Sean Maher presents The Zealot's Lore

The King is dead, long live the King.

2005-07-19T17:53:00.000-07:00

The End Is Near

2005-07-15T08:44:00.000-07:00

Jason Rodriguez is Cool

2005-07-05T16:40:00.000-07:00

Jason Rodriguez, who writes my bar-none favorite blog over at The Moose In The Closet and works as an editor for Hoarse And Buggy (of Elk's Run and Western Tales of Terror fame), asked me to write a story for him so he could go on vacation. That lazy bastard!

So I wrote one of my favorites, about the guy who turned me into a miscreant. Take a look. You can even check out Jason suspecting me of suckupery and trying to reassure everybody that having a girlfriend means I'm not gay.

No, Jason's never been to San Francisco, so he doesn't know any better.

Review: Jeffrey Brown's Any Easy Intimacy

2005-06-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

I've got a new review up at Bookshelf Comics, for Jeffrey Brown's latest, Any Easy Intimacy (a.k.a. AEIOU). Here's a little piece of it:

Many of these scenes are touching, or interesting, or discreet. On an early date, Brown and Sophia stop outside a store and look into the window – Brown exclaims, “Look at all the cool spatulas!” and the two share a smiling moment after the girl laughs. It’s odd, and quiet, and affecting. One of the things that makes romance really believable is when two folks who normally feel a bit strange suddenly find themselves comfortable when in each other’s company – this scene convincingly conveys that experience in two pages, a fine example of combining efficiency with subtlety.

The full review is at the link. While you're there, you can check out our new interview with Tom Beland of True Story Swear To God fame and acclaim, and if you check out the "Party Of Five" feature you'll find a brief essay from Mr. James Sime, whose brilliant Isotope - The Comic Book Lounge reopened at incredible new digs last night.

Review: Zombie Tales #1

2005-06-29T09:54:00.000-07:00

Zombie Tales #1 is released today by BOOM! Studios and Atomeka, an anthology volume collecting five short zombie-themed stories and the first chapter of a longer tale.

It features an impressive line-up of talent, including Mark Waid, Keith Giffen and Ron Lim (one of my favorites since his days on Silver Surfer), and a cover by the brilliant Dave (100 Bullets) Johnson.

But me, I’m pretty well zombie-d out these days, y’know? Seems like everywhere I turn somebody’s got their own damn zombie story.

What redeems this collection for me, then, is the humor. These stories are often grotesque and nihilistic, as living dead stories should always be, but there’s also an irreverent through line of comedy that freshens the book up and makes it worth reading.

“I, Zombie” by Andrew Cosby and Keith Giffen (he draws, too?) is about a zombie named Ted trying to find some food. The stilted “undead” narration plays a familiar card (“aren’t stupid people funny?”) but with a macabre twist and a couple pretty decent gags; there’s something surreal about watching a zombie smash his alarm clock in a surprised rage that I can’t quite put my finger on, but it made me smile. After a brief tour of the post-apocalypse, Ted ends up with the key to the apocalypse in his arms – it’s the only “To Be Continued” in the collection, but it’s a fun story and I’d be happy to see more of it. I was also surprised by how much I liked Giffen's artwork. I have a feeling his artistic chops are well known and I was just in the dark until now, but you can't blame a guy for learning, can ya?

“Severance” by Mike Nelson and Joe Abraham is a fun piece that really shows off what you can do with story density. We’re brought into the story halfway through an action scene, as things have gone wrong in the lab where a desperate scientist is researching a cure to the zombie disease so he can bring back his son. The tale jumps from plot point to plot point at a sprint, but because these are all familiar characters and scenarios it’s easy to follow – really, this kind of thing would blow me away if it took a longer format but maintained the density. It’s the sort of thing I hear Grant Morrison getting credit for all the time but this is much clearer, more direct storytelling. Again, there’s an undercurrent of smirking, cruel humor to the tale that doesn’t quite bubble to the surface but keeps things brisk and fun.

“Daddy Smells Different” by John Rogers and Andy Kuhn is basically a punchline tale, and a bit obvious at that, but I won’t spoil it for you. Not the best thing here, but it does what it intends to and Kuhn’s artwork is lovely.

“For Pete’s Sake” by Johanna Stokes and J.K. Woodward is about a lonely woman whose husband has become a zombie. She’s started a new sort of life for herself in the post-apocalypse and keeps her husband on a chain in their home. Again, it’s the underlying humor that makes this work – the dramatics of her loneliness didn’t really grab me, but the scene in which she prepares his dinner, for example, had some nice grossout laughs.

“If You’re So Smart” by Mark Waid and Carlos Magno is really clever – this and “Severance” are my favorite tales from the book. The idea of taking a test to see how well you’d survive in a world of zombies is funny and starts the reader trying to think of what sorts of questions should be on the test. The ones that Waid comes up with are all pretty funny, and the twist at the end is sick and clever. Magno also deserves credit for keeping things visually interesting, especially since the bulk of this short is just a girl sitting at a desk taking a test – I have to imagine that was a bit of a challenge, but this reads very smoothly without feeling flat. Great work.

“Dead Meat” by Keith Giffen and Ron Lim is the most conventional zombie tale of the bunch – my least favorite in terms of plot and script, especially since we come in after all the action has taken place – but this was made up for (at least for me) by the always-gorgeous Ron Lim artwork. I’ve always loved the way this guy draws monsters, so a zombie tale is a good fit for him. It’s not the flashiest script, doesn’t really let him show off the way Jim Starlin used to, but it’s still really nice to see his work again.

At 48 pages for $6.99, the book may seem a bit prohibitively expensive; the price-per-page isn’t any worse than if you’d bought two single issues of a 22-page comic, and you get a nice square-binding into the deal, but my feeling is that anthologies should offer a better price point than other books, being the gamble that they usually are. The stories here maintain a relatively high standard of quality, which helps, and some “big name” talent, which helps more - but I'm a bit of a price-watcher, so it still makes this more difficult to recommend than if it was $5. It's worth at least picking this up and flipping through - I enjoyed it quite a bit more than I expected to.

I’ve seen several reviews pop up over the last few days; if you’re interested, take a look at what Andrew Wickliffe had to say at The Stop Button, or check out the reviews from Adam Lawrence, Dan MacLeod and "The Consumer" Joe Rivera, all at the Isotope Virtual Lounge. Oh, and Randy Lander taken a look too, over on The Fourth Rail. Jesus, this book's getting a lot of press!

Cool indie comics in September

2005-06-27T16:31:00.000-07:00

Take a look at this thread I started over on MillarWorld.

I wanted those publishers in the second half of the Previews magazine to get a little love. There's a lot of wonderful stuff that comes out of that bubbling cauldron of independent publishing, and it's always easy to miss a quality project in the roughage between Brian Pulido variant covers and Shonen Jump.

So I took a look at the Previews text file (September edition available here) and did some cherry picking. Turns out I've got plenty of company - a lot of people are calling out a lot of interesting books, and if you're looking for something new you could do a lot worse than stop by.

We even have Larry Young stopping by and ringing Pavlov's bell.

Marvel's new $1 flipbooks - a couple questions

2005-06-22T15:52:00.000-07:00

This is from my response to a great thread started by James Sime over on the IsoLounge, about the new, cheap Marvel flip-books.

When I was getting into comics (around age 8-11), I didn't read any of the "old" stuff. I read what was new at the time; PAD's Incredible Hulk, McFarlane's and Larsen's Spidey stuff, Silvestri's Wolverine, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - these were my bread and butter.

If you'd handed me a Stan Lee comic, I don't know how I would have responded. Never happened, so I don't know. Could have been anything from "WOW, this is awesome!" to "Jeez, this is campy and stupid. I'm gonna go watch Tiny Toons."

Much as we may appreciate Jack Kirby's art style now, to a pre-teen, it's all about Rob Liefeld, y'know?

So I'm curious if anyone has actually witnessed or recorded how kids respond to comics that are 40+ years old.

Don't get me wrong - I think this is an awesome move on Marvel's part, and I want nothing more than for these kinds of efforts to succeed and grow - but I'm unsure of the chosen material. After all, if they try this, and it flops because the kids aren't excited by Reed Richards' imperative mission to beat the commies in the space race, that's money that Marvel's lost on a "Hey Kids! Comics!' initiative without seeing any return. Which, if I were running the place, would make me feel pretty shy about doing something similar again.

Follow-up question: Any idea why they chose the material they did? Would it have cost a lot more to use, say, Jim Lee's X-Men run?

To answer my own question: It seems likely that comics this cheap are to Marvel as newspapers are to their publishers. That is, the cover price is so low that every sale represents a loss to the publisher, because that price is actually lower than the cost of production. In newspapers, this is seen as a portal to increased revenue from ad sales - "Hey, Nike - we've got 500,000 people reading our newspaper. Wanna take out a $10,000 ad?" But in this case, if Marvel used a more contemporary, popular comic, a huge portion of the sales would likely be existing readers, picking up a little piece of their youth on the cheap. So Marvel would not only be taking a loss (from all those sales to fanboys) without reaching their intended audience (the kiddies), they'd also be cannibalizing their own sales of things like the Spider-man Visionaries: Todd McFarlane trade sales - because if you could get two of those issues for a buck, why shell out a Jackson for nine issues?

Tough situation. At least they're not responding with inaction. Nice to see a little chutzpah in the face of a challenge.

Follow-up Review: Hero Camp #2

2005-06-21T18:17:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago I reviewed Hero Camp #1 and made some guesses about how issue #2 would work out for me. I enjoyed the clever, playful character designs from Robbi Rodriguez, and I liked the silly, almost vaudevillian humor from Greg Thompson’s script; my main gripe, on the other hand, was with Thompson’s hints that this would become a more serious story, a coming of age tale that I thought didn’t fit the tone and style of the book. Ultimately I decided it was worth the gamble to pick up Hero Camp #2.

It’s good news, today: Thompson must have gotten my letters and had Rodriguez bang out some new art mighty fast, because this second issue does exactly what I thought it should, and surprises me a little bit at the same time.

The first half of this issue is a really entertaining tour through the world of Hero Camp, presented as Our Hero, Eric, strolls around the campgrounds on a lazy Saturday, running into friends and seeing what they’re up to. I’ve already talked about how much I like Rodriguez’ entertaining character designs, but the spotlight shifts here as Thompson gets to show off his own clever sense of humor through several snapshot character moments. These scenes are breezy and whimsical, and when the plot (such as it is) kicks in halfway through, it feels like the more perilous elements of the story are meshing better with the book’s tone than last time around – this is probably because of three great new characters that are both well-written and wonderfully designed and rendered. They’re all basically the same character, but their presence on the page is charismatic and funny.

The back-up story was the strongest element in the first issue, but I think it veers off a little too much this time. I like the bits where the super-kids are talking about their childhood dreams, what they wanted to be before the super-hero path became clear. When the circle comes around to Eric, and he says he wants to be a writer – I’m sorry, no. I’ve read that scene, heard that monologue, and listened to that song a hundred times already. Hell, Neil Simon writes it in every single play. It’s a sweet scene, clearly intended to communicate Thompson’s passion for his craft and its possibilities, but it’s not nearly as imaginative a moment as I now know he’s capable of.

This is a hard series to pin down, and I’m surprised to find that out. Hearing the concept and reading the first issue made this seem like a fairly obvious book to me – Misunderstood Kid Finally Comes Out Of His Shell, right? – but at this point I don’t know where the series is going. This issue tells a self-contained story, which is pretty unusual in a four-issue mini with a built-in character arc in the premise. And where usually by this point in a miniseries the introduction of characters and ideas would have slowed down, if anything it feels like the new stuff is accelerating. It leaves me feeling optimistic about the rest of the series, hoping Thompson’s got the guts to just keep going whole hog and slamming out new stuff with abandon. This series doesn’t need a story, exactly; the story’s in the premise, and it’s been done – it should be the road, not the car. Right now I’m getting the idea that Thompson understands that, and I’m looking forward to finding out if I’m right.

Holy Crap

2005-06-20T17:32:00.000-07:00

Batman Begins was awesome.

I mean, I knew the cast was great, and it had one of the best new directors from the last ten years, and it was picking up elements from the greatest Batman story ever (Year One, natch), but I had no idea that:

Bruce Wayne's father was an interesting, powerful character with the charisma to effectively haunt Bruce as an adult.
There's a middle ground between Dopey Slam-Whiz Batman and All Knowing Asshole Batman? He's a complex character? No way!
Ra's Al Ghul lived in such stunning scenery - man, talk about evocative settings.
Liam Neeson was so goddamn amazing as a screen presence (just kidding, I did know that).
The script would be so sharp - I mean, a few corny one-liners aside (It's not who you are inside, it's what you do that matters...), this was really killer dialogue. It really hit home when Liam Neeson explained who's fault the death of Bruce's parents was - what a scene.
Michael Caine is funny as hell.
The Batmobile didn't suck, and actually worked in the movie a lot better than I'd guessed from the promo stills.
"Christian Bale is one hot hunk of man." I put that in quotes so you'll believe me when I say that Molly said that, not me. But I can't disagree with her. Jesus, now that's an action movie physique.

Loved it. I don't think a comparison between this and Tim Burton's original works very well, because they try to do very different things - Burton's was a fantastical legend, and this was a dark character study. I loved both.

Running Wild

2005-06-17T16:24:00.000-07:00

I know I've been very bad this week. Please forgive. I'm in the middle of moving (into a lovely flat with the missus, which we're thrilled about) and life is hectic.

As an apology, I offer the comics-reflecting-life-reflecting-comics moment of the year:

Presto change-o!

I'll be back with my thoughts on Hero Camp #2 soon as I can manage it. Did it follow through on the strengths I saw in issue #1? Did it succumb to the aspects I didn't like as much?

Stay tuned to find out.

The Black Diamond

2005-06-13T17:42:00.000-07:00

I picked up an advance copy of The Black Diamond: On Ramp at the Isotope last week (it's released everywhere else on this coming Wednesday), which features a full issue's worth of teaser story to Larry Young's upcoming six-issue miniseries with artist Join Proctor, as well as a six-page preview of the Smoke And Guns OGN that will destroy us all.

Having read a few of Larry Young's books in the last couple years, I've come to expect two things from him.

First, an idea that delicately balances crazy imagination (I would have never thought of that!) with a broadly appealing, everybody-loves-a-good-action-flick angle (How come I didn't think of that?). The Black Diamond is full of car chase scenes and explosions and big guns - well, of course it is. But guess what? It all happens on an eight-lane transcontinental highway built 150 feet in the air and designated specifically for the kind of lawless apeshit that decent Americans don't want on their drive to work.

The other thing I expect from Young is a little meta-commentary, a little something that rises above the story and speaks directly to the reader. We get that here, too, in an interesting discussion of stories themselves. How many stories are there? I seem to remember, a long time ago, that some jerk told me there were only forty-two stories or something like that, though I never found out what those forty-two were.

It's a good thing I saved my time, because Young boils it down quite a bit more: there's "Just trying to get home" and there's "Stranger comes to town," and everything else is a variation on the theme.

See, that was compelling enough, because it got me thinking about a lot of stories and whether they fit into either category, but then Young pulls it down to just one. It's a thoughtful point that left me thinking, but without weighing the story down; no, the point is made while one character is loading a shotgun, and a scant four pages later we're treated to some really excellent explodo.

Which brings me to the artwork. This is the first thing I've seen by Jon Proctor, and the first color book from AiT/Planet Lar, and if this is any indication I hope I'll see plenty more of both.

Proctor's pencils are interesting by themselves - his layouts are manic, explosive affairs, instantly developing the frantic world of the story - but the real shining star here is the coloring. The palettes he uses here are really stunning, and they're richly reproduced; ripe, fat shades. Each page is like a meal.

On top of this, the Smoke And Guns preview is unbelievably gorgeous, and writer Kirsten Baldock has included a one-page "journal entry" detailing a typical night as a cigarette girl; this is really cool, because in the comic we'll be seeing an exaggerated, mob-scene version of the cigarette girl lifestyle, and it's fun to read that with the context of what work is actually like for these fine ladies.

Jesus, there's more here, and there's plenty more to say about Smoke And Guns, but I'm starving to death and I've got to do some more work on my upcoming move into a new home with Molly.

You'll do fine finding a copy of this to read for yourself, anyway. Because AiT/Planet Lar is shipping a bunch of extra copies to every retailer who ordered it. For free. Seriously. I read it here. Now that's pimping out your comics.

Review: Age of Bronze, volume 2 - SACRIFICE

2005-06-09T09:21:00.000-07:00

I've got a review of the absolutely amazing second volume of Eric Shanower's Trojan War epic, Age of Bronze, up at Bookshelf Comics today. Have a look and let me know what you thought; after reading this trade, I ended up picking up the most recent issue of AoB (#20) yesterday, as well, so I'll try and come back with some thoughts on it in the next few days.

Also got an advance copy of the Black Diamond / Smoke And Guns preview for the upcoming AiT/Planet Lar books (care of the Isotope), and it looks awesome. I'll come back with some thoughts when I've had the time to pour over it.

Review: Hero Camp #1

2005-06-07T18:48:00.000-07:00

Hero Camp was on my radar for a long time before the first issue came out a couple weeks ago, because writer Greg Thompson is a regular “face” over on MillarWorld and made sure to keep the book’s title on everybody’s minds. It’s a book I’ve been a bit anxious to read, honestly, because while Thompson’s online persona is charmingly unaffected and intelligent, the concept of the book doesn’t make it sound like my cup of tea.

See, while the last few years have really opened my eyes to how incredible comics can be, and I’ve been getting more and more excited about the medium, I’ve also been getting increasingly blasé when it comes to superhero books in particular. I don’t begrudge the genre its sales dominance in the industry, and I think it’s got a lot of great stories left to tell, but right now (with a few exceptions, like Invincible, Captain America and Supreme Power) I’m just not getting excited about superheroes. The idea of a summer camp for superpowered teenagers sound cute, but I wondered if it was just the kind of thing that was gonna leave me flat no matter how good it was.

So, does Hero Camp buck the trend?

There’s a lot here to like. Robbi Rodriguez’s character designs are really fun and distinctive for the most part, reminding me in some spots of Mike Allred’s work on X-Statix while showing us some of his own unique flavor with the issue’s villains and, surprisingly, with the inevitable standard big bruiser character (a la The Hulk), a kid named Block. I’d have guess this would be the hardest character to make distinct, since there’s such a long list of similar brutes. Perhaps it’s that challenge that pushed Rodriguez to bring his A-game to the character; whatever it was, he’s got a fun look, and when he first appeared in the issue I hoped he’d be getting some decent “face time” in the series.

I got my wish, because Block gets his own back-up story in the closing pages of the issue. It’s a hammy scene with a classic vaudeville joke that could easily slide down the line into cliché, but it plays well. Thompson’s dialogue is “comic booky” enough that I approach the story with different expectations, wanting something lighthearted and silly, and that’s exactly what I’m served.

There are also a number of fun tweaks of dialogue throughout the issue; the teenage boy superhero flying right behind a supergirl and exclaiming to his friend, “Dude! You can see straight up her skirt!” rings true and plays it with just enough restrained class to keep it cute.

Here’s the thing, though. There’s a limit to the effectiveness of cute and restrained, and it comes when we get to the serious character stuff. Our Hero, a boy named Eric, is the son of two famous superheroes and has shown no sign of powers, yet is believed to “secretly” be the most powerful kid in camp. While there are a number of obvious ways this could play out (he discovers his powers at the key moment, he finds a way to make a meaningful contribution without powers, etc.), this would still work if the character’s response to his situation was a little more personal, a little more specific to himself as a character. But as a result of the cute, iconic charm of the book’s style, he’s given nearly nothing to make him that specific a person; he’s got all the usual teenage boy trappings, like a loyal dog and a girl to crush on and so on, but that’s as far as it goes.

The idea here, I have to guess, is to appeal to a broader audience. Tom Petty once said he wrote lyrics by taking a personal story and removing detail after detail until anyone could see themselves in the song. There’s something to be said for that, and I think Thompson is employing a similar tactic here. But for me, he goes just a little too far with it. There’s some entertaining mystery behind the true nature of Eric’s powers, and the relationship between the lead villainess and one of Eric’s friends, but I’m not intrigued enough by either character to really have that hook in me that I need. It could also well be that the character arc Eric is facing is just not one that resonates with me; I learned long ago that my parents' confident expectations in me weren't important in defining myself, that just "being me" was enough for the three of us, and I can't help suspecting that Eric will learn this lesson in a friendly, affirming way that'll simultaneously comfort and tire me.

Those who are big fans of old school four-color super-hero books will find plenty to like here, but I’ll have to see the next issue to make a decision; if Block takes on a bigger role, or the villains do some more funny stuff, or the vaudeville angle gets a little thicker in the scripting – all of which show potential in this issue – I’ll be in. If it looks like this is shaping up to be a coming of age story, I’ll probably pass, because that kind of stuff just doesn’t often speak to me anymore.

Review: True Story, Swear To God volume 2

2005-06-01T16:42:00.000-07:00

I've got a review for True Story, Swear To God volume 2: This One Goes To 11 up on Bookshelf Comics. Take a look, I thought this was a really great book and it was fun to write about why.

Review: Jeremy Tinder mini-comics

2005-05-31T13:42:00.000-07:00

At last year’s Alternative Press Expo (APE), one of my favorite experiences was going to Jeremy Tinder’s table. It was the first one I hit, right inside the door and up the stairs, and I picked up one of his mini-comics and started reading. It was a short one, as all his comics are, and I loved it. I ended up getting, if I remember right, six mini-comics and a sketch of Blanka from Street Fighter II for five bucks. Nice!

This year, Tinder had upgraded. All his comics were two bucks, and while they weren’t any longer, they were printed with better cover stock. Behind him, mounted on the wall, were 50-some 4” x 6” paintings he had made especially for the show. The package deal this time around was $25 for all ten comics and a painting, plus he threw in a sketch of Mario riding Yoshi. It was the most money I dropped at a single table this year, and now I wanna talk about the great stuff I got for my hard-earned dough. Here are some samples of his paintings - I nabbed the one on the bottom right.

A word about Tinder’s style before I go book-by-book: his comics are generally 5 to 10 pages, drawn and written in a simple, crude style that should appeal to all the folks who tell me Craig Thompson and James Kochalka are great comics artists. While I’ve been entertained by Goodbye, Chunky Rice and Monkey vs. Robot, I think this style is best suited to the distilled whiskey shots Tinder provides. You can only play the crude-n-cute card for so long at a time before it begins to feel like an affectation, and Tinder strikes a perfect pitch that always leaves me both satisfied and hungry for more – and where Thompson and Kochalka both have a “deeper meaning” thing going on in their long-form books, these comics are lighter and funnier, a bit like Jeffrey Brown’s Miniature Sulk, which I recently reviewed here, and the moments of insight are more low key. While Tinder plays in an aesthetic sandbox similar to the folks I’ve mentioned, he definitely has his own voice, and it’s funny, sweet and pretty bizarre.

A Very Special Christmas Comic 2 is a good example; it’s the sequel to last year’s holiday Shaq adventure, though we go Shaqless this time around and instead get a zombie Santa. That’s right, a couple of kids find Santa dead in an alley and magically bring him to life. The result is sort of a creepy twist on the Frosty The Snowman story, and the ending made me cringe, laugh and smile in a matter of moments. Loved this.

Helmet Kid is about a young boy putting on a metal helmet and fighting crime with Kraft singles in his pockets. He’s a smartass and a doofus, and the dialogue works really well in this one. Funny as hell.

Shawn is basically a visual gag about an office employee who looks like Pac Man. Funny, quick read.

Rotten Eggs is one of those classic Kids At War In The Neighborhood stories. Tinder has a great grasp on the meaningless rage of children in groups, and this was both funny and oddly insightful without being precious.

Robots Don’t Say “I Love You” is a savage scene between a robot and his girlfriend. This was probably the meanest Tinder comic I’ve read, but it works (and cracks me up) because it’s completely ridiculous watching a human woman in a “relationship fight” with a robot.

Creepfolio: A Portfolio of Scary Drawings is exactly what it sounds like; it’s not my favorite, because I really enjoy Tinder’s writing and this is strictly an art piece, but these are indeed creepy designs and the monstrous dude in the Lindsay Lohan shirt is a classic.

4 More Years probably displays pretty accurately what last year’s election was like for a lot of people, as a group of friends sit on the couch watching the television results and cursing. I cringed at the start, as I’m generally phobic of political humor (which I find usually has no sense of humor about itself), but Tinder pulls it off with another absurd robot moment that had me laughing out loud.

What Do We Do Next? is a clever bit of self-reference, as this comic is the result of an experiment Tinder conducted with a class of high school students he teaches. Its basically a jam comic, with Tinder kicking it off with the first two pages and four of his students contributing pages that pick up where the last left off. This has limited success for me as a reader, because while some of the students’ work is clever and funny, some of it is just too crude to be clear, and one of them doesn’t seem to speak English very well. That said – how awesome is this? Jesus, I wish I’d gone to a high school where they did stuff this cool. I asked Tinder about it at APE and he said the school basically lets him teach however he wants to; hot damn!

Finally, Andy Saturday and His Dear Friend Jim in: Love/Hate is the most heartwarming of the bunch, and the most likely to appeal to those Thompson/Kochalka fans I was talking about earlier. It’s the longest story here and follows two friends through a day of misunderstandings (both angry and harmless) and realizations. None of the realizations are completely accurate, and at the end neither one of them knows what actually happened, but the resolution doesn’t suffer as a result – instead, it feels more real and resonant. It’s rare that two people completely understand one another, but that doesn’t have to stand in the way of friendship. This was a sweetheart of a story, perhaps a little too saccharine for some, but in the context of the rest of these comics I thought it capped everything off really well.

Tinder’s promised me he’ll be back at APE again next year, and I can’t wait to see what he’ll have for me. I highly recommend you take the time to track him down yourself and see if these don’t appeal to you as much as they do to me. In the meantime, you can check out his website at http://www.livejournal.com/users/jeremytinder/.

Preacher and Beer (Spoilers!)

2005-05-27T13:41:00.000-07:00

“I tell ya, Molly, I’m gonna have to buy some Charlie Chaplin DVDs. I fuckin’ love that guy.”

“I don’t understand why Garth Ennis has such a problem with him.”

“You mean that scene in the bar—“

“Yeah.”

“—when Jesse and Cassidy are talking about him versus Laurel & Hardy?”

“Yeah.”

“That pissed me off, too.”

“Can I have a sip of your beer?”

“…”

“What?”

“Really? I mean sure, go ahead, but—

“Well—“

“—you’re drinking beer now?”

“Well, last night? When you were at the Isotope and I went to Zeitgeist?”

“You said that was a cool place, right?”

“It’d be right up your alley. They played Tom Waits twice in a row.”

“Hoo.”

“And it’s just the kind of place where you have to drink beer, and I think I’m starting to like it.”

“I thought you hated it.”

“I just hate it on your breath. But drinking it, I don’t know… it kinda makes you feel… healthy.”

“HOLY CRAP, you finally understand! Oh, it’s best with Guinness! You can practically feel your body thanking you when you drink it.”

“Anyway, that scene with Jesse where he’s talking about Chaplin… I mean, nine times out of ten, when he’s Setting Everybody Straight and he’s so fucking sure of himself, he’s right on.”

“Totally.”

“But that one time out of ten, he goes too far or it’s just something stupid—

“Like picking on Chaplin.”

“—like picking on Chaplin, and you start to wonder – Are you just blowing smoke up your own ass? I mean, he’s a cool role model character and everything, and you can tell Ennis sure has has a fuckin’ boner for him, but it’s just too much sometimes.”

“I’m telling you, it's Cassidy's story.”

“I know.”

“That letter he writes Jesse at the end? The P.S.?”

“I know.”

“That letter’s made me cry more than once, y’know.”

“I know.”

“And the part where Jesse takes his hand and he punches him—“

“OH, GOD!”

“—I felt like throwing up. I was physically sick.”

“I know just how you feel. It was totally… it was like you said in your blog, it was totally visceral.”

“Hey, do you still wanna do your idea?”

“You mean—“

“Yeah, the Preacher idea? Take a long weekend and some chairs and go sit in the sun with a bottle of bourbon and some ice and just read the whole series?”

“Well, I thought we could make a road trip out of it. Go somewhere like up in the mountains or something.”

“We gotta do that.”

“Soon as the weather gets better, baby, I’d love to.”

“Okay. I’m gonna go get a beer - you want one?”

“No, I just like sipping yours.”

“All right, well I better get two then. Hey, you wanna watch some Charlie Chaplin with me this weekend? Maybe The Gold Rush?”

"Sure, baby."

Interview with Elk's Run artist, Noel Tuazon

2005-05-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

Elk's Run is an incredible new series from Western Tales of Terror publisher Hoarse & Buggy. You may have read my glowing review of issue one way back when I got a hold of an advance copy; you may have seen all the amazing support this book has gotten on messageboards and from creators like Warren Ellis, Brian Michael Bendis and B. Clay Moore.

Or maybe you haven't been so lucky just yet.

If you've never heard of the series before, take a look at my review and browse around the H&B website for just a minute; this is an excellent new book that really deserves your attention. One of the selling points for me has been the incredible artwork, and that's why it was such a pleasure to be able to interview the series' artist, Mr. Noel Tuazon. Let's have a look at what he had to say.

Sean Maher: Let's start by giving our readers a little personal information. Tell me something really embarrassing about Elk's Run writer Josh Fialkov.

Noel Tuazon: Josh is a BIG fan of pan flutist, Zamfir.

SM: Now it's your turn. What about you?

NT: The most embarrassing thing about me is that I waited almost 2 hours just to get Ace Frehley's autograph.

SM: How did you become a comics artist? What drew you to work in this medium?

NT: I guess it started back in college (Erindale and Sheridan College). A friend, Dominic Bugatto, who's a wicked illustrator, introduced me to works by Jeff Jones, Mike Kaluta, Wrightson, Sienkiewicz, etc. This was kind of new to me since when I was younger I tended to care more for the characters or the book's subject matter rather than the artists of the comic books. From there I began drawing the odd strip for the college newspaper. The drawing style tended to lean more on the cartoony side. Towards the end of college I was sending samples out to editors and comic artists just to get their opinions and also hoping to get the odd assignment. Unfortunately I've yet to become a full time illustrator and still do my full time job working in a warehouse.

SM: Who's your greatest inspiration? Not your biggest influence, not the person who's work you admire or want to emulate the most. I mean the person who keeps you fired up, who fans the flames of that passion for comics. When you're feeling down and tired, the thought of them gets you back on your feet and ready to fight. We all know that comics self-publishing is full of those difficult moments, so you've got to have a secret weapon somewhere in your life. Who or what is it?

NT: What drew me to comics was that it was easier than making a movie. I guess working at a series of boring, non-art related jobs gets me still fired up when it comes to my passion for comics (and, add to that, children's books and editiorial illustration). I just don't want to end up becoming the type who does his or her 8 or 12 hour shift then goes home for a meal then down on their asses watching reality TV shows.

SM: How did you get involved in the Elk's Run project?

NT: I think it was a link on Steve Niles' web site which connected me to Hoarse and Buggy Productions. I saw their project, Western Tales of Terror, advertised and decided I should show my comic page samples in hopes that I would be able to illustrate WTOT stories. Josh saw my work and decided I would be suited for his little project, "Elk's Run".

SM: Describe your working relationship with Josh Fialkov. What's your collaborative process like?

NT: So far it's been Josh e-mailing me the scripts. I read them, draw character designs if they're needed, then it's off to doing the roughs layouts in inks. These roughs are then e-mailed off (five to six pages at a time) to Josh and Jason for evaluation. Once they're approved, it's off to the good paper (Bristol) for the final version.

SM: What can readers find in Elk's Run that they can't find anywhere else?

NT: Readers of "Elk's Run" will find no silicone breasted women.

SM: What do you think is special about the book?

NT: What's special about the book is that its "heroes" and "monsters" are not in costumes but rather in everyday clothing and settings. Plus, of course, no silicone breasted women.

SM: Is Elk's Run your first professional work?

NT: My first professional work was actually in a Cerebus reprint in 1989, which featured single page comics as backups. Other works include the two issue "Arianne" (written by Rafael Nieves) for Slave Labor and later reprinted by Moonstone Books and some anthologies (Taboo Especial, Dennis Eichorn's Real Stuff, Reactor Girl, Drawing the Line, Frecklebean Comics, Fleshrot 2, and Fleshrot Halloween Special). So, it's been off and on between me and comics within the last 16 years.

SM: What's your "day job"? How do you pay the bills while you're fighting the good fight and making comics? How do you balance the two?

NT: My day job is as a shipper and receiver for a small bridal gown company and the only art related full time job I've ever had was doing storyboard revisions for an animated company here in Toronto called Nelvana. I manage to balance the the day job and illustration by dedicating about an hour or two on the comics during the weeknights and five hours or so on weekends.

SM: Describe your process, and get into some detail for our aspiring-comics-genius readers. Everybody's got a technique that works best for them, a pattern they work with; what's yours?

NT: The technique I employ when starting on the final art is roughing out the pencils with blue non-photo pencil including the panel borders themselves. Then I straighten the borders with a ruler before going over them with a thick marker. Sometimes I'll even start inking images in the panels before inking the borders. I should note that I rarely draw tight pencils but just go straight into the blue pencils.

SM: What have been your most important resources as an independent comics artist? Influential books, sources of information, mentors, materials - what could you not do this job without?

NT: For influence and inspiration, I've looked at the works of Jeffrey Jones, early Wrightson, Kaluta, Mazzuchelli, and now within the last two to three years it's been EC reprints featuring artists such as Wally Wood, Al Williamson, Frank Frazetta, etc.. Additional books include ones on James Montgomery Flagg, Charles Dana Gibson, Andrew Loomis' instructional drawing books, and, last but not least, the drawing instructors at this small animation school in Toronto called Studio M.

SM: What is the most important lesson you'd like to pass on to other independent artists, based on your experience thus far?

NT: The most important lesson is to probably expect to do some projects for small wages or even for free. Also, keep practicing on your drawing skills even if it's only for a few hours or minutes per day. Keep away from manga!

SM: Do you have any other projects lined up after ER? If not, what kind of material would you LIKE to work on?

NT: No projects lined up for now after ER's run but I do have an illustrated story appearing in one of Graphic Classics' anthologies (Adventure Classics: Graphic Classics Volume Twelve) sometime in July. It's an adaptation of a Damon Runyon story.

SM: What is your greatest ambition in comics?

NT: My greatest in ambition in comics is to draw anything from weird fiction to even superheroes.

SM: Finally, tell me your drink of choice and name something horrible (or hysterical) that happened once when you were drinking it.

NT: My apologies for my boring answer to this one but I'm more of a water and juice drinker. As far as I can remember nothing horrible or hysterical has happened to me with regards to those drinks. Whew! I need a drink.

Stray Bullets Volume 2: Somewhere Out West

2005-05-23T21:13:00.000-07:00

David Lapham continues releasing Stray Bullets in trade collections that are smartly organized and value-priced – veering dramatically from his previous trade program in both regards – with Stray Bullets Volume 2: Somewhere Out West, which contains the second seven-issue story arc in this brilliant crime series.

This arc is easily the most outlandish of the four-and-a-half that have been published thus far, centered (as the title suggests) somewhere out west. Four characters – Virginia Applejack, Beth, Orson and Nina – have fled from Baltimore, where the last arc took place, and experience their new life on a skewed, surreal level, in a desert town where the populace expect the coast of California to sink into the ocean ANY DAY NOW and leave them soaking in the luxury of beachfront property. The artwork begins to take on a more impressionistic style (though only when appropriate) and a number of new, cartoonish characters appear to balance the relative normalcy our heroes bring along with them.

Lapham begins a number of important developments in the series with this arc, beginning with the real introduction of his second-most-important character, Beth. We first met Beth very briefly in the first arc, as she barged into the life of young Orson, a buttoned-down mama’s boy who had just started to learn what the violent world of Stray Bullets had in store for him. We got the vague impression then, and it’s developed at length here, that Beth is savvy to something the rest of us are not; she’s a flawed character, to be sure – arrogant and selfish and addicted to danger and adrenaline – but there’s also a fierce confidence that suggests she’s seen some unbelievable situations in her time and that she's learned how to handle herself under fire. What’s most impressive (and effective) about this is that nothing is explicitly spelled out. There are a few odd references to the past, vague allusions to her past relationships with characters and rough situations she’s obviously survived, but for the most part this impression is made entirely through her response to the here-and-now of the story. It’s incredibly layered storytelling that manages to not only develop the character and add an explosive, exciting ingredient to the story being told, but it creates a sense of history that always draws me into a story. I’m always completely sucked in by stories that clearly exist in a world bigger than themselves, that leave cracked-open doors to legends and wide expansive futures. Stray Bullets began doing this with its first issue, but Lapham’s grip on his craft had grown so much by the time he got to these stories that the reader doesn’t see him at work anymore, and it feels seamlessly built into the stories’ present.

As I said, Beth will prove to be the series’ second most important character, an adult foil to its very most important – young Virginia Applejack. Virginia’s influence in these seven issues is relatively small, and she disappears almost entirely in the third arc, but her role here is an important if unobtrusive one. For now, she’s here to observe. While the story told in this arc is self-contained and exciting and crazy, it will also serve later in the series as a premise, an element of Virginia’s past that not only lets us know what’s going on with her character, but will also give us a vague idea of what Beth’s past was like; we’ll use the experience we’ve seen Virginia go through to estimate what Beth has been through, and the mistakes Beth makes as an adult become a sort of ominous prophecy for Virginia. We suspect, though, that Virginia has some greater reservoir of intelligence than Beth, and that’s the central tension of the series – will Virginia live the same destructive, doomed life as Beth? Is that her in the trunk in the series’ first issue?

We’re driven to truly care because we can see how the world of Stray Bullets tests its characters; Beth, bold and strong though she is, is clearly a product of her environment, a changed person for all she’s been through, living more by trying to outfox the rules that have been set for her than by her own rules. Virginia’s on the other end of the spectrum for now, watching everything unfold through her child’s eyes and calling foul where she sees it, unaware of any real need on her part to change. Stuck between these two is Orson.

As I said above, we last met Orson as he was completely freaking out. He’d just started to really see the uncontrollably violent world in which he lives, and he was scared out of his mind and angry. When we meet him again in this arc, we see a good boy trying to be a bad man; he’s in love with Beth and, for now, Beth only cares about herself and her fun. Again, we get vague reference to history – Orson, in an amazing night of drunken bravery, has somehow pulled one over on the series’ ubervillain-in-absentia, Harry. They’re on the run now, and Orson has sobered up, and must wrestle with his fearful desire to maintain a low profile on the run from Harry and the certain death he represents, while Beth barks at him about being a real man, complaining (as does everybody who knows him, it seems) that he’s a boring dork. With his life on the line, but the woman he loves pushing him, what choice can he make? Orson’s story is the real tragedy of this arc, because he’s so clearly out of his element, and he has a much more grounded, pedestrian moral compass than any other character. He’s completely unequipped to deal with the dangers of the life he believes he’s chosen, though he’s obviously been pushed into it by forces both more powerful and more adult than he is.

After a number of more surreal (and often silly) adventures in this western hideout, with Orson shuddering at every loud noise for fear that they’ll be caught by the evil forces they’ve run from, he and Beth are finally called to answer for what they’ve done in an explosive 48-page closing issue. This is a climax as they should always be done, full of uncertainty and terror, action and blood, defining character moments and permanent consequences. The action takes us all around this new world they’ve built for themselves, crossing paths with all the new characters and doling out cruel fates with heartbreaking levity. When it’s finished, we realize the silliness of this arc had an intangible thread of gravity running all through it, and the consequences echo throughout the rest of the series.

It’s an exciting and powerful conclusion to the arc and reminds us that Stray Bullets serves dual purposes – to entertain and to engage, to make us think and feel while we’re shouting “Holy shit!” at every amazing turn of events – and caps off Exhibit B in my ongoing argument that this is the best series currently in publication.

Reference: my review of Stray Bullets Volume 1: Innocence of Nihilism

Bookshelf Comics

2005-05-23T08:58:00.000-07:00

A fun new website has launched called Bookshelf Comics - full of information and reviews for squarebound comics - prestige formats, OGNs, TPBs, HCs, and whatever other acronyms you like for describing comics you put (crazy as this might sound) on your bookshelf!

I'll be contributing reviews, and I'll link to 'em from here every time I do. Today I've got a new review up for Jeffrey Brown's Miniature Sulk, so take a look and explore the site!

Of course, I'll be continuing to update here on The Zealot's Lore with reviews and more, starting with a follow-up to my review of Stray Bullets Volume 1: Innocence of Nihilism with a review of Volume 2: Somewhere Out West. Watch for it later today.

War Cry

2005-05-19T22:42:00.000-07:00

I love the hell out of comics. I love ‘em so much I started up a blog just to write about ‘em whenever I could. In the spirit of putting some gas back in the Zealot’s Lore tank – that is, juicing myself up for a second wind of more regular entries – tonight I’m gonna talk a little bit about why.

First of all, comics are unbelievably entertaining. They can take me anywhere, show me anything, any time I want. As I discussed in this entry, they strike a unique balance between providing the world of the story for me and demanding my participation in its creation; my mind is the motor and comics crank it up. All I have to do is let it run. Unlike film, I’m never irritated by the special effects being choppy here or too flashy there, and I’m not at the mercy of the artist to sit through anything – I can pick it up and put it down and move the whole story at the pace that best fits for me. And unlike straight prose, I’m not visualizing something by myself in the dark; I know I’m seeing what I was meant to see. And the potential there is unlimited. I’ve never found a medium that took me to so many different places with such smooth flexibility.

Comics make me feel like a kid. I read The Incredible Hulk and I feel the same sympathy for poor persecuted Bruce Banner I felt when I was eight; and I feel the same elation when he rises from within himself against the world that torments him to show he is the strongest one there is. I believe the Hulk is the strongest one there is, like other people believe in great football teams, and his every victory is my victory. Everyone’s got a super-hero that means something to them, who they’re always rooting for, and who’s silly spandex fights get their blood pumping. A lot of folks really identify with poor bad-luck Peter Parker. For some folks it's Batman or Wolverine. The Hulk is mine; and like any kid, I'll put my favorite up against your favorite any damn day of the week!

At the same time, comics make me feel uniquely grown-up. I’m in on something nobody else is in on. And it’s smart. They’d like to fool you by putting pictures in with the words, sure. But I’ve never read a prose book like Stray Bullets, or Sin City, or Planetary, that communicated in such a complex language, balancing the plain and the subtle in so exciting a way. I’ve never seen a movie as shockingly visceral as Preacher or The Ultimates or White Death – oh, film can physically shock me in a way impossible for comics, sure, but the flipside to that coin is that I know the limits of what’s happening in a movie; if the alien jumps out, I know just what it looks like and how scary it is. The Saint of Killers is limited only by my brain’s ability to imagine fright. The closing pages of White Death are as terrifying and hopeless as I’m able to conjure in my own mind. Most other adults don’t get the opportunity to realize that. And they never push their imagination beyond what the movie tells them.

I love comics because they’re pretty much the only medium that can get away with being totally ridiculous and still taking itself seriously. The Infinity Gauntlet was one of the best times I ever had in my life, and it’s totally absurd. I’ve laughed out loud reading Shaolin Cowboy, which has to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen – but it’s absolutely, unflinchingly itself, and it has nothing to apologize for.

I love comics because of the community that’s sprung up around them. I love talking about comics with my friends, enjoying everything about them that I’ve already said and more, and I love the truthfulness behind people’s passion for it – folks might get into movies to become famous, or into music to get laid, or into literature to get respect; folks get into comics because they love the shit out of ‘em.

Just like me.

A free set of ADAM STRANGE #1-8

2005-05-15T13:29:00.000-07:00

I'm giving away the complete Adam Strange mini in a thread over on Millarworld - all you have to do is buy some other awesome comics and I'll hook you up. Check out the link for details:

http://www.millarworld.net/index.php?showtopic=49042

Review: Malsaine #1

2005-05-03T21:54:00.000-07:00

Tonight I’m taking a look at Malsaine #1, written by Manny Blacksher with art by Barry Hughes, and published by Imprint Comics.

The superficial stuff that occurred to me immediately: it’s a fine value for the dollar. The cover price is $2.95 for 32 pages without ads. The story itself is a bit shorter than that, depending on what you consider “the story” – there’s a lengthy text-only introduction that reveals itself to be the opening lines of the story, which is an interesting tweak. And at the end, there are a few pages of mock-up old-timey advertisements, and a one-page faux newspaper story. It’s printed on a nice, thick paper with a glossy coating, just slightly smaller than the standard 7” x 10” format, and reads in the “landscape” format as opposed to “portrait,” and thank God, it’s stapled accordingly (can’t tell you how irritating it is when this isn’t the case and I have to read a comic like I’m looking at a Playboy centerfold).

As for the actual content – it’s unusual. I’ve not read anything quite like this recently, though I have a feeling it’ll strike a familiar chord in many readers. On the surface, this is about a kid named James going to a new school in a town called Malsaine in the southern United States. He challenges his English teacher in a class discussion of Huckleberry Finn, meets a pretentious jazz aficionado named Lucius and gets invited to a concert. As the issue closes, he thinks about going to the concert. Along the way, publisher Dave Hendrick tells me, “The book's about all those things we went through as adolescents, finding your identity, falling in love/lust, isolation and rebellion, there's also a hefty amount of magic realism, ghosts, jazz and foul mouthed ravens to keep everyone happy.”

Strange, no? I’m not used to comics stories being told in such an ambling, relaxed pace. I think it works, though, and largely because this style belongs in this setting; Malsaine itself seems a relaxed Southern town, content to move in its own time and hiding massive secrets that only the erosion of time will reveal. The story reflects that personality, and it’s a consistency I always enjoy. The old-timey American gothic feel is also voiced in the scene between James and Lucius as they discuss music; we expect James to respond to the namedropping of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis with contemporary examples (say, Queens Of The Stone Age) but instead he names Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis; whether this is meant to characterize James as an old-fashioned sort or establish the world of the story as vaguely timeless is unclear, but either way it brings a funny air of respectability to the tale, as well as a clear division between the world of the story and the world of the reader. Again, odd, but comforting.

The artwork, like the writing, is unusual but feels familiar. It’s a very blocky, impressionistic style, and the colors are rich and alternatingly psychedelic and mundane. I’m not sure what impression this is supposed to make, honestly; for the moment, it serves mostly to reinforce that sense of relaxed anxiety the book is promising. The style doesn’t convey action or sequencing very well, but we’re not given any content that requires it; instead, it reinforces the tension between movement and rest. The consistency between these two creators is remarkable, especially given their geographic distance from each other (writer Blacksher being an American southern gentleman and Hughes being a Dubliner).

The opening pages, as I mentioned earlier, are a written introduction that turns out to be narration. Whether this intro is meant to be an omnipotent “writer’s voice” or the internal monologue of our Hero isn’t clearly spelled out, but it functions much the same either way: this book clearly aims to be a story about stories, literary analysis made literature. It’s not at all like Neil Gaiman’s similar effort in the Sandman epic, but fans of that series may enjoy what is on the table here. The narrative builds suspense that is then left in the background for the remainder of the issue; discussion of the classic fairy tale tropes, the location of the forest as a testing ground where characters are clearly determined to be good or evil, lends some suspense to James’ distant window-gazing into the woods near his home.

Other themes are introduced here, but aren’t much developed yet. James’ monologue about the travels of Huck Finn and Jim the slave makes an interesting point about Mark Twain’s take on society, but it’s not clear how – or if – this is supposed to apply to this story. Similarly, the scenes between James and Lucius don’t seem to really have a purpose; am I being too goal-oriented? Too impatient? Perhaps. Could very well be; I am, after all, a Yankee. It may be that the creators are trying for now only to set the mood and introduce the players, and in that regard they do fine work here. And while I found the mock-up "Society Page" at the end pretty dull, I really dug the closing line: "Only the Future will tell, and I for one can hardly wait to hear it speak."

I don’t believe this is readily available in the United States, but the publisher seems happy to send individual copies across the pond. If you’re curious, shoot an e-mail to malsaine@imprintcomics.com, and tell them I sent you.

Filthy Lying Irish

2005-05-02T20:17:00.000-07:00

"Hey, honey - did you finish writing your review for tonight?"

"No, I think I'm gonna do it in the morning. I had a rough day at work today and I really just wanna veg out."

"What? So you're not gonna write anything?"

"Don't really feel like it."

"You should write something about me."

"..."

"What?"

"You're not a comic."

"Just go on there and say I made you spend tonight with me. Tell them about all the garlic I got ready for your salmon. Or tell them how I just shaved my legs!"

"Um--"

"Just put me on there. People like that kind of thing. You have to put some of yourself into these blogs, so people get an idea of who you are."

"I guess you're right. I just feel like kind of a wanker writing a blog about how my day went and people I know and shit like that."

"Just shut up and go write something about me."

"Okay, baby."

"I'm gonna go put on Les Miserables In Concert."

"Okay. Can we watch The Wire when I'm done? I heard it's really good and I rented the DVD."

"Sure."

"I love you."

"I love you too, baby. Now go write something while I make a bagel."

When the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drum...

Mmmm... hotlinks...

2005-05-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

Just received an e-mail from Phil Parr over at "Hey Grown Ups - Comics!", letting me know he's giving away the Complete 30 Days of Night slipcase hardcover, the first Sandman hardcover, and the first twelve issues of Supreme Power.

I'm not real familiar with his site, but I thought it might be worth your time to check out his contest and maybe get some free comics.

Stay tuned later today for a new review... this one from across the broad Atlantic.

Meantime, I've got some weekly bought-n'-thought reviews up on Millarworld.

Oh, and the Jimi Hendrix of color flatting, rising star Josh Richardson has been interviewed over on Sequential Tart. You've heard of In The Trenches, right? The column detailing a foot soldier's advance through the ranks of professional comics? If not, check it out right this minute, and start with the archives. Once you've done that, take a look at the gentleman's first interview.

Nominated for a Squiddy!

2005-04-27T13:46:00.000-07:00

Well, I'll be damned. I've been nominated for something!

I appear under "Best Comics Reviewer" in the "First Pseudo-Nominee List" for the 2004 Squiddy Awards. Click here for the full list of nominations.

If you'd like to cast a vote, all you have to do is check out any of the newsgroups listed below or send an e-mail to votes2004@squiddies.org. Here are the groups where you can find a "ballot":

rec.arts.comics.dc.lsh
rec.arts.comics.dc.universe
rec.arts.comics.dc.vertigo
rec.arts.comics.elfquest
rec.arts.comics.info
rec.arts.comics.marketplace
rec.arts.comics.marvel.universe
rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks
rec.arts.comics.misc
rec.arts.comics.strips

There are also a host of fun nomination categories, and some great stuff has been nominated. Demo sweeps with about a million nominations, and I'm glad to see Western Tales of Terror get a nod for best comics anthology - it's been a fun book, with cool short stories from the a host of great talent including Phil Hester (if you haven't read The Coffin or Deep Sleeper, check those out ASAP), Ryan Ottley (who's been knocking me out on Invincible), Jay Faerber (who writes Noble Causes, a great super-family book for Image that I just started reading), and of course, Josh Fialkov of Elk's Run fame.

Go take a look. And while you're there - vote for me!

(Need to do a little digging and make sure I'm up to snuff? You could go back and check out my reviews of 1000 Steps to World Domination, the Sin City movie, the new Stray Bullets trade, David Hine's Strange Embrace, or this week's advance review of Fragile Prophet for starters.)

fragile PROPHET #1 - advance APE review

2005-04-25T21:20:00.000-07:00

fragile PROPHET (which I’ll hereafter refer to as Fragile Prophet, ‘cause I’m not the fancy type) is an upcoming four-issue miniseries from Lost In The Dark Press. I picked up a preview copy of #1 at APE this year and it was my favorite “find” – oh, I picked up a lot of other stuff I loved, like a bunch of mini-comics from the good Mr. Jeremy Tinder and the big new trade collection of Arsenic Lullaby, stuff I knew going in that I would love, but this was my favorite book to discover.

Fragile Prophet is the story of a young autistic boy and his older, caretaker brother as they discover that the afflicted younger sibling has the power to see the future. The opening issue follows them quickly through a tumultuous time in their lives as they discover and begin to cope with this ability, and closes as the young one, Jake, sees a disturbing vision of his own future that throws a powerful twist on their relationship.

Most books of this kind – those with an outlandish, almost supernatural premise – will choose to focus on developing either the characters or the plot, and filling in the weaker element with a “classic” standby. If the plot is the point, then the characters will be standard tropes to get the audience familiar with the territory and to let the writer focus on being clever; if the characters are the point, a stock plot will prop up the narrative while the writer spends his or her time building character with dialogue and exploring relationships to endear the cast to the reader. This book chooses to explore some ambiguity and intrigue on both sides of the equation, and it’s a refreshing combination.

Esau – the older brother – is the voice-over narrator, bringing us up to speed through his recollection of “how it started.” The opening sequence, with Jake lost in a Target-esque department store, is funny and sweet, as we see a few brief moments of the brothers’ normal lives. Writer Jeff Davidson’s dialogue sets the tone for the rest of the book – the character’s speech is natural and believable, but with just enough rhythm and punch to ascribe some fast character traits and make the reader start asking questions. The revelation of Jake’s abilities is a great moment, with more humor and uncertainty, and a funny kind of innocence that reassures me this is not another heartless exercise of intellect – later scenes explore the idea that Esau may be abusing his role as Jake’s caretaker to cash in, and in many books this would be a foregone conclusion: of course Esau would be neglecting his brother for financial gain, and of course he would either pay the price or finally learn his lesson. This book seems to have a little more compassion and thoughtfulness for its characters and does not drive us to believe anything so obvious. It’s possible that Esau isn’t making the right decisions, certainly – his affection for his brother is plain and his wit is charming, but there’s a bit of a slacker vibe to him that signals early on that he might not be right about everything.

It’s also nice to find that the plot of the series seems to have more than just a couple threads in it; while this opening issue wastes no time in moving the main characters to the cliffhanger ending, a number of smaller plot threads and character relationships are introduced, and most of them are pretty promising. On their way to fame, the boys spend some time in a traveling carnival, entangling themselves in all the bizarre and shadowy dangers that go with such a scene – a strangely half-menacing, half-ridiculous enemy introduces himself and disappears, and I expect to see more of him as the series continues. Other interesting characters get some good lines in the second half of the issue, but I don’t want to spoil too much for those who won’t read it until the summer.

The artwork is in a very unique style, one that balances the personal warmth and creepy uncertainty that the script calls for – the writing and the artwork are very well matched here. Stephen R. Buell has a style that reminds me a bit of the old Aeon Flux cartoons on Liquid Television; the anatomy is slightly skewed, the faces stretched out, but there remains something very viscerally human and personal about the characters he draws. It’s just stylized enough to make the reader a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit unfamiliar, but without alienating us from the characters. It’s a subtle balance and while I can draw comparisons to existing work, I don’t think I’ve seen comic art quite like this before. Funny, charming, creepy, weird – everything about the book as a whole is represented in the artwork, which suggests an unusually unified effort on the part of the two creators.

I have one quibble, and it’s a technical one. The lettering in this book is confusing. Dialogue doesn’t bounce back and forth visually, as it should. The order in which I am supposed to read the word balloons is not clear, and that makes me stop and review all the different bits of dialogue and reassemble them for myself, taking me out of the story while I figure out how to read it. Hopefully this is something that can be fixed before the main run of the first issue sees print, but if not, I imagine it can be resolved in the second issue.

At any rate, while it’s irritating, it’s not nearly irritating enough to keep me from recommending this. The style of this comic is something new to me, and it’s subtle and nuanced; I don’t know whether to shudder or smile as I read these pages, and if I find myself doing both, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable contradiction. The emotional punch behind this unusual style is resonant and friendly, and I look forward to seeing where the creators will take the rest of this story.

EDIT: A nine-page preview, depicting the opening scene (in which we discover Jake's power), is available here:

How To Sell Me Your Comics - discussion

2005-04-14T17:26:00.000-07:00

Man, there's a smokin' discussion going on in response to the article below, and that discussion is here, as the Isotope Virtual Lounge. Alex de Campi is a genius. And Jason Rodriguez is a funny goddamn man. Check it out.

http://isotopecomics.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=256

How To Sell Me Your Comics, part one: APE

2005-04-13T16:52:00.000-07:00

I was thinking of writing another book review today – maybe the first three issues of Helios, which I just got from the publisher in the mail, or the first Astro City trade, which I got from Larry Young – and when I got around to thinking about reviewing Video #1 and Fragile Prophet #1, which I picked up from the Lost In The Dark Press table at APE, I realized I had something else on my mind. See, over the last several months I’ve started really trying to pay attention to the way this business works, and I realized I learned a lot from my exploration of APE this year. Some great successes and some pretty miserable failures.

I’ve also noticed a new column up on the Isotope forum by Joe Rivera, called The Consumer. Joe lets us know in a stirring manifesto that the most important cog in the whole comics machine is himself – the consumer. The reader. We’re the last link in the chain, and without us, everything falls apart. Because none of it works unless we decide to grab our wallets, pull some hard-earned cash out of there, and slap it down on the counter to take those comics home and read ‘em.

I think Joe’s got himself a mighty fine point. So I’m writing today to paint a little picture about how folks can get me to do just that, and I’m gonna use APE as my canvas.

Tell Me Why Your Book Is Good
I read an article by Larry Young a while back about how creators should pitch their books to publishers, and he told them, “Know what your book is about.” He explained how to be concise and how to get your concept across quickly and attractively. Frankly, if you’re trying to sell your book to anybody, you should take a look at that article, ‘cause it works the same on me as a reader. Most tables I walked up to at APE, I asked the same question: “What can you tell me about this?” – and I’d point at their book or their posters or whatever – and boy, did I get a range of answers. Some folks had it together. Bret Hodson, creator of Romance And Cigarettes, told me, “It’s like True Story Swear To God, but if it turned out really badly. With more swearing.” Out came my three dollars. Lots of people, on the other hand, didn’t have any idea what to say to me (and these are all real quotes):

“This one has robots.”
“It’s autobiographical. Oh, and this one is a humor anthology.”
“It’s not really about anything, really.”

And away I walk. There’s a harsh truth you’re gonna have to deal with: I've seen a lot of indie books that were amateurish and stupid. I say that as a huge indie supporter. Even if I’ve got my cash in my hand as I walk up to you, you’re gonna have to convince me, and that means being able to tell me why I’ll like your book.

Present Yourself
Look, you have to have some confidence and enthusiasm. There are shy, sensitive-looking people slouching at fifty other tables. I don’t want to share a cry with you. I want to have a conversation. If I come up and say hello, don’t look surprised! And try not to act desperate; that gets me nervous, and kinda creeped out. You want me relaxed. It’s okay if you’re a perfectionist and you don’t think your art is good enough. It’s okay if your book has a sad theme, or if it’s about something depressing or alienated. That doesn’t mean it’s smart to pitch it to me in the same way. Save that depression and alienation for your drawing board; when you’re actually talking to me, try to at least give the impression that you’re glad I’m there. You don’t have to tell me the funniest joke I ever heard right off the bat. You don’t have to launch into a prepared speech about your book. You don’t even have to impress me – that’s for your book to do. What you have to do is make me want to continue to stand in front of your table. It’s like Las Vegas. The longer I stay, the more likely I’m gonna leave my money with you. If you’re having trouble getting confident enough about your actual book – and I can understand self-doubt, believe me – then start simple. Smile or nod at me. Say hello. Take a deep breath, and go from there.

Have An Interesting Cover Design
Again, pretty obvious, right? Well, a lot of y’all fucked that up. I saw some great covers this year – one of the best was the cover to Lost In The Dark Press’ Video #1. Here’s that cover from their website (this is the best I could find – the real thing doesn’t have the text at the bottom):

There’s a lot of good stuff to say about this. The color is vivid and sharp. There’s a good balance of detail and “white space” (which in this case is actually colored black). It provides just enough content and context to get me interested, and no more. That’s ideal – get me interested, but don’t give anything away if you can avoid it. You get the best of both worlds; it’s physically appealing to the eye, because it gives me just enough to look at without overloading me, and it’s mentally appealing to… well, the brain, because it makes me want to find out more about what’s going on here. If you made this cover any more “busy,” you’d ruin it – there wouldn’t be any mystery, and it wouldn’t be as eye-catching because you’d kill the contrast and overload the image. A lot of folks had some really plain covers, boring or busy or uninspired, and I don’t want to drag them out because this isn’t a finger-pointing column, but let me say this much: Take advantage of your production specs. If you’re printing in black-and-white, work it; don’t just settle for it. If your book is physically smaller than the average, find a design that fits that size. I saw a lot of covers that were obviously meant to be in color on full-size glossy paper, and frankly, that just makes me want to wait until you get your act together and print it that way. To put it another way: play to your strengths, brother. For more on what makes covers work, you might take a look at what Warren Ellis or James Sime had to say.

Don’t Be Sloppy
Jesus, I saw some shoddy-ass looking books on the tables, and I didn’t want anything to do with them. That doesn’t mean you have to have high production values – though you do, as the feller says, get what you pay for – but at least make sure you proof-read this stuff before you send it out. As Jason Rodriguez pointed out in a recent entry on his blog, the letterer is the public face of the writer. If the lettering has a screw-up, it makes the writer look stupid and incompetent. I can’t tell you how many books suffer from this, even in comics from bigger publishers. It drives me nuts and it should embarrass you. I don’t intend to be mean or overly harsh, but this is a tough-love issue that a lot of people need to listen to. When I’m reading your book and a character says something like, “Oh Johnny I lvoe you,” that pretty much tells me that you didn’t read this thing even once. That tells me that you don’t really give a shit about your book. And that tells me that I don’t need to give a shit about your book. This applies to a lot of aspects of your comics besides the lettering – but the basic lesson is, Don’t Be Sloppy. Pay attention to what you’re doing. If you’re not doing the very best job you can do, that’s okay with me – the guy at the table next to you is.

Sell Stuff I Can Afford
I know you want to use the bookstore market, and I know Larry Young convinced you that releasing your book as an OGN was the smart move. Hey, I wouldn’t begin to argue – it’s working like gangbusters for his books, and I sure as hell can’t argue with his numbers. But take a closer look at his numbers. $13 for a 96-page book, which is what he's proposing, is okay. It’s a little more prohibitive than a $3 floppy, but it’s still within a reasonable range. But if all you’ve got is $20 trades stacked up, I’m walkin’. I’m not made of money, brother, and I’m not dropping a Jackson on anything I didn’t already plan on buying. That means you’re gonna have to work about a hundred times as hard, for less than ten times as much of my money. A $20 trade is fine, especially if it’s a good value for my dollar – throw in some sketches and bonus features, please – but at least offer me an “in” that won’t scare me so bad and drain my wallet so quick. A $2 preview piece, or a free ashcan, for example, will get you well on your way, if I like it. I left a lot of tables empty-handed, even when their stuff looked great, because they didn’t have anything in my budget.

Make Me Remember You
So let’s say you’ve got it all together and you’ve gotten me to pick up your book and flip through it, and I like it enough to buy it. Is that all you want? That one sale? Is that why you worked so hard? Or do you want me to remember to pick up the next thing I see with your name on it?—or tell my friends about how cool you are? Remember, you won’t always be there to sell something to me, so it’s to your benefit to make sure I remember your name. There are a lot of ways to do this, and one of the biggest ones is your personality. Our conversation is gonna make me remember you. By the time I got to Daniel Cooney’s table, for example, I was a little low on funds and not really looking to get anything over $3. He was selling trades of his Valentine series, which were reasonably priced but at the moment a little beyond what I was able to spend. But he took some time and talked to me – told me not just what the series was about, but what he wanted to do with it, why he was getting excited about it. His enthusiasm shined through and it seemed almost like he was more interested in talking with me about the book than in selling it to me. It was sincere. I’m gonna remember that excitement, that look on his face. He wasn’t just reciting a speech; he was thinking, imagining, getting worked up. That’s one good way to make me remember you – love the hell out of your goddamn book.

But not everybody’s that confident, or that sociable – maybe you’re a shy one, and this is your first time out. Okay, I can sympathize. You don’t have to charm the hell out of me, don’t worry. There’s another way you can make me remember you, and it's something you already know how to do – comics. When I tell you I want to buy your book, ask me if I’d like you to sign it. If I say no, fine – but who the hell says no? If I say yes, you’re at a crossroads. You can just sign your name on the damn thing and hand it to me, and off we go our separate ways, you with my money and me with your comic and some meaningless scribble on it. Or, you can put some pepper on it. Draw a little sketch. Ask me how to spell my name and write me a little note. Your signature is, let’s face it, worthless. Jim Lee, you ain’t. The point of having you sign it is to make it personal, so take advantage of the opportunity. It doesn’t have to be your best work. I don’t expect it to be. But if you go just that small extra distance, I’m gonna notice. When I read your book, all huddled up on my couch, and I see that silly little doodle, I’m gonna think about you, try to remember your face. Whether it's funny, or clever, or thoughtful, or stupid, the result will be the same: I’m gonna smile. Who knows? Maybe I’ll show it to a friend. Now you’ve got me doing your marketing for you. I got a lot of books signed when I was at APE this year. A lot of them are just defaced comics. But a few of them are special. I’m gonna keep ‘em, and I’m gonna take ‘em out once in a while and look at the sketches and notes, and maybe I’ll remember their creators’ names next time I’m browsing the indie racks at my local comics shop. Props to Josh Cotter, Doug Paszkiewcz, Jeremy Tinder and and everyone else to made that extra little effort - it's appreciated.

By no means is this list comprehensive. These are just some thoughts I’ve been musing over since APE, and I thought they might be helpful to one or two burgeoning creators out there. If any of my fellow readers have any other suggestions, please, let us know! Leave a comment or post on a message board. There’s no way we can expect the service and products we want unless we’re vocal about it. As Joe Rivera says, we are the most powerful force in the comics industry. And you know what they say about great power.

APE - my stash

2005-04-09T18:32:00.000-07:00

Damn, but that was a packed show. I'll be headed out to the APE Aftermath party at the Isotope in a bit, but I wanted to drop in real quick and talk about what I picked up - I haven't had a chance to read any of this yet, but a lot of it looks really interesting.

Periphery #2 / Holmes #1, from O-P-P: Nice samurai art and a catchy cover grabbed my attention and then my three bucks.

Arsenic Lullaby: Year of the Fetus TPB, from AAA Milwaukee Publishing: I love this series. It's the only place I can get my fix of child molestation jokes and holocaust humor. Seriously fucked up, and writer/artist Doug was a really nice guy.

The J.W. Cotter 2005-Con Sketchbook Plus! from Josh Cotter (usually published by AdHouse Books: I love this guy's mini-comics. Skyscrapers of the Midwest is last year's winner of the Isotope Award for Excellence in Mini-Comics, and I can't wait for more.

Who's Yo Daddy? from 5ive Finger Discount / Jamurai: A Star Wars parody about young Anakin Skywalker wanting to grow up and be a black drug dealer. Sounds like it might be stupid, I know, but this was really funny when I flipped through it.

walk like tall birds by someone named Briana: Uh, no contact info anywhere here, but I thought the idea of a puppet story - with the puppeteer at the top of the page, moving the two animal characters around - was pretty charming as a concept.

Feed America's Children preview from Wildcard Productions: A free advance ashcan of a charity book with art from P. Craig Russell, Rom L:im, Keiron Dwyer, Darick Robertson, C.P. Smith, Joe Jusko, Jimmy Palmiotti, Phil Winslade and more. None of those guys look like they're in the ashcan, but hell, it was free.

The Way Things Are by Karen Luk: Cheap little mini-comic with some attractive princess-and-dragons art; worth 50 cents to me to find out if it's any good.

Band of Thieves #1 by some kids who didn't put their names on this thing: It was pretty cheap and I was talking to one of the kids who worked on it. The cover design was pretty damn sharp so I picked it up, but there's no information here at all about getting more.

Romance And Coffee #1 from Angry Bret Comics: Had a good conversation with this guy about shitty comic book movies and figured I'd try it out. He pitched it as "True Story Swear To God with more swear words."

Pirate Cove ashcans from http://www.piratecovecomic.com: Free. Plus there's more free at the website. Why not?

Midnight Creep and Matequilla del Pato from Post Apocalyptic Funhouse: The former is a "blues comic" which sounded interesting to me considering how much I liked Bluesman a couple months ago, and the the latter is a jam comic between that guy and this dude who drew a "hideous portrait" of me. Both were nice enough to draw a little sketch in the comics for me, which was cool. More of you people who get tables should do this - it makes an impression, really.

My Day from ticknart: I thought this was kinda funny when I was flipping through it, so I figured I'd try it out.

Joanna Estep Samples from (here's a shocker) Joanna Estep: Some nice art here. Good high-contrast B&W stuff with no grays, which is a style that usually appeals to me (see Frank Miller, Becky Cloonan, Eduardo Risso for folks who really kick ass with it).

U.T.L. (a preview) by Dave Bergland: I'm pretty sure this was free. Not sure what it's about yet, but worth taking a look for free, now isn't it?

Video #1 and Fragile Prophet #1 from Lost in the Dark Press: Pretty sharp production values and cover designs get you about 2/3 of the way towards selling me your comic. These guys also took some time to describe their pitch and concept - I gotta say, I had a few tables where I walked up and said, "What can you tell me about this stuff?" and they had nothing to say. "Well, what's this about?" Um, it's not really about anything. Why the hell did you buy a table, dumbass? (That's not these guys, I should be clear: they had their pitch and everything all set for me.)

inSECURITY Comics, File #2 from, well, inSECURITY Comics: This was a large-format comics (a little bigger than 8.5" x 11") for just a buck and it came with a pretty sweet sketch on the cover. That's enough for my dollar.

Paper Theater TPB from Alternative Comics: I read this in floppy format years ago and thought it was pretty damn funny. The square-bound trade was pretty big and just five bucks, which was good enough for me.

Murder Can Be Fun #17 by John Marr: A zine about kids from the pre-60's era, when the world was fun, doing awful things. Sounds funny to me, and it looks pretty researched.

Ragtag #3 from Punchthroat Productions: A cheap anthology of work from a shitload of artists, including Brian Wood and Jim Mahfood and a bunch of people I never heard of. Combining company like that means some of these folks might be up-and-comers, right? So it's worth five bucks to find out about 'em now.

jobnik! #1 from Real Gone Girl Studios: Autobiography about a girl who joined the Israeli army in late 1999, I think, or 2000. She had a desk job. Those two things seemed like a weird combination and I thought this might be worth a look.

An Open Place #1 by Jeremy Waltman: Again, sharp cover design is half the battle. Jeremy also had a pretty quick tongue when I asked him about the premise, and the art looked pretty nice, so I snagged the first issue.

Bon Jour le Muffin promo issue by Mike Adam and John Hageman Jr.: Another free one that got put in my hand. Nice cover.

Short "Graphic" Stories by Peter Kinne: The card in front of this one said something like, "Killer SUVs, Going into Las Vegas Whore Houses, and Cleaning Up After Tornadoes", and the whole table was auto-bio stuff. How is that not worth a look? This might be a fun one.

Scuttle from Scuttle Comics: Another free one. This was big, too - surprised it was free.

and, returning from last year,

A whole buttload of different mini-comics (and a small painting!) by Jeremy Tinder, who I met at last year's APE and whose stuff I liked a lot then. I think his work is charming and sweet, and a lot of it's funny as hell. I got ten minis and an original painting and a sketch of Mario and Yoshi for $25. It was the biggest single purchase I made this year, but I'm confident it'll be worth it. This guy does good stuff. Looking forward to reading the new pile.

That's it! I think I dropped almost a hundred bucks. My book bag was overflowing with comics. Now I gotta go drop these off at home and head on out to the APE Aftermath party at the Isotope and see who won this year's Isotope Award for Excellence in Mini-Comics. The last two winners, Josh Cotter and Rob Osborne, have done work I really loved, so I can't wait to see who won this year.

Cheers!

EDIT: Oh yeah, and I also got a poster of the cover to Flight Volume 2, and I got to meet Kazu Kibuishi, which was cool because I really loved Daisy Kutter. He was really nice and told me a little bit about his next project (!!) but that table was busier'n a mofo, so I didn't linger. The man had comics to sign.

Strange Embrace review

2005-04-08T21:14:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of ever-generous Uncle Larry, I recently read David Hine's graphic novel, Strange Embrace, published in its collected edition in 2003 by Active Images. Before now, I'd only heard of David Hine as the writer of District X, a relatively new Marvel series that impressed me with its richness of ideas in the first three issues and then completely nose-dived into dreary cliché storytelling. So going in, I honestly didn't know what to expect; did Hine have the chops to put together a complete story, and take it beyond the "ripe idea" stage?

Well, yes, he did. Strange Embrace is a crafty, sly piece of psychological horror that I found surprisingly accessible; I was expecting this brainy English horror story, written and drawn by the same man (in black-and-white, no less), to be somewhat haughty and pretentious, but I was proven very wrong. The book tells its story in a very straightforward manner, broken into four long chapters that each focus on a different character, and the interaction between and among these characters' lives forms a remarkably linear, cohesive whole. The final effect of the book is chilling and thought-provoking, and strangely enough, while it ends with the total destruction of several lives (at least one of them innocent), there's a feeling of completion and satisfaction to it, as if a cycle has completed and a bizarre kind of justice has been done.

The first quarter of the story introduces Alex, a malicious psychic who will serve as the narrator for the remaining three story segments. His story really serves as a mood-setter more than anything else; the details of his life and what's happened to him ultimately have very little to do with the rest of the book, though he does introduced a couple motifs. A big one is bleeding walls. Throughout the story, walls are leaking, bleeding, exploding, and while it’s clearly got the potential to be one of those symbols that readers debate over and over until it’s a dead issue, I’m pretty sure it’s just intended to (A) be freaky, and (B) the obvious: people – all people – hide things, wall themselves off from others, build protective barriers, and a central theme of this book is that those barriers are essentially destructive, horrible things.

The rest of the story, and the bulk of the book, focuses on the tragedy of the family Corbeau. This family is populated by a number of well-intentioned but dangerously frail men and women, all of them hiding something, all of them meaning to protect themselves but ultimately sealing themselves off from the personal connections that would redeem them, would save them from the horror that takes over (and sometimes ends) their lives.

The point here – and it’s a bit of a spoiler for those who haven’t read this at least once – is both an emotional and a cerebral one, but there’s a slight of hand that takes place. Calling a story “psychological horror” usually implies that the tale will be more cunning and tricksy than your usual monster-in-the-shadows scare fest, that the Evil Creature’s secret plot is more intelligent than the usual “kill all the good people” plot. Still, the actual horror itself, the aberration that disturbs and frightens the audience, is usually some kind of unexplainable phenomenon, a terror from the shadows that strikes and then disappears back into the night, leaving terror and tragedy in its wake; we’re not supposed to understand exactly why it happened. In Strange Embrace, it’s much clearer what the horror is: it is psychology itself. The mysterious evils that strike the cast are revealed, piece by piece, to be the result of the intellectual and emotional frailties of the very same characters who suffer and fear. Alex and his limbo-dwelling collection of ghosts are a decoy. The effects of the horror element of the story – the fear and suffering of its characters – are the same as the cause. So there’s a satisfying, cyclical nature to the devastation that sweeps through every life in the story. It causes and resolves itself.

The result is that this book is well worth a second read, without seeming as if the first read was a waste of time (as was the case with, say, Fight Club). Nothing is revealed that cheapens what has come before; every revelation simply sheds more light on what has come before.

Hine’s art style is better than I thought it’d be. Most writer/artists who end up being just writers? I think they’ve made the right decision. I think Bendis’ art is terrible. Brubaker’s art suited the stories he used it to tell, but I’m glad he left it behind. Hine? Not so bad. He uses a very European inking style, very clean and bold, and a lot of his faces remind me of Jason Lutes’ style. He’s got more of an impressionistic method of characterization, though, using fairly natural, mundane face shapes for his more “normal” and benign characters and exaggerating the appearances of his more wounded and dangerous ones. He makes subtle use of visual motifs as well – it’s tasteful and reserved repetition, and while its meaning is not always clear, it helps lend some cohesion to the story, which shifts perspective a number of times. The visual consistency helps keep the story on track.

Strange Embrace engages some fairly cliché thematic material – the European obsession with the evil mystery of Dark Africa, religious fear of sexual intimacy, child abuse yielding crippled adults, and so on – but it resolves this issues in a satisfying way by leaping from foot to foot, demanding that the reader do the same, leading us on like a murder mystery. We’re sure it was the butler, until we’re sure it was the maid. When the end comes, and we realize it was the victims themselves, it’s a sobering close.

Stray Bullets volume 1: Innocence of Nihilism

2005-04-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve been a fanatical Stray Bullets fan for years now, and today creator David Lapham is launching a new line of collections in honor of the series’ tenth anniversary. The new format collects each seven- or eight-issue “arc” into affordable softcovers; until now, you had to buy the series in trades that collected just 4 issues each or throw down $35 for the oversized hardcover collections. While I haven’t seen the new format yet, I do own all the hardcovers and so can provide a review of the stories collected therein. I’ll be back later with my thoughts on the actual production and any extras Lapham may have included.

For now, though, just the stories – the first seven issues of Stray Bullets give a really good idea of what the series will be like, introducing and developing several characters across seven self-contained crime stories that build a thematic arc and also cross into each other in spots, a lot like how the characters in Frank Miller’s Sin City series weave in and out of each others’ worlds.

While they’re both crime-genre books and both explore the “shared universe” style of storytelling, though, the two series couldn’t be more different. Lapham uses a very naturalistic, unaffected style in both his writing and his artwork (with one glaring exception, which I’ll explain later), using the latter to play with the ways facial expressions and body language can communicate in comics. Where Miller uses crime to explore exaggerated themes of heroism and fantasy and legends of dark worlds and broken empires and ultimate evil, Lapham uses crime to study real people and how violence affects them, how everyone grows their own strengths and vulnerabilities, developing in a world where the random intrusion of violent tragedy – the stray bullet, you see – is a trial almost everyone must face at least once. This raises complex character issues of control, anger, self-preservation and resilience, and each of these concepts is explored in a different way by every character.

There is no judgment made on any of the cast – there are no flawless heroes, no irredeemable villains – largely because the ideas of heroism and villainy are irrelevant to the main characters. Those themes don’t often apply in the real world, where we’re so often more concerned with what’s right in front of us – our jobs, the people we know, the events of our day. The characters in Stray Bullets aren’t really different from us; their world isn’t any more wildly uncontrollable than ours is. They just experience events of a more dramatic, electric scale than most of us usually do. What’s fascinating is to watch them respond to those events in a way that believably reflects what we, and those around us, might do in the same situation.

The centerpiece of the collection, for me, is the second story, which introduces Virginia Applejack, a 13-year-old girl growing up in Baltimore in 1977. This was given out for Free Comic Book Day three years ago, and I’ve been hooked ever since. It opens with Virginia witnessing an incident of brutal violence, then takes us through the next several weeks of her life, portraying her response with compelling show-don’t-tell panache and even a little humor.

The closing sequence of the issue is devastating and shocking – I’m amazed this didn’t draw more controversy when it was first released – but Lapham uses this shock to wake us up, to disturb us and make us think. No immediate solution is given, no after-school special wrap-up where we learn the lesson of the day, and this lack of hand-holding may be read by some as shallow, or mean-spirited; some may think Lapham doesn’t care, and is only interested in selling the spectacle of violence. I couldn’t disagree more; to me, Lapham is showing the utmost respect for his audience, allowing us not only to draw our own conclusions based on what we’ve seen, but suggesting that maybe there are no conclusions to draw – that some patience is called for, that no trauma is ever “finished,” no story ever complete. As Virginia herself narrates in a story from the second arc, “A happy ending is knowing where to put these two words: THE END. If you keep going, all stories end tragically. They end in death – usually preceded by some horrible painful ailment – so if you want some smiles, you’d better THE END your way out while the gettin’s good!”

One thing that amazes me is Lapham’s convincing portrayal of the slippery slope his characters find themselves in, how believably he brings his characters to make ludicrous decisions that always leave the survivors and spectators wondering, “What the hell were they thinking?” Much like novelist Hubert Selby. Jr., Lapham wants us to treat that as an actual question and not as a rhetorical judgment; he wants us to understand the confusion and desperation that can take over our minds in dangerous or stressful situations, and he brings us to that point by following his characters through moments of normalcy, where we can connect to them by their humor or their manner of speech, into the sudden disruption that seems to close off their options and push them to make decisions immediately – those stray bullets going off again, and nobody thinks when they hear those suckers firing. We act. We duck, or run, or look around. Often we do the wrong thing, and just as often we don’t realize it. Are we always likeable? Absolutely not, and neither are Lapham’s characters.

And while the violence in this book can be intense and viscerally frightening – something I’ve rarely seen achieved in comics – that only drives home the seriousness of its impact. There are characters here who don’t understand violence, and it’s important to remember that they don’t necessarily represent the author; some of these characters shiver nervously in the corner when faced with danger, and some of them laugh and poke it with a stick. The consequences are not always what is morally expected – the bad guys don’t always die (though they often do) and the good guys aren’t always brave (or very “good”). This is realism.

With one huge exception. The sixth chapter, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” will throw many readers for a loop. The central character of this story is named Amy Racecar, and the style and content abruptly shift gears into an absurdist adventure story. The nature of Amy Racecar is not explicitly explained for a long time in the series, but there are hints even in her first appearance here; I don’t want to give anything away, because figuring it out on your own is really a lot of fun. I’ll just give you a hint – look for the character who skews the realism of the series most. There’s a connection between them.

I loved the stories collected in this volume, and I thought the series only got better from here. This book might not be for everyone – it’s hostile to any formal sense of morality, and some readers prefer to follow one story instead of jumping around with every issue – but for me it’s easily the best thing on the stands today. This gets the highest possible recommendation I can give. Please do yourself a solid and at least read through the first couple issues. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be hooked for life.

Uh-oh

2005-04-04T21:41:00.000-07:00

Forgive the delayed and brief entry, if you will - I meant to review David Hine's Strange Embrace tonight, but I've just been to my first eye-doctor appointment ever (as evidenced by my inability to spell optamologist), and it turns out I'm near-sighted and need glasses. For fuck's sake. I guess I'm glad to find out, but bummed that it's so, if that makes sense.

Plus, my eyes are dialated as shit and it hurts to look at the screen. So, I'll be back tomorrow.

Cheers, y'all. Stay tuned for the new super-powered, four-eyed Sean Maher. Up, up and away!

Reviews for Comics from the week of 03/31/05

2005-04-03T15:48:00.000-07:00

I was a tad underwhelmed this week, so forgive the lateness:

The Goon #11 – Man, it feels like it’s been a while. The last issue we got of this was before Christmas, and that issue was a Scrooge spoof, so this is our first “real” Goon story in about 5 months, so I’m hankering for a lot more of this. Eric Powell continues to deliver an interesting combination of absurd comedy (Frankie dines with Lord Falderal), black comedy (Frankie threatens to drown the crippled kid who pisses him off), imaginative visuals (The Flesh-Eating Eye Monster) and genuinely disturbing moments of true horror – in this issue, the sequences showing Dr. Alloy’s decomposition were truly unsettling, and his desperation really rang true. Powell’s done a great job creating a supporting cast that is as believable and sympathetic as it is bizarre and exaggerated, and Alloy’s suffering (and resulting transformation) is his strongest work in this regard since he closed The Buzzard’s story several issues back. I’m looking forward to how this continues next issue.

Countdown to Infinite Crisis #1 – Everybody’s reviewed the hell out of this already, so I’ll be brief: I picked this up because I thought that, as a promotionally-priced one-shot, it might be a good jumping on point to see what’s been going on in the DCU and give me an informed leg-up on the upcoming slew of miniseries related to the events of this book. I couldn’t possibly have been more turned off. I have no idea who almost all the characters in this book are and the story does a poor job of introducing most of them. The tangential storylines, both past events referenced and upcoming series teased, were baffling to me as a new reader. I won’t be checking out any related stuff in the DCU for a while.

Zombies and Broken Hearts #1 – This was a reasonably clever parody piece featuring a zombie running around town trying to get laid. It’s decent, but not brilliant. If that sounds like your kind of thing, take a look. Personally, I’d rather read The Goon again.

The Amazing Joy Buzzards #4 – Probably the least shoddy issue of this series yet, which is reassuring. There’s promise here, but I’ve felt it was kinda sloppy thus far and it’s been turning me off; like The Intimates before it, I want to like this but find myself pleading with it way too often. “Please don’t have stupid lettering mistakes everywhere, please!” I’m also a bit tired of independent comics fooling around with clichés in what reads to me as an attempt to be ironic or clever; the revamped Spider-man origin in this issue, for example, put me off more than it made me smile, although I did smile for a moment. That said, I think Smith and Hipp been consistently improving this series since its debut, and I know I’ve come to like The Intimates pretty well, so I’m holding out for another issue or two with this series as well. Enjoyed a lot of the art in this issue, as it did a good job mixing up its own rhythm with ambient, mood-setting sequences, big moment splash pages, and clever experiments – for example, there’s one panel that segues from a flashback story into the present-tense face of the character who’s telling said story, splitting his face up Harvey Dent-style, and I like that sort of thing when it’s successful, as this is. The writing does a good job balancing the over-stylized mod posturing with actual relationships between the main characters. I’m still not laughing as much as I have the feeling I’m meant to be, but as I said, at least the momentum here is in the direction of “better” and not “worse”. The book closes on a cliffhanger with the payoff to be delivered in a web-comic, which is at once clever and irritating. At first, I thought, “Neat. I’ll have to go check that out.” But then I thought: Since the webcomic will be reproduced in the upcoming trade, isn’t that kind of a sneer at the people who’ve been reading this in the serial format, who won’t have that part of the story in any printed form? Anyway, I’m still on the fence here, but I’ll be getting the next issue at least.

Fantastic Four #524 – Waid got a little too sappy in the closing issues of his run for my taste, and he wraps it up all saccharine and cuddly here. Sue gets a moment to discuss how she feels about being Invisible Woman that neatly addresses the haunted characterization Reed received in Waid’s first issue, which is a nice treat for those of us who’ve been reading since then, but it’s done in a manner that should be accessible to relatively new readers. An important question readers have been asking for several issues – if Reed cares so much about Ben, why doesn’t he use the technology at hand to free him from being The Thing? – is well answered also, and the reveal rings completely true. Where the after-school special moralizing completely jumps the tracks is when Ben explains why he must refuse Reed’s solution. It doesn’t really make any sense, and it’s clearly meant to be a moment that makes us admire Ben Grimm all over again, so its sloppiness is frustrating. I was really irritated with Mike Wieringo’s costume design for the revamped Dr. Doom a couple years ago, but in the time since then I have to admit he’s really proven himself the ideal FF artist, combining cartoonish linework and comedic timing with sympathetic facial expressions and convincingly big superheroics to bring us into the Imaginauts’ world with flair. I’m dropping the title as this team leaves, and while I don’t think they went out on a perfect note, they certainly wrapped up their run in a consistent, ultimately satisfying way.

Damn Nation #2 – I’ll be damned. This was not only my Pleasant Surprise of the Week, but also my favorite read. I was expecting this series to wear me out a bit, as I’ve been feeling a little overloaded with zombie/vampire/etc. comics and movies, but this three-issue mini has completely challenged my expectations. This issue is top-notch work in every regard. While I had a hard time really getting into J. Alexander’s art on his Queen & Country arc (I think his style gets confusing in black-and-white), in color I can’t get enough of it – it’s alternatingly frightening, moody, comforting, suspenseful, lush, and panicked, and it tackles all these approaches with amazing success. The characters are clear, the action surprisingly kinetic for painted work, and the coloring really helps it shine – it swings the palette from rich and deep to gray and stark, in perfect concert with what the given scene calls for. Andrew Cosby – this being my first reading of his work, that I know of – impresses me as well, with an amazing amount of story density and convincing, fun characterization; and as strong as his dialogue is, he includes plenty of space for Alexander to show off. One page in particular features only three panels – two are close-ups of characters’ eyes, and the third is a close-up of a character’s mouth with one word of dialogue. It’s remarkably restrained on the part of the writer, and it works to the scene’s benefit in every way, by building suspense and balancing clarity with ambiguity; I know what’s about to happen, but I don’t know exactly how or why, and it’s really brilliant comics making. Exciting stuff, and highly recommended.

Comic Monsters

2005-04-02T15:45:00.000-08:00

Got an e-mail in my inbox telling me about a website called Comic Monsters, and they're doing a month-long giveaway with free comics, paperbacks and DVDs going out every week. Looks like there's not much in the way of attached strings, so y'all might wanna take a look.

Review: Children Of The Grave #1-2

2005-03-31T20:34:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I’m looking at the first two issues of Children Of The Grave, a four-issue miniseries written by Tom Waltz and drawn by Casey Maloney, and published by Shooting Star Comics. Issue #2 just came out this Wednesday.

The book is about a team of three American black-ops soldiers (leader LT and his brothers-in-arms Shiv and Li’l Pete) who find themselves in the Middle East hot on the trail of an insane military officer who’s gone rogue from his native country with a small battalion of loyal fighters and slaughtered a field-full of his enemies’ children. Our heroes come across the mass grave of said children to find every individual grave mysteriously emptied, and are then given orders to take down the violent madman and his entire cadre of scumbag gunmuscle.

The first issue sets up the story, and plods along a bit as Waltz tries to introduce all his characters and set up his basic plot elements. As a first issue, it’s a little sloppy. Too often, lately, I’m finding that miniseries spend their whole first issue setting up their pitch and (I can only imagine) expecting enough of the creators’ style or the pitch's charm to rub off on the reader to bring them back for the next issue. I think this is a mistake; if your premise is that an insane middle-eastern military leader has slaughtered a graveyard-full of children who rise from the grave for vengeance (and that’s a good chunk of this series’ premise), those zombie children should appear well before the last page of your opening issue. Instead of getting straight to it, most of this book’s opening issue sets up its characters and their histories. Personally, I don’t like when stories have to “set aside” time to establish their characters; I like discovering who those people are as the story occurs, in the thick of everything, so that I get layers of the onion peeled back as the plot progresses. To me, that creates a heightened level of excitement in the story by tying it to my connection with the people who inhabit it. I get more involved. This issue feeds me the whole onion up front, before anything else happens, and while a lot of the information we’re given is important later on, it's overwritten and kills a little bit of the tension, and I’m definitely glad that I got to read the first two issues in one sitting.

Because I thought the second issue of this was fantastic. Maloney’s linework is detailed and gritty, especially during an impressive firefight that opens the issue. The scene is just violent enough to balance the light-hearted excitement and action of the best military genre work with the disgusting and haunting elements of horror. At the same time, the writing itself balances military and horror themes in strong harmony; both the Waltz and Maloney are balancing the two genres very well, drawing on the strengths of each one to reinforce the other. Where a lot of genre-mixing work feels gimmicky and overly clever, this combination feels like a natural fit for the story being told.

In the middle of the firefight the titular Children of the Grave appear before LT and issue a strange demand; we learn something important about LT by his response, and at the same time the plot moves forward and a really interesting mystery is introduced, and LT’s relationship to the two supporting characters changes in a way that is both obvious and subtly handled. This is exactly the kind of crafty story structuring that I thought was missing in the first issue, and I’m glad to see this creative team has improved so much in just one issue – it’s not just an improvement over what I’d already read, but genuinely impressive and exciting in and of itself.

I’m surprised to say that at this point I have no idea where the series is going. Waltz has introduced a mystery that has me completely stumped, but without making the story or characters unreachable. The book can go in any number of directions at this point, and I’m excited to see how it’s going to play out. Whether you tried the first issue and it didn’t do it for you, or you’ve missed the series entirely so far, I recommend picking up the second issue (which has a summary of the first, to catch new readers up to the story) and taking a look. It’s good fun.

Here are the Diamond order numbers:
Issue #1: NOV042877
Issue #2: JAN052919 (available now)
Issue #3: MAR053100 (available in May)

Advance review - Scar Tissue #1

2005-03-28T19:37:00.000-08:00

Scar Tissue #1 has a cover date of July 2005, so I’m fairly sure what I hold in my hands is an advance copy. It’s being released by Ronin Studios, with J. Andrew Clark writing, and David Wachter doing all of the art except the colors, which Brent Wachter handles.

I’m not sure how to discuss the book without getting into some spoilers, so be warned.

Scar Tissue is a book about a regular Joe (named Ben) who ends up in a hospital after being turned into an “innocent bystander” during an epic fight between a Superman fill-in named The Compatriot and his arch-nemesis, a green-skinned evil dude named Grundoom. Ben receives a heart transplant under mysterious circumstances, and heals at an unprecedented speed, ultimately discovering he’s developed super-powers and, finally, that he’s been given the slain Grundoom’s heart.

I hate to say it, but I didn’t really like this book much. I thought the concept was trite and the execution, while perfectly competent, was mediocre.

From a technical standpoint, my only gripe is with the coloring. The palette Wachter uses is attractive and appropriate enough, but the pencils regularly include a row of teeth on characters’ expressions, and about a third of the time it seems like the teeth are the same color as the lips. It’s amateurish and distracting, and it would never happen on color flatter Josh Richardson’s watch.

I thought the characters were cliché. Ben resists the Great Responsibility that obviously comes with the Great Power he’s been given, wanting only to live a normal life. Now, there’s nothing unreasonable about that, and I can certainly sympathize with the character, but that’s all we get; there’s nothing more specific, no hook, nothing really unique about him. Ben’s uncle – yes, his uncle, who’s taken care of Ben since Ben’s parents died and done his very best – hides the truth behind Ben’s mysterious benefactor, worried that the truth will be too upsetting, and basically mothers the hell out of him; again, understandable and realistic, but uninteresting to me.

I did kind of enjoy Ben’s brother Carl, who got a few good “boy-he’s-dumb” gags, including one about congenital heart disease, and has an interesting scene at the end of the book, in which he prepares breakfast for his ailing brother. Maybe I’m not quite putting my finger on it, but there’s something interesting about a family of three men, and the act of making breakfast for someone else somehow conjures a male/female relationship in my mind – the fact that it’s two men lends a neat spin on their relationship. Whatever it was, that closing scene held my interest most of any parts in the book, and if Ben’s family relationships are explored more in subsequent issues, it might develop into a book I enjoy more than I did this first issue. I don’t get the feeling that the book is headed in that direction, though.

No, this seems like a pretty dedicated super-hero book, and I think that may be where it loses me. I can still enjoy super-hero comics, and they don’t even have to be weird – as much as I like twists on the genre like Sleeper or She-Hulk, I still really enjoy straight-ahead costume comics like Astonishing X-Men, Ultimate Spider-Man and Invincible. But one thing those books need to do is provide interesting action, and I wasn’t really excited by what I saw here; in a contstruction yard, a big steel girder falls on Ben, bending around him and thudding to the ground when he stands up – it’s pretty cool, and the visuals are exciting, but I knew exactly what would happen from the moment the scene opened, four pages earlier. Its predictability neutralizes its impact.

Again, though, I’m not the right audience for this book. This is aimed at a younger reader than me, a reader who wants a little more cartoony moralism and creepy, alien-looking bad guys in green robes, who get excited by wondering just what peril Ben will survive on the construction yard – they know something’s gonna happen, and the fun of it is finding out what and when. This book would have fit on my reading list a lot better when it also included Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and McFarlane’s work on Spidey. If you’re looking for something along those lines, this will be worth your time at least to pick up and take a look. It's just not the kind of thing that interests me much anymore.

A moment for all things High Falutin'

2005-03-27T19:52:00.000-08:00

I’ll bet you never guessed, but I want to be a writer. On occasion, I’m given to spouting off about writing and art in general, and this is just such an occasion. If you’re put off by people talking about Art as if it were something important, you might not enjoy this post, and I completely understand – indulgent wankery, all of it. I promise to write more about comics tomorrow.

There are many writers of acclaim – I’ll refrain from naming one because I’ll certainly name the wrong one – who insist on, struggle for, and often seem to achieve a creative process and product that has entirely to do with its authors’ imaginations, and nothing to do with its audience. I often see interviews with writers in which the question is posed whether and how the writer responds to or incorporates feedback from their audience into their ongoing work, and to find the writer reply with something to the effect of a middle finger, an insistence that the audience should not be a part of the creative process at all, that creative work should come solely from its author. In many cases, this results in work that is solely for its author, and often further results in a reputation for pretentiousness and deceptively meaningless efforts.

On the other hand, the bulk of what we usually consider brilliant or important art also tends to come from artists with this attitude.

I’m probably not going to manage to be that kind of writer, because I feel there are some basic compromises that such an exclusive and sweeping philosophy needs to make in order to be sound. I’m always suspicious of dogmatic thinking, and this is no exception.

I think the moment where the whole “My art is, and only should be, about me and from me and for me” approach becomes fallacious is when the product is “finished,” and somehow passed on from the creator to someone else – an audience member, a critic, a publisher or distributor, anyone, anyone to whom the work is given. At this point, we are engaged in communication, which requires some elements of individual compromise not accounted for by the Me school.

One of these requirements is the fact that each party must use a language that the other can understand. The words you use to speak to people didn’t originate in you; you didn’t invent or create them. Originally, and very naturally, you thought in terms of sensory input, in images and sounds and feelings. Verbal language was taught to you as a way of abstracting these sensations so they could be understood by someone who could not or did not share them. The very act of turning the images and sounds in our imagination into written words (or drawings, or songs, or movies) is a compromise of the work’s autonomy. It is a logical admission that what you are doing has a basic function of transmitting an idea or feeling from one individual to another. That connection is hard enough to simply establish - people come from all variety of backgrounds and carry a host of unnamable prejudices and predispositions to the table simply by virtue of having lived a different life than yours - why make it more difficult for them to understand you? Why not do your part to help bridge that gap, and speak in a shared language?

To me, the act of imagining is always an interpretation of something I’ve absorbed; it’s really more an act of transformation than creation. Input comes to me in the form of experience, I make of it what I can, and output leaves in the form of writing or conversation. I don’t feel like I’m really making anything up. What I am doing is trying to make someone else understand how I feel or think. I’m excited about something, and I want that excitement to be shared – positive, negative, or more complex, it’s the excitement that makes me want to write; I want a connection. If I didn’t want or need one, I wouldn’t bother with writing anything out; I’d just sit there and think about it. What drives me to write (or sing/draw/whatever) is the potential to share my excitement with someone else, and it seems foolish to ignore the last half of the equation.

Of course, it's not that simple. If all I did was pander to my audience, the value of my input would be zero. There's a balance to be struck. But that's another can of worms.

Like I said, more about comics tomorrow. Thanks for sticking that out with me.

Reviews for comics from the week of 03/24/05

2005-03-25T17:26:00.000-08:00

The Expatriate #1: Mixed feelings about this. I’ve been ridiculously excited about the series ever since I first saw the preview art pages by newcomer Jason Latour, and his work here is everything I hoped it would be after seeing those pages. The fact that flatter Josh Richardson is my homie set aside, the colors themselves (which, Josh will tell you, are ultimately totally in Latour’s control) are spectacular, so powerful at times that they threaten to overcome the other elements of the book, but beautiful enough that I don’t mind at all. Latour has a great flair for kinetics, as well, and the action scenes that pepper the opening issue are all convincing and exciting – I’m put in mind of Sean Phillips’ work on Sleeper and Cliff Chiang’s on Human Target. The pencils and inks do a great job establishing the characters, which is necessary to the book because writer B. Clay Moore doesn’t give us a lot to respond to. The two Evil CIA Agents are clever characters, and their repartee is fun to watch. But the lead characters – Jack Dexter and Maria Lobo – are both pretty vacuous at this point; their dialogue isn’t particularly revealing, and they pretty much just go through the motions of explaining themselves to each other – “I’m on the run and I can’t tell you why!” “Well, I guess that’s okay because I’m married to a thug I don’t love and just want to escape this town!” I’ve seen that before, many times, and it was done best in Tom Waits’ classic song, “Burma Shave.” I’m going to stick with the series for a bit because I have confidence that these characters will be developed a little more, and because the art is a really rare find, but I hope Moore takes his protagonists to a less conventional place than he has thus far – he’s promising that he will, and I’m inclined to trust him.

The Incredible Hulk #79: I missed this last week, so I picked it up on Wednesday. I honestly don’t have much to say about it. Lee Weeks kicks ass drawing The Hulk kick the shit out of Fin Fang Foom, of course, and otherwise this didn’t make much of an impression. There’s a guest appearance teaser that closes out the issue, and the appearance made me roll my eyes because this character seems to appear in every Marvel comic, but on the other hand there is a genuine relationship between said character and The Hulk and there’s no reason Peter David won’t be able to make the appearance worthwhile.

Pigtale #2: The “cute as a button” characterization from the first issue takes a bit more of a back seat this time around, giving way to more visual experiments, and my feeling is that the book is better for it. When a series is written and drawn by the same person, almost every time you’ll find that the creator is better at one than the other, and Ovi Nedelcu’s “right hand” is clearly artwork. Several sequences here manage both to drop my jaw and make me take a second, closer look, especially the pages that take our villain down into his secret lair – there’s one page in particular that follows a small make-shift elevator down into the black oblivion and the panel design, while simple and elegant, is among the most amazing I’ve ever seen. The characters still aren’t really knocking my socks off and the plot is fairly cookie cutter (“Let’s revolt, fellow animals, and kill all the humans!”), but I’ll stick around for the eye candy at least a while longer.

Spellbinders #1: This was my Pleasant Surprise of the Week. I’m a huge Mike Carey fan, and his Lucifer series (despite occasional ups and downs) is the best epic fantasy series in publication, but a lot of his Marvel work has disappointed me. I just don’t think he’s got a comfortable grip on the superhero genre. It’s clear from this issue, though, that Marvel have given him the football and let him run with it in his own style, and the change in the quality is immediately apparent. We’re introduced to the world of the series through a brief, chilling opening scene that balances quirky humor, grotesque and fascinating horror and fantasy elements, and more down-to-earth personal relationships, and that scene seems to set the tone for the rest of the book – the series looks to balance all three of those elements with great skill. The characterization is efficient and effective, although we meet a few too many characters right off the bat and it’s a little hard to keep track of them all. The main characters are given plenty of time, though, and it’s a cast of unique, interesting people, with no obvious clichés or one-note wonders. The plot and pacing are a real change of pace, both for Marvel and for Carey, with the status quo being quickly established and then abruptly, surprisingly turned all on its ear in the final pages, with a cliffhanger that spits on all the expectations I had brought to the book. The artwork isn’t spectacular or shocking, but it’s perfectly competent at telling the story clearly and establishing unique looks for the characters without, again, making clichés out of them. The final package has a lot more in common with Carey’s charming My Faith In Frankie miniseries than with his boring Ultimate Elektra, and while I’d had some doubts about the premise, I’m completely reassured that this will be a lot of fun to keep reading. If not for Sleeper, actually, this would have been my favorite book of the week.

Spiderman/Human Torch #3: I’m a little bit tired of Spiderman stories about how Peter Parker dealt (or continues to deal) with the death of Gwen Stacey, but this is a fair balance of emotionally wrought material and goofball humor. The villain of this issue has some hysterical “super-ape” lackeys, and when, during an escape in the stolen Spidermobile, he shouts at one of them, “Don’t lick that wrapper! That was on the floor!” I cracked clean up. Slott remains one of the best writers in the business for combining serious super-hero drama with goofball humor and wry self-awareness that isn’t smug or ironic.

Hellblazer #206: This was a great little one-shot that takes a break from Constantine proper and focuses on the effects that recent events have had on his friend, Chas. I’ll say this much: poor fucking Chas. Having been possessed by a demon of some kind that, upon exiting, left a bit of demon feces in his body/soul/mind, he spends a great deal of this issue just Doing Awful Things. Great character moments here, especially at the end when he realizes what’s happened and tries to face the consequences, completely unequipped for the fallout from behavior he would never have exhibited on his own. The interaction between John Constantine’s hellspawn daughter and Chas is also a nice scene, with the element of danger waxing and waning in the same unpredictable storminess as a normal conversation between a fourteen year-old girl and her uncle figure – the content of the conversation is largely the same as what such a mundane discussion would be like, as a grown man speaks to a young girl about questions of identity and individuality. The dialogue is fairly interesting in its own right, especially as the girl is given some revealing voice-over narrative earlier in the issue, but the element of mortal danger that accompanies the scene makes a nice extra layer. It’s just the sort of thing Carey really excels with, and it’s nice to have an issue of this series that stands on its own – I wish there were more of them. Guest artist Giuseppe Camuncoli (The Intimates) handles most of the material well, though his take on “Crazy Chas” is a little too cartoonish and not really imaginative enough for my taste – it detracts from the believability of the situation just when that believability would be most helpful to the story; I can’t imagine Chas’ wife not noticing, “Gee, he looks completely out of his mind and his eyes are glowing red. Maybe I oughta give that bastard Constantine friend of his a call and see if something’s up.” Still, I found Carey’s firing on both cylinders this week.

Conan #14: Hard to keep reviewing this because “more of the same great stuff” can only be stretched out so far. The series keeps balancing the standard “sword and sorcery” material with bits and pieces of more subtle characterization, such as Conan’s decision in this issue to sacrifice his female counterpart rather than himself. It’s a moment in which you don’t completely admire his bravery and morality, and it adds a nice shade of gray to what is otherwise a completely black and white character. The showdown at the end (which closes this arc) was powerful and believable, and Conan’s boastful celebration in the closing pages was charming and funny, in spite of some increasingly sloppy pencil work from the otherwise impressive Cary Nord (whose character designs for the Bone Woman are spectacular and beautifully creepy). Kevin Sutton did a great review of this issue over on ComiX-Fan in which he points out that the near-invincible Conan will have a hard time, going forward, in creating tension, because we’ll always know that he can face down anything. “If it bleeds, I can kill it,” he says, and that might simplify the dangers Conan will face throughout the series. However, as Sutton also points out, Busiek cleverly side-stepped this in the first arc through Conan’s failure to protect the more vulnerable supporting cast he’d built, and I’m confident Busiek has it in him to keep things just a little complex. So, yeah: More of the same great stuff.

Sleeper Season II #10: All of a sudden, I realize the structure of the second season completely mirrors the first, and it makes me want to go back and re-read every issue of the last several months. The first half of the series set all the pieces in play, slowly establishing the mood and the new status quo for the characters. The next three issues start throwing monkey wrenches in the machinery, raising questions about the everything that’s been established thus far, and the last three issues – if this one is any indication – bring everything crashing down in a spectacular, inevitable disaster. This is probably my favorite issue of the second season so far, and it’s by far the most grotesque; the scene that closes the issue, between Holden, Miss Misery and Peter Grimm, is absolutely disgusting, but also holds a strange kind of perverted excitement so that it’s hard not to stare. Phillips does a great job illustrating what Grimm’s mind-whammy is like, and the narration builds on that image without repeating anything. We also see Grifter coming into play as an important piece on the chess board, and it’s a lot of fun to see how his tale in the Point Blank prequel series is playing into the conclusion. My favorite book of the week, for sure.

The New West #1: There’s a lot about this that I like, and I lot that I don’t. There are some solid, if cliché, characters here, particularly the lead, who is described by the artist as “a tough guy in the vein of Jake Gittes from Chinatown,” with a little Bruce Willis and a little Robert Mitchum. The relationships are well established, too, although the Mayor’s daughter sex kitten is a little cookie-cutter, and her attraction to the Dashing But Forbidden Lead is a little too obvious – by and large, though, the motivations are believable and the tough guy voice-over narration is enough to fill in a little color. The main thing that doesn’t work for me is that Palmiotti has a really amateurish style of dialogue that relies way too much on exposition, and a lot of it doesn’t make sense – in the opening scene the Sexy Daughter asks the Dashing Lead to recount a story she’s obviously heard over and over again for no discernable reason, and when she interrupts his story to say, “I know where Polytechnic is; I was going there for visual arts,” I can’t imagine they haven’t already had that discussion. There’s no reason for her to be saying that, and it comes across as really lazy storytelling. Once we get past the expository opening, however, the plot develops quickly and believably, and the world Palmiotti has imagined, in which some kind of techie terrorism has killed electricity (just in L.A.? Across the country? Throughout the world?) is not terribly clear but nonetheless establishes a great mood and a wonderful setting for the action piece that follows, which is funny and slick and makes the book worth reading. The cliffhanger ending is compelling and I want to read the second (and final) part of the story; I just hope the craft of it will match up more closely to the second half of what we get here than the first half.

World Conquest Poetry Winners Announced!

2005-03-24T13:26:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to the winners of the 1000 Steps to World Domination contest and many thanks to everyone who entered!

The Grand Poo-Bah Winner, who gets a free copy of both Go Forth And Conquer and 1000 Steps to World Domination, as well as getting his poem illustrated by Rob Osborne and walking home with the original art, is:

Matt Silady, author of "How I Will Rule You All"

The Runners-Up, who all win free copies of Go Forth And Conquer, are:

Skippy for "Deez Nutz"
Mark W. Hale for "If I had a giant robot gorilla suit I'd stomp all over town..."
Kevin J. Church for "3 Haikus for World Conquest"
Shawn Demumbrum for "Absolute Tyrant Haiku"
David Campbell for "My World Conquest Haiku"

Looks like haiku are popular these days. I blame television.

Thanks again to the Great Rob Osborne for his magnanimous leadership and to everyone with the gumption to enter.

Jumping Off The Page, part one

2005-03-23T12:57:00.000-08:00

I was thinking a little bit about what I said at the end of my Sin City review, and about the “Blood in the Gutters” chapter of Scott McCloud’s superlative Understanding Comics, and I got a little excited and thought I’d share. This is the first in what I plan to be a series of short essays called Jumping Off The Page.

I’ve been thinking and studying for a while about what makes comics special. Too often I think they’re treated as fake movies, or dumbed-down books. The medium itself is something powerful and unique, and I like to think of myself as a student of the form. Pretentious? Obviously. But it comes from a genuine passion for comics, so I ain’t apologizing.

McCloud discusses in his book the concept of closure, or the “phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole.” He gets into the mechanics of how the gutter between panels is an invitation and a tool for the audience to participate in creating the story; the way panels are laid out on a page, and the action or shift that is implied between them is something that involves the reader and stimulates the imagination. Ultimately, McCloud concludes that “no other artform gives so much to its audience while asking so much from them as well.”

Well, I was thinking about what I said about Frank Miller’s Sin City – that he had captured a way of imagining things that I’d left behind in my childhood, a way of imagining based on what was unknown and inconceivable, as opposed to the adult method of imagination based on experience and comparison – and wondering if maybe that wasn’t something unique to comics.

Because as much as I loved the Sin City movie, and as much as I thought Rodriguez captured that same surreal fantasy on film, something in the translation was lost. I’ve been asking myself why, and I have some ideas.

When you watch a film, your vision and your hearing are both being engaged, and the filmmaker is completely in control of what you see and hear. The volume, the rhythm, the brightness, the darkness, everything that the audience is able to see or hear is accounted for and controlled by the artist. In a way, this disengages the audience’s imagination. Everything the audience perceives is the result of the creators’ imagination, so there’s little impetus or opportunity to participate in creating the story. While there are stylistic exceptions, directors who tease their audience with what they can’t see or hear, the movie is still prompting the audience about when it’s appropriate to engage their minds and get those wheels turning – the movie itself is still squarely in the driver’s seat.

Going in the other direction, the far end of the spectrum is prose. Prose is entirely iconic, as McCloud points out, and it’s completely up to the reader to determine what the sensual aspects of the material are like. This even applies when the writing is especially evocative or vivid. Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorite books that always burns an image in my mind – the author is recounting an event of his childhood in which he accidentally fell into a big tub of boiling-hot water:

I reached over and touched my right hand with my left, and the whole thing came off like a wet glove. I mean, the skin on the top of the wrist and the back of my hand, along with the fingernails, all just turned loose and slid down to the ground. I could see my fingernails lying in the little puddle my flesh had made on the ground in front of me.
Harry Crews, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, page 122

Pretty damn graphic, right? But every single person who reads it is imagining something completely different. The color and texture of the skin, the dirt on the ground, the light and the air and everything that is a part of that scene is invented completely by the reader, and is certainly not the same thing as what actually happened, or even how the writer remembers it. Everybody processes the information in their own minds and creates the scene for themselves, which means there are infinite ways the scene could appear.

Comics, on the third hand, treads ground that it shares only (and barely) with music. Comics only gives you a piece of the puzzle – it engages your vision and controls what you see. Music controls only what you hear. But it doesn’t give you the whole puzzle. You know what the shape is, you know what a part of it looks like, but it’s up to you to fill in the rest. What this gives comics is a power to not only share the exact vision of the creator(s), but to involve the audience in the creation of the story at the same time. This power is unmatched by any other medium.

Comics even trumps music in this regard because of the process of closure. Reading a comic, you may see exactly what the artist intended for you to see, but you still don't see everything in the world of that comic. You're still filling in gaps where the comic is unable to show physical movement, helping to build what the scene looks and moves like, even though you know exactly how every element in that comic appears. Even music can't do this - you only hear what the band plays. You don't imagine notes where they don't get played. The musician is still holding on to that control.

There are exceptions, of course, and there are even art forms that engage senses other than sight and hearing – theater, for example, can play with smell and feeling by controlling the environment in which the audience finds itself (though it rarely does) – but it’s almost completely uncharted territory and comics is right in front leading the way.

I really like my art to create a dialogue – a line of connection between the artist and me. That’s why comics are a perfect fit. Comics have a superlative ability to suggest.

How does that suggestion work? I’m not completely sure. But I’m not done thinking about it. In my next installment of Jumping Off The Page, I’ll look a little closer at the mechanics of how that element of comics works.

Reviews for comics from the week of 03/16/05

2005-03-21T13:15:00.000-08:00

I’m a little behind with these, but there was some great stuff and a couple let-downs so I figure better late than never.

Jack Hunter: G.I. Spy “Eyes Only Preview”: Hey, I love trying new books out, so when I see stuff like this I always pick it up. This looks like your typical James Bond material, which isn’t really my bag, but it is pretty damn well done. The opening sequence in a dangerous frozen wasteland establishes the Russian scientist/solider villain as properly ruthless and brilliant, and the remainder of the issue is an introduction to the Bond stand-in with just enough of a tweak to make this worthwhile for fans of the genre. Jack Hunter has a more self-deprecating sense of humor than Bond, and it comes across a little more American and rowdy. The mistakes he makes in the ballroom action scene are funny, and if this genre had any appeal for me at all I’d probably check this out when it launches.

Invincible #21: Felt like I read this in about three minutes. There are some fun sequences, particularly when the Evil Batman character pulls Mark into his “Cloak from Cloak & Dagger” dimension of darkness and Mark just won’t let go of his hand – the guy is a pussy, plain and simple, and the ball-busting Mark gives him is pretty funny. But I felt kinda ripped off when I got to the last page. “That’s it?” What’s here is good stuff, as usual, but I didn’t feel like I got enough it this time around.

Captain America #4: I really liked the first issue of this, and felt a little let down by the second and third. This picks up a bit, but I think the pacing isn’t up to Brubaker’s golden standard from Sleeper’s first twelve issues. The fight scene with Crossbones was a lot of fun, and the mystery behind what’s happening to Cap’s mind is intriguing, but the tension feels a little artificial to me. I know I’m gonna find out what this is all about by the end of the arc – and if I don’t, I’ll at least get a big piece of the puzzle and some fun new questions – and I don’t feel like there’s a good reason why it’s taking this long to get there. I’m giving this book until the end of the first arc, and if nothing happens to change my mind, I’ll be switching to trade collections. The Brube’s often quite good at pulling rabbits out of his sleeve, so that big surprise may happen, but I’ve gotten really sensitive to the treatment of the serial format and the decompression trend. Density is my buzz-word of the day, and I know Brubaker’s got it in him, but this ain’t it.

Plastic Man #15: Better than the last few issues, but the humor’s wearing off a little. Too many pages spent on the same silly DC in-jokes (World Changing Events, decompression, and so on), not enough visual gags packed into each page. When I started picking this up around issue 7, every page had three or four or five different cartooning ideas that made me smile and thrilled me with the wealth of imagination it offered, but now it’s down to one gag per page at best. Still, this is funnier than the last few issues, which haven't been funny at all, so I’m glad to see some improvement.

Lucifer #60: Building towards a climax here, and it’s always fun when Mazikeen kicks ass, even if it’s only for two pages. I think she’s my favorite example of the “kick-ass chick you wouldn’t want to fuck with in a million years” trope, which can often be condescending and stupid. Carey’s done a great job of avoiding that with this character, largely by complicating her with a healthy dose of conflicting loyalties and hidden agendas; when it all wraps up in the coming year, I’ll be writing about this series as a whole, and I’ll have quite a bit to say about ol’ Mazi. Anyway, we don’t see that much of her here, but what we get I love, as always. Mostly we just come closer to rounding a corner with the Jill Presto subplot (Christ, finally), and learn a little more about Lilith’s plans. The revelation at the end of this issue is a good one, and I’m looking forward to the shit hitting the fan, but for me this series suffers a bit when Lucifer himself doesn’t appear, and this is one of those arcs.

Human Target #20: Going out with a bang and not a whimper. This is a great arc, with the reliably brilliant artwork from Cliff Chiang blowing me away every time I turn the page. Milligan finally does what I’ve been waiting for – he kicks his lead character’s ass, very badly. Christopher Chance is a character that has been in need of a situation he couldn’t handle, because it was getting predictable. When he gets his ass handed to him early in this issue, it gives way to a sequence of scenes showing him licking his wounds, trying to figure out how to proceed, and it reveals a really interesting side of the character that we haven’t seen before. And on top of that, Milligan is an absolute master of the serial format – he’s off about as often as he’s on, but he’s almost always “on” when he’s writing this series, and every issue is perfectly crafted; everything moves at a fast clip, keeping my heart beating and my eyes darting about the page, but he doesn’t go too far with it either, and keeps it at a level where I feel confident as a reader that I’m understanding everything I should (Grant Morrison, for example, has trouble with that, or I have trouble with him). Mother of God, I’m going to miss this series.

Noble Causes #8: I picked up the first collection of this series a while back, having enjoyed Faerber’s Seattle-based gumshoe book, Dodge’s Bullets. With a little nudging from Faerber himself, who’s been fishing around a lot of my message-board haunts lately and letting people know about the jump-on points with issues 7 and 8, I decided to try it out. I’m glad I did. The pacing here is moving at a note-perfect clip, with a lot of elements that remind me of what I enjoyed about Uncanny X-Men when I was a kid. In one scene, for example, two female characters (one a pregnant super-heroine, the other a regular-Jane wife of a super-hero) are taking a walk in the park when something unexpected happens to one of them – but as a result, we learn something about both of them. It’s a great way to stretch the value of your storytelling dollar without cheapening either surprise, and it’s the kind of thing I seem to remember Claremont having been good at. Plus, there’s a great fight sequence between two main characters, complete with boulder-throwing and great big blasts of energy, and that sequence concludes with the introduction of a new danger that really makes an impact on the reader – I can’t wait to see how Our Heroes are going to deal with it. If Invincible is doing for me what Ultimate Spider-Man used to, then Noble Causes looks like it might be applying for the X-Men’s job. As for the issue as a jumping-on point: yeah, it works. Will the new reader catch all the references? Definitely not. I didn’t. But I picked up enough to enjoy what I saw, and there’s a catch-up page on the inside front cover with bios for all the main characters and a plot summary I didn't read because I wanted to see how the storytelling itself would catch me up. I wish it wasn’t $3.50, but this book is definitely worth a look if you’re looking for classic super-team fights and drama combined with some fresh new ideas and characters, and it's passed my patented Serial Format Density Test with flying colors.

Shaolin Cowboy #2: Jesus, nobody’s gonna be able to pin this series down. The first issue was a challenge, for sure – ten pages spent on a single panel with no action, followed by ten pages of “violence porn” kung fu action, and a wisecracking donkey talking shit with his balls hanging out. Nothing like a story or a plot or even any characters emerged, which threw a lot of readers for a loop – it would usually turn me clean off and send me running for the hills, but I’ve got a soft-spot for Geof Darrow's madness from his work with Frank Miller, and I knew something special was going on. This issue completely flips the script on the first one, and took me about four times as long to read. King Crab, the Shaolin Cowboy’s greatest nemesis, eats up most of the issue by recounting his his misfortune at the hands of the Cowboy and his quest for vengeance, lighting up a cigarette as he tells the story. As with the first issue, this is absolutely, jaw-droppingly ridiculous, and remarkably stupid, and wonderful. Watching a little 12”-wide crab practicing ju jitsu alongside a class of Chinese monks is pretty fucking surreal. But that pales in comparison to the spectacular action stunt that ends the fight scene between Cowboy and Crab. I don’t want to spoil it, but it is all at once completely unbelievable and retarded and riveting and exciting and funny. I laughed out loud reading that sequence, thrilled with the sheer ballsiness of Darrow’s work. There are also a few spots where the Cowboy himself has some dialogue, and it goes a long way towards giving him some palpable character. Is this series going to work for everyone? I have a feeling not. But it works like gangbusters for me. My favorite read of the week.

LAST DAY for the 1000 Steps To World Domination contest!

2005-03-18T09:22:00.000-08:00

Tonight's the deadline! It costs you absolutely nothing to enter, and it'll be fun, and you can win some great comics AND original art from the amazing Rob Osborne.

All you gotta do is write a poem about the virtues of World Conquest, and e-mail it directly to Rob at rob@absolutetyrant.com. You have until midnight tonight.

DO IT NOW!

Advance Movie Review: SIN CITY

2005-03-17T18:22:00.000-08:00

So, I got to see one of the advance screenings of the Sin City movie last night, thanks to a free pass from the good Mr. James Sime at The Isotope Comic Book Lounge.

Man, I just enjoyed the hell out of that movie.

Let me get a few things out of the way - here’s what you’re gonna read everywhere: This is a ridiculously accurate translation of the comics to the screen, with the panels from the comics actually matching the visual shots of the film. It’s gritty and it’s stylized and it’s absolutely gorgeous, and any fan of the comics should be pleased with what they see.

I’m gonna get into minor spoilers here, but they’ll only spoil elements that already existed in the comics, so if you’ve read the original Sin City, as well as That Yellow Bastard and The Big Fat Kill, you won’t get any surprises ruined. And if you haven’t read those books, get on top of that right now – these are some of the best American comics ever made!

First of all, the actors in the three lead roles all do remarkable, note-perfect work. Mickey Rourke is great as Marv, and while his prosthetic chin looked kinda funny to me in the trailers, in the movie it works wonderfully. He really conjures the frantic, imbalanced anger and fear of the character, the way he moves, the way he talks, in a way I wasn’t expecting live-action acting to be able to capture. Bruce Willis holds it together nicely as Hartigan, and while I don’t quite buy him as a 68-year-old, he’s pretty comfortable with the Slightly Rundown, Good-Hearted Cop Willing To Bend The Law To Do The Right Thing. It’s pretty much exactly what you would expect from Willis playing this role – if you were expecting something new, you’ll be disappointed, but if you just want to see John McClane as an old man, you’ll be a pig in shit. I haven’t seen Clive Owen in anything else except The Bourne Supremacy, but he makes a mighty impression as Dwight.

The supporting roles are a big part of the fun of the comics, and several of them are great here, too. Remember the guy in The Big Fat Kill who got the arrow-message shot through his chest, and he stood there asking for help? He’s hysterical. Rosario Dawson does an incredible job as Gail, bringing that character to life with all the verve and sexiness and furious decisiveness the character needs. Miho is a character trope that often bores me (woo hoo, look at the tiny little Asian martial artist with the ninja stars), but Miller gave her some really fun presence in the comics and that’s brought to the screen with gutsy, silent perfection by Devon Aoki. Michael Clarke Duncan scares the shit out of me as the giant Manute, especially when he tells Gail about the coming bloodbath of Old Town and concludes, “Nothing can stop this.” And Schlubb and Klump perform their “delusions of eloquence” just as well as I’d hoped.

One of my favorites is Elijah Wood as Kevin, because now he’s supposed to be creepy. He always kinda gives me the willies anyway, and it’s nice to know that this time around, it’s intentional.

Not everybody is comfortable with the stylized material, though. Michael Madsen, coming off what I thought was his career-best performance in Kill Bill Volume 2, gives his career worst with an awkward, phoned-in performance as Hartigan’s partner. His scene opens the main story of the movie, which is unfortunate because it was so awful that even when it was over, I was on edge for the next twenty minutes, worried that it would get that bad again. Brittany Murphy gets way more screen time than she deserves, and while she’s at least trying where Madsen clearly didn’t give a shit, you can see her struggling to make it work pretty much every time she opens her mouth.

Speaking of which, there are a few sloppy elements here that really surprised me. The dubbing is off in a few places, especially when Murphy speaks. It’s jarring and it pulled me out of the movie, and I can’t imagine how that got past a professional director like Robert Rodriguez. In spite of the movie’s full willingness to be brutal (the demise of That Yellow Bastard is especially graphic, a testament to Rodriguez’ commitment to Miller’s work), there are a few places where the stage combat is obvious and awkward – for example, when Wendy is pistol-whipping Marv in the chair, it looks like she’s not actually hitting him. It looks like she’s stage acting, and it’s something that could have been easily fixed, giving a kind of a rushed feel to parts of the movie.

That scene brings to mind the scripting. For the most part, the sheer ballsy stylization of the film makes it work. In a few places, it’s made clear that Miller’s writing was really meant to be read on the page and not spoken, and in a few more places lines have been omitted or rewritten – badly. Cardinal Roark’s speech to Marv about cannibalism is shortened and redone, and when Roark says what was Marv’s line in the comic – “I joined in” – it’s just stupid. In Wendy's pistol-whipping scene, Miller had given Marv a great line about how she should be hitting him with the butt of the gun and not the barrel, and that’s inexplicably cut from the same scene in the film.

By and large, though, it works, and it’s why people are comparing this movie to Pulp Fiction. That comparison is a mistake. The only thing this movie shares with Pulp Fiction is a stylized unfriendliness to reality, and the guts to follow through. Pulp Fiction had an intentional hipness to it, a sense of humor that spoke to pot-smokers, coke-heads and beatniks, and everyone who ever secretly envied those people, and it made its audience feel like they were part of an interesting nu-retro scene, an homage to the culture of the American past with a sly wink to the present. Sin City offers no such invitation to its audience. There’s no broad social commentary or cultural mish-mash. Rather than taking a familiar world and giving it a self-conscious tweak, which is what Tarantino does, Sin City builds its own world from the ground up, and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a film.

Frank Miller’s vision of Sin City had its origins in Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson and Dashiell Hammett, sure, but he took only the barest elements from those inspirations and ran in a totally new direction. Sin City the comic was (and in the film it remains) an experiment in bleeding stories down to their barest elements, their most necessary ingredients, and then using style and flair to rebuild the content. The result was at once pulpier and grittier than anything I’d ever seen and yet seemed obvious when it was done; why hadn’t I read that before? Why hadn’t I seen that before? It was too familiar not to have been calling back to some memory of a movie I’d seen as a kid. Then it hit me: this was a memory. This was how I remembered movies I’d seen as a kid. But where children use inexperience, the things they don’t know and haven’t seen, as the fuel of their imagination, adults do the opposite; they make comparisons to what they’ve already seen and heard and experienced to shape the things they imagine. Frank Miller recreated that immeasurable make-believe of my childhood, and served it to me as an adult. Robert Rodriguez seems to understand that. There was never a comic or a novel or a magazine like Sin City, and there’s never been a movie like it either.

Don't forget - 3 more days for 1000 Steps!

2005-03-16T13:14:00.000-08:00

Remember, the 1000 Steps to World Domination Giveaway - for free comics and original art from AiT/PlanetLar artist and Fearless Leader Rob Osborne - still has three days left! You have until midnight on Friday to submit your entries, so don't miss out. Rob's art is really gorgeous, and it won't cost you a penny to win it!

You can scroll down or click here for the original post to get the details.

Gotham Central Free Comics Giveaway, Part Duex!

2005-03-16T11:47:00.000-08:00

We have a winner in the first part of the Gotham Central giveaway! Behold, Good Mister Sean Witzke (no relation) has jumped on board the book and will soon receive a little bonus for his efforts. Look how happy he looks!

Enjoy those books, Mr. Witzke! I'm glad to know you'll be enjoying Gotham Central with the rest of us lucky readers.

Here's the thing. I'm having a lot of fun pimping out this great book and trying to get you people reading. I really want people to start checking out this book. So I don't want to stop just because one guy won already.

And I just remembered that the first five issues of Gotham Central were released in a nice, cheap $10 trade that would really fill in the space to the left of my "Half A Life" trade nicely.

You know what THAT means. That means five more extra issues of Gotham Central sitting around my apartment, looking for a good home. Everyone else who posts a picture (or a link to a picture, which I guess is more realistic) of themselves holding #28 and #29 by the end of the week (let's call it 12:00 Sunday) will be thrown into a hat and the one will be chosen randomly to have the FIRST five issues sent to them for free!

Sound good? Go buy some great comics!

Gotham Central review & Free Comics Giveaway #2!

2005-03-15T09:51:00.000-08:00

Like a lot of people, I’ve been wondering lately if the death toll does not knell for Gotham Central. First of all, ever since the conclusion of Brubaker’s wonderful “Unresolved” arc last year, I’ve felt like the series was in a slump; it started being kind of a flat read for me. I was still pretty bummed out, though, when I found out Michael Lark had signed a Marvel-exclusive contract and was leaving the book, because I couldn’t see anyone quite filling his shoes. Lark’s inker, Stefano Gaudiano, had done some fill-in issues that only kinda worked for me. “Sean Phillips?” I wondered. “Cliff Chiang?” Then word came out it would be Kano, whose work I’d seen in the H-E-R-O trade I picked up a couple years ago, and I made that face you make when you’re not exactly let down by something, but you’re sure not thrilled about it either. To make matters worse, Ed Brubaker signed a Marvel-exclusive contract, too. Now, while Greg Rucka penned my all-time favorite Gotham Central story arc with “Half A Life”, I’ve generally enjoyed the Brubaker parts more than the Rucka parts, so when I found out that The Brube was leaving the title I thought to myself, “Well, I guess that’s pretty much the end of Gotham Central.”

I could not possibly have been more wrong. And now I’m skipping my morning cigarette to blast away at the computer for a few minutes because I’m totally fucking psyched about this book again and I gotta tell you about it.

The two most recent issues of Gotham Central - #28 and #29, which came out last month and last week, respectively – mark the fist step of the new ongoing team of Rucka, Kano, continuing inker Stefano Gaudiano, and continuing colorist Lee Loughridge, and the series hasn’t been this good in a while. I think maybe this mix-up is just the kick in the ass that Gotham Central needed.

The story opens on a couple of kids getting into trouble in a sketchy neighborhood, winding up trapped in some kind of abandoned science lab with an unknown chemical spill hurting one of them badly, and trapping the other. We meet a cop named Andrew Kelly – a hint gets dropped later that we’ve met him before, in the No Man’s Land saga, but I never read that stuff. Suffice to say, though, Rucka tells me a lot about Kelly in a really short period of time, without infodumping or getting sentimental. With some deft, plain dialogue, Rucka really imparts that this guy is a good, working-man cop, doing his best and breaking his partner’s balls once in a while, and now here he is trying to save these kids. I really like this guy.

Then Rucka really fucks him up. What a hook! Classic, effective storytelling, done in an absolutely horrific fire sequence that shows off not only the upgrade in paper stock that Gotham Central got a few issues back, but the remarkable work of colorist Lee Loughridge, whose name I hadn’t bothered to learn until now. I always enjoyed the coloring on this book, but the colors in issue #28 really raised my eyebrows. This sequence is totally horrifying. I’ll be looking for anything else with the name Loughridge on it now, I can tell you that.

The story then moves to Renee Montoya, who apparently knows Officer Kelly, and we get some great sequences as she tries to work her way around the scene of the crime – which just happens to be in her old neighborhood, where her estranged father runs his store. Now, it gets said a lot, to the extent that sometimes I start thinking it’s just hype, but it’s the truth: Greg Rucka writes some of the best female characters in all of comics, with Renee Montoya at the top of my personal list. She was the central character of that “Half A Life” arc I loved so much, and she’s taking a big role in this arc, too, and that’s nothing but good news for me. Rucka takes her through a number of powerful scenes – including encounters with her father, her boss, her lover, and of course, Batman, in one of my favorite Batman scenes in recent memory.

A Flash-related villain turns out to be involved, and I was a little bit concerned that the incorporation of The Flash’s world into the world of Gotham Central would either confuse me or turn me off, because I’ve never read any Flash books, but neither is the case. Rucka has kept everything accessible here, and in the closing pages of issue #29, he introduces some Keystone City characters with the same subtle flair he used to introduce Officer Kelly. I “get” and enjoy those characters right away. This kind of efficient, effective characterization reminds me of my favorite issues of Peter Milligan’s excellent Human Target series, which spent a lot of its run on three-issue, self-contained arcs that had to introduce and develop their own characters in just a few pages, and Rucka succeeds here just as well as Milligan did when Human Target was at its best.

So the writing has reassured and excited me – what about the art? Can Kano and Gaudiano pick up the slack?

They sure as hell can. This arc features a little role-reversal, with Gaudiano on pencils and Keno on inks, but the team seems to have developed an instant chemistry. The work here does exactly what it should – it keeps the tone that Lark left behind, but it also forges its own style. The scenes depicting what has happened to poor Officer Kelly are especially powerful and well-rendered; the hospital scene in issue #29 really placed me in the moment, wondering how the hospital staff were gonna handle this situation, and the visuals really played a huge part in making that scene read so well. The balance between Lark's style and the "new voice," if you will, is exactly what I was hoping for, and if we can look forward to more work like this when the artists switch roles, I’ll be just as happy as a pig in shit.

This isn’t a time to drop Gotham Central. This is a time to start reading it.

And with that in mind, I’m gonna take this opportunity to announce The Second Zealot’s Lore Comics Giveaway! You know that “Half A Life” arc that I mentioned like eight times in this review? Well, it’s coming out in trade soon, and I’m gonna be picking it up. Like I said, it’s my favorite arc of the book so far, and this has been one hell of a book, so why wouldn’t I want it on my bookshelf?

That means that I’ll have some singles to spare. The full story arc, issues 6 through 10, and I’m offering them now to anyone who starts reading the book. Here’s what you have to do: go to your local comics shop. Find the issues I just reviewed – that’s #28 and #29 – and pick ‘em up. Take a picture of yourself holding the issues, and either post the picture or post a link to the picture in the comments thread at the bottom of this post. First person to post a pic, I’ll get your mailing info and ship the books out to you, totally free of charge. I’ll even cover the shipping.

“But how can I read issues 28 and 29 if I haven’t read any of the series yet? Won’t I be missing out on a lot of story?” You won’t be missing out on much context, trust me – the current story stands really well on its own. But as coincidence would have it, what little context really would be helpful to understand the background of this story is contained in – you guessed it – the “Half A Life” arc. So, you’ll be getting seven comics for the price of two, including my All Time Favorite Gotham Central story, and I’ll be happy ‘cause I’m still here spreading the word for books that make me happy.

Oh, and you’ll probably end up hooked on Gotham Central. But trust me, you’ll be glad.

(P.S. - The 1000 Steps to World Domination contest - to win free Rob Osborne comics and original art - is still going strong. Scroll down for details - you can still enter and win up until midnight this Friday, so check it out!)

Armor X #1 review

2005-03-12T23:49:00.000-08:00

If you're here looking for the Rob Osborne 1000 Steps to World Domination contest, just scroll down. It's right below this review.

Armor X #1 came out this week, one of the many recent and upcoming Image launches that have been keeping me excited about what the publisher has in store for 2005. The solicitation copy struck a chord of interest for me: essentially, this series (a four-issue mini, if I'm not mistaken) promises to look at the "With great power" trope we've seen a thousand times over, but with a much darker edge. What if Peter Parker wasn't such a spunky, resiliant young lad? What if a super-hero-style power suddenly fell in the hands of a more damaged kid, someone much more potentially dangerous? Would the spirit of heroism shine through and triumph, or would we see the origin story of a super-villain?

These seem to be the questions that writer Kieth Champagne is asking, and I think they're compelling questions. As much as I love Spider-Man, it's always seemed a little too easy for him to continue to try to do the right thing. He screws up a lot, sure, especially in Brian Michael Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man, but there's always a heart of gold in there, just bumbling around and trying to do the best he can. I'm glad to see a series that questions this God-given do-goodery and offers a more edgy slant on the origin.

The main character here is Carson, a high school senior with no friends, and even with my expectations that he would be shown as a 'darker' sort of protagonist, his characterization surprised me by really pushing the envelope. This is a fucked up kid. Early in the book we see him being picked on by your usual pack of team-jacket-wearing jock bullies, who actually call him "Columbine" and issue the usual threats, and my first instinct as a reader is to assume he's being wrongfully persecuted.

Nope.

He's saved from this first encounter by an intervention from the Alpha Jock, a character named Rico who takes the Harry Osborn role and calls off the wolves, because deep down he really likes Carson. And while I'm inclined to roll my eyes at the introduction of such a stock character and action, I have to say the art in this sequence suspended my disbelief pretty effectively. One panel in particular, showing the expression on Rico's face as he stares down his jock subordinates, was whimsical and interesting, and combined with some pretty solid dialogue from Rico, it redeemed the scene. Next, of course, since Carson hasn't been able to really explain himself yet, I'm expecting to see the scene where the two of them take a moment to connect and understand each other.

This is where my expectations started getting shoved to the side. Carson spits in Rico's face, running off and telling Rico, "You're all on the list!" We then follow Carson through a series of scenes that really illustrate that the creators are not demanding that we sympathize with Carson. He's shown - very effectively, I thought, with fair restraint concerning cliches - to really be an asshole. We're given clear clues about why he's such a dick, but we're not asked to take those explanations as excuses. It's an approach I always appreciate, and it's especially important in a story like this. That Champagne approaches the character in this fashion impresses me, and provides some reassurance that he'll be able to jump what I consider this series' greatest hurdle.

And that is that when I think about it, and read this book on paper, I realize that I don't want the answers to the questions this series will raise. I don't want it to be a super-hero story where the integrity of the human spirit finally rises above adversity. I don't want it to be a super-villain origin story. What I do want is a little more ambiguity, a little more nuance, something that will leave me still thinking when it's over. Does this series run the risk of becoming one of those simplistic fables with the moral explained at the end? Yes, it does. That was my main concern from the beginning. We aren't given a conclusive answer in the opening issue whether or not Armor X will succumb to that style of storytelling, but the characterization of the main character thus far is reassuring.

The pacing is strong here, and appropriate for a first issue. We're introduced to all the main players - including Carson's love interest, a blind girl who surprised the hell out of me with a seriously racy bit of dialogue in her opening scene with Carson - and the premise is completely filled out, with a couple questions and mysteries introduced and an appropriate (if slightly predictable) cliffhanger closing everything out. It's a well-proportioned episode of the story, and that's something I've been particularly sensitive to in recent months, as my monthly pull-list has grown a bit and I've started to pay closer and closer attention to the way creators take advantage of the serial format, looking for titles to drop in favor of waiting for the collected editions. I'm happy to say that this issue, at least, packs just the right amount of story and development.

A moment here about the artwork: it's competent. Nothing here totally blows me away, but as I said earlier, there are moments where facial expressions really hold a scene together, and some credit has to be given for an artist who can do that. Andy Smith doesn't really express a very unique style here, to the extent that the costume design immediately brings to mind the old X-O Manowar costume from back in the good old Valiant days (and funny enough, X-O artist Bart Sears does a pin-up on the back cover). But Smith's work does service the story well, with clear storytelling and sequencing.

Armor X #1 doesn't completely assuage my concerns about the potential weaknesses behind its premise, but it also exceeds my expectations regarding its strengths. I'll be checking out the rest of the series.

2005-03-12T12:34:00.000-08:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog. Hopefully this will make it easier for all of you to join in discussions!

1000 Steps Contest UPDATE!!!

2005-03-11T14:43:00.000-08:00

Okay, a few folks have asked about the deadline. We're setting it at midnight, Friday, March 18th. That's one week from today.

But that's not the only reason for the update: Rob has graciously sweetened the pot.

The winning poem will not just get 1000 Steps to World Domination, but Rob Osborne, the dominator of the world himself, will illustrate the winning poem and send his original artwork to the winner!

Jesus, I wish I could enter this myself, now. If only I hadn't already proven how crappy my poetry is...

1000 Steps to World Domination... and A Free Giveaway!

2005-03-11T09:42:00.000-08:00

When I first read Rob Osborne’s remarkable 1000 Steps to World Domination, I wrote a review for Millarworld that began with the words, “I feel great.”

Just moments ago, I finished a re-read of the book, and I gotta say: it worked again.

1000 Steps is the AiT/Planet Lar edition of a mini-comic that won the 2003 Isotope Award for Excellence in Mini-Comics. When I picked it up at the release party, I knew it would be good – Comic Pimp James Sime had been extolling its many virtues from the moment he’d read it, to the point that I asked him to stop because I was worried he’d build it up too much – but I was completely unprepared for what an exciting and mature book it turned out to be.

Do I mean mature as in “complex relationships between conflicted, soulful characters”? Do I mean mature as in “violence and nudity galore”? Lord no. I mean this looks like the work of somebody who’s been cartooning for a long time and has really honed his craft. This is professional comics, make no mistake. "Mini-comic" does not translate automatically to "amateurish crap," as I once thought, in my younger, more foolish days. If anything, it may often translate, and 1000 Steos is certainly an example, to an endeavor of real dedication and passion. One thing is made crystal-fucking-clear in these pages: Rob Osborne loves comics.

So, what do I mean by exciting? Explosions everywhere and a relentless, bullet-paced plot? Hell no. This isn’t a full story in the traditional sense, though the character development is deceptively subtle. This is a manifesto. This is a call to arms. This is what everyone should read who can’t figure out if they’re really passionate about comics, or if it’s just a hobby to them.

As far as the actual, literal content goes: 1000 Steps is a series of mostly self-contained pages that build on each other and deliver an overarching message, along the lines of the week-long stories Bill Watterson used to do (like when Calvin lost Hobbes and finally discovered him at Susie’s tea party, for example). There are a number of running stories that intersperse with each other: there’s Rob Osborne himself, discussing his plan to overthrow the earth with comics (using dialogue from real conversations with his wife, Sarah) and locked in a life-and-death struggle with a monkey literally on his back; there’s an alien invader, stuck with anal-probe duty when all he wants to do is overthrow the earth; God shows up and gives Rob advice now and then, including a recommendation that he takes naps after large meals; and there’s a clever spin on the old tortoise and the hare story, with a pissed-off, determined tortoise talking shit to the rabbit. There’s also an extended sequence called “The War Of Art,” which declares that “Conquest is the primary aim of comics,” while an Asian influence takes over the artwork, putting me in mind of some of Scott Morse’s sequences in his best book, Soulwind. Osborne’s actual style is quite different (and much more accessible), but the eclectic influences are there in both men’s art.

Really, while Osborne is beating the drum here for his plan to take over the world through comics, I think this stuff could be inspiring and funny to anyone. The fundamental lesson isn’t a particularly new one (“Bust your ass to succeed at all times and you will be an exceptional person,” basically) but the delivery is clever and compelling, with a unique sense of humor that’ll charm your pants off and an account of the challenges Osborne’s fought along the way that takes itself just seriously enough.

Wonderful stuff. I feel great, again, and I owe it to Rob Osborne.

And now we come to the fulfillment of my promise: the first Zealot’s Lore giveaway! Ever the benevolent world-dominator, Mr. Osborne is teaming with me to give away five copies of his mini-comic “Go Forth & Conquer!" completely free!

Well, there’s one small catch. If you’re clever, though, you can turn that catch into an opportunity.

You have to write a poem. Not a long one, if you don’t want! Write a haiku! The only restriction is that it must be a poem touting the virtues of World Conquest. Type it up, e-mail it to Rob at rob@absolutetyrant.com, and include your mailing address. Rob’s five favorite poems will get a free copy of the “Go Forth And Conquer!” mini-comic, and the best one will get a free copy of 1000 Steps to World Domination! See, you won’t even have to spend any money to see if my review was malarkey. You can find out without spending a dime!

I’ll get the ball rolling, just in case you’re feeling shy:

To conquer the world
Is my favorite thing;
Much better than packages
Wrapped up with string.

…see? My poem totally sucked ass! There’s no need to be shy!

Now get cracking and win your free comics!

An invitation to All Readers, and some Indy Love

2005-03-09T12:40:00.000-08:00

So yesterday I ran down the list of the books I regularly pick up from the Big Two, trying to show everyone that I'm no comic-snob, and I loved brightly colored costumed heroics as much as the next guy. Maybe you noticed how few DC superhero books I picked up - I've just never had much interest in any of 'em besides Batman. Am I making a mistake? Ignoring a perfectly good title for no good reason? Drop me a line and let me know.

That goes for any book, any time - I am always, always on the look out for some great new comics to read. And I'll give you my word right now - if you can give me a pitch for why I should be reading your favorite book, I will check it out. I will buy at least one issue. If I dig it, I'll write about it here on The Zealot's Lore. That's a solid gold promise. Try me.

And try to really explain the book's appeal; think about why you love it, and tell me. I don't want you to write me a book, but "You should buy Superman 'cause it rules" is not quite enough. Give me one concrete reason, and I'm sold. You'll not only have pimped out at least one copy of your favorite title, but I might just give it some free publicity as a result. What've you got to lose?

This does NOT apply to trades, of course.

Okay, so moving on:

One post down, you'll see my picks from Marvel and DC. Here's a list of some (maybe not all) of the books I regularly check out from other publishers:

AiT / PlanetLar - Now, this one's a bit tricky since Larry has been trailblazing in the holy name of the OGN, the original graphic novel. Thirteen bucks, usually, for about a hundred pages of new, self-contained story. And while I gotta give some serious love for that (Christ, does anybody else have the balls to do this? And the fortitude to make it work?), it makes it tough to give a list of AiT books I regularly check out. No ongoing series. So, I get pretty much everything. It's all been enjoyable stuff, although I sure hope there's a sequel to Bad Mojo in the works, 'cause the ending (and my conversation with the writer, Bill Harms) made it pretty clear that the story's not over yet! I bought all of Demo last year, and coming soon is Larry's new ongoing book with rising-star artist Jon Proctor, The Black Diamond (scroll down the link for an interview w/Proctor).

Image - Man, I don't know what they're putting in the water over in Berkeley, but it's really given this co-op publisher a shot in the arm in 2005. Every single month lately I'm finding something new from Image in the Diamond Previews catalogue that gets me at least curious. They've already been publishing several of my favorite titles - The Walking Dead and Small Gods are both currently top-of-the-pile books for me, and I also love Invincible - but a who barrage of great (or at least interesting) new titles is coming down the pike. Mora #1 was a fantastic start to a series that looks really promising, and I was intrigued enough by Pig Tale #1 to stick around and see where it's going, but there's also The Expatriate (a new B. Clay Moore espionage book with absolutely stunning artwork by newcomer Jason Latour), The Atheist by the inimitable Phil Hester (writer of The Coffin and Deep Sleeper, the latter being one of last year's very best miniseries) and John McCrea, and X-Armor, which comes out today and looks like it might deliver a deliciously edgy take on the old schmoe-becomes-a-hero formula. The list goes on, but I'll pimp those out as they come closer into view.

Dark Horse has gotten my attention in the last year, publishing two of my favorite books to read in the serial format, Conan and The Goon. Kurt Busiek's rock-solid scripting and the unstoppable art team of Cary Nord on pencils and industry legend Dave Stewart have made Conan a real surprise for me, since I went into the book with basically no interest in the character. And Eric Powell's instant-classic, The Goon, is a brilliant combination of pulpy noir, irreverent and sick humor, and geniune pathos, displayed with one of the most amazing artistic styles on the market today. Powell somehow combines a truckload of influences (most noticeably Jack Kirby) with his own unique voice to create some of my favorite art in any book today. What's even better is that both of these books are definitely students of the serial, episodic format. There's no trade-inflating here, folks: every issue is jam-packed with story and character development and really makes me feel like I've plunked down my three dollars for something meaty. There are a couple of Conan spin-offs coming down the pipeline, and Powell is scripting a new four-issue mini called Billy The Kid's Old Timey Oddities that looks pretty promising. Keep your eyes peeled.

My lunch hour is about up, and I'm not finished! Maybe I'll have to give the rest of my indie favorites a shout-out a little further down the line. But before I go, I have one last book I have to talk about. That's Geof Darrow's unparalleled Shaolin Cowboy, published by Burlyman Entertainment. This is 100% balls-to-the-wall fearless comic bookery. This book is truly beautiful. It's completely ridiculous. It's a marvel to look at. It's spectacularly violent. It spends 10 pages on a single, motionless panel. Shaolin Cowboy is unrelenting, uncomprising, and unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it. Is it for everyone? Probably not. Some people might be turned off, and understandably so, by the complete absence of traditional plotting or character work. But there's something different going on here. We're only one issue in, so I don't know what it is, but Darrow is a rare talent in this medium and my trust in him is complete.

Stay tuned for The First Zealot's Lore Giveaway in my next post. It's gonna be fun, and it might just put you in touch with a great new book you've never seen before. Y'all come back now, hear?

A "cheers" to Larry Young, followed by Sean Reaching Out

2005-03-08T20:04:00.000-08:00

Holy cow. I don't know how he found it, but Mighty Larry Young has seen this humble endeavor and throws a shout-out my way on the AiT / Planet Lar site. You might know good Mr. Young from his publishing company, a great San Francisco institution responsible for the release of such titles as Hench (a personal favorite), the justly acclaimed Brian Wood / Becky Cloonan collaboration on Demo, and the recently released Couriers 03: The Ballad of Johnny Funwrecker (for which I did an advance review on Millarworld which is now, sadly, disappeared) and Proof of Concept, the latter being a particularly magnanimous effort to create a name for several starting-out artists. It's all fine work, to be sure, and I send a cheerful tip o' the hat to Mr. Young.

And now, Sean Reaches Out:

I don't know about y'all, but I tend to categorize web-based, comics-related efforts really quickly: (1) This guy is way too into mainstream super-hero comics, (2) this guy is way too contemptuous of mainstream super-hero comics, or (3) this guy has something to say that I must listen to.

I bet you can guess which part I want to play.

So, in the interest of letting you know right here, up front, whether I'm going to speak to your tastes or not, I thought it might be wise to do a quick review of my current reading list. Personally, I pride myself on being an excellent audience, and if I can find some passion and dedication mixed in with some talent and creativity, I don't give a shit where a book comes from as long as I know where I can get more. So, hopefully, you'll see something here that you can identify with, and you'll come on back to The Zealot's Lore and see the new stuff that's keeping me excited about comics. Here we go.

Marvel: From the fine folks at Marvel, I regularly pick up (though most of these are on my trade-list these days):

Astonishing X-Men - Fine characterization of classic characters, and some fun, crazy plotting. What more could I ask of an X-Men book?
Captain America - Because I'll follow Brubaker nearly anywhere.
Daredevil - Bendis' best characterization of a man, I think.
Fantastic Four - Waid's Unthinkable/Authoritative Action/Hereafter trilogy being my favorite superhero story in memory.
The Incredible Hulk - Now that PAD's back, natch.
Iron Man - Because Ellis is at his best writing science fiction.
Powers - Loved this series ever since an especially memorable death scene in Vol. 4.
The Pulse - If only because Alias was Bendis' best characterization of a woman.
Punisher MAX - Because when Ennis really lets loose, it's the best wild ride in comics.
Runaways - Because Vaughan is a masterful plotter and does (I think) his most charming work on this title.
She-Hulk - Because Dan Slott should be writing every Marvel super-hero book; the guy's got the industry-best lock on super-heroic goofiness matched with geniune drama.
Spellbinders - 'Cause I'll follow Lucifer's Mike Carey to literally any book.
Spiderman/Human Torch - Dan Slott, of course.
Supreme Power - Don't miss The Authority anymore, do I?
All the Ultimate titles - I wait for the trade on all a'these, since they're pretty much written that way, but they're almost always refreshing fun.
Wolverine - 'Cause who doesn't want to see Wolvierine vs. A Shark vs. The FF vs. The X-Men vs. Everyone Else?

DC: (oh, Christ, look out, this post is about to get LONG):

Adam Strange - Fine intergalactic action from master action writer Andy Diggle and gorgeous art from Pascal Ferry and colorist Dave McCaig.
Authority: Revolution - Brubaker, like I said.
Catwoman: When In Rome - Because I've enjoyed all of Jeph Loeb's Batman stories and because Tim Sale is one of the five best artists in the industry.
Detective Comics - Because I'll follow David "Stray Bullets" Lapham to hell and back. This may not be his very best work, but this is the best writer in comics today.
Fables - Probably the most fertile concept of any title in publication, and Willingham has shown improvement with every single arc.
Gotham Central - It's baffling this series doesn't sell like hotcakes, because there's something in it for every single reader I can think of.
Hard Time - Please come back soon, last bastion of good prison drama.
Hellblazer - Again, Mike Carey. Not sure what I think of this run overall, but I know Carey's got some real chops when it comes to the uber-arc, so I trust it's going somewhere.
Human Target - R.I.P., oh you wonderful book. Sleazy and sleek, this was the best creepy action book on the market.
Losers - Again, Diggle writes really stellar action, and Jock is a perfect artistic match.
Lucifer - The best epic book on the market, period. And because somehow Mike Carey has made philosophical debate into a tense, high-stakes contest for the fate of the universe. I thought philosophy was boring wankery, but Carey's proven me wrong.
Planetary - Christ, is there any reason NOT to be reading this? Ellis' career best, in my opinion, and unbelievably gorgeous artwork from John Cassaday and Laura Martin.
Plastic Man - Because Kyle Baker might just be the best working cartoonist. This book (when it's at its best) is jam-fucking-packed with visual humor. On a bit of a down-turn lately, but I'm sure it's gonna pick up.
Sleeper Season II - See, this title is the reason that I'll follow Brubaker anywhere. Superlative super-noir that deserves (and will, I promise, receive) an entire post of its own.
Solo - 'Cause who doesn't want to see the industry's best artists turned loose on whatever material they want?

Good lord, this post is way the hell too long already. I'll be back tomorrow to talk about the books I love from all the other publishers (and boy, that list has been growing, thanks to the slew of wonderful material coming from Ait/Planet Lar, Image, Dark Horse, El Capitan, and more).

And after that? I've got some serious comic-pimping up my sleeve, so keep reading and see if you can nab some free comics. You have my word, they'll be good comics, too, not just newspaper clippings of Family Circus.

Unless that's what y'all want. Why don't ya leave me a comment or two and let me know? I live to serve.

Elk's Run #1 - Advance comic review

2005-03-04T17:24:00.000-08:00

This is from a thread I originally posted on Millarworld, which is currently dead. It's a great book and deserves to have some positive word on the net, so I figured I'd re-post it here:

Here I am holding a copy of Elk’s Run #1, a preview copy I snagged care of my friendly neighborhood Isotope. It’s from a publisher called Hoarse And Buggy, who’ve recently launched (I think) with the Western Tales of Terror anthology series, which I’ve been enjoying. Elk’s Run #1 the first part of an eight-issue story that promises to approach every issue from the perspective of a different major character.

The story – which, judging from some of the preview material available, is only just getting started here – focuses on an insular little community in Elk’s Ridge, Virginia, which is the site of a coal mining disaster some years hence. We’re given hints that the town has since transformed itself into some kind of commune, with a shared workload and an apparently closed border. Some local teenagers are feeling a bit restless and meet up at the only road out of town (which happens to run through a tunnel) late one night. Are they planning an escape? It doesn’t seem so. The implication as I read it was a bit more mischievous and innocent (y’know, teenager shit). Before they can get to it, though, tragedy strikes. The response of the adults in charge closes the issue with a decisive action that is disturbing in its savagery and gruesomeness, but also strangely attractive, smacking of a zeal for justice and a rock-solid, consistent moral code.

That ambiguity makes the promise of the solicits – the perspective shift from issue to issue that I mentioned earlier – especially intriguing. Writer Joshua Fialkov has taken some issues that often lend themselves to strident, polarized opinionating and lent them not just complexity but subtlety; we aren’t so much given 2+ sides of the argument as we are given a story, a collection of events and characters, that doesn’t take sides one way or the other – it just relates what’s happening and who it’s happening to. It’s an approach I appreciate in any storytelling form, but when it addresses issues like patriotism, abuse of power, and American militias, I have to give some serious credit.

Credit is also due for the strong balancing act here between character and plot. We’re not told a lot about any of the characters yet, but they’re suggested with a sort of quiet brevity that I found refreshing; there’s a family dinner table scene near the beginning of the issue with what could easily be a cliché teenager-is-mad-at-overbearing-mean-father exchange, and Fialkov deftly avoids that quagmire with simple, unsentimental dialogue. Nobody gives a speech; a few sentences are shared, just enough to give the reader an idea where the characters are coming from, and then the scene ends. It’s very measured, careful character work, not unlike some of the best issues of Demo (my favorite was #8, “Mixtape”, and that’s the one I’m thinking of here), but with an eerie edge that makes me think of The Twilight Zone, Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," and the more frightening parts of the Stand By Me movie. Meanwhile, the plotting moves at a lightning pace that still carries that element of calm and understatement. A number of compelling mysteries are raised, and the foreshadowing of the calamity yet to come is chilling and effective without being overblown. It strikes me that the style of the story, the way it’s being told, is a good reflection of the substance of the story itself – a sort of subterranean bubbling, a tension not quite breaching the surface but keeping everyone’s blood high and hot while they wait. It’s not just a clever example of craft, but a way to help the reader to empathize with the characters by sharing their sensations.

A lot of credit for the mood I’m talking about must go to the artwork, which is especially impressive when the script calls for it; the balance of quiet scenes that don’t draw attention to themselves against the disastrous E-ticket moments is balanced just as well by the art as it is by the script, which suggests to me a really clear, shared vision on the part of the collaborators. The accident that strikes the teenagers at night is an especially well-done bit of sequential storytelling, with a perspective device that builds a LOT of tension and fear VERY fast. The closing sequence I talked about earlier – the parents’ retribution – is also effective, but less explicit. Artist Noel Tuazon has a sketchy, simplistic style for the most part, and his paneling alternates between more unusual, creative layouts and relatively conventional grids, reminding me a bit of Javier Pulido’s work on Human Target.

Finally, I have to talk about the coloring. I’ve never read a comic with colors by Scott A. Keating (no relation, I must assume, to Joe Keatinge, color flatter emeritus) but I hope I read many more. The colors are rich and full, and do a wonderful job setting whatever mood is called for. Especially noticeable is the distinction between times of day; while a lot of this issue takes place at night, there are scenes at sunset and a dreary morning, and the linework is complemented perfectly by the tones Mr. Keating sets to the page.

On top of all that, the production values here are really good. The cover is a nice card stock, and the paper is a thick, semi-gloss stock that shows off the colors especially well. All this for $3.00 is a solid deal, especially from a new, independent publisher. Oh, and we also get a funny, weird little werewolf back-up story, completely unrelated to the main story, with art by Nate Bellegarde, who does the Invincipals backups in Robert Kirkman’s Invincible.

This one gets a high recommendation from me; the quality of the content and the format is impressive, especially for a creative team and publisher that, to be honest, I’d never heard of before (unless they’re also the folks publishing Western Tales of Terror, which is pretty damn new itself). By all indications, though, they’re coming out of the gate with a great first series, and I’m looking forward to the rest of it.

Some good Irish... reggae?

2005-03-04T12:44:00.000-08:00

I've been really digging this one song I heard on Live365.com's Shite'n'Onions station.

The song is called "Mise Eire" (mee-sheh air-uh, or "I am Ireland") and it's by a group called Seanchai And The Unity Squad, from their new album, Rebel Massive. The group is New York Irish, with (apparently) a hip-hop angle.

Now, I'm not really interested in hearing Irish guys rap. But this song doesn't go that way - it's Irish reggae. I've been hearing for ages that the Irish people love reggae and Jamaican culture in general, and Shane MacGowan spent as much time talking about reggae as he did talking about punk and Irish folk in his wonderful book, A Drink with Shane MacGowan. It didn't make any sense to me at all. After all, the Irish are drunks, not potheads, right?

You know what? It completely works. I don't know what I was missing, but this song figured it out for me. The beat is smooth and uplifting. The words have an easy political bent, not too obnoxious, and the chorus is catchy as hell. Each verse is sung by a different member of the group, including a guest appearance by Shane, with everyone joining in for the chorus, and the result feels like a pub sing-along on a clear breezy night, with a pint glass raised in every hand and a drunken, brotherly joy in every heart.

Mise eire, mise eire, I love this land, every woman and every man.
Mise eire, mise eire, a worker's republic, an everlasting peace.

Food for thought...

2005-03-04T09:54:00.000-08:00

I want to take a second here to admit influences. As attractive as the idea of being a self-made man is, and as much as I whole-heartedly pursue that concept, I still believe in listening; I believe in influence. And sharing some of the ideas that excite me seems like a good way to open.

Here's some shit I believe, care of the good Mr. Bernstein:

The test of the integrity of a poem, or any work of art, may be, simply: does it lead, in the end, to freedom, or does it merely expand the arena of confinement? A voice from the outside, truly, is what we need to hear. Even a single word. Even something that is not a word, but suggests such a word.

And a word from the great Harry Crews, quoted in Getting Naked With Harry Crews: Interviews (and this isn't so much something I completely buy as it is something that makes me think):

Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.

Welcome, one and all.

2005-03-03T10:28:00.000-08:00

The Zealot’s Lore was originally a website I set up at San Francisco State to post my own creative writing and that of Steven Jesse Bernstein, a Seattle writer I admired then and whose work I still love. That website is going through some changes, and when I’m done, it will be fully dedicated to Bernstein, as I find my own writing from that time completely unreadable. I’ll be finding a way to get some of my newer stuff online, but I don’t have that quite figured out yet.

So.

Why start a blog? This ain’t a daily journal, I’ll tell ya that. I’m not here to write about how my day at work was, or how much fun I had at bowling night, or any of that crap.

Mostly, I imagine this will be a review column. My thoughts on what I’m reading, listening to, or watching. But I won't stop there. In a medium as uniquely responsive to its audience as comics, I know I can make a difference - you'll see me working tirelessly to help promote the books I really love, doing giveaways and contests, and connecting you to other folks who're doing the same. Basically, this is about digging my heels in, spitting in my palms, picking up that rope and doing my part to help drag the rest of the world to the promised land of great comics.

The great folks who make the comics I really love might get a new reader or two. Somebody who picks up an issue of, say, Small Gods or Elk's Run, curious because they've seen me raving about how great they are, might just find a new book that really turns 'em on. And I'll be right there in the middle, thrilled out of my mind just to be a part of it.

Thanks for taking a look. I hope I can make it interesting. I think I can.