Tagged: comics

Who Is AC? by Hope Larson & Tintin Pantoja

version-1-0-0-22

If this were a TV show, it would be a pilot that didn’t get picked up: it obviously aimed to start a series, and, a decade later, it didn’t. There are a lot of plot points, themes, and ideas that aren’t completely explained or fleshed out here – but of course there would be, if it were going to be a series. Those are hooks for later stories, for further details to come later, room for the story to grow.

But, for whatever reason, it didn’t. Who Is AC?  is a decade-old standalone now; I suppose it’s just possible that writer Hope Larson and artist Tintin Pantoja could get back together and tell us what happened next, but this was a Sailor Moon-inspired, manga-styled graphic novel about superheroes and social media aimed at tweens. That audience is now in college; the phones they used in 2013 are four generations out of date; and the ways all of us interact online has shifted and altered. Any follow-up would either be a period piece or a full reboot.

But, if you can ignore the fact that the main character gets her superpowers from a candybar phone, the likes of which were I think solidly out of date even in 2013, AC is a fast-moving, if somewhat superficial, adventure story about one girl who gets superpowers and discovers there are Trolls lurking out in the world.

Lin just moved with her family to the small college town of Barnhurst – location deliberately left unspecified, but  notably small and far away from everything. On the flight over, her phone rang while in airplane mode, and something happened that transformed her. She can use that phone contact, in a way the book doesn’t over-explain, to turn into a costumed superheroine with what looks like a big spear and some vaguely computer-esque powers.

Trace is a young man, about the same age, who lives in Barnhurst. He works in a copy shop, where he meets Lin making her zine. He’s got a crush on Mel, who works next door at the get-your-photos-taken-in-old-timey-garb shop (which is sustainable as a business in a small college town? Barnhurst must get substantially more tourist traffic than it seems to). Mel is a bit self-centered, the stereotypical pretty girl, but seems like a basically nice, normal person, not an airhead or a spoiled brat. The two have a date, which does not go well, largely because Trace is even more self-centered and full of unwarranted assumptions about every last thing in the world than we expected. (He’s also about sixteen or so, which means it comes across as young and unformed and needing some life experience rather than completely horrible. But he is clearly reminiscent of That Internet Guy, who was a loathed type even in 2013.)

The same night as that date, Lin witnesses a hold-up at the copy shop. She transforms into her alter ego, saves the day, and captures the crook (who is a sad-sack guy trying to get money to pay for dental work). But she also transforms again on the way home, to see how it works, and causes an accident for an already-mad Trace and his bike.

Trace posts an angry rant online about the superheroine after he learns about the holdup, calling her Anonymous Coward. (Presumably, if there had been a series, AC would have stood for other things – but that’s the source of the name here.) At about the same time, a shadowy figure in a repurposed Pizza Hut somewhere nearby – clearly the Big Villain of the series, but not completely identified in this book – tempts Mel into becoming what I suppose I have to call an Evil Minion.

Mel and Trace are going to meet someone isolated the next night, where Mel will presumably use the power of the Negative Internet to change Trace into another Evil Minion like herself. But Lin shows up, and there is a battle with lots of 1s and 0s in it, and the hold of the Troll (I guess we can call the big villain that – he’s called a troll in the book, which implies he may not be alone) is broken.

Lin’s secret identity is still, we think, safe, though her costume doesn’t cover her face all that much. Mel and Trace are back to being friends, we think, and maybe, if there were a Book Two, might move on to more. But AC doesn’t have a real superhero name, the origin of her powers and the Troll are still mysterious, and it’s not clear what the significance of the plot of the book was.

So: very much an introductory first volume, mostly set up and mysteries. All things that will now never be cleared up; this is all we have. Pantoja gives it an energetic, mildly manga style, and Larson, as always, is good with the big personalities of young people. It’s not quite a complete story, but it’s fine as long as you think of it as a pilot episode getting burned off one random night in the summer.

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

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 1

version-1-0-0-20

I’ve been known to bemoan the fact that the caption was basically wiped out of mainstream US comics in an extinction event roughly congruent with the big ’90s crash. I’ll admit that captions may have made a comeback since, like tiny mammals after the Chicxulub impact, but I read mainstream comics only rarely these days, so I don’t really know either way. But my point was that captions were useful, and did work well in a lot of the iconic ’80s stories, so, geez, maybe don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater?

Well, I hadn’t taken a look at any bathwater for a while. My opinion may have shifted somewhat.

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 1  is the first of three fairly large volumes collecting their combined run on the Daredevil character, from 1979 through 1982. Now, there’s an asterisk there – several asterisks, actually – since this is corporate comics, and it was created assembly-line style. Janson was the inker before Miller joined as penciler, working over Gene Colan, and took over as penciler/inker afterward. And Miller started off as “the hot new artist,” picking up co-plotting after a few issues and eventually taking over as writer as well. So what most readers think of as “the Frank Miller Daredevil” starts up about halfway through this book.

But comics fans are completionists, and this is a complete package, so that’s a good thing. It also has extensive credits of who did what – something comics weren’t good at for a long time, but they made up for it starting sometime in the 1970s, and became obsessive about it in the flood of reprint projects starting in the ’90s.

Included in this book are:

  • Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man issues 27 & 28, written by Bill Mantlo and inked by Frank Springer; it’s basically a Frank Miller try-out, I guess, since Daredevil guest-stars
  • Daredevil #158-161, 163-166, written by Roger McKenzie (with Miller contributing for 165 and 166)
  • Daredevil # 167, written by David Michelinie and Miller
  • Daredevil #168-172, written by Miller

Now, Bill Mantlo has definitely written better comics than this. So has Michelinie. I don’t know McKenzie’s work well, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. But the stories here – even the ones when Miller takes over at the end – are filled with long, verbose, tedious captions that “set the scene” and “provide color commentary” but mostly tell us what we’re looking at and repeat standard phrases about the character and world.

Daredevil doesn’t have a single phrase that gets beaten into the ground like Wolverine’s “I’m the best at what I do and what I do isn’t pretty,” but both “man without fear” (including related references to DD never giving up on anything ever) and “hey, don’t forget this guy is, like, totally blind!” come up like a bad penny every few pages.

The stories are also…what’s a more polite word for cliched and standard? There were a lot of comics like these in the 1970s and 1980s, and only slightly different before and after that – superhero yardgoods, rolled out to fill up pages and entertain an audience that just wanted to see this guy in this costume punching a particular group of villains and repeating his catchphrase.

Miller was an solid artist from the beginning, which is good. And Janson supported him well. They worked well together to make eye-pleasing pages full of superhero action, only slightly marred by the reams of words pasted on top of all of it.

Once Miller starts writing the stories, the elements of his later work slide in. The last five issues here are one plotline, in which The Kingpin – up to this point entirely a Spider-Man villain, and at that point retired in Japan – comes back to New York for a vaguely described plea deal in which he will hand over a dossier on his successors to the Manhattan DA in return for complete immunity on all of his previous crimes. (Which is, what thirty years of murders and gang-lord-ing and attempted spider-squashing? Nice deal.) We also get a flashback to Daredevil’s college days, to meet the One Great Love of His Life, Elektra, the beautiful daughter of a Greek diplomat who drops out of school when Daddy is murdered by terrorists that not-yet-Daredevil isn’t quite able to stop. She drops out, of course, to become an international assassin in a skimpy costume made up of mostly red straps.

As, of course, you do. In superhero comics, at least.

Bullseye, the most iconic Daredevil antagonist – basically his Joker or Lex Luthor – turns up several times, with a lot of hugger-mugger and opportunities for Daredevil to emote and express his pure goodness and desire for justice, including during the Kingpin plotline at the end. (I do have to admit that Miller makes better use of him, with less histrionics, than McKenzie did.)

So the front half of Vol. 1 is just a slight step up from a standard Marvel comic of 1979 – Miller is energetic, but there were plenty of good, energetic artists then. The end shows more promise, but Miller is still working in the same mode: characters talk too much, and the narrative voice might be pulling back just slightly, but it’s still too intrusive, and spends far too much time telling the reader things he should already know or can see right there in the same panel.

I’m assuming all that gets better in Vol. 2; I’ll have to take a look.

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

Last Kiss: Sex Day by John Lustig

last20kiss20-20sex20day-7093800

I try not to be a gatekeeper. I have standards and expectations – and, like everyone else, some tropes and styles and story-structures I like better than others. But I like to think I can take the how and what as it comes.

So I haven’t mentioned the syndicated comic “strip” Last Kiss here before, as far as I can tell. But I’ve been aware of it, and read it here and there, and I’m definitely not against it. (I’m sure some people are – repurposing of art brings out a lot of thoughts and emotions in some people.)

The deal of Last Kiss is that John Lustig takes panels from mostly ’50s romance comics – a lot of Dick Giordano and Vince Colletta, I think, a lot of people who can’t be exactly credited seventy years later – edits them a bit, has them recolored, and adds new, humorous dialogue and captions. It’s all juxtaposition humor, with those clean-cut young men in crew cuts and young ladies in classy gowns talking about Gangnam style or whatever. Last Kiss has been running for quite some time – I want to say something like twenty years, in CBG and as a few issues in comics format and mostly on GoComics – but there’s a deep well of original material to work from, and I don’t think Lustig pushes out lots of material at any one time.

Last Kiss: Sex Day  is a mildly themed – sex is the theme, though that’s at least an underlying theme a lot of the time in Last Kiss, since it starts with romance comics to begin with – collection of the strip from 2013, a short book of about sixty pages. As far as I can tell, it’s only available digitally, which is just fine for this kind of frivolous exercise.

Last Kiss is all individual panels, and they’re presented one to a page here, with an occasional second page to show what the art looked like in its original form and with its original dialogue. (Lustig’s is always funnier, but often vastly less weird.) It’s sarcastic, it’s at least mildly “weren’t those old people totally squaresville” humor, and it’s all in the same territory of jokes. So this is a good length, and an amusing package: if you like the idea of Last Kiss, and don’t mind some mildly risqué humor, Sex Day is a fine sampler.

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

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 7: Gen’s Story by Stan Sakai

This one collects seven more issues of the early Usagi Yojimbo comic, plus a story from Critters, though the dates in the book are a little confusing. The book itself claims a first edition in September 1991, but says the stories included are copyright no earlier than 1992. Now, Stan Sakai is a fantastic creator, but I do think he’s bound by linear time, so issues 32-38 of Usagi, which were published from February 1992 through March of 1993, could not be collected in late 1991. Given that it has a 1996 Sergio Aragones introduction, and the second edition is said to be December 1997…I’m wondering if that first edition is a typo or just a mistake inserted onto the copyright page so long ago everyone has forgotten about it.

This book is also the end of the initial Fantagraphics run of Usagi. A second edition started up – checks notes – what looks like the very same month from Mirage . That one only lasted sixteen issues, but then Dark Horse picked it up and ran for another twenty-plus years for over a hundred and fifty issues.

So I’ll look to see if the beginning of the eighth volume seems to be more of an attempt to onboard new readers; this seventh volume, Gen’s Story , is much like the books immediately preceding it. There’s one long story that gives the book its title, this time featuring the return of the irascible rhino bounty hunter Gen, and featuring some historical backstory for him, alongside a cluster of shorter, relatively standalone stories.

We meet a female thief, Kitsune, who may be a love interest for Usagi, and then she returns in a later story. We’ve got a ghost story, in which Usagi is able to lay the spirit of a general he served under. We’ve got two shorter stories, one mostly humorous about young Usagi with his sensei and one where he’s narrating an encounter with an evil witch-like character to Noriyuki, the young panda lord who has showed up in this series a few times. And there’s “The Last Ino Story,” in which Gen and Usagi find that blind swordspig and nurse him back to health, learning what’s happened to him after their last meeting. (With about a hundred and eighty issues of later Usagi, I’m vaguely dubious anything of this era is “the last” anything, but it’s possible he never shows up again.)

As always, Usagi is upstanding and righteous, closely following the code of bushido and not particularly suffering because of it – this is a lightly moralistic series for younger readers, so the character with the rigid moral framework will be correct in every situation and events will arrange themselves so that he succeeds in his endeavors. Gen in particular exists to show an alternative to Usagi – not quite villainous, but clearly Not Right, like a young man bandying a girl’s name in a Wodehouse novel. The fact that this entire social setup was exploitative and corrupt, enabling a vicious caste of violence experts who were able to terrorize peasants basically at will…well, that’s just the way of the samurai, isn’t it?

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

Anna by Mia Oberländer

Books that are obvious metaphors can be tricky. Especially if you’re not quite sure exactly what they’re a metaphor for.

I think Anna  is Mia Oberländer’s first major graphic novel – it says it was created as part of her thesis in illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences – so I don’t have any prior work to check, to see what her usual method of working is. (The edition of Anna I read was translated by a person whose name was printed, vertically, in a fussy scripty font – apologies if I get it wrong but it seems to be Nika Knight.)

In the German mountain town of Bad Hohenheim, we see three generations of women, all named Anna. Perhaps for clarity, the grandmother is Anna1, her daughter Anna2, and our blonde narrator Anna3. And we immediately think that this will not be a naturalistic, straightforward story.

Anna2, and eventually Anna3, are exceptionally tall. Extraordinarily tall, strikingly tall, unusually tall, remarkably tall, uncomfortably tall. They have gangly super-long legs and torsos maybe a bit longer than normal. They tower over all of the rest of the people in the town – even the men, I think, though the point seems to be that they’re too tall for women, and that makes them generally unattractive to men and that they stand out in a way women shouldn’t.

There’s clearly an element of feminism in this metaphor – there’s a TV talking head who has an extended sequence giving advice to exceptionally tall girls which is the clearest indication of that part of the theme – but Anna2 and Anna3 are also clearly meant to be strange for women, outside of the norms, different in an unsettling way. They can’t be feminine in the way their society expects – they’re too big, taking up too much space, gangling randomly about, clearly out of place. We see Anna2’s size being commented on when she’s still a baby, her long legs erupting from a carriage to splay all over.

Is the metaphor about women who “take up too much space” – who are too big, too dominant, too much not deferential and quietly “feminine?” Maybe, but I think Oberländer’s point is more focused on tall than big – it’s tricky to know her connotations for both words, since she originally worked in German, but height is important here.

This is a mountain village, after all. Mountains are tall. Mountains can be climbed, perhaps more easily with long legs. Tall people can see farther at the top of mountains, and may be more at home there.

Oberländer tells this story in chapters, skipping around in time. We see Anna2 as a baby, Anna1 as a young girl with a dog with equally long and gangly legs, Anna3 as a young woman telling us the story and looking for love herself. Oberländer has a conversational tone in her captions, as if Anna3 was telling us this, in fits and starts, coming back to one thread and then another, telling us her family’s history.

Oberländer tells her story in big blocky drawings, characters often seen head-on. She typically has only a few panels to each page, jammed next to each other with thin ruled borders. Her lettering is florid, scripty, a bit difficult to read to slow the reader down. The drawing, though, is much cleaner, clearer: the pictures are understood instantly, while the words take just that bit of effort.

Again, I can’t tell you exactly what the metaphor means. It may not be that precise, to have a single meaning, in the first place. It’s a story about women that stick up, that can never hide in the crowd, that are out of place where they grew up and need to make or find places for themselves. That’s the general territory: a family of women, how they interact, what the “normal” grandmother thinks and does and says when her daughter and then granddaughter are notably different, when they stick up out of normal life so much it can’t be overlooked.

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

Thinking About Thinking by Grant Snider

thinking20about20thinking-9701532

I didn’t think Grant Snider made comics quickly enough to put out a book every year – he’s a working orthodontist, as I always find a way to fit in when I write about his work, since it’s such a highly-skilled, well-paid, and useful career and yet anti-glamorous and low profile at the same time – but this one came less than a year after the last one. So he may be more productive even than I give him credit for.

If I call Snider a cartoonist of introspection and hard-fought positivity, that might sound like spinach, or like the kind of thing you’d find in the New Age store next to the singing bowls and horrible incense. But he is, and his work is much better, more grounded, than that description might imply. Maybe because he’s from Kansas City: there’s an inherently Midwestern sensibleness and focus on real, everyday life in his work. Snider never feels like he’s intellectualizing, even as he does entire books about poetry (last year’s Poetry Comics ) or creativity (The Shape of Ideas ) or even the potentially-pretentiously titled The Art of Living . All his work is personal – often because he has his self-insert character at the middle of his comics, but even his other characters walk that difficult line between Everypeople and particular.

Thinking About Thinking , like several of Snider’s books, is “organized” by a single exemplary comic up front, which provides chapter titles into which everything else slots. In this case, it’s a single page headed “I think, therefore…” with nine panels of different endings to that sentence, from “I overthink” to “I am.” Each one of those panels turns into a half-title for a section of the book, with thematically related comics afterward.

It’s all thematically related, of course: the overall theme is, like so much of Snider’s work, those intertwined desires: to be happy, to do meaningful things in our lives, to be better, to be present, to be authentically ourselves, to just be without twisting ourselves into knots along the way with all of those desires. This time out, the focus is on thinking, mostly overthinking, given those themes and modern life in general.

Snider’s little figures, especially that author-insert and the others drawn to that scale, always remind me of R.O. Blechman – Snider has the same energy and looseness, his people equally able to go anywhere and do anything within their little boxes. He uses color well, usually just a few within a single strip, and his palette shifts by his subject matter – I’ve mostly seen him use flat, comic-style colors, but he also does watercolor-looking strips and some newer pieces with color gradients in the backgrounds.

You have to be willing to be positive to read Snider’s comics, to be willing to want to be better and to want to connect with other people and the world. That may be a big ask these days, especially for the kind of people who are defined by their own anger and hatred. I would like to think Snider’s work can help put people into the right mood and mindset, but I know the world is far too full of people who are never introspective, never thinking about the consequences of their actions, never concerned with other people at all. But that’s just yet another way that this world, and living in it, is difficult and painful…and, nevertheless, worth it. That’s what Snider’s work is all about, in the end: how to live in the world well, even with all the obstacles the world and ourselves throw up. That’s heroic in its way, and deeply necessary, and entirely admirable. Thinking About Thinking is another fine collection of work in that project.

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

Naked City by Eric Drooker

version-1-0-0-18

Everyone has story elements that annoy them unreasonably. For me, it’s often small factual things that undermine core themes of a book – the ones that make me think, “wait, well if she can do X, then Y can’t be true.”

So I spent a lot of time while reading Eric Drooker’s 2024 graphic novel Naked City  trying to square one very minor circle in my head, and failing. You see, the main character is Isabel, a young wannabe singer-songwriter who moves to New York to chase her art. Her mother was Mexican, and was deported when she was young; her father an American who has recently died. One thread of the book is Isabel’s worry that she’s undocumented – the book never makes it quite clear, but she apparently doesn’t have any paperwork of any kind.

Leave aside the fact that she went to school, where the usual  functionaries would have demanded and received all kinds of proof of her existence and residence and medical history and whatnot. But Drooker has Isabel take a quick European tour right in the middle of the worry about her potentially-undocumented status. And I kept asking myself: does Drooker think, or want his audience to think, that anyone can fly off to another continent, and work there for an extended period of time, without a passport? That plot element – which is totally extraneous, by the way; Drooker could have made it a West Coast thing with no change to the narrative at all – proves that she must have documentation, or it couldn’t have happened.

This is not important to the book at all. It didn’t need to be that way. But it’s the kind of element that makes me question every strength of the book, every moody blue panel and every allusive line of dialogue, wondering if they’re as randomly rickety in their own ways.

Naked City is somewhat fabulistic, which could be the answer to that question – and the one of why Isabel never even tried to look for that lost mother, or know her mother’s name. Fables are focused on telling their specific story, in a particular story-teller way, and details only come up as they support that work.

So Isabel goes to New York, looking to make music and share it with people. She gets a lousy McJob (literally) and busks on the corner, but needs to also do something more remunerative. So she answers an ad to work as an artist’s model, for an unnamed painter who is another of our main characters – the fable here is about making art, and he’s the other side of that equation.

Normally, in a fable, there would be a strong distinction between the two – one is lazy but successful, the other driven but a failure, that kind of thing. Drooker, though, isn’t constructing this explicitly as a fable with a specific moral: both of our central artists are positive, and both become notably successful in their art as the book goes on…though both have to deal with one Business Person, the gatekeeper to success, who isn’t as positive and artsy as they are. (Isabel’s Business Person, as is typical for the music industry, is vastly worse: predatory and demanding and actively molding her into something she doesn’t want to be.)

There are two other main characters. First is Alex, a flighty dancer who “dates” Isabel for a while and dips in and out of the narrative, mostly there (I think) to be the avatar of a certain type of young hedonic artist, living for sensation and totally in the moment. Turning up later in the book is another unnamed man, older, maimed, a former window-washer and probably currently homeless – he’s the unexpectedly philosophical voice of experience, stoic and accepting. He’s not an artist of any kind, but he used to be a craftsman of a sort, taking pride in doing his work well, and now is almost a nihilist, insisting that life is only about the pursuit of money but (maybe paradoxically) refusing to actually do that himself.

Naked City is the kind of book where characters suddenly launch into detailed explanations of their own motivations and desires; it’s about Art and Life and features people who think in those capital-letter terms at great length. Isabel mostly pours it out in her songs, which makes her the most naturalistic character – and that’s good, because she’s central and gets the most page-time. The Painter engages in the most obvious why-art conversations, with just about every other character; I don’t know if Drooker specifically thought of him as an author stand-in, but he tends in that direction. Alex, and the band of similar folks that follow along with him for a few scenes  – because it’s no fun being a hedonist alone – are more shallow, entirely about the moment and sensation above all.

It’s a fairly long book, over three hundred pages, but mostly leisurely – Isabel and The Painter rise in their respective creative worlds, in their different ways, and then things change, for both of them, and they make other artistic choices. It ends better for one of them than the other: I don’t know if Drooker had a moral in mind, but if he did, it doesn’t entirely become clear. To be fair, Drooker’s comics have typically been more imagistic, and he ends this book in his old silent mode, with a forty-page wordless sequence largely framed by snow.

I tend to think Naked City gets too specific too much for its own good – the talky bits are more specific, and less successful, than the pure-image sections. Isabel’s past and parents are a distraction: Drooker wants to show she launched from a specific place, but where she launched from isn’t central to this story. The Painter is more iconic, because we know less about him: he’s there, he’s been painting for years. We know what he wants and cares about and loves: what’s important.

But this is the kind of book that will be most loved and clutched to heart by other wanna-be artists, who will see themselves in all of the arguments about art and commerce, selling out and rising up, who will passionately agree with specific speeches – I wouldn’t be surprised to see some panels or lines from Naked City turned into tattoos before too long; it’s that kind of book. If you’re in that bucket, you should take a look at it: it is deep and capacious, and will give you language to talk about things you care about and examples to frame your thinking.

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

Santos Sisters, Vol. 1 by Greg and Fake

santos20sisters201-2536648

The single-name thing seems to have leapt from Eurocomics and landed on North American shores – well, we’ve always had it in other fields, like music (Cher! Madonna!), but comics-makers are embracing it as well. I may be concerned that our Strategic Name Reserve is in danger of being depleted – there aren’t that many regular forenames, though if we allow variants and standard nouns, we’re in much better shape – but I am still not, despite all my demands, the High Lord of All English Usage, so all I can do is Canute it up here.

I don’t know what arbitration mechanism is available if there’s, say, a Belgian who goes by “Greg” and a North American who does the same – it seems like the kind of thing that could easily happen – but, again, I have not been granted the awesome power I keep asking for, so I guess it’s not my problem.

In any case, Belgians, the name Greg has officially been claimed (by a guy from Chicago, as I understand it), so you snoozed and I suppose you lost. The name Fake has also been claimed (by a guy from Manzanillo, Mexico), but that’s probably less in-demand. And they have teamed up, like Hawk and Animal of the Legion of Doom, over the past few years to make a comic called Santos Sisters.

The first collection of that comic was published a couple of months ago, under the fairly obvious title Santos Sisters, Vol. 1 . From online descriptions – not the book itself – I learn that Fake is the writer and Greg is the artist. The book collects the first five issues of the series, plus a few odds and ends, though not the covers of those five issues, which seems like an odd and unusual choice. The back cover also gives, for what might be the first time: their fabulous superhero origin. (They found medallions on the beach that granted them superpowers from a goddess, Madame Sosostris.)

Santos Sisters is basically a mash-up of vaguely ’90s superhero elements – more early-Image than anything else, big bulky guns and all – with Archie-style storytelling, all in a mildly mocking tone that regularly spells things incorrectly in dialogue, I think deliberately. Alana and Ambar are sisters – we can call their last name Santos, but that’s probably not right – who are probably in their early 20s, since they seem to live in an apartment, but they get up to Archie-ish teen hijinks with boyfriends and dates.

Alana is the serious one, Betty-coded, with lighter skin, smaller breasts and the blue outfit. Ambar is the party girl in red, Veronica-coded and always ready for action of whatever type. They fight crime in the Southern California city of Las Brisas, the kind of place that has a vibrant downtown and a beach and is close enough to ski slopes for a day trip – a location designed for comics stories.

Their stories are short, in that Archie style. Sometimes about battling some supervillain threatening Las Brisas, but as often watching “Boozy Bees” on TV, or squabbling about dating two guys at once, or going camping in the mountains, or aiding Don Quixote (?!) who has randomly arrived in town (??!?). The word “random” is appropos much of the time, as are “quirky” and “slightly silly.” Again, it’s all starting from the premise “what if these Archie-style girls were Image-esque superheroines?”

Their powers are not deeply defined: they have costumes, of course, which manifest when they call on the goddess. They’re probably resistant to harm, since that’s pretty standard, and they do seem to glow when in costume. They definitely fly, and manifest big guns (most of the time) or big swords (once in a while, I suppose for a change of pace) with which to battle their enemies. But it’s not like Alana channels the power of ice and Ambar fire, or one of them turns into an armadillo and the other an ocelot, or their necklaces generate pulsing colorful forcefields in the shape of household objects, or anything like that. They just chase bad guys, squabble among themselves, and shoot their guns to mow down the henchmen. (Major villains get fisticuffs, or talked down, or some other less-lethal activity, so they can return in later stories.)

It’s a fun premise, and hasn’t worn out its welcome yet. It probably will, since it’s not a hugely durable or extensible premise, but a hundred and fifty pages doesn’t get us there. Greg draws it all in that Archie look, and is good at both the heavy-lidded women and the dim-bulb men. Fake’s stories are varied and goofy in interesting ways – there are twenty-two different stories here, and none of them are repetitive or rely on the same ideas. Again, I’m sure that will come: the premise isn’t that deep. But I’d expect probably another book this size of similar stories, then maybe one big all-the-villains-team-up epic, before it hits the wall of ennui.

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

Just Act Normal by John McNamee

just20act20normal-4943241

Three years ago, when I saw the first collection of John McNamee’s Pie Comics – it’s called Goldilocks and the Infinite Bears ; it’s funny; you should read it – I thought the strip might have ended, and was mildly sad that only the first of the strip’s three collections were available in my library’s app.

Well, sometime over those three years, a second Pie Comics collection popped up there – yclept Just Act Normal  – and I just noticed and read it. In possibly even better news, McNamee has started posting to Tumblr again, with a half-dozen new cartoons this year after a six-year silence.

So the TL;DR for those of you with short attention spans: McNamee is quirky and funny, he’s got a great semi-stick-figure style – a little in the Tom Gauld vein, which is high praise – and there’s the promise of more stuff from him, too. This book is good; the first book is good. (I can’t figure out what the third book’s title is, and suspect it may be a mirage – on the other hand, the book I read, which clearly has Just Act Normal on its pages, has Book Learnin’ as a header/title in the Hoopla app, so maybe that‘s the title of his third book?)

McNamee has the kind of art that’s instantly readable and is much harder to do than it looks. (The fewer the lines, the tougher it is.) And his jokes are wry, sarcastic, modern, and true – he got his start at The Onion, which gives you a sense of the comic sensibility and tradition he mostly works in.

There are no continuing characters; it’s mostly four-panel bits, different every time. You can jump in anywhere. So you might as well.

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

Daisy Goes to the Moon by Matthew Klickstein & Rick Geary

version-1-0-0-16

Daisy Ashford was real. She was born in 1881, and wrote a cluster of stories in her youth: weird, oddball things with eccentric spelling and an often-shaky grasp on how people actually lived and talked to each other, all bathed in the sunny happiness of a coddled girl of the Victorian age. After she grew up, she rediscovered those stories, and some of them were published around 1919 with the help of J.M. Barrie. There have been periodic revivals and rediscoveries since then; a movie of her most famous “novel,” The Young Visiters, was made by the BBC about twenty years ago. (I know I saw it, but it must have been before the life of this blog.)

Daisy Goes to the Moon  is about Daisy, but not by Daisy. Matthew Klickstein wrote a short novel in Daisy’s style – which seems to me to be the opposite of the point of juvenilia, frankly – and it was published in 2009, full of 1950s imagery and ideas. And now Rick Geary, master of both whimsy and Victoriana, has turned Klickstein’s story into a short graphic novel, full of authentically Daisy-esque spelling and moderately appropriate Daisy-esque situations and comments.

(Daisy herself died in 1972 at the age of 90, so she’s no more going to complain about what people have done to her memory than Shakespeare is.)

This begins with Daisy about the age of nine, when she wrote her most famous works, and dressed up in the usual Victorian-girl look, down to the big bow in her hair. She’s sitting under a tree, Alice-like, when a “rokit” lands nearby. It’s piloted by Mr. Zogolbythm (Mr. Z), a tall, skinny man all in black who comes from the moon, to which he proceeds to whisk Daisy for an adventure.

The story continues somewhat episodically, somewhat along the lines of the usual tour-of-the-future style for utopian works. Daisy experiences the high-tech of the moon – including a “so-you-can-hear-and-read-too” device implanted in her brain to allow her to understand moon language – flees Moon Monsters and creatures from other planets, shops for shoes and goes to an automat, and so on.

Soon, though, another character pops up: Mr. Blahdel (Mr. B) an American time-traveler from the 1950s, lugging a TV that’s missing an important part. B and Z have some mostly minor disagreements, which lead to further adventures when they dispute over the navigation of a spaceship. We also descend into metafiction when Daisy finds a book written by her sister Angie, which retells the first half of the story badly – the bratty Angie has followed Daisy (somehow; this isn’t clear) to the Moon.

And, of course, in the end Daisy gets back home safe and sound, and declares that to the best place to be.

Geary’s art is as detailed and energetic as always; quirkiness and whimsy typically brings out some of his best work, and that’s the case here. I might think that was an odd project, but it’s done as authentically and honestly as it could be, and this is a fun, amusing story.

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

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks