Author: Andrew Wheeler

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10,000 Ink Stains: A Memoir by Jeff Lemire

For some reason, I thought this book was in comics format – maybe just from an assumption that’s how Lemire works, or that he draws so quickly that it would nearly as easy to do it that way as in text. But I was wrong: this is a conventional prose memoir, albeit one with lots of art (and an entire early self-published comic in the back).

10,000 Ink Stains  is Jeff Lemire’s memoir of what he calls the first twenty-five years of his comics career. I like a lot of what he’s done, so I hope that isn’t hubris – I’d like to think he has another twenty-five years or more ahead of him.

Lemire has done a lot of work in a lot of directions over those twenty-five years, so it’s not surprising that his memoir is well-organized, even compartmentalized. He talks a bit up front, and occasionally later, about how hard it was to talk about his personal life here, particularly some struggles with anxiety and other mental-health issues – but that’s a very small part of the book, partially because I don’t think Lemire’s readership ever noticed any slowing of work or lesser effort because of his problems. (He clearly has a ferocious work ethic – or maybe I mean he loves making stories in comics form, so that’s what he spends most of his time on.)

There are nineteen chapters here, each covering one project or a small related cluster of projects, plus an introduction to set the scene and an epilogue to sum it all up. The first chapter is the usual memoir “how I got to zero” section, covering his childhood and education and all of that – up to the point where he decided to start getting serious about comics. The second chapter covers that self-published comic – Lemire put out two issues of Ashtray in the mid-Aughts – and his Xeric-winning first book, Lost Dogs . From there, Lemire has chapters on Essex County  and The Nobody , on groups of smaller projects, on Sweet Tooth the comics series and Sweet Tooth the TV series, on his work for DC and then for Marvel, on The Underwater Welder  and Trillium  and Roughneck , on his adventure comics with other artists (Descender , Gideon Falls, and Plutona ), on Black Hammer  and Royal City , one chapter on both Frogcatchers and Mazebook , on the recent Essex County TV show, and one last chapter on his two current/upcoming projects, The Static Age and Minor Arcana.

That’s a lot of comics, even for twenty-five years. Lemire did a lot of work – a lot of different, detailed, thoughtful, often excellent work. I might make fun of Black Hammer, and suspect I would be similarly dismissive of most of his Marvel and DC work, but Lemire puts in the time and effort to do stories he cares about and do them well, even when some readers (yours truly, for example) might not be as excited by all of them.

There’s not a lot of detail about any single project, which might disappoint some readers: if you’re a massive Underwater Welder fan, for example, you’ll only get about ten pages about it. Lemire generally has liked all of his immediate collaborators and most of his editors – there are some left-unnamed editorial functionaries and fellow writers for DC and Marvel who were less than collegial, but Lemire keeps it vague enough that I think even people more plugged in than me will only have suspicions of who he’s talking about – and he mostly likes the work he did, and focuses on the things he learned or did differently on each project.

There’s some insights into how he draws each project, including how one early art teacher encouraged him to use the back of a pen nib, the source of some of those chunky, dynamic Lemire lines – but I’m not an artist, so I can only point and say he does talk about that, which may be of interest to people who understand the topic.

All in all, 10,000 Ink Stains is a comprehensive, thorough look at a busy career, by a writer I think was not overly given to this kind of introspection before. If you like Lemire’s comics, you’ll probably like hearing how he made them.

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

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Sergio Aragones’ Groo: The Hogs of Horder

I sometimes look at a Groo book and think “that will be a quick read, and an easy one to write about.” And then I’m wrong on both counts. It happened with the three-book Friends and Foes  series in 22-23, and it just happened again now.

Groo looks quick and breezy, but it’s a wordy comic, and creator Sergio Aragones, for all his speed and facility, draws a lot of detail. So the pages are engaging and light and fun, but they demand more attention than you expect. And then I remember, after finishing reading, that Groo (the character) is aggressively stupid, but Groo (the comic) nearly always has a point of view or moral or life lesson it’s trying to impart, and untangling that takes effort.

The Hogs of Horder  was the new Groo series in 2009-2010; its four issues started in October of ’09 and the book came out in August of ’10. So it is absolutely the “the Groo take on the Global Financial Crisis” book, just to warn you.

Aragones (here, as usual, assisted by Mark Evanier on something vague related to scripting, Stan Sakai on letters, and Tom Luth with Michelle Madsen on colors) is not a subtle or nuanced creator. And, in Groo stories, there can be villains, but most of the problems in the world will be caused by Groo himself. So Hogs of Horder both wants to blame some general long-term economic shifts (moving production overseas to a lower-cost country, for one main example) for the woe in this world and also wants to make Groo personally responsible for the shift, because he’s an idiot who sinks ships and destroys stuff.

This means that we have a lot of panels with lots of mercantile folks – in Groo’s medieval-ish world, carriage-makers and home-builders and flask-makers and so on – gloating about getting loans from bankers to spend on making their stuff, but more importantly “high salaries for ourselves” (even though, if they are the owners, what they actually get is a return on their invested capital, and if they are not the owners, how come we never see the owners?) after Groo breaks things.

This runs round and round for a while, as Groo goes from the cheap foreign country to the US-analogue, breaking things and causing all of the business owners/leaders to go to the banks for loans to rebuild everything they’re doing and/or to set up new operations in that cheaper nation. It is all pitched in that speaking-to-children tone Groo often uses, and is about that level of sophistication; even readers who think capitalists are typically rapacious and destructive will find this version really overly simplified and silly.

But “silly” is the point of Groo. He breaks everything, and it is funny, and then he walks away to break something else somewhere else. Oh, and there are jokes about mendicants and cheese dip along the way. If you want a Groo story, this is one. I haven’t yet figured out a good reason to recommend any one Groo story above any other one, so just pick the Groo thing closest to your hand at the time, if you want to read one. That’s basically what I did. Maybe I’ll take a longer break before doing so again, this time.

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

Wednesday Comics edited by Mark Chiarello

As I write this, the reruns of Richard Thompson’s great Cul de Sac daily comic on GoComics have hit the summer camp sequence of 2010, introducing Andre Chang , a boy who wants to draw comics and is bigger and louder – especially in his comics – than anyone else.

Andre is lovable and amusing, because he’s a child with a child’s enthusiasms, and we assume he will grow out of it, at least somewhat, and temper that enthusiasm with other qualities.

A project from DC from the prior year, Wednesday Comics , belies that hope.

It was a bold, interesting experiment: to turn out standard DC comics (their usual characters, their usual stories, in-continuity as far as I can tell) in a Sunday-newspaper broadsheet format. Editor Mark Chiarello’s introduction to this oversized single-volume collection – they were originally printed in newspaper-size pamphlets and distributed weekly, because everything in superhero comics must be printed in a pamphlet and distributed weekly – sidestepped the fact that Sunday comics still existed at that point, and resolutely ignored the existence of humorous newspaper strips, which most of us realize has been the majority of the form for their entire history. This was one of the first worrying points: DC has a long history of humor itself, and it wouldn’t have been impossible for some alternate-world version of Wednesday Comics to have an Inferior Five strip, or even, if I’m shooting for the moon, Bob Hope. (When I first got this book, I had an alternate-world hope for a mash-up style book, from some elseworlds DC with more of a sense of humor: maybe Teen Titans in a Peanuts style, or Krypto as Marmaduke or Green Arrow and Black Canary in Blondie situations. That’s not something this world’s DC would ever do, of course. Pity: that would be a fun book, and different from anything else on the shelves…though, again, the Big Two never do anything deliberately different these days.)

Unfortunately, the most important thing about modern superhero comics – more than the costumes, more than the secret identities, more than the endless “who would win” arguments, more than the catchphrases and shocking reverses and Never Agains – is that you must take them seriously at all times. Superhero comics are serious and deep and important, telling stories about guys in funny costumes punching each other imbued with the power of ancient myth, and anyone who doesn’t accept this basic, fundamental truth will be wished into the cornfield.

So Wednesday Comics could never have been a project full of the influence of the actually most popular Sunday comics, now or ever. You’ll look in vain for anything influenced by Krazy Kat here, or Bringing Up Father, or Peanuts, or Far Side, or Calvin and Hobbes – not even a Luann or Bloom County. The model for “Sunday comics” here is a very vaguely remembered Hal Foster Prince Valiant, described as if there were an era when the Sunday color insert was entirely made up of full-page adventure stories in that mode.

These are all Andre Chang comics: as big as possible, loud and flashy most of the time, modern in the most trivial ways while mostly looking backwards to a cleaned-up dream of the Silver Age. There are fifteen full stories here (plus two single-page try-outs), each one twelve big pages long. Assuming each page is roughly the size of two normal comics pages, that’s essentially a single issue of story for each one of them – call it a fill-in issue, in a different, hopefully exciting format.

Some of the artists engage with the larger page – Ben Caldwell’s Wonder Woman story in particular has detailed, interesting layouts that run all over the page, though unfortunately I found that one confusing and cramped, with too many tiny boxes that didn’t flow as I hoped. Some artists, on the other hand, just seem to have their normal work blown up to the larger size, as Joe Kubert’s (impeccably drawn, I’ll admit) Sgt. Rock story, which adds bands at the bottom and top of each page to fill it out.

I’ll be frank: there’s not a single story here I’d pick out as exemplary in a good way. I like Kyle Baker’s work a lot; here he gives us a muddy, dull Hawkman stopping aliens from hijacking airplanes (?!) and then fighting dinosaurs with Aquaman – that perhaps shows the Andre Chang-ness of it best; it’s all boys playing with whatever toys they grab out of the box, making them fight.

OK. Other possible highlights include a really awesome-looking Deadman story by Dave Bullock and Vinton Heuck, Paul Pope’s mildly self-pitying and convoluted Adam Strange story, and a mostly sunny and silly Supergirl story from Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner. There are also stories where the art is fun and lively, making good use of the large canvas, to tell cliched and standard stories, such as Mike Allred on Metamorpho, Joe Quiňones on Green Lantern, José Luis Garcia-López on Metal Men, and somewhat (I don’t love the art-style, but it’s different and inventive and striking) Sean Galloway on Teen Titans. In pretty much all of those cases, the story is bland yardgoods – there’s even a “new villain hates the heroes for histrionic unspecified ‘they’re the real bad guys’ reasons,” as required for any project like this – but the art redeems it somewhat.

No story in here will surprise you, or make you laugh, or make you think. At best, you will be reminded that you think a particular character is Wicked Kewl and want to read more stories about that character punching bad guys – which, of course, is what DC wanted out of the project in the first place. So, if that happens, this book has been successful in its aim.

The book is also physically large, obviously, and a bit unwieldy to read and store. So keep that in mind if you decide to check it out. I personally got a copy from my local library, which turned out to be a great choice: I don’t need to keep the thing, and trying to manhandle it into position to read will soon be just a vague memory. Wednesday Comics is more interesting as a concept than as an object in the physical world: it is ungainly, tries too hard, trips over itself, and wears out its welcome much sooner than you expect.

Wait: maybe it is essentially Marmaduke, after all.

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

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy by Doug Savage

When a creator you like turns to creating works for younger readers, you have two choices: follow him along, and check out the new stuff, trying to have an open mind, or to avoid the new stuff and grump about how creators should keep doing the things you discovered them for, grumble grumble.

OR – and this is what I seem to do most of the time – you could not even notice the creator has material in a different genre for about a decade, and then stumble on it randomly when the “new thing” has a fifth book published, and wonder where the time has gone, alas, where are the green fields of our youth?

Doug Savage is a funny, inventive cartoonist. I discovered him with the Savage Chickens project, which I think was either his first big thing or his breakout. Adults don’t buy books of funny drawings very consistently these days – this is sad, because in my youth, the small funny book of cartoons by the cash-register was a dependable publishing category, with big successes every year, but the Internet ruined that like it has ruined so many things – but, and here’s the trick, kids still do. So a lot of funny, inventive cartoonists have found that, if they can tune their sensibility to middle-schoolers or grade-schoolers, they could have a really awesome career making fun things, visiting a very appreciative (though often massively rambunctious) audience, and enjoying a mostly supportive community of peers.

I don’t know if any of that went into Savage’s decision to make Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy  in 2016 – many cartoonists fall into making books for younger readers because they have younger readers roaming around their houses – I’m talking about their own children, usually, not semi-feral bands of tweens – and there can be other reasons as well. But Savage made a graphic novel for middle-schoolers, got it published by Andrews McMeel, which also handled his “Savage Chickens” books, and has gone on to do four more books about these characters in the decade since then.

This first book has three mostly separate stories, all set in this same forest and focused on the main characters. They’re superheroes, I guess. They fight evil, or try to, or intend to. Laser Moose is a moose who can shoot lasers out of his eyeballs for unspecified reasons, and who takes his responsibilities as a laser-shooting moose very, very seriously, probably too much so. Rabbit Boy is his sidekick, a sunny and positive rabbit with no visible superpowers but a somewhat more grounded view of reality that is desperately needed to keep Laser Moose from just cutting everything within sight in half.

In this book, they “battle” aliens who don’t seem to really be invading at all. They discover a hideous Aquabear, transformed into a monstrous chimera by toxic waste, and, after some setbacks, return the monster to the human facility that created him, making him the humans’ problem. And they foil a new plot by Laser Moose’s arch-enemy, Cyborgupine – yes, a cyborg porcupine – who has created a fiendish minion, Mechasquirrel.

It’s all fun and zippy, in an appealing kid-friendly cartooning style, mostly thin lines and flat colors. It’s the kind of style that looks like an evolved version of the drawings those kids themselves are making – accessible, immediate, quickly readable. And Savage is as funny here with delusional moose and sunny bunnies as he was with wage-slave chickens. You don’t need to be ten to enjoy Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, though, if you can access your inner ten-year-old at will, that definitely helps.

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

Night Drive by Richard Sala

This was Richard Sala’s first book; this edition is (at least for the moment) Richard Sala’s last book.

Sala died in mid-2020, alone at home, of what turned out to be a heart attack. He didn’t die of COVID, but I have to believe he’s one of the many, many people who would have had a much better chance of surviving that horrible year – getting better health care, being seen by more people who could notice something was wrong, etc. – if it hadn’t happened. But that’s the deal with the past: it’s already happened, its horrors and unfairnesses already baked in. And that’s a pretty solidly Richard Sala thought, frankly.

The original Night Drive was self-published by Sala in 1984, a 32-page comic in 500 signed copies. It got appreciative reviews, sold a decent number of those copies, and was useful for Sala to open doors to get illustration work – and then the long last story, “Invisible Hands,” was picked up by MTV’s Liquid Television, which gave Sala another paying gig to help get his career started.

This expanded edition of Night Drive  came out this May, just about doubling the size of the original and turning it into a small hardcover book. It includes a foreword remembering Sala by his friend and fellow comics writer Dana Marie Andra, an interview section with answers from Sala about this book over the span of several decades, and a number of stories and illustrations from the same era – some almost made it into Night Drive, some were for the potential follow-up that was shelved when his work on Liquid Television and illustration jobs got too busy.

The art is both deeply Sala – scratchy, black-and-white, with scrawled lettering and quirky misshapen faces – and deeply 1980s, full of design-y borders and title panels. His work got somewhat easier to visually “read” later, when he moved into working most commonly in watercolors, but this is Sala at his darkest and most cryptic, all of his old horror-movie and noir influences coming out in a flood of tropes and dialogue and ideas. The pieces here are more vignettes than stories, as if Sala was trying to get down all of his inspiration and his ideas his way as fast as he could. He got clearer than this, he told more complete and satisfying stories than this – he definitely got better at his craft and I think moved closer to doing exactly what he wanted to do – but this package is full of pure unfiltered Richard Sala, early in his development and heady with the possibilities of comics.

“Invisible Hands” is still the standout here – long enough to give Sala room to maneuver, full of fiendish plots and mysterious characters, shocking reverses and new complications, quirky and entirely Sala but close enough to a normal narrative for the parallax to be deeply satisfying. But the whole package is fun, a deep dive into the beginnings of a unique artist and the style of a very distinctive, and now long-gone era.

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

Free Pass by Julian Hanshaw

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Comics are about sex less often than most artforms. Call it a lingering prudishness, the hangover from long decades seen as a medium just for kids, or just the fact that drawn sex is inherently a bit more fleshy than the written kind. But it’s true: comics avoid sex a lot of the time, and often only wink when they come close to that territory.

Free Pass , Julian Hanshaw’s 2022 graphic novel, isn’t winking. Hanshaw avoids drawing the nitty-gritty of sex most of the time, or obscures it, but this is a book about one couple and their sex life – and they’re young and reasonably energetic. And…but then, I’ll get into the plot in a moment.

The book opens with the couple – Huck and Nadia, young British tech workers who are maybe thirty, maybe a few years one side or the other of that – talking sex, while we see their house from outside, porno movies playing on a big screen we can see through a sliding door. They’re discussing having sex with other people, we come to realize, possibly partner swapping. They haven’t done it yet, but they’re both intrigued, and running through the other couples they know, the times they wonder if it might have happened, and what comes next.

Eventually, they decide to make “Free Pass” lists – five celebrities for each of them, people they could have sex with guilt- and consequence-free if it somehow happened. We see Huck making his list over the next few days – the book mostly follows him, mostly lets us understand what’s in his head – in his job at a tech company, Abrazo.

They both work at Abrazo, which is mostly a fictionalized Facebook: big, all-encompassing, dominant. Nadia is a programmer; we don’t see a lot of what she does, but she’s more technical, more specifically skilled, than Huck is. Huck is on a moderation team, maybe a low-level supervisor there. We don’t see the things he moderates, just the complaints about them, and something of the internal Abrazo double-speak about what they get rid of and what they don’t.

Frankly, I think Hanshaw has a specific political point here, and it’s a bit opaque to me. In the US, especially now, three years later, what we saw the big tech companies trying to do with moderation was largely getting rid of the worst of the worst: hate speech, death threats, attacks on people with racial and sexually-charged language. The complaint with that approach was that they tended to censor right-wing voices – the unspoken underpinning was that the right wing was deeply hateful, sexist and racist, but that they saw that as a good thing and wanted free rein to spew their anger and vitriol everywhere, to yell as loudly as they could and take over any spaces they could drive other people out of. I’m pretty sure Hanshaw isn’t saying he’s in favor of that, but, from a US perspective in 2025, I’m not sure what else he means. Maybe it’s some more lefty flavor of Abrazo being too chummy with the government, and getting rid of anything against their interests.

Because, you see, there’s an election coming up. The candidates are fictional, and we don’t know what parties they represent. But there’s a “four more years” person (Libby) and a “change it all” person (Maynard) – which I think codes them as Tory and Labour, respectively. The book is organized by the days until the election: we start a little more than two weeks out. But, like Abrazo’s moderation decisions, any actual political policies are presented in coded, nonspecific terms – so I think what it means is clearer if you’re British, particularly if you are British and it is 2022, looking towards the general election that eventually happened in 2024.

The election itself is mostly background, but Abrazo’s moderation decisions are a huge part of Huck’s day, and a source of stress to him. He’s listening to podcasts from “the other side” – I think Hanshaw means people like the EFF, free-internet types, rather than Nigel Farage and the kick-out-the-foreigners crowd – which some of his co-workers look askance at. He’s also a bit awkward, in that tech-guy way, and for a while I wondered if he was meant to be seen as incel-adjacent, as having picked up some of those thoughts and ideas despite being in an on-going successful relationship.

That’s all swirling around, when Huck gets a new product to test – from Ali, the male half of the couple he and Nadia hit upon as the perfect choices for their first swinging experience in the first scene. It’s an AI sex robot, Ali says. It comes in a big box; it’s a blank humanoid form that has a tablet to control it. On that tablet is a menu of people, men and women, and the user can choose who the robot turns into. And, of course, the robot is a wonderful, perfect, lover, in that time-honored way that traces back to at least Tanith Lee’s Silver Metal Lover (or maybe Barbarella, or even, if you accept much more winking and hinting, “Helen O’Loy”).

Many stories with a sex robot like that would be about jealousy, about a break-up, but Huck and Nadia are enthusiastic and experimental and geeky, and they take to their new fuck-buddy like fish to water. Hanshaw presents this imagistically, but I think it’s mostly “turn it into a man for you, and then into a woman for me,” with maybe some three-way fun along the way. But they have a lot of sex – even more so once Nadia realizes she can mildly hack the tablet and turn the robot into anyone, not just the hardcoded choices. They spend something like a week just fucking celebrity simulacra, and seem to be fantastically happy at it, if maybe a bit sore and tired by the end.

But, meanwhile, Nadia has been interviewing with a newer tech company, Hapus, which promises to be more responsive and independent. They specifically do not moderate in the way that’s problematic with Abrazo, whatever that’s meant to be. She gets the job, and Huck is supportive, but maybe not entirely happy – because she might be moving away from him or because he feels guilty about what he does for Abrazo, or both.

Huck and Nadia actually call out sick from work for several days for their fuck-fest, which is yet another element that leads to a confrontation between Ali and Huck. They give back the sex robot, and the election happens.

I think we’re meant to guess who won; Hanshaw doesn’t say. The last section jumps ahead a year: Nadia is happily working for Hapus, Huck is running for a local political office, and the sex robots are rolling out broadly. I think it’s meant to be a happy ending, but I don’t know what party Huck is standing for or what his platform is, and ubiquitous easily-hackable sex robots might not be the most stabilizing element to add into a society. So maybe ambiguously happy.

Hanshaw has a fairly lumpy way of drawing people, which is surprisingly excellent for this story: his people are real and flawed, not porn models. Huck and Nadia look like relatively fit, fairly young, absolutely normal people, and even the sex robot doesn’t come across as pure pneumatic distilled sex, just another body with which they can have fun.

And Free Pass is absolutely packed with ideas and thoughts – about sex, relationships, online discourse, how to think about governments – mostly posed in non-specific, non-partisan ways, so it doesn’t trip anyone’s propaganda detectors. It’s a fun, quirky, mostly positive book about a couple who have a lot of sex with a sex robot and come out of it (and associated events) with a stronger relationship.

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

The Black Incal by Alexandro Jodorowski & Mœbius

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I read The Incal at least thirty years ago, during the burst of Mœbius republications from Marvel. As I recall, I thought it was OK space opera, with an annoying main character and more mystical mumbo-jumbo than I preferred. (At the time, I was much more enthusiastic about the Blueberry stories, a long Western series drawn by Mœbius and written by Jean-Michel Charlier.)

Humanoids republished the original Incal series – in six volumes this time, matching the original French albums, unlike the Marvel 2-in-1s – in 2012, going back to the original French colors by Yves Chaland and taking out some minor censorship that had crept into English-language editions in the ’90s. And so, for no good reason, I’m taking another look at this series.

The Black Incal  is the first of the six albums of the main series, written by Alexandro Jodorowski and drawn by Mœbius. The stories originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the early ’80s; Jodorowski went on to write a lot more in this universe – some of it under an “Incal” title and some not, a few with Mœbius but mostly not. And I have to admit that I do not have a high opinion of Jodorowski’s work, though I’ve mostly read the comics he wrote for Mœbius – he’s also a filmmaker and has done lots of other projects, so I may be reacting most strongly to their gestalt. (The worst thing I’ve seen is Madwoman of the Sacred Heart , if you want to see my heights of spleen and bile.)

The Incal, on the other hand, starts off as more-or-less conventional skiffy adventure, with only a few eruptions of Meaning. Our hero is John DiFool (a worrying name, admittedly), a “Class-R” private investigator in one of those ultra-urbanized, stratified medium futures, in an underground city on what seems to be Earth. He starts out being beaten and terrorized by mysterious masked figures, is thrown to what should be his death, and then saved by the Cybo-Cops. He tells them a plausible story – which might even be mostly true – about him bodyguarding an aristo woman for a night of debauchery among the lower classes before things went sideways and he ran away and was knocked out in the inevitable gigantic service tunnels.

John neglects to mention that he got a strange box from a gigantic dying “mutant,” or that other mutants and the alien Berg (from another galaxy, Jodorowski offhandedly remarks, to underscore how little he understands how any of this works) are fighting over this MacGuffin.

The MacGuffin itself is The Incal, a small luminous pyramid that talks and can bestow strange and wondrous powers on its possessor in ways that aren’t clear at all in this book. Descriptions of the series call it “The Light Incal” in distinction to the Dark Incal, the title object that John is sent by the main Incal to find in the back half of this book.

Most of this book is frenetic action overlaid with lots of talking. It’s the kind of action story where people narrate their every last action and emotional state, like a ’60s Spider-Man comic with slightly less quipping but vastly more emoting. John gets one story of What He Needs To Do and What It All Means from the Incal, but, as I recall, this changes somewhat as the series goes on, and the story gets bigger and more grandiose. There are various forces arrayed against John, but we’re not clear yet on who they all are, how they connect to each other, or what they want. But it is clearly John on the run with the vastly powerful thingamabob, with All Hands Against Him.

Oh! Also, near the end, one group of villains hires the Metabaron, a sleek figure in a metaleather jacket with a metashaved head and steely metaeyes, to find John and retrieve the Incal in his metacraft. (OK, not every noun associated with him has “meta” attached to it – but a hell of a lot of them do, in a way that gets silly within two or three pages.)

It ends entirely in the middle of the action; John has been captured yet again by someone we’re pretty sure is a villain and the Metabaron is getting metacloser. I suspect every volume ends more or less that way; I’ll see.

The Dark Incal is stylish and would move really quickly if it weren’t for all of the repetitive dialogue. Mœbius’s art is detailed – maybe to the point of being overbusy a few times, but mostly right in that sweet spot of Big SF action, with lots of gigantic constructed stuff looming and swooping around. I have the lurking suspicion that it will all add up to less than it seems, but that may be my memories of the last time I read it. It is the epitome of ’80s SF adventure in French comics, in all of the good and bad ways.

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

Who Is AC? by Hope Larson & Tintin Pantoja

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If this were a TV show, it would be a pilot that didn’t get picked up: it obviously aimed to start a series, and, a decade later, it didn’t. There are a lot of plot points, themes, and ideas that aren’t completely explained or fleshed out here – but of course there would be, if it were going to be a series. Those are hooks for later stories, for further details to come later, room for the story to grow.

But, for whatever reason, it didn’t. Who Is AC?  is a decade-old standalone now; I suppose it’s just possible that writer Hope Larson and artist Tintin Pantoja could get back together and tell us what happened next, but this was a Sailor Moon-inspired, manga-styled graphic novel about superheroes and social media aimed at tweens. That audience is now in college; the phones they used in 2013 are four generations out of date; and the ways all of us interact online has shifted and altered. Any follow-up would either be a period piece or a full reboot.

But, if you can ignore the fact that the main character gets her superpowers from a candybar phone, the likes of which were I think solidly out of date even in 2013, AC is a fast-moving, if somewhat superficial, adventure story about one girl who gets superpowers and discovers there are Trolls lurking out in the world.

Lin just moved with her family to the small college town of Barnhurst – location deliberately left unspecified, but  notably small and far away from everything. On the flight over, her phone rang while in airplane mode, and something happened that transformed her. She can use that phone contact, in a way the book doesn’t over-explain, to turn into a costumed superheroine with what looks like a big spear and some vaguely computer-esque powers.

Trace is a young man, about the same age, who lives in Barnhurst. He works in a copy shop, where he meets Lin making her zine. He’s got a crush on Mel, who works next door at the get-your-photos-taken-in-old-timey-garb shop (which is sustainable as a business in a small college town? Barnhurst must get substantially more tourist traffic than it seems to). Mel is a bit self-centered, the stereotypical pretty girl, but seems like a basically nice, normal person, not an airhead or a spoiled brat. The two have a date, which does not go well, largely because Trace is even more self-centered and full of unwarranted assumptions about every last thing in the world than we expected. (He’s also about sixteen or so, which means it comes across as young and unformed and needing some life experience rather than completely horrible. But he is clearly reminiscent of That Internet Guy, who was a loathed type even in 2013.)

The same night as that date, Lin witnesses a hold-up at the copy shop. She transforms into her alter ego, saves the day, and captures the crook (who is a sad-sack guy trying to get money to pay for dental work). But she also transforms again on the way home, to see how it works, and causes an accident for an already-mad Trace and his bike.

Trace posts an angry rant online about the superheroine after he learns about the holdup, calling her Anonymous Coward. (Presumably, if there had been a series, AC would have stood for other things – but that’s the source of the name here.) At about the same time, a shadowy figure in a repurposed Pizza Hut somewhere nearby – clearly the Big Villain of the series, but not completely identified in this book – tempts Mel into becoming what I suppose I have to call an Evil Minion.

Mel and Trace are going to meet someone isolated the next night, where Mel will presumably use the power of the Negative Internet to change Trace into another Evil Minion like herself. But Lin shows up, and there is a battle with lots of 1s and 0s in it, and the hold of the Troll (I guess we can call the big villain that – he’s called a troll in the book, which implies he may not be alone) is broken.

Lin’s secret identity is still, we think, safe, though her costume doesn’t cover her face all that much. Mel and Trace are back to being friends, we think, and maybe, if there were a Book Two, might move on to more. But AC doesn’t have a real superhero name, the origin of her powers and the Troll are still mysterious, and it’s not clear what the significance of the plot of the book was.

So: very much an introductory first volume, mostly set up and mysteries. All things that will now never be cleared up; this is all we have. Pantoja gives it an energetic, mildly manga style, and Larson, as always, is good with the big personalities of young people. It’s not quite a complete story, but it’s fine as long as you think of it as a pilot episode getting burned off one random night in the summer.

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

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 1

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I’ve been known to bemoan the fact that the caption was basically wiped out of mainstream US comics in an extinction event roughly congruent with the big ’90s crash. I’ll admit that captions may have made a comeback since, like tiny mammals after the Chicxulub impact, but I read mainstream comics only rarely these days, so I don’t really know either way. But my point was that captions were useful, and did work well in a lot of the iconic ’80s stories, so, geez, maybe don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater?

Well, I hadn’t taken a look at any bathwater for a while. My opinion may have shifted somewhat.

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 1  is the first of three fairly large volumes collecting their combined run on the Daredevil character, from 1979 through 1982. Now, there’s an asterisk there – several asterisks, actually – since this is corporate comics, and it was created assembly-line style. Janson was the inker before Miller joined as penciler, working over Gene Colan, and took over as penciler/inker afterward. And Miller started off as “the hot new artist,” picking up co-plotting after a few issues and eventually taking over as writer as well. So what most readers think of as “the Frank Miller Daredevil” starts up about halfway through this book.

But comics fans are completionists, and this is a complete package, so that’s a good thing. It also has extensive credits of who did what – something comics weren’t good at for a long time, but they made up for it starting sometime in the 1970s, and became obsessive about it in the flood of reprint projects starting in the ’90s.

Included in this book are:

  • Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man issues 27 & 28, written by Bill Mantlo and inked by Frank Springer; it’s basically a Frank Miller try-out, I guess, since Daredevil guest-stars
  • Daredevil #158-161, 163-166, written by Roger McKenzie (with Miller contributing for 165 and 166)
  • Daredevil # 167, written by David Michelinie and Miller
  • Daredevil #168-172, written by Miller

Now, Bill Mantlo has definitely written better comics than this. So has Michelinie. I don’t know McKenzie’s work well, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. But the stories here – even the ones when Miller takes over at the end – are filled with long, verbose, tedious captions that “set the scene” and “provide color commentary” but mostly tell us what we’re looking at and repeat standard phrases about the character and world.

Daredevil doesn’t have a single phrase that gets beaten into the ground like Wolverine’s “I’m the best at what I do and what I do isn’t pretty,” but both “man without fear” (including related references to DD never giving up on anything ever) and “hey, don’t forget this guy is, like, totally blind!” come up like a bad penny every few pages.

The stories are also…what’s a more polite word for cliched and standard? There were a lot of comics like these in the 1970s and 1980s, and only slightly different before and after that – superhero yardgoods, rolled out to fill up pages and entertain an audience that just wanted to see this guy in this costume punching a particular group of villains and repeating his catchphrase.

Miller was an solid artist from the beginning, which is good. And Janson supported him well. They worked well together to make eye-pleasing pages full of superhero action, only slightly marred by the reams of words pasted on top of all of it.

Once Miller starts writing the stories, the elements of his later work slide in. The last five issues here are one plotline, in which The Kingpin – up to this point entirely a Spider-Man villain, and at that point retired in Japan – comes back to New York for a vaguely described plea deal in which he will hand over a dossier on his successors to the Manhattan DA in return for complete immunity on all of his previous crimes. (Which is, what thirty years of murders and gang-lord-ing and attempted spider-squashing? Nice deal.) We also get a flashback to Daredevil’s college days, to meet the One Great Love of His Life, Elektra, the beautiful daughter of a Greek diplomat who drops out of school when Daddy is murdered by terrorists that not-yet-Daredevil isn’t quite able to stop. She drops out, of course, to become an international assassin in a skimpy costume made up of mostly red straps.

As, of course, you do. In superhero comics, at least.

Bullseye, the most iconic Daredevil antagonist – basically his Joker or Lex Luthor – turns up several times, with a lot of hugger-mugger and opportunities for Daredevil to emote and express his pure goodness and desire for justice, including during the Kingpin plotline at the end. (I do have to admit that Miller makes better use of him, with less histrionics, than McKenzie did.)

So the front half of Vol. 1 is just a slight step up from a standard Marvel comic of 1979 – Miller is energetic, but there were plenty of good, energetic artists then. The end shows more promise, but Miller is still working in the same mode: characters talk too much, and the narrative voice might be pulling back just slightly, but it’s still too intrusive, and spends far too much time telling the reader things he should already know or can see right there in the same panel.

I’m assuming all that gets better in Vol. 2; I’ll have to take a look.

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

Last Kiss: Sex Day by John Lustig

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I try not to be a gatekeeper. I have standards and expectations – and, like everyone else, some tropes and styles and story-structures I like better than others. But I like to think I can take the how and what as it comes.

So I haven’t mentioned the syndicated comic “strip” Last Kiss here before, as far as I can tell. But I’ve been aware of it, and read it here and there, and I’m definitely not against it. (I’m sure some people are – repurposing of art brings out a lot of thoughts and emotions in some people.)

The deal of Last Kiss is that John Lustig takes panels from mostly ’50s romance comics – a lot of Dick Giordano and Vince Colletta, I think, a lot of people who can’t be exactly credited seventy years later – edits them a bit, has them recolored, and adds new, humorous dialogue and captions. It’s all juxtaposition humor, with those clean-cut young men in crew cuts and young ladies in classy gowns talking about Gangnam style or whatever. Last Kiss has been running for quite some time – I want to say something like twenty years, in CBG and as a few issues in comics format and mostly on GoComics – but there’s a deep well of original material to work from, and I don’t think Lustig pushes out lots of material at any one time.

Last Kiss: Sex Day  is a mildly themed – sex is the theme, though that’s at least an underlying theme a lot of the time in Last Kiss, since it starts with romance comics to begin with – collection of the strip from 2013, a short book of about sixty pages. As far as I can tell, it’s only available digitally, which is just fine for this kind of frivolous exercise.

Last Kiss is all individual panels, and they’re presented one to a page here, with an occasional second page to show what the art looked like in its original form and with its original dialogue. (Lustig’s is always funnier, but often vastly less weird.) It’s sarcastic, it’s at least mildly “weren’t those old people totally squaresville” humor, and it’s all in the same territory of jokes. So this is a good length, and an amusing package: if you like the idea of Last Kiss, and don’t mind some mildly risqué humor, Sex Day is a fine sampler.

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

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