Category: Reviews

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Laika

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This graphic novel is pretty good just on its own terms, but it’s an excellent object lesson. If you know of anyone who thinks that comics are essentially limited in scope to brightly-clad folks punching each other with great vigor, this will help to expand their horizons. It’s the story of Laika, a Russian dog who was the first living creature from Earth deliberately sent outside the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s an impressively-researched story braiding a fictional back-story for Laika (and several other characters I believe are also fictionalized) with the story of the “Chief Designer” of the early Russian space program, Sergei Korolev. And all that is told in comics, and, I suspect, primarily aimed at the grade 6-12 audience.

I’m not familiar with Adadzis’s work, but the note on him in [[[Laika]]] calls him an editorial consultant who “creates words and pictures for a living and loves both equally.” According to his website, muck of his work has been for children, especially recently, though he did something called Millennium Fever (with Duncan Fegredo) for Vertigo in 1995 and [[[Children of the Voyager]]] (with Paul Johnson) for Marvel in 1993.

Laika is a dense book; we start off with a flashback to Korolev’s release from the gulag in 1939, stop briefly at the first successful Sputnik launch in 1957, and then dive back into a long account of the life of a dog. (Who, as we all can guess, eventually becomes Laika.) This graphic novel is about two hundred pages long, and each page has about ten small panels, in shifting grids with occasional snippets of white space. And there’s quite a lot of dialogue along the way, in what I’m tempted to call the Russian manner. It’s not a quick read by any means, and the panels can get quite cramped at times. It’s never difficult to read, but there is an awful lot here. Those who judge books by how much time they take to read should enjoy Laika.

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D2DVD REVIEW: The Film Crew

 

51yyhys0wyl-_aa240_-9001373Okay, I admit it. I’m still a fan of [[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]], the long-running teevee series that featured four robots and a loser riffing on a couple hundred B-flicks… if you’re feeling particularly generous about that “B” part. Michael J. Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy were among the show’s writers and producers. They were also performers – Corbett with the eighth season, Murphy with second season. Nelson, who was head writer from the start, played odd parts for the first four seasons and took over the lead when creator Joel Hodgson left the show at the beginning of season five. The show ran from 1988 through 1999 and begat a feature film.

And I miss it a lot. Particularly after a presidential press conference.

So it was with missed emotions that I popped the first D2DVD by The Film Crew, [[[Hollywood After Dark]]], into my machine. This can’t possibly be as cool as Mystery Science Theater 3000, I thought. And I was only barely right. Nelson, Corbett and Murphy did what they do best: use a contrived reason to sit in a darkened theater and make jokes about a really horrible movie… but without the trademarked silhouette.

If the phrase “sexy Rue McClanahan” sounds like an oxymoron, Hollywood After Dark certainly provides the proof. It is perfectly horrible; it was made for Nelson, Corbett and Murphy to eviscerate. They were fully up to the task, and since the three were also the voices of the featured riffers in MST3K’s last three seasons, if you close your eyes it seems a lot like the original. They only have about half the number of writers, so the material isn’t quite as sharp.

The presentation was bisected by one studio bit, and here’s where I’m having a hard time shaking off MST3K. The ‘Bots had wonderfully wacky and occasionally evil personalities; the Film Crew enjoys its work and is perfectly fine with their environs. No tension, at least not in this first offering.

Shout! will be releasing three more Film Crew D2DVDs this year, and I suspect they’re already looking at their orders and deciding if there will be more. I have great confidence in the Film Crew, and Hollywood After Dark was a good if not great first offering. They will settle comfortably in their new roles.

I recommend this to my fellow MSTies. Yeah, there’s no ‘Bots. Deal with it.

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Screw Heaven, When I Die I’m Going to Mars

screw-7449533Shannon Wheeler (no relation, as far as I know) is, of course, the creator of Too Much Coffee Man, and also the possessor of the world’s greatest surname. (Trust me: I know.) This is his new book, which is not another TMCM collection, though TMCM does show up in a couple of strips.

Screw Heaven is copyright 2007, and doesn’t contain any information about previous appearances of any of the strips collected in it. That either means that it’s all completely new and never-before seen (plausible, but I’d expect the book would hold together more coherently if that were the case) or that Dark Horse neglected to mention that these are from Wheeler’s previously-published comics, or website, or magazine work, or something else entirely. I’m a suspicious, pessimistic, grumpy guy, so I’m assuming that the latter is actually the case – though I have no evidence either way.

Screw Heaven opens with an introduction by Jesse Michaels (singer of something called Operation Ivy, of which I have never heard) and then dives into twelve “chapters,” each with between one and twenty single-page cartoons. Some of the chapters collect cartoons that clearly go together; chapter three, for example, is nearly a complete narrative. Others are more general, and only tied together by a theme.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: The Professor’s Daughter

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According to their publisher, First Second, Sfar and Guibert have had very complicated careers. Both of them write and draw, separately and together, so they each have individual works, and they each have illustrated the other’s scripts. The Professor’s Daughter – originally published in France in 1997 – was their first collaboration and their first notable success. It’s just now made it to the USA, trailing some later works by Sfar (such as The Rabbi’s Cat, which attracted a lot of favorable attention two years ago) and by both of them (the children’s series Sardine in Outer Space).

The Professor’s Daughter is album-length – 64 pages, plus some sketches and background materials as an appendix – but has a small trim size, about 5” x 8”. It’s a generally handsome book, with French flaps, cleanly white pages, and sizable margins.

The story begins without any exposition: a young woman is going out for a walk with a walking, talking mummy. We quickly learn that she is Lillian, the professor’s daughter of the title, that he is the Pharaoh Imhotep IV (and the property of her father), and that it is sometime late in the reign of Queen Victoria. We never do learn why Imhotep is mobile and active now – or why he wasn’t in the past – that’s the premise, and we have to take it for granted. (more…)

TV REVIEW: Jekyll

bbcjekyll-9178210What if the story of Jekyll and Hyde were based on a real person, a true case? And what if there were someone alive in the present day that had the same horrible curse?

This is the premise of the new BBC mini-series Jekyll, premiering this Saturday at 8 PM on BBC America. The series was envisioned by producer Jeffrey Taylor and Steven Moffat, creator of the British comedy Coupling and writer of several episodes of the new Doctor Who series (such as “[[[The Girl In The Fireplace]]]” and “[[[The Empty Child]]]”). Steven Moffat handles the writing for all episodes.

The six episode mini-series features Doctor Tom Jackman, a man who doesn’t know who his parents were, having been found as an abandoned baby in a railway station. For the past several months, Dr. Jackman has been having black-outs during which another force is inexplicably inhabiting his body. Along with this darker personality that seems to lack any morals, there is a physical change. Jackman’s alter ego is actually younger, thinner, two inches taller, and has borderline superhuman strength and speed. Jackman soon finds out that the famous story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was based on a real person who lived and died in the 19th century. Now Jackman struggles to keep his life in control and his family safe, a family he prays that his own “Mr. Hyde” will never find out about lest he decide to attack them.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Spent

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Joe Matt is a lazy, pornography-obsessed cartoonist whose main (or possibly only) subject is his own miserable life. If you’ve heard of Matt’s work before, you’re probably wondering why I’m restating the obvious. If you’ve never heard of Matt before, you’re probably wondering how much of a career one can get out of that – well, it’s not a deep well, but he’s been at it for nearly twenty years.

Spent collects four issues of Matt’s comic Peepshow; it’s essentially a sequel to his first full-length graphic novel, The Poor Bastard. Poor Bastard was mostly about his rocky relationship with his girlfriend Trish in the early ‘90s, and Spent’s four issues take place in 1994, 1996, 1998, and 2002, respectively. (And the really sad and pathetic thing is that Matt’s depicted life didn’t change in the slightest between ’94 and ’02; these issues read almost as if they’re four successive days.) Matt is seen either in company with his two cartoonist friends, Seth and Chester Brown, or (generally alone) in his room, obsessing about himself and talking to the reader.

Now, what I say from here on applies to the “Joe Matt” who is the main character of Spent; it may or may not precisely describe the real-world Joe Matt, though, to all appearances, he does document his life quite honestly. (And a tip of the hat to my fellow comics reviewer Jeff VanderMeer, with whom I spent several enjoyable months last year debating such things as how much of the “Bret Easton Ellis” in Lunar Park can be mapped onto the man of the same name who wrote that novel.) (more…)

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DVD Review: Fleisher’s Popeye

 

jerry-beck1-1924481Note:  All you need to know is that Popeye is back, on DVD, this Tuesday, July 31.  If you’re not getting up to go place your order I guess you can continue reading if you want, but that’s all you really need to know.  Otherwise, know that —

The modest and self-effacing Jerry Beck has once again returned from animation’s mountaintop with the real deal in the form of [[[Popeye The Sailor, 1933-1938]]]. Sixty cartoons on four discs, plus plenty bonus features, commentary, the works.  To the purist, and why be in pop culture if not to root out the impure, these are the only Popeye cartoons worth the name.

Not since their theatrical release, all those decades ago, have people been able to see these works as they were intended to be seen.  This of course assumes you are going to show them in a jammed movie palace on Saturday night filled with everyone in your town from eight to eighty who’ve just seen a newsreel starring Mussolini.

I don’t have to tell you that every studio but Disney thought their cartoons were an embarrassing necessity of the business, like Port-o-Sans at Woodstock. Once the studios didn’t need to program short subjects along with their features they dropped them thisquick.

They lived on in fragile prints, before the age of videotape, picking up scratches and noise each time they were put through your local television station’s film chain.  When Hanna-Barbera’s half hour shows became widely available in their second run the broadcasters decided to save themselves a few minutes trouble and ditch the short cartoons for the new, half-hour, self contained shows.

It is some testimony to their naïve sense of duty to their customers that most TV stations had one of their employees put on a yachting hat or an engineer’s cap and pretend to be Sailor Sam or Casey Jones for an hour or so to keep the cartoons from bumping into the commercials.  The half hour TV era cartoon shows let the stations save the money on the host segments (the host was the least of it; they had to light a set and staff the studio: a couple of cameramen, a floor director, a director and an engineer).

But what we tuned in for were the cartoons.  And we could tell the old Hollywood cartoons were the gold standard.  First of all, they were obscure.  We didn’t get all the jokes, didn’t understand all the references, just like when we observed the grown-ups.  There were jokes we got the first time, and we came back because we could instinctively tell from the timing that there were more laughs to be had, and even more precious, insights into the adult world not to be had in any other way.

Olive, for example, at one point sang that she would only consider a “clean shaven man,” a new idea to second grade boys.  Bluto’s beard and Popeye’s stubble were random phenomena to us, like rabbits having long ears.  We weren’t aware of the idle pleasures of beard husbandry or the agony of a daily shave.  But the knowledge of Olive’s preference (and the goddam song) stay with you a lifetime.

Warners and Columbia were glad to get a few bucks for the rights to their now useless films from television distributors in the late 1940s.  The ubiquitous a.a.p. company marketed hundreds of cartoons to greedy television stations.  These cartoons, made by adults for a general audience, were now thought to be perfect children’s programming.  Of course they weren’t.  Children loved them, but so did everyone else.  Adults didn’t watch them because they were working or grabbing breakfast when the cartoons were on.  And the children of the ‘50s dined on a rich diet of adult cartoons, adult comedy shorts and re-runs of even earlier television programs, such as the history of vaudeville and burlesque sketch comedy contained in the Abbot and Costello.

The SDCC panel on the subject featured a couple of guys in the Popeye business today, a darling young couple, in the animation biz, who were, in a stretch of the term, brought together by the one-eyed sailor.  There was Jerry Beck to assure us the restoration was every bit as surreal and scarily sharp as the job done on the Looney Tunes sets.  And there was Tom Hatten.

If you haven’t gotten the idea yet, I love the now almost entirely gone, once ubiquitous children’s television hosts.  Sometimes incredibly gifted, gravitating to the major markets, sometimes Krusty on a Krutch, stuck inside of Springfield.

tom-hatten1-6886215Tom Hatten was Popeye’s man in Los Angeles and so, even though I’d never before laid eyes on the man, I can vouch for his talent and love for his craft.  Part of the job was doing personal appearances around town.  If it was anything like the one’s I went to in Cleveland, Ohio (Jungle Larry) and on Long Island (Soupy Sales) they were probably mob scenes.  Though not an animator, he had to draw sketches of the Popeye characters by the countless dozens.

I had to ask Hatten if he was aware of [[[The Simpson’s]]] Krusty the Clown, and whether he found him funny.  To my surprise, and sort of admiration, he said he found the limited, stylized animation so off-putting he can’t watch it.  He also singled out [[[Bullwinkle]]] for inclusion in that category.  So he didn’t know or wouldn’t say if he found insight or insult in their rendering of his professional fellows.

They played one of the documentary features, on the several people who’ve been the voice of Popeye, including, what I would call a surprise, even for San Diego, that Mae Questel, the voice of Olive Oyl, did a stint as Popeye, too, and was maybe second to the great Jack Mercer.  Mercer brought the character to life with his inspired ad lib comments, rising to brilliance when he would contribute scat fills between the phrases when Popeye would sing a song.

The set is peerless entertainment, higher education and made by my good friend Jerry Beck, whose web site, Cartoonbrew.com is a must visit for all cartoon freaks everywhere.  But don’t worry about some buddy-buddy thing going on here.  If you like Popeye, if you miss those great black and white cartoons (and the couple of color shorts they did) this is for you.  I’ll be the guy ahead of you in line Tuesday morning.  Just don’t blow me down.

Popeye the Sailor: 1933-1938, Vol. 1; Warner Home Video.

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: The Saga of the Bloody Benders

benders-9425765It’s been twenty years since Geary’s original A Treasury of Victorian Murder was published – and who would have thought, then, that a slim book of arch graphic short stories about little-known murders in Victorian England would be the beginning of the comics Geary would spend most of the decades to come creating? The first of the smaller-format, single-case volumes, Jack the Ripper, followed in 1995, with a new book every other year through 2005’s The Murder of Abraham Lincoln. Then 2006 saw The Case of Madeleine Smith, and this year yet another new Geary murder case.

Except for the first volume, each “Treasury of Victorian Murder” is a small book – about 5½ “ x 8¼” with roughly eighty pages of comics – about a particular, somewhat famous murder case from 19th century England or the USA. He’s covered the deaths of two Presidents – Lincoln and Garfield – and the cases "H.H. Holmes," Lizzie Borden, and Jack the Ripper. The remaining two books – about Mary Rogers and Madeleine Smith – are about famous sensational cases, crimes of passion.

The Bender “family” – there’s some doubt as to whether they were actually related, as they claimed to be – of Labette County, Kansas are not quite as famous as most of those cases (though I hadn’t heard of Madeleine Smith before, either). But they were certainly actively murderous and impressively mysterious, so their story gives Geary quite a bit to dig into. The Benders arrived in that raw, rural area of Kansas in 1870, very soon after the Civil War and not much longer after Kansas became a state in 1861. They set up a single-room (divided by a hanging canvas) inn and grocery on the major trail through the area, and settled into the community – considered eccentric, certainly, but basically accepted.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: The Black Diamond Detective Agency

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The Black Diamond Detective Agency is a bit of an anomaly for Eddie Campbell – it’s a book he wrote and illustrated alone that nevertheless is not concerned with stories or storytelling in any way. Campbell’s probably best-known for illustrating From Hell from Alan Moore’s famously copious scripts, but most of his work has been writing and drawing his own stories, sometimes with help from a loose band of local Australian cartoonists.

His two long-running sequences are both deeply about story: Bacchus consists of the tales of the few remaining Greek gods in the modern world, and contains many tales-within-tales, retold stories, and other storytelling conceits. The “Alec MacGarry” stories are even more entwined with stories, since they’re Campbell’s thinly-veiled autobiography about his own life as a comics creator, and are, at their heart, about the process of creating art and stories.

So it’s a bit odd to find that Black Diamond is a conventional detective story – a murder mystery, to be precise – set at the turn of the 20th century in the American Midwest. (That last is also surprising since Campbell is a Scot long resident in Australia – middle America isn’t his part of the world at all.) The story begins with a mysterious man in Lebanon, Missouri witnessing the explosion of a train during a demonstration and then helping to pull the wounded from the wreckage. He’s soon arrested and questioned, since the boxes of nitro used to blow up the train have his name on them.

It gets more complicated from there, but the focus is on that man of several names and on the investigation run by the Black Diamond Agency (which stands in for the real-life Pinkertons) of the explosion and related events. And, showing its origin as a screenplay, there’s a Big Secret at the end, which will be familiar to many – we’ve seen a story much like this many times before.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: The Architect

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Imaginative literature thrives on the “what if?” story. What if aliens invaded Earth? What if vampires were real? What if a superpowered infant was rocketed to Earth from a doomed planet?

Or, in this case: what if Frank Lloyd Wright were an insane evil druid whose wrath extended years after his death?

OK, the architect in this graphic novel isn’t precisely Wright. He’s a prickly, arrogant, obnoxious know-it-all (so far, that doesn’t just describe Wright, but all architects) building his dream home (with some Fallingwater-esque elements) in 1969 Wisconsin. He’s running low on money, but that never stops arrogant, visionary architects in imaginative fiction – he just runs off to do some lectures to raise some money. Which leaves his young, city-jaded, hot-to-trot wife alone, and bored, in the company of the young, dashing, level-headed construction foreman. Do I need to draw you a diagram?

I draw a veil over what happens next, except to say that the bulk of this graphic novel  (which has seventy pages of story, for those counting at home) takes place in the present day, among a group of young people cleaning up and restoring the aforementioned dream home.

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