John Buys Comics, August 5th Edition

The Sixth Gun No. 2

So last month when this came out I was running a bit behind, and last week when issue two came out I completely missed that fact. Well, I won't be dropping the ball on one of the best series of the year any longer, no sir!

So: this is (so far) the story of a gun, one of a set of six, that is in the possession of a preacher's daughter. The former owner of the gun, Confederate General Oliander Bedford Hume, is dead and shackled to his casket by chains of cold iron, yet he is pursuing her, aided by the holders of the other five: his wife and four Apocalypse-themed riders. Her only ally in trying to escape the grim fate that Hume has planned for her is Drake Sinclair, a thoroughly unscrupulous and quite mysterious rogue.

Here are the four excellent things about this series: One and Two: the writing and art. Both are top-notch. The book is a joy to look at and reads like nobody's business. Three: it manages to capture the same sense of amorality that the Old West of, say, Sergio Leone has. It is a terrible place, where evil and atrocity can really shine.

Fourth: this is one of the few places that I've really ever seen magic and the occult modernized successfully. Usually, were one to read a tale involving cowboys fighting over a magic artifact then that object would be the Spear of Destiny or something else form long ago. The Hell-forged revolvers and oracular lynching victims of The Sixth Gun are highly satisfying extensions of the mythologies of the past into the present (well, almost. In geologic terms). Why shouldn't the mystical grow and change along with everything else, after all?

Just plain great, on all fronts.

Warlord of Io

I love James Turner's comics, and not just because I get to talk about vector graphics every time another one comes out (honestly, I know nothing about 'em. I just like writing "vector graphics" - the words roll off the typing fingers).  

If you've been reading my blatherings about comics for long enough then you may recall that Warlord of Io had a single issue maybe a year ago and then moved online. Diamond's distribution policies dictated that it wasn't getting ordered in sufficient quantities, so pfft, no more issues for me. Needless to say, I was delighted to see this collection on the shelf yesterday. 

As for the plot: the titular Warlord is Zing, twentysomething video game aficionado and aspiring rock god, who inherits the throne of the Jovian satellite Io when his father abruptly retires. Zing is swiftly overthrown by a military junta and must balance his aspirations, the good of his people and the demands of ladyfriend Moxy Comet as he flees for his life. 

Setting this thing in the far future and also in orbit around Jupiter is the perfect showcase for Turner's inventiveness - I think that this book might actually include more crazy monster designs than the last Rex Libris trade, which was quite literally about crazy monsters being everywhere. Not that this is an example of craziness at the expense of plot - Io is a lovely little character piece that just happens to have weirdo aliens on every page. Hooray!

Brain Camp

I've managed my time poorly yet again. In keeping with my poorly-thought-out policy of reading books after floppies, I just finished this and it's late at night. Trust me, I would go on but I need sleep. Here are the highlights:

1. Faith Erin Hicks excels at drawing young people in strange situations. Here we have a book about science fictional weirdness at a summer camp. Predictably, it is great-looking.

2. Susan Kim and Laurence Klaven: I hadn't read them before, though I may now have to go back and pick up City of Spies. Again: young people in weird situations. Plucky youths against adult conspiracy! There's a reason I read so many books that could be described in those terms whilst I was growing up and that reason is that done well they equal pure entertainment.

To summarize: GOOD BOOK. And Hicks' art looks delightful in colour.

Kill Shakespeare No. 4

Another  highly entertaining issue! This is the one, in fact, that out-Shakespeare nerded me - I had to look up a couple of the minor characters. In my defence, I was at my most slackerly the year that I was supposedly reading all of the plays. Wait, that's not really much of a defence, is it? In any case: good job.

BUT.

I have one major problem with this issue, and since I didn't notice it earlier it's probably some form of editorial oversight or the like. There's a lot of olde timey English being spoken here, which is appropriate for something set not just in Shakespearian England but in Shakespeare itself, but there are some major grammatical problems here. Thee, thou and thy are not interchangeable! Oh, the madness!

Writers of the world: I will check your Elizabethan English FOR FREE at any time, it drives me so nuts.

Superman: The Last Family of Krypton No. 1 - Hey, Elseworlds is back! Hooray! And this is a lovely little story about Jor-El and Lara coming to Earth with their kid! Yay! And of course everything is going to go horribly wrong next issue! Yay!

Sparta, USA No. 6 - Yet another Wildstorm series ends. Will they step up with a new crazy yarn for me to read? Who knows? What I do know is that I was taken off-guard by the end of this one. Hooray for surprises!

Hellboy: The Storm No. 2 - I know that I go on and on about Hellboy and its sibling titles, or at least heavily imply that I could go on and on,  but hot damn. Stuff from maybe a decade ago is paying off in this title right now. There is possibly nothing else out there that encompasses both continuity and progress quite like these series do. Okay, there probably is, but I like this better.

Baltimore: The Plague Ships No. 1 - And speaking of Mike Mignola... I see now that I should never have skipped the Baltimore illustrated novel when it came out. Oh for both the money and time to read everything I want to! But enough whining: whether I have context or not the fact remains that a vampire gets harpooned in this book and that that is never not awesome.

This Is Completely Off-Topic

I mention on my bio page that I sometimes make video games with my old friend/ former blog- and room-mate Paul, and that we start a lot of projects but never really finish them. We work in fits and starts, thanks to the fact that we both have jobs and girlfriends and other hobbies, and frequently enough time will elapse between brainstorming sessions that we completely lose the thread, or rethink what we want to accomplish or something – it’s very sad, I know.

Anyway, it happened again not too long ago. Boarding Party, the game that we’d been noodling along on for more than a year and a half, died a quiet death. This time, though, I’d created a lot more art and story than usual and though it is comforting to know that I’ll never need to make a message board avatar again if I don't want to, I reckon that I might as well put them up here as store them in a series of hard drives until I accidentally delete them in a fit of misplaced spring cleaning.

Here's the setting, as pitched to the friends that I like to run ideas by to make sure that they're not completely stupid: "It's the far, far future. Like, way far. Humanity has spread across the stars in a mass, unified diaspora, contacting aliens and terraforming and settling and so forth. And then maybe there was a war or a plague or a lapse into decadence, but whatever Empire or Republic or what have you was keeping everything together fell apart and all of the human worlds were mostly on their own. Some reverted to barbarism and some kept on in pretty much the same fashion but most ended up somewhere in between.

The game takes place some time later - solar systems are now akin to island nations trading with each other across the void of space. There are coalitions and warlords and colonies and the beginning of a spaceborne version of the British Empire sending ships back and forth and so of course there are privateers and pirates preying upon them. Technology is drawn from a multitude of worlds and is jury-rigged and kept up with spit and luck and kind of evens out into a high-tech steampunk kind of aesthetic."

The players each would have controlled a pirate captain and their crew in a turn-based battle, drawing units from a wide variety of worlds with an enormous diversity of cultures. And here they are!

I'm going to just put up the images - no sense in making this vanity post too long. Hover your mouse over the little guys if you want to learn more about what I consider to be fascinating backstory.

FLAMBEAUX

 

THE SCOUT

KNIFEMURDERER

FATBOY and BOXHEADS

VACUUMBOY

BEASTMASTER

 

... AND FRIENDS 

BOARDING PARTIER

CAPTAIN FAT

ENGINEER

COMBAT BLOB

CAPTAIN DEVASTATION

AUTOMANTID

MOUSTACHE SOLDIER

And that is that. I guess that I should mention that all of this is (c) Johnathan Munroe, 2010, in the unlikely event that we get around to using it somewhere, someday. Because it is!

Thanks for validating me!

Downe By Law

 Some days, I want to read a comic book that makes me consider new ideas, or one that stretches the boundaries of the medium’s possibilities. Other days, I just want to read a comic where a guy punches another guy’s head off, and said displaced cranium is stuck on the first guy’s fist for the duration of the comic. Image’s new one-shot Officer Downe was made for just those kinds of days.

 Aimed squarely at fans of hyper-violent comics in the vein of Miller and Darrow’s Hard Boiled, Joe Casey and Chris Burnham’s Officer Downe has a pretty simple concept. In a cartoony-futuristic Los Angeles ruled by animal-headed gangsters and depraved evil geniuses, Officer Terrence Downe is the last line of defense for ordinary citizens. A nigh-indestructible supercop of Hulk-like proportions, Downe uses a combination of foolishly huge guns and freakishly large fists to mow down armies of jumpsuited ninjas and rampaging convicts. When Downe inevitably suffers enough catastrophic damage to his frame that he finally drops dead in a bloody, dismembered heap, his fellow officers recover his remains and the combined psychic might of 100 telekinetic sensitives is used to resurrect him so he can do it all over again. For about 48 of the most violent pages I’ve ever seen, that’s pretty much it. Definitely not for the faint of heart, to put it mildly.

 I keep giving scripter Joe Casey a shot with his various projects over the years, and I keep just not quite clicking with his work (I thought if anything the guy wrote did it for me, his ‘70s Kirby riff Godland would be the book, but strangely I couldn’t get into it). However, the straight-ahead high concept approach of Officer Downe did the trick this time. Chris Burnham’s unbelievably gory artwork helps a lot—clearly, this guy has been studying the combination of operatically-choregraphed mayhem, microscopic attention to detail, and over-the-top ultraviolence that has made Geof Darrow and Frank Quitely superstars. Marc Letzmann’s lively colour palette tops the whole package off nicely. Once again, though, and I can’t stress this enough—this book is not for the squeamish. It contains enough decapitiations, defenestrations, and peeled-off faces to make RoboCop director Paul Verhoeven turn away in disgust.

 A word on the format as well—I really appreciated that Officer Downe was a comic book, a double-sized, glossy-papered, done-in-one affair that isn’t squarebound, or part of a series, or likely to make its way into another collection of some sort (trade-waiting will avail you naught here). For five bucks, you get a substantial, self-contained read with a couple of extras thrown in for good measure (an interview with Casey, and a look at some of Burnham’s concept art). If you’ve ever enjoyed the irresponsible antics of proto-fascist comic book thugs like Judge Dredd or Marshal Law, you’ll be happy that Officer Downe is out there. 

Archie Sunday: Archie fucks up another crossword puzzle

 

No, Archie. No. Unless the New York Times is really losing it.

The Unfunnies: Peg Hits the Beach

Peg is one of those DC characters who lurked in the interstices for years, starring in a half- or one-page gag every couple of issues. She's a typical blonde teen girl who occupies a world in which all of the females under a certain age have either one giant tooth or a portal to a realm of pure radiance situated in the middle of their faces.

This comic is of course completely mystifying to one such as myself who hates and fears the awesome cancer-spewing might of the sun, but I suspect that the saga of a girl who sets out to get a sun burn in time for the big dance and then can't go to the big dance because of her sun burn might have been a head-scretcher in even the most heliophilic of eras.

(This one's from Superboy No. 15)

Will You Live To See The "Dawn Of The Gearheads"?

 I didn’t really know how I felt the first time I finished reading the first issue of Scott Morse’s new IDW series Strange Science Fantasy, only that I’d liked it a lot. A second read-through convinced me that I loved it. It feels less like a comic than a piece of unique art that just happens to be in the form of a comic book, if that doesn’t sound too pretentious or off-putting. I’m not saying it’s for everybody—I can almost imagine that, had I been in a different mood when I read it, I might not have cared for it at all—but it most definitely felt like something deeply felt and weirdly personal that had been successfully married to a particular pop sensibility. If that’s not art, then I’m not sure that I know what art is.

 

The first issue of this six-part mini reads like Rebel Without a Cause meets The Road Warrior, as directed by a coked-up Ralph Bakshi and then adapted into an E.C. science fiction comic. In a dystopian drag-racing-obsessed world, a mortally injured gearhead is reborn as The Headlight, an inspiring figure and leader of hot-rodders whose face has been replaced with a helmeted porthole of blazing light. The Headlight and his followers seek to smash the old order and create a new society, enlisting the aid of some technologically tricked-out animals like the “V-Eighp”. Hints of a larger metaphor appear, then are dismissed just as quickly—a guy dressed like a superhero is run down at one point, and The Headlight deals some righteous justice to “the fat cats, those who dined on the muscles of the dreamers”. These blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em asides linger in your consciousness just enough to give the reader a taste of the artist’s own ideas about this stuff, without hanging around long enough to belabor the point.

 

And the art! Oh man, this is one crazy-looking, gorgeous book. Morse’s animation background informs every panel of this book, from the rubbery forms of both the gearheads and their hot rods, to the shocking vibrancy of the colour scheme. There’s even a one-page strip by Paul Pope! On both a narrative level and a visual level, Strange Science Fantasy is a comic that you experience more than you read. You can’t really sit and think about the story or the characters, because, well, there sort of aren’t any. It’s more like listening to a really great song with totally bizarre lyrics, that you then listen to a few more times trying to figure out just what the hell the songwriter is trying to say. You just don’t know why, but you just know you like it. Or you don’t, as the case may be. Like I said at the top, it’s not for everybody, but it was kind of just what I needed at just the right time, I guess. Does that make sense?