Tagged: IDW

Snaked, eyed: a review

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  • December 28, 2007

snaked01_int1-2-2670924

Are you tired of the Christmas spirit? Clifford Meth and Rufus Dayglo’s Snaked is guaranteed to wash all that away.

In one of the more audacious acts of counter-programming in comics, IDW is releasing Snaked today, in the skip-ship days between December holidays. And Snaked is about as far from Christmas treacle as you can get.

If you’re already a Meth addict, you probably suspected no less. Clifford Meth is a man who does benefits for Bill Loebs and Dave Cockrum– but as a storyteller, he would take Harlan Ellison calling him bugfuck and use it as a cover pullquote. Clifford’s stories have often been dark and mean and nasty and this is no exception. His story hints at, in no particular order, violence, politics, mayhem, cannibalism, September 11, the Bush Administration, the Clinton legacy, and prison rape. Rufus Dayglo’s art reminds one of collages compiled from lunatics’ sketches with crayons drawn on newspaper clippings of murder and corruption trials.

Like I said, the feel-good story of the season.

I wouldn’t recommend this book if you’re trying to smile after a few days with the in-laws*– Snaked is a brutal piece of work. But if you’re looking to dispense with plastered on holiday smiles, this book is the comics equivalent of listening to speed metal to get Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer out of your head. And that’s a good thing.

* Unless you’re hoping your in-laws meets the sort of fate that happens to some of the characters. And if so, I don’t want to know about it.

An Agnostic’s Christmas, by John Ostrander

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  • December 20, 2007

It’s an odd time of year if you’re an agnostic. It’s especially odd if you’re a church-going agnostic like myself. Oh, I suppose it could be said that Christmas is an odd time of year for everyone one way or another. We rush around spending money we don’t really have buying gifts for people, some of whom we don’t really like. Amidst the desperate scurry, we try to convince ourselves that it really is the happiest time of year and, for some, perhaps it is.

Christmas isn’t just a “holiday” in the sense that the Fourth of July is a holiday. It’s a holiday in the sense of being a “holi-day” – a holy day. It celebrates the day Jahweh became Jesus; the day that, according to the story told, God came off His (Her) mountain and incarnated as a mortal child, a baby boy. That’s what underlines the whole Christmas concept. The mythology has that at its root.

The existence of Jesus (as a mortal) I can buy; the existence of Yahweh (or any other god), not so much.

Aside: before anyone starts chiming in about the pagan roots of Christmas, I know all about that. I don’t believe in your gods, either. And few if any folks are celebrating the pagan rituals; if they still have meaning, it’s only because the majority of people see them in a Christian or quasi-Christian context. Yes, the Church swiped your ideas and co-opted them. Get over it. (more…)

Jon Sable Freelance continuity

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  • December 7, 2007

Promoting a question from the comments on the latest installment of Jon Sable Freelance: Ashes of Eden, Lee Houston Jr. writes:

Okay… as usual great Mike Grell story and art, but it leaves me scratching my head because sadly I do not remember when this first appeared. When and how do Ashes of Eden and his guest appearance in Shaman’s Tears fit into the overall Jon Sable continuity?

That’s because Ashes of Eden is appearing here first, on ComicMix. It’s all new. Tell your friends. (Tell them it’s new GrimJack and Munden’s Bar stories, too.)

As for continuity — let’s see if I have this straight:

Since everybody asks, Marv Wolfman’s Sable series, while exceptional in many regards, is not part of Mike Grell’s continuity. Think of it as existing on Earth Sable2, if you must. Perhaps we can get Marv to write a story combining the two earths — no, because then someone else will come along and mess it up in 2017.

Besides, Marv’s Munden’s Bar story comes first.

Glenn Hauman is associate editor of Jon Sable Freelance: Bloodtrail, Jon Sable Freelance: Ashes of Eden (which he also colors), and of the IDW Sable reprints. He’s also production director of ComicMix, has had the thankless job of putting up with editor Mike Gold for about a decade (hey, thank you, Glenn!) and spends his spare time writing Star Trek stories and roaming the streets of eastern New Jersey.

Romance! Action! Prose!

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  • December 7, 2007

It used to be, the most successful comic book heroes would eventually wind up in prose.  These days, with superheroes fully integrated into mainstream America, it’s no surprise that several novelists have taken their own, unique looks at the genre.  Already this year we’ve had the well received Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman and Perry Moore’s Hero.  It’s no surprise, then, that the romance genre would also introduce their own take on the subject.

 

Long-time comic book fan and one-time DC Comics staffer Elizabeth M. Flynn, writing as Ellis Flynn, has produced Introducing Sonika.  The novel is an eBook, available from Cerridwen Press as of December 13.

 

According to the publisher, “Sonika is actually 28-year-old Sonya Penn, a Gen Y gal working hard as a physical therapist in order to pay off the enormous medical bills that remained after her parents’ deaths. Like so many of her generation, her career has left her no time for romance. But unlike so many others like her, the medical bills she’s working hard to pay off were incurred when her super-hero parents were killed by their arch-nemesis, Gentleman Geoffrey.

 

“Sonya could hardly know that when she met her newest client, he would not only turn out to be John Arlen, the heir to an engineering fortune, but that he, too, was injured by a super-villain. (more…)

Burning the candle, by Elayne Riggs

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  • December 5, 2007

elayne100-9533021This column is finally up to installment #42. As you well know, that’s said to be the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything. And now that I’m 50 years old, I’m supposed to be ever much smarter than I used to be, and ever so much closer to achieving the enlightenment that’s supposed to help me understand the questions to that answer.

Don’t you believe it. It’s a good thing life is a constant learning experience, although it’s a bit disheartening that the more I live the more there remains for me to learn. I can’t be the only one who constantly feels like I’m treading water, or running in place just to keep up.

Last night many Jews began the annual commemoration of Chanukah (or Hanukkah or Channukah or Throat-Warbler Mangrove), the Festival of Lights, not to be confused with Diwali, the Festival of Light marking the victory of good over evil, and uplifting of spiritual darkness, which seems to predate it by a good many centuries. Chanukah marks the rededication of the Second Temple (after it was desecrated by Antiochus IV Epiphanes at the time of the Maccabee rebellion, a couple hundred years before that Jesus guy came along) and the miracle that one day’s worth of consecrated olive oil wound up burning for eight (the length of time it took to process a new batch). So instead of celebrating something cool like the uplifting of spiritual darkness, in the hands of the Jews the festival became the glorification of frugality, of making a little go a long way.

Then the Christians came along and, within another few centuries, had converted massive populations and co-opted their festivals so that Midwinter (the winter solstice) practices became part of Christmas, which grew and grew into a general celebration of plenty and excess and cheer (except for those people who insist on missing the point by suggesting Santa is a "bad role model" because he’s fat and jolly; no no, can’t have any happy large people around during the months when it’s customary to fatten up to stave off cold and hunger!). And you know, given the choice between a whooping it up over how fortunate one is to have enough to eat and how dire one’s circumstances are that one has to burn the midnight oil for a week — well, let’s just say it’s easy to see how one can become so popular it’s no longer solely Christian or even pagan but practically secular, where the other is forever relegated in the public consciousness to second-place status and an excuse to teach lessons in multicultural inclusion.

(more…)

The return of Jon Sable Freelance!

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  • November 2, 2007

Jon Sable FreelanceContinuing with our commitment to bringing you the best in online comics, ComicMix is proud to announce the return of Mike Grell’s Jon Sable Freelance in an all new adventure!

Jon Sable is many things: freelance bounty hunter, bodyguard, mercenary, even a children’s book author.  It’s true.  Under the pen name of “B. B. Flemm,” Sable is the author of a popular series of children’s stories about a troop of leprechauns living in Central Park. 

How did he get to this point in his bizarre life? Ivory poachers slaughtered his family when Sable was a professional hunter in Africa.  Deported back to the States, he drank himself to the bottom.  With the help of his mentor, Sonny Pratt, and his literary agent, Eden Kendall, he struggled to put his life back together.

In his newest adventure, Sable is hired by the head of an African diamond cartel to transport a magnificent raw diamond to an exhibit in New York. But his task is complicated by having to play escort, bodyguard and babysitter to the cartel’s corporate spokesperson, Bashira, a temperamental model with a history of drug problems. While Sable struggles to keep her under control and out of tabloid headlines he finds himself the center of a deadly hunt and a plot that reaches beyond the world of glamour and into the world of terror…

Jon Sable Freelance: Ashes Of Eden premieres today on ComicMix, with new installments weekly– all online, all free!

And if you’d like to read the previous exploits of Jon Sable, we recommend The Complete Jon Sable Freelance from IDW Publishing, reprinting the entire run from the 80’s. The cover to Volume 1 of this handsome edition is pictured here.

The Legend of Grimjack, Vol. 8: Review

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  • October 30, 2007

Yes, we’ve hit the point where reprints of medium-level ‘80s comics can run to eight volumes – and, since the comic in question is GrimJack, that is perfectly dandy with me. Since GrimJack was gone for a good decade (before the recent Killer Instinct miniseries, and, of course, these trade paperback reprints), I suspect that some of you might not know what the man and his world.

Well, let me quote myself to bring you up to speed:

John Gaunt, aka GrimJack, is a cop/secret agent/PI in an aggressively multi-dimensional (and arbitrarily immense) city, and he walks down those mean streets, yadda yadda yadda. It’s hard-boiled fantasy adventure, in a setting where anything can pop up and probably will. Everybody betrays everybody (especially the dames), and everybody but our hero is corrupt as all hell. This is the kind of comic that the comics world thinks of as being vastly different from superheroes, even though John Gaunt:

  • wears the same clothes all the time, which instantly identify him
  • saves people (and the world) regularly
  • has what amounts to a codename
  • has a couple of similar friends who he "teams up" with on occasion
  • appears in 4-color pamphlet form

This volume reprints issues 47 to 54, right in the middle of the 81-issue run, with stories that originally saw print at the end of the ‘80s. Most of this book consists of the end of a long storyline that started in the comics collected in Volume 6 and saw John Gaunt killed and resurrected, among other changes. That big storyline (which doesn’t seem to have an official name) had kicked off when Tom Mandrake took over penciling this series, which was the first time he and Ostrander worked together extensively. (They would later rack up long, successful runs on Spectre and other series at DC.) (more…)

Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography review

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  • October 25, 2007

Charles Schulz‘s life is already turning into a legend, in large part because he did the one thing a man can rarely control: he died perfectly, at the precise right time and place. Late in the night before his final Peanuts strip would appear in newspapers, on February 12, 2000, Schulz slipped into immortality.
 
On the other hand, he was close to immortal already; Peanuts was one of the biggest comic strips in this history of the medium, one of the largest licensing empires in the world, and one of the most beloved set of characters in the USA. And, since Schulz famously wrote every word and drew every line of the 17,897 strips from 1950 through 2000, it was purely his own achievement. Snoopy sheets would never have been big business if kids hadn’t already loved Snoopy, and they never would have loved Snoopy without Schulz. It’s difficult to overestimate what Schulz meant to cartooning over the past fifty years: he reshaped the newspaper strip in his image, brought a new tone and style to public discourse, and was hugely influential far beyond the bounds of the newspaper page.
 
And now, seven years after Schulz died, comes the first full-scale biography of the man who changed the face of newspaper comics forever. (more…)

Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here And Now #1: Review

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  • October 17, 2007

Cory Doctorow is either very arrogant or very smart.

Anyone who knows Cory would dispute the first bit, but consider: he gives away all of his writing to readers for free. If you want to read his website at boingboing, by all means; if you want to download his novels, go to Cory’s website and do so, he encourages it and wants you to spread the word. And he expects that he will make money doing this, that his stuff is so good that people will send him money in one way or another. So he either is very arrogant about the quality of his work– or he knows something about the workings of the world that you don’t. Which makes him, if not very smart, then certainly a born science fiction writer. And since he does make money doing this, he’s certainly not dumb.

IDW has begun to adapt his shorter fiction pieces into comic book form, starting with 2004’s "Anda’s Game". You can read the story (for free, of course) here, so the question is: does it work in comics? It certainly does. Esteve Polls’s art reminds me of the work of various Filipino horror comics artists of the 70’s, and Dara Naraghi does a solid condensation and adaptation of Cory’s story. Give this book a shot– the stories are done in one issue, and it’s worth the time.

Disclaimer: I help package books for IDW, and in fact, I’m already late delivering the art for the Munden’s Bar trade paperback…

The world’s first human flipbook

  • News
  • September 24, 2007

Erbert and Gerbert’s Subs and Clubs, a Midwest-based chain of sub shops, decided to do something a little different to advertise their business. Here’s the entire how-to and the result:

We’d love to know if there are any other "human flipbooks" in existence!

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