Best. Cliffhanger. Ever.

From Justice Society of America Kingdom Come Special: Magog #1, backup story by Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins

Thyear in Review, part i

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I haven't done much since joining this blog because I haven't finished reading much (in my approved area of expertise) since joining. Mostly, comicswise, I've been reading DC stuff I borrowed from Ben. But as I do finish things, I will be reporting on them.

In the meantime, I will present you with a three-part report on the best indie stuff I've read this year (although there is one Vertigo title included). Not all of it was new this year (if you expect me to only report on what's cutting edge, you'll need to get Fantagraphics and SLG and so forth to start sending me stuff for free. I'll be happy to pick it up at Comic Relief if that's more convenient for you guys.)

This issue we'll start with a look at a kids' collection edited by that legendary comix pair Spiegelman and Mouly:

Strange Stories for Strange Kids edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly

This collection wasn't as slambang awesome as I expected, but overall it was pretty good and some of the pieces were excellent. It's a good gift to introduce kids into comics other than Superman and Garfield. (Although, if they much read Garfield, please wean them to this as soon as possible. Incredibly, a book will soon be published. Sort of makes you rethink everything you ever thought about Jim Davis, doesn't it?)

Barnaby by Crockett Johnson

Strange Stories included the opening to Johnson's newspaper comic Barnaby. It's a testament to how much newspaper comics have changed over the years that I can't even imagine how this strip was published back then. But however it fit in the holes left by advertising, it's wonderful and brilliant and it's highly upsetting that Barnaby is out of print. I hope Fantagraphics, which is doing such marvelous work with Krazy Kat and Dick Tracy and even Dennis the Menace for heaven's sake will pick up Barnaby soon and give us the tale of a young boy and his chainsmoking fairy godfather in beautiful hardcover.

Complete Peanuts by Charles M. Schultz

Speaking of Fantagraphics's volumes of newspaper comics, we can't forget their greatest service, the reprinting of every Peanuts ever. Holy crap these books are beautiful and fun and sometimes even moving and yes you should buy them all for your personal library even given our current economy. No question.

The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories by Nicholas Gurewitch

It's borderline impossible to give justice to the broad expanse of PBF wickedness, so click this one and browse some more:

Before we go this time, let's look at some comics best known for winning some serious award in the field of lit for the under-18 crowd.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

This book reads more like watching a movie, and it's alternations between single-spread images and prose is unlike anything else I've read. It's bound to be an important part of the discourse on what comics is and where it's headed, so read it now and don't be left out.

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

This is a new addition to my basic recommendations for all people trying comics on for the first time. This book is astonishing and pulls stunts only comics can pull. Read.

I know these are just bitesized blurbs, but if you're looking for good reads, these will meet your needs. Expect more year-in-review from me soon.

I've Got a Horse in My Pants, and I'm Not Afraid to Use It.

I thought Sir Apropos of Nothing would be a good bet. Peter David, adapting one of his own books into a comic, yes? Peter David, the funny guy who writes X-Factor, wrote Hulk and an eearlier X-Factor and the only sadly forgotten 2099 comic, Spider-Man 2099? But it ended up being kind of boring. Except for the joke at the end about Stephen King's Dark Tower. Pete, you're slipping.

So I just re-read Grant Morrison's X-Men run. I like how when you read a Grant Morrison run on a superhero, you go from "that's so cool" to "that's... uh..." to "WTF is happening in this damn comic?" to "The alien brain rays have made me a man now, and I must father three-armed progeny."

This video probably explains it all.

Ultimate Iron Man

I wrote this a while ago for my comics column and didn't post it because it looked too much like nepotism. It's a review of Ultimate Iron Man by Orson Scott Card. Before I post it, though, I want to clarify for all the people who have asked that just because I work for the Orson, I don't agree with him on everything. For starters, Iraq, gay marriage, taste in music, and the true purpose of the goatee. (I say it's a sign of secret allegiance to Satan.)

Ultimate Iron Man

Besides the bladder-bursting special scene, Iron Man turned out to be a surprisingly good superhero movie. I put it up with the Spider-Man and X-Men movies, just below the holiness that is Batman Begins. Our good Chris Bellamy has covered the film in glorious style, so check out his review and let me give the nerd history. (There will be an exam later.)
Iron Man the 60s comic began with Tony Stark the weapons designer, trapped by the Viet Cong and forced to build a bomb. Instead, he built a suit of armor that would keep his shrapnel-laced heart alive. A wizened scientist helped him; someone who had gotten on the wrong side of Charlie. In the end, the old scientist did a kamikaze style attack to buy Tony some time before the armor came online, giving him the motivation he needed to continue fighting evil when his buddy died. If you saw the movie, you know it follows this tactic almost exclusively, replacing the Viet Cong with an Al-Qaeda/Taliban type group.
From then on, Tony’s heart is his Kryptonite and his billionaire playboy lifestyle a way to finance the many suits of armor. In the comics, his alcoholism has also dogged him, and recently, his tendency to run the superhero community like a President with unlimited vetoes.
Ultimate Iron Man is a very, very different take on the hero. It’s so different it’s amazing that it ends up in a similar place, but at the same time, it’s more than worth the read for a fan of the movie. In Ultimate Iron Man, Tony is born an Iron Man as the result of an experimental illness that infected his mother, and tries to survive life as a childhood genius on the run from the law. From the beginning, he is trying to take back the company that has been stolen from his father.
The childhood genius angle should come as no surprise, as the comic is written by a certain Orson Scott Card. You may have heard of him. (Yes, this is the hand that feeds me, and it tastes like chocolate.)
Since Scott prefers that his peons refer to him as Mighty Card, I’ll accede to his royal wishes. His Cardness begins the story with Howard Stark, Tony’s father. Howard has invited a rather attractive young geneticist to help with his latest project: liquid armor. Together they watch as the blue liquid is poured all over a test subject, who then gets smacked so hard with a baseball bat that it breaks. The subject is unharmed. Liquid armor, Howard explains later, is obviously useful stuff, but it eats into people’s skin after the first few minutes. The geneticist has come to help build better bodies to wear the armor—bodies that will regrow the skin that has been eaten away.
At the same time, Howard Stark’s ex-wife is scheming with his arch-rival, Zebediah Stane (father of Obidiah, Jeff Bridges the Dude in the film) to take over the company. While they plan their takeover, the now pregnant geneticist, having become Howard’s new wife, gets bitten by a test subject and infected by the virus she designed to regenerate body cells eaten by the armor.
The virus causes her body to regenerate to the point of killing her. All at once, she dies, the child is born, and the company is bought out.
Tony, the child, is freakishly smart due to the effects of the virus on his growing brain, and in constant pain as well. The only way to save the baby from the pain is by covering him in the blue stuff.
Howard, the father, takes his son and his technology and runs, constantly moving away from his company, which has now been turned against him. Eventually he seems to get the upper hand back when Stane is convicted, but a few more twists remain, especially since this series serves only as a prologue. Most twisty of all, Tony decides that his skin is not enough, and begins building himself an iron suit.
Although this is a comic with some convoluted twists and turns, the Card keeps the dialogue minimal, contributing only to the story and barely giving us time to breathe. I was surprised. From someone who makes a living telling stories only with words, the dialogue in Ultimate Iron Man is sparse. Sometimes it’s too sparse, as in the paragraphs where the black characters seem to be carrying on an entirely different conversation with Tony about race from the one they were having moments before. In those moments, I wish I had some of His Orsonness’ exposition about what the characters are thinking. But most of the time it’s a refreshingly quick read in a medium where writers rely heavily on dialogue.
There are some poignant moments that follow Card’s tradition of self-deprecating humor, like when Howard’s wife, just before dying, weeps at his assertation that he will never find another woman like her. “Idiots who get infected with a virus they designed themselves are a dime a dozen.”
The art is also a mixture of bad and good points. Most of the book is drawn by Andy Kubert, who brings a hulking dynamism to the characters, both good and bad, and whose perspectives are always brilliant, like in the scene where the blue-coated man flies toward the camera headfirst, baseball bat shattering in the background. Some of his details are a bit too sketchy or exaggerated, especially with the extreme close-ups he favors. But almost every shot is a risky, forced-perspective lurch, from claustrophobic facial shots to twisting around an expansive fight scene, giving one the feeling that the series is constantly switching between epic to personal.
The art takes a downturn with the change to Mark Bagley, who is traditionally a good artist for light, cartoony books, and good when inked by someone who gets his clean, bright style. Unfortunately, this is not a light cartoony book, and inker Danny Miki makes Bagley’s work look much too dirty. However, they do manage a brilliant moment where Tony takes his first drink and realizes the inborn pain of his physical life can be washed away… with alcohol. And thus begins life as a billionaire playboy boozehound.
His Royal Orsonness has a sequel series running now, with the very talented Pasqual Ferry, and I intend to pick it up.

Madman is Not My Friend

A couple weeks ago, Theric graciously lent me his Madman Gargantua, collecting all of Mike Allred's pre-Image Madman comics. I'd heard many good things about Allred and Madman over the years, so I was curious to check it out. I've read a little over half of the 850-page collection now and I must say, it's very good stuff. The charactes are zany, the stories are wacky, and the art is delightfully retro. And I won't comment on Allred's propensity for drawing the title character with a rather largish bulge.

So why is Madman not my friend? Here's the deal: Between Amazon.com gift certificates and a recent birthday, in the past couple weeks I've acquired a dozen or so trade paperback collections of DC superhero comics, which are now sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read. Madman Gargantua is gargantuan. 850 pages. And these are not pages with a panel or two of pretty superhero poses and a couple lines of dialogue. Allred's stories are packed with action, dialogue, and inner monologues pondering the nature of the universe. It's taking me a very long time to read this collection.

Meanwhile, those trades, collecting recent unread adventures of my superhero friends as well as not-so-recent adventures that I missed the first time around and will fill in the gaps in my encyclopedic knowledge of the DC Universe, and other adventures I've read before but am anxious to revisit just for the fun of it, call to me from the shelf. And I find myself resenting Madman for keeping me away from them. Which has led me to a realization: I don't read comics because I appreciate the literary qualities of the artform; I read comics because the stories in them are about familiar people and places that have been part of my life for sixteen years now. Heck, probably half of what I read is crap, as far as literary qualities go, but I read and enjoy it anway.

So I've decided to break my rarely-broken rule of finishing one book before moving on to the next, so as not to ruin my Madman experience with the anticipation of other things I'd rather be reading right now. I'll catch up on Batman and Superman and the Justice League, then get back to Madman when I can appreciate him for what he is: a fascinating piece of comics art and storytelling, but not my friend.

The snob treads on DC toes

Manhunter Vol. 1: Street Justice by Marc Andreyko et al

After a four year hiatus, I am back to borrowing comic books from Ben (thank for moving to California, buddy). And although I liked this first one okay, I realized (rerealized?) what it is I dislike so much about "normal" serialized comics. By being constrained to such a specific length, the storytelling tends to suffer. And then this collection just ends at a spot that makes the whole book feel like a prologue. What's up with that? A twelve-dollar-and-ninety-nine-cent prologue?

The thing is, there's nothing I disliked about this book. It's really just the nature of its form that gets under my skin. (Which is why I nover subscribe for or purchase single issues.)

That said, I'll probably borrow further Manhunter volumes from Ben (if he'll let me after this review). I just wish we could leave the Dickens Method behind in comics. You know: for me, personally. Because what I want obviously matters more than what the people who actually pay for these things want. Obviously.

Thinking of Astonishing X-Men today

Could Wolverine really survive reentry? I mean, seriously.

In Days of Future Past, he was killed by a simple shot from a Sentinel. Reentry must have burned all his flesh off.

How could his bone marrow get through the adamantium? Is there any organic material left? Space germs?

Help me out here.