For the past few months, Chris Ekman has been sharing his views on the monthly Previews comics catalogue from Diamond with the readers of the Warren Ellis Forum and offering his advice on the books to watch out for. Now his critical appraisals have found a new home at Ninth Art, so join us on a journey into the future, with Chris Ekman's THINGS TO COME!

You'll just have to imagine the crack of thunder when we say that.

Previews June 2001, for comics shipping August 2001

DENIS KITCHEN PUBLISHING, page 250
DARK HORSE COMICS, page 29

Denis Kitchen, venerable underground publisher, seemed to go underground for good after the ignominious demise of Kitchen Sink in 1999. But he's tunneled his way back to the surface, and, lucky for us, dug up a long-buried work by Harvey Kurtzman.

You should already know the importance of Kurtzman, the man who made MAD. You may be wondering, nevertheless, why you ought to pay $25 for THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE ANT (order code: JUN012080), an 80 page book with one panel per page. Answer: for the art. Kurtzman, a peerless storyteller, usually laid out his comics for other artists to draw. His collaborators were all top-rank, and it's a joy to lose oneself in the fine detail and background jokes they added - but those came at the expense of the verve of Kurtzman's own artwork. Looking at the few works of unmediated Kurtzman we have - the HEY LOOK! strips, a smattering of dramatic EC stories, and his magnum opus, THE JUNGLE BOOK - it becomes clear that he too was an artist of the top rank. Few cartoonists have been more disciplined or seemed more spontaneous.

Good to have you back, Denis. Now, get to work collecting Kurtzman's post-MAD magazines, HUMBUG and TRUMP - or we'll tell Kevin Eastman about your new publishing venture.

There's another Kurtzman book out this month for the same price, but even at 240 pages, it's the worse buy. Namely, it's LITTLE ANNIE FANNY VOL. 2 (JUN010016, $24.95). R. Fiore observed in The Comics Journal that Annie, an impossibly pneumatic yet innocent blonde in permanent dishabille, is the "bizarre apotheosis of the Playboy ideal, a woman who strips but doesn't fuck", and "an example of the very dishonesty Kurtzman always despised". The redeeming value is in the craftsmanship, for this was Kurtzman at his most perfectionistic. Will Elder's lush watercolor art is gorgeous, and Kurtzman's carefully researched scripts have their moments. But overall it's empty. If you must get a volume of these strips, get the earlier one, from when Kurtzman hadn't yet been totally defeated.

DC

Online Resources
Previews is available online at Diamond Comics. To learn about the advantages of pre-ordering, visit Warren Ellis' OrderingComics.com. The leading DCU project stars a walking corpse, which seems apt. The whole company seems zombified this month.

The deeply ridiculous Deadman, hero to necrophiliacs everywhere, is in DEAD AGAIN made to revisit the deaths of Barry Allen, Jason Todd, Superman, Hal Jordan, and Dark Phoenix (oops- strike that last one). Why? Because fanboys can't cope with tragedy in fiction unless they're assured that the alternative would have been even worse. Looks to be more morbidly silly than Jhonen Vasquez, and may even wrest the Bathos Championship from the Death of Little Nell.

While DEADMAN: DEAD AGAIN frolics in the graveyard, OUR WORLDS AT WAR whistles past it. Near as I can tell, Superman has to defend Earth from Imperiex and his alien hordes, Darkseid and his minions from Apokolips, and Doomsday, the mineral-rich loony who killed him once already. With one hand tied behind his back, no doubt. And a head cold.

Meanwhile, the Just Imagine Stan Lee Without Jack Kirby Around To Do The Bulk Of The Work For Him Creating Much of Anything line revamps WONDER WOMAN this month. 60-year-old characters + 40-year-old soap opera characterisation = innovation! Stodgier still is SUPERMAN & BATMAN: GENERATIONS II, another Reader's Digest condensation of DCU history by crotchety has-been John Byrne.

Even Vertigo is retrograde this month, as they fall back on the gimmick that made their name, the old "grim-'n'-gritty revamp of a goofy old comic nobody remembers" trick. ANGEL AND THE APE is being revived by Howard Chaykin, so it remains to be seen only how he'll transform a gorilla into his standard-issue oversexed rogue with a certain latent nobility.

About the only forward-looking new books showcased this month are NINJA BOY, a quasi-manga book in which the protagonist, having no meat at all on his lower legs and forearms, seems to have Popeye's physique in reverse; DEXTER'S LABORATORY for 50 cents, which just goes to prove that DC can barely give the Cartoon Network books away; a new RIFLE BRIGADE miniseries; and a WILDSTORM SPECIAL. There are some good collections, but that's it for the new stuff. The rest of the books dwell on past glories the way your great-uncle does down at the Legion Hall, while nursing a snifter of brandy and trying to bean passing young ragamuffins with copies of "The Greatest Generation."

IMAGE

The front page of Image's section shows nothing but the Miracleman logo, with a footnote: "MIRACLEMAN(tm) is copyright(r) and trademark 2001 Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc. All rights reserved." When Todd says "don't believe everything that you read," he ain't kidding...

MARVEL

I don't read Marvel comics, but I am following Grant Morrison's NEW X-MEN with interest. So far he's told us that X is for extinction; I have the sneaking suspicion that V will turn out to be for vendetta.

Let me explain. Most Marvel comics are middle-of-the-road liberal and humanist, and as in most things X-MEN sets the standard. Mutants are stand-ins for whatever persecuted minority is convenient. The good guys are led by Professor X, the non-violent stand-in for Martin Luther King, who works within the system for incremental change; the bad guys are led by Magneto, the militant stand-in for Malcolm X, who foments revolution. Clashes invariably result in a stirring defence of moderation.

Grant Morrison is not a liberal. He doesn't share Xavier's belief in the civilising power of education - note that in three of his creator-owned books, KILL YOUR BOYFRIEND, ST SWITHIN'S DAY and THE INVISIBLES, the heroes are malcontented youths so bored with school that they seek release in spectacular acts of violence. Nor does he believe in working within the system - the Invisibles are at war not merely with the ruling order but with the very idea of a ruling order.

In short, Grant is an anarchist. Which is just what the X-Men needs. Because liberal superheroes are tame, and tame is boring. If I'm reading things right, the boys at Marvel are gambling that Grant's anarchism will revitalise superhero comics the way Frank Miller's fascism revitalised them in the late '80s.

Bold move. There's a problem, though. Grant may not be for working within the system politically, but he certainly is for it culturally, or he wouldn't be at Marvel. It's not selling out - he genuinely believes that it's the counterculture that's colonised the corporate monoculture, not vice versa. But it is a contradiction, and Grant has yet to face up to it.

It is inevitable that his message will be diluted in a thousand little ways; first, by being forced into the costumed adventurer genre, which hurt even V FOR VENDETTA, and second, by having to compete with other interpretations of the characters. This month alone, Grant is sharing the X-Men with Joe Casey in UNCANNY, Mark Millar in ULTIMATE, Chris Claremont in (ugh) X-TREME, and various writers in the Icons solo miniseries. (The "streamlining" of the X-franchise rather resembles the US Congress's periodic "streamlining" of the tax code.) How much impact can Grant have, ultimately? Dunno, but it'll be fascinating to watch.

As for the rest of Marvel, it's all Greek to me, especially ELEKTRA (get it? Greek? Elektra? Haw, I slay me!). They're marketing ELEKTRA as the vanguard of their sexy and violent non-Code mature titles, but also marketing ELEKTRA lunchboxes. Somewhere, Joe Lieberman is drawing up subpoenas and salivating...

WIZARD ENTERTAINMENT, page 180

From Black Bull comes yet another new title, SHADOW REAVERS. My dictionary defines 'reave' as "to seize and carry off forcibly," so apparently these people filch peoples' shadows, which they then, I don't know, sell on eBay or something. The solicitation text does little to clear up the confusion, promising "fast-paced, over-the-top action and in-your-face artwork" and generally reciting the modern-day Catechism of Cliché. It's being written by Wizard's editor-In-chief, but I'm sure there's no conflict of interest.

Meanwhile, Wizard itself boldly breaks from tradition by promoting Alex Ross, Joe Quesada, and Kevin Smith. Looks like that tongue-lashing from Frank Miller really made a difference.

DRAWN AND QUARTERLY, page 250
FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS, page 262

If you don't buy DRAWN & QUARTERLY (JUN012083, $24.95), OPTIC NERVE (JUN012085, $2.95), EIGHTBALL (JUN012150, $5.95) and ARTBABE (JUN012148, $4.95) this month, everybody will laugh at you.

INSIGHT STUDIOS GROUP, page 272

Frank Cho's comic strip Liberty Meadows gets the deluxe collection treatment in the hardcover BIG BOOK OF LOVE (JUN012203, $29.95). This will delight fans of LIBERTY MEADOWS and agitate me, because I bloody hate LIBERTY MEADOWS.

It's not even the flaws of the strip, which are too numerous to list here, that agitate me; it's the fact that so many people I like and respect and who should know better rave about it. These are people who in comic books are very much aware of the dangers of derivation; they know that Rob Liefeld is a bad artist because he copies without understanding from Mike Golden, who copied from Art Adams, who copied from Jack Kirby. So why don't they see that Frank Cho is a bad writer because he copies without understanding from Berkeley "BLOOM COUNTY" Breathed, who copied from Garry "DOONESBURY" Trudeau, who copied from Jules "FEIFFER" Feiffer?

LEGAL ACTION COMICS, page 278
ANDREWS & MCMEEL, in the Comics Theme subsection of the Books section, page 320

For those of you not familiar with the Ted Rall vs. "Dirty" Danny Hellman lawsuit, here's a summary. (You must have known you couldn't hide forever.) Rall, editorial cartoonist and aspiring voice of his generation, wrote a high-profile and utterly reprehensible hatchet job on Art "MAUS" Spiegelman for the Village Voice. Hellman, illustrator and notorious prankster, took it upon himself to avenge Spiegelman by forging a self-aggrandising e-mail in Rall's name, announcing the creation of an iconoclastic message board called "Ted Rall's Balls," and sending it to several of Rall's employers. Now, you don't have to have read much of Rall's work to know he was bullied in high school, and intends never to be bullied again, so it was no great surprise when he immediately came out with all legal guns blazing. The result has been two years of Rall using a Howitzer to hunt a fly and Hellman unrepentantly asserting his First Amendment right to impersonate people, and an edifying spectacle it has been.

None of this would be relevant if it didn't show up in stark relief the personality flaws that hamper Rall's work. Hellman's just an asshole who doesn't know when to quit, but Rall is something far more dangerous: a self-pitying bully. He stopped being the victim a long time ago, but still feels like one.

Rall's editorial cartoons, as collected in SEARCH AND DESTROY (JUN012522, $12.95), can be quite good when he's dealing with neglected issues of substance. But just as often, he's dealing with the many injustices suffered by his poor self: being bullied, his parents divorcing, Reagan cutting his student loan funding, having to work temp jobs, getting turned down for an National Endowment of the Arts grant, etc. These themes pop up whether relevant or not, as in one strip I recall that cast Dilbert, illogically, as a deadbeat dad. (See also his recent update of 1984, 2024.)

LEGAL ACTION COMICS (JUN012230, $14.95), the benefit anthology for Hellman, will likely be the better book. It features such comix eminencies as Robert Crumb, Kim Deitch, Mary Fleener, Kaz, Peter Kuper, Gary Panter, Spain Rodriguez, Art Spiegelman, and Robert Williams. (I mention this because you wouldn't know it from Previews - somehow this got classified as porn, which means that there's no image or solicitation text and it will likely be widely overlooked.) This should make everyone happy: Readers get a good, 250-page book, cheap; Hellman gets money for lawyers; and Rall gets the confirmation he's always craved that he's not paranoid - all his peers do hate him.

Chris Ekman is a political cartoonist.

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