issues of Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight Bryan Talbot did in 1992; '40s men in '40s hats; the Yellow Peril thru history; Batman planning for everything; and the 1951 jungle adventure film Bowanga Bowanga: White Sirens of Africa, which is basically one colored projector lens and a rumba record away from being a Joseph Cornell picture.

In case you were curious, the serial was released on R1 dvd in 2005, to coincide with the home video edition of Batman Begins. "See how Batman really began," read the case, and oh boy did that feel a bit wry after my viewing. I do plan on getting to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen eventually, probably in a two-for-one piece with G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, so that I'll have a month and a half to properly assess its cultural legacy.

Anyway, I really like how this one turned out, and I hope you like it too.

The Silent Detective

2009-06-24T23:59:00.007-05:00

Detective Comics #854

You don't need me to tell you that the visual aspect of Marvel or DC comics tends to get overlooked when it comes to online discussion. What's that old stereotypical review structure? Four paragraphs on the plot followed by one for the art? Or is it five for the plot? Either way, it's clear that the pictures typically don't receive the same attention as the words -- to the extent the elements are separable in a medium that demands their co-mingling as the basis of storytelling -- and there's reasons for that beyond simple discomfort with analyzing the technical aspects of drawing.

For example, there's the particular appeal of shared-universe superhero comics as individual windows to a continuous, sort-of consistent, never-ending master story; like it or not, that's the power behind the superhero throne, the engine of the pamphlet format's prevailing financial hits and its very generic uniqueness, encouraging storylines that 'matter' and plot beats groom as much for salivation as satisfaction. This condition, however, doesn't encourage discussion of sheer visual quality, because its primary virtues are Event and Correlation, which, in the abstract, exist apart from forms.

But even superhero series that thrive away from these mechanisms (or non-shared-universe genre-or-thereabouts work) tend to attract the most attention for their place in the continuity of their writers' works; just for fun, go back to all your favorite Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye posts and check how much space is devoted to Cameron Stewart. Hell, start with mine, they're right down with the worst of 'em).

And then there's even simpler troubles; a lot of superhero art just doesn't warrant a lot of discussion, and the serial format -- though obviously not superhero-exclusive -- makes it hard for frequent commentators to find substantive things to say about perfectly competent, nondescript work, while self-contained books proffer the option of evaluating even uninspiring visuals as a closer-to-equal part of the closed experience. Put simply, sometimes "looks nice, doesn't fuck up" really is the most you can say without contorting yourself into suffocation, and the knot only gets tighter with each new chapter. Could this mean... waiting for the trade?!

It's funny though, because superheroes tore away from pulp characters with the might of visceral, two-fisted pictures behind them, and now the structure, economics and possibly the very appeal of the genre works against focused appreciation of the visual aspect.

That's why artists like J.H. Williams III are God's gift to superhero picture talk. These are pages that slap you in the mouth and say "holy shit, I am here." While other superhero pages sit at the bar chatting dryly amongst themselves, the Williams page storms into the room with a bouncer still clinging to one ankle, knocking down tables and fetching a whiskey bottle to smash over the head of some clown that looked at it wrong. Or maybe the whiskey was crap so the bottle was the real target; philosophical questions abound. Either way, I trust it's not denigrating to note that the excellence of Williams' art also manages an excellence at steering attention to its excellence, enough so that the commentator feels like an idiot not devoting copious space to its many other self-evident strengths.

And just look at that page above! I don't want to come off as saying Williams' material is without subtlety -- some of his work with writers like Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis is marvelous at drawing out added layers of meaning, quietly, through purely visual means -- but he does occasionally flatten a thinner script via blast force of style (see: his last Detective Comics issue, #821). None of that here - this is fun, witty stuff, with fine contributions by letterer Todd Klein and colorist Dave Stewart, of whom more will be said later.

But really, check out all that's going on above. Obviously the most striking bit is how Williams' uppermost establishing panel gives way to tight middle segments depicting Batwoman caressing the poor thug from chin to shoulder, after which the entirety of Gotham City vanishes into the sun with Our Heroine's embrace, but I also love the little triangle splashing down into the bottom panel. I love that it functions as both a fourth middle panel, creating an in-out-out-in sequence, and an out-of-sequence glimpse of Batwoman's emotions, also leading to the eruption at the bottom, which, by the way, takes the shape of a bat. Super power!

And that's not all:

Here's the next page, which uses exactly the same layout to conclude the sequence with reversed elements. The longshot pinning of Page A is the burning embrace of Page B. The middle three panels tilt the perspective away from Batwoman as the dominant force. The likewise double-motivated triangle replaces that extreme, personal close-up with the POV of a totally different character, Batman from way above, and the concluding bat-symbol thus becomes Batman's presence, rather than an externalization of Batwoman's power. Page A starts far, then gets close and hot; Page B serves to cool, while removing the focus from Batwoman to the more familiar, looming hero.

Almost every 'superhero' page in this comic is like that, often crashing across double spreads for maximum exhibitionism. It's not enough for Batwoman to take on a gang of villains; inset panels must transform into red-tinted lightning bolts raining from the sky. Perversely, it's not a quick read at all, since these vainglorious layout do everything to grab your attention as soon as you turn the page and force you to linger on their contours, even as, say, a panel of Batwoman getting into costume is shaped as an arrow, guiding you to the next image in a way that draws screaming attention to the obvious act of reading in sequence.

It's crazy! If Morrison & Frank Quitely are trying to instill some of the old camp in Batman and Robin, Williams threatens to draw camp from the very idea of the superhero action comic, which strikes me as far more daring.

And yet!

The out-of-costume scenes are totally different. Kate Kane's daytime life is strictly squares and rectangles. If Batman chides Batwoman on her flowing, distracting red hair in those eye-catching super-layouts, the wig coming off (yep, it's a wig) causes the pages to straighten as well. If superhero writing is often powered by 'momentism' -- the pursuit of moments that most keenly encapsulate the iconic status of superhero characters -- Williams' storytelling not only agrees, and indeed casts superheroism itself as superficially nothing other than attention-grabbing instances, but contextualizes such momentism as the active desire of this new, young Batwoman, a wordless motivation, the flailing for a gravitas she can't have yet built. A common superfoe, as you are surely aware.

Speaking of which, you should probably be aware that writer Greg Rucka's plot is near-comprehensive superhero introduction boilerplate, if snappily executed. She's unlucky in love! Here's a hint at the pain in her past! New villains, but not too new! Maybe it helps to have read 52! Yes, Batwoman is still after those crazies to subscribe to the (literal) religion of crime, now led by a goth lolita Alice of a woozy underworld wonderland. She's actually pretty amusing for her five panels, but she's nothing compared to the Alfred character, Kate's pop (as in apparently her actual dad), a vaguely Frank Castle-like military guy whom Williams gives an amazing dead stare whenever he's not looking directly at weapons.

Still, such light, basic plotting might be just fine to let the visual concepts establish themselves. And I don't know who's idea it was for Kate to flash a distinctive V for Vendetta grin on her solid white face while father shows her the artillery, but it was just the right touch for a scene transitioning from the fundamental calm of life to the vicious cabaret of fantasy hair and special effects.

It's gradual, the costuming. The panels remain staid (in fact mirroring an earlier 'tour' of Kate's living quarters), but Dave Stewart changes. You've no doubt noticed the coloring effects at play: grimy paint effects and blasts of washing color for the superhero moments, with unfailingly bold hues for the plainclothes parts. Williams may step away from the latter, but Stewart assures us that these scenes are gently artificial as well; there is no real life for Kate Kane, just shifts in tone, as the superhero colors begin to take hold in her Bat-lair, her preparation climaxing with the aforementioned arrow panel. Move right along.

And the comic glories in this. It's new, for an old thing, and long-awaited. And it revels in that feeling. Not just Williams, the whole visual aspect. Batwoman isn't just white, she's bright, her always-blinding face (the issue's key visual constant) and her gleaming outfit often a touch lighter than every person around her, save for when Alice arrives to sear the environment as a veritable walking source of lumination. I didn't see these superpowers on Wikipedia, and I don't know if they'll last for the next creative team, but here their glow compels further consideration of the novice superhero mystery: how to be seen?

If nothing else, we're assured the hero and her villain are the most vivid actors on the small location rented for them. They'll have other parts, and life will go on, but this short and mad time will soon pass away, wordless and unacknowledged, as art often is in this place.

I wasn't just sleeping, although my four hours a night is indeed precious to me.

2009-06-22T23:59:00.006-05:00

*Nope, there was no nothing last week, since I wound up working on several projects that either won't see print for a while or can't be posted yet because they're not large enough for the voices to stop. One of them, however, god willing, should be up in the Savage Land tomorrow or Wednesday, and it's big!

I thought about setting up a Twitter account for a while (Tom Spurgeon's had one since May??), just to get something out, but I can barely keep anything under 1400 words, let alone 140 characters. Moreover, I dunno if the internet is itching for my up-to-the-minute impressions of Herogasm, specifically that it's sort of funny, in that I laughed at the abortion clinic bit even though the whole 'getting high off superhero sex leftovers' routine was done earlier and better in James Kochalka's Super F*ckers. Oh my god, I just wrote that sentence and meant it. Superhero decadence is a hell of a thing.

Plus, you know, the Kochalka series had a really secure visual identity, while the Ennis book... doesn't. It probably needed either an Ian Churchill to hard sell the smutty aspect or a Rick Veitch to make everything as disgusting as possible, and while I thought John McCrea could do the latter, his co-pencilling stuff with Keith Burns seems trapped in some awkward border region between Dicks and a nondescript DCU fill-in arc. And I understand what's happening, that it's supposed to look like middle ground superhero work that's slightly off, the better with which to transmit the filth, you see, but the problem is it never seems so much irreverent as ill at ease. And this ain't comedy of awkwardness; you've gotta have conviction.

Ahhh, look at that. You see what I mean? Fuck it, maybe I should devote a Twitter account to hilarious and thought-provoking Youtube links. They've got the best of cinema up there, and scenes from my own life. Yeah...

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

Low Moon: New Jason, from Fantagraphics. All I need to know. This one's a 216-page, $24.99 hardcover collecting Norway's finest's New York Times Magazine western serial (online here) along with four all-new short stories. Slideshow; preview. This guy's a treasure.

The Actress and the Bishop: Wasn't expecting this - a $3.99, 32-page b&w Desperado pamphlet collection of Brian Bolland's oddball humor strips from the pages of A1 and elsewhere. A very inexpensive alternative for those who missed/can't afford the 2005 Knockabout hardcover Bolland Strips!, which collected this material along with other funny bits. Yeah, search this out.

Detective Comics #854: Right up top so you don't miss it. Starting the long-awaited Greg Rucka/J.H. Williams III run on the venerable Bat-book, now starring Batwoman for an initial four-issue storyline. It's $3.99, but also 40 pages, and you get a Cully Hamner-drawn back-up story (starring the Question) with the deal. Swoon!

Faust Vol. 2: Being the second of Del Rey's cherry-pickin' compilation editions of the otaku culture-informed Japanese literary magazine (with manga); 2008's domestic vol. 7 ran a brisk 1240 pages, so something tells me there may be enough material out there for a third English edition, should demand warrant. The manga section of this one has some nice-looking stuff, including a new 56-page story by FLCL and Q-Ko-Chan: The Earth Invader Girl artist Ueda Hajime and annotated sketchbook samples from elusive Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo. Words too. It's 432 pages for $17.95; here's my review of vol. 1.

A Treasury of XXth Century Murder Vol. 2: Famous Players: Rick Geary, doing that Rick Geary thing. This one's 80 pages on the unsolved shooting of Silent Era Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor; certainly no lack of players here. From NBM, as always; it's a $15.95 hardcover. Preview here.

Remake: New from AdHouse, and one of the talked-about MoCCA books I didn't manage to pick up. It's a 144-page, $12.95 collection of robot fighting comedy from Lamar Abrams. Enjoy beatings and chuckles via this preview.

Prayer Requested: Hmm, a Drawn and Quarterly debut by illustrator Christian Northeast, from the petit livre line of lil' books of art. This one's a 96-page, $15.95 color collection of 'found' prayers transformed into images. Have a look.

Black Jack Vol. 5 (of 17): Vertical may never tire of Osamu Tezuka, and here's another 320 pages of testimony for your $16.95. You know, I've heard whispers that some episodes of this decade-running series may not be all that great. In fact, some of them are possibly kinda bad! To that I say: THANK FUCKING GOD, POP THE CORK, because that means we're diving deep into Tezuka's insane prolificacy for a closer look at the high-speed creations of a man who couldn't possibly be great every time, like c'mon now. The Astro Boy diehards already carry this burning truth in their hearts, but here we see the contortions of production for the broader audience of the so-called '70s Golden Age. Yes we will know him better; it's part of the fun of these things.

Sayonara, Zetsubo-Sensei Vol. 2: Or, Goodbye, Mr. Despair, with the connotation of teaching on the Mr., a la Goodbye, Mr. Chips. That's a bit of explaining to do as far as manga titles go, but this is a damned internet-popular franchise as far as I can tell, albeit with much focus on the successful, still-running anime adaptation (ooh, they did a Mignola homage). The domestic manga's currently up to vol. 17, and likewise ongoing. It's an ensemble high school comedy with infusions of social satire and surreal antics, headed by a suicidal male teacher and boasting a formidable cast of eccentric girl students. The artist is Koji Kumeta, working in a sleek, iconographic style fit to accommodate his often-dense arrays of info and graphics and charts. Some find it off-putting, but I like it fine. I can't find a preview, so:

Although that one's especially zesty. Here's something more typical:

Tiny signs, footnotes explaining things, manga references, characters addressing the reader, string bean limbs and visual aids - hope you like translation notes, since there's 11 pages of 'em in here in teeny tiny font size, and that's after the five pages of story commentary by Kumeta himself.

Still, even while the Japanese-specific humor has you scratching your head and flipping to the rear, there's some good, visceral laffs tucked away, often stemming from Kumeta's talent for stupid-clever concepts -- Commodore Perry arrives to commemorate the 'opening' of Japan to the West by attempting to open a swimming pool, library books, girls' legs, boys' flies, people's hearts, etc. -- and piling on complications until seemingly banal scenarios climax with, say, gossiping apartment complex housewives revealing the secrets of the cosmos. Don't mind the boys' comics teenage cutie fan service (Kumeta tries to put it in quotes but whoops, it's still there!); this is oddball manga of disarming and possibly wide appeal. From Del Rey; $12.99 for 170 pages.

Mushishi Vol. 7 (of 10): Meanwhile, in sadder Del Rey manga news, it looks like this excellent Yuki Urushibara series about a teacher-doctor-shaman who knows the wild, primal stuff of life in a timeless world has been sent back to the slow boat - vol. 8 apparently isn't due until February 2010 (and it's been forever since vol. 6, if not necessarily forever-from-now since this and Zetsubo-Sensei have been in bookstores for a month and a half now, but... you know what I'm saying). Sure, good things take time and all that, but it'd be a real shame if this translation sputtered to a halt two books from the end. Reminder: we're past the anime, so these are all-exclusive stories. Only $12.99 for 234 pages.

Gantz Vol. 5: Oh well, at least Gantz is clear through vol. 8; even at 228 pages a shot ($12.95), Hiroya Oku needs his room. As in, vol. 26 just hit Japan last week. I'm not even caught up on these Dark Horse editions. Charming as ever.

Empowered Vol. 5: Holy shit, there's five of these? Holy shit. Adam Warren, man. Dark Horse, 208 pages, $14.95, rips, tears. Look.

Cerebus Archive #2: Further nuggets 'n commentary from the house of Sim. The toll is $3.00.

Viking #2: This Image series had a fun, eye-catching first issue, and you gotta love those oversized pamphlet proportions. Only $2.99 for 24 color pages too. From writer Ivan Brandon & artist Nic Klein.

Dark Reign: Zodiac #1 (of 3): This is your Joe Casey alert for the week. I failed shamefully at taking note of Peter Milligan's The Trial of Thor comic last week, so I'm trying to scan these various Marvel things closely. Joe Casey alert, him and Nathan Fox and José Villarrubia. Preview.

Patsy Walker: Hellcat: A Marvel series plenty of people liked, from writer Kathryn Immonen & artist David Lafuente. Plus: a Marvel Comics Presents serial with artist Stuart Immonen. All in softcover for $16.99.

Ultimates by Mark Millar & Bryan Hitch Omnibus: Also a Marvel series plenty of people liked, for a while. Scooping up both Millar/Hitch series with the sketch version of Series 2 #1 and that 2005 Annual Steve Dillon drew. A mere $99.99 to relive the very essence of mainline superheroes in the early oughts, for better or worse.

JLA: The Deluxe Edition Vol. 2: More hardcover weight related to the Grant Morrison run, 320 pages for $29.99. This one collects the fan-favorite Rock of Ages (Initial Crisis?) storyline, the virgin misadventures of quintessential oh-my-god-this-new-villain-just-kicked-every-superhero's-ass-HE'S-SO-COOL wonder boy Prometheus, and... JLA/WildC.A.T.s, which I'm sure we'd all miss on principle if it wasn't here. Hey, someone out there likes it, don't let me bring you down.

All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder Vol. 1: I say "might as well throw in the stray issue #10 while you're at it," but hope endures as the American Classic hits softcover for $19.99 at that clean issue #9 break.

A full week of passion beckons.

2009-06-15T23:59:00.002-05:00

*This doesn't look like much, but that damned festival pushed last week's version of today's post over to Wednesday anyhow.

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

The Sky Crawlers (a new R1 dvd release of Mamoru Oshii's 2008 theatrical anime; a world of cold fighter jets, arrested development and sorry, looping time as a metaphor for wounded art - Seaguy is duly referenced)

At comiXology.

*Oh gee, well here's a surprise up front -

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

Legacy: Holy shit, it's a new Jack Katz comic!! It's... it's 100 pages long! Yeah... Jesus, yeah - Jack Katz the pre-Code horror guy and all-around funnybook hand, who divorced himself from the mainstream in '74 to spend 12 years on a massive, dense, idiosyncratic fantasy opus, The First Kingdom, one of the original post-underground 'bridge' comics. Man, I had no idea this was coming. It's about a dead man and his insanely large fortune, left to an unknown-to-the-family woman who speaks no English, and the intrigue that follows an insurance investigator's arrival. Published by The Hero Initiative, for the benefit of longtime cartoonists in need of health care; Hero's Charlie Novinskie serves as co-writer, going by the cover. It's $14.95. Jack Katz. Boy.

Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?: Being the new book by Brian Fies, the artist behind the noted 2004 webcomic memoir Mom's Cancer (published in hardcover by Abrams in 2006); there was some excited chatter around that one, mostly owing to nobody having heard of Fies before or seen any of his art, although his work showed some intuitive grasp of comics storytelling. Here, he covers over 35 years of father-son relations in the face of advancing technology and shimmering ideals, with authentic photographs and faux-'period' adventure comics mixed in. It's 208 color pages, hardcover, and also from Abrams; $24.95, preview here.

The Fart Party Vol. 2: The next collection of funny autobiographical comics by Julia Wertz, following her travels around the U.S. and tossing in a few never-before-seen strips. Introduction by Nicholas Gurewitch. From Atomic Book Company; $13.95 for 200 pages.

Nexus: As It Happened Vol. 1: In which the long-lived Mike Baron/Steve Rude creation kicks off a new, low-priced reprint campaign from Rude Dude Productions that'll basically track Dark Horse's Nexus Archives series, but with everything in b&w and sized 6" x 8.5", at a $9.99 cover price. Less Nexus Essentials than manga-style, but it's an option; first one's 216 pages, collecting the 1981-82 magazines and issues #1-4 of the comic book series.

Wonton Soup Vol. 2: The sophomore outing for an Oni Press series featuring outer space cuisine and intergalactic truckin'. Creator James Stokoe has an eye-catching style going; only $11.95 for 192 pages too. I'd flip through it; have a look.

20th Century Boys Vol. 3 (of 24): Naoki Urasawa, still chuggin' along. This really is a fun, lively series with a type of depth -- a sweetly moody sense of adults sorting out their formative choices and attitudes as kids and adolescents -- that's missing from a lot of fantastic suspense-driven comics of this sort. Still early too; plenty of time to hop aboard.

Elephantmen #20: Concluding artist Marian Churchland's run on this Richard Starkings-created vignettes-from-the-future Image series with a look at hippo detective Hip Flask's human trainee Vanity. I'll miss that soft coloring. Have a look.

Madman Atomic Comics #16: Penultimate issue for the Image incarnation of Mike Allred's creation; this one's all about the music.

Phonogram 2: The Singles Club #3 (of 7): And speaking of which - Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie, with shorts drawn by Leigh Gallagher and Lee O'Connor. Big week for Image; peek.

Hellblazer #256: Peter Milligan, new storyline, yes.

Mysterius: The Unfathomable #6 (of 6): Jeff Parker, Tom Fowler, Wildstorm, gone.

Sleeper: Season One: Very handy, this. A shiny new Wildstorm trade collecting the complete 2003-04 superhero espionage series from Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips (later of Criminal) into a 288-page, $24.99 package. Samples. Expect a second brick compiling the sequel series shortly.

Incognito #4 (of 6): And look at that! The new Brubaker/Phillips superhero series, a crime thing from Icon, right on the same day! I think Brubaker might have some Marvel superhero thing this week I heard about on the news, but then they had a story about chihuahuas barking at a mountain lion and I forgot all about it. Those chihuahuas were barking!

Herogasm #2 (of 6): Fun and games from Garth Ennis & John McCrea; preview here. DC also has Hitman: A Rage in Arkham this week, a $14.99 reissue of vol. 1 for a prior Ennis/McCrea experience, for those who're truly insatiable.

Starman Omnibus Vol. 3: Golden Age of Reprints? Why not?! Yet another $49.99 brick of this beloved James Robinson-written DC series, its 432 pages covering Starman #30-38, Starman Annual #2 and Starman Secret Files #1, with Tony Harris presiding over art by various hands. Note that this volume also collects a complete spin-off, 1997's The Shade #1-4, boasting no less than Michael Zulli, Gene Ha and J.H. Williams III & Mick Gray on individual issues.

Batman: The Black Casebook: Meanwhile, this isn't so much a product of the Golden Age of Reprints as some hopefully fun tie-in antics for your $17.99, as Grant Morrison introduces 144 pages' worth of ye olde Batman, Detective Comics and World's Finest Comics stories that informed his pre-Batman and Robin run with poor lost Bruce Wayne. And hey - you never know what the future may hold.

Two Against the Modern World

2009-06-15T17:20:00.000-05:00

*New column is up. This one peers into two recent works that decry an art prone to repetition, through a wider critique of societal self-preservation and the comfy heroes that champion it by default: the irregular comic book project Seaguy and the new-to-R1 2008 anime movie The Sky Crawlers, from director Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor and Urusei Yatsura, among many other endeavors. Let me know what you think!

It's gotta be done; it's gotta be fast.

2009-06-10T08:00:00.001-05:00

*Read my two-part MoCCA report below. Because it totally killed the time I had for this.

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #3 (of 3) and Batman and Robin #1 (two from Grant Morrison)

MoCCA Part 1 (manga, firearms, Elmo)

MoCCA Part 2 (lots and lots of books)

*Okay, this week only: TOP FIVE FORMAT.

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

The Color of Water: Being the sequel to Kim Dong Hwa's The Color of Earth, a strange, lovely, quite deeply underappreciated piece of comics-as-poetry from a major publisher. I guess part of the problem is that manhwa tends to get lumped in with the poppier side of manga regardless of content; worthwhile exceptions in English can probably be counted on your fingers. But First Second really has something here - a series of carefully modulated chapters tracking points in a young rural girl's growth, each one layering on visual and textual metaphors relating flowers and plants and natural growths to the beauty and wonder of female sexuality as understood by mothers and daughters. Sweet, bucolic, unfailingly sex-positive, unafraid to seem silly (and indeed, sometimes more than a bit silly, sure); it's kind of marvelous. To be followed by The Color of Heaven, later this year; 320 pages for $16.95. Preview here.

The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: More from Abrams ComicArts, this time a $40.00, 11 1/4" x 10 1/2" hardcover tribute to the legend of war and satire, fully authorized and with many rare items. By Denis Kitchen & Paul Buhle; more here.

Detroit Metal City Vol. 1: Just a little comedy here, folks; Kiminori Wakasugi's been running this since 2005, a gag-laden saga of a dainty young lad who really wants to write silly, frothy pop songs, though his massive true talent is in hardcore death metal. Can young Soichi keep his flouncy life in order while living a double life as Johannes Krauser II, titan of rape & genocide and master of the teeth-only guitar solo, whose devout fans literally take him to be a demon from hell? A font of anime (Studio 4°C! the director of Mushishi!), tribute albums and a live-action film (Gene Simmons! the dude who played L!), still ongoing. Vol. 1 is 200 pages for $12.99.

Anna Mercury 2 #1 (of 5): Only the newest in Avatar's line of small-scale, entertaining Warren Ellis-written projects. This one's a sequel (really?!), with returning artist Facundo Percio. The standard $3.99 for color.

Final Crisis HC: I could cheat and make note of Flash: The Human Race, a $14.99 softcover collecting the end of the Grant Morrison/Mark Millar joint run on the series (going from #136) and the whole of Millar's solo tenure ('till #141), but I wouldn't dare. No, just be on alert for this 240-page, $24.99 hardcover collection of all the Grant Morrison-written comics content -- not counting the Batman tie-ins, which are in the Batman: R.I.P. hardcover -- for this thing that was an Event. It had its moments; I'll just say that.

MoCCA '09: The Tourist

2009-06-09T23:59:00.005-05:00

(back to part 1)

***

VII. It was almost 2:30 when the 69th Regiment Armory came into view. Amazingly, there was still a line stretched all the way around one corner of the block; I really hoped it wasn't another fire alarm mishap, or a capacity problem, or people being turned away because they were too cool, which would definitely pose a problem for me and my gym bag of untranslated manga.

As it was, the line for tickets just happened to be that fucking long. In fact, as I'd find out later, the show hadn't even opened until 12:00 or so for a variety of reasons; "delayed books" was quoted to me. Luckily, I'd spent my morning time uptown oohing and aahing at doorways and trees. Even better: I'd pre-ordered my ticket online, so I got to walk to the front of the queue and state that I was on the list. I was sternly instructed to get a handstamp, a formless red thing that looked like I bumped the back of my palm off a table and wiped away in about two hours. Nobody checked me anyhow.

The first thing I noticed about the Armory: big. High ceiling, wide. Looming, even. But open too - you could see basically the entire show in one glance. I think there was a program, but I never found it, and I didn't really want or need one, though I'm told a bunch of folks somehow got omitted from the listings.

The second thing I noticed: it was exactly like the old venues they used to have for wrestling shows back when I was kid. My heart soared as I imagined Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli reuniting to land the Doomsday Device on Adrian Tomine. That's what City of Glass was all about.

Mazzucchelli already had a massive crowd formed for debut copies of Asterios Polyp; I said hello to Frank Santoro and Dash Shaw, but I didn't get in line myself. There were other things I wanted to find.

***

Pushwagners Soft City (Pushwagner)

Take this, for example. A huge, thick, 160-page look-at-me book just sitting around at MoCCA with no fanfare, no line, no nothing. Seems almost scandalous in a place like this, where the attentive patron can walk in with a 3/4 shot at guessing all the 'buzz' books without looking at a damned thing, based strictly on preliminary heat. But my history books tell me scandal isn't foreign to an Armory Show, thank god.

So yeah, I always hope I'll run in to something great at these shows from someone who didn't think to alert the online comics press at all, just shoving off and getting it out there; with table prices going up, there's less and less of a chance for smaller, less savvy artists to manage such surprises in the wake of well-financed (for comics), careful publishing entities.

I wouldn't say this book entirely fits that bill, but only because I was told it'd be finished soon at last year's MoCCA. It's an English-language tome from Norwegian publisher No Comprendo Press -- the web presence of which is minimal -- collecting sequential work by the artist Pushwagner, who initially completed the project in the mid-'70s, only to have the original pages lost in a suitcase until 2002, when the whole thing turned up in Oslo. It's now a $35.00 oversized softcover, in b&w with spot color, and I have no idea how you might order it.

But what astonishing work! Very simple on first blush: a panorama of conformity, with office drones waking up in the morning to their Stepford wives, driving off to labor at the behest of a captain of industry while the brides 'n babies consume what they're told. The burning eye of the sun rises at the start of the book and sets at the end, so that the cycle might begin again. Odd, unreal, parodic dialogue occasionally punctures the happening; the word 'soft' is the charm telling of the comfort of this life.

Pushwagner mostly works in images: sprawling, towering single and double-page splashes, pitting simple humans against mighty towers of power and commerce. Page after page we zoom in on terrible drives to work, traffic lights some of the only color in the world; violent fantasies occasionally mark the environment, ineffectual. But while the people are tiny, and similar, their hand-drawn state quietly reminds us of their humanity, latent here, boomed out by the noise of society's mechanisms.

Powerful allegorical worldbuilding here. These jpegs are just details; the book won't even fit on my scanner. I'd urge you to check this out, but I'm not sure how you can do it. Keep it in mind anyway; you never know what you'll run into.

***

Angst: The Best of Norwegian Comics Vol. 3 (various)

As usual for MoCCA -- new layout be damned -- there was a whole row of Scandinavian tables against the wall. And, as usual, I was happy to pick up the new Angst; it's a sort of national promotion anthology, with no credited editor, published jointly between the aforementioned No Comprendo, Jippi Comics and Dongery. Many of the same artists as seen in prior editions are included; the impression is that of a small scene, but one of variety, ranging from the careful detail of Martin Ernstsen -

-to the happy mayhem of one Øystein Runde.

Handy things, these, although I suspect some of the artists would rather be represented in a forum not so bound by implication of national identity as its driving force. Sadly, I wound up missing out an another good-looking one, From Wonderland With Love, a very attractive collection of comics from Denmark. Do follow that link, check it out; I think Diamond might have it eventually.

***

VIII. My bag was already getting heavy, and I'd hardly had a chance to look around. Why was I sweating?

I ran downstairs to use the men's room, hoping someone would do the honor of a Duchamp joke. It didn't work out just then, but I understand Gary Panter managed as part of the next day's programming, held in the only readily open room without toilets also downstairs. Same went for Saturday.

It was easy to fall in love with that lower level; it was totally a reformed dungeon, all crumbling stone facade and ruined paint, like the old music room in my high school basement back in the day. There were vintage weapons behind glass, and entire halls roped off FOR MILITARY PERSONNEL ONLY. I presume that's where they keep the guns and ammo, but fuck that; I'm all about love from now on.

Oh, I also dug how you had to pass by military recruitment posters on the way down to the bathroom or programming. Nice touch, that.

Upon returning to the main floor, I started to notice that the temperature wasn't really changing all that much regardless of where I was in the building. "The air conditioning must be way up and quiet," I thought, unaware at the time that there was apparently no air conditioning in the building whatsoever, save for the programming room, and it was probably a massive stroke of luck that it just happened to be 15-20 degrees cooler outside than for MoCCA 2008, where people were frying eggs on the CBLDF fundraising table in spite of all modern convenience.

The PictureBox table was right in front. It was mobbed, and Dan Nadel said as much, at which point I found myself trying to keep out of the way of his business, although it was pretty clear he wanted to talk more and I didn't know what to do. People swarmed. I whacked someone with my bag, but totally not on purpose.

***

Multiforce (Mat Brinkman)

And this was maybe the fastest-moving PictureBox publication of them all that day, a $15.00, 11" x 16.5" pamphlet collection of Brinkman's Paper Rodeo feature, 2000-05.

For those who loved the near-wordless monster society observation of the artist's Teratoid Heights, this is a mutant version of that, a chatty, all-over everywhere tour of a wildly detailed fantasy landscape, full of talks and encounters. Nearly all the Fort Thunder books released in this gradual second flowering have shown a keen emphasis on society, and this one brings Brinkman's love for jagged, melty creatures more into line with the dispersed conversations of something like Brian Chippendale's Ninja, but with a special focus on consuming, identifying spaces, every page a new world.

And they're big pages; up above is 4 of over 30 panels from a sample sheet; you owe it to yourself to see them all in person. I picked up two copies, one of which was for Chris Mautner. "I just know Chris'll love this," I thought, bending the pamphlet horribly while shoving it into my bag.

***

Cold Heat Special #9 (Frank Santoro & Lane Milburn)

Wouldn't be an alternative comics show without one of these puppies. The side-story/fever dream freakout Cold Heat minis are now on the cusp of matching the projected issue length of the main series (issue #7/8 of which is due at SPX in a few months), and this one -- a small pamphlet with b&w covers and two-color innards -- even reunites series co-creator Santoro with Closed Caption Comics' Milburn, he of last issue, thus creating the appearance of a regular team. The story has heroine Castle looking around in a castle, and there are horses.

***

1-800-MICE #3 (Matthew Thurber)

And yeah - a third issue for Thurber's funny, surreal series, which picked up a few devout readers back in the day. This one's in more of a large minicomic format, all white paper and such, but the content's just as we left it. It doesn't seem to be available online at the moment, but keep checking the PictureBox site.

***

Epoxy #1 (of 3) (John Pham)

Then, of course, there's Frank Santoro's longbox.

Already a beloved staple of cons otherwise lacking in bags 'n boards, it's an exciting selection of doubles from the Santoro archives (new every time!) promising all sorts of goodies from god knows when. Supposedly there was Shaky Kane stuff that'd already sold by the time I got there; I've left my eventual purchase in-bag for the illustration above, so as to best convey Santoro's enthusiasm for putting things together (really though, you need him standing there hand-selling). A stray copy of Jimbo #4 bore a label reading "GARY PANTER INVENTED YOUR STYLE." The various Brendan McCarthy comics actually grew in excitement, until an issue of Paradax declared "BRENDAN MCCARTHY KILL KILL KILL."

This is not to be confused with the random smatter of stuff generally found at the PictureBox table, such as Real Deal. I'd actually found issue #3 of that in a back-issue bin at a local shop; the store owner looked at me in disbelief as I brought it up, like I'd snuck the comic into the store with me to play a joke and hilariously give him my money or something.

Anyway, Epoxy #1 was released in 2000, this was Pham's comics debut, at least as far as the non-minicomics world was concerned. 'Twas an olde tyme self-published one man anthology pamphlet, with three stories spread over 64 pages. Fantagraphics is releasing Pham's current series, Sublife, which doesn't bear nearly as much Euro-kissed manga influence as the stuff of yore. Now if only I could track down #2...

***

IX. Next up was the always-swell Bries table, home of Belgium's finest English and Dutch-language comics (they have themed anthologies too). I heard a lot of nice things about Red Riding Hood Redux, a set of five small books by Nora Krug concerning the old folk tale, very nicely designed. In fact, somebody with a big publisher was complimenting the Bries table on their book designs as I walked up and started fingerprinting everything.

"Would you like a bag?" I was asked when I'd finished.

"No. I've got bags."

It must be great to fly all the way over from Belgium for really scintillating conversation.

***

The First Book of Hope (and) The Second Book of Hope (Tommi Musturi)

These are Bries' editions of small, 48-page landscape-format comics by Finnish artist Musturi, also the mind behind the art comics anthology GlömpX. They're works of careful, page-by-page pacing, modulated to maintain a reflective tone. A lovely, duotone color cartoon approach accompanies (and sometimes raises irony from) a man's narration of lingering anxiety; I expect Chris Ware comparisons exist somewhere, although Musturi's steady-beating narrative draws less attention to itself, remaining as quiet as puffs of breeze over thoughts. I'm told a third issue is due in a few months.

***

X. Around that time I ran into Sean T. Collins, who explained most of the situation surrounding the show's late start. It turned out the panels were late too, which all but assured I couldn't catch the Fletcher Hanks show before I had to run back for my train.

It's always good to see Sean at these things. I also ran into Douglas Wolk and Neilalien, the later of whom scoffed at my upcoming 5th anniversary of blogging - but a spring chicken! A veritable poking egg! I dug through my bag to show everyone what I bought, thus bending Chris' copy of Multiforce well beyond recognition.

I didn't get to see all the books that were recommended to me. A fair amount of people were excited over Kazimir Strzepek's The Mourning Star Vol. 2. I love Tom Gauld's work, but I sort of ran out of money before I could reach The Gigantic Robot.

Ditto for Jerry Moriarty and The Complete Jack Survives; that's a Buenaventura Press book (so is Gauld's), which means I'll probably find it easily in stores or online or something in the near future and thus and maybe shouldn't be buying it at a show, but I make exceptions for artist signings. However, Moriarty was literally walking away as I arrived -- and the Buenaventura credit card machine had a $50.00 minimum -- and I let it go for later. It was great just seeing the RAW veteran there, at his first-even signing, tall and lean with long strands of sliver hair falling against his face, like a corollary wizard out of Tolkein, the kind that isn't on the page yet somehow manages to seem there.

***

You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! (ed. Paul Karasik)

Moriarty is also a suspected Patient Zero for the Fletcher Hanks effect, having originally suggested the Golden Age auteur's work for reprinting in RAW lo those many years ago. These days Hanks is as well-known as any comic book artist of the period, mainly through the efforts of Karasik and his Fantagraphics-published megahit 2007 collection I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! I mean, when Stardust gets a prominent cameo in Alan Moore's & Kevin O'Neill's newest outing for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you know the culture has been duly fucking saturated.

Well, IT ENDS HERE, as they say in the funnies. It's pretty fun flipping through this companion volume and seeing how it mirrors the first book: black cover in place of white, Fantomah in place of Stardust, etc. Karasik even starts the book with the final panel from his comics-format essay that closed vol. 1, and then proceeds to laungh into just what that first book lacked: a prose introduction packed with historical context. Special emphasis is placed on sorting out what Hanks isn't -- an 'outsider' artist, basically; he had formal art training, which he occasionally excelled at, and he ran in the same circles as some early comic book folk -- from the stuff that really does make him unique, like his career-spanning insistence on writing and drawing everything himself, not a universal quality in the pre-WWII comic book world.

Then it's off to the remainder of the Hanks library, although Karasik notes that some 'variant' versions of existing stories were published in places with re-drawn figures, so it's implied there may be some off-model Hanks still floating around out there. The editor also admits up front that you can track the decline of Hanks' raw funnybook power as the chronological tales move forward and page layouts become uniform, and action comics motifs become more codified. I'd also add that the first volume was pretty clearly intended as a 'best-of' project, leaving this subsequent stuff feeling a bit like leftovers. Nothing reddens the cheeks and gets the sniffles going like Stardust pounding the crap out of some dastard and turning him in to the space authorities. GAH!

But once you've got the bug, there's no getting rid of it. You'll want this, and you'll see it through 'till the end, at which point Karasik presents a reproduction of no less than Hanks' Certificate of Death. 'The end' indeed.

Fantagraphics had some fun offering show patrons good reason to buy early; while supplies lasted, your purchase got you an exclusive minicomic reprint of a Fantomah story in b&w -- it's a coloring book, you see -- with a Charles Burns portrait reproduced from a Believer cover. Something must have worked; the book sold out.

***

XI. I think I might have been the last one to get his book signed that day; right after he finished my sketch, giggling over how weird it was coming, Karasik stood up to fill in for the absent Gary Groth at the Arnold Roth/Al Jaffee panel, which was pretty obviously behind schedule. I said hello to Mike Baehr, manning the table, but I didn't stay long; it was getting pretty late, and I hadn't even made a complete run of the floor yet. I stuffed the book in my bag, and the rapidly increasingly head caused Chris' copy of Multiforce to wrap around it like a young marsupial embracing its mother, which just didn't make sense.

Moving across the room, I ran into my old friends Justin J. Fox and Marcos Pérez; they were in very good humor, particularly when I described myself as a full-time free spirit blowing across the Mountain Laurel bush of this life on Earth. I'm not sure if it was the button-down shirt or the gym bag full of comics that did it.

***

I Dreamed of You and Mr. Eyebyaninch #2 (Justin J. Fox)

The second in Fox's series of landscape-format books, b&w and hand-stitched and 30 pages. Not a show debut or anything, but still! Fantastic journeys to the interior, doomed romance, clowns in mouths, talking creatures and sharp teeth - all curled and crossed in wide format. The lettering's aces too.

***

XII. It was 4:30 or so by then, and quickly becoming obvious what I wasn't going to be doing. Finding Tucker & Nina Stone and Matthew J. Brady, for instance. Attending many panels at all, if any. Buying even 1/5 of the European comics I liked and probably won't be seeing sitting around in person again for another year.

That last part really bugged me, so I took another look at that side of the room. I still regret not picking up some Finnish or Romanian stuff. On the plus side, though, I ran into Andrei Molotiu, editor of Fantagraphics' upcoming Abstract Comics: The Anthology, one of the books I'm most anticipating at the moment. A preview copy was available for perusal; it's a lovely book to hold and flip through, full of varied contributions from major 'names' -- Robert Crumb, Gary Panter, Lewis Trondheim, Patrick McDonnell, James Kochalka -- and new faces alike (not to mention comics bloggers Derik Badman & Noah Berlatsky). Andrei was very excited about the project, and for good reason.

***

Nautilus (Andrei Molotiu)

Plus, he had a new solo book for sale ($20.00) from Danish publisher Fahrenheit, an oversized album format hardcover collecting three pieces: Expedition to the Interior (from Blurred Vision Vol. 4); 24 x 24: A Vague Epic (a fittingly titled suite of 24 titled one-pagers subdivided into 24 panels each); and [otherwise untitled]. A compact, attractive introduction to the artist's work.

I also got a sketch, prompted by a word of my choosing: gallop. I don't have the slightest idea why I chose that, although maybe it's best such things come straight out of you with no consideration. Maybe my limited time was getting to me? This is just a detail below, by the way; Andrei wound up drawing all the way across two pages.

***

Reykjavik (Henrik Rehr)

This was another book from the same publisher in the same tall, deluxe album format; Rehr was selling it for a startling $5.00. It's a single piece, a black-to-white storm of churning aquatic visuals, still every so often for primal creation forms -- roots, tendrils -- to hang in the depths. Strikes me as a creation myth, tiny square panels of activity gradually battered off into what could be called fingerprints. Potent.

The artist wiped sweat from his brow as he sketched. Oddly, while drawn in much the same style as the splashing images of the book, the completed forms seemed more like licks of fire. Could have been the white background. Or the room.

"And now," he said, handing me my book, "I'm having a drink."

***

XIII. There was a bottled water machine by the programming room downstairs. A Poweraide machine too, priced at $1.25, which wasn't bad at all; Sean theorized that the Armory wasn't built with bilking people for their comfort in mind, and thus showed cracks in its armor of convention expectations. Probably right; if they'd wanted to drive people to buy stuff from the heat, there'd be more than two machines anyway.

I also took the opportunity to ask Sean where Kate Beacon was; it seems she wasn't listed in the program as an exhibitor (neither was Brian Wood), although I didn't know that. I just can't find anything. And I was terrified that I was going to call her 'Kate Bacon' by accident and thus precipitate a calamity. Beacon. Beacon! you fool!

***

Never Learn Anything From History (Kate Beaton)

Of course, then I found out her name was Beaton.

Look - she drew me a little man:

***

XIV. I'd been told Tim Hodler had arrived, so I rolled back over to the PictureBox table. It's funny, those conversations; we can all probably agree that MoCCA is primarily a consumer show. There's programming, yes, better positioned compared to the last few years', but it's mostly people walking around and buying things from folks behind tables. Comiket, only way smaller. It's not a promotional show, where the primary trade is anticipation over forthcoming products; NYCC, for instance. No, there's more of a human connection here, but it's the connection between money in one hand and items in the one across. That's the anatomy of the place, the flow of blood.

Conversation, that other human contact, stands little chance in such an environment unless you're moving around with friends from your side of the table. I usually do, although this time I didn't. I was mainly focused on the other side, the artists and merchants, busy busy. Stuffing my bag good and tight; it was starting to kill, and it was really, really hot by then. Weight and heat; books that look right, that you've heard about, but the funny thing about 'buzz' books is that they're anticipation too. Solidified, condensed, but people don't have time to read the damn things ahead of time. Not usually. They become promises, from one person to another; a separate communication, one for the sales floor, divorced from the communication of art.

You've got to extend the festival if you want something else. The money's getting tighter, and more of it's necessary. If you're attending, you stick to the programs, you look for the receptions, you go to the things afterward; there's your talking to people. In one place - the collection of everyone is the 'festival' aspect, although I could be too kind here, mistaking people gathering for something specific to one year, one place, one event.

I wouldn't be there. I'm a tourist, becoming absorbed by the urban, unfamiliar surroundings, whisked away down the vessels of the floor. It's like wandering around in NYC, but in a large room with a lot of things to buy. When the time comes, I'll leave. People will go to bed, and I'll be gone. People will sing, and I'll be gone. I felt like I needed a camera. A shirt to mark the occasion. A shirt to soak up my sweat. Oh my arm started to ache, from all of the things I bought.

Um, none of that was in my conversation with Tim. We talked about Batman and Robin #1 and Pluto and stuff. Sean was there, and Douglas for a while, and Neilalien. Tim did take a picture of that. It was nice. I dug through my bag one last time, and noticed that Chris' copy of Multiforce had become a meticulous origami duckling. Maybe I should give him my copy.

It was time to run, wrap it up.

***

George Sprott (1894-1975) (Seth)

It was almost the end of the day, the line was short; I had to. Seth's jacket was on the whole time. He kept a little circle of tools to sketch with; I like how the color scheme kind of matches the book cover. Typical!

***

Windy Corner Magazine #3 (ed. Austin English)

Found at the Sparkplug table; last thing I got, glad I didn't miss it. Windy Corner is a really nice pamphlet-format magazine of and about comics art, nurtured by English, an artist and perceptive critic (he used to do the Comics Journal's minicomics column). Lots of color images in this new one, which includes comics by Sakura Maku, Frank Santoro on Gipi's Garage Band, Vanessa Davis in conversation with the great Carol Tyler, and helpful illustrations by folks like Molly Colleen O'Connell:

Get it from the Sparkplug site if you missed it at the show; 80 pages you won't regret for $11.00. The internet gives you time and space. Appreciate.

***

XV. And that was about the end, at 6:00. The place stayed open later than usual, I'm told, to make up for the snafus. The Fletcher Hanks show was just getting started, down in the cellar. Likely hipsters strolled up and down the streets, and I waved while thinking of Elmo. I bought a coffee, stepped around a man laying on the sidewalk, and walked off toward Penn Station.

Penn Station was a long, agonizing way off, and my bag really started to hurt. Soon I was switching arms over and over. Pausing. Giving people pause. After eight or so blocks I dropped the whole thing and faced the wall, struggling to put my shirt back together and my bones where they belonged.

In passing, I caught the eye of a woman. She was staring, but not oddly. Regarding me as unique landscape, but land nonetheless. Like I was meant to be there. Like I'd blended in as a visitor so perfectly I when then, for an instant, like something native, belonging. My sight lingered as she passed. I smiled.

***

***

"My god," I whispered, "she thought I was pissing."

I. As usual, I didn't wake up until I was 45 minutes out of bed, and then I panicked on the highway, and of course I got to the station too early.

2009-06-08T23:59:00.003-05:00

II. So there were two teenage girls sitting next to me on a station bench. One of them was looking at her feet, swinging to and fro in flip-flops. The other had a streak of hot bottled near-purple plunging vertically down her head, and a polite if mildly ironic smile on her lips.

"It's okay," she cooed, "lots of fun. C'mon, fun!"

A nice scene; good to see kids still urge friends to see them off on the train, going to god knows where. A job interview in Philadelphia? Relatives in Trenton? Did she have a new minicomic ready for the MoCCA festival in New York, and she forgot to alert the internet, and suddenly she's uncertain as to the very fact of her existence?

"Fun! Fun!" chanted the streaky girl, unable to grant such high-functioning clichés their suggested book value. It's hard being 17 these days.

Me, I was serious as high mass in a blackout at the sounding of trumpets. It was the first comics show I'd ever attended without any friends traveling along, and indeed my first trip to New York City entirely alone. It's a dangerous place, Manhattan; my 8th grade teacher always told us not to look up at the skyscrapers, or someone nearby would steal our wallets before we peered back down. I guess there's daily prizes, tokens in exchange, etc. All I saw last time were small town girls and beaming families purchasing items.

But the dangers I knew of were real, if different: I'm talking hipsters. That's right, the insidious, KAOS-like force that's been not-so-secretly behind every sub-par comic book, overrated movie and unappealing book design of the last decade, not counting superhero stuff, although maybe they're just especially stealthy with those.

And it's more than that! Hipsters are like locusts, terrorists and postmodernism combined; last year someone from Adbusters declared them literally the end of Western civilization, and I could just imagine what they'd do to a lonely boy like me. God, they'd surround me in their shirts and pants, politically unmotivated, forcing me to listen to music I find unappealing and not inviting me places. Usually I'd have Chris Mautner around to ward them off with silver crosses and other Capcom merchandise, in the event they somehow appeared, possibly in the form of shades or multi-headed dragons in tight pants.

Not this year. It looked like it was just me and my Beretta 92FS. I patted it under my shirt and it whispered "comics" in my head. Too bad I wasted all my ammunition last night during that dream about people lining up to use my apartment toilet.

Hey, no problem: MoCCA's in an armory this year. There's gotta be some bullets somewhere.

III. Alright, no, I'm joking; I didn't really bring a gun on the train. That's silly. And dangerous too.

I mean, someone's gotta to be selling one somewhere in NYC.

IV. It was overcast as the train pulled in, but omens were good; that house in Newark with three doors and no steps was still standing, unchanged, like the Statue of Liberty, only made in America and better. Fuck the subway, I was walking.

Not to MoCCA; not yet. Living in a hollow pumpkin in a field of weeds instills certain feelings about large metropolitan areas. There's a thrill in discovering anonymity by virtue of overwhelming human traffic. It's not just that the architecture affects you -- the old buildings and the tourist places and the franchise restaurants and the shitty shops and all -- but that it absorbs you, so that you're part of some fanciful abstraction, the 'will' of the city itself, supplicant and sure. To vanish there is to fade from labor, from worry, from a kid driving by on the way to the ice cream place and firing an air pistol and plugging the guy in front of you instead.

Fucking ecstatic is what I'm saying. I wanted it. So what if strolling down Madison Avenue doesn't mean a thing these days? If I'm there, I might as well. Let the noise have me, alone and absorbed!

First, however, I needed to shop for some comics, in anticipation of shopping for comics later.

V. And what better place to go than Kinokunya Books? I might have missed it last year, and I totally couldn't find it on Google Street View because I kept turning my guy in the wrong direction and my supervisor was yelling something about expedition, but old fashioned 'writing important things down on a post-it note and putting it in my pocket' served me well, just like when making small talk.

I was pretty impressed walking in off 6th Avenue; Kinokunya is a lot bigger inside than it looks from the street, with a 'general Japanese publication needs' level right from the door, a specialty concerns floor downstairs, and a big ol' escalator to nerd heaven planted way in the back. Those ink drawings Takehiko Inoue did on the walls? One's at the top of the up escalator, and the other's on the way down.

Quickly, I found myself lost in the Japanese-language manga section, which is slightly larger than a well-stocked Borders' English-language comics corner (and there's a ton of English-language stuff too). Did you know that color Yoshitoshi ABe serial from Robot has a trade collection out? Or that Japanese art books start at $55.00 or so? I opted to start feeling around by recognition, getting the hang of the place.

Behind me, two girls in costumes discussed how kids today were ruining manga. A camera crew set up to record a show by the cafe. Everything was in shrink wrap. No problem.

***

Takemitsuzamurai Vol. 5 (Issei Eifuku & Taiyō Matsumoto)

This was the most recent Matsumoto stuff I could find, a collection from his current ongoing series, the title of which translates roughly to Bamboo Blade Samurai. It's noteworthy for having won an Excellence Prize at the 2007 Japan Media Arts Festival; a sixth volume came out in Japan in April, but I didn't see it around.

As you can see, this stuff's a definite departure from the Matsumoto work currently available in English (Tekkonkinkreet, Blue Spring, those ultra-successful big money editions of No. 5); the characters are stylized in a manner evocative of various woodblock prints, while their environment is sliced and ripped into striking panel organization. This is a samurai comic through and through, from the art, and it seems the content has prompted Matsumoto to adopt a subtler poise.

Well, not entirely subtle, no. I don't know anything about writer Eifuku, and I wonder how the process of collaboration has affected Matsumoto's approach; it seems no less 'free,' but distinctly more self-controlled, if you get what I'm saying. There might be an interesting give and take between the writing and the art; the visuals seem heavy on artifice, self-evidently built up in places from strips and scraps of texture, almost like collage. It's lovely, but playful, and an entirely on-the-level script could draw some special power from that.

Lord knows when we'll find out for ourselves, aboveground. VIZ still has Matsumoto's solo Gogo Monster set for November, and I reckon they'll feel it out from there.

***

Tesoro (Natsume Ono)

Ono is probably best known (if at all) for her 2005-06 series Ristorante Paradiso, a Rome-set romantic drama from the pages of the beloved Manga Erotics F (motto: "Standards Up, Pants Down"); a television anime adaptation just began airing this past April. Her newest series is an NYC police project called Coppers, serialized in Kodansha's monthly Morning 2 anthology, aka: the one that's free online (click the purple orb; Coppers doesn't seem to be around this month, though).

This, however, was published under the auspices of Shogakukan's 'alternative'-flavored magazine IKKI (the extremely fresh and alternative spelling of comix is employed!), which VIZ recently launched in English-speaking environs as a source for online serialization of VIZ Signature offerings. The English IKKI will eventually get around to serializing Ono's ongoing Edo period drama House of Five Leaves (six volumes thus far), while VIZ preps a January 2010 all-in-one print release of her 2004-05 webmanga series not simple, from the now-defunct online magazine Comic Seed!

Tesoro, however, is not on tap for a North American release at the moment, although it gives a nice overview of Ono as a visualist. As the cover indicates, it's a collection of short stories produced over the course of 10 years; some of them are featured on her homepage, while others hail from parts unknown to monolingual prats like myself.

Nonetheless, it's clear that Ono is an appealing visualist, fine with the subtleties of facial expression while cartooning human forms broadly. Some works are inky and composed in squat, almost superdeformed style, while others veer away into doodles.

Many additional drawings are included, suggesting an extensive variation in style. She's done some BL stuff too, if I'm not mistaken, and samples I've seen online from other projects suggest a more 'realist' approach in her arsenal. I find a lot of this stuff to be really appealing on a visceral level -- very warm and sweet -- so I'm looking forward to witnessing the push VIZ is preparing for her.

***

Golgo 13 Vol. 150 (Takao Saito & Saito Production)

Alright, yes, I'm a nerd. I bought vol. 150 of Golgo 13, I guess because I figured Wolverine might show, being an anniversary issue and all. There's a whole G13 section at Kinokunya, going up to the most recent vol. 152. This thing's been going on so long the dust jacket flaps do nothing but list the names of prior volumes, in teeny tiny type.

Someone out there has all this shit memorized. Someone hit on the head in 1969.

Anyway: Duke Togo. I love him, you love him, we all love him, and his comics are just as much fun in Japanese as they are in English.

Aw hell, you can forget that stuff. Duke is a man of action, after all, and there's three huge stories in here, 2002-03. This book came out in 2008. Golgo 13 the serial is half a decade ahead of its collected editions. All praise the Saito Pro assembly line!

Story #1 is your typical extensive Top Secret Mission, this time seeing Duke hired to destroy some Very Important CIA Documents by carrying a huge weapon around and shooting his way through a fireworks display.

Exciting stuff, but not nearly as excellent as Our Man's natty dress sense! Yep, it's the 21st century and G13 is rocking the ascot under his black vampire jacket.

Better still: that's an art error. The ascot only appears in that particular panel, one presumes because some mad, beautiful fool at Saito Pro decided that this particular scene simply could not pass without proper gekiga action hero attire coming into view at least once. I salute you, HERO.

Meanwhile, in Story #2, Duke encounters trouble in a more casual manner.

This one's a jungle thriller, in which various competing factions struggle over a cache of valuable materials. It's also the kind of story where Duke is the only one left alive at the end, and he couldn't care less about the folly of man's greed. A Swiss account's all a real man needs.

Finally, Story #3 pits Golgo 13 against this excellent dude:

Amazingly, that's exactly how I looked that day in the Kinokunya bookstore, albeit without the gun, and fearful because of it. From what I can make out, the plot has something to do with timing and hitting targets with just the right delay; two characters draw a chart for the reader at one point. I appreciate the gesture, but I'm nonetheless confident that the most vital motif beams through regardless of tongue or culture.

Duke is Awesome. And everyone knows it.

As a special bonus, colorful advertising slips fall out while you flip through your book. I think this one's some cell phone dating service, which is great, since Golgo 13 readers are probably too busy catching up on tens of thousands of pages of back issues to manage face-to-face contact anyway.

Thanks, Golgo 13 - looks like you've pulled off the impossible hit of love into my heart.

***

VI. I spent way too long in that store. Way too long, and I didn't care.

It was almost 1:00, and the sun had gotten to blazing. I'd bought a lunch at the Kinokunya cafe: a chicken-themed bento box and a supermarket-quality spicy tuna onigiri, with a green tea frap that actually tasted like a milk tea. I sat in Bryant Park and ate. A parade went by - seriously. All of my books went into my handy gym bag, over my shoulder. Easy.

I'd go up Broadway, over to Park Avenue. Down to Madison Square, in the way a tourist can be led.

Before all that, though, there was Times Square. Everyone's made a hundred jokes about that place, naturally; how it's Disney World, how it's all garish and fake and dumb. They don't let you out of the womb without making a few of those, I think.

I'm not sure about all those jokes, but I am sure Spongebob Squarepants and Elmo were standing in the fucking middle of Times Fucking Square that particular afternoon, along with an expansive score of tourists sitting in color-coded folding chairs, right out in the street. Was it seat day? Was a concert happening? I was confused. So many

Oh my god.

My mind raced. Think, Jog - this is 42nd Street. A former nexus of trash entertainment and porno pleasure collected from all over the globe. Cultural resistance against the prevailing American mainstream, a subversive bulwark of minority, countercultural expression veiled as titilation for the bourgeois bold. And all these people, sitting here, in this place... awash in a tradition of good sleaze, sitting and staring, smiling and inactive, some of them dancing in an unappealing manner...

Jesus Christ, they ALL must be HIPSTERS!!

I flew into a blind panic, thrusting my hands under my shirt and wishing Bethany (my gun) was there so I could shoot my way out. Someone had to help me. Someone trustworthy. Bright, successful, respectful of people.

"Elmo! Elmo! I need a handgun, Elmo! A handgun! A handgun! A handgun! A handgun! Elmo, a handgun for protection! Elmo! Elmo... Elmo like handgun? Er, bullets nom nom danger vanish? Elmo? Elmo?!"

He looked at me then, but Elmo's face was full of sadness. I was immediately overcome with shame, even though I'd sincerely believed that Elmo's World placed a premium on personal security. No matter; I was being ridiculous, and everyone knew except me. My eyes began to water.

Then Elmo vigorously rubbed a bald guy's head and it was so funny we laughed and laughed, staggering and grabbing our sides, tears of anxiety chased by broiling streams of revelry and I fell right to the ground laughing and so many people were there with me, grown adults grasping each other just howling and curled in sandals and t-shirts into fetal positions and then ribs literally started exploding from laughter, pop pop popping hard in writhing pockets of flesh like unventilated microwave suppers, dozens of bodies bursting piece by piece in peals of hysteria in rhythmic procession like music and young children started dancing, actually dancing in the streets, 10, 12-year old kids to the beat of their parents' sides erupting like champagne corks under a tablecloth up and down Times Square, New York City, skin melting in chuckles through the folds of a hundred chairs on asphalt and souls rising to the sky and then a hurricane of pigeons from seven blocks around whirled upward into a cyclone shitting cherry blossoms, perfumed pink petals commemorating the ephemeral grace of the formless, shameless, bodiless hilarity that engulfed us all and Elmo, oh oh Elmo, oh yes my Elmo, you're no Grover, no, but today you'll do.

***

(forward to part 2)

(random images taken from Rakia, by Masao Yajima & Boichi, running wild in Kodansha's Morning)

Most Dreaded "What's Coming Up" Post

2009-06-07T23:59:00.002-05:00

It may look like Golgo 13 is taking a break up there, but he's ready to spring into a thrilling week of action involving my scanning a lot of pictures. I'm finishing my MoCCA trip report now -- great to see you/sorry I missed you, by the way! -- so I'm actually going to post it Monday evening (i.e. in 18 hours or something) in place of my usual Monday post, which will run on Tuesday. Nobody likes a stale con post.

That's me disappearing in the first panel, and Billy Bat is saying "see you all Monday evening," and the remaining captions are extolling my virtues, such as timeliness. See you all Monday evening!

Wish I'd read 'em in this order.

2009-06-03T23:00:00.005-05:00

Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #3 (of 3)

I know my mind is broken and all, but isn't that one hell of a Chris Ware pose Mom is striking up there? Jesus Christ I love that.

Last time around, reader Moose N. Squirrel suggested I wasn't doing this series justice with my continued focus on its inherent superhero genre critique. And I agree, it's definitely about more than that. At its broadest, the extended Seaguy saga is about becoming aware of the controlling forces of this world -- in place before you can think, and adept at doing the subsequent thinking for you -- and taking it upon yourself to become aware of the contours of that control. Stability, comfort, amusement - it's all part of the plan.

So pretend its a wall. You come to understand its size, and you push. It moves a little, maybe gives a ways before you have to back up. Writer Grant Morrison has suggested the Seaguy books each represent a period in the title character's growth, and for now that's fitting. A child pushes a little ways, in Book 1, then falls over and goes back to bed. A teenager, in the present book, pushes and pushes with intent to wreck. But those kids are callow, and rarely make sure the job's done right. Around their romance, the mechanisms still click.

On the other hand, there's another part of this issue I love to pieces, the very last page, and while it's a decent enough grace note on its own, you really don't get the full impact unless: (A) you've read New X-Men; (B) you're aware of the proximity of the original Seaguy's release to a troubled genre situation at Marvel; and (C) you recognize how the in-story idealism of the older work applies to the commentary-on-the-refutation-of-that-idealism of Seaguy by again becoming in-story idealism.

It's very teenage, very fuck you I do believe in change FUCK YOU, and while Morrison's intertextual frolics and rampant cross-referencing and calling back can become overwhelming, this is one of the times where it's done to heartbreakingly lovely effect, one that relies on the superhero aspect of the greater metaphor.

Indeed, even on a page-by-page basis, the comic is stronger when it's close to the viscerally fantastic; Cameron Stewart has ample opportunity to flex his whimsey-terror muscles in a great bit with Mickey Eye costumed characters dragging citizens of its magic kingdom into a factory-dungeon for granting wishes made through tears -- those big eyes and their red legs and little tails look cute even dumping bodies in the furnace -- while a later bit taking on reality television and consumer video narcissism feels like mere lecturing despite its larger social topic. Plus, the big climactic superhero fights has one of the best laughs of the series ("ikt"), although I liked the bit with the wedding invitation too.

There's some curious storytelling choices, though, which maybe serve to shore up the metaphor better than the drama. The Seaguy we see in this issue seems a good five or six steps farther along the path than the just-again-waking guy we left in issue #2; Morrison even inserts some dialogue alluding to terrible things the hero as seen to change him, although not in any specific way. Whatever it is, he's ready and able to rip the place down, although ambiguity hasn't been totally abandoned; like in The Prisoner, the nonconformist's victory over Number 2 only reveals more of the workings of the Village, and Seaguy doesn't even go so far as to ask to see Number 1.

It's enough that there's a hole in the wall, even as he's told a New Eye is as good as grown. No matter; the series plunges back into metaphor. The eternal swordfight, the long struggle, fighting and fighting to get at what you want, endless struggle; last issue has Seaguy reject absurd masculine extremes and this one sees everyone halt the violence, save for in the service of revolution! If this is Western society, it's awfully self-healing, being the best there is at what it does (and what it does is sustain itself). And if its superheroes, isn't this little victory just a request for now that everything not be so ugly and retroactive? Like, don't do anything really awful?

I guess the future form is left to Book 3; Morrison's present tense seems pronounced simply enough.

***

Batman and Robin #1

Case in point. Morrison has mentioned that this series is going to be a forum for "just crazy stories that are pretty upfront," as opposed to, say, R.I.P., and while this sort of anticipatory pronouncement needn't and shouldn't be taken as a warranty -- I'm pretty sure Seven Soldiers was preceded with an ultimately (happily) broken vow to leave his metaphors in the drawer -- so far, this time, I actually believe him.

Quite frankly, I don't have all that much to say about this comic. It's a slick, enjoyable introduction to the new Batman status quo, entirely accessible to anyone who skipped Battle for the Cowl (say, me), though still unobtrusively connected to prior Morrison storylines; note that gooey, ham-headed villain Prof. Pyg (a possible university colleague to Dr. Hurt?) is the same guy that enjoys an inverted crucifixion in Batman #666's alternate future. And what better way to kick off a breezy new series -- one that sees fit to open with Our Heroes putting a stop to Mr. Toad's wild ride... of crime!! -- than a quick citation to one of the best issues of the prior run, one dedicated to showing off how bad it all could be if the Batman were goddamned different.

Frank Quitely, though, does deserve a few words. I hate to be the 10,000th mention of this on the internet, but Morrison's particular approach to storytelling compression really does come off a lot better accompanied by an artist that carries a unique cut of the burden.

The script here doesn't get into the details of how Dick Grayson took up the Batman position at all, nor does it spend any time detailing his connection to Damian. It does provide a few pages of angst for Dick, and several dismissive remarks from his boy sidekick -- already one of the funnier ideas at work is having a Batman teamed with a Robin that's really, really, really eager to move up the Bat-hierarchy -- yet the art gently leavens the tone with Dick's slight smile, and Damion's relaxed posture; there's real camaraderie here, silent but authentic, bonding this super young team as eager to get some things done, high-profile. Words can't do that alone.

I suspect comparisons to All Star Superman are inevitable; on a purely visual level, Quitely seems slightly scratchier with his pencils, maybe as a consequence of working with a different colorist (Alex Sinclar, Gotham dark & busy to Jamie Grant's Metropolis bright 'n shiny), or possibly due to cutting loose the Super-series' airy wide views in favor of heavier action. Morrison, meanwhile, seems especially dedicated to serving up a fresh start, which is appropriate beyond the issue number on the cover. Both ASS and the former Batman strove to provide comprehensive visions of their respective heroes, the former through distillation, and the latter via accumulation, accepting all of Bat-history as 'true.'

That's all over now, and while Batman and Robin has several things in common with the Superman book -- an old-yet-new cast, a 12-issue megastory, a light-yet-serious feel, Frank Quitely (for now) -- it's also an in-continuity advance toward simpler, sleeker Batman comics. Funny that the out-of-continuity ASS could just pick up and be, while the DCU material apparently needed a lengthy exegesis and a crossover Event and the replacement of the characters wearing the costumes to roll its way to the point of being a pick-up-and-go friendly superhero comic.

Which is exactly what this is for the moment: a fun, accessible Batman book with neat takes on the main cast and some colorful new(ish) villains, no more, no less. It's not built to last; Quitely will be absent for issues #4-9, in favor of different art teams, and obviously we can expect Bruce Wayne's return sometime after #12, if not earlier. Hell, Final Crisis itself made it clear he wouldn't stay dead.

The object then, I think, is to get a little extra fun in while that possibility is least encumbered, and maybe serve as an example for the more exacting rebirth of the first guy. Small steps, pressing toward the barricade. Like the guy in the wetsuit.

And the third.

2009-06-01T21:30:00.001-05:00

*Nothing much on this site for the last few days; obligations, ideas, etc.

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Ashen Victor (finally, a manga that answers the burning question of "what if Sin City starred Dream from The Sandman and it was about racetrack fixing among cyborgs?"... I bet you were just thinking that)

(at The Savage Critics)

I Want to Go Home (a 1989 film by Alain Resnais, about an American cartoonist reluctantly abroad in Paris)

(at comiXology)

*D&Q's got it all -

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

George Sprott (1894-1975): Oh, this'll be nice. It's the new one from Seth -- yes, not just book design but actual comics by Seth! -- an oversized (12" x 14") hardcover expansion of the serial he drew for the New York Times, which I considered one of the ten best comics of 2007, "a consummate expression of the artist's passion, cannily adapting the 'documentary' pep of 2005's Wimbledon Green to the serial format, and exploiting each week's large spread of tiny, uniform-hued panels as a new facet of the flawed gemstone life of the titular old-time local television host and older-time boyish adventurer. Included are the death of a man, the death of his times, the passing of personal creation into collectible items, and the ways we are born anew inside each person we meet." I can't wait to see how Seth blows the thing up to 96 (big!) pages; the preview suggests additional contortions in time, probably divvied out by the page. Look into this. It's $24.95; Times archive here.

Mijeong: New from NBM, a 240-page softcover collection of b&w and color stories by manhwa artist Byun Byung-Jun, previously of NBM's Run, Bong-Gu, Run! Plenty of rich, atmospheric style at work in these melancholy tales. Big preview here.

32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set: Definitely your fun-with-format item of the week, being a lil' box from Drawn and Quarterly containing facsimile editions of the complete seven-issue, 1991-94 minicomic run of Adrian Tomine's signature series. I think this'll serve the material well; bookshelf collections basically force it into the context of 'Adrian Tomine and his career path,' even though I suspect it's also very representative of classical minicomic structure: a little humor; a little anecdote; a little zine-derived taste-of-the-author direct communication. It's $19.95 for the pleasure.

Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Book Four (of Five): This, on the other hand, is a more traditional D&Q reprint tome, the latest in the Moomin newspaper strip series. Still 8 1/2" x 12"; $19.95 for 106 pages. Peer.

Uptight #3: And speaking of signature series, here's an upstanding example of that dying pamphlet breed, 24 b&w pages of Jordan Crane from Fantagraphics for only $2.75. Contains more of the Keeping Two serial, plus a short adventure with the cast of The Clouds Above and a new ghost story. Preview here; my review of issue #2 here.

Love is a Peculiar Type of Thing: Oh, another! This one appears courtesy of a November 2008 Xeric Grant; it's a 96-page, $10.00, partial-color collection of short comics by Box Brown, "focusing on the plight of an average twentysomething named Ben and his girlfriend Ellen. Themes of love, fear, questioning religion, depression, anxiety, and sex are all explored with humor, insight, and understanding." So it's said.

Tiny Tyrant Vol. 1: The Ethelbertosaurus: Just so you know, this is not a new book of material from this antic kid-in-charge-of-grown-ups series by writer Lewis Trondheim and artist Fabrice Parme; it's the first half (64 pages) of publisher First Second's 2007 edition, in a larger format (7 1/2" x 10") and at a lower price ($9.95). Inessential Trondheim, but cute; have a peek.

Slam Dunk Vol. 4 (of 31): More from Takehiko Inoue's excellent '90s basketball manga classic. I have no reason to expect the slightest dip in quality.

Batman & Robin #1: Morrison & Quitely... they did X-Treme X-Men, right?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Vampires: A 40-page, $2.99 Dark Horse pamphlet one-off, noteworthy for the participation of two contributors to Pixu (see: Douglas Wolk's review at Bookforum), writer Becky Cloonan and artist Vasilis Lolos. Might as well seek out Gabriel Bá's & Fábio Moon's variant cover to complete the crew. Preview here.

Wolverine: Revolver: Well, I guess if you publish enough of these things he'd have to discover Kabbalah... no, wait. I confused myself. This is actually the new Wolverine one-off by Das Pastoras, he of Wolverine: Switchback, Deicide and the Alejandro Jodorowsky-written Castaka (not yet in English). Written by crime novelist and occasional Punisher scribe Victor Gischler; it's $3.99. Interview 'n preview here.

The Muppet Show #3 (of 4): Such a nice showcase for Roger Langridge. This one's the Gonzo issue, as you can see.

The Boys #31: In which the second half of this Garth Ennis-written series kicks off with various superhumans, wise to Our Non-Heroes' tricks, opt to take the fight to them. This storyline will be four issues long, and drawn by frequent Ennis collaborator Carlos Ezquerra (who's also drawing the current Garth Ennis' Battlefields: The Tankies). Sample.

Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye #3 (of 3): Morrison & Stewart... they did The Authority, right? No, wait... The Establishment?

The Punisher: Naked Kill: A $3.99 one-off in which Frank takes on a snuff film ring without a damn weapon in sight - it's two kinds of naked, you see. From thriller and martial arts-related prose specialist Jonathan Mayberry (also set to take over Black Panther soon) and Castle regulars Laurence Campbell & Lee Loughridge. Feast your eyes. And don't forget to complete your Garth Ennis deluxe hardcover collection with this week's $34.99 The Punisher MAX HC Vol. 5, covering Barracuda's last stand and the neverending end of everything. I tried to sum it up here.

Another week, another three posts in the space of 20 hours.

2009-06-01T17:00:00.001-05:00

*New column! My most digressive one yet, fittingly fixed on cinema legend Alain Resnais, who made a comics-centered movie with Jules Feiffer in 1989 titled I Want to Go Home. It lost a ton of cash at the time, and never did manage to open in the US, but Kino dug it out for R1 dvd last month, and it's worth looking at for its treatment of the art in that particular era.

Also: seriously, don't watch that Blur video before you actually see Last Year at Marienbad (I mean, if you're planning to see it). There's no damn way you're keeping a straight face after that.

I'm behind enough as it is.

2009-05-26T23:59:00.005-05:00

*New comics on Thursday around here, which is why yesterday's Diamond-based post is today.

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

GlömpX (all-Finland comics anthology, in English; three dimensional art to get you thinking about paper)

Plus!

Perramus: Escape From the Past (part one of a new series of not-too-long posts on foreign-language comics that somehow found their way to English back in the day; we begin with Alberto Breccia's omnivorous political allegory)

At The Savage Critics!

*Totally some stuff worth waiting for, though.

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

Special Forces Vol. 1: Hot to Death: Sure, I'll say it: this is the best Kyle Baker comic of the 21st century so far, a spittin' mad satire of the Iraq War in the form of a breathtakingly crass action comics tribute to the struggles of America's most underprivileged troops that just can't help but romantizice the hell out of a situation none of these people should be in, all while dropping in tasty front-of-Previews comics industry bonuses like rampant sexualization of 'strong' female characters and entirely ill-fitting superhero-flavored tropes. Baker's visuals are a fascinating hybrid of his agile comedy style, contemporary post-Image impact and war comics classicism, and his Frank Miller-styled narrative voice is so dead-on eerie I've heard people swear it's Miller done right. I hope he keeps the original final page, 'cause it's like being slapped in the face. Only $16.99 for 200 big pages. The first two chapters are free online.

My Inner Bimbo: The newest work from Sam Kieth (with co-artists Josh Hagler & Leigh Dragoon), tracking the adventures of a aging man who's feminine aspect develops its own persona, eventually maturing into her own complicated person while still in limited control of Our Man's body. Magic, allusion and crypto-autobiography abound in dense, sooty pages. You know if you want it. From Oni; $19.95 for 168 b&w pages.

Chicken With Plums: A new softcover edition of Persepolis creator (and The Photographer guest letterer) Marjane Satrapi's most recent comic, an Angoulême Best Album winner concerning depression, music and food in 1950s Iran. From Pantheon; $12.95.

This is a Souvenir: The Songs of Spearmint & Shirley Lee: This certainly does appear to be a $29.99, 208-page all-color anthology of comics inspired by the British indie pop outfit. With contributions by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie, Chynna Clugston-Flores, Jamie S. Rich, Scott Mills, Rich Johnston, Salgood Sam and more. Edited by Eric Stephenson, and presented in the same massive LP size as the Tori Amos-themed Comic Book Tattoo, which should put it in the 'lavish' category as far as these things go. Gaze.

Bayou Vol. 1: Being the first hardcopy output of DC's Zuda label for webcomics; it's the first four chapters of Jeremy Love's story of fantasy creatures and child questing in a Depression Era deep south. The whole series is online here; the landscape-format book is $14.99 for 160 pages.

The John Stanley Library: Melvin Monster Vol. 1 (of 3): The official debut of Drawn and Quarterly's extensive, Seth-designed effort to compile the famed Little Lulu cartoonist's lesser-known works into deluxe 7.75" x 11" hardcovers; first up it's issues #1-3 of the 1965-69 Dell series about a creepy child who just wants to behave. Expect impeccable gags. It's 112 pages for $19.95. Sneak peek.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan: The Jesse Marsh Years Vol. 2: Another week, another Dark Horse Archives project, promising the Golden Age (and thereabouts, maybe) in hardcover for $49.95. This one sports issues #6-10 (1948-49) of the old Gold Key Tarzan series, from writer Gaylord DuBois and artist Jesse Marsh, the latter a sort of artist's artist's artist, admired by talents ranging from Alex Toth to Richard Corben to Gilbert Hernandez. For further reading, I commend to you Comic Art #9, and Ron Goulart's fine essay on the topic, but meanwhile there's 224 pages of color source material in here. Preview.

DC Comics Classics Library: Roots of the Swamp Thing: And moving forward in time, DC's all-color reprint brick effort brings us the first 13 issues (1972-74) of the original Len Wein-scripted muck monster ongoing (plus the origin stuff from House of Secrets #92), which I think should cover all of artist Bernie Wrightson's work on the series, along with a few issues of work by follow-up artist Nestor Redondo. Your $39.99 gets you 320 pages. Note that Wein's follow-up writer, Gerry Conway, has an all-new DC project starting this week, The Last Days of Animal Man #1 (of 6), a future-set story drawn by Chris Batista & Dave Meikis.

Elephantmen Vol. 2: Fatal Diseases: I'm gonna have to write more about this Richard Starkings-created Image series in the future, because it's genuinely odd work, an issue-by-issue modular perspective on vignettes from the ongoing lives of various people and anthropomorphic beasts trying to get by while massive socio-political operations click-clack around them, seemingly without anyone in power. It strikes me as reminiscent of a '90s self-publishing boom series, totally devoted to taking its author's playful ideas as seriously as possible across a longform narrative and often determinedly reaching beyond its grasp, although Elephantmen leaves open the possibility that the story will never end, barring some annihilation event. This is the second big hardcover collection of the main series, 312 color pages for $34.99, covering issues #8-14, plus the 'pilot' issue of preliminary concepts by Kurt Busiek, Jeph Loeb and others.

Berserk Vol. 29: Will Kentaro Miura's grue-smeared anti-fantasy manga ever come to an end? Um, I don't really know; didn't he say this was supposed to be his life's work or something? Hey, witches. It's 216 pages for $13.95. Also in swords this week, note that Dark Horse has the $17.95 softcover collection Conan Vol. 7: Cimmeria, which picks up all of Richard Corben's recent work on the series, albeit as flashbacks within a larger tale from writer Tim Truman and primary artist Tomás Giorello.

20th Century Boys Vol. 2 (of 24): I'm telling ya - two volumes in, and this is already my favorite Naoki Urasawa series. A rash decision? Perhaps; 4000+ pages to go leaves plenty of room to mess things up. But right now? It's Urasawa's warmest, most character-driven work by far, which I admit may try the patience of folks who want a smoking suspense juggernaut right off the top, but again: 4000+ pages.

Madame Xanadu #11: In which series writer Matt Wagner kicks off a five-issue storyline featuring art by Michael Wm. Kaluta, working on comics interiors for the first time since... I think he illustrated an Alan Moore prose thing in Tom Strong's Terrific Tales #9 in '04? Before that you might have to hit those Dark Horse The Shadow comics from the '90s. Anyhow, here he is.

Garth Ennis' Battlefields: The Tankies #2 (of 3): More treading from Ennis & artist Carlos Ezquerra. Have a look, and keep another eye peeled for Dynamite's $12.99 softcover collection of the series' prior war story, Dear Billy, drawn by the often underrated Peter Snejbjerg.

Gødland #28: Always good to have a little Joe Casey & Tom Scioli. Preview.

glamourpuss #7: Dave Sim, on schedule.

Ignition City #3 (of 5): Warren Ellis and people that don't blast off.

Crossed #5 (of 9): If this was a movie at Cannes this year, I bet it'd have won some shit.

God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga: I'll presume this isn't the first academic study of Dr. Tezuka's oeuvre ever published in English, but it's the only one I can think of at the moment. Author Natsu Onoda Power promises an emphasis on Tezuka's use of intertextuality -- concerning both his own creations and various non-comics works -- and close readings of some obscure, never-published-in-English pieces. From the University Press of Mississippi, a 208-page softcover priced at $25.00.

Often predatory; somewhere in the grey area between a caring embrace and a flying leap to tackle someone.

2009-05-21T03:00:00.001-05:00

GlömpX

This is a new 168-page color anthology of English-language (but mostly wordless) comics from Finland. It's limited to 1000 hardcover copies, produced by comics and music purveyor Boing Being and published by Huuda Huuda at EUR 28 or $35, although the actual U.S. price may vary; Copacetic Comics has it in stock for $39.95. I can't seem to find any other North American locations duly armed just yet, but you can import it from various sources.

The brainchild of editor Tommi Musturi -- an accomplished cartoonist whose The First Book of Hope and The Second Book of Hope are available from Belgian publisher Bries, probably at their MoCCA table in a few weeks, if you're attending -- Glömp has been ongoing at a mostly annual rate since 1997; its heart has been new work from Finnish artists, although prior issues have seen the participation of Kevin Huizenga, Anders Nilsen, Christopher Forgues, Lilli Carré, Olivier Schrauwen, Tom Gauld, Jeffrey Brown and many others. Its presence in the English-dominant world has been spotty, although earlier editions can be had through Top Shelf, Poopsheet and Quimby's (or Forbidden Planet in the UK).

This is the 10th edition of the now well-developed project, and the last to be edited by Musturi; it comes complete with a 56-minute soundtrack CD, and will be accompanied by a touring exhibition. I see a ready comparison to PictureBox's The Ganzfeld 7, which recently concluded itself with a book 'n disc all-color blowout, although other sources have drawn understandable parallels with the likewise once-modest, now-expansive Kramers Ergot. Indeed, Glömp itself deems it fit to deal with the legacy of comics anthologies in this very issue, even as it searches for somewhere new to press, maybe beyond the page.

(Janne Tervamäki)

The historical content is provided via an introductory essay by Finnish retailer Jelle Hugaerts, who briefly considers the makeup of a good comics anthology (the editor is "the soul") before launching into a history of the format, pinpointing William Gaines' affirmative pairing of stories with writers, features with features and talents with their names as the philosophical birth of the 'anthology' from the mere collection of features as was much of the Golden Age.

He then hits most of the expected American-European landmarks, although his very consideration of the European end ensures a somewhat different narrative than the North American standard; his positioning of Kramers as a sort of hybridization of the '90s-born French image fury of Le Dernier Cri with traditional narrative stands in sharp contrast to the occasional domestic characterization of American 'art' comics as freshly galloping away from accessible storytelling.

As for new advances, Hugaerts places special emphasis on minicomics and the anthology form as an arena for artists to hone and experiment, away from the growing expectation of bookshelf-ready material perilously early in an aesthetic's development (the potential of online comics goes unmentioned). "As for bigger, more book-sized anthologies, their key to success lies all the more in getting cohesive content or experimenting with the format," he notes, in what might as well be a wave to open the curtain.

Amusingly -- and speaking of cohesive content! -- the soundtrack CD seems to back this impression, with Maniacs Dream contributer Fricara Pacchu's opening track providing a long round of applause before launching into a swelling mess of sounds suggestive of an especially surreal gallery opening. The remaining three cuts (none under 10 minutes), however, exhibit more of what I'd anticipated: looping refrains and distortion studies, albeit with a certain emphasis on 'natural' base noise, exemplified by Kiiskinen's 18:17 Bill & Bull, best described as a vérité radio documentary on the subject of rubbing inflated party balloons, adapted by electromagnetic demigods for consumption in their home dimension.

(Tommi Musturi)

There's a strong natural aspect to the comics too, perhaps inevitably so, in that this special Glömp has required all narrative pieces to be 3-D. And I don't mean computer graphics or special glasses; rather, the comics must somehow exist in three-dimensional space, beyond the flat confines of the page, yet paradoxically for the purposes of inclusion in an anthology book apart from the aforementioned live exhibition.

It's dangerous work, this, particularly headed by an essay on the development of the successful comics anthology! All those 2-D comics are marked with pencil and ink and coverings and corrections or however many digital layers, of course, but their objective is typically to reproduce on the page; that's the completed form, and the reason I find it so hard to interface with original pages hanging on a gallery wall. Even exceptions to this rule like the one-of-a-kind object transformation of Maggots can at least function in simulacrum. But comics narratives rendered as 3-D objects? How do you keep a collection of that from retreating into an exhibition catalog?

That's the big question of GlömpX, at least for me, and the solutions devised by its 15 pieces provoked some good fascination. I was really taken the book's variations in story presentation, sometimes opening a segment with a wide view of the object in question then diving in for a closer look, sometimes saving the 'full' form of the work until the end, and often mixing perspectives to compelling effect.

Musturi's own story/project, for example, is very simple. We're started off with a double-page photographic presentation of four sheets of painted glass standing in a lake, the glare of the sun helpfully shining through one of them. The next four pages of the book present those sheets as comics pages (see above), altered somewhat for reproduction, but nonetheless indicative of the total exhibit's intent - light shining through translucent space, illustrated on both sides, to promote a naturalistic alternative to the look of animation cels.

But while the end result is shimmering and spooky -- and appropriately themed plot-wise as a fable of elemental, godly upheaval -- the work doesn't seem benefited by its conformity to the book. All of the image is present across the pages, but it still feels excerpted, like you're missing out on not truly seeing the light shine through those plates. You're divorced, isolated from the water and the heat; behind a pane of your own.

(Amanda Vähämäki; detail)

Yet even as the anthology absolutely begs the question of presentation, other pieces rise to certain innovations. Many of the stories as seen in the book are in fact augmented, in that 2-D drawings appear to be juxtaposed against careful framing of the 3-D works. There's a nice entry titled Sausages & Peas, composed by Amanda Vähämäki, whose story collection The Bun Field was recently released in North America by Drawn and Quarterly (and reviewed by Tom Spurgeon & Bart Beaty).

It's a 10-page look at a family dinner, with each left-hand page sporting 2-D studies of movement and antics by one member of the five-person clan, bordered at the top or bottom by fleeting, funny/sweet sepia memories, while each right-handed page provides an unbroken 3-D image of the entire kitchen -- seemingly formed from clay and illustrated paper/wood cut-outs -- slowly moving forward in time with each subsequent splash. In this way, Vähämäki casts her 2-D drawings as personal, subjective, while the facing 3-D content reflects the removed positioning of God, you - the reader, seeing the everything characters can't.

Nothing happens in the story, by the way, but it's astonishing how the artist's give-and-take between subjectivity and objectivity, involvement and dispassion, creates its own emotional power. It completely transforms the disability of Musturi's piece -- or, say, the inverted presentation of Pauliina Mäkelä's Hexen, a lineup of alternating fox and child images ultimately revealed to be taken from the top of a cloth draped around a doll, like the solution at the end of a mystery -- into a meaningful aspect of the reader's involvement with the work.

(Jyrki Heikkinen; detail)

Other contributions offer different compositions. Kramers Ergot 7 veteran Aapo Rapi teams with textile artist and weaver Sonja Salomäki for Disco Pizza, a dizzy burst of one medium after another, paintings running into models heading towards photography preceding sickly-colored comics, all this company in service of two characters' shared lonliness.

Elsewhere, Katri Sipiläinen presses deeper into contrast, pitting a full-bore Leisure Town-style sculpture fumetti against a b&w pencil story as baleful sagas of personal insecurity on two sides of a fantasy lake. Some pieces even blur the line of what's what, like Janne Tervamäki's Strange Weather, a near-abstract interplay of one-panel cartoons and searing illustrational details that effectively obscures any trace of the 3-D element, maybe as a means of begging the question of its utility.

My favorite pieces, though, find similar means of deconstructing and reconstructing the very stuff of the comics page. Witness above a little taste of Jyrki Heikkinen's Hip Hip Hooray!, a tall sculpture depicting the path of various characters toward the experience of death, floating word balloons built right in. Three double-page photographic splashes showcase portions of the whole, but they're pasted over with smaller images zooming in on different characters, thus creating 'panels' laid out to create the illusion of characters moving along the road, reasserting the primacy of the 2-D page as a means of traversing a 3-D setting.

Meanwhile, Le Dernier Cri participant Reijo Kärkkäinen slices out a garish diorama for The Operator, all blurry focus and jarring shapes at first, then moving in to place 'panels' cut from elsewhere on set in almost exactly the same jagged, clashing angles as the contours of the set itself, resulting in a rather profound disruption of reality through just-impossible-enough perspectives, mutating the 3-D environment itself by mimicking its qualities in a 2-D modification. It's like a drive through the uncanny valley, except now you're checking out the scenery rather than the inhabitants - a novel means of provoking environmental dread, which naturally rises to the forefront of the narrative, through its violation of nature.

(Hanneriina Moisseinen)

I can't say every part of this book is so complex, or nearly as involved; that's the toll of the anthology. Some will find Hanneriina Moisseinen's tale of heavy metal triumph via embroidered doilies to be overly precious, although others (like myself) might be charmed. Moreover, I readily admit that some might find the very concept limiting - these are not 'literary' comics by the North American understanding, though they are narratives, which certain readers may well deem shallow if they consider the presentational tension at work to be less than compelling.

Still, I can't help but feel impressed with this book, even while I'm unimpressed with some of its parts. Potentially a leaden piece of a multimedia puzzle, it's instead a good-natured harassment of the anthology comic, determined to strike a few worthwhile balances between the flat necessities of the page and the horizon looming behind. I don't know if it exposes a vital new dimension in the comics form, as departing editor Musturi would wish, but it supplies ample suggestion that the anthologies to follow don't have to move along the studied line of history; there are other directions, even if travelled by a leap from behind and a doubling up.