Emptying The Big Basket 03

CR receives two to three comics a day. That adds up. It's more than we can handle in our 200-plus formal reviews a year.

Some comics are reviewed right away. Some comics are never going to be reviewed. The remainder go into a giant basket. When the basket is full and must be emptied, it's time to run whatever commentary we can muster. It may not be a full review -- and even that ain't much -- but least it's something.

We greatly appreciate you sending in your material for review. Thank you. It helps us track what you're doing, and what's going on in the field. All of it gets read. If it doesn't end up reviewed that's my fault for not coming up with a proper idea. I hope you'll forgive me.

Below please find today's skeleton of reviews, a skeleton that will be filled with words throughout the day.

*****

Title: Cool Jerk Vol. 1
Creator: Paul Horn
Publishing Information: HornCo Press, softcover, 128 pages, 2007, $12
Ordering Numbers: 9781424337835 (ISBN13)

I am so not the audience for this book, a collection of the now-online Cool Jerk strips that ran in the Reno Gazette-Journal in the early to mid-1990s, even though I might have once fallen into its demographic. Paul Horn's comics have a nice illustration-y sheen to them, but the humor in which he traffics is almost the exact opposite of what I find amusing or funny. There's a character named Armpit. Most of the strips deal with wacky situations, Three's Company-style escalations, like a protest for the right of women to wear thong swimsuits that leads to one of the guys wearing a thong, too. There are a lot of celebrity name-dropping jokes, and even more of what I'd generally call recognition humor -- where most of the joke comes from being able to identify the person or concept involved rather than the structure or idea of the joke itself. There's also an element of self-congratulation behind the whole thing, a kind of holding up a certain model or certain set of behaviors as superior to that of the common, deluded masses, with nothing in the way of self-criticism involved that might question the fundamental correctness of the leads. Mostly, though, the whole thing seems to be trying too hard. Granted, I was 25 in 1994 and I tried too hard in all of my creative endeavors, to much, much less of a popular return.

*****



Title: Mad Hat
Creator: Dave Wagoner
Publishing Information: Self-Published, softcover, September 2007, $14.99
Ordering Numbers: 1419670034 (ISBN10), 9781419670039 (ISBN13)

I suspect that this is the kind of book that someone smart out there is going to champion five years now and make the original reviewers feel defensive about their initial reactions. Whether the original critics or the later critic is the one that will be on the right side of things I'm not quite as sure. My first reaction is negative. It's hard not to feel affection for a story as downbeat as this one about lowlife criminals in early World War II Europe being freed in order to be recruited into espionage (at least I'm pretty sure that's what's going on). However, the story and especially the art proves crude to the point of distraction. What both text and visuals lack is the kind of detail that buttresses plots and provides atmosphere to the longer narratives. The comic is boiled down to almost Albuquerque Ben levels of abstract settings and rudimentary story progression, as if the author has held the story so close for so long he's forgotten that it needs to be told rather than simply put down on paper for his own benefit. I admire the ambition here, but as of this volume, nothing else.

*****



Title: You'll Have That, Vols. 1-2
Creator: Wes Molebash
Publishing Information: Viper Comics, softcover, 64 pages, May/December 2006, $4.95
Ordering Numbers: 0977788318, 9780977788361/0977788369

I enjoyed these collections of an observational humor on-line comic strip much more than I thought I would. The primary vein cartoonist Wes Molebash mines for humor is the subtle differences between men and women exemplified by his just-married characters. A secondary thread that runs throughout the strips deals with the easy intimacy felt by the characters, and I found those strips -- such as one where the couple goes out on a New Year's Eve just to return home where they're happier and more comfortable -- generally more amusing than the guy/girl ones. The characters' affection for one another informs all of the strips, though, providing a baseline comfort and forgiveness where the reader is subliminally assured that the differences expressed aren't going to be divisive or even the start of an argument. Our couple is almost amused by the parts of their life together that grind rather than mesh perfectly; it's a loving portrait of the fundamental generosity that informs the best, most caring partnerships.

*****



Title: As The World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Stay In Denial
Creators: Derrick Jensen, Stephanie McMillan
Publishing Information: Seven Stories, softcover, 220 pages, 2007, $14.95
Ordering Numbers: 9781583227770 (ISBN13)

I wanted to like this comic a lot more than I did, and I'm not quite certain why I didn't. The book carves into its pages an appealingly radical message that the growing environmental crisis requires wholesale societal changes rather than individual, drop-in-the-bucket actions involving recycling, inflating one's tires or using less shower water. It uses a number of cartoon tropes I tend to find pleasurable: grotesques as authority figures, strongly symbolic characters, talking animals and an absurd plot thread where space robots come to exploit earth's natural resources and find that we already have everything in place necessary for them to optimize that planet-wide fleecing. A number of artist Stephanie McMillan's pages are generally fun, with cute character design and displayed skill for composing both panels and pages. The main problem is that the book doesn't quite hold together. The pacing is loopy, and about halfway through you begin to wonder if the whole message couldn't have been communicated in a single 24-page comic. Still, I'm surprised so very few people talked about his book when it came out. It's certainly lively.

*****



Title: Nobody Likes Tony Pony
Creators: Jamie Cosley
Publishing Information: Self-Published, comic book, 24 pages, $2.50
Ordering Numbers:

This is a self-published comic book that lies somewhere in between professional and advanced business card quality. The cover is genuinely eye-catching, particularly if it were to be racked among other books, but the overall impression that product gives off is that of a fancier-than-usual Xerox job. This is a collection of (mostly) workplace strips that were done by Cosley to place on-line. They are driven by gags, standard (although admittedly solid) jokes about the excessive behavior of the lead's various office mates at a store that I believe sells office chairs. There's nothing that pops here, though, and Cosley's art choices could probably use greater clarification in future strips -- it feels like the backgrounds are spare by default more than from a conscious choice on Cosley's part to emphasize the foregrounded figures, for instance. Like many young strips, there are also a couple of jokes that are pure headscratchers, betraying the fact that Cosley has a greater knowledge of his setting and milieu than someone reading his comics over a few minutes' time. Which makes sense, really.

*****



Title: Glister #3
Creator: Andi Watson
Publishing Information: Image Comics, softcover, 64 pages, December 2007, $5.99
Ordering Numbers: 9781582409252 (ISBN13)

Andi Watson routinely makes comics that lots of people complain that someone out there should be making. In the third of his Glister volumes, Watson again tells a child's faerie story in such a way that it's both familiar and surprising. It's the story of Gilster Butterworth's mother, and the daughter's attempt to retrieve her mom from the clutches of the faerie land, which has just been re-zoned as neighbor to her and her father. The star here is Watson's art, which is simplified in terms of its depiction of form, and frequently sparse, but still contains all the visual detail necessary to create this very specific, old-fashioned, touched-by-magic world. As much as there are going to be cynical attempts in the next few years -- there are cynical attempts already -- to make comics work that appeals to children, this book, closer to Tony Millionaire than to something mass produced or slapped together with a movie deal in mind, comes closest to my own memories of what made work like that dear to my heart. While I might have a disagreement or two with the book, I certainly don't detect anything in it close to a failure. These should be a lot more popular than they are, and that they're not indicates a lot of industry work left to do.

*****



Title: The Official Handbook of the Invincible Universe
Creators: Various
Publishing Information: Image, softcover, 112 pages, November 2007, $12.99
Ordering Numbers: 1582408319 (ISBN10), 9781582408316 (ISBN13)

I think the best way to read this book is as a kind of comics-culture tribute to Robert Kirkman's unlikely from-the-ground-up superhero universe success story, although at the same I'm not sure it provides a single clue as to why Kirkman's creation works when so many similar efforts have failed. This is of course an elaborate, straight-faced take on Mark Gruenwald and Peter Sanderson's Marvel Universe guides from the 1980s, which were in and of themselves curious items, maybe the greatest expression of fanzine culture preoccupation ever put out by a major comics company. If you're not familiar with them, they're basically written biographies and breakdowns of each character, with an accompanying illustration -- the kind of thing you might see as a profile in a role-playing game, or in a guidebook volume that might be published alongside a popular series of fantasy books. Information is pulled from the comics or finessed from other material on hand in a way that may reveal a hitherto unknown fact or three, which I guess is part of the appeal for hardcore fans. What may make this less appealing than those original Marvel books or their DC equivalents is that a bible for the Invincible Universe already exists -- the series, which is directed by a single creator in a way that the sprawling mainstream book universes never could be. A positive side to such books is that most people know what it is upon sight and for that matter know if they'll want it or not.

*****



Title: Madman, Vol. 2
Creators: Mike Allred, various
Publishing Information: Image Comics, softcover, 456 pages, November 2007, $17.99
Ordering Numbers: 1582408114 (ISBN10), 9781582408118 (ISBN13)

I'll say one thing for the Madman volumes recently released by Mike Allred in conjunction with his new Image Comics series: the price is right. At $18 for 450 pages of full color, which will likely get reduced at the on-line booksellers to less than $13, you can stock up on a lot of Mike Allred's curiously popular comics for a pretty great price. I say curiously popular because despite its suite of publishers and multiple iterations for every set of comics completed, some of what I've read indicates that Madman has never really sold so well that you'd think so many editions and publishing partners would be possible. This volume collects the first 11 issues of the Dark Horse comic. At this point the character had became pretty ingrained in the comic's wider mythology. I would say this worked to the character's disadvantage. For much of this volume, I felt like I could have used a crib sheet despite the fact that only 20 people seemed to exist in the entire world. Madman is odd in another way in that a lot of people seem to like the look and feel of the book without ever copping to enjoying any of the stories themselves. I can't blame them, as I can't remember any of the stories only 10 minutes after reading one the collections. As a bonus, there are pin-ups here from Peter Bagge, Jim Woodring and Dan Clowes, and they're about as odd as you'd imagine in exactly the ways you might imagine.

*****



Title: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
Creator: Christopher Moore
Publishing Information: Harper Collins, softcover, 464 pages, 2002, $13.95
Ordering Numbers: 0380813815 (ISBN10), 9780380813810 (ISBN13)

Sometimes I get prose books for review without any explanation. This is a re-release of Christopher Moore's humorous novel about a best friend of the young Jesus Christ being resurrected in order to write the gospel that includes the story of those early years. It's the kind of back story DC would do these days as a weekly comics series. Lamb becomes a kind of buddy travel movie with a lot of sophomoric humor blended into the mix, that in its better moments turns serious enough for the reader to have the immensity of what's taking place wash over them. It's reasonably amusing, and surprisingly reverential, although it's the rare humorist able to get away with characters speaking in the same voice without reducing the impact of the work, and Moore is not yet among that small group.

*****



Title: Jellaby, Vol. 1
Creators: Kean Soo
Publishing Information: Hyperion, softcover, 160 pages, February 2008, $9.99
Ordering Numbers: 1423103033 (ISBN10), 978-1423103035 (ISBN13)

This is a fairly adorable children's book with an odd approach to the art (the figures sort of look like Bill Watterson's character designs pushed through through a cartoon prism, which makes their movements strange at least to my eye) and a classic juvenile literature storyline. Misunderstood girl doesn't fit in; fantasy creature enters her life as a substitute for a parental figure and a bridge to make a first, real friendship. I'm a sucker for that basic set-up, although it's what the author does with future volumes that will make or break the series. I'm suspicious as to whether the world he's created will have enough in the way of informative detail to ground anything in the way of further fantasy elements. This first book has its moments, though: the look on the second lead's face when the creature (named Jellaby) makes itself known to him, a joke where Jellaby claps for something stupid, a nightmare image suffered by our heroine. I would have read this book ten times when I was eight.

*****



Title: Bone, Vol. 7: Ghost Circles
Creators: Jeff Smith, Steve Hamaker
Publishing Information: Scholastic, softcover, 152 pages, February 2008, $9.95
Ordering Numbers: 0439706343 (ISBN10), 9780439706346 (ISBN13)

Looking back from my perspective as a multiple-time reader of the series in its entirety, the adventures in this seventh volume of Jeff Smith's Bone saga are probably the slowest portion of the overall story. The Bones, Gran'ma Ben and Thorn cross hazardous countryside and are reunited with Bartleby; the humans defend themselves against attack and then recover after the physical calamity that sweeps through that part of the world. The big appeal of this book to me is a selection of some of Smith's best single images and one killer sequence. The images I like that are in here include his best single fight image, which he puts on an extremely rare (for him) two-page spread; Kingdox balefully staring out from a too-small tunnel exit; and an entire scene built around the haunting, creepy sight of Briar's malformed body as she struggles to get herself back together. The best sequence is a creepy visit to the world of the ghost circles punctuated by an unforgettable, chilling "gotcha" panel. Hamaker's colors add a lot of atmosphere to the leads' long journey, and the action scenes pop a bit due to the weight given the figures as they move into color from black and white. I can't imagine any of the tens of thousands of kids following this story through to the end are going to think for a second this chapter is even a little bit slow. I'd listen to them before I listened to me.

*****



Title: The Pro
Creators: Garth Ennis, Amanda Conner, Jimmy Palmiotti, Paul Mounts
Publishing Information: Image Comics, softcover/spined comic book, 80 pages, September 2007, $7.99
Ordering Numbers: 1582408505 (ISBN10), 9781582408507 (ISBN13)

What looks to be a reprint of a Direct Market success story from a half-decade back, I find myself wishing it were funnier, or told more than the one standard late '90s-era joke that superheroes are uptight, weird-ass hypocrites with a particular hang-up about sex. It does that well, and Amanda Conner's art gives the reader a pretty, satirical take on mainstream American comics approaches, but this is practically the definition of a slight book. I had a hard time reading it not because it was poorly done on any level but because other things in the room where I was reading it kept distracting me -- not exactly the hallmark of an engrossing read.

*****



Title: Hotwire Comics #2
Creators: Various, Edited by Glenn Head
Publishing Information: Fantagraphics, oversized softcover, 136 pages, February 2008, $22.99
Ordering Numbers: 1560978910 (ISBN10), 9781560978916 (ISBN13)

This book is the very definition of a solid anthology, lacking only that one stand-out feature that defined past greats. Its over-sized presentation puts to good use its line-up of talented visual-driven cartoonists, even those of whom you might not automatically case, like Johnny Ryand the great Doug Allen. Like the better issues of any anthology, there are two stand-up-and-notice works by two cartoonists whose work I hadn't seriously examined before now: Tobias Tak's "The 10-Inch Giant" and Jeremy Onsmith's "The Candy Rod" both given a chance to appear that I don't think most anthologies would afford such cartoonists. But really it's old favorites like Mack White and Carol Swain that attract me to the book in the first place. Unlike many anthologies, this book seems to return to the format as a why to see cartoonists you might never see otherwise, at least not these days.

*****



Title: Best Erotic Comics 2008
Creators: Various; Greta Christina, Editor
Publishing Information: Last Gasp, softcover, 200 pages, February 2008, $19.95
Ordering Numbers: 0867196866 (ISBN10), 9780867196863 (ISBN13)

This is a nice volume, filled with a lot of great cartoonists one doesn't think of as working in erotic comics (excerpts from Dan Clowes, Gilbert Hernandez) and a potent mix of cartoonists who one probably thinks of first as artists working in this area of the medium (Colleen Cover, Steve MacIsaac). There's a classic Dori Seda story, and an older one from Phoebe Gloeckner. I had never heard of El Bute and Quinn, who turn in two of the volume's best looking works. The only thing that's a little confusing is that the title says 2008, and some if not most of this work was done more than five years ago. I think the strategy is two years of a wide net and then increasingly more specific date ranges as the series continues. Hopefully by then there will be work that justifies a passionate interest in the series beyond recognizing a general quality -- it would be nice to have a book of dirty comics that was as compelling as comics as the work in some of the best anthologies. The simple fact that there are no comics here that are violent genitalia-obsessed slapstick posing as erotic works makes me hopeful.

*****



Title: Serenity: Space Cadet Vs. Drama Queen
Creators: Real Buzz Studios, Min Kwan
Publishing Information: Thomas Nelson, softcover, 128 pages, January 2008, $10.99
Ordering Numbers: 1595543945 (ISBN10), 9781595543943 (ISBN13)

This is a much slicker package than the first volume of Serenity that I read, with more attractive art, more vibrant colors, heavier paper stock and a snappier design. Art for Christians rarely operates in the same way that regular art does. I can't imagine this satisfying a whole lot of discerning secular folks on the basis of its execution as comics. Okay, I'll admit it, I can't really imagine it satisfying anyone I know well, not as art. The pacing is sluggish, the characters act in bold and obvious ways, none of the characters has a unique voice, and the art is terribly simplistic in its employment of manga tropes. Christians looking for art are frequently seeking comfort and solace in addition to all the reasons a lot of people pursue art, and I can imagine this book providing its potential readership those things. It works on one level as a decency fantasy, and while its points are blunt, the dangers of laissez-faire parenting isn't an idea that pops up in a lot of comics. I wish the whole thing had some grit, and not even in a sexual or mature way. For instance, this issue involves the kids making a movie and the movie is portrayed in exactly the same way a $100 million dollar movie would be portrayed; I think a depiction that actually didn't have multiple camera angles and convincing special effects would have been more interesting and fun.




Title: The Complete Persepolis
Creator: Marjane Satrapi
Publishing Information: Pantheon, softcover, 344 pages, 2007, $24.95
Ordering Numbers: 9780375714832 (ISBN13)

I have a major essay about Marjane Satrapi's work in total in me that should find purchase somewhere in the next couple of years. I wanted to write a brief review of this publication, as I think this collection of the two Pantheon releases under separate cover (2003, 2004) was a bit underplayed by the comics press in terms of it being a solid, smart release perfect for gift-giving. It's a nice production, you might say. The reason for this release is to have the most sensible crossproduct out there for any fans of the Persepolis movie, and while some of those readers might be shocked by how rudimentary some of the page look compared to their equivalent scenes in the film, no matter what you think of the graphic novel its simple art and wry voice find easy connection with a wide swath of readers. The curious thing about reading both of these books together is how Satrapi becomes more skilled at various formal tasks and scene to scene conceptions as she slowly rids herself of the the David B.-like visual stunts she's not yet the artist to manage. Anyway, this is one of the five or ten must-read comics of this decade, in a format that should please just about anyone, so consider it brought to your attention.

*****



Title: Stan Lee: Conversations
Creator: Jeff McLaughlin
Publishing Information: University Press of Mississippi, softcover, 244 pages, 2007, $20
Ordering Numbers: 1578069858 (ISBN10)

This book kind of slipped out last year to almost no press within comics, and despite what seems like a steep price I'd say it's must-read for those interested in comics history. Unlike some other interview collections, Lee was interviewed in a variety of places that range wildly in terms of the subject matter and approach. Perhaps unique among comics interview subjects, Lee's role as a popularizer of Marvel Comics makes his interviews important in ways that other people's aren't. Not only can you read the comics for clues as to Marvel's history, not only can you read them for insight into Lee, and not only can you read them for the astute one-liners which usually sprinkle any historical interview collection (for instance, Lee notes more than 25 years ago that other-media adaptations of Marvel's work have almost no real impact on the publishing projects themselves), you can also use them to trace Lee's efforts to go anywhere he was being paid to go and a few places he wasn't in order to spread the Marvel (and Stan Lee) gospel. In that light, the derision he faced on an early Dick Cavett show (believe me, it's even worse on the tape) becomes just as important as the discussion of 1960s Marvel hirings and firings he has with Roy Thomas in 1998. I'm not sure what I'd make of this book as a purchase, but I know that if it had been available at my high school's library, I would have checked it out for an entire month of study halls, and been much more informed for it.

*****



Title: Essential Howard The Duck Vol. 1
Creators: Steve Gerber, Frank Brunner, Gene Colan
Publishing Information: Marvel, softcover, 592 pages, February 2002, $14.95
Ordering Numbers: 0785108319 (ISBN10), 9780785108313 (ISBN13)

Someday I want to write something much longer on Steve Gerber the same way I do Marjane Satrapi, but re-reading this book upon Gerber's passing made me realize once again how well the Howard the Duck concept fit into his 1970s writing style. Similarly well-regarded work on Man-Thing, Defenders and Omega the Unknown feel like they generate a lot of energy through the mismatch of writer to concept, the way those books would rattle around at the far edges of our expectations regarding style (Omega), genre (Defenders) or the bare minimum functions of a comic book to communicate in a straight-forward fashion (the Man-Thing comics). Howard the Duck feels natural in a way those don't, the kind of comic that begins to write itself as much as it is being directed by someone like Gerber, and that's an accomplishment in and of itself given the strange match of funny animal satire to grim-faced, serious 1970s superhero books.

I think everyone should own these comics. The biggest disappointment is that much of the satire turns out to be broad and toothless, particularly a Star Wars parody that nearly every other comedy vehicle of the time period did more effectively and savagely than what's accomplished here. Dr. Bong proves to be a great name and a terrible character, dull as a pile of gravel. The incidental material, the pages of Howard walking around and interacting with one or two close friends and being a walking metaphor for alienation -- those still really work, and when they're supported by odd formal tricks best remembered in the Deadline Doom issue but also sprinkled throughout the regular stories, it still feels like a special comic. In fact, reading these books again it's hard not to see the whole affair as a poignant deconstruction of a favorite 1970s trope: the man out of time, the Archie Bunkers and the mystical Humphrey Bogart that haunts Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam or even Dirty Harry Callahan or John Wayne's character in The Shootist. Alienation, Gerber seems to say, comes from the inside no matter how grotesque the parade of weirdos that drive you deeper and deeper into that conception of yourself.

*****



Title: Showcase Presents Green Lantern Vol. 1
Creators: John Broome, Gil Kane, Murphy Anderson
Publishing Information: DC Comics, softcover, 528 pages, October 2005, $9.99
Ordering Numbers: 1401207596 (ISBN10), 9781401207595 (ISBN13)

I think this particular softcover trade will be remembered for two things beyond the content of the reprints. First, it was one of the first offerings in DC's Showcase line, a black and white cheap reprint effort to match Marvel's Essentials effort, and even came at a price point of less than $10 the company quickly abandoned. Second, this book was such an odd choice to help kick off a line because Green Lantern more than any comic depends on color. The hero's powers are all things green, his enemy isn't so much an individual character as the color yellow, and the original stories depended on luminous skin colorations and a rainbow's worth of ray beams. It's not only fine in an artistic sense for a comic book to depend so much on color, it can also be a strength of low, pulpy material. I know that it's important here, because I will read most classic comics in black and white standing across the room with my glasses off while shaking my head back and forth like a spooky extra from Jacob's Ladder and not notice a difference from a comic absorbed at rest in its full colorful glory -- and I definitely felt its absence here.

As for the comics stories themselves, I liked them more a second time reading them than a first time. They're pretty standard, dry, light science fiction where the drama develops from the writer's application of story bible truths against a situation that challenges or twists them. They're actually quite charming in that way, even though the only reward for more sophisticated readers tends to be an ability to hold those concepts in your mind from story to story, which allows for comparisons and reinforces the drama inherent in whatever situation to be finessed through. Gil Kane's art is still boss after all these years. Although it's filtered through a DC house style more than his later work would be, it also lacks a lot of the stylistic quirks and short cuts Kane brought to bear on art he would later produce at a high rate of speed. His panels where a body suddenly leaps into motion -- a person running from gunfire, Green Lantern flexing into flight -- are the most fun. Even after all these years, Kane shows there's something extraordinary about watching a flying man swoop in on your position, or something unknown that emerges some eight to ten feet away.

Updated to Add: Jim Caldwell wrote a long e-mail this morning saying my use of the word abandons implies DC meant to keep this lower price, and they didn't mean to -- it was an introductory price. I didn't mean to imply that; I regret the language. The reason I wanted to point it out is because a lot of people who weren't up on what DC was trying to do were excited about the initial price offering thinking that it was going to be the price of more volumes in the series. This is important because I think that it got the series off to a poor start, the opposite of what one of a series' kick-off books should do. The introductory price gimmick only let a lot of people including myself think the prices were quickly raised instead of initially lowered, and because of what I mention above it's not like they put their best foot forward with the choice of the color dependent Green Lantern as one of the initial offerings. So if you're slightly disappointed in a $9.95 book, it's not like that's going to be an incentive to buy a bunch of similar $16.95 books.

*****



Title: Essential Man-Thing Vol. 1
Creators: Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway, Len Wein, Steve Gerber, Mike Ploog, Tony Isabella, Gray Morrow, John Buscema, Neal Adams, Rich Buckler, Val Mayerik
Publishing Information: Marvel, softcover, 544 pages, December 2006, $16.99
Ordering Numbers: 0785121358 (ISBN10), 9780785121350 (ISBN13)

Saying "they don't make comics like this anymore" is a gross understatement when it comes to the original 1970s Man-Thing comics. They don't make comics like these anymore and they don't make comics that even resemble comics like these anymore. Crude social drama and broad satire more reminiscent of 1970s television drama than mainstream comics of any era force the lead character into a basic avenging outsider/force of nature role. He does it rather well, mostly because the Man-Thing's design is so odd and unlikely, especially a face dominated by a t-shape that resembles green tubes stuffed with socks, and a boneless body that's weird to see in action even as little kid can grasp the concept.

It's hard to call these effective comic books. The art varies wildly and the set-ups to the individual stories are kind of crude and self-aware; there's a pageantry element to them that makes the whole exercise feel strained. Nothing feels like it develops organically; the characters feels like they're being marched around. Some of the zanier efforts take you away from that feel of artificial play-acting; you might remember Howard the Duck walking out from the bushes, but a stand-alone issue that makes an impression is the story introducing Steve Gerber's Wundarr, a goof on the idea of Superman featuring the alien prince as an unwanted orphan who when his version of the Kents decide they want no part of the weirdness of a rocket grows into his early 20s with the mind of an infant. If you like to read comics with half of your mind focused on elements of comics history and roads not taken and weird expressions of post-underground, pre-independent funnybook culture, you might enjoy this book. Younger kids might be able to take it straight up as comic book horror-adventure-fantasy, but I'd have to see that to believe it.

*****



Title: Extraction!
Creators: David Widgington, Frederic Dubois, Dawn Paley, Joe Ollmann, Sophie Toupin, Ruth Tait, Tamara Herman, Stanley Wany, Peter Cizek, Phil Angers, Marc Tessier
Publishing Information: Cumulus Press, softcover, 128 pages, $20
Ordering Numbers: 9780978247416 (ISBN13)

This recent Expozine book award winner turns out to be as classy as you'd expect; it's also one of those projects that likes to talk about itself, with a foreword, introduction, epilogue, thank-yous, contributor bios and even a glossary. The best comic comes from the partnership of Dawn Paley and Joe Ollmann. Ollmann's savage take on figure drawing lends the entire tale a kind of squalid, depressing air, and the comic seems as much about the difficulty of media people pursuing such a story as it is about the issues themselves. I also enjoyed Phil Angers' freedom with the conceptual portion of his comic, and the general high-level execution of those visuals. None of these comics will make anyone forget Joe Sacco, R. Crumb in Help! or even the applicable Saul Steinberg short pieces, but it's nice to see comics work on such serious subject matter. The idea that Francoise Mouly floats in one of the support sections that journalism benefits from the idiosyncrasy of illustrative visualization may stay in my head longer than any of the individual comics.

*****



Title: Popgun, Vol. 1
Creators: Various
Publishing Information: Image, softcover, 448 pages, November 2007, $29.99
Ordering Numbers: 1582408246 (ISBN10), 9781582408248 (ISBN13)

I found this comic almost completely unreadable, even though I'm sure there's some good work in here. For instance, I liked the look of a story by someone named Graham Corcoran; it used a brightly appealing cut-out style and way of foregrounding the figures that made it stand out. There's another artist named Matthew Weldon that will probably get as much work as he can handle if he's as fast as his work is appealing. Most everything else here blends together into a brightly-colored stew of stories that remind me of an average short-story from an old issue of Epic Illustrated: mostly cliched, executed with some panache, instantly forgettable. I would assume that this is some sort of reaction to the success of similarly well-crafted mainstream-focused comics anthologies; I wish the impulse had been to leave things as they were instead of piling on.

*****



Title: ACME Novelty Library #18
Creator: Chris Ware
Publishing Information: Self-Published, hardcover, 56 pages, December 2007, $17.95
Ordering Numbers: 1897299176 (ISBN), 9781897299173 (ISBN13)

At this point, I'm thinking Chris Ware would have to release a comic book made of fire in order to get the attention he's due each and every time he puts his comics out there into published form. This book, one of the best of 2007, is a collection of his "Building Stories" focused on the character of the young girl with the prosthetic leg. It's as melancholy as anything Ware has ever done. His take on the character seems to be summarized in the third to last cartoon: "... for most of her life, has been much to eager to be loved (and so has lived it for the greater part alone)..." While possessed of any number of impressive formal strategies, what makes this work stands out are character details so funny and uncomfortable they'll likely crush your heart: the upturned tag on the girl as she aggressively and unsuccessfully hits on a guy, the way she describes her emotional need to re-connect with an ex-boyfriend in some fashion even if it's just to pick up word of him on a google search, the way the lead lingers for slightly too long in an embrace with a former long-term babysitting client. ACME Novelty Library remains one of the best comic book series ever, and everyone that doesn't pick up every single issue is really missing out.

*****



Title: Tech Jacket Vol. 1: The Boy From Earth
Creators: Robert Kirkman, EJ Su
Publishing Information: Image Comics, softcover, 144 pages, November 2007, $14.99
Ordering Numbers: 1582407711 (ISBN10), 9781582407715 (ISBN13)

This is some really generic comics, the kind of thing that feels more like a movie pitch or an extra title taken on by its creators for the fun of it rather than anything that reflects a passionate interest of either person. The only twist on this standard science fiction armor/weapon finds boy as new wearer story is that the relative greater strength of humans makes our hero a genuine unstoppable badass in the space war from which the tech jacket comes. That's not enough to hang an entire book. Beyond that, you're left with some excruciatingly cliched comics tropes and almost generic modern, cartoon-influenced superhero art. It's not a good combination.

*****



Title: The Ride Home
Creators: Joey Weiser
Publishing Information: AdHouse Books, softcover, 168 pages, August 2007, $8.95
Ordering Numbers: 097703044X (ISBN10), 9780977030446 (ISBN13)

This is a cute and really, really forgettable book about a "van gnome" named Nodo who gets lost, seeks to return to his van, and finally comes to a realization about what home is. Some of the little touches shine, such as the idea that the van gnomes in the story give out directions that read like a child's view of neighborhood, naming objects rather than streets. Weiser's line is appealing, too. However, the character designs range from the ordinary to the baffling, the protagonist is kind of an unappealing little lump, and in general this is the kind of predictable story that has to be told extremely well or with an enormous number of quirks or otherwise hit every not perfectly in order to be a keeper. I'm afraid this one isn't, and anyone reading it will probably feel just as badly as I do to give such a genial comic a sour recommendation.

*****



Title: Incredible Comics
Creator: Tom Nguyen
Publishing Information: Impact, softcover, 128 pages, 2007, $19.99
Ordering Numbers: 1581809468 (ISBN10), 9781581809466 (ISBN13)

I don't know Tom Nguyen and I'm not familiar with his comics art work, but pretty much everything you need to know about this art book you can get from the above cover. If you want to draw comics like that -- what the subtitle calls "kick-ass comic art" -- this book will likely to get you started. It's the kind of book that has as many pages on how to draw boobs as it does on doing thumbnails for your comics pages, but most of the advice seems sound given those parameters, if extremely cursory. When he suggests that you get better at these things through practice, it feels less like a summing-up or an additional warning and more like a cheat. Artists have to start somewhere, though. Best of all, Nguyen's model-filled publicity photos on the back cover and in the front of the book shows that he walks the walk not just draws the walk, so I say God bless him.

*****



Title: Walk A Mile In My Muu-Muu
Creator: Bill Griffith
Publishing Information: Fantagraphics, softcover, 160 pages, 2007, $18.95
Ordering Numbers: 9781560978770 (ISBN13)

I'm not the biggest Zippy fan in the world as it appears on my daily comics page, but these trade collections are pretty terrific. In fact, they're so good I wonder if Griffith isn't in the middle of one of those late-period renaissances that sometimes grip strip cartoonists, where everything kind of comes together in a considered fashion that's somehow more vital than the dozen or so years of comics that precede it. Clustered together in thematic fashion, one notices how tightly scripted the comic in general can be, and how well drawn the various landscapes, oddities and setting in which Griffith plunks down his leads. Griffith once said that the inspiration for doing the pinheads came in part from watching their scenes in Freaks and how their fake language miles removed from reality appealed to him, and you can kind of see how smart a concept that is, how consistently our society churns out any number of cultural implements that make no sense at all unless you're built that way.

*****



Title: James Sturm's America: God, Gold and Golems
Creator: James Sturm
Publishing Information: Drawn and Quarterly, hardcover, 192 pages, October 2007, $24.95
Ordering Numbers: 1897299052 (ISBN10), 9781897299050 (ISBN13)

It says a great deal about comics flush period right now that a volume this handsome filled with comics this solid gets almost no play in the comics or comics-interested press. It also says something about the minute gradations in feel that come with certain publishing projects that this feels more like a second edition geared towards bookstores than a necessary compilation of great comics. None of that matters as much as the fact that for less than $20 if you look around you can own a beautifully mounted series of historical stories by a skilled cartoonist working at the top of his game. The rediscovery to be had here isn't Golem's Mighty Swing but "Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight" with its exacting, even cruel tone and Sturm's ability to vary his visual perspective in a way that adds a great deal of psychological import to the most pedestrian scenes. It's the kind of story that could have an effective second life in another medium because of its understated power rather than a high concept. This collection if one for the permanent library; if you have the individual books, you can give them away now.

*****



Title: Listening Spirituality
Creators: Patricia Loring
Publishing Information: Openings Press, softcover, 208 pages, 1997, $18
Ordering Numbers: 0965759903 (ISBN10)

I have no idea why on God's earth I received a book from a Quaker press about spiritual relationships, let alone one that looks like it came out in 1997. The only thing I could find in its pages that made me think of comics is that the author offers up a way to let visual icons lead one into prayer, and even that's more of a pathway to jokes rather than anything serious. It could be I got it for the illustrations, but they're essentially silhouettes like the one seen above. Maybe if I had some of that listening spirituality, I could hear an answer.

*****



Title: Giant Robot Warriors
Creators: Stuart Moore, Ryan Kelly
Publishing Information: AiT-Planet Lar, softcover, 120 pages, 2003, $12.95
Ordering Numbers: 1932051198 (ISBN10), 9781932051193 (ISBN13)

This is an awfully odd title, a satire of modern war that even its author admits fit into a very specific historical window -- post-9/11 America before things turned really sour with the occupation of Iraq. A department of Giant Robots is called into action (ready or not) when similar (perhaps better) technology is employed by a small Middle Eastern country. The book is ably executed but varies wildly in tone both in general and via the specifics. It's hard to feel grounded within a story where you're not sure what elements to take seriously and what elements should be looked on as fodder for comic exaggeration and broad satirical jabbing. A subplot involving a robot president felt really flat to me, so much so that I could quite enjoy the comics for much more than the craft skills displayed by its writer and its artist. Mostly, I was just left hoping the whole thing could have been tighter. It's as if the book weren't subject to any kind of editorial scrutiny at all, when there seems a whole lot of tightening could have been done.

*****
*****
 
posted 10:00 am PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives