Suicide Girls # 1

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Suicide Girls # 1 (IDW, 2011).



Most of the time, when a comic shop clerk recommends a book to me, I've got enough of a sense of decency to actually purchase that book from them, instead of doing something scummy like buying it off Amazon or the like. But a couple of weeks ago, I stopped by the Titan store in Woodstock to say hello to the manager, whom I dated some years ago, and - in front of my kids! - she tells me that she had thought about me when the shop received the first issue of a new Suicide Girls miniseries, and that I'd certainly enjoy all the nude pin-ups in the back drawn by Cameron Stewart.

So I probably should have bought it from that store, but, try as I might, I just don't know that it's right to go around buying smut from anybody you used to smooch. So I bought it from the shop where we always visit for Free Comic Book Day, since you can get more free stuff there if you spend some money, and couldn't decide what else I wanted to actually buy to get the desired amount of free swag.

We'll draw a polite veil on why the manager in question instantly thought of me upon seeing this comic, but we'll agree that I should probably buy something else from her to make up for being a bad customer. At least I have an ex who recommends me girlie mags; there's this one girl I once dated who has taken to pretending she's not white so she can "win" racial arguments on the internet.

Anyway, unfortunately, Cameron Stewart only inks the actual comic, which is penciled by David Hahn and scripted by Brea Grant. Stewart does contribute four pin-ups in the back, and the artwork is generally very good throughout. The story, however, really needs an electric charge to get moving. I know that it seems that critiquing the story of a Suicide Girls comic book is like kicking small, defenseless animals, but while this wasn't a very good comic by any measure, I've seen far, far worse from Marvel and DC lately. The plot suggests a world where, rather than being a fun soft-porn-led online community, the Suicide Girls are a very old, Illuminati-styled secret society of ass-kickers. The scenario's genuinely not far removed from Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. Seriously. The execution is, surprisingly, not quite so good.

I'm willing to accept the very silly rules of the narrative for its own sake. This is a world where a murderer - one of the heroes of the story - tattoos the names of her victims on her body, which is something only a very, very stupid killer would do. But okay, they do that sort of thing in Suicide Girls-world. There's a big multi-national religio-techno-conspiracy based around privatizing the prison system and so it's okay to kill the executives behind it. As with The Invisibles, the morality of the protagonists is shifty and their actions are ethically questionable but it's given a pass because the baddies are allegedly bad enough to deserve it.

I don't have half the problem with the narrative as I do the slow, deliberate presentation. Twenty big-paneled pages breeze by and damn near nothing happens in them. Brea Grant, an actress just beginning her comic-writing career, is sadly taking lessons from modern American superhero comics. All that happens in these twenty pages is that a small group of Suicide Girls break their new recruit out of prison and they give each other a little backstory. Maybe two of the six ladies get a little memorable characterization, but for the most part, it's paced in a similarly glacial style as almost everything I've read by Brian Michael Bendis and his imitators, with long establishing shots and lengthy internal narration from the imprisoned recruit, when picking up the pace and using more panels per page could have seen so much more story in this issue. Nothing happens across any six pages that a better writer couldn't have managed in one.

This leads to very disappointing results from Hahn, whose figure work, as I recall from his old series Private Beach, is really excellent, but, forced to only draw four or five panels a page, he's got no choice but to emphasize too much negative space. This is a story that mostly takes place in a dark prison and in a dimly-lit underground base.

I'm willing to be a little kinder to Grant, and give her points for trying, than I was to Joe Casey and Frazer Irving, whose Iron Man book I mentioned here a few weeks ago, because those two have been in this business a while and really should know better. I've got no objection to this book's concept, and am not going to dismiss it out of hand just because it's fashionable among comic book snobs to mock the Suicide Girls for being naked or having a booth at San Diego or whatever, but while it's not very good, at least it's different and it's drawn very well. I can't recommend it, but I appreciate the effort. And that pin-up of Radeo in the back. My.

Seven Soldiers of Victory Volume One

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Seven Soldiers of Victory Volume One (DC, 2010)



When DC first announced Seven Soldiers of Victory, a proclaimed "mega-series" written by Grant Morrison, I was equally excited and skeptical. The superhero publishers often promise that their big crossover epics will be both self-contained and understandable, and they invariably disappoint. The notion here was that, over thirty (!) chapters, Morrison would tell an intricate, interweaving story across seven 4-issue miniseries and a pair of bookend specials. The plan was that readers who only wished to try out one or a couple of the miniseries could have a fully-told experience with no loose ends or confusion, but readers who bought all thirty chapters would have a really amazing read, seeing plot strands from the various stories weave in and out of each other.

There was very little reason to think that this could work. Even accepting that this was Morrison, writer of most of the best superhero titles of the last twenty years, DC Comics just isn't set up to succeed on this level. Whether through poor editorial control or last-minute artist swaps or unannounced tie-ins forcing readers to buy extra comics just to understand what the heck is happening in the funnybooks they've already paid for, this publisher repeatedly drops the ball. Morrison was the architect for just about the only line-wide crossover that I can remember ever enjoying, the high-concept One Million, and DC couldn't even compile a collected edition of it without leaving out a chapter necessary to understand the story's epilogue.

So it was both a relief and an absolute shock to watch Seven Soldiers unfold and it turn out to be one of Morrison's five or six best stories, ever. It's amazing, wild and wonderful, and I find more fantastic connections and hidden treasures each time I read it.

The story takes its title from a 1940s DC trademark, in which seven wartime costumed heroes would beat up Nazis and protect the homefront from spies and saboteurs and fifth columnists. Over time, nostalgia-minded writers and editors would revisit the concept - Geoff Johns seemed particularly interested in it - revising the lineup and the details to fit the ongoing DC continuity.

In the one-off issue that kickstarts the epic, one of the aging, surviving Soldiers assembles a new team of seven wannabes to revisit an old case that his fellows had tackled in the '40s. (There's some comic book hocus-pocus explaining how said Soldier isn't well past "aging" and into "ninety-some years old," but don't worry about it.) This new team of Seven Soldiers meets a spectacular, unbelievable end at the hands of a brutal and amazing foe, a timejumping race of extradimensional insect-riders called the Sheeda. It's a terrific issue, illustrated by J.H. Williams, which does a great job setting up a new group of engaging and entertaining characters as the heroes and then one-ups them with the half-seen, stunning villains of the piece. Somewhere, there's an alternate universe where Morrison has been writing Doctor Who and using the Sheeda as the villains there and the whole planet is enthralled.

So, humanity's salvation comes down to a new team of Seven Soldiers, who (a) do not know that there is a mutual threat against civilization and (b) do not know that they are a team and (c) do not meet each other. Morrison's new Seven Soldiers are a mix of new characters who take the names of older DC properties, revamped versions of older characters and, at least in the case of the stage magician Zatanna, slightly new takes on existing continuity. Each gets a four-issue miniseries to tell their tale.

This new hardback collection of the first half of the epic reprints the Shining Knight and Guardian stories in full (illustrated by Simone Bianchi and by Cameron Stewart), as well as most of the Zatanna and Klarion stories (drawn by Ryan Sook and by the awesome Frazer Irving), along with the one-off introduction. It's incredibly fun. I had always reread each miniseries on its own between the bookends, but coming to them in staggered order like they are printed here reveals patterns and repeated memes between the adventures, tying things together masterfully. Zatanna and her apprentice visit the scene of a battle staged in the Shining Knight's adventure, and meet a man who is referred to in the Guardian's tale, which literally crosses paths with Klarion's during a chase scene on a New York subway line. This is perhaps my fifth time reading it, and I'm still finding new details that I'd missed before.

This is the third publication of the story, which originally ran as thirty single issues published in 2005. There was a four-volume trade paperback collection in 2006-07, which, in a rare attack of common sense, your favorite Hipster Dad did not purchase, and now this very nice hardcover. DC chose an unfortunately thin paper stock, but it's otherwise a nice-looking book, with a small section of design sketches rounding out the fifteen chapters. It's great fun, and ranks between All-Star Superman and New X Men as my pick for Morrison's most engaging and wild work of the last decade. Of course it is highly recommended, but now the next question is whether to dig out the next fifteen issues from their comic box, or wait until the second hardcover is released later in the year. Decisions, decisions.

Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye # 1-2 (Vertigo, 2009).



Well, this is a little more like a step in the right direction. Honestly, even hardcore Grant Morrison apologists like myself have to admit that he's been rudderless lately, wasting our time and his with impenetrable messes like Final Crisis, where every imaginative moment was lost in a tidal wave of poor transitions and incoherent storytelling.

Seaguy was first seen in a 2004 miniseries, one of three that Morrison did for Vertigo that year. From the beginning, it felt like there was a lot more to this odd world that he and Cameron Stewart had designed than we would ever see. There's no place in Seaguy's universe that's identifiably our world, instead it is populated by allegories and pastiches from our history of fiction and literature. Seaguy himself, bored and restless and longing for the adventure that the architects of his world had long ago completed, caught our attention because we could really identify with his energy and desire. Compare this to Final Crisis, where readers can't identify with anybody in the narrative.

Honestly, Morrison's been fumbling so badly the last couple of years that I wasn't confident he could pull off the new three-part adventure, but it works extremely well. From the bizarre reconstructions of long-dead monsters, made from bone and from twentieth-century household items, to the retired gladiator who refuses to miss a turn on an amusement park ride to the very concept of our hero being banished into a trap of a world that bears a strong resemblance to Carmen, there's a strong allegory about the nature of fiction, particularly modern superhero fiction, running under the bizarre surface of Seaguy's adventure. It's very like TV's The Prisoner, where Patrick McGoohan is playing a character who's more than just the fictional "Number Six." Everything in Seaguy is rich with multiple meanings and commentary, and it's an entertaining read from start to, well, middle. The story will wrap up next month, and I can't guess what will happen next. Whether you're just interested in the wild surface ride or curious about Morrison's meta-commentary, this comes highly recommended.