All Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder Vol. 1

Frank Miller, writer

Jim Lee, artist

DC, 2009

240 pages

$19.99

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Now that this first volume of Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s, uh, controversial Bat-book is out in a nice fat trade paperback, I finally sat and read its nine issues’ worth of comics from start to finish for the first time. Then I sat around and tried to figure out what to say about it. One phrase kept leaping to mind no matter how much I tried to come up with an alternate approach, so fuck it: That phrase is “mentally ill.”

But I mean it in the best way!

I understand that Miller’s staccato and repetitive dialogue and narration is enough to give some people aneurysms. Ditto, and more so depending on whether you’re talking about some of my former coworkers at Wizard, his new take on Batman as a cackling, grinning, foul-mouthed, stubble-sporting, child-abusing psychopath. For pete’s sake, former editor Bob Schreck’s introduction to the volume is nothing more or less than an apologetic for what follows. But I know self-parody when I see it–and honestly, even if Miller really isn’t capable of writing in any other way anymore, that doesn’t make it any less of a self-parody–and I have no attachment to some platonic ideal of Batman. In point of fact I actually have long felt Batman would have more fun pounding the bloody bejesus out of criminals than we’ve been led to believe. In the immortal words of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.

And you know, the thing really is (to quote Grant Morrison’s Mad Hatter) very much cleverer than its rep as a goddamn-Batman meme generator would indicate. Miller is constantly getting Lee to play around with panel layouts in memorable fashion, from the Bendis-like talking-head array during Batman and Dick Grayson’s conversation in the Batmobile to the gigantic splash-page extreme-closeups of the Robin and Superman logos (the impact of which is muted somewhat by similar treatment of other images to fill up space in the collection, but still) to the outrageously over-the-top barroom banter juxtaposed with an image of a burning fuse during the Black Canary’s introduction. There are even a couple moments that recalled the genuine madcap wit of mid-period Miller (roughly from The Dark Knight Returns through Hard Boiled)–a great jumpcut reveal of Dick’s kidnapping ruse during the Dynamic Duo’s confrontation with poor befuddled Green Lantern, and that massive multi-page fold-out of the Batcave that just keeps unfolding. By the time I got to the fourth fold, I was laughing out loud. Though Jim Lee has aged into his “nicest guy and biggest artist in comics” role very gracefully, he’ll never be the formal innovator (or popularizer of others’ innovations) that Miller has been, but even still, all these moments shine quite aside from his primary selling point of drawing DC’s characters as heroic and awesome and eye-poppingly big-big–BIG as possible. Put it all together and it’s a pleasure to flip through this book.

That’s not to say that the “this goes to 11” tone works all the time. There’s just no way to carry off any kind of emotional nuance if everyone sounds like a manic cross between Raymond Chandler and Matthew Perry’s Chandler. At one point, you’re supposed to infer from Vicki Vale’s speech pattern that she’s in shock, but she just sounds like everyone else (I imagine that was intentional, but it’s still a bit flummoxing). Meanwhile, the selling point of Miller’s Joker, back since DKR, is that he’s unsmiling and quiet, but his internal monologue is as chatty as all the other characters’. It doesn’t help that the Joker has always been one of Lee’s weakest interpretations of DC’s characters, the nose too pointy, the face too demonic. And honestly, Lee’s polished work is the reason that this book, at its best, will always just be really entertaining, whereas I truly think that the raw power Miller’s own The Dark Knight Strikes Again (or his crazy gorgeous alternate covers for ASB&R, reprinted here) is like a message from an alternate future for superhero comics.

But having the first nine issues of the book collected in one place does a lot to clarify what’s going on. For example, no longer does the Batmobile ride seem to go on for weeks (though Miller inserted a joke about that)–it just seems like one more feverish element in a story paced like a series of exclamation points. And tackling those initial, hostile conversations between Batman and Robin just a few minutes before you come to this arc’s comparatively quiet graveside denouement helps you realize that hey, this book just might be about Robin’s buoyant presence dragging Batman back from the brink of lunacy as we were promised after all! It certainly makes a convincing case that running around dressed as a bat and hospitalizing people all night for a year or so would drive you, well, batshit. Maybe that’s the quality, the tone, that Miller’s trying to capture more than anything else. I mean, there’s an issue where Batman and Robin lure Green Lantern into a room painted from floor to ceiling in bright yellow–so are they, though unfortunately we don’t see how that came to be–and Robin steals his power ring and crushes his windpipe so they have to perform an emergency tracheotomy on him. Mentally ill, meant as a compliment.

Blackest Night #0-2

Geoff Johns, writer

Ivan Reis, artist

32 pages each

#0: Free

#1-2: #3.99 each

Despite months of “Prelude” issues (whole story arcs, actually), a zero issue, and a “Prologue,” in Green Lantern #43, it’s the official first issue of Geoff Johns’s years-in-the-planning event comic Blackest Night that counts. And to be honest, my first read-through left me cold, largely by way of contrast.

That first Sinestro Corps Special a few years back was a first-round knockout–nutso heavy-metal character designs and all-out ring-on-ring action by Ethan Van Sciver, a Humpty Dumpty Green Lantern getting shot in the head, and a final “holy crap, this is going to blow you away if you’re a giant fucking nerd” secret bad-guy reveal splash page that, since I am a giant fucking nerd, blew me away. By comparison, BN #1 doesn’t have a whole lot going on. The “hey wouldn’t it be neat if…” idea of different-colored Lantern Corps isn’t new anymore. Both the comic’s general premise of dead heroes being brought back to life as killer zombies and the identities of many of the specific heroes to be revived were already common knowledge for most semi-savvy superhero fans. Van Sciver’s career-best art, and Doug Mahnke’s star turn on the tie-in issues of the main Green Lantern title–both of them weirder and harder-edged than mainstream comics need to be, with Mahnke in particular edging upward toward the top mainstream tier of Quitely, Romita Jr., Cassaday, and Frank–are replaced by the stalwart but pretty traditionally superheroey art of Ivan Reis, looking like Jim Lee scaled back toward Neal Adams a bit but somehow muddier and murkier than he’s been on GL in the past. There’s no last-page reveal at all. And the violence is extreme even by dismemberment enthusiast Johns’s standards.

But I think that this was ultimately a case of me expecting something different than what Johns was attempting to deliver. He doesn’t need to launch several years’ worth of future stories here–instead, he needs to tie several years’ worth of past stories by writers across the DC line together. He doesn’t need to kick off a thrilling saga of space-faring combat–he needs to start telling a horror story about dead superheroes coming back to life and murdering their friends. He doesn’t need to redefine and reinvigorate a character and his mythos–he needs to serve up a series of snapshots of multiple characters and the mythos of the entire DC Universe.

So rather than writing a review of BN #1 the second I bought it, I sat on it, keeping it in my backpack and pulling it out every now and then for another flip-through, another read. Now that I knew what to expect, I started to enjoy it, and the following issue, a lot more. I could admire how Reis made the Black Lantern versions of kindly old superheroes like Martian Manhunter and Aquaman into hulking, uruk-hai-style physical and existential menaces. I could get a kick out of his little flourishes, like the impressive Green Lantern hologram display of all the DCU’s dead heroes, or his riff on Rags Morales’s hyperthyroidal Hawkman (now the standard portrayal of the character, much to my amusement and delight). I could chuckle at the “jump scare” of turning a page on a quite rooftop conversation between Commissioner Gordon and his daughter Barbara to suddenly find Hal Jordan’s plummeting body smashing the Batsignal into pieces.

For as long as I’ve been reading it, Johns’s superhero writing has consisted almost solely of finding ways to express through action and dialogue exactly what each of DC’s superheroes means. As they fight, heroes will explain what it is that makes them tick and what iconic qualities they represent in DC’s pantheon, while villains will berate them for failing to live up to those demands. If this sounds boring or precious, most of the time it’s neither, because Johns just happens to be really good at identifying those core components of each character and basing fun action adventures around them. With the exception of the Justice Society of America–there’s just no way to remove the smell of mothballs and Ben-Gay from a team full of septuagenarians, guys in gimp masks, and (oddly) perky teens–his major recent works, lengthy runs on Action Comics and Green Lantern, have been like a carefully curated retrospective of Superman and Green Lantern’s careers, enemies, and milieux. At this point, if my comics-curious best friend from high school asked me to loan him comics that would inform him as to why Supes or GL are awesome, they’re what I’d hand him.

I guess that the idea behind Blackest Night is for Johns to take aim not so much at any particular character or even set of characters but at a basic fact of life for the DC Universe itself, the simultaneous omnipresence and impermanence of death. Everyone’s always getting killed (editorially speaking, Dan DiDio’s tenure at the top has been like a Robespierrian reign of terror for the men and women in tights) yet everyone’s always getting brought back to life (at the same time he’s been reviving more dead people that Jesus and George A. Romero combined). The power of the Black Lanterns reanimates dead heroes as extremely violent and extremely douchey killing machines, who taunt and mock the heroes they target for death, who are then brought back to life in the same fashion to continue the cycle. Depending on how much credit you’re willing to extend Johns, you could argue that this concept makes literal the way the constant death/rebirth cycle makes a metaphorical mockery of whatever import these characters’ adventures are supposed to have with us. If it’s all a wash eventually, what the heck difference does all the blood sweat and tears, all the rage and avarice and fear and will and hope and compassion and love that drive the multicolored Lanterns, even make?

Chances are a lot of you are simply saying “Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care.” Unless you have some basic investment in the idea that these characters can still be used to tell involving stories, this probably won’t mean much to you. Moreover, unlike Grant Morrison, Johns’s evangelical belief in the power of superheroes isn’t accompanied by the experimentalist brio that’ll hook the hipsters. He’s simply trying to make a really good superhero comic book. But here’s the thing: A little faith is all you need. As other people have gone into in great detail, Johns strove to make this thing as new-reader friendly as a comic that culminates in the Elongated Man and his rape-murdered wife rising from the dead and slaughtering the umpteenth incarnation of Hawkman and Hawkgirl can be. Obviously I like superhero comics and have read quite a few, but without having read them as a child, I lack the masters degree in minutiae that many fans, particularly self-identifying DC fans, seem to view as a necessity. Therefore, while I think I’d heard the names of, say, Aquaman’s little posse of Garth and Mera and Tula and Dolphin before, I had no idea who the hell they were when they all showed up to fight over Aquaman’s grave. But because Johns’s writing is always primarily concerned with explaining and exploring each character’s role in the pantheon, I didn’t need to know who they were–it was explained to me between, and during, punches. So then it becomes a scene not about trivia questions, but about characters’ past mistakes and biggest failures literally coming back to destroy them. It’s quite effectively done. It’s not knocking me on my ass the way Final Crisis did, but who says it needs to? It’s a fun, violent superhero comic that has a sense of weight, a sense that within its confines, what’s happening to the characters, despite all the dying and rebirthing, matters to them. Clearly it matters to Johns, and I think his ability to translate that into writing that’s creative and entertaining rather than insular and pathetic is his personal power ring.

West Coast Blues

Jacques Tardi, writer/artist

adapted from the novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette

Fantagraphics, 2009

pages, hardcover

$18.99

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In a book like this, where a cartoonist is adapting a novel you haven’t read, it’s difficult to say who deserves credit for what. All I know is, someone deserves a lot of credit. As slim, smooth, and hard as its attractive, Adam Grano-designed album-style hardcover format, West Coast Blues is as strong a crime comic as you’re likely to see this year (or until whenever the next Gipi Wish You Were Here Ignatz book comes out). So maybe it’s weird for me to start by talking about the problems I had with it, but let’s get them out of the way: Certain basic character components are things you’ve seen many times before. There are hitmen who banter innocuously between dispassionate murder attempts, a torturer who loves his dog, and a protagonist who doesn’t seem attached to anyone but his own hide. Which is weird, since the protagonist, George, is just an average joe. Maybe there are people out there who, when suddenly targeted by murderers, would be able to ditch their families and entire lives without feeling much of anything about it, but I don’t think I know any, and I’m certainly not one of them. All I do is feel. Sometimes I think crime fiction would be a lot more effective if, as is often the case in real life, the crime really visibly fucked the victims up. (Though to be fair, there are other characters we come across for whom it’s done exactly that.)

What the book does right makes for a much longer list than what it does wrong. For starters, there’s Tardi’s art, a master class in spotted blacks and lines like garrote wire. Tardi juxtaposes cartoony figures against frequently photorealistic backgrounds and objects like a manga-ka, but his characters of a rubbery Rick Geary look that’s at once lighthearted and ugly. This makes them perfect vessels for the story’s sudden bursts of apocalyptic violence, which appear out of nowhere, rain mayhem all over a couple of pages, and then vanish like a summer storm, returning us to our taciturn hero and his quotidian environments. I think everyone will talk about the beach attack, for instance–how well Tardi conveys a Jaws-like seashore scene so sunny and crowded with swimmers that a man could be assaulted and drowned without even those closest to him realizing that anything was going on but horseplay. It was a stroke of genius for this to be the first big setpiece, sending the message that bad shit could go down anytime, anyplace. Just as impressive, and just as well-choreographed from an action perspective, is the book’s central one-two-three punch: a chaotic shootout, an assault by a ghoulish hobo, and the tumble from a train through a seemingly Mirkwood-like forest that’s seen on the book’s cover. After a prolonged period of Godot-like waiting for something to happen, it all seems to happen at once, leaving both George and the viewer dazed and confused amid Tardi’s riot of a woods. George emerges from the other side of this sequence as another person, in a literal sense, and it’s such bravura storytelling we can innately understand why.

The end of the book (and the beginning) seem to want to raise bigger questions than the basic plot–essentially, “no good deed goes unpunished”–would appear to offer. I suppose it’s to Tardi and Manchette’s credit that they try to address my complaint about George’s weird stoicism more or less head on, though I’m not sure I buy their explanation. But it left me thinking, I’ll give them that, and a book that can leave me thinking after keeping me turning the pages as fast as I can is a book that got it done if you ask me. I even liked how people’s howls of pain were simply portrayed as giant letter A’s. This sucker’s good.

Comics Are for Idiots!: Blecky Yuckerella Vol. 3

Johnny Ryan, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2008

104 pages

$11.99

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Prison Pit Vol. 1

Johnny Ryan, writer/artist

120 pages

$12.99

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One of these comics features a giant monster made of semen, a guy who shoots acidic puss out of his body acne, and a slug who sucks cock. The other is a Johnny Ryan gag-strip collection.

Yes, both of these books are like kryptonite to good taste. But there are a couple of big differences between what Johnny Ryan is doing in Comics Are for Idiots!, his latest Blecky Yuckerella strip collection, and what he’s doing in Prison Pit, his ultraviolent action-comic debut. The most obvious is he switched from brush in the former to pen in the latter, stripping himself of his secret weapon: one of the lushest lines in comics. Turns out it was a smart move. With Blecky, the buoyancy of his slick black swooshes and swoops is reflected in his figurework: everyone’s googly-eyed, grinning and chortling like, well, idiots, and if they’re not doing that then they’re gasping or being knocked out of the panel, feet flying in the air, their shock or disgust just as joyous as their glee. That’s how gags about curing brain tumors by exposing them to dogshit or throwing babies in the trash (and to be fair, this is nowhere near as bad as things have been getting in Angry Youth Comix lately) still manage to get you to laugh along with them–they’re just so exuberant! Prison Pit, on the other hand, is all business. Yes, tongue’s in cheek to a certain extent–in addition to the gross-out bits I mentioned above, all the characters look like rejected He-Man concepts, there’s gratuitous swearing and swastikas, the portentous opening chapter heading reads “FUCKED” while the second chapter is called “MEGA-FUCKED,” and Ryan has said he’s swiping liberally from ridonkulous action manga like Berserk. And yet the tone feels as serious as a heart attack, thanks in no small part to a line that’s gone wiry and vicious, able to evoke the doom-laden skies of Gilbert Hernandez’s Chance in Hell, the nightmarish stone wastelands of Mat Brinkman’s Teratoid Heights, the seedy body-horror of Josh Simmons, the painstaking monumentalism of Tom Gauld. At times when the visuals are at their most abstract, you’d be hard pressed to recognize Ryan in them at all.

The second big difference is one of pacing. The four-panel Blecky strips often feel like a breakneck race to the punchline through some kind of bizarre obstacle course requiring the basic premise of the gag to get more ridiculous with each panel. It’s not enough for Blecky to get a pair of x-ray spex–she has to use them to spy on Wedgie’s kidney, and the kidney has to be anthropomorphized, and it has to be going through the personals column, and it has to be circling ads for both men and women, so that the ultimate joke is that Wedgie has a bicurious vital organ. Maybe the best distillation of this kind of set-up features Blecky’s Aunt Jiggles getting her ass caught in a jelly jar, her boobs caught in a coffin lid, and her head caught in a bird’s vagina one panel at a time, for a payoff panel of Blecky saying “You’re the coolest person I’ve ever met.” Rapid-fire ridiculousness is the height of virtue here. Compare that to Prison Pit, which opens with an abstracted, dialogue-free spaceship landing that lasts for four pages. Similar space is given to the protagonist getting wrapped up in someone’s prehensile intestines, or cutting someone’s head off, or falling through the sky, or tumbling down a mountain, or simply losing consciousness. This meticulous rolling-out of physical business is occasionally contrasted with dramatic splash pages–from an x-ray view of the hero’s circulatory system to a disembodied portrait of his penis–but for the most part, this giant fight scene feels disconcertingly quiet, lonely, and loveless, right down to its skin-crawling coda. Ryan’s rep as altcomix’s premier overgrown juvenile delinquent is well deserved–and don’t get me wrong, you can absolutely enjoy Prison Pit on that level–but the poetic savagery he depicts here is the work of a grown-ass man.

Red Riding Hood Redux (Red Riding Hood, The Wolf, The Grandmother, The Mother, and The Hunter)

Nora Krug, writer/artist

Bries, 2009

80 pages per volume

$5 individually, $20 for the set, if I recall correctly

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I’m going to make Nora Krug’s multifaceted, wordless retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood story sound dreary and depressing if I say that it’s about the ugly business of adult life: Grief, greed, alcoholism, joyless sex, irrevocable mistakes, brutal dominion over animals. The thing is, it’s not not about those things–they’re present in the five interlocking little volumes, each presenting not just the point of view but the literal eye-view (and sometimes mind’s-eye-view) of a different character in the story, that are bundled together with a rubber band to form the overall package. But Red Riding Hood Redux is also about vivid and skillful use of color, clever formal play, astute visual shorthand, baroque and virtuoso storytelling, funny comic business, and the sheer pleasure of telling a shaggy dog tale. Krug deftly reintroduces us to the specifics of the Red Riding Hood story, from the stuff we all remember (“What big ears you have!”) to the stuff we thought we’d forgotten (Grandma and Red filling the sleeping wolf’s belly up with rocks in order to dupe him into still feeling full after the hunter frees them). Oftentimes she presents us with only the half of key sequences and conversations that our current POV character can see, leaving us to fill in the blanks first mentally and then, with great pleasure, through the other side of the story when we get to the other characters’ versions. But just as much fun, if not more, are the aspects of the tale Krug concocts on her own. Maybe there really was a love triangle between Red’s mom, the hunter, and Red’s dad, who by the way was imprisoned for the accidental killing of Grandpa, but I sure never heard it in the versions of the story I was told; Krug imbues this whole bedroom drama with heart, laughs, and real regret. At other times she gets fanciful, creating a bizarre Journey to the Center of the Earth-style world-within-world inside the Wolf’s belly, and continuing the Wolf’s story post-mortem in a fashion that delighted this animal lover to no end. Krug’s simple line and deft coloring are both perfect fits for the project, keeping things childlike while still able to convey all kinds of information and emotional content within the sparse one-frame-per-page set-up she’s using. Heck, just the way she drew Grandma and Red’s views when they get drunk was worth the price of admission. If you can snag this, by all means do so.

Stuffed!

Glenn Eichler, writer

Nick Bertozzi, artist

First Second, 2009

128 pages

$17.99

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While I can’t say I recommend this book without reservations, I also can’t say I’ve ready very many comics about the moral and ethical issues surrounding the depatriated, taxidermied body of an African. Along with Nick Bertozzi’s always elegant, full-of-life cartooning, it’s that subject matter that will get Stuffed! over with those for whom it’ll get over. In Colbert Report writer/Daria helmer Glenn Eichler’s story, two estranged brothers–happy, if harried, suburbanite Tim and acid casualty Free–come into the possession of the stuffed human remains of a man from Africa, who’d been displayed as a curio in their surly late father’s rinky-dink museum of weird stuff. Tim hooks up with Howard Bright, an African-American anthropologist at the Museum of Natural History, in hopes Bright and the other Museum staffers can help locate “The Savage”‘s country of origin and return him home. The quite contrary Free, who’s not all there, instead argues that the best way to honor the memory of both the African and their father is to keep the former on display. Various didactic contretemps ensue between Tim and Free, Howard and Free, Howard and his wife, Free and Howard’s wife, Howard and his son, Howard and other museum staffers, Tim and diplomats from a pair of African countries where the stuffed guy may have come from, and so on. Yeah, there are a lot of arguments in this book, the kind of arguments where conflicting worldviews are represented and, in the aftermath of one pivotal argument, catharsis is achieved. You may be tired of those kinds of arguments in dramas, and honestly I don’t blame you. But it’s tough to get tired of watching Bertozzi draw them. Despite occasionally acidic coloring by Bertozzi and Chris Sinderson, his figurework and body language looking more than ever like a down-and-dirty Will Eisner, rough-edged and inky where Eisner was smooth and cartoony. His characters seem to move around within their panels with real vitality, breathing breezy readability into what could have been tedious talking-head scenes in lesser hands. (It’s easy to spot the lingering influence of the Modernist painters he chronicled in The Salon, too.) And I have to say it’s rather refreshing to read a graphic novel in which every character is essentially working toward advancing basic human decency, even in misguided ways. And that’s the heart of Stuffed!–a legacy of tragedy and brutality has been reduced to kitsch, so how do we expand it back out of spearchucking stereotypes and past racism and oppression into the full-fledged humanity this person was entitled to? It’s a provocative and engrossing question, and your interest in the answer can get you past Stuffed!‘s shortcomings for the curios to be found inside.