"Self-Portait," from Wally Wood's witzend

See? I can be polite and still talk about the King of Comics. I can be as fucking polite as you please, and–

Aw, horseshit!

Last night, I promised all the Kirby Virgins in the audience that they’d have their minds blown, and I’m afraid I may not have delivered. Sure, I gave you some great craggy-faced Gods of Evil, and some beautiful (if strange and/or distressed) women. I have you a man with a T-Rex on his damn head. I even gave you a picture of God Himself. But I didn’t really deliver on Kirby Cosmic, Kirby Rising, Kirby Transcendent. This is the sort of material that defined Kirby in the 1970s, as he came to grips both with his own artistic enlightenment and with the strange new generation of turned-on, tuned-in young people he found as his readership. Kirby always liked the young people, it seems, and though he wasn’t entirely at home among them (as the above ”Self Portrait” of a perplexed-looking Thing in a Beatle wig shows), he certainly spoke to them in ways they understood and appreciated. I mean, he found himself invited backstage to meet Paul McCartney, for god’s sake! And then, of course, there’s this:

Yes, Frank Zappa was a Kirby fan. Because, of course he was!

At any rate. In the 70s, Kirby was all about the Transcendent Moment, the moment of revelation when a normal human’s mind becomes connected to something bigger. It’s no wonder he was tapped to do the funnybook adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey, then, and it’s no wonder that film’s climactic moment looked like this when he did:

Kirby did a rare coloring job on this page and a few of the other “trip-out” scenes from that adaptation, so here you’re seeing his real intent for his trademark cosmic mind-fucks (or at least as close as the vagaries of scanners and rotting pulp paper will allow). That he followed this up with an entire on-going (if brief-lived) 2001 series makes me deliriously happy. It’s some of my favorite Kirby work, each issue an all-new story about some insanely bizarre character having a transcendence-through-death experience after encountering one of the mysterious monoliths, including this guy:

That’s X-51, better-known as Machine Man, who debuted in the final issue of 2001, which launched him off into his own follow-up series shortly thereafter. There’s nothing cosmic or transcendental about him, really, but my god he looks cool in that panel!

But getting back to that trademark Kirby energy, or Kirby Krackle, as it’s come to be known… It’s everywhere in Kirby’s work. From the cosmic…

…to the bizarre…

…to the abstract.

He even worked a similar dynamic into his action scenes, often representing great impacts…

…or even just sucker punches…

…as little more than speed lines rendered with such great force that they knock the color right out of the picture!

I’ll close tonight with two pieces I discovered only just recently. They’re portfolio pieces, things that Kirby drew for his own amusement, or as an exercise in being a funnybook illustrating god or something, I don’t know. They’re both abstracts, in which Kirby gives free reign to his design aesthetics and just goes wild. There’s little or no Krackle here, but they’re so batshit unto themselves that I think they belong with those shots. Out of thousands of Jack Kirby drawings, these may very well be my favorites. So, enjoy…

click to embiggen

cick to embiggen

If you’re not familiar with the story, Stan Lee had initially gone to Jack Kirby to develop his Spider-Man idea. But Ditko told Stan that Kirby’s version was essentially just the Fly character he’d developed with Joe Simon over at Archie Comics (which was more or less true), and so Stan gave Ditko the job instead, and we got a much better character out of the deal. But Stan didn’t like Ditko’s cover, and got Jack to draw a replacement, which is the cover we all know:

It’s a tough call for me which one’s better. The bright primary colors of the Ditko version are certainly appealing, as is the shocked expression of that guy looking out the window. The whole cover’s teeming with excitement and movement, too. Even the logo is telling me that I should be super-hyped to read about this new Spider-Man character.

The Kirby version is (unusually for Kirby) a bit static by comparison. But the darkness and grey mist of his cover fit the tone of the story a bit better, I think. Even the under-stated Spider-Man logo (or anti-logo) speaks well to the nerdy bookworm hero we’re introduced to inside. Kirby puts Spidey front and center on his piece, as well; moving the hapless thug to his other arm puts the costume on display in a way that Ditko’s version can’t match. And I love the perspective Kirby used on the mask webbing. As a huge Ditko Spidey fan I hate to admit this, but… I think maybe Kirby drew the character better in this instance.

Nice work for what I’ve always heard was kind of a last-minute rush job. I dunno; maybe Jack was still smarting over the office politics, and wanted to show Ditko up a little.

Anyway. Enough Spidey. Later on tonight… More cosmic grandeur from Kirby in the 70s!

This is your brain... This is your brain on KIRBY!

Ahem. Pardon my French. But I needed something to herald my return to the nerd farm, and well… What better than The King himself? It was just gonna be “Kirby Dammit!” but… Considering who we’re talking about here, that just didn’t seem to have the proper… COSMIC OOMPH. I mean… just look at this!

This is Kirby’s portrait of God. That’s God Almighty, Omnipotent Ruler of the Universe, and don’t you fucking forget it! I mean, holy (literally HOLY!) shit! If ever a deity needed profanity to get across how mind-blowingly, ass-kickingly… AWESOME he is… it’s this one.

So… KIRBY, GODDAMMIT!!!!

That’s JACK Kirby, in case you don’t know, the mightiest funnybook artist ever to walk the face of That Dude Up Above’s green Earth. If you’re even reading this, I would assume that you know who he is. If you don’t… Well… I’m very disappointed in you. But, still. Hang on to your hat, Dork Virgin! Like that fortunate young man in the picture at the top, you are about to have your mind blown.

Now. In the interest of equal time, I suppose I should share with you Kirby’s vision of the Man Downstairs, as well…

Not QUITE as awe-inspiring, I don’t think, but man oh man. The power, the majesty, the sheer raw ODDITY on display here makes up for a lot. Note also this idea of control equalling peace. That becomes a recurring theme for Kirby over time. For a man who put his life on the line to stop fascism in World War II, and who worked in an industry where he had very little control over his own creations, this perverse inversion of the American ideal would become the ultimate evil. An evil personified in our next subject…

FACE!

That’s Darkseid, God of Evil and Lord of the planet Apokolips, who sits high on the short list of Greatest Funnybook Villains Ever. Here he’s having an evil laugh at the expense of his own son. It’s a great shot, one of those uncomfortable close-ups Kirby was all-too-willing to indulge in from time to time (I like Darkseid’s uneven, slab-like teeth in particular). But this next picture, which captures the Big Guy in a more serious moment, does a better job of getting aross exactly WHY he’s such a great villain:

Just let me repeat that for you: “I AM THE REVELATION! The TIGER-FORCE at the core of all things!” That… is sheer demented poetry, and one of the more evocative descriptions of evil you’re likely to see. This idea of Darkseid (and, by extension, evil itself) as this predatory beast stalking all reality… Terrifying stuff. It lends an implacable, tireless aspect to evil that’s at the core of Kirby’s general outlook on life as endless, constant struggle. Kirby heroes are fighting heroes, always exerting force to protect society against the bastards.

It’s not all bad in Kirby’s world, though. In addition to predatory evil, there’s also transcendent good…

…and beauty…

…even if that beauty is often threatened…

…and sometimes comes in very strange packages.

Hmm. I don't think there's an entry for "phone-dangling fish-lady" in my dream dictionary...

And, of course, there’s always room for a dude with a T-Rex on his head:

Aaaaannnddd… I think that’s all I’ve got time for tonight. I’ll be back soon, though (no, really!), with another round of awesome images from the King of Comics. Next time out: ACTION! IMPACT! ENERGY! And an endless supply of KIRBY KRACKLE!

It’s also caused me to re-evaluate the stuff I like. When funnybooks were something I read in-between writing about them, the fact that I wasn’t being blown away by everything I was spending money on didn’t seem that important. But after a month or two of mostly reading them with very little writing… Man. Why the hell am I spending so much money on stuff that’s only mildly entertaining? So I’ve decided to pare back a bit, and only buy stuff that I’m genuinely excited to read. This cut-back is still a work in progress, but who’s lost the most of my business so far? Comixology, to be honest. Since my digital comics purchases were mostly things I didn’t like enough to buy in print, a cut-back on stuff that’s not blowing me away means that most of my digital funnybooks are gonna go. So what have I cut? Glad you asked…

Swamp Thing, by Scott Snyder and Yanick Paquette

To be honest, I’d already decided to drop this book. Scott Snyder is a writer I want to like, but just… don’t. He’s very good at individual scenes and concepts, but I always find something lacking in his work overall. On this book, he just keeps inviting comparisons to the Alan Moore run, comparisons he inevitably comes up on the losing end of. His “everything you know is a lie” take on the character is neither as inventive nor as compelling as Moore’s, his “kids’ insane asylum horror” not as scary or real, his “dudes with their heads twisted around backwards” not as freaky or terrifying.

Now, as I think I said in my last review of this book, “not as good as Alan Moore” isn’t much of an insult. But beyond that, Snyder’s run as a whole just feels a bit rote. Bland. Sanitized. Take the idea of rotting, for instance. It’s Snyder’s major villainous theme in the series thus far, and it could be a very effective vehicle for visceral horror. But it’s just not, and I think that’s down to Snyder’s approach. The early issues set the groundwork for greater horrors to come, but ultimately it’s too… nice… to truly horrify. There’s no creative vitality behind it, no sense of perverse delight or demented excess powering the horror. There’s also no real insight into what truly disturbs people, and so it doesn’t cut deep enough to scare.

It’s just too white-bread to be effective. It’s horror for pussies and small children. And… Well, I don’t think I can really insult the book any worse than that, so I’ll move on…

Batman, by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo

I’d given the Batman relaunch a miss initially, but I’d heard enough good things that I gave it a shot, buying the first three issues at the reduced digital back-issue price. And it’s not bad. I like the Court of Owls, and the mystery surrounding them. It’s a perfectly serviceable little Batman story that feels, to me, like a decent episode of the 1990s animated series. I can’t find anything specifically wrong with it. It’s perfectly OK, and I think the book’s in capable, if not particularly inspired, hands.

I just don’t find it compelling enough to even spend two dollars on a month-old digital copy.

Animal Man, by Jeff Lemire and Travel Foreman

I’m not dropping this book completely, just going digital, and waiting a month to get it cheaper. Because the visceral horror element is working marvelously here, largely due to Travel Foreman’s talent for drawing really grotesque swelling fleshy things.

Embiggen for even greater gross-out effect!

That’s some supremely effective body horror right there, and it’s thus far propelled me through a story that I honestly find a little dull. I just don’t care about The Red and its avatars, and I don’t like the way the book’s less about Animal Man, and more about how he’s now a (kinda weak-ass) guardian for his own daughter, who’s really the important one. It just seems counter-intuitive to me to go out of your way NOT to make your title character the most central one in the book.

And don’t even get me started about the talking cat.

Of course, the writing’s not all bad. Lemire handles complex character relationships well, and he’s done a nice job establishing the Baker family dynamics. He’s even managed to write Our Hero’s cute kids in a way that doesn’t make me want to vomit. But that aspect of the book feels a bit underdeveloped to me at this point; it’s really just a backdrop to all the “avatar of the Red” crap, and I’m getting bored. But maybe I can cope with that for two bucks a pop…

The Flash, by Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato

Another perfectly fine little comic that I’m sorely tempted to keep following. It’s not great, but it features a totally competent and unselfconscious kind of writing that I’d like to see on more mainstream super hero books. It’s pleasant without being cute. It’s good-natured but not naïve. And it’s very friendly to new readers, which was the whole point of the DC Reboot to begin with. It also has a creative spark, a vitality, that’s too often lacking in work-for-hire funnybooks. Francis Manapul is turning in some very creative work visually, coming up with neat speed tricks that play out around inventive layouts designed just for them. It’s neat.

And… damn if I haven’t talked myself into continuing with it. I’m definitely moving it to the one-month-later Cheap Bastard plan, though. Because, enjoyable as it is, it’s still merely competent on the writing side, and that does limit my affection for it.

Supergirl, by Michael Green, Mike Johnson, and Mahmud Asrar

And speaking of books that are merely competent… I enjoyed the first three or four issues of this book, but it’s just not much better than OK, in story or art. And, as I said at the top, I’m tired of paying money for “just OK.”

I, Vampire, by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Andrea Sorrentino

Despite my love of Fialkov’s indie work (Elk’s Run, and the excellent Tumor), and despite my nostalgic fondness for the I, Vampire property… This book just isn’t doing it for me. The writing hasn’t been great, and there’s a definite “been there, done that” feel to the proceedings. And honestly… For every really evocative image artist Andrea Sorrentino turns in…

There’s another one that looks like douchebag night at the goth club.

So you might notice that Comixology’s loss is also DC’s. In part, that’s because DC offers such an attractive digital pricing strategy for books that I was only mildly interested in to begin with. A less charitable person than myself might put that lack of interest down to a general creative failure in the DC Reboot, and even I have to admit that most of the books really aren’t very good. Of course, I also subscribe to the theory that 90% of everything is crap, so the fact that I’m still buying so few of the Reboot titles doesn’t really surprise me. Hell, considering how long it had been since I bought a DC spandex book not written by Grant Morrison before the Reboot, it still represents a significant improvement in quality for them in my book.

Of course, DC isn’t responsible for the only casualties of my cut-backs, as you’ll see…

Butcher Baker, by Joe Casey and Mike Huddleston

I was really big on this book initially. Outrageous super hero action that reads like it comes from an alternate universe where Miller and Sienkiewicz’s Elektra Assassin became the new Spandex Storytelling Bible in much the same way that Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four did two decades earlier?  Sign me the fuck up! And make no mistake, this is a fucking beautiful book.

Mike Huddleston is turning in mind-blowing work here, with a dizzying mix of art and coloring styles that both matches and elevates the purposefully crass action. And that action itself is nothing to sneeze at. I mean, I can’t help but feel at least a little love for any comic that features a cartoon stand-in for Buford T. Justice working with a naked hermaphroditic fertility god/dess.

So why am I dropping the book? Well, as the series has progressed, it’s become less about the insane over-the-topness that sold me on it in the first place, and more about the title character working through some kind of self-loathing midlife crisis. And I just can’t take the whining anymore.

Fantastic Four / FF, by Jonathan Hickman and A Variety of Artists

I’ve turned on this book awfully quick, and it’s purely for economic reasons. A re-read of some recent issues made me realize that spinning half the plotlines out into a second comic has spread things too thin. I mean, I like this book… as a single, densely-packed funnybook series with ten million things going on. But I’m not sure I’d keep buying it if they raised the price to four dollars, and now I’m paying six to get the same story. So it joins Ed Brubaker’s Captain America and the Bendis Avengers stuff on the pile of Marvel books that have priced themselves out of my range of interest.

(An aside: were Marvel to introduce more attractive digital pricing like their number one competitor, I might start back reading quite a few books that I’ve dropped over pricing issues. For two bucks apiece,  for instance, I might keep reading Fantastic Four. And I’d be all over that new Brubaker Cap series like a drunken teenager on prom night…)

SHIELD, by Jonathan Hickman and Dustin Weaver

No pricing concerns here. I just think it’s gotten silly.

Iron Man, by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larocca

I still dig this book, but I’ll probably never re-read any of it. And since Larocca’s artwork doesn’t do much for me, either… It’s silly to keep cluttering up my house with funnybooks I’ll never crack open again. So I’m going to keep reading, but I’m switching to digital for it. It’ll chafe to pay out… wait… This book costs four dollars! Well, shit! That might do more than chafe. I’m gonna have to think about this…

Prophet #21, from Brandon Graham and Simon Roy

Now, this is evidently a relaunch of a Rob Liefield series from the 90s, continuing its numbering as if it hasn’t been more than a decade since the last one saw print. I vaguely remember it being on the stands back then, but I’ve never actually read an issue, and have no idea what it was about. That’s okay, though, because Graham moves the action (I think) several thousand years into that book’s future, and takes off running in what I can only assume is a very different direction from anything Liefield ever dreamed up for it. Because, seriously, this is some really fucked up shit.

We open on a future-world populated with strange animals and savage non-human creatures…

…into which bursts Our Hero, John Prophet, burrowing up from underground in his weird, spiky, evil-dildo mole machine. Prophet then climbs out and gives artist Simon Roy his first chance (of many) to blow my damn mind with a one-two punch of gruesome body horror and bleakly beautiful panoramic landscape illustration:

Seriously... Click to embiggen. You'll be both sad and glad that you did.

And things just get increasingly weird from there. Prophet’s got a mission here in future-world to save the human race. But, honestly? It looks like it’s a little too late for that to me. Strange new species have come to dominance, and I’m not sure there’s room for us at the top of the food chain anymore.

Again, click to embiggen. Just be prepared...

There’s also an alien race colonizing the Earth whose primary sense is smell, and Our Hero spends much of the rest of the issue living among them. Their society is savage and strange, and we’re confronted with several more different shades of weird body horror as Prophet waits to meet his contact, “passing” as an alien by wearing one of their hides on his back so he smells right to them. Which works, with some limited success…

If it feels like I’m just summarizing here, pausing to go “Look at this!” every so often… That’s because I am. There’s no better review of this book than just telling you about it, honestly. And I’m not even giving away that much. Prophet 21 is endlessly inventive, assaulting the reader with waves of amazing gross-out concepts on every page.

All this climaxes (eww!) when Prophet finally meets with his contact, a vagina-faced alien monkey who wants to have sex with him in exchange for the information it has to give him. And if the images above haven’t provided you with enough nightmare-fuel for the new year, that most certainly will. No, I’m not going to show it to you. Because that really would be spoiling things…

Wildly creative in an exquisitely wrong way, the new Prophet is the real deal. It’s rare to see a mainstream funnybook so willing to take readers out of their comfort zone, and to do it so very skillfully. Because this isn’t just gross-out shock tactics here. Graham’s using a documentarian voice to create a truly alien biosphere in this comic, and Roy’s illustrating it with grisly aplomb. Add in some genuinely beautiful restrained color work, and sound effects lettering that’s fully-integrated into the art, and you’re looking at the state-of-the-art in funnybooks for the new decade.

It reminds me, in the best possible way, of some of the creative chances comics took back in the 80s. And it reminds me of something else, too. I couldn’t find Prophet at my local funnybook store this week, and so I wound up buying a digital copy (which I must admit didn’t really do Roy’s artwork justice). But that digital purchase did lead me to a fascinating juxtaposition, because Comixology was also offering the first issue of Jack Kirby’s Kamandi for cheap money this week, and I read them back-to-back. I’d read Kamandi before, but putting it next to Prophet really put the newer book in proper context for me. Even though “Oonaki Meat Farm” doesn’t have quite the same insane ring as “Kanga-Rat Murder Society,” there’s a similar energy at work in both series, a crazy “Did-I-really-just-read-that?” feeling that I love. And in a funnybook industry that’s often so creatively conservative that it strangles itself, that’s good to see.

Grade: A

Batman Inc: Leviathan Strikes!, by Grant Morrison, Cam Stewart, and Chris Burnham

They could have just as easily called this issue “Hey! I Was Reading That!” It does, after all, collect the final two issues of Batman Inc. Season One, which would have seen print before now if DC hadn’t decided to put the series on hold in favor of the DC Reboot. Considering that I’m reading this, but not any of the bat-books that have come about because of that reboot, I’m sure you can understand my annoyance. Still, it’s here now, so I suppose I can’t complain too bitterly.

The first issue collected here is a fine done-in-one featuring Batgirl Stephanie Brown secretly infiltrating an evil English girl’s school being run by Leviathan. Accented with some very nice art from Cameron Stewart, it reminded me a bit of an episode of the Avengers, and I dug it the most. Of course, it’s only a warm-up.

Because the rest of the book is devoted to what was supposed to be the double-sized finale to Season One, the labyrinthine mind-fuck that is Batman’s final encounter with aging Nazi super-spy Otto Netz, aka Doctor Dedalus. Luckily for Bats, he brings along all three of his sons…

…and they save his ass when he’s dosed with a drug that mimics the mental deterioration of Alzheimer’s. It’s a nice showcase for all the Robins, too. In the picture above, you’ll note Dick (in the older Batman suit) identifying the meaning of the doors (puzzles having always been his thing). Later on, it’s Tim Drake (dressed as Red Robin) who displays his supreme detective skills by figuring out the real identity of Leviathan before Batman himself does. And Damian… Well…

…Damian lets his father down by putting Dedalus’ own Nazi blade through the old man’s head. This is a pretty big moment in the character’s history, I think, taking a life after vowing not to and feeling genuine remorse for it. It’s a far cry from his first outing as Robin, when he cut off the Spook’s head and gleefully brought it home to the Batcave as proof that he deserved the red tunic more than Drake.

And at the end, of course, Leviathan’s true identity is revealed. While Morrison played entirely fair on this one, I must admit that I don’t feel at all bad about guessing wrong. My candidate was Jezebel Jet, and the class issues Leviathan is capitalizing on to build its army are the same ones Jet used to break down Bruce Wayne’s resolve for the Black Glove. Thematically, she was a perfect fit. Of course, so is the actual person revealed as Leviathan, so like I said… I can’t complain.

Grade: A

And that’s far more than I intended to write here. We’ve got too much ground to cover for me to go on and on about one book like this. Gotta do better from here on out…

Action Comics #4, by Grant Morrison and Rags Morales

This isn’t something I’ve seen pointed out very much, but in this issue Superman fights a giant robot with a tank for a head.

I mean, it’s another fine issue of Action: super-compressed storytelling, some nice character work, Metropolis under glass, and the debut of Steel (which places him, oddly, at the dawn of the super hero in the new DC timeline). It could have used a few more pages if they’re gonna charge four bucks for it, and the back-up story featuring the fight between Steel and Metallo was fucking unreadable. But, still. TANK. For a HEAD. Heh.

Grade: A-

Batwoman #4, by JH Williams III and W. Haden Blackman

Another superb and visually-exciting issue. I don’t have time to examine everything Williams does here, but wow. This issue features a sex scene that’s both tasteful and genuinely erotic, as Kate Kane and Maggie Sawyer finally go to bed together. Doubly impressive is the way this sequence plays out, literally achieving climax at the same moment that Flamebird bleeds out in an alleyway after fighting a losing battle against a freaky sickle-handed Frankenstein. It’s a kind of juxtaposition we’ve seen before, of course, both in comics and in film, but this is so well-done that I frankly don’t care. This is the best issue yet of the new Batwoman solo series, and one that begins to raise the quality of the writing above the spandex herd. It’s still the art that makes it special, mind you, but the story’s coming right along now, too.

Grade: A

Defenders #1, by Matt Fraction and Terry Dodson

This new Defenders book is loose, funny and weird, the closest any of Fraction’s mainstream Marvel writing has come to the easy fun of Casanova. It’s not as good as Casanova, mind you. But that rollicking surface, at least, is fully operational, and I had a lot of fun reading this first issue. It’s completely disposable stuff, of course, the kind of thing I’d normally be picking up digitally these days. Only two things have me buying print copies, as a matter of fact: the four dollar price tag, and the pure nostalgic joy of seeing the return of the little bottom-of-page trailer ads Marvel used to run in the 70s. I mean, I could give a rat’s ass that X23 is joining the Avengers Academy, but it’s cool being told about it nonetheless. I don’t think I’d want them in every book, but their light, airy tone fits this one like a glove.

Grade: B+

Thor #9, by Matt Fraction and Pascual Ferry

More fun corporate spandex work from Matt Fraction. In the wake of Fear Itself, this book has unexpectedly become a rollicking great story of villainous intrigue, funny in an “I can’t believe they’re going here” kind of way. Lotsa fun, refreshingly free of angst, and nicely-illustrated by Pascual Ferry.

Grade: A-

Iron Man #511, by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca

Still Fraction’s smartest corporate work, but with a slight lifting of the dark cloud that’s hung over it from launch. This is becoming a fast-paced, media-savvy little book with a great collection of villains. My favorite bit for the last couple of issues: the Mandarin is tailoring himself to look as much like Tony Stark as possible. Literally. Right down to wearing the same suits. Some panels, I have to do a double-take. It’s a nice visual continuation of the character’s obsession with Stark, which is the kind of thing that’s kept me reading for so very long.

Grade: B+

Wonder Woman #4, by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang

An improvement over last issue’s comically petulant response to Diana finding out that she wasn’t really made of clay, but of eggs and sperm like everyone else. I mean, it’s equally funny this issue to find out that Wonder Woman is a heavy metal fan, but in a less ridiculous, mocking way. Also, she admits that she was being stupid last issue, which ameliorates things a bit. I’m digging Azzarello’s take on Ares, as well. At least, I assume that’s Ares. Apollo simply calls him “War,” which… would pretty much make him Ares in this context. At any rate, I like this manifestation of him as a cynical, drunken old man with bare bloody feet. It brings the book even closer to Eddie Campbell’s take on these gods, without feeling like a rip-off, and that’s a good thing.

Grade: A-

Spaceman #2&3, by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso

Azzarello and Risso’s dystopian sci-fi social satire rolls on in these two issues, with more future-slang, Martian flashbacks, and a bit of the old ultra-violence. I really don’t have much to say about these issues in the short-form. They were enjoyable, though, and I’ll keep reading.

Grade: B+

Butcher #6, by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson

The secret origin of Billy Butcher draws to a close this issue, and while I think the series as a whole has been worthwhile, this final issue felt like more of a fill-in-the-blanks inevitability than a shocking conclusion. I suppose that if you read Butcher as a stand-alone story, it works better. But reading it as part of the larger storyline of The Boys, I really felt like there was nothing in this finale that I couldn’t have happily assumed from context. I mean, it’s good. It’s got the mixture of callous humor, shocking violence, and honest character drama that makes me love its parent book so very much. I guess I was just… hoping there’d be more. A little surprise that brought Butcher into even sharper focus than we already had on him. But such was not to be.

Grade: B+

Fantastic Four #601, by Jonathan Hickman and Steve Epting FF #12&13, by Jonathan Hickman and Juan Bobilo

Fantastic Four continues following the Kree attack on Earth and return of Johnny Storm, while FF goes off to Latveria with the Richards children and their Future Foundation pals. Hickman’s split the series’ many on-going plot threads up rather wisely here, I think, though the two books really can’t be read separately at this point. If you’ve been reading the series,though, the new split book is ultimately more of the same.

Grade: B

The Ultimates #4&5, by Jonathan Hickman, Esad Ribic, and Brandon Peterson

Still enjoying this more sci-fi take on the series. The book suffers a bit when Brandon Peterson fills in for Esad Ribic on art in issue five, but it’s still solidly entertaining stuff.

Grade: B

Animal Man #4, by Jeff Lemire and Travel Foreman

Travel Foreman’s visceral, meaty visuals continue to be the primary draw for me on this series. Lemire’s story is good super-horror stuff, mind you, but without such grippingly appropriate artwork I’m not so sure it would continue to grab me. Even as it is, I’m considering switching to digital for it; I doubt I’ll ever want to re-read this book, so I might as well…

Grade: B

Sweet Tooth #28, by Jeff Lemire and Matt Kindt

The “secret origin” of the plague concludes in fine form this issue, raising just as many questions as it answers. Is Eskimo mysticism really the reason all this is happening? I’m sure there’s more, and I can’t wait to find it out. In the meantime, though, this period tale of arctic adventure has been top-notch stuff. Probably my favorite story in the series to date.

Grade: B+

Kick-Ass 2 #6, by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.

Big dumb bloody fun that shouldn’t be as entertaining as it is.

Grade: B+

Secret Avengers #20, by Warren Ellis and Alex Maleev

Another great high-concept issue, as Ellis is joined by Alex Maleev to produce a slick, time-jumping super-spy epic. The Modesty Blaise style comic strip section doesn’t work quite as well as it might, but the issue’s so good overall that I don’t really care.

Grade: A-

Now that I have your attention…

One of the great unsung funnybook artists of the current generation is one Mr. Rafael Grampa. Hailing from Brazil, Grampa has sprung onto the American comics scene somewhat stealthily in recent years, most popularly lending his idiosyncratic vision to drawings of various popular super hero characters, like the one of our favorite flying rodent that we so shamelessly used above to trick you into reading this piece.

Not that we feel the least bit bad about that: it’s one hell of an illustration. There’s lots to like here, from the Dynamic Duo’s slightly creepy edge, to the great detail in the flow of Batman’s cape, to the casual-but-superb composition, all the curves complementing and counterbalancing each other. Then there’s the little details. The often-far-too-neat utility belt actually looks like a useful tool, for instance, made so by the simple expediency of hanging a couple of grenades off it. It’s busy enough to seem real, but not too busy, and slung slightly to one side, as if he’s just shifted it to get at one of his many wonderful toys. That Batarang in his hand, perhaps, with its crazy-long Bat-Rope coiled around his forearm.

It’s Robin that really grabs me here, though, and he does it with attitude rather than heavy detail. I mean, he’s basically a cape with a head and a fist here, after all. But in spite of that Tintin haircut, and even though he’s safely protected by the confines of Batman’s all-encompassing cloak, the Boy Wonder’s obviously ready to kick some ass. Chin band-aid, no-nonsense expression, weird-ass brass knuckles… That’s a plucky kid you don’t wanna mess with.

Similarly, you probably wouldn’t want to trade blows with Grampa’s pugnaciously pugilistic Daredevil, either…

More fine attention to detail in this one, including the hooks on the dual billy clubs, and the insane amount of cord coming out of the one in his left hand. The thigh-strapped holster for the clubs is nicely realized, too. It’s there on the traditional costume, of course, but (much like Batman’s utility belt) it’s been cartooned down to something so simple and easy to draw that it’s not a major design element.

Of course, that kind of hyper-real detail is a hallmark of Grampa’s super hero drawings. Note the boxer/wrestler-style lace-up boots, for instance, or the slight gap between the mask and the neck of the sweatshirt. Hell, for that matter, look at the sweatshirt! That’s a genius piece of costume design, especially when paired with the red-brown tunic, which Grampa’s turned into a pull-over tank top. I’m digging on the long-shorts look, too, and the sewn-in knee pads. That kind of protection, along with those MMA-style gloves, makes a lot more sense to me as a part of super hero costume design than the currently-popular body armor look, especially for street-level martial arts characters who need some freedom of movement to pull off all the fancy fighting techniques they use. Grampa’s actually made the original Daredevil costume into something that looks functional and cool, and for the first time ever I actually prefer it to the all-red suit that replaced it.

There’s a lot more going on here than this uber-dorky concern over the practicalities of men dressing up in colorful tights to fight crime, however. This illustration also shows a mastery of body language and a talent for cartooning (because, for all its “realism,” that outfit is exaggerated in all the right ways). I really like the way the clouds circle around Daredevil’s head, too, making him the center of the composition and also kinda mirroring his radar sense. Grampa knows how to use that busy, “lines all over” style to actual good effect, as well, giving his already-meaty drawing style added weight and texture, and an even more visceral feel. Jim Lee and his legion of artistic hellspawn could learn a lot from this.

And judging by his Justice League redesigns, Lee could also learn a lot from this drawing thematically, from its ability to reflect a character’s background in his personal appearance. Because, while this “super heroes as fighters” thing has sort of become Grampa’s claim to fame (as we’ll get to later), it’s especially appropriate for Daredevil. Boxing is a big part of his origin story, after all, and Grampa’s crammed a lot of boxing references in here. The gloves and boots I’ve already mentioned, but the stance and build also kind of scream “fighter.” He’s even worked it into the mask, with the nose piece looking a bit like band-aid stretched tight over a broken nose.

It’s great stuff. But it’s not Grampa’s best work. Not even close. It’s just pin-up stuff, after all, and he’s even better at sequential art. His virtuoso performance came on his American debut, the OGN Mesmo Delivery Service. But we’ll get to Mesmo in part two. Right now, I’m just going to show you a sequence from a story Grampa illustrated for a recent Hellblazer anniversary issue. It involves John Constantine going into a bar to uncover some demonic shenanigans, finding this goat, and… Oh, hell. Just let these two pages do their work:

Hot damn! That’s good stuff. First of all, you’ve got Grampa’s own style to contend with, his afore-mentioned meatiness and superb cartooning ability. Grampa’s big on the tough guy aesthetic, seedy misshapen bastards and over-ripe biker babe types, so this barroom gives him the opportunity to indulge that fascination. So it’s all trucker hats and giant mustaches on the background characters, drawn in a style that’s just cartoony enough for them to pass for comedy relief while not feeling out of place in a world where John Constatine fights a demon with a broken liquor bottle.

Of course, Grampa’s attention to detail helps ground things, as well. While he’s obviously been influenced by Geoff Darrow, Grampa’s details are generally in service to the storytelling, rather than being the whole point of the drawing as it often seems with Darrow. That first panel, for instance, serves to establish the bar as a set. And the later inset panel of Constantine being knocked into the liquor rack is a classic filmic long shot, a showy display of the artist’s talent for perspective, certainly, but also getting across how far Our Hero flew after getting clocked by the demon. It also allows Grampa to work in crowd reactions without wasting a panel on it and thus taking the focus away from the fight, which is the real story here.

And it’s in that fight that we see exactly how wide a grasp of storytelling technique Grampa really has. We start off with a pretty classic horror comics moment of extreme violence kept off-camera. As Constantine cuts the goat’s throat, all we see is the bottle raised high, with a blood trail behind it to tell us what’s just happened. That trick of using things from the environment in place of speed lines to indicate motion is something Grampa’s particularly good at, in fact; we’ll see it again in this very sequence. At any rate. The next panel of the goat transforming is a bit confused (nobody’s perfect), but it’s followed by a big splashy Image-style reveal on the demon. And I say “Image-style” specifically because… Look at that thing! It’s all giant and weirdly proportioned (correctly proportioned, unlike most Image-style designs, but weird nonetheless), and its gigantic horns bleed over the panels above. Rather than interfere in those drawings, though, they’re tucked away in the corners, where they complement the angles and serve to funnel the reader’s eye right on down to the money shot reveal at the bottom of the page. And what a reveal! That thing fills the entire bottom half of the page, dwarfing Our Hero and making it look about as bad for him as it can be.

So of course, Grampa follows that at the top of the second page with a great cinematic freeze-frame moment of Constantine smirking like the cocky bastard he is. The cartoony clouds of dust and smoke behind him, and his flapping tie, capture movement, and we’re still reminded of the giant danger in the foreground by the demon’s huge hands framing the panel. But it’s still a perfect hero moment, bravado in the face of adversity, caught in the split-second before everything goes completely off the rails.

And when the action picks back up in the next panel, Grampa goes all manga with it! The starburst of the punch’s impact, the motion-distended demon arm, even the cartoon clouds, are all right out of the Japanese funnybook playbook, and used to good effect. This is a very cartoony panel in general, in fact. Constantine’s pose as he goes flying is especially cartoony-looking. It doesn’t put me in mind of manga so much as it does Tintin, though. Something in the arc and angle of his body, and the way that one pants leg is creeping up over his shoe just kinda screams Herge to me. We also see the puffs of smoke serving to replace speed lines again, this time tracking Constantine’s trajectory off-panel. Ditto (if you look real close over at the edge of the page) a trail of blood coming from Our Hero’s unseen head. So that’s Japanese and Belgian influences on a collision course with Looney Tunes, all in the same panel. And somehow, Grampa boils all that down to a coherent whole.

True 21st-Century funnybooks right there, people. Gotta love it.

We’ll look further into Grampa’s sequential flair next time, with close-ups on both his afore-mentioned magnum opus Mesmo Delivery, and on the story that put him on most mainstream fanboys’ maps, his Wolverine story from the second Strange Tales anthology. In the meantime, though, here’s a couple-three more stunning Rafael Grampa pin-up illustrations to whet your appetite…

Traditional Japanese print influences for a Werewolf by Night cover? Why the hell not?

An appropriately slick approach for a spot illustration on cybercrime.

Mike Allred's Madman retains his funky retro-cool edge while somehow also coming off completely bad-ass.

Fantastic Four #600, by Jonathan Hickman, Steve Epting, Carmine DeGiandomenico, Ming Doyle, Leinil Francis Yu, and Farel Dalrymple

There are a number of ways to approach anniversary issues. You can do the big retrospective celebration of the series’ history. You can do the “conclusion to the big major storyline” thing, or maybe even take the book in an “exciting new direction.” Or you can do what Jonathan Hickman and his collaborators did here, and just give us a major story in the on-going saga of Marvel’s first family. Granted, with 100 pages to burn, Hickman covers a lot of ground, and he does so with a multitude of stories, each drawn by a different artist. So we get a regular-sized chapter of the current storyline (a Kree invasion of Earth), a handful of short features filling in some pretty important things that have happened in the background between issues of that storyline, and the capper, the double-length story at the heart of the book that brings the Human Torch back from the dead.

Should I have said "SPOILER"? I think maybe I should have...

And, seriously, there’s no cheat here. He actually does come back from the dead. Not just once, but… Hell, I’m not exactly sure how many times Johnny Storm dies in this story, but it’s a lot. I won’t spoil the details here, but it’s at once a cool science fiction adventure story, and a pretty funny commentary on Marvel marketing’s decree that they kill off a major character once a quarter. Sure, it’s still part of that big, artificial marketing ploy, and we all knew it was going to happen. But as I’ve argued before, super hero stories follow predictable formulas anyway. The only thing that matters is how entertainingly those formulas are executed along the way.

And I was entertained here. This is very much a Human Torch story, one in which he shines as a hero in his own right, something we don’t often get to see in the book’s team environment. He handles a bad situation with aplomb, and solves problems his own way, outside of Reed’s leadership. It’s impressive, and fun, and horribly horribly violent. In other words, solid spandex funnybooks.

It’s no more than that, though, and that means I’m gonna have to think long and hard about whether I want to keep buying this book in print, or go digital with it. Especially now that it’s going to be two different series (FF, the post-Johnny-Storm iteration of the book, will be continuing alongside the revived Fantastic Four series starting next month). If the price point’s at four bucks for each of them, I might have to consider dropping one or both. But if they’re keeping it at three… Let’s be honest here. Much as I’ve been enjoying this run, I’ll almost certainly never re-read it. And that would make it perfect for digital status. Hrm. Only time will tell.

Grade: B+

Kick-Ass 2 #5 (of 6), by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr

I expect big dumb fun out of this book, and that’s what it delivers on the whole. There’s one major (and I do mean MAJOR) plot point in this issue, though, that hinges on a pretty horrible misunderstanding of the American penal system. Without getting into spoilers, Kick-Ass’ dad has been arrested after claiming to be Kick-Ass in an attempt to protect his son from legal troubles. But, because Kick-Ass hasn’t actually done anything, you know, wrong… They’re only going to hold him for 48 hours. And yet, he seems to get processed and held in a full-blown prison, rather than the local lock-up they’d actually put you in for that kind of arrest. And it’s that prison set-up that allows something very bad to happen, something that probably couldn’t happen in the drunk tank.

This in no way detracted from my enjoyment of the bloodbath that follows, understand. It’s exactly the kind of ridiculous, over-the-top violence I read Kick-Ass to see, and I loved every minute of it.

But, man. I spent the rest of the issue with my suspension of disbelief totally shattered. It’s a fine line you have to walk in this kind of story. A nine-year-old killing machine is blatantly ridiculous, for instance, and thus a-okay. But if you’re going to deal with the legal ramifications of being a super hero… That’s too close to reality not to get it right.

Grade: B

RASL by Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith remains one of modern comics’ most interesting cartoonists, and a purveyor of exactly the sort of off-center middle-brow fantasy we love the most around here. While I doubt we’ll ever get something like Asterios Polyp out of him, his first series Bone is already an all-ages classic of the type that sells over time to generations of readers.

(And if you don’t know Bone, you should. It’s like Lord of the Rings filtered through Walt Kelly’s Pogo, and any fantasy fan who’s unfamiliar with it can’t really consider themselves well-read in the genre. That’s right! I just called out the fantasy dorks! Read Bone or turn in your Hobbit wigs, muthascratchas!)

At any rate. Smith has made his name, and his fortune, outside the funnybook mainstream. That’s a rarity in an industry whose fanbase seems so fanatically devoted to corporate trademarks at the expense of everything else, and I admire the hell out of him for doing it. Granted, he hit it big in the 90s, when small independent comics could still become breakaway hits, but Smith earned every ounce of his success by busting his ass to make it happen.

Bone has been so successful, in fact, that I can only imagine that it’s funding Smith’s current project, a decidedly uncommercial science fiction epic called RASL. Obsessed with quantum physics, multiple universe theory, and the work of Nikola Tesla, RASL is as much history and science lesson as it is a sci-fi adventure story (though it’s one of those, too). This issue’s overview of Tesla’s life, for instance, kind of makes me wish Smith would do a full funnybook bio of the great man.

I mean, LOOK at this!

Sure, it removes the action from the creepy (some would say positively Lynchian) atmosphere of previous installments, and any issue in which God (a deformed little girl in a filthy sun dress) doesn’t appear is always a bit disappointing. But I’m as fascinated by Tesla as Smith obviously is, so… In my book, it’s all good.

(Oh, and I buy this in print. I’m not even sure it’s available in a digital edition, and even if it were… I’m gonna want a hard copy of this one. I think it’ll stand up to a re-read once it’s all done. Kinda looking forward to it, in fact…)

Grade: A

Superman #1 & 2, by George Perez and Jesus Merino

I’ve been enjoying Grant Morrison’s Action Comics so much that I decided (against my better judgment) to check out the new Superman title, as well, just to see the future Action’s heading towards. On that front, these two issues served me well. Clark Kent’s working for the Daily Planet, Lois Lane has moved on to TV news, and the whole civilian side of things seems to circle around the tension between print and broadcast journalism. There’s frustrated romance between Clark, Lois, and Superman, too, but on the whole this is a comic about the news business.

And that’s pretty cool. Superman hasn’t really made being a reporter feel like an exciting career since the earliest days of the strip, and it’s neat to see that return. I like the busy feel of it, too, the non-stop hustle and bustle of the newsroom, the tensions between getting the story out fast and getting it out right, and the way that modern communications technology has changed how all that works. I also like that Our Hero, the Man of Tomorrow, doesn’t check his cell phone and is considered a bit of a Luddite by those around him for so diligently sticking with print in a video world.

Or, should I say, I like the idea of all that. Because the execution of it is a little less thrilling. It’s not a bad book, per se, it’s just… not very good. Perez is doing this news story style of narration that, while it ties nicely into the book’s themes, comes off as a bit belabored. Rather than getting more insight into what Superman’s going through in the action sequences, I feel like I’m being told things that the art should be showing me. Granted, it’s not showing me much of anything. Jesus Merino is packing his pages full of images, but to no good end. Too often, even beyond the intrusive narration, Perez is having to spackle the action together with expository dialogue from Jimmy Olsen as he films whatever’s happening (or should be happening) on-panel. It’s Merino’s job to convey that information, and he’s not getting it done.

Of course, the action sequences he’s being asked to draw are also pretty uninspired. In both of these issues, we see Superman fighting a nameless, faceless, personality-less, monster while cameras record his every action. This is obviously leading somewhere, of course, but it’s also dead boring. There’s a reason pulp super-villains gloat and leer: it’s entertaining! And that’s something these super-monsters, thus far, are not. Much of the supporting cast falls flat, too, coming off more like one-dimensional caricatures than actual people.

I dunno. Like I said, the book’s not awful. It just ain’t good. Even buying these issues digitally for two bucks a pop on DC’s one-month-later Cheap Bastard Plan, I don’t feel like I got my money’s worth. So, bleh. End of the line for this one.

Grade: C-

Ultimate Hawkeye #4 (of 4), by Jonathan Hickman, Rafa Sandoval, and Jordi Tarragona

While I’m glad that, with the conclusion of this Hawkeye mini, Jonathan Hickman’s Ultimates work will be confined to a single four-dollar funnybook… I’ve gotta say, this was pretty damn good. In one fell swoop, he’s managed to introduce the Ultimate versions of the most mis-handled Marvel creations of both Jack Kirby and Grant Morrison. That’s impressive, both from a creative standpoint, and for having the balls to tackle cast-off concepts from two of the most vivid imaginations in funnybook history.

How does he do it? By introducing us to the Chinese twin brothers Xorn and Zorn, the two most successful products of the SEAR super-soldier program. They have stars for brains or somesuch, and one of them leads a group of super-humans known as the Celestials, while the other leads an equal and opposite group known as the Eternals. They work together like the opposing sides of yin and yang…

...as reflected in their spandex monk robes...

…and consider the regular old human race to be Deviants. Which… wow. If you’re up on your Kirby and Morrison, that works far, far better than it has any right to. Kirby’s Celestial/Eternal terminology slots very neatly into Asian cultures, after all, and if you’re talking about Asian Marvel characters who are all about the sort of transcendent consciousness and mystery of Kirby’s work, Morrison’s maybe-he-existed-maybe-he-didn’t Xorn and his even-less-certain-of-reality brother are a perfect fit. I’m still kind of reeling from the elegance of it, even now. Bravo, Mr. Hickman! That is some mighty fine pulp remodeling right there!

It’s not all about combining spandex DNA, however. We also get some fascinating (and perhaps even terrifying) insight into Hawkeye and his relationship to Nick Fury. Warned by Xorn that completing his mission and returning the Celestial serum to the West might have dire consequences one day, Hawkeye’s faith in Fury is so complete that he doesn’t even bat an eye. So it’s mission accomplished, with a sudden heavy burden placed upon Fury’s unwitting and all-too-fallible shoulders. Which makes me look forward to future issues of The Ultimates very, very much…

Grade: B+

The Shade #2 (of 12), by James Robinson and Cully Hamner

After feeling kind of luke-warm about this series’ debut issue, I gave it another chance in digital form. And I kind of wish I hadn’t. I’m not entirely sure what it is, but… I’m just finding something about it off-putting. I think maybe in part it’s the glib tone. That can go over well with me, but there’s a self-satisfied edge to it here that bugs me. The narration from the detective Von Hammer, especially, makes me want to slap somebody. He introduces himself with a quote from the Shaft theme song, then self-consciously reveals that he’s really not “a private detective and a sex machine with all the chicks,” but that he’s “always wanted to say that.”

Gah! Okay, number one, I’ve seen that “I’ve always wanted to say that” gag a million times. Number two, quoting the Shaft theme is also a pretty played out joke. And number three, quoting Shaft isn’t funny at all if you don’t get it right! It’s DICK! Private DICK! Who’s a sex machine with all the chicks! See, there’s a sex joke in there if you say “dick,” and there’s not one if you say “detective!” The whole scene’s just a big ball of suck, and it’s only made worse because I get the feeling that the writer actually thinks it’s pretty clever.

GAH!

With shit like that going on, I find the Shade’s Oscar-Wilde-via-Bauhaus patter annoying, as well, and I get an even greater sense that James Robinson thinks that’s clever. And to be fair, it probably is sometimes. But I absolutely can’t appreciate it because the book’s overall tone is driving me batshit.

Cully Hamner’s artwork, however, is very nice.

Grade: C

Captain America and Bucky # 624, by Ed Brubaker, Marc Andreyko, and Chris Samnee

The sixth and final issue of this creative team’s run through Bucky Barnes’ life comes to a close here, and it’s been a nice ride. The writing’s been imminently decent, and I love the period setting. I might not have started reading if I’d known going in that this was really just a lead-in to the new Winter Soldier series launching next year, mind you. I wanted World War II super-action, and the scope of this was sort of outside that.

But it’s Chris Samnee’s artwork that really made this book worth buying, and it’s also the only reason I’m even writing about it tonight. Because, out of dozens of nice panels in this final issue, there was this one:

click to embiggen

And that’s such a nice piece of cartooning that I just had to share it.

Grade: B

For the most part, I buy digital copies of things I don’t think I’m going to want to re-read down the line. Most super hero comics fall under this category for me, honestly, especially the DC Reboot stuff. There’s not a lot of truly stand-out books coming from DC right now, but a good handful of them are pleasant enough little reads, and that makes them good candidates for digital. Especially if I’m willing to wait a month for the price to go down (and in most cases, I am). Marvel’s got a good number of books I’d like to read digitally, too, but they’re too damned expensive. I mean, if I’m not willing to pay four bucks for Ed Brubaker’s Captain America in print, there’s no way in hell I’m paying that much for digital. I’m buying a good three or four DC series I wouldn’t be getting otherwise because of their pricing, though. I call it the “cheap bastard plan,” and it means they’re the big digital winner with me.

At any rate. What follows are reviews of books I’ve bought both in print and digital the last couple of weeks, and I thought it might be interesting to go into why I buy things in each format. But I guess I should let you be the judge of that…

Batwoman #3, by JH Williams III and W. Haden Blackman

I buy this book in print for one simple reason: the stunning artwork and page design of JH Williams III. Yes, Williams and his writing partner Blackman are doing a nice job developing their cast, and creating thematically-satisfying super hero adventures in which the bad guys are a reflection of the inner turmoil of the lead character. The writing is really quite surprisingly good, and might just qualify Batwoman as a keeper all by itself. But, man. Visually, this book is light-years ahead of just about everything else on the stands. I’ve often said that the experience of reading it must be very much like how it felt to be reading Jim Steranko’s SHIELD when it was coming out monthly. It’s that good, and that different from anything else out there. In fact, here…

A nice two-page spread that’s indicative of the fine work being done here. Williams’ fluid layouts become literally so, as he uses the flow of the water to direct your eye across the page, and the bubbles as little cameo panels unto themselves. Check out what he does in those, too, Our Heroine going from slick, lineless Batwoman to pen-and-ink pale Kate Kane to classically cartooned little Kate, and finally to soft-lined Alice (Kate’s addled super villain twin sister, who died by water).

Those shifts in artistic style are a hallmark of the series, as you can see in this next sequence from later in the issue:

A super-nice page that sees Kate wash off the Batwoman glamour on one side while her cousin (and just-pages-earlier rejected sidekick) Bette takes on the glamour of Flamebird. Everything from art style to panel orientation flips here. I like Bette’s flaming panel borders in particular. She hasn’t gotten her own page-defining special effect before now, to match Kate’s lightning bolts and jagged bats, and it’s significant that she comes into her own only after Kate gives her the boot. Of course, since water has a habit of dousing fire, I’m not so sure this little outing’s going to go very well at all for young Bette…

I’m also kind of impressed at how Williams manages to work in so many panels of attractive, athletic women changing clothes without making it seem like an exercise in sexploitation. Maybe it’s because, a couple of pages later, he also gives us sequences like this one between Kate and her love interest, Gotham police detective Maggie Sawyer:

Beautiful, romantic stuff. Simultaneously gut-wrenching, touching, and drawn with a delicacy you don’t often see in super hero comics.

It’s a masterfully-designed page, too. Check out how the background just fades out in the second panel, as Kate finally breaks down. Even the outer border of that inset shot of Maggie caressing her cheek fades out, the emotion of the moment bringing the world down to just the two of them. But even the faded outline of the stairs enhances the page structure, forming the top of a pyramid made up of the outer edges of their bodies in the two panels that follow.

It’s amazing work, only made moreso by the quality of the writing. Maggie quoting her father, just as Kate’s breaking down over her separation from her own dad, is the icing on the cake for this one. Why is it only just now occurring to me how similar Maggie and the Colonel are? Of course, I doubt that she’s going to be as supportive of Kate’s double life as he’s been, so let’s hope that Kate’s not looking for a replacement…

Grade: A

The Boys: Butcher, Baker, Candlestickmaker #5 (of 6), by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson

Normally, I buy this book in print. The Boys is one of my favorite on-going series, Garth Ennis at his long-form best, and this long-awaited origin story for Billy Butcher has been great stuff. But this issue didn’t show up in my subscription folder at my local funnybook store last week, and I don’t recall seeing it on the shelf, either. I bring this up not to chastise my funnybook dealer, but to make a point about my digital comics buying decisions. When I saw the issue up for digital sale, even at four dollars, I snatched it up without a second thought. That’s how much I like this book.

It’s a good issue, too. Ennis and Robertson use splash pages to devastating effect through the center of the story, cap it off with one of the series’ trademark ugly scenes, and punctuate the whole thing with one of the more terrifyingly funny lines in the book’s history. It doesn’t have the chilling quality of the recent “Why’d you kill my dog?” sequence, but even still… Gah!

Grade: A

Wonder Woman #3, by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang

Though it’s not as good as DC’s OTHER major series with the word “Woman” in the title, I’ve really been enjoying this Wonder Woman reboot. The art’s nice, the logo’s cool, Brian Azzarello is taking a horror-tinged approach that I like, and his modern interpretations of Greek myth are spiffy. Plus, this issue revamps Wonder Woman’s origin story in a way that’s both shocking and utterly mundane at the same time (SPOILER alert: Hippolyta had sex!).

Diana’s reaction to this revelation is a bit over-blown, more like a petulant teenager than a grown woman. And her last-page declaration that she is only to be addressed as Wonder Woman…

…actually made me laugh out loud. Because, seriously? Of course (and I may be giving Azzarello too much credit here), I suppose it’s in keeping with the exaggerated passions of the myths she springs from. Hercules, for example, is a jerk not because he’s supposed to be a jerk, but because the Greeks valued passion above all else. And compared to some of the crap Hercules did, Diana’s (oh, excuse me… Wonder Woman’s) actions are downright rational. So I’ll cope, and see where things go from here.

As I was writing all that, I was trying to figure out why I’m buying this in print, and I’m not entirely sure. I don’t know that Azzarello’s writing is nuanced enough to reward re-readings, and while Chiang’s art is nice, he’s not really doing anything with his pages that makes me want to preserve them in print. And yet, I still want to keep buying print copies. I think it’s the total package, maybe, the cool and progressive feel of the book as a whole. I’m excited about it, and that excitement translates into wanting a copy to keep. And maybe to loan out, too…

Grade: B

The Conversation, vol. 1, by James Kochalka and Craig Thompson

A light-hearted discussion of art philosophy between the two greatest indie cartoonists of their generation. This came out a while ago, I think, but it only appeared on Comixology this week. I missed the print version completely, and since the digital was priced at two bucks (down from five) I picked it up. It’s fun. Over the course of 50 single-panel pages, the philosophical discussions get pretty deep. But Kochalka and Thompson wisely insert a mocking Greek chorus of cartoon animals that keep them from getting pretentious. Kochalka’s playful sense of the perverse helps on that front, too, as he (at least, I think it was him) presents rain as God peeing on the world before Thompson waxes rhapsodic about the glory of nature. I also like that the whole thing ends with the two of them crawling back into the womb, which is sort of what this kind of philosophical wank-fest is all about in the first place.

I notice that volume two is also available, and I may pick that up as well next week. Watching two cartoonists of this stature playing around together like this doesn’t happen all that often, and I feel like I should enjoy it while I’ve got the chance.

Grade: A-

Fear Itself 7.2: Thor, by Matt Fraction and Adam Kubert

Big doings for the Thor series here, including another really nice bit of myth-shaping by Matt Fraction. From the ashes of Thor’s funeral pyre comes Tanarus, God of Thunder! Tanarus is the Celtic version of Thor, essentially the same character under a different name, and as he’s born…

…the funeral turns into a party! Because, hey! It’s Tanarus! Everybody loves Tanarus! All those boisterous adventures he had with the Avengers! The Lee/Kirby Tanarus! Walt Simonson’s more-true-to-the-Celts 80s revamp! You know! Tanarus! The life of the motherfucking party! Or, as Freya put it… What an ass.

Yes, the Ragnarok cycle’s turning over, and as the gods’ history is re-written, so is everybody else’s right along with it. Everything new is indeed old again. Fraction’s been playing around with this idea since he started writing Thor. We’ve seen the world as shaped by Odin the All-Father, and got a taste of what it might be like if the Serpent took that mantle. Now Odin’s abdicated, and we’re entering the world of the All-Mother. I’ll be curious to see where that goes over the next few months. Especially in light of what happens on the last page.

I buy this book in print, in part because I love big ideas like those. Of course, the conclusions to all of Fraction’s storylines thus far have fallen a bit flat, and big ideas are easily shrunken down to the digital reader screen. So the real reason I buy it in print is the art. Not that it’s necessarily great work, but Fraction and his artists are turning in big two-page spreads to best-capture all the big god-action, and two page spreads don’t shrink down to the screen very well. Single pages are readable, even though I’m losing roughly a square inch off the print version. But spreads are impossible, even on landscape view, and the full-page reading experience is still important to me.

Grade: B+

Batman #1-2, by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo

Scott Snyder’s Batman is a perfect cheap bastard plan comic for me. I’m kinda luke-warm on Scott Snyder’s writing in general, and any run on any book that comes in too close a proximity to a Grant Morrison run is frankly going to suffer in comparison. But I was willing to give this one a shot, cheap-bastard-wise, which I finally remembered to do this week. I’m kinda glad I waited, too, because if I’d just picked up issue one last month, I might not have come back for issue two. Part of the problem was the book’s attempt to be new-reader-friendly. But I expected that; while I don’t need to be introduced to the three Robins, casual readers don’t know Damian Wayne or Tim Drake from Adam. So I was fine with that. I think I was primarily bothered by the way Snyder chose to have Bats take down so many arch-villains all at once in the issue’s opening sequence. It devalues some really fine bad guys, and that’s never a good thing. These guys get their asses handed to them all the time, of course, but taking even one of them out should at least make Batman break a sweat.

Beyond that, Snyder has introduced a mystery built around some Gotham folklore concerning something called The Council of Owls. Which would be a lot cooler if we hadn’t just gone through months of bat-centric Gotham folklore in Morrison’s run. Snyder’s Batman is also perhaps a little overly paranoid, but it’s a long way from the grim self-parody the character too often descends into, and I like that. On the whole, he’s weaving a neat little mystery here, and delivering a perfectly serviceable 21st Century Batman. It’s not great, but I’ll take even a decent Batman comic if it’s only two bucks. I mean… it’s Batman!

Grade: B-

Supergirl #1-3, by Michael Green & Michael F. Johnson and Mahmud Asar

I’ve been buying this one same-day-digital since the reboot, but I think it’s time to move it onto the cheap bastard plan. Not that I’m not enjoying it; so far, it’s been a fun read. But it’s not so much fun that it won’t wait a month.

So what makes it good-not-great? Well, I like that Green and Johnson are taking their time establishing Supergirl as a very confused teenager dropped without warning into a world she knows nothing about. I won’t go so far as to say that she feels real, though. She feels like a character in a story, as does the “evil Steve Jobs” bad guy introduced as the villain in issue three. They’re entertaining characterizations, but they show no hints of depth beyond that characterization. And that’s the difference between good and great.

Likewise, Mahmud Asar’s artwork is nice to look at, but it’s not great. In spite of some moments of brilliance, it’s ultimately just imminently serviceable funnybook art that never goes the full cheesecake exploitation route. And considering what’s going on in some of DC’s other books with prominent female leads…

…that’s nice to see.

(An aside: how do people in the DC Universe keep having sex with their clothes on? I mean, maybe that catsuit unzips a lot further than I think, but there’s no way Harley’s getting any through Deadshot’s briefs and her Daisy Dukes. And what’s up with that clown car joke, anyway? Is she implying that Deadshot’s got multiple penises? That kind of makes the Starfire-as-sex-doll stuff from Red Hood not… seem so… bad… Okay, no, I was wrong. That’s still so freaking wrong I can’t believe it…)

But anyway! Supergirl! Refreshingly free of exploitative images of Kryptonian jailbait!

Grade: B-

Fear Itself 7.3: Iron Man, by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca

These extra epilogues to Fear Itself were originally just supposed to be the next issues of their title characters’ on-going series, but Marvel marketing decided that they’d sell better as Fear Itself epilogues. I bring this up because this issue, in particular, doesn’t flow out of the parent mini-series at all, but instead out of what’s been going on in the monthly Iron Man series. Which has been Fear Itself related, certainly. But if you’ve been reading the core series, and not the Iron Man monthly… It probably won’t mean a whole lot to you.

If you have, though, it’s kinda brilliant. It’s the culmination of everything Fraction’s been grappling with in his Iron Man Fear Itself arc, the things Tony Stark is really afraid of. His alcoholism has been the most obvious fear, of course, but (appropriately, I think) it’s really just an excuse, a destructive coping mechanism that allows him to escape the thing he’s really afraid of: the loss of control. That’s at the base of his adversarial relationship with Odin (who’s standing in for God, and simultaneously IS God), and it’s why the Grey Gargoyle’s mass murder of Paris shook him so deeply. The death was horrible, yes. But even more horrible for Stark was his complete inability to stop it.

And Odin, being, you know, GOD and stuff… Knows that better than Stark himself does. So here, in the aftermath of his son’s death, and before he abdicates the throne of the All-Father, he decides to give Stark a glimpse (just a glimpse) of his true place in the grand cosmic scheme of things. Why? Well, I think it’s a bit of tough love (which is, evidently, the only kind of love Odin ever shows anyone), a little something to show Stark that he’s nothing in the grand scheme of things, and that he has control over exactly jack. Maybe in the hope that the poor bastard can just relax a little, you know? Or maybe not. Who am I to try to comprehend the mind of God, after all?

I buy Iron Man in print, and I do that for two reasons: one, it’s four bucks for digital, and at that price I’ll take a physical copy over a digital one when I can. But also, it’s a book that rewards re-reading. In fact, it almost demands it. This book, in spite of its depth of character and Larroca’s talent for facial expression, sometimes has sort of a flat affect about it. The big moments aren’t presented any differently than the small ones. The dramatic cues we’re used to, the storytelling tricks that let us know something important is happening, just aren’t there.

And so on first reading it’s easy to feel like nothing’s happening (a common complaint about the series). On the re-read, though, once I’ve got the basic events of the plot in my head, all this… stuff just comes spilling out. Little things, actions, lines of dialogue that resonate with other lines of dialogue, often from earlier issues, that fill the stories with meaning. Some people consider that lack of immediacy bad writing. I consider it more bang for my buck. But to each his own.

Oh, one last thing: this issue (and Fear Itself as a whole) gets downgraded considerably because [SPOILER] they’ve now erased the one truly horrifying thing that happened in the entire series: the murder of Paris. As a final favor to Stark (or, you know, for whatever reason God does anything), Odin restores everyone to flesh. I’m assuming the ones who were crushed into dust didn’t make it (in part because it makes me less disappointed), but all the intact statues? Good as new. I half-expected it to happen, and it still pisses me off. Because between this, the arrival of Tanarus, and the double-fake death of Bucky, absolutely nothing happened in Fear Itself that doesn’t happen in every major super villain attack. Any aftermath they attempt to spin out of it at this point pretty much means nothing. Well-written as it may be, it’s a literal Deus ex Machina (what else do you call a team-up between Odin and Iron Man, after all?), and that sucks. [/SPOILER]

Grade: A for the Iron Man stuff / D for everything between the Spoiler tags

The Flash #1-2, by Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato

A same-day digital buy for me that I don’t think I’ll be switching over to the cheap bastard plan anytime soon. This one’s an unusual case, you see, in that the main attraction of it for me is the visual storytelling. Manapul’s doing some really neat stuff with his pages, using layout tricks to enhance Flash super-speed stunts and just generally bringing the thunder on page design. I also like the way he’s playing around with what it means to be super-fast, delving into what it might be like to have a high-speed consciousness. That’s cool sci-fi content, and it gets a dynamic visual, as well:

The book’s got a refreshingly contemporary feel, too. Barry Allen’s web of friendships, professional contacts, and romantic entanglements just scan right for a young man of the 21st Century, and feel much more like a real life than what you see of the personal lives of most spandex characters. Good as it is, though, it’s not complex or dramatically exciting enough to make me think that I’ll want to re-read it later. And Manapul’s visual tricks are of a type that translate just fine to the digital screen. So, much as I’m glad that there’s a visually-interesting super hero comic about the relatively pleasant life of a nice guy, I’m fine with only an ephemeral digital copy.

Grade: B+

(EDIT: Forgot to insert the FlashMind image first time out. D’oh!)

He’s freaking unbreakable! And, if you embiggen that last picture… perhaps even divine. And that must be why someone’s taken it upon themselves to write, one tweet at a time, Batman’s holy text. Click here to visit The Book of Batman, the best Twitter feed since the original Hobo Darkseid!

At any rate. As we say here on the nerd farm… FUNNYBOOKSINREVIEWAREGO!!!

Action Comics #3
by Grant Morrison, Rags Morales, and Gene Ha

This comic is good, okay? Fast-paced, don’t-let-it-catch-you-sleeping action, equally tricksy character development, some really nice artwork from a guy who not only knows anatomy, but is also good at camera placement and visual storytelling… It’s a class act all the way around. And this issue also gives us a peek at life on Krypton, illuminated by the incomparable Gene Ha, including a cameo by Krypto. It’s the best thing to come out of DC’s New 52 by far, with nothing else even close to being in its league.

So. Action Comics. Grade A. Got it? We all in agreement? Good! Now that we’ve got the “review” part of this review out of the way, we can move on to things we can’t just take as a given…

Three issues in, the larger plot is starting to really take shape. This issue, we discover that Clark Kent has a secret source, a “Deep Throat” if you will, feeding him information on corrupt businessman Glen Glenmorgan. Deep Throat has some pretty specific knowledge of the events of issue one, and he’s egging Clark on to keep pushing against the man known as “Mr. Metropolis.” It’s clear at this point is that someone is manipulating the major players in Metropolis. But who?

Is it Lex Luthor, using Glenmorgan’s desire to bury incriminating secrets to bankroll his delivery of Superman to General Lane, then setting Clark up to take Glenmorgan down with inside info? While simultaneously making a thus-far-ill-defined deal with the incoming Brainiac? It’s certainly the kind of complicated, “playing all sides against the middle” super-genius plan Morrison might concoct for a character like Luthor. Even Clark’s code word with Deep Throat feels like something Luthor might come up with: it’s “Icarus,” which indicates that Deep Throat thinks he’s leading Our Hero to his doom by goading him into flying too close to the sun.

So Luthor seems a pretty good candidate to me. We’re lacking any sort of motivation, of course, but the character’s past history (which, admittedly, now no longer happened) would lead me to believe that taking down the current “Mr. Metropolis” and taking his place might be something Luthor would be interested in. I think he’d enjoy the power that the role of “millionaire industrialist with military ties” would bring him, don’t you?

There’s another player on the board here, though, and after a re-read of the series to date, I’ve become far more interested in him. I’m always wrong about things like this, of course, but still. Bear with me for a minute.

We know that Luthor knew about Glenmorgan’s plan to blow up the bullet train, because he used it to deliver Superman to the military. There’s also dialogue evidence indicating that Glenmorgan was involved in the plan to take Superman down. But that dialogue actually only indicates that Glenmorgan agreed to let the military herd Superman onto some properties he was anxious to get rid of anyway. We have no evidence that Luthor made any deal of any kind with Glenmorgan directly. In fact, we know that he didn’t. That deal was actually made by an odd little man with spindly limbs and an over-sized head. They’re calling him “Teetotal” over on the DC Boards (based on his refusal of a celebratory drink), and that’s too great a name not to use until his real one’s revealed.

Anyway. I’d been assuming that Teetotal was working for Luthor, but what if that’s not the case? What if he’s the one making the deals and doing the dirty work, with Luthor and Glenmorgan merely operating as clients to him? That makes him a much bigger player that I first thought, which in turn makes me wonder who the hell he really is. Well… So far in this opening arc, we’ve seen Luthor, Brainiac, and now Metallo. In the hierarchy of classic Superman villains, that really only leaves us two guys unaccounted for: Bizarro, who was really more nuisance than villain, and Mr. Mxyzptlk, who’s typically depicted as… an odd little man with spindly limbs and an over-sized head…

Considering Morrison’s perspective on higher-dimensional entities, that’s a terrifying prospect. Much as I like the idea of Luthor being a big enough super-genius to plot out this web of deceit, I think I like the idea of Mxyzptlk as some kind of evil quadruple-crossing imp, sowing the seeds of change and chaos, like Superman’s version of the Invisibles’ Mr. Quimper, even more.

But, you know. Like I said. I’m always wrong.

Still, though. Good funnybook.

Grade: A

Swamp Thing #3
by Scott Snyder and Yanick Paquette

This book, on the other hand, just keeps pissing me off. Sure, it’s got a nice opening, a pitch-black little gag that pays off with the kind of horrific inevitability that Alan Moore once brought to the title. Or that he would have brought to it, if he was a more obvious and slightly less interesting writer.

That sounds more harsh than maybe it should. Snyder’s tale of the boy in the plastic bubble isn’t bad. It’s just… not as good as the stuff Moore pulled off when he wrote his Swamp Thing story about damaged kids living in an institution. It’s more rote, falls back more on stereotypes, and is just more predictable in general. Maybe that’s not a fair comparison to make, but any Swamp Thing story that brings back Abby Arcane and takes place partially in a children’s hospital kind of BEGS that comparison. And creepy as it is, I’m sorry. This thing doesn’t hold a candle to that crazy-ass white monkey.

Of course, I’m predisposed not to like this issue anyway, because it introduces a concept that brings DC’s mystical life-force cosmology a bit too close to Geoff Johns’ Rainbow Lantern crap for my taste. Alan Moore (him again!) gave us The Green, the plant consciousness of the Earth, and somebody on one of the post-Grant-Morrison Animal Man runs gave us The Red, which is the same thing but for animals. Well, now Snyder’s giving us The Black, which is the consciousness of rotting dead things, and I’ve got problems with this idea top to bottom.

First of all, being rotten and dead would seem to preclude the presence of any consciousness at all. Rot isn’t any sort of animating force. It’s the absence of such, and giving it any kind of animating uni-mind doesn’t quite sit right with me. Snyder’s also trying to sell the Arcane family as avatars of the Black, which bugs me on a thematic level if nothing else. Abby Arcane was the bride of the Swamp Thing, after all, and her uncle Anton was connected to biological mad science, actually creating life in his laboratory, and then gaining demonic powers of creation after his death. Nothing about them screams “ROT!” to me, so it feels like Snyder’s trying to hammer a square peg into a round thematic hole.

But, whatever. Even accepting all that (which I will not do without one hell of a fight, I assure you), I simply cannot buy what Abby says about how she’s been resisting the Black’s influence: she’s been living in the swamp, where the Black has no power. Yeah, because nothing EVER rots in a freaking swamp!

And this is where the idea just completely breaks down for me. Setting up rot as the enemy of plants doesn’t make sense. It’s rot, after all, that returns nutrients to the soil that the plants need to survive. Lots of things rot in the swamp, which is what makes it such a good place for plantlife to thrive. So while no living thing wants to rot and die, they have to for the next generation to live. Plants and rot aren’t enemies so much as they’re locked into symbiotic stalemate. One can’t exist without the other, so any kind of fight between them is… kinda dumb.

But, hey. At least there was this page:

So the issue wasn’t a total waste of my three bucks. Yanick Paquette’s artwork in general, in fact, is very very nice. Still… I think Swamp Thing’s off the pull list as of now. Maybe I’ll go one-month-later digital with it. There’s still some decent horror stuff here, and for two bucks I may be better-able to overlook the thematic weaknesses.

Grade: C-

I think that all of this goes back to the fact that originally there can’t have been any difference between magic and art. The earliest visual arts we have are the cave paintings at Lascaux. Now, these are shamanic. The very way that the cave paintings at Lascaux were arranged, where you have to go through very narrow, sort of crouching series of corridors almost, before you get to this center cave where there are these wonderful animal pictures. It must have been done as some sort of initiation. You’re led through this darkness…and when you get to the center chamber, probably lit up by fire, you would not have seen drawings of animals on the walls: You would have had animals flying around the room. That is because if you’d never seen a drawing before. Just imagine what the very idea of representation before people had the idea of visual representation. What a magical act it was to draw some marks on a cave wall and have everybody understand that this sort of humped line was actually the spine of that ox that we killed two days ago! And to understand that a line on a wall WAS in some way the animal, you know, that’s something that we can’t really grasp now because we are used to looking at a picture and thinking, “Of course, well it’s a picture. It’s a picture of a cow, it’s a picture of a horse.” But back THEN, what an incredible leap of consciousness to actually come up with representational art, which of course leads to written language. The first people to do it would have been magicians.

There are dismissable cranks, and there are invaluable cranks, and Moore the wizard of Southampton if of the latter sort.

The pre-agrarian, animistic mindset is a topic Moore treated at length in the notoriously difficult first chapter of his only novel to date, Voice of the Fire. Not so much a novel as a pastiche of short stories tied together by the most tentatively connected themes, Chap. 1 is the first-person account of an exile from a Celtic tribe living in England, 8,000 BCE. Such a task obviously can never approach anything approaching realist precision, being dependent on the clues of archaeology, analogies from contemporary hunter-gatherer ethnography, and sheer speculative imagination as it is. The results of Moore’s experiment are mixed. He is given to some excesses in suggesting the primitiveness of his subjects. Taboos like nuclear family-incest are nonexistent, thought these are observed to be fully established in all contemporary prestate societies. Though in reality all human languages are equally complex and have at least three tenses, Moore confines his characters’ vocabulary to a few hundred words, and their grammar is ridiculously simplistic–the only first person personal pronoun is “I,” and the only tense is present. All this leads to really tortured prosal constructions; the idea “I cried” becomes “I make hot water from I’s eyes.” 

But Moore does succeed in communicating the radically different worldviews engendered by cultural evolution; for example, characters have concepts for numbers, but lack specific terminology to discuss them. “Four” is spoken as “as many as on an owl’s claw” or “one less than on a hand.”  This is parallel to some contemporary hunter-gatherer societies with counting systems limited to ”One, two, three, many.”

The 8,000 BCE chapter isn’t the most emotionally or humanly compelling of the novel, and the rest of the stories are far more readable–in fact, they are joys to read, and the work on the whole is on par with the comic classics of Moore’s ovure, Watchmen, From Hell, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But it is the one with the most material for thought-experiments.

Damnit, this is totally worth getting excited about, because

i.) It’ll be awesome. It’s by Maurissa Tancharoen-Whedon and Jed Whedon, the a pair who proved to be the strongest writing entity on the show. And it will revolve around Felicia Day’s Mag’s post-apocalyptic antics; the 2019-world was vivid, but painted with minimalist strokes. I’m eager to see Tancharoen and Whedon continue world-building and elaborating on the setpiece which so brilliantly took the implication of the show’s driving technology to its logical limits.

ii.) We don’t know if or when the next Mutant Enemy production will happen.  After two delays, Cabin in the Woods still doesn’t have a release date, and the open secret of Joss’ helming the Avengers movie has never officially been confirmed–although Edward Norton’s being fired from the hypothetical project totes is. Grr. Arrgh.

The Avengers are one of the hardest teams to build a movie around. Maybe you can shoot a bright, comic, gadget-porn adventure film with Iron Man and get the feel right and make it work. Maybe (and it’s not proven) you can shoot a mythological-epic Thor film and make it work, and a Captain America movie, and an Ant-Man. But what happens when they all step into the same frame? What kind of film are you shooting then? How do you light it? Who’s going to believe in it? Who is going to make sense of that tonal conundrum, and forge those disparate alloys into a single unbreakable metal, Marvel-style?

The proposed answer is writer-director Joss Whedon. And although the history of auteur directors and beloved franchises knows both triumph (James Cameron’s “Aliens”) and debacle (Ang Lee’s “Hulk”) there are very good reasons why he should get the job.

Since, provably, no two people share the same Whedon, I will explain who mine is. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was an ensemble show with vampires, vampire slayers, and ultimately, demons, cyborgs, wizards, ghosts – an inclusive world. It was sprawling and messy and you can hear him working his style out as he goes; it also includes the most wrenching and emotionally bare work he has ever done, proof positive that you can write the human and the supernatural and that they’re the same thing.

…

[T]hereis a central truth about superhero films, that Whedon obviously gets. It’s not about banter or bigger explosions or CGI or moral clarity. Superheroes aren’t better or purer than other people, they are interesting because they’re f—ed up. Maybe it’s your body or your mind or your family situation- it’s probably all three. You get to a certain moment and your body starts doing amazing, terrifying things. To the point where your can fly or turn invisible or are unreasonably good at violent behavior. You’re not exactly normal; but it’s not exactly a normal world is it?

Q: What do you think of Joss Whedon coming on as director?
Lee: I think it’s wonderful. The man is so talented. He’s really great. He’s gonna do a good job.

Now, it isn’t Lee’s decision, and I’m not sure how ”in the loop” he really is on the deal. Lee speaks as if Whedon has definitively been chosen for the project, saying “He’s gonna do a good job,” without qualifying it along the lines of “If he gets it, he’s gonna do a good job.” 

Yet Whedon himself has yet to confirm the rumors.

Still. The endorsement of the creator of the franchise can’t possibly be a bad thing.

Personal Note: I’m following this story out of a loyalty to Whedon. If I didn’t think too hardly about it, I enjoyed Iron Man, but hadn’t been waiting anxiously for sequels until I learned one of my favorite people ever might be directing them.

Also, I am a bad geek and have never made a final commitment in the Marvel v. DC debate. Where DC scores an F in science, Marvel earns maybe a D-plus or C-minus. On the whole, Marvel’s writers have traditionally had a better grasp on the Zeitgeist and pressing social issues. 

Moreover, Marvel’s protagonists have always had a dash more of realism, and better fit within a human scope. DC’s heroes are more archetypically heroic; though this diminishes believibility and vividness of characterization, it provides something I believe necessary to the culture, to our narrative imaginaiton.

Also, DC has Batman.

So it’s a draw.

Joss directing Robert Downey Jr. and Edward Norton. It would be a hell of a thing.

Who wants to bet he somehow gives Kitty Pryde a cameo? My goodness, that would mean he would work with Ellen Page, too!

That being said…the Avengers mythos doesn’t especially lend itself to Whedonesque themes. It’s a mostly male superhero team. And unlike the X-Men (who exist in the same fictional universe as the Avengers, and for whom Joss has written comics for), its members aren’t mistrusted social outcasts for having powers; they’re actually quite beloved by the mainstream fictional populace. (Their top-billed member wears an American flag as a costume, for god’s sake.)

Correction: He wears an American flag except when he's protesting unrealistic body image-standards as promoted by comic-book art. And yes, the image on the left really was published by Marvel.

If this is true: What will Whedon do with The Avengers?

A few months ago Marvel announced that 2010 would see a big push for some events built around women — as characters, as creators, and as readers. Here’s one of the first projects out of the box, GIRL COMICS, a three-issue anthology miniseries much in the spirit of STRANGE TALES, featuring comics created exclusively BY women. And that means writing, lettering, drawing — everything.Contributors include Kathryn Immonen, Marjorie Liu, Devin Grayson, Ann Nocenti, Trina Robbins, G. Willow Wilson, Stephanie Buscema, Amanda Conner, Jill Thompson, Louise Simonson, Valerie D’Orazio, Colleen Coover, Molly Crabapple, Nikki Cook, Ming Doyle, Abby Denson, and Carla Speed McNeil. The book is edited by Jeanine Schaefer, and we’re happy to debut the cover of the first issue, by Amanda Conner, colored by Laura Martin.

I can’t say anything about any of the contributors listed. The only names in comics I know are the blockbuster indie stars, and all male; Alan Moore, Art  Spiegelman, Bill Williangham, and of course, Joss Whedon (and the latter I don’t know by his comics work. I picked up like two copies of Buffy Season 8 before the shame of buying comic books overwhelmed me.). So I cannot speak to how or if women creators were selected on a meritocratic basis from the female-creator pool.

If the best female creators weren’t picked, is the whole undertaking a stunt condescending to women? Or do female fans and creators, underrepresented in the comics community, need the publicity boost as a means of advancement?

Why are superwomen victimized? If these women are heroes, surely they should be able to protect themselves against the dangers faced by real women. But superwomen are denied their dignity. Not only are superwomen victims of sex crimes, loss of identity and murder: they have to wear pasties and heels while they fight crime.

Women are not the only minority in the comic medium frequently given the expendable treatment. Gay and lesbian superheroes also face violent ends. In a list similar to Simone’s, author Perry Moore compiled a list which showed that gay characters are represented as perverts and villains who are usually killed, maimed, or victims of hate crimes.

GRAEME: Okay, so you say that the book’s the reality of your life and whatever you’re going through, which makes a lot of sense; reading the text pieces in the back of each issue, the reader gets the feeling that Casanova (the series) seems to be developing into some kind of allegorical almost-autobiography, with what happens to Casanova (the character) happening in some form to you, and vice versa – Is that why you decided to get rid of the character for the majority of the second volume, to give yourself a less dangerous life?

FRACTION: I think I can answer this question, and be somewhat disingenuous, as the answer would be predicated on what your personal perception of the second volume is, to date, which is — incomplete, or I can answer it and completely blow the ending and the resolution to the story and more than a couple fairly complicated reveals that I’ve worked really hard at not resolving prematurely. So I’m going to answer a question you didn’t exactly ask and hope that it suffices.

In a story about choice, responsibility, and identity, I thought it might be of some value — as a writer — and hopefully of some entertainment — to a reader — to completely disregard any and all assumptions we all might have and see where that leads us. The biggest assumption, the most basic assumption, being that this is a book starring Casanova Quinn. The first volume studies Casanova as a character in positive space; the second, in the negative space that surrounded him. When it’s done, both volumes form a kind of whole. For a book starring twins and drawn by twins, that felt kind of fitting. Then again, I’m easily entertained.

More in link.

My wacky misconception led to me being wildly disappointed when I found out that, not only is the guy not Jewish, Booster Gold isn’t even his real name! Nay, his birth name is actually Michael Jon Carter, which is pretty much as goy a name as possible. This brings up some fascinating thoughts about the world of the future, where a man out to promote himself would feel compelled to adopt a Jewish identity (perhaps the Learned Elders had finally succeeded?) – but no, Wikipedia tells me that Booster was just Michael Jon Carter’s college football nickname.

I think whoever created Booster really dropped the ball by making him a Gentile. Think about it: a flying Jew from the future – the stories practically write themselves! Just swipe the plots from Seinfeld and throw in some jetpacks. Maybe Booster’s parents are visiting from the future and he becomes so annoyed with them that he starts sleeping at the JLA headquarters. Or maybe Booster avoids a dinner invitation from his great-aunt Astra by citing an already-scheduled fight with Captain Boomerang, but is then spotted in a restaurant by his cousin Payload. Or how about Booster’s friend the Blue Beetle thinks Munich was terrible but doesn’t say so in public because he’s afraid of being called an anti-Semite. The only way this idea could be improved is if his sidekick was Lenny Kravitz.

So join with me in weeping at the road not taken. No matter who you are – woman or man, Gentile or Jew – we have all felt the terrible loss wrought by finding out that Booster Gold isn’t Jewish. As you read the following lyrics with tears rolling down your face, please imagine you’re watching Beaches and think of what could have been.

Memories,
Like the corners of my mind
Misty water-colored memories
Of the way we were
Scattered pictures,
Of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another
For the way we were
Can it be that it was all so simple then?
Or has time re-written every line?
If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we? Could we?
Memories, may be beautiful and yet
What’s too painful to remember
We simply choose to forget
So it’s the laughter
We will remember
Whenever we remember…
The way we were…
The way we were…

I should add, however, that I also have problems with the underlying concept of superheroes. Let’s be honest that the idea is pretty ridiculous – a grown man dressing like a giant bat and fighting crime (for example). Don’t get me wrong, The Dark Knight Returns was a fascinating work but it breaks down once you remember that yes, it’s about a guy in a bat costume who goes around punching criminals. There’s no way you can play that character straight, not for any length of time and not for an audience of adults. Lest we forget, superheroes were originally created to appeal to children, but since kids have effectively stopped reading superhero books, we’re left with the Big 2 trying to appeal to adults using characters created for a way younger audience. The “adult” superhero books try to deal with more complex situations but it doesn’t really fit. They seem especially trite when you compare them (for example) to Persepolis or The Acme Novelty Library, books that were created to explore those more complex themes and do not come burdened with a past as light children’s entertainment.

I agree with Noel Murray’s statement that:

Batman, Superman, Spider-Man etc. have all had good runs, and those runs either have been or will be collected, and made available for new readers whenever they want them. If Detective Comics and Action were cancelled outright tomorrow, that might be the best thing that ever happened to the titles and to the characters in them. Focus on the reprints. They’re cheaper to produce, since the creative work has already been paid for; and the quality of the material is generally better.

But that doesn’t mean that DC and Marvel need to retire their chief moneymakers. (For one thing, they kind of have to keep publishing stories about them or they’ll lose the copyright.) Instead, they should set the good writers loose on a series of graphic novels. Ditch continuity altogether, and let them brainstorm the kinds of Superman and Avengers stories they’ve always longed to tell. Some can be traditional, like Kurt Busiek’s Avengers Forever, and some can be left-field homages, like Busiek’s Superman: Secret Identity. Some can be for mature audiences, and some for kids. A shift in focus will also give the top artists in the industry the chance to do their best work without the pressure of a monthly deadline. Both of the big two already do this to an extent, but maintaining monthly titles as well has overextended the creative teams and the characters.

Just retire the damn characters, they already have decades of adventures that can be endlessly reprinted. Come out with higher quality stuff when you have them and not be forced to churn out crap every month, and don’t feel the need to slavishly follow every single bit of continuity-linked minutiae. To quote Noel Murray quoting John Byrne, “When you reach an age where you start nitpicking and making fun of the clichés of superherodom, than it’s time to put your comic books away and leave them for those who still appreciate them.”

Shawn Ryan Interview, page one
Shawn Ryan Interview, page two

Michael Chiklis Interview

In case you weren’t able to figure it out from the picture, Askeladd killed Thorfinn’s dad. A kid out for revenge sounds a little hackneyed, I know, but Yukimura introduces a bit of a twist: Thorfinn figures that the best way for him to eventually kill Askeladd is to work for the guy. It sounds weird, but Askeladd finds him useful and keeps him around. Yukimura makes Askeladd an interesting character since he is by far the cleverest among the Vikings, seemingly a good leader who commands loyalty and respect from his men.

The story begins by introducing us to Thorfinn and the Vikings in action in France, where they are the decisive factor in a siege battle between rival tribes. At the battle’s conclusion, Thorfinn demands a duel with Askeladd as reward for his role in the fight. The narration then jumps back several years to show us how Thorfinn ended up where he did.

Some of you are probably wondering what all this has to do with Vinland, a.k.a. the eastern coast of modern day Canada and/or the United States. Well, a guy named Leif Erikson was a friend of Thorfinn’s dad and tells the boy about a magical land to the west filled with good pasture and nice weather. Incidentally, the historical records say a guy named Thorfinn led an expedition to Vinland. Coincidence? Probably not.

Anyway, all that stuff doesn’t really matter, since the most important part in a Viking story is the violence. How does it stack up in this book? Well…

Ouch.

Damn!

Go Vikings!

Minnesota rules!

Convinced yet? If not, try this on for size: you can read it for free. Yes, you read that right. As of the time of this writing, Vinland Saga has not yet officially been translated. All the pictures are from Mangascreener, an amateur translation group, and these guys like to share. Head on over to their site and check it out. If you know how to use Bittorrent or IRC the files are pretty easy to get; if not, I suggest you Google and find out how. Vinland Saga is an ongoing series and is currently up to a fourth volume; the Mangascreener folks have it translated up to volume two and a bit. Check it out – you’ve got nothing to lose.

Mangascreener: Vinland Saga

This Wednesday at ELITE COMICS– (that’s 11842 Quivira out in the OP)– I’ll be signing CASANOVA #6 and PUNISHER: WAR JOURNAL #1 from 11 AM until Question Mark Question Mark Question Mark.  I will be there with a suit and my Stilt-Man HeroClix. Come by! Bring your weak asses on!