Looking Out For The Little Guy: I KEEE YOU!!

Riding Baltimore's public transportation, I hear all kinds of things. Arguments between families, people crying on the way to a funeral and I even overheard a couple talking about if they were going to get an abortion or not. Baltimore comic, vinyl toy, porn and everything-that-is-great store Atomic Books published I KEEE YOU!!, a collection of "over heards". Each strip is drawn by a different artist, most of which are from the city itself.

It's hard to explain the embarrassment of hearing something you shouldn't have, or the excitement of something so weird and gnarly you laugh out loud in front of the person. These stories may as well have been told to you by a friend, some of which cross over into legendary status. Here's a selection of the funniest:

Peter Laird's Palblog

Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in a lot of ways defines my childhood, just not the "Eastman and Laird" part. Now as an adult, finding Peter Laird's blog Palblog is forcing me to look back at why I liked the Turtles, and what defined them to me. I read the Archie comics not the original series, watched the cartoons and movies, and bought all the dumb stuff, particularly the toys.


Going to a toy store and grabbing a figure you hadn't seen before meant more than that one single new toy, it meant ten new toys. Flipping over the packaging always meant new mutants and Shred-Heads to be discovered, sometimes from the comic series but sometimes something created just for the toy line. Even before seeing the toys in person, I would imagine them while I played and even have big build up scenarios leading up to their arrival, saving my allowance just waiting for Triceraton to terrorize my room.


Small details like the bugs crawling all over the figure "Scumbug" changed the way that I drew and the way I played. Growing older I wanted to see the more "adult" version of these characters, and began collecting the original TMNT series comics but actually found them to be dull. The universe portrayed in the Archie comics seemed full. There was an entire world of other monsters who weren't so monstrous, and not every story revolved around the Turtles. The world the figures lived in still seemed more interesting to me than the city the Eastman and Laird Turtles fought in.

Peter Laird's Palblog makes me think he also got more into the world of the Archie mutants more than what he actually started. The world of the Turtles grew and grew, so he had to populate it. Seeing his sketches for toys that were released adds almost a metaphysical feeling to the figures you owned, filling you with a non-ironic kind of nostalgia that sends you onto eBay willing to spend any amount for a Panda Kahn figure.


The little boy in me sees the figures that weren't produced and can only think of what I would've done if I had them as a child. It's almost unfair some of these will never see the light of day, drawn with notes on how they'd work and more often than not pictures of the accessories.


Laird is open and it seems like one day all of his sketch books will be documented on his site, from TMNT anatomy studies to pictures of Luke and Chewbacca fighting storm troopers. His honesty about his career is stunning in an industry where artists hide the fact they once illustrated Barbie picture books, talking about how much he was paid for newspaper illustrations and how much control he actually had over the Turtles.

The only thing I can compare Palblog to is finding an old sketch book from childhood and discovering all of your super hero drawings. The imagination of who you were when you were 7 is something that once lost can't be regained, but Laird's blog brings that feeling back. It puts me into my mother's back yard digging holes and sitting on the basement steps thinking of new animals to become mutants, it simply gives you glimpses of a world you lost.

Designer, Graffer, Comics Nerd, CEY ADAMS

The new issue of Wax Poetics features, among other great things, an interview with graphic designer Cey Adams. Adams is best known as an early graffiti writer, in-house designer for DEF JAM records during the 80s, and brains behind plenty of iconic hip-hop album covers (Ready to Die, Fear of a Black Planet) and could've been one of many dudes to make a book that bigs himself up exclusively, but instead he's gone ahead and made a crazy compendium/history of rap inspired design called DEFinition:The Art & Design of Hip-Hop.

Among the many things Adams and interviewer Michael A. Gonzales (himself something of a legend, check him out at Riffs & Revolutions) get into is illustration and hip-hop and the connection to comics. Adams was responsible for hiring the great Bill Sienkiewicz to paint the cover of EPMD's Business as Usual. A bunch of years later, Sienkiewicz would do the cover of RZA's Bobby Digital album as well- a great mix of Sienkiewicz's hyper-real style of illustration meeting up with those explosive 70s blaxploitation movie painted posters.




Adams also discusses the hiring of children's book illustrator Ed Renfro to do the art for the Beastie Boys' Hello Nasty, which as far I can tell, never came to fruition beyond this great T-shirt design:


Another fascinating aspect of the article is Adams discussing the cover art of Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet and how the idea, after it was conceptualized by Chuck D, they decided to find "an illustrator that really unders[tood] how the solar system works" and they got B.E Johnson who had worked for NASA! One of the coolest parts of Adams' book is the presentation of Johnson's original painting without any graphics on it, just this Public Enemy logo on the moon and then earth and nebulas and awesome space shit floating around behind it:

ROBIN IN THE RYE or Caulfield the Boy Wonder

This gem has been popping up around a few of my time-absorbing internet haunts lately, so maybe it's old news to some of you. But for those interested in the source, this is the creation of Andrew Lorenzi. Inspired by comic parodies from the likes of R. Sikoryak, it's a pretty righteous way to revamp an old classic.



Comic nerds spend so much time arguing over what real people would best portray superheros, so it's pretty cool to see the opinions turn to what superheros would best portray other fictional characters from far across the spectrum of literature.

Being this art history nerd, I'm just waiting for someone to redo "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey" as "The Execution of Lady Jean Grey." Eh?

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Happy New Years from Kevin Eastman and the Comics4Serious gang! We'll have some real content soon!

Happy Holidays!

We're going to be taking off a little bit of time, but don't worry, we'll be back on the 1st of January. We hope all of you have a great holiday, and thank you so much for reading our blog. See you in the New Year!

Umbrella Academy: DALLAS #2

Issue #2 begins with a scene that seems to reference Hemingway's "The Killers"--or maybe Don Siegel's film The Killers or maybe Siodmak's film, or maybe both or all three--as two fake-friendly and therefore, all the fucking scarier hit man types needle a waitress and diner owner. There's probably some Edward Hopper's "Night Hawks" in there too, and the torture that follows is some Reservoir Dogs type shit (complete with Godard's thin suits that John Woo took that Tarantino then took), but it's more a big sloppy mess of references and ideas turned inside out and around one another than some in-joke clever pastiche that means nothing.

Then again, it doesn't exactly mean something either, it's atmosphere and context and slowly moving towards the same nebulous pre-hippie, late 50s/early 60s sense that issue #1 of "Dallas" touched upon with J.F.K and bowling alley blues and milkmen and all the rest. Unlike the first volume/story arc/mini-series of Umbrella, "Apocalypse Suite" which hit the ground running, "Dallas" is a slow burn that's moving towards some odd cohesion.

More than anything else, I'm reminded of DC's Final Crisis which before it stopped making any sense in issue #3, was a mess of scenes, ideas, and mini-events that only sort of connected but filled you with a weird, palpable dread. That series became so disappointing because I felt like I was in good hands with Morrison and that'd it all work out or end up a little clearer or at least be fun and it you know, didn't. "Dallas" though, I'm a little more confident in and each issue's filled with enough mini-moments and weird ideas that the fact that it's kind of playing the comic-book bullshit game by teasing you issue-to-issue becomes negligible.

At the same time, the disjointed, not-totally-satisfying feeling of "Dallas" makes a lot of sense because it's about all of them not being together and not getting along. The series was set-up as a kind of "The Uncanny Royal Tenenbaums" or something, with the series looking back to the victories as children, their failures now, and their re-finding their glory, but then, they all split up, and this is like the failure after the failure after the re-found glory. Each character's on their own and they're all kind of devastated, mad at one another, and mad at themselves. When you go from Number Five in an ugly ass tenement buiilding drinking liquor and watching a monkey dressed-up as Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday" to Seance drunk in a Hawaiian shirt in front of Pogo's grave at like midnight, you're not exactly reading for a story and where it's going hardly matters, you just sort of viscerally feel it.

And there is this comic book-y feeling of dread and whatsgonnahappennext??!! with the hit men, who are looking for Number Five--just like the rest of the Umbrella Academy or at least, the ones that care to look. They're funny and creepy, oversized Japanese Vinyl Toy heads atop the body of Mr. Blonde. I promise I'll stop with the old movie references but their companionship takes on a like misanthropic romantic aspect--like the hit men in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia--by the end when they hug one another in a graveyard after one hands the other a box of Girl Scout cookie thin mints. These guys are especially evil because we haven't really seen a true, at least for now unexplained evil in Umbrella. We've seen giant, city-crushing monuments and we've seen The White Violin, a member of the Academy, her "evil" caused by years of family resentment, but there's not been a conventional villain(s) bent on doing bad.

When talking about really good comics, I end up celebrating the story and writing more because it's kinda easier and there's more to open-up and discuss, but Gabriel Ba's art really needs to be discussed here. The first Final Crisis connection I made, outside of the pacing, was the way that like J.G Jones' stuff on that series, Ba (along with colorist Dave Stewart) do this thing of giving each part of the story--or each character's scenes--it's own color scheme and sense of shading and angle. It's something multi-character movies like Magnolia or Traffic do too, but there's a sense of colors bleeding into one another or abruptly contrasting here that works much more effectively. And Ba's work, is just the right amount of lines or details to be both cartoony and fun and devastating and ugly when it needs to be (Spaceboy's bloated laziness, the hacked-off arms and legs of the diner owner).

When Ba does "wide" shots, he just dashes off an oblong circle for a head and draws a stretched-out "W" for legs, but will draw each and every architectural detail of a building or the knicks and dashes of use and wear on a bedpost or windowsill. Last issue's brilliant eight-page fight scene was uh, brilliant, but the thing that really got me about it was the glow around the parking lot lights. They were colored, off-center circles and nothing more (the candle flickers at the end of this issue are really similar) but it was the perfect amount of detail and in a way, gave off this odd, eerie feeling that was the perfect, subliminal preamble for the violence about to occur. And that "something's about to happen" is what "Dallas" seems to be about, from the slowly moving narrative, to the mystery hit men--and the fact that it's called "Dallas" and had JFK in it, some kind of assassination's going to occur, right?--you keep reading for the big story, but you also read for the little, sad, ugly details of the Umbrella Academy's dysfunction.

There's also this really cool Ross Campbell drawing of "The Rumor" in the back:

Maddie Blaustein - Never Forget

Recently some friends and I have gotten back into the game Pokemon, and while doing "research" on the characters, we found out that the voice of the pokemon Meowth also happened to have written comics. Maddie Blaustein wrote for Marvel and DC, working on some of the Milestone titles, including Static and Hardware.

One of the most interesting things about Blaustein though, is that she is a transsexual. Traveling with the Tranny Road Show, a comedy troupe, she pushed gender issues. She's also famous for being the voice of the Gollum who attempted to put his name in the hat for presidency.

Often she was credited under her former name, Adam Blaustein, or her nickname, Addie Blaustein. She died in her sleep on December, 11th of this year. Maddie Blaustein did the voices in all of the Pokemon movies up until 8.

She'll be remembered for her work in cartoons, and her sense of humor, this posted on her Myspace.com page:
Meowth needs Therapy

ANYWHERE BUT HERE by Tori Miki

I found this tucked away on the bottom shelf of a bookcase at Foundation's Edge in Raleigh a while back, and as soon as I cracked it open in the store I was laughing out loud at every single page. It's all sort of like, if you get it, you get it, but if you don't I can't really explain to you why it's the greatest thing on earth.











All the strips in this book appeared in the Japanese TV guide/"information magazine" (so it says in the book's introduction, not totally sure all that entails) TV Bros dating back to 1988.

Where My Money Went - Dec. 17th

Every Wednesday, I push the limits of my budget for my comic addiction. This is where my money went this week:


I know Christmas comics are supposed to be lame but whatever, I'm a sucker. The Frank Quitely cover is great, I love sappy shit like this. The first story alone makes the book worth it, a story about Santa's origin, explaining he's the last son from an ice planet. His parents shot him into space on a path to Earth so he could keep their race alive. That's cool, right guys?



I know we just had our Larry Marder interview but we have to talk about the new Beanworld: "Every Cutie Deserves A Toy." I'm basically over the color shit because it just means that now I know that there are boys and girls, and the only girl isn't Professor Garbanzo! I had no idea! The new Beanworld trade comes out in February, so finally I can get people into Beanworld without hunting down the trades that are impossible to find. Larry Marder is basically a genius, he hasn't missed a beat since the last TOTB book, it's incredible how real it all feels to me and how much I understand from all the Bean Dudes. Best comic ever?


I waste (and I do mean waste) a lot of money on Marvel Comics. However, I think DC characters are never enough, even when the writing is great the characters never feel developed enough. But I LOVE Marvel, the characters sometimes act like people you know and actually feel like personalities. I buy so many Marvel books because I hope it'll be interesting, and then I get shit like this. $3.99 for extended versions of the previews I got at the end of Dark Reign. I never feel ripped off or am this person who feels cheated but Marvel is sorta fucking with me.


Madman #12 separates Joe and It-Girl, and has more weirdo Mormon stuff, but ends with return of Madman's biggest villain! Allred's panel design and way of playing with motion in a single panel continues to evolve and grow, he's basically on his way to changing comics again. Madman-Joe (Madwoman? Madgirl?) is exciting, possibly leading into Frank putting together an all new super hero team, and maybe even leading a new Atomics?

Cosmic Comix's 18th Annual Year-End Sale

Despite what any survey or free weekly says, Cosmic Comix is the best comic store in Baltimore, MD. Their back issues are completely in order and easy to browse, the boxes are never tight and are all clearly labeled. It's the only store I ever see children in, and you know, dudes with girlfriends.

The entire staff is extremely helpful, greeting you at the door, and if you subscribe, like David and I do, your new comics are placed directly in your hand. Brutally honest, Cosmic Comix is the only store where an employee hasn't swayed me into buying something weird/bad. Especially Rusty, who will always give you his honest opinion about comics (without nerding out), even if it means you may not buy it.

Another great thing about the store is it's CLEAN, your fingers never look disgusting after going through a box and you don't sneeze from back issues. The wall of figures is reorganized constantly, making you rethink your priorities everytime that one Wolverine toy is moved.

Just to get down to it, Cosmic is one of the best, and one of the only stores worth going to. Here's what we all got:

Sammy:

-What If? #45: "What If The Hulk Went Berserk?" I bought this because isn't that the point? The Hulk goes berserk all the time, right? Or have I been mixing him up with someone else?

-The Thing #31 "Devil Dinosaur: The Movie." This feels much more like a What If, with The Thing fighting dinosaurs and being in a movie and all.

-Michaelangelo Christmas Special. This was actually really great, it had some awesome old turtles' pin-ups and two stories that ruled.

-Brute Force #1. I don't know how I couldn't buy this for a dollar, it feels like someone was playing a trick on me.


-Jordi Bernet Solo. I haven't bought any of the Solo issues, but this one seemed too good to pass up. It has a Batman/Poison Ivy story, and a great Jonah Hex one. The art is great and one of the non-character stories is an incredible black and white story, written by Joe Kelly.

-The Survivors: Talons of Blood. This is an over sized that I assumed I'd have to pay trade price for but Rusty gave it to me for a dollar! Race apocalypse story, incredible art by a guy named Hermann.

-Mephisto Vs. Series. This set of four has Mephisto, who is basically Marvel's devil, working his way up the totem pole stealing souls hoping to eventually land himself Silver Surfer's soul. The four issue series has him facing off against a different team each installment, the four being Fantastic Four, X-Factor, X-Men, and finally, Avengers. 3 bucks for all four!

-Fist of the North Star Part Two #1-5. Kung Fu apocalypse comics, from the old Viz Media set, each cover is just more awesome than the last.

-Hercules Prince of Power #1-4. I love Hercules and I love him even more when he's in outer space. There's nothing more that can be said about it.

-Bio-Booster Armor Guyver. My first exposure to Guyver was the American movie, but after seeing the animes as a kid, when I saw these comics I knew I needed them. More classic Viz manga.

-Batman: The Doom That Came To Gotham. This is a three issue prestige style mini series written by Mignola and drawn by this dude Tom Nixey. It has a ton of characters in it all set in an H.P. Lovecraft story. It's great to see Mignola's worlds mixed.

Karen:

-The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: Not even gonna lie, I'm this college student right in the middle of finals bullshit, so I haven't actually gotten around to reading this yet. I'd picked up the freebie preview of it though a couple weeks ago, and the art looks pretty good, if not a little too sketchy, final-undergrad-illustration-project-ish.

-Capt. Marvel Mini-Bust: Sammy's birthday present! Dude had been talking about that shit for ages.

-Super Manga Blast Vol. 1. I was like a second away from buying all nineteen of these, solely for the installments of What's Michael?, these great little vignettes that range from Michael being this normal housecat, to stories like the one in this issue where he's a professional wrestler in this animal world.


He can't do an elbow drop because cats always land on their feet! HAHAHAHAAaawwwww...

David:


Fury #1-6 by Garth Ennis and Darrick Robertson. I didn't buy this series the first day of the sale since I had never read a Nick Fury story and am not exactly a fan of Garth Ennis. Having said that, once I saw Bill Sienkiewicz's typically glorious covers, I had to pick it up.

Space Usagi #1-3. Usagi Yojimbo is one of Sammy's favorite comics and it is a truth universally acknowledged that if you take an otherwise great comic and put it in space, the result is generally superior by several orders of magnitude.

Vertigo POP!: London #3-4. I picked up the first two issues of this mini penned by Peter Milligan with illustrations by Philip Bond in another comics shop's dollar box. Milligan's Sub-Mariner: The Depths is hands down one of the best series going right now and Bond's work on some of Grant Morrison's better works, such as the recently re-issued Kill Your Boyfriend, made this series more or less irresistible.

Repo #1-2. The fact that Rick Spears is the cousin of a great friend of all of us here at Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader? had infinitely less to do with my decision to pick up the first two issues of this mini-series, illustrated by frequent Spears collaborator Rob G, than the fact that his Pirates of Coney Island is probably the best incomplete comics series you will ever read.

Hellboy: Makoma #1 of 2. The recent Hellboy: The Crooked Man series illustrated by Richard Corben is perhaps the best installment yet in Mike Mignola's vast Hellboy universe. Makoma incorporates the Corben illustrated tale within a frame narrative drawn by Mignola himself. What more needs to be said?


Batman: Gotham Knights #2. I credit Brandon with urging me to pick up this issue of Gotham Knights for John Byrne's superb Batman: Black & White story included at the back of the comic. Byrne's retro tale of the bust-up of a decadent ring of drug-dealing plutocrats is written and drawn in a style evocative of the Batman comics of the 1940s.


Steelgrip Starkey and the All-Purpose Power Tool #1-6. There is something about these Epic series from the '70s and '80s--in this case about a construction worker hired to operate a miraculous power tool allowing him to single-handedly construct entire skyscrapers in a matter of minutes--that makes them difficult to pass over. Besides, check out that cover!

Clash #1-3. I have had particularly good luck with these DC prestige-style mini-series from the early '90s, having previously picked up Howard Chaykin and José Luis Garcia Lopez's exuberantly bizarre jungle-fascist space-epic Twilight. This series, written by Tom Veitch with pencils by Adam Kubert, once again illustrates, in its prophetic musings on a once and future destroyed Afghanistan, Shelley's conception of poets as "mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present,"

Bad Company: Goodbye, Krool World TPB. All I had to do was flip through a handful of pages from this collection of stories from 2000 AD by Peter Milligan, with art by Brett Ewins, Jim McCarthy and Steve Dillon, I knew I wouldn't leave the store without it.

Cage #4-5. Azzarello and Corben's rambunctiously cerebral Banner is one of my favorite trades and the word in my circles is that, if anything, their take on Luke Cage is superior even to that great series. Even better than getting these two issues for a buck each is the fact that later that evening as I was cruising eBay for the series' first three issues, I came across a listing that offered Cage #1-4 and all four issues of Banner, all for an extremely reasonable price. As it turns out, the lot was being sold by none other than Cosmic Comix in Catonsville. A quick email to the guys at Cosmic got me the first three issues of Cage at a price you would be hard pressed to match at any other comics shop, bar none.