#1 is the loneliest number of all

So, about that retailing thing...

Ah! No, just kidding!

How about some reviews, this time of some of the new #1's from this week...

ADAM STRANGE SPECIAL #1: Much like the HAWKMAN SPECIAL #1 from a few weeks ago, this tries to set up a new status quo projecting Adam as one of the "Aberrant Six" with a lot of yadda yadda yadda set up about Synnar and some cosmic problem, and blech, I don't find any of this compelling whatsoever. Adam starts jumping through time, rather than space, which you know, could actually maybe be a somewhat interesting twist on his basic set up... but absolutely nothing of consequence is done with this concept, other than maybe showing a future where Alana appears to hate him, essentially negating everything interesting about Adam Strange to begin with (he's always always trying to get back to Alana) If "Synnar" was a compelling villain, then maybe this setup would be interesting, but while Kirby got away with doing a misspelled "Dark Side" in the 60s, that doesn't fly in 2007! At least HAWKMAN had some really nice Starlin art. Rick Leonardi just isn't in the same league. I really hope we don't have to sit through four more specials to get to the rest of the "Aberrant Six and have an actual story happen... AWFUL.

JONAH HEX #35: Well, OK, it's not a #1, but I feel compelled to bring up this issue, with fucking nice J.H. Williams art! This gets my vote for the prettiest comic of the week. I don't buy the plot at all, where they try to rape a drugged Hex (imagine the howls if the genders were reversed!), but the art is nice enough to make me not care too much... GOOD.

MARVEL APES #1: I was walking in expecting to loath this, what with that "preview" they ran in whatever Spider-Man special that was a few weeks ago, where it read like a really bad CAPTAIN CARROT, with half of the puns. So, I was pretty surprised that this was as an enjoyable read as it was, was actually set in "real" continuity, and had some genuine character development. Albeit with The Mandrill. Still, all of that rates it an easy OK.

MS. MARVEL ANNUAL #1: Hey it says #1 on my invoice, so it counts! This was a fun Bugs Bunny story. Bugs is played by Spider-Man, and Ms. Marvel gets the Elmer Fudd role. Not strictly the choice *I* would have made in casting the lead as Elmer, but sure, why not? This was surprisingly OK, but should have ended with Ms. Marvel having her face ashy and hair frizzed out from an explosion or something...

SECRET SIX #1: This comic was pretty wrong, with its love of casual violence and female lap dances, but I think it was probably my favorite capes & tights book of the week. I'm not sure that this is sustainable as a monthly ongoing title, but here's a place I'm willing to find out. VERY GOOD.

SUB-MARINER: DEPTHS #1: Lovely lovely art, but the protagonist isn't really on view, and I found my head nodding as I tried to get through it. Still, LOVELY art, and worth an OK on that basis alone.

TWELVE #1/2: Slightly cheating again for this pack of golden age Timely reprints, but holy cow there's an AWESOME Basil Wolverton Rockman story buried in here which is worth the purchase price all by itself. It's really amazing how strinkingly different it is from the comics that surround it. The package as a whole: OK. That Wolverton bit? VERY GOOD.

OK, I need to get back to work now! What did YOU think?

-B

Before you go: Jeff Finally Gets Around to Love & Rockets New Stories #1

My timing, as is typical, is atrocious: I've been meaning to write a review of this book ever since I bought a copy at SDCC. Since it just hit stores this week, I all but exhort you to dash out and buy a copy: not just because it's Love & Rockets and it's the Hernandez Bros., and not even because it's the Hernandez Bros. at what may be at the start of (yet another) period of sustained excellence, but because both Jaime and Gilbert give you, in their own way, their versions of Final Crisis and Secret Invasion and the comparison and contrast may soothe and intrigue you.

[More exhorting and coercing and hopefully avuncular rib-poking behind the cut.]

Although it starts as a typical Locas story, with Maggie at her apartment complex talking to her pal Angel about a mysterious tenant, "The Search for Penny Century" changes gears very early on, as Angel, finally alone, changes into costume and scales a roof:

Y'see, the core of the first issue of L&R: NS #1 is 50 pages of Jaime Hernandez doing superheroes, and it so openly and easily moves back forth between the silly and the stellar, it reduced me to a piece of gibbering fanboy protoplasm. And isn't that supposed to be the point of Final Crisis and Secret Invasion? (In fact, although I knew better, I approached Jaime at the table and asked if the story was meant to be a reaction of Marvel and DC's current addiction to big events. He was, thankfully, entirely gracious about it, and just said that he thought it'd be fun to do something with a lot of energy.)

I could go on to summarize what happens in the story, but I think that does it a degree of disservice. Let's just say that Jaime, like Grant Morrison, creates a ton of new characters in a short degree of time and yet, for me, does a much a better job of convincing me to care about them. This shouldn't be particularly surprising, of course: Jaime is, in the very best sense, a cartoonist, and cartooning not only allows for any number of narrative shortcuts, the shortcuts produce a feeling of delight when done correctly.

And this, by the way, is why my timing is so atrocious: If I'd written this review when I'd intended, my comparison of Jaime's story to Final Crisis would be more in a "huh, isn't this funny?" kind of way. Coming now on the heels of my review of Superman Beyond #1, the comparison seems more confrontational, and corrective, than I intend. On the other hand, if you want to buy a copy of L&R:NS #1 to apply the reasoning of my Superman Beyond review to it and show why I'm full of shit, I don't mind at all...as long as you buy a copy of this book.

It'd be a disservice, by the way, to suggest that Jaime's story is the only reason to pick up L&R:NS #1.

Beto contributes a story about a pair of Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis analogues that end up on an alien planet, getting superpowers, battling each other, and killing hundreds of aliens. Again, this neatly lines up with current trends and obsessions in current work-for-hire capes & tights, but it's also deeply goofy, hugely fun, and any resemblance to current superhero big events is probably entirely unintentional.

It's a much shorter piece than Jaime's, as Gilbert's peripatetic attention span sends him in several different directions at once. There's cartoon characters engaging in compulsive behavior:

and oblique, evocative non-narratives:

and a fun little story that Mario writes and Beto draws, and a story written and drawn by Beto--that reads a bit like if Vittorio De Sica and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had collaborated--that isn't particularly fun.

Anyway, this is far afield from my usual "blah, blah, blah" type of review, but I hope it nonetheless convinces you to at least pick up the L&R if you find yourself at the comic store this weekend. I thought the book was a knockout, and this is a great place to jump on-board if you never followed Los Bros before.

(Oh, and super-thanks to Fantagraphics for keeping a very well-tended Flickr stream. This review, quite obviously, would've been enormously different without it.)

Retailing: Cory's right

Cory Doctorow makes a really sensible suggestion right here, that I think every comics publisher should immediately implement.

This would have instant great benefits for me. I don't know about any other POS system, but MOBY has a space on the Individual Item display page (that shows me the sources I can buy a book from, ordering information, price, every transaction I've ever made on the item and so on and so forth) that displays the covers.

Currently, that image defaults to the item code on the Diamond website, though it can be edited to show another source. The problems are three there: 1) Diamond, of course, has to carry it, 2) You have to log on to Diamond's retailer site, which autologs you off after 30 minutes or so, and 3) Diamond is VERY liassez-faire about what size image the put in the standard path. Sometimes you get postage stamp sixed pics, othertimes the largest possible version where the window can only display the first quarter or so of it.

I use the feature ALL the time when people ask about something I don't have. Especially because, in comics there are TONS of "variant editions", and titles starting over with incredibly minute naming variations, and so on, so pinpoint THE thing someone wants to buy is really important.

An ISBN and UPC directory would be VERY helpful, and, besides the whole "having to rename the files" thing, is something that really COULD be implemented "tomorrow". It's just too simple and easy and smooth of an idea.

AND IT WILL HELP SELL MORE BOOKS.

It would also be of great use to me both as a blogger who is basically stupid when it comes to html -- I never ever have art in my posts because I'm pretty dumb about how to do it. This idea would make it trivial.

It would also be of HUGE use to me in putting together ONOMATOPOEIA, the store's print newsletter. CEO (as we call it) has to be out at the same time as PREVIEWS so that we have enough time to collect orders from people properly. But only a handful of publishers actually have publicly available art BEFORE PREVIEWS ships, which is when I need it the most. (Fantagraphics wins the prize here, they have a FTP site with art up, typically, 6 weeks before PREVIEWS ships -- that's a fantastic lead time)

ANyway, I think this is a stupidly good idea, and I urge any publisher reading this blog to immediately implement this idea (though we'd need to add UPCs for the comics)

-B

Diana's 50 Favorite Moments In Comics

Because all the cool kids are doing it! In no particular order, my 50 favorite moments in comics:

1. SWAMP THING #56, "My Blue Heaven": Stranded on a distant planet, the Swamp Thing recreates his hometown and is content to live an empty fantasy until a replica of John Constantine starts voicing some inconvenient truths. It's even creepier when you realize that every character on the Blue Planet is really just Swamp Thing throwing his voice.

2. BOX OFFICE POISON: Towards the end of the book, Hildy tells Ed about her little sister Marlys. It turns out the reader has already met Marlys in an earlier, seemingly-unrelated part of the story... a part that becomes incredibly tragic once the missing context is in place.

3. WHY I HATE SATURN: Anne sets out for California to find her sister, only to get hit by the Deluxe Edition of Murphy's Law. If it can go wrong, it will. If it can't go wrong, it will anyway.

4: NIKOLAI DANTE, "Amerika": After a decade of watching Tsar Vladimir commit atrocity after atrocity, Nikolai reaches his breaking point and stabs the Conqueror, only to be struck down a moment later by Konstantin.

5. SPIDER-MAN 2099 #25, "Truth Hurts": One of the better examples of the "everything you know is wrong" plot twist - Miguel learns about his mother and Tyler Stone, and the whole story gets turned on its head.

6. FANTASTIC FOUR #524, "Tag": The Fantastic Four are racing across Manhattan to reclaim their lost powers, but Reed has sabotaged Ben's equipment, intending to become the Thing himself and leave Ben human. But Ben figures it out and swaps his gadget with Reed's, unwilling to let his best friend take the fall for him.

6. STARMAN #80, "'Arrivederci, Bon Voyage, Goodbye": Jack Knight leaves Opal City.

7. CATWOMAN #19, "No Easy Way Down": Still reeling from the aftermath of the Black Mask's attack, Selina gets drunk and decides to rob a museum, until Batman talks her out of it.

8. RUNAWAYS #16, "The Good Die Young": Alex is revealed as the Pride's mole. Quite literally the last character I suspected.

9. INCREDIBLE HULK: FUTURE IMPERFECT: The Hulk defeats the Maestro by sending him back to the gamma bomb detonation, turning Bruce Banner's entire history into an ouroboros.

10. DAREDEVIL #182, "She's Alive": Convinced that Elektra faked her death, Matt digs up her coffin, expecting it to be empty. It isn't.

11. FRAY #8: Melaka kills Urkonn, her mentor and friend, when she realizes he murdered Loo to get her to accept her destiny.

12. DEADENDERS #16, "Smashing Time": Even after the universe rewrites itself, Noah (formerly Beezer) has a moment of distant recognition when he finds an abandoned scooter in the middle of the road. For a split-second, he can almost remember the friends and the life he left behind.

13. BONE #37, "Harvest Moon": In a genuinely creepy scene, a disoriented Thorn pulls her cloak over her head, looking exactly like the defeated Hooded One. It was ultimately a red herring, but that doesn't change the "brr" factor.

14. BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS: Jarred out of a vegetative state by the return of his nemesis, the Joker's first words are "Batman. Darling."

15. SPIDER-GIRL #41, "Funeral For A Fiend": Normie Osborn (Harry's son) stops by the hospital to visit Mary-Jane Parker. As he turns to leave, he bumps into Peter - and for a moment, Peter only sees the Goblin and Normie only sees Spider-Man. Then Peter offers his hand; a moment later, they embrace, finally laying the past to rest.

16. TOP TEN #11, "His First Day on the New Job": This is such an Alan Moore thing to do: Joe Pi, the latest officer to join the Neopolis police department, is a robot. He's also the most human character in the series. When Joe realizes Irma Geddon's kids were attached to the late Sung Li, her previous partner, Joe decides to cheer them up with a trick of his own.

17. NEW X-MEN #149, "Phoenix In Darkness": In many ways, I see this as the quintessential post-Claremont Magneto story - "I am your inner star, Erik. I am the conscience you can never silence. I will never let you be."

18. HELLBOY: THE RIGHT HAND OF DOOM: Igor Bromhead has bound Hellboy using his true name, Anung un Rama; moments later, the demon Ualac steals the Crown of the Apocalypse off Hellboy's head. Things seem pretty bleak until Hellboy is informed that "Anung un Rama" quite literally means "he who wears the crown" - that no longer applies to him, so it's not his name. The spell is broken, and much butt-kicking ensues.

19. DEADPOOL #11, "With Great Power Comes Great Coincidence": Deadpool and Blind Al time-travel into a Stan Lee/John Romita Sr. issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. The whole issue's hilarious, but special mention goes to Deadpool's reaction to Harry's (and Norman's) "unique" hairstyle.

20. ASTONISHING X-MEN #15, "Torn": Cassandra Nova turns Wolverine into a six-year-old girl. Awesome.

21. THE AUTHORITY #12, "Outer Dark": The death of Jenny Sparks.

22. GRAVITY #5: His nemesis, the Black Death, has been defeated, but Greg Willis still doesn't feel like a superhero... until Spider-Man stops by to congratulate him on a job well-done.

23. ULTRA: SEVEN DAYS #8: Having been told by a psychic that she would find her true love in seven days, Pearl reaches the end of day 7 alone. When she realizes it's not going to happen, she maintains her composure until someone asks her for the time, at which point she starts crying.

24. BIZARRO COMICS: Mxyzptlk browses through the Hall of Superman Spin-Offs.

25. VEILS: Vivian discovers the truth behind the story of Rosalind and the Sultan.

26. WATCHMEN: The whole book is one big Favorite Moment for me, but if I have to pick a scene, I'll go with Ozymandias' revelatory monologue in the penultimate issue, coupled with the immortal "I did it thirty-five minutes ago." I'll bet you guys anything the studios will rewrite that "downer" ending so that Rorschach and the others save the day.

27. Y: THE LAST MAN #30, "Ring of Truth": Hero faces her demons.

28. COMMON GROUNDS #4, "Time of Their Lives": Forty years after their last battle, Blackwatch and Commander Power meet again. But they're not who you think they are. That last panel with the newspaper clipping turns the whole story on its head.

29. ALIAS #28, "Purple": It's a complete deus ex machina, but I can't help smiling whenever I see that double-page spread of Jessica punching the Purple Man square in the mouth.

30. SANDMAN #37, "I Woke Up and One of Us Was Crying": Barbara defiantly crosses out Alvin's name on the tombstone, and - in Tacky Flamingo lipstick - writes WANDA instead.

31. SUPERMAN: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MAN OF TOMORROW?: With the Fortress of Solitude under siege and Superman preparing for his last stand, Jimmy and Lana sneak out to fight the gathered villains themselves. "We're only second-stringers, Jimmy, but we'll show 'em... Nobody loved him better than us. Nobody!"

32. ASTRO CITY #0.5, "The Nearness of You": Michael's decision to remember Miranda puts your typical Crisis-esque multiversal time-travel epic in a completely human context.

33. FABLES #55, "Over There": Having heard the Snow Queen's plans for the conquest of Earth, Pinocchio lays out a surprisingly vivid counter-scenario where the human race unites with the Fables and tears the Adversary's Empire apart.

34. H-E-R-O #4: Jerry finally does something heroic, after losing his superpowers.

35. EXILES #34, "A Second Farewell": Mariko gets another chance with Mary.

36. DOCTOR STRANGE: THE OATH #5: Doctor Strange and Night Nurse get together. Aww, they're so cute!

37. MY FAITH IN FRANKIE #3: "You've broken Commandments One through Three, Seven and Nine. I'm taking you down, Frankie."

38. THE ADVENTURES OF BARRY WEEN: MONKEY TALES #6: Barry jumps into the past to save Sara's life; when he realizes he's succeeded and everything's back to normal, he heads into the kitchen and promptly bursts into tears. It's a powerful reminder that, despite his intellect, Barry's still just a kid.

39. EMPIRE #5: Golgoth realizes his daughter Delfi has become as corrupt and monstrous as he is. So he snaps her neck.

40. MARTHA WASHINGTON: GIVE ME LIBERTY: President Howard Nissen tears down Cabrini Green at Martha's request.

41. THE BIRTHDAY RIOTS: Troy Adams' death shakes Max to his core - when the rioters surround his car the next day, Max just opens the door and lets the crowd beat him, in penance for his betrayal.

42. SUPERGIRL #79: Seconds after she decides to live Kara Zor-El's life, Linda Danvers chafes at all the "secret weapon" talk and goes public, changing everything.

43. LOKI #1: It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it thing, but Rob Rodi suggests a different angle on the Loki/Thor rivalry: in a flashback, we see them as teenagers, and Loki idly carves a heart in the dirt as he watches Thor.

44. MAUS: Not so much a "favorite" moment as one that haunted me for a long time; Vladek describes a particular instance in the Nazi purges where they murder crying children. Despite the fact that it's cats and mice - or maybe because of that - it's an image that stuck.

45. THE SURROGATES #5: Rather than face the reality outside her apartment, Greer's wife kills herself. The real world has a price.

46. ZENITH PHASE 3: Everyone's pretty shocked that the self-absorbed, spoiled superbrat Zenith sacrificed his life to save the Multiverse. Turns out he didn't: that was his mirror-universe double Vertex, the guy who actually was a hero.

47. CRIMINAL #5: For a split-second, you think Leo might have made it in time to save Greta. But, of course, he doesn't.

48. I, JOKER: The unnamed protagonist finds the last recording of Bruce Wayne prior to his death.

49. V FOR VENDETTA: Valerie's letter.

50. WE3 #3: 1 starts howling and wailing for 3 as it goes off to face 4 alone. Breaks my heart every time.

More of that retailing stuff...! Ahhhhh!

I was a little hesitant to post something else retailing related so soon, but we've had two reviews up in the last 2 days (and I'll be writing something tomorrow or Friday, I promise!), so I feel OK about mentioning this nice article by Richard Bruton of Forbidden Planet's blog where he discusses my last two TILTINGs. He has some kind words, and I always appreciate other retailers discussing the topics I bring up.

But there's a little bit of grousing behind the cut....

buuuuut... Dirk Deppey, dependably, uses the opportunity to misunderstand the Direct Market YET AGAIN.

Dirk starts by dismissing the idea of a "book glut" (which retailers are using in a specific way -- much like the "B&W glut" and the "speculation glut", including the understanding that such gluts tend to eventually self-correct, though they almost always take publishers and retailers with them before they do so), by likening DM stores to Generalist book stores.

Thing is, DM retailers are not Generalists -- they're specialists. Not terribly unlike Science Fiction bookstores, or Mystery bookstores, or going a smidge more afield, a Jazz-specialist record store, or an "midnight movie" or "international"-specialized video store. All of those things exist within San Francisco, and, yeah, when I go into one of them I pretty much expect them to have "everything" that I might want to buy within their specialization.

I don't expect a generalist like B&N or Borders to have more than a "token" amount of specialized genres. I mean, sure you expect to see Asimov and Heinlein in the Sci-fi section, but I wouldn't necessarily expect them to have, dunno, Neal Asher?

I'd expect that Borderlands, here in SF would have him though... or at least know what I was talking about in the first place, and where to point me if they didn't. That's the point of a specialist, really.

Borders carries SF, but they also carry mystery, romance, history, maps, comics, and a gajillion other things. The two cases aren't really that comparable, except maybe for the "Pop Culture"-style DM store, that aren't necessarily "comic book stores" per se.

Listen, we live in an environment where "Embarrassment of Riches" seems to describe it pretty darn well, so it's a funny thing to be talking about "too many books" -- but when a retailer says that, what they're actually talking about is "too many books that don't sell". I think we're ALL very excited (display issues aside) to have many many books that sell. We're less excited about books that don't sell and clog up the racks and make the rest of the store look bad.

As noted, this will eventually be self-correcting, as, presumably, more retailers start to get a handle on their inventory and start making decisions like I have (example: this month I didn't order just under half of the TPs that Marvel offered... not even a single copy. I just couldn't see the demand), but in the meantime, it's a lot of chaff to sort through to get to the wheat.

Then Dirk makes the pitch that we need returnability.

*sigh*

Look, we have returnability right now -- it's called "using a bookstore distributor". I've used one for years. Any "DM" retailer can use one at any time, there's no penalties upon us for doing so. Well, except for lower discounts, and paying shipping two ways and tying up money until the returns are available. Oh, and the 10% (of total purchases) limit on returns, too. But I've bought thousands of dollars of stock "returnable".

I haven't returned any of it, because shipping, administration and labor costs soak up any real savings you could have gotten, and leaves you with nothing; whereas buying non-returnable leaves you eating some books, but at least you still own them so you can discount them away.

Dirk suggests that ComicsPRO can "negotiate" for better returnable terms. There's two little problems there. First is: there are pretty significant limits on what a retailer organization CAN do, based on Federal Anti-Trust laws. Seriously, talking about numbers, discounts, any of that kind of stuff has to be done EXCEPTIONALLY carefully, when it can even be done in the first place, or you run the risk of getting your ass thrown in Federal prison. ComicsPRO has paid for excellent and in-depth counsel and has a comprehensive policy involving anti-trust issues, and this is not something that is at all trivial to do, even if there was desire among the membership for it.

The second little problem is that were we somehow able to "negotiate", say, a 5% better discount on returnable items, Diamond (or whoever we convinced to do so) IS LEGALLY OBLIGATED (cf: anti-trust law) to offer that same EXACT deal to all comers. Like Borders and B&N and Amazon.

There's a third problem too: Diamond is set up to NOT do returns. For them to have a REAL returns program would be a really fundamental change in the physical way that they do business, and it would be to NO GAIN FOR THEM. Because MOST of their business comes from the brokered publishers, they can't possibly make money processing orders, then processing returns, because they're not buying books, then reselling them as a traditional distributor does. The work based on a fee-structure. What THAT means is that if Marvel/DC/Dark Horse/Image agreed to returns that were "better" than the current deal, they'd have to pay TWICE: once to us (the "better deal"), and once to Diamond. I think it is pretty safe to say "not going to happen".

At the end of the day, I don't think returnability will do anything significant to increase sell-in -- because the problem isn't the books that are selling... those you just reorder; The problem is the ones that aren't selling. No amount of returnability would get me to order something that I can't discern an audience for. MS MARVEL v 3 HC doesn't look any more attractive if I can possibly return it when it doesn't sell. Nor does a $125 96 page KRAMER'S ERGOT, for that matter. Fuck, can you even imagine the hassles of trying to ship back a broadsheet-sized book if you don't keep the original box, and/or you don't have a shipping department? *shudder*

My favorite part is this bit: "It might even give shopowners an incentive to experiment with reaching out to those new customers that the Direct Market so clearly needs right now." Which doesn't even make sense on the face of it: YES, there are what any reasonable comics-loving person would probably call a "bad comics store" that is closed and insular and geared exclusively to culture and commerce that Dirk doesn't care for. Fuck, I don't care for it either! But, THOSE stores will never ever EVER "experiment" like that because all THEY care about is the lowest hanging fruit in their own mono-focus.

Stores that DON'T myopically mono-focus already have an "experiment" budget. I call it the Mercy Fuck, personally. I probably WILL buy a (1) copy of the 96 page $125 KRAMER's ERGOT because, like Kenny Penman suggests, it's a "Trophy Book", and it is expected that a store like mine would have a copy of that. I do not actually expect to sell one in anything like a reasonable time frame, but I'll order one, and if I were to sell it in a reasonable time frame, I'll order another and be excited!

At the end of the day, were I a publisher, I'd be looking at consignment rather than returnability as the solution for the more commercially marginal projects. No one is going to order what they honestly don't believe they can sell, EVEN IF they can return the unsold copies; they, however, might be willing to accept cost-upfront-free copies to establish that a market exists for that product. The difference is who pays when.

-B

Obsolescence & Model Kits: Jeff Looks at FC: Superman Beyond #1 and G-Mo in the DCU

I remember when I was a kid being entranced with model kits. It was a different time then, back before semi-autistic engineers could make themselves rich with their penchant for elegant complexity: instead of writing computer code, they wrote tactical charts for historical wargames, assembled model kits of cars, ships, jets, and rockets (and, occasionally, monsters and robots), and crafted massive model train sets in garages and basements. Painstakingly, they assembled private landscapes--usually based on an actual historic train route--stipling mounds of carved foam to create textured boulders; studying photographs to create detail accurate train yards; rigging lighting; recreating timetables. Until finally, the engineer was done: he'd remade a corner of the world to scale. It looked perfect, ran smoothly, and made you ache to look at it--because it was devoid of people. I never felt so sad as when I looked at a perfectly constructed model train set.

Whereas model trains made me sad, the model kits filled me with frustration. Even the simplest was well beyond the scope of my clumsy fingers and lazy soul. You had to snap and clip plastic parts off a manufactured lattice, then sand the barb from where the part connected with a lattice, glue the parts together, wait, paint them, wait, apply decals, construct the diorama in which to...I'll be honest, I never got past clipping the third or fourth part off the lattice. Part of it--most of it, actually--was shameful laziness, but some of it was the suspiciousness with which I regarded the model makers. After all, if I was supposed to do all that, why didn't I just carve the god-damned thing out of soap? It seemed to me they were taking advantage of my desires (and the abundance of industrial grade plastic at their disposal), turning a tidy profit by promising a completed product for which I would do the majority of the work.

I realized just yesterday, that those feelings of frustration and shame and suspiciousness, are my constant companions when reading most of Grant Morrison's work for the last five or six months. At some point, Morrison stopped writing stories, and began churning out mental model kits of stories, which only work if you take the time to snip them apart, study the instructions, and assemble them yourself.

[More in this vein, alas, behind the cut.]

I have theories as to why Morrison has turned down this path. Many, many, theories. The least generous theory is that Morrison is a brilliant manic-depressive who can cogitate like a motherfucker in his manic stage, falls back on his tropes when he hits his depressive phase (or just stops producing altogether), and is smart enough to make it all sound like it was one organic plan after the fact. So, for example, you get something like "New X-Men" that generates tons of new ideas in the beginning, hits a bad patch where it's all about Mutantbolik and his flying saucer girlfriend, then sprints through a "widescreen" finale (followed by a rushed two part epilogue that jams in all the stuff he never got around to).

A more generous theory is that while Morrison has the mind of a formalist, he's got the heart of an anarchist. If a storyline of his takes too long, he can't help but think of ways to fuck it up and make it more interesting, even if those new ideas invalidate the groundwork he laid. I'm thinking here, again, of his New X-Men storyline, but also The Invisibles, which mutated as it went along, ending far from where it started. Because Morrison constantly layers in allusions that work on multiple levels, it's easy for him to claim victory in the end by suggesting the level that didn't satisfy wasn't the one you weren't supposed to be paying attention to. In some cases (Sea Guy or The Filth, let's say), I believe that's absolutely the case and in some (Xorn, and the New X-Men run being characterized by Morrison as a conscious deconstruction of how the franchise defeats the author), I believe that's absolutely Morrison talking out his lipstick-smeared butthole.

But most generous of all my theories is that G-Mo has constructed a way to promote the work on the Internet that doesn't involve running a forum, or having a Twitter account, or keeping track of his Myspace friends: the individual issues aren't stories jammed with easter eggs, but easter egg hunts cordoned off by a ribbon of plot. The stories themselves aren't particularly difficult, but tracking the details of the plot through the thicket of detail can be, which is where all the online annotations come in handy. As Abhay pointed out in his brilliant recreation of a Marvel panel at SDCC, readers today don't really have any idea how a story works--they only want to know what will happen to the characters they follow, hitting Newsarama day after day to get the spoilers, with no real interest in the story that ostensibly explains exactly that. And companies and creators play along, spoiling stories to lesser and greater degrees so as to build buzz and heat from the resulting discussions and outcries. Morrison's brilliant and daring twist is to construct stories so people will hit the Internet not to discuss what will happen, but to figure out what is happening. Next to the way Mark Millar promotes himself on the Internet, it looks downright elegant.

Under this theory, the fact my enjoyment of Final Crisis didn't really start until I read Douglas' annotations, or that my enjoyment of Batman R.I.P. derives entirely from commentary of fine internet including (but not limited to) Mindless Ones, Funnybook Babylon, and our own critics and commenters, is all part of the plan. Indeed, even though I picked up the majority of the references in Final Crisis: Superman Beyond #1 covered by David Uzumeri's annotations, his willingness to analyze Morrison's intentions on the fly (particularly during that five page Monitor origin sequence) gave me a greater appreciation of the work, and even helped me uncover new layers of interpretation.

However, while they gave me the tools to appreciate the work, they didn't give me the tools to enjoy it which suggests that something has gone terribly wrong, either with me or this devious master plan I've capriciously attributed to the book's writer. Honestly, I'd be more willing to attribute this to me if I wasn't reading a comic book where five supermen board a yellow submarine to sail through the metaverse--and one of those supermen is a drugged-out Dr. Manhattan analogue. As Graeme McMillan so frequently says to me when discussing comics, "Come on! How can you not love that?" Honestly, it's such a direct descendant to batshit Steve Gerber stories from the '70s, I can see how I could love it. I should love this book.

And yet, I don't. I mean, I think I'd give it a high OK or something (particularly if you have stereoscopic vision and can take advantage of the 3-D glasses, which I don't and can't) because it's pretty and cool and brings back stuff from Morrison's Animal Man run.

And yet.... I dunno. It could be the model kit factor, where I'm a little frustrated that for $4.50 I get so much frickin' event and so little story. There's not really what you would call much of a plot revealed in all these pretty pages: Superman gets recruited by Zillo Valla (although no one uses that name until the last four or five pages and, at least in the case of Superman, it's not clear how he learns it), they board the Ultima Thule, things go wrong, they end up in Limbo, people make arbitrary decisions--honestly, at this point, it's not really too different from a Friday the 13th movie. You've got the bullying jock (Ultraman), the kind-hearted peacemaker (Captain Marvel), the druggie nerd (Quantum Superman) and the kid who dies the first time he has sex (Overman). If the second issue has Superman in a bra and panties running screaming around the perimeter of a lake while being chased by a chainsaw wielding Anti-Monitor, I won't be too surprised.

I don't think it's the model kit factor, in short. I think Morrison has fallen prey to the Model Train set mindset. Everything looks gorgeous, and the detail is planned out to a staggering level, but there aren't any characters in Superman Beyond #1: there are people with names, their basic character and that's all you got. While Morrison has used such deliberate flatness to extraordinarily good effect in All-Star Superman, I find it more disappointing here simply because there's not thirty-plus years of character identification with most of these characters, and the ones for whom there are--Captain Marvel, for example--get about three lines that aren't purely exposition. It's not surprising Morrison uses a musical motif to explain the travel through the metaverses: he's using the characters in this book (and perhaps in his others) like leitmotifs, thematic markers that gain complexity when contrasted with other markers.

It's a very smart way to deal with work-for-hire superheroes--you can't change them or develop them, after all, so half the traditional conception of what makes a story is out the window anyway. But it may be that I find I prefer the illusion of change and development to no development whatsoever, no matter how much room you clear up for phantasmagorical imagery once you chuck that illusion. For example, if Morrison recognizes that the character with the most depth in Superman: Beyond #1 is Merryman, the King of Limbo, he seems unaware of what this might mean. It's not that every character is too delightful to be consigned to Limbo, but that in innumerable universes where everything happens but nothing has any lasting impact, it's really no different to a single space where nothing happens--the former is just prettier than the latter, and it takes a little longer for boredom to set in there. But once it does, it doesn't matter how many times the trains trundle past their scale-model mountains. No one waits near the flickering waxy light of the station for them to arrive, and when the creator leaves the room, it's as if none of it ever happened.

An added day before the new comics means another day with which to file my review from 8/27: Jog Enjoyed His Holiday

Kick-Ass #4 (of 8)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arriving THURSDAY 9/4/2008

Here is what Comix Experience is receiving this week.

REMEMBER: Due to the Labor Day holiday, comics in the US will be 24 HOURS LATE, and will not be for sale until THURSDAY, 9/4. If you go in on Wednesday, you're LCS will probably laugh at you behind your back!

If you live in Canada, where they don't have a Labor Day, comics ship as normal for Wednesday.

It's a small week, but with a couple of decent books...

ADAM STRANGE SPECIAL #1
ARMY @ LOVE THE ART OF WAR #2 (OF 6)
AUTHORITY #2
BATMAN STRIKES #49
DETECTIVE COMICS #848 RIP
EL DIABLO #1 (OF 6)
FABLES #75 (NOTE PRICE)
FRINGE #1 (OF 6)
GREEN LANTERN #34
HELLBLAZER PRESENTS CHAS THE KNOWLEDGE #3 (OF 5)
HOUSE OF MYSTERY #5
JONAH HEX #35
LOONEY TUNES #166
MANHUNTER #34
NIGHTWING #148 RIP
SECRET SIX #1
STORMING PARADISE #3 (OF 6)
SUPERGIRL #33
TITANS #4
TOR #5 (OF 6)
TRINITY #14
UN-MEN #13
VINYL UNDERGROUND #12
WAR THAT TIME FORGOT #5 (OF 12)
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #570 NWD
DEAD OF NIGHT DEVIL SLAYER #1 (OF 4)
ETERNALS #4
INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #5
IRON MAN GOLDEN AVENGER
MARVEL APES #1 (OF 4)
MS MARVEL ANNUAL #1
PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #23
SECRET INVASION FRONT LINE #3 (OF 5) SI
SPIDER-MAN LOVES MARY JANE SEASON 2 #2 (OF 5)
SUB-MARINER DEPTHS #1 (OF 5)
TWELVE 1/2
UNIVERSAL WAR ONE #3 (OF 3)
VENOM DARK ORIGIN #2 (OF 5)
X-MEN MANIFEST DESTINY #1 (OF 4) MD
X-MEN ORIGIN BEAST
2000 AD #1599
2000 AD #1600
ANGEL AFTER THE FALL #12
ARCHIE DIGEST #247
ARMY OF DARKNESS #12 LONG ROAD HOME
BAOBAB #3 (RES)
BOYS #22
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #18
END LEAGUE #4
GALAXY QUEST GLOBAL WARNING #2
INTERIORAE #3
KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #142
NEW BATTLESTAR GALACTICA SEASON ZERO #12
SAMMY THE MOUSE #2
SAVAGE DRAGON #137
SAVAGE TALES #9
SPAWN #182
TANK GIRL VISIONS OF BOOGA #4
VERONICA #190
WITCHBLADE #120 HALEY & NOWLAN CVR B

Books / Mags / Stuff
BAD BOY 10TH ANN HC (DE) (RES)
BLEACH TP VOL 24
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER OMNIBUS TP VOL 05
COMICS JOURNAL #292
COUNTER X TP VOL 02
DEATH OF THE NEW GODS HC
DEITCHS PICTORAMA SC
DR FATE COUNTDOWN TO MYSTERY TP
GOOD NEIGHBORS HC VOL 01 KIN
HELLBLAZER THE LAUGHING MAGICIAN TP
ILLUSTRATION MAGAZINE #23
IMMORTAL IRON FIST TP VOL 02 CITIES OF HEAVEN
INVASION TP
IRON MANUAL TP
JUDGE ANDERSON TP SHAMBALLA
JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #275
KRAZY & IGNATZ TP 1943 1944 HE NODS QUIESCENT SIESTA
KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE TP VOL 07
LOVE & ROCKETS NEW STORIES #1
MARTIAN CONFEDERACY GN VOL 1 REDNECKS RED PLANET
MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN TP VOL 10 CRISIS DIGEST
MPD PSYCHO TP VOL 06
NARUTO TP VOL 31
PORTABLE FRANK SC
SHOOTING WAR TP
SHOWCASE PRESENTS SUPERMAN TP VOL 04
SLOW STORM GN
STICKLEBACK GN
SWORD OF RED SONJA DOOM O/T GODS TP
TRANNY GN
TWELVE PREM HC VOL 01
WAITING FOR FOOD CRUMB PLACEMAT DRAWINGS HC VOL 04
WITCHBLADE SHADES OF GRAY TP

What looks good to YOU?

-B

Blogwar XXXVI: GAKKA WAKKA WAKKA

Like I said, with kindergarten drop off, I'm in to work HOURS before the store opens, so rather than working on the new order form (6 days left!), let's try this one more time...

(But, under the cut, 'cuz I know only a small percentage of people care about any of this)

What's funny is that if I knew how to link images (I always have to call Jeff to link them for me, that's how sad I am!), I probably would have picked the same piece as Dirk just did. Heh, that really sums our "conversations" quite well!

(Side note: according to the permalink, that's post #666 on the new journalista. Nicely satanic!)

Either way, I really like Dirk. He's provides an excellent service (seldom do I not follow at least 2 links that I'd've never found on my own), and while I increasingly disagree with the extremes of his perspective, it's a valuable perspective nonetheless. I say this up front because I was probably unnecessarily ad hominem yesterday, and I don't want anyone to think this is personal or something.

It's just that I believe that Dirk is arguing from his agenda (as he always does) (and, hell, as I always do), and mistaking some pretty basic things about how markets work in his pursuit of that agenda.

Here's the essence of my point, in one handy paragraph: For ANY goods, service, or product that is meant as a commercial enterprise, the producer of those goods, services or products has to identify their market, then bring those goods, services or products TO that market. If the "low-hanging fruit" of that market (the "motivated buyer") is not large enough to make your production of those goods, services or products profitable, then the PRODUCER needs to work to expand their share of that market.

What you don't get to do is BLAME THE MARKET for the failure to be profitable.

It's not the MARKET's fault your work doesn't sell; it is the producers.

This is true whether you're talking about the DM, or the bookstore market, or the internet market (represented, in this case, primarily by Amazon). Virgin comics were, in fact, available in all of those market spaces. As far as I am able to tell from extremely limited tools available to me, Virgin comics didn't succeed in ANY of those channels.

Because of this, I really do think it's goofy to blame any individual segment of the market for the success of a line. Dirk's argument seems to stem from this statement: "The Direct Market of comics shops served as the primary outlet for Virgin’s products in North America, and this virtually guaranteed the company poor sales figures from day one."

But this seems to me to be a faulty premise on the face of it -- I strongly suspect if you could get any Virgin execs on the phone none of them would at any point agree with the thought that the DM was the "primary outlet" for their books. In fact, it was clear from talking to Sharad back before launch that they had plans for distribution well beyond the DM, and the sense that I took from Virgin was that they didn't *actually* care about the DM in any appreciable way, other than us being the lowest hanging fruit.

Certainly the DM is the EASIEST channel to market to -- Diamond's got many mechanisms to talk directly and sales specifically to their client retailers, and since each and every DM store DOES use Diamond you don't have to worry about not reaching members of that channel. But at no point did it appear to me that that was the ONLY place they were trying to sell.

Dirk says "I would dispute this to the extent that I’ve never actually seen a Virgin TPB in a chain bookstore — and I keep a regular watch on the shelves of my local Borders and Barnes & Noble branches — so while I’m not privy to the company’s marketing tactics, it seems to me that either they never really had a proper mass-market strategy in place, or said strategy was so badly bungled that it effectively left the company at the mercy of the Direct Market by omission."

I think here that Dirk misunderstands how markets buy. Goods are offered to a retailer, retailer decides whether or not they believe they can sell them. Retailers are under no obligation to buy those products if they don't believe they can sell them. If Dirk doesn't see Virgin books at Borders and B&N, what I would assume is that the buyers for those companies looked at those products and decided they weren't worth giving floor space to because they couldn't see an audience for them.

Here's the thing, I think it would be just as valid to say "The bookstores served as the primary outlet for Virgin’s products in North America, and this virtually guaranteed the company poor sales figures from day one." I'm *positive* that Virgin saw their destiny in the mass market, but if the Mass doesn't want your product, it doesn't really matter what the fuck your "strategy" is in the first place, now does it?

My point was that there WAS some potential audience out there for this material, even if it's half-a-percent. BUT YOU HAVE TO TELL THAT AUDIENCE THAT IT IS THERE FOR THEM, REGARDLESS OF SALES CHANNEL.

Virgin never did that. I pointed them, pre-launch, to what could have been a model success story, the Indian-population-dense, and student-dense, and California-Eastern-Mysticism-dense Berkeley which happens to have one of the best comic shops in the world. And they never bothered to follow through on it.

OF COURSE they failed, but it's not because of the DM, and it's not because of bookstores, and it's not because of Amazon... it's because they were a bad publisher in that they never identified a market for their works, or did what it took to service those markets. And that is NOT any individual market's fault, that's the PUBLISHER's fault!

****

Other random notes on Dirk's 2nd piece:

Disney periodicals don't sell in the DM because they're $7, and don't have a rational publishing schedule (they skips months at a time, then come out one week after another; they ship everything in a single week, etc.)

In the Tilting Dirk linked to he misread this sentence: "FOC has pretty dramatically changed the way that comics retailers do business; in fact I'd suggest that it is one of the reasons that Marvel and DC are currently at or near 80% of the market in orders, because there's "less risk" in ordering their material in a FOC environment." That is entire DM, not Comix Experience. It is approximately 65% at Comix Experience, and Vertigo, and author focused sales (ie: Moore, Ellis, Moore, Ennis, etc,) is the bulk of that.

-B

12 (and then some) Reasons Why

Because Jeff asked and David Brothers threatened, here are 50 things that I love about comics, including at least one comic that I really, really would love to write, in case anyone at DC Comics is reading and desperate (Actually, I think that the next weekly book DC does should be an anthology of work by internet critics, forced to do at least one strip each so that all the professionals get to point and laugh at us for a change. It'd sell like crap, but imagine the schaudenfruede!). Anyway - More reviews later this week, I promise. For now, click that "Click to read more" and... well, read more.

(Also, if "anonymous" called Jeff a fanboy, he/she'll love me.)

50 Things I Love About Comics, because two people demanded it.

5 Creators That I Will Buy Anything From, Sight Unseen
1. Kevin Huizenga
2. Bryan Lee O'Malley
3. Darwyn Cooke
4. Grant Morrison
5. Brandon Graham

5 Creators That I Would Probably Buy Anything From, But Would At Least Look At First
1. Jack Kirby (I know, heresy! But it's got to be late-period, and I admit it; Devil Dinosaur let me down hard.)
2. Paul Pope
3. Nick Abadzis
4. Eddie Campbell
5. Matt Fraction

5 Artists Who Continually Blow My Puny Little Mind
1. James Jean
2. Gabriel Ba
3. Jack Kirby
4. Kent Williams
5. Dave McKean

5 Pretty Much Perfect Comics, If You Ask Me
1. Seven Soldiers #1
2. Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness
3. Graffiti Kitchen
4. Or Else #2
5. Mister Miracle #3

5 Comics That Changed My Life, And Why
1. Uncanny X-Men #185 - The first one I read and thought, I'm going to collect these.
2. Animal Man #1 - When I realized that the Grant Morrison from 2000AD and this Grant Morrison were the same person, and then realized that Scottish people could write American comics, which oddly enough made them more real.
3. Cages #4: For the craft, and the realization that Alan Bennett didn't have a lock on monologues like that.
4. Graffiti Kitchen: My first auto-bio comic, I think? And the first one that, as the song goes, said something to me about my life.
5. The Invisibles: As a series, it weirdly mirrored my life for the five or so years it ran, and changed my idea of what normal was. Possibly for the better; I'm not quite sure about that yet.

5 Comics I Collected The Entire Run Of
1. Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol
2. Steve Englehart's The Green Lantern Corps
3. Green Lantern: Mosaic
4. Tom Peyer's Hourman
5. Marvel Super-Heroes: Secret Wars, the British version that also included Secret Wars II and all of its crossovers.

5 Characters That I Wish I Could Speak Like
1. Dr. Doom
2. Luke Cage
3. The Watcher
4. Namor, the Sub-Mariner
5. The Thing

5 Minor Characters I Love So Much That I WIsh I Could Write Them (and, just because, what I would do with them)
1. The Manhattan Guardian (Create a franchise of Guardian newspapers all across the DCU America, so that there'd be a Metropolis Guardian, a Gotham Guardian, a Los Angeles Guardian, etc. Hilarity ensues.)
2. OMAC (Turn him into DC's version of Iron Man during "Armor Wars", working for SHADE from Frankenstein.)
3. Dazzler (Make it into the romance book it so clearly wanted to be when it started, and bring back lots of minor supporting characters from other books for her to date.)
4. Rick Jones (When Epic was around and Marvel had no standards, I almost pitched an Ultimate Rick Jones book where he was this retro beatnik loser who idolized Kerouac teamed up with Ultimate Doc Samson, who was a former pro-wrestler turned radio talk show shrink. Together, they fought monsters.) See also: Snapper Carr.
5. Ralph Dibny (Is he really minor? I'm not sure. But I love love LOVE the idea of Ralph and Sue as the Thin Man meets Topper: Deadman and Wife, anyone?)

5 Items That Only Exist In Comics That I Wish I Owned In Real Life
1. The Time Bubble
2. The Cosmic Treadmill
3. Clothes made of unstable molecules
4. A Green Lantern ring
5. Weather Wizard's climate-controlling wand

5 Random Other Things That I Love About Comics
1. John Workman's sound effects in Walt Simonson's Thor
2. Death Note, in general
3. Being able to read all the old comics that didn't work in Essentials or Showcase format, like those Teen Titans and Defenders runs...
4. Newsarama and Comic Book Resources. Completely seriously, no matter what you may think.
5. 52's Oolong Island of Mad Scientists, which may have been the greatest one idea out of a series of wonderfully dumb and dumbly wonderful ideas.

Tuesday-Type Content: 50 Things Jeff Likes About Comics.

I really liked David Brothers' '50 Things I Like' list he did recently over on 4th Letter, as well as some of the lists he reprinted and linked to as a result. And last time I saw him, David said, as we parted, "hey, you should do a list." Somehow that led to me not being able to sleep past 6 AM on a Sunday morning as I sorted and re-sorted the little sublists I'd do.

Anyway, post-jump: 50 things I like about comics, with hopefully just the right amount of commentary.

5 Great "Eras" for Publishers

DC in the late '50s, early '60s: A legacy that's like the pyramids in Egypt--lovely to look at, but I'm damn glad I didn't have to work on 'em. (Reading Weisinger-era Superman is like having dinner at the home of a wife abuser: you feel sick at your complicity but, you gotta admit, the pot roast is perfect.) The mix of genuine talent being ground under by fierce editorial formula, the considerable resources of the company, and an aggressive approach to creating IP (although at the time it was probably called something like "following the marketplace") paid off in a huge back library of material and properties that DC could reinvent for years to come.

Marvel in the early to mid-'70s: Of course, I'm going to pick this era since it was the era I fell in love with comics, but still: Marvel finally being able to publish as many titles as it wanted, combined with a ton of new talent inspired by Marvel's heyday who had absolutely no conception of what work-for-hire work meant. I mean, it's not just that you had more than twenty issues of a title called Man-Thing; it's that you had Howard The Duck, a character in Man-Thing so popular he got his own book.

Fantagraphics in the early '90s: Los Bros Hernandez were still doing Love & Rockets (at what could be argued was their most ambitious period, if it wasn't for the fact they've always been, and continue to be, outrageously ambitious); Peter Bagge was doing Hate; Clowes was doing Eightball. While none of these books were monthly, their publication schedules were such that if you kept coming to the comic book store every week, it seemed like one of them would pop every sixth visit or so.

Despite all the praise and accolades at the time, I think nobody--not the readers, not the publishers, not the retailers--realized how exceptional a line-up this was. I'm not a sports guy, but the closest analogy that comes to mind is when the 49ers replaced Joe Montana with Steve Young. Sure, we San Franciscans knew we were fortunate to have two great QBs in a row, but we didn't realize how unbelievably fortunate: we also believed that, hey, of course we got two great QBs in a row because the 49ers are the greatest football team in the world, and San Francisco is the greatest city in the world, etc., etc. I think that there was a similar feeling at Fantagraphics that, yeah, these guys are geniuses, absolutely, but when they start to burn out (or slow down), we'll have the next generation of geniuses ready to come up. And when they published the first issue of Acme Novelty Library #1 in 1993, it looked like that would actually be the case. But it wasn't.

Vertigo in the mid- to late-'90s: Preacher, The Invisibles, and (pulled over from the failed Helix line) Transmetropolitan. Also, the last great era of letter pages.

Viz, right here in the mid-'00s: This is my own opinion deliriously unmoored from anything like historical knowledge, but Viz strikes me as generally lazy and complacent, willing to write off its lack of hustle as a commitment to the long haul. So it took Tokyopop licensing and dumping materials cheaply on the shelves to get Viz to step up its publishing schedule, and it took Vertical publishing high-end niche materials to get Viz to dip its fiscally conservative toes into riskier waters. Whether my opinion is at all close to the mark or not, all I know is I've got Drifting Classroom, Death Note, Monster, Tekkon Kinkreet, Cat Eyed Boy, and thirteen volumes of Golgo 13 on my shelves. And I've got 20th Century Boys to look forward to in 2008. I feel exceptionally fortunate.

5 Creators I'd Kill To Make Documentaries About

Dave Sim: I mean, c'mon. I can't think of a better post-Crumb documentary subject.

Eastman & Laird: Counting them as one creator is a bit of a cheat, but I think cutting between, say, Eastman and his wife Julie Strain doing bondage photoshoots of models on their palatial estate to Laird handing out Xeric Awards in some half-empty convention hall, would be worth it.

Evan Dorkin: And it's a bit of a cheat not including Dorkin's wife Sarah Dyer in this category, since she's an interesting creator and cartoonist in her own right. But just Dorkin talking, talking, talking, while alternating between his detail-filled panels, and the more depressing views of Staten Island? How can than not half-fill a screening room at Opera Plaza for thirteen days?

William Moulton Marston: Again, a gimme.

Rob Liefeld: Kind of the rise & fall of the Image Seven, as focused through this one guy who, from what I can tell, has never been honest about a deadline a day in his life.

5 Perfect Comic Books

Boom Boom #2: David Lasky's retelling of Joyce's writing of Ulysses using pages rderawn from The Origin of Marvel Comics. Up there with Spiegelman and Moore as far as sheer formalistic brio.

: Featuring "Art School Confidential," "Chicago," and, yes, "Needledick the Bug Fucker." The first time I read this, I realized how people could talk about how reading Mad back in the '50s could completely change the way they saw everything.

Omac #1: If you had to pick one last superhero comic to read, this would be the one. Every panel of this is jammed with subtext and possibility. Even the rest of the Kirby issues aren't half as good as the comic series that exists in your brain after you've read this one issue.

Arcade #6: The first comic where I finally "got" Crumb, but it's also got Spiegelman's 'Malpractice Suite,' which still floors me. And S. Clay Wilson! And Bill Griffith! And Rory Hayes! And Mark Beyer! Pretty much bifurcated into Weirdo and Raw, both of which I loved, but never quite in the same way I loved this.

Sam & Max's Freelance Police Special #1: The inspiration for Hit The Road and one of my picks for all-time funniest comic book. Most of my perfect comic book picks were chosen by how many times I've read and reread them; this issue of Sam & Max has to be in the double digits by now.

5 Writers Whose Work For Marvel in the '70s I'll Always Adore

Steve Gerber: Yeah, that's probably a given.

Steve Englehart: Somewhere tucked away in my brain is an essay about how Englehart made comic contuity work in a way that fooled just about everyone into thinking it was an easy and positive benefit to superhero universes than it actually is.

Don McGregor: My goal for this year is to re-read Panther's Rage, which was pretty much my version of Watchmen when I was, I dunno, nine? And review it here, is the plan.

Doug Moench: Overwrought? All these guys were overwrought--it came with the territory. But Moench's overwroughtness also underscored the fact that he seemingly took every assignment seriously, be it Planet of the Apes, dialoguing duties on Rich Buckler's Deathlok, Godzilla, or, of course, Master of Kung-Fu.

Chris Claremont: Claremont was pretty much the last and latest of this generation and, of course, by far the most successful. For better or for worse, so many of the techniques (both strengths and weaknesses) of the '70s Marvel writers found their apotheosis in Claremont's work on Uncanny X-Men.

5 Portrayals of Comic Characters in Other Media I Love More Than The Originals

Buster Crabbe's Flash Gordon: I saw these serials when I was really young and they were perfect. I wish I could show you what I see in my mind when I think back on these.

Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark: Yeah, absolutely. Tony Stark of the comics is pretty much a whiny beeyotch, when he's not being painted as a great big tool. RDJ somehow transcends all of that, while remaining faithful to it? Like, how the hell did he do that?

Chris Evans' Johnny Storm: Kinda similar to the above. Never liked Johnny Storm until Evans gave him crack comic timing.

300 The Movie: Zack Snyder's 300 is so much better than Miller's 300, I think, in the same way Pierre Menard's Quixote is so much better than Cervantes' Quixote.

(I'm shocked I left both Heath Ledger's Joker and Bava's Danger: Diabolik off this list. But that speaks to how much I love the original material, I guess.)

5 More Perfect Comics, With Far Less Commentary

Acme Novelty Library #1: Barely edging out that one awesome issue where Jimmy, his Mom and Superman get stuck on a desert island (and mainly because I can never remember the issue number on that one).

Seven Soldiers: Frankenstein #1: Barely edging out Seven Soldiers #1.

Swamp Thing #32: "Pog."

Love & Rockets #4: the conclusion of the first Heartbreak Soup story and 100 Rooms.

Giant-Size Captain America #1: A collection of Lee & Kirby Cap stories that were just excuses for Kirby to draw fight scenes for six or seven pages at a stretch. True comic book crack: I didn't even have an opinion about it the first 15 times I read it.

Twenty Other Things I Like About Comics, Unsorted & Without Comment:

Paul Pope
Angel & The Ape
The Fortress of Solitude
Dr. Slump
"Tricky Cad"
Skull the Slayer
Those Giant Working Props (in Finger & Sprang's Batman?)
Analogues of corporate controlled characters
Letter pages by Ennis and Morrison
Ghost Rider
Guido Crepax
Snoopy's Doghouse
The Giant Gil Kane Heads o' Drama
Sgt. Frog
Bêlit
Kirby fingers
Golgo 13
The initials "LL"
Alan Moore's beard
The comics blogosphere

Touched For The Very Last Time: Hibbs on Virgin's collapse

I'm still getting used to this whole "kindergarten" thing -- it isn't in my natural disposition to leave the house before 7:30 in the morning, really -- but it DOES give me a smidge more time before the store opens. What I SHOULD be doing right now is the new order form, but I've still got 7 days until it is late, so while I'm waiting for ONOMATOPOEIA to print on the photocopier, let me spout off a little, instead of doing "real" work!

(I COULD save this for a TILTING, but by then it will be "two weeks old")

So, anyway, Virgin Comics has shut down, seemingly suddenly and in the middle of the night. Much like everyone else, this doesn't really surprise me, but it might be worth exploring a little on the whys of it.

Unlike Dirk, I don't believe that the issue is the Direct Market. Dirk's argument basically goes like this: "DM retailers are big poopy heads. Neener-neener-neener!" This is largely Dirk's argument about every and anything involving comics, and it is kinda goofy, really, because it assumes that it is the RETAILER that is responsible for sales, and not, say, THE PUBLISHER.

When I went out to the Feb 2006 NY Comics Convention, on my short list of people to talk to was the new start-up of Virgin comics. They hadn't published any comics yet, but news was out that they were going to do it. "Self," I told myself, "maybe here's a real chance to expand the market with a company with big pockets known for aggressive and innovative marketing!" I'm not really down with "if you build it, they will come" -- you also have to TELL them about it. How would they KNOW to come otherwise?

I know some of you just come for the reviews, so I'll put the rest of this under the cut...

So, I sat down with Sharad and the marketing guy (funnily enough, at a Marvel cocktail party for retailers) and looked over their launch strategy (at that moment they were only talking about the Indian comics), and quickly saw that it probably wasn't going to work -- they planned to launch with not one, but FOUR different titles based on Indian myths. They were certainly gorgeous looking things -- some of these artists could REALLY draw -- but the problem was that they were working drastically against the public's belief-in-interest. It's not that Americans might not be interested in the Great Goddess Devi, or modern retellings of the Sanskrit epic cycle of Ramayan -- it's that they have no idea that they might be.

Well, no, even I don't believe that Americans (as a mass) ARE actually interested in any of that, but of the half of a percent that might be, you're going to have to actively tell them such things exist if you want to have a chance of them buying it.

This is where Dirk goes wrong -- he says that the problem was that the DM isn't going to reach a "broad cross-section of young American readers". This may or may not be true (I sure think I do a pretty job job of that), but I think it ignores two pretty salient points. 1) that a "broad cross-section of young American readers" aren't natively interested in Indian myth. Probably especially in a post 9/11 world. 2) they WERE available to that "broad cross-section of young American readers". These comics were sold in the Virgin megastores.

I made about 3 trips in a 9 month period after Virgin's launch to the Megastore in downtown San Francisco. As near as I was able to tell from looking at the stock, the Virgin comics didn't sell. Virgin's own stores, with that coveted audience of a "broad cross-section of young American readers" wasn't selling any significant copies of Virgin comic books.

As a retailer, I can see Baker & Taylor's inventory for their west coast warehouse. B&T is one of the major bookstore distributors. None of Virgin's "not yet published" titles has orders for even 50 copies, while in the tab that marks "30 day demand", only one of their 31 listed in-print TP/HCs has demand of over one (1) copy! (that would be the 7 copies demand for The Tall Tales of Vishnu Sharma, Panchatantra.

This tells me that the BOOKSTORES don't want these comics either.

I told Virgin that their best opportunity would either be from reaching college students, doing comparative religions or something, or to work with communities that had significant Indian populations. I strongly suggested (even writing down the contact info) that they look to Comic Relief in Berkeley for both -- if you can't sell these comics in Berkeley, they won't sell anywhere. I also called Rory to tell them I pointed Virgin in his direction, and he said he'd be really happy to work with them.

They never contacted him.

Picture this. You're a big strong corporation with a global brand. You're, dunno, off the top of my head, Kodak. Some bright and passionate light really really believes in comics, and wants to do a line of comics based around photography and photographers. You've managed to convince someone on the Board of Directors to fund this for a while, but you have a finite budget for promotion. Do you 1) Take out expensive ads in Wizard, Previews, trying to convince superhero-oriented customers to buy "Ansel Adams: The Wizard's Eye" and "Paparazzo Tales!" and whatever, or do you 2) tell people who are interested in photography and photographers that there are comics about their interests, and here's where you find them...?

I can't speak for any other retailer, but I'd love a thriving number of wide and diverse topics to be covered in comics. In Japan apparently comics about Mah-Jong sell very well, so there's no real reason that something equivalent couldn't happen here (Well, except that North America is something over 9.6 million sq km, while Japan is about 377k sq km, so it's really a lot harder to physically distribute niche products) -- heck, I thought that the Nascar comics sold really well at Nascar events (but really badly out here in San Francisco), so it clearly CAN be done.

But if you're going to do a series of comics about race car driving or photography or, yeah, even Indian Mythology, you're going to have to drive the customer TO the outlets where they're available. You're going to have to EDUCATE those potential customers the product even EXISTS.

That's pretty basic.

For myself, I thought the writing for Virgin was quickly on the wall -- pacting with B-list celebrities to use their name really is a plan that seldom works. Who really wants to buy a "Guy Ritchie" comics or a "Nic Cage" comic? That's no strike against them, but it's certainly nothing in their favor either, unless the base premise itself is strong (then the B-lister gains more from it than the publisher)

This also created a deep discordance in what the heck Virgin WAS -- were they about Indian comics, or about star-fucking, or what? You HAVE to have a clear identity in the market to use it in the best manner, and Virgin seemed to be too many different things, none of which were working very well.

Plus, once they partnered with Stan Lee's POW Entertainment, it was clear they didn't even know the right way to sell out. I mean, God love Stan Lee, he IS the man... but POW? As the kids say, "Roffle"

I suspect that Tom is in the right here -- they had too much (transcontinental!) overhead for their actual sales.

Meanwhile, I keep hoping that a well-funded operation will eventually come along and do things the right way.

I'll probably be hoping for the rest of my life.

-B

Arriving 8/27/08

Three FINAL CRISIS tie-ins; every "Avengers" comic (including the kids-oriented one) all shipping, and a pair of Ellis' Avatar titles.

2000 AD #1597
2000 AD #1598
A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #87 (A)
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #569 NWD
AMBUSH BUG YEAR NONE #2 (OF 6)
ANGEL REVELATIONS #4 (OF 5)
AVENGERS INITIATIVE #16 SI
BART SIMPSON COMICS #43
BATMAN GOTHAM AFTER MIDNIGHT #4 (OF 12)
BETTY & VERONICA #237
BETTY & VERONICA DIGEST #187
BLACK PANTHER #40 SI
BLUE BEETLE #30
BOY WHO MADE SILENCE #6
BRIT #8
CALIBER #5 (OF 5)
CARTOON NETWORK BLOCK PARTY #48
CATWOMAN #82
CTHULHU TALES #3 CVR B
DAREDEVIL #110
DC UNIVERSE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT #1
DMZ #34
DOKTOR SLEEPLESS #8 WRAP CVR (RES)
EMILY THE STRANGE II ALONE ISSUE #4
FALLEN ANGEL IDW #29
FAMILY DYNAMIC #1 (OF 3)
FANTASTIC FOUR TRUE STORY #2 (OF 4)
FINAL CRISIS ROGUES REVENGE #2 (OF 3)
FINAL CRISIS SUPERMAN BEYOND #1 (OF 2)
FREEDOM FORMULA #2
GHOST RIDER ANNUAL #2 MERCY
GRAVEL #4 WRAP CVR
GUERILLAS #1 (OF 9)
HAUNT OF HORROR LOVECRAFT #3 (OF 3)
HERCULES #5 (OF 5)
IMMORTAL IRON FIST #18
JACK OF FABLES #25
JUGHEADS DOUBLE DIGEST #143
JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #18
KICK ASS #4
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #45
LOST BOYS REIGN OF FROGS #4 (OF 4)
MADAME XANADU #3
MARVEL ADVENTURES AVENGERS #27
MARVEL ADVENTURES FANTASTIC FOUR #39
MARVEL ADVENTURES SUPER HEROES #2
MARVEL COMICS PRESENTS #12
MIGHTY AVENGERS #17 SI
NECRONOMICON #1 (OF 4)
NEW AVENGERS #44 SI
NEW EXILES #10
NEW WARRIORS #15 SI
NEWUNIVERSAL CONQUEROR
NORTHLANDERS #9
NOVA #16 SI
PROOF #11
REIGN IN HELL #2 (OF 8)
RUNAWAYS 3 #1
SECRET HISTORY THE AUTHORITY HAWKSMOOR #6 (OF 6)
SECRET INVASION AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1 (OF 3) SI
SHE-HULK 2 #32 SI
SKAAR SON OF HULK #3
SONIC X #36
STAR TREK YEAR FOUR ENTERPRISE EXPERIMENT #5
STAR WARS LEGACY #27
STAR WARS REBELLION #16 VECTOR PART 8 (OF 12)
SUPERMAN #679
SUPERNATURAL RISING SON #5 (OF 6)
TEEN TITANS #62
TEEN TITANS YEAR ONE #6 (OF 6)
THUNDERBOLTS #123 SI
TRINITY #13
ULTIMATE IRON MAN II #5 (OF 5)
ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #125
ULTIMATE X-MEN #97
WILDCATS WORLDS END #2
WOLVERINE #68
WOLVERINE FIRST CLASS #6
X-FORCE #6 DWS
X-MEN LEGACY #215 MD

Books / Mags / Stuff
ACHEWOOD THE GREAT OUTDOOR FIGHT HC
ALL STAR SUPERMAN TP VOL 01
ALTER EGO #80
ASTOUNDING WOLF MAN TP 01 (RES)
BRAVE AND THE BOLD HC VOL 02 THE BOOK OF DESTINY
COUNTDOWN LORD HAVOK AND THE EXTREMISTS TP
DAREDEVIL BY BENDIS OMNIBUS HC VOL 1
FANTASTIC FOUR VISIONARIES WALT SIMONSON TP VOL 02
FEAR AGENT TP VOL 04 HATCHET JOB
FOKKE & SUKKE SC
FOUNDATION TP
JLA DELUXE EDITION HC VOL 01
JUXTAPOZ VOL 15 #9 SEP 2008
MARVEL ADVENTURES IRON MAN TP VOL 03 DIGEST
METAL MEN HC
MYSPACE DARK HORSE PRESENTS TP VOL 01
NEW WARRIORS TP VOL 02 THRASHED
OGENKI CLINIC & OTHER STORIES TP (A)
PREVIEWS VOL XVIII #9
SIMPSONS TREEHOUSE OF HORROR TP VOL 05 DEAD MANS JEST
STAR TREK COMMUNICATOR & PHASER 2-PACK
STAR WARS KNIGHTS O/T OLD REPUBLIC TP VOL 04 DAZE OF HATE KN
STRANGE EMBRACE HC VOL 01
SUICIDE SQUAD FROM THE ASHES TP
SURREAL ADVENTURES OF EDGAR ALLAN POO GN VOL 02
TEMPLESMITH ART OF WORMWOOD GENTLEMAN CORPSE SC
TERRY MOORES ECHO TP VOL 01 MOON LAKE
TYPHON GN VOL 01 (A)
WITCHBLADE TP VOL 05
WIZARD MAGAZINE #204 CAPT AMERICA IRON MAN THOR CVR
X-MEN LEGACY PREM HC VOL 01 DIVIDED HE STANDS
X-MEN TP VOL 03 COMPLETE ONSLAUGHT EPIC
YOUNG INHUMANS TP

What looks good to YOU?

-B

This review is light on pictures because the book's the same way: Jog on the oddest release of 8/20

Faust Vol. 1

Boy, Tim Vigil sure has changed.

No, no wait - this is something else, in every sense of the phrase. Faust, just to get one thing out of the way right up top, is not primarily manga - it's an irregularly published Japanese literary journal, albeit one with a comics section, founded in 2003 by editor-in-chief Katsushi Ōta and published by book giant/Big Three manga publisher Kodansha. It's fashioned as a squarebound 'mook' -- a supple book with the glossy design and continuing features of a magazine -- and runs anywhere from 500 to 1200+ pages per volume. Vol. 7 was just released in Japan a few weeks ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there's other, smaller aspects of that mission in this book. Several shorter stories and essays are included, many of which (interestingly) take a concerned look at extreme isolation, as if knowing a segment of the otaku audience will be attracted to the project's features. There's also some comics, mostly high-gloss visual poems (see: Robot), three out of four of which are presented in a glossy color section, then repeated in tones immediately thereafter. The fourth sees NisiOisiN team up with artist Yun Kouga of Loveless (the manga, not the Vertigo series) for a story about a man interrogating a brilliant, imprisoned weapons designer; it all turns into a metaphor for longing to be the best while lacking the supreme natural ability some are born with, a concern that's surely popped into the head of many readers of boys' comics. Shit, did you expect anything less? So, while I can't say this material is much better than OKAY on the whole, it's a peculiarly forthright, coherent type of OKAY, one that'll probably hold some extra value for readers who've had their attention piqued. It does take its pursuits seriously, mining the culture and accoutrements of visual media for personal revelations from the inside, and occasionally striking something affectingly immediate and perverse, gold enough to pay off the sluggish and pretentious that I suppose will have to come up as well.

Abhay Writes about AIR #1, While Eating Wontons

I'm undecided on AIR #1. Well, not really: I think it's not very good. But, shit, I want to like it. It's an implausible comic book. Action scenes obey no logic; characters' actions make little sense; dialogue doesn't resemble actual human speech; none of the emotions seem real.

Fine. So: dream logic, then...? That seems to be how the book wants to be judged. The book opens with a wink to Salman Rushdie's SATANIC VERSES, perhaps to signal to readers that the book will traffic in a similar sort of magical realism. And-- and that's something, isn't it? Trusting readers to be savvy enough to not only catch that reference but to be able to infer a meaning from that reference-- isn't that something?

It's about flying, after all. Dream of flying, if I remember my Freud, are all about sex and erections. Personally, I like erections. But the relationship between the two romantic leads is just a lift from Stanley Donen's CHARADE anyways, so I don't know how interested I was in that relationship to begin with. Does anyone expect Audrey Hepburn & Cary Grant to be topped by a comic book?

I look forward to future issues where the main character of AIR rides a banana into a train tunnel. (If anything, AIR reminded me not of Rushdie or Pynchon, but Vittorio Giardino's creepy LITTLE EGO comics from early 1990's HEAVY METAL magazines. LITTLE EGO was a Winsor McKay LITTLE NEMO parody involving the dreams of a frequently naked European woman who... Why don't I use ellipses to avoid proceeding with this disturbing paragraph? It's not as embarrassing as Wally Wood's CANNON but ... dot dot dot...)

Anyways: I was frustrated with AIR, constantly saying to myself "but no human being would ever DO that." Even accepting that parts will be implausible-- it's interesting, but is it entertaining? The lead characters are just... dull. Even accepting that it's okay that everything that's coming out of their mouths is implausible, they weren't interesting. Nothing that came out of their mouths was funny or cool or intriguing. I didn't care if they kissed or had sex or blew up or all of the above at once. The main character just seemed ... I don't know, pouty, and ... describing sky-kisses in random narration boxes doesn't quite cure that, no. The male lead didn't seem mysterious and cool; he seemed, I don't know, like a lesser Antonio Banderas character. Some very unsubtle sex metaphors don't make up for that.

All the usual Vertigo critiques apply. The main character's design is DRAB. It's not enough to feature a female main character, and think the job done. Comic book characters, the great ones beg to be drawn. Artists sketch endless variations of those characters; fans get tattoos; grown-ups play dress-up. A great cartoon character is more than just a drawing of a person; it's a symbolic gateway into an entire fictional world. All of the successful Vertigo series have starred comic book characters. Agent Graves, Jesse Custer, King Mob, Spider Jerusalem, Yorick Brown; as a SCALPED fan, I'd happily argue on behalf of Dashiell Bad Horse. And I personally don't think that's a bug to comics; I think that's a feature.

The lead character of AIR is an ugly blonde in a neckerchief, and a severe ponytail. What's comic about such a miserable creature? I'll grant you, this matches the image in my head of the vast majority of the unpleasant, soul-dead flight attendants I've had the misfortune of dealing with in the United States. Air travel was drained of any drip or drop of glamour in the late 70's and early 80's-- the airlines stopped hiring Pierre Cardin after a while (so did the nurses). Was anyone alive for the Coffee, Tea or Me days? If that's a problem for you, fly in Asia. Fly in Asia where sex harassment lawsuits have apparently not yet found a receptive audience.

AIR exists in that glamour-of-flight-is-dead world. Which I actually find extremely interesting, so interesting that I almost want to forgive everything.

While some have derided the book for being vague as to place, I would argue that's the book's greatest strength. The reality of travel is once you step through security, once you're separate from your home, your luggage, your clothes, your supplies... Who are you anymore? You're anonymous; you're an ID in your wallet. You cross over to some fuck-ugly phantom world of Cinnabons, Au Bon Pain, magazine racks, uncomfortable seats, crying babies, identical anonymous spaces. Wondering, "Who the hell buys porn magazines in an airport? And where do they, you know, *use* it?" But someone does buy it and that means someone invariably uses it somewhere, and often too because there's vast swaths of porno in every airport you've ever been in. You could be US Senator, but step into an airport and anonymous gay bathroom sex suddenly becomes a reasonable, logical option.

Travel enough, and the whole world blurs. Here's Pico Iyer describing a Kazuo Ishiguro novel:

"[F]ive hundred pages of action, or its abscence, had taken place more or less in a hotel, in some unnamed foreign town through which a touring artist works through a labyrinth in a dream, surrounded by people and passions he can't begin to fathom. The book is a novel about a state akin to jet lag, a nightmare of disorientation and disconnection, and its main character, at some level, does not know who he is, whom he's among or who he is taken to be."

Or, of course, if you prefer a more vulgar reference, there's FIGHT CLUB, I suppose: "You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O'Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour."

Is there a comic to be set in that world? Maybe there is. Is that comic AIR? I had hoped that it would be, but the first issue's dream logic and fantasy conceits don't leave me encouraged that it's a good fit for me and my personal interests.

MK Perker's art is not competitive with other artists on the stands. Perker's storytelling is weak, his compositions are dull, his drawings only rarely have energy, and his characters lack appeal. The idea of the lead characters having sex is more gross than hot. For some unknowable reason, his editors leave him to ink himself; I can't guess why from the results. I truly, truly dislike being harsh to comic artists since they have a difficult job, especially where, as is the case here, the art on Perker's website is noticeably better than what can be seen in AIR #1 and this might be a poor example of what he's capable of...

Vertigo's typically indifferent colors don't help, of course: strap in for the color brown, everybody! Do they get a discount on brown? Is that how they keep the costs down? Seriously, dead seriously: What is with these people, and the color brown? Does anyone even know? This is an open invitation to any Vertigo colorist willing to do an interview about the color brown. Please explain.

Why don't Vertigo books look as good as Image books, if they have editors and can pay artists a page rate ahead of time? Of course, some might be asking why they don't have first issues which clearly explain a premise that retailers can repeat to potential customers, either, but... But I admire that they gambled on a challenging premise like AIR features, Salman Rushdie quotes and all, however ambivalent I might be about the results. I find the lack of a clear high concept here truly encouraging, personally.

There's this supporting character called Fletcher that's pretty much horrible; the reader's early hopes that he'll be obliterated in an air disaster are cruelly denied. A flashback isn't plainly indicated as such (though I think that can be chalked up to being a feature of the book's dream-like aspirations). The book focuses on some nonsense about competing secret-societies, which... call it Pynchon-esque all you want, it's dull and played-out material. That's all if you can successfully avoid thinking about the poisonous market realities that hover over this book long enough to enjoy it. The less said of the book's final essay, the better, though I would agree with the goodly Mr. Hibbs that having a final essay is something that can only help sell a comic to me.

Plus, the book's commentary on air travel isn't one I can relate to my own experience. The book is fascinated by air travel's relationship with terrorism, but... My own personal experience of air travel after 9/11 (and, heck, before) is not having to cope with terrorists or a fear of terrorism, but with bureaucracy, an endless, numbing bureaucracy. Sure, I have a healthy fear of terrorism, and crashing, and the fact they don't put enough fuel in the fucking planes. But I have more than a fear-- I have a fucking certain expectation when flying that I'll be negatively impacted in some way with the decaying, failed apparatus of the airlines, endlessly arrogant, propped up with government hand-outs, manned by underpaid illiterates, certain to delay and delay and lose luggage and delay some more, awful, awful, awful. A state of affairs which I don't actually blame on terrorism and 9/11, much at all, though reasonable minds can differ who's to blame...

So, I don't know. The book's one big visual moment-- the opening image, that worked, at least. As unbelievable as the rest of it was, that moment still worked. And the book's setting is interesting to me. The premise-- an intelligent adventure comic starring a stewardess? There's something there. The idea of ignoring its problems, having some faith, and looking at #2 anyways has a certain allure.

I don't know how this review sounds-- shit, I don't know how any of them sound, but... I really do want to like it.

Two Comics and One Not from 8/20

The Castro Theatre here in town is showing a sing-along copy of THE LITTLE MERMAID this week (through the 28th). There are two shows a day -- one at 2 PM and one at 7:30 PM.

Today, at least, the 2pm showing is all about the kindergartener (Ben starts on Monday, jeez we're nervous. He's not, however), and I quite imagine that the 7:30 show is going to be about the drag queens, but if you either like the film, or have a little kid, then I really recommend going.

What's nice about THE LITTLE MERMAID is that it works in nearly equal measure for both boys AND girls. Ben can barely stand SLEEPING BEAUTY or CINDERELLA or SNOW WHITE, because they are "too girly" for him, but he LOVES TLM, because there's also plenty of action and 'splosions and scary bits and stuff.

Even if you're an adult, it's really fun to watch the movie with audience response and call backs (we were instructed, variously, to make smoochy noises when Ariel and Eric are about to kiss, hiss and boo when Ursula shows up, go "woof! Woof!" everytime Max the dog does, wave glowsticks, or use those clapper-on-a-stick things at appropriate times, scream "no, Ariel, don't do it!" when she's about to sign the contract, and so on), and with everyone (well, all of the adults... most of the kids can't read the subtitled lyrics, actually) signing along with gusto. They had awesome gift bags for everyone attending (with crowns, and pearls, and glowsticks and poppers and even a dinglehopper!)

It was about 90% little girls (and 90% moms, too -- virtually no dads attended), and almost all of them wore a costume. They brought every single kid in a costume up to the stage, with the Castro's Wurlitzer playing Disney tunes to accompany them. Ben wanted to go up too, and since he was wearing a skeleton shirt, I told him to go for it. Since it was all kids, they declared them ALL to be winners, but I imagine the 7:30 show with be a little more cut throat...

Anyway, it was a blast, and I don't know if the print can tour or what, but if you're in the Bay Area, I thought it was totally worth making the trip to the Castro, one of the most beautiful movie palaces to grace the world, and see the film like this.

But I know you don't actually care about that... you want to know about comics...

FINAL CRISIS: LEGION OF THREE WORLDS #1: I'm gently torn on this one. On the one hand I would imagine that the audience for this is somewhat small -- if you're not already a LSH fan, then why would you want to see three iterations of them together? But maybe not that small, because at one time the Legion was one of DC's biggest books, really.

In a way, Geoff Johns' recent career has all about the fan service, and the fan service to a very specific period of time. Bringing Hal and the Corps back to their glory, returning to Infinity Inc, and now his what-if-Zero-Hour-never-rebooted-them LSH, I like virtually every move Johns makes. I, too, am of that very specific time frame.

Plus, y'know, George Perez. Who doesn't like to see him draw Cast-of-Thousands stuff?

So, yah, fanboy tingle, super-double liked this, hit every note I would have hoped, and so on.

On the other hand, there's a LOT of yadda yadda going on here -- virtually nothing HAPPENS in the comic, and that which does was either more or less shown before in the recent ACTION COMICS arc about the LSH, or, like in every Legion comic in the past (Have we EVER seen Takron-Galtos, and NOT have it involve everyone busting out?)

Lots of the yadda covers stuff that, frankly, I'd expect the audience for a LSH-centric tie-in to a CRISIS mini-series would way already know. There's something like 4 pages devoted to nothing more than Superman's origin, and his rogue's gallery. Who DOESN'T know that stuff? And would they buy a continuity-unknotting tie-in to a big-summer-crossover?

You have to give it up to Johns for doing what he said, and making this completely 100% accessible to people who don't know these characters or situations... but I really don't think that there's very many living humans who DON'T know them, AND would want to naturally buy this...

The problem with being that "accessible" is that it makes this pretty much 36 pages of set-up, and the story doesn't begin in earnest, really, until issue #2 (well, or I'll assume, at least). Still, with Perez drawing, you could have 36 pages focusing on the HOMEWORLDS of the Legion, and I'd still probably be happy, really. Had nearly anyone else drawn this script, I might have had to go with a high "OK", but, pushing my fan buttons with Perez art, I think I can say VERY GOOD. I'd need an actual story to call it "excellent"

AIR #1: Didn't work for me, really at all. The set-up situations were really too unbelievable, both in the acrophobe flight attendant, as well as the vast conspiric(ies) who go on multiple flights and multiple identities as they please.

Plus besides a few token words in Dutch, there's a maddening unspecificity in where we are at any given point in the story, and there's a lack of any consequence in what would seem to be from the outside, several suspicious and strange incidents happening to the same attendant.

I'll give it another issue or two to surprise me, but at this moment, I'll go with an EH.

Well, hrm, actually, I want to add points for it being the first first issue I've read in a LONG time which had something I very very much missed -- the introductory backstage text piece. I LOVE columns on process or "why are we doing this book" or whatever, so I'm going to bump this up to OK, *just* for that. Now, it wasn't a good example of it (it's a little too self-congratulatory and sure of "Good" Art for that), but damn it, that's the kind of thing all new books should have.

That's my opinion, but what did YOU think?

-B

Arriving 8/20/2008

Smallish week, but some good things...

AIR #1
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #568 NWD
ANNA MERCURY #3 (OF 5) PAINTED CVR
ARCHIE #588
BATGIRL #2 (OF 6)
BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS #10
BIRDS OF PREY #121
BRAVE AND THE BOLD #16
CAPTAIN AMERICA #41
CARTOON NETWORK ACTION PACK #28
CASEY BLUE BEYOND TOMORROW #4 (OF 6)
CHARLATAN BALL #3
CONAN THE CIMMERIAN #2
DARK IVORY #3 (OF 4)
DC SPECIAL CYBORG #4 (OF 5)
DC WILDSTORM DREAMWAR #5 (OF 6)
DOCTOR WHO FORGOTTEN #1
DRAFTED #10
FEAR AGENT #23 1 AGAINST 1 (PT 2 OF 6)
FINAL CRISIS LEGION OF THREE WORLDS #1 (OF 5)
FLASH #243
FOOLKILLER WHITE ANGELS #2 (OF 5)
GHOST RIDER #26
GUARDIANS OF GALAXY #4 SI
HACK SLASH SERIES #15 SEELEY CVR B
HELM #2 (OF 4)
INCREDIBLE HERCULES #120 SI
IRON FIST ORIGIN OF DANNY RAND
IRON MAN DIRECTOR OF SHIELD #32
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #24
KILLER #8 (OF 10)
MADMAN ATOMIC COMICS #10
MARVEL 1985 #4 (OF 6)
MARVEL SPOTLIGHT SPIDER-MAN BRAND NEW DAY
MOON KNIGHT #21
OKKO CYCLE OF EARTH #2 (OF 4)
PALS N GALS DOUBLE DIGEST #124
PS238 #33
PUNISHER #61
RANN THANAGAR HOLY WAR #4 (OF 8)
RED STAR SWORD OF LIES #3 (OF 3) (NET) (RES)
REX LIBRIS #12
REX MUNDI DH ED #13
ROBIN #177
SCALPED #20
SCOOBY DOO #135
SIMPSONS COMICS #145
SKRULLS VS POWER PACK #2 (OF 4)
SPIRIT #20
SQUADRON SUPREME 2 #2
STAR WARS KNIGHTS OF OLD REPUBLIC #32 TURNABOUT
STORMWATCH PHD WORLDS END #13
SUPER FRIENDS #6
SUPERMAN BATMAN #51
TANGENT SUPERMANS REIGN #6 (OF 12)
THICKER THAN BLOOD #2 (OF 3)
TRINITY #12
TRUE BELIEVERS #2 (OF 5)
ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #57
UNCANNY X-MEN #501 MD
WORLD OF WARCRAFT #10
X-FACTOR #34 SI
X-FACTOR SPECIAL LAYLA MILLER
X-MEN FIRST CLASS VOL 2 #15
YOUNG X-MEN #5 DWS

Books / Mags / Stuff
BIONICLE GN VOL 02
COMICS BUYERS GUIDE #1646 OCT 2008
DOCTOR WHO AGENT PROVACATEUR TP
DONALD DUCK FAMILY DAAN JIPPES COLLECTION TP VOL 01
EC ARCHIVES TALES FROM THE CRYPT HC VOL 03
GOOD-BYE MARIANNE GN
HERBIE ARCHIVES HC VOL 01
KATY KEENE SPECIAL TP VOL 01
MIDNIGHTER TP VOL 02 ANTHEM
MIGHTY AVENGERS TP VOL 01
NAOKI URASAWAS MONSTER TP VOL 16
PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL CLASSIC TP VOL 01
SANDMAN PRESENTS DEAD BOY DETECTIVES TP
SCORCHY SMITH AND THE ART OF NOEL SICKLES HC
SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE ATOM TP VOL 02
SILVER SURFER TP REQUIEM
SPIDER-MAN LOVES MARY JANE HC VOL 02
STAR WARS FORCE UNLEASHED GN
SUPERMAN CHRONICLES TP VOL 05
TOMARTS ACTION FIGURE DIGEST #168
TRIPWIRE 2008 ANNUAL
ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN TP VOL 20 AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS
VADEBONCOEUR COLLECTION OF IMAGES #10
VIDEO WATCHDOG #142
WOLVERINE LOGAN PREMIERE HC
X-MEN TP DIVIDED WE STAND
YOUNGBLOOD TP VOL 01 FOCUS TESTED

What looks good to YOU...?

-B

“I Should Write Some Boring Reviews Of Comics," Said Abhay, Out Loud, to Nobody in Particular.

I'll try to avoid spoilers and skip the Jump; sorry if I screw up. THE ASTOUNDING WOLFMAN #7 by ROBERT KIRKMAN, JASON HOWARD, and RUS WOOTEN: I watched this video of Robert Kirkman the other day; he put out this odd video saying that established comic creators should focus exclusively on their own comics, and quit their jobs, and something-something-kids. But I had a weird time turning 30, too, so who am I to judge?

Anyways, it at least worked as a marketing video, and successfully reminded me that guy existed and that I didn’t really have an articulate reason why I don’t read his comics other than “Tony Moore stopped drawing them.” So, this WOLFMAN thing: it’s apparently about a werewolf who wears a drawing of a werewolf on his chest...?? Part of me wants to applaud, but it doesn’t get better than that: issue #7 is the BIG TWIST issue.

Having not read any prior issue, I had no emotional investment in any of what was happening. It’s funny to see a twist from that vantage point: it all seems so transparent, the things that writers do to push buttons. “Here’s a puppy with a gun to its head.” It makes the whole enterprise seem so mechanical. I don’t want to spoil this comic, but it’s drearily typical in terms of what it thinks is shocking.

There’s not much here of any noticeable interest besides the Twist. But if you liked INVINCIBLE, it's the same sort of thing. It’s similarly simple. The character design works. “Monster hero” is a decent character type no one else is doing very well right now. Characters explain their feelings at each other at numbing length and in precise detail. It’s easy.

Jason Howard is credited as “penciler, inker, colorist” instead of “artist." Which is kind of sad, if you think about it too much. Which I did. I think I spent more time thinking about that than any of the contents.

I’d rather watch more videos where Kirkman calls for the heads of the 5 Comic Families to assemble on a cruise-ship, though(?). That part was fucking excellent.

SECRET INVASON THOR by MATT FRACTION, DOUG BRAITHEWAITE, PAUL MOUNTS, VC’s JOE CARAMANGA, GABRIELLE DELL’OTTO, ALEJANDRO ARBONA, WARREN SIMONS, JOE QUESADA and DAN BUCKLEY: I don’t know about the story-- it takes Thor off the board, in order to service some unnecessary pregnant white woman subplot. Pregnant white women, puppies in danger, crying Chinese babies, cat up a tree, Jessica Tandy on a horse that's headed the wrong way, Michael Clarke Duncan crying while holding a decapitated teddy-bear, Meredith Baxter Birney dying of a Woman's Disease but making a video for the daughter she won't live long enough to see graduate—- sure, all those things work 99% of the time and get the audience on your side; I guess I’m just being a shit-bag, but the pregnant lady caught me in a bad, cynical mood. Not a good mood to be reading comics in, I guess. I’m not really a big fan of the Morgan Freeman narration, either; it's a little anxious to be taken seriously for a comic about Kirby gods fighting green aliens.

But: Doug Braithewaite, huh? That’s a reason to take a look at this comic; it’s a good looking comic book. Paul Mounts colors from his pencils, which is usually not a technique that I’m particularly enamored with. But here, it works: maybe because the unfinished feeling of the pencils somehow conveys these characters as being otherworldly, not part and parcel of our fully-inked reality, not just crappy Vikings with delusions of grandeur. I don’t think it would work on every book; besides, Braithewaite and Bill Reinhold on inks ala their PUNISHER run, say? That’s a pretty solid team I’d rather not see messed with.

I’d enjoyed the Jason Aaron BLACK PANTHER tie-in more, for going into the mindset of the enemy, and being more of a war comic. This one promises to be a little more epic in scale than that though, which might yield dividends in future issues. Heck, maybe the pregnant lady will work in the later issues, and this will end up being a weirdly moving Viking versus Alien comic about birth in the face of war or some shit. Who knows? Not me. Maybe Michael Clarke Duncan.

MUMBAI MACGUFFIN by SAURAV MOHAPATRA, SAUMIN PATEL, V. VENKATA SUBRAMANIAN, NILESH MAHADIK, REUBEN THOMAS, AND SETH JARET: This is the first time Virgin Comics has ever put out a comic I was willing to read. I’m not a huge fan of “Chief Visionary” Deepak Chopra, or I’m guessing “Chief Creative Officer” “Gotham” Chopra, either. I don’t really know much about Richard Branson, except I have the vague impression he’s some kind of doucher. Besides all that, they’re not a company that has me in mind. The company has been fairly open about being dedicated more towards pleasing Hollywood executives than comic book fans. I am not Ashton Kutcher’s agent.

The company employs Indian writers and Indian artists, but this is the first time I’ve ever noticed them putting out a comic about India, and not just peddling a watered-down version of the mythology. It was reasonable. Saurav Mohapatra’s scripts a dopey action-comedy in a mix of Hindi and English, and heaps together a Mumbai filled with gangsters, taxi drivers, hitmen, CIA operatives, spiritualists, and terrorists. It’s a silly mish-mash. It could be better-- the ending makes little sense, and it’d have been nice if they’d given the lead white character a personality, any personality at all. As for the art, the inexperience is noticeable, but it’s at least clear and the character designs are fun enough, even if there’s a definite need for improvement on composition, storytelling, and inking.

But it moves fast and it doesn’t take itself seriously, at least, and I guess I found it endearing despite its flaws, like a B-movie on at 2 a.m. on HBO that’s better than I’d have guessed: it’s not as good as REAL MEN or SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO, but I’d watch it all the way to the end. Light-hearted action-comedies set in the real world? I’m the audience for those. Indian comic creators, inspired by Japanese manga or French sci-fi comics, selling comics in America, swapping spit with Pico Iyer? It all sounds great in theory, before you add in Ed Burns or whoever pitching their shitty D-list movie ideas, or Chopra & Family hawking discount spirituality and crackpot nonsense to credulous westerners, or god knows what ridiculous business practices they’re almost certainly engaged in. There were Indian comic creators before Virgin, and if these guys can improve their game, let’s hope there’ll be Indian comic creators after these Virgin people are gone, gone, gone.

CRIMINAL #4 of VOLUME 2 by ED BRUBAKER, SEAN PHILLIPS, and VAL STAPLES: I don’t know. This arc, the main character is a cartoonist who sometimes visualizes his creation speaking to him-- hardboiled private-dick Frank Kafka. What do you make of that? I haven’t decided if I think it’s clever, or if I think it’s a Dabney Coleman vehicle. I guess we’ll find out.

Besides that, it’s the usual laughs and hi-jinks. As ever, the series’ dedication to un-cool, unpleasant fuck-ups is admirable, though the umpteenth lady character who’s an emotionally-damaged sperm-bank is maybe … I don’t know, maybe going to start getting weird eventually? There’s a fine line between “genre convention” and “skuzzy creep-o shit” that I don’t think has been crossed yet for this book, for me, personally, but… but that way lies Frank Miller, and, shit, I’d hate to see that happen to anybody.

TORPEDO 1936 VOLUME 6 by E. SANCHEZ ABULI and JORDI BERNET: IDW recently announced plans to reprint this classic gangster comic, but after I’d picked up a batch of the Bernet run from Bud Plant. Holy crap! Remember my hoity-toity line between “genre convention” and “skuzzy creep-o shit”? This book crosses that line, and the next line past that into “should I be embarrassed to be reading this?” territory. It’s not … It’s not as embarrassing as Wally Wood’s CANNON, say, but still: I didn’t know anything about TORPEDO besides that Bernet drew it, so I was surprised by what a cheerfully depraved comic it turned out to be.

For example: in this volume, the main character organizes a gang-bang—and that’s the least unpleasant part of what happens. You don’t root for the main character to win because you like him, so much as you want to see what horrible shit he’ll pull next. Bernet makes it all look beautiful, of course, but that fact that a dog with a boner playing with lit dynamite is being so well drawn? That sort of adds to the crazy of the whole thing.

I’m still trying to comprehend how Alex Toth worked on this series—how do you spot blacks for a gangbang? “Dear Steve Rude, Why didn’t you research the gangbang? Library card! Dedication! Silhouette! Dildo-play!” That’s not a letter you want in the mail.

SAMMY THE MOUSE #1 and #2 by ZAK SALLY: So, this is about an alcoholic rat either suffering from serious mental problems, or stuck in the middle of some kind of spiritual awakening— which is probably the same thing. The rat’s friends include other broke-down, alcoholic animal cartoons. The art’s got plenty of nervous energy, black & white with blue & brown accents—- the best bits summon up a sort of horrible run-down cartoon world broken down from neglect and mental illness.

The timing’s good; the storytelling’s fun; I’m clueless what any of it possibly means, but I like watching cartoon characters drinking, so I suppose it’s entertaining. Most of the comic’s been spent watching characters hang out; something larger seems to be happening, but there’s no telling what that is exactly. If the project is aiming for 300 pages though, at an issue a year… well, if I’m doing the geometry right there, which I might not be, there might be a pretty decent wait to find out what this is all about.

I don’t know how to judge it really, in the meantime. So far, it at least feels mysterious instead of random, but there’s no telling how long that’ll last. I liked #1 more than #2: #1 was funnier and had better drawings than #2. But I especially liked a panel in #2 where a hand’s absence is depicted by the vacuum it leaves in space. It’s a neat depiction of speed and shock: something should be there but it's suddenly not.

I’ve been re-reading old Jaime Hernandez comics though—early LOVE & ROCKETS stuff. I hadn’t been interested in his superhero half to the new issue (though Gilbert's Martin & Lewis bit was killer). But it got me revisiting things like Mechanics, 100 Rooms, The Lost Women— that brief rocket half of LOVE & ROCKETS. People dismiss that stuff since Jaime’s later stuff was better, but: the early Jaime work isn't exactly shabby. It’s not really fair to read stuff like SAMMY THE MOUSE at the same time; it feels so slow & under-populated by comparison.

That's not a fair place for me to be coming from, maybe. That maybe goes for all of the above. All of these reviews are so goddamn unfair. "Dear Steve Rude, Have you read Death of Speedy lately? Dildo-play!" He doesn't deserve that in his mailbox. Who deserves that? Nobody. Maybe Michael Clarke Duncan.

A History of Punishment for Adults: Jog reaches the last, black page on 8/13

The Punisher MAX #60

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

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

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

But it is there, and The Punisher MAX is here, and right now it's 180 degrees away.

What's been striking to me about this final storyline is how different it's been from even earlier issues of the series itself. Ennis' Punisher has always been evolving, of course. Marvel also recently reprinted Welcome Back, Frank, which marked the start of the writer's prolonged association with the character, at the dawn of the Jemas era in 2000. That was the 'Knights' Punisher, a comedic take on the character cracking polar bears in the kisser and making fools of superheroes, although there were more 'serious' bits too.

Eventually, in 2004, the Knights version of the character was scrapped and the MAX version officially began (although the 'Vol. 0' MAX miniseries The Punisher: Born was released in 2003); it marked a break away from all prior continuity, taking place in its own private universe, one with few Marvel characters. Nick Fury was there (or, the version of Fury Ennis devised for his 2001-02 Fury MAX miniseries), and characters from Punisher history were occasionally featured (or alluded to), but all of them inhabited a closed-off world that operated in quasi-realtime -- each new storyline 'occurs' at the time its first issue is published in the reader's world -- much like the old Hellblazer, the series that first brought Ennis' work to North America.

That's not to say the MAX Punisher did away with comedy altogether; it'd actually be a pretty big mistake to call it entirely serious. Rather, it embraced a type of 'heightened reality' approach, stretching the emotions and activities of 'realistic' characters to encompass wild deeds and develop dryly absurd situations - it's all a bit like what manga writer Kazuo Koike does with some of his projects, though Ennis is more droll a writer, and I suspect far less inclined toward oddball improvisation. Still: the Punisher parachutes out of a nuclear missile! That stuff's right in there (Mother Russia, Vol. 3).

(and note that I'm leaving out the likely influence of prose crime writers, which I'm just not equipped to address, sorry)

Yet in the same way, there were long, cold, dark themes at work. Ennis has really used the longview well in this series - you can get a satisfying story out of the average collected volume (or even a given issue, although Ennis' skill with a cliffhanger doesn't always translate to individually great chapters), but the best effect is to observe how Ennis works his concerns over years of time, both in terms of his writing and the characters' fictional lives.

It's certainly the only way to fully appreciate one of the series' core themes, a very old one - that violence and retribution circle back to return to any given actor. I think it's something to note exactly how many supporting cast members get killed over the course of this series, and, on the flip side, how Ennis never allows any one villain to retain primacy for the whole run.

There's other concerns as well - the interrelationship between 'high' and 'low' crime, rich and poor (generally white and not-white), is a big one, reaching its climax in the extended The Punisher Shoots Enron saga of Barracuda (Vol. 6), which was chock-full of interracial, class-crossing chaos, in addition to the obvious satire. Note how Barracuda himself (by all rights, he shouldn't have ever worked outside of that storyline, so specific is his position) quietly shifts in Long Cold Dark (Vol. 9), still a tool of (different) powerful interests, but seen a little differently amidst the story's individual theme of parents creating Hell for their children.

That's just one way Ennis operates with a eye toward the expansive. But always, always, it's clear that his main character is doomed, no matter how great at killing he might be. We're all doomed, really, if you take the 2004 MAX one-shot The Punisher: The End as not the optional 'ending' for the character it was conceived as by its publisher (The End is a whole series of not-really 'final' stories for Marvel characters, in case you didn't know), but as the actual ending for the closed-off MAX Punisher world. There, international warmaking (a frequent motif in the MAX series proper) leads to a nuclear exchange with China, apparently wiping out most of the population of the US, and maybe the world.

"That's the trouble with a war you never want to end," remarks Frank Castle to a traveling companion, whom he'll later kill for his pre-apocalyptic crimes, regardless of how maybe people are even left in the world. It's a line that belied a total lack of self-awareness in 2004, but now seems just the opposite - Vol. 9 'ended' the story of this series, in terms of Frank's characterization, with his acknowledgement that he's done as much to create his horrible life as anyone else -- the people who shot his family, the Vietnam conflict that roused his taste for killing -- yet he still rejects any attempt to start over, and returns to The War.

Maybe, at the end of human time, he's making a little joke about how he'll be the last one left, burning in an irradiated city as he envisions a return to the place where his wife and children were killed, perhaps touching a bit of Morrisonian hyper-sanity and realizing that he's not going to Hell, but has always been there, because he's a Marvel comic book character that must have adventures into perpetuity, and so his wife and children will always be shot, and he'll always be mad, over and over, revival and revamp, new writers and artists, never, ever ending until they all blink from the culture's attention.

Man, that hits me a lot more than tossing Wolverine into an electric fence since his bones are metal and it'd totally melt his internal organs before he could heal... sounds kinda quaint, given the last 13 years of comics.

And so, here we are at the spectacularly-titled Valley Forge, Valley Forge: The Slaughter of a U.S. Marine Garrison and the Birth of the Punisher, Vol. 10, the last. Like I mentioned, Frank's story reached a sort of 'ending' in Vol. 9, so this one is a little different. It's the only one of Ennis' MAX stories missing the title character's famous narration; here, he's observed, puzzled over. We never once climb inside him, for what more needs be said? The action is often interrupted by text and 'photos' taken from a book written by the brother of a dead character from Born, and the chapters we read touch on prior themes of the series, though with a special emphasis on warfare waged on questionable grounds.

This is far and away the most political of Ennis' Punisher works; it's a little reminiscent of his Punisher-ish 2004-05 Avatar series 303, in that it functions on one level as a murder fantasy concerning men who start conflicts for poor reasons. It's also the most serious, concluding with no less than poetry appearing on the page as Nick Fury growls at television footage of wounded soldiers in Iraq. Poetry and song lyrics in comics are dangerous stuff, but Ennis -- so often pilloried as a fatally 'cool' writer prone to sneering at nerdy shit like superheroes while he makes his money -- seems intent on spending his final pages being as emotional as he pleases, no matter how silly he might look.

It works and it doesn't. The plot -- wicked Army and Air Force brass send good men to kill Frank so as to wipe out evidence of the nasty shit they've been pulling at varous points in the series -- operates well in accommodating Ennis' shift of focus away from the inside of Frank's head. There's little surprise that Frank copes with facing good men sent to defeat him by simply evading and disarming (due to his awesome skills) until they're forced to give up - when you're fighing a war that never ends, you're likely to outlast people with other aspects to their lives, after all. He runs circles around them for most of it, quick enough that the suspense seems lopsided, though I think that's attributable to seeing the Punisher how others see him, for once.

Additionally, by turning his gaze away from Frank, Ennis also redirects his grand theme. Here, Frank exists symbolically as well as physically, as the embodiment of Vietnam damage up and walking - it's something he's been known as at various points in the series, but in this storyline he's very much an instrument of delivering violence straight to the door of men looking to profit from bloodshed, what went around coming back around. That probably makes this one of Ennis' more pro-Punisher stories, although longtime readers know that Frank is just as doomed for his sins and everyone else.

Of course, those longtime readers will encounter some jarring shift in tone. I understand that Ennis wants to provide an immediately weighty capstone for his run, but all this rue and verse has a way of clashing with the actual details of the evil generals' scheme, which did involve a flesh-devouring virus, a sweet little girl, the aforementioned nuclear missile dive and the Punisher thrashing a miniature martial arts master to death by grabbing his leg and bashing him against things.

And it'll surely be up to each reader to decide if an in-story cultivation of a terrorist cell with the intention to execute a strike on foreign soil while covertly securing the use of a bacteriological weapon really synchs up allegorically to What Ennis is Really Talking About when he writes of "those who profited" from a shitty war started on shit grounds - and those prone to sudden explosions of racism in the Big Villain manner of the rest of the series at that! I'm not sure it comes across as convincing as it could; one of the benefits of writing 303 for Avatar was that he didn't have to speak so indirectly, with such potential for choking on those extra words.

Still, there's moments of some power in here, and a willingness to acknowledge the personal, human element inside grand moral flourishes. The artist, Goran Parlov, is excellent as always, his caricature-prone faces deftly wrinkling into pain and rage, and his action pages so sleek and hard you'll hear everything fine without sound effects. He's become sort of the series' 'regular' artist in the last few volumes, and he fits in well with Ennis' flowing tone, now gone over the falls to address real world concerns with unrestrained anger.

Feel free to query how any of this will look to someone hopping on at the end; I bet it'd seem a bit tinny, its super-character moving into combat with such assurance that inevitability seems at his back; longterm readers will get more kick out of the final issue's march of its villains to doom, because they know it's inevitable, from what Ennis has built from things he did not create. It's a GOOD final word for what's become a model of what a corporate-owned series can do, with a writer willing to glare so deep into its implications, ready to devote an awful lot of time and space to work-for-hire service, and renowned enough to get just what he wants away from the rigor of the shared universe.

It's work that'll inform the future incarnations, inevitably born again into that acknowledged perdition of further adventures.

Reminder: Garage Sale is Today

You can also consider this post a reminder that I still have no idea how to use a flash:

These and other fine books, only a quarter each. (I should mention I've got a box full of old Comics Journals, and I'm letting those go for only fifty cents each.) I'm on Cortland Avenue between Andover and Moultrie, 94110 (although this isn't the address use 515 Cortland to get a close enough fix on my location). We're going to be near the rubble of the old library, and next to the storage containmnent cube. Yes, it's a garage sale, Armagetto-style! And I hope you can turn out. We'll be there from 9 to 4.

See you there!