I'm Not Even Certain There's an Award For This...

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... but I'd like to nominate a comic for the title of Most Tenuous Link Between Cover Image and Actual Story.

It's a much-bandied-about fact that the covers for Silver Age comics, and especially Silver Age DC comics, were occasionally drawn long before the story that they were connected to was even written - that the cover was essentially used as the seed idea that the story was later grown around. I've certainly encountered plenty of olde tyme comics that were probably put together in that way but this is the one time that I am absolutely confident in pointing my gnarled finger and screeching like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

First, the cover:

Within, the number one story (Mystery in Space being an anthology comic) is entitled

The hero: a brown-haired, strong-jawed dude, but not the same brown-haired, strong-jawed dude.

Whoops, I guess that image doesn't really show his hair colour. In any case, it's not the same guy and he has to run around getting the titular seven wonders for those evidently lazy aliens. And the wonder on Mercury is:

And that's about it for the jewel-folks, which probably means that this  is the only Silver Age comic that I can think of that features the (implicit) death of the standard-issue leggy dame/ chiseled-featured dude duo.

I'll bet that the Jewel Full of Murder was a big attraction at the Seven Wonders museum they end up putting together at the end of the story.

Kyle Baker in Halifax! Tomorrow!

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The incomparable KYLE BAKER will be speaking at the Halifax North Branch Library tomorrow afternoon! Baker, as you probably know, is an incredibly prolific writer and illustrator, who has won every comics-related award there is and worked for every publisher and company in the business. I just read (or in some cases re-read) a bunch of his stuff including Nat Turner, Why I Hate Saturn and The Bakers books—all amazing, and each totally different from the last. Baker's work is as diverse as it is brilliant.

Baker's talk is part of a day-long Graphic Novel Camp—an event providing education about comics and celebrating the medium. LBW's BFFs Mike Holmes and Faith Erin Hicks will also be there, as well as Kate Beaton (of Hark! A Vagrant fame), and the wonderful Rebecca Kraatz (if you haven't read her book, House of Sugar, do it! And check out the beautiful wood-burned images on her website. Looking at them is like a present you give yourself).

For more information about the Graphic Novel Camp event go here.

This is event is free! So come by! 

John Cheers Up, Buys Comics

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King City No. 6

 
It’s way past the third issue, but I’m going to do it anyway! I am going to kick off my new THIRD ISSUE RECAP, designed to strike a balance between my own hatred of spoilers and my friend Tubby’s assertion that my reviews can read like I assume that everyone has already read the comic that I’m talking about.
 
THIRD ISSUE RECAP is about conveying how good something is, and works on the same assumption that SECOND ISSUE OF JUDGEMENT does: that by the end of the second issue of a series, the tone has been set and enough information about the comic has been conveyed that one can make an informed decision about it. Come issue 3, I’ll feel okay about recapping issues 1 and 2 and it shouldn’t be too hard for folks to catch up if I manage to sell anyone on the idea of picking it up.
 
THIRD SIXTH ISSUE RECAP! This is actually going to be a terrible recap because my copies of all five previous issues are randomly distributed among 8 boxes that are stacked up in a closet - the joys of moving. However, I shall do my best.
 
The titular King City is an enormous metropolis in an indeterminate future, populated entirely by thieves, spies and the like (and every building and character look amazing. Brandon Graham layers on the detail and doesn’t spare the design for even the most minor of characters, and yet it all looks super clean and uncluttered). Main character Joe is a thief who left the city for as-yet undisclosed reasons some time ago and has returned as a cat master, that is one who employs a size-and-shape-changing superintelligent cat as an all-purpose tool and weapon. He begins to reintegrate himself into the city, hooks up with his old buddy Pete (possibly a luchadore) and gets embroiled in some sort of plot involving aliens and an evil old man that is still panning out. And there’s his lost love Anna and her war hero boyfriend Max, too.
 
I’m glad I stepped away from this for a second, because I think I figured out what’s great about this comic: it’s full of ridiculous ideas (guy with a shape-changing cat! Street gang based on owls! Ex-KGB sasquatch running a hidden bar!) and loaded with sight gags and ludicrous situations but the characters themselves are not ridiculous – they aren’t mugging at the camera. Anna’s job might be painting mustaches on billboards, but she comes off as someone who has a job that they love, not as a gag. The story and the characters could easily be translated to, say, a noir setting. They are independent of their situation.
 
Plus, it looks fantastic.
 
R13 No. 3
 
Hey, maybe I should have explained THIRD ISSUE RECAP on this actual third issue. Ah, well, no changing it now. This is another one that involves comics that are inaccessible to me at this point, so I may b a bit vague.
 
R13 (okay, this is probably the lead character’s name, though I can’t recall him being referred to by it yet) is to all appearances a robot body topped by a dome. Floating in the dome is a human skull with the number 13 inscribed on its forehead. He’s got a mysterious past: so far we know that he’s come from the island of Crete and that’s about it. Oh, and he’s got these terrific spindly limbs that look fantastic while he’s leaping around chopping dudes.
 
R13’s calling, or perhaps his fate, is to be a monster-fighter. Thusfar he has had run-ins with a sea monster, a phoenix and, this issue, a Cyclops. All of this monster-mashing has earned him the enmity of Echidna, mother of monsters in Greek myth and half snake/half lady any way you shake it. More fighting ensues.
 
There’s no question that I am a fan of the Big Dudes Punching Creatures school of graphical entertainment, and R13 certainly succeeds on that front, but beyond that he is a genuinely charming character – he has essentially no memory of who or what he is and comes of as confused and uncertain but just basically a good guy. This is pretty remarkable, now that I think of it – Character is Searching For Identity and Purpose is all to frequently translated to Character is Self-Obsessed and Whiney. Good show!
 
 
Today’s I Am Bored drawing is R13!
 
Superman No. 698 - Does anyone else think that the layout of the cover on this sucker is really reminiscent of Mike Mignola? Maybe it’s just all of the hanging cities in the background. Man, I’m really enjoying these. I wish that Blackest Night had gotten to be this self-contained.
 
 
Orc Stain No. 2 - Man, this comic is great. I don’t even think it came out this week, but I got my copy of issue 2 yesterday and I want to reiterate what an insanely detailed, absurdly creative, huge world James Stokoe has put together here. The creativity inherent in the designs of the crazy organic technology alone is worth checking out, but there’s going to be an incredible gonzo fantasy story playing out over the course of this series. I can feel it in my bones.
 
There, I’m all done! (Turns around, notices three books he bought this week, blanches) Uh, I mean: here’s some more!
 
Widgey Q. Butterfluff
 
I have no idea if they’re still making children’s cartoons in the “exceedingly happy utopian community of tiny creatures occasionally menaced by generic evil” vein, but basically every second show that I watched as a youth fit that description, so I was powerless to resist this book.
 
It features – you guessed it – an exceedingly happy utopian community of tiny creatures. You have your heroine, Widgey Q Butterfluff, her male counterpart (and most amusing character) Buster B. Gooseberry, obligatory general scientician Professor Schoolbug and generic evil Lord Meanskull. Everything in SnugglePump Valley is bright and happy and anthropomorphic!
 
I hate to use the term subversive, but mainly because it’s misused so frequently. In this case: completely appropriate. Steph Cherrywell has done a hell of a job of subverting the ideas behind children’s cartoons, from the suspect motivation of the polluting villain to the concept of using caring as a fuel source. And it’s funny! And it still manages to be kind of sweet even while satirizing the concept of cartoons with twee sweetness as their core concept!
 
Hooray!
 
The Book of Grickle
 
I first ran into Grickle in a library copy of an earlier collection by Graham Annable, possibly also called Grickle, and am extraordinarily glad to have a chance to squirrel this away into my book pile.
 
Grickle is hard to quantify. The characters look like gag cartoon characters and they sometimes act like such. They frequently inhabit worlds filled with wacky gag cartoon-style antics. They emote like real people, though, both facially and in that they feel love, despair and simple joys. It’s a funny and sometimes poignant comic full of seemingly simple pictures that you will find yourself going back to study several times after you’ve technically finished reading.
 
Sadly, this collection does not include “Party Ass”, my favourite Grickle comic. Fingers crossed for next time.
 
I’m sleepy! Ye shall live in suspense over what the third book was! Forever!

 

 

Blackest Night Cheeses Me Off Again

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 I've calmed down since, but I got kind of irritated by a certain aspect of Green Lantern No. 52 earlier today. Let's watch!

Spoilers! Spoilers aplenty! Read no further if you care about such things!

So this is a mostly-talking issue and I’m not too upset about it. There had to be an origin of that white light thing that Sinestro ate in Blackest Night and if it was a bit long, well, that’s kind of what happens when a story is blown up to somewhere between four and ten times the size that it needs to be. Gah, and there’s probably going to be another one of these for Nekron, isn’t there.

So Sinestro stops in the middle of a fight with about a million dudes and narrates the history of the White Light Entity. It goes something like this: the Entity appeared in our universe and created all of the stars and planets and stuff. It then created the Earth at the point in space where it first entered our universe and hid inside (deep within the planets gooey centre in the narration but about a foot below the surface in the actual comic). The Entity’s presence caused life to evolve, and then as creatures start displaying emotions (emotions like willpower!) they are transformed into Ion and Parallax and Predator and so forth, seven in all. I think that this is the origin of the emotional spectrum. Like, Ion is the first anything anywhere to exhibit willpower and afterward there is green light power for all - it's not explicitly stated but it's strongly implied and so I'm going with it.

This whole thing has been bugging me for a while now and I think I’ve figured out why: it’s the Earth-centric aspect of the whole thing, straight out of terrible 50s sci-fi. Where Our Heroes Are is the Most Important Place in All Creation. It’s a perennial problem in comics, especially DC comics, wherein writers feel a perpetual need to explain the remarkably high instance of alien invasion and such. I kind of thought that they settled that problem fine way back in Invasion: humans have a crazy genetic code and so there are lots of superhumans and so alien races want to exploit/conquer/destroy our planet. Simple, and yet every new event seems to layer on another heaping spoonful of importance, until the fictional history of the DCU Earth resembles some ungodly narrative casserole. I swear, if this exact same origin was set on a random alien planet I would have no problem with it, but it isn't and now I have to tear it apart.

Okay, so the timeline goes: Entity arrives - creates universe - creates Earth, hides inside - life starts - unicellular/whale-looking thing feels first will - flying bug thing generates first fear - some other bug (?) feels first love - snake feels first avarice - bull (?) feels first rage - bird feels first hope - octopus feels first compassion.

I guess that this is a comic book and that the Earth could be 10+ billion years old instead of the 4 or 5 we currently reckon it to be, and maybe the universe revolves around a stationary Earth that is certainly not quintillions of kilometers away from where it might have been 10 billion years ago. Maybe the DCU is that radically different than ours.

And maybe the entire Age of Reptiles happened without any creature feeling anything like rage. Maybe dinosaurs went about their business in a dignified manner and didn’t take anything personally. It took the Rise of the Cows to mess things up for everyone. And maybe no living creature in the entire universe felt hope or compassion any time until the last, say, million years or so - remember, that octopus didn’t get around to it until after the cow-murder.

But even if every Green Lantern story told before this whole rainbow brouhaha is now said to be completely apocryphal, there are some holes in this story. Geoff Johns creation Larfleeze the Orange Lantern got his start billions of years ago, all fighting the Guardians and betraying his homies and such. And then billions of years went by and snakes and apples evolved and a snake in an apple tree felt avarice for the first time. Bah.

I suppose that I should be as willing to discard what I know about evolution and such as I was to abandon cosmology and common sense and the prior established history of the Green Lanterns and by extension the DCU, but this last detail pushes things just a bit too far. An earth that is the centre of the universe, that evolved the very first life anywhere and that reached the Age of Mammals something like 10 billion years ago (necessary for anyone to have gotten angry for most of the history of the universe, remember) only to remain in a sort of evolutionary stasis since then is just a bit too much for my suspension of disbelief glands to process. Especially since I just described the planet Malthus, a central element in Green Lantern’s history. There’s already a place that this could have been set that would have made all of this make sense! I mean, it wouldn’t be the greatest story ever told, but by GOD would it be about a billion times more palatable without ERTH ISS COOL AND IMPURTENT scrawled across it in foot-high letters.

Okay, I had to go and do something and I’ve calmed sown a bit. All I’ve got left is that it’s weird that that one robot would know the term “Western Seaboard” and not “Tootsie Pop”. They’re both pretty Earth-colloquial, right?

Okay… nerd rage spent. Go read the rest of the reviews in the next post for me being happy about comics. I'll try not to do this any more.

The Once And Future King

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 Last week saw the release of American Vampire, Vertigo’s latest ongoing horror series and hopeful heir to other Vertigo top-sellers like Y: The Last Man and 100 Bullets. American Vampire contains two separate but related stories set in different periods of American history—the lead story deals with a young actress in 1920s Hollywood who runs afoul of bloodsuckers of many kinds, and the second feature gives the origin story of an old west outlaw in the 1880s as he becomes the first of a new breed of vampire. This was a pretty solid first issue, co-written by newcomer Scott Snyder and featuring eye-catching art by Rafael Albuquerque (Blue Beetle, Superman/Batman), who’s been long overdue for superstar status. Thankfully, he’ll have a pretty decent chance of receiving his due recognition now, thanks to the book’s other co-creator—Stephen King, who pens the second story that’ll run as a backup feature in the first five issues. This honest-to-goodness original comics work by King was probably inevitable, as the blockbuster novelist has been getting tons of attention in the comics field these days. Marvel has made a veritable cottage industry out of adapting his work into comics form (The Stand, The Dark Tower, N), and Del Rey recently got into the act with their adaptation of The Talisman, King’s collaboration with Peter Straub. Even King’s son, novelist Joe Hill (20th Century Ghosts, Heart Shaped Box) has gotten into the act, with the excellent Locke & Key from IDW, which I reviewed here). King’s work on American Vampire is quite good—it has a gleefully sadistic grit to it that I think fans of Preacher would enjoy—but Snyder’s lead feature reads a bit more smoothly, I thought. Either way, King’s name will likely bring legions of fans to the series, many of whom would never have given it a second thought, and I suspect that’s the idea. With all this comic-book interest in the King of Horror these days, I thought I’d take a look back at the author’s history in the field. If I’ve missed anything, please feel free to point it out in the comments section—as a Constant Reader, I’m always on the lookout for more King.

 

The first King/comics crossover that I know of is a pretty rare find these days, and goes all the way back to 1981. Bizarre Adventures #29, part of Marvel’s now-defunct black and white magazine lineup that included Savage Sword of Conan and Rampaging Hulk, featured an adaptation of King’s short story The Lawnmower Man (the original prose version can be found in the Night Shift collection). More people are familiar with the 1992 Lawnmower Man movie starring Pierce Brosnan and Jeff Fahey (Lapidus from Lost!), but I can assure you, King’s story has absolutely zilch to do with director Brett Leonard’s Flowers For Algernon by way of William Gibson premise. In fact, the material was altered so drastically, King successfully sued to have his name removed from the ad campaign! The IMDB maintains that a low-budget short was made in 1987 that hews more closely to the original short, but I have no idea where to find it. I’m not sure why Marvel chose to adapt such a crazy-assed story for their first stab at a King adaptation, but I’m glad they did—it’s a wild read in both its prose and comics form.

For those unfamiliar, King’s story is about an unlucky suburban slob named Harold Parkette who hires the wrong landscaping company to trim his giant lawn. It seems that the Pastoral Greenery company answers to the ancient god Pan, and they employ a morbidly obese, cloven-footed lunatic named Karras and his hellish familiar, a giant red monster of a lawnmower that does his bidding while he runs around naked eating the freshly mown grass. Fearing what the neighbours will say, Parkette tries to call the cops to report a case of indecent exposure, and winds up on the business end of the mower as a result. “God Bless The Grass”, indeed. 

This is truly one of King’s weirdest short stories (although that title may yet still belong to Here There Be Tygers from Skeleton Crew), but it’s a ghoulishly good time nonetheless—an exercise in vivid and ridiculous imagery, to be sure. It’s well served by Simonson’s artwork as well; even at this early stage of his career, his dynamic layouts and innovative use of sound effects as a graphic element are undeniably cool. I’ve only come across this magazine twice in my career as a comics retailer, but it’s worth tracking down if you’re a fan of either King or Simonson (or preferably both).

 

Next up is Creepshow, the comic book tie-in to King’s 1982 cinematic collaboration with George A. Romero. If there hadn’t been a comic to go along with this movie, I think I would have been a little insulted—the film itself is a tribute to E.C. horror comics of the 1950s like Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror (King showed some love for these classics in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre). An anthology film featuring five tales of supernatural terror and gruesomely appropriate comeuppance, Creepshow has an awesome cast that includes Ted Danson, Adrienne Barbeau, Hal Holbrook, and a wickedly villainous turn from Leslie Nielsen of all people. It also stars E.G. Marshall (the President from Superman II!) as a reclusive billionaire asshole in the Howard Hughes tradition, and best of all, it features the disco-dancing skills of a young Ed Harris. The film even utilizes comic book panels in its framing sequence, and is hosted by a robed skeleton dude not unlike the Cryptkeeper. The Creepshow comic, released in an 8 X 11 graphic album format by Plume Books, is drawn by horror great Berni Wrightson, no stranger to King collaborations—the genre legend provided illustrations for King’s Cycle Of The Werewolf and the expanded edition of The Stand. In Creepshow, he totally captures Tom Savini’s amazing creature designs for a man who turns into a vegetable (appropriately enough, since Wrightson co-created Swamp Thing)...

...a toothsome, ravenous Yeti...

...and all manner of those zombies that all the kids are into these days.

The Creepshow graphic novel (featuring a cover illustration by E.C. Comics great Jack Kamen) is sadly out of print and fetches a pretty penny online, but keep your eyes peeled the next time you’re at a yard sale or in a used bookstore—there are a lot of copies floating around out there.

 Last but not least, King and his pal Wrightson were among the many superstar contributors to Marvel’s X-Men: Heroes For Hope anthology, a 1985 benefit comic whose proceeds went towards Ethiopian famine relief efforts. King and Wrightson joined such luminaries as Harlan Ellison, Frank Miller, Richard Corben, and, in a rare Marvel venture, Alan Moore (hey, it was for a good cause, after all). The duo turned in a fantastically creepy three-page sequence where poor Kitty Pryde came face-to-face with the physical embodiment of hunger itself. I find King’s literary voice comes through most clearly in “Hungry”’s good-old-boy demeanor—King excels at ghoulish good humour.

 

So those are all the King comics I know about, right up until Marvel began adapting and spinning off tales from the Dark Tower universe. One of these days, I’d love to see somebody publish some sort of anthology where different creators could adapt King’s short stories into comic book form. There are certainly plenty such stories out there—I believe there are currently five short story collections in print, and then there are the novellas, and shorter works for other anthologies as well. A King short story anthology could conceivably run for years and years before running out of stories to adapt, and the name brand recognition would help it overcome the fate of so many other anthology books in today’s marketplace. Until then, hail to the King, baby!