Author: Andrew Wheeler

Zenith: Phases One to Four by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell

Zenith is quite likely the best possible revisionist superhero comic series told in five-page chapters. That sounds like damning with faint praise, and there’s an aspect of that — those short chapters put Morrison and Yeowell’s work in a straitjacket that they can never get free from, denying them all but the most absolutely necessary splash pages and forcing every installment to move forward quickly and efficiently — but it’s still an impressive achievement, and a pretty good revisionist superhero in general. His stories originally ran in the UK comics magazine 2000 AD, in weekly installments between 1987 and 1992, which explains the five-page-chapters issue. All the stories were written by Grant Morrison, at that point the current snotty Young Turk of British Comics, and drawn by Steve Yeowell, who had no such easy hook to be hung on and so had to get by on hard work and talent. (Not that Morrison was lacking in either of those.)

Zenith supposedly is a slacker superhero, and these stories are old enough that Generation X (my generation) was the one filled with young lazy layabouts who couldn’t be bothered to work — whereas now we know that really describes millennials, who have the bad grace to be young now, when so many of us are sadly no longer so. (We may all know different in another twenty years, but we’ll need to think up a new derogatory nickname for yet another generation first.) Zenith isn’t really that much of a slacker; he does hesitate initially to jump into the big superhero plot of Phase One. but that’s over very quickly (no room for Hamlet-esque equivocation in five-page chapters), and he’s flying around and punching monsters almost immediately.

Phase One quickly introduces us to what we need to know, with a prologue of this world’s end of WWII: the Nazi superhero Masterman is about to kill the English superhero Maximan in Berlin when he’s temporarily stymied by a nuclear bomb that levels the city. (No spoilers: we see the not-dead Masterman by the end of the prologue in the modern day. As I said, short chapters means this has to move fast.) Fast forward two generations: there were a bunch of British superheroes in the ’60s, who broke free from government control, called themselves Cloud Nine, and eventually broke up. Half of them are now dead, and the three left alive have all lost their powers.

But two of the dead supers had a son, and that boy — Robert McDowell — is the 19-year-old pop star Zenith in the fateful year 1987. Zenith is self-centered and arrogant and the kind of prick that only the teenage international celebrity only-superhero-in-the-world could be. His agent tries to keep him on-task, poor man, but it’s clearly an impossible job. Oh, but here comes Masterman, reincarnated by a secret society that worships the Lovecraftian “Many-Angled Ones” from beyond space that which to come down and eat our souls. (As in Loveccraft, it doesn’t do to think too much about why cultists would want to destroy the entire world and have their souls eaten first.)

And it turns out that the three depowered superheroes are not as depowered as previously thought, and that Zenith will join the battle once we get through a few scenes of him being petulant and young and thick-headed. So Zenith and the most powerful of those remnant ’60s heroes — Peter St. John, a powerful telepath and hippie-turned-Thatcherite PM — defeat Masterman and the thing from beyond space that inhabited him, saving the world and paving the way for St. John’s ascension to running the Defense Ministry.

There are, of course, Dark Hints about Zenith’s parents, which come out in Phase Two. This one is the least cosmic of all four Phases, with a Bond-villain-style mad billionaire who has bankrolled the creation of new supers — though a connection with the One Scientist that created all of the UK’s supers for three generations [1] — and plots to destroy the current world with nuclear fire and build a new one with his pet superhumans. Zenith needs the help of a CIA agent and (once again) St. John to foil this one, but of course it is foiled in the end.

As usual for events that supposedly killed entire super-teams, we learn by this point that hardly anyone in Cloud Nine actually died or was depowered in the ’60s. Half of the team fled to one of the infinite alternate worlds — this might be the first time Morrison uses that idea, so Morrison fans take note — as part of a larger Plan, which the three left behind (St. John and the two that don’t do much) didn’t want any part of.  But that’s still to come.

Phase Threeis the big, gaudy Crisis of the Zenith universe, with supers from dozens of worlds gathering together with Zenith and St. John under the leadership of an alternate-universe Maximan to defeat the Llogior. (The Lovecraftian Many-Angled Ones having quietly rebranded themselves at some point while they were offstage in Phase Two, they will be known under this name from now on.) Zenith even meets his nice, heroic counterpart from another universe, Vertex, which allows for some tension near the end.

And, yes, the collection of superheroes vaguely familiar to British audiences of the late ’80s — and much less so to this American, or to anyone not deeply steeped in UK comics of the ’60s and ’70s — does save the multiverse, although some fall tragically along the way, to make it more meaningful. (And there’s at least one shocking betrayal, for the same reasons.) But Zenith has very little to do with it; he’s there, and he does punch a few things, but that’s about the extent of his involvement.

Finally, Phase Four came along after a two-year gap, and introduced color to the series. (I’m not sure if this is because 2000 AD finally went all-color around 1992, or if it had a color section for a while and Zenith was at that point considered worthy, or what. But this Phase is in full comic-book color, while the first three are pure Yeowell ink.) Now the Big Plan of the surviving members of Cloud 9 comes to fruition, and of course it has to do with conquering the world and the Lloigor and all the things every Zenith story is about.

And, once again, St. John is the one who actually saves the world, while Zenith is mostly just around for the ride. Morrison did continue to hint that St. John wasn’t what he seemed — hints that go all the way back to the final pages of Phase One — which would imply that a Phase Five would finally see Zenith battle St. John. (This is very much a minimalist superhero universe, despite the multiple universes in Phase Three; everyone comes from the same origin, and they keep fighting and killing each other — eventually, obviously, the last two standing will have to fight in the final battle.) But there never was a Phase Five; the Phase Four book ends with a late-Morrison mash-up story from ten years later that throws all of the toys up in the air and delights in the weird shapes they make coming down. There’s no sign that Morrison and Yeowell ever will, or could, continue this story in a conventional way: this is what we have, and this is all there ever will be.

As I said a thousand words or so ago, Zenith is inherently handicapped by being told in five-page chapters. Morrison was lucky enough to be writing in a time and for a magazine that was happy to have lots of captions, so he’s able to tell larger, more complex stories than you might expect given that scope — but, still, every chapter has to have a shape, and has to have some action or tension to close it, and that gives Zenith an inherently herky-jerky cadence, with confrontations and fights coming at predictable intervals and never lasting very long.

Yeowell is also handicapped by the space: there’s only so much superhero action you can draw when you need to have ten panels and at least that many captions on each page. He does get more than his share of striking images out of Morrison’s concepts, though, particularly in Phase Four (perhaps because the rising tide of the ’90s was privileging pictures over captions).

So this is another flawed masterpiece, much like its model Miracleman. I imagine that amuses Grant Morrison to no end.

[1] This is very much like Emil Gargunza, from Alan Moore’s slightly earlier Marvelman/Miracleman stories. The backstory of Zenith in general bears a lot of resemblances to Moore’s worldbuilding; Morrison substituted Cthulhu for Warpsmiths, pretty much, and went forward from there.

Deadman: Lost Souls by Mike Baron and Kelley Jones

deadmanlostsouls-3694417DC Comics thought it was riding a horror revival in the early ’90s, when it turned out they just had the good luck to hire Neil Gaiman to write Sandman. (Sure, the rest of the early Vertigo lineup, and the Vertigo precursors like the Alan Moore Swamp Thing, had a strong horror flavor in their superhero gumbo, but it was always a flavor rather than a main course, and it died out pretty much in parallel to Sandman wandering further and further away from horror.) But, along the way, they put out a bunch of comics with horror flavors — from vampire Batman to the creepiness of Shade the Changing Man — and revived a number of characters with horror in their DNA.

Deadman is one obvious example. He’s one of DC’s third-tier heroes, who’s had an ongoing series a few times but never long enough to really deserve that “ongoing” name. But he is dead, and his power is possessing people so he can use their bodies to do whatever he’s doing at the time, and he was definitely available, so he got scarified and sent off to see if he could attract that Sandman lightning. (Actually, given the timing, I suspect it was Swamp Thing lightning — the bigger bolt hadn’t hit DC yet.)

So the team of Mike Baron and Kelley Jones — Baron one of the more inventive and interesting mainstream comics writers of that generation, with excellent work from Badger and Nexus and a fine run on Punisher at roughly the same time; and Jones an impressionist of the comics page, a heir of Bernie Wrightson with a great eye for grotesques and extreme situations — relaunched a Deadman serial in Action Comics Weekly in the late ’80s, which eventually led to two short “Prestige Format” miniseries in 1989 and 1992.

Those two miniseries — each one was two 48-page issues long, under the titles Love After Death and Exorcism — were collected in Deadman: Lost Soulsin 1995, which stayed in print some time after that. (DC didn’t including printing numbers or dates during this era — in fact, I’m not sure if they do that now — so I can’t tell precisely how old my copy is. Comics publishers are about fifty years behind prose publishers in some very basic putting-books-together stuff.)

The two are discrete stories, but this book tries to disguise that by running them together without separation — it’s a bit jarring to go from the Love After Death “deadend” page immediately to two pages of Exorcism that quickly retell that story and the rest of the Deadman backstory — and they are related, since Love After Death basically breaks Deadman and Exorcism puts him back together. (Well, he actually breaks after the end of Love After Death, but that’s just quibbling.)

So we begin with Deadman sour and unhappy and frustrated — he’s been bodiless for however long its been since his first story in 1967, fighting to keep the cosmic balance for the vague goddess Rama Kushna, and his angst over that is rising. Deadman hears a rumor of a haunted house out in the Wisconsin woods, the abandoned home of a circus owner from decades before, supposedly haunted by the spirit of his aerialist wife. Deadman was a circus performer and aerialist in life, so he’s intrigued and goes to investigate. And he does find the ghost of the beautiful aerialist, who does have the power to touch living people at will — but she’s not the only ghost, and her dead husband is still around and powered by a nasty demonic spirit.

Does Deadman defeat the evil ringmaster and his demon overlord? Well, what do you think? Does he get the girl and (after)live happily ever after? You really haven’t read many mainstream comics, have you?

And so Exorcism begins with Deadman having gone crazy — comic-book style crazy, the kind that’s very demonstrative and can be snapped out of with a bit of help — and roaming around some other woods (in Vermont this time), where he runs into a heavy metal band and a pair of young lovers. The band is quickly possessed by three ancient, and very different, nasty spirits, and the young lovers are quickly in danger. Since Deadman is comic-book crazy, he basically caused that, and capers about gleefully. Meanwhile, Madame Waxahachie — a comics character who makes Amanda Waller look svelte and demure and non-stereotypical — finds the circus booking agent in Boston that Deadman has been possessing to beat up gay men — this part of the plot doesn’t entirely make sense — and drags that man and his regular therapist up to the abandoned church in Vermont where the possessed band is, in time for a guest appearance by the Phantom Stranger (who is as clear and helpful as he usually is).

And then things all go to hell, of course. But, in the end, Deadman is not-crazy again, and the evil spirits are banished back to wherever, and most of the good people are still alive. And, most importantly, Deadman is back to his standard status quo and available to show up in big crossovers and other superhero bumf for another couple of decades. As he did.

These two stories are more than slightly over-the-top; I suspect Baron was out of his usual comfort zone in this supernatural milieu, and he doesn’t deliver his best work here. The art is the real standout: Jones revels in the opportunities to draw cadaverous Deadman in tortured poses (often floating in mid-air) and all of the horribly fleshy monsters that Baron can think up. This is not a pretty comics story, but it’s full of excellent creepy art, and Jones’s inky blacks are well-supported by an equally spooky coloring job by Les Dorscheid.

I’ll be honest: this isn’t a lost masterpiece or anything. But it does collect two decent stories with great art from one of the quirkier characters in the DC Universe. If you have a fondness for DC’s supernatural characters — I know I do, and I don’t think I’m the only one — this could be a fun find.

Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? by Brian Fies

whateverhappenedtotheworldoftomorrrow3f-7766502Building and sustaining a career as a graphic novelist is even harder than the equivalent for a prose writer: comics require at least twice as much work per page (writing and drawing — sometimes inking and coloring and lettering, too) for something that’s read in a fifth of the time. And that turns making comics, especially mid-list comics, into a time-sink which has serious trouble delivering monetarily on a level with the effort required. And yet people keep trying, like any artform: there are always people with stories to tell and images to share, and some of them manage to turn that into a career along the way. (Others fail entirely, or do a couple of stories and then move on to something else.)

Brian Fies is an interesting case along that continuum. His first major graphic story, Mom’s Cancer, was a memoir comic that originally appeared in installments online, about ten years ago. That attracted attention, and got reprinted as a book, and the book apparently did well. His follow-up, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, came four years later — quite fast for a two-hundred page book written and drawn all by one person — and was more thematically and conceptually inventive, a switch to mostly fiction, but eventually, it seems, was not quite as successful as his first book.

(This is really common: the disappointing second book/record/gallery show is a cliche across many media. Sometimes the disappointment is commercial, sometimes critical — and sometimes it doesn’t exist at all, which then is the surprising story in that case.)

Fies hasn’t yet put out a third book in the six years since Tomorrow. (Though, again, remember that comics take time to make — time to work up the idea, time to write, time to draw, and then all of the usual publishing stuff. And that often has to happen in between or on top of having a regular job.) And so outside observers like me wonder if Tomorrow was a disappointment to its publisher — though an outside observer can never figure that out, since it depends entirely on costs and payments and expectations.

I’m not the best reader for Tomorrow, temperamentally: it’s a thoughtful, careful fictionalization of the “why don’t we have jetpacks?” line of complaint, and I’ve long since gotten sick of that from hearing it in SF circles for around thirty years. [1] This particular incarnation of that argument starts with the New York World’s Fair of 1939, possibly the very height of technological optimism, and mildly asks why the dreams embodied in that fair never came true.

(How many dreams ever come true? But we’re not supposed to ask such questions.)

Tomorrow focuses on a father and his son — Pop and Buddy, as Everyman and Everyboy as Fies can make them — on a visit to the fair, where they’re thrilled and inspired by the wonders they see there. Fies clearly means these two to be iconic rather than real people, but, to my mind, that’s ignoring the more important questions: I found myself wondering about the rest of their family, about what Mom or Big Sis would make of these particular technological wonders, and if they would be as impressive to them. (Or what Grandpa, who already went from horse-and-buggy to airplanes and ocean liners, would say. Pop does have a speech along those lines, but it’s all in the service of Progress Always Thrusting Forward.)

After the Fair, Tomorrow presents a series of snapshot chapters in the middle of each of the next four decades — 1945 through 1975 — in which Pop and Buddy appear at the same ages as they were in 1939. (And there are still no other members of their family: no mother or hunt of what happened to her, no other siblings, no extended family — just two men, older and younger, and their technologically-mediated father-son bond.) So they witness V-E day, build a fallout shelter in the basement, watch a Gemini lift off from Cape Canaveral, and finally the Apollo-Soyuz separation — almost all specifically space-exploration moments, like yet another sour Stephen Baxter story about how the author didn’t get to visit Moon Base Alpha like he was supposed to.

And there’s a lot of narration along the way, as “Buddy” tells the reader all of the space-related history in each ten-year span — all still very much like those whiny “I was promised a house on Mars!” stories from SF magazines of 10-15 years ago. Again, I have never little patience for that viewpoint: I’ve heard it too many times, and I never bought into it myself. The Space Race is a thing that happened for geopolitical reasons, not scientific or exploration reasons, and it ended when those real reasons were no longer as powerful. There was no aim of history, no majestic purpose to spread monkeys in tin cans throughout the universe. And Tomorrow has a coda at the end — with Pop and Buddy finally broken free from their static ages — that somewhat addresses that, talking about the actual technological changes in the years since 1975. But it’s also unabashedly still in the tank for the “man must conquer the universe with big phallic rockets!” idea, as if the last forty years was just a pause in the Inevitable Thrust of Man.

Tomorrow is an attractive, very well-presented version of an argument and a viewpoint that I rejected long ago. Other readers may be less negative towards the agitprop and thus be able to enjoy the book itself more than I did — I’ve just seen this very same kind of story too many times before, by too many writers around Fies’s age (fifty-ish, just old enough to be kids during the Apollo years and thus indoctrinated to expect they would go to space some day) to believe in it. And I’m young enough — I don’t get to say that very often, these days, so I’ll take any chance I can get — not to be part of that cohort; Apollo was dead by the time I was old enough to care.

If you love space, and the promise of ever-better transportation, and the dreams of the Space Age, you really will enjoy Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? In fact, if you’re just not nearly as negative about those things as I am, you’ll probably like it quite a lot.

[1] Short version of my comeback: geometric growth, in anything humans do, always flattens out. It never hits the asymptote, or comes close. We know this in general, but we keep forgetting it for specific cases. So the Transportation Singularity didn’t happen: we didn’t get ubiquitous flying cars or jet-packs, we can’t go to Mars for a vacation, and FTL is still a pipe dream. Similarly, the Information Singularity won’t happen either, for similar reasons. Any prediction that contains “and then it goes on just like this for a long time” is bullshit.

Monsieur Jean: The SIngles Theory

monsieurjean-13singlestheory-1995454Monsieur Jean is the semi-autobiographical — a novelist rather than a cartoonist, and somewhat Everyman-ized — central character in a series of slice-of-life comics stories by the French creators Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian. Much of that series has been collected in English as From Bachelor to Father, after about half of it originally appeared over here as Get a Life. [1] (French albums are short, we must remember: to them, a full-length book-format comic is often just 48 pages. So American reprint projects typically stick at least two books together, and sometimes much more than that.)

The Singles Theory, as far as I can tell, came out of sequence and out of size: it’s a 120-plus-page epic of mundanity, set between two of the earlier books, in a popular period of Jean’s life. It’s the story of how he got inspired to write his second novel — which anyone involved with the literary world know is the really tough one. (Anyone can write one novel, but for it to be a career and a life, a novelist has to be able to write number two — three and the rest will then follow.) I suspect this is a popular book in the series, since the US edition is a translation of a special duotone edition that came out in France in 2011.

All of the Monsieur Jean stories have love affairs — dating, meeting new people, sex, relationship troubles, and break-ups — as central to their plots, but Singles Theory uses that as the central conceit: Jean’s friend Felix, in the middle of a divorce, has moved in with him and has understandably soured on the entire idea of romance and love. At the same time, Jean is having recurring nightmares of armed men who claim they are about to kill him, but always get distracted long enough for Jean to wake up. His friends insist this is all about sex…probably because, in a book like this, everything is all about sex.

Those are some of the loose threads that wind through a series of discrete, individual stories about Jean and his friends — they go to a birthday party for a friend far our in the countryside, Jean is interviewed badly about his work, Felix gets trapped in an elevator, and so forth. It’s not for readers who want gigantic moments and lots of punching in their comics, but they’re very unlikely to pick up something called Monsieur Jean in the first place. For people who like movies and books that are about characters and dialogue rather than plot — who appreciate that things don’t always have to move at a breakneck pace — this is a wonderful story about real people in a real world.

[1] I’ve read Get a Life twice — most recently just a couple of months ago — and reviewed it in a quick, desultory fashion here each time. I won’t bother to link; you’re not missing anything. Slice-of-life stories are difficult to criticize/analyze.

Elektra:Assassin by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz

In the late ’80s, Elektra: Assassin was possibly the very favorite comic of my brother and myself — he even bought an extra copy of the splash-page-filled climactic issue and covered a large portion of his ceiling with it. (I can still quote the important bit from memory: “And flesh/all flesh/will scream/and burn/and die” with the next page being the utterly perfect “and die/and die/and die/and die/and die.”

Does it hold up? Surprisingly well, actually. It uses some Marvel Universe furniture — SHIELD is important, with Nick Fury wandering through once or twice, and Daredevil shows up equally briefly in a flashback — but it’s really its own thing, a fever dream of politics and megadeath and violence and paranoia that’s set sometime that could be 1972 or 1986 or no year in particular. And for a book so over the top and full of grotesques, it’s got some of Miller’s most subtle writing — particularly impressive for those of us depressed at how Miller abandoned subtlety forever almost immediately afterward.

It’s set before Elektra’s death in Daredevil — probably. A presidential campaign is heating up, and a young, personable candidate (Ken Wind), who is a Democrat but never named as such, is winning over America with his sunny vision. Meanwhile, The President, who looks mostly like Nixon but could be Reagan if you squint hard enough, is paranoid and obsessed with nuclear war and his own machismo. And if you think you know which of those is a bigger threat to the world, you’re wrong. (This may be a hint of Miller’s later right-wing stridency, but it works perfectly in context.)

And in a small Latin American tin-pot dictatorship — propped up by SHIELD and the US more generally — a deeply mediocre and not overly intelligent SHIELD agent named Garrett is about to get in way over his head. The Beast — the supernatural being behind the secretive Hand organization of ninja — is trying to possess a human being, to further that plot I hinted at in the first paragraph. And Elektra is there to stop him, mostly by killing people in inventive and spectacular ways.

But Elektra is in over her head, too. She’s been captured and indoctrinated by the Hand at least twice, not to mention the time she just spent in a snake pit of a local insane asylum, and her fuzzy and confused mind is running almost entirely on instinct and pure willpower.

Unfortunately, Elektra and Garrett are the only ones who can save the world. From the Beast, and his dreams of megadeath. From Ken Wind. From the technological wizards of SHIELD’s ExTechOps division, and the cyborgs they create to chase the AWOL Garrett — including his ex-partner, Perry, who would have been a serial killer if he hadn’t found an easier, more legal way to kill lots of people.

Miller tells this story in the best example of ’80s style I know of, all stream-of-consciousness narrative captions from multiple points of view and overlapping screamed dialogue. He throws hints into the air to have them hit targets perfectly sixty pages later, and weaves it all together seamlessly. And this is Sienkiewicz at the height of his visual ambition, right before Stray Toasters, painting like a demon and shifting from photorealist to a child’s scrawl to slashes of color instantly to support Miller’s equally quick changes of mood. (I’ll also note that Archie Goodwin, one of the unsung heroes of comics, was the original editor, and I expect that he had a lot to do with making Elektra: Assassin as coherent and crisp and powerful as it is.)

Elektra: Assassin is a smart, fast-moving, overwhelming, psychological, all-encompassing thriller comic, set in the Marvel Universe but not of it, and a superhero story only by courtesy. It does things effortlessly on the page that are thrilling and amazing, and has amazing depths of subtlety for a book about a ninja-girl stopping a demon from blowing up the world. This is one major ’80s comic that completely holds up, and one of the real highlights of the careers of two hugely talented creators.

Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick

There are times when I doubt that Feynman could possibly be real. A wild man physics savant who was also  a world-class womanizer, bongo player, and practical joker? No, no — that’s a fictional character, not a real man. But the world then gently points out that he was real.

Ottaviani has made a small career in comics out of telling stories about science and scientists, and this latest book-length graphic novel fits well into his oeuvre. Feynman is the most interesting scientist of the 20th century, beating out even Einstein and Hawking — quirky, fun, endlessly quotable, but still clearly brilliant at really esoteric theoretical physics and creator of a major explanatory theory that hardly anyone has ever understood.

(I know much less about Myrick — he’s got a lot of credits, but I haven’t seen much of his work. He has a slightly cartoonier style than I’d expect for a biography, which means his Feynman looks only slightly like the real man, but he has the skills to tell this story well, despite a lot of talking heads and big caption boxes.)

Ottaviani mostly tells Feynman’s story straight through, with a few digressions for style and framing. He uses unobtrusive captions to place each scene in a time and place, jumping forward occasionally to use a major lecture or discovery to frame earlier events. It makes what could have been a dull life — Feynman, for all of his energy and wit and wackiness, spent most of his time lecturing, writing, or sitting in a chair thinking about physics — into a thoughtful graphic novel that mediates on an interesting life lived well.

I expect this will mostly be read by physics nerds and young readers — it’s the kind of thing
that teachers and librarians hope will snare some resultant reader into a life-long passion — but that’s fine. Feynman was both of those things, in his time, and I think he’d be glad of the company.

Hellboy’s Buddies: Three volumes of Abe Sapien and one of a B.P.R.D. Vampire

This will be a bad review — not a negative one, since I enjoyed these books, and like the endlessly proliferating world of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe. No, this will be a poorly informed review, quick and slapdash and lazy, written more than two months after reading the books. But I’ve done a lot of them over the years — hey, I’m not getting paid here, so you get what you get — so I think I have a facility for doing quick superficial reviews that only mildly suck.

(And, if you really care what I think about the Hellboy universe, you can check out older posts on Hellboy in Hell , The Storm and the Fury , Being Human , Witchfinder , The Wild Hunt , The Midnight Circus ,  The Devil Does Not Jest , The Crooked Man , Lobster Johnson 3 and 4 , Hell on Earth 1-3 , Hell on Earth 4-10 , The Burning Hand , 1947 , 1948 , War on Frogs , and even further back from those if you follow some internal links.)

Abe Sapien: Dark and Terrible and the New Race of Man
Abe Sapien: The Shape of Things to Come
Abe Sapien: Sacred Places
(written by Mignola and Scott Allie, with one bit co-written by Mignola with John Arcudi; art by one or both of Sebastian Fiumara and Max Fiumara; colors by Dave Stewart)

These three volumes reprint the first year and a half (roughly) of the ongoing Abe Sapien comic, spinning off from B.P.R.D. when Abe himself cut loose from that joint, in the wake of another transformation and driven by a niggling worry that he might be an Apocalypse Beast himself. (For a different apocalypse than Hellboy himself, but this universe is well-stocked with potential and actual apocalypses to choose from.)

And they remind me of nothing so much as ’70s Hulk comics: the mysterious stranger with dangerous powers wanders across the Southwest, encountering both good people and monsters. Admittedly, the landscape Abe encounters is vastly changed: the Frog War might have been “won,” more or less, but there are massive alien monsters scattered around the world, entire cities have been destroyed, and normal life is basically over.

(Parenthetically, I’ll repeat again what I said in my review of the last clutch of B.P.R.D. stories: Mignola and his collaborators here are writing stories set after industrial civilization has collapsed, but they don’t quite seem to realize that. There’s no way any contemporary supply chains are still operating, and I’d estimate several billion people have already died — or been transformed into monsters — by this point. Just getting enough food to eat should be the primary worry of everyone in this world; not getting eaten by a monster is now a luxury.)

Meanwhile — because it wouldn’t be the Hellboy universe without subplots — a mostly dead B.P.R.D. agent has been brought back by a necromancer with a fiendish plot that we don’t entirely understand yet. And the B.P.R.D. is chasing Abe in a way that alternates between friendly and not-so-much.

And along the way a bunch of people die, and so do a bunch of monsters. This is a nastier world than the pre-apocalypse status quo, even if there does seem to be a somewhat functional government and occasional new consumer goods when there really shouldn’t be. Abe is mostly moping through all of this, worried that he is an Apocalypse Beast but pretty sure he isn’t, but still wanting to figure out how he fits into this world and what he should be doing.

It’s an interesting storyline, running somewhere through the territory between horror and superheroes: Abe is strong and knowledgeable, but he and his friends have already failed to stop the end of the world. Even if I do think these series must eventually show the extinction of the last humans on earth, there’s plenty of time and narrative space until that point.

B.P.R.D.: Vampire
(written by Mignola, Gabriel Ba, and Fabio Moon; art by Ba and Moon; colors by Stewart)


And this standalone story is a loose sequel to the 1946-1948 stories, focusing on one B.P.R.D. agent who was transformed into something more than human — and no prizes for guessing what.

I don’t think all of the middle has been filled in — this book covers a short time in the late ’40s, and that agent I don’t believe has showed up in any B.P.R.D. stories set any later in time than that — so I suspect this is Mignola throwing a ball up into the air and expecting to catch it much later, in some future B.P.R.D. story. (Or maybe there will be a direct sequel, which will end his story; it could go either way.)

So: moody, expressive art from Ba and Moon. Somewhat less dialogue than usual for a B.P.R.D. story, but still plenty of exposition. A conflicted hero and a mass of nasties. (I seem to be channeling Joe Bob Briggs here. I think there are a few breasts, actually. And plenty of blood.) This is a stylish, smart piece of a much larger story that pretty much stands on its own — if you want to sample Mignola without diving headfirst into the tangled mythology, this would be a very good choice.

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

The Back Half of Scary Go Round by John Allison

John Allison has spent most of the past twenty years chronicling an ever-proliferating series of strange events in and around the small British town of Tackleford, somewhere in darkest Yorkshire. More impressively, he’s done all of this in public, on the Internet, most days of the week, for free. And he’s done it in comics form.

First up was Bobbins , which I haven’t made a serious study of yet, but was in the traditional newspaper strip-comic format and focused on the staff of Tackleford’s City Lights magazine, with perhaps some supernatural eruptions. After Allison closed that down around the turn of the millennium, he launched a new series with a somewhat overlapping cast of characters called Scary Go Round , which itself ended in 2009. SGR was formatted like a comics page, which made it easier to collect in book form and (possibly) allowed Allison to write more complex stories and include more of his quirky humor and details in each update. It also was clearly fantasy: characters visited Hell, were turned into zombies, and battled giant monsters to save the world. (Though Allison’s offhand tone and character-based plotting turned all of those elements into something very different from what you’d expect.) That strip was entirely collected into eight volumes, though — in the way of the webcomic — it’s also still all available online, as are Allison’s other strips.

For the next round of stories, Allison switched format again, to a double-tier newspaper style, which gave him a similar number of panels per page to SGR but with a more compact feel. That strip was called Bad Machinery , and it followed up the end of SGR to focus on two “teams” of tweens at the local school, who solve mysteries in competition with each other. Allison still includes supernatural elements, but they tend to be more subdued in Machinery than they were in SGR, making his stories better controlled and more focused on characters. He also clearly designed Machinery for eventual book publication, with long story arcs that each fit cleanly into a single book. (See my reviews of the three Machinery books to date: one , two , and three .)

Allison has also made a number of related print comics in various formats over the years — including Expecting to Fly , which appeared online first — and there’s a 2013-2015 run of Bobbins , just to confuse things even more. Since Machinery in its turn ended last year, he produced a transitional story called “Space Is the Place ” (with part of the Machinery cast going to a space camp in Wales). And he’s also been writing a monthly comic called Giant Days — confusingly, this is also the title of a major SGR storyline, plus an earlier sidebar print project — for a different art team, which may or may not have a Tackleford connection. (I haven’t seen it yet, since it’s only in floppy form so far.)

So Tackleford is a place that Allison knows well, and has been telling stories about in a variety of ways for a long time. It’s his Yoknapatawpha County or Castle Rock — the core of a world that extends out to many places. With that said, though, Machinery feels more focused on Tackleford than SGR did — maybe because the main characters of Machinery were kids, and limited in their ability to go other places and do other things.

I’ve been a fan of Machinery for a while, but only recently started diving back into Allison’s archives. The first four SGR collections are currently unavailable to most readers in book form — I believe ebooks are still obtainable in the UK, but not elsewhere due to a stupid recent tax law in that backwards country — but books five through eight are still out there, most easily obtainable in the US from Topatco . And so that’s how I got those books — Great Aches, Ahoy Hoy!, Peloton, and Recklessly Yours — and finally read a big wodge of SGR for myself.

What strikes me most about this slightly-less-formed version of Allison’s world is how consistent he’s been in his concerns: his stories have focused on smart, sarcastic women with a goal in mind — Shelley Winters as the exemplar for SGR, Charlotte Grote for Machinery, with plenty of others including Amy Chilton and Dark Esther — in a world of slightly slower, bemused men who end up along for the ride.

Unlike the Machinery books, each SGR volume collects a number of stories, adding up to about eleven months for each book. (More or less, to allow for full stories in each one.) Allison also includes notes on each storyline and some sketches and similar material at the end of each book, in the old way to entice freebie online readers to actually pay money for something.

These books, covering the strips from early 2006 through the end in late 2009, show serious growth in Allison’s art style, from a cleaner version of the look he began SGR with in 2002, drawn on a computer, through a hand-drawn middle period and a brief “hand-drawn, but much bigger originals” period before settling back onto the computer. (Where I think he’s stayed ever since.) The first story of Great Aches is in that early, flat-computer-color style, but everything else has a energetic hand-drawn look which well suites Allison’s frenetic characters and zigzag pacing.

The stories are a bit sillier and more anarchic than Machinery, and Allison’s notes make it clear that he spent this period making it up as he went along, diving into long stories without necessarily having a clear idea of how he’d get to the end. But even if the stories are somewhat shaggier and less formed, they’re still Allison stories, with unlikely turns of plot and deflation always waiting in the wings. And his dialogue was whip-smart from well before this period, full of witty asides and great cross-talk that always feels plausible enough while still not conforming to the way real people ever did or would talk. (That is a good thing: people talk badly almost all of the time. Fiction is to make things better and more interesting.)

So, in conclusion: John Allison is awesome. Buy his books, read his comics, enrich him with your dollars and pounds and more exotic currencies. Start here, start with Bad Machinery, go crazy and drop all the way back to the beginning of Bobbins in 1998 to get the full John Allison experience from the beginning. It’s all good. 

Note: I’m not including the usual Amazon links this time, because that’s a very bad way to read and/or buy Allison’s older work. You can get the Bad Machinery books there if you want, but the others are available other places more easily. And, honestly, for a webcomic you should just read a bunch of it online first — surely we understand that by now?

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

Comics Round Up: June 2015

These books each deserve their own posts, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to get it. But here’s the deal I have for them: if I write more than three solid paragraphs about any one of them — and that does happen; I’m never sure how long my fingers are going to keep moving — that book will get broken out and become its own post. (So it’s entirely possible no one but me will ever read this introductory paragraph; that’s happened before with planned round-ups.)

Sam Zabel And The Magic Pen

by Dylan Horrocks

Autobio comics can be fun, but they can only go so far. Comics are such a time-consuming discipline, with so many hours spent hunched over a drawing board, that creators who rely on that mode either disappear up the navel of anatomizing their own process or misrepresent the few bits of their lives spent doing other things. Some creators, though, take “themselves” — or some version of their selves and lives — and throw that into something deeply unreal. And that can be much more satisfying.

This new graphic novel from New Zealander Horrocks — best known in artsy comics circles for his book Hicksville , best known in the CBR world for writing Batgirl for a while — is not about “Dylan Horrocks.” As you can easily see from the title, the hero is named Sam Zabel. And the Big Two superheroine he writes is Lady Night, a mystic hero in the Dr. Fate mode. And the fantasy world he falls into is, I have to assume, not something that comes directly out of Horrocks’s experience.

Though that would be pretty cool, if it did.

Any story about a creator becomes a story about creation: about making stories and being blocked and finding inspiration and working despite obstacles and the wellsprings of story and all of that jazz. Horrocks does a good version of that story here, but you’re not likely to be greatly surprised at the twists of the story or the places it goes. Stories about stories are a minor genre these days, and this is a pretty good one. (You can still read a version of it — I think it was somewhat updated and altered for book publication — on Horrock’s site.) And if telling this story re-energized Horrocks so he can tell more stories, and maybe even stories (unlike this and Hickville) that aren’t about how comics are special and cool and the greatest artform in the history of the universe while at the exact same time a pitiless industry that eats its young….well, that would also be pretty cool.

Sin Titulo

by Cameron Stewart

This is another fantasy story, with some elements in common with Sam Zabel — though not the connection to creative people or comics — but I probably shouldn’t emphasize that part, since those are the secrets that come out later in what’s mostly a mystery plot. And it also originally appeared for free online, though its URL leads to a blank page. (You can google it yourself, if you like: I see no reason to link to nothingness.)

So a young man goes to visit his grandfather in a nursing home and is shocked to learn the old man died a month before. A noir plot then start up: a photo of the grandfather with a beautiful young woman suggests depths, then disappears; a thuggish orderly is abusing patients and has darker secrets; the young man gets obsessed and starts neglecting his job and girlfriend. But there are also prophetic dreams, of trees and beaches, and the solution to this mystery will not be mundane.

Sin Titulo is a strong story, that turns naturally from realism into fantasy and uses its noir elements — not just plot; the layout and drawing style evoke classic strip comics and the dark alleys of old movies — with assurance and ability.

No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular!, Vols. 6 & 7

by Nico Tanigawa

Every series falls into ruts; every comedy finds that its running jokes stop running quite so well. I’m not saying that’s definitely what’s happened to this manga series, since I could have had an off day while reading these, or maybe these stories just didn’t connect with me the way I hoped they would. But I am feeling that WataMote (the fan-name for the series, from the first two words of the Japanese title) is thinning out a bit, and not as exciting to me as it was before.

(Speaking of before, can I point you to my reviews of volumes 1 and 2 , 3 , 4 , and 5 ?)

I don’t have much more to say about these volumes: I found parts of them funny, but more opaque. It may be because this clump of story got into more Japanese-specific moments that they didn’t connect with me, or maybe Tomoko’s schtik is wearing on me. Either way: this was still fun, and I’ll come back for another volume or two (which should see Tomoko to her graduation), but maybe not any more than that. It could be that the first few volumes are the best: that’s not uncommon. And those stories still exist, and are still as good as ever.

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

Review: “The Book of Human Insects” by Osamu Tezuka

  • Uncategorized
  • November 8, 2012

the-book-of-human-insects-by-osamu-tezuka-3197749Some writers love their characters, and can hardly bear to have anything bad happen to them. Osamu Tezuka, though, is not one of them: particularly in his books for adults, like MW, Ayako, Ode to Kirihito, and Apollo’s Song, he creates profoundly damaged — and damaging — characters, and then sets them up to bounce off each other like frenzied fighting cocks until he’s satisfied.

[[[The Book of Human Insects]]] is another work in that vein, though even more so — its main character is a cuckoo of a woman, who “steals” the creative abilities of every person she comes into contact with, doing what they do just a bit better and more impressive and leaving them wrung out and ruined when she moves on. It’s from that period in Tezuka’s career when he was focusing on comics like this — it was serialized in Play Comic during 1970 and 71, at roughly the same time as Ode and Apollo. And, to be honest, the people that Toshiko Tomura (or any of her many other names) steals from aren’t much better than she is — they’re certainly not innocent, or anything more than slightly better than she is.

Tomura has just won a major literary award with her first book as Human Insects opens — but, as we come to see, that means it’s time for her to move on, since she can only have one great achievement in any field. (Since they’re not her achievements, really, except in that she takes them and makes them hers.) Human Insects follows Tomura as she stalks forward into new territory, and we also slowly discover the people — men, primarily; this is a story from the early ’70s and could be read as a curdled take on a certain kind of feminism — that she’s already met, seduced, co-opted, and abandoned already.

A Western story of the same era would probably spend a long time psychologizing about Tomura, explaining why she is the way she is, with references to her childhood traumas and whatnot. Tezuka, coming out of a different tradition, just presents Tomura: we see some hints of her past, and she clearly doesn’t have a healthy relationship with that, but there’s none of the deadening “now I’ll explain everything to you” that an American would have felt compelled to include in 1970. Tomura is nasty and manipulative and utterly self-centered: that’s just who she is. And, because that’s who she is, she will win, even when faced with men more powerful and seemingly as ruthless as she is.

Human Insects is not the most pleasant read, in common with Tezuka’s other books of this era: in a world full of scoundrels and bastards, there is only nastiness and back-stabbing. And Human Instincts doesn’t have the supernatural majesty of Ode to Kirihito or the epic family-saga sweep of Ayako (or the pure feral energy of MW), so it’s pleasures are at a more human scale, and driven by schadenfreude and bemused head-shaking. These are nasty people doing nasty things, but we recognize them all: Tezuka makes them all very real nasty people, doing exaggerated, large-scale versions of the kind of petty slights we see every day. Human Insects is a misanthropic book, as you’d expect from the title, but not an unconvincing one.

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