Tagged: The Past Is a Foreign Country

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tomorrow the Birds by Osamu Tezuka

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol. 3

Credits are always a tricky thing for assembly-line comics. Projects tend to have a particular, clear breakdown of responsibilities – this guy writes, that other guy draws, a third guy inks – but those comics tended to be monthly, and monthly deadlines lead to messiness. (Ask the guy who spent sixteen years in a business that had a minimum of seventeen “months” a year.)

And creators want to work with each other – sometimes the same crew for a while, sometimes a one-off with that idol of theirs or the new guy doing interesting stuff.

When it comes to gather all of that messiness into a book, sometimes the publishers err on the side of simplicity. The first time the “Frank Miller Daredevil” was collected, it was under roughly that title, even though Klaus Janson drew the vast majority of those stories. For the second go-round, Marvel decided they needed to add Janson to the title, which makes a lot of sense.

But it meant that there was a first book with stories mostly written by or with other people, one of them inked by Frank Springer, and most of them drawn by Miller and inked by Janson. And then a second book that really was all Miller/Janson, the core of the run.

And this third, concluding volume gets messy again, with Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol.3  collecting not just the climax of their run together – Daredevil issues 186-191 – but several odder and quirkier things, several of which Janson had nothing to do with. So it’s yes Frank Miller, as before, and some embarrassed shuffling of feet about how much Janson there is.

There are three quirkier things, so I’ll take them first, in the order they appear in the book and in increasing order of importance and strength.

Miller and Janson did an issue of What If…? in 1981, with co-writer Mike W. Barr, asking the comical question “What if Matt Murdock became an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.?” It would be a very standard late-’70s, early-’80s Marvel comic, much like the stories in the first Miller/Janson volume, is what. Talky, obvious, full of cramped panels and way too much narration from that boring bald giant on the moon. This is included, I assume, for completionists.

Miller returned to Daredevil for a one-off issue, #219, in mid-’85 (about a year before the Born Again sequence with David Mazzucchelli), apparently in large part to work with John Buscema. The credits are a bit vague – the splash page credits everything to Miller (with an asterisk), Buscema, and inker Gerry Talaoc – but I assume Miller wrote this story and did layouts that Buscema finished. This is a hardboiled “crooked town” story in twenty-ish pages, with Matt Murdock (out of costume) wandering into this Jersey hellhole and incidentally (and almost accidentally) cleaning it up on his way back out. This story has many of the weaknesses of both Marvel comics of the era and Miller in particular, but it’s a solid piece that works on its own level.

And the last eighty pages or so of this book incorporate the 1986 graphic novel Daredevil: Love & War, written by Miller and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz, in what ended up being a try-out for their Elektra: Assassin project almost immediately afterward. This is very much a one-off, but it’s glorious and energetic, with Sienkiewicz at the height of his ’80s inventiveness and Miller’s multiple-narrators captions working quite well. Daredevil himself doesn’t actually do a lot in this story, actually – he is necessary to the plot, I’ll admit, but he also sets off for a whole lot of derring-do that fizzles entertainingly.

I’ve left the meat of the book for last: issues 186-191 is the big ninja storyline, the single most important vector for their takeover of American culture (particularly comics culture) later in the ’80s. But we can’t blame Miller and Janson for that. The stories are muscular and taut, with Miller dialing down his wordiness and telling this story visually a lot more than was standard for Marvel at the time. It includes all the greatest hits of the Miller Daredevil: Matt’s mentor Stick and the small band of good-guy ninjas he leads, his dead-but-gets-better global-assassin ex-girlfriend Elektra, the super-evil ninjas of The Hand and their world-domination plots, the Kingpin, and a cameo by currently-paralyzed assassin Bullseye.

Those issues, though, in the best Marvel Manner, actually starts with some hugger-mugger about Matt’s current girlfriend, Heather Glenn, and the family company she supposedly runs that has gotten involved with…gasp! horror!…some kind of munitions work. As usual with Big Two comics of this era, both the legal and the business details are ludicrous and unbelievable to anyone who is not twelve, and all of the characters talk about it in mind-numbing detail that only proves how little any of the creative team involved understood law or business. But, eventually, the Heather subplot ends and we get to the ninjas, who are thankfully much quieter.

My takeaway from this, and the whole mass of Miller/Janson Daredevil stories, is that everything is part of its time and place. The best of this material is as good as any adventure stories in comics form anyone has made over the past century. But a lot of it is dull, cliched and obvious, rolling out wallpaper-like standard plots, themes, and concepts that are third-hand at best and threadbare if you look too closely. The three Daredevil books have nearly a thousand pages of comics: three to four hundred of that is pretty darn good. The rest you need to slog through to get to the high points.

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

Jim Henson’s The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow adapted by Roger Langridge

I knew I was going to be writing this post on Thanksgiving morning, so I picked an appropriate book. Of course, since time flows forward, you’re reading this much later, untethered from any holiday (unless you celebrate Three Kings’ Day, in which case, go you), but that’s the reason for it.

Jim Henson was the kind of creative personality who generated a lot of ideas. My sense is that most of them never happened; I don’t know what that meant for his focus on the projects that did happen, but the work was generally top-quality, so I don’t suppose it matters. He generally worked with screenwriter Jerry Juhl, who put Henson ideas into a usable form, and they were credited together with scripts for a lot of projects that did come to fruition.

As well as a lot of things that are still sitting in trunks at the Henson Company, or Disney, or wherever.

One of those was a script from the late ’60s for a Thanksgiving special, to include both Muppets and live-action actors. So not quite an early precursor to Emmett Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, but clearly coming from the same strand of Henson’s creative output. The special was never made; it’s ’60s enough that I doubt it ever would get made now.

But, about ten years ago, the Jim Henson Company decided, for whatever reason, they wanted to get this project out into the world somehow, and connected with cartoonist Roger Langridge. Langridge took the Henson/Juhl script, turned it into four issues of comics, and drew it all, with colors by Ian Herring.

And that’s how we got to Jim Henson’s The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow .

Somewhere fairly rural in New England, in a region with a lot of turkey farms, is the small town of Turkey Hollow. Living there is Timmy Henderson, a boy who wants to learn to play his guitar but is finding it difficult, his hippie-ish older sister Ann, their aunt and guardian Clytemnestra, the grocer/mayor/sheriff/postmaster Grover Cowley, and nasty evil landowner Eldridge Sump.

Sump wants to drive the Hendersons from their land, for the usual I’m-evil, I-want-to-take-everything reasons in stories for children. He is thoroughly one-note, and you probably can already picture him in your mind: black clothes, white hair, little round glasses, goatee, sharp face, always scowling and declaiming.

Timmy is out practicing his guitar in the woods one day near Thanksgiving, and a meteor – which we saw crash-land three hundred years earlier in a prologue – opens, with five furry “monsters” emerging. They don’t talk, but they’re musical Muppets – each one makes a particular sound/note, and they help him with his song. He tries to hide the monsters from everyone else, but Ann and Aunt Cly soon find out, and love them just as much as he does, including at least one musical number. (This was going to be a musical, so the cast breaks into song every ten pages or so.)

Meanwhile, Sump has heard the monsters, and wants to use them to force the Hendersons off their land. He’s also got a plot – possibly originally unrelated – to steal all of the other turkeys from all of his neighbors for unspecified reasons, which he puts into action, framing the monsters. The monsters are thrown into jail for eating turkeys, even though we readers know they only eat rocks.

Timmy helps the monsters escape jail – because it’s difficult to hold rock-eating monsters in a stone building – and it all comes to a head on Thanksgiving, with a thug hired by Sump running around with a shotgun trying to kill the monsters, Grover investigating both real crimes and the ones Sump alleges, and other tomfoolery.

In the end, there’s a song, good wins out, and the missing turkeys are found unharmed and stolen in Sump’s house – so they can all be slaughtered and eaten in the final scene. (I mean, yes, that’s how it works, but you don’t expect it to be so blatant in a story for kids.) Oh, and Grover finally admits he’s hot for Aunt Cly, so they start dating.

This would have been a perfectly cromulent 1968 TV special, which would have been re-run annually for much of the ’70s and then probably half-forgotten, with revivals now and then. It wasn’t, but it’s a comic now, so that’s close enough. It’s not a lost classic, but it’s a very Henson-y thing, with all of the music and found-family stuff, and this package also includes photos of the puppets Henson’s team built for the network presentations back in 1968 and some other historical material, which adds to the package.

If you’re looking for a Thanksgiving-themed comic to read – and I was – there’s not a lot to choose from, but this is a solid choice. Langridge always does good work, particularly when trying to depict music on the page or when doing Muppet-adjacent stories, so this fits well with his strengths.

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.

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.

The Black Incal by Alexandro Jodorowski & Mœbius

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I read The Incal at least thirty years ago, during the burst of Mœbius republications from Marvel. As I recall, I thought it was OK space opera, with an annoying main character and more mystical mumbo-jumbo than I preferred. (At the time, I was much more enthusiastic about the Blueberry stories, a long Western series drawn by Mœbius and written by Jean-Michel Charlier.)

Humanoids republished the original Incal series – in six volumes this time, matching the original French albums, unlike the Marvel 2-in-1s – in 2012, going back to the original French colors by Yves Chaland and taking out some minor censorship that had crept into English-language editions in the ’90s. And so, for no good reason, I’m taking another look at this series.

The Black Incal  is the first of the six albums of the main series, written by Alexandro Jodorowski and drawn by Mœbius. The stories originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the early ’80s; Jodorowski went on to write a lot more in this universe – some of it under an “Incal” title and some not, a few with Mœbius but mostly not. And I have to admit that I do not have a high opinion of Jodorowski’s work, though I’ve mostly read the comics he wrote for Mœbius – he’s also a filmmaker and has done lots of other projects, so I may be reacting most strongly to their gestalt. (The worst thing I’ve seen is Madwoman of the Sacred Heart , if you want to see my heights of spleen and bile.)

The Incal, on the other hand, starts off as more-or-less conventional skiffy adventure, with only a few eruptions of Meaning. Our hero is John DiFool (a worrying name, admittedly), a “Class-R” private investigator in one of those ultra-urbanized, stratified medium futures, in an underground city on what seems to be Earth. He starts out being beaten and terrorized by mysterious masked figures, is thrown to what should be his death, and then saved by the Cybo-Cops. He tells them a plausible story – which might even be mostly true – about him bodyguarding an aristo woman for a night of debauchery among the lower classes before things went sideways and he ran away and was knocked out in the inevitable gigantic service tunnels.

John neglects to mention that he got a strange box from a gigantic dying “mutant,” or that other mutants and the alien Berg (from another galaxy, Jodorowski offhandedly remarks, to underscore how little he understands how any of this works) are fighting over this MacGuffin.

The MacGuffin itself is The Incal, a small luminous pyramid that talks and can bestow strange and wondrous powers on its possessor in ways that aren’t clear at all in this book. Descriptions of the series call it “The Light Incal” in distinction to the Dark Incal, the title object that John is sent by the main Incal to find in the back half of this book.

Most of this book is frenetic action overlaid with lots of talking. It’s the kind of action story where people narrate their every last action and emotional state, like a ’60s Spider-Man comic with slightly less quipping but vastly more emoting. John gets one story of What He Needs To Do and What It All Means from the Incal, but, as I recall, this changes somewhat as the series goes on, and the story gets bigger and more grandiose. There are various forces arrayed against John, but we’re not clear yet on who they all are, how they connect to each other, or what they want. But it is clearly John on the run with the vastly powerful thingamabob, with All Hands Against Him.

Oh! Also, near the end, one group of villains hires the Metabaron, a sleek figure in a metaleather jacket with a metashaved head and steely metaeyes, to find John and retrieve the Incal in his metacraft. (OK, not every noun associated with him has “meta” attached to it – but a hell of a lot of them do, in a way that gets silly within two or three pages.)

It ends entirely in the middle of the action; John has been captured yet again by someone we’re pretty sure is a villain and the Metabaron is getting metacloser. I suspect every volume ends more or less that way; I’ll see.

The Dark Incal is stylish and would move really quickly if it weren’t for all of the repetitive dialogue. Mœbius’s art is detailed – maybe to the point of being overbusy a few times, but mostly right in that sweet spot of Big SF action, with lots of gigantic constructed stuff looming and swooping around. I have the lurking suspicion that it will all add up to less than it seems, but that may be my memories of the last time I read it. It is the epitome of ’80s SF adventure in French comics, in all of the good and bad ways.

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

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 1

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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.

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.

Daisy Goes to the Moon by Matthew Klickstein & Rick Geary

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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.

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