Around the Store in 31 Days: Day Thirteen

So, since it is the (spooky!) 13th day of this little experiment, let's go with something off the Horror rack?

I think I mentioned before that we also have a Licensed rack, and an awful lot stuff in "Horror" could fit there as well -- EVIL DEAD, Clive Barker comics, HALLOWEEN, and so on.

Ditto with today's pick -- RICHARD MATHESON'S I AM LEGEND. After all, it was originally a prose book (and, eventually, several different films as well).

IAL was originally published back in the day by Eclipse, and it was one of the first books that IDW "rescued" from Eclipse's backlist. It is adapted by Steve Niles, back in the days in which he was primarily known as an "adapter" than as someone doing original comics -- Niles also did most of the Eclipse Clive Barker comics, for example -- and while I can't say that I've read the original prose novel by Matheson, on a pure guess there's not a TON chopped out from the text. That is to say that there's a lot of words here, and there's a fair amount of caption-describing-the-art going on.

But, to a degree, that's a good thing, I think, in prose adaptations, because it seems to me that the value of the original work IS the original work itself.

The art is by Elman Brown, whom 15 minutes of internet searching isn't turning up a lot for -- he did work in other Eclipse/Niles horror comics (like FLY IN MY EYE), and, apparantly, he drew a few issues of PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL back in 1994, but the most recent credit I can find for him is an issue of TALES OF THE TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES in '96 -- so it's apparently been 11 years since he's drawn a comic.

That's a shame because I find his art very appealing -- there's a big Wrightson thing going on there, but he also has a really clear grasp on comics storytelling and mood, and is really terrific at capturing emotion.

All in all, I think this is a great comic, and certainly works better than any of the movie attempts (that I've seen, at least -- haven't seen the Will Smith version yet)

I'm going to go with a bonus here, because this isn't actually my favorite thing in my horror section, but the thing that IS my fave isn't a comic at all -- it is Max Brook's WORLD WAR Z: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ZOMBIE WAR, which is straight-up prose. This is one of the best "post-apocalypse" stories I've ever read (even if, y'know, humanity survives that one in the end; which I don't think is really a spoiler, since the title pretty much gives it away).

What I adore about this book is that it is incredibly thoughtful about the global nature of apocalypse -- it is as first-person recollections of "what happened" -- as well as insanely detailed-oriented about scope and ramification and incident. Every 2-3 pages the action shifts to another situation, WHOLLY different than the one before it, and each and every one makes you think (and go "Damn! never thought of THAT!")

You want a prose book that would make an amazing comic book adaptation? Here ya' go, kids.

That's today's pick(s) -- see you tomorrow!

-B

Around the Store in 31 Days: Day Twelve

OK, so I've clearly lost the daily pattern we had at the start -- my apologies, it's been a rough and busy week. I SHOULD be able to do daily through Wednesday this week, but then I have to disappear again (ComicsPRO's annual in Vegas)

Matt Wagner is one of my favorite creators in the whole wide world. (Come by the store some day and I'll tell you the story of why I'm in comics, and why Matt is really the one to blame) You can tell if you look at the store, because I've got more than 20 pieces of original Matt Wagner art (most commissions) hanging around the store -- including an on-going series of JSA portraits (in fact, I even have two that I still haven't even gotten framed yet)

In most circumstances this would probably lead to a discussion of MAGE: THE HERO DISCOVERED, except that, well, it is OP from Image at the moment, and who knows when it is coming back into print? If it does, grab it.

But, since it is OP, let me relate another story here...

(This is where I would have put the jump, if it wasn't for the small fact that more than half of you HATE the jump. We're trying to figure out what to do in the long run, but I heard ya', at least)

This was early in the store's life -- probably about '93 or '94. A gentleman came into the store, and he was pretty obviously on his last legs with AIDS. He was weak and emaciated, had palsy and could barely walk. He had a few sores on his face as well.

He asks me if I have any comics about suicide.

...

Now, I'm seriously torn here. The guy's sick, and my assumption is that the reason he's asking is because he's contemplating killing himself. This is the first time (and the only time since) that I felt like I had to make a moral decision about selling someone a comic book, y'know?

In the end, I walked over to the rack and pulled off a copy of GRENDEL: THE DEVIL INSIDE, the story of the Brian Li Sung version of Grendel by Matt and Bernie Mireault.

This story aside, the is a great comic, told in fragment, by a fragmented mind teetering on the brink of extinction. Wagner hasn't, I don't think, really gotten his due as a writer, and the experimental efforts he had through the 90s. Sure, some of them failed pretty massively, but overall he's changed the way I approach a peiece of comics writing by his playing with technique and format. And Mireault's art is astonishing here, bubbling with madness and grief.

I never saw the sick man again, so I don't know if DEVIL INSIDE helped him or hurt him. I dearly hope it is the former.

-B

And Now, Jog: 3/12 comics were three days ago

Gutsville #3 (of 6):

Glad this one's back in action. It's an Image miniseries from writer Simon Spurrier and artist Frazer Irving; both 2000 AD veterans, the former was last seen in US comics via the recent Silver Surfer: In Thy Name miniseries, while the latter has provided distinctive visuals to projects ranging from DC's Robin to Marvel's Silent War. Issue #2 came out roughly half a year ago, the subsequent delay apparently owing to personal and familial illnesses on Irving's part. The remaining half of the series should be out in shorter order.

I like it so far, and this issue is a GOOD indicator of why. I don't think it's saying too much to note that Irving's art is the series' most immediate draw, nor does it even need be said that the book's concept -- an unstuck-in-time theocratic society planted in an enclosed world of strange magic -- allows for images that strongly recall Irving's work on maybe his most acclaimed project, the Grant Morrison-written Klarion the Witch Boy.

But Irving's work is better here. Perhaps the story's particular setting, the belly of some seafaring monster, has proven inspirational; his monochrome environments swirl and roll, backgrounds typically little more than fleshy patterns sunk with color, while his human characters bend and jut expressively, their clothing or mustaches typically carrying as much weight as their body language.

The occasional monster designs are more wrinkled & creepy, and much funnier - this issue has a long-clawed wraith in a wide-brimmed hat with a huge mouth and a long, drippy tongue plastered onto its stomach. Overall, there's a strong sense of place at work, not so much original as emphatic. Irving also has the habit of inserting a vivid glimpse of a dog's asshole into climactic splash pages of flight, which I consider worthwhile. Plus: the occasional pause for psychedelics.

All of this serves to deepen Spurrier's script, which is otherwise a simple enough piece of fantastical class/race/religious struggle, complete with forbidden affections between a noble-wed girl and the local ratcatcher/frustrated artist, and brewing revolution against the men that rule the belly of the beast. A serial(?) killer, weapons from the modern world I like it more for the details; exposition might be provided by a character, say, accidentally bumping into a book and reading several pages of background information to us, but there is wit to some of the characterizations, and a playful attitude exhibited toward the general concept. "Sodomitic puddle of cockpaste" is a good expression.

So right. Did I say GOOD? I said it again. About on the level I expect from a contemporary comic of the type. I don't think the other two issues should be hard to find, so try it out.

All will be well if if if if if: Douglas on two 3/12 Marvels.

Two '70s throwbacks, of different kinds. Short version: the new Mighty Avengers is a very nice execution of a badly flawed premise, and The Last Defenders struggles with the idea behind what it's building on. More under the cut.

MIGHTY AVENGERS #10: I'm still really enjoying Brian Michael Bendis's attempts to give every issue of this series (and of New Avengers) its own plot and tone--it helps prevent the sense a lot of other series have that they're written for the trade and broken up wherever the plot allows--and I'm glad he's still doing the info-overload tricks (the thought balloons, the constant internal chatter from Tony's armor) that make this series read differently from its sibling. This issue: Iron Man and Dr. Doom, stranded in the '70s! (Well, in the comics of the '70s--when the issue plugged on pg. 2 came out, the band plugged on a T-shirt on the same page hadn't formed yet.)

But the first premise of this issue is that Iron Man is terrified of setting off some kind of "butterfly effect" in the past that changes the present. Fair enough--but they discuss their previous experience with time travel this issue, and Tony wasn't nearly as worried about changing history then. (I suppose there's a Marvel Universe precedent for being able to change history, which is why we have e.g. "Days of Future Past," but has there been a Marvel butterfly-effect story?) For that matter, if Tony had access to a time machine--and given the opening sequence of last month's Fantastic Four, we have to assume that his pal Reed Richards still has one--wouldn't the very first thing he would do be going back a few months to save Steve Rogers?

The second premise is that since Mastermind made everyone forget that Bob had ever existed, he can openly retrieve Reed's time machine without fear of changing history. This makes no sense at all--if Mastermind makes me forget where I left my keys, that doesn't mean they aren't where I left them.

That said, the execution moves so smoothly the plot problems almost don't get in the way. This is Mark Bagley in peak form--if Trinity looks this good, I'm going to be really happy. The production tricks are really clever, too: the little bottom-of-page ads for "on sale now!" comics, the "continued after next page" squibs, and the old-fashioned dot-screen coloring (anybody want to identify what the first comic to use that technique to indicate a sequence set in the past was? I'm curious) make the very contemporary verbal cat-and-mouse games between Iron Man and Dr. Doom seem weirdly anachronistic in a really appropriate way. (Doom's dialogue is just far enough off--"Okay. Yes" doesn't sound like him--that Tony's suspicions that he's a Skrull are reasonable.) Bendis can't quite channel '70s--the "It's bedlam on the street as New York's glitziest citizens run in mortal terror!" sequence is way cornier than Marvel comics of that era actually were--but as long as you don't stop to think about logic, the style and flow of the story are Very Good.

THE LAST DEFENDERS #1: I'm not quite sure what Joe Casey and Keith Giffen are getting at here. The joy of Steve Gerber-era Defenders, which is what this is pretty much a callback to, wasn't entirely that it was a team made up of second-stringers and characters who had absolutely nothing to do with each other except that they basically drank at the same bar; it was that Defenders was deliberately unimportant in the scheme of things, and Gerber could therefore do any bizarre thing he wanted with it. (A Trout In the Milk and friends wrote a series of very long posts on the dynamics of Gerber's Defenders--all the parts are linked here.)

This story, though, is about Nighthawk, the Very Most Boring Superhero of All Time, assembling a new group of Defenders (under the auspices of the Initiative), which is sort of like assembling a new group of people to drink at a bar that closed 20 years ago. They don't have anything to do with each other (the other three are She-Hulk, Colossus and the Blazing Skull); they fight some people affiliated with the Sons of the Serpent, which I always get confused with Kobra for some inexplicable reason, plus one of the Brothers Grimm refers to Nighthawk as "bird-man" the way the Hulk used to. Then there's an apropos-of-nothing flashback to the Ancient One turning the Son of Satan away 40 years ago, some tonal fluctuations toward goofiness (a caption reading "The Sons of the Serpent are getting their mystic ceremony on," the group smashing through a window as one of them yells "Defenders defenestrate!"), and finally a page on which Head seems to have drifted over from The All-New Atom (oh, fine, it's a Rigellian recorder) and Yandroth explains to him that the Defenders are actually incredibly important if they've got a lineup that... is nothing like the one in this issue and a lot like the Dr. Strange/Namor/Hulk-era one. This could be the making of an interesting story about fruitless nostalgia, especially since the title of the miniseries (and the title page) imply that it's meant to be the end of the line for the Defenders concept. But it seems to be an exercise in fruitless nostalgia instead, and the totally generic artwork doesn't help. Eh, I'm afraid.

*****

As long as I'm here, I might as well plug two not-comics-related projects I'm working on: Mincing Up the Morning is a collection of videos of musicians whose birthday it is each day, and Circle the Globe is a linkblog--just a bunch of interesting quotes and pictures and videos I encounter. Because, you know, everybody needs more stuff on the Internet to look at.

Abhay Is Going to Post This Nonsense and then Sleep Until Monday, Y'all

So, this last week, I've been really into Conan and Octopus Pie, I guess...?

They're both sitcoms-- situational comedies? Somehow, sitcoms became a bad word among educated people, but they’re great in theory: characters get into situations, and then the comedy is seeing how the particular character chooses to get out of them. A comedy that arises out of the observation of character? Well, hell, that doesn't sound so bad.

On the other hand, Mama's Family.

Oh god, Mama's Family.

Why, Vicki Lawrence? WHY?

You don't put Mama below the jump. You don't put Baby in the corner, and you don't put Mama below the jump. That's just common sense.

OCTOPUS PIE:

Octopus Pie is an Odd Couple sitcom created by Meredith Gran, a 20-something year old Brooklyn animator, about a pair of barely post-collegiate Brooklyn women who somehow end up as unlikely roommates. (Barely Post-Collegiate was my favorite Hustler magazine). One is high strung and angry; the other is a pot-smoking nudist.

Swearing, pot smoking and topless women... Combine that with a proper dosage of 1970's Conan comics, in order to get your Ultra-Violence food group satisfied, and you have my Recipe for the Perfect Evening of Comics.

Serve chilled. Get it? Chilled, like Hey, let’s chill out, dudes, but also chilled like… nevermind. You just had to be there.

It starts out a little rough—a digression concerning a stolen bicycle throws off the momentum of an over-abbreviated first chapter. Both writing and art only begin to click together late in the third story, "Bake 'n Bake".

Linking to specific strips/jokes won't work for this review though because OP works like a sitcom-- a situational comedy only becomes funny once you grow to know and like the characters, rising and falling more on that attachment than the strength or weakness of individual jokes. (e.g., an awful lot of otherwise smart people claimed 30 ROCK wasn't funny after the first episode or that it somehow magically got better; it was funny from the beginning -- they just didn't know the characters yet). Anyways-- sorry, no linking.

But: Octopus Pie has a nice mix of drug jokes, funny drawings, dialogue jokes, absurdity and character humor. I don’t want to oversell it: I often find it funny, but sometimes it misses funny and lands at cute or with a thud (... same thing, maybe). A couple of the characters still feel like Generic Types maybe too-common to webcomics—the laid-back wise graduate student boyfriend, the angry incompetent boss, etc.

But the ingredients are there. The terrific "Natural Phenomenon" and the excellently-titled "Skate or Don’t" seem to have started moving the comic to a better, funnier, more specific place: there are small stabs at considering regrets; a very-slowly emerging theme of moving on from the past.

It’s PG humor with R-rated elements—there’s nudity and drugs, but the tone is extremely sweet and good-natured. If you're waiting for, like, the Jules Feiffer of webcomics or whatever, the cartoonist who'll eviscerate the neuroses and delusions and prejudices of all-grownsed-up adults ala the stuff that’s collected in Feiffer's SICK SICK SICK, say-- I'm just not familiar enough with webcomics to point you in the right direction or to know who that is, or if they exist, unfortunately. Anyone..?

On the other hand, one of the Octopus Pie strips had a lady with a bong staring at a cat:

I love the expressions in this comic. While Gran’s still growing as a writer, her strongest point seems to be knowing how much she can rely on a funny drawing.

It's encouraging, though, the number of genuinely funny lady cartoonists on the internet. Danielle Corsetto's Girls with Slingshots has a similar "two ladies who get up to the business" premise, but is a very different strip, also often funny. Gran, Corsetto, Dylan Meconis-- all of these creators (and more I probably haven't heard of) putting out funny comics, finding their comedic voices at the same time... I don't know: I just hope that's a trend that's receiving a proper amount of attention and encouragement. Apparently, Octopus Pie is getting some lately for this making-of video, so… that’s … swell?

But I hate all webcomics ever forever, for the awful interfaces! Awful! Clicking the Octopus Pie webcomic takes you BACKWARDS through the comic instead of forwards. Why? Am I doing it wrong?? Who reads comics backwards?? Answer: Merlin. Like way too many webcomics, Octopus Pie forces you to hunt the "Next" link down on the page, position your mouse over a tiny four-letter word, and click that. Dude, dude, dude: I just want to read a fucking comic during my lunch break, not test my hand-eye coordination.

I am not Merlin: I live in a one-bedroom apartment, and I read Conan comics! Help me out.

CONAN, WHO IS A BARBARIAN:

Conan has a similarly easy premise to grasp: there's this guy with a sword or maybe an axe, and he doesn't like shirts, and he just wanders around.

For the last year or so, I've been primarily reading the classic Marvel comics, the heyday of the 1960's and early 1970’s. And I realized I'd never touched the Conan comics. But they have a significant place in that history, right? It was my understanding that Marvel’s Conan was one of the more popular books of the wave of just-slightly-darker comics that happened in the 1970's with the loosening of the CCA restrictions in '71-ish(?). Popular thanks to Roy Thomas and, more importantly, a young Barry Windsor-Smith.

It's such a long-lasting character. Conan’s been around since 1932. 1932! Robert E. Howard wrote well enough, I suppose; on the other hand, he also used to write things like: “I don’t know whether an Oriental smells any different than a [worst word in English language] when he’s roasting, but I’m willing to bet the aroma of scorching hide would have the same chastening effect on his surviving tribesman.” That attitude filters into the short stories here or there, like in this excerpt of Conan dialogue from 1936’s Red Nails: "The pay was poor and the wine was sour, and I don't like black women. And that's the only kind that came to our camp at Sukhmet--rings in their noses and their teeth filed--bah!”

And yet from such shitty beginnings... Today, Governor Conan rules my state! There are videogames, two movies (one good), comics still published to this day, etc. It's this vast empire of sweaty ridiculousness, built from the toil of a suicidal racist mama’s boy. Okeydoke.

It’s not even that Conan’s a particularly interesting character. I read a fistful of classic Marvel CONAN recently, and I couldn't tell you a single fucking thing about Conan except he likes to rock it shirtless, he's got a mullet, and he's into broadswords. So: basically what I imagine in my head anytime I hear someone talking about Mobile, Alabama. Dudes of Alabama: please live up to my lofty expectations of you! Conan's fictional biography is spelled out in the books and movies-- he wanders around, he becomes a king, etc., so what was left for the creators of the comics? In the issues I read, it seems like all they could do was put out a sitcom: "Here's the time Conan fought the Planet of the Apes underground." Or "Here's the time Conan fought a wizard." Or "here's the time Conan pretended to be gay in order to rent an apartment from the Ropers, but then there was a wacky misunderstanding."

The best issue I saw was Issue #4 by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor Smith. "Here's the time Conan fights a crazy fucking tower." Conan goes to a crazy fucking tower; Conan kills a spider; Conan kills an elephant-alien; Conan kills a wizard; then the elephant-alien eats the wizard's soul, and the tower blows up for no reason like an asshole.

The issue was nominated for a Shazam Award from the Academy of Comic Book Arts, but it got beat by a Swamp Thing comic.

5 years of experience and continuity later, here is the plot of issue #64 by Roy Thomas and Jim Starlin: Conan fights a giant; Conan drinks some water; he find out the water’s been poisoned by a Wizard; Conan sleeps with the Wizard’s girlfriend then goes to kill the Wizard; the Wizard traps Conan with the giant, but they team up and kill the Wizard; Conan dumps the Wizard’s girlfriend, and rides off on this awesome horse. The end. Not… not a lot of evolution, no.

(Tangent: as evidenced by Conan #64 and Warlock, back in the 1970's, Jim Starlin really thought skulls were the raddest thing ever, I guess. Does he still do that? I think that's adorable. End of tangent).

The whole Marvel approach of Fantastic Heroes with Human Failings or Internal Contradictions-- it's nowhere to be seen. They didn't even fucking try. Any classic Marvel soap opera? Nope. It was just PLONK-- here's a Jurassic-era Redneck, true believers. He's going to wander around; he's going to fuck shit up; GiddyUp.

Still: CONAN hit the spot for me this week. The 70’s Conan comics were an obvious influence on Punisher or Wolverine, but Marvel couldn’t leave it alone with those two; they had to tack on all the stupid whining—Wolverine’s “Boo-Hoo, my past, I don’t remember my past” or Punisher’s “Boo-Hoo, my dead family.”

There is no “Boo-Hoo” with Conan. Conan's just porno for skinny dudes—there’s no time for all that foreplay. PLONK: commence with the macho. Conan just gets on with it; he loves it and leaves it; he hires it out at $4,100 an hour the day before Valentine’s Day; he creepy-sex-metaphors it. I liked that feeling reading those comics, that it’s all battle-axes and no Hiroshima, no way of gussying it up or pretending it’s fancy. It’s take it or leave it. It's my way or the highway. It doesn't have to go home but you can't stay here. It's 110%, 100% of the time. It's... When the going get tough... San Dimas High School football rules...

THE INEVITABLE CROSS-OVER:

Where are the macho webcomics?

The Dumb-ass Retarded Macho Bullshit market is so thoroughly addressed by traditional comics that I suppose it’s extra-difficult for a webcomic creator to get attention with that type of material. Sure, there’s misogyny in webcomics; couldn't have comics without that for... God only knows what reason. Your Webcomic is Bad can point you to plenty of that. But what about machismo? What about Ricardo Montalban?

It has to be a tragic microcosm of SOMETHING how the 20-something year old ladies are putting out these webcomics where people are partying and smoking j’s and kissing and having fun, and 20-something year old guys are creating webcomics about sitting on their couch playing videogames by themselves.

I’m no anthropologist but I’m pretty sure that’s what it looks like when societies become sterile. I think it’s a warning sign, like the thing with the frogs or the thing with the bees or the thing where my dick no longer gets hard and sometimes it vomits blood.

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

It is for that reason I must conclude this review by urging the gentlemen webcomic creators to take a moment, pause, and pay heed.

Gentlemen, if I say I'm a comic book fan, you will agree. Gentleman, I urge you to read more 1970’s Conan comics and learn from their contents, learn what people not making comics on the internet refer to as “ALPHA MEN.” Strapping, hairy, brain-damaged alpha men, who punch things, and enjoy punching things, find transcendence in their punching, like Conan, like … perhaps you someday, perhaps even you. If I must put it to you in your own language, in your vernacular, then let me say that there is a value to alpha men that, indeed, may even be better than the value provided by Valve’s ORANGE BOX. See? I speak the lingo.

I urge you, I urge you: shut off the X-Box, grow a mullet, take off your shirt, stand on a street corner hollering at women, and let’s turn this society around, fellas, before it’s too late. Biological clocks are ticking.

Just close your eyes and think of Crom. Thank you.

Around the Store in 31 Days: Day Eleven

Yeah, looks like "daily" is starting to peter out, what with having to retour schools and stuff thanks to the incredibly screwed up results of the SFUSD system for placing elementary schools...

Since I did a DC superhero comic last time, let's go with "Equal Time" and do a Marvel one this go round.

Find out what it is after the jump!

So, the real problem with a Marvel GN is that they don't exactly have their shit together in terms of keeping things in print, or at least in a format that I especially want to recommend -- I'm a little so-so on something like the MILLER BY DAREDEVIL COMPANION HC, when I'd rather tell you to buy DAREDEVIL BORN AGAIN or ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN. But you can't GET them separately, foo.

I thought for a moment about recommending ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, but that strikes me as far too obvious (even though, actually, super-terrific), but find something semi-obscure that is ALSO available is proving really fuckin' hard.

But, after thinking about it a while I found a good one -- and, oddly, one that I personally believe is only still in print because of Trade Dress.

See, when Marvel started their post-marvelcution TP program, they began with the premise that the characters were far more important than the contents or the creators, and they designed their spines accordingly.

My recommendation for today is the badly titled WOLVERINE LEGENDS v 2: HAVOK AND WOLVERINE: MELTDOWN written by Walt and Louise Simonson with art by John J. Muth and Kent Williams.

Nowhere on the cover does it say any of that, and all the spine says is "Wolverine Legends v2", which is sorta problematic if you want to sell the thing.

(v1 of the series is the Sam Kieth WOLVERINE/HULK, which is decent, but v3 is a Frank Tieri story, v4 is that awful Bruce Jones X-isle story, so it's not like "Wolverine Legends" as a brand name is a big mark of quality, in and of itself!)

This entry, however, is really swell stuff, from that late post-Dark Knight 80s period when Epic was alive, and Marvel was actually willing to experiment in form and function, and they were willing to put out fully painted abstract looking books.

This is just a big pile of spiffiness from page 1 to book's end, and is one of the best looking things that Marvel ever released.

Go. Find yourself a copy. You will not be disappointed.

-B

Around the Store in 31 Days: Day Ten

OK, how about a superhero comic, since I've gone nine days without one...

This one is from our DC rack, and represents one of the best re-imaginings of a classic character that I think has ever been done.

The late 80s were a weird period for DC comics, still reeling from the impact of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. As I understand it, one of the various plans was that the entire "universe" was to be "rebooted", and started from scratch. This pretty much didn't happen in a satisfying fashion, with some books starting over, while others didn't. MAN OF STEEL revamped Superman, but Batman kept on being the "same old" BATMAN (barring, of course, BATMAN: YEAR ONE), and the less said about what was done with characters like Hawkman, the probably the better.

And then it was Wonder Woman's turn.

George Perez was the artist on Wonder Woman, and his first seven issues are collected as WONDER WOMAN: GODS AND MORTALS.

This is a nice retelling of the Wonder Woman origin, with a modern spin, as well as tying it deeply to Olympian myths.

What I like about Perez's WW is that she's a wide-eyed innocent, trained to fight, and savagely at that, but always looking for another way to solve the problem; that's really rare in super-hero comics. And there's a joy in seeing the world through her naive eyes -- one of my favorite sequences is the "Bullets & Bracelets" number, where a gun is fired at her for the first time, and its these four wonderful panels of her expression, all, "O! M! F! G!!!!"

Perez also gives WW a pretty strong supporting cast, stronger than she'd had in decades, and gave her real and tangible reasons to be around and to be what she is; ah, if only all revamps were as thoughtful as this one!

Great great stuff, and it is both exciting AND fun.

-B

Heart Attacks and Rock'N'Roll: Graeme digs some 3/5 books.

There’s something to the way that your workplace reacts to someone having a heart attack in the middle of it, I think; whereas other, “lesser,” places than my dayjob would shrug off the sight of four medics asking questions of, and sticking all manner of IVs in, a near-comatose woman in the middle of the office, right now it’s like someone’s dropped a special Unnerving Bomb. Everyone here is freaked out and wondering when it’s going to be their turn.

Well, except for everyone who’s already been through that kind of thing. Not the most healthy of places, my work.

Anyway, comics?

CABLE #1: Yet another attempt by Marvel to redo Lone Wolf and Cub (Really, Nomad wasn’t enough?), this time with added cybernetics and the smallest baby in the history of the world. It’s almost as if Ariel Olivetti has never actually seen a real baby, but instead is working off some photos and a vague idea that “babies are small”. Storywise, this is pretty generic “I am in the future, it is bleak. I am a man. I have a mission.” stuff, but I’m sure that someone, somewhere, probably has never read this kind of thing before. Pretty Eh.

ECHO #1: I never read any of the Valiant comics, back in the ‘90s – There was something about them that felt as if they were the generic fill-ins for 1980s Marvel books, but that they were like that every single month – but the feeling I got from this new Terry Moore book was that it’s a Valiant revival in spirit if not name. It’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong about it (Well, aside from the pacing, perhaps, but I’m willing to let that slide), but more than there was absolutely nothing compelling or even that interesting about it. Sure, it’s not just another Strangers In Paradise, and therefore good for Moore, but on the other hand, Eh. Who cares about something like this?

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE NEW FRONTIER SPECIAL: Now this, on the other hand… Mmmm. Visual candy from start to finish, especially the design work on the back-up “And this is how we made the movie” pages. Which is good because, storywise, this was amazingly slight. It’s understandable, really; Cooke probably said all that he wanted to say in the original series, and so there probably wasn’t much more to add beyond the mix of injokes and references that pepper the plots of the three short stories herein, but at the same time, I’d kind of been hoping for something that had a little bit more meat to it in terms of writing (My favorite of the stories, in terms of writing, was the Wonder Woman/Black Canary short, which may be because it was the most intentionally comedic and throwaway). That said, even with the lightness of the stories, it was still Very Good indeed.

LOGAN #1: Brian K. Vaughan! Eduardo Risso! And it’s still just a Wolverine comic! I don’t know why I was expecting more, really; the clichés of Wolverine tends to overwhelm so many writers, so I don’t know why I thought Vaughan would get ‘round them… He didn’t, though, and so we’re left with a moderately interesting flashback story with pretty art. It’s Okay, and if you were in the mood for a Wolverine story, you’d probably enjoy the hell out’ve it. Me? I was expecting more, which was my problem.

STEPHEN KING'S THE DARK TOWER: THE LONG ROAD HOME #1: I don’t know if it’s the overly lush art (Jae Lee’s pencils, reprinted at the back of the book, are lovely. But adding Richard Isanove’s colors over them is like Phil Spector adding his special production talents to “Across The Universe”) or the nadsat dialogue, but I just can’t read these comics. I try, but my eyes glaze over and my brain shuts off. I can’t explain it, and I almost feel guilty for having no opinion about the what may be the biggest book of the year, but still…

YOUNG LIARS #1: This, on the other hand, is kind of awesome. Fast-paced and ridiculous, it feels unlike anything else Vertigo is publishing right now just because it feels like the Stooges to the Radiohead of the rest of the line (Well, aside from the Fables books; I haven’t quite worked out which band they are, yet). It’s almost a victim of its own stylings; if it doesn’t burn out and get cancelled within a year, I’ll almost be disappointed, but at the same time, it’s a Very Good first issue.

Next week: Very little of interest whatsoever, thankfully iving me the chance to purchase and finish off the rest of Death Note, my newest addiction... But what did the rest of you think?

Around the Store in 31 Days: Day Nine

Comics, of course, aren't just an American thing (or just a Japanese thing, for that matter) -- there's tons and tons of really amazing work coming out of Europe.

Virtually none of it makes it to America, however, at least not at a price that most Americans are willing to pay. And probably 2/3rds of what DOES arrive in the states in Erotica.

This is a dire shame, really, because there's so much good material out there that could find an audience if only someone would publish it here.

DC tried and failed with the Humanoids deal (I think it was mostly overproduction of fairly mediocre material, at the same time they overproduced the CMX manga stuff), and Marvel is about to try a deal with Soliel (which I have a really hard time believing is going to work, as it SO far away from their "core values")

When I first opened the store, there was a reasonable amount of stuff that had been translated, but in today's climate most of the interesting material has fallen out of print, or isn't stocked by distribution (be it Diamond OR the "book" distribs like B&T)

I mean, it drives me fuckin' bonkers that there's exactly NO Moebius comics in print in the US at this point -- I had heard that the problems there were something about the rights to the work and who owned what and who represented what to whom and all that, and I don't know the real details, just that I could be selling a shitload of Mssr. Giraud's work, and I'm not because it isn't in print.

Anyway, here's a look at another Euro artist whose book IS for sale on my shelves, and I think is terrific, after the jump...

Lorenzo Mattotti's DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE is a astonishing piece of comics work.

Mattotti's art is like a fever dream, full of swirling, maddened colors and tone, which absolutely fits a story like DR/MR.

(You can find Mattotti's website right here, while Lambiek's page on him has some excellent and clear examples of his comics work)

Oh, since i was searching for links, here's one from Two sample pages from the book itself, yay.

I first saw Mattotti's work in FIRES, and was blown away by the style and verve that it displayed -- being expressionistic, but still firmly rooted on a comics page. He also uses his color palate in remarkable ways for comics.

It doesn't look like Diamond or B&T have it in stock, but NBM says they have copies in stock, so I think it is still in print.

Plus, I hadn't remembered until I started searching that this actually won an Eisner in '04 for best Foreign work.

DR/MR is an oft told tale, but this is a really revelatory presentation of it, and one that absolutely belongs on your bookshelf.

-B

Curse of the Maroon Glove: It strikes Jog on 3/9

Omega: The Unknown #6 (of 10):

This one's really found its level, I've gotta say. Even when it draws close to being too cute, it has a habit of slowly, cleverly backing away. Hell, it's got a Watcheresque character who doubles as a Harry Naybors-like in-story critic ("The Overthinker," haw), but it somehow comes off as more a playful tribute than anything. This issue kicks off the second half of the series, and brings with it a few new locales and some character development, but what really caught my eye was a shitload of doubling going on.

Some of it is really obvious - in the first three pages, we've got two funereal splash pages, one for boy hero(?) Alex and the other for sly superhero The Mink, each of them helpfully bearing their own tone-setting title. Alex's ("Omega the Unknown, Chapter Six") is straightforward and dispassionate, while Mink's ("The Unparalleled Mink in: Night Hideous") is kitschy and overcooked, seemingly a put-on. Writer Jonathan Lethem ("with" Karl Rusnak) risks overstating some fairly obvious differences between the characters, but the dimension given to both does hold some interest; Alex can't function properly in front of grieving parents without telling lies, while artist Farel Dalrymple (with colorist Paul Hornschemeier) suggests a genuine rage inside Mink, in spite of his rampant playacting for ever-present cameras.

There's also one of those familiar sequences in which the action stops for a few comic-within-the-comic pages, rendered in a simpler style (here by Hornschemeier). I've read enough Alan Moore to kinda never want to see this stuff ever again, but this issue is clever enough to make the contemporary Mink superhero comic pretty moody and sexual -- moreso than the actual story! -- playing up the perceived absurdity of merchandise-ready costumed characters drinking heavily and leaving the bedroom unhappy, while also maybe revealing some things about Mink that the showman himself could never say in public. The fiction is silly for its misplaced maturity, but Lethem (with Rusnak) also positions it as potentially honest in a way that a more detatched, less embarrassing type of 'realism' can't manage.

Feel free to compare it to Alex's double-page splash of robot doodles, a second bit of art reflecting personal concerns. It also brings me back to last issue's neato fight scene, with onlookers trying to identify the participants from what comics they've read, and going so far as to extrapolate their intents. It's an old Marvel trope that the superheroes have their own comic books going, and its nice to see that stuff brought back in a thoughtful way (and it allows for Gary Panter to show up next issue!).

Of course, the nanotech plague is also spreading, which means Mink also gets compared to his own right hand, which has sprouted legs and is already acting far more superheroic than Mink himself, in that it commands the love of nanotech zombie hordes and shows some interest in bulking up for... a future issue. I'm trying to resist getting too far into my reading, since I suspect that a lot of things are going to be kept unclear until the very end (and, honestly, probably beyond), but I wonder if the zombies aren't acting as wicked forces of normalcy, joining Alex, Mink and taciturn Omega (who's kind of Alex's future, naturally) in their oddness? Even the book's world seems very anti-Marvel, with dramatic deaths taking place either off-panel or in an utterly unexciting way... will it face an incursion of action?

Er, anyway, it's has developed into a nice, low-key superhero/weird mystery series. I'm glad a lot of the scenery has shifted to university eccentricity, since Lethem (with Rusnak) seems a lot comfier with that than city high school bullies; a lot of that oppressed nerd material was too arch for me, and its dramatics mixed poorly with the series' tendency for understatement. But this issue is VERY GOOD, and I'm really looking forward to the rest.

Two Long, Two Short: Jeff Looks at Logan #1

It's nice to feel part of something larger, to be connected to others through a similar sensibility or predilection. And so, as I finished the last page of Logan #1 and groaned aloud, there was an element of pleasure in the groan, knowing that there would be others like me who had groaned aloud at the cheapness of the cliffhanger, and it was possible, almost, to imagine my groan joining others already in the air, mingling there in some luminiferous aether of fanboy disgruntlement.

After the jump, the spoiler, some snark, and a dramatic reduction in the hoity-toityness of the post's tone.

So, yes. Logan's in Japan at the end of World War II. He busts out of a prison, befriends an American soldier, tries to be the voice of reason, and then saves the life of a lovely Japanese woman who repays him by bedding him down. And on the last page, we learn this idyllic Japanese area he finds himself in is...Hiroshima.

Now, don't get me wrong. Do I want to see Logan stumbling around all Barefoot Gen, his flesh cooking off him and regrowing while he endures a visual tapestry of horrors? Hells, yes. But while fellow SCer Douglas rightly berates this cliffhanger as cheap, I found my groan came not as much from the cheapness of it, but that Vaughan, student of structure that he is, had found a quick and easy escape hatch to an nearly infinite number of Wolverine storylines which anyone can now exploit. In the interest of making the jobs of wanna-be-Ways and aspiring-Tieris even easier, allow me to extrapolate a few of the next nine hundred Wolverine miniseries:

• A routine Poutine delivery gone terribly wrong puts Logan in the center of the cauldron of Stalingrad. How will his mutant healing power affect the duel of two master snipers battling for supremacy of the city? 
• Logan arrives in chaotic Uganda in early 1978 after his longtime wargame-by-correspondence opponent sends several frantic messages; upon further investigation, he discovers the man he thought was his friend (and fellow "Starship Troopers" afficionado) is none other than Idi Amin Dada! Hijinks! 
• It's Logan and Deadpool competing to find the mythical Brewster's Millions in The Republic of Biafra at just the wrong time. Is Sabretooth involved? 
• Logan has finally met Ms. Right and her name is Marlo Thomas! Unfortunately for Logan, she has also begun dating the very sexy, very influential politican Henry Kissinger. Who will win her love?

I think you can see where I'm going with this. Taking genuine historical tragedies and JephLoeberizing them so they become another big reveal and yet another way for the story to achieve some sort of impact it hasn't earned is distasteful and, yeah, cheap. It can also be kind of fun, frankly, and probably a legitimate venue of superhero stories from the first time, I dunno, Superboy spanked Benedict Arnold or something.

I mean, I'm just about to start in on the thirteenth volume of a Japanese sniper who, if the books are to be believed, has helped shape the history of the world through little more than his superb marksmanship and well-above-average penis. Why should I care if writers pitching a miniseries can now ransack through our atrocity exhibition in search of that perfect cock for Logan to punch? ("Hey, how about Leopold & Loeb? Two cocks!")

I wish I could tell you. I think maybe it, again, has to do with the cheapness (say what you will about Golgo 13, but it sure seems like they research the shit out of those stories) and maybe it has something to do with mutantkind's own Arthur Fonzarelli. Wolverine is, in my mind, a fascinating metaphor for Western Civilization and the Industrial Revolution as viewed through post-Industrial Revolution eyes: civilization has literally made him a piece of machinery, his sniktastic claws popping with the regularity of a piece of assembly line robotics. He is the little guy made powerful through that glory of industrialization, a regular job in which he's a specialist ("the best he is at what he does," etc., etc.). It's little wonder that Wolverine has ended up tied so closely with Japan, being as they took that industrial template to the next level.

And yet, although I appreciate the bathos and male self-pity that surrounds Logan whenever it's put in a Western civilization blue collar context (sitting in a honky-tonk, staring bitterly into his beer; weeping over his inability to understand his own past, befouled as it is by the arbiters of history), it bugs me that he'll be in Hiroshima, or Laos, or Biafra, suffering as they have suffered. Because although that is the nature of male self-pity--God, why must it always be all about me!--to subsume everything in its quest to bemoan itself, Logan should suffer as we have suffered (and, yeah, I mean, post-industrial, Western Civilization "we") and not as those onto which we have shoveled all our shit (and bombs, and toxins, and crappy snack crackers) have suffered. It rankles a bit.

On the other hand, the art is nice even if the price is a bit steep. I'm going with an above-EH, in a "I pray for my soul" kind of way.

Around the Store in 31 Days: Day Eight

Did I mention that I'm making this up as I go along? I don't have a list books that I'm covering or anything, I'm just wandering in the store each day and coming up with whatever suits my fancy that day.

I'm also trying to (in the end) cover each of the racks in the store -- some racks have 2-5 genres/authors on them (like the Miller/Moore/Morrison/Creating Comics) rack -- if I just do one book in each category as I have them at the store, then I'd be at like 28 books from just that.

Some of them are easier than others. For example, today I think I'm eyeing the "licensed comics" rack, and that's a pretty hard one in a lot of ways -- most licensed comics actually, um, kinda stink.

Generally speaking they don't put "A List talent" on licensed books, though every once in a while they do. On today's installment, they did. Find out what it is, after the jump!

(And just for the record, what I call "licensed" is anything that isn't NATIVELY comics -- something that started as a TV show or novel or movie or that kind of thing)

(We don't put all licensed comics in the licensed section, though -- for example something like HELLRAISER is in the "horror" section, while BUFFY would be on the "Joss Whedon" rack, and so on and so forth)

Anyway, A-list talents, etc....

Pretty much the last people you'd expect to see doing a STAR TREK comic were Chris Claremont and Adam Hughes (!), yet in the early 90s that's exactly what happened on STAR TREK: DEBT OF HONOR.

Set right after ST IV: THE VOYAGE HOME (thus: the best post-TOS period), DEBT OF HONOR is, at the least, the god-damn prettiest STAR TREK comic you've ever seen in your life. That Hughes kid shure can draw!

The book suffers a little bit from Claremont-itis, but there isn't any Psychic Rape at least, so that's a plus. On the other hand, there IS a sizable lift from ALIEN, but at least this is a milieu in which that works reasonably well.

Ugh, I'm crazy today, store's been insanely busy (I started writing this at 10:45 am, and it is now just after 6), and we got our School Assignments for Ben's kindergarten (didn't get even one of the seven schools we wanted, sigh), so, screw it, I'm going to leave it right there. There WON'T be one of these tomorrow (I *need* a day away from thinking about comics this week), but I'm going to try and get two up on Monday...

Sorry this one was so shitty and half-written. I still like the comic...

-B

Jog takes a look at 3/4: Yes, 3/4

BodyWorld:

Yeah, there may have been comics released on Wednesday, but I feel the urge to talk about this past Tuesday instead, since it saw the completion of Chapter Two of a VERY GOOD webcomic, Dash Shaw's BodyWorld. If you're an admirer of rampant drug use, sticky sporting events, eye-searing colors, municipalities of the future and extra-sweaty teenage hookups, you'd best be clicking that link forthwith. Now, Shaw isn't a mysterious guy on the comics scene. He's already completed two longform comics projects -- Love Eats Brains: A Zombie Romance (Odd God Press, 2004) and The Mother's Mouth (Alternative Comics, 2006) -- a collection of short stories -- Goddess Head (Teenage Dinosaur Press, 2005) -- plus anthology contributions to MOME and Meathaus, along with an upcoming story in Marvel's alternative comics thingy and various other projects. This summer will bring a 720-page(!!) graphic novel from Fantagraphics, The Bottomless Belly Button. Obviously what he needed was more things to do, so he started a webcomic at the top of this year.

Those who only know of Shaw through the vigorous formalism of some of his earlier works may be surprised by how straightforward a comedic sci-fi soap opera BodyWorld is thus far. The plot more-or-less follows Prof. Paul Panther, a deeply questionable academic who's (allegedly) putting together an encyclopedia of hallucinogenic plants, or at least an updated edition thereof. He's a sorry, abrasive bastard, a romantic nostalgist and very much prone to harming himself. His misadventures take him to futuristic Boney Borough, where strange things are growing out by the local high school, and youth drama seethes inside among a wishes-she-was mature girl, the strapping athletic hero she's seeing, and the obligatory pretty cheerleader.

It's a fast-paced story, charged with Shaw's detail-prone imagination; you'd better believe the beloved local sport of Dieball -- a collision of lacrosse, a live-action tabletop game and a Double Dare physical challenge -- is presented with full gameplay instructions, just as Boney Borough itself is helpfully mapped. There's small mysteries, and odd folks wandering around. I can't say the main cast is thrillingly detailed yet, early in the story as we are, but Prof. Panther is a lot of fun, and the occasional awkwardness of Shaw's dialogue is offset by the ingenuity of his art.

Packed with distinctively outlined character art -- and I love how the older ones are literally sharper or more determinedly molded than his round, simpler youths -- Shaw's 'core' style sets white-heavy foreground elements against outline-free layers of color, sometimes vividly contrasted to affect the mood of a sequence. Arrows and sound effects often fill panels, while large portions of word balloons remain blank, lending a mannered, diagrammatic sensation to these hesitant characters' interactions, although Shaw is careful enough with subtle expression to give them some human dignity.

But this is a pliable world too, prone to launching into bold slashes of movement, bodies contorting with speed against suddenly abstract backgrounds. Note how the burning primary colors of the players below clash with the muted hues of the geometric crowd and their buzz of panel elements.

Meanwhile, one of Prof. Panther's flashbacks might adopt a monochrome, doodled elegance, befitting the cherished fuzziness of even his more painful recollections.

It really is an intuitive setup, smartly complimenting the artist's story - and it's great for emphasizing the body in Shaw's world. Nearly everything these characters do is related to physical sensation -- sports, drugs, climbing, kissing, bleeding -- the only refuge being Prof. Panther's memories, which fail to help him any. Every body is nearly a blank slate, all but demanding the marks and colors and letters of tactile sensation. Shaw has mentioned that psychic phenomena is soon to come to the plot (along with drama at the prom), and it will be something to see how this works in the context of this thought-through world.

Anyway, it's neat. And free. Updates each Tuesday. Go connect.

Number One With A Bullet: Diana Quick-Shoots 5/3

Let's get right in there, shall we? BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #12: Here's my $0.02 on The L Thing, from the perspective of a series-long fan. Do I believe Buffy would sleep with a woman? Yes, provided the woman is a Slayer - that was, after all, the subtext of her dynamic with Faith (especially in "Bad Girls"). However, I thought the execution here was a bit problematic for two reasons. Number one, as Chris Sims points out, the whole "post-coital reveal" really is a cliche these days. Number two, and this is something that bothered me a lot during the show's final years, there's no subtext or ambiguity in the Buffyverse anymore. That was a huge pet peeve for me, because the first three seasons were great at being subtle (ie: you never knew exactly what Angelus and Drusilla were up to behind Spike's back, which left your imagination running on overtime), and afterwards everything was in-your-face-with-a-can-of-mace (I'm thinking here of the near-rape in "Seeing Red" to name just one egregious "geez, what happened to my show?" scene). It could've been more interesting to be ambiguous about Buffy and Satsu, to drop teases and hints, rather than pull the old Wile E. Coyote anvil-to-the-head maneuver. I wasn't at all surprised to learn that Drew Goddard wrote that Season 7 episode when Spike's mother goes all Freudian on him, because that's exactly the kind of bluntness (which, in all honesty, could very easily be attributed to sensationalism) we get here. All that said, this is still a VERY GOOD issue, and Goddard deserves kudos for the abundant humor, to say nothing of the main reason I'm enjoying Season 8: new variations on canonical threats. The vampires in this issue are linked to an enemy Buffy's faced before, and that's precisely the sort of internal continuity mixed with innovation that makes the story even more interesting (and I didn't even like that particular enemy when he turned up).

CABLE #1: Cable, as a character, greatly benefited from MESSIAH COMPLEX: if, in earlier appearances, he either drifted around aimlessly or played at being Robo-Jesus, he's now a soldier with a clear mission and a nemesis who thematically parallels his own situation (after all, Bishop is also a soldier with a clear mission). What isn't apparent by the end of the issue is where Duane Swierczynski wants to go from here, big-picture-wise: is this series set in the New Jersey of 2043 we see here? Or will Cable and the baby be jumping through time with Bishop on their heels? It could go either way, and both options have potential (though I think we need a bigger supporting cast, because Cable monologuing as the baby cries could get old very fast), but we're off to a GOOD start. Special props to Ariel Olivetti for that look on Cable's face when he has to change the baby's diaper. Verily, a fate worse than death... and if this baby turns out to be Jean Grey, we can look forward to the inevitable argument where they both scream "I CHANGED YOUR DIAPERS!" at each other.

LOGAN #1: With Y: THE LAST MAN complete, I've been feeling the lack of Brian Vaughan in my monthly readings (don't ask about EX MACHINA). Now, I'm not a Wolverine fan. At all. But there's a handful of writers who can get me to check out anything they do, and Vaughan's one of them. (Carey's another, which no doubt explains why I feel like I've already passed my Wolverine quota for this year.) So imagine my disappointment when LOGAN #1 turned out to be a rather dull comic. Where is Vaughan's trademark unpredictability? Where are the twists and turns? This issue reads like WOLVERINE FOR DUMMIES, a standard (and standardized) fusion of stock tropes I've seen a hundred times already. EH, because I honestly don't care.

Postscript: The second I finished posting this, I saw that Douglas had beaten me to it.

 

I call the right side!

Let me break their jaws: Douglas's quick takes on 3/5

Pamphlets! Under the cut: LOGAN, NEW FRONTIER and YOUNG LIARS.

LOGAN #1: I realized after I'd bought this issue that it's cover-priced at $3.99, and for that money I expect more than 22 pages of story. And in fact I got more: it's 23 pages of story. (And a glossy cover; so what?) Eduardo Risso's in good form, but I expected much better from Brian K. Vaughan. The story is once again sending Wolverine to Japan (which was a really clever and refreshing idea when Claremont and Miller did it twenty-five years ago--yes, I am of the Paul O'Brien "oh Christ, not Japan again" school), and once again exploring a bit of his adventuring past so deeply forgotten it's never been referred to before. Although I suppose repeating oneself is the risk you run when you've got him appearing in at least half a dozen books a month. Also, Vaughan's cliffhangers tend to be much less cheap than this one. What's the exquisite, pastoral Japanese locale where Wolverine rescues and is bedded by a beautiful young woman in the waning days of World War II? Why, a little town he's never heard of called Hiroshima, of course! Knocked down to Awful for the price gouging.

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE NEW FRONTIER SPECIAL #1: Effectively a 48-page plug for the direct-to-video animated New Frontier movie, but hell, it's Darwyn Cooke--nine pages of the first story even have his signature at the bottom, distractingly enough. That story doesn't really add much to the original series--Superman and Batman have a misunderstanding and fight, and then Wonder Woman mediates a deal between them--but Cooke's artwork and design sense are the point here. The backup Robin/Kid Flash story is seriously incoherent (having Robin drag-race Wally Wood is a joke I wish someone would explain to me), and the Wonder Woman/Black Canary/Gloria Steinem teamup is just kind of a dopey joke. Good, on the strength of the lead feature's lovely Cooke art.

YOUNG LIARS #1: A new Vertigo ongoing by David Lapham, who spends the better part of his text piece wincing about the fact that he still hasn't finished Stray Bullets yet. So instead of Amy Racecar, we get a different all-id-no-superego antiheroine, Sadie Dawkins, who's come by her personality the Phineas Gage way--she's got a bullet in "the moral and emotional centers of [her] brain." I'm looking forward to hearing what Polite Dissent says about that one. This is apparently Lapham's take on youth culture, and specifically the New York music scene of the moment (the story happens literally yesterday, March 7, 2008), and he's really shaky on that stuff from the top of the very first page, where the credits appear on a cassette tape. Note: that date is 2008, not 1993. The supporting cast are broad but shallow caricatures--an anorexic ex-model called Annie X, an aging trust fund kid ("Daddy refused to pay the co-op. They're kicking me out tomorrow!"), etc. Lapham's stuffed this issue with temporal jumps and cutaways, and he seems to have some kind of master plan for the series. I could be convinced yet, but this is an Awful start.

Around the Store in 31 Days: Day Seven

Look, I made it a whole week!

I like comics that make me laugh. I also like comics that are smart and teach me something new.

Even better when they do both!

More after that ol' jump!

EPICURUS THE SAGE is a clever little book. Set in Ancient Greece, in concerns philosophy, philosophers, and the Greek Gods.

Socrates is a jerk, Plato is a boob, and Epicurus tries to find a reasonable position based upon moderation. Throw in a young Alexander the Great, and quests from Hades and Hera and such like and you've got a pretty rich comic stew.

EPICURUS, by William Messner-Loebs and Sam Kieth was orignally published by Piranha Press, DC's attempt at an "eclectic" imprint in the early 90s. Looking back at it now, they really did produce a great deal of interesting material: GREGORY, BEAUTIFUL STORIES FOR UGLY CHILDREN, I think that both WHY I HATE SATURN and STUCK RUBBER BABY were also Piranha books. Really, a great imprint, and a shame it never went much further.

You're going to have your own opinion of which of Piranha's books were the best (I know many will vote for SATURN or GREGORY), but my heart is with EPICURUS THE SAGE -- its sorta really only in comics that you're going to find a satirical comedy based on Greek Philosophy, and Messner-Loebs turned in some home-runs of scripts that are both whimsical, educational and absolutely hysterical.

It also has some of my favorite bits of Kieth art, where he's doing super-zany big foot cartooning that's also insanely feathered and cross-hatched like a Wrightson drawing.

When Messner-Loebs ran into financial troubles, Wildstorm reissued the previous EPICURUS material (2 OGNs, plus a short story from the FAST FORWARD anthology) in a complete collection, with an all-new story as well. As much as I love charities like the HERO INITIATIVE, I also think its great when publisher's step up and actually bring those suffering creator's work back into print so everyone can enjoy it.

Anyway, this is terrific top-notch stuff, and if you never thought Greek philosophy could be funny stuff, you're in for an amazing treat here.

-B

Around the Store in 31 Days: Day Six

So yesterday I did a "kid's" comic, let's go 180 degrees the other way today, and talk about something that's fully for adults.

With like screwing, and everything.

More after the jump, but if you're a prude, you should probably stop reading here.

Erotic comics are a difficult thing, a lot of the time, because you have to rate them both on how well they tell their story (when, that is, they HAVE one), as well as how "hot" it is. That latter is SUPER subjective.

I think most erotic comics really (no pun intended) suck. Especially these days. There were a couple of years were stuff of pretty decent quality was coming out, that was human-driven (instead of purely fuck-driven), where the art was luscious, etc.

But these days, it seems like erotic comics are largely of the "Rebecca" school, or of the hardcore Japanese erotic (epitomized by A-G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY) where all women are stupid sluts who once you warm them up they'll happily be humiliated in any number of subhuman and degrading ways, because all they REALLY are is a cunt (and mouth and ass...)

While (I suppose) there can be a few moments of hot fucking within that framework, that doesn't do a whole lot for me. I've even seen increasing elements of this in artists whom I think are incredibly amazing craftsmen, like, say, Milo Manara.

There's very little erotic comics in my personal collection, in fact, I only have two things in there. One of them is Coleen Coover's SMALL FAVORS, the sweet and funny lesbian sex comic, and the other is my actual subject today: Bill Willingham's IRONWOOD.

I've been a Willingham fan for a long time -- heck, I bought my copy of VILLAINS AND VIGILANTES (to tie it back to the gamer-geek post from a few days ago) because of his art. V&V had a module ("Death Duel with the Destroyers") that leads into Willingham's ELEMENTALS series, and ELEMENTALS pretty much led into IRONWOOD... Yes, role-playing games lead directly to pornography.

What I love about IRONWOOD is that is has (*gasp*) an actual STORY, which, sure, is heavy on the fantasy tropes, (and kinda ends awkwardly) but actually moves forward and does stuff.

Plus there's fucking. Always a bonus.

It's funny, it's pretty hot, it has a plot, and my memory of it is that it also has a diversity of sizes and shapes and things going into other things.

And can I tell you, the boy can draw. I wish he'd draw more these days.

So, yeah, that's my pick today: IRONWOOD, the only Sword-and-Sorcery Porno Comedy.

-B

Editurs r gud

Two quick periodical hits, since I'm standing in a pretty empty store today for some reason...

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #552: I'm just generally opposed to any character introduction where a seemingly normal junkie (Down to yelling "China white, we've got a date!") is able to evade Spider-Man through the streets of Manhattan. that's just sloppy lazy writing.

But what bugs me even more is two editorial lapses which just TORE me out of the comic. First off, on page 8 Spidey tears the ass in his suit. On page 10, the crowd comments about being able to see his ass. Page 9, which has got a fairly clear ass shot? Nothing.

(not that I WANT to see Spidey's ass, just saying)

But the bigger one for me is that "The Freak", takes a drug of some kind that literally makes him puke up his guts, on camera, which then swallow him up making a bloody organic cocoon. It's pretty gross and explicit. Then four pages later "Ox" picks up "the Bookie" and the caption at the bottom of the pages says "And let's cut it there folks, before it gets too gruesome for our all-ages comic!"

Uh, what?

This is the first arc of BND Spidey which I really really hated. Phil Jimenez's art makes things a little better, but there's a few really weird shots, like that one on page 7 where it looks like he's channelling McFarlane, with a leg that can't possibly be where it is. Plus that cover? What's wrong with Pete's arms. All in all, I'll say AWFUL.

UNCANNY X-MEN 496: First off, thank god for a comic set in SF where you don't see the GG bridge in every panel, and there's actually a pretty good representation of a Victorian "Painted Lady". But the "Previous in..." page at the start of the book says that the City has morphed into "a far out version of itself from the summer of '69"

Now, maybe this is splitting hairs, but its my understanding that by '69, the Haight was mostly boarded-up store fronts, and that speed and smack had long replaced weed and acid as the drug of choice. Apparently even by '67 the bloom was off the rose, and it was really like '65 and '66 that SF was "groovy".

'69 was Altamont, right?

Interestingly, the giant Eternal is still standing in Golden Gate park, though (cf: Gaiman's ETERNALS mini)... I never expected to see that referenced again, and I suspect that no one (even Neil) knows how that one resolves...

The rest of the book is fine, if a bit slight, especially coming off the Big Crossover, pretty much the textbook definition of an OK comic book.

DC SPECIAL: RAVEN #1: Other than not liking the comic at all, I really have to comment on the cover blurb "Finally in her own EMO series". O. M. G! AWFUL.

Alright, store is full of people again, I'm out...

What did YOU think?

-B

Around the Store in 31 Days: Day Five

If you're old enough, you might remember when DC comics had a slogan int he UPC box of their Direct Market-shipping comics that said something "DC Comics: They're not just for kids anymore!"

And, in general, the comic book industry has really followed that lead -- comics AREN'T for kids any longer (except for a very small number of titles)

To me this is kind of a shame. When I bring home the new week's books, and plop on the sofa to start reading them, I often have to chase Ben (now four-years old) away when I'm reading something even as supposedly as innocuous as SPIDER-MAN or SUPERMAN, because there's just so much violence and in them.

Unnecessary violence and blood, for that matter.

Some of my favorite fiction is "for kids" -- I can watch WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (Gene Wilder version) weekly, if I had to. I love reading Ben books like CHARLOTTE'S WEB or JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH or our current project of going through the Baum OZ books (man, there's some archaic language in those though -- I find myself "rewriting" them as I read them) -- and I'd say that the best kid's work really needs to have things that appeal to EVERYONE in them.

So today's pick is a GN aimed at kids, but also working very well for adults, too!

More after the jump...

There's a couple of easy and obvious choices for "Kid's" comics. It's hard to go wrong with a BONE or a Carl Bark's UNCLE SCROOGE comic, or even the first incarnations of the "DC Animated" comics (BATMAN ADVENTURES, SUPERMAN ADVENTURES), but I'm going to go with something a smidge more "obscure".

James Robinson & Paul Smith's LEAVE IT TO CHANCE.

The "high concept" of this series can be summed up as "NANCY DREW meets HARRY POTTER", (Well, though Robinson't intro to v1 calls it "NANCY DREW meets KOLCHAK THE NIGHT STALKER", but then, HARRY POTTER started in '98, and the introduction is dated '97) and its just tons of fun.

There's action, suspense, adventure, magic, and even a cute pet dragon, and its both absolutely wonderful for kids AND adults, just like it should be.

LEAVE IT TO CHANCE is one of those books that just doesn't turn very often (in fact, it might be the slowest sellers in our kid's section), but I'll continue to carry it until the day I die because I just like it so much. It is usually my number one suggestion to parent's looking blankly at the kid's section, but they almost always opt for something THEY've previously heard of.

Format might be working against sales, as well -- CHANCE is available in three oversized "European" laminated hardcovers, which makes it look more expensive than it actually is (and compared to a number of "real world" kids books, it's down right cheap)

Either way, the stories are a delight, never talking down to its audience, always crisp and fun, while Paul Smith's artwork is just drop-dead gorgeous.

Comics: They aren't just for adults. Read some LEAVE TO CHANCE and find out!

-B

Around the Store in 31 Days: Day Four

I was going to write about a completely different book this morning, but then I saw the news that DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS co-creator Gary Gygax died on Tuesday morning.

The intersection between comics and games is often a pretty deep one -- our forms of geekness are different, but there's a lot of overlap between the two camps.

Back when I opened Comix Experience in 1989, it was de rigueur for comic book stores to carry gaming material. I opened my stores 4 doors down from San Francisco's best (and, today, only) game store, Gamescape, so that I wouldn't have to touch the things.

It's not that I'm not a gamer (I am -- dude, I was playing D&D when it was those three little booklets in the box), but I had a theory that it was better to do one thing really really well, then two things sorta half-assed.

But there are comics that are ABOUT gaming, and one of them is one of my favorite comics of all.

More after the jump!

KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE is an odd bird. It's typically (especially in the early days) just 6-8 static clip-art-style shots with lots and lots and lots of dialog.

Its also hysterical.

Some of it is kind of "insider baseball"-funny... a lot of the jokes might get lost on you if you don't game yourself, but I think that, for the most part, the gags are pretty universal if you have even the slightest awareness of gamings tropes.

There's a Rules Lawyer, a ground-down-by-real-life-so-he-needs-to-kill-imaginary-stuff-to-stay-sane hack-and-slasher, a hardcore roleplayer, and a dumb guy who goes along with his friends, plus their long-suffering DM, just playing games for 24 pages a month.

Some of the humor is just the absurdity of people so trapped in their world-view that they don't know how else to deal with things ("OK, coming over the hill, you see a gazebo." "A Gazebo?! What's that?" "I waste it with my crossbow!" "Fireballs coming on line, BA!" "um, guys...?"), and some of it is about mechanics of games, or tropes that gamers all take for granted, but it is pretty uniformly hilarious.

A quick look at the book might make you turn away from the crude "clip art", but the style will quickly grow on you, and sticking with it will give you one of the most consistently funny and whimsical "funny books" on the shelves today.

There are, as of this writing, something like 24 trade paperbacks reprinting the first eighty-something issues. Sadly, most of them seem to be either out-of-print, or at least unavailable from Diamond (and "real" book distributors, like Baker & Taylor simply don't stock them), but the series is currently on it's 136th issue, an astonishing and remarkable achievement by any standard.

I especially recommend the "Bundle of Trouble"s (that's what they call their TPs) around the v4 to 8 range -- they've found their voice by then, and worked out some of the kinks, and the "extra" stories in the backs of the BoT (typically, one reprints 4 issues, with another 30 or so pages of new material) like the "Bagwars" saga are amazing pieces of timing and humor.

Currently the series is a hybrid comics/game magazine -- there's 30-something pages of comics, and another equal amount of RP supplementary material. I almost always stop reading once the comics are done, but I still always feel like I've gotten my money's worth out of each issue.

I guess what I like the best about KoDT is that it is TOTALLY out of the mainstream of comics culture -- it's almost like the "Dev team" (KoDT is created by a team of writers, all switching back and forth each issue) fell backwards into the whole comic thing -- it's totally off the radar of most comics people, and yet its longer running and much much funnier than almost anything else running today.

There's not enough "funny" in the funny books these days, so I'd urge you to try and track down some KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE today.

Me, I've got to get back to prepping for this week's comics... and rolling a d20 salute to Gary Gygax...

-B