The Whale

Aidan Koch, writer/artist

Gaze Books, September 2010

64 pages

$10

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If his own Xeric Grant-funded book Young Lions and this inaugural release for his Gaze Books imprint are any indication, cartoonist and newly minted publisher Blaise Larmee could certainly do a lot worse than cranking out tastefully designed, inexpensive perfectbound softcover books with brightly colored covers containing softly pencilled, elliptically plotted comics about longing for however long he feels like doing so. Even with all the vitality artcomix has right now, this is an underserved aesthetic, overwhelmed by inkslingers whose work tends to be either tighter and angrier or choppier and wilder. I’d imagine that this material is going to click hard with a group of people who just aren’t getting the comics that might speak to them elsewhere.

I’m not sure how hard it clicked for me, for whatever that’s worth, despite it being a really lovely comic I’m glad I read. In a weird way the lettering, of all things, gives the game away in terms of why this story, of a young woman coming to terms with the death of her partner (whose gender is unclear, and unimportant), didn’t hit me the way it might have. (Or the way Anders Nilsen’s comics on this topic, for example, actually did.) Stick with me for a minute here: Koch draws like a slightly beefed-up version of Larmee–her sensuous, slightly tremulant line shored up by more detailed and realistic figurework and portraiture and a more frequent, textural use of light and dark grays. She has a knack for using filmic techniques like eyeline matches–between her main character and her tiny, adorable dog, to name one memorable example–to make panel transitions pop. And many of those panels are strikingly, intelligently composed: I’m fond of a splash page of boats along a dock at the bottom of the page, the water filling the rest of the page with just a few suggestions of waves and ripples, which echoes a similar “shot” of our protagonist’s bare feet protruding from the bottom of the page as she looks down at a rug partially covered with boxes of her late loved one’s possessions. We get bird’s eye views, seal’s eye views, close-ups, panoramas, and through it all the sense that we’re not just seeing some figures move back and forth in tiny boxes someone drew, but that we’re in a world someone inhabits, and which that someone colors and contours with her emotions and thoughts. It’s confident comics-making.

Then there’s that lettering. It’s not unpleasant, don’t get me wrong–nice simple all-caps block hand-lettering, in pencil, slanting slightly forward. It’s just that relative to the size and tone of the drawings, it’s a bit overwhelming. The handwriting might obscure that everything’s being said IN ALL-CAPS ITAL, but that’s what it is, and it wrings a lot of the nuance and quietness out of the emotional content of the words. This in turn draws attention to how several of the story’s beats are, if not cliches, then at least familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the literature of loss. Boxing up their stuff, grabbing/being grabbed by certain memorable possessions; survivor’s guilt (“THEY SAID I WAS THE LUCKY ONE“); the soothing and saddening presence of the sea; the fairly on-the-nose metaphor to which the title refers, and so on. It’s grief in all-caps ital, if you will.

This, perhaps, is a weakness of this style: losing sight of the fact that feeling something intensely is, in itself, value neutral. How you express it counts more than that you express it. There’s one genuinely moving bit here where that’s clear: The protagonist calls for her dog, and the second time she does so her word balloon has suddenly sprouted another tail, pointing to a ghostly figure who once would have done the same. It’s a killer detail, unexpected and immediately powerful. It’s worth more than any all-caps emotion.

Scary Stories Treasury

Alvin Schwartz, writer

Stephen Gammell, artist

HarperCollins, 1995

115 pages, hardcover

$9.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

It was a red-letter day when I snagged this omnibus edition of the three collections of scary stories from folklore assembled and retold by Alvin Schwartz and illustrated by Stephen Gammell: 1981’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, 1984’s More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and 1991’s Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones. Honestly, I could skip this review and just post the collection of Gammell’s world-beating brain-searing images I gathered up from the Internet, and any point I’d have tried to make would probably be made at least as effectively. If you ever came across these books as a kid, you probably, and this is no joke, remember some of these illustrations better than the faces of your best friends. Like a proto-Al Columbia, veteran illustrator and Caldecott Medal winner Gammell found a way to depict a kind of evil that seems to have seeped into and corrupted those depictions themselves. Instead of deconstructing these images like Columbia does–using sketches, abandoned work, damaged or destroyed pages and so on to suggest that these things almost too horrible to truly commit to paper–Gammell uses washed-out black and gray inks to suggest forms slowly coalescing into being from…someplace else, someplace we can’t fully see and wouldn’t want to. On the memorable occasions when he comes right out and draws these things where you can’t help but look at them, and seemingly they at you, it can quite literally be difficult to sustain that gaze. I defy you to stare at this image, for example–astutely chosen as this omnibus collection’s cover; no effing around here!–without eventually just shaking your head and saying “Jesus.”

But Gammell is equally adept, and just as haunting, when he’s not depicting anything in particular. In a few memorable pieces–sometimes in illustrations for the front matter, sometimes for the stories themselves–he goes full-on black-psychedelic, creating images that suggest surrealism but which replace the traditional visual punning of that movement with disconcertingly decontextualized tendrils and splatters and parts of leering, screaming faces. My favorite of these is the below illustration, for the story “Oh, Susannah!”

Which leads me to the storyteller, Alvin Schwartz. A folklorist with dozens of collections under his belt, Schwartz displays here what I imagine to be a hugely underrated and underremembered proficiency with his prose. These are books for children and young adults, but Schwartz uses that to his advantage. In his best moments, he takes the economical prose typically used to communicate to these age groups–that “So-and-so was a person and this is what happened to him” factuality–and employs it to tell stories of not just the unexplained, but the unexplainable. Again, “Oh, Susannah!” is my favorite. A college student names Susannah comes home late at night and tries to go to sleep, only to be awoken by her roommate, already in bed, singing the old Stephen Foster song. When she switches on the light to confront the roommate, she discovers that the roommate’s head is missing. The story ends with Susannah telling herself “I’m having a nightmare. When I wake up, everything will be all right….” Who murdered the roommate? How long ago did it happen? If the roommate is dead, who was singing the song? Is Susannah having a nightmare? Will everything be all right? What does any of this have to do with the cosmic hellscape with which Gammell has adorned this story? We don’t know, and Schwartz’s all-business prose offers us no comforting room for interpretation. It is what it is, and what it is is horrifying.

Schwartz’s technique can make even the collections’ most familiar stories freshly disturbing. Consider his take on the old “the call is coming from inside the house” urban legend that gave rise to When a Stranger Calls. Here’s how he ends it:

Just then a door upstairs opened. A man they had never seen before started down the stairs toward them. As they ran from the house, he was smiling in a very strange way. A few minutes later, the police found him there and arrested him.

As adults, we know what might cause a stranger who’s spent the evening hiding in a house, menacing a babysitter and the three little children she’s been watching, to smile in a very strange way. Indeed, Schwartz states repeatedly, in introductions to the volumes and chapters and in the notes and sources sections at the back of each volume, that scary stories about the non-supernatural are a way for young people to warn each other of the dangers the real world contains once they leave the protection of their parents–a homeopathic remedy for all-too-real fears, if you will. But within the context of the story itself, the man’s motives and bizarre behavior–that strange smile, his apparent lingering long enough for the police to “find him there and arrest him”–is a mystery, both tantalizing and repellent. It’s up to the young reader to fill in the blanks, and nothing good’s going in them.

But it’s also worth noting that Gammell and Schwartz display a sly sense of humor in a lot of their work here as well, befitting the funny-scary tone of a lot of these summer-camp and tall-tale-derived stories. I’m thinking of the subtly grinning alligator with the human hand who accompanies a story of shapeshifting swimming fanatics that ends with the sentence “Everybody knows there aren’t any alligators around here.” Or of the juxtaposition of the extravagantly bloody, elegantly gesturing hand that accompanies “The Ghost with the Bloody Fingers” with the downright goofy story itself, which ends with a guitar-playing hippie obliviously telling the sanguine specter to “Cool it, man! Get yourself a Band-Aid.” This stuff works as a relief valve for the out-and-out scary stuff, obviously. But it also shows just how deft both writer and artist are in treading that liminal area–between funny-weird and funny-haha, between fact and fiction, between popcorn-spilling scary and afraid to get up and go to the bathroom at night scary–where all these folk tales dwell.

One last thing: Schwartz comes up with the best titles! Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark itself is brilliantly matter-of-fact, but the section and story titles really get good in vol. 2: “When She Saw Him, She Screamed and Ran,” “Something Was Wrong,” “A Weird Blue Light,” “Somebody Fell from Aloft,” “She Was Spittin’ and Yowlin’ Just Like a Cat,” “When I Wake Up, Everything Will Be All Right”…More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is the best collection of titles this side of early Gang of Four–just one more delight to be found in this treasure of a book.

The ACME Novelty Library #20

Chris Ware, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, September 2010

72 pages, hardcover

$23.95

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What makes a life? Is it the narrative we assemble in retrospect from the sights and sounds we remember best? Is it like comics in that regard, a combination of words and pictures stacked together to tell a story? To what degree do we act as our own cartoonists, then, picking and choosing the right combination of words and pictures to tell the story of ourselves we most want to hear? Is it possible that the way we misremember things tells us more of that story? What about the words and pictures we skip entirely? When we come to a point in the story that makes us think “Wait a minute, shouldn’t we have seen Event X or Y or Z by now, why did we skip that, shouldn’t that have been a bigger deal,” what does that tell us? What does a jump cut mean? What does an absence mean? Or what does a presence mean? What do we make of recurring marginalia that pops up when the story is supposed to be dealing with something entirely different? Is that persistence a reflection of the original absence? And who are the characters in our story? Is it fair to see them that way? Do they have any idea that’s what they are to us? Do they know how big a role they play? Do we know how big a role we’ve played in their stories? Would we even remember? Would we ever have known in the first place, or did we forget? How does it feel to find out? How do their stories affect our own? What happens when they leave our story? What happens when we leave theirs? What gets in the way of our own story? What constitutes static on the screen, blots out the image as it really is and makes it something else, however briefly? What do we do and say and think and feel in those moments that’s different from all the other moments? In what new direction will those moments send our story? What happens when we prefer the way the story used to be told? What happens when we find ourselves in a new story of someone else’s making? What happens when a turn of a page to a new set of words and images stuns us, hurts us? What happens when we reach the end of the story? What makes a story worth telling? A life worth living? Looking back, can we ever be sure that the answer isn’t “nothing”?

Incredible Hulks #612-613

Greg Pak, Scott Reed, writers

Tom Raney, Brian Ching, artists

Marvel, August-September 2010

32 story pages each

$3.99 each

When I talk about how Batman is the only superhero for whom I feel affection outside or beyond the quality of the Batman comic currently in my hand or movie/TV show currently on my TV, that’s not quite true. Years before I got into Batman, my childhood (and I mean young childhood, barely remembered fuzzy pool of memories out of which pops the occasional actual memory) favorites were, thanks to a back-to-back hour of Saturday morning cartoon programming, Spider-Man and the Hulk. But I think my continuing fondness for the Hulk, at least, stems from his being the superhero metaphor to which I most closely relate. First of all, huge green dude punching things is the superhero concept boiled down to its strongman essence. Secondly, mild-mannered smart guy who smashes anything that makes him angry? Sure, I’ll eat it. But best of all, the consequences of that superpower are built right into the concept. He might be able to put it off by becoming ruler of some planet someplace, or forming a surrogate family of super-goons, but ultimately the Hulk will always be an outcast, always unwanted, always on the run. If Spidey’s thing is “with great power comes great responsibility,” the Hulk is a cautionary tale about what happens when great power is used irresponsibly.

So I dig the Hulk. More specifically, I dig a lot of what writer Greg Pak has done with the Hulk. His Planet Hulk saga showed an admirable attention to detail in building the sci-fi space-opera world, aliens, and cultures through which an exiled Hulk cut a swathe on the road to becoming ruler of the planet. His subsequent World War Hulk event took the kind of concept that would make a third-grader say “Awesome!”–the Hulk vs. the Marvel Universe–and tied it to both killer fight scenes for John Romita Jr. to draw and an exploration of whether the ends justify the means and the extremes to which grief and rage will push us. After that, though, the Hulk disappeared from his own title, which became a road movie starring a de-powered Bruce Banner and his alter ego’s barbarian alien son Skaar, and then everything got tied up in a huge multiple-title roundelay of crossovers and spinoff miniseries and so on.

Now, I really liked all the huge gamma-irradiated bruisers suddenly coming out of the woodwork to jump ugly with one another throughout these events–after all, I love the Hulk conceptually, and there’s really not anything that having a million Hulk-type guys and girls running around pounding the shit of each other does to weaken that concept, so by all means let a thousand She-Hulks bloom. But without THE Hulk, without The Strongest One There Is, I decided to tune out until Big Green himself was back. Which is what Incredible Hulks–that’s not me referring to more than one issue of Incredible Hulk,that’s really a plural, it’s really referring to multiple Incredible Hulk characters a la William Safire going to Burger King and ordering five Whoppers Jr.–promises: Bruce Banner can transform back into the Hulk when he gets angry again, and he’s now surrounded by a posse of behemoths. If this is a book that lives up to the promise of a “Giants Walk the Earth” era of Hulks, I’m all for it.

As it turns out, I’m not all for it. On a surface level I think primary artist Tom Raney can pull off one genuinely impressive drawing of some big super-dude for every eight or nine drawings that make them look sort of gawky, so there’s that. But beyond that, you’ve got two problems.

One, I appreciate how hard Pak, aided by co-writer Scott Reed in this case, works at really doing the worldbuilding with regards to the space-opera concepts involved in this book’s co-feature, the story of Hulk’s other alien son Hiro-Kala traveling through space to find and kill his brother Skaar. But it’s almost impossible to get me to care about worldbuilding if the world you’re building don’t house a character I care about to begin with. Thus Planet Hulk works fine, because it’s the Hulk and I like the Hulk, but Hiro-Kala, Son of Hulk’s journey through space with his psychic-planet frenemy doesn’t work, because not only do I know very little about Hiro-Kala, the psychic planet, or anyone on it, but it also lacks the basic conceptual oomph that making him a huge strong awesome-looking brute would give him. He’s just a scrawny bald dude with crazy psychic powers, and the combination doesn’t mesh with the Hulk the way even his usual super-genius-model antagonists like the Leader or MODOK do.

Two, and this is the same problem I had with Incredible Hulk once it shifted to being the Banner & Skaar road movie storyline, I really don’t like stakes-free fighting in superhero comics. In the Banner/Skaar stories, Banner kept duping Skaar into meeting and fighting various heroes and villains with which the Hulk used to memorably spar–Juggernaut, the Thing, Wolverine, etc.–in order to train him to be a better fighter so he could kill off Banner’s alter ego if and when he ever reemerged. In other words, we knew these fights wouldn’t matter, because they were all pointing to some future fight; plus, in half the cases they were with other heroes, and we knew things could get only so ugly. So you just ended up twiddling your thumbs during what should be the most thrilling and visceral part of any supercomic.

In the case of Incredible Hulks #612-613, we know that the Hulk and the Red She-Hulk–the new vicious Hulk alter ego of Bruce’s ex-wife Betty–aren’t going to seriously hurt or kill each other or anyone else. We know it because they’re main characters who were married. We know it because they’re not really fighting for any particular reason–on an emotional level it’s the equivalent of two exes arguing. We know it because all the other characters are treating it with the seriousness of people watching a couple have an ugly spat in the frozen foods aisle of the supermarket. We know it because this is billed as a Hulk Family book and she’s the matriarch and thus she’s not going anywhere. In other words the book works overtime, on every conceivable level, to send the message that this battle doesn’t really matter. So…why have it, then?

Look, I know that part of superhero comics dating back to the Silver Age is having these goofy inconsequential fights where heroes smack each other around for a variety of reasons–mistaken identity, just being in a bad mood, whatever. But that it’s been done is not a good enough reason to keep doing it. If you’re like me, you think that fights in superhero comics are as important as songs are to musical theater. They’re where the real emotion of the story is expressed through spectacle. Granted, on a certain level that’s what’s going on here: Instead of just using harsh language, Hulk and Red She-Hulk punch each other. But the problem is that we know this won’t have any real consequences. They’re gonna make up and the story’s gonna move on. A good fight scene has to have some real, palpable ramifications for the participants–something that shakes up the status quo of the book on some level. As I detailed above, we know this won’t happen here. So keep your powder dry and save the fighting for when it matters.

Batman and Robin #14

Grant Morrison, writer

Frazer Irving, artist

DC, September 2010

24 story pages

$2.99

Despite liking this issue more than any other single-issue Batman comic I’ve ever read–short version: shuddery stylish Lynchian atmosphere with genuinely horrifying villains, cool action sequences, killer art, and a sense that it’s fun to be a Batman comic–I didn’t want to review it, simply because I’ve reviewed like a billion Grant Morrison Bat-books. But a quick check of my left-hand sidebar reveals that I’ve run only five such reviews; that’s a tie for third place in the Attentiondeficitdisorderly Review Sweepstakes with Big Questions, compared to eight separate reviews for MOME and a whopping eleven for King Shit of Comics Time Mountain, Cold Heat. (It’s Frank Santoro’s world–we just live in it.)

So what the hey, let’s talk about artist Frazer Irving and artist Frazer Irving only. Irving emerges here as Morrison’s single best collaborator, I think. This is something of a surprise, not only because of the existence of Frank Quitely, but because this pair’s previous Bat-collabo, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #2, was a murky, hard-to-follow mess, owing largely to Irving’s failure to properly differentiate his Puritan-garbed Bruce Wayne from his similarly attired antagonist. (This has its in-story reasons, as it turns out, but still.) This issue, however, is the kind of thing where you could just go page by page enumerating all the visual high points and let that make your argument for you. To wit!

* Page one: The steely blue color of abandoned Wayne Manor

* Page two: The Joker cowering on the floor, turning to face us only after he’s revealed he’s been in control all along

* Page three: The Joker’s awkward positioning of his hands, closed eyes, off-balance body language, and big grin conveying how he’s flailing around without a care in the world, so confident is he that he’ll best his tiny, deadly opponent Robin; the barely visible splash of blood when the Joker scratches Robin’s face with his poisoned fingernails

* Page four: The emergence of aquamarine against he ugly brown background as Robin begins hallucinating; depicting Robin’s spasms by showing him against the floor, propped up only by his heels and the back of his head–his whole body an inverted rictus

* Page five: The sudden shift from blue-green to bright orange as the explosion hits–the door has already been blown clear across the hallway and knocked the cop off his feet, as though we blinked and missed a panel

* Page six: What do you even say about this image of Professor Pyg hanging upside-down, held up by barbed wire, in the womb of his monument to his imaginary mother? It’s an absolute killer, but I will add that the belly-fat rolls are a nice touch.

* Page seven: The choreography of the Senator’s recoiling away from Doctor Hurt’s gunshot; the tangent linking the vomit bucket to the pumpkin with teeth in it (yes, it’s that kind of comic)

* Page eight: The fact that this action sequence is colored pink; the motion of Gordon’s body and trenchcoat in panel three

* Page nine: The color palette’s shift to orange with every gunshot; the cantered frames

* Page ten: The way Batman’s body seems to spin with each panel

* Page eleven: The final three panels leaning forward into one another, pushing Batman and the viewer along to the inevitable explosion

* Page twelve: That top-most silhouetted body flung into the air by the explosion, limbs dangling backwards

* Page thirteen: Professor Pyg’s proclamatory pointer-finger gesture as he announces “Je suis showbiz!”; the quasi-fisheye view of Hurt, Pyg, and their minions walking down the hall, as though they’ll breeze right past us in another second

* Page fourteen: The musculature of Dick Grayson’s bare back

* Page fifteen: The light from the doorway as Batman runs to the Batcopter

* Page sixteen: Conveying Commissioner Gordon’s disorientation when he awakes by drawing the panel upside-down, but in such a way that we can only tell for sure that it is upside-down if we flip it upside-down ourselves

* Page seventeen: The way panel three is lit from below and to the left; the consistency of the profile of Pyg’s mask in panels five and six

* Page eighteen: Pyg’s gut sticking out when he suspects he’s being made fun of for his weight problem

* Page nineteen: Pyg and Hurt, the Diabolical Duo

* Page twenty: Batman’s whirling-dervish fight choreography

* Page twenty-one: The look on Batman’s face as he lands the punch in panel four; Pyg’s pose when he tells Batman “I can’t blame you for finding me attractive”

* Page twenty-two: Batman’s flat boot-sole connecting with Pyg’s flat pig-nose; the fountain-like silhouette of Batman’s cape as he lands

* Page twenty-three: The ungainly way Batman whips around to see who’s behind him, when it turns out it’s no one and he was being tricked by Gordon–the pose conveys that he’s been duped

* Page twenty-four: Joker in the Batcave at last; the smiley face painted on the bound-and-gagged Robin; the final three images of Batman, the Joker, and Doctor Hurt

I’ve read a lot of superhero comics, and this sort of attention to detail is all but nonexistent. To rely this much on subtle shifts of figurework and coloring to convey both vital plot information and to enhance our understanding and appreciation of the physical combat that is superhero comics’ bread and butter, to have the chops to pull it off and the confidence to even try…well, it’s pretty much unheard of outside of some really titanic stuff, Dave Gibbons on Watchmen/Frank Quitely on All Star Superman-type stuff. And while Irving shares with Quitely a genuine, contemporary sense of style and art that allows for neon-bright colors to really pop, his work (perhaps because he does all the color and texture himself) feels fuller. Flipping through the book again before writing this sentence I realized that Irving will drop backgrounds just as often as Quitely does, but with his billowing puffs and swirls giving every panel depth, you’d never know it from memory. Irving took a comic it was apparently a struggle to convince people who needed to be convinced he should even be involved in and handed in the best-drawn superhero comic of the year, and honestly one of the best-drawn comics of the year period. Bravo.

Bound & Gagged

Andrice Arp, Marc Bell, Elijah J. Brubaker, Shawn Cheng, Chris C. Cilla, Michael DeForge, Kim Deitch, J. T. Dockery, Theo Ellsworth, Austin English, Eamon Espey, Robert Goodin, Julia Gfrorer, Levon Jihanian, Juliacks, Kaz, David King, Tom Neely, Anders Nilsen, Scot Nobles, Jason Overby, John Porcellino, Jesse Reklaw, Tim Root, Zak Sally, Gabby Schulz, Josh Simmons, Ryan Standfest, Kaz Strzepek, Matthew Thurber, Noah Van Sciver, Dylan Williams, Chris Wright, writers/artists

Tom Neely, editor

I Will Destroy You, September 2010

72 pages

$10

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“What happens when you ask a bunch of cartoonists, artists, and assorted weirdos to do one panel gag comics? Comedy! Horror! Navel gazing! Abstraction! And more!!!” So reads the back cover of this collection of gag comics by a galaxy of alt/underground comix stars, and it’s pretty accurate as far as it goes. And as anyone familiar with the history of altcomix one-panel gags from Ivan Brunetti on down, the horror, comedy, and navel gazing can get pretty inextricable from one another. As such it’s the cartoons that make me say “Jeeeeeez” as well as “hahahaha” that click the hardest for me here. Josh Simmons takes top honors, as he is wont to do, with a drawing of burning, skinned cattle corpses floating down a river to a caption that reads “Uncle Daddy’s home.” The piece distills into a single panel the near-psychotic level of horror and rage that has absolutely seethed from Simmons’s every work for the past several years. Though nothing else really comes close to that level of nihilistic uncomedy, there’s something almost as soul-damaging in Tim Root’s lushly colored, presumably drawn-from-life portrait of an old woman in line in front of him at a convenience store whose wig has become infested with ants. Austin English hands in a page darkened with pencil to the point of near illegibility, accompanied by an incongruously sunny “Hello!” Perhaps the single most indelible image in the whole collection is Levon Jihanian’s reappropriation of the little girl from The Family Circus, here rendered as a mercilessly crosshatched shadow-person with white voids for eyes and bearing the legend “There is only one road that does not lead to death; and that is the road to hell.” I know, this thing’s a laff riot!

Actually, I laughed at all of those cartoons. The rest? Oh, you know, it’s a mixed bag, as you’d expect from anything with that many contributors. Tom Neely and Anders Nilsen’s contributions are poetic in gorgeous in the respectively lush and minimal way that Neel and Nilsen cartoons are poetic and gorgeous generally, but none are really gag comics. Andrice Arp gets a few yuks out of incongruous scenes drawn from her dreams, Julia Gforer at the expense of Wolverine, Marc Bell by doing his usual warped children’s television aesthetic thing, Theo Ellsworth by actually writing actual jokes that dovetail with his hyperdetailed cartooning, Kaz Strzepek by cracking a couple of mildly off-color jokes about fantasy creatures of the sort you might find on a D&D website, Eamon Espey by creating a Boschian tableau of defecating, murdering demons captioned with the phrase “Time to make the donuts.” The rest I suppose I could take or leave. It’s an exercise, geared more to the participants than the audience.

Rambo 3.5

Jim Rugg, writer/artist

self-published, April 2010

32 pages

$2

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Read it for free via Jim Rugg’s blog

George W. Bush is a dimwit. There, I just saved you a couple of bucks. Ah, I’m being way too harsh, there–Jim Rugg is a true illustrative talent, and in this minicomic pastiche of the Rambo movies and satire of the Bush Administration and post-9/11 America generally he slips and slides between various alternative-comics styles, from slick and cartoony to editorial-page-y to an almost Frank Santoroish shot of John Rambo viewing Ground Zero, with vigor and ease. The problem is that it’s in service of not much at all, particularly when compared with the surprisingly fecund material in Rugg’s similarly minded mash-up of pop-cult-trash and politics, Afrodisiac. Bush is here presented in a way you’ve seen him a million times before, a moronic, sneering fratboy manchild-of-privilege who’s both bloodthirsty and personally cowardly, and it’s not really any funnier here than it was in all the altweekly political cartoons you remember. Similarly, the portrayal of Rambo is solidly aligned with the Reagan-jingoist interpretation that jibes most closely with the second and third installments of his series, and with the very basic Bush-bashing the comic’s interested in. The complicating weirdness of the first and fourth films–in which Rambo is a victim of American adventurism rather than an exponent of it (the former) and a spiritually crippled killing machine and avatar of Conradian horror (the latter)–is ignored altogether. The comic’s the poorer for this, since I think the country’s blind stumbling rage, which if anything seems worse now than it did then, makes a far more compelling subject for exploration than the easy-target “America, Fuck Yeah”itude found in the umpteenth hyuk-hyuk Bush joke. Here’s hoping Josh Simmons makes Rambo 4.5.

Kaspar

Diane Obamsawin, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, January 2009

96 pages

$12.95

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Again with the brown for the cover, but alright, fine, I’m clearly on the losing end of this aesthetic battle with D&Q and I accept that. What’s far more interesting here, and it’s a shame if the drab cover (not to mention the choice of grayscale for the interiors) obscure this, is the story of Kaspar itself. Or rather himself–Obomsawin here traces through contemporaneous accounts the life of one Kaspar Hauser, who for five years around 1830 intrigued and baffled European society with his amazing story of spending his first 16 years kept in total isolation with no human contact whatsoever before being taught some rudimentary language and handwriting by a mysterious man in black who then left him in Nuremberg to fend for himself. Kaspar’s story is one of a kind of cruelty my mind and soul virtually invert themselves to avoid having to deal with–I’m reminded of the story my wife told me from one of her psych courses, about a 19th-century experiment that used loud noises to condition a baby to be so afraid of bunnies that eventually he couldn’t even see a cotton ball without screaming. There’s something so unspeakably awful about human beings harming the human beinghood of a child right from the start that when I came across lines from Kaspar like “There is straw on the ground where I sit and sleep–it never occurs to me to want to stand up,” or the idea that he doesn’t know there even is anything else but himself, the bread and water he’s brought while sleeping, and the toy horse he’s locked up with, part of me just wants to run and hide. The trick of the book upon Hauser’s Chauncey Gardiner-like entrance into high society is using his literal inability to fathom the cruelty done to him (how can he–until now he had no context for what he was missing) and his appreciation for simple things like the color red or the concept of distance as a proxy for our own rejection of such monstrousness and a way to awaken our own lust for life respectively.

Of course, a visit to Wikipedia reveals that Hauser was almost certainly a peerless goldbricker, something his various patrons almost all cottoned to eventually, and from which the mysterious accidents and “assaults” that repeatedly befell and eventually killed him were likely self-inflicted to distract. Obomsawin’s choices to tell the story from Kaspar’s first-person perspective and to draw it in a simplistic, childlike, unadorned fashion we naturally scan as a direct outgrowth of Kaspar’s naivete–not to mention her one-page direct-address strip at the end, detailing her research for us, her “dear readers”–are a conscious effort to put aside the controversy and tease metaphorical meaning out of a story that’s too good to check. But if you’re like me, your mind already scrambled its way to “oh, this has gotta be a hoax, he must have been putting them on” long before you closed the book and opened up Google, and so the whole time you’re reading you’re wondering not just what Kaspar’s suffering, his reaction to society, and society’s reaction to him say to us–you’re wondering what the fact that someone could fake all that stuff says to us as well. I’m still wondering. In a way, the need in someone who’d do that is every bit as deep and devastating as the need in someone who was like that for real.

Fallen Angel

Nicolas Robel, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, July 2006

80 pages

$9.95

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Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before, but I don’t get dreary brown book covers like this one–especially this one, given that the art inside is done in comparatively cheery hues of red and green as well as brown. This time around, however, the content is just as baffling to me as the package. Robel tells a fairy-tale-like story about a little man named Barnabe who lives in a Central Park-type oasis in the big city but is haunted by nightmares in which he becomes a giant and can’t help but leave a trail of destruction wherever he goes. One day an actual giant appears and magically conjures up three giant beautiful women, with whom Barnabe falls in love. When two of them spurn his advances, he either tries and fails to commit suicide Groundhog Day-style or just contemplates it, I’m not exactly sure. But then the third woman feels fond of him after all and starts looking for him, but by then it’s too late–he’s built Icarus-style wings for himself and taken a header off a cliff. Once he lands he snuggles with the woman, and there’s some narration about how he hadn’t noticed that his isolated life had changed, and then he lives in the city all of a sudden. Robel is using the dream logic of fairy-tale storytelling, obviously, but the symbols and rhythms and analogues make little sense either on their own terms or in terms of extrapolating them to a real-world moral, especially given the frequent disconnect between the narration and the events of the story. (I suppose it could be thinly veiled autobio, but in that case it never transcends the personal.) Robel has a memorably jagged take on the cute, round-headed little characters that populate many alternative comics of this sort, one that’s clearly of a piece with his hand-lettering, but it’s not so attractive or unusual that it overcomes the book’s other shortcomings by, say, creating cohesive and inviting environments, or even simply being really pretty to look at. Shrug.

Nicolas

Pascal Girard, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, December 2008

64 pages

$9.95

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Let’s get two visual elements out of the way: 1) This is one of D&Q’s many, many little brown books, and I don’t understand the attraction to that ugly color; it makes books look like galleys to me. 2) Pascal Girard’s loose, messy minimalism is so close to Jeffrey Brown’s in appearance and effect, particularly in terms of character design, that this is practically a J.B. tribute album; not at all surprising to see Brown show up in the thank-yous. That said? Oof, this is a little gut-punch of a book. It’s a very minimal memoir dealing with the death of writer/artist Pascal Girard’s little brother Nicolas when both brothers were little boys, and how that loss has affected Girard’s life ever since. Starting it off with a three page section called “BEFORE” featuring the two boys playing Ghostbusters together, then abruptly transitioning to “AFTER” with a shot of Pascal sitting there alone is just one example of how pointed and to-the-point this book gets. I’m particularly struck by the decision (a very un-Brownian decision at that) to eschew panel borders and backgrounds entirely and rarely if ever telegraph temporal or spatial transitions. Each page contains two images, almost more doodled than drawn, floating atop the white paper, like the sudden flash of isolated, painful childhood memories to the surface of your otherwise formless and featureless sea of memory. Some sequences are almost too difficult to bear–Pascal clutching his pillow with increasing intensity, his eyes welling with black tears like stormclouds, as his parents finally tell him the story of Nicolas’s final hours; the final flashback, ending with an almost manic number of HA HA HA HA HAs as the two brothers, oblivious as to what is to come, laugh together. Somehow that laughter is an indication of a pain that will never go away.

Snake Oil #5: Wolf

Chuck Forsman, writer/artist

self-published, 2009

20 pages

$4

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I think there’s something on the verge of being really, really good here. Forsman’s wispy, hesitant line and Segar and Gray by way of Chester Brown and Sammy Harkham character designs can at times feel a bit unmoored against his backgroundless panels–I never quite buy their physicality. But it’s a lovely style, one that makes his characters instantly sympathetic, particularly the hefty, good-natured title character with his wilted mohawk and Sears uniform, but also even the abrasive, adenoidal types with whom he interacts. And that in turn is key to making the umpteenth “’80s ennui among the Great American Nowhere’s lower middle class” comic you’ve read feel, if not fresh, then at least deeply felt rather than a report from a rear-view mirror. Several of the moments Forsman selects to highlight in this day in the life are really astutely observed and wincingly sad, recognizable to anyone who’s overstayed their welcome in suburbia with shit jobs, fast food, small-hours onanism, and well-meaning reprimands from the family with whom he’s saddled himself. (Take that either way you want.) The ending in particular killed me, and I could return to the page where Wolf eats a burger and fries by himself over and over. Forsman clearly has enough control over line, pacing, and story that this is the sort of comic you read as much for the promise of future ones as for this one itself. I look forward to that future.

Set to Sea

Drew Weing, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, August 2010

144 pages, hardcover

$16.99

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It’s an odd little notion, the idea that you’ve lived a better, fuller life for having killed people. That’s probably a somewhat unfair aspect of Drew Weing’s good-natured, lushly drawn storybook (that’s the term the comic practically demands I use) Set to Sea–a tale of a big lummox of a poet whose lackluster verses about life on the open sea are given new verve when he’s shanghai’d into service on an actual ship–for me to seize on. After all, Weing’s bigfooted style and inviting rather than intimidating illustrative chops place him squarely in the adventure-comics tradition of Carl Barks and Jeff Smith. Why be churlish and begrudge its central character’s baptism by fire? Well, because it really is the central, transformative moment in his story. Before the pirate raid that he ends up beating back pretty much singlehandedly by slaughtering dozens of buccaneers and beating their captain to death in a rage, he’s miserable aboard his new home–complaining about the work and the rations, literally tossing his notebook full of unfinished poems into the ocean. Afterwards, he’s accepted by his shipmates, elected third mate, introduced to a world of beauty and adventure around the globe, and filled with enough genuine insight into the sailor’s life to become a hugely popular poet back on the mainland. At first I was impressed by how wordlessly nasty that central fight got, how Weing was unwilling to neuter the violence of this world. But by the time we get to the end of the book, with the now-respected poet/sailor, bearded and eyepatched, reclining by the fire of the pub from which he was once forcibly ejected, thinking back on a life well lived…well, this isn’t like Bilbo Baggins, forever trying to recapture his combat high, or Frodo Baggins, forever damaged by the horrors he witnessed and endured. It’s a dude kicking back saying “Yeah, it was all worth it.” I wish Weing had examined that assumption a little more closely.

Second Thoughts

Niklas Asker, writer/artist

Top Shelf, March 2009

80 pages

$9.95

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A sexily drawn story of how hard it is for sexy young people with glamorous careers in the arts to really connect with one another? Sure, I’ll eat it, though I’d understand if you’d prefer to pass. Second Thoughts isn’t exactly the sort of tear-down-the-sky take on this well-trodden slice-of-life litcomix subgenre that might cause you to reevaluate it if you’d grown tired of it in the past. What it is is an extremely well-executed example of it, with a surprising degree narrative complexity, subtle enough to be imperceptible to me until I read the back-cover copy after finishing my first read.

In retrospect, Asker tips his hand by first introducing Jess, one of the book’s two main characters, this one a writer struggling with a project and making a long-distance call to a touring musician girlfriend who’s clearly cheating on her. Jess then meets cute at the airport with John, a music photographer on the outs with his touring musician girlfriend and on his way out of town for good who not-so-surreptitiously snaps a photo of Jess as she waits for her girlfriend to return. Jess’s girlfriend texts to say she missed her flight in, John’s flight out gets cancelled, and the two go their separate ways, not meeting again until they both end up in bed together–but neither in the way you’re thinking now, nor in the way I thought when I first read that scene. Along the way a few of the character names change from one thing to another, and that’s all I’ll say about that.

Second Thoughts‘s primary selling point is Asker’s luxurious, inky art. He’s working in a style that will be familiar to fans of Paul Pope or Farel Dalrymple, but ratcheted down in a realist direction, evoking, say, some of Craig Thompson’s Blutch-ier stuff. Everything’s dark and shiny, the characters are all attractive in the sort of way that leaves you idly daydreaming about what it’d be like to make out with them…the book feels like the sort of thing meant to be read at night in an apartment in the city with cigarettes and a glass of wine–the sort of thing meant to be read by the characters involved, in other words. Which ends up being really fitting, because the whole idea is the way the mysterious glamour of attractive strangers enables us to conjure up whole lives for them in a way that is really more a commentary on our own lives than on theirs. It’s a nice place to visit.

Artichoke Tales

Megan Kelso, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2010

232 pages, hardcover

$22.99

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Over a decade in the making, and it shows. This is far and away the best comic I’ve ever read from Megan Kelso, succeeding on almost every level. Her clear-line style gives an airy ease to her often detail-heavy drawings of nature and the people who inhabit it; similarly, her complex exercise in fantasy worldbuilding–and I don’t mean detailed maps with funny names, I mean real worldbuilding, constructing cultural and religious and economic structures rooted in environment and history and exerting macro and micro influence across the lives of all the characters involved–is subsumed into an absorbing, briskly moving house-divided family soap opera. So many elements in her tale of a land divided between its agricultural South and industrial North jumped out and demanded to be contemplated and enjoyed: Those appealing artichoke-head character designs. The Queen who fails her people in disastrously bloody fashion despite the good intentions of an entire system dedicated to her success. The way Kelso tells a byzantine multigenerational tale replete with flashbacks and jumps back and forth in time and space and the age of the characters involved while hardly ever telegraphing any of it, creating the impression of a tapestry of inescapable memory and history always influencing the present. The thoughtful, almost cerebral treatment of attraction, sex, and marriage. Heck, even the de rigeur fantasy trope of placing the actions of singular actors at the pivot points of world history is made to feel here less like the denial of the huge impersonal forces that drive human events more often than not than as some a logical, representative outgrowth of them. And man, that clear line is just sick. I dug this book to a degree that surprised me and look forward to returning to it. It’s a rich vein of alt-fantasy being tapped here.

The Man with the Getaway Face

Darwyn Cooke, writer/artist

based on the novel by Richard Stark

IDW, April 2010

24 pages

$2

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I never read The Hunter, the first in cartoonist Darwyn Cooke’s series of adaptations of Richard Stark/Donald Westlake’s Parker novels. As I’ve said before, on an aesthetic level I’m just not buying the ring-a-ding-ding Rat Pack nostalgia he’s selling. Moreover, to me the appeal of pulp has always been its deliberate economical unloveliness, so it’s weird to me to read a comic about a brutal killer lifted from the world of dimestore paperbacks that looks like a demo reel from a topflight animation shop. But I do recognize both the appeal of the source material and the pure chops of the adapter, and at just 24 pages and two bucks, The Man with the Getaway Face–an apparently short and sweet adaptation of the novel of the same and a prologue/teaser for the next full-fledged Parker graphic novel, The Outfit, and name–seemed worth a shot.

The result’s pretty much what I expected. It’s easy as pie to get drawn into a heist story, even one as knowingly prosaic as what Stark was up to here: Parker takes a job robbing an armored car during its guards’ regular stop at a roadside diner even though the money is barely worth the effort and despite knowing for a fact that one of his three coconspirators plans to steal his share, simply because he badly needs the cash following reconstructive surgery to hide his identity from the mob. Once the players and the plight are established, you race through Cooke’s panel-crammed pages (the lack of borders helps a bit in that regard, but they’re still pretty cramped given how much space-filling brushwork is going on inside each of them) to see how the scheme unfolds. And there’s certainly something enticingly Conan-like about Parker, a guy who feels no compunction about stealing if he needs money and killing whoever crosses him, but is just sort of steely about it rather than bloodthirsty.

That said, I really don’t get the appeal of populating a story like that with animation archetypes straight out of central casting, from the zaftig, flirty diner waitress to her tiny, balding, pencil-mustachioed patsy. The surgery subplot means that the Parker we see here is a complete redesign of a character Cooke already spent a graphic novel chronicling; an impressive feat with a strong payoff, but I wish the other characters shared his no-nonsense design. And it’s not as though that look and feel bring a ton to the action table, either. Not that there’s much action to speak of (just some guards getting coldcocked and a car crash), but from the angles to the choreography it feels like the goal is to make you say “ooh!” not “ouch,” let alone “Jesus Christ.” And that’s what I wanted, instead of it all being so…oh my god, am I really about to say this?…cartoony. I want pulp to be pulpy, you know? I don’t want it to look like Don Draper channeling Bruce Timm.

Al Burian Goes to Hell

Al Burian, writer/artist

Migraine, July 2010

80 pages

price unknown

Out of stock at Microcosm Distribution

Confession time: I threw this book away. More specifically I left it on the “free table” at my day job. Some stuff that doesn’t appeal to me at first glance gets kept around anyway just in case, like if there’s clearly a fully formed aesthetic at work that simply happens not to be my cup of tea; crude-looking zine-y stuff usually doesn’t stick around at all. But a few hours after putting this on the giveaway pile, an older, cooler coworker of mine pressed it back into my hands, saying he’d just read it in one sitting and was totally blown away by just how deep into his own darkness Burian was willing to go. Alrighty then–what have we here?

Well, I can see how my coworker, who I’m guessing hasn’t read a small-press comic since the ’70s, would be impressed. Years of immersion in the medium and exposure to an untold number of autobiographical alternative comics can dull you to the impact a book about nothing but the author’s depression and self-loathing could have on the unsuspecting. Burian uses a very, very loose pastiche of Dante’s Inferno to show himself spiraling into emotional paralysis over the course of a day spent at work, in art school, getting thrown out of a supermarket for grazing at the bulk bins, talking about life and literary theory with friends/faculty/presidential assassins, and so on; what he’s particularly good at is demonstrating how self-awareness–of the run-of-the-mill nature of his problems, of how turning them into art doesn’t necessarily validate either problems or art, of how he’s relatively fortunate in the grand scheme of things–makes the depression of the sort suffered by white male American middle-class artsy-fartsy types feel even worse, not better. Not only are you depressed, you’re lame, which is even more depressing!

But this is probably all stuff you were already aware of. However sympathetic you might feel about Burian’s plight, the art is still rudimentary–his avatar is a simplistic Easter Island-browed cartoon usually shown in profile, backgrounds are minimal to nonexistent, his line is just sort of a thick inert presence on the page. The storytelling, too, is pretty lackadaisical, basically just enough of a Dante swipe to avoid having to come up with a throughline of its own. I’m not the sort of person who waxes outraged over navel-gazing to make myself feel like more of a he-man autobio-haters club member, but bellybuttons ahoy. I’m also noticing that the bright pink cover is smearing itself all over the exterior of my laptop when the two are placed together in my backpack. It’s crudely done, is what I’m saying. It did leave me wondering what grade Burian got on it–it’s his college thesis–but it mostly left me wanting to give him an issue of King-Cat and say “Give it another shot”…

…which apparently is just what Burian did. Google reveals that by now he’s longtime punkrock and zinescene staple, living the expatriate life in Berlin. Indeed, according to this post on his blog, he never intended for this work–done some seventeen years ago, when he was 22–to be published, and a former colleague did so without authorization. I guess he got out of Hell, but Hell followed with him. A strange little saga.

The Airy Tales

Olga Volozova, writer/artist

Sparplug, 2008

128 pages

$15

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Like some of the other Sparkplug titles I’ve sampled–Inkweed comes to mind–The Airy Tales, Olga Volozova’s collection of original short fairy tales and fables, is a tough sell at first glance. And as I’ve often said, first glance is precisely where I buy or pass. There are too many comics and too few hours in the day to force myself to plow through a book I don’t find appealing on an art-surface level. Every once in a while an imprint will come along whose guiding aesthetic, and this is nobody’s fault, simply has little Venn-diagram overlap with mine. First Second is one; Sparkplug seems at times to be another. But then for whatever reason–usually because I’m up against a self-imposed deadline and the book looks short enough to read on the train– I’ll say “What the hell,” take it off the shelf, give it a read, and exit gladder for having done so.

Such is the case with The Airy Tales. Like Inkweed, its visuals aren’t really too my taste. Volozova’s shaky line and mixed media elements come across a little bit Stieg, a little bit Salazar, and a lot alien from where I’m at. The painted colors read craft-y rather than considered, the character designs are too wishy-washy to stand out the way the great illustrated children’s-book characters do, and the placement of captions in particular is a detriment to readability. It’s clear Volozova’s intent is to combine the sequential storytelling of comics with the static image-and-text approach of a child’s storybook, but her solution–placing the text in little boxes surrounding the central image that are sometimes read from top to bottom and sometimes read from left to right–is confusing even to someone who got his altcomix start with Acme Novelty Library.

This leaves the writing to do most of the work–and it works. I really have to hand it to Volozova for capturing the ineffable quality of fairy tales before Disney simplified them into plucky can-do adventures. The recurring images bear the mark of springing unbidden and unexplained from her underbrain, whether it’s giant celestial birds using tiny threads thousands of miles long to guide each individual human around the Earth or a man made of rain who uses his godlike powers of growth to make the lives of the people who come to him for help just slightly better than before. Most of the time you get the sense that there’s some moral to the story, but it’s a, well, weird moral, a moral based on the moral-ity of an age or society lost to us. Like, there’s this one extended fable about a group of people who each live on a different leaf of a tree that sheds those leaves every day, only for them to drift back onto the tree each night. All the residents have full lives except this one guy whose sole possession is a bright yellow sweater; since his leaf isn’t burdened with family members or fun stuff, he ends up higher on the trunk every day, and his neighbors get jealous. Finally he catches on and deliberately builds a contraption to lower himself down to their level, and they’re all finally happy, and you think it’s a crabs-in-the-pot-type parable about how livin’ free means living outside society, or whatever. But then the story ends by telling us only the yellow-sweater man knew that in fact the leaves were never gonna re-attach to the tree again, because of the impending snowfall–and then the snowfall comes and each snowflake contains a little kid or animal cub. And that’s it! That’s the end. As Zak Smith recently said, the wonderful thing about Wonderland is that it makes you wonder; The Airy Tales certainly left me scratching my head. It’s alien from me in both the bad way and the good way.

Curio Cabinet

John Brodowski, writer/artist

Secret Acres, April 2010

144 pages

$15

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I’ve been writing about the similarity between the horrific and the sublime for (God help me) over a decade now, but its rare for me to come across a comic that makes that connection as frequently and as subtly as John Brodowski’s Curio Cabinet. While reading it I located squarely in the increasingly rich contemporary alt-horror tradition–the deformed figures and soft pencils of Renee French, the heavy-metal/D&D imagery of Lane Milburn, the mostly wordless narratives of (to my delight!) almost too many talented horror cartoonists to list. And yes, there’s even the de rigeur cat-torturing scene. But only in flipping through the book in preparation to write this review did I realize just how many of Brodowski’s short, creepy stories end with their alternately hapless or horrifying protagonists gazing into a vista of vast natural or even cosmic splendor. Two separate characters who have very different nature-based obsessions both end up immersed in the great outdoors, staring off into the distance–as does a lake monster after unleashing its full destructive power on a battlefield. Two other characters–one the victim of a monster-induced car wreck, the other none other than Jason Voorhees–become a part of titanic outer-space tableaux: Jason is cradled by his mother Pieta-style in the sky, the accident victim welcomed into the embrace of a colossal dog-god. Several stand-alone images, most memorably a series of illustrations from the old anti-Semitic myth cycle of the Wandering Jew, take on a similarly ecstatic, transcendental feel. The message is both troubling and comforting: It implies a connection between the individual horrors we experience and the very fabric of existence, yet it also suggests that perhaps an enlightenment is possible whereby this waking nightmare can be appreciated, if never fully understood. More like this, please.

A God Somewhere

John Arcudi, writer

Peter Snejbjerg, artist

DC/WildStorm, June 2010

200 pages

$24.99

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As the co-writer and by all accounts driving creative force behind the Hellboy spinoff series B.P.R.D., John Arcudi is responsible for what amounts to the best ongoing superhero series on the stands. A God Somewhere is not on that level. Which, as was the case with Wednesday’s review, is perfectly fine–few things are. Moreover, much of what makes B.P.R.D. so effective is tied into just how long it’s been going on. We’ve had years and years to get acquainted with and grow attached to its characters and the neuroses they bring to their long, losing war with the paranormal–to say nothing of the ever more baroque mythology of that war itself. By contrast, A God Somewhere has to get us to care about its central quartet of characters–brothers Hugh and Eric, their best friend Sam, and Hugh’s wife Alma on whom Sam has long harbored a more-than-crush–and their paranormal plight–Eric mysteriously gains powers that make him the world’s only superhuman, but which very rapidly drive him Doctor Manhattan-style crazy in such a way as to make him the world’s only supervillain–in the space of the equivalent of four issues.

It does this mostly through shorthand. Racial and religious issues are presented in the didactic style of a Law & Order episode (or, well, a superhero comic). Plot drivers are cribbed liberally from universal superhero touchstones like Watchmen or the Incredible Hulk TV show. The creators operate under the assumption that the audience is already familiar enough with once-innovative ideas for the subgenre–Superman as Christ figure; superpowers would “really” drive a normal person into bloodthirsty madness–to take them as read. In short, it can feel rushed, even clumsy–words you’d never associate with the laconic, precision-calibrated existential action-horror-black-comedy of B.P.R.D.

But the same intelligence and willigness to discomfit that Arcudi brings to that title shows up here, even if it’s forced to fight against the constraints of the shorter format. Flashbacks that enrich our understanding of the characters and their complex quadrangle start and stop with almost Jaime Hernandez-like suddenness, with only a change in panel-border color to differentiate them from the main action, which boasts equally fanfare-free jumps forward through time. The violence is in the over-the-top True Blood-level splatter mode of similar work in Powers and Invincible, but contains enough disturbing detail, largely through the familiar sub/urban setting of some of the worst bloodbaths, to lodge in the brain and curdle in the gut. There’s at least one plot twist so unexpected and awful I didn’t even understand what I was looking at until it was made clear a couple pages later. The degree to which Arcudi is willing to leave what’s going on inside Eric’s head a mystery, allowing him to speak only in transparently faux-profundities like what Sam calls “a crazy, mass-murdering Buddha,” is refreshing and a bit haunting. Peter Snejbjerg’s warm, round character designs–his stuff here reminds me a lot of Richard Corben’s Hulk comic Banner, and not simply because of the shared subject matter–are undermined a bit by uncharacteristically bland, brown-town coloring by Bjarne Hansen, but these are still people it’s pleasant to look at even when what’s going on is super-unpleasant. Is it the landmark that the effusive blurbs from Mike Mignola and Denny O’Neil make it out to be? No, but I would argue that that’s not the intention, either. It feels to me more like an exercise: a bunch of ideas about character and concept that Arcudi wanted to try out. Even if it’s not entirely successful, that exercise was a worthwhile one.

Fandancer

Geoff Grogan, writer/artist

self-published, August 2010

36 big-ass pages

$20

Buy it from Geoff Grogan

This isn’t quite the knockout blow that was writer/artist Geoff Grogan’s last full-length mixed-media comic, Look Out!! Monsters. And believe me, that’s totally fine–without that out-of-nowhere book’s shock-of-the-new impact, its follow-up, Fandancer, was never gonna hit that hard. But from that stunning cover, perhaps my favorite of the year, on down, it’s definitely a hit. A sort of feminine yin to LO!!M‘s Frankenstein-by-way-of-Jack-Kirby masculine yang, Fandancer (loosely) tells the story of a superheroine we join mid-plummet from an exploding plane, harried by her Bizarro-style nemesis until she hits the water below. Then we appear to be transported backwards, first to the womb and then to some dawn-of-time confrontation between a nude woman and a male interloper who reveals himself as a goat-headed devil before stealing the suddenly very pregnant woman’s embryo/glowing-life-force-thing, eating it, and then restoring her to life as an afterthought. Then (I think) the superheroine whose (I think) origin story we’ve just seen comes to in the water, and through a series of collages involving vintage comic and advertising art, outer-space vistas, and hysterical dialogue cribbed alternately from romance and superhero comics, we trace (I think) her journey into the underworld lair of her male bedeviler, whom she subsequently defeats in cartooned combat. The book ends with a close-up of her face, the life-force back in her possession.

Or maybe not, I don’t know. The story, to the extent that there is one–and in the cut-up/collage section, who the hell really knows–isn’t important. What is important is the dazzling art from Grogan, in a variety of styles: primary-color Kirby pastiche, loose and gorgeous red-and-gold-and-blue crayon, the startlingly effective reappropriated collage material which appears to be tweaking all the usual suspects in that arena, from Lichtenstein to Spiegelman to Glamourpuss-era Sim. No matter the style, man oh man does all of it work hella well on the oversized pages Grogan’s working with here, with really stellar paper stock production values to boot–each flip of the page is an eye-popping pleasure. And as in Look Out!! Monsters, what emerges most clearly from the deliberately elliptical and allusive storytelling is a sense of struggle, of great inner beauty under traumatic assault from great inner ugliness. (Don’t get it twisted, there’s some funny stuff in here, too–I’m pretty sure one collage page is actually a sex scene, and figuring that out made me laugh out loud.) My sincerest hope is that Grogan keeps putting out a book like this every couple years, Ignatz Series-style. (The format’s very similar, if that helps you picture what’s going on here.) I’ll be back for all of ’em.