500 Essential Graphic Novels by Gene Kannenberg Jr.

The only thing more obnoxious than invoking the "rise of the graphic novel" in both popularity and "maturity" is complaining about people invoking the graphic novel's rise in popularity and maturity, but real quick: Too many articles and even a few books, latch onto the same group of canonized comics, toss in a few slightly more obscure ones, talk about the Yellow Kid and R. Crumb and Chris Ware and send that ish off to their publisher. Thankfully, Gene Kannenberg Jr.'s 500 Essential Graphic Novels is not another kinda lazy, pseudo-survey of comics, it's a pretty well-done, fairly populist look at a ton of different books.

On sheer volume, Kannenberg beats the "Maus, Frank Miller, Chris Ware" school of "serious" comics writing. There's pretty much no way anybody who opens 500 has read everything within its pages. For a person new or relatively new to comics, the scope of the book and Kannenberg's choices might be overwhelming, but that's a good thing because this is the kind of book that you keep lying around, ready to consult or flip through at any moment. To the more avid comics reader, most (but not all) of these titles will be familiar but Kannenberg's concise but enthusiastic take on one comic or another will make you re-think a comic you hated or remind you of a comic that's been buried in your stack of back issues for years.

Kannenberg also has a way of injecting smart, terse comic criticism into his summaries. He'll often toss in a fairly radical or brave opinion on a certain book in a way that will get the well-informed comics nerd thinking harder, but won't prevent a newer reader from picking it up either. For example, he might be the first person to admit that Mouseguard isn't really that good (but the art and overall feeling of it still makes it great) and suggests that J.M DeMatteis' Moonshadow is the "finest" fantasy comic (and not Sandman). His review of Jimmy Corrigan says that it's "not the masterpiece that some critics claim" which is interesting because it doesn't tow the "comics are smart now" party line and you know, is true. The comment won't stop new readers from picking up the book and gives seasoned readers some food for thought.

If there's a problem with the book, it's that the whole thing feels a little rushed. Again, undoubtedly related to some aspect of the mainstream press wanting to jump on the "comics are cool" bandwagon, Kannenberg for the most part, strikes a balance between making a big, silly list book and adding other layers to it, but some mistakes are egregious. For example, there are a couple of times where the cover image is from a previous printing or is simply a different volume altogether. Not a big deal, but genuinely confusing since Kannenberg goes through the effort of proving ISBNs. His entry on Concrete Volume 1: The Depths is accompanied by a picture of the pretty much out-of-print "The Complete Concrete" (which contains the books that make up "The Depths" and much more), but the ISBN is for "The Depths". Another weird thing is listing 2002's collection of the black and white issues of Madman ("The Oddity Odyssey"), as if the IMAGE collections don't exist (and they came out way before other re-issues that are listed in the book). Does he prefer the black and white issues? It'd be nice to know.

There's also some weird grammatical errors and words missing from sentences, which suggests a lack of proofreading and adds to the relatively rushed feel of the book. This is furthered by the occasional awkward sentence and an unfortunate reliance on cliches when describing a book's effect on the reader. No doubt, a book like this is a balancing act of saying a lot in a little space, not getting too into the minor details, and lots of other stuff, but lines like this, from a description of Farel Dalrymple's Pop Gun War come close to non-sense: "...all of it is well-observed and the story becomes deeply personal for the reader, as well as the writer." How does the story become deeply personal for the writer?

One also gets the sense that for a lot of these, he just dug up one of those really incredible Fantagraphics catalogs from the late 90s that were like, 200 pages and picked and chose weird, lesser known stuff, but again, there's worse offenses than that. These complaints are nitpicking though, because the book's made for people lacking the knowledge to nitpick and again, for those more deeply into comics, what's annoying about the book will bring them back to it over time.

Dave Sim's Judenhass

So Dave Sim appears to be much on the brain here these days and at the risk of boring the reader with a sort of mono-focus on one particular creator, I think a word needs to be said about his graphic narrative of the Holocaust Judenhass. The fact is that the creation of a new work centering on the Holocaust is something of a risky business, and adopting a critical approach to such a work is not without its own risks. That Dave Sim has managed to create in Judenhass a work that is provocative without being offensive, affective without being sentimental, a work that details the horrors of the Holocaust without being craven is an accomplishment of no minor order.

Sim explains the sort of central conceit of the book with a quote on the back cover in which he laments the inadequacy of the term 'anti-Semitism', a term which ostensibly would apply equally to Arabs as to Jews, to describe the phenomenon which drove the executors of Hitler's Final Solution. In his research, he came across the German word Judenhass, literally Jew-Hatred. He writes:

It seemed to me that the term served to distill the ancient problem to its essence, and in such a way as to hopefully allow other non-Jews (like myself) to see the problem 'unlaundered' and through fresh eyes. Europe and various other jurisdictions aren't experiencing a sudden upsurge in 'anti-Semitism.' What they are experiencing is an upsurge in "Judenhass"--Jew Hatred.



Sim takes a two-pronged approach to his subject in Judenhass, juxtaposing citations from the historical record of Jew Hatred in Europe and the West with archival images largely originating from the liberation of the camps at the end of the war. Sim's aim, in part, is to demonstrate that far from being a question of how a catastrophe on the order of the Holocaust could have occurred, the ubiquity of anti-Semitism at all levels of Western society made it more or less inevitable.

This thesis is not new, nor is it without its problems, but I think the larger point is that the Holocaust happened because not enough people could be bothered to stop it from happening. When you consider that people lived in societies whose intellectual leaders almost without exception characterized Jews as somehow less than fully human, the notion that they would not put their lives or livelihoods at risk to save these Jews becomes somewhat more plausible. I would venture that there are people--even governments--today who would plan and execute the wholesale destruction of the remainder of world's Jews, if given the chance. Presumably, however, there would be enough of us to raise enough of a stink in order to prevent such a thing from happening.

This, of course, will not necessarily always be the case, which is part of the point of continuing to explore the historical facts and implications of the Holocaust in art. Another part, I believe, is to show that even though we are living now fully six decades beyond the end of the war, we are not entirely free from implication in these atrocities. One of the more salient quotes included in the book that speaks to these ideas comes from William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It is not even past."



Judenhass is a comic and it is a perfect example of how this subject matter is peculiarly suited to the medium of comics on multiple levels. One of the earliest observations that Sim makes in the book is the special relationship that the comics world shares with Jews and how different this art form would be were it not for the Jews who made it what it is. Beyond this allusion to the history of comics in America, Judenhass provides the ideal forum for the practice of precisely the type of photo-realistic illustration that Sim has been documenting in his series Glamourpuss. There is something about the effect of Sim's art in the book, which tempers the realism with something of a storybook quality that makes it somehow more affective and therefore more horrifying than if Sim had simply illustrated the book with a montage of photographs.



Sim employs the very cinematic approach that Dave Gibbons attempted with Watchmen, but in this case to great effect. Alternately starting with an image in a long shot or a tight close-up, he repeats the images, gradually either pulling the viewer in to highlight further detail, or pulling the perspective back in a sort of still image reveal. The repetition of the images of emaciated survivors or the stacked corpses of victims challenges the reader to engage the book without being affected.



Many of the book's more significant moments lay in the unarticulated implications or layers of meaning of the particular images reproduced or narratives recounted. The recounting of the story of Harry Truman's visit with his friend and former business partner (and Jew) Eddie Jacobson and subsequent meeting of Truman with Chaim Weizmann and the resultant recognition of the State of Israel by the United States risks lapsing into just the sort of sentimentality that is amongst the greatest pitfalls of narrative dealing with the Holocaust. It escapes this eventuality by virtue of the unspoken, yet entirely present, implications of America's historical alliance with the Jewish State--implications which arguably play a by no means minor role in America's current position in world affairs.



Another example of this sort of multi-layered juxtaposition of images and irony and meaning comes with a set of images which reveal the aspect of a victim of the Holocaust to be reminiscent to the crucifix, which heads the staff of Pope John Paul II. The former Pope is shown on a later page praying at the Western Wall in Jeruasalem, backed by the text of an address he gave at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in 2000. As documented in James Carroll's broad history of the troubled relation between the Catholic Church and the Jewish PeopleConstantine's Sword (which is quoted repeatedly in Judenhass), the Christian cross is a symbol that has long been associated with the history of European anti-Semitism. As recently as the 1990s, controversy has erupted over the presence of a large cross looming over the site of the death camp at Auschwitz Birkenau--very understandably troubling the survivors of the Holocaust and their families.



The history of art--and I lump journalism and narrative history into this term--dealing with the Holocaust is rife with stories that seem to be aimed to make us feel somehow better about what happened by showing that despite the horror of what happened, there were those who risked their lives and their livelihoods in order to save even a few individuals from eventual slaughter. That these stories are based in truth, I do not call into question. What I do call into question is the value of anything which might make anyone feel good about the Holocaust.

The best works dealing with this subject--Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem--are effective precisely because they eschew anything which would permit the viewer/reader to be absorbed in the subject matter as they would a densely plotted novel. Moreover, the real horror of the Holocaust lies in the banal repetition of everyday events by ordinary people, all in the service of the systematic destruction of an entire nation.



The barbarity of the result belies the meticulous everydayness of the method. Wholesale slaughter on the scale of the Holocaust could not have been effected without the participation or at least the tacit approval of nearly all levels of society. With Judenhass, Sim contributes to this body of work by illustrating not only the intellectual tradition of contempt for Jews, but also by the merciless repetition of images depicting the practical implications of such an enterprise.

Dave Sim is not without his idiosyncrasies or mad ideas, but he has performed an important service with the publication of Judenhass. Events in the world today show that the currents of Jew Hatred, far from being vanquished, bubble very near to the surface of world culture. As the generation which survived the Second World War ages and slowly passes on, the world will need works like Sim's as a reminder of the dangers of complacency in the face of racism.

All Star Superman #12: Superman.....secrets.

It took me kind of a while to decide how I felt about this one. It definitely wasn’t kind of the over-the-top science fiction ending that I expected. In the previous issue we saw a white-suited Superman and an army of robots fight a mad sentient sun in the depths of space. I remember thinking, "How are they going to top this one?" The answer is: they didn’t, at least not in the way I expected. What we got was a weird dream and a brawl between Luthor and Superman. Ultimately, it worked out better than anything I expected because it focused on Superman’s fears and his death.

Superman’s death, while magnificent in scope, is understated by the comic. Superman sacrifices himself and becomes one with the sun, but the actual panel of it happening is only a sliver of a page. Compare this to the double page spread of Superman flying through the sun or Superman and Lois on the moon and it looks particularly insignificant. There are three panels of Superman flying through space and then it just sort of happens. The next page is Lois and Jimmy in a Park one year later, and his death isn’t allowed to sink in at all. There’s no resolution to it until the page after with Superman in the heart of the Sun. I think it’s pretty clear that Superman isn’t coming back that and Lois is really just wishing.

As Brandon pointed out in his review the whole finale isn’t beautiful at all. The tears and the blood look disgusting. There’s smoke everywhere and Quitely makes Superman’s final actions on Earth claustrophobic. Quietly’s art coupled with the layout gives his death a jarring effect. It makes Superman’s final act feel more like a real death. It just sort of happens and it takes a while for it to sink in. When it’s all said and done it’s not it’s not the actual death that we remember, but an amalgam of memories and feelings from their life.

His death is preceded by a dream that outlines his fears and hopes for humanity. At the end of issue 11, Superman is technically already dead. Issue 12 starts with him in the land of radio-consciousness. This is interpreted by Superman as an exploding Krypton where he is Kal-el son of Joe-el. Kal-el is completely oblivious to his current situation and it’s his father that tells him he’s actually dead. Through some strange protests by Kal-el at the end of this sequence it ends up feeling more like a vision than an actual occurrence, and it becomes more of a peak into Superman’s unconscious. He is like a father figure to the world, but struggles with what it means to be a father. The issue implies that one day humans will become super-men just like the Kryptonians, and the exploding Krypton embodies Superman’s fear for the present and future of Earth. In these pages he’s working to save Krypton and worries about losing the people he’s fighting to save. He struggles with the idea of not being able to save everyone, which goes back to issue 6 when he cries out at not being able to save Jonathan Kent from a heart attack.

His ultimate dream is not that the world will be OK without him but that humans will one day ascend to his level. Not the level of super-powers but more like his level of awareness, which Lex seems to attain for a moment when he loses his 24-hour superpowers. His final image and hope is a populist one. He's in the center of the Sun working like in a factory. He wants everyone to be O.K. and to ascend as a race, but his final actions are elitist By leaving the hope for humanity solely in the hands of Professor Quintum puts his trust in science and technology. It's a hopeful, but strange vision for the future. Professor Quintum and his P.R.O.J.E.C.T. team continue to invent new technologies continuing our racial advancement, while Jimmy and Lois remain on Earth and figure out how to deal with it all. A challenge for human ingenuity, indeed.

Mini Marvels: Rock, Paper, Scissor By Chris Giarruso

For a few years now in the back of Marvel comics we've been getting short, one-page cartoon strips called "Mini Marvels" that parallel what's going on in the Marvel universe, or just have these shrunken Marvel heroes going on silly little adventures. The digest trade of Rock, Paper, Scissor is getting a second printing available this Wednesday, and for ten bucks it's worth getting.


Even the cover of the first printing has a few gags, like Daredevil running backwards (cause he's blind, duh) and don't even get me started on the fact that each hero's hand is in a rock, paper, or scissor shape. I've gone CRAZY trying to figure out if it's just for fun or if it's implying who could beat who.


Some of the stories are completely brand new and others are continuity based. Unlike Tiny Titans it's less obvious what age the Mini Marvels are because they don't do child like things, but are simply immature people. The comic feels really pure to me in a way that something like Peanuts does, where the humor doesn't rely on fart jokes (not that fart jokes aren't hilarious) but gags and pranks, silly jokes for nerds like me who have been reading Marvel comics since they were five. It's also printed in "digest" format, which really means "manga size" so more kids will buy it, but I think it's awesome that way because kids like little shit for some reason. Like, you give them a toy car that's WAY smaller than a hot wheels and they are all over it.


Chris Giarruso's website gives you the sense that he really cares about these characters (especially Hawkeye, for some reason) and his site has a lot more on it than Marvel heroes and villains. The sketchbook area has a ton of crayon drawings of DC, Image, and Dark Horse characters. It also has a lot of characters he's created in comics you can purchase on the site. Giarruso does a really good job of giving you the characters you know, in his own way, without taking away from the personalities that we are familiar with. He also randomly throws in real moments, but not the sad kind, just the real kind.

Alex Ross: Political Muckraker

This Alex Ross painted Obama shirt is pretty great and an interesting addition to Ross' non-superhero, political work because this one's not cynical or satirical but a genuine expression of excitement and support. At the same time, there's something a little funny and over-the-top about Obama as a superhero that it's still Ross having some fun with his craft and the idolization of Obama, so, it shares a little bit of the knowing fun as these other two political images.

This image has gotten a second life as a T-shirt you can find at a lot of comic book stores, but in its original presentation, as the cover of the Village Voice's "Queer Issue", it's political mockery takes on a context beyond just being a funny and cruel image of our President and Vice President; "graphic art as political protest" and all that good stuff. What totally sells the image is that it's so well-rendered and like, conventionally beautiful. It isn't a tossed-off offensive image, Ross put some time and labor into this and that's why it's good. One gets the sense that someone as technically talented as Ross really enjoys having an ability to render such absurd images as this so perfectly.

This image is the least effective but the most clear in its message and again, kind of invokes turn of the century era political cartooning in that it's just a immediate and telling image. Ross has some fun with the posing and Bush's face, finding a weird balance between our President's likeness and stature and throwing in some small percentage of Bela Lugosi physicality in there too.

***I think Ross' work is at its most effective when it's a little absurd and out-there, like the political images above. When he's painting something a little silly or just strange, it adds a tension between his hyper photo-realism and the raw, strangeness of the image. This painting of Krypto the Super Dog is from the new issue of Superman that comes out this week and it's one of the better Ross images in a long time.

His work doing the covers of the "Batman RIP" story arc have been annoying because the story is about breaking-down and fucking with the image of Batman and Ross is still painting him as glorious and muscular and bounding through the air. One gets the sense that DC just wanted to spruce up Morrison's weird story with something more aesthetically pleasing, especially since it's not the Batman suit he's wearing in the arc or even in Batman for a while now. Like Ross just sent over some years or decade-old paintings of Batman and DC stuck them on the covers.

Marvels has always been preferable to Kingdom Come not only because it's a better read but because it makes no sense to paint these beautifully wrought images of the aged, on-their-way out heroes, while it makes perfect sense to paint heroes in that style for Marvels because it's from the perspective of a "regular" person, who would indeed, see these heroes as statuesque. There's also this sense of Ross being something of a total hired gun, which is a little unappealing. From those nonsensical "Batman RIP" covers to making Marvels in 1994 and then going over to DC and doing a very similar book the next year, his work and passion seem a little suspect. So, it's additionally cool when some humor and fun slip into his art, like in those political paintings or in the less conventional paintings, like Krypto or this next image of Plastic Man.

See, what you get in this Plastic Man image is a kind of mix of Ross-ian photo-realism and some sense of imagination or energy. Most of Ross' stuff clearly looks like it was painted from photos and poses; it's flat and has no energy, even if it's painted as realistically as possible. On this Plastic Man image, Ross had to use a little bit of imagination or something because there's no dudes out there with long ass rubbery arms.

This is preferable to an image like this one of Shazam, which is self-serious and looks way too much like David Puddy from Seinfeld...

"high five...

Comics Adaptations That Never Happened: Freak Brothers & The Incal

The decision to animate Gilbert Shelton's Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers in stop-motion is perfect. Shelton's art on Freak Brothers is lots of hatching and line and obsessive detail of the cruddy details of the real-world and even super-expensive animation wouldn't be able to replicate it and casting a movie with real-life actors would be fun and maybe even successful, it'd end up having little to do with the original comic. Stop-motion, besides just almost always being awesome, fits the other-wordly quality of the comic and allows for it to be comic-booky but realistic too. Check out this still and you'll see all the water-damage, trash on the floor, paint-peeling reality that could've been.

If you look in the background, you'll see a person--I think it's Shelton actually--peeking through the door at 3-D versions of his creations and in the teaser clip above, there's some really weird like meta stuff, like the guy peaking up from under the road as Fat Freddy's Cat looks around, and the end...who knows if the plot is some weird our reality/their reality claymation head-trip (let's hope it is) but it says "Copyright 2006" and although awesome animation like this probably takes forever, maybe this project hasn't been dead-ed, but there's not really any info on it since this initial teaser.

The animated Incal movie on the other hand, is undoubtedly forever incomplete and it's a total bummer because it looks like a pretty close to perfect transfer from comic page to animation cels. It's surprising how little information there is on this project--even like, what exact year this promo/teaser comes from--and what, how, and why it never got finished.

Extra sad because so many small details that often get lost in the shuffle towards converting something into a movie seem to still be there. They maintained the near-faded color-scheme of the comics, the animation's really fluid and rubbery which is a good translation of Moebius' art to animation, and the music, this chugging trance of 808 snaps, it's perfect. The animation style fits too in part because it approximate the Moebius style on Incale well enough but also because in the late 80s, Moebius' work got increasingly clean and pure and often looked like stills from lost or never-were fantasy films, especially his Magic Crystal stuff and some of Silver Surfer: Parable.

Somedays You Just Can't Get Rid of a Bomb

Alright, so for better or worse, I am this person that spends way too much time on the internet. And not just like most of the kids do these days, on MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, etc, but down in the dregs of sites like the aforementioned Space Ghetto, where you can find, among a fair amount of useful and entertaining images and facts, things that have no business being brought up on this blog, or really anywhere else. Somewhere in the middle of this...is Batman.

I was trying to keep away from silly panels taken out of context, where oh my god, Batman and Robin totally look so gay or oh man, did you see that one where Batman calls Robin a retard? How GRITTY. How RAW. But come on. Boners.

And just so I don't have to feel so alone in my fondness for totally retarded goon fodder, I came across this in awesome comics dude Vasilis Lolos' blog:

Glamourpuss #3

Glamourpuss' thesis--yeah, this comic really does have a thesis--is a discussion of the artificiality of fashion magazines and their celebration of exclusivity and consumption transferred onto the insular, hard work of classic comics illustrators, thereby highlighting the good, old fashioned craftsmanship and genius of those guys in contrast to the less savory aesthetics at work in say, Vogue. As suggested before, anybody who reads Glamourpuss and wants to still dismiss Dave Sim as simply "misogynist" doesn't really get it.

The previous issue #2, made a really complicated read because of the way the extended, depressed rants of glamourpuss weirdly matched-up with Sim's history of photo-realism, but in #3, the text is more direct and immediate and there's not as much information as much as half-committed speculation that Milt Caniff shook Alex Raymond's hand too-hard on purpose because Raymond ripped off his shit. Sim wisely teases the reader by explaining the photo and breaking it down into smaller parts before he cites his evidence of Raymond's art-jacking but it doesn't go much beyond this creepy, fan-boy speculation which, when juxtaposed with poor fashion parodies, makes for an undercooked read.

Issues #1 and #2 functioned on multiple levels of meaning and worked through their contrast and counterpoint. The covers of both issues were full of "The Onion" by way of "The National Review" fake headlines, but the jokes on the inside were darker as well as more sympathetic. If you came to the issues looking to laugh at fashion and the dumb women obsessed with it, you'd close the book by page two, sorely disappointed. Issue #2's inside cover rant on the fundamental health issues of a certain kind of birth control and the problems glamourpuss suffers in therapy were made palpable, in a satirical but humane parody of a Cosmopolitan style article on depression ( A minor problem before, this issue's overall crappiness highlights Sim's moronic inability or disinterest in differentiating high-end fashion magazines from more conventional women's magazines like Cosmo or Allure).

For issue #3 though, Sim's pretty much contextualized old comics and photo-realism and so, he gets all fan boy on us instead and for whatever reason, falls totally on the side of mockery and moral outrage when it comes to the fashion stuff. The cover and the inside don't contrast or conflict; exactly what's advertised on the exterior's found inside and it's mainly ugly and not even that informative.

I Don't Need The Movie, Give Me The Game.

After the success of Lego Star Wars, the dudes at Traveller's Tales were given the oppurtunity to make Lego Batman which comes out Sept. 23rd for almost every currently available console. The Lego Star Wars game was something I bought randomly and became obsessed with. On it's surface, it's a simple platformer with an easy combat system that anyone can pick up, but it's difficult enough for the hardcore nerd in me who needs to collect every last thing. The more I played, I realized that I could be any character from any Star Wars movie, from Luke to JarJar, each person (or Droid or Wookie) has it's own special action that you need to get 100% completion. You can earn points to buy more characters and bonuses, and get to go through every moment of the movies.

The Lego Batman website alone is great to play around and see the different characters, especially Mr. Freeze and Clayface. A large amount of Batman's Rogue's Gallery is sure to make it into this game, and with Killer Moth featured on the site, I can't imagine who else they're going to bring in.


AND McDonald's even has Lego Batman Happy Meal Toys!


And if you're too scared of awesome all-ages stuff and need to look tough, Batman: Arkham Asylum is scheduled for sometime in 2009 and will be coming out for X-Box 360 and PS3. Most licensed games are so awful now it's not even worth getting excited about any of them, but holy shit, Killer Croc???


With Marvel putting out games like Spider-Man 2 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance, for DC to have been allowing the Batman Begins tie-in game, and the sad, terrible one we won't talk about, it's good to see two games I actually want to play. Lego Batman is going to be something I obsess over for the rest of the year, and Batman: Arkham Asylum will be the reason I buy an X-Box. I mean, that Killer Croc looks awesome.

and The Joker???


That's all I need, I'm sold.

Dave Sim...

...is pretty hard to like. His series Glamourpuss is brilliant and this totally rarified weird thing. Godard-ian in how it approaches popular media, Glamourpuss uses fashion design and culture as a jumping-off point for an extended rant about the history of comics illustration, complete with impressive replicas of the art, and a half-funny, half-pathetically out-of-date parody of mid-high-end fashion magazines.

But...he's also a dumbass. Not because of the endless debates about misogyny and women and blah, blah blah,--we shouldn't allow only left-leaning artists to have silly views--but because his arrogance on the topic offend the reader more than the views themselves.

Undoubtedly, Glamourpuss is in part, a response and or further dealing with his past discussions of men's superiority--although what most of them read like, is someone who is annoyed by postmodern Feminism and thinks it has more weight in our culture than it does--because it's at least in theory, a very sympathetic satire on how women are exploited and messed-around with due to and because of fashion, fashion magazines, and the super-capitalism that the magazines support. It's very unsophisticated, it's the kind of "concern" for women that "sensitive" guys in high school who haven't gotten laid yet have for women as a gender, but dude is trying!

And so, I open issue #3 and start reading and very quickly get to this: "And if glamourpuss walks, her alimony cheques are going with her and this funnybook is toast. Word--as glamourpuss' Obama supporter friends put it." It's not that it's an Obama joke there, but that a) It's hopelessly out of date with contemporary slang and b) it's getting kinda racist. Somehow, it's weirder and sadder to read it because of the out-of-date thing, which makes his satire seem pathetic. Sure, somewhere out there, some liberals feel real hip and cool for voting for a black guy and maybe, maybe they affect some pathetically out-of-date (if ever existent) sense of negritude when talking about Obama, but most people don't.

The racism of the joke, like Sim's misogyny, comes out of some weirdly out-of-date sense of protecting those unlike him. The joke there is that white people who say "word" are silly and are racist for co-opting "black" slang (and therefore, his joke is on the side of black people), which would be right if Sim's sense of whiteness and blackness wasn't so dumb and unmoving. It's sad the same way the reference to "Access Hollywood" on the cover or David and Victoria Beckham on a page inside are...as some old, creepy dude referencing them because it's the extent of his interaction with current pop culture. The same thing is said for "word" because like most dudes in their fifties, especially a fucking Canadian, his interaction with black culture probably like, begins and ends at In Living Colour or something.

I won't not read the book and I'm not even angry or offended--as I said, liberals whose art I like get to say dumb stuff all the time--but it's a little pathetic and that just makes me sort of uncomfortable. Opening Glamourpuss or old issues of Cerebus, one just has to remember they're re-entering the world of Dave Sim and that's why we read comics, especially creator-driven comics, to be immersed in a comic book creators' idiosyncracies.

Belated B-Day Wishes to Joe Kubert

Joe Kubert turned 82 yesterday, we forgot. Happy Birthday, Joe!

***Here's a Madman pin-up that doesn't seem to already be on the internet. Madman hatched from an egg with this weird God-like Tor with an Amish beard character hovering over-top? Awesome and sort of what Mike Allred's series is all about.


***One aspect of Kubert's work that seems to be forever overshadowed by his ridiculously consistent and brilliant illustration, is his writing. One foot's firmly planted in the over-excited language of old comics, but Kubert's writing has a hard-edged poetry to it too, like the writing of old crime and pulp novels, from which of course, a lot of the "comics" style of writing came from in the first place. He hits a sentence or two in every book that's perfectly written and his narration especially, always has an odd, complicated interaction with his images. He's a great, ego-less storyteller, so often, just by the art, exactly what's going on is really clear and as a result, his narration adds a strange, emotional level to what's going on, it's more than informative and it's more than internal dialogue too. Here's a pretty hilarious caricature of Kubert:


***
Kubert's writing often has a resigned inevitability to it and his art's fairly realistic, but he has a brilliant imagination, best exemplified in the weirdo creatures and monster he creates. Similar to the stuff I was blabbing about above--the tension between the words and the image--the creatures seem even more alive and surreal because Kubert's writing generally go for realism.

All-Star Superman #12

All-Star Superman #12 is a fascinating contrast to "Batman RIP" and Final Crisis, the two other Morrison series going on, because both of those stories totally lost their footing last issue and even at their best, you came out of them thinking, "I appreciate what he's doing" while All-Star Superman bypasses intellectualizing and just feels perfect.

As expected, everything sort of comes together in the final issue of All-Star Superman, but it's not in a back-story/continuity obsessed way nor is it a kind of stand-alone, super satisfying way either. The whole issue's like the rest of the series--and like the best Morrison writing--a wobbly, non-narrative, but forward moving nonetheless, trip through lots of ideas both heady and silly, with the right amount of sincerity and emotion, and a scene or two that totally understands the mythology and iconography that make comics goofy kids stuff and the shit that makes grown-ass men like myself tear-up.

The opening scene, a dream-but-not-dream sequence between Superman and his father, ends with Superman getting a choice between occupying the place "individual awareness builds for itself", either heaven ("thought-palaces") or hell, or "to turn and face down evil one last time." The Morrison-ian touch there is that we decide upon death, whether to occupy heaven or hell, and that returning to Earth to live a little while longer, isn't any kind or relief or pardon, but Superman takes it anyway because he's that dude.

The entire series has been about death and Superman dying but it's been a given since issue one, sucking out the silly "we're killing a hero" crap companies do to get more readers and just sort of moving ever closer to that inevitability. The fact that it was announced in issue #1 and that it was known the series had twelve issues, made the death of Superman a reality, but a reality like the weird/sad understanding that your parents or pet will die. You know it's coming and you have some sense of when, but it's still pretty heavy.

It's Morrison bringing palpable mortality to comic books. He did the same thing in issue #1 of Final Crisis when he killed-off Martian Manhunter like it was nothing, joked about it ("let's pray for a resurrection" said Superman), and totally didn't dwell on it all; it was like a real death, quick and unexpected and meaningless. Here, it's less cynical--I assume because Morrison cares a little more about this series--but the effect is the same.

Quitely's art too, seems concerned with the flesh, as Superman and Luthor look particularly lumpy in this issue. He's been slowly making them skinnier and the entire look of the series, while still relatively bright and rotund, is getting more lines and wrinkles but here, it's almost too much. Too much in the sense that this final issue isn't as fun to look at, but that's a good thing.

It's telling that some of the most well-wrought imagery, that which doesn't have this almost Leinil Yu-esque line scratchiness to it, is of destruction--a crumbling Krypton space-station, debris on the floor of the Daily Planet, and the brilliant page where Lex is struck by a car--which makes sense in a comic that ultimately, finds significance and beauty in things coming apart and not working out perfectly. Superman defeats Luthor, but you almost feel fucked up about it. Luthor's no longer any kind of threat and he pathetically doesn't realize it, and Quitely illustrates each glob of blood that flies off his face from Superman's punches as ugly as possible. Even the final Superman/Lois embrace is a little off because Superman's not wearing his cape, Superman's cells are slowly deteriorating, and Lois is crying (the tears too are ugly, like Luthor's blood). Of course, this all makes it more affecting.

Goon City, Pixel Art Project

Goon City is a pixel art project started by Ryan Allen. The site is basically Google maps if anyone could design regions. The best part about it is it's really fun to just scan all the different areas. There is SO much to be explored. Just like Google Maps, you can scan and zoom but instead of satellite photos or road maps, you see someone's great idea. The project is genius, in part, because the concept essentially is not far from how land is actually developed (without zoning laws of course!). Just marinate on that for a minute...how fucked up is that people can actually "own" land? Alternatively, how GREAT is it that people (even you!) can own and develop land, making it a personal area of their own? 

Goon City ultimately looks like an aesthetically shittier but more interesting version of the pixel art cityscapes done by Eboy. The problem with the Eboy cityscapes is that they use too many similar buildings and instead of making cities exactly accurate, they just makes them boring or use the buildings to pimp out shit like Peecol, the line of Eboy figurines for kidrobot. Also, let's not forget that they are doing this based on actual cities, which probably have some incredible old hand-drawn map like this one already: 

The DIFFERENCE: Eboy is a group of deutsche-men on some real derivative shit and ...THIS IS FOR THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE.

HERE ARE SOME FUN ONES:

Dunder Mifflin from The Office


Saarlac Pit from Star Wars


A scene from Mars Attacks


A scene from the movie Heat


The Truman Show in action


Gotham Police Department


Caveman with a boner, or something?


Replication of a horse picture that was on Space Ghetto a couple of days ago (with Mega Man in the foreground)

Powerful Panels: Tomb of Dracula #2 by Gene Colan

About the only constant in Tomb of Dracula is Gene Colan's artwork. Writers came and went--especially early on--but he's there from #1's clever re-telling and updating of the Dracula story to those late issues when for some reason, Dracula and the Silver Surfer are hanging out. Like so many of the post-Kirby/Ditko 60s and 70s mainstream artists, a superficial look at the art leads to the assumption that it was all very similar. This wasn't helped by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein's immediate appropriation of comics art, turning it into kitsch before it ever really go to breathe, but the real excitement of the era's art lies in the details; subtle differentiations between artists, what they did to make an end-run around the brutal, bottom line demands of comics. Colan's work stands out for being a little darker, with thicker lines, more black and a penchant for Ditko-esque, quasi-psychedelic imagery to punctuate a scene of action. This is what made him ideal for both Howard the Duck and Tomb of Dracula.

Of course, in a lot of ways, the two series weren't that different. There's a over-the-top edge to Tomb as the series navigates being really fascinating and scary and a little goofy and over-the-top too. And the series was smart to not shy away from that absurd stuff because putting Dracula at the center of the comic basically sucks him of all his mystique and turns him into a melodramatic, old-as shit weirdo.

On the the final page of issue #2, in the panels building up to the issue's end, Dracula sees dawn approaching and makes his way back to his coffin. Main character Frank Drake though, isn't even concerned with Dracula because he just had to kill Jeanie, his girlfriend who got bit at the end of issue #1. There are other moments like this that cuts Dracula down to size or like, temporarily demand him irrelevant to the narrative. In the first issue, Drake thwacks Drac in the head with a silver make-up compact and we get a pretty hilarious close-up of Dracula angrily holding his temple.

Here, Dracula has a giant, villain-like speech and no one cares: "Know this Frank Drake--you've won but a battle...in the final analysis, the game is mine--as it always has been--will always be--Mine! Forever mine!". I won't get snarky and make fun of comic book melodrama, but what is strange there is how Dracula has to tell him that "in the final analysis", Drake will lose. It's weird and obsessive and sort of confounds his own threats. It's like how in the song "My Way", Sinatra talks about how "the record" will "show that [he] did it [his] way". The record?! This rugged individualist guy is going to defer to "the record"?

But again, this whole scene isn't about Dracula, it's about Frank Drake, whose whole life just got fucked the fuck up. He stabs his girlfriend and then watches her melt from the very dawn light that Dracula split to avoid. Colan, in the first of the three panels directly above, shows her melting by little dashes of ink, like particles of life spreading and dissipating. Some real E.C Comics style stuff, especially her swirling word balloon, but she's not screaming in terror, even in these final moments, she tries to comfort Frank, telling him, "It's better this way...I don't hurt anymore...". The next panel goes wide and we see Jeanie as a disgusting mess on the floor. Drake sobs and his best friend--and the guy Drake stole Jeanie from--Clifton Graves holds tight to a curtain, in his own way equally shocked. There's nothing really "comic book" about this frame, it's just real. It's clear something very horrible happened, but their posing is awkward and realistic and not melodramatic. The narration reads like the action slug in a screenplay, succinctly and vaguely poetically describing exactly what we see in the frame--"Drake sinks to his knees..."--and then adding a note about "understand[ing] the full meaning of futility..."; for that frame at least, it's some black and white, sad-bastard Scandanavian movie contemplating "the full meaning of futility".

And then the comic does something very odd. For the final panel of the issue, it goes to an exterior shot of Big Ben and a horse statue with rays of sun peaking out, as the narrator pontificates on "revenge". The image and the narration have no obvious connection and it has little to no relationship to the previous panels either. Showing Big Ben and the statue is not working on some symbolic level and so, there's no direct correlation between what's happened and where the comic book leaves you. It's almost like the horrible scene we just experienced was too much and the comic had to leave the room with two grief-stricken guys and a melted girlfriend in it and get some air.

By the way, the Gene Colan Tribute book comes out tomorrow and although it's $9.99, it's probably worth picking up. If not for the bunch of Colan-illustrated stories and artist reminisces, for the fact that the money made on the book will go towards Gene Colan's medical bills. All roads lead back to Robert Kirkman's silly "vlog" manifesto thingy as of late, but this book's a pretty good example of a big evil comic book company helping out one of their aging slaves...