Well, Dang

My post for today just completely fell apart on me and I don't have time to work up another, so you're just going to have to content yourself with this image, deemed by myself, and esteemed Batmanologist (the esteeming is also self-generated) to be one of the greatest costumes ever worn in Gotham City. From Batman No. 234:

She only made a one-panel appearance and her only role in the story was to be threatened by a clown while riding around on a hot dog float, but Mustard-Hat Lady has found a place in my heart. I like to envision some fairly unlikely alternate universe in which she defeats the clowns on her own and joins the Batman Family in their never-ending vigilante crusade. I'll bet that Condiment King gets a bit more respect in that universe, too.

"John Buys Comics!" he exclaimed.

Hellboy in Mexico

Ahhhh…

I have no idea when I first encountered the idea of Hellboy spending some time fighting monsters in Mexico with three luchadore brothers. It may have been as recently as last year in the Hellboy Companion or it might have been hinted at in a letters page back in 2002. The exact date is, in fact, immaterial because I have been craving this so hard since whenever it was that it felt like forever ago.

And now it’s here! And it’s good, as all Hellboy one-shots are. I think that it’s a natural law, as-yet unquantified by our science. It’s not terrifically deep, of course, but who needs deep, especially when the other series in the Hellboy universe are concerned with portents of doom and the deferral of monstrous destiny. As much as I love all of that, sometimes it’s nice to sit down with some old-school monster-punching action.

That’s not to say that this book is only about punching. There’s enough abridged exploration of loyalty, friendship and vengeance here that it could have made a fair-sized miniseries. But it didn't have to be: everything is there and everything is fantastic. The punching and assorted moves that I no longer know the names of (early 90s Johnathan is slightly ashamed of this) are executed with admirable skill, even when not compared to books in which fight scenes are mere bundles of unresolvable limbs. It is wonderfully and abundantly clear what each character is up to in this book.

izombie No. 1

There’s a pretty good chance that you caught the preview for this that was floating around the last month or so but just in case, here’s the skinny: it’s written by Chris Robeson and drawn by Michael Allred, and it’s about a girl who is a zombie, but not the corpse-lookin’-lurch-around-the-countryside type, just a bit pale, a bit dead. The catch is that unless she eats a fresh human brain each month, she will become the lurching and mindless sort of zombie. To facilitate her pursuit of brains, Gwen (that’s her name) works as a gravedigger.

The preview also set up the fact that there would be mystery-solving in this comic, as Gwen must placate the echos of the people whose brains she eats, absorbed during that super-gross process. What I did not know ahead of time was that this was going to be a girl detective kind of story, complete with Sixties-era ghost sidekick, nerdy were-dog love interest and crypt HQ! Even if I hadn’t read old Nancy Drew and Trixie Beldon adventures throughout my formative years, I would be all over this.

I don't really know what else to say. If fun writing, Allred art and plucky supernatural girls solving mysteries isn't enough to get you interested in this one then I guess that we're very different people.

Superf*ckers

How happy was I to see this collection? SO HAPPY. I used to have access to the individual issues of this comic but then lost them in what can only be described as a messy roommate divorce. What fun to have them again!

Superf*ckers is an incredibly satisfying book, essentially about what a group of super-powered teenagers would probably really be like, and while it’s certainly not what I want to encounter when I pick up an issue of Legion of Super-Heroes it’s nonetheless very cathartic to read about over-indulgence, petty politicking, mind games and misfiring hormones in a similar context. I was a pretty innocuous teen, but I'm pretty certain that given the chance and the powers I'd have been smoking grote and engaging in ethically questionable behaviour just as readily as Jack Krak or Orange Lightning.

All the old clichés get illustrated, Kochalka-style: tryouts, super-romance, disgusting sidekicks, too many rules. I think that it gains a lot by being adorable and brightly-coloured as well - not having to waste energy on being grossed out and offended leaves a lot more for delighted clapping and squeals of glee.

Sparta U.S.A. No. 3

THIRD ISSUE RECAP: Sparta is a town in… another dimension or a fantasy land or the future, I’m not sure. Or maybe someplace else. Wherever it is located, it appears to be a football-obsessed small American town. Look a little closer, though, and there are a lot of strange things about the place, like the fact that its citizens are encouraged to get ahead by any means necessary, up to and including murder, as long as they don’t get caught. The people of Sparta don’t know anything about sexual reproduction - their babies are delivered on a semi-annual basis by the Maestro, their sinister blue Governor. And nobody leaves town because they’ll probably be eaten by yeti.

The hero of the book, Godfrey McLaine, has left town and learned about the birds and the bees and so forth, and now he's come back in order to free the people from the Maestro. So far this has involved getting his ass handed to him by the entire town (who just wanted to watch football, dammit), but he subsequently formed a militia out of the only people in town willing to have more faith in him than the Maestro: all of his former lovers.

Having written this out I now realize that it is all very strange. I assure you, however, that it is strange in a good way. Every issue has more yeti than the last!

Brightest Day No. 1 - Nobody said "Brightest Day", so one point to them.  

Batman and Robin No. 12 - Good job, Grant Morrison. You caught me completely off-guard.

Astro City: Dark Age Book Four No. 4 - Holy poo! Dark Age is done! Not that I didn’t enjoy it but it must be said: I am incredibly excited to read some

Orc Stain No. 3 - Fully half of this issue reads like a video game, in the best possible sense. That is, not like most comics based on video games. It’s like… like when you’ve been playing a game for a while and you’re on a level that’s giving you some trouble and then suddenly you just nail it. You fly through the level like it was nothing. That is exactly what the action in this book felt like to me. Astonishingly good.

Secret Six No. 21 - Hey, Dwarfstar! Always good to see someone keep on being a super-villain even after the series they started out in was cancelled. Also: there is a joke in this issue that is so good/bad that I guffawed, though subsequently I learned that it was impossible to explain to someone who doesn’t read comics, no matter how fast you talk or how many times you assure them that what you're talking about makes sense.

Batman Confidential No 44 - My, but that Sam Keith story was interminable. It’s good to get back to reading short, unconnected Batman stories. Hey, check it out, it's the second-best zombie from Return of the Living Dead!

"I Presume Those Are Tears Of Happiness?"

Me: “Hey, Dan Clowes has a new graphic novel coming out from Drawn & Quarterly! It’s called Wilson!”

Tiina: “Oh yeah? Is it another story about an isolated, socially awkward weirdo?”

Me: “…”

 Okay, so Clowes’ new book isn’t exactly a big departure for the Eightball cartoonist. Like Ice Haven, it’s composed of a series of shorter strips that, when read together, compose a larger narrative. Like Ghost World, it wanders the streets of a small town that is slowly turning into yet another strip mall. And yes, like pretty much everything else Clowes has done, it stars an arrogant, acid-tongued loner who longs for the comfort of simpler times while looking down his nose at everyone around him. There are certain themes and tropes that we’ve come to expect from the trailblazing cartoonist who, along with Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine, and Peter Bagge, came to define alternative comics in the 1990s, and honestly, a huge departure would have been fairly jarring at this point. It would be like Lars Von Trier suddenly deciding to make a G-rated comedy.

The star of Wilson is an aging, bitter malcontent, disgusted with nearly everything and everyone around him, with the exception of his beloved dog Pepper. When his father—his last living blood relative (that he knows of at this point)—dies of cancer, a suddenly despondent Wilson attempts to reconnect with his ex-wife, who informs him that the two have a now-teenaged daughter who was given up for adoption at birth. The tentatively-reconciled couple track down their daughter—a sullen creep not unlike her old man—and what begins as an uneasy family reunion almost casually morphs into a kidnapping. This is followed by incarceration, a marriage of convenience, further isolation, and a final, long-sought-after, last-page spiritual revelation that has most likely arrived way too late.

 

Each page of Wilson reads as an individual comic strip, rendered in its own style and colour palette, capped by a punchline that is usually either profane or heartbreaking, or both. The various cartoon styles keep things fresh as the impossible-to-like protagonist becomes more and more unpleasant. That’s not to say that Clowes doesn’t manage to evoke some sympathy for his title character—there’s a devastating (yet still kind of funny) scene near the end when the visibly aging Wilson desperately attempts to connect with his grandson via Skype; Wilson chirps happily at the kid, who is only interested in “playing the catapilla game” on the computer. Wilson is a character who, like Enid in Ghost World, willfully refuses to become a member of society, perennially disgusted by the dying bookstore market, the internet, and the proliferation of nail salons in his neighbourhood. We laugh at Wilson’s antisocial observations, while recognizing that his is a cautionary tale; if you stand outside the rest of the world long enough, you may be forever denied re-entry.

 

Wilson is Clowes’ first book with Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly, and it’s a handsome hardcover volume.  However, the $21.95 price tag for 77 pages of story may be a little off-putting for some consumers. It may make you long for the days when guys like Clowes actually put out individual issues to be collected in a volume like this later, but that’s just the way the business is headed, I guess—when your periodicals only usually move a few thousand copies or so, it makes more financial sense to put the whole work out as a completed volume. Still, given the choice between several ad-ridden installments of the latest Marvel or DC crossover or an attractive, oversized hardcover that someone clearly put a few years worth of work into, I’d go with Wilson any day. The territory it covers may be familiar, but Clowes certainly knows his way around it by now.

What Superman Does Not Like

I was originally going to write about this story (from Lois Lane No 20) for one of our recent theme weeks, but since the funniest in the story - as well as the reason that it was appropriate for the week in question - came at the very end and would have been telegraphed too much by the giant banner at the top of the post, I rejected it.

But I just couldn't stay away, so here comes "Superman's Flight From Lois Lane" - see if you can figure out if it was rejected from Hat, Fat or Cat Week before the shocking final panel!

We open with a typical Lois and Clark reporting assignment: 

 

Yes, back in the day being an intrepid reporter sometimes meant that you were like the guys in those reality shows where they try out extreme jobs and get stung by giant Japanese hornets and the like. I think I have a comic somewhere that has Perry force his staff to recreate a Donner Party-esque doomed trek through the desert - the man would go to any lengths to sell a paper.

And of course Clark's parachute malfunctions, but it looks like it happened about five seconds after he left the plane. The ol' super-speed should give him plenty of time to fix the problem before Lois notices that anything's wro-

You know, if legitimate skydiving mishaps resulted in perfect person-shaped holes in the ground I think that we'd all feel a little worse about enjoying old Looney Tunes. 

Clark manages to cover for himself with a speedy application of super-breath, of course (and boy, did he get a lot of use out of that power in the 60s. I demand more super-breath, DC!), and you'd think that this would be one situation in which he wouldn't have to fall over himself trying to allay Lois' suspicions. After all, her eyes were closed throughout the incident, right?

Nope! That lady would take literally anything as a potential sign that Clark was Superman. I guess that you have to give her credit: she had the right man. Trouble was, the right man didn't want to be found out, and this was the last straw. It's super-power time!

Yes, Superman decides to fly into the past, endangering, I'm sure, the very fabric of space and time and abandoning more than a decade's worth of friendships and hard work, in order to make sure that a cute girl will no longer want to be his girlfriend. That guy. Not shown: Superman murdering his past self in order to take his place.

So Clark Kent: reporter is no more. What's a youngish, unattached, nigh-omnipotent man from the near future to do? Become a stock speculator? Spend a lot of time preventing wars? Go to work for a different newspaper?

Use his super-powers to ace a job interview and become a disc jockey! Hooray! This is one of those times that I am wholeheartedly behind Clark, instead of slightly off to the side, scratching my head. Just check him out here:

Imagine with me now: a world in which this was a permanent change. We might have a goateed Beatnik Superman in our past, right next to Mullet Superman. At this point, who knows? Clark might have a fart-sound-riddled morning show with Jimmy Olsen and Ron Troupe as his foul-mouthed sidekicks and a rich legacy of radio station problems - Dabney Donovan makes a DNAlien that eats vinyl! Brainiac attacks just as Clark convinces a caller to put her phone somewhere inadvisable! Morgan Edge buys the station and gives the boys an ill-advised morning show! Oh where are Elseworlds when I really need them?

But it's not all great tunes and lovely melodies for the Sultan of Song. This being the Silver Age, Superman can only go for so long without at least one of his recurring themes surfacing.

In this case, it's the fact that he can't walk four steps without tripping over a cute girl with the initials "L.L." Of course, there's always more to the LL package than the initials and the hourglass figure:

Yes, in common with many of the Double-L girls, Liza is observant enough to suspect Clark of being Superman while simultaneously deluded enough not to consider that Superman might not be overjoyed to have his carefully-kept secret revealed on a whim.

Also note that DJ SUperman has traded in his old "cowardly Clark" cover for a new "sleepy Clark" version. 

"Clark, where were you when Luthor was attacking the station?" "Well, at first I was looking for help but one thing led to another and I ended up catching forty winks in a supply closet."

Liza tries out a few of the standard tricks, like the invulnerable hair-snip test, but the cheap perfume gag shown above is her master plan - I'm not sure if she's not quite as smart as Lois and Lana or if she just doesn't have the attention span to keep thinking up new little schemes, but after Superman solves the problem in a typically over-the-top manner:

... the resulting failure is potent enough to destroy her life.

Yes, Liza's dreams are crushed, she quits her job and presumably moves back to whatever small town she was originally from, there to marry the manager of the hardware store she works at part time to pay her parents rent. She never, ever listens to the radio, because it reminds her of what might have been.

Clark, meanwhile, couldn't be happier.

But all good things must come to an end, and for this story "the end" is synonymous with Lois Lane, who comes to WMET to interview the hot new disc jockey that everyone's talking about. And here's where I start scratching my head again, because rather than sit through one interview with Lois, he returns to the future - presumably going a few weeks into the past to murder his recent-past self before he could murder original Clark and begin this whole mess - to hang out with her every day.

Now here's the theme week stuff. Do you have a guess? Write it down before going any further.

Yes, it's Fat Week for the win! Liza Landis, in the original continuum, married the station manager and plumped up! Or maybe this is one of those weird Silver Age stories where time travel has effects on the present even when it's been undone, and this is what she did after resigning in shame. Either way, despite her evident contentedness and "Wife of the Year" status, Clark reacts exactly as one might expect:

ABJECT HORROR.

Yes, Superman once again rigidly sticks to his "No Fat Chicks" policy. Intrepid careerwomen need only apply if their waistline has a smaller diameter than their head and they intend to keep it that way. 

Happy Free Comic Book Day! I'm off to... get free comic books!

John Buys Comics. Compulsively.

Stumptown No. 3

THIRD ISSUE RECAP!

Actually, I’m not sure if I’ve talked about this comic before. If I haven’t, shame on me - I am a bounder and a cad of the highest order.

Stumptown is a classic detective story, in the “protagonist just keeps following up leads no matter how beat up they get or how many people they piss off until they get their man/woman” mode, and we’ve just gotten to the point where our hero Dex has met all of the characters but still has no sweet clue what’s going on. I was going to make a crack about it being hard to follow the mystery because the books come out so far apart, but I just read the piece at the back and it turns out that they come out far apart because Matthew Southworth is adding extra pages, and now I feel like a jerk.

Speaking of Southworth, he’s been doing a heck of a job on this book, and the text pieces that he’s been putting in the back have really been showcasing just how much design goes into a project like this. Likewise, Greg Rucka has been writing some terrific characters, which is good because that’s how you make a detective book shine. It’s clear that aside from being a damage-prone but ultimately indestructible private investigator with a cool car and some bad habits, Dex is a genuinely interesting person who loves her brother and has complicated relationships and so on. Ever since I stopped working in libraries I’ve had a really hard time finding decent detective fiction among the sea of mediocre, so this is a very welcome book.

Random Acts of Violence

So… I buy a lot of comics on impulse. I figure that since I’m doing these reviews I might as well spread my net wide and so I’ll pick up a lot of first issues and small trades that look even marginally interesting. And hey, Palmiotti and Gray! Dude in a welding outfit! Okay title! Could be all right! Was not, actually all right!

In a nutshell, Random Acts of Violence is about two guys who make a comic in the torture porn style, become immensely popular and inadvertently inspire people to commit heinous murders, until the whole thing loops around and they themselves are in the sort of situations that they’ve been writing about.

And surprisingly, it’s meh. Unlike the Eighties-style horror movies that seem to have inspired Last Resort, I have no real interest in Saw and Hostel and the rest of the subgenre that’s being referenced here, mostly because they have no joy in them. So I can’t revel in the tropes of a form that I love, and I certainly can’t celebrate the fact that they’re being transcended, because they aren’t. I can’t even get too worked up about the weird misogyny of the whole thing, because the characters manage to talk it to death round about page 30 or so. I mean, that doesn’t make it go away but now I’m kind of bored when I think of it.

Most of the entertainment value that I managed to wring from this came from speculating about the aspects of comics culture that crop up in the course of the story: do Palmiotti and Gray have a super low opinion of fans? Being as this is a book made by two guys (okay, four guys. Leave me alone!) about a book made by two guys, are there analogies being drawn here? Does that make the unfortunate girlfriend Amanda Connor? Is that as disturbing as I think it is? And my number 1 speculation: would we (that's you and me) really embrace an over-written torture porn comic book hard enough to make it as popular as depicted here - one issue and its indie creators are being flown all over the country to massive acclaim? I guess we'll see.

Husk No. 1

Maybe I should start keeping up on upcoming comics, because I didn’t know what the hell this was and so almost missed it. I was almost a fool.

Just in case you haven’t been reading up on this stuff either, Husk is the first (I think? I really do need to keep up on the news) part of a team-up between Marvel and French comics publisher Soleil, the goal of which is to introduce some fine Gallic comics to North American audiences and presumably make everyone scads of money.

This is very exciting! France - heck, Europe - has an incredibly rich comics culture that we only see in dribs and drabs, and any concerted effort to bring some of it over here so that I can read it without, you know, having to have retroactively paid attention in all of those French classes is fine by me.

As for the book itself, it’s concerned with Sarah, the devil-may-care pilot of an Arnold M5 Husk, a biomechanical exosuit used by police, military and industry. There’s a lot of philosophizing about the interface of man and machine, punctuated by wicked action and big explosions. As you may have inferred from that last sentence, it has a lot in common with Ghost in the Shell, even down to the fact that there’s a brain-hacker on the loose. I have to say though: this looks a heck of a lot prettier and the philosophy is either translated better or is less impenetrable to begin with.

Garrison No. 1

It’s the near future and the US government’s obsession with security has blossomed into full-fledged paranoia, making it the “most surveilled nation in the history of the world”. Our heroine, Jillian Bracewell, works for the National Bureau of Surveillance, and organization that is getting seriously irked by title character Garrison. Why? Because Garrison has been appearing on-camera long enough to murder people - more than 150 people - and then disappearing again, all over the country that's why.

So far, so good - a perfectly fun first issue, interesting character potential, nice art. It could go any number of ways, plot-wise, so I’m going to wait a month and do a SECOND ISSUE OF JUDGEMENT, just in case.

Okay, mostly because I haven't done one in a while.

Detective Comics No. 864

I’m ignoring the fact that Batwoman is no longer in this comic, because it would unduly prejudice me against it... Okay, done.

Hey, this is a good time!

I didn’t actually read the book (presumably Batman) that had the big “Black Mask is Jeremiah Arkham” reveal, but no matter: it’s pretty satisfying to me. The idea that Arkham was just as crazy as the people under his care has been floating around for a long time now, and while it’s a concept that could comfortably exist on the periphery of the Batman mythos forever, it has in fact been the focus of way too many stories for nothing to eventually come of it.

I mean, Alfred has been made into a super-villain. Robin has (kinda). How long could an insane asylum director reasonably hold out?

The Great Unknown No. 3

MINIATURE THIRD ISSUE RECAP: I’m sorry that it can’t be full-size, but it’s been about a year and my memory ain’t quite good enough. So: Zach Feld is an inventive genius, but every time he comes close to patenting something, someone else gets it to market first. He’s become paranoid and secretive, to the point that his family has called in a reality show intervention on him. And then, round about the middle of issue two, he discovers that someone actually has been stealing his ideas right out of his head and selling them on an online auction site called imind. Now he's teaming up with a group of funny-headed Objectivists who have also been exploited by the idea-thieves and things are presumably going to get science-awesome and possibly also science-violent.

Gah. Are there no comics that I can rag on for being slow? How can I take issue with Duncan Rouleau taking a while to write and draw and presumably colour this, especially when it looks so good? And issue four comes out next month, so I can just shut my mouth.

Usagi Yojimbo No. 128 - I’d been reading the older stories in this series as per my usual compulsive-need-to-catch-up modus operandi but I just couldn’t resist the sweet sweet samurai action any longer. I’m kind of glad I did, because the fifty-issue jump made me realize that Stan Sakai is actually getting better. That’s crazy! He was already astonishingly good! But yes: check out Usagi’s facial expression, stance and movement while he’s fighting in this issue - damn that magnificent man.

Green Lantern Corps No. 47 - Things calm down on the Lantern front, for one issue, at least. A nice little epilogue issue, with two points of excitement: Firstly: Kilowog’s assertion that he just wants to be a space cop is very encouraging because that’s what I want to read about. Secondly, the “Coming this year…” splash at the end looks very promising - a whole lot of the pictured events could fit snugly into an action-packed cosmic cop adventure. I am preparing for glee, particularly if that one guy with the flaming sword is related to the space genie that the Legion had to fight that one time.

"There are dozens of us! DOZENS!"

 I’ve been recently started re-watching the late, great Arrested Development on DVD, which is always fun to do when a show carries that many layers of humour. It’s tough to pick a favourite character—everything raspy illusionist Gob Bluth does or says is hilarious to me—but I’ve gotta go with Tobias Funke, Lindsay Bluth’s probably-gay, psychatrist-turned-actor husband (played by Mr. Show’s David Cross).

 

If you are familiar at all with the show, then you probably know that Tobias suffers from an extremely rare psychological affliction; he’s a Never-nude, which means that he can’t stand to ever be completely naked. Hence his ever-present cut-off jean shorts, which he even wears while sobbing in the shower after blowing yet another audition.

 

The introduction of this character detail, however, reminded me of a conversation with a customer of mine a few years back, when said customer pointed out a comics character who also apparently suffered from the same bizarre neurosis:

 

Poor guy. I just thought he liked cut-offs.

 A footnote: while preparing to do this post, I did a Google search for the words “Kamandi” and “never nude” to see if anyone else in the blogosphere had tackled this subject already. I found a link to Chris Samnee’s blog, where he referred to Kamandi as a Never-nude in the comments thread pertaining to an amazing Kamandi/OMAC illustration he had done (do yourself a favour and check it out here). By the way, Samnee is a super-talented artist to watch out for. His upcoming Thor and the Mighty Avengers ongoing series, written by LBW favourite Roger Langridge, promises to be a lot more entertaining than most of the current Avengers franchise.