Every once in a while I’ll notice that my wife or one of my friends is visiting this page. Usually they get about as far as a sentence that begins, “With the final, Big-Reveal-laden issue of Jeph Loeb & Jim Lee’s Batman storyline, “Hush,” due in stores this week,” or “Heated–and yet intelligent and readable!–debates abound on the Comics Journal messboard,” then turn around and get the hell out of here. I’m not sure that I blame them.
For the unreconstructed fanboy in all of us (speaking of surefire ways to begin sentences in a fashion that scares the Missus away, huh?) comes the news that Brian Michael Bendis’s superduper Ultimate Six series will be extended a full issue because its climactic fight scene is too long. That sound you hear? That’s glee. (However, it is a bit disingenuous for Bendis to claim, “I didn’t realize the sixth member was going to be such a fun guessing game for everyone.” When you say you’re doing a book about six characters but only reveal the identities of five, you know what’s gonna happen.)
Bill Sherman continues his exploration of manga by reviewing Iron Wok Jan!, a series about chefs. No, I’m not kidding. It seems to be proof that Japanese comics can make anything interesting–you know, like movies can do. (Would you have reacted similarly if I had said Bill reviewed a movie about chefs? Didn’t think so.)
(Actually, Japanese TV has made cooking interesting, too, but maybe that’s just because when I watch Iron Chef I picture Chairman Kaga as mad warlord, with a legion of chefs-slash-ninja-assassins at his disposal. I mean, look in his eyes when he bites into that pepper–that is the look of madness. Dr. Doom looks like that sometimes. And during the final episode of Iron Chef, Kagasan rode into Kitchen Stadium on a horse. I swear to God.)
Ahem. Also on the manga beat is Shawn Fumo, who today discusses what European comics could learn from their Japanese counterparts. According to an article he sites by bandes-dessinees creator Frederic Boilet, manga’s strength is its lack of reliance on genre, which he sees as being as much of a problem in Europe as many believe it is in America. The flaw in Boilet’s argument, as Shawn and I both see it, is this anti-genre snobbery: Boilet appears to think that when it comes to genre fiction, none of it is particularly good (and believe me, in Europe they’re tackling a lot more types of genre fiction than we are here in superhero-fixated America). If Fantagraphics’s Kim Thompson is right and More “Crap” Is What We Need (the scare quotes are mine, naturally), then Europe isn’t a bad model to follow. Still, Japan’s emphasis on everyday-life stories (in my book, just another genre) is admirable, and one that American comics would be well-advised to investigate.
Let’s everyone wish Dirk Deppey well, okay?
Before it degenerates into the usual anti-Bush fatuities (is “The Hand Puppet” as clever and devastating a perjorative nickname for the President as Rall’s “Generalissimo El Busho”? U-decide!), Steven Grant‘s column offers a provocative two-pronged take on the perils of “servicing trademarks”: The dead-end nature (creatively and, in the long run, financially) of revamping old comics titles or characters, and the role that continuity rehashes like X-Men: The Hidden Years and Spider-Man: Chapter One played in artist/writer (I almost put “writer/artist,” heaven forbid) John Byrne’s fall from grace into “yesterday’s news” territory. I think Grant underestimates the enjoy-ability of a good revamp (what else would you call The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for example, let alone Ultimate Spider-Man?), but he’s basically right: The big companies, and market & labor practices in general, have made supercomics the only game in town for people who wish to make a good living off the Direct Market, and the only supercomics people really buy star those good old characters; couple that with the big companies’ reluctance to publish stuff they don’t own, and you have a dramatic lack of new properties being invented. It’s the comics equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture, and in the long run, it’s not good.
Jim Henley analyzes the good, the bad & the ugly when it comes to his local and semi-local comic book stores. He points out something that should be obvious: People will walk past all kinds of stuff in a store to get to the staple products that they know are in there. This is why grocey stores put the produce and dairy all the way on the sides of the store and the meat in the back–they want you to walk past all the rest of the stuff, and since you know those important foods are in there and you know you’re gonna buy them anyway, you really don’t care. So why, then, do comics retailers insist on putting pictures of Batman and Spider-Man in their store windows while sticking altcomix and books all the way in the back? Supercomics fans know what they want, and they know where to get it–believe me, they’re not NOT going to come into the store on Wednesday because they think you’ve stopped stocking Wolverine since he’s not right next to the check-out counter anymore. As a matter of fact, everyone knows they can get superhero comics in comics stores, because nearly everyone thinks there’s no such thing as non-superhero comics. The stuff you put up front should be stuff that actually might catch non-fanboys’ eyes. I mean, duh.
I have to say, it was a pretty good day at the comic book store today. I don’t like to list what I bought, generally speaking, but I was just tickled by nearly everything I picked up today.
Amazing Spider-Man 499: Alls I can say is that NeilAlien will fucking flip out. And with that gorgeous JRJR art, who can blame him? One question, though: What exactly is going on in the graveyard at the end? Are we supposed to know?
Thor: Vikings 3: I’d imagine the ‘Alien will flip out again, but not in a good way–Garth Ennis seems to be writing Doc Strange a bit on the lavender side. Not that there’s anything wrong with that… but moreover, the callous attitude with which Thor and Strange, two of the Marvel U’s foremost boy scouts, treat the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people is jarring, and not particularly relevatory or clever. I am enjoying the gore, though, and there seems to be more of that on the way, so hooray!
Born 4: Ennis’s Vietnam Punisher origin story comes to its brutal and depressing climax. Thank God for brutal and depressing, as opposed to brutal and zany, which Ennis has been doing in his main Punisher series with diminishing returns for some time now. I’ll quibble, of course, with the broadly stated anti-American-war sentiments at the beginning (I can only assume the comments are directed at the architects of Gulf War II, who are obviously the puppets of the big companies and therefore attacked Iraq, but are obviously the pupptes of the big companies and therefore DIDN’T attack Iraq for years, so, uh…does not compute), but Ennis’s look into the addictive psychology of killing and the soporific effects of hopelessness was very appealing to me, and a good sign for what will happen when he takes the Punisher into his promised more-serious direction later this year. (I guess Mark Millar will be taking up the zany reins on his upcoming Punisher project. Woo hoo.)
The Incredible Hulk 61: Now that we’re really focusing on The Conspiracy, it would help if at least some of the conspirators didn’t look exactly alike. Still, I can’t wait to see where writer Bruce Jones ends up with this, and Mike Deodato’s art is lovely (and sexy, again). One question: the leader of the conspiracy has got to be The Leader, right? I mean, who else?
Captain America 18: A big “fuckin’ a!” to this story of Captain A, on the run from Nazis in a German-ruled alternate 1960s New York City. Like I pointed out last week, this is how you do Captain America–un-arrogant, unbowed, and beating the snot out of genocidal totalitarians. It’s also how you do alternate-history Marvel stories, by the way: This Easter-Egg-filled romp of an issue, with some tremendous action sequences by the increasingly good Lee Weeks, is basically a Where Are They Now (or Where They Were Then, or Where They Would Have Been If Then Was Like This Instead Of How Then Actually Was?) of important Marvel characters, showing the ways in which an Axis victory in WWII would have changed our beloved fictional universe. Writer Dave Gibbons’s done this much more entertainingly–and, importantly, organically–than Neil Gaiman has managed with his much-touted, now much-maligned series 1602 thus far.
Smax 1&2: I guess I was one of those people to whom this project just screamed “inessential”–chalk it up to the goofy art and the “Top Ten meets Shrek” word-of-mouth. I figured this was going to be another lark in the vein of much of writer Alan Moore’s America’s Best Comics work, which leads to a “thanks, but no thanks” from yours truly. But on ADD’s recommendation, I picked up the series’ two issues thus far, and enjoyed ’em quite a bit. Since it’s a Top Ten spin-off, it’s written very much in that mode: If TT is a TV show, Smax is like the nostalgia-fueled post-cancellation TV movie. It doesn’t have as many fanboy eye-pops as its predecessor, but there’s still quite a few fun cameos in there (the white troll buying drugs from a black troll would have been a funny and pointed gag even if they weren’t troll-doll trolls; I also enjoyed spotting the occasional Tolkienism). I wasn’t quite as disturbed by the second issue as was ADD, but it was definitely rough stuff that belied the cartoony look of Zander Cannon’s art, and that dragon was simply astounding. Glad I picked this up.
Finally, the much-ballyhooed Batman 619: Um, are you kidding?