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Review: Wolverine reference books

It’s fascinating to see the same material presented in competing books, approached in entirely different ways.  DK Publishing, the successful home to the various character-specific Ultimate Guides, offers up Wolverine: Inside the World of the Living Weapon (200 pages, $24.99) while Pocket Books, which has been home to the Marvel novels, gives us The Wolverine Files (160 pages, $40).  The former is written by DK mainstay Matthew K. Manning while Mike W. Barr, not a writer normally associated with guide books or Wolverine, handles the second book.

Both detail the character’s background, his friends, his foes, his greatest capers, and a look at his deeply fractured psyche and tortured soul. 

However, Manning’s book gives readers a far more detailed accounting of the backgrounds of the characters and storylines. Taking a chronological approach, he offers up overview of specific eras followed by key issue spotlights plus long looks at the key people in his life, both the good and the evil. Interspersed are also short bits regarding how the stories fit in with the overall publishing program at Marvel along with some insight into the creators and their efforts.  As a result, this is a far richer, and cheaper, reading experience.

DK, known for its hyperkinetic layouts, tones things done here and makes each spread easier to read, with nice call outs, and judicious graphic selections showing the great range of art styles employed through the years.

If this book is to be faulted, it’s in not providing enough information regarding the behind-the-scenes work that led to these stories and events. For example, why did Bill Jemas decide that 2001 was the time to finally provide Logan with an origin?  Also, Wolverine’s unusual friendships with Jubilee and Kitty Pryde are given short-shrift and both deserved more space.

Barr’s approach is the more creative, with files, reports, letters and memos from the people in Wolverine’s life summing up the man’s background and career. Written from the point of view of Nick Fury, Natasha Romanov, Jasper Sitwell and others, it has varied voices which make for a different reading experience.

The book is more cleanly designed, resembling a S.H.I.E.L.D. case file with tabs along the edge to replicate the look of a report. There are margin notes from Fury and sections are redacted to give it that “declassified look”. The profiles of people and places read not too different from a Marvel Handbook page and the art skews to the works from the last decade and could have benefited from material culled from earlier points in his publishing career.

While a more varied read, it’s also not as complete a dossier and for $40, it should offer a lot more, especially with the competitive book.

If both books are beyond your wallet, Marvel competes with their licensees with [[[Wolverine: Weapon X Files]]], a 64-page comic book for a mere $4.99. Head writer Jeff Christiansen and his ten colleagues have the advantage of the files being the most up-to-date given the shorter schedule for a comic versus a book. The Handbook pages follow the traditional format and scream for a redesign and the pick-up art is hit or miss.

Want more Wolverine after seeing the movie this weekend? You have plenty of options.

Manga Friday: A Drifting Life

A Drifting Life
By Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Drawn & Quarterly, April 2009, $29.99

It’s hard, sometimes impossible, to avoid a tunnel-visioned view of the world – not to have one’s mental map of things resemble that famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, with familiar things reassuringly large and the rest of the world a small, distant blur. And so everything we learn gets filtered through that initial world-view, with each fact setting itself into place like a brick and used as shorthand for huge swaths of that surrounding blur, and a few isolated facts pass for “knowledge” of something far away.

For most of us, the history of manga goes like this: Tezuka sprung, fully-formed, sometime after the war. There were other creators, but hardly anybody can remember any of them. Eventually, the shonen-shojo gulf appeared, in the ‘70s, and real manga history started, with series that we can usually remember and some that we’ve actually read. Maybe we believe that because so very little of the first generation of manga has ever been translated into English, and maybe that’s because most of those stories are utterly ephemeral and best forgotten even by the Japanese. Or maybe not – but how would we know what was good, what the artistic movements, the creators, the publishing lines and magazines were fifty years ago in a country on the other side of the world, in a language where we can’t even tell where words end?

That’s where A Drifting Life comes in. It’s another one of those bricks: isolated, yes. Specific rather than comprehensive, absolutely. Biased, certainly. But it’s the story of those years, of the early days of manga from 1945 through 1960, from a creator who was there, and telling a semi-fictionalized story of a culture, an industry and a time we knew nothing about before.

Drawn & Quarterly has published three books of Tatsumi’s work before this, three collections of his short stories from the 1969-1972 period: The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-Bye. A Drifting Life comes from somewhat later in his career, though how much later isn’t clear. It’s been said that Tatsumi worked on this for more than a decade, and the epilogue – set in 1995 – has the feeling of bringing the story up to the “present day.” So, from that evidence, I surmise that Tatsumi worked on A Drifting Life from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, with serious uncertainty about both ends of that assumption. But it does look like he came to write this memoir long after the events he’s writing about, and probably at least a decade after he created the other stories we’ve seen from him. (more…)

The Many Origins of Wolverine

If you’ve read ORIGIN: The Story of Wolverine, Weapon X and various issues of his own title and the X-Men books, then you know the basic background of the mysterious mutant called Logan and the secrets behind who he was in the past. It took many years to piece together, but we finally learned the truth.

Basically, Wolverine was born James Howlett, later taking on the name Logan after discovering he was a mutant with heightened senses, advanced healing, a connection to animals, and bone claws that could extend from his hand.

Logan traveled the world, becoming a samurai at heart, later becoming involved in the Weapon X project, working alongside his old enemy Victor Creed AKA Sabretooth, a mutant who had similar abilities but none of Logan’s compassion. Weapon X eventually attempted to turn him into a bio-weapon, burying most of his memoies, implanting false ones, and lacing his skeleton and bone claws with the unbreakable metal adamantium. After escaping Weapon X, he worked for the government for a few years before finally joining the X-Men. Since then, he has become a true hero, discovering his whole past in recent years.

But this story was not intended from the beginning. There were a few other proposed ideas for Wolverine that were discarded. There were ideas hinted at but later disproved or simply never followed up on.

Want to hear more? Read on. (more…)

Grave of the Anime Companies: Central Park Media Files for Bankruptcy

Anime and manga distributor Central Park Media filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last Friday, which means that the company does not plan to restructure and its assets will be liquidated. CPM put out such classic anime as “Revolutionary Girl Utena,” “Project A-Ko,” “Demon City Shinjuku” and “Grave of the Fireflies.” They also published yaoi manga under the Be Beautiful imprint as well as assorted shojo and shonen titles. However, they hadn’t issued any new releases in a year.

This news comes less than two years after the collapse of Geneon USA. Apparently, CPM won’t comment on how they got to this unfortunate pass, although they’ve obviously been struggling for some time. Of course, times are tough in publishing, and the bottom’s dropping out of the manga market in Japan. Geneon also cited illegal downloading as a factor in their troubles, and I’m wondering what role that played in CPM’s demise.

It’s sort of ironic, really. Fan subs and scanlations helped build the manga and anime industry in the U.S., and now they’re probably helping to tear it down.

Amy Goldschlager is an editor at findingDulcinea, the Librarian of the Internet, and SweetSearch, the smarter search engine.

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Marvelman / Miracleman to the Big Screen?

  • Uncategorized
  • April 30, 2009

miracleman-1-8932833A highly placed source with one of Hollywood’s leading film production companies has revealed to ComicMix that an agent for a Scottish businessman has been offering around to studios and producers the purported feature film rights to Marvelman, the superhero property whose rights status has been in limbo since publisher Eclipse Comics went into bankruptcy in the middle of Neil Gaiman’s iconic run as its writer more than twenty years ago.

Any movement tending to resolve the rights to Marvelman – and to bring it back into print – would be welcome news for fans who have been following the Marvelman saga for more than two decades and been put through a roller coaster ride of ups and downs as a litany of claimants to the rights to Miracleman have continually come out of the woodwork.

When the title was first brought into the United States from England, Eclipse Comics prudently changed Marvelman to Miracleman to avoid obvious potential trademark issues with Marvel Comics, and the series has continued to generate interest in the comics world more than twenty years after it was last published. One top comics editor, speaking not-for-attribution, told ComicMix that “If a publisher could actually be assured that they had the rights to publish the title, and most importantly, if Neil would license the rights to his scripts and would agree to finish the scripts for the story he started but never got to finish, the book sales would be through the roof – we’re talking astronomical. The fact that the title got into the Gaiman/McFarlane litigation has kept it in the spotlight. And Alan Moore wrote issues of the title before Neil, and Alan still has a bit of a following. But Alan isn’t the key to the deal. It’s all about Gaiman.”

(more…)

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Forrest J Ackerman estate auction begins today

  • Uncategorized
  • April 30, 2009

dracula-book02-1-7057876The most impressive science fiction collection in the world— and yes, I say it’s even more impressive than the one at Skywalker Ranch– will be going on the auction block today starting at 12 noon Pacific time, and continuing tomorrow, May 1st, at 11am Pacific time.

How impressive is it? Look at that photo to the right, which is lot #660 in the auction..

That’s a first edition of Dracula. Not impressed? It’s a first edition signed by the author, Bram Stoker.

That would be enough for most people– but not Forry. He went farther and got it autographed by Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Bill Obbagy, Ingrid Pitt, Karl Freund, Donald A. Reed, Barry Atwater, Maila Nurmi a.k.a. “Vampira”, Carla Laemmle, Carroll Borland, John Carradine, Raymond McNally, Ferdy Mayne, Paul Naschy, Barbara Leigh… and Bela Lugosi.

Take a look.

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You can bid by phone or online. Or you can just download the catalogs and drool over…

  • The dress Rita Hayworth wore in Gilda.
  • The original art for Vampirella #1.
  • Darth Maul’s lightsaber.
  • The original head of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. 
  • Dracula’s cape and signet ring.
  • Cylons. Full size.
  • Adam West’s Batman uniform and Lee Meriwether’s Catwoman outfit.
  • Paintings from Rod Serling’s Night Galllery.
  • Inspector Clouseau’s trenchcoat.
  • The Voight-Kampff test manual from Blade Runner.
  • Rambo’s bow and arrows.
  • The hero crystal shard from The Dark Crystal.
  • Ferris Bueller’s leather jacket.
  • Swimsuits from Baywatch.
  • The Shadow’s cloak, scarf, and fedora.
  • Judge Dredd’s helmet.
  • Lara Croft’s pistols.
  • The Jumanji game.
  • Terminators of all shapes and sizes.
  • Batman’s cowl and cape.
  • Riddler’s cane.
  • Mr. Freeze’s armor.
  • The Green Goblin’s trident.
  • Zorro’s mask, cape, and whip.
  • D’Artagnan and the Musketeer’s swords.
  • Uncle Junior Soprano’s revolver.
  • Alien eggs. 
  • Wolverine’s dogtags– hell, Wolverine’s claws.
  • Autographs and photos and title cards from everybody.
  • And yes– even a Golden Ticket.

Download the Catalog here as a .zip file, or download the PDFs individually.
Lots 1-166 | 167-349 | 350-522 | 523-753 | 754-939 | 940-1114 | 1114-1174

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Review: ‘Hulk Vs.’

  • Uncategorized
  • April 30, 2009

hulk-se-6313438Marvel has had varying degrees of success with the direct-to-video efforts but the program continues and there’s little surprise that the most recent offering featured Wolverine, given the release this week of [[[X-Men Origins: Wolverine]]]. What is odd is that Lionsgate chose to release the video Hulk Vs. in January, too late for the holidays and too early to capitalize on the Fox feature.

The two-disc set features separate Hulk features and shine very different lights on the character. In the first, Wolverine is assigned to hunt down a monster crossing the border from America, codenamed the Hulk. Along the way, the two battle with much carnage but then the plot is complicated by the arrival of several foes from throughout Weapon X’s career – Lady Deathstrike, Sabretooth, Omega Red, and Deadpool. In the 37 minute story, there are numerous flashbacks to the Weapon X program and how Logan was turned into a living weapon.

Visually, it’s the best animated Wolverine we’ve seen yet. The character designs for his opponents are pretty terrific, but no surprise since they were handled by Jeff Matsuda. It’s also one of the best voice casts I’ve heard on a Marvel production. The story moves along nicely and the action is pretty relentless.

On the other hand, it’s not much of a Hulk story. Also, on their own, each of the villains has proven to be a match for Wolverine, but here, collectively, they’re dispatched with far too much ease, weakening their threat.

The second disc has a stronger story but weaker vocal casting and shows Loki using the Hulk as a pawn in his game against his half-brother Thor.  The 45 minute story is spent entirely in Asgard and pits not only Thor against the Hulk but Thor and Loki against Hel, bargaining for the soul of Bruce Banner. What happens to Banner is rather poignant and gives this tale an emotional wallop missing from the other adventure. If the forthcoming [[[Tales of Asgard]]] animated feature is anything like this, we’ll all benefit.

Each disc comes with an assortment of trailers in addition to Making Of featurettes. The Wolverine disc has footage from the Lionsgate panel at last summer’s San Diego convention while the Thor disc has a loving tribute to Jack Kirby.

If you have an insatiable appetite for the ol’ canucklehead, you could do worse than investing your time with this DVD set.

Adam West faces his own economic lone justice

  • News
  • April 29, 2009

Okay, let’s say you were a costumed crimefighter, and you financed your crusade through your own personal fortune.

And then, for the sake of argument, you ran out of cash because of a nasty economic downturn, couldn’t pay the upkeep on all those wonderful toys.

Sounds like a great idea for a story, right? You could do an entire graphic novel about it, and chronicle the struggles as you struggle to make ends meet while still fighting the good fight against the forces of evil.

Or you could just sell everything off…

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Review: Showcase Presents Ambush Bug by Giffen, Fleming, Oksner, and others

  • Uncategorized
  • April 29, 2009

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Showcase Presents: Ambush Bug Vol. 1
Plot & Pencils by Keith Giffen, Script by Robert Loren Fleming, Inks by Bob Oksner (for most of the stories)
DC Comics, March 2009, $16.99

We all have to look back at the comics of our youth once in a while. It’s not always a pleasant experience, particularly when we’re reminded of what no-taste cretins we once were. But, once in a while, it’s possible to look back and discover that our taste wasn’t that bad, that something we remember as funny was actually clever and inventive as well. Even then, though, we might have to wade in pretty far before we get to the good stuff.

Ambush Bug started off as a random villain in a minor issue of a minor DC comic in late 1982 – DC Comics Presents #52, at that time the [[[Superman]]] team-up book – written by Paul Kupperberg, though the Bug was created by penciller Keith Giffen. He was there purely as an additional complication, as the A story in that issue saw a rampaging Negative Woman (from the then-new incarnation of the Doom Patrol) trashing Metropolis while Supes and her teammates tried to stop her. (And that issue is very of its time, with acres and acres of tedious explanatory dialogue like “The name’s Joshua Clay – Tempest to you, Superman. The lady calls herself Arani, or Celsius, take your pick! Put us together an’ you get the Doom Patrol” and similar decaying-Silver-Age tediousness.)

The Bug came back to DC Comics Presents slightly wackier, but still vaguely villainous, seven issues later, with Giffen taking over plotting as well and getting Paul Levitz to write an ostensible Superman-Legion of Super-Heroes team-up. It turned into a chase-the-wacky-villain around plot, something like a minor ‘50s Joker story. Kupperberg grabbed the Bug another six months later and made him wackier still for an issue of [[[Supergirl]]].

And then Giffen took the Bug back for good, putting him in three short stories for [[[Action Comics]]], where the core Bug team – Giffen on plots and pencils, Robert Loren Fleming providing script, and Bob Oksner on inks – came together. Giffen’s panels shoved into each other, eliminating gutters most of the time, and his Munoz-influenced period, all big noses, tight close-ups and odd angles, began – all of which gave the Bug’s stories a dark, cluttered, deeply nonheroic look. Oksner chipped in by dropped pots on ink on every page to fill Giffen’s blacks. And Fleming brought a light touch to the prose that made the stories funny and not just amusing.

(more…)

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