Milk & Cheese

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 Milk & Cheese (Dark Horse, 2011).

This has got to be one of the most repetitive, one-note strips that I have ever loved, but it's not as though its creator, Evan Dorkin, doesn't know that all too well. About two-thirds of the way through this book, which reprints dozens and dozens of these short strips where Milk, a small carton of hate, and Cheese, an equally short wedge of spite, angrily, gleefully and indestructibly take out their wrath in gory, grisly, hilarious fashion against whomever has pissed them off lately, we come to one of my very favorite of all the strips. It's a simple one page story where Dorkin draws himself having a telephone conversation with somebody about how incredibly tiring it is to keep churning these ridiculous things out. There's no character development, no ongoing stories, nothing whatever that keeps an artist interested and invested in staying with his creations. "They barely sustain a two-page strip," Dorkin says, before recounting a clueless television executive's inquiry about selling the rights to the characters for a children's show, literally unaware that Milk and Cheese are foul-mouthed, murderous alcoholics.

I'm of two minds about Dark Horse's recent collection of the strip, which, heaven knows, was overdue for retirement a while ago. There have not been any new Milk & Cheese stories for quite some time, and, hopefully, this nice hardback will serve as the complete and definitive edition. I can't praise Dark Horse enough for doing this so well; it is a fine package, priced right at twenty dollars, and seems to contain every single published appearance of the duo, along with lots of bonus material. The reproduction is top-notch, on very good paper.

But, oh, reading these again. What is repetitive by the end of a single twenty-something comic book is completely exhausting after two hundred. About halfway through, I stopped reading and just looked at the art. I'm not sure that I missed anything; I had read these all before, years ago, and again, minutes previously. It's not just the same joke, it's the same delivery. Well, there are slight changes. In time, Dorkin seems to sic Milk and Cheese on particular subcultures rather than just society-at-large. The double-barreled attack on RenFesters is amazingly funny throughout, and he comes up with such ridiculous profanities and epithets that, even inured to the same-old violence, continue to get me laughing. I'm not sure that I've ever come across a funnier exclamation of shock than "Jackals of Botswana!"

It is quite neat seeing Dorkin's art evolve. He started out in the late eighties with a much thinner line and fewer solids, but he did not sacrifice any detail as his work tightened up. I really like the way that Dorkin is such a rounded cartoonist that his lettering is every bit as important as the rest of the material. I recall seeing one of his Simpsons comics for Bongo and feeling that it just looked completely wrong because the lettering was the Bongo house style and not his own.

In other words, then, it is a terrific collection, and one done with love and a sense towards pleasing the most anal-retentive and nitpicky of commentators. (I suspect, to be honest, that might actually be me.) But, much like a huge, 50-disc brick of a DVD set containing every single Three Stooges film, this is the sort of enterprise that many will start, but very few will finish. Recommended in small doses, with a couple of weeks' break after each chapter.

Hellboy / Beasts of Burden: Sacrifice

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 Hellboy / Beasts of Burden: Sacrifice (Dark Horse, 2010).



There's no getting past it; I do have a problem with this book's ending. I just didn't get it. I'd rather address it at the start of this writeup than end on a sour note, though, because it's otherwise a terrific book. I just didn't understand what happened after the climax. In this new one-off from Dark Horse, the paranormal investigator Hellboy - you know him; he was in a couple of movies and some very good comics - runs across the dogs and cats from Dark Horse Comics' latest minor sensation, saves the world with them and then... well, he leaves the woods telling one of them that he'd be right back and the pug looks at him funny. Hellboy returns to the farm where the adventure began and evidently decides against going back, and then the last page confused the issue even more.

See, the last two pages might have left me scratching my head, but the other twenty-odd had me grinning from ear to ear. It might not be the best Beasts of Burden adventure, but there are certainly far worse Hellboy stories. Jill Thompson's artwork is reliably gorgeous, whether painting cute little puppies and pretty wood landscapes or ugly tramp hideouts and golem-like monsters with discarded human skulls for heads. Her Hellboy is really great, and I love the sense of confidence he portrays, and especially the way the dogs scatter and scurry around him, little blurs of motion caught in freeze frame. I especially liked a very quick scene where Hellboy takes in his new allies with barely a pause and moves on.

I call Beasts of Burden a minor sensation, and I'd like to expand on that. Thompson and writer Evan Dorkin have come up with one of the best and most genuinely original concepts in American comics in ages, and have been quietly telling stories that seem to get a good bit of critical praise, but I don't know that this has translated into the massive sales that such a neat series deserves. We all talk big about wanting to reward originality in fiction, and wanting to see new and clever ideas that haven't been done before. There's a great big beautiful hardcover collection of the previous Beasts of Burden stories, and hopefully this little one-shot will prompt more of Hellboy's many fans to give it a shot. You should, too, if you enjoy horror or black comedy at all. It's a hugely rewarding and very good series, and I'm looking forward to Dorkin and Thompson's next adventures with these characters.

The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror # 16

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 The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror # 16 (Bongo, 2010).



Another year, another Treehouse of Horror comic. I typically don't buy these - even when I watched The Simpsons on television, the Halloween show was always one I'd skip - but Bizarro Wuxtry set aside a copy of this one for me because Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer contributed the 15-page lead story. Well, if it's Dorkin, I'm willing to roll the dice.

Really, these two did a terrific job on their collaboration. It's a wild and loving - if that's the word - tribute to Jack Kirby's monster comics of the late fifties, with scientists bringing atom-age creatures to Earth. Carnage, mayhem and gore results, as Springfield gets obliterated and the cast, knowingly wordy as these old comics were, gets decimated in progressively grislier encounters with the alien menace. There were a couple of bits where I thought it sailed a bit too far for my liking, but I'm an old fuddy-duddy and nobody cares what I think. Maaaaaatlock!

As impressive and funny as this was, it's one of several stories in the comic. Honestly, I think that the most entertaining tale is a 13-pager by Peter Kuper, which opens with Bart getting his eyeball stuck sticking out of his head when a wedgie from Nelson goes awry and becomes a clever parody of various Edgar Allen Poe tropes by the end. While Dorkin's Kirby pastiche follows a pretty clear, if hilariously blood-spattered, path, Kuper's story is an unpredictable mess and I greatly enjoyed watching it unfold. Probably not for younger readers, or the fuddy-duddier among us, but if you still enjoy the guilty pleasure of gruesome fates and unhappy endings, you may find some malevolent chuckles here.

Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites

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 Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites (Dark Horse, 2010)



I've been enjoying Evan Dorkin's wild comedies for so long that I raised an eyebrow about his latest project, a supernatural horror story. It didn't help that it follows a gang of neighborhood dogs - sorry, but dogs are my least favorite animals - and that it was illustrated by Jill Thompson, whose previous pen-and-ink work I've never embraced. Turns out I was quite spectacularly wrong on every front.

As for the artwork, it turns out that whatever I thought of Thompson's linework, as a painter, she is quite superb. Not only is her comic storytelling very clear and well-designed, but she captures the emotions of her characters very well. These pages really look terrific, and leave me curious to see more from her in this style.

Her style is the perfect complement to a fascinating, really intelligent take on horror which could have been very silly - the premise is ridiculous - but, played straight, ends up being very dramatic and occasionally chilling. A group of neighborhood pets is charged with joining a wide-ranging animal defense of our world from supernatural threats. That Dorkin is able to rein in what could have been goofy and turn it into something frightening really impresses me.

The stories collected in this book originally appeared as one-offs in various anthologies released by Dark Horse Comics before it got its own four-issue miniseries. Each chapter is its own stand-alone short story with various subplot threads developing the background and increasing the tension as the book continues. Probably the most amazing is a chapter in which a new mother dog comes to our heroes for help finding her missing puppies. If the last page of that story doesn't chill you to your soul, you're lacking one.

Dark Horse has done a wonderful job packaging this collection in a reasonably-priced hardcover. It's fleshed out with sketchbook material from Thompson and notes from Dorkin and just oozes quality. I highly recommend this for all readers, and expect to reconsider it in December as a potential book of the year nominee. I was very, very satisfied and am sure you will be, too.

Bart Simpson # 54

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 Bart Simpson # 54 (Bongo, 2010)



Sad to say that we're coming to an end of the big stacks of Simpsons comics that have been teetering around this house for years; only medium-sized stacks await us in the future. I told my son to make some changes in the various subscriptions that I finance and to have his mother pick up some slack from stores in Louisville - she won't, of course - and so he has elected to scale back to just one monthly title from Bongo's line. The bimonthly Bart Simpson got the axe and so we picked up our last issue, for now, from Bizarro Wuxtry in Athens. Not that Louisville's lacking a good funnybook store - their Great Escape branch is terrific - but I don't think there's any way in hell we can get his mother to send money to Athens for Bart Simpson comics.

I think it's pretty bad timing on everybody's part. Not only has the Simpsons' publisher, Bongo, finally got a website up and running, but the Bart title has gotten stronger with each issue thanks to regular contributions from cartoonists and creators not normally seen on licensed properties. I was unfamiliar with Carol Lay and Peter Kuper despite extensive credits in comics, but they both contributed really funny stuff in Bart Simpson # 54. Kuper's story, in which a firecracker explosion leaves Bart deaf, mute, color blind and an easy target for the unscrupulous Mr. Burns, is a real scream.

I'm more familiar with Sergio Aragonés, of course, and he has his standard single page comic in each issue that's always worth seeing. Evan Dorkin, best known for Milk & Cheese and his never-published-frequently-enough Dork!, also has a few pages, and, oddly, the only thing that I didn't like about them is the lettering. Something had struck me as "off" about the pages, and when Dorkin mentioned on his blog last week that deadline doom had forced him to turn in a comic recently for somebody else to letter, that's when it clicked. This is a really funny little story, but the trademark Simpsons lettering, oddly, just doesn't do the mayhem justice.

I think Bongo's line is a no-brainer. Three bucks gets you some clever little comics packed with in-jokes and silliness suitable for everybody with a funny bone. Happily recommended.