* Get a load of this: The Los Angeles Opera is making an opera out of David Cronenberg’s The Fly. And get a load of the creative team: Music by Howard Shore (The Lord of the Rings, The Silence of the Lambs, and countless Cronenberg movies), book by David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly), design by Dante Ferretti (Gangs of New York, Sweeney Todd), conducted by Placido Domingo (of Three Tenors fame) and directed by Cronenberg himself. Damn! (Via Ian Brill.)

* Neither Stacie Ponder of Final Girl nor Jason Adams of My New Plaid Pants liked George A. Romero’s new docu-zombie movie Diary of the Dead. This doesn’t bode well.

* Dread Central reports that Romero’s next project may be Diamond Dead, an off-beat non-Dead-verse story he’d tried to get off the ground once before about a rock singer who makes a deal with death to bring her band back to life.

* Dread Central also says that Alexandre Aja’s remake of Piranha (!) might now be 3-D. It’s funny: I still remember the brief moment after Haute Tension when this guy was supposed to be the future of horror. But hey, I actually prefer the idea of a 3-D movie about man-eating fish to anything else Aja’s been associated with thus far.

* Loren Coleman of Cryptomundo has the goods on author William Gibbons’s upcoming book about the mokele-mbembe, the living dinosaur that supposedly roams the Congo basin (and maybe my favorite cryptid). He also posts some cool out-of-context photos of the boxed-up Gigantopithecus replica from the breakdown of the American Museum of Natural History’s Mythic Creatures exhibit.

* Another “Get a load of this” moment: Behold, a six-gilled shark with a meter-wide head and an 18-foot body, swimming around at 3280 feet below the surface. You’ve gotta love the beside-themselves commentary from the researchers.

(Via Deep Sea News via Kennyb.)

* Finally, this week’s Horror Roundtable is one of my favorites in a long time: Name your favorite horror-movie cliche! Best of all, every single participant has a different answer. Feast your eyes, glut your soul!

Mother, Come Home

Dark Horse, November 2003

Paul Hornschemeier, writer/artist

128 pages

$14.95

Buy it used through Amazon.com

Originally written on March 3, 2004 for publication by The Comics Journal

2003 saw the release of gargantuan tomes like Palomar, The Frank Book, and Blankets, so it might seem facetious to claim that the year’s most ambitious graphic novel was a 128-page paperback. But how else to describe Mother, Come Home, a book wherein author Paul Hornschemeier’s formidable formal mastery is harnessed to an even more consciously grand personal tragedy? This is the kind of storytelling that’s as likely to fall flat on its face as it is to fly. Hornschemeier’s willingness to throw the full weight of his skill into this task is what ensured the latter outcome.

Originally serialized in the author’s Forlorn Funnies series, a more narrative-minded follow-up to his experimental one-man anthology Sequential, Mother tells the story of Thomas Tennant, a preternaturally conscientious seven-year-old dealing with the death of his mother and his father’s subsequent disappearance into his own broken mind. Interstitial titles set up the conceit that the novel is merely the “introduction” to a larger work, the first “chapter” of which is to be called “We Are All Released.” In this alone–that is, in grafting an unnecessarily complex framing device onto the story in order to deliver the four-word message of hope at the book’s end–Hornschemeier’s artistic fascination with the tension between control and freedom is evident.

It’s a tension that’s at work on every page. The cartoonist’s considerable skill in graphic design manifests itself in a panoply of geometric intra-panel layouts–boxes bisected by a furrowed brow, the edge of a door, the bend of a telephone receiver. It’s not specific images that stand out upon reflecting on Hornschemeier’s art, but unexpected diagonals and rounded corners, a sort of poetry of shape. But when Thomas retreats into his fantasy life, this everything-in-its-right-place precision is forgone for scratchy, simplistic, childlike linework. The escape Thomas plans for his father is made manifest in the boy’s own dreams.

Much has been made about Hornschemeier’s skill as a colorist, and his work in that department is every bit as deft as you’ve heard, but his lettering merits special mention. Throughout the book, the characters’ words are subtly dwarfed by the word balloons that contain them. This simultaneously suggests a certain generosity of spirit, a yearning for something more than what is being expressed, and a recognition of the futility and smallness of language to deal with the immensity of the suffering going on beneath, and on, the surface. (And it does so on the parts of both the characters and the creator, by the way.) Individual moments linger, too: Within the father’s fantasy, it’s the comments that seem the most casual which expand to fill their entire panels, conveying a sort of frantic off-handedness that smacks also of denial; lower-case lettering slips off-line and expands in manic curlicues, perfectly conveying Thomas’s hysteria upon realizing he’s alerted his uncle to his father’s breakdown. Meanwhile, the simplicity of the captions’ lettering offsets the occasionally baroque prose (perhaps bulletproofing the book against the kind of criticism occasionally leveled at Craig Thompson’s similar linguistic stylings in Blankets).

What elevates the book from graphic-designers-gone-wild wankery, though, is the way these devices perfectly complement and convey the values of the narrative. As Thomas and his father’s family falls apart, the two of them adopt a succession of tactics–a lion mask, a retreat into solipsism, a rigorously followed “groundskeeping” routine, a residential treatment facility, methodical escape plans–to exert control over the unbearable chaos of their lives, precisely for the purpose of freeing them from it. The tension-breaking achieved on a formal level by Hornschemeier’s occasional insertion of exhilarating out-of-nowhere experimentation (the floating fantasy introduction; the full-page jacket-cover illustration for another book with a tendentious relationship to the story itself; the nighttime views of the book’s sleeping characters, from the most important to the most obscure) is echoed on the narrative plane by flashes of humor (Thomas’s hilarious smackdown of his teacher makes up for her somewhat unrealistic (and unforgivable) behavior) and immensely warm pathos (the exchanged glances between a smiling Thomas and a scowling nurse are worth the price of admission alone for their heartbreaking directness). It culminates in a climax that by all rights should seem ham-fisted and forced, and yet works, emerging as it does from intensely intimate (and therefore immediately understandable) details of touch and sight and (not) taste–tiny, sensate building blocks of calamitous inevitability. What hints of too-neat tragedy remain are torn to pieces by the book’s final words, and the forward-looking eeriness of the image that accompanies them.

Mother, Come Home is the work of a young cartoonist who, confident in his craft, decided to do something big with it. For his ambition alone–which, thankfully, is far more common amongst his cartoonist peer group then its reputation as a collection of coasting glad-handlers would have it–he is to be respected. For his success–his indelible, beautiful, and heartrending graphic novel, the type of book for which the phrase “auspicious debut” was invented–he is to be celebrated. His book is a joy to read; the fact that this is a feeling forbidden to the characters therein makes it all the sharper, and sweeter, and harder to forget.

* B-Sol at the Vault of Horror brings us a rundown of George A. Romero’s appearance on the Opie & Anthony show today, including the zombie king’s comments about Land of the Dead, Zombi 2, Resident Evil, Saw, Hostel, World War Z, and whether any racial commentary in the original Night of the Living Dead was intentional.

* Various sites are reporting that the Hellraiser remake supposedly has a January 9th, 2009 release date.

* Eve Tushnet spots an interesting quote from Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, calling the rise of doppelganger/double horror during the Romantic era a reflection of those writers’ replacement of church and state with the Self as the ultimate authority.

* My All Too Flat-mate Ken Bromberg drew my attention to this creepy Wikipedia entry on “rat kings,” cryptozoological clusters of rats whose tails have become inextricably entwined.

* The FBI and various police agencies arrested almost the entire Gambino family hierarchy today—except for one captain who lammed it, making the story even more awesome than it already was.

* Rob Humanick of The Projection Booth and The House Next Door has declared February 22-28 the VHS Blogathon, celebrating the unique phenomenology of the late, lamented format of our collective youth.

* Steven Wintle of the Horror Blog will be spending the next year participating in a weekly gladiator-movie podcast based off one of those 50-movie DVD value packs, god help us.

* I’m not as wowed by her covers for Runaways and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as others seem to be, but this preview art for Jo Chen’s new manga The Other Side of the Mirror is just gorgeous. Just look at the line placement alone. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Finally, should female dragon people have tits?

* I read this story about community activists forcing a Union City, Indiana McDonald’s to remove all R-rated movies from its Redbox dollar-a-night DVD-rental kiosk with great interest. Besides the fact that I always find such efforts distasteful, I’ve noticed that the Redbox at the supermarket where I shop is stocked almost wall-to-wall with horror movies–many of which are of the straight-to-video variety, which depend almost entirely on rentals for revenue–and these genre efforts would obviously be a prime target of bluenosed initiatives like this.

* Speaking of video rentals, Robbie Freeling gives a shout-out to old-school neighborhood video store horror section posters and box art.

* CRwM of And Now the Screaming Starts reviews Josh Simmons’s excellent horror graphic novel House.

* Johnny Bacardi points out the weaknesses of the neither-here-nor-there cartoony realism of the Vertigo house style.

* Marvel editor Tom Brevoort hosted a Marvel-only best-of award vote at his blog, and the results are refreshing because the best writer at Marvel right now, Ed Brubaker, and the two best books at Marvel right now, Brubaker’s Captain America and The Immortal Iron Fist, really clean up. (Via Graeme McMillan.)

* In the middle of a crazy interview centering on the identity of Britt Ekland’s ass double in The Wicker Man, director Robin Hardy and star Christopher Lee deliver a pair of absolutely killer quotes about their upcoming semi-sequel to the film, now evocatively titled Cowboys for Christ:

[Hardy] described his follow-up movie as “another film with beautiful songs, sassy sex, a few good laughs and horror upon horrors ahead”.

And:

“The reason I want to work again with Robin is because he has written a book that is erotic, romantic, comic and horrific enough to loosen the bowels of a bronze statue,” [Lee] said.

Yee-haw! (Via Bloody Good Horror.)

* Finally, my old friend from ToyFare magazine, Zach Oat of Topless Robot, presents the Top 10 Star Wars Toys That Unintentionally Look Like Other Celebrities.

Death Note Vol. 1

Viz, September 2005

Tsugumi Ohba, writer

Takeshi Obata, artist

Pookie Rolf, translator/adapter

200 pages

$7.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

It’s hard not to cackle with glee at how neatly Death Note fits into the scary-media pantheon, filling a slot previously occupied by Marilyn Manson, Beavis and Butt-Head, Bart Simpson, Grand Theft Auto, N.W.A., Natural Born Killers, Dungeons & Dragons, and so on all the way back to the days of Elvis Presley and EC Comics. The premise–a straight-A student discovers a death god’s notebook, and anyone whose name he writes in it dies–is practically guaranteed to send authorities into a Chicken Little panic. It’s not the world’s most artful effort: like most translated manga, scene transitions are awkward and dialogue comes out in weird little bursts, while the figurework is sturdy but pretty standard and the characters play comfortably to type.

But it shines in a couple of regards besides that initial, killer high concept. I really enjoy the way Obata spots blacks; they’re pitch dark and almost geometric, as though the page is occasionally partially posessed by a slightly greasier Mike Mignola. And they come together in the form of Ryuk, the death god whose comically lanky larger-than-life presence and googly-eyed, permanently grinning, static shock of a face is a continual source of chuckles for me in its ostentatious weirdness. The other highlight is Light, the model high-schooler who within a few hours of finding the death note has become an archcriminal capable of baffling the combined law enforcement agencies of the entire world with his plot to exterminate the global criminal underclass and force everyone else into good behavior via paranoia. I’ve grown reluctant to harp on sociopolitical messages in genre work, but the idea here seems to be that Japan’s insanely intense educational culture produces miniature sociopaths, and that’s just plain funny. Right now the cat-and-mouse games aren’t engaging in any visceral way–by way of contrast, I’m watching the first season of The Wire for the first time, and there’s just no comparison–but the whole thing just tickles me in much the same way that Light’s plans tickle Ryuk, so I’ll make my way through the whole series, I’m sure.

Barack Obama via Shepard Fairey.

* The trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s next movie The Happening is up, and man, it’s a lot rougher trade than you might be expecting, particularly given the vague “natural disaster” pre-release buzz you’ve heard. Definitely check it out.

* And here’s a not terribly convincing compared to comparable scenes from the likes of Cloverfield and the Dawn of the Dead remake but still fun clip from Diary of the Dead (via Bloody Good Horror).

* I really liked this passage from Joe “Jog” McCulloch’s review of There Will Be Blood:

I’m sure it helped that I didn’t see Day-Lewis as purely wicked until the very end; I’ve read some critics going on about the relentless evil of the character, which strikes me as silly and wrongheaded. I always felt that Daniel Plainview was human, if increasingly compromised by greed and loathing; even in the film’s early segments he acts primarily out of self-interest, yes, but Anderson and Day-Lewis spend enough time on bits of character shading — prodding H.W. into understanding his line of work, basking smugly in stopping that little girl’s abuse — that the character at least exhibits signs of adhering to some personal code of ethics.

Totally. Even the marketing campaign gives the impression that he’s bad to the bone, which is a shame; it left my wife (who hasn’t seen the movie) asking me “Does this movie even have a story, or is it just about showing what a bad person this guy is?” Kudos also to Jog for noting the more sophisticated use of landscape in No Country for Old Men as opposed to here in Blood.

* Giant Monsters Attack! lists the 10 weirdest giant monsters–believe it or not, they’re not all kaiju!

* If you’re looking for a nice concise history of horror films in the ’70s and ’80s you could do a lot worse than B-Sol’s run-down for the Vault of Horror. It might be a little too concise–lumping those two decades together makes for some strange bedfellows and unfortunate omissions–but there’s none of the mainstream-critic condescension or fanboy-“Our Genre” nonsense that typically mars these efforts.

* Matt from the all-too-infrequently updated British horror-review site Black Lagoon rises from the murky depths once more for a review of Cloverfield that loses me each time it asserts that the movie would be better without the home-video conceit. I admire his gusto for specifically questioning the validity of the “YouTube generation” tag mooted as a justification for this technique’s newfound popularity (by this blog and others), but from where I was sitting the seen/not seen effect of the restricted narrative construction was what made the monster work so well.

* Finally, I love this exchange from Pitchfork’s interview with the wondrous electro-pop duo Goldfrapp about their more subdued new album Seventh Tree:

Pitchfork: After the glamorous disco fantasy of Supernature, the new record could almost be called Human Nature. A lot of people are going to see Seventh Tree as a more personal and even confessional record. Does it feel more personal to you? Are you being any more direct? Or is it just another aspect of your character?

AG: Well, Supernature wasn’t just a character and nor was Black Cherry, so that’s slightly insulting…

Pitchfork: I’m not implying you’re playing a role…

AG: Saying that you’ve got acoustic instruments and that’s traditional and so people will think it’s more intimate, that will always be the case. It’s a more intimate sound, so it’s going to sound more direct whatever you’re singing about. I mean, it is a more personal record. But I think by the nature of having a voice that is more upfront and the way the vocals are set against the music, it’s always going to feel more personal, even if the lyrics weren’t, if you know what I mean? So it has it’s moments of being more intimate or being personal, it’s true. Some of it’s confessional, but some of it is complete and utter gobbledeegook!

The idea that slick, sexy, glittery dance music is any less “honest” than stripped-down acoustic ballads is pretty…dare I say rockist?

Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel

The New Press, September 2001

Dr. Seuss, writer/artist

Richard H. Minear, editor

272 pages

$19.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

I have to admit that I personally find editorial and political cartoons to be a colossal, frequently distasteful waste of time and resources. 99.9 times out of 100 they’re just strident, unimaginative, button-pushing sermons to the choir. They’re intended not to enlighten or persuade but to flatten complex issues into images so reductive that they’re not just simplistic but frequently misleading or even mendacious in their representation of what’s being talked about–which really doesn’t matter, because the right people will applaud and the right people will be outraged. You have to be extraordinarily gifted to make a go of this field, and maybe half a dozen such artists in the history of the English-speaking world have had that knack.

As it turns out, Dr. Seuss was one of them. Prior to his enshrinement as the 20th century’s preeminent author-illustrator of children’s books, the then-struggling Geisel–prompted by a loathing of Fascism–was an editorial cartoonist for PM, a daily New York City newspaper that served as sort of an unofficial spokesorgan for the Leftist coalition called the Popular Front. But as editor Minear points out in his informative and readable text pieces that contextualize the cartoons in this volume, the good Doctor was more populist than Popular Front, and his war-era cartoons reflect a general sense of, if not quite Leftist, then left-leaning fair-play values. As such they are enormously refreshing to look at and read. Seuss passionately attacks the racist Jim Crow policies of the military and industry. He targets the anti-Semitism of Charles Lindbergh and the isolationist movement, including one memorable cartoon where his uniquely Seussian “eagle” (it’s impossible to look at this big-beaked, long-necked American mascot and not put the species in quotes) bears a placard reading “I AM PART JEWISH.” One pre-war cartoon even lumps Communists (with whom PM was basically okay) in with Nazis and Fascists as the joeys in the kangaroo pouch of America Firsters. In fact his earliest post-Pearl Harbor cartoons, of Dec. 8th and 9th 1941, seem to view the onset of war primarily as a rebuke to the benighted domestic forces of isolationism he and the progressives at PM were regularly targeting anyway.

Also exhilarating is his choice of imagery, which is deeply Seussian and totally alien to the usual played-out editorial-cartoon tropes. He makes surprising use of visuals indebted to horror and fantasy: On several occasions he portrays the Axis menace as massive sea serpents (as regular readers of this blog’s horror posts know, I’m a sucker for water monsters), and in his best anti-Japan cartoon a spokesman for the Empire mouthing civilized platitudes is revealed by the downward-drifting eye to be a Lovecraftian monstrosity with lobster claws and dragon’s feet. Similarly, one of his most memorable jabs at Hitler portrays the Fürher as a sword-wielding, horned-helmet and skull-and-swastika-wearing barbarian dictator seated in a shadowy cave lair atop a hill of skulls, sending out his Vichy lackey Pierre Laval to round up forced French labor.

The Japanese monster-man, of course, serves to highlight through contrast Seuss’s big weakness: His depiction of the Japanese enemy as a fungible assortment of slanty-eyed, buck-toothed, pig-nosed, coke-bottle-glasses-wearing stereotypes, even extending to the supposed fifth column of Japanese-Americans who he lampoons as waiting for instructions from home in one cartoon. In this he’s no different than pretty much every other American propagandist of the period, but it’s still a letdown given his sensitive and progressive treatment of American racism generally, and how artistically creative he gets with virtually every other facet of the war. Take his bestiary, for example: his unusual American eagle I’ve already mentioned, while he frequently represents Germany as a put-upon dachshund. Russia almost always pops up as some giant bear, dinosaur, abominable snowman or something else huge. And delightfully, Seuss peppers astonished cats, dogs, and birds throughout his cartoons, reacting to the ridiculousness they encounter. Though it’s true that, as Minear points out, Seuss’s treatment of the Japanese is comparatively gentle compared to some of the really barbaric treatment they received from other artists, it’s still depressing to see his humorous specificity dropped when dealing with Japan, which is almost always depicted as a stereotype Minear, in his text pieces, can’t help but wrap in scare quotes.

But in pretty much every other aspect, these cartoons shine. For example, there are his drawings of the war’s leaders. His Mussolini is a contemptible jut-jawed pot-bellied dolt, portrayed in one laugh-out-loud parody ad for the fatuous charity “Bundles for Benito” as buck-nekkid except for a strategically placed copy of Mein Kampf. Seuss’s Hitler is always blithely unaware of his impending, inevitable defeat, eyes blissfully closed, nose in the air, combover jutting jauntily. (I do wish he’d have taken on the Allied leaders more directly: His infrequently depicted Stalin is pretty pro forma, and Roosevelt and Churchill, two of the most eminently caricaturable world leaders of all time and practically Dr. Seuss characters already, are never drawn at all.) Seuss also draws some wickedly complex Rube Goldberg-esque situations as allegories for bureaucratic red tape, and his occasional forays into military hardware–like the ginormous American warplane with fully 13 giant gun barrels bearing down on Hitler’s pathetically tiny single-propeller affair–are packed with energy and high estimation of American power. He’s a hoot as a wordsmith too, as you might expect. “Food? We Germans don’t eat food! We Germans eat countries!” says a skinny Prussian father to his emaciated son in a cartoon ridiculing Germany’s bad fortunes at home. A pre-war cartoon shows a matronly America Firster reading a storybook called Adolf the Wolf to her alarmed children: “…and the Wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones…But those were Foreign Children and it really didn’t matter.” The joke hits all-too-familiar targets in this the “Never Again” age.

Which leads to the most chilling cartoon in the collection: Hitler and Laval merrily singing a duet in a forest whose trees are laden with hanged Jews. In his text pieces, Minear argues that Seuss’s goofy, Chaplinesque Hitler and his overall humorous comportment is inadequate to the task of upbraiding the true evil and horror of the war, while standout cartoons like this one and a pair of ominously Orwellian predictions of the fate of the American populace should Germany win do a better job. I’d just say different, not necessarily better. Seuss’s cartoons neither deny the evil of Hitler nor lend to it an air of grandeur–they mock it to within an inch of its lousy life. I think that’s about right.

I finally got around to reading Clive Barker’s out-of-the-blue return to proper horror, Mister B. Gone, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. In some ways it seems intended to be a return to the in-your-face splatterpunk of his earliest work: the violence, the grotesquerie, and the overall maliciousness and heinousness of the titular demon’s behavior are all pushed to a level Barker hasn’t approached in some time. It also feels like an angrier book than he’s written since maybe Cabal, its first-person confessional set-up enabling it to literally berate and threaten the reader, and its big last-chapter revelation evincing a young man’s hostility to conventional religious and moral authority. And while it is indeed the umpteenth paean to the power of storytelling and the magic of reading that you’ve come across, there’s also a hearty dose of ambivalence, even dread, regarding the overall effect of literature on humanity that serves as a welcome leavening agent for such stories’ usual self-congratulatory feel.

But that same first-person conceit–the demon, Jakabok “Mister B.” Botch, has been magically transformed into the very book you hold and keeps interrupting his story in an attempt to get you to burn the book and end his suffering–continuously undercuts the effect Barker’s going for. Mister B. begins the story as a kid, so his misadventures feel a little too jolly to mesh with the savagery of the gory setpieces. The same is true of his flowery prose; one wishes Barker would get out of his own way and be a little more economical at times, letting the extravagance of his imagination do the work for itself. B. also proves to be a lousy judge of what aspects of his own story are most interesting: Most of his worst misdeeds are simply alluded to, glossed over in too-brief recaps of his centuries-long reign of terror. Worse, the most interesting aspect of his life, his slowly building love for his demonic buddy, mentor, and traveling companion Quitoon, is asserted after the fact rather than developed organically through an in-depth recounting of their behavior together.

Perhaps the best way to look at Mister B. Gone is a throat-clearing exercise for the very busy Barker. After all, before its impending publication was announced, he’d never even mentioned working on it before, being in the midst of his young-adult fantasy series Abarat, his massive “death of Pinhead” opus The Scarlet Gospels, various film and television and painting projects, and perhaps the early planning stages of long-overdue sequels to past books like Galilee and The Great and Secret Show & Everville. The feeling that this is a book he had to get out of his system before he could proceed is a fun one to bask in, even if the book itself isn’t as powerful as perhaps it was inside his head.

This week’s Horror Roundtable is about our favorite horror-movie era. I get on my high horse instead.

* Beasts! II, the sequel to Fantagraphics’ hit mythological/cryptozoological monster art book, is everywhere today. Here’s The Blot author Tom Neely’s contribution, a skinwalker in mid-transformation.

* And over at the Beasts! blog, editor Jacob Covey presents these Beasts!-inspired illustrations of Bigfoot and a sea monster from Josh Cochrane. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* I probably play video games once, maybe twice a year (not counting Snood), so I’m always on the outside looking in, but I still find the cultural and artistic ramifications of video games fascinating. So this New York Times piece on the increasingly communal nature of the top-selling video games definitely caught my eye. I would question, however, the notion that this is a new development in gaming. All my fondest video-game memories–swapping Zelda strategies with the kids down the block, getting stoned during marathon Mario Kart and Goldeneye sessions in college, taking breaks to play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in the middle of the workday at A&F–are group efforts.

* I saw this Denny’s commercial starring Tony “Paulie Walnuts” Sirico for the first time the other night, and after enjoying the hell out of his exquisitely funny rage, godDAMN I was almost overwhelmed with longing for The Sopranos. Best show ever.

* Finally, the long-mooted film version of Books of Blood, the framing story to the Clive Barker short-story collections of the same name, has now been officially announced. This will be the first of a series of adaptations of stories from the series (well, “first” if we’re not counting Rawhead Rex and Nightbreed and Candyman and Lord of Illusions and The Midnight Meat Train).

The Immortal Iron Fist #12

Marvel, January 2008

Ed Brubaker & Matt Fraction, writers

David Aja, Kano, and Javier Pulido, artists

22 pages

$2.99

Find it through Marvel

Buy it through Midtown Comics

Immortal Iron Fist is my favorite superhero title on the market these days, though I’m not sure issue #12 makes the best case for that preference. As part five (really six, counting a related stand-alone annual issue) of a storyarc centered around a celestial kung-fu tournament, it’s more of an exposition-laden lull than a bonafide step forward. Moreover it’s capped off by a “threat” to Iron Fist’s pals Luke Cage, Misty Knight, and Colleen Wing that you and I and the writers all know won’t be carried out; this is obviously par for the course in franchise superhero comics, but even when we know no one’s gonna die the key is to keep us guessing as to what other consequences there might be, and while Iron Fist’s tournament pulls that off, the Heroes for Hire getting kidnapped by Hydra doesn’t. Artwise, the hugely rewarding structural breakdown the series has heretofore relied on, er, breaks down a bit. Normally, regular artist David Aja handles all the present-day material with his expressive version of the moody-realist modern-day Marvel house style (exemplified elsewhere by Daredevil‘s Alex Maleev, Michael Lark, and Stefano Gaudino and Captain America‘s Steve Epting and Mike Perkins), while a rotating cast of able guest artists tackles flashbacks focusing on previous bearers of the Iron Fist mantle. This time, however, Javier Pulido pinch-hits on a pair of present-day scenes seemingly selected at random, and his art, while pleasant as always, seems oddly loose, almost unfinished, compared to the shadowy stylings we’ve come to expect from Aja.

On the other hand (fist?), the proper guest-star turn by Kano is an absolute killer. His line has a physical presence on the page that imbues his flashback about Wendell Rand (the current Iron Fist’s dad) bailing out of his own date with the dragon who gives the Iron Fists their power, provided he doesn’t kill and eat them first, with real power and grace. As Wendell strides into the snow to face the beast, his body language and position in the frame convey all the date-with-destiny grandeur of “The Immigrant Song,” only to be convincingly transmogrified into absolute panic as he realizes he’s simply not up to the challenge. And man, his brief but fateful fight with ex-friend Davos upon his return is so chock-full of energy that it all but bends the page. This latter scene in particular is enhanced by the witty coloring of Matt Hollingsworth, who along with Dave Stewart is one of the best in the biz–after a decade or two of Vertigo, I never thought earthtones could be this exciting. As for Aja, I’m so used to enjoying his art that I almost find myself speechless about it. Suffice it to say that of all the talented guys I listed above who are doing work similar to his, he’s my favorite, the best able to harness naturalist image-making to super-natural content.

And while, as I said, this isn’t the most dynamic entry in the story so far, the elements that make this such an enjoyable series are all there. It’s quite easy to armchair-quarterback the division of labor between the two writers involved: Fraction injects Brubaker’s melancholy sins-of-the-past obsession with humor and a greater appreciation for this genre’s wild side; Brubaker tempers Fraction’s tendency toward glibness, goofiness, and condescension to his material and his audience with meticulous character work and emotional heft. Both writers are refreshingly, delightfully open to using the things that make the superhero and kung-fu material they’re combining here so much fun: the tournament structure, crazy nicknames and finishing moves straight out of a Wu-Tang Clan sample, the fungible menace of enemy goons (presented by Pulido as a human sea in his finest moment here), an ever-expanding mythos that hews close to what makes the core character concept tick while increasing its possibilities exponentially. If you are open to superheroes at all, this is the one book you should be reading.