Back in Print: Alison Dare!

In exciting news, Tundra Books is re-releasing two excellent all-ages graphic novels: Alison Dare: Little Miss Adventures and Alison Dare: The Heart of the Maiden. If you haven't heard of these books, you have probably heard of their creators: the all-Canadian, all-awesome, all-J. team of J. Torres and J. Bone. Here at Living Between Wednesdays, we love those guys. And we love quality comics for kids. And we especially love it when those comics feature a strong female lead character (bonus that she solves mysteries with her two clever gal pals).

Alison Dare is like a 12-year-old Indiana Jones, and the books are full of fun adventure and mystery-solving. Superhero nerds like myself will appreciate the fact that Allison's father is a Blue Beetle-esque masked hero.  Plus, between Torres' humour and Bone's always-fantastic art, these books are just really cute.

I am just really glad these books are back in print because they are fantastic for young readers, especially for young girls whose imaginations don't start and end in a Disney Princess castle.

To promote the launch of the new editions of these books, Tundra is having a cool contest. Just follow this link to their blog and you can download a printable cut-out of Alison Dare herself. Print it, cut it, and pose Allison wherever your imagination decides.

For example, here she is hanging out at Strange Adventures Comic Shop in Halifax:

And here she is fighting the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man:

And here she is standing guard at Halifax Harbour (ready to fight off pirates or smugglers):

I had much bigger plans for my little Alison Dare cut-out, but sadly it was destroyed by a very strong wind coming off the harbour that day. But she was totally going to be fighting a statue of Winston Churchill that stands outside the Halifax Public Library.

Go check out the books, and go enter the contest! Or at least encourage your kids to!

Adscape: You Are Under the Spell of Ka-Bala

As I mentioned in my review of The Bulletproof Coffin yesterday, Shaky Kane and David HIne have referenced one of my very faourite pieces of occult claptrap, Ka-Bala, which possibly hasn't seen the light of day since Grant Morrison stuck a working one under the Pentagon in some of the weirdest issues of his run on the Doom Patrol. 

 

I originally fell in love with Ka-Bala thanks to this ad, which is not only a study in hyperbole but an interesting look at what 1967 advertisers thought children might be interested enough in to dabble in the black arts. After some examination, however, I became extremely impressed with the inclusiveness of the mystic experience presented by Ka-Bala. Firstly, as can be seen here, the glowy effects seen above are no lie: that sucker is made out of luminous plastic, and the Eye of Zohar has its own little clip-on halo. And speaking of the Eye:

Both the Eye and the game itself almost certainly derive their names from Cabbala/Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, in which Zohar is the most important text, and probably not a glowing, ever-revolving eye. As well, and I'm not sure that this is intentional, the Eye is constantly staring at the "crystal marble", an obvious nod to the classic Old Cinematic Gypsy trick of crystallomancy, or divination by gazing into an orb, jewel, or possibly champaign. But wait, there's more:

The game also came with "Taro" cards, which I am now considering a misspelling of Tarot rather than a deliberate distancing since I'm told that they had images of the Major Arcana on the back. And, though not shown in this ad, the figures of the Zodiac are set around the rim of the game, so you can use it to do a little ad hoc astrology if necessary. Yes, in one wee mass-produced device, the Transogram company managed to encapsulate all of the forms of divination that the average North American is likely to ever encounter. But they could - and should - have gone so much farther! As long as we're trying to tell the future, why don't we haul out some of the interesting ways to do so?

First off: as cool as the Eye of Zohar is, I have to admit that I'm extremely fond of the concept of alectryomancy, in which you employ a rooster in much the same capacity. Originally, you'd place the rooster in a circle with letters around the rim and take note of how it walked or pecked. And here's where it really beats the Eye: since you couldn't very well put a live rooster in every box, the thing would have to be made out of plastic, yes? So why not fill it with plastic guts and introduce children to the joys of extispicy, also known as haruspex, divination by reading the entrails of birds. Heck, this one could be a twofer, as you could also give them some knowledge of the grand old and even more specific art of heptascopy, or reading the future in an animal's liver. I mean, I assume that you could only do one at a time, but maybe a failed bit of extispicy could be salvaged at the heptascopic level.

 

Of course, the Eye doesn't necessarily have to go: with a minor change it could become a representative of that most modern of divinatory techniques, the Magic 8 Ball, which I'm going to call billiardomancy. It may not be etymologically correct, but dammit, I like it. Plus I don't know how to say pool ball in Greek.

Of course, if the Eye were actually on fire rather than merely being surrounded by an eerie plastic glow, you could get up to both pyromancy, which involves looking for signs in the shape of flames, and empyromancy, or burning things and then... somehow telling the future from the way that they burn. I really wish that I'd known about empyromancy when I was a teenager - I could have been the most future-aware kid in school.

Oh, and I guess that you could get up to a bit of scapulimancy, but really: who has enough shoulder blades laying around for that any more?

Of course, if you're already doing some divination by a fire, you might as well get up to a bit of axinomancy, or - you guessed it - divination by means of making an axe red hot and observing the motions of a piece of jet placed upon its surface. Always a hit at camp-outs.

All of these are certainly opportunities that Transogram missed, but none of them sadden me more than the exclusion of my newly-discovered favourite method of divination: gyromancy.

Gyromancy is the noble art of spinning around until you get dizzy and fall over, the direction of your fall being the significant factor. Transogram, if you still exist as a company, take note: above is my concept sketch for the Ka-Bala Gyroscopy Plus, with ride-in Eye of Zohar. Just climb inside and the mystic orb will do the rest, whirling around and around until you're so dizzy that you can't help but accurately predict the future! Call me!

One last thing: I'd only ever encountered the one Ka-Bala ad, so imagine my surprise when I found a second. Here it is, for posterity:

Poor Billy. This is the Sixties equivalent of your parents figuring out how to use the email.

There's No Escape From the All-Seeing John Buys Comics!

Adventure Comics No. 12

There have been a few different reimaginings of the relationship between Superboy/man and the Legion of Super-Heroes over the years, but I think that the take on the whole thing that started in the cartoon - that the Legion functions as Superboy's much-needed peer group and place to learn about himself - is definitely my favourite. Young Clark Kent has always been portrayed as someone who had to be aggressively normal all the time, and since his career as Superboy in the Twentieth Century has been reduced to something between few and no adventures, it makes sense that he'd have to have had somewhere to cut loose in order to have ended up as well-adjusted as he seems to be. 

All in all, a fun issue - the kissing scene was cute (and laser-beam kisses, those are a new power, aren't they?) and Superboy's list-making tied in nicely with Johns' run on the series. According to the Internet, Levitz' whole first arc on this book is going to deal with Superboy and the Legion, which is just ducky.

Invincible No. 72

Good holy crap, Kirkman. Every time Conquest shows up I have this incredibly visceral reaction to something he does and I love it. I wish I could quantify why the things that happen in this book are different than, say, the things I complain about inBrightest Day... I guess that it's because the characters in this book were created with this sort of thing in mind - Conquest is a killer from a race of killers, and his gutting Atom Eve or doing what he did in this issue are appropriate means to his end of being a herald of the Viltrumite doom. By contrast, Black Manta carving up a store full of people or (Dr Light/Black Hand/Max Lord) retroactively becoming a (serial rapist/murderous necrophiliac/megalomaniacal sociopath) in order that they be able to fill that role in the story du jour has the stink of the shoehorn about it.

So good job, Invincible, for having characters with defined roles and who change and grow in a believable if over-the-top manner. And thanks for all of the guts, too.

Joker's Asylum II: The Riddler

I have no idea how I missed the original Joker's Asylum comics, or indeed why I haven't read all of them yet. I think that I shall call myself a fool for having done so. Judging from this and the Penguin story in the first series, I'm going to declare these some of the best looks I've had at the members of Batman's rogues gallery in years.

Even if I'm wrong about the issues that I haven't read, then this is still an incredibly satisfying Riddler story, one with a couple of different levels of enjoyment. Firstly, it's a pretty fun look at how Edward Nigma goes about wooing a lady, and why he does so. And then you get to the end **SPOILERS** and you find out that appropriately enough the Joker has set the story up as a riddle for you to solve - not the hardest-to-figure-out riddle, I'll admit, but going back and figuring out how all of the clues were incorporated into the story is fascinating. This is exactly the kind of comic that I want to be reading: Calloway, Guinaldo and Fernandez win... comics. For this week.

The Bulletproof Coffin No. 1

I was pretty much sold on this comic as soon as I saw that the werewolf-masked kid on the cover was in the Jack Kirby hunched-over-with-your-arms-hanging-straight-down pose, and I was definitely sold once I noticed that the fake comic in this book referenced the Eye of Ka-Bala, one of my favourite Silver Age ad subjects. Indeed, this book is filled with references to the Silver Age, in the best possible way. Fake-but-familiar tchotchkes and comics that never were act as hooks for what looks to be a satisfyingly surreal mystery. Shaky Kane's nice clean art only accentuates this.

The main character, Steve Newman, is one of those protagonists that is entirely ripe for involvement in a story: strange job (he hauls away dead people's stuff), obsession with the past (leading him to steal a lot of dead people's stuff), disconnected from his family. This issue was largely set-up - including a pretty great horror comic-style morality tale called The Unforgiving Eye - but I'm betting that hijinks will shortly ensue.

Sweet Tooth No. 10 - Ha haaaa! Now that Dave's on the Sweet Tooth train, the whole LBW crew can get together and be alternately delighted and depressed! Will Gus ever find a home, or will he be messily eviscerated before this is done? I'd put the odds of each at about fifty percent.

I, Zombie No. 2 - I maintain everything that I said about the last issue, but geez. One of you could have told me that I was making an ass out of myself calling it izombie. I had to look in the indicia, for heaven's sake.

Chimichanga No. 2 - Holy crap, there was a second issue of Chimichanga!

"Will He Save The Galaxy--Or Destroy It?"

 Somebody better take Marvel Comics’ collective temperature—are they feeling okay? Deadpool didn’t appear in a single comic this week! For that matter, there weren’t any major releases at all in the X-Men franchise (except for Giant-Size X-Men Forever #1…are those crickets I hear?), or Spider-Man (there was a Spider-Girl, and a $1.00 reprint of Amazing Spider-Man #546), or Batman (well, Batman Confidential, and Joker’s Asylum: Riddler), or Superman (a Superman/Batman Annual featuring Batman Beyond doesn’t really count, does it?). It was just one of those weeks that comes along every once in awhile, where the biggest release is a Serenity one-shot. There were only a few things that really excited me this week, but we’ll get to them in a minute; in the meantime, have some random observations on the new comics for the week of June 2, won’t you?

 -The house ads for Marvel’s Shadowland event would seem to indicate that this whole Franken-Castle experiment is coming to an end sooner rather than later—they depict a bearded, but non-monsterized, Punisher blasting Spider-Man with a shotgun. I remain a big fan of the sheer insanity of making the Punisher into a Frankenstein, but I’ll be just as happy to see it end within the next few months. I really enjoyed that first arc, but extending it beyond those six issues might be a mistake (although not as big a mistake as re-titling the book Franken-Castle! That’s just asking for trouble).

 -Is it me, or do Mouse Guard and Mice Templar seem to come out on the same week more often than not?  When they do come out, I mean—both are pretty infrequent.

 -Avengers: The Origin by Joe Casey and Phil Noto is a miniseries that is taking five issues to re-tell a story—Avengers #1 by Lee and Kirby—that took 22 pages to tell in 1963. The same week that the third issue of this re-telling drops, Marvel releases the first issue of Avengers Prime, which reprints a Walt Simonson story from 1989's Avengers #300 that recaps the same events…in seven pages.  It’s the new math, folks. Just go with it.

 -I’m the last LBW contributor to get on board with this, but I have finally gotten caught up with Jeff Lemire’s excellent Vertigo series Sweet Tooth. I opened each new issue with a mixture of excitement and dread, wondering what the hell is going to happen to poor, antler-headed Gus and his hulking protector (maybe?), Jepperd. This week’s issue ten continues to unravel the mystery of Gus’s unnatural existence in another beautifully hand-crafted, heartbreaking issue. A great book, and unlike anything Vertigo’s ever done before.

 

All right, enough of all that. The two things I was most excited about this week had a lot to do with my own personal nostalgia. One was Dark Horse’s brand-spanking new Omnibus reprinting the Marvel Star Wars series. I was kind of embarrassed at how much I was looking forward to this one. The original Star Wars comics were among some of the first comics I owned, and in the days before DVD or VHS, they were how I used to get my required fix of the Force and all that jazz. They were pretty goofy, but I read them until they basically fell apart, and I was pretty excited to revisit them in this new volume. It didn’t hurt that I’ve been on a bit of a kick lately, having just read J.W. Rinzler’s extremely in-depth chronicling of the making of the original movie (this led to me buying the DVD set again—something I swore I would never do!—when I found a copy of the boxed set that contains, as mere second disc extras, mind you, the original, unaltered theatrical releases of the original trilogy). The Omnibus edition of the original Marvel run contains the first 27 issues for 25 bucks, so it’s not much of a financial risk. So far, I’ve only read the first six issues—which adapt the first film—and, surprisingly, they hold up pretty well! I mean, they’re totally ridiculous, of course, as you would expect a mash-up of old-timey Star Wars and Seventies Marvel comics to be. But on the other hand, I love both of those things, so why wouldn’t I love this? I can’t get enough of how scripter Roy Thomas imposed the Marvel style onto George Lucas’s vision; for example, issue five is titled Lo, The Moons of Yavin! The covers are a study in foolishness as well;

 

Seriously, Luke, if you can see the Death Star in the sky above you, you’re done, son! Listen to Han, he knows what he’s talking about. As if to hammer home the Marvelness of these proceedings, Luke even calls Uncle Owen Uncle Ben at one point. Seriously! But still, the art by Howard Chaykin and Steve Leialoha is cool, eschewing the photo-reference overload made popular in most comics adaptations since, and it’s interesting to see how the finer details of the larger Star Wars universe hadn’t been nailed down yet—Jabba the Hutt appears on Tattoine as a yellow, whiskered humanoid (suck it, Special Editions!). I don’t know how much I would recommend this collection for anyone who wasn’t already a Star Wars fan or didn’t grow up reading these comics, but I’m certainly getting a kick out of them; I may have to do a series of posts about the subsequent issues in this collection, if it turns out there’s anything interesting to say about them. They’re a nice historical reminder of a time when the Star Wars universe was still pretty uncharted territory, when pint-sized fans like me were hungry for any new information about all those crazy planets and aliens. Of course, a lot of the characters and ideas that were introduced by writers like Thomas and later, Archie Goodwin and David Michelinie, were eventually paved over to make way for more “official” novels, videogames, cartoons, Special Editions, sequels, and, heaven help us, prequels, but unlike a lot of the revising of history that Lucasfilm has indulged in over the decades, this stuff is still readily available. One final note—was Marvel trying to equate Luke Skywalker with Bat Lash on the cover caption to issue #1?

 

The other big release for me this week was Hawkeye & Mockingbird #1 by Jim McCann and David Lopez (the team who reunited Clint & Bobbi in New Avengers: The Reunion). This new ongoing has the on-again/off-again couple, well, on again, teaming up romantically and superheroically to fight superterrorists and other assorted baddies. I had high hopes for this one, as Hawkeye is one of my all-time favourite characters (and he’s had a rough couple of years, to say the least), and I’m happy to say I wasn’t disappointed. This is a fun, fast-paced issue with lots of action, humour, and intriguing subplots involving Mockingbird’s family history and a potential team-up of two of the pair’s classic nemeses (well, one is a cool new take on a classic one, but still). There are lots of fun shout-outs to stuff like the original 1982 Hawkeye miniseries and the duo’s tenure in the West Coast Avengers, but none of it is impenetrable to new readers—in fact, this double-sized first issue comes with a handy backup feature where the heroes playfully narrate each other’s complex together-and-separate histories. This is good to have on hand, when both of your leads have been dead at least once (twice this decade for Hawkeye!). Unlike the similar Green Arrow/Black Canary series from a few years back, this book doesn’t collapse instantly under the weight of tons of ongoing continuity--McCann’s script hits the ground running in its own direction and has a sense of fun, romantic adventure about it. And I seriously hope someone at Marvel has David Lopez chained down, because this guy has some chops. This is one gorgeous-looking book, all smooth lines and easy-to-follow action.

This is probably my favourite thing to come out of all this Heroic Age jazz right now, and I hope it sticks around for awhile (especially with this particular creative team on board). I do have one small complaint--I'm really tired of seeing the word rape in mainstream superhero comics--Bobbi drops it in reference to her ordeal at the hands of the Phantom Rider back in West Coast Avengers. If you must, it's possible to allude to this stuff without typing what has become the most overused "r" word in comics since "retcon"; Young Avengers Special #1 was a perfect example of this, where we know that something awful happened to Kate BIshop in the past, but it's never explicitly stated or shown. This is a pretty minor complaint, though. It was a pretty great comic otherwise.

Sorry Power Girl: I Just Can't Do It.

In honour of the end of what will surely be remembered as the best run of Power Girl appearances (that's right, not just in her own comic: anywhere) I was going to put together a timeline of PG appearances that would necessarily showcase the changes to her costume and *ahem* carriage over the years. The longer that I worked on it though, the more it became evident that I was going to end up with a thirty-year history of one character's boobs. Which was kind of the point, I admit, but it was far to creepy for me to go on. Instead, here's an abridged form of the same. From her very first appearance in All-Star Comics No. 58:

 

And from last year's astonishingly good Power Girl No. 1:

Everything in between was either a variation on the same theme or an aberration best forgotten.

Man, Am I Ever Getting Sick Of That Damn Green Arrow Preview: New Comics For May 26th

 It’s felt like the last few weeks have been particularly bleak and dreary in the world of comics, with lots of pain and death and suffering. However, this week’s new releases had a lot more fun stuff going on, and generally made me feel a whole lot better about the industry in general and superhero comics in particular. That’s not to say that some things weren’t depressing (shame on you, Amazing Spider-Man) or horribly violent (can at least one issue of Green Lantern pass without somebody being skeletonized or skinned alive?), but overall, things were looking up.

 

Dazzler #1: A few weeks back, I was pretty hard on 1984’s Dazzler: The Movie graphic novel. I’ll stand by that, but this Women of Marvel one-shot was a much better vehicle for everybody’s favourite disco-themed superheroine. The story involves Arcade (I love that guy!) using a bunch of killer robots, who correspond with a lot of the villains from Dazzler’s solo series, to try and kill the mutant songstress at the behest of her evil sister. There are some fun callbacks to the most ridiculous moments of Dazzler’s book—she once again has to face Dr. Doom and Galactus, albeit robot versions—but most ridiculous of all, she is forced to fight for her life in her original roller-skated, KISS-makeup’d costume. This was written by Jim McCann, who is also going to be scripting the upcoming Hawkeye and Mockingbird ongoing (I got my fingers crossed for that one, and this comic gave me a lot of hope), and drawn with great style by Toronto guys Ramon Perez and Kalman Androsofszky. There’s a short back-up that makes this into a Necrosha tie-in, but the main feature is the reason to check this out.

 

Hey, that's enough outta you!

 Thunderbolts #144: Steve Rogers puts Luke Cage (himself a reformed criminal) in charge of a new team of T-bolts, mostly villains out to redeem themselves in this Heroic Age crossover. The team, made up of old school ‘Bolts like Songbird and Moonstone, as well as newbies like Crossbones and Juggernaut, is an odd mix that might make for some good readin’—strangest of all, Man-Thing is on board, using his connection to the Nexus of All Realities to provide the team’s transportation abilities. Jeff Parker continues his streak of writing great team books for Marvel (once again, if you missed Atlas last week, you need to get on that ASAP), also proving himself to be either a big fan of Aziz Ansari’s stand-up routine or the MTV reality dating show Next, or both—a female prisoner declares of Luke Cage, “If he’s got a neck tattoo, I’m gonna lick it!”. There’s also a great last-page villain reveal that is extra cool for longtime Thunderbolts readers. If Moonstone can just get herself a less slutty outfit, this book will be in great shape.

 

See? That is one trampy getup. 

The Thanos Imperative: Ignition #1: This was maybe not the most new-reader-friendly one-shot, as it builds out of several Annihilation and War/Realm of Kings miniseries, not to mention the ongoing (but maybe now cancelled?) Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy books, but it did make me want to check out the next installment. Apparently, in some of those books, it was revealed that there’s a parallel universe that is slowly bleeding into the Marvel-verse, one where life has triumphed over death I guess? Even so, this happy-sounding place has been dubbed the Cancerverse, so it can’t be that great. Anyway, the denizens of this ‘verse want to invade the Marvel universe and eliminate death, starting with the avatar of death himself, the recently-resurrected Thanos. This was a confusing but intriguing first issue—it practically requires a flow chart to keep track of all its dozens of characters. But once again, the last-page reveal of the avatar of life from the Cancerverse—in other words, the big villain of the upcoming Thanos Imperative miniseries—is a cool shocker that, in retrospect, makes perfect sense.

 

G.I. Joe: Hearts and Minds #1: I haven’t read anything by Max Brooks prior to this, but the author of such bestsellers as World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide manages to keep the living dead out of this miniseries (so far, anyway), telling two short stories focusing on a Cobra operative and a Joe soldier, respectively. First up, in the better of the two stories, we get a look at what makes cold-blooded mercenary (and lousy poet, if I remember his action figure’s file card correctly) Major Bludd tick, and the second story gives us some background on Joe tracking expert Spirit. Bludd's story contrasts his cold-bloodedness with his surprisingly tragic and decidedly mundane family history, while the Spirit story focuses on how the character hates that everyone just assumes, because of his Native American heritage, that he is an expert tracker...but, of course, he is an expert tracker anyway, hence his surly disposition. I have no idea where this fits in terms of continuity, if there even is such a thing where a bunch of action figures are concerned, but I was able to enjoy it purely based on my nostalgia for the G.I. Joe universe. Next up is Tripwire and Firefly! Man, I hope they get to Beach-Head at some point.

 

Seven Psychopaths #1: This is really getting to be the year of “guys on a mission” stories, what with The Losers, The A-Team, and The Expendables, isn’t it? This new book from Boom! Studios stars a disgraced British Army Colonel in London during the Blitz, who gets a letter from an old guy named Goldschmidt in an insane asylum, advocating the use of a team of certified lunatics to drop into Berlin and assassinate Hitler. That’s so crazy, it just might work! The Colonel springs Goldschmidt and they begin assembling their team, on the premise that these guys (and gals) will be so nutty and unpredictable that the Nazis won’t be able to catch them or stop them—also, that the mystical significance of the number 7, as in there will be seven of them, will give power to their cause. I don’t know where Sean Phillips found time to draw this, between his stints on Criminal and the new Dark Tower series, but I’m glad he did. Fabien Vehlmann's script is tight, and funny too—my favourite part is when Goldschmidt notices that the Colonel’s file on the project is labeled “Seven Psychos”, and he gets all offended by it. I have not idea where this story could be going, but I hope the creators go all Tarantino with it and create their own batshit crazy ending for WWII.

Secret Avengers #1: Not that it took much, but this book really blew the doors off last week’s Avengers relaunch. Like Thunderbolts, this is a totally strange assortment of Marvel characters from different eras and genres (War Machine, Nova, and Moon Knight, together at last?!?), but Ed Brubaker sells it. This shadow-ops team deals with all sorts of crazy threats before they can even become threats, and their varied specialties come in mighty handy. The result is a cool mix of real world (well, Marvel real world) action and cosmic intrigue that has lots of callbacks to old-school House of Ideas. The Serpent Crown? That dastardly Roxxon corporation? Now you’re talking my language, Brubaker! There’s a predictably cheesecakey opening scene where Valkyrie and Black Widow have to go undercover as call girls—the superheroine glass ceiling at work—but otherwise, artist Mike Deodato, who I’m not normally a big fan of, turns in some surprisingly good work here. His shadowy visuals work the conspiracy angle nicely, and he shifts gears ably from “realistic” scenes, like the opening gambit in Dubai, to the trip to Mars in the final pages. Also, Marvel pulls the hat trick for final page bad guy reveals this week, with this issue’s mastermind being the most surprising of the three. Also, I cannot overstate how awesome it is to have the Beast on an Avengers team again. We gotta get Wonder Man in on this so they can be all rowdy ‘til dawn like they used to.

Who wouldn't want to party with those guys?