Jessica Farm Vol. 1

Josh Simmons, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, April 2008

100 pages

$14.95

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

It’s a truism to say that comics have an unlimited special effects budget, thus casting their unfettered nature with regards to other narrative arts like film and television as primarily rooted in spectacle. But that sky’s-the-limit difference can be a formal one as well. With few if any physical or logistical constraints on an ongoing creator-owned comic’s length–particularly during this Internet Age–the ways in which stories are told may be similarly stretched. Any artist with a preexisting propensity for rambling, discursive narratives will find this limitlessness to be right in their wheelhouse.

No one seems to be stepping up to this plate with more determination than Josh Simmons, the underground-informed cartoonist behind many gleefully vulgar minis and anthology contributions who really exploded into comics-cognoscenti consciousness with his relentlessly bleak, wordless survival-horror graphic novel House last year. Jessica Farm Vol. 1 is the initial fruition of a project he’s apparently had simmering for eight years, a projected 600-page graphic novel drawn one page per month and released in 96-page installments every eight years until its completion in the year 2050. With Jessica Farm, Simmons has created a comics-reading experience where getting there isn’t half the fun–it is, by definition and at least for the next half-century or so, all the fun.

Is it fun? The answer is a qualified yes. For starters, Simmons tackles the erotic far more directly than any other cartoonists of his generation that I can think of, excepting Hans Rickheit I suppose–certainly more directly than anyone else with his Fantagraphics-granted level of exposure. The parts of this volume I’ll remember most vividly involve the titular teen (?) grabbing other male characters by the cock on more than one occasion, an earthy and erotically matter-of-fact gesture. While character design does not strike me as Simmons’s strong suit, he does give Jessica a winsome jolie-laide beauty, with wide eyes and sensually ropy tresses. And he really tapdances along the line that separates sexy from smutty from potty-humor in his depiction of his characters’ bodies. When we catch a glimpse of Jessica’s pudenda sticking out slightly from between her legs as we see her shower from behind, or when the mute, naked Mr. Sugarcock seasons her soup by dipping his balls in it Louie-from-The-State-style, or when Sugarcock’s full-tilt sprinting is indicated by his namesake member flopping like a windsock in the opposite direction, the sight is intimate, titillating and discomfiting all at once.

Indeed Simmons excels as an artist of human physicality. Fans of his memorably gruesome Batman pastiche will no doubt be delighted to find that comic’s thoughtful illustration of the body at work echoed throughout Jessica Farm, from watching tiny little people clamber up stairs that are each twice their height to the many shots of Jessica diving or pole-sliding through the many floors of her seemingly enchanted home. Depicting the cavernous and claustrophic contours of that home and other environments by moving his characters through them is another great strength of Simmons’s cartooning, and the scenes in which Jessica and her alternately adorable and threatening companions wend their way through the house’s darkened corridors no doubt contain within them the seeds of House, the artist’s full-length exploration of exploring.

The problem with this experiment, I suppose, is one of its methodology. The attention-getting publishing schedule is no doubt what made you aware of the book in the first place, and in terms of sounding completely awesome, hey, mission accomplished. But once you hit page 96 and realize that it’ll be another eight years before a subsequent volume provides you with a continuation–and more importantly, a context for–what you’ve just read, the bloom fades off that rose in a hurry. As I was getting at before, the format lends itself perfectly to a peripatetic story in which Jessica, Alice- (or Odysseus)-like, has a variety of surreal encounters. But as Alan Moore once astutely pointed out, myths need a Ragnarok, and without the hard defining line of an ending (at least until the grandchildren of the Bushes and Clintons are running for office), there’s no real way to judge whether Jessica’s rambling, discursive adventures are more or less than the sum of their dream-logic parts. So for every powerful image, like the Paperhouse-esque silhouette/villain/father or the little French band that plays in Jessica’s shower, there’s something that seems a bit on the nose without further explanation or exploration, like the cute li’l monkey getting stabbed to death or a room full of giant fetus-babies with their eyes gouged out and tongues pulled out. Without the constant an ending would provide, the equation is unsolvable. Of course, we wouldn’t even be discussing these challenging topics if the comic were not an experiment to begin with.

Tekkon Kinkreet: Black and White

Taiyo Matsumoto, writer/artist

Lillian Olsen, translator

Viz, September 2007

624 pages

$29.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tekkon Kinkreet is how its art constantly draws attention to its nature as art yet never compromises the totality of the story’s vision. Like a Gahan Wilson cartoon or Klaus Voorman’s cover for the Beatles’ Revolver, Matsumoto’s shaky—I almost wanna say gawky—line reveals itself as the product of a hand committing ink to paper on every page. Its largely uniform weight draws the eye to every detail at once, momentarily disabling the part of our brain that tricks us into seeing comics pages as three-dimensional environments rather than an assemblage of flat shapes, at least until Matusmoto’s skillful spotting of blacks (holy moses, check out page 538!) once again guides us back into the illusion.

Step back for a wider view and the gangly linework fits neatly with the spindly, frequently scarred characters, and the messy city they inhabit, most often viewed from the ground up like a lost child would see it. There’s a weakness to the art that is again reinforced by the story: On a certain level it’s a futuristic, dystopian crime-action thriller about rival factions (cops, street gangs, yakuza, a sinister religious/entertainment corporation, and two feral kids named Black and White) battling for control of a sprawling city called Treasure Town. But while the action is thrilling–and, refreshingly enough for a translated manga with a potentially byzantine plot, easy to follow–where the book really hits home is on an emotional level. Its elegiac feel is perhaps meant to recall real-world analogues like the Disneyfication of New York City, but for me it functions as a message about caring for people and things who are past caring for themselves. It’s defined by relationships between people who end up making themselves emotionally vulnerable and yoked to a belief in something better at great risk to themselves–streetwise Black’s love for his idiot-savant brother White, White’s love for his increasingly brutal brother Black, crimelord the Rat’s desire to preserve the city he’s mostly just stolen from, the cops’ desire to preserve even the criminal underclass against an encroaching and even more vicious modernity. Now, as someone who’s gotten a lot more enjoyment out of Disneyfied Times Square than Taxi Driver Times Square, many of the book’s more didactic moments and gangster poses fall flat with me. But there’s a part of everyone that still pines for wild youth, warts and all.

In the end almost all the characters are forced to choose the things that are most important to them and move on, leaving the rest behind, which is essentially how the process of growing up works. It’s a coming of age tale that actually feels like coming of age does. I’m really impressed by how slowly and naturally these themes unfold, too–Matsumoto has a grasp on pacing that makes this serialized work read just great in a collected edition. It’s all packed into a well-designed, hefty softcover, the kind of book that begs to be given as a gift or passed from reader to reader. Recommended.

Planetes Vols. 1-3

Makoto Yukimura, writer/artist

Yuki Nakamura, translator

Anna Wenger, adapter

Tokyopop, 2003-2004

Volume 1: 240 pages

Volume 2: 268 pages

Volume 3: 240 pages

$9.99 each

Buy them from Amazon.com

Originally written on July 1st, 2004 for publication in The Comics Journal

The unending torrent of translated manga titles is all too easy for a reader raised on American comics to drown in. Unfamiliar and therefore arbitrary-seeming conventions, countless -makis, -muras, and other seemingly interchangeable surnames, and that damned right-to-left flow: It’s enough to cause Western eyes to glaze over. It’s gotten to the point where an exasperated sigh of “I just don’t get manga” is viewed as an acceptable assessment in some circles. Indeed, “It’s all speed-lined, Japanophilic crap starring giant robots and big-titted doe-eyed schoolgirls in their panties” has assumed a place of (dis)honor right along side “It’s all mindless, sexist, crypto-fascist adolescent power fantasies about men in tights hitting each other” (mainstream/superhero/genre comics) and “It’s all pointless, self-obsessed, navel-gazing slice-of-life stories about pathetic white guys feeling sorry for themselves” (alternative/underground/art comics) in the pantheon of stupidly dismissive sequential-art stereotypes.

Enter Makoto Yukimura’s Planetes, the antidote to conventional wisdom about what translated manga can be, and the perfect gateway drug for fans of American art- and genre-comics alike. Compelling characters, story, and art add up to one of the finest regularly published titles you’re likely to come across on the racks today, from any country.

Working within the type of hard science-fiction framework not often seen in genre comics, Planetes takes place in the semi-near future, a time when orbital space stations bustle with civilian activity, the moon has been colonized, Mars is on its way to being so, and a manned expedition to Jupiter is on the horizon. The high volume of space travel has given rise to unforeseen, space-borne growth industries, the least glamorous of which is debris pick-up. Glorified garbagemen travel through low Earth orbit, picking up busted satellites, wreckage from shuttle accidents, discarded refuse, and other space junk before it can collide at high velocity with unwary travelers.

From this SF premise, writer/artist Makoto Yukimura (ably assisted by the nearly invisible adaptation work of Anna Wenger) spins something pretty close to magic. The key–and it’s so simple it’ll make you kind of angry that every writer doesn’t employ it–is that the action stems not from the external dictates of plotting or the need to get across some “mad idea” aimed at knocking the metaphysical socks off the reader, but springs organically from the internal workings of the characters themselves. And what characters they are.

We’re first introduced to Yuri, an astronaut of Russian decent, in a full-color flashback, on board a passenger space flight with his wife. Even this very first scene is peppered with the alarmingly perceptive moments that make the series so memorable: Yuri’s wife carries a compass with her every time she travels through space, in order to remember that even in the directionless void, there’s a direction home. It’s the sort of short, sharp shock of instant insight and attachment that makes the ensuing, slow-motion catastrophe all the more wrenching to watch, as does Yakimura’s jarring change in perspective from an extreme, speed-blurred close-up to a cold, impersonal long shot. The accident that claims Yuri’s wife’s life was caused by the type of debris storm that Yuri, in his new career as a debris clearer, seeks to prevent, though his stoicism is complete enough to hide this true, tragic motivation even from himself.

Yuri’s crewmate Fee is a much less quiet sort. A chain-smoking American woman of the sort some space-age Guess Who might sing about, Fee is the Bones McCoy of the hauler’s crew. Her deadpan, take-no-shit refusal to indulge the melancholy reveries of her shipmmates makes her not just a natural foil for the sensitive Yuri and the moody Hachimaki (crew member number three), but a literal lifesaver given the mental duress contact with the vastness of space can engender. As if to contrast Fee’s level-headedness with the space-shot flakiness of the other main characters, Yakimura assigns her the series’ single most heroic act–preventing the destruction by terrorists of an entire space station, which in turn would generate enough debris to effectively end space travel for years. Fee’s heroism, however, derives not from some high-minded belief that man is meant for the stars, but from a jones for the cigarettes available for sale on the space station. It’s not idealism that motivates Fee–it’s a nic fit.

The aforementioned Hachimaki initially strikes the reader as the book’s shallowest, least-interesting character. Hachimaki may be a garbageman, but his ambition to be something more is clear. It’s alternately expressed as a desire to own his own spaceship (a luxury item even in this era of lunar cities) and an obsession with becoming a crew member on the first, years-long manned trip to Jupiter. By now readers familiar with the conventions of manga characterization may be rolling their eyes: The young man who works relentlessly to become the best in his chosen field is a staple of shonen stories, from your standard martial-arts adventures to the culinary competitors of Iron Wok Jan. And of course, you don’t need to be a manga devotee to know that The Brash, Tow-Headed Rookie With Something To Prove is a well-trod road indeed.

But as Hachimaki moves to the forefront, eventually becoming the lead character of the later volumes, we’re stunned to see the emergence of a genuinely complex and conflicted character. There’s nothing conventional at all about Hachimaki’s near-pathological desire to prove his emotionless self-sufficience to anyone who cares to notice. The emptiness of space–which in one of Volume One’s most harrowing sequences nearly cripples the still-inexperienced astronaut–is both the perfect nemesis for him to conquer and the perfect refuge in which he can hide from the emotional demands of interpersonal contact. It’s this that Hachimaki finds more frightening than the risks of space travel, in which humans are after all little more than glorified debris themselves.

Yukimura’s ability to slowly coax out the emotional core of his lead character lies not just in his expertise in shaping Hachimaki himself, but in the gorgeous sensitivity with which he peppers the story with memorable supporting players who naturally elicit moving and riveting responses from the upstart astronaut. There’s Mr. Rowland, the aging astronaut who’d rather abandon himself to the ravages of the lunar desert than die Earthside. There’s Nono, the lunar-born girl whose emotional strength exceeds that of her low-G-weakened physiology. There’s Hachimaki’s family: His father, the head-in-the-clouds veteran astronaut; his brother, the cool, single-minded amateur rocket scientist (seriously); his mother, whose love for her family is constantly tested by their passion for being thousands of miles away from home. There’s Hakimu, the anti-colonization terrorist (the other big growth industry of the era) whose initial refusal to kill Hachimaki is more devastating to the young explorer than his eventual change of heart. There’s Sally, the captain of Hackimaki’s Jupiter-bound crew whose last-ditch attempt to snap him out of his malaise is equal parts touching, hilarious, and (well) hot. Last and certainly not least there’s Tanabe, Hachimaki’s successor aboard the debris hauler and the woman whose belief in a thing called love becomes more attractive to Hachimaki the more infuriatingly naïve he finds it.

But the real miracle of Planetes is that its indelible characters are matched by unforgettable imagery. “Visual poetry” is how I’ve heard it described, and that nails it as well as any description can. Yukimura’s style is already more realistic and appealing than many of his counterparts’, but he adds to this an almost uncanny ability to produce both individual moments and entire sequences of stunning visual impact. Volume Three’s finest moments come when a white cat, embodying Hachimaki’s conflicting desires for death and love, directly addresses the viewer (in place of Hachimaki himself), its white tail coiling and swaying against the black void so vividly as to be nearly animate. Volume Two offers another demonstration of Yukimura’s skill with contrast: As Hachimaki nearly drowns following a motorcycle accident back on Earth, he’s drawn as a reverse negative–fluid, minimalist white lines against a black background. The effect, amidst Yukimura’s rich realism and almost colorful graytone, is as startling as the accident itself. And it’s not just extreme mental states that Yukimura evokes with panache: His splash pages of lunar landscapes and extraterrestrial vistas immediately bring to mind the vivid, alien beauty of Kubrick’s 2001, or the powerful contrast between man and nature of a Ford or Leone. Meanwhile his simple character work is just as memorable. Two standout moments come from Volume Three: Tanabe grinning as the wind blows through both her hair and the beautiful array of windmills behind her, and Tanabe’s father on stage during his punk-rock filth-and-fury heyday. The last time I saw the heart-rending loveliness of a happy, beautiful woman and the super-fuckin’-funness of rock and roll depicted this convincingly, I was reading Love and Rockets.

Is that a fair comparison to make? I think it just might be. Literate comics fans have, I think, been conditioned to ignore the kinds of books put out by the American manga-publishing giants like Tokyopop and Viz; they’ve convinced themselves to stick with the Tezukas and Miyazakis and Tsuges, or to pine wistfully after a vaguely defined glut of Good Stuff They’re Never Gonna Translate. But do yourself a favor. Elbow your way past the TRL-watching kids lined up in front of the manga racks at the bookstore. It’s an unlikely place to renew your faith in comics, I know, but if you pick up the sturdy, gray-spined volumes of Planetes you find there, that’s exactly what this emotional, beautiful series will do.

Incredible Hercules #114-115

Greg Pak & Fred Van Lente, writers

Khoi Pham, artist

Marvel Comics, February & March 2008

22 pages of story each, I think?

$2.99 each

Anyone else reading this? The Marvel fans among you must first put aside your disbelief and disgust that Marvel brass honestly believe Jeph Loeb is the best choice to take over the Hulk from Planet Hulk and World War Hulk author Greg Pak; now that Pak’s launched this spinoff title to replace Incredible Hulk (the name of the upcoming movie, in case you forgot, which apparently Marvel did), Loeb has the opportunity to inflict himself on yet another marquee character. The rest of you have no idea what I’m talking about and don’t care to find out. So I’m really speaking to the first segment of the audience: My bet is that if you enjoy superhero comics, or at least Marvel’s version thereof, you’ll really enjoy this series.

It feels a bit like Immortal Iron Fist in that it bounces between flashbacks and the present day (which I guess is Lost‘s influence on comics, now that I think about it) in a way that fleshes out its Greek god main character Hercules and his brother and nemesis Ares’ unique place in the Marvel Universe, one that retains their mythological history while still having them occasionally team-up with Hawkeye and Wonder Man. Khoi Pham’s art is impressively scratchy yet also expensive-looking, as if New Avengers artist Leinil Yu were better at drawing widescreen action. He and his sadly late colorist Stephane Peru also make the transitions between flashback and present day so distinct that I had to double-check to make sure they didn’t switch pencillers a la David Aja and his gaggle of guest stars on Iron Fist. The writing is also sharp, with the characterization of Herc, his teen-genius ally Amadeus Cho, his resentful brother and erstwhile Avenger Ares, and his former teammate and current reluctant adversary Black Widow imbued with more emotional shading than you’d think they deserve. There’s even a clever moebius-strip moment as Hercules recounts the story of his Twelve Labors, making a nice little point about both the nature of myth as primarily a chronicle of moral values rather than a history lesson, and also serving up an indictment of the self-perpetuating nature of violence among Great Men in a subtle but unmistakable way that’s rarely seen in the sort of comic that’s an oblique tie-in to World War Hulk and Secret Invasion. Like all Marvel writers at the moment, Van Lente and Pak are faced with the fact that the company’s massive Civil War event made about 50% of their intellectual property irredeemably icky; they square that circle by giving the characters implicated in Iron Man’s dickheaded dictatorship appear the same shrugged-shoulders “whaddyagonnado?” air that most of the writers themselves have. And again as with Iron Fist, there are knowing winks at Marvel’s less-than-storied ’70s material, from Hercules’ goofy old team the Champions to the fact that Godzilla was once an in-continuity target of S.H.I.E.L.D. Good stuff.

Bald Knob

John Hankiewicz, writer/artist

self-published, 2007

28 pages

$4

Buy it from John Hankiewicz

This book is more or less the platonic ideal of comics for me today. I think it was Paul Pope who wondered where the great prose stylists are in this medium? I’d recommend he check out Hankiewicz’s writing in this minicomic, a page-by-page accrual of disjointed observations about a morning the narrator (presumably Hankiewicz himself) spent with his father prior to the latter’s departure by train. It’s a “there is a certain slant of light” swirl of sense-memories and small talk: the perfume sent in an abandoned train-station waiting room, the reflected sunlight on a gravel lot, enjoying an unnecessary second meal at Waffle House, using shopworn turns of phrase to describe the weather. Hankiewicz’s words evoke an attempt to preserve the remnants of a moment, or perhaps even the remnants of a relationship, that has passed its peak level of intimacy and intensity and is now and forever imbued with a sense of its own recession into the past. Meanwhile his art does the same thing, its minutely detailed panel-per-page depictions of the crumbling buildings Hainkiewicz and his father navigate capturing the warm sadness of decrepit Americana as well as anything this side of the scenery outside your window on the train as it recedes into the distance. What a magnificent little comic.

Strangeways: Murder Moon

Matt Maxwell, writer

Luis Garagña, Gervasio, Jok, artists

Highway 62 Press, March 2008

144 pages

$13.95

Preview it at Highway 62

Buy it from MyComicShop.com

If Strangeways were twice as long as it is, it’d be a better book. I don’t mean that the story should be expanded, mind you; there’s an admirable and intelligent economy to the way Maxwell sets up his world-weary Western-horror milieu. It’s just that the existing material feels crammed into 50% fewer pages than it would really take to tell the story properly. Particularly in the early going, the exposition-heavy word balloons necessary to introduce the characters and the plot jockey for space with a riot of heavy, hard-to-parse blacks in every panel, which in turn fight for primacy on cramped pages whose gridless layouts make it difficult for the eye to find an anchor, or for the story to find a rhythm from shot to shot, page to page, and scene to scene. The result isn’t the psychological claustrophobia called for in the story but an artistic claustrophobia that hampered my experience of that story. Simply spreading the images and dialogue across more pages would give everything the room to breathe it needs. Indeed there are passages you can point to–an evocative jailhouse conversation between the sheriff and a condemned man, the climactic meeting of the gun-toting hero and his werewolf antagonist’s kin–where just such an effect is achieved. Not coincidentally, these are the points in the main story where Maxwell’s compellingly melancholy take on his two genres comes through most effectively.

The short story that rounds out the collection presents another counterfactual case in point. Here Garagña’s Caliber/Desperado-style inking is supplanted by Gervasio and Jok’s wiry line and washes of white, and the effect is like stepping out of a stuffy saloon into a moonlit night. Maxwell’s writing is particularly strong here. As with the main story, the prose is refreshingly tight (seldom is heard a misplaced word, to paraphrase a perhaps appropriate song). But this unique “origin of the species” story for the werewolves combines an imaginative core concept involving Native American mythology with genuine emotional power–it’s the kind of think I think Dan Simmons tried to do in The Terror, but like similar stories in, say, Hellboy, it works better here in this lean and mean format. (It also shakes loose of the grime-encrusted Western setting, which is fine by me. I’m a little tired of that vibe, which now that I think of it probably doesn’t bode well for my plan to Netflix my way through Deadwood.) If there’s more of this sort of thing on the way from the Strangeways project, I’d be happy to check it out.

Mouse Guard: Fall 1152

David Petersen, writer/artist

Villard Books, March 2008

200 pages

$17.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

David Petersen is a prodigiously talented illustrator, no question. When it comes to being a writer, he may not know art, but he knows what he likes. In its somber, Tolkienesque way, this tale of swordplay and strife amid warring factions of medieval mice warriors is just as much a product of the “art of enthusiasm” school of genre mash-up as Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim or Brubaker, Fraction, and Aja’s The Immortal Iron Fist, or even Neil Marshall’s Doomsday. Without a hint of irony it clearly exists to repackage Petersen’s favorite tropes–Joseph Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces, Watership Down‘s red in tooth and claw fuzzy-rodent society, Tolkien’s faux-archaiac prose, Ralph Bakshi’s rotoscoped villains–into a whole that satisfies his own obsessions, all in the hopes that it will satisfy others’ as well.

Mission accomplished on that score, at least for this reviewer, at least for the most part. Listen, I’m sure there are more hardcore fantasy devotees out there who would tear it to shreds for its likeable but stock characters and storylines (three guesses as to whether the black mouse called Midnight is the Guard’s secret traitor) and the clunkiness of the prose (“There I found the record of legend being fact”). Comics readers might object to pacing that frequently gets ahead of itself (introductory text pieces that kick off each chapter deliver vital information skipped by the comic itself; the climax of the story arrives too suddenly). You can probably tell from those flaws whether or not this thing is your cup of meat; there are probably many of you for whom it isn’t. I for one wish the book displayed even a modicum of self-awareness, let alone humor, about itself; I can’t imagine Petersen thinks anything other than he’s making one for the ages, and that loss of perspective hurts him at critical moments, from shading his characters to recognizing the failure of the ending.

But never once did I feel like my intelligence was insulted, a prerequisite for any action-adventure comic that many fail to meet. Nor did I feel like I was “reading” a series of pin-ups or illustrations instead of a comic. For all his pure chops–the lush, textural colors, the evocatively shaky line, the note-perfect cute-savage mouse designs–Petersen does indeed cartoon in these pages. The sound effect for a snake’s hiss weaves sinuously through the foliage. A sudden cut to a goggles-wearing mouse elicits a guffaw. Astute use of photorealism gives predatory snakes and crabs an otherworldly air. Even the format–the pages are square!–speaks to Petersen’s confidence in his vision. It’s not quite fully realized, indeed for anyone other than Petersen it probably couldn’t be, but as comics’ answer to Harry Potter it entertained me enough to tune in next time.

Across the Universe: The DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore

Alan Moore, writer

Dave Gibbons, Klaus Janson, Jim Baikie, Kevin O’Neill, Paris Cullins, Rick Veitch, Al Williamson, Joe Orlando, Bill Willingham, George Freeman, artists

DC Comics, 2003

208 pages

$19.95

Buy it used from Amazon.com

Though it’s now out of print, having been supplanted by a collection that also includes the longer stories Batman: The Killing Joke and Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, this particular anthology of mainline-DC stories by Alan Moore is the superior book, and not just because of the absence of the irksome reproduction errors that plagued the two aforementioned stories in the later edition. Without those two tales–both of them swinging-for-the-fences “last word” efforts about their respective milieus, grim’n’gritty Batman and Silver Age Superman–overshadowing the proceedings, we’re able to better compare in apples-to-apples fashion the short stories that remain, and better appreciate their pleasurable successes–and almost as pleasurable failures.

Moore’s superhero work dealt with the same problems as any superhero story–devising wild science-fiction settings, creating threats believable enough to overwhelm the audience’s knowledge that nothing bad is really gonna happen to our hero, deriving resonance from each character’s time-honored tropes. The best I can do to describe what he did differently from his contemporaries is to say that he solved these problems by attacking them from a completely different direction than any other writer at the time.

For example, in not one but two separate “Superman vs. parasitical plant life” stories–the Swamp Thing crossover “The Jungle Line” and the now-classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for tale “For the Man Who Has Everything”–Moore makes the all but invulnerable Superman eminently vulnerable, physically and emotionally, by tying him back to his roots in the apocalyptic extermination of Krypton and its inhabitants. Rather than simply throw another alien powerhouse or supergenius at the guy as most writers would do, Moore plays off the “Last Son” aspect of the character to create a threat that’s primarily emotional rather than physical or mental–blazing a path that’s still followed by the character’s most successful interpreters to this day.

Many of his other novel approaches stem from the classical science-fiction notion of a “literature of ideas,” as opposed to the superhero science-fiction norm of humanoid aliens in crazy clothes with laser guns. These stories’ strength is one of raw concept: How would a Green Lantern power ring operate for a being with no concept of light or sight? How do you conquer beings who operate on a time frame so slow that it would take them years to even notice your presence? How do you teach the birds and the bees to a species with no females? Why limit the aliens we encounter to more or less humanoid forms when they could be sentient planets or sentient smallpox viruses? It’s a litany of the kind of idea that’d blow the minds of anyone whose idea of science fiction began on Tattooine and ended on Krypton.

The art in the collection firmly roots it to the time of its origin. To a superhero reader raised on the high-gloss, digitally colored, border-busting, photoref’d slugfests of today, it all must look hopelessly primitive; even the artists who still have some name-recognition juice today, like Dave “Watchmen” Gibbons and Klaus Janson, come across as quaintly classicist and nostalgically sloppy respectively. (God only knows what a Greg Land fan would make of the Lovecraftian avant-garde demons in Kevin O’Neill’s creepy Green Lantern story!) But this too plays to Moore’s strengths as a writer in this period by harkening back to a simpler time before the writer grew so fixated on form and referentiality, instead preferring simple superhero morality plays of idea and emotion.

Not everything works, not by a long shot. Stories involving street-level heroes Green Arrow & Black Canary and Vigilante are distinguished primarily by less-than-enthralling narrative conceits, the former likening a night in the big city to an athletic event for no clear reason and the latter interspersing Vigilante’s team-up with a comically clichéd party girl (“I’ve got forty kilos of good Colombian weed stashed up there!”) with excerpts from the creepily loving letter of the pedophile they’re chasing to his intended victim. A Batman story from the perspective of an obscure, insane villain who thinks he’s perfectly sane has its limitations revealed by the two decades’ worth of such stories that followed. All the standard pitfalls of ’80s superhero comics can be found at one point or another: multiracial vest-wearing street gangs, howlingly unrealistic dialect, incongruously forcing clunky sci-fi ideas into conversational speech (“Why are you still staring out of the window? The underlights of Aunt Allura’s paragondola vanished five units ago.”).

But those good stories—the Superman, Green Lantern, and Vega ones mostly—are really awfully good. Best of all they make it seem like telling a good story was Moore’s only goal. Maybe that’s why I enjoy this book as much as almost anything I’ve read by the bard of Northampton: With no Victoriana to riff on and no snake gods to worship, the guy can spin a heckuva yarn.

Hellboy Junior

Mike Mignola, Bill Wray, writers

Mignola, Hilary Barta, Dave Cooper, Stephen Destefano, Pat McEown, Kevin Nowlan, artists

Dark Horse Comics, January 2004

120 pages

$14.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

Originally written on June 23, 2004 for publication by The Comics Journal

The post-movie-version influx of new readers to a tie-in title has, at least since the first Batman film, been something of a chimera for mainstream comics publishers. This is most likely because nearly everyone on Earth is already aware that (say) Spider-Man comics exist, and have made up their minds long ago whether or not they are actually going to buy such things, regardless of whether or not they agree with Gene Shalit’s assessment that the character’s celluloid incarnation is “a non-stop thrill ride” or what have you. Seen in that light, Mike Mignola’s much-lauded but relatively obscure Hellboy actually has more in common with Ghost World than The Hulk, and the bona-fide sales boom for Hellboy graphic novels after the film’s critical and commercial success bears this out.

One can only wonder, then, what Joe & Jane Q. Non-Fanboy would think were they to wander into their local Android’s Dungeon (or, more likely, Borders) in search of further adventures of the sardonic, demonic paranormal investigator, only to pick up a copy of Hellboy Junior instead. Sure, Ron Perlman is a great comic actor, even under six inches of prosthetics. But could even his wittiest mid-battle bon mot prepare the unwary reader for a comic in which a young Hellboy pays for mail-order hallucinogenic mushrooms with gold teeth pulled out of the mouth of an emetophagic Idi Amin, who is later rewarded by Satan with sex for all eternity with a septuagenarian nun?

Such is the sense of humor on display in this completely out-of-left-field anthology, released this spring and comprised of comics originally published in the late ’90s. Primarily an extended riff on Mignola’s character by gonzo humor cartoonist and Ren & Stimpy collaborator Bill Wray, Hellboy Junior largely eschews the former’s eerie, deadpan comedy for something much closer to Angry Youth Comix. Pustules abound, as do vomit, interspecies sex, and dismemberment. It may sound overly broad and scattershot, but it’s done with an offensive brio that makes it difficult not to go along, and laugh while you’re at it. Well, laugh, or exclaim “Holy shit.” This is, after all, a Muppet Babies version of a beloved hero, and here he is involved in stories that end with Bob Hope emceeing at the crucifixion of Hitler.

The Hellboy Junior stories themselves are a mixed bag. “The Devil Don’t Smoke,” drawn by Mignola himself, contains the kind of non-sequitur humor that made Mignola’s The Amazing Screw-On Head such a treat (there’s a one-panel cameo appearance by an imperious skeleton with a nail through his head, you know what I mean?), and as such is far removed from the sicko gags of the rest of the book. Artist Dave Cooper makes “Hellboy Jr’s Magical Mushroom Trip” every bit as visually rich as you’d expect, though the real star of the show may well be Cooper’s luminous covers and smart lettering, which depict the various stages of H.J.’s reverie with perfectly evocative clarity. But the two Hellboy tales drawn by Wray run on well past the point of diminishing returns–maggots, violence, abusing Hitler, yes, we get it.

Indeed, the funniest, and not coincidentally the most offensive, moments come not in the Hellboy material, but in Wray’s incongruous parodies of old Harvey comics and other storybook & cartoon icons. Baby Huey, for example, is re-imagined by Wray and artist Stephen DeStefano as Huge Retarded Duck, an enormous diaper-clad imbecile who graphically disembowels three redneck ducklings during their attempted rape of his mother, only to impregnate her himself. Folks, that’s comedy. Throw in an Acme-style ad for the Spear of Destiny (“I couldn’t have killed Christ without it!” raves Gaius Cassius, Roman Centurion) and sharp, sleazy art turns by Hilary Barta and Pat McEown, and you’ve got a package that’ll amuse the deviant 15-year-old in all of us. Let’s just hope it doesn’t single-handedly derail the semi-horned one’s marketing mojo.

Battlestack Galacti-crap

Brian Chippendale, writer/artist

self-published, January 2005

28 pages

I forget how much it cost and can’t find a realistic price anywhere online

Buy it from Target, believe it or not

The other day I mentioned that Micrographica‘s casual quality did not mesh well with its presentation as a perfectbound graphic novella. Battlestack Galacti-crap, on the other hand, is exactly what it should be–a crazy little minicomic with a bright green-and-pink silkscreend cover and photocopied pages that look like they can barely contain the throwaway wildness they document.

The product of Fort Thunder alum/Lightning Bolt drummer/Ninja and Maggots author/Björk collaborator Brian Chippendale, its “story” is kind of like The Wire for three-year-olds: A group of gaudily costumed creatures called Gang Gloom has the bright idea to sell cheap cupcakes down on Stack Street, a move that the members of rival outfit Teamy Weamy don’t take kindly to. The resulting rumble, “of course,” ends up with all the participants stacked on top of each other in tangled-up tower of crazy creatures–apparently that’s how “any interaction on Stack Street always ends.”

Something about this minicomic tapped into a long-forgotten vein of surreal action-humor in my psyche. When I was a kid I seem to remember being fascinated by the idea of people/things being so stuck together they couldn’t move, yet not treating this like a crisis and simply chit-chatting with each other like it’s a minor inconvenience. (This seems like a Jim Henson kinda idea–was it from a Muppet movie?) Needless to say it’s a perfect fit with Chippendale’s method of choice for cartooning, which is to fill up as much of the page with visual information as he can, and the scenes of dozens of helmet and mask-wearing characters mashed together are appropriately sloppy and exuberant. But many of the characters get a chance to shine on either end of the action in the ersatz pin-up pages that kick off and conclude the story. In both cases the art provides the visual punch for Chippendale’s goofy sense of humor: The solo shots of the characters proposing the cupcake-selling idea grant an absurd sense of grandeur to the silly proceedings, while the suggestion by one guy at the bottom of the titular “battlestack” that another’s back injury might be cured by one of the recipes in his handy copy of Healing with Whole Foods reaches a Pythonesque level of comic incongruity. And then there’s that lovely page where someone yells “EVERYBODY OFF!” and the stack collapses in a dynamically lovely waterfall of falling bodies. Top to bottom, this minicomic is a miniature model of form fitting function.

Kill Your Boyfriend

Grant Morrison, writer

Philip Bond, artist

DC/Vertigo, 1995

62 pages

$5.95

Buy it used for, like, $40 from Amazon.com

There was a time, circa the moment in high school when I nicknamed my then-girlfriend’s breasts Mickey and Mallory, when I would have thought this astonishingly earnest encomium to the liberation of smart high-schoolers via sex, drugs, violence, and arty notions of personal identity was the coolest motherfucking book I’d ever read. There have also been times, like the moment I realized how incredibly stupid it was to give that same girlfriend a copy of Sin City bearing the inscription “I’ll be your Marv if you’ll be my Goldie” for her birthday and not expect her to be disturbed by my comparing her to a dead prostitute, that a book like this would have earned sneers of derision and/or waves of nausea from me.

At this particular moment, however, I’m at a Goldilocks-like level of just-right comfort with this comic. Goddess only knows if Grant Morrison intended lines like “The only way to stop being bored is to do something interesting or criminal. These days it comes to the same thing” with a straight face, but viewed from the remove of 14 years Kill Your Boyfriend strike me less as po-faced Warren Ellis-style pop-violent hipsterism and more of an embrace-cum-pastiche of its most ridiculous aspects, an exercise in depicting the mindset of a bored kid who’s too cool for school and too smart for his own good than a demonstration of being embarrassingly trapped in that mindset. Little flourishes throughout the comic point in that self-aware direction: The presence of genuinely transgressive elements, like unwitting incest, that are left on the page to be troubling and never get absolved via the I’m-okay-you’re-okay treatment (a la Alan Moore’s Smax); the seeming acknowledgment via a group of all-talk-no-action art students that this comic itself is all talk and no action; the use of direct address by the teenage-girl protagonist, with word balloons disarmingly replacing narrative captions, to highlight the unreality of the narrative and the comparative cipher nature of the glamorous-criminal boyfriend figure; the fact that the ballyhooed killing spree really only includes two murders (Natural Born Killers or Bonnie and Clyde this isn’t). Even some of the stuff that I think can be read more straightforwardly, like the Girl’s proclamation of her first sexual encounter as “brilliant,” is fine with me, since so was mine, and fuck the bluenose prudery that drums otherwise into everyone’s head.

Of course there’s plenty here that’s kind of a mess. The run-on declamations of everyone’s awesomeness are way too on-the-nose. The Girl’s square original boyfriend is a mess of contradictory character traits–fantasy-geek prurience jars bizarrely with condescending asceticism, and the notion that any teenage guy would turn down actual sex in favor of jerking off is ludicrous on its face. The ending, with its “whoa look out your normal-looking neighbor might be a killcrazy former sex maniac who took E and liked it so watch out you dead-behind-the-eyes wage slave” message was surely just as played out when it was written in 1994 as it is now. And the Vertigo-mandated occlusion of any actual explicitness when it comes to sex is as cringe-inducing as always, given how far they’ll take the violence and how much they pride themselves on being “mature.” But nothing can be too terrible when it’s drawn by Philip Bond, whose Britpop cartooniness couldn’t be more perfect for this material. Overall it’s not a comic I see myself returning to very often, but as a warts-and-all time capsule of what it’s like to be one of Morrison’s archetypal “smart 14-year-olds,” you could do worse.

Beginning in mid-January, I started watching The Wire from Season One onward via Netflix and, eventually, TiVo. Obviously I’d heard great things about the show for ages, but the crescendo surrounding the start of the show’s fifth and final season coupled with the realization that I could pop a disc into my computer and watch an episode a day on my lunchbreak finally proved too much for me to resist. Soon after starting, I began emailing my thoughts about the show to sundry friends, but mostly to All Too Flat mastermind Kennyb, who had started plowing through the show a couple months before me, I think.

Now that I’ve finished the series, I’ve compiled all these little (mostly) one-sided dialogues for your enjoyment. Taken together, they provide a running commentary on the show, and an ongoing view into my reaction to it. And since I came to the show with the perspective of someone who loves its main rival for the title of Best Show Ever, The Sopranos, these emails also frequently compare and contrast the two shows.

So, SPOILER WARNING FOR ANYONE WHO HASN’T SEEN EVERY EPISODE OF THE SHOW. I blow plot points left right and center. But if you have seen the whole thing, my hope is that you can get something out of watching my take on the show evolve from episode to episode and season to season until it becomes a more-or-less coherent response to the political and thematic issues addressed by the show and the techniques it uses to address them.

—–

Date: Jan 17 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Justin Aclin
Subject: TV

Best Dramas Ever:
The Sopranos
Twin Peaks
Lost
Battlestar Galactica

Best Comedies Ever:
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Fawlty Towers
The State
Seinfeld

You could cobble together a top-tier comedy from the best stuff SNL has done over the years, and I’m about five episodes deep into The Wire so the jury is still out on that one, but for now, THE END.

—–

Date: Jan 23 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Subject: Comment

I’m watching an episode of The Wire every day during my lunchbreak. Pretty good so far. Yesterday I finished Season One Episode 8, the one where Omar (who’s awesome) kills Stinkum and they up the bounty on his head to $10,000. I’m enjoying it a lot, though at the moment I don’t see the argument for it being better than The Sopranos.

—–

Date: Jan 30 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Subject: The Wire season one

I just finished it yesterday and will probably start season two on Friday during lunch (today I’ve got no discs from Netflix and tomorrow I’m interviewing Katee “Starbuck” Sackhoff during my lunchbreak). It’s fun to see that (judging from the season’s final scene) the creators quickly realized that Omar is basically the coolest character ever. I really enjoyed it overall and am glad things more or less worked out for the cops. My one quibble is that D’Angelo’s relationship with his Lady Macbeth-esque mother wasn’t well-established enough for it to make sense to me for him to suddenly change his mind at her behest about all the horrendous stuff his uncle made him a party to, which we just spent an entire season establishing he just couldn’t stand, and do a 20-year bid on Avon’s behalf instead of flipping.

What I like about this show is how it sets up the ultimate indications of good policework and being a good person as cooperation, competence, and creativity, three vastly underrated qualities in the real world.

—–

Date: Jan 30 2008
From: Kenneth Bromberg
To: Sean T. Collins
Re: The Wire season one

Ally and I just finished watching Season 4 last week. That problem
with fundamental changes in behavior with no discernible reason
happens a couple of times throughout the show (it’s actually something
Ally and I were discussing the other day about a character in S4).

The second season is good, but not as good as the first, in my
opinion, ‘cuz the bands all broken up at the beginning, and it’s an
entirely different chemistry. Possibly still good, but I watched it
so soon after finishing the first season (as you will be) that it was
hard to get into and enjoy the same way.

—–

Date: Jan 30 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Re: The Wire season one

I was gonna say, it must be tough for the writers to justify getting McNulty out of the marine unit and back with his old team.

—–

Date: Feb 6 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Subject: The best Wu-Tang verse ever?

My top five:

1) Ol’ Dirty Bastard on “Brooklyn Zoo” (the whole song is all one verse for chrissakes)
2) U-God on Raekwon’s “Knuckleheadz”
3) RZA on Ghostface Killah’s “Ghost Deini”
4) Inspectah Deck on Wu-Tang Clan’s “Triumph” (“I bomb atomically” etc.)
5) Inspectah Deck on GZA/Genius’s “Duel of the Iron Mic” (“Building lobbies are graveyards for small-timers/Bitches caught in airports, keys in they vaginas” is the most evocative hip-hop couplet ever written)

You?

Sean

PS: Six eps deep into The Wire Season Two. You’re right, it starts slow, but it’s super satisfying to watch the bullshit politics with Valchek work in their favor! When I realized that was what was gonna happen I laughed out loud. Also, the show is doing a really good job with the dockworker characters–they really could have screwed the pooch on the whole show if those guys weren’t interesting and well-acted. However, I was disappointed with the death of D’Angelo because it felt like an afterthought in that episode. Compare it to deaths of major characters in The Sopranos where you spend the whole episode terrified of what’s going to happen even if you don’t know that it IS going to happen. What’s funny is that his demise is the most Sopranos-esque thing that’s happened on the show, from the loyal relative/underling having second thoughts about the life angle to Stringer screwing his babymama.

—–

Date: Feb 14 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Subject: The Wire and fairness

Okay, so I just finished the second-to-last episode of Season Two, and one thing that I’m really finding about this show is that I can handle murder–it’s people being UNFAIR I can’t stand! I hate the Greek’s FBI mole, I hate that Stringer tried to trick Omar into killing Brother Mouzone, I hate the brass fucking Daniels and McNulty and Prez for political reasons…if you want to sell drugs and rob and steal and kill people for money, by all means. Just be HONEST!

On a related note, please don’t tell me if there is eventually an Omar/Brother Mouzone team-up at some point, because for now I’m enjoying writing the fanfic in my head.

—–

Date: Feb 20 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Subject: Wire update

Okay, I finished Season Two last week, and it definitely ended on a high note. It was weird–right until the last two episodes I felt like “whoa, this season’s almost over? It feels like it barely got started!” I think that was because compared to Avon and Stringer, the Sobotka boys were pretty harmless, so you didn’t feel that the show had generated the same sense of urgency about catching them. But then it flipped to whether or not they were going to get killed, and even though they got a little heavy handed at times (the weird slo-mo after Ziggy killed the greek guy who ran the electronics store), I really felt for Frank and Nick. And I was SUPER-glad Omar wised up to Stringer giving him bad intel about Brother Mouzone, as I think I mentioned.

Now I’m a couple episodes into Season Three, and I can’t help but be a little disappointed that they’re not taking things in just as left-field a direction as dedicating Season Two to the plight of the stevedores union. It’s right back in the Avon/Stringer/corner-dealer/police-politics territory of Season One. I mean, still a good show, but I was hoping for, I dunno, airport workers.

—–

Date: Feb 22 2008
Chat with Justin Aclin

Justin: Lost definitely learned a thing or wo about introducing characters versus Nikki and Paolo last year
me: Yep.
Do you watch The Wire?
Very good at introducing new characters even when they seemingly have NOTHING to do with the characters we already know.
(I’m catching up on Netflix)
Justin: Haven’t watched it yet
me: It’s good.
Justin: So I hear. One of these days

—–

Date: Feb 26 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Subject: About halfway through Season Three of The Wire

I like that Stringer set up the Commission!
Omar is underused. I don’t know if they could use him more without removing some of the mystique, though.
Last night I had a dream that D’Angelo Barksdale and Tasha from Omar’s crew had somehow been brought back to life by the government and were going to work for the cops as informants. But then Tasha was a double agent.
You know what one big difference between this and The Sopranos is? The Sopranos is one of the scariest shows I’ve ever seen. I always kind of spent the episodes in a state of half-terror that something was going to happen. Even when there are gunfights and murders on The Wire, you don’t feel that way. Somehow it’s just a much more straightforward show, if that makes any sense.

—–

Date: Feb 26 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kiel Phegley
Re: Bourne movies

I HAVE heard good things about them, particularly in the formal-filmmaking areas you cite. Although I must admit that I got a little cheesed off when I heard him talking smack about James Bond, considering how good Casino Royale was.

Maybe I’ll Netflix ’em after I get through The Wire–I’m about halfway through season three now, which leaves season four and the current/final season. Do you watch that show?

I find it very engrossing, but I don’t see myself returning to it the way I do The Sopranos, Lost, Twin Peaks, or BSG. Or Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, or Seinfeld, for that matter.

I don’t know why that is, necessarily–perhaps because it’s just less WEIRD than any of those shows, and the weirdness, the stuff that you can’t point to and explain exactly why that was there in the show, is where the most intellectual and emotional excitement is located for me.

But as a police procedural, it’s pretty impossible to beat. And almost all the characters are INSANELY likeable. You wanna hang out with all of them!

—–

Date: Feb 27 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Subject: Wire update

I’m going to blog all these once I’m finished with the series btw.

So I’m up to, like, ep 9 of Season Three.

Poor Prez! Ah, you knew things would end badly the second they took time to make sure we noticed him and McNulty doing anything together.

Thought of the day: Brother Mouzone must be to Wire fans what the Russian is to Sopranos fans.

—–

Date: Feb 27 2008
Chat with Justin Aclin

me: I’m still working through The Wire
addictive!
but mostly because of this one character who I won’t spoil for you
but you’ll know who I’m talking about if you ever watch it
boy, will you ever
Justin: Nice.
I’ll watch it when me and the missus are in a mental state to watch something a little heavier
me: yeah.
although it doesn’t bring me down the way The Sopranos did
when I first watched the first three seasons of The Sopranos in a row, it affected my personality
Justin: wow!
me: yeah, I got angrier easier
I went about in pity for myself
Justin: They never established who gave him that card, did they?
me: no
Justin: It was the Russian.
me: if I had to pinpoint the reason why The Sopranos is better than The Wire, it’s that The Wire would tell you
hahahahaha
actually this morning I thought to myself that a certain Wire character must be the Russian for Wire fans
Justin: The Russian was responsible for all dangling plot threads
He killed the cameraman at the end of the finale
me: hahahahahahaha
brilliant
Justin: Thanks. 🙂
“The further adventures of the Russian” – YouTube gold!
me: w3rd

—–

Date: Feb 29 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: TJ Dietsch
Re: Last night’s Lost

A side note about how anal-retentive I am regarding avoiding spoilers: I close one eye and use one hand to block the very bottom of the screen during the opening of every episode in order not to see who’s guest-starring in the episode, because the dumbasses constantly blow big surprise cameo appearances by putting the actors’ names in the credits at the beginning of the show. In much the same way, I used to block the screen before episodes of The Sopranos when HBO would put up the content-warning screen because I didn’t want to know beforehand if there’d be any violence or not.

This is why I refuse to learn who plays who on The Wire aside from Dominic West and Lance Reddick.

—–

Date: Feb 29 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Subject: I just saw the second-to-last episode of The Wire Season 3

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Mother fucking TEAM-UP!!!!!!!!!!!!

It was everything I’d hoped for and more. Well played, gentlemen. Well fucking played.

HHHHHHHAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Okay, I think I’ve calmed down long enough to point out that Omar and Brother Mouzone’s little joint venture worked the exact same way as a Silver Age superhero crossover. When they first meet, there’s a misunderstanding and they fight, but then they clear things up and work together to take down a common foe. (Now that I think about it, that was the idea behind the movie that the Three Amigos rejected and got fired over.)

I am in heaven.

One more episode to go in this season I guess, but it’s nice to see it following The Sopranos’ pattern of having the biggest stuff happen in the penultimate episode.

My main wish is that everything work out for Dennis the boxer. I’d be really pissed if he ended up getting killed or arrested or his gym gets closed. That would be unfair!

Now that I think about it, this season stands a chance of having everything work out for everyone. I’m sure Daniels’s group will be bummed about Stringer’s death since they don’t get to put him away themselves, but meanwhile Bunny will arrest Avon, Carcetti will go to bat for the free zones, and young up-and-comer Marlowe will end up in charge of the area. Huzzah!

Sean

PS: You must have gotten a kick out of me comparing Brother Mouzone to the Russian the other day.

—–

Date: Mar 1 2008
From: Kenneth Bromberg
To: Sean T. Collins
Re: I just saw the second-to-last episode of The Wire Season 3

> PS: You must have gotten a kick out of me comparing Brother Mouzon to the
> Russian the other day.

It made me laugh a lot.

—–

Date: Mar 5 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Subject: The Wire update

Okay, I’m three episodes deep into Season Four now, but within one episode I pinpointed why I was always vaguely disappointed with Season Three. At first I thought it was because S1 established the ground rules, and then S2 threw them out the window in a thrilling way and introduced a whole new environment with the Sobotkas and the docks and the Greeks, while S3 basically went back to S1 territory. (Albeit with a slight expansion, into Bunny Colvin’s sci-fi alternate reality where America had a semi-sane drug policy. Carcetti’s political stuff was mostly an afterthought and at any rate didn’t feel nearly as far removed from the world of the show at large as, say, the stevedore stuff felt from the Barksdale gang.)

I still think that’s PART of why S3 felt less impressive in the end than the other seasons, but when I saw that they’d be spending a lot of time on the middle-school kids in S4, I realized a different factor was at play: S3 didn’t have a *tragedy.* Season One had D’Angelo and Wallace–basically good people who got caught up in crime and paid for it. Season Two had Frank, Nick, and Ziggy Sobotka–same deal. Season Three didn’t have anything like that. Now, maybe everything will work out for Namond and Dookie and Randy and the rest of those little rascals, but somehow I doubt it–bang, tragedy.

So far I’m enjoying Marlowe as the villain. He and his followers (especially Chris and Snoop, obvs) are creepy and dangerous rather than blustery and dangerous like Avon and Stringer’s outfit. It’s an interesting tonal shift. I await the inevitable Snoop vs. Omar conflagration with bated breath.

There has also been an impressive amount of visible dick in the season thus far. Including an erection, mid-BJ! (Belonging to the Colonel from A Different World, no less.) It’s not TV, it’s HBO.

Finally, Prez Goes to School makes me think of my wife’s job. Hers involves fewer incidents with boxcutters, to be fair.

—–

Date: Mar 6 2008
From: Jim Dougan
To: Sean T. Collins
Subject: Parting Ways

The Wire “not even close” to the Sopranos? Here’s where you and I part ways, sir…in divorce court this is what they call “irreconcilable differences”.

smooch

—–

Date: Mar 6 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Jim Dougan
Re: Parting Ways

Not even close.

—–

Date: Mar 6 2008
From: Jim Dougan
To: Sean T. Collins
Re: Parting Ways

Funny; I feel the same way in the exact opposite direction. I guess we’ll agree to disagree again…

—–

Date: Mar 6 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Jim Dougan
Re: Parting Ways

I get the sense from reading political blogs that preferring The Wire to The Sopranos is a DC/NY thing.

—–

Date: Mar 6 2008
From: Jim Dougan
To: Sean T. Collins
Re: Parting Ways

Funny, that. I’m guessing it’s the primacy of government and other institutional power here, whereas NY is a more war of all against all kind of thing – individuals vs. individuals. It also could be just the familiarity of the setting, a little “hometown pride” thing, conscious or unconscious.

We DCers can identify more closely with the plight of souls futilely (is that a word?) throwing themselves against implacable, corrupt institutions than with individuals carving out their own space, their downfall being their implacable and unchanging personal demons, in a world that they otherwise would be expected to control (or at least guide). I know that years of dealing with the DC city gov’t (not even the Feds) through an interminable home renovation has left me permanently scarred and highly sympathetic to The Wire’s worldview. That is, I can change and become a better person (unlike Tony), but no matter how much I’ve got my shit together personally I will always be at the mercy of an government institution that makes Brazil look attractive (at least there you can bribe people to get shit done.)

And yet, here I am.

—–

Date: Mar 6 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Jim Dougan
Re: Parting Ways

I’m cooking up a massive post on The Wire for when I get through all of it, constructed of these little missives I’m sending to a buddy of mine every once in a while who caught up with the show before I did, and I’m sure I’ll elaborate on this point in that eventual post, but I think you’re right about the primacy of institutional elements in The Wire vs. what I read as a more “open text” approach in The Sopranos, where it’s less tied into the mechanics of how the police/docks/gangs/schools/newspapers work and more about an examination of a bad person.

And yeah, I’m sure Jersey plays the same role for New Yorkers and Long Islanders that Baltimore plays for the Beltway.

—–

Date: Mar 8 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Subject: Powering through The Wire Season Four

..in a desperate and no doubt futile attempt to be able to finish all my TiVo’d Season Five episodes before the inevitable series-finale spoilers become unavoidable online. I’m in the middle of the second-to-last episode now.

Thoughts:

1) The stuff with the kids is fantastic, just as gutsy as the dockworker stuff but probably even better. A storyline like this is definitely what Season Three was missing, both in terms of that tragic feel I was talking about and the out-of-left-field-ness of it. I’m going to be really, really, really upset if (when) something really bad happens to one of them, goddammit.

2) The political blogger Matt Yglesias is a big fan, as are seemingly all political bloggers, and he posted something I caught out of the corner of my eye the other day saying the show’s best stuff was the rise and fall of Stringer Bell. I don’t think so. Not that Stringer wasn’t an interesting character or a good villain or played by a good actor, because all that’s true, but of all the non-politician, non-brass, non-Greek, non-Marlo’s-crew characters, he’s basically the most unapologetically douchebaggish. We never see that he really cared about anyone or anything other than power and himself and getting more power for himself. Compared to Avon or Frank Sobotka (or Tony Soprano or anyone from that show), he never really did anything nice for anyone, or showed that he was upset about doing any of the deceitful and awful things that he did. I guess selling Avon out upset him mildly, but clearly not as bad as selling Stringer out upset Avon, or as bad as finding out what happened to D’Angelo upset Avon, and on and on and on. So when he dies, I really was just thinking “good riddance to this jerk.” Especially since he was killed at the hands of the best character on the show and another really cool villain.

3) I’m really digging well-adjusted, sober, family-man, non-dickhead McNulty. I hope he keeps it up!

4) As the show goes on I continue to feel genuine affection for all the characters who go out of their way to help each other and be competent and cooperative and not stab people in the back. Lester would probably be number one, but also Bunny, Bunk, Kima, Prez, and to a certain extent Daniels and Carcetti. Working together and being nice to people because it’s nice to be nice to people are among my favorite virtues in this world.

And oh yeah, fuck Marlo. The second he had that poor security guard killed because he dared talk back to him, he put a bullseye on his head as far as I’m concerned. Avon would have civilians killed if they really crossed him, but not just because they had the temerity to ask not to be insulted.

—–

Date: Mar 8 2008
From: Kenneth Bromberg
To: Sean T. Collins
Re: Powering through The Wire Season Four

I know I don’t often respond to these messages of yours – don’t think
it’s because I’m not interested in what you have to say, or don’t want
to hold a discussion about it. It’s because I know I’m ahead of you
in the season, but it’s all kind of mashed up in my head. So I don’t
want to inadvertently say something which would ruin the show for you.
This is one of those shows where that would be a real shame.

> And oh yeah, fuck Marlo. The second he had that poor security guard killed
> because he dared talk back to him, he put a bullseye on his head as far as I’m
> concerned. Avon would have civilians killed if they really crossed him, but not
> just because they had the temerity to ask not to be insulted.

Yeah, that was such a tense scene right there, and completely defined
him as a character. And by “character” I obviously mean “douche”

—–

Date: Mar 8 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Re: Powering through The Wire Season Four

Dude, no worries at all–I totally don’t expect any replies. In fact I expect and DEMAND no replies for the exact reasons you cite. Mostly I just hope to entertain you with my inaccurate predictions a la Brother Mouzone = The Russian. 🙂 And like I said I’m compiling all this stuff for a big blog post after I finish the series.

I forgot to put Dennis and Omar on my list of competent, decent people. Well, relatively speaking with Omar.

—–

Date: Mar 9 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Re: Powering through The Wire Season Four

Okay, finished Season Four. The final two episodes were pretty magnificent basically because of what I was saying before about the role the kids played. Not only were all of their stories really moving, but I think casting them as the victims of the unfeeling bureaucracy rather than the cops made that theme hit home emotionally in a way that before that it was really doing primarily mentally. Like, we all know the drug war is a farcical assault on poor people, black people, civil liberties, common sense, and basic human decency, and now the system is rigged so that it really can’t be stopped. We all know that, which makes the point kind of an easy one to make, which is why I think all the political bloggers and mainstream-media critics love the show so much–they don’t even need to work AT ALL to find an ALLEGORY for the dark side of the American dream in this, because that’s what it’s about on a surface level. But making it about the kids and seeing how that rigid approach to fluid problems affects not just the police and the judicial system but also the education system and the political system kind of elevates it into that realm that I like so much, which is that notion that pretty much everything is terrible.

My one slight quibble is that Bodie’s change of heart in a positive direction was really just as sudden as D’Angelo’s change of heart in a negative direction at the end of Season One. Bodie didn’t get enough time this season for that to feel properly built up. Bubbles’s suicide attempt had a little more build-up but it still felt a little undercooked–maybe because he was discovered by Landsman, who didn’t have the history with him that Kima or even McNulty did?

—–

Date: Mar 9 2008
From: Kenneth Bromberg
To: Sean T. Collins
Re: Powering through The Wire Season Four

Ally and I discussed that first bit a lot after we watched the last
couple of episodes. We both felt that sort of character shift was a
very surprising weakness in an otherwise incredibly strong show. And
it was funny, because you could *see* that it was going to happen, and
that the shift was inevitable… but not because of any actual
character development that was going on. Just because it was an
inevitable part of the storyline.

—–

Date: Mar 9 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Subject: Powering through The Wire Season Five

Okay, now I’m three eps deep into Season Five. Rough start if you ask me.

1) After the dock stuff and especially the school/kids stuff, having the latest left turn be into the newspaper world feels pretty self-indulgent. Compared to what happened to Randy, Dukie, Namond, and Michael, I really don’t care that the Sun shuttered its Beijing bureau.

2) You wanna talk about incongruous changes of direction in character, how about McNulty? If the reason he’s drinking and whoring and being a dickhead again is because he’s frustrated that he can’t make big cases, why wasn’t he drinking and whoring and being a dickhead when he was a beat cop for that year? I’m not just complaining because he’s stepping out on Amy Ryan, who by rights should make any Irishman happy as a pig in shit to come home to every night–I’m complaining because it feels like the writers got bored with him being a decent person and reverted to form.

3) And don’t even get me started about him making up a serial killer. I feel about that the way Bunk does. And Lester joining in? Another out-of-character moment. Doesn’t it occur to these two geniuses that even if their plan works, they might end up getting taken off the Marlo Stansfield investigation to work their non-existent serial killer?

4) Speaking of lying douchebags, I’m already sick of the fabulist at the newspaper. They could have at least cast an actor who doesn’t scream “I’m a dick!” just from looking at him. I know, I know, I hate unfair stuff and lying is unfair and that’s why I don’t like this storyline, but I don’t like this storyline.

5) Man OH man does Marlo and his crew of psychopaths have to go. The problem is that I don’t see how the writers WON’T kill Omar in the process of him taking Marlo down, which is pissing me off preemptively.

6) Wouldn’t it have just been easier to leak the shuttering of the investigation into the 22 rowhouse bodies to the press and get the money flowing again that way than making up a goddamn serial killer? Seriously, that’s annoying.

—–

Date: Mar 10 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Re: Powering through The Wire Season Five

Only three more episodes to go in the season. I feel like in this last episode it took a slight turn for the less infuriating, what with Gus finally starting to unravel Scott’s bullshit stories, Omar really going to work on Marlo’s people, and at least some tangible benefits for other cases stemming from Jimmy’s unbelievably cockamamie invent-a-psycho storyline.

But there are still so many problems:

* It’s not just that Jimmy and Lester are being dishonest, which would just be a flaw in the character, it’s that they’re also being stupid, which is OUT of character. As I predicted, their nonsense is keeping Bunk from ACTUALLY pinning a real murder on Marlo Stanfield–I had a feeling that Chris spitting on Michael’s abusive stepdad after he killed was stupid of Chris to do what with DNA and all, and they seem to be setting up that the DNA results, once the ME’s office actually gets to them, will crack the case. So they prevent this from happening. Jimmy also acts stunned that the serial killer he made up in order to get press and resources…is getting press and resources. No shit, sherlock. Now, this would all be mildly tolerable from Jimmy, who’s got a track record of douchebaggery toward anyone who gets in his way–but not Lester! Lester in fact CHEWED JIMMY OUT in Season Three for refusing to get with the program and give up on Stringer. Now he’s doing the exact same thing–worse, in fact! Nothing that’s happening now is any worse than what happened to Lester back then–let alone being exiled to the property unit for over a decade–so a “well, he finally just snapped” defense doesn’t make any sense for this behavior. And worst of all, they both seem oblivious to the fact that this could take down everyone involved–not just them and Sydnor, but Landsman, Daniels, Pearlman, anyone with any oversight who didn’t catch on. Fuck that. The problem isn’t one of good writing about bad people, it’s a problem of bad writing.

* Meanwhile, the newspaper storyline proceeds with everything playing out under the watchful eye of those two supercilious newsroom higher-ups–total caricatured buffoons with no nuance as characters whatsoever. I mean, just compare them to the multifaceted evil brass types like Bill Rawls and Ervin Burrell. I guess Simon really hated his editors? Fair enough, but working out his frustrations regarding the overuse of the word “Dickensian” in this hamfisted way makes for rotten characterization.

* The only storylines I’m really still invested in at this point are Bunk’s, Bubbles’s (every time he shows up it’s like a flashback to a different, better show), Michael & Dukie’s (ditto) and Omar’s. Kima’s too, but she’s not getting enough screentime. I’m mostly sitting around hoping that McNulty and Freamon don’t somehow screw over poor Daniels with their horseshit.

On the plus side, Marlo killing Proposition Joe indicates to me that Marlo will in fact get his comeuppance, because that’s what happens to characters who kill characters like Prop Joe. I also like how Marlo’s now hooked up with the show’s only other pure-dee archvillain, the Greek. And Carver is great any time he shows up, while when Herc stole Marlo’s cell number from Levy’s rolodex I literally cheered. And hey, John Munch cameo! I was wondering if they’d pull that off.

—–

Date: Mar 11 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Re: Powering through The Wire Season Five

Omar deserved better. Not a better death–a better show to die in.

—–

Date: Mar 11 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Re: Powering through The Wire Season Five

Okay, show’s over! Quick thoughts:

1) You just know that the argument in favor of how the show killed off Omar is gonna be “hey, there are no heroes in real life, people just get shot.” That would work if this were No Country for Old Men, but it isn’t. It’s a show where Omar and Brother Mouzone had a superhero team-up and, in the final episode, Son of Omar roams again! Just to be clear, I’m not agreeing with the people who’ve apparently complained all along that Omar is some bullshit fictional character, because he was SOOOOOO well-developed and such a fascinating and (I think) beautiful man. Michael Williams really gave the performance of a lifetime in his final episodes, when he really seems to be losing it over all the people who got killed just for knowing him, staggering around on a limp, voice on the edge of cracking all the time, destroying everything he touches. He was a MAGNIFICENT character, and they punked him to make a point every bit as preachy as having the moron editors voice the complaint that “if you just do a story about society’s ills, you throw in everything but have nothing”–ha ha ha, eat THAT, people who don’t like The Wire–breaking the show’s own established storytelling methods in doing so. Screw that.

2) And again, screw McNulty and Lester behaving not immorally–which is the whole point of the show–but RIDICULOUSLY. OF COURSE this would sink their case against Marlo, OF COURSE it would inspire copycat killings, OF COURSE it would devastate the families of the dead homeless, OF COURSE it would threaten the careers of decent people like Daniels and Ronnie and anyone else anywhere near it who had nothing to do with it. The writers made them idiots all of a sudden. Screw that.

3) And finally, screw the small-beer Sun storyline, which really does seem like Simon getting back at his bosses at the expense of his own show. It’s every bit as incongruous as Beethoven interrupting his 9th Symphony for a spoken-word monologue about how his piano tuner gypped him one time. They didn’t even TRY to make the two evil editors or the careerist bullshit artist reporter sympathetic or even multi-dimensional. Marlo practically comes off better. What’s even more frustrating is that this flat, undercooked storyline and the absurd serial-killer business ate up so much time in an already shortened season that actually interesting characters/storylines like Carcetti, the Season Four kids, and the raw detective work of tapping Marlo’s phones and decoding his code felt like afterthoughts.

4) Should Marlo have been killed? You bet. I swear this isn’t a case of me succumbing to Sopranos-fan-esque “they shoulda whacked him”-itis–Marlo is a really interesting character, but he has NO dimensions, he’s a pure sociopath. Having him reclaim a corner in a business suit tells us nothing about him we didn’t already know. Wanting him dead for all the outrageously heinous things he orchestrated isn’t shortchanging him–it’s the kind of resolution a character like that practically demands. And hey, if they can Sonny Corleone old Stringer Bell at the hands of Batman and the Punisher, there’s no room for a high horse about “people just get away with stuff.”

And oh yeah, Dukie becomes a junkie–yet another out-of-nowhere character reversal. Ridiculous!

—–

Date: Mar 12 2008
From: Sean T. Collins
To: Kenneth Bromberg
Subject: Overall thoughts

Is it an excellent show? Of course it is.

Now that I’m finished with it I’m catching up with some of the critical response to it and am sort of getting a sense for what people are focusing on with it. First up is the “radical” narrative structure where no one episode is “about” anything, they’re all just hour-long units that contain scenes from the ongoing storylines. To be honest I didn’t even notice that! In retrospect I can see how it went further in that direction than really any other show, but I do feel like watching The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and Twin Peaks (perhaps the last one most of all) primed me for being able to follow a show structured along those lines without any difficulty. Actually, that reminds me: Twin Peaks was just a riff on the way soap operas told stories, so seeing it that way, The Wire isn’t any more innovative in pure structural terms than All My Children. Still, kudos for going there.

And it’s obviously powerful politically and socially. Time and time again I was knocked on my ass by how awful things were for many of these characters–Wallace and his siblings’ apartment, that big bearded stevedore ending up homeless, Randy in the group home, and allllll those scenes of little kids witnessing murders or murder victims. Brutal and, I’m ashamed to say, eye opening.

In formal terms I can think of a grand total of one scene that I though overplayed its hand cinematographically–Ziggy’s shock after killing Double G–and that’s it. It’s a beautiful looking show. It’s a fantastically acted show–I mean, jesus, find a false note among any of the main performances. ANY of them, and there were, like, 60! And while there were some story arcs that are better than others (Seasons Two and Four over Seasons One and Three), with the exception of McNulty & Lester’s absurd meltdown and the wooden Evil Newspapermen in Season Five and those random character turn-arounds I’ve been talking about, it was written with dead-on precision in dialogue and plotting.

All that being said, I think it’s a much more WYSIWYG show than The Sopranos. I don’t think there’s much mystery to The Wire, in terms of what it’s saying about the characters, or their milieu. I just don’t feel like I had to do as much work as a viewer–I don’t think I was challenged to look at myself, for example. As I said, this is why I believe political writers are so fond of The Wire: their issues are tackled dead-on, like a position paper. Provided you dislike the drug war, No Child Left Behind, and Jayson Blair, you’re almost off the hook. Ultimately that’s why The Sopranos is better. The meaning is occulted and the indictment extends to everyone. Moreover I think it took fewer chances and reaped fewer rewards in terms of formal experimentation, editing, cinematography, tonal shifts, humor, satire…Even before the fairly disastrous final season, the notion that it’s not just better than The Sopranos but leaves it in the fucking dust just isn’t supportable to me.

And regarding the problems with the final season, see also this quote from David Simon about how he views audience objections to Season Five:

“Freamon had been told no for a long time, for most of his career. And McNulty? Shit, I think he’ll try anything once. His intellectual vanity has been on display since the first season. But if people didn’t believe it, they didn’t believe it. I’m second-guessing people a little bit, and that’s not fair–every viewer’s entitled to their own opinion. I think what they really didn’t believe was that their favorite characters were behaving in an unethical way. That bothered them. I think TV shows are supposed to deliver on certain things. Omar is supposed to go down in a blaze of glory. McNulty is supposed to either lose and suffer or finally win, but he’s not supposed to walk away from the rigged game and do something that bothers viewers.”

I knew this would be Simon’s defense of the serial killer storyline, but he’s wrong. The problem isn’t that McNulty and Freamon’s behavior is unethical–I mean, good people behaving badly has been the theme of the entire show! And the audience is used to that–it’s a core part of the show’s appeal. What we’re NOT used to is smart characters behaving like total morons all of a sudden, ignoring the obvious consequences of their cockamamie scheme (drawing resources away from other investigations, inspiring copycat killings, risking the careers of their friends like Daniels and Pearlman and Griggs and Sydnor and Carver, and on and on and on). Even if you put aside the fact that Lester sat in the property unit for over a decade without complaining, and that a couple of seasons back he chewed McNulty out for refusing to get with the program and investigate Kintel Williamson instead of Stringer Bell as ordered, it simply wasn’t believable that these two brilliant detectives would do something this ridiculous.

Moreover, Simon can wax superior to Omar going out in a blaze of glory all he wants–but that’s EXACTLY what happened to Stringer Bell! And, to an extent, Frank Sobotka. And Bodie, for crying out loud. And Snoop. And Wallace. And Prop Joe. With the exception of D’Angelo, almost all the major victims had a dramatic build-up to their demise. And as the emergence of Michael as Silver Age Omar shows, even AFTER they kill Omar they can’t resist mythologizing him. Which is fine! Just OWN it, and don’t break your own rules to make a lame point about how shit happens.

Micrographica

Renee French, writer/artist

Top Shelf, May 2007

208 pages

$10

Buy it from Top Shelf

Buy it from Amazon.com

I’m rarely as baffled by a comic as I am by this one. Originally drawn in one-centimeter-square panels and published online, it’s the “story” of three tiny rodents who at varying times find a ball of shit, a corpse, a grub, a bigger rodent, and a sandwich. It’s a weird mixture of South Park potty humor and French’s trademark body-horror, the uncomfortable intimacy of which is somehow made even more disturbing by the scale of the drawings even though you’d think the gag-cartoon nature of the material itself would mitigate against it. Believe me, it doesn’t.

I think French is a very, very good cartoonist, and it’s a testament to her abilities that the procrustean parameters she imposed on her drawings for this project didn’t prevent her from exploiting the vulnerable, exposed physicality of her characters as well as she always does, bulbously distended noses, eczema-ridden nipples and all. The sticking point is the intentionally, admittedly slapdash nature of the story. On the one hand, it’s always refreshing to me to see a cartoonist present a comic that defies the usual niceties of story structure or readily graspable “meaning.” On the other, I’m not sure that kind of braindump necessarily warrants presentation as a stand-alone graphic novella that costs ten bucks. As a minicomic or a story in an anthology, it would be easier to swallow somehow, though I understand that the one-panel-per-page set-up probably precludes publication in such venues.

Justice League: The New Frontier Special

Darwyn Cooke, writer

Cooke, David Bullock, J. Bone, artists

DC Comics, March 2008

48 pages

$4.99

Here it is at DC’s website but I don’t think you can buy it there

I’ve long been a skeptic with regards to writer-artist Darwyn Cooke’s nostalgia-tinged approach to superheroes in titles like The Spirit and DC: The New Frontier (the antecedent to this one-shot and the basis of the animated feature to which its release is tied). What’s interesting about Cooke’s take on the topic is that it dodges many of the usual pitfalls of “they don’t make ’em like they used to”-ism by acknowledging that these are not products of a more innocent era–the era they come from, like all eras, was actually pretty fucked up. Rather, he slips up by insisting that the classic superheroes themselves are viable moral exemplars. To me this is very weird and a little icky. I don’t think we can really derive any kind of meaningful ethical guidelines from the career of Green Lantern–I mostly just think characters who dress up in cool costumes and use awesome powers to fight crime and tyranny and killer aliens can make for some fun stories with some powerful emotional beats. Now, the specific flaw of the New Frontier project of depciting the Silver Age DC icons as active in the actual time period that spawned them is that it takes Cooke’s problematic approach to superheroes and applies it to the Kennedy era itself, even though, given the actual historical record, viewing JFK in this hagiographical manner is almost as dubious as treating Batman that way. At any rate, as symbols of a brave new world of muscular Camelot progressivism, I’m not sure masked vigilantes make a whole lot of sense.

But to its great credit, JL:TNFS largely eschews the more heavy-handed philosophical elements of its predecessor, instead focusing on telling a ripping mid-’50s period yarn about Batman and Superman fighting, Dark Knight Returns-style. Frankly I’ll never get tired of Batman handing Superman’s ass to him with Kryptonite weapons, and seeing him do so via the effortlessly dynamic, feet-kicked-up-on-the-desk casual, retro-cool art of Cooke is all the better. Moreover, the short-story length mitigates against Cooke’s tendency toward bloat–there’s no room to cram in any multi-page paeans to Adam Strange! Instead, the special is rounded out by a pair of shorter, humor-oriented stories illustrated by Cooke collaborators Bullock (a Robin/Kid Flash team-up involving an unholy union between drag-racing delinquents and Communist saboteurs, which is a pretty fabulous idea) and Bone (a raid on a Playboy club by Wonder Woman and Black Canary which ends with Gloria Steinem in bunny regalia winking at the viewer; I’m still trying to figure out what was going on with this one other than Cooke riffing on the fact that Wondy was on the cover of the first issue of Ms. and that women look good in fishnet stockings).

I suppose what I would like New Frontier to be is a Watchmen-esque application of superheroes to a specific political and temporal milieu, whereby we can sit back and watch how things play out for these icons in a setting a lot more constrained than their usual anything-goes shared universe without the material telling us how to feel about what happens. In other words I don’t want the reverence to go any deeper than Cooke’s gorgeous throwback art. That’s not really what we’re getting here, but it’s brief enough and cool enough that I can pretend.

Scott Pilgrim Vol. 4: Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together

Bryan Lee O’Malley, writer/artist

Oni Press, October 2007

216 pages

$11.95

Buy it from Oni

Buy it from Amazon.com

You see a lot of criticism of the movie Juno centering on its stylized hipster-nerd banter. I haven’t seen the film, but I understand it involves the phrases “home skillet” and “honest to blog,” and that does indeed sound unfortunate. I would guess that someone out there could make similar hay out of the Scott Pilgrim series. Everyone is very “on” and clever and buoyant and witty and catty, a little like a stylized version of what you’d like to think you and your friends constantly sound like: “Scott, if your life had a face I would punch it. I would punch your life in the face.” Surely there’s people who’d just as soon light the book on fire as read lines like that.

I’m not one of those people. I find the Scott Pilgrim world so winning, so immersive. Part of it is that dialogue, which makes you feel like you’re entering another, more entertaining world. Part of it is the books’ Nintendo-realism, and the sense-memory of playing video games conjured up every time Scott wins experience points or levels up. Part of it is the tremendously charming art, which gets more stylized and self-assured with each new volume. While at times I wish O’Malley’s characters were a little easier to tell apart, I actually got the hang of it pretty quickly this time because each of them has some little stylistic filigree–bangs or freckles or a ponytail or a beard or somesuch–that economically sets them apart.

And part of it is the characters. They’re admittedly not the deepest or most complex bunch, but I want fun things to happen to them. I want all of Scott’s cute female friends to make out with each other (even though the trendy-lesbian thing is a little easy–I mean, so am I). I want his roommate Wallace to party with his pants off. I want his snotty bandmates to dole out put-downs like Judge Judy and Dr. Phil. Now, do I want Scott really to get it together? I’m not so sure. I’m kind of enjoying him falling bass-ackwards into everything, like the Dude from The Big Lebowski or Kramer from Seinfeld. Still, I really enjoyed the story of his estranged rock-star ex-girlfriend Envy from Vol. 3, and while this installment’s saga of whether he and Ramona will finally say “I love you” isn’t quite as satisfying, it does at least begin to grapple not just with the emotional aspect of post-initial-infatuation relationships, but also with the sexual aspects, which had kind of been elided until now. I like reading Scott Pilgrim comics.

Blankets

Top Shelf, July 2003

Craig Thompson, writer/artist

592 pages

$29.95

Buy it from Top Shelf

Buy it from Amazon.com

Originally written on March 8, 2004 for publication by The Comics Journal

It’s safe to describe Blankets as the year’s most talked-about, most hyped, most divisive graphic novel. It’s also safe to describe it as one of the year’s best. The victim of an emperor’s-new-clothes backlash that in at least some cases had as much to do with the book’s publisher or its author’s previous work or the p.r. campaign surrounding it as with the book itself, Blankets is a marvelously drawn bildungsroman with a heart as big as the Midwestern plains in which it takes place. For that, it has been pilloried, and I wish I could understand why. Actually, scratch that–no, I don’t. If loving this rapturously illustrated and warmly told story of ecstatic pain is wrong, well, you know the rest.

Blankets is the more-or-less straight autobiography that author Craig Thompson’s debut novel, Goodbye, Chunky Rice, hinted at. Indeed, elements of Chunky Rice put in cameo appearances throughout its successor’s 592 pages, hinting at a rich underlying emotional universe in much the same way that The Lord of the Rings provided deeper and sadder echoes of material first found in The Hobbit. It’s a book about long-distance relationships–one with a girl, one with God; how they burn impossibly bright and yet can be extinguished with a phone call (in the former case) or a footnote (in the latter). Refusing to coast on mere audience recognition, Thompson’s art both mines and mimes the riot of emotion such relationships engender, employing sweepingly expressive brushwork–each page seems to swirl like a snowdrift–and a vast–perhaps “dizzying” is a better word–array of formally experimental devices. And yet the art steers clear of the facile: Everyone notices the “blankets” of lush white snow, but a careful scan through the book reveals an almost obsessive use of powerful blacks, the unspoken yang to the wintry yin. Thompson’s narration is believably unreliable, at times appearing to believe every word of its descriptions of sexual or spiritual perfection, at other times imbuing the delivery with that unmistakable you-can’t-go-home-again regret, at all times trusting the reader to make the distinction. What we’re left with is a book about rejecting Christianity that, miraculously, judges not; a book about adolescence that recognizes that term as one describing an age, not a level of complexity, or more specifically a lack thereof. In love and in loss, what happens to our teenaged hearts matters. So does Blankets.

Death Note Vol. 2

Tsugumi Ohba, writer

Takeshi Obata, artist

Pookie Rolf, translator/adapter

Viz, November 2005

200 pages

$7.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

First of all, look at that price point–talk about bang for the buck! No wonder these things are so popular. Second of all I found this volume to be an improvement over its predecessor in virtually every respect. The art is more interesting and individualized in its depiction of the characters: I loved the big bag-rimmed eyes, wiggly bare toes, and thumb-biting neurosis of L the wunderkind investigator, and man oh man I could look at the clothes and hair Obata delivered for the ill-fated Naomi Misora all day. But of course we won’t be seeing much of her anymore, and that’s part and parcel of the improvement in terms of the tension of the cat-and-mouse suspense aspects seen in this issue: We see just how far Light will go to preserve his anonymity by killing off very likeable, very innocent characters, and by having that happen this early in the game, the creators show us that no one is safe and that they’ll be throwing curveballs. I still get a little tired of the constant narration of everyone’s thoughts and deductions–I long for the quiet cogitation of the characters from The Wire, which I’m experiencing for the first time more or less simultaneously to Death Note and which displays a lot more faith in the audience to follow what’s going on–but I’ll admit that it’s an effective way of showing off how byzantine the schemes and counter-schemes get from moment to moment. It’s enjoyable pulp fiction.

Blar

Drew Weing, writer/artist

Little House Comics, 2005

20 pages

$3.25

Buy it from Little House

This minicomic about an adorable barbarian killing machine and his gag-strip adventures reminds me of Roger Langridge’s Fred the Clown stuff in three particulars: 1) The bigfoot-style cartooning is absolutely impeccable (I actually prefer this to Langridge–it’s warmer and humbler, if that makes sense); 2) the humor stems primarily from a human shortcoming (in this case stupidity, in Langridge’s case usually a combination of stupidity and venality) being expressed through comic business; 3) the comic business isn’t funny. Seriously, I’d love to see this character in a far more straightforward action-adventure mode, one that’s as ridiculous as this is and just as chock full of crazy enemies (The Berserker Hordes of Nazroth! The Dread Wizard-King! Mecha-King Gilgator!) but stripped of the shallow pratfall-based punchlines.

Did I mention the cartooning, though? Christ. Actually the book’s most entertaining aspects stem from the art more than the business–the house-sized sword in the final strip is a laugh-out-loud riff on the Berserk school of big-ass-sword-wielding, and that die-cut blood splatter on the front cover is witty and eye-catching (that cover scan doesn’t do it justice at all), and I love that Blar’s arm is almost always extended perpendicular to his body, with his sword perpendicular to his arm. The jokes could be that good too!

The Chunky Gnars: A Chocolate Gun Tribute

Chris Cornwell, writer/artist

PictureBox Inc., October 2007

16 pages

$3.00

Buy it at PictureBox

Like Paul Pope’s cover version of the first issue of Jack Kirby’s OMAC from his issue of Solo and Josh Simmons’s unauthorized Batman-as-psychopath minicomic Batman, Chris Cornwell’s Chunky Gnars mines the fertile vein of another creator’s work, in this case Frank Santoro & Ben Jones’s wondrous drug-teen-rock-action opus Cold Heat. I think these kinds of call-and-response comics can really tease out what works and doesn’t work in the original and be an extremely enlightening exercise for the responder.

In this case, Cornwell doesn’t quite hit the heights that the originators do, but to be fair that doesn’t seem like his intent–his goal is playing up the mixed-genre nature of Cold Heat for humorous effect, like having a rock-star-slash-assassin and an evil senator piloting a giant robot minotaur. Some of those moments are very funny, in fact, if a little catchphrasey–“I don’t start killin’…TILL I’M DONE ROCKIN’!!” shots the hipster assassin when the senator tries to get him to skip the encore and start the massacre. Better still is Cornwell’s funny-because-it’s-true depiction of the senator’s absurd, obliviously prurient fixation on the supposed evil of popular culture: Beads of sweat running down his bald head (which has suddenly been isolated against an oozing abstract background), he kicks off a test run of his latest speech with the immortal opener “We have become a nation that worships the rectum,” before his assistant unceremoniously cuts this reverie off.

While the whole thing doesn’t exactly cohere nor rise to the level of its inspiration, it does contain some gaze-worthy art that is at alternating times reminiscent of Santoro, Brian Chippendale, and in the second of its four title panels Beto Hernandez. Mostly it exists as a testament to how fired up Cold Heat has people, which is valuable in and of itself.

Aline and the Others

Guy Delisle, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, November 2006

72 pages

$9.95

Buy it from Drawn & Quarterly

On the one hand this book is an absolutely magnificent display of bravura cartooning–understated, energetic, loose as a goose, full of the joy of imagemaking. In a fashion reminiscent of Bill Plympton’s animated shorts, Delisle creates miniature portraits of various, mostly unpleasant women in wordless-strip form. The uniform layouts–tight grids of 15 tiny square panels per page–provides a static contrast by which we can marvel at Delisle’s effortless line and proficiency with delivering whatever tone he chooses–kinetic action in “Rita,” genuine erotic heat in “Diane” and “Karine,” delightful and unexpected visual puns throughout (my favorite, I think, was “Irene,” where both of the title character’s arms slide out of her left socket as though they were connected through her shoulders like an axle). Delisle chronicles his own sexual neuroses and issues with as much candor and visual cleverness as you’re likely to see this side of John Cuneo’s similar project nEuROTIC.

On the other hand, it’s quite easy to read this book as savagely misogynistic in its repeated reduction of women to their constituent body parts, or its repeated depiction of staid portly women as literally holding the pneumatic sluts within themselves prisoner, or its repeated message that women are materialistic, hypocritical assholes who’d just as soon make men miserable for no reason as look at them, let alone fuck them. Men don’t come off that great either, but that’s usually because they were stupid enough to get involved with women in the first place. The tone gets so strident that it flattens out the sophistication and creativity of Delisle’s ideas–cleavage and vaginas swallowing men whole, a literal vagina dentata, yes yes, we get it. It’s entirely possible that this is all quite self-aware–the existence of the androcentric companion volume Albert and the Others would appear to indicate that, though I haven’t read the book itself–but it’s also entirely possible that that doesn’t matter, and that at a certain point putting your conflicted or outright hostile feelings toward women on display leads to reinforcing them rather than confronting them. I honestly don’t know. It’s a powerful comic book, I’ll give it that.