Time to Wax Enthusiastic About Blacksad

 

This week saw the release of the first-ever English collection of the three Blacksad stories, one of which is in its first official English translation, even. Needless to say, this was a very exciting event, made even more so by the fact that I wasn't paying attention and didn't know that it was going to happen. It was like, well, like unexpectedly finding out that there was a Blacksad hardcover that I could buy, frankly. 

For those of you not in the know: an explanation: Blacksad is a comic by Spanish creators Juan Diaz Canales (writing) and Juanjo Guarnido (art), and it is hands down the best example of noir-style detective storytelling that I have ever read in a comic. And also, everyone is anthropomorphic animals. The animal thing might have detracted from the tough Fifties grittiness, except that it is an intrinsic part of the story. The animal forms are used in an almost totemic fashion - what you are inside is reflected in your form, whether you're a cold-blooded industrialist lizard or a literally weaselly tabloid reporter.

John Blacksad is a private detective and our protagonist. In the course of this collection he investigates the murder of an old flame, runs afoul of a racist secret society in small town America and gets tangled up in the early days of Senator Joe McCarthy (here a bombastic rooster named Gallo) and HUAC. Canales and Guarnido definitely didn't simply ape the noir thrillers of yore - which assuredly would have steered well clear of the latter two topics - they were using the tropes of the form to their own ends. Setting a story about what is essentially the KKK as founded by Arctic animals in a country that is still recovering from World War II allows you to look at a lot of the causes of the problems that are still with us today, and as a bonus, the fact that all involved are animals just underscores the ultimate indefensibility of an ideology built around pigmentation.

That having been said, Blacksad definitely does hit all of the classic noir detective notes. He antagonizes the police, heads down morally ambiguous roads in search of justice, frequents dive bars. He asks the wrong questions and someone tries to teach him a lesson:

And then he keeps on asking the wrong questions and gets that lesson. In the face.

He occasionally gets the girl:

But mostly doesn't.

But what these stories really excel at, other than looking frigging amazing, is capturing the world-weary, morally ambiguous philosophies of the works that inspired them. The first book alone is filled with quotable material:

Or how about this:

I get a tingle when I read that: that is damned good writing. Blacksad's interior monologue plays out in your head in a voice roughened by cigarettes and whiskey and maybe a touch of despair (and helped along by some tweaks to the translation that make everything less, well, translated-seeming than the older editions). 

Excellent call on bringing this out, Dark Horse. Keep this up and soon you'll have all of my money.

Ruts & Gullies: Une histoire voyage super cool sur les Canadiens-français en Russie!

This brand new little paperback from Conundrum Press has brightened my week. I was getting mopey thinking about how I won’t get to travel anywhere this summer, except to and from work. I’ve spent the past few years touring a lot with my band, but now I’m a real working lady, and I’m getting antsy for a road trip that won’t come.

Then Ruts & Gullies reminded me that I can travel through the magic of books! Books! Each page draws you into an imaginary world that’s way better than say, actually going to Brooklyn!

But for real, travel stories are great for satisfying an adventure-craving when you’re stuck at home. Ruts and Gullies chronicles French-Canadian cartoonist Philippe Girard and his cartoonist pal, Jimmy Beaulieu as they travel from Quebec City to St. Petersburg, Russia for a comics arts festival.

While significant trips are often imbued with a sense of escape or freedom or emotional catharsis, Girard’s is especially so. He heads to Russia on the heels of losing a close friend to cancer and when he returns to Canada he’ll undergo a semi-serious surgery, so his travel is bookended by significant and scary events.

However, Ruts & Gullies doesn’t head into super self-reflective territory. The events in Girard’s life just give the reader insight as to why he would go to country everyone tells him is crime-ridden and impoverished and all around, generally scary. He’s been given a sense a bravery or maybe carefree-ness that comes with being so close to death.

But, like I said, Ruts & Gullies isn't weighty— it's a fascinating and joyful read. It’s along the same lines as the amazing Guy Delisle’s Shenzhen and Pyongyang—interesting and funny tidbits about a people and country that are relatively unknown to most Canadians, without getting too “aren’t other cultures hilarious?”

Comics are a perfect medium for Girard’s story since, like most travel stories, it’s less of a straightforward narrative and more scenes of interesting moments in Russia: seeing the remnants of communist culture, trying weird new food, lost passports, public transit mishaps, cool new friends, etc.

No kidding, I really did feel that Girard took me with him on thrilling trip to an awesomely strange destination, and I didn’t even have to leave Scrapperton at home.

Poor Falcon. (No Spoilers, I Promise)

So, that Marvel Star Wars omnibus from Dark Horse I mentioned in last week's reviews? I basically thought I'd be working on that thing for a month or two, or that I might even have a hard time reading it at all after a point. Turns out I'm nearly finished all 500 pages of it! It was actually kind of tough to tear myself away from it to read new comics this week. I don't know what this says about me--I think it probably has more to do with the irresistible pull of nostalgia than the quality of the comics themselves--but I'm already committing myself to buying the next volume this fall. In the meantime, there are new comics out there too! Every week, it seems!

 

Tom Strong and The Robots of Doom #1: I can’t help but wonder—does Alan Moore have any say in DC/Wildstorms’ continuing use of his America’s Best Comics characters? That’s not to say that there hasn’t been interesting material released without his consent, if that is in fact the case; last year’s Top Ten Season Two miniseries was quite good, and I also enjoyed the first issue of this new Tom Strong four-parter. It doesn’t hurt that in both cases, the original series artist—Gene Ha on the former, and Chris Sprouse on the latter—returned to handle the visuals. Sadly, it’s really hard to get anyone excited about these characters without the involvement of Mr. Moore, and that’s a shame because there’s clearly a lot of life left in his ideas. I don’t know that this new Tom Strong series--in which Tom’s evil Nazi bastard kid Albrecht messes around with the timestream, using an indestructible robot army to win World War II for the Axis—is particularly new reader-friendly, as it builds naturally off of several stories from the book’s original run. Peter Hogan’s script does make a point of dropping some on-the-go introductions of Tom’s cast, like his wife Dhalua, his daughter Tesla, their robotic butler Pneuman, and the family’s intelligent gorilla pal King Solomon, but it’s not long before this group is irrevocably altered by Albrecht’s machinations. Like I said, a bit daunting for newbies, but for old fogies like me who remember that, only a little over a decade ago when we had four or five ongoing superhero (I’m sorry, science hero) comics written by Moore being published at the same time, it’s like visiting with old friends.

 

Tales Designed To Thrizzle #6: I never quite realize how much I miss Michael Kupperman’s roughly-annual blasts of ridiculousness, until a new issue drops and it’s like a breath of fresh, absurd air. In this latest issue, new features like Jungle Princess (which deals with the threats of rhino smuggling and falling magazine ad revenues in equal measure) and All About Drainage share page space with classic Thrizzle bits like Twain & Einstein. My personal favourite strip this time out is Willie Wealth, a Richie Rich parody that calls attention to the serious problem of eating your wealth as though it were food. Thrizzle may not be for everyone—if you don’t enjoy surreal comedy in the vein of Adult Swim’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force or Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job, you may want to give this one a wide berth. However, if phrases like “I am farting my way to a beatoff bonanza” makes you giggle uncontrollably for way too long, then you seriously need to get thrizzled.

 Captain America #606: A brand new story arc kicks off this issue, with the current Baron Zemo plotting revenge against the current Captain America. Makes sense, I suppose; killing Bucky at the end of WWII was always the original Baron’s greatest achievement, and now it’s basically  meaningless. I already like this arc better than the previous one, which just sort of petered out at the end. I’ve always loved Baron Zemo, and he makes a great return to villainous form here, assembling a bunch of like-minded badasses to start some trouble. There’s a cool Kirby-inspired throwdown with the Wrecking Crew, and a classy tip of the hat to Steranko in a nightmare sequence later on, but…is it just me, or does somebody on the production end of things have it in for the Falcon? At one point, the top of his head is cut off…

…but that’s far less insulting than the fact that his half of a double-page spread appears to have been cropped out entirely to make room for a Honda ad!

Now obviously, I’m not 100% sure that’s what happened here, but I can’t imagine why Butch Guice would draw his legs in there if the rest of him wasn’t supposed to be visible too. Mighty suspicious.

 

Batman #700: A Grant Morrison comic can be plenty confusing even without the introduction of time travel. But even though the central mystery of this extra-sized anniversary issue, which involves a time-travelling “Maybe Machine”, the Joker’s lost Jokebook, and several incarnations of Batman over the decades (centuries, even), didn’t make a lot of sense, it was still a fun, multi-faceted look at the character’s many iterations over the years. I’m not sure that Tony Daniel was the right artistic choice to illustrate the Biff! Pow! era of Batman’s career—wouldn’t someone with the pop-art sensiblities of, say, Mike Allred have been more appropriate?--but I think he mostly pulls it off.  I also wish Frank Quitely could have drawn the entirety of the present-day Dick Grayson Batman segment (Scott Kolins ably handles the last three pages, but the change in styles is pretty jarring), but it was cool to see Andy Kubert return to the title to revisit the sinister Damian Wayne future-Batman last seen in #666.  As an aside, this issue cemented my enjoyment of Dick as Batman once and for all—the scene where he calls a GCPD officer by his first name and asks how his kid is doing had me grinning.

 

Moving Pictures: This new Top Shelf-published book from Kathryn and Stuart Immonen is one of those books that must be read very carefully—there’s just as much, if not more, going on between the panels as there is within them. Set during the German occupation of France during WWII, Moving Pictures follows a museum curator, a Canadian woman named Ila, as she attempts to hide, and thereby protect, several priceless art pieces from being claimed by the Nazi treasuries. This scheme is made more complicated by her romantic involvement with an officer from the Military Art Commission, who is charged with finding the missing art. The story shifts back and forth in time, beginning with Ila being questioned by Rolf, gradually revealing more about her plot and their relationship in a series of flashbacks. This is a story of historical intrigue that, despite its particular backdrop, avoids the usual imagery of Nazi soldiers, concentration camps, or firearms of any kind; what we don’t see on the page remains just as terrible a threat as it would if we had seen it. That controlled, assured subtlety in Kathryn Immonen’s script elevates Moving Pictures from a simple tale of wartime intrigue into a more complex meditation on the personal and cultural significance of art. Stuart Immonen’s art is equally spare, his characters realized from the simplest of shapes and often defined by the shadows around them. A quietly affecting historical drama, as far removed from the couple’s recent Marvel Comics work as you can imagine.

Back in Print: Alison Dare!

In exciting news, Tundra Books is re-releasing two excellent all-ages graphic novels: Alison Dare: Little Miss Adventures and Alison Dare: The Heart of the Maiden. If you haven't heard of these books, you have probably heard of their creators: the all-Canadian, all-awesome, all-J. team of J. Torres and J. Bone. Here at Living Between Wednesdays, we love those guys. And we love quality comics for kids. And we especially love it when those comics feature a strong female lead character (bonus that she solves mysteries with her two clever gal pals).

Alison Dare is like a 12-year-old Indiana Jones, and the books are full of fun adventure and mystery-solving. Superhero nerds like myself will appreciate the fact that Allison's father is a Blue Beetle-esque masked hero.  Plus, between Torres' humour and Bone's always-fantastic art, these books are just really cute.

I am just really glad these books are back in print because they are fantastic for young readers, especially for young girls whose imaginations don't start and end in a Disney Princess castle.

To promote the launch of the new editions of these books, Tundra is having a cool contest. Just follow this link to their blog and you can download a printable cut-out of Alison Dare herself. Print it, cut it, and pose Allison wherever your imagination decides.

For example, here she is hanging out at Strange Adventures Comic Shop in Halifax:

And here she is fighting the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man:

And here she is standing guard at Halifax Harbour (ready to fight off pirates or smugglers):

I had much bigger plans for my little Alison Dare cut-out, but sadly it was destroyed by a very strong wind coming off the harbour that day. But she was totally going to be fighting a statue of Winston Churchill that stands outside the Halifax Public Library.

Go check out the books, and go enter the contest! Or at least encourage your kids to!

Adscape: You Are Under the Spell of Ka-Bala

As I mentioned in my review of The Bulletproof Coffin yesterday, Shaky Kane and David HIne have referenced one of my very faourite pieces of occult claptrap, Ka-Bala, which possibly hasn't seen the light of day since Grant Morrison stuck a working one under the Pentagon in some of the weirdest issues of his run on the Doom Patrol. 

 

I originally fell in love with Ka-Bala thanks to this ad, which is not only a study in hyperbole but an interesting look at what 1967 advertisers thought children might be interested enough in to dabble in the black arts. After some examination, however, I became extremely impressed with the inclusiveness of the mystic experience presented by Ka-Bala. Firstly, as can be seen here, the glowy effects seen above are no lie: that sucker is made out of luminous plastic, and the Eye of Zohar has its own little clip-on halo. And speaking of the Eye:

Both the Eye and the game itself almost certainly derive their names from Cabbala/Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, in which Zohar is the most important text, and probably not a glowing, ever-revolving eye. As well, and I'm not sure that this is intentional, the Eye is constantly staring at the "crystal marble", an obvious nod to the classic Old Cinematic Gypsy trick of crystallomancy, or divination by gazing into an orb, jewel, or possibly champaign. But wait, there's more:

The game also came with "Taro" cards, which I am now considering a misspelling of Tarot rather than a deliberate distancing since I'm told that they had images of the Major Arcana on the back. And, though not shown in this ad, the figures of the Zodiac are set around the rim of the game, so you can use it to do a little ad hoc astrology if necessary. Yes, in one wee mass-produced device, the Transogram company managed to encapsulate all of the forms of divination that the average North American is likely to ever encounter. But they could - and should - have gone so much farther! As long as we're trying to tell the future, why don't we haul out some of the interesting ways to do so?

First off: as cool as the Eye of Zohar is, I have to admit that I'm extremely fond of the concept of alectryomancy, in which you employ a rooster in much the same capacity. Originally, you'd place the rooster in a circle with letters around the rim and take note of how it walked or pecked. And here's where it really beats the Eye: since you couldn't very well put a live rooster in every box, the thing would have to be made out of plastic, yes? So why not fill it with plastic guts and introduce children to the joys of extispicy, also known as haruspex, divination by reading the entrails of birds. Heck, this one could be a twofer, as you could also give them some knowledge of the grand old and even more specific art of heptascopy, or reading the future in an animal's liver. I mean, I assume that you could only do one at a time, but maybe a failed bit of extispicy could be salvaged at the heptascopic level.

 

Of course, the Eye doesn't necessarily have to go: with a minor change it could become a representative of that most modern of divinatory techniques, the Magic 8 Ball, which I'm going to call billiardomancy. It may not be etymologically correct, but dammit, I like it. Plus I don't know how to say pool ball in Greek.

Of course, if the Eye were actually on fire rather than merely being surrounded by an eerie plastic glow, you could get up to both pyromancy, which involves looking for signs in the shape of flames, and empyromancy, or burning things and then... somehow telling the future from the way that they burn. I really wish that I'd known about empyromancy when I was a teenager - I could have been the most future-aware kid in school.

Oh, and I guess that you could get up to a bit of scapulimancy, but really: who has enough shoulder blades laying around for that any more?

Of course, if you're already doing some divination by a fire, you might as well get up to a bit of axinomancy, or - you guessed it - divination by means of making an axe red hot and observing the motions of a piece of jet placed upon its surface. Always a hit at camp-outs.

All of these are certainly opportunities that Transogram missed, but none of them sadden me more than the exclusion of my newly-discovered favourite method of divination: gyromancy.

Gyromancy is the noble art of spinning around until you get dizzy and fall over, the direction of your fall being the significant factor. Transogram, if you still exist as a company, take note: above is my concept sketch for the Ka-Bala Gyroscopy Plus, with ride-in Eye of Zohar. Just climb inside and the mystic orb will do the rest, whirling around and around until you're so dizzy that you can't help but accurately predict the future! Call me!

One last thing: I'd only ever encountered the one Ka-Bala ad, so imagine my surprise when I found a second. Here it is, for posterity:

Poor Billy. This is the Sixties equivalent of your parents figuring out how to use the email.

There's No Escape From the All-Seeing John Buys Comics!

Adventure Comics No. 12

There have been a few different reimaginings of the relationship between Superboy/man and the Legion of Super-Heroes over the years, but I think that the take on the whole thing that started in the cartoon - that the Legion functions as Superboy's much-needed peer group and place to learn about himself - is definitely my favourite. Young Clark Kent has always been portrayed as someone who had to be aggressively normal all the time, and since his career as Superboy in the Twentieth Century has been reduced to something between few and no adventures, it makes sense that he'd have to have had somewhere to cut loose in order to have ended up as well-adjusted as he seems to be. 

All in all, a fun issue - the kissing scene was cute (and laser-beam kisses, those are a new power, aren't they?) and Superboy's list-making tied in nicely with Johns' run on the series. According to the Internet, Levitz' whole first arc on this book is going to deal with Superboy and the Legion, which is just ducky.

Invincible No. 72

Good holy crap, Kirkman. Every time Conquest shows up I have this incredibly visceral reaction to something he does and I love it. I wish I could quantify why the things that happen in this book are different than, say, the things I complain about inBrightest Day... I guess that it's because the characters in this book were created with this sort of thing in mind - Conquest is a killer from a race of killers, and his gutting Atom Eve or doing what he did in this issue are appropriate means to his end of being a herald of the Viltrumite doom. By contrast, Black Manta carving up a store full of people or (Dr Light/Black Hand/Max Lord) retroactively becoming a (serial rapist/murderous necrophiliac/megalomaniacal sociopath) in order that they be able to fill that role in the story du jour has the stink of the shoehorn about it.

So good job, Invincible, for having characters with defined roles and who change and grow in a believable if over-the-top manner. And thanks for all of the guts, too.

Joker's Asylum II: The Riddler

I have no idea how I missed the original Joker's Asylum comics, or indeed why I haven't read all of them yet. I think that I shall call myself a fool for having done so. Judging from this and the Penguin story in the first series, I'm going to declare these some of the best looks I've had at the members of Batman's rogues gallery in years.

Even if I'm wrong about the issues that I haven't read, then this is still an incredibly satisfying Riddler story, one with a couple of different levels of enjoyment. Firstly, it's a pretty fun look at how Edward Nigma goes about wooing a lady, and why he does so. And then you get to the end **SPOILERS** and you find out that appropriately enough the Joker has set the story up as a riddle for you to solve - not the hardest-to-figure-out riddle, I'll admit, but going back and figuring out how all of the clues were incorporated into the story is fascinating. This is exactly the kind of comic that I want to be reading: Calloway, Guinaldo and Fernandez win... comics. For this week.

The Bulletproof Coffin No. 1

I was pretty much sold on this comic as soon as I saw that the werewolf-masked kid on the cover was in the Jack Kirby hunched-over-with-your-arms-hanging-straight-down pose, and I was definitely sold once I noticed that the fake comic in this book referenced the Eye of Ka-Bala, one of my favourite Silver Age ad subjects. Indeed, this book is filled with references to the Silver Age, in the best possible way. Fake-but-familiar tchotchkes and comics that never were act as hooks for what looks to be a satisfyingly surreal mystery. Shaky Kane's nice clean art only accentuates this.

The main character, Steve Newman, is one of those protagonists that is entirely ripe for involvement in a story: strange job (he hauls away dead people's stuff), obsession with the past (leading him to steal a lot of dead people's stuff), disconnected from his family. This issue was largely set-up - including a pretty great horror comic-style morality tale called The Unforgiving Eye - but I'm betting that hijinks will shortly ensue.

Sweet Tooth No. 10 - Ha haaaa! Now that Dave's on the Sweet Tooth train, the whole LBW crew can get together and be alternately delighted and depressed! Will Gus ever find a home, or will he be messily eviscerated before this is done? I'd put the odds of each at about fifty percent.

I, Zombie No. 2 - I maintain everything that I said about the last issue, but geez. One of you could have told me that I was making an ass out of myself calling it izombie. I had to look in the indicia, for heaven's sake.

Chimichanga No. 2 - Holy crap, there was a second issue of Chimichanga!