Andrew Wheeler

Book-A-Day 2018 #103: Syllabus by Lynda Barry

Reviews
April 14, 2018

This is not a graphic novel. It’s not even graphic non-fiction in a narrative form. It’s related to Lynda Barry’s last few books, What It Is and Picture This , but it’s less conventional and concerned with telling a story than those two books were.

Luckily, it has a title that tells us what it is: Syllabus .

Barry has taught courses in storytelling and creativity — that sounds vague, because they were inter-departmental courses that were about brain science as much as how to draw and write — for several years, mostly at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This book is something like a blended experience of being in those classes, or perhaps particularly “The Unthinkable Mind” class from spring of 2013. It contains what seem to be Barry’s actual handouts and worksheets from that course, along with exercises from the students that year, organized chronologically to cover that whole semester. There are also some pages, especially near the beginning, that set the scene and explain her process and and overall plan for the class — but, as the book goes on, more and more it is a record of what that class did.

So it’s possible for a devoted student to follow most of the instructions here, and make for herself a one-person version of that course. (She couldn’t do everything, since there are some exercises where work gets handed around the class, with each person adding something new.)

Syllabus is a much denser book than What It Is and Picture This were: those aimed to entertain while touching on profound ideas, while Syllabus aims to document an entire teaching method and program. It’s all related — Barry’s ideas on art and life have been basically the same through the past decade — but Syllabus is the operationalization of those ideas, if you’ll let me descend into bafflegab for a moment.

I frankly was surprised by Syllabus: I wasn’t expecting a book so dense and so school-book-y. (Perhaps I should have read the title a few more times! It was not hidden.) I appreciate a lot of Barry’s work and enthusiasm, while still fervently believing that I would hate every second of being in a class like this…and not just because I’ve never liked or been good at drawing. But be aware: this is deeper and denser than her previous work, and is for a more rarefied and self-selected audience of people really interested in the sources of creativity and how to teach stimulating those sources.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #102: Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1954 by Mike Mignola, Chris Roberson and various artists

Reviews
April 13, 2018

So the big Hellboy story is over — it’s been over longer than most people think, as I argued when I wrote about the second volume of Hellboy in Hell. But Hellboy is still a valuable piece of intellectual property, with a potential movie reboot still kicking around in the background somewhere. So there has to be some Hellboy product coming out on a regular basis, to help keep the lights on at Dark Horse and to keep Mike Mignola busy.

Well, maybe that’s too cynical a view of things. Hellboy is an interesting, fun character, and his history contains vast swaths of space and time to throw additional stories into. It’s not impossible that Mignola and his collaborators are really, really enthusiastic about all of those possibilities and that Mignola is taking on such a large number of collaborators and doing a whole lot of unrelated one-off stories because that’s precisely what the Hellboy universe needs right at this moment. The world is vast; all things are possible. And it’s clear that Mignola and team are enjoying what they’re doing.

So what we have here is Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1954 , containing four miscellaneous stories all taking place in that year and all written by Mignola with Chris Roberson, his current major writing collaborator (following John Arcudi). Two of the stories were two-issue mini-series, another was a single issue, and the fourth appeared in a giveaway comic for Free Comic Book Day in 2015.

(Similar volumes covering the years 1952 and 1953 came out previously.)

The four stories are all entirely separate, which is nothing new for Hellboy: even now, probably a majority of the books featuring him are made up of miscellaneous tales of investigating (and then, inevitably, punching to death) some mysterious folkloric thing in some odd corner of the world. The best of the short pure-Mignola stories relied on folklore and atmosphere rather than tying everything into the standard Hellboy mythology, and it’s good to see that most of the stories here follow in that vein.

We lead off with a two-parter, “Black Sun,” drawn by Stephen Green in the traditional dark and moody style of other-hands Hellboy-universe stories. I tend to think of that look as being codified by Guy Davis in B.P.R.D., but a lot of people (the Fiumara brothers, Duncan Fegredo, Ben Stenbeck, Tyler Crook, James Harren, and even Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba) have worked in that vein on various Hellboy-related stories over the years and done good work. “Black Sun” features both Nazis and flying saucers, and is the most core-mythology of the stories here.

Moodiest (and probably best) is the single-issue story, “The Unreasoning Beast,” with art by Patric Reynolds. It has a monkey in it; I probably shouldn’t say more than that.

The other two-parter is “Ghost Moon,” set in Hong Kong. Brian Churilla draws this one, and I found the style to be brighter and more open than most Hellboy stuff. Some of that may be Dave Stewart’s colors, but he colors nearly everything in the Hellboy universe, so it must be a deliberate choice here. This is another story using real-world folklore, but I found it a little pat and obvious.

And last is the shortest piece, “The Mirror,” drawn by Richard Corben. Corben’s grotesques work pretty well for Hellboy, though I personally like his work best in small doses. This is more a vignette than a story, but it’s a nice vignette.

We all know that this book exists because a lot of us like Hellboy and want to keep reading stories about Hellboy, even when there’s no compelling in-story reason for those stories to continue. If that describes you, you’ll probably like this book: it does that Hellboy thing, in the extended-universe manner, and does it pretty well. But if you haven’t gotten into the Hellboy thing yet, go back to the pure Mignola stuff and start there.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #100: The Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow

Reviews
April 11, 2018

People will tell you that The Ghost in the Shell is a single story, about a cyborg cop in a complex future Japan and her pursuit of a mysterious AI called The Puppeteer. They are lying to you.

Oh, that thread is here, and the very last installment here sees the conclusion of that story. It’s a plausible lie, like all the best ones.

But Ghost in the Shell is three hundred and fifty pages of comics, across eleven long chapters, and most of those chapters are individual episodes of our heroine murdering lots of people because the government tells her to. Puppeteer comes in during one of those murder sprees earlier in the book, and then returns in the aftermath of yet another kill-that-guy mission for something like an ending.

There is a lot of pseudo-philosophical talk about brains and bodies, and a whole lot of skiffy bafflegab — which I think was not translated as crisply and clearly as it should have been — about the cyberpunk details of the technology here. But that’s not nearly as unique as Ghost‘s boosters pretend it is — or as coherent.

Of course, we do have to remember that Ghost started serialization in 1989 and was collected in 1991 — cyberpunk wasn’t new at that point, true (in fact, I think “Vincent Omniveritas” had declared it dead several years before), but Ghost showed that cyberpunk was going global and infiltrating new media. If you think of it as an ’80s cyberpunk comic, Ghost is pretty good — it has a complex, lived-in world, lots of interesting technology turned to criminal and/or destructive purposes, and a deeply jaundiced view of anyone in power. Masamune Shirow might have been working on the other side of the world, in a different language, and a different medium than the first wave of cyberpunks, but he could see what was important in that mode and turn it into the stories he wanted to tell.

The street finds its own use for things, as they say.

In this case, it’s the story of a cyborg mass-murderess, who is our heroine because she kills people the government aims her at, and we still thought that was good enough in the ’80s. (She does get in trouble near the end for her bloody work, but only because she was unfortunate enough to do it where a camera could see it — the killing itself is never questioned for a second, by anyone in the book.)

As you might guess, I found it a lot to swallow. Oh, not that a government would have a secret assassin — that’s traditional enough in this kind of story. Maybe a bit that she’s part of a big squad with a code number ending in nine — explicitly shown to be one of a series of similar teams with mostly non-overlapping opportunities for mass murder — which implies a level of bloodthirstiness that seems unlikely to be sustained for very long, even in a country as full of targets as Japan. Mostly because Major Motoko Kusanagi never really becomes a person: she’s a collection of standard manga reactions and poses, there to be in the middle of the action and do Cool Stuff. Her entire personality is “dangerous sexy manga chick.”

Again, 1989 was another world — Japan doubly so, manga triply so. But, coming to Ghost in the Shell now, it does not look terribly impressive.

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

Book-A- Day 2018 #98: Saga, Vol. 8 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Reviews
April 9, 2018

I should probably stop writing about Saga through the lens of my own expectations. I want it to be a single story that started with the birth of one child in this space-fantasy universe, and to have it end well in a way that wraps up that story. But it’s becoming more and more clear that creator Brian K. Vaughan instead sees Saga as a universe to tell stories in, and that those stories will all be somewhat related to that central family.

So I’m looking for a unity that isn’t here, and will never be here: Saga will run as long as people keep buying it (or until artist Fiona Staples decides she wants to do something else; I can’t imagine this continuing without her), and it will be a normal comic-book, full of issues that are separate stories or add up to an “arc” of three or six issues. Eventually, it will stop, for whatever reason, but the whole of Saga is not a single story and there’s no way to make it one at this point.

I’m sad about this, because there are enough serialized adventures in comics already and not enough stories, but no one asked me. I do hope I can draw a line under than thought here, and leave it buried: it’s not a useful framework for looking at Saga going forward from here. (And I see I keep saying a variation of the same thing every time I write about Saga, which must be tedious on your end: see my posts on volumes one , two , three , four, five , six , and especially seven for my repeated cataloging of pointless objections.)

So: here’s Saga, Vol. 8 , collecting another chunk of six issues. The first of these even seems to be an attempt at an introduction for new readers, that old standby of serialized comics. Let me just note that “new-reader friendly” is only important in a medium where going back to the beginning is infeasible or impossible: Netflix has built a big business on letting people binge from Season One Episode One.

Anyway, this volume is the story of an abortion. Well, it’s described as an abortion, repeatedly, but the baby is dead in the womb — in a mystical, woo-woo kind of way that means that child is also a ghost running around nearby — which means the medical procedure is actually quite distinct from an abortion. One suspects Vaughan might be trying to make points, or just be provocative for the sake of being provocative. The big events at the end of the last volume left that child dead in the womb, and apparently it’s not simple to just get him out. (If anything were simple, it wouldn’t be Saga.)

I find it harder and harder to write about the Saga volumes at this point: I’m trying not to give away who needs an abortion, even though that’s blindingly obvious to any semi-serious reader of the series. But I feel like the plot details of part forty-three of an umpty-ump part story shouldn’t be splashed around; I think most readers will want to get here under their own power. And, more seriously, Saga is becoming more and more soap-opera-ish with each issue: I forget precisely which TV-head is the guy running around in this issue (Count something? the Duc of NBC? Crown Prince Cyborg MCMLXXVI?), and I can’t remember where Lying Cat got to (she’s not in here at all), and I’m only vaguely invested in the some-other-horrible-person-has-captured-The-Will-and-has-now-learned-our-heroes-exist-oh-woe plotline.

Look, these are sturdy, well-built characters. They inhabit a big, complicated universe. Staples can draw any damn thing Vaughan can throw at her, and make it look both real and retroactively obvious. Many of the relationships here are ones readers care about and are invested in. But Saga seems to be still proliferating, and the initial burst of energy that was so enticing is slowly expanding into that big universe, like the Big Bang, and is cooling and becoming less excited as it goes.

Hmm. I guess I can’t stop talking about the same issues with Saga every damn time. Oh, well. Saga has gone from being a thunderbolt of energy and passion to a solid, entertaining space adventure comic. It’s still very nice, but it’s not what it was.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #96: Rise of the Black Flame by Mignola, Roberson & Mitten

Reviews
April 7, 2018

Another day, another Hellboy spinoff. It’s not quite that frequent in the real world, but it certainly can seem that way. (And I did just talk about The Visitor: How and Why He Stayed yesterday.)

Rise of the Black Flame is another unnecessary book, which fills in backstory that wasn’t required the first time around. Of course, all fiction is unnecessary if you think of things that way — but this is material that explains how one character got the beginning of another story when we already had “he was subsumed by some alien evil power,” and that was good enough.

Again, for me basically every single “mainstream” comic is totally unnecessary — who does Spider-Man fight this month? which character will have a shocking death touted in press releases three months ahead? does any of it track back to anything at all from the original creators? — so this is a very minor complaint. Rise of the Black Flame is more original than any Superman story from the past ten years, for example. But it’s still a sign of the rot at the heart of comics: this is a medium utterly speciated into the narrow niche of delivering exactly the same thing on a weekly basis to a purportedly adult audience.

So, yes: two British cops in Burma in the early 1920s follow the path of some kidnapped girls, learn of a shadowy evil cult next door in Siam, meet up with two female paranormal investigators — one of whom has a link to Sir Edward Grey of Witchfinder fame, to keep the world-building knitted together — and eventually find their way to the sinister temple crouching in the jungle where an aeons-old cult is ready to finally summon The Great Darkness. Do they manage to foil the incarnation of the being who later becomes a major antagonist to Hellboy? Of course they don’t — we already know that.

Christopher Mitten is another solid artist for the Hellboy universe: he’s more towards the realistic side than creator Mike Mignola, with maybe some echoes of long-time B.P.R.D. artist Guy Davis. And Chris Roberson, the current major story collaborator with Mignola, knows this world about as well as anyone not in Mignola’s head can — it’s all smooth and well-told and connected.

But this is, in the end, another villain origin story. Those are never particularly necessary to begin with, and this one even less than usual. It has nice atmosphere and tells a solid adventure story, but it just takes us to the place we always knew it was going.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #94: Lewis & Clark by Nick Bertozzi

Reviews
April 5, 2018

I’ve already done my song-and-dance about explorers in my post four years ago about Bertozzi’s book Shackleton, so it’s best to take that as read here. [1] But Shackleton lived in an age when most of the world had been mapped and organized; he was trying to fill in one of the last few open spaces on the map, to be The Guy who got his name on that effort.

By comparison, Lewis and Clark were just military men sent off by their commander, with orders roughly equivalent to “check out what’s over that hill there.” It turned out “that hill there” was the Rocky Mountains, but there were a lot more empty places on maps a hundred years earlier. Lewis and Clark led a team through one of those big empty places, and helped fill it in.

(Well, fill it in for white people on the East coast of North America. The people already in those lands had a decent sense of at least their immediate area.)

But, anyway. Nick Bertozzi told a story about explorers before Shackleton. And this is it: Lewis & Clark , an album-sized graphic novel that I suspect was aimed at least partly at a school audience. If I still worked at a publishing company that sold into the trade — which I didn’t, for a good year or so even before I left Wiley in 2015 — I could have looked up how it sold, and maybe gotten a sense if that strategy was successful. But, instead, I can come to Lewis & Clark as just another reader.

Bertozzi tells this story in episodes, a page or three at a time. He has the whole 1803-1806 expedition to cover (plus a little before and afterward), and only 137 pages to fit thousands of miles of wandering and many many eventful days into, so that’s not surprising. (If there are any Lewis and Clark scholars out there, I can’t guarantee your favorite moment from the expedition is dramatized in this book.) He somewhat alternates between single pages and double-page spreads, which is occasionally confusing — the reader isn’t always sure whether to read straight across the top tier, or continue down the left page. That does make for some impressive vistas, though — Lewis & Clark takes advantage of its larger size, which can make up for the black and white art. [2]

I get the sense Bertozzi’s aim here was to faithfully chronicle the high points of a historically important event, and not provide commentary or his own opinions. If so, he did a great job: Lewis & Clark is the kind of comic that feels like a camera-eye, a view into a world long gone. His art is bold and strongly story-telling, moving the action forward. This is, inevitably, a very episodic book, but it’s an engrossing one, and the personalities of the main characters come through even told in episodes.

[1] Shackleton was a 2014 book I read when it was new; this is a 2011 book it took me seven years to get to. I have no compelling reason for why it happened that way, and must throw myself upon the mercy of the court.

[2] I’m fine with b&w myself — I got into comics in the ’80s, when b&w was hip and trendy — but, for a lot of people, it’s means the work is unfinished.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #90: The Nemo Trilogy by Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill

Reviews
April 1, 2018

One of the core joys of comic books for the past fifty years has been playing with other people’s toys. I’m not hugely in sympathy with that impulse myself, but I can recognize that a lot of people want to do it, either directly (by writing comics) or indirectly (by reading those comics and arguing about how it should have been done).

Alan Moore, I’m coming to think, became a famous and respected comics writer because he has that urge on a level previously unknown to man: he wants to play with everyone’s toys, all at once, together, making some massive Lego set that takes over his living room and forcing his family to quietly leave and go live with relatives. (My metaphor may be breaking down slightly.)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stories are clearly the strongest expression of that love: they take as many other people’s fictional characters as possible — those from authors safely dead and their works in the public domain, so their current corporate guardians can’t cause problems — and mash them together in various permutations.

(Lost Girls, on the other hand, is the fictional equivalent of taking the clothes off GI Joe and Barbie and making them kiss, then pretending they’re having sex.)

I finally caught up with a League offshoot recently — the three short graphic novels Moore wrote for League collaborator Kevin O’Neil to draw about “Princess Janni Dakkar,” the daughter of Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo. The three Nemo book, like the rest of the League stories, are entirely filled with other people’s characters and settings and ideas: that’s the point of that universe. It’s Moore’s only personal Amalgam universe, with all of the bits that he likes of every fictional world he’s ever enjoyed.

And so these books are stuffed with other people’s characters and ideas — so many of them that you have to be a pop-culture scholar to know who all of them are. Since I’m not Jess Nevins — there’s already one of him! — I’m not going to go that deeply into the specifics. (Though I might be better read than I expected, since I recognized the Thinking Machine from his real name — the benefits of a childhood spent read everything that came to hand.)

The trilogy covers most of Janni’s life — she’s young and energetic in Heart of Ice , set in 1922, middle-aged and concerned about her family in The Roses of Berlin ‘s 1941, and a dying, haunted old woman by 1975 for River of Ghosts . The three books are closely connected by the same antagonist — H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha (aka “She”), the immortal white African queen. I call her the antagonist and not the villain because Janni sets the whole thing in motion by stealing what seems to be the entire wealth of the exiled Ayesha at the beginning of Heart of Ice.

Of course, Janni is in the old family business — she’s a pirate. And if one sets up as a pirate, one can’t be surprised when other people take offense to their things being stolen. It’s not quite true to say that one unwise attack blighted the rest of Janni’s life, since this is a horrible 20th century full of monsters and villains (not least Janni and her fellow megalomaniacs and criminals, who seem to run roughshod over everyone else and may actually rule the world! bwaa ha ha ha!), but it certainly didn’t help.

So Heart of Ice tells the story of a badly planned expedition to Antarctica, to what Moore does not exactly call the Mountains of Madness. Janni’s rapidly shrinking forces, who I think are all minor British adventure heroes of the 19th century, are harried by a group of American “science heroes” hired by Ayesha’s current benefactors. The group is led by a thinly veiled Tom Swift, here under a veiled name because trademarks are far more durable than copyrights.

Then The Roses of Berlin sees Janni and her husband, Broad Arrow Jack, fighting their way into a Rotwangian nightmare Berlin to save their daughter and her husband (the second generation Robur) from the evil clutches of the worse-than-Nazis, who are inevitably allied to Ayesha. And, again, Robur and “young mistress Hira” were engaged in war on Germany when they were captured — the enemies in these books may be horrible and cruel and entirely wrong for this world, but they’re equally sinned against by our putative heroes.

Finally, an obsessed Jenni chases rumors of a reborn Ayesha up the Amazon to the obligatory den of hidden Nazis and their robot bimbo army in River of Ghosts, bringing an end to the story of Janni and Ayesha, though the Nemo family will live on, for potential sequels.

At the end of it all the world is still, as far as we can see, run by the villains of popular literature, and there’s no sign it’s anything but horrible for anyone who isn’t the star of a story Moore liked as a child. We did have three gorgeously-drawn adventure stories full of wonders and terrors, and a game of spot-the-reference that many of us will have enjoyed a lot. But it all does feel faintly pointless, as if Moore can write these everybody-else’s-characters-fight stories in his sleep, and is now doing so.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #86: Descender, Vol. 4 by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen

Reviews
March 28, 2018

At some point, writing about an ongoing series becomes gibberish to the uninformed and spoilers to the slightly behind. (Maybe not both at exactly the same moment, but both eventually.) I’d like to think that can still be a long way off, that I can spin out interesting things to say about the fourth volume collecting a SFnal comic, but it’s not me that will be the judge of that.

A lot of plot has come before we hit the first page of Descender, Vol. 4: Orbital Mechanics — by the way, does that title feel like it’s just a random skiffy-sounding reference? asking for a friend — full of character and incident and shocking revelations and worldbuilding and all that good stuff. (See my posts on the first and second and third volumes for more details of the good stuff.)

We’re also into serious split-the-party multi-threaded plotting here: as we begin, TIM-21 is running away from TIM-22 on Machine Moon, while Telsa and Quon are trying to escape that same place, seeing as how they’re meat-based organisms and the robots take a dim view of that. Meanwhile, Andy has reunited with his now-cyborged ex-girlfriend Effie and is back on 21’s trail. That sounds like they’re all going to get together, doesn’t it?

But no — writer Jeff Lemire has plenty more complications to work through in this space-opera universe, so any tearful (or gunfire-filled) reunions will have to wait for a while. We’re still in frying-pan-into-fire mode here, as nearly all of the characters we’re supposed to like are in worse positions by the end of the book. I have to admit I wonder how long Lemire can keep that up: eventually, everybody is going to get killed or the last-second escapes will get silly. But, for now, there’s enough stuff going on in this universe to keep it all plausible.

Artist Dustin Nguyen is still chugging along here — I particularly like his use of color in this book to indicate mood and environment. It’s a seemingly small thing that can be very effective, particularly when one person is making all of the art.

I still hope that Descender has a specific story to tell, with a real ending — that it’s not going to just spin out complications for as long as people will buy it. The only way to tell that will be through time; we’ll have to wait and see. For now, this is still an excellent space opera in comics form.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #85: Groo Vs. Conan by Sergio Aragones, Mark Evanier, and Thomas Yeates

Reviews
March 27, 2018

Something can be both an obvious idea and a bad idea. I think we’ve all had that weird vertiginous feeling when looking down from a great height, like we want to jump off.

Nearly all of us manage to foil that impulse, and, of the few who don’t, a large proportion have tethers or parachutes or other safety apparatus to save them from immediately dying. But that’s the feeling I mean: the sense that doing this thing would be really dumb, and yet wanting to see what it would be like anyway.

I have to assume some such impulse led to the 2014 comics series Groo Vs. Conan . It’s such an obvious idea — two barbarian adventurers! utterly different worlds and personalities and styles of story and even art! — and just as immediately a bad idea.

And yet, as we can see, it happened.

The story is by Groo creator Sergio Aragones with his long-time collaborator Mark Evanier. The art is by Aragones (the cartoony, Groo-filled bits) and by Thomas Yeates (the heroic-fantasy stuff with Conan in it), regularly drawing radically different images in the same panel. And, yes, it is about Groo meeting (and fighting) Conan.

But wait! There’s an even worse idea lurking within!

Groo Vs. Conan tells two stories: one is the regular fictional story that starts in Groo’s world, heavily features the words “mendicant” and “Crom,” and has a lot of swordplay of varying levels of silliness. But the other story, and I swear I am not making this up, is about Aragones himself trying to save his favorite comic-book store from an evil developer (who is also very, very parallel with the villain on Groo-world) and along the way is treated with so many random medicines that he goes crazy and starts believing he is Conan.

This may be a spoiler, but I will at least admit that the two levels of story never interact: Aragones does not summon Groo to cartoony-Los-Angeles through the power of his dementia. And this is entirely a good thing.

Now, many of the panels here are amusing, particularly the all-Aragones ones. Aragones and Evanier are good at humor involving dumb swordsmen; they’ve been doing this for decades. But the Yeates art sits very uneasily alongside Aragones’s art to begin with — they don’t mesh at all, or seem to depict the same world — and the more serious tone of the Conan bits are a drag on the whole proceedings. There’s no way to take Groo Vs. Conan seriously, but the reader keeps running into serious sword & sorcery art and dialogue that are supposed to be taken seriously.

Groo stories were never high art, and never tried to be. But they were internally consistent, and stayed on a particular level of abstraction. This thing, though, is all over the place, trying to be serious, silly-funny, satirical-funny, and just plain goofy, all at the same time. I don’t want to say that level of tonal shift is impossible in one work, because it isn’t. But it’s as hard as all of those individual things put together, and they’re each already difficult. Plus doing it with cliched, well-known characters adds yet another level of complication and difficulty, and then throwing the metafiction on top of that…

Groo Vs. Conan is a mess: a weird, shambling combination of things that don’t really work together. That it exists at all is impressive, I’ll admit. But it’s the book equivalent of Doctor Frankenstein’s creation, and I’m afraid I have to lift my pitchfork at this point.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #84: Super-Powered Revenge Christmas by Bill Corbett and Len Peralta

Reviews
March 26, 2018

I could make up all sorts of excuses why I read this book. Perhaps the MST3K connection, since I’m in a hotel in the Twin Cities area right now, on a business trip. Maybe I could pretend to have planned to read it at Christmas, and neglected it for a couple of months.

The answer is equally silly, but more boring. I’m on a week-long business trip, yes. I brought four books to read — three comics and one novel. I haven’t yet touched the novel, but I read one of the comics on each of the first three days of the trip. But now, on Day Four, they’re all done. So I was left to rummage through one of the e-reader apps on my tablet, after an evening excursion with my co-workers, to find something to read and then write about. I’ve had a couple of drinks, so I might not be thinking entirely like my normal self. And this book was up near the top in the default sort in GoodReader, I couldn’t remember why I had it at all, and it looked silly.

So that’s how I came to read Super-Powered Revenge Christmas , which by the way is a 2014 graphic novel written by Bill Corbett and drawn by Len Peralta. It’s a quirky take on Christmas, with a brooding Superman-esque “Red Avenger” whose is secretly Sa’nn Tah-Kl’awwz from the planet Yoool. (Look, I said it was silly, didn’t I?) RA battles an evil corporation — HEROD, which is a silly acronym, and run by a thinly-veiled Scrooge — and soon is joined in his battle by Caribou, a deer-man whose nose lights up when he gets angry. Then there’s a snow goddess as a gender-swap take on Frosty, plus two very nice people who are going to have a baby who will be the greatest mutant of all time. Oh, and there’s a frame story about a comics creator team-cum-couple who broke up over telling this story and are now recounting it to three strangers in a bar on Christmas Eve. And it apparently was both adapted from a stage play by Corbett and Kickstarted into existence in this form.

Super-Powered Revenge Christmas is deliberately designed so that it can’t be taken seriously at any point; it is impregnable to all criticism in its hermetic goofiness and sprawling pop-culture Xmas ambitions. It is very, very, very, very silly. Very. It’s not really funny, but it’s not trying to be — it’s aiming at knowing smirks rather than full laughs.

I don’t know why anyone would want to construct a story like this. But someone did. (Two someones, one of them twice.) And this now exists. I’ve just spent an hour or two first reading it and then typing this. None of that makes any sense. You can’t explain any of it. And yet it happened. Let that be a lesson to all of you.