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PICK OF THE MONTH
NOTES FROM A DEFEATIST, by Joe Sacco, from Fantagraphics Books
OCT02 2574, pg. 306, $19.95
Joe Sacco has taken comic books someplace they'd never gone before - into war zones. His excellent graphic novels PALESTINE and SAFE AREA GORAZDE have been justly celebrated as both great works of cartooning and great works of reportage. This book, NOTES FROM A DEFEATIST, is a collection of his best pre-PALESTINE work.
The great thing about those stories is that Sacco was freer to get cartoony and play with the page. The first of them, "In The Company Of Long Hair", tells of Sacco's travails tagging along on the European tour of a rock band he knew, as resident cartoonist and concession stand clerk. For much of it, he does away with borders and crams all the 'panels' together woozily to help capture the blur of life on the road.
In "When Good Bombs Happen to Bad People" he drops comics narrative and does just one big, stark, almost impressionistic panel per page, with lots of footnotes off to the side. In "How I Loved The War" he does... well, anything he thinks will work.
The war Sacco "loved", by the way, was the Gulf War. The first one, that is. As you might guess, it's now the most relevant story in the book. Sacco captures the same stage of the war that we're in now - the long, deadening months after the decision has apparently been made but before hostilities begin. It's the moment when you feel the tectonic plates are shaking in their moorings and realize how foolish it was to expect to be consulted.
Nobody in elective office right now is telling the truth about what we might be in for. At times like this we can only turn to artists and journalists. It doesn't happen often, but Joe Sacco is both.
DARK HORSE COMICS
It's a fruitful month for Dark Horse's Maverick line:
MIKE MIGNOLA'S BPRD COLLECTION, by Mike Mignola and others
OCT02 0014, pg. Pg. 27, $17.95
Mike Mignola's BPRD? Not entirely. The BPRD, which stands for Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, is the agency for which Mignola's signature character Hellboy used to work, and this comic stars all the HELLBOY second bananas. But unlike HELLBOY, this isn't Mignola solo - he collaborated with writers Christopher Golden (who has done a number of HELLBOY prose novels) and Tom Sniegoski, and left the drawing to Ryan Sook.
Nevertheless, you might never have known if you hadn't been told. Golden and Sniegoski take pains to maintain the feel of the original, and Sook does a Mignola impression that's truly uncanny. I have mixed feelings about creators spending their energies mimicking another creator this way, but there's no question that it's done skillfully here. Also contains three short stories not previously reprinted, one of which Mignola wrote and another of which he wrote and inked.
REID FLEMING/ FLAMING CARROT CROSSOVER #1 (of #1), written by Bob Burden, drawn by Burden and David Boswell
They missed a bet by not calling this FLEMING CARROT...
These cartoonists haven't published since the '90s, and it's been a good decade since these characters had their heydays, so a refresher course is in order. Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot is "America's first Surrealist Superhero." Imagine Zippy the Pinhead as a crimefighter and you've got the idea, except that compared to the Carrot, Zippy is a model of concentrated ratiocination. Burden draws in a deliberately clunky style that recalls the inchoate madness of Golden Age comics.
David Boswell's Reid Fleming is "the World's Toughest Milkman," and, like Flaming Carrot, a working-class hero. Long before MILK & CHEESE were dairy products gone bad, he was the dairy delivery guy gone bad - a berzerker force of pure aggression who always wins. And like MILK & CHEESE, it's much cleverer than it sounds. Visually Boswell is inspired mostly by old black & white movies, and he draws a little better than, but not dissimilarly to, Burden.
This ought to be a comedy rampage like comics hasn't seen in years. (Let's hope it leads to more work from Boswell - he's been stalled mid-storyline since 1998!)
USAGI YOJIMBO: THE SHROUDED MOON, by Stan Sakai
OCT02 0016, pg. 29, $15.95
The latest collection of short stories about Usagi Yojimbo, the rabbit ronin. Don't let the rabbit part throw you- Sakai uses anthropomorphic characters because that's what he likes to draw, but the stories themselves are played perfectly straight. And it is certainly one of the most elegant comics being published today.
ISOLATION AND ILLUSION, by P Craig Russell
OCT02 0018, pg. 30, $14.95
This is a career-spanning selection of Russell's short stories, most of them long out of print. Russell is that rarest of creatures, a classically-trained illustrator who can make sequential art that flows and dances, and everything he does is worth looking at.
PROMETHEA VOL. 2, by Alan Moore & J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray, and José Villarrubia
OCT02 0808, pg. 89, $14.95
It's about goddamn time. Absurdly, the hardcover of VOL. 3 is coming out before this, the softcover of VOL. 2.
This is, admittedly, Moore with training wheels. The America's Best Comics line was designed to be commercial, and so it never strays very far from the superhero idiom. But this is the ABC title whose subject, magic, is closest to Moore's heart, and so it's the one where he's let himself go furthest afield - for long stretches the plot is entirely forgotten as Moore rambles through the Immateria, the Jungian ideaspace from which Promethea springs.
This has led to some critical grumbling that the book is no longer a story, but a lecture. Maybe true. But what a lecture! It could be about the International Monetary Fund and still be enthralling, so long as JH Williams and Mick Gray were drawing it. This is a comic so ornate that it makes even P Craig Russell's work look under-decorated by comparison. Even the panel borders hold significance, in this. And the wild page layouts, like the celebrated Moebius strip sequence in issue #15 (not included here- this covers #7-#12), are a wonder to behold. Even if you have no interest in magic, you'll want a look just for the eyeball kicks.
And if you do have an interest...
EGOMANIA MAGAZINE #2, edited by Eddie Campbell
OCT02 2562, pg. 305, $4.95
The bulk of this issue's 48 pages are given over to an interview of Moore solely on the subject of magic, conducted by Eddie Campbell, who has adapted two of Moore's séance/spoken word performance pieces (THE BIRTH CAUL and SNAKES AND LADDERS) to comics to spectacular effect. This will be Moore without the training wheels, or the net. Also included are the next couple of chapters of Campbell's remarkable history of humor. DC
DC is so excited about its lineup this month that it's bought both Previews covers, in order to promote... AQUAMAN and ROBOTECH. Cutting edge!
I don't so much mind ROBOTECH, because the '80s animated-kiddie-show revival trend can't last much longer. (Don't believe me? Check Misc! Mayhem Productions in the indy section, which is soliciting SUPERCAR #1. Yes, at last, Supermarionation - on paper! If this barrel has a bottom, we must be reaching it.) But it's a shame to see yet another doomed revamp of AQUAMAN, because it's by Rick Veitch, and this next book made me wish he'd stop serving time writing other people's characters...
GREYSHIRT: INDIGO SUNSET, by Rick Veitch and various.
OCT02 0805, pg. 89, $19.95
GREYSHIRT, a character Alan Moore created for Veitch to draw in TOMORROW STORIES, is not much more than an analogue of Will Eisner's THE SPIRIT, and like the Spirit, he's often relegated to a walk-on role in his own strip. In this miniseries, Veitch gave the character a comprehensive backstory. He did it as well as it was possible to do, but the main problem is, there isn't enough source material to work from.
For all the cleverness he invested in each issue's ten-page Indigo City newspaper section, for example, it doesn't add an extra dimension, because everything in it is about Greyshirt, Franky LaFayette (the young hood Greyshirt used to be), and The Lure. The Lure? That's the second problem. It's a horror concept, some sort of life-force-sucking alien Lovecraftian reptile that lurks in Indigo City's condemned sapphire mines, and it's central to the plot. But it's a poor fit for the character, and it betrays the probability that Veitch, if left to his own devices, would rather be writing a much different kind of book.
GLOBAL FREQUENCY #3 (of 12), by Warren Ellis and, this month, Glen Fabry and Liam Sharpe
OCT02 0794, pg. 87, $2.95
Here is Ellis' solicitation for the issue, taken from his GLOBAL FREQUENCY website:
"Do you know what it would take to make a bionic man? You'd have to replace a big chunk of the skeleton, and introduce artificial muscle, otherwise the first time he used his bionic arm it'd rip free from the rest of his body. New skin. Serious changes to lung structure. Blood replacement. What would that do to your mind? Would you want to be trapped in a lab complex with him?"
I reproduce it here in full because DC, for some reason, has chosen to throw it out and replace it with this:
"Two hours ago the world's first truly bionic man woke up and didn't like what he saw in the mirror. Two-hundred-plus bodies later, Miranda Zero and the specially-chosen field experts from Global Frequency are on a collision course with a nuclear-powered cyborg programmed to get his kicks... from killing people."
"On a collision course"? Will they be racing against time and battling the odds as well? And that stinger is laugh-out-loud funny. Most made-for-TV thrillers are pitched better than that, forchrissakes.
Speaking of DC's ad monkeys: this month sees a softcover edition of Will Eisner's latest graphic novel THE NAME OF THE GAME (OCT02 0782, pg. 85, $19.95). It is described in the first sentence of the feature article as "Eisner Award-winning." Do they realize how peculiar that sounds?
IMAGE COMICS
REX MUNDI, by Arvid Nelson & Eric J
OCT02 1763, pg. 129, $2.95
I overlooked the #0 issue of this that came out some months back, because frankly, with its shrieking logo and fairly standard mainstream artwork, it blended right in. But I got to read #0 when it was online. And it turns out to be a solid suspense thriller.
For openers, it plays off one of my favorite conspiracy theories, the one that says the Knights Templar found the Holy Grail and secreted it somewhere in Rennes-le-Chateau. The book is clearly well-researched. And while the drawing style still isn't to my taste, the level of detail is impressive, the coloring and production add a great deal, and the layouts are both interesting and easy to follow. There is promise here.
You can still see some pages from #0 here.
FORLORN FUNNIES #3, by Paul Hornschemeier
OCT02 2260, pg. 214, $3.95
The first issue was funny; this one seems to have swung over deep into 'forlorn'. Whatever the mood, I can't wait to see what Hornschemeier has thought up next.
THE ANNOTATED MANTOOTH, by Matt Fraction, Andy Kuhn and Tim Fisher
OCT02 2287, pg. 219, $12.95
Yes, this is a funnybook about a giant ape. Yes, comics has of late been overrun with zany primates. So, no, I can't defend liking this as much as I do. But if loving REX MANTOOTH is wrong, then... well, you know. Matt Fraction could have wrung some humor out of that tired catchphrase - just look at his MANTOOTH ad, wherein he perfectly lampoons promotional hype and successfully gets comedy mileage out of the phrase 'keeping it real'.
Anyhow, the comic. It reads like an over-the-top parody of HELLBOY. And considering how over-the-top HELLBOY is to begin with, that's an accomplishment. REX MANTOOTH hits all the buttons at once just to see what happens. It appeals to the basest lizard-brain instincts in everybody. You'll never be able to sit straight-faced through a manly action flick ever again. It should just be a throwaway, but it's better than it has any right to be.
The collection is 96 pages long. The original REX MANTOOTH stories were each 13 pages long - all three of them. Does that mean the promised extras - "covers, essays, scripts, annotations, pinups... a foreword, a preface, an introduction, and publisher's note" - will take up over half the book? Will AiT/PlanetLAR go this far for a conceptual joke? There's a whole Frankfurt School-inspired thesis paper just waiting to be written about how the surfeit of extras in THE ANNOTATED MANTOOTH constitute a commodified simulacrum of the aura of the artwork that is inevitably liquidated in the age of mechanical reproduction. (Those Frankfurt School guys, they were very, very big on 'keeping it real'.)
B@#CHES GONE WILD!, edited by Hart Fisher
OCT02 2405, pg. 252, $29.95
Special Signed Edition: OCT02 2406, pg. 252, $39.95
A DVD of Boneyard's hijinks at this year's WizardWorld convention, wherein Hart Fisher, self-proclaimed "most dangerous man in comics", torments the Christian publisher unluckily assigned to the adjacent booth, assaults his audience at a poetry reading, cusses out doofus Wizard prexy and speculation jackal Gareb Shamus, and does something unnamed but presumably horrible to the "fanboy (who) puts his hands on the master of destruction's hot Japanese wife." Other fanboys volunteer to be beaten by rented dominatrices. They're charging way too much for what is essentially an hour-long home video, but nevertheless, this is genius. Why hasn't Diamond made Boneyard a Premier Publisher?
COLLIER'S VOL. 2 #2, by David Collier
OCT02 2515, pg. 288, $3.50
D&Q gets grim 'n' gritty, almost: "This is pure Collier, wandering through old memories and the filthy downtown streets, in the latest in his series of biographical sketches. Collier takes us back 20 years to his rocky friendship with an old Brit punker and fellow cartoonist named Brat X." Brat X? Sounds like a new Marvel revamp... Collier is a good, quirky observational cartoonist whose art bears some of R. Crumb's influence, though Collier hasn't got Crumb's facility.
LUBA'S COMICS AND STORIES #3, by Gilbert Hernandez
OCT02 2571, pg. 305, $3.50
Gilbert Hernandez is making his presence felt, this year. Not only is he doing all sorts of work, including a new serialized graphic novel called JULIO'S DAY, for the new incarnation of LOVE & ROCKETS (which I forgot to mention last month - VOL. 2 #6, SEP02 2116, $3.95), and continuing this, the solo title for his signature character Luba, but he's also taking over the writing of BIRDS OF PREY this month, the Bat-book starring the female second bananas.
Why did they want him for the job, I wonder? The last thing Gilbert did for DC was the Vertigo miniseries GRIP: THE STRANGE WORLD OF MEN, which was a barrel of fun but which sold miserably, due to having next to no promotion and being the sort of book internet funnybook reviewers pejoratively call "weirdness for weirdness' sake". Go figure. As long as his mainstream work subsidizes more stuff like this, I'm happy.
BLACK HOLE #10, by Charles Burns
OCT02 2570, pg. 305, $4.50
Think DAZED & CONFUSED, done as a horror film. There's a "Teen Plague" going around school, an STD that causes weird and unpredictable mutations, and the unlucky souls who are seen to have caught it end up outcasts, subsisting off garbage in the woods on the edge of town... The subtext of most body horror is fear of puberty; Burns' brilliant stroke was to foreground it. And Burns, with his high-contrast, inhumanly-precise style, is peerless at depicting corruption of the flesh. Sexy, creepy and true, this is one of those Best Comics You're Not Reading.
COMICS JOURNAL WINTER 2003 SPECIAL, edited by Gary Groth
OCT02 2572, pg. 306, $22.95
Even people who can't stand the regular COMICS JOURNAL are going gaga over these twice-yearly coffee-table specials. Featured interviewee this time is William Stout, "one of the most accomplished, critically acclaimed and commercially successful illustrators, painters and cartoonists in America today". The first time I ever went to Kevin Eastman's Words & Pictures Museum in Northampton, Massachusetts, it was to see an exhibit of art from Stout's book THE DINOSAUR, and I spent hours gaping at it in wonder...
Also featured: appreciations of THE SIMPSONS, ESCAPE (Britain's answer to RAW), Lynda Barry (ERNIE POOK'S COMEEK), Tom Hart (HUTCH OWEN), and Milt Gross. And there's another star-studded comics section, this time with a Patriotism theme.
INFOSPECT PRESS
SWELL, by various, edited by Peter Conrad
OCT02 2651, pg. 319, $7.95
This is a new 80-page small press anthology with no apparent organising principle. Minimally thrilling, right? But check out these glowing endorsements from Conrad's website:
"Raucous, audacious, downright bizarre, truly disturbing, and wholly outstanding. But fair warning - if you take the whole dose at once, you might find your mind truly altered." --Greg Rucka (WHITEOUT, QUEEN & COUNTRY)
"SWELL combines work from the best alternative strip cartoonists with some of the best new talents yet to emerge from the minicomics underground in a great introductory primer to this Comics Revolution we keep hearing so much about. In a world where comics anthologies are dime-a-dozen fast food, SWELL is a ten-dollar dim sum sampler served on the best china plates. Viva la SWELL!" --Dirk Deppey, THE COMICS JOURNAL
The emerging minicomics talents include David Lasky (URBAN HIPSTER), Neil Fitzpatrick (NEIL JAM) and John Hankiewicz (TEPID); the alt-strip cartoonists include Sam Henderson (MAGIC WHISTLE), Keith Knight (THE K CHRONICLES), Shannon Wheeler (TOO MUCH COFFEE MAN) and Ted Rall (TO AFGHANISTAN AND BACK); also included are comic bo- pardon me, 'drawn book' artist Donna Barr (THE DESERT PEACH), and James Kochalka, just because he has to be in everything.
CHIAROSCURO #5, by Troy Little
OCT02 2686, pg. 322, $2.75
New issue of the Xeric-winning series. In this issue, our boy, hopelessly blocked painter Steven Patch, recovers from the weird interrogation and vicious beating visited upon him last issue by mysterious agents. If you're looking to catch up, there's this:
CHIAROSCURO #1-4 LIMITED EDITION PACK - SIGNED WITH SKETCH
OCT02 2687, pg. 322, $14.95
ODDBALLZ #5, by Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet
OCT02 2700, pg. 325, $2.95
This month, a new McConey adventure begins, this one set in the Old West. (There's no continuity between McConey albums, except for the core cast: McConey the shy, conscientious rabbit, of course; Doug the responsible dog; and Ritchie the irritating jokester cat.) Also, there's a new chapter of the CALVIN & HOBBES-esque "Astronauts of the Future." So this is a 'good jumping-on point' as the marketing people say. And if you want to catch up - and by now you should, god knows I've been banging on about this series long enough - you can just order the ODDBALLZ #1-4 SET (OCT02 2701, pg. 325, $9.95).
COURTNEY CRUMRIN AND THE NIGHT THINGS, by Ted Naifeh
OCT02 2723, pg. 332, $11.95
Courtney's not a happy child. Foremost among the things she's not happy about is having to move to a new town, thanks to her awful social-climbing yuppie parents, into her Uncle Aloysius's house, a big old ramshackle estate which looks haunted. And is haunted. Courtney's being contacted by the Other Side, and they want to make friends...
Now, granted, this is a familiar-sounding premise. I could almost have been describing BEETLEJUICE. But it's all in the execution, and word is that the execution is terrific. From what I've seen, namely the preview in this year's ONI COLOR SPECIAL and the first 11 pages of issue #1, I'm inclined to agree.
COURTNEY CRUMRIN is in the grand tradition of kid's books with sly digs that only adults will fully savour, like when the yuppie parents say of Courtney, "She's really a good girl. We can just put her in front of the tube and forget about her." Or when Courtney's new teacher gives the class an assignment: "Calculate your net worth." Naifeh's also a top-flight cartoonist, a bit reminiscent of Zander Cannon. He's taken the daring step of severely masking Courtney's face, giving her giant Keene-painting doe eyes and no nose; it feels a little incongruent at first, but one gets used to it. This book looks like a real treat.
If you don't want to start right off with a collection, there's also a new miniseries...
COURTNEY CRUMRIN & THE COVEN OF MYSTICS #1 (of 4), by Ted Naifeh
OCT02 2722, pg. 329, $2.95
Combined they form a larger story, but Naifeh says each issue can stand alone.
REBELLION / TITAN
HEWLIGAN'S HAIRCUT, by Peter Millgan & Jamie Hewlett
OCT02 2749, pg. 333, $16
This is madcap comedy, defying "the laws of physics and of rational page layout", apparently much sought after by Milligan fans yet "unavailable for over ten years". Don't ask me what it's about - I haven't found anybody on the web who dares to even attempt an explanation. I can report that, at the time, Warren Ellis called it "the finest sustained funnystuff of the year".
TANK GIRL VOL. 4: THE ODYSSEY, by Peter Milligan & Jamie Hewlett
OCT02 2786, pg. 340, $15.95
By the very same team, coincidentally. As you might have guessed from the title, this drafts the Tank Girl cast into a twisted update of Homer's epic poem.
Between these two books, Cyberosia's collection of JOHNNY NEMO, and DC's trade paperback of SKREEMER, there's been a real push lately to get Milligan's back catalogue back into print. By everybody except... DC. (The SKREEMER TPB doesn't count - that was originally Cyberosia's baby, which DC snatched away at the last minute. One suspects they wouldn't have bothered otherwise.) Why isn't DC bothering to make money off all the work he's done for them, now that his star is back on the rise thanks to X-STATIX? Hell, why didn't they collect the entirety of SHADE THE CHANGING MAN, one of the seminal Vertigo titles, years ago?
WHERE HATS GO, by Kurt Wolfgang
OCT02 2812, pg. 344, $8
Wolfgang is best known for ripping the piss out of the small press scene in his award-winning minicomic anthology LOWJINX, but with WHERE HATS GO, a graphic novelette, he reveals himself as an old softie. It's a story with no words- just a few pictograms - about a city kid who in a stiff wind loses the cap his late grandpa gave him, and who tries everything to get it back.
It's a tricky thing to sustain for 160 pages, but Wolfgang's got a big bag of tricks. (It helps that it's about more than just a lost hat - for instance, there's another kid who joins the hunt...) The art's full of eyeball kicks, from the way the wind tangles itself across the landscape in great fat spools, to the phenomenal ugliness of the kid's pet bulldog. It's a small story and a small book, but a warmly satisfying one.
PISTOLWHIP: THE YELLOW MENACE, by Matt Kindt & Jason Hall
OCT02 2813, pg. 344, $14.95
This is the sequel to the debut graphic novel by Kindt and Hall that had everybody raving last year. Except me, because I didn't buy it. Dereliction of duty, I know, but it didn't appeal. When Top Shelf calls Kindt's artwork "reminiscent of the best European graphic novelists," I wish I knew who they have in mind. To me it looks like a sketchier Nick Bertozzi.
Kindt has some stylistic quirks I like, like his touches of funhouse-mirror perspective, but he's also got some weaknesses that can't be explained away by style. Look at page 4 of YELLOW MENACE: in the center panel, our hero is running while looking behind him, yet his shoulders and hips are facing straight forward, his front knee is locked and his front foot is pointing straight up at the sky. He then trips over a tiny but strangely immovable dog, or cast-iron dog replica. He knocks over a policeman from behind, but in the next panel the policeman has somehow fallen on top of him. Let's face it, it's a little rough.
As for the story, it's an homage to radio serials of the '30s and '40s, so you get archetypical chumps, dames and hoods with snappy noir monikers like Mitch Pistolwhip and Charlie Minks. The first chapter, which is online, has some lovely sequences, but it's all too self-aware. It grates on me in the same way as do those fake modern '50s-style diners that put pictures of James Dean on the walls and use words like 'daddy-o' in the menu. But, again, I haven't read the whole book, and almost everyone who has, including our own Zack Smith, has adored it, so I could easily be wrong.
This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.
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