John Buys Comics Like They Are Hotcakes That Are Going Out of Style

Hit Monkey (One Shot)

What a strange little comic.

I bought this pretty much on a whim and due to an abiding love for odd characters, but honestly I was expecting something along the lines of Mr. Stuffins: a funny-style book where a lot of the humour was generated by taking a tough-guy role and filling it with an adorable-style character. Instead, this is more akin to… I have no idea what. It’s somewhere between a Kurosawa film and Hinterland Who’s Who, if that makes any sense, which it won’t if you’re not Canadian.

Basically, I wasn’t surprised by the fact that I enjoyed this book but am almost in shock over the fact that it was actually so good. It’s good enough that I’m not letting myself write any spoilers, people! And that’s hard!

Human Target No. 1

Man, I can’t believe that I’ve become one of those “no TV” guys. I did it completely on accident, I swear. I still download Death Comes to Town every week, regular.

But I am a guy without a TV, and so I miss stuff like the fact that there’s a Human Target series on Fox. I literally just found out on the ISB yesterday. And even though Sims was giving the show a hard time about not actually being about a guy who disguises himself as other guys, you know, like THE HUMAN TARGET does, I was a bit interested. I picked up the comic of the show based on a comic.

Bleah. If ever a comic read like a TV show, this is it, all glib one-liners and tough talk. (not like a comic book at all, no sirree) Quiet, parenthetical aside. This is teevee-style glib dialogue and it doesn’t belong in a comic book. It just serves to underscore the fact that this version of Christopher Chance is just some Transporter-like glorified bodyguard. Too bad he doesn’t have a gimmick to make himself interesting like I don’t know dressing up like his client and having identity problems…

Double bleah.

Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom

So I guess that it has now been conclusively proven that I cannot resist any comic that involves HP Lovecraft having Cthulhu Mythos-style adventures, especially if they’re adorable. I managed to hold out for about five minutes before finally putting this one on my pile, but it was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

But really, how can you go wrong with a story that involves a young, huge-eyed Lovecraft reading a magical book and being transported to a regular-style fairytale land in trouble which he, as the kid from another land, has to fix. It all works quite well, both as a young-person-having-an-adventure romp and as a Mythos tome.

And of course, tentacles abound.

The Unwritten No. 10 – No specific reason, but this was the first issue that felt to me like the series was going to be around for the long haul. This is a very good thing and basically exactly what I’ve been wishing for the last year (ish).

Invincible Presents Atom Eve and Rex Splode No 3 (of 3) – What fun! I miss Rex.

Batman and Robin No. 8 – Now this is proper Morrison writing: jam-packed with ideas and on the very cusp of losing you without actually doing so, with at least one idea per issue that makes you shout out “Of course!”

Daytripper No. 3 – Oh man I just got that it’s the same guy in every issue. I’m freaking out, dude.

Solomon Kane: Death’s Black Riders No. 2 – I’m trying to follow the Hellboy Protocol on these Solomon Kane series and not just go “Omigod you guys this issue was awesome just like the last eight and Solomon Kane shot another dude in the face!” every time one comes out, but this issue Allie and Guevara managed to incorporate the terrific little Kane story “Rattle of Bones” into the ongoing narrative and with aplomb, so I must use this space to praise them mightily. I raise my imaginary glass to ye, comicsmen!

Action Comics No. 27 – I demand more Kryptonian mythology! Well done, everyone.

Booster Gold No. 29 – Wait, first Metal Men, now Blue Beetle? Stop being cowards about things, DC. Keep the backups going, you jerks. Putting a little message in the last page doesn’t make things cool between us over this.

Adventure Comics No. 7 – Ugh. Bad call making the first issue under a new creative team a tie-in to Blackest Night. I’ll reserve the right to do a SECOND MONTH OF JUDGEMENT on this one.

R.E.B.E.L.S. No. 13 – Even if this series weren’t great every month, the drawings of Despero’s head regrowing a tiny little body would make it totally worth buying.

It's Like A Comic, But In A Book!

 One of the best things about working in a comic store is having a look at what turns up in collections that people sell to us. More often than not, it's a pile of W.I.L.D.Cats or Youngblood that are headed right for the discount bin, but occasionally some cool old-timey treasures turn up. My favourite of these are the now-obsolete repackagings of vintage material that are fairly hard to come by, from the days when publishers were still experimenting with people's ideas of what constituted a comics-delivery system, so to speak. I'm talking about the old over-sized treasury editions (my favourite of these is the Kirby 2001: A Space Odyssey adaptation, but I'm still keeping an eye out for the original Superman Vs. Spider-Man), or the novel-sized digest reprints where you would only usually get about two panels per page. However, this little gem appeared in a collection a few weeks back:

Published by Simon & Schuster, this collection features a pretty random collection of pretty awesome Spidey classics. There's some early John Romita-drawn issues (yes, despite what the cover would have you believe, somebody other than Stan Lee was involved) featuring old favourites like Electro and the Rhino, and the notoriously non-Code approved three-issue arc by Lee and Gil Kane where Harry gets hooked on drugs, triggering his old man to become the Green Goblin again. This arc is also notable for having appeared at a time when Stan Lee decided to stop using so many exclamation points all the time, resulting in weirdly deadpan delivery from everyone. Check it out: 

The issue after this one is the one where they basically just erased any punctuation that wasn't a necessary exclamation point or question mark, which reads as though everyone is talking in a weird monotone voice (there's a great article about this short-lived phenomenon over at Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed). That drug dealer guy is awesome, by the way. Only a career criminal could get away with that look. Speaking of fashion, though, let's take a better look at Peter and Harry's wardrobe at this point...

Whoa, what the hell is going on? Harry at least has the excuse of a raging drug habit to explain away his orange suit and yellow turtleneck combo, but Peter's outfit has entirely too many tassels. He looks like Beyonce!

I sort of got off track here. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, old Spider-Man comics are the best. Especially when you can get 'em in a now-defunct format.

Dateline: Smallville

Local couple Jonathan and Martha Kent, known affectionately as "Pa" and "Ma" respectively, found to have only one joke:

Sources indicate that they've been using the joke daily for the last fifteen years, alternating punchline duties biweekly.

The Kents' son Clark was unavailable for comment.

John Buys Comics and it Feels So Good

Crogan’s March

If you’re not in the know about this series (The Crogan Adventures by Chris Schweizer), it’s about a guy telling his two sons stories about their ancestors, who were evidently all incredibly cool guys - the family tree at the front of the book includes a smuggler, a lion tamer and a WWI pilot, for example (and speaking of the family tree, Schweizer does and incredible job of making a pretty diverse bunch of guys look like they’re related. I’ve been staring at them for a while now and I think that it’s all in the eyebrows). Crogan’s Vengeance, the first in the series, came outlast year and was a very fun story about “Catfoot” Crogan, pirate, the first of the line. Crogan’s Vengeance was a fine comic, heck, a great comic, but Crogan’s March is MAGNIFICENT. I decided to pick up some Turkish food on the way back from the comic shoppe last night and cracked open Crogan’s March while I waited, and I have never in my life cared less about how long my food was going to take to get ready.

Peter Crogan is a Corporal in the French Foreign Legion, with two months left on his five-year tour. He’s a crack shot (when he’s standing still) a former boxer and an all-around good guy who just happens to be smack in the middle of one of the more violent spots in the days of the European Empires. He’s the kind of character that you like from panel one onward and he has a magnificent mustache.

Oh, and every other character in the book is immensely likeable as well. Schweizer makes each character distinct in both look and personality, to the extent that one of my favourite characters had maybe two lines and then died - I could just tell that he was terrific. Some of the characters from Crogan’s Vengeance get Blackadder-esque cameos as background and minor characters as well, which is great, particularly as Peter Crogan gets to lay a haymaker on a guy who is a double of his ancestor’s arch-enemy. Time-spanning family rivalry, woo!

And there’s a very thoughtful exploration of colonialism going on here too, and not the COLONIALISM IS ALL BAD ALL THE TIME blanket statement that I encountered with dreary regularity in my days as an English major - not that it wasn’t pretty damn terrible in most respects, don’t get me wrong. It’s just nice to read a work that sets that aside and instead looks at the differing motivations that the people who were involved in the process had. The differing opinions that Crogan’s superiors hold on this topic inform a lot of the book’s conflict.

Oh, man. I can look forward to a new Crogan Adventure every year so hard.

World of New Krypton No 12 - It was a mystery all along! Well, I guess I knew that, but it was a proper mystery, with clues and everything! And now Superman’s solved it! Hooray! You know, if New Krypton is still around in a year or so a series about trying to be a detective on a planet of supermans could be a pretty fun time.

Casper and the Spectrals No. 1 - This actually came out a while ago but I didn’t see it until yesterday and I just had to see what they’d done to the old Harvey crew. Have to say: not too bad. The character designs aren’t aggressively weird (and it was high time that Hot Stuff stopped wearing a diaper, let me tell you) although Wendy’s eyes, even by the standards of manga-influenced comic characters, are unnervingly gigantic. I’m pretty certain that she has at least a 270 degree field of vision. So, I'm not going to keep buying it, but I guess that it's a pretty decent modernization of the junk I read as a kid.

Doom Patrol No. 7 - Crazy Jane is back! Animal-Mineral-Vegetable Man is back! The Metal Men defeat Giganta in an unusual manner! Fun!

Red Robin No. 9 - I just keep enjoying this series more and more. Tim’s dropped a lot of his angst since he found the Bat-cave painting, he’s owning up to the fact that he looks like Dr Mid-Nite and he’s starting to react to some of the things that he’s been up to in other peoples’ comics (like being a bit of a dick to Superboy, say). It was a bit of a breather issue, a between story arcs kind of thing, but those are the kinds of issues where you really get a chance to enjoy a character sans drama, so hurrah.

Sweet Tooth No. 6 - Sorry Tiina. He didn’t get adopted by a nice family and get to play with a dog all day. Maybe next issue? 

Underappreciated Comic Movie Showcase: Punisher War Zone

I enjoyed a pretty great haul for my birthday yesterday. My girlfriend Hillary gave me socks (I go through an alarming number of these), a Dairy Queen ice cream cake, a copy of Peter Biskind’s Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced Hollywood (I have a weakness for trashy Hollywood memoirs, and Biskind never disappoints), Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell (how come more people didn’t see this?), and one of the most criminally underappreciated comic-to-film adaptations of all time…Punisher: War Zone. The fact that I already didn’t own this movie on DVD is a bit embarrassing, because I think I’ve seen it three times already. It’s easily the best of the three Punisher movies, although that’s not really saying much. It tanked pretty hard at the box office, thanks to a combination of awful reviews and a cast with very little marquee value. I sadly missed it in the theatre; it didn’t play anywhere near me, and when Hillary and I were in Toronto for Christmas of 2008, we opted for Slumdog Millionaire instead, to my eternal regret. 

I’m not going to make an argument that Punisher: War Zone is a faithful adaptation of the comic or anything. No one’s going to accuse me of being a huge Punisher fan—I liked the character’s old Amazing Spider-Man appearances as an occasional supporting badass, I enjoyed Garth Ennis’s ultraviolent interpretation, and I’m loving the ridiculousness of the current Franken-Castle arc by Rick Remender and Tony Moore, but I don’t generally go out of my way to read about the character. In fact, I would recommend War Zone more for fans of insanely excessive Reagan-era action films like Commando or Rambo: First Blood Part II rather than a faithful page-to-screen translation.

Punisher: War Zone isn’t really a sequel to either the 1989 Dolph Lundgren direct-to-video interpretation or the 2004 Thomas Jane stinkbomb, nor is it concerned with rebooting the franchise or whatever. The Punisher, AKA Frank Castle, is a guy whose family was killed by the mob, so now he wears a skull and kills bad guys 24-7, and that’s all you need to know. This time around, the title character is played by Ray Stevenson, better known as Titus Pullo on HBO’s short-lived but vastly entertaining Rome series. There isn’t a lot of range to this performance, but really, how much do you need? Stevenson looks like he basically wants to throttle everyone around him all the time, which is about right I guess. Castle’s war on crime eventually brings him up against a vain, preening mob boss played by another welcome HBO face, Dominic West (McNutty from The Wire!). Castle drops the guy into some sort of bottle-recycling contraption, but he survives and is reborn as Jigsaw, a leather-faced creep bent on revenge. Jigsaw busts his even crazier brother, Loony Bin Jim (another cult favourite—Doug Hutchison, who you might remember as Eugene Victor Tooms from a couple of X-Files episodes, or more recently as Horace Goodspeed from Lost’s Dharma Initiative), out of an asylum to help dispatch the Punisher. Castle’s thinking about hanging up the skull-shirt once and for all after accidentally killing an undercover police officer, but when Jigsaw and his bro threaten the dead cop’s wife and kid, the Punisher finds it within himself to kill again. And again, and again, and…well, you get the idea.

Directed by Lexi Alexander, Punisher: War Zone is a surprisingly beautiful movie, given the lurid subject matter. It’s shot in an eye-catching pallet of vivid primary colours, in a tip of the hat to the movie’s comic book origins. There are nods to several of the comic’s incarnations as well—the Punisher employs hapless detective Martin Soap (Dash Mihok) as his inside man in the police department, while utilizing the technological skills of his pal Microchip (played by Newman himself, Wayne Knight!). Unlike the previous two Punisher films, though, War Zone refuses to take itself too seriously; the tone is very tongue-in-cheek without totally veering into silliness. West and Hutchison appear to be having a blast, hamming it up to beat the band (the scene where they travel around the city recruiting gangs of ethnic stereotypes with a rabble-rousing speech—in front of a flapping American flag, no less—is worth the price of admission). Any movie that features a Parkour-based gang, one with a hilarious name like the Urban Free Flow Gang, is clearly not out to win any Oscars.

Did I mention the violence, by the way? This is possibly the most gleefully gory movie since Starship Troopers. Castle dispatches his enemies with rocket launchers, chair legs, and good ol’ fashioned shotgun blasts to the face. Loony Bin Jim appears to disembowel and maybe even partly devour a hospital orderly with his bare hands, and the origin of Jigsaw involves a whole lotta broken glass being mashed into Dominic West’s face. If you’ve got a weak stomach, maybe you might want to skip this movie altogether, but if you have a taste for cartoonish, borderline NC-17 mayhem, you’ll have a blast. Might I recommend a few drinks to enchance the experience? And, if you’re ever faced with the same choice as me—Slumdog Millionaire vs. Punisher: War Zone—please, don’t make the same mistake I did. I mean, does Slumdog Millionaire have a Parkour guy getting blown to pieces mid-leap by a rocket launcher? I don’t think so!

Ladies' Night at the Comic Shop

Last week, at Strange Adventures (the comic shop that keeps this blog knee-deep in Superman), we held our first ever Ladies' Night. Thursday evening, after regular store hours ended, Ladies' Night began. No dudes were allowed, and anyone who considers themselves a woman was welcomed in. It was only lady staff members working, and even the owner, Cal, was sent to near by bar to read comics and hang out with any dads, boyfriends or brothers who were dropping ladies off at the store.

The idea behind this event was that, I've found, when talking to women about comics, a lot of them tend to be super interested and excited about comics, but unsure where to start, and nervous about going into a shop and asking for recommendations. I love comics, and I work in comic shop, but I've still felt weird, uncomfortable and frustrated going into other shops. Why would I want some douche talking down to me about comics—something I love, and something that's supposed to fun? While I think Strange Adventures works pretty hard to be a welcoming place for anyone, all the time, comic shops on the whole tend to be unpleasant places for women. So we wanted a night where women could come in and browse, and ask myself and the other lady staff members for recommendations. 

Besides introducing the uninitiated to comics, we also wanted a night where women who are big comic fans could hang out, eat some snacks, get some freebies and buy some stuff on sale. Strange Adventures has quite a few women customers, and we thought it would be fun for them to get to meet each other.

So we bought snacks (chocolate—'cause ladies love that stuff, right?), made up a bunch of gift bags, did up a display of comics by female creators and comics that might appeal to women, sent the dudes away, opened the doors at 7pm and....

IT! WAS! OFF! THE! HOOK!

The first hour, the store was wall to wall, full of people. Our shop isn't huge, but you literally couldn't turn around without bumping into someone. We had over an hundred women in the store during this two hour event, and, if you're interested in bottom line, we made about as much money as we do on a busy Saturday, in a quarter of the time. It was insanely awesome.

People were seriously so stoked, to the point where one lady was shaking my hand, thanking me excitedly, saying, "I'm forty-five years old and I've never been a comic shop before! I love this stuff, but I've always felt too scared! You ladies are amazing!" I felt like someone paid her to come tell me exactly what I wanted to hear.

 After the first hour, the crowd settled into a busy-but-less-insane level, and I was actually able to make recommendations and have some good talks with people. We sold tons of stuff by women creators—lots of Alison Bechdel, and Faith Erin Hicks, who was at the event, hanging out and talking to ladies. Lots of Brian K. Vaughn, Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon went too, and then all sorts of other stuff—almost as much variety as on a normal day.

It was nice to see solid proof of what I already know: women like comics! They like all different kinds of comics! They want to buy comics, so stop actively discouraging them! The masses of women that came to this event really showed how much it was needed. Everyone kept asking when the next Ladies' Night would be.

I know the comics industry is still a total sausage fest. It's changing, for sure, but it needs a big push. And as someone on the retail end of things, I'm trying my best to help.

You can check out more pictures on the Strange Adventures site, and read some press here and here.