Tagged: fantasy

As I write this, the reruns of Richard Thompson’s great Cul de Sac daily comic on GoComics have hit the summer camp sequence of 2010, introducing Andre Chang , a boy who wants to draw comics and is bigger and louder – especially in his comics – than anyone else.

Andre is lovable and amusing, because he’s a child with a child’s enthusiasms, and we assume he will grow out of it, at least somewhat, and temper that enthusiasm with other qualities.

A project from DC from the prior year, Wednesday Comics , belies that hope.

It was a bold, interesting experiment: to turn out standard DC comics (their usual characters, their usual stories, in-continuity as far as I can tell) in a Sunday-newspaper broadsheet format. Editor Mark Chiarello’s introduction to this oversized single-volume collection – they were originally printed in newspaper-size pamphlets and distributed weekly, because everything in superhero comics must be printed in a pamphlet and distributed weekly – sidestepped the fact that Sunday comics still existed at that point, and resolutely ignored the existence of humorous newspaper strips, which most of us realize has been the majority of the form for their entire history. This was one of the first worrying points: DC has a long history of humor itself, and it wouldn’t have been impossible for some alternate-world version of Wednesday Comics to have an Inferior Five strip, or even, if I’m shooting for the moon, Bob Hope. (When I first got this book, I had an alternate-world hope for a mash-up style book, from some elseworlds DC with more of a sense of humor: maybe Teen Titans in a Peanuts style, or Krypto as Marmaduke or Green Arrow and Black Canary in Blondie situations. That’s not something this world’s DC would ever do, of course. Pity: that would be a fun book, and different from anything else on the shelves…though, again, the Big Two never do anything deliberately different these days.)

Unfortunately, the most important thing about modern superhero comics – more than the costumes, more than the secret identities, more than the endless “who would win” arguments, more than the catchphrases and shocking reverses and Never Agains – is that you must take them seriously at all times. Superhero comics are serious and deep and important, telling stories about guys in funny costumes punching each other imbued with the power of ancient myth, and anyone who doesn’t accept this basic, fundamental truth will be wished into the cornfield.

So Wednesday Comics could never have been a project full of the influence of the actually most popular Sunday comics, now or ever. You’ll look in vain for anything influenced by Krazy Kat here, or Bringing Up Father, or Peanuts, or Far Side, or Calvin and Hobbes – not even a Luann or Bloom County. The model for “Sunday comics” here is a very vaguely remembered Hal Foster Prince Valiant, described as if there were an era when the Sunday color insert was entirely made up of full-page adventure stories in that mode.

These are all Andre Chang comics: as big as possible, loud and flashy most of the time, modern in the most trivial ways while mostly looking backwards to a cleaned-up dream of the Silver Age. There are fifteen full stories here (plus two single-page try-outs), each one twelve big pages long. Assuming each page is roughly the size of two normal comics pages, that’s essentially a single issue of story for each one of them – call it a fill-in issue, in a different, hopefully exciting format.

Some of the artists engage with the larger page – Ben Caldwell’s Wonder Woman story in particular has detailed, interesting layouts that run all over the page, though unfortunately I found that one confusing and cramped, with too many tiny boxes that didn’t flow as I hoped. Some artists, on the other hand, just seem to have their normal work blown up to the larger size, as Joe Kubert’s (impeccably drawn, I’ll admit) Sgt. Rock story, which adds bands at the bottom and top of each page to fill it out.

I’ll be frank: there’s not a single story here I’d pick out as exemplary in a good way. I like Kyle Baker’s work a lot; here he gives us a muddy, dull Hawkman stopping aliens from hijacking airplanes (?!) and then fighting dinosaurs with Aquaman – that perhaps shows the Andre Chang-ness of it best; it’s all boys playing with whatever toys they grab out of the box, making them fight.

OK. Other possible highlights include a really awesome-looking Deadman story by Dave Bullock and Vinton Heuck, Paul Pope’s mildly self-pitying and convoluted Adam Strange story, and a mostly sunny and silly Supergirl story from Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner. There are also stories where the art is fun and lively, making good use of the large canvas, to tell cliched and standard stories, such as Mike Allred on Metamorpho, Joe Quiňones on Green Lantern, José Luis Garcia-López on Metal Men, and somewhat (I don’t love the art-style, but it’s different and inventive and striking) Sean Galloway on Teen Titans. In pretty much all of those cases, the story is bland yardgoods – there’s even a “new villain hates the heroes for histrionic unspecified ‘they’re the real bad guys’ reasons,” as required for any project like this – but the art redeems it somewhat.

No story in here will surprise you, or make you laugh, or make you think. At best, you will be reminded that you think a particular character is Wicked Kewl and want to read more stories about that character punching bad guys – which, of course, is what DC wanted out of the project in the first place. So, if that happens, this book has been successful in its aim.

The book is also physically large, obviously, and a bit unwieldy to read and store. So keep that in mind if you decide to check it out. I personally got a copy from my local library, which turned out to be a great choice: I don’t need to keep the thing, and trying to manhandle it into position to read will soon be just a vague memory. Wednesday Comics is more interesting as a concept than as an object in the physical world: it is ungainly, tries too hard, trips over itself, and wears out its welcome much sooner than you expect.

Wait: maybe it is essentially Marmaduke, after all.

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

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.

This is not a sequel to Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell . It is, though, the only other project I know of by the team behind that webcomic, and it’s set in a world very similar to Darwin Carmichael‘s. It may even be the same world, though not necessarily so.

Darwin Carmichael ran from 2009 through 2013 and then was collected into a book. Sophie Goldstein drew about 90% of it and co-wrote it all, as far as I can tell, and Jenn Jordan drew a few bits and did the other half of the writing.

An Embarrassment of Witches  was a 2020 original graphic novel. This time out, it looks like Goldstein (the professional comics-maker and teacher) did all of the art, but the book is still vague about their roles, so I continue to assume they write it together, in whatever way. (Probably not Marvel Method. My guess would be some variety of co-plotting, with Goldstein maybe doing page breakdowns and then coming back together for dialogue.)

Darwin was set in a modern NYC where everything in myth was true – there were minotaurs on the subway and stoner angels were important to the plot. In Witches, we only see humans, but it’s a world with industrialized, systematized magic – our milieu is the academic world around magic, focused on two young women and their post-graduate lives.

As required in a story about two people, they’re quite different: Rory is impulsive, unsure, flitting from one idea to the next. Angela is driven, focused, serious. And the story is thus mostly about Rory, since she’s more interesting and active.

They’ve both just graduated. Angela is about to start an internship with Rory’s Type A mother, Dr. Audrey Rosenberg. Rory is heading off to work at a dragon sanctuary in Australia with her boyfriend Holden…who, just before getting on the plane, tells her that he wants to open up their relationship to other people. (We get the sense that this sort of thing happens to Rory all the time – she misreads signals, dives into everything headfirst, and gets hurt all the time by everything before bouncing off into something totally different after a big emotional scene.)

So Rory impulsively doesn’t go to Australia, begs Angela to let her stay in the walk-in closet of their apartment – they’ve sublet her room to a guy named Guy for the summer – sells off most of her stuff, and then falls for Guy and decides to follow him into his new Interdisciplinary Magick program. (Every time Rory does something, you can assume the word “impulsively” is there. The narrative doesn’t say she always does this about a boy, but the two cases we see here both fit that pattern.)

Meanwhile, Angela, in a somewhat more low-key manner, is one of six interns working for Dr. Rosenberg (Rory’s mother, again), who is demanding and exacting and apparently has not one iota of human feeling for her employees or family.

They both crash, of course. Angela because she’s been doing the boiling-frog thing, with pressure building up bit by bit probably since she was five, and she just cracks. Rory because that’s what she always does: throws herself into something but only half-asses it, misunderstands other people and doesn’t say what she wants or needs, and then collapses into an emotional wreck when it inevitably breaks apart. 

They yell at each other, they break their friendship…but only briefly, because it’s that kind of story. They also have familiars – I think everyone in this world does, but the familiars are pretty independent and seem to wander off for weeks at a time – who kibitz on their relationship, squabble with each other, and help to mend everything in the end.

It’s a story I’ve seen many times before – you probably have, too. One part quarter-life crisis, one part best friends assuming too much of their relationship. Goldstein and Jordan tell it well, and their quirky, specific world adds a lot of depth and intertest to what could otherwise be a pretty general and bland story. Rory would be deeply annoying in most stories; she’s the kind of person who goes out of her way to step on every damn rake on the ground, over and over again.

In the end, they both move on to things that we think are good for them – at least, we hope so, and it is the end, so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. It’s a solid ending, open and forward-looking. I don’t know if we’ll get another story by Goldstein and Jordan set in a world of industrialized magic, but…if we got two, surely there’s no reason there couldn’t be three?

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

Comics artists of a certain age always want to draw Loki in a helmet with big twisty ram’s horns. I know why, they know why – we all know why. But reminding readers of bombastic comics for kids, hacked out monthly and printed on the cheapest paper available, might not be the mental connection you want to make in your classy hardcover collection of retold myths. I’m just saying.

Norse Mythology, Volume 1  is the latest in the long line of floppies and sturdier-formatted objects intending to, as far as I can tell, create sequential pictures for every last word Neil Gaiman has ever written in his long career. (Look out for Duran Duran by Neil Gaiman: The Graphic Novel!)

As is usual for this project, Gaiman wrote the original thing (in this case, the 2017 book Norse Mythology , a novel-shaped retelling of what bits of Norse mythology survived Christianity, which ain’t much) and is not credited with anything at all related to this book. P. Craig Russell adapted the original thing into comics, and drew some of it – here the first two (of seven) sections. And various other people – Jill Thompson, Mike Mignola, David Rubín, Jerry Ordway, Piotr Kowalski – drew the other bits, sometimes coloring it themselves and sometimes letting others (mostly Lovern Kindzierski) do the colors.

The stories were originally published in twelve floppy issues, with multiple covers because it’s the modern world and we can’t have anything nice anymore, and then those were collected into three hardcovers. I’ll let you figure out which of the two this one was.

(So it’s exactly the same model as The Graveyard Book , for those still confused.)

Using multiple artists works a bit better here than in Graveyard, which was basically one story – this is more miscellaneous to begin with, since the stories are only vaguely in chronological order for the usual mythological reasons. And the styles work well together – they’re individual, but all are working here mostly in an adventure-comics look with quite a lot of Stan-and-Jack in its DNA.

As usual with Russell’s adaptations, it’s very faithful, with lots of captions to use as much of the original prose as possible. As always, I find that is just fine, and probably what the paying audience wants, but it makes the whole thing just slightly plodding and obvious.

But, let me be honest: you get this book because you want more Neil Gaiman stuff, and you want it to be as Neil Gaiman-y as possible. You probably already read the underlying book, and want something as much like “exactly that, but with pictures of Loki in a helmet with big twisty ram’s horns” as possible. This book delivers on that promise.

(Note: I read this book on December 15, and wrote this post on December 21. It is entirely possible that you do not want any more Neil Gaiman stuff ever again in your life. That’s entirely valid, too.)

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