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Shelf Watch: This Week’s Comics

ikillgiants_cover-8368705Every week I look ahead at Diamond’s shipping lists to see what I’ll be reviewing for the Weekly Haul. Here’s what’s on tap this week (reminder, comics aren’t out till Thursday):

Not sure why, but I’m looking forward to Image’s I Kill Giants #1, even though I don’t have much of an idea what it’s about. The art reminds me a lot of Alex Robinson’s — but with more manga influences — so that might be a lot of it.

Dark Horse has a couple of usual suspects on the way in The Goon #26 and B.P.R.D.: The Warning #1, as well as the Hellboy: Oddest Jobs trade. I’ve been especially impressed with The Goon of late, after it nosedived when Eric Powell shifted his focus to Action Comics and the Chinatown GN.

DC has a fairly ho-hum slate. Tops would be Booster Gold #1000000, though DC’s Web site says that’s not coming out till next week. There’s Final Crisis Requiem, the one-shot that deals with the Martian Manhunter’s death (glossed over in Final Crisis), and the Batman books are tied into the lackluster RIP storyline. Nothing screams “must read.”

Marvel has a big headline with Secret Invasion #4, but aside from that there’s nothing of exceptional interest, aside from the preview for Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s Captain America: White and the always excellent Nova (issue 15). Am I the only one already tired of Matt Fraction’s Invincible Iron Man, even though only the third issue is coming out now?

In the small presses, there’s the eighth volume of Bone and the trade of Badger Saves the World. Other than that, pretty slim pickings.

What are you looking forward to?

Comics and Chris Ware in Virginia Quarterly Review

Comics have long battled against proponents of "serious literature," who have often decried comics as a less intellectual medium than prose.

In the past few years, comics have become increasingly accepted into popular culture, and now it seems they’re well established in the literary world too.

The Virginia Quarterly Review, one of the elite literary magazines, ran a special comics issue this spring, which I just happened across on a recent trip to the bookstore.

It features a cover by Art Spiegelman (seen at right) and, best of all, a new story from Chris Ware. The fictional biography of Jordan W. Lint shows the character’s life through a glance at single days of his existence.

You can see a preview at the VQR Web site, right here.

The Real Day Evil Won

Comic books usually fall back on stories of good versus evil, superheroes battling against villains with the fate of the world on the line.

DC Comics is taking a new spin on that with their big summer event, Final Crisis, which posits that the dark side of Darkseid has triumphed, and the heroes are left scrambling. Grant Morrison, the writer of that incoherent mess, would be well served to take a few lessons from an all too true story of evil defeating good.

In the not so recent past, a wealthy Oklahoma businessman swooped in to buy the Seattle Supersonics (my favorite team in my favorite league, the NBA). The new owner, Clay Bennett, agreed to keep the team in Seattle, where the Sonics had won a championship and built a legion of fans.

Gradually, it became clear Bennett wanted all along to steal the team away to Oklahoma City, spurning his supposed "good faith effort" to remain in Seattle. The man who’s supposed to oversee the NBA and prevent things like entire fan bases from being ripped off is commissioner David Stern, at right.

Unfortunately for Sonics fans, Stern and Bennett are old chums, so the commish managed to actually speed along the move, even telling Seattle it was the city’s fault.

The city did all it could to fight back, but ended up not having the muscle, and the Sonics are now history.

We’ll see if Superman, Batman and company end up victorious in Final Crisis. But in the real world, the good guys don’t always win.

ComicMix Six: The Best ‘Hellboy’ Stories

In previous editions of ComicMix Six, we’ve rounded up everything from Political Campaigns in Comics to Celebrity Team-Ups. This Friday marks the newest milestone for Mike Mignola’s Hellboy franchise, with the movie sequel Hellboy 2: The Golden Army hitting theaters, so this week’s list focuses on Mignola’s most popular creation.

The evil-fighting demon named "Hellboy" has been one of the most successful new superheroes introduced in the past 20 years, first appearing as a joke illustration from Mignola in the early 1990s and then evolving into his current incarnation to debut in a full-fledged Dark Horse comics series.

Now the Hellboy world is huge, comprising several Hellboy books, the B.P.R.D. line, video games and the Hellboy movies.

Picking through all those 15-plus years of content, here are the six very best Hellboy stories, from epics to little fairy tales, from Cavendish Hall to Hell on Earth, and everywhere in between (Note: Only Hellboy-specific stories are included in the list).

Read on for the ComicMix Six: Best Hellboy Stories.

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The Devil Made Me Do It, by Elayne Riggs

I haven’t had a lot of free time lately, but what little I’ve had on the weekends has been devoted to my Zen-relaxation hobbies of sleeping, watching baseball, reading blogs and playing computer games. I’m not big on the kill-em-all-let-fictional-dieties-sort-em-out ones, I much prefer the puzzle games like Atlantis Quest or Bejeweled or Chuzzle (I got my mom addicted to Chuzzle!) or Bookworm. But I do confess to a soft spot for a little phenom from Blizzard Entertainment known as Diablo.

Being cursed with a pretty bad memory for entertainment ephemera, I can’t remember if I ever played the first version of Diablo. I suppose I must have, way back, but it never really caught my interest except as a spectator sport. I loved to watch Robin play it, and he was was quite the fan, so when Diablo II came out I decided to learn its ins and outs and play alongside him. It wasn’t easy, neither of the two computers we had at the time had really fast processing speed, so when we played a round together either or both or our monitors would be pretty messed up, would freeze then go into fast-motion, all the stuff that tells you This Game Is Beyond Your Machine’s Puny Capabilities. Nonetheless, we persisted, more apart than together, and there was a stretch of some months when Diablo II took up most of our computer time, particularly with the debut of the expansion set, entitled “Lord of Destruction” (or as Robin and I, and apparently the creator of the above illustration, preferred to think of it, “Lord of the Dance”).

And I mean, it’s weird to like Diablo so much, not only as a woman who does tend to fall into the stereotypical story preference trends (i.e., preferring characterization to explosions, the evolution of relationships and personal growth to battles and gore, participation of interesting female characters in their own life stories rather than objectification and “love interest” secondary leads), but as someone who just isn’t into entertainment violence, period. I can look at sex far more easily than I can look at violence. Sexual parity is nowhere near accomplished, so most of the stuff in that realm still caters to the male gaze, as I’ve previously observed, but violence as entertainment (at least to me) really seems to cater to the male gaze. I just don’t find it fun. Even when it’s at the level of embarrassment comedy, I still feel for the victim. Maybe it’s because I’m something of a klutz, and the atmosphere around the Riggs Residence often resembles a slapstick sitcom. When I go to give my husband a mock smack on the head and wind up hurting my hand (and wrist, and elbow) instead, it may be amusing at the time in a karmic-justice kinda way, but I know my arm’s going to be killing me the next couple days and I’ll have all these “where did I get those?” bruises and, oh kiddies, it’s just not worth the pain. (more…)

Mike Mignola Says ‘Hellboy 3’ in the Works

hellboy2poster5-2089479The end of Hellboy is in sight, though it’s still quite a ways out on the horizon.

In a new interview on Metromix, Hellboy creator Mike Mignola talks about Friday’s Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, but more importantly he says planning is already underway for a third film.

Also, Mignola hints at the future of Hellboy in comics:

[Guillermo] has thrown out so many ideas for the third movie, you go, ‘Geez, if he puts everything into “Hellboy 3” that he says will be in “Hellboy 3,” it’ll be 36 hours long.’ The third film, being the end of (the film trilogy), is hard for me. The comic is going to go for 10 to 15 more years, so I don’t want to give him my ending. I want my ending to be a surprise.

While you’re waiting on that, make sure to check out all of ComicMix‘s extensive Hellboy 2 coverage, including this interview with actress Selma Blair and this interview with director Guillermo del Toro.

Stan Lee Media Central to Case Against Clinton

stanlee-2309587Some diligent journalist needs to jump in and write a book about the ongoing fight for the rights to Stan Lee’s Marvel creations, because it becomes a little more bizarre every day.

The case is essentially between Stan Lee Media and its shareholders, who are collectively filing suit against Marvel and Stan Lee, saying they conspired to keep the rights to Lee’s creations from Stan Lee Media.

Sound confusing? Barron’s has a good breakdown of how this all came to be.

In short, Lee assigned his rights to Stan Lee Media, the failed dotcom that’s now run by Peter Paul, who wants the company to assert those rights over the many characters that have boosted Marvel’s fortunes through comics and movies.

Paul is saying that Lee left Stan Lee Media, and conspired with Bill Clinton (yes, that Bill Clinton) to break business promises made to Paul.

Paul is throwing corruption allegations against Clinton in a California suit, which is ongoing. For what it’s worth, Paul recently ran afoul of the SEC, which is also covered in that last link, from World Net Daily.

Review: ‘Skyscrapers of the Midwest’ by Joshua W. Cotter

skyscrapers2-3107482Skyscrapers of the Midwest
By Joshua W. Cotter
AdHouse Books, June 2008, $19.95

If Chris Ware were a few years younger, grew up in a more religious household, and had less of an obsession with comics formalism, he just might have become Joshua Cotter. Or maybe that’s just me being flippant – it isn’t really fair to Cotter; his work covers some of the same emotional terrain as Ware’s, but is otherwise very different.

[[[Skyscrapers]]] is difficult to describe; it’s made up of many short stories – sometimes as many as three to a page – that mostly focus on a family in the small town of South Nodaway, somewhere in the vast American Midwest in 1987. There’s also the robot Nova Stealth, who is both the human-sized hero of a Marvel-ish comic the elder boy of the family loves, that boy’s robot toy, and a gigantic god-figure stalking across the landscape, sometimes in imagination but other times clearly real. And then there are the stories that get into really weird stuff.

The stories mostly focus on the family’s ten-year-old son, who is never named. Neither are his father or mother, though his younger brother Jeffrey has the same name as Cotter’s own younger brother (to whom the book is dedicated). And Cotter was born in 1977, which would make him ten year old in 1987 – the same age as his fifth-grade hero. So we do know a name for this boy, even if that name never appears in the book.

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Wal-Mart Stocks ‘Racist’ Comic

meminsml-6211600Back in 2005, the Mexican government heard quite a bit of outcry when the country’s popular comic book character, Memin Pinguin, was commemorated on stamps.

It was a controversial decision because, as many see it, Memin is a racist stereotype of dark-skinned people. Look at the image at right and decide for yourself.

Now Memin is back in the news, as some reprints of the comic book series have turned up in Texas Wal-Marts. And a few shoppers are none-too-pleased.

She found one passage particularly offensive. In the frame, Memin Pinguin is being kicked by a light-skinned man and is called “a black troublemaker.”

Activist Quanell X said the problem with the book is more than just words.

“This is poking fun at the physical features or an entire people. Making them look buffoonish (and) portraying the young (black) kid as stupid,” said Quanell. “Whenever they are beating him, they are referring to him as Negro. Even here when he is being punched, slapped (he is called) Negro.

“This is a disgrace.”

Wal-Mart didn’t offer a comment for the story.

You can find a bit more background right here, including some evidence that the book isn’t racist.

Happy Birthday: Whilce Portacio

  • Uncategorized
  • July 8, 2008

wetworks2-3113566Born in Sangley Point, Cavite City, Philippines in 1963, Whilce Portacio joined Marvel Comics as an inker in 1985 but soon began penciling for them as well. He worked on The Punisher, X-Factor, and The Uncanny X-Men before leaving in 1992 to found Image Comics with several other well-known comic book artists.

Portacio soon withdrew from the partnership but in 1994 he published his title Wetworks through Jim Lee’s Wildstorm imprint. In 2006 Portacio and Wildstorm began Wetworks, vol. 2—after the first six issues he stepped back from the interior art duties but continues to illustrate the covers.

Portacio has also been drawing the new DC series Batman Confidential. In October 2008 he will become the new artist on Todd MacFarlane’s Spawn.

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