Wake Up, Wake Up It's The Best of the Month: June 2010

S.H.I.E.L.D #2 by Jonathan Hickman and Dustin Weaver

With this series and his recent run on Fantastic Four, Jonathan Hickman is becoming one of Marvel's brightest stars--even if most comics readers don't realize it. His work borrows a page from the Morrison handbook and utilizes science-fiction/fantasy in broad terms to illustrate themes about society at large as well the characters' inner development. It's the artful way he does the former and the fact that he cares about the latter at all that makes his work so interesting.

Hickman's big trick is taking everything up a notch. In Fantastic Four Reed Richards wants to literally solve everything, and S.H.I.E.L.D. is no different, with grandiose dialogue like "Drink deeply and live forever" and "I built all of it." It sounds like this would get old after a while, but it never does. Hickman uses sci-fi as a tool and not as the focus of his stories. You're too busy thinking about how the characters relate to each other to seriously consider the guy with a nuclear reactor in his chest, and it all feels properly commonplace.

Issue #2 suffers from a scatterbrained style--which is probably another Morrison influence--but it's still a strong read due to well, the same thing Hickman does in everything, and also smaller things like an incredibly designed double-page spread featuring Nostradamus and Leonardo's continued presence as number-one-most-awesome-human.

Abe Sapien: The Abyssal Plain #1 by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Peter Snejbjerg

Abyssal Plain begins with a Russian man trapped in a submarine waiting to die and writing to his girlfriend to pass the time. He goes on to talk about, in the panel above, how you never really think you will die, how there's always some hope. It's the kind of thing that makes you feel like you've been punched in the solar plexus. Short and direct and really powerful.

The opening is effective but strange, because it doesn't have anything to do with the plot really, and even the deeper, thematics aren't addressed in the story. What it does do however, is provide a the sense that every character in this story--and the Hellboy universe--whether important or not, has a notable, affecting backstory. The result is that even the smallest detail or piece of information, even the slightest shift in person feels bigger and deeper. So when Abe's counterpart in this B.P.R.D mission starts acting like a jerk, he's not just a foil or simple counterpoint to Abe's good-natured kindness, you get the sense of this guy slowly cultivating his shitbag attitude...and that makes it all the worse.

Tons of wordless panels help this story to fly by--each panel feels like it carries it's own weight--but the tone's set with the opening. Again, not thematically laid-out and not a key piece of plot information, but somehow the feeling of this issue's set from page one. Immediately after the opening, a panel of Abe staring out into a grey sky gives the impression that Abe is having the same sort of thoughts that the sailor had, and when Abe briefly meets up with the sailor's body later, there's a mysterious knowing look between Abe and the corpse and we almost understand it.

The Bulletproof Coffin #1 by David Hine and Shaky Kane

This is one of those comics that feels like such a small portion of the overall picture that it's hard to know exactly what's going on at times. The plot has no clear focus, with things jumping from the main character, Steve, to excessive explanation of the fictional Hine and Kane and their Kirby/Lee like relationship.

The comic is ultimately a celebration/deconstruction of comics' underbelly. The stories behind the stories, like the Lee/Kirby drama, and the early weirdness of comics where from panel to panel really anything could happen. It's like how Paul Karasik included his search for information about the Fletcher Hanks in the back of I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets!. His interest started with the weirdness of the comics, but grew into an interest into the man behind them, and pretty soon real-life weirdness and comics weirdness were the same thing. There's definitely a natural inclination to try to understand the psychology behind the people who create art--especially in those who create the weird or subversive--and Bulletproof Coffin feeds that interest while still giving readers the more visceral and simple thrills of a comic book.

It's successful as a meta-comic because it doesn't try too hard to analyze what is going on, and like the comics it emulates, Bulletproof Coffin is interested in entertaining; in being awesome. The book's major diversion is sticking in an entire comic by the fictional creator and it's not all that different from the rest of the comic--just as weird and cool and exciting. Kane too, subtly shifts his style for the comic-in-a-comic but not too much, so it's all one big, weird thing.

Kane draws Steve lounging comfortably holding that comic in his hands, and it's a great panel because it wordlessly captures what it's like to relax and read a comic. The next panel is his hands holding the comic, then it's a full page spread of the comic he's reading, and you proceed to read the whole comic he has in his hands. It's a trippy all-encompassing use of visual narrative and when I saw the cover inside the comic, it threw me for a loop--the idea of starting another comic inside this other comics--and I think that's the feeling Hine and Kane are going for here.

Others: Thor #611, Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard #1, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #3, King City #9

Horrific Sublime: Abe Sapien - The Drowning

While it wouldn't be fair to describe Abe Sapien: The Drowning as impenetrable, it is certainly one of the more delightfully elusive comics to be published in recent memory. As Brandon pointed out in his review of the book, Abe's first solo book is in large part about the crisis of confidence and responsibility attendant to his first 'solo' assignment. This peculiar mirroring of form and content aside, there is an awful lot of other stuff going on in the book, the significance of which is not immediately clear.

The narrative and imagery of The Drowning are firmly anchored in the sea, which is appropriate for a story centering on Abe. The shipwreck with which the series opens sets the tone for the book, not only in terms of the centrality of the looming threat represented by the sea, but also the eerie luminescence of Jason Shawn Alexander's art, complemented by Dave Stewart's colors. While the narrative is ostensibly about Abe's attempt to recover the Lipu Dagger from the corpse of the Dutch warlock Epke Vrooman, as the story progresses the focus shifts increasingly toward the legacies of the Sainte Sebastien's twin evils: the 17th century blaze which wiped out the island's leper colony, and the island's history as a hub in the trade of African slaves.


There is a sequence in the series' fourth issue in which the old woman who had conjured the sea creatures who attacked Abe and Agent Van Fleet as they dived in search of the dagger, killing the latter, recounts the island's ignoble history to Abe, evoking the "traffic in flesh," and "innocent blood spilled." The illustrations on these pages depict the shackled African slaves parading down the island's cobbled streets, followed by a panel showing a bound man being savagely whipped, the panel colored completely in lurid blood red. The book's ruminations on the evils of the slave trade, its evocations of shipwrecks and malevolent sea creatures, and the impressionistic ink splatters and celestial light of the illustrations recall the paintings of the English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner, particularly his astonishing Slavers Throwing the Dead and Dying Overboard, Typhoon Coming On (1840).

Slavers Throwing the Dead and Dying Overboard, Typhoon Coming On

Shipwreck


Flint Castle

Abe Sapien: The Drowning

One of the many things that makes Mike Mignola's constatly-growing Hellboy universe so great is how everything matters. Nothing feels tossed-off or less significant than something else. Certain series aren't "events"--events are of course, the current bane of comics' existence--and certain series aren't more fun or unimportant (except for "Weird Tales" and "Hellboy Junior"). Every "Hellboy" sub-series fills in some chronological holes, answers some questions or poses new ones, and still gives you plenty of cool monsters and usually finds time to sneak up emotionally devastate you somewhere along the way too.

Abe Sapien: The Drowning is probably the best sub-series yet and it comes out today as a trade. A five-issue series that started earlier this year, written by Mignola and drawn by Jason Shawn Alexander, The Drowning tells the story of Abe Sapien's first mission without Hellboy and the mission's absolute failure. Everything about the mission is presented as second-rate, from it taking place on Saint-Sebastien in France (not the famous city in Spain), to constant references from B.P.R.D agents that it's Hellboy that gets all the exciting jobs, to of course, it being placed in the hands of the rather inexperienced Abraham Sapien.

The "hook" of this series, the relating point of it all--if you stripped it off its connection to the Hellboy universe and the mythology of Saint Sebastian, and a bunch of bad-ass water monsters--is the first day of your first big job where everything's gone wrong. Of course, it's not some office job or something, so the consequences are every ounce of Abe's self-confidence in the shadow of Hellboy, and a whole lot of guilt about his perceived responsibility for the death of some B.P.R.D agents. Abe's a really nice and sensitive guy, he doesn't hide his emotions in jokes or hard-ass quotables like Hellboy, he just sort of scrunches up and gets really upset, which makes this series more of a psychological portrait of guilt and learning that the world's fucked, than your typical Hellboy story.

Usually, Mignola buries the emotions behind adventure and Lovecraft-like atmospherics, but here, the most memorable stuff is the moments of Abe freaking out. The plot about the island and the forces that protect a century-dead Warlock are there, but they're muddled even by Mignola's standards--although I think it's supposed to be as confusing for the reader as it is for Abe--and are really, just a vehicle in which we enter into Abe's guilts and fears.

This is some of Mignola's most direct and emotional writing and it's matched quite well by the more realistic art of Jason Shawn Alexander. We're mainly used to seeing Mignola's own art or the significantly more cartoony work of Guy Davis, but here, Alexander's work, a mix of Scott Hampton's wisely sloppy lines and Jae Lee's realism (but none of the rigidity of Lee's art), takes a more sober and overtly serious take on the Hellboy universe, which fits the "it's really, really fucked but it'll be okay in the end, I promise" tone of the story.

In issue #2, there's a particularly affecting dream sequence in which Abe, struggling to get someone, anyone from B.P.R.D on the phone, imagines Hellboy appearing and yelling at him for the failed mission. "What the Hell were you thinking?", a Hellboy-shaped shadow asks, and for a moment we think it's Hellboy to save the day, and on the next page, out of the shadow, he asks "What made you think you were ready for this?". It's followed by a page of others similarly chastising Abe until he finally explodes at the imagined versions of his friends. We're totally in Abe's head for this sequence as it's drawn and presented as realistically as the rest of the issue and it's disturbing to see Abe's friends being so cruel, which only serves to highlight just how overwhelmed and guilt-ridden Abe is at this point; he's paranoid, out of his head, imagining his best friends losing all their sympathy.

The final issue of the series ends with the real-life version of the events Abe imagined in #2. It begins with a solitary image of Abe, sadly perched on a boat looking out at the ocean--actually, quite similar to the Herzog image from Nosferatu I blabbed on about here--and is followed by a reverse angle of Abe apologizing to Bruttenholm, who of course, tells him it wasn't his fault and means it: "It was a bad situation...No one could have foreseen what would happen." The rest of the scene is intercut between Abe and the Professor talking and strangely affecting images back at Saint Sebastien (B.P.R.D clean-up crew, the townspeople, a dead boy), illustrating the aftermath, both happy and sad, of the mission.