A Review of Batwoman in Detective Comics Focusing Mostly on the Art

Detective Comics #858

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(from Batman: Year One)

Oh shit, it's David Mazzucchelli! My god, Williams must have found him at a rare con appearance or talk and touched his exposed skin and took his power! I wonder if he'll ever get to kiss Gambit? Hang on, Batman's Marvel, right? No, I checked. That answer's no. Maybe I need a more detailed refresher here.

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

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

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

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

(Id.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(just guess, huh?)

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

And as for Kate Kane.

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

Hibbs on 10/28

It is like waiting for a bus around here, no one posts for a while, then BAM! three at once.

Let's look at a few books from this week, under the jump, shall we?

DETECTIVE COMICS #858: David's excellent post on Rucka's writing not withstanding, I was pretty blown away by the art on this issue. I mean, William's "painterly" work is excellent, but I couldn't believe just how well he channeled David Mazuchelli's "Batman: Year One" style for this not-so-named, but-clearly-Batwoman-Year-One-esque story. What a smart choice, and what an amazing job in working against his "natural" style. My only real criticism is the cover -- that's pretty ugly, and one of the very few times that i think the Variant cover simply looks better in every significant way. Either way, this is purely EXCELLENT work, and I'm looking forward to, say, 2015 when I get to buy the "Absolute Edition" of this wondrous comic.

X-NECROSHA & NEW MUTANTS #6: No, DC's not the only one running a "dead heroes come back from the dead, all evil and shit" storyline. I have to say that this feels jarringly out-of-tone to what I expect from X-Men stories, and it also seems needlessly complicated at this point in the "Utopia" storyline, but it worked adequately well. The big problem in "Necrosha" is just how many characters are running around, and how you need a scorecard to keep track of them. In the lead story they start off alright in identifying who is who, but about the middle of the issue a bunch of characters appear with no identification, almost as if they forgot. I had sort of the same problem with the Dark Avengers/X-Men crossover -- Fraction was awesome with those little twitter-esque summaries of the characters at the start (I felt like I could read a book that was really nothing but those), but as the story progressed that got dropped (or maybe written out with the idea of the eventual collection in mind.. which is maybe less than ideal with a company that has such a hard time keeping collections in print - and, anyway, in two years will anyone even remember the "Dark Avengers" at all?)

(Sidebar on that: I had a returning, lapsed reader come in the other day, asking me for Venom comics. I showed him classic collections [McFarlane, the Bendis USM bits, etc.], but they wanted something modern. Well, here's the current incarnation of Venom here in "Dark Reign: Sinister Spider-Man". "Uh, why is he called 'Spider-Man'?" I tried to explain the whole Norman Osbourne thing and the Dark Avengers, but he looked at me as if I was speaking Martian. There's also this one starring Eddie Brock... it is called "Anti-Venom". More blank stares. "So, you don't have any current Venom comics?" Well, these are Venom, they're just not called that exactly. "Maybe I'll come back later when I have more money" Sale lost, yay!)

Anyway, I do have to say that I pretty much love Zeb Wells take on Doug "Cypher" Ramsey in NM #6, and the notion that EVERYTHING is "language", and that Doug is actually pretty much 32 flavors of bad-ass. I specifically thought the "what they're REALLY saying" sequence was absolutely brilliant, and probably the best single piece of writing I've read this month. However, the art was pretty shit-tacular, especially with its lack of backgrounds, and primary-coloring. Yikes. Took what otherwise have been a VERY GOOD book down to, say, an OK, about the same I'd rate the NECROSHA one-shot itself.

DARK REIGN - THE LIST: PUNISHER: I discussed this a little already, that too often spin-off things from a main plot are way too often Red Skies-y -- Norman Osbourne says "I will kill this character", and at the end they're still alive with no verifiable difference in their status quo. In part this is also a problem with Marvel's marketing machine: they say that everything is an "11", but they're usually (say) a "6", and when you DO get that "11", no one hears the signal through all of the noise. The "Dark Reign- The List" branding has been a real flop for me, because there are 27 other books that all say "Dark Reign" on the cover -- but this one, this one was a real game-changer.

I have to say that I've thought that most of the "Dark Avengers" thing has been pretty floppish -- while it is a good high concept, they really haven't been doing too much that IS "dark", and 9 out of 10 times they just let the "good guys" get away, often in pretty contrived ways. Osborne doesn't seem to have a plan any more than the Cylons did, and so much of the past year in Marvel editorial has felt to me like wheel spinning.

So, you can color me shocked when (dark) Wolverine cuts Frank Castle into little tiny bite-sized bits and chucks them down a sewer. That's... different.

JRJR's art is impressively brutal -- I mean if you WANT to see Frank Castle butchered like a cow, that is the way to do it. I'm not really sure if I DO want that, all in all -- I've never really liked the Punisher except for maybe the Ennis years -- but this was the first time in a year (yeesh!) that the "Dark" part of the "Dark Avengers" has felt even a little bit right to me.

I also can't really say that I'm much interested in "FrankenCastle" as a concept, and, even more so, I have my severe doubts that this is what the audience for THE PUNISHER (especially in a "set in the Marvel U" title) is going to be interested in this new direction, even a little bit, but you have to give them points for trying out something completely new.

Despite my trepidations on the direction, I have to admit, I thought this was pretty GOOD in execution.

("Execution", heh)

HULK #16: Here's one that's absolutely going in the wrong direction completely. I mean, really, the only point that I could see in this book was in the mystery of "who is the Red Hulk", and that's not a strong enough premise to stretch out over like a year and a half, with apparently no end in sight. And now it's not enough that they still haven't resolved that mystery, but now they're piling MORE mysteries on top of that with the new Red SHE-Hulk, and the bits with Doc Sampson.

At Comix Experience, at least, this is turning into a commercial disaster -- I'm pretty certain we'll be into single digit sales on my next FOC order, which, considering how well "Hulk" Launched is really really bad -- we've lost something like 67% of the audience for Hulk, and if we compare it to, say, WORLD WAR HULK, we're rapidly approaching a 90% attrition.

The writing on this issue is gruesomely bad, pulling all of the lazy tricks of quoting from other things that I thought Loeb had abandoned after the "Our Worlds at War" Superman stories (that was the title, wasn't it? Too lazy to Google) -- Sun Tzu, the Parable of the Elephant, "my father got me to stop smoking by making me smoke an entire pack in an hour" blah blah blah it just really bugged me.

It also really bugs me that there's all of these characters running through the issue, and none of them -- NONE -- are identified or given plausible motivations, and other characters who had been in the story (Elektra or Domino) seem to have been written out between issues. That and the off-hand bullshit of "Oh, I killed Jen Walters", ugh.

Ian Churchill's art is weird here. In interviews, Loeb says that this is how Churchill has always wanted to draw, but that, for marketing reasons he changed his style to fit what the market said it wanted -- and now he's a big-foot cartoonist. It is... well, it is alright, but it isn't, I don't think, what anyone really wants from a Overly-Muscled-People-Punching-Things comic. The thing about "cartoony" art is that it needs to... hm, well move, I guess. Squash and stretch, having some independent energy of some kind, and this doesn't -- it is all pretty "dull" on the page, and blocky.

All in all this is a pretty AWFUL comic book, and it is leading into what might be the first "event" storyline ("Fall of the Hulks") in CE history where I'm ordering less than 10 copies for the racks. Yikes.

That's what I have for this week: What did YOU think?

-B

A Review of Batwoman in Detective Comics Focusing Mostly on the Writing

A while ago, my boy Pedro at Funnybook Babylon talked about how sometimes bad art can obscure a less-than-wonderful script, since bad art is easier to bitch about and more easily apparent. I'm here to talk about the inverse, especially as it relates to Greg Rucka's inadvertent (I'm pretty sure he originally thought this was going to be a solo miniseries or ongoing) return to Detective Comics.

Because, let's be fair: everyone's talking about how gorgeous and brilliant and formally inventive J.H. Williams III is, but I just haven't seen people talk about the story all that much. I reread "Elegy" before reading Detective Comics #858 this week, and the entire story works incredibly well as a continuous whole, with Williams's chameleonic layouts perfectly complementing the very diverse locations and settings that Rucka's building into this.

But even completely ignoring the art side, there's a lot going on here. It's difficult to discuss the story without discussing Kate's relationship to the Bat-symbol; she's absolutely taking up the aegis of a concept larger than herself, but that's a logical decision for someone ingrained with a military mindset, something that's absolutely integral to Kate's character.

There's a joke, and a criticism, somewhere about how Batwoman combines Rucka's two favorite concepts as a writer - the military and tough but flawed female heroes - into a single company-owned franchise, but while that might be true the military angle DOES do a great deal to distinguish her from the other people rocking the Bat - and a traumatic past is pretty much the prerequisite to join that club in the first place. Just look at what happened to poor ol' Tim Drake.

The hook that's driving this series as of the beginning of GO - and SPOILER SHADES on, kids, I'm about to ruin the end of the last arc - is that Batwoman's character is really one half of a yin/yang thing, a character who's largely dedicated to order and discipline, although the ballroom scenes with Maggie Sawyer betray a streak of mischievousness. The other half would, of course, have to be dedicated to chaos with a streak of order and community - and that's her sister Beth, heading up the Religion of Crime while being driven by her ordered obsession to emulate Alice Liddell.

Rucka teases this duality for the first three issues, but it's really in #857 that Williams's art starts reflecting the nature of Batwoman and Alice's relationship - an artistic theme I will, perhaps incorrectly, attribute to Rucka's plot over Williams's layout and design. At the end of the issue, the overall theme is clear, and then with #858, the first part of "Go," Rucka switches gears completely to writing what may be his strongest subject: parents and their children.

From Batman: Death and the Maidens to his Montoya Family scenes in Gotham Central, Rucka is superb at writing family dynamics, and this is HUGELY to his advantage when dealing with the material presented by the Kanes. What's impressive about the way Rucka portrays Kate and Beth's relationship with their mother isn't just the immediate portrayal in the flashbacks, but how thoroughly it informs Kate's indifference to her STEPmother in the present-day situation of the first arc. Greg Rucka mothers are creatures of great insight and tough love, and Gabi Kane is no exception to that rule - while the current stepmother is, at this point, just a disapproving, misunderstanding cypher. In Rucka's world, real (not necessarily biological, but committed) parents don't just love their kids, they UNDERSTAND them, more than the children would ever like to believe or admit.

This level of parental insight heavily informed Rucka's writing of Bruce and Alfred in his first Detective run, and it applies very accurately to Kate and her father here. It's a very similar relationship without being a carbon-copy: both father figures understand their kids' obsessions and the tragedy that drives them, while also wishing for them a healthier emotional balance. However, Colonel Kane makes judgments about Kate that Alfred just doesn't with Bruce; the Colonel is certainly not Kate's servant in any way, and his support is neither monetarily reimbursed nor unconditional - in short, he has a far greater influence. Kate looks up to her dad more than Bruce admires Alfred, and this makes for a totally different, while still similar, dynamic.

Of course, then you have Kate and Beth: Rucka goes a long way to portray these two as almost identical in #858, having them equal out each other's mistakes and pretend to be each other in school. When the tragic Joe Chill/Crime Alley equivalent moment occurs at the end of the issue, it's even worse that we know Beth's fate, and how easily there could have been Beth Kane, Batwoman and Kate Kane, High Madame of the Dark Faith. Even more than Bruce's, Kate's existence is based purely on chance, a straight up fifty-fifty split. Survivor's guilt can be a powerful motivator, and although we're only one issue into "Go" I don't think I'd be out of line saying it heavily informs Kate's actions.

Even completely ignoring Williams's more than considerable contributions, Greg Rucka has built an incredibly compelling character, driven by believable personal demons, in Kate Kane. There's a solid argument to be made that this comic is the pinnacle of Rucka's superhero career so far, combining the detail-obsessiveness of Queen & Country and Checkmate with the familial drama and character work of Gotham Central and Wonder Woman. Kate Kane is a character that's uniquely informed by his sensibilities and style, while also providing a ton of springboards for future writers to jump off of - which is pretty much the definition of a quality toy placed into a superhero universe sandbox. Without a doubt, Detective Comics featuring Batwoman is Greg Rucka's most EXCELLENT contribution to superhero comics to date.

AND NOW: A SHORT DISCUSSION OF "THE QUESTION."

Recently CBR's Tim Callahan referred to the Question backup as "lesser Greg Rucka, lesser Cully Hamner, and not worth your time." While I'd certainly never go that far - it's a perfectly entertaining street-level detective story - it just feels like a bit of a letdown after Montoya's recent appearances in Final Crisis. We saw her team up with the Huntress, save the Spectre, take down the Biblical Cain (who was also Vandal Savage) and then get offered the role of building Jack Kirby's Future That's Coming. Oh, and then she traveled on the Bleedfaring sausage party known as Zillo Valla's Ultima Thule with 52 Supermen.

So to see her taking down border-crossing human traffickers: while it's really nice to see Montoya in her element and beating the shit out of random thugs again, I want to see the next step in her evolution, not a standard detective story with Renee Montoya as the Question slotted in. And while Rucka can do standard detective stories better than most people in the business, he can do character work better, and character work with his pets like Montoya best. So while it's almost definite that future installments will bring me Montoya stories that delve into the character rather than use her to drive a relatively unrelated story, these first five installments left me somewhat cold, and I really felt "Pipeline: Chapter One" was just OKAY - but that's largely because it wasn't what I wanted it to be, more than any specific faults in the writing or art.

Favorites: The Dark Knight Strikes Again

Years ago I came across an eye-opening quote from Jaron Lanier in the liner notes of the reissued Gary Numan album The Pleasure Principle. Google reveals that it was pulled from this Wired essay. Here's what it said:

"Style used to be, in part, a record of the technological limitations of the media of each period. The sound of The Beatles was the sound of what you could do if you pushed a '60s-era recording studio absolutely as far as it could go. Artists long for limitations; excessive freedom casts us into a vacuum. We are vulnerable to becoming jittery and aimless, like children with nothing to do. That is why narrow simulations of 'vintage' music synthesizers are hotter right now than more flexible and powerful machines. Digital artists also face constraints in their tools, of course, but often these constraints are so distant, scattered, and rapidly changing that they can't be pushed against in a sustained way."

Lanier wrote that in 1997. I'm actually not sure which vintage-synth resurgence he was talking about, unless you count the Rentals or something (although everyone and their grandfather was namechecking Gary Numan back then, which was sort of the point of including the quote in the liner notes. Maybe he meant Boards of Canada?).

But golly, it sure seems prescient now, huh? Here we are, in the post-electroclash, post-Neptunes, post-DFA era. The hot indie-rock microgenre is glo-fi, which sounds like playing a cassette of your favorite shiny happy pop song when you were three years old after it's sat in the sun-cooked tape deck of your mom's Buick for about 20 years. And my single favorite musical moment of last year, as harrowing as those songs are soothing, was the part of the universally acclaimed Portishead comeback album that sounded exactly like something from a John Carpenter film score. (It's at the 3:51 mark. It's awesome, isn't it?)

And that's just on the music end. Visually? Take a look at Heavy Light, a show at the Deitch Gallery this summer featuring a murderers' row of video artist specializing in primary-color overload and technique that doesn't just accentuate but revels in its own limitations. Foremost among them, at least for us comics folks, is Ben Jones, member of the hugely influential underground collective Paper Rad and recent reinterpreter of the massively mainstream The Simpsons and Where the Wild Things Are. But the ones with the widest cultural import at the moment are Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of the astonishingly funny and bizarre Adult Swim series Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!. Their color palette is garish, their digital manipulations are knowingly crude, and their analog experiments are even more so. When they combine the three, god help us all. And let's not forget Wareheim's unforgettable, magisterially NSFW collaboration with fellow Heavy Light contributor and Gary Panter collaborator Devin Flynn.

Yeah, most of these guys are playing it either for laughs or for sheer mind-melting overload, but I think there's frequently beauty in there to rival what some of the musicians are doing. (Click again on that first Ben Jones link.) And (thank you Internet God) this amazing video by Peppermelon shows that you can do action, awe, even sensuality with this aesthetic. The rawness, the brightness, the willingness to let the seams show--it all gives you something to push against again.

When I've written about The Dark Knight Strikes Again I've been fond of saying it was years ahead of its time. Sometime in the past week and a half or so, there was a day when I was listened to Washed Out at work, then came home and stumbled across that Deitch show link in an old bookmark, then watched an episode of Tim & Eric, then came across that Ben Jones WTWTA strip--and suddenly I realized I was right! Not that it matters--at all--whether or not Miller and Varley have any real continuity with any of this material. They certainly didn't get there before Paper Rad, unless I'm wildly mistaken. But then half the fun of DKSA is spotting all the stuff Miller does, from naked newscasters to superheroes ruling the earth rather than just guarding it, seemingly without realizing someone's done it first. What difference would that make? Meanwhile, in all the off-the-beaten-path references Frank Santoro has cited during the production of his Ben Jones collaboration Cold Heat--essentially a glo-fi comic book--I haven't heard word one about this book. But I'm not saying Miller & Varley paved the way for anything. I'm saying that when Miller abandoned his chops (and, for the most part, backgrounds!) for the down and dirty styles he (thought he) saw at SPX, and when Varley decided to use photoshop to call attention to itself rather than to create a simulacrum of something else, they were using the same tools, tapping the same vein, seeking the same sense of excitement, discovery, and trailblazing as these newer movements.

I've also been fond of likening DKSA to proto-punk, taking a cue from Tony Millionaire's jacket-wrap blurb: "Miller has done for comics what the Ramones et al have done for music. This book looks like it was done by a guy with a pen and his girlfriend on an iMac." The idea is that it's raw, it's loud, it's brash, it doesn't have time for the usual niceties--it's getting comics back to their primal pulp roots. I spoke to Miller several times during and following the release of the book, one time for print, and he said as much. (I certainly never would have bought the cockamamie idea that this thing was some sort of corporate cash-grab even if he'd never said word one.) He even mentioned to me his belief that the brightly colored costumes of the early superheroes served mainly the dual purpose of a) telling them apart from one another, and b) proving they weren't naked, so even his thinking in historical terms had him ready to peel back from realism as a form of reclamation. And of course it's not exactly like the story was at all subtle in this regard: Batman and his army came back to overthrow the dictators that kept us fat and happy and turned the superheroes into boring wimps. But ultimately the punk comparisons were just a little off. Born less of despair than of delight, filled less with anger than with joy, The Dark Knight Strikes Again anticipated a way of doing things that is not intended to look or sound effortless, that draws attention to its own construction, but which--with every pixelization and artifact, with every crayolafied visual and left-in glitch, with every burbly synth and sky-bright color--pushes against that construction and springs out into something wild and wonderful.

The Brave and the Bold #28: Welcome to Where Your Soul Dies

I read a lot of comics.

As a general rule, I at least keep up with most of the Big Two shared-universe titles, and I'm not utterly averse to J. Michael Straczynski as a writer. The first half of his Amazing Spider-Man run, Supreme Power, Thor - he's written comics I enjoyed thoroughly and am glad I paid money for.

He also wrote this.

I'm used to, and have a certain respect for, well-intentioned, interesting or ambitious failures. It's why I'm still spending money for Dark Wolverine, after all. To really earn my ire, a comic has to be completely fucked up not just in the execution, but all the way back to the project's creative germ. This is one of those comics.

Told with all the excitement and wit of a PSA capping off a Saturday morning cartoon from 1995, The Brave and the Bold #28 is a stupendous exercise in the time-honored field of insulting your audience. It's astonishing that just twelve issues ago this entire book's premise was based on fun team-ups; this is just about the least fun Barry Allen time travel story you'll ever read, as Straczynski somehow manages to turn a story about a time-travelling forensics cop shooting up Nazis into a completely banal morality play about -- I don't know what. Support Our Troops? America Is Complicated? Killing In War Sure Is Ugly But It Is Necessary? Anyone past the age of five doesn't need a fucking superhero comic to beat that into their brains, especially when said superhero comic doesn't even bother using metaphors and instead just places the main character smack in the middle of World War II.

While there, he meets up with the Inglourious BasterdsBlackhawks, who are not flying planes for bullshit handwaved reasons and don't take very well to Barry Allen's "not grinning like an idiot while perforating holes in scores of Nazis" mentality. So what does Barry Allen do, stuck in this time period with a broken leg but still able to use the entirety of the rest of his power set? He lets the Blackhawks call him a pussy, and then -- I am not making this up -- steals a uniform from a dead American soldier and rolls with the Blackhawks for a period of weeks. This period, by the way, is depicted in a single splash page, as the rest of the comic is needed for all the insipid moralizing.

So then, after pretending to be an American soldier for a matter of weeks and not using his powers to save lives in the war, his leg heals and he goes back through the time rift to the present - but not before providing a speech to Blackhawk about how this isn't the war to end all wars, but America survives, and its principles are intact, and they can't never take down Old Glory dagnabbit not while the goshdarn American spirit survives, by golly!

In conclusion - I guess that if you're the type of person who was moved and entertained by Amazing Spider-Man #36, the 9/11 tribute issue, then you might find something of worth in this. On the other hand, if you have read a history book before in your life, are capable of making moral decisions on your own, or just don't like being preached to in the least subtle manner possible - then you will probably feel, as I did, that this comic is the most astonishingly, pretentiously intelligence-insulting exaggeration of all of the preachiest, most insufferable aspects of JMS's writing.

This comic is like being lectured to by your grandfather. This comic is like a video they put on in history class during a substitute session. This comic is buying a story for $2.99 and instead getting a poorly-written polemic combined with an emotionally manipulative guilt factory. This comic is CRAP, saved only by Jesus Saiz's appealing but not especially noteworthy art. So if you didn't know what kind of comic this was -- now you know.

And knowing is half the battle.

What scares you

I was standing around Ben's schoolyard the other morning talking with the first graders while waiting for the morning bell to ring, and one of them announced to me that they were afraid of squirrels (first graders are really cute with what will just pop out of their mouths) (She had been bitten by a squirrel a few weeks before apparently, so I can get behind that)

So I started asking the kids what they were all scared of -- I have a very mild fear of heights (more like I get dizzy), and Ben said "Ghost Galaxy!" (I think we'll come back to that), one little boy said people dressed as zombies, and another said spiders, but the one that tugged at my heart was the precious little girl who declared it was "Jesus"

I blinked rapidly.

"Um, honey, why are you scared of Jesus, he's supposed to be very nice and said everyone should be friendly to everyone else."

"Yes, but he's part of God, and God is very very very big, and we're like ants to him."

***

ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE: RECORDED ATTACKS: Another thing that scares me is the notion that book publishers are going to come into comics not having the slightest idea of what they're doing. This was proven to me with this volume from Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House.

I really really really liked Max Brook's WORLD WAR Z -- more for its scope of history and world building and just plain thinking about the impact of the upcoming Zombie Apocalypse on the whole of the world than about the zombies themselves; heck, I like it so much I even bought the audiobook version (truncated as it is, it has some excellent performances -- Alan Alda FTW!), so I'm pretty hip to the idea of a GN extension of that world. The premise is to show various Zombie attacks, all before modern times, and how other cultures and historical periods would have dealt with them (I'm iffy on the Caveman one, just from a Reasoning POV, but the rest are clever)

However, take a look at that cover. Here's a copy of it.

Notice anything odd about that?

Think about it a moment.

For the slow among you: Max Brooks is "just" a writer (at least as far as I know) -- and he certainly didn't draw the book. YET THE ARTIST'S NAME IS NO WHERE TO BE FOUND ON THE FRONT COVER (or spine, for that matter)

There's a little small line on the BACK cover about how the book is "illustrated by" Ibraim Roberson, but it's all just an afterthought in the marketing copy. Even in the indicia page (or whatever they call that page in proper books) Roberson's name is in a smaller type size than the ISBN number.

The weird thing to me is that this was apparently changed at some point in the production process -- here's the Random House website with the cover as it was solicited -- and Roberson's name is right there on the front cover where it should be. Some Marketing (probably) person made a conscious decision to remove Roberson's name from the book.

Here's the thing: in comics, there's no such thing as "illustrated by" -- the artist (or artistS, since penciller, inker, and colorist are all common components) is either an equal, or, in some cases, greater-than participant in the creative process as the writer. Especially in a book like this which has lots and lots and lots of silent sequences.

For all I know Max Brook's script is very very detailed, dictating "camera position" and exact details and everything so that "any" artist could have done exactly the same work... but from what I know about comics production, that seems pretty darn unlikely to me. In fact, in a lot of ways, the text seems a bit divorced from the sequential story-telling, almost as if Brooks just wrote some (very) short prose chapters and left it at that. I don't know.

But I do know that "comics" is "Words AND Pictures working together", and to not credit the artist on the front cover or spine is, in my opinion, horrifically disrespectful, and utterly screwed up.

The book itself is a low GOOD, being mostly vignettes that don't add together, and being, let's be charitible, outrageously expensive at $17 for a black & white paperback, which should be selling 10s of thousands of units based on the Author's cachet.

***

So far for three years running, Ben and I take an annual "father and son" trip; and, so far, each year we head down to Disneyland. Ben's an October baby, so we're always there for the Halloween decorations at Disneyland, especially the Nightmare Before Christmas overlay on The Haunted Mansion (which is 99 flavors of awesome, I got to tell you).

This year Ben was (finally!) tall enough to ride the Indiana Jones ride, and he DUG IT -- we went on it three times before the lines got too long to make it "worth it"

We go midweek on a week with no holidays or anything, hoping for the least lines possible, but this year it was absolutely packed. I'm thinking the "get in free on your birthday" promotion is REALLY working, because I saw a TON of people wearing "It's my birthday" pins. Also, there's a marked rush at about 3 PM, making me think a lot of locals have annual passes, and come by after school for a ride or three.

We did little this year that we didn't do other years -- I still can't get Ben to consent to the Twilight Zone ride, though we did get on Soaring Over California as our last ride of the day. Very impressive, but way not worth the hour in line that it ended up being (it was 25 minutes we we got in line, but I guess they had an army of "Fast Pass" people show up, because it took 65 minutes total)

Other than that was a new overlay on Space Mountain, called "Ghost Galaxy".

I had the vague thought that maybe they'd just replace the streaking lights with ghost shaped lights or something. Maybe change the sound track a bit.

You couldn't tell what it might be from the outside of the ride, since they couldn't be bothered to change the entry whatsoever -- and, seriously, walking through that 1970s edifice to futurism is about as unghostly as one might get. There WAS a sign or two that said "small children might find this frightening", but hell, Indy says THAT, and Ben was grinning and cackling through Indy.

Not on Ghost Galaxy. He was as white as a sheet at the end, and said, in a very quiet voice, "I never want to go on that again as long as I live, Daddy"

Dig that he LOVED Space Mountain last year, AND as a four year old too.

Ghost Galaxy basically just projects "gory" spirits up on the walls -- there's no blood, per se, but they're colored blood red. As an adult, it's utterly laughable, but it freaked the fuck out of Ben. It also sort of ruined the ride. Space Mountain is awesome because the ... well, I don't know what to call the moving lights... the hyperspeed effect, maybe?... really helped with the smoothness and the movement of the roller coaster part. Randomly projecting big square "ghost" portraits completely screwed up the effect. That's a ride I'll never ride again myself. AWFUL.

***

BLACKEST NIGHT BATMAN 1-3, and SUPERMAN #1-3: To me, the biggest sin of a crossover tie-in is to be "red skies". That is, where basically nothing really happens, except to take money from your pocket. And I kind of feel that BN crossovers are doing pretty much that -- zombies show up, get fended off, the end.

BATMAN was especially that -- there's nothing in there that "moved the needle" much, while SUPERMAN at least put up an "anti Zombie field" around "New Krypton" (that will also repel anyone else), which, I'm thinking, is going to explain why SUPERMAN: WORLD OF NEW KRYPTON is only a 12 issue mini-series. Of course, that will make WoNK a less satisfying read, perhaps, with "See something else!" as it's big conclusion.

Overall, neither was any better than OK.

***

The pounding in my head is starting again from all the drilling outside. Maybe THAT's what I really fear: street construction (And the loss of business from it)

What did YOU think?

-B

Murder, Most Foul

I'm in hell.

We're coming up on the... fourth? week of the "Divisadero Streetscape Improvements", where they're completely gutting the street to replace sewer lines, and then, eventually, to give us a wider media with trees and stuff, and while I'm sure that, in the end, it will be very pleasant and wonderful, it's horrific right now -- deafening destruction (I can barely hear the phone ring during most of our business hours), an utter lack of parking in about a three block radius, and shutting off at least half of the four lanes on Divis most of the time.

Business STINKS because of it -- we're down by nearly a third. Yay for "stimulus"!

It's funny, if PG&E shuts loses power for even a few hours, there's forms one can fill out to get reimbursed for your business losses. As near as I can tell there's nothing remotely the same for when the Government catastrophically annihilates your business...

(If there is something that I don't know about, please feel free to let me know, because I'm bleeding thousands of dollars a month, yay!!)

Anyway, that's one of the reasons I'm barely writing the last few weeks -- I can barely hear myself think, let alone string two sentences together.

Plus, we've got buckets of rain falling now, which is always welcome in a paper-based economy -- and getting the new comics to the store is going to be funfunfun in this weather and street closures world.

Anyway, I'm in a lousy mood, so what a perfect time to try and write something about something...

RED TORNADO #2: It seems to me this comic was based on a throw-away line in, I think, 52, by, I think, Grant Morrison. Morrison is an awesome idea machine, tossing off little that-sounds-cool continuity gifts left and right. Thing is: they're not always really worthy of having entire stories based around them.

The tossed off idea here is that Professor T.O. Morrow didn't only build Reddy, but he also made other androids like The Red Torpedo, and The Red Inferno. This could be a somewhat interesting b- or c-story plot in a group book like JLA, but it is, in no way, an a-level plot capable of carrying its own mini-series.

This is not a terrible comic or anything -- but it's not something that anyone without money falling out of their butts is going to be willing to spend $3 a throw on. It's not quite EH, so the Savage Critic scale insists that it must be AWFUL.

DOCTOR VOODOO AVENGER OF THE SUPERNATURAL #1: My, that's a long title! It sounds like one cooked up by marketing, to me -- to try and work "Avenger" into the title, since that's now Marvel's strongest franchise. Can you imagine trying to convince some one in 1997 that The Avengers would be Marvel's tentpole in the early days of c21? Nah, me neither. 'course they kind of screw the pooch by having "avenger" being in teensey tiny letters, and covered up (on the first issue, no less!) by the figure on the cover.

Here's the thing I don't get, however. "Brother" Voodoo could never ever sustain an ongoing title. And Dr. Strange has largely proven over the decades that he can't either. So why does anyone think that this one can possibly work as an ongoing? It might be one thing as a mini-series, but this is clearly an unsustainable project that will be lucky to make it to issue #13. Especially with a $4 launch.

Here's the thing, though: this isn't shitty. Far from it, in fact -- up until hitting the non-ending of the ending, I was basically enjoying it just fine. This is perfectly OK comics -- but you need to be WAY better than "OK" to 1) be a monthly ongoing in this climate, and 2) To charge $4 for a story that just suddenly stops in a pretty ambiguous place.

GRANDVILLE HC: Yeah, very tasty material -- I really like all of the nice worldbuilding going on here, and I'd like to see more of these characters. VERY GOOD.

PLANETARY #27: Great ending. Telegraphed a lot, but great nonetheless. Would been even better if it had come out four years ago, but I was very happy with this: VERY GOOD.

BATMAN & ROBIN #5: The art continues to annoy me, but the story and the characterization is top notch. I'd be perfectly fine if Jason Todd did die, however. GOOD.

OK, my head hurts too much from the concrete saws outside to keep going on... but I'm going to try to do an "old style" SC column by Friday, if I can (though me and the boy are in Disneyland on Thursday [father & Son trip for his Birthday, FTW!], so we'll see...)

What did YOU think?

-B

The Political Fursona

Grandville

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tucker Proves He Is Incapable Of Sincerity, Thinking: Post One Of One

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

Yes, there's something after the jump. Monster vol 5, by Naoki Urasawa Naoki Urasawa's Monster goes on a bit longer than necessary, but it's still an All Around GOOD in my book. And while Monster's conclusion includes a violent showdown that greatly pleases me, where men shoot men through chairs while occasionally throwing each other guns in the rain, the portion that stands out in memory is a quieter one that takes place in the fifth volume. It begins here, with Inspector Lunge (the Gerard to Kenzo Tenma's Kimble) examining a murder scene. Twenty pages later, Tenma arrives at the same scene. Going through the same motions as Lunge, he also reaches the same conclusion, explaining Lunge's "hm" from earlier, and thus cementing the two's relationship that continues until the story's end. Tenma wants the truth. Lunge just wants Tenma. See, somebody died in this room--Tenma thought it was the man he's after, and Lunge thought the same. They are both wrong.

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

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

Domu: A Child's Dream, by Katsuhiro Otomo One of the other comics that I've fallen head over heels with recently is the third volume of Domu: A Child's Dream. The first two volumes (serialized by Dark Horse in 1995) aren't bad, but it's when Everything Goes The Fuck Down in volume three that keeps sticking with me lately. Take a look at this: She doesn't deserve that, if that matters to you. Neither does this guy, who dies just trying to help. Domu's a pretty straightforward thriller--a couple of telekinetics go to war with each other in a gigantic apartment complex. Otomo spends the majority of the third volume tracing the carnage of their initial, vicious battle, which leaves a healthy portion of the apartment (and its tenants) destroyed. But then he flips it on the reader, with a short "pick up the pieces" interlude. After that little fake-out, the battle continues--only this time, the little girl is prepared for her elderly nemesis. The two sit--her on a swing, him on a park bench--and have a staring contest. Neither speak, ignoring an "urgh" in the final moments, and with only one exception, none of the bystanders realize what's happening. It's a testament to Otomo's skill that the panels move the way they do--cutting back and forth, the viewpoint going up and down, with little bits of unrelated dialog spitting their way into the frames, accelerating and defining the rate at which the action is occurring. Little details--the way in which tiny shadows appear under pebbles as they race above the ground, a fragment of something slicing across the only onlooker's face--define the actual "action" surrounding the quiet center of the piece, the beating heart: a little girl with a determined (albeit blank) look on her face as she finishes the ugly job of exterminating a crazed killer. As conclusions go, it's EXCELLENT.

Another thing I like is punchlines, which you aren't supposed to ruin, but hey: this next one is from a few years ago and I don't care. "The Groceries", by Kevin Huizenga This story is from Or Else # 2, when Glenn and Wendy are unpacking groceries and daydreaming/fantasizing about their future child. Glenn's fantasy involves him getting too little sleep and eventually teaching the child to ride a bike. It's affectionate and brief, and Glenn is only broken from it when Wendy glances over at him and says "What's wrong with you? Come over here and help me." After he describes his thoughts, Wendy daydreams of a more boisterous, verbal future, one that concludes with the frightening image of a bowl being knocked off its high perch, falling directly towards the head of their child. Before you see the tragedy occur, Huizenga cuts to this drawing. Then, when Wendy describes the dream to Glenn, Huizenga separates the concluding sentence, with Wendy's "And it falls but you catch it before it hits her" appearing on the next page.

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

And that's what makes the joke--which, up until this point, has been pretty well disguised, so clever. She ain't even pregnant. It's just a melon, which they're eating in the next panel. Of course, few comics retain their humor when their pacing is broken up on the computer screen--it's understandable that this doesn't neccessarily work in scan-and-talk, but it's still a decent encapsulation of what I find so likable about Huizenga's work. Jog described his feelings about Ganges like this:

But that's the rub; moreso than any continuing comic I can think of, Ganges places maximum emphasis on how events don't matter so much in a life as how they're processed, by means ranging from simple moment-to-moment experience to fleeting reflections on whole segments of a guy's youth gone by. 

I can agree with that, and I'd include much of Or Else in that as well. It's not what Huizenga's saying that makes his work so unique, so special--it's how he's saying it. That's the most generic thing one could say about the man's work, but therein lies the rub: it doesn't make it any less true. Here, it's not the drawings, but the pacing--the way pages separate dialog, the blankness of an expression described by the emptiness of a panel--that make the work stand beyond what is, at its most basic, another indy comic about a happy couple going about the mundane necessities. Maybe it's because I'm getting older/shithead-ier, but it's the subtlety that I'm getting into these days. Hell, I used to think this was the coolest part of Batman: Year One. Now, I like that Mazzucchelli indicates Gordon's ass-peep with a tiny little line. See it? Oh, JIM. You are a CAD.

24 Hour Comic Day? But I've Only Read Seven Comics!

To interrupt Douglas' 24 Hour Reviewathon slightly, I thought I'd share short thoughts about what little I have read recently that wasn't the Absolute Promethea collection (No extras? I'm surprised) or the end of Paul Levitz's run on Legion of Super-Heroes (which noticably becomes the Keith Giffen show more and more the closer it gets to the end). Which is to say, not a lot. But still!

DETECTIVE COMICS #857: Another VERY GOOD issue, even with the last-minute revelations about Alice (which felt cheap and hopefully lead somewhere interesting, so as to remove the "What, I'm reading mid-90s X-Books all of a sudden?" taste from my mouth). JH Williams' art continues to just amaze, so much so that news that he'll be replaced by Jock for a fill-in to catch his breath seems like the end of the world. No offence, Jock, but right now, it feels like no-one else is in Williams' league.

GREEN LANTERN #46: I should probably feel as if this finally brings the two sides of Blackest Night together (All the different Lanterns/Zombies Attack The DCU), but this just seemed forced and uneven in a way that the other Geoff Johns-written parts of the crossover haven't - Maybe because it tried, and fails, to bring everything together convincingly? I'm still enjoying the crossover, in general; I just am starting to wish that it'd been left as just Zombies Attack The DCU and everything else could've happened at another time. A high OKAY, but I wanted more, dammit.

MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #55: Despite not growing up with a high school-age Peter Parker, there's something about the tone and speed of Paul Tobin's soft-relaunch of this series that makes it feel like the perfect Spider-Man comic to me. The Peter here is a nice guy, out of his depth more than a little, but yet the completely neurotic Spidey of Bendis' Ultimate book. VERY GOOD, even if I still want them to change that logo.

SPIDER-MAN: THE CLONE SAGA #1: I never read the original Clone Saga, and on the basis of the first issue of this rehash, I didn't miss anything; the script is rushed and unfocused, the art is... well, very Todd Nauck, which isn't really to my taste (Sorry, Young Justice fans), and the whole thing feels much more phoned-in than any "This is how we meant to do it the first time" should feel. EH at best, but that's probably me being charitable.

SUPERGIRL #45: I'm with Sean; the Superman family may - to those not reading the books on a regular basis - seem like a collection of fail right now, what with Superman not actually appearing in the book that bears his name and everything, but to those who are reading, the weekly cross-title story is the closest DC have gotten to the excitement of 52 since that book finished, a feeling diminished only slightly by knowing it's all going to end in a big crossover or event or whatever they're called next year. For now, though, GOOD.

THE UNKNOWN: THE DEVIL MADE FLESH #1: Entirely not what I expected after the first mini (Which had a disappointing final issue after three great issues of set-up, if you ask me), and all the better for it, Mark Waid's semi-supernatural mystery returns with a GOOD opener that suggests that nothing is as it seems. I have no idea where it'll go from here, which means I'll be back next month.

X-MEN FOREVER #8: Proving once and for all that all the X-Men are idiots (and that the X-Women know what's up), the Sentinels return and hide behind a pretty face, fooling the boys. After its (more exciting) frenetic opening, this series feels like it's settled into a slower groove as the bizarro twin of Grant Morrison's NewXMen run, complete with Sentinels and new discoveries about the nature of mutants and evolution, but with added costumes, guest-stars and Claremontisms. There are many, many worse things to be. Still GOOD, surprisingly.

Douglas Vs. Write About Comics All Day Day 2009, Pt. 3 of it's looking like 3

Under the cut: "Ten Thousand Things to Do" and this year's issue of "Love and Rockets." TEN THOUSAND THINGS TO DO #5: This is Jesse Reklaw's enormously charming diary comic--he's apparently just finished the sixth and final issue, but this was the latest one that was at SPX. I suspect I'll be pulling it out decades from now to show people what bohemian life was like in the Portland of the late '00s. Reklaw's got a pretty interesting day-to-day existence, as bohemia goes, and he cherrypicks it for the funny/interesting-to-draw bits:

That lower-right-hand image, incidentally, appears with variations on every page: a diagram that indicates Reklaw's mood, energy level, pain levels (head, shoulder and lower back), and how many caffeine and alcohol drinks he consumed that day. He pretty much sticks to the format, although there are a few guest strips--his life drawn by other people!--and a couple of sidebar "diaries" of his cats. This is the sort of diary that's about discovering patterns in the diarist's life, not isolating individual moments to aestheticize them (like, say, James Kochalka's or Lewis Trondheim's), but it's been a consistent pleasure all year; it's VERY GOOD, and I'll miss it when it's over.

LOVE & ROCKETS: NEW STORIES NO. 2: Man, I've been grappling with this one since I picked it up at Comic-Con back in July, and I still don't entirely have a handle on my reaction to it. Both Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez are permanently on my must-read-everything-they-do list; they both still draw like the hand of God; they're both wandering away from the kinds of work I treasure most by them, but I admire the fact that they're not just playing the greatest hits over and over. The two-part superhero story Jaime's done last issue and this issue ultimately falls into the same category for me as his wrestling stories--I enjoy watching his characters talk to one another more than I enjoy seeing them throwing each other across the room, and I kept wishing I could find out what's going on with Hopey and Ray and so on instead of tracking the convolutions of the goofy sci-fi scenario here. (Also, it took me until halfway through this issue to realize that "Ti-Girls" was supposed to rhyme with "hi, girls" and suggest "tigers" rather than, er, "T-girls.")

Gilbert's two stories aren't what I was expecting him to do at this point (although, again, I'm kind of glad that they're not), aside from prominently featuring women with enormous racks. The brief, super-condensed "Sad Girl" is effectively a continuation of the post-Palomar stories he was drawing in the L&R vol. 2 era: the Kid Stuff Kids are all grown up now ("Killer" is Guadalupe's daughter), and the story even ends with a little heart, like most of the stories collected in Luba. "Hypnotwist" is the centerpiece of this issue, a 42-page silent story that's much more in the vein of Gilbert's New Love/Fear of Comics stuff--a grotesque dream-logic narrative that strings together a bunch of unbelievably creepy images, most of which appear in several permutations, then ends. (The dialogue in "Sad Girl" suggests that "Hypnotwist" is adapted from a movie in whose remake Killer appeared, in the same way that "Chance in Hell" is adapted from one of Fritz's movies.) Both pieces have the visual crackle and sparkle that appears in Gilbert's work when he's pushing himself into uncomfortable territory, but--again, I find myself wishing for the depth of character writing that he did so well in Luba and the first volume of L&R. At the same time, I don't think he could have made the leap from "Poison River" to Luba without the stretching phase of Fear of Comics, and maybe the same sort of process is happening here. This issue seems like a document of a transitional period for both brothers; I'll call it VERY GOOD, but I think I'm much more interested in what comes next than I am in these stories themselves.

Hibbs and the Read Comics All Day Day

See, for me, EVERY day is "read comics all day" day!

I actually have two modes of reading comics, however, and this is kind of the "working in a candy store" problem -- most of the times I read comics, it is sadly "professionally" reading them. It's part of my job and function to have a general handle on what's going on in comics, so I like HAVE to read them. I order to properly ORDER and SELL comics, I feel like I have to read a lot of stuff that, really, I'd rather not read. I need to read, say, every other issue at least of virtually every "mainstream" comic so I know what they are and where they're going.

(More after the jump!)

Every week there are comics that I WANT to read, of course, but because of the way they arrive in the store (that is: all at once), I usually either intersperse or leave for last the comics I WANT to read (say, DETECTIVE or BATMAN & ROBIN or KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE) inbetween all of the stuff I'm much less enthusiastic about (Say, most DARK REIGN: COLON or FINAL CRISIS AFTERMATH: COLON titles) because otherwise I can't bring myself to read the less-desirable stuff.

And this means that I probably don't get as much out of the stuff I DO like, y'see?

It's all "professional" at that point.

The second mode of reading is when I'm at home, and I'm just reading for pleasure. Nine times out of ten that therefore becomes REreading for pleasure, if you follow?

Because of having a small son (Six Years Old tomorrow, YAY!), my "me time" is more and more limited -- I've just come downstairs after reading to him, and it's like 9 PM, yeesh, and I've got maybe 3 hours to "me" tonight before I have to fall asleep again. So a lot of my "pleasure" reading is in the "inbetween moments" -- in the bathroom, maybe, or taking a comic with me when I go out to sneak a smoke -- little 10 and 15 minute breaks and that's all I've got.

Which brings us to the topic of this column -- this week, in taking my breaks, and sneaking my sneaks, I've been rereading Sergio Aragones' GROO THE WANDERER.

These are PERFECT "break" comics -- they usually are fast reads, but they absolutely encourage you to linger in particular panels. Can you spot the hidden message? What has The Minstrel's top-of-his-lute characters metamorphosised into this time? What's the funniest background gag Aragones has snuck in? And so on.

This week I've been reading through the Dark Horse collections, most specifically from THE GROO HOUNDBOOK to THE GROO NURSERY, or that is to say from v8 to v14, if my fingers are counting correctly. Which further makes between issues #32 and 56.

This is a great period for the book: Groo is given a permanent partner in Ruferto, his faithful dog, which added a ton of storytelling possibilities; and a huge chunk of the recurring humor is established in these issues (most notably the "I Am The Prince of Chichester" gag) -- you can tell that Aragones' (and Evanier and Luth and Sakai) are all having a ball, and are really hitting their stride as a finely oiled team.

What I like the most about GROO in this incarnation is that most of the stories are completely self-contained in terms of introduction and execution of plot -- everything you need to know is always explicitly laid out for you, naturally, in the course of the story, and they all come to a nice moral point at the end. Even if they're multi-part stories -- each chapter comes to its own, separate conclusion. In short, in reading each issue, you really feel like you got an issue's worth.

That's a great feeling, especially compared to today's comics.

Seriously, these guys are master of both compacting the content so that you really feel like you got a full experience, as well as streamlining it so there's seldom anything extraneous or wasted. These are absolutely dead-on perfect 22 page entertainment packages, and there's not a creator alive who probably couldn't benefit from reading a few issues of GROO and paying attention to the Lean Density on display. This is really masterclass stuff, even if it is just silly comics about a stupid barbarian.

(As a further aside, I read these in BACKWARDS publication order -- from N to H -- and they read perfectly well that way.)

Ben is really starting to read now, so I have to keep a certain amount of prudence in what I leave lying where now -- not so much with GROO. Those I left right out where he'd spot them too, and he's been happily immersed in them. This is what makes it an even better comic -- it is absolutely entertaining for both kids AND adults. (While it is a crazy-over-the-top violent comic, it is of a level of LOONEY TUNES violence, which I think personally is just fine for kidlets)

I'm less enthralled with the last 3-4 mini-series of GROO because they, it seemed to me, were more about the message of the story, being structured as 4-part stories, then about here's-an-awesome-22-pages-kiddo. Most of the GROO THE WANDERER collections are out-of-print (and either way, I think they only ran to just a hair past the halfway point) but Evanier has said on his great blog there will be omnibuses coming from Dark Horse later this year. Hopefully the color ones that DH does, but maybe not in that smaller trim size because GROO is not a book that will be served by shrinking it. I'd be just as happy with B&W "ESSENTIAL-style" newsprint ones, really -- more issues at a time that way, too. It would be about 11 volumes in the color format, and something more like 7 in the ESSENTIAL format...

Anyway, I hope this period comes back into print soon, as it really is EXCELLENT.

As always, what did YOU think?

-B

Abhay spent the Imaginary Comic-Holiday writing about DAR: A SUPER GIRLY ETC.

DAR: A SUPER GIRLY TOP SECRET COMIC DIARY, VOLUME ONE by Erika Moen— I read a collection of Erika Moen’s journal webcomic DAR. I don’t know if it’s available in stores; it was an impulse buy from the internet. I was trying to find something the Savage Critic website’s own Mr. Douglas Wolk had written, and instead found his appearance on something called the Erika Moen Show.

The Erika Moen Show is a video-podcast where Ms. Moen sits on a dimly-lit couch with various comic/webcomic luminaries, and proceeds to ask said luminaries a variety of questions, with the help of the disembodied voice of Ms. Moen’s off-screen husband. If you’re interested in how the internet is rewriting the cartoonist-audience relationship, “video-podcasts set on couches of female cartoonist plus a disembodied husband voice” might be kind-of a mind-blowing window into the future for you. The book is a collection of one-page journal comics. I could probably end this right there, and 100% of you would be just about 100% right on whether or not you would like this comic, based solely on that description. Me? I tend to avoid that sort of thing, journal comics. For the obvious reason: I’m fanatically self-centered. I don’t read blogs by acquaintances; I don’t read twitters from friends; I’ve got a mirror, and I’m looking at it, and guess what? Handsome’s looking back. <Wink>. In conclusion: Me. Catch the fever. Have extra long pleasure.

I hadn’t read a journal comic in a while, years maybe, so I enjoyed DAR enough just as a change of diet. I’m entirely disqualified to criticize it in any knowledgeable way, to compare it against other journal comics, the James Kolchaka thing, or Jason Marcy or what have you. I can compare it to numbing comics where Namor the Sub-Mariner throws his wife’s severed head through a window at a bad guy— is that helpful for anyone? In a different mood, I’d have thrown DAR in a corner and forced myself to swear on a Bible that I would never again drink and internet-stalk Douglas Wolk. But that didn’t happen, so hello, bottle of Maker’s Mark and Google Image—our time is now.

The webcomic seems primarily to be about how Ms. Moen formerly self-identified as a lesbian or queer or what have you, a lady what has sex with other ladies, but then ended up marrying and having sex with the disembodied voice. It’s a set of strips from that transition from lesbian to married-to-a-dude lesbian (or whatever the proper terminology is there…?). Am- Am I supposed to review that part? Now, the Savage Critic website will review a human life for your amusement! All will be judged, all will be found wanting! Mwah-ha-ha! Spin the wheel of fate! Hurrah: everybody loves parties!

The good episodes of DAR are about sex. Moen employs the same circular-headed cartoon characters with dot eyes, the same cute-driven style that Jeff Brown or Dave Heatley use— all of them softening their sex comics with a certain amount of adorable. Which sounds like a good idea, unless you start dwelling on Stephen Jay Gould too much.

Stephen Jay Gould was a popular science writer in the field of evolutionary biology. And as a bit of popular science writing, Gould posited in an essay entitled “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse” that the reason cartoon characters were popular was due to neoteny.

As explained by the International Cognition and Culture Institute:

“Gould … proposes that the reason why we find Mickey Mouse attractive is due to our innate attraction for all things baby-like. Gould dwells on Konrad Lorenz's theory of neoteny. Neoteny is the set of facial characteristics peculiar to babies. The theory states that, in the course of evolution, our species (and many others besides) have evolved neotenic features for our youngsters, in order to tap this innate mechanism that attaches us to round faces, big eyes and soft features - what so many languages have a word for: the cute, the kawaii, the mignon, the moutik. Gould spectacularly illustrated his point with the ontogeny of Mickey Mouse, who evolved, in a somewhat spooky trajectory … from a real character with features and peculiarities to a big simplified balloon of niceness.”

So, if you dwell on that paragraph too much, there is something just wrong and creepy about autobiographical sex-comics, wronger and creepier than your garden variety hentai even. Hentai’s typically about, what, a teenage schoolgirl having sex with a softball team, and the softball team is her brother-dad. Which is gross. But autobiographical sex-comics? Maybe they’re basically about babies getting sexy with other babies. Eew! If Stephen Jay Gould is to be believed anyways. I’m just the messenger here...

Sure, it doesn’t gross out everybody. There’s a fetish called paraphilic infantilism, and that fetish is about primarily heterosexual men characterized by their sexual desire to wear diapers and be treated as infants / toddlers. And to be careful about this topic, Wikipedia says paraphilic infantilism is NOT the same thing as pedophilia, so if you were worried about that—you know, you can sleep well at night knowing that the diaper people usually just want to have sex with you, and not your children. Good night and sweet dreams. In fact, Wikipedia says a whole mess of things about paraphilic infantilism that I’d like to unscrub from my brain—where do I sign up for that? Is there a Wikipedia page that explains how to do that? I don’t want to know about the diaper people anymore.

But notwithanding Wikipedia, at the end of the day, I’d still rather see Moen’s baby-people have sex than a Greg Land photo-person have sex. Does that make me a diaper-man, internet? I hope not. I’d really rather not be a diaper-man. Really: not cool, Greg Land.

The more bothersome thing about DAR is the lack of editing (is it okay for me to complain about lack of editing?). Or what appears to be a lack of editing. One that particularly stands out: a comic advising web-cartoonist Dylan Meconis to check her Flickr Favorites because Moen and an unidentified woman in a cowboy hat played a no-doubt hilarious prank on Meconis’s Flickr account that Meconis hadn’t actually noticed-- a comic with no noticeable conclusion whatsoever. I wonder why this or a number of other comics (con reports, comics explicitly about the challenges of doing autobiographical webcomics, etc.) needed to be preserved in print, but I suspect there exists fans of the webcomic who would have been more put-out had it not been collected than passer-by’s such as myself. Hell, editing lessens pages.

Moen's website seems somewhat frustrating-- is there a table of contents or a quick way of navigating through the strips that I can't seem to find? Is there a reason that "clicking on a strip takes me to the next strip" isn't a standard feature of webcomics yet as of 2009-- was there a debate on how webcomics should be navigated that "clicking on a strip takes me to the next strip" somehow lost? For the book, Moen’s craft isn’t quite as polished as it appears to be now—her line only becomes remotely pleasing sometime in mid-2008, late in the book. Looking at the webcomic now, the backgrounds-- a problem spot in the book-- have thankfully improved since then: at least, there’s hints a ruler might have been purchased at some point. Or maybe Moen’s further along whatever learning curve needed to take place with a brush; or maybe Moen purchased Manga Studio; maybe the first letter of every word in the last sentence of the previous paragraph spells out the word “Help”; maybe every essay I write has hidden pleas for help that you’ve all just been ignoring; oh god...

Anyways: Horror-dildos. Anal sex. Shrunken balls. Strippers. Tits. Vibrators. Most of all, Queefing. Unfortunately, the comic is not always in this vein, but these are all honorable and worthwhile topics for comics-- DAR's not long on ambition, and your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for "harmless cute". But: wouldn't anything more than "harmless cute" for a comic about queefing be the wrong way to go? I think they’re topics that work best in comics for that very reason. A short story would be too profound. Richard Ford would write about some unemployed single father holding a horror-dildo in a motel parking lot; the horror-dildo would symbolize middle-age disappointment. And a movie, a horror-dildo just isn’t enough to build a movie around. The horror-dildo would need a character arc. Or there’d be a scene where Shia LeBouf went to Dildo-Heaven to meet the God-Dildos. The horror-dildo would dildo in super-slow-mo for no reason. I don’t want to watch that.

But comics? A horror-dildo is just right. So, that’s (1) your mom’s butt, and (2) comics. Congratulations, comics. Let’s have cupcakes! The cupcakes symbolize middle-age disappointment.

However, eating lowers pessimism. <Wink>

24 Hour Comic Day 2: This Time, About The Folks Behind The Comics

Despite what it sounds like, it's a compliment when I call CONVERSATIONS WITH ADD a frustrating read. For those unfamiliar with it - which may be most reading this - it's a free e-book collection of interviews and Q&As with comic folk conducted by Alan David Doane over the last ten years for ComicBookGalaxy.com as well as his radio station, and it's full of names you'll recognize: Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Mark Millar, Joe Quesada, Mark Waid, Brett Warnock, Peter Bagge, Seth, and many many more.

What's frustrating about it is twofold, and both pretty much the nature of the beast - Some of the interviews are so old that I wish they'd had a little more background information attached to put them into the appropriate historical context (Kurt Busiek and Mark Waid both talk in depth about the short-lived Gorilla Comics, for example, and I'd have love to have seen some more editorial footnotes about what happened to it in practice, because as it is the uneducated reader will be left thinking "That sounds great! I wonder what happened to it?" Of course, you could make the argument that no uneducated reader would be downloading an e-book collection of interviews from a comic book website...), and some of the interviews - namely, the ones from his "Five Questions With..." series - are... well, too short.

The second complaint pretty much gets to the whole "it's a compliment" part; ADD is, especially in the longer interviews when he gets to go into greater depth with creators, a very effective and enjoyable interviewer, and the frustration of the short interviews is really "I wanted much more!" more than "Well, that was a waste of time." He knows when to let the subject go on at length, and also what questions to ask to prompt the conversation into interesting directions, and if some of those questions betray his own prejudices and feelings about the medium and industry, then so what? It makes for a more interesting interview, in almost all cases.

At times, this nearly-300 page collection feels like a contemporary sequel to the (great) Comics Journal Library: The Writers collection Tom Spurgeon edited a few years back, and makes you want more longform (and freeform) interviews from Doane. Someone should be paying him to do this on a regular basis, but until then, this freebie book exists to tide us over. Unless you have a complete aversion to PDFs, go and grab it.

Hey, Guys, What's With All This About The Comics? Jeff On Some Old Stuff

Man, oh man. Am I out of shape with this writing review thing... that Firefox extension I added? The one that's supposed to write them for me while I play flash games? It totally doesn't work! But when Douglas announced he was going to be writing reviews during 24 Hour Read Comics All Day day, a bunch of us Savage types figured we would also post so...

Savage...Critics...Assemble?

After the jump: stuff so old, the newest thing is like two weeks old. Woo! Hang fire!

BLACKEST NIGHT #3: My significantly atrophied critical faculties fail me here—I can’t figure out whether to give Geoff Johns not enough credit or too much credit. If I go for the former, the gruesome bathetic murder scene in this issue rips off of the death of Tim Drake’s dad in Identity Crisis in a very ineffective way. If I go for the latter, it, and the appearance of Ralph and Sue in issue #1, suggest Johns is doing a weird riff on Identity Crisis so as to—what? Comment on that mini’s ‘opening of the way’ for death and debasement in the DCU? Bite Didio’s hand while seeming to praise his work? Tweak the noses of blood-&-circus style fans who thrive on this stuff? (It doesn’t seem accidental that the power of the Black Lanterns, like the sales of superhero books today, grow with every death.) And if so, isn’t that like Michael Bay decrying shaky cameras and shit editing?

I don’t know. I just can’t figure it out. Certainly I think Johns was better served by promising, as he did with The Sinestro Corps War, to kinda bring the awesome and then totally bringing the awesome as opposed to here, where he totally promises to bring the awesome, and then brings the “yeah, it’s okay if you think Pet Semetary was Stephen King’s best book.” A depressing lack of zombie sharks—and an obvious misalignment with the zeitgeist on my part—makes this an EH.

CAPTAIN AMERICA REBORN #3: Brubaker continues to be the victim of his own success as his attempts to reconnect me with Steve Rogers remind me how the character is always toeing the line of whininess with his big red boot: “Here I am in space watching men die, far from bleaty-blahhty-bloo-blah-blah.” It kinda me wishes Brube had bit even more from Slaughterhouse Five and put Steve on Mars where he coulda had mad sex with a Montana Wildhack-analogue. All the Bucky stuff I liked just fine—as action setpieces go, it was a little calculated, maybe, but fun. Also, am I only the one who feels like this issue felt like a Butch Guice issue inked by Brian Hitch rather than vice-versa? Either way, averages out to an OK or higher.

CHEW #1-4: Is this book really that popular, or am I just falling for Rich Johnston’s line of favorable BS he scatters for valued former sources? Don’t get me wrong, I like the book—Layman’s really crafted his chops on all kinds of licensed material and it’s great seeing them turned on such a ridiculous premise, and Rob Guillory’s art is both appealingly wonky and admirably disciplined—but its wild success seems odd, if not without precedent. I guess Chew could be to Fell what Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was to X-Men and Frank Miller's Daredevil comics: a blur between homage and parody that because of talent and zeitgeist (and investor greed?) is suddenly vaulted into the realm of its own odd thing, a duck-billed platypus of a comic book, in a way.

In any event, my food issues and appreciation for the craft at work put this work in the GOODish range and I’m curious to see how Layman spins the premise next. I was gonna talk this issue's neat little use of photocopied panels into the ground, but I'll spare you.

Fantastic Four #571: I think this, better than any other book, exemplifies my currently conflicted feelings about the state of mainstream superhero stuff.

Because, on the one hand? It’s really quite good. The story—in which Mr. Fantastic is enlisted into a cadre of alternative dimension Mr. Fantastics intent on rewriting reality for the better—is suitably epic; the characters are recognizably themselves without being simple cardboard cutouts of themselves; and I’m really loving the art by Dale Eaglesham (with fantastic coloring by Paul Mounts) which feels very full, very polished. (In fact, it almost feels too polished which, since the polish Joe Sinnott brought to Kirby on FF is where the title really ‘began,’ works for me.) Really, just about everything you need to know is summed up in the double-page spread in this ish, where an army of Reeds dispatch a Galactus on Earth 2012, all waving about Ultimate Nullifiers like they’re boomers at a Stones concert—in fact, Hickman and Eaglesham even throw in Gold and Copper Surfers in addition to the Silver one (a nice nod to our current Gradation Age of comics).

So, yeah. Awesome. And yet, reading it just makes me feel like Marcello at the end of La Dolce Vita, a sullen hedonist staring gimlet-eyed at the proceedings: “Right, right, you go there; when’s Doom going to show? Oh, there he is. And the undercurrent of questionable ethicality?” It’s pretty easy for me to imagine a pie chart for a lot of superhero comics these days, something like:

And you know, that’s okay but I feel like I see this formula all over the place now (even in Morrison’s Batman & Robin) and it dulls my enthusiasm a tad.

It is worth pointing out, by the way, that it’s Hickman’s second issue (if you don’t count the Dark Reign mini—and since I haven’t read it yet, I don’t) and he’s already worked in Doom and Galactus—presumably the same way Prince might do ninety seconds of Purple Rain early on his show and get to the shit he’s really got up his sleeve—so I’m probably jumping the gun here. But when there’s something this GOOD, and my reaction to it is so muted, it’s probably just as well I haven’t been bombarding the site with reviews…

INCOGNITO #6: Again, I chalk up me being underwhelmed by this as Ed being a victim of his own success. Because if you look at this as a superhero story, it does everything a superhero story should: gives you a character with a costume, a sense of the universe he works in, origin story, arch villain, dramatic final fight (and with a mirror image to boot, so as to underline the character’s internal conflict and everything). I all but heard the closing soundtrack song performed by Aerosmith, ‘(Love Won’t Go) Incognito,’ that would play during the closing credits of Stephen Sommers’ film adaptation.

But if you look at this as a crime story, it falls short of the mark set by Criminal, or even the first volume of Sleeper. For one thing, because the tone of the ending feels so different from the first two-thirds, it doesn’t even feel like an ending (or else an out-of-place one) and crime stories—particularly the ones we’re used to reading by Brubaker—end.

It was a GOOD issue and a highly GOOD mini and let’s face it, getting Sean Phillips art month in and month out is nothing to complain about. But, wow, am I looking forward to the return of Criminal, I really am.

STRANGE TALES #1: Amazingly gorgeous, but apparently I’m still such a Marvel fanboy deep in my soul that I was a little stung by how mocking the tone of everything seemed. Even Paul Pope, the guy who regularly pulls the sublime from the ridiculous, decides to play Kirby’s Inhumans for laffs, with a story hook that feels copped from a Harvey comic. I got the feeling the cartoonists involved in the project (except Peter Bagge, who did his Hulk story roughly five or six years before everyone else) dearly love the design work of the characters they’re worked on but find some other aspect—be it superheroes or work-for-hire or fan culture—deeply repugnant. While Bertozzi’s MODOK story did kinda tug my heartstrings in its deeply fucked up way, the first half of Bagge’s story was the only thing that seemed to have anything to say other than:

I can’t help but give it a GOOD for the art, though, and admit I’ll be getting the next two issues. I'll just have to armor up my tender fanboy heart before doing so.

Douglas vs. Write About Comics All Day Day 2009, Pt. 2 of Several

Two I didn't like so much, under the cut: "Logicomix" and "Dark Entries."

LOGICOMIX: AN EPIC SEARCH FOR TRUTH: This is a comics biography of Bertrand Russell (preview here) that's been getting a lot of exceptionally enthusiastic praise lately: Bryan Appleyard of the Sunday Times called it "probably the best and certainly the most extraordinary graphic novel I have ever come across," which makes me suspect that he has not come across very many of any kind. It's by a relatively large cast, which is fine: Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou are credited with "concept & story," Doxiadis with the script, Alecos Papadatos with "character design & drawings," Annie Di Donna with color. All four of them actually appear in the story (Di Donna with an outrageous French accent: "It's life zat is building zat!"), as does Anne Bardy, credited with "visual research & lettering" in smaller type (alongside two inkers).

The biographical part, as it turns out, is framed by the lazy device of the book's creators themselves chatting about how exactly they're going to represent Russell and the mathematical and philosophical innovations in which he took part. When the ostensible subject of the book hits dry patches, they return (repeatedly) to quibble about what it all means, discuss how to illustrate the themes they conveniently spell out, wander around, and finally attend a performance of part of the "Oresteia," which appears in lieu of any kind of real dramatic resolution.

It's not as if they haven't sacrificed plenty to drama already: an end-note indicates that "our book is definitely not--nor does it want to be--a work of history," and that therefore most of its biographical details are telescoped, simplified or outright invented. There are ways to make that work in historical fiction, of course--ask any biopic--and it can be done well in comics (see, for instance, Chester Brown's Louis Riel). But what's actually present on the page here suggests that it is a relatively faithful work of history, if you don't know better. There's a sequence in which the young Russell goes to visit the elderly, deranged Georg Cantor ("Try and imagine a young painter being received by Michelangelo. A composer meeting Beethoven," declares Russell-the-narrator). He has a horrible experience, and goes on to have nightmares inspired by the meeting; the afterword notes that "it is safe to assume that Russell never met... Cantor in the flesh." In other words, that scene is only there to make a dry subject more exciting to look at.

Which raises the question that often comes to mind when I'm reading a "source-based" comic (as the panel at last weekend's SPX put it) that isn't creator-driven like Louis Riel or From Hell or Crumb's Genesis, for instance: Why is this comics? What is there to gain by explaining this with drawings? What can a handmade visual interpretation add to this? The art team is just fine--they've got a low-friction sort of post-Hergé kids'-comics style that only really gets in the way when they try to get fancy. But the only way to turn abstract mathematical concepts like the ones this book deals with into comics is to have a character explain them, and the only way to illustrate how revolutionary and surprising they are is to have characters recoil in shock at the explanation. In the framing sequences, the creators pat themselves on the back a bit for being clever enough to make a comic book about this stuff, and some reviews I've seen have echoed that congratulatory tone: Rob Sharp at the Independent claims that it "challenges the traditional character of the superhero or detective... It has been critically acclaimed as a welcome subversion of the graphic novel genre." If graphic novels were a genre, then it might be. But they're not. AWFUL.

DARK ENTRIES: Speaking of books discussed in the British newspaper pieces linked above: this is one of the first two books from the new Vertigo Crime imprint, a John Constantine story written by crime novelist Ian Rankin and drawn by Werther Dell'Edera. (Notable quote from the Independent piece: "Bizarrely, he never met the book's Italian artist, Werther Dell'Edera; in fact, as he was only liaising with him via DC, he was unaware that the book was eventually going to be published in black and white.") You would think that a book selected for to launch a new crime imprint would be, you know, a crime story, rather than a numbingly by-the-book supernatural/horror story in which a popular reality-TV show turns out to be run by demons DO YOU SEE and the inhabitants of the Big Brother-oid house are actually in "Gameshow Hell" DO YOU GET IT YET, HUH? You'd also think that it would be wiser to launch a new imprint with a book that Dell'Edera had time to make look as imposing and menacing as his work on Loveless, but whether it was or not (I have no idea), a lot of the book's second half appears to have been drawn in one hell of a hurry. AWFUL.

Douglas vs. Write About Comics All Day Day 2009, Pt. 1 of At Least 1

It's 24 Hour Comics Day, and it's also Read Comics All Day Day, and I figured I might join the festivities myself. I'm not going to be reviewing comics here all day--I have some things I need to write for other places--but figured I could mention a few worth-seeking-out things I picked up at SPX, as well as some other stuff. Below the cut: three of my favorite things I've read lately, "Woman King," "Driven by Lemons" and "Ganges" #3.

WOMAN KING: This is a small, self-published book by Colleen Frakes that knocked me for a loop--an understated but sharp-fanged fable about a human girl who becomes king of the bears during a war between bears and humans. (There's a 30-page preview of it here.) The basic setup (cute little silent girl + bears) and four-panels-a-page pulse remind me a bit of Chris Baldwin's "Little Dee," but its tone is fascinating and really original: Frakes plays with the reader's sympathies constantly, and keeps feinting toward the way things can be expected to happen in fables, then pushing the story somewhere else. Here's a great panel lifted from Rob Clough's review of it:

Now, that's a total Calvin & Hobbes sort of image there, but what's happening in the scene is that some other bears have just killed a pretentious artist dude (who's sketching the big human-bear battle, noting that "I am not interested in drawing action as much as the quiet spaces in between"). Off-panel, of course. Quiet spaces! Frakes has done a lot of clever design work here, too--her bears are, like, eight lines and two dots, and their personality comes out in the subtleties of her brushstrokes. It's EXCELLENT, and it makes me really excited to see whatever she does next.

GANGES #3: One of the many, many things I like about Kevin Huizenga's work is that a lot of his comics are about things that are not likely candidates for visual representation, and he manages to make them fascinating to look at anyway. Most of this issue is about the process of perceiving one's own consciousness--the sort of hyperconsciousness of your own mind that happens when you're trying to get to sleep and can't--which is potentially the least interesting thing anybody could draw. And it looks fantastic: here's the second page, which is just about the least ambitious page in the issue and still gorgeous and full of smart ideas. (Jog has a couple of my favorite pages embedded in his SPX writeup.)

Huizenga's Glenn Ganges (image lifted from The Balloonist) is vividly aware of the workings of his mind--what's happening here is that he's thinking about having seen a newspaper earlier (a footnote hilariously reminds the reader that it happened back in issue #1, 3 1/2 years ago), and the image is rising through the flat, rippling substrate within his mind from which thoughts emerge. (It's a little bit like Larry Marder's map of the Beanworld.) The joke of this issue is that that sort of self-awareness is mighty frustrating when you're trying to get to sleep; the "big action scene" on the last page is a perfect punch line. EXCELLENT.

DRIVEN BY LEMONS: This one, though, was my favorite book I picked up at SPX--a reproduction of a medium-size Moleskine that Joshua Cotter filled start-to-finish with something that keeps shifting between not-quite-explicable narrative and not-quite-non-narrative abstraction. It surprised me to realize that there are only a few pages that would really fit in that Abstract Comics anthology Fantagraphics just published, and most of them actually serve the story in their context. Like this one:

It's scribbly in an appealingly fanatical, graphomaniacal way--look closely at that first page, and the way the blue part starts out as a mass of minuscule triangles. (In fact, there's a running theme in the book about blue triangles and red squares.) Even a sequence where Cotter fills the better part of six straight pages with black doodles looks like it's actually specific forms overlaid on one another until they fill almost all the space on the page; a lot of those forms look like parts of the bunny who's the book's main character. One of the longer sections--laid out in a helpful "table of contents" that kind of corresponds to the actual contents--is called "The Get Better Factory," and it centers on a bunny-in-the-hospital sequence that is close to the same "lying in bed, not going anywhere" problem that Huizenga plays with. Cotter draws it a very different way, though: a repeated, static, 16-times-a-page image of the hospital bed, with its details shifting along with the psychological state of its occupant (including incursions from the terrible pain that's always nearby in a "get better factory," impossible to escape), until mental noise overtakes and devours the entire scene. Anyway, it's an EXCELLENT book, and I feel like I'm just beginning to look at it--I want to come back to it and think about it more. I'd also kind of love to see some other cartoonists take on the fill-a-Moleskine-and-publish-it challenge. (Dirk Schweiger's Moresukine kind of counts, I suppose, but not as much as this.)

Hibbs quick hits from 9/30 shipping

Just a couple of quick thoughts, to keep my hand in the game...

ASTRO CITY ASTRA SPECIAL #1: I've kind of disliked the whole "Dark Ages" storyline -- just feels like it's been going on and on and on with no end in sight, with characters I don't care about all that much. AC has always been best (IMO) with "done in one" stories. Well, this one is "done in two", but it worked a lot better for this reader than anything else lately. It might also because I like Astra a lot. Either way, this felt very much like a "return to form" for me, and I thought it was VERY GOOD.

I also really liked the cover stock -- it is shiny and slick, like (say) SUPERMAN: SECRET ORIGINS, or how the "Ultimate" books used to be, but it isn't "slippery". You can pick up a stack of them by the middle and not have them go flying everywhere in all kinds of directions. I dunno if this was an accident, or something that they did on purpose (Kurt? Want to chime in in the comments?), but it's a very nice stock, giving both nice "hand" as well as signifying the book is "special" without the slippery problem. As fans you're probably not handling big stacks of slippery books, but as a retailer I very much appreciate it.

As long as I'm talking about cover stocks, let me mention that last week's BOOM! titles also had a new stock that I liked very much -- one of the things that has REALLY hurt BOOM! sales, in my opinion, is that they've had lousy "hand" (that is to say, holding it in your hand, if you think "This feels flimsy, and not worth the cover price!", that's "hand"). Last week's books FINALLY saw an upgrade of that, and it made a huge psychological difference (Now all we have to get them to do is to FUCKING ELIMINATE THE FORCED 50/50 variants -- esp. on the "kids" books. Kids could give one rat's fart about multiple covers, and kids also totally paw and devastate their racks [the only rack that's worse at Comix Experience is the porno rack], and having two cover for each comic only makes things massively epically worse); on the other hand, this week's BOOM! book, THE UNKNOWN: THE DEVIL MADE FLESH #1 was back to the shitty thin stock, which I'm desperately hoping is an accident, and that last week was A PLAN. Anyway, stop digressing Hibbs!!

BATMAN WIDENING GYRE #2: Can I just say it is very very very VERY strange to see "Fun Land" -- from SANDMAN #14, is it? The Serial Killers Convention issue anyway -- presented here as a BATMAN VILLAIN? Especially so without any kind of nod to Gaiman whatsoever? There's something just... wrong about that. I mean, it's a little better than talking about merkins or Poison Ivy's sexual preferences, but still, "one of these things is not the other" and all that. The rest of the issue? EH.

BOMB QUEEN VI #1: I have one "Obama Grandmother" who really likes collecting all of the various Obama comic appearances -- she wants me to pull them all aside for her. I'm generally happy to do so because she seems to genuinely enjoy it (and money is money), but this here is one I just dunno about. I really feel like saying to her "whatever you do, don't READ this one" because I can't see how an "Obama Grandmother" is going to relate to all of the swearing and borderline pornography on display here. I sort of think that, generally, "Bomb Queen" has run its course, but I had at least one or two actual genuine laughs, like I would with "The Boys" as well, so it is reasonably OK.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA 80 PAGE GIANT #1: Pretty old school. The team breaks into small two man teams throughout history, which is a fun enough premise. The EXECUTION varies pretty dramatically depending on the individual creative team (There's a few pieces in here not much better than, say "New Talent Showcase"), but it was the rare modern DC comic that I could actually read with my 5 year old standing over my shoulder, so I'm inclined to give it a GOOD just for that. Dunno when Snapper Carr started hanging out with the League again, though?

NEW MUTANTS #5: I didn't care (either way) about the story, but I thought the art on this issue, by Zachary Baldus (and, I am thinking, colorist James Campbell as well -- hard to tell from the outside where one starts and the other ends) was really terrific -- distinct, totally unlike anything else Marvel is publishing today, and full of personality. I especially like how Cannonball resembles (Fantagraphics') Eric Reynolds from the late 90s (I don't know what his haircut looks like today). I very much want to see more from this artist(s?). VERY GOOD on the art alone (though your mileage may vary -- it sure isn't Marvel "House Style")

SPIDER-MAN CLONE SAGA #1: I honestly don't get the point of this book. Why would ANYone want a RETELLING of the awful 90s Clone Saga? My customers seem to agree as well, sold a total of one copy so far. This is exactly the kind of book that makes me joyous that we have FOC (Final Order Cutoff, or the chance to CUT orders before the next issue ships). I guess the execution was adequate enough, but after like 4 pages I put the book down saying "Why why why?!?!", which pretty much is the essence of CRAP.

THOR #603: When did Loki become a dude again? I mean, it isn't like Asgardian Gods really should have fixed corporeal essences -- you'd think Loki could change A/S/L as often as It liked -- but did I miss a plot point somewhere? Still a she in MIGHTY AVENGERS, and in recent "Cabal" stuff, and anyway I sort of liked that change.

Anyway, I'm still liking this book a lot, but it totally feels like JMS is deeply in the MIDDLE of a lot of stuff happening here, and I have a fairly hard time to see how this will be satisfactorily wrapped up in a single special.

The thing is, I mostly think that people were buying this BECAUSE of JMS, because, generally, I think Thor is such an noncommercial character, and, even with the desire for a big crossover (or whatever) to get ready for the movie, they should have just let JMS have his little corner of the Marvel U to do what he's doing here.

Anyway, I thought this issue was fairly GOOD.

That's all I have time for today -- as always, what did YOU think?

-B

The funniest comic I've ever read: Boy's Club #3

Boy's Club #3Matt Furie, writer/artist Buenaventura Press, 2009 40 pages $4.95 Buy it from Buenaventura Press

It might seem premature to cover a comic I read for the first time a little over a week ago in my "Favorites" series. It might be premature—if that comic weren't Boy's Club #3. Find out why I'm breakin' all the rules after the jump.

Two Fridays ago some friends and I gathered 'round the flatscreen for a drunken, junk-food-laden, back-to-back marathon viewing of Crank 2: High Voltage, RoboCop, and Road House. At least, that was the plan. Unfortunately we're not as young and irresponsible as we once were, so fully half the group punched out after the first (AMAZING, SEE IT RIGHT NOW) movie. By the time we got through RoboCop there were only four of us left, and none of us felt that watching Dalton clean up the small town of Jasper, Missouri in a quiet little quartet would do the late Patrick Swayze justice. So we called it a night, our grand plan abandoned.

Beery, belchy, and bloated, in addition to just plain disappointed, I spent 45 minutes in a livery cab slowly winding it sway down the West Side of Manhattan while playing Christian contemporary music on the radio, barely making the late-night "drunk train" back to Long Island. I finally get home and start staggering up the stairs when I notice a package from Buenaventura Press. Inside was the latest issue of Matt Furie's Boy's Club. I was not about to delay that particular gratification no matter how badly I let down the ghost of Patrick Swayze earlier in the evening, and so, choosing to kill two birds with one stone, I brought it with me for a little bathroom reading.

A few minutes later I'm sitting there, my body literally convulsing with suppressed laughter. I'm trying desperately not to just crack up, thus waking my sleeping wife and causing her to wonder what the hell it is I'm doing in the bathroom at two in the morning that's giving me the giggles. The second I realized what the story of the issue was about, whoa man, I could barely stand it. Whatever else went wrong that night, Boy's Club #3 went very, very right.

If you've never come across it before, Boy's Club is an irregularly produced humor comic chronicling the misadventures of four muppet-like roommates: Pepe, the big eater; Brett, the dancing machine; Landwolf, the party animal; and Andy, the funnyman. They drink, they do drugs, they play video games, they eat junk food and watch TV, they speak in catchphrases, they pull pranks on each other involving nudity and bodily functions, they sit around doing nothing in particular--they are, essentially, me and my roommates from 1997-2000. Furie's line is as unadorned as his character designs are rock-solid and reliably funny. Their simplicity allows nuances to shine, so he's able to capture just the right pose for a goofy dance or just the right disgusted facial expression in reaction to foot-fetish porn. Their simplicity also makes the strip's frequent psychedelic explosions truly mindblowing in their hyperrealistic detail. The combination is stupid like a fox, at once a celebration of idiocy and a ferociously funny satire of the culture that encourages it.

When I reviewed Boy's Club #1 I called it "one of the funniest comic books I've ever read." When I reviewed Boy's Club #2 I said "I like it even better than the first issue." Well, I like Boy's Club #3 best of all. In other words, Boy's Club #3 is the funniest comic book I've ever read. What puts it over the top compared to its predecessors? I'd say it's the shaggy-dog story that ties this issue together. In the past, Boy's Club issues consisted of stand-alone strips. Some were little vignettes of the Club's dissolute life of sloth and shenanigans...

Others were hallucinatory drug-induced freakouts...

A lot were riffs on cheesy, disposable pop-culture glossolalia...

And still others were clever tweaks of reader expectations using the basic mechanics of the comic's simple six-panel grid...

Boy's Club #3 has all that in spades, and more: It has a story that connects every sub-strip into a cohesive whole.

A story about a giant turd.

I'm not going to spoil whose turd it is, what happens to it, or even what almost happens to it. I'll simply say that an actual Boy's Club story could have been a fun-sapping disaster, but instead it just brings out more of what I love about these characters and this concept. Now I realize they don't have to be relegated to one page gags—they can do things or interact over a period of time and still be just as funny as they are in short bursts. Letting them live out a story for the length of a comic makes them even more reminiscent of the embarrassing, hilarious, gloriously stupid things I myself lived out in my day.

Boy's Club #3 is like the Side B of Abbey Road of poop jokes. Buy three copies--one to read, one to lend out, and one to leave in the bathroom.

It really was a kitten, after all: Douglas vs. 9/23

DETECTIVE COMICS #857: The Batwoman serial is my favorite thing happening in superhero comics at the moment, and it keeps getting more luxuriously inventive with each installment. I actually went back and reread all four parts after reading this one, and there are a handful of earlier scenes that open up in the light of later ones. One of those later cues is Alice's final line of dialogue this issue--I believe it may be the only thing she's said in four issues that isn't a quotation from Lewis Carroll's Alice--which sure makes Kate's hallucination in #855 a lot more interesting. The Question backups still aren't clicking at all: I suspect an eight-page story needs to be much more densely packed to work as a serial. But the Batwoman stuff is so far ahead of the pack in terms of immersive storytelling, layout and composition, color-as-content, you name it--I really hope other mainstream comics creators take it as a call to step up their own game. EXCELLENT. SPIDER-WOMAN #1: I know this series has been in the works forever, but it feels very strange to be picking up a high-profile Marvel title this month and have the plot revolve around ferreting out hidden Skrulls--that one got beaten into the dust a while back, and at a moment when the Marvel universe is almost all driving toward the end of the Norman Osborn plot, it feels positively retrograde. There's also a lot of telling-not-showing going on this issue, maybe because only three characters have significant speaking parts; there's some other wobbly writing, too, as when Abigail Brand gives Jessica Drew what she says isn't a "Skrull detector watch" but is functionally exactly that (it's drawn, in that panel only, as Jessica's iPhone, for some reason), or when Jessica's narrative voice reads exactly like Jessica Jones's used to in Alias. I admire the fact that Alex Maleev is crediting Jolynn Carpenter as his model for Jessica Drew, although I wish he'd just made up a way to draw her face without photo-ref instead; I always enjoy Maleev's chemistry with Bendis, and even though not a lot actually happens this issue, it works well as a mood piece. If this had come out the week after Secret Invasion ended, it'd probably seem better than just OKAY. But it didn't, and it doesn't.

WEDNESDAY COMICS #12: I loved this series in theory, and God knows it was pretty to look at. But this issue augmented the problem it's had all along--that writers who are used to the rhythm of 22-page stories can get whiplash when they try to write for a single big page--with the problem that Sunday-paper adventure serial strips aren't really designed to wrap up neatly. Only a few strips manage to avoid the "...yeah, okay, we're done now" effect, especially the two that were the most pleasant surprises of this series: Ben Caldwell's Wonder Woman ends in a totally appropriate way, and the Kerschl/Fletcher Flash serial was so good and so clever that I really want to see what they do next. GOOD, and I'm looking forward to Wednesday II or whatever it ends up being called.