Tagged: comics

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The Complete Hate, Vol.1 by Peter Bagge

There was a time when slackers were hip. Especially young slackers, particularly in Seattle or thereabouts. I don’t know why. I don’t remember the sequence, thirty-some years later – I think it was a “scene” first, even before Nirvana hit big, with breathless media coverage about what all these wacky young people were doing.

But it was a big deal, for a while. Just before and during the first wave of grunge, when my generation, GenX, was young and aimless and energetic, with hair and abs and knees as good as any of us were ever going to get. A lot of us resented the attention and the stupidly breathless media focus on mostly dumb egotists doing mostly dumb egotistical things, while the vast majority of that generation were living ordinary lives and doing normal things – much like what the average Boomer probably thought about hippies, come to think of it.

I think Peter Bagge’s Hate comics series might actually have been one of the early signposts of that scene – the first issue came out in April of 1990, well before Nirvana’s Nevermind or the movie Slackers. Oh, it was definitely already a scene – Bagge himself had moved to Seattle, for reasons I’m sure he would argue long and loud had nothing to do with any of that, a few years before – but I think in Spring of 1990 it was still a mostly underground scene, known by cognoscenti, and not the media extravaganza it became a year or so later.

The Complete Hate, Vol.1  collects the first half of Bagge’s 1990s Hate comics: the first fifteen issues, from 1990 to 1994. (He’s done other things called Hate since then, first an Annual for about a decade, then an newer Revisited that I haven’t seen.) This is the full Buddy-in-Seattle run, starting with a minor time-skip from the end of the Bradley family stories in Neat Stuff .

As it often is with Bagge, all of his characters are horrible people who make universally bad decisions, with massive anger issues and an almost total lack of impulse control. (I enjoyed that in fiction a lot more at the time, before people almost exactly like that took over all the levers of my government.) Buddy Bradley is the central character, and the one who comes closest to being a functional adult – oh, he still makes bad decisions every time he gets the chance, but we see his thought processes as he almost resists his impulses and sometimes even feels bad about the things he does. Well, he mostly feels bad because bad things happen to him because of his stupid decisions, because he’s a Bagge character and they have no capacity to mentally model other people’s thinking at all.

Buddy is working in a used-book store: it’s a McJob that lets him steal stuff from work and doesn’t require too much effort or thinking. (Slacker, remember?) This is actually a step or three up from where we saw him at the end of Neat Stuff – he was living on a beach at that point, having gotten kicked out of every home he possibly could have – so baby steps, huh?

His childhood friend Stinky (Leonard Brown, the guy on the cover) also made the trek, and is more suited for the fake-it-till-you-make-it culture, having no self-awareness at all and only ego. Their third roommate is the socially awkward loner George Cecil Hamilton III, who mostly stays in his room, reading and writing conspiracy-theory materials. (Yes, people like that existed before the Internet – they tended to use the mails, they had a much lower profile, and the world was better for their relative disconnection.)

And Buddy’s ex-girlfriend Lisa and new girlfriend Valerie (as of the beginning of the series) are also roommates, making more sitcom-like opportunities for drama.

These fifteen issues take that cast, add in a few supporting characters, and bounce them off each other violently and chaotically for what seems to be maybe a year or so in-universe. (There’s no way the timeline is as long as the four-plus years the issues took to come out.) Nobody learns anything, nobody gets better at anything, nobody advances in their careers – people do move in and out, change jobs and chase dreams (like Stinky’s band, which almost takes off), and break up and form new “relationships,” because things are always happening in a Bagge comic.

It’s energetic and nutty: these people will always make the worst choice possible when given the chance. I don’t think Bagge even wrote it that way; this is just how he sees people. It intersects with his core libertarianism, of course: he’s of the school that you should just let people do whatever, because people are universally horrible and that (somehow) keeps everyone off his lawn. I still think that Bagge characters + libertarianism = something like The Purge all night every night, but I’m not here to enforce logical consistency into fictional worlds.

His cartooning is still aggressively rubber-hose here, with the old faithful concentric-circles to show that characters are running really fast, too. It’s very wordy, too – his characters may not be good at getting what they want, but they can yell back and forth at each other for pages on end.

Hate is a time-capsule now, this first batch probably the most so. This was a time and place in American culture, and Bagge had a predictably sour and jaundiced take on it before it had even properly gotten started. If you can have sympathy for characters who resolutely refuse to do anything to deserve sympathy, you can have a great time reading it.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Shaolin Cowboy: Start Trek by Geof Darrow

There are some creative projects that you’re pretty sure just aren’t for you. Maybe it’s in a genre you know nothing about – and aren’t inclined to learn. Maybe it’s a creator that just doesn’t click for you.

Or maybe you know that the project is doing something you’re not really interested in. And then, twenty years later, you see it again, and don’t remember exactly why you avoided it, and remember liking that creator’s work, once upon a time.

So you try it. And you remember: you were right to begin with.

I am not going to be praising Shaolin Cowboy: Start Trek . Geof Darrow is an amazing artist, delivering a long sequence of magnificent, eye-catching pages here, and his imagination is clearly equally fertile and weird.

But I’ve always been a fan of story. And Darrow makes only the most minor, vague, smirking-into-his-sleeve attempts to tell a story here. This is not so much a book as it is a series of ultraviolent moments, frozen in time and memorialized on large pages. The best way to experience it, I think, would either be in a volume at the size of the original art or, even better, that actual art, on the walls of some museum somewhere, maybe even in a slightly confusing layout so that the viewer can’t quite read it as a story at all.

The premise is that there’s this guy – both an ex-Shaolin monk and a gunslinger, somehow. He’s dumpy and not-young, leaning a bit into the kung-fu movie trope that the really old guy is the scariest killer. He’s out in the desert somewhere, probably the American West. It’s an unspecified time – now or a little later – with a lot of modern-looking people but also whatever fantastic-looking monsters and supernatural entities that Darrow feels like drawing at that moment. As the first page of the book puts it: “Someplace in the middle of nowhere, the day before yesterday and a week before tomorrow.”

A lot of people want to kill this guy. The one reason we learn here – from a talking crab, no less – doesn’t show any evil on the cowboy’s side, but the crab has good reason to be eternally angry and to swear vengeance in the traditional manner. We can assume all of the other dozens or hundreds of odd and heavily-armed people assembled in this desert have reasons as well – maybe equally good, maybe worse, maybe better.

I tend to think that if hundreds of people are insistent enough on your being dead enough to gear up and chase you into a desert, you’ve definitely done something you shouldn’t have. But maybe the cowboy is just really, really karmically unlucky, and that every action in his previous life horribly damaged someone else in ways that he couldn’t predict and didn’t notice. Either way, we start with – hundreds? dozens? lots – of people assembled, as the cowboy rides up on his talking mule, and announce that they’re going to kill him.

Well, the Talking Killer Gambit never works, of course. So we get a bunch of hyper-detailed double-page spreads of dozens of these unnamed people being murdered in horrible ways – but it’s by our hero, which means we’re presumably happy about it.

So that happens. Then the cowboy is moseying on a bit further, and discovers a talking baby and three flying supernatural demonish entities. One of those entities, of course, decides to fight him, and the dialogue this creepy skeletal whatsit yells at him during the fight gives the usual confusing and half-baked explanation, in which the talking baby is cosmically important and the Fate of the World lies in its bloody hands. (Did I mention the creepy baby has blood-soaked hands for no specific mentioned reason? He does.)

But we need to go through about a hundred pages of fighting in weird ways, before we get to the it’s-not-the-end. (It all just stops when we hit the last page. There were some more Shaolin Cowboy issues after this run, which have been collected elsewhere; I have no idea if they “end” the “story.”) We do see a lot of very impressive spaces and monsters, and plenty of detailed double-page spreads of zombie hordes and seas of dismembered corpses and people flying through space doing that holding-up-two-fingers-to-show-its-martial-arts thing. It is exceptionally visually inventive.

But, as an actual book that tells a story, I can’t say there’s much of anything here. There’s a kind of comic that is driven by whatever the artist felt like drawing at that moment; this is perhaps the exemplar of that style. Continuity and logic and plausibility are not its strong suits.

If you have the visual tastes of a hyperactive fifteen-year-old-boy, this will be the greatest comic in the history of everything. For anyone else, adjust your expectations accordingly.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Black Hammer: Spiral City by Jeff Lemire and Teddy Kristiansen

I think this is still the most recent Black Hammer  collection; it came out last November. It’s set in the modern day, and does not feature the series main characters – the group of five Bronze Age heroes stuck on an extradimensional farm, like that dog you had as a child that had to go away, who I’ve come to call the Moping Crew because their super-team was never named.

Like most Black Hammer stories, it tells superhero stories that the reader will find at least faintly familiar, using its own invented world and characters that are different enough from Marvel and DC so as not to excite the vicious IP lawyers. I wonder if anyone has traced those familiarities: my sense is that some of them are obvious, but I also think there have been many more iterations of these stories since the ’70s-80s versions I only vaguely remember.

Anyway, Black Hammer: Spiral City  is potentially a new beginning for the series. It’s written by series creator Jeff Lemire, with atmospheric, organic art in a variety of styles by Teddy Kristiansen. I have a hard time taking anything Black Hammer seriously, for the above second-hand story reasons, but maybe you feel differently.

It is soon after the Second Crisis Cataclysm. The techno-powered semi-fascist governmental/military group known as Cadmus AIM TRIDENT maintains the peace in Metropolis New York Spiral City. This city is presumably somewhere in the USA, but Lemire has never said where, or referred to any larger government of any kind. Black Hammer stories tend to use “Spiral City” as shorthand to mean “the real world” or “where we live” – Lemire’s city has the usual streets and neighborhoods named after dead superhero artists, but there’s never been a sense of larger geography, of suburbs and bridges and commuters and airports and so on.

That lack of specificity is used as if it were a strength in the storytelling here: one strand is in a storybook style, about a “kingdom” in which we follow a few iconic characters: a fool and a princess and a knight and a king. The kingdom, of course, is Spiral City itself, which has a mayor but apparently is not subject to any other level of government.

Malcolm Gold is the villain, the “king.” He runs TRIDENT, and we know from the first page he’s the Luthor-esque manipulator gathering power for his own nefarious aims. (Primarily outlawing superheroes, since that’s the most important issue in a superhero story.) Aside from being evil and personally corrupt, he might be a reasonably effective technocratic manager, but superhero stories are never happy with “reasonably effective.” He is running for mayor, and we expect he will win.

The fool is Inspector Insector, a bug-headed private detective who is a bit of metafiction – a “forgotten character” from a land of others like him, who never appeared in a “real story” in the “real world” until he bumbled his way into the Second Cataclysm and became part of a story – the Black Hammer story. He could be a fun character in the right kind of story, but his strengths and style are at odds with most of the core elements of the series: he has no powers, is no good as smashing Anti-Gods, and isn’t even much good at moping. He wanders through this story as something like comic relief – though his story is sadder than that.

The princess is Helle’s Bell, a superpowered pop star at a cusp in her career. She’s trying to expand her work into movies, but she’s also a young, hot-headed – literally, as with everything in superhero comics: she has fire-based powers triggered by her anger – prima donna who will sabotage her own best chance and be forced to run back to her Spiral City home from the vague land of Hollywood we first see her in.

And the knight is Concretestador, a former guard at the Akrham Spiral Asylum, which Malcolm just shut down with much grinning and twirling of mustache, because we all know comic-book asylums and prisons are just revolving doors to hold antagonists until they’re needed for the next story, at which point they will escape easily. Concretestador needs to get a new job, but his skills are particular and the obvious outlets (TRIDENT and its ilk) are run by Malcolm and so don’t want anyone good-coded. So he goes back to fighting other supers at the usual underground high-stakes fighting ring.

Meanwhile, behind all this, the general public – as always in superhero comics, a stupid mass of sheep-like morons who can’t understand that superpowered people are better and special and their rightful masters – has responded to the Second Cataclysm by turning against all superheroes, on the grounds that alien gods never seem to try to eat planets that don’t have superheroes on them.

(The Spiral City centrality issue also means that people talk as if Anti-God was trying to destroy Spiral City specifically, and not the entire universe it was part of – which is how it appeared in the actual story, too, so I can’t fault them for that. Come to think of it, perhaps Spiral City is a small, flat, compact universe – that would explain how the evil forces could appear in the sky above during the various Crises Cataclysms at a 1-to-1 mapping; that would never work on any normal round planet.)

Anyway, everyone hates superheroes now: it’s that kind of story. The bad guy is about to win a landslide election, take over everything, and outlaw Our Heroes. The plucky Good Guys are outnumbered, overwhelmed, and seemingly have no options left.

Of course they win in the end. Of course Malcolm wins the election but is forced to leave Spiral City, the only real place in the universe, with his tail between his legs. Along the way, nearly every friend Inspector Insector has is murdered by a serial killer, but I guess you can’t make a superhero story without breaking eggs.

This is a second-hand story told well. If you’ve read superhero comics, of almost any kind, any time in the past fifty years, it will all rhyme with things already in your head. I think that’s the point. I personally prefer stories that at least attempt to do something new, but I may be in the minority.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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The Complete Peanuts, 1957 to 1958 by Charles M. Schulz

I reviewed a lot of the Complete Peanuts series when they were coming out – I bought them all, and read them contemporaneously, but the blog started up in the middle of that timeframe – so there’s already a lot of words on this blog about Charles M. Schulz and his comics. This one, back in the day, was the first volume in the series covered here, in a quick round-up post of the kind I used to do. [1]

I used to throw in a big block of links to all of the books in the series in my Peanuts posts; I’m not doing that this time. Let me instead link the first and last  books; you can go forward and backward from there if you have the time and inclination.

When I buy new books, they sit on dedicated shelves, and have to run under my eyes to win their places on the “real” shelves. (Do other people do that, too?) I even do that if I’m buying a new copy or edition of a book I read before – if I like it enough to pay for it again, I must like it enough to read it again, right? So I’ve had a new copy of this book for a few years, and finally re-read it. I’ll try to be more concise than I was for a lot of the books in this series, since I’ve already written so much about Schulz and Peanuts.

The Complete Peanuts, 1957 to 1958  collects, like most of the books in the series, two full years of the Peanuts comic strips, daily and Sunday, in order. The whole fifty-year (with an asterisk; it’s actually 49-years-and-four-and-a-half-months) run was written and drawn by Schulz, with no assists from anyone else.

The first time around, I was struck by the energy and novelty of Schulz’s early work, all of these still moderately realistic kids in a suburban setting that was empty of anything but them, most of the time. Parents and other adults are occasionally offstage voices, in a way Schulz would reduce and eliminate over the next few years. The personalities are still shifting – Violet is still prominent here, mostly as a foil for Charlie Brown, but in ways that are more generic and less specific than the foil Lucy was turning into.

This time, I found it more transitional: not the shock of the first couple of years, when the kids were as close to feral as 1950s newspaper-comics kids could be, and not the full emotionally-resonant world that Schulz built out, starting in the early 1960s. Charlie Brown has completely transitioned into a sad sack; we see him failing to kick the football and managing his baseball team (as well as he can, which is not well). Lucy is somewhere in the middle, still half fussbudget but getting closer to the force of nature – loosely based on Schulz’s first wife in later years, many commentators believe – that she became. Linus is continuing on his own path, still very much “the little kid” for jokes about his security blanket but more philosophical more of the time.

And Snoopy, as called out by the cover and the introduction by Jonathan Franzen, hasn’t gotten into any of the manias he would embody in future decades – he’s not “Joe” anybody yet, and his doghouse is still conventional and static – but he’s clearly not a real dog, or a normal one, and his personality is getting bigger and brighter and more expressive. I still think the real era of Snoopy doesn’t start until after the big continuity sequences of the ’60s and early ’70s – the cult of Snoopy started about the time of the bicentennial – but Schulz was already heading in that direction almost twenty years earlier, and Snoopy was clearly the same character he would be in those later strips.

There are some short sequences here – one week, maybe two – but this is mostly gag-a-day work. The sequences are often just five or six similar gags, with Snoopy impersonating a vulture or Beethoven’s birthday or Linus’ blanket jokes.

Schulz got more sophisticated and deeper than this, but you can see the seeds of his peak from here – he was building up to it, adding characters and shifting the characters he already had. And his drawing was up to its peak already: that can be hard to realize until you see someone else trying to draw Schulz’s characters, and you realize how precise his poses and lines are, how few details he actually draws to make his whole world.

[1] At some point – much later than it should have been – I realized that a working editor should not be posting quick thoughts in public about books he was considering for his publishing program. I was remarkably dumb in public for a remarkably long time; I hope I’m at least making different mistakes now.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Wild That We’re Alive by Lauren Haldeman

Every book is from a particular person, with a distinctive point of view. The best authors realize that, and are as deeply themselves as they can be, to emphasize the things only they would say, in the ways only they would say it.

Wild That We’re Alive  is a collection of diary comics, from one woman, mostly about her family life. It’s not anything at all like that description would make you think it is – some hybrid of Erma Bombeck and James Kochalka – because that’s not who Lauren Haldeman is.

Haldeman is a poet – with several awards and a pedigree from the University of Iowa, so I don’t just mean “someone who has written some poetry” – a web designer, editor, painter, and obviously a maker of comics. But what I think is the key fact is that she’s the kind of person who has one child, and that child is named Magnus.

There’s a kind of mom who has five or more kids, all named things like Jacob and Hannah. There’s a kind of mom who has two or three kids, with names you can’t predict. And there’s a kind of mom who has just one, with a name like Magnus or Tinkerbell.

Magnus is a character here, appearing in a number of comics. Haldeman’s husband, Ben, is mentioned but less present. But they’re all about her: these are diary comics. Each one is generally a single image, captioned or with dialogue – one image for a single moment, a single thought. Haldeman works in big blocks of generally light, soothing colors, and a bold, expressive, individualistic line.

She draws people somewhat anthropomorphically – maybe dogs, maybe bipedal kangaroos? – with herself central in most of these comics. They’re about what’s it’s like to be Lauren Haldeman in the world, sometimes the physical world but even more often her mental world. I think Haldeman is the kind of person who never stops thinking about things, even when she wants to be quieter and just present. (Ask me why I recognize that.) She doesn’t always provide context: there are a number of comics about grief, but we never learn who Haldeman is grieving, how recent the loss was, or anything like that. They’re all from her point of view, so things she already knows likely won’t be mentioned.

Wild That We’re Alive is organized as a year. After a brief introductory section about her family and animals, Haldeman mentions she thinks of years as beginning in the fall – she seems to still be embedded in the academic year, from her work with the University of Iowa and maybe other academic-related web-design work. So the book follows that flow, with full-page paintings for half-titles (and occasionally elsewhere) leading into sections of comics from that time of year.

I think this was a project, a daily comic Haldeman did. Maybe for one particular year, maybe off and on for several years. I don’t see it on her website, so maybe it was mostly on social media, in the way a lot of comics-makers do these days. (If the eyeballs are on Instagram, it only makes sense to post there first.)

I’m not the first person to point out that poets and comic-writers need to have a similar level of concision, of using exactly the right word in a space where there’s only room for a few words. Haldeman is a great example of that; her language is precise and thoughtful, but also conversational and playful – not “poetry” in the old academic “study-this” sense, but poetic in the allusive, connected, word-besotted sense.

At times, Haldeman feels like a higher-brow version of Grant Snider – similar concerns about internal emotional states and the purpose of life, but pitched in a mindset informed by more of the academic world and with some weltschmerz behind it. I like Snider, and I like a more rigorous thought-pattern, so both of those things are good.

To close as I started, Haldeman is particular and distinctive: that’s good in and of itself, even more so because she has interesting thoughts and makes striking pictures about them.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Goes Like This by Jordan Crane

I like reading short stories much more than I like writing about them. And I don’t read short fiction all that much, so maybe I don’t even enjoy even reading them as much as I think I do. That’s complicated math, so I’ll leave it there.

Jordan Crane has been making comics for thirty years, but I only noticed him with his magnificent graphic novel Keeping Two  a few years ago. (Insert the usual disclaimer about the world being huge and full of interesting things, so no one can see all of it they want to.) Since making comics is time-consuming, his next book was Goes Like This , a collection of shorter works – and a lot of prints, actually – originally published from 2002 to 2022.

It is visually inventive, especially the prints, which are eye-popping and stunning. The stories are varied, from wordless one-pagers to longer dialogue-filled full stories. They tend to be sad or depressive at their core, with a surprising amount of death piling up, especially early in the book. (The first two long comics stories, if I remember correctly, sandwich a bunch of prints that all seem to be people falling to their deaths with their mouths open, so I wonder if Crane had a period in his work that was particularly doomy.)

His art style is somewhat malleable – this collection does span twenty years – but it’s all in a crisp, indy-comics storytelling mode, his people just a little soft and rubber-hose, their faces expressive with their usually-narrow eyes and other features defined with a few bold lines.

Without diving into individual stories, there’s not that much more to say: it’s a compelling collection of strong work. The stories stand alone, aside from the first two numbered chapters from a project that I suspect might have been an early attempt at what became Keeping Two. Those stories also tend to have simpler palettes – usually black and white or a few tones – while the prints are often overlaid with bright, jangling patterns. They almost seem to come out of completely different creative impulses in Crane, though you can see some continuity in his people and the situation they’re in: the prints are occasionally static, but, especially early in the book, they depict moments, out of context, where something is happening that would not be out of place in his stories.

There is a lot of death in it. Even the stories that don’t have on-panel deaths tend to be thematically about things dying or sickly, a relationship or a way of living. Crane does not seem to be a cartoonist of happiness: this is what I’m saying. That’s somewhat expected in indy-comics circles, admittedly, but know that Crane goes deeply to that well, both in narrative and in imagery, in this collection.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Young Shadow & the Watchdogs by Ben Sears

I’m still not sure if Ben Sears intends his comics to be all-ages (or, more specifically, most-ages, for tweens and up), or if it’s a by-product of the stories that he tells. Either way, I’d say his books are OK for tweens, mostly, if that’s something you care about.

Young Shadow & the Watchdogs  is Sears’ new book this year; it follows 2021’s Young Shadow  and can be considered a sequel to that book. I say “can be considered,” because it doesn’t reference the plot of the first book in any way, and Spiral Scratch isn’t in this book – so maybe it’s a prequel, instead. Or just another book in the same world, with no clear time sequence.

In the first book, Young Shadow was an urban vigilante, of the kind renowned in comics since the 1930s, though he was somewhat more lefty – mostly beating up polluters and corrupt cops – than the typical Big Two character. And he’s still doing some of that here: the story starts with Shadow and a group of kids – a distributed group of sidekicks, I suppose, or something like the Shadow’s organization, or a anarcho-syndicalist collective, if we think he’s leaning more heavily into the lefty thing – follow a truck with two bearded guys, stop them from dumping large barrels of something toxic in a place they shouldn’t, and turn them those bearded guys to the authorities of Soil & Water.

So we think “Young Shadow & the Watchdogs” is this vigilante group, probably. The title at first made me think it was a band, but sadly it’s definitely not that. But it’s not exactly a superteam, either: The Watchdogs are actually a baseball team, and Shadow is their coach. There’s only eight of them other than Shadow, which means, including him, they only just barely have enough players to field a team, and can never change pitchers – but it’s comics, and I suppose Sears wants to avoid having a too-large cast.

Anyway, the Shadows have a game coming up, with the requisite snooty rich kids – the term of art used in the book is “prep school jerks” – in two days. So the day after the vigilante action, they’re going to have a big practice to make sure they’re ready.

Parenthetically, these seem to be school-age kids – maybe middle school, maybe late elementary – but no one even mentions school. They’re out late at night stopping polluters who threaten them with guns, and parents don’t seem to bat an eye. And they spend the whole next day playing baseball. I assume that Bolt City has public schools and that these kids are enrolled, but the book itself provides no evidence to support that.

The reader thinks that the book will be about that big game with the snooty rich kids, and this old Meatballs fan was up for that. Or, possibly, that the polluters would come back and interfere with the game: some kind of intersection of the vigilante plot and the baseball plot. Neither of those two things are true.

Instead, Watchdogs takes a turn into the supernatural – signposted by a cold-open sequence about a nasty pro baseball player, in some earlier time and place – and the Watchdogs instead play a very different baseball game, against an unexpected opposing team. I don’t want to be coy about it; you can see them on the cover: the Watchdogs need to battle a team of skeletons because of the usual haunted-artifact-makes-them reasons. If they lose, they all die.

To immediately defuse all tension, they do not get eaten by the eels at this time. Sears works in a combination of the traditions of the superhero comic and the It-was-Old-Man-Jenkins! kid-friendly mystery, both of which require that the hero win in the end and everything be put right with the world. So they play fair, they play well, and they win in the end. The haunted artifact is returned to its proper custodian, and even the grumpy old  supernatural baseball player has a change of heart, maybe, we think.

Sears tells all of this in a fun cartoony line, softly rounded and full of amusing visual interest in every panel. He tells it all straight, but his art subtly tells the reader not to worry; nothing too scary will happen from these skeletons and other monsters. That’s another reason I think his books are OK for younger readers: they fit well in that tradition, and tell stories in ways that audience will both enjoy and be familiar with.

I’d still like to see a proper sequel to Young Shadow, to see what happens next and what’s the deal with Bolt City, but this was an amusing diversion from that plot, with an appealing cast and a lot of pages with great bits on them.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Uri Tupka and the Gods by Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart

Mike Mignola seems to be settling into his “Lands Unknown” for an extended stay; that’s a good thing for those of us who enjoyed the light touch and quirky bits of folklore – not to mention the pure joy of storytelling evident throughout – that he brought to the first “Lands Unknown” book, Bowling for Corpses .

In possibly even-better news for long-term Mignola fans, he’s also shifted to a longer narrative, with a main character who he says will return in at least one more book. This isn’t like Hellboy; the world is not constructed around a single character that we’ll follow for a decade. But we might get more than the quick views of semi-archetypes that we got in Bowling.

Uri Tupka and the Gods  is the second “Lands Unknown” book, a standalone graphic novel set in that world. The background is one part Europe in the Dark Ages and several parts vaguely Europeanesque fantasy-novel-land, of the style stretching back to Bob Howard. We get bits of maps in this book, with clusters of small countries with evocative titles and a “Northern Empire” lurking on the edge of that map, plus the usual dangerous wildlife (in one scene a forest giant fights a river dragon) and humans (pirates, caught between those aforementioned monsters). Mignola throws out minor details of the world, which could be hooks for further stories or just local color, as his hero navigates through it.

Uri Tupka is a scholar in late middle age, who has spent his life studying the gods of this world. Along with a few colleagues, he sent a letter condemning the emperor for some kind of statue, for which he was declared a heretic – his colleagues were seized and killed immediately. But Tupka had a prophetic dream, which told him to run – and so he did.

He travels south, as a pilgrim, after a fateful encounter with a local hermit. He is actually on a pilgrimage, honestly – to find out what happened to the gods, who were part of normal life in the deep past but are distant and unseen now. He has various other adventures, including frightening episodes with a devil-figure and various naked flying witch-women. I won’t give more detail than that: this is an episodic, picaresque book – and a fairly short one – so the episodes are best read for themselves.

But he does make it to an ancient city, with a famous temple to the gods. (This world has lots and lots of gods, by the way: Mignola names a handful of them but says there are vastly more, seeding the ground for as many more stories as he wants to tell.) And then he goes on from there to an even more remote and strange place, where he does learn where the gods are now and what they are doing.

Again, I don’t want to give away the whole thing, but this is a Manichean world, as fantasy worlds usually are. There is an Adversary, opposed to humanity and life and light and happiness, with as much or more power as the forces of light. And Tupka now has a new focus for his studies: that adversary and its minions. That will come in the second book about Tupka, which Mignola promises at the end here.

Mignola’s art is strong and inspired in Uri Tupka, with writing quirky and specific – this new world has clearly inspired him, and he’s pouring out its details in stories that play well to his strengths. I hope he keeps up this pace – a new “Lands Unknown” book a year for a while would be a nice thing.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Dogtangle by Max Huffman

Comics do at least half of their storytelling through images – but sometimes I wonder if some creators think their images can communicate deep, complex concepts that are clear and crisp in their own minds, even when they don’t embody those ideas in words.

Max Huffman’s graphic novel Dogtangle  brings up those thoughts: it’s obviously full of ideas, and Huffman is clearly coming from a specific viewpoint and stance, but his words only sketch lightly around the edges of his premises, leaving his energetic, deeply particular art to carry a lot of the weight of his story here.

That art is deeply caricatured, verging into pure design at times; his characters, to my eye, disappearing into his tinted pages as just more elements to shock or delight the viewer. It’s a deeply cartoony, distinctive style – I think I see graffiti influences, especially in his display type, and maybe equally in his defiant love for stark pages and imagery that doesn’t quite come into focus unless you already know what you’re looking at.

Dogtangle has plenty of dialogue, and a few captions to define what we’re look at, but not nearly enough words to explain all of the complexities of Huffman’s weird, satirical world. Concepts are thrown onto the page once for the reader to catch, and I suppose Huffman assumes that reader will assemble the elements in their own minds to match the model he has in his own. But I found Dogtangle, as it went along, more to dissolve in my mind to a sequence of striking images – vignettes, scenes, or moments – that sit like beads next to each other but don’t connect or combine to form a coherent whole.

I’m sure there is a story here, in Huffman’s mind. I’m just not sure it made it onto the page in a format that’s intelligible to most readers.

Here’s what I can tell you. Vernon Smilth is a local gadfly in Business Park, making long speeches during boring civic meetings in the converted Taco Bell, trying to slow down the relentless redevelopment of the town. He’s a failure at this, and there’s no sign that he does anything for an actual living: this is all he does that we see.

At one meeting, he meets Caressa Vignette, head and face of the pharmaceutical company named for her. We later on get the usual corporate hugger-mugger, in vague terms, so she doesn’t outright own the company, but her actual title and role and what Vignette really does is never clear – they make stuff, she’s in charge, that’s as far as Huffman wants to explain.

Smilth and Vignette fall in love, eat soup, get married – in the course of about two pages. They both want to do something big, something impressive. And Smilth has an idea: to create a Hypermutt. (The word is always presented in display type, like a splash page, in that Huffman graffiti-esque style, so it’s deeply difficult to read.)

Like many things in Dogtangle, exactly how this works is vague and doesn’t make much sense. But the Hypermutt is basically a specialized Katamari: once created, it is a big ball of dog that absorbs any other dogs that touch it. This supposedly is the next big product for Vignette, which is supposed to be satirical, but I have a hard time even seeing the space where the joke is supposed to be: this is not a consumer product at all; it can’t be sold to multiple people; and it seems to have nothing to do with the actual business of a pharmaceutical company.

Anyway, they make this thing, which is not as central to the book as you might imagine.

Almost immediately, Smilth and the hypermutt disappear – Vignette gets a ransom note for one or both of them, but we don’t see anyone nab either of them. Smilth is threatened and beaten by one of the Business Park zoning nabobs, apparently because his useless complaints at meetings were slightly less useless than Huffman made them appear. He has angered Powerful Forces, and He Will Pay.

What does that have to do with the Hypermutt? Did this Florida-based zoning overlord also grab the dog for some unspecified reason? Well…maybe? It’s never clear.

Back in Business Park, Vignette goes into business-crisis mode, running the gauntlet of shouted questions from reporters and hiring Ermine Slalom, a high-powered something-or-other (lawyer?) who will help her keep control of the company…but that plot gets derailed quickly by new characters Simon (Slalom’s little four-eyed nephew, who she’s caring for) and Smilth’s formidable mother, who arrives at the same time and is kept in the dark about her son’s disappearance.

From that point, a lot more stuff happens – some of it in what seems to be a completely different alternate universe where all of these characters are living in medieval Europe, for no obvious reason. Oh, and it flashes forward what I think is a few years, to Simone Slalom – who I thought at first was Simon’s mother, but maybe she’s an older sister? – where the Hypermutt now dominates the sky and has ruined the world.

Because what happens when dogs get stuck together in an ever-growing ball is that they fly into the sky and form a layer of cloud…obviously. (Duh!)

Anyway, this is SF and it is satirical, so of course there is an apocalypse, and this one is the Hypermutt apocalypse. At this point, the reader starts to wonder if the build-things-everywhere, knock-down-the-old-city, make-all-the-money folks are actually supposed to be our heroes. They did try to stop the apocalypse and their motivations were clear and reasonable, if venial.

Back to plot: Simone once pet-sat the Hypermutt, and was “the best sitter ever,” so now she has to retrieve Smilth from inside the flying cloud of dog. That sentence makes slightly more sense in context, though not very much. She does, he is freed, the Hypermutt collapses or dies or something, and the world…is maybe slightly less apocalyptic in the end? Huffman ends the book with a deeply enigmatic stretch of mostly-wordless pages that I assume mean something to him but left me flipping back and forth to figure out if he actually explained anything or told us where he left any of these characters.

(As far as I can tell: no.)

So Dogtangle is a deeply weird book, a massively particular book, and one that I suspect you might need to be Max Huffman to understand. Well, maybe Huffman could explain it to you in person, too – that’s possible. But, if you’re just reading it, do not expect it all to come together or make conventional narrative sense. It will look awesome, full of bizarre pages, and you may find yourself asking questions like “All of the pages are tinted, and the colors shift repeatedly throughout the book, from blue to yellow and so on, to end with orange. Does that mean anything?”

I suspect, in Huffman’s head, there’s a lot of meaning here. But it is not particularly clear on the page.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Tomorrow the Birds by Osamu Tezuka

Osamu Tezuka made a lot of comics. According to Wikipedia , over 700 works, comprising more than 150,000 pages. I doubt even half of that has been translated into English. So the view any North American reader has of his work – unless that reader both is fluent in Japanese and has access to a library-worth of Tezuka – is going to be limited, tentative, and gatekept by other people.

I come back to Tezuka periodically, though I think I found the period and style I find most compelling first: Tezuka was inspired by the adult-oriented gekiga movement in the mid-60s, and changed up his style and concerns for at least one strand of his work going forward for the next twenty years. (Tezuka died of cancer, at only 60, in 1989.) Vertical published a lot of that Tezuka material, around fifteen years ago, including The Book of Human Insects , Ayako , Ode to Kirihito , Buddha , Dororo , Black Jack , MW , and Apollo’s Song .

There’s probably more in that style – to say it again, Tezuka was ridiculously prolific – but I haven’t seen anything newly-published along those lines in years. So I’ve poked into other Tezuka styles and series – the well-regarded early adventure Princess Knight , for example, and more recently the anthology Shakespeare Manga Theater  and the odd One Hundred Tales . But the seriousness and darkness of those core gekiga works hasn’t come out in anything else I’ve seen.

But I keep looking. So this time I grabbed Tomorrow the Birds , from the time-frame that also saw those gekiga books. It was serialized in S-F Magazine between 1971 and 1975, collected in Japanese not long afterward, and translated into English for this 2024 edition by Iyasu Adair Nagata.

It’s somewhat more serious than the ’50s-era Tezuka books I’ve seen – it comes close to the doomy gekiga, especially early in the book – but still has some goofiness in it. And Tezuka seems to have leaned heavily into the serialized nature of this story to tell very different kinds of stories – to the point that the back half of the book feels a bit like “well, here’s a Western set in this world, and now here’s a fable, and then let’s try a ghost story.”

Tomorrow is basically a future history, spanning what seems to be at least a thousand years, told in nineteen mostly short chapters. In the near future, magpies (maybe corvids in general) have gotten smarter, learned to harness fire, and start attacking humanity. Very quickly, over the course of the first four or five stories, Japan surrenders to the birds and helps them destroy other human nations – I expect this was a political dig – and human civilization ends. The birds turn into anthropomorphic birdmen in a mechanism Tezuka wisely does not explain – though, as you can see from the cover, he does note that their heads get substantially larger to house more complex brains.

There’s also a minor thread of an alien civilization monitoring Earth, and how they have interfered to create the rise of the birds. This is another bit of Tazuka’s SFnal satire, and also gives him his ending – I saw it coming, but it’s well done.

Each of the nineteen stories in Tomorrow is separate. The first few, during the war between humans and birds, take place in a short period of time – maybe one generation at most – but the rest of the book stretches down long centuries, as birdman civilization grows, changes, and is expressed differently in different places on earth. As I said, we get a very traditional Western – with a human in the Noble Savage role – and several other clearly genre exercises, as if Tezuka was working down a checklist of kinds of stories to tell in this milieu.

The stories are mostly in the downbeat, tragic, or SFnal if-this-goes-on mode: things go badly for the main-character humans in all of the stories, and often not much better for main-character birds. This becomes a bit obvious once the reader notices it – and any reader will definitely notice how the first few stories are all “birds attack humans, humans lose” – but each story is strongly told, and all of this material does have a similar tone and sweep and seriousness to his core gekiga works.

It is a goofy premise, but Tezuka sells it well, and gets through the “birds destroy human civilization by setting things on fire” bits quickly enough that most readers won’t argue too much. We take it as allegorical, accept the WWII echoes and the core Japanese-ness of the idea, and see where the story takes us. Tomorrow the Birds is not quite as darkly uncompromising as something like MW or Ode to Kirihito, but it’s from the same strain of Tezuka’s work and has many of the same concerns and ideas.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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