Follow:

The Mix : What are people talking about today?

0

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout by Doug Savage

First up: I know I missed one. In between the original Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy  and this book, there was Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Disco Fever, which is unavailable from any library near me, digitally or physically. (In fact, none of the nearby libraries seem to have any of the Laser Moose books in dead-tree form, which shocks and annoys me.) I may have to read it in a bookstore at some point, assuming I remember.

But I’m pretty sure there weren’t any shocking revelations or major change in Disco Fever: this is a middle-grade graphic novel series about a moose who shoots lasers out of his eyes and his best friend the slightly more reasonable rabbit, and that’s going to be the whole point. Oh, and they fight crime. Well, maybe not crime as such, since they’re out in the woods – but they help nice people and foil miscreants, so basically the same thing.

OK, so maybe Laser Moose gets a little wild with his eye-lasers, and cuts off the deer Frank’s leg once in a while. These kinds of things will happen when you’re defending the forest. And, anyway, Doc the raccoon can sew Frank’s leg back on. Again.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout is just what the title implies: another adventure of Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, in which they meet and help out a time-traveling fish. A time-traveler from the polluted far future came back to their bucolic wilderness and dropped his time gizmo, which the fish immediately ate. (Because “I thought it might be a grasshopper. I tend to eat anything in the river, just in case it’s a tasty grasshopper. You don’t want to find out that it was a grasshopper later, when it’s already gone,” which makes just as much sense as anyone’s motivation in this series.) 

This makes the fish travel semi-randomly in time: a big purple vortex appears repeatedly to pull him off when he thinks about past events and then again to return him to the present day. Our heroes – plus the evil Aquabear from the first book – get caught up in the shenanigans, with the usual time-travel complications, including changing the past and seeing how current-day things actually got that way. Oh, and dinosaurs. Time-travel stories are required to have dinosaurs.

In the end, Moose and Rabbit put (nearly) everyone back in their proper times, get the time gizmo back to the traveler, and watch the fish follow the traveler off to the future in search of adventure.

It is aimed at middle-graders, which may be a detriment for some readers. I love the goofy tone, and the plot’s zippiness, and creator Doug Savage’s clean cartoony lines, all of which make it a lot of fun and solidly land it in that genre. Graphic novels for pre-teens can often be substantially less serious than those for older readers, and I appreciate that a lot. Savage is particularly good at that kind of thing.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

0

Graylight by Naomi Nowak

Naomi Nowak published three graphic novels in the Aughts – I missed the first one, Unholy Kinship, but covered the second one, House of Clay, for ComicMix at the time. And now I’ve finally found my way to the third book, 2009’s Graylight .

At the time, I referred to her as “a cartoonist resident in Sweden, of Hungarian-Polish ancestry” and noted that she seemed to work in English. She might not be making comics, but she seems to still be in Sweden, and still making art – paintings and jewelry, these days. I don’t want to say art is art – I like to see narrative work, and have a bias in that direction – but it’s great to see artists having what looks like a reasonably sustainable career, making the things they want to.

Graylight is an allusive, imagistic book, colored out to the edge of the pages in tones that look just a bit desaturated to my eye – a unique, particular palette surrounding and supporting Nowak’s complex lines and complicated page structures. Lines defining people sometimes fade out or end unexpectedly, while objects – especially thematically important ones, seem to be closer to the surface of the page and shown in more detail.

The underlying story isn’t as complex as the way Nowak tells it: there’s a young woman, Sasha, in this unnamed village that we assume is somewhere in Sweden. She’s a bit flighty and self-centered: we see her with her friends and meeting a reporter, Erik, in town to interview a famous reclusive author, Aurora, who lives in the woods nearby.

Sasha impulsively – we think she does everything impulsively; she’s that kind of young person – goes along with Erik as his “photographer,” though we don’t see her holding a camera at any point. Aurora and her grown son Edmund are not happy there’s someone else with Erik for the interview, so Sasha flounces off, but not before (impulsively) stealing a book from Aurora’s house.

Sasha, over the next few days, starts a no-strings relationship with Erik – this somewhat frustrates him, since he wants more. 

There’s also something of a curse that starts to hit her, in ways Nowak presents almost entirely imagistically. Aurora knows she has stolen the book, and believes Sasha has the same kind of power she does – she’s a witch, more or less, and calls on two others like her to make the traditional trinity to call down her curse on Sasha.

There’s also what the book description calls a love triangle – Edmund hangs around, watching Sasha during the days before the curse comes on – but it’s not entirely clear if he’s in love with her, fascinated with her as an example of the outside world he’s unfamiliar with, or just keeping an eye on her for his mother. In any case, he eventually comes to see her, as the curse starts affecting her more strongly, and retrieves the book and breaks the curse (these may be the same action).

Again, Nowak tells this story through gesture – drawn in an idiosyncratic way – and allusive dialogue and imagistic pictures, rather than by explaining in any detail. It’s a visually fascinating book, full of striking images, with a story that I suspect different readers will take in somewhat different ways.

So many comics are easily pigeon-holed; it’s refreshing to find one as specific and different, in both style and substance, as this one.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

0

Dear Beloved Stranger by Dino Pai

Everyone has one book in them, they say. Usually the “how I got here” story – whatever was unique or special or striking about childhood or life in general. I don’t think that’s dismissive; I like to think of it as celebratory: everyone can make at least one work of art, if they put in the time and effort and have the drive.

And when I come across a book that is “how I got here,” I wonder if this was the one book, or the springboard to a continuing career.

Dino Pai’s first major work was the 2013 graphic novel Dear Beloved Stranger . It’s somewhat autobiographical: Pai was a new graduate from art school, and his central character here is a new art school graduate named Dino. I never want to assume with semi-autobiographical stories, though: “semi” is a huge territory, and just using your own name doesn’t mean any particular moment or thought is taken from life.

Stranger is largely about the desire to create: Dino is out of school, looking for a job without much luck so far, and feeling stuck. So he starts making a story, after running into former classmate Cathy. That story is the story we’re reading, more or less, framed by letters to an unnamed “Dear Beloved Stranger.” I thought there was going to be some romantic tension with Cathy, or that she was the one Dino was writing to – I’m not sure if that was my misreading, Pai making that a possibility deliberately, or an unfortunate choice in the work.

But Cathy is really just the catalyst here, so making her an attractive classmate, of the gender Dino is attracted to, feels like a distraction – she could have been a male classmate, or a teacher, or some other mentor, and that would have made that role more distinct from the “Dear Beloved Stranger.” (Of course, maybe the answer is Pai wanted that ambiguity, or simply that “Cathy” was the real person in Pai’s actual life, and that bit is less “semi” and more fully autobiographical.)

The book is in multiple sections, in somewhat different art styles: the story of the young artist Dino, the work he’s creating, and how they merge together in the end. Pai moves from mostly greyish tones for the “real” scenes and soft colors for the fantasy sequences, both with an attractively detailed, just-this-side-of-fussy style.

We do learn who the stranger is in the end; I won’t spoil that here. It’s personal and important for Dino, and probably equally so for the real Pai, but I did wish it had been weaved in earlier in the book, and that Cathy wasn’t there as such an obvious red herring. But the story is satisfying; we feel for Dino and think that Pai did well in this first major work.

And if we then search to see what he’s done since – which I did – we find that he’s mostly been working in animation since then, making stories, but that he seems to have done some comics as well. I’m always happy to see that: I want creators to keep creating, for the people who make “here’s how I broke through and actually started making art” stories to keep doing that, in whatever ways they can and want to. So Dear Beloved Stranger was the beginning, but there’s more after it: this launched Dino Pai, and he’s been going since then.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

0

The Disappearance of Charley Butters by Zach Worton

Charley Butters is probably dead. He was a painter in his mid-life during the later 1950s, so by the time of this 2015 graphic novel – set, as far as I can tell, basically contemporaneously – he would have been at least in his eighties. But there are two more books in this series, so I suppose he may show up as a centenarian eventually.

This is not really the story of Charley Butters, though. He’s in the title, and his model and mystery is important, yes. But it’s the story of Travis, a young man who works in a record store and sings in a black metal band.

Travis and his two bandmates are going off into the woods with filmmaker Stuart, to gesticulate and grimace in extreme makeup – they’re making a video. The four guys are bickering, complaining about each other, nagging, picking on each other – they’re grumpy and combative, in a bad mood.

That’s probably good for death metal, though. You don’t want to be too happy when you’re invoking the devil.

After a couple of hours of mugging in one clearing, they head over to their next filming location – but stop when they see an old shack. Maybe there’s something cool there they can put into the video?

They “break” into the shack – the door was jammed shut but not locked, and the place is decades old, untouched for who knows how long. Inside, they find a lot of notebooks, some old canned goods, and what looks like a couple of dozen versions of the same painting.

This was Charley Butter’s cabin: he built it, after running away from the art scene in whatever the local city is. (This is set somewhere in Canada, probably around one of the smaller cities in Ontario – creator Zach Worton is from Mississauga, so that can be Guess #1.) The guys poke through his stuff, realize he was a “schizo,” and head off to finish up the video.

But Travis comes back later, to collect all the notebooks, to read Butters’ diaries. He’s becoming fascinated with what I suppose I should call The Disappearance of Charley Butters .

Travis is unhappy – he started this band on a lark, but it’s not his kind of music, and central figure Mike is an alcoholic asshole with very particular, demanding notions of what’s appropriate for black metal. So he quits the band, cuts his hair, starts dating a girl named Kat, and spends a lot of time reading the Charley Butters notebooks.

Parallel to Travis’s story, we get flashbacks to Butters – he has a successful gallery show, but starts having auditory hallucinations, which leads him out to that wooded cabin. He becomes entirely reclusive, avoiding all people.

Travis is becoming fascinated with Butters’ story – and, coincidentally, so is Stuart, the filmmaker who made their video. The two decide to make a documentary about Butters, with Travis as the on-camera interviewer and Stuart directing. Their first interview is with Butter’s wife (ex-wife? widow?) Eleanor, which doesn’t go well – Travis keeps interrupting her, and asking the wrong questions first – and gets cut off early.

But they still want to make the documentary. That’s where this book ends: they know that Butters existed, that he lived in the woods for a while and then wandered off somewhere else, and they intend to keep investigating.

Worton has a fine storytelling eye here; he’s mostly working in a four-panel grid, and has a crisp style that’s particularly good in silent panels and contemplative moments. The story is obviously not done, but what’s here is satisfying enough while clearly being the first part of a longer piece. (Worton did make two more graphic novels to complete the trilogy between 2016 and 2018; I haven’t seen them yet.)

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

0

George Sand: True Genius, True Woman by Séverine Vidal and Kim Consigny

Most lives don’t have a specific story. People do things, they live and die, and it doesn’t form any particular shape. Famous people are more likely to have stronger story elements – there’s at least a rise, possibly a fall, probably phases or eras – but that only means better raw materials for a biographer.

So if I say that George Sand: True Genius, True Woman  tells an “and then this happened” version of the famous 19th century novelist’s life, I’m mostly just saying that George Sand had a normal kind of life. Things happened, she did her work, she was involved in causes and had love affairs, and then she died. That’s the story writer Séverine Vidal and artist Kim Consigny tell here: one woman’s life, from fairly early childhood to the moment of her death, in some detail. Vidal focuses somewhat on Sand’s writing, but more so on her relationships – with her mother and grandmother in youth, with other family members and the men she was involved with later in life.

And I appreciate that. Some biographies, especially in graphic-novel form, find a story in their subject’s lives by focusing on a moment or a period on the person’s life. That’s certainly valid, but, especially in a case where I don’t know the person’s life all that well – as here – I’d really prefer to get the full sweep of the story. And George Sand does just that.

She was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, daughter of what seems to be a minor noble in the very early 19th century, and the Napoleonic Wars somewhat impinged on that childhood – spent primarily at the family estate in Nohant in central France – but the drama of her early life was more centered on the conflict between her aristocratic paternal grandmother and her Parisian mother after the death of Aurore’s father at a young age.

Vidal and Consigny show young Aurore as strong-willed, rebellious, prone to visions, and often unhappy with her role as a young aristocratic woman. (As seen later in life, she was against both the roles of “woman” and “aristocrat” as they existed in France at the time.)

She grew up, she started to write, she had affairs – but, before most of that, she did what women in her time had to do: she got married, at the age of eighteen. It was not a success, and maybe that lack of success led to some of the rest.

This is a fairly long graphic novel, over three hundred pages, and it’s packed with details from all of Sand’s life – again, more skewed to her personal life than to details of the themes and reactions to her works, though we do see her talk about and work on her major books here.

There’s a lot of text, particularly dialogue. I assume a lot of it is taken from Sand’s own extensive memoirs, or third-party accounts – I don’t know if we can entirely trust any detailed account of a conversation before sound recording, but Sand’s life was well-documented. Consigny brings a lose, breezy, amiable, energetic line to the proceedings, giving a lot of life to a story of people mostly in rooms talking to each other.

I’ve never read Sand, and knew very little about her life or work before this book. So I’ll say it’s a fine introduction, and a strong portrait of an interesting, influential figure who lived through tumultuous times and was close to a lot of other cultural figures of her day.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

0

Support Nonprofits on #GivingTuesday: Help CBLDF, Hero Initiative, and BINC aid the Comics Community

  • News
  • December 2, 2025

Hey everyone! With so many nonprofits needing a helping hand during this crazy pandemic, today is a special #GivingTuesday! It’s a day to shine a light on charities and remind us all to show them some love through donations (which, by the way, are usually tax-deductible).

If you have the funds and whant to help the comics community, consider these three organizations:

CBLDF Comic Book Legal Defense Fund logo

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund receives more than a quarter of its annual budget in year-end gifts from supporters. But, that can change by helping donate on a special day like today!

All year round, the CBLDF boldly defends the right to read. Their tireless efforts confront the escalating censorship challenges faced by students, educators, and libraries, while providing an essential safety net for creators and retailers.

The CBLDF actively supports librarians, educators, and retailers in understanding their rights and ensuring books remain available on shelves. If you’re considering an organization to support, we strongly encourage you to acknowledge their invaluable work.

Donations to CBLDF are fully tax-deductible in the year they are made. Join the cause and empower CBLDF to continue their vital mission by making a donation today—whether it’s a holiday gift of a signed graphic novel, becoming a member, or contributing a tax-deductible cash donation.

Donate now and show off your support.

The Hero Initiative

The Hero Initiative helps comic creators in need.

Formed in 2000, the organization serves as a vibrant safety net for comic creators in need, empowering them to thrive. Transitioning to a not-for-profit in 2001, it has joyfully granted over $1,000,000 to countless comic book creators, celebrating their invaluable contributions and helping to shape the thriving industry we cherish today.

Hero builds a vibrant financial safety net for yesterday’s creators who may need emergency medical aid, support for life’s essentials, and a pathway back to fulfilling employment. It’s a wonderful opportunity for all of us to show our gratitude and give back to those who have brought us immense joy and inspiration.

Be a Hero and help them out… contribute today!

BINC

Binc is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit devoted to supporting booksellers during their most challenging times. Born from the heartfelt desire of bookstore employees, the Binc Foundation aims to create a safety net for those facing unexpected financial difficulties. With compassion at its core, Binc is committed to being there for bookstore employees throughout the United States when they need it the most.

Binc’s help can change based on what retailers need. They’re all about lending a hand with costs like medical stuff or personal household expenses when certain situations pop up, such as:

  • If a bookstore worker gets sick and can’t make it to work.
  • If someone in a bookseller’s home gets sick and the employee has to quarantine to keep the virus from spreading more.
  • If a bookseller ends up losing over half their work hours because folks are told to stay home from work, or due to a mandatory quarantine.

You can donate now to help BINC get funds to those in need.

0

Phillip Kennedy Johnson goes Exclusive with Marvel

LOS ANGELES – November 25, 2025 – Phillip Kennedy Johnson, highly regarded across the comics industry for his enthralling work at major studios featuring The Hulk, Batman & Robin, Superman, and many more, has signed a multi-year contract to write comics exclusively for Marvel, effective January 2026.

The announcement comes as Marvel prepares to release the next chapter in Johnson’s ongoing run of The Hulk comics – Infernal Hulk – which arrives on shelves this Wednesday.

“My friends at Marvel have been ideal collaborators, and I’m extremely honored and excited that they’ve asked me to play such a bigger role in the company,” Johnson said. “Now that our Incredible Hulk run is kicking off its second act with Infernal Hulk #1, and with the other mind-blowing projects we’re putting together for 2026 and 2027, it felt like the time to make Marvel my comics home for a while.”

Johnson has amassed an impressive portfolio of popular comics titles since breaking into the industry in 2015, most recently continuing his acclaimed run on fan-favorites The Incredible Hulk for Marvel and Batman & Robin for DC. He is best known for his acclaimed work on Superman and Action Comics, Marvel’s Alien, Green Lantern: War Journal, and Hellhunters. He is the writer and co-creator of DC Black Label’s The Fellspyre Chronicles, BOOM! Studios’ Crocodile Black, Last Sons of America, and Warlords of Appalachia, and has also been published with Archaia, IDW, Aftershock, Dynamite, and Scout Comics. He currently teaches Creative Writing at The Joe Kubert School.

Born in Iowa and raised in Kentucky, Johnson is a graduate of Eastern Kentucky University and the University of North Texas, with a Bachelor’s Degree and a Master’s Degree in Music. He is recently retired from the United States Army after more than two decades of service. Outside of writing, Johnson is an active musician in the Washington, DC/Baltimore area, having served as a trumpet player with The U.S. Army Field Band of Washington, DC, from 2005 to 2025, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the Moscow Ballet, the Dallas Opera, Washington Symphonic Brass, and more.

Infernal Hulk picks up after Hulk’s epic rematch with the Eldest, the powerful first-born child of the Mother of Horrors, from October’s Incredible Hulk #30. The Eldest’s long-seeded plan comes to fruition as it uses the power of the Strongest There Is to usher in a new Age of Monsters, unleashing a dark destiny for the entire Marvel Universe and declaring war for its very soul.

“The Hulk story we’re building up to is the most ambitious thing I’ve written to date, and the titles we’re planning for 2026 and 2027 are legitimate dream projects for me,” Johnson explained. “My son, who learned to love reading from the same old ripped-up Marvel, DC and Gold Key Comics that I used to read, gave me his unreserved blessing to do this, and that was all the advice I needed. To him, to all my other readers, and to my fellow comic fans: I promise, I won’t let you down.”

While Johnson officially joins Marvel exclusively starting in January, he will finish his current runs for other publishers, including his heralded writings for Batman & Robin and Adventures of Superman: Book of El for DC.

“I’m as close as ever with all the awesome people at DC, and my current runs on Batman & Robin and Adventures of Superman: Book of El will continue through their planned conclusions next year,” Johnson said. “Comics are about making cool stuff with your friends, and I hope my DC fans check out what we’ve got coming at Marvel. I’m still getting better at this gig, and I CANNOT WAIT to show you what we’re building at Marvel right now.”

0

REVIEW: Megalopolis

Megalopolis
By Francis Ford Coppola, Chris Ryall, & Jacob Phillips
160 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$25.99

While curious, I did not go to see Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. I had read about the trouble shoot, the confused critics, and the box office doldrums, and never got around to it on streaming. Thankfully, Abrams ComicArts has provided us with a graphic novel adaptation, which apparently isn’t slavish to the screenplay. Billed as an “alternate” version, it apparently is to be considered a sibling to the feature.

Coppola succumbs to the fascination with ancient Rome, which has become the cliché starting point for alternate futures such as The Hunger Games, Red Rising, and even Foundation. Somehow, the empire never fell, and futuristic wonders can be found in New Rome, which is our New York City.

It’s a story about family and competing visions of that future: one utopian in its aspirations, the other set in a regressive status quo.

That’s about all that makes sense. Chris Ryall, an accomplished writer and editor in his own right, fails to turn Coppola’s ideas into a coherent narrative with clearly defined characters. The worldbuilding raises more questions than it answers, and none of it is appealing. We root for none of the characters or, frankly, care about them long before the story ends. He’s billed as both writer and editor, and here, a seasoned editorial hand was required.

I gather the film’s narrative is its philosophical sweep, which isn’t evident here.

Similarly, cartoon Jacob Phillips is fine with the people, but New Rome needs to be a personality in its own right; we’re giving more of an impression of the city than something comprehensible.

I admire the experimentation evident in the project, but the execution does not deliver an enjoyable reading experience.

0

REVIEW: The Essential Peanuts

The Essential Peanuts
By Mark Evanier
336 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$75

I was growing up during Peanuts’ peak period, the 1960s-70s, and you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing images of the gang. Yes, I bought some of the Fawcett paperback collections from the Bookmobile and was thrilled that Apollo 10’s command capsule and lunar module were named Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

I was also overwhelmed by the ubiquitousness of Snoopy, who easily eclipsed the humans and was on t-shirts, a Thanksgiving Day parade balloon, lunch boxes, and so, so much more. I didn’t fully grasp the genius of Charles M. Shulz’s work until much later. It wasn’t my favorite strip, yet I read it every day, and I still do in the Classic Peanuts strip.

As a result, I was delighted to see this 75th anniversary overview of the strip and its global influence, along with the simplicity of Shulz’s linework. I learned about him from the recent Funny Things: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles M. Shulz and learned even more in this handsome collection.

The mammoth hardcover traces Peanuts in two ways: a 75 Essential strips, with commentary and supplemental strips; and a chronological exploration of the strip’s evolution, broken down by decade. As a result, you get some 700 daily and Sunday strips out of the 17,000+ he wrote and drew. One of the things that set Schulz apart from his peers was that he never, ever used assistants; he wrote, drew, and lettered each and every installment. That alone is worthy of celebration.

In Evanier’s clear-eyed prose, we see which new concepts or characters were introduced, which ones freshened, and which ones faded with time. Among the first casualties, for example, are Shermy and Patty, who were there on day one but were reduced to occasional background players within a year or two. We can see the rise of Snoopy’s sentience and then his playfulness as he turns his doghouse into a Sopwith Camel airplane, and how good ol’ Charlie Brown doesn’t quite know what to do with the newly arrived Peppermint Patty’s interest in him.

To me, the strip hit a crescendo in the late 1970s and then began a gradual decline, one that took the next 20 years to wind down. In the final years, health problems caused the steady line to wobble, the characters getting somewhat cruder, while the heart never left.

Accompanying Evanier are celebrity quotes drawn from Fantagraphics’ complete collection of the strip, as well as new sidebars written by translators and editors, who round out our understanding of the strip and its creator.

There is a second volume in this slipcase, filled with facsimiles of fun memorabilia that may bring back a memory, as it did for me, or just a smile. That’s all Shulz wanted from his readers, and he delivered daily for some 50 years, a totally remarkable accomplishment from the most unassuming of people.

0

ArkhaManiacs by Art Baltazar & Franco

Art Baltazar and Franco have been making a very particular kind of comics for twenty years or so – kid-friendly versions of popular superhero and superhero-adjacent properties, bright and happy and light-hearted, colorful and zippy, full of rubber-hose cartooning and vibrant colors, with usually a cluster of short related stories with minimal plots but a lot of (mostly goofy) character work.

It’s been a durable model, and it’s worked quite well, from what I’ve seen. I think they started with Tiny Titans, which ran for a long time and seemed to be a major success from my chair. The only comic of theirs I’ve covered on this blog was Itty Bitty Hellboy  a decade ago; I got their books for my kids when my kids were young, but my kids are in their mid-twenties now. So I haven’t read a Baltazar/Franco [1] book in quite some time, but I had a lot of fond memories.

ArkhaManiacs  is exactly the same kind of thing they do so well: it collects a short series from 2020 about a kid Bruce Wayne in a somewhat sunnier, happier Gotham City and his encounters with the inhabitants of the Arkham Apartments.

And…it just struck me as a bit odd, subtly off in ways that made me uneasy. Centrally, the problem is that it’s reminiscent of, or seems to reference, the classic creepy Grant Morrison/Dave McKean Arkham Asylum . In both cases, Bruce comes to this mysterious place, is led around by the Joker, meets a whole bunch of weird people, and is told repeatedly he needs to lighten up.

I don’t think Baltazar and Franco meant to make this rhyme with Arkham Asylum. But it does. So the subtext is that a whole bunch of colorful characters – whom we, the adult reader, knows as insane murderers – are urging a kid Bruce, pre-trauma, that he needs to become more like them by using his imagination.

In a kid context, we can just take it all as straightforward, as it’s presented: these colorful characters are harmless. They’re not inhabitants of an asylum, just goofy people living in an apartment building, and they have a lot of fun, and do clearly have great imaginations. And Bruce is a bit of a serious, quiet kid, who could use some loosening up – which is what happens here. In the book itself, it’s all sunny and kid-friendly, Killer Croc and Bane and Harley Quinn and the Penguin all just having fun and playing pretend around a pool.

But…that inevitably makes me think of this Morrison moment, which I don’t want to be reminded of during a book for kids set before Bruce’s parents are murdered:

You may be able to read ArkhaManiacs and not think about Arkham Asylum. Your kids, if you have any, will almost certainly be able to, and that’s probably even more important. But if you know Arkham Asylum, this book will hit more uncomfortably than you expect.

[1] Franco’s last name is Aureliani, which isn’t hidden, but he uses the single name professionally, like Ms. Sarkisian 

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks