Abe Sapien: The Drowning

Mike Mignola, writer

Jason Shawn Alexander, artist

Dark Horse, 2008

144 pages

$17.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

Maybe the most interesting thing about Mike Mignola’s Hellboy/B.P.R.D. franchise is how at this point in its history, when Mignola and his collaborators are producing enough miniseries set in this world to give the impression that it’s actually one big ongoing monthly (if not two!), the material is actually at its bleakest. What was once a rollicking Jack Kirby vs. H.P. Lovecraft mash-up—albeit one that wedded the former artist’s bombast and visual joie de vivre with the at times oppressive horror of the latter—is now almost a tone poem about three-time loserdom. Pretty much every Hellboy-related miniseries over the past extremely productive year or so has left me feeling really sad about the characters, who regularly confront evidence that they’re just not up to snuff, and that there are things in the world so horrible that even a demon, a fishman, a ghost, a firestarter, a resurrected black-ops officer, and a small army of experts and soldiers look like pikers compared to it.

That’s certainly the theme of Abe Sapien: The Drowning, the first solo series dedicated to Hellboy’s gilled second banana. Set during one of Hellboy’s earlier hiatuses from the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, it shares with the current series of Mignola/John Arcudi/Guy Davis minis a sense that without the Big Red One around, without his guiding force, his colleagues and friends can barely keep their head above water. Some people are different and special because of it, the message seems to be, but some people are just different, and that makes life a long, difficult struggle indeed.

In this case, Abe is sent on what’s supposed to be an easy mission in order to break him in as a solo operative: Swim around off the coast of a former leper colony to retrieve a magic dagger once used to kill a warlock, now resting on the ocean floor somewhere. It doesn’t go so well. One thing that struck me is just how much Mignola uses certain tropes that obviously scare him on some level in nearly all of his books: little unassuming guys transforming into big giant horrible monsters; groups of creepy servant people; mouths opening and extruding something huge and terrible. Nearly all of this is reflected in the plot, which starts out small and seemingly clear and soon balloons into a morass of shifting and expanding alliances and motives. Poor Abe is out of his depth in more ways than one.

Besides being one of Mignola’s more emotionally affecting stories of late, it’s also one of his most effective as horror. That’s largely down to the art of Jason Shawn Alexander, who owes less to Mignola’s high-contrast cartooning or Guy Davis’s neurotic line and more to the ’80s and ’90s horror and dark fantasy of artists like the Hampton Brothers, Pratt, and John Van Fleet (all of whom are amusingly name-checked as B.P.R.D. agents). There are a great many striking panels (the burning ghost priest, the statue of Saint Sebastian, the moray eel) and a few genuinely frightening, tough-to-look-at ones (the old woman in the window, the face of the warlock, the converted church). I know there’s a knee-jerk reaction to a writer-artist farming out part of his workload to other creators, but Mignola’s choices in that regard, from Arcudi and Davis to Richard Corben to Alexander) have been consistently terrific. The same is true of their comics.

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s fundraiser walk is this Sunday. My wife will be walking and she’s close to her new goal of raising $1000. Please consider donating even just a few dollars to this very worthwhile cause.

Wizard COO Fred Pierce has been fired.

Burma Chronicles

Guy Delisle, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, 2008

272 pages, hardcover

$19.95

Buy it from D&Q

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Early on, I thought that this was going to be my least favorite of Delisle’s three tyranny travelogues. This time out, instead of Delisle being sent to China or North Korea due to his job as an animator, it’s his wife, a member of Doctors Without Borders, whose career has brought Delisle to Burma (technically Myanmar, but that’s essentially the “slave name” assigned it by the ruling military junta, so many countries don’t use it). This means that the daily grind of work that formed the spine of Delisle’s activities in Pyongyang and Shenzhen gets replaced with laps around a pool, cute business with his baby Louis, and a generally more tourist/holiday vibe. The more it starts to feel like a James Kochalka sketchbook diary the more you feel the absence of that structure. (The inclusion, for the first time, of slapsticky wordless vignettes doesn’t help either.)

But in a way, this is fitting, because Burma as a nation seems to be missing the usual structure as well. As seen through the glimpses Delisle is afforded, China is a country that’s genuinely interested in the economic products of the modern professional, though not the cultural and political ones, and is milking them for all they’re worth. North Korea is too far gone to make a go of that, but to flatter itself and properly impress its subjects, the regime makes a show of being modern; it can’t afford not to lie about it. Now, perhaps it’s just Delisle’s lack of gainful employment that masks bustling business elsewhere in the city of Rangoon, but Burma as a government seems perfectly content with letting the people with whom Westerners come in contact live in relative, non-Westernized simplicity, while away from Western eyes–in entire zones of the country where foreigners are not permitted–the real economic and military depredations take place. Indeed, shielding their doings from outsiders appears to be their number-one concern.

This picture begins to emerge about a quarter of the way through the book and slowly picks up steam because, for the first time, one of Delisle’s travel memoirs has a sort of real-life “plot”: The death by a thousand cuts to which the junta is subjecting Western charities and NGOs, preventing them from reaching the people who need them the most (persecuted minorities) and slowly forcing them to shut themselves down lest they end up complicit in the government’s discrimination. Slowly the junta’s efforts at reality control become harder to miss–culminating most absurdly in the wholesale relocation of the capital from Rangoon to a prefab city in the middle of nowhere whose name can’t even be released to the public for security reasons.

Once again Delisle is a jolly, slightly frantic fish out of water, but this time the juxtaposition between him and his host nation is more poignant than ever. Two stories stick out: A meditation retreat at a Buddhist monastery, the simplicity of which seems to almost haunt Delisle after the information overload of all his other journeys throughout the country; and a heartbreaking incident in which Delisle beamingly presents a French newspaper article about his sojourn in Burma to the amateur animators he’s been teaching as a hobby, only to discover that because of its critical tone toward the junta, one of his students is soon “disappeared.” In both of these very different cases Delisle is left wondering how life could be lived that way, and so are we.

* Stop your grinnin’ and drop your linen—there’s a veritable bumper crop of new Kevin Huizenga comics, including the new Or Else and the debut of Fight or Run, available for purchase at this weekend’s SPX, where I and my wallet will be in attendance. Good stuff from PictureBox, too, including Powr Mastrs Vol. 2.

* Looks like Zack Snyder did one of those Fellowship of the Rings deals where a goodly chunk of Watchmen footage was screened for critics, to seemingly uniformly positive reactions. The movie’s gonna be 2 hours and 43 minutes long or so, while the length of Dr. Manhattan’s visible cock was unverified at presstime. AICN’s Moriarty has a lengthy review.

* Speaking of Snyder, at the Watchmen sneak peek he revealed he is in fact planning a 300 sequel based on an as-yet-unfinished, and most likely un-started, new Frank Miller graphic novel about a subsequent battle between the Greeks and Persians. I’m looking forward to both.

* Joe “Jog” McCulloch seems less high on Batman #680 than I was–I really quite liked it; the sinister ambiance of that comic was really something–but you should read his review anyway.

* Finally, Happy 40th Birthday, Night of the Living Dead!

I will be attending the Small Press Expo in Bethesday, Maryland this Saturday. I will be wearing a bright red Partyka T-shirt and (most likely) carrying a San Diego Comic-Con tote bag, and, of course, you will know me by the trail of Bowie sketches. Please say hello to me!

Recent events in the lives of people very close to us have prompted The Missus to join the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Out of the Darkness community walk in Old Westbury, Long Island this weekend. The walk is a fundraiser for the AFSP, and she’s set up a donor page for people who would like to sponsor her walk. Her target amount is $500. Would you please donate whatever you can to help?

Today the penultimate issue of Grant Morrison & Tony Daniel’s “Batman: R.I.P.” storyline comes out, and with it, one would assume, the reveal of one or both of the storyline’s big mysteries: the identity of criminal mastermind the Black Glove and the fate of Batman himself. I actually have no clue what happens and my friends who do have kept mum, and I haven’t stumbled across any spoilers online, either. It’s been a loooooong time since I looked forward to reading an issue of a comic with the same anticipation that I looked forward to watching an episode of Lost or late Sopranos. I actually gushed about it to the Missus this morning, something I’m not sure I’ve ever done about a monthly comic: “Something really big’s gonna happen to Batman but no one knows what it is!” Maybe this is what reading comics feels like for people who don’t work at Wizard and find out everything in advance.

Not counting the dancing girls who I guess came with the show, is there a single moment in this performance that is not completely disarming, open, and emotionally direct? Tracey Thorn’s unassuming outfit and tentative dancing, even the slight false notes here and there in her otherwise silken voice, give the impression that she’s just some girl who after months and months of sitting in her apartment thinking these thoughts finally found the courage to sing them. “Tonight I feel above the law–I’m comin’ in to land”…if you can find a better encapsulation of that blissfully, knowingly foolhardy confidence you get when you’re finally gonna make your move on the person you want, I want you to please let me know. This is a perfect little song.

Shenzhen

Guy Delisle, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, 2006

152 pages

$19.95, hardcover

Buy it from D&Q

Buy it from Amazon.com

Shenzhen is the second book to be released in French-Canadian cartoonist/animator Guy Delisle’s series of travelogues about working in Asian dictatorships (although I believe it was the first to be written); the art in both the ones I’ve read so far is so effortless and well-constructed it almost disappears. This book’s predecessor, Pyongyang, was a really breathtaking look at life in the country with the worst human rights record on Earth–I mean, how can you top a fish-out-of-water story set in a nation that seems to have used 1984 as a how-to manual? You can’t, really, and Shenzhen doesn’t come across as an attempt. Since the Chinese autocracy, at least in the areas Delisle visits, is far less all-pervasive than Kim Jong-Il’s, the book is by necessity a lot less about normal workaday life butting up against the contours of a nightmarish totalitarianism. Obviously there’s a culture clash to be found, but Delisle is quite aware that whatever “inscrutability” he finds in the customs and habits of his hosts lies at least as much with him as it does with them.

Instead, Shenzhen slowly reveals itself to be about how life in the city–an economic “free zone” surrounded by electric fences and guard towers, a place that’s freer than nearly any other in China yet still drearily proscripted–is sort of a macro version of what Delisle’s internal life as a working stiff is in micro. While in many ways Delisle and his European and American counterparts have much more freedom than anyone he’ll meet in China–at a “miniature world tour” tourist attraction he reflects that if he wanted he could simply buy a ticket to India and visit the actual Taj Mahal, while a tiny, rat-infested replica is as close as any of his co-workers are ever likely to get–his dispiriting daily routine is hardly any different from those of his Chinese counterparts. The biggest discrepancy appears to lie in the availability of leisure products: There’s something quite poignant about how his co-workers glom on to whatever meager scraps of Western art and entertainment they can get–a single picture of a Rembrandt painting, a Magic Johnson highlight reel, a painting of a French dinner setting, bootleg movies with the theater audience visible and audible–while Delisle can lie on his bed and listen to “the new Portishead CD” and wonder what the maid in his hotel, who occasionally uses/abuses his discman while she cleans, must think of it. What emerges is a picture of life in a state that has gone from Communist to corporatist, accruing the world-power benefits of wealth while passing few of its normally attendant social improvements down to the workers who make that wealth possible–and the disquieting hint that we Western wage slaves, whatever somatic advantages we might have, are a lot more similar to the workers of Shenzhen than we’d like to believe.