Happiness Is A Warm Popgun: Part II of Jeff's Talk with Adam Knave

Yesterday was the first part of my interview with writer/editor Adam Knave, wherein I did a terrible job of getting him to talk about the third volume of Popgun, out today. Today, I do a slightly better job, and although I'm still meager with the art, it doesn't look quite as tiny.

The interview should conclude tomorrow, with discussion about Knave's webcomic and influences.

Part II is after the jump.

JL: Anything else you want to add about Popgun?

AK: It’s awesome and you should buy it? It’s funny; my mother is mostly an editor and also a writer. My father was a writer first and would occasionally edit. And I grew up self-identifying—I’m not like one of those kids who was fifteen, ‘I’m a writer!’ But in my head, I’m always that guy who writes stuff, and never an editor.

And outside of D.J.’s story and the occasional thing, you know, work on websites and doing columns, I haven’t been an editor…until I got thrown into this. And it’s been an incredible learning curve. D.J. Kirkbride is one of the most amazing proofers I’ve seen in my life. The man has a gift. And the fact that Popgun comes out roughly every eight months? It kills me that anyone gets the book done. Just the amount of work, and how strong the book is. If you look at Book One or Two or Three, there really aren’t bad stories.

Part of why I agreed to the book was I was just a fan of it. Because anthologies traditionally don’t really sell, unless—and again Rantz is a god among men for pulling together Comic Book Tattoo—and let’s face it, he was kind of smart: yeah, put Tori Amos’ name on an anthology, it’ll sell. Yeah, that works.

But Popgun had nothing for it but ‘let’s make this incredibly good.’ And that’s kind of where we all sit when we work on it. It’s—I’ve been involved in publishing too long, I’ve seen too many teams of people who just really work together on a project for the money because they’re there today, and they think they’re supposed to be. But with Popgun, everyone involved in it is honestly just there for the love and are amazingly good professionals. And I think we end up with an amazing book full of people that produce…'Bastard Road.' Every chance I get I mention 'Bastard Road,' let me tell you. I am such a hardcore fan of that strip.

JL: That’s the [Cockfighter Blues]?

AK: Yeah. I actually told Brian I want the panel of “Giant Black Cock!” printed on velvet, and I will hang it framed in my living room. I’m not kidding.

Bastard Road: Cockfighter Blues by Brian Winkeler and Dave Curd

But it’s such a joyous thing. It’s that weird mix of everything comics can do, and a lot of Popgun is about that potential of comics. Don’t we all just keep hearing this, you know, ‘oh, well, comics. Just the superhero stuff is all that actually sells and nobody is really innovating anything…unless your name is Grant Morrison,’ unless you’re attacking Grant Morrison that day, in which case he’s not.

But you hear like three names of people who innovate in comics, and I’m telling you, we have like four hundred and seventy-odd pages of people who innovate in comics, hands down. These are people who are just doing incredibly new things with the medium. And it’s brave, and it’s just interesting to see from a production thing—hey, I get to read this stuff first—al of these stories that don’t always have anything in common, but you look through the book and you can feel this thread. You know, that music sensibility isn’t in every page. People aren’t going, ‘let me write a comic based on a rap song.’ But you do feel that sensibility of—before Top Forty Stations became huge and, you know, I grew up in New York, so I’m going to assume the rest of the world was like New York. You know, what became of Top Forty stations back in the early ‘80s played some really weird stuff. They were playing ‘Mercy Seat’ by Nick Cave on the god-damned radio, not a song you would actually get away with playing today.

But they would take these chances, and you had DJs who didn’t have orders to play these four records over and over, and you had people creating something interesting. Even if you didn’t like it, you had to respect it. And I think that’s really where Popgun lives. Because I don’t like every story in the book. I would be lying if I said I did, let’s face it. There’s too much stuff in there to love every story in the book.

But even the ones where I sit there and go ‘Really? This is--? Uh, okay,’ I consistently respect the craft that went into it, because everyone is at a really, really high level here. You have to respect the creators who push this stuff out, and you can tell they just kind of gave their all for it for, again, an Image anthology that—yeah, Volume One won a Harvey, and that’s awesome and well-deserved, I think. But I think it’s not going to buy these cats a car, you know? Let’s face it.

And I get mail, constantly, from people who are not unknown in the industry, who go, ‘I want to be part of Popgun.’ And that just amazes me. Not because, ‘Wow, they like us.’ But just that word is spreading and we’re becoming this place you go for the experiments, for the fun of it, for ‘let’s see what comics can do for a change,’ instead of being told what comics can do.

Vertex by Juan Doe

We tell people, ‘play. What’s the story you’ve always wanted to tell? Let’s see that one.' We actually just got a list of pitches from somebody whose name I can’t remember at all, who’s going to do a story for us, and he gave us these three choices. Here he is, a nice guy, he’s giving us options, that’s kind of awesome. ‘Which one do you want?’

And me, D.J., and Anthony all took a look at this list and we all universally, without talking to each other, went for the strangest, most experimental one in the batch. We’re just like, ‘we want to see you pull off that.’ Because no one’s done that yet.

And you don’t include that really unique, special weird thing unless it’s the one you really want to do. No one ever includes that in the list unless that’s the one they want. So that’s the one we’re going to go for. We want people to tell those stories that they really are fully invested in, because you can see that investment on the page.

We Like the Guns, The Guns That Go Pop: Part I of Jeff's Talk with Adam Knave.

Adam Knave is an assistant editor for the third volume of Popgun, out this Wednesday. He's also a writer of prose and a webcomic writer, and from what I can tell he works his ass off. Other writers and artists have projects they describe as "boot camp," for example, but Knave, along with artist Renato Pastor and editor Lauren Vogelbaum, are planning their webcomic to be a five year boot camp, one in which they're already significantly ahead of what they have posted.

I'm still learning the interviewer ropes so I apologize for the awkward breaks and pacing in the interview--I tried to keep this first part short then realized it was in fact too short. Part one is behind the jump.

Jeff Lester: Let’s start with Popgun, because that’s in theory the stuff that’s most important to get out on time here. When did you—let’s go for the big picture. How would you describe Popgun for somebody who’s never seen it or read it? Adam Knave: The way it was originally pitched to me, when I first came on board, that it was the graphic mix tape. And that’s been their tag since Day One. And you know, you hear something like graphic mixtape, and you say it to people, and they go, ‘so they have music?’ You know, and then you realize you’re dealing with the slow people.

But it really comes down to, it is a graphic mixtape—they actually pull that off. You know, it has all the weird joys of a great mixtape: there’s a flow to it—we’re actually trying something slightly different with the flow in Volume Three than we have in the past.

JL: Oh, yeah?

AK: Yeah, we get to play with that. Volume Two was very much: here are these cool songs that go together. Volume Three, there’s a thematic flow. There’s more of a grouping of stories going on. Because I’m going to take you from one place to the other.

And there’s always an intermission in the middle of the book which…I don’t know if this is what they were thinking of when Mark and Joe first started the book, but it gives me such fond memories of cassettes and that’s the inset cover of the cassette. And so that’s awesome! Because it’s just like the flip to the cassette map! That just makes me smile. Every time.

I’m easily pleased.

JL: That’s good. Always helpful in this line of work.

AK: You know, everyone—everyone—has made mixtapes—or I suppose at this point, playlists—for friends. And that’s really what it is—trying to find established voices doing new things, as well as brand-new voices who just really should be bigger than they are right now. And just letting them play, and seeing where it all comes to and then finding a way to mix it all together, to get a finished product that reads like it was meant.

JL: So do you guys lay down any sorts of boundaries, as far as page limits or topics, or anything like that? AK: Yes and no? There are some boundaries for content. It is an Image book. There’s never going to be outright porn. Past that? Mmm, not really. If it’s justified in the story, we’re usually fine with it.

Page count? I think the longest thing we’ve ever had is thirty pages. I know we have a thirty pager in Volume Three, and that’s the longest anything’s ever going to go. But we also have at least one one-page story. So we’re fairly free; it’s just we have so many people and so much material that we have to put a cap on it somewhere.

JL: I would think so. It’s a pretty big slice of comics.

AK: The great thing is both—I believe it’s Volume One and Two, actually—every volume so far has had roughly 100 pages of content that gets chopped out and pushed to the next volume.

You know, you’d think we’d already have a hundred pages, we’d stop. We don’t. And in Volume Three we actually hit the physical limit to keep the price point. We hit the physical page limit.

JL: How did the story that you end up co-writing in this volume end up happening?

AK: D.J. and I go way back. I don’t know if you remember—here’s a little slice of comic history for you—Too Much Coffee Man magazine.

JL: Oh, yeah.

AK: My first-ever, like, hard-print published journalism type stuff was in an issue of that. A website I ran, we interviewed Shannon Wheeler, and I kept in touch with him because I’m shameless. It’s how you get somewhere, you know?

And then just every now and then, I’d tell him, you know: if you ever need anything done, let me know. Glad to help out.

And one day he dropped a line and said, ‘I had this guy who was going to interview somebody for it me and then he dropped out. Can you do it?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ This was a Wednesday.

He said, ‘Okay. I need you to find someone who speaks Klingon and interview them.’

And I was reading this going, ‘You want me to—am I reading this correctly?’

And he’s like, ‘Yeah, find someone who speaks Klingon, interview, but we’re going to just present the interview in Klingon with no translation. And it’s going to be really funny.’

And I was like, ‘Okay.’ Again, this is Wednesday. He says, ‘All right. I need it by Friday.’

JL: So you actually had to transcribe—conduct and transcribe—an interview in Klingon in two days. AK: I did it over email. I actually had a friend in Atlanta who knew someone they worked with who spoke Klingon.

God bless people who live near DragonCon. That’s really the secret.

But, no, I had to proof Klingon. Which, you know, I’m sitting with a book, going, ‘You need this extra apostrophe after this q.’ Just sitting there going, ‘what the hell am I doing?’

But I ended up on the staff of that for like the two or three issues before it went under. Which I still say had nothing do with me. And the last issue—which actually never came out—was Kirkbride’s first issue.

It was one of those things where he was now the new kid, and I was now the seasoned vet of like an issue and a half. So we were like, ‘let’s do something together!’ And we just found that we write together really weirdly well.

So when he was doing Popgun, I edited his story in Volume Two. And we said, ‘we should do something together.’ So we started doing all these stories. And finding artists—which, you know exactly the fun of that. Where you go, ‘It’s for Image. There won’t be any money! Because, well, it’s Image. So there’s no pay rate. So there might be money at the back end, but won’t you do this for free for now?’ It’s an eight page story, that’s why we get someone to say yes.

So we had a bunch of stuff in the works that we thought was going to end up in Volume Two. And nothing quite got done in time. We had an artist bail on us, and all the standard things that happen in life. And we ended up finding Matteo, who…I want to ‘art marry’ him.

He’s blindingly fast. And if you look at his work…he turned those pages around in something under a page a day.

JL: Good grief. Really.

AK: He’d sent us these sketches, and they were kind of very airy and all over the place. And we’re like, ‘there’s not going to be enough room! How is this going to work?’ And he says, ‘Oh no, those were just the sketches. I’m re-drawing them!’

And we’re like, “You’re going to…okay?’ You know, what do you say. ‘You go do the thing you do that frightens us, and we’ll be over here, screaming.’ And he just knocks them out of the god-damned park.

JL: That’s really amazing to know, particularly since the storytelling is really energetic—the angles and perspectives are all over the place, and everything’s always moving. You guys have just a few pages so of course it’s got to move, but there’s maybe half a panel where somebody isn’t screaming or running or flying.

AK: And I will admit, this is mostly my fault. I come from prose which, you know, that sentence makes it sound like another planet, and I guess in comics it is. I was at New York Comic Con talking to people, and I’d be like, ‘oh, did you want a copy of my book?’ Because I had my book with me (because I’m a whore, and I don’t mind that) and people were going, ‘It’s just prose? Why would you do that?’

So I hadn’t been writing many comics, because…when you grow up and you love comics, you want to write comics but you don’t know any artists, and after a while, you stop trying. So I hadn’t been really working in comics, so I was very much a wordy bastard. (As you might be noticing from this interview. It’s a curse.)

So the script kind of had these six pages that really should’ve been more like twelve. And it kind of forced ‘Teo to just make everything move that much faster. And when we saw it, we’re like, ‘Oh my god, you actually pulled this off. And we’re so sorry we did this to you!’

You know, we’re doing another one for Volume Four. Same characters. We’re doing a sequel. Not so much a sequel, as another story with these lunatics. We’re taking twelve pages and we’re writing about the same amount of script we did for the first one. Just because we figured we’d actually let him draw.

Tomorrow in Part II: More about Popgun, webcomics, etc.

Da Fug? Jeff is Enslaved by Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye

Is it fair to review a book about which I have very little to say? To you or to me?

Probably not. And yet, it seems necessary to write a little review of Grant Morrison's Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #1, if only because I and a million other people on the Internet were more than willing to record our impressions of G-Mo's Final Crisis each and every time an issue came out. Although I have nothing to support this theory, I've always assumed one of the conditions to Morrison's agreeing to do Final Crisis was that Vertigo publish the follow-up to his sublime but not particularly fiscally successful Seaguy.

And so, in my mind, while not fair to you or or to me, perhaps writing up my thoughts on this issue at this early juncture is more than fair to Grant Morrison, so that my second-guessing, half-baked theories, and if my flimsy, lazy thinking ends up being shown off in all its deluded, wearing-my-underwear-on-the-outside-of-my pants glory...then maybe so much the fairer.

You are welcome to join me in my fool's errand after the jump.

Let me begin by cataloging my sins. I purchased this issue and read it almost immediately, occasionally smiling while doing so. I then put it aside. Then, after a few days, when I realized things had remained relatively quiet on the Internets, I decided it might be good to see if I could start some sort of conversation on the matter. To do so, I did NOT go to my bookcase and dig out my Seaguy trade (it's all the way on the other side of the room!), I did NOT scrupulously re-read Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #1 (I spent about two minutes re-reading it), and I did NOT think through what I was going to say before I started typing.

As long as I am cataloging my acts of hubris, I should confess my nagging doubt that I have deeply misunderstood the first Seaguy limited series, if only because it seems to me one of the clearest and most straightforward pieces Morrison has ever written. Every time I read or talk to someone saying they enjoyed Seaguy but were pretty sure they weren't getting a lot of it, I realize my conviction regarding Seaguy's thematic transparency is more than likely that of the narcissist, the undeveloped child, around whom the world seems to revolve, and with whom the world communicates its system of odd, gnostic signs with perfect soothing clarity.

For me, the first Seaguy mini was a lovely, devastating meditation on the nature of corporate-owned characters and their lot in life: They traipse about in theme parks, immortal, carefree. As Morrison frequently does (and can often do so well), Seaguy is a look at how that life must feel for the character--the unsettled, subtle anguish of someone for whom everything is pleasant but nothing is good. The theme park in which they are an attraction seems to them a boisterous, capricious town eager to distract from what lies behind its manufactured facade. The characters never die, but their sidekicks do--but in order for everything to stay the same, the memories must be ripped from them, like a waxing of the forebrain, and although the mind aches from the loss, it doesn't know why.

And even better, this sort of haunted, ahistorical pleasantness was just a perfect god-damned snapshot of America--not post-9/11, but post-post-9/11, where my wife and I go out to dinner and shop along some lovely prefabricated spot like Santana Row, while non-chain stores sicken and die like poisoned children; where we sit at home and speculate about Lost, while the TV barely shows the war, now in its fifth year of grinding up the poor; and where I lie awake sometimes at night knowing that my distance from the true and terrible conflicts in this world (which I can sense thrashing about, coiling and uncoiling like a serpent fighting for its life, which I sometimes imagine being the cause of the flickering I can see on the night horizon from my window) is a luxury, a luxury for which I'll gladly suffer under the yoke of dull but steady employment, even while I idly wonder what it must be like to touch the scales of that furious beast. All of this I can feel in my life and see in the bright candy colors of the first Seaguy mini, in the pitch-perfect art of Cameron Stewart, looking like a one-page comic ad for the action figure you never bought, and, like I said, the whole thing doesn't seem baffling at all. It's as to-the-point as a ransom note.

And so I was never too riled up about seeing the sequel to Seaguy, although I rooted for the possibility and was gladdened by its announcement. For me, the perfect sequel of Seaguy would be exactly--and I mean exactly--the same three issues of Seaguy, just with Lucky El Loro in place of Chubby Da Choona. Failing that, it's probably for the best to have only the original miniseries and the the promised sequel never to arrive, so that a reader had no choice but to return to the original story again and again until they'd suddenly realize that the first volume of Seaguy was the sequel, and that they, the readers, were the true slaves of Mickey Eye.

But just as a child spends some time investigating outside their window and realizes with some degree of relief and no small amount of disappointment that the faerie messenger scratching and knocking furtively at the bedroom window was merely a newly displaced dangling branch, I come to tell you the the first issue of Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye is not a mere repeat of Seaguy's first issue, but a comic book all its own, a continuation of the fugue, but also an entirely new measure of it.

In Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #1, Seaguy is more unsettled, more aware that something isn't quite right in his world, and quicker to realize when he's being lied to. Where it last time took Seaguy the course of several issues to wander in over his head and lose his sidekick, here it takes less than twenty pages, leaving enough time for a quick asylum incident that recalls the end of Peter Pan and a rescue by the three chaps seen on the cover, whom I've nicknamed (for now) TeaGuy, ThreeGuy, and PeeGuy (although the colors and logos on the closing page and the cover don't match, so maybe Peeguy is really green and Teaguy is really yellow, I don't know).

Considering the rescue comes hot on the heels of evil Lotharius' order for "radical solutions," I think it seems likely the trio of Seaguy analogues may end up being tools to keep Seaguy from discovering the truth. It'll be interesting to see if Teaguy, Threeguy and Peeguy end up being Morrison's spoof on the growing tendency to give superheroes lineage make-overs, putting them as but one in a line of Fisty Riders or Green Flashes. It seems important that Seaguy consider himself inessential, when the behavior of everyone around him suggests that he is in fact crucial to the world around him. And, of course, doltish clod of a comic reviewer that I am, I only know begin to realize how Seaguy's scuba mask resembles nothing so much as an eye itself. It seems a very Morrisonian pun if 'Seaguy' is in fact 'Seeguy' and I wonder if he's going to end up having some unexpectedly close ties to Mickey Eye than might have already been established. (That last clause is a a somewhat slipshod way of confessing I don't quite remember what was revealed at the end of the last Seaguy by the time he ended up on the moon--butterflies? Mummies? Maybe I really should've dug through my shelves and re-read that trade?)

Oh, and the art on this, by the way, was superb. Stewart knows right where to put an unsettlingly realistic touch in the midst of things at their most unreal (there's a close-up shot of slightly misaligned bottom teeth that's just spot-on) and I love how none of the panels here are fully bordered--they manage to feel both claustrophobic and disquietingly open-ended, as if the characters inside are trapped, but something could still enter in suddenly and change everything. And the colors by Dave Stewart? Also great--I really liked that greyish miasmatic feel he gives the first few pages.

So that's one rube's opinion: Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #1 is Very Good stuff, worthy of your time and attention and even that high-end Internet chatter that we only seem to break out for the big-money events. Ignore it at your peril.

Arriving April 8th, 2009

I'm in New York City this week, which is why I've been otherwise silent for the last couple of days, and will be for the next few.

Our 20th anniversary thing went REALLY well -- we did more than 200% of a normal Wednesday, saw a lot of old and familiar faces, AND we got a ton of food donations for the San Francisco Food Bank, yay!

We went out to dinner last night with the astonishingly awesome Garth Ennis, the even more awesome Ruth Cole (*I* wouldn't have the stones to do an intercontinental yacht race, that's for sure), and Brian K. Vaughan. Such nice people, such great company.

Anyway, here's the one tiny bit of work I have to do this week, and now I'm done, so back to vacation!

1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS ADVENTURES OF SINBAD #9
3 GEEKS SLAB MADNESS #3 (OF 3)
A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #102 (A)
ALL NEW SAVAGE SHE-HULK #1 (OF 4) DKR
AMAZON #2 (OF 3)
ANITA BLAKE LC NECROMANCER #1 (OF 5)
ANNA MERCURY ARTBOOK #1
ARCHIE & FRIENDS #130
BATMAN BATTLE FOR THE COWL #2 (OF 3)
BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #28
BETTY & VERONICA DIGEST #193 (NOTE PRICE)
BOOSTER GOLD #19
BPRD BLACK GODDESS #4 (OF 5)
CAPTAIN BRITAIN AND MI 13 #12
CARTOON NETWORK ACTION PACK #36
CLEANERS #3 (OF 4)
DAREDEVIL NOIR #1 (OF 4)
DARK REIGN HAWKEYE #1 (OF 5) DKR
DARK TOWER GUIDE TO GILEAD
DEAD IRONS #3
DEADPOOL SUICIDE KINGS #1 (OF 5)
DOKTOR SLEEPLESS #12
EXILES #1
GEN 13 #29
GREEN LANTERN #39 (ORIGINS)
GRIMM FAIRY TALES #37
HEXED #4 (OF 4)
HOUSE OF MYSTERY #12
IGNITION CITY #1 (OF 5)
INFINITE HORIZON #4 (OF 6)
JUGHEADS DOUBLE DIGEST #149 (NOTE PRICE)
LAST REIGN KINGS OF WAR #5 (OF 5)
LOCKE & KEY HEAD GAMES #4
MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #50
MARVEL APES AMAZING SPIDER-MONKEY #1
MARVEL ZOMBIES 4 #1 (OF 4)
MASQUERADE #2
MICE TEMPLAR SKETCHBOOK #1
NORTHLANDERS #16
PUNISHER FRANK CASTLE MAX #69
SCOOBY DOO #143
SECRET SIX #8
SHRAPNEL #4 (OF 5) BROOKS CVR A
SOLOMON GRUNDY #2 (OF 7)
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG #199
SPIRIT #27
STAR TREK MISSIONS END #2
SUPERGIRL COSMIC ADVENTURES IN THE 8TH GRADE #5 (OF 6)
SUPERMAN WORLD OF NEW KRYPTON #2 (OF 12)
SWORD #16
TERMINATOR REVOLUTION #4 (OF 5)
TERMINATOR SALVATION MOVIE PREQ #4 (OF 4)
TERRY MOORES ECHO #11
TIMESTORM 2009 2099 #1 (OF 4)
TITANS #12
TRINITY #45
ULTIMATE WOLVERINE VS HULK #4 (OF 6)
WAR OF KINGS ASCENSION #1 (OF 4)
WARLORD #1
WOLVERINE WEAPON X #1
WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ #5 (OF 8)
YOUNG LIARS #14
YTHAQ NO ESCAPE #1 (OF 3)

Books / Mags / Stuff
AND THERE YOU ARE GN
CHARLATAN GN VOL 01 PRELUDES
DOCTOR WHO FORGOTTEN TP
GANTZ TP VOL 04
GREEN ARROW YEAR ONE TP
GRIMM FAIRY TALES TP VOL 05
HARVEY COMICS CLASSICS TP VOL 05 HARVEY GIRLS
HEAVY METAL MAY 2009 #123
HELLBLAZER PRESENTS CHAS THE KNOWLEDGE TP
JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED HEROES TP
JUXTAPOZ VOL 16 #4 APR 2009
MARVEL ZOMBIES 3 HC
MARVEL ZOMBIES TP VOL 02
MOBY DICK TP
NARUTO TP VOL 42
NARUTO TP VOL 43
NARUTO TP VOL 44
POPGUN GN VOL 03
SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE DOOM PATROL TP VOL 01
SIZZLE #41 (A)
SKETCH MAGAZINE #39
STAR TREK COUNTDOWN TP
STILL I RISE GN
TALES FROM WONDERLAND TP
UNCANNY X-MEN HC MANIFEST DESTINY
WOLVERINE HC WORST DAY EVER
WORLD WAR 3 ILLUSTRATED #39

What looks good to YOU?

-B

Patterns of Patterning: David Takes a Look at Irredeemable #1 (With Capsule Comments on Other Stuff From This Week)

In Grant Morrison's afterword to Irredeemable #1, he discusses an email exchange he had with the book's writer Mark Waid regarding patterning, or the practice of essentially permanently categorizing and cubbyholing a person's potential and MO. Morrison goes on to relate this to himself being "patterned" as a factory of insane gobbledygook - and while that's an opinion of him that may be held by many, I'd hardly call it a complete majority, so I was surprised at how defensively that came off - and of Waid being "patterned" as a dude who writes Silver Age throwback stories, which, well, is pretty true. A lot of people don't remember Empire.

And it's difficult not to compare Irredeemable with its seeming spiritual predecessor - they're both stories where Mark Waid, Biggest Superman Fan Alive, writes about really nasty people doing shitty things to each other, so some people seem to initially view it as a sort of novelty thing, like Avenue Q or that YouTube video with Bert & Ernie performing M.O.P.'s "Ante Up" - hey, Mark Waid's writing about bad people! Empire succeeded creatively, though, because it relied on more than shock value - Waid's a superb character writer, and all of his skills in that arena were on full display. So it's disappointing that Irredeemable #1 seems to sidestep the issue of character entirely so that Mark Waid can try to break his pattern.

I'm not saying it's a bad comic, not by any means, but the Plutonian (the I'm-sick-of-being-called-of-a-fag-so-fuck-you-guys spiteful, homicidal Superman analogue that drives the action of the book) isn't really a character yet, he's a just a guy flying around blowing shit up while people panic - something which takes up a decent chunk of the issue's bulk. It's a lot of shock and sadism, and it's certainly well-executed (and, I must admit, not overly gory or fetishistic in any way - credit to artist Peter Krause on the opening sequence especially), but throughout the issue we're only teased with a glimmer of the "why" for all this. It's certainly Waid breaking out of his pattern, but a part of me wonders if it isn't going too far in the other direction - if it's trying so hard to be mean that it loses sight of that human element that marks the best of Waid's work. Or maybe I'm just patterning the guy.

Peter Krause does a great job with the art - it reminds me a lot of Steve Epting in Captain America, except with a far more varied and vibrant color palette courtesy of Andrew Dalhouse, just the right mix of mythological iconography and creepy stalker faces for a book that's all about perverting the supposedly incorruptible.

None of this is to say that it isn't a Good comic - it is, and I'm fairly confident that my complaints about the book's lack of a human hook won't last long, since this is an ongoing series and I doubt he'll stay away from that for long. I think it's going to make for a really good ongoing series, and I'm incredibly happy Waid's finally in the position where he can give himself a canvas like this. But taken as a hermetically sealed first issue, I'm still going to be buying the second issue more on my trust in Mark Waid as a creator than in me being hooked into the story so far.

Also, if you ever wanted to see what a two-page four-star verbal blowjob was like, Grant Morrison's afterword sure is something.

On to some other stuff - it's a shame Geoff Johns's run on Justice Society of America is ending with such a whimper, since the first few issues of this run were superb and really seemed to be showing a ton of promise, but the endless droning of the Kingdom Come storyline killed so much momentum that I can really see why Johns chose to leave the book. It just doesn't have as much energy as his other work, and has that same plodding, co-written feeling that his late issues of Teen Titans did, where the car was just running out of gas. I think next month's Eaglesham-drawn Stargirl spotlight will probably be a winner, but other than that this issue and run overall have been fairly disappointing. Okay.

In terms of superhero fun, I'm really enjoying the "Messiah War" storyline crossing over between Cable and X-Force - this week's Cable #13 is the second part, sort of rearranging all the pieces of the stuff I remember loving as a kid (Cable! Deadpool being funny! Wolverine slicing shit up! Archangel flying! Stryfe's awesome blade armor! Copious time travel!) into a story that actually has some degree of forethought and coherence, unlike the flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants plotting of the Liefeld/Nicieza/Lobdell stuff I inexplicably loved as a kid. I really wish Olivetti would draw his own backgrounds instead of using 3D models and Quake II screenshots, but Duane Swierczynski writes quite a Good comic here.

Lastly, I've got to admit I've really turned around on Daniel Way recently - I thought a lot of his early Wolverine: Origins work was fairly awful, horribly paced stuff, so I'm really surprised by how much I'm enjoying not only that book these days (the focus provided by Dark Reign certainly helps, though) but also his Deadpool, which pushes out its eighth issue this week, the third part of the "Magnum Opus" crossover with Andy Diggle's Thunderbolts. It's a fun madcamp romp more than any sort of high art to be sure, but for God's sake the story is titled "Magnum Opus" in full self-awareness, and as a superhero comedy that manages to stay within the bounds of seriousness I can pretty much say that I laughed a lot and was genuinely surprised by a number of the plot turns, so that's a pretty Good comic to me.

I've also got quite a lot to say about the first issues of Flash: Rebirth and Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye, one in review form and one in a sort of annotation-esque form (I'm not sure yet), but I owe some love to my homies at Funnybook Babylon so make sure to keep an eye out there for those and other great articles.

Arriving 4/1/2009

Don't forget: Wednesday is Comix Experience's 20th anniversary! Bring in a food donation for the San Francisco Food Bank, and receive a 20% discount on ANYthing in the store (including all of these new titles)

2000 AD #1625
2000 AD #1626
AGENTS OF ATLAS #3 DKR
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #590
ANGEL BLOOD AND TRENCHES #2
ASTONISHING TALES #3
ASTOUNDING WOLF-MAN #14
AUTHORITY #9
AVENGERS INVADERS #9 (OF 12)
BANG TANGO #3 (OF 6)
BATMAN BATTLE FOR THE COWL MAN BAT #1
BETTY #179 (NOTE PRICE)
BILLY BATSON AND THE MAGIC OF SHAZAM #4 (RES)
BLACK PANTHER 2 #3 DKR
BOYS #29
BUCKAROO BANZAI ORIGINS #1
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #24 CHEN CVR
CABLE #13 XMW
CAPTAIN ACTION COMICS #3 MYCHAELS MODERN CVR
CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS 70TH ANNIV SPECIAL #1
CARS ROOKIE #1 (OF 4)
DARK REIGN FANTASTIC FOUR #2 (OF 5) DKR
DEAD OF NIGHT FEATURING WEREWOLF BY NIGHT #4 (OF 4)
DEAD ROMEO #1 (OF 6)
DEADPOOL #9 DKR
DESTROYER #1 (OF 5)
DR DOOM MASTERS OF EVIL #3 (OF 4)
FARSCAPE #4
FLASH REBIRTH #1 (OF 5)
FRANKLIN RICHARDS APRIL FOOLS
GI JOE #4
GLAMOURPUSS #6
GRAVEL #10
GREATEST HITS #6 (OF 6)
HAUNTED TANK #5 (OF 5)
INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #12 DKR
IRREDEEMABLE #1
JERSEY GODS #3
JONAH HEX #42
JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #25
KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #149
LOONEY TUNES #173
MARVEL ASSISTANT SIZE SPECTACULAR #1 (OF 2)
MIGHTY #3
NEW AVENGERS REUNION #2 (OF 4) DKR
OFFICIAL INDEX TO MARVEL UNIVERSE #4
PALS N GALS DOUBLE DIGEST #130 (NOTE PRICE)
PRIDE & PREJUDICE #1 (OF 5)
REMNANT #4 (OF 4)
SAVAGE DRAGON #146
SCALPED #27
SEAGUY THE SLAVES OF MICKEY EYE #1 (OF 3)
SECRET WARRIORS #3 DKR
STAR TREK COUNTDOWN #4
STAR TREK CREW #2
STRANGE ADVENTURES #2 (OF 8)
SUPER HUMAN RESOURCES #3 (OF 4)
SUPERMAN BATMAN #57
TEEN TITANS #69
TEEN TITANS ANNUAL 2009 #1
TRINITY #44
UNIVERSAL WAR ONE REVELATIONS #1 (OF 3)
WAR OF KINGS #2 (OF 6)
WHO WANTS TO BE A SUPERHERO THE DEFUSER
X-MEN FIRST CLASS FINALS #3 (OF 4)

Books / Mags /Stuff
4 GIRLFRIENDS GN VOL 01 (O/A) (A)
BATMAN THE HEART OF HUSH HC
BOMB QUEEN TP VOL 05 BOMBASTIC
CHRONICLES OF SOME MADE GN
DC WILDSTORM DREAMWAR TP
DUNGEON ZENITH TP VOL 03 BACK IN STYLE
ELIXIR GN
FALLEN ANGEL TP VOL 06 CITIES OF LIGHT AND DARK
FREEDOM COLLECTIVE ONE SHOT
HELM TP VOL 01
HI FRUCTOSE MAGAZINE QUARTERLY #11
JONAH HEX BULLETS DONT LIE TP
JSA TP VOL 02 THY KINGDOM COME PART 01
JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #282
PIANO TUNER GN VOL 02 (A)
PREVIEWS #247 APRIL 2009
RESIDENT EVIL FIRE AND ICE TP
STAR WARS OMNIBUS EMISSARIES AND ASSASSINS
TRIPWIRE SUPERHERO SPECIAL
VIDEO WATCHDOG #148
WARHAMMER 40K DEFENDERS OF ULTRAMAR TP
WITCHING HOUR TP NEW PTG

What looks good to YOU?

-B

My Scott, Your Jean: Jeff Takes A Quick Look at His Sacred Cows.

Because I follow several of the Alert Nerd people on Twitter, I had the head's up about their "what's your Scott & Jean?" event they were planning for March 30th. Unfortunately, because I'm still a waster with terrible time management skills and the world's worst book to re-draft, I didn't realize that March 30th would somehow end up being, y'know, today.

I think the question is relatively comprehensible to yr. average comics geek. As Sarah puts it in Alert Nerd's master post:

Said phrase means, essentially, “That is my geek sacred cow, the one topic I cannot discuss rationally because it makes me too insane/angry/scary-eyed.”

So what's my geek sacred cow? Let's find out together shall we? After the jump.

Being the "Raised on '70s Marvel" geezer that I am, my list of geek sacred cows back during that time would've been something like:

(1) Bucky stays dead; (2) Gwen Stacy stays dead; (3) Uncle Ben stays dead; (4) Howard The Duck does not wear pants, and wears a hat too small for his head.

In the '80s, I think I would've added the following to the list:

(1) Jean Grey stays dead; (2) Nobody but Frank Miller writes Elektra; (3) You never learn Wolverine's origin; (4) You can't break up Nightwing and Starfire (Hey, my entry point into DC was Wolfman & Perez's Teen Titans).

In fact, this may have been the true joy of being a young comic book geek: stepping out each fine morning and looking out an entire herd of geek sacred cows happily grazing before you--nobody but Kirk will command the Enterprise; the Man From Atlantis will never remember his origin; in the end, Godzilla never loses; you can't have a Planet of the Apes movie without Roddy McDowall; you never see the Human Fly's face. There's something thrilling about coming down from Mount Sinai with those two tablets of shall-nots and will-nots. Every parent will tell you about the phase their kid goes through where their response to everything is 'no!' But there's also something satisfying about these rules because you learn them, basically on your own. Unless you're reading a John Byrne comic, nobody would ever say, 'Reed can never cure Ben! Iron Fist will always love Misty Knight! Scott will only love Jean!' They're the things you learn on your own--that's why they're so powerful, something so similar to sacred.

But over time, as you get older, you watch most of your sacred cows get a bolt in their brain, hung upside down and bled, cut into parts. Then you are offered the chance to plunk down some cash so you can bite into that extra-thick and juicy hamburger formerly known as your sacred cow. And some of us bite deep into that burger just so we can complain knowledgeably about what a horrible waste, a sacrilege, a defilement of the divine, the burger's production is. And some of us realize the sacred cows were never grazing in our pasture, and we either stay because we like the view, or we split.

Or, you know, every so often, in mid-self-righteous mouthful,we find ourselves going, 'this is one damn tasty burger.' I was not a big fan of bringing Bucky back, but god-damned if Brubaker didn't grill that shit up and serve it to me with thick-sliced onions and a side of bacon. I was incredibly annoyed at how lame 'One More Day' was, but on the next-to-last page, I was a little bummed Gwen Stacy wasn't right there next to Harry Osborn--as long as you're gonna defile the church, people, fornicate on the altar, not in the pews.

(ugh, no, not literally.)

Now, it may be that I have some list of geek sacred cows that I am hiding from you--that I am, in fact, hiding from myself, so that I don't have to worry about saying them out loud and having today's writers go, 'Wow. That would blow everybody's mind if it turned out that Dick Grayson was gay, wouldn't it? Hmmm...'

Because in a marketplace that caters exclusively to the disciples, sacrilege sells. If you can sell the sacrilege in a way that stays true to the characters, then you've got a pretty good future in this business. But if you can't? Find the cow, man. Find it and kill it.

But I came to this meme to honor it, not to bury it. I'll give you two Scott & Jeans, in fact: a bugbear and a meta-bugbear, either of which I'll happily argue about until the [WARNING: STOP TALKING ABOUT FUCKING COWS!]... new comics come in.

Scott & Jean Number One: Lois Lane and Superman and Clark Kent must always be a love triangle.

Why? Because apart from his constant inherent goodness (which is only interesting now because no other hero is considered constantly, inherently good--fifty years ago, that was par for the course) it is the only fucking interesting thing about Superman, that's why. Nearly every other single interesting thing about Superman (Kandor, weird 'L.L.' fixation, lost civilization of Krypton, the Legion) is an odd external facet, some little idea that stuck and crystallized in a really interesting way.

But the fact that Lois loves Superman and Clark loves Lois, but Lois doesn't love Clark the way she loves Superman and so therefore Superman can't love Lois the way she loves him, comes from Superman/Clark himself, and not from any external geegaw or fifth-dimensional whatsit or from being exposed to some rare strain of Kryptonite that makes him peevish or capricious. You can spend a lot of time and energy thinking about why this weird dynamic exists (and believe me, I have) and you'll never get to the heart of it, but you can, like an actor, pick a reason that makes sense to you and craft stories that suggest your explanation.

The bizarre love triangle (or maybe it's better to say Bizarro love triangle, since it's not a triangle at all) is not only tied to the internal drama of the lead character and multivalent, it's also real. (In fact, it's better than real--it's super-real, in that "a wheel is a leg" kind of way.) Remember that person who liked you enough to hook up with you (repeatedly, even!) but always had some weirdo explanation as to why they couldn't be with you? Remember that person who adored you, and you realized all you had to do was adore them back and everything would be fine, but there was something--the way they slouched or the way they laughed, or your unrequieted love for someone else, or the fact that you were still five years away from realizing you were an emotionally damaged alcoholic who had to keep everyone at arm's length? Sometimes, later on, you figure out why things didn't happen, or maybe you never do and you think of that person--not so much the one who got away as the one you let go--and you accept it because that's the way things are, you guess: Lois loves Superman and Clark loves Lois, but Lois doesn't love Clark the way she loves Superman and so therefore Superman can't love Lois the way she loves him.

Scott & Jean Number Two (the meta-bugbear): Continuity matters.

Continuity is a noose. Continuity is a trap. I believe that, I really do. It's one thing to have continuity for five years or ten years in your superhero universe--maybe you can split your Earths in two, and you can double that. But it's like entropy--sooner or later it gets you. At a certain point, it renders the system useless as every transaction in the closed system is made and no other transaction can be made. A noose. A trap.

But even though I know that, continuity matters to me--without it, the idea that what happens now matters to what happens next, and what happened last month is important to what's happening now. The noose of continuity is what has raised superhero comics to such spectacularly successful heights. More and more, I enjoy the craft of a fine done-in-one, but that's because there aren't that many continuity driven stories I enjoy these days--maybe because I'm not personally invested in them, since there's either a good chance they'll be undone in the next two years or because they ignore some piece of former continuity, or the continuity they had to wipe in order for the story they had to have happen. But as much as I enjoy sitting around high on the drug of my choice reading Bob Haney Brave & The Bold showcases (and I'm enjoying it these days probably more than I should), I totally would've ditched comics when I was twelve or fourteen or seventeen if that's all there had been to it.

(Yes, really.)

I wish I had somewhere further to go with this point from there, but I don't think I do. This is where I have to remember that those cows don't belong to me--they belong to the guy next door, the one who assures me the cows are sacred to him, too. (You know, the guy running the slaughterhouse.) He's gotta make a living, or he closes up shop and there are no more cows. [HOW THE HELL DID I END UP ON THE FUCKING COWS AGAIN? STOP, STOP, STOP.] Maybe this is why I'm more vegetarian these days--18 volumes of Urasawa's Japanese mushrooms; Jaime and Gilbert's strange burrito joint with the tear-summoning hot sauce; stranged aged cheeses from the '40s and '50s. I dunno.

And, anyway, the stupid settlement says that Howard has to wear pants, so what are ya going to do, right?

Abhay Talks about Two Stacks of Comics.

At the beginning of March, I spent a week living out of a hotel room.

Hotel-living turns into the fucking Shining for me pretty fast. Long creepy hallways of identical rooms, filled with strangers. Why are there so many pillows on hotel beds now? 9 pillows? 10 pillows? The classier the hotel, the more pillows on the bed. Occam’s Razor says that the logical conclusion is that fancy people like to play pillow fort on vacation. Plus, thanks to the Local Channel 6 News Action Eyewitness Investigation Squad-team on my TV, I’m convinced that if I had UV goggles, the entire room and all 20 pillows would all glow white-hot with fancy-man semen stains, like Tron bukkake aftermath.

After the hotel stay, I visited my hometown, stayed with my family. I was around My Stuff again, not Hotel Stuff. Not just My Stuff, but My Old Stuff. Found a stack of old comics, thirteen random comics from different years, different eras, slung together next to my bed, collecting dust.

I want to write about that stack. Not really "reviews" or anything that formal-- I don't see the point of "reviewing" any of these comics, but just talking about what books were in that stack. Plus there’s another stack, a second stack.

The Mighty Thor #382 by Walt Simonson and Sal Buscema: This was the very last issue of the Walt Simonson run. Thor's soul is trapped in the body of the invincible Destroyer robot, and he has to robot-fight his way through Hell in order to steal his dead body away from the Goddess of Death, in time to defeat an army of evil ice dwarves invading Asgard.

Do they still make comics like that? Maybe they do; I haven’t bought one recently.

In the letter pages, Sean of Tahoe, California, "a fan of legends", writes a letter in support of Thor's new beard. He is responding to a previous letter from an earlier letter column that disapproved of the beard. Tank Girl 2 #1 by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett: A collection of short Tank Girl stories. They just cram jokes into the margins, nooks, crannies— it’s just filled with drawings and doodles and noodling. It still feel very alive. A lot of people don’t make that effort.

Suicide Squad #18 by John Ostrander, Luke McDonnell, and Bob Lewis: After I quit Marvel comics in middle school, I eventually switched to DC. This was one of my first DC books; I got it from the 24-Hour Ameristop next to the chili place in town. The Suicide Squad fights some bad guys. Without even re-reading it, just by looking at the cover, I could remember at least one line from it: Captain Cold tells a bad guy how "Hell isn’t hot. Hell is cold, and buddy, I'm Captain Cold."

When I first got into DC Comics, everyone in them was a middle-aged failure at life. The Suicide Squad was all about Amanda Waller, an aging, widowed, morbidly obese bureaucrat. The Secret Origins story of Cave Carlson ends with one of Cave Carlson’s sidekicks, years after their adventures together, homeless and in a wheelchair, begging for change. The Atom was divorced, after he’d caught his wife cheating on him in the back of a Chevy. Captain Atom had a dead wife and kids he couldn’t relate to. The Swimmer would go from swimming pool to swimming pool, fighting crime. I don’t really understand DC characters any other way, I guess. DC books don’t make any sense to me, anymore.

The Last American #1 by Alan Grant, John Wagner and Mike McMahon: I don't really remember anything about this comic other than buying it for Mike McMahon's drawings, the way he builds drawings out of sharp lines, flat colors, off-kilter shapes. Lego humans, wandering through desolate post-apocalyptic landscapes.

Most of the comics I’ve read lately have just been that sort of “Art Experience” for me. When I got home from my trip, I returned back to a second stack of comics. I’ve been buying #1 issues this year, non-established-universe #1 issues, trying to get some whiff of what’s new in comics, what people making new things were trying to do. But: Jersey Gods (Image), The Great Unknown (Image), Mysterius the Unfathomable (Wildstorm), Bang Tango (Vertigo), The Life & Times of Savior 28 (IDW)…?

Couldn’t catch a scent of anything.

I’m not saying these are bad books necessarily (well: maybe some of them)(Bang Tango), just that my experience of them has been really art-focused. I guess I’ve been distracted. I've already forgotten every single one of Jersey Gods' characters; I just remember enjoying Dan McDaid's performance.

Jersey Gods is about Kirby-style Space Gods fighting in New Jersey; The Great Unknown is about an inventor whose ideas are being stolen from his mind; Mysterius the Unfathomable is about a magician who is a PG-13 asshole; Bang Tango is about a retired gangster who dances tango, who goes back to being a gangster; Life & Times of Saviour 28 is about a superhero who gets murdered while protesting the Bush Administration.

Some of the books are entertaining, for what they are. Mysterius seems focused on “fun” in a very professional way, and in a way I think most people will find effective; I think smart people trying to create fun stories is at least admirable in theory-- it's something I've always enjoyed about the Ocean's 11 movies, say. Et cetera. Sure: entertainment, if you’re in the mood to be entertained.

I just didn't feel very connected to any of them regardless.

American Flagg #3 by Howard Chaykin and Ken Bruzenak: Aaah-- Chaykin, lingerie, blowjobs, Ken Bruzenak lettering, and violence, all for a single U.S. dollar.

But more than that—the way a comic can contain a whole world. You can see signs in the background, you can see what people are wearing, you can see the brand-names of their junk food. The characters in FLAGG, I know what they watch on TV: Bob Violence. The name of the cab company in WATCHMEN? Prometheus Cabs.

Who does that needlepoint right now?

The new comics I’ve read-- none really created an entire world for themselves. Jersey Gods tried but its first issue cribbed so heavily from Jack Kirby that it was hard to take it very seriously as its own thing. But I can’t really criticize all of these new books for failing to tell me their main characters' favorite TV show, can I? That sort of world-building seems rare in general, so singling these books out in particular strikes me as unfair.

X-Men Classics #98 by Chris Claremont, John Romita Jr., Glynis Oliver, Dan Green: Before I’d ever seen an X-Men Comic, or had any idea what one was, another kid in third grade attempted to describe the contents of this issue to me. Do you have any idea how long it took him? “The X-Men fight Nimrod” takes somewhere between nine hours and forever to explain to someone who’d never heard of a mutant, Rogue, Wolverine, Sentinels, Days of Future Past, any of it. Now, you can just rent the movie.

Someday, I would like to travel back in time and give both of those kids wedgies. Then: I'd put them in a figure four leg-lock or a camel clutch, and I'd explain to them that they were gebronies. Then, dangle them over a cliff until they wet themselves, you know like Bill Paxton in True Lies. Then, I would explain sexual intercourse to them because I think at that age, it'd really gross them out and it'd just be super-funny to see their expressions. Plus, I would throw in stuff like vagina dentata or nekomimi fetishes or docking or whatever, just to screw them up a little mentally, you know, for giggles. Then, if I had time, and I wasn't tired, I'd go back in time and murder Hitler and prevent the Holocaust or whatever. But first: beating up those little brats. Priorities.

The last panel of this comic is my favorite-- a Russian with an eyepatch says "We are fast approaching a crossroads, Sasha. And I fear that somewhere, somehow, the decision has already been made...to turn us irrevocably towards Armageddon."

I’m about 100% sure this is how every single issue of the X-men ended in the 1980’s.

Tribe #1 by Todd Johnson and Larry Stroman: this was a black superhero team by Larry Stroman at the peak of his comic career, published by Image Comics near the peak of its fanboy-dominance. 1993. The cover is black cardstock with the Tribe logo in gold-embossed letters. No art-- just the gold-embossed letters. Stroman and Johnson's names are almost bigger than the title of the book. According to Wikipedia, it was cancelled by Image before the second issue came out, because it had been delayed so much. According to Wikipedia, its final issue was issue #0.

If you explained the 90's to a kid reading comics today, do you think they would believe you?

Jinx True Crime Confessions by Brian Michael Bendis: Bendis creates a comic around a series of monologues and interviews, people talking about violence they've witnessed, pranks they've pulled. I think this is reprinted in the Total Sell-Out trade.

The selling point aren’t any characters; it has no characters. The selling point is just Bendis. The old Jinx books were just so packed with entertainment value-- letter pages, reviews, short humor strips from his Cleveland newspaper strip. That’s not really true of any of the books in my New #1 Comics stack. Everyone’s trying to make their stories the stars; no one seems very interested in communicating anything about themselves instead. Only Jersey Gods even has a letter page, and it’s not exactly rich with personality...

I doubt this one-shot would ever get made today, but it’s not like comics have ever really been set up to sell books like this. Plus: not many people seem interested in making stuff like this anyways, comics that are just entertaining without trying to sell some new character / concept / bullshit.

Stray Bullets #3 by Dave Lapham: This issue is titled "The Party," but it doesn’t have Lapham’s best party scene in it. For that, you want issue #5, the first Orson issue. But I remember when this comic first started coming out being so excited, going out-of-my-head excited, that the page numbers continued from issue to issue. You know, how if issue #2 ended at page 45, then issue #3 started at page 46...? Oh, man!

It's a strange detail to be excited by but I think a lot of people overlook how much those little details can matter for fans. The letter page in the old Bendis Jinx comics, the page numbers in Stray Bullets, the lettering in American Flagg-- just some hint that there's something going on, some extra bit of work being invested.

The new comics I’ve seen? Can I really tell any of them apart? The Great Unknown has a one-color all-blue color scheme, but even that’s becoming a thing now, maybe.

I tried Dave Lapham’s Vertigo book Young Liars again a couple weeks back, issue #13 (“The Rock Life”). I hadn’t thought much of the first issue, but the new issue had some Twilight Zone moments that were somewhat appealing. The premise apparently went in more of a science fiction direction than the first issue had promised. I didn’t think the first issue had promised anything with any particularity, at all.

Which: maybe that’s true of the other new comics I’ve read recently-- maybe they’re holding back some key part of their DNA. Reading past a first issue is essentially a leap of faith. One I’m making less often.

I went to a screening of a documentary about Joe Sedelmaier the other day. Yes, THE Joe Sedelmaier. At the Q&A afterwards, he said two things that stuck out. First, talking about the work he'd created that he hadn't felt good about, he said "I always said 'Oh-oh' when someone said to me, 'Joe, it's good for what it is.' If something's 'good for what it is', what it is is usually bullshit." I laughed and thought of Mysterius the Unfathomable. The second thing he said, before introducing a (terrific) short film he'd made: "It's about the importance of having an open mind. Everyone thinks they have an open mind, the same way everyone thinks they have a sense of humor. Usually, they don't have either." I didn't really laugh at that.

Instant Piano #1 by Kyle Baker, Mark Badger, Robbie Busch, Stephen Destefano and Evan Dorkin: This was a very uneven issue of a comedy anthology. Some comedic voices blend together well; these guys, not so much-- everyone's voices were just too different. I remember the second issue being much better, but the series didn’t last very long. Dorkin still makes comics, too rarely; Destefano works on the Venture Bros. now, I think; I don’t know what happened to Badger or Busch, though both have blogs, of course.

Challengers of the Unknown #2 by Steven Grant, Len Kaminski, John Paul Leon, Shawn Martinbrough, and Matt Hollingsworth: Aaah, John Paul Leon working with Matt Hollingsworth-- why doesn’t that happen every week?

This was in a brief era in comics in the mid-90's when everyone was trying to recreate the success of the X-Files television show. DC's solution was a Challengers of the Unknown revamp. I enjoyed it at the time—Grant & Kaminski did done-in-one “weird mystery” stories that Leon & Hollingsworth were suited for more than would always be the case in their later assignments.

But living in something else’s shadow never makes much sense in the long term. I’m no expert on positioning, but-- you know: as fun as Dan McDaid’s art is (and it’s fun), as hard as they try, can Jersey Gods ever be anything besides “that book trying to be Jack Kirby”? Jersey Gods is about Kirby; tango-dancing aside Bang Tango’s first issue didn’t promise anything besides cliched pulp crime fiction; Mysterius is about a Mandrake/Doctor-Who type character; Life & Times of Saviour 28 will likely be compared unfavorably to the current storyline in Captain America, let alone any number of other superhero "deconstruction" stories. An argument can be made here on behalf of The Great Unknown. The Great Unknown at least doesn’t feel assembled from a pop culture erector set, at least. Which isn't to say it succeeds at the whole character/dialogue/plot thing, but...

Of course, The Walking Dead perhaps started out owing some debt to George Romero; Casanova owes a debt to, well, plenty; Umbrella Academy probably pays some small licensing fee to Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol. I don’t know. There’s an expression that “bad artists copy; great artists steal.”

Casual Heroes #1 by Kevin McCarthy: This was a weirdly well-remembered celebrity superhero riff-- very fondly remembered by the few people who caught on to it, though glancing at it now, I don't really know why. The celebrity superhero riff has become old hat since this first came out; maybe it was fresher then. There were rumors that Kevin McCarthy was making comics again a few years back, but I don’t know what became of them.

Super Powers #4 by Jack Kirby, Joey Cavalieri, and Adrian Gonzales: This is terrible shit, a 10-cent bin gamble that never paid off. Jack Kirby draws a cro-magnon Superman fighting the Justice League on the cover, but nothing inside remotely pays off on the promise of that.

Adrian Gonzales draws the interiors. The cover sold the book, though. Jack Kirby. I went with the Jack Kirby hardcover LOSERS collection this week. I’d never seen any of his LOSERS comics, but I love the Kirby HOWLING COMMANDO comics. I'm only a couple issues in; so far, the Losers aren’t quite as cheerfully violent as the Howling Commandos. I like Kirby’s war comics for the violence, but I have a hard time putting the fact that he served in the war out of my head. Kirby almost lost limbs to frostbite, but could still make happy-go-lucky comics about the Losers saving a classical pianist from the Nazis...? These sugary candy-coated explosion-fantasies. But, you know, Lee Marvin made The Dirty Dozen. It's sort of amazing, sort of odd.

According to wikipedia, Kirby’s wife Roz worked in a lingerie store during the war. I’d never read that before today. What were lingerie stores like during World War 2? I never really thought about World War 2 era lingerie stores before, what that shopping experience must have been like.

“Dateline: Normandy. Jerry's nowhere to be found now that our boys landed on their shores. Goodbye, Jerry, say hello to St. Peters. Dateline: New York. Sale on Crotchless Bustiers brings Broadway to its knees-- the bee’s knees. Why, is that Vivian Leigh buying a chiffron babydoll with faux fur trimmed cups, satin bow, and g-string? Those leathers corsets she's buying provide as much support for her, as Liberty war bonds provide support for our boys. Our March to War has been silky smooth thanks to pink-satin corsets with removable straps. What’s that? Francis is getting in on the action, buying a spaghetti-strap fishnet crotchless bodystocking with low-cut, criss-cross backstraps? Thatta boy, Francis! You know who doesn’t likes Lace Deep-V Teddies? That’s right: Adolf Hitler.” Oh god, I could do this all weekend...

And weren’t they rationing fabrics during the war? Was lingerie during World War 2 made out of, what, potatoes? Sex potatoes? I’m guessing Jack Kirby's wife didn't sell very sexy lingerie. Deal with that opinion, nerds. Savage critics.

Anyways, right: comic books. I guess I gave up on my whole first issue plan. It just wasn’t leading me anywhere interesting, and I'm having a better time sticking with Jack Kirby. Same as everybody, I really enjoyed Boom Studios' and Roger Langridge's MUPPET SHOW #1-- I'm not made out of stone. Same as everybody, I liked that they didn't do some "Muppets have a Charles Dickens adventure in Space" bullshit but stuck with the Muppets at their most entertaining: theater-nerds trying to put on a show.

Past that, I’m not finding anything that means anything to me. Whatever inspired these creators to create these particular books, I didn't share in that feeling when I read them. But: I didn't give any of them much of a chance either. If I'm honest about it, I don't think I did. Everyone thinks they're open-minded but... And I don't know why that's the case, why I wouldn't be receptive to what they're selling. They're nerdy books? Well, I'm a nerdy guy so that should be an okay marriage. But: not so much. And it's disconcerting. It’s like being in a hotel-- you’re surrounded by this stuff, and it’s like, “Bed” or “Table”, stuff you like in theory. But they're not right. There’s something not right about them. There’s too many pillows.

The old hat routine: Douglas on a couple of 3/25 comics

THE MUPPET SHOW COMIC BOOK #1: I had some conflicting expectations for this one. I would not have expected a comic book based on a TV variety show inspired by stage vaudeville (and notable for excellent puppetry and famous guest stars) to be up to much good. On the other hand, Roger Langridge, who's writing and drawing it, has never to my knowledge made a comic book that's less than worthwhile--I even kind of liked GROSS POINT. It turns out to be VERY GOOD, I'm happy to say, because it reads less like a solid cartoonist servicing somebody else's trademark than like somebody had the bright idea to let Langridge have some fun with the Muppet characters. It's a Roger Langridge comic through-and-through, even within the strictly formulaic confines of the Muppet Show format--a friend pointed out that almost all the Muppets are only seen from the waist up, puppet-style, although Robin the Frog's eyebrows levitate a couple of inches into the air, comics-style. A few sequences (especially the ones involving rhymes) are straight out of Fred the Clown territory. Which is to say dry, bubbly whimsy: there's something at least kind of amusing in nearly every panel.

It's pretty impressive as a juggling act, actually: there's more of a narrative through-line here than there usually was on the TV show, but Langridge manages to cram in a Muppet News Flash, "Pigs In Space," a climactic musical number, a Statler-and-Waldorf routine, and even some guest stars: an aged pair of "Zimmer Twins" (who seem to owe a little to Dave Sim's Mick 'n' Keef). He also nails the Muppet characters' speech patterns so well you can hear their voices--particularly in a Swedish Chef sequence that's arguably even funnier for having its dialogue written rather than spoken:

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #31: This might be a first: in-story spoilers for a comic that hasn't even been solicited yet. This issue was sold as dealing with "the fallout from FINAL CRISIS," which it does, sort of. But it also follows up on some threads from JUSTICE LEAGUE: A CRY FOR JUSTICE. What's that, you ask? Well, it's the James Robinson-written Justice League series that was announced a year ago, and has now become a miniseries, "coming this July," according to a footnote. Whoops: now we know some of what happens in it.

We also now know what happened in the scenes of FINAL CRISIS where story logic (and visual logic) dictated that Hawkman and Hawkgirl died: they didn't, they just got roughed up a little. Apparently, this was a decision made after those scenes went to press. Dwayne McDuffie posted last month that "I wrote a scene set at their gravesite that I recently had to quickly rewrite into something not very good." He's right; it's not.

As for the rest of the issue, the premise is that the Justice League is failing to accomplish its objectives, which are... Right. So Hal has started another group, to do things more proactively, which is a problem, because the League can't have a situation like, say, Batman with the Outsiders, and... Anyway. Wally, the world's greatest multitasker... Never mind. So they have to disband, because... wait, that was the plot of the end of the previous JLA series... Oh the hell with it. This is not even a story: it's a set of mandated beats to which these characters can't even be tacked without stretching them until they rip. AWFUL.

What I'm Buying

Getting to know you, getting to know all about you! My "Favorites" post series will mostly be focusing on stand-alone book-format titles from throughout the years, and that's a big part of how I experience comics. But I also look forward to Wednesdays for my front-of-Previews fix as much as the next nerd (even if I end up doing things a bit differently once we get there). So I thought it might be fun to take a look at the mostly superhero/"mainstream" titles I'm digging these days. Come flip through my pull list after the jump.

I've got pretty odd and unrepresentative reading habits, I think. I switched to buying only trade paperbacks back in 2004 or so, doing so online for the most part. Working at Wizard, where we got copies of virtually everything for our library, made that pretty easy: I could still read series in their monthly installments and evaluate whether or not it was worth plunking down the money and preordering the tpb. After the Wiz gave me the boot it got a little harder, but I still have enough access to review copies and the like that I'm able to keep up with most series on a monthly basis.

So when I say I buy a book, it's the collections I'm referring to. Virtually always this means softcover--I don't like hardcovers. And that means I can often have a long time to wait before getting a copy of a series I like in my hot little hands, particularly for DC. I'm also particular about exactly what I'll pay for, and even what I'll grab for free. There are series I enjoy fine enough when reading them courtesy of a friendly PR person or a friend or by skimming a copy in the shop that I'd probably only collect if I could snag free trades, and there are also a few series I follow for some reason or other but don't care to own.

Below you'll find lists of all these kinds of books--my whole "mainstream" reading list. "The Buy Pile" is what I'm definitely buying. "On the Bubble" are books I'd happily stick on my shelves if I could grab free or super-cheap copies somehow, but I'm just not sure if I can commit the cash to buying them outright. "Following" means I stay on top of it as best I can, but I'm not interested in hanging on to it for posterity. (Notes in parentheses where warranted.)

So here's how it breaks down...

Marvel: The Buy Pile Agents of Atlas (I assume--I really liked the miniseries and so far so good for the ongoing) Captain America Criminal Daredevil The Immortal Iron Fist (Brubaker/Fraction/Aja era) Incognito Incredible Hercules Invincible Iron Man Omega the Unknown (completed) Powers Ultimate Spider-Man

Lots of Brubaker, a pair of old-school Bendis books, Fraction's Iron Man, and a smattering of titles on the fringes of the modern Marvel Universe, which is where the action tends to be for me these days.

DC: The Buy Pile Action Comics (Geoff Johns era) All Star Superman All Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder (on hiatus or something) Astro City Batman Batman & Robin (when it starts) Ex Machina The Exterminators (canceled/completed) Final Crisis (completed) Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds The Flash: Rebirth (when it starts) Green Lantern Superman: New Krypton (crossover event - completed) Superman: Secret Origin (when it starts)

I'm pretty much a Morrison/Johns man. If they gave up writing comics for Lent or something, that would pretty much mean 40 days of no DC books for me at this point. I thought The Exterminators was entertaining and intriguing; haven't finished it yet. Ex Machina I'm hopelessly behind on in the monthlies, but I think I'm all caught up in trade. Astro City is maddeningly infrequent, but when it's there, so am I. Frank Miller has a lifetime pass from me, but I'd think All Star Batman was hilarious even if he didn't.

Image: The Buy Pile Invincible Jack Staff The Walking Dead

Robert Kirkman's two improbable success stories, plus Paul Grist's superhero thing, the second book to earn the "maddeningly infrequent" label on this list.

Dark Horse: The Buy Pile B.P.R.D. Hellboy

I'll buy any and all Mignola-verse titles, including the solo spinoffs like Abe Sapien or Lobster Johnson.

Marvel: On the Bubble Immortal Iron Fist (Swierczynski era) Captain Britain & MI-13 The Stand Thor (Matt Fraction one-shots) Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk

I'm putting The Stand here simply because I feel weird putting a book containing a bunch of stuff I wrote on the Buy Pile (I'm Marvel.com's Stand correspondent and a lot of the little features I do on the book end up in the book itself). With post-Aja IIF, I'm a little iffy on the art, though Swierczynski's ideas and tone have been right in line with the Frubaker material everyone loved. With Captain Britain and Fraction's Thor, I can't decide if I like the execution as much as I like the ideas. With Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk, Damon Lindelof has earned a lot of credit with me, but I sort of want to see where it goes before deciding whether to pick it up for good.

DC: On the Bubble Action Comics (Rucka era) Green Lantern Corps Superman Superman: World of New Krypton Supergirl

The "New Krypton" crossover hooked me and I'll be buying those trades, which I assume will be collecting the comics involved by triangle number rather than by series. But now that Johns isn't involved directly in them anymore, I'm not sure if I'll be keeping that up. Similarly, I don't think I've ever actually read an issue of Green Lantern Corps that wasn't part of the Sinestro Corps War, but I enjoy the concepts Johns has introduced so much that I'm trying to track down the trades so that eventually I can read them in rapid succession and see what's what.

Marvel: Following Dark Avengers New Avengers Mighty Avengers (Bendis era) Secret Invasion (completed)

I like to keep abreast of what's going on in the Marvel U., and I like a lot of the surface qualities of Bendis's writing even when the ultimate execution is lackluster, so I've been trying to stay on top of these series even though what's actually going on in them holds little interest for me.

DC: Following Final Crisis: Rogues' Revenge (completed) Justice Society of America Secret Six

Rogues' Revenge was kind of like Geoff clearing his throat of the Flash runs that took place between his own once and future tenures on the title, so it's interesting in that regard but not something I feel the need to have on my bookshelf. JSoA is kinda like the Bendis Avengers books in that I'm fond of the writer but not too fond of what he's writing in this particular series. Secret Six features solid writing from Gail Simone and solid art from Nicola Scott, but while I find it fun, it doesn't quite click with me on an emotional level.

So there you have it. As the fella says, what looks good to you?

20 Years of Experience!

First off, the new TILTING AT WINDMILLS is up at Comic Book Resources -- it is all about the ComicsPRO meeting from last week, and also has a look inside Diamond's new warehouse.

But this week's bigger news is that on Wednesday, April 1st, it is the 20th anniversary of Comix Experience.

Whoa. Man, it sure don't feel like 20 years.

On 4/1, we're going to hold a food drive for the San Francisco Food Bank. If you bring a can of food in as a donation, then you will get 20% off absolutely anything in the store.

And, yes, Wednesday is New Comics Day; and, yes, that discount will apply to that week's new comics as well, so, y'know, it is kind of a good deal.

The discount will ONLY be given with a food donation, so do make sure you bring one, otherwise you'll have to run next door to the market and have to buy one, and you'll probably feel a little silly.

Anyway, I do hope to see you there, and I would certainly appreciate it if you can help spread the word. I'd very much like to have the big food barrel all filled up when they come to take it back the next day!

Finally, speaking personally, I know that I will be happy to take any and all donations of 20 year old scotch whiskey, and I'll be just as happy to share it with people who show up as well, so we can drink and have a good time too, as well as helping out a great charity.

Hope to see you there on Wednesday, April 1st, at Comix Experience!

-B

Hey, Kids! Comics! Reviews for March 25

Yeah, OK, so I lied to both you and myself about my scheduling. I'll be better in the future, I promise. I'll also try to be more... savage... in my criticisms, hopefully regarding some books that aren't *too* obvious of whipping boys. (What's the point of making fun of Ultimatum at this point?)

So yeah, comics!

I read some good comics! And some mediocre comics, and even one utterly, completely, fucking terrible comic, which I will review since there were complaints last time I wasn't "savage" enough. Let's see how we roll now, bitches.

New Avengers #51 Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayamn! First: Billy Tan really isn't very good at all, I'm sorry, and he needs to be put on a book more suited to big whiz-bang action sequences than this. It's the same problem David Finch had with working with Bendis (although then again David Finch found a new home with Jeph Loeb) - he just isn't very good at anything other than stuff that's supposed to make you go, "Damn! That shit is BADASS!" If it's not supposed to be badass - they can't draw it. So it's funny that the most BADASS sequences of this issue went to the immensely talented Chris Bachalo, while Billy Tan got to basically draw the Avengers version of chillin' at your bro's crib smoking a spliff and watching the Battlestar finale. But at least we don't have any blatantly repeated panels, so we're a step above last issue.

That said, the writing - I've talked a while ago on FBB about how I feel like Bendis really works better with long-term plotting, where he can drop shit out of nowhere in an issue where you're expecting standard decompression that just surprises the shit out of you. I won't spoil it for obvious reasons, but there's absolutely one of those moments in this issue, and it was unexpected and genuine and really well-done on Bendis's part. As flawed as the art is, I love these characters and Bendis's plans on them so much that I'd honestly pay $3.99 just for a printed copy of the script if I had to. In the grand scheme of things it's a Very Good chapter of a Good comic.

Amazing Spider-Man #589 Welcome to the Web-Heads, Fred Van Lente! HOPE YOU SURVIVE THE EXPERIENCE (of thousands of dorks emailing you asking when One More Day will be undone)

Siqueira does a good job on the art - he's solid but the dude needs to continue developing his own distinctive style - but it's Van Lente who's the star here, rehabilitating the Spot (from the place he left him in the Super-Villain Team-Up: M.O.D.O.K.'s 11 miniseries) and making a certain joke I won't spoil work that absolutely, positively, definitely should have been the dumbest, nerdiest, most unnecessary reference ever. But in the script - it works, and it works really well, especially with Cory Petit's assistance. Other than that, it's another Good issue of Amazing Spider-Man, which has done a pretty admirable job not being a shitty comic despite having so many chefs in the pot, especially considering the lineup of relative winners they've had since "New Ways to Die."

Immortal Iron Fist #24 Another oneshot interrupting the main story that'll probably be collected in a separate trade, but I don't really care, because the book is just brimming with ideas. I've never read D-Swyz's prose work, but I was a fan of his since I read his first issue of Cable - not because it was especially good, but because all of its problems were symptomatic of getting your brain around the medium, not of a lack of talent in the first place. The potential that I saw has been completely fulfilled since, and his work on Iron Fist - perhaps Marvel's most fertile idea-soil of a franchise in a long time - is what's done that. I mean, a pacifist Iron Fist - when Fraction and Brubaker rebooted the character in 2006, they came up with ideas like Iron Fists with guns and stuff, but the... simple complexity... of a pacifist Iron Fist could lead to any number of stories, one of which is told here and perfectly fits in to the recently-established history of K'un-Lun. Very Good.

Incredible Hercules #127, Captain America #48, Daredevil #117 Do you really need me to tell you these books are pretty great?

Oracle: The Cure #1 So, uh, yeah. This was... a comic? Kevin VanHook said he got this assignment "primarily because [he's] a computer geek." Look, I'm used to some technical inaccuracies in comics like this, I can accept them - when you're dealing with macroscale technology like Ultron or a Mother Box, I'm fully willing to accept some sort of superintelligent or divine variable that I can't fathom. But I work dealing with programming and computer logic, and this is some serious bullshit from both mathematical and logical perspectives. The Anti-Life Equation represented as a set of numerical constants transformed into diamonds that when combined blow someone's head off? Are you fucking serious? Kevin VanHook's script is internally consistent and his dialogue is relatively grounded, but there's a certain fetishistic quality to the book - especially in the shower segment drawn by Julian Lopez - that makes it fail on both the personal/microscale and big-ideas/macroscale levels. Awful.

Arriving 3/25/2009

Curse Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid git!

Yes, I'm soooooo tired from the ComicsPRO meeting: as a Board member, I was up at 7 am most every morning, and asleep at 2am most nights, and I can never ever ever sleep in hotel rooms, so I do a lot of tossing and turning because the pillow isn't the right size or whatever.

I'll have a full write up on the event for TILTING this Friday, but in the short term let me say that I was amazed and impressed by my brethren; on how hard they wanted to work, on how completely professional they were in dealing with controversial issues, on how infectious their enthusiasm was. I strongly believe that more got done this weekend for the future strength and health of this market than any 3 San Diego Comic Cons put together.

But, the rest can wait: here's this week's shipping list...

A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #101 (A)
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #589
AMBER ATOMS #2
ARCHIE DOUBLE DIGEST #197 (NOTE PRICE)
AVENGERS INITIATIVE FEATURING REPTIL #1
BATMAN BATTLE FOR THE COWL COMMISSIONER GORDON #1
BATMAN GOTHAM AFTER MIDNIGHT #11 (OF 12)
BATMAN THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #3
CAPTAIN AMERICA #48
CARTOON NETWORK BLOCK PARTY #55
CONAN THE CIMMERIAN #9
CROSSED #4 (OF 9)
DAREDEVIL #117
DARK REIGN ELEKTRA #1 (OF 5) DKR
DARKNESS #76 IRVING CVR A
DEATH DEFYING DEVIL #4
ELEPHANTMEN #17 (RES) (NOTE PRICE)
FANTASTIC FOUR #565
FUTURAMA COMICS #42
GARTH ENNIS BATTLEFIELDS DEAR BILLY #3
GEARS OF WAR #5
GUARDIANS OF GALAXY #12
HACK SLASH SERIES #21 TITUS CVR A
HERO SQUARED LOVE & DEATH #2 (OF 3)
IMMORTAL IRON FIST #24
INCREDIBLE HERCULES #127 DKR
INCREDIBLES FAMILY MATTERS #1 (OF 4)
INDIANA JONES & TOMB OF THE GODS #4 (OF 4)
JACK OF FABLES #32
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #31
MADAME XANADU #9
MARVEL ADVENTURES FANTASTIC FOUR #46
MIGHTY AVENGERS #23 DKR
MS MARVEL #37 DKR
MUPPET SHOW #1 (OF 4)
NEW AVENGERS #51 DKR
NOVA #23
ORACLE #1 (OF 3)
PHANTOM GHOST WHO WALKS #1 SY BARRY CVR
PROOF #18
RUNAWAYS 3 #8
SKAAR SON OF HULK #9
SONIC UNIVERSE #2
SPAWN #190
SQUADRON SUPREME 2 #9
STAR TREK ALIEN SPOTLIGHT TRIBBLES
STAR TREK LAST GENERATION #5
STAR TREK MISSIONS END #1
STAR WARS LEGACY #34 STORMS PART 1 OF 2
STREET FIGHTER II TURBO #5 CRUZ CVR A
SUPER HUMAN RESOURCES #2 (OF 4)
SUPERMAN #686
TAROT WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE #55
TERMINATOR SALVATION MOVIE PREQ #3 (OF 4)
THUNDERBOLTS #130 DKR
TOP 10 SPECIAL #1
TRINITY #43
UBU BUBU #4
UMBRELLA ACADEMY DALLAS #5 (OF 6)
UNKNOWN SOLDIER #6
USAGI YOJIMBO #119
WAR MACHINE #4 DKR
WAR OF KINGS DARKHAWK #2 (OF 2)
WAR THAT TIME FORGOT #11 (OF 12)
WILDCATS #9
WOLVERINE FIRST CLASS #13
WONDER WOMAN #30
X-FORCE CABLE MESSIAH WAR PROLOGUE XMW
X-INFERNUS #4 (OF 4)
X-MEN KINGBREAKER #4 (OF 4)
X-MEN SWORD OF BRADDOCKS
X-MEN TIMES AND LIFE OF LUCAS BISHOP #2 (OF 3)

Books / Mags / Stuff
AMERICAN JESUS TP VOL 01 CHOSEN
AVENGERS PREM HC HAWKEYE
BACK ISSUE #33
BERSERK TP VOL 28
BOODY BIZARE COMICS OF BOODY ROGERS GN
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG #86 SCORPION
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG #87 LADY DEATHSTRIKE
DAREDEVIL TP LADY BULLSEYE
DC SUPERHERO FIGURINE COLL MAG #04 GREEN LANTERN
DC SUPERHERO FIGURINE COLL MAG #05 FLASH
DC SUPERHERO FIGURINE COLL MAG #06 TIM DRAKE ROBIN
DC SUPERHERO FIGURINE COLL MAG #23 SPECTRE
DC SUPERHERO FIGURINE COLL MAG #24 CREEPER
DESPERADOES TP OMNIBUS
GUARDIANS OF GALAXY TP VOL 01 LEGACY
HO HC
JLA CLASSIFIED CLASSIC ONE THIRD INNER CASE
JUXTAPOZ VOL 16 #4 APR 2009
MARVEL ADVENTURES FF TP DOOMED DIGEST
MOTHER COME HOME HC
MS MARVEL TP VOL 05 SECRET INVASION
SECRET HISTORY OF THE AUTHORITY HAWKSMOOR TP
SECRET IDENTITY FETISH ART OF JOE SHUSTER HC
SECRET INVASION TP AMAZING SPIDER-MAN
SECRET INVASION TP THOR
SHOWCASE PRESENTS AMBUSH BUG TP VOL 01
SIMPSONS COMICS TP VOL 17 HIT THE ROAD
STAR TREK MAGAZINE #17 NEWSSTAND ED
STITCH GN
SUPERMAN BATMAN ENEMIES AMONG US TP
SUPERMEN FIRST WAVE OF HEROES (1939-41) GN
TED MCKEEVER LIBRARY HC VOL 03 METROPOL
TEZUKAS BLACK JACK TP VOL 04
TICK THE COMPLETE EDLUND TP (O/A)
TOMARTS ACTION FIGURE DIGEST #176
WALKING TOUR OF THE SHAMBLES SC NEW PTG (O/A)
WIZARD MAG #211 GOLD ALEX MALEEVE SPIDER-WOMAN CVR

What looks good to YOU?

-B

My Life is Choked with Comics #18 - King Smurf

The Politics of Smurfing

This is the story of the day the Smurfs became terrorists.

***

In 1965, the comics album King Smurf (Le Schtroumpfissime) was released to French-reading audiences. It was drawn by 'Peyo' (Pierre Culliford), the artist and animator who had created the Smurfs (Les Schtroumpfs) in 1958 as impish supporting characters for his Johan et Pirlouit medieval adventure series. It was written with Yvan Delporte, editor-in-chief of Le Journal de Spirou, the Belgian comics magazine in which the story had been serialized.

In 1978, the Belgian publisher Dupuis licensed an English translation of the album to Random House -- sans its original back-up story (Schtroumphonie en Ut) -- for simultaneous release in Canada and the United States. As evidenced by the back cover of the U.S. edition, an entire line of English-language Smurfs books had been released (or at least planned) by that time, although the franchise's prolifigate merchandise had only just begun to materialize stateside, its longstanding smash success in Europe not quite yet gone supernova.

In 1981, the animation studio Hanna-Barbera Productions introduced its wildly popular television adaptation of the Smurfs, which ultimately ran for 256 half-hour episodes, until 1990. It was a cultural force. Most of you reading this can still whistle that damned theme song. Yes you can. R1 dvd box sets began appearing in early 2008, although I suspect many viewers were not aware that the little blue characters were approaching their 50th anniversary, or that it all used to be a comic, or that the comic used to be political, sometimes, owing to its time and place.

King Smurf was adapted into an episode of the animated series in its first season. The edges were smoothed down considerably. But then, the Smurf Village is a secret place, and I expect the comic book Smurfs would rather keep a few things to themselves.

***

Our tale begins on a beautiful night in Smurf Village. Papa Smurf, who is totally not a Communist, is up late cooking up some alchemical thing for a no-doubt beneficial purpose.

But wait! Papa is fresh out of the suggestively-named herb "Euphorbium," which is crucial to the success of his project! We're never told what exactly Euphorbium does, or how it ran out, but my current theory connects it to the community service obligations that required Papa's appearance in Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. Anyway, it's obvious this little ritual to Glycon won't work without it.

I do think the whole explosive materials in the lab deal is what's known as 'the pistol in act one,' just a heads up.

As such, Papa takes off the next morning to fetch some herb on "the other smurf of the mountains," where I presume the police helicopters cannot navigate. He asks his Smurfs to "be very smurf" while he's gone, at which point a Smurf smurfs in to suggest a round of smurf, but then Brainy Smurf smurfs in like a smurfwit and starts demanding everyone work on restoring a bridge and shit (smurf). The gang isn't terribly enthused about addressing Smurf Village's longstanding infrastructure problems.

Oh right, "go to smurf," yeah! Did you think me and your elementary school classmates were the only ones to play the 'replace ass with smurf' game? No, I kind of expect that possibility occurred to Peyo approximately three seconds after he and fellow cartoonist André Franquin came up with the Smurf (Schtroumpf) language over dinner, and may indeed have made up the majority of the Schtroumpf-related interactions for the remainder of the week.

You do know the Smurf language, right? And how the different Smurfs have different characteristics, even though they look pretty much the same? Brainy Smurf is slightly more complicated, in that he's both a brain and a total dipshit who's usually wrong about things. He's actually a really good, funny character in this particular comic, a very specific-seeming caricature of (pseudo)intellectual elites as social conformists, trusting in the status quo to reward them for their blustering support while remaining totally clueless to anything outside of their frame of reference.

Naturally, Brainy expects to be hailed leader of the Smurfs, more or less because he figures it's his turn, just for being as brainy as him. This (again) doesn't go over well with the other Smurfs, who eventually opt for their first-ever display of "universal smurffrage." A few kinks in the plan quickly emerge.

The philosophical profundity in the bottom left corner comes from Grouchy Smurf, who boasts one of the more iconographically questionable origins in comics history, having been a sunny Smurf who was bitten by a bug that turned his skin black and made him violent and sour; more and more Smurfs were bitten and made black, until Papa managed to expunge the blackness from Smurf society, although Grouchy was still grouchy afterwards. This all went down in 1963's The Black Smurfs (Les Schtroumpfs Noirs), not available in English.

Getting back to the story, a lone anonymous Smurf soon arrives at a startling revelation: if he promises people stuff, they'll vote for him! So, when Brainy Smurf finishes boring some other Smurf to tears via assertions of his Papa-approved greatness, Our Smurf zips in and promises to pass a law outlawing bores - success!

Soon Lazy Smurf is promised a Right-Not-to-Work Bill, Harmony Smurf is promised a position as first trumpet in the Big Smurf Band and Vanity Smurf is complimented on his immense physical beauty. Smurf Prime even makes sure to urge Dopey Smurf to vote for Brainy, trusting that he'll somehow screw it up. Speaking of Brainy, the niceties of the political process seem to have escaped him.

Before long, Smurf (and yes, it's always just VOTE FOR SMURF, since it could be anyone in his position, you see) is having parades in his honor, and delivering hot campaign speeches before inviting the lads out for drinks while Brainy babbles on and on about his status as virtual incumbent to an audience of Grouchy, who hates drinking.

Election day arrives. It's a real nest of vipers, chock-full of thrown-out ballots and rampant fraud; thank heavens there's no appeals in Smurf Village, or we'd still be awaiting the results.

In the end, Smurf-Just-Smurf emerges winner of the farce, with Brainy receiving votes from only himself and Dopey Smurf, who is so phenomenally stupid that he managed to screw up fulfillment of Smurf's intent for him to screw up, paradoxically arriving at the correct result for possibly the first time ever. The total voting population of Smurf Village, by the way, is exactly 100, counting the absentee Papa. I only ask that you dedicate your next trivia night victory to me.

***

If you really want to understand the Smurfs-in-comics, though, just take a look at their feet. Fat, oval lumps, real dinner rolls.

Oh, I'm sure there's some longstanding precident for that look, and it's obviously been used in many places subsequent. But I always associate it with Belgian comics of that period, specifically the tight-knit "Marcinelle school" of Belgian cartooning, named for the town surrounding Dupuis, aesthetically headquartered in the Spirou anthology and bound by blood (and marketing) to always oppose Le Journal de Tintin, home of Hergé and the style that would become known as the ligne claire, the "clear line," after some Dutch guy cooked up a sufficiently catchy name in the '70s.

The Marcinelle school was different, focusing broadly on vigorously cartooned forms and the illusion of movement. Granted, there were several individual departures, including, ironically, the "school's" founder, Joseph "Jijé" Gillain, who eventually developed a distinct oscellation between a clear line-inspired cartoon approach and a polished 'realistic' style, a dichotomy later replicated by his noteworthy pupil, the Frenchman Jean "Moebius" Giraud. But the core identity of the style was nonetheless firm, perfected in the works of André Franquin, the great cartoonist who headed Spirou's flagship series, Spirou et Fantasio, in its mighty golden age.

However, almost nobody in the U.S. has heard of Spirou et/ou Fantasio, whereas everyone over the age of 15 has heard of the Smurfs, and so they are the sealed-in-amber conclusion of the Marcinelle school for many American eyes. And while Peyo was no Franquin, there's something about the uniform chubby roundness of the lil' blue devils that suggests a summary at work, a distillation of accrued cartooning tropes into factory-ready icons, every one perfect, and perfectly ready to adopt specific, isolated attributes: Brainy, Lazy, Grouchy, etc. After all, if you're not going to tend toward realism, as the Tintin school did, you might as well plunge into sheer iconography, the sure symbol of Smurf society.

But that's no secret; it's as plain as your eyes, regardless of your personal awareness as to Papa's seat in Belgian comics history.

No, the mystery is provided by Delporte, who lived until 2007 and wrote a ferocious amount of comics, not to mention his share of scripts for the Smurfs cartoon show. As stated above, though, the Saturday morning iteration tended to be sedate, in spite of the slapstick, while Delporte's Smurf scripts for comics took on an often satirical edge. They were children's comics, sure, but keenly aware of their place in a society owned and operated by adults.

Take, for example, 1973's Smurf Vs. Smurf; I haven't read it (since it's never been translated to English), but Wikipedia's summary suggests that it's a fairly pointed lampoon of the strife between the Dutch-speaking northern region of Belgium (Flanders) and the French-speaking South (Wallonia), as translated to an ongoing Smurf Village argument between the verb-dominant Smurfs (ex: I wanna smurf you like an animal) and their noun-dominant brothers (I wanna fuck you like a smurf). All-out war in the streets soon erupts, leaving Papa to restore peace via the conclusion of the hit comic book and motion picture Watchmen.

I'm serious; the story ends in almost exactly the same general manner as the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons classic, with Papa fabricating a threat by villain and gourmand Gargamel so as to pretty much scare the warring Smurfs into a state of peace. I sure hope Wikipedia isn't pulling my leg, since there's even apparently an ambiguous ending suggesting that the harmony may be short-lived! No word on whether Grouchy Smurf narrates from a journal kept of the story's events, or if any right-wing publications discover it in the end.

***

But oh, dear readers, trouble soon arrives in the fair Smurf municipality. The freshly-elected Smurfy Smurf hustles into his room to change into a little something he'd obviously been working on for a while: a brand-new footy pants 'n cap combo, forged from pure gold. Or, colored in that manner, unsuccessfully.

Undeterred, Our Man declares that all shall henceforth refer to him as King Smurf, resulting in highly respectful peals of laughter. No matter: when Harmony Smurf pops into the His Majesty's office to collect on his Big Smurf Band promise, King Smurf gives him a really fancy title (First Chief Head Spokesman), outfits him with a drum, and sends him out to announce that all Smurfs will respect and obey, or face terrible consequences.

This prompts Hefty Smurf (who is strong) to bust into the King's room to kick his ass. But King Smurf knows what desires lurk in a powerful Smurf's heart.

In mere minutes, Hefty has lined up an honor guard of fellow Smurfs, armed with deadly blades. Brainy can't believe he wasn't picked. Tiring of his shabby digs, King Smurf decides to put the rest of the village to work building him a rightly awesome palace. Sensing another authority figure whom he can leap behind, Brainy takes up his tools while the guards round up the rest of the Smurfs. The reign of terror has begun.

Yes, forced labor is the new rule of the day! Smurfs now live as slaves, worked to the bone under threat of death! The rule of law is useless too, and inequality reigns supreme; poor Jokey Smurf gets hauled before His Eminence for pulling off one of his knee-slapping 'exploding gift' tricks on a guard, and comes face to hideously singed face with the new double standard.

Sending a man to jail for innocently detonating a bomb in someone's face in the name of fun is step #5 or #6 down the road to totalitarianism, as I've personally mentioned to several magisterial district judges, so you can imagine the uproar in the Smurf community following Jokey's arrest and detention. But a march on the palace only leads the Smurfs to be held back at speartip, and the crowd is soon dispersed. Is there no hope left in this town?

Under the cover of night, a shadow falls across a mushroom house. A cloaked figure evades the evening patrol. He knocks on a door, whispers a password, and enters. Then descends. There's friends waiting, under the earth.

La résistance! De weerstand! A regular White(-Hatted) Brigade! Smurfs should not fear their government - the government should fear its Smurfs!!

No time at all is wasted. The Secret Smurf Society drugs a guard, busts into the prison and runs like hell to the woods beyond the village. Brainy Smurf, no doubt anticipating a change in the winds, happens to be with them, and also manages to be the only one caught. For the remainder of the comic, he'll occasionally get a one-panel cut to his prison cell, in which he'll ponder when his friends will be around to break him out and hail him as a hero. Nobody will ever come.

That's probably the most powerful lesson a young person can take from the Smurfs: don't be an asshole.

***

The politics of King Smurf in particular -- or at least its deep-seated distrust of political mechanisms -- likewise had some probable correlation with the adult life of Belgium surrounding its creation.

After all, both Peyo and Delporte were born in 1928, positioning their individual comings-of-age directly against the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, in which many citizens were shipped away for use as forced labor in the Nazi machine. It's extraordinarily easy to see those rebel Smurfs' covert activities as reminiscent of the many factions of the Belgian resistance, often squirreled away in the woods, spiriting away downed pilots and evading capture to subvert another day.

However, this reading seems insufficient, since neither Belgians nor Smurfs elected Adolph Hitler, who was not specifically a king. No, Belgian had a king of its own, Leopold III, a controversial man in those days of struggle. It had been less than three weeks since the German invasion of May, 1940, when the King of the Belgians announced the nation's surrender, without the approval of the legislature. Compounding the difficulty, Leopold III chose to remain in Belgium under the occupation, while the civil government eventually repositioned itself in London, outside the village of mushrooms, although unsuccessful overtures were made to construct full occupational governance in Belgium.

This resulted in a duly anarchic state of affairs, with the Belgian monarch and legislature-in-exile declining to entirely recognize one another's authority, neither body cooperating with the Nazis and their military government, and various aspects of the resistance -- necessarily separated by language, remember -- sometimes operating to their own ends.

Interestingly, though, from this chaos grew the might of the Marcinelle school, the home of the Smurfs. Imported comics became inaccessible, leaving gaps to be filled; Jijé drew a considerable amount of Spirou's content in those days, including a few off-label episodes of the American comics the magazine was running at the time, like Superman. By the time the war ended, Jijé had the authority to appoint younger artists like Franquin to fill slots, thus seeding the future of Spirou in the trodden dirt of war. Peyo followed several years later, having met Franquin & company as a teenage animator during the occupation.

Still, formative an artistic age as it was, it couldn't have been the best time for instilling pride in civic coordination in a pair of young men, to say nothing of respect for His Majesty, who was deported by the German military government in 1944, and, following the end of the war, settled in Switzerland while the returned Belgian government set about determining whether he was a literal traitor (A: no). His eventual return to the domain in 1950 was marked with violence and civil disoedience, particularly in the Wallonia region, and he abdicated the throne in 1951.

Yet while it's probably not a stretch to position Peyo's & Delporte's vision of governance-as-free-for-all as purely a product of the domestic upheaval which, in its way, brought them to the place they were, there were separate breakdowns going on as the comic itself was drawn, farther away, but still close.

***

King Smurf is on edge after the jailbreak, and his enforcers are attentive to even the slightest departure from the usual. Still, Smurfs sometimes manage to slip away from the village, trusting that their faith won't get them killed by their exiled brothers out in the trees.

Serious shit those Smurfs are into. Covert activities have been sowing the seeds of discord in the village too:

Yes, they're threatening to kill him. Or, I dunno, maybe "Smurf to King Smurf" means "Voter Recall to King Smurf"; I don't even know how you read those things. Is it subtle shifts in the handwriting? A perfect in the 'S' the difference between libel and reverence? Oh the debates I have with my anime hug pillows!

Regardless, King Smurf clearly gets the message, and opts to put a crack forestry investigatory together the only way he knows how: by appealing to everyone's basest instincts.

I really do truly love that this comic is aimed squarely at kids. There's no respect for anything at all in here. Not military service, not heads of state, not the fundamentals of democracy... it's great! It's awesome, noisy slapstick paired up with bizarre fits of witty sophistication, all in a crispy pretzel cone of rampant anti-authoritarianism. How could the cartoon get so fucking saccharine? Smurfs have teeth! Shit out in the woods? It bites you.

So, King Smurf leads his decorated fellows out into the forest to smoke out the rebels. What results can best be described as a rib-tickling military quagmire (aren't they all?), with people falling into holes, getting soaked with water and opening strange gifts in the middle of nowhere to unhappy conclusions.

The campaign is a disaster. King Smurf and his men turn tail and retreat as the rebels laugh and jeer. Defections are evident. Still defiant, King Smurf declares that all Smurfs shall now join the military or face jail. A wall is erected around the Smurf Village. Nobody gets in or out.

A message from the other side is delivered.

Abdicate, Your Highness, or draw your sword. The King of the Smurfs opts for the latter.

It's time to get down to some serious killing.

***

Belgium's colonialist disposition was in for a shift as World War II ended. For our purposes, some symbolism can be dragged from the work of Hergé, whose Tintin in the Congo contained several unconcerned references to the colony's status as such in its 1931 initial printing, which were removed by the artist in an extensive 1946 revision.

Outside of comics, pressure for Congolise self-government was building as the '50s moved forward; riots erupted in 1959 upon Belgian prohibition of a meeting by the increasingly formidable ethnic association ABAKO, resulting in some allowance for Congolise participation in governance, and the subsequent formation of dozens of political parties.

Events passed with tremendous speed. Plans to transition the colony into independence compressed, and free elections were held in May of 1960. The Mouvement National Congolais-Lumumba performed well, and the formal handover of power occurred on June 30, 1960. However, not a week later, a mutiny broke out against remaining foreign military officers, leading to the entrance of the Belgian army and, by August, the secession of two areas -- the mining-rich province of Katanga, still close to Belgian industry, and the region of South Kasai -- and the intervention of the United Nations. This situation (and I'm wildly simplifying here) also led to prime minister Patrice Lumumba requesting aid from the Soviet Union to press into Kasai, after which strife exploded in the parliment and army chief of staff Joseph Mobutu, with support from the American CIA, ultimately took power in a military coup.

The struggle continued through the 1960s. In 1964, the year King Smurf began serialization, violent rebellions broke out, which again saw involvement by Belgium and the U.S. In 1965, the year the comic was published in a collected edition, Mobutu (who had previously suspended the parliment) launched a second coup and prohibited all political organizations save for his. This was the backdrop for the story's creation and release, in addition to the bloody division of Ruanda-Urundi into Rwanda & Burundi. The motif of elections leading to conflict seems perhaps informed by such current events.

Naturally, the comic's satire isn't directly on point. I speculate. And frankly, a noxious reading is possible from that perspective, a clucking of the tongue at those silly Smurfs thinking they can run things without the undemocratic wisdom of Papa around - my god, can names get any more paternalistic than "Papa"?

Yet maybe I'm wrong to look to the Smurf's feet for their secrets. Maybe the answer to everything is on top of their heads.

Those wilted cone things aren't their skulls, you know; they're Phrygian caps, and I'm not talking gallbladders. I mean headgear of antiquity, used in ancient Greek art as a symbol of foreignness, and in Roman culture as an accoutriment of freedom, worn by freedmen. Sometimes there was a martian connotation; if you should even encounter a Smurf running at you quoting Horace in Latin at the top of his lungs, the meaning will be clear. The caps were later adopted by the American and French Revolutions for their long-built association with liberty. The red cap was preferred, but putting Papa and his Smurfs together gives you something cumulative: the colors of both lands, red, white and blue.

And if indeed the Smurfs, as icons, as drawings, as mentioned above, are a distillation of accrued cartooning tropes, perfectly molded identities upon which endless human characteristics can be imprinted, the widest exposure of the Marcinelle school, grown from the dirt of World War II and wearing liberty caps and fighting in the midst of a democratic collapse in a time of post-colonialist democratic collapse, then - isn't their uniformity especially and awfully human? Isn't there a metaphor at work in these blue gnomes born it seems with freedom atop their brows?

Doesn't everyone want to be actualized? To be in control of themselves? And don't we still fall into groups, communities of desire or necessity, to our benefit and peril?

That's the real conflict of Smurf village, illustrated in King Smurf. To long to stand for yourself, but for individuality to be your downfall, and to become a collective, all again for freedom; resistance, rebellion, subjugation. Liberty atop the brow, all Smurf underneath, just lose Brainy's glasses and shave Papa's beard.

Er, and there's Smurfette, I guess, but she's not in this comic, and that's another story.

***

Thus:

What more needs to be said?

Do note, though, that while the Smurfs hold clubs and rocks and spears and things, and sometimes bite one another's asses, most of the actual warfare goes on via the not-very-deadly tomato, which Peyo nonetheless uses for maximum graphic detail, red on white. It's an impressive balancing act, maintaining an appropriateness for children while getting the point across without a lot of obfusication. I mean:

As the battle rages, some hot-blooded patriot gets the bright idea to raid Papa's lab, which we've long ago established contains a lot of explosive materials, no doubt stockpiled for the revolution Papa won't be heading, in that he is not a Communist. The bomb is lit, and chucked into the palace, and in a glorious flash of victory the walls of the oppressor come falling, mostly around Brainy Smurf, who was still locked inside. Ah, he's a big guy, he can take it.

Before long, the war's conclusion is certain. The final press is made. No quarter given. We're gonna see what color a Smurf bleeds. This had to happen. This is how you water a society.

And then, Papa walks in, before anyone's head seriously loses track of its shoulders. He's unhappy to an extent that even a green sack full of Euphorbium cannot counteract, not that he'd ever try that stuff.

I like the pike driven through the red-stained home on the left; they should have ended more episodes of the Get Along Gang with images like that.

Yep, with Papa back in town, order is soon restored. King Smurf volunteers to clean up the village all by himself, but soon every Smurf is jumping in to help. Everyone is happy, and democracy is rightfully relegated to the scrap heap of bad ideas. I mean, nobody comes out and says that, no, but it's not left unclear that Smurf Village probably won't be seeing another election day for a quite a while; what's the need, with Papa back? I mean it: the comic concludes with the heroes rejecting democracy and it's a happy ending.

All right, ok, but what are the Smurfs? Politically? Like, isn't this a weaselly ending, the whole book talking all sorts of shit about the perils of authority and then spinning around and having the Smurfs just agree with whatever Chairman Papa says?

Jesus, 'Papa' does have that paternalist bite.

Which makes sense, because, on the surface, not as icons, not symbols or allegories, without thinking about it too hard - the Smurfs are children, in the way their audience is children. And surely children need to listen to their parents when it's time to go to bed.

But that's the only authority this comic nods toward as valid. The parent, calling an end to playtime, and scolding the kiddies for acting like "human beings," which we might as well call adults, specifically the adults a child witnesses beyond their parents' adoration. Don't grow up to be like them. Don't make their mistakes.

Someday they'll be old enough to know their parents hold some responsibility. Until then, you know what they can do with the shit stupid robes of those awful motherfuckers?

Sadly, this wouldn't be the final conflict to bedevil the good Smurf Village.

***

In 2005, a certain commercial for UNICEF aired on European television.

Produced with the agreement of the family of Peyo, who died in 1992, the short piece depicted happy, dancing Smurfs and their delightful music annihilated by aerial bombing, their shouts of terror giving way the the squeals of Baby Smurf, a future bomb-thrower, an anticipatory gunman aimed, in potential, toward the next village, the next nation, sitting in the center of a heap of blue corpses, their faces blackened in that Marcinelle manner.

Witnessing this terrible scene, it is not difficult to imagine the tiny Smurfling growing to find a mask and wear it, and hide among the trees. This time it won't be tomatoes, and there's no Papa left to stop it.

The ad campaign was initiated to raise money for the rehabilitation of child soldiers in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the former colonies of Belgium.

And history's great burden is that it never does end.

***

Nothing ever seems to end.

February 2009 sales

ICv2 has the latest sales figures up; and they're reporting that GN sales are down by 9%.

Well, OK, but I'm reasonably certain that isn't a function of actual sales in the DM. Actually, it is almost certain that's really a function of Diamond moving their Memphis warehouse in February.

Starting February 4th, Diamond stopped ALL reorders so they could do the move. This was supposed to last for something like 10 days. But, even the "top sellers" didn't start flowing again until the end of the month. As of today, 3/17, they STILL haven't completed the move 100%. According to today's Diamond Daily (Gated, sorry) they've managed to move 17,800 of 20k SKUs -- there's still more than 2000 SKUs they haven't yet reactivated. *sigh*

February was the best of bad choices to move the warehouse -- Feb is usually a "dead" month, by and large -- but we had an unusual number of VERY strong books this February, including, yeah, WATCHMEN as well as things like BATMAN RIP and the 5th SCOTT PILGRIM book.

You wonder why your LCS didn't have SCOTT PILGRIM for most of February? It sure wasn't their fault (well, at least for the stores that know how to order) -- Diamond didn't fill a SINGLE reorder for it for 3-ish weeks!

ICv2 didn't bother to note this, but I'd sure hope that in the official record books Feb '09 gets an asterisk next to it because of the warehouse move (Are you listening John Mayo and John Jackson Miller?) -- given that reorders were effectively nil for 3-ish weeks in February, I think that ONLY a 9% drop should be looked at as a HUGE gain for the month; given the lack of reorders anything less than double digits is probably a positive.

(At Comix Experience, we had our best February in nineteen of them, despite being reorder-less)

There's probably going to be a certain amount of yelling this week in Memphis...

-B

Arriving 3/18/2009

I'm hectic with the ComicsPRO Memphis meeting this week, so here's the list of what we're supposed to arrive...

2000 AD #1622
2000 AD #1623
2000 AD #1624
AGE OF BRONZE #28
AIR #7
AMAZING SPIDER-GIRL #30
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #588
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN EXTRA #3
ANGEL #19
AZRAEL DEATHS DARK KNIGHT #1 (OF 3)
BAD DOG #2 (NOTE PRICE)
BETTY & VERONICA DOUBLE DIGEST #169 (NOTE PRICE)
BETTY & VERONICA SPECTACULAR #88
BLACK LIGHTNING YEAR ONE #6 (OF 6)
BOMB QUEEN V #6 (OF 6)
CHURCH OF HELL #1
DARK AVENGERS #3 DKR
DEAD #3 KINGDOM OF FLIES
DEADPOOL GAMES OF DEATH
END LEAGUE #7
ENDERS GAME BATTLE SCHOOL #4 (OF 5)
ETERNALS #9
EUREKA #3 (OF 4)
FALL OF CTHULHU APOCALYPSE #4 (OF 4)
FRANK FRAZETTAS FREEDOM FRAZETTA CVR A
GHOST WHISPERER THE MUSE #4
GREATEST AMERICAN HERO #2 (OF 3)
GROOM LAKE #1
HELLBLAZER #253
HOTWIRE #2 (OF 5) PUGH CVR A
INVINCIBLE #60
JUGHEAD #194 (NOTE PRICE)
KULL #5 (OF 6)
LILLIM #1 (OF 5)
MARVEL ADVENTURES AVENGERS #34
MAURA #1
MOON KNIGHT #28
MYSTERIUS THE UNFATHOMABLE #3 (OF 6)
NINJA HIGH SCHOOL #168
OUTSIDERS #16
POTTERS FIELD STONE COLD ONE-SHOT
PUNISHER #3 DKR
RAWBONE #1
RED SONJA #42
SCOURGE OF GODS #3 (OF 3)
SIMPSONS COMICS #152
SPIDER-MAN NOIR #4 (OF 4)
STAR TREK COUNTDOWN #3
STAR TREK CREW #1
STAR WARS KNIGHTS O/T OLD REPUBLIC #39 DUELING AMBITIONS PAR
STORMWATCH PHD #20
SUPER FRIENDS #13
SUPERGIRL #39
TINY TITANS #14
TRINITY #42
TRUE TALES O/T ROLLER DERBY DOPPELGANGER A/T HANGER
ULTIMATE X-MEN #100
ULTIMATUM #3 (OF 5)
UNCANNY X-MEN #507
VIGILANTE #4
VINCENT PRICE PRESENTS #5
WATCHMENSCH
WITCHBLADE #125 BACHALO DANI CVR A
WOLVERINE #71
WOLVERINE ORIGINS #34 DKR
WORLD OF WARCRAFT #17
X-FACTOR #41
X-FILES #5 (OF 6)
X-FORCE #13
X-MEN LEGACY #222
YOUNG X-MEN #12
ZOMBIES THAT ATE THE WORLD #2
ZORRO #11

Books / Mags / Stuff
1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS ADVENTURES OF SINBAD TP VOL 01
ADVENTURES OF BLANCHE HC
AIR TP VOL 01 LETTERS FROM LOST COUNTRIES
ALAN MOORE LIGHT OF THY COUNTENANCE GN
AMERICAN FLAGG DEFINITIVE COLL TP VOL 02 (RES)
BATMAN CHRONICLES TP VOL 07
BATMAN HAUNTED GOTHAM TP
CINEFEX #117 APR 2009
COMPLETE JUST A PILGRIM HC
COURTNEY CRUMRIN TP VOL 04 MONSTROUS HOLIDAY
DRINKY CROWS MAAKIES TREASURY HC
FALLEN ANGEL OMNIBUS TP VOL 01
GEEK MONTHLY APR 2009
GOLDEN AGE SHEENA QUEEN O/T JUNGLE TP 02
HACK SLASH TP VOL 05
ILLUSTRATION MAGAZINE #2 2ND PTG
ILLUSTRATION MAGAZINE #25
JUDGE DREDD COMPLETE CASE FILES TP VOL 12
JUNGLE BOOK HC
LARGO WINCH TP VOL 03 DUTCH CONNECTION
LITTLE NOTHINGS GN VOL 02 PRISONER SYNDROME
LOST CONSTELLATIONS THE ART OF TARA MCPHERSON
LUCKY LUKE TP VOL 15 DALTONS IN THE BLIZZARD
MIGHTY AVENGERS TP VOL 03 SECRET INVASION BOOK 01
MY MOMMY IS IN AMERICA & SHE MET BUFFALO BILL HC
NECRONOMICON TP
NEW MUTANTS CLASSIC TP VOL 04
NIKOLAI DANTE BEAST OF RUDINSHTEIN TP
PLATINUM GRIT TP VOL 01
PLUTO URASAWA X TEZUKA GN VOL 02
POWERS TP VOL 12 COOLEST DEAD SUPERHEROES
PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL TP VOL 04
RED STAR SWORD OF LIES TP VOL 01
RONINBEBOP SC
SOLEIL SAMURAI HC VOL 01 LEGEND
SQUADRON SUPREME TP PRE WAR YEARS
SQUADRON SUPREME TP VOL 01 POWER TO THE PEOPLE
TOR A PREHISTORIC ODYSSEY HC
X-MEN FIRST CLASS TP WONDER YEARS

What looks good to YOU?

-B

Favorites: The Last Lonely Saturday

The Last Lonely Saturday Jordan Crane, writer/artist Red Ink, 2000 Currently available from Fantagraphics 80 pages, softcover or hardcover $8

I find it both impossible and undesirable to separate The Last Lonely Saturday from the pivotal role it played in my life as a comics reader, and thus in my life in general. During the year 2001 I took a job as an editor at the A&F Quarterly, Abercrombie & Fitch's big giant magazine/catalog/softcore porn hybrid publication. My boss there, Savas Abadsidis, was and is a big fanboy, and a chance encounter with a Wizard magazine on his desk, which contained an article teasing an upcoming revamp of the X-Men by Grant Morrison (whom I remembered favorably from my days as a comics reader in high school for Arkham Asylum) and Frank Quitely, led me into Jim Hanley's Universe on 33rd Street to track down the series. This was the first time I'd entered a comic shop to purchase anything that wasn't either an isolated Acme Novelty Library, Savage Dragon, or Frank Miller comic in years--the birth of my modern comics readership. (The rest of the story after the jump...)

Intrigued by the offerings on hand, and empowered by a complete lack of editorial oversight that enabled us to write about anything we wanted in the Quarterly--not to mention Abercrombie's expense account--I made a solemn vow to buy something completely unfamiliar to me every week. Jordan Crane's The Last Lonely Saturday was one of my first such purchases. From there it was a short journey to Crane's anthology NON, his distributor Highwater Books, the Fort Thunder aesthetic in general, and thence all of alternative comics.

None of that was likely to happen if I didn't just love The Last Lonely Saturday to pieces. And that itself might seem unlikely. It's a slight book--many of its 80 pages are endpapers, and the rest contain all of two panels apiece. Dialogue is minimal; the majority of it of it comes from a little boy's triplet proclamations: "It's a man," "Look man run," "Ha ha! Windy!" It has a simple red, white, and orange color scheme. Although a ghost is involved and a character dies, we're pretty far from the violent morality plays that make up much of Crane's recent work.

What The Last Lonely Saturday is is a love story, a romantic fable. To some eyes, it might be a creepy one at that. In the tradition of the Police's "Every Breath You Take," albeit in something of a gender reversal from that song, Saturday could be looked at as a depiction of the role fixation and selfishness, even emotional violence, frequently play in love. But just as the sweeping, insistent, intimate, evocative sound of "Every Breath You Take" make it one of the great love songs regardless of the obsessive lyrics, so too the particulars of The Last Lonely Saturday make it pretty much the best love story in comics form I've ever come across. Crane's character designs are at their most adorable here. His jolly little potato-shaped protagonist, with his rumpled suit and charmingly crinkled brow, looks like the grandpa of our collective unconscious made real. His beloved Elenore's jaunty hairdo, long eyelashes, and high-wattage smile evoke beauty and charm that transcends her cartoony form, while her two lines of flashback dialogue upon receiving flowers from her beau ("Oh sweet heart! They're just lovely!") nail me to the floor with sweetness every time. Everything seems airy--leaves and papers float and twirl in the breeze, the little old man's car jauntily jumps along the road, puffy white clouds are a constant presence in the background--until, at the story's moment of truth, Crane weighs down his line and crumples his art toward the center of the panel. I'm a huge, huge sucker for emotionally devastated old men, so imagine my utter joy when our hero is granted a reunion with his dear Elenore! (Think the video for Blur's "Coffee & TV" and you've pretty much got it.) At that point, it doesn't matter to me how it happened--that it did happen is what's important, and that Elenore understands that is what makes this a great love story, in that it appreciates that what can seem unpleasant to outsiders is, within that world of two, an act of grace. It's an intelligent, moving, beautiful, terrific little comic.

Okay, so you're a rocket scientist: Diana on 3/12

Mr. Kyle Baker, you got some 'splainin' to do. I hate to start reviews with that God-awful cliche "I liked his old stuff better!" but for context's sake, WHY I HATE SATURN still makes me laugh. I say that because I think I picked up and read SPECIAL FORCES expecting the same kind of manic energy you'll find with Anne Merkel and her crazy sister, or with Larry running amok in the streets of New York in I DIE AT MIDNIGHT.

SPECIAL FORCES #4... did not make me laugh.

It may be that I'm just sick of politics-via-comics in general: in a medium where subtlety is the exception rather than the rule, I can't think of many instances where political/military criticism didn't come off as awkward and simplistic, where valid points are submerged under a wave of bile that aspires to be clever and falls far short of the mark (pick a Millar comic, any Millar comic).

Or it may be that SPECIAL FORCES seems to be making contradictory points: on the one hand, Felony and Zone represent an implicit accusation that the United States Army recruited people for the Iraq war who had no business on the battlefield. Baker helpfully attaches news articles describing the recruitment and eventual dismissal of an autistic teenager to demonstrate that there's a bit of truth in this fiction.

On the other hand, these "unfit soldiers" turn out to be as capable (if not moreso) of getting the job done. Doesn't that suggest that the Army was right to enlist them in the first place? If an autistic kid succeeds where entire squadrons of trained soldiers fail (in pretty embarrassing ways), that sends a very different message and doesn't quite match the critical tone Baker's aiming for.

But there's something more essential that's missing here. The situation in Iraq is no laughing matter, and yet I can't help wishing that SPECIAL FORCES had exhibited more of Baker's snark and wit - as it stands, it's pretty much just an EH story that tries to send a message far too aggressively to be successful.

X-MEN: NOIR #4 also came out this week, wrapping up Marvel's first foray into what seems to be a rising Noirverse (although I'm still curious as to how DAREDEVIL: NOIR will distinguish itself from Ed Brubaker's DAREDEVIL: POORLY-LIT URBAN CRIMEFIGHTING WITH FEMME FATALES, CORRUPT COPS AND CRIME SYNDICATES).

This sort of thing can be very tricky to pull off: the last time Marvel tried to import its universe to a different historical period/genre, we got 1602 and its spin-offs, most of which was spent playing Spot The Analogue.

Fortunately, Fred Van Lente avoids this trap by putting together a rather clever string of adaptations: I liked the idea of mutants being swapped out for sociopaths, with the Xavier/Magneto ideological schism taking on a decidedly more realistic dimension. I loved Van Lente's take on Anne-Marie (Rogue) and the resolution to her storyline. The Bolivar Trask/Sentinels prose story ends up with a different moral than you might be expecting.

In fact, the only problem I had with this miniseries is that the X-Men aren't the protagonists: the story's focalized through and narrated by a completely different character (who may or may not be an analogue for a mainstream Marvel figure, it's rather difficult to tell), and that leads us to a confusing last-minute twist ending that didn't really work for me. It's still VERY GOOD, though, and one of the few examples of a cross-genre experiment that successfully adapts superhero characters into other molds and conventions.

Kramers Ergot 7

A lot of comics were the subject of controversy in 2008: Ice Haven, Memin Pinguin (remember that?), that one comic where the dog ate the teenagers. Surprisingly, alt comix anthology Kramers Ergot 7 was arguably the most controversial comic of them all. The issue was not the content (though much of it would scandalize those who were offended by Ice Haven), but the price of the book. Some of the controversy came from those who supported (or who were at least familiar with) the anthology series and its contributors, but who regretted the high ($125) price point. Others came from people who had apparently never heard of the series, or who had little interest in the sorts of comics which had been featured in previous volumes of Kramers Ergot.

By the time Kramers Ergot 7 actually came out, however, the furor had mostly subsided. It's almost too bad that the controversy didn't happen closer to the book's release, because the actual content of KE7 hasn't actually received nearly as much attention as its price point. And since the only thing which could justify the high price is good content, it seems like a relevant issue. Kramers Ergot 7 was the most anticipated comic of the year for many people, including myself. How did reality stack up to expectation? The answer, along with my best attempt at providing some art samples (this thing's way too big for my scanner, and our digital camera/the person operating it aren't ideal), comes after the break.

Usually anthologies are all over the place in terms of quality and content, but that's surprisingly untrue for Kramers Ergot 7. This volume boasts an incredible roster of cartoonists, including several best-of-their-generation types, folks who your more literate friends and acquaintances might have actually heard of. Thousands of New York Times readers are familiar with Seth, Chris Ware, Jaime Hernandez, and Dan Clowes from their contributions to the Sunday "Funny Pages" section. And while Adrian Tomine hasn't had anything appear in the NYT (yet), he fits in with this group pretty well (surely you remember this picture from, you guessed it, the New York Times). These cartoonists' contributions to KE7 are, for the most part, the sort of thing that would appeal to the audiences they've built over the last decade or so. Ware's story is actually a continuation of his NYT work, while Seth has another contemplation of the Canada of yesterday (though it's not nearly as bittersweet--or as good--as George Sprott). Tomine's story fits pretty neatly within the niche he's carved out as well.

I found Hernandez' and Clowes' contributions the more interesting from this group. Hernandez' story is one of the denser single-pagers in the book (and there are a lot of dense single-page stories in KE7), a frantic, entertaining study of memory and sentimentality. Clowes' story, "Sawdust," is excellent, effectively a counterpoint to his equally good NYT story, Mister Wonderful. There's a real similarity between the protagonists--age, stream-of-conscious narration, desire for romance--but this is a much darker, even noirish work. I don't think Clowes has written many lines funnier than "Lucky for me, he couldn't dig a grave for shit!"

Daniel Clowes

But the most famous cartoonist featured in KE7 is unquestionably Matt Groening. I was as surprised as anyone to see him announced as a contributor, but his single page strip is one of the best in the book. Groening produces an homage to this illustration, but with a focus on Southern Californian despair which should be eminently familiar to anyone who's read Life in Hell over the past few decades. "River of Unsold Screenplays" replaces "Failure," "Grad School/No Escape" replaces "Charlatanism," and so forth. It's no bleaker than "Love is Hell" or "School is Hell," but the context is so much different now than in the 1980s. These days, Groening effectively represents the best case scenario for the modern alternative cartoonist. If anyone knows anything about the "Road to Success," it's Matt Groening, so it's rather dispiriting to see a long slide labeled "Disappointing sales of second album, novel, play or film." And you have to kind of wince at a series of spider webs spun by "Psycho Exes," or a cliff labeled "ungrateful children." (Simpsons fans might make note of a balloon labeled "Crackpot cult religion, you know the one.") It's a great encapsulation of Groening's Life In Hell, and one of the best cartoons of his career.

And that about does it for the very famous people, though there are plenty of other contributors who are well-known within comics circles. Ivan Brunetti plays with the book's mammoth size by forcing the reader to turn it upside down to finish his story--the joke's on us, since this thing weighs about as much as a St. Bernard. Kevin Huizenga does something similar with his page. Kim Deitch basically distills his story from Pictorama into three pages, but it's worth the repetition to see all his incredible bottle cap designs--or are they replicas? I have to admit some ignorance of the bottlecap collecting hobby here, but they're really nice, charming drawings either way. Ben Katchor contributors two stories about architecture in his imagined New York; if that sounds good, you won't be disappointed when you read them. Richard Sala's single page is mostly a showcase for his gorgeous art and character design (we're talking monsters and villains in vibrant watercolor here).

Richard Sala

The lesser-known contributors bring just as much--probably more--to the table, plus they provide the book with some degree of aesthetic and thematic coherence. When you flip through Kramers Ergot 7 for the first time, you're not struck by the star-studded lineup so much as the barrage of colors from story to story. Given the dimensions of the book, it's practically an assault on the eyes. Many of the contributors work in limited palettes, making KE7 a staggering visual experience. Stories by Sala, Dan Zettwotch, Frank Santoro, Blex Bolex, Anna Sommer, and Helge Reumann are especially noteworthy; the blue and red motif is particularly popular (and effective). Deitch's soothing pastels and Ben Jones and PShaw's multi-tiered, multi-hued contributions also stand out.

Blex Bolex

Once you actually start reading Kramers Ergot 7, you might also notice how many of the contributors have produced work dealing with the fantastic. Perhaps inspired by the towering dimensions of the book, a good many of these cartoonists turn to religion and mythology in particular. Several reviews have cited Tom Gauld's four page retelling of Noah's Ark as a highlight of KE7, and justifiably so. I've long admired Gauld's work, and it's never looked better than it does here. Gauld takes advantage of the book's size as well as anyone, using large panels to underscore the surprise of Noah's sons in finding their father wasn't just a senile old weirdo. The dense linework is stunning, reminiscent of Edward Gorey in the larger panels.

Tom Gauld

Other contributors' stories explore religion in a more general sense. The first of Conrad Botes' two stories is sort of like a pantheistic Book of Job, only without any reward at the end for the protagonist. There are a lot of horrific images inKE7, but Botes' depiction of a series of divine punishments is particularly unnerving. John Brodowski's single page story is one of the best examples of dark humor in the book, dealing with the ill-fated resurrection of an arctic traveler. Joe Daly's cold, precise drawings depict a disturbing creation myth, with bizarre creatures with enormous phalli emerging from the ocean and raping the land-dwellers, who immediately gives birth to a swarm of offspring. Anders Nilsen, Shary Boyle, and David Heatley contribute stories of a similar ilk.

Conrad Botes

There's also a great deal of surreal fantasy in Kramers Ergot 7. CF delivers a two-page strip which will appeal to those who enjoy his Powr Mastrs series. Will Sweeny works in roughly the same territory, imbuing his tale of monster invasion with very cool character design and beautiful, gossamer linework. Matthew Thurber chronicles Brian Eno's work producing an album of songs written by the resurrected corpse of Michael Hutchence. (I'm struggling to explain exactly how much weirder (and better) the actual strip is than that description.) Florent Ruppert and Jerome Mulot's two-page story is surreal and highly effective; the large panels convey the enormity of a staircase which various figures are scaling. And the art, black and white with hundreds of evenly-spaced, short, vertical lines, really stands out in a book filled with violent displays of color.

Ruppert and Mulot

Matt Furie's story is handsome and disturbing, particularly for those who have read Boy's Club--the good-natured anthropomorphic burnouts are now killing and enslaving each other. Ted May's "Cradle of Frankenstein" has a more straightforward narrative than many of these stories, but the layout is daring, every bit as good as you'd expect from someone who included a Slade-themed pinball machine in the last issue of Injury (RIP).

Matt Furie

Probably the best of KE7's fantasy comics--and actually probably the best thing in the book, period--is Josh Simmons' extremely dense 3-page comic, "Night of the Jibblers." The pacing is extraordinarily effective, building a great deal of tension for two payoffs, each of which floored me for very different reasons. Just as remarkable are the Jibblers, some of the most memorable creatures I've ever seen on a comics page. No spoilers here; you really need to read this story if you have any interest in the genre. I'm not at all exaggerating when I say it's one of the best horror comics I've ever read. I'm now wondering if Josh Simmons might be the most underrated active cartoonist in the world.

Two other contributions bear special mention. While not rooted in fantasy per se, Gabrielle Bell's deconstruction of the espionage genre is a career highlight. By eliminating any trace of motivation from the protagonist, Bell exposes the absurdity of the spy thriller, while simultaneously distilling its appeal to its base elements (eg, exotic settings and murder). The monotony of the 8 x 8 grid enhances the effect. It reminds me a great deal of Richard Sala's shorter work, except Bell plays it the whole thing perfectly straight.

Editor Sammy Harkham provides as fitting a cover for Kramers Ergot 7 as one could hope for. The image depicts a post-apocalyptic colony, but it's somewhat unusual in that it's less of a wasteland and more of an idyllic pastoral. Storefronts on what used to be a city street are coated with vines and moss, but life continues to thrive; young women sit in communion with nature (one's even hugging a deer). Harkham's cover hints at the nature of the culture these human survivors have constructed. First, they're all female; the lone male figure is a cadaver in a car which is in the process of being coated in green. All the women are unclothed, except one figure who appears to be receiving oral sex from another figure (whose genitals are obscured by a group of passing ducks, adding a further note of ambiguity--maybe there are men in this world after all?). Only one storefront isn't covered in vines; rather than a store name, there is an ambiguous image which might possibly be of religious significance. Water is flowing out of its window display. The most dominant aspect of the composition is the black sky, taking up the top third of the picture and making the whole image quite ominous.

Sammy Harkham

It's a terrific illustration, and an appropriate one in a few of ways. Like many of the stories within the pages of KE7, the cover is extraordinarily dense, providing a great deal of narrative meat in what amounts to a single panel. Furthermore, the image of a post-apocalyptic city street inhabited by naked women and wildlife actually gives you a good idea of what you'll find within: haunting, off-kilter fantasy. Finally, one of the women is reading the comics section of a newspaper upside down, thus undercutting the grandiosity of the whole Kramers Ergot project.

That's the thing which might surprise all those who were inexplicably angered by the very thought of a $125 anthology: this is not a pretentious, ponderous book. Many of the stories are quite funny. Johnny Ryan's strip, "My Sexy History," mocks the most famous work by fellow contributor David Heatley--which itself appeared in a previous volume of Kramers Ergot. And it comes a mere three pages after Heatley's story in this volume!

Kramers Ergot 7 is, for my money (all $125 of it!), the best anthology of the last decade. It's also the most impressive monument to comics as a form of art. Those enormous pages do absolutely make a difference, both for the opportunities it provides the cartoonists and the overwhelming effect on the reader. Several contributors turn in the best work of their careers. I only wish I could afford to buy a copy for Alan David Doane.

Batman, where art thou?

BATMAN: BATTLE FOR THE COWL #1: I had somewhere between low and no expectations for this. Ultimately, it would seem to be a placeholder of a comic: it seems unlikely, given what we know, that the "battle" will end up with any other than Brucie-boy back in control.

Like many DC comics, this feels needlessly brutal -- people getting eaten and blown apart and Underage Jailbait Unattached Feet and all of that; and, like many DC comics, this feels oddly unattached from continuity -- the Birds of Prey are disbanded in their own comic, and together here; this wouldn't appear to be post-FINAL CRISIS (though I guess it could be), and so on.

It also repeats several Been There, Done That plot points: blah blah someone brings the b-list villains together; blah blah, warring gangs fight over the Batman-less pie (though I liked the pig mask guys, that was cute); blah blah Arkham explodes (how many times does that make?); blah blah someone who Gets It Wrong is usurping Batman's costume; and so on.

But despite that, the execution is perfectly adequate. There's a basic attempt to give different characters different personalities. And there's at least somewhat of a mounting urgency in the narrative.

This is journeyman work -- perfectly acceptable in all ways, if not especially thrilling. And while I could have lived without the $4 price tag, at least there are 30 story pages, so the math isn't completely heinous. But it is hard to work up any real feelings about it either way: a textbook example of an OK comic book.

But you know who really should be the next Batman? Jon Stewart.

No, no, not the Green Lantern. Sheesh.

I was just very impressed with Stewart's assault on CNBC and Jim Cramer this whole week, and the face-to-face interview last night was absolutely riveting television. Stewart just plain HAMMERED Cramer, but did it without screaming or ranting or using much else other than reason and a plea for ethical conduct.

Jon Stewart is an American treasure, and his sense of Justice is just a soaring stalwart thing.

I wish we had ten of him.

-B