Author: Andrew Wheeler

Yeah, it did take me until now to finally read Herbie. It is so much exactly the kind of thing that I would like that the delay seems weird, but it’s a big world, and you can only do one thing at a time. I finally got to this particular thing, and can finally talk about it.

But wait! You say. Did I come in the middle of something? What on earth are you going on about?

All right, all right. Herbie Popnecker was the “hero” of a series of stories from the American Comics Group, for about a decade from 1958 through 1967 — first as one-off stories in anthologies, then as the star of twenty-three issues of his own comic in 64-67. He’s a short, fat, torpid, laconic kid with heavy-lidded eyes, a bowl haircut, and a lollipop always in his mouth, whose father is constantly complaining about him and calling him a “little fat nothing.” He doesn’t like sports or schoolwork or playing with other kids; at home he tends to sit in a straightback chair and doze, and we don’t see him at school or interacting with his peers.

So far, so promising for a humor title, right? Sounds just like the thing in the ’50s-’60s burst of teen-interest comics, with Archie and Binky and Scooter!

Well, Herbie was more than just a little fat nothing, luckily. He was also world-famous, almost omnipotent, and oddly resourceful. His lollipops gave him superpowers — this is slightly inconsistent, since sometimes he seems to have power merely because he is Herbie — and his aid is regularly sought by US Presidents and UN Secretary-Generals. Gorgeous women swoon at his approach. Vicious animals flee when they realize who he is. He travels in time, via lollipop and a flying boat-like grandfather clock, and can walk under the oceans and across empty space to reach distant planets.

And, if threatened, all he needs to do is ask “You want I should bop you with this here lollipop?” Herbie’s bop is a force that can frighten the greatest forces in the universe — in just this book, we see suns, dragons, and Satan himself cowed by it.

That is one weird mix of elements, and it doesn’t seem like it should work. But ACG editor Richard E. Hughes (writing as “Shane O’Shea”) kept a deadpan tone around Herbie, making it all strangely plausible. And Ogden Whitney drew all of the stories in a solid, straightforward style — both of them as if to drain any possible insinuation of imagination out of the stories, as if to prove Herbie’s adventures must be plausible if they are this normal-seeming.

It worked. It still works, now: some elements are a little outdated (the supernatural creatures are somewhat comic-booky and of their time), but most of Herbie is unique and sui generis. And many individual panels are still laugh-out-loud funny after fifty-plus years.

The first third of the Herbie stories were collected in 2008 as Herbie Archives, Volume One , which is what I finally read. There are two more volumes, collecting the rest of the Herbie stories, which I now need to dig up and read. If you like weird comics, you probably already know about Herbie. If you’ve never read him, you’ll probably want to move him up in the queue — this is still really good stuff, nutty and crazy in all the best midcentury ways.

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

Oh, look — another comics series I’m still poking my way through, a year or so after it ended! There are ten volumes of the collected Chew, so I’m three or four years behind at this point. I don’t see any particular reason to be concerned about this — not reading a book right when it comes out doesn’t harm anything, or cause a single problem — but I do seem to be doing a lot of it lately.

Anyway: Chew, Vol. 6: Space Cakes . Right smack-dab in the middle of the weird alternate-world detective story by John Layman (words) and Rob Guillory (pictures). See my reviews of volumes one and two and three-through-five (during one of my periodic reviewing bankruptcies) if you care; don’t if you don’t.

This is a comic-book world, coming out regularly in pamphlet form from a major publisher. And that means that, even if this isn’t officially a superhero comic, it will tend to bend in that direction, as a tree growing in a continuous wind will be bent. So this world is, by this point, chock-full of people with weird powers, all of which (this is Chew‘s particular shtick) are food-related. We started with Tony Chu, who can read the history of something by eating it, and this book focuses on his twin sister Toni, who can see the future of the things she eats.

She works for NASA, another one of the super-powerful government agencies (along with the FDA and USDA) in this alternate world. And she’s bubbly and goofy, as befits this goofy series. So, while Tony is in a coma (more or less) Toni takes over for a few issues of culinary mayhem and derring-do. The usual supporting cast runs around doing their thing — including an included one-shot of the murderous rooster Poyo — but this is Toni’s story.

It’s not exactly a good story for her, in the end, but saying more would get into spoiler territory. And the last few pages imply the book will go back to being about Tony, as we’d expect. So this is a big chunk of middle, though it’s chewy, flavorful middle, in a banquet where we know exactly when the dessert and brandy will be coming.

Sidebar: Hey, I haven’t complained about anyone’s ONIX feed for a while! This book was published in January of 2013, and the publisher, Image, still hasn’t managed to upload (to the major online stores) a version of the cover with words on it yet. This is appalling, and if I rated books on some kind of a scale, they’d definitely lose points for that.

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

Note: I didn’t plan to read this book and have the review land on Halloween — that was purely random. But it’s nice when things work out so appropriately, isn’t it? 

There are books where you wonder why anyone ever thought they were a good idea — how they could possibly have come into existence. A fully-painted series of comic books in which a sweaty-looking Superman and Batman trade dreams as part of the schemes of an undead Scottish laird to beat a random female demon would fall into that category for a whole lot of people.

But, once you realize that comics not uncommonly come into existence because the then-hot artist had a list of things he really wanted to draw, it starts to make more sense. Legends of the World’s Finest , the book in question, has introductions from both writer Walt Simonson and painter Daniel Brereton in which both of them pretend this was a good or at least plausible idea to begin with. (In their defense, it was 1993, when the spandex-dudes industry was teetering on an unsustainable peak of grimacing, variant covers, belt pouches, bad art, and speculator hype. A lot of things looked like good ideas at the time from inside the industry. And Brereton, unlike some artists of that era, was hot because he paints creepy, gorgeous art, so the demon-plot at least was driven by his obvious strengths.)

This Legends is also from long enough ago that it feels more like the wordy comics of the ’70s and ’80s than the more stripped-down style of the last twenty years — everyone here yammers on a lot, and the narrative voice gets into the action, too, telling us things we can clearly see in the panels repeatedly. I’m too lazy to look up whether the “real” Superman was officially dead or alive when Legends was published — it was right in the middle of that foofaraw, when first he was dead, then he was four other people, and then he suddenly wasn’t dead and wasn’t any of them, either — but it’s from that era of comics, when the Big Two companies were throwing everything they could think of at the wall, with the Image founders doing the same with even less likely things, and nearly everything was sticking.

For a while, at least. The wall wised up before too long, and a hell of a lot of things suddenly stopped sticking very soon after this. And a lot of projects that worked well enough in the inflationary era look silly and ridiculous afterwards.

Again, which brings us back to Legends. It is silly. I won’t say that it’s actually ridiculous, but it and ridiculous are close enough neighbors to share a snow-blower this winter. It has Batman and Superman act wildly out of character on purpose, but doesn’t manage to wring any humor, or much drama, out of that. It manages to feel much longer than its hundred-and-fifty-ish pages. For a presumably out-of-continuity Prestige Format series, it’s remarkably mired in the dull continuity of the era. (Superman thinks about his last encounter with Blaze, the female demon! It features the character sensation of never, the who-ever-cared-about-her Silver Banshee!)

There are a lot of big elements here that just don’t come off as big. The world is nearly destroyed, yet again, but it’s ho-hum. There’s way too much talking, none of it in words that are surprising or interesting. And it teaches the great superhero lesson that evil people can never change, so you should never ever help anyone who asks.

Everyone has probably forgotten this even existed. They were pretty much right to do so. But the Brereton art is still quite impressive, especially if you want to see a sweaty, bodybuilder-esque Superman lurching around. That’s the most positive thing I can say about it.

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

This is not a limited series. I know: I was surprised, too. But Peter Bagge’s afterword, which explains the history of Sweatshop , makes it clear that it was intended to be ongoing, and that he would have been happy to keep it running for a much longer time.

That didn’t happen: Sweatshop got a six-issue run from DC in 2003, when that company was in one its periodic throes of trying to broaden its range, which was followed by the inevitable and equally periodic pullback to its core competency of grimacing people in spandex punching each other repeatedly.

Sweatshop is not about spandex, or punching. It does have its share of grimacing, and other extreme facial expressions, because we are talking about Peter Bagge here. But, otherwise, it doesn’t look much like a good fit for DC. Our central character is Mel Bowling, a comics creator on the far side of middle age. He’s the credited creator of the syndicated strip Freddy Ferret — though it’s really put together by his oddball crew of young, underpaid assistants — and a lazy, narcissistic golf-playing blowhard.

(The set-up is not unlike some manga about manga-making — Bagge doesn’t mention any inspirations, or Japanese comics at all, in his afterword, but it’s at the very least a striking case of parallel development.)

Reading the first issue, I thought it would feature Bagge’s art on stories about the whole team and his fellow artists (Stephen Destefano, Bill Wray, Stephanie Gladden, Jim Blanchard, and Johnny Ryan also contribute art to these stories) each picking up from the POV of one of the assistants. That would have been neat, and more formally interesting, but it’s not the way the series ended up going: the feint in that direction was apparently a scene-setting one-off for that first issue. Instead, there’s mostly a lead story for each issue drawn by Bagge, and then additional stories drawn by one or more of the others, in the style of old humor comics.

The stories are all about that crew in Bowling’s studio — worrying about the “Hammie” awards, planning and going to the big Comic-Con, dealing with a new writer joining the team, and various career and personal issues for all of them. It’s not quite as zany and slapstick as Bagge got in the ’80s and ’90s, but these are broad characters who do crazy things: it’s a lot like a sitcom on the page.

Sweatshop is funny, and probably even funnier the more you know about strip comics: I suspect Bagge buried jokes and references I didn’t get among the ones I did see and laugh at. Some readers may find the changing art styles distracting, though they all are in the same tradition — Bagge’s rubber-hose arms and googly eyes are probably the most extreme, cartoony style here, with the others giving a (sometimes only very slightly) more restrained version of the same look. What can I say? It’s a funny collection of stories about comics and comics people, and a decade has only dated it slightly. (A contemporary version would definitely have at least one issue full of webcomic jokes.)

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

The great thing about history is that it never stops being history. It might technically get older, but, realistically, a hundred years is the same as a hundred and twenty. Old is old, dead is dead.

So I can read the tenth anniversary edition of a book four years later without feeling any guilt, because the guy it’s about has been dead since 1885 anyway. He’s not doing anything new in the meantime.

I am, of course talking about Chester Brown’s historical graphical comic-book thing Louis Riel , one of the works that most deforms the common usage of the term “graphic novel.” (So I’m avoiding using it directly.) Brown himself is one of those quirky Canadian oddballs that comics seems to throw off regularly — not quite as monomaniacal and misogynistic as Dave Sim, definitely further down the spectrum than seems-to-mostly-just-be-eccentric Seth, and probably about equal with world-class work-avoider Joe Matt — with his own very defined passions and crankish ideas that mostly stay out of this primarily fact-based book. (Riel did claim to have direct knowledge of the divine, which could easily have been one of the things that attracted Brown to his story — but that’s material that was already there waiting for him. And women are almost entirely absent from this story of 19th century politics and war, whether because of Brown’s views or because any contributions they made were quiet at the time and ignored thereafter.)

I can’t speak from any personal knowledge of Riel’s story, or any previous scholarship. My sense is that Brown followed the generally accepted scholarly consensus at the time, and that his telling is as “true” as any book of history: it’s what most experts think happened, in broad outlines, even if some of them probably argue violently with each other about individual details. And that is the old sad story of distant elites of one ethnicity scheming to disenfranchise (or worse) a minority they don’t like within a burgeoning territory they control.

In this case, it’s the English-descended government of Canada, mostly in the person of Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, planning how best to cut up and use a vast section of the mid-continent prairies and deliberately alienating, damaging, and snubbing the locals, particularly the population of mixed French-native background called Metis. (That area eventually became the province of Manitoba, if that helps place it in space and time.)

The Metis people were not happy with this, of course. “No taxation without representation” is only one specific expression of an age-old problem: those people over there, with all the power and most of the guns, are telling us to do things we don’t think they should have any say in. The Metis fought back, and Louis Riel is the man who became their leader — it seems, from Brown’s telling, that was because he was right there when the first clash happened on Metis land, and because he spoke English well enough to be a go-between. And he was strong-willed and charismatic to stay in that role. Brown presents him as the leader of his people, and doesn’t get into any power struggles that might have happened within the Metis community, even as we suspect they must have happened.

Riel eventually led two different rebellions against the government of Canada. As Brown tells it, he was goaded and guided into doing so by Macdonald and others, who knew they would win militarily and preferred the simplicity of bullets to the messiness of actually doing their political jobs of compromising and allowing all voices to be heard. It’s a sad, sordid story, basically a tragedy: Riel was unstable and mentally ill (that supposed direct connection with the divine), which possibly kept him from finding a better solution for his people. Or maybe they were doomed from the beginning, since the other side had the government, the railroad, most of the guns, more money, and their own racism to convince themselves they were firmly in the right.

Brown tells the story well, focusing on Riel’s life and actions and using a clean six-panel grid — he gets out of the way of his story almost entirely. This looks like a Chester Brown story, since his art is distinctive, but it reads like compelling reality, without the surrealistic breaks and self-obsessions of his earlier works. There’s a reason this has become a Canadian classic; it tells an important story well. This edition includes an extensive collection of sources and notes, plus a section at the back with sketches, original comics covers and other related stuff. To maximize the scholarly heft, there’s an essay by an academic to close the whole thing out. But most readers won’t bother with that anyway. The book itself is enough: it tells a story we’ve seen many times before, but need to be reminded of regularly.

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

Boulet is one of those European Cartoonists who are so cool they only need one name, like Herge. (And several others — I feel like there’s a lot of them, but can’t be bothered to research the question right now.) Or maybe it’s not a coolness thing — perhaps it helps them avoid the social shame of being known publicly as a cartoonist? Or maybe it just fits better on a comics page as a signature?
So many possibilities.

Anyway, his real name is Gilles Roussel, but he works in comics as Boulet. And he started a blog in 2004, which seems to be what really pushed his career forward and gave him some momentum. (2004 was a good year for blogs — most of the years since, not so much.)

The blog has been collected in several volumes in French, under the overall title Notes. (Wikipedia lists four volumes, but that’s only through 2010. Actually, that Wikipedia entry seems to stop listing anything as of about 2010, which leads me to believe it hasn’t been updated this decade.) Last year, Soaring Penguin Press — which I’ve never heard of before, though I immediately like them for their name — had the first volume translated and published it in the UK. And somehow one copy of that edition found its way to an independent bookstore in New Jersey and finally into my hands.

That book is Notes, Vol. 1: Born to Be a Larve . (Not sure why it uses the French spelling “larve” rather than the English “larva,” but that’s just my editor-brain kicking in when no one asked it to.) And it collects roughly the first year of that comics-blog, plus some framing pages of Boulet talking to a woman (his editor? a friend? another comic-blogger? she doesn’t seem to be a girlfriend,  and I can’t find anywhere she’s named) about assembling and organizing this very book you’re reading.

The new material (well, “new” as of 2008 when the book was assembled) comments on and contextualizes the older blog entries — this is a fancy way to say that Boulet and his unnamed female interlocutor talk about the story on the previous pages, and Boulet sometimes gives more details about those stories.

Because this is the kind of blog that’s based on real life. (They all supposedly were, and it can be hard to tell how much any individual blog is “real,” I suppose, but this is mostly day-to-day life-of-a-cartoonist stuff.) There’s some stories about conventions, and some stories about daily life as a cartoonist, and the inevitable here’s-the-dream-I-had-last-night-because-I-can’t-think-of-anything-else-this-week entry. All of the old blog entries are in color — some seem to be watercolored, and some are more traditional spot color (by Boulet, presumably) over pen-lines. The new stuff is mostly black-and-white, except for the orange of Boulet’s hair. (Which is a fun design element, and also shows how much his style loosened up between the initial blog entries and this book.)

Some of the stories are a single page, but they’re generally longer than that — enough to tell a little story, or run through a series of events. The stories themselves are not dates, though Boulet mentions several times how much trouble it was to find all of them and put them in the correct chronological order.

So this is a book of parts — Boulet explicitly worries about that in his framing material up front, and revisits the idea at the end — like a book of short stories. It’s all things that happened to this one French cartoonist (even if some of them, as with many creative folks, were things that happened entirely in his head) over the course of a year more than a decade ago.

(By the way, the blog is still going, and there’s an English version now — the latter is available here .)

If you’re the kind of American whose conception of “comics” is entirely filled by people in bright colors punching each other, this is very much not the book for you. I hope there aren’t actually that many of you, but — since I’m a pessimist — I tend to assume you’re the majority, you thick-knuckled vulgarians you. But, for the rest of us, this is a neat book by an interesting creator, and for other comics-makers, it’s an intriguing look into a life in comics in a somewhat different market and ecosystem.

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

I can’t claim any connection to the cartoonist Shannon Wheeler, despite the name similarity. Oh, he lives in Portland, as does my brother — but I think that’s as close as it gets. The Wheelers are a vast clan, with our fingers in all of the world’s pies, and Shannon’s branch is very distant from my own.

But, still, he is a Wheeler, and thus one of the best in the world at whatever he chooses to do, by the power of that exceptional name. In his case, first there was the hit comic Too Much Coffee Man (in several formats, for a long time, and not quite done even now). But he’s also been working seriously on New Yorker-style single-panel cartoons for at least a decade now, with some success in that fine magazine.

And, since he’s a guy who publishes the cartoons he makes — a man wants to eat, and his audiences wants to laugh — I’ve seen two books of those cartoons so far: I Thought You Would Be Funnier and I Don’t Get It .

I don’t actually know how many of those books there are, now — I have a vague sense Wheeler has been putting out one a year, since since when or until when is less clear — but I found and read another one last month: I Told You So , published in 2012.

This one is loosely organized by place — San Francisco, New York, Portland, The Suburbs, The Internets, and Unexplored Places — which are, more or less, where the respective cartoons take place. It’s as good an organizing principle as any other, I suppose.

And it’s full of single-panel cartoons, in the arch, somewhat artificial New Yorker style. (All art is artificial, of course — that’s what makes it art. So that is in no way a dig.) Wheeler has a classic cartoony style here, full of tones and soft edges, that primes the reader to look for this kind of humor. (Well, it does for me, at least.)

Again, he is a Wheeler, and therefore excellent at what he does. It’s no surprise he was good at this kind of cartoon. If you like New Yorker-y cartoons, Wheeler has a number of these little books full of them, and so far I can recommend them all.

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

I’m in danger of turning into a broken record on this subject: Geary has been doing the same thing brilliantly for so long that I’ve run out of different ways to say it.

Black Dahlia is the seventh in his “Treasury of XXth Century Murder,” which followed eight similar books in the “Treasury of Victorian Murder” (and one even earlier book, The Treasury of Victorian Murder, Vol. 1, a miscellaneous collection that was the prototype for the whole sub-career). Each one is a roughly comic-book-sized hardcover, of about eighty pages, telling the story of one famous historical murder. He’s done Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield, Jack the Ripper and H.H. Holmes, Sacco and Vanzetti and several more not as well-known in the 21st century. Each book is carefully researched and filled with maps and diagrams of the towns and murder locations — all drawn by Geary in his precise but puckish style.

The new book for 2016 — he’s had one of these for most years this century — covers the famous LA murder case from 1947, as previously retold by James Ellroy and countless others. As always, Geary isn’t here to fictionalize the case, or make up his own ending — he wants to present the true story, as best it can be determined, in all of its complexity and confusion, and lay out what might have happened, if that’s clear at all. It isn’t, in this case: whoever killed Elizabeth Short got away with it cleanly, and we’ll probably never know who he was.

Some of these books are more about the before, and some are more about the after — some murders have a huge media life, with shocking revelations and new suspects, and some just don’t. The Black Dahlia case basically went nowhere, so Geary doesn’t have a lot of after to work with. But Elizabeth Short did have a complicated life for her twenty-two years, which means Black Dahlia starts with the murder and then moves back to tell Short’s life story, or the pieces of it that seem to be relevant to her death.

Geary seems to be drawn to the unsolved, complicated cases the most — not the ones where we know what happened and who did it, but the ones where we can almost tell what happened, where there are some suspicions but not proof, the ones that are a bit frustrating, the ones where we’re pretty sure a murderer completely got away with it. Black Dahlia is deeply in that mode: whether Short was killed by a gangster or an angry boyfriend, he got away entirely. (And he’s probably dead now, which is as much getting away with anything that anyone can ever do.)

As always, Geary’s eye is focused and distinct. He gives us the people and places of the time — the right hairstyles, the right cars, the right streetscapes — to build the world that Elizabeth Short lived and died in. A series of books about old murders might seem frivolous or macabre, but death is just a lens to look at life. And Geary is excellent at telling us about both life and death.

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