Author: Andrew Wheeler

Book-A-Day 2018 #279: Sebastian O/The Mystery Play by Grant Morrison, Steve Yeowell, and Jon J Muth

What do you do with the quirky minor failures of a major creator?

Well, you can ignore them, and that’s what happens most of the time. You can also try to spiff them up a bit, and get them walking two by two, in hopes that they’ll look more impressive in company. If the creator is major enough and his backlist extensive enough, you might find yourself doing that.

In this case, you did — if “you” are DC Comics and “the creator” is writer and self-proclaimed chaos magician Grant Morrison. And you probably made a bit of money out of it, which is the whole point of the exercise.

But these are still quirky minor failures, even twenty-five years later, and perhaps at this remove even more clearly show Morrison’s characteristic failure modes: a reliance on high concepts even when they don’t make narrative sense, a tropism to stylishness as an end in itself, an unwillingness to actually explain anything that might make his worlds actually plausible, provocative dialogue that neither sounds like human beings talking nor has any solid meaning, and, above all else, the love of flash over substance.

The book is Sebastian O/The Mystery Play . The two things collected are 1993’s three-issue alternate-Victorian serial-killer [1] frivolity drawn by Steve Yeowell (who also did the much better Zenith  with Morrison) and the 1994 spooky, sophomorically “philosophical” bad detective story graphic novel drawn by Jon J Muth (who later fled comics for illustrating children’s books, possibly because of tripe like this).

Both of them are stylish in their own ways; both are entertaining on their own levels. Both also fail on basic levels of plausibility, much like other Morrison works up to his famous JLA run. So maybe his fans will love these oddball early-90s stories, but I tend to think they’re not the right kind of weird — no superheroes, not set in a cool version of the modern world, not obviously transgressive.

Sebastian O is set in a steampunky alternate-Vistorian world that doesn’t seem to have any real reason to be alternate. The title character, a melange of Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, and Jack the Ripper, is supposedly a genius, but we only see him run around, murder people, and talk about his clothes. He escapes from jail at the beginning of the story, where he was incarcerated for what seem like vague and trumped-up “being gay and subversive” reasons. We readers would thus be on his side, if not for the randomly violent ways he does escape, and rampages through the secret gay-cult society that apparently betrayed him.

I say “gay,” because the narrative makes that clear, though in the usual Mauve Decade euphemisms. But neither Sebastian nor the people he chases show much affection for anyone who is not themselves, and their choice of sexual partners is not particularly important for this thriller-chase plot. Like so many Morrison stories, it seems like an affectation or a signpost rather than anything intrinsic to the story.

Anyway, Sebastian murders his way out of prison, murders his way through his former friends, and finds the fiend behind the whole thing, who frankly seems somewhat unpleasant but not nearly as bad as Sebastian. There is a Shocking Revelation at the end, which, as often with Morrison, doesn’t actually make any sense, and which is ignored anyway. So we’re left with the story of the murderous rampage of a Victorian dandy — if you’re looking for that, you are in luck.

The Mystery Play is more sedate and grounded. The small Yorkshire city of Townley, struggling for whatever reason, is putting on a large-scale production of traditional medieval mystery plays for the Christmas season, dramatizing what seems like most of the Bible for the entertainment of tourists. On the night of the debut of the first play, someone murders the actor playing God.

And, yes, every single person in Townley who talks about this event afterward refers to this as “the death of God.” Not the death of a prominent local doctor, who they all knew, but an amateur acting part that he just took and died in the middle of. And it is Ontologically Important to every single one of them. Morrison’s greasy thumb is particularly prominent with this element, and it overwhelms the entire story.

A single Detective Sergeant is sent from vaguely somewhere else, with no driver and no lines of reporting back to his superiors and no paperwork and no connections to the local coppers. This is of course A Whopping Great Clue, and only the dimmest readers will miss it. It’s also entirely stupid, and wouldn’t actually work for more than five seconds, even before “Detective Sergeant Frank Carpenter” spends all of his time in philosophical musings about God and the Devil.

Eventually, there is another play performed “on-stage” in the story, and it of course is the very end of the mystery cycle, in which Jesus is crucified. Nudge nudge wink wink!

It’s unfortunate that the story is such bullshit, because Muth delivers stunning work here — moody painted pages with stunningly real faces, a fantastic mix of levels of abstraction. Every single page here is absolutely gorgeous, and a masterpiece of the comics art. Shame about the words thrown on top, though.

So Sebastian O is an answer to the question “What if Oscar Wilde was a man of action?” and The Mystery Play similar investigates “What if God were killed during a mystery play?” Neither of those are particularly good questions, and Morrison’s attempts to imbue them with deep meaning fall flat. This is probably why they were quietly out of print for much of the last twenty-five years, and why they will probably slip back into that abyss once the stock of this 2017 omnibus are depleted. Morrison has some little-known gems in his backlist — I mentioned Zenith before, also with Yeowell, for one example — but these are not among them.

[1] Morrison’s main character is a serial killer, and a deeply unrepentant one. Some of the people he kills “deserve it,” but he’s also happy to just slaughter anyone in his way. Since he’s incredibly shallow otherwise, it’s the defining characteristic of his personality.

antickmusingsdyil2auoc8za-2447546 antickmusingsd63t7ie-lg7y-8110618 antickmusingsdqj6idk7rits-5267601

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #276: Sex Criminals, Vol. 5: Five-Fingered Discount by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky

I have two ways I could start this, and I don’t know which one to take. So my indecision will instead be the actual starting point, and I will provide you with two options:

  • Last time out, I noted that Sex Criminals seemed to be sliding in the direction of being a superhero comic about people with sex-based powers, but that tide is now going out.
  • There might be a real honest-to-god ending coming up for Sex Criminals, and not just amusing sex-jokes and vaguely sex-positive character development.
Both of those things are positive, to my mind — the world already has too many superhero comics, and not enough comics that actually end well. So I’m reenergized, at least a bit, which is a nice thing to have happen five books into a series.
In case you’re lost, I’ll repeat the information in the title. The book is Sex Criminals, Vol. 5: Five-Fingered Discount , reprinting issues 21-25 of the Image series written by Matt Fraction and drawn by Chip Zdarsky. For some more context, see my posts on the earlier books: the unnamed first volume , Two Worlds, One Cop , Three the Hard Way . and Fourgy .

As the back covers explain amusingly, both Suze and Jon make time stop when they orgasm. They discovered their mutual secret the first time they had sex, and used it to rob banks for a while. Since then, they’ve learned that a bunch of other people can do the same thing, and even weirder things.

In the last volume, they broke up. (Um, Spoiler! I guess.) Since Sex Criminals is a reasonably mainstream serial comic with occasional superhero tropisms, we know both that “breaking up the team” is something that will happen every so often and that it cannot be permanent.

I’m not going to throw in a Spoiler! again, but guess what?

This is the volume where nearly the entire sex-powered cast (which is all but one or two of them) are slowly gravitating towards each other, slowly giving up their individual complaints and animuses, for the big team-up against the real villain: the rich guy.

(He is a real villain, too, and a complete asshole, but he’s also the one rich guy.)

From the end of this book, I had the strong opinion that there would be one more volume to get us to the big ending, and it looks like I’m right: random Googling told me that some random Internet guy says that is indeed the case. And if you can’t believe some random Internet guy, who can you believe? (He sourced it to the issue #25 letter column. Does that sound slightly more authoritative?)

So: this is mostly character stuff (plus sex jokes), and the threatened superhero-style all-hands smack-down has been averted, at least for now. There will be one more volume, to fix whatever can be fixed, and give whoever deserves it a Happily Ever After. Stuff actually happens that matters in this book, and it’s pretty much all decisions and thoughts — moments between people. And, again, a lot of sex jokes — what could be better?

antickmusingsdyil2auoc8za-3428611 antickmusingsd63t7ie-lg7y-6807838 antickmusingsdqj6idk7rits-8329023

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #274: Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 1 by The Hernandez Brothers

This week, I Love (And Rockets) Mondays leaves behind the lands of carefully tended and curated reprints and heads into the off-road weeds of messy serial comics. We’ll be back to carefully-tended a couple of times before the end, but Love and Rockets was a serial comic to begin with, and that’s how nearly all new L&R material has appeared for nearly forty years. So we were going to get there eventually.

The paperback Love and Rockets series, subtitled “New Stories,” was the third series. The original magazine-sized L&R ran from 1981 to 1996, was followed by a bunch of individual comics by the two Hernandez brothers (Gilbert and Jaime), and then by a triumphant reunion with the comics-format second series in 2001. After twenty issues of that over six years, it was time for another change, and so New Stories was born: it would come out once a year, with exactly one hundred pages of comics, evenly divided between the two brothers. [1]

That didn’t exactly happen — I keep getting the sense that behind the scenes Gilbert was more prolific than Jaime, which may have caused some stress to the model — but New Stories had eight big books from 2008 through 2016, and only skipped one year as the time between issues kept to twelve months most of the time.

So: this week’s book is Love and Rockets: New Stories, No.1 , which contains the first two installments of Jaime’s Ti-Girls Adventures, which we’ve already seen in revised and collected form in Angels and Magpies, and a collection of not-obviously linked stories from Gilbert, at least one of which is familiar from Comics Dementia. Again, we’re getting into the time-frame where everything hasn’t been collected cleanly yet — or, at least, where I haven’t figured it all out yet.

It’s structured as a sandwich: Jaime has two long (25-page) installments of a larger story, which open and close the book. In between are seven shorter Gilbert stories — including one, “Chiro El Indio,” scripted by his Halley’s Comet of a brother Mario — which feel a bit like palate-cleansers, without any obvious connections to Palomar or Maria’s three daughters.

Ti-Girls is choppier and more comic-booky in this original presentation — each of the two sections is one page shorter than the final version, and Jaime later moved the single “cover” image here and added a new one for the other installment. I have the sense that the dialogue might have also been changed between the two versions, but I’m not looking to do a panel-by-panel comparison. (I still think this is basically Jaime’s least successful story of his mature career.) Given that Love and Rockets was largely selling through direct-market comic shops, and those were (and still are) heavily superhero-centric, I can’t say this was a bad way to launch the new volume, and it might have pulled in new readers.

Gilbert’s stories include the creepy “Papa,” featuring that guy with holes in his forehead and long hair in back. I don’t remember if he comes back directly, but Gilbert rarely hits an idea only once, so I’ll be looking for him. Also a pleasure is “The New Adventures of Duke and Sammy,” a Martin-and-Lewis comic in Gilbert gonzo-space-epic style: it is unique and nutty and coo-coo. The other stories tend to be shorter and more allusive: there’s a full-on dream-logic piece titled “?;” “Never Say Never,” which is almost a fable, in a twisted Gilbert way; “Victory Dance,” which connects oddly to “Papa” and feels like it may be another brick in a much larger wall; and a single page of miscellaneous strips under the title “The Funny Papers” that are not as humorous as you would expect.

It was a decent relaunch for the series, showing what the two brothers could do, and bringing back Mario in a supporting role one more time. Interestingly, it was very much not the two brothers doing their usual kind of stories — Jaime was wandering off into the lands of superhero self-indulgence and Gilbert was making individual unconnected short stories in between longer epics. Maybe after almost thirty years they decided they didn’t have anything to prove this time. (And they didn’t.)

[1] This may be a spoiler, but that paperback-format series itself ended, and there’s now a fourth Love and Rockets series, back in comics format, which started in 2016. There is an unstoppable tropism to pamphlets in American comics; we stand against it at our peril.

antickmusingsdyil2auoc8za-1019493 antickmusingsd63t7ie-lg7y-7584703 antickmusingsdqj6idk7rits-1598853

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #273: Henchgirl by Kristen Gudsnuk

Flipping the script is a great way to freshen things up. The standard take on Young People Today is that they’re poor and stressed out, so how about giving your heroine more income than she knows what to do with and a give-no-fucks attitude?

OK, sure, she still lives in a dumpy apartment with two roommates, because young people always do that, but she actually has a decent health-care plan. (Though she does have to see Dr. Maniac every time.)

That’s the kind of plan you get when you work for a supervillain: those are the pros and cons. You have to fight superheroes a lot, but you make a lot of money and get to steal really cool things.

This is Mary Posa’s life: she’s a Henchgirl  in the Butterfly Gang, run by Monsieur Butterfly. (The other members: Larry Va, Paladan Birdwing, Chris Calis, Katie Pillar, and of course Coco Oon.) She’s young and gleeful in Crepe City, in this offbeat and not-entirely-serious story about superpersons by Kristen Gudsnuk.

I said “not-entirely-serious,” but it’s not entirely silly, either. Henchgirl is neither parody nor straight superhero story, but something more particular, in-between. Mary’s world is silly, maybe even a little more so than your standard superhero world, but it’s taken as seriously as any of those. Mary lives in a town where the preeminent hero is Mr. Great Guy, and where we the readers can figure out pretty easily that’s he’s actually millionaire playboy Greg Gains. But that’s where she really lives: it’s not the basis for jokes. Crepe City is absurd in different ways than our world — ways that align with a lot of superhero-comics cliches — but who’s to say those absurdities are less likely?

Mary is flippant and frivolous and carefree — well, as carefree as you can be when you’re one of the top lieutenants of a major villain in a superhero universe. Luckily, this is the kind of superhero universe where the villains mostly get away with it and their henchfolks are rolling in the dough. Things blow up, buildings fall down, aliens invade and kill thousands — it’s a modern superhero world, and it would probably look pretty grim ‘n’ gritty if we were seeing it from Mr. Great Guy’s POV.

For Mary, though, it’s pretty sweet for a long time: she gets a boyfriend, Fred, who is also the not-terribly-effective superhero Mannequin, and uses him to leak her boss’s plan to rob an orphanage. (So the crew does her heist instead, and also she gets to feel good about the horrible thing they didn’t do.) The money’s great, the hours aren’t bad, and she can live with her roommates Tina and Sue complaining about her evil activities and lack of tax-paying work.

But then things start getting more problematic: Monsieur Butterfly is getting violent as he searches for the “mole” in his gang…and the gang is not that big to begin with. And her parents, the ’80s-era heroes Flame Girl and El Romancero, come to town on their big fancy book tour, accompanied by the daughter they did put in their book, the budding superheroine Photo-Girl.

And Mannequin gets a new crime-fighting partner in the cute but overwhelming Lovely Celestial Angel Amelia, and along the way gets a power increase from her magical gadgets and a new identity as the Time Baron. And Mary’s roommate Tina starts developing a weird superpower of her own. And Mary’s attempt at heroism, saving her parents from a supervillain, is successful but not particularly popular (or legal, for that matter).

Can one henchgirl make it through all of those problems and find happiness, fulfillment, and that one perfect mask? You’d better believe it!

Mary is an interesting character: a slacker villain henchwoman with vaguely good intentions and a random vague cluelessness that may be just not bothering with things that bore her. The world around her is filled with similarly interesting people — all pretty flawed, in various ways, but not necessarily bad people, even if they spend their time robbing banks and cheating orphans.

This is the complete Henchgirl, at least for now. There could be more stories about Mary, but Gudsnuk left her in a good superhero-universe ending spot, so I don’t think there will be any for at least a few years.

I think Henchgirl was creator Kristen Gudsnuk’s first major work — or maybe I think that because I didn’t hear of her before this. (And I hope I would have heard of someone doing work that’s this much fun!) She’s got a nice, easy line, in a modern style with some anime and western-animation influences and a loose-limbed ease with action and the lack thereof.

I liked Henchgirl a lot — example: while Googling Gudsnuk to type this, I found she has a new middle-grade graphic novel out this year, and I already have a hold on it at the library — and, if you actually read my blog, there’s a very good chance you will, as well. It’s that kind of off-kilter semi-superhero thing that uses the genre as a jumping-off point rather than a pit to wallow in.

Gudsnuk is funny and smart and tells good stories with good people. I hope she does a lot more comics, so I can read ’em.

antickmusingsdyil2auoc8za-3540680 antickmusingsd63t7ie-lg7y-5929961 antickmusingsdqj6idk7rits-4537030

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #272: Oddjob by Ian and Tyson Smith

An indy comic with bold, dark-outlined computer art and a cast off oddballs investigating weird things…I smell the ’90s!

I kid, I kid. But Oddjob  does feel very much of a particular era in comics. This book collects the full Slave Labor Graphic series of the same name (which followed a series of minicomics, some in different art styles, under slightly different names) by Ian and Tyson Smith. The book was published in 2002, collecting comics from early 1999 through early 2001 — which is close enough to “the ’90s” for me.

I don’t know the Smith brothers otherwise: I found this book randomly in a store, many years later, and picked it up because it reminded me of a lot of other oddball comics from the ’90s and other decades. From a quick websearch, it looks like this was the way they broke into comics, and they had a couple of projects afterward, moved on into movies for a while, and have been quiet (at least on the places I saw) for about a decade.

On the other hand, there’s both a dead British politician and a live British comedian named “Ian Smuth,” and Tyson is only somewhat less common. So it’s entirely possible that they’re active doing something artsy but not plugged strongly into Google-Fu.

Anyway, this is the mostly-complete adventures of Moe, Investigator of the Odd! He has a mysterious, enigmatic origin, goggles that he never removes, a vault full of strange and quirky artifacts that he must keep from the hands of ordinary men, and an office above “the second freshest-smelling bar in Spiral City.”

His sidekicks are the tough Moose Mulligan, owner and tender of that bar I just mentioned, and the nearly-useless performance-artist Robin the Clown. His investigations include living Gummi creatures from another dimension, exploding echidnas, missing mystical tikis, and the bell that makes it recess forever. There is both a runawayMoe-bot and an Evil Moe within just eight issues.

It has to be said that Oddjob is aggressively wacky. I think it’s all honestly wacky: these are the stories these guys wanted to tell. But it is not unlike other very wacky things in comics and animation, from Flaming Carrot and Freakazoid on down.

Writer Ian has a knack for keeping it all going and making the pacing work — not a small thing in a story where literally anything could happen. And artist Tyson’s fat inky lines are delightful — there’s a note in the backmatter that he moved to computer art because he could finally get the really clean, thick lines he wanted that way, and it shows in his work.

Even in the history of quirky comics, Oddjob is just a footnote. But everything doesn’t need to be important or major: things can just be fun. And this is.

antickmusingsdyil2auoc8za-7945121 antickmusingsd63t7ie-lg7y-3876004 antickmusingsdqj6idk7rits-4445356

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #270: Come Again by Nate Powell

The cliche is that the happiest-looking people have the darkest secrets. I don’t know if that’s consistently true in real life — how would you design a study to test that, anyway? — but it’s a surefire winner in fiction, where contrast and irony are the go-to tools.

Nate Powell’s new graphic novel Come Again is about the secrets in a seemingly idyllic group of hippies on an Arkansas Ozark hill. Haven Station is where they live, an “intentional community” eight years into its life in 1979. They farm and garden and live off the land — what the land mostly provides is marijuana, but don’t say that too loudly.

Two couples were among the first to join up back in 1971; four young friends who had known each other since childhood: Haluska and Gus, Whitney and Adrian. Since then, they each had a son — Haluska and Gus’s Jacob, Whitney and Adrian’s Shane. Gus left Haluska, a year or so back, and went “downhill” to the local town, back to straight society and normal life. It looks like it was the usual kind of breakup, and they’re friendly with each other, still, for Jacob’s sake and because this is a small, isolated area and you can’t get too far away from each other.

Gus did not leave Haluska because she’s been having an affair with Adrian. He doesn’t know that. No one knows that.

But they have: they’ve been sneaking away together since at least 1971, since before they joined Haven Station. And Haluska is our central character here, the one who will have to confront those long-held secrets and those years of lying.

(I’m happy that the book focuses on a woman: we need more of that. I’m not as happy about how Come Again settles all of the weight of responsibility for this affair on her shoulders, letting Adrian stay vague and personable. He’s just as responsible, just as complicit, just as central, just as lying. And centering the story on her can look like slut-shaming from a lot of perspectives: that the woman bears the price for infidelity, and is the one who has to make everything right, because she’s the one who controls sexuality and child-rearing. It’s not a fatal flaw, but it’s noticeable. And that conception  — that this all is Haluska’s responsibility — is central to Come Again.)

Powell’s books often have supernatural underpinnings, particularly the magisterial Swallow Me Whole. Come Again follows in that tradition, but, as before, it’s nothing you’ve seen before, nothing with a name. On that Ozark hillside, there’s a door, which leads into some rooms and caverns. In that space — maybe also elsewhere; maybe everywhere — is an entity, a voice in the darkness that is sometimes quiet and half-forgotten and sometimes is demanding, feeding on secrets.

That set of caverns, of course, is where Haluska and Adrian run away to have sex together. We see them do so near the beginning of this book; we think they may have been doing this, off and on, every day or week or month for eight years or more. That’s a lot of secrets.

Most of Come Again take place over a couple of days. It’s Haluska and Adrian’s turn to take the farm’s produce — again, with the pot hidden under the table but the real draw for their customers — down to a farmer’s market in town. Meanwhile, Jacob and Shane, the two boys of these two couples, are out wandering around like boys do.

They find the door. They enter the caves. They go too far.

Meanwhile, Haluska and Adrian come back from town, in the middle of a fight. They break up, for what might be forever. They won’t need that door anymore, and prove it to each other.

But a boy is lost. And when he’s not found, he quickly drops out of memory — as if no one, except one person, can hold on to the secret of his existence.

And who cares most about secrets in this place?

Come Again has gorgeous, brilliant pages, equal parts seeped in the darkness of night secrets and dark caves and shot through with the glow of a late-summer day. Powell has some neat tricks with lettering as well, to show secrets and forgetfulness, to hint at the power of that strange voice underground.

I didn’t love Come Again as much as Swallow Me Whole, in part because of the embedded sexism of Haluska, in part because I don’t quite buy the logic of the supernatural deal at the end. But it’s a strong work, well-written and powerfully imagined and brilliantly drawn. And Powell is one of our very best comics storytellers in the modern world.

Don’t let my minor misgivings keep you away: this is a major book by a major creator, and if you’re not familiar with Powell, you’ve got a lot of great work ahead of you.

antickmusingsdyil2auoc8za-5814848 antickmusingsd63t7ie-lg7y-9047318 antickmusingsdqj6idk7rits-6207451

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #268: My Boyfriend Is a Bear by Pamela Ribon and Cat Farris

No one’s perfect, y’know? You’re always going to have to deal with some things that aren’t exactly what you’d want when you’re in a relationship with someone. Sometimes it’ll be a dealbreaker — there’s an entertaining double-page spread in this book headed “Douchebags I’ve Dated” with some examples — but some things you might just decide you can live with.

Say that you’re a young modern LA girl, with an unpleasant call-center job, taking abuse from people who didn’t realize they’d signed up for recurring payments for some useless software. Say you have run through those aforementioned douchebags, and even more, without finding anyone nice. And say you meet someone loving and cuddly and tender and only somewhat clumsy and prone to breaking things, and that he clearly loves you.

Would it be a dealbreaker if he happens to be a five-hundred pound American Black Bear?

Well, it wasn’t for Nora. And this is her story: My Boyfriend Is a Bear . You could probably read it as an allegory if you wanted to, but, really, it’s a fun romance comic about one girl and one bear against the world.

This is, as you might imagine, not entirely serious. Nora’s new boyfriend is just “the bear,” and the most articulate thing he ever says is “grah.” (Which can be more articulate than some people, granted.) My Boyfriend Is a Bear is not set in a world of sentient bears or uplifted mammals or anything exotic like that: it’s our world, our LA, only this one bear is in love with this girl. And vice versa.

Boyfriend is sweet and fun and goofy, and is probably playing with more genre-romance cliches than I noticed. Writer Pamela Ribon keeps Nora quirky and fun without making her a total dingbat, and artist Cat Farris makes all of the pages just as cute as a button.

And, if your own relationships bear some odd resemblance to Nora and the bear, well, that’s your own problem….

antickmusingsdyil2auoc8za-6066970 antickmusingsd63t7ie-lg7y-6011144 antickmusingsdqj6idk7rits-1546037

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

Trese Goes Global!

There is a great urban-fantasy comic from the Philippines called Trese. I’ve written about the first three volumes here a few years ago — and there have been three more volumes since then, plus a seventh in progress.

The books are difficult to find on this side of the Pacific, though. (Difficult to find in most of the world, from what I can see — that happens when you publish out of a smaller country.) And that’s a huge shame: this is damn good stuff, as fantasy, as detective stories, as modern reworkings of folktale material, and as comics.

Well, you’re finally in luck.

Trese creators Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldismo have launched an IndieGogo campaign for a global edition of Trese — starting from the beginning for those of you who haven’t seen it before.

A digital edition of the first comic is a measly two bucks. That’s a steal.

I’ve already backed it, and kicked in an extra donation to help out. (The least I can do, since I got the first few books for free as a reviewer.) Go check it out yourself , and I hope you’ll decide to back it as well.

My dream is that Trese will someday be as big as Hellboy — it may be a crazy dream, but I’ll settle for Trese books actually widely available in North America.

antickmusingsdyil2auoc8za-5412969 antickmusingsd63t7ie-lg7y-7355200 antickmusingsdqj6idk7rits-9609934

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #265: Captain Marvel, Vol. 1: Earth’s Mightiest Hero by DeConnick, Sebela, Soy, RIos, & Andrade

First up, the consumer note that I wanted but didn’t get: this is indeed Volume 1 of the books reprinting the 2012 Captain Marvel series written by Kelly Sue DeConnick. (It contains twelve issues and the second volume has five more.) That was preceded by comics called Captain Marvel (just by Marvel, with various people using that superhero moniker) in 2008, 2002, 2000, 1995, 1994, 1989, and 1968, and followed by further Marvel Captain Marvel series in 2014, 2016, and 2017 (that last one starting with issue number 125, to totally confuse everyone).

So this is nowhere near the beginning of anything. Being a superhero series from one of the Big Two, I shouldn’t have to mention that it’s nowhere near an ending, either.

But, there’s a Captain Marvel movie coming, vaguely sort-of based on this take on the character, so this is the book Marvel is hoping people will buy once they see and like that movie, and this series is also somewhat of a grand-mommy to the recent slew of “diverse” comics from Marvel. (Scare-quotes around “diverse” since a lot of it is just showcasing more women, who the numerically literate among us already know make up more than half of the human race.)

So, anyway: Captain Marvel: Earth’s Mightiest Hero, Vol. 1 . (I think that’s the correct order of the title elements. If not, I have another option in the post title.) These are the comics where Carol Danvers, ex-Air Force test pilot and possessor of strange powers granted her by alien beings (somewhat literally) changes her costume and name, casting off “Ms. Marvel” so it can be used by someone else and Marvel can sell more comics and make more money because she is better than that, and deserves to use the slightly misspelled name of an alien dead guy because blah blah legacy yammer yammer mantle yadda yadda please tell me you’re buying this?

The stupid speech I’m referring to above is given by Captain America on pages 8-10 of the first issue here, after they beat up a random bad guy in a museum for I’m sure what wouldn’t be a gratuitous fight scene if anyone bothered to explain it. It contains the kind of logic and rhetoric that exist only in superhero comics, and only there because the real reason Carol Danvers is going to become Captain Marvel is that 1) Marvel owns a trademark in that name, and expects that trademark to return it some cold hard cash on the regular and 2) there are several thousand fanboys consumers who will buy anything that says Captain Marvel on the cover, at least for a few issues. Danvers is just the most obvious person to do so.

So Captain Marvel exists as pure trademark-extension, for both “Carol Danversâ„¢” and “Captain Marvelâ„¢.” Let’s stipulate that. And it doesn’t have to be all that good to fulfill that mission: Danvers punches someone new each issue, has some supporting cast with problems, bingo bango, it’ll last long enough to make us to the next crossover event where everything will change.

But DeConnick is actually interested in people and their relationships — well, let’s not go crazy here; she is to the extent anyone can be in the straitjacket of a Marvel Universe comic — and so she (and co-writer Christopher Sebela, on issues 7-8 and 10-12 for no obvious reason) has plots that mostly aren’t about punching the Villain of the Month, and which tie into Danvers’s backstory and history.

Now, again, I don’t want to oversell it: it’s mostly on the level of a decent made-for-TV movie or passable airport paperback, with the tough female test pilot still yearning to prove what she can do after she’s left that world, and her complicated relationship with the older woman who was something of a mentor to her, plus a friendship with another woman who used to be Captain Marvel and the guy who will probably be a boyfriend, eventually. (With added time travel and aliens, obviously.)

The art is also quite distinctive: Dexter Soy does six of the issues, in what I think is a full-painted look and which is brightly surreal in a good way. Emma Rios has a spiky take on more traditional comics pencil-and-ink look (colored by Jordie Bellaire) for two issues in the middle, and Filipe Andrade does the last four issues in a very angular, loose-lined (but with almost chibi faces) style that also goes all the way to color.

This may well have looked like something startlingly different, particularly to pure Marvel readers of 2012. And it is pretty different from most of what Marvel was doing, being actually concerned with women and their emotions. For me, it’s slightly more interesting than a standard Marvel comic, but only the same way sandstone is more interesting than a broken piece of concrete — one is a bit more real than the other.

antickmusingsdyil2auoc8za-4342818 antickmusingsd63t7ie-lg7y-7614603 antickmusingsdqj6idk7rits-3660516

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #264: Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur, Vol. 1: BFF by Montclare, Reeder, and Bustos

It is pretty hard to have a team-up book where one of the two team members has no way to actually know the other one’s name. (Not to mention everyone else in the world, who know that name by some kind of comic-book-world telepathy, I think.)

And, on an entirely different level, it is hard for me to take seriously a book that seems to be the high-speed collision of “hey, don’t we need to do something with Moon Boy and Devil Dinosaur every so often to keep the trademark active?” and “hey, girls in STEM are hot right now, so we should do a comic about a nerdy girl.”

Don’t get me wrong, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Vol. 1: BFF  tells a pleasant story, tells it well, and has entirely positive messages to impart to what I think it hopes is a multicultural audience of mostly young, mostly female readers. But there seems to be a lot of product management going on in the background.

Anyway: Moon Girl! Actually the preteen New Yorker Lunella Lafayette, who is way too smart for her school already at the age of nine! [1] Picked on by her classmates for being a know-it-all with a huge air of superiority who doesn’t deign to even talk to them most of the time! Has the Inhuman gene, because this is a 2016 Marvel comic, and they were desperately trying to make that A Thing! [2] Makes weird science-y things out of random stuff, because that’s totally something that anyone actually does in any reasonable world!

Devil Dinosaur! Named that by an outcast monkey-boy in some vague past era where bright-red dinosaurs mingle with monkey-boys! [3] Has that name in whatever language monkey-boy speaks, which is definitely not English! Smarter than you’d expect a vaguely T. Rex-y thing to be, and better able to sneak away and hide in (a) a modern city that (b) he’s never been in before and (c) has nothing, as far as we can see, that he eats… than you’d expect! Also substantially more committed to fighting crime and not, y’know, eating things than you’d expect!

Luckily for her, because they meet wacky in the middle of issue 1, when the Maguffin the Nightstone (maybe) Kree Omni-Wave Projector (this time for sure!) burbles a hole in the space-time continuum and plops DD face to face with MG.

(Oh, and also lets loose a group of bad monkey-boys — and I think one monkey-girl, though I don’t want to judge anyone’s monkey-gender presentation. Which leads us to…)

The Killer Folk! Tougher than Moon Boy! (Whom they, um, kill (?) before running through the hole in the space-time continuum.) Tougher than the Yancy Street Gang! Basically evil hipsters by the end of the book! They want the Maguffin (oops) and don’t care who gets in their way! When they get it, they will…be happy they have it and maybe do some more minor street crime, I guess. But they’re our villains!

So MG somehow knows the big red dinosaur that grabs her in its teeth is friendly and named DD, and imprints on it like a baby duck. DD doesn’t talk and mostly just smashes stuff, but he seems cool with being her sidekick (or vice-versa). And the monkey-boy did tell DD to go stop the Killer Folk from doing their Killer-Folk thing, and I guess that’s what DD is doing, in his giant-red-dinosaur way.

The maguffin bounces back and forth between Killer Folk and Our Heroes, as the rest of the city gets more and more peeved at the giant red dinosaur breaking all kinds of things all over the place. Luckily, we readers are on the side of the giant red dinosaur, so we are really pissed when an actual superhero (well, the Amadeus Cho Hulk, so sort-of an actual superhero) shows up to be all superior, tell MG to go back to school, and arrests DD for being big and red and dinosaurian.

Does MG get her big red implement of mass destruction back? Do the two of them retrieve the Maguffin once and for all, and defeat the Killer Folk? Is there a Shocking Change that takes place on the very last page, to get us to buy Volume 2?

Reader, you know the answer already. [4]

[1] I was going to check to see what NYC magnet schools she would be eligible for, but that would just be mean.

[2] As opposed to The Thing, which they already had. And who isn’t an Inhuman. At least the last time I checked.

[3] Wait. Isn’t this supposed to be a comic for people who care about science?

[4] I forgot to mention who made this book, didn’t I? Brandon Montclare and Amy Reeder wrote it, and Natacha Bustos drew it. Tamra Bonvillain did the colors, which I thought were particularly strong.

antickmusingsdyil2auoc8za-2962512 antickmusingsd63t7ie-lg7y-3337747 antickmusingsdqj6idk7rits-3626554

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