The self-same financial catastrophe that beset Top Shelf, Drawn & Quarterly, and Fantagraphics over the past couple of years has finally dropped the hammer on the fourth leg of the North American altcomix table, Jeff Mason’s Alternative Comics. The details are here. The good news is that, as with the aforementioned publishers, Alternative’s got plenty of wonderful comics to read, so coming to their aid financially is a win-win situation. I recommend Nick Bertozzi’s Rubber Necker series and his graphic novel The Masochists, just for starters…

Over at Comic Book Galaxy I have a piece on Robert Kirkman’s Invincible, Brian Wood’s Demo, and Charles Burns’s Black Hole, examining the ways in which these disparate creators utilize the fiction of the fantastic to depict the teen experience. Check it out!

The better something is, the more important it is to criticize it. You owe it to the thing to make sure it adheres to its own high standards.

That’s why you should read Dave Intermittent‘s critique of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s involvement in amicus briefs, and Alan David Doane‘s comments on Gary Groth’s biographically fixated interview with Phoebe Gloeckner in the Comics Journal.

If the CBLDF and the Journal weren’t of such vital importance to a healthy comics industry and art form, people wouldn’t bother getting upset when they see them drop the ball.

The Missus presents her adventures at a vocal health clinic. She also shows off her DIY Phoebe Gloeckner-centric attire. See why I married her?

1) This is your company. This is your company after you hire Peggy Burns to be your publicist.

Any questions?

2) Art Spiegelman’s drawing process involves the use of a computer on a fairly extensive basis. I’m impressed–I figured him for something of a luddite, but he’s taking advantage of all the tools at his disposal.

3) Seth is as glam as fuck. He’s the Thin White Duke of comics. I just wish he’d kept his actual name–Gregory Gallant. Most people have to invent glitter pseudonyms, but this guy was born with one!

4) Chris Ware’s borderline-pathological self-deprecation and melancholy seems to be pretty much a non-stop deal. Can you imagine what he’d be like if he wasn’t the best cartoonist in the world?

5) Seeing Charles Burns’s Black Hole compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses (primarily in terms of its serialization, but not just in those terms) makes me smile, quietly, to myself.

7) Ware’s explanation of his thought process while working is maybe the most fascinating such explanation I’ve ever read from a cartoonist. It’s a new way about thinking about the creation of comics, at least for me.

8) Kudos to the author for mentioning The Dark Knight Returns and the work of Neil Gaiman, as well as interviewing Alan Moore, without acting like the presence of genre fiction amidst various and sundry McSweeney’s alums is something to be apologized for.

You’ll be pleasantly surprised as to how non-snobby, non-“bang! pow!”, almost entirely factually accurate this article is. It’s the best I’ve read from one of the mainstream guardians of literary and artistic taste in a long time.

Marc Singer, with help from a rogues gallery of pop-culture commentators, maps out the stages of innovation and traditionalism in various subsets of superhero comics. Where, oh where to map Grant Morrison? This post is a hell of a read.

Per Jim Henley‘s question, Franklin Harris mulls over the matter of authorship in the Lee-Kirby and (especially) Lee-Ditko collaborations.

That’s all I got.

Yet another post. I’m a god-damned machine.

Marc Singer counters the Spider-Man 2 euphoria. Bonus points for busting on American Beauty are cancelled out by penalty points for busting on The Return of the King, but regardless, it’s a usesful corrective to the “The upper left-hand tentacle turns in an Oscar-worthy performance” buzz circulating in the comics blogosphere.

Using this Sequart article as a springboard, John Jakala wonders whether manga fans will buy into American comics publishers’ attempts to reformat their comics in the manga-digest style. For the record, it’s not that I think putting Western comics in manga-sized digest will make your average Clamp fan run out and buy Sin City–I just think it *couldn’t hurt.* My experience in retail only confirmed what I already believed–when it comes to getting your comic shelved in high-traffic, high-sell-thru areas, format matters. Big time. Why fight the tide?

Back to SM2, that selfsame John Jakala post links to this Matt Martin takedown of the flick. Unlike Matt, I haven’t tried to make much hay out of the numerous illogical, goofy, suspsension-of-disbelief-shattering moments that pepper the movie, because after all I liked Daredevil, but I do wonder why people who decried similar moments in the latter film have entirely overlooked them here.

Finally, I’d like to mention that Wizard #154, the issue currently on the stands, features my debut piece for the magazine. It’s an interview with Geoff Johns on the soon-to-be-resurrected Hal Jordan. H.E.A.T. Members–you’re welcome!

Heaven’s War

Image Comics

A while back I took a quick look at Heaven’s War, a fantasy-cum-conspiracy-theory graphic novel by Micah Harris and Michael “Alias” Gaydos. Chances are you never heard of this book–and that’s a crime. Two of its main characters–C.S. Lewis and (especially) J.R.R. Tolkien–are very much in literary and pop-culture vogue, and given the popularity of books that are plumbing the self-same area of conspiracy-theory legend–most notably Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and its “nonfiction” antecedent Holy Blood, Holy Grail–it seemed to me that Heaven’s publisher, Image Comics, had a hit on its hands and punted. I have no idea whether the coup d’etat that happened at Image in the interim will affect how (or if) the book is marketed in the future, but I feel it’s worth drawing your attention to it yet again by reposting my review. Fans of intelligent, slightly heady Christian-mythology genre fiction would do well to snap up a copy post haste.

—–

I spent part of Super Bowl Sunday reading Micah Harris & Michael Gaydos’ excellent graphic novel Heaven’s War, from the increasingly indie-feeling Image Comics. The book concerns the race between legendary occultist Aleister Crowley and legendary fantasy authors the Inklings (Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien) to unravel the secrets of the Priory of Sion as encrypted in the church at Rennes-Le-Chateau.

At this point you probably fall into one of two camps: You are either saying “Holy Moses, I’ve got to get that!” or “Huh?” And if there’s a problem with this fascinating little book, it’s that it doesn’t go far enough to draw members of the latter group into the former. I’ve spent the last decade drenching myself in fantasy and occult esoterica, to the point where simply enumerating the names of the real-life figures who are characters in the book and the places and groups involved in the story is enough to tell me exactly what’s involved and what’s at stake. According to the notes offered by Harris at the back of the book, the published version of the graphic novel is much shorter than what he’d originally planned to produce. I can’t help but wonder if additional pages build-up, place-setting, and character development wouldn’t have been helpful to those readers who weren’t already familiar with the players and their milieux. In other words, to crib a criticism Tolkien levvied at his own novel, “the book is too short.”

That being said, I think the book still holds up: for its charming and involving depiction of the personalities of its four eccentric protagonists; for its deft and appropriately mystical exploration of conspiracy-theory metaphysics; for its gorgeous black-and-white art by Alias cartoonist Michael Gaydos, whose sensibilities in both action and portraiture are subtle yet perfectly clear; for its optimism in the face of awesome horrors, a sentiment appropriate to the work of all three of its heroes; and for its ambition, tackling in relatively short order the type of mysteries of faith and history that were previously the exclusive comics territory of Moore & Campbell’s From Hell. If you enjoyed, for example, William Gull’s guided tour of London in that book, this will rivet you to your seat.

If the work of any of its characters appeals to you, please do pick up Heaven’s War. I continue to find myself thinking over the issues it tackles, and the images it offers.

Me and Edith Head

Too often in the world of comics, a “quick read” is quickly forgettable. Not so for Me and Edith Head and Family Reunion, two delightful minicomics illustrated by Whiteout and On the Road to Perdition artist Steve Lieber. Lieber’s combination of classicist chops and an understanding of the inherent whimsy of the art form make for a memorable read.

In Edith, Lieber marries a strong Eisner influence to a relatively subdued tale of teen angst giving way to teen determination. Written by novelist (and Lieber’s wife) Sara Ryan, Edith follows a teenager named Katrina whose hopes of starring in the school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are dashed when she’s put in charge of the costume department instead. Using books written by legendary Hollywood designer Edith Head as inspiration, Katrina surprises herself when she discovers she’s got a knack for both the artistry and the organization necessary to create memorable costumes. Ryan serves up a script memorable for its lack of after-school-special cliches, and Lieber takes the ball and runs with it, producing several sequences that impress with their imaginative presentation yet do not overwhelm with showiness. Particularly strong is the way he plays with the passage of time. Comics’ flexibility in depicting this is one of the medium’s great gifts; in such scenes as Katrina’s first immersion in the chaotic costume room or the ongoing transformation of her own bedroom from pigsty to pristine, Lieber conveys a great deal through the simple manipulation of props and costumes. Katrina’s own transformation is invigorating to watch. “As hard as this may be for you to believe,” she says to her mother, who’s in the midst of a divorce from Katrina’s father, “what’s happening to me has nothing to do with either of you.” Sure enough, we believe her–our protagonist is a teen smart enough and spirited enough not to be dragged down by circumstance. It’s enough to make one hope this minicomic falls into the right (teenaged) hands, where it could very well do a lot of good.

Featuring the lead character from novelist Sean Stewart’s upcoming release Perfect Circle, Family Reunion is an original story by Stewart that goes further afield from the everyday than does Edith. Protagonist William “Dead” Kennedy sees dead people. Yes, ghosts. The problem is that he’s also surrounded by the living–in this case, a family reunion full of distant relations–with whom he seems little more adept at communicating. Stewart does a tight little job of creating a likeable loser, a guy who through no real fault of his own has a life that’s going nowhere, complete with chronic unemployment, an ex-wife, and a daughter he doesn’t get to see often enough. D.K.’s situation is contrasted quite nicely with that of the ghostly relative haunting him during the reunion, a casualty of Vietnam who couldn’t handle the hard luck that transformed him from a baseball phenom to a jungle-bound junkie literally overnight. Lieber’s sympathetic character work–again, the similarities to a toned-down Eisner are striking, and serve the story well–warmly and cleverly links these two individuals and the garrulous, slightly sad aunts and uncles whose expectations of the young men have shaped both their lives, for better and for worse. Water-gun fights and the Texas Longhorns’ “hook ’em horns” hand gesture help give the story a happy-sad summer feeling that lingers well after the final full-page image.

Sixteen and eight pages respectively, Edith and Reunion accomplish a great deal despite, or maybe because of, their low page counts. They showcase an artist whose sensibilities mesh comfortably with those of his collaborators, and tell human stories that wriggle free of convention. They’re well worth the three bucks. When was the last time you said that of a comic (let alone two!) you read inside of five minutes?

I once had a conversation about the late Mark Gruenwald, author of the flawed but still seminal and inarguably compelling Squadron Supreme, with one of his contemporaries. (For those of you who haven’t read the book, it’s a bizarre amalgam: Half then-groundbreaking realistic-superhero tropes and examination of the troubling underside of hero worship, half Marvel house-style Bronze Age-isms and wonky thought-balloon writing.) What was Gru’s story? I asked his fellow pro. Was he a brilliant writer hamstrung by company constraints? Or was he simply a guy who had great ideas but lacked the genius necessary to properly pull them off, a la Moore or Miller? This pro’s view was that it was probably more the latter than the former.

Tim O’Neil makes a similar argument in yet another long, thoughtful post on the ins and outs of superheroes, continuity, and other things I was pretty sure he didn’t want us to waste our time talking about. (No, I’m not gonna let that go. 😉 ) Go read it: It’s a revealing look at Tim’s true feelings about the genre and a heartfelt appreciation of Gruenwald’s work to boot.

In a related post, Dave Fiore does his usual thing, this time focusing on Gruenwald’s Captain America run. It makes me wish there was a version of this character, a character I love in the abstract, that I could get as into as Dave got into Gruenwald’s.

Courtesy of the illustrious Dave comes a link to this John Commonplacebook post, which goes almost deliriously in-depth into two scenes from Spider-Man 2: The atrocious Christ-figure bit from the subway, and the random-ass chocolate cake scene with the pretty daughter of the nasty landlord. Personally, my explanation for the latter scene was that, as the girl is clearly anorexic, it’s not like she was gonna eat it; there is, however, no excuse for the former scene. Anyway, John writes very well, but I can’t decide: Is this an insightful exploration of a rich text, or a textbook case of Milo George’s “justifying a love of junk” theory? You make the call!

(I would also like to say that I’m really coming to resent all these long analytic SM2 pieces, because they’re gonna make me wanna see the stupid fucking thing again despite my better judgement, when I know that I could go see Anchorman and enjoy it a lot more–and probably get just as much out of a close analysis of it to boot. All this business is like when people coax incredible amounts of societal and philosophical meaning out of, say, The Munsters or Bewitched. The analysis is interesting, and probably not even inaccurate, but that doesn’t make the shows any good. Ah, well. Dr. Octopus was kind of cool, I’ll give everyone that. Except for the idiotic talking-to-the-tentacles thing. It was dopey when Dafoe talked to his mask, and it’s dopey now, even if they’re a quadruple phallic symbol with vaginas dentata on the end. And I’ll be honest–I’m irritated that Donna Murphy was wasted in one of those “I’m a woman who needs to die to help make a male character interesting” roles, particularly because her death ended up playing exactly no part in her husband’s villainous motivation. Also, did you know that water can extinguish the sun without boiling? Alright, alright, I’ll stop there.)

The invaluable Egon reports that the Dewey Decimal Classification News is soliciting advice on how best to file graphic novels within the system. Clearly the presence of graphic novels in libraries is increasingly prominent.

Eightball #23 came out today, so now’s a good time to remind you that I’ve already written a lengthy review of the book: Click here for the original version and click here for the tweaked ‘n’ polished Comic Book Galaxy version.

David Welsh has written a wonderful review of the wonderful manga series Planetes. Regulars here at ADDTF know that Planetes is this blog’s nominee for The Best Comic You’re Not Reading. So render it ineligible and read it!

It turns out that Scott at Polite Dissent is a genius. Why? Well, now, when I say that Hush is the worst fucking Batman comic imaginable in any possible world, I actually can prove it with graphs! But Scott, even if you hadn’t just come up with a brilliant method of deducing the suckitude of any given Batman storyline, anyone who repeatedly kicks the snot out of Hush is okay by me.

Street Angel

When it comes to talking about Street Angel, I guess I’m “their grandma,” because “everybody” is already taken. You can’t swing a dead cat around the comics blogosphere without hitting a writer who’s praised the book to high heaven, or indeed hosted some sort of contest-cum-outreach-program to draw more attention to this unassuming black-and-white adventure comic. My expectations for the book, as you might therefore guess, were pretty high. I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I was a little disappointed, but I do think that’s less the fault of the book, which on its own terms is a success, and more the fault of the folks going on and on about it like it’s the greatest thing to happen to comics since sliced bread. (Has sliced bread ever happened to comics? I guess if you count Stray Toasters.)

The key to Street Angel’s success is its intelligent and slightly subversive premise. In the near future, the urban everycity known as Wilkesborough is beset by every schlocky genre convention known to man–mad scientists, hordes of ninjas, time-traveling conquistadores-slash-pirates, hard-luck astronauts, and so forth. The only thing keeping the town from slipping into complete chaos and destruction is a young gutterpunk code-named Street Angel, a fourteen-year-old skateboarder with the most destructive martial-arts capabilities this side of The Bride.

Indeed, the overall tone is not unlike an even more blatantly comedic remake of Tarantino’s Kill Bill saga. The giddy kitchen-sink blend of beloved B-movie (in this case, B-comics) conventions is there, as is the beautiful heroine who’s equal parts deadly and deadpan, and can navigate the disparate genres clashing around her with laugh-inducing aplomb. Also similar is the fact that, as was the case with Tarantino and The Bride, writer Maruca and artist Rugg mercifully refuse to have Street Angel parade around in her underwear.

Yet another point in common is the way that the Street Angel creators play with the actual formal stuff of comics-making. The back covers of each issue, for example, are dead-on sendups of well-known cartoonists’ ouevres–Issue One parodies the Lee/Silvestri/Turner Image school, right down to the thong straps peaking ou from the suddenly buxom Street Angel’s cargo pants, while Issue Two elicits a reaction along the lines of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Clowes or Tomine!” Sound effects often have their constituent letters knocked around the room by the very action they’re supposed to depict. The series’ funniest moment thus far takes place when Street Angel faces down a platoon of the evil geologist (a pretty hilarious concept on its own, no?) Dr. Pangea’s ninjas, only to have apparently dispatched them all Kill-Bill-House-Of-Blue-Leaves-style by the very next panel. “No, dear reader, you didn’t skip a page,” proclaims a caption. “Street Angel wiped out all of Pangea’s hench-ninja in the time it took you to turn the page.” (Dr. Pangea’s name itself comes into play in a similar fashion earlier in the issue, as characters wonder which came first, the moniker or the scientist’s obsession with reuniting the world’s land masses. This isn’t the kind of nature-or-nurture debate you had in college.)

The subversive element, though, stems not from the parodies of comic-book conventions, but from the position of Street Angel in the city she’s forced time and again to save. Beneath all the goofy, over-the-top ninja basketball games and Inca pimp gods is a book whose heroine is a homeless child with filthy hair and body odor. In the hands of some writers this might be little more than a conceit, a half-hearted stab at that ol’ Dickensian-urchin appeal, but Maruca is smart enough to drive the point home at the very end of each adventure, sticking a finger in Street Angel’s rollicking successes. Street Angel rescues the Mayor’s daughter, who subsequently and ruthlessly berates her savior’s hygiene; Street Angel persuades the Incan god Inti to send Hernando Cortez and his band of warriors back to their own time, and is subsequently propositioned by Inti to join his stable of prostitutes. (“Virgins are especially valuable. Ha ha ha ha ha ha!” Shades of Harvey Keitel in Taxi Driver, or R. Kelly in real life.) It’s not often you see genuine socioeconomic commentary in rock’em-sock’em superhero parodies.

The art, too, is strong. Rugg is an appealing draftsman whose work will likely bring to mind Paul Pope, especially given the similarities between Street Angel and Pope’s cutie-pie adventure stories in THB. But to the stylish, blobby inkings of a Pope or a Farel Dalrymple, Rugg brings minimalist lessons learned from Adrian Tomine, and the occasional hint of the muscular caricature of Dean Haspiel. It’s a style that does very, very right by itself, able to convey kinetic action without overwhelming and altcomix steez without bogging down. When Rugg leaves something out, you know it’s by choice (and by the right choice) rather than by inability.

So why was I disappointed? Maybe this is just something I privilege, even in my gonzo action comedies, but I need character in my comics. As I’ve discussed, Street Angel herself has a great deal of potential, but no other characters are similarly fleshed out or based on similarly rich observations of the interplay between genre and personality. It’s fun to watch ninjas and Spanish pirates and Irish astronauts and skateboarding assassins duke it out, but not so much fun that I can ignore the fact that the outcome is essentially meaningless. And I’m not even saying that Street Angel has to suddenly evolve into Palomar–books like Paul Grist’s unbelievably enjoyable Jack Staff prove that seat-of-your-pants black-and-white indie superhero romps can be rich in compelling, even relatable characters. Other supercompressed comics have acheived similar results, including Grant Morrison’s Seaguy and (the granddaddies of them all) Jack Kirby’s Fourth World books. Heck, even the “action for action’s sake” monster meanderings of Mat Brinkman’s Teratoid Heights convey a human reality behind the wordless monsters therein. To be fair, we’re only two issues into the Street Angel series, but that’s certainly a direction I hope it goes down–the book would undoubtedly improve as a result.

So you’re unlikely to coax one of those “If you’re taking a dump right now, don’t even finish wiping–RUN OUT AND BY THIS BOOK WITH YOUR PANTS AROUND YOUR ANKLES IF YOU HAVE TO”-type hyperbolic statements about Street Angel out of me. But it’s a fine, fun book, and one with a great deal of promise should Maruca and Rugg harness the intelligence and imagination they bring to making us laugh at it and use it to make us laugh with it instead.

The old blogroll has changed substantially over the last couple weeks or so. Peruse and surf!

One prominent addition to said blogroll is Heidi MacDonald, former Beat columnist and current Beat blogger. You may remember that I was touting the potential of Heidi to do a great blog in the Gawker/Kicker/Wonkette mode waaaay back when. Lo and behold, that’s what she’s done, and she’s already breaking stories left and right. My favorite so far: Dark Horse will be rereleasing its Sin City volumes in time for the film version’s release, in manga-digest format. Could it be that my old “it’s the format, stupid” mantra (blog-initiated, retail-tested) is a belief that’s shared by the movers and the shakers?

Here’s an announcement that took me by surprise: Veteran-scribe-turned-hot-new-thing Bruce Jones is leaving Marvel. Huh. I can see how people might think that his conspiracy-laden Incredible Hulk saga bears diminishing returns, but I flipped through my trade-paperback copies of the series the other day and was amazed at how readable and enjoyable they remain. This is in no small part due to the editorial latitude afforded him by top-notch ed. Axel Alonso, as well as Jones’s own ability to coax career-best work out of artists ranging from John Romita Jr. to Lee Weeks to Mike Deodato (and who’d’a thunk that one?). Jones was also a reliable go-to guy for a variety of Hulk- and Wolverine-related miniseries, the most recent of which, a Hulk vs. Thing thing, was only recently announced. It’s a big surprise to see him defect to DC, and it makes one wonder who’ll be the next in line to chafe under the more rigorous editorial demands that fellow ship-jumper Chuck Austen described.

Lots of people are saying lots of interesting things about Spider-Man 2, a film about which I couldn’t come up with something interesting to say if you paid me. (Well, yeah, I could: Can we have a moratorium on films that include a scene in which a character, pushed to the brink of despair by the horror of his own actions, clenches his fists, closes his eyes, raises his face to the heavens and screams “NOOOOOOOOO!” to no one in particular? There, that will be $150, please.) With Dave Fiore’s encouragement I’m going to let my thousand-word summary of the film stand: It’s clear to me that I’m on so different a wavelength regarding this film than are my usual interlocutors that discussing it would be futile for all concerned. I’ll say simply that it’s my belief that the fascinating insights into both the superhero genre and larger points of aesthetics and ethics being generated by the film speak more directly to the high quality of the pundits involved than to the film itself. (For what it’s worth, I think Johnny Bacardi‘s positive but measured assessment is much more in line with the intellectual and filmic weight the film can actually bear in and of itself. Ditto John Jakala‘s pan.)

The blockbuster interview of the moment is at PopImage: Jonathan Ellis speaks with Grant Morrison, and the amazing and inspiring quotes ensue as you knew they would, and as they do with the regularity of Old Faithful whenever Morrison speaks. I found his points about the too-easily-forsaken Wild-West potential of even “mainstream” comics particularly well-taken, as well as his refreshing lack of equivalency about Magneto’s terror campaign (the fitting end to which has already been retconned out of creation by the House of Ideas). (His argument that manga is where the hip-now-pop energy of comics is these days is certainly borne out by my sojourn in retail, that’s for damn sure.)

Also worth a read is Chris Butcher’s intro to the interview, in which he recounts the life-changing impact Morrison’s Invisibles had on him. The Invisibles is by far my least favorite work of Morrison’s; I found it difficult to follow in an annoying, poorly executed way, not a challenging way. Moreover, any impact it may have had on me was diluted by the fact that I read The Illuminatus! Trilogy long before; that book had the “Life-Changing Conspiracy Mindfuck” spot in my mental bookshelf well and truly filled. Still, the fact that a comic book can change someone’s life speaks well both of the form and of the practitioner in question. (And I like the Chris Butcher we have as a result.)

As part of his ongoing crusade against wasting time discussing superhero comics, Tim O’Neil has posted two of the longest, most considered analyses of supercomic continuity I’ve ever seen. (I dunno, maybe he’s going for some of that Morrisonesque Filth-style innoculation? Or maybe (seriously this time) he just really likes supercomics and gets frustrated when they don’t live up to his very specific expectations. I’m going with the latter.) Now, I’m an unapologetic admirer of (good) supercomics, and yet not even I can imagine not reading a particular book because of its inconsistent portrayal of the freaking Absorbing Man. Still, Tim’s main point–that writers, in choosing to either ignore continuity or dredge up its longest-forgotten elements, should always consider how this would effect the tone of the story and thereby its success in evoking the desired response from the readers–is an insightful and necessary corrective to a debate about such issues that too often devolves into blanket pro-and-anti camps.

Finally:

The late-night slots of Comedy Central and Cartoon Network have become a graveyard where failed cartoon sitcoms endlessly cycle through their six episode initial commitments. The least lamented is the odious right-wing Simpsons knock-off, Family Guy.

–R. Fiore, “The Glory That Was The Simpsons,” The Comics Journal, Special Edition Volume Four, Winter 2004.

Well, Mr. Fiore, I could challenge your definitions of both “least lamented” and “right-wing” (???), but I think I’ll go the more succinct route: As Nelson would say, “Ha ha!”

(Link courtesy of Kevin Melrose. That’s something we in the blogosphere should just tattoo on our foreheads, isn’t it?)

It’s Eightball Appreciation Day over at Comic Book Galaxy! Alan David Doane offers an encomium for the Daniel Clowes series in general and Eightball #22 in particular. Also up at CBG is a revised edition of the Eightball #23 review I originally wrote for this blog.

Meanwhile, back on the Gloeckner beat, ADD feels much the same way about Gloeckner’s comics as I do, and says as much in his run-down of the Phoebe-centric latest issue of the Comics Journal, found here.

Point is, if you’re looking for comics that deliver on the promise and potential of the medium, look no further.

Happy Birthday, America!

And what better way to celebrate than with some goodies all related to one of the three or four greatest living cartoonists.

First of all, I know this is sort of old news, but only at MoCCA last weekend was I finally able to pick up a copy of the Journal’s Winter 2004 Special Edition, which features both an in-depth overview of Phoebe Gloeckner’s career by Tom Spurgeon and a brand-new “photoromance” in which Gloeckner discusses several unlikely people who’ve provided her with artistic inspiration. (It also features a game of “Sexual Memory” that is one of the more bizarre things she’s ever done, and as you can guess if you’re at all familiar with her work, that’s saying something.)

Second, the most recent regular issue of the Journal has both a one-on-one interview conducted by Gary Groth, portions of which are excerpted here, and a review of The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Donald Phelps. Like the Special Edition, this issue is definitely worth picking up if you’re at all interested in Phoebe’s work: Not only does it feature another original photoromance, but the interview contains a great sidebar about the long and winding road that Diary took before finally being reviewed by the Journal, which is just happening now, over a year and a half after its release. (This has been a topic of some interest to me ever since I interviewed Phoebe, as astute ADDTF readers might recall.)

Finally, did you know that Phoebe is blogging again? Yes, she’s back! Go say hello. And buy her books, if you don’t already have them, because the simple fact of the matter is that comics don’t come any better.

Hench

There’s hardly a vein left in the big superhero-comics motherlode that hasn’t been mined to near depletion. Neo-traditionalism, mad ideas, revisionism, retro, decompression, superheroes-plus (as in “plus crime/romance/sci-fi/what have you”): To quote the Barenaked Ladies, and God knows I try not to make that a habit, it’s all been done. You’re forgiven, then, if you greet Hench, the umpteenth iteration of “a realistic take on superheroes” to come down the pike, with something less than enthusiasm.

You are not forgiven, however, if you let that prevent you from giving the book a try. You’ll find your forebearance amply rewarded. In Hench’s slim 80 pages writer Adam Beechen establishes himself as a bona fide talent: a writer with a firm grasp on the interplay between the demands of character and plot, a command of genre convetions solid enough to make his undermining of same come across not as cheap shots but as smarts, and an ability to walk the well-worn paths of realistic superheroes and street-level crime tales without a stumble into cliche.

Hench is told mainly in flashback, as Mike, our protagonist, holds a gun to the head of a bound and incapacitated superhero named the Still of the Night. Mike is a career criminal, and his speciality is “henching,” serving as manpower, muscle, and cannon fodder for the various, nefarious supervillains that populate the world of the book. Slowly he tells the story of the choices he made–and the choices made for him–that brought him to this pass, a pivotal moment during which he must choose between becoming a murderer or, quite possibly, becoming the victim of one at the hands of the terrifying hero at his feet.

The story would be little more than a case of deja vu–Rehashtro City, if you will–if it weren’t for Beechen’s skill in depicting the emotional logic of Mike’s downward trajectory from football phenom to three-time loser. Beechen realizes that the presence of flying, bulletproof people who fight or commit crime is not a “get out of a semblance of normal human behavior free” card for a writer. As written by Beechen, Mike gets involved in supercrime for that most quotidian of reasons–money–but this is just a small part of his motivation for keeping at it. Right from the get-go he’s honest with himself about the odds for success in this field: As Randy, the ex-footballer friend who gets him involved in the life, puts it in one of their initial conversations on the topic, “Figure two out of every three jobs, you’re either going to jail or you’re going to the hospital and then to jail.” What makes Mike an ideal henchman isn’t just the poverty that leads so many to a life of crime, but an unextinguishable desire to be told what to do and to do it. Even when he’s helping to plot the overthrow of the U.S. government or risking capture at the hands of an alien crimefighter, Mike’s a linebacker at heart. The coaches may change, but as we see time and time again as Mike immerses himself in a particular supervillain’s world (the neo-fascist Shadow Army, the occultist Hellbent, the masochistic Pain Freak, and so on) only to do his time and forget about them afterwards, the coaches don’t matter. It’s getting back in the game that counts.

By the end of Mike’s story, he’s taking increasingly dangerous, borderline-suicidal jobs, with criminals like the radioactive Half-Life and the dangerously unhinged Pencil Neck. He’s become one of those people who say things like “I could do a five year bid standing on my head” and mean it. He’s lost his family (though, sadly for all involved, not his attachment to them), and he’s all but lost his ability to picture a better way of living for himself. If this sounds familiar to you from some of the better crime films you’ve seen, it probably should. The superhero trappings give Hench a selling point, but like all good superhero stories, it’s the truth behind the capes that counts. Hench has it.

That’s not to say that there’s not a single misstep in the book. The climax of the book centers on Mike’s decision as to what to do with the Still of the Night, who it turns out is part of that breed of “heroes” who’s as crazy and violent as the villains he fights. As the copy on the back of the book proclaims: “Heroes. Villains. The line between them has never been thinner.” Unfortunately, outside of the confines of the world of superhero fetishists (and yes, I’ll count myself in that number), I’m just not sure this is a particularly useful point, or an incisive glimpse at some deeper human truth. It doesn’t take too much insight to point out that a gibbering sociopath who dresses up in costume and beats the crap out of people every night may, in fact, be a not terribly heroic individual. “We’re not so different, you and I,” the villain always says to the antihero. “No duh,” I say to them both.

And then there’s the art. I suppose Ken Lowery is right: Manny Bello’s storytelling is always clear. Moreover, there are occasional visuals–the weird spirals and circles that comprise Half-Life, for example, or Mike’s refreshingly idiosyncratic appearance–that impress the reader. But overall one can’t escape the feeling that Bello is that guy in your algebra class who draws those really awesome pictures. Back in algebra class they were indeed really awesome, but the distance between algebra class and becoming a published comics artist must be paved with more growth than Bello has undergone. The art often looks hurried and unfinished, laced throughout with the kind of shortcuts that should get beaten out of artists at their very first portfolio review. There’s more to crosshatching than drawing a few rows of Xs, for example, and there’s more to drawing buildings (and cars, and chains, and guns–especially the gun that’s central to the entire story, for Pete’s sake!) than taking a ruler and drawing some rectangles. Finally, the conceit of reproducing famous stand-alone images from the ouevres of the great superhero comics of yore is amusing, but Bello lacks both the skill to depict these homages with enough accuracy to impress and the imagination to subert them in a compelling fashion. In the final analysis, seeing facsimiles of the poses and pin-ups of Kirby, Ditko, Romita, Steranko et al simply makes one pine for the originals. (In much the same way, the relatively hefty pricetag–thirteen bucks for 80 black-and-white pages–makes one pine for a manga digest, where you can get three times the page count for three bucks cheaper.)

But for fans of superhero stories who are looking not for something different–that’s next to impossible to find–but for something that distinguishes itself, Hench is a discovery. Reading it, you know that it won’t be long before the Big Two are beating a path toward this talented writer’s door. We can only hope that he can tell other kinds of stories with the deftness and confidence he brought to this one.

Chuck Austen is leaving Marvel.

I was never as enthusiastic an Austen basher as some, for a few reasons. One, U.S. War Machine is one of my favorite supercomics ever, his artwork on the Elektra miniseries that Brian Bendis wrote is maybe the only time a non-Frank Miller or Bill Sienkievicz take on the character worked, and even The Eternals was sleazily entertaining. Second, I quickly figured out a good rule of thumb for parsing his work: If he can show nipples and disembowelment, it’s probably pretty good, and if he can’t, run for the fucking hills. Three, once I establish that someone’s book isn’t very good–now see if you can follow me on this one–I stop reading it. I abandoned his X-Men stuff when they started fighting werewolves and taking atrociously sophomoric, nearly braindead swipes at organized religion (not my favorite thing in the world, but even if the Catholic Church was run by a clone of Adolf Hitler, attacking it still wouldn’t justify that nightmarishly bad Nightcrawler storyline), and I haven’t looked back. That’s the good thing about comics: No one’s forcing you at gunpoint to buy them, or even read them in the store. In my head, Magneto is still dead, Nightcrawler is still a mutant, and that two-issue New X-Men coda Austen did exists only in the Negative Zone.

It’s mildly disturbing to see the role that Marvel’s backtracking away from pushing the boundaries of what mainstream, superhero comics could be played in Austen’s ouster. If Austen’s dopey PG-13 work on X-Men is out of bounds, what are the odds we’ll see something like Unstable Molecules come along again anytime soon? On the other hand, Marvel’s reliance on Austen to work on franchise books, work he was quite obviously ill-suited for, was a genuine problem for the company. By excusing himself from the table, Austen just made Marvel’s job–making good comics–that much easier.

(Link courtesy of Kevin Melrose.)

Alan David Doane has five questions for Bluesman and Castaways writer Rob Vollmar.

Tim O’Neil takes a look at the work of rising star Kevin Huizenga.

NeilAlien offers a surprisingly heartfelt MoCCA recap.

They write things like this.

Even aside from its solely ignorance-based conflation of all comics with superhero comics, it reflects that unique head-in-the-sand avoidance of innovation and mass culture in the guise of Standing Astride The Stream Of History Yelling Stop that is cultural conservatism. They’re still fighting the late ’60s culture wars in a way that’s just as embarassing as their liberal nemeses’. It’s also fairly entertaining to note that the rhetoric here employed is completely indistingushable from that of the rabidly Bush-hating socialists who likewise view the superhero genre with apoplectic disgust. Which once again proves my theories about political extremists: Weak minds think alike.

(Link courtesy of Kevin Melrose.)

UPDATE: Franklin Harris has links to responses from other conservative writers who think superhero comics are just fine, thank you very much. (He also indulges the stupid desire to use the word “chickenhawk,” but whaddyagonnado.)