Howard the Duck

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 Howard the Duck (Marvel, 2003)



When the late Steve Gerber returned to Marvel for a final, six-issue run on his most celebrated property, Howard the Duck, I remember being incredibly excited. I've reread the series several times and smiled and laughed but nevertheless closed the book each time wishing things had worked out a little bit differently.

I believe that Howard was the best American comic book of the seventies, and it still holds up extremely well, despite the aggravating aftertaste of the many sad years that followed for Gerber fighting for his rights as a creator. He and Marvel Comics stayed at loggerheads for years. It looked for a few minutes in the mid-nineties like they'd buried the hatchet, but the circumstances behind a one-off issue of Marvel Team-Up produced then proved unsatisfying to Gerber, and the incident ended with Howard and his human steady, Bev, spirited out of the Marvel Universe and into a witness protection program at Image Comics under the names Leonard the Duck and Rhonda.

About seven years later, everybody was friendly again and Gerber returned to Marvel for what would be a final six-issue epilogue for his classic characters. Back in Cleveland and working as security guards at a junkyard, Howard and Bev are desperate and just barely scraping by, but before long, their lives are turned upside down again by the craziness of life in the 21st Century. Bev's ex-husband Dr. Bong is back in town, and his latest gene-splicing scheme not only sees Howard's body changed into a great big mouse, but getting to the bottom of things will send our heroes to find the truth about boy bands, feel-good talk shows, Vertigo Comics, Witchblade and why it is that the Father always leaves the Son and the Holy Ghost to pay for the drinks.

The artwork on five of the six issues was provided by Phil Winslade, who had earlier collaborated with Gerber on the delightful Nevada. That character makes a brief, silly cameo in these pages. On one issue, Glenn Fabry, who painted the covers of the original issues steps in. I greatly enjoy each of their work a lot, and like how they pepper the pages with in-jokes and detail.

And yet... it feels bittersweet and incomplete. I really got the feeling that Gerber had so much say to say through and about Howard, even after the final chapter, which sees Howard grilling the Almighty about the purpose of existence. In a perfect world, Marvel would have greenlit a full series that would have ran for years, until we lost Gerber in 2008. Then again, in a perfect world, we wouldn't have lost Gerber in 2008. Recommended.

Slaine: Demon Killer

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 Slaine: Demon Killer (Rebellion, 2010)



With their fifth volume in the collected adventures of Slaine, Rebellion has entered the long-running strip's somewhat questionable period. There's usually something worth looking at in the series, and happily, "Demon Killer" and its assorted stories have aged much better than I remember them. It helps that Pat Mills' scripts were tackled by some tremendously good artists, but this is still the period where the rot began, and it's hard to approach them without knowing that subsequent episodes would be notably poorer.

The previous four volumes saw Slaine as a wandering hero, returning to his tribe in time to become its leader, and unite all of the Celtic tribes as their High King in opposition to an army of demons and beasts. The fourth book, "The Horned God," could well have been an excellent finale, but Mills found many more stories to tell and Slaine returned after about two years' break.

In "Demon Killer," a storyline painted by Glenn Fabry (42 pages) and by Dermot Power (54), Slaine reaches the end of his seven-year reign as High King and is ceremonially put to death, only to have the Earth's goddess Danu resurrect him for a mission in her land's future, defending Britain from Roman invaders. The story's peppered with very memorable moments, most stunningly its bleak tone towards the end when Slaine realizes he has underestimated the sort of atrocities that Romans would be willing to exact upon the native Britons.

The artwork is gorgeous, and the story in which Slaine and his wife Niamh are forced to find some compromise in their squabbling marriage by being tied to a tree is really funny. Best of all is a terrific scene in which Slaine first arrives in Roman-occupied Britain and is racking up a body count within sixty seconds.

All in all, it's quite a good package of twenty episodes, plus some pin-ups and a very neat bonus: a David Lloyd-illustrated role-playing game strip from the pages of Diceman. Sadly, the reprint of this game is missing a page, making it a little difficult to play, but I think of it as just a bonus and not essential. That's a good way to think of the book, really. It's good, but not outstanding, and the series' new time-traveling format really robbed Slaine of its charm. Recommended for completists, only.

Slaine Vol. 3

Speaking of reprints, in other news, I finally tracked down a copy of the third Slaine collection a few months ago. This, The King, was one that Diamond never saw fit to deliver to my local comic shop, along with Mega-City Undercover, which was released the same week. Fortunately, I found a copy at The Great Escape in Nashville in November. This is a really spectacular shop, worth driving a hundred miles out of your way to visit. The book reprints close to forty episodes which originally saw print between 1985 and 1988.

Much as Pat Mills has a story to tell, the star of the book is Glenn Fabry, who illustrated about half the episodes. When these episodes originally ran, it felt like there was one delay after another pushing back new Slaine stories. Fabry drew just a handful of the pages in the "Tomb of Terror" storyline, a 15-part diversion from Mills' ongoing goal of reuniting the warrior with his tribe. The bulk of "Tomb" was illustrated by David Pugh, and was accompanied by a pencil-and-dice role-playing supplement with each new episode. The RPG pages, with artwork by Garry Leach, are included as a bonus feature in the back, making this one of the cutest little extras that Rebellion has presented.

After "Tomb," there was a break of about nine months before Mike Collins and Mark Farmer took on art chores for a seven week, Zodiac-related serial. Then Fabry got the reins for the twelve-part "Slaine the King," which originally ran in two chunks over five months. Ever behind on his deadlines, and probably deep in debt with his local Dick Blick for all the ink he was using, Fabry's amazing work was worth the wait at the time and just looks better on these pages. The definitive Slaine artist is probably McMahon to me, but Fabry's a very close second.

It was originally thought that Fabry would be illustrating the classic "Horned God," to appear in the standard black-and-white with a color centerspread, shortly after the completion of the Judge Dredd epic "Oz" wrapped up in 1988. As 2000 AD changed paper size and increased its color pages, it was eventually decided that Simon Bisley would paint the epic instead. A little more than a year after the conclusion of "Slaine the King," four last black and white Fabry episodes appeared as a teaser strip and a three-part miniseries. These served as a taster prelude for the forthcoming "Horned God."

Around the same time, Mills and Fabry collaborated on a color newspaper strip called Scatha which was truncated by The News on Sunday's imminent failure. You can read more about that and see some sample episodes over at Bear Alley. Fabry also contributed a color pin-up of Slaine's enemy Megrim as a taster for his unproduced color epic which ran on the back cover of prog 524. It might have been frustrating twenty years ago waiting for each new storyline to get going, but it really resulted in some great comics. Even if you don't like the character of Slaine, this book is certainly recommended for Fabry's glorious artwork. Hopefully Diamond will treat your store better than mine and get you a copy quickly!

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday, February 05, 2009.)

The Sandman: Endless Nights and James Bond: Shark Bait

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



I never got around to buying this, but Marie has a copy, which promptly made its way onto the top of my nightstand pile before I shelved it with her other books. Released in 2004, this sees Neil Gaiman and seven artists new to his universe telling seven short tales about his Endless family. They're not all successful - Frank Quitely brings brilliant, beautiful imagery to a story that tells us nothing new about Destiny, Bill Sienkiewicz's messy, challenging layout ends up obscuring a very nice story of Delerium, and I gave up on Barron Storey's "Fifteen Portraits of Despair" entirely - but the four where everything clicks are genuinely wonderful additions to the Sandman story. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I liked the Milo Manara story a lot - I should probably reread all those Manara books outside of young eyes; it's been a while - but best of all is a great tale of Destruction, hanging out at a very strange archaeological dig. I've said before that Gaiman's short stories are more entertaining and fulfilling than his longer tales; don't let Endless Nights' position as "apocrypha" to the ten-book Sandman story encourage you to overlook this!



Speaking of books that should be read away from young eyes, well, the Bond newspaper strips of the 1970s weren't shy about a little T&A, but the first two strips in this collection are just full of Horak-drawn nudity, especially the title piece, in which Bond's KGB nemesis spends pages in just a pair of panties. I wasn't pleased with the previous volume and its implausibly outrageous stories, but things are considerably more believable in these three tales, which are much more grounded in rough seventies espionage. "The Xanadu Connection" and "Shark Bait," from 1978-79, were the last from the original series of strips which dated back to 1964 and never actually appeared in UK newspapers. The series resumed in the pages of the Daily Star in 1981 with "Doomcrack," which was drawn by MAD's Harry North. Overall, a very good volume, and, I must point out, it's got another great essay about James Bond comics, this time highlighting Dark Horse's troubled run and a tale never completed, written by Alan Porter, who knows a whole heck of a lot about 007's long, strange career!

(Originally posted February 28, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)