Tagged: Reviews

George Sand: True Genius, True Woman by Séverine Vidal and Kim Consigny

Most lives don’t have a specific story. People do things, they live and die, and it doesn’t form any particular shape. Famous people are more likely to have stronger story elements – there’s at least a rise, possibly a fall, probably phases or eras – but that only means better raw materials for a biographer.

So if I say that George Sand: True Genius, True Woman  tells an “and then this happened” version of the famous 19th century novelist’s life, I’m mostly just saying that George Sand had a normal kind of life. Things happened, she did her work, she was involved in causes and had love affairs, and then she died. That’s the story writer Séverine Vidal and artist Kim Consigny tell here: one woman’s life, from fairly early childhood to the moment of her death, in some detail. Vidal focuses somewhat on Sand’s writing, but more so on her relationships – with her mother and grandmother in youth, with other family members and the men she was involved with later in life.

And I appreciate that. Some biographies, especially in graphic-novel form, find a story in their subject’s lives by focusing on a moment or a period on the person’s life. That’s certainly valid, but, especially in a case where I don’t know the person’s life all that well – as here – I’d really prefer to get the full sweep of the story. And George Sand does just that.

She was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, daughter of what seems to be a minor noble in the very early 19th century, and the Napoleonic Wars somewhat impinged on that childhood – spent primarily at the family estate in Nohant in central France – but the drama of her early life was more centered on the conflict between her aristocratic paternal grandmother and her Parisian mother after the death of Aurore’s father at a young age.

Vidal and Consigny show young Aurore as strong-willed, rebellious, prone to visions, and often unhappy with her role as a young aristocratic woman. (As seen later in life, she was against both the roles of “woman” and “aristocrat” as they existed in France at the time.)

She grew up, she started to write, she had affairs – but, before most of that, she did what women in her time had to do: she got married, at the age of eighteen. It was not a success, and maybe that lack of success led to some of the rest.

This is a fairly long graphic novel, over three hundred pages, and it’s packed with details from all of Sand’s life – again, more skewed to her personal life than to details of the themes and reactions to her works, though we do see her talk about and work on her major books here.

There’s a lot of text, particularly dialogue. I assume a lot of it is taken from Sand’s own extensive memoirs, or third-party accounts – I don’t know if we can entirely trust any detailed account of a conversation before sound recording, but Sand’s life was well-documented. Consigny brings a lose, breezy, amiable, energetic line to the proceedings, giving a lot of life to a story of people mostly in rooms talking to each other.

I’ve never read Sand, and knew very little about her life or work before this book. So I’ll say it’s a fine introduction, and a strong portrait of an interesting, influential figure who lived through tumultuous times and was close to a lot of other cultural figures of her day.

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

ArkhaManiacs by Art Baltazar & Franco

Art Baltazar and Franco have been making a very particular kind of comics for twenty years or so – kid-friendly versions of popular superhero and superhero-adjacent properties, bright and happy and light-hearted, colorful and zippy, full of rubber-hose cartooning and vibrant colors, with usually a cluster of short related stories with minimal plots but a lot of (mostly goofy) character work.

It’s been a durable model, and it’s worked quite well, from what I’ve seen. I think they started with Tiny Titans, which ran for a long time and seemed to be a major success from my chair. The only comic of theirs I’ve covered on this blog was Itty Bitty Hellboy  a decade ago; I got their books for my kids when my kids were young, but my kids are in their mid-twenties now. So I haven’t read a Baltazar/Franco [1] book in quite some time, but I had a lot of fond memories.

ArkhaManiacs  is exactly the same kind of thing they do so well: it collects a short series from 2020 about a kid Bruce Wayne in a somewhat sunnier, happier Gotham City and his encounters with the inhabitants of the Arkham Apartments.

And…it just struck me as a bit odd, subtly off in ways that made me uneasy. Centrally, the problem is that it’s reminiscent of, or seems to reference, the classic creepy Grant Morrison/Dave McKean Arkham Asylum . In both cases, Bruce comes to this mysterious place, is led around by the Joker, meets a whole bunch of weird people, and is told repeatedly he needs to lighten up.

I don’t think Baltazar and Franco meant to make this rhyme with Arkham Asylum. But it does. So the subtext is that a whole bunch of colorful characters – whom we, the adult reader, knows as insane murderers – are urging a kid Bruce, pre-trauma, that he needs to become more like them by using his imagination.

In a kid context, we can just take it all as straightforward, as it’s presented: these colorful characters are harmless. They’re not inhabitants of an asylum, just goofy people living in an apartment building, and they have a lot of fun, and do clearly have great imaginations. And Bruce is a bit of a serious, quiet kid, who could use some loosening up – which is what happens here. In the book itself, it’s all sunny and kid-friendly, Killer Croc and Bane and Harley Quinn and the Penguin all just having fun and playing pretend around a pool.

But…that inevitably makes me think of this Morrison moment, which I don’t want to be reminded of during a book for kids set before Bruce’s parents are murdered:

You may be able to read ArkhaManiacs and not think about Arkham Asylum. Your kids, if you have any, will almost certainly be able to, and that’s probably even more important. But if you know Arkham Asylum, this book will hit more uncomfortably than you expect.

[1] Franco’s last name is Aureliani, which isn’t hidden, but he uses the single name professionally, like Ms. Sarkisian 

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

Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol. 2

The first volume collecting the Miller/Janson run on Daredevil included fifteen issues of the title series, plus two “try-out” issues of a Spider-Man comic Miller drew before that. Daredevil was published bi-monthly in those days, so that was a longer swath of time than comics readers these days realize: issues dated from February 1979 through July 1981.

This second volume, with the meat-and-potatoes title Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol. 2 , is slightly shorter, collecting issues 173-184 of Daredevil, exactly a year’s worth of issues from August 1981 through July 1982. But Miller, writing and laying these comics out, was still changing and transforming his work; there’s almost as much difference between the first and last stories here as in the first volume.

The captions, and the overwriting tendencies of 1970s comics in general, is ebbing – only slightly in the first couple of issues, but noticeably towards the end of this stretch. There’s at least one very good multi-page action sequence that takes place entirely wordlessly. Oh, everyone still talks too much, and says the same things too much, and the captions are dull and obvious fairly regularly – but you can start to see daylight through them, like a massive overcast that’s starting to break up. We know, eventually, there will be entire stories written with a lighter hand and an ear for how people actually talk.

(And then that would all go away again, if we’re talking about Miller specifically. He is a fascinating example of a creator who started off in a standard, deeply artificial mode, managed to become close to naturalistic for a while, and then dove deeply into an even more clotted, personal, tediously artificial mode later on.)

The art looks a bit blander and stiffer to my eye in the first couple of issues, with an off-model egg-headed Kingpin and an Elektra just slightly off as well. I don’t know if it was Miller switching up how he worked – looser, tighter, different tools – on the way to his mature blocky style, or if the difference is mostly from Janson’s finishes. (I’m never sure how to take their “art” and “finishes” credits here – did Miller pencil these stories, mostly, or did he just lay them out? Did he do the initial work on the boards, or send Janson thumbnails? And did that working mode change over the course of the years they worked together?) 

This is also the soap-opera era of Marvel, so each issue has a vaguely separate story, but they run into each other – Elektra comes back to do some international-assassin-ing in New York, the Gladiator is tried and reformed, Kingpin schemes and hires Elektra as his new fixer, Bullseye comes back again like a bad penny. There’s a political campaign, in which Kingpin’s hand-picked mayoral candidate is likely to beat a glimpsed and unnamed Ed Koch unless Daredevil’s reporter buddy Ben Urich can dig up more useful dirt without getting himself murdered.

There’s a bit of vague Orientalism, but the ninja are mostly just mooks in funny suits at this point – they’re called ninjas, and we can assume they’re Japanese in origin, but that’s about it. Miller would appropriate much more, later on.

Like most monthly comics, this isn’t a single thing: it’s a thing in the middle of transformation, eternally. One story bleeds into the next, ideas work their ways through and conclude, art shifts and changes over time even when the team remains the same. It’s still getting better here, which is exciting and invigorating: captions getting shorter and more precise, art getting more dynamic and layouts more visual. It’s still assembly-line adventure comics for young readers, don’t get me wrong, but Miller and Janson had ambition and ideas, and they were aiming for the top of their particular genre – and that’s something to be celebrated, no matter what the genre is.

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

Betty Blues by Renaud Dillies

I have two ways I could start with today’s book, neither of which has much to do with the book itself. I could mention I read another graphic novel by Renaud Dillies a decade ago, Bubbles & Gondola , and only vaguely remembered it when I saw a thumbnail image of the B&G cover at the back of this book. Or I could point out that the title is not the same as a certain smutty French movie from the 1980s, and reminisce that I saw that movie at college, and that the first line of the movie provoked one of the best, rippling, unexpected crowd laughs I’ve ever experienced. [1]

None of that gets us much closer to Renaud Dillies’ bande dessinée Betty Blues – copyright 2003 in France, published in this edition in the US in 2013, translated by Joe Johnson and colored by Anne-Claire Jouvray. I could mention that Bubbles was the story of a novelist and Betty is the story of a jazz musician, so I can assume that Dillies has at least a small tropism towards telling stories of the creative life.

Betty Blues, I learn from Lambiek, was Dillies’s first book, and won him the best debut award at Angoulême that year. And that does somewhat explain the ways that Betty is a bit too earnest, a bit too constructed, with some lines that read like Johnson is trying to take a very specific French idiom, probably a bit too high-toned for the immediate scene, and put it into the closest approximation to idiomatic English he can. Betty at times feels like a book stretching, reaching for something – meaning, purpose, universality – and getting very close but not quite selling it all in the end.

Little Rice Duck is the main character; he’s a jazz trumpeter in a band, playing at night, slightly drunk, in some bar as the book opens. We think he’s been doing this for a long time; we think he’s very good at it. We also know there’s very little money or prestige in it. But we think he was happy.

Was. He had a girlfriend, Betty, sitting at the bar, as we guess she did most nights. This night, a rich guy, James Patton, sits down next to her, plies her with champagne, and whisks her away. Rice is broken when he finds out, and goes on a drunken bender, throwing away his trumpet and declaring he’s going to give up music forever and move far away. The possibility that Betty could possibly come back, or that there might be any other woman in the world he might someday be happy with, is clearly not on the table.

The rest of the book follows two major threads and one minor one. The minor one is a married couple, Peter and Susan – he was injured by Rice’s falling trumpet and they get through some surgery and deciding to sell the trumpet. The two major threads are, of course, Rice and Betty. He travels as far away as he can get, takes a job at a sawmill, and gets caught up in industrial action. Betty, on the other hand, is basically kidnapped by James, who doesn’t let her get away or do anything, but pampers her for a while until she finally gets fed up with his obsessive rich-guy nature and walks away when he has her as arm candy at a public event.

Both Rice and Betty are pretty passive, Betty even more so than Rice. They’re mostly dragged into situations and don’t do very much to change their lives – their lives are changed for them by others.

We think this will probably be some sort of circular story, that Rice and Betty will reunite, or at least meet, after all they’ve been through. They might not get back together, but it’s the kind of story that looks like it should end that way.

It does not: Betty Blues is much more French than that. I won’t spoil the ending, but it does have a quintessentially Gallic shrug at the end.

Dillies’ art is glorious, though – great smoky-jazz-club ambiance, with lots of organic, scratchy, quick-looking lines in his square six-panel grids. The art looks great, and sells the emotions of its anthropomorphic characters, even if the dialogue is sometimes a bit stilted and oddly-phrased.

I tend to be a grump about stories of artists and about people who do things for insufficient reasons, so I may not be the best judge of Betty Blue. I did see a lot of strength and life to it, particularly remembering it was Dillies’ first book-length project.

[1] The movie is Betty Blue. The scene is, as I recall, a tracking shot that comes in from outside a house to show the two main characters very energetically fucking…on a kitchen table, maybe? And the line is “I had known Betty for a week.”

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

Last Kiss: Casual Fridays by John Lustig

I felt lazy yesterday, and wanted a book I could read quickly and then write something quickly here. I may have been too lazy, if that’s possible. (I have my doubts.)

So I read John Lustig’s Last Kiss: Casual Fridays . It’s a short, digital-only collection of that strip from 2013 – much like Sex Day , which I read a couple of months ago. In fact, go see that earlier post for all the details of what Last Kiss is and how it works, if you’re interested. The short version is: Lustig takes panels from mostly ’50s romance comics, cleans them up and has them recolored in a modern style (I think by someone else), then adds snarky new captions. So it’s a single-panel comic but entirely out of repurposed artwork, a quirky hybrid of Roy Lichtenstein and Wondermark.

As you can guess from the title of the other book and the cover of this one, the jokes are often directly sexual, but Lustig leans into other clichés as well – there’s a big cluster of “women hate cooking” jokes in this book, for example. Since these are all single panels, the jokes need to be quick and tight – not a lot of room for nuance or wordplay.

I got this book – and the previous one before it – from my library app, which is how I’d recommend reading them; they may also be available from the subscription end of Kindle or other similar outlets. There is a retail price, if you’re thinking about “owning” it, but, as a 68-page book, it’s a higher per-page cost than I’d be comfortable with.

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

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 8: Shades of Death by Stan Sakai

This one was a professional transition – it collects the first six issues (plus stories from issues seven and eight) of the second series of Usagi Yojimbo , from Mirage – but, within the story, there’s no indication of that. Creator Stan Sakai didn’t reboot the series, drop into long explanatory flashback stories for the relaunch, or even make much of an apparent effort to attract any new readers. Well, it was 1993, when “long-running” was a selling point for a comic, unlike today.

As it was, the Mirage series only lasted sixteen issues, and they didn’t manage to publish any collections – this eighth book, and all of the subsequent book-format Usagi materials (I think; there’s been a lot of them and I might be missing some odd item) came out from Dark Horse, which started the third Usagi series in 1996 and published 165 issues over the next twenty years.

That’s the background of Usagi Yojimbo Book 8: Shades of Death , which was originally published in 1997. The current edition, which I read digitally, is from 2010; it doesn’t say what was different but my guess is that it was mostly trade dress – there’s no sign that Sakai changed any of the stories fifteen years later.

Shades includes seven stories, all of which stand alone and don’t directly connect to each other. (When your main character is a wandering adventurer who’s solo most of the time, you can just make stories as you feel like it, and they line up just fine.) Two of them, “Shades of Green” and “Shi,” are long three-parters, sixty-some pages each. Two more – the wordless “The Lizards’ Tale” and the flashback “Battlefield” – are about the length of a single issue, in the low twenty-page range. The last three, “Jizo,” “Usagi’s Garden,” and “Autumn,” are eight-pagers that presumably were backup stories.

Three of those stories feature Usagi as a young rabbit – a kit, I suppose – learning Important Life Lessons from his sensei, Katsuichi. Usagi has never been officially a book for young readers, but it’s always been young-reader-adjacent, with any sex kept implied and the violence stylized enough to pass, and these three pieces show that side of the series strongly: as always, Usagi Yojimbo was a comic told in a register suitable for tweens.

The jump to Mirage also meant another crossover with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; Usagi had met one of them (Leo, maybe?) a few times before, but now all four of the TMNT are summoned to this cod-Edo-Japan world by the traditional old guy (who, unsubtly, Sakai draws to look just like their leader, Splinter) to battle side-by-side with Usagi and defeat the evil ninja, in the first story of the book, “Shades of Green.”

There are other evil ninja in other stories, too: that’s how cod-Edo-Japan stories work: noble samurai battle fiendish ninja, and of course prevail in the end. This isn’t “the end” – Sakai had another four thousand-plus story pages still to come (and I’m not sure that he isn’t still adding more on, even now) – but you know what I mean.

Usagi stories are dependable and fairly predictable, but, luckily, the American comics audience for the past eighty years has craved monthly doses of exactly the same thing, only with slightly different covers so they know to buy it again. So Usagi has been successful commercially, and it’s pretty successful artistically – as long as you like this sort of thing and are comfortable with the moral lessons inherent in any stories about violence experts.

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

Yeah! by Peter Bagge and Gilbert Hernandez

I never want to discourage creators from stretching, from trying new things and talking to new audiences. But, sometimes, it just doesn’t really click.

In the late ’90s, Peter Bagge had been making sarcastic comics about grumpy twenty-something slackers in Hate for more than a decade; his work was really closely associated with not just a particular adult audience, but a very specific tone and style. It’s no surprise that he wanted to do something different.

What he did was surprising, though: he wrote the all-ages, Comics Code-approved girl-band comic Yeah! for DC Comics, collaborating with Gilbert Hernandez. (Hernandez’s career has taken a lot of odd turns, and he’s worked with a number of writers over the years, so this was not quite as much of a departure for him – I’ve always gotten the sense that Hernandez just has the desire or need to generate a lot of work, to keep himself engaged and happy, and the more different the better.)

Bagge’s introduction in this 2011 collection of Yeah! – notably from Fantagraphics, longtime publisher of both Bagge and Hernandez, not DC, which is a big signpost to the fortunes of the series for those who can read tea-leaves – notes that he had an eight-year-old daughter at the time, and had gotten happily into “girl culture,” which reignited his love of pop music. There always are reasons and explanations for specific projects; they always make sense to the creators at the time, and enough sense to the publishers that they make it out into the market. The question, always, is how that market responds.

Yeah! was not a success in the market. It ran nine issues, and was only collected a decade later by a different publisher. (And here I should also note that the collection is in black-and-white, but I think the original comics were in color, since characters make comments about the colors of things pretty regularly, and 1999 was awfully late for a book for tween girls without color.)

And the comics are…OK, I suppose. Bagge is a wordy writer, and this reads not too differently from his better-known work, to the point that the regular Bagge reader starts wondering if these characters are actually being honest and straightforward, or if Bagge has just unlocked a previously inaccessible level of sarcasm. There’s one backup strip at the end that Bagge draws himself, and it’s really hard not to read it like a Hate story – Bagge clearly intends for it to be taken straight, but regular readers will assume spleen and bile in his phrases.

Yeah! is the name of the band: Honey, Woo-Woo and Krazy, three best friends not quite out of their teens, a few years into a music career. They are struggling on Earth but the biggest act in the galaxy, beloved by millions across dozens of alien worlds. (But this was a contemporary Earth that hadn’t had a first contact yet, so there’s no commerce with those alien worlds, so the vast loot Yeah! brings in is useless. They don’t seem to even bank it on an alien world so it’s available for tours or such, like the old Soviet Union; they just give it away or ignore it.) They also have an old, nutty guy as their manager: Crusty; his inventions got them out into the galaxy but his general incompetence can’t get them any good gigs on Earth.

The nine issues are each basically standalone, with goofy adventures either on Earth or in space – including the inevitable flashbacks to reveal Who They Are and How They Got Here – as Yeah! chases fame and fortune here (with little success) and gets involved in odd alien things out there. On Earth, they have a rival, Miss Hellraiser, and a band of boys, The Snobs, who always beat them in battle-of-the-bands situations and one of whom has a crush on Woo-Woo. In space, the characters are all one-offs – there’s the driver of their space limo who shows up a couple of times without actually getting a personality or anything to do. The stories are all wordy, and all full of the cultural assumptions and ideas of a guy Bagge’s age (early 40s around this time), including a bunch of hippie jokes.

This is all fine: it’s amusing and entertaining, and the gestalt of Bagge’s writing and Hernandez’s art works well together. It is too wordy, in that old-fashioned comics style, full of long captions and long dialogue balloons that say a lot of the same things over and over again. And it all comes across as something like a generation-later version of Bob Hope: goofy, sui generis comics that are meant to appeal to a younger audience but are full of the ideas and plot devices of old people.

Yeah! is basically forgotten, for good and sufficient reasons. It might not quite deserve that, but most things get forgotten twenty-five years later. If you really loved Josie and the Pussycats (the movie, the concept or the comics) and wish there was something else sorta like that, you might be in luck.

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

10,000 Ink Stains: A Memoir by Jeff Lemire

For some reason, I thought this book was in comics format – maybe just from an assumption that’s how Lemire works, or that he draws so quickly that it would nearly as easy to do it that way as in text. But I was wrong: this is a conventional prose memoir, albeit one with lots of art (and an entire early self-published comic in the back).

10,000 Ink Stains  is Jeff Lemire’s memoir of what he calls the first twenty-five years of his comics career. I like a lot of what he’s done, so I hope that isn’t hubris – I’d like to think he has another twenty-five years or more ahead of him.

Lemire has done a lot of work in a lot of directions over those twenty-five years, so it’s not surprising that his memoir is well-organized, even compartmentalized. He talks a bit up front, and occasionally later, about how hard it was to talk about his personal life here, particularly some struggles with anxiety and other mental-health issues – but that’s a very small part of the book, partially because I don’t think Lemire’s readership ever noticed any slowing of work or lesser effort because of his problems. (He clearly has a ferocious work ethic – or maybe I mean he loves making stories in comics form, so that’s what he spends most of his time on.)

There are nineteen chapters here, each covering one project or a small related cluster of projects, plus an introduction to set the scene and an epilogue to sum it all up. The first chapter is the usual memoir “how I got to zero” section, covering his childhood and education and all of that – up to the point where he decided to start getting serious about comics. The second chapter covers that self-published comic – Lemire put out two issues of Ashtray in the mid-Aughts – and his Xeric-winning first book, Lost Dogs . From there, Lemire has chapters on Essex County  and The Nobody , on groups of smaller projects, on Sweet Tooth the comics series and Sweet Tooth the TV series, on his work for DC and then for Marvel, on The Underwater Welder  and Trillium  and Roughneck , on his adventure comics with other artists (Descender , Gideon Falls, and Plutona ), on Black Hammer  and Royal City , one chapter on both Frogcatchers and Mazebook , on the recent Essex County TV show, and one last chapter on his two current/upcoming projects, The Static Age and Minor Arcana.

That’s a lot of comics, even for twenty-five years. Lemire did a lot of work – a lot of different, detailed, thoughtful, often excellent work. I might make fun of Black Hammer, and suspect I would be similarly dismissive of most of his Marvel and DC work, but Lemire puts in the time and effort to do stories he cares about and do them well, even when some readers (yours truly, for example) might not be as excited by all of them.

There’s not a lot of detail about any single project, which might disappoint some readers: if you’re a massive Underwater Welder fan, for example, you’ll only get about ten pages about it. Lemire generally has liked all of his immediate collaborators and most of his editors – there are some left-unnamed editorial functionaries and fellow writers for DC and Marvel who were less than collegial, but Lemire keeps it vague enough that I think even people more plugged in than me will only have suspicions of who he’s talking about – and he mostly likes the work he did, and focuses on the things he learned or did differently on each project.

There’s some insights into how he draws each project, including how one early art teacher encouraged him to use the back of a pen nib, the source of some of those chunky, dynamic Lemire lines – but I’m not an artist, so I can only point and say he does talk about that, which may be of interest to people who understand the topic.

All in all, 10,000 Ink Stains is a comprehensive, thorough look at a busy career, by a writer I think was not overly given to this kind of introspection before. If you like Lemire’s comics, you’ll probably like hearing how he made them.

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

Sergio Aragones’ Groo: The Hogs of Horder

I sometimes look at a Groo book and think “that will be a quick read, and an easy one to write about.” And then I’m wrong on both counts. It happened with the three-book Friends and Foes  series in 22-23, and it just happened again now.

Groo looks quick and breezy, but it’s a wordy comic, and creator Sergio Aragones, for all his speed and facility, draws a lot of detail. So the pages are engaging and light and fun, but they demand more attention than you expect. And then I remember, after finishing reading, that Groo (the character) is aggressively stupid, but Groo (the comic) nearly always has a point of view or moral or life lesson it’s trying to impart, and untangling that takes effort.

The Hogs of Horder  was the new Groo series in 2009-2010; its four issues started in October of ’09 and the book came out in August of ’10. So it is absolutely the “the Groo take on the Global Financial Crisis” book, just to warn you.

Aragones (here, as usual, assisted by Mark Evanier on something vague related to scripting, Stan Sakai on letters, and Tom Luth with Michelle Madsen on colors) is not a subtle or nuanced creator. And, in Groo stories, there can be villains, but most of the problems in the world will be caused by Groo himself. So Hogs of Horder both wants to blame some general long-term economic shifts (moving production overseas to a lower-cost country, for one main example) for the woe in this world and also wants to make Groo personally responsible for the shift, because he’s an idiot who sinks ships and destroys stuff.

This means that we have a lot of panels with lots of mercantile folks – in Groo’s medieval-ish world, carriage-makers and home-builders and flask-makers and so on – gloating about getting loans from bankers to spend on making their stuff, but more importantly “high salaries for ourselves” (even though, if they are the owners, what they actually get is a return on their invested capital, and if they are not the owners, how come we never see the owners?) after Groo breaks things.

This runs round and round for a while, as Groo goes from the cheap foreign country to the US-analogue, breaking things and causing all of the business owners/leaders to go to the banks for loans to rebuild everything they’re doing and/or to set up new operations in that cheaper nation. It is all pitched in that speaking-to-children tone Groo often uses, and is about that level of sophistication; even readers who think capitalists are typically rapacious and destructive will find this version really overly simplified and silly.

But “silly” is the point of Groo. He breaks everything, and it is funny, and then he walks away to break something else somewhere else. Oh, and there are jokes about mendicants and cheese dip along the way. If you want a Groo story, this is one. I haven’t yet figured out a good reason to recommend any one Groo story above any other one, so just pick the Groo thing closest to your hand at the time, if you want to read one. That’s basically what I did. Maybe I’ll take a longer break before doing so again, this time.

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

Wednesday Comics edited by Mark Chiarello

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.

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