Category: Reviews

Review: ‘Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!’

 

american-flagg-1794127Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!
By Howard Chaykin
Dynamic Forces, July 2008, $49.99

Science Fiction has never been quite as successful in comics form as it seemed it should have been. Oh, sure, there have been plenty of vaguely SFnal ideas and premises – from [[[Superman]]] to [[[Kamandi]]] to the [[[X-Men]]] to the [[[Ex-Mutants]]] – but they were rarely anything deeper than an end to the sentence “There’s this guy, see? and he’s….” One of the few counterexamples was Howard Chaykin’s [[[American Flagg!]]], starting in 1983 – that series had many of the usual flaws and unlikelihoods of near-future dystopias, but it also had a depth and texture to its world that was rare in comics SF (and never to be expected in even purely prose works, either).

American Flagg! suffered from Chaykin’s waning attention for a while, and then crashed and burned almost immediately after he finally left the series, with a cringe-making overly “sexy” storyline utterly overwritten by Alan Moore. American Flagg! limped from muddled storyline to confused characterization for a couple of years afterward – but the beginning, when Chaykin was fully energized by his new creation and the stories he was telling, is one of the best SF stories in American comics.

The series has never been collected well, though a few slim album-sized reprints were once available, and may be findable through used-book channels. This Dynamic Forces edition, reprinting the first fourteen issues of the series, is quite pricey. (Especially for a book with no page numbers, and one in which the pages are precisely the size of the original comics – not oversized, as those previous album reprints had been.) This book has a strong, thoughtful introduction by Michael Chabon – which has already appeared in his [[[Maps and Legends]]] collection, presumably due to the delay in the American Flagg! book – a gushing afterword by Jim Lee, and a new short story written and drawn by Chaykin.

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Review: ‘The Dead Boy Detectives’ by Bryan Talbot and Ed Brubaker

deadboy-3368922By my count, there are four good reasons to buy [[[The Sandman Presents: The Dead Boy Detectives]]], now out from Vertigo.

First, it’s cheap, at a slight $12.99 for some 100 pages of comics.

Second, it’s a heckuva good mystery yarn with plenty of occult elements.

Third, it’s part of The Sandman world, and there are plenty of readers who snap up anything associated with Neil Gaiman’s creation.

But the last — and, for me, best — reason to pick up the book is that it further illustrates Ed Brubaker’s dexterity as a writer. I’ve long said that the thing that makes him so talented is that if his name wasn’t on the cover of his comics, you wouldn’t be able to recognize him as the author (also, his books are all quite good).

Unlike a Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis or Brian Michael Bendis, Brubaker writes comics without stamping his voice all over them. And, in [[[The Dead Boy Detectives]]], he shows off a wholly new voice, slipping seamlessly into the world of the ghostly boy sleuths and their London setting.

Like all great P.I. stories, this one begins with a girl, then gets all weird with shriveled dead bodies, witches and immortal creeps. It’s not quite unpredictable yet manages to be surprising.

But, mostly, the great characterization of ghosts Charles and Edwin and their childish interplay is what makes this one a winner. Well, that and the other reasons listed above.

Van Jensen is a former crime reporter turned comic book journalist. Every Wednesday, he braves Atlanta traffic to visit Oxford Comics, where he reads a whole mess of books for his weekly Reviews. Van’s blog can be found at graphicfiction.wordpress.com.

Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Van Jensen directly at van (dot) jensen (at) comicmix (dot) com.

Review: ‘Red Colored Elegy’ by Seiichi Hayashi

red-colored-elegy-8097679Red Colored Elegy
By Seiichi Hayashi
Drawn & Quarterly, July 2008, $24.95

[[[Red Colored Elegy]]] is like no other manga you’ve ever seen, a blast of pop art- and film-inspired storytelling from 1971 that was hugely influential to a generation of Japanese youth but has never been published in English until now. It’s like the American underground comics of the same era in being a break from the mainstream comics of its place and era, but unlike them – and unlike anything else I’ve seen before [[[RAW]]] in the ‘80s – in its style and visual language.

Sachiko Yamaguchi and Ichiro Nishimoto are a young couple, both connected to the manga/anime world, living together in Tokyo but unsure of what to do with their lives, in the way of all restless young people everywhere. Ichiro wants to be an artist of some kind: he abandoned painting when he couldn’t make a living at it, and quits an animation job to work on a graphic novel that he can’t sell. Sachiko is a tracer for another animation company; she has only the ambitions of a girl in a story by a man: to get married, to have kids, to run a house, to have a life.

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Review: ‘Flight, Vol. 5’ edited by Kazu Kibuishi

 flight-51-4889565Flight, Volume Five
Edited by Kazu Kibuishi
Villard/Random House, July 2008, $25.00

As always, the stories in the annual [[[Flight]]] volume are gorgeous and fun, created by a group of artists who worked on storyboards and other art for animated movies, and Flight is easily the most visually diverse of the new breed of mass-market comics anthologies.

But I can’t help but think that most of these stories are square watermelons – the products of creators trained and taught to run their imaginations down narrow channels to produce upbeat, kid-friendly stories with defined beats and clear morals. Nearly every story in Flight 5 could be seen as the treatment for a big-budget “family” animated movie, and many of them feel explicitly like the first scene or two of such a movie. Even once these guys – and all but two of them are guys, which some people may find notable – have been given the freedom of Flight, they continue to tell stories in that one, confined mode, like so many victims of Stockholm syndrome unwilling to leave their own prisons.

The stories are each well-told, but, as they pile up one after another, the number of naïf protagonists learning about the world (often under mortal peril) become just more variations on the same theme. There’s the fox-like world-saver of Michael Gagne’s “[[[The Broken Path]]],” the anthropomorphic fox-man of Reagan Lodge’s “[[[The Dragon]]],” the self-consciously ironic Bigdome of Paul Rivoche’s “[[[Flowers for Mama]]],” Dave Roman’s series of folks who could all be “The Chosen One,” the probably-delusional child Princess of Pluto in Svetlana Chmakova’s “On the Importance of Space Travel,” and – the youngest and most obvious lesson-telling of all of these – boy hero of Richard Pose’s “Beisbol 2.”

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Review: ‘After 9/11’ by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón

97808090237071-8612528A few years back, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón came up with the novel idea of retelling the 9/11 Commission Report in comic book form.

Now they’re back with something of a sequel, After 9/11: America’s War on Terror (Hill and Wang, $16.95). While their earlier book was a simple recreation of an existing document, this is a more impressive endeavor, as they compile facts from a great number of sources to create one of the most encompassing yet looks at our ongoing wars.

I really only have one criticism. The book is labeled “graphic journalism,” which is a bit of a misnomer. The creators did no original reporting, as far as I can tell, instead researching media reports for their information.

It’s really an illustrated work of history, an encompassing paper-bound documentary of the past seven years in American foreign policy. Which is to say it’s a pretty depressing read.

The creators organize their collection of news reports and government documents in chronological form, as the U.S. launches its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter through no small part of deception.

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Review: ‘Astro City: Dark Age’ by Kurt Busiek

9383_400x600-6430301Kurt Busiek’s brain is about average-sized, I assume. And yet it contains this entire city, detailed down to every last resident’s personality and scrap of trash in the street.

His mastery of [[[Astro City]]] is on full display in the latest collection of the WildStorm series, The Dark Age ($29.99). Busiek ventures back to the not-so-pleasant past to tell the story of two brothers who go on very different paths amidst the chaos of superheroes and villains.

We’ve seen plenty of examples of superhero stories told in a down-to-earth way, or viewed from the average man’s perspective, maybe most notably in Busiek’s acclaimed [[[Marvels]]] with Alex Ross (who provides the killer cover at right). Neither of those elements is what sets Astro City apart, though they fuel its success.

Rather, its the depth to which Busiek explores the brothers’ lives (and those of everyone else). Charles and Royal Williams go through childhood tragedy and end up on opposite ends of the law.

Each is plagued in his own way by the super-powered element, with the bombastic battles tearing Astro City apart.

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Review: ‘Scout, Vol. 2’ by Timothy Truman

scout2-5451664Scout, Volume Two
By Timothy Truman
Dynamite Entertainment, July 2008, $19.95

This, as you might have guessed from the title of the book, is the second collection of Tim Truman’s [[[Scout]]] series, originally published over twenty-four issues starting in 1987 from Eclipse Comics. (You young ‘uns won’t know from Eclipse, but they were one of the major “indy” comics companies, back before anybody used that term.) The first Scout collection came out last year, and I reviewed it then.

To recap: Scout is set in a world of the worst fears of mid-‘80s liberals: global warming ran riot, turning most of the US into a desert; the US government collapsed into corporate fascism; the US economy basically dried up and blew away; and everything generally went to hell. It also went to hell really, really quickly, since Scout starts in 1999, only twelve years after it was originally published. By the beginning of this volume – the eighth issue and the start of a new plotline – it’s possibly a year later than that, but everything is still horrible, and getting even worse. (It’s one of those post-apocalypse settings in which regular people, like you and me, seem to have all died off quietly, without even leaving rotting corpses or giant piles of bones behind, so that the tough survivalist types can battle it out over the scarce resources left.)

But Scout’s world is different from our own in other ways: it’s not really a science-fictional world, despite being set in the near future. Various kinds of magic and mysticism really do work, and our hero, former Army Ranger Emanuel Santana, is explicitly on a mission to destroy a series of legendary monsters that are behind the USA’s troubles. (The first storyline was called “[[[The Four Monsters]]];” in that, he tracked down and killed four monsters from Apache mythology, all masquerading as powerful humans. At the beginning of this volume, his spirit guide – a talking prairie dog called Gahn – leads Santana to the next monster, which is a part of him.)

 

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Review: Creepy Archives Volume 1

Pretty soon, this is going to turn into a review of Dark Horse’s [[[Creepy Archives Volume 1]]]. Hang in there; I’ll get to it, I promise.

I miss Archie Goodwin, particularly this time of year. He died 10 years ago from cancer at the ridiculously young age of 60. He was one of the best writers this medium has ever seen. In a field that sports the talents of Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer, and Dennis O’Neil, Archie was of that highest caliber. If Archie ghosted bible tracks for Jack Chick, I would have read them. He was that good.

As a human being, he was even better. A life-long EC Comics fan (you could see it in his work, as well as in those with whom he chose to associate), for a couple years Archie and I had adjoining offices at DC Comics. We used to go out to lunch and talk about, oh, [[[Tales From The Crypt]]] and Ronald Reagan. Did I mention Archie was very politically aware? Read his [[[Blazing Combat]]] stories. Anyway, sometimes our conversations scared the Manhattan businessmen who sat near us.

Archie enjoyed that. I enjoyed those conversations immensely; I wish I could relive them.

So why do miss Archie “particularly this time of year”? This is convention season. No matter where we were, we would run into each other a couple times each year at various airport gates. He could be leaving from New York and I from Chicago and we’d run into each other on connecting flights in Denver. We could both be at a show in, oh, his native Kansas City and we could be flying to two different places, but we’d still share the first leg of our respective flights. At first it was uncanny; quickly, it became another fact of life.

I haven’t met all 6,500,000,000 people on this planet, but based upon my unscientific sampling I can state with complete confidence that there are few people with greater wit, charm, and intelligence. So there.

This brings us to Dark Horse’s Creepy Archives Volume 1. Archie started writing for Jim Warren’s Creepy with the first issue; by issue two he was story editor and issue four he was the sole credited editor. He wrote most of the stories and, therefore, did a lot to define the 1960s horror story while working with a lot of EC greats like Reed Crandall, Jack Davis, Al Williamson, Alex Toth, George Evans, Joe Orlando, Wally Wood and Frank Frazetta. As time progressed, he added younger talent like Gray Morrow, Neal Adams, and Steve Ditko.

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Doctor Who in Review: Season Four, Episode #13 – “Journey’s End”

The hit BBC series Doctor Who is now in its fourth season on the Sci-Fi Channel, and since we’re all big fans here at ComicMix, we’ve decided to kick off an episode-by-episode analysis of the reinvigorated science-fiction classic.

Every week, I’ll do my best to go through the most recent episode with a fine-tooth comb (or whatever the “sonic screwdriver” equivalent might be) and call out the highlights, low points, continuity checks and storyline hints I can find to keep in mind for future episodes. I’ll post the review each Monday, so you have ample time to check out the episode once it airs each Friday at 9 PM EST on Sci-Fi Channel before I spoil anything.

Missed a week? Check out the “Doctor Who in Review” archive or check out any of the past editions of this column via the links at the end of this article.

Keep in mind, I’m going to assume readers have already watched the episode when I put fingers to keyboard and come up with the roundup of important plot points. In other words, SPOILER ALERT!

Let’s begin now, shall we?

Season Four, Episode #13: “Journey’s End”

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Review: ‘Meathaus: SOS’

meathauscover1-1371309I was talking to cartoonist Jim Rugg recently about comics anthologies, and he said his thought as a reader is that each collection should have one great story, and then anything else good is just gravy.

In the case of the latest volume of Meathaus, SOS (Nerdcore, $30), Rugg’s Afrodisiac story is the gravy. His old-school, dot-matrix-styled, blaxploitation character has a predictably badass encounter with vampires.

The one great story in SOS, then, is the volume’s first entry, a longish bizarro riff on [[[Zelda]]] (I think) from Farel Dalrymple. It’s a story of two brothers who stumble into a mysterious cave and are attacked by an evil elf wearing a fedora and trench coat.

Dalrymple’s art is as energetic as ever, and the story is a strangely edited puzzler that’s worth multiple reads.

There’s plenty more gravy in the 272 pages. Most notably Dash Shaw’s melding of science fiction and nude modeling for art classes. I don’t think any more needs to be said.

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