Author: Andrew Wheeler

Alan Moore famously has a love-hate relationship with superhero comics. Well, I mean, a lot of people love or hate superhero comics, and plenty do both. The difference is that superhero comics hates and loves Moore back.

In the late ’90s, after he’d cast a magic incantation cursing DC Comics and all of its wares, swearing never to work for them again under any circumstances, Moore started his own line of superhero comics, under the not-at-all-self-aggrandizing label of America’s Best Comics. And then his publisher sold the entire company to DC anyway, pretty much simultaneously with the launch of the ABC line.

(It’s almost enough to make one believe that deep Northamptonian magic doesn’t actually do anything!)

One of those ABC books was Promethea, with art by J.H. Williams II and Mick Gray. I read the first collection sometime in the early Aughts, and didn’t remember a whole lot about it. (I do remember that nothing I saw of America’s Best Comics, then or later, impressed me all that much. But I can be hard to impress when it comes to superhero stuff.) Since I’m reading giant stacks of comics-format books this year to feed the maw of Book-A-Day, I figured I might as well try Promethea, Book 1 again.

(I’m still not that impressed. This is not a surprise.)

Promethea the character is a legacy hero, one of many in Moore’s work — he’s been very fond of having his main character be one of a million versions of the same thing, from the Captain Britain multiverse to the Parliament of Trees. This time, the original of Promethea is a fourth-century girl in Egyptian Alexandria bodily transported to the realm of story by the god Thoth-Hermes, and somehow because of that gets to be the template for a series of mystically-powered superwomen starting at the end of the 19th century in the US. Since Moore always has miles of notes, I’m not going to ask what Promethea was doing for the intervening thirteen centuries, because he’d probably tell me in great detail in some tedious end-of-book text feature.

Our brand-new Promethea is Sophie Bangs — that name sounds much more like a camgirl than a superheroine, but OK — in a mildly science-utopian 1999, a slightly alternate comic-book-universey version of the real world her story was published into. She’s a college student researching the legend of Promethea, providing both the natural opportunity for a lot of infodumping and the reason why she gets saddled with the glowy caduceus staff and form-fitting bronze armor.

There are, of course, equally mystical evil people who want to snuff out this new Promethea before she comes into her full powers, and they try to do so. But most of the story here, from the first six issues of the Promethea comic, is an extended tour of the Immateria, the lands of story and myth, in the company of each of the recent dead Prometheas in turn.

That tour is not over at the end of this book; nothing is actually resolved by the last page here and Sophie/Promethea is heading out into a promised two more sections of the Immateria to learn more lessons from more dead predecessors. Why this is where the vast and cool intelligences of DC chose to end this particular book is beyond me; I suspect they believe that their target audience doesn’t understand the idea of stories “ending” anyway, and so don’t bother wasting time with such things.

But I am a well-known cynic.

Promethea is a perfectly adequate superhero comic, with powers and characters that make more sense than many of its competitors. Williams and Gray draw well, and get some inventive page designs out of it. You could certainly do worse than this.

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

I read the first volume of Martian Confederacy nine years ago, around the time it came out, but clearly didn’t love it enough to jump into the second book any time quickly.

But time wounds all heels, and, during a business trip recently, I remembered that I had The Martian Confederacy, Vol. 2: From Mars With Love  on a device, and so read it to keep the Book-A-Day streak going. (If you think that “streak” is filled with the book equivalent of a lot of bloop singles, well, you’re not wrong.) As with the first book, it’s written by Jason McNamara and drawn by Paige Braddock, and both of them will probably be very surprised to see this post pop up if they have the usual Google ego-searches active. (I’m sure they’ve done plenty of other stuff since this, and I like to believe that everyone gets better, too.)

Martian Confederacy has a veneer of seriousness and drama, but it’s a loose, ramshackle construction that fights against that seriousness every step of the way. (I called it “the Dukes of Hazard on Mars” the first time around, and I stand by that.)

As the cover gives away, central this time is a love story between our somewhat lunkish (but good-hearted) hero Boone and Lou, his android roommate (platonically, up to this point). They set off to investigate the abduction of the children of a friend of Lou’s — there’s a big hole in the side of their trailer and everything — and end up being shanghaied by the Alcalde into investigating a wider problem, and breaking his rules to get off the planet and find the culprits.

You see — and you’ll want to be sitting down for this — there’s a planet-wide child theft ring, which nobody has heard about for some reason, and the Alcalde (corrupt, the only law/government on the entire planet, no apparent thugs to actually enforce his edicts but he acts like someone will do what he decrees) tells Boone and Lou that they need to solve the problem before he (the Alcalde) comes back from his honeymoon. Oh, and they’re specifically ordered not to leave the planet, though the instant they start to think it about, it’s clear the kids were all kidnapped to somewhere other than Mars.

That’s how From Mars, With Love is the whole way: superficially plausible as long as you don’t think about anything for even a second, and full of very durable cliches mixed with random oddities. (The Alcalde’s new wife is two women, connected upside-down at the torso, and they flip around semi-randomly, taking over the personality and activity of the single person they seem to be legally.) The universe is pretty crapsack — slavery (at least of non-human sentients) is legal, kidnapping kids is pretty common, and everything is pretty beat-up and junky. And the plot is the usual combination of fighting and let-me-tell-you-what’s-really-happening, with the kind of ending you’d expect from a story like this.

I have a feeling the creators took it a bit more seriously than I did, but that’s OK: you should commit to the things you’re doing. As far as I can tell, this is where the series ended — two collections of outlaw medium-future adventures, sticking it to The Man on the red planet. It’s unique, I’ll give it that: it’s definitely one of a kind.

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

Hey, remember Minx? (Don’t worry, a lot of people don’t.)

DC Comics launched that imprint in 2007 to great fanfare, with a raft of interesting creators (many from outside the comic-shop) world and a focus on fiction for teen girls that was unusual for comics of the modern era. It flopped in barely a year, though: that’s why you might not remember it.

Other companies, before and since, have published plenty of very successful books for this audience — I need only mention the name Raina Telgemeier. But DC didn’t manage to do it: maybe because they were too locked into their usual distribution channels, maybe because “DC Comics” turned off those girls, maybe because the stars just weren’t right. But it did flop.

I’ve covered most of the Minx books randomly here — Re-Gifters and Clubbing, The Plain Janes and Good as Lily, Janes sequel Janes in Love , Kimmie66 , Water Baby , Confessions of a Blabbermouth , and Emiko Superstar  in a quick way during my Eisner-judging frenzy. But one of the Minx books I didn’t manage to read at the time was The New York Four, a graphic novel about four young women, all first-year students at New York University, by writer Brian Wood and artist Ryan Kelly.

But somehow, without realizing the connection, I had a publicity copy (in electronic form) of the Dark Horse book The New York Four , from 2014, which also included the aborted sequel The New York Five, which was done for Minx but never published by them. (And I mean literally not realizing; I figured it out while starting to type this.)

But now I’ve knocked off one more Minx: I think the only ones I haven’t seen now are Burnout and Token.

The New York Four (the original graphic novel) was also, in a way, a follow-up to Local , a Brian Wood/Ryan Kelly comic about an aimless young woman from a year or so before. But this one is more obviously made for the teen set: every one of these four women has A Problem, presumably one that some segment of the target audience would relate to. (I don’t think it was that mercenary, but we do have The Catfished Girl, and The Stalker, and The Sugar-Daddy Chaser, and The Outer-Borough Slut, if you want to be reductive.) The first story focuses almost exclusively on The Catfished Girl, Riley, who is also said to be a bookworm (we don’t see this) from a demanding family whose older sister ran away for mysterious reasons seven years before. The other three are supporting characters in the Riley story in Four, though the slightly shorter Five is more balanced. A different structure, one that let each woman have an independent story that the others supported, might have been better, but even this structure didn’t make it out into public unscathed, so I’m not really complaining.

The characterization is thoughtful but tends to be one-note — each of the Four is mostly her issue, which is underlined by one of the organizing principles of both Four and Five: they’re all taking part in an unlikely get-college-kids-to-take-high-school-exams-regularly program, which is also inexplicably well-paid, and they have to meet regularly with a psychiatrist as part of this program. It’s entirely possible that Wood is basing this fictional program on something similar or identical in the real world, but it seemed incredibly bizarre and unlikely to me, a convoluted way to get his characters into reality-TV style “tell your story into the camera” moments.

Kelly’s art is lush and detailed, with all of the people distinctive and real. He gives this book a lot of depth, down to body language — look at main character Riley on the cover! can’t you tell a lot about her just from that? — and facial expressions.

But it feels like there’s just too much here, and Wood ends up giving short shrift to the fact that these women are in college — we barely see them in class, and they don’t interact with other students at all. I suspect that he had a novel’s worth of ideas for a novella-length story. And I can’t help but compare it to the John Allison-written Giant Days , which started slightly later and was in pamphlet-format comics originally, which let it give each of its (only three) young women the spotlight in turn.

There’s a lot of good in The New York Four, and it could have been better if it and Minx had been a success: I expect Wood and Kelly would have done further stories, and maybe even followed these women all the way to graduation. Oh, well. Failure is the way of the world…and that’s a lesson you can also get by reading The New York Four.

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

This book came out of a particular moment, and a particular place — England, in the mid-80s, during one of its periodic frenzies about “offensive” material in comics form. But it’s more generally applicable, to any nation that claims a heritage from an Abrahamaic religion (which includes, I’ bet, 95%+ of the people reading this.)

It’s a book that was created to make a point. An obvious one, for people who actually knew the truth, but Bible-thumpers are regularly ignorant of many of the horrible lessons contained in the thing they thump.

The title gives it away, of course: Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament . All the murder and rape and war and human sacrifice and “take my virgin daughters instead of my male guest” that can be crammed into 68 pages, by a crew of major and semi-major names from the independent UK scene at the time. The book was edited and assembled by someone, but that person is never named — it’s some editor at Knockabout Publications at the time, but I have no idea who that is.

To be blunt, Outrageous Tales is pointedly saying the the source of a lot of people’s moral compass is full of horrible lessons and shocking stories and thoroughly evil deeds, many of them very much in the name of You Know Who. (Almost as if it were a collection of legends from a savage group of desert tribes from more than a thousand years!)

So Neil Gaiman writes a long section adapting a whole bunch of the book of Judges — one of the ones that doesn’t come up much in the modern day, since it’s full of horrible things and the main lesson is “do what God says or die horribly, and maybe die horribly even if you do” — turning it into something very much like an EC Comic. Mike Matthews does the very twisted “host” art for the opening and closing sections, with other artists (including Dave McKean) doing the bits in the middle.

Other greatest hits of the Bible include an Alan Moore/Hunt Emerson take on a long list of “kill people who have fucked in this incorrect way” from Leviticus, with Emerson gleefully depicting a rapidly shrinking Israelite tribe killing their fellow tribesmen who broke each rule in turn. Kim Deitch does a straight adaptation of the book of Job, without any of the rib-nudging of many of the other stories, and it’s still horrifying, since Job’s is a horrifying story. Brian Bolland has Elisha cursing forty-two boys to be eaten by bears for calling him “Baldy,” and Dave Gibbons turns the angels of Sodom and Gomorrah into something like aliens. (Which, in retrospect, seems to be slightly off-message.)

There are a few other stories tucked into the niches in between, but it’s not a long book — only 68 pages, as I said. And it is all pretty much the same tone: can you believe what’s in this old book of laws and stories?

I can believe it, but I am the guy who won the Bible Olympics as a teen two years running. (It was a very liberal church, so this material was never an emphasis — but what teen boy isn’t fascinated with the horrible Old Testament stuff?) You may not need this book to learn this lesson. In fact, that’s the real problem with Outrageous Tales: the people who most need to learn this lesson will never learn it from a book like this.

But most lessons are like that, aren’t they? If they were easy, they wouldn’t be real lessons.

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

I do like titles that end with “by {insert author};” they save me time and space on my post titles. Perhaps I should do a year where I only read books like that.

(I rely on you readers to talk me out of patently stupid ideas like that one.)

I have a feeling Liz Prince has a more interesting and full cartooning career than I’ve managed to keep up with: I can be obtuse like that. I have read and liked her books Tomboy  and Alone Forever , but I bet there’s more out there. I should probably take a look.

But right now I’m here to tell you about Look Back and Laugh , a collection of her journal comics from 2016. If I have this right, Prince started a Patreon sometime around then, and one of the rewards was a monthly printed collection of daily diary strips. (I’m not clear why she didn’t just put them online daily and password-protect them for backers, but I bet the reason has something to do with the romance of ‘zines.) She also seems to have at least sometimes gotten behind on “daily” comics and had to catch up by doing a week at a time, which is totally endearing and something I’d be likely to do if I was in a similar circumstance.

(Assuming a world in which I could actually draw, obviously. Which is not this world.)

Look Back collects those 366 comics, along with a new comic-strip introduction by Prince, and they’re very much journal comics — mostly done in a quiet moment at the end of the day, sometimes about one big thing that happened that day, sometimes about two or four little things that happened, and sometimes about how she can’t think of anything particularly notable that happened. This was a pretty eventful year for Prince and her partner Kyle (I didn’t see a last name for him in the comics; I presume Prince’s audience already knows who he is): they got married, they bought a house, and they moved from outside Boston up to Portland, Maine. (Those latter two are obviously related.)

But, mostly, it’s about what she did that day. That’s the joy of journal comics: they’re about the everyday and the mundane. Some days are sitting and drawing, some are frenzied cleaning the new house and trying to find that one random thing in a sea of packed boxes. This turned out to be a good year for Prince to start making journal comics about, but the hidden secret is that they’re all good years.

Prince is working on a small canvas here, and trying to fit in enough words to explain what’s going on. But even with those constraints, she has a bouncy, cartoony style and a good eye to lock in how she draws the people in her life. You may not be interested in anyone’s journal comics, and that’s fine — but, if you are, Liz Prince does them really well.

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

Andi Watson, I think, started off expecting to tell stories of action and adventure in comics, with a fantastic flair, but kept finding those stories turning more personal and character-focused as he told them. (I could say “more mundane,” but that sounds like an insult. It isn’t: life itself is mundane. But it sounds that way.)

That happened on a large scale with his first major series, Skeleton Key , which I re-read earlier this year. And it happened on a smaller canvas with Geisha, the four-issue series that he created in between the main run of Skeleton Key and the four-part “Roots” coda in 1999.

The Complete Geisha  is the 2003 book that collects all of the Geisha work up to that point — I think there might be some later short stories, but this could be it. It collects the main four-part story from the fall of 1998, a one-shot follow-up from 2000, and a few short related stories.

There’s no geisha in the book — at least, not any obvious one. Jomi Sohodo is an android raised in a human family — this seems to be rare, if not unique — who wants to be an artist, even though it’s heavily hinted that her line was designed as sexbots. She doesn’t want to work in the family bodyguard business, as her three human brothers do, but it’s paying work, and she has a hard time selling her paintings, so she ends up, over the course of the original story, in the family business. And that leads to drama and complications, as the body she guards is a top model with an angry ex-manager/boyfriend and her new art patron is a nasty gangster.

I don’t know if Watson expected to tell a story of androids in human society, or if the sexbot thing was ever supposed to pay off. But Jomi is the only android we see, in a society that I think is supposed to be full of them, and he seems less interested in the running around and bodyguarding than he is with Jomi’s struggles to get into the art world and the compromises she has to do along the way.

The one-shot, two years later, is in Watson’s softer mature style — and I could mean both the art and the story. There’s more shading in the art, rounder edges , and very little “action” in the usual comics sense. And it’s about Jomi as a person, particularly her relationship with one brother starting a new band, rather than anything plottier.

So this is transitional Watson, starting from the story he thought he wanted to tell (or that he thought the market wanted, or someone told him to make for that market) towards more individual stories like Love Fights  or Little Star . Transitions are quirky, individual things, and Geisha shows some of that in its shape, but it’s still a good Watson comic about art and family and finding your place in the world.

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

I’m pretty sure this has been published in one volume, at least once. But the current edition is two volumes, and that’s what I read. (Long before that, it was published as fifteen comic book issues, and I had those as well, before my 2011 flood. But all things must pass.)

“This” is the first volume of Matt Wagner’s epic transmuting-his-life-into-heroic-adventure trilogy Mage. Mage: The Hero Discovered was one of Wagner’s first major comics projects in the 1980s and was followed by The Hero Defined at the end of the ’90s and, eventually, by The Hero Denied, planned to wrap up by the end of this year.

Since that third volume is about to finish up, and I expect to read it, I thought I might as well go back for the first two: when a creator takes 15-20 years between installments, you can do him the favor of reminding yourself of the old pieces before coming to the new ones. So I re-read Hero Discovered this month (Volume One , Volume Two ), plan to hit Hero Defined next month, which should get me ready for the first Hero Denied collection…which I see was published a few days ago. (I doubt I’ll be able to hold off until the second half of Denied is published as a book in February, but I did skip buying all of the floppies, so maybe I will. As I get older, the appeal of story-pieces has gone down precipitously.)

Very early in the life of this blog, I had a breathless review of Defined , which I’m linking here for completeness’s sake — I really hope you don’t go back and read those burblings, which I am now embarrassed by. Otherwise, I’ve mentioned it, but not gotten into any depth.

It starts with overwriting two guys meeting on a city street — one may be drunk, and pretends to be happy, and one may be a bum, or pretends to be one. (Their dialogue is wince-inducing: if you decide to read Mage, you need to remember that it was nearly the first thing Wagner did in comics, and that he got better quickly — though ponderous unbelievable dialogue is an occasional hazard throughout the Mage stories.)

The not-drunk guy is Kevin Matchstick, who is so sad because he’s all alone. The not-bum calls himself Mirth, and he’s the mage of the title — there will be a different one for each series. Right after their conversation, Kevin sees a man attacking an actual bum in an alley, and surprises himself by running to intervene. He’s even more surprised to find the assailant is a hairless pale-skinned humanoid with sharp points on his elbows and that Kevin suddenly has super-strength and speed. The bum dies; the humanoid gets away.

And Kevin goes back to his apartment, confused, to find Mirth, who starts the official Hero’s Journey by explaining (well, a little) who he and Kevin are. Mirth is the World-Mage, opposed to the evil Umbra Sprite and his sons, the Grackleflints (the humanoids), who do the usual evil thing of corruption and destruction. Kevin has another fight with three (of five) of the Grackleflints in a subway car before he gets the next round of explanations from Mirth.

I’ll be blunt here, though Kevin doesn’t find this out for a long time: he’s The Eternal Champion King Arthur kind-of King Arthur, in that he’s the latest incarnation of a mythic hero and was once little Wart. He will gather allies — a teenage girl with a bat and a dead public defender — and, together, they will help him battle the Umbra Sprite and all of the supernatural creatures that the Sprite can summon and throw at him. The Sprite is searching for the Fisher King — another reincarnation, though not a hero — and if his Grackleflints can kill the Fisher King, it will bring a new era of death and destruction to earth.

And that’s the story of Discovered: this is explicitly a Hero’s Journey book, so Kevin learns bits and pieces of the setup over about four hundred pages, punctuated with fights against dragons and giants and redcaps and other mythical beasties, and occasionally broken up by attempts to actually figure out what the forces of evil are doing, where they’re headquartered, and how to stop them.

Before the end, there are major sacrifices so the Hero can stand alone, quite a lot of epic fight scenes, and a surprisingly nuanced view of the relationships among the forces of evil. Wagner started this series a little shakily, but it had great bones right from the beginning, and both his drawing and writing skills got stronger very quickly. It’s unfortunate that the two very worst pages in the whole Mage saga are the first two, but at least you can know that going in.

Somewhere along the line, the original 1980s-era coloring disappeared and was replaced by a more modern treatment by Jeromy Cox and James Rochelle — I think this is from the Defined era, but don’t quote me. I should also note that Wagner is inked by Sam Kieth, starting with the sixth (of fifteen) chapters, and that lines up with one of several leaps forward in the strength of the art. (So it’s not all Wagner, as the cover makes it seem — very few comics are that much of an auteur medium; there’s always some collaboration going on.)

Mage is a strong urban fantasy story in comics form, clearly in a mythic vein but with a lot of individual touches. It’s classy enough to have titles from Hamlet (and never say so, or explain them), and street enough to be about the reincarnation of King Arthur beating up monsters to save the world. And, if you’ve been waiting for the whole Mage saga to be done, you are nearly in luck.

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