Jog - The Blog

The Tactile World of Cinema

2012-01-30T00:35:00.002-05:00

I have a new piece up at MUBI on the many thoughts that came to mind upon seeing Steven Soderbergh's Haywire. But really, all talk of translucent boundaries between disreputable and super-reputable cinema seems a bit fussy when Bazin himself, more than half a century ago, gladly compared an acknowledged masterwork of children's cinema with a film I'd first encounter on a Something Weird Barry Mahon double-feature dvd in the early '00s...

The new year is going exactly as planned.

2012-01-04T19:11:00.005-05:00

1. I recently had the pleasure of contributing to MUBI's annual writers poll, focused on Fantasy Double Features. Mostly I discuss Panic Movement co-founder Fernando Arrabal's Viva la muerte, as almost everybody has likely had their fill of my proffered counterpart, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Except me, I suppose.

2. Meanwhile, over in print, the holiday season saw the release of the newest edition of the Norwegian literary magazine Vinduet, and with it an article by Mr. Aksel Kielland on the state of non-superhero/non-assembly line comics in America. Included are a few quotes from me, which were solicited a while back; Tucker Stone, Matt Seneca and Robin McConnell are in there too. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be an online edition of the issue at the moment -- and it's all in Norwegian, which gives me childish glee in pretending I've attained a spontaneous mastery of the language from merely posting on the same website as Kim Thompson -- so you'll have to take my word that I totally enhanced U.S. prestige abroad.

The Next Time I Do Some Fucking Audio Thing

2011-12-17T23:46:00.006-05:00

Alright, so - Robin McConnell asked me to participate in a Year in Review edition of his comics-centered radio show Inkstuds with Matt Seneca and Tim Hodler. I had a great time.

Also, I suggested the Bobby Vee song at 1:25:00-ish. Don't even try to get me to apologize, it's just not gonna happen.

I SPEAKS

2011-12-08T20:07:00.005-05:00

Last weekend I settled into Tucker Stone's beautiful home with Matt Seneca to record a freewheeling conversation about whatever came to our minds or fell into our hands.

LINX/NOTEZ

1. I can't pronounce anything.

2. Talbot/Busiek situation.

3. Sadly, I did not notice that an S.F. Supplementary File #2A was also available at the CCC table; #2B was only in the box, as far as I know. The concluding #2C is due in January.

4. I'm afraid I misrepresented Eddie Campbell's remarks on panels. Here is the pertinent quote, from his interview with Dirk Deppey from The Comics Journal #273:

"Like for instance, I once did a talk on 10 points, 10 principles toward a rhetoric of the comic-strip vocabulary. I told Scott McCloud of it. He wanted to start arguing with me about some of my points. [Deppey laughs.] He wanted to disagree with me right there on the spot, in the middle of the street as it happens. I love him. One of my points was: The entire drama of a situation must be contained in each and every panel within the sequence depicting it. The example that I gave was the final chase scene in Krigstein’s “Master Race.” I brought slides, or at least a reprint of the story, and they quickly made transparencies. There are 13 slim panels, in which both the protagonist and antagonist appear in each and every panel, and their relationship is clear in each of those images: One is chasing, one is being chased. No cutaway shots, no intercut shots of details, the entire drama of a chaser and a chased is present in each and every panel."

5. I swear to god we're not baked.

6. Mould Map #1 was not a newspaper, it was a 12" x 16" two-color magazine on matte-like paper.

7. Hellberta cover/images. (Note Alarmed Annie in the upper right corner).

8. Lisa Hanawalt's hybrid pieces are at The Hairpin.

9. That Michael Thibodeaux comic with the Jack Kirby cover was Last of the Viking Heroes #1 from Genesis West Comics.

10. The '78 initial edition of Chaykin's The Stars My Destination was actually published by Baronet Publishing Company, not Heavy Metal, although Heavy Metal magazine excerpted it in the March and Nov. '79 issues (Vol. 2 No. 11 and Vol. 3 No. 7).

11. A dude's body coming apart due to voodoo. Drawn by Chic Stone, originally published in Tales of Voodoo Jan. 1970 (Vol. 3 No, 1).

12. Matt is correct, the Angus McKie serial in Heavy Metal was titled So Beautiful and So Dangerous; serialized from Oct. '78 through June '79, excluding the May '79 issue. It was subsequently compiled into a '79 Simon & Schuster paperback, and later reprinted in full in the magazine's 1996 One Step Beyond special.

13. Upon reflection, that Superhero panel looks more like Alex Ross's variant cover to a Ben Marra comic. Also, the Dark Horse comic he did was titled The Blue Lily. Also, the Tekno comic I was thinking of was Teknophage.

14. Also, the next time I do some fucking audio thing I'm gonna prep like I'm arguing before the Supreme Court of the United States.

15. Jim Lee drew the Image X month swap issue of The Savage Dragon (#13).

16. Those really really fucking gory action comics where they all look like little manga-ish kids.

17. There are two separate anecdotes about me upsetting my mother. I don't know what that means.

Special All Saints' Day Post - ONE DAY EARLY

2011-10-31T17:30:00.002-05:00

Yes, it's Halloween, and Gaelic harvest tradition thereby commands the appearance of an essay on pre-Code horror comics at the Los Angeles Review of Books (the Angels in question no doubt circling in anticipation of the holy day of obligation to follow). For optimal effect, imagine me reading this post aloud dressed as a vampire on a local television set with pauses every paragraph and a half for scenes from The Mummy's Hand. Pleasant screams!

I am a team player.

2011-10-28T18:07:00.005-05:00

1. The Comics Journal recently held a roundtable discussion of Craig Thompson's Habibi, and I was among the participants. Guaranteed to the be the first comic book review post you'll read this year to reference the 2011 Pankaj Kapoor Hindi movie flop Mausam. I also threw in a mini-review of Frank Miller's Holy Terror; be sure to read the comments for a piece of art reference I totally missed.

2. In conjunction with the October 2011 Horror Manga Moveable Feast, I was invited to submit an essay on Kazuo Umezu's survival horror classic The Drifting Classroom to the Hooded Utilitarian. I decided to massively abridge the series in such a way that virtually everything with the story's perpetually imperiled children is eliminated, nonetheless leaving a potently full work with some surprising similarities to other Umezu works. It was a sensation I picked up on during my very first reading, and I was glad to explore it at fuller length.

The Mystic World of Cinema

2011-10-11T05:46:00.002-05:00

HEY. I have a new essay over at MUBI on Terrence Malick's recent The Tree of Life, out today on home video. MANY THANKS, SORRY I YELLED.

Brief Encounter

2011-08-25T19:10:00.003-05:00

I recently interviewed Alejandro Jodorowsky for the Comics Journal dot com; you can read it here. I liked how it turned out a lot, but what remains to be seen in English is a really detailed, exhaustive conversation with Jodorowsky -- maybe not something he'd even be interested in, I don't know -- preferably conducted by someone fluent in Spanish and culled from an afternoon encounter with the breadth of the man's work laid out. He's a truly unique presence, a high-profile participant of over four decades' experience in 'mainstream'-tuned comics nonetheless spun from a particular, holistic, fecund approach to creation and a uniquely personal means of collaboration. This needn't involve whacking open the Whys of art, by the way; there's deep narrative history around, from a man both inside and outside at once. I hope to see it someday.

Presenting: Jog - The Blog Original Content! (not really.)

2011-08-19T22:22:00.011-05:00

A while back I was contacted by Robert Stanley Martin, who was putting together an International Best Comics Poll for the Hooded Utilitarian. The request for participants came in the form of a question - "What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?" I came up with the following list of obviously correct answers:

- The Comet of Carthage, Yves Chaland & Yann Lepennetier
- Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise, Gary Panter
- Krazy Kat, George Herriman
- The Last of the Summer Wine, Eddie Campbell
- Minnie's 3rd Love or: "Nightmare on Polk Street", Phoebe Gloeckner
- Mysterious Suspense #1, Steve Ditko (dialogue credited to D.C. Glanzman)
- Rogan Gosh, Brendan McCarthy & Peter Milligan
- Screw-Style (Nejishiki), Yoshiharu Tsuge
- Thrilling Adventure Stories (aka: I Guess), Chris Ware
- [untitled The New Adventures of Venus short from Measles #2], Gilbert Hernandez

A few notes:

*The Comet of Carthage is available as part of Humanoids' Chaland Anthology #1: Freddy Lombard, which was released in hardcover in 2003 and softcover (via the DC/Humanoids deal) in 2004. I discussed it a little bit with Tucker Stone shortly after first reading it; since then, it's only grown in appeal as less a re-creation or a commentary upon classic mid-century children's comics styles -- as the "Atom" or "Atomic" approach is typically identified -- but a full-scale reconstitution of a past style as supportive of brazen poetic gestures and mythic allusions in a manner its earlier practitioners could not or would not have thought to attempt. Naturally, this perspective is limited by my monolingual handicap, and the vagaries of English-language comics publishing; Les Humanoïdes in France is planning a re-release of all four of their Chaland collections in a boxed set this October, so maybe that's a signal vols. 3 and 4 might actually show in English some day.

*Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise was one of the first comics I ever wanted to write about, so that's what I did. I think I've mentioned it about a million times since then, in a variety of inappropriate contexts; it's still "crushingly powerful stuff," you'll be pleased to know.

*Krazy Kat, meanwhile, had to settle for an examination of intuitive book design. It's a big thing to cover on its own -- the largest endeavor by far on my list, being a three-decade-plus tenure in the face of nine individual books or short stories -- but what continues to thrill me about Herriman's achievement is that I can constantly dive into it absolutely anywhere and pick up entirely new ideas and sensations; for having such a famously simple premise greeting the curious, it's nonetheless one of the most marvelously fertile grounds in comics, its virtues branching to compliment seemingly any means of engagement at any time.

*Quite a lot of people put Eddie Campbell on their lists, but I was the only one to suggest anything from Deadface/Bacchus (besides Joshua Dysart putting the whole thing on his extended list), specifically The Last of the Summer Wine, a short story initially published in Harrier Comics' Bacchus #2 (1988), and currently found in Doing the Islands with Bacchus, the third Bacchus softcover collection. Fittingly for a title character known to represent "that mysterious force in nature which we recognize to be higher than reason," I can't entirely explain the slow, subtle power that builds over 24 pages depicting part of a short island tour shared by three not-entirely-undying men while cataloging Greek gods, the mythic resonance of the number twelve, geniuses of antiquity and missing fragments of classical sculpture, always conjoined with visual jokes and comments or serving as metaphors for the accumulation of knowledge, facts, anecdotes - the deaths of Rasputin the mad monk and a nameless Napoleonic general squished between a pair of fucking horses as indicative of mortality even among seemingly everlasting characters and architectures. Yet coursing through it all is wine and the sea, and friendship and conversation, and revelry posited as romantic salvation - there are days, such as this one, where I think it's the quintessence of Campbell's art.

*I only recently wrote about Minnie's 3rd Love, but it's a story that's been with me forever.

*Mysterious Suspense #1 -- published by Charlton in 1968 and most recently reprinted by DC in both a standalone Millennium Edition comic book (2000) and in vol. 2 of The Action Heroes Archives (2007), both times with garish 'remastered' coloring -- is the first and only full-length comic book entirely devoted to Steve Ditko's version of The Question (there was no issue #2); the character had previously appeared in back-up stories in Blue Beetle, in a somewhat softer form, though by this point he was indistinguishable from Ditko's Mr. A save for name and physical appearance. The Question, you see, had been Answered. While the dialogue in this issue is typically credited to Glanzman, it's generally accepted that Ditko did all the writing himself, and I've always found his flatly declarative style perfect for a morality play that's less performance than incantation. One day I'll write a book -- not a long book, a 33⅓ or Deep Focus kind of thing -- explaining why this comic not only summarizes everything I find appealing about superheroes, but indeed captures the entire trajectory of superhero comics publishing in its slight confines. Alan Moore wouldn't want it any other way!

*I wrote about Rogan Gosh here. If you really sat me down and twisted my arm back and made me seriously think about the idea of the comics page as a simulacrum of space-time with all accordant narrative potential to rupture the walls of reality, I'd have to admit that McCarthy & Milligan got it down best with this short, vigorous tour of pulsing alternate dimensions and the diverse manifestations of individuals across them, capable of realizing (or failing to realize) something both individually valuable yet commonly profound.

*Screw-Style (1968) is here because I will think about it until I am dead.

(Ok, ok, go read Matthias Wivel)

*Much like how I love Eddie Campbell's Alec stories, yet found myself most treasuring a single short story from outside that region, I found myself in the end most responsive to Chris Ware's contribution to the 1991 final issue of Raw: I Guess, aka Thrilling Adventure Stories, aka the one where it's a superhero comic except all of the typographical elements from captions to dialogue to thought balloons to sound effects consecutively form an unseen character's monologue on a youth touched by superheroes, racism and strained family relations, the visual component providing various calibrations of irony, poignancy and pacing to the narration. Ware would get much more formally ambitious, but the quiet excellence of these six pages stick with me the most, although perhaps that's a potential best vested in short works; from the looks of this list, I prefer them.

*As for The New Adventures of Venus:

"Space is tight, so I’ll tell you about my favorite six-page comic. It’s an episode of The New Adventures of Venus by Gilbert Hernandez, from issue #2 of Measles (May 1999), an “all-ages” (read: safe-for-kids) series he edited at Fantagraphics from 1998 to 2001. In it, little Venus and her Tia (aunt) Fritz visit a sparse, windswept local amusement park on an overcast day. A big opening panel takes up two-thirds of the first page, emphasizing the sky, as goofy science fiction buildings poke up behind Venus, dressed in a goofy science fiction costume. It’s a heavy atmosphere, but Venus romps around the small, cheap-looking enclosures like a native, making plaster alien statues talk in a stilted way that glows with provincial enthusiasm. Tia Fritz is in costume too, but the few other patrons glimpsed are not, which distresses her - this was her favorite place when she was Venus’ age.

"When I was Venus’ age I’d make up stories for amusement parks, vast conspiracy motives tethering every cheap locale together, and when I’d go to bed I’d dream of them. This, I know, was childhood; as I grew into a student, I dreamed of hotels, more pragmatic things. An interim setting. Hernandez’s framing demands I read space before character, so it’s easy to interface with Venus’ enthusiasm in such an evocative setting. But the land stands apart from her, and so I stare at Fritz too, both perfectly indulgent yet unsuccessful at reading these pages the same way; she cannot escape her maturity any more than her small outfit can make her into a girl. It’s effortlessly, almost wordlessly melancholic in that direction, complicated further by Venus’ mama, in adult clothes at home, confiding to the child that the place only ever made her sad. But Venus can’t understand, laying in her bed.

"These days I mostly dream of a home in a nicer location, which is so banally revealing I’ll stop right here."

-from Favorites (2011), ed. Craig Fischer

*And finally, you've got to keep in mind that "favorites" shift according to reflection, study, room temperature, etc., and while I couldn't say exactly what I'd omit from the Top Ten, I know any of the below 15 could have just as easily appeared there:

- The ACME Novelty Library, Chris Ware
- Adventures From Mauretania, Chris Reynolds
- The Airtight Garage, Moebius
- The Alec Stories, Eddie Campbell
- Bakune Young vol. 2, Toyokazu Matsunaga (only vol. 2)
- The Book of Jim, Jim Woodring
- Cryptic Wit, Gerald Jablonski
- Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, Winsor McCay
- The Filth, Grant Morrison, Chris Weston & Gary Erskine
- Gloriana, Kevin Huizenga (the Or Else #2 version)
- Hellblazer Annual #1, Jamie Delano, Bryan Talbot & Dean Motter
- Here, Richard Maguire
- Phoenix: Karma, Osamu Tezuka
- The Saga of the Swamp Thing, Alan Moore, Stephen R. Bissette, John Totleben, Rick Veitch & a galaxy of stars
- This Was Your Life!, Jack T. Chick

Even then I feel a little constrained. Where's From Hell? Epileptic? Enigma? Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga? Loustal & Paringaux? Taiyō Matsumoto? What happened to Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse? (my reading isn't thorough!) Alack Sinner? (I can only read English!)... ah, get back to me on my deathbed, you'll have all the answers then.

Oh no, it's... Serious Literature!

2011-07-29T06:21:00.005-05:00

Here's a conversation between Tucker Stone and myself on the topic of David Foster Wallace's unfinished (frankly curated) final novel The Pale King, a work of interesting standing in the continuum of Wallace's body of work. I liked the process of putting this together; hopefully the enthusiasm is infectious on reading.

SAVAGE Critics

2011-06-24T18:15:00.002-05:00

I was very happy to participate in a recent roundtable discussion (hosted by Abhay Khosla) of the recent superhero crossover miniseries Fear Itself and Flashpoint. All three parts (1, 2 and 3) are now up at the Savage Critics, and commended to your attention. I'm probably going to read the rest of Flashpoint...

Past; Present; Future

2011-05-26T21:13:00.005-05:00

1. I've been doing my THIS WEEK IN COMICS! column at the Comics Journal for a few months(!) now - always weekly, always updated Tuesday morning at 8:00 EST. Archive here.

2. Today I also did a guest essay for the Panelists at the invitation of Derik Badman, as part of the monthly Manga Moveable Feast internet posting fiesta, focused this May '11 on Mitsuru Adachi's baseball drama Cross Game, currently on its third two-or-three-in-one extra fat volume from Viz. Adachi's one of those hugely popular manga artists with a career spanning close to half a century that's hardly had a damn thing officially released in English, with the doubly interesting trait of working almost exclusively in the super high-volume arena of weekly serialization at the head of a manga studio. Yet the very core of his work seems fused to the particulars of this potentially mechanistic area of industry - more at the link.

3. Also, coming this June: Favorites, a 40-page zine in which writers-on-comics and artists-of-comics expound upon their most beloved shit (or, in my case, write a bunch of stuff about hotels and theme parks). It's edited by Craig Fischer -- also of the Panelists -- and will be available at Heroes Con in Charlotte, North Carolina, then online some time thereafter. Your $5.00 goes toward Parkinson's research via Team Cul de Sac. List of contributors; cover art by Richard Thompson here.

New Stuff

2011-04-11T01:08:00.003-05:00

PRESENTING: My first post at MUBI, the very fine cinema website. It's focused on two of the most critically derided fantastical action movies of recent years: Frank Miller's The Spirit and Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, and how they share a bit of space in terms of artifice, self-reference, and (especially) images of women. Hope you enjoy it.

Productivity

2011-03-17T18:35:00.002-05:00

OMG, multiple links!

1. I did my first proper comic review for the new Comics Journal, in re Weapons of the Metabaron, a somewhat notorious Alejandro Jodorowsky joint drawn in part by Travis Charest; hopefully other shorter reviews will be forthcoming.

2. Also at TCJ, my weekly column continues apace, with a few words about German artist Matthias Schultheiss' Propellerman, an odd example of a (literally) foreign talent leaping into the superhero pool at the height of the Image comics revolution of the early '90s, and meeting the aesthetic on its own level.

3. Meanwhile, the movie review column at the Factual Opinion has emerged from its winter hibernation with many good things from Mr. Tucker Stone, plus my thoughts on Black Swan and Film Socialisme.

More to come soon...?!

In retrospect, getting the dude from Weezer to work viral publicity was an inspired move.

2011-03-08T18:11:00.003-05:00

IT'S ALL TRUE: Comics Comics has been retired, and The Comics Journal has been revised. This will take you to the new homebase for THIS WEEK IN COMICS!, which will update every Tuesday at 8:00 AM, EST. Lots of other stuff up at the site already, so poke around...

The green sprouts again in 2011.

2011-02-28T18:19:00.003-05:00

Once upon a time, about a year ago, there was a roundtable at the Hooded Utilitarian concerning the seminal Alan Moore-written issues of [The Saga of the] Swamp Thing. I was among the participants, but my eventual contribution was excerpted from an unfinished whole. I also got some feedback indicating gaps in my thinking, which eventually caused the entire massive bulk of it to shift.

So now here's part one (of two) of the expanded, revised piece, suddenly snapping off at the end like an old Heavy Metal serial. More James Caviezel to come.

Happy Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T06:23:00.002-05:00

*Because I love you, here's a new, long essay on Steve Ditko, with a particular focus on his 320 pages of new work since 2008. You still love me, right? I'm... am I still attractive to you...??

Happy New Year, dusty website

2010-12-31T00:31:00.003-05:00

There were many fine comics in 2010, but what about... secret comics?! Presenting a Peter Greenaway exhibition catalog scrambling Veronese's The Wedding At Cana into sequential, dialogued images, with a little help from 16th century porn. 'Tis the season.

Hark - A Review!

2010-10-08T01:51:00.002-05:00

Old fashioned 3000 words on a 25-page comic - Alan Moore/Jacen Burrows, Neonomicon #2 (of 4)

I don't usually link to my upcoming comics posts on Comics Comics...

2010-09-14T06:43:00.001-05:00

But I've got some early thoughts on ACME Novelty Library #20 I'm probably going to revisit at some point.

New Ocean of Words

2010-09-06T23:49:00.003-05:00

Labor Day is well and truly over where I'm sitting. SO: newly posted, a 19,000-word discussion between myself and the very fine writer-on-comics/artist-of-comics Matt Seneca, on the twin topics of (and several various topics relating to) Jack Kirby's 1976 Marvel Treasury adaptation of the motion picture 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jim Steranko's 1981 Heavy Metal-backed serialized comic of the Sean Connery vehicle Outland. A MEGA POST fit for avoidance of your return to work - thank us later, America!

Wheee, comics reviewed!

2010-08-12T23:21:00.001-05:00

NEW MANGA - Bakuman Vol. 1 (from the creators of Death Note) & Peepo Choo Vol. 1 (of 3) (ripped from the pages of Morning 2)... submitted for your pleasure.

Tra-La, new words

2010-07-29T18:15:00.001-05:00

advance review of the motion picture Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Wha - comics?!

2010-06-27T20:35:00.002-05:00

Or: content!

Here is a long (7500+ word) interview I did with Bryan Lee O'Malley at SPX in 2008, now transcribed and illustrated and loaded up to Comics Comics. Enjoy!

Two More

2010-06-04T02:49:00.002-05:00

a few words I'm pretty pleased with up top on Joe Kubert's Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965

a piece on the new Shaky Kane/David Hine series The Bulletproof Coffin

Enjoy!

Links to Relevant Contemporary Writing

2010-05-10T20:19:00.003-05:00

(DISCLAIMER: involving me.)

Comics I Bought Over Mother's Day Weekend (In which short reviews of a 1957 album by the creator of the Smurfs, a 2009 Marvel team-up miniseries, a vaguely smutty sports manga and the latest issue of James Stokoe's Orc Stain clump together into some kind of comparative comics art thingy.)

Savage Symposium: Wilson (Just your garden-variety 15,000-word discussion of the latest by Daniel Clowes; featuring the participation of Sean T. Collins, Chris Eckert, Brian Hibbs, Abhay Khosla, Tucker Stone, David Uzumeri, Douglas Wolk and myself. Sample: "And sometimes, I didn’t learn anything, but was instead embroiled in an erotic game of cat & mouse. But who was predator, and who was prey?" More awaits.)

Worth An Update

2010-04-25T21:50:00.009-05:00

Redoubtable Eurocomics correspondent Pedro Bouça writes in with some very interesting, apparently not-yet-officially-announced news:

OH SHIT, THE SMURFS ARE BACK IN PRINT

From Papercutz, the kids' comics line of veteran French-to-English publisher NBM; apparently the new line will begin in August with $5.99 paperback and $10.99 hardcover editions of both the first Smurfs album Les Schtroumpfs noirs (1963) and the Johan et Pirlouit album in which the characters first appeared, La Flûte à six trous (aka: La flûte à six schtroumpfs, 1958).

To my dismay, it appears Les Schtroumpfs noirs will be presented in an edited edition, The Purple Smurf, altering the title character's maddened, infected color state to regal purple from the original black. I'm not aware of prior edited editions -- and it seems an apparently unaltered version was just released to the French-language Canadian market last year (EDIT: I'm now told in the comments that it's an illustrated storybook) -- but it's worth noting that the black-to-purple change was previously made by the Hanna-Barbera television adaptation of that particular album (which actually contains three stories, not just the title piece). La flûte à six trous/schtroumpfs will be released as The Smurfs and the Magic Flute, again replicating an aspect of the wildly popular animated iteration of the franchise, i.e. the 1976 theatrical film of the same title. I presume the two stories mentioned on the cover were both present in at least the latter day French editions, since the page count is identical to the most recent Dupuis edition.

TAKE NOTE: this is all based on my casual observation of Amazon's listings, and everything can change at any time. I'm also unaware of the size of any of these new editions, or whether the paperback or hardcover editions will differ at all - obviously it'd be great if at least the hardcovers were full-sized albums. EDIT #2: Aaaand over at Robot 6 Torsten Adair consults Books in Print, which identifies both the hardcover and softcover editions as 6.5" x 9", the same dimensions as NBM's Dungeon paperbacks.

That's not the end of it either - November promises the arrival of The Smurf King, aka: the amazing King Smurf (Le Schtroumpfissime, 1965), which looks like it'll include a back-up story omitted from the 1978 Random House English-language edition I currently own; at that time the publisher turned a bunch of the original albums' shorter stories (and at least one of the stories in the otherwise unreleased Les Schtroumpfs noirs) into "mini-storybooks" that were sold separately. It looks like the plan might be to go right down the line with the original French-language album releases - that would mean The Smurfette (La Schtroumpfette, 1967) is next, another one I don't believe was ever released in the U.S. - let's hope to see it now.

O Morning

2010-04-06T05:07:00.002-05:00

This week's comics (w' a bonus look at Tank Girl: The Odyssey, by Peter Milligan & Jamie Hewlett)

Weekly films (I do 2009's Vincere, a very good Marco Bellocchio picture maybe playing on demand right now)

A Few

2010-03-30T17:39:00.002-05:00

New comics 3/31 (with a short appreciation of the 1992 Paul Ollswang/Taft Chatham/James Carpenter comic Doofer: Pathway to McEarth)

Movie reviews (I cover Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer)

My last week or so.

2010-03-24T19:05:00.007-05:00

Today's comics

Thoughts on thought balloons - the comments are especially good on this one, and be sure to check out additional responses by Heidi MacDonald, Scott McCloud, Barry Deutsch and Jeet Heer

Weekly movies - concerning the 2009 picture Pirate Radio

Graphic Novels: About Women. By Women. - a (very) short thing on the Carol Swain collection Crossing the Empty Quarter and Other Stories, among picks by Katherine Dacey, Noah Berlatsky, David Welsh, Matthew J. Brady and others

***

And, for a little pertinent news:

Humanoids to return to North American publishing - this June's debut offerings will be the final volume of The Metabarons (in the DC/Humanoids format!) and the start of a new six-issue comic book release for Bouncer (starting with the third French album, where DC/Humanoids left off), along with the first of four more issues of Lucha Libre (formerly Image/Humanoids, now retitled The Unfabulous Five) and the first among six issues of Whispers in the Walls (Le manoir des murmures), an ongoing series (a third French album is due in June) by filmmaker David Muñoz and artists Tirso Cons & Javi Montez

MOOOORE

2010-03-16T05:07:00.001-05:00

New comics at Comics Comics.

New cinema at the Factual Opinion. (by which I mean Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic)

My Life is Choked with Comics - Archives

2010-03-11T18:51:00.004-05:00

This is an ongoing column at The Savage Critics. It began as a weekly feature in which I would chit-chat about whatever miscellaneous comics I was reading at the time, and then transformed into an irregular, image-heavy series of long, structurally diverse essays about whatever miscellaneous comics I was reading at the time. Thanks to Brian Hibbs for inviting and indulging me.

***

#1 - Rogan Gosh by Brendan McCarthy & Peter Milligan (7/18/07)

#2 - Wish You Were Here #1-2 by Gipi (7/25/07)

#3 - Marshal Law: Fear and Loathing by Pat Mills & Kevin O'Neill (8/1/07)

#4 - The Naked Cosmos dir. by Gilbert Hernandez (8/8/07)

#5 - Valérian: Spatio-Temporal Agent by Pierre Christin & Jean-Claude Mézières (8/15/07)

#6 - Soldier X #1-8 by Darko Macan & Igor Kordey (8/23/07)

#7 - Taboo 2 ed. by Stephen R. Bissette (8/30/07)

#8 - Batman: The Cult by Jim Starlin & Berni Wrightson (9/7/07)

#9 - Kill Your Boyfriend (and) Girl by Grant Morrison & Philip Bond (and) Peter Milligan & Duncan Fegredo (9/14/07)

#10 - Starstruck by Elaine Lee & Michael Wm. Kaluta (9/27/07)

#11 - Tekkonkinkreet by Taiyō Matsumoto (10/9/07)

#12 - Judex dir. by Louis Feuillade (10/29/07)

#13 - Black Jack by Osamu Tezuka (11/23/07)

#14 - Jademan Comics founded by Tony Wong (11/29/07)

#15 - Little Sammy Sneeze: The Complete Color Sunday Comics 1904-1905 by Winsor McCay (12/28/07)

#16 - Panorama of Hell by Hideshi Hino (2/25/08)

#17 - The Horrorist by Jamie Delano & David Lloyd (6/23/08)

#18 - King Smurf by Peyo & Yvan Delporte (3/19/09)

#19 - Manga (pt. 1) (pt. 2) ed. by Masaichi Mukaide (9/21/09, 11/30/09)

#20 - Captain Hadacol #2 by unknown (2/1/10)

***

BONUS: OLD ENGLISH

This was a short-lived attempt at reviving the 'old,' loose-fitting style of My Life is Choked..., but focused on forgotten English translation of foreign comics, with a heavy emphasis on images. The intent was to get a weekly or biweekly column up and running again, but I didn't keep it up very long. Maybe I'll go back eventually. If so, I'll be sure to update the short list below.

#1 - Perramus: Escape From the Past #1-2 by Alberto Breccia & Juan Sasturain (5/27/09)

#2 - Ashen Victor by Yukito Kishiro (6/1/09)

#3 - Conquering Armies by Jean-Claude Gal & Jean-Pierre Dionnet (7/6/09)

Ah, relaxing weekly link post, I love you.

2010-03-09T05:01:00.002-05:00

This week's new comics at Comics Comics.

And two movie reviews at The Factual Opinion, including Avatar (on which I don't go into much detail) and Peter Greenaway's 1993 provocation The Baby of Mâcon (on which I linger a bit more)

THIS WEEK IN COMICS RETURNS!

2010-03-02T05:13:00.002-05:00

But it's... oh my god, WHAT THE FUCK?

Yes, it's true! After over half a decade in the bosom of my Blogspot account, the weekly comics roundup now has a brand new home at Comics Comics. That'll be the place to go from now on, or at least until the public outcry becomes too much to bear.

This naturally raises a tiny lil' question - what the hell is the purpose of this site? There's a highly convincing answer to that which, unfortunately, I haven't found quite yet, but at the very least I'll be doing weekly link posts to keep all of my writing straight. For example:

***

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Shutter Island & My Name is Khan (two new feature films, reviewed by me in Tucker Stone's new weekly movie log column thing, Too Many Movies Tuesdays, to which I will contribute every week)

***

So there! Very useful, right?! Maybe now would be a good time to trawl the archives... but thank you for reading. There's a lot more reading coming up.

Still broken, still not much to say.

2010-02-15T23:59:00.000-05:00

***

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Biomega Vol. 1 (of 6) & All My Darling Daughters (two recent Viz releases, unabashed sci-fi/horror action and unabashed relationship drama from the abashment-scarce world of mature audiences manga)

***

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

(well, Diamond's site is still mostly down, so once again I'm going by Midtown Comics' listings, which do not necessarily reflect everything Diamond is actually going to release this week, and indeed may reflect books distributed to Midtown Comics by other means - for example, Comix Experience is apparently getting in the ten-years-in-the-making color print edition of Jason Shiga's Meanwhile: Pick Any Path. 3,856 Story Possibilities -- an insane comics take on the old Choose Your Own Adventure books, $15.95 from Abrams, original webcomic here -- as well as Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys vol. 7, while Midtown is getting the new Dark Horse edition of Mesmo Delivery, and ne'er the twain shall meet, so keep your eyes peeled)

Almost Silent: In which Fantagraphics goes about compiling some of its many albums by the ever-prolific, Norwegian-born Jason into the same fatter, squatter $24.99 hardcover format as the artist's recent story collection Low Moon. 'Not Much Talking' seems to be the theme of its 304 (mostly b&w) pages, featuring the artist's wacky shorts collection Meow, Baby!, the interesting silent comedy-as-suspense thriller fusion experiment Tell Me Something (a model for his future genre-bending albums), the not-as-interesting zombie romance The Living and the Dead, and his secret masterpiece, You Can't Get There From Here, a beautifully paced, quietly experimental slash of emotional agony by way of vintage Frankenstein imagery, and my choice for best comic of 2004, back when I'd just starting doing this internet deal.

A good overall sampler of an excellent stylist in the mature form that's, sadly, never quite attracted the critical hosannas which accompanied his aberrational 2001 agony-of-ruined-expectations funny animal lit comics breakthrough Hey, Wait..., the agony (and the funny animals) having mixed with a restless desire to explore the absurd melodrama and heartbroken comedy of generic forms as half-recalled, a subjective popular library. Of course, 2001 was almost a very long decade ago. Many samples here.

Bone Handbook: Celebrating the completion of the new colorized iteration of Jeff Smith's enduringly popular series with something that might even catch the eye of folks who've yet to upgrade from their b&w Cartoon Books trades - a 128-page Official Guide, crammed with character bios, a timeline of events, cover art, process info, interviews and more. From Scholastic.

Starman Omnibus Vol. 4: Another $49.99 nets you issues #39-46 of the James Robinson/Tony Harris opus -- including a pair of Jerry Ordway-written crossover issues of The Power of Shazam! (#35-36) and a quite a few guest artists, Gene Ha among them -- but I suspect the real item of interest here will probably be 1999's Batman/Hellboy/Starman miniseries, drawn by no less than Mike Mignola himself and, unless I'm totally mistaken, never before collected in North America. Also rescued: the 1998 one-off Starman: The Mist and the 1999 Starman 80-Page Giant.

DC Universe Origins: This might be fun - a $14.99 collection of all those little origin summaries DC stuck in the back of 52 and Countdown, mostly written by Mark Waid or Scott Beatty, and drawn by a whole lot of people. Brian Bolland, Kevin Nowlan, Adam Hughes, Howard Chaykin - many more.

Joe the Barbarian #2 (of 8): Man, could you believe last issue? Where the hell does Vertigo get off in couching all those visually dominant opening pages in the context of a $1.00 introductory issue?! It's like they expect controversy or something over a perfectly evocative prelude, and feel the need to circumvent prospective trouble by lowering the price! What the fuck do they take us for?? Well, I'm not going to stand for these insults, although I am going to buy this $2.99 second issue from Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy.

Simpsons Comics #163: Being an all-Aragonés, Sergio special, which automatically makes it worth a flip. It's $2.99.

Hellblazer #264: In which Peter Milligan wraps up the Indian storyline with primary artists Giuseppe Camuncoli & Stefano Landini. Primary secondary artist (and cover illustrator) Simon Bisley returns for another two issues starting next month.

Garth Ennis' Battlefields: Happy Valley #3 (of 3): Another air campaign concludes, like so. After this comes a first for Ennis' war stories: a sequel, following up on line standout The Tankies, with artist Carlos Ezquerra riding along once more.

The Mighty Thor by Dan Jurgens & John Romita, Jr Vol. 2: Sure, you could buy that deluxe $24.99 Kick-Ass hardcover out this week, but know that Marvel has seen fit to provide a more traditional superhero alternative, in the form of this new (also $24.99) softcover collection of late '90s JRJR, along with guest art by John Buscema & Jerry Ordway and writer Dan Jurgens himself. Collects issues #9-13 and Annual 1999 of the pertinent series.

Near Death Highway Star

2010-02-10T00:37:00.002-05:00

***

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

(Note that while Diamond's site is sort of up now, kinda, their new release list apparently isn't, so I'm going by Midtown Comics' list, which is generally near-complete, although it really only guarantees that the items in question will show up at Midtown Comics, which, close as it gets, does not equate to every Diamond-serviced shop, not that all of them will even be open and/or receive their books tomorrow, what with the east coast of the United States getting shit on by a beatific polar ass aimed terrestrially. I didn't break anything driving home.)

Barron Storey: The Marat/Sade Journals: Robot 6 says Drawn and Quarterly is supposed to have their new edition of Dylan Horrocks' Hicksville out this week, while Dark Horse should manage their snazzy printing of Rafael Grampá's Mesmo Delivery. The former is quite possibly the least-actually-read of the acknowledged 'literary' comics landmarks of the past 15 years, while the latter is a fairly recent art showcase action-horror thingy enjoying a larger post-buzz print run. Neither are on Midtown's list for the week, nor is Little Nothings Vol. 3: Uneasy Happiness, NBM's promised third volume of Lewis Trondheim's autobiographical webcomic series, so... I dunno, keep your eyes open?

As such, the 'available again' crown for the week of 2/10 in comic book stores can therefore only go to this elusive 1993 Tundra Press commission, a selection of journal images from the influential illustrator Barron Storey, related by citation to Peter Weiss' 1963 play and consumed with the theme of broke-down love. Publisher Graphic Novel Art promises a deluxe presentation more in line with Storey's actual journals, plus a David Mack introduction, a bonus Dave McKean drawing, and a new afterword by Storey. It's a 136-page color hardcover, priced at $39.00.

King - A Comics Biography: The Special Edition: In which Fantagraphics again collects Ho Che Anderson's 1993-2002 chronicle of Martin Luther King, Jr. (last published in '05), this time with over 70 pages of supplements, ranging from an essay to notes to preliminary art to a shorter comics story. Big preview here.

Newave: Underground Mini Comix of the 1980s: Because the Golden Age of Reprints assures that no comic shall be left behind, we're now into compiling minicomics from the alternative comics era. An eye-watering 892 pages of them, at a winsomely appropriate 5" x 6.25" size. And while you'll certainly find Gary Panter, Dan Clowes, Peter Bagge, Mary Fleener, Rick Geary, Fred Hembeck, Mack White, J.R. Williams, Hilary Barta, Sam Henderson and other recognizable names tucked away in there, the real fun will likely be in editor Michael Dowers' selection -- honed in on life signs of the older 'underground' period -- of now-obscure period talents with access to pens, paper and photocopying, with a few pertinent interviews thrown in as well. Full table of contents here, historical introduction here, samples here, Tom Spurgeon review here. A Fantagraphics hardcover, only $24.99.

Hellblazer: Pandemonium: Being the gala return of originating series writer Jamie Delano to a longform John Constantine story, in the form of a 128-page hardcover original seeing Our Man off to Iraq, presumably for a taste of the no quarter relevancy horror upon which this house was built. Art by Jock; the price is $24.99. Vertigo also has vol. 2 of its hardcover reissue of Preacher this week -- collecting issues #13-26 -- while Vertigo's own Grant Morrison enjoys the actually-not-from-Vertigo-at-all vol. 2 softcover release of All Star Superman.

Choker #1 (of 6): A new sci-fi noir series from Image, written by Ben McCool with art by the always-welcome Ben Templesmith. Sneak peek.

Phonogram 2: The Singles Club #7 (of 7): Ending Kieron Gillen's & Jamie McKelvie's music-as-magic project overall, for the immediate future. One last look.

The Muppet Show Comic Book Vol. 2 #2: Langridge, ongoing.

Daytripper #3 (of 10): Moon, Bá, continuing.

Starstruck #6 (of 13): Lee, Kaluta, revised.

PunisherMax #4: Aaron, Dillon, shootings, preview.

B.P.R.D.: King of Fear #2 (of 5): Mignola, Arcudi, Davis, preview.

Batman and Robin #8: Morrison, Stewart, Lazarus, preview.

Groo: The Hogs of Horder #3 (of 4): Evanier, Aragonés, financial crises, preview.

World War 3 Illustrated #40: Bipartisanship.

Just a note.

2010-02-09T06:59:00.002-05:00

*New comics info is delayed until tonight, probably, because Diamond got snowed in. I'm personally looking forward to another foot over today and tomorrow after last weekend's 18 inches, and I had it easy. See ya later.

Ongoing Adventures

2010-02-01T23:59:00.004-05:00

***

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Captain Hadacol (NEW AND EXPANDED!! MORE PICTURES! MORE VITAMINS! Presenting the story of the first-ever patent medicine superhero, powered-up on a 24 proof dietary supplement YOU can buy at home, provided it's 1951! Also: songs, cartoons, testimonials, and a special plea. Don't leave me hanging.)

***

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

Demo Vol. 2 #1 (of 6): Aaaah, you know what that is, reader? Nostalgia. And don't you tell me it's too early for '00s nostalgia - we're an entire month into 2010 now, long enough for a man to starve.

And Demo truly was a product of its time, primordially steeped in the millennial Jemas era of Marvel -- wherein writer Brian Wood formulated a number of 'street-level' mutant ideas for use in Joe Quesada's NYX project, which was originally intended to be a MAX line launch title drawn by David Choe, who split with Marvel acrimoniously and I think later presented some of the visual concepts in his 2002 collection Bruised Fruit -- then realized in 2003 as a 12-issue suite of self-contained young-people-with-strange-powers comics from AiT/Planet Lar.

If you were around then, swimming in internet rhetoric, you'll immediately recall what it meant for that publisher to release non-bookshelf comics, the whole slew of period funnybook politicking behind the format. It was a talked-about series, one of the inescapable 'blogosphere favorites' from back when comics blogs were scant enough that favorites could emerge in a way that some commentary on them seemed nearly compulsory to remain current in thinking; Scott Pilgrim was another one, maybe the one that broke wide away from the public readership ricochet chamber. To have been there at the time -- and I was reading blog posts before I was writing 'em -- is to render Demo inseparable from the looming mutation of online writing-on-comics, which soon after the series' 2005 collection found itself unable to keep up the pretense of holding the whole world in its palms.

Demo underwent its own transformation over those original 12 issues - dual transformations, actually, relating to both principals of the creative team. First was artist Becky Cloonan restlessly sprinting through a dozen variations on a visual style, like a one-woman demonstration of the multitudes within the broad idea of 'manga' influence, there within the first heat rush of the Japanese comics boom. Then there was Wood, working his way through some occasionally painful on-the-nose mutant youth scenarios in early issues to develop increasingly roundabout and expressive takes on a 'weird powers' premise that finally seemed to dissolve like a pill having performed its duty, and effected some desired change in the body.

Ironists in the crowd likely grinned at the completed series' 2008 republication by Vertigo, both an imprint of Marvel's longtime rival and itself representative of superhero concepts swallowed up and dispersed. They're the homebase for this new sequence of $2.99 Wood/Cloonan stories, which the writer has mentioned as delving more into the "supernatural" than the super-powered. I wonder how it'll manifest, being the work of far more seasoned creators; the title Demo always denotes some vulnerable run-through, and oh was that accomplished back then, from back to front. Preview.

Smile (A Dental Drama): Being a newly colorized and expanded 224-page Scholastic edition of artist Raina Telgemeier's autobiographical webcomic about tooth-related calamity in the sixth grade. Available as a $21.99 hardcover and a $10.99 softcover. It looks really cute.

Ultimo Vol. 1: I can imagine few more wonderful possibilities in this world than Stan Lee riffing like a madman over otherwise completed manga pages he's never before laid eyes on, so hope burns eternal for this East-West collaboration with Shaman King creator Hiroyuki Takei, filling out comics pages from a concept by Stan the Man, who's supposedly playing a role in the English localization, although I don't think it's the all-out Marvel Method mania I crave. Katherine Dacey deems it "competently executed but utterly forgettable," and I can see that possibility cropping up as well. From Viz; $9.99 for 216 pages.

Slam Dunk Vol. 8 (of 31): Also Viz; more from Takehiko Inoue's breakthrough.

Knights of the Zodiac Vol. 28 (of 28): And also a long-coming grand finale to one of the past decade's seemingly doomed attempts at bringing over 'classic' shonen manga - but somehow, Masami Kurumada's big '80s Greek myth fighting team super smash Saint Seiya has persevered since 2003, shining the light of hope on all of us fretting over the prospects of some fellow golden-oldie-as-far-as-manga-in-North-America-goes, like... Slam Dunk, for instance. Anyway, I don't know what the fuck is supposed to happen here, but Shaenon Garrity says all the series' dead characters come back evil like in Blackest Night, and that sounds neat. Again, $9.99, 216 pages.

Berserk Vol. 33: This, however, is from Dark Horse, and it feels like it comes out biweekly. Actually, life is just passing me by! Up to vol. 34 in Japan, $14.99 in English. Hats! Scarves!

Little Lulu Vol. 22: The Big Dipper Club and Other Stories: Nothing beats it.

Fall Out Toy Works #3 (of 5): Brett Lewis of The Winter Men - his current series, from Image.

Criminal: The Sinners #4 (of 5): Brubaker, Phillips. Have a look.

The Boys #39: Ennis, Robertson. Preview.

Batman Confidential #41: Part 2 of 4 for Sam Kieth, cultivating an unnervingly regular presence of late.

Greek Street #8: And here's your Peter Milligan of the week.

Ultimate Comics X #1: In contrast to all that, here's what's intended to be an ongoing superhero presence for the considerably elusive, influential Art Adams - a new bimonthly Ultimate series from writer Jeph Loeb, poised to introduce some crucial new character to the mix. Still, yeah: Art Adams.

Indomitable Iron Man: This is one of two $3.99, four-story anthologies Marvel is putting out this week, although it doesn't appear to have the holiday tie-in of Marvel Heartbreakers - and believe me, I've been trying to think up a Groundhog Day joke for hours. It instead appears to be a throwback to the b&w Marvel magazines of yore, albeit in typical Marvel comic book size and almost certainly without the gratuitous nudity (otherwise they'd be charging more). The highlight will probably be whatever writer/artist Howard Chaykin comes up with, in that he knows the terrain damn well. Preview.

Dominic Fortune: It Can Happen Here and Now: And just to mark the occasion, Marvel is also releasing this $19.99 softcover devoted to Chaykin's swashbuckling rogue-for-hire, including an actual b&w piece of the type, from 1975's Marvel Preview #2, plus 1980's patchy color Fortune tale from Marvel Premiere #56 -- plotted by Chaykin & Len Wein, scripted by David Michelinie, laid out by Chaykin and finished by Terry Austin -- along with Chaykin's very fine 2009 MAX miniseries and a Dean Motter/Greg Scott story originally published as an online serial.

Komiks: Comic Art in Russia: And finally, here's a really interesting-looking new study from José Alaniz of the University of Washington, Seattle, burrowing into a uniquely troubled comics tradition having "borne the brunt of ideological change--thriving in summers of relative freedom, freezing in hard winters of official disdain." It nonetheless endures. From the University Press of Mississippi; 288 pages for $38.00.

We start with the ending.

2010-01-25T23:00:00.001-05:00

***

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

Barefoot Gen Vol. 9 (of 10): Breaking Down Borders & Barefoot Gen Vol. 10 (of 10): Never Give Up: Being the long, long-awaited release of the final 270-page volumes of Keiji Nakazawa's 1972-73 boys' comics saga of the Hiroshima bombing and its extended aftermath, a richly symbolic moment for manga in United States, in that the initial volume of Gen was the first Japanese comic ever translated to English for release in book form, all the way back in 1978. These books see young Gen becoming considerably less young, as the story advances to 1953 and the budding artist encounters romance, drugs and a personal ambition that'll take him far away from the scene of the tragedy, though it naturally can't ever leave him - that Gen is more-or-less Nakazawa himself perhaps needn't even be stated by now. From Last Gasp, $14.95 each.

Afrodisiac: In which Brian Maruca & Jim Rugg -- creators of the admired surreal action comic Street Angel -- present a conceptual AdHouse art book supposedly not unlike Al Columbia's recent Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days, but devoted entirely to semi-simulated '70s comic book tales and franchise fragments starring a most pliable blaxploitation-style title character. Sean Collins recently read the whole thing as a commentary on the aesthetically insular world of early Bronze Age comic books attempting to interface with a super-cool, much more complicated minority culture by basically imposing its goofy tropes on the most sensational pop-visible aspects of said culture, to comedic (and perhaps disturbing) effect. I know I'd want to give it a flip right away. It's $14.95; video trailer here, sample pages here.

The Vermont Monster Guide: What's always worth noting? A new project from Stephen R. Bissette, here illustrating a Joseph A. Citro field manual to legendary beasts of the green mountain state; several making of videos are online. From the University Press of New England; $18.95 for 128 pages. Note that Bissette also has a new webcomic going right now, King of Monster Isle.

Hotwire Comics Vol. 3: The newest 138-page installment of editor Glenn Head's odd, oversized Fantagraphics anthology, a distinctly old-fashioned scattershot alternative comics production with a crew drawn heavily from Monte Beauchamp's old Blab! anthologies and Head's own shorter-lived Snake Eyes. Basically, it's a louder, more comedic, more visually-driven, and frankly more uneven sibling rival to MOME, although the promise of new Mack White, Mary Fleener and Rick Altergott comics is fine with me. Also featuring Michael Kupperman, Johnny Ryan, R. Sikoryak, David Sandlin, Tim Lane -- who seems to have been otherwise quiet since his intriguing 2008 debut collection Abandoned Cars -- Sam Henderson, Max Andersson, Doug Allen, Danny Hellman, Stephane Blanquet and more. It's $22.99; preview here.

Dirty Dishes: Your latest 96-page item in Drawn and Quarterly's petit livre series of small art books, this time a $14.95 platform for Canadian artist and animator Amy Lockhart, also of anthologies like PictureBox's The Ganzfeld and Conundrum Press' Nog A Dod. The publisher has samples.

Remember: I can't say I adored Orange, Tokyopop's North American debut release for Chinese manhua artist Benjamin (Zhang Bin), but I'll give it this - while many teen angst comics betray the hand of a looming adult artist presence relaying a story they think young people might relate to, Benjamin's work lacked any such evident filter, behaving in the capricious, ponderous, entirely self-absorbed manner of an actual moody teenager, exactly as I remember it, in spite of a nearly toxic application of mad color gloss to every damn page. This is a 2004 story suite, 144 color pages for $14.99, purportedly obsessed with doomed love, ruined ambitions and comics creation; preview here.

Sayonara, Zetsubo-Sensei Vol. 5: But if it's the lighter side of suicidal despair you crave, here's another $10.99 package of Koji Kumeta's wide-ranging Japanese cultural satire by way of high school girl ensemble comedy, now up to vol. 19 at home. Buckle up for translation notes!

Tank Girl Remastered Vol. 5: Apocalypse: It had to happen - the first of these Titan Books collections of the Alan Martin/Jamie Hewlett creation to feature neither Alan Martin nor Jamie Hewlett as primary participants. Still, it does have artists Andy Pritchett & Philip Bond, working with Phil Gascoine from an Alan Grant script about the imminent end of the world and Our Heroine's sudden pregnancy, as initially released by Vertigo, 1995-96. The fee is $14.95 for 112 pages.

The Complete World War Robot: On its way to being a movie, I believe, but the appeal is naturally the 96 square pages of Ashley Wood illustrations depicting small med and hulking round machines. Text by T.P. Louise (of course), published by IDW (as usual), priced at $29.99 in hardcover format. Simulated flip-through here.

Alias: Ultimate Collection Book 2 (of 2): In case you missed one of Brian Michael Bendis' signature works from earlier in the decade (2001-04), this $34.99 softcover rounds out the run with issues #16-28.

Batman and Robin #7: Meanwhile, on the other end of the superhero continent, Grant Morrison reunites with Seaguy/Seven Soldiers cohort Cameron Stewart for a sorta post-Blackest Night-related storyline that also figures in with the eventual return of Bruce Wayne, maybe, but certainly features fan-favorite Morrison stock players Knight and Squire, plus temporary sister title protagonist Batwoman. Inky preview here.

Detective Comics #861: Speaking of which, here's the start of what's probably the last Batwoman storyline in this title, after which the character moves to her own series later this year. Three issues for now, written by Greg Rucka and illustrated by Jock. Have a look.

Frank Frazetta's Dark Kingdom #4 (of 4): When I was a child, I had a dream that an angel handed me a color prayer postcard of a saint, the identity of whom I cannot remember, and told me that I was to tear it up and scatter it on the street in front of my aunt's house. However, hoping it would grow, I instead buried the fragments in the dirt in the back yard, and all that happened was the readymade corpus became filthy. So I asked for penance, all teary and small, and I was told to wait 20 years and then identify the week of release of every new Tim Vigil release on my internet comic book site. Dear readers, the night of that dream was the night before Grips #1 hit the stands, and these days I'm sure it was really the devil I spoke to, but a deal's a deal; $3.99.

Kick-Ass #8 (of 8): This ain't the devil, though; it's just genre and fandom, and little incursions on taste reinforcing the pleasure of fantasies delayed & delivered. Kick-Ass was never realistic, it was about how realism is like fasting, and how fasting itself can function as not so much a virtue as a means of having food taste richer when you finally stop. Millar's kitchen is no less loving than Mark Waid's, or Grant Morrison's, but he's long ago understood that the real, mild spice is the most widely appetizing, and every roar in the theater at every little girl cuss and every bloody plunging sword is another growling belly; this is fast food, this is broad superheroes, this is creator-owned franchising beyond the medium's ratty county line. Me, I'm stuffed on fluff, and I'm local as shit, so let me break metaphor while I ready my bed: the problem with new superhero comics isn't that they're decadent, it's that they're not decadent enough.

I'm even more behind than usual so this is gonna be quick.

2010-01-19T02:59:00.005-05:00

***

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

almost every comic I bought last week (including Orc Stain #1, Army of Two #1, Neonomicon Hornbook, Starstruck #5 and PunisherMax #3)

***

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

not simple: Being the start of Viz's major 2010 effort to launch mangaka Natsume Ono on the North American scene. I mentioned her a little bit last summer when I picked up her Japanese-only story collection Tesoro; I really like her art, a pliable series of variations on squat cartoon forms that absolutely radiate tenderness and vulnerability, two traits probably in generous supply in this all-in-one collection of a 2004-05 webmagazine series following a young man's search for his sister, the only bright point in all his existence. A big 320 pages for $14.99. Free chapter here; overview by David Welsh here.

Joe the Barbarian #1 (of 8): You might have heard of this one - the big new Grant Morrison project from Vertigo, with art by the wonderfully vocal Sean Murphy. A troubled boy is whisked away in an ill delirium to save the world of his toys from a terrible disaster. Preview.

The Barry Windsor-Smith Conan Archives Vol. 1 (of 2): Hmm, can it be called a product of the Golden Age of Reprints if it's collecting prior reprints into a handier form? I dunno -- and I bet a cleaner example will present itself shortly -- but if for some reason you don't have Windsor-Smith's Conan comics on hand, here's the 200-page first half of Dark Horse's artist-specific hardcover project, with 'remastered' coloring I'm not sure about. Written by Roy Thomas, priced at $49.99.

Loverboy: This appears to be a new 128-page Vanguard Productions semi-autobiographical graphic novel about a small man on the prowl for the tall women he craves, written and drawn by 91-year old Dondi (and Wildcat) co-creator Irwin Hasen. Yes, that does automatically make it worth a flip-through, and there's both a $19.95 softcover and a $29.95 hardcover available if you're up for buying.

Thirteen Going on Eighteen: Now here's the Golden Age I know, hauling in a big (7.75" x 11") fat (336-page) entry in Drawn and Quarterly's John Stanley Library, this time covering a '60s teen humor series about girls as friends and rivals, with Stanley as writer/artist. I've read samples from this around, and it's pretty damn funny. It's $39.95.

Oishinbo Vol. 7: Izakaya: Pub Food: Say goodbye for now to cocky eating master Yamaoka with one more edutaining 276-page dose of hooray-for-Japan food power; you'll never eat half of this, ha ha ha! This time: casual eats. It's $12.99.

Pluto Vol. 7 (of 8): Woah, look what's almost done! Osamu Tezuka by way of Naoki Urasawa, screaming towards the penultimate. From Viz, $12.99.

Black Jack Vol. 9 (of 17): But if it's uncut Tezuka you crave, Vertical's got you covered with 320 more pages of $16.95 super-medicine. My god, when will the healing end?!

Vagabond VizBig Edition Vol. 6: We do know when this is going to end - later this year, as artist Takehiko Inoue has recently stated. That'll put the final tally of these three-in-one bricks at 11 or 12, depending on exactly when the swordsman series concludes. For now, $19.99 nets you vols. 16-18 of the regular run. Note that Inoue and Viz also have REAL vol. 7 this week (in Japan it's up to vol. 9), and I wonder if that irregular ongoing basketball drama won't be getting its creator's fuller attention by 2011.

All My Darling Daughters: And finally in Japanese comics, Viz presents a $12.99, 208-page suite of five short stories brushing on a thirtysomething woman's difficult personal situation after her mother (whom she still lives with) decides to marry a much younger man. From the widely respected Fumi Yoshinaga, of Antique Bakery and Ôoku: The Inner Chambers.

RASL #6: More of Jeff Smith and dimension-hopping desert sci-fi.

Garth Ennis' Battlefields: Happy Valley #2 (of 3): More of Ennis-written combat sagas. Preview.

Hellblazer #263: Your Peter Milligan of the week, continuing Constantine's India.

glamourpuss #11: Dave Sim keeps it photo-real.

The Zombies That Ate the World #8 (of 8): And finally, the end of this Guy Davis-drawn saga of undead co-existence with the urban American future. I think this also wraps up the DDP/Humanoids alliance for now, in that I'm unaware of any future scheduled projects, although it's always worth keeping an eye open, eh?

A little scant, but never too little.

2010-01-11T23:59:00.001-05:00

***

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Death Note (a commentary on Tsugumi Ohba's & Takeshi Obata's leanish, meanish shonen sensation as an emblematic 'mainstream' comic of the '00s, for what the term's worth anymore)

***

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

The Complete Torpedo Vol. 1: Ha! You thought the Golden Age of Reprints would sit these early days of 2010 out? You thought it'd rest for even one week, with an empire still to build?!

(Not from Torpedo)

Poor fool. You'd better just tithe IDW $24.99 now and steel your faith in this much-desired, months-delayed first hardcover collection of seminal Depression era New York hit man comics from writer Enrique Sánchez Abulí and artists Jordi Bernet & (briefly) Alex Toth, est. 1981 in Spanish-language environs. It's oversized and 160 pages, with a new English translation by Jimmy Palmiotti and book design by Darwyn Cooke. Then after that you can pick up IDW's $39.99 The Complete Dick Tracy Vol. 9: 1944-45 and Hermes Press' Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: The Complete Newspaper Dailies Vol. 3 1932-1934, because these damn pyramids aren't gonna build themselves. Stack those comics bricks! Stack 'em!

Graylight: I don't know the slightest thing about this book, save that NBM is publishing it, as they have with two prior books by Swedish artist Naomi Nowak, Unholy Kinship (2006) and House of Clay (2007). It looks like a surreal, misty thing, and the solicitation tells me it's about a woman in (romantic) trouble. Your $12.95 gets you 144 pages of more.

Neonomicon Hornbook: Being a fancily-titled $1.99 preview of Alan Moore's upcoming Lovecraftian project with artist Jacen Burrows, a sequel to Burrows' (and adaptor Antony Johnston's) 2003 comics adaptation of Moore's prose story The Courtyard, except this one's actually an all-original Moore script, I believe his first with publisher Avatar. This 16-page item contains finished art, script excerpts, design sketches and more; as it usually goes with Alan Moore, even among those cold on his recent work (or his work full stop), I doubt many will be able to resist a little peek.

Blade of the Immortal Vol. 22: Footsteps: Only the latest $19.99 shot of Hiroaki Samura, its 232 pages paced a ways behind Japan's newest vol. 25. Ninja preview. Note that Dark Horse is preparing to expand its Blade line of products, with Junichi Ohsako's 2008 official prose novel Legend of the Sword Demon due out in a few weeks and Samura's (likewise 2008) 'Art of' book set for an expanded English release in June.

Silent Möbius Complete Edition Vol. 2 (of 15): Aw, but I can't blame ya if you want to pledge a softer $14.99 toward some sweet sweet nostalgia - errant X-Men and Batman artist Kia Asamiya's 1988-99 saga of cyberpunk occult policewomen vs. the demonic menace of the Lucifer Hawks in a cobalt tinsel Tokyo sprawl of 2026. It was Asamiya's big splash as a mangaka after years of working in animation, escorting him straight to the director's chair for a 54-minute theatrical anime short in 1991, which itself spawned a sequel movie and a television series. Manga and anime alike quickly found a home in North America, with Viz beginning serialization of the latter in '91 and Streamline Pictures picking up the initial anime in '92, as spicy action sci-fi could often be promised a run at the place in those days, and the artist always did like American comics and movies.

As a result, Silent Möbius got to be somewhat well-known, basically by virtue of hanging around and being visible a lot; truth be told, it's not a very good comic as much as attractively sewn together from bits of other popular comics, leaving it highly adept at pushing certain otaku buttons of its day by sheer force of genre collage. The original Viz translation totaled 12 volumes by 2003, wrapping up the core series just in time for the current manga boom. Now here comes Udon with spanking new editions, in right-to-left format, with the original Japanese color bits, supplemental materials and, eventually, a stack of unseen-in-English sidestory and prequel material, hence the extra three books. I suspect its ferociously derivative nature will only help it form a kind of an executive summary of period nerd delight today, while hearkening back to a time when glittering electric razor skyscrapers were as much a mark of manga in America as teeming bookstore shelves.

Creepy Archives Vol. 5: This, meanwhile, will push a different breed of reader's buttons, even as it sees the old Warren content (Creepy #21-25) sail into a difficult financial period. Still a bunch of nice Steve Ditko in here, I do believe. Still $49.99, still Dark Horse. Preview. Also this week on the fifty dollar old stuff from Dark Horse beat is Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery Vol. 2, the solicitation of which tells me Alex Toth is again somehow involved.

Human Target: Chance Meetings: Your Peter Milligan of the week, this time a helpful $14.99 reprint of his very fine 1999 Vertigo miniseries revival of DC's bodyguard-as-master of disguise character, with art by the late Edvin Biuković, along with its 2002 original graphic novel sequel Final Cut, drawn by Javier Pulido. This is all in support of some upcoming television show, which I think is a fine excuse for good comics cheap.

Doc Savage: The Silver Pyramid: Your random old DC miniseries of the week (oh alright, I think it's here to support the upcoming Brian Azzarello First Wave pulp hero universe), a 1987-88 out-of-retirement adventure from writer Dennis O'Neil and the green team of Adam & Andy Kubert. It's $19.99.

Age of Reptiles: The Journey #2 (of 4): Rushing dinosaurs from Ricardo Delgado. Preview.

Daytripper #2 (of 10): The rush of time from Fábio Moon & Gabriel Bá.

Die Hard Year One #4: Howard Chaykin is writing this ongoing Boom! license book, now ending its first storyline. I'm told it's nuts. I trust there's shootings.

PunisherMax #3: Shootings here too.

The Muppet Show Comic Book #1: You know the picture rocket format can't be too close to the cliff when Roger Langridge gets an all-new launch of an ongoing series following a successful pair of miniseries, and it somehow feels inevitable. Yes.

(Nor are they Muppets)

Sky Doll: Doll Factory #2 (of 2): Man, Marvel's even putting out a(nother) $5.99 comic's worth of production materials from a French religio-media manga fusion satire that doesn't even have its next album scheduled yet. Apropos of nothing, did you know the final volume of Valérian and Laureline (aka: Valérian: Spatio-Temporal Agent), L'Ouvre temps, is due out later this month? All the better that Cinebook is still set to start a new English translation effort sometime this year, I hope.

I may be back to work, but the holidays are still running.

2010-01-05T18:14:00.004-05:00

*Hence, me and Tom Spurgeon and one of the prime mainstream comics of the '00s: Tsugumi Ohba's and Takeshi Obata's Death Note. Four thoughts spring to mind:

1. I made a bunch of jokes about the Punisher, but Ennis' run on the MAX series actually was one of the 'series' I was considering - now that I look at the finished piece, I wonder if maybe the two should have been paired head-to-head to determine the most perfect expression of glass-hard nihilism in popular comics of the aughts.

2. Here's that Kiyohiko Azuma interview I mentioned.

Everything is for manga. While taking a walk, watching a movie, shopping, or eating, manga is always on my mind. And this is the first priority. This is the way I think. However, in reality, I could manage to keep manga in my mind all right, but sometimes I forget that it has the first priority. This makes me feel I am too soft on myself. I want to be an artisan rather than an artist.

3. In my excitement, I appear to have forgotten one of the most elementary factors in Death Note's crossover appeal: the $7.99 price point, making it absurdly easy for people who'd heard about the work to make the leap into buying it. Having copies in seemingly every big box bookstore in North America probably helped - such was the might of Shonen Jump mid-decade.

4. You might get the impression that I'm torn on Death Note as an actual story. That's true. But know this - that scene in vol. 3 (ch. 20) with Light and L playing tennis really really hard while trying to think ahead of everything the other might possibly be thinking, really really harder? Best Scenes of the Decade contender, top 20 at worst. You bet your ass.

Anyway, many thanks to Tom for prompting me to spend wonderful holiday hours in contemplation of jokes about teenage girls blowing up their school for yaoi. I didn't find a good one, but I'm a better person.

Quick One: Start the Year Fast

2010-01-04T23:59:00.003-05:00

I'm trying to drop 20 pounds, so I figure I ought to keep moving.

***

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Best of 2009 (reminder: all works that did not qualify will be withdrawn from circulation and pulped at the close of business Friday)

***

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

The Troublemakers: Oh shit, here's how you start 2010 off right - new Gilbert Hernandez. Specifically, his $19.99 Fantagraphics hardcover follow up to Chance in Hell (my Best of 2007 #1 pick) and Speak of the Devil (a portion of which was among my Best of 2008) in that it's a 'movie' that exists in the greater Love and Rockets world. As you can maybe guess, I've really enjoyed these project, and this one carries a double charge as Beto's entry into the emboldened crime comics scene of recent months: a sleazy rocker, a pair of nasty ladies and a big drug money rip-off are prominently featured over 128 cruel pages. Review coming soon, god willing, but here's a preview in which women wrestle on a dusty road immediately following the main titles.

The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D.: Elsewhere in cockeyed genre hardcovers that put the "Fanta" before the "graphics," Dash Shaw brings a 104-page collection of color sci-fi stuff, ranging from production materials from the titular animated serial (his directorial debut) to various shorts from MOME and elsewhere, plus an all-new extra-length story. Definitely flip through this one; Shaw's fleshy, emotive, color-seared approach isn't quite like anyone else's, and the subject matter will (sort of) prepare you for Pantheon's collected BodyWorld later this year. It's (also) $19.99; samples here.

The Box Man: But enough of this gun shootin' and planet eatin' - what of the new bizarre pictures from Japan's world of "manga" comics? Enter Drawn and Quarterly and Garo veteran Imiri Sakabashira, a cartoonist and painter making his English-language bookshelf debut (he's also been in Vice) with what appears to be an all-new work, a strange and oozing trip report from some kind of porno kaiju movie geography. That's all I know, but the guy comes recommended by persons of good taste. It's $24.95 for 128 b&w pages; preview here.

Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms: Being a dandy new $14.95 hardcover edition of Last Gasp's fine 2007 release of Fumiyo Kouno's gentle, generations-spanning story of young women connected to Hiroshima and its ever-present 20th century legacy. The artist recently won an Excellence Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival for the book's 2008 sequel, Kono Sekai no Katasumi ni, which hopefully will appear in English one of these days.

Shutter Island: Well here's an interesting tie-in for the upcoming Martin Scorsese picture - a swift Tokyopop English edition of French artist Christian De Metter's 2009 comics adaptation of Dennis Lehane's original prose novel, 128 pages in color for $21.99. Preview here.

Olympians Vol. 1: Zeus: King of the Gods: The first out the door in First Second's new wave of releases, seeing George O'Connor of 2006's Journey Into Mohawk Country and 2009's Ball Peen Hammer (with Adam Rapp) begin a projected 12-book series adapting Greek mythology to an action comics style. It's a $16.99 hardcover, although I understand a $9.99 paperback edition should be around soon. In color, 80 pages; preview.

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Vol. 1: I don't think I can cite the Golden Age of Reprints when the last edition of this was out in 2005, but that thing's going for something like $160.00 on Amazon now; I guess the demand is out there for a $24.99, 112-page Boom! Studios hardcover edition of what appears to be half of Don Rosa's much-loved extended 'origin' story for the great duck character, which doubles as a massive homage to the good (great!) duck artist Carl Barks. A similar two-volume re-release of Rosa's related stories (previously collected as The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion) will follow, resulting in a total of four volumes.

Bringing Up Father: From Sea to Shining Sea: Ah, but this surely counts! Yet another sorely tempting $49.99 item from IDW's Library of American Comics, but of a slightly different makeup, content to compile just a single, huge 1939-40 storyline from George McManus' beloved strip (est. 1913), following Maggie & Jiggs and their newly married daughter on a cross-country tour. A big (11" x 10") 272 pages, with the usual extras.

Big Questions #13: A House That Floats: A new $9.95 Drawn and Quarterly installment of Anders Nilsen's long-running serial of humans and (especially) animals skirting survival an a strange, bucolic place. Always worth a look as one of the few remaining alternative comic picture rockets around that doesn't do the all-in-one thing. Sean Collins reviews it here.

B.P.R.D.: King of Fear #1 (of 5): But if it's a more traditional $3.50 piece you're after, I doubt you'll go wrong with this new Guy Davis-drawn kickoff to one of those climactic storylines that crop up in the Hellboy universe's most prolific series. See it.

The Boys #38: And speaking of building toward things, writer Garth Ennis has mentioned that this series is now set to run for an extra-long 70 issues, with two more connecting miniseries on top of the completed Herogasm, which seems to mark this final (for now) 'origins' issue as the series' halfway point, mostly. Presenting: the Female.

King City #4 (of 12): Here's some good Brandon Graham reprints, sprinkled with new bonuses.

Tank Girl: Skidmarks #2 (of 4): Here's some colorized Alan Martin/Rufus Dayglo reprints, which I hadn't read when they were new.

Starstruck #5 (of 13): Here's some excellent old 'n new or old-made-new and certainly newly colored though not colorized material from Elaine Lee and Michael Wm. Kaluta.

Batman Confidential #40: Woah, Sam Kieth for the next four issues.

Greek Street #7: And Peter Milligan too.

Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books: Your non-comics oddity of the week - a new Bart Beaty & Nick Nguyen translation of a 2005 academic tome by American studies professor Jean-Paul Gabilliet of the University of Bordeaux, analyzing the history, distribution and turbulent legitimization of our domestic stuff from an interdisciplinary perspective. I can't imagine this not being worth at least paging through, which you can do online via Google Books. From the University Press of Mississippi; 432 pages in hardcover for $55.00, priced for learning.

Most Equivocal

2010-01-02T23:59:00.001-05:00

Here's an old truism: if you've followed a critic long enough, their year in review piece isn't going to be very surprising. Well this year I've finally found a way around that little hazard: not reviewing comics! Ha ha, finally some payout from that month and a half spent writing about French comics nobody bought!

As a result, this year's very exciting and highly objective Top 10 countdown is even more nonsensical than usual, although the more I think about it the more I wonder if this whole 'problem' is all the more fitting. I've never, ever thought of an end of year comics list as anything other than a necessarily subjective expression of a writer's experience with an art form that year; as a result, I presume the writer hasn't read everything, and isn't necessarily looking to include everything he or she has read. Likewise, I tend to take the ranking of highly dissimilar works, one on top of the other, as a means of sorting out what the writer values in the medium, how one comic's visceral impact, say, might outweigh formal experimentation, or how verisimilitude maybe emerges as more appealing to that individual than self-evident literary flourish.

These are the fine distinctions that lists can push to the front; that's why it's not just a few works under review, but a year. Granted, this perception tends to favor annotated lists over plain bullet points, and it doesn't leave a lot of room for lists by committee or vote -- I participated in one of those a few years ago, and god bless Chris Tamarri, wherever he is, but that was enough for one half decade -- but that just syncs with my idea of 'criticism' as offering ideas to hopefully enhance folks' experience with the medium. It's not the only brand of criticism around, but it's what I've always tried write.

That said, in the spirit of overindulgent explication that is my hallmark, allow me to offer some words on books I didn't include. C'mon! Humor the old man. Five years is fucking forever on the internet, and going whole weeks without a review puts me firmly in the semi-retired bracket. It's hard to believe there was really a day where comics critics would go months without writing. Anyway, they're all dead now.

***

THE TOP FIVE CAVEATS OF 2009

5. Alec: The Years Have Pants: My main rule, in place since 2006, is that a comic must be appearing for the first time in English, in substantive part, in the year in question, to be eligible. No, I don't have an airtight I'll-make-partner-for-this definition of 'substantive' at hand, but then, this year didn't offer a lot of opportunities to explore matters of first impression, like what to do with Brian Chippendale's Maggots, which appeared in broken-up form in minicomics, and anyway was initially conceived as a unique item available for perusal in the artist's bedroom (A: include it). When in doubt, I can probably just hide behind subjectivity. See? What a great concept!

Obviously not to be included are career retrospectives and/or omnibus compilations of prior published works. In no way does that mean you shouldn't check out something like this entirely awesome collection of groundbreaking autobiographical comics by Eddie Campbell, one of the godfathers of the genre in English and a restless, inquisitive stylist. While you're at it, don't dare overlook Dark Horse's unexpected publication of Crossing the Empty Quarter and Other Stories, a lovingly detailed retrospective of a quarter century's work by the excellent, elusive Carol Swain, specialist in elliptical, metaphorical portraits of society's outsiders and marginals, with a few sharp departures into expressive narrative. Top flight.

4. George Sprott 1894-1975: Also obvious are serialized works newly available in collected editions. This hugely acclaimed book was initially presented as weekly pages in the New York Times Magazine (still online), and in fact made my best of list back in 2007. It has not declined with age, and benefits nicely from careful latter-day augmentations. Seth tends to get slammed online as a nostalgist and a snob, and his considerable success as an illustrator and book designer has probably started to overshadow his skills as a cartoonist in a serious way by now, but none of this affects the sensitivity he affords his haughty, flawed characters populating an adoringly detailed fantasy past of old local television and older, bounding adventure.

And if that's not quite the adventure you're looking for, well - I've probably written enough about The Winter Men by now, but it is always highly recommended.

3. Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941: And god, what of the Golden Age of Reprints? Chris Mautner had a nice rundown of the year's highlights earlier today at Robot 6, and I thereby defer to him, although he didn't include my personal favorite. And no, Greg Sadowski's Fantagraphics-published collection of pre-WWII superhero comics is certainly not the most academically rigorous item of the era - if anything, its minimal drizzle of historical context encourages daydreams about how wild and woolly early Golden Age costumed adventure comics might have been, even though I suspect most readers will know that it was mostly a ton of cranked-out shit, styled to fill space above any particularized entertainment impulse.

But that presumes two things: (1) that contemporary reprint projects have to strive toward well-cited education as a firm objective; and (2) that contemporary readers cannot tell when they are being given an impression rather than a lecture. The academic impulse seems increasingly prevalent - how many reviews honed in on the added context this book afforded its publisher's Fletcher Hanks reprints, above what it said about its genre's potential? The latter aspect is imaginative, I admit, but the capacity of today's reprint collections to adopt distinct identities from the presentation of their comics content rather than the content itself does not foreclose on the potential for valuable, creative excerptions from larger bodies of work.

There are dangers, naturally - to cite an infamous example, I felt Chip Kidd's presentation of Jiro Kuwata's work in 2008's Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan actively detracted from the fine comics at hand (although query whether it could possibly be better that the work wasn't presented in English at all, which is I think the primary alternative with an obscure project like that). Yet Supermen! excited me, not primarily for bringing Fletcher Hanks around to greater contextual sense -- although I liked that too -- but for suggesting a burning, manic soul of superhero comics, a reckless freedom differentiated from pulp writing and feature films by gnarled visual style while set apart from newspaper strips by virtue of a restless hunger to entertain quick and hard.

It felt like the start of a future, and the comedown only hit when I realized I enjoyed it more than any new superhero comic of 2009.

2. The Squirrel Machine: But back to the rules! Next rule, a very useful one: no comics that I didn't read, and boy, I didn't get to read an awful lot of interesting-sounding comics this year. People did seem to like this new Hans Rickheit book, for instance. I also didn't get to Carol Tyler's You'll Never Know, Book One: A Good and Decent Man, or Jacques Tardi's You Are Here, or Marian Churchland's Beast. But at least these books were somewhat well-covered as far as bookshelf comics go. Does anyone remember, for example, Laurie Sandell's The Impostor's Daughter: A True Memoir, the kind of big-ass publisher's Major Comics Project that could have dominated discussion even as recently as when I started blogging? Couldn't comment; didn't read. How sick with content we are.

1. [webcomics]: And then there's my own flat-footed failings. Like way too many writers-on-comics-without-a-disclaimer, I don't cover online comics nearly enough. Or, to be exact, I didn't cover any online comics whatsoever in 2009, which I think is a damning failure indeed for an allegedly catholic comics critic, particularly one that keeps yapping on and on about cultural differences in comics creation while ignoring the place where old provincial concerns hold the least sway. Maybe to be replaced by new provincial concerns. I'll know in 2010, I do so resolve.

***

THE TOP TEN COMICS OF 2009

10. The Color of Earth: I always like to start these lists off with a troubled work that nonetheless wins me over -- that's a critical bias, btw, valuing works with considerable (if sometimes theoretical) flaws because, impliedly, the work's excellence shines brighter for its handicap -- and what better selection this year than the opening volume of Kim Dong Hwa's trilogy of relentless poetic metaphor linking the stuff of a bygone agrarian Korea to female sexuality, both developing and stirring, in the person of a young girl and her single mother. Every chapter is a capsule, catching a scrap of time and setting loosely cartooned humans against detailed scenes of nature, emphasizing the fluidity of human living as something in concert with the biological inevitability of flowers and fruits and rain. Like the seasons, or aging, this concept never, ever lets up.

Such total absence of narrative self-consciousness is rare for a comic released in North America; indeed, this is maybe the easiest comic on planet Earth to poke fun at -- as per Tom Spurgeon, it's partially about "how flat-out naughty everything in nature is" -- and some will doubtlessly find its obsessive focus to be irritating, particularly once diminishing returns in both the basic visual sense as well as sheer narrative accumulation begin to set in as of vol. 2, The Color of Water, followed by The Color of Heaven.

Yet to me this first book remains a splendid exploration of the poetic storytelling potential in an ostensibly plainspoken, no tricks, no dazzle, one-picture-cleanly-follows-the-next comics style, and its metaphoric union of teen girl masturbation and a mother taking a lover to nature's cyclical authority is quietly, excellently subversive on the North American scene. That it might plant the seed of 'manhwa' perceived off-the-cuff as something other than manga's dumb little sister is a fine bonus. Review here.

9. Cockbone: Josh Simmons is turning into a fixture on my end of year lists, and that's because he won't stop producing the most face-scratchingly cruel horror comics around. This one was first published (and reviewed) this year in the Robin Bougie-edited filthy sex anthology Sleazy Slice #3 and then released as a standalone 24-page minicomic in a plain brown wrapper, and I can't decide which venue is more fitting. Possibly a homage of sorts to Chester Brown's Ed the Happy Clown -- or at least the child of profound influence -- Cockbone nonetheless rises up as a very Josh Simmons comic, witnessing another innocent fed to the hell of this horrible world and its ugly magic, spined penis and hallucinogenic spunk and all. Best final page of the year too.

8. West Coast Blues: You see, this is what I'm talking about. It was a fine year for crime comics, and you absolutely don't have to choose between Darwyn Cooke's Parker: The Hunter and something else in the economic sense; it's a fine book, a nice piece of cool craft that fixes the source material's struggle between money-driven criminal forces in a monochrome period style that suggests stylish jackets and chairs forged of sickened steel, to say nothing of Parker, who is harder.

But man, I just liked this one more. A 2005 work from Jacques Tardi, translated to English this year, West Coast Blues sees a canonized master working fortunately far from masterpiece expectations yet well within his career-spanning affection for the genre. Teeming with fleshy characters prone to bleeding and puking, rippled with burn lines of existential dismay, the story keenly exploits how the thrills promised by bloody adventure outside the law segue into the terror of governmental systems failing to protect their cozy consumer citizens. Compared to this, peerless Parker is a captain of industry, and I guess I tend to root for the underdog. Review here.

7. Treehouse of Horror #15: Surely the finest corporate franchise comic in four seasons, and a stellar example of how a storied pop culture monolith can inspire fascinating, personal variations. It probably helps that The Simpsons really is a monolith, in that it's singular - I suspect Marvel's intermittently-compelling-at-best 'indy'-style anthology Strange Tales was hamstrung by the burden of dealing with properties that need to exist in multiple places -- movies, games, cartoons -- for multiple audiences, resulting in a jokey default mode of interaction.

The Simpsons, meanwhile, knows exactly where its audience is from its specific cultural position (and comes fully equipped with a Halloween tradition of messing around with the format), possibly allowing Kramers Ergot founder and project guest editor Sammy Harkham a firmer idea of how to direct the many excellent talents present. As a result, Matthew Thurber & Kevin Huizenga advance the show's characters, timeline and politics into doomy mayhem, C.F. mixes visual signals into disturbing comedy, and Ben Jones straight-up kills it with a magnificent adoption of the look and feel of a television episode for riffing on bootleg merchandise and artistic appropriation, two things readily on the minds of contributors to long-lived characters. Review here.

6. Cold Heat #5/6: So I guess it makes sense that a whole series stamped with Jones' fingerprints would rank a little higher, eh? The return of Cold Heat was my favorite funnybook surprise of the year: two double-issues of all-new stuff, limited in run and priced at a premium to face down the increasingly ugly economic circumstances facing 'alternative' longbox comics, even the ones where alien power shimmers in the sky and a teenage heroine smashes evil's face. Especially those, maybe. This was my favorite of the pair, blending Jones' outright giddy approach to scripting an action climax -- it's like hearing a friend throwing together funny lines and situations so enthusiastically you can't possibly let it register as a joke -- with Frank Santoro's geometrically loose-limbed visuals, a restless shape-shifter with an adamantium skeleton. The result is a comic as if projected by sheer will from a shared impression of genre.

5. Prison Pit Book One: Funny thing about Johnny Ryan - despite his reputation for boundary-pushing comedy, a lot of his projects are very old fashioned at heart. Structurally, Angry Youth Comix sits closer to John Stanley in its building gags and character business than any underground transgressor or post-'80s alt showcase, while Blecky Yuckerella is practically Nancy-esque in its laser-honed daily strip focus. And even Ryan's one-page lampoons a la The Comic Book Holocaust are marked with richly curved lines as fit for glossy mid-century panel gags as sketchbook shit-eating, which only helps the laffs along.

I think that made this one seem even more striking, as Ryan suddenly raced to the front lines of bookshelf-canny New Action sagas with an all-fight tome as internationally cognisant as anything by Brandon Graham or Bryan Lee O'Malley, yet wholly original in approach. The tale of a prisoner, a pit, and all the stuff destined to either meet with his fists or meld with his body, Prison Pit is as visceral and gory as fantasy throwdowns get, while remaining almost contemplative in its plain-paneled studies of bodily movement. And bodies are crucial; this story might seem decompressed like some manga, but it also taps that vein of wonder over physically transformative possibilities, of changing through struggle. Everything in the pit spurts, spits and pumps, which puts it nicely in line with the artist's comedy - if it weren't for Dash Shaw he could have titled it Bodyworld and ended up even more ahead of the pack. Review here.

4. Footnotes in Gaza: Hopefully in the next few days I'll have something written on this latest slab of Joe Sacco reportage and how its narrative disposition does and doesn't relate to its more divisive sibling-in-spirit, Emmanuel Guibert's, Didier Lefevre's & Frederic Lemercier's The Photographer (which I enjoyed). For now, rest assured that Sacco's sweeping return to the Israel-Palestine conflict distills the subjective-as-hell stuff of personal narrative, lots of 'em, into some state of the art for the North American (auto)biographical tradition.

3. Driven by Lemons: I first wrote about Skyscrapers of the Midwest artist Joshua Cotter's 'difficult second album' as an excited highlight of my SPX experience here, but then I tried to boil it down here, so maybe that version bears repeating:

Presented as a facsimile sketchbook, Cotter's follow-up to his popular Skyscrapers of the Midwest is the kind of dense, inventive, idea-rich thingamajig that'd knot your belly with intimidated awe if he showed it to you on the side, though the philosophical musings and cartoon iconography within are personal enough that it's more like you broke into his bedroom and pulled it out of a drawer.

The tale of a lil' rabbit's personal journey, more or less (kinda), this is the kind of comic that sees a new visual style pop up on every third or fifth page, yet images recur, anxieties solidify, and even the endpapers have something to add, so worked-over are all these pages with spew of the soul and skull. For funnybook adventurers.

That'll do, pig. That'll do.

2. Asterios Polyp: Wow, have you heard of this one?! I don't know how much more needs to be said regarding the on-page merits of superhero legend-turned-art comics man of mystery David Mazzucchelli's triumphant return to comics, so humor me while I talk about talking about comics, and how Mazzucchelli has forced the question of art. I know I can use practice developing a surer perspective on comics' visual aspect, working at the critical vocabulary and learning to apply it better to comics as a whole. I can think of a few superhero comics that called for a hard, holistic glance, like Wednesday Comics, which was top of the pops as a symbolic corrective to 52 and Countdown, but demonstrated that bland stories can't just be conveyed in a larger, glossier way, or Detective Comics, a thrilling feat of iconographic-metaphoric invention that, for its balance between the art and a very competent but on-the-level plot, wound up never quite breaking out into ecstatics.

In contrast, Asterios Polyp almost immediately kicks 'plot' in the stomach and smashes its face into the curb as hard as it can, and leaves it stewing in blood and loose teeth. Some critics have since declared its story dead on delivery, but my enthusiasm for Mazzucchelli's work comes from how his lines and symbols and typography and colors reanimate the story and absolutely command its movement. From this study of how its art works -- and to study the work, you have to study the art -- you can trace the potential and function of any of its myriad familiar comic book tools. It's all at the front - it's Mazzucchelli the teacher, drawing firm examples. Look close, and benefit. Modernism can be your Santa Claus.

1. GoGo Monster: And here's Taiyo Matsumoto and the best comic of 2009, a tale of two schoolboys in their third year of classes, one of whom spends most of his time fading in and out of a world of invisible spirits facing an even more obscure threat; it was published in Japan in 2000, right before No. 5 began serialization. I've had a review half-written for a little while now -- the book came out pretty recently -- so in lieu of that I'll provide a sub-list of Reasons Why This is Great to compliment my Top Ten Funnies and Best of Show Disclaimers rundown:

(A) It's the most furiously cartooned book I've read all year, a no-assistants one man show of total vision penmanship that leaves its 'realistic' scenery vibrating; buildings literally wave and curve in the background while characters adopt scribbly or sharp appearances based on minute shifts in mood. It's like Matsumoto seized on the propensity of manga characters in stories where boys see spirits to shift to superdeformed mode when something funny happens and exploded it into three-dimensional sphere of hypersensitive bodily flux.

(B) Gone is any trace of the punkish action comics posture of Tekkonkinkreet. Why is that a virtue? Because GoGo Monster functions as a stealthy follow-up project; there's no doubt in my mind as to why Viz selected it to follow that long-brewing success, since it's functionally a loose remake, at one point even replicating a plot twist. The trick is, the work formerly known as Black and White concluded with its heroes extricating themselves from the heroic narrative as a means of growing up. Thus, GoGo Monster rips the explicit fantasy out and presents another two boys in a similar story that's nonetheless entirely different, more delicate, daydreamier. Better.

(C) But you don't need to know that part. GoGo Monster is also a lovely self-contained unit, an original hardcover graphic novel, even in Japan, where such things are pretty rare. Every bit of the format is exploited, with a cardboard slipcase giving way to a wraparound cover that doubles as the work's first page, although the 'first' page is actually page "-8," which leads into page -7 on the inside-front cover, then -6 through -1 on tinted pages, followed by several pages of black to indicate a narrative break of two years, and then full-color titles on page 0, thereafter counting to over 450 in crisp b&w. You bet your ass the solid black inside-back cover is significant - it's another break in time, one we can't see past.

(D) The main action of the book takes place over five chapters: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring. This is a cycle, though, not a schematic. If anything, GoGo Monster is reminiscent in tone (not style) of John Porcellino at his sensation-of-moments airiest, with seemingly half the pages in the book devoted specifically to evocation: word balloons floating idle chatter in the air, familiar characters' faces gazing out, words repeating, images repeating, airplanes, rabbits, scribbles on a desk, not so far from the scribbles that are the children.

(E) Dotting this mental-temporal landscape are startling scenes and images, ranging from a multi-page depiction of a boy swimming in front of an adult -- every page-topping wide panel set outside the pool exactly the same while below are jagged, tense variations of working through water with a cramp -- to one of the indelible character designs of 2009(/2000) in the form of the story's semi-antagonist I.Q., an older boy wearing a silly assortment of boxes over his head, always with a single hole cut out to reveal a spectacularly eerie photorealistic cross-hatched eye, always the most detailed bit of anatomy on any given page. Cross-hatching serves as the looming presence of adulthood throughout the book, finally erupting in a classic I-am-a-master-cartoonist-and-I-can-do-ANYTHING-I-WANT visual blowout climax in which all panels become filled with infinitesimally minute cross-hatches and stippling so that the reader is forced to stare deeply into every panel, slowly navigating as if literally in a dark room, just barely making out faces or legs or terrible animal shapes, and it's actually scary.

(F) All of this seems absolutely effortless, from the most worked-over panels to the (far more plentiful) pages of perfect, energetic doodling. I have no problem believing that Matsumoto may not have known what would be two pages ahead of him at any given time, though I doubt that's true, it's too complete a work. The book is best read in one sitting; it's a breeze of a comic, sincerely refreshing. So great is its artist's expressive power that even the book's chilly, ill-fitting English typeface seems outright alien, as if drawing attention to the futility of translation. Aesthetes may still object, and they wouldn't be wrong.

(G) Still, Matsumoto endures. I haven't even gotten into the book's literary qualities, like I.Q.'s reader surrogate role in first observing the action and then questioning the narrative, or how the setting embodies the educational approach at work in the boys' lives, allowing little children to work through their odd issues while placing pressure on older kids to set an example, and establish a hierarchy. Matsumoto isn't out to criticize, however. He seems totally happy as an adult, content to look back to childhood with an adult's command of his art and ask: was it awesome? Yeah.

How is your holiday?

2009-12-28T18:30:00.001-05:00

*If you're having one. I am, and mine's ok, thanks.

***

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival 2 (concluding the one con report I've written that I feel best about; believe it or not, a lot of this is an exercise in learning the value of concision, albeit in the micro sense - contains minicomics, new manga in Japan, various recent releases circa the end of November, one bit inspired by a dream I had on Christmas Eve, more, etc.)

***

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

[nothing]: Just keeping in practice here for now; it's gonna hurt when I'm doing this every week after Marvel and/or DC stop publishing. But that's next year!

You could always show up at your store anyway, see if they're doing anything for/privy to the existence of Indy Comic Book Week, maybe holding a New Year's Eve's Eve sale. Maybe they got in that non-deluxe Rocketeer hardcover you've been looking for, or that Alec collection?

In lieu of funnybook content, I'll also mention that my whole family went out to see Sherlock Holmes in theaters, so here's a few things:

1. It is something to realize that From Hell has been sufficiently internalized by the right people that bits of the Iain Sinclair tour-of-London chapter can poke their head out of a breezy, summer-style money machine like this to serve as plot dressing. Is there some more immediate influence at work I'm missing?

2. The acting is fun in the same way as in some of the recent Marvel movies, in that the main performers seem entirely relaxed and willing to play up some amusing business dredged up from the background and lore of very storied characters, and all the better if the performer's very presence offers some added synchronization. By which I mean Robert Downey, Jr. is in twitchy scamp mode here, as opposed to cocky-yet-lovable rogue mode as in Iron Man, but the unavoidable aspect of being Robert Downey, Jr. adds a vulnerability that plays equally well off of an antisocial soul like Holmes and an ostensibly tortured, 'weapon's burden' badass like Tony Stark.

3. I sort of liked it. I mean, it's formulaic as possible, to the point where you can finish characters' lines at times before they do, but it's efficient, chummily-scripted, with a fairly endearing tendency to emphasize in-movie logic over the supernatural fantasy movie stuff the script hangs around as modern superhero/sci-fi decoration. That's not to say most of the action scenes aren't ludicrous, but I kind of dug how the pictured tried to at least metaphorically stick with Holmes' everything-makes-sense point of view.

4. On the other hand, my mother absolutely hated it, primarily because the script doesn't extend the slightest hand to the audience. Indeed, the plot is almost entirely powered by stuff happening quickly, Holmes looking at things and then performing vivid extrapolations from background details so as to move the characters to the next event. Now, I haven't read more than three of the original Holmes stories in my life, so maybe they're all like that, and if I were feeling especially generous I'd argue that point is that we, the viewers, cannot ever hope to approach such a fabulous mind, better that we sit agog and observe - which doesn't explain quite why typical reader surrogate Watson is that much of an ass-kicking he-man, or how the female Catwoman to Holmes' Batman doesn't get the same filmic aura of untouchability even though she's presented as the occasional superior to Holmes' intellect, but I guess she's not the star of the movie.

5. If there's one thing that stood out about Guy Ritchie's direction -- which is mostly smooth and unspectacular, a no-doubt prudent submersion of his hyper-vivid taste for indulgence into blockbuster machinework; compared to someone like Michael Bay, which own hyper-vivid taste for indulgence doubles as blockbuster machinework, Ritchie seems like a well-behaved classmate that doesn't make you grin as much -- it's a little mote of wit added to the action stylings, so that the obligatory slooooooow action shots double as Holmes thinking about stuff, working out every angle, the 'joke' being that he can't even punch someone or whack them on the head without really thinking it through. This even extends to a dramatic fake-out explosion scene, where slow-motion (and a mournful string refrain) seems to indicate tragedy, but it's actually just Our Man sorting things out again, so as to explain invisible scents and elusive sights for our benefit later.

It's still a lecture in the end, but you take what you can get.

Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival: Collapsed Experience Special Post Part 2 (of 2)

2009-12-25T23:00:00.005-05:00

(back to part 1)

***

"Money from an animation festival..." I thought, stacking up my purchases. Only $2.00 for one of those old Continuity Comics Deathwatch 2000 crossover issues with the "indestructible" Tyvek covers - I figured it'd come in handy if it started to hail. Just to my right, two junior high-looking kids were ransacking Frank's quarter bin.

"Hey!" one of them shouted, "what's more important? Story or animation?"

At first I didn't know what the hell he was getting at. He was holding up an old 1988 Viz/Eclipse issue of Masaomi Kanzaki's Xenon, so I wondered if it was some anime thing and the wires had gotten crossed. But as Frank helpfully fished out an old(er) Paul Gulacy issue of Master of Kung Fu to illustrate the competing values of in-panel art vs. panel-to-panel art, I realized the kid meant 'animation' as in 'how panels read' - the illusion of movement from picture to picture, and, implicitly, the value of how that illusion is maintained. It wasn't a preference, that was his impression of what comics art is; no wonder he went for the action manga.

Absently, I fished through my bag for a freebie I'd picked up on the way in: the local retailer (and show co-organizer) Desert Island's free comics newspaper, Smoke Signal, issue #3. The store's table also had stacks of the famous Fort Thunder issue of The Comics Journal (#256), which I can forthrightly credit with changing the very way I look at comics, way back in 2003 when I was maybe a year into reading the things regularly again. I concealed money in envelopes and sent them to the torn-down Fort's P.O. box, and I got some strange things, issues of Paper Rodeo - spilled and spattered ink in maybe-sequential form, with lots of hand-drawn local ads. It could have been from Venus.

I began to scan the tables with more intent. More 'work,' I guess. If there's anything you can damn well count on with a first-time event like this, regardless of the guest list, it's that there won't be a ton of coverage later to clue you in on what you missed so you can fill the gaps in your education online, SPX-style. Shit, there wasn't even a lot of online hype before the show. No, this one wouldn't be too unlike the classic coal country/midwestern/name-your-region hotel shows, bargain bin heroes not 100% unlike Frank Santoro loading up the longboxes when all the door prizes are gone, although I guess none of them were giving an art talk later. Just packed up and gone. Man, I still like those shows.

And like those shows, there were no 'hot debuts' in Brooklyn; a small stack of advance copies of Dash Shaw's The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century materialized by the end of the day, but it wasn't a big deal. There were no 'buzz books' to warrant long lines or excited prose; at one point I turned around to see Charles Burns and Adrian Tomine sitting at the Drawn and Quarterly table with an appreciative but very permeable crowd in front of them. Surely this virgin exploit did not bear the burdens of MoCCA, the lynchpin status or the institutional support - it was a local show down in a literal fucking cellar, and, for all the spread-out crowd and the animation playing on a flat screen television on the stage where the youth group probably does Live Stations every Lent, it felt it.

I paged through Smoke Signal. When I first read Paper Rodeo I didn't even understand most of what I saw, but I'm glad I had the experience while I was still developing a comparatively organized critical consciousness. The Desert Island paper isn't nearly as haphazard, it's pretty well organized as far as broadsheet-style folded paper comics giveaways go, balanced neatly between rough-hewn but basically direct humor stuff, semi-sequential visual vignettes and traditional autobio and lit-comics narrative forms. My impression is that it decently captures a lot of today's non-webcomic alt-comics styles.

What was slowly fascinating, though, was how the show didn't behave that way, what with all the east coast 'art' comics people and European brut 'n design forces and the screenprinters and mark-makers floating around. No, this wasn't a show about new or big comics, or particularly balanced comics or, y'know, not even (eek!) relevant comics, not in the sense that they're bound to lead the medium toward anything popular or prominent. It was about arranged comics, packed together to recast the familiarity of these works -- and believe me, if even all you do is MoCCA and SPX every year, it is familiar -- as something more prone to aesthetic impression than miscellaneous buy-my-book capitalism, as seems to be the norm for the alternative shows I've hit.

So: curation, to its due extent. And make no mistake, the show floor was set up in your typical farmer's market format, with items to buy at every stop; I'm sure some tables did better than others, maybe some of the bigger publishers' tables in particular. Hey, I also doubt a curatorial mission statement was drafted somewhere and disseminated among the showrunners, or that a vice's grip was necessarily felt on table registration. Yet left in the room was some character, some gutter-filling meaning, animation between tables that told me that comics could be like stiller forms of visual art and that wide-defined clarity of storytelling could rightly and coherently not enjoy a god-given primacy and no, everyone will not starve and the medium will not lapse further into irrelevancy.

I didn't need to look that hard, it was right in the title: Comics and Graphics, two things that are not the same, but close enough. And if this is not perhaps an inroad to greater cultural recognition of the comics form in the money/column inches (bullet points) (asides) (dreams) (memories)/prominent blog posts/basic popular appeal sense, well - that's how it is in a church basement, at a local show, among the longboxes, off the highway among the Heavy Metal back issues and local sketch-signers, the old food of comics fandom - so why not show some real under-the-stairs niche vision?

I thought hard about all of these things as I ate a hot dog with apples and curry at a possibly-curated food stand in the back of the room.

***

JM: Comics?

TS: Okay. Slam Dunk! I haven't picked up 7 yet, but I have read up until 6. I think that's a fantastic series.

JM: Oh, it's wonderful. I'm looking forward to the big game, which is going to take up the last seven or so volumes of the series.

TS: I loved how 5 ended with ten seconds on the clock.

JM: Oh yes, it gets wacky that way. It's finally outpaced the old Gutsoon! releases. They tried to do a weekly manga anthology here, Raijin Comics, and it just fucking failed. The collections of Slam Dunk just died.

(Golgo 13's camel isn't as manly as him, but it'll learn.)

TS: I'd be curious to know how well this thing is selling. Not in the Direct Market, obviously. Just at all.

JM: I'd be curious to know what kind of licensing thing they've got, because I know that occasionally they're bound to release the entirety of a series. I don't know if they're required to release all of Slam Dunk because they've got Vagabond. I think Vagabond sells really well. I don't know that it does, though.

TS: No, I think Vagabond does well. A lot of people seem to know about Vagabond, care about Vagabond.

JM: Yes.

TS: I think too, in America--for some reason - [Miyamoto] Musashi stuff, just anything Musashi, like The Book of Five Rings, etc. All of it seems to be available, out there. I'm not sure how that happened, but the stuff has presence.

JM: Swords man! Showing up to the big battle, all disheveled, making a wooden sword out of the oar from the boat he rowed to the island on.

TS: Have you seen those Toshiro Mifunes?

JM: The Samurai Trilogy? Yes.

TS: I like those movies. They're a little Gone With The Wind-y, but I like them.

***

Plague Hero (Tunde Adebimpe) & What Had Happened Was... (Domitille Collardey)

But if there was any new and now and very very exciting trend to be divined from the show floor, it'd have to be... ENVELOPE COMICS. Which are self-published comics that come hand-packed in an ENVELOPE. It's not Tyvek, but I dig the protective and decorative qualities!

As you can see, Plague Hero contrasts the gold, green and gray facial close-ups of its outer packaging with the many colors and faces of its cover (actually a wraparound). That's kind of a feint, since every one of the comic's 28 pages is a double-page splash, facial close-up or similar tight view of something, albeit in often blazing color.

See? Same as the envelope. Artist Tunde Adebimpe is best known as a songwriter and lead singer for the music outfit TV on the Radio, and his full page images (no panels) are bordered at the bottom by a narrative poem that crawls across each set of facing pages as a stanza. Or a verse, since this might as well be a song with musical illustrations, though I suspect most comics readers (myself included) view 'musical' traits in comics as secondary to panel arrangements and page beats.

In contrast, Adebimpe's music is synesthetic, derived from bright colors swirling around his pages, two at a time. Facing pages are usually occupied by animal boxers (a mule and a bird-thing) squaring off in a big fight, narratively positioning the work's colors as in conflict, even as his words delight in the thrill of merely being up in front of so many people, helpfully depicted on the cover. You soon notice that both fighters are Adebimpe's narrator, indicated through a mix of neutral language and willfully conflicting words and pictures - truly it doesn't matter if you win or lose, 'cause just being alive in the plague makes you a hero.

Not to turn every one of these comics into a device in the larger metaphor of the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival 2009, but yeah - the victory is getting up and doing, which is a decent enough theme for a fast-paced debut comic I haven't seen up for sale anywhere outside the show itself.

Meanwhile, the envelope for What Had Happened Was... seems more apt to pretend that a special gift of comics has been mailed straight to you, which I guess it could be if you order it from artist Domitille Collardey's webshop ($6.00 U.S., $8.00 elsewhere). Note the seal of approval below!

Collardey's highest profile work so far has been with the Chicou-Chicou group, a French collective that saw an eponymous, 400+ page anthology published last year by Lewis Trondheim's Shampooing label at Delcourt. But Collardey is New York-based now, so her one-woman debut is this 20-page b&w and color oversized pamphlet, in English and French (with English subtitles at the bottom of those pages) - if she represents the European and American forces at work in the show, the book's makeup reflects an adopted hometown advantage.

The subject matter won't upset anyone's traditional American indie comics perceptions either - indeed, this is probably the most 'classical' comic I found at the show, in that it hews closely to the autobiographical/here's-stuff-I-saw/here's-stuff-I-like style that's probably still what the resolutely unacclimated deem all self-published comics of an alternative festival to be. Mind you, I don't know nearly enough about French autobiographical comics of the last twenty years to address the work on that level, which is surely pertinent.

Anyway, Collardey has an attractive, wavy line, sometimes enhanced with delicate paints - the visual impression is vulnerability thickened with resolve, as there is an assured craft to her pages that disallows you from feeling her drawings might come apart, even if they look it. Tellingly, the various and sundry collected strips share the theme of uncertain beginnings, from the cover art of Our Woman struggling through blackness and inside covers festooned with traces from artistic influences to stories about moving to New York, fixating on Americana (the Michael Jackson collection), interviewing someone admired (Françoise Mouly) and even proving an origin story for a life's path to comics, its first and last pages maked by dropouts in an otherwise constant narration, artistic serenity likened to the self-sustained bliss of childhood.

The fragility of that place is not stated, of course. It is everywhere.

***

(The title of this translates to Mysterious Girlfriend X, but I'm guessing the title page displays all you'll ever really need to know. The series concerns a yandere-type classroom weird girl and the young man who becomes addicted to her spit, enough so that his body needs it all the time, and then they fall in love and get psychic powers. Great old-school trashy manga art from Riichi Ueshiba.)

TS: Empowered. Do you read that?

JM: I stopped reading after the first couple of volumes. I did get the one-shot that Dark Horse just put out.

TS: What do you think about it?

JM: It's always a little weird. I think it was the first one, some of the responses surrounding it may have imbued it with more satiric bite and cleverness than is actually in it, I think? Because when you look at more than one of these books, I think some people have come around to this, it's as much a wallow in tie-me-up and "oh woe is me" female super-hero stuff as it is a castigation of the industry that degrades female super-heroes. It's as much a soap opera, which isn't something you might get from the one-shot, which just fills you in on who Empowered the character is.

The construction is kind of funny, because it just bounces from scene-to-scene, willy-nilly. It's interesting, because it's almost - it's like a deviantART comic that's gotten a bunch of attention, something that's done well enough to get a thousand pages of it released from a front-of-Previews publisher. You've gotta respect that man! Have you read a lot of Adam Warren's work?

(It's smut, from what I can tell. Dumb smut too, at least by synopsis. 'Mature' manga by way of being a boys' comics love comedy with added breasts, perhaps not atypically so for Afternoon, a monthly phonebook with something of a reputation for skewing younger and pandering to otaku needs. Not that they're the only men with sexual desires, but the story's premise is unique to that demographic, run on the virgin-borne mystery of a woman's fluids, her unknowable innards given magical force. Ick.)

TS: I've read Livewires. One or two volumes of Empowered.

JM: What did you think?

TS: I think it's a have-your-cake and eat it too kind of thing. I'd read it after it had been out for awhile, after it had been agreed that "this is a comic that was doing something." I don't know if you'd call it "positive" for females, but it seemed to have been decided that it was satiric, that it was critical of that fetish mentality. I have a bit of a hard time with that, part of my understanding is that it was born out of sketch requests.

JM: Well, born out of him getting sketch requests that he felt weird about. That's what gives it texture, that he was feeling kind of weird about doing this. I agree with Johnny Bacardi, who I think said that it would have made an awesome serial in Penthouse Comix.

TS: Ha. Sure. I don't actively have an idea or defense prepared for not sharing the "pornography is bad" mentality, I just don't think it is, unless it's criminal.

(I mean, it's not like drawings of girls in cute and/or minial outfits are terrible on their face, but you've got to examine the context. Which means, granted, that you'd also have to deal with yaoi's idealization, aestheticization, fictionalization of gay men, a very small, not-incredibly-powerful-in-Japan group, primarily for the apolitical consumption of heterosexual women, a far larger consumer group.)

JM: I suppose one argument is that pornography promotes augmented, unrealistic views of women. But when you look at it, the sheer amount of pornography on the internet -- if you take it as one big thing, the economics show that pornography, stealing it, enough to bite into the industry's money -- it really does represent a massive spread of different kinds of women, and from far enough back, looking at all of it, it really doesn't represent the same unrealistic depictions of women that say, a magazine spread might.

TS: Television or film too.

JM: Which might be because it's so incredibly cheap to make it successfully - a digital camera, nothing else. Inevitability has its virtues in that way.

(Wait a minute - "massive spread"...? Oh Jesus Christ, just... like, just skip to the next segment or something, ok? Nothing good is coming of this.)

TS: I don't know, it just seems that there has to be a worse consequence than merely promoting an unrealistic view of women and relationships before something gets shut down. There's a sort of brilliance to that thing the Onion News did on "why pornography should be more realistic," that it should depict complete shame, failure to reach orgasm, that it should depict people not calling you the day after...

JM: You look at the big adult production companies, say in the Golden Age of porn, the late 70's, and there's always a few projects that go for that kind of realism. Obviously it's never going to be dominant in the industry, but there always seems to be something that is at least trying to achieve a more base realism.

TS: There's just a lot of weird art porn as well. I don't know the names of those things. I don't know how far down this road I want to go. Empowered? I think it's drawn well. I don't want to read it. Not for me.

JM: For me, it's fallen into the "it's nice," but not nice enough for me to want to read it? There's stuff that I don't jump on.

(Hey, are you even reading these transcripts? Y'know, Afternoon looks almost exactly like a Cerebus collection in dimension - that huge transcript in The Latter Days was the only part of the whole series I didn't read. I just looked at the illustrations. All love to Tucker, but you can always just look at the pictures here, panels in panels, panel-to-panel, 'animation.')

TS: I do think that it's interesting, from a publishing model standpoint, that Empowered seems to have proved that you can successfully serialize a story in graphic novel format.

JM: And a lot of that is because Warren gets the art out.

TS: It's on its schedule, and it comes out regularly. Hell, we're talking about a book that comes out and is invariably shrink wrapped and yet it's been successful enough to have five full volumes.

JM: Exactly. It's a thousand fucking pages on the market, coming from Dark Horse. That's not something that should be taken so lightly.

(It's alright. This looks okay. See how the big finish erupts the page, dancing that obscures the heaving bosoms the attentive obsessive might spot first. Scroll up, roll down - god, that happy, momentary primacy of drawing as drawing, god, be it ignorance I still can't deny it, god, I can't even read this and it seems to succeed, in spite of itself.)

***

The second area of the show I visited was the programming room in the Secret Project Robot gallery space, just one climb of the loading dock stairs away from the actual end of the road (Metropolitan Ave.), by the razor wire fences. It was almost 4:00 and the panels were running late; I stood in the antechamber and listened to the last 10 minutes of Ben Katchor's absolutely packed presentation, which at that point was a story reading with comics-on-the-overhead accompaniment. Stripped of visuals, it sounded almost exactly like A Prairie Home Companion, down to the slow-paced narration and steady gulps of crowd laughter, although presumably more urbane.

My experience with the panels turned out a lot like a video game, in that each round took me closer to my goal of getting a seat. (Which doesn't say much for my taste in video games.) I made it to the floor for the Flatlands: Comics On the Picture Plane discussion, a fairly cerebral march of presentations by Lisa Hanawalt, Mark Newgarden, Ron Regé, Jr. and David Sandlin on the idea of comics as both arrangements of symbols and depictions of imaginary three-dimensional space. The crowd rioted, Salvador Dali kicked over the projector, the cops turned on the hose, I didn't take notes - hopefully a transcript or recording exists somewhere, because picking through text might be the most fruitful means of engaging the material. Also, the Secret Project toilets are lit so your piss seems to glow.

Tucker Stone arrived in time to grab seats up front for Frank Santoro's live drawing event, which was wonderful, and probably wouldn't be served well at all by a transcript; it should have been held upstairs at the church, with Santoro at the pulpit exhorting the congregation. Programming organizer Bill Kartalopoulos stood off to one side, occasionally lobbing queries in Santoro's direction. On opposite ends of a table and dueling overhead projectors, two artists created one page of comics each, adapting Odysseus' encounter with the Sirens, consulting Santoro's golden ratio diagram for organizational guidance toward a stronger, more appealing image. It was like a polemical chalk-talk gone self-aware enough to allow for alternate expressions of its lecture routine:

(1.) R. Sikoryak initially seemed on track to complete his page in 15 minutes, until I saw him breaking out the scissors and slicing transparency paper into panels. He then switched and swapped out different layers, refining his drawings with different marker colors per sheet, comparing images and working in stacks as he cast Thimble Theatre characters in the story, a la his Masterpiece Comics. He noted that Santoro's grid suggested more of comic book-type layout than the E.C. Segar strip style he'd normally adopt, and declared the page would be finished in about a month. Piecing things together, it was clear how meticulous the act of construction could get in his work, which I think led to his engagement with Santoro's designs on a holistic level. Back and forth he went, tinkering, squares and rectangles in and out.

(2.) Gabrielle Bell began by drawing her panels. Then she started filling in the uppermost left panel, and finished in the bottommost right. Her page was composed of panels of even height and varying width; her usage of the grid created something of a layout symmety, although she seemed to use its contours mainly to guide her in-panel drawing, which did not stop for more than a few moments at any given time. Every line she made stayed on the page; she made no mistakes. When she finished ten minutes early, she pulled out some markers and began to color.

***

TS: Ahh! Dark Tower!

JM: Ahh! Dark Tower! Jae Lee!

TS: DARK TOWER!

JM: AHHH!

(Ladies and gentlemen, your 2009 Japan Media Arts Festival Grand Prize for Manga winner - Makoto Yukimura's Vinland Saga! Yeah, take that, author of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms!)

TS: Did you hear he's supposedly going to do another book?

JM: Oh, really?

TS: Like, a book-book.

JM: Where did you hear that?

TS: Hell, I don't know. Some conference thingy.

JM: He's illustrating a prose book?

TS: No, no. Stephen King is doing another Dark Tower book.

JM: Oh, Stephen King?

TS: Like a book-book.

JM: I hadn't heard that. What kind of bad attitude is this, "book-book"? Comics are fucking books.

TS: Fine. A prose book.

JM: Yeah!

(Seriously, I've been demanding this thing get itself licensed since 2005, and if you'd told me then that Takashi Nemoto would have a new book in English before Yukimura... sometimes I wonder if Planetes wound up exactly visible enough that folks with authority looked up and looked at the sales and took note of Yukimura as someone not to bother with.)

TS: Have you read any of these Dark Tower comics?

JM: Yes, I've read a few.

TS: You're a big Jae Lee fan.

JM: Yes I am. It's kind of heartbreaking, because this Richard Isanove - see, Jae Lee is doing the pencils, and Isanove is really filling it in with the coloring effects. It's not so pleasant, I don't think. All the people look like Muppets molded from latex, the people look like they're wearing rubber people costumes on top of their bodies, and it's really too bad. Jae Lee's - one thing he's really good at it, is that there's always at least one page in his comics where people pose as if they're uncomfortable in their own skin. Especially in the early stuff, the early Dark Tower The Gunslinger Born series. The teenagers in that comic actually look like teenagers, they don't look fully mature which is really hard for a lot of artists to do. I'm sure he's using some photo-ref, but he fucking sells it.

I mean, it's Jae Lee, he's always a little strange because he's really gotten into a heavy, almost theatrical style presentation, like an opera or something else on a stage. It's pre-Tezuka manga, with the little dog Norakuro running along the stage kind of presentation. With Lee, I get the feeling from his comics that he's just not big on cinematographic elements in his art. A lot of Image artists, and he's associated with that Image generation, he started on Namor [the Sub-Mariner], then he did a bunch of WildC.A.T.s and Youngblood stuff. He took this posey style, people posing, and he's built an entire aesthetic around it. It's operatic, posing with faces half-formed. For my money, the best thing he ever did was that one Ultimate Fantastic Four [#20], where 3/4 of the issue, everything is in shadow, with these little color flashes for the eyes. That was awesome. What's your opinion on Jae Lee?

(What this house ad is saying is: "America, you want me and I want you! Here is my want face, now show me yours!")

TS: I don't really have a knowledge base to have one. I've read Fantastic Four 1234 and I tried to read the Dark Tower book because I got it for free, that's it. I read those books, the novels. I liked those when I was a kid. Wizard and Glass, that's a good one. It's just a western with supernatural elements. It's not like the other books in the series. But those books went to hell, they all went to complete hell. Stephen King becomes a character in the books, they incorporate when he got hit by a van and nearly died, those are plot points in the book.

JM: In the new Dark Tower book maybe Stephen King will team up with Superboy Prime.

TS: Well, the bad guy in the last Dark Tower book is the same guy from Final Crisis. Wait, no. The Crimson King. Maybe that's Doom Patrol.

JM: Red Jack? That character was kind of based off the film The Ruling Class, the Peter O' Toole movie where he thought he was Jack the Ripper. That's a fucking good movie. Probably my favorite Peter O'Toole movie.

TS: Oh yeah! That's an old Criterion isn't it? I've meant to see that. He's wearing a bowler cap on the front, right?

JM: Yes, that's it, with a halo around it. Alan Moore cites that movie in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century too.

***

[untitled] (Dash Shaw) & City-Hunter Magazine #1 (C.F.)

If the artists on stage were set to the task of demonstrating attitudes of page composition, hanging meat on the bones of one page of several -- image construction as a comic's endoskeleton, let's say -- other 'established' artists put out some new small-run picture zines: exoskeletal images. Dash Shaw -- he of comics and animation -- keeps it direct with a brown, landscape-format eight-pager depicting scenes from a big drinking party.

That's all. It's nice. There's shirtless toasts, cases of Keystone Light, girls kissing - a simple progress. Although I wonder if there's some special, obvious-but-not-to-me purpose, some underlying...

Oh my god, it's live drawing from the Ben Katchor panel!!

But 'simple' doesn't always remain cozy, as often proven by C.F., creator of Powr Mastrs. I'm pretty sure you'll know if you're gonna click with his new Fantasy Empire Magazine Co. release (see also: Core of Caligua) from the opening editorial.

This is issue #1 of City-Hunter Magazine, so a new feature probably isn't that surprising; the other 19 pages, three of which are labeled page 14 (with a and b subdivisions) share the same easygoing goofball spirit of discovery in less a mortal city than one divined from the word' s personal implication. It's not a tribute to the manga of Tsukasa Hojo either, but a similar and especially personal urban imagination runs the place.

Main Dice, for example, is four pages of a uniformed action man posing small and shadowed in diverse locations that do just enough to establish a 'city' that the eventual sci-fi car park and Arabian Nights palace interior just have to fit in with your internal street view. Other sections have drawings of a castle and a compound, a nine-panel science fiction segment, an extreme-fuzz close-up of USA Today's Life section at its web page, and a full-page color bondage pin-up that becomes oddly disquieting when you realize how improbably the girl's leg is tied to the desk. A Paid Advertisement tempts you to go here, for additional allusive sequences.

***

TS: The Comics Journal #300.

JM: I've read the Comics Journal.

TS: The whole thing?

JM: Not the whole thing. What was your favorite interview in it so far?

(Here's a little Yukinobu Hoshino, from his ongoing Case Records of Professor Munakata, as mentioned in the other week's Manga post. I've gotta fess up - Jason Thompson was onto something, this really does look a lot like Ryoichi Ikegami, particularly in the stark backgrounds of the first two tiers, and the undramatic outlines of the characters, the mark of a 'realist' mangaka honing it down, saving it up to stay on schedule.)

TS: I liked the Fraction interview with Denny O'Neil, I haven't finished the Huizenga/Speigelman one, but I liked what I've read so far. That's the one I mentioned to you, the one that kind of broke my heart a little bit, finding out that somebody who I would've assumed - maybe not that they have incredible financial success, but that I assumed was perfectly comfortable and well off from how much they make.

JM: Well, I haven't read the interview, but maybe that's not Huizenga's idea of success.

TS: Oh, I would doubt that it is. I think most of the sort of people who are going to do creative, non-mainstream, "alternative" work, work that's clearly tied into following what one wants to do with one's art - it's normal to see them not caring about whether they have financial success. I don't think Frank Santoro, Dan Nadel, those kinds of people are concerned with what their work is doing to their bank accounts to figure out if they're "successful." At the same time? There's a desire on my part -- possibly socialist and liberal -- that the artists I like be financially successful.

That's the thing with comics, you can only read so many stories about these people getting hit by medical bills, suffering without treatment when they face something like cancer, a disease that hits about a third of the public - and yet all that work those people have put in, they're incapable of paying for help. It's their choice, sure. They have to face those consequences. But it doesn't mean I have to like it, or not find it upsetting. I'm not going to be hardcore and cold steel when people who make the work I like end up in a place where someone might say "your choice!" I just would've liked to read that Huizenga made a little more money, because I like what he does. He may not care about that. But what he cares or doesn't care about doesn't change my feelings. It certainly doesn't mean I have to adopt his worldview, which strikes me as a bit less cynical then my own.

(Look at the white outlines on these women, how they seem cut and pasted against the background, by hand - no light source, a rightmost shirt and head of hair molded from the same distressed approach to a pool of ink. Fuck the historical context of Western influence on a hardening aesthetic in the 1970s - this is some by-hand manga at the edges, in the attire.)

JM: Sure. I still remember a comment from the Howard Chaykin/Ho Che Anderson interview...

TS: I haven't read that one yet. I'm saving that one, because Howard Chaykin is by far the best interview subject the Journal has ever had.

JM: I like the history aspect of Howard Chaykin in the final Journal, he's in some of the early ones.

TS: Yeah, I've read one recently, it was one of those fantasy comics that he's done.

JM: The Byron Preiss one? Empire, or the one with Michael Moorcock [Swords of Heaven, Flowers of Hell]?

TS: It's the Michael Moorcock one.

JM: That's also the Frank Brunner issue [#51], the one where Howard the Duck's cigar is put out on Stan Lee's desk, an open letter "fuck you Marvel."

TS: "I won't be signing that contract!"

JM: Yes! Well, there's a line from the new Chaykin interview, I'm paraphrasing it, but a line where he says "I'm a very sentimental man. I'm just not a very sentimental writer." And that sticks me with me.

(Old times, old times.)

TS: Chaykin just has a complete lack of bullshit when he's talking. There's this interview in the original collection of his The Shadow mini-series where he acknowledges that he doesn't really care for the Shadow, and that his job with the Shadow was to make something profitable for his employer. And yet you don't read something there that comes across like hackwork, some rush job.

JM: The first issue of that Shadow comic, I think it came out the month before Batman: The Dark Knight Returns - that is some straight blood and thunder mid-80's super-hero comics. The supporting cast of the Shadow, getting shot in the head, page after page after page.

TS: I can't remember if it's a girl or a guy, but there's somebody shoved inside the water cooler, broken and mangled with just a...

JM: He's having a blast, you can see him just having fun with the Shadow saying awful things, playing with his fascist leanings. I think Dennis O'Neil said in the old Mike Kaluta Shadow book that "you gotta be careful with the Shadow," because there is kind of a fascist element. You have to treat the Shadow as basically a demigod. You know how they always say that there's one thing you have to buy to get into a story? The thing you have to buy about the Shadow is that He's Right. He's right about what's wrong, and you have to buy that or else you're going to end up in sticky territory.

***

In issue #300 of The Comics Journal, J.C. Menu, one of the founders of L'Association, asks:

"Do you live with the feeling that this civilization with all its industries, including the book industry, is going to collapse?"

(This is much better if you imagine the silly bird Lewis Trondheim always draws him as.)

"What kind of crazy question is that?!" replies Sammy Harkham, creator of the art comics anthology staple, Kramers Ergot, which has always been a bit more accessible than its reputation suggests. Then he answers very forthrightly, but I was nodding my head from line one.

Elsewhere, Gary Groth jokes that Fantagraphics will soon be switching its publishing model to selling exactly one copy of one comic for one million dollars. This will place it more in line with 'fine' art in galleries. I looked around the show floor, having returned through the dark rain with Tucker Stone, and I realized that the comics market atmosphere could have its own non-unique but perfectly real leavening effect on the notion of 'gallery' art, as collided with the comics form, promoting the desire to read visual art as well as merely behold it, even in the absence of perfectly sequential story panels, to emphasize knowing and feeling in art, not as a good citizen's trait but as encouraged out from the body of the work, as a way of seeing.

Comics can be stately, or aloof. They do not need to tell clean stories, or depict accurate scenes, or represent activities so that anyone can understand. They can, but they don't need to. And it does no good to assert that crisp criterion underground and declare what you see within only the purview of curiosity. Because you can claim until your cheeks are beets that comics is a mass medium, and must therefore literally cast its net wide, but this defines the form, implicitly, as struggling with acceptance. An accurate definition, sure: very few comics appeal to a lot of people, compared to other 'mass' media, 'popular' media, and often success is stated equivocally, as reference or adaptation, as visibility in public or fodder for bolder mass arts.

Mass appeal shouldn't have to exist as a lost kingdom, a city to re-take or a gate to beg into. To think of mass appeal in the slight arms of the Brooklyn curation is to be dared to understand that the battle ended with the form, that comics' mass appeal always exists, inside the beholder. To understand that images connect, that drawings are bones, that animation, if invisible, still dangles the world between you and the artist - this explication it is the heart of comics. It is clear, clear as day, unpretentious in that it doesn't demand any literal sequence, just the crackle of activity behind your eyes, the voice whispering that visual art embodies a world, and from there you can deny that world, deny representation, switch and swap, allude - it's mass appeal as perspective, and you can educate that, and benefit greatly. But it's a thing of the masses.

Maybe I'm condescending. Maybe everyone has considered this, and is over it. Maybe I'm slow and backward with visual art. But it is still comics, that snatch of essence freed to hover above the closing tables and counted money.

And so I became surrounded by images.

***

TS: Starr The Slayer! Did you finish it? I didn't finish it.

JM: I did finish it. It's fun. What I liked about it was that it had the kind of "loose" fantasy feeling that brings me back to [Richard] Corben's underground days. Daniel Way is writing it, but he's writing it in a way that it mixes with Corben's art and really makes you feel that this is some collar-loosening fantasy thing. There's people saying things like "Motherfucker!" and it's - I liked it. I haven't read a lot of Daniel Way's stuff, I haven't liked a lot of Daniel Way's stuff I read, but I found this satisfying. I don't think it would have worked with a different artist honestly, but I liked the final product.

TS: Well, it's a comic that I didn't keep up with mostly because it was selling out pretty consistently. It's numbers are pretty small. I have a soft spot for Corben's art, I think the only thing I haven't really enjoyed by him was the Lovecraft adaptations. I like Lovecraft quite a bit, it's just - I didn't enjoy them. I don't want to be the "book was better" stickler, but that's how I felt. Lovecraft's stuff is so pure, and I don't want something else in the way.

(Kodansha was happy as can be over the debut of the first collected volume of Shinkichi Kato's The Planet of Sutakola, devoting no less than THREE Morning 2 ad slots to the occasion; scanlation hounds of a few years back will recognize Kato's name from the early '90s gonzo satire National Quiz, but the art never does quite look like anything else.)

JM: Have you read that Lovecraft comic that Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows did? The Courtyard?

TS: No. No, Jacen Burrows is - he's never been my thing.

JM: From your reviewing Jacen Burrows, I get the feeling that you always start off kind of suspicious of him, but he inevitably wins you over at the end.

TS: There may be some truth to that. I should give that some thought. Courtyard - it's short, right? Prestige format style thing?

JM: A two issue series, collected into a prestige format. Then they did a color prestige format version, and the new horror comic they're doing is prestige format. The Courtyard is based on a short story Alan Moore did. The new one, Necronomicon [EDIT: this is incorrect; the title is "Neonomicon"], is an original comic that Jacen Burrows is doing whenever Crossed is finished. It's going to follow up the Courtyard. Apparently it's going to be intense, with some of the Lovecraft racial stuff.

TS: I'll give it a chance. I try to read all his stuff, just haven't gotten around to it yet.

***

This is from an imported Presspop Gallery portfolio of album covers by Toshio Saeki, illustrator and comics artist, colorful guy of fantastic sex zones.

These are glossy pages with colored ink sitting inside a larger screen printed cover, all by Keith G. Herkiz - Bordetella.

This is from a comic titled All Kinds of Bees I found sitting in a pile labeled Take One at Secret Project Robot. It illustrates victims of domestic violence telling stories, sketched covertly.

This is Bluetooth I by Panayiotis Terzis, a large newspaper of drawings over photographs.

This is School, a Japanese-published, English-language zine edited by Maki Hakui. It's really wonderful - 22 pages of writing on art & culture by women, often talking to women, or about women. Great stuff on classic shojo manga too.

Oh... oh right, manga! Fuck, I knew I forgot something!

***

TS: Ahhh.

JM: Ahhh?

TS: Peter Milligan.

JM: Ahh! Peter Milligan. I haven't even read the new Greek Street issue, although I have it. I guess when I say things like "Peter Milligan Book of the Week," it's because I'm just tickled that I CAN say things like that, because for a while, he was just absent. And now he's just really prolific. I loved his Vertigo stuff back in the 90's, like Face.

TS: The Eaters!

JM: The Eaters. Enigma. Hell, you want a good post-Watchmen super-hero movie, Enigma would be a good idea. It works really well as a comic, you'd have to change it to be a movie, but it's very good.

TS: Have you read Bad Company?

JM: Oh yeah, I've read some of Bad Company.

TS: I really like Bad Company.

JM: That was the early 2000 AD stuff.

TS: And then there's the Brendan McCarthy stuff, all of that stuff is great.

JM: And let's just state it for the record. Rogan Gosh - and you'll notice, the order is Brendan McCarthy and then Peter Milligan because McCarthy had a particularly strong hand in that, but that is literally one of my favorite comics of all time. Rogan Gosh.

(This manga is titled SOLA. I don't know the artist's name, because sometimes online translation programs fail me. Afternoon devoted 200 of its 1200+ pages this month to a special digest volume, printing the winners of the Four Seasons Awards for debut stories. This one took home the Moto Hagio Special Award, which I presume is a commendation for visual ingenuity. So here's the simple idea of two characters connecting.)

TS: Bold statement.

JM: I don't know if it's my favorite-favorite, that would probably be Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise, but Rogan Gosh is way up there man. It is.

TS: Did you read The Programme - wait, you kept up with that, you wrote about it, right?

JM: Yes, I reviewed all of Programme at the Savage Critics. It's the kind of thing where you're kind of like "they tried, sigh." On the Programme's tombstone, they have the inscription "It Tried." I know you like that C.P. Smith guy, he did the art for Wolverine Noir.

TS: His work in Wolverine Noir is fantastic.

JM: Parts of the Programme is - I think Jonny Rench was coloring it, and then Smith started coloring it himself, and it's almost, like, confrontationally ugly. It really didn't look like anything else, Wildstorm, Vertigo. It was trying to get down to it. The story - it's okay, it's Millgan. It's about how superpowers fighting will inevitably push people further into extreme zones. It was okay. Overlong at twelve issues. I reviewed it.

TS: Infinity Inc.?

JM: Oh, Infinity Inc.! That just went right off the rails at the very end. That final issue just screamed, "we gotta shut it down! Hit the button, we gotta turn it off!" I guess they were just told "wrap it up," and that's what they had to do. It had some good parts, especially in the beginning. it was kind of a reappraisal of the stuff he was doing in X-Statix. It had its moments, let's say.

(And here's a flashback, the extravagence of layout replaced by needly clouds of hatching and cross-hatching.)

TS: I will say that he's done some stuff that I didn't even realize he'd done, like Venom vs. Carnage with Clayton Crain on the art.

JM: He did two of those! Toxin!

TS: He did some stuff with [Spider Man's] Tangled Web, but that was pretty much everybody on Tangled Web.

JM: He and [Duncan] Fegredo reunited for a Flowers for Algernon take with the Rhino. That was a funny story.

TS: I think that's sitting in the to-be-read pile, along with the Programme. The only real black mark I have for him right now would probably be The Resurrection of Ra's Al Ghul. I always thought of that as a "helper" comic.

JM: That was pretty disorganized, that thing. Even if you read it in the context of [Grant] Morrison's Batman megastory, it barely relates to anything. You can just take it out. It's a big action crossover, but you could literally remove that book from the Morrison Batman library, and nothing will happen. You'll lose nothing of importance.

TS: They chucked away a bit of the best of what they did with the Dini Batman stories, it was right after, I think? Batman drugged Ra's into a coma, keeping him locked away. That was brilliant, they dumped it. There's been a couple of those, where they put a button on the end of these Batman villains in a fashion that was truly satisfying, an end that was smart and made it like "you don't need to see them anymore." Status quo changes that were smart and worthwhile. Like turning the Penguin into what he is now.

I still remember that old Kelley Jones - it might have been written by Doug Moench? Kelley Jones Swamp Thing/Killer Croc story [Batman #521-522]. You ever read that?

JM: No, I don't think so.

(And here's the start of a climactic dance number. I liked this one a hell of a lot -- I really like the idea of climactic dance numbers -- although heaven knows if I'd like it more or less if I could read beyond image.)

TS: It's when Killer Croc became such an animal that they just had application for him anymore, so Batman entrusts him to the care of Swamp Thing. He's no longer cognizant of what's going on, and so that's what Batman does with him, just hands him off to Swamp Thing. He becomes a sort of pet. It wasn't touching or anything, but it was a smart conclusion for characters that never have any conclusions. Ra's Al Ghul conclusion would've been more worthwhile if it had just lasted longer. It gave a nice Heavy Metal Cruel idea to Batman. You can't do anything to Ra's Al Ghul, he's always coming back, so why not drug him into mindlessness and lock him up in a room? That's what they did.

JM: The mechanisms of damnation.

(When I was younger, I loaned my brother a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. When I asked him what he thought of the narrative, broken up and jumping through time, he replied that he didn't read it in order. He picked it up every night, and read segments in an order contrary to Vonnegut's out-of-order. "Like the Bibe," he said. I thought this was absolutely ridiculous, because even broken order suggests an authorial intent, rising action cresting left-to-right, like the timeline we might imagine for our lives, if we read left-to-right.)

[NOISE OUTSIDE]

(Today when I look at the form of simple, storytelling manga in a foreign language, I realize my attachment to the visuals is as 'wrong,' but to boil these representations down to sheer expressions is to touch something in comics, your own stupid, inaccurate inventions of animation, a misunderstanding just for you, that still communicates. You are the girl here, and the boy is the comic, and he is dancing, still for you.)

TS: The mechanisms of damnation.

(What consolation.)

[A SCREAM ESCAPES THE EARTH AS HORNS SOUND, BIRDS CAW, AND YAE, EACH AND EVERY INTANGIBLE HUMAN CONCEPT SUDDENLY MOLDS PHYSICAL BEING OUT FROM THE BLUE MID-DAY NEW YORK CITY SKY, DEAD AND ABSENT SOULS AGAIN LIVING, VISIBLE VIVID AND TRANSPARENT LIKE A TRILLION-LAYERED HEAVING FILTER OVER THE FUTILE SOLIDS OF SECURE HUMAN INDUSTRY, STREETS AND BILLBOARDS ALL HOT PRISMED AND MISTY ECTOPLASMIC - IT IS THE LAST DAY]

JM: Let's go back to books I haven't read.

TS: Did you

[END]

Holiday Good Times

2009-12-21T23:30:00.001-05:00

*Well, at least I finished my Christmas shopping. Other than that, last week wasn't a great one for getting anything done, although I maintain I would have gotten part two of that con thing up if the words had only worked like they're supposed to. I'm now consulting the manual.

*Theatrical Shorts Dept: Oh, I did see the new Coen Brothers movie, A Serious Man, which I liked a hell of a lot. Although I think I was misled by some of the reviews - this is much more of a comedy than anyone seems to be talking about, in that there were laughs just about straight on through. I thought it was a lot funnier than Burn After Reading, for example, which landed for me as another not-quite-there Coens attempt at deliberate farce (I haven't seen The Hudsucker Proxy, though, the most infamous of those efforts, albeit an infamy of an earlier, different time). Maybe I just find them funnier when the weight of their effort isn't on the comedy?

I particularly liked how much its of a piece with other Coen pictures, how it adapts the chaotic universe outlook of (just sticking to recent work) diverse stuff like the literary adaptation of No Country for Old Men and the all-star spoofing of Burn After Reading to some deeply-felt religious struggle. By which I mean how the landscapes of No Country are neutral ground for human misdeeds and the control of fate offered by the flip of a coin won't stop you from being hit by a random car, and how the conspiracies and intrigues of the Burn cast are all self-absorbed, mostly fantasy playing out in an uncaring world - how all that mirrors the religious person's agony at how when things go wrong you don't weep in thrall of an immediate God.

Ah shoot, I'm gonna have to get into spoilers. If that's not your thing, skip down to the bold letters.

I took the primary theme of the film as physicality's interaction with spirituality/the supernatural, an old concern for sure. The opening Yiddish fable is a synecdoche; the husband accepts the physical nature of things while the wife views the home's situation in supernaturally religious terms, with no conclusion reached after Special Guest Star Fyvush Finkel gets shanked - the departure of the 'threat' to the house leaves the husband convinced that his wife is crazy, while the wife is content in having obviously saved the day.

The film proper reestablishes this setup right in front, with the titles and the title tune literally flowing into the ear of young Danny, preventing him from hearing his lessons (and happily suggesting that the movie itself will probably only confuse and distract from genuine religious concerns), cross-cut with Larry's physical examination, the scientific results of which are of course incomplete, a fact the Coens underline by going for the great old 'smoking doctor' joke. No surprises here.

And as Larry's life proceeds to spend the remainder of the film falling apart in a Job-like manner, he's mocked by the fact that his trials are fairly logical as far as things go, that his three 'friends' (the Rabbis) can only embody different ways of confronting struggle under the eye of God, and certainly that no divine answer appears to be forthcoming. Granted, I've seen some readings of the film cast the finale as God's 'answer' to Larry's moral failure (in contrast to Job's success), but I see it less as explicit punishment than human physicality finally, ironically begging questions of deeper contemplation that can otherwise be put away like paying for records by mail.

Consider how the film's ending mirrors its (post-Yiddish) beginning, again cross-cutting between Larry and Danny, except this time Larry's old body is clearly in bad shape from within, and he must contemplate not social or economic meltdown but the reality of death. At the same time, Danny tries to pay off the bully that's been chasing him for the entire movie, but here at the end he's standing still, as they both watch the storm swirling, suddenly aware that there's bigger things than them in the world, real physical smitin'.

Naturally, none of this mandates a belief in divine power; you can read the whole movie as a study of silly characters running back and forth crazy from superstition in the nihilistic world, in the same way that you can read, say, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, as an avowed agnostic's intellectual survey of variations on faith. The context would argue otherwise -- and you'll notice I'm not reading the Coens' film in the specifically Jewish context it's planted in, so I'm possibly on thin ice myself -- but that multiplicity of readings is going to be present with subject matter that explores such doubt without blinking. Although I daresay that denying A Serious Man's, er, seriousness in exploring these deeply-felt theological basics involves holding the characters at more of an arm's length than the filmmakers themselves.

But yeah - funny movie, a really sharp, clever treatment of topics near and dear to probably a lot of people the Coens knew/know. Lots of love in this picture, great touches, etc.

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

(Do note that while the awesome-looking Eddie Campbell collection Alec: The Years Have Pants is set for imminent release according to some lists, such as Midtown Comics', it is not on Diamond's list for the week... so basically, keep your eyes peeled at the shop, since it might be there but maybe not.)

Footnotes in Gaza: Straight up from the footnote-like region of the Merchandise section of the Diamond list comes a popular recent pick for your stop-the-presses-here's-a-book-of-the-year talking point - the new 432-page(!) hardcover work by Joe Sacco, honed in on the town of Rafah at the bottom of the Gaza Strip, and the 1956 killing of over 100 Palestinians that embodies the area's living conflict.

Every time I see a new Sacco comic I'm struck by how out-of-time he seems; with his in-story avatar furiously scribbling down the action, his caption narrations topping many a panel and his subjects frequently turning to address YOU the reader, a pretty fucking straight alt comics line can be drawn back to American Splendor, or even Justin Green's stuff, to an extent, which isn't something that can be said at all for contemporary lit comics superstars of Sacco's stature. His innovation, I think, is in refining these storied techniques in pursuit of a subject matter that both benefits from the comics form -- particularly in evoking the faces of displaced people, and their bodies and living spaces and posture too, but the faces are very very important -- and conflicts with it in terms of tone, if a bit from the formal characteristics Sacco adopts. In other words, I'm never surprised that the back-of-cover quotes on these things continue to marvel at the sight of comics as journalism, because Joe Sacco's comics look like comics as anyone who's read Archie can recognize.

That's not to say he's alone in the effort -- I suppose any number of biographical, reportage comics, that 9/11 Report book etc. use the same basic tried-and-true toolkit -- but circumstances have left him as maybe the only A-list longform People Know Him big-time publishing cartoonist in North America today really working an older, just-post-underground brand of comics art, save for Harvey Pekar himself (with various artists, of course). It's really worth comparing with The Photographer, this year's other big comics-as-journalism release, both as immediate in general storytelling posture as Sacco's book but also a bit tricky and formalistic in that (maybe stereotyped) French alternative comics manner. But yeah - look through this book, it's something. The price is $29.95, the publisher is Metropolitan Books.

The Original Johnson Vol. 1 (of 2): And speaking of comics biography, here's the first IDW collection of Thriller co-creator Trevor Von Eeden's webcomic saga of boxing legend and early 20th century media sensation Jack Johnson. It's 128 color pages for $19.99.

The Art of Herge, Inventor of Tintin Vol. 2 (of 3): 1937-1949: Being the $39.95 center hardcover layer of Last Gasp's big (11" x 8.9") collection of drawings and illustrations by the great Georges Remi, picking up with the start of the color Tintin and passing through the WWII years. With text by Philippe Goddin, translated by Michael Farr. It's 208 pages.

The Great Anti-War Cartoons: Or, for more of a thematic arrangement, Fantagraphics has a $24.99, 192-page Craig Yoe-edited collection of international images from across 200 years. Samples.

Sublife Vol. 2: The latest in this annual (or so) landscape-format Fantagraphics series from John Pham, who first came to most readers' attention with the 2000-2002 self-published, multi-format series Epoxy, a really striking fusion of NON-ready lush cartooning with Otomo-like detail action. He later appeared in early issues of the Fanta anthology MOME with his serial 221 Sycamore St., an odder, less satisfying union of Chris Ware-styled storytelling devices and dreamy symbolic interludes reminiscent of David B. The extra-length debut issue of Sublife was greatly devoted to revising that serial, and it will continue into this new 48-page, $7.99 edition, along with a smaller (even more Ware-like) outer space serial, a self-contained story of a more direct pastel & scratching dissonance (samples here) and assorted short strips. Certainly worth flipping through.

Hellboy: The Bride of Hell: The new Mike Mignola/Richard Corben joint, this time a $3.50 one-off comic with Our Boy on the trail of a missing woman promised to evil. What's not to like? Preview.

Detective Comics #860: The last segment in the Origin o' Batwoman sequence, and the final Greg Rucka/J.H. Williams III issue for a while, as the latter takes some time to work on the larger story's concluding five chapters. Or six. Actually, Williams has been firmly hinting that the rest of the story might not even be happening in Detective Comics itself. Regardless, issue #861 starts up a three-part Rucka-written Batwoman side-story with art by Jock, and the Cully Hamner-drawn Question backup, as here, as always.

The Mighty Vol. 1: Tucker Stone once described this Peter J. Tomasi & Keith Champagne-written series as the version of Super-Man in that one issue of The ACME Novelty Library where he gouges out all those eyes on the desert island starring in a proper DC superhero comic, which is worth bringing up. This is a $17.99 softcover collection of the first six issues, which'll be half of the whole series once all is said and done in January. Peter Snejbjerg draws a bunch of this part, so it'll look pretty slick too.

Crossed #8 (of 9): In which Garth Ennis' & Jacen Burrows' end-of-days zombie (or thereabouts) series skips 'n whistles ahead, no doubt with an extra laugh on its lips given the heartwarming events of last issue.

Criminal: The Sinners #3 (of 5): More from Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips. Have a look.

Beasts of Burden #4 (of 4): No more for now from Evan Dorkin & Jill Thompson. Check it out.

Frank Frazetta's Dark Kingdom #3 (of 4): I am bound by statute to identify and log every new Tim Vigil-drawn comic or illustrated prose story in comic form, so there.

Gantz Vol. 8: Seriously, Hiroya Oku will probably keep making this so long as you buy it.

Garth Ennis' Battlefields: Happy Valley #1 (of 3): Marking the return of Ennis' Dynamite strain of war stories with a lil' thing about an Australian bomb crew over Germany in 1942, with art by 2000 A.D. regular PJ Holden. Note that there's only three issues due; as with the last bunch of these things, it's gonna be trilogy of three-part stories coming out monthly, so I think some wires got crossed somewhere and Happy Valley got solicited as a nine-part series, when it's actually just set to be followed by two other three-chapter tales. Preview.

Charley's War Vol. 6: Underground and Over the Top: Ho ho ho, Joe Sacco & Garth Ennis not quite enough for the conflict department of your internal Santa's Workshop? Well why not a $19.95, 9" x 12" hardback shot of Pat Mills' & Joe Colquhoun's vintage battle pictures of the sick futility that was World War One? There's no comics next week, so savor these 112 pages of absurd human ruin while you toast the new year. Be sure, it's fiction, but not too much, and of a period, but really unending. Have a funny 2010!

Asleep At the Keys: The Post

2009-12-14T23:00:00.000-05:00

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival 1 (featuring reviews of French brut force Pakito Bolino's Spermanga and various Shaky Kane klassiks, plus comments on new manga in Japan, idle chatter on recent Diamond releases and some actual thoughts on the comics convention in question - the second half will be up tomorrow or Wednesday)

*What's the word of the week? OLD. Old old old. The Criterion Collection of Comics is real.

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

Gahan Wilson: 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons: I mean, c'mon, a $125.00, 942-page three-volume slipcased doorstep -- by which I mean it's so big it doesn't stop the door, you use it to access the door from a lower level -- collecting what appears to be all of the famed wit's content for Playboy, ranging from cartoons to prose stories to illustrated essays... but mostly cartoons. And in the good Criterion tradition, publisher Fantagraphics has readied a set of production notes by designer Jacob Covey and an introductory appreciation by author Neil Gaiman. Big preview here.

The Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures: But if you want your all-in-one hardcovers more recently interested (and a lot smaller) (and way cheaper), you might want to look at this IDW collection of the late Dave Stevens' breezy early 20th century movie serial-inspired odyssey into adventure comics perfectionism, which blinked in and out of sight for 13 years (1982-95) and 111 pages before settling into a conclusion of sorts. It remains an attractive piece of modern throwback costumed hero stuff -- Michael Wm. Kaluta, no stranger to that himself, did breakdowns for some of the later segments -- here newly recolored by Laura Martin, presumably to add consistency to visuals noticeably affected by evolving visual tools. The publisher has two editions ready, a $29.99 basic edition, 144 pages, and a $75.00 Deluxe Edition that adds 104 extra pages of production art and bonus images.

Silver Streak Comics #24 (The Next Issue Project #2): Wow, kinda forgot this was still a going concern - not a reprint at all, but Image's most conceptual of anthologies, assigning today's popular artists to public domain superhero and adventure characters to create a $3.99 'next issue' of a long-gone Golden Age series, printed in the larger period-specific pamphlet format. The first one of these was a very mixed bag, but it's still hard for me to resist the prospect of Erik Larsen, Paul Grist and Michael T. Gilbert (of Mr. Monster) playing around with ye olde Lev Gleason superheroes. The probability of Jack Cole homage is high. Preview.

Asterix & Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book: Being the 34th official entry in the mighty Franco-Belgian series, another old comic, but one that simply never stopped after its creation just over 50 years ago by the late René Goscinny and current writer/artist Albert Uderzo. And 'mighty' stands strictly in terms of money and visibility, I'm afraid; almost everyone seems to agree that Asterix has been in decline for some time now, with 2005's Asterix and the Falling Sky (vol. 33) representing a mild cultural protectionist meltdown over the hideous uniform monster horde of manga, coupled with American superhero jokes dating back to crew cut era William Gaines. This one promises to be a little different, a probably-cozy old-series-talking-about-aging thing wherein 12 short stories track birthday celebrations throughout the years, matched up with a guidebook feature based around text by Goscinny. From Sterling Publishing Company; a $14.95 hardcover, 56 pages.

The Art of Ditko: See, we're passing through the vintage comics color spectrum here. This is another IDW project, a Craig Yoe-edited/designed 9 1/2" x 12 1/2" hardcover appreciation of someone who needs no introduction, nor even a mention of his given name. Rare stories and art are promised, along with appreciations by Jerry Robinson, John Romita and P. Craig Russell, with an introduction by Stan Lee. It's 208 color pages for $29.99.

Drawing Down the Moon: The Art of Charles Vess: Or maybe the latest in Dark Horse's line of artist-focused hardcover showcases will do? I've never heard of any of these things not looking really nice, so if you like high fantasy specialist Vess I can't imagine your $39.99 going to waste. Huge preview here, by which I mean over 1/4 of the book's contents - I get the impression someone's mighty confident about this thing's appeal as a physical item. It's 9" x 12", 200 color pages, with an intro by author Susanna Clarke.

The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion: Ok, what's next in our journey through antiquity? How about an expanded reprint of a 1992 book about a vintage newspaper strip? Layers of an onion, friend. Brian M. Kane compiles and Fantagraphics publishes this 160-page package of essays and samples and synopses of everything Valiant, right up to today, with the participation of the strip's current creative team of Gary Gianni & Mark Schultz. It looks like this. Note that this week brings the $39.99 hardback; a $24.99 softcover should follow shortly.

Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie Vol. 4: House Divided Or Will Fate Trick Trixie?: Oh my god, wait - we haven't had a proper thick book reprinting a big stack of old newspaper strips yet this week? Thank providence good American pluck and industry for IDW's Library of American Comics, because now 1932 and half of 1933 are coming back to life for $49.99. What could possibly come next?

Connie Vol. 1: Captives of the Space Pirates & Connie Vol. 2: Battle for Titan: Oh. Oh right. And finally, there is Connie. Don't know what Connie is? Yeah, me neither, but the internet assures me it's a signature comics work by illustrator Frank Godwin and the product of a smaller syndicate, which meant exposure in smaller papers. Running from 1927-44, Connie apparently tossed its girl hero into any situation deemed attractive for the time, and these two $11.95 books -- 140 and 112 pages respectively -- cover the 1939 sci-fi era of the strip in which Connie went into space to confront space threats. From longtime rare/obscure funnies purveyors Pacific Comics Club, doing a 'deluxe' release and taken up by Diamond. Why not? Now can't possibly not be the time.

20th Century Boys Vol. 6 (of 24): But getting back to new... shit, are manga reprints too??

Children of the Sea Vol. 2: Maybe if it's a newer manga... sure, like this evocative, lightly-plotted Daisuke Igarashi series about special water kids and vanishing fish, sort of an arty children's entertainment, although I understand it maybe doesn't remain fit for children for too long. Up to vol. 4 in Japan; $14.99, Viz, IKKI, high-end.

Elephantmen #23: Ending the current (long) run of self-contained side character stories, to focus on something else next.

Gødland #30: Joe Casey, Tom Scioli. Look.

The Zombies That Ate the World #7 (of 8): Drawn by Guy Davis.

Hellblazer #262: Your Peter Milligan of the week.

Dodgem Logic #1: And finally, both old and new - the official bimonthly lifestyle magazine from off the streets of Northampton, England, fronted by writer/artist(!) Alan Moore, in the thrall of reviving some bygone whiff of the underground papers. Your $3.99 nets you cartoons (by the likes of Kevin O'Neil, Melinda Gebbe and Savage Pencil), helpful advice and chat on society, a CD of local music (including the Magus himself on one track) and texts of varying styles and attitudes. The official site has a lot of free things, enough to warrant an entire section labeled "Steal," which is probably as close to online culture as a new print endeavor can get today.

Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival: Collapsed Experience Special Post 1 (of 2)

2009-12-13T23:59:00.005-05:00

(One week or so ago I traveled to New York City to attend the maiden happening of a new, small comics convention held in the basement of a church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was a somewhat 'curated' event, presented by the local small press comics retailer Desert Island and the art comics publisher PictureBox Inc. It was held on Saturday, December 5th, though I stayed in town until Sunday, December 6th, in the home of Tucker & Nina Stone. I didn't meet up with Tucker until late in the day Saturday, and we spent basically the rest of my trip chatting and drinking coffee -- portions transcribed here -- and walking around the city, with an all-important stop at Manhattan's Kinokuniya Book Store, a key vendor of imported Japanese-language manga collections and anthologies. I left on the 7:15 train on Sunday evening.)

(What follows is culled from all parts of that trip, with transcription again by Tucker Stone, and manga images culled from recent issues of the Shogakukan-published anthology Big Comic and the Kodansha-published anthologies Morning, Morning 2 and Afternoon.)

***

Ah, Brooklyn! Fuck me in the mouth, what a day!

I could hear the drops chattering over the crowd as I ascended from the L line, concrete giving way to clouds, then a cheesecloth sheet of rain. It was alright. I'd never been to Williamsburg before, so I'd walked the entire path to the show in Google Street View; it was nice to be reminded that a real place is still different, in spite of technology, even if that reminder insisted on falling onto my head.

The show was divided into three locations, two of which I visited. The 'floor' of the show was in the basement of a church -- Our Lady of Consolation, no better venue for an alternative comics event in this country -- down a slick set of steps and over a pile of stacked umbrellas. I kept mine with me, so I could drip onto people's tables by way of introduction. Other attendees were less enthusiastic.

"Nobody'd better take my stuff," a woman behind me said, "if this thing's missing, I'm taking someone else's."

"That's bad karma," replied her companion.

"It's not karma. It's community."

***

[THE SETTING IS A FINE LIVING ROOM ON A SUNNY AFTERNOON]

JM: I'm excited about comics. Please, name a comic.

(You might not know it at first glance, but this is the new series from Minetaro Mochizuki, artist of the well-regarded survival horror manga Dragon Head - it's titled 東京怪童, which I can totally understand but I'm not telling.)

TS: Gogo Monster?

JM: I haven't seen a copy yet. Not in my own regular store, the big box book stores don't get it for another week. I'm looking forward to it. Taiyō Matsumoto's really fucking popular in Japan. I guess he's an alternative flavor kind of guy, but among the alternative flavor guys, he's around the top of the heap, and has the pull to get something like Gogo Monster released, like a deluxe hardcover. And when I say, "oh, this is a deluxe hardcover", something in a slipcase, that's because it's based off the Japanese edition.

TS: This is the one with those red edged pages?

JM: Yes! Not only is it the same as the deluxe edition published in Japan, that was the only format. Gogo Monster was an original graphic novel in manga, and while that's not unheard of, they're really hard to come by. Yuichi Yokoyama's Travel was another one, but I think it was published in France first. And that speaks to the economic power that Matsumoto has.

(Lots of very thick outlines and curved figures, with a hipster-ish '70s design sense; at first I thought it was an 'American' type of wacky comedy, but there seems to be a disorienting psychic plotline going, stamped with 'foreign' images.)

TS: It's old, right?

JM: It's from 2000.

TS: When was Tekkonkinkreet?

JM: Tekkonkinkreet is from the 90's. They started publishing that in [Viz's 'mature' manga anthology] Pulp.

TS: And it was the success of Tekkonkinkreet that got him the muscle to put out Gogo Monster in that fashion?

JM: Well, Tekkonkinkreet wasn't a success in America when they first tried to bring it here. That huge Tekkonkinkreet book that they have - that came out because of the anime. The first time they published Tekkonkinkreet in Pulp it went under before it was finished. They finished it in pamphlets, back when it was called Black and White. Then they put out a three volume collected edition that I don't think did very well.

They tried to put out another Matsumoto book called No.5. There's anecdotal stuff out there naming that as the worst selling book in Viz history. It was direct-to-collection in the late 90's, by the time the industry had just fucking crashed - it just didn't work. [EDIT: This is incorrect; the two extant volumes of No. 5 were released in 2002 and 2003.] Tekkon Kinkreet finally did well when the anime came out -- I don't know how well it did -- but they put it out in that all-in-one thing that you can just pick up the whole story, piggybacking on a movie.

(And Napoleon Dynamite's in it too. Because it's beautiful to see a manga out there still waving the "fuck it, this'll never be seen outside of Japan" banner - Jon Heder, your reach is vast.)

***

Spermanga (Pakito Bolino)

No sooner was I on the floor than I turned right and saw this: a big yellow 84-page hardcover slightly smaller than Gary Panter's Jimbo's Inferno -- which is to say pretty damn big -- with visible text in English, wrapped up tight in plastic on a table of sprawling silkscreen prints. This caught my eye - it's silly to deem a huge $40 hardcover comic of this type 'conservative,' but the disposition of the table was such that anything not evidently handmade stood out as controlled.

And then, as you can see above, the friendly logo of L'Association, that most revered of French alternative comics publishers, still without an operational website in the twilight of the '00s. Plus:

The infamous L'Association bar code sticker. "Humanity will not be happy until the day the last bureaucrat has been hanged with the entrails of the last capitalist!"

I'd never heard of Spermanga - turns out it's a 2009 release. Moreover, it's something of a titanic team-up between artcomics forces, being a collection of work by Pakito Bolino, co-founder (with Caroline Sury) of the famed ultra-small press comics and prints collective Le Dernier Cri, active since 1993, when Spawn was huge. It was Le Dernier Cri's table, filled more with Graphics than Comics; I spotted a few copies of the most recent (8th) edition of the publisher's Hôpital Brut house anthology, a handmade, proudly garish, disheveled, different-paper-stock-seemingly-every-other-page affair that makes any given Kramers Ergot read like Y: The Last Man.

Sadly, there were no copies of the group's 2006 dvd extravaganza Le religions sauvages, the extended trailer for which seems ripped right out of my older relatives' nightmares of Satanism as a tone; apparently all copies were reserved for Le Dernier Cri's current exhibition at Brooklyn's Cinders Gallery, presumably the reason why they were in town for the show to begin with.

This is not an easygoing book. Granted, you can certainly list similarities with other works -- Panter seems to glide right alongside Bolino's drawings, and there's an opening lineup of mostly extraneous fantasy characters akin to Brian Chippendale's similarly huge Ninja -- but mark my words, this is harder and meaner than all the rest.

Ostensibly a compilation of four short stories, all of them somehow concerned with weird mutations and violent struggles, Spermanga mostly laughs in the face of literary appeal, but only after a good tease. It's entirely in English -- remember, this is a French publication -- generally tortured beyond all but barest notion of comprehensibility. Panels are laid out in clean, large arrangements, often failing to make narrative sense in relation to one another. There are many action scenes (often against Nazis) and dramatic situations -- indeed, some of the English seems to have been selected entirely based on how cool it sounds -- thwarted by Bolino's habit of drawing characters differently from panel to panel.

I don't mean an expressive, pliable approach to figure work by that. I mean almost totally different character designs as the stories continue, no acknowledgement, no 'hints' - pure capricious feeling. Maybe all the stories are one story. Maybe they're all the same story. Maybe it's just the pleasure of drawing busy destruction, swastikas decorating many panels as they would a freshly carved desk, and if you think that's childish I think that's why it's done, because this art is opposition, to taste and decorum, and maybe the simple agreed-upon idea of how adults act.

Yet I think there's more. This is a beautiful work, not just for the dotty and scribbled urine coloring that often seems to be drawing its own secret comics behind the lines - no, what gets me is how Spermanga eerily evokes the sensation of drinking in a fabulous work you can't possibly understand, i.e. a foreign work. There are many icons in here -- Doraemon, Mega Man -- a small hinge of familiarity made weird not just by Bolino's perversion but by being, by acting - really, aren't all Doraemon comics and cartoons a bit strange when all you know is a symbol?

This is the work's submerged theme. "Sper[m]" for the sick appeal of the drawings, "[m]anga" for the alien quality - I suspect it's no coincidence that Le Dernier Cri had worked with several Japanese artists over the years, even as the 'mainstream' of French comics has reacted to the growing power of popular manga with occasional fits of terror (see: Asterix and the Falling Sky, a real Chicken Little album). By its barely-there English and obscure images, sometimes crackling into amazing sensations, Spermanga forces the reader away from storytelling illusions and demands interaction with the notional 'story' you know is going on but remains somehow out of your reach. I guess the pictures in Big Comic are slicker, but the feeling is quite the same; Bolino exploits this foreignness as illustrative of the gulf between an artist's pleasure and a reader's subsequent understanding.

Speaking of which, I didn't know that Bolino himself was running the table. As he handed me the book -- which he would eventually sell out of -- he breathed in and summarized the aesthetic posture of the entire festival.

"These are my drawings."

***

TS: Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary.

JM: I have the Binky Brown Sampler. Do you have that?

TS: Nah, I got the original version of it.

JM: The 1970's comic book?

TS: Yes, that's what I have. It's this old and beat up copy from somewhere, it's not the sampler. I can't remember how I got ahold of it.

JM: Yeah, in the Sampler, it's clear that the Holy Virgin story is the draw. It has an Art Spiegelman introduction. The McSweeney's book has a different Art Spiegelman introduction, a nice afterword, but the main thing is how huge it is. They shot it from the original art, in color. All the white out is on it, all the paste over is on it, all the stuff that usually disappears is on it. When you look at it, there's a distance from it, where you see the mechanisms that went by to create it. I haven't read through it yet to see if the sensation is different, being so aware of its creation. That's an increasingly common technique these days--Anders Nilsen doing his philosophy comic [Monologues for the Coming Plague] and scratching out the words he didn't like - it emphasizes the mark-making aspects of comics, the construction aspect of it.

(Yep, the indie-flavored Morning 2 really does have a serial wherein Jesus & Buddha are cool cats touring Japan: Hikaru Nakamura's Saint Young Men. I think I saw all these people on the show floor.)

TS: Who created the new Binky Brown cover? The imitation diptych thing?

JM: I don't know. They have the original cover stuck in the middle of it.

TS: It's about the size of a large postage stamp. It's tiny.

JM: It gives it a medieval look. You've read it, Binky Brown is about religious and sexual aspects of his obsessive compulsive disorder. It's fun reading that and remembering Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which also has a segment on OCD, seeing a lot of the same spice come from a non-religious perspective. It's more of a nebulous, almost science fiction-like "Cosmic forces are going to destroy the world if I don't touch the table with both my hands."

TS: It seems like that's a stereotype of cartoonists, it's clearly a classic one of readers, but the OCD tendencies of having to actually draw all day, an act that's got so much control and repetition, physically. That's another one.

JM: Well, Alison Bechdel apparently constructed the entirety of Fun Home from books of photographs, archives of a lot of her life. I think she's mentioned in interviews how it was kind of channeling her energies in a more creative direction. It's a very obsessive work of a construction, I think she photoreferenced the whole thing, playing every character and every panel.

TS: Jesus Christ.

***

The show was busy. You've heard that. I bet you've heard a lot of stuff, since I'm filing this report more than a week after the fact. That's really it though - it was an oddly dense show, unified in a way that larger, established 'indie' shows aren't. You know what to skip over with those.

This time I found myself stepping around the room for an hour before reaching the back half of the basement. Part of that's because it was really crowded, but it also seemed like each table had some special potential, even though I recognized a lot of the wares in the end. This was the first BCGF, so there wasn't a lot of hype going around, no hot debut books planned or expectations in place with which to gauge the tenor of the scene. Instead, there was collective presence, of which more will be said later.

As often happens, I was especially drawn to the exhibitors from outside North America, little tastes of bigger comics places. Bries of Belgium had what looked to be a reduced stock, mostly wordless or English-language books dotted with popular sellers from prior shows, like Olivier Schrauwen's My Boy and Nora Krug's Red Riding Hood Redux. Corraini of Italy brought complete sets or singles from its pamphlet-format Un Sedicesimo line of artist showcase books. As mentioned above, Le Dernier Cri occupied French space - and only in a show like this could an operation like that stand in for French comics!

Inoculations against memorizing the layout of the East Coast minicomics area. And, as usual, there's another type around too...

***

TS: Tales of the Beanworld. Are you actually keeping up with the new Beanworld?

JM: No, I haven't kept up with the new Beanworld.

(This little showstopper comes courtesy of Haruko Ichikawa, an artist I've never heard of before.)

TS: Have you gotten any of the reprints?

JM: I've got the holiday one that they put out, the color one [Beanworld Holiday Special]. Beanworld--have you read Beanworld at all?

TS: I have one of the 1995 Beanworld Press collections, the comics sized trade. I don't know how much of that is in these new collections. That's the only one I've got, I've read that quite a few times.

JM: Beanworld's an interesting comic. I've said this before, but it's almost like a Mat Brinkman monster comic reimagined as a Sunday newspaper strip of gag stories. I like that his art has not fucking aged a day, that it even looks better now than it did before. It looks like a clip-art webcomic - I think I'm just repeating stuff I've said on my website. Now I think he's actually using clip-art to make it.

(A very sinuous, elegant approach, stretching a minimal landscape until reality near transparency.)

TS: I wonder - if you look at some of the art in Fight or Run, Ganges #2, there's a very similar behavior pattern to those video game avatars in [Kevin] Huizenga's comics and the Beanworld characters. I get more of a sense of depth from Ganges, mostly because I just think Huizenga's a better cartoonist - well, maybe just a better illustrator, in that his characters have more of a shape, they've got weight to them. Beanworld always struck me as a sort of half-newspaper gag, half-education comic.

JM: Thing is, it's a faux-education comic. It's deliberately creating the sensation of an education comic, a whimsical, metaphorical thing. I wonder what Frank Santoro makes of Beanworld?

TS: Hh. That might be interesting.

JM: Because Frank loves a lot of the other comics, the older comics, and how they relate to the process of "art" comics today. I wonder what he makes of fucking Beanworld and Larry Marder.

TS: I wonder what anybody makes of Beanworld. People talk about in the sense that they like it, but I don't know that I've ever read anything about it that's gone beyond that, something that goes beyond to the "I like it because of..."

[TUCKER GESTURES TO INDICATE A PAUCITY OF SUBSTANCE]

(Balance, poise, the subtleties of overwhelming landscape; kinda Ukiyo-e, like Hokusai, a manga artist from back when it meant something different.)

JM: I haven't looked into the old writings of the old Comics Journals, but I bet there's something about old Beanworld. There's been nothing since it started back up, no reappraisal of it since it came back. I would like to read that.

TS: Is this third one [Beanworld: Remember Here When You Are There!] the first new material?

JM: No, the holiday special was the first new material. This third volume is the first big book of new material. And he did a Dark Horse Myspace thing as well.

TS: Yeah, I didn't read any of those.

JM: Here's something. We've been talking about how I don't read any fucking comics, and I'll admit - the kind of reviews you do? I don't read any of those comics. But since we're talking about me not reading comics, how about you? Do you read any webcomics?

TS: Not really? Well, let's see. I read Bodyworld when it was coming up. I read Achewood, the Kate Beaton stuff, Dinosaur Comics...

JM: You mentioned the Dark Horse Myspace thing [EDIT: No, I did] - do you find it more difficult to "check in," because it's not physically in front of you at a store? Is it the Wednesday mentality? Trying to keep track of the "new" comics? I know there's RSS feed.

TS: Part of it is that I stopped subscribing to so many webcomics when I was no longer spending all day sitting at a computer. I read a lot more webcomics at my old day job, just completely random stuff, even things I didn't even care for. Lots of Zuda stuff, Act-I-Vate stuff - I actually do keep up with some of the Act-I-Vate stuff. Power Out, Loviathan. But I was a lot more active with that when I spent 9-10 hours a day sitting at a computer, on the job. Having a bunch of RSS feeds that pop up with new content every five minutes is a lot easier to keep up with when you're on a computer all day.

But when you're not spending all day at a computer, coming home to 70, 80, 90 things - I couldn't handle it. It's too much, and when a culling process starts, it's not a "I'm going to cull some of the webcomics based on what I really like," it becomes a "I'm not going to read any of these things" via this format anymore. Now it's checking on Achewood once a week to play catch up.

JM: Ah, see? That interests me, that coming home to a raw list of webcomics at the end of the day - it's a little like the big blast of pamplet comics every Wednesday.

TS: It is, but it isn't. Because it's constant, it's every single day...

JM: Is it oppressive?

(From what I can gather, this is a concluding one-off story of an annual sequence of four, something about a ball player with a bum shoulder that walks around with faceless little girl. She later explodes; but then, so might any given page from the looks of it.)

TS: I think it has a sense of being oppressive, and there's this - there's a portion of interaction beyond the comic, with the online presence of the cartoonist coming with them, and I don't actually care for that. I was a pretty consistent newspaper comic reader growing up, just reading everything - and there was no interaction with the people involved. I didn't end up online seeing them say "go fuck yourself" or "I fucking hate this guy."

JM: I think that's kind of a taboo with newspaper cartoonists, like when you go on Comics Curmudgeon and he's interacting with the guy who draws Slylock Fox [& Comics For Kids]. It's kind of odd seeing that kind of interaction with newspaper cartoonists.

TS: I was a pretty obsessive reader of Comics Curmudgeon.

JM: I was too. I can't even recall a reason why I stopped, I just got out of it.

TS: Same here. The active relationship with online cartoonists is one that I just don't have any interest in. That's part of the charm with mainstream superhero comics that alt and art doesn't have either, there's more of a distance. I don't need a relationship with the people who create the stuff that I'm into. But because comics are small, you end up getting to know these people - and hey, in some ways it's a benefit. It's nothing against these people, they're regular people like everybody else. It just makes for a weird relationship with the people who create the art, it's the classic case of when your buddy makes a CD, gives it to you, and then won't stop calling you to find out what you think of it.

JM: I was thinking about webcomics because I wrote that manga thing earlier this week, and one thing I totally didn't address was webcomics. Part of that was because I was focusing on perceptions and qualities of print publishing, and I think webcomics may lack some of the biases that print has. It's not going to be a "here is manga, and here is comics." It's a little freer in that way. I suppose it has to do with the economic requirements of print, that there aren't any economic requirements for webcomics per se because - a lot of people don't make any money doing it.

(House ad. Green 'n pale, The title is Mushi to Uta. Dig that heavenly neon.)

TS: Have you seen those things where people are constructing webcomics through an interface?

JM: No.

TS: A couple of people I read are doing that, it's a sort of social networking interface where one makes a webcomic out of pre-constructed parts. It's mostly gag cartoons, three panel things, I haven't looked into it too deeply. The creators can then embed it on their own websites, while all of the comics are posted on the main website. I assume there's some advertising model, it looks free. I have no idea if it's popular or not.

***

Shaky Kane's A-Men and Black Star Fiction Library (USA Edition) #1 (Shaky Kane & co.)

...Frank Santoro's longboxes. This time there were five or six of those suckers set up, including an honest-to-god quarter bin, injecting a dose of old-timey hotel ballroom local con feeling into what was pretty much exactly that, albeit devoted to Comics and Graphics of a curated-ish sort.

As it turned out, I doubled up and got part of my overseas experience out of the longboxes themselves with these two pamphlets devoted to one Michael Coulthard, aka: Shaky Kane. While part of that especially fertile batch of British cartoonists that entered comics in the mid-'70s -- including artists that later specialized in writing, like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison -- Shaky Kane has remained somewhat obscure, despite contributions to NME, 2000 A.D., Revolver and Deadline. Do note, however, that he'll soon be joining up with David Hine for a new Image series, The Bulletproof Coffin, right up there on my front-of-Previews 2010 anticipation list with Brendan McCarthy's Spider-Man/Dr. Strange miniseries, perhaps the Ditkovian counterbalance to Shaky Kane's wildly idiosyncratic processing of Kirby's mighty influence (among others').

Needless to say, this individuality has attracted Frank's attention -- Comics Comics #4 boasted a pertinent cover story/interview feature (along with an unrelated essay by me, full disclosure) -- and thus a few tricky-to-find items popped up for sale. Take Shaky Kane's A-Men, a collection of late '80s strips first seen in Deadline - it was published in 2002 by the artist's own Wishbone Studio (with financial assistance by the Exeter City Counsel as part of an animation festival), its source materials scanned from back issues of Deadline itself, and its rights situation apparently not totally sorted out, as Shaky Kane himself asserts. Still, the work had to get out - bah, it's nearly as handmade as Hôpital Brut!

A-Men is a deeply odd strip, although I guess any of the Deadline features that weren't Tank Girl might seem a little off today. For all the Kirby kreases and Dalek imagery a lot of it's a Judge Dredd riff, with the titular police-plus force smashing into a nasty, secular society (Reagan's Day is duly celebrated as April Fools') in parodically 'heroic' fashion, vignettes detailing their origins and...

Well, initially telling of their adventures, but very quickly opting to just have the A-Men talking about themselves, while scenes of a wider society occasionally swirl. Eventually a hardboiled detective character enters the story, seemingly from another strip entirely, but it turns out it's really Shaky Kane himself, who then assassinates Jesus Christ in outer space as a means of breaking the A-Men's spirits and ridding his mind of their foul exploits.

I can't imagine this impression was easy to get from Deadline's initial run, but A-Men works best as an off-the-cuff, self-reflexive expression of artistic evolution over the course of a project, with the increasingly monologue-prone anti-heroes offering the artist ample opportunity to replace action comics storytelling with contained page designs and splash images, all while his near-immediate disinterest in plotting complications from his satiric premise develops on-page into his own character's desire to end the feature in a good two-fisted manner.

It all matches the relative lack of polish to the art, very much sorting itself out as it goes along (and always a bit fragile, emotional in its classic pop comics evocation), along with the hodgepodge quality of the pamphlet collection, which 'completes' the air of it in that way. Surely it seems more sympatico with the silkscreen dreams and newsprint images of the BCGF than the polished comedy sketchings of recent Tank Girl outings.

Around the time the A-Men collection rolled out, Shaky Kane was also working on his own slicker endeavor, an anthology comic that eventually saw release in the U.S. as a one-off glossy magazine featuring two color stories drawn by Shaky Kane, and a headlining supernatural character Scratch -- an acid casualty variant on the Crow or Spawn -- created and written by the artist and one Ian Porter, also the magazine's editor (I think - there's no such credit given).

The first story, colored by Ali Jen and reprinted from the second (and final) U.K. issue, sees Scratch revive a shot-dead policeman (always with the police!) for the sole purpose of rubbing his face in all of his evil deeds. It's a surer work of graphics, clearly evolved from the Deadline stuff, with single pages rarely featuring more than three panels at a time and scenes of memory stretching across double-page layouts, big & bold images the key.

The second story seems to have been reprinted (and probably colorized, by Tim Seelig) from a prior Wishbone Studio release, The Dinosaurs Are Coming! Returning to the monologue style, the artist presents a masked consumer ranting about the latest media fad to hit society, which might as well melt into the possibility of wide-scale catastrophe, since news is entertainment anyhow.

It's a terse, funny piece, good enough that I'm interested in tracking down a copy of the Shaky Kane humor magazine Lazy Frog, to say nothing of the artist's most recent completed project, Shaky Kane's Monster Truck, a 50-page illustration with text that promises to extend the artist's spread-out designs well beyond their prior limits, and probably out of the confines of a longbox, however well tended to. Again: summary of the show.

***

(This is from that salaryman manga Carl Horn mentioned the other day, President Shima Kosaku -- or President Kosaku Shima, if you switch it up Western-like -- the latest in creator Kenshi Hirokane's Shima Kosaku line of grown-up comics about a guy rising in rank through the Japanese corporate system via the power of being an awesome model employee we all should all think of at our desks, starting in 1983 with Section Chief Shima Kosaku, then moving on to Division Chief Shima Kosaku, Managing Director Shima Kosaku, Executive Managing Director Shima Kosaku, the current President Shima Kosaku, then probably Author and Television Pundit Shima Kosaku, Catatonic Inpatient Shima Kosaku and Neutrino Cosmic God Shima Kosaku, which will still somehow involve board meetings.)

TS: One Model Nation?

JM: I haven't seen it yet. I suppose there should be a disclaimer on my weekly lists. Everything I write on my website, I don't necessarily buy. It's just things I think are interesting, brought to people's attention. Occasionally I get the idea that people think I buy everything I write on this, like "wow, that's really expensive."

[DOORBELL RINGS]

TS: Huh? We should probably move to another room.

NS: Is that alright? She's having a hard time.

TS: Fine.

(Another breathless, hot-blooded scene as only Shima Kosaku can bring it.)

[LONG PERIOD OF SILENCE]

JM: How dare you give up on Cromartie High School at volume 4!

TS: I've had trouble finding them.

JM: I had the same problem.

TS: I think it'll be an Amazon is my friend thing on that one.

[DOOR SLAMS]

TS: Slam Dunk you buy. Popeye you buy.

JM: I'd never read the old Fantagraphics collections. This particular volume features the Sea Hag storyline, which was in The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. It's a landmark thing, I don't know if you've read it.

TS: I don't. I've seen it.

JM: It's really cheap online, you should definitely check it out.

TS: I always mix it up with the other one, I see that one all the time.

JM: A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics, which is okay. It's a Golden Age collection, it's okay. Not near as good as the other one.

(That's right, there's exactly four pages of color comics in this 454-page issue of Morning, and one of them just went to a pair of saucy motherfuckers presenting a logo to President Shima Kosaku, 'cause that's just how they roll in the big boy seinen weeklies, and if you don't like it you can piss right back off to CoroCoro, asshole-kun.)

TS: That Comic-Book Comics thing is one that I've seen in every single used book store, there's always a bunch of beat up copies. Sometimes they look like they're beat up in the same exact way, makes me wonder if they came from one specific place, or if it's some famous supposed-to-be-destroyed print run.

I haven't actually kept up with those Popeye reprints, but I plan to. There's something about large sized comics, even when the price isn't that high - maybe it's the New York mentality, not wanting to carry shit around.

JM: Yeah, I can just stash it in my car. Which I also fill with diesel fuel, unrefined oil. Which I dig up myself, illegally. Then I watch NASCAR with one eye.

TS: I've got a lot of love for NASCAR.

JM: Yes?

TS: Theoretically. I like the concept quite a bit. I don't actually watch it. But I like the idea that I could.

***

(forward to part 2)

They're Prompting You to Jolt the Holiday Economy

2009-12-07T23:59:00.002-05:00

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

stunt casting (in the tradition of The Comics Journal #300 but far better, Tucker Stone and I have a special conversation about comics; countless insights erupt from all of last week's pamphlets in an obscene display of hilarity and meaning, with a lot of heart too)

*It's a light one on Wednesday, although I've gotta commend one item in particular to your flipping eye -

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

Crossing the Empty Quarter and Other Stories: It'd probably be excessive to title Welsh-raised, painting-trained Carol Swain the most underappreciated cartoonist in the history of ever, particularly considering she's a one-time Peter Milligan/Brendan McCarthy collaborator (on Skin) that counts Alan Moore among her appreciative readers, but rarely have I found a cartoonist to be so reliable at delivering an utterly unique worldview -- a stark, grimly poetic semi-rural setting torn by ex-hellraiser snarling-through-the-fog attitude and a visionary outsider's obscure address -- in such a spread-out bunch of settings: her old Way Out Strips series, the current Hotwire anthologies, her erratic Fantagraphics releases Invasion of the Mind Sappers (1995) and Foodboy (2004).

Amazingly, this Dark Horse project is the second major Swain hardcover release of 2009, following Fantagraphics' Giraffes in my Hair: A Rock 'N' Roll Life, a memoir of writer and Swain partner Bruce Paley. Here it's a full-scale career-spanning collection of short stories, over 30 of them in b&w and color, crammed into a 200-page, $24.95 hardcover. Don't let it get lost in the crowd. Sample story here; exciting flipbook preview here.

Daytripper #1 (of 10): Being the much-anticipated Vertigo project by Fábio Moon & Gabriel Bá, both of whom naturally have extensive experience in writing their own comics prior to and apart from Casanova and The Umbrella Academy -- the 2006 Dark Horse collection De: Tales is worth checking out on that front -- though this is pretty well tagged as the post-breakthrough work, with colorist Dave Stewart along to assure us of visual polish. Along with breathless comparisons to David Mazzucchelli, Craig Thompson and Paul Pope, the publisher promises "quiet moments that ask big questions" and "a mystery about the meaning of life itself," told through the temporally fragmented life of a dissatisfied news writer in Brazil. I haven't been this interested in a Vertigo series in a while... so, full-priced $2.99. Sneak peek.

Yotsuba&! Vol. 7: More from the lil' "cutie pie manga aimed at male otaku" that could - this thing's got stacks of copies at my local Borders. Vol. 9 is currently new to Japan. Yen Press is also presenting its new edition of ADV Manga's Azumanga Daioh omnibus this week, collecting an earlier, similarly wide-appealing gag-based high school cutie pie comedy from artist Kiyohiko Azuma.

Detroit Metal City Vol. 3: Somehow I don't think this ongoing ALL METAL manga from Kiminori Wakasugi will enjoy a similar kids' comics crossover, although admirers of dirty jokes in situation comedy (a famed metal legend is really OMG an indie pop wimp!!) will possibly have a lot of fun with this. A $12.99 Viz release; up to vol. 8 in Japan.

Sky Doll: A $19.99 Marvel softcover edition of this universe-spanning, animation-informed and furry-casted lampoon of diverse religion and media from Disney Italy veterans Alessandro Barbucci & Barbara Canepa, closing in on five years as a series with a fourth chapter still forthcoming. Note that this edition does not appear to collect any of the content (mostly production art) from the not-yet-finished-in-English Sky Doll: Doll Factory series, so it remains a slightly smaller, twice-as-expensive version of the Heavy Metal Summer 2006 Special -- where these first three chapters initially saw North American release -- with nicer paper and a smoother English translation.

The Muppet Show Comic Book Vol. 2 #0: Being the 'first' issue of the newest incarnation of this popular licensed series, which apparently will present itself as a formal ongoing series after all. Roger Langridge will remain the primary artist, but this $2.99 introduction has a guest turn by Shelli Paroline. Preview.

Tank Girl: Dark Nuggets: Yes, its the same current Tank Girl team of Alan Martin and Rufus Dayglo, who are indeed working on a color miniseries for Titan (Tank Girl: Skidmarks) right now -- first published as a b&w serial in the Judge Dredd Megazine -- but this is a new, b&w 32-page Image special presenting three complete stories of a supposedly nastier type. More will follow, along with more from IDW ("Publisher #3") in turn. Preview.

Phonogram 2: The Singles Club #6 (of 7): Nearing the end of Kieron Gillen's & Jamie McKelvie's second music-as-magic miniseries, and it looks like you, Phonogram reader, better savor it while it's here. Preview.

PunisherMAX #2: One Kingpin, comin' up.

B.P.R.D.: War on Frogs #4: In which this series of action/suspense-heavy John Arcudi flashback/looking-back pamphlets comes to a close with the always-welcome art of Peter Snejbjerg and a focus on gaseous Johann Kraus, who finds out what the hell happens to all of these cannon fodder monsters after they die. Looks like this.

Citizen Rex #6 (of 6): Concluding Gilbert & Mario Hernandez's odd, sometimes striking miniseries, a real old-timey 'alternative comics' kind of offhandedly joking sci-fi series hyper-literate in funnybook art. Mario sez "I tried to give it the feel of a strange late-night foreign movie you're too drunk to remember clearly the next day," but it's more like an untethered anthology serial you don't realize went on so long until you look it up. Recommended, but remember - I even sort of liked Girl Crazy. Samples.

Batman: The Cult: Oh, this is a new $19.99 printing of that post-Dark Knight 1988 Jim Starlin/Bernie Wrightson miniseries where Batman's mind is ruined by an evil preacher and his deadly henchman Alan Moore and they all conquer Gotham but then Batman gets away and him and Jason Todd ride into town in a monster truck Batmobile and beat the shit out of an entire religion. It may be gritty late '80s superhero stuff at its silliest, but my affection remains undimmed.

As is often in case in waning 2009, this post is mainly a link to content, although I also added sword violence.

2009-12-06T23:59:00.001-05:00

*I'm back from the Brooklyn comics 'n graphics thingy, a very well-attended event that I can't cover in much detail right now. I think '60s Golgo 13 is upset.

He won't have to wait forever though, and right now you can enjoy a special edition of Comics of the Weak featuring me and Tucker Stone, my very generous host for the weekend, recorded in the Factual Opinion's offices, New York NY. So many comics covered in such a short time!

(This is really what I sound like when I can't look things up and spend two and a half hours rewriting one paragraph.)

We also managed to hit the Manhattan location of Kinokuniya, which is always a lot of fun. Hey, you know what happened in last month's Blade of the Immortal?

That happened.

Ok, here's the future.

2009-12-01T23:59:00.001-05:00

*I'm gonna be attending the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival this Saturday, located in scenic Williamsburg, right off the L line. One day only and no admission fee, so everybody in the NYC area should think about peering in.

It should be a special occasion; I've never been to a comics show on its very first date of operation, the lineup of exhibitors looks really impressive (Le Dernier Cri! Bries!) and the programming boasts a killer lineup, stuffing Gary Panter, Peter Saul, R.O. Blechman, Kim Deitch, Dash Shaw, Ben Katchor, Lisa Hanawalt, Mark Newgarden, Ron Regé, Jr, David Sandlin, Frank Santoro, Gabrielle Bell and R. Sikoryak into just five segments of one hour each. More here.

***

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Manga (the early '80s anthology of that name; the art form of a foreign people; the presence in North America; the idea and the shifting reality; MANGA) (also: Youtube anime links)

***

*I'm not the first to say this, but holy shit is this a big week for Diamond's "offered again" items. I don't usually cover those, but - Asterios Polyp, The ACME Novelty Library #19 (aka: Chris Ware's Martian Chronicles), the first Moomin newspaper strip collection, all three volumes of Osamu Tezuka's excellent supernatural action series Dororo... I'd recommend any of these, so feel free to catch up.

THIS WEEK IN ALL-NEW CONFLICTS OF INTEREST!

The Comics Journal #300: It wasn't online for long because it was too beautiful to live, but now it's in print ready for a place of honor in your home. Just $14.99 buys you the last-ever periodical installment of the Journal, now an online presence (well, actually the online presence will be here; that's the beta version over there) that might run a review or two by someone you know.

For now, a thick collection of conversations between comics figures aware of the terrain and new to the game: Art Spiegelman & Kevin Huizenga; J.C. Menu & Sammy Harkham; Dave Gibbons & Frank Quitely; Dave Mazzucchelli & Dash Shaw; Alison Bechdel & Danica Novgorodoff; Howard Chaykin & Ho Che Anderson; Dennis O’Neil & Matt Fraction; Jaime Hernandez & Zak Sally; Ted Rall & Matt Bors; Jim Borgman & Keith Knight; and Stan Sakai & Chris Schweizer. Essays too. Good readin'.

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

GoGo Monster: There's a ton of manga out this week, so I'm putting something extra-special up top - a new VIZ English edition of a 2000 book by Taiyō Matsumoto, he of Tekkonkinkreet (Black & White). It's another story of friendship between young boys, this time a transfer student and the kid he sits next to, who believes that weird creatures only he can see are taking over the world. The climax is supposedly a whopper. Also unique: the presentation, a deluxe slipcased hardcover in keeping with the original Japanese edition. And it's still only $27.99 for 464 pages. Art samples here. I expect fine things.

Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary: And I know there's good things here, in a 64-page McSweeney's reissue of Justin Green's seminal 1972 autobiographical comic, a lively depiction of obsessive-compulsive disorder as fueled by the conflict between religious faith and sexual desire. A classic, but a very active one. The publisher looks to be giving it a biblical gold trim kind of design scheme, with way oversized 14" x 10" dimensions, hence the $29.00 price tag; if that seems a bit much, Last Gasp's fatter, smaller, less expensive 1995 Binky Brown Sampler is still in print. Introduction by Art Spiegelman. Google books images from the Last Gasp edition here.

Larry Marder's Beanworld Book 3: Remember Here When You Are There!: Being an all-new 186-page, $19.95 hardcover shot of Larry Marder's study of natural fantasy - the close workings of a whimsically invented ecosystem and the talking critter society inside it. Halfway between an experimental clip art webcomic and a gag-heavy serial newspaper strip, Beanworld is just too damn peculiar to look its age, despite hailing from the 1985 pre-heat of the coming b&w boom; this installment finally concludes the first 1/4 of the series' seasonal cycle. Preview.

One Model Nation: An Image original from Dandy Warhols singer/guitarist Courtney Taylor & Street Angel's Jim Rugg, laying out the wide influence and abrupt end of a German band in tumultuous 1977; I think the theme is the futility of remaining apolitical as a prime actor in society. It's 144 color pages for $17.99. Have a look.

Popeye Vol. 4 (of 6): Plunder Island: The one with the Sea Hag and the Goon; the Golden Age of E.C. Segar's creation, or so it's said. Up to the usual die-cut hardcover standard, I'm sure; 168 pages, 10.5" x 14.75", $29.99. From Fantagraphics; preview.

Little Lulu Vol. 21: Miss Feeny's Folly and Other Stories: Meanwhile, Dark Horse has another 200-page, $14.95 color package of vintage John Stanley & Irving Tripp. Call it Popeye's antithesis: compact, no-frills, and possibly ready to go on forever, although Stanley's only sticking around for the next six volumes or so. Collects issues #100-105 of the Dell series, in case you need to keep your checklist straight. Samples.

Slam Dunk Vol. 7 (of 31): Takehiko Inoue's basketball classic, which seems to have gotten itself upped in price to $9.99 somewhere along the way.

Sayonara, Zetsubo Sensei Vol. 4: Jokes, satire, suicide and endnotes - Japanese funnies as we like it. Ongoing, currently up to vol. 19 overseas.

Empowered Special: The Wench With a Million Sighs: A special $3.99 Dark Horse pamphlet outing for Adam Warren's superheroine exploitation lampoon, likely poised to summarize the concept for people not quite ready for five 200+ page softcover books. Pages.

The Secret History Vol. 7: I haven't kept up with this $5.95 prestige format-type English translation of writer Jean-Pierre Pécau's immortals-across-time series, but I ought to note that this is apparently the final album Archaia Studios will publish, with initial artist Igor Kordey onboard (and always welcome). It's up to vol. 16 in France.

Dark Tower: The Battle of Jericho Hill #1 (of 5): And in other endings-that-don't-end-anything-but-at-least-the-original-artist-came-back news, here's the 'final' installment of Marvel's original Stephen King-derived series-of-series, with Jae Lee restored to the penciller's position. As of now, he does not appear to be returning for the interiors of the next Dark Tower comic, a more direct prequel thing subtitled simply The Gunslinger, with follow-up miniseries already planned to follow.

Starstruck #4 (of 13): Long reprint-but-not-entirely series #1 - Elaine Lee's & Michael Wm. Kaluta's massive sci-fi saga, from IDW.

King City #3 (of 12): Long reprint-but-not-entirely series #2 - Brandon Graham's city romance action cat thingy, from Image.

The Boys #37: Continuing the series' current spread of secret origins with an issue dedicated specially to that French guy. Voilà.

Jonah Hex #50: With special guest artist Darwyn Cook.

Starr the Slayer #4 (of 4): With always special artist Richard Corben. Preview.

Greek Street #6: The Peter Milligan location this week.

glamourpuss #10: Dave Sim was in comics stores in 1977 and he'll be waving goodbye behind you when you opt yourself out, believe it.

I have 10,000 words to make up for the heartbreak.

2009-12-01T05:01:00.003-05:00

*New comics aren't out until Thursday around here, so that's why the new comics post isn't going to be up until Tuesday night.

In the meantime, I recently (finally) posted the rest of my two part look at Manga - it's an early '80s anthology book that purported to introduce the magic of Japanese comics and culture to English-reading audiences, although the differences between manga then and Manga then are telling, as is the state of manga in North America today. Lots of pictures in this one, probably a few artists you'll recognize and several more that have gone on to interesting things. Enjoy!

Thanks in advance for that.

2009-11-23T23:59:00.003-05:00

*Last night I had a dream that aliens were invading, and I was holed up in my aunt's old house with Spider-Man and a bunch of other people.

It wasn't Peter Parker or anything, it was Spider-Man, in full costume, sitting listlessly at the kitchen table, not saying a word. Some guy told me we had to train for the aliens' attack, so he wound up chasing me around the house armed with some air gun with a scope on it. I managed to hide for a bit and when he came by I ran to disarm him, but then the world changed into a Zack Snyder slow slow slow slow action scene, except I could feel the slowing so that it seemed the distance between me and my target was being halved and halved again forever, and I got slower and slower, and it was agony.

Spider-Man didn't lift a finger to help me. He didn't go fight the aliens either. Fuck you Spider-Man, you're a piece of shit. I can't even look at you, and now I posted it all so everyone knows the truth. Fuck you, me and you are finished. I wish the machines crushed you in that one issue. We are done. I hate you.

***

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Astro Boy (Astro Boy's a real superhero, Spider-Man, he was fighting in 'Nam while you were salting up Aunt May's wheatcakes with baby tears in your bassinet every morning, asshole; covers the recent movie and pertinent manga context)

***

"Stupid Babies."

- Angelica from Rugrats, on Spider-Man

***

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

Ganges #3: Oh, but I know what'll make it all better - the latest $7.95 installment of Kevin Huizenga's Ignatz-format (oversized, nice paper, dust cover) pamphlet series from Fantagraphics & Coconino Press, a journey through what's still adding up to be considerably less than a day in the life of observant Glenn Ganges, the narrative eye diving in and out of memories and perceptions and impressions and all the stuff that makes up human experience, serving to summarize all of Huizenga's experiments in comics storytelling so far. It's not what happens here but how it happens, the 'how' alone revealing the complexities of the person, a biography of craft-as-occasion, the hundred revelations to a man remaining still. Jokes too, and real police action. I got into it more here, and Fantagraphics has a slideshow here. This is the one to flip through on Wednesday, yes.

The Winter Men: God, twice as nice - a 176-page, $19.99 softcover Wildstorm collection of the well-regarded 2005-09 Brett Lewis/John Paul Leon Russian ex-rocket squad series, a dense piece of just-into-fantasy worldbuilding with terrific dialogue and some excellent visuals. I went into some detail here, with a few spoilers; well worth a look.

Shade the Changing Man Vol. 2: Edge of Vision: It's... it's like the world's dial is set to delight. Finally collecting issues #7-13 of Peter Milligan's 1990-96 proto-Vertigo classic, with most of these chapters drawn by Chris Bachalo. Only 57 issues to go! It's $19.99.

Saga of the Swamp Thing Vol. 2: Now this is just too much! The second deluxe hardcover repackaging of the famous Alan Moore, Stephen R. Bissette & John Totleben run on the muck monster character, collecting issues #28-34 and Annual #2, including the "Pog" issue (in homage to Walt Kelly, drawn by Shawn McManus) and the sex issue. You know if your $24.99 is going this way. Man, I feel great!

A Distant Neighborhood Vol. 2 (of 2): What? Above? No, I'm not Perez Hilton, I'm just upset. Was upset. C'mon, would Perez Hilton recommend the new Jiro Taniguchi manga from Fanfare/Ponent Mon? NO... granted, I wasn't really over the moon with vol. 1 myself, but I'm sure the artist will at least serve up some potent visual evocation of the 1963 this series' salaryman protagonist is stuck in (and in his 14-year old body of the time at that), and the story may well deepen as he draws closer to the events that caused his father to abandon the household back around that time. Apropos of nothing, I've seen copies of vol. 1 in various Borders locations recently, so the publisher's spotty U.S. distribution seems to be getting a little better. Good on them. It's $23.00 for 208 pages; preview here.

Years of the Elephant: Also from Fanfare/Ponent Mon this week is a change of pace - an English translation of a Dutch-language comic initially serialized in eight chapters by the excellent Belgian publisher Bries in 2007 and 2008. It's autobiographical fiction of the most intimate sort, a sketched-out account of artist Willy Linthout's attempts to cope with his son's suicide, efforts that involve no shortage of funnybook gags and fantasies, rendered in a line not unlike Johnny Ryan's. Yet another one to flip through this week if you encounter it. It's $18.95 for 168 pages; samples here.

Proper Go Well High: A Trains Are... Mint Book: I believe the second book by Oliver East, a 166-page work from the UK-based Blank Slate Books just now hitting North America via Diamond. Basically it's the story of a walk, from Manchester to Liverpool, sticking close to the railroad tracks. Richard Bruton has much more information (and several images) in his review; it looks nice. Priced at $19.99.

Sparky O'Hare: Master Electrician: Also from Blank Slate, a 94-page, $8.99 collection of humor strips by German cartoonist Mawil, who some might remember from the 2003 Top Shelf book Beach Safari, or maybe the 2008 Blank Slate release We Can Still be Friends. Again, Richard Bruton has more.

Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture Vol. 1: Your eye-catching manga debut for the week, a 240-page Del Rey release of Masayuki Ishikawa's ongoing seinen series (started in 2004, currently at vol. 8, adapted to 11 episodes of television anime in 2007; great opening titles) regarding an agricultural student with the ability to communicate with micro-organisms and all the funny/dramatic/educational microbe-related situations that arise. I like the sound of this! Only $10.99.

Berserk Vol. 32: More more more from Kentaro Miura. More. Dark Horse's release is two volumes behind the Japanese ongoing.

Star Comics: All-Star Collection Vol. 1: But maybe you want something a little sweeter? Here's a selection of works from Marvel's old Star Comics line (est. 1984), probably best remembered by '80s kids for licensed books like Fraggle Rock or Alf; an effort was also made to pick up some Harvey Comics characters, but when that didn't go through Marvel picked up Harvey veterans Warren Kremer (paired with writer Lennie Herman) and Bob Bolling (creator of Little Archie) to produce new(ish) comics. Some of the results are collected in this $19.99 softcover, including Bolling's Wally the Wizard (#1-2) and Kremer's & Herman's Planet Terry (#1-2), Top Dog (#1-3) and Royal Roy (#1-2). As seen in the current X-Babies miniseries, which presentes the X-Men as babies, which they aren't normally, unlike some Marvel superheroes.

Detective Comics #859: Surely the superhero item of the week, part 2 of 3 in Greg Rucka's & J.H. Williams III's origin of Batwoman saga, now with added 52 wrap-up power. Preview.

The Boys Vol. 5: Herogasm: In which this miniseries struck from the Garth Ennis/Darick Robertson supermen-that-smash-superheroes project assumes its expected place as a specific spread of issues in the larger storyline. This was kind of a weird thing, starting off as a parody of superhero Event crossovers -- in which all of the series' superhumans actually sneak away to secret island to have a massive orgy -- but gradually becoming immersed in the larger series' various subplots, to the point where certain miniseries-specific points (like good superheroine Starlight finding herself turned on in spite of herself by the sheer decadence of the scene) simply vanish while apparent long-term things (such as Hughie's distressing encounter with Black Noir) are set up for resolution way later, I'm guessing.

That probably makes this thing a bit easier to read as a $19.99 softcover in a series, although there were a few funny things going on with withheld information that interacted with contemporaneously released issues of the main series (set a little ways down the series timeline) that suggest the whole thing was planned at least in part as Boys Biweekly in execution, which doesn't quite explain the misty plotting of the Herogasm side of things. It also doesn't help that guest artists John McCrea & Keith Burns don't quite manage the visceral style necessary to sell the sexy and/or revolting bits of the script, or that Ennis ends on a routine study of a good, hard man forced to choose between the honor of his duty and the corruption said duty tends to support - another twist that seems to emerge from the mist about halfway through. Preview. Note that publisher Dynamite also a $29.99 hardcover this week for the series' second collection, Get Some, collecting issues #7-14 of the regular run (currently up to #36); many samples here.

Incognito: Also in anti-superhero activity this week, here's an $18.99 Icon softcover collection of Ed Brubaker's & Sean Phillips' pulp hero-styled study of a supervillain-in-hiding who discovers the pleasure of playing at violent superhero activities as an escape from his shitty office job. Secrets from the past eventually bubble up, leading to basically an extended origin story setup for a subsequent series to come. Certainly above average for this sort of trade-paced superhuman series kickoff -- it really does fit in well with the approach taken by some mainline Marvel U books -- but probably more orthodox than anyone anticipated, with not much in the way of depth just yet.

Criminal: The Sinners #2 (of 5): On the other hand, Brubaker & Phillips have done a nice job of dipping us back into the family-tied crime world of their other ongoing creator-owned concern. Can hapless-by-conscience gangland enforcer Tracy Lawless unravel the mystery of seemingly unrelated underworld murders? Especially when it might really be just happenstance that joins them? Here's some pages from the new $3.50 issue. In other Icon updates, Brian Michael Bendis' & Michael Avon Oeming's Powers relaunches with a new #1, previewed here, along with vol. 3 of the Definitive hardcover collection, gathering up issues #25-37 of the original Images series (thus leaving 30 issues of the first Icon series between it and the new #1) for $29.99.

The Dead: Kingdom of Flies: In case you happened to enjoy his recent Hellblazer run, here's a 96-page, $15.00 softcover collection of a zombies vs. soldiers and the fire brigade miniseries Simon Bisley recently pencilled for writer Alan Grant. From Berserker Comics; many pages here.

I Am Legion #6 (of 6): Closing out Fabien Nury's & John Cassaday's French market occult thriller, and the first DDP/Humanoids project; my Humanoids-in-English master list has been duly updated!

Beasts of Burden #3 (of 4): Cats 'n dogs 'n occult mystery from Evan Dorkin & Jill Thompson. Preview.

Creepy Comics #2: Continuing Dark Horse's 48-page, $4.99 pamphlet-format revival of the old Warren horror magazine, this time featuring a story by Nathan Fox of Dark Reign: Zodiac. More here.

Image United #1 (of 6): You know, I'm a child of the Image Revolution and all, I loved The Savage Dragon and Shadowhawk and The Maxx - I felt the 13-year old boy appeal of, say, Pitt. This thing... there's something about it, this Robert Kirkman-written mega-crossover, and it's got to do with the fact that it's the highest-profile old-school jam comic in at least a decade. All six Image founders not named Jim Lee putting pencils to the same pages for big, violent swirls of pure high '90s ultra-muscle superhero excess, everyone working their own characters (and Whilce Portacio simply inventing a new one since Wildstorm has Wetworks) - it's $3.99's worth of superhero decadence, frankly, but of a purer, page-to-eye, art-first sort. That appeals to the lizard/boy side of me, and/or the part that senses some whiff of sedition in re: the writer/editor-driven universal plot points of big ticket superhero comics. Sparse production diary here; color preview here, opening joke on the fallen status of these clenched-fisted character included. No babies, I bet.

Best Bullet Butt Boy About

2009-11-19T19:25:00.001-05:00

*New movie column, this time about the new not-really-a-hit Astro Boy movie (at least not in the U.S.), as related to a delightful little Osamu Tezuka tale from the late '60s in which the Mighty Atom beats the living shit out of United States forces in Vietnam. Urasawa should remake that one next. Enjoy!

Good things come to those who check the internet obsessively hundreds of times per day.

2009-11-16T23:59:00.003-05:00

*That's how I came to win the Nobel Prize in Victory.

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

pamphlets from last week (being Batman and Robin #6, PunisherMAX #1, Starstruck #3 and Hellboy: The Wild Hunt #8)

*Well, issue #300 of The Comics Journal was available online for a few hours (and maybe still is for subscribers?) - long enough for me to assess and affirm the quality of most of its 11 inter-generational conversations between cartoonists. I'd rank the Ho Che Anderson/Howard Chaykin piece as tops in sheer enjoyment, although all of them have their virtues; I mean, J.C. Menu in English. Come on.

But it's also worth mentioning that most of the Journal's regular columnists appear in this final magazine(ish)-format as well (plus a few reviews); of particular note is (will be) Matthias Wivel's piece on Moebius' The Airtight Garage and how its various incarnations (including 2008's new Le chasseur déprime) follow his development. Right now Moebius is in one of those odd positions European cartoonists often find themselves stuck in vis-à-vis North America where his renown is obvious but his work is somewhat inaccessible, to say nothing of recent work, which means a lot of English-language discussion of the work takes on a retrospective quality, and these retrospectives tend to imply the guy's hands were stolen by goblins sometime in the early 1990s, because hey: no recent work in English, save for that one Halo comic.

This piece covers a wider range, and I think offers a fuller view of one aspect of Moebius' body of work, which is valuable. And it also demonstrates the vitality remaining in the Journal's recurring, non-interview features.

*So then -

THIS WEEK IN COMICS:

Driven by Lemons: The new book from Joshua W. Cotter of Skyscrapers of the Midwest, which Sean T. Collins, in an interview with Cotter from the Comics Journal #299, referred to as making Skyscrapers look like Harry Potter in terms of accessibility, to which Cotter replied "I just have to do what my brain tells me to, you know?" The result here is a facsimile Moleskine sketchbook filled with seemingly random or abstract (and sometimes self-referential) drawings in a number of styles, which eventually fuse together loosely into an improvisatory philosophical wander. I went more in depth here, but let me state plainly that this is top-tier work for late in 2009. From AdHouse; $19.95 for 104 b&w and color pages. Preview.

Pictures That Tick: An unexpected Dark Horse reprint of a 2001 Allen Spiegel Fine Arts collection of Dave McKean's short comics from about a decade's stretch prior. I recall liking this stuff when it was new-ish, although I haven't gone back to it in four or five years. Literary and poetic shorts, touching on McKean's collage style and the inkwork of much of Cages; certainly those who enjoyed that longform work will want this, as McKean is not prolific in the comics form. It's a $19.95 softcover, 184 b&w and color pages.

The Fir-Tree: A 72-page hardcover Lilli Carré adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen tale; I expect it'll look pretty. From HarperCollins' It Books imprint, priced at $14.99.

The Gift of the Magi: Also from It Books, a similarly conceived (96-page, $14.99) O. Henry adaptation by Joel Priddy, with the expected holiday theme. These things are 5" x 7" so I bet they'll fit in a stocking.

Casper the Friendly Ghost 60th Anniversary Hardcover: I like a birthday celebration comic for beloved kids' entertainment franchise that has its title character weeping tears of shame right on the front cover almost as much as I like ghost school report cards where all the grades spell out OOOO, so you can just imagine how the low low $9.95 cover price on this 7" x 10", 80-page color item is the frosty white icing on a cake of the hilarious youthful dead. Collecting 1949's Casper the Friendly Ghost #1 from publisher Archer St. John and what I presume is Harvey Comics Hits #61 from 1952, which was also effectively Casper #6, picking up from the St. John run, i.e. the first Harvey issue of Casper, although the official Harvey series didn't pick up until #7. Also, the "60th Anniversary" here deals with comics only; the Casper character actually dates back to the 1930s. When I come back from the dead as a ghost I'll scare everyone with comic book info, screaming issue numbers as they all run because I hate friends and these are tears of pride. Anyway: two Golden Age comics here. Preview.

Tarzan: The Jesse Marsh Years Vol. 4: But if you're more of a jungle pulp type, Dark Horse also has another 232 pages of Golden Age stuff just your speed. The usual $49.95; see?

Alex Raymond's Rip Kirby: The First Modern Detective Vol. 1 (of 5) 1946-1947: Shit, why the hell not? You've read about it in Dave Sim's glamourpuss, now experience Raymond's photo-realism style for yourself in his final major newspaper strip, a sleek and modern detective thing written by King Features editor Ward Greene, at least for this book, another huge Library of American Comics hardcover from IDW, where they never sleep. Your $49.99 gets you 320 pages, including educational materials from Raymond biographer Tom Roberts and expert Brian Walker.

Pluto Vol. 6 (of 8): Meanwhile, in manga - Tezuka by way of Urasawa, again. The usual $12.99.

Black Jack Vol. 8 (of 17): Or maybe Tezuka by way of Tezuka, for another 328 pages. It really is something that 2000+ pages of Black Jack is out in English now, huh? And Vertical isn't quite halfway done. And even that won't cover the stuff Tezuka didn't want to reprint! Crazy.

Oishinbo Vol. 6: The Joy of Rice: There's also a million or so pages of this quintessential cooking manga, although it looks like VIZ's translation may be halting soon - only one more volume after this one (on casual venue 'izakaya' foods) is set, due in January 2010.

Vagabond Vol. 30: On the other hand, the publisher is primed to see Takehiko Inoue's swordsman drama through (it's currently up to vol. 31 in Japan), as it enters its final year or two.

Borgia Vol. 3: Flames from Hell: And then there's popular Eurocomics. You've probably heard that Milo Manara is finally wrapping up work on X-Men: Ragazze in fuga (roughly, X-Men: Girls in Flight), a Chris Claremont-written 'women of the X-Men' original Italian comic album first announced in March of 2006 - some b&w preview pages are now out and about. But Manara hasn't just been drawing superheroes the whole time; indeed, Heavy Metal readers have been treated over the last few years to this historical fiction exploitation-movie-on-paper series scripted by no less than Alejandro Jodorowsky, a man who knows his family issues and can no doubt appreciate the reign of the dirtiest Pope of all. This is HM's oversized $14.95 unedited hardcover album version of the newest stuff, which was supposed to conclude the story at one point, though it looks like a fourth chapter is forthcoming, maybe around the time that X-Men comic drops in English.

Viking #4: Ivan Brandon & Nic Klein, oversized Image at $2.99 for 24 pages of no nonsense. Preview.

Fall Out Toy Works #2 (of 5): Hard to believe The Winter Men is finally due in collected form next week. Here's the current project by its writer, Brett Lewis, a normal-sized Image at $3.99, all anime-slick and 32 pages.

Hellblazer #261: Your Peter Milligan of the week, seeing regular series artists Giuseppe Camuncoli & Stefano Landini return for a three-parter.

Dominic Fortune #4 (of 4): Concluding Howard Chaykin's trip back in time (in several ways).

The 'Nam Vol. 1: And then there's another odd bit of Marvel time-travel, a gritty bit of 1986 in the form of a period war comic, cooked up by two veterans of the day, editor Larry Hama and writer Doug Murray. Following soldier Edward Marks as he arrives on the scene in 1966, the idea was that each issue would jump forward a month with each issue's realtime release (albeit realtime decades removed). However, it's probably influential penciller Michael Golden that left the most lasting impression on readers, and this new $29.99 softcover collection notably stops at issue #10, just a few issues before Golden's departure from the series; Murray remained as regular writer until 1990, and the series continued to 1993, by which point the Punisher had been introduced as a sales-boosting member of the cast. Still, these 248 pages can perhaps be read as particular to their time, when the very plates of the superhero publishing earth seemed to shift.

I feel better.

2009-11-09T23:59:00.002-05:00

*Been sick all weekend, including one night of trying not to move under the blankets so the winter wraiths couldn't get into my pores. That is a medical condition and those are terms of art.

THIS WEEK IN COMICS:

Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days: Being the first-ever bookshelf ready comics-related item by Al Columbia, a blinking presence on the comics scene for years now. Chris Mautner has some background on the guy's work, although this new 240-page hardcover project is (appropriately) different from anything else he's done. It's an arrangement of drawings -- sometimes preparations for drawings -- generally honed in on the journey of two old-timey animation-looking kids. Sometimes there's dialogue, sometimes there's 'scenes,' but most of the work's interest comes from wrenching you though time and space as the narrative stretches just thin enough to part in spots, only to gum together again for a little while, until it's pulled again. Not an easy work in the slightest; some will dismiss it as just a hodgepodge of frustrated impulses. And some have already declared that part of the appeal. Have a look. From Fantagraphics; $28.99.

Hot Potatoe: Elsewhere in collected images, Drawn and Quarterly brings 276 pages of work from Marc Bell, the elusive talent behind the excellent 2003 Highwater Books production Shrimpy and Paul and Friends and Fantagraphics' 2004 pamphlet Worn Tuff Elbow #1. Since then, Bell's ultra-tactile '60s underground stylings -- already so layered and intense to seem more like the memory of an sunny-soaked acid funnybook -- have mostly leaked out into illustration and sculpture and found stuff made his. The best of it (and it before it), 2001-08, including anthology comics never before collected, is featured here as a $39.95 color hardcover.

Luna Park: Meanwhile, Vertigo continues its line of original hardcovers with a 160-page color tale of Coney Island, a Russian gangster and relevant events of 100 years ago, from journalist and historical fiction novelist Kevin Baker. Art by Danijel Zezelj & Dave Stewart, which locks this in as probably the most interesting project I've seen from the line in a while. Tiny lil' preview here. It's $24.99.

Beast: A 152-page solo work from Marian Churchland, whose lithe, manga-informed art got some attention in a few recent issues of Elephantmen. This one's about a sculptor who's tasked with carving the likeness of an uncanny client. Preview. From Image, $15.99.

The Year of Loving Dangerously: A 128-page collaborative work from writer Ted Rall and artist Pablo G. Callejo, chock-full of all-real 1980s suicidal turmoil and economic desperation as in fucking-to-keep-a-roof-over-your-head, as lived by the writer. Just look. From NBM, $18.95.

Insomnia Café: I'm aware that Turkish-born cartoonist M.K. Perker has a body of solo comics work behind his Vertigo collaborations with writer G. Willow Wilson (Cairo, Air), but I don't think any of it's available in English. So, I'm not sure what to expect from this all-new project from Dark Horse, an 80-page b&w hardcover telling the allegorical story of a troubled rare books expert granted access to an Archive full of volumes still being written. Perker's art seems a good deal more lively and caricature-prone here than in his Vertigo stuff, and it could be worth checking out how his storytelling operates. It's $14.95.

Sky Doll: Doll Factory #1 (of 2): This, on the other hand, is a translation of a foreign work, specifically a pamphlet-format miniseries version of a 96-page art book from 2003 concerning the ongoing Sky Doll religious-satire/Disney-anime fusion series from Alessandro Barbucci & Barbara Canepa, the three extant volumes of which Heavy Metal published as an all-in-one magazine in 2006 and Marvel re-published (with a new translation) as its own pamphlet miniseries in 2008. Why a process-heavy 'making of' album is getting transformed into a pair of $5.99 comic books is beyond me, although there's a short bonus story included, and this does mark the first entirely new material to see English release since the Heavy Metal publication, so...

The Authority: The Lost Year Reader: Oh, here's a $2.99 reprint of Grant Morrison's & Gene Ha's abortive revival of The Authority from 2006. Or, one issue came out in 2006 and then another one arrived in 2007, and that was pretty much that, although it did get one more issue out there than Morrison's contemporaneous WildC.A.T.s project with Jim Lee (supposedly to see completion as an original graphic novel one of these days) - this all went down while Morrison was on the writing staff of 52, you'll recall. Now it's years later, a totally different Authority series has over a dozen issues out, and Wildstorm has retained fellow 52 veteran Keith Giffen to script out 10 new issues from Morrison's plotting so as to fill in the gaps between series; the effort begins next week (with issue #3), with artists Darick Robertson & Trevor Scott, although Jonathan Wayshak is listed as artist for issue #4.

There's some irony in seeing two different art teams pegged for the first two issues, actually - out of all of Morrison's superhero projects from 2006 or so, The Authority was maybe the farthest he ventured outside of his comfort zone, and part of that was from how artist Gene Ha (cover artist on the 10 new issues) seemed so in synch with Morrison's concept for the revival, a none-too-original planting of the Authority cast in the 'real' non-superhero world. It was all in the execution, how Morrison struggled to give his human characters unaffected, dispassionate dialogue, while Ha spent nearly all of issue #1 keeping everyone's face somehow obscured from view, bodies slumped and lumpy, and then humbled more by the literal vastness of the Authority and their technology, a witty variant on the bigger! bolder! Widescreen stylings that made the stuff popular under Ellis & Hitch. For a writer often accused of paying little mind to visual qualities, it seemed like an interesting use of a franchise revival for aesthetic adventuring.

But it was also a thing of potential, of word-picture linkages that needed space to play out. Just from the solicitations it looks like the mission is different now, with the writer acting as plotter to another writer and artists coming in to draw the storylines. So: it's more like 52. Ah, just more like a superhero comic, a continuity comic, although it'd be great if Giffen's mean streak would show; maybe that's the best to hope for now.

Batman and Robin #6: And here's your new Morrison, ending the Red Hood storyline and the much-remarked-upon tenure of penciller Philip Tan. Sneak peek. Note that series is taking a break until the end of January so that its upcoming Blackest Night tie-in story (drawn by Cameron Stewart) won't get ahead of the Event itself.

PunisherMax #1: You might complain about these $3.99 price tags, but times are so tight at Marvel they can't even afford title spacing. God, what the fuck kind of joke is that? I don't have the fucking money for that. Is Diablo Cody sitting on my couch? Do I have a band? What the hell have you done to me, Frank Castle? That's million-dollar talk show humor. Jason Aaron & Steve Dillon re-launch the Punisher. I blame them.

Tank Girl: Skidmarks #1 (of 4): No, this isn't an IDW series, although writer/co-creator Alan Martin and artist Rufus Dayglo are involved; it's a pamphlet miniseries from Titan Publishing, reprinting a serial from the Judge Dredd Megazine, newly colorized. Samples here.

Phonogram 2: The Singles Club #5 (of 7): Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie return to that one club, and those songs, and the people. Backup drawn by Dan Boultwood. Gillen also has a Marvel debut this week, S.W.O.R.D. #1 with penciller Steven Sanders.

SuperGod #1 (of 5): Another superhero take from writer Warren Ellis and publisher Avatar, drawn by one Garrie Gastonny. The topic is superhumans as divine, as far as it relates to humans. Preview here. Ellis & Avatar also have Gravel #15 this week.

Chronicles of Wormwood: The Last Battle #2 (of 6): Also Avatar, also divine; Garth Ennis & Oscar Jiminez.

Citizen Rex #5 (of 6): Hernandez, Gilbert & Mario. Here.

B.P.R.D.: 1947 #5 (of 5): Ending the current Mike Mignola/Joshua Dysart/Fábio Moon/Gabriel Bá miniseries. Like so. Co-writer John Arcudi and artist Guy Davis return in January for the next present day storyline, King of Fear.

Hellboy: The Wild Hunt #8 (of 8): Ending the current Mike Mignola/Duncan Fegredo miniseries, although you probably don't want to count on much of an ending-ending; the Mignolaverse letters page is the glue that binds all the many Hellboy series, frequently addressing totally different stories and artists than whoever's in a given comic at a time, and recently (in the Abe Sapien: The Haunted Boy one-off) it's been referring to The Wild Hunt as guilty of "the sin of setup," perhaps better taken as the first 1/3 or so of an especially long story than as a self-contained unit (even by Hellboy standards, I guess), which will continue at some point in 2010, certainly after the next Mignola project with Richard Corben, the one-issue Hellboy: The Bride of Hell, due in a month and a half. Still, I'm sure some added origin-related info will appear to mark the border between storylines. Preview.

Frank Frazetta's Dark Kingdom #2: I am required by law to disclose all Tim Vigil comics, including this $3.99 item from Image, although the art actually serves as illustration to a prose story by Mark Kidwell. I am a man of liberal construction.

Batman/Doc Savage Special: Sure, sure, it may be a $4.99, 56-page introduction to yet another DC universe-among-universes, complete with a big miniseries yet to come, but writer/mastermind Brian Azzarello seems to have a pretty great concept brewing: a matured, shared universe of pulp magazine fixtures, upset by the arrival of the gun-toting early Batman cast as the young hotshot in town, thus neatly linking the early notion of the superhero to the costumed magazine characters that certainly provided some of the concept's lineage. So yeah: Doc Savage and Batman-with-a-gun, drawn by Phil Noto. I think the Spirit's gonna show up too? Later?

An anticipation post that goes near and far.

2009-11-02T22:40:00.001-05:00

*Ladies and gentlemen, Brendan McCarthy on Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. April, May, June: 2010.

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Detective Comics #858 (focusing on J.H. Williams III - where he's been, what he's doing, and where he's going with what he's done; thanks for the kind words on this one, everyone!)

*Closer -

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

Monsters: A new Secret Acres collection of Ken Dahl's frank, vivid, and energetically cartooned account of herpes - its composition, its spread and its effects on a man, and other people. I've read some of this in minicomics form, and I was impressed by its visual ingenuity and strong sense of humor. Very much worth checking out; it's $18.00 for 208 pages, 7" x 7". Chris Mautner reviews it here.

Buenaventura Press Comics Revival 3-Pak: In which the well-known art comics publisher looks to the past for a means of keeping pamphlet-format alternative comics viable in the Direct Market - the old fashioned 3-in-1 plastic bag bundle, like you used to see in the supermarket. Except every one of these $11.95 packs features the same three comics: (1) Lisa Hanawalt's I Want You #1; (2) Ted May's Injury Comics #3; and (3) Eric Haven's The Aviatrix #1. All three are essentially humor comics in some way, whether it's (1) alternative weekly-type cute-absurd grotesqueries, (2) high school autobio and fantasy hero pastiche or (3) po-faced adventure stuff crashing into wild-eyed faux-autobio vignettes. I reviewed them in here.

Like a Dog: A new hardcover collection of rare and scattered work by cartoonist and musician Zak Sally -- best known in comics for his Ignatz series Sammy the Mouse, two issues extant -- culled from 15 years of work. Featuring the first two (of three) issues of Sally's one-man anthology series Recidivist, plus various and sundry short pieces, with annotations, bonuses and an introduction by John Porcellino. From Fantagraphics; $22.99 for 134 b&w and color pages. Preview here.

Usagi Yojimbo: Yokai: Think of it as a really special, really deluxe one-off issue if you want, but I wonder if this isn't Dark Horse's bid to break Stan Sakai's long-lived funny animal swordsman series into some bookstore hearts. A 6" x 9", $14.95 hardcover, 64 pages, all-new in painted color, wherein Usagi struggles to rescue a kidnapped man from a thoroughly haunted castle. Have a look.

Lobo: Highway to Hell #1 (of 2): Sometimes I feel like Sam Kieth is single-handedly keeping the old DC Prestige Format afloat; then I wonder if the creator of The Maxx and Zero Girl (and errant co-creator of The Sandman) is the only artist I'll follow onto these things. Anyhow, here's our latest chance to catch up, in a new Lobo vs. Satan story written by Scott Ian, the bedrock of music outfit Anthrax. Your $6.99 gets you 64 color pages, which I'm actually only presuming are in the Prestige Format, given the price point. Let's hope? Preview.

The James Bond Omnibus Vol. 001: Vintage reprints, as expected. Some year not far away there might be weeks without huge stacks of material pulled from all over the history of world comics, but, for now, Titan Books brings a 304-page compilation of the earliest, most famous comic strip adaptations of Ian Fleming's novels, 11 serials that ran from 1958 to 1962 in the Daily Express, drawn by John McLusky with script adaptation by Henry Gammidge, Anthony Hearne and, in the case of Dr. No, Peter O'Donnell, later co-creator of Modesty Blaise. In glorious b&w; it'll run you only $14.95 in the U.S.

Criminal Deluxe Edition Vol. 1: But if it's more recent guns 'n money (in omnibus form) you lust for, now you can plunk down $49.99 for a 432-page collection of the first three storylines (Vol. 1 #1-10, Vol. 2 #1-3) of Ed Brubaker's & Sean Phillips' intergenerational crime saga, which reads a hell of a lot better in big chunks anyway. Includes an introduction by Dave Gibbons, a bonus story (from Liberty Comics #1, I think), the series' initial comics-format online 'trailer,' bonus production art and more.

NANA Vol. 19: And then there's always the latest from this prime shōjo series, whose readers will appreciate its drawing closer to where it's up to in Japan (vol. 21), currently still frozen, I think, since artist Ai Yazawa took ill in June.

Age of Reptiles: The Journey #1 (of 4): Man, I didn't expect to see this series again. Not a value judgment, just... you never really know when veteran storyboardist and production artist Ricardo Delgado will pop up with more wordless Dark Horse comics about dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts romping around. This new entry follows the 1993-94 Age of Reptiles (later subtitled Tribal Warfare) and 1996's Age of Reptiles: The Hunt, and sees lots of creatures herding together to migrate south, only to encounter a feisty Tyrannosaurus rex. They don't make 'em like this anymore. In color, $3.50; preview.

Starstruck #3 (of 13): And on that note, more from IDW, presenting the Elaine Lee/Michael Wm. Kaluta classic in new color.

From the Ashes #6 (of 6): Also, IDW wraps up Bob Fingerman's post-apocalypse slice-of-life this week.

The Zombies That Ate the World #6 (of 8): Devil's Due and Humanoids with more Guy Davis, in case you're in withdrawal. Related -

Witchfinder: In the Service of Angels #5 (of 5): Your Mike Mignola of the week, with artist Ben Stenbeck, now linking up to current stories in B.P.R.D., despite taking place in Victorian times. Like so.

Greek Street #5: Your Peter Milligan of the week, bringing the first softcover's worth of this ancient-myths-as-crime-drama series to a close. See some here. Note that Vertigo also has the actual first softcover for Milligan's Hellblazer run out this week, Scab, collecting his first storyline with regular artists Giuseppe Camuncoli & Stefano Landini (#251-253), a subsequent story with guest artists Goran Sudzuka & Rodney Ramos (#254-255) and a bonus short from issue #250 drawn by Eddie Campbell, all for $14.99.

Herogasm #6 (of 6): Closing out a fairly typical stretch of issues for The Boys, which just seemed ready to go a little early. Have a peek, but don't settle in...

The Boys #36: That's right, a double-shot of Garth Ennis climax power, as the subsiding orgy of Herogasm gives way to this final set of revelations regarding team member Mother's Milk. Yep. The French guy and the dangerous lady have their secret origins up next.

Starr the Slayer #3 (of 4): This is kind of a lot of pamphlets this week, huh? These things add up too. But the stylings of Richard Corben, they are hard to resist. Daniel Way scripts.

Black Widow: Deadly Origin #1 (of 4): On the other hand, I'm not sure about $3.99 for a movie-primed Natalia Romanova background tour, although the usually-good Paul Cornell is writing and the always-good John Paul Leon is on board for flashback sequences. Primary drawing by Tom Raney, as you can see.

Strange Tales #3 (of 3): And then, the Marvel 'indie' experiment reaches its end. Peter Bagge closes up his Hulk story, and nods are made by Max Cannon, Nicholas Gurewitch, Chris Chua, Becky Cloonan, Paul Hornschemeier, Jay Stephens, Corey Lewis, Stan Sakai (as mentioned above), Jonathan Jay Lee and Warren Simons. Cloonan preview here; Lewis preview here.

Age of Bronze #29: And then there's the long haul. The 'part 10 in a continuing story.' The Special Music Issue in which "Achilles headlines with a song about cosmic sex as Cressida has her heart ripped out. The gods don’t seem to pay much attention to King Priam of Troy, but he drones on and on anyway. And when the songs are over, the battles and intrigue keep going." I suspect battles and intrigue sums up the process of maintaining a creator-owned comic book for 11 years. So here's to you, Eric Shanower -- also starting a second Skottie Young-illustrated Marvel Oz series this week, The Marvelous Land of Oz -- and your massive comics account of the Trojan War. See it here, 24 pages, $3.50. Luck to you as always.

Consumer updates of all sorts.

2009-10-26T23:59:00.003-05:00

*So, is DMP's release of Tezuka's Swallowing the Earth already out of print? I notice Amazon has already reverted its listing to used/new sellers, and other sites seem to have it on perpetual backorder. Are copies scarce? Distribution problems? Does Diamond still have it? Copies should be available through that title link above, at least, but I dunno how big the print run was; might want to start checking up now, if your interest is scratching.

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Up in Flames (yes, there was a Mr. Natural/Fabulous Furry Freak Bros. porno in the '70s, at a crucial time for underground comics and dirty movies alike)

Flipped! Halloween Special (just a few words on horror manga in a roundtable on the topic)

*In other dawn of modern manga news, I've really been enjoying Abrams' The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga; lots and lots of images from all sorts of early and untranslated works, and Helen McCarthy's text, while introductory by its own admission, is doing a good job of laying out the context succinctly so far.

But I've gotta say, the best part right now is definitely the included dvd. I haven't heard much about it online -- and I kinda get the impression Abrams is attempting to keep the details hazy -- but it's not brand-new content. It's better: a newly subtitled 1985-or-thereabouts NHK documentary on Tezuka, made with his full participation, following him around for a few weeks of his life as a God of Manga long ago established.

A working God too, living out of a gritty one-man apartment/workspace five days a week -- the documentary crew installs remote cameras and mirrors(!!) so we can watch Tezuka draw, glance at the tv, scratch himself, nod off at the drawing board -- commanding his art assistants by day (one of them admits to having slept on a studio couch for about a week straight), and occasionally running through the streets of '80s Tokyo to catch his ride to the airport where a plane to France awaits, cranking out pencilled pages on the drive down and securing a fax number for the pages he's gonna be drawing on the flight. Later he wins an animation award at a festival in Hiroshima, and slips back to his hotel room for more work in between popping in at the reception.

Not much on the life 'n times presented; but then, you just bought a book for that, right? No, the dvd is where you get to hang around with Tezuka, who jokes that you'd have to be an idiot to draw comics for a living, answers a question upside-down in a handstand and vows to figure out how to get his old hands to draw a good circle again, so he'll be ready to go for the next 40 years of his career. He'd be dead in less than half a decade. I can't imagine some glossy contemporary supplement serving him better.

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

Red Snow: And look at this - the latest in Drawn and Quarterly's attempts at bringing classic gekiga to the English language, or at least works by classic gekiga artists. This is a 2005 collection of short stories by the late Susumu Katsumata (1943-2007), who was active in comics since shortly after the entry of the venerable alternative magazine Garo onto the mid-'60s scene. I understand these are emotion-saturated pieces, set in a rural mid-century Japan touched by mythic fantasy. I'd peer through this before anything else on Wednesday. A 232-page hardcover, $24.95.

Map of My Heart: But if you're in more of a retrospective mood, D&Q also has a new collection for artist John Porcellino and his King-Cat Comics and Stories (est. 1989), which recently saw the release of issue #70. More than 75 stories, musings and slices of life culled from issues #51-61 of King-Cat (1996-2002) are included in these 304 pages, tracking several major shifts in the artist's life as rendered in his assured yet contemplative style. Here's a sample; it's (also) $24.95.

The Fat Freddy's Cat Omnibus: What, the porn review wasn't enough? You want the real stuff? These vintage high-slapstick underground capers are probably the opposite of contemplative, although the cat always was a bit smarter than Fat Freddy himself. It's a 368-page Knockabout Comics presentation, so I'm presuming all the extended The Adventures of Fat Freddy's Cat material is in here -- parodic social comedy, genre spoofs, hippie exchanges, stretching from the '60s into the '90s -- along with the one-pagers and stuff. The U.S. price is $29.99.

Key Moments from the History of Comics: And now a beginning - 48 pages of gag comics by François Ayroles, set in the world of the funnies, culled from two French books of the type (2005, 2008), and published in English by Beguiling Books, the publishing arm of North American ultra-retailer The Beguiling. I believe this was initially released in conjunction with the 2009 Toronto Comic Art Festival, to which Ayroles was invited as a guest of honor. More here; it's $10.00.

Rockpool Files: Ah, sneaking up on me! A new book from writer Glenn Dakin, British alternative comics mainstay; you might recall the Top Shelf collection Abe: Wrong for All the Right Reasons. This is a new collection of strips drawn by Phil Elliott (the two previously teamed on the 2005 pamphlet Mr. Night), concerning a crab who is also a detective. From SLG Publishing; 64 pages for $6.95.

Tank Girl Remastered Vol. 4: The Odyssey: Meanwhile, more vintage British funnies surface, these being a 1995 Vertigo commission teaming artist/co-creator Jamie Hewlett with writer Peter Milligan for a monstrous and Joycean plunge into fame and doom. Features new reflections from the writer, and some other stuff From Titan Books; $14.95 for 112 color pages.

The Eternal Conflicts of the Cosmic Warrior: A 32-page, $3.50 one-off by Paul Grist, spinning out from the soon-to-relaunch Jack Staff, and leading into its own series of miniseries for a fighter that tends to show up just when a final effort is needed. Samples.

Groo: The Hogs of Horder #1 (of 4): That's right, the title's implication is quite clear; it's the Groo version of America's Financial Crisis. From Mark Evanier & Sergio Aragonés, the latter of whom is also starting up his work on Bart Simpson Comics this week with issue #50. Groo preview here.

Abe Sapien: The Haunted Boy: More Mignola & Arcudi, out of nowhere!! This is a 40-page comic featuring Abe Sapien, as drawn by one Patric Reynolds, of the back-up story in Hellboy: The Wild Hunt #7 the other week. Preview.

Dark Reign: The List - Punisher: John Romita, Jr. drawing the Punisher gets a mention, simple as that.

Detective Comics #858: Starting the next storyline in the Greg Rucka/ J.H. Williams III run.

Ignition City #5 (of 5): Ending this grounded space pilot series from writer Warren Ellis.

1,000 Comic Books You Must Read: Canon fodder, plain and simple. A 272-page charge. But this one comes from a single source, Marvel/DC writer Tony Isabella, and I suspect will carry some good personality in its tour of not-optional history. From Krause Publications, a $29.99 hardcover.

The now-expected Monday sub-post.

2009-10-26T17:50:00.001-05:00

*It's Halloween, almost, and David Welsh invited me to participate in a special edition of his Flipped! column over at the Comics Reporter. The topic is horror manga, so I (briefly) cover works by three ghosts of Japanese comics: (1) Junji Ito, the once-top banana among Kazuo Umezu devotees who's since vanished from the North American scene; (2) Ultra-Gash Inferno auteur Suehiro Maruo, soon to re-materialize in English via The Strange Tale of Panorama Island, coming next year from Last Gasp; and (3) the notorious Jun Hayami, whose Creation Books-curated ero-guro collection Beauty Labyrinth of Razors wound up as the Great Pumpkin of manga in English when UK printers deemed it too hot to handle and the publisher briefly released it as an e-book before sending it away to live with the Great Old Ones.

Many others contribute, so enjoy!

Robert Crumb adapted the Bible to comics so I turned in a column on porno.

2009-10-21T18:31:00.003-05:00

*Specifically, the 1973 porn feature Up in Flames, an unauthorized hardcore usage of Mr. Natural and Gilbert Shelton's the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers -- also the subject of an authorized, fully storyboarded stop-motion animated feature, Grass Roots, currently seeking production funds -- preserved for the ages on DVD-R by Something Weird Video (NOT WORK SAFE PLEASE DO NOT INCLUDE IN YOUR POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS OR CRAFT SESSIONS WITH YOUR STUDENTS). It may not cover All 50 Chapters of Genesis, but it does prominently feature the line "like a little snatch, Mr. Natch?" Also: general thoughts on smut; happenings of the year 1973; Blind Arthur Blake. Enjoy.

Stuff Coming Up

2009-10-19T23:50:00.000-05:00

*Robert Crumb column in two or three days; already written, just needs posting. The second half of that Manga thing that's been gathering dust for close to a month now; too polemical and unfair in my first go, re-thinking. International comics fun. Minicomics. Maybe my daylight time will get less hectic.

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

The Story of O: You know what always comes first on this site? Straight-up smut by Guido Crepax. Slip on your owl mask and join NBM for this new 176-page, all-in-one, $24.95 hardcover edition of Crepax's 1975 adaptation of Pauline Réage's classic novel of submission, composed for a lover who claimed that a woman could not write effectively in the manner of de Sade. The influential Crepax -- an avowed inspiration for younger European cartoonists like David B. -- adds his consummate design style and a deft command of the page, conveying voyeurism through large panels flanked by smaller glimpses of eyes and people, and emphasizing bondage via contracting bodily details, as seen here. Those eager for more might want to track down Taschen's two Crepax hardcovers from 2000 (Justine and the Story of O and Emmanuelle, Bianca and Venus in Furs), which puts together 1000 or so pages of this stuff between them, although I can't speak for the quality.

What a Wonderful World! Vols. 1-2 (of 2): Inio Asano is one of the more interesting young artists working in manga today -- I mean, as far as someone who doesn't live in Japan and can't read Japanese can tell -- having already built up a varied and striking catalog before the age of 30. However, he's probably best known in North America at the moment for his least interesting work, the 2005-06 twentysomethings-in-flux navel-gazer solanin (released by VIZ in 2008), which I totally admit to being in the minority on, given the Eisner and Harvey nominations and near-unanimous critical acclaim and all that. Nonetheless! I still think it's an uneasy, mechanical drama contraption, sweating like realism while doling out neat, tiny epiphanies and pivoting on a riotous moment of high melodrama; I'd recommend Hiroaki Samura's Ohikkoshi, published by Dark Horse in 2006, as a similar type of manga that's more interesting and accomplished, I think, on every conceivable level.

None of that's to say it was awful or anything, but I think this earlier (2003-04) suite of odd, brooding snatches of urban living plays better to the artist's strengths in slicing out ominous images from calm settings and setting them against supple, expressive cartooning to capture tricky moods and subtle unease, although there's certainly no lack of aimless young things eager to tell us of their internal tumult either. Worth a look though. Note that VIZ is releasing both volumes on the same day, 210 pages each, priced at $12.99 a pop.

RIN-NE Vol. 1: Being VIZ's first hardcopy collection of longstanding manga hit machine Rumiko Takahashi's new project, serialized online in English at the same as each chapter's Japanese publication. It's about a girl who wants to stop seeing spirits and her classmate, a half-boy half-shinigami. Only $9.99.

Vagabond VIZBIG Edition Vol. 5: That's vols. 13-15 of Takehiko Inoue's swordsman opus, all together in one 624-page, $19.99 softcover doorstop. Inoue has estimated a 2010 or 2011 conclusion for the series, currently up to vol. 31 in Japan (and vol. 29 in VIZ's single releases), so expect there to be 11 or so of these tomes in total. Inoue also has a new volume of his (other) basketball series out this week, Real Vol. 6.

Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys Vol. 5 (of 24): It'd be nice if this winds up going monthly after Pluto ends in three volumes, although I think Monster ran bi-monthly without any competition from the same artist.

Comic Diorama: A neat-looking Top Shelf pamphlet by artist Grant Reynolds, promising five stories of weird, mythical and exploratory themes in 48 pages. It's $5.00; preview.

Noir: A Collection of Crime Comics: A new Dark Horse effort, bringing together some well-known talents for new b&w crime stories, or at least stories featuring said talents' familiar characters that fit into a noir theme, like Dean Motter's Mister X or Paul Grist's Kane. Also included are a new Criminal story from Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips, plus work from Brian Azzarello, Rick Geary, David Lapham, Jeff Lemire and more. It's a 120-page softcover, priced at $12.95. Have a look.

Dread & Superficiality: Woody Allen as Comic Strip: It's true, readers - some days I doubt the 100-year reign of our Golden Age of Reprints. But all it takes to restore my faith is a $35.00 hardcover devoted to the 'best of' artist Stuart Hample's 1976-84 Inside Woody Allen newspaper strip. So yeah: daily gags with Woody Allen instead of Hägar the Horrible, which, debuting the year before Annie Hall, essentially preserved the persona dominant in Allen's early, funny works on the comics page, as if to (unintentionally) parody a comic strip gag character remaining the same forever, said gags sometimes supplied by Allen's own joke writers. Published by Abrams, 240 pages in 11" x 8" landscape format. Chris Mautner reviewed it here.

The Family Circus Library Vol. 1: Don't listen to my jokes about newspaper strips, though. I get annoyed when people call this the Family Circle. C'mon, their house is a circus! It's content, not form! Anyway, this is the 240-page debut of IDW's newest $39.99 reprint effort, collecting Bil Keane dailies and Sundays from 1960 and 1961.

The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My: Well shit, I didn't know Drawn and Quarterly was putting out Tove Jannson's Moomin picture books too. This is the first of five (though I don't know if D&Q are actually publishing any more), a 1952 story about a search for milk and a missing sister. An oversized (8.2" x 11.25") hardcover, 20 color pages for $16.95. Look.

Talking Lines: Also from D&Q, a 272-page, $29.95 compilation of airy tales by R.O. Blechman, whom Dan Nadel can introduce better than I. Introduction by Seth.

Garth Ennis' The Complete Battlefields Vol. 1: Being Dynamite's big $29.99 hardcover collection of all of writer Garth Ennis' recent WWII comics, released in anticipation of the next entry in the series, December's aerial bomber-themed Happy Valley, with artist P.J. Holden. Preview of the old stuff.

Wolfskin: A $17.99 softcover (or limited edition $27.99 hardcover) collection for one of writer Warren Ellis' less prominent Avatar projects, tracking the adventures of a hulking blonde barbarian with a core of religious terror inside him. I recall the original three-issue 2006-07 miniseries providing ample opportunity for artist Juan Jose Ryp (Black Summer, No Hero) to pile on the gore in a super-blunt take on the old warring-parties-played-by-a-hired-gun scenario, while a 2008 Annual brought in co-writer Mike Wolfer (Gravel) and artist Gianluca Pagliarani (Aetheric Mechanics, Ignition City) to lesser effect. Both are here, for those interested in Ellis' works with familiar cohorts.

Citizen Rex #4 (of 6): Keeping the sci-fi coming from Gilbert & Mario Hernandez. An interesting companion piece (if you can find it) might be Fantagraphics' 2001 pamphlet Tales From Shock City, which collected in duotone Beto's & Mario's Tales from Somnopolis back-up stories from Mister X, scrubbed of all reference to that property. Very much of the same general feel as this new Dark Horse series. Preview.

Sugarshock: Speaking of pamphlet collections, here's that antic, supercute Joss Whedon/Fábio Moon webcomic from 2007 about a spunky girl band in outer space, now available in a 40-page solo package for $3.50, including lots of process material in the back.

Dominic Fortune #3 (of 4): Chaykin MAX.

Beasts of Burden #2 (of 4): This first panel is great.

Batman Confidential #25: Concluding this easy-to-miss Peter Milligan/Andy Clarke story about Batman hitting things in Russia, maybe particularly easy to miss since this is the second issue out this month. Milligan also has Hellblazer #260 this week, wrapping up a two-issue run by guest artist Simon Bisley.

Uncle Sam: Aaaah man, this fucking comic. Easily one of the oddest things Vertigo published in the doomy, stormcloud months of the late '90s, Uncle Sam marked a distinctly bombastic usage of artist/co-writer Alex Ross' Kingdom Come capital; I think it can best be described today as that one illustration of George W. Bush as a vampire sucking the blood out of the Statue of Liberty as expanded to graphic novel length. Scripted by Steve Darnall, the story follows Uncle Sam -- the very soul of Our Nation -- reduced to a babbling, warmongering homeless man who stumbles through vast tableaux of historical atrocity and idealism, dotted with international political icons glowing and breathing and ready to converse, on the road to confronting Sen. Rush Limbaugh and the Dark Side of Patriotism, depicted as a gigantic, wicked clone of Our Man seated on a throne of television monitors full of tits and cookies and sporting events while putting a cigar of dollar bills out on the Capitol dome.

A work of activist anti-subtlety from front to back, the project nevertheless provides maybe a best-ever forum for Ross' particular visual style, allowing him to toss away potential superheroic concerns for speed or movement and focus on positioning his editorial page cosplay cast for maximum gut impact, bleeding scenes of hallucinatory broadside illustration unseen in a comics-related context possibly since Hearst shackled McCay down in the editorial office. Granted, it doesn't so much as toe the county line of kitsch as pretend it lives in a world with no borders at all -- which is either an awfully cosmopolitan attitude for an American work to take or manifest destiny at work, depending on your outlook -- but at least it has the benefit today of comparison to those impossibly mawkish Paul Dini-written oversized DC Superheroes vs. Real World Problems books that directly followed. This shit is World War 3 Illustrated in comparison. Now it's an oversized deluxe hardcover, 128 pages for $19.99.