Comics - On The Ration

KAMANDI THE LAST BOY ON EARTH BY JACK KIRBY Volume One

2012-02-23T01:54:00.001-08:00

The story of how I got the book: The short story is, my parents got it for me for Christmas. The long story is that my Dad likes to do online surveys and is rewarded by the companies that run them with vouchers that can be exchanged for credit at online shops. So it has become something of a Christmas tradition for my Dad to ask me to convert these virtual vouchers to Amazon credit and then tell me to order something for myself for Christmas up to the value of £20 and no more. Some might say that this process is sapping the spirit of gift giving out of the festival but I don’t mind. As long as I get something that I want.

Kamandi The Last Boy On Earth: As a boy, I loved Jack Kirby’s Silver Age artwork but always felt disappointed by the stuff he was doing during the seventies. I remember owning a couple of issues collected in this book at one time and feeling that his frequent use of the splash page and double-paged spread was at odds with everything else that was happening in mainstream comics at the time. How was I to know that this was all you were going to get from comics thirty years later? I was, of course, wrong to feel this way, and one of the pleasures I have as an adult is buying collections of his work from this period, such as the Captain America Omnibus and The Eternals, and being able to recognise how great it is.

The surface premise of Kamandi is often described as a cash-in on Planet Of The Apes which was hugely popular at the time that the comics were originally published. Kamandi is a disturbingly muscular boy, like those troubling images of children who take part in body building competitions that your mates post on Facebook from time to time, who surfaces from an underground bunker he’s lived in for all of his live one day to discover that nature’s order has gone topsy-turvy. Humans are now stupid beasts and the animals are vertical, articulate and sophisticated people. There are communities of tiger-people and bat-people and dog-people and ape-people scattered across the shattered American landscape. Any animal you can think of is now evolved, except for horses for some reason, which every other creature rides around on.

The obvious narrative threads such as the animal-people never thinking of Kamandi as anything more than a beast beneath them despite him speaking their language and other demonstrations of intelligence are ever present throughout the twenty issues collected here. But Kirby’s thing is also to throw other back-of-the-brain elements into the mix such robot gangsters, nuclear men and mutant misfits. It makes this a conceit that could almost write itself into something that only Kirby could do. I’ve also grown to love Kirby’s story telling from this period where he drops us straight into the middle of the action from the start with a splash, elaborates with a double-paged spread and then makes fantastic sense of it all with oddly constructed narration.

The book production: I’m perfectly happy with the paper stock DC uses for these collections. It’s a low grade stock meant to represent the reproduction processes of the original comics. But I do know from talking to friends that not everyone is as laid back as I am about this and would prefer a glossier paper and so it’s something I thing DC should reconsider. I do, however, agree with the point of view that the binding of these books is too tight. It’s not just the double paged spreads where artwork is lost in the centre. Even single pages take a bit of spine cracking to read fully.

Final thought: I’m intrigued, when DC have flogged to death every other Jack Kirby creation from this period, such as The Fourth World, as to why Kamandi has seemingly been left untouched. The answer can’t be something as depressingly simple as it not being set in the DC Universe, can it.

Objects of (No) Desire: Before Watchmen

2012-02-17T01:48:00.000-08:00

Last week, DC announced that they are going to be releasing a bunch of prequels to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, called, rather unimaginatively, Before Watchmen. My first reaction to this news was: Is this a joke? My second reaction was: I can’t believe it’s taken them so long to get around to doing something like this. And my third reaction was: 35 frigging comics?!? Good grief! (Note: My actual reactions may not have taken place in this order.)

Morally, I’m not really sure how I feel about this project. I know that Alan Moore does not approve and feels that he has been treated unfairly by DC over the years, although I don’t know all the details. I do know that Moore and Gibbons were promised that the rights to Watchmen would be returned to them after the series had been out of print for at least a year, and obviously that has never happened because the book was much more successful than anyone could have imagined and, rather depressingly, is still the number one selling graphic novel today, about 25 years after its initial release. On its own, this doesn’t seem like the worst thing to ever happen to a creator. I mean, if Watchmen had gone out of print, I guess it would mean that Moore and Gibbons would now own the rights to a flop, and as it stands, Moore and Gibbons have done pretty well out of the deal (I think / hope). Certainly, compared to the likes of Siegel and Shuster, Jack Kirby, etc., Moore doesn’t seem to have been treated that badly at all. But just because he wasn’t shafted quite as badly as some other guys, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t shafted and that the shafting was enjoyable. I also suspect there is much more to all this than I am aware of, so I don’t really feel qualified to talk about the contractual side of the argument in much more detail (although, interestingly, Dave Gibbons seems to be happy with the deal, and even with Before Watchmen). I have a certain amount of sympathy with the people who have been saying that it is somewhat hypocritical of Moore to complain about other people producing works using characters he created (or co-created) when a large chunk of his career has been spent writing stories about characters that other people created – Captain Britain, Marvelman, Swamp Thing, even Superman – and it is something he has continued to do, with Lost Girls and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Admittedly, most of the people who created these characters aren’t running around saying that they disapprove of their characters being used by Moore – and if they did, I’m sure that Moore would respect their wishes – but I think some of them probably would disapprove if they weren’t, err, dead.

My main objection to Before Watchmen, then, is not really a moral one (I do tend to side with Alan Moore when he says that he has been treated unfairly by DC, and I do tend to think that Alan Moore writing comics using other people's characters – particularly when the original creators are dead and the characters are in the public domain – isn't quite the same as DC farming out his characters to other creators, I just haven't quite worked out why I feel this way yet). What I mainly object to is the sheer pointlessness of the project, the creative bankruptcy that it points to, and the idiotic way in which DC intend to publish it. As I said, I am very surprised that DC haven’t tried something like this before, but I guess that at least one person working for the company – Paul Levitz? – realised that Watchmen was something that didn’t need a sequel or a prequel or anything like it, and is perfect as it is.

Before I go any further, I am going to be slightly controversial and say that I do not actually think that Watchmen is perfect. It is a very good book, a very important book, and I loved when it first came out, but the last time I read it, which was a good few years ago now, I thought that a lot of the dialogue seemed quite forced and the whole thing seemed like a technical exercise more than anything. Perhaps because so many modern creators have stolen so much from it, it even seemed a bit dated – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I still have a great deal of affection for it, but as fond of it as I am, the fact that this book is still the best selling graphic novel around, that most people’s first point of contact with ‘grown up’ comics is a (admittedly very good) DC superhero book from the 1980s, rather than, say, Love and Rockets, or something published more recently, is something that I find rather depressing – and I’m pretty sure that Alan Moore feels similarly. However, although I do not think that Watchmen is a perfect comic, it is perfectly self-contained, it can be picked up and read without any prior knowledge of the ‘Watchmen Universe’, and that, I think, is one reason that it has been so successful.

The people currently in charge at DC just don’t get the notion of a self-contained unit, though. They also don’t seem to understand restraint. These are the same people who recently re-launched their entire line of super-hero comics with 52 new titles in the space of a single month! And very few of the ‘New 52’ comics that I sampled seemed fresh and new at all. In fact, most of them appeared to be set in the same old DC Universe, and even referred to past events, so really they’d just done what comic companies have been doing for decades now – re-numbered some titles to boost sales in the short-term – but on a grand scale. This move seemed to boost DC’s sales figures and profile for a while, and no-doubt made their shareholders very happy, but the success of the ‘New 52’ and the same short-term thinking that led to it has now led us to Before Watchmen, quite a few years after any kind of Watchmen prequel / sequel would have made sense. I mean, although I never wanted to see any more Watchmen comics – certainly not ones that weren’t by Moore and Gibbons – I would have understood if DC had done something like this shortly after the release of the original, or even a few years ago, to cash in on the Watchmen movie publicity, but doing it now seems like an act of extreme desperation. And not only are they doing it, they are doing it big time, with 35 comics – six mini-series and an epilogue – released over a period of just 35 weeks. Even if all of these comics turn out to be brilliant, releasing 35 of them seems like overkill, to put it mildly. I mean, there are currently only 12 Watchmen comics available, and they have been conveniently reprinted in one book. Now, DC are preparing to nearly quadruple the number of Watchmen comics available. And no doubt the reprint programme they have in mind for these comics is just as stupid as the decision to produce the comics in the first place.

Paul (Rainey) has often said to me that, if Watchmen were being published for the first time today, DC would not collect the series in one large paperback. First, they would release it spread over two slim hardcovers, then two slim trade paperbacks, and then, a few years later, they would release the Absolute Edition, and it just wouldn’t get a chance to become the success it has been, released as a single, self-contained collection. And I think he’s right. There is no chance at all that Before Watchmen will be released in one paperback volume, because there will be too many comics to collect in one paperback volume, so no doubt it will be released as six slim (but expensive) hardcovers, followed by six slim trade paperbacks, and then somewhere down the line it will probably get released as an Absolute Edition. In the short-term, the comics will sell very well, even if they are terrible, and the collections will probably do reasonable business, too, but the sheer number of books that will be available and the formats they will available in guarantee that Before Watchmen will NEVER be anywhere near as successful as the original, and in the long-term it will probably put people off of reading the original, because it will no longer be a self-contained story. Rather than being a £12.99 (approx.) investment, becoming familiar with the ‘Watchmen Universe’ will soon be a somewhat confusing £100+ investment. I usually try and avoid swearing on this blog, but the people in charge at DC (and Marvel) really are fucking morons.

I will not be buying or reading any of the Before Watchmen comics, of course. I just don’t have any interest – not even in the Darwyn Cooke comics – and I now think a little bit less of all the creators involved. I don’t really blame any of them for taking the money, and I’d understand even more if these were people who didn’t particularly like the original, I just don’t understand why any of them think that this project (DC seem to be calling it an ‘initiative’, even though it is the opposite of an initiative) is a good idea. And I think most of them do actually think this is a good idea. Looking around online the other day, I saw this quote from J. Michael Straczynski, one of the writers involved, who unintentionally summed up everything that is wrong with the project, and modern DC (and Marvel) comics in general: ‘Every writer and editor on this project is a massive fan of the original book, and of Alan's work. As the months passed, we e-mailed each other with the smallest question of continuity, determined to be excruciatingly faithful to the original book because we know what's at stake. We want to add to, not subtract from, the quality of what Alan and Dave created. We know we have a hell of a legacy to live up to, and we're determined to achieve that.’

It’s the bit about ‘continuity’ that really bothers me, because continuity is the problem. Continuity is the reason that I, a 42-year-old man who has been reading comics his entire life, don’t understand what the hell is going on in most comics I pick up these days, and I’m sure it’s a big part of why most kids are not buying DC comics anymore (but are buying Manga!). Also, I’m pretty sure that Alan Moore couldn’t give a shit about how faithful these comics are to the continuity of the original. Right up until the inexplicably changed ending, Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie was faithful to the continuity of the original work – the one time I saw it, I was surprised just how closely it did follow the book – but thanks mainly to the sexed-up fight sequences, it still managed to completely miss the point of the original, and I’m pretty sure that Before Watchmen will, too.

CLiNT 14

2012-02-15T01:29:00.001-08:00

You may or may not be surprised to learn that I am still reading CLiNT. Two issues ago I came THIS close to stopping except that Mark Millar promised in an editorial that a full episode of Kick Ass 2 would appear next time after months of drip feeding readers the story with tiny glimpses and on this occasion his boast stuck. (I actually renewed my subscription because of this, meaning that I get a twenty percent discount on a £4.25 issue.)

Since I last wrote here about CLiNT, the good news is that it’s no longer pretending to be a lad’s mag and has come out as a comic. The bad news for the team of features writers is that most of the their content has been dropped. All that remains is the Badass Cinema column and, more fittingly, a major article on comics. So far we’ve seen pieces on upcoming Millar projects and an interview with Garth Ennis. In this issue, there’s a big twelve page piece on contemporary Marvel taking the form of interviews with three high ranking editors. I skimmed through that one and there was little of interest there that I could see although it was accompanied by some nice artwork. The illustrations seem to fall into two categories; 1) groupings of superheroes assembled using random-generator software and 2) various different versions of Spider-Man.

Thankfully, it’s another big episode of Kick Ass 2 this issue which sees the start of the big, bloody show down between the good guys and the bad guys. One of Millar’s boasts about Kick Ass which never stuck is that it is a whole new level of realism in superhero comics. Really, what we have is a hyper-violent version of early Spider-Man but without much of the humanity. Millar doesn’t want his bad guys to be anything more complicated than arseholes for fear that it will compromise that moment of exhilaration as they get their just deserts.

It’s seemingly a big penultimate episode for Superior too. Just like in Kick Ass 2, the bad guys are indiscriminately taking innocent life en mass without being burdened by something as inconvenient as a conscience or doubt. One of the bad guys is an empowered twelve year old who never once stops to think that maybe he’s going too far in his slaughter and, disappointingly, Millar never once stops to wonder why he doesn’t. It’s a twenty-four pages long fight scene built for the big screen and even tributes the climax of the second Superman movie. It’s a shame because despite what can be achieved using modern special effects, superhero fight sequences are still something comics can do better.

Zombies/war mash-up strip (yawn; zombies), Graveyard of Empires, I consider to be out of CLiNT’s scope. I understand now that the comic is limited in the amount of originated material that it’s able to run (despite often soliciting for submissions that, probably, never get looked at) that it needs to run reprint material but does it have to be non-UK? Another of Millar’s boasts that didn’t stick is that CLiNT is a British comic continuing the tradition of The Eagle and 2000 AD but surely he can at least run Image Comics material with more of a British feel to it such as Bulletproof Coffin by David Hine and Shaky Kane or Mud Man by Paul Grist.

Popeye Volume 2

2012-02-13T01:26:00.000-08:00

I have On The Ration stalwart, Rob Wells, to thank for me reading this after his reviews of books from this series he posted here. If it wasn’t for him, I would never have imagined myself reading Popeye comics. For me, Popeye had been defined by the cartoon show of the 70s/80s in which the character fought Brutus (or was it Pluto) for the romantic attentions of Olive Oyl who was usually holding a crocodile’s mouth open with her outstretched legs. Popeye would squeeze a can of spinach into his mouth, punch Brutus/Pluto into the sea, save Olive from the beast before going through the whole sorry process for another ten minutes immediately after. Of course, like most extra media interpretations of comic strips, this cartoon series was several Chinese whispers removed from the EC Segar’s source material of which this is the second collection.

Popeye originally appeared in Segar’s daily newspaper strip Thimble Theatre ten years after it had started during the late 1920s. He proved so popular that it wasn’t long before he was the main character. It is easy to see why. Ugly of face, one of eye, big of heart, free with his fists and his manglification of the English language; Popeye was flawed but honest. He is what he is.

The first half of this book collects a run of daily strips from 1930 to 1932. Each day’s strip is usually six panels long, although it is not uncommon for the space for two to joined together for an extra sized one, and is part of a larger narrative. Popeye starts this volume by visiting the West, which as a sailor used to water he doesn’t like, before travelling around America and the world for other adventures.

The second half features the colour Sunday strips from this period and is why the volume is the cumbersome A3 size that it is. Popeye occupies the top two thirds of the page while the bottom third is taken up with another Segar comic called Sappo, a humour strip about a seemingly childless middle aged couple. Popeye’s Sunday adventures are based in and around the same local and like all good sitcoms features a regular support cast and locations. Although usually part of a longer narrative, these are accessible alone. In this volume, Popeye’s Sunday adventures usually involve him preparing for a big boxing fight by playing craps with his mates down at the docks, eating hamburgers in Rough-House’s restaurant, wooing Olive and getting arrested for brawling. Often, he escapes jail by punching a hole through the wall to defeat his opponent in the highly anticipated boxing match before going back to jail of his own accord to serve the rest of his time.

Clearly, these are brilliantly drawn strips filled with full figure exuberance and very few close ups. Segar was prolific producing six daily strips and a Sunday’s page of a substantial size. But they are joyfully written also. Popeye speaks in a highly original mangled English but Olive and Wimpy, who makes his first appearances in this volume, have their own distinctive speech rhythms too. Segar was a great chorographer. In one Sunday strip, Popeye argues with Rough-House about his upcoming boxing match with a gorilla while Wimpy tries to help himself to a free hamburger (again).

I’m surprised at how timeless these strips seem to be. Or are these depression era yarns just relevant again? One reoccurring theme is Popeye receiving a windfall of money for a good deed and then going down to the docks to lose it all in a game of craps. The worrying theme seems to be that people like Popeye, people who have never had very much, don’t know what to do with money on the rare occasions that they get it. A couple of times, he tries to put it to good use. In one of the daily narratives he opens The One-Way Bank so he can make individual donations to the homeless. Unfortunately he was unable to resist giving attractive brunettes huge sums of money for fur coats and the like. In another story, he buys an orphan enough clothes to last her life time in a misguided attempt to provide her with security. Later he manages to reunite the girl with her millionaire parents. In a surprisingly moving moment, Popeye offers the rich father all of his sprize fight money to spend on his daughter.

Segar uses asterisks and hash-tags to cover for expletives, a method still used today in comics, usually those published by Marvel or DC. For example, if you’re reading an Avengers comic written by Brian Michael Bendis, you know he’s substituting these symbols for phrases like “mother fucker.” While reading volume one of Popeye I substituted these bits of texts with words like “fucking” and “shit”. It wasn’t until this volume that I realised that Segar was probably covering for words like “damn” and “hell”. The moment I used these words instead, a whole new rhythm opened up.

Of course, Popeye is all about the fighting. In the dailies, weeks can pass by before Popeye starts to lay into someone with his fists and its usually exhilarating when he does so because some sneaky bastard is getting his comeuppance. Even in these circumstances, it’s not unknown for Popeye to shake hands with him afterwards out of good, ol’ fashioned respeck. A Sunday strip, however, rarely concludes without Popeye having beaten somebody up. In the main it’s somebody who deserves a good sockin’, like some arsehole in the park looking for a scrap, but Popeye isn’t averse to laying an innocent passerby among the sweet peas if no one else is available.

It’s the fallout of Popeye’s violence that breaks the spell of the book for me occasionally. It’s not uncommon for Wimpy to end up with a black eye or for Olive to end up in a state thanks to him. A couple of times, Popeye violently shakes Olive in frustration. It’s shocking to my modern sensibilities to see this and confusing as to how to take the rest of the violence that occurs. Can it ever be slapstick if a man slaps a woman he’s in a relationship with in the heat of an argument? Even if he expresses regret later? Regardless, I get enough enjoyment from these strips and have enough faith in Segar as an artist not to let this put me off reading the rest of these collections.

What has surprised me the most about EC Segar’s Popeye is that it’s laugh out loud funny. In one strip, Popeye is being escorted in handcuffs to jail by a policeman but this doesn’t stop him going to the docks for a game of craps or visiting the restaurant for a sanrich. When he falls asleep under a tree, the obliging policeman frees himself and cuffs another, this time obese, officer to Popeye. When he wakes up he bursts out laughing and says, “Well blow me down! Tha’sa good joke on me!!” In the One Way Bank, a homeless guy repeatedly appears at the counter asking for money looking slightly different each time. He’s shaved his moustache off, he’s put on a pair of glasses, he’s wearing a false beard. It’s the humour that’s the most humbling thing about EC Segar’s Popeye for me. Each new generation thinks that they invented humour but it turns out that our great grandparents were much funnier than we ever are.

Objects of Desire; Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus 2

2012-02-09T01:25:00.000-08:00

Despite the comic reading world becoming increasingly aware of the tiny, if any, royalty cheques silver age artists get from Marvel for reprinting their work, I still crave this book. Due out in a couple of months, it collects together Amazing Spider-Man issues 39 to 67 as well as annuals and other odd and sods from the first couple of years after Steve Ditko stopped drawing the character.

I can’t help it. I love Marvels Omnibus books. Actually, I love Marvel’s Omnibus books when they collect comics from this period. I don’t really care for material from the mid eighties onwards, but prior to that, I’m usually very tempted and if it features artwork by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, then I am usually overcome with desire. Unnerving, middle-aged longing. Of course, this book doesn’t feature artwork by either of those guys, it’s mainly by John Romita SR, an artist who I will confess passed me by a bit when I was a kid, so my pining for it makes it all the irrational.

Unfortunately, getting a copy of this book cheaply is proving to be very difficult. I’ve been watching it on Amazon UK and the lowest the price has got (for the tribute cover) has been £49. Currently, it’s listed at £56. I have a copy on order from Forbidden Planet International for £46 including P&P. If you order it from them now, then you can get it for fifty quid but I was able to order it for less because of a promotion they had when the book was first offered by Marvel a couple of months back.

Anyway, if Marvel are reading this, please can you publish the following Omnibus books; Fantastic Four Vol 3 (by Lee and Kirby), SHIELD (Silver Age Kirby and Steranko), Sgt Fury (Lee and Kirby) and Doctor Strange (by Steve Ditko)? I did tweet you this request a couple of months ago but nothing’s happened yet. You’re not ignoring me are you?

Too Much Sex & Violence #2

2012-01-29T03:47:00.000-08:00

This is a shameless plug, not a review. An objective review of this comic would be more or less impossible for me to write, as it is written by Rol Hirst, who has written many reviews for this blog, and I am one of the many artists – Stephen Prestwood, Neil Cavenham, Dave Metcalfe-Carr, Nigel Lowrey, Mark Renhard, Ryan Taylor, Tony McGee – who contributed to it. Still, I read it yesterday and, in my heavily biased opinion, I thought it was great.

Too Much Sex & Violence is set in the fictional seaside town of Fathomsby, home to retired superheroes, vampire DJs, four-armed gigolos, and various other oddballs, including Sister Serena, a nun who offers a very unique service which male readers should find particularly distressing. At first glance, TMS&V seems a lot like the TV series The League of Gentlemen, but now that we are two issues in, it has really started to distinguish itself. I was particularly intrigued by the description of Fathomsby as a kind of retirement home for individuals with shady reputations ‘who have served their country in such a way as to be granted full immunity ... from all future prosecutions’.

Rol clearly knows what he is doing here. He has created some great characters for this series, has cleverly juggled the scenes to allow for a rotating crew of artists (I drew three pages for this issue, drew two pages in the first issue, and am currently drawing two pages for the third issue), and has produced a really, really strong script. I am a fan of Rol’s writing anyway, but I was honestly surprised by how good this issue is. It’s much better than the first issue, and that was bloody good. He may want to consider taking up writing comics for a living. I think he could go far.

As I said, I am not able to be objective at all regarding this series, so you should probably just check it out yourselves. Both issues are available to order from Rol for £2.50 each (including postage within the UK). Alternatively, both Gosh and Orbital in London have the first issue (Orbital definitely still have a few copies left, I’m not sure about Gosh) and if you are an Ace Comics customer, I know that Biff also has the first issue (it may be available elsewhere but you’ll have to ask Rol). Hopefully, the same establishments will soon have the second issue, too.

Whispers #1

2012-01-19T11:49:00.000-08:00

Whispers is a new series by Joshua Luna, who is one half of the Luna Brothers, the team behind series such as Ultra, Girls, and The Sword. Joshua was the writing half of the Luna Brothers, with art duties on the aforementioned titles falling to Jonathan Luna, but it turns out that Joshua is a very good artist, too. In fact, his art here looks like a lot like his brother’s, but with a touch of Daniel Clowes added for good measure. It appears to have been shot from the pencils – not inked – which is a look that doesn’t always work for me, especially on colour comics, but here it looks really effective.

The story is about a young man suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, who finds that he can leave his body in ghost form while he sleeps and visit people he knows. They can’t see or hear him, but he is able to influence their thoughts to some degree by talking to them. Joshua Luna’s stories often remind me of the novels of Stephen King, in that the basic idea can sound a bit naff, maybe even unoriginal, but the execution turns them into something special. They are full of witty dialogue, too, which goes a long way with me. And unlike most other modern writers, he writes great periodical comics that usually end on a cliff-hanger of some kind and leave me desperate for the next issue.

Compared to Luna’s previous comics, the ending to this comic was quite subdued – naked girls from outer space didn’t beat anyone to death and nobody got their jaw punched off – but it did intrigue me enough to make me want to come back for more. I really enjoyed Girls and The Sword (I have a copy of Ultra in my reading pile at the moment) and I think I am going to enjoy this series, too.

Cost: I didn’t get this ‘on the ration’ at all. It has a cover price of $2.99 and that’s what I paid when downloaded it from Comixology. I probably would have been able to get it cheaper if I’d waited a few weeks, but I was keen to check it out. If I buy any future issues, I will wait until they fall in price to at least $1.99, but I’ll probably just wait until the first TPB comes out and buy a copy of that instead.

Psychiatric Tales by Darryl Cunningham

2012-01-15T11:14:00.000-08:00

Darryl Cunningham drew on his time working in a psychiatric hospital to produce the ‘eleven graphic stories about mental illness’ collected in this book. Most of the stories focus on, and attempt to demystify, particular mental illnesses (depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia) or aspects of mental illnesses (self-harm, suicide), one focuses on famous people who have suffered from mental illness (Winston Churchill, Spike Milligan), and the final story focuses on the author’s own experiences of mental illness. I enjoyed the whole book, but as an aspiring cartoonist who has also experienced mental illness, I could really relate to the final story.

I have suffered from depression and low self-esteem on and off since I was a teenager (I’m now 42), and like the author, I spent years producing comic strips that I was too insecure to promote, partly because I disliked being the centre of attention. On more than one occasion, I have given up writing and drawing entirely, for several years at a time, and I have also experienced years of unemployment. I have never been that outgoing, but in the late-1990s, I started to become extremely agoraphobic, and until very recently, I couldn’t even walk a short distance from my home on my own without having a panic attack. I am more or less over that now, but only because I spent more than two years in counselling, receiving cognitive behavioural therapy, and finally started to take anti-depressants, after resisting them for years because I was worried that they would make me feel worse (I still only took half the dose my doctor recommended, but since reading the chapter on depression in this book, I have increased to the recommended dose).

Not only do I now go out more or less normally (although I do still struggle with my natural tendency to stay at home), I am also much less afraid of pushing myself forward. As recently as two years ago, I wouldn’t have even considered blogging (I used to get paranoid if I just posted a message on someone else’s blog, or even on Facebook) but now I have three blogs on the go, have started drawing again, and am enjoying it more than I ever did in the past. That I could enjoy going out, writing on a public forum, or even publishing my comics online without experiencing anxiety, was inconceivable to me for many years... which all seems a bit odd to me now.

Using simple artwork, frequently interspersed with distorted photographs, Cunningham effectively conveys the inner turmoil experienced by people with mental illnesses, an inner turmoil that can be made much worse by public misconceptions about mental illness and a general lack of sympathy. As one character in the book says, ‘If I’d had cancer, people would have rallied around, but because I had schizophrenia, few people wanted to know’. I found parts of the book quite upsetting, particularly the section on self-harm, but ultimately this is an uplifting book with a very positive message: no matter how hopeless things may seem when you are suffering from a mental illness, no matter how unlikely it seems that you will enjoy life again, things can get better, a mental illness is not necessarily a life sentence, your experiences can make you a stronger person and you can enjoy life (and comics) again. I whole-heartedly agree.

‘Psychiatric Tales’ deserves to be widely read and it would make a great addition to any library. If I weren’t broke and living my life ‘on the ration’, I would buy multiple copies to give to friends, family and passing strangers. But just because I’m not going to do that, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t. Buy several!

Cost: This has a cover price of $15.00 (I have managed to end up with a copy of the US edition of this book) but I got my copy from the Book Depository, last May, and paid just £6.96 (including postage). It’s gone up a bit since then but it would be well worth buying even at the full cover price. (Note: I put off reading this for so long because Paul had already read and reviewed it on this blog, so I thought I should let a bit of time pass before I reviewed it again, but I now wish I’d read it sooner.)

Scalped Vol.8: You Gotta Sin To Get Saved TPB

2012-01-13T01:44:00.000-08:00

‘You Gotta Sin To Get Saved’ collects Scalped issues 43 to 49 by writer Jason Aaron, artist R.M. Guéra and guest artists Jason LaTour and Davide Furnò, and it’s another great volume. It took me a couple of issues to get back into the series, partly because a good few months have passed since I read the last volume and my memory ain’t so good – which is one reason I usually can’t be bothered to collect periodical comics – and partly because the first two issues reprinted in this volume told relatively self-contained stories about relatively minor, unlikable characters, but once the ‘You Gotta Sin To Get Saved’ storyline that made up the rest of the book got going, I was hooked.

In this volume, the complex characters that Jason Aaron has created become even more sympathetic, particularly, and most surprisingly, the supposed villain of the piece: chief of the Prairie Rose Indian Reservation / crime boss Lincoln Red Crow. Meanwhile, our hero, undercover FBI agent Dashiell Bad Horse, is involved in a bloody shoot-out with the man who killed his mother at the end of the first volume, and still doesn’t realise that this is the man who killed his mother.

I literally found myself perched on the edge of my seat as I got nearer the end of this book, as the atmosphere got more and more tense – particularly during the build-up to the shoot-out in the final issue reprinted here – and I really didn’t want it to end. Frustratingly, when it did end, nothing was really resolved, but as this series is set to end at #60 – just one or (more likely) two more volumes to go now – most characters had taken at least a few more steps towards their places in the grand finale.

Although R.M. Guéra is clearly a very good artist, I found his style far too murky when I first started following this series, but it’s a style that’s really grown on me and he produces some great work in this volume, from raindrops on a spider’s web to one creepy-looking horse (a bad horse?). And there's some great work from the guest artists, too! I still think that Davide Furnò's art looks like some old John Buscema drawings inked over with a marker pen, but it's a look that I am very fond of and I'd really like to see more of his work.

Personally, I can’t wait to see how this series ends and can’t wait until I can read the whole thing in one go. Bring on the final volume(s)!

Cost: This has a (Titan Books) cover price of £14.99 but you can get it online at the moment for under £9.00. My copy was a Christmas present, so it didn’t cost me a penny. Hooray!

Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes HC

2012-01-06T07:08:00.000-08:00

‘Lost in the Andes’ is the first in a series of volumes reprinting comics by legendary Disney cartoonist Carl Barks. I had never read any of the material in this book before – I wasn’t even born when these stories were first printed, between 1942 and 1966, and most of the reprint volumes I’ve seen in the past have been rather expensive – but I had certainly heard about it, have always wanted to check some of it out, and was very keen to get a copy of this book. It is certainly a great-looking book – I love that cover! – and it’s obvious even just flicking through it why Barks is held in such high regard, but I’m slightly embarrassed to report that I didn’t particularly enjoy reading it (embarrassed because it’s obviously quality material and everyone else seems to love this stuff).

This reprints four longish stores (about 20 pages each), nine shorter stories (about 10 pages each), and a handful of one-pagers. The first of the longish stories, ‘Lost in the Andes’, is the best one. In it, Donald Duck and his three nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie, get lost in the Andes while searching for the source of some square eggs that Donald discovered while working as ‘fourth assistant janitor’ at the Museum of Natural Sciences, and eventually they stumble upon the lost city of Plain Awful, where nearly everything is square and everyone talks in an outrageous Southern US accent (because the only other person to discover the city was an American professor) and eats nothing but (square) eggs. The art here is fantastic – as it is throughout the book – particularly on the panel in which Donald and his nephews stumble upon Plain Awful, while the story is mildly amusing rather than laugh-out-loud funny. Of the remaining longish stories, ‘Race to the South Seas’ and ‘Voodoo Hoodoo’ are okay but I got a bit bored with both of them long before they ended, while ‘The Golden Christmas Tree’, in which Huey, Dewey and Louie, seeking a golden Christmas tree, are lured up a mountain by a witch, is juvenile nonsense.

I actually preferred the shorter stories to the longer adventures – they were funnier and Donald seemed to have more personality in these strips, while in the longer strips he was quite bland and more or less any character could have played his role – and I particularly liked the one in which Donald and his nephews competed against each other on a rigged TV quiz. The ending of this strip, in which Donald managed to answer a seemingly impossible question, but in doing so fried his brain and ended up choosing a tricycle as his prize, rather than a barrel full of money, was quite brilliant. Overall, though, I found this book a bit disappointing and was quite pleased to reach the end. I guess the main problem is the fact that I am 42 years old. I am too old to really enjoy (most) comics written for young children, but too young to have read these stories the first time around, and therefore I have no emotional attachment to them. I also have no real emotional attachment to the Disney characters – if this was a collection of Daffy Duck strips, I may have felt differently – and while Huey, Dewey and Louie were cute enough, it was hard to get too attached to Donald based on his personality – or lack thereof – in this book. I probably enjoyed reading the introduction to this book more than I enjoyed reading the book itself, but then I always enjoy reading about the lives of great cartoonists. Having said all that, I may still buy the next volume in this series, a collection of comics about Donald’s stingy uncle Scrooge McDuck – Barks’ own creation – as based on his few appearances in this book, he seems like a much more amusing character.

Cost: This has a recommended retail price of £17.99 / $24.99. I bought my copy from Amazon, where it was priced at £13.65, but I had a £5.00 Amazon voucher I got for answering online surveys for the Radio Times, which reduced the price to just £8.65. At that price, I’m glad I bought it.

Rob's Top 10 Comic-Related Bargains of 2011

2011-12-29T10:09:00.000-08:00

This time last year, I put together a list of my top ten graphic novels of 2010 and my top ten comic-related bargains of 2010. I’m not going to bother putting together a list of my top ten graphic novels of 2011, mainly because I don’t think I have read ten new graphic novels this year, so I’ll just say that Love and Rockets New Stories #4 was probably my favourite of the few new GNs I read in 2011, that I also enjoyed reading Locke & Key, Scalped, Jonah Hex and the current reprints of E.C. Segar’s Popeye strips, as well as small press comics by Andrew Cheverton (‘Pictures Made of Light’, ‘West’), Martin Eden (‘Spandex’), Rol Hirst (‘Too Much Sex & Violence’), and Paul Rainey (‘Thunder Brother: Soap Division’) and leave it there. Instead, here are my top 10 comic-related bargains of 2011:

10. E.C. Segar’s Popeye HCs

I didn’t get an especially great deal on these – although I have been bought at least two of the five volumes I have so far as presents – I just happen to think that these brilliant books are great value for money anyway. Each volume has a recommended retail price of £21.99 / $29.99, you can usually get them online for around £15.00 (sometimes less), and yet they are huge books, packed full of comics, which take longer to read than most Marvel Omnibus books (which is something I say every time I review one, but it’s true).

9. Christian Comics from a Woman in Hastings

In the summer, following a tip-off from my sister, who met a woman selling comics at a car boot sale and got her number for me, I went to a big house in Hastings and spent an hour or so rummaging through piles of comics priced at £1.00 each. Most of them were just ‘80s / ‘90s crap and overpriced at £1.00 each, but I did manage to find ten comics I wanted to buy, including two hilarious Christian comics from the 1970s – ‘Hansi the Girl Who Loved the Swastika’ and ‘The Cross and the Switchblade’ – which would have made rummaging through all those comics more than worthwhile even if they had been the only two comics I bought.

8. Books from The Works

A branch of discount book chain The Works finally opened near me this year, and while they don’t often have graphic novels in there, I have managed to grab a couple of comic-related bargains since they opened. First, I got a copy of Chip Kidd’s ‘Bat-Manga’ book – which reprints some long-forgotten Japanese Batman comics from the ‘60s – for £4.99 (RRP £19.99) and then I got a copy of ‘The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga’ – a rather large hardcover book that comes with a Tezuka documentary on DVD – for £6.99 (RRP £25.00). Neither of those were books I was desperate to own, but they are both very nice books, and were impossible to resist at those prices.

7. Books Subsidised by the Radio Times

A year or so ago, I was asked to take part in online surveys by the Radio Times – a magazine I subscribe to – in return for points which can be converted to Amazon vouchers. These surveys only come through occasionally and don’t take very long to complete, and so far I have managed to convert my survey points into two £5.00 Amazon vouchers. The first one I put towards a Jonah Hex book and the second one I put towards the first volume of The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library, ‘Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes’, which I am reading right now. This has a recommended retail price of £17.99, had an Amazon price of £13.65 when I ordered it, and it only cost me £8.65. It’s a great looking book!

6. Essentials Books from Ebay

Back in May, a tip-off from Rol led me to eBay, where some bloke had listed a lot of Marvel Essentials books for sale – buy-it-now – for just £4.00 (plus £1.00 for postage) each. I bought six or seven volumes of the Essential Hulk, Essential Power Man and Iron Fist Volumes 1 & 2, Essential Marvel Two-In-One Volume 1, and probably some other stuff, too. I haven’t read any of these books yet, but I will enjoy catching up with them eventually.

5. Thor Omnibus Subsidised by LoveFilm

Earlier in the year, I signed up for a free trial with online DVD rental company LoveFilm, who at the time were offering a free £20.00 Amazon voucher along with their trials. This was only open to first time customers, but I gave it a go anyway, even though I have enjoyed several free LoveFilm trials in the past, and eventually I was emailed a £20 Amazon voucher which I put towards a copy of the Thor Omnibus HC (the one by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby) which has a recommended retail price of £75.00, had an Amazon price of £56.13 at the time, and thanks to my voucher, only cost me £36.13. I wish I’d enjoyed reading it more.

4. Books Bought with Nectar Points

Have you got a Nectar card? Well, even if you don’t shop in Sainsbury’s, you should probably get one, because you can also collect points from hundreds of online retailers, including Amazon and eBay, if you visit these sites through links on the Nectar website, and the best thing is that you can later exchange your points for Amazon vouchers. A few months ago, I exchanged some of my points for a £20.00 Amazon voucher, which I spent on several Jonah hex TPBs, and I currently have enough points to get another £35.00 of Amazon vouchers, which I will (of course) be spending on even more graphic novels soon.

3. Library Books

I didn’t get that many graphic novels out of the library this year but libraries are great and still deserve a place near the top of this list. This year, I borrowed the first few volumes of Scalped – which I liked so much I have since bought them all – and the final volume of Ex Machina, as well as a few unusual GNs that I was keen to read but not enough to actually buy them, like DC’s ‘Saga of the Super-Sons’ TPB. Most of the libraries near me have at least a few graphic novels in stock and, better still, if I go to the Kent Libraries website, I can search all the libraries in Kent and get books sent to my local library, and all I have to pay is a 35p reservation fee. In the past, I have even asked my local library to order books in just for me, which they have, and again, all I had to pay was a small reservation fee, and I recently found out that I can order in books from public libraries all over the UK – not just within my county – which costs more, but it’s still only a couple of quid. All of the services I have just mentioned should be available in libraries throughout the UK.

2. Digital Comics

I know that digital comics aren’t for everyone but I love ‘em. I do find it difficult to read some comics online and I still prefer my graphic novels made of ink and paper, but I much prefer digital comics to monthly periodical comics these days and they also provide an affordable way to sample new series. I don’t think the price of most digital comics is low enough, considering they have no resale value – $1.99 is usually the most I will pay for a digital comic, and even that seems like a bit too much – but Comixology regularly offer certain comics at just $0.99c for a limited period. This year, I downloaded issues 1 to 11 of Jeff Smith’s Rasl for $0.99c each (although the first issue was free) and Morning Glories issues 1 to 12 for $0.99c each (I think the first issue of that was free, too), which was quite a saving on the price of buying the paper comics.

1. 110 Marvel GNs

Back in the spring, I noticed that a seller who lives quite near to me had listed a collection of 110 Marvel graphic novels for sale on eBay for about £500 and hadn’t received any offers. I emailed him and offered him £400 in cash for a private sale, which he accepted, and I went and collected them the same day. I kept back more than twenty of these books for myself – including all the Fantastic Four Visionaries: John Byrne books, Hulk Visionaries: Peter David volumes 1 to 7, Champions Classic volumes 1 & 2, and What If Classic volumes 1 to 5 – and sold the rest on Amazon for a little over £400. It was a bit of a pain in the arse selling all the books I didn’t want, and I still have a few that haven’t sold yet, but it was more than worth the effort. The books I kept would have cost me about £200 to buy new but this way they didn’t cost me a penny, meaning that this deal was always going to be hard to beat as my bargain of the year.

Happy new year! May 2012 bring bargains to you all!

Swamp Thing issues 2 and 3 (2011)

2011-12-24T08:53:00.000-08:00

Swamp Thing is the only one of the handful of DC’s ‘New 52’ titles I sampled that I have decided to stick with beyond the first issue, as I am quite fond of the character and the first issue was reasonably strong, despite it being ‘bogged’ down in continuity and a bit too talky.

In issue one, Alec Holland had returned from the dead and was working as a labourer, some weird horror stuff happened, and Swamp Thing himself – the creature that, for many years, thought it was Alec Holland – only appeared on the final page. Except it turns out in #2 that this wasn’t the Swamp Thing we all know and love at all, but another swamp creature who looks a lot like him and has come to talk to Alec on behalf of ‘The Green’. This swamp creature spends most of #2 telling Alec that, even though he never was the original Swamp Thing, he was supposed to be, and that the Swamp Thing that we all know and love was just something ‘The Green’ cobbled together at the last minute when Alec Holland went and buggered up its plans by dying. ‘The Green’ has brought Alec back from the dead because it wants him to become a new Swamp Thing, a Swamp Thing with a human core, which will be necessary to defend ‘The Green’ against ‘The Rot’ – which is the opposite of ‘The Green’ – and its representative, Sethe, who is on his way to unleash his own brand of horror upon the Earth. Alec turns down this invitation to become another Swamp Thing, and at the end of #2, while fleeing from some monsters, he is rescued by a short-haired Abigail Arcane, who already knows all about Sethe and ‘The Rot’ and spends half of #3 talking to him about it.

Just as there are some humans, like Alec, who are born with a connection to ‘The Green’, there are others, like Abigail and her family, who are born with a connection to ‘The Rot’, and when the original Swamp Thing disappeared from her life, Abigail began to feel ‘The Rot’ calling to her again. More importantly, the rot has also been calling to her half brother, William Arcane, who lives in a plastic bubble in a children’s home because he is acutely allergic to chlorophyll, and she needs Alec’s help to save him. (Note: Even though he does not yet look like an overgrown turnip, Alec has the ability to manipulate trees and plants and other green stuff.)

I was under the impression that all of DC’s ‘New 52’ titles were supposed to be fresh and accessible to new readers, but this series was already ‘mired’ in continuity just a few pages into the first issue, and it’s hard to see how anyone who hadn’t already read Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run wouldn’t be seriously confused by now. Writer Scott Snyder is clearly paying tribute to Moore’s run here, while at the same time pissing all over it, telling us that Moore’s Swamp Thing was a just a failed second choice, a dry run for a new, improved creature. This decision to write off Moore’s Swamp Thing doesn’t particularly bother me, even though Moore’s Swamp Thing run is one of my favourite runs of comics ever – probably my favourite thing Alan Moore has done. I still have those comics and nothing anyone else does will stop me enjoying them. In fact, I want creators to make bold moves, to try something different, and wish this series could have been less tied to its past (which probably would have made it a lot less talky). Snyder is a good writer, clearly faced with a difficult task – i.e. following Alan Moore – but I did think that some of the dialogue seemed a bit contrived, the many references to ‘The Green’ seemed quite heavy-handed, and the first time someone mentioned ‘The Rot’, I struggled not to laugh.

The good news is that the horror aspects of this comic – which again seem reminiscent of the horror in Alan Moore’s run – work well and are really quite disturbing, thanks largely to Yanick Paquette’s stunning art. I have enjoyed his work in the past but he really seems to have upped his game here (although at least half of the pages in #3 were drawn by someone called Victor Ibáñez, who did such a good job that I didn’t realise that it was the work of a different artist until I got to the credits on the final page). I am definitely going to give this series a chance and will stick with it until the end of the first story arc, as it has the potential to be a really good – and great looking – horror comic, and hopefully, once all the set up is out of the way, it will become just that. Whether or not I continue beyond the first story arc really depends on whether everyone stops talking so much.

Cost: These have a cover price of $2.99 each. I downloaded mine from Comixology and paid $1.99 each, which is the price they drop to once they have been on sale at $2.99 for a month.

Sergio Aragones Funnies issues 1 to 5

2011-12-03T09:55:00.000-08:00

Sergio Aragonés is in his mid-seventies now but is still going strong, as this new monthly series from Matt Groening’s Bongo Comics demonstrates. Each issue is a mix of the single-page, silent humour strips Aragonés is most famous for, a few longer strips – some based on historical events, some fictional and funny, some fictional and touching, some autobiographical – and puzzle pages (spot the difference, etc.). It’s a slightly odd mix, as I can’t imagine most kids being that interested in the autobiographical stories, the humour strips are mostly aimed at a youngish audience, and the puzzle pages are aimed at a very young audience, but it’s still the perfect outlet for Aragonés’ talents and the sort of outlet he should have been given years ago.

For me, the best thing about these comics is the autobiographical strips. Born in Spain, a refugee in France during the Spanish Civil War, educated in Mexico, and a seasoned traveller, Aragonés has lived quite an eventful life and the stories he has told so far seem to be just the tip of the iceberg. There is at least one autobiographical story per issue, and so far he has told of his time working as a movie extra (while still a student) in the 1950s, the first time he ever earned money drawing, his love of scuba diving, his love of puppets, and most interesting / unexpected of all, his time working as a camera assistant / sound man on wildlife documentaries, which took him all over the world. I could honestly read these stories all day long and I hope this series – and Sergio – just keeps on going forever.

These have a cover price of $3.50 (about £2.50) each. I bought a couple of issues on eBid and the rest on eBay, from various sellers, and paid about £2.00 each, including postage.

Spandex #5

2011-11-24T09:41:00.000-08:00

It’s another great issue of Martin Eden’s Spandex. Last issue, with the exception of their leader, Liberty, and their newest member, Neon, the various members of Britain’s first gay super-hero team, Spandex, were defeated by lesbian super-villain team Les Girlz. This issue, Liberty finds herself taking on dozens of super-villains, with a little help from the original Spandex team, Japanese super-heroes the J-Team, and the O-Men, in a piss-take of bloated super-hero crossover events. Along the way, we find out Liberty’s origin, and the origin of the Spandex team, in some nicely done flashback scenes, and eventually we get to find out what has happened to the defeated members of Spandex, and who the traitor in the team is (it’s not who you think it is).

This is part two of a four-part story, so nothing is resolved by the end of the issue. In fact, the main story doesn’t progress that much from the end of the previous issue, but what does occur is a lot of fun. Eden has a gift for creating great characters and this issue is packed full of original super-heroes and super-villains. Some of his characters are parodies of existing characters given a gay twist – the Gulk, James Bend, etc. – but they are usually witty / clever parodies, seemingly informed by genuine affection for the source material (this very modern, occasionally rude, super-hero comic is clearly not the work of someone who hates super-heroes). I assume that most of these characters were created especially for this issue, but the O-Men were the stars of Eden’s previous super-hero series, which I regret to say I’ve never read, and I was very pleased to read on the final page of this issue that he will be releasing several large O-Men collections in the near future. If the O-Men was half as good as Spandex is, I will definitely be buying them all!

Spandex is available for £3.20 per issue (including postage and packing) from the Spandex website.

Jonah Hex: Tall Tales TPB

2011-11-15T04:23:00.000-08:00

Another great Jonah Hex book, this time collecting JH issues 55 to 60, written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti (as usual) and illustrated by Vicente Alcázar, Phil Winslade, Jordi Bernet, CP Smith, Giancarlo Caracuzzo and Brian Stelfreeze. While the previous volume, The Six Gun War, dabbled with an extended storyline, the issues collected in this volume return to the more successful done-in-one (and even done-in-half, as one of the issues collected here contained two stories) format seen in previous volumes. Best of the bunch is the title story, illustrated by the fantastic Jordi Bernet, in which two kids sneak off one night to watch Jonah hex in action, and discover that he more than lives up to the ‘tall tales’ they have heard about him, but all the other issues are good, too. Gray and Palmiotti somehow continue to come up with new twists on some otherwise generic Western stories and pepper their scripts with great dialogue. In the story ‘Tall Tales’, not only does Jonah Hex literally tackle a horse to the ground after he runs out of bullets during a gunfight, but the outlaw who had been riding the horse then says: ‘Well, there it is then, eh? The wily exploits of a genuine outlaw finally at an end thanks to the acrobatic horse tackling of the world’s ugliest man.’ I would have bought this book for that scene alone!

Spanish artist Jordi Bernet, a Jonah Hex regular, illustrates two stories in this volume and his cartoony European style is perfect for this series – I would be happy if every JH comic was drawn by Bernet – but the work by the other artists contributing to this volume is never less than good. I really liked the look of the issue drawn by Giancarlo Caracuzzo – like a cross between John Buscema and Tony Moore – but the more realistic art of CP Smith and Brian Stelfreeze was very good, too.

I’ve got no complaints about this book and I’ll definitely be back for the next (final?) volume, ‘Bury Me In Hell’. This volume has a (Titan Books) cover price of £10.99. I bought my copy from Amazon, where it is currently £9.89, but as was the case with the previous volume, I paid for it with a gift voucher I got from trading in some of my Nectar points, so it didn’t really cost me anything.

John Byrne's Next Men Book One

2011-11-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

This book, published by Dark Horse in 1993, collects John Byrne’s Next Men issues 0 to 6. The Next Men are a bunch of super-powered teenagers, bred in a laboratory using technology from the future, who awaken from the dream world they have grown up in, believing it to be reality, and immediately find themselves up against the military, the police, rednecks, and the crooked politician behind their creation. Although I used to be a big John Byrne fan, I had never read these comics before, as I gave up on superhero comics in the late-1980s and didn’t get back into them again until around 1999 / 2000. And even if I had been reading superhero comics in the 1990s, I’m not sure that I would have rushed out and bought a superhero comic by John Byrne. His work for Marvel in the late-1970s / early-1980s – particularly his work on the X-Men and the Fantastic Four – is what got me hooked on comics in the first place, but I lost interest in his work while he was working on Superman for DC and moved on to other creators. I still had a lot of affection for his earlier work, though, even when I was only reading ‘alternative’ comics. I still have a lot of affection for it now, and often find myself tempted to buy John Byrne comics that I missed out on over the last couple of decades when I see them, even though I suspect that I wouldn’t really enjoy them, and know that I will never manage to recapture the thrill that discovering his earlier work gave me when I was a kid.

This first Next Men book was mostly set-up but it was fast paced, action packed, and it set things up quite nicely. The writing style was a bit simplistic and even a bit dated, but then, this book is nearly twenty years old now. The self-inked artwork wasn’t Byrne’s best but it was still good. I actually did quite enjoy reading this un-demanding book and want to know what happens next. I didn’t enjoy it enough that I’m going to rush out and buy any more Next Men books, but I would certainly pick them up if I saw them very cheap somewhere, which was the case with this book. This has a cover price of £12.99 / $16.95 but I bought my copy in a charity shop for £1.50.

Batman #1 / Wonder Woman #1

2011-10-23T04:18:00.000-07:00

Here are two more comics I downloaded from Comixology. Two more comics from DC’s ‘New 52’, in fact. Considering I had very little interest in DC’s recent reboot, I seem to have downloaded rather a lot of their new number ones, don’t I? So far, I have downloaded Action Comics #1 (didn’t like it), Frankenstein Agent of SHADE #1 (not bad), Animal Man #1 (also not bad), Swamp Thing #1 (pretty good), and now these two. That’s all the ones I was even remotely interested in apart from All-Star Western #1, the title I was most interested in, which I probably won’t download at all now as I am intending to buy the eventual trade paperback collection (but I bet the bastards at DC release it as an overpriced ‘deluxe’ hardcover first and make me wait about a year for the TPB).

I started off not liking Batman #1 very much. It began with yet another breakout at Arkham Asylum and Batman, with a little help from a friend, taking down several of his greatest foes – Killer Croc, The Riddler, Mr Freeze, Two-Face, Scarecrow, Professor Pyg, etc. – over the course of just a few pages, which makes you wonder how this lot ever managed to give Batman so much trouble in the past. Writer Scott ‘American Vampire’ Snyder’s narration also seemed a bit heavy handed to start with, and I wasn’t particularly taken with Greg Capullo’s art during the breakout, as it seemed a bit too much like the Jim Lee-inspired art on display in a lot of modern DC comics (which is fine if you like that sort of thing, but I don’t – Jim Aparo is the best Batman artist ever, as far as I’m concerned, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise). However, as the comic went on, I warmed to it. Snyder’s Dark Knight Detective seems to be just that – a detective – and after the initial, obligatory action sequence in Arkham, he goes on to investigate a (very gory for a mainstream DC comic) murder using just his smarts and billions of dollars worth of forensics equipment, rather than beating information out of informants, etc., which makes a change (although I’m sure he will get to do some beating as the story goes on). What also makes a change is Bruce Wayne’s plans to use his fortune to redevelop some of Gotham’s poorer areas, which might prove a more effective way to combat crime than dressing up as the world’s most expensive bat and punching poor people. Greg Capullo’s art grew on me as the story went on, too. I think I just didn’t like the way he drew all the super-villains in Arkham, but everything else was rather nice.

Like most of the other ‘New 52’ comics I read, this doesn’t seem like much of a reboot at all. I mean, this doesn’t even try and restart the Batman franchise from day one. Not only is there no new origin for Batman himself, most of his old foes seem to already be well-established criminals, plus former-Robin Dick Grayson is already Nightwing, former-Robin Tim Drake is already Red Robin, and Damian Wayne is already the current Robin, so this Batman has clearly been around long enough to burn through a couple of sidekicks.

To tell the truth, I am not a massive Batman fan and therefore I am not the target audience for this comic. I only bought it because it had received some good reviews and because it was written by Scott Snyder, and I didn’t really expect to like it that much. In the end, though, I thought it was pretty good. I’m not sure if I will bother buying the second issue, but if I ever see the TPB in my local library, I will definitely check it out, and I’d quite like to read some of Snyder’s earlier Batman work, too, as I keep hearing good things about it.

Wonder Woman #1 looked amazing, thanks to artist Cliff Chiang, and writer Brian Azzarello (who I’ve always considered a bit overrated) has written the least boring Wonder Woman comic I’ve ever read. But that isn’t really saying much. This issue was action-packed, violent, gory, and even a little bit sexy, but I didn’t really understand what was going on. Some horses were beheaded, some creatures grew from the horses’ neck-stumps, they tried to kill a girl, Wonder Woman saved her. I’m sure it will become clear who this girl is in the next issue, or at least several issues down the line, but I’m not sure if I can be bothered to stick around and find out. Again, though, I’m not really a Wonder Woman fan, am not really the target audience for this comic, and only really bought it because it had received a lot of good reviews. Azzarello, perhaps wisely, has set this series firmly in the world of Greek mythology, so if you are in to such things, you may enjoy this comic more than I did. Unfortunately, my interest in such things is low. I might read the TPB if I saw it in my local library, but if it weren’t for the great art, I probably wouldn’t bother.

Cost: As was the case with all the other ‘New 52’ comics I have bought, I downloaded these from Comixology. This time, though, instead of getting drunk and downloading them on the day they were released, I waited a month and got them a dollar cheaper than I would have done if I’d been less patient / less sober. In other words, these cost me $1.99 each.

Locke & Key: Clockworks issues 1 & 2

2011-10-19T03:59:00.000-07:00

Being a rather impatient fellow, when I saw that Comixology have now started selling downloads of IDW comics and had copies of Locke & Key: Clockworks issues 1 and 2 for just $1.99 each (cover price $3.99 each), I downloaded them right away. I’m still going to by the next hardcover collection when it comes out, but that probably won’t be out until next spring, at least, and who can wait that long? Well, not me. I like this series a lot and, as I said, I am rather impatient.

In Clockworks #1, in a story set in Lovecraft, Massachusetts, in 1775, we finally discover the origin of the various magical keys hidden around the Keyhouse. In this particularly bloody issue, shortly after seeing his parents hung by the British for treason, locksmith’s son Benjamin Locke and his sister, Miranda, flee to the caves beneath Lovecraft to aid the revolutionaries hiding there, only to discover that there are worse things than the British – yes, really – hiding behind the ‘black door’. Several revolutionaries are possessed by demons and go kill-crazy, and Benjamin Locke is inspired to create a padlock to hold the black door shut, and 100 magical keys, from some material that came from behind the door. I enjoyed this issue a lot, and was quite disappointed to find that #2 was set in the present day, like all previous issues of this series, until I remembered where the last book, Keys To The Kingdom, left off – with the body of the youngest Locke sibling, Bode, now inhabited by the evil being formally known as Dodge.

Evil Bode establishes his evil credentials fairly quickly, dispatching one of his classmates, who has figured out that Bode is no longer Bode, by the second page of the issue. From there, Evil Bode sets about looking for the key to the black door – the Omega Key – and accidently sets free his sister Kinsey’s fear and sorrow, which have been trapped in a jar, believed drowned, since they were removed from her head in L&K Vol.2 (yeah, I know that all sounds a bit odd, but I haven’t got time to fully recap the entire series – Clockworks is L&K Vol.5 – so you’ll just have to read it all yourself or go with me for now). Kinsey’s fear and sorrow get into oldest Locke sibling Tyler’s head and cause a bit of trouble, but most importantly, by the end of the issue, the Locke kids have found yet another key and Evil Bode has the Omega key in his hands (I do wonder why Dodge / Evil Bode never just tortured the location of the Omega key out of Tyler, instead of putting so much effort into pretending to be a normal kid – going to school, etc. – in order to find it).

This is a really good series, cleverly / wittily scripted by Joe Hill (I’ve read all his novels and enjoyed them, too – particularly the short story collection ‘20^th Century Ghosts’ – but L&K is better) and with great, detailed art by Gabriel Rodriguez. I can’t wait for the next issue, which I think is out next week, and I will probably download that, too, just as soon as the price drops to $1.99 or less (because I feel weird spending more than $1.99 on a comic with no resale value).

Note: I would like to point out that Comixology do not sponsor this blog – although, if they want to, they are more than welcome to do so – even though it might seem like it at the moment, what with all the downloads I keep reviewing. I do still read paper comics and still have piles of unread graphic novels to get through, but even though the graphic novel / TPB remains my preferred format, I really can’t be bothered with paper periodical comics anymore, so most of the new serial comics I review from now on are likely to have been downloaded.

Love and Rockets: New Stories #4

2011-10-14T04:57:00.000-07:00

This latest issue of Love and Rockets: New Stories is another great one. It’s not quite as good as the previous issue, but then, few comics are. Once again, Gilbert tells two seemingly-unconnected-but-actually-connected stories. The first, ‘King Vampire’, is a vampire story (duh!) starring Guadalupe’s daughter, Killer, and Fritz, while the second is a story in which a younger Fritz chats to an old boyfriend about various topics, including the possible end of reading and writing within our lifetimes, atheism, and a vampire movie Fritz has been offered a role in but can’t take on for another seven years, because she’s locked into a contract. The sexy / violent vampire story was okay – well, it looked really good – but I enjoyed reading Gilbert’s second story more, even if it wasn’t necessarily a memorable one, and wasn't as visually exciting as the vampire story. The real star of this issue, though, once again, is Jaime, who offers a sort-of sequel to last issue’s amazing ‘Browntown’ story called ‘Return To Me’ and also concludes last issue’s ‘The Love Bunglers’.

‘Return To Me’ tells the story of a teenage Maggie’s return to Hoppers, three years after the events depicted in ‘Browntown’, and her origins as a mechanic, all told from the point of view of a friend. It’s a good short story, with an unexpected twist in the tail – wisely, it doesn’t try to be another ‘Browntown’ – but the highlight of this issue is the conclusion to ‘The Love Bunglers’, a story about the on / off romance between Maggie and Ray and the return of Maggie’s long-lost brother Calvin. I don’t want to give anything away but this is great work from Jaime, who has always been a great artist but has now developed into the superior storyteller among the various Hernandez brothers, too, which is certainly not what I thought back in the early days of Love and Rockets (in the 1980s, right up until the end of ‘Human Diastrophism’, and possibly even a bit beyond that, I was always more of a Gilbert guy). The end of this story feels like the perfect conclusion for these characters and it’s hard to see where Jaime can go from here with Maggie and Ray, at least. Will future stories focus more on newer characters, like Angel? Will we see more stories about Penny century instead? Or will Jaime go somewhere else entirely (actually, I kind of hope so)? There may even be more Maggie and Ray stories in the pipeline, but whatever happens, I’ll be there.

Cost: It seems wrong, somehow, for me to boast about how little I paid for this – which is the usual remit of this blog – so I won’t. It has a recommended retail price of £10.99 / $14.99. You could get it for less than that online but I doubt you would regret paying full price for it (unless you have never read a Love and Rockets comic before, in which case you might just end up feeling confused reading this – I have been reading Love and Rockets since at least 1987, even I feel like I need to go back and read everything again in order to fully appreciate this series, and one day I will do just that).

Jonah Hex Vol.8: The Six Gun War TPB

2011-10-06T04:42:00.000-07:00

The unique selling point of the most recent Jonah Hex series (just cancelled in the DC reboot and replaced with a new Western title, ‘All-Star Western’) was that most issues of the monthly comic contained done-in-one stories, and the eventual trade paperback collections – no fancy deluxe hardcovers for this series – read like short story collections, usually featuring work by multiple artists, even if the stories were always written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti. The series wasn’t entirely self-contained – I think there were a couple of two or three part stories, and supporting characters frequently recurred, so some familiarity with previous issues of the series was often useful – but it was usually just about possible to pick up a single issue of Jonah Hex and enjoy it on its own, which is more than you can say for most other comics published these days. However, The Six Gun War, which collects JH issues 44 to 49, was the nearest this series got to a ‘crossover event’, with one story, in which Jonah teams up with several other DC Western characters, running over six whole issues.

The story starts with Hex getting ambushed by plantation owner Quentin Turnbull, who (wrongly) believes that Hex was responsible for the death of his son during the Civil War (not the Marvel one). Turnbull buries Hex alive and leaves him for dead but, thanks to the timely arrival of some grave robbers, Hex gets free and goes looking for revenge with the help of Bat Lash, El Diablo, scar-faced female bounty hunter Tallulah Black, and some Comanche warriors he encounters along the way. It’s a bloody, violent book, with some great dialogue in it – I particularly liked some of the insults exchanged between Bat Lash and Tallulah Black (Mexican Bandit: ‘Don’t try to hide, we have you outnumbered! Give us the woman!’ Bat Lash: ‘Heh, heh, ha ha... give us the woman... heh...’ Tallula Black: ‘Whut’s so damned funny about that?’ Bat Lash: ‘They clearly didn’t get a good look at you. If they did, they’d be asking for the horses instead.’) – and decent art by Christiano Cucina, who is not as good as some of the artists that have worked on this series, but better than others.

After a six-issue build-up, the ending seemed like a bit of an anti-climax, and I think I prefer the short story format of previous volumes, but this was still an enjoyable read.

Cost: This has a (Titan Books) cover price of £10.99. I bought my copy from Amazon, where it was (and still is) priced at £9.89, and paid for it using a gift certificate I got by trading in some of my Nectar points, so it sort of didn't cost me anything. (Top Tip: Not only can you exchange your Nectar points for Amazon vouchers, you can also collect Nectar points on your Amazon purchases if you log into Amazon via the Nectar website.)

Severed 1 & 2

2011-09-25T01:10:00.000-07:00

Severed is a new horror series written by Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft, illustrated by Attila Futaki, and published by Image. I have no idea who Scott Tuft and Attila Futaki are but Scott Snyder is the bloke who currently writes American Vampire, Swamp Thing and Batman, and this has received some very good reviews so far so I thought I’d check it out.

The story starts in the 1950s, with a one-armed old man called Jack Garron receiving a letter that prompts him to start recalling the story of how he lost his arm. This takes us back to 1916, where the 12-year-old Jack Garron, a promising violinist, runs away from home and hops aboard a freight train headed for Chicago, hoping to be reunited with his musician father, who abandoned him when he was a baby. Meanwhile, a creepy old man with razor sharp teeth, who claims to represent General Electric, takes another boy from an orphanage under the pretence of an apprenticeship, and then eats him. Blimey.

The story unfolds at quite a leisurely pace. By the end of the second issue, Jack still hasn’t encountered the razor-toothed man – or his father – but it seems inevitable that their paths will collide eventually and I think I’m interested enough to stick around for a bit. I certainly want to know more about the razor-toothed man, even if Jack’s part of the story hasn’t completely grabbed me yet. The writing and the art are both very good, but not so good that I am going to rave about either just yet. I feel like this could develop into something, though. The disturbing covers to both issues certainly indicate that there is something more to the razor-toothed man than sharp teeth (and some weird tattoos). I want to know what that something is, so I will definitely give this at least one more issue, and am pretty sure that I will stick with it for a while.

Cost: These have a cover price of $2.99 each. I downloaded #1 from Comixology and paid $1.99. If I’d waited a bit, I could have got #2 for $1.99, too, but I got impatient (and a bit drunk) and downloaded it the day it came out for $2.99.

Harvey Comics Classics Vol.1: Casper The Friendly Ghost

2011-09-22T01:20:00.000-07:00

I’ve decided to make more of an effort to tackle some of the older items in the mountain of unread comics and graphic novels that has built up around me over the years, and while this book is far from the oldest unread book in my collection, it has certainly been sitting around unread for a few years now. In fact, I’m pretty sure I bought this sometime in 2007, the year it was published. I was unable to resist ordering it back then, and I have never been able to bring myself to sell it unread, but I really had to force myself to start reading it. Luckily, it wasn’t quite the chore I was worried it might be, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I enjoyed it.

Published by Dark Horse, this reprints nearly 500 pages of golden and silver age Casper The Friendly Ghost comics, originally published between 1949 and 1965. Casper was created by animators Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo, who sold the character to Famous Studios in 1944 for $200 (Reit went on to become a successful writer, while Oriolo remained in animation and eventually went on to become the sole owner of – but not the creator of – Felix the Cat, so this isn’t yet another story of two young men selling the rights to an ultimately successful character and then dying broke). In 1949, after a series of successful Casper cartoons, St John Publications began publishing Casper comics, with Harvey Comics landing the licence to produce Casper comics in 1952, and buying the rights to character outright in 1959. These comics were produced by (un-credited) artists and writers from the world of animation, and the perfectly-inked pages have the slick, simple, professional look of animation cells.

This is certainly a very nice looking book. Published on glossy paper, mostly in black and white, these comics don’t look half a century old at all. In fact, only the two short colour sections in the book look dated, and that’s because the pages have not been re-coloured and the old-fashioned colour reproduction techniques date these pages badly. However, as much as I liked the look of this book, and the idea of reading it when I first bought it, the stories were aimed at readers so much younger than myself that it was hard for me to really enjoy them. Had I been 35 years younger, I may have enjoyed reading this more, but the 42-year old, cynical me, spoiled by reading too many ‘grim and gritty’ comics in the eighties, kept wondering what a modern writer might make of Casper, and why a comic about the ghost of a dead child was ever such a hit. Harvey editor Sid Jacobson apparently insisted that ghosts are purely fantasy beings, like giants and goblins, with ‘no past life beforehand’, but that is clearly bullshit. I mean, I don’t believe in ghosts, so I guess they are fantasy beings to me, but everything I have ever heard about these fantasy beings implies they are the restless spirits (or something like that) of dead people, and Casper is the ghost of a dead kid if ever I saw one. Also, I wanted to know if religious groups were anti-Casper. These comics are almost sickeningly sweet, but most of the characters, even the good guys, are either ghosts or witches. That had to piss off some religious types, right? And I also wanted to know why Casper struggled to keep friends. He would spend whole strips flying around desperately trying to find some friends, would eventually find some... but by the next strip he was friendless and on the hunt for friends again.

See what I mean? I am just too old and cynical for this sort of thing, and the only strips in here I really liked were the strips about Casper’s cousin ‘Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost’ – Spooky being a little wiseguy ghost with a Brooklyn accent and a ‘doiby’ hat. If I had a kid, particularly a very young kid, I wouldn’t hesitate to give this to them and I can’t think of any reason they wouldn’t enjoy it. But if you are over 10 years old and didn’t grow up reading Casper comics, you might want to give this a miss.

Cost: This has a recommended retail price of $19.95 (about £12.99?). It seems to be out of print at the moment but there are plenty of new and used copies available on Amazon. As I said, I bought my copy in 2007, and while I can’t remember exactly how much I paid for it now, I do remember buying it from an Amazon Marketplace seller and think I paid just over £6.00 (which may or may not have included postage).

Action Comics #1 (2011)

2011-09-20T01:44:00.000-07:00

I wasn’t originally planning on buying this, as I am not a big fan of Superman comics. I like most of the Superman movies a lot, even the most recent one, and even quite enjoy watching Smallville, but Superman comics have just never really done it for me. I am generally not a big fan of any DC comics, have very little interest in the recent DC reboot, of which this is a big part, and as regular readers of this blog (I know there are at least two of you out there) will know, I am not even that keen on the writing of Grant Morrison. However, one of the few Superman comics I have enjoyed in recent years is All Star Superman, which is also one of the few Grant Morrison books I really like, and as Action Comics #1 has received rave reviews pretty much everywhere, I thought I should check it out. And – surprise, surprise! – I didn’t like it that much.

I do like the fact that Morrison has taken Superman back to basics, has made him less powerful, and has him tackling crooked businessmen at the beginning of the comic, rather than super-villains – which seems like a good / obvious move in this post-credit crunch era we live in. However, I can’t imagine that Superman’s reduced power levels will last long and Superman versus big business didn’t even last until the end of this first issue, as the main villain was quickly revealed as yet another version of Lex Luthor. Another positive is that, unlike many other comics written by Grant Morrison, this issue actually made sense to me. Actually, I wouldn’t have guessed it was the work of Grant Morrison if it didn’t say so in the credits. There were no really weird bits – nobody took acid, nobody hallucinated, nobody broke through any fourth walls – but there also weren’t any really good bits either. It was certainly an action packed comic, but it was also kind of dull.

With better art, this might have seemed like a better comic. Rags Morales is not a bad artist – he is certainly well above average – and I seem to remember quite enjoying his work on the couple of issues of the First Wave mini-series I read, but on big superhero books like Identity Crisis, and on this, his art just reeks of the old DC house style – not bad at all, but really quite variable (some panels appear to be the work of a superior artist, while many others look hurried) and also not particularly stylish. Had this been drawn by Frank Quitely, I probably would have thought a lot more of the whole endeavour, but as it is, this just seemed like a an above average Superman comic from the 1990s, in which Superman wears jeans and throws villains off of tall buildings to force a confession out of them, even though said confession probably wouldn’t stand up in a court of law.

This issue ends on a cliffhanger, but I must say that I am remarkably uninterested in what happens next, and won’t be buying the next issue – I feel like a bit of a sucker for falling for the hype and buying this issue! I bought the digital version of this comic, from Comixology, and paid $3.99 (about £2.54) for it. That was the full cover price, but it still worked out cheaper than buying the paper version of this comic from my local comic shop, as UK comic shops have to take into account shipping costs, etc., and I think my LCS charges £3.30 for a $3.99 comic. Still, if I’d waited a few weeks, I could have got this from Comixology for $2.99 or less – in my defence, I was drunk when I bought this – and I really wish I hadn’t bought it at all.

Animal Man #1 / Frankenstein Agent of SHADE #1

2011-09-17T04:36:00.000-07:00

Here’s two more digital comics that I downloaded while slightly drunk last week – both of them comics I was planning on downloading anyway, but had I been fully in control of my senses, I probably would have waited a few weeks until they dropped in price a bit. Oh well.

Both of these are written by Jeff ‘Sweet Tooth’ Lemire, which is why I wanted to read them, and both are also part of DC’s current line-wide reboot, which doesn’t interest me that much at all. Really, though, there isn’t much in either comic to indicate a new status quo, other than a line of dialogue in the Frankenstein comic which refers to ‘Supermen’ and ‘Batmen’ as if they were a new phenomenon. Otherwise, both of these comics could have been – and appear to be – set in the old DCU.

Animal Man #1 is the better of the two comics. It starts with Buddy ‘Animal Man’ Baker at home with his family, reading an interview he did with a magazine. Buddy’s past as a superhero is openly referred to, so I guess this is the same old Animal Man, all the stuff that happened during Grant Morrison’s celebrated run on the title still happened, and this idea I had that DC were going to start again from scratch with all their characters was just a misunderstanding on my part. Buddy’s wife thinks he was happier when he was crime-fighting, and pretty soon he is flying off in costume to break up a siege at a children’s hospital. That dealt with, Buddy starts bleeding from the eyes, for no apparent reason, and then things get weirder. This wasn’t necessarily a brilliant comic – all the stuff about Buddy’s love for his family, and the scene in the children’s hospital, seemed a bit heavy-handed to me – but I liked it more the weirder it got. There was a nice creepy dream sequence towards the end and the creepy final page – which reminded me of parts of the new Swamp Thing #1, although I really hope the two comics aren’t linked – left me intrigued enough that I will probably come back for at least one more issue. Oh, and Travel Foreman’s art, which has received mixed reviews elsewhere, was excellent throughout, but particularly during the dream sequence.

Frankenstein Agent of SHADE #1 isn’t bad either, it just isn’t quite as good as Animal Man #1, mainly because most of the issue is set-up. It starts with some big monsters taking over a small town and then we head to SHADE (Super Human Advanced Defence Executive) headquarters, which are set inside a three inch wide, indestructible dome, currently hovering 2,000 miles above Manhattan Island, and accessible only using a combination of teleportation and shrink technology provided by Ray ‘The Atom’ Palmer. Frankenstein (shouldn’t that be Frankenstein’s Monster?) arrives at SHADE HQ and then spends most of the issue getting filled in on the goings on at SHADE and the monster situation by the head of SHADE, who Frankenstein refers to as 'father', even though he currently wears the form of a ten-year-old girl (I may have missed something in another comic, or I may not, but whatever, I’m prepared to just go along with that for now). He is then introduced to the new Creature Commandos – a werewolf, a vampire, a mummy, and a woman who looks like Abe Sapien / The Creature from the Black lagoon – and they all head off to ‘Monster Town, USA’ to kick some butt.

Although this issue is mostly set-up, it is at least a decent set up. Alberto Ponticelli’s art – which is not too far removed from Jeff Lemire’s own style – is very good, and while I’m not that keen on the new Creature Commandos so far, I like the DC version of Frankenstein, I’d like to meet Frankenstein's wife (she’s stuck in ‘Monster Town’ and should show up more in the next issue), and I think this could turn into a fun series. I’m just not sure if it’s the sort of fun I want to pay for, so while I would happily read the next issue for free, I’m not sure if I will be back for more yet. I’ll have to see how I feel next month.

Cost: These comics have a cover price of $2.99 each. I downloaded them from Comixology and paid $2.99 (about £1.90) each, which, err, may be the full cover price but it still worked out cheaper than buying them from my local comic shop, which would have charged about £2.50 per issue. Still, if I’d waited a few weeks they would have dropped in price to $1.99 each, which is usually the most I will pay for a digital comic (no resale value, and all that) and if I do buy the second issues of either of these titles, I will definitely try and be more patient.

Swamp Thing #1 (2011)

2011-09-16T03:44:00.000-07:00

A couple of nights ago, I got a little bit drunk and bought some digital comics. Oh well. I’ve done worse things when drunk. They were at least all comics I was planning on buying in digital form anyway, I was just planning on waiting a few weeks, until some of them went down in price a bit. Still, I paid less than I would have paid if I’d bought any of them from my local comic shop, and there’s no point feeling bad about it now – I may as well just read and review them!

First up for review is Swamp Thing #1, which is part of DC’s new line-wide reboot. Not being much of a DC fan, I had very little interest in this reboot, and I initially wasn’t planning on picking up any of their new titles, but I like Swamp Thing, am a fan of Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s run with the character, am an even bigger fan of Alan Moore’s run, and as this has a decent creative team on it – Scott ‘American Vampire’ Snyder and Yanick ‘nothing springs to mind but he’s a very good artist’ Paquette – and has received some pretty good reviews so far, I thought I’d check it out. And it is pretty good, actually, if a little confusing.

This starts with a few pages featuring Superman, Batman, and Aquaman, which make it immediately clear that Swamp Thing is back in the DC Universe proper, rather than stranded over at Vertigo. This shift makes absolutely zero difference to my life, as every Swamp Thing comic I have ever read was set in the DC Universe anyway, and it is only after Alan Moore’s run ended, and I, along with most other people, stopped reading the comic, that Swamp Thing became a Vertigo title. Anyway, after a few pages of superheroes, we are introduced to Alec Holland, who died in an explosion way back in Swamp Thing #1 (1972 series) and never really was Swamp Thing, even though a mutated plant thought it was Alec Holland for a number of years. Mysteriously, though, Alec Holland has returned from the dead and is working as a labourer when he receives a visit from Superman, who doesn’t look anything like he does in Grant Morrison and Rags Morales’ Action Comics #1 (from what I have read online, I believe that Action Comics #1, which I will review some other time, is set a few years before most of the other reboot titles, but there is nothing in either this comic or in Action Comics #1 to tell me this, even though this is supposed to be the start of a new-reader-friendly era). Superman is worried about Holland – he knows how it feels to return from the dead – but Holland pretty much tells him to clear off. Then the horror begins, with Swamp Thing himself (itself?) only appearing on the very last page of the comic.

The reason I said this comic is a bit confusing was not because I found the story confusing. I am confused about why Alec Holland has returned from the dead, and why he has Swamp Thing’s memories when Alec Holland never was Swamp Thing, but I’m reasonably confident that Snyder will eventually explain all this. I am also confused about why there are monsters running around, and why some people’s heads are turning 180 degrees, but as this is a horror comic, I expect to see monsters, etc., and I am even more confident that Snyder will eventually explain all that than I am that he will explain the return of Alec Holland. No, what confuses me is why all this is considered a reboot. I mean, there is nothing in this comic that couldn’t have taken place in the old DC Universe. In fact, it does appear to take place in the old DC Universe. Alec Holland’s memories of Swamp Thing seem to include Abigail Arcane and, presumably, all the stuff that went on during Alan Moore’s run on the title, at least, and Superman even references ‘The death of Superman’. I was expecting all of DC’s titles to start again from issue one, with new origins for their various characters and no convoluted continuity so that they could attract new readers. But really, this is just a new number one, apparently set in the same old DCU, where everything that happened before still happened, and everyone still talks about it.

Fortunately, this is a good first issue anyway, even if it isn’t as new-reader-friendly as advertised. The writing is reasonably strong and I am intrigued by the circumstances surrounding Alec Holland’s return and by the horror elements of the story. The characters whose heads twisted 180 degrees made me think of the Invunche, from Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run, which was presumably deliberate, although whether or not this was just a tip of the hat to Moore or an indication that the Invunche are returning is unclear (personally, I hope they are not returning, as I would like to see some new ideas and characters emerging from this ‘reboot’). The only really weak part of the script – the part that made me cringe – was when Alec Holland told Superman that, after returning from the dead, he briefly returned to lab work and made another batch of bio-restorative formula, but then, disillusioned, threw it into the swamp behind his hotel. What? Hasn’t he learnt anything? Even if he couldn’t remember what happened the last time some of that stuff ended up in a swamp, what kind of scientist throws discarded experiments into a swamp (note: if this isn’t the cause of Swamp Thing’s return on the last page, I’ll buy a hat from a charity shop and eat it)? I’m pretty sure there are proper disposal procedures for that sort of thing, to stop the outbreak of plagues, etc. Or am I just nit-picking? Meanwhile, Yanick Paquette’s artwork was near-perfect and would have made this issue worth buying for the art alone, if I was the sort of person who bought comics for the art alone. I’ll certainly come back for the second issue, at least.

Cost: This has a cover price of $2.99. I downloaded my copy from Comixology and paid, err, $2.99 (about £1.90), which is technically the full cover price. However, as I live in the UK, where retailers have to pay more for their comics to take into account shipping costs, etc., this does constitute a saving on the £2.50 (or thereabouts) my local comic shop would have charged for this item, and I didn’t have to pay for petrol, parking, etc., to get it – I just got drunk, sat on my arse, ordered it, and got it within seconds. I love digital comics, me (although I like ‘em more when they are $1.99 or less)!

The Invincible Iron Man - Unmasked

2011-09-10T02:00:00.000-07:00

At our now legendary 'Comics - On The Ration' panel at Caption, Paul mentioned that 'The Works' was a good place to look for cheap trades, whilst Rol mentioned that Panini's pocket books were bargain collections.

Last weekend, these two coalesced for me when I popped into a branch of the aforementioned bargain bookstore and discovered a collection of pocket books at the price of £1.99 each or 3 for a fiver.

Naturally, I ignored the collections of modern stuff, which is why I'm reviewing a collection of Iron Man from, oh, 1968, or thereabouts. This book collects around ten issues from this era, written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by George Tuska.

The stories are nothing special - identikit Marvel fare in which Tony Stark wrestles with the guilt of having a secret identity and how he wants to share his secret with somebody but he can't so he ends up pushing them away whilst he really wants to pull them closer yada yada yada.

However, I've never really been a fan of George Tuska before but that may be because I've only been exposed to the odd issue of his work here or there. His is a crisp cartoony style which reminds me of Frank Robbins, but it's one that lends a charm to Shellhead's Rogues Gallery, and is the major appeal of this book.

Is it value for money? Well, it's probably value for money at £3.99. I paid £1.66 so it would be churlish to grumble.

Popeye Vol.3: 'Let's You and Him Fight!' HC

2011-09-09T09:33:00.000-07:00

This third oversized collection of E.C. Segar’s Popeye-era Thimble Theatre strips collects all the daily strips from June 1932 to December 1933, all the full-page, colour Sunday strips from October 1932 to November 1933, and twelve never-before-reprinted strips that were produced to promote the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. And like the previous volumes in this series, apart from a very tedious introduction, it is brilliant stuff.

This volume features the first appearance of Popeye’s adopted son ‘Swee’pea’ (although Popeye actually christens him ‘Scooner Seawell Georgia Washenting Christiffer Columbia Daniel Boom’ by tipping a bucket of spinach over his head) and the first appearance of Bluto (although Bluto was the main villain in the animated Popeye cartoons, his appearance in one of the storylines in this book marked the only time he ever appeared in a Segar Popeye strip). In the dailies, Popeye sails the ‘eighth sea’ in search of treasure; returns to Nazilia with King Blozo and helps him fix an election; becomes king of Popilania, thought deserted but actually populated by ‘wild men’ and, even better, ‘wild women’, which gives Olive Oyl cause for concern (Popeye: ‘Can’t a swab take a bath, comb his hairs, shine his shoes, trim his nails, wear a flower, an’ use a squirt of prefume without you thinkin’ sumpin?’) and causes all the men in Nazilia move to Popilania; becomes star reporter for the Daily Blast; and after getting hit in the face with a baseball bat so hard that it drives his head through a wall, is diagnosed with a terminal case of ‘bonkus of the konkus’, spends what must have been a few months’ worth of strips wandering around convinced he is a lonely cowboy (Popeye: ‘I yama lonely cowboy. Me horsh is gone. Me horsh run’d away – I ain’t got no more horsh.’), and then makes a sudden, unexpected recovery (Popeye: ‘Nothin’ can kill me ... I am immoral.’ Doctor: ‘You mean immortal?’ Popeye: ‘I means what I means – tha’s what I means.’). Meanwhile, nearly all of the Sunday strips focus on the antics of arch-scrounger J. Wellington Wimpy. In the best of these Sunday strips, Popeye pretends to be Wimpy’s grandmother to prove to someone that Wimpy would not choke his own grandmother for a hamburger, and loses his bet, as Segar’s Wimpy is such a greedy bastard that he would do pretty much anything – other than pay – for food.

These books are great value for money. There is at least as much reading material in one of these volumes as there is in your average Marvel Omnibus book – admittedly on fewer (larger) pages – but at a fraction of the price. This volume has a recommended retail price of £21.99 / $29.99 but Forbidden Planet International have it for just £13.79 (plus £1.00 P&P) at the moment. I didn’t pay a penny for my copy, as my wife bought me for it as an anniversary present. I am tempted to order the remaining three volumes in the series right now, but if I don’t, I know what I’ll be asking for this Christmas!

Locke & Key Vol.4: Keys To The Kingdom HC

2011-08-25T05:32:00.000-07:00

Locke & Key is a horror / fantasy series written by Joe Hill, who is the son of Stephen King, and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez, who I’m sure comes from a good family, too. The series is about the Locke kids, Tyler, Kinsey and Bode, who have recently moved to the Keyhouse in the town of Lovecraft, Massachusetts, along with their mother, where they keep finding magical keys. These keys include the ‘Ghost Key’, which turns the user into a ghost, the ‘Head Key’, which allows the user to literally open the top of his or her head and insert knowledge (by putting in books, etc.) or remove memories and emotions, the ‘Anywhere Key’, which allows the user to travel anywhere they wish to go, and so on. These keys have something to do with their late father, although we don’t know the full story behind the keys yet, and there is also some kind of demon, disguised as a teenage boy called Zack, who has befriended the Locke kids and is after the most powerful key of all, the ‘Omega Key’, which will open the black door and let through many more demons. Or something like that. This may or may not sound corny to you – I certainly think the title of the series, Locke & Key, is very corny, as is setting a horror series in a town called Lovecraft – but it is actually very well written, beautifully drawn, and it’s a series I would happily recommend to more or less anyone.

This fourth volume in the series introduces several more keys and offers a slight change of pace. All six of the comics collected here continue the main storyline, but four of them are relatively self-contained, and Hill and Rodriguez use some of these issues to experiment with some new storytelling techniques. The first issue, in which the youngest Locke sibling, Bode, discovers the ‘Beast Key’ and is transformed into a sparrow, is a tribute to Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson, with four panels on each page, sitting over a larger splash image, in the style of a newspaper strip. Bode’s pages, at least, are drawn in a more cartoony style, with the last panel on each page containing some kind of a punchline, or at least a turning point in the story, and it’s a clever issue. The second issue doesn’t really try anything new stylistically. Here, Hill and Bode look at the issue of race, when Kinsey and Bode discover the ‘Skin Key’ and turn themselves black so that they can visit a black nursing home resident who knew their father but apparently dislikes white people. This is a really good issue, and a tense one, too, as Zack also pays the nursing home a visit - with knives! - while the kids are there. The third issue, entitled ‘February’, is another clever one, with the action taking place over the course of a month, with no more than a page or so given over to any one day of that month. The scrapes that the kids get themselves into with various new keys are given no more than one (often amusing) panel each, with no explanation for what is going on, while the bulk of the story focuses on the negative effect that Kinsey’s experiments with the ‘Head Key’ have on her friends, and Tyler’s break-up with his girlfriend. The fourth issue focuses on one of my favourite characters, Rufus, a mentally handicapped boy who is obsessed with war, and his toy soldiers. Rufus, is seems, can see and talk to ghosts, and here he spends most of the issue talking to the ghost of the man who killed the Locke kids’ dad, who appears to him dressed as a soldier and tells him a few of Zack’s secrets. Parts of this issue are made to look like an old war comic – a war comic in which the characters are Rufus, Bode and their toy soldiers (and a monkey, and a robot) – but most of the issue is made up of exposition. Then we get to the two-part story that closes the book, in which the Locke kids finally discover that Zack is not all he seems to be, and the bloody, shocking ending left me very impatient to read the next volume, which probably won’t be out until next year. All in all, this was another enjoyable volume in this enjoyable series.

Cost: This has a recommended retail price of £18.99 / $24.99. It is currently available on Amazon for £10.82, but I bought my copy in my local comic shop – The Grinning Demon in Maidstone – several weeks ago now, and paid £20.00. Yes, that’s right, I actually paid £1.01 more than the recommended retail price for this book, which isn’t like me at all, but the owner of my local comic shop is so bloody friendly that, when I saw this sitting on the shelves in there, on the day of its release, I just couldn’t resist it. I do now feel a bit stupid for paying over the odds for this book, but I also feel good about supporting my local comic shop for a change, rather than a big – possibly evil – online retailer. Mmm, I may have to rethink this ‘on the ration’ lark.

Rasl issues 1 to 11

2011-08-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

Rasl is a sci-fi series by Jeff Smith, the creator of Bone. I must admit that I lost interest in Bone fairly quickly. The art was great and the first two books I read were very funny indeed, but I seem to remember that subsequent volumes were much less amusing, with the focus shifting from humour to Lord-of-the-Rings-style fantasy, which isn’t really my sort of thing, and I gave up on the series long before the end. I think I may have been a bit hasty, and I’d be interested in giving Bone another chance now that it is complete and available in a variety of different formats, but I reckon I’d still lose interest after I’d got past the first couple of volumes and have to force my way to the end. Only eleven issues of Rasl have been released so far, and I may eventually lose interest in this series, too, but so far it seems pretty great.

The story starts with our hero, Rasl, travelling to a parallel universe to steal an original Picasso painting, and then inadvertently fleeing back to yet another parallel universe – a universe where things are much the same as they are on our world, except Bob Dylan releases records under his given name, Robert Zimmerman – rather than the universe he started in. Rasl is attacked by a lizard-faced man who shoots a hole in his purloined Picasso, and after following him back home, kills his prostitute girlfriend. This is not just a crime drama with a sci-fi twist, though, and we soon find out that Rasl is more than a common thief. The lizard-faced man is after the hidden notebooks of Nikola Tesla, which former scientist Rasl has in his possession, and the secrets hidden in these notebooks could destroy the universe. In some ways, these comics reminded me of Cerebus, back when it was still good – for me, Cerebus was at its best up until the end of Church and State – as Smith occasionally gives us large chunks of historical information which threaten to reveal the bigger picture, but just when we think we are going to find out what is really going on, the pace changes and Rasl begins a romance with an alternative universe version of one of his dead lovers, or else encounters some offbeat characters, such as the creepy little girl who may or may not be god, or else just has another long fight with the lizard-faced man. These comics are quick to read but the story unfolds slowly. If I had been reading these as they were released, with a long wait between issues, I may have gotten bored and given up, but read in one big chunk I found these comics thoroughly enjoyable and quite engrossing. And Smith’s art is fantastic, too. I mean, his art was great on Bone, but here it is even better, and it often made me think of the work of Jaime Hernandez, but with a touch of Paul Pope thrown in for good measure (and I don’t think I’m just saying that because Rasl himself looks a bit like photos I’ve seen of Paul Pope).

Cost: I actually downloaded these comics from Comixology, several weeks ago, when they were on sale. The first issue was (and still is) free to download and issues two to eleven were reduced from $1.99 to $0.99c each (they have since gone back up to $1.99 each). According to my credit card bill, then, these comics ended up costing me £6.29, which isn’t bad at all for eleven comics that would have cost me over £3.00 each to buy from my local comic shop. I read these on my iPod Touch, and enjoyed reading them that way, although it was difficult to flick back through them for review purposes – so I didn’t really bother, which explains any inaccuracies in this review – and my preference is still for printed graphic novels, even if I do prefer digital comics to printed periodical comics these days. I may continue to buy this series digitally, but I enjoyed reading this story in big chunks a lot and am tempted to start buying the slim-but-oversized collections that are available instead.

Batman - Cacophony / The Widening Gyre

2011-08-09T13:28:00.000-07:00

It's gotten to the stage where I just can't bring myself to spend money on DC comics any more, as (Hellblazer excepted) I'm so often disappointed in them. I still like a lot of the characters though and will keep trying new books in the hope that some of what I liked about those characters in years gone by will be recaptured by today's creators. But until I find a new DC comic that knocks my socks off, I've vowed to limit my reading to the truest form of On The Ration-ing... picking them up from my local library.

However, these two DC books seemed like a good bet. Bruce Wayne is my favourite of the big DC heroes and I've long enjoyed the work (both comics and films) of geek-made-good Kevin Smith, even though he does seem somewhat past his prime these days. After enjoyable runs on DC's Green Arrow and Marvel's Daredevil 10+ years ago, he's been absent from mainstream comics for a while (or when he has turned up, he's failed to finish the stories he's started), but his return to Batman was much-trumpeted. So I thought I'd give it a go.

It's probably a good job I took both books out of the library at the same time as had I just loaned Cacophony, I might not have gone back for its far more interesting sequel. The first book features the return of a masked psychopath introduced in Smith's Green Arrow, a rogue who seems far more suited to Batman's gallery of gimmicky nutcases in that he speaks only in sound effects. Blam! Shik! Boom! You get the picture. He's a fun character, but not really arch-nemesis material, but Smith has that taken care of by focusing much of this book's attention on a gang war between the Joker and Maxie Zeus. At times, Cacophony feels more like a Joker book than a Batman one - and had it been promoted as such, I might not have been so annoyed by some of the jokes. Smith's sense of humour is notoriously juvenile and scatological, and there are many such gags here (including one about anal rape) which just seem out of place in a Batman comic. I've no problem with the jokes themselves and much of Smith's dialogue is witty... it just seems out of place.

The Widening Gyre is a far more satisfying read, although I was unaware when I started it that there's actually a huge To Be Continued... at the end, which also caused me some major problems.

Before that though, Smith pulls his finger out and delivers one of the better Batman stories I've read in recent years. A mysterious new vigilante called Baphomet arrives in Gotham and Batman has to decide whether to trust him. Meanwhile Bruce Wayne's old girlfriend Silver St. Cloud shows up and Smith gives us the happiest Batman I've read since Alan Davis was drawing the character. It's actually quite refreshing, with loads of colourful flashbacks to different periods in Bat-history, and the most human Bruce Wayne we've seen since Frank Miller darkened the knight. But enjoyable as it is, it starts to feel wrong after a while. It's like in On Her Majesty's Secret Service where James Bond finds true love and gets married... you want Bond to be happy, but you know he'll stop being the character you enjoy. And just as in OHMSS, and just as in Smith's own run on Daredevil, a necessary tragedy is waiting just around the corner...

Which is where the first volume of The Widening Gyre concludes: on a shocking moment of violence and an "unexpected plot twist" that Smith confidently asserts (in the afterword) no one saw coming. Well, I hate to break it to you, Kev: I did. I'm reminded of the first time I saw The Sixth Sense and about ten minutes into the film I thought, "I do hope Bruce Willis isn't dead". (Oh, sod off, I've not spoilered it - if you haven't seen The Sixth Sense yet, you never will.) Only it's worse than that here. I actually guessed the twist of The Widening Gyre even before I started reading it. Merely scanning the plot synopsis on the back cover after reading Cacophony, I thought "I bet XXXXXXXXXX". And sure enough, I was right on the money.

Lack of surprise and uncharacteristic Batman aside, I still enjoyed TWG and look forward to reading the rest the story when it finally arrives in my local library. The art by Smith's comic shop owning cohort (and Clerks bit-parter) Walt Flanagan is inconsistent but improves with every issue. He does draws far better women than men, and thankfully non-cheesecakey women at that. And the dialogue has enough depth, wit and "why has nobody ever asked Batman that?" moments to keep me smiling throughout. It's definitely a more mainstream and less impenetrable Batman saga than the one Grant Morrison's currently writing in the proper Batbooks, and self-contained too - not a Black Lantern or Infinite Crisis in sight.

Hansi the Girl Who Loved the Swastika / The Cross and the Switchblade

2011-08-01T05:03:00.000-07:00

These awesome comics were published in the early seventies (1972 / 1973) by Spire Christian Comics, and were the work of former Archie artist Al Hartley, a born again Christian. There were quite a few titles in the Spire Christian Comics line – at least 57, as far as I can tell – most of them written and drawn by Hartley. Some featured the various Archie characters, others were adaptations of bible stories, and others (like these two) adapted Christian novels. After looking at lists of the other Spire comics available, I reckon I have managed to pick up two of the best titles – by which I mean that they have the funniest titles – although I would definitely be interested in picking up copies of ‘God’s Smuggler’, ‘He’s The Greatest’ (the story of Jesus), and ‘Jughead’s Soul Food’, and I would probably donate a testicle for a copy of ‘Hello, I’m Johnny Cash’.

‘Hansi , The Girl Who Loved The Swastika’, is the story of a young girl (Hansi) who turns her back on Jesus and joins the Hitler youth after the Nazis arrive in Sudetenland in 1938. Hansi soon turns into a cold-hearted, wide-eyed robot, who is proud to be living on rations ‘for Germany’s great future’, dismisses the suffering of blinded German soldiers while working as a nurse (Soldier: ‘I lost my ideals when I lost my eyes on the Russian front!’ Nurse Hansi: ‘We are nothing--- The Reich is everything!’), and spurns the advances of all men (‘I’m pure! And I’m going to stay pure!’). Even after the war, when Hansi ends up in a Russian labour camp where all the other women are repeatedly raped by soldiers every night, she manages to remain pure, because the soldiers think that young, pretty Hansi is too skinny.

After escaping the Russian labour camp with her purity intact, Hansi is rescued by American soldiers and is surprised to find that not all soldiers are fussy rapists, just Russian soldiers. Later, she is reunited with her childhood sweetheart, who she feared dead at sea, and they marry, but there is still something missing in their lives. Then, one day, her husband brings home a bible and Hansi reluctantly (at first) re-embraces the word of God. Eventually, they have children (by this point, I’m assuming that Hansi is no longer pure – the filthy slut!) and move to America, where Hansi, now working as a teacher, is shocked by all the litter, obesity levels, and the proliferation of consumer goods. ‘I wonder---,’ says Hansi, ‘do all these things obscure God’s blessings??? Is that why so many of my students are troubled???’ However, while listening to the American national anthem, Hansi hears the line ‘one nation under God’ and realises that it’s okay to love America, as unlike Nazi Germany, America has been blessed by God, and ‘it’s all right to love what God has blessed!’ She then dedicates her life to helping young people to find God, visiting prisons, and shit like that.

‘The Cross and the Switchblade’ is another corker, although it was never going to be as good as its hilarious cover promised. This cover shows a bland looking teenage hoodlum holding up a preacher at knifepoint, saying: ‘I could kill you, preach!’ To which the preacher replies: ‘Yes, you could, Nicky! You could cut me up in a thousand pieces! And every piece will say I love you!’

The story is about a preacher who abandons his pregnant wife with her blessing, and the blessing of his congregation, who even have a whip-round for him, and heads to sleazy New York to sort out the gang problem - with God’s help, of course. Dismissed by the authorities, he soon finds himself hanging around with teenage gangs and heroin addicts, and eventually wins them over when he manages to convert the toughest gang member, Nicky, and convinces him to throw away his grass and become a preacher, using tactics such as love and irrefutable logic (Nicky: ‘How can I trust something I can’t see or feel?’ Preacher: ‘If you could see it and feel it, it wouldn’t require any faith! But God wants you to live by faith!’).

The artwork in both comics is a little bland but actually pretty good. The art in ‘Hansi’ is blandest, and way too cute for a story about Nazi Germany and Russian rape camps. The weirdest thing about it, though, is that, even though the story takes place over several decades, Hansi doesn’t seem to age at all. Towards the end of the comic, she visits some prisoners in an American prison and tells them about her escape from the Russians and her first encounter with American soldiers. She says: ‘None of you were born then--- but maybe your dad was there that morning!’, which makes me think that Hansi is supposed to be pretty old at this point, but she still looks just like a 12-year-old girl! The art in ‘The Cross and the Switchblade’ is more stylish, and even has a touch of Steve Ditko about it, but it really is just a touch and mainly it looks like the art in an Archie comic, which also doesn’t look right in a story about gang violence and drug addiction (that reminds me, I really must look out for a copy of that ‘Archie Vs The Punisher’ comic that came out in the ‘90s). Ever wanted to see Veronica from Betty and Veronica on heroin, or see an Archie character say the ‘N’ word? Then look out for a copy of ‘The Cross and the Switchblade’ and your dreams will come true.

Cost: I bought these comics from a woman my sister put me in touch with after she saw her selling comics at a car boot sale. I went to her house on Saturday and spent an hour or so rummaging through piles of ‘80s and ‘90s crap, only managed to find ten comics I actually wanted to buy, and even a few of those I had to think about. These two, however, leapt out at me and begged to be bought. Was God calling to me? I doubt it. I am not religious (in case you haven’t already worked that out) and doubt I ever will be, but I will happily add these two curiosities to my comic collection and think they were well worth the £1.00 each I paid for them.

Ultimate Doomsday

2011-07-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

I bought this book on Amazonfor £14.99. I didn't consider that a bad price considering it's the oversized hardcover version and the softcover is currently listed at £19.49 (!), plus it features three 4-issue mini-series, meaning it worked out at just over a quid a comic. Sounds like a good On The Ration deal, right? Well, yes... until you realise the story that's told over these 12 issues could easily have been told in ONE 4-issue mini series.

I'm tired of defending Brian Michael Bendis. For a while there, he was my favourite Marvel writer. Back when Ultimate Spider-Man began, and during his lengthy run on Daredevil, he could do no wrong. His critics always carped that he was the king of decompressed storytelling and that his dialogue was rambling and all the characters spoke with the same voice... and I defended him because his scripts often made me laugh and for a while I felt like he was pushing the Marvel (and Ultimate) Universe in interesting directions. But lately, he's just annoying me. And this book is a perfect example of why...

Let's start with the decompression. As I said earlier, this story could easily have been told in 4 issues... or less. The basic plot involves a mysterious villain attacking the big brains of the Ultimate Universe - Reed Richards and Sue Storm, Peter Parker, the brain trust at Roxxon (including Dr. Octopus) and Nick Fury (more for his cunning than his book-smarts). The good guys join together to find out who's responsible... and they're shocked to discover it's Reed Richards himself, gone rogue / mental. There's a big fight, Reed is lost in space, Ben Grimm proposes to Sue... and that's pretty much it. There's a subplot involving Spider-Man's ultimate clone, Spider-Girl, who calls herself Jessica Drew and Julia Carpenter for no other reason than that's what the Spiderwomen in the regular Marvel Universe are called. But that subplot doesn't really go anywhere beyond a few dodgy jokes about Peter Parker being cloned as a girl.

So... if that's the story... how does Bendis stretch it to 12 issues? Well, he has two major tools in his arsenal. Firstly, splash pages. I've never read any comic with more one and two page splashes. It's all part of this "comics as widescreen event movie entertainment" idea that's clogging the u-bend at the moment, but it makes for a very quick read - I'd have been mad as hell if I'd bought this book as individual issues: three quid for a 5 minute read!? Yes, Rafa Sandoval's art is quite spectacular in places - this comic does look like a big Hollywood blockbuster. But pound for pound, the entertainment value just doesn't measure up.

And then there's the dialogue. I used to consider Bendis's dialogue hip and funny. I even compared him to screenwriters like Aaron Sorkin and David Mamet... and I still believe that in his early work, that comparison was valid. But he's got too big and too lazy and his scripts are getting extremely repetitive now...

Repetitive how?

Repetitive like lots of characters asking themselves questions that have already been answered in the previous panel...

Already been answered in the previous panel?

Yes, and repeating information that's already been given three times.

Three times?

Yes, three times.

That must get annoying.

It gets very annoying.

How annoying?

Very.

As annoying as me asking you "how annoying?" again?

Even more annoying than that.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

The final problem I have with this book is the Ultimate Universe itself. I used to find it quite a fun place: a contemporary, ever-so-slightly more realistic version of the Silver Age Marvel Universe. But lately it's just become one big What If? story, with shock tactic after shock tactic after shock tactic... usually big character deaths (Wolverine, Spider-Man, Magneto, Dr. Doom)... although for some reason I find the idea of turning Reed Richards into the new Dr. Doom the most unsettling shock tactic yet. It goes against everything we know about this character, even the Ultimate version, and it's obviously only been done to make headlines. It's cheap... unlike this book. £14.99 turned out to be a bloody high price.

Jonah Hex Vol.1: Face Full of Violence TPB

2011-07-29T05:04:00.000-07:00

This collects issues 1 to 6 of the current DC Jonah Hex series, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray. Nothing ground breaking here, just some solid, very readable, done-in-one Western tales, with nice art by Luke Ross (issues 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6), who clearly modelled his version of Hex on Clint Eastwood, and okay (but maybe too scruffy for my liking) art by Hex’s co-creator Tony DeZuñiga (issue 5 only). I have already reviewed at least two later volumes in this series and I find myself with little new to say about this first volume. I do like this series a lot, though. Probably the most notable thing about it is the fact that the individual issues in the series are nearly always self-contained, and could probably be read and enjoyed even by someone who has never read a DC comic before (although some familiarity with the character Bat Lash, who pops up in JH #2, might aid your enjoyment of that particular issue). This is depressingly rare in modern mainstream comics, where even most trade paperbacks are not self-contained anymore, and it’s a real shame that this series is going to be cancelled as part of DC’s upcoming reboot and replaced with a new Western series, All-Star Western. I am looking forward to that new series a bit, as at least it is still written by Palmiotti and Gray, and I will almost certainly pick up the first trade paperback, but the fact that the Jonah Hex story that kicks off the series is set in Gotham City and that that story does not appear to be self-contained is worrying. As this reboot is presumably supposed to make DC’s comics more accessible to new readers, taking what is already one of their most accessible titles – a title featuring largely self-contained stories that don’t end up disappearing up their own arses, unlike the stories in pretty much every other DC comic – and introducing it into a convoluted new continuity just seems stupid.

Cost: This has a cover price of $12.99 (about £10.00?). It appears to be out of print at the moment but there are plenty of new and used copies available on Amazon. I bought my copy on eBay at least two years ago and really can’t remember how much I paid for it now. Not sure why it has taken me so long to get around to reading it, either, as until recently it was the only volume in the series I actually owned and I have already read and enjoyed volumes 2 to 9, which I got out of my local library. I also recently picked up a cheap collection of Jonah Hex stuff on eBay, which contained, among other things, the first six books in this series, so I now find myself with two copies of this book, if anyone wants one.

Fear Itself #4

2011-07-27T04:37:00.000-07:00

I am starting to feel like a bit of a prick for breaking blog rules to buy this series now, as most of the action really does seem to be taking place in other comics and this main series seems like little more than a well-drawn teaser for the tie-in comics. Under normal circumstances, I would just stop buying this now, but I went and asked the bloke in my local comic shop – the Grinning Demon in Maidstone – to reserve the remaining three issues of the series for me, and he is so bloody friendly that I just can’t bring myself to cancel the order. The last time I went in there, intending to just pick up this and have a look through the 50p boxes, I ended up paying £20 for the latest Locke & Key HC, which has a recommended retail price of £18.99 and is currently only £11.93 on Amazon. Yes, that’s right: I actually paid £1.01 more than the RRP, and £8.07 more than the current Amazon price, just because I saw a book I really wanted sitting on a shelf in front of me and, after chatting to a friendly bloke about comics for half an hour or so, felt like supporting my LCS for a change. On the ration, indeed.

I should point out that I haven’t completely lost it. I still can’t seem to walk past a charity shop without popping inside for a look, the 50p boxes and reduced GNs are still the first thing I look at in any comic shop, and I still occasionally go to extraordinary lengths to get stuff cheap. A couple of months ago, I spent £400 on a collection of 110 Marvel graphic novels, kept back 29 for myself, and have been slowly flogging off all the stuff I didn’t want since then, in an effort to make my money back (so far, I have made back £388.97, which means that the 29 books I kept for myself only cost me £11.03 – unless you put a price on all the time I wasted selling off the stuff I didn’t want, which you probably should – and I still have a few books left to sell), and this coming weekend I am going to view a large comic collection my sister tipped me off about after meeting someone at a car boot sale (Top Tip: Buy in bulk and save £££!). I am still a stingy bastard, and still have an eye for a bargain, but from time to time I still do stupid things like paying full cover price for a Marvel event comic, or paying more than the RRP for a book I could have got a lot cheaper online – which seems especially stupid when you consider that I am currently unemployed. I really must try harder.

I will honour my commitment to my local comic shop and will buy the copies of the last three issues of this series that I reserved. I may even buy other stuff while I’m in there, but I will try my best to stick to the bargain boxes from now on. I probably won’t be reviewing the rest of Fear Itself, partly because I’m not getting it on the ration, but also because I don't think I am going to have much more to say about it. I think I paid £3.30 for #4, and like I said, I feel like a prick for buying it.

Neil Gaiman's The Eternals

2011-07-23T08:52:00.000-07:00

I have problems with Neil Gaiman. It's no secret. I thought Sandman was an interesting comic that it rapidly disappeared up its own cūlus aēnī. And if you think it's pretentious of me to use the Latin for "bronze anus" in that sentence... well, quite. Et tu, Brutus.

I also rapidly grew tired of the rock star cult that surrounded the writer. In my mind, I always picture him in a leather jacket riding a Harley. Though I can't ever find the photo that spawned this mental image, I know I saw it somewhere. I don't ever believe a writer should overshadow his writing in the way that singers can, and often do, overshadow their songs. But for a long time Neil Gaiman seemed to get off more on being Neil Gaiman... than actually writing any new comics.

But my biggest peeve was always Gaiman's obsession with "the power of stories". From Sandman onwards, a recurring theme of his work became "the mythical power of stories", "the healing power of stories", "the cultural power of stories" et cetera, et cetera, et cetera... I can't remember the last time I read a Neil Gaiman comic that didn't have this theme at its centre, and it often seemed he was so insistent on pressing home his love of stories... he forgot to actually write one in the process.

As a result, I rarely jump to read a new Neil Gaiman comic. However, three things persuaded me to give The Eternals a shot...

One: his recent script for Doctor Who was one of the highlights of the latest series. There's no doubt Gaiman is a clever, imaginative writer when he puts his mind to it and his dialogue often sparkles. That's certainly the case in The Eternals, particularly the early chapters which exile Jack Kirby's New (Marvel) Gods in mainstream America, unable to remember their divine providence. This is a book where the talking heads scenes shine even more than the superheroey stuff... from a writing point of view at least. Which leads me on to...

Two: John Romita Jr. Until Marcos Martin arrived on the scene, JRJR was my favourite mainstream comic artist - though one who causes controversy with many of my arty friends who are constantly telling me he's grown lazy in his old(er) age and his work's not a patch on what it was 20+ years ago. What do I know? I can't draw more than a stick figure. And, perhaps just as controversially, I was never a Jack Kirby fan either. Ditko, Romita Sr., Colan, Kane, the Buscemas... love 'em all. But while I can appreciate everything Kirby gave us, I always found his art blocky, chunked up... a little too larger than life. That said, there's no contemporary artist better suited to updating the HUGENESS of Kirby's Eternals than JRJR - and I fully accept the contradiction that the very things I enjoy most about Romita Jr.'s work are the exact same things I disliked about Kirby's. What can I say? I'm a comic fan - don't expect logic.

And Three, because this is Comics - On The Ration, after all: the price. This was the Panini / Marvel UK edition, but I picked it up on eBay for the bargain price of £2.49 - including p&p.

So... was it worth it? Well, yes. It'd be churlish to say otherwise, especially at that price. Still, much as I enjoyed JRJR's art and Gaiman's script (at least in the beginning), The Eternalsstill hasn't won me over to the Cult of Neil. Because, as a story, it makes for a great first act. The book is all about re-establishing the characters, giving them a slice more humanity and personality (injecting some of the Stan that was always missing from Jack's solo work), and setting them a distinct role and purpose within the 21st Century Marvel universe. And if this was the first graphic novel in an ongoing series, that'd be all fine and good. Yet it seems clear from reading the afterword (and from the fact that this book was published 5+ years ago) that Gaiman never intended for it to be any more than that. Which seems like a bit of a cheat to me. From reading Sandman, I remember Neil often did great work on the set-up... but ultimately fluffed the resolution. Here, he doesn't even attempt one. It's like he's done all the fun stuff then thrown his hands in the air and said "let someone else take it from here!" I know there's an argument that in mainstream superhero comics there's no such thing as "The End" - but someone tell that to Grant Morrison, whose climaxes are often so good nobody dares follow them. When it comes to the "power of stories", Neil, there's nothing more satisfying than a really good final page. Throw me one of those next time and you might just have a fan.

Spider-Man: Red-Headed Stranger & Spider-Man: Return of the Black Cat TPBs

2011-07-21T10:56:00.000-07:00

‘Red-Headed Stranger’ collects Amazing Spider-Man issues 602 to 605. Marvel seem to be publishing quite a lot of trade paperbacks that only collect four comics these days, and this doesn’t seem like nearly enough comics to justify a trade-paperback collection to me, but I seem to be getting used to it, because I didn’t even notice that this was a pretty slender collection until after I finished it. I guess this is partly because #605 was an extra-large issue and partly because I enjoyed reading it enough that I didn’t really care.

In issues 602 to 604, written by Fred Van Lente and illustrated by Barry Kitson and Robert Atkins, Spider-Man faces the Chameleon, who, for the first time I remember, is genuinely scary. This Chameleon doesn’t just put on a rubber mask and pretend to be his victims, he makes a real effort to become them, before dissolving their bodies in acid. Then, once he has replaced his victims, he spends a bit of time living their lives. Here, the Chameleon captures and replaces Peter Parker, and while he somehow doesn’t discover that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, he does find out pretty much everything else about him and even sleeps with his roommate, Michele Gonzales. The way that Peter Parker survived getting dipped in acid was a bit corny but overall this was a good three-issue story arc and Van Lente seemed to have a good feel for Spidey.

ASM #605 is split into three chapters, the first two of which are also written by Fred Van Lente (with the third chapter written by Brian Reed). The first chapter is a perfectly decent story about Mary Jane Watson, which benefits from great art by Javier Pulido (very much like the work of the great Marcos Martin). The rest of the issue, about Peter Parker’s troubles with women, is okay too. I can just about handle the fact that Peter Parker, who was once married to super-model Mary Jane Watson, still has women troubles. What always does annoy me is Peter Parker’s money woes. I mean, if you can invent your own web fluid, have super-powers, are in the Avengers and a personal friend of the FF and you still ain’t making any money, then there is something seriously wrong with you.

‘Return of the Black Cat’ collects ASM issues 606 to 611 and a story from Web of Spider-Man #1. More comics collected but the book itself is a bit crap. Issues 606 and 607, written by Joe Kelly, in which Spidey teams up with the Black Cat against Diablo, are okay, but it’s mainly Mike McKone’s excellent artwork that makes them okay (for some reason, though, the last few pages of #607 are drawn by another – lesser – artist).

Most of the rest of the book features a story that ties into the universally reviled Clone Saga, which I have never read, so I had no idea who most of the characters in this story – Kaine, Raptor, etc. – were, but I’m pretty sure that, even if I did know who they all were, I would still think this storyline, mostly written by Marc Guggenheim, was rubbish. And the very dated looking artwork – unfortunately dated the 1990s – was pretty bad too. Eric Canete’s art in the final issue collected here, #611, in which Spidey fights Deadpool, is very nice / very stylish but the story, by Joe Kelly, was just annoying. (Note: I don’t like Deadpool, so I am biased). In summary, then: One of these books was pretty good and the other was pretty bad.

Cost: Red-Headed Stranger has a recommended retail price of £10.99 and Return of the Black Cat has a recommended retail price of £14.99. I got my copies on eBay and paid £5.47 (including postage) for RHS and £6.68 (including postage) for ROTBC. I only regret buying one of these books. Can you guess which one?

Ganges #3

2011-07-18T02:52:00.000-07:00

I recently read a collection of old Chester Gould Dick Tracy strips which had a great quote from Art Spiegelman on the back cover, and part of that quote read: ‘Gould understood better than anyone that comic strip drawing isn’t really drawing at all, but rather a kind of diagramming.’ I was reminded of that quote while reading this, the third issue of cartoonist Kevin Huizenga’s Ganges, part of Fantagraphics’ Ignatz line, and the same quote wouldn’t be out of place on the back of any of Huizenga’s often brilliant comics. Here, Huizenga attempts to diagram the trouble his everyman character Glenn Ganges has sleeping after drinking too much coffee and the many things going on in his head. While the physical Glenn lies still in bed, the mental Glenn goes for a stroll up the side of a tree, contemplates the back and forth relationship between thinking and doing, wonders whether or not women burgle, and eventually manages to fall asleep (briefly) after trying some relaxation exercises (note to Glenn: it’s called ‘progressive muscle relaxation’). The best part of the strip, for me, was the part where the mental Glenn wandered around shooting at various thought balloons in attempt to clear his mind, which was very clever stuff and not something that could easily be achieved with computer lettering. In Huizenga’s comics / diagrams, the word and thought balloons are an essential part of the artwork.

The comic is divided into two stories but the second (shorter) story is really just a more humorous continuation of the first. After failing to remain asleep, Glenn eventually decides to get up and try and get some letter writing done. However, he can’t focus on writing without music playing so he puts some noise cancelling headphones on his sleeping wife, puts some music on, pushes the volume levels he can get away with to their limit, and eventually receives a visit from the police. Result: funny.

I didn’t enjoy this issue quite as much as I enjoyed Ganges #1, but then Ganges #1 was one of the best comics I have ever read. This was still very enjoyable, also very clever, and well worth the £4.75 I paid for it on eBay. All three issues of Ganges seem to be available from Amazon (etc.) for a similar price. I would also strongly recommend the Curses hardcover, published by Drawn & Quarterly, which collects a whole bunch of Kevin Huizenga strips, most of which first appeared in various anthologies. I believe that book is now out of print but there seem to be plenty of used copies available on Amazon, some of them at very reasonable prices.

Spider-Man: Died In Your Arms Tonight TPB

2011-07-13T00:35:00.000-07:00

This book collects Amazing Spider-Man issues 600 and 601, a story from Amazing Spider-Man Family #7, and Amazing Spider-Man Annual #36. Which doesn’t sound like a huge amount of content for a trade paperback but ASM #600 was a triple-sized issue (maybe more than triple-sized) and ASM Annual #36 was double-sized and this book ended up being a much more substantial read than I was expecting it to be.

The highlight of the book is the lead story from ASM #600, written by Dan Slott and illustrated by John Romita Jr (inked by Klaus Janson), in which a severely brain-damaged Doctor Octopus (brain-damaged because of all the blows to the head he has taken over the years) tries to take over New York and ruin Aunt May’s wedding to J. Jonah Jameson’s dad. I read this story when ASM #600 first came out and didn’t really like it then but I think I must have just been in a bad mood that day, because I enjoyed it quite a lot this time. The art is great and the script is witty, action packed and even quite touching in places. There is one line Aunt May utters that I liked so much I wrote it down to impress girls with at a later date: ‘All the good things that happen in life, they happen in an instant too.’ But then I am a bit of a sap (also a married sap, so don’t tell my wife about that impressing girls bit). Lots of guest stars, too, including the New Avengers, Daredevil and the FF, which helped to make it feel like a big-deal issue. Then, in ASM #601, Peter Parker has women troubles to deal with after he gets intimate with his female roommate, Michele Gonzales, and is stood up by a returning Mary Jane Watson. This issue, by Mark Waid and Mario Alberti, isn’t as good as #600 but I still enjoyed it.

There are lots of short Spider-Man strips in here, too, most of them from ASM #600, including a nice one by Stan Lee and Marcos Martin (a strong contender for the title 'best Spider-Man artist ever'). The rest of the strips were unmemorable but still decent reads, although the art was variable.

This has a recommended retail price of £14.99 / $19.99. You can get it for just over £10.00 from Amazon, etc., but I got my copy off of eBay for £7.12, including postage. I don’t regret buying it.

Legion Of Monsters

2011-07-12T13:06:00.000-07:00

I'm a sucker for buying collections of old 70s Marvel horror comics - which is strange, because when I get round to reading them, they often prove a huge disappointment. I grew up watching the old Universal monster movies on late night TV, so have a curious affection for Frankenstein's monster, Dracula and the Wolfman - I desperately want the Marvel versions to live up to my memories of those old films. Chances are the films would prove just as disappointing if I watched them again today... but nostalgia's funny that way.

Anyway, when I saw a reasonably cheap copy of this collection - in which contemporary creators bring modern storytelling styles to characters like the Monster of Frankenstein, Dracula and his daughter Lilith, the Man-Thing, Satana and Werewolf By Night (along with some "classic" reprints), I had to give it a go. It's not a complete success, but there was enough here to make it worth the £7.50 I shelled out.

Both new and old offer a mixed bag of delights and disappointments, but that's usually the case with anthologies. Of the new, the best strip is Ted McKeever's zombie love story starring Simon Garth. It's the least Marvel / most indie story here. Former Moon Knight writer Charlie Huston provides a creepy Poe-ish Man-Thing tale that shines thanks to Klaus Janson artwork (looking even more lush in the large hardback format). There's also stunning David Finch art on the Dracula & Lilith face-off, making CB Cebulski's script stand out more than it might otherwise. Mike Carey tries to inject a little depth into his Werewolf By Night adventure, but he's hampered by the shiny-porn-star art of Greg Land. Jonathan Hickman's Living Mummy strip is the weirdest thing here - written and drawn in the style of Hickman's Nightly News, it didn't quite work for me. The weakest offerings are a rather too superhero-y take on Satana by Robin Furth and Kalman Andrasofszky (eat that, spellcheck!) and Brendan Cahill's Morbius strip which feels a little like a watered down Buffy plot with gaudy painted art by Michael Gaydos. Skottie Young also provides an atmospheric ode to Frankenstein's monster, though this is overshadowed by the first of the 70s reprints by Doug Moench and Val Mayerik (doing his best Bernie Wrightson impression) in which Frankenstein finds acceptance and then betrayal at a costume party. It's by far the most affecting story in the book.

The rest of the reprints don't quite live up to that one, and the selection seems a little random. There's the origin of Manphibian, notably only for the corny name and overcrowded Dave Cockrum art. There's a rare 70s horror team-up which gives this anthology its Legion of Monsters title, from Marvel Premiere 28. It's by Bill Mantlo and Frank Robbins and it's a wasted opportunity. Finally there's three appearance from Scott Edelman's Scarecrow, including a bizarre team-up with the Thing. You have to wonder what Edelman was smoking when he wrote these strips... but the scripts do contain flashes of esoteric wit.

I bought the Legion Of Monsters HChardcover (no trade paperback appears to have been released) from an Amazon Marketplace seller for £4.70, plus £2.80 p&p. The copy I received looks like it was been chewed by the seller's dog (or perhaps his werewolf) but as it's no longer in print, new copies are going for around £30, and even the cheapest second hand ones are currently £12.49, I think I got a semi-bargain.

A Sickness In The Family

2011-07-10T05:00:00.000-07:00

Another book I discovered on my first visit to the surprisingly well-stocked graphic novel section in our local village library was this original Vertigo book by Denise Mina and Antonio Fuso. Mina is a Scottish crime novelist who occasionally dips her toe in the comics world, most notably with a short run on Hellblazer a few years back, between Mike Carey and Andy Diggle.

A Sickness In The Family is published as part of the Vertigo Crime imprint which also included Ian Rankin's debut comics work, Dark Entries, starring John Constantine. (By the way, if you're interested in checking out an On The Ration copy of that, I'd try your local branch of The Works as I've seen it on sale there for just a couple of quid.) A Sickness... is an original concept which doesn't feature John Conjob, though he would fit in pretty well here with the book's mix of jealousy, bitterness, insanity, betrayal... and hints of the supernatural.

The story tells of a family, the Ushers (work out the pun yourself) whose house and home is slowly falling apart. Ted, the father, is trying to keep his family together despite his wife's constant affairs and the various misdemeanours that are threatening the future prospects of his children, William, Amy and Sam. Like many modern households, each member of the family is wrapped up with their own selfish concerns, and have little time for each other, or for their elderly grandma who's recently come to stay. And then people start dying...

This was a curious book. It's immensely readable, due in large part to the smooth artwork of Antonio Fuso and the small format (A5) pages which are kept turning with pacy, natural dialogue. The plot kept me guessing throughout, threw in a few juicy red herrings, before unveiling a killer who was both a huge surprise and entirely predictable (the more I thought about it afterwards). I did think it might have worked better as a novel, allowing for deeper character insight, or as a film, giving the right cast the opportunity to spark off each other. I wouldn't particularly recommend it as a fine example of what can be achieved in the graphic novel form (except for the artwork), but it's a damn sight more readable than much of the garbage filling the shelves of your local comic shop this weekend. I guess you'll have to find a nice cheap copy (or pick it up from your local library) and make up your own mind...

Showcase Presents the Phantom Stranger Vol.1 TPB

2011-07-06T07:26:00.000-07:00

This book contains black and white reprints of Showcase #80 and the Phantom Stranger issues 1 to 21, which were originally published between 1969 and 1972. I bought this last year and had been looking forward to reading it for a while, as I quite like horror comics and know very little about the Phantom Stranger, but unfortunately I found this a real struggle to get through.

I did quite enjoy the first few comics reprinted here, including Showcase #80. These issues seemed a lot more old-fashioned than the rest of the book and I found out after I finished reading it that this is because these issues mostly consisted of reprints from the fifties, with newer framing sequences added. These stories usually involved the Phantom Stranger and his foil, Dr Terrence Thirteen: The Ghost Breaker, encountering some mystery and trying to explain it away by referring to some of their earlier adventures (cue fifties reprints). In these issues, the Phantom Stranger is more mysterious than in later stories, clearly a supernatural character but not explicitly so – there is more of an ‘is he magic or isn’t he?’ thing going on – while Dr. Thirteen is a one man Scooby-Doo gang, an arch-cynic who has dedicated his life to proving that there is no such thing as magic, so most of his stories involve him uncovering elaborate plots in which someone pretends to be a ghost in order to gain an inheritance, etc.

Once the newer (1960s) stories begin, the Phantom Stranger’s powers become more obvious – we never really find out much about him, but I suppose that’s fair enough with a character called the Phantom Stranger – and his adventures become more entangled with those of Dr Thirteen, who I liked a lot in the fifties reprints but here he quickly became very annoying. I mean, I am as cynical as it gets – I don’t believe in God, the supernatural, or even Santa Claus – but if I saw some of the shit Dr Thirteen was witness to in this book, I would be down on my knees praying to the baby Jesus every day of my frigging life. But not Dr Thirteen. He attempts to explain everything away as a trick of the light or hypnosis (in one particularly lame later issue, he reveals that one particular haunting is not the work of spirits at all, but merely the work of aliens, which wouldn’t make me sleep any sounder at night) and it gets boring very quickly.

Worse still, in a bunch of early issues written by Robert Kanigher, not only do the Phantom Stranger and Dr Thirteen keep bumping in to each other, they also keep bumping in to a bunch of annoying teenagers called Spartacus, Attila, Wild Rose, and Mister Square, whose names alone should give you a pretty good idea how hopelessly dated their ‘hip’ lingo seems now (and probably even seemed then). I wanted them all to die horribly, and thankfully they disappeared when another writer took over. This book is the work of multiple writers and artists, but most issues are either written by Robert Kanigher or Len Wein, who writes most of the later issues. Those aforementioned Robert Kanigher issues were probably the worst issues in the book, but the Len Wein issues were pretty tedious, too. Wein wisely separated the Phantom Stranger and Dr Thirteen in to their own stories again but his issues were horribly overwritten and as I got nearer the end of the book I found myself skim-reading most of the captions, and even some of the dialogue, and the adventures themselves were pretty repetitive. I might have enjoyed Wein’s issues more if they had been nearer the beginning of the book, but under the circumstances I just found them boring and couldn’t wait to finish this and move on to something else.

On the plus side, this book does contain some great art. At least half of the book is drawn by Jim Aparo – one of my all-time favourite comic artists – at his Silver / Bronze Age best, but there are also a few issues drawn by Neal Adams and I really liked Bill Draut’s art in the early issues. Had I just read those early issues, and then made do with enjoying the art only on the later issues, I probably would have appreciated this book a lot more.

This has a recommended retail price of £10.49 / $16.99. You can get it for a bit less than that from all the usual online retailers but I bought my copy from a bloke I met through eBay for £5.00. No postage because he lives near me and I collected it in person and I also bought a whole load of other Showcase and Essential books from him for the same price. Kind of wish I hadn’t bought Showcase Presents The Phantom Stranger Vol.2 now, though, as the art in that seems a bit more variable – not much Jim Aparo – and I can’t ever see myself managing to work up the enthusiasm that will probably be required to slog my way through it.

All Star Batman & Robin

2011-07-05T09:11:00.000-07:00

This comic made me feel grubby.

But that isn't always a bad thing...

Having written two of the all-time best Batman stories in Year One and Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller now attempts to bridge the gap between them with a spectacularly over-the-top, ludicrously macho train-wreck of a comic that presents us with a Batman we've never seen before and retells the origin of Dick Grayson, the Boy Wonder, with outrageous nerve. It's like the Jim Steinman album of comic books - everything's louder than everything else, every cop is crooked, every woman is an impossibly long-legged underwear model, and every other superhero is either a jerk or lives in wide-eyed admiration of the goddamned Batman.

Oh yes, the goddamned Batman. Everyone calls him that. He even calls himself that.

"What, are you dense?" he asks a confused Grayson on their first meeting. "Are you retarded? Who the hell do you think I am? I'm the goddamned Batman."

Yep, it doesn't sound like any Batman you've ever read before... and it isn't. Miller tries half-heartedly to explain away the Batman's dialogue as his obsessive attempt to help Dick stay focused, keep him angry, not allow him to wallow in grief over his parent's death... make him into a soldier. But that explanation only goes so far and soon psycho-Batman is saying goddamned-this and goddamned-that even when he's talking to himself (which he does a lot).

Yes, Frank Miller has long since become a parody of himself. Yet it's impossible not to be entertained by that parody. There are some huge plot holes and gaping logic chasms in this book (let's not even mention Dick hearing Alfred's voice for the first time and pinpointing his accent as "South Kensington, I think") yet still Miller tries to come up with a plausible reason for why a violent vigilante would ever bring himself to take on board a 12 year old side-kick. His explanation? Batman is nuts. This whole world's nuts, so he has to be nuts to deal with it.

After all, this is a world where every costumed heroine is ogled as a sex object by every man she meets... and relishes in busting balls to prove she's not just that. It's a world in which Wonder Woman says things like, "Out of my way, sperm bank!" It's a world in which Batman saves Black Canary from a violent gang and she thanks him with a quick shag on the docks. It's a world in which the Joker has an assistant with swastikas on her boobs. Is it sexist? In a world (our own) of Anti-Feminism and Slut Walks, that's debatable.

It's also a world in which everyone keeps telling Batman his Batmobile is "queer". So it is homophobic? Or is it actually (like Miller's infamous 300) homoerotic?

"His hand lands on my shoulder," Dick narrates, "weightless as a falling leaf. Those bigass fingers of his squeeze like a gentle caress."

I've never been a Jim Lee fan, but he's the perfect artist to illustrate Miller's gaudy, ridiculous excesses. The art here literally leaps off the page - just check out the SIX page splash of the Batcave the first time Dick enters that dark, frigid hole. (Goddamn it, Frank, you've got me doing it now.) It's as grossly unnecessary as everything else in this book... yet you can't help but admire it. (Or maybe that's just me.)

Best of all is Batman's humiliation of Green Lantern in the final chapter, describing Hal Jordan as "a moron with the imagination of a potato" before letting Robin beat this "retarded demigod" half to death in a yellow-painted room. Hell, that was worth the price of the book all by itself.

I bought All Star Batman & Robin Vol 1on eBay for the bargain price of £2.49 + £2.49 p&p. It collects 9 issues (there are supposed to be more to come, but both Miller and Lee appear to have lost interest) and I fully intended to read it once and sell it on for a profit. The truth is... I just enjoyed it too much. And I feel goddamned grubby for admitting that.

American Vampire

2011-07-04T02:50:00.000-07:00

Vertigo made a big hoo-ha about the fact they'd persuaded Stephen King to write his first ever original comics series (as opposed to the Dark Tower adaptations Marvel has been producing for years now), so I was intrigued to check this out when I saw it in my local library. Yep, now that I'm unemployed I'm really going to stick to the letter of the law round these parts - this book cost me nothing but the shoe leather it took to walk into the centre of our village.

American Vampire sets out with a pretty bold aim - to chronicle an alternate history of America in which vampires are as much a part of the culture as overpaid actors and crooked politicians. But these aren't cutesy twinkling Twilight vampires though: these guys are putting the blood back into bloodsucking.

It begins, as many of the best American legends do, in the latter days of the Wild West when an outlaw, murderer and bank robber called Skinner Sweet falls prey to an old, wealthy European vamp. Though Skinner himself is turned, the circumstances of his death prevent his resurrection for a number of years, and when he does eventually waken he's become a very different kind of vampire - one who can walk in the daylight.

Skinner's story continues in the book's alternating thread, set in 1920s Hollywood, wherein an ambitious young actress called Pearl Jones finds herself at the mercy of the fanged fiends who rule the casting couch. Like Skinner, Pearl is transformed into a new breed of vampire, and takes the necessary revenge on those who created her.

At the end of book one, American Vampire looks set to be an exciting and ambitious project, though Stephen King's involvement is secondary. The real guiding force is Scott Snyder, who scripts the Pearl Jones segments and appears to have provided much of the plot for the Skinner Sweet origin that's written by King. Both writers being overly modest in their introductions, it's difficult to tell just who came up with what, but it's clear that American Vampire is Snyder's brainchild, with King dragged along for the ride (and the extra sales his name will obviously bring). There's little stylistic difference between the two, and if credits were stripped from this book I'd easily believe it all the work of one writer. Likewise I doubt I'd recognise King's voice from his sections, despite being a huge fan of his work. Comics and novels are very different beasts, and the in-depth characterisation you'd expect from King's prose isn't particularly noticeable here; it's telling that in his introduction, King mentions his surprise at discovering thought balloons were considered old-hat in contemporary comics... for a writer who loves to get inside his character's heads, you can't help but feel this was a loss. The only truly typical King trait here is that Skinner Sweet's origin is told from the perspective of a grumpy pulp novelist.

Despite all this, American Vampire is both thrilling and engrossing, and I'll happily pop down the library to catch volume 2 when the book arrives in August. It's particularly worth a look for Rafael Albuquerque's dramatic and expressive artwork.

If you're slightly more flush than I am right now, you can pick up the hardcover of American Vampire: Volume. 1from Amazon for £10.36 (almost half rrp). Not sure when the trade paperback comes out, but I'm sure that'll be even cheaper.

Eagle Comic : 12th June, 1982

2011-06-25T09:02:00.000-07:00

Ahhh. 1982. The Eagle Comic. I remember it well. I remember getting Issue 1 because I was going to visit somebody in hospital, and my parents wanted something to keep me occupied. I remember Dan Dare's car switching number plates in that first episode. I remember Doomlord being pretty cool and all of the other photo strips being a bit crap, and I remember dropping the comic before too long, partly because some of the photo strips were a bit crap and mostly because it wasn't Marvel.

However, I came across a stock of these recently in a long neglected corner of Northampton, and I have to admit, I do have a faint twinge of nostalgia for them. I remember how modern that logo seemed at the time, and how cool the Dan Dare strip was (obviously I didn't know the original)

Reading through this issue as an adult, there's a lot more that you notice. Look, the footy strip is written by Tom Tully (he did lots of Roy of The Rovers and Billy's Boots), Dan Dare is credited to Mills and Wagner, whilst there's a couple of Alan Grant credits in there.

But that's not why I bought this issue. There's one short story that I saw on the interweb a few years ago that I distinctly remembered from my callow youth, a grisly tale of a comics dealer ripping off a punter. It was the first time I ever saw the interior of a comics shop (it is Forbidden Planet in Denmark St), and, oh look, it's written by Alan Moore.

In reverse On The Ration style, I, like our titular Collector, made sure that I paid a fair price for it. And it's the best 50p I've spent in a long time. Read it here, and let me know if I made the right decision.

DC Versus Marvel Comics

2011-06-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

At last - a proper On The Ration bargain! This book is currently out of print, and the cheapest you can find it on Amazon is about £9 (including p&p). I picked up my copy a few weeks ago from eBay for £1.99 plus £1.30 p&p. I think I got it so cheap as nobody else bid - probably because the seller listed it as just "graphic novel" rather than giving the title of the book anywhere in the listing.

Anyway... was it worth £3.29?

Not really. Considering the unlimited potential of crossing over the two biggest comics universes and pitting their greatest heroes against one another, this was actually woefully bad. Then again, it was released in the 90s, the absolute nadir of comic book publishing.

Where do I begin? The utter bollocks plot involving two giant Shogun Warrior style mystic/extraterrestrial sibling badguys, a glowing cardboard box in an alleyway, and a half-hearted rehash of Marvel's Contest Of The Champions mini series from the early 80s?

Or how about the lazy writing (obviously by committee, despite the credits going to just two writers, Ron Marz and the usually reliable Peter David) which imagines we'll all be happy enough just to see Superman and the Hulk or Wolverine and Lobo on the same page... we won't need any actual characterisation, action (beyond the obvious punch-ups), plot twists, drama or humour? (The best example of this is the opening 3 page confrontation between Spider-Man and the Joker - potentially the two funniest characters in comics - which doesn't even raise a titter.) Added to that, in many cases these aren't even the classic versions of the characters - Spider-Man is the Ben Reilly clone and Green Lantern is the even-more-rubbish-than-Hal-Jordan Kyle Rayner.

Or what about the phoned-in artwork by Dan Jurgens and Claudio Castellini (though to be fair, given this is the 90s, I suppose that could have been much worse)? Don't even start me on the hair... why did everybody have such ridiculous hairdos in 90s comics? Superman has a mullet, Wonder Woman looks like Medusa, Thor looks like a WWE wrestler, and Wolverine... god, Wolverine looks like his fingers have been stuck permanently in an electrical socket.

Needless to say, this book will be going straight back on eBay. If I had any sense, I'd tell you it was brilliant and direct you to the link. Instead, I'll say that if you do want to see the great superheroes of two different universes go head to head, check out the far superior JLA / Avengers book by Kurt Busiek and George Perez. That's out of print too (since Marvel and DC don't seem to be getting on too well at the moment), and while it's hardly a classic, it is a hell of a lot more interesting than the waste of paper and ink I've just reviewed.

Fear Itself #3

2011-06-23T03:30:00.000-07:00

Oh dear. I’m starting to feel like a fool for getting all excited about this latest Marvel event series now. Matt Fraction’s writing is perfectly okay and Stuart Immonen’s art is great, but most of the action seems to be taking place in other titles and this series is starting to look like not much more than an advert for those titles. In this issue, one of my favourite Marvel heroes is turned into one of ‘the Worthy’ – the seven heralds of some big villain called ‘The Serpent’ – but this all happens over the course of four pages – two of which are a double-page spread – and this part of the story looks like it continues in Fear Itself: Spider-Man #3 (even though it’s not Spider-Man who turns into one of the Worthy and it’s not someone you would immediately associate with Spider-Man). Similarly, two of my favourite Marvel villains have been transformed into members of the Worthy, both of those transformations have taken place in tie-in comics and one of those villains hasn’t appeared in this series at all (I don’t think) apart from in the adverts for the tie-ins that appear on the last couple of pages of each issue.

Something big does actually does happen in this comic – a major Marvel hero dies, I think – but it all happened rather quickly and I think it probably would have had more impact if it had happened in that character’s own comic, rather than here. Plus it’s not like that character hasn’t died and come back from the dead before, so it was hard to get too excited about it.

This has an RRP of $3.99 and I didn’t get my copy ‘on the ration’ at all. I bought it in my local comic shop – The Grinning Demon in Maidstone – and paid full price for it. I don’t know exactly what that price was, as I also bought a lot of other comics and graphic novels that were heavily discounted – including two new / sealed hardcover Marvel Masterworks books for £10.00 each – and didn’t get a receipt, but I reckon it was at least £3.00. However, the bloke who runs the Grinning Demon is always very friendly and accommodating, so I don’t regret buying it there at all – I do kind of regret buying it, I just don’t regret buying it there – and I will probably buy the rest of the series there, too, because I’m a completist idiot who is still stupid enough to think that this series will pick up again and allow me to catch up with everything that has been going on at Marvel over the last year or so.

Jonah Hex: No Way Back HC

2011-06-22T01:46:00.000-07:00

This Jonah Hex original graphic novel is written by current Jonah Hex writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti and illustrated by Jonah Hex co-creator Tony DeZuniga. The story is the sort of thing that we’ve seen a million times before in Jonah Hex comics – Hex defending a town full of cowardly, unarmed innocents from bandits – but here he is also briefly reunited with his mother, who abandoned him to his cruel father as a child, and discovers that he has a half-brother who is a priest. It’s a decent story, and just as good as an average issue of the current Jonah Hex series. Unfortunately, Tony DeZuniga’s art has seen much better days. I’m not going to complain about it too much, as DeZuniga is about 70 years old now and I love to see the old guys getting work - plus it’s not like the art was terrible, just a bit messy and hurried-looking - but it did drag the story down a bit, in my opinion. Still, while this book is no classic, I enjoyed reading it while I was reading it and didn’t pay much for it at all.

This hardcover edition has a recommended retail price of £14.99 / $19.99. You can get it from online for nearer £10.00 but I got my copy as part of a pretty great eBay win, which included this book, the first six trade paperbacks collecting the current JH series, all eighteen issues of that Hex series from the 1980s, where JH got sent to the future, plus eight more JH comics, for £25.00 (including postage). Bingo!

Ant-Man & Wasp - Small World

2011-06-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

I really liked Marvel's reinvention of Ant-Man as sexist scumbag Eric O'Grady in Robert Kirkman's Irredeemable Ant-Man, so I was pleased to see the character given a new mini-series, teamed with the original Ant-Man, Hank Pym, who's now (rather confusingly) calling himself Wasp in memory of his dead wife.

Hack/Slash creator Tim Seeley provides both script and art. I've never read Hack/Slash, but from its title I imagined it to be one of those shallow, flashy, ultra-violent Image books of the 90s, so Seeley's work here is far more traditional than I expected. His art is solid, if unspectacular, and his script, while containing flashes of wit and innovation, isn't quite as enjoyable as Kirkman's. (Bizarrely, I don't rate Kirkman as a writer, he has a tendency to overwrite and use gobfulls of unnecessary exposition - but Ant-Man was the best title I've seen from him.) The problem with a character like Eric O'Grady is that he's only really entertaining as a scumbag - redeem him too much and he's just another generic shrinking superhero. But storytelling is all about developing character, making characters grow through changes. Thank god for Stan Lee's "illusion of change" ethos... you can take Eric so far as a good guy, but his efforts towards self-improvement must ultimately fail. Pairing him with Hank Pym makes for an interesting contrast, since Pym's redemption (from alcoholic wife-beater) has been a continuing theme of his adventures in recent years. Will Hank improve Eric... or will Eric drag Hank down? I reckon Seeley could have made more of this, the story he does give us is fun, but ultimately inconsequential. Maybe I was expecting too much.

Three issues doesn't make for a particularly chunky trade paperback, so Marvel have backed the main strip up with five reprints of the original Ant-Man / Wasp adventures from Tales to Astonish #44 - 48. I always think I've read all the original Stan Lee Marvel books in one reprint or another, yet I'd never seen these strips before. Obviously, they're nowhere near the best of the Lee/Kirby or Lee/Ditko stuff. Partly that's because Lee provides plot only (scripts are by H.E. Huntley, aka Ernie Hart) and while Kirby does layouts on the first two stories, the rest of the art is by the king of scratchy pens, Don Heck. I found myself enjoying them despite this. There are some wonderfully loopy ideas in these old stories. For example, Ant-Man can't fly, so he devises a huge catapult to rocket him across town to the scene of a crime, then radios ahead to his ant buddies to get together and create a soft, cushiony landing spot. There's a kooky 60s villain called Trago, a mad jazz musician who Ant-Man can only defeat by climbing inside his trumpet. And best of all, in his first battle with the Porcupine, Ant-Man is almost defeated when the villain drops him in a bath-tub full of water and the sides are too slippery for him to climb out. Plus, there's all that typically sexist Mad Men style guff Stan always dropped into the Reed & Sue dialogue of early Fantastic Four...

"Wasp, don't you hear me? Oh, she's looking at the diamond! Just like a woman! Tell me, Jan, what do females find so fascinating about jewellery?"

"If only you'd buy me some, Big Daddy, I'd be happy to explain it to you!"

Ant-Man & Waspis pretty good value at £7.69 on Amazon (or a penny less from the Book Depository). Neither strip is a classic of its era, but there's enough fun to be had to make them worth the price... or less, if you can find it cheaper.

The Sensational She-Hulk by John Byrne Volume #1

2011-06-15T00:11:00.000-07:00

When David Addison turned to the camera in Moonlighting and spoke directly to the viewers at home, I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Admittedly, I was fourteen at the time, but the idea that a fictional character might know they were a fictional character - and enjoy that conceit (rather than being terrified by it, as Buddy Baker was in Grant Morrison's Animal Man)... well, that just blew me away. Post-modern self-referencing irony became my favourite kind of tricksy literary device and I followed it wherever it cropped up - from Moonlighting to Blazing Saddles to It's Gary Shandling's Show... to John Byrne's Sensational She-Hulk.

Byrne was at the height of his fame in 1989 when he returned to Marvel after successfully revamping the post-Crisis Superman. He could probably have cherry-picked any character to work on at that point, so his decision to launch a brand new She-Hulk #1 (after the original title fizzled out years earlier) came completely from left field. His decision to position the title as an action-comedy - a fourth-wall busting action comedy at that - proved an even bigger surprise. But fair play to him, it was also a stroke of genius and the eight issues he produced before falling out with editorial and quitting the book were some of my favourite comics of this era. (His later return to the title a few years later was also fun... but never quite matched what had gone before.)

The big question, as with any reprint collection of comics I haven't read for 20+ years, is how does Sensational She-Hulk stand up today? And the answer is... better than expected. There's no denying Byrne was having heaps of fun with this book. The Marvel Universe is his plaything, and he's especially interested in the cheesier characters in the toybox. The opening story kicks off with the Circus of Crime, Mysterio and former Defenders baddies The Headmen who only want She-Hulk for her body... so they can use it as the vessel for their crazy colleague Chondu whose current torso is a batwinged, chicken-footed, tentacle-armed monstrosity. Spider-Man guest stars and heads do roll.

Next up are Stilt Man, former Howard The Duck baddie Doctor Bong (in an amusing story that rips the piss out of Saturday morning cartoons), Razorback, the characters from short-lived 80s truck-driving comic US1, and best of all, classic teddy-bear-like Marvel Monster Xemnu, The Living Titan. Xemnu is one of my favourite Marvel villains - he's just sooooo cute!

But much as I enjoyed seeing these crazy characters - treated with admirable respect, for all their comedic value - the real draw remains the fourth wall stuff. When She-Hulk is being attacked by the Toad Men in issue #2, Byrne cuts away to a subplot. On returning to the battle, we find both Shulky and her enemies sat around looking bored. "Oh good, you're back," she says to the reader - and then the battle continues. In issue #4, desperate to escape one of the crazy Saturday morning cartoon worlds of Dr. Bong, She-Hulk tears her way through the comic page and runs through a two page spread spoofing one of those huge Mile High Comics ads that used to feature in every Marvel title of the era. And when She-Hulk's clothing is shredded in a battle with Stilt Man, a supporting character asks why her underwear always remains intact. She-Hulk turns down the back of her chemise to reveal an "Approved by the Comics Code" badge stitched into the fabric. Even 20 years later, I'm still a sucker for post-modern gags like these, and while I rarely laughed out loud while reading this book, I did a hell of a lot of smiling... and any comic that makes me smile is a success.

Byrne's art has never been better (except, possibly, for the Terry Austin days), though some of the outfits and hairstyles are hilariously 80s. His drawing are big and bold and colourful and fun. When his work is this good, there's hardly anyone I'd rather have drawing the Marvel Universe.

The Sensational She-Hulk By John Byrne - Volume 1has a retail price of £18, which is pretty steep for 8 issues, but you can find it for about £12 if you shop around, which isn't too bad. I'll get back to reviewing proper On The Ration bargains next time... but considering how much I enjoyed reading these comics again, I still consider this one good value. Whether you'll feel the same will depend on your tolerance for John Byrne, clever-clever 4th-wall busting satire, and dumb villains. If that combination sounds at all appealing, then get out there and find an affordable copy of this book asap!

Captain America - The Captain

2011-06-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

OK, this is a pretty expensive book - my copy cost me around twenty quid, though you can probably pick it up for about £18 if you shop around the Amazon marketplace. Now, given the rather lukewarm review I gave an earlier Captain America collection from the same era, Scourge Of The Underworld, you might wonder why I'd spend that much again? Well, two reasons really. One, I remember really enjoying this story when I first read it as a kid; and two, it isn't actually that expensive when you consider it collects twenty comics, two of them double-sized... even me, with my Grade B mathematics GCSE from 1986, can work out this comes to less than a quid an issue (well, if you count the double-sized issues as two each)... and less than a quid an issue is, as far as I'm concerned, an On The Ration price.

That said... was it worth the money?

I'd have to go with 'yes' this time... for me at least... though your own mileage may vary. The story begins when a government body called The Commission decide to call Steve Rogers to order. "Your days of running around being a hero of the people are over," they tell him. "We paid for the creation of Captain America - you work for us. Toe the line, winghead, do what we tell you, or we'll find someone else to sling that old indestructible shield."

Now Steve being Steve doesn't take too kindly to this kind of ultimatum. Captain America, he argues, is bigger than politics. He is a symbol of all the good stuff America stands for - not the grubby reality of political compromise. But rather than kick up a fuss, he hands in his shield, stops wearing the red, white and blue... and goes off to find his future.

Meanwhile, the Commission draft in another hero to fill his shoes. John Walker, aka the Super-Patriot, a good old Southern boy who's more accustomed to following orders... and a man who may not be playing with the full deck. He's Guy Gardner without the comedy value. Naturally, Walker finds it tough to live up to his new role and things go rapidly downhill when his identity is exposed and he suffers tragedy at the hands of a group of far right hatemongers called the Watchdogs.

Meanwhile, Steve Rogers is struggling to adopt a new costumed identity - The Captain - and take down the villainous Serpent Society's plans to turn the whole of Washington into snakes. Steve's mission is further hindered by squabbling sidekicks (Nomad and D-Man) and his lack of shield, plus the betrayal of his old friend Tony Stark who's gone rogue during this period of Marvel history in the original Armour Wars saga.

The two storylines converge in the inevitable face-off between the two Captains, wherein the identity of the villain behind The Commission is revealed... and there are absolutely no surprises here. Along the way we get to see Steve Rogers battle a serpentine Ronald Reagan, witness John Walker's vicious vengeance against the former friends who exposed his identity, and watch Serpent Squad member Diamondback attempt to go straight for the love of a (too) good (to be true) man.

Captain America: The Captaintook me ages to read. As a trade paperback it's longer than many Essentials collections, but with the added benefit of full colour which is particularly appreciated when Kieron Dwyer arrives as regular artist. Dwyer draws every issue from #339 - 350 (following a more traditionally illustrated opening from Tom Morgan) and his art here has a wonderfully fluid nature that reminds me of early John Byrne (no surprise, considering Byrne is Dwyer's step-father). Mark Gruenwald's script is overwritten by today's standards, but that's par for the course when re-reading comics from the 80s. I didn't notice the strong political leanings of Gruenwald's storyline when I was a kid. It's obvious he paints Rogers as the democrat hero, and Walker as the bigoted, headstrong republican who could never fill those big red boots. It's obviously written in reaction to a decade under the heel of the Reagan administration - turning Big Ron into a forked-tongued reptile isn't the most subtle of political allegories - but it made me wonder if such partisan political satire would be allowed by Marvel today?

Punisher Max: Kingpin TPB

2011-06-12T02:34:00.000-07:00

While I am not a massive Punisher fan, I do find the character quite appealing, on some very basic level, when he’s done right. I really liked Garth Ennis’s Punisher Max run, but wasn’t so keen on his Marvel Knights Punisher run, which had its moments but mostly seemed a bit immature. I think I prefer the Punisher when he is shooting the shit out of the Mafia, people traffickers, etc., rather than when he’s played for laughs and up against cartoonish villains. This book, written by Jason ‘Scalped’ Aaron, had swearing in it and lots of violence but it reminded me more of the Marvel Knights Punisher than it did the Marvel Max Punisher – and not just because it was drawn by Steve Dillon.

The five issues reprinted in this volume (Punisher Max 1-5) document the rise of the Marvel Max version of the Kingpin, and the Punisher himself ends up seeming like a supporting character in a Kingpin comic, rather than the other way around. I like the Kingpin as a villain but, as a Daredevil fan, I have probably read more than enough Kingpin stories already and didn’t really need to read a retelling of his origin in a punisher comic – the next volume introduces the Marvel Max version of Bullseye! – particularly as this version of the Kingpin is pretty similar to the regular Marvel Universe Kingpin. The weakest point in the book was probably the Punisher’s protracted battle with a pretty lame hitman called the Mennonite, who is as tough as nails but basically just an olde-worlde bloke with a hammer, and it seemed odd to me that the Kingpin would send a hitman who doesn’t even carry a gun after the Punisher. Overall, though, this was a decent read and it kept me entertained while I was reading it, even if it wasn’t particularly memorable stuff (I finished reading this about a week ago and am really struggling to find things to say about it now, but I doubt I would have been able to say much more if I’d reviewed it right away). I’ll probably pick up a copy the next volume, mainly because I have a certain amount of faith in Jason Aaron’s writing ability and would like to see if his shot at the Punisher improves, but I will definitely be trying to get it ‘on the ration’.

This volume has a recommended retail price of £14.99 / $19.99, which isn’t exactly a bargain price for a book that only collects five comics, but I got my copy from the Book Depository, during their recent 10% off sale, for £8.43. (Note 1: Obviously, it was 10% off their already low prices, not 10% off the RRP – at the moment they’ve got it for £9.89.) (Note 2: I promise I will try not review any more books written by Jason Aaron until at least November, which is when both the next volume of Scalped comes out and the next volume of Punisher Max comes out in softcover, as I have reviewed rather a lot of his books recently.)

Paying For It by Chester Brown

2011-06-11T02:06:00.000-07:00

Chester Brown has been one of my favourite cartoonists ever since I picked up my first issue of Yummy Fur in the late-1980s (I don’t remember exactly which issue I started with, but it would have been about mid-way through the story of Ed the Happy Clown). His last book, Louis Riel, a biography of the 19th century Canadian revolutionary, was not one my favourites, mainly because I had little interest in the subject, but I pretty much love all of his other books, and ‘The Playboy’, an autobiographical look at his relationship with Playboy magazine, is one of my favourite graphic novels ever. As much as I like his work, though, I was quite reluctant to buy this – I certainly didn’t pre-order a copy, or even rush out and get one the day it came out – and only ordered a copy after I was unable to explain to someone why I didn’t really want to own this book when I am a fan of Chester Brown’s work.

For those who don’t know, ‘Paying For It’ is Brown’s return to autobiographical – rather than biographical – comics and it details his exploits as a ‘john’ – i.e. a frequenter of prostitutes. The book starts in 1996, which is when Brown broke up with his last girlfriend. After the breakup, he decides that romantic love is a myth but is unable to reconcile his desire not to have another girlfriend with his desire to continue to have sex, particularly as he lacks the social skills necessary to pick up women in bars. Then, over a period of several years, he sleeps with numerous prostitutes, before eventually entering into a bizarre monogamous relationship with one prostitute, who he is apparently still seeing (she’s not his girlfriend and he still pays her for sex, they just don’t sleep with other people – or at least he doesn’t).

I think the main reason I was so reluctant to read this book was because, based on what I had read about it before buying it, I thought I would find it quite disturbing. I can just about handle the fact that Brown has slept with prostitutes but the fact he has slept with a lot of prostitutes and has embraced being a john as a lifestyle choice just seemed a bit weird to me. Before I go any further, I should probably confess that, while I have never had sex with a prostitute and have never engaged in any form of sexual activity with a prostitute, when I was in my early 20s, in the early 1990s, I did try to pick up prostitutes on several occasions, while walking back through Soho in London on my way back from various drinking sessions. Thankfully, I was so useless with women that I failed to even have paid sex. On a couple of occasions, I managed to pluck up the courage to talk to these women (actually, I think all of them approached me, but I was clearly looking for something) but I ran away before we could go anywhere, on another couple of occasions, I just didn’t have enough money on me, and on the final occasion, I was led into a courtyard full of men and robbed (I only had £30 on me and at that point I didn’t have a bank account or any credit cards, so there was nothing else they could steal from me). On every single occasion, I was very pleased that I hadn’t gone through with it (to be honest, I am inclined to think that none of the women who approached me were really prostitutes and I probably would have been mugged on every occasion, had I gone any further, and I think I would have deserved it) and my attitude to prostitution completely changed soon after that when I saw a television programme in which someone described using a prostitute as paying someone to rape them. I think this view was probably a bit extreme, but it’s not so far off, is it? Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that I have tried to pick up prostitutes in the (distant) past, that I deeply regret it, that I regretted it even then, and that even if I had had sex with a prostitute, I like to think that I would have been quite ashamed of myself afterwards, would not have done it regularly, and I certainly wouldn’t be telling you about it. Chester Brown, on the other hand, loves it, and thinks everyone should do it.

The 200+ page comic book section of this book is actually not quite as disturbing as I thought it might be, although it is certainly disturbing. There is nothing noble about a man in his late-30s / early-40s seeking out young girls to have paid sex with. In some cases, he doubts whether the girls he is having sex with are actually 18, as they claim to be, but takes them at their word and has sex with them anyway. It is occasionally clear that the women Brown has sex with don’t want to have sex with him at all – probably none of the women Brown has sex with actually want to have sex with him, but at least most of them are willing participants – and one woman covers her face with her hair while they have sex. In one scene, Brown even admits to finding it a turn-on when he realises that a woman he is having sex with is in pain. Make no mistake: this book is incredibly sleazy. But it is also surprisingly funny in places. I actually laughed quite a lot while reading this, which may seem like a very odd thing for me to say. Sometimes my laughter was the result of shock, but there is lots of humour in the scenes in which Brown debates the merits of using prostitutes with his friends, the cartoonists Joe Matt and Seth, who do not approve of his position at all. These are the best scenes, though, and mostly the many scenes of Brown having sex with prostitutes (and then reviewing their performances online) left me thinking that Chester Brown is a bit of a cold-hearted creep.

After the comic book section of the book, there is a lengthy appendix / notes section, in which Brown shows that he is not only a creep, but that he has gone at least part-way down the road followed by his former friend Dave Sim and has gone somewhat nuts (Brown and Sim are apparently no longer on speaking terms because Brown refused to sign an online petition, set up by Sim – a cartoonist who devoted large sections of his comic to essays about the inferiority of women – which stated that ‘Dave Sim is not a misogynist’). Brown starts by claiming that prostitution is just another form of dating and then goes on to paint a picture of some perfect future in which everyone realises, like him, that romantic love is a myth and paid sex becomes the norm. He then goes on to confront the various arguments against prostitution and argues his case rather badly. He claims that marriage is ‘evil’, that prostitution should be decriminalised but that prostitutes should not have to pay taxes because sex is sacred (although not so sacred that it shouldn’t be bought and sold), and the low point of his argument comes when he decides that the girls working in one brothel he frequented were probably not sex slaves because the door was always opened by ‘plain-and-dumpy’ or ‘flat-out ugly’ girls and a sex-slaver would seek to maximise profits by making the most attractive girls open the door so as not to scare off potential customers. Furthermore, Brown says: ‘I can’t imagine that sex-slavers would have bothered to kidnap “Angelina II”. She wasn’t someone who might have been attractive at one point - - she had clearly always been very difficult-to-look-at.’

Brown allows Seth to provide a couple of pages of notes, too, and these two pages were the highlight of the book for me. Seth is very nice about his friend and says that, although he is an oddball, he is ‘the kindest, gentlest and most deeply thoughtful oddball I know’, but he also says that Brown ‘seems to have a very limited emotional range compared to most people. There does seem to be something wrong with him’. Indeed, Seth refers to his friend as ‘The Robot’. Most tellingly, I think, Seth says that, in the sections of the comic in which Brown debates prostitution with his friends, Brown comes off better than he does in real life. In real life, ‘often his opinion is a little too dogmatic ... a little too tied to the Libertarian party-line about the sanctity of property rights’. Just as Steve Ditko embraced Objectivism in the ‘60s, Brown seems to have whole-heartedly embraced Libertarianism – he has even run as a Libertarian party candidate in Canada on more than one occasion – and his political beliefs have infected his work. These beliefs, particularly his belief in a limited role for the state, do not sit well with the fact that this book, like his previous book, was part-funded by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts – in recent interviews, Brown has stated that he is against government funding of the arts but is not against artists taking the money when it’s available – but I doubt he will have to worry about any accusations of hypocrisy in the future, as I would be astounded if the Canadian government ever give him another penny once they realise what they have funded.

Brown’s whoring and his political beliefs do not make him a bad cartoonist – he is still a great cartoonist – but they have turned me off of reading his work. Even if his next book is a children’s book, just knowing what he will be spending his money on would probably be enough to make me feel uncomfortable buying a copy. I kind of admire his honesty – particularly as he is expressing such unpopular opinions – but I think there is probably such a thing as being too honest and I’m very surprised that there hasn’t been more of a backlash against this book.

Cost: Paying For It has a recommended retail price of £16.99 but I bought my copy from the Book Depository, during their recent 10% off sale, for £10.26. I’m glad I read it – I think – but I certainly don’t want to keep it and will be selling it on ASAP.

Scalped Volumes 6 & 7

2011-06-06T05:44:00.000-07:00

Reports of the theft of Scalped Vol.6 from my local library appear to have been exaggerated and my assumption that it would be months before they got a copy of Vol.7 in appears to have been unjustified, as they managed to get me copies of both of these books mere weeks after I finished reading Vol.5. That means that I did not need to buy these two books, as I said I would at the end of my review of Scalped Vol. 5, but I’m going to buy them all anyway because I now think that this is a series I will want to keep and read over and over again. I can’t believe that I was so indifferent about the first two volumes now!

In Scalped Vol.6: The Gnawing, which collects Scalped issues 30 to 34 by series writer Jason Aaron and regular artist R.M. Guéra, reservation chief / crime lord Lincoln Red Crow has to smooth things over with his Asian-American business partners following the events of Scalped Vol.4, but makes things much worse before he makes them better, and our drug-addled ‘hero’, undercover FBI agent Dashiell ‘Dash’ Bad Horse, finally gets his revenge on Diesel Engine. This is a particularly brutal volume, in which Dash goes even further over the line he crossed several volumes ago, but it’s gripping stuff and I loved the explanation for the title on the first story page!

In Scalped Vol.7: Rez Blues, which collects Scalped issues 35 to 42 by Aaron, Guéra and guest artists artists Danijel Zezelj and Davide Furnò, Chief Red Crow’s top enforcer, Shunka, confronts his sexuality, we get to meet Dash’s dad, Wade, who has rather a lot in common with his son, and both Dash and his lover, Red Crow’s estranged daughter Carol, clean up their acts, both for very different reasons. It’s not as brutal as Vol.6 but it’s twice as sleazy, also surprisingly touching, and it follows in the tradition of previous volumes by being even better than the volume that preceded it.

This is a really good series, full of strong characters, and if I owned copies of all seven of the volumes published so far I could quite happily sit down and re-read them all right now. The wait for Vol.8, which doesn’t come out until November, is going to be a long one.

Cost: Scalped Vol.6 has a recommended retail price of £10.99 and Scalped Vol.7 has a recommended retail price of £14.99. I got them both out of my local library and all I paid was a 25p (per book) reservation fee, but, as I said, I will be buying copies of all the available volumes as soon as I see them at the right price (I have already managed to pick up a copy of Vol.1 on eBay for £3.50 but volumes 2 and 3 seem to be out of print and harder to find at the moment, which I hope is just a temporary situation).

Fantastic Four by Jonathan Hickman Volumes 1, 2 & 3

2011-06-03T13:04:00.000-07:00

Between them, these three trade paperbacks collect Fantastic Four issues 570 to 582, written by Jonathan Hickman and illustrated by Dale Eaglesham (issues 570 to 572 and 575 to 578) and Neil Edwards (issues 573 to 574 and 579 to 582). That’s just thirteen issues spread over three trade paperbacks – five issues in volume one and four each in volumes two and three – and that is my biggest complaint about these books. Any trade paperback collecting just four issues of an ongoing series feels rather unnecessary to me, and had I bought these in hardcover format – believe it or not, Marvel do release hardcover books that only collect four comics these days – I would have felt like a fool, particularly as none of these books tell a complete story. All three books combined don’t even tell a complete story, as they are merely the first three chapters in Hickman’s larger plan for the FF. Luckily, though, I didn’t pay too much for these and they were decent books, so I don’t feel ripped-off, but I probably would have been better off waiting for the inevitable FF by Jonathan Hickman Omnibus, as these comics will no doubt read better in one big collection and I’m pretty sure I will need to read them all again when the softcover edition of the next volume comes out to remind myself what happened. Not that I understood everything that happened in these volumes.

Like Grant Morrison before him, Hickman writes comics that are full of big ideas and aren’t necessarily that reader-friendly, but thankfully Hickman’s comics are a bit more accessible than Morrison’s, which I have only recently started to appreciate. In volume one, the best of these three books, Reed Richards joins a council of Reed Richards from alternate Earths and attempts to solve everything, Johnny and Ben take a break on Nu-World (which has gotten more interesting since it first appeared in Mark Millar’s ultimately-poor run on the FF), and Franklin and Valeria Richards are visited by a future version of Franklin, who arrives with a warning which kicks off Hickman’s larger storyline. Part of Franklin’s warning is: ‘There will be a war between the four cities’, and in volume 2, we are introduced to the four cities – one city in each of the four issues reprinted in the book. At the very end of volume two, the war between the cities kicks off, and then in volume three things get really confusing, when Reed Richards' dad fights an alternate version of himself with the help of college-age versions of Reed Richards, Ben Grimm and Victor Von Doom. And that is one of the least confusing parts of the book, because I barely understood what was going on with Nu-World at all, or with the future versions of Franklin and Valeria in the final issue reprinted here.

These were pretty good comics but I didn’t enjoy them quite as much as I thought I would – I read the first three issues reprinted in volume one when they first came out and was really impressed but they were probably still my favourite issues – mainly because I have a low tolerance for this sort of thing – i.e. non-linear stories full of big sci-fi ideas. While I have recently begun to appreciate some of Grant Morrison’s comics, I don’t always understand them and I only occasionally enjoy reading them, and I recently stopped watching Doctor Who because I was finding most episodes a bit tedious and confusing. In short, I like my fiction a bit more down to Earth – even if that fiction is about people with super-powers – but I must say that this sort of storytelling suits the FF and it’s great to see Hickman doing something different with them and implementing some big changes, rather than telling the same old stories over and over again. I think Stan and Jack would approve, I will almost certainly buy the next volume (which will hopefully reprint more than four comics), and it would have been worth buying these books just to see the Dragon Man wearing reading glasses, which was the highlight for me. Oh, and the art was pretty good, too.

Cost: These books have a combined recommended retail price of £34.97, which isn’t exactly a bargain price for thirteen comics, but I bought them from the Book Depository during their recent 10%-off sale – which has been extended until June 5^th – for a more reasonable £19.19 (using money I got selling off comics I no longer wanted on eBay, which is where most of the money I spend on new comics comes from).

The Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy Volume 1: 1931-1933 HC

2011-05-29T03:48:00.000-07:00

These IDW Dick Tracy collections are very similar in format to Fantagraphics’ Complete Peanuts books, only bigger. I’m not sure that these books contain any more comic strips, as they only reprint two dailies (or one Sunday strip) to a page, while the Peanuts books reprint three dailies (or one Sunday strip) to a page, but they are certainly thicker, the dimensions are larger, and it took me a lot longer to read this book than it would take me to read a Complete Peanuts book, mainly because Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy strips are more wordy and detailed.

Dick Tracy, according to Max Allan Collins’ introduction to this volume, was the first police procedural drama, pre-dating television dramas like CSI, etc., by many decades and published at a time when pulp fiction authors were more interested in private eyes and crooks. Dick Tracy was a tough cop, but he solved crimes using his smarts, employing forensics techniques, dusting for fingerprints, running ballistics tests, and so on. In the 1930s, then, this was ground-breaking stuff, but unfortunately it all seems a bit dull by today’s standards, and even Collins admits that these early strips are not the best of Dick Tracy. Gould’s cartooning is superb, but the surprisingly violent stories – in one strip, Tracy is tortured by gangsters who burn his feet with a blowtorch – are only mildly interesting, and the gallery of grotesque villains usually associated with Dick Tracy – Pruneface, Mumbles, etc. – are entirely absent from this volume. Here, Tracy tackles a variety of cardboard cut-out gangsters, while the recurring foe that gives him the most trouble is a child-snatching vagrant called ‘Steve the Tramp’. Tracy’s sweetheart, Tess Trueheart, is portrayed as a fickle idiot, and there are some outrageous depictions of black people, but such depictions were commonplace at the time – I doubt that Gould was being deliberately sexist or racist – and it is just about possible to laugh at them now, although images of black people looking like a black-faced, white-lipped clowns, more than happy to enjoy a status similar to a family dog, still shock.

I found this book more interesting than enjoyable. I’m glad I read it but I won’t be carrying on with the series, mainly because there are going to be more than twenty volumes in all, eleven of which have been published so far, and these books are rather expensive. More recent volumes have a recommended retail price of £29.99, while this first volume has an RRP of £22.50. It’s available from all the usual online retailers for nearer £15.00, and I got my copy on eBay for £10.00, but I doubt I would manage to find any future volumes for a similar price, and even if I did, I’m not sure that I’d want to spend the money. However, I am keen to pick up a copy of IDW’s recently-published Best of Dick Tracy book, for an overview of the character from 1931 to 1971, and I am particularly keen to pick up a copy of The Complete Little Orphan Annie Vol.1, also published by IDW, for a look at the early days of another classic American comic strip character.

Stray Bullets: A West Anthology

2011-05-25T14:02:00.000-07:00

Last year’s hardcover collection of writer Andrew Cheverton and artist Tim Keable’s ‘West’ comics was one of my favourite books of the year, so I ordered a copy of this new West comic as soon as it came out - no rationing - and I wasn’t disappointed. Unlike previous issues, this contains art by various artists, including both Cheverton and Keable. Cheverton provides the Simon Gane-like art for the framing strip, in which ‘fabled gunman’ Jerusalem West’s great grandson recalls some of his great grandfather’s adventures, which may or may not be true, while the adventures themselves are illustrated by Tim Keable, Warwick Johnson Cadwell, Jenika Ioffreda, Paul Rainey, and Emma Price.

I was particularly excited to see Paul ‘There’s No Time Like The Present’ Rainey drawing a (funny) Western strip but all of the artists here – most of whom I was unfamiliar with – do a great job. I was very impressed by the creepy, Guy Davis-like art of Warwick Johnson Cadwell, and Jenika Ioffreda’s manga-influenced art was very professional looking. I must admit, though, that it didn’t seem like West until I arrived at the story illustrated by Tim Keable, who also provided a very nice cover for this issue.

The stories were all good – Badwater Lake and Bad Dollars, my favourite stories, were both more light-hearted than usual, Midsummer Ball was touching, and Fort Eyrie was touching and, err, eerie – and I can’t wait for the next West comic, ‘Confederate Dead’

Stray Bullets: A West Anthology is available for £3.50, including postage, from Angry Candy.

Thing Classic Vol.1 TPB

2011-05-23T10:55:00.000-07:00

I was unaware of this existence of this book, which collects the Thing issues 1 to 10 from 1983 / 1984, until a few weeks ago, but once a certain Mr Rol told me about it, I was simply unable to resist ordering a copy. I’m not sure why, really. I mean, yes, it’s a book full of Thing comics written by John Byrne, who at that point was also in the middle of his classic run as writer / artist of the Fantastic Four – sounds pretty good so far, doesn’t it? – but it’s also a book full of Thing comics drawn by Ron Wilson, an artist whose work I hated when I was younger, and I didn’t even buy more than two or three issues of this series when I was a Marvel-addicted teenager – I was 14 / 15 years old when these comics were originally released – even though I was most certainly buying the Fantastic Four at the time. I suppose I bought it mostly because of the John Byrne factor, but also because I am starting to get a bit nostalgic about the 1980s, which is crazy because I hated the 1980s at the time, and particularly the early-1980s, when I was still at school (man, I hated school!). I guess now that I am older, I am able to mentally sift the good from the bad, and appreciate the things that did make me happy in the 1980s – comics, pop music, etc. – without associating them with a time when I was essentially miserable. Or something like that. Whatever it was that compelled me to buy this book, I wanted it bad and I got it. And it’s okay. I suppose. In places.

The first few issues reprinted in this volume are actually not that bad at all, and the first two issues are even pretty good. In issue one, the thing returns to Yancy Street to try and talk some sense into a street gang by telling them about his own involvement with gangs as a kid. The only thing that marred this issue was the fact that it contained yet another retelling of the FF’s origin (there’s another retelling in #10) and Ron Wilson’s art, which is not necessarily bad but is rather boring. Wilson draws the least threatening-looking street gang I have ever seen – I swear the Happy Days gang were scarier looking than this lot! But the downbeat story was decent, even if Byrne does tend to over-write a bit (as it was the 1980s, I’m prepared to overlook that sort of thing). Issue two contains another downbeat story, with the Thing again thinking back to his younger, pre-Thing days, after he receives a letter from an old flame and begins to worry what she will think of him when she sees his rocky face for the first time. This issue is inked by Byrne, in the scruffy style he was using in the FF at the time, which transforms Wilson’s art and makes it look like Byrne drew the whole thing (perhaps in a hurry, but it’s a big improvement). After a reasonable start, though, the quality of the stories starts to go downhill, and apart from a few pages drawn entirely by Byrne in #7, the rest of the art is by Wilson, inked by Hilary Barta and Joe Sinnott.

Issue three, in which the Thing, with the help of Lockjaw and Crystal, fights the rest of the Inhumans to stop them turning Crystal and Quicksilver’s human baby into an Inhuman, is alright. In this issue, we discover that Lockjaw is not a dog at all, but a particularly ugly Inhuman – which is what puts Quicksilver off the idea of changing his kid into an Inhuman – and he even speaks for the first time. (Did Marvel ever bring that up again or did Lockjaw just go back to being a dog after this?) It’s not as good as the first couple of issues, though. The two part story from issues five and six, in which the Thing destroys half of New York after being possessed by the Puppet Master, is pretty bad, and the story from #7 isn’t much better (remember assistant editors’ month?), while the two part story in issues eight and nine, in which the Thing again destroys half of New York, this time possessed by the spirit of a murdered Egyptian slave – who dresses like a Roman centurion, for some reason – is really bad. Which only leaves five decent issues in the book.

The better issues are the more subdued issues, in which the Thing dwells on his past or his relationship with Alicia, or some other emotional dilemma, while the bad issues mostly contain action-orientated stories. These issues are bad partly because Ron Wilson’s art isn’t exciting enough to carry the action and partly because the stories are just plain bad. I guess Byrne was saving his better adventure stories for the FF.

Cost: This has a very high recommended retail price of £18.99 / $24.99. I bought my copy from the Book Depository for a more reasonable £11.91 but I probably could have picked up all the comics contained in this book for less than that on eBay and I probably could have picked up all the good issues for a couple of quid. On the ration indeed.

Spandex #4

2011-05-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

This fourth issue of Martin Eden’s Spandex – which is about a team of gay, Brighton-based super-heroes – is titled O.M.F.G., which seemed like a pretty good choice of title to me. It starts with the return of the 50-foot lesbian from #1, who attacks Diva – my favourite Spandex member – in her own home, and from there most of the rest of the team are taken down one-by-one by the various members of Les Girlz, a team of lesbian super-villains who have been lingering in the background since this series began. The attack on Spandex member Indigo, and the revelation about her pregnancy, was particularly shocking, but most of the attacks on our heroes were a bit of a surprise, and it seems likely that one or two of them may not live to see the next issue.

This is a really good series, with great characters, nice art and very high production values – full-colour, glossy paper – for a self-published comic. Although it’s rather rude in places, and definitely not for kids, it reminds me a lot of the super-team comics we used to get in the late-seventies / early eighties: Claremont / Byrne-era X-Men, Wolfman / Perez-era Teen Titans, etc. It’s a lot of fun but also full of action and drama, and every issue has been a hell of a lot more entertaining than any single issue – or any single story arc – of the New Avengers. Super-hero fans everywhere should check out this series – gay or not – and Bendis et al should take note: this is how you put together a good team book. I generally feel like a bit of a fool any time I crack and pick up a copy of a Bendis Avengers comic – I quite like Bendis and I quite like the Avengers, so how bad can a Bendis-written Avengers comic be? Oh. That bad. – but I can’t wait to read the next issue of this comic.

Spandex #4 is available for £3.20 (including postage) from Martin Eden. I assume it’s available from selected comic shops, too.

Snake 'N' Bacon's Cartoon Cabaret

2011-05-18T03:24:00.000-07:00

Fans of Michael Kupperman’s ‘Tales Designed to Thrizzle’ will no doubt enjoy this earlier collection of his work, published by Harper Collins in 2000, as it is pretty much the same sort of thing, and just as funny. It contains lots of short, surreal humour strips, starring many of the same characters who went on to appear in ‘Thrizzle’ – Snake ‘n’ Bacon (of course), the Scaredy Kids, Underpants-On-His-Head-Man, Cousin Grampa (AKA Robot Grampa, AKA Tumblin’ Grampa, AKA Stinkin’ Grampa, etc.) – lots of covers for non-existent comics – ‘Two-Tailed Fists’, ‘Doctor Terror’s House of Errors’, ‘Criminal District Attorney’ (‘You’ll never get me, copper! And if you do I’ll prosecute myself!’) – and some brilliant bogus ads – ‘Make big $$$$, teach your cat electric appliance repairing at home in your spare time’ (‘Aren’t you tired of your cat just lying there doing nothing?’). As in ‘Thrizzle’, the art is an odd mix of simply drawn characters and detailed linework, which adds to the surreal feel of the book, and the only major difference between this book and Kupperman’s more recent collection is that this book was published as a black and white softcover, rather than a colour hardcover, which means it’s a few quid cheaper and actually even more attractive to a price-sensitive / tight-fisted reader like myself.

I bought my copy of this book from the Book Depository, a couple of months ago, for £8.06 (including postage) but it has since gone down in price slightly, to £8.02. (Note: enter the code MAY11 at the checkout, before the end of the May, and get a 10% discount on any items available at the Book Depository!)

Dark Horse Noir

2011-05-16T06:54:00.000-07:00

I do like a good crime comic. Criminal, Sin City, Stray Bullets, 100 Bullets, Harker, Gotham Central - all favourites. Some of the biggest names in comics do their best work when dabbling in the murky underworld. Brian Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Brian Azzarello, David Lapham... they're always slumming it when writing superheroes. Their hearts belong in the gutter.

Short story anthologies are usually a much harder sell though. For every gem you usually have to wade through two or three dullards. I can't remember the last time I picked up an anthology book like this where every story was a winner... this one comes closer than most.

The book kicks off with a black-hearted Stray Bullets adventure, written and drawn by Dave Lapham, in which Virginia Applejack gets kidnapped and locked in a trunk by former schoolmates with a grudge... and seedy intentions. No previous knowledge of the Stray Bullets world is required, but this is still a great taster for that book... as well as setting the nasty tone for what's to come.

Other familiar creator-owned strips in this collection include Dean Motter's Mister X, Paul Grist's Kane, and an excellent Criminal short by Brubaker and Sean Phillips. All are worthy stand-alone stories that may well entice readers to check out the regular books. But good as they are, there's even better to be found here...

Highlights for me included Jeff Lemire's The Old Silo in which a destitute farmer stumbles across one last chance to save his land from the bank. The New Me by Gary Phillips and Eduardo Barreto (possibly the best artist here - though competition is fierce) sends a gigolo gym instructor to a revolting fate. Then Alex De Campi and Hugo Petrus give us Fracture, a dark twin to Sliding Doors which carries a sting in the tale for anyone stuck in the 9-5 drudgery of commuting to and from a thankless office job.

OK, not every story's a classic. A couple are pretty forgettable - including, surprisingly, Brian Azzarello's The Bad Night which leads to a cheap comic geek gag conclusion, though it's mitigated by excellent art from Gabriel Ba. Ken Lizzi's prose story Trustworthy doesn't really fit either - nothing wrong with it, I just always find it harder to read prose when its sandwiched in the middle of comic strips. And Lady's Choice, by Matthew and Shawn Fillbach is decidedly average. In such esteemed company, that proves its undoing.

I bought a new copy of Dark Horse Noir on the Amazon Marketplace for £4.04 (p&p included). It's since got even cheaper - as I write this, you could pick up a copy for £3.41. At that price, it'd be a crime not to!

Fear Itself #2

2011-05-15T03:01:00.000-07:00

Breakin’ the law, breakin’ the law! Yes, I’m breaking blog rules again to bring you a review of Fear Itself #2, which I bought on eBay, from seller Trusevich, for £2.50. That’s more than twice the maximum price (£1.20) I am allowed to pay for any comic published by a publisher with a Diamond-exclusive distribution deal, but as that £2.50 included postage and this $3.99 comic would have cost me over £3.00 if I’d bought it in my local comic shop, I don’t think that price was that unreasonable (it was certainly the cheapest copy available on eBay when I bought it). So, if you don’t tell anyone I broke the rules, I won’t, and once Fear Itself is over and done with, we can go back to business as usual. Deal?

Anyway, in the last issue of Fear Itself, the Asgardian gods, led by Odin, withdrew from their home on Earth and returned to Asgard after the Red Skull’s daughter, Sin, was transformed into someone called Skadi by a mystical hammer and released her ‘father’ – not the Red Skull but someone calling himself 'the Serpent' – from his tomb at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. From there, the Serpent sent out several more hammers to summon ‘the Worthy’, and this issue deals mostly with the summoning of some of the Worthy. Basically, several major Marvel characters – one of them one of Marvel’s biggest heroes, another one of the X-Men’s greatest foes – pick up hammers and are transformed into heralds of the Serpent.

I find myself with very little to say about this issue, as apart from a small segment at the beginning of the comic set on Asgard – which has seen better days – and a small segment at the end of the comic where Sin launches a Nazi-themed assault on Washington DC, the summoning of the Worthy was about all that happened in this issue and the whole thing read very quickly. We only got to witness three actual transformations, it looks like another transformation may have already taken place in another comic – unless writer Matt Fraction thought that one panel dedicated to that character in this comic was enough – and two of the more interesting transformations look like they will be taking place in Iron Man comics. This is rather annoying but I guess this sort of thing is to be expected in a crossover event, and apart from that, I don’t really have any major complaints. The writing seems strong and Stuart Immonen’s art, as usual, is very, very good. I may not have enjoyed this issue as much as I enjoyed the first issue but I’m still quite intrigued by the story and, as a long-term Thing fan, the fact that the next issue is titled ‘The Hammer That Fell On Yancy Street’ guarantees that I will be back for more next month.

Essential Super-Villain Team-Up

2011-05-13T13:11:00.000-07:00

The original Marvel Team-Up was one of my favourite comics growing up, but I missed out on its dark companion, partly because the book only lasted 17 issues, but also because it wasn't particularly well distributed in the UK, so back issues were hard to come by. The only comics here I'd read previously were issues 8 and 9 which were probably made available to UK audiences because they tied into a big crossover storyline in Avengers... which is also included in this book, along with a few other related comics.

The collection begins with a short run of Dr. Doom solo stories that appeared as one half of the Astonishing Tales comic back in the very early 70s. These are most notable for some excellent Wally Wood artwork in the first few issues that made me realise I need to check out more of Wood's work pronto. The 10-page stories begin well, as written by Roy Thomas, but when Larry Lieber takes over you know they're going to go downhill fast. He may be Stan Lee's brother, but creative genius doesn't appear to run in the family.

Following this, Super-Villain Team-Up kicks off properly... sort of. Curiously, before the regular comic began, two Giant Sized issues were published featuring Dr. Doom and the Submariner, continuing storylines from Namor's own just-cancelled solo title as well as explaining Doom's fate following his most recent encounter with the Fantastic Four. That's one of the biggest problems with this book - people complain nowadays about all the crossovers that make you read a bunch of different comics to understand exactly what's going on... well, Super-Villain Team-Up appears to be the 70s equivalent. Equally frustrating, the book can't ever seem to settle on a regular creative team, with no writer or artist working on the title for more than about 3 consecutive issues. As a result, while there are some very enjoyable moments here from writers such as Gerry Conway and Steve Englehart, nobody's given much time to develop their own plots with a definite beginning, middle and end. It says something about a collection like this when its best stories by far actually come from the Avengers tie-in comics by Gerry Conway, Jim Shooter and George Perez.

That said, Super-Villain Team-Up is not without its enjoyable moments - most notably Englehart's surreal spot of political satire that has US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger show up to broker a non-interference deal with Dr. Doom that effectively bans American superheroes from messing with his plans. I've no idea whether this caused controversy back in the 70s, but imagine Donald Rumsfeld or Hilary Clinton making a similar pact in the 21st century - that'd surely hit the headlines. There's also the debut and origin of the Shroud, a character who becomes slightly more interesting in later years, but is little more than a blind Batman here.

The book was originally cancelled with issue #14 (1977), but returned the following year with a reprint issue (#15) before a final two-part story was released in '79 and '80. These last two issues make for the best (non-Avengers) story here, and ironically neither Dr. Doom nor the Submariner stars. Instead it's a team-up between the Red Skrull and the Hate Monger (who turns out to be Adolf Hitler resurrected) in a quest to recreate the Cosmic Cube. Peter B. Gillis delivers a couple of interesting twists with solid, if unspectacular, artwork from Carmine Infantino and Arvell Jones.

I bought Essential Super-Villain Team-Up a year or so back on eBay for just under a fiver (including p&p). My copy has a creased cover, so I wouldn't have wanted to pay any more. It's still available on Amazonfor under a tenner, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless you're either a complete Marvel zombie or a glutton for punishment. I'm obviously both! That said, it kept me reading, I found it fun in short bursts, and I had no desire to bung my copy on eBay having got to the end... so it can't be all bad.

Wolverine 1 to 6 and Wolverine: Road to Hell

2011-05-11T08:47:00.000-07:00

I bought these comics on eBay a month or so ago because they are written by Jason ‘Scalped’ Aaron. ‘Road to Hell’ and Wolverine 1 to 5 contain the ‘Wolverine Goes to Hell’ storyline and #6 contains the first part of ‘Wolverine vs. the X-Men’, which is pretty much a continuation of ‘Wolverine Goes to Hell’ but with a new artist and a different story title. I wasn’t expecting too much from these comics, I don’t think, but I thought they might be fun, at least. In the end, though, I didn’t really enjoy them at all. Part of this was probably down to my fundamental dislike of the Wolverine character, who always seems like a bit of a prick to me, and part of this was probably down to my lack of familiarity with what is going on in the X-Men titles these days – I started to lose interest in the X-Men the day Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s run on the title ended in the early 1980s, finally stopped buying the Uncanny X-Men in about 1988, and have read very few X-Men comics since then – but mainly I didn’t enjoy these because they were pretty bad comics.

In ‘Wolverine Goes to Hell’, Wolverine’s soul is literally sent to Hell while his body, possessed by a demon, wanders around the Earth killing lots of people. The bits of the story set on Earth, where two Ghost Riders, the Son of Satan and Mystique fight the possessed Wolverine and try and exorcise the demon controlling his body, were okay, I suppose (although if I hadn’t read Rol’s recent review of the Ghost Rider by Jason Aaron Omnibus, I wouldn’t even know that there was more than one Ghost Rider and would have been even more confused, plus it didn’t really make sense that Mystique was helping them when it turned out that she had helped send Wolverine to hell in the first place), but the bits set in hell were laughably bad. Basically, the Hell portrayed in this comic is just one more death trap for Wolverine to escape from and not particularly scary, either. Worst of all, the Devil is an unimaginative idiot and I have no idea how he ever became so successful / feared by religious types, particularly with Hell so easy to escape from. In these comics, Wolverine literally beats up the Devil, and most of his old enemies / murder victims, with the help of Puck (yes, that midget from Alpha Flight), and then climbs out of hell (apparently, there is an exit, so if you have been a bad boy or girl, you may want to pick up a copy of Wolverine #5 and plan your escape from Hell now)!

I spent quite a lot of the time I was reading these comics wondering if I had missed something, as we never got to find out who had sent Wolverine to Hell, or why, until Wolverine #5, and I thought maybe that part of the story had happened in another comic – which is the sort of thing that happens in Marvel comics these days – but I don’t think that was the case. I still don’t know who the organisation that sent Wolverine to Hell are, although I have a feeling that they will be troubling this title for many months / years to come, but the revelation that the whole plan had been orchestrated by Wolverine’s dead dad was just the icing on the shit cake. Wolverine’s dad was the first person he ever killed (you know you are a prick when you are able to refer to someone as the first person you ever killed), was apparently not a very nice man, and he brought Wolverine to hell not to punish him, but to tell him how proud he was of the (bad) way he had turned out and to propose that the pair of them took over Hell and ran it together as a family business, which has got to be one of the stupidest plans any villain has ever cooked up. I mean, did Wolverine’s dad really think that his son would be grateful to him for dragging him to hell and giving all his old enemies a chance to fight him again?

The art here, by Renato Guedes and Jose Wilson Magalhaes, wasn’t that great either. It was okay in places and not completely terrible but there was something a bit amateurish about it, the women all had massive tits, and some of Mystique’s poses, in particular, looked like they had been copied from an issue of Playboy, even when she was riding a bike! (Note: the Jae Lee covers were all lovely!)

The art in Wolverine #6, by Daniel Acuña, was a lot nicer and the story marginally better, as at least Wolverine was no longer in Hell, but as I said earlier, it’s really just a continuation of the Hell story. Wolverine was back in his body, but the demon that had possessed him hadn’t quite left yet, so Wolverine spent most of the issue fighting the X-Men. I am mildly interested in finding out what happens next – although I doubt the X-Men will make the world a safer place and put Wolverine to sleep once and for all, which is what I really want to see happen – but not enough to spend money on any more Wolverine comics, particularly as this story will probably drag on and on and on. I am slightly more interested in catching up with what is going on in the X-Men titles at the moment, as I had no idea that Namor was now an X-Man until I read this comic and would like to see what Matt Fraction is doing with the characters, now that they are based in San Francisco, but I doubt I’ll ever do that, either, as there are probably too many damn comics for me to catch up with, I can’t afford to buy them all, and I would probably find them too confusing to follow even if I could afford them. (Note to Marvel: publish fewer damn comics and make them less confusing for me, please!)

Cost: These comics have a cover price of $3.99 each but I got them on eBay for £5.95, which wasn’t that bad at all for seven very recent comics (Wolverine #6 is the April 2011 issue), and hopefully I will be able to flog them on eBay for at least that and buy something a bit better instead.

Black Widow: Deadly Origin

2011-05-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

I've long been a fan of Natalia / Natasha Romanova / Romanoff, the Black Widow. She's a sexy Russian spy who would clearly have given James Bond a run for his money, complete with a chequered history AND a black leather catsuit. She's been an effective - and, at times, provocative - guest star, team-player and co-star in a wide range of books, yet rarely has she dazzled in a solo capacity. I'm not sure why that is, there would appear to be bags of untapped potential here... she's obviously just been waiting for the right writer.

Step forward Paul Cornell, who in just four issues gives us the best Black Widow story I've ever read, deconstructing the slinky, stinging sexpot as both a character and a concept without resorting to unnecessary reinvention. The story opens with an amusing spy spoof featuring cross, double cross and triple cross aboard a stolen space shuttle. Natasha escapes and returns home to a panicked phone call from her former partner Ivan who reveals "the Icepick Protocol has been activated!" (Frederick Forsyth would be proud) before being gunned down in the street.

What follows is a race against time in which Natasha must save the lives of her former partners (including Hawkeye, Daredevil and Hercules) who have been infected by deadly nanite technology as a direct result of their previous dalliances with the Widow. (It's almost as though their brains are being post-coitally eaten alive... in case you missed the metaphor.) Meanwhile the story flashes back to reveal key events in Natasha's history, contextualising them against the fall of the Soviet Union in the latter half of the 20th Century. Cornell demonstrates masterfully tight plotting here, compressing years of storytelling into four issues, while also leaving plenty of room for action (including a big showdown with the unsurprising enemy behind the plot to destroy all Natasha's former boyfriends). Put it this way - if Brian Bendis had written this story, it would have taken three years to tell.

Cornell's script is witty and exciting - it's the best comic I've read from him yet (shame on Marvel for letting him slip through their fingers to the Distinguished Competition). He's helped along by strong work from artists Tom Raney (on the present day adventure) and John Paul Leon (who brings rich atmosphere and smart design to the flashbacks).

Black Widow: Deadly Origin was part of Rob's Big Graphic Novels Haul of 2011 (which I'm sure he'll explain in more detail when he gets around to reviewing some of the books he netted). As a result it cost me just £3.00, which is an absolute bargain for such an entertaining read - it'd be well worth the £6.91 it's currently selling for at The Book Depository.

Scalped Vol.5: High Lonesome TPB

2011-05-09T05:12:00.000-07:00

Scalped Vol.5: High Lonesome introduces a new scumbag to the Prairie Rose Indian Reservation, down-on-his-luck conman of a thousand faces, Wesley Willeford. Wesley rumbles our ‘hero’, Dashiell ‘Dash’ Bad Horse, who is currently hooked on drugs and involved in a destructive relationship with the daughter of reservation chief / crime lord Lincoln Red Crow, as an undercover FBI agent and uses him to try and rob the Crazy Horse Casino, which leads to a bloody final chapter. In this volume, we also discover the origin of Indian-wannabe / FBI agent / murderer Diesel Engine, what happened to turn Dash’s FBI supervisor, Nitz, into such a mean bastard, exactly who killed those two FBI agents back in 1975, and who killed Gina Bad Horse back in Scalped Vol.1.

This series gets better with each passing volume and I have gone from being fairly indifferent about the first two volumes I read to being completely hooked, to the point where I now want to track down and buy (cheap) copies of all the previous volumes – which, like this volume, I originally got out of my local library – and buy this and all the subsequent volumes, too. I may have to buy a copy of vol.6, at the very least, as the copy I reserved at the library weeks ago appears to have been stolen, and it may be some time before they get vol.7, if they get it at all. That’s okay, though, as these books are released as relatively inexpensive softcovers, not fancy-pants hardcovers, and while it may not turn out to be a series that I want to keep forever, I’m pretty sure that it is something I will want to reread at least once or twice (if only to remind myself what is going on as new volumes come out).

Writer Jason Aaron has created an intriguing story here, and some sleazy but sympathetic characters, while regular artist RM Guéra’s murky, Eduardo Risso-like art is very well suited to the book. This volume also features work by guest artists Davide Furnò (who drew a few issues in previous volumes) and Francesco Francavilla, and I particularly like Furnò’s art, which always looks to me like someone inked some John Buscema pencils with a marker pen (but in a good way).

This has a Titan Books cover price of £10.99, but the Vertigo edition (the same book but without an impossible-to-remove sticker on the back cover) is almost certainly available cheaper online (I hope so because I might end up buying a copy). They may even have a copy in your local library, if some thieving bugger hasn’t stolen it.