Criminal: Last Of The Innocent #1

It’s been a over week since Criminal: Last Of The Innocent #1 hit the stands at better comic shops everywhere, so I feel justified in discussing it freely—the high concept of this latest in Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ series-of-miniseries is one of its best selling points, but the reveal of it definitely merits a spoiler warning. So, if you just want to take my word for it that it was the best comic I read last week and proceed from there, then by all means, go buy it and then come back to read my thoughts on it. Otherwise, read on while I try to make a point about its greater relevance, both sudden and ongoing.

 Still with me? Or back after reading it? Okay, good. Criminal: Last Of The Innocent is about a guy named Riley Richards, once a fun-loving, all-American teen, returning to his hometown of Brookview to deal with his father’s terminal illness. In the years since he passed on the girl next door, Lizzie, to marry her rich rival, Felicity, Riley’s life has gone down the toilet—he’s in hock to the mob, and Felicity is cheating on him with another one of his childhood friends, Teddy. By the issue’s end, Riley is convinced that the only way to reclaim his fun-loving youth is to murder his cheating wife. Any of these characters sound familiar? Even if you don’t pick up on it right away, the cartoony flashbacks to the gang’s wayward youths spell it out for you pretty quickly—Last Of The Innocent is about what happens after Archie grows up and marries Veronica. If you have never read a Criminal comic before, it doesn’t matter; each of Brubaker and Phillips’ crime series stands alone, even if some of the characters have connections to the protagonists in the preceding series. All you need to enjoy Last Of The Innocent #1 is a love of a good story—particularly a good crime noir story—and a passing knowledge of Archie comics (a little familiarity with Richie Rich and Josie & The Pussycats doesn’t hurt either, but it’s far from essential).

 Last Of The Innocent #1 works on more than one level, as every good story should. As said, it works as a hard-boiled crime story, one where some poor sap who’s had a bad go of things decides that one unforgivable, irreversible act of violence will turn his life around. It also works on a postmodern level, examining what might have become of a group of beloved cartoon archetypes after they all graduated from high school and moved out of their parents’ houses (even if this took them over half a century, in publishing terms). And finally, it works on the level of satire—specifically, a satire of our current preoccupation with, and the inherent dangers of, nostalgia. Riley is so convinced that his childhood was wonderful and perfect that he’s willing to kill it to get it back, even though a) he can’t ever get it back, not really, and b) his childhood maybe wasn’t as wonderful as he thought—the cartoony flashback sequences always seem to have some kind of danger and/or general unwholesomeness lurking around (sex, drugs, and murder were a lot more common in Brookview than in Riverdale, it turns out).

 This is an especially relevant theme, these days. Woody Allen’s latest movie, Midnight In Paris, wrestles with the notion that the good old days were, in fact, highly overrated, and that nostalgia is something of a tender trap. This week, J.J. Abrams’ new film, Super 8 opens—a loving homage to late 1970s/early 1980s sci-fi films like E.T. and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind—and some critics have already accused it of being an empty exercise in Spielberg worship (the legendary director executive-produced Super 8). And, last week’s bombshell announcement that DC Comics plans to relaunch their entire superhero publishing line in September speaks to both the need to let go of the past (70-plus years of continuity will be largely ignored to provide a fresh start for potential new readers, or so we were told at first), while also confirming that, in fact, nostalgia is an inescapable strand of the DNA of comics fans (after early reports of a total reboot, DC’s steady stream of title announcements for the September relaunch reveal that most of these series maintain the previous continuity pretty much intact, despite the requisite costume redesigns and creative team rotations). Even for comic book publishers, it’s tough to let go of the good old days.

 Last Of The Innocent isn’t one of those wretched re-examinations of beloved comics characters that wallows in postmodernism by simply recasting old favourites as drug addicts, wife beaters, and fascists (although one of the thinly-veiled Riverdale gang is now saddled with a substance abuse problem). Brubaker and Phillips actually have something to say about the dangers of viewing the past through rose-coloured glasses, and their Archie pastiche provides an entertaining and insightful storytelling device with which to deliver it.  

Excellent Faces: Wonder Woman

Preamble: Wonder Woman and Faith are talkin' romance in JLA No. 90

And then ZING!, an Excellent Face appears:

Hooray!

The Sensational Character Find of 1950

Though I love Silver Age super-hero comics, I had until recently been pretty uninterested in the other funnybooks of the 50s and 60s, the war and romance and teen comics. How could they hold the same appeal? But then I encountered the perplexing comic oddity known to man as Kafloppos, and was semi-consumed with finding more of them, with ferreting out exactly what the hell they mean. And since Kafloppos was a semi-homeless strip that bounced from All-Funny to Batman to Action Comics to Boy Commandos, I've ended up reading a pretty wide variety of books recently. And hey, it turns out that The Adventures of Alan Ladd, say, is basically filled with exactly the same kind of gangster-slugging, tough-talking, ridiculous adventure that I love, only with a fictionalized version of Alan Ladd in place of, say, Johnny Double.

And even if I didn't enjoy reading them,  The Adventures of Alan Ladd would hold a special place in my heart thanks to these three panels from issue 2, in a story entitled "Sheriff Alan Ladd":

Specifically, that unnamed, unreferenced, unspeaking girl who mutely pines for Alan. There's something very nearly perfect about the way that she's been drawn.

She's just so... intent, and Alan is so oblivious, that for three panels her poignant little drama completely overshadows the ludicrous plot. 

And then she is gone forever, hopefully to a long and happy life in her strange little Wild West themed 1950s town.

Alan Ladd caught the stagecoach robbers, by the way.

Silent Piner, I salute you.

I Obviously Have a Lot to Learn About Dungeon Mastering

I try to take my guys on adventures filled with mystery and crazy monsters (and, lately, a lot of municipal politics), but recently I was looking through some old issues of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons from the late 80s and, well, I just don't know if I can compete with this, from issue 7:

Your eyes are not deceiving you: that is the magically reanimated and enlarged skeleton of a jester that has been sent to destroy the city of Waterdeep, fighting off that city's griffon-mounted airforce. And, might I add, the skeleton is able to breathe both fire and ice.

It's enough to make a man think about hanging up his dice.

The Unfunnies: Time Was, A Prison Was a Place For Laughter.

I've mentioned the legal-system themed cartoons that ran in the various Batman comics before, with their light-hearted looks at crime and punishment and strange interconnectedness. Here's Warden Willis, head of the prison featured in Jail Jests. Presumably Lefty Looie is somewhere in the background.

Aside from the general thematic strangeness of these comics, I recently realized that they are all from the late 50s/early 60s, which is also the time period that the Shawshank Redemption, Cool Hand Luke... basically most of the classic prison movies are set in, and it's messing with my perceptions. I keep picturing 2143 putting fishhooks in his enemies' food or 2130 getting throttled with his own tether because he back-talked a guard.

The Morgan Freeman narration does add a certain class, though.

- From Detective Comics no 261

Even When Stripped of His Fantastic Powers, John Buys Comics

I bought comics! And now you get to read about them!

Flashpoint No. 2 (and about a million miniseries) (DC)

 

Why it's Here: I'm honestly not sure. Is it because I feel like I should at least make a pass at reviewing DC's Summer crossover? Because I want to see what kind of tomfoolery is going to spark the Big Reset in September? Is it just that I'm a sucker for an alternate universe story? No idea.

Non Spoiler Summary: The Reverse Flash has messed with time and now Everything is Different and Crazy and Dark. Batman is Thomas Wayne! Atlantis done blowed up most of Europe! Dogs are marrying cats!

The Very Best Thing About It: There's a lot of decent alternate-universe-everything-is-different stuff going on: less-used characters like Shade the Changing Man and the Outsider rub elbows with interestingly-tweaked versions of old standards such as the five-kids-and-a-tiger version of Captain Marvel Thunder. Plus it's always fun to see Dr Thirteen.

The Very Worst Thing About It: It just feels a bit... tepid. A lot of the characters in this world have clear motivations (stop the war between Atlantis and the Amazons, don't get killed, steal things, etc) but the series itself lacks any sort of clear reason for being. The world has changed because Reverse Flash did... something, or a lot of things, right? And he did it to... mess with the Flash? To what end? Honestly, the Sadistic Mastermind Who Hatches Overly-Elaborate Schemes and Gloats All the Time villain archetype is near universally the most tedious and irritating thing in comics. Reverse Flash is Hush is terrible and the world that he has created has no dramatic reason to exist. If it wasn't being played up as a BIG! FAT! IMPORTANT! CROSSOVER! this could just be a standalone Flash story with no consequences outside of his own book, and not many there.

I might take all this back if some later issue reveals that, say, the absence of Barry Allen caused the heroes to lose during the original Crisis and this is the shitty final

Also, the entire series takes place at night or under heavy cloud cover. THE WORLD IS LITERALLY DARK and the symbolism heavy-handed.

Who Made It: A Geoff Johns joint. Plus a lot of artists and auxiliary writers.

Closing Comments: I'm going to give this thing a couple of more chances. This means that I am part of the event problem. I feel terrible about this.

The Tooth (Oni)

 

Why It's Here: It's an original graphic novel about an anthropomorphic tooth that fights monsters. That's amazing.

Non Spoiler Summary: Think old Man-Thing or Swamp Thing: the travels and travails of an improbable creature and its human cohorts in a world crawling with demons and monsters and dark science. And it's framed as a story arc in a long-running series, complete with letters pages and callbacks to non-existent continuity. Fun!

The Very Best Thing About It: That it's a pretty much perfect recreation of the Weird Wandering Monster subgenre from days of yore, complete with purple narration and crazy monsters and an internal mythology that makes things like a tooth monster that splits its time between killing things and living in a dude's mouth make sense.

The Very Worst Thing About It: My boss just expressed interest in the odd book sitting on my desk, whereupon I realized that there was no way for me to explain it to a layperson without sounding like a crazy man. That's unfortunate.

Who Made It: Cullen Bunn and Shawn Lee wrote it and Matt Kindt drawed it.

Isle of 100,000 Graves (Fantagraphics)

Why I'm Keeping This Short: It's a Jason comic. Do you like those? Then you will like this. Do you not like those? You won't like this. If you have no idea what I'm talking about... Do you like the idea of a slice-of-life story in a very strange setting where all of the characters are idiosyncratically-drawn anthropomorphic dogs and birds? Well there you go then.

50 Girls 50 (Image)

Why I'm Keeping This Short: Because there's only so much you can say about this story if you're not getting mad about it. It's got a dumb title (at least I think it does, because that's the way it's written in the indicia) and a generic sci-fi story with really nice art - the only really remarkable thing about it is the number of plot hoops that Doug Murray and Frank Cho jumped through in order to set up their cheesecake-fest. "Earth is starving and we need to find another planet! Look, a wormhole that messes up the Y chromosome - better send a spaceship full of hot science-babes to look for one." "Oh, no! This jungle planet we landed on has a crazy atmosphere that dissolves plastic! We are forced to wander around in tiny scraps of cloth and spear-fight giant insects until we can find a way off!" And so on. If Frank Cho's jungle ladies appeal to or repulse you, this book is likely to do the same.

Criminal: The Last of the Innocent (Icon)

Why I'm Keeping This Short: Because I foolishly have not read any Criminal before and I have no idea if discussing the plot of this issue will be spoilery. Succinctly, it is excellent.