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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Notes for a War Story

In its original Italian form, Notes for a War Story won the 2005 Goscinny Prize for Best Script and was the Best Book of the Year for 2006 at the Angouleme comics festival, so I have to assume that it’s one of the very best European works of recent years. Which is unfortunate, since I found it only moderately successful.

It’s set in an unnamed European country, during an unnamed conflict among unspecified groups, in the vaguely recent past. All the non-specificity is meant to give it an aura of timelessness, or of dislocation, or something like that, but it left this reader feeling as if I were wandering about in a fog. Compared to the specificity and closely-observed detail of a book like Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, Notes from a [[[War Story]]] is thin and ineffectual, unwilling to commit to being for anything, or against anything other than the very abstract idea of war.

The plot follows three young men – Giuliano, Christian, and Little Killer – who are scavenging in a region of small villages being bombed by enemy forces. They’re not in the armed forces, and they never encounter anything like regular armed forces, not even as much as seeing a bomber in the sky. They’re supposedly in the middle of a war, but they are actually seen in a mostly-depopulated landscape, drifting into gangsterhood.

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MIKE GOLD: Get a life? Why?

  • News
  • August 13, 2007

mikegold100-4635945It would be silly if I didn’t enjoy being a comics and popular culture mini-mogel. It’s fun to have movie stars call you up; that just happened. Getting into movie screenings is swell. People give you cool stuff. I’ve been friends with Will Eisner and Dick Sprang, and Dick Giordano was at my birthday party last week. I get to work with my closest friends, with people I respect, and with folks with whom I am in awe. Coupled with my fantastic, loving family, I live out Randy Newman’s great song from 1983: My Life is Good.

Of course, Newman’s a bit sarcastic, but then again, so am I. But I prefer to think of me as edgy. Randy, on the other hand, writes songs for Disney movies. We all have our outlets.

And comics is one of mine. A big one. It’s been the thread that’s run through my entire life. I learned how to read by trying to decipher Pogo and Li’l Abner on the comics page of the Chicago Daily News. I left broadcasting in 1976 to work for DC Comics, and I’ve never looked back. It’s how I met my wife and daughter (figure that one out).

0804-23-assemblesquad-8855189So now that I’ve turned 57, I once again find myself in the middle of another “summer” comics convention season. In the past couple months we ComicMix folk have been to, oh, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Long Island, San Diego, Chicago, four or five different shows in New York City, and probably a couple I’m temporarily forgetting. I’ve still got Tarrytown NY, Baltimore MD, and Columbus Ohio to go this year, along with at least one other show in Manhattan. And one thought has been clattering against my brainpan for the last several weeks:

I’m really getting too old for all this.

Right now, I want to go see The Simpsons Movie and Sicko and the Bourne Whatever, and I want to sit down with a stack of comic books as tall as Glenn Hauman and just chill out and read ‘em.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. I’m whining. There’s a difference.

I love ComicMix, I love seeing old friends at these here conventions, and I truly enjoy meeting comics fans. But, right now, I don’t think we’ve got a show scheduled for October (I refuse to check) and, damn it, I’m going to go trick-or-treating and I’m going to go to a couple hockey games with my daughter.

You see, my life IS good.

Mike Gold is editor-in-chief of ComicMix.

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WW-CHICAGO: The Big Game!

24_logo-9290715The Big ComicMix Broadcast winds up Wizard World Chicago with a roll of the dice and an in-depth look at the many sides of the new gaming product previewed here at the show – from the new 24 game based on the TV show to a peek at the 40th Annual GenCon starting up ion just a few days. And did you know there is a red hot new pro wrestling organization that is on TV and toy shelves but isn’t spelled W-W-E? Then it’s a a quick shot from the Planet of the Apes guy from the day when he used to travel with a different bunch.

Roll The eight sided dice, kiss the wizard and PRESS THE BUTTON!

Gandhi Does Davros

  • Uncategorized
  • August 12, 2007

ben-kingsley-9261488The London Sun reports Oscar winning Sir Ben Kingsley is in "final" negotiations to join Doctor Who this coming season to play Davros, the man behind (and later inside) The Daleks.

Kingsley’s credits include Schlindler’s List, Twelfth Night, and Gandhi, for which he won the Oscar.

WW-CHICAGO: Marvel Still Civil

  • News
  • August 12, 2007

Wild Weather on the East Coast Friday stranded most of the Mondo Marvel panelists in New York (hmmm… wonder how ComicMix‘s E.I.C. made it out that evening), leaving Joe Quesada and C. B. Cebuliski to fend for themselves while sharing with the crowd images and news from upcoming Marvel projects.

One other panelist, Rob Liefeld, who was there to talk about his new Killraven series. Apparently thought up at a bar in San Diego last year, Liefeld and Rob Kirkman will be bringing us an all-new take on the charactertarting fresh and looking to integrate Killraven into the Marvel Universe of the future – a world where our heroes are gone but their artifacts remain, one piece of art had Killraven holding Captain America’s shield. Look for the book in mid-2008. Reminding us that the creators of comics were and are comics fans themselves, Liefeld took some time to talk about his love for the character (and his DC counter-part Kamandi) during his childhood, you could hear the 11 year old Rob coming through loud and clear.

Luke Cage is back in his tiara and yellow shirt now that writer/artist (and Cartoon Network legend) Genny Tartakovsky has gotten a hold of him. The new artist on Punisher War Journal is Corey Walker. Doing his first work for Marvel, Tan Eng Huat (Doom Patrol) will be the artist on the mini-series Silver Surfer: In Thy Name, to be written by Simon Spurrier (2000 A.D.). I wonder if that news blows the ending of the current Silver Surfer mini.

Up next for Paul Jenkins will be a limited series drawn by Paul Guluay called Penance: Relentless about “the most hated man in America.”

Quesada and Cebuliski also said there are some big shake ups (an end?) coming to the Ultimates Universe by year’s end, and we’ll be seeing the "real" Nick Fury back in action next year.

WW-CHICAGO: DC at the crossroads

  • Uncategorized
  • August 12, 2007

At Wizard World Chicago this weekend DC staffers sat down for another DC Nation panel and gave fans some insight into what we can expect in the Immediate" future."

Editorial honcho Dan Didio was joined by coordinating editor Jann Jones, marketeer Bob Wayne, Jim Starlin and  Sean McKeever. Starting off we heard what we have down the pipeline after Countdown to Final Crisis, the aptly named Final Crisis will be a seven issue series by Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones starting in May 2008.

And since the weekly format has been so successful for DC over the recent years, starting weekly in December Countdown: Arena starts bringing us more tastes of the Multiverse pitting three different versions of a character fighting out to be a leader in Monarch’s army. The results will be determined by the fans who will get to vote on the DC website for the winner. That’s right folks its reality comics!

Salvation Run will place DC villains in a penal colony, their own planet resulting from the DC heroes looking for a better solution than prisons and Arkham.

Starlin will be killing off whomever he feels like in Death of the New Gods, an eight-part mini-series starting in October. At the panel he jovially made it clear that no one is safe.

The long awaited Marv Wolfman/Damian Scott Raven has been slated for early 2008. In other Titans news we’ll see a Terra mini-series in March.

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Kyle Rayner will be joining the Challengers. DiDio suggested for everything to make sense read GL 26 then Atom #18 (Actually, DiDio was unsure of the actual issue number but assured us it’s the one after GL 26) then Countdown, all of which should be going down in December/January if I’ve done my math correctly.

Jann Jones described The Black Canary Wedding Planner (out in September) as the “girliest book” ever put out and marveled at how a man (J. Torres) could be doing such a great job writing it.

Cassandra Kane will pop up again in Gotham Underground. McKeever said to look for Manhunter to join the Birds of Prey and DiDio says the Manhunter series isn’t gone, they just want to have a few issues put to bed before they start publishing up again.

DiDio also assures us he’s got a big map of the multiverse and is plotting out what all 52 planets are to ensure the richest DC Universe possible. On a side note, Earth 26 is the Captain Carrot Earth and Vertigo is still not going to be a part of any DC Universe.

Getting wind of what’s been happening

  • News
  • August 12, 2007

Once again we’re away from Second City comic book happenings here in the First City, but at least we can all share Chicago nickname puns as well as the Perseid meteor showers this evening from pretty much wherever we live.  That, and the ComicMix columns from this past week:

As you might expect, Mellifluous Mike Raub is in attendance at WizWorld Chicago, meaning more Big ComicMix Broadcasts than usual:

The interesting thing about many vacations is how much you want to do at the beginning and how little you’ve done at the end.  Mine has gone according to plan in terms of reading (see my column linked above) but not writing.  Ah well, maybe next time…

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Can’t Get Enough of B.T.K.

  • News
  • August 12, 2007

price-brown-100-7714236You just can’t live in Texas if you don’t have a lot of soul, as Doug Sahm would have it. No, and you can’t live in Arizona if you don’t have a sense of Yuma.

But we were talking about Texas, where you also just can’t live without an immersion in the lore of Billy the Kid. Folklore and pop-fiction, that is, as opposed to factual knowledge or even perceived truth. By the time of the post-middle 20th century, such mis-familiarity had so thoroughly outstripped the facts in the case of this most notorious badman that most of the B.T.K. legendry bombarding the youth of America – and not merely the Texas / New Mexico Plains region – came not from Texas, but rather from Texas as filtered through the movies and the comic books.

billy-the-kid-toby-1950-1-2-4677122For years on end, my most vivid images of Billy the Kid came from Toby Press’ Billy the Kid Adventure Magazine (29 issues, spanning 1950 – 1955 and boasting efforts by the likes of Al Williamson, Frank Frazetta, and Harvey Kurtzman) and from the after-school telecasts of an extensive run of low-budget movies starring, by turns, Bob Steele and Buster Crabbe. At a turning-point for such awareness, while visiting Northwest Texas’ Panhandle–Plains Historical Museum with the folks, I noticed a display containing this document:

Tascosa Texas

Thursday Oct 26th

1878

Know all persons by these presents that I do hereby sell and diliver [sic] to Henry F. Hoyt one Sorrel Horse Branded BB on left hip and other indistinct Branded on Shoulders, for the Sum of Seventy five $ dollars, in hand received.

[Signed] W.H. Bonney

Witness

Jos. E. Masters

Geo. J. Howard

“You know who wrote that, don’t you?” asked my Dad. “Your teevee-cowboy hero, Billy the Kid – that’s who. Billy Bonney.

“Except he wasn’t any teevee hero,” Dad continued. “More of a juvenile-delinquent punk, if you ask me.”

“They had juvenile delinquents in 1878?” I asked in reply, missing the point altogether. I was sufficiently flabbergasted by the revelation that Billy the Kid had been a Real Guy – or that the movies and the comic-book series (both loosely conceived and dense with internal contradictions) could claim a basis in fact – to find myself at a loss for words as to this larger issue.

The right words would occur to me later. My father had heard at first hand some harsh accounts of Billy’s dealings, via a Depression-era acquaintance with Elizabeth “Frenchy” McCormick (ca. 1852–1941), last survivor of the long-abandoned frontier settlement known as Tascosa. So Dad and I had plenty to discuss – my Hollywood-and-funnybooks perception, vs. Dad’s owlhoot-punk opinions. (more…)

WW-CHICAGO: Big ComicMix Broadcast for Day 2

magellan-3887627Day Two at Wizard World has presented us with a lot of cool stuff to bring you on the Big ComicMix Broadcast— starting with an adorable lady who is putting her heart and soul into her love of comics and producing her own work completely on her own. Then Battlestar: Galactica‘s Richard Hatch unveils his newest passion project, The Great War of Magellan , and we give you a chance to work with him on the development of the concept!  Then there’s a tip on how you can be your own comic book star – and a trip back to when there was a group on the charts whose front man was doing the pirate things a long time before Johnny Depp!

Ready to work with Richard? Then PRESS THE BUTTON!

 

 

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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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