Peter Milligan's Hellblazer: Scab

Before spotting the new trade at the bookstore where I'm employed, I had never read a single Hellblazer story. I still don't even really know what John Constantine's deal is, aside from the fact that he's this sorta hard-boiled Londoner with an early-aughties bro-chic hairdo and some sort of connection to the supernatural. All the same, the three-issue title story bops nicely along and it turns out that it's useful to look at it through the lens of the Milligan theory Brandon expounded in the context of the writer's recent run on Batman Confidential, if only to see how "Scab" succeeds, while "The Bat and the Beast" occasionally misses the mark.

Insofar as "Scab" is about something, it is the apparent collapse of capitalism brought about by the implosion of the financial markets of the last 18 months. But Milligan doesn't approach the topic in any of the obvious ways and instead looks back to the origins of the atmosphere of financial prodigality in the mid-nineties and the implications it had for Britain's working classes and especially leftist politics. So think unions and old, Marx-y Labour versus Tony Blair, spiraling housing costs and prodigious credit. But while Milligan clearly tends toward the lefty side of things, the narrative is generally served by the circumstances, rather than the other way round, and thus never feels tendentious.

Milligan's tale of a supernaturally malignant scab begins with a scab of another sort, to wit, "Red" Mal Brady, a dyed-in-the-wool socialist dockers' union negotiator who betrays his proletarian brothers for the proverbial thirty pieces of silver. This betrayal, which resulted in the dissolution of the union and signaled the end of old Labour, was caused not by Red Mal's greed, but rather by a spell cast upon him by a younger, more corrupt John Constantine. The problem is, as our stories continually remind us, our pasts are wont to come back to haunt us, generally in the form of unresolved guilt. Milligan simply personifies this guilt by turning it into the catalyst for the festering skin lesions that attack Mal, Constantine and his doctor/girlfriend Phoebe.

If the preceding doesn't really strike you as particularly dynamic, that's because it isn't. The story works more for the sort of playfulness of Milligan's approach than as a result of its plot or any of the 'larger' questions it grapples with. For example, when a bit of Constantine's scab self animates and attaches itself to Phoebe's coat, eventually finding its way into her ear, it manages to latch onto some lingering guilt over the fetus she aborted a decade earlier. Thus, when Phoebe is jolted awake, she finds an anthropomorphized scab-mass calling her 'mum' and asking for chocky biscuits. But rather than ruminate on the morbidity of these circumstances, Milligan has Constantine take the little guilt-beast back to his apartment and attempts to reason with it.


The exchange that plays out between the two is brilliantly glib, and emblematic of Milligan's ability to have fun with such apparently serious issues. When Constantine tries to convince the scab-fetus that it's nothing but a "bunch of agitated scabs," the thing replies that it may not be normal, but that it is still a person . . . "with rights." That last bit, tossed on almost as an afterthought, pokes ruthless fun at the Rawls-ian Theory of Justice sort of thinking that underlies so many social movements, no matter how absurd or counter-productive.

There are other moments like this--Phoebe's medically jocular approach to the beasts in her closet, Constantine's flashbacks to his extraordinarily abusive treatment of his uncle, or the look of particularly vicious schadenfreude he wears as he accepts the job of conjuring up Red Mal's betrayal--in what is ultimately an extremely well executed three-issue mini-series. "Scab" works where "The Bat and the Beast" doesn't because of the lightness with which it wears its topicality and the relative concision of its narrative. I wouldn't say that the book has turned me into a Hellblazer reader, per se, but it does confirm for me Milligan's continued reign as the king of smart-dumb comics.

Powerful Panels: Halloween Edition Part II - What You Can't See Will Scare You: The Unseen Terrors of Naoki Urasawa

by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us

-Georges Bataille

While Jesse has taken a look at some of the more terrifying moments in the venerable horror comics genre, some of the scariest comics I've ever read aren't horror comics at all, but are sci-fi manga. Books like Otomo's Akira--seriously maybe the most terrifying thing I've ever read--and Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys and Pluto are frightening not only because they ask important questions about the possible ramifications of technology, but by their creators' ability to create an atmosphere of dread centered on some unseen and terrible power.

This technique of enhancing fear by occultation certainly isn't new and it is flawed insofar as eventually you've gotta show just what it is that is so scary. Urasawa manages to avoid this flaw and thereby redefine what is scary in comics in a couple of ways. First, he doesn't rely on suspense to move his stories forward and instead reveals the nature of the threat early on--like, you know what it is but you don't know what it's going to do. Thus Urasawa's is a terror of suggestion and dread, a psychological fear which is far more awful and satisfying than mere "heart-pounding" suspense. Urasawa also stays ahead of the need to simply reveal his monsters by constantly changing the stakes in his stories, demonstrating repeatedly that everything that readers might have thought was sacred up to a certain point no longer matters at all.

20th Century Boys:

Each of the three panels shown here depicts the apocalyptic robot weapon created by the Friends cult to terrorize Tokyo in December 2000. Though each panel illustrates the same beast, each is terrifying in different ways in large measure due to their context.


20th Century Boys Volume 2

The first couple of volumes of the series are concerned with laying down the basics of the story and readers are just becoming accustomed to the rhythm of the series's jumps in time. The panel from volume 2 comes as the derelict-prophet Kamisama recounts one of his prophetic dreams. Thus readers are getting one of their first real tactile tastes of the devastation that is in store for Kenji and his friends and it is massive and foreboding.


20th Century Boys Volume 4

A lot has happened by the time we get to the next panel taken from the final pages of volume 4. Kenji's convenience store has burnt to the ground; he has been branded a terrorist by the Friends-infiltrated government; and he and his friends are now living underground preparing to fight an enemy they know next to nothing about. As Kenji and his childhood friend Otcho are led by the Friend himself into the warehouse where the robot is being stored, the scale of the thing is apparent. Kenji's observation that the thing's glowing eyes seemed to be watching them pretty much nails the terror in this panel.


20th Century Boys Volume 5

Volume 5 of 20th Century Boys is a prime example of Urasawa's tendency to change the stakes in the middle the game. This final panel comes early in the volume, right after the group's abortive attempt to kidnap the Friend's right-hand man, now an important government minister. The date is December 31, 2000, zero hour for the Friends' millenarian plans. But when you see that robot moving through the streets of Tokyo, just at the moment Kenji and his group seem at their weakest, you cannot help but think, this isn't the way this is supposed to happen. The good guys are supposed to stop the nefarious plans of the villains and go on to live happy lives, right? In short measure it becomes clear that this isn't right at all and this is precisely why Urasawa is so good at terrifying readers again and again.


Pluto:

Each of the panels or pages I've scanned from Pluto also depict the same thing, even though they sorta don't. At a basic level, each panel shows Pluto, a robot bent on destroying each of the world's most advanced robots. The reason for my equivocation, however, is that as Pluto develops, it becomes clear that the identity of the eponymous character is a bit more complex than it first appears.


Pluto Volume 1

This page, taken from the early pages of the series's first volume, show the robot detective Gesicht reviewing the memory chip of a security robot that was destroyed. As the page indicates, the robot's attention was distracted for a split second by what appears to be a human, jumping from one building to another so quickly that the robot only registers it as a blur. That suggestive blur, so minuscule and yet powerful enough to distract a robot-cop sufficiently to allow a drug addled hoodlum to destroy him is among the series first terrifying moments.


Pluto Volume 2

This next page also depicts Pluto, in this case as he prepares to destroy the Turkish warrior robot Brando. Pluto's obscured appearances in these early volumes is terrifying not only because we never get a complete picture of the thing, but also because of his ability to summarily destroy what are supposed to be the world's most powerful weapons. Finally, take another look at the close-up of Pluto's eyes; there is a humanity to them that enhances the terror, an effect that will be magnified in later illustrations.


Pluto Volume 3

This panel from volume 3 is a bit of an oddball, since it only becomes clear later in the series that the giant in the desert is probably Pluto. At this point in the story, however, all we know is that this terrifying silhouette was seen by a small Persian boy just after his village had been completely destroyed in the war. The terror of this image comes from a compounding of the creepiness of the obscured image itself, the massiveness of the figure and the disabling terror that the image has wrought into the little boy.


Pluto Volume 6

The final page, coming near the end of volume 6, shows the confrontation between Pluto--or what we've known as Pluto for most of the series--and Gesicht. What is terrible about the images on this page is not just those horrible gnashing teeth at the top of the page, though they are frightening enough, but even more those eyes, that look of terror, anguish and recognition that is so very human. As I mentioned above, you get a suggestion of this in the panel from volume 2, but in this case it is more extreme. At this point in the story, we have a better idea of what Pluto is, his origins and identity and thus the suffering in those eyes is more devastating. With this volume, as with volume 5 of 20th Century Boys, Urasawa completely changes the stakes and it is unclear what direction the series will take in volume 7.

Powerful Panels: Halloween Edition

It's Halloween and Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader? has decided to celebrate with some fear-filled, powerful panels. Horror is a genre with a lot of comics' history behind it (duh) and it's fascinating to see how that root, horror-influence and the grammar it developed bleeds into nearly every kind of comic. Sometimes there's still just plain old, awesome horror comics, others up the gore or the details, and some graft the signs and signifiers of horror into comics that from the outside, have little to do with the genre. No matter what, you see the powerful horror style in nearly every type of comic.

The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezu

This is a classic Horror manga from the 70s, and the above panel depicts one of the big revelations in the book. This is the first time the main character, Sho, has confronted the current situation of the school. The premise is that after an earthquake an elementary school is transported to some alien wasteland. The fear comes in watching a school full of children essentially riot and the way their teachers have to deal with it. There's no monsters or ghosts so a lot of the fear is psychological and rooted in human survival instincts. It's a bit like a zombie movie.

Umezu does an excellent job of making the landscape look horrific and it acts essentially, as a monster. This double page spread actually isn't the first time the reader has seen the landscape. There is a double page spread directly before this when the teachers first notice the landscape. Sho's double page is more significant because he's the main character but also because he's the first child to see the situation. It's just the landscape and his face really hammering in the effect of this event on Sho. Although he freaks out at first, he's one of the first truly able to come to terms with these catastrophic circumstances. Sho is deeply distressed but seeing the situation actually helps him come to terms with it.

Swamp Thing by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson

This could have been any number of panels from this classic run on Swamp Thing. Wein and Wrightson build a tense and psychologically taxing atmosphere. This is a classic Horror comic through and through, but the twist is, the hero's the monster. This set of panels really shows how the horror of the narrative works. There's no shocking surprises; just a meandering inevitability to the events.

It's a subtle technique that is demonstrated in these panels. Swamp Thing is obscured at first and through each panel takes up more room even forcing out the shooter's speech bubbles. The final, and most powerful panel, puts the reader in the shooters' position. We're forced to stare at a face that isn't particularly scary to us, just kind of weird, but we're coaxed into the same reaction as the shooter because of his position in the panel. He's not scared of Swamp Thing, but he's horrified by the realization that there's absolutely nothing he can do to stop death.

The Maximortal by Rick Veitch

This isn't a typical horror comic, but so much in it is just plain gruesome. Veitch re-imagines the Superman myth with a big twist: this super-being has all the same flaws as a regular human. So, as in the panel above, if he throws a temper tantrum he's able to pulverize you in the process. The real-life idea Vietch addresses here is a unbalanced relationship between parent and child. It's the sort of situation that you come across in maybe the mall or toy store. You'll see a clearly spoiled kid acting like an idiot and getting whatever they want.

Veitch's panel has the same gut-wrenching effects by contrasting the boys perfection against the father's mutilation, highlighting the imbalance. Part of the point Veitch makes is that many of the ideas we hold up as "perfect" grow problematic when analyzed or executed. Even though Superman works mostly as a symbol, Veitch shows that at his worst, Superman is closer to a violent, childish fantasy.

Green Lantern #43 by Geoff Jones and Doug Mahnke

There's been a lot of good recent Horror-ish super hero comics lately. It probably all started with Marvel Zombies, and includes Final Crisis #4, Blackest Night #0, #1, and this issue of Green Lantern. Probably one of the most explicit suicide scenes I've ever seen in any media. Jones actually builds to it throughout the story with a depressing tale of this C-list supervillian.

The real reason this is so chilling is Mahnke's combination of pain and a sheer blank expression on his face. It's exactly what I'd imagine a picture of this to look like. The crisp art really works by showing details like tear ducts on the sides of his eyes (for emotion) and green splattered brains (for a cringe). Of course, it's not really a suicide--the Black Hand is resurrected as a zombie Black Lantern later--but just staring at this full page spread is enough to send chills down your spine.

(Stay tuned for David's Part II. Happy Halloween!)

The Negative Zone: Release More Relevant Old Stuff!

Pepe Moreno's Rebel is the kind of junky, murky, skateboard punk future Euro-comic that once occupied it's own hard-to-place subgenre. Neither big, dumb comic book trash nor super-sophisticated art-comic, it floats around somewhere in the middle.

The kind of thing that might be jammed between more recent trades at an older comics store, or stuck in a box with some other oversized comics, water damaged. It'll feel like a relic because the past two decades of prevailing comics trends, be it the 90s adolescent-leaning hero books or the mannered, cutesy, oh-so-serious alt-comix and all that falls between, don't have much to do with something like Rebel.

And it's not like Rebel's all that good even, but the handmade feeling to the art, in contrast to its Escape from New York action comic exterior--you've been taught, by an industry of businessmen and capital-a Artists that there are no grey areas, that something is sophisticated or isn't--will just kinda confuse you in a really awesome way.

The dusty trade you uncovered will either be priced for a non-existent "collector's price" or it'll be falling apart, cracks when you open it, and at cover-price and either way, you'll leave the store without it. But it might be something you think about as it rubs up against most of your notions of comics or "comix" or Comics or "graphic novels" or whatever.

Then, you wander into Barnes & Noble--which has either replaced your local comics store or has a better selection because your local comics store is run by a bitter fuck who ran his business into the ground and curses Diamond and "the internet" for doing it--and you see, IDW's recent re-issue of Pepe Moreno's Rebel.

Or maybe you still live in a town with a good, functioning comics store, one that isn't trying to just coast along, and they ordered from Eurotica, the recent reissue of Guido Crepax's The Story of O--confusing too because it fits into no categories...it isn't the latest issue of Hot Moms and it's not by Alan Moore and priced at $120 either.

Though both of these reissues are exceptions, they're invigorating because they do sorta kinda answer something I've yelled about in my head or to other comics fans, as I see say, the useless work of Fletcher Hanks reissued or the work of Japanese innovators recontextualized as birthing North American alt-comix: Where's all that weird 70s and 80s shit? Why do I have to run to eBay for a Moebius story? Can someone reissue this stuff?!

These two reissues and this over-arching trend of non-mainstream comics shying away from the alt-comix trend of insularity have me excited for how comic books for "smart people" evolve, but it's gotta keep going. These should be as frequent as designed-by-Seth reissues of 60s kiddie comics and a mess of oddities from some never-remembered Golden-Age weirdo. The act of reissuing is obviously complex and weird and often done for fun, not profit, but well, I just hope it can extend to stuff that's even a harder sell than the comics that do get reissued.

But it seems that the reasons for not reissuing something like Rebel are a little more nefarious. Clearly, it's rooted in what sells and doesn't sell and what's available to reissue (rights and all that good stuff) but it's a kind of self-fulfilling thing, wherein trippy, Heavy Metal-era comics aren't what people want and therefore aren't worth re-releasing because they haven't been released.

And worse, they've been sorta kinda pushed out of comic book history. This quasi-erasure relates to three things, all of them industry-oriented:

1. It does not really benefit Marvel or DC to take note of these things because they were either not publishing it all or were publishing it in the past and now, can't work it inside their mythology. That's to say, it isn't Batman or Spiderman, what's it gotta do with making money in 2009?

2. It does not really benefit the smaller companies, especially the tastemakers like Fantagraphics or Top Shelf to try to republish this stuff because their bread and butter is still very much the overtly sophisticted, gets-write-ups-in-the-New York Times type comics, be it personal, arty stuff made now or lost pieces of early comics history.

3. For many of the comics historians and comics thinkers, stuff like Heavy Metal, etc. doesn't fit into the narrative they're constructing in classrooms, at SPX panels, and on NPR or wherever. It takes too much explanation. Even say, Howard the Duck can be turned into a narrative about iconoclastic creators left to do whatever because a growing comics behemoth was totally not growing during the heavy 70s.

Of course, these comics also occupy a weird place in terms of relevance, rights, availability and all that, but those seem secondary to the way that something as not even that great as Rebel fucks with expectations. A company like IDW and maybe even BOOM! or Image if they were to get into the field of reissuing, are ideal because they don't have a dog in the fight like "the big two"--or the tastemaking two or three--and really, it would only benefit them to start dishing out some nice-looking, affordable weird 70s Euro stuff. They'd not only be filling an important gap in comics history, but quietly usurping many of the accepted notions, convenient notions of where certain comics fit. And that's a really good thing.

Foundation's Edge Fall Sale Haul

Here's what I said about The Foundation's Edge fall sale last year. It's all true this year too:

"Foundation's Edge in Raleigh, North Carolina is probably maybe the best comics store in the world. The people who work there--well at least the owner and the main dude working--are really nice and helpful and know their shit, it's got any and every new issue each week, and an insane amount of back issues, dusty old graphic novels, a stellar collection of porno comics, and a ton of other great stuff, and it's all at ridiculously kind prices. It's a store that's never gotten rid of anything, obviously blossomed during the smart 80s comics boom, weathered the 90s turd-comics storm, and keeps going.

Well, over the past few weeks, plastered on lightpoles and university bulletin boards around Hilsborough Street have been flyers for a big sale, and so, after work, Monique and I headed over there with high hopes but also a boatload of cynicism because other than Baltimore's Cosmic Comix, "comic store sale" usually translates to "take these issues of Shadowhawk off my hands and oh yeah, here's a bunch of XXL T-shirts for 9.99 instead of 17.99!" We were greeted at the door--did I mention these guys are actually friendly?!--with the flyer above and raced upstairs to the back issues and manga and action figures. A bunch of stuff had been put out on tables and marked down to ridiculous sales prices, everything from kinda recent hardback collections to old-as-shit RPG books and tons of weird European stuff."

And also like last year, the money spent (Monique and I's total: $105.35) pretty much means I spent my checks from this and this all on comics! But blah blah blah, let's dig into the haul...

Brandon's Haul:

• Dare: The Controversial Memoir of Dan Dare #2 & #3 by Grant Morrison & Rian Hughes

The issues run like $4 a piece, so I waited until this sale to pick up the next two--still need #4, they didn't have it--but this is just really awesome series. It's basically a take on Miller’s Dark Knight Returns wherein an aged icon—this time Britain’s much-loved Dan Dare—feels the need to get back into the game, only this time he doesn’t go back to his superheroics, he agrees to shill for the Thatcher-esque Conservative party. Imagine if a retired Batman, so bored of life in his old age, picked up a call from Dick Cheney or something around 2004 and helped get Bush and pals re-elected. It’s actually far more dystopian than anything Miller could ever think of.

• The Last Generation: Book I by Bryer, Foust, & Parch

Sammy grabbed the issues of these at comic-con and BLAM! Foundation's Edge had a trade of the first three issues for 2 bucks. Am really excited to read this. Just as an aside...one of the really funny/sad/awesome things about this sale was that some of the stuff I couldn't find anywhere at Comic-Con is just sitting in Foundation's Edge. Not sure what that says about the con, really. Haven't read this yet but it looks insane and there's a cool intro from Chuck Dixon in which he sort of presents the series as somehow, an uncynical post-apocalypse story!

• Negative Burn #12, #18, & #20

These have some stray Paul Pope stories and that's why I got them. Serioulsy--these were at the top of my list for comic-con but they were nowhere to be found, but they're all rotting away in a whitebox in Raleigh, NC. The stories are an illustrated version of part of Engles' eulogy to Marx, a fucked-up Clowes-ian Christmas tale, and one of Pope's signature 90s, smokey autobiographical tales about a dude he met whose girlfriend drowned. Back issues were 40% off, so each of these was around 2 bucks!!!

• Optimism of Youth by Jack Jackson
• The Secret of San Saba by Jack Jackson

Jack Jackson or "Jaxon" as he's usually known is an underground artist whose work I've been seeking out lately and again, couldn't find any of at comic-con but found these two trades. The thing about stores like Foundation's Edge, which came out when the weird, indie comics boom of the early 80s was there is that they just have so much shit in boxes and piles and for a sale or just every once in a while they sort some of it and stick it on the shelves. I've never seen these in the store until today but they're long OOP, so they probably were unearthed and put on the shelf at cover price--the store's nice like that. One is a bunch of Jaxon's weird, trippy strip type stories and one is somehow about Spanish explorers and Apaches and a giant-ass bug. Looks awesome.



• The Story of O by Guido Crepax

Just re-released in a pretty nice and fairly affordable hardback, made more affordable when all the trades are 35% off. I love artsy-fartsy porno comixxx.

Monique's Haul:

• Gon: Underground by Masashi Tanaka

Gon is everything a manga reader wants without any extra variables. Gon is both a loner and a fighter so that solves the whole "antagonist/protagonist" element but it's the art that reaches above and beyond to both make reading easier and compensate for the heavy nature focus. The bonus here is that it fulfills the quick-reading dream of NO TEXT but still is able to be funny and cute. "Underground" is a collection of stories dealing with well, underground dwellers such as ants and prairie dogs.

• Magical Pokemon Journey by Yumi Tsukirino

Pokemon comics are weird. You want to be really into them and sometimes they can be really awful. I mostly bought this one because it was a dollar and it features some STAR pokemons like jigglypuff and magikarp. If they made these color, it would redeem all problems 100%.

• Man-Thing: Whatever Knows Fear... by Hans Rodionoff & Kyle Hotz

Man-Thing is kind of like this ugly dog breed that the general population thinks is ugly but a certain sect thinks they are the cutest thing ever. I think Man-Thing is cute. I don't think I'd think so in real life but as a cartoon, he's just a stringy, mossy, blob with body builder attributes. Anyway, this collection includes both modern Man-Thangs and 70's Man-Thangs which illuminates a lot of the differences between modern comics and bronze age comics. The biggest contrast, at least for me, is in the art styles but most notably, the coloring. The bronze age stuff just uses color fearlessly which just means the sky is bright blue and a man's shirt is bright yellow while the modern 'mics just struggle for mood and style. Even though Man-Thing is "scary", why does it have to look "scary"? I don't think I'll ever really understand the obviousness of mainstream, modern comics.



• Morphos The Shapechanger by Burne Hogarth

This is really something else. No, seriously. A really great essay prefacing this unfinished work by Gary Groth, of Fantagraphics and The Comics Journal, describes Hogarth as "adapting to the needs of the genre and the character." Morphos is a super-hero like character that is the result of Merlin the wizard, trapped in crystal after falling in love with the Lady of the Lake and getting played, wanting to make the human race greater through his own DNA contained in his hair. The hair is given to a female commercial scientist who eventually, with the help of her partner, is able to conceive Morphos by injecting the embryo into herself. Unfortunately, the company she works for catches on to her plans and most of the completed story is her running from the owners of the company she works for with her co-worker. The story remains unfinished because Hogarth died but the book includes the written epilogue that he constructed as a skeleton for the story. Morphos is eventually able to change shapes but is not capable of true violence. The art is incredibly detailed in color and line-craft so it's especially a shame that he wasn't able to get to the shapeshifting part of the story because he would have been able to do an incredible job of translating that into pictures. 


• Pink Flamingos: Bring Down the Night by John R. Sanevere, Carol Q. Sansevere & William Rieser

This is just a Miami Vice-like story using 4 young women who are in a club called, not surprisingly, "The Pink Flamingos." The art is completely like the cover and all in color. There's not a lot of information on this or the second book on the internets but thats probably because it's put out by Angel Entertainment,Inc but is also called a "Simon & Schuster Graphic Novel."

• Space Fantasies Vol 1, Number One by Some Weirdos

Half-porno comic and half-super hero comic, this is, ultimately, just some weird fan-made 70's comic.

• Street Fighter by Len Strazewski & Don Hillsman

[No Comment]



• Wallace's Wood's The Wizard King, The King of the World by Wallace Wood

I've never read LotR. I've seen the LotR movies but I don't remember them. So, I don't really understand how this compares to LotR but it is said to be similar. Basically, this dwarf-man is tricked into becoming a hero to save the world from an evil force/god. I'm dying to find parts two and three.

• The World of Ginger Fox by Mike Baron & Mitch O'Connell

Brandon Graham has mentioned this one before. It's a really weird (like) 80's feminism story. Basically, Ginger Fox becomes the CEO of a movie production company while also falling in love with one of the asian, lead actors in one of the in-production kung-fu movies. Hollywood old-heads try to take her down but she makes it out on top...Murphy Brown style...or not.

• Tuesday and Thursday, Queens Blvd, and Dream Big Dreams by Andrew Zaben

Altogether, these cost 4 dollars so, I thought it was worth the risk. The art is AWFUL. Seriously, just awful...no use of perspective and sometimes, it's even hard to tell the different characters apart. The stories have this 90's feel to them-- introspective but weirdly self-obsessed. There's a lot of "meaningful conversations" and love triangle type stuff usually umbrella-ed by some larger problem. The "umbrella" of Dream Big Dreams, for example, is the question a bar owner faces when given the option to turn his bar into a franchise. The people who patronize his bar don't want it because it's sort of this old-indie-dude-dive bar but his wife sees those dollar $igns. I'm not sure if I'll be able to make it through them completely but for now, I've convinced myself that I'm into this 90's story aesthetic (even though, I realized I'm much more into it when used with young people--My So-Called Life, Clarissa Explains it All, Blossom--than with older folks who have jobs and marriages, etc.)

The Art of Osamu Tezuka - God of Manga

In a section entitled “Negative Viewpoints,” which comes toward the end of her new monograph, The Art of Osamu Tezuka – God of Manga, Helen McCarthy alludes to a review of the English-language edition of Ode to Kirihito that appeared in the Anime News Network’s Right Turn Only blog, which stated, in effect, that one doesn’t speak of weaknesses when considering Tezuka’s work because he hadn’t any. As McCarthy sagely points out, such fawning serves little purpose and it is just this sort of mythologizing that has prevented, in English at least, the emergence of any serious critical evaluation of his work.

This is one of the underlying themes and intentions to which McCarthy continually refers throughout the book: only when the gloss of myth has been wiped away, can we fully appreciate the significance of Tezuka’s accomplishments. Here also is a major example of the sort of oppositional tension that McCarthy negotiates in order to justly treat this vast subject.

It’s this same tension that allowed McCarthy to pull off what I think is the book’s greatest coup: balancing the needs and expectations of an audience that will be unevenly split between Tezuka fans and academics. One of the problems of the lack of a vibrant critical tradition for comics in this country is that what critical literature there is tends to bend too far in one direction or the other, rather than speaking to both audiences. McCarthy here includes enough neat little tidbits that will wow fans—such as the anecdote about how Tezuka turned down Stanley Kubrick’s offer to hire him to do design work for 2001: A Space Odyssey—while also including information about new discoveries of old comics or Kodansha’s plans to make Tezuka's entire œuvre available in translation online, that will hopefully spur budding academics to continue the work she has begun. And of course there is the art.

Crime and Punishment

From the perspective of a reader with pretensions to serious criticism, but whose only access to Tezuka has been the small portions of his works that have been as yet translated into English, what McCarthy’s book does is contextualize Tezuka and his work in terms of the broader history of art and culture. Thus, in the sequence reprinted from his 1953 adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, we are not only afforded the opportunity to see the incredible level of compositional innovation at this early stage in his career, but also how Tezuka married storytelling techniques rooted in the cinema and his Japanese predecessors to the world’s great philosophical and moral literature.

Ayako
McCarthy also documents how throughout much of his career, Tezuka was viewed by critics as being passé—an artist who relied on overly simplified characterizations in an idiom rooted in the past—and how this critical ambivalence spurred much of his most interesting work and perhaps more than anything else was responsible for his ability to remain relevant for so long. Books such as MW, Ode to Kirihito and especially Black Jack reflected Tezuka’s attempts to wrestle with his own incorruptibly humanist outlook in the face of the great evil present in the world. Black Jack was originally conceived as a sort of cipher to tie together a four-part miniseries celebrating his career and showcasing all of his characters. The character was so popular with readers, however, that he was ultimately given his own series, allowing Tezuka to explore the medical career for which he trained, but gave up in order to continue making comics. Black Jack is the touchstone of Tezuka’s moral universe and embodies the tension inherent to all of the artist’s mature works between his dogged faith in humanity and the power of good deeds and the realization that all is not well in the world.


Give a God a Break



In the past year, a couple of autobiographical manga—Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life and Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary—have explored the unfathomable pressures under which comics creators in Japan frequently work. In the case of the latter book, it led Azuma to drop all of his responsibilities and go homeless—twice. The film that is bundled with McCarthy’s book is remarkable for its providing documentary evidence of this editorial pressure. In the movie’s first few minutes we see Tezuka set up in the apartment that he stays in five days/week to work. The only person allowed within this sacred workspace is his wife—assistants and editors can come no farther than the entryway. As an assistant pops in to bring Tezuka his dinner, he lets the artist know that an editor wants him to call.

The exchange between the two that follows is illuminating; the assistant continually urging Tezuka to call in the face of the artist’s stubborn assertions that all the editor wants to know is when the work will be finished. Indeed, the pressure of deadlines is perhaps the controlling theme of this short documentary. The entire first section is concerned with the race to meet a deadline so that Tezuka can attend a planned Franco-Japanese cultural exchange in Paris. As the deadline looms closer and it becomes clear that the installments will not be finished in time to make his flight, new reservations are made for the following day. Even then, Tezuka struggles to finish the work and the episode culminates with Tezuka sitting in the backseat of a car waiting outside the airport terminal, hurriedly scribbling pages until it’s decided he can complete them on the plane and fax them from Paris. As if this scenario were not humiliating enough, viewers are then allowed into a publisher’s strategy meeting in which the suits comment that Tezuka gives editors hemorrhoids and that the best way to treat the man who has redefined the comics and animation industries over four decades is to drag the work out of him.


Lots of Neat Shit

Tezuka & Moebius - Kyoto, 1982

There is something incongruous about seeing a photograph such as the one above depicting Osamu Tezuka seated beside Moebius in some idyllic Kyoto setting in 1982. It’s like reading about that dinner at The Majestic in 1922, attended by Marcel Proust and James Joyce. You think about it and you’re like, “yeah, of course that would happen,” but somehow it still feels, I don’t know, supernatural? In any event, I realize that it’s rather a crass way of putting it, but aside from the excellent framework it provides for beginning a systematic evaluation of the man and his work, The Art of Osamu Tezuka – God of Manga is valuable for the wealth of neat shit it contains, of which this photograph is emblematic. Other examples are the images of the earliest comics drawn by Tezuka—one, Pin Pin Sei-chan, was drawn when the artist was in fifth grade—discussions of his experimental animation and even an image of a page in which Tezuka laid out the “Star System,” under which his various iconic characters ‘performed’ in many of his series.

Pin Pin Sei-chan

It is difficult to imagine the scope of the task that McCarthy took upon herself. Contending with a body of work as massive as Tezuka’s and coming out with a book that is beautiful, useful and legitimately informative is no mean feat. The danger of creating a book of this nature is that it will sell poorly and ultimately end up on the remainders shelves of bookstores, snatched up for a small fraction of the original asking price. I think in this case, however, such a fate is unlikely and indeed hope that the book engenders the further critical assessment of Tezuka’s work that McCarthy seeks.

Baltimore Comic-Con 2009 - Brandon's Take

Let me reveal this blog's "cards" a bit: You're getting these nerded-out lists of the random-ass comics we all bought at the Baltimore Comic-Con because that's what comics and comic conventions are about. Not getting poor old Jeph Loeb to sign six copies of Spiderman: Blue or those tiny slivers of industry insider information the big three (I'm counting IMAGE as big at this point) mindfully drop to you, the comics reader. It's about comics.

That said...it was especially about comics this year for all of us because well, we didn't really attend any of the panels and autographs are for suckers. The panels, this year relegated not to their own rooms as in past years but these weird, flimsy, roof-less structures in the back corner of the main room of the con, meaning the roar of the crowd or "your kid is missing!" announcements, over-powered the actual panels making them totally not fun to sit and listen to. Really. This was awful. Disrespectful to the fans and the creators.

Really, if there's ever some kind of sad-sack movie a la The Wrestler about comics artists, there'll be a scene in which the artist tries to speak to a group of adoring fans in a shit-ass, half-structure room, with bad sound, made worse by a loud-ass crowd like nine feet away. The weekend was fun at the time, the not attending panels hardly a big deal, but a few days later I feel a little bit like I didn't really get my $25 bucks worth. Still, when it came to comics, it didn't disappoint...

Awesome Undergrounds
Because I had more money than usual--and I've been super into porn comics as of late--I went hard on kinda expensive underground stuff. It's main appeal for me has been the realization of just how insane this stuff remains...and how artistically interesting it is too. That's to say, if you're making "indie" comics nowadays, chances are you should look at this kind of shit and just feel ashamed. Freak Brothers was a comic that I was into when I was in middle-school--via reprints obviously--and Bode is an obvious legend, so the only "risk" I really took was on Inner-City Romance which turned out to me well worth it. A sort of fine-art, proto-graffiti, urban nightmare sex comic. I'll be on the hunt for the first four issues of this series.

• The Complete Cheech Wizard Vol 1 by Vaughn Bode
• Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers #6 by Gilbert Shelton
• Inner-City Romance #5 by Guy Collwell
• Junkwaffel #3 by Vaughn Bode

Cheap, Random, Back Issues
All these were from one dude with $1 comics whiteboxes that became 15 comics for $10 if you could find enough stuff. Between Monique and I, were got thirty issues from dude. The only thing here I went in looking for was the Hellboy: Weird Tales because it has a story by Gene Colan and the idea of Colan illustrating the Hellboy universe is too much. That said, I also found the issue of Casanova I didn't have, one of the few Concrete things I didn't have, some dope Eduardo Risso illustrated stuff and some recent Corben too.

• Casanova #4 by Fraction & Ba
• Concrete: Eclectica #2 by Paul Chadwick
• The Exploits of the Junior Carrot Patrol by Rick Geary
• Haunt of Horror: Edgar Allan Poe #3 by Richard Corben & Rich Margopoulos
• Hellboy: Weird Tales #6
• Johnny Double #1-4 by Azzarello & Risso
• Swamp Thing #7 by Corben & Pfeifer
• Weird Western Tales #3

Some Trades
You can really clean-up on trades at the comic-con, everyone's offering them at like 50% off or 3 for the price of 1 and all kinds of good stuff. Still though, it's mainly stuff you see all the time and well, at this point in my comics reading career, I get cynical towards stuff that's seen everywhere, unless it's just plain awesome. So, I picked up Red Colored Elegy for $8 bucks, mainly because the only thing that's stopped me from reading it has been it's high cover price. Also, copped this old Elementals trade for $2 from these guys with lots of old Heavy Metals and shit.

• Elementals: The Natural Order by Bill Willingham
• Red Colored Elegy by Seichi Hayashi

TMNT!
Trying to complete the run of all the Eastman and Laird-drawn issues and really only need issue 3 at this point. TMNT is just an underground comic really. The art has much more in common with the straggly, nervous cartooning of Shelton or even, Crumb than anything else out there. But then it's basically a trippy Jack Kirby-inspired, Frank Miller-tinged party-action comic or something. I mean you know all this already though...

• Michaelangelo One-Shot by Eastman & Laird
• TMNT #2 by Eastman & Laird

EXCLUSIVE VIDEO FROM THE BALTIMORE COMIC-CON!!!

Baltimore Comic-Con 2009: Jesse's Take

This was my third year attending the comic-con, and this year I went in with a different approach: the list. We can all agree that the main objective is to take advantage of the flea-market atmosphere and get some great deals on comics. So, it was only natural to take the game to the next level. Maybe I just couldn't handle the next level, but the list had mixed results. I'd definitely get disappointed when a well organized booth wouldn't have anything I was looking for or everything was overpriced. I could really only keep a couple things from my fairly long list in my head, and while I was looking for one thing I'd get distracted by something completely different.

It's the surprises that are really the highlight of the comic-con though. If you're just going to come with a printed-out list of every comic you own and try and fill in the gaps you're not really doing it. You got to go with the flow and see what pops out at you. The list had it's moments helping to keep certain titles in my mind, but next year, any list I take will be short and consulted infrequently.

The biggest surprise for me was probably the highlight of my comic-con and that was the blog's good friend Larry Marder. I hadn't had a chance to meet him in the past and was interested in introducing myself as a fan. The first day I was lost in the throngs of people and missed out, but that night inspired by David's drawing he made to participate in the Beanworld sketch exchange I drew one of my own. The next day I handed it in and spoke with Mr. Marder and got to see first hand what I had heard: that he is a intelligent, friendly, and genuine person. As I turned in my sketch it brought about some laughs and he started sketching immediately so I didn't get a chance to ask for specifically what I wanted. When I saw he was drawing exactly what I envisioned I said, "Wow, that's exactly what I was going to ask for. You read my mind. " He promptly responded, "No, Beanworld did."

And that about sums it up. Come to get great deals and end up getting your mind read by Beanworld. I did get lots of great deals though:

Haul Highlights

The Maximortal by Rick Veitch
One of the classics right here. A super hero deconstruction that is actually thoughtful and gripping. Finally glad I got it and can't wait to read it again.

The Mystery of Mary Rodgers by Rick Geary.
Blanche Goes to New York by Rick Geary
Got to catch them all.

Challengers of the Unknown #1 by Leob and Sale
Yes.

Space Usagi 92' #2 96' #2 by Stan Sakai
All the quality of Usagi Yojimbo.....in Space.

Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil by Jeff Smith
Big Jeff Smith fan and found the issues for real cheap. I've seen pages of this where Shazam is fighting monsters. The first issue has Billy Batson as a homeless orphan and Shazam sort of powerless to help him. Good so far!
Marvel Fanfare #12, #18, #19, #25, #33
I'm trying to get all these too. Even the worst ones are decent and the best ones are the best. Just read #18 last night and on the last page, after everyone is saved, Captain America goes back inside a burning building to save the American flag. Got to love it.

Star Wars Tales #13
Kind of like Marvel Fanfare, Star Wars Tales aren't attached to any continuity so writers don't have editors looking over their shoulders. This is an all Mace Windu issue and two of the stories are really well done. One has Mace Windu testing and failing an Jedi apprentice and the other features an email from Mace Windu's parents. One of the stories with a stupid time travel plot has great art and a very Moebius looking Mace.

Vimanarama #2, #3 by Grant Morrison and Phillip Bond
I got the first issue of this and it was interesting. The whole first issue is pretty boring minute of daily life then things explode on the last couple pages. A pretty ballsy start to a three issue mini-series.

Thor #387 by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz
This issue is the prelude to one of the craziest Thor stories I've ever read. The Celestials are destroying some planet and Thor decides to fight them. With the most powerful blow he's ever struck he cracks open the helmet of one, goes INSIDE the Celestial, finds its brain, and cracks Mjolnir. Yup.

Conan the King #27, #28, #29, #30, #31
These were the real comic surprises of the convention. I found them and picked them up from the cover art alone. They didn't disappoint. The first issue has an evil sorcerer turning eyeballs into worms and summoning demons to fight for him. They have a very Prince Valiant, anything can happen feel. Characters come and go and ones you are attached to could die at any moment. Numerous subplots run through each issue making it rewarding through each and every issue.