Archive for September 17, 2009

Hitler’s Responsible This

September 17, 2009

Breathtaking.

Comics Time: Night Business #1-2

September 16, 2009

Night Business #1 & 2

Benjamin Marra, writer/artist

American Tradition, 2008-2009

24 pages each

$3 each

Buy them from BenjaminMarra.com

I had a whole long tedious review of these comics written out and five seconds ago I deleted it. Didn’t even copy it to the clipboard first! I think it’s stupid to write a boring review of an exciting comic. (Not that it’s stopped me in the past…) And Night Business is definitely an exciting comic, the kind of thing you want to sneak into the hands of all your teenaged cousins or spill beer and pizza grease on during the Crank 2: High Voltage/Road House/Predator movie marathon you’re having this Friday night.

The point I was trying to make in the scrapped review was that Night Business isn’t a pastiche of ’80s trash-culture thrillers as found in straight-to-video late-night-cable exploitation movies or “adult” independent comics from fly-by-night “publishers” so much as it’s a re-creation of them. Dolly Parton (whom, coincidentally, Marra has drawn) famously said “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap”; while I doubt that Night Business cost anyone a lot of money, its cheapness is clearly hard-earned. Benjamin Marra’s art is studiously amateurish and ugly in a totally consistent fashion–precisely the way that the art of someone whose natural talent is totally outgunned by his boundless enthusiasm and obsession bordering on dedication would be. These blocky, blockheaded, stiff figures–everyone, male and female, looks like their bodies are 85% gristle–seem like the thought-through product of a worldview, like they’re the output of someone who’s drawn page after page after meaty, pulpy page of these people without ever thinking twice about what anyone will think of it (beyond, perhaps, “they’ll fuckin’ love it!”). The layouts are simple, all business, as if to say “enough of all the frou-frou, let’s just see what happens next.” Every outfit is peeled from some hair-metal or porno fantasy world where men are either leather and denim street toughs or sharp-dressed sharks in suits, and where women routinely walk around in lingerie and heels. The City (capitalized like a motherfucker) consists almost solely of strip clubs, alleys, morgues, and the preposterous offices of an exotic-dancer management empire; everything is lit by streetlights or neon. In order to offset some of the icky taste that might be left in your mouth by doing a story about the serial murder of strippers while spending page after page depicting the naked bodies of those strippers (necessarily, I think; look how toothless Robert Rodriguez’s strangely prudish grindhouse homage Planet Terror ended up being without it), the series takes a page from every bard of the urban nightpeople since Steve Perry’s small-town girl took the midnight train going anywhere and builds up the hopes, desires, and dreams of each dancer as she takes it off to the leering crowds. Sure, they’re all pure-dee hokum, but in a world where the men’s emotions can all be expressed by grimacing and never rise above the complexity level of a Blackest Night tie-in issue’s Lantern Corps appearances, they’re the most psychologically fleshed-out characters in the book. The effect isn’t just reminiscent of some bargain-bin Scarface, it’s identical. If it weren’t for the ironic author photo and bio giving the game away at the back of each issue you’d never know that Marra is, on some level at least, kidding. And by that point, who cares? Smoke ’em if you got ’em and bring on issue #3.

Carnival of souls

September 15, 2009

* Patrick Swayze died yesterday. He was the star of the movie Road House, the foundational text of the Manly Movie Mamajama and a favorite way for The Missus and I to while away a couple of leisurely hours on the weekends. As such it’s difficult to exaggerate the enjoyment he’s given me over the past four years or so. I’m really sorry he died.

* My fellow MMM attendees are also as upset as you’d imagine. Rickey Purdin is posting a Swayze sketch a day every day for the rest of the month, while if you read only one emotional tribute to the man and his movies, make it Chris Ward’s.

* Now that I’m done plugging my own appearances (I’m presenting an Ignatz Award too! Okay, now I’m done) I want to point out that SPX’s programming slate for this year boasts and more.

* Tom Spurgeon ponders the Disney/Marvel and WB/DC stories. A couple elements of his analysis stood out to me:

1) The idea that somewhere between Marvel’s current domination of the rump Direct Market and holding it to the sales standard of Stephenie Meyer or James Patterson there’s a middle ground in which it, and the DM overall, simply does a better job of getting comics to the kinds of people who are interested in buying comics. There probably are plenty of runners left on the bases, particularly in terms of Marvel’s book program. And this is really just a subset of larger point regarding the potential for major structural changes resulting from these moves, not just trying to push a little harder or stretch things out a little further in existing directions.

2) The speculation that Jim Lee may be named Publisher of DC. Why not!

* I can’t believe there are only six issues of Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris’s Ex Machina left! This was always my favorite of BKV’s creator-owned titles, though now I’m hopelessly far behind and am going to have to catch up in trade. In the back of my mind I always reminded myself that the series revealed it was going to have a down ending right on the first page of the first issue, and I’m excited to see what that down ending is.

* Paranormal Activity has a trailer and a sneak preview release date–September 25th at midnight, which means I won’t be going because I’m schlepping down to SPX the next morning. Rats.

* It only just occurred to me after reading his review of New Avengers #49 that Ninja author Brian Chippendale named his new blog Marvelous Coma because it’s going to be about Marvel comics. Holy smokes. Meanwhile, you can’t tell me that issue wouldn’t have been better if it had Chippendales suggested extra page in it.

* Johnny Ryan is working some rough, rough chuckles. Are these even jokes anymore?

* Dread Central has a couple clips from John Harrison’s film adaptation of Clive Barker’s Book of Blood. It hits DVD September 22nd, and let’s face it, it’s gonna be months before I see the fucking thing because I’m so far behind on my movie-watching so this is kind of pathetic that I’m even acting like I’m all on top of this shit.

* For a long time I’ve thought about the kinds of superhero comics readers who follow characters rather than creators in terms I borrowed from Jerry Seinfeld’s routine about sports fans: Like people who love a player when he’s on “their” team but hate him after he leaves even though the only difference is the uniform, fans who’ll buy any goddamn Batman comic regardless of who’s writing or drawing him are, in essence, rooting for laundry. But I’d never thought of using this analogy in defense, or at least in explanation, of that weird completist behavior the way Tim O’Neil does in his latest X-Men essay. Tim likens fans who’ll buy the X-Men no matter what to fans of the Cubs or other perennial also-rans, where not only are you expected to stick with the team through thick and thin, the thin periods actually increase rather than decrease your devotion. Of course, I don’t like sports either. Anyway, Tim also advances an argument as to why the X-Men franchise cratered in the ’00s: He blames Grant Morrison, though not in the way you’re thinking. (My theory is that Marvel doesn’t really grok the outsider concept anymore, hence the mangling of the mutant-minority metaphor in House of M, but Tim’s got a point.)

* I stumbled across Chris Mautner’s review of Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth #1 in my RSS reader today, and his throwaway line about the deus ex machina at the end of the issue got me thinking: The serialized comic book can be a real turkey of a format for long-form stories, can’t it? I thought the ending was by far the weakest and most pat thing about the issue, and it’s not hard to see how it was nothing more or less than an in-story solution to the logistical problem of having to stop the issue there instead of going on in the laconic fashion Lemire’s independent projects afford him. I actually think this hurts more in “serious” books like this than in superhero comics–with superheroes, you’ve sort of been raised to expect that cliffhanger. Here, it’s kind of like watching an hour-long drama that has to end with every commercial break and start up again four minutes later.

* If you can’t combine Tolkien with Lovecraft willy-nilly in your massively multiplayer online role-playing game, why even bother?

Comics Time: The Squirrel Machine

September 14, 2009

The Squirrel Machine

Hans Rickheit, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2009

192 pages, hardcover

$18.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

Given what I’ve been reading lately I can’t help but compare Hans Rickheit to Fort Thunder. Like Brian Chippendale, Mat Brinkman, Brian Ralph et al, Rickheit spent the late ’90s and very early ’00s living and working in a combination art gallery/performance space/flophouse in a New England college town–theirs, Fort Thunder, in Providence; his, the Zeitgeist Gallery, in Cambridge. Like them, he saw his one-time shangri-la end before its time–theirs by municipal diktat, his by fire. Like them–and, like them, perhaps unsurprisingly given his years-long conflation of room and board with bristol board–he creates comics centered on the exploration of space, rooms, houses, environments. And like them, he fills that space with marks, so that reading one is almost a tactile, exploratory experience itself.

But the similarities are not complete. Unlike Ralph’s cavemen or Brinkman’s monsters or Chippendale’s warriors, Rickheit’s Edwardians are observers at least as much as explorers. Though they move about in his strange, gristly world, they are not of that world. More often than not they’re limned by a fine white void; it serves the purpose of making them pop against his often overwhelming backgrounds, yes, but it also reinforces their separateness, their otherness. They wander through strange environments constructed by unknown architects, gazing through lenses and orifices at any number of bizarre transmixtures of human, animal, and machine. They are constantly seeing things, to borrow the title of a book by Rickheit’s visual and thematic kindred spirit Jim Woodring. When we see what they see, the effect is reminiscent of catching a glimpse of an older family member as he or she masturbates, or strips to reveal what Rickehit’s friend E. Stephen Frederick refers to in his memorably Kenneth Smithian introduction to The Squirrel Machine as “secondary hair.”

In the comics of the Fort, exploration is, at worst, value-neutral. In Ralph’s comics they lead mostly to mischief and lessons learned (though that changed somewhat in the bleak zombie comic Daybreak), in Chippendale’s they usually lead to freedom or adventure, and in Brinkman’s, for every bleak wordless parable of creatures lost in an endless maze, there’s another LOL-inducing story of a beast barging into a castle to take a dump on the king’s throne. In Rickheit’s comics, though, the explorations and the visions waiting at their conclusions are unmistakably disturbing. They reveal creatures and creations of arcane origin and dubious value, frequently hidden inside a smoothly artificial or warmly organic surface like a grotesque parody of birth, or a Cracker Jack prize. When you end up at the end of one of Rickheit’s wonderings, there’s a sense that, to quote Trent Reznor, “Now I am somewhere I am not supposed to be, and I can see things I know I really shouldn’t see.” That’s no less true for our desire to see them. In this, he has more in common with Josh Simmons than with the Fort, though unlike the House author, up until this point the damage incurred in Rickheit’s characters’ travels is more psychological than physical.

This changes in The Squirrel Machine, Rickheit’s Fantagraphics debut and for all intents and purposes a simultaneous coming-out party and summation of all that has gone before. In the past–his Xeric-winning erotic coming-of-age nightmare Chloe, his dewily sexualized surrealist gag strip Cochlea & Eustacea–Rickheit imbued his character’s journeys into what he refers to as the Underbrain with a sliver of redemptive power. Chloe finds something that replaces what she lost; Cochlea and Eustacea’s antics are as funny and horny as they are freaky. But here, the downbeat direction hinted at by C&E’s fate in the last issue of Rickheit’s self-published anthology Chrome Fetus emerges in full flower, and the result is awesome to behold.

In Rickheit’s story of the brilliant brothers Torpor, William and Edmund, art does not provide the antidote to the encroaching cruelty of the civilized world, as it does in Chippendale’s Ninja. On the contrary, the art of William and Edmund is wholly dependent on the taking of life. Their childhood games aren’t free-spirited enactments of the struggle of good against evil, and they’re not really games, either. They’re attempts to follow their brains as far as they can take them. Other beings–the animals who are their chosen medium, their hapless mother, the angry townsfolk and mocking bullies–factor in only as means rather than ends. Even exploration itself is represented as a frightening loss of control by its most prominent exponent here, Edmund’s sleepwalking. There seems to be no escape from the power structure of oppressor and oppressed.

The one exception to that rule is for those with whom they can form a sexual connection–but even that will only be allowed to take them so far. Visually, Rickheit tips his hand after the book’s first big sex scene. It’s weird, hot stuff as always from Rickheit, rooted in memorable details that serve to knock you off balance and make you vulnerable like the characters themselves. But in the middle of the act we cut to a stunning two-page spread, silent, no people present–simply incredibly byzantine images of the Torpor family home, utterly cluttered with the detritus of their inventions. Pipes and chains and ropes and stairs and beams and wires crisscross the panels, creating along with the gutters a dense thicket of tangents and congruences. The eye is led everywhere and nowhere all at once. The message is clear: Sex offers no escape. And like art, it can, and likely will, destroy and degrade and subjugate. When life and love, of a sort, finally do reassert themselves at the book’s end, it’s horrifying and drawn in a fashion that makes it look less like a natural thing and more like a terrible apparition, or a special effect.

It’s strange, but of all the dizzying details Rickheit deploys in The Squirrel Machine, the one that stood out the most to me came early on in the book: A distant water tower topped not with the usual tank, but with what looks like a giant version of the old-fashioned, grated helmets divers once wore. It sits atop a tower and beside a train trestle that are both as realistic as you please, but there it is, a mute monument to illogic. In Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum, Amadeus Arkham recalls his fateful initiation into his mad mother’s “other world”:

A world of fathomless signs and portents. Of magic and terror. And mysterious symbols.

This has long been the world Rickheit has chronicled. The allure in both cases is that these portents can be scryed, these symbols can be decoded, this world can be mapped. But it’s only in reading this book–a painstaking chronicle of the lack of solace provided by art to the powerless–and thinking back on the diver’s-helmet tower that I realized that in our darkest moments, it’s easy to see that world as our world too–only the symbols can’t be read. When exploration is punished, when everything we see feels like something we oughtn’t, when theoretically life-affirming forces are either nipped in the bud or exposed as brutal frauds, doesn’t it all seem as maddeningly inscrutable as a giant diver’s helmet on top of a water tower? That there’s some reason for it all, something lurking beneath the surface, something we will never, ever get to?

STC @ SPX

September 14, 2009

The SPX programming slate is up! Astute readers will notice the following items of potential interest:

Critics’ Roundtable

A murderers’ row of comics critics will address general issues facing comics criticism today and will candidly discuss several new and recent works in a lively, no-holds-barred, roundtable conversation. Rob Clough, Sean Collins, Gary Groth, Chris Mautner, Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone and Douglas Wolk will share their acute critical insights with moderator Bill Kartalopoulos.

The New Action

For decades, independent cartoonists have labored to distinguish their work from the corporately-controlled material popularly associated with the form. In the process, artist-driven comics have frequently avoided genres such as adventure, fantasy, and science fiction. Recent years, however, have seen a wave of cartoonists who embrace genre and have explored new ways to activate comics’ ability to depict movement, action, and spectacle. Sean Collins will discuss these topics and more with Shawn Cheng, Benjamin Marra, Brian Ralph, Frank Santoro and Kazimir Strzepek.

SPX is Saturday, September 26th and Sunday, September 27th. Please come and say hello!

Carnival of souls

September 14, 2009

* Josh Simmons’s excellent, unauthorized Batman minicomic is now on sale for a limited time at Secret Headquarters’ web store. You know what to do.

* Speaking of sales, Top Shelf and PictureBox are both having great ones right about now. The Top Shelf sale boasts some real steals, while the PictureBox sale ends tomorrow. Shop early, shop often!

* Cameron Stewart will be drawing the third arc of Grant Morrison’s Batman and Robin! Announcement here; more art here; interview here; attempt to read the tea leaves as to what this means for Frank Quitely’s previously announced second arc and Frazer Irving’s never officially announced but talked about by Morrison and Stewart arc here.

* Here’s a real treat: The great film scholar David Bordwell takes a look at Inglourious Basterds (and Public Enemies, but I skipped that part because I never got to see the movie). One insight out of many:

Talk in Tarantino comes in two main varieties: banter and intimidation.

* My pal Kevin Mahadeo speaks to Agents of Atlas author Jeff Parker about the team’s upcoming crossover with the X-Men. That’s a come-up for the Agents and Parker alike.

* Nice get for Robot 6’s weekly What Are You Reading? column: Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly.

* One of the reasons I’ve been enjoying (and repeatedly linking to) Curt Purcell’s Blackest Night posts is because as a lapsed reader of superhero comics who’s been away from them for quite some time, he’s coming at the project with a set of assumptions we devotees don’t have, and without another set of assumptions that we devotees do have. In his latest post on BN, he voices disappointment that despite ten or so issues of Blackest Night comics if you count all the tie-ins, the only thing that’s really happened is some old superheroes and supervillains have come back as Black Lanterns and attacked other superheroes. Having spent the past eight years or so reading superhero comics on the regular, it was weird to me just to see Curt use the phrase “ten issues later” to describe where we’re at with Blackest Night–by my reckoning, i.e. by the numbering of the main BN series, we’re only two issues deep. It would never occur to me that anything important would happen in any of the tie-ins, except perhaps the Johns-authored Green Lantern and Tales of the Corps issues. There are a couple of routes recent event comics have taken to make their tie-ins matter: You can use them to fill in all the important story details that your main-series slugfest elides, as did Secret Invasion scribe Brian Bendis in his vastly superior New Avengers and Mighty Avengers issues; or you can make the tie-ins have little, if anything, to do with the main series, as Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, and Greg Rucka did with their Final Crisis minis. The problems here are obvious, though: The former can leave fans feeling like we could have lost a few boring battle splash pages in favor of actual information, while the latter can leave fans scratching their heads and ruing their purchases.

* The quote of the day comes from Squirrel Machine author Hans Rickheit:

I have now graduated from being someone who draws comics that no-one reads to a person that draws comics that no-one comprehends!

* Finally, Brickhousebunny21 would like us all to know that All Of Our Responsible This.

Fire Walk With Meme

September 12, 2009

In related news, Brickhousebunny21, who coined this phrase, has decided to pay this blog a visit in the comment thread downblog. Make him feel at home!

WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS?

September 11, 2009

My friend Rob Bricken, aka Topless Robot, has a recurring feature at his site called Fan Fiction Friday, the goal of which is to plumb the abyss of horror that is the collective imagination of the nerd Internet. This week’s installment is about a woman having sex with a baby Pokemon teddy-bear thing. But where it really takes off is when the author (search the page for Brickhousebunny21) shows up to complain and threaten. He leads with WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS?, as meme-worthy a phrase I’ve seen on the Internet since “I am aware of all Internet traditions.” It’s an ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US waiting to happen. I’m working it into my repertoire immediately. The next time I’m outraged by something on the Internet, I’m damn well gonna try to find out whose responsible this.

The Beatles and drugs

September 11, 2009

Is it just me, or are the Beatles the best argument in favor of recreational drug use ever? It’s universally acknowledged–indeed it’s all but written into the band’s official unofficial hagiography–that the full flowering of the band’s genius stemmed directly from their discovery of marijuana and LSD. Before drugs they were awesome-to-behold hitmakers, yeah, but after drugs they recorded Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, the White Album, and Abbey Road, and transformed human society, more or less. Certainly that’s the contour of the storybook version of their career as will become canon for a generation courtesy of Rock Band–the missing ingredient is elided, but all of a sudden they go from a rockin’ live act to godlike beings performing psychedelic masterpieces in “dreamscapes.” Best of all, drugs didn’t contribute to their break-up, and none of them O.D.’d! Drugs were terrific for the Beatles. And yet even as we trumpet the treasures that pot and acid helped John, Paul, and George mine from their brains, the government will be spending millions upon millions of dollars telling kids that recreational drug use is always horrible. Lying to them, in other words. (Drink up, though!)

Comics Time: Ninja

September 11, 2009

Ninja

Brian Chippendale, writer/artist

PictureBox, 2006

128 pages, hardcover

$34.95

Buy it from PictureBox

Buy it from Amazon.com

Starting off a review of a Brian Chippendale comic by talking a plot seems like the laziest most wrongheaded way to start off a review of a Brian Chippendale comic, like an unwitting parody of all the lame comics criticism that other comics critics criticize for focusing on writing rather than art. Shouldn’t I be saying something about markmaking or snake-style layouts? Maybe, but much more so than with Chippendale’s Maggots, the creation of which predated and the publication of which followed this book, the plot of Ninja matters. Not just as a driver for the imagery, but to Chippendale, and to me.

The book starts with these silly little comics about a ninja–basically, fighting against Cobra from GI Joe–that Chippendale drew when he was 11. They look like a child artist’s representation of a sidescrolling Nintendo game, like Ninja Gaiden: After breaking into a bad-guy base, the ninja will move forward or up or down and discover a new opponent, and we watch as he figures out a way to defeat or avoid each enemy. Most of these strips end when the ninja, having stolen some valuables from the evildoers, successfully escapes from their lair and returns to his home (complete with its incongruously normal front door). What Chippendale does in this collection is every so often insert a brand-new, recently drawn strip between the stuff he drew as a kid, fleshing out the Ninja’s home life and world at large. Meanwhile, in the world of the kid strips, the bad guys become less involved with…whatever it was they were up to before the Ninja showed up, and more and more fixated on capturing and killing the Ninja in retribution for all the havoc he’s caused them.

The problem for Chippendale is that his younger self was apparently less dedicated to making art than his grown-up incarnation–like many kids who spent their youths creating their own, enthusiastically derivative fantasy worlds to play in, he eventually ran out of steam, and his final Ninja strip from that era is unfinished. The solution? A new penultimate strip, in which the bad guys build a doomsday device that gets out of control and begins absorbing reality as we know it. Now, when 11-year-old Chippendale’s last Ninja strip abruptly cuts off mid-page, leaving rows of blank panels unfilled beneath it, it’s not just a kid losing interest and putting his pencil down to go play Nintendo or skateboard–it’s the end of a world as we know it.

Cut to 18 years later, and to the bulk of the book. Now, in typical Fort Thunder fashion (prefigured to an astonishing degree by the space-based action of the kid stuff) we explore the city of Grain and its surroundings, where the Ninja and his enemies once lived. Only now, with the Ninja gone and his “killing villains for fun and profit” activities curtailed, the city’s gone to hell. Not the openly dictatorial hell that the old Bad Guys might have ushered in–they seem to have been consumed by their own device, unless I missed something–but a quotidian nightmare of corrupt public officials, rapacious corporate raiders, callous resource thieves, brutal cops, and relentless, even violent, gentrification and homogenization. Everyone may still look like refugees from Super Mario or the Masters of the Universe, and the level of violence and dimension-hopping and overall weirdness remains consistent with that, but in essence their concerns are the same as those of an artist who returns home from a tour with his noise-rock band to discover the place he’d lived and worked in for years had chains on the doors so the city could raze it and install a supermarket parking lot.

Of course none of this is super-apparent from the get-go. I spent a decent amount of time waiting for the Ninja to show up again after the 18-year jump, storming back into town to take it back. But as we watch Chippendale’s little groups of characters–good, bad, and ugly alike–go about their zany business, it becomes apparent that there’s a build to the eventual reveal of “What happened to the Ninja?” to rival any slow-burn mystery-villain storyline Marvel or DC have done this decade. And once you find out, the solution is elegantly simple, childlike, charming, and utterly inspiring. I’m not going to spoil it, but suffice it to say I closed this book feeling better about humanity than I’ve felt in quite some time. Maybe there is a solution after all.

Okay, so, the art. The collage material is an eye-candy orgy as you’d expect, one of the purest distillations of that aspect of Chippendale and the whole Providence scene’s output as I’ve seen so far, though for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what role it was playing in the narrative–it didn’t seem to pop up at logical reality-warping breaks, like when the Bad Guys’ machine ran amok and caused a House of M style fade to white–until I read in PictureBox’s synopsis of the book that they’re just chapter breaks. More immediately grokkable and impressive to me were the many, many bravura moments in the comics themselves–painstakingly delineated Dore-style deserts, a city covered completely in OCD stripes, characters becoming aware of a spy camera filming them in a scene simultaneously “shot” from their perspective and that of the camera, two scenes taking place at the same time but on different vibrational planes suddenly smooshed together in strips as though they were pieced together from two separate shredded documents, a brutal torture sequence and hot sex scene both showing up in the book’s final act. And Chippendales back-and-forth panel flow is so addictive (and much more consistent than in Maggots) that I found myself trying to read other comics that way after finishing Ninja. There’s a certain magic to these elements that feeds into and plays off of the narrative even when it doesn’t have any strict narrative cause, like any great spectacle.

But ultimately this is a book about an idea: the need to persevere in your pursuit of fun, which in most of the ways that matter is a synonym for Good with a capital g. Sometimes, compromise may be necessary–after all, the Ninja was slicing up bad guys not just because in the world of the comic it’s the right thing to do, but for their loot; and (still trying to avoid being spoilery, though this may skirt the edge) his ultimate fate does not necessarily provide a happy ending for everyone. But you can reclaim the comics you made when you were a kid and build them up into a statement on where you are as a grown-up without sacrificing the buoyant illogic and unfettered imagination that came through originally. You can hang on to the important things you found in your arts-commune idyll even when the outside world finally smashes down the walls around you. You can still think ninjas are cool.

9.11.09

September 11, 2009

God bless America
Land that I love
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night with a light from above
From the mountains
To the prairies
To the oceans
White with foam
God bless America
My home sweet home

—–
As he followed her inside Mother Abagail’s house he thought it would be better, much better, if they did break down and spread. Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problems. When the cells began to clump together and grow dark. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names…the faces…

Fran lit a kerosene lamp and it made a soft yellow glow. Peter looked up at them quietly, already sleepy. He had played hard. Fran slipped him into a nightshirt.

All any of us can buy is time, Stu thought. Peter’s lifetime, his children’s lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren. Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest.

“What?” she asked, and he realized he had murmured it aloud.

“A season of rest,” he repeated.

“What does that mean?”

“Everything,” he said, and took her hand.

Looking down at Peter he thought: Maybe if we tell him what happened, he’ll tell his own children. Warn them. Dear children, the toys are death–they’re flashburns and radiation sickness, and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don’t play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please…please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook.

“Frannie,” he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes.

“What, Stuart?”

“Do you think…do you think people ever learn anything?”

She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:

I don’t know.

–Stephen King, The Stand

Carnival of souls

September 10, 2009

* Dirk Deppey takes Paul Levitz’s tenure at the top of DC and does this to it:

It’s weird that you pretty much only have Dirk’s frontal assault on the one hand and then a slew of panegyrics, from Brian Hibbs and Heidi MacDonald to Kurt Busiek and Marv Wolfman, on the other. You’re not seeing much in the way of “he did a good job on these things and a lousy job on these things,” or even just “he was mostly good but lousy on this issue” or “he was mostly lousy but good on this issue.” I think Brian might have inadvertently gotten to the heart of the divide with this comment-thread explanation of his concerns about the industry in the post-Levitz era:

…Paul, specifically, was an agent that always kept the DM in mind as one of his primary and most important markets.

Maybe whether or not you view Levitz as a hero or a villain comes down to whether you share his apparent prioritization of preserving the Direct Market, the beating heart of North American comics culture, as currently constituted over other concerns, be they commercial or creative. Although I think it’s more complicated than that, since I’ve heard from more people than Dirk that Levitz’s role in DM history during the ’90s wasn’t always indisputably that of someone with its long-term best interest at heart. I’ve heard similarly conflicting things about his role in the evolving conception of creators’ rights, a split perhaps best characterized as one between incrementalism and absolutism. I dunno, man, I just read comics.

* Anyway, CBR’s Jonah Weiland interviewed Levitz and incoming DC Entertainment honcho Diane Nelson about the restructuring and reshuffling. The news here is that Levitz’s Publisher role will be filled by a person to be determined later rather than becoming part of Nelson’s job; also, Nelson’s assurances that DC’s editorial/creative direction won’t be touched aren’t quite as absolute as were Bob Iger’s regarding Marvel. Then again, Nelson’s admittedly not a comics person, and it sounds unlikely that she’ll dive into that end of DCE’s business all that much initially simply because she’ll need a crash course on it first.

* Few things will make me happier about comics this year than Hans Rickheit’s The Squirrel Machine getting a rave review from Tom Spurgeon. At least it seems like a rave from a skim of it–I’m not going to read it until I actually read the book.

* The much-touted, Paramount-purchased horror mockumentary Paranormal Activity will not be getting a bigger-budget remake, so whenever we end up getting it, we’ll be getting it raw.

* Curt Purcell’s last Blackest Night/Great Darkness Saga comparison tackles the depiction of characters’ fear as a way to convince readers that there’s something to be afraid of.

* A video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz and Richard Seitz consisting of nothing but wordless scenes of mass panic from disaster, giant monster, and alien invasion movies? Hell yeah.

* The great Jim Rugg posts some teaser art for One Model Nation, his upcoming Image…graphic novel, I think? The premise sounds a bit like “What if Gang of Four actually were militant freedom fighters?”, so sign me up.

* This would feel like bigger news if it weren’t for all the seismic goings-on involving Disney and Marvel, Kodansha and Tokyopop, and Warner Bros. and DC over the past crazy week and a half, I think, but New York Comic Con is merging with New York Anime Festival. Which makes it sound like a) North America now has its second-biggest public nerd-culture gathering pretty set in stone, and b) the con wars are going to change the shape of the North American con scene above and beyond whether or not more Wizard/Shamus shows are started or shuttered.

* Hey, while we’re talking about Warner Bros. (we were, a while ago, remember?), Joel Silver’s WB take on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe is dunzo, leading to much rejoicing from the expected quarters. And me, too, probably–that treatment sounded like crap. Sadly, I think the failure of Speed Racer combined with the success of the Transformers movies and G.I. Joe signals that the weirdness of He-Man will be well and truly drained from the property by the time it hits the silver screen. I’d be happy to be wrong about that, though.

* I always loved how my coworkers at ToyFare would get customized action figures of themselves as going-away presents–Ben Morse has posted a gallery of ’em.

* The final slew of Pitchfork Beatles reissue reviews is up. The late-model Beatles albums have found themselves out of favor over the years for reasons quite different than, say, Sgt. Pepper, but I’ve always loved them, the White Album and Abbey Road in particular. The point of the Beatles is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and if anything I think that’s even more true when those constituent parts are all the more visible. In his review of the White Album, my favorite album by anyone ever, Mark Richardson puts it best:

Listening as the tracks scroll by, there’s a constant feeling of discovery.

I don’t think that would be true if the band were still functioning like a well-oiled machine. Sure, you might have gotten something astonishing if they were, but why bog yourself down in hypotheticals when the actual is so sprawling and all-encompassing and astonishing already?

Once again, I was pleased to see 10s for those two albums, and 9-pluses for Let It Be and Past Masters. It’s difficult to pinpoint a time when the Beatles weren’t at the height of their powers, and they were the best band of all time, so again, why beat around the bush? Plus, on a cheeky level, giving Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles, and Abbey Road all 10s will enable the “which album is the best?” debate to continue unimpeded. (I almost wish they’d given one an 11.)

One last thing: I know comparing anything to the Beatles is like some sort of reverse Godwin’s Law, but when you read things like this, the magnitude of their achievement becomes very, very difficult not to overshadow pretty much every creative enterprise undertaken ever since:

The Beatles’ run in the 1960s is good fodder for thought experiments. For example, Abbey Road came out in late September 1969. Though Let It Be was then still unreleased, the Beatles wouldn’t record another album together. But they were still young men: George was 26 years old, Paul was 27, John was 28, and Ringo was 29. The Beatles’ first album, Please Please Me, had come out almost exactly six and a half years earlier. So if Abbey Road had been released today, Please Please Me would date to March 2003.

Breathtaking. Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair.

Carnival of souls

September 9, 2009

* Warner Bros. has announced that DC Comics is now DC Entertainment, and Paul Levitz is no longer in charge of it. Stepping in for Levitz is Diane Nelson, previously best known for overseeing Warner Bros.’ multimedia Harry Potter empire. She’ll be reporting to Jeff Robinov, the president of WB Pictures. Levitz will be taking over Adventure Comics from Geoff Johns after just one story arc. I am for shit at industry prognostications, though I suppose it’s worth noting that when Disney bought Marvel, no one stepped down.

* CBR and my friend Kiel Phegley landed Joe Quesada’s one and only interview about the Disney/Marvel acquisition until the completion of the deal. I found it funny how Kiel dutifully asked question after specific question about the future of Marvel and Disney’s various comics enterprises only for Quesada to offer variations on “no comment” due to legal concerns. But it’s still an interesting interview in terms of the tick-tock of Quesada’s involvement with the merger, and his repeated and adamant assertion that this will change Marvel’s existing creative direction not one iota.

* Allegedly, the rapturously reviewed horror mockumentary Paranormal Activity will receive a limited release on September 25th. Jason Adams, it’s a date.

* Pitchfork is still on the Beatles beat, with reviews of Rock Band and everything from Rubber Soul through Magical Mystery Tour. Scott Plagenhoef’s reviews of those records aren’t quite as revelatory as were Tom Ewing’s takes on the earlier albums, but it would be tough to be since so much more has been written and thought about these ones. It’d be very, very difficult for me to find a new in for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, you know? But the Magical Mystery Tour review comes pretty close, articulating that childlike-wonder, storybook feel I allude to from time to time. And it was nice to see all four albums get wall-to-wall 10.0s–no earlier-funnier-stuff revisionism for Sgt. Pepper, no “it’s nice, but not really an album” for Magical Mystery Tour. Best band ever, best albums ever, why fuck around? I’m really curious as to what they’ll say about the White Album and Abbey Road, for which I see more and more detractors because of the fractured nature of the band at the time of their recording. But who cares, honestly? I must have missed all the complaints that Big Boi should have had a bigger role in the recording of “Hey Ya.” The White Album contains every emotion I’ve ever had, so I don’t care if they weren’t holding hands while they recorded it, or if John, George, and Paul’s songs all sound different. That’s the appeal!

Comics Time: Sweet Tooth #1

September 9, 2009

Sweet Tooth #1

Jeff Lemire, writer/artist

DC/Vertigo, September 2009

32 pages

$1.00!

Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! have a recurring…concept, I guess? called “Brown Town.” Sometimes it’s used as a euphemism for potty humor: “That ‘Poop Tube’ sketch was a little too Brown Town for our parents.” Sometimes it’s just a funny-sounding nonsense phrase, as in their unsolicited candy jingle-cum-Doobie Brothers pastiche “Rolo Tony.” But I like to think it’s meant to describe where we’re often taken by colorists for Vertigo comics.

Jose Villarrubia’s Lee Loughridge impersonation aside, this is a fascinating little comic just because of how different it is from pretty much everything else Vertigo has done this decade. There’s no fabulous and violent rock’n’rollin’, there’s no in-your-face ugliness (except for one shot–pun intended), there’s no modern-mythmaking, no real echoes of Gaiman or Ennis or Ellis or Azzarello or Willigham. And there’s no writer/artist team, either–it’s just Jeff Lemire, author of Top Shelf’s Essex County trilogy and creator of some of the best damn convention sketches you will ever see. It’s tough to imagine a better fit for this story of an isolated deer-boy hybrid left on his own in an unforgiving post-apocalyptic world after the death of his father than Lemire’s shaky, nervous line, which has always had a vulnerable deer-in-the-headlights quality and which isn’t toned down or slicked up a bit for this major-label effort. Even the bloodspatter remains an abstracted splash of red rather than an HBO Original gorefest. The art holds color well, moreover, though as I said, it might be nice if colors other than brown were deployed for that purpose. Instant-classic cover, too, perhaps the best the imprint has seen…I was gonna say since Dave Johnson on 100 Bullets or James Jean on Fables, but this strikes me as potentially iconic in and of itself in a way that those storied cover-art runs only were in toto.

In one of those self-promoting editorial columns Vertigo creators do during a series launch, Lemire suggests that what sets Sweet Tooth apart from your average monthly comic is the quietness of his approach, an approach he’s carrying over from his altcomix, the idea being that when something really fucked up happens, it’ll be that much more startling. I think he’s right, so far, one issue in. Now, there are things I’m not so sure about–the boy’s dialect scans a bit like Claremontian cliche at times, while his bumpkin naivete and the hunters’ gruff bad-guy-ness are a little too high-pitched to maintain that delicate quietness Lemire’s striving for. And this is a bit picayune, but I feel like a lot of shots crop off the characters’ feet for no reason? But regardless, this is a very likeable book, a comic you want to succeed really for all the right reasons: It’s clearly the product of a personal vision rather than an attempt to fill some kind of niche, it has lovely art, it attempts to win you over to its characters rather than bash you over the head with their badassness, and it honestly seems like it could go anyplace at all at this point. I’ll be following it.

Carnival of souls part two

September 8, 2009

* Part one is here.

* As you may have heard, this is a landmark week for popular culture: Crank: High Voltage comes out on DVD today. I…I just can’t describe…please see this movie. It makes everything else look like it’s half asleep. I don’t care if you can hear the bass in Beatles songs that aren’t “Don’t Let Me Down” now^: You will never feel more alive than you do while watching Crank: High Voltage.

* Lost in my bookmarks: My erstwhile Robot 6 coblogger Chris Mautner caught this fascinating interview with Alan Moore by Mania.com’s Kurt Amacker about all things Marvelman. The newsy bit is Moore’s statement that his Marvelman material is likely going to be reprinted by Marvel, with his blessing but without his name attached (a decision having to do with his distaste for the material retrospectively, his distaste for Marvel generally, and his distaste for the mainstream American comics industry at large). But even more interesting to me is Moore’s account of the long and ugly-sounding saga of his involvement with the Marvelman rights dispute–I, for one, had no idea that the rights to the character seem to have been quite literally stolen out from under Mick Anglo, who legally never ceased to maintain them. I also really liked this bit about Moore’s intentions upon writing the character’s relaunch/revamp:

“I’d got a vague idea that there was a way that I thought superheroes could be done that would be more gripping and more intense than the way they were being done at the time.”

Having not read Marvelman I can’t speak to whether or not he pulled it off. But I’ve read Watchmen a few times, and I think that Moore’s current disdainful view of the genre, and that of many critics who use Moore’s superhero work as a cudgel against the genre in general, obscures the fact that at its heart, that book’s a cracking good superhero story that succeeds on exactly the grounds Moore stipulates above. I wouldn’t be surprised to find this true of Marvelman as well.

* Speaking of prickly legal disputes over genre-fiction landmarks, the Lord of the Rings royalty dispute between The Tolkien Trust, HarperCollins, and New Line Cinema has officially been settled. This means Guillermo Del Toro’s Hobbit movies continue apace.

* Brian Hibbs loved Strange Tales #1. Brian, I can assure you it wasn’t thought of as Wednesday Comics counterprogramming, unless someone at Marvel got wind of Wednesday Comics over two years ago…

* Daylight vampires? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* I said earlier on Twitter that I love the Beatles and that the current onslaught of Beatles coverage couldn’t go on long enough as far as I was concerned. (This was before I read Chuck Klosterman’s egregious AV Club piece. Ugh. But still.) In that light I recommend Pitchfork’s overview and album-by-album coverage of the Beatles’ catalog’s CD rereleases, all of which can be found by clicking that link. Mark Richardson’s overview explains in easy-to-grok detail what’s going on with the remastering and packaging and why you should (or shouldn’t!) care. Tom Ewing’s album reviews (he’s done the five pre-Rubber Soul records so far) chart a steady course between the Scylla and Charybdis of Beatles criticism–tediously reverent supplication and equally tediously wrongheaded skepticism–neither throwing his hands up in surrendered awe nor spitting out barbs about the emperor’s new clothes but focusing instead just on what they’re doing with each song and each album and how it does or doesn’t click. This being the Beatles, it mostly clicks hard, and Ewing’s open about that, which I appreciate.

I also appreciate the case he lays out for the creative identities of each of these early records. I think I’ve described before how the Beatles fit on a continuum with J.R.R. Tolkien and Monty Python for my adolescent self–art as a dizzying torrent of information, a multifaceted array of reference-making and world-building. And so, as I imagine was the case for many fans of my ilk, it’s really the psychedelic and post-psychedelic material that clicked with me hardest–Sgt. Pepper onward, for the most part, during my teen years, and to a lesser extent Rubber Soul and Revolver after that. These records, of course, also fit most neatly with the rockist philosophy that largely held sway among music critics prior to this decade–the belief system that holds “John was the only true genius in the group” a truth to be self-evident. (This viewpoint still lives, by the way–I saw Mikal Gilmore say exactly that in a supplement to his recent Rolling Stone cover story on the Beatles’ break-up and I was momentarily stunned. That’s what a decade of poptimism and being surrounded by Macca boosters will do to you.) Now, I never disliked the early pop smashes, far from it. (Except maybe “Twist and Shout,” because that’s how much I hate Ferris Bueller.) In fact I always liked them a lot–they just didn’t fire my imagination. Since then I’ve come to love them. But I’d never really sat and processed a case for the albums some of them came from as albums–as full-length statements by artists, as opposed to soundtracks and odds’n’sods collections of radio staples and covers and slow-dance pop ballads churned out by record labels–prior to reading Ewing’s work here. It’s really rather exciting and I recommend it if this isn’t something you’d ever really considered before.

^ not true–yes I do

Carnival of souls

September 8, 2009

* Well, I wrapped up my guestblogging stint at Robot 6 on Friday. My last few posts included a round-up of reactions to Disney CEO Bob Iger’s visit to the Marvel offices, a photographic tribute to the Incredible Shrinking Wizard Entertainment, a look at the array of new Cold Heat comics coming out this fall (Cold Heat #7/8! Mome Vol. 16! and according to Frank Santoro, the long-awaited 6th and 7th Cold Heat Specials!!!), and a peak at what I’m reading now. Many many thanks to JK Parkin, Kevin Melrose, Chris Mautner, Jonah Weiland, and all at Robot 6 and CBR for this hella fun opportunity!

* Remember when I said that Rambo V was going to be about Rambo vs. Mexican druglords? It’s actually going to be about Rambo fighting a monster. Seriously, a genetically engineered monster, created by the government’s top secret science-fiction labs, running amok in the Arctic, the whole nine yards. I really, really don’t know how to feel about that. On the one hand, Rambo was my favorite movie of 2008, and I think it really established that killing his way through Third World hellholes is Rambo’s milieu. On the other hand, I’m not sure there’s any place for that particular concept to go after that movie–seriously, they shot kids and jammed rifle barrels into the bullet holes, where else could Stallone take it? And as the Rambo films have come closer and closer to replicating Sylvester Stallone’s platonic concept of war as some sort of necessary horror, maybe actual horror is the only way for that concept to become even purer. Click the link to listen to a voice mail Sly left on Harry Knowle’s phone about it. I am totally serious.

* Curt Purcell takes on his horror-movie nemesis, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and comes away pleased, if not transformed. Curt’s right to believe that seeing this film during one’s formative years as a horror fan is a seismic experience; I remember renting it with some buddies and watching it stoned as a lark and ending up feeling like I’d been in some sort of horrible accident. I think what’s most interesting in Curt’s post is how he hones in on how the film’s much-touted documentary-style ugliness is actually a studied series of deliberate choices–one thing that emerges from repeated viewings of the film is that this ostensible ugliness crosses the line into beauty on several occasions (the Pam shot, the final shot, the long shot of the van pulling over to pick up the hitchhiker, some of the nighttime work, etc etc etc).

* Joe “Jog” McCulloch reviews Jacques Tardi’s excellent comics adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s crime novel West Coast Blues, occasionally by way of comparison to Darwyn Cooke’s comics adaptation of Richard Stark’s crime novel Parker: The Hunter. It’s juicy.

* God help us all, Tom Spurgeon’s placeholder post for the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con International is up.

* Man, I must be out of touch: I had no idea The Weinstein Company is in serious financial trouble. Interestingly, this is largely due the varying fortunes of such of-interest-to-readers-of-this-blog genre films as Grindhouse, Inglourious Basterds, Halloween II, and The Road. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

* Those of you who took an interest in Matt Wiegle’s illustrations for George Orwell’s 1984 will want to check out the July and August daily drawing archives at the Partyka site for much more where that came from.

* Elsewhere, Matt investigates the eternal struggle of good and evil represented by the Phantom and Randall Flagg.

* What a young Sean T. Collins wouldn’t have given for some sort of King Kong vs. Godzilla comic that looked like this drawing from Steve Bisette’s sketchbook. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Watching a giant killer bear tear-ass through a church and Pearl Harbor a priest gave this particular ex-Catholic high school student more enjoyment than words can describe.

* It’s difficult to imagine a photo more tailor made to tickle me pink.

* Ben Morse Presents: “Well, stranger, we feed them strangers” and other artistic delights given as parting gifts to departing Wizard staffers.

* Finally, Damn Right Your Dad Played It. Chris Ward, ladies and gentlemen.

They Were Collaborators

September 8, 2009

I’m not sure what to make out of Ng Suat Tong’s post on writer/artist collaboration in superhero comics over at The Comics Reporter. Well, okay, I didn’t like it–that’s what I made out of it.

And sure, part of the reason for that is that he takes a hammer to superhero comics I think quite highly of–he dresses down Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s Daredevil run at length, and dismisses Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, Mike Perkins et al’s Captain America run with a snide parenthetical aside. But more than that, I was surprised by the haphazard manner in which Ng conflates several totally different issues–the lack of credit given to today’s artists vs. the lack of detail present in today’s scripts vs. the cinematic (as opposed to, um, comics-matic) nature of much of today’s comic art.

Meanwhile some of his specific lines of attack seem poorly observed to me. For example: Far be it from me to mount a spirited defense of the art of Pia Guerra on Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man–its nondescript, not quite cartoony, not quite realistic, Vertigo-house-style stiffness is the reason I didn’t read that book until after it ended. But that same, let’s say, obviousness is precisely why the book clicked with so many non-comics readers of my acquaintance: It’s among the easiest comic art to read that you’ll ever come across. Moreover, the whole point of Y is to hew as closely as possible to the real world we know (with one big difference). How are the fervidly imagined dreamscapes of Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart’s Seaguy a relevant point of comparison in either respect? It reminds me of that time a few weeks ago when everyone got on Dan Nadel’s case for supposedly comparing Darwyn Cooke to John Stanley, an apples-to-oranges comparison he wasn’t actually making–only this time that really is what Ng is doing, even though he occasionally throws in a perfunctory “far be it from me to compare Alex Maleev to Jack Kirby” disclaimer.

I also think it’s a mistake to view the Moore/Morrison method of scripting as the pinnacle of the form. That’s not to deny the brilliance of either writer, mind you, nor the effectiveness of their best scripts. It’s just that with Morrison, there are just as many collaborators who were unable to make his meticulous method work as who succeeded, if not more. And with Moore, that method seemed to do exactly what Ng is decrying elsewhere, which is end up leading audiences to give all the credit to Moore and not his wide array of gifted artistic collaborators. These pitfalls aren’t the fault of either writer, of course, and in the normal course of things I wouldn’t even bring them up as strikes against their techniques. (Perhaps I’d go after the “plethora of references, symbols and incidental details” Ng lionizes in the work of Morrison and (by implication) Moore; my suspicion of fiction designed to be decoded rather than read is well-documented on this blog.) But the way Ng selectively highlights elements of M&M’s methods to make one point even though they’d count against his melange of other points necessitates my doing so. Basically I don’t think micromanaging every panel and page is the one true path any more than the far sparser scripting of today’s marquee writers is. Further, if these issues have anything to do with, say, Marvel and DC’s occasionally unfortunate choice of trade dress for their collected editions, that point needs to be much more rigorously argued than what Ng’s up to in his piece.

Comics Time: Agents of Atlas #10

September 7, 2009

Agents of Atlas #10

Jeff Parker, writer

Gabriel Hardman, Paul Rivoche, artists

Marvel, September 2009

32 pages

$2.99

Credit for this excellent superhero comic must go first and foremost to colorist Elizabeth Dismang. Coloring this nuanced, engaging, and lovely in a superhero comic is a rare treat indeed, and from nighttime parking lots to forgotten mad-science labs to the red hair of the goddess Aphrodite to the sheen of a killer robot, Dismang imbues this issue of Jeff Parker’s strong off-model Marvel super-series with warm, sumptuous, tactile hues. Put it together with the just-so minimal-realism (is there such a thing) of Hardman and Rivoche and you have the best-looking variation on modern Marvel’s noir-naturalism house style since David Aja on The Immortal Iron Fist (or that Ann Nocenti Daredevil story everyone’s talking about). Right now I’m looking at a panel where Venus asks a wistful-looking Namora if she’s thinking about her old comrade and lover Hercules, and the team nails the emotion of it just as well as they handle the machine guns and robots of the action sequence that follows it. It’s really a joy to look at.

And that makes all the difference, doesn’t it? Books like Agents of Atlas, operating at the margins of the mainline superhero universe of which they are nominally a part, live and die on the strength and cleverness of their ideas, or specifically the variation they represent on the usual superhero ideas, if you follow me. But there are a lot of perfectly clever, perfectly nice minor superhero comics out there–you’ve probably read a lot of them–with art that never rises above the functional, and therefore who cares? But you care about the Agents of Atlas after reading a gorgeous-looking, well-constructed issue like this. Parker packs its pages with idea after idea–you get more exposition on this whole “warring Dragon Clans” idea that makes for a nice fit with the kinds of things Iron Fist fans would appreciate; you get a crazy Weapon Plus-style look at the decades-old killer-robot production program Atlas has instituted; you get a big giant battle with souped-up automatons. But more importantly, you also get that great calm-before-the-storm feeling you’ll remember from your favorite action movies, with the characters collecting their thoughts, bonding a bit, but also making damn sure they’re ready for whatever’s about to come through that door. I know that sounds like such a cliche, but here it feels fresh, rooted to this specific motley crew of characters drawn from the various corners of the Marvel Universe and thrown together by the accident of when they were first published. You’ll believe a top-notch, visually and emotionally engaging comic can be made out of an Atlantean queen, a siren, a talking gorilla, a mute robot, a Uranian-Earthling hybrid guy, a dragon, a bunch of knowing yellow-peril/dragon-lady pastiches, a thawed-out secret agent from the ’50s, an Art Bell knockoff, and some warp zones. Like Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Guy Davis’s B.P.R.D., it’s an ensemble action book with brains, looks, and heart. Well done all around.

Comics Time: Inkweed

September 4, 2009

Inkweed

Chris Wright, writer/artist

Sparkplug, 2008

152 pages

$16

Buy it from Sparkplug

I didn’t want to like this comic. I didn’t even want to read it. There’s something…off-putting about that cover, a weird combination of Klasky-Csupo/Gary Baseman character design I never found that appealing and just a lot of brown, empty space. The interiors similarly failed to pull me in–lots of crosshatched backgrounds and clothing placed behind and draped around a cast of sub-Muppets. In order to keep myself sane, my usual criteria for whether I’d even read a comic at all is that I at least have to enjoy flipping through it, so I was sorely tempted to leave this on the shelf and would have done so but for the good things I half-remember hearing about it. Plus, it seemed like it’d be a quick read.

What I didn’t count on is the writing. Good Lord. I’m still not 100% sold on his art, but the Chris Wright stories collected here are sharp as a knife, just as incisive, just as likely to leave a wound. Most concern older people coming to terms, or failing to, with their failures: a painter who seems to have traded acclaim for ability, an astronomer who falls in unrequited love with his assistant, a witch who cultivates fine blends of pipe tobacco for an unappreciative Satan, a famous author whose equally gifted but resentful son comes between him and his young wife, another painter whose drinking gives him an outlet for his extravagant self-loathing and a cover for his fear of failure. I suppose these are all fairly well-trodden paths–you don’t have to have read Asterios Polyp recently to feel like you’ve gotten your fair share of stealth-autobio art about the struggles of artists. But Wright is distinguished by the swift and brutal way he deals with the themes. The ends of his stories tend to leave the characters staring down the abyss in matter-of-fact fashion–literally, in the case of the astronomer, who can only gaze once again into his telescope, and in the case of the famous painter, who must trade his blank canvases for the blankest canvas of all. Other stories end with no-nonsense cris de coeur: “What’s wrong with me?” asks the alcoholic painter; “FUCK!” yells a man whose confrontation with God over the heartache he feels has been abruptly cut short mid-sentence when God vanishes with a Nightcrawler-style BAMF. The lead-ups to these grand finales are unsparing as well, particularly the story about the father and son authors and the father’s wife–that one takes a swing-for-the-fences turn for the disturbing that still manages to preserve the humanity and agency of all the characters involved rather than reducing any of them to something for someone else to react to. Wright accomplishes that in part by pushing the most extreme reactions off-panel, just one of any number of extremely shrewd storytelling choices he makes in here.

And you know, the art does have stuff to recommend it after all. Populating his stories with dollar-store Fraggles may be off-putting at first glance, but it can keep the stories from getting too maudlin or too on-the-nose. It also strangely enhances the period feel of the material–watching these creatures roam around in 19th-century garb reminds me of half-remembered cartoons in which anthropomorphized animals acted out human conflicts in old-timey settings. But his strongest visual flourish is the way he can slowly zoom in and out of abstraction in the middle of his stories, focusing only on the patterns created panel to panel by hands, eyes, stars, candles, enabling our minds to make sense of the images as the characters similarly grapple with their thoughts and emotions. Wright eventually lets this get away from him a bit toward the back of the book in a series of abstracted one-page strips and illustrations–the strongest of these, a short and bitter near-poem about alcoholism, is also the most straightforward. But the way he works such sequences into his traditional short stories bespeaks confidence and skill. This is already one of the best-written comics I’ve read in quite some time–goodness knows where a few more years at the drawing table will take him.