Batman: Knightfall Part One: Broken Bat

Chuck Dixon, Doug Moench, writers

Jim Aparo, Jim Balent, Norm Breyfogle, Graham Nolan, artists

DC, 1993

272 pages

$17.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Savage Critic(s).

Bonus ? Comics

Kevin Huizenga, writer/artist

USS Catastrophe, 2009

4 pages

free with a copy of Rumbling Chapter Two, as far as I can gather

Buy it from the Catastrophe Shop

SPOILER ALERT

This thing’s cute: Two guys (previously seen at the end of Or Else #5, having a conversation told in illegible scrawls of differing lengths) sit across from each other, pondering a big question–or at least a big question mark, which hovers in between them. The man on the left pulls it down onto the table, cuts it into tiny pieces that are the shape of miniature question marks, tries to answer each constituent part with the help of some books, until finally all the little question marks snap right back into the big question mark. The guy on the right just grabs the little dot from the bottom of the question mark and shoves it into the hole formed by the circular part of the question mark. This apparently answers the question, which disappears. The guy on the right smokes a cigarette in celebration. “End.” The formal stuff is fun, the punchline panel made me chuckle, and I think maybe there’s even a lesson to be learned about not making simple problems more complex by way of trying to solve them. I think in an ideal world all our great cartoonists would knock out little unimpeachable one-sheeters like this all the time during their morning coffee.

Rumbling Chapter Two

Kevin Huizenga, writer/artist

USS Catastrophe, 2009

36 pages

$3

Buy it from the Catastrophe Shop

What impressed me most about Rumbling, Kevin Huizenga’s adaptation of a dystopian/post-apocalyptic short story by Italian writer Giorgio Manganelli, is how effectively it conveys that whole Handmaid’s Tale/The Road things-fall-apart vibe while still residing squarely in Huizenga’s wheelhouse of formal play and finely observed transcendence-through-the-mundane detail. So you get a very effective vignette in which this alternate-future Glenn Ganges, an irreligious foreigner stranded in a country torn apart by a religious civil war, overhears a mother tell her kid it’s impolite to stare at Glenn, that the reason he wasn’t praying when the bells rang is because God doesn’t talk to him like He does to us; or, following that, a sequence where Glenn is picked up by a local to be driven to his boss the ambassador’s safehouse in the country and starts wondering if the man is going to do him harm, but then is slowly lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the passing countryside. Excellent dystopian stuff in both cases, but moreover, they both end up showcasing Huizenga’s preexisting strengths: I loved how the little boy’s confused/fascinated torrent of thoughts upon being introduced to the idea of an irreligious man were conveyed by an explosion of thought balloons cut off by the panel borders, and how Glenn’s long ride into the country was depicted by two panels featuring the pick-up truck’s sideview mirror jutting into the passing scenery, reflecting Glenn’s weary and then sleeping face. Meanwhile the wide array of warring factions gives Huizenga ample opportunity to design more of the kinds of symbols and logos that seem to burst out of his comics like automatic writing, and there’s a funny recurring bit that takes a Chris Ware-style enlargement of key words in a narrative caption to splash-page extremes. In other words it’s a comic that succeeds on a lot of levels all at once.

I actually think this material comes across better in the story’s current delivery mode, a standalone self-published minicomic, than it did in Or Else #5, the final issue of Huizenga’s Drawn & Quarterly one-man anthology, in which Rumbling‘s first chapter appeared. There it was surrounded by short pieces that were in some cases related enough to the main story to feel like a full-fledged part of it but in other cases really had nothing to do with it; the lingering feeling that all this stuff was connected served to mute the first chapter’s impact and hinder its momentum. In Rumbling Chapter Two, Rumbling‘s all you get, and the comic’s the better for it.

Cockbone

Josh Simmons, writer/artist

self-published, 2009

26 pages

Buy it in Sleazy Slice #3 for $8 from Robin Bougie

There’s just no way to properly talk about this book without explicitly describing some of the things that happen in it so take that as a spoiler alert please

You know how in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, we get introduced to Joe Pesci’s character with that whole hilarious “What do you mean I’m funny?” exchange, but in Casino, we get introduced to Joe Pesci’s character with him stabbing some guy repeatedly in the neck with a pen and then mocking him as he lies on the ground whimpering? You know how that difference kind of gets across the overall variation in tone between the two films? Josh Simmons’s In the Land of Magic has a bright yellow cover and starts with a fantasy parody sequence. Cockbone has a crumpled, grease-stained brown paper bag for a cover and stars like this.

“You pansy little bitch.”

“Kill the dog.”

“Kill the dog, faggot.”

Then–spoiler alert–the faggot kills the dog.

It’s safe to say that this comic contains the most extreme material I’ve ever actually come across in a comic. Imagine if the rape-murder sequence in Poison River were the length of an entire story and depicted with all the graphicness of Phoebe Gloeckner’s diagrammatic blowjob illustrations (where do you think the title comes from?), but with none of the clean, cool reserve of either. Even the blood splatter is angular and angry.

Cockbone is a non-stop litany of incest, animal cruelty, genital mutilation, murder, saturation bombing, homophobia, racism, and sexual depravity designed to make you as uncomfortable as possible, over and over again. The second you get over seeing a howling dog getting shot repeatedly until its ribcage explodes outward in jagged shards, you’ve got the main character’s brothers and mother repeatedly sucking him off to extract his hallucinogenic semen. Get a handle on the sight of a man’s wart-covered penis splitting apart and revealing a fishbone-like spine, and you’ve immediately got to deal with three guys peeling each other’s skin off as the beat each other to death, and then jetplanes bombing a city with little stick-figure people literally exploding from the heat. There’s just no respite, ever. And in the comic’s most memorable, haunting effect, it doesn’t so much end as give up–rather than actually showing what happens in the last two panels, Simmons superimposes simple caption boxes over the visuals that sum up their hidden contents in one or two words, as though the main character, Simmons, the world couldn’t bear to endure the real thing.

Simmons looks into the heart of humanity and what he sees comes wrapped in a grease-stained brown paper bag.

In a Land of Magic

Josh Simmons, writer/artist

self-published, 2009

20 pages

Read it at grandpapier.org

Visit Josh Simmons’s website

In my experience most cartoonists trafficking in this kind of material (most filmmakers and writers too) can’t help but convey that as awful as it is, it’s also kinda hilarious. The gore, violence, sexual brutality, humiliation, torture, animal cruelty–there could be some kind of serious point being made somewhere in there, but just as importantly, that shit is kinda cool! It’s fun to scare the straights, it’s a hoot to “go there.” And indeed there are elements in Simmons’s fantasy-world minicomic In the Land of Magic that could, at first glance, make you think that’s what he’s doing as well. His characters have always been on the cartoony, comical side, and when you’re drawing stereotypical elf-folk and wizards straight out of Patton Oswalt’s RPGer parody character on Reno 911, it’s not like they’re going to get less silly. Silliness is in fact the point when it comes to their Stan Lee’s Thor faux-olde fashioned dialogue (“Lothar–What fore dost thou lookest at, my love?”). And when the elf couple Lothar and Hester journey beyond the borders of their magic land to start exploring the Dark Forest beyond, there’s a page consisting almost solely visual double entendres that make it look like they’re 69ing or fisting each other. It’s funny!

SPOILER ALERT

Then Lothar does battle with Arachnad the Terrible, a battle that ends with Lothar saying the following to his fallen foe:

Poor little baby…Baby done got a broken neck, isn’t he? Can’t move, can you? Awww….poor little guy JESUS CHRIST I HAVE THE BIGGEST FUCKING HARD-ON!!

From there, Lothar strips naked, cuts a hole through the underside of Arachnad’s chin, bashes out Arachnad’s teeth, and fucks the wound so that the head of his penis repeatedly thrusts out through Arachnad’s gaping mouth until he ejaculates.

Yeah.

You know, even then, you could probably think that maybe this is all an exercise in seeing just how far we can go with this sort of thing. But I think the end of the book tells the tale, when Lothar forces the horrified Hester to hold his hands and endure his lovey-dovey blandishments, insisting that she have sex with him even as his once-again hardening cock drips Arachnad’s blood. “I-I’ve never seen you like this before,” she stammers before he forces her out of the hiding place she’d retreated to. I think that’s what Simmons’s work is about: terror that this is inside him, and an inability to do anything about it other than put it on display.

What makes Simmons’s brand of taboo-shattering impossible to write off, or shake off, is that behind the transgression there’s no smile. No smile at all.

Batman Year 100

Paul Pope, writer/artist

DC Comics, 2007

230 pages

$19.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

Originally written on April 8, 2007 for publication in The Comics Journal

Over the past decade, the most innovative and entertaining examples of action cinema have gone in one of two directions. Some have used a stylized combination of wire work and digital tomfoolery to make it all look easy–wuxia movies, The Matrix (wuxia gone Western), 300 (wuxia‘s Western equivalent), Kill Bill Volume One. Others have gone for a lived-in, beat-down, de-glamorized vibe that makes it look damn hard–Casino Royale, the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings, Kill Bill Volume Two.

Given Paul Pope’s futurist bent and Japanese influences, you might think his epic science-fiction alternate-future Bat-book would head in the former direction. Not so! From the thrilling opening sequence of Batman Year 100 onward, Pope makes it clear that he’s going to make his hero seem super by making everything he does seem as down-to-earth, and difficult, as possible. Frank Miller’s interior-monologue litanies of broken ribs and paralyzed nerve clusters notwithstanding, there’s never been a better depiction of the extremely physical nature of dressing up like a bat, running around city rooftops and picking fights with people. And in the hands of an action choreographer and stylist like Pope, that alone makes for a hell of a comic.

Pope’s obsession with the man half of the Batman–evident even in the antiquated, hyphenated way he frequently spells “the Bat-Man of Gotham”‘s moniker itself–was apparently a preeminent concern of the writer/artist’s from the get-go. The book’s copious extra features include an initial sketch sent to editor Bob Schreck, accompanied by a laundry list of handwritten questions pertaining not to where the character keeps his kryptonite ring or whether he and Catwoman are still an item, but his height, his build, what material his mask is made of, whether he can wear “square trunks like an Olympic swimmer” and which joints his costume might gather at. In notes written for the collection, Pope explains his fixation:

“My preference is to work on stories where I am free to completely design a fictional world–literally from the ground up. Take Batman’s boots for example. This guy would need a good, sturdy pair of boots…It’s long been a pet peeve of mine when you come across comic book artists who insist on drawing generic, featureless boot-like shapes beneath the ankles of their superheroes, as if boots were just vague, foot-shaped stumps molded out of colorful plastic blobs, resembling something you’d get out of a toy box at a dentist’s office…”

There’s a lot more where that came from–and that’s just the costume design. Perhaps that’s to be expected from Pope, who as an artist has frequently dallied in the world of fashion and is attuned to the dovetailing of form and function, style and substance with any well-dressed individual, superheroes included. But the “concealed human vulnerability” conveyed in his clunky clodhoppers and wrinkly elbows is concealed no longer the second Pope puts him through his action-adventure paces. The book opens with Batman being doggedly pursued by, well, dogs, across the familiar rooftop landscape of Gotham’s vigilante clique. This Batman doesn’t just toss a few Batarangs, launch a grappling hook and swing away to brood atop a gargoyle another day. When he jumps a 25-foot gap between roofs, trailing blood from a wound in his side, he actually has to pause to catch his breath and give his aching bones and muscles a chance to recuperate. (And to smirk at his frustrated canine pursuers, admittedly.) When he hides from a SWAT team in a child’s apartment, it’s with a sense of genuine peril should the kid rat him out–in his weakened state, he’d clearly get his ass handed to him. And when he finally turns the tables on the federal goons by attacking them in a stairwell, it’s clear he’s relying far more on the element of surprise and pure costumed bluster than on flawless martial artistry. This Batman could lose, and that’s what makes his adventures so much fun to follow.

The choice even makes thematic sense. The semi-dystopian setting of Year 100 is one of Pope’s now-trademark libertarian nightmare scenarios, a world where surveillance cameras are surgically grafted into the eyeballs of police dogs and the fact that Batman wears a mask and therefore can’t be identified presents a far more visceral threat to his governmental enemies than the fact that he’s suspected of murdering a federal agent. In the same way that Orwell’s free-thinking Winston is told by his torturers that he is the last human being, Pope’s Batman is memorable not because of any dazzling gadgets or superhuman displays of physical prowess, but because he eats, sleeps, keeps protein bars in his utility belt, wears a shirt that’s a size too small, talks with a speech impediment when he wears scary fake fangs to freak out federal goons, gets his ass thoroughly kicked every time he sees action, and requires a small support team consisting of a doctor, a tech expert and a motorcycle mechanic to help him get anything done at all. With each of the aforementioned acts he reasserts his irreducible humanity in a world classified and documented and categorized and bureaucratized to within an inch of its life. It’s all enhanced by Pope’s familiar stylistic tics–meaty and careworn faces, bee-stung lips, heavy brows, hair that hasn’t seen shampoo for a fortnight, clothes that bulge and bag and buckle, characters who clamber and carom down creaky stairs and through grimy alleys and around telephone wires. He’s not a number, he’s a free man. The physical is political.

And much to this fanboy’s delight, the Bat-portion of “Bat-Man” doesn’t go ignored. I wish I could remember the name of the online wit who pointed out the true ridiculousness of Batman’s outfit: Like an old Star Wars Halloween costume with the character’s picture plastered on the chest, the Bat-costume’s central motif is a freaking drawing of the animal it’s supposed to transform its wearer into. What kind of sissy-ass criminal would be scared of that? But to this Batman of the year 2039, the key to striking terror isn’t the animal itself, but the unfamiliarity it represents. Fighting against platoons of jackbooted federales with animalistic nicknames like the Wolves and the Panthers, Batman takes advantage of his sui generis state–none of these professional ass-kickers have ever seen anything like him–and uses it to scare the crap out of them. His mask is designed to distort his facial features into inhuman unrecognizability. He uses sonic enhancements to emit growls. He wears a set of porcelain vampire teeth. Put it all together and, as captured in a searingly intense panel depicting a motion-captured close-up from a surveillance camera, it’s the scariest Batman has ever looked and acted, even if his sleeves are too short. (Colorist Jose Villarubia nails that Blair Witch by way of One Night in Paris screen; he’s at his best with the neons and glows of the tech-y end of Pope’s world, rather than the Vertigo-style greens that sully the down-and-dirty stuff.)

If I’m lingering on business rather than story, that’s because the story itself doesn’t cohere nearly as well as the ideas and images behind its lead character. In a plot drawing heavily from post-9/11 fears of governmental intrusion and terrorist brutality–Pope being perhaps the only major comics artist (not counting Red-Meat Miller) to give the taboo against taking the latter as seriously as the former the middle finger it deserves–Batman, his little band of helpers, and Capt. Jim Gordon (presented here as a quid pro quo political appointee) uncover a small but serious conspiracy within the federal ranks to hijack a terrorist-developed doomsday virus for their own ends. Or something. To be honest, it’s kind of hard to follow, existing mainly as a platform upon which Pope’s characters declaim didactically about the wisdom of trusting the government, the depths of depravity to which terrorists have no problem sinking, the healing power of open-source information streams, and so on. It makes for a cute ending–one where Batman and crew avert the apocalypse not by kicking the Joker’s ass but by the counterintelligence equivalent of uploading a video to YouTube–and insofar as it relies on fulfilling relatable tasks (climbing up ropes, locating lost computer disks, remembering stuff), it’s refreshing. But in terms of presenting readers with a compelling and solvable mystery, one wishes Pope had taken as much time making it as solid and singular as Batman’s trunks. Toward the end, even the action starts to slip away, with a motorcycle chase that’s tough to parse and too death-defying by half. How about giving the Bat-cycle a flat tire?

But the book is redeemed by its final pages, where Pope makes the seemingly counterintuitive, extremely unorthodox choice to keep Batman’s secret identity a secret from both his enemies–and us. Is he, somehow, the same Bruce Wayne who cooked up the heroic identity way back in 1939? Is he a descendent who took up the mantle? Is he (most likely) just some guy who thinks privacy and decency need a human avatar in this crazy mixed-up world? He’s not telling, and neither is Pope, who leaves us with a final panel that brings us full circle by showing Batman frantically running away from pursuers who will never catch him. The specifics may get a little wonky, but that indelible wish to remain unfettered, unclassifiable and untouchable–even if you get the snot beat out of you from time to time for your troubles–is as good a reason as any to dress up in a costume, or read a book about a guy who does so.

Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941

Greg Sadowski, editor

Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, George E. Brenner, Ken Fitch, Fred Guardineer, Bill Everett, Will Eisner, Lou Fine, Dick Briefer, Jack Kirby, Fletcher Hanks, Irv Novick, Jack Cole, Al Bryant, Ogden Whitney, Gardner Fox, Mart Bailey, Basil Wolverton, Joe Simon, writers/artists

192 pages

$24.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

Looked at strictly as an archival project, this Greg Sadowski-edited and designed anthology of early superhero comics is, like Paul Karasik’s Fletcher Hanks collection and DC’s Jack Kirby omnibuses before it, a real “here’s how it’s done” moment. Entertaining, left-field subject matter; eye-pleasing design; tactile paper stock; color technique and reproduction values that neither hide the material behind the haze of nostalgia nor try to mask its primitive origins with out-of-place high-gloss modernity; manageable length and heft; art presented at a powerful but not brobdingnagian size. The ongoing efforts of the aforementioned editors and publishers, along with the likes of Dan Nadel and Craig Yoe, truly have us living in the Golden Age of Reprints.

But how does the thing read? Well, generally speaking. I have to admit I don’t feel that the book is quite the revelation that, say, Jog argues it to be. Taken as a whole the early superhero comics reproduced here lack both the transcendent artistry and metaphorical/philosophical vision of Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus and the eerie, obsessive-compulsive, barely checked madness of Hanks’s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! Meanwhile, though the wordy foreword by Jonathan Lethem makes much of how these protean efforts present an array of paths not taken by the more codified superhero stories that followed, those of us who’ve put a lot of time into reading modern superhero comics and nearly as much into arguing on their behalf are used to hunting down fruitfully unusual avenues of expression in that genre from past and present alike. Moreover, for all their occasional flashes of genuine sophistication or bracing weirdness, most of these stories are overwhelmed by their rudimentary plots, wooden dialogue, omnipresent narration, and the sense that for all their high-pitched violence, the actual emotional and physical stakes for the one-dimensional “characters” involved are vanishingly small. Read a couple at a time, the stories are entertainingly zesty; stretched one after the other, you’re gonna need to put the book down.

But even if the book isn’t the “reverse-neutron bomb” Lethem makes it out to be, who said it needed to be one? There’s enough pleasure to be had in recognizing the plug-ugly goons, heavy-lidded dames, and even the earliest traces of Kirbytech in the former Jacob Kurtzberg’s contributions; or seeing just how much sharper was Jack Cole than his contemporaries in terms of comedy and layout. I’ll take any excuse to look at comics by Fletcher Hanks, with his neurotically repeated figures and forms; placing them in close proximity with, say, Al Bryant’s “Fero the Planet Detective” sharpens our appreciation for the latter’s comically capricious violence and memorably hideous villains. Soon to be a star outside the genre, Basil Wolverton crafts a sci-fi adventure with character and costume designs that alternately prefigure the undergrounds and Chris Ware and a comparatively complex story that evokes the macho codes of honor and friendship often found in its pulp-prose forebears. Will Einser and Lou Fine turn in a tremendous, print-it-as-a-poster-and-hang-it-up cover for “Samson,” and give us one of the great simple pleasures in superhero comics–a bold, attractively streamlined costume–in the red-and-yellow person of the Flame.

As you might expect, any number of panels and word balloons are internet-meme-worthy–just flipping through at random I came across one of my favorite, a scene from a Bill Everett “Sub-Zero” comic in which the villain takes the time to fix up some foamy shaving cream, the better to fit the captured hero’s head for the electric chair’s skullcap. But there are moments of weird beauty, too: Eisner and Fine’s Flame standing like a Greek god as he speaks with a beautiful woman; Wolverton’s armored spacemen colliding in battle; Fred Guardineer bringing a statue of George Washington to uncanny life; Kirby’s proto-Roger Dean Martian landscape. And while the variety of approaches on display here may not necessarily blow minds, they should at least open some eyes. In a time when the major superhero companies seem dead-set on creating the most uniform tone possible across their lines–black-ops badasses in spandex at Marvel, a hyperviolent pantheon at DC–evidence that superheroes can behave in any number of ways against any number of threats is indeed liberating, perhaps even necessary. Forget the turgid prose–focus on the weird beauty. That’s what I did.

Dragon Head Vols. 1-5

Minetaro Mochizuki, writer/artist

Tokyopop, 2005-2007

232-248 pages each

$9.99 each

Buy them from Amazon.com

Originally written on February 21, 2007 for publication in The Comics Journal

First, an admission: If it’s the post-apocalypse, I’ll eat it.

Second, an assertion: Even discounting my bias, Dragon Head is one of the most compulsively readable manga to reach an appreciable non-otaku audience (or at least this member thereof) in quite some time.

I found this somewhat surprising given DH‘s shaky start. Its first two volumes focus on an overbaked, if gut-level-gripping, high concept: Three high-school students are the sole survivors of a catastrophic train wreck in a collapsed tunnel deep underground. At this early stage the characters come out of Battle Royale central casting: Older boy Teru tries to do the right thing despite his mounting panic, younger nerd Nobuo bugs out and start doing things with knives and dead bodies, damsel in distress Ako is disarmingly wounded and pretty and ultimately more sensible than her two male companions combined, that sort of thing. Nobuo in particular is played to the cheap seats, going from zero to Lord of the Flies in the space of the first volume. Smart, detail-driven moment, like Ako awakening from a two-day coma to discover she’d gotten her period while she was unconscious and nearly going to pieces because her tampons were lost in the rubble, are few and far between.

By contrast, Mochizuki’s cartooning is vivid, memorable, even sensual, and seems to be where he’s deriving most of his pleasure here. However weak the psychological underpinnings of Nobuo’s freakout may be, Mochizuki renders its end result, the demonic face and body markings the kid gives himself using dead girls’ makeup, with graphic glee. Nearly wordless sequences throughout the second volume in which he chases Ako and later strips and paints her unconscious body utilize predatory pacing and intelligent image choices (a sharply turned head, a hand on a breast) to portray adolescent pre-sexuality gone vicious and sour. Mochizuki also evokes the impenetrable with evident relish, be it the walls of stone that hem the survivors in, the darkness that the kids are always trying to stave off with flashlights, lighters, and torched bottles of booze, or the mass of upturned seats, broken glass, torn-up backpacks and mangled limbs that fills the wreckage of the train.

Indeed, Mochizuki’s zeal for colossal depictions of the man-versus-nature conflict (a surprisingly rare sight in comics, for some reason) gives rise to a fairly major problem with Tokyopop’s translation work: In a world where so much action is the result of massive, indistinguishable walls of steam, stone, water, flame, earth, mud, and/or ash threatening to consume our protagonists, would it really be too much to ask for the publisher to translate the damn sound effects? They don’t even have to replace the Japanese characters–just run an English translation in smaller print alongside them and you’d be good to go. As it stands, without a telltale “RRRRUMBLE” or “HISSSSSSSSSSS” or “FWOOOOOSH,” the book’s many otherwise-silent sequences of natural disaster are extremely difficult to parse. Is that an ominous groan or an imminent collapse we’re hearing? Are Ako and Teru being overwhelmed by water or smoke or heat or their own overactive imaginations? All too frequently, if you don’t understand the kanji, your guess is as good as mine.

But all is forgiven once the inevitable showdown between sanity and face-painting, darkness-worshipping lunacy is over and the surviving kids finally make it to the surface world. We’re not entirely safe from wonky mental breakdowns yet; both Ako and Teru will, at varying points throughout the remaining volumes, weave in and out of catatonia or psychosis without much rhyme or reason. But as soon as they discover that whatever happened to their train tunnel happened to pretty much the entire rest of the world, the backdrop of their story expands exponentially, and their characters feel similarly enlarged. Their existential horror upon realizing that the atmosphere is full of enough soot to choke out the midday sun, their subsequent dazed, fumbling search for food, water, and news of the world, and Mochizuki’s you-can-taste-the-ash-in-your-mouth art for the sequence, are just the first signs that the book’s comparatively shallow action-thriller days are behind it. Had the book continued in that vein you might have expected the pair to become a cutesy, thrown-together-by-circumstance couple; instead their bond seems deeper and truer, driven by an instinctual need to survive and see that the other survives as well.

Sure enough, the greatest obstacle to their mutual survival turns out to be other people. Once again this could have been a minefield of cliche, but Teru and Ako’s dreamily horrifying journey among the human detritus of their dead world is where the book really takes off. A group of similar kids appears friendly, if slightly off, only for our heroes to discover that they blithely worship the “demon” they blame for the apocalypse they’ve experienced in a hard-to-shake ceremony involving gas masks and fireworks. A middle-aged woman in a motorcycle helmet takes them in, carving out a quiet, stately interlude for characters and reader alike in a refreshingly un-motherly way. Even the inevitable soldiers gone feral largely steer clear of the same old poses–granted, that’s how they start out, but soon a pair of them are joined with Ako and Teru more or less as equals, behaving and interacting as unpredictably as one suspects people in the real world would.

Through it all, the spectre of Nobuo hangs over Teru in particular, sometimes all but subliminally (one tremendous four-panel sequence shows Teru lying unconscious in the distance of identical shots of a rubble-filled scene, changing only in the fourth panel when Nobuo appears out of nowhere, mockingly squatting beside the body of his rival). He’s far more convincing and frightening an enemy when he’s treated as a source of guilt (why couldn’t Teru get his act together and save the poor kid, he wonders) than as a source of law-of-the-jungle fear. Mochizuki’s attention to detail regarding the headgear of the characters whom Teru and Ako stumble across later (they always seem to be sporting earphones or gas masks or baseball caps or motorcycle helmets or something) echoes Nobuo’s self-transformed skull and hints at whatever the title may really mean (by the end of Vol. 5, the only explicit reference is in the mutterings of an apparent lobotomy victim).

The overall effect is a nightmarish picaresque, like a cross between Children of Men and Apocalypse Now. With each volume better than the one before it, the perambulating structure pays off in spades. Get through the tunnel and you’ll want to see where the journey ends up.

Jin & Jam #1

Hellen Jo, writer/artist

Sparkplug Comic Books, 2008

36 pages

$5

Buy it from Sparkplug

The first thing I thought during my initial flip-through of Jin & Jam was “Boy, this person sure likes Taiyo Matsumoto.” Then I started reading from the beginning and the first thing I saw was an epigraph from Black & White, aka Tekkon Kinkreet, by Taiyo Matsumoto. So it’s not like Hellen Jo is trying to hide the influence, which emerges not just in the wiry art and leering character designs but in the plot itself, involving various paired-off tweenage characters gettin’ in trouble and stickin’ it to the man. But we’re not in Matsumoto’s sprawling dystopian future cityscape, we’re in a cramped, just-left-of-normal version of San Jose, California. And that’s where I start to detect another, subtler influence: Jaime Hernandez and the Locas of Love & Rockets. As we watch Jam, Hank, Jin, Ting, and Terng do the shiftless-layabout teenage-wasteland thing, we observe little details about their California culture: the junk-food diets, the bike-riding cops with bike helmets and short-shorts, the angry Korean Presbyterian preachers and so on. Meanwhile, the fact that the title of the book is Jin & Jam even though when we meet Jam she’s already paired off with Hank indicates that there will be some kind of emotional shift taking place, breaking up or truncating one friendship as another blossoms. We even start to see it happen by the end of the book: As Jin and Jam take a fantastical ride on a swing set under the stars, the faces of their “friends” literally vanish, leaving Jin & Jam as the only real people in the book’s final splash page. Is this Tekkon Kinkreet or Wigwam Bam or just a jack of both trades but master of neither? Too soon to tell, but are you not entertained regardless?

First Time

Sibylline, writer

Alfred, Capucine, Jerome d’Aviau, Virginie Augustin, Vince, Rica, Olivier Vatine, Cyril Pedrosa, Dominique Bertail, Dave McKean, artists

NBM/Eurotica, 2009

108 pages, hardcover

$19.95

Buy it from NBM/Eurotica

Buy it from Amazon.com

Gloria Leonard said that the difference between pornography and erotica is lighting; it stands to reason that in comics, the difference between pornography and erotica is linework. First Time, then, is definitely erotica. This collection of sexually graphic vignettes features high-class, high-quality European artists whose styles will be instantly familiar to readers of alt/art/lit comics here in the States, even if the artists themselves (most of them pseudonymous, I think) are not. But best of all, a couple of them are familiar. Yep, “Cyril Pedrosa” is indeed Three Shadows Cyril Pedrosa! And Dave McKean is indeed “Neil Gaiman” Dave McKean! Maybe it’s just me, but I think seeing cartoonists whose mainstream work you know and admire get smutty is one of life’s simple pleasures, like discovering the lovely but respectable actor you’re crushing on did an extensive nude scene back when everything was at its youngest and most pert.

Indeed, the reclamation of the erotic as something respectable comics creators can depict and respectable comics readers can discuss is something of a hobbyhorse of mine. Shouldn’t sex be something we tackle at least as often and as directly and with at least as much sophistication as we deal with violence and misery? Heck, shouldn’t it be something we tackle independently from violence in misery? This is a pretty terrific step in all those directions. In addition to bonafide critics’ darlings Pedrosa and McKean, every artist looks like they could have stepped out of a Petit Livre from Drawn & Quarterly or one of Fantagraphics’ Blab! storybooks or MOME guest spots.

Writer Sibylline seems to have either tailored the material to her collaborators or picked them to suit the material. “First Time,” a sweet story of a girl’s deflowering that comes with a funny twist ending, has an appropriately Top Shelf-ish vibe courtesy of the angular cartooning of artist Alfred, while the more self-indulgent topic matter of “Sex Shop” and “Fantasy” earn the more voluptuous, outwardly sexy curved lines of Capucine and Jerome d’Aviau respectively. “1+1″‘s story of a first-time girl-on-girl hook-up and the subsequent disappointment it engenders in one of its participants gets an animated look from artist Virginie Augustin, which nicely supports its initial whimsy and free-spiritedness and eventual heartbreak. “2+1”, with its tangle of bodies in a cramped apartment, slowly evolves from Tim Sale to Aeon Flux courtesy of artist Vince. Rica’s “Nobody,” the most Robin Bougie-ish of the stories what with its sex-doll subject matter, also boasts the most Robin Bougie-ish art, while Olivier Vatine’s “Club,” appropriately enough, reminds me of that New X-Men issue where Chris Bachalo helped reimagine the Hellfire Club as a strip joint in a tip of the hat to its NYC namesake. For those who’ve read the sweet, sensitive Three Paradoxes, Pedrosa’s aptly titled “Submission” may come as a shock, what with all the deep-throating and spanking and following orders to go look in the mirror with a mouth full of semen, but then again I think it was clear from that graphic novel’s bold visuals that Pedrosa could pull off pretty much anything. Dominique Bertail’s “Sodomy” has the most traditional sex comix look, I think, but its gender-reversal subject matter is strong enough that matter-of-factness is an apt stylilstic choice. Finally, McKean’s “X-Rated” combines manipulated film stills with cubist kama-sutra positioning for something that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a deleted Arkham Asylum scene where the Joker watched Batman get it on with Poison Ivy over the closed-circuit cameras. The whole project is a bit undercut by slightly wooden translation work from Joe Johnson, but only a bit. Overall it made me wish that more work like this was being produced. If you like your smut smart and your art sexy, seek this out.

Asterios Polyp

David Mazzucchelli, writer/artist

Pantheon, June 2009

344 pages, hardcover

$29.95

Pre-order it from Amazon.com

An extraordinarily easy book to read, Asterios Polyp is, I’m finding, a nearly equally extraordinarily difficult book to talk about. Frankly I think I just feel out of my depth. For example, cartoonist David Mazzucchelli has a long history of making art comics in Europe, and I’ve flipped through a few in the store or off my buddy Josiah’s shelf, but the only Mazzucchelli comics I’ve read from start to finish prior to this book are Batman Year One, Daredevil: Born Again, and that little comic with the spilled jar of ink he did for The Comics Journal Special Edition: Cartoonists on Cartooning. But hey, fine, I can fake it, I can certainly locate Asterios Polyp within the tradition of alternative comics. For exaple, it uses color and, to a certain extent, character design like a Dash Shaw webcomic or MOME contribution; it mixes imagery with external narrating text like Chris Ware, only with several orders of magnitude more room to breathe on the page, like Ware filmed in slow motion. That, I get.

What I’m having harder time with, where I feel really out of my depth, is in trying to locate the book’s story content. Asterios Polyp is a highly lauded, award-winning “paper architect,” i.e. a guy whose designs are awesome but have never actually been built, who divides his time between Manhattan and the Ithaca, NY university where he is a professor. We join his story already in progress, as a fire consumes his ratty, messy, porn(?)-soundtracked bachelor pad. Asterios does not pass Go, does not collect $200, proceeds directly from fleeing his apartment in the rain with his wallet and a handful of knicknacks and watching the fire department fight the fire down into the subway and back up and out at the Port Authority, where he takes a bus to the middle of nowhere and gets the first job he can find (as an auto mechanic) and crashpad he can find (renting a room from his boss at the auto shop). From there we bounce back and forth between revelatory events in the present day and key events in the life that led him there, mostly having to do with his ill-fated relationship with the talented but somewhat timid sculptor he was once married to.

In other words, it’s very Woody Allen, very Philip Roth, very New Yorker. A sophisticated urban aesthete unsuccessfully balances the life of the mind with the life of his weiner and then wonders where it all went wrong; his life is contrasted with that of the spirited younger woman he can never quite get a handle on and various other sophisticated urban aesthetes whose arrogance and eccentricity he deplores yet cannot see within himself. And there’s my problem: I know enough about that stuff to recognize the template, but I don’t know enough of it to know if it goes beyond using the template into wholesale swiping and/or rote recapitulation. The best I can do is say “Well, this reminds me somewhat of the Woody/Alan Alda bits in Crimes & Misdemeanors.” I’m simply not well-read enough in this area to comment beyond that. Ask me to speak authoritatively about the next Neil Marshall movie and I can probably handle that, but this? Donnie, you’re out of your element.

What I can say with confidence, however, is that I enjoyed that story immensely. And a big part of that is because this isn’t a Woody Allen film or a Philip Roth novel–it’s a comic, and there’s no mistaking it. Yeah, the basic story could be told in other ways, but if you wanted an illustration of that old saw that you should be able to look at a comic and determine why it’s a comic and not a movie pitch or a short story, look no further. Mazzucchelli clearly had a blast drawing this thing.

My favorite ambitious graphic novels of recent vintage have been pretty manic and information-heavy in terms of the visual approach–Theo Ellsworth’s Capacity and Josh Cotter’s Skyscrapers of the Midwest spring to mind, and even Dash Shaw’s Bottomless Belly Button feels dense and claustrophobic compared much of his other recent work, if only for the lack of color. Asterios Polyp, on the other hand, is airy and light from start to finish, like giving your eyeballs a breath of fresh air. There are all kinds of panel layouts, splash pages, and stand-alone images here, popping right off the big white pages, and the CMYK colors are just a pleasure to look at.

Meanwhile, it’s almost unspeakably clever. Mazzucchelli gives each major character and setting its own color scheme, that’s apparent from the start–Asterios is bright blue, while his wife Hana is bright pink. But oh, the places Mazzucchelli goes with that! By the time Asterios takes Hana to meet his mother and invalid father, he’s wearing a pink checkered jacket, while she has on a blue shirt. In a passage meant to illustrate how our memories slowly refine our original experiences “because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback,” Asterios’s remembered Hana slowly morphs from having a pink shirt on against a white background to wearing a blue shirt against a blue background. And in a much later scene which I’m going to try hard not to spoil, where the two encounter each other long after their divorce and after myriad transformative experiences, the color scheme is totally different–all oranges and greens. Meanwhile, “neutral zones” in both dreaming and waking life are yellow and purple. And let me assure you that as far as the use of color goes, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Then there are the countless clever references to the history and art of cartooning. Given our hero’s occupation and preoccupations, there are quite a few mini-essays on architecture, philosophy, design, music…and they’re drawn and lettered like something out of Understanding Comics. A Latina chef swats flies on the ceiling and looks like she could have gotten off the plane from Palomar yesterday, while her band’s drummer sports a “Los Bros” sticker on his drumkit. Asterios’s dapper in-his-youth father looks like he stepped out of a Seth comic. The Midwesterners who take Asterios in–Stiff Major and his zaftig wife Ursula, and no, Mazzucchelli is clearly not above having some Vonneguttian fun with names–could be thrown up on the screen in a Disney/Pixar production tomorrow. Hana I can’t quite put my finger on, but she’s got a distinct ’50s/’60s illustration vibe, part Charles Addams part something else I’m too slow to pick up. Asterios himself is given to standing in profile and holding a cigarette like Eustace Tilley holds his monocle. His teaching career reads like Art School Confidential from the professor’s perspective. (Student: “I’m thinking about adding fenestration to this planar surface…?” Asterios: “How about just putting a couple of windows in that wall?”)

None of this would matter, or at least it would matter very little, if the comic weren’t a series of emotional hooks and twists and high points and explosions, which it is. The dream sequences are uniformly strong, with one involving a flooded subway station-cum-dock so evocatively drawn–thick washes of purple ink, rough crosshatching for one of the first times in the whole book–that I could practically hear the echoing slosh of the water in the tunnels. Asterios’s unique, virtually constant headshape (how have I not talked about this until now?) essentially requires him to be drawn in profile, so the few times we see him turn toward us (again in a dream sequence, notably!) are stop-and-pay-attention moments. The book’s bravura sequence (you’ll hear about this a lot) condenses the couple’s entire life together into a series of snapshot images of Hana’s various movements and bodily secretions; here’s one case where my familiarity with this technique bred nothing but admiration for seeing it so well done. The ending…I’ll say I imagine it will be controversial and leave it at that, but I got a kick out of it.

The real knockout moment for me, though, came during the pivotal argument that stories like this inevitably include, the storm that built for years yet ultimately came out of nowhere and nothing was the same after that. You spend the build-up to it noticing that something is awry, something in the way Hana has been drawn, something in the way there seem to be two or three things going on at once in the interactions between Hana, Asterios, and the other characters involved (including a memorable little imp named Willy Ilium in the book’s Clare Quilty role). Once it gets going, once the pink-and-blue color scheme starts shifting appropriately and the linework and coloring get scratchier and choppier and angrier, you’re rooting for Hana all the way, you think that finally the beef you’ve been accumulating on her behalf is going to get the apocalyptic airing it deserves. And then…and then…BAM, a line you just did not see coming at all, making it all the more devastating, because after all, neither did Asterios. I think this particular exchange may open the book up to charges that it embraces the same sexism it nominally deplores in its characters, but to me it’s the human element that comes through, not the gendered one. I read this scene and said “My God” out loud on the train. (You really need to read the book to get what I’m talking about, I suppose, and it doesn’t come out until June so unless you somehow ended up with a review copy months ago like I did I guess that’s difficult, but do me a favor, bookmark this and come back later and see if you think I’m right, okay?)

I may not know ahhht, is I suppose what I’m saying, but I know what I like. And I like Asterios Polyp a lot. It’s certainly a book to savor. I suspect it’s a book to treasure. I guess it wasn’t that hard to talk about after all.

Ojingogo

Matthew Forsythe, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, September 2008

152 pages

$14.95

Buy it from D&Q

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Ojingogo reminds me of the immersive, action-intensive creature comics of Fort Thunder alums Brian Ralph and Mat Brinkman released by Highwater Books earlier this decade, books like Cave-In and Teratoid Heights. Heck, you could lump Brian Chippendale’s Maggots in there too if you wanted. Little critter guys wander around meeting other weird critters who grow or shrink or try to eat them in various configurations. There’s some video game logic to it, some children’s book overtones too. It’s a fun template.

But where Matthew Forsythe falls short of the Fort Thunder gang is in creating interpretable, continuous environments in which these adventures take place. Teratoid Heights, for example, was rigorously laid out from panel to panel; no matter how odd the protagonists or how nightmarish or isolated the space in which they moved, you could easily see the continuity from one panel to the next, to the point where he could cut to another character for panels or pages at a time and the second he returned you to the original character you still knew where you were. In Cave-In, Ralph’s sumptuous, textural backgrounds provided a sense that you were moving through a concrete, cohesive space. Maggots‘s frequently blacked-out backgrounds removed that tool from Chippendale’s continuity-of-action arsenal but provided a strange sense of unity all their own, while his intuitive Chutes ‘n’ Ladders layouts literally forced you to increase your concentration on continuity.

Ojingogo offers no such aid. Cuts between characters are frequent and sudden, with little to indicate why we’re switching viewpoints or where we’re switching our viewpoint to. This in turn makes it difficult to string together behavioral causes-and-effects for the characters and what they do. I was frequently at a loss as to why characters who seemed friendly were now fighting or vice versa, or why characters who were together were now separate, and so on. And when you have that much trouble figuring out basic things like the relationships between the protagonists, the creature-feature flights of fancy–growing, shrinking, transforming, etc.–become even more difficult to contextualize. By the end of the book I was just kind of turning the pages and looking at the pictures as much as I was reading the comic. There are certainly pleasures to be had in reading the book that way: Forsythe’s Koreana (is there such a word?) character designs are delightful, his line and use of graytones are pretty much perfect for this kind of comic, he has a real knack for body language (there was one sequence in which a Brinkman-esque giant squatted down to take a look at something that really strcuk me), and there are occasional moments of humor that made me chuckle (like when a pair of characters set up one of those box/stick/string traps to try and capture another creature, but it turns out he’s now like five times as big as they are, and he bounds past them, and as they stand there stunned, the box-trap falls shut on nothing). But with so little in the way of continuity of action or imagery, it’s a lot like reading little vignettes at random–you just couldn’t immerse yourself in it if you wanted to. Maybe this is a function of the book’s original life as a webcomic, but it makes for a frustrating read as a graphic novel, because you know how well it could work.

Cold Heat #2 & 4

BJ and Frank Santoro, writers/artists

PictureBox, Inc., 2006/2007

24 pages each

$5 each

Read it for free at ColdHeatComics.com

Buy it from PictureBox

Originally written I don’t remember when for WizardUniverse.com’s Thursday Morning Quarterback feature

COLD HEAT #2

The deliberately crude art style of this indier-than-indie miniseries will no doubt turn many readers of Big Two comics off. That’s a damn shame, because BJ and Santoro have created a unique and addictive hybrid of thrilling sci-fi murder mystery and drugged-up punk-rock coming-of-age tale. Continuing the story of a high school girl named Castle who’s reeling from the death of the lead singer of her favorite band and from getting dumped and fired simultaneously by the CEO of the company she was interning at, this issue introduces the man who’ll doubtlessly be the series’ big bad: Senator Wastmor. In his crazed search for the ‘killer’ of his dirtbag son—i.e. whoever provided him the drugs he O.D.’d on, at a party where Castle was the last person to see him alive—he’s the perfect portrait of the power-crazed politician: He mouths platitudes about how ‘the war on illegal drugs and underage drinking is now at its own D-Day’ on TV, while spewing obscenities and violent threats against the kids of Castle’s hometown when the camera’s off. Meanwhile, the pink-and-blue art nails the feeling of being really, really messed up as Castle takes way too many pills and gets embroiled ever deeper in the strange events befalling her town. If you can put aside your preconceptions and track down this comic, you’re in for a treat.

COLD HEAT #4

Like a 6-year-old trying to describe the awesomeness of Space Mountain at Disney World, this indie tale of sex, drugs, rock, conspiracies and alien abductions draws its strength from the contrast between the epic nature of its subject matter and the childlike way it’s presented. With its simple pink and blue color scheme and deliberately lo-fi linework, this issue’s revelation of presumed-dead rock singer Joel Cannon’s ‘2001’-style contact with extraterrestrial beings has a purity that makes up for its lack of detail, making its mystical vistas as powerful as those of any mainstream artist.

Cold Heat #1

BJ and Frank Santoro, writers/artists

PictureBox, Inc., 2006

24 pages

$5

Read it for free at ColdHeatComics.com

Buy it from PictureBox

Originally written on November 22, 2006 for publication in The Comics Journal

Cold Heat is a terrific comic for people who don’t think of their adolescence as having been particularly adolescent. That is to say, the prevailing approach toward reminiscing about one’s teenage years seems to be one of cringing embarrassment–no, actually, more one of condescension: “Ugh, what a little idiot I was then, I can’t believe I listened to Stone Temple Pilots,” etc. Writer-artists BJ (aka Ben Jones, he of those dog comics) and Frank Santoro say “fuck that noise” and instead choose to emphasize the rapturous beauty that adolescence’s grandiose melodrama and edge-of-disaster emotion constantly infuses into everyday life, particularly where music and romance are concerned. In doing so they craft a comic that is impossible not to compare to both arenas. Cold Heat‘s wispy, barely-there linework, the visual leitmotif of swirling and the rock-centric storyline–the events of the first issue revolve around our heroine Castle’s reaction to the fatal overdose of Joel Cannon, beloved lead singer of the noise band Chocolate Gun–don’t so much suggest as demand references to the blindingly happysad guitar maelstroms of Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and M83. Moreover, readers of a certain age will no doubt remember the whirlwind of emotion they were caught up in upon the death of Kurt Cobain, the likely inspiration here. I still remember storming away from the dinner table when my dad dared to agree with Andy Rooney’s “good riddance” assessment of Kurt’s passing; Cold Heat is a little like remembering that incident in comic book form. But the romance angle is important too. The book starts out with an almost anti-romantic vignette–Castle is callously informed by the CEO of the company at which she is an intern that the outfit has gone belly-up after just having had sex with him. “I forgot my CD player there,” she realizes after she leaves–one more regret. But soon the wide-eyed, upturned-face beauty of Jones and Santoro’s portraiture of Castle takes hold, suggesting a lo-fi–or more accurately, doodled-during-math-class–approximation of romance-era John Romita Sr. The simplistic pink, white and blue color scheme adds to the “just hadda get it down on paper before study hall ended” feel so effectively that you might not notice the subtlety with which a sort of crayon shading is used to evoke smoke-filled, drug-addled parties and the lonely, scary darkness of suburban nightfall. And the hints of craziness–a murder mystery, a potential World War III, a minotaur carrying a severed head–somehow combine to evoke teenagedom much more accurately than a strict slice-of-life comic would. Add in the slick cover stock, a letters page (called “Heat Waves!”), a letter from editor Dan Nadel that reads like liner notes from that old Temple of the Dog CD you’ve been meaning to rip to your iTunes and a short prose story by Timothy Hodler about falling in love with the office superhero fan, and you’ve got a comic that feels like a cable from a world where the only thing that exists is a dimly lit bedroom in which you’re wearing ripped jeans and you just keep listening to and rewinding “Teen Age Riot” over and over again. Outstanding.

The Last Lonely Saturday

Jordan Crane, writer/artist

Red Ink, 2000

80 pages

$8, softcover or hardcover (!)

Buy it from Fantagraphics

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For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Savage Critic(s).

Cold Heat #5/6

BJ & Frank Santoro, writers/artists

PictureBox, Inc.

48 pages

$20 (limited edition of 100 copies)

Buy it from PictureBox

Cold Heat was truly tailor-made for my enjoyment. Combining genre storytelling with avant garde art and layout, minimalist linework with maximalist psychedelia, shoegazey atmosphere with cotton-candy colors with Kurt Cobain and Ziggy Stardust references with teen-angsty sex, drugs, and violence…basically, even if Cold Heat didn’t exist, it would be necessary for me to invent it. I never thought I’d get the chance to hold a new single issue of Cold Heat in my hands again, so on that level alone, the existence of this comic book (a double-issue, technically, but who’s counting) is cause for rejoicing, regardless of the execution.

Fortunately, the execution is killer. I think the standout story element in this installment is just how far Jones and Santoro are willing to take the Senator Wastmor character in terms of making him an embodiment of elite-political culture at its most loathsome, a sort of fever dream of naked cruelty, avarice, rapaciousness, and hypocrisy, complete with Uzis, orgies, and shitting on prisoners. It’s reminiscent of C.F.’s Powr Mastrs in terms of imagining Power and those who master it as corrupt, violent, and disgusting.

Visually, the changes here are subtle but important. The introduction of purples to the pink/blue color scheme to flesh out and darken the world a bit. The replacement of the swirling motif with one of diamond-like patterns imposes a new level and form of visual power on the world of the comic. “There’s no turning back” reads a Castle thought-caption at the bottom of a page where this geometric device is at its most prominent, and such is its impact that we absolutely believe her.

This is not to say that it’s all gruesome abuse and overwhelming visuals. Wastmor and his schemes and depredations are an over-the-top goof, at varying times referencing classic abuse-of-authority touchstones from Salo to Illuminatus! to Twin Peaks to Eyes Wide Shut to Revenge of the Nerds; he conducts his final Uzi-toting rampage clad only in thong underwear. Meanwhile there’s a laugh-out-loud dialogue exchange between Castle and her martial-arts instructor, in which they fill each other in on their respective adventures, that revels in the story’s deadplan implausibility in a fashion reminiscent of a similar recent scene in Lost. Like Scott Pilgrim on haphazardly mixed cold meds and anti-depressants, Cold Heat is a true trip, a visionary experience in a medium that should be providing them by the bucketload. Please read it.

Snake ‘n’ Bacon’s Cartoon Cabaret

Michael Kupperman, writer/artist

Harper Entertainment, 2000

128 pages

$14

Buy it from Amazon.com

Hmm, what’s my “in” here? I could start by saying that Kupperman is a kindred spirit to Terry Gilliam: Gilliam’s animation work for Monty Python repurposed the imagery of Victorian and Edwardian England for surrealist humor and sexual satire, while Kupperman similarly works with visuals from the pulp and adventure publications of pre- and post-War America for surrealist humor (again) and riffs on the absurdity and violence of that culture. I could also say that he draws everything much, much better than he needs to–it’s like if Charles Burns did a book full of super-dense gag strips. I could point out that unlike most of the funnies, these comics truly work as comics, with visuals and text constantly trading off in terms of what’s doing the heavy lifting in getting the jokes across. I could elaborate by saying he’ll go both elaborate and direct with both components–for example, the visual gag at the heart of “Dead End Alley” is unanticipatable and complex, while the punchline panel of “The Cowboy in the Dinner Roll” is exactly what you think it’s gonna be and hammers the laff home with the subtlety of Mjolnir; meanwhile, you get text-heavy pieces like “Murder Makes My Head Hurt” and “From ‘Lives of the Cartoonists'” that take a full page to unspool and reach their pinnacle, but you also get instant-crackup juxtapositions like “Swamp Blanket Bingo,” “Sex Blimps,” “Sherlockules,” and “I Am a Gamera.” I could say that the work he’s doing in Tales Designed to Thrizzle, despite simply being a continuation of everything you’re seeing here, is better overall, but somehow that only makes this book more fun as it becomes rewarding to see how he refines his approach and execution in the later books. But I think I’ll call Michael Kupperman a comic (and comics) genius and leave it at that.

The Exterminators Vol. 1: Bug Brothers

Simon Oliver, writer

Tony Moore, artist

DC/Vertigo, 2006

128 pages

$9.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

Originally written on November 2, 2006 for publication in The Comics Journal

Conspiracy theory has long been the hallmark of a certain strain of DC-subimprint storytelling. From Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles to Warren Ellis’s Planetary, the edgier edges of Time Warner’s sequential art empire are rife with tales of beautiful badasses whose proficiency in matters of philosophy, style and killing people enable them to thwart the world’s secret chiefs and revel in knowledge withheld from the blissfully ignorant masses. The Exterminators is almost a willful antithesis to such books: Here, the people who unearth the true world order are an assortment of creepy working stiffs who kill bugs for a living.

If anything, first-time comics writer Simon Oliver actually goes overboard in serving up steaming piles of anti-glamour in this opening chapter of what augurs to be an apocalyptic conflict between humanity and an army of nature-run-amok creature-feature “smart roaches.” If Oliver had one Direct Market retailer order for every time one of his characters says “motherfucker,” he’d be well clear of the cancellation threshold. Meanwhile, the (self-conscious) sexiness of the Illuminatus!-inspired work delivered by his UK-based counterparts is transmogrified here into a sordid vibe that borders on misogyny whenever sexuality is broached. The archvillain of the piece is a lesbian corporate overlord who inducts new recruits (like lead character and ex-con Henry James’s restless girlfriend Laura) into her sinister enterprise by fucking them; future installments of the series introduce a new prostitute love interest for Henry who dresses up like famous literary figures for her johns, and an obese researcher who obliviously bangs a shady scientist who all but wears an “I’m a Fugitive Khmer Rouge War Criminal” T-shirt. Aside from the single angelic Hispanic mother whose horrific roach infestation serves as the central plot of this volume (and it’s not like that cliched character does much to ameliorate the other ones), women in The Exterminators haven’t yet proven to be a whole lot more than whores.

But based on this volume, I’m willing to give Oliver time to fix that problem. There’s something enormously refreshing about Henry, a character who genuinely enjoys the break he’s making from his criminal past and the hard but rewarding work he’s doing at the Bug-Bee-Gone company, run by his step-father Nils. Even as he’s slowly drawn into the mysteries of Egyptian bug gods, super-roaches and sci-fi biological weapons (developed by the corporation at which Laura is exploring her lipstick-lesbian side), he never cops a “look how cool I am” attitude nor a working class anti-hero pose–Oliver’s delightful scripting shows him attacking each problem like it’s a particularly frightening and yet potentially surmountable obstacle in a 9-to-5 job. He’s aided tremendously in this by the effortlessly pleasant cartooning of Tony Moore. His oblong faces and expressive eyes give each of his characters the kind of air that, were they real people, would make you come home from a day at work and say to your significant other, “You know such-and-such? Man, there’s just something about that guy I really like.” Moore broke out by helping to launch Robert Kirkman’s hit zombie epic The Walking Dead, and he’s just as proficient with horror-genre tropes here as he was there, from bug-ridden corpses to armies of the bugs themselves.

Overall Bug Brothers is skeevy fun, which is probably exactly what it set out to be, and the bargain price DC slapped it with will hopefully go a long way toward encouraging readers to pick up one of Vertigo’s most unique offerings. It’s not a series I want to see go legs-up anytime soon.

Ultimate Spider-Man #131

Brian Michael Bendis, writer

Stuart Immonen, artist

Marvel, February 2009

32 pages

$2.99

The problems with Marvel’s Ultimate line were easy to spot from the start. Its appeal stemmed from its freshness: You didn’t need to be conversant with decades of continuity to understand it, you could get a thrill out of seeing familiar characters and concepts appear and behave in entertainingly new ways, and because the series were all brand new the writers could tie them to their cultural and political moment much more tightly than could writers of characters whose first appearances involved atomic testing or the Vietnam War. In all three cases, eventual obsolescence was, if not planned, then at least inherent: After a few years the books would develop convoluted continuity of their own, the novelty of the tweaks would wear off, the writers would run out of A-listers and start introducing lesser characters to dwindling returns, and the cultural and political environment would shift even as the characters would be stuck in corporate-superhero aging limbo. What’s more, and this was harder to anticipate, the mainline Marvel Universe would itself become Ultimatized, as Ultimate writers Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar were hired to apply their “realistic,” paramilitary spin on superheroes to the company’s flagship titles.

So it was inevitable that each of the Ultimate books would reach its sell-by date sooner or later. For me, Ultimate X-Men navigated strong runs by Millar, Bendis, and Brian K. Vaughan but was undone by a combination of Robert Kirkman’s “I Love the ’90s” nostalgia and a slow drift from depicting the characters, particularly Wolverine (who now looks exactly the same as his Marvel U. counterpart), as teenagers, which was part of what made it work. Ultimates lost steam in its second volume, which featured the introduction of magical antagonists in a way that didn’t jibe with the basic premise of the book and also suffered from writer Millar’s usual tics (self-impressed dialogue, lack of earned peripeteia). Ultimate Fantastic Four, originally a collaboration between Millar and Bendis, unimaginatively recast the FF as kids to no discernible benefit, then handed the reins to Warren Ellis for dreary and unscary reimaginings of their two best villains, Dr. Doom and (in spin-offs) “Gah Lak Tus.” The less said about miniseries like Ultimate Daredevil & Elektra, Ultimate Vision, and (remember this?) Ultimate Adventures, to say nothing of Loeb’s Ultimates 3, the better.

The one lasting highlight? Ultimate Spider-Man, Brian Bendis’s starmaking series and the line’s heart, if not its flagship (that would be Ultimates). Cooked up by Marvel’s then-President Bill Jemas as a reaction to a mainline Peter Parker who seemed hopelessly old and square (I think Jemas once compared him to late-period Billy Joel), the series stars a teen version of the Wall-Crawler and is the closest thing superhero comics have ever served up (completely unintentionally as best I can tell) to shonen manga. The length of its run (well over 100 issues at this point, a virtually singular accomplishment among non-creator owned superhero comics today), the big-eyed art of longtime penciller Mark Bagley, the age of its protagonists, and Bendis’s never less than deft combination of genuinely kick-ass superhero combat and intrigue with teen romance and angst all evoke Japan’s bread-and-butter boys’ adventure series. A brief slump in the upper-double-digit issues gave way to strong arcs wrapping up long-running storylines, while a recent, seamless transition from Bagley to Stuart Immonen gave the book a more polished look and a more faithful window into teen fashion and physical comportment. Of the four for-the-ages superhero titles that made me a Bendis believer and a regular superhero-comic reader in the early part of this decade–the others were Daredevil, since handed by Bendis and Alex Maleev to the equally capable Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark; Alias, the mature-readers super-private-eye collaboration with Michael Gaydos (starring best-new-female-character-in-years Jessica Jones), preemptively shuttered by Bendis, who subsequently picked up its plot threads in less satisfactory fashion in his mainstream-Marvel titles The Pulse and New Avengers; Powers, Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming’s creator-owned cops-and-capes procedural, hampered by erratic scheduling ever since its move from Image to Marvel’s Icon imprint–Ultimate Spider-Man is the only one still going strong.

So it pains me some to see it gamely playing along with Loeb’s reboot, which doesn’t seem like half the book USM is at its worst–but fortunately, the USM tie-in issues, of which this is one, are FAR from USM at its worst. Indeed, this is exactly how big event crossovers should be done. Bendis takes the simultaneously goofy and gruesome conceit at the heart of Loeb’s series–Magneto steals Thor’s hammer and uses it to drown Manhattan in a tsunami, killing millions–and treats it completely seriously, casting Spider-Man’s heroism against a genuinely traumatic and tragic backdrop. Bendis also takes the opportunity to shake up the supporting cast: Just before the flood hits, Aunt May is arrested under suspicion that she knows Spidey’s identity; during the flood, J. Jonah Jameson spots Spider-Man trying to help people while JJJ himself heads for the hills, and realizing everything he’d said about Spidey was bullshit, completely changes his tune; Spider-Woman, here interpreted as a clone of Peter, returns (presumably to take the reins after the reboot). Bendis makes great use of the definitive event trope–crossover appearances by other characters–by dodging the fight/team-up binary: Daredevil, who in the Ultimate Universe is kind of an asshole to Spider-Man, shows up but only as a dead body, a pretty traumatic thing for Peter to discover; the Hulk shows up too, alternating between his old-school childlike monster persona and the destructive weapon of mass destruction approach, which means you get both the classic Spidey-Hulk vibe you remember from your childhood and the raw terror of Spidey fleeing from his life from the Cloverfield monster in purple pants that the Ultimate Universe version of that relationship could be expected to provide. For his part, Immonen’s figurework is loose yet clearly thought-through–it’s very appealing, particularly his floppy, blocky hairstyles–and he has a knack for whacked-out visuals like J. Jonah Jameson’s picture windows revealing the fact that the Daily Planet building is almost totally underwater.

I have no idea where Ultimatum will leave Ultimate Spider-Man, and no particular desire to find out where it will leave the rest of the Ultimate line. But for now, it’s providing Bendis and Immonen an opportunity to do Spider-Man vs. the Apocalypse, and they’re seizing that opportunity with gusto. Good for them. I hope there are 131 more issues.

Dirtbags, Mallchicks & Motorbikes

Dave Kiersh, writer/artist

self-published, 2009

136 pages

$20 incl. shipping

Preview it at Kiersh’s website

Buy it exclusively from the author via Paypal – davekiershATaolDOTcom

I’ve kept my eye on Dave Kiersh’s work since coming across it in Jordan Crane’s seminal NON anthologies, where his simple line and design sensibility and poetic writing style coupled with his aching, romantic subject matter to suggest John Porcellino gone Young Romance. In the years that followed he’s drifted from more straightforward pseudo-autobio tone poems toward a more targeted examination of love, lust, and emotional turmoil among suburban adolescents, frequently filtered through the sensibilities of late ’70s and ’80s afterschool specials, young adult novels, and teen sex comedies. It’s an unusual pursuit, that’s for sure, and I think Tom Spurgeon said it’s a shallow pool for a cartoonist of Kiersh’s obvious talents to swim in, let alone spend a Xeric Grant on, but I don’t think Tom’s right. For whatever reason, that kind of material has a lot of power. The mirror it held up to the actual experience of suburban American adolescence may have simultaneously sensationalized and simplified that experience, but the reflection was recognizable nonetheless; artists as wide-ranging as Charles Burns, Judd Apatow, Richard Kelly, and M83’s Anthony Gonzalez have recorded their observations of that reflection, to memorable effect. Why not Kiersh?

Dirtbags, Mallchicks & Motorbikes, as you can probably guess from the title, sees Kiersh continuing to explore and refine his interpretation of the teenage-wasteland’s aesthetic and emotional milieux. It’s a collection of short stories, none of which feature any kind of resolution, not even the usual non-resolution resolutions you see in other short comics about young people and relationships; they just kind of end. It’s a bold choice, and it’s what prevents several of the more knowingly pastiche-driven stories–the boy who falls for his invalid mother’s sexy live-in nurse; the girl whose hotsy-totsy friend convinces her to shoplift a push-up bra–from feeling paint-by-numbers. Other well-worn types get zig when they should zag: The kid who winds up lonely in the crowd when he throws a party while his parents are away is the star quarterback; the beautiful tennis player with the loser admirer doesn’t slowly discover the man of her dreams beneath his grubby exterior, she simply fucks him in the stands just to see what life is like when you don’t care. The stories themselves twist and turn rewardingly before they expire; I was particularly taken with an interlude between the thoughtful quarterback and a drunk cheerleader who throws herself at him in the bathroom, which he escapes by promising to take a shower with her but climbing through the shower window before she can climb in with him, and by the way a story on teen pregnancy is constantly shifting the ground between the main character (the father-to-be) and everyone he encounters (the mother of his baby, his boss, his customer, his friend, his mother, the notional baby itself) in terms of values like responsibility and caring. Kiersh’s art is less fancifcul here than in his old work or his recent book Never Land, rooted firmly in emotions inspired by the everyday rather than daydreams. His thick round line is reminiscent of Keith Haring’s, particularly in the suburbiascape endpages, but Kiersh uses those chunky delineations to connote isolation rather than cohesion and community. This strikes me as very thoughtful, considered, personal work. If you like the Donnie Darko soundtrack school of wistfully emotional ’80s pop, or modern-day approximations thereof, I think you’ll get a lot out of this.