tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25129291906805502282024-02-19T06:29:50.305-05:00Flashmob Fridays - A Trouble With Comics JointJoin us every Friday as we examine a single comic book or graphic novel to try to find a critical consensus among our writers.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-65685578303059181442012-02-24T05:30:00.001-05:002012-02-27T18:47:33.649-05:00Alan Moore's Twilight Proposal<span style="font-weight:bold;">Introduction by Alan David Doane:</span><br /><br />Honestly I didn't intend the irony, but this week's FMF, looking at <a href="http://fourcolorheroes.home.insightbb.com/twilightfree.html">Alan Moore's never-published Twilight proposal</a>, also represents the twilight of Flashmob Fridays. This is our final outing.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR4NXe3JJEJn4sSzfiScv3XwdYHQRubMfDMJCRihmIg1hwnZuM002YYIuCkUDYDCfu6A8JJJWw9wUp5WMHRZAEY_UtZ4L4UEDe8sVzcOMaUl1hjn8eiPMRtS9U-OQF3YjOzHJ6zI74RCg/s1600/Moore%252C+Alan+4.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR4NXe3JJEJn4sSzfiScv3XwdYHQRubMfDMJCRihmIg1hwnZuM002YYIuCkUDYDCfu6A8JJJWw9wUp5WMHRZAEY_UtZ4L4UEDe8sVzcOMaUl1hjn8eiPMRtS9U-OQF3YjOzHJ6zI74RCg/s400/Moore%252C+Alan+4.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5712588326487874898" /></a><br /><br />I love the idea of a bunch of great writers getting together each week to take many and varied looks at a particular comic or graphic novel (...or unpublished proposal), and I'd be more than happy if someone else picked up the ball and ran with it somewhere else. But my current schedule and energy level just aren't allowing me to enjoy bringing this thing to life every week as I enjoyed it when we first began. And to half-ass it week in and week out is not fair to the contributors here, or the people coming to read their work each week. <br /><br />So thanks for hanging out with us here every week, and I hope you'll check out our efforts over at <a href="http://troublewithcomics.com">Trouble With Comics</a>, where any future writings-about-comics by at least myself and Christopher Allen (as well as any FMF contributor who wants to join us -- the door's always open, gang) are likely to be found. <br /><br />With that, here's our final Flashmob Fridays. Take it away, gang.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Roger Green:</span><br /><br />Okay, that tricky Alan David Doane fellow threw us a curve this week. Instead of critiquing a comic book, we're to evaluate an "unpublished series proposal for DC Comics" written by Alan Moore that runs 27 pages and was written more than two decades ago. Oh, why not?<br /><br />Moore made some cogent observations about previous attempts to tie together events of a comic book universe. He notes the merchandising angle that Marvel used to create the Secret Wars series and crossovers in 1984 and 1985. In fact, if <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Wars">the Wikipedia page about Secret Wars</a> is correct, it was the Mattel merchandising that dictated at least some of the story structure of Secret Wars. As Moore noted, and I agree, the "assembled multitude of characters look merely banal, which I personally believe happened with Secret Wars." It was also a retailer's puzzlement. The ancillary books would likely receive a spike in sales, but for how long? Would readers decide that they did not REALLY have to read the crossover books at all, but merely follow the story in the titular book? Reorders, in those days, were pretty difficult to come by in those days, and reprints just didn't happen that often.<br /><br />Comic readers are often a loyal lot. While I wasn't a big DC fan in the 1980s, I got the sense from our store's customers that the result of DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths was unsettling. As Moore put it: "In the wake of the time-altering at the end of the Crisis we are left with a universe where the entire past continuity of DC, for the most part, simply never happened." That angered some fans that "the larger part of DC's continuity will simply have to be scrapped and consigned to one of Orwell's memory holes along with a large amount of characters who, more than simply being dead, are now unpeople."<br /><br />Interestingly, Moore shows himself to be a bit of a fanboy himself, and opposed to messing too much with certain conventions when he noted his disappointment "at the end of the first Superman film, when he turns time back to save Lois. It ruined the small but genuine enjoyment that I'd got from that first movie and destroyed all credibility for any of the following sequels as far as I was concerned." <br /><br />Continuity of a 40- or 50- or 70-year old icon is always complicated unless the character is allowed to age. "There are a number of people in the industry...who feel that it's time to break down the continuity and try to get rid of a lot of the rather anal and obsessive attitudes that have been allowed to dominate the marketplace and to some degree have hindered it in its periodic attempts to be taken seriously." Anyone who listen to comic book fans debate incessantly knows to be true. "I suppose a shining example of this would be Frank [Miller's] Dark Knight." <br /><br />Moore believed his Twilight outline would serve both the "audience thirsty for the stability that an ordered continuity gives them" and those would throw "continuity to the winds altogether." Yet it shouldn't be the dystopian model used in Dark Knight or his own Watchmen. <br /><br />Soon thereafter, Moore got into the details of the various "Houses" of superheroes, and I rather tuned out at this point. Whether it would or would not have worked is impossible to say, in retrospect. That Moore spent so much time analyzing the CONTEXT of the crossover was much more interesting to me than the storyline itself.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Christopher Allen:</span><br /><br />It's difficult and not really fair to review an unfinished project. In this case we have a project that wasn't really even begun: Twilight, a proposal for a massive DC crossover series that would have been a big DC event around 1987. Seemingly on the strength of Watchmen, Alan Moore was asked to come up with it. I'm not sure if his bad feelings towards DC developed this early to kill the project, or DC just decided to go in another direction, but it never happened. DC instead followed Legends with a ho-hum event called Millennium and went on from there.<br /><br />Like most Moore scripts, this is fun to read, and I thought I might just make notes as I'm reading it rather than waiting until the end. First off, it's charming but also sad how much of a DC team player Moore is trying to be at this point. He's coming off Watchmen and looking to give DC another big hit that meets their commercial goals while hopefully being a creatively rich and satisfying experience. Moore understands that his job isn't just to deliver a good book; he's got to give other creators good ideas to mine for new or revamped series of their own. He also knows that DC will want the book to provide merchandising options, like Twilight t-shirts and the like, and he's okay with it. He's engaged with the current mainstream comics world, effusive with praise for Miller's Dark Knight, respectfully critical of Secret Wars.<br /><br />At the same time, there is a sense that Moore is going to try to resist going too far with working out the story until the project is approved. <br /><br />The proposal is subtitled, “First Gleamings” and the self-deprecating tone of it makes explicit he can't guarantee he's going to get to the finish line. Although Moore asks for the reader's (editor's) indulgence that fuzzy or flat areas will be polished up and improved in the actual scripting, there is at the same time a feeling that some of these details will be figured out at the moment Moore is writing the proposal.<br /><br />One interesting thing about the proposal is that Moore expresses concern that big reboot events like Crisis on Infinite Earths can make older readers feel that the stories they grew up with, that meant something to them and for which they're nostalgic, have been invalidated by the fiat of the current hot creator or editorial powers-that-be. It's a core concern of Moore's, and it reminds me of his famous quote that all comics stories are imaginary. At the time, he was attempting to show there was no difference between the stories a company like DC deemed “imaginary” and the ones that were considered part of continuity. Essentially, he's saying that it's really up to the reader to take what they want from the stories, to believe or not believe in whichever one they want.<br /><br />Moore eventually starts laying out the basic idea of Twilight, which is an attempt to put superheroes into a mythical context by using actual mythological underpinnings, in this case the Norse end-of-days myth, Ragnarok, when the old gods are killed off. This in itself is not a particularly original idea. Offhand, I know only about fifteen years earlier, Jack Kirby's Fourth World Saga drew inspiration from Ragnarok as well, though his books were canceled before he really got around to the Darkseid/Orion battle that might have brought on Ragnarok. And of course, Thor writers have written about preventing Ragnarok for decades. But as they say, it's all in the execution.<br /><br />Moore recognizes that superheroes, while arguably our modern mythological characters, usually lack mythological resonance in the actual stories because superhero stories rarely have an end. He cites DKR as one of the few that has this resonance because it does provide an end to Superman and Batman, while at the same time making it irrelevant whether any creators after Miller ever actually fill in the gaps to make DKR the “real”, in-continuity end to Superman and Batman after all. It doesn't matter. What's ironic is that this is one of the reasons Watchmen is still resonant over a quarter-century later. It probably would have been well-regarded if it had featured the Charlton characters originally planned for use—characters that went on into other DC Comics stories not long after, from other creators. But using new characters in a self-contained story that felt complete is unfortunately a rather rare thing in comics. Here, Moore is interested less in trying to create a similar luxurious situation than in creating something that feels like a meaningful modern legend that creates new possibilities for further exploration while being simultaneously just another possibility, a story that doesn't close off other stories or the feelings readers have about them. It even allows for the revisiting of old continuities and discarded storylines and timelines. It seems like about the best way to try to put together a work-for-hire story, a very generous challenge to oneself.<br /><br />The mechanism for revisiting these sometimes wonky but charming old stories and characters like Brother Power, Prez, the Rainbow Batman and such, is a “fluke field” created by old Legion of Super-Heroes villain The Time Trapper, perhaps facilitated by the timestream already being weakened by the Crisis and other continuity-ordering/altering events.<br /><br />Moore envisions the story structurally much like Watchmen; twelve issues, no ads, 28 pages each. There’s an end-of-days event going on 20 or 30 years in the future, and so the superheroes of that time send a message back in time, to then-current DC continuity, hoping those heroes can prevent this Twilight. He envisions Legion of Super-Heroes villain The Time Trapper creating, yes, a time trap, in order to prevent heroes from stopping his evil future plan. This creates a time bubble or “fluke field” that allows for the existence of characters previously booted out of continuity like Prez, Brother Power, presumably alternate Earth versions of other heroes, and also lends itself to use in current continuity LOSH stories by Paul Levitz as well as the rest of the DCU, if the other creators want to play along. Eventually, the heroes escape and return to their respective times, while Rip Hunter goes to the future and meets an older John Constantine, who tells him to go back to our time and enlist the aid of the younger Constantine to prevent the Twilight.<br /> <br />The story, in Moore’s mind, will ripple back and forth between different times, so in the dystopic future he sees, the superheroes essentially rule the world, having had leadership thrust upon them in the wake of governments and social institutions crumbling. They are divided into various houses, as with royalty. If this sounds a bit like Kingdom Come, Squadron Supreme or House of M, well, yeah. I’ll leave that for others to dig into the various similarities. We have the House of Steel, led by Superman and wife Wonder Woman (now Superwoman), and they’ve got two kids, the son being a bad apple. Next is the House of Thunder, with a married Captain and Mary Marvel, though it’s a marriage of convenience and strategy, and she’s having an affair with the now-grown Captain Marvel Jr., who struggles under the shadow of Captain Marvel. This is interesting, as you’ve got Moore exploring not just, as he describes, a Guinevere/Lancelot type of story, but it’s also Oedipal and quite similar to the conflict he explored in Marvelman between Marvelman and Kid Marvelman. And, let’s face it, it’s a <span style="font-style:italic;">de rigueur</span> plot for any superhero family: the sidekick or junior member always rebels against the patriarchal original hero.<br /> <br />The House of Titans is made up of grown, grimmer Teen Titans members, including a Nightwing every bit as driven as Batman but lacking his compassion. It’s funny; when this proposal was assigned to us to review, one of my colleagues felt that the natural course of a review of an unpublished project would be a “I wouldn’t do it that way” approach, and I thought to myself that that was the last thing I would be concerned with. And yet, I have to say I don’t see Nightwing this way at all. He not only had parents who loved him, like Bruce Wayne, but unlike Bruce, he was around them all the time, essentially learning his acrobat’s trade from them. I kind of think he would have been a bit warmer and well-adjusted than Bruce, and indeed, that’s generally how he’s portrayed. But that’s not to say Moore couldn’t have done a very credible job with his interpretation, or that that interpretation might have changed a little or a lot as the real writing began.<br /> <br />After intriguing takes on the increasingly robotic Cyborg and mentally deteriorating Changeling (now Chimera), we meet The House of Mystery, the old DC spook story anthology title being a slam-dunk for use in Twilight’s vision of Houses. As one might expect, it’s peopled by DC’s supernatural or magical characters like Deadman, Zatanna, the Spectre, and a reformed Felix Faust. Moore does not at this point have much to say about them and they don’t look to figure very prominently in the plot, so he moves on to The House of Secrets. They’re analogous to the Legion of Doom, with Lex Luthor, Catwoman, Captain Cold, Dr. Sivana, Gorilla Grodd and other villains. They’re the bad guys who’ve managed to survive the superhero purges of villains and have become the de facto protectors of a remote region of Nevada. Moore hints here at moral relativism, which is clearly a major theme in a story about heroes who’ve become corrupt, warring factions.<br /> <br />The House of Justice is made up of some ex-Justice Leaguers and second-or-third generation heroes like a female Dr. Light, a female Flash (Slipstream), Wonder Girl (now Wonder Woman). The House of Tomorrow is comprised of time-lost characters like Rip Hunter, Jonah Hex, and Space Ranger. The presence of a younger version of Time Trapper indicates this House might be fairly important to stopping the Twilight. The House of Lanterns is shuttered, all aliens having been banished from Earth, other than the grandfathered-in Superman. They’ll be pulled into the story somehow.<br /> <br />One thing I like about Moore’s vision of the future is that he wants to avoid the clichéd, nuke-ravaged version and instead focus on a society that has unraveled and is evolving into something else, as happened with the Industrial Revoltion. What exactly that is and how it will be explored, he’s not so clear on in the proposal.<br /> <br />While even Moore himself has taken a share of the blame for, and turned against, the mid-'80s grim ‘n gritty, deconstructionist take on superheroes that became the status quo by 1990, that doesn’t mean it’s not a lot of fun to read what he would have done in that regard with Twilight. We’ve got the remaining heroes living in a rundown barrio, unaligned with any Houses and, aside from Constantine, seemingly rather useless. There’s a drunken, gibbering Uncle Sam, a Doll Man who’s mutated into some sort of six inch walking stick type of insect-man, the former Phanton Lady as a kind of caretaker/hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold type, and a legless Blackhawk, recruiting a new squadron from the barrio’s leather bars. Doubtful DC would have let that get through. Plastic Man is a male prostitute because, well, why not?<br /> <br />Moore also touches on the idea of the exchanging-body superhero, both with Captain Marvel and Congorilla. In the case of Congorilla, his human form is 90 years old and frail, but alive, while none of the Marvel Family’s human forms age. Congorilla spends all his time as the immortal gorilla, now a Gotham crime lord, while Captain Marvel is the only one of the Marvel Family who still occasionally changes to his human counterpart, Billy Batson, still a child. This causes problems in his marriage, which Moore doesn’t explain yet, but it would seem that this difference makes Marvel a character who could conceivably change and break out of the downward spiral he and the rest of the heroes are on. Also, it’s pretty clear Moore intended to use the detail about not changing back to human to symbolize and help explain the detachment from humanity these superheroes experienced, which led to their corruption and justifies their bloody ends in the Ragnarok event.<br /> <br />Curiously, Moore casts Green Arrow and Black Canary as editors of a radical newspaper, and two of the nicest characters in the book (thus the ones most identifiable to readers). It’s an unusual take on Green Arrow, who usually works well as a loudmouth (if righteous) jerk, but as so many heroes have taken dark turns it makes sense to take one who was already somewhat antisocial and make him a better person.<br /> <br />It should be no surprise to anyone that when in doubt about characterization, Moore gives a character some sordid or darkly comic details. Bondage figures into The Question, Platinum from the Metal Men is a sex worker (dating Robotman), Gold has to hide because gold is in such demand he’s in danger of being melted down. Billy Batson has gone quietly mad, apparently due to a mental puberty and maturation in his prepubescent body.<br /> <br />Again, as with Watchmen, there is a mystery to kick off the story, this one a sordid, bondage-filled locked-room murder. I thought the solution to where the murderer was would have to do with the murderer killing an ancestor and thus ceasing to exist, but no, it’s a little more prosaic: invisibility. The rest of Moore’s plot involves a lot of hero-on-hero violence, the arrival of the Lanterns and other aliens to essentially rescue humanity from the so-called heroes, a kind of unmasking and rolling up of sleeves, with a hard-earned utopia ahead.<br /> <br />Looking at all this again, despite the hundreds of words above I find it really is impossible to “review” an unpublished work. You recount details and ideas, because that’s all there is. You notice similarities of themes in other Moore work, and similarities to actual published work that came after this proposal was written. But to say whether it “works” or not is impossible, because it’s not finished. We have some story beats, lots of character details, and several sketches of character conflicts, but there’s no dialogue. There are no captions or page breakdowns. No artwork. Who would have brought this to life on the page? There are indications of storytelling conceits that would add resonance to the work, like the decrepit, jingoistic monologues of Uncle Sam possibly tying into the action on subsequent scenes, but we don’t see any real examples of this in action. It’s an ambitious work, no doubt. Whether it’s more or less ambitious than Watchmen is unfair, because it’s unfinished and could have changed a lot in the actual scripting. In the end, I feel like it was a lost opportunity for DC that certainly wasn’t replaced by Kingdom Come or anything else, but the fact it never got done is no real tragedy. It presents itself as a potentially very rich and entertaining story, surely one of the more interesting unpublished superhero stories ever, but Moore has gotten to explore similar themes and ideas in subsequent work like Supreme, Promethea and elsewhere, and indeed, the central theme of power being a corrupting influence was already done to a faretheewell in Watchmen. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Joseph Gualtieri:</span><br /><br />There is something odd about reviewing a comic that never was for a comics review site. Except, well, you probably have read Twilight, and I don’t just mean that you found a copy of Moore’s proposal on the web before DC issued a cease and desist letter. Over the 25 years since Moore wrote the Twilight proposal, DC has strip-mined it dry for many of its ideas. The most infamous example of this Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s 1995 Kingdom Come, which even mined Moore’s Houses iconography in its ads. Brad Meltzer and Rags Morales’s Identity Crisis (2004), too, owes a debt to Twilight, in this case taking other key half of the plot, the locked room murder mystery (which is not handled half as well as Moore’s). It’s hard not to see shades of Twilight in numerous other works though — Steve Darnell and Ross’s Uncle Sam (1997), Geoff Johns’s Booster Gold (2007) and Flashpoint (2011), and even Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers (2005) and Final Crisis (2008) all take an element or two from it, and that’s not even counting how Moore correctly predicts further Crises down the line to muck with DC’s continuity — Zero Hour (1994), the Kingdom (1999), Infinite Crisis (2005), and Flashpoint again.<br /><br />Re-reading the proposal for the first time in years two things struck me. The first is that there is no way DC would publish the plot as-is. Structurally, the time travel device involving the Time Trapper Moore uses to set up the scenario is on the complex side even for a time travel tale, and just seems superfluous to the actual story. I can’t see why it’s there unless it was a sop to editorial concerns of the time (pun intended). Then there’s some of the content. Blackhawk picking up teenage boys is a gag (he’s really recruiting them into a private army), sure, but Moore also has Sandra Knight sleeping around, Plastic Man as a gigolo, and an incestuous relationship between Billy and Mary Batson (more on this in a bit). Especially after what happened with Watchmen and the Quality characters, I’m curious as to what extent Moore included some of this material just so DC would cut it, leaving content he really wanted in there.<br /><br />The other thing that occurred to me this time about Twilight is how in a lot of ways it’s the ultimate product of Moore’s decade of strip-mining Robert Mayer’s Superfolks that saw him produce Marvelman, Watchmen, and “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” <a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/boy-from-the-boroughs/">When Moore finally spoke publicly about Mayer’s book</a>, he tried to minimize its role in his career and attack Grant Morrison for bringing it up (in a coded manner) in a magazine column:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">I can’t even remember when I read it. It would probably have been before I wrote Marvelman, and it would have had the same kind of influence upon me as the much earlier – probably a bit early for Grant Morrison to have spotted it – Brian Patten’s poem, ‘Where Are You Now, Batman?’, [...] I’d still say that Harvey Kurtzman’s Superduperman probably had the preliminary influence, but I do remember Superfolks and finding some bits of it in that same sort of vein. I also remember reading Joseph Torchia’s The Kryptonite Kid around that time. I found that quite moving. I can’t remember whether… I did read it, certainly, but as I say, I think Grant Morrison, by his own admission, said in an interview that, back at that stage of his career, that was his way of making himself famous, by actually attacking a more famous writer, who incidentally had got him his job at Vertigo.</span><br /> <br />The Twilight proposal may be the best example of just how untrue what Moore said is — he clearly internalized Superfolks to such a degree that he never, ever makes note of the fact that Mary and Billy Batson’s relationship is an incestuous one. For those unfamiliar with Superfolks, the coupling of the book’s Batson analogues is a key plot point, producing one of the book’s major villains. Meyer’s take on the Marvel Family hangs all over Moore’s take on Billy’s sexuality in the proposal.<br /> <br />The Alan Moore writing Twilight is a very different person from the one we’ve all come to know over the last few years worth of interviews; some of that obviously has to do with his awful relationship with DC, but the Alan Moore who wrote Twilight was also quite clearly into superhero comics, particularly in their post-modern, third wave form in a way that’s incredible discordant with the Moore of today. Comparing the ending of Twilight to that of Kingdom Come may reveal that more than anything else. Kingdom Come, for all its <span style="font-style:italic;">sturm und drang</span>, ends on a happy, hopeful note as the superheroes give up their identities and re-dedicate themselves to humanity. In Twilight, the epic clash of the different superhero houses ends with nearly everybody dead and an inter-dimensional war being fought on multiple fronts across the galaxy. And then the John Constantine of the past screws over his future self by denying himself true love. Twilight, despite just being a proposal, is dramatically more satisfying than its foremost actually published child, which is absolutely hilarious.<br /> <br />There is a lot more to talk about with regards to Twilight, but I think it may be best to wrap it up here, and leave some surprises for those of you who have not read it yet. It’s a shockingly satisfying as a read by itself, and there’s some excellent dramatic irony in there with how Moore starts off with a section on its marketing potential. Frankly, we should all be thankful that we live in an age when it’s possible for something like this to easily be passed around, as it is an utterly invaluable document in examining Moore’s career and the development of the superhero genre. Track it down if you haven’t already.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-12619324399947832002012-02-17T01:25:00.002-05:002012-02-17T01:36:02.056-05:00Conan The Barbarian #1<span style="font-weight:bold;">Introduction by Alan David Doane:</span><br /><br />I didn't find myself falling into the world of Conan in this latest relaunch of the series in comics form, but then again, I almost never have.<br /><br />I was too young in the 1970s to experience the original Roy Thomas/Barry Windsor-Smith Conan. John Buscema was drawing it by the time I sampled it, and his journeyman approach to depicting the wondrous world Robert E. Howard created fascinated me not at all. It wasn't until <a href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/blog/2009/03/baxter-building-your-collection-tom.html">the 1980s Baxter Paper era</a> and the reissue in that format of the Windsor-Smith masterpiece Red Nails that I was able to see a glimpse of the brilliance that Howard-in-comics could contain. But still, I mostly ignored Conan and his by then hundreds of issues of appearances. Barbarians, swords and sorcery really didn't do it for me. By the mid-1980s I knew comics held greater thrills than mere superheroes, having fallen in love with books like Cerebus (irony!), Love and Rockets and Elfquest, but Howard and his world still eluded me.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7MCQqeKDAcANlxBgVL0FMWW86PLnrod-YuCncZ0zMMCnaS22ARog3DEYyuEZglQECqG71kDdvhPHhLV51isWoZBbhDBOkV-KEVfWW2dC2bomOjQ6VJ19ZvRGYn0Dun4JwsQncvetT5kM/s1600/conan1.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 208px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7MCQqeKDAcANlxBgVL0FMWW86PLnrod-YuCncZ0zMMCnaS22ARog3DEYyuEZglQECqG71kDdvhPHhLV51isWoZBbhDBOkV-KEVfWW2dC2bomOjQ6VJ19ZvRGYn0Dun4JwsQncvetT5kM/s320/conan1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5709984942839779474" /></a><br /><br />Amazingly, when I met Barry Windsor-Smith in-person <a href="http://comicbookgalaxy.com/bws.html">to interview him back on the next-to-last day of 1999</a>, I still hadn't read much Conan. I was by then well aware of the general outline of the character's mythology (hotly debated among true fans), but my appreciation for Windsor-Smith's work at that point was more in the direction of his post-Marvel work like Storyteller and the then-current Opus art books.<br /><br />It was only when Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord launched their longform exploration of Conan and his world, over 30 years after I started reading comic books, that somehow I became hooked. Something about Busiek's approach spoke to me. Nord's artwork bore no resemblance at all to the work of anyone who had drawn Conan in the past, and somehow that Busiek/Nord collaboration (occasionally with other artists contributing) became my entry point into Robert E. Howard. I went on to read all Howard's Conan stories, and at this late date I think those prose stories actually have become my favourites. I am often inclined to like the purest, most original form of almost any entertainment (give me Lee and Ditko if you must give me Spider-Man at all, thanks), and Howard's writing has a visceral appeal that doesn't really translate completely to comics. There have been great Conan stories in comics, don't get me wrong -- but none of them match the power and impact of Howard speaking directly to your brain.<br /><br />I didn't have much interest in Brian Wood's Northlanders, but that now-canceled series is no doubt what got him the gig writing this new Conan the Barbarian. Becky Cloonan takes a new visual tack for the series, and I applaud her for it, but I still miss Nord's work, and Busiek's canny distillation of Howard's writing, and honestly the only Conan comic book I own at the moment is Thomas and Windsor-Smith's Conan the Barbarian #1. And I own it not because it's Conan, but because it's a reminder of a very different era in comics, when Conan The Barbarian #1 made a huge splash among the readership and changed what people thought was possible in comic books. This new series won't do that. It's professional Conan comics, but it's not as good as the original Thomas/BWS run, or Busiek and Nord -- and certainly nowhere near as thrilling as the actual Howard stories. It fills a space on the stands that dealers and readers have come to think of as the place where Conan comics go every month, but that's all. It's a shame it couldn't be more special or more fun than that. At their best, Conan stories can be both, and more. They can open up whole new worlds of wonder. Maybe some day they will again.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Mick Martin:</span><br /><br />I wouldn’t say my first contribution to the reincarnated Flashmob Fridays is because of Conan the Barbarian, but I will admit that when I finally decided it was time to vacuum the cobwebs off the keyboard and get back to blogging, ADD’s choice of Conan sure didn’t hurt. I’m not a huge Conan fan, but I adored the series Dark Horse began in 2004 with Kurt Busiek at the helm (not to mention artist Cary Nord whose art seemed perfect for Conan and whose tenure on the book ended much too soon). With Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan steering this time around, I couldn’t imagine I would be disappointed. Apparently, I need a better imagination.<br /> <br />The first issue seems to serve mainly as build-up to the confrontation with some kind of mystical temptress/pirate named Bêlit. The comic opens with Conan escaping the city guards of the capital Messantia by hopping aboard the Argus, whose captain and crew are initially not happy about his presence. Conan silences their protests with threats, but soon woos them into brotherhood with the story of why he was being pursued in the first place. Captain Tito accepts the rowdy Cimmerian and even comes to count on his sword-arm. Tito has heard stories of this Bêlit, the Queen of the Black Coast, and hopes Conan will protect his ship.<br /> <br />The only thing I really liked about the book was Cloonan’s art. There’s a much stronger element of cartoon in her Conan than I’ve seen in previous series and it’s refreshing. It’s the first time I can remember seeing a Conan comic and not immediately thinking of Frank Frazetta.<br /> <br />Otherwise, I was underwhelmed. The first and biggest problem is there’s so little action. It’s all build-up and exposition. Even when given the chance for just a panel or two with some classic Cimmerian bloodletting, Wood and Cloonan shy away from it. For example, when Conan tells the crew of the Argus why he ran from the city guards, there are opportunities for some sword-fighting fun, but instead we get panels of Conan led into courtrooms or a naked Conan puking in his prison cell. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t only enjoy action comics. But if it’s a Conan comic we’re talking about then swords should be getting wet somewhere between the front and back covers, particularly in the first issue.<br /> <br />It also rubbed me the wrong way how quickly Conan and Captain Tito became stalwart allies. Wood never sold me on the idea that the sailors of the Argus would suddenly fall head-over-heels for the guy who just threatened them because he told a story they liked, particularly since the story isn’t even told all that well. The scene in which Conan tells the crew about his adventures in Messantia reminded me of my least favorite parts of Kenneth Brannagh’s Shakespeare films; when Brannagh realizes it’s probably boring having the camera on himself every second of a 5-minute long soliloquy and so occasionally switches to the other actors, who are always crowded around Brannagh, smiling, nodding furiously, and looking at each other as if to say “This guy craps gold!” I just didn’t buy it.<br /> <br />Overall I think Wood and Cloonan made some bad choices about where to enter the story and what to show us. There is perhaps a fine line between critiquing a work and telling a creative team how to do its job, but I can’t help but wonder whether or not this first issue would have read better if it had started with Conan in prison and letting us follow his escape rather than telling it all in flashback.<br /> <br />I would be willing to check out the second issue, mainly because I like Conan and because Wood and Cloonan are talents I trust. Who knows? Maybe this will read much better in a trade. But it has to be said that if this was an unknown property and/or if I had never heard of Wood and Cloonan, I probably wouldn’t bother with it again.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1e5oyy-oDeJJlnbzHnH7iL62eXn9qAXZM7JZY-CwijovrZ6ibNFc3YhsmksDP-oc3-yNeizHZvcx_6LF_zRooEU19s1NkzMmn2rWs8OarFCDZPympkmR88rbnRl1-9gJgMcqwyDjteTk/s1600/noname-1.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 308px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1e5oyy-oDeJJlnbzHnH7iL62eXn9qAXZM7JZY-CwijovrZ6ibNFc3YhsmksDP-oc3-yNeizHZvcx_6LF_zRooEU19s1NkzMmn2rWs8OarFCDZPympkmR88rbnRl1-9gJgMcqwyDjteTk/s400/noname-1.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5709985702364995266" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Scott Cederlund:</span><br /><br />I think there are two ways to look at Brian Wood’s writing on Conan the Barbarian #1.<br /><br />The first and maybe more natural way is that this is the same guy who’s writing Northlanders. Other than the settings, which are different, both books feature tales of barbaric men and women in olden days. Wood’s Conan fits in with that work on Northlanders. It’s logical that the writer of a very modern take on viking tales would adapt to what is starting off as a pirate’s tale as Conan takes on the deadly beauty known as Bêlit, the queen of the Black Coast. Wood captures the sense of high adventure, opening the book and giving Becky Cloonan a fun and roguish action sequence that’s just a small taste of the adventures this character can and will have.<br /><br />The other side to Wood’s writing on Conan #1 is that this is from the writer of Demo and Local, books about growing up and that strange transition from being children to being adults. That’s exactly the same point that this version of Conan is at in his life. He’s out, on his own and high on his own self-worth. This is a young and brash character who merely thinks he knows the ways of the world and can hang with the big boys. Conan greats life one adventure and one moment at a time, barely thinking about repercussions before he’s leaping onto the next strange ship that’s on the sea before him. <br /><br />With those two sides of Brian Wood in mind, it makes for a different and interesting Conan. To me and probably many other comic fans, Conan is defined by Roy Thomas and John Buscema. While there has been the occasional deviation from Buscema’s huge and muscular warrior, Conan himself has always seems to stay constant and defined. He’s Conan no matter whether he’s a Cimmerian or a barbarian or a king. The settings and circumstances may change but the character is a rock and constant character. Wood and Cloonan give him a softer and younger edge. He’s wild, reckless not because that’ a character flaw but because he’s barely a man and doesn’t know any better.<br /><br />Because of the many angles of Wood’s writing, Conan the Barbarian #1 is a Conan book that doesn’t have to feel like a Conan book. The character is known and recognizable but you can also read this as the story of any barbarian boy on the journey to becoming a man. It works on both of those levels.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Joseph Gualtieri</span><br /><br />The essay at the back of Conan The Barbarian #1 by Assistant Editor Brandon Wright claims the comic was intended as a jumping-on point for new readers, and I’m at an utter loss to figure out how. It opens with Conan racing on to a ship via horse while being chased. This is the only action scene in the whole comic. Conan proceeds to explain how he came to that situation, a scenario which involves a wrongfully imprisoned Conan splitting a judge’s head open, which is not even remotely shown. The captain of the ship discusses with Conan how the Queen of the Black Coast is negatively impacting shipping in the region. Conan swears to eliminate the problem and the story-telling in the issue goes off the rails and becomes incoherent. Let’s try and make sense of this sequence:<br /> <br />* Conan leaves the ship he he is on and swims to the Queen’s ship.<br /><br />* After reaching the ship, there’s a page of Conan and the Queen meeting in the water and having sex.<br /><br />* Conan jolts awake on the Queen’s ship, with no one around.<br /><br />* He looks over at the other ship and sees the Queen, who hisses at him.<br /><br />* Conan is on the original ship with the crew, raising his sword and yelling “alarm” and there’s a “continued" caption<br /> <br />If not for the last page, this sequence would still have some minor issues of clarity, but that page makes it nonsensical. Maybe it’s a fake Conan or something, but there’s no indication creating something like that is within the Queen’s power.<br /> <br />That a third of the issue is a poorly done sequence is far from the book’s only problem. I alluded above to the lack of action in the comic. All that’s there is the opening chase sequence, and it isn’t much. Now, I do not need non-stop action in a Conan comic, but it becomes odd when Conan narrates his adventures in the town that lead up to the chase, but Wood and Cloonan choose not to show the more visually orientated parts of the flashback like Conan attacking the judge.<br /> <br />Another confusing element of the comic is the narration structure — it has two different narrators, not counting Conan for the flashback sequence. One of them provides information, such as “Town X.” The other, well, that is the weird part. That narration is presented in a font that clearly looks like it was produced by a typewriter and is written in the third person omniscient. My suspicion is that this narration is taken from the Robert Howard novel being adapted, but there’s no indication on the credits page that this is the case, instead pushing my Grant Morrison-addled mind to wonder if it’s taken from a diegetic text produced by a supporting character who Ishamel-like writes about event after the fact and after time-traveling to the twentieth century so he or she can access a typewriter. It probably is Howard’s prose, or perhaps Wood rewriting Howard, but why on Earth is presented this way? It’s unnecessarily distracting.<br /> <br />Finally, I do not think this issue is a very good jumping-on point, and say this as someone who knows practically zip about Conan. My sole exposure to the character comes from occasionally watching the early '90s cartoon series, Conan the Adventurer back when it originally aired. The novels, the Oliver Stone film, and the comics are all pieces of pop culture that I just haven’t experienced. Wood does tells us a little about Conan — he’s honorable, isn’t just a berserker, and pays his debts, but there just isn’t enough here to hook me on the character and care about what happens next. Again, the flashback sequence hurts the book because it reveals more about Conan than any other part of the comics, except the reader only gets brief snippets of it coupled with narration by Conan himself. I really have no way to know if he’s telling truth about those events or not.<br /> <br />Add all of these problems together and you have one of the worst comics Flashmob Fridays has looked at so far, topped only by that train wreck of a Daredevil issue we started with, and at least that was supposed to be a jumping-on point for new readers.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1593079818/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=comboogal-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1593079818">Buy Conan: Born on the Battlefield from Amazon.com</a>.<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=comboogal-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1593079818" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-51471446909620765482012-02-10T00:01:00.009-05:002012-02-10T02:58:41.571-05:00Time Warp #1-5<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg96QS0a3pnr5NCgu5dp_e1a9rtrrB3doc-TR44w-oBpJ_qrSc0razGOxFNOX4SQYfb-33xg0COVOxCDrJINcPrKRp42xReJv7H5ideZd2RiEvHkqqWSkTg9Aj-kbeRuVDhGo2H1tIAP0c/s1600/Time_Warp1.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 256px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg96QS0a3pnr5NCgu5dp_e1a9rtrrB3doc-TR44w-oBpJ_qrSc0razGOxFNOX4SQYfb-33xg0COVOxCDrJINcPrKRp42xReJv7H5ideZd2RiEvHkqqWSkTg9Aj-kbeRuVDhGo2H1tIAP0c/s400/Time_Warp1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5707297425044606610" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Introduction by Alan David Doane</span><br /><br />All apologies, as Kurt Cobain once said. I have to apologize for us missing our first scheduled Friday last week, but for one reason or another this one didn't come together as smoothly as our past outings. Maybe I should have realized it would take longer to read and review five 64-page comics than our usual one comic or graphic novel. (Note to contributors: next week's title is Cerebus. All of it. Ha ha ha!)<br /><br />I also have to apologize for not writing a review myself (still acclimating to my new job) and for blowing this introduction. Thankfully Johnny Bacardi covers much of the historical context that I really, truly wanted to write about, and very well, at that. All I can add is that as a 10 or 11-year-old comics reader, I loved the idea of the Dollar Comics line that Time Warp was a part of, and I think the North American comic book industry has really failed itself and its potential and actual readers by not continuously having a format like this available on a regular basis. Sure, a lot of the stories stunk -- it was a DC comic in the 1970s, after all. But the idea behind the Dollar Comics format was a brilliant one, and I remember joyously grabbing up every one I could back in those long-ago days. Marvel tried something similar with the 100-Page Monster format (Tom Brevoort said outright he was inspired by the Dollar Comics of his youth), but in my opinion, they didn't give it enough of a shot and probably overpriced it by a buck or two.<br /><br />But hey, comics industry? If you are serious about still existing in 2 or 3 years as anything other than a digital dream of what comics used to be, you need to figure out a way to collect large chunks of good-to-great comics in a cheap and lengthy format like the Dollar Comics. Like Time Warp. Not necessarily this exact format, but a big chunk of good, cheap comics kids can get excited about, collect, trade, and read under a tree on a nice summer day. Is that really too goddamned much to ask? Think carefully before you answer, comics industry -- your very survival may depend upon whether you can be as clever and experimental as DC Comics in the mid-1970s. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Johnny Bacardi</span><br /><br />"I remember...doing the Time Warp..."<br /><br />Towards the ass-end of the '70s, inspired by the desire to make a buck in the recent aftermath of the notorious DC Implosion of a year or so prior, the Company Formerly Known as National Periodical Publications decided to take a tentative stab at publishing oversize comics again, and therefore justifying the decision to charge a whole dollar for them, rather than the 40 cents they were charging on the average for the normal-sized titles. Most of the dollar titles were those that DC was already publishing, like World's Finest, Detective, and Adventure Comics, and thus provided opportunities to burn off unused Implosion inventory rather than utilize reprints, like they did in the early-mid '70s via the 100 Page Super Spectaculars. By the way, and I hope you'll let me digress even more than i already have, those 100-Pagers served as teenage me's introduction to many excellent Golden Age stories and creators, such as Jack Cole's Plastic Man, Bernard Baily's Spectre, Gardner Fox/Howard Sherman's Dr. Fate, the Reed Crandall-era Doll Man and Blackhawks, Lou Fine's Ray, and Siegel and Shuster's Superman. Now those were some damn fine comics, and only cost 50 cents to boot.<br /><br />Anyway, most likely inspired by the recent success of Star Wars and the reception given Heavy Metal magazine as well as Warren's fairly popular 1984, DC also decided to try and launch a couple of straight science fiction anthologies, and Time Warp was the first; they also later exhumed the Mystery in Space title as well. Enticed by the as-always splendid Mike Kaluta covers, I bought every darn one of them back when I was 19, and as my recent rereading of the run for this review has revealed to me, I also promptly forgot about the contents of pretty much all of them, which probably tells you pretty much what you need to know, at least from my vantage point.<br /><br />Most of the stories in these five issues, by a panoply of writers both veterans of (Bob Haney, George Kashdan, Jack C. Harris, Dennis O'Neil of course) and new to (Dan Mishkin and Andy Cohn, soon of Amethyst; J.M. DeMatteis, pre-Justice League; don't know what his first comics work was but I bet there wasn't much of it before this) comics, adhere pretty closely to the time honored Sci-Fi tradition, which can be traced from the pulps through EC Comics through DC's own early-'60s perpetuation, mostly at the behest of Julius Schwartz. People in spaceships, alien encounters, malevolent computers and/or robots, twist endings...nothing especially fresh or original, not even then...and certainly not now. So, the focus shifts to the art...and that's where Time Warp acquits itself in much better fashion. It was a mix of creators either past their prime, like Steve Ditko and Gil Kane, or just approaching that status, like Jim Aparo (who by 1979 had already begun the streamlining process which made his art much less of a joy to behold just five years previous) or the redoubtable and under-appreciated Tom Sutton. Personal favorite Jerry Grandenetti contributed a story in every issue or darn near it, and while none of them displayed the expressionistic excess of his '60s work that I love so much, each of his jobs were solid and did the slight stories justice. I don't think he did much comics work after this. Also of note was the presence of the late Don Newton, whose somewhat moody work was very popular in those days; I was always hot and cold on him myself -- his Batman was a standout, as I recall, but I wasn't a fan of much else with his byline. Lots of South American artists represent; some I had heard of and have gone on to achieve some standing, like Alex Nino, John Celardo, or the late Fred Carillo, and a handful whose name I don't recall seeing in any comics credit box since, like Joel Magpayo or Ernesto Patricio. Howard Chaykin contributes a rushed-looking art job, on a story by someone named Wyatt Gwyon (a pseudonym?). It was amusing to see Joe Orlando drawing a tale of a man, stranded on a planet, who creates a robot to keep him company...it brought back echoes to me of his stint drawing Otto Binder's Adam Link for Warren in the mid-'60s. Young Trevor Von Eeden turns up, post Black Lightning but pre-Green Arrow and Thriller, inked beyond recognition. And so it goes. <br /><br />Each issue is a real mishmash; legends past their salad days rubbing shoulders with young turks and newbies just happy to see their name in print, all on the crappiest yellowed paper stock you can imagine. I suppose if you should happen to run across an issue or two in a quarter box it might make for a decent read on a slow afternoon, for nostalgia's sake if nothing else. I can't imagine why anyone younger than, say, 45 would even be interested, unless they were just hardcore fans of the likes of Ditko, Chaykin, Kaluta, or Kane.<br /><br />For my part, though, I'm of the "Let's NOT do the Time Warp again" mentality.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Christopher Allen:</span><br /><br />“Step this way for the safety spray!”<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbZmGB6m_scXWx5xE6p1mUC5tIXPGHSpyF62Ij4MoiVIugfQEkZPeanJyZipyXJY7oF-urHy39noP3Z0Fvuef-qFCUkonkyjBNrIVKXFQmoV-GqWH9MoQxuC4fU72fy6N5EKxTME1p1_M/s1600/tw3.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 260px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbZmGB6m_scXWx5xE6p1mUC5tIXPGHSpyF62Ij4MoiVIugfQEkZPeanJyZipyXJY7oF-urHy39noP3Z0Fvuef-qFCUkonkyjBNrIVKXFQmoV-GqWH9MoQxuC4fU72fy6N5EKxTME1p1_M/s400/tw3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5707298245321672226" /></a>After the “DC Implosion” of 1978, DC actually continued to pump out 64-page <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_Comics">Dollar Comics</a> such as Superman Family and World's Finest, while exploring the war genre in G.I. Combat and new title All-Out War. But editor/writer Jack C. Harris and Executive Editor Joe Orlando also put together Time Warp, a bimonthly science fiction anthology that would serve as a kind of reboot of '60s DC sci-fi titles like Strange Adventures. Interestingly, Time Warp was chosen as a name precisely because Harris and Orlando didn't want to just reboot Strange Adventures or another old book, concerned that young fans might be confused. This is, of course, the opposite of current editing/marketing strategy for DC.<br /><br />“I wanted to die on the surface, like a human, though I would die as a smellie...”<br /><br />Time Warp only lasted five issues (10 months), but boy, that's like 250 pages of comics. If, like me, you decide to read them all in one day, chances are good you'll be numb and exhausted. Basically, a good 80% of the stories are either Man vs. Hideous Aliens/Monsters, Man Turning Into Hideous Monster (or Cyborg), or Man Destroying His World. Sometimes the destroying the world leads to the turning into a monster, sometimes it's the aliens destroying the world, sometimes Man destroys not only Earth but the aliens' planet, too...you get the idea. There are also several tales of greedy, heartless opportunists/poachers/thieves who put money, pleasure or fame ahead of others and pay dearly for it. These are the stories most reminiscent of the kind Orlando worked on or was exposed to at EC Comics in the '50s on books like Weird Science and which influenced countless other '50s stories from National/DC and Atlas/Timely/Marvel, stories with twist endings, spaceships and slimy aliens who were just asking for some laser pistol payback. The kinds of pulpy, occasionally grisly SF stories that thrilled young comics fans until the Kefauver/Wertham era took the teeth out of such tales, followed by the ascendancy of the superhero subgenre.<br /><br />“Renamed in honor of his achievement...Chief Mushroom Cloud!”<br /><br />I would like to say that Time Warp is a real underrated gem, a lost classic cut down too soon. I can't say that, but there is a baseline competence throughout, even though it features stories from folks who came and went through the comics industry without making much of a splash, names like Mimai Kin and Wyatt Gwyon. Yes, those are correctly spelled. There's also an artist called only, “Vicatan,” and I'd like to say the art was as addictive as the name suggested. The stories themselves are often wearingly formulaic and familiar, with at times absurd twists: the two bitter enemies who are reincarnated or who appear in slightly different form on another planet and can't help but be enemies; the future world free of disease that faces doom from the common cold; the hunter who unwittingly kills his friend who's metamorphosed into a monster, who then becomes a hunted monster himself. We've seen most of it before, with a few stories diverging from the formula. Perhaps it's unfair to knock the book for familiarity when so many superhero books are virtually identical, but when you have each issue being a chunk of 50 pages or so at a time and there's one story after another about humans ruining the planet or growing tentacles because the planet is already ruined, enjoying the book becomes more of an academic exercise.<br /><br />“Surely you were meant for...Vipswarzznee!”<br /><br />Which is okay, because there's a lot here to enjoy on a moderate level. I was reminded of the recent Steve Ditko reprints, where the stories themselves are routinely mediocre and the pleasure is to be found in just seeing how Ditko tells the story. Ditko is actually the most frequent contributor to Time Warp, charmingly corny and timelessly cool at the same time, though it's fair to say he doesn't add many of his trademark flourishes and patterns.You do get to see him draw a woman in a bikini, though, which is a real rarity for him. <br /><br />There's also sturdy work from DC stalwarts like Don Newton and Jim Aparo and a robust and distinctive style to Jerry Grandenetti's work in this era that makes me much more interested in him than I ever was before, and a Sheldon Mayer-written tale that I found amusing for its take on time travel paradoxes. For instance, if you travel to the past and kill an architect, you can come back to your time to find that the building he designed still exists, but is about to collapse and kill hundreds of people. Among the highlights, however, along with the Ditko stories and several detail-stuffed Tom Sutton efforts, are one-offs from the reclusive Trevor Von Eeden (with Carl Potts), Gil Kane (a gorgeous but brief return to DC before signing on for a Tarzan newspaper strip), and a young Howard Chaykin working in a style clearly influenced by Alex Toth.<br /><br />“Pardon the interruption, Captain Moonkid.”<br /><br />It's also useful to examine the stories within the context of the era in which they were produced, 1979-1980, with the Cold War still going on and Russia thought of by most Americans as a dangerous enemy. The dread of nuclear war or chemical weapons permeates almost every story, (one evil character is given the Russian-sounding name of General Smerdyakov, though the story doesn't take place on Earth) with characters destroying the Earth, mutating into monsters, and in few instances is there any hope or signs of rebuilding, of getting a second chance to get things right. I think in one of those hopeful stories, the two humans had changed into crawling green slime monsters with eyestalks, but you take what you get. It's also interesting to consider this era for comics, and DC in particular. You have a mix of older and younger talents here, but perhaps due to DC's conservatism, or maybe just the pervasive influence of EC Comics and Twilight Zone type storytelling, even relatively young writers like J.M. DeMatteis, Paul Levitz and Dennis O'Neil for the most part turn in standard, if reasonably well-crafted, fare, although again, it's generally informed by the fears of the times they lived in. Although the samey quality of the work gets to be overpowering, a well-chosen collection of about 100 pages worth of this stuff would actually be pretty fun.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Johanna Draper Carlson</span><br /><br />I didn't read all five of the Time Warp issues we were assigned this week, because even with my fondness for another era of comic storytelling, 300 pages was a bit much all at once, especially without continuing characters. But the one I did read, the first, reminded me of several things: <br /><br />1. Short stories are harder to do well than longer stories, which might be why the comic anthology is all but dead while the collection-told-in-serialized-chapters rules the comic market. <br /><br />2. I've always been surprised that science fiction isn't more successful in comic form, since it seems the perfect medium for it: idea-driven, cheap to show the most outrageous concept, capable of portraying anything that can be imagined, sharing much of the same fandom. But if one rules out superheroes (which are only SF in the loosest definition), then it's difficult to think of any well-known, successful SF comics. (Manga, as usual, is the exception, and many more people should be reading Finder.) <br /><br />3. I miss the art style of the '80s, where competence was required at a minimum. Ah, the glory of Dick Giordano inks and relatively realistically drawn and posed figures. These were filler work, but they're all readable and easy to follow, artistically. <br /><br />4. Science fiction is where O. Henry-style stories went to multiply. The twist ending -- aliens are just like us! judging by appearance is bad! love will show you how bad prejudice is! murderers get what's coming to them! aliens may be bigger or smaller than us! -- is a requirement, it seems, to make the tale meaningful. It's the EC influence, I'm sure, with everyone remembering those classic morality tales disguised as fiction. <br /><br />5. Yet science fiction ages badly. All these technological marvels, and no one could envision equality between the sexes, or a world run by people who weren't white. Maybe because the future is shown as a scary place, full of things that can kill you. That's the biggest twist ending of all: technology can't protect you. <br /><br />6. My gracious, the limited color palette made for some vibrant choices. Purple shirts, orange machinery, bright yellow walls, reds, blues, and of course, lots of green tentacles. <br /><br />I think the piece I'll remember most is yet another "Martians want our women" story with Steve Ditko art, because, aside from the cliched premise, his showgirls are really strange-looking. His aliens, in another chapter, are much better. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Joseph Gualtieri</span><br /><br />In its two-hundred and fiftieth issue, the Comics Journal published an article by Ng Suat Tong called “EC and the Chimera of Memory.” The actual article is, aside from the target, a fairly standard Journal rip job. Arguably a necessary one, as the critical regard for New Direction EC Comics does outstrip their merit in some ways, but I bring the article up for the tagline given to it on the title page, which does not have anything to do with the actual content, “[...] Tong explains why EC comprises a ‘legacy of mediocrity.’” Frankly, that description would pretty much fit this week’s Flashmob Fridays installment, as DC’s Time Warp anthology sadly amounts to being a little more than a pale imitation of EC at its best.<br /> <br />Last week, with Chainsaw Comics’ Fear, we did briefly discuss the problematic nature of anthologies — they are always going to be a mixed bag. Unfortunately, the best part of Time Warp, on all five of its issues, comes on the cover. Each one is a lovely illustration by Michael William Kaluta, usually divorced from any of the tales inside. Of perhaps more historical interest though, is that DC chose to place the names of the creators on the cover, above the title even. This is not a subject I’ve had time to research to see if it’s a first for a major American comics publisher, but even if it is not, it is genuinely shocking and pleasing to see such a thing in a comic from the late 1970s.<br /> <br />As with the EC comics, the art is generally the best element of the interiors. Steve Ditko has at least one story in 4/5 issues (though this is not his best work). Don Newton, an artist I know but whom I’m largely unfamiliar with, is I believe in all five issues and is usually delivers the best-looking story in each issue. Tom Sutton, Howard Chaykin, Dick Giordano contribute one or more nice-looking tales to the series, but by issue four, less and less of the big names are appearing.<br /> <br />The writing is rarely worth talking about. These are all EC-style twist ending sci-fi horror tinged stories and despite a Murderer’s Row line-up writers from the period, they largely fail to even be as entertainingly lurid as the EC comics from 25 years prior. There’s one stand-out exception to this; it is still not very good, but “Pen Pal” by Bob Haney and Fred Carrilo probably comes the closest to matching EC. In it, a woman takes up correspondence with an astronaut stationed far away. She begins having nightmares about being sexually assaulted by an alien; her Freudian psychotherapist suggests this means she needs to go and finally consummate her relationship with her pen pal. Shockingly (or not), the pen pal turns out to be the alien of her nightmares, which are produced by him having sex with a clone of her produced from a lock of hair she sent him. The woman destroys the clone, and the final panels are a look of horror on her face as the alien caresses her and tells her how now she’ll have to stay with him because killing a clone is a capital offense. Again, this story isn’t actually good, but it is as close as Time Warp gets to truly capturing the tone and spirit of EC.<br /> <br />The other exception to the blending together of all the cliché twist endings for me is “The Truth.” Lushly illustrated by Sutton, it is one of several early stories by J.M. DeMatteis found in Time Warp, and seems like the most like his mature work. In it, an astronaut encounters a humanoid race that seemingly practices human sacrifice. After crashing there and falling in love with a priestess, he learns that what looks like a barbaric practice, is actually the final stage of their culture’s method of mind-expansion. As with the other stories, there’s nothing ground-breaking here, but it’s quite well done and shows themes DeMatteis would go on to explore in more depth with his more mature work.<br /> <br />As it only lasted five issues and there was a clear talent drain on the final two issues, Time Warp was a failed experiment for DC in 1979, and time has not exactly been kind to it. In 2012 reprints of the EC Comics it weakly draws on are (mostly) readily available, rendering Time Warp essentially superfluous. Still, if you’re a fan of any of the big-name artists involved in the early issues, Time Warp is relatively inexpensive to pick up and it’s probably worth your while to track them down if you’re a Ditko, Sutton, Newton, Kaluta, or Chaykin fan.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Scott Cederlund</span><br /><br />Reading DC's Time Warp #s 1-5 for this week's Flashmob Fridays, I'm trying to figure out how I'm so unfamiliar with this short-lived series (though that may have something to do with it) even though it features stunning Kaluta covers and art by names like Grandenetti, Chaykin, Ploog, Giordano and Ditko. At the height of Star Wars fever, a huge comic featuring science fiction stories was something that I think a 10 year old me would have been all over. Sadly, I don't remember this title at all and it would still be a few years into the Reagan decade before I'd discover anthology comics thanks to Dark Horse Presents. More and more as I grow older, I realize how much of my own comic book tastes that I still have to this day are formed thanks to the old newsstand distribution system and the local drugstore's magazine racks. <br /><br />Time Warp is a perfect example of a blind spot in my history and how it was formed. Discovering comics back around the ancient days of 1976, the only places I would go to regularly that had them was the neighborhood drugstore and the Ben Franklin Five and Dime store. The drugstore was a weekly store for entertainment, one quarter at a time. I remember plenty of Spider-Man, Avengers, Batman and Justice League in the racks but not a lot else. Compared to the wall-to-wall new comic shelves that most shops today have, I think I was stuck with a selection of only 15 books to choose from, mostly the most popular superheroes that DC and Marvel offered. No war comics, no horror comics and no science fiction comics other than Marvel's continuing Star Wars series. <br /><br />I can't imagine that they ever carried Time Warp. Even if they did, I was already conditioned to think that my comics should look like second-generation Kirby knockoffs and not like Kaluta's graceful and delicate cover images. The eighties and the discovery of comic shops and back issues would open up the world for me. I started to discover that there were more comics than just the few I regularly could see on the magazine racks. But even as my knowledge of comics grew, my tastes still stayed fairly focused on superheroes.<br /><br />Now, thirty years later and reading Time Warp for the first time, it makes me wistful for other books that I wish I had discovered as a kid -- EC's old horror and science fiction comics. The stories in Time Warp also draw heavily from The Twilight Zone, delivering cautionary tales about the future and man's small role in a great big universe. Half of the stories look and feel like classic science fiction comics, more Flash Gordon than Star Wars. These are odd stories, relics and imitators of those old EC comics, stories that are about cliches of science fiction. Then in the same issues, there are cutting edge stories, using science fiction to comment more on the world around the creators. <br /><br />It's thirty years since these issues came out and I've just read this series for the first time, thanks to a drug store that just didn't carry these books. Unlike when I read EC comics or old Creepy magazines, Time Warp doesn't leave me feeling like I missed anything. Some nice art, some fun stories but Time Warp's stories all kind of felt the same. Unlike DC's other anthologies House of Secrets and House of Mystery that my store didn't carry that I've learned to love through the Showcase reprints, Time Warp was a series that didn't offer enough new and exciting stories to make it a timeless series.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-90258998561726664142012-02-03T05:29:00.003-05:002012-02-03T15:46:41.176-05:00Please Stand By<a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7023/6811218367_01a5ea9a64.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 500px; height: 375px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7023/6811218367_01a5ea9a64.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />Flashmob Fridays will return Friday, February 10th. We apologize for any inconvenience.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-19741546041535036482012-01-27T02:25:00.001-05:002012-01-27T02:32:30.960-05:00Chainsaw Comics Presents: Fear<span style="font-weight:bold;">Introduction by Alan David Doane:</span><br /><br />I don't fear death. I know that oblivion and non-existence await my consciousness at the moment I breathe my last, and there's comfort in that thought. After all, I spent billions of years not existing before I was born, so I figure I'll be pretty good at it again after I die. In between my two long periods of non-existence, though, I did learn to fear a few things.<br /><br />Dental work. There's not much more I dread. I have recurring nightmares of looking in the mirror as my teeth fall out, one by one. The clinking sound they make as they impact with the porcelain sink haunts me. I've gone months in ever-increasing agony because I fear going to the dentist. And since every trip to the dentist has ended with the problem resolved and the pain gone, it is about the most irrational fear I can imagine.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhThvRXhCwr_5uPJX5TM9kIPD12rvHhSp6UseCQ0CLqiFCA263p8T9Rz6AKndBqsB-9M8CFPyCxVShaDWp6HkQ0r7RvKbl4S1gWCFn9JOLRdKBaD8JQ0E5wg1-qKg9BDp05U_2cBJOh-uA/s1600/fear_cover.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 207px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhThvRXhCwr_5uPJX5TM9kIPD12rvHhSp6UseCQ0CLqiFCA263p8T9Rz6AKndBqsB-9M8CFPyCxVShaDWp6HkQ0r7RvKbl4S1gWCFn9JOLRdKBaD8JQ0E5wg1-qKg9BDp05U_2cBJOh-uA/s320/fear_cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5701920761940178658" /></a><br /><br />Pain. Closely related to the above, yes, but I also worry about falling on the ice (I live in upstate New York, when ice is a possibility about six months of the year) and breaking a bone. Last year my daughter turned to hug a friend on the sidewalk and twisted her foot the wrong way, and don't even ask me how this is possible, but she broke the hell out of her foot and was in a cast and in pain for nearly six months. To watch your child suffer while you are helpless to make it go away is one of the most frustrating and awful parts of being a parent, and one they don't mention in those cheery, hazy impending parenthood videos.<br /><br />Poverty. I spent a lot of time in the past couple of years fearing what any worsening of the already devastated economy might mean for my family. It was a dark time, one that I am glad to be emerging from, and I hope the many millions living in similar circumstances are given a hand up sometime soon. But seeing how ineffective this nation's leaders are, I fear they won't be.<br /><br />There are other things I fear, but I should stop introducing and let the reviewing begin. Chainsaw Comics Presents: Fear is filled with cartoonists I enjoy, like Jason Marcy, L. Nichols, Box Brown and others. I didn't find the time to write a review myself, but luckily the Flashmob Fridays gang did.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDZU3rwsu4Ix8T1LH7nG-ZhPa87cqH-5dJtmVf25OXj0jPpCDEtNr2RkIx3gBJeC4RUL24eELyRzknSBLifVJOb27xKkd1BPc1B-rsqtAxKj0GInfttq0e61yDBWf8E3rm_IFFaIkYC_M/s1600/fear01.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 202px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDZU3rwsu4Ix8T1LH7nG-ZhPa87cqH-5dJtmVf25OXj0jPpCDEtNr2RkIx3gBJeC4RUL24eELyRzknSBLifVJOb27xKkd1BPc1B-rsqtAxKj0GInfttq0e61yDBWf8E3rm_IFFaIkYC_M/s400/fear01.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702146140125747778" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Joseph Gualtieri:</span><br /><br />Chainsaw Comics Presents Fear, edited by Aaron Brassea, Nathan Stryker, and L. Nichols is like most comics anthologies a mixed bag. At a slim 100 pages of comics and just under 30 stories, there’s always another story just a few pages away that might make up for a dud. All the stories deal with the theme of fear, as befits the title, but the approaches vary greatly. Some illustrate what seem like deeply personal fears, others illustrate common phobias, and quite a few tales are humorous.<br /> <br />“Hug” by Simon Taylor is probably the single best story in the anthology. It’s quite creepy and beautifully illustrated in a Manga style. “Where Will You Spend Eternity” by Flashmob Friday favorite Box Brown is other contender for that title. It’s a terrific semi-abstract dream about the fear of what happens after death. “Be Careful Where You Hide Your Secrets” by Dino Caruso and Paul Little is another one of the strongest shorts; the art is probably the closest to that found in mainstream comics within the volume, and the story deftly combines fears about intimacy, the invasion of privacy, and what happens when you share your art.<br /> <br />“A Bigfoot Adventure” by Jefery J. Manley and “Big Bad Wolf” by Clifton Chandler are two of the better-looking tales in the anthology, but have weaker stories. The former is clearly trying to be wacky, as the characters include a Grim Reaper and some sort of floating blob, but it never quite comes together. “Big Bad Wolf” has gorgeous chiaroscuro art, and no dialogue. It feels like the beginning of a story rather than a complete take on the wolves from fairy tales. <br /> <br />There are too many short funny tales in the volume to mention them all but standouts include: “A Grave Error” by JT Yost, a hilarious take on the fear of being buried alive, “Atychiphobia” by Aaron Brassea and Nathan Stryker, where a man’s fear of failing at creating his own music leads to him quitting his job to be in a Beatles cover band, and “What Not to Think About in the Dark” by Evan Nichols, where an adult at a summer camp is persuaded to tell the kids what he finds scary in the dark. The latter in particular stands out as exactly hits on the difference between the fears of children and adults, which makes it rather poignant despite its short length.<br /> <br />Anthologies are always a rough sell, but Chainsaw has a good model here and I’m already looking forward to their next book, this time about Joy.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Roger Green:</span><br /><br />I LOVE the idea of the Chainsaw Comics anthology on fear. Different perspectives about what people are afraid of. The trick with a multi-creator product, though, is that it will almost invariably be of differing quality.<br /><br />So, story #1 -meh, story #2 - meh; are these guys brothers of different mothers? A similar vibe. Story #3 - meh. Then there was story #4, which has some of the worst lettering ever; it's in cursive, and I found it REALLY irritating.<br /><br />It's about this point that I decided that the exercise wasn't worth it. But then story #5, Addie by Robyn Jordan. I didn't love it, but it was about something. What Have I Done? by Brad Britton was slight, and he can't spell "piece", but it showed better technique than the earlier works.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdhS89Q_ZSPVIofW3g7G2P1acCqqL1U4KevE0fJ337x3cm4NPOFV9WjCFwhyFS9Rzyme8sA07G3GNRroak4Igtv5M92EP61O79LDwpklSj07Ft948PkB2emh6S8C4uraUx5lJJL6oYAhM/s1600/fear02.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 349px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdhS89Q_ZSPVIofW3g7G2P1acCqqL1U4KevE0fJ337x3cm4NPOFV9WjCFwhyFS9Rzyme8sA07G3GNRroak4Igtv5M92EP61O79LDwpklSj07Ft948PkB2emh6S8C4uraUx5lJJL6oYAhM/s400/fear02.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702146352242304818" /></a>I actually thought A Boy and His Dog by Bren Collins was "real". And from then on, the level of storytelling improved quite a bit. Some stories I liked, others, not quite, but the percentage of positive tales was higher than the duds. Things That Go Bump in the Night by Aaron Brassea gave me a mild chuckle. A Bigfoot Adventure by Jeffrey J. Manley went on too long for the joke, and had some production problems on one page, but had potential. Big Bad Wolf by Clifton Chandler had an interesting wood carving effect.<br /><br />Kurt & Adele: A Love Story by Emi Gennis, based on real people, was quite strong, though it too had a production issue. There's a nice twist in A Grave Error by J.T. Yost. Re: Thanatophobia by Non-Work in Progress - I've been there. My Silent Fear by Bob Lipski I liked. I KNOW the guy in Atychiphobia by Aaron Brassea and Nathan Stryker, and appreciated the Beatles reference.<br /><br />Perhaps my favorite piece is Be Careful Where You Hide Your Secrets by Dino Caruso and Paul Little. Maybe it's because anyone who has ever been in more than one relationship might be able to relate to the situation. It's also arguably the best drawn item in the collection.<br /><br />Anxious About How Guilty To Feel by Tom McHenry is interesting to me, because, while it doesn't particularly apply to me, I took it as information about others. Clever one-page is What Not to Think About In the Dark by Evan Nichols.<br /><br />Someone should have edited Pumpkin by Simon Taylor. If, somehow, the message in the last paragraph had been slowly revealed throughout the last page, it would have been far more effective. Also the word 'you' is written 'yopu' at one point.<br /><br />Finally, Perfect Man versus Confidence by Chris Fenoglio was a fun tale in the superhero motif. <br /><br />Having read through it twice, I should say that it is far better than I had expected. But I think some of the weakest material is in the front. Still, I would give it a chance; enough of it is good to make it worthwhile. I'd be interested to see the subsequent collection, Joy, scheduled for later this year. <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKPM81_GtgFUJjwndVMwkh_TYoYziWzAzIM3SI4vVQ-IerYr5219niZFZzmHRrzA2zHDYj2vz_ODELv_FBBj6pEptC9thBrlHoBzllkeSFGNiJVtUVY3tM0fWZM3PYbQ-8-EQ21mnimJA/s1600/fear03.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 165px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKPM81_GtgFUJjwndVMwkh_TYoYziWzAzIM3SI4vVQ-IerYr5219niZFZzmHRrzA2zHDYj2vz_ODELv_FBBj6pEptC9thBrlHoBzllkeSFGNiJVtUVY3tM0fWZM3PYbQ-8-EQ21mnimJA/s400/fear03.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702146715092916370" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1466419563/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=comboogal-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1466419563">Buy Chainsaw Comics Presents: Fear from Amazon.com</a>.<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=comboogal-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1466419563" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-88615238027320673962012-01-20T00:00:00.003-05:002012-01-20T06:50:33.321-05:00Harvey Pekar's Cleveland<span style="font-weight:bold;">Introduction by Alan David Doane:</span><br /><br />The greatest minds ever to create comics -- I'm thinking of creators like Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, <a href="http://troublewithcomics.com/post/10758087622/add-flashback-bernard-krigstein-in-the-spotlight">Bernard Krigstein</a>, <a href="http://flashmobfridays.blogspot.com/2012/01/walt-disneys-donald-duck-lost-in-andes.html">Carl Barks</a>, Alan Moore, and of course, <a href="http://troublewithcomics.com/post/806518446/harvey-pekar-interview">Harvey Pekar</a> -- all rose to prominence, won the respect of readers and other writers and artists, and guaranteed their places in the history of comics because of one common element: Each of them showed the rest of us that there were possibilities in comics that no one had seen until they carved out the path. Toth showed how much you could do by showing only the bare essentials; Krigstein showed how breaking out of the expected box could lead to an infinite fractal complexity on the comics page. Barks demonstrated how powerful the wedding of children's characters and inventive storytelling could be; Moore taught those willing to learn how to use the power of imagination to create new heights of majesty in comics writing.<a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7148/6725081431_5c069869fb.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 228px; height: 300px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7019/6729328331_99bec1155c.jpg" border="0" hspace="9" vspace="9" alt="" /></a><br /><br />And then there's Harvey. Sure, there had been a few autobiographical or semi-autobiographical works created in comics before Pekar first began writing scripts about his life and times on the streets of Cleveland. But almost immediately, those with a vested interest in comics as an artform saw that there was an entirely unsuspected potential to be found in speaking plainly but thoughtfully about moments as common and diverse as waiting in line at the supermarket, crashing your car in the snow, or finding out you have cancer. By depicting and examining his own everyday existence in nearly obsessive detail, Harvey Pekar somehow tapped into a universality of the human spirit in a way that elevated the artform of comics higher than it otherwise would ever have risen. On a large scale, the potential of storytelling in comics form is greater now than it was before Harvey first set pen to paper. On the smallest scale, that of the individual reader, I know that my life has been improved, my spirit touched, my intellect challenged and rewarded, because this one file clerk in Cleveland made up some comic books about his life.<br /><br />There is, in fact, no one in comics whose work I love more than I do the comics of Harvey Pekar. There may be a few I hold in equal esteem (pro tip: check out that list in paragraph 1), but no one has ever exceeded Harvey's reach. Few have even attempted to scale his heights, never mind done so for four decades. That Harvey did so for so little financial reward is kind of amazing and speaks to his tenacity as a human being. He knew comics was an artform, he knew his work was important (although it never, ever felt <span style="font-style:italic;">self</span>-important), and I suspect he sacrificed a lot to bring his vision to life again and again, especially in the earliest years of self-publishing, long before comics and book publishers came calling. <br /><br />Harvey liked to say comics are just words and pictures, and that you can do anything with words and pictures. We know that's true in large part because <span style="font-style:italic;">he</span> proved it. I often think of him, and I hope that the respect and attention he garnered late in his career, especially after his American Splendor comic book became <span style="font-style:italic;">American Splendor</span> the movie, was enough for him. I hope he knew how much we all loved his comics. I hope he knew how much we all loved <span style="font-style:italic;">him</span>. Never before and never since has comics produced a Harvey Pekar. And never again will Harvey Pekar produce comics. Cleveland is his last work, and I'm very pleased that it's the subject of this week's Flashmob Fridays.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Christopher Allen:</span><br /><br />What I believe is the final completed work by the late author Harvey Pekar is now available, an expansive memoir that also performs about half of the time as a history of Cleveland, Ohio. The so-called navel-gazing, emo, whiny autobiographical comics of the ‘80s and ‘90s were never as large in number as detractors claimed, but what there were always found an antidote in Pekar’s comics, which addressed disease, relationship and work problems with either a crusty humor or resolve, a get-it-out-and-over-with quality that Pekar brings to this finale project.<br /> <br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7146/6729214493_979d1e48f2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 290px; height: 272px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7146/6729214493_979d1e48f2.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>After some uneven work the past several years, such as the overrated graphic novel, The Quitter, a detached nonfiction look at Macedonia, and a Vertigo miniseries that more often than not found him unable to polish mundane anecdotes and observations into bright gems of humanity, it’s fitting that Pekar ends on familiar ground, just him and his beloved hometown. That said, much of the history of Cleveland, as told by Pekar, is not all that interesting, and while it seems fairly well-researched, some observations are arbitrary and inconsistent. For instance, African-Americans seem to have an above-average quality of life compared to other cities, for a while, and then by the ‘60s there are several riots, without much explanation how things deteriorated. What industries’ or athletic teams’ declines, or other factors contributing to Cleveland’s decline and lack of growth, are not examined. Which is fine; no one should expect this to be a definitive history, but one should understand that this is Cleveland through Pekar’s eyes as a lifelong resident, a working class, self-educated writer whose lens is focused more on the city’s cultural history as it happened to him, its great library and symphony, its jazz clubs, used bookstores and parks. If you’re interested in Cleveland’s rock and roll history, great restaurants, organized crime or political history, this is not the book for you.<br /> <br />Pekar has worked with some good artists before, but Joseph Remnant (and how ironic is that name for the artist of Pekar’s last book?) is really ideal for this material. Fairly realistic, not too stylistic, and with a warm crosshatching style that works well with Pekar’s prose to capture Cleveland’s past and present with both clarity and fondness. His figures are gently slope-shouldered, reminiscent to me of great children’s book illustrator Mercer Mayer (The Great Brain, Little Critters), which works very well in most of the book, aside from maybe the riots, which call for something a bit more dynamic. Remnant’s Pekar is cuddly without being a caricature. The only real issue is how often to include Harvey in the art and how often to just let him narrate, which results in odd choices like Harvey talking to the reader while sitting on a moving subway. It was probably Pekar’s choice to include himself periodically, but it seems unnecessary, as his voice is always distinct and present in the narration. It’s easy enough to just see the art as if one is looking through Pekar’s eyes, so there’s no much need to actually see him shuffling around the city.<br /> <br />Ultimately, although there is some merit in the historical portions of the book, the most compelling material is autobiographical, with young Harvey making friends, discovering a love of reading, scholarship and collecting, and some material on girlfriends/wives (much of which has been explored at greater length in prior American Splendor work), as well as a bittersweet conclusion that finds Pekar working hard in retirement to make ends meet, even as his intellectual curiosity has cooled. Maybe my favorite part was learning that as a middle-aged man, he immersed himself in literary scholarship out of spite for his ex-wife, which struck me as hilarious, practical, and totally Harvey. Not the best book he’s done, but well worth reading.<br /><br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7021/6728088673_f69044b315_z.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 590px; height: 406px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7021/6728088673_f69044b315_z.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">Roger Green:</span><br /><br />Don't know just when I started reading Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, but it was definitely in the early period of his self-publishing mode in the late 1970s, with art probably by Robert Crumb. I totally identified with the main character, which of course was Harvey himself, a caustically sharp observer of the human condition, especially his own. But, in my comic book drought days, I had never read his later works published by Dark Horse or DC/Vertigo. (I did see, and love, the 2003 film of the same name.) I actively never watched him on Letterman, because I thought Dave would treat him as a buffoon.<br /><br />So reading Cleveland was rather like going to a college reunion. Would I still like this guy? Would he still be as clever and pointed as that fellow I once knew? And when you read Harvey, you DO feel that you "know" him.<br /><br />The book starts with a lengthy history of the title city. I got a bit impatient with it, not so much because of its length but because there wasn't enough of Harvey's voice there. I did, though, understand the point of some of this section, especially as it related to baseball and race relations, because when we FINALLY get to the Harvey part - on PAGE 43! - the context of the some of the earlier stuff begins to make more sense.<br /><br />And it's in these next 80 or so pages that I said, "There's the Harvey I remember," analyzing his complicated relationship with women, how having losing sports teams gives a city an inferiority complex, his hoarding behavior with books and music, his work history, the value of the public library, and his staged blowup with Letterman.<br /><br />The latter pages are bittersweet as he muses, in the words of Paul Simon, "how terribly strange to be 70." What will his future be like? Unfortunately, Harvey never made it to 71. Still, I was glad to spend one more round with an old friend. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Scott Cederlund:</span><br /><br />A city where the sweet Twinkie filling flows freely out of pipes sounds like some magical place like Willie Wonka’s factory. The truth is that such a fantastic place exists in Cleveland, one of America’s historical cities that’s a sad shadow of the city it once promised to be. The building where Twinkie filling still runs trhough the pipes, a one-time Hostess factory now converted into a giant used book store, is a re-occuring set piece in Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland, a book about a city the author lives in as much as it is about the author himself. Over the years, Pekar has become synonymous with Cleveland. One almost doesn’t exist without the other. When Anthony Bourdain took his Travel Channel show to Cleveland a few years ago, he had to have Pekar on the show. For Bourdain, like so many others, Pekar <span style="font-style:italic;">is</span> Cleveland.<br /><br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7157/6728088707_973eec3aab.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 287px; height: 272px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7157/6728088707_973eec3aab.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland begins as a hopeful dream. Pekar and artist Joseph Remnant begin the book in 1948 when the Cleveland Indians won the World Series. “Yeah, I’ve had plenty of good days,” Pekar muses, but the best was still the day when he was eight years old listening to the game over his school’s P.A. system. To this kid, sports were everything and his entire civic pride was wrapped up in his baseball team. Pekar regales his audience with stories of Cleveland Indian baseball from the late 1940s and early 1950s before delving into the history of Cleveland. Beginning from the earliest days in 1795, the desires for the city were always countered by a stark reality. Even as the city, more of an outpost then, began to grow along the Cuyahoga, the river itself became a source of disease and insects. <br /><br />As Pekar chronicles the history of the city, for every success there is an equal or greater failing that the city experiences. His recounting of the 1948 World Series at the beginning of the book perfectly introduces this pattern. They won in 1948 but the Indians would go on to lose the 1954 World Series. It would take them another 40 years to reach the World Series but they lost twice during the 1990s and haven’t been back since. “For me,” Pekar writes, “the 1954 World Series was a turning point. I always looked at the Indians as an up-and-coming team. But now they seemed to be rotten to the core with success... A few years later, that’s how I viewed Cleveland: rotten.”<br /><br />That’s the viewpoint of a kid but this book easily shows that Pekar’s feelings for the city are a bit more complex than that. By Pekar’s account, there always seems to be something eating away at the city and its people. For every step forward, there were two or three back. So maybe even if the city’s core is rotten, Pekar still finds the good in it. He finds the bookstores with Twinkies filling in the pipes. He finds the people and the joy in the city even as he recognizes all of the missed opportunities that exist for Cleveland and for himself.<br /><br />For a book about a city, about halfway through the book Pekar takes a side path and begins talking about himself and his own life. It starts out as a diversion but it becomes the second half of the book. In it’s own way, that’s typical Pekar as so much of his work is autobiography but it also illustrates the relationship of the man and his city. As much as he can see both the good and the bad in his hometown, he expresses the same about his own life. There are loving but absent parents. There are wives but there are also divorces. There is cultish fame but it never translates into book sales. There is happiness but there is also cancer. <br /><br />Remnant brings the whole book together, drawing Cleveland and Pekar showing their warmth and their warts. He doesn’t gloss over anything that Pekar writes, instead showing the life of the man and the city with the honesty and openness that Pekar expresses in his writing. Remnant also gives the book its steady foundation. Pekar is all over the place in his narration and feels unfocused. Is this a book about the city or the man? Pekar never makes clear his intent as he wanders from one moment in time to another as easily as wandering from one city block to another. Remnant keeps up with Pekar, shifting from the historical recounting of the 1800s to the 1970s when Pekar is talking about his own search for love and friendship. Pekar wanders in this book, starting in one place, going off in a tangent but bringing it all back together and never straying far from Cleveland.<br /><br />In the end, Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland is a bittersweet book. Two entities, man and city, are so intertwined and yet neither one is able to have the success or satisfaction they desire. This book could just as easily be titled Cleveland’s Harvey Pekar because their stories are split almost in half in this story and their stories are thematically so similar. One becomes a metaphor for the other. Pekar was great at making the mundane entertaining and enlightening but here he also makes the mundane sad but optimistic. He’s so discouraged by the city and life around him but he’s also so optimistic that tomorrow may be just a bit better than today. The city may be rotten to the core but as long as Twinkie filling flows through the pipes, there’s a bit of magic in this town and maybe the Indians will win next year.<br /><br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7157/6728088783_2109b7010c_z.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 596px; height: 480px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7157/6728088783_2109b7010c_z.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Johanna Draper Carlson:</span><br /><br />Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland, illustrated by Joseph Remnant, is the quintessential Pekar autobiographical graphic novel, a love letter to his hometown that unblinkingly looks at the bad as well as the good. Pekar's narration intertwines moments and memories of his life with incidents that demonstrate the downfall of what was once an industrial powerhouse. <br /><br />I've never been able to really get the appeal of Pekar before. There was too much crotchety old man complaining about it, but here, the setting gives the work more of a hook for me. Looking at his life, even when he's grumbling, as a parallel to the downturn of a great American metropolis puts things in perspective. Plus, I now better appreciate the viewpoint of someone older and with experience; I think of his comments as having more perspective. Having seen how a community can decline, some grumpiness is understandable. <br /><br />Remnant's work is a perfect choice for the material. It's straightforward, well-suited to the journalistic approach, but has its own character. Instead of simply drawing what we're being told, the illustrations add to the story by fleshing out the text and providing a real sense of place and time. <br /><br />Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland is a fitting final work by the curmudgeon who made comic autobiography into the powerhouse it is today, as well as a wonderful starting point for anyone wanting to sample his work. <br /><br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7154/6729195047_7caf6dc368_z.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 595px; height: 422px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7154/6729195047_7caf6dc368_z.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1603090916/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=comboogal-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1603090916">Buy Harvey Pekar's Cleveland from Amazon.com</a>.<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=comboogal-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1603090916" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-78797645798454203142012-01-15T04:40:00.001-05:002012-01-15T04:41:12.024-05:00The Wrap-Up Show: Action Comics #5<a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7004/6480228613_66726035df_z.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 625px; height: 204px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7004/6480228613_66726035df_z.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Hello hello! <a href="http://flashmobfridays.blogspot.com/2012/01/action-comics-5.html">Friday's post on Morrison and Kubert's Action Comics #5</a> got our critics typing furiously -- so furiously, in the case of Scott Cederlund, that he was so spent after writing his contribution that he forgot to actually send it to your humble editor. So, with no further ado, because as Stan always noted, we've run all out of ado -- here's Scott's take on Action Comics #5.</span><br /><br />Grant Morrison has already done the near-perfect version Superman’s origin story in All-Star Superman #1:<br /><br /><blockquote>“Doomed planet.<br /><br />“Desperate Scientists.<br /><br />“Last Hope.<br /><br />“Kindly Couple”</blockquote><br />For the story we’ve no doubt seen countless times, Morrison and Frank Quitely reduced it down to eight words and four pictures. It reminded us of everything we needed to know about Superman. It’s not tied into any particular continuity or story but it’s so simple that it’s about all Superman stories. In that way, it made All-Star Superman a universal story. Anyone who knows anything about Superman could pick up that book and not have to worry about whether they were reading the Golden Age Superman, John Byrne’s reboot, Waid’s version of the story or Geoff Johns’s most recent retelling. Morrison created the platonic ideal of a “baby is sent away from an exploding planet to be found and raised by a farming couple.” Action Comics #5 does in 28 pages what Morrison slyly did in four panels. <br /><br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7173/6699943731_1ccc30c227_z.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 640px; height: 461px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7173/6699943731_1ccc30c227_z.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>The problem is that those four panels are expanded to the story beats in Action Comics #5 and they don’t even come together as a story. Slotted-in between the main story in issues #4 and #7, Action Comics #5 has the stink of an old-fashioned fill-in issue, complete with a story that has tangential ties to the rest of the series and a different artist. Morrison shows us these moments on Krypton and on earth that we’ve seen countless times without adding anything substantial to it. The costumes and the rocket look different. The Kent’s child-bearing problems are a bit more realistic and emotional but in a sense they were always implied. And in the end, mysterious, shadowy characters show up to tease us about future plot points. <br /><br />In his book <span style="font-style:italic;">Supergods</span>, Morrison describes Siegel and Shuster’s Superman as a socialistic hero a man trying to bring down the corrupt businesses of the late 1930s. He’s a hero of the people who isn’t actually of the people himself. He’s the perpetual outsider who’s strongest wish is to have the American dream life everyone wishes for. In Action Comics, Morrison has tried to recreate that version of Superman. This isn’t the Silver Age hero that he paid homage to in All-Star Superman and this isn’t any Superman we’ve seen in the last 40 years. This is a Superman who is going to be an American hero because he’s going to fight for the American people. <br /><br />That’s where Morrison’s story started. Not with Brainiac and cities being stolen. Not with exploding planets and doomed races. Action Comics #1 started with Superman trying to force a confession out of a corrupt businessman. That doesn’t sound very super but I think Morrison knows that his Clark Kent isn’t Superman yet. Anyone can wear a t-shirt with the S-shield on it. I do it all the time. Morrison’s Superman is a primitive proto-hero and that’s the story that Morrison should be telling. Everything he’s done in the last three issues feel like Superman stories we’ve read countless times by Mort Weisinger, Curt Swan, John Byrne and Dan Jurgens. <br /><br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7001/6699973703_4c790afa7b.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 326px; height: 500px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7001/6699973703_4c790afa7b.jpg" border="2" alt="" /></a>In this last few years of political, economic and social upheaval in the United States, I think Morrison is on the right track in trying to redefine Superman. The 21st Century started out with a Superman that somehow tried to renounce any American citizenship and even was proclaimed as standing for “truth, justice and all of that other stuff.” But like the times when Superman was created, the “American way” is either corny, an anachronism or a lie depending on your views of the country. And how does the country’s #1 adopted son respond to that? That’s the story that it felt like Morrison was trying to tell in the first two issues of Action. How does the ultimate boy scout live in an era where the Boy Scouts are eventually sent overseas to fight wars that no one understands while those who stay home get rich and fat? <br /><br />After only a couple issues of a 21st century Superman, Morrison falls back on retelling the stories we already know with Krypton and Kansas and Lex Luthor and Brainiac. Maybe that’s the new DC, the illusion of change and progress as the stories end up recycling everything we’ve seen before. We expect more out of Morrison though, don’t we? We expect to see some reinvention of these stories and these concepts but any changes in Action Comics #5 to the familiar origin are purely cosmetic and don’t add anything to the story that he has been telling. DC has become the masters of illusion with this revamp but it’s a thin illusion. Maybe if Morrison had shown us something we hadn’t seen before this issue would feel more significant but like the rest of Morrison’s Action run so far, it’s full of ideas and concepts that feel like they want to find a story to be a part of.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401235468/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=comboogal-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1401235468">Buy Action Comics Vol. 1: Superman and the Men of Steel from Amazon.com</a>.<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=comboogal-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1401235468" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-16061784986047330202012-01-11T08:17:00.022-05:002012-01-13T02:14:14.038-05:00Action Comics #5<span style="font-weight:bold;">Introduction by Alan David Doane:</span><br /><br />In my more contemplative moments (those moments I contemplate comics, anyway), I sometimes wonder whatever happened to the Grant Morrison that wrote The Invisibles, <a href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/jlaearth2_review.html">JLA: Earth 2</a>, Flex Mentallo, <a href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/051004review.html">The Filth</a>, <a href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/newxmen142_review.html">New X-Men</a>, Marvel Boy, or even All-Star Superman.<br /><br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7003/6683553221_9ea073c6dc_b.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 414px; height: 640px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7003/6683553221_9ea073c6dc_z.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>To say Morrison's output in the days since Seven Soldiers of Victory has been largely a disappointment would be a huge understatement. It seems like, somewhere along the line, he lost some key element of his gift for writing comics. I was astonished at how poorly Final Crisis held up, after eagerly anticipating a reunion of the creative team from Marvel Boy, which was a work of sheer genius, and one of the best Marvel books of the past 25 years. So what happened to Morrison? I'd hazard a guess that spending much time literally or metaphorically with his DC Comics colleague, the witless writer of fanboy fiction Geoff Johns would be enough to damage anyone's brain cells. Short of that, perhaps Morrison is just phoning it in. I have no idea why the quality of his his work has fallen off so precipitously, but I am rock-solid in my conviction that it has. <br /><br />I've kinda-sorta followed Action Comics since The New 52 event, but I haven't found anything in it to engage me. Unlike my fellow traveler Chris Allen below, I don't care much for the artwork of Rags Morales (I don't hate it, it just does nothing for me), and the first four issues seemed like so much placekeeping. This fifth issue feels more like a first issue, like the beginning of something new, but of course it's Superman, so we must relive his origin story for the 18,674th time. Seriously, DC? Hollywood? There are intelligent, highly-evolved blue-green slime molds living millennial lifespans in the southwestern rim of the galaxy of Andromeda that are bored as fuck with the retelling of Superman's origin. So you can bet your ass that we are too, right here at home. Besides, Morrison had the last word in Super-origin-retelling in the first page (see illustration, click it to see it bigger) of All-Star Superman. So why are we sitting through this again?<br /><br />The gimmick that the rocketship is telling the story is new, and somewhat clever. Almost Morrisonesque, one might say. The art, by Alleged Watchmen 2 scab Andy Kubert, is attractive in that "half my dad, half Jim Lee" way that Kubert has about him. The shadowy, half-familiar villains lend a hint of intrigue. Which is a hint more than just about any New 52 title has issued forth, with a rare Wonder Woman or Swamp Thing-type exception. (And frankly, Swamp Thing is getting fucking <span style="font-style:italic;">draggy</span>, folks.)<br /><br />So here we are with Morrison feeling slightly more like Morrison than he has in some time, a clever idea or two, and much more attractive art than the title has seen at all to date in its relaunch. I'd recommend you check this issue out if you like the creators, or even the character, but I won't tell you it's a work of genius, or even worthy of being held up in the mid-range of Morrison's complete body of work. He's done worse, but he's done far better, too. As someone who generally likes Morrison's take on DC's major superheroes (his JLA remains one of the company's best-written books ever), I really wanted to love this issue. That I didn't hate it seems something of a miracle given the current quality of corporate superhero books as a whole, but I could have liked it a lot more than I did, if only it had been a little better written, and had any reason whatsoever to exist.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Christopher Allen:</span><br /><br />Grant Morrison's short Action Comics run has thus far been plagued by a seeming lack of ambition unusual for Morrison. Usually, if a book isn't successful, it's due more to trying to do too much and not pulling it all together, so it has been dismaying to get through four issues where not a lot has happened besides a decision to write Superman as a cocky punk. In the past couple weeks, readers have discovered that DC put the New 52 together very quickly, and are now changing some creative teams, so it could be that Morrison had to come up with something quickly, making a hasty claim to another big character so as to not get lost in the Lee/Johns vision of the DCU of today. Who knows? What is known is that Action has been pretty forgettable, if nicely drawn by Rags Morales.<a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7006/6678614383_307024cdbd.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 325px; height: 500px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7006/6678614383_307024cdbd.jpg" border="0" hspace="9" vspace="9" alt="" /></a><br /><br />This issue marks a departure from the series so far, the beginning of a two issue flashback drawn by Andy Kubert that retells Superman's origin yet again. The story provides a chance for Morales to catch up, arriving suddenly in the middle of the first arc, and in some ways it could provide a bit of a breather for Morrison as well. How hard is it to write another wrinkle on Superman's origin? But Morrison digs in and does a nice job capturing the sacrifice of Jor-El and Lara and the pain of the childless Jon and Martha Kent, while tweaking past history with a rupture in the Phantom Zone leading to Kal-El being sent to Earth and Krypto disappearing, while Kal-El's craft is navigated by an early version of Brainiac, which goes into sleep mode when it's discovered by the government. Add to that a team of new enemies for Superman that seem to be embodiments of the goofy old alternate forms of Kryptonite of the '50s, and this is an issue that, while it isn't close to Morrison at the top of his game, is still clever and entertaining. Kubert isn't one of Morrison's more imaginative collaborators -- as witnessed by the ho-hum depiction of Krypton's destruction -- but Morrison has worked with him enough by now to know how to use him well, and Kubert is at least a solid storyteller who keeps things moving without drawing attention to himself rather than the tale being told.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Yan Basque:</span><br /><br />One of my favourite things about Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All Star Superman is the brilliant way they dispense with Superman's origin in a single page. It's the very first page of the comic and consists of four panels and a total of eight words: "Doomed planet. Desperate scientists. Last hope. Kindly couple." Those words - combined with the images of (1) Krypton about to blow up, (2) Kal-El's birth parents, (3) the rocket flying away from exploding Krypton, and (4) a shot from baby Kal-El's POV with Martha and Jon leaning over him, Martha holding a piece of red cloth, and the big, bright, yellow sun in the background - perfectly encapsulate Superman's origin story. It's one of the best examples of compressed storytelling I've come across in modern superhero comics. <br /><br />Part of the reason All Star Superman's first page works so well is that we already know the origin story. We've seen it, heard it, read it a thousand times already. For some reason, DC is obsessed with retelling it over and over again. In the past decade, we've seen versions of it in Superman: Birthright (2003-04), All Star Superman (2006-08) Superman: Secret Origin (2009-10), Superman: Earth One (2010).<br /><br />So here, in Action Comics #5, we get a completely unnecessary retelling of that origin. What Grant Morrison had reduced to a perfect single page in All Star is now drawn out into a convoluted mess to fill a whole issue of one of the most overrated titles of DC's New 52.<br /><br />I've read the first couple of issues of the relaunched Action Comics and found nothing to enjoy in them. The extremely inconsistent and rushed art was already getting patched up by fill-in artists by the second issue. Meanwhile, Grant Morrison's younger, cockier and angrier Superman feels to me like a very boring take on the character. This is just not what I want out of Superman comics. (But then again, neither was "Grounded" or much of what we've gotten in the past few years.) <br /><br />This particular issue is about as insular and cryptic as an already well-known origin story can get, which seems to be exactly the opposite of what the New 52 relaunch was supposed to achieve. Wasn't it going to simplify things for new readers. Well, guess what? If new readers know anything about superhero comics, it's probably Superman's origin. So why is DC taking what those potential new readers already know and complicating it with this mess of a story? <br /><br />In the opening scenes, Jor-El and Lara exchange some of the worst expository dialogue Morrison has ever written. They keep telling each other things they already know: "We built it together, you and I." Meanwhile, the narration from Brainiac/Superman's rocket's point of view might be kind of a neat trick, except that it's hard to figure out what he/it's talking about some of the time. Then when time travel got involved, I was having some bad flashbacks to the more nonsensical parts of Return of Bruce Wayne and I completely lost interest. <br /><br />Andy Kubert's art is serviceable but unremarkable.<br /><br />There's also a backup story by Sholly Fisch and Crisscross, about the Kents trying to conceive a child before Kal-El's arrival on Earth. I have no opinion about this story, but Crisscross is one of the worst artists at DC right now and I can't stomach the way his weird faces are constantly morphing from panel to panel, making you question how they could possibly belong to the same character. <br /><br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7004/6688501955_7453cca150_z.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 640px; height: 188px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7004/6688501955_7453cca150_z.jpg" border="2" alt="" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Joseph Gualtieri:</span><br /><br />Grant Morrison’s long-form comics projects, post-Invisibles anyway, tend to get off to a fast, appealing start, descend into a slow burn, and then reach an exciting climax that ties the series up nicely. New X-Men and the pre-Final Crisis Batman run are probably the two best examples of this. In the case of the former, “E for Extinction” clearly marked the beginning of a new era, then things settled down the series received some poor reviews until the rush of “Murder at the Mansion,” “Assault on Weapon Plus,” “Planet X,” and “Here Comes Tomorrow” turned general opinion around. The reaction to “Batman and Son” wasn’t as positive as the one for “E for Extinction,” but Batman fighting ninja Man-Bats against a backdrop of Lichtenstein paintings is a fun one. Unfortunately other than the JH Williams III illustrated “Black Glove,” Morrison’s Batman did not seem to gain any critical traction during its middle period. Then “R.I.P.” hit, and while it is one of the more divisive stories in Batman’s long history, it worked quite well for some critics and readers. The next period of Morrison’s long Batman run, on Batman & Robin, would go through a similar spectrum of critical reaction, with a positive response to the first arc, disdain for the second, and then an upswing towards the end.<br /> <br />So why take the long look at the reaction to some of Morrison’s more recent superhero work? Because from what I’ve seen, people hate Action Comics #5, and I think it’s well worth viewing it within the past lens of Morrison’s pattern of work. Whatever Morrison’s doing in Action, it isn’t close to the end yet, and his work usually does not become clear until that point. Reviewing a single issue in the middle of one of Morrison’s long form epics is not going to give you much of a sense of the totality of the work or of where he’s going.<br /> <br />In the very first Flashmob Fridays, we looked at <a href="http://flashmobfridays.blogspot.com/2011/12/daredevil-6.html">an issue of Mark Waid’s Daredevil</a> that was the conclusion and frankly, I savaged it. The comic did not provide the information necessary for a new reader to pick it up and follow what was going on in it. Action Comics #5 may be part of a longer epic, but unlike the DD issue reviewed here, it is comprehensible on its own terms. Yes, it’ll be clearer if you’ve read the previous four issues of the series, but for the most part it is a straightforward new telling of Superman’s origin, with the added twist of some of the story being from the sentient rocket’s perspective. Other than the mysterious new villains (who are mysterious new villains) it is clear enough who all of the major players in the comic are, so it passes that crucial test while Daredevil failed it.<br /> <br />There is another reason why this issue is not being well received — the first page of All Star Superman #1. It covers much of the same material as Action #5 in just four panels with eight words; it’s a masterpiece of economical storytelling and one of the best single pages of Morrison’s career. Consequently, at least some of the negative reaction to Action #5 seems to come from the change in approach; instead of super-condensed, now Morrison’s told the origin in a (relatively) decompressed fashion. If there are two things superhero fans seem to be sick of these days, it’s retelling origin stories and decompression; combine the two and it’s no wonder people hate this comic. Take those prejudices away though, and there is actually nothing wrong with this comic. Did the world need another telling of Superman’s origin? Not particularly, but this was obviously coming given the remit of the new 52. To steal a point from Comics Alliance’s Chris Sims, if Morrison didn’t write this someone else would have. Better to have a writer of Morrison’s caliber do it, and again, he isn’t just doing a straight retelling. Whatever’s going on with the ship that brought baby Kal-El to Earth is intertwined with Morrison’s on-going plot and this issue provided what will likely be key new details in that direction.<br /> <br />That all out of the way, there is one big flaw with the issue. It comes after #4 ended on a cliffhanger for Superman’s battle with the revamped Brainiac, which promised it would be resolved in #7. Clearly, the production on the comic is screwed up and as result the next story arc was moved up. Financially, this is clearly a better alternative for DC than not publishing Action for two months. As a reader, I’m not sure this is beneficial.<br /> <br />Action Comics #5 is far from being Morrison’s best work, but it works on its own terms, as a new version of Superman’s origin, and seems to provide key pieces of Morrison’s on-going storyline. It does nothing to deserve the critical drubbing it’s received, which seem to have more to do with love for All Star Superman than anything genuinely wrong with the comic.<br /> <br />If you’re wondering why I’ve no mentioned the Sholly Fisch back-up, it’s because now that’s completely unnecessary and adds to neither the on-going storyline nor to the Superman mythos in general.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401235468/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=comboogal-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1401235468">Buy Action Comics Vol. 1: Superman and the Men of Steel from Amazon.com</a>.<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=comboogal-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1401235468" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-87978110626900436712012-01-05T17:43:00.014-05:002012-01-08T11:22:20.593-05:00Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes<b>Introduction by Alan David Doane:</b><br /><br />Oh, I wanted to review this one. But with a new job and intensive training all this week, and my wife needing rides in the middle of the night after working crazy overtime, believe me when I tell you it's a miracle I got these posted at all.<br /><br />That said, I do want to chime in briefly and say I did read (devour, really) Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes from cover to cover, and the two things I have to note are that it is definitely one of the best-designed comics collections I have ever held in my hands, and also that Carl Barks is every bit the comics master you've always heard. <a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7025/6643899061_0d39b179ce.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 350px; height: 488px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7025/6643899061_0d39b179ce.jpg" border="0" hspace="9" vspace="9" alt="" /></a><br /><br />This series of book collecting his Ducks comics is pretty much the Barks project I have waited all my life for. As long as I've been reading comics (hint: Nixon had yet to resign the presidency when I started) I've been hearing about "the good Duck artist," and the samples I've read here and there always seemed to validate that claim. I can remember, however, not being terribly impressed by the oil painting recreations he did that were sold as prints in the 1980s. With a little more understanding of comics (and Disney) under my belt now, I am glad Barks was able to get some reward for his work in whatever way possible, as messy as his latter-day personal life may have become. <br /><br />You'll learn about all of that and more in the text pieces that are included in this volume. More importantly, though, if like me you've never seen Barks's work presented the right way, you'll come away with delight for his seemingly effortless storytelling skills, and wonder that one hand could create so very many pages of absolutely flawless, brilliant comics. I thanks to everyone at Fantagraphics Books who helped bring this project to fruition, and I envy anyone who is about to read this book for the first time. Wonders await.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Roger Green:</span><br /><br />If you've been to my Twitter link, you know that the logo is a duck version of me drawn by my friend, the late Raoul Vezina. Why did he dub me as a duck? Perhaps it was that I did a fairly bad imitation of an angry Donald Duck back in the 1980s, when we worked together.<br /><br />There's something about the Disney ducks that is in my DNA. When they were made available, I bought several volumes of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Barks_Library">Carl Barks Library</a> between in 1983 and 1988; sad tale of why I don't have them now. Regardless, when I started buying comic books as an adult, I shunned the "kiddie" comics, yet was always drawn to Uncle Scrooge and his family. Truth was, I didn't know the name of the guy who wrote and drew the stories, only that I still liked them as an adult. <br /><br />As Donald Ault wrote in the introduction to the Lost in the Andes collection, "Barks was perhaps the most widely read but least-known author in the world. Like other comic book artists at that time, he was anonymous during the years he was producing his comics. At the same time, because his work was so exceptional, he developed a huge number of fans, who only knew him as 'the good artist.'"<br /><br />The book mixes the 20- to 30-page adventures, filled with incredible detail, with the shorter (8-10 pages) stories and some one-page gag strips. As Ault and other editorial contributors noted, the long form allowed Barks's imagination to roam; the tales are practically NatGeo documentaries of places that never existed. If I'm slightly less entranced by the long pieces, it may be a function of the evolving characters of the major players, which changed to fit the story needs. Also, the 'Voodoo Hoodoo' story uses caricatures of black people that are slightly off-putting, though nowhere nearly as problematic as Barks's contemporaries' work. Still, 'The Golden Christmas Tree' is a sweet tale of love.<br /><br />The short pieces, which Barks found to be more work to write, tended to be jokier. The casual reader might find them, and the single pagers, a bit more accessible. I found the extensive editorial content almost as enjoyable as the comics themselves.<br /><br />This is a fine collection, enhanced by the blend of story types included.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Joseph Gualtieri:</span><br /><br />Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes magically transported me back my earliest days as comics reader. Like many children of the 1980s, licensed comics provided my gateway into comic books -- GI Joe, Transformers, Batman (OK, not licensed, but the '60s cartoon was a regular part of my after-school TV watching when it aired at 5PM on a pre-Spanish channel 27), and Disney duck comics. I was lucky I picked up my first Disney comics when I did, at the tail end of the first period when Gladstone printed Disney comics, prior to the Disney briefly trying to run their own comic company. The results of Disney handling their comics in-house were unpleasant, to my memory, though I may have been past the target age group as well, I think not because I loved the Gladstone duck comics at the time despite a general aversion to Disney films and TV shows, aside from the then-running Duck Tales and a couple of films. Duck Tales, of course, was heavily influenced by Carl Barks, which I learned from Gladstone mixing reprints of Barks’s work in with newer material and their back matter made sure Barks and Don Rosa were two of the earliest comics creators’ names I knew.<br /> <br />I get away from the point I was headed towards. Reading these stories 20+ years after my initial exposure to many of them, I’m not as swept away by many of them as I once was. The issue isn’t Barks’s penciling, which is amazing, but rather the writing, and more specifically the plotting. Too often the stories really on just one thing after another happening, utter absurdities (the square chickens and bubbles of the titular story), and <span style="font-style:italic;">deus ex machina</span> endings (OK, the last one is really just in “The Golden Christmas Tree”). A few of the stories do work, and quite well (“Race to the South Seas” and “The Sunken Yacht”), but they are in the minority for the collection. I suspect that a younger reader (such as ten year old me) would be more willing to just go with the stories, unfortunately, I would hesitate before handing this particular collection to our hypothetical youth, as several stories feature depictions of minorities that are very much of their time. The most problematic story in the collection in this regard is easily “Voodoo Hoodoo.” “Race to the South Seas” does have Donald assuming some Pacific Islanders are cannibals, but he’s also shown to be wrong. In contrast, “Voodoo Hoodoo” has characters drawn like Ebony White and an evil, Voodoo-practicing witch doctor. Now I am in no way condemning Fantagraphics for reprinting these stories; in fact, I think they deserve praise for doing so, and Disney for allowing them to be reprinted. By contrast, a few years ago DC scuttled a Monster Society of Evil collection, supposedly because of concerns about the racially sensitive material it would have contained (never mind that they had already reprinted said material over several Archive editions). It’s important that this material be preserved and presented as a part of comics history. Unfortunately, that does cut down the potential audience somewhat.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Scott Cederlund:</span><br /><br />I think I missed a key developmental stage of my childhood where I should have learned to read funny animal comics. There’s a world of differences between Carl Bark’s brand of funny animal stories like those found in Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes and the books I was stuck reading: Captain Carrot and the Amazing Zoo Crew (which I only stuck around for the first few “collectible” issue) and Cerebus. Captain Carrot was close enough to the superhero books that were my world at that point and Cerebus was pretentious enough for the art/English major I would become. Funny animals for the sake of funny animals is something that still eludes me.<br /><br />I think what I really miss is more of an appreciation for the Carl Barks art. He’s the most well-known classic Disney artist but when I look at the stories in Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes, I see more of a generic house Disney style than anything else. I can’t pick out my Carl Barkses from my Don Rosas. It’s all Donald Duck and his nephews looking like I remember them from Disney’s old Sunday night movies. Somehow, Barks’s work in this book registers to me as stories but not necessarily as comics.<br /><br />What I enjoy about Barks (and his spiritual descendant Don Rosa) is that he doesn’t tell stories about cartoonish ducks but he tells them about characters who happen to be cartoonish ducks. The stories themselves, from the adventurous and titular “Lost in the Andes” to the screwballish “Plenty of Pets” and even to the one page gag strips, are built around characters. Donald Duck is the loyal but easily flustered hero. He seems to be all about himself and how everything affects him but he’s always doing things for his nephews or his uncle out of a strong love that exists among these characters. Even as characters lose their tempers and get mad at each other, there’s never a sense of spite or selfishness around these characters. Donald Duck is like Ralph Kramden in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Honeymooners</span>. He’s quick to anger but there’s hardly a bigger heart around.<br /><br />Around this unique family (a duck, his nephews and his uncle), Barks builds these fun adventures as Donald travels to South America in search of square eggs or travels the oceans looking for his marooned uncle. There’s a surprising amount of adventure if all you expect from your funny animals is laughs and gags. Barks fills the pages of the longer epic tales (20-30 pages equals the epics) with adventure and danger on almost every page. And he gives all of his characters an ingenuity to be able to get out of the danger. It’s a cartoonish world that has its own logic and rules of physics but Barks makes it all logical and it makes sense that this is how it would work in the world of Donald Duck. Of course there would be square eggs laid by square chickens. And if there are square chickens, it only follows that there would need to be square roosters. <br /><br />Barks creates some fun, entertaining stories so I guess they’re right when they call him the “good” Duck artist. Barks’s actual art and storytelling becomes a bit invisible behind the stories and maybe that’s the way it should be. The power of the characters and the rush of the stories is what the art is communicating. With little other experience with other Disney comics, it’s hard to tell just how good this stuff is. If you had given me any one of the comics that’s reprinted in this book, I guess I would have just naturally assumed that this is how well put together all of the other Disney books were. It’s strange not to know what the bad stuff is like because it makes it that much harder to tell how extraordinary the good stuff is.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1606994743/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=comboogal-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1606994743">Buy Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes from Amazon.com</a>.<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=comboogal-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1606994743" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-49553277472124572272011-12-30T01:14:00.001-05:002012-01-08T11:23:34.745-05:00The Wrap-Up Show - Thoughts on FMF: Criminal: The Last of the Innocent<a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7004/6480228613_66726035df_z.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 625px; height: 204px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7004/6480228613_66726035df_z.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Hello hello! We're skipping a new Flashmob Fridays post this week due to the busy holiday season (Boxing Day <span style="font-style:italic;">really</span> wiped us out), but Christopher Allen has a few thoughts on last week's featured title, <a href="http://flashmobfridays.blogspot.com/2011/12/criminal-last-of-innocent.html">Criminal: The Last of the Innocent</a>. Chris, take it away</span>:<br /><br />In Ed Brubaker's best work, one finds the theme of man trying to escape the sins of his past. We see this in early work such as Lowlife and Deadenders, up through Sleeper, the Winter Soldier/Bucky saga in Captain America, and other Criminal stories. In The Last of the Innocent, we find Brubaker exploring this theme once again, with the ambition and reach we would expect from a serious artist.<br /><br />We meet Riley Richards, a man who finds himself stuck in a life that crushes his soul, even as it affords him all the material comforts he could want. He is married to a rich bitch named Felicia, and working for her father. The father-in-law is cruel, while Felix (her nickname) has a bit more dimension, although it appears what was once love is now curdling into pity, and maybe even that is draining away, as Riley discovers she is sleeping with his old school rival, Teddy. Riley comes back to his hometown when his dad is hospitalized, and it is there that he's reminded of simpler times, and a possible escape from his current predicament. His first sweetheart, Lizzie, is still there, beautiful as ever and still pining for him, while his best pal, Freakout, has now been sober for a full year. Riley concocts a plan to rid himself of Felix, while establishing a solid alibi, a fall guy, and a way to keep Felix' money, in hopes of soon running away with Lizzie and starting life anew.<br /><br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7013/6581637061_17ddccd1f9_z.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 640px; height: 339px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7013/6581637061_17ddccd1f9_z.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />The plot itself, while almost bulletproof (there are a couple moments where Riley unnecessarily arouses or inflames suspicions), is just the engine for Brubaker to delve into one of his more complex characters. In fact, Riley is made more complex by the shades Brubaker gives the supporting cast. Felix's dad is a heel but his pursuit of Riley is justified not just by love and grief but by Riley's actual guilt. Felix isn't all bad, and there is some implication that her betrayal of Riley was set in motion by Riley's failure to become the man she hoped he would become. Riley doesn't appear to have been prevented from becoming a better man; the opportunity was there, but instead he gambled and caroused rather than pouring his energy into either work or saving his marriage. Freakout is that fun, bad influence that many Brubaker characters have to either abandon or destroy in order to start their new lives. Except Freakout is different; he actually knows Riley better than anyone, and he was well on his way towards his own personal redemption before Riley set him back on his self-destructive course.<br /><br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7020/6581630441_5fcf94b3c9.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 357px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7020/6581630441_5fcf94b3c9.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Aided by his best partner, Sean Phillips, Brubaker accessorizes this seedy melodrama with a series of one-page gag strips drawn in a style reminiscent of Archie Comics. And indeed, the characters themselves are stand-ins for Archie Andrews (Riley), Veronica/Ronnie (Felicia/Felix), Betty (Lizzie), Reggie (Teddy), and Jughead (Freakout), as well as amusing but not distracting nods to Moose, Mr. Weatherbee, and Valerie of Josie and the Pussycats. Brubaker has Phillips draw the gags in this similar, brightly colored style to emphasize how much simpler Riley's life was as a teenager, but he cleverly counters this conceit with the gags always revolving around either pain or seedy activity. Darker parodies of all-ages comics fare have been with us since Tijuana Bibles, so it's fortunate that Brubaker exercises restraint in their use here, and in fact, confining each flashback to a one page gag tends to sharpen his focus. However, while the Archie motif will certainly grab the attention of most fans, even those with only vague knowledge of Archie, what stood out for me was how sharp Brubaker's narration and dialogue was throughout the story. There is hardly a line or observation from Riley that doesn't reverberate with pain or self-loathing. We feel for Riley, up to a point, but his actions are unforgivable, particularly towards the innocent fool, Freakout, and so it makes Brubaker's seemingly happy ending all the better, because by now we know that Riley is the type of person who will find a way towards misery again.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0785158294/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=comboogal-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0785158294">Buy Criminal Vol. 6: The Last of the Innocent from Amazon.com</a>.<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=comboogal-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0785158294" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-12448466341834561762011-12-23T06:51:00.000-05:002011-12-23T06:51:47.012-05:00Criminal: The Last of the Innocent<strong>Introduction by Alan David Doane:</strong> We have a guest contributor for this week's Flashmob Fridays, Bubba Beasley from <a href="http://criminalcomic.blogspot.com">A Criminal Blog</a>. I started ACB a few years ago ahead of the release of the first issue of Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. I had been mesmerized by their work together on WildStorm's Sleeper series, which remains to this day a high point in the past 25 years in comics. In addition to Phillips's always lush and evocative artwork, on Sleeper Ed Brubaker proved he had major comics-writing chops by taking a character brilliantly conceived by Alan Moore (Tao, who Moore created for his Wildcats run) and utilizing him with equal, if not superior narrative creativity. If you think that's an easy feat, let me show you a few hundred bad comics by other writers who have tried and failed.<a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7024/6555664937_e5ba57d797.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 324px; height: 500px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7024/6555664937_e5ba57d797.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />So, Criminal remains the only comic I ever felt strongly enough to create a dedicated blog around, and then Bubba Beasley came along and added his own passion and insight, and he still writes for ACB today. When looking for someone to write about Ed and Sean's latest (and very possibly greatest) Criminal emission, Bubba was the natural go-to guy. But he's not the only one weighing in on The Last of the Innocent. Members of our regular Flashmob Fridays team also have stuff to say about what I think is one of the best comics of the year, so I'll get out of the way. Let the Flashmobbing begin.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Bubba Beasley:</span><br /> <br />It is remarkable that "The Last of the Innocent" may be the most critically acclaimed story arc in Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' comic CRIMINAL. The series started very strong in late 2006, and it kept raising the bar with each of its first four arcs: the first arc introduced the introspective but brutal series, the second arc wove a different heist into every issue, the third arc presented a trio of stories that were all self-contained but intricately related, and the fourth was a surprisingly twisted thriller that worked because of careful writing rather than any cheap gimmicks. <br /> <br />After that, it appeared that the series might have peaked. The pair shifted their focus to two arcs of the "apoclyptic pulp noir" INCOGNITO, for which Fox acquired the film rights last year. Between those two arcs we had the fifth CRIMINAL story, and it wasn't just a sequel to the popular story "Lawless," it was a somewhat less effective retread. In both stories, Tracy Lawless investigated a murder mystery and indulged in a very imprudent affair, all while being unknowingly pursued, but in "The Sinners" these elements weren't as organic to the unfolding plot.<br /> <br />(Looking beyond Brubaker's creator-owned work for Marvel's Icon imprint, I've also noticed some frustration and even boredom among fans of his lengthy, otherwise crowd-pleasing run with Captain America.)<br /> <br />Before this latest entry, I had basically steeled myself to accept the possibility that CRIMINAL had started the slow drift from the jaw-dropping to merely the very good, and so "The Last of the Innocent" is as much a surprise as anything that has come before it. It's phenomenal even compared to the earlier, great work. It's a real achievement for Brubaker and Phillips, in more ways than most readers may realize.<br /> <br />1) The story arc establishes CRIMINAL as Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' collaborative magnum opus; it's hard to imagine that their working relationship, already ten years old, will produce another work that is such a sustained and ambition project. With "The Last of the Innocent," the pair have published 26 full-length issues of CRIMINAL, finally surpassing SLEEPER's 24-issue run. There's no telling how many more stories the two will end up telling in this world. Brubaker has continued to tease "Coward's Way Out," a sequel to the debut story arc, and he may still be planning to conclude the series with the story of the crucial murder that was hinted at in "Coward." <br /> <br />2) The story arc defines CRIMINAL as a true anthology series set in a single, shared universe. Going by the previous arcs, one would have assumed that the series would focus on a small group of career criminals, fathers and sons. A short-story contribution to Dark Horse's 2009 anthology Noir, the CRIMINAL "emission" called "21st Century Noir" was wholly unmoored from the series' established cast and locations. With "The Last of the Innocent," we have a protagonist who was neck-deep in debts to the mob, on speaking terms with the crime boss Sebastian Hyde and his enforcer Teeg Lawless, but he's clearly not part of their organization.<br /> <br />The series consists of self-contained stories where the focus shifts from one character to another, and this is probably one significant reason that the series hasn't maintained a single numbering sequence through its numerous arcs. It went from a 10-issue first volume to a 7-issue second volume and finally to a series of mini-series, the idea being that new readers can jump onto every new #1 issue. This is probably why readers overlooked the milestone of its twenty-fifth issue: that issue was numbered "The Last of the Innocent" #3.<br /> <br />Take the trade paperback for this latest mini-series, and look at its spine. The number "6" should be there but isn't, and only the description on the back cover mentions that it is "the sixth standalone graphic novel" in the series. I'm guessing that each trade collection will be treated as an essentially self-contained publication.<br /> <br />I personally think the best reading order is the publication order, as one can trace the continued growth of both writer and artist. With each new arc, both tend to push themselves just a little bit further. But readers really can start with any book in the series, and "The Last of the Innocent" wouldn't be a bad introduction at all.<br /> <br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7013/6558734637_51c5139a56.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 498px; height: 500px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7013/6558734637_51c5139a56.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>3) The story arc plants CRIMINAL firmly and almost exclusively within the medium of comic books. It was announced just two months ago that the first arc "Coward" is being adapted to film, but in a Word Balloon podcast in April, Ed Brubaker explained that this latest arc is "belligerantly a comic book," a story that could really only be told well in this particular medium. It's about comic books, in the sense that the characters riff on classic characters from comic books and comic strips: in addition to Archie and his gang, I caught analogues to Dagwood and Richie Rich, and a grown-up Encyclopedia Brown makes an appearance. It's also about the nostalgia that comic books evoke, and it uses the tropes and language of comic books to distinguish the dispiriting present from the idealized (but far from ideal) past.<br /> <br />I'd argue that the entire series would be difficult to adapt. It doesn't have the high concept of SLEEPER's super-powered espionage or INCOGNITO's pulp trappings, and unlike Sin City -- noir comic's other anthology series in a shared universe -- CRIMINAL doesn't use garish images to tell simple stories, both of which made it easier to condense several of Frank Miller's stories into a single, brazen film. <br /> <br />No, CRIMINAL is subtle and even restrained. Notice how, in both "Coward" and "The Last of the Innocent," the most brutal violence isn't shown in detail for shock value. The violence is made clear only to those paying close attention to both the images and the text.<br /> <br />The series' narration frequently serves as a counterpoint to the art, and the two rarely convey redundant information, but the monologue reads far better on paper than it would sound out loud. The artwork is about as realistic as Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth's Stumptown, but I'd argue that it's much more moody, with the shadows conveying more than just physical reality and Val Staples and Dave Stewart's colors doing more than just provide visual variety -- and none of this would be easy to capture in a film or television series.<br /> <br />Even the structure of the series would hinder any complete adaptation. The series spans decades, which would probably require multiple actors for the same role, and it doesn't focus on a single character, ensemble, or even location. (Midway through its run, the TV series ER had cycled through an almost entirely new cast while keeping the setting of County General Hospital.)<br /> <br />An individual story could be captured in a single film, but would the actors' contracts include options for their cameos in other CRIMINAL films? Is it even clear how often an actor would be needed for a comic series that's still being published? An anthology series of made-for-TV movies, for a network like HBO or Showtime, would be ideal but is unlikely in the extreme.<br /> <br />Ultimately, a film adaptation of a single CRIMINAL story may serve the same purpose as the flashier comic series like INCOGNITO and the upcoming horror noir FATALE. My hope is that they all point potential readers to the pure crime comic and to the stories that are best suited for the medium.<br /> <br />4) The story arc even arguably places CRIMINAL in the same area code as the comic medium's greatest works. Before this arc, I would note that it's simply well executed. CRIMINAL is neither an autobiographical indie comic or a post-modern approach to the caped superhero, and it's not the exercise in formalism that was a major part of Watchmen or Asterios Polyp. It's a genre comic, focused on crime and noir, and it generally uses only those techniques and tools that help effectively tell an extremely well-written but sometimes conventional narrative. <br /> <br />Not every great work has to redefine the medium entirely. Not even every masterpiece can be a Citizen Kane, and I used to think CRIMINAL could be a Casablanca, a classic that transcends the merely competent execution.<br /> <br />But then "The Last of the Innocent" hit, and here we have a story that trades on literally none of the series' strength while adding layers of subtext and meaning for those who are quite familiar with the family-friendly comics of old. The conversation about CRIMINAL's place in the canon will almost certainly begin here...<br /> <br />...and all of this is worth noting in addition to the story itself. Beyond establishing the series' context within the creators' body of work and the medium of comics, and beyond defining the series as an anthology that was tailor-made for the medium, "The Last of the Innocent" tells one helluva crime story. <br /> <br />One reason the story's so good is that its protagonist is so bad.<br /> <br />It's easy to miss, but the story revolves around the most purely sociopathic protagonist that we've seen in the CRIMINAL universe. The story obviously plays on the theme of nostalgia, but the main character was seduced by a particular kind of nostalgia, the ache for the teenager's hedonistic irresponsibility. He didn't miss a life of innocence or true intimacy, he missed a life of getting high and getting laid, not worrying about himself or other people. Even Teeg Lawless, who would terrorize his family, was driven to commit unspeakably violent acts in order to protect his family.<br /> <br />Here, the creators' restraint obscures the main character's pathology so that we end up almost empathizing with him: the amoral characterization is found most clearly in what Brubaker and Phillips don't show us: in a story that is told almost entirely from the killer's point of view, the missing pieces reflect his damaged pyche.<br /> <br />You don't see a sense of personal responsibility on the part of Riley Richards, all-American teenager turned cold-blooded killer. You see his bad habits in adolescence and the worse habits in adulthood -- the gambling and sexual depravity (subtly shown) -- and the reader can project a path from the teenage pot use to the life-threatening gambling debts, but the path isn't even suggested. There's the idealized past, there's the bleak present, and Riley seems unwilling to see the causal chain from one to the other, to see that it was his choices that made his life miserable.<br /> <br />Even after he's secured his "return to innocence," Riley promises himself that he'll keep living the high life in the big city, sowing the seeds of ruin for his new life as he tried to run away from the consequences of his old life.<br /> <br />You also don't see any real sympathy for the people in Riley's life. He's aware of the deeply traumatic event that probably led to his wife's acting out in youth and in adulthood, but that doesn't seem to make him more compassionate toward her; he uses her in his youth, and he resents her after they marry. He may be right that people don't need an excuse to be so screwed up, but he has no charity toward people in any case.<br /> <br />His father who died early in the story, his widowed mother, his friends and enemies: none of their lives truly matter to Riley, and he treats them as objects to be used or obstacles to be overcome.<br /> <br />Even toward the end of the story, when Riley sobs after his last brutal crime, it's not clear that he mourns for his victim or merely for the self-inflicted loss in his own life.<br /> <br />There might be an explanation if not an excuse: you don't see responsibility or sympathy, but you also don't see a fully formed picture of a grown man who has accepted adulthood without becoming jaded. Maybe there are no good, responsible husbands and fathers in the bleak world of CRIMINAL, but if there are -- candidates such as his own father are only barely sketched -- they are entirely outside of Riley's perception. <br /> <br />C.S. Lewis wrote, "It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."<br /> <br />Maybe Riley Richards didn't see the option of hatching, so he chose to go bad.<br /> <br />"The Last of the Innocent" doesn't flinch from showing us how bad, but it makes the wretched man's motives understandable if not the least bit admirable. It puts a very human face on a monster.<br /> <br />It would deserve high praise for that even without the subtext of Archie, Betty, and Veronica. That subtext makes a great story that much more outstanding.<br /><br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7001/6558748307_63e7cfc4e3_z.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 640px; height: 343px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7001/6558748307_63e7cfc4e3_z.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Scott Cederlund:</span><br /><br />In the comics of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, characters like Holden Carver in Sleeper and Tracy Lawless in Criminal have all been sucked into the mire and darkness of cities where laws and are practically meaningless and powerless. "Right" and "wrong" have completely different meanings in these comic book pages. Brubaker and Phillips’s modern crime stories reflect some primal fear that the law doesn’t exist for anything other than to keep our own criminal instincts in check. They create comics about these hearts of darkness that exist in the men that are actually the heroes of their stories. Riley Richards in Criminal: The Last of the Innocent is a slightly different type of “hero” for Brubaker and Phillips. He has the same kind of blackish heart but he gives in to the darkness that Carver and Lawless spend their stories trying to rise above.<br /><br />Returning to his childhood home, Richards gets swept up in an Archie Comics-like nostalgia for his teenage days. Memories of the girl next door Lizzie, his best friend Freakout, and the girl Felicity (along with her family money) he would end up marrying and even the lurid EC Comics he read with their injury-to-the-eye motifs make his teenage years seem so much better than his present where his wife’s father barely tolerates him while she’s screwing his high school rival. So Richards thinks that the way to get back to happier days is to kill his wife and return home. The girl next door and even the EC Comics are still there. His best friend is there too but Freakout (a nickname which should be some kind of indication) still fights his own demons that Richards has tried to ignore while he was wrapped up in his own life. It’s a simple plan; kill his wife and return to the girl next door without a care in the world. <br /><br />Of all of Brubaker and Phillips characters, Riley Richards is the one who wins. He gets exactly what he wants. It’s not a dream and it’s not an imaginary story as Richards’s plan works to near-perfection. Even better yet, he gets his wife’s fortune, much to the ire of his father-in-law. He wins and that’s what makes Criminal: The Last of the Innocent so frustrating. Going back to the idea of Brubaker and Phillips’ heroes, the struggle between a desire to do good and an instinct to do bad does not exist Riley’s character. Once he gets the idea that Felicity has to go, there is no turning back for Riley as the story becomes about the journey to him finding his own happiness. Unlike other characters in other Brubaker and Phillips’s stories who have gotten dragged down deeper and deeper into the darkness mostly through their own weaknesses and failures, Riley’s story is about him rising up into that darkness, accepting it and controlling it so that he is never overwhelmed by the circumstances around his life. There is no failed heist or tragic death for him to try to overcome. There is no outside force manipulating Riley into actions he doesn’t want. There is only his plan and it’s all about his control of the world around him. <br /><br />For a book about crime, Criminal: The Last of the Innocent is also about comic books in the same way that the earlier volume Criminal: Bad Night was about comic strips. In both stories, Phillips plays around with the protagonists’ views of reality and the audiences experience of their point of views. Jacob in Bad Night saw the world through the eyes of his Dick Tracy-ish character. That comic strip character was the voice whispering in the back of Jacob’s mind, pushing his action and controlling him. Riley isn’t quite that delusional but when he first sees Lizzie, for one brief moment she’s the perfect Dan DeCarlo woman, sitting behind the wheel of a convertible. While Riley’s memory of the past is filtered through Archie Comics, there’s that little bit of the present that’s still that simple and clear to him and that’s what he wants back. Other than in a dream sequence, Phillips’s scratchy reality and the clear line Archie memories never inhabit the same time space. That one moment where Lizzie brings all of the memories and feelings back to him is where she’s that perfect girl again. He sees the past as an Archie comic but he also sees Lizzie that way, a memento of an easier time. <br /><br />So the killer is the hero of his own story as Brubaker and Phillips finally get to craft a Criminal story where the protagonist gets everything that he wanted. Instead of the usual sympathetic guilt we feel at the end of one of their Criminal stories, we feel a bit of revulsion as we see Riley frolic on a private beach knowing that he got away with it. Maybe it's because we're some kind of passive accomplice, not able to warn any of the victims in his way as he takes a murderous path to regain his own innocence. The Last of The Innocent is a different kind of crime story for Brubaker and Phillips. For once, they let us follow the story of a winner and it leaves you feeling guilty in the end. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Johanna Draper Carlson:</span><br /><br />I've previously reviewed Criminal: The Last of the Innocent <a href="http://comicsworthreading.com/2011/09/08/criminal-the-last-of-the-innocent-1-3/">here</a>, but when I did so, I resisted talking about the ending. (That's for two reasons: to avoid spoilers, and because I originally wrote about the story when only three of the four issues were out.) I'm going to discuss the conclusion here instead, so SPOILER ALERT for what follows. <br /><br />When I first read the final issue of this storyline, I was disappointed by the lack of justice I perceived. Riley gets away with three murders, at least for now, and winds up with a fortune and the girl he thinks he truly loves. Then I realized that I was assuming, because this was a comic book published (however indirectly) by Marvel, that a certain moral code would be upheld, where criminals get punished. That didn't necessarily apply to a noir story. (Perhaps if I'd read any of the other Criminal stories, I'd have known better going in.) <br /><br />This is also a temporary situation. We've seen, at the beginning of the book, how much Riley can screw up a good thing by, as one of the bad guys he owes money to puts it, "gambling an' whoring." Nothing's really changed about him, and the situations we've seen him go through have likely only accentuated his recklessness and stupid choices when it comes to future decisions. He's got a new temporary addiction, his new girlfriend, but how long will it take before he gets bored of her and screws things up? In such a light, the "new beginning" Riley narrates on the last page feels artificial, just like the imposition of the old-school art style over the grungy backgrounds. <br /><br />The third thing I thought, and this is where I surprised myself, was "well, why not?" (This was only after the third and later re-readings, when I'd gotten over being shocked.) The promise of the modern comic industry is continual re-invention, no matter what horrible events reside in a character's past. Superman goes from being a vigilante thug to a representative of legal authority to depowered modern guy to collaborator in forced mind-erasing to young punk. Archie hangs out with the Punisher and KISS while going to prom hundreds of times and never learning not to ask out two girls at once. Given the medium, why not show a happy ending and the potential of starting anew, regardless of one's past? <br /><br />The question now is, how believable do you find Riley's assertions when he's been lying to himself and others the whole story? <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Joseph Gualtieri:</span><br /><br />In <span style="font-style:italic;">A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction</span>, Linda Hutcheon repeatedly refers to parody as being perhaps the key characteristic of postmodern art, “the perfect postmodern form...for it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies” and that “Parody seems to offer a perspective on the present and the past which allows an artist to speak to a discourse from within it, but without being totally recuperated by it.”<br /> <br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7147/6558765273_c9efe30c8d.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 396px; height: 500px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7147/6558765273_c9efe30c8d.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Criminal: Last of the Innocent by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips is a parody of Archie Comics in general. That’s nothing new, of course, given the age of the franchise. The most notorious parodies of it are probably “Goodman Goes Playboy” by Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman (available for free on the Comics Journal website) and Weird Comic-Book Fantasy, a play by future comics scribe Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa originally titled Archie’s Weird Fantasy until a lawsuit forced changes to it (if anyone knows how to get a copy, please leave a comment below). As with Kurtzman and Elder, Brubaker and Philips add explicit sex and drugs to the Archie milieu with Last of the Innocent, but their parody goes far beyond such crude humour.<br /> <br />The bulk of the Last of the Innocent occurs in 1982, but it frequently flashes back to the late 1960s in a deft technical maneuver. In past Criminal volumes, Brubaker and Philips have used a comic strip within the comic, Frank Kafka, Private Eye, as a counterpoint to the action (and in the fourth and best volume, they introduce us to the creator of the strip). They reprise that device here in a more complex way by providing one-and two page flashbacks that are also presented as gag pages or scripts from “Riley Richards” comics illustrated by Phillips in a faux-Dan DeCarlo style. The first few of these flashbacks are largely in the “Goodman Goes Playboy” mode of adding sex and drugs to the characters, but two pages from the end of the first issue has the first real break from portrayal of an idyllic past in the flashbacks, as Richards remembers finding a dead body along with Freakout (the Jughead character). To bring Hutcheon back, the flashbacks are the primary way Brubaker and Philips, parody Archie, offering a clear way to “incorporates and challenge” the source material.<br /> <br />The next issue Richards makes his way into the local police records to research the death, which was part of a series, with the aim of framing his wife’s lover for her murder as well as the unsolved ones from the past. Serial murder would, on the surface, seem to be just one more element added to Brubaker and Phillips’s sordid version of Archie, but the way they use it is devastating. The discovery of the dead body comes during a long monologue by Richards worth quoting at length:<br /><br /><blockquote>That night I have the weirdest dream… I’m flying over Brookview… But the town is the same as when I was a kid...Like I’m a tourist in my own past [...] I see all the lazy Sundays in the world. And I have this strange feeling... that I can go back and fix all the mistakes I made. Like I could do it all over again. And be back in the warmth of those endless summers...</blockquote> <br />Immediately after waking from the dream, Richards resolves to kill his wife, Felix/Veronica. There’s a clear connection here between Richards’s romanticized view of the past and the murderous decision that drives the rest of the series. Further, this is the opposite what Brubaker and Phillips do; for the creators, the flashbacks are a way for offering comment on the source material, for Richards, memories are something to wallow in and wish for an imagined Golden Age, not gain perspective.<br /> <br />In the final issue, the second to last flashback is from Freakout’s perspective and reveals the truth behind the 1960s serial killing — that they were done to provide cover for a couple carrying on an affair to murder the woman’s husband. Discussing the matter with Richards, Freakout tells him that they (and the police) were the only people who knew the murder weapon. Richards is rendered silent for a panel and then admits, “Actually, I forgot about that part...” His memory is exposed as not just idealized, but factually incorrect. Richards commits a second murder, leaving a tainted syringe for Freakout, and returns home to Lizzie/Betty, concluding “the last person — maybe the only person — who really knew me...is lying on a slab in the Brookview County Morgue. So now I can be whoever I want,” as the art shows Richards and Lizzie in Phillips’s usual style slowly transform into the faux-DeCarlo style even as the world around them doesn’t change.<br /> <br />Towards the series’ end, Richards and Lizzie are living in a beachfront house that once belonged to Felix, he thinks, “I always knew coming here with Lizzie would be better,” which is in marked contrast to his memories in issue two, where he’s sexually active with Felix while Lizzie will barely do anything with him of that nature. Looking in on a sleeping Lizzie after a day of sex at the beach house, he thinks, “How can she have stayed so pure. I hope some of that will rub off on me...” Lizzie is “pure” because she’s barely a character in the comic. Beyond asking her about dating one old classmate, Richards makes no inquiries about how she’s spent the last decade or so; he treats her as if she’s spent the whole time waiting for him, and can restore the false the innocence to him that he so longs for.<br /> <br />I can scarcely imagine a more devastating critique of Archie Comics than the one Brubaker and Phillips provide in The Last of the Innocent. While that franchise has always taken place in the present, it’s usually been a backward, delayed sort of present (as Flashmob Fridays readers know, Riverdale only recently had its first gay citizen move in). The Last of the Innocent exposes the cost of the nostalgia inherent in the property. It’ll survive this broadside, just as it did “Goodman Goes Playboy” and Archie’s Weird Science; that in no way decreases the power of Brubaker and Phillips’s work. They engage fully with Archie here, and delve deep within it and expose the hollow core to it like no one else.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0785158294/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=comboogal-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0785158294">Buy Criminal Vol. 6: The Last of the Innocent from Amazon.com</a>.<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=comboogal-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0785158294" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-10128265633163216802011-12-16T00:21:00.000-05:002011-12-16T00:23:23.766-05:00The Survivalist<span style="font-weight:bold;">Introduction</span><br /><br />Who is Box Brown, and what is his new graphic novel, The Survivalist? Get <a href="http://troublewithcomics.com/post/14221700434/five-questions-for-box-brown">a short sketch on these subjects</a> on our parent blog Trouble With Comics, and then come back here and see what the Flashmob Fridays gang thought of Brown's newest work, from Blank Slate books.<br /><br /><a href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7011/6486722373_2ab5b49ee8.jpg"><img border="0" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7011/6486722373_2ab5b49ee8.jpg" align="right" hspace="5" vspace="5" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">Roger Green:</span><br /><br />One of the curses of being out of the comic scene is that I had no idea who/what a <a href="http://boxbrown.com/" target="_new">Box Brown</a> was. Turns out he's a well-regarded, interesting-seeming guy who's drawn more than a few books in recent years, in a stylized manner that reminds me of some underground artists of the past.<br /><br />I was gearing up to read The Survivalist, a TMI recap which is out there on the Internet. This was a triptych of a book thematically. The first part is the guy in the cubicle who listens to right-wing radio and hates Big Pharma. He's believable, to be sure -- I have relatives... But he's not all that pleasant to be around. His co-workers are banal and not all that interesting. He straddles the line between character and caricature. All of this, I suppose was the artist's intent, and in that fashion, he succeeds.<br /><br />The second part is essentially a monologue, which made me impatient, and worse, bored. It could be interesting can one be sitting alone drawing comic books that, perhaps, no one will ever see, but this just annoyed me, maybe because I hadn't invested in him.<br /><br />The third part, though, is primarily a one-on-one dealing with a woman. This section interested me the most by far, though her fate is foretold early on. By the end, at least, I was interested to see what the protagonist would do in this changed world. So I guess I didn't like reading it very much, yet was engaged enough by the end with the changes in the main character to want to see him again. Odd, I reckon.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7148/6486762353_cfb1810193_z.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 640px; height: 223px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7148/6486762353_cfb1810193_z.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Alan David Doane:</span><br /><br />You may have noticed there are a lot of crazy people in the world today, perhaps more than at any time in history. The confluence of worldwide financial disruptions and unprecedented access to instantaneous global communication has resulted in our anxieties and fears being instantly transmitted across the world to anyone willing to read, watch or listen to them. The end result has been a self-reinforcing feedback loop comprised of legitimate outrage and lunatic hysteria in seemingly equal measure.<br /><br />Noah W. is the title character in cartoonist Box Brown's new comic The Survivalist; his parents built a bomb shelter in the 1950s that circumstance forces him to he live in. He spends his free time working on comics no one will ever read and smoking pot, while listening to right-wing hate-radio broadcaster Dick March (great name!) and raging against the oppressive influence of "Big Pharma" on the people.<br /><br />One day a meteor strike changes Noah's world, at once wiping out everything he knew, yet justifying his crazy life in the bunker, surrounded by survival packs of 50-year barbecue-flavour potato chips. When things have stabilized enough in the surface world for him to venture outside, he meets Fatima, seemingly the last woman on Earth, and we get to the meat of the story, Noah's dialogues with Fatima about life, the universe and everything.<br /><br />The Survivalist isn't a paradigm-shifting graphic novel that will be trumpeted on NPR or in the New York Times Review of Books. It's a pretty straightforward and unassuming set of well-cartooned observations about human nature, actually, with Box Brown having a great deal of fun with his characters and with some Chris Ware-style diagrams (and in at least one panel, Ivan Brunetti-style romantic reductionism). Best of all, Brown doesn't judge his lead character too severely, but rather lets him state his beliefs and then see how they respond and evolve when they intersect with events in the real world, which operates at a scale in which we humans barely have a say at all. This technique may prove to be overwhelmingly prescient and applicable to us all in the very near future, making The Survivalist not only a fun read but one that speaks to our universal experience as human beings facing increasingly troubled and troubling times.<br /><br /><b>Christopher Allen:</b><br /><br />I’m not familiar with Box Brown’s work, so based only on this, I call him a promising cartoonist who doesn’t quite put it all together to make a satisfying book. The cover is intended to resemble some type of end-of-days instruction book, and it’s effective at that, but also a hint at what I find to be the shortcoming of the book. More on that later. The story finds an annoyingly negative office nerd—the kind of guy who ruins your breakroom lunch because he can’t resist telling you about the chemicals in it—whose apocalyptic worldview is proven correct by some vague attack that leaves rubble and death for as far as he can see. Lucky for him, he was in his bomb shelter.<br /> <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7016/6486775331_173b0c8082.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 253px; height: 264px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7016/6486775331_173b0c8082.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>The funniest part of the book, and the part I sense was closest to the author’s life, is how this unexpected disaster affords our hero the time to finally do what he wants to do, which is to work on his comics. He’s got plenty of food stored away, so he hunkers down and finishes off that graphic novel he’s been wanting to do. I suspect that some of us in the same situation would do something like this, maybe play videogames all day long, rather than head out to reestablish society. The black-and-white artwork is well-suited to a story that seems to strive for poignance but mostly settles for dark humor.<br /> <br />What I found most disappointing is the lack of change in the main character. True, there are successful stories about characters faced with something that should have a profound impact on their life and yet they remain essentially the same person afterwards: Daniel Clowes’ The Death Ray is a good example of this. But with both the apocalypse and the interactions with the irradiated woman he visits, who eventually dies, Brown doesn’t show us that either event has really changed the main character one way or another. He doesn’t grow from having to fend for himself or spending time with someone he probably wouldn’t have if the rest of humanity wasn’t annihilated, nor does he seem to suffer much in the way of loss from her passing. The lack of attention to what felt to me like essential elements to give the story meaning, left me disappointed, though the craft and interesting premise of the story were enough to at least leave me interested in seeing what Brown does next.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Joseph Gualtieri</span><br /><br />When Doane delivered this week’s assignment, I was pleasantly surprised by it, as I had never previously heard of Box Brown. Going into this with absolutely no preconceptions about the work was going to make for a fun and novel experience.<br /> <br />The artwork is probably the least impressive element of the book, but it’s not bad by any means. Brown’s style is very much of the Seth/Chester Brown/Joe Matt Torontoist school (not that they look alike, but there’s a similarity in terms of figure work between them, particularly the latter two), but it’s not as polished as the work of those big names. Brown’s style does differ from them a bit, as there’s one page showing protagonist Noah Wartowsky’s home and underground bunker that’s almost Wareian (as are the covers).<br /> <br />The most memorable sequence in the book comes on pages 9-12. Wartowsky heads to bed wondering about the visibility of a comet headed towards Earth that some in the “lamestream media” think will cause massive amounts of destruction. Brown cuts to a long panel, again showing the house and bomb shelter, with a tiny meteor apparently heading for the house in what looks like the world’s funniest parody of the ending to David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp. Brown cuts again though and we can see that the comet isn’t heading for Wartowsky’s home, but for a nearby city. Upon waking up, Brown wonderfully captures the banality of Wartowsky’s routine, with it slowly dawning on him just what the meteor hitting means.<br /> <br />Those pages are the high point for Brown blending words and pictures in the book, but the story is consistently good from one cover flap to the next. Wartowsky is a rabid listener of a Rush Limbaugh-like figure, spurred in that direction by the deaths of his parents years ago. At 36, Wartowsky is alone, trapped in his bitterness which is reinforced by the talk radio he listens to. After the meteor hits, Wartowsky comes across another survivor, Fatima. Now the basic as of the plot are utterly cliché, both in terms of what happens to Fatima and her effect on Wartowsky, it’s the way Brown hits those plot points that makes the comic work. I do not want to give anything away, but if the Survivalist is ever adapted into a film, their relationship will in all likelihood be altered into something far more conventional. The very end of the comic in particular stands out; as it addresses a problem I had with the comic to that point and does so in a way that clearly makes the earlier issue into a feature of the story, as it ties into Wartowsky’s mental state prior to meeting Fatima.<br /> <br />The Survivalist is not going to be the best comic you read in 2011, or possibly even December, but it’s quite good and well worth reading. Brown’s completely new to me, but after reading the Survivalist, I definitely want to see more work from him.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Johnny Bacardi</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7012/6486789897_2da6e22652.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 413px; height: 296px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7012/6486789897_2da6e22652.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>I'm not sure who or what Mr. Brown is weighing in on exactly with his end-of-civilization fable THE SURVIVALIST; Conspiracy theory nuts? People who buy the "wisdom" crackpot radio show hosts impart? Nerdy antisocial cartoonists? Socially awkward potheads? People who routinely ignore warnings of a globe-threatening nature? None of the above? All of the above? What was the question again? Anyway...even though it resolutely sits on the fence of objectivity and paints all its characters (well, except radio host Dave March) with a pretty even-handed brush, I still found myself fascinated by how this tale unfolded until the kinda bitter end, and that's not an easy thing to do...so kudos to Mr. Brown, whose dry Seth-meets-Charles Burns style did a good job keeping me interested. This was my first look into the "Box," and while this didn't display a whole lot of outside-the-box thinking, ha ha, I think I'll be checking out some more when I get the chance.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1906653550/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=comboogal-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1906653550">Buy The Survivalist from Amazon.com.</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=comboogal-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1906653550" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-84236126163965651472011-12-10T00:01:00.001-05:002012-01-08T11:24:42.837-05:00The Wrap-Up Show - Thoughts on FMF: Kevin Keller #2<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7004/6480228613_66726035df_z.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 625px; height: 204px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7004/6480228613_66726035df_z.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />Hello hello! Welcome to the [FMF] Wrap-Up Show, a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Flashmob Fridays, with commentary from our group of writers on how this week's feature came together, and how it turned out.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Alan David Doane:</span><br /><br />"<span style="font-style:italic;">In the behind-the-scenes discussion for this week's edition of Flashmob Fridays, I suggested that having a gay character in Riverdale and addressing very topical issues like gays in the military and gay marriage were inherently political. Upon further reflection, though, I think my biggest disappointment with this comic is that it is so profoundly apolitical. It doesn't seem to have anything to say about anything at all.</span>" -- Yan Basque<br /><br />When I chose Kevin Keller #2 for <a href="http://flashmobfridays.blogspot.com/2011/12/kevin-keller-2.html">our second Flashmob Fridays</a> (you'll pardon the pun) outing, I'll admit as an editor I was attempting a zig-zag away from the expected; we started off with <a href="http://flashmobfridays.blogspot.com/2011/12/daredevil-6.html">reviews</a> of Mark Waid's generally-recognized-as-excellent Daredevil, and I suppose it would have been really, really easy to go from there to some well-regarded New 52 title from DC, assuming any of them rise to the level of well-regarded, which I'm not entirely convinced of. But with an openly gay writer onboard our FMF team, and another who is a regular reader/reviewer of Archie Comics, I knew I could count on at least a couple of really interesting takes on a fairly significant contemporary comic book, Kevin Keller. <br /><br />In looking back on the published reviews, I think we all mainly agreed about the basic good of having a gay Archie character vs. the non-good (it's debatable whether it descends to the level of harmful or not) inherent in the toothlessness of it all. Yan Basque really honed right in on that aspect and conveyed perfectly the dilemma Archie's writers and artists have in trying to faithfully depict a true gay character in a universe of cheerfully sexless American icons. I don't mean to be condescending in saying I wanted the perspective of a gay writer in talking about this issue and this character -- I asked Yan to join us on FMF because I have admired his writing about comics for many months -- but I think he really brought some welcome depth and frankness to the subject. That said, I can't think of many more important issues facing the world today than diversity and acceptance of all kinds of people, and I am glad Archie is trying, but I, too, like Yan, and like most of the rest of the FMF team, wish the end result felt a little more real, a little more convincing, and a little more important to the ongoing dialogue.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Johnny Bacardi:</span><br /><br />I didn't get anything together; I was deathly ill [the night of the deadline]. It's just as well; I couldn't really think of anything to say about it other than while it's good to have any sort of positive examples of gay people in comics, as a comic that's some weak sauce. Bland art, too concerned with staying on that Stan G./Al Hartley/DeCarlo model and doing so very stiffly and super-obvious and a super-careful script with a lead that is so carefully crafted to be NICE and LIKEABLE that he comes across as too good to be true. <br /><br />I read my share of Archie comics growing up; in the '60s I really liked the Pureheart the Powerful stuff, but, like Gold Key and Harvey comics they were always second and third fiddle to the Marvel and DC stuff. Several years later my wife would buy the occasional digest at the grocery, which of course I would read, since, well, they were comics. Comics my wife bought! But overall, I've never been particularly interested or excited by Archie comics, and while I commend their forward thinking the execution leaves a lot to be desired.<br /><br />Hey, that reads like a review, doesn't it? <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Chris Allen:</span><br /><br />I guess when all is said and done, Archie Comics deserves a bit of credit for introducing a gay character to squeaky clean, asexual Riverdale. Maybe it was a gimmick, maybe it was just the cold calculation of realizing there must be some sort of gay demographic they weren’t previously reaching, or maybe someone just recognized that Riverdale needed to reflect a bit of our reality, however sanitized and forced through the typical Archie filtering.<br /><br />To start picking at Kevin Keller for not having a sexual life, or encountering real trauma and hatred for being openly gay, is to really just start pulling at the thread that holds all of Archie Comics together. None of these characters are meant to be real people. They’re stuck in high school, don’t have sex, don’t get in any kind of trouble with their parents, the law, or substance abuse. Moose is likely never going to have a career-ending football injury. The Lodges won’t lose their house due to poor investments. Archie won’t watch his mother die. Jughead won’t get diabetes. And Kevin Keller will probably not be seen with his tongue in another guy’s mouth.<br /><br />For the record, I’m only rooting for that last example to happen. So I think we can take this one issue on its own as a well-intentioned effort that suffers from being too nice. It’s hard to appreciate the struggles of an openly gay teen like Kevin (whose father was also not around a lot when he was growing up) when those struggles are unrealistically soft, and overcome so easily. It’s a little like superhero comics when they try to tackle real world issues like war and hunger. There’s probably a way to do it that doesn’t seem pat, awkward or stupid, but it would take time and a great deal of sensitivity and talent. Likewise, I’m not sure Dan Parent is the writer, or Archie Comics the publisher, to explore anything close to a three dimensional gay character in their light, humorous escapist comics. On its own, there isn’t a lot to recommend the book. It’s inevitable that one sees it as a starting point towards something a little deeper, but expectations have to be pretty low that that will happen.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Buy <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1879794934/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=comboogal-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1879794934">Kevin Keller HC</a> from Amazon.com.<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=comboogal-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1879794934" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-44284617822796541972011-12-09T03:39:00.001-05:002011-12-09T03:50:09.563-05:00Kevin Keller #2<span style="font-weight:bold;">Introduction by Johanna Draper Carlson:</span><br /><br />Archie Comics' traditional approach focused on capturing trends once its older writers and artists heard about them, leading some to say that you know fads are over once they appear in an Archie comic. Now, under new management, Archie seems to be chasing hot topics as a way of gaining free publicity, especially among the wider mainstream media. So, between "Archie gets married" magazines and an "Archie meets KISS" licensed story comes this political football. Kevin Keller #2 (actually Veronica #208 in indicia labeling) cover-features the new gay kid character praising (with <span style="font-style:italic;">four</span> visual flag elements) his military dad, alluding to recent real-life events involving gays in the military and the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" several months ago. <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7145/6456218733_b9f235c837.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 325px; height: 500px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7145/6456218733_b9f235c837.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />The actual story isn't as focused or patriotic. Kevin's family wants to plan a party for dad's birthday, and since Veronica is always hanging around, she gets involved. (The two characters most often paired with Kevin in the stories he's appeared in so far are Veronica, who seems to view a gay best friend as a key accessory, and Jughead, whom Kevin has a large number of characteristics in common with, hmmm.) The family event gives Veronica an excuse to "snoop through [Kevin's] private stuff", as he puts it, including photos that result in flashback stories of Kevin's life as a military brat. <br /><br />Kevin is bullied as a younger kid but learns to stand up for himself through athletic accomplishment. Kevin misses his dad, stationed away from the family. Kevin protects his friends when they get picked on. This isn't much of a story, more a collection of feel-good reminders of how one should behave in dealing with difficult circumstances. <br /><br />The art is standard current Archie look, with simple lines and faces and bright, eye-catching colors. It has energy, as figures are always gesturing or posing, in spite of the stories being driven by dialogue instead of images. <br /><br />Readers looking for stories specifically focusing on life as a gay teen will be disappointed, as only one of the incidents deals with hazing specifically for that reason, and it's phrased in terms of Kevin seeming effeminate, not gay. That gives Kevin's story a normality and universality that's a good thing, but it also ignores the part of his character that makes him particularly distinctive. I hope the two remaining issues of this series show Kevin dating, just as the other teens do. While we're told every issue that Kevin is gay, we have yet to see that in the visuals. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Roger Green:</span><br /><br />I may not be reading lots of comics these days, but even I knew, from general media stories, that Kevin Keller was supposed to be this "revolutionary" character in the Archie Comics universe. I hadn't read any of the stories, though. Yet this second issue, scripted and penciled by Dan Parent, could serve as an origin issue for both Kevin and his family.<br /><br />Kevin is talking with Veronica Lodge in a living room when Ronnie overhears Kevin's sister and mom making plans. Veronica, always the buttinsky, inserts herself in the scheme for a surprise party for Kevin's dad. In doing so, she unearths the Keller family history from Kevin's parents dating to life as a military family, with Kevin needing to be the "man of the house." She, and we, also discover Kevin, always the new kid in class, had been bullied, but eventually grew strong enough, physically and emotionally, to overcome.<br /><br />I found the story enjoyable, even occasionally moving. Kevin had come out as gay in high school, but that doesn't even warrant a mention until the 10th page and is disposed of by the end of the 11th. Some might find Kevin's conversion from victim to protector not credible, but I did; there is always a bit of trying harder when one is the outsider. The narrative shows a level of patriotism that, for the most part, was not TOO cloying or xenophobic. The ending, though, seemed to go on a little long, and the word "musketeers" was misspelled a couple times.<br /><br />As for the artwork, it looked like old-style Archie work. I mean, it's not Dan DeCarlo, but no one is. There are some long shots that are not well drawn, including one of the Archies band, but most of it is quite decent. The last Archie book I had read was <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/archie-new-look-series-volume-2-joe-staton/1025444123?ean=9781879794382">a "new look" story penciled by the great Joe Staton</a>. And while I grew to like it, I'm traditional enough to appreciate the standard look. One other thing: Kevin's eyes in this story are SO blue; Paul Newman blue, and I briefly found it distracting, but forgot about it after a while.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Christopher Allen:</span><br /><br />In the past year or so, Archie Comics has taken steps to introduce at least one aspect of real life into their humor books with the introduction of openly gay teen, Kevin Keller. I haven’t read a lot of them, but it’s obviously a difficult balancing act, as sexuality has historically had very little place within the Riverdale universe. Archie may vacillate between Betty and Veronica, but aside from a little kissing, it’s not clear what he would do with either of them.<br /> <br />So, in Kevin Keller, we have a character whose sexuality as a generator of story material is restricted mainly to how others perceive him, not really what it means to him. Kevin is gay because we are told so. There are no indicators in his speech or body language. As such, he could present a broad canvas upon which readers can paint their own frustrations, pain and triumph, whether gay, straight, teenaged, pre-teen, or older, in a way that the late ‘70s-‘80s Uncanny X-Men did, young mutants as a metaphor for anyone disenfranchised or persecuted. But, at least with this issue, Kevin is instead a relatively untroubled young man, overcoming any obstacles or resistance with guilelessness and a can-do attitude.<br /> <br />The story for this issue, such as it is, involves Kevin, his mother and sister planning a surprise birthday party for Kevin’s dad, a retired Colonel. Kevin’s friend, Veronica, offers to help with the decorations, and the tiny bit of comedy and drama in the story comes from her going overboard and almost ruining the surprise by putting balloons and signs OUTSIDE. Ha. Equally clumsy is the artwork, which seems to have taken the tack that in order to become more relevant, let’s lose almost all traces of the recognizable Archie house style and leave only the most workmanlike elements: coloring book-style thick outlines on figures with incongruous, too-fine lines for everything else. Inker Rich Koslowski needs to keep working on his tablet settings.<br /> <br />But, while the surprise party plot is rather weakly structured and unfunny, the issue does succeed in certain areas. Kevin’s mother’s pride in her husband and his military service is nice, as are the flashbacks where Kevin first overcomes homophobia via superior athletic ability, and later by paying it forward and helping a younger schoolmate going through similar bullying. It’s also hard to come down too hard on the relationship between Kevin and his dad. Yes, it’s less interesting to have uncomplicated mutual love and admiration — stories are after all about conflict — but if anyone not experiencing this gets a bit of encouragement that things can get better, great. The Archie books have historically been a lighthearted escape from reality. It would probably be unfair to expect these baby steps into reality to go much farther than this.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Alan David Doane:</span><br /><br />The primary purpose of Kevin Keller, the comic book, seems to be to send a positive message to teens and other readers that being gay isn't evil, wrong or disgusting. Kevin is a funny, good-natured dude whose life history is looked at in this issue, and although we see that he's experienced some bullying and bullshit that will be familiar not only to gays but to most kids who've been through high school (I lived a variant of the pudding incident seen herein myself, and it's the most humiliating memory of my teenage years), he and his family have survived bigotry and hate and feel like a healthy and fully-drawn family.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7032/6456246415_54800fe378.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 296px; height: 322px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7032/6456246415_54800fe378.jpg" border="2" alt="" /></a>The depiction of a 21st century family requires a three-dimensional approach to storytelling that demands all the rest of the regular Archie characters be just a little more complex and nuanced than they usually are in their other, more solely entertainment-minded titles. It's a welcome development and a good sign for society as a whole when a publisher the size of Archie Comics makes a bold move to just be honest about the fact that it's okay to be gay, or have a gay family member, without being particular pedantic or preachy. The script even acknowledges the risk of such an approach, when Veronica says "this is like one of those greeting card commercials! Does Kevin do <span style="font-style:italic;">anything</span> wrong?" It's a chance to acknowledge that gays are people too, with good points and shortcomings, like any other human being. The story and art are up to the usual Archie standard, in addition to being educational, positive and progressive in its nature.<br /><br />When I was a kid reading Archie Comics, the only Archie offering similar to this was the vanilla-coated Spire Christian Comics featuring the Archie characters. I haven't looked at those in decades, and can't say if they were as positive a cultural development as the creation of Kevin Keller is, but it seems unlikely. Kevin Keller seems to say that we should rely on our family and friends for support and try to develop our own strength (both inner and physical) as a way to respond to life's challenges. That seems to me a far better, more humanistic and mature message to send to readers, and if the overall end result seems more well-intentioned than brilliantly executed, it's still one that the folks at Archie Comics are to be applauded for. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Joseph Gualtieri:</span><br /><br />Ten years ago, I never would have thought that Archie Comics would not only still be around but thriving after reinventing itself as their titular franchise heads towards its seventieth anniversary in a few weeks. That’s not shabby for a property rooted in nostalgia for Depression-era Haverhill. Like a lot of comics readers, I briefly read Archie comics alongside other entry-level comics like GI Joe and Transformers. Up until the company began modernizing itself a few years ago, my only relationship with the company for about 20 years was chuckling at covers dug up by bloggers. In the last couple of years though they put out some intriguing download-only comics and I certainly couldn’t resist checking out the first issue of the new Life With Archie series (and the company smartly put out a trade for adults who don’t want to wade through Justin Bieber pictures).<br /> <br />That brings us to the comic up for review this week, Kevin Keller #2. Keller, the first openly gay Archie character, is another key part of the company reinventing itself for twenty-first century. The most remarkable thing about this comic is that it’s not remarkable at all; Keller’s simply portrayed as relative newcomer to Riverdale who happens to be gay and comes from a military family. The latter element is actually more a part of the story than Keller’s homosexuality. The issue of bullying comes up, but the comic depicts it was being something that anyone who’s smaller and more awkward than the bullies goes through, not just “girly boys” (as one of the bullies calls Keller).<br /> <br />The comic isn’t perfect in terms of representation though. While it does a terrific job of depicting Keller as normal, he’s also Cam-and-Mitchelled. It’s actually hard to tell that Keller’s gay from the comic; sure the bullies hurl insults at him, but I can’t help but wonder if someone reading the comic without knowing that he’s gay would think Veronica’s his girlfriend and the bullies were just mocking him. The Keller in Life With Archie is due to get married, but the company should make sure that the contemporary version actually dates. This is just one issue, so I’m not going to judge it too harshly for not showing Keller dating.<br /> <br />Overall, if I had kids I’d be more than happy to hand this comic to them. The level of craft involved is what I expect from Archie and while it could be a little better in terms of representing Keller’s homosexuality, I’m pretty happy that it shows Keller as just another part of Archie’s world.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7014/6478897515_6e73af1062_z.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 633px; height: 339px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7014/6478897515_6e73af1062_z.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Jason Urbanciz:</span><br /><br />Kevin Keller is the latest addition to the ageless cast of the Archie universe. Though I don’t think I’ve ever read a single Archie comic, the basics are familiar to anyone, as if they are ingrained on the genetic memory of all Americans of a certain age. This issue, the second of Kevin’s solo title gives us a quick run-through of Kevin’s personal history and his relationship with his Dad, an Army Colonel (named, appropriately, The Colonel) while Kevin and Veronica ready his home for his Dad’s big birthday party.<br /><br />Kevin relates his pre-Riverdale history to Veronica through the lens of having to grow up without his Dad around a lot. Since Kevin is gay that meant dealing with bullies, but also helping people who were in a similar situation to him and it’s all handled very well, and with kid-appropriate revenge upon the bullies (a locker full of pudding). Heck, Kevin even notes he got detention for the pudding incident, as if to tell the younger readers there are consequences for even the most well-intentioned bits of mischief.<br /><br />The book definitely takes aim at communicating some heavy topics at its young audience, including an injury the Colonel incurred while in the Army (presumably on the battlefield). While writer/penciler Dan Parent generally hits the topics head-on, he does so with a soft touch, and his bright, colorful art keeps the mood light.<br /><br />I’m sure that because of Kevin’s sexual orientation, some people will want to assign a political viewpoint to what is a kids' comic, but the simple message is that gay people are people too who deserve basic human respect. It says something when that in itself is a shocking message we need to shield our children from.<br /><br />It’s a fun comic, with some funny jokes and a good message for kids to not be jerks and stick up for people who need it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Yan Basque:</span><br /><br />I read a few Archie comics when I was a kid. After that, they fell almost completely off my radar for a decade or more, but I started paying attention again last year when they introduced Kevin Keller. I was curious about how this openly gay character would fit into the world of Riverdale, which from my recollection seemed to be perpetually frozen in a 1950s nostalgia. <br /><br />Kevin Keller is definitely a contemporary character. Not because he is openly gay, but because his homosexuality is both his primary defining characteristic -- his entire reason for existing as a fictional construct, in fact -- while it is simultaneously treated as being of absolutely no importance. By avoiding every gay stereotype, they've created a character who is exactly like everybody else. Had I not known before reading this comic that he was gay, I would have been very surprised when he casually mentions on page 11 that he had "already come out" about a year ago in high school. This statement and the little anecdote that follows, where his classmates call him a "girly boy" and he humiliates them by winning a race (yawn!), are the only evidence of him being gay that I found in the story.<br /><br />Since I haven't read any of Kevin Keller's previous appearances in Archie comics, I don't know how much of a backstory he's been given. Has he had any boyfriends? When did he come out to his parents and friends? This comic hints at some trouble with bullies when he was younger, but the cause of the bullying is not specified. I don't want to suggest that the only stories featuring a gay character that matter is those of him coming out or making out with other boys, but I'm finding it very difficult to relate to this character when everything about his life is so... unproblematic? (I'm struggling to find the right word here.)<br /><br />It's not that there is no conflict or drama in the story. It's just that the problems the characters face are impossible to take seriously when they're easily resolved in a few panels and don't have any lasting consequences. An absent father during childhood doesn't leave any emotional scars. Being bullied and beaten by schoolmates is no big deal -- you just cope with it. Your dad gets injured and feels guilty about having to retire from the army? Just write a front page newspaper article about it and make him realize that he's a hero. <br /><br />In the behind-the-scenes discussion for this week's edition of Flashmob Fridays, I suggested that having a gay character in Riverdale and addressing very topical issues like gays in the military and gay marriage were inherently political. Upon further reflection, though, I think my biggest disappointment with this comic is that it is so profoundly apolitical. It doesn't seem to have anything to say about anything at all.<br /><br />Am I happy that this character and this comic book exist? I guess so. I mean, if Archie comics are going to continue to appear on the stands, then I'd rather they do so with an openly gay character as part of the cast. And Kevin Keller is consistent with the universe in which he exists. I don't know if Archie comics could have done an openly gay character any differently without completely changing the rest of Riverdale. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Scott Cederlund:</span><br /><br />Kevin Keller #2 (or Veronica Presents #208, whatever you prefer to call it) has something a lot of comic books don’t have; it has a message. And it’s a good message. Rather than assume stereotypical roles for Kevin, a gay boy, and father, a military man through and through, and recreate a typical antagonism that’s best characterized as “you don’t tell, I won’t ask,” Dan Parent writes a story about a somewhat typical suburban family that’s trying to throw a surprise birthday party for their father. It’s the stuff of 1950 era sitcoms that’s still fairly simple and easy to relate to still in 2011. “Oh, look at the antics of the Keller family. They’re like <span style="font-style:italic;">I Love Lucy</span> only I don’t think Ricky Jr. was gay.”<br /><br />Parent’s story is filled with good role models, good lessons and good sentiment. <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7160/6456279527_857c281e9c.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 332px; height: 305px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7160/6456279527_857c281e9c.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>It’s “good” in the way that Mr. Rogers or Sesame Street is “good” but it’s not a story. Parent puts together a string of events and memories but there’s very little development that happens in this issue. Nothing at the end of the issue is any different than anything at the beginning of the issue other than a party is thrown. We find out a bit about Kevin, growing up as a military brat and the troubles of being gay during high school but it’s just a recital of recollections of a character that does not know how to build any drama.<br /><br />At the end of the issue, you’re supposed to feel good (there’s that word again) about Kevin, his family and maybe even your own feelings about the character. And you know that you are supposed to feel that way because all of the characters are laughing, smiling, playing jangly music and feeling generally up with life. They’re doing that because they haven’t gone through anything this issue. Parent runs down the events of Kevin’s life but there’s never any drama in those events. There’s never any movement forward or growth for the characters because they haven’t gone through anything that really challenges them in this issue. Even the bullying displayed because of Kevin’s homosexuality comes across as little more than typical school bullying because Kevin always faces it with a smile and a wink as he shows the bullies just the kind of man he is. Events are on display in this issue but they are never explored to understand just how these events affect anyone involved.<br /><br />This book has a good heart and the depiction of a supportive family and loving friends is admirable but it’s only a message showing us how to act without showing the consequences of our own hurtful actions to others. It’s a book with a fine agenda. Kevin Keller #2 doesn’t have much of a story but it’s got a good message for its readers. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Buy <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1879794934/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=comboogal-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1879794934">Kevin Keller HC</a> from Amazon.com.<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=comboogal-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1879794934" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-21591971775837651812011-12-02T00:40:00.008-05:002011-12-08T06:14:08.453-05:00Daredevil #6<span style="font-weight:bold;">Introduction:</span><br /><br />And here we go! Starting today and (fingers crossed) every Friday, the Flashmob Fridays gang will congregate right in this space (well, on this blog) and weigh in on one particular comic book or graphic novel! For details on what it's all about, how to participate as a writer or get your comic considered for review, <a href="http://flashmobfridays.blogspot.com/2011/11/end-of-interregnum.html">read my introductory post from yesterday</a>, and thanks for checking out Flashmob Fridays! If you like what you see, please bookmark us, subscribe to our RSS feed (in the sidebar at left), tell your friends, and buy the CafePress Flashmob Fridays hoodie! (Just kidding. For now.)<br /><br />And now with no further ado, because, as Stan Lee once said, we've exhausted our supply of ado, here's the first new Flashmob Fridays, a look at this week's Daredevil #6 by Mark Waid and Marcos Martin, published by Marvel Comics.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Joseph Gualtieri: </span><br /><br />If anything good came out of Marvel’s Brand New Day Spider-Man reboot, it was Marcos Martin. Oh, Martin had been around for awhile before that, but he never seemed to make too much an impression, despite penciling Batgirl Year One. His work was sporadic, and mainly consisted of fill-ins. Marvel’s been using him as something of a pinch-hitter, but his Paper Doll arc in Amazing Spider-Man #559-561 seemed to finally win him a fan base. By contrast, Mark Waid has, of course, been one of the biggest names in superhero comics since his “Return of Barry Allen” storyline way back in 1993 (and writing that makes me feel quite old). One would hope that teaming up a well-regarded writer and a hot artist would produce a great comic; Daredevil #6, unfortunately, isn’t the best work from either one of them.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7032/6437450325_541c8e9b6a.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 329px; height: 500px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7032/6437450325_541c8e9b6a.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>The opening sequence is gorgeous, as Daredevil saves himself after being thrown into the sea by Bruiser, apparently in the previous issue. From there though, the comic goes downhill as the characters are convoluted, the plot makes little sense, and worst of all, makes poor use of Martin’s skills. A good portion of the blame for this does not fall on Waid, necessarily, but rather on whoever’s responsible for the recap page. For some reason, despite being Daredevil, the recap page is presented, as in Amazing Spider-Man, as the front page of an issue of the Daily Bugle, and like the ASM Bugle recap pages, it’s short on information that might help a new reader. The whole point to a recap page should be clarifying things for a new reader so that the comic isn’t bogged down with unnecessary exposition. If you’ve ever read a run of Marvel comics from the late 1960s through the early '90s (say, in an Essential) you’ll probably find yourself skimming a lot as it seems as if at least a quarter of the average issue was devoted to in-text recaps. With the trade being the final form of most comics these days, it’s understandable and desirable for writing styles to change to accommodate the format change, but the recap page needs to utilized properly for the single issue to work on its own.<br /><br />Daredevil and Bruiser’s motivations and reasons for being in this issue are clear, but the other three major characters in this issue are all muddled. First up is Randall, who planned to betray the Midas Corporation by exposing a deal they made with five of the evil terrorist organizations in the Marvel Universe. It’s never clear why he was doing that, what sort of evidence he had, or anything else. Overall though, those are minor compared to the other two characters. Zachary works for Midas and hired Bruiser to go after Randall. That’s clear enough, but what’s his role in Midas? Is he the head of the company? Is he a mid-level manager? Is the threat of Midas gone when he dies? I have no idea. Then there’s Austin Cao. I have absolutely no idea who this guy is, despite him being mentioned on the recap page as a client of Matt Murdock’s who was fired from Midas. He’s also referred to as being a friend of Randall’s, but the connection there on the page is zilch otherwise and he just plays the role of boy hostage in this issue.<br /><br />All of that should have been covered by the recap page. Where the issue itself turns Byzantine is the plot. Brusier grabs Randall and brings him to Midas’s extremely boring and bland looking base, DD follows, a fight ensues and during that Zachary has some techs unlock security on the Omega Drive, which contains information related to the five-way deal. The Omega Drive replaces Randall as the McGuffin for the second half for the book, but it’s never clear where it came from or why Zachary had the security on it unlocked. Maybe this was evidence Randall had on him proving the deal, but that’s nowhere in the text.<br /><br />While Randall is the real villain of the issue, most of the comic is taken up by a fight between Brusier and Daredevil. As I already noted, it takes place in a bland, boring base. Martin does choreograph the fight well, and there’s the occasional flourish like all of page 12, overall this just doesn’t come off as the best use of skills. Bruiser himself is a mixed bag; the idea of an up-and coming super villain seeking sponsorship is a neat idea, but he’s seemingly sponsored by every evil organization in the Marvel Universe. I don’t watch a lot of NASCAR (okay, <span style="font-style:italic;">any</span>), but usually, one company in a certain product field sponsors someone. Having AIM, the Serpent Society, and Hydra all sponsor you is sort of like getting sponsorship from Coke, Pepsi, and Polar. Further muddling things, for Brusier has a Luchador mask, which doesn’t fit the corporate sponsorship theme. His power set is neat though; rather than being a typical super-strong type, he can focus his mass one part of his body and enhance that. It’s almost like some weird combination of the Blob and Ultra Boy. There’s some potential here, even if Waid and Martin didn’t bring it all out.<br /><br />Overall, while there are some decent elements to this issue, it’s far from the best work of the creators involved, even if some of the blame falls on editorial for not properly utilizing the recap page.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Alan David Doane:</span><br /><br />When I was 15, there was no comic I look forward to more every month than Frank Miller and Klaus Janson's Daredevil. Claremont, Byrne and Austin were doing fun, exciting stuff on Uncanny X-Men, Simonson was tearing it up on Thor, but there was something about Miller and Janson's DD that really got under my skin and kept me coming back for more, month after month.<br /><br />Unfortunately, that legendary run of comics got under Marvel's skin, and the skins of many thousands of readers, too. For decades, Daredevil as a comic book has been defined either by its debt to Miller/Janson (Chichester, Bendis, Brubaker) or by its sometimes-flailing attempt to do something, anything different (Nocenti, Smith).<br /><br />Mark Waid, a writer who can do truly extraordinary things when given some free rein (see his first run of Captain America with artist Ron Garney), seems to be enjoying just that privilege these days, and has reinvented Daredevil (both the comic and the character) in a manner that neither evokes Miller/Janson nor strikes one as a counter-response to same. I wouldn't call it sui generis, as stylistically the book these days reminds me a bit of the Gene Colan era (seriously, would Mike Murdock be <span style="font-style:italic;">that</span> out of place in this version of Daredevil?), but it does feel fresh and contemporary. The current issue concludes a storyline that saw Matt Murdock protecting and defending a young man who gets in a little over his head and ends up endangered by numerous longtime evil secret groups like AIM and HYDRA. The most pleasing thing about this issue, and this run, is that Waid is actually telling comprehensible stories with a beginning, middle and end. Sure they're designed to be collected into trade paperbacks, but unlike the majority of Marvel and DC titles these days, stuff actually happens over the course of the stories, characters are built and explored, and the reader is invited to dive into the world being created and have fun along with the creators. The events of recent years -- from Brubaker's outstanding run to Andy Diggle's disastrously awful one -- were acknowledged early on, and then thankfully moved on from. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7143/6440101495_b8a686858f_z.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 640px; height: 233px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7143/6440101495_b8a686858f_z.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Artist Marcos Martin brings a light, visually appealing Pop Noir sensibility to the book, reminiscent of stylists like Darwyn Cooke or David Mazzucchelli without any obvious debt to any particular artist. My favourite artistic run on Daredevil of the past decade was the work Michael Lark did with writer Ed Brubaker, but that era's over and Martin really does make a nice creative partner for Waid. "Nice" is probably not the most evocative or compelling word I could use to convince you to give this title a try, but along with "fun" and "entertaining" it's my honest reaction to the current run on Daredevil. Considering how many superhero comics are not very nice these days, or any fun at all, there's many worse things it could be called.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Matt Springer:</span><br /><br />I spend a great deal of time pondering Mark Waid. Perhaps more than is healthy. How was that mocha latte, Mark? The one I watched you purchase this morning while sitting in my riot gear and underpants outside the Starbucks on Melrose?<br /><br />I think a lot about Mark Waid because he is one of those creators whose gifts are so exceptional as to be invisible. When you love a writer, sometimes there's an urge to place her into a neat cubby hole -- Morrison's the eccentric one, Brubaker's the crimey one, Johns is a blood-drenched thirteen-year-old with dual shotguns under his black trenchcoat. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7014/6438671629_e15fbc0347.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 366px; height: 419px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7014/6438671629_e15fbc0347.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>There was a time, and maybe that time is still now, when Waid was recognized as the "silver age retro" guy who could whip your sorry ass at obscure Superman trivia with one hand while writing <span style="font-style:italic;">Who's Who</span> entries about the Legion of Substitute Heroes with the other. Thanks largely to his creator-owned work on the dark superhero series Irredeemable and Incorruptible, he's been able to shed that mantle to a degree. (I'm waiting for the kids version, Incorrigible.)<br /><br />So now he's encamped at Marvel where he's spearheading the latest revamp of Daredevil, a character who has become most familiar to readers over the past couple decades for enduring a parade of tragedy that would inspire the welcome release of suicide in lesser men. And at first glance, Waid's Daredevil fits into the lazy stereotype of the Waid comic -- it's a character we all love, and he's fun again! Just like in the sixties! Next issue, Foggy Nelson becomes Turtle Boy!<br /><br />But it's not that simple. There's nuance here, and breakneck action, and villains distinguished by casual, naked greed. Coupled with Marcos Martin's pencils, each page is so crisp and clean you could eat off it. That opening splash alone -- Martin's pitch-perfect rendering of Daredevil submerged deep underwater at the lower right of the panel, with a single caption, "There's one advantage to being underwater."<br /><br />It seems so simple but it's packed with meaning. On the first page of the issue, Daredevil's immediately in danger. Even if you've never picked up the book, you're drawn in by that simple fact. The black of the water is accented by the subdued red of Daredevil's costume. He's positioned upside down, falling through that water, and with the flatness of the page itself, he already looks beaten. Of course, he's not, but the suggestion of imminent defeat from the very first page creates suspense. One page, one big panel, practically a master class in comics.<br /><br />There are great writers who are great just because they execute on the raw fundamentals of storytelling better than anyone else. They find a character, understand the fundamentals of what's special about that character, and then they simply amplify those traits. Mark Waid is one of those writers, and his Daredevil is awesome.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Scott Cederlund:</span><br /><br />How do you classify artists like Marcos Martin? In Daredevil #6, Martin is doing something that you don’t see a lot of artists in superhero comic books doing today; he’s drawing elegantly. He’s drawing what should be a classic style where each and every line is absolutely essential to the image and to the story. It’s how the Marvel style was built by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. It’s what John Buscema and John Romita carried on. Those early Marvel artists all knew the power of the line and applied it judiciously to the page. They didn’t go crazy and just splash ink everywhere (although there is a time and a place for that artistic approach as well) but established Marvel by drawing just what they needed to on the page. That could mean a wild Ditko dimension or a solid Avengers argument between Black Panther and Hawkeye or one of Read Richards’ other worldly adventures. <br /><br />For too long, Daredevil visually has been defined by night and shadows. Frank Miller, John Romita Jr., Alex Maleev, and Michael Lark, just to name a few, have made Daredevil as grim and dark of a character as possible. Like Paulo Rivera has done of the first five issue of this latest Daredevil series, Martin draws anything but heavy heavy shadows. Martin’s Daredevil moves on the page thanks to the artist's simple yet elegant (there’s that word again) line, which defines the characters and settings but also moves with the characters. Movement is such a hard thing to convey through static drawn images, but a character like Daredevil needs to move through a page. <br /><br />Martin draws a two-page spread in the first third of the issue where an image of Daredevil kicking a henchman spreads across the entire two pages. It’s one of those perfectly captured moments, like a perfect photograph to capture a boxing match or other sports event. All the power, energy and character of the moment is captured in one perfect image. Daredevil comes in from stage left, his body stretched out in mid-air as his heel connects with an AIM lackey’s jaw, sending the lackey reeling to the far right of the image. A hostage, arms tied behind his back, ducks below Daredevil as if they spent weeks practicing this move. It’s the kind of image and moment that in real life you hope you’re lucky enough to capture once or twice with a camera. It’s the kind of captured image that’s even rarer in comics.<br /><br />Over the years, there have been plenty of images of Daredevil kicking a thug in the face but it’s Martin’s simplicity that makes this image and his art in the whole issue something special. The clean lines that Martin uses to draw Daredevil make it nice and easy to just follow the action from one side of the page, all the way across it and then out of the page. His Daredevil looks like he belongs in the air, not like he’s flying but more like he is an acrobat or martial artist and this is just one of his go-to moves. Martin carries that lightness and motion of the character throughout the book. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7156/6440084609_1d25e989f7.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 419px; height: 324px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7156/6440084609_1d25e989f7.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>The other thing that Martin does consistently is he surprises the readers. Whether it’s through one panel or an inventive layout, most pages have at least one unique element on it that make you just stop and say “wow.” The very first page is one of those with Daredevil sinking into the blackness of the ocean, with a thin line of air bubbles leading up to the surface. It’s a different kind of darkness than the character usually knows and Martin makes it both familiar and different that way. On other pages, a brief panel shows how Daredevil experiences the world around him. It may be an interesting layout or it may be a great splash page showing that the bad guys have been set up in a Mexican standoff shown from an unique angle; Martin makes sure that at least every other page has something on it that catches your eye because it’s so different than anything else you see in a comic book right now.<br /><br />I wonder if we need to come up with a new term to describe the type of art that Martin and Rivera are doing in Daredevil. The first thing that pops to my mind is “superhero minimalism.” As shown in Daredevil #6, Martin knows what he needs to put on the page to tell the story. He doesn’t put too much information and he doesn’t put in too little either. Each line is part of the storytelling process and contributes to the panel, to the page and to the whole issue. Kirby knew how much information needed to be on a page (even if some of his inkers didn’t agree with him) and he pretty much built the Marvel style of storytelling. That’s not to say that Martin is the next Jack Kirby but he understands how Kirby’s art worked and connected with an audience and he actually manages to apply those lessons to his own art. It’s not about what you’re drawing but it is about how you’re drawing it. Martin draws really well.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Johnny Bacardi:</span><br /><br />Like (I suspect) many others, I had become so bored with the whole dreary, melodramatic, brooding, suffering, tortured Miller/Bendis/Brubaker take on Daredevil, that Mark Waid's run so far has been like encountering an oasis in the middle of a hot, endless desert. It's not so much that Waid has revived the swashbuckling, wisecracking DD of my youth, even though that was long overdue...it's that it seems like Waid just went away and actually thought about the character for a good long while- about what made him tick, what could make him interesting and engaging and dare I say even fun to read, about cause and effect and what his supporting cast should be and how they should react...and has set about to write the best superhero comic series he possibly can, with all of us as the beneficiary. I don't mean to gush so unabashedly, but I sure never saw this coming, and it's so surprisingly good that it makes me fear the fanman backlash- the same people that help keep so much Big Two junk alive won't embrace this, surely. Anyway, be that as it may, I think sales have been pretty good so far so we'll keep fingers crossed. <br /><br />I haven't even mentioned the fact that Waid is assisted by two of the best of today's superhero artists, Paolo Rivera and Marcos Martin. Rivera I was less familiar with, but he's provided one clever, smart visual after another, and Martin has excelled on his alternating arcs as well...I've enjoyed Martin's work on other projects such as Batgirl Year One and the Dr. Strange mini of a couple of years ago... he has such a intuitive grasp of layout and staging, and a facile, supple way of drawing people, that he (I think) is as close as we'll get to a modern Ditko. Unfortunately, he's leaving the rotation, but Rivera's staying on, thank goodness.<br /><br />This particular issue had me a bit concerned...the Unbeatable Big Bad named Bruiser that was introduced last issue seemed a bit crass somehow, and reminded me more than a little of the guy with the flag on his face from that long-ago Miller/Mazzuchelli story arc, whose name eludes me. But not to worry; the rematch between DD and the new guy was a clinic in how to make a superhero fight interesting. It was all tied in to a bigger-picture arc which had Matt Murdock striving to protect a young blind man who accidentally overheard something which jeopardized his life at the hands of five of Marvel's criminal organizations- you know, AIM, Hydra, etc., and it was resolved in exciting, even humorous (I laughed out loud at the joke on page 19) fashion. Waid even cleverly sets himself up with a plotline, should he choose to pursue it, that will lurk for next few issues, I'm sure.<br /><br />I'm really trying hard to be critical here, honestly, but it's hard to be objective. I don't know what has gotten into the good but never THIS good before Waid, but I intend to enjoy it as long as I can. Along with Thunderbolts, Daredevil is most certainly, in my opinion, the best superhero comic Marvel has to offer right now, and is better than anything that its distinguished competition is throwing out there as well.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Christopher Allen:</span><br /><br />Last week I was reading a book from TwoMorrows that collected a lot of Stan Lee ephemera (old proposals, interviews, and a number of tributes). In a 1967 interview, Lee reflected on his various ongoing Marvel titles and his only regret at the time was that he had thus far failed to make Daredevil distinct from Amazing Spider-Man. They both fought some of the same villains, and both had John Romita, Sr. providing the artwork around this time. Although Gene Colan did bring a different atmosphere, when most readers think of Daredevil now, it’s with the weight of years of Frank Miller’s noir-inspired work, which has cast its shadow on recent runs by Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker and, most recently, Andy Diggle. Evil ninjas, demons, and an increasingly tortured Matt Murdock who could be desperate or calculating but rarely having much fun or seeming in command of his faculties.<br /> <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7161/6438736117_075f3343bc.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 500px; height: 342px;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7161/6438736117_075f3343bc.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Well, superhero comics are all about change, or at least the illusion of change, and so it wasn’t surprising that with Spider-Man group editor Steve Wacker taking over the editing of Daredevil, things would come sort of full circle with a return to a brighter, more upbeat book for DD. <a href="http://www.dawn.com/2011/08/17/blind-hero-daredevil-takes-on-new-life-with-audio.html">Wacker is a pretty imaginative guy</a> but in this case, getting Mark Waid to write the book was a no-brainer. Waid had already worked with Wacker for a few years as one of the rotating crew of writers that restored Amazing Spider-Man to not only a good book, but a good book to get every week. And although Waid is no stranger to darker superhero stories (Kingdom Come, Irredeemable), he also has a track record of coming onto books that have gone off the rails into darkness or stupidity and making them enjoyable again.<br /> <br />This issue concludes a two-part story in which Daredevil tries to rescue a scientist from the clutches of representatives from five of the biggest Marvel Universe criminal/terrorist organizations, including A.I.M. and Hydra. To do this, he has to first get through a new villain called Bruiser. This sounds fairly generic, but Waid is a very clever, playful writer, offering a lot of nice details and ideas. We get Daredevil’s observation (while underwater, apparently dumped overboard in issue #5) that sound travels faster in water than air. We get the fact that Bruiser is not just a tough guy but has the power to shift his center of gravity, making him not only able to strike with great force but also difficult to flip or knock down. And we get the revelation that the innocent young man used as leverage to get the scientist to comply is the scientist’s lover, not his son.<br /><br />It would be easy to take the book at face value, with the clean, Romitaesque storytelling and lack of shadows as a Silver Age throwback, and indeed Waid has been guilty of this before, not that it’s anything to feel guilty about. But while the art and the Stan Lee-inspired cheek of “Simperin’ Steve” Wacker’s letters page are clearly nods to simpler times, Waid never resorts to parody or in any way dumbs down his writing. My only concern is that this is the last issue for Marcos Martin on art, with the not-quite-as-good Paolo Rivera returning. But if smartly constructed stories that only take an issue or two to wrap up, with humor, clever twists and relatively bloodless action are considered throwbacks, then I’ll take more, please.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Buy <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0785152377/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=comboogal-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0785152377">Daredevil. Vol. 1 HC by Mark Waid, Marcos Martin and Paolo Rivera from Amazon.com</a>.<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=comboogal-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0785152377" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-5277370057553849552011-11-30T18:14:00.014-05:002011-12-27T02:21:17.838-05:00The End of the InterregnumThe six posts that precede this one were originally compiled and posted on the first version of <a href="http://www.troublewithcomics.com">Trouble With Comics</a> back in 2009. TWC itself was a spinoff of <a href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com">Comic Book Galaxy</a>, a site I founded back in 2000, and it was meant to recapture some of the freewheeling, all-hands-on-deck feel of the earliest days of CBG.<br /><br />Recently, I had cause to browse the original TWC archives, and I was looking at Flashmob Fridays, and really despaired that we ever stopped doing it. Since spontaneity and flexibility are built right into the idea, I quickly decided it might be time to give it another go. Joining me and my longtime companion <a href="http://christopherallen.tumblr.com/">Christopher Allen</a> on this new version of Flashmob Fridays are some writers we admire and are totally jazzed to be working with; some we've shared ideaspace with before, and some for the first time: Yan Basque of <a href="http://irrelevantcomics.blogspot.com/">Irrelevant Comics</a>, <a href="http://www.comicsworthreading.com">Johanna Draper Carlson</a>, Joseph Gualtieri, Scott Cederlund, Roger Green of <a href="http://www.rogerogreen.com/">Ramblin' With Roger</a>, Chris Arrant, David Allen Jones (perhaps better known as Johnny Bacardi), superfan of everything Matt Springer, Jason Urbanciz, and Mick Martin of <a href="http://superheroesetc.blogspot.com/">Superheroes, Etc.</a>. We hope to add some new names to this lineup from time to time, but these are the core writers who've thrown in their lot with us.<br /><br />So, here's what you can expect: Every week, this batch of writers-about-comics (and if that description applies to you, or you would like it to, and you'd like to contribute, <a href="mailto:alandaviddoane@gmail.com">drop me a line</a>) will converge in this space and weigh in with their thoughts on the comic chosen for review that week. It might be a new release, or a forgotten classic, or something else entirely. The aim is to get as many good writers talking about a specific comic every Friday, to give you, the home reader, a quick sense of what the critical consensus is about a comic you might be interested in buying/reading/downloading/slabbing for future financial windfalls of enormous proportions. I'm not certain yet if we'll have something up <span style="font-style:italic;">this</span> Friday, which as I write this is the day after tomorrow, but for sure by next Friday we'll be ready to roll, and in the meantime we have our initial half-dozen posts from 2009 archived here now. See the archives in the sidebar.<br /><br />Finally, if you're a creator or publisher and you'd like your comic to get the Flashmob Fridays treatment, we'll need a complete CBR/CBZ or PDF copy of your comic, which you can <a href="mailto:alandaviddoane@gmail.com">email to me</a> for consideration.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-39740545561871791882009-11-20T14:49:00.000-05:002011-12-05T17:41:55.604-05:00Flashmob Fridays #006: Scalped, Vertigo, and the State of the Floppy<b>Introduction by Alan David Doane</b><br /><br />We're back with another episode of the semi-regular Flashmob Fridays, but it's a little different this time. Usually, someone suggests a comic, and within a couple days whoever wants to participate can weigh in with their thoughts. This time, one of Christopher Allen's <a href=http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/2009/11/daily-breakdowns-037-tcj-moore-and.html>columns</a> this week garnered a lot of reaction -- some from readers, but even more from the other TWCers (Troublers? Twickers?), who turned out to be big fans of Jason Aaron's and R.M. Guera's series, <strong>Scalped</strong>. First up, Chris expands on his thoughts, then the rest of the gang <s>piles on</s> weighs in.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Christopher Allen</span><br /><br />My goal in reading <span style="font-weight:bold;">Scalped</span> #31 and the other two Vertigo books was pretty simple, though admittedly I didn't put a lot of thought into the ramifications of it. As I think I've written before, I hadn't been reading many monthly comics for a few years, preferring to pick up hard-and-softcover collections of things I'm interested in or that had good reviews/word of mouth. But in getting back into much more frequent reviews and enjoying the renewed practice of hitting the comics shop every Wednesday, I figured I'd check out these three series about which I'd been pretty curious. In the case of <strong>Scalped</strong>, it very well may have been a recommendation from Johnny Bacardi a month or so ago that planted that seed in my head.<br /><br />So, anyway, I know the score: monthly series from Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, IDW and others (<i>you</i> can call them "mainstream" if you want; I'll just call them genre comics) are structured so as to be fairly easily collected in hardcovers and trade paperbacks not long after each story arc concludes. But, without ill intent, I just wanted to see if a random issue of one of these Vertigo series (and Vertigo was chosen only because I was interested in those particular books) could provide a satisfying reading experience on its own, without being too confusing for a new reader. Would it be clear enough, and good enough, that I would want to go back to the beginning as well as continue forward? And so I approached the books with those parameters, which to me seemed fair enough. <br /><br />I was surprised at the passionate <strong>Scalped</strong> support that followed from Matt, Johnny, David Wynne and Marc Sobel, who either thought I was too tough/unfair on the book, and/or that it was unfair to judge either that series or Vertigo books in general that way, as a) the series needs to be read from the beginning, or b) Vertigo's story arcs are intended for collection, so one should only review the collection. <br /><br />I did, and do, bristle at those assertions, I have to admit, though it was throughout a respectful exchange with all of them. To me, I do believe in that old saw about every comic being somebody's first. Yes, there are plenty of series where I've taken the plunge and bought the first trade based on word of mouth or liking one of the creators, but I also pick up semi-random monthly issues, too. If I like it, I might just wait for the collection and give the one issue away, or continue with the monthly issues. I have my methods. <br /><br />Although there was some attempt at a correlation between monthly comics and complex cable TV shows like <i>Deadwood</i>, I couldn't really agree with the idea that it would be nearly impenetrable if one decided to start in the middle of the second season. Episodic television like that, and <i>The Sopranos</i>, <i>Mad Men</i>, etc., may have long, overarching storylines, but there's always a story that begins and ends in that one episode, plus at the 46 to 50 minutes, there's a lot more room for the stories to develop, and for lots of characterization, than in one issue of a monthly comic. Is it Jason Aaron's fault that in the original format for his series, he only gets 22 pages a month to move his story and characters along? No. Is it his fault that he chooses a decompressed style where the action depicted would equate to about ten minutes of screen time, at $2.99? Sure it is. Or I should say, "fault" isn't quite the right word, but it's a storytelling choice he has to live with, just as he has to live with not putting his best foot forward on what appears to be a fairly pivotal issue of the series and instead lacks memorable dialogue and seems filled with cliched or one-note characters. <br /><br />But again, I gave the benefit of the doubt to the series that what was there wasn't too bad and I might want to start from the beginning. It wasn't really about <strong>Scalped</strong>, anyway; that just kicked off a larger discussion. And getting back to that point, yes, I think it's perfectly fair to judge an entertainment product on its own terms, be it a television show, comic, book, whatever. If I had the slightest interest in <i>Twilight: New Moon</i>, I might go see and review it, without having seen the first or having read any of the books. It would only be fair to throw those caveats into the review, but sure, I could review it. If Vertigo, DC and any other publisher choose to continue to put out comics in this format, then they can be judged in that format. <br /><br />The larger issue it brought up to me is that I really think the decompressed style you see in a lot of monthly comics are really hastening their demise. I remember a few years ago wondering if "compression" would be the next big thing -- to me a sound strategy to add more value to the expensive comic book. Aside from Warren Ellis's <strong>Fell</strong> and the odd effort here and there (I just read the first <strong>Agents of Atlas</strong> trade and it's exceptionally brisk), it hasn't really happened. I'm not asking for anthology titles with bang-bang six page complete stories, or a series with every issue a "done-in-one" story. I just think when editors and creative teams allow stories to feel stretched out, when not a lot happens from issue to issue because the writer's got three issues of story he has to make last six, then what they're doing is selling that series short. It could be canceled earlier, if enough fans get turned off, or it could be one of those books that everyone loves at first and then it overstays its welcome, like <strong>100 Bullets</strong>, maybe <strong>Preacher</strong>. Is <strong>Fables</strong> still a passionate read for many, or more of a duty or habit now? I dunno. I better stop now before all the <strong>Fables</strong>, <strong>100 Bullets</strong> and <strong>Preacher</strong> fans jump on me.<br /><br />I promised my colleagues I would get off my soapbox and let them have the last words. I thank JB and Matt below (as well as Marc and David, who added their own sharp comments on our email group but didn't have time to formalize them here) for the lively discussion. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Johnny Bacardi</span><br /><br />I've been reading <span style="font-weight:bold;">Scalped</span> since the first trade, and I believe that the more you get into the story, the more some of the characters and their motivations will become apparent. Chris is right in that there are a lot of standard crime-drama beats being hit, and the setting is providing novelty, but Aaron has built his characters up slowly, and it does help to at least read an arc to get a feel for them. It's kinda like judging <i>Deadwood</i> after watching one mid-season two episode. Guera's art had to grow on me a little, too-- it's really an amalgam of a dozen different artists, but he's good at staging and creating dynamic-looking pages, and capable of doing emotions well (something that comes in really handy, given all the angst). <br /><br />Guess you can tell I'm in the bag for this series, huh!<br /><br />Really, though, the gist of what I was going to say is that the corrosive Dash/Carol relationship that caused consternation is one that's been coming to a head through the last dozen or more issues, and I can see why it wouldn't make sense coming in cold. But I don't think I'd want to see a lot of expository dialogue explaining things either, so I guess that's just the nature of that particular beast and I see your point in that respect. I still hope you sample a bigger set someday!<br /><br />I re-read the first issue this morning, and I was a bit surprised how clunky it came across in places--Aaron was trying to establish a lot of things through dialogue, and a lot of it read flat and obvious. Once he got established, though, I think it got a lot better in that respect. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Matt Springer</span><br /><br />You may not know this but the Trouble With Comics writers room frequently breaks out into near-mudwrestling matches over such trivial topics as the quality of Howard Johnson's room service and the length of Wolverine's pubic hair. (It's shaved. SHAVED I SAY YOU VARLOT!)<br /><br />I confess, I helped begin the latest tussle with my reaction to Chris Allen's reaction to <strong>Scalped</strong>, <strong>Air</strong>, and <strong>Northlanders</strong> in a <a href=http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/2009/11/daily-breakdowns-037-tcj-moore-and.html>recent<br />installment</a> of his excellent Daily Breakdowns.<br /><br />Overall, his reviews seemed to indicate that he believes any comic book series should be accessible every issue, without fail, to a new reader. Personally, I can see where that would be a virtue for mainstream superhero series but I think it's pretty well-established at this point in the comics world that Vertigo series tend to be large, rich stories told in arcs/chapters that aren't usually easily accessed randomly.<br /><br />Vertigo is actually doing two things to encourage that viewpoint -- the $1 first issue and the $9.99 debut trade. It might be more fair to judge the series on their first trades since that seems to be the method they're encouraging. The issue of jump-on-ability is almost secondary to the issue of Vertigo's specific strategy, if that makes sense -- Vertigo has clearly chosen a path that emphasizes trade collections with the floppies acting as merely a secondary concern toward making back perhaps cost. At least that would be my guess based on the apparent success of something like Fables which still sells easily under 10,000 copies per issue.<br /><br />So ultimately, saying you can't really jump onto a Vertigo book at any point is sorta judging them on standards they themselves reject, which gets me to the issue of floppies as a viable entertainment unit at all. I feel like we're actually watching floppies die before our very eyes. I'm not gonna value judge that statement, like "Let's set a fire to help them die" or "Let's save them with polybags and lotsa luuuv!" I'm just saying that pretty much across the board, comic book series have rejected the notion that "every comic is someone's first comic," and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Honestly, these pamphlets are<br />basically being sold into the same dwindling audience of obsessives, and we all know the drill, so what does it matter?<br /><br />It makes me think of HBO shows; most of the long-form series I've watched in the HBO model (<i>Sopranos</i>, <i>Wire</i>, <i>Rome</i>, <i>Big Love</i>, <i>Mad Men</i>) are pretty damn impenetrable if you just picked up the remote one night and said, "Hey, I'll give this a try." I think you could get a really good feel for the tone and the mood of the show, and possibly decide if you liked it or not, but plot-wise, you'd be lost.<br /><br />Again, let me say I don't think this is a bad thing; I think the opening of this vista in both print and television has enabled some amazing storytelling that would have been unimaginable even twenty years ago. But let's not pretend something should still be true when the vast majority of us all know it isn't: No modern-day comic book is really anybody's "first comic," and floppies are going the way of Wolverine's pubic hair.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-12508695728036861662009-11-13T14:46:00.000-05:002011-12-05T17:41:07.643-05:00Flashmob Fridays #005: Gates of Eden #1<b>Introduction by Alan David Doane</b><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">In 1982, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Gates of Eden</span> was ahead of its time, an independent comic that the market didn't quite know what to do with, packed with idiosyncratic contributions from a who's who of talented comic artists, including Steve Leialoha, P. Craig Russell, John Byrne, Fred Hembeck, Michael Kaluta and others. For this edition of Flashmob Fridays, we start with a reminiscence of the title's troubled publishing history from former <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FantaCo_Enterprises">FantaCo</a> employee Roger Green, and continue on with reviews by the Trouble with Comics writers. Anyone interested in FantaCo's history is invited to browse <a href="http://rogerowengreen.blogspot.com/">Roger's blog</a>, as it's a semi-regular topic of discussion there.</span><br /><br /><b><a href="http://rogerowengreen.blogspot.com/">Roger Green</a></b><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/gates_of_eden_1-715981.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 251px; height: 320px;" src="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/gates_of_eden_1-715978.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">Gates of Eden</span>, which came out in the spring of 1982, was a great FantaCo comic book, but a tremendous drain on the company. Gates was very much the brainchild of Mitch Cohn, from the Dylan-inspired title (Mitch was a huge Dylan fan) to the selection of the artists, Gates really represented his sensibilities. Most, though not all, of the artists appeared in the book based on Mitch's urging. I don't know that he knew all the artists going into the project, but he had a Rolodex of potential contributors he had put together from friends and friends of friends.<br /><br />I suppose Mitch was like a kid in a candy store, putting together his dream book. I recall him on the phone practically gushing to his comic art heroes. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them were not big commercial draws. John Byrne, who had done work for FantaCo's <span style="font-weight:bold;">Chronicles</span> series, had a following. So did Fred Hembeck, who FantaCo had published since 1980. But most were popular as "underground" or "ground level" artists. I wasn't directly involved in the structuring of the book, but I always thought editor Mitch was a great advocate for the artists to get as much money as possible, quite likely more than the market would generally bear. Meanwhile, owner/publisher Tom Skulan was more of a bottom-line guy, wanting to put together a package as inexpensively as possible. The one thing that they did share, however, was care for the production values; they both wanted it to look good.<br /><br />If I had specific numbers, they are lost in the mist. I do know that <span style="font-weight:bold;">Gates of Eden</span> #1 was not profitable. Unlike other items were published around that time, such as the <span style="font-weight:bold;">Chronicles</span> dedicated to the Avengers and Spider-Man, we were not getting the either the distributor reorders, or the mail order/store sales we wanted/needed. <span style="font-weight:bold;">Gates</span> #1 and other situations put FantaCo in a real cash crunch that it took a couple years to get out of. <br /><br />So when <span style="font-weight:bold;">Gates of Eden</span> #2's low preliminary distributor numbers came in, Tom and Mitch, with some input from me, brainstormed about what to do. Lessen the quality of the paper stock was considered, as was raising the cover price from $2.95 to $3.50. Ultimately, though, this would have meant resoliciting the title, and we didn't think that would help. So Tom pulled the plug on <span style="font-weight:bold;">Gates</span> #2. From a business point of view, it was probably the correct thing to do, but I'm fairly sure that Mitch felt he had lost face with the people he had contacted to contribute.<br /><br />Ultimately, the fact that Mitch was both an employee of FantaCo's, and therefore of Tom's, and yet was an independent contractor of sorts putting together this package for FantaCo caused all sorts of muddled lines of communication. And I sometimes got caught in the middle as a sounding board for both sides.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Johnny Bacardi</span><br /><br />I don't remember much about the whys and wherefores of the release of <span style="font-weight:bold;">Gates of Eden</span>; I probably saw an ad in the <span style="font-weight:bold;">Comics Journal</span>, which featured that gorgeous Mike Kaluta cover -- and since I was a connoisseur of all things MWK as much in 1983 as I am in 2009, I would have bought it for that if nothing else. Basically a themed one-shot, said theme being a look back at the Sixties, It features a host of contributors, many of which were stalwarts of the Underground scene of that time like Foolbert Sturgeon, Lee Marrs, Kim Deitch, Rick Geary, and Spain. The story which still stands out the most to me is Steve Leialoha's look back at Altamont, the free festival which soon turned into a nightmare as someone was stabbed by a Hell's Angel member during the Rolling Stones' set, the Angels being there to ostensibly provide security at the behest of the Grateful Dead. That show was said to be the death knell for the Hippie Dream. More than anything, I just enjoy seeing Leialoha on full art again -- he's been pretty much inking Mark Buckingham on Fables for years now, and his idiosyncratic style (which was also being brought to bear on Marvel/Epic's <span style="font-weight:bold;">Coyote</span> at about the same time) is pretty much subsumed there. Trina Robbins, who was really turning out a lot of work at the time for a number of companies, is also represented with a look at Hippie fashions, right in her wheelhouse -- it even has cutout dolls. Another enjoyable reminiscence was brought to us by Fred Hembeck, who shares a story of longsuffering Mets fandom, which culminated in their 1969 World Series win. Jeff Jones turns in one of his Idyl-style pieces, and Craig Russell also contributes an psychedelic two-page spread. I had forgotten exactly how much was stuffed in this one issue!<br /><br />Guess it didn't sell all that well, because they didn't do another one to my knowledge. Too bad; there's some fine storytelling and a lot of good art in this collection. It's a look back at a time which gets more and more romanticized, and while there's a fair amount of that going on here, several of the entries also take a more level-headed point of view as well for balance, and all in all, this was a lot better than I remember thinking it was back in 1983 when I first read it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Christopher Allen</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/gates_panel_1-743716.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 284px; height: 320px;" src="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/gates_panel_1-743712.JPG" border="0" alt="" /></a>You know, I actually own a copy of this comic -- a gift from ADD -- but I never read it until now. I have to admit I'm glad he brought it up again. Maybe I needed an audience. Anyway, this comic gave me a warm feeling, in a way, as it reminded me of my dad's side of the family. They were all kind of hippies in the '60s, and my aunt has long had an art supply shop in Haight-Ashbury. The stories in here reminded me of them because of the combination of idealism and creativity. It's one thing to see a documentary about the '60s, but quite another to have a group of cartoonists telling their own personal '60s remembrances. Although some of these guys were maybe somewhat associated with the '60s underground comics scene, none of them are particularly radical. These are not stories that push the boundaries with a lot of sex and drugs. Rather, they're stories of people who were young and trying to find themselves during one of our more turbulent times. a time of great fear and great hope. Steve Leialoha's "Altamont" is a standout. Even though I'd seen the film, <i>Gimme Shelter</i>, and knew the details, Leialoha brought a real artistry. Mick slings his hips just right. The tension builds. There's confusion even amid the clear storytelling. Really excellent work.<br /><br />We also get a nice piece on the '68 Chicago convention riot, lots on Nixon, LBJ, JFK, communes, fashion, the miracle Mets, and an eye-opening story by Sharon Kahn Rudahl on the difficulties of trying to get an abortion in the '60s. It's almost like publisher Tom Skulan and editor Mitch Cohn made a list of everything important in the '60s and handed it out to all these cartoonists, except that kind of thing wouldn't have really worked. Somehow they just picked the right talent, and the talent knew the right stories to tell. Pretty fantastic.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-29772587651451681252009-10-16T14:35:00.000-04:002011-12-05T17:42:33.991-05:00Flashmob Fridays #004: Planetary #27<b>Introduction by Alan David Doane</b><br /><br />You may recall that <span style="font-weight:bold;">Planetary</span> was to have been finished around the same time as the 20th century. It appears that time has finally come.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/planetary27-735041.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 213px; height: 320px;" src="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/planetary27-735002.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">Planetary</span> #27, the final issue of the sometimes-celebrated series by Warren Ellis, John Cassaday and Laura Martin, is here at last, and the subject of this week's Flashmob Fridays. In <a href="http://warren-ellis.livejournal.com/591863.html">a post on his LiveJournal</a>, Ellis reflected on the end of the series, saying "It’s a book I associate with bad times: protracted illnesses, big arguments...my physical collapse and months in bed, and my dad’s long illness and eventual death. All of these things are intertwined with <span style="font-weight:bold;">PLANETARY</span> for me, and make it difficult to enjoy the moment."<br /><br />Of course, any individual is likely to suffer some setbacks and tragedies in any given ten year span, but it did seem at times like this particular comic book was cursed -- a phenomenon that would have gone unnoticed if not for the fact that, at its best, it was one of the most exciting and beautiful adventure comics being published. Together with <span style="font-weight:bold;">The Authority</span> #1-12 with Bryan Hitch, Paul Neary and (again) Laura Martin, these two series represent a pretty high peak for Ellis's writing powers and excellent comic books that are always worth re-reading and losing one's self in.<br /><br />But of course, it's been hard to judge the series as a whole as long as this one, last issue remained unpublished. Now that it's in print, the TWC gang shares their thoughts on the epoch-ending issue.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Christopher Allen</span><br /><br />I won’t be commenting on the long-awaited twenty-seventh and final issue of <strong>Planetary</strong>. I haven’t read it. But like a baseball player, you want to get your swings in, and the reason I’m not reviewing the final issue right now is what I wanted to write about.<br /><br /><strong>Planetary</strong> and <strong>The Authority</strong> hold some meaning for me, as much as any superhero comic of the past decade. I first encountered both series in mid-1999. I hadn’t been reading comics for a year or two, having gotten married, bought a house, and tried to get serious about work. One day I noticed a nice-looking comics & collectibles shop in a strip mall in my new neighborhood, and went in, marveling at such things as busts of superheroes, and wondering what this card game was that the kids were playing at a table in the middle of the shop. Well, the need to read some new comics gripped me, and I looked over the shelves, which had new releases with prior issues underneath. Being out of the loop, I looked for some familiar faces. Hey, that looks like John Byrne art, and he’s doing my favorite character, Spider-Man in a kind of Year One thing? Cool! Hey, it sounded like a good idea at the time.<br /><br />But I also noticed a couple other books, nearly jumping off the shelves with their stylish covers, and these were the two Warren Ellis series. I wasn’t reading many comics when Ellis made his earlier splashes in comics, so his name meant nothing to me at the time. But these books, they really had the look of the state of the art in superhero comics, and so I picked up the first couple issues of each (there were complete runs there) and read them that night. <strong>The Authority</strong> was a glorious kick up the pants to superheroes, with stories of real scope and consequence and a fresh attitude to solving them, while <strong>Planetary</strong> was an ingenious way to pull together every cool superhero/sci-fi/horror character or concept, with either some new tweaks or a good scrubbing to get them down to what made them cool in the first place.<br /><br /><strong>The Authority</strong> was great, but it had already been out for a while when I discovered it, and Ellis was just about done writing it, a rare case of a comics creator making the perfect exit, but <strong>Planetary</strong> only had a few issues out when I started with it. I recall my boss at the time, who was my age, sharing a fondness for superheroes, and I soon lent him these books, making him an instant fan as well. As <strong>The Authority</strong> passed through many creative hands and with increasingly diminishing returns, <strong>Planetary</strong> kept going, and with generally good stewardship by Ellis, aside from some less-than-stellar one-shots.<br /><br />Unaccustomed to paying for high-priced hardcovers, <strong>Absolute Authority</strong> and <strong>Absolute Planetary</strong> were nonetheless instant purchases for me. As they were state-of-the-art monthly comics, so too did they lead the way towards the boom in fancy slipcased editions. It was upon my purchase of these that I stopped buying <strong>Planetary</strong> on a regular basis. It’s not that I was disillusioned at all—I forget a lot of what I read, but several years on, The Drummer, Jakita Wagner and Elijah Snow are still there for me in my mind, along with certain scenes and dialogue. No, it’s just that I felt like the next time I read them would have to be in another Absolute edition. I didn’t want fifteen minutes of brilliance whenever Ellis and Cassaday could get together to make it happen, once a year or so. It’s really nothing on them; I’ve never been one of those guys who turns on creators for missing deadlines as long as the work’s good. It’s just that I set <strong>Planetary</strong> aside, a reward of hours of images and ideas to be enjoyed fully upon its completion. Various projects, illnesses and other difficulties aside, I really think this has always been a special book for Ellis and Cassaday, and that neither wanted to do it unless they could bring their best effort to it. And so, when the time comes, I will read it in the best format possible. A thank you to both for some great memories, and more to come.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Michael Paciocco</span><br /><br />I had become largely bored and uninterested in comic books by the time I was twenty. Not surprising really; the adolescent power fantasies and melodramas that I was all too familiar with by the time had no longer anything to offer me except the promise of the same, and I was ready to move on out of comics. However, needing some kind of stimulation that wasn’t offered by mass media, it was a combination of boredom and experimentation that I picked up issues #3-6 of <span style="font-weight:bold;">Planetary</span> from the local comic shop.<br /><br />So, it’s all Ellis, Cassaday, and Martin’s fault that I’m still buying comics at all nearly ten years later. And not just because I’ve been waiting for this particular issue either, although there were a few occasions where it certainly felt like it.<br /><br />At the time I started reading the series, there was nothing like it, and that there still isn’t anything comparable to this is a credit to the creators, and the strength of their vision, despite the waxing and waning of the title over the years as various, sundry reasons, both professional and personal, diverted some of the energy and immediacy from this work. Still, it was worth the wait for this epilogue and endcap for the series.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/planetary_27_002-713971.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 303px; height: 320px;" src="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/planetary_27_002-713966.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Ellis’s best works are often obsessed with “A Finer World” and the efforts, sacrifices, compromises, and rewards of the quest to create them. In that sense, this finale represents a Platonic ideal of how such a world might come about. There’s a sense of unbridled optimism and selfless altruism that is absent in most of his other writing, which makes it all the more rewarding to examine and immerse oneself in. As an epilogue, it is more concerned with wrapping up various loose ends, some of them going back a decade (in publishing time). Most of the mysteries are solved, one is left wide open, and a few more are actually created.<br /><br />It’s often been claimed (and by Ellis himself) that <span style="font-weight:bold;">Planetary</span> was his ultimate meta-story about the transformative powers of fiction, and comic books in particular. If that’s the case, I’ve long held to the belief that the core members of Planetary are metaphorical stand-ins for Ellis’s own instincts as a comic fan: the ‘mad idea’ lover, the action junkie, and of course, the puzzle-maker and problem solver as embodied by the acerbic and brilliant Elijah Snow. And this final issue is, like many of the best issues, a story about Elijah, about the quests that drive him, the decisions he make to better the world, and how much of the world and its wonders he’s willing to risk for the sake of making the world a more tolerable place. <br /><br />I’ll make an admission here that I’m sad to admit -– I generally don’t like Cassaday’s art on other works, as there’s just no way for me to separate his visual style in my head from this series. I can’t think of any other artist that can create the rich tapestry of worlds that seem both old-fashioned in their opulence and at the same time incredibly advanced beyond our technical grasp. I hope that he enjoys a successful career in the years to come because I do admire his work, but it is as difficult for me to imagine this series as presented by any other artist as it is for me to see his work and not immediately think of his efforts on this series.<br /><br />Laura Martin is the unsung hero of this series, and her palate here, as with the rest of the series, is as vibrant as it is necessary. Martin’s colors here and in the rest of the series has been essential in setting both the tone of the series, and in subtly bringing out characterization and mood in many of the defining sequences of the book; take a look at how a shadow never falls on Elijah’s white suit, and yet it never appears to glow or reflect light. There’s a dozen unique effects just like that in this issue alone, and hundreds more over the length of the series. Martin shows how vital color can be in a story, and that makes her as indispensable as anyone else on this book. <br /><br />And so <span style="font-weight:bold;">Planetary</span> ends, not with a bang or a whimper, but with the final pieces falling into place and locking together into a complete picture, as it should. I admit, I’ll miss this series, and I highly doubt we’ll see something like this from the Big Two for a long time to come. What I will miss more than this book though, was its effect on me – this series lead me to scour the net for good comics and for fellow fans to discuss the series with. It led me to Warren Ellis’s site, to that of other creators, to meet fans that I still talk to today, and of course, to Comic Book Galaxy. I will miss discussing the various mysteries and fan theories that circulated about the story over its long run, and I’ll miss the thrill of turning the cover of an issue to see something new and unexpected behind it. It was a strange world, and let’s keep it that way.<br /><br />(But I think I know who the fictionaut really is, and if you’ve read the series carefully, you’ve probably come to the same conclusion. If you want to discuss it with me, feel free to contact me anytime...)<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/planetary_27_001-788594.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 104px;" src="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/planetary_27_001-788569.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Marc Sobel</span><br /><br />Alright, let's get the issue of the delay out of the way first so we can get to the actual comic. <br /> <br />I've never been one of those fans who gets too uptight when a comic I like is delayed. I understand that drawing, inking, coloring and lettering hundreds of little panels takes time, and I'd much rather creators focus on making their pages as great as possible, rather than rush to meet some corporate-imposed artificial deadline. However, there is a limit to this philosophy. When an artist leaves a title unfinished to work on other projects, this seems unfair and disrespectful to the fans who supported the series. The reality is that this book is so delayed (issue #26 came out nearly three years ago), that I have little to no recollection of what was going on in the story, and to really get back into it would require going back and re-reading the series, which is a time commitment I'm not willing to make right now. <br /> <br />The whole issue is basically a rescue mission to save Ambrose from some kind of time vortex he sealed himself in right after being shot. Unfortunately, I remember very little about who Ambrose is, what happened to him, or why it's so important that the others rescue him. Although there was undoubtedly a lot of context I'm forgetting in those earlier issues, the opening pages of this final chapter do little to recap what went before. One would have thought, given the delay, that it would have been common sense to add a "Previously in Planetary..." style recap before launching into this final chapter, but unfortunately, there is nothing. The script also suffer from an overwhelming amount of pseudo-science, the kind of made-up techno-jargon that sounds like it could almost be real, except that it's actual meaning lies just beyond your grasp. It's like your typical Grant Morrison comic, strung together with ideas that almost make sense, but never quite coalescing into a coherent, believable concept. What is "quantum foam?" "Chernekov radiation?" "Super-massive frame dragging?" These are just a few examples of the physics-based techno-babble that weigh-down the first half of the book. In that sense, the story is alienating and confusing. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/planetary_27_003-767202.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 139px;" src="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/planetary_27_003-767194.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> <br />All that being said, John Cassaday delivers in a big way. Cassaday is the best artist Ellis has ever worked with, and he's worked with some pretty good ones. The artwork in this final issue is superb! In fact, it's THE highlight, and for fans of Cassaday's work, it was worth the long wait. The amount of attention paid to every tiny detail, and the architectural precision throughout is impressive. There's also some exceptional coloring in this issue. I find most digital coloring in mainstream comics to be overwrought and eye-numbing, washing out the linework rather than enhancing it, but Ellis's script calls for bright, popping colors, crackling off the page like raw energy, and to that end, Laura Martin delivers in spades. Her electric, neon colors jump off the page in places and go far beyond just filling in the spaces demarked by the linework. <br /> <br />Overall, I didn't think this final issue was anything amazing, though the artwork was certainly worth the price. I suppose it was good enough to make me want to go back and re-read the series again (though I doubt I will anytime soon), and that's perhaps the best compliment I can pay it. <br /> <br />The rest of the issue features a 6-page "sneak peek" of Victorian Undead, and the generic title tells you pretty much all you need to know about this creatively bankrupt concept. It's yet another zombie book, this time set in Victorian England and from the preview, it looks like a hideously-colored atrocity, regurgitating the same old cliched zombie crap as if a new setting could somehow magically reinvigorate this exhausted genre. I hope it's better than it looks in this preview, but I kinda doubt it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-34388453087193277482009-10-09T14:32:00.001-04:002011-12-27T02:24:40.687-05:00Flashmob Fridays #003: Haunt #1<span style="font-weight:bold;">Christopher Allen</span><br /><br /><strong>Haunt</strong> may purport to be a gritty supernatural adventure comic. It may even purport to be fun. But what it is, is a creatively bankrupt exercise in coming up with a new action figure/cartoon/movie property with a lot of corrupt pieces stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. To carry the monster analogies onward, old vampires McFarlane and Capullo have gotten younger talents Kirkman and Ottley to give them some fresh blood. I honestly wonder why a guy like Kirkman, who is a good writer at times, would willingly give up months (at least) of his time on something so ugly and trashy as this. <strong>Marvel Zombies</strong> is pandering, but at least it’s entertaining. <strong>Haunt</strong> is the kind of book that knocks writers off the Cool List because its cynicism is so transparent it breaks faith with the fans. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/Haunt1-731903.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 208px; height: 320px;" src="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/Haunt1-731897.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Starting the story with a priest finishing up a round of sex with a prostitute is just the kind of thing to let readers know we’re dealing with a bunch of immature men trying to be edgy, especially with the addition of other trite signifiers of the priest’s degradation as having him curse frequently, have beard stubble, and Heaven Forfend—he smokes, too! Surely the Image “Director’s Cut” edition of this issue will have a scene of him dipping his balls in the baptismal font.<br /><br />Shifting into flashback mode, we see the priest’s brother (no, I don’t remember the character names and don’t care to read it again to find out) as a mercenary or black operative with a conscience, killing the Mengele-like scientist he’s supposed to rescue, and getting killed in turn for spoiling the mission. If the earlier priest scene hadn’t been so loathsome, this scene might have worked a little better, but as it is, I was already repulsed by the sourness of the story and the juvenile dialogue.<br /><br />All is not lost, however, as the final scene is unintentionally hilarious. The priest, who has been haunted by the ghost of his brother, is shot by killers who have come to the brother’s widow’s house to silence her, suddenly merges (with his brother) into a supernatural creature with more than a passing resemblance to Marvel Comics’ Venom. McFarlane has a thing about widows of killers, I guess; hey, it worked for <strong>Spawn</strong>. It then dispenses some sticky—one might say <i>ectojismic</i>—vengeance to the would-be assassins. The funniest part is when the priest, still in this new Haunt guise, calls out to his brother and finds he’s right there, sharing the same body, and he says, “I guess I’m not crazy after all.” Because when you have changed into a supernatural being with extraordinary, apparently easy to master bukkake powers, and you find this creature also contains the soul of your dead brother, the first thought is going to be relief that you are not, in fact, a raving lunatic. Aw. Ful. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Mick Martin</span><br /><br />I was pleasantly surprised at the story quality of <b>Haunt</b>. It's not great, but it's not horrible. While I've enjoyed his work on <b>The Walking Dead</b> Kirkman's Marvel work was largely disappointing, and while I didn't hate it, the few issues of <b>Invincible</b> I checked out didn't convince me to keep reading.<br /><br />Other than that, there's little about <b>Haunt</b> I liked. I didn't hate it, but it didn't impress me either. The concept seems like a tired mix between Brother Voodoo and <b>Spawn</b> (I think I already heard about a McFarlane project regarding an undead hero who used to be a covert-ops soldier and I don't know why covert-ops soldiers are the only guys who get to be undead heroes - Maybe they get that in lieu of a scholarship?). I didn't like the fact that there was hardly anyone in the story I felt sympathetic towards. The covert-ops brother does something supposedly brave and morally "correct", but I couldn't help thinking it was an act made A) out of a sense of self-righteous indignation B) by a character who murders random strangers on the orders of his superiors.<br /><br />Two things about the art. First, while I know taking potshots at McFarlane is hardly original, I have to say it's very unimpressive that the guy couldn't - or wouldn't bother to - draw a character on the first issue's cover that didn't look like Spider-Man. I mean, the guy is NOTHING like Spider-Man, thematically or physically. But I look at the cover, and all I see is Spider-Man.<br /><br />Second, the main character's costume was I think, for me, the final nail in his coffin. The costume looks horrible. It isn't even that it looks like a bad design - it looks lazy and unfinished. It looks like they came up with it in 5 minutes and never looked back.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Alan David Doane</span><br /><br />Marvel's Venom meets <span style="font-style:italic;">24</span>'s Jack Bauer in this unpleasant and unattractive new mess from Image Comics. Writer Robert Kirkman has the chops to create a comprehensible story, which is more than you could say for almost all of the original Image creators, so it's not like this is as unreadable as most of the comics with Todd McFarlane's name attached; but the look here is solidly 1990 Image, with all the overwrought scowls, gory action and speedlines-as-background that that implies.<br /><br />More than anything one gets the sense that McFarlane felt it was time Image cash in on whatever part he had in the "creation," of Venom all those years ago, so there's a lot of angst, Catholic guilt trips and uninteresting reveals on the way to the new fake Spider-Man/Venom avatar getting up and making McFarlane Spidey/Venom poses. Haunt seems to be composed of milk or possibly semen, which splurts in the air webbing-like from the areas of impact where he is shot, while his Venom-like claws tear the heads off personality-free bad guys specifically created to have their heads torn off.<br /><br />I would have thought at this late date that the bad comics I don't want to read would have moved on from material like this, but no, here it is, it's 1990 all over again. If you're feeling nostalgic for the lousy titles Image crammed the racks with in the early 1990s, most of which now crammed into quarter bins across the nation, then by all means, pick this up. Otherwise, avoid at all costs.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Matt Springer</span><br /><br />When I was thirteen, Image Comics was the bomb. McFarlane, Lee, even iefeld...that's what I was all about. I stood in line in a tent at Chicago Comicon in the early nineties to get Todd McFarlane to sign a copy of an old <span style="font-weight:bold;">Quasar</span> issue featuring his pencils on the cover.<br /><br />It's been years since I followed Image closely at all -- I'm talking the core Image creators and characters, of course. I buy Image books all the time; they've evolved into a terrific and diverse publishing label that has several interesting books on the schedule month after month, from miniseries like <span style="font-weight:bold;">King City</span> and <span style="font-weight:bold;">Underground</span> to ongoings like <span style="font-weight:bold;">Chew</span>, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Godland</span>, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Age of Bronze</span>, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Elephantmen</span>...the list goes on. They might be the most "game" publisher in comics right now, willing to take risks with one-shots and miniseries that often pay off with strong critical and cult hits.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Haunt</span> is a new book co-created by the newest Image partner, Robert Kirkman, and an original partner, Todd McFarlane. It's got Greg<br />Capullo on layouts and Ryan Ottley on finishes; McFarlane inks and provides a cover. It's an absolutely Image book, in the old-school sense. Lots of crosshatching, gratuitous violence, breasts the size of bowling balls, and heaploads of "bad ass" such as a priest who hires prostitutes and a doctor who mutilates living people. The concept is reminiscent of <span style="font-weight:bold;">Spawn</span>, in that it's another dead-guy-rises-again-for-vengeance bit, except the dead guy is possessing his living brother's body to become who I assume is the titular hero -- he's not named in the book.<br /><br />Kirkman is a writer whose stuff I sometimes enjoy, and other times don't; certainly I respect most of what he does, even if it's not my cuppa. Even McFarlane has had his moments; it may not be the most popular opinion but I liked his adjectiveless <span style="font-weight:bold;">Spider-Man</span> stuff for what it was. I...don't respect this much. I don't like it either.<br /><br />There's occasional moments of blunt cleverness; I could see this concept having potential in other hands, even though honestly, it doesn't seem like the most original concept to me. Right now it's like Robert Kirkman is the first creator actually nostalgic for the "glory days" of Image style over substance, and the first one in a position to actually relive those days with a new book cut from the same cloth as the "classics." In many important ways, this is <span style="font-weight:bold;">Spawn 2.0</span>. I woulda loved it when I was thirteen. Today? It's not for me.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Johnny Bacardi</span><br /><br />Oh, brother. Pun intended.<br /><br />We've been blessed, so to speak, with a new Image Comic called <span style="font-weight:bold;">Haunt</span>, which is a collaboration between popular writer Robert (<span style="font-weight:bold;">Walking Dead, Invincible</span> -- but you knew that already, didn't you) Kirkman and wealthy baseball souvenir enthusiast and onetime comics artist Todd McFarlane, apparently born out of the latter's challenge to the former to stop playing with his balls and draw some more comics.<br /><br />Of course, it's not really a total McFarlane art effort -- it's a Ghidrah of sorts, with someone (well known in some circles, I'm sure) named Ryan Ottley on layouts, then longtime stalwart Greg Capullo doing the penciling honors...after which the Toddster comes along and lays down inks. Where it goes next in this assembly line isn't made clear; the preview PDF I read didn't come with any actual credits. I can assume it's then Photoshopped, to give it that hightoned veneer that all comics of this stripe demand these days.<br /><br />Kirkman's a decent enough scripter, although I got bored with <span style="font-weight:bold;">Walking Dead</span> after a dozen issues; here, I suppose the thinking is not to stray too far outside either's comfort zone -- there's a reason why the lead character(s) in all its costumed glory looks like Spawn's second cousin twice removed. It is a ghoul-ash of a number of different genres -- supernatural, action thriller, superspy, Catholicism, horror (with a nod to the mad doctors performing hellish experiments sub-category), and eventually superhero...and damned if it doesn't kinda work on its own terms. Of course, these terms are strictly of the straight-to-DVD, late night Cinemax kinda type, but Kirkman (despite some gratuitous profanity) thankfully doesn't get too pretentious with the dialogue, and truth be told Capullo has always been better than the company he usually keeps, and thus the layouts and pacing aren't showoffish and cluttered, keeping readabilty at a high level.<br /><br />Which is not to say that I recommend this at all -- it's the kind of lowest-common-denominator supernatural superhero action horseshit that one would hope that comics outgrew years ago, but sadly doesn't seem to be the case. We've all seen this before, done better (and certainly done worse). However, if, like a mushroom, you thrive on this particular type of manure, then you will probably want to pick this up. That said, I think I'll decline to join you.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-23427129166308527492009-10-02T14:17:00.000-04:002011-12-05T17:43:23.175-05:00Flashmob Fridays #002: Incredible Hulk Annual #13This week, the internet's premier Hulk aficionado Mick Martin called us all at the last minute and told us to weigh in on <span style="font-weight:bold;">Incredible Hulk Annual #13</span>, and here we go!<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Mick Martin</span><br /><br /><b>Incredible Hulk Annual</b> #13, or "Friends," is part of what Hulk fans have come to call the Crossroads Saga. In what was the first of a long series of Hulk personality juggling, Bill Mantlo gave Bruce Banner the ability to change back and forth between himself and the Hulk at will, only to take it away later via the machinations of Doctor Strange's enemy, Nightmare. The battle with Nightmare rendered the Hulk an almost completely mindless brute, even more destructive than before, leaving Doctor Strange with the sad duty of exiling the Hulk to a crossroads with seemingly endless pathways leading to different worlds. The one thing each world shared in common was that their inhabitants were as powerful as, or more powerful than, the Hulk. The Hulk stayed in the Crossroads for nearly a year -- from <b>Incredible Hulk</b> #301 to #313 -- until Alpha Flight unwittingly fished him out, at which point the creative teams of <b>Hulk</b> and <b>Alpha Flight</b> switched chairs.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/Incredible_Hulk_Annual_13-709642.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 209px; height: 320px;" src="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/Incredible_Hulk_Annual_13-709640.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>"Friends" is a fairly typical example of the stories Mantlo produced during the Crossroads era. Usually the Hulk would go to a world and find a damsel in distress or a new friend, and the story tended to end in death, betrayal, or both. I read this comic, along with the rest of the Crossroads Saga, as a child and by that point they were just about the most depressing stories I'd ever come across. By the time he emerged from the Crossroads to a bunch of very surprised (and soon very bruised) Canadians, it felt like finally getting home after the longest, crappiest work day of your life.<br /><br />Compared to today's comics, "Friends" can feel pretty cheesy. With a Hulk who is -- for most of the story -- unable to even speak in his classic, monosyllabic, third-person caveman-tongue, the bulk of "Friends" reads like a strange nature program. The Hulk scrounges for food on a strange, alien planet while Mantlo narrates like <i>Wild Kingdom</i>'s Marlin Perkins stranded on the Klingon homeworld. The narration is melodramatic, and sometimes awkwardly goofy. While it's clear we are meant to take the Hulk's plight seriously, it's difficult when Mantlo gets uncharacteristically silly with lines like "Amidst much guttural growling, the green goliath gorges." <br /><br />The planet of "Friends" has only toxic food, and we soon learn the only way the Hulk can ingest the food is by being physically connected with the symbiote he calls "Sym." Sym, basically a crawling spine with fangs, attaches itself to the back of Hulk's neck after the Hulk angrily kills its original host. At first, the Hulk thrashes and fights to free himself from Sym. After learning he can finally eat the planet's food with Sym's fangs stuck in his neck, the Hulk accepts the creature's presence. For a while the two enjoy a tranquil life. The Hulk keeps healthy on the planet's food, Sym marvels at the feats the Hulk is capable of, and the two become friends. Unfortunately, when Sym's people learns he has merged with an alien, they demand he leave the Hulk. Sym refuses and the Hulk brings him to the top of the planet's tallest mountain where Sym can be the first of his people to see the stars. While the Hulk sleeps, Sym detaches himself from the Hulk, knowing if he doesn't that the Hulk will die. Distraught by Sym's death, the Hulk returns to the Crossroads.<br /><br />In many ways, the story is unremarkable. Upon rereading it for this review, though, I realized that, if looked at in the right light, the story of <b>Incredible Hulk Annual</b> #13 could be seen as a highly compressed version of the character's entire history up to that point. As I wrote earlier, "Friends" is typical of the Crossroads stories. In each, the Hulk tends to find a friend who is either dead or an enemy by the end of the story. Where "Friends" differs is that the friend Hulk finds is a symbiote -- a creature who is literally, <i>physically</i> one with Hulk for most of the tale. And the idea of a symbiotic relationship is nothing new to the Hulk. He'd had one with Bruce Banner for years. Like on Earth, when the weaker half's people learned of what had become of him, Sym's race hounded them. Just as the Hulk had, for a time, found peace and unity with Banner, he ultimately accepted the presence of Sym. Eventually, Sym dies and leaves the Hulk alone, just as Banner "died" (the same way all comic book characters die). In fact, while Sym is still attached to Hulk, the green goliath regains his limited "Hulk like SYM!" speech, which he lost after Banner's "death" and loses again after the death of Sym. <br /><br />The Crossroads stories perplex me and "Friends" is no different. <b>Incredible Hulk Annual</b> #13 is not a story I would automatically think to pluck out and read. In many ways, Mantlo's Crossroad stories are simply not good. But they stay wedged in my mind and I can't help but think there was something desperately important he was trying to say with them.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Alan David Doane</span><br /><br />Gerry Talaoc was one hell of an inker, to be able to bring the sort of life to Alan Kupperberg's pencils that he did here. The book is absolutely average for the period in terms of both story and art, but I remember disliking virtually everything Kupperberg ever drew, so the fact that this book looks as atmospheric and professional as it does is a minor miracle, and one I attribute to Talaoc's gifts.<br /><br />Bill Mantlo wrote a lot of <span style="font-weight:bold;">Hulk</span> comics in the 1970s, and I'm sure I read most of them, but nothing really resonates with me in this story, or in trying to evoke my own memories of reading <span style="font-weight:bold;">Hulk</span> comics when I was a pre-teen or into my early teens. It lacks the energy and punch Sal Buscema brought to the book during the time I was reading it and liked it (around age 9), not that Buscema's art ever rose much above the level of simple, effective storytelling.<br /><br />I will say there's a damn lot of words in this issue, most of which I couldn't bring myself to bother to read after the first handful of pages, but that the tone of struggle and loneliness and making a connection with another soul probably would have moved me when I was 8 or 9 years old. It's too bad Marvel can't be bothered to create these sort of entry-level melodramas for young readers today, churning out instead the simplified "Adventures"-style of storytelling that DC has always been better at (in print and on TV), or the faux-mature stylings of Bendis and his colleagues. That this sort of comic isn't attempted -- or probably even possible -- anymore, is probably a major reason why kids aren't attracted to Marvel (or DC) comics in the 21st century.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Johnny Bacardi</span><br /><br />Sometimes, one's opinion of any sort of creative endeavor, be it music, film, or even a comic book story can be influenced or informed by nostalgia or one's own experiences at the time of initial exposure; as a case in point, I offer my own example: the mix of the music on the second album by the Electric Light Orchestra, new to me at the time and which I listened to as I first read DC's 1970's <span style="font-weight:bold;">Shadow</span> #2 (also, a very early exposure to the art of Mike Kaluta as well) at age 13 have combined to form an unbreakable bond in the murky recesses of what passes for my mind. I'm sure everyone has similar experiences.<br /><br />This phenomenon was what went through my mind when we were given this week's Flashmob Friday "assignment" of commentary on 1984's <span style="font-weight:bold;">Incredible Hulk Annual</span> #13, which came out at a time during which I had pretty much given up on buying Marvel Comics, which had become Shooterized (analogous to Pasteurized) to the point of bland homogeny, the occasional Miller <span style="font-weight:bold;">Daredevil</span>, Simonson <span style="font-weight:bold;">Thor</span> or Byrne <span style="font-weight:bold;">Fantastic Four</span> notwithstanding. I also have never really been much of a <span style="font-weight:bold;">Hulk</span> reader, either; I read a few issues here and there as a preteen, and didn't mind seeing him pop up in other comics that I read, but as the '70s wore on the book seemed to devolve into five hundred consecutive issues in which he's constantly hunted and hounded and fighting the super villain of the month and being called "Jade-Jaws", many written by Len Wein, who had just a couple of years before thrilled me with his <span style="font-weight:bold;">Swamp Thing</span>, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Phantom Stranger</span> and <span style="font-weight:bold;">Justice League</span> efforts at DC but had somehow been reduced to another imitation Roy Thomas Marvel hack after crossing the street; and each and every one drawn by consummate pro Sal Buscema, featuring the Hulk with a gaping mouth equal to the length of his head. I wanted none of it, and I never saw anything as the '80s came on that changed my opinion, so it's no wonder that I was completely unfamiliar with this particular issue, and was a bit surprised to see it offered up for our examination.<br /><br />Oddly enough for an annual, it seems to take place in between issues of the regular title; intended as a supplement I suppose. Apparently the Hulk has completely eliminated all traces of Bruce Banner from his psyche and has been sent "elsewhere" by Dr. Strange (hey, they kinda did the same thing in World War Hulk! Oh the relevance to current events!), to a Ditkoesque (or actually, an approximation of Jim Starlin's version of a Ditko-like otherdimensional realm, but more on that later) realm where he can follow each path to a different destination, ostensibly to find one in which he can find "happiness," just as long as it's not on our Earth apparently. Doc Strange has woven a mighty spell, as it also allows for a failsafe in that if Hulky is unhappy in whatever world he lands in, it will automatically send him back to Ditkoland, presumably for another chance. He's not alone in Ditkoland, either; there are some mysterious floating glowy puffballs that are also striving to make Hulky happy in between travels, guess they're kinda like Motel 6 mysterious floating glowy puffballs. Anyway, after landing in a world full of acidic rain and dinosaurs that he can't beat up, he ends up going to another realm in which all the food is poisonous, but the animal life survives thanks to chalky white wormish parasites, that look like big spinal cords and enable their hosts to eat and survive in exchange for mobility. Of course, one latches on to the Hulk, and they eventually get to know each other and strike up a friendship of convenience. Wormy longs to see the sky and stars, and Hulk is all too happy to help him in this goal, although the results end up tragic, as you knew they would. Then, an abrupt and somewhat downbeat ending, which curiously reminded me of the old children's book <span style="font-style:italic;">Goodnight Moon</span>.<br /><br />Now what exactly writer Bill Mantlo was striving for here is unclear (to me, anyway)...is he trying to set Wormy up as some sort of muse figure, or perhaps imagination/inspiration, enabling the Hulk to survive in this hostile environment? He's not particularly written as inspiring, nor does he really inspire much sympathy. Perhaps Wormy is intended to represent something more mundane, like a brawn needs brains to be able to glimpse the stars sort of thing. Perhaps it's something that's obvious to everyone but me, who knows. Mantlo's prose is excessively melodramatic, as so many Marvel writers (and to be fair, more than a few DC scribes as well) tended to be back then -- we're a million miles away from the terse dialogue and caption style of your Moores and Ellises. It progresses decently enough, and kept me reading until the end in order to find out what was going to happen, but the payoff wasn't especially memorable to me. Artwise, it was drawn by Alan Kupperberg, who labored anonymously for Marvel during the Shooter regime to little lasting effect; if he had a recognizable style, he used it on his own work because it sure didn't look anything but generic on the few Marvel books I saw with his work. On this issue, he apes Jim Starlin in very convincing fashion; in fact, before I checked the credits I thought it WAS Starlin. So nicely done on that front, Mr. K! Inks were provided by my old pal Gerry Talaoc, whom I always considered an above-average part of the whole Filipino/South American artist movement of the '70s on DC books like <span style="font-weight:bold;">Star-Spangled War Stories</span> featuring The Unknown Soldier and <span style="font-weight:bold;">Phantom Stranger</span>. Here, he's pretty much subsuming his style to help further Kupperberg's Starlin illusion; I think he succeeds, for what that's worth.<br /><br />All of which brings me back to my opening paragraph, and our individual, subjective impressions regarding the stuff we put in our heads. I have a feeling that this comic must be one which carried a special meaning or fond memory for the person who suggested it, one which I'll never be able to completely experience for myself. To me, this is just another anonymous, bland mid-'80s Marvel Comic Book, the likes of which left me unwilling to buy any but a handful of fringe Marvel titles for almost two decades until just recently. I don't get the importance. To others, those who also tend to revere the likes of <span style="font-weight:bold;">Squadron Supreme</span> and Englehart's <span style="font-weight:bold;">Captain America</span> run, this is good comics. Who's to say who's right and who's wrong...I'll leave that up to you, dear reader.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Marc Sobel</span><br /><br />1. Well, damn, that was pretty weird! <br /><br />2. Bill Mantlo basically wrote a love story between the Hulk and a disembodied spinal cord. <br /><br />3. This comic peddles weirdness for weirdness's sake. I'll give Mantlo credit for breaking out of the villain-of-the-month formula, but the push to concoct outrageous Ditko-like mindscapes for the Hulk to wander through comes with only the thinnest pretense of a plot. Perhaps if read as a chapter within the broader context of the Hulk universe of the early '80s, maybe this issue might have made more sense, but read as a stand-alone, it's a bit of a head-scratcher. Where is the Hulk and why has he been banished by Doctor Strange? What happened to his human side? Why can't he utter a grammatically correct sentence? None of these questions are addressed.<br /><br />4. Also, whereas Ditko's early Doctor Strange tales felt bold and original, these surreal images, particularly in the first half of the book, feel derivative and labored. The craftsmanship of Alan Kupperberg (with Gerry Talaoc on inks) is indisputable, these guys can certainly draw, but the images feel like tired retreads of earlier visionaries.<br /><br />5. I will say this, though. There are at least three or four really nice splash pages, especially the double-page spread on the title page with the Hulk pinned under the foot of a huge alien dinosaur. <br /><br />6. Bill Mantlo's narration quickly becomes tedious, merely describing what is visually depicted. Like a lot of Stan Lee's early Marvel stories, after a while you realize you can just skip over or skim most of it, focusing instead on the images. <br /><br />7. Is there some kind of contractual requirement that all Hulk writers must use the phrase "Hulk is the strongest one there is" in every story? Same as "with great power..." for Spider-Man? Maybe it wasn't such a cliché back in 1984, but I kind of doubt it.<br /><br />8. When I reached the climactic final scene, in which the Hulk had ascended the mountain with his spiny new friend so the two could gaze upon the heavens together like young lovers, all I could think about was..."Look at the stars, look how they shine for you, and all the things you do, and they were all yellow..." Maybe Chris Martin was a Hulk fan as a kid?<br /><br />9. I think the real flaw in this story is that the raging Hulk is just a wholly uninteresting character. What I always loved about the Hulk when Peter David was writing it, and even in the old TV show, was Bruce Banner's struggle to be human and tame the beast within. That's what made the character interesting. Without his human side, the Hulk is one-dimensional, idiotic and frankly, irritating. Who would want to spend time watching this mindless brute stagger around searching for food, no matter how surreal and visually spectacular the locale? <br /><br />10. The other thing that made David's run on the Hulk so memorable was the great supporting cast. In fact, most great superhero books have a diverse and interesting cast of supporting characters surrounding the lead. This solo Hulk story could benefited from a little Rick Jones humor, Doc Samson psychobabble, Betty Ross anguish, etc. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Matt Springer</span><br /><br />"The Hulk ignores the puffball collective."<br /><br />If that isn't the greatest line I've ever read in a comic book, it's damn close to it. That's a Bill Mantlo original, from <span style="font-weight:bold;">Incredible Hulk Annual</span> #13, circa 1984. When Mick volunteered to provide the pick for this week's Flashmob Friday, I encouraged him to "make it weird." He delivered, in spades.<br /><br />Sometimes I get to thinking about the enormity that is the collected output of the comic book industry over the past seventy-odd years. So very many titles, running for so very many months, each one bringing a new round of issues with stories upon stories upon stories. So, so many plots, characters; villains and schemes; days saved and worlds that were never the same. <br /><br />And we all know much of it, maybe most of it, is low-grade superhero pablum. That's good stuff, strong stuff, and it satisfies. It scratches an itch. <br /><br />But we also know that as the writers and artists toiled to churn out all this material over decades spent at typewriters and drawing tables, the urge to flip the script must have occasionally loomed large. Instead of plugging new variables into tried and true superhero comic formulas, there must have been an almost physical need to occasionally create a story that practically defies description. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Incredible Hulk Annual</span> #13 is such a story. I don't mean to overinflate its importance, or even its quality; it's a clever, creative science fiction parable with the Hulk as its protagonist. It's told mostly in narration, with only a handful of characters, and one of them an ignorant brute. It's got a puffball collective and snakes like spines that attach to symbiotes and yearn to see the stars. <br /><br />Mantlo takes full advantage of the Hulk, who is particularly suited to this type of story -- remove him from the boundaries of the Marvel universe, and he's practically a blank slate onto which you can place any story you want. His fundamental desire for understanding, coupled with a continued inability to supress his rage, means that the ending of these stories may always be the same, even when the journey is new. He can never find true happiness or contentment, and it's the world's fault, and it's his fault too. This story riffs on that theme, in ways both ambitious and mundane; it's set in a pretty whacked-out fantasyscape, but at its heart it's a simple sci-fi story with the Hulk as its star. You could imagine a similar tale minus the Hulk in <span style="font-style:italic;">Weird Tales</span> or <span style="font-style:italic;">Amazing Stories</span> magazine. <br /><br />Yet here it is, totally native to its chosen form, words and pictures and a pissed-off green guy in torn purple pants, exactly what you want, nothing you expect. Again, not overstating it (I hope), but seriously -- this book is a good single-issue argument for the oddity, the wonder, the idiocy and the greatness of the 20th Century American Superhero Comic Book. Nice choice, Mick.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Christopher Allen</span><br /><br />Away, all this asinine alliteration. Mantlo makes a morass of the mother tongue! Actually, while it probably would have been better as a single issue instead of an annual, this isn't too bad. The Kupperberg/Talaoc team present a pretty good Hulk, along with the alien creatures. The Crossroads was a good idea, as it opened things up for almost any kind of Hulk story, although I think a lot of them mainly just gave Hulk a reason to fight aliens. The Symbiont story here led me to believe it would resolve itself with Hulk figuring out how to beat the symbiont and get him off his back, so to speak, so kudos to Mantlo for trying something a little more ambitious. It's overwrought and overwritten, but it has some charm. I may not ever read this story again, but I fear The Puffball Collective is now stuck in my brain forever.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2512929190680550228.post-2727798823029511022009-09-17T14:15:00.001-04:002011-12-05T17:40:35.420-05:00Flashmob Fridays #001: Final CrisisHere's the deal: Flashmob Fridays here on Trouble with Comics means that every Friday, the TWC gang will receive last-minute notice that it's time to review a particular comic or graphic novel (or movie or novel or who the hell knows what? It's <span style="font-style:italic;">EDGY</span>, baby!), and we'll aggregate them all here on Flashmob Fridays.<br /><br />This week's inaugural edition covers <span style="font-weight:bold;">Final Crisis</span> by Grant Morrison, JG Jones and company. <span style="font-weight:bold;">TROUBLE TEAM GO</span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Johnny Bacardi:</span><br /><br />Final Crisis? Okay, first things first -- as if we needed reminding, and apparently in some circles we did, stories are eternal, comics can be a medium "free from restrictions," Superman is the foremost avatar of the manifestation of the human imagination, and superheroes are not meant to have darker sides but should remain heroic, Alan Moore be damned.<br /><br />Also, Grant really, really, really liked Jack Kirby's comics. It's hard to say what this would have been like if Morrison had had his way from the outset; this just reeked of editorial interference, which of course he denies... that would be an excuse, anyway, because even by Moz's standards, this was so chaotic and messy that it was a real chore to follow.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/FinalCrisis2-715423.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 207px; height: 320px;" src="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/FinalCrisis2-715416.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Sure, he at least tried to play fair with the readers by keeping everything as linear as production schedules would allow, but the storytelling style he employed was choppy and haphazard- we got glimpses of things, rather than any sort of coherent, sustained scenes, with admittedly a few exceptions, and while I am not always averse to narratives in which the reader is expected to do his or her share of work to get the total picture, I keep wondering if this message, that's he's given us before, is worth the effort. Part of this readability issue may have to be laid at the feet of this art collaborators; one wonders what a seasoned old pro like George Perez, who has lots of experience in depicting multitudes of characters, all shouting and brawling and shooting things out of their hands while rubble and cosmic energies crack and sizzle around them, would have done.<br /><br />J.G. Jones is a hell of an artist in my book, capable of drawing lithe, sensual figures and telling a story well, the same with Carlos Pacheco and co., and Doug Mahnke, whom I consider one of the best, if not THE best, artist working on mainstream superhero comics today, comes along at the end and saves the day...but it's as if all of them saw Morrison's involved scripting and took it as a sign to ramp up their OWN tendencies towards obfuscation irregardless of how disjointed it all became. I suppose after all is said and done, though, this has to be viewed as a measured success, even though I have to wonder if this is what the braintrust at DC had in mind when this all got started; Morrison did, I think, say what he wanted to say and in the process gave us some FUCK YEAH moments, some of which will stick with readers, or at least this reader, for a long time -- not the least of which was Mahnke's brilliantly realized image of Frankenstein riding a hell hound to the rescue, as well as the ascension of Mr. Tawky Tawny to Chief Tiger Badass (amusing, and fitting), Batman's climactic showdown with Darkseid (I still liked it better when he dodged the Omega Beam in Justice League Unlimited) and Superman's climactic aria.<br /><br />Still, after all this, I have to wonder: first of all, is a more sophisticated-in-the-telling version of <span style="font-weight:bold;">Showcase</span> #100, or even <span style="font-weight:bold;">Crisis on Infinite Earths</span>, something that we should celebrate and one of our best writers aspire to? And two, is our Grant a one-trick pony? He's been trotting out the same metaphysicalities for two decades now, from Seven Soldiers back through <span style="font-weight:bold;">Seaguy</span> all the way to the <span style="font-weight:bold;">Invisibles</span> and <span style="font-weight:bold;">Flex Mentallo</span>. Based on the odd work like the more-excellent-as-time-passes <span style="font-weight:bold;">WE3</span>, I'd say not. <br /><br />But to be honest, I find myself wishing that Morrison would step away from the capes and even comics in general for a little while and take a vacation of some sort, recharge the old batteries, do a little sigil magic whilst masturbating, whatever- just think of something new. We'll see where he, and DC, go from here; one has to suppose than event fatigue will someday set in, even among the hardcore faithful, who seem to be dwindling in number.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Alan David Doane:</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/FINAL_CRISIS_PROMO-749473.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 248px; height: 320px;" src="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/FINAL_CRISIS_PROMO-749424.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Oh, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Final Crisis</span>, how I so wanted to love you. When DC announced it was going to re-team the writer and artist of <span style="font-weight:bold;">Marvel Boy</span> (one of the best Marvel series of the past 25 years, brilliant and gorgeous from start to finish), I was cautiously optimistic. I knew Morrison and Jones could deliver the goods, but recent Morrison sojourns into the bowels of the DC Universe have been hit or miss; not much since Seven Soldiers has turned me on, and even that brought maybe only 60 percent of the fun promised in the premise.<br /><br />No need to mince words, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Final Crisis</span> is a goddamned mess. But so's your bed after a particularly energetic round of coitus, so that's not always a bad thing. Unfortunately, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Final Crisis</span> feels nothing like sex (Morrison's best comics actually often do) and a lot like driving past a homely hooker at 70 MPH and wondering if maybe she was better looking than you thought, and maybe you should turn around and give her another look...?<br /><br />Nah. I wanted to like <span style="font-weight:bold;">Final Crisis</span>, a lot. Morrison is one of the few writers left working for DC that I can ever find entertaining, never mind enlightening (you know, Morrison, and then there's that other one, you know, that guy...?), and here and there one finds moments that flash of the very best Morrison can deliver, but in the final analysis, having read the series three times through now, it's just a disaster. It starts off coherently enough, with the murder of Orion and the investigation that follows. But within a few dozen pages it's all over the map, and not in the good way <span style="font-weight:bold;">New X-Men</span> sometimes was.<br /><br />Jones's art never seems as focused as it did on <span style="font-weight:bold;">Marvel Boy</span> (or even <span style="font-weight:bold;">Wanted</span>), and he disappears for the most part after the first three issues or so anyway; Morrison has too much going on and doesn't bring enough structure or order to allow the reader to immerse themselves in the story that's trying to be told. Batman's initial defeat seems tossed off and just background material, almost forgotten by the time it's called back in his eventual checkmate move; the beats seem all off on the key events of the story. One feels hard-pressed to be able to even the existence of a narrative structure, never mind try to describe it. And yet at the end, in the Monitors sequence, you have the feeling of an epic story coming to its logical, almost wholly unearned conclusion.<br /><br />Morrison's best works in comics so far are <span style="font-weight:bold;">WE3</span>, <span style="font-weight:bold;">JLA: Earth 2</span> and <span style="font-weight:bold;">New X-Men</span>; only the first two are perfect, with New X-Men losing points for its multiple artists and the rush jobs they were forced to endure. Final Crisis has that problem, and a strong sense of editorial throttling added to the mix as well. As a result, it doesn't get anywhere within a million miles of the high points of any of those other Morrison-written comics.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Matt Springer:</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/final_crisis_hc-767963.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 208px; height: 320px;" src="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/final_crisis_hc-767958.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>As a reader of spandex fantasies, I prize ideas and ambition above perhaps all other things. I will forgive many sins, from leaden dialogue to skritchy art, if there's an idea I enjoy, or if I think the enterprise had aspirations to greater things.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Final Crisis</span> is an incredibly ambitious comic, and ultimately, I think it falls a bit short of those ambitions. But lord, what a story it tells in the trying. Darkseid taking over the earth with the Anti-Life Equation, Batman killing him by shooting a bullet backwards through time, the Flashes of three generations racing against the odds to save the multiverse (again)...and in the end, Superman shattering the grip of evil by singing just the right song.<br /><br />Visually, it's a bit hard to judge the work; the rotating door of artists kicked in at some point mid-series, as it often does on an event comic, and that makes it hard to make any comprehensive critiques. I will say that I think Doug Mahnke ended up being a better fit for the title than J.G. Jones; I feel like Jones produces work that's a bit too "real" for a story this fantastic. I did like Carlos Pacheco's pages, though, and always wish that guy got more work.<br /><br />Morrison's work often rewards, if not requires, multiple readings. I've only read <span style="font-weight:bold;">Final Crisis</span> once so what sticks out to me are the massive moments of genius, the frequent narrative gaps that demand filling (and often become full once that second or third reading is complete), and the sheer ambition of the piece. The guy wanted to tell the ultimate story of evil triumphing over good, and good winning anyway. He got close.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Christopher Allen:</span><br /><br /><i>"We have come for light<br />Wholly, we have come for light"<br /><br />--The Breeders, "New Year"</i><br /><br /><strong>Instant, Non-Final Thoughts on Final Crisis</strong><br /><br />* The cover to the hardcover is one of the bleakest, least appealing I've seen for a DC book. Rather than conveying significance, it feels more like Anti-Life itself. The story itself, while dark at times, is meant to be fun and ultimately uplifting. The cover feels like defeat. <br /><br />* J.G. Jones's slight alteration to the design of New Gods' knowledge seeker Metron is as simple, crisp and correct a costume update as I can remember since John Byrne's smart redo of the Fantastic Four. <br /><br />* Killing Orion first is a typically right-on Morrison move. The DCU's true warrior, locked in eternal struggle, until now.<br /><br />* As much as we complain about decompression, some moments need some space, and Libra ends up less memorable due to his introduction being shoehorned into all kinds of plot and a meeting of the Injustice Society.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/finalcrisis1-782132.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 209px; height: 320px;" src="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/finalcrisis1-782121.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>* A few other writers might have come up with The Orrery as a literal mechanical device controlling the workings of the universe, but who else would throw away the idea that time itself is a kind of virus or germ contaminating its previously unchanging workings? I'm reminded of Frank Lloyd Wright's great, arrogant quote, "Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves."<br /><br />* It's pretty clear even in the first issue, with the way Superman is drawn, that J.G. Jones was getting artistic pinch-hitting early on, right? Or maybe he just draws a bad Superman.<br /><br />* J.G. Jones is not quite Quitely, Cassaday or Hitch, but he's a distinctive, exciting enough stylist that it's a real risk putting him on a monthly book, even a miniseries. He's like a really talented running back or wide receiver. If he's in the game, you'll see brilliance. If he's out, it's that much harder on a replacement, who's not up on the more complex packages. You almost wish for a lesser artist than Jones from the start, for consistency vs. the high points of his pages distracting from the rest.<br /><br />* I like how worldly Morrison took some of the most obvious, pop culture aspects of Japan and came up with the ridiculous but appealing Super Young Team, all ready for someone else to run with them in another project.<br /><br />* The Alpha Lanterns don't really feel like a Morrison idea to me. Johns? They just seem really obvious.<br /><br />* Delicate balancing act, the J'onn J'onzz funeral. Somber but with the little bit of metahumor in Superman's hope for his resurrection.<br /><br />* The Evil Factory - Jones has the same gift for depicting horror and weirdness matter-of-factly as Chris Weston. <br /><br />* Jay Garrick with Robert Mitchum's face--good call. <br /><br />* I have no real feelings about the return of Barry Allen, but it was done pretty well here.<br /><br />* It seems like a mistake, the bad girl stuff with Mary Marvel. Kind of a tawdry representation of Anti-Life when Morrison had been pretty effective in building the horror up to then. <br /><br />* <strong>Superman Beyond</strong> is included in the hardcover, and feels somewhat out of place. A decent, trippy multiverse story with multiple versions of Superman and forgotten heroes going against a space vampire named Mandrakk. If it had been a Quitely-drawn <strong>All Star Superman</strong> two-parter it would have gone down a treat. As a stand-alone it's not bad, and it's the best Doug Mahnke art I've seen, even without the 3D effects from the original comics. It just doesn't sit right in this collection, especially as it interrupts a story that's hard enough to follow as it is without 40-plus pages of distraction.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/Final-Crisis-Submit-758309.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 213px; height: 320px;" src="http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/uploaded_images/Final-Crisis-Submit-758306.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>* The <strong>Submit</strong> story, though much more tied into the events of Final Crisis, is much worse, and though I wasn't there at the time, I'm guessing this was when readers really started to turn on Morrison. It's not a bad premise -- Black Lightning protects a family from Darkseid's Justifiers -- mentally enslaved human soldiers rounding up the unconverted. Lightning tries to convince supervillain The Tattooed Man that he can be more, be good, before Lightning himself is overcome, symbolically forcing The Tattooed Man to choose to be a hero to balance the scales. I like the basics of it, but Matthew Clark is a middling superhero artist and there's a feeling at times that his storytelling choices forced Morrison to have to rewrite some of his script, perhaps on short notice. There's no flow to a lot of it.<br /><br />* Back to FC proper, and as much as I hoped for consistency in the art, Carlos Pacheco is welcome, with the delicate curve of Black Canary's chin and a rock-solid depiction of Hal Jordan.<br /><br />* Darkseid as a huffing, puffing vessel of evil even he doesn't quite comprehend is somehow more chilling than the grinning, haughty Darkseid we all knew.<br /><br />* From the fourth issue on, Morrison seems unable to keep all his plates spinning. The Weeja Dell/Nix Uotan thread begun in the first issue finally makes sense and turns out to be the most important part -- eternal love and devotion to a noble idea trumping Anti-Life -- but it has to fight for space amid dozens of superheroes on motorcycles, Lex Luthor deciding he'd rather try to save Earth so he can take it over later, the Tiger people from Kirby's <strong>Kamandi</strong>, and Batman of course getting the best scene, the showdown with Darkseid. The last issue has its moments, mainly Superman and Darkseid and the weapon of music, but it feels frantic and disjointed, and Mahnke, though good, is just too ordinary to wrap things up in high style. Admittedly, there's so much plot and exposition to get through that any artist would have trouble really shining. The scene hinting that Batman is alive but in another time is easy to mock, but memorable and surprising. It's a shame the Weeja Dell stuff and the other plot threads don't conclude as strongly, as if Morrison is just plain exhausted.<br /><br />* All in all, the harsh criticism seems unfair. It's pretty easy to reread the book and see several simpler but perhaps more triumphant iterations. The Weeja Dell story could have been the hook, or Superman and the musical god weapon, or just a good old fashioned gathering of disparate heroes against a big menace story. All of them are here, as well as creation myth and espionage and redemption and corruption and youthful vigor and hard-earned wisdom and a just man falsely accused. Morrison is guilty only of too much ambition, of wanting to do more with a big superhero event story than most readers would have expected or even wanted. Give him credit for putting three or four times as many pieces out there rather than blame him for failing to pull all of them together.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0