Bite Club

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 Bite Club (DC/Vertigo, 2007).



When Bite Club, a miniseries written by Howard Chaykin, first appeared in the mid-2000s, I dismissed it out of hand because it looked like pandering. Sexy vampires. If they're in YA prose books, then they're brooding, misunderstood young males, and if they're in comics, then they're aggressive females, usually naked. Make no mistake, Risa, the usually naked central character of the two miniseries, is every bit of a stereotype as Edward in Twilight. It just depends on your target audience. If you're writing for eleven year-old girls curious about sex, your vampire is Edward, and if you're writing for sexually frustrated twentysomething boys, your vampire is Risa.

I paused after I found a very, very cheap collected edition of the eleven issues of Bite Club when I realized David Hahn was credited with the art*. Hahn had, at that point, shown up a surprising number of times in some Bookshelf entries over the summer. I really do like his art quite a lot, and I'd probably enjoy looking at the work even beyond all the bare comic book boobies. Unfortunately, I chose to read it as well.

Oh, most of the original series covers were drawn by Frank Quitely. Some of them are cheeky and silly and those are worth looking at. Just not the text.

Bite Club is every bit as tired and tedious as I felt it would be when I first heard of it, and a lot of it is down to the protagonists who circle around Risa. The premise is that in this world, vampires are treated as an ethnic minority and have been running organized crime in Miami for decades. Just to show how much originality and thought went into this production, the family consigliere is an old Jewish lawyer who calls the young male leads "boychik." Well, of course he does.

But if no thought at all went into coming up with a Sopranos-with-vampires comic, even less thought went into crafting this thing so closely to the Vertigo template that it's practically a parody. Of course Risa is gorgeous, and a lesbian, and gets naked a lot, because this is a Vertigo book! Of course she comes onto the male protagonists, who are unsure and lack confidence about a) sex and b) vampires, who are just a metaphor for sex, because this is a Vertigo book! This hews so closely to the Vertigo stereotype that I think Chaykin spent more time seething about his contempt for the audience than he did developing the characters.

Put another way, when Risa is finally sent to jail early in the second story, above the objections of the rookie detective who has fallen for her aggressive, untouchable charm - and Lord, it's infuriating, the way the "nice boy" becomes so smitten with the idea of Risa as she makes the first move - anyway, when the narrative tells us that Risa is heading for jail, anybody who is unable to guess that Hahn will soon be illustrating an expansive naked girl fight in the prison shower has not read any fiction since kindergarten. It's that obvious, and that tiresome, and, really, not at all sexy and certainly not recommended.

*Note that, owing to poor reading of the credits on the part of this reviewer, the original draft of this review credited co-writer Tischman with pencils and Hahn with inks. I regret the error.

Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits

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 Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits (DC/Vertigo, 1996).



I've occasionally had discussions with people who just don't like black and white comics, and have spent their lives conditioned to think in terms of four-color spectacular super-fights. They don't like the look of color-stripped collections like Marvel's Essentials or DC's Showcases. The harsh reality of godawful, half-assed color comics like the old Marvel Further Adventures of Indiana Jones are lost on them. However, I'd read and reread the absurd, day-glow world of solid hot pink backgrounds and assorted flat yellow and green characters of those Indy books a dozen times before suffering through the eye-punching "Dangerous Habits," a pivotal, excellently-scripted storyline that saw writer Garth Ennis bring his mindset to the world of John Constantine for the first time. I received a copy from somebody on paperbackswap.com a couple of weeks ago, and my retinas are still hurting.

The real tragedy is that it looks like artist Will Simpson really did try his best on this book. The design and pacing are excellent, and it appears that Simpson and his inkers balanced the pages in anticipation of having them colored. Then colorist Tom Ziuko went to work on them and utterly, absolutely, ruined them. A random flip opens the book to page 82, where the entire page is purple. This is, from start to finish, the laziest coloring job that I've ever seen, with giant chunks of solid, dull colors dumped over Simpson's linework with no attention paid to what the hell is being colored. Simpson's a fine artist, and good Lord, this is an amazing script, but the book is absolutely ruined by the unbelievable hack job that Ziuko pulled.

And this is a huge shame, because "Dangerous Habits" turned out to be one of the best Hellblazer stories that I've ever read. It's a tossup between this, "Rake at the Gates of Hell" (also by Ennis) and that unbelievable one-off that John Smith and Sean Phillips did about the laundromat. I've always enjoyed John Constantine in theory, but the unreliable artwork and DC/Vertigo's unbelievably dopey job of collecting the series in book form - mercifully and at long last on its way to being corrected with the forthcoming reissue of Original Sins - has had me loathe to really dig into it. This, artwork aside, was definitely worth the wait.

This story opens with Constantine coughing up chunks of his lungs and seeing a doctor, who confirms that he's got terminal lung cancer and only a few weeks to live. Seeing the rogue trying to make amends with old friends and family while desperately looking for a way out of this mess, and really, really pissing off the devil along the way is amazing. Cheating death is Constantine's specialty, but the way he manages to step out of this nightmare - for now - really is a treat.

Obviously it's not spoiling anything to note that he doesn't die here - the comic has continued for about another hundred monthly issues since this story - but the resolution to this is just about the most audacious and beautiful idea that Ennis has ever come up with. I'd recommend this wholeheartedly and loudly, if only it didn't look so hotdamned horrible.

DC's mature readers line, which evolved into Vertigo, was always marked by bad coloring. The Jamie Delano/Steve Pugh run on Animal Man was similarly hideous, and a flip through this own book's odds-n-sods Rare Cuts collection shows many more poorly-executed color choices, including some more of Ziuko's wince-inducing work. The other day I was talking about how the filthy rich me of a parallel Earth has been hiring better artists to redraw Grant Morrison's comics. In that same alternate reality, Simpson drew "Dangerous Habits" balanced for black and white, nobody ruined his linework with this garish, dimwit color, and it's the best horror comic book that money can buy. So, recommended, but with reservations.

The Invisibles: The Invisible Kingdom

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 Invisibles: The Invisible Kingdom (volume six) (DC, 2000).



This book remains a massive disappointment to me. About two-thirds of it are absolutely blinding, some of Grant Morrison's very best work. And then we reach the climax and it is a complete mess. Most of the time, Morrison handles his finales incredibly well. This is one of those rare instances where he fumbles at about the two.

This last book of The Invisibles is the longest, reprinting the series' final twelve issues. It's set a year after the events of volume six, and starts with the three operatives of Division X, last seen in book three, finally making a break in their investigation of Sir Miles and the royal conspiracy. However, what these super-agents don't know is that Mr. Six is in league with the opposing, Invisibles conspiracy. Things spiral crazily out of control as King Mob, Jack Frost and Lord Fanny return to England and one member of Division X - the one who bases his persona on John Thaw's character from The Sweeney - is kidnapped and wakes up in a burning wicker man...

Actually, that this incident is set almost two and a half years after the last Division X episode just drives home what an amazing, parallel, series we missed while the focus was on the main characters. If Grant Morrison and Philip Bond, who illustrated these four episodes, would reteam for a good twenty issue run with Division X, I would buy the hell out of that series. Forget the conspiracy and the metanarrative, I just want to see these guys busting heads and having weird adventures.

So the first third of the book, drawn by Bond, is amazing, and the middle third, drawn by Sean Phillips and centered on 99 year-old Edith Manning, is transcendent. The installment where Edith, having come to India to die, spends her final hours with King Mob, is one of the most brilliant things that Morrison has ever written. Reading it again brought new tears. It's absolutely heart-hammering work, and the tiny flashes from ten years previous, with a younger, twentysomething King Mob looking for some kind of meaning, looking at the river with The Smiths on his walkman, about to have his life upended by an eighty-nine year-old lady who met his future self in the 1920s, suggest just how wild and amazing Doctor Who could be in Morrison's hands. (You think time is wibbly-wobbly when Moffat writes it?)

And then things fall apart.

A big part of the problem is Morrison's decision to let a freaking pile of artists jam on the climactic issues, resulting in a schizophrenic mess, and key, critical moments undermined by huge shifts in style. The absolute worst moment comes when King Mob phones the old girlfriend that we met briefly in book five. She gradually realizes that he's been very badly injured as, going into shock, he starts reliving a childhood memory of the last episode of a kiddie puppet show. Steve Yeowell draws the sequence, and does it brilliantly. I'm a huge fan of Yeowell's, and this might be one of the best things he's ever done. But then it's completely ruined by giving the climactic page of the sequence to Rian Hughes. Normally, I'm a big fan of Hughes, but this splash page is so jarring a shift in style that it doesn't look like it belongs in the same comic at all. It looks like an ad for British Telecom.

This keeps happening, with key moments either interrupted by a change in artist, or assigned to artists who make a complete hash out of things. Characters change their appearance every few pages, even in the middle of scenes. Yeowell and John Ridgway are the only participants in these pages who seem like they have a handle on even how to stage some of the action. There are others who don't look like they should have been let near a mainstream adventure comic at all, let alone one as challenging as this. There's a parallel universe where I'm filthy, stinking rich, and in that reality, I've commissioned Yeowell to redraw everybody else's bungled work and make it look consistent and good. (Parallel-me has also hired Cameron Stewart to redraw all the godawful art of Morrison's JLA, and hired Tony Harris to do the same to Morrison's run on Batman. Don't you wish we could have those comics?)

But while the art jam is a big problem, the script really is a bigger one. On the textual level, the villains' plans have completely stopped making sense - it all seems to be built around coronating a squishy tentacle monster as the new King of England, for some reason - and the Invisibles are going to stop it by doing something, and Sir Miles has been disavowed but suddenly he's back at the reins of things. Divorced from the subtext, it's just a rotten piece of drama, with confused motivations, and once a reader puts the fractured narrative into a linear sequence to understand it, it still doesn't resonate because it's incomprehensible sludge with too many characters.

But the subtext, the suggestion that there's much more to this work of fiction than we can see, completely overwhelms what's going on, and that's why The Invisibles fails right at the end. It's been previously hinted that the events of books one through six were the events that Ragged Robin wrote in a book, and then, rather than traveling back in time to experience as we were told, she actually entered her own fiction and interacted with her characters. By the end, we've added another layer of metatext and pseudoscience, that even Robin's participation was just part of a larger game, that basically people ten or twelve years in the future who read New Scientist every month have built a video game called The Invisibles which features a character who thinks that she wrote The Invisibles, who participates in the events described in her fiction, and, through the use of fiction suits (which people used to just call "writing yourself into your story," and sneered at), other... people... do... too?

The narrative is lost in this. Fiction, even complicated fiction, is most effective when the reader can enjoy the narrative at one level without being sledgehammered by the complex ideas of the other levels. The big climax here is one where both the structure and the meaning are intentionally obscured by the subtext, by the fractured style of storytelling, and by the poor mix of artists, who mishandle the material. It is a massive disappointment as well as a breathtaking experiment, and honestly, while having the whole thing drawn by Yeowell would improve things, as long as we're fantasizing, I think I'd still rather see a Philip Bond-drawn Division X series than bother. Recommended, but only because the first two-thirds are completely amazing, and readers can stop reading when the Sean Phillips artwork wraps up and have a fine experience.

The Invisibles: Kissing Mister Quimper

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 Invisibles: Kissing Mister Quimper (volume six) (DC/Vertigo, 1999).



So the sixth book in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles wrapped up the series' second "volume" of publication. This was a twenty-issue run that saw King Mob and his cell in the United States, working both with and against the hierarchy of their conspiracy and in opposition to the American military and a, frankly, dull as dishwater shouty general. He had employed a small man named Mr. Quimper - unlike the general, a fascinating villain - and Quimper had been slowly performing psychic manipulation on the protagonists, twisting the team leader, Ragged Robin, and influencing her behavior.

The artwork for this last run of eight installments was provided by Chris Weston, and while I normally really enjoy his work without reservation, this is not quite his best material. While it is certainly terrific, I found myself really disliking his depiction of King Mob, who wears such giant earrings that it actively distracted me! Otherwise, the work is just amazing, with wild dreamscapes and excellent figure work. I especially found myself liking the realistic way that he draws the characters to not look like standard comic book supermodels.

Overall, it's more wild, brilliantly constructed material, full of twists and turns and amazing surprises. Unfortunately for readers of the collected edition, a thoughtless bit of layout editing leaves a whacking huge and pivotal moment splash-paged on the right side of the book, instead of on the left so readers could turn the page and be shocked by it. Every so often, I'd like to have a word or two with DC Comics' collected edition department. Spoiling that twist by laying out that way, well, that's just criminal. Recommended, of course.

The Invisibles: Counting to None

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 Invisibles: Counting to None (volume five) (DC/Vertigo, 1998).



Four volumes of pretty darn good, if sometimes flawed, comics build up to this one. Holy freaking anna, this is an amazing read, and it starts filling in the gaps left in the previous editions to turn those into something wild.

The action this time out - the book covers eight episodes of the original run - centers around a magical device called The Hand of Glory, which the Invisibles' various conspiratorial allies have been passing around for years until it lands in the company of our heroes. Finding out how to activate the device, and what its powers actually are, require King Mob to travel back to the 1920s, the last known time that any Invisible had seen the Hand at work.

It's not just that writer Grant Morrison uses time travel here so interestingly, stitching together incidents from previous volumes that have their origins in the 1920s adventure, it's that he's able to make the characters so achingly human that some of these revelations just pounded me in the chest like a hammer. There's an amazing bit where one of the characters looks to one side and notices an old man and a teenager on a swingset, tying back to an incident in one of the series' opening episodes. The whole scene where twentysomething Edith enjoys some private time with King Mob, away from the rest of her gang, is absolutely beautiful, especially when he realizes what is about to happen based on what the ninetysomething Edith of the present day had told him some years previously.

When everything is in sync between his ideas and his artists, and that doesn't happen nearly often enough, Morrison executes his ideas better than anybody else in the medium. There is a really stunning moment when the 1920s gang activates the Hand and there's a sudden cutaway from what the reader expects to see to what would become of these characters over the course of the next few years. Instead of showing us what happens next, Morrison shows us their fates. The effect is a jarring thwack, akin to that heartstopping thundercrack in the middle of St. Etienne's "Avenue."

And heck, that all's just the middle of the book. When King Mob awakens in the present, the Hand is gone again. One of his associates has stolen it, hoping to trade it with the conspiracy of the other side for information about a missing relative. At this point, the plot gets deliciously twisted, with counterbluffs and double agents and suddenly, one of the book's original sales lines, "Whose side are you on?" seems like a newly naive question every third page.

Most of the artwork in this volume is provided by Phil Jimenez, and it is completely terrific. Well, I suppose I could quibble that he seems to give King Mob unusually large ears to show off his piercings, which Chris Weston, in the next volume, would really make look ridiculous. But Jimenez is given one challenge after another to draw, from glimpses into other realities to nightclubs in the 1920s to a gunfight with the returning villains the Cyphermen, and he knocks them out of the park. Jimenez is one of my favorite of Morrison's many collaborators. I look at how gorgeous the artwork in this book is, and can't help wishing he could have drawn all those Morrison superhero books that ended up looking so awful.

Anyway, this book is the point where The Invisibles really starts paying off. As much as I enjoyed the first four books, and said when they were being released how great it was, this is the point where it goes from very good to amazing. It's absolutely wild and wonderful, and flatly the very best long-form work to ever be published under the Vertigo banner. Pricelessly good and absolutely recommended.

The Invisibles: Bloody Hell in America

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 Invisibles: Bloody Hell in America (Volume Four) (DC, 1997).



The fourth and shortest volume in The Invisibles represented a last-gasp chance for writer Grant Morrison to refocus his plotlines and make his occult techno-conspiracy thriller a little more palatable for audiences who had been dropping the book during its initial run. After 25 monthly issues, the comic took a one-month break and came back relaunched with a new first issue ("volume two, number one," a common, desperate sales ploy in the industry that occasionally works) and a new regular cover artist in the reliable Brian Bolland. The plotting was planned to be more straightforward, with more pedal-to-the-metal action and gunplay to keep readers' attention.

The other new trick in Morrison's arsenal was the employment of Phil Jimenez as the regular artist, Rather than mixing up art duties for short arcs and one-offs, Jimenez was taken on for a dozen issues to give the series a more uniform feel. It works very well; Jiminez really does give this run of episodes a very personal stamp and his work is just terrific.

At any rate, while the story in the previous three collections feels like it takes place over the space of perhaps one month, this time out we get our heroes enjoying more than a year of downtime, relocated to the United States for King Mob to recuperate from his injuries in the previous episodes and begin a kinky affair with his teammate Ragged Robin. They've been operating from a safe house in upstate New York but need to travel to the American southwest when a local Invisibles cell gets decimated by the military while trying to liberate a supposed AIDS vaccine from a top-secret, high -security establishment.

I've always felt that Morrison's only real disappointment as a writer is that he often fails to establish his villains very well. He comes up with plenty of memorable, if not downright brilliant concepts, but every so often readers run into a shouty villain whose motivation is unclear and methods very vague. The general in charge of this facility, who's in league with the otherdimensional, weird, superconspiracy that we'd met in the England-based episodes earlier in the series, is one of Morrison's all-time worst bad guys, a loudmouth who is depicted without nuance or dimension. Oddly, around the time this comic was first published, Morrison had a similar, shouty American general causing trouble in the pages of the long-running JLA, which he was scripting. I guess with so many high-concept notions and characters to play with, including the return of the much more interesting villain Mr. Quimper from the previous episode, something had to give.

It's an odd lapse on Morrison's part, as the rest of the story is incredibly interesting, with several fascinating new characters and hints about Ragged Robin's still-secret past. There is a scene in a diner early on that tries a little too hard to appeal to Vertigo's outsider audience, but it gives us one of several really good Lord Fanny moments, so it's easy to forgive. As the low-priced reintroduction to The Invisibles that this was intended, it isn't a complete success, but it's not a bad read.

The Invisibles: Entropy in the UK

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 Invisibles: Entropy in the UK (Volume Three) (Vertigo, 1996)



So I've been rereading Grant Morrison's late-90s series The Invisibles and I had completely forgotten what a bear the third book in the series of seven is. It isn't at all bad, and compiled in one volume it's not too great a chore, but when this was first published, it really was an exercise in testing readers' loyalty.

At the end of the previous volume, two of our heroes had been wounded and captured by the enemy, a grand conspiracy of the British gentry with interdimensional beasties. Remembering that this was a monthly comic, there followed three issues where Sir Miles tries to break down the psychic defenses of his captive, King Mob, and get through an elaborate series of defensive fictions to find his identity and origin. Then there were two one-off chapters looking at the other characters before the protagonists and their allies reassembled to rescue King Mob. This took eight months in all. I really wanted to love this series, but this was a period where it was really trying my patience. It reads much, much better over the course of one week.

That said, the second half of the rescue story is really among the most challenging scribblings from Morrison's pen. Legend has it that the writer was suffering from a massive infection that nearly killed him at the time, and much of the narration reads like a fever dream. This is apparently one of several moments in the series where the fiction he was writing started influencing the reality of his life, and it's interesting to see how the story begins with Sir Miles and his associates injecting King Mob full of toxins to induce cellular breakdown and organ failure, and see how this creeping degeneration impacted Morrison himself.

Some of the visuals in the second half are a little disappointing. No matter how much I typically enjoy Steve Yeowell's artwork, there's no denying that he really was up against one of his biggest artistic challenges with some of the lost-in-a-void magic business of the story. Sad to say the result looks pretty flat and dull, particularly when weighed against the vibrant opening chapters by Phil Jimenez, the breaks by Tommy Lee Edwards and Paul Johnson, and a really terrific epilogue by Mark Buckingham.

This last chapter really renewed my interest after the previous challenging months had sapped it somewhat. It's a one-off which reveals that the schoolteacher from the series' first episode, who was later revealed to be a deep-cover Invisible with the code name Mr. Six, has a triple-identity as a government agent. He's one of three paranormal investigators in a recently-reactivated team called Division X. Continuing the Invisibles' theme of tapping into British media as visual inspirations, Mr. Six dresses like the '70s TV detective Jason King, and his colleagues resemble Regan and Carter from The Sweeney. They have a weird and wild case which visits a casino and uncovers a pornography ring for fetishes involving aliens and royals, and meet a very curious dwarf called Quimper.

I remember loving this episode so much that, when the monthly series took a brief hiatus before relaunching as a second volume, I would have been perfectly happy to see the back of the difficult-to-love Invisibles in favor of an ongoing Division X series. Fortunately, the more straightforward scripting and wild surface action of this episode would point the way to how The Invisibles would be handled in the future, and the Division X characters would be seen again. It's a good set of stories, albeit quite dense in places, and it just left me hungry to start volume four soon. Just, you know, after a short break.

The Invisibles: Apocalipstick

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 Invisibles: Apocalipstick (Volume Two) (Vertigo, 1995)



Oh, my. Is this ever more like it. Rereading the first collected edition of Grant Morrison's nineties series The Invisibles had been an exercise in frustration, with the writer assuring us that wonderful things were in store for us, but that we had to wait patiently while he set up a very complicated board game with way too many pieces first. I still think that he just plain did that badly, but after the spectacular mess that was "Arcadia," things improve greatly - exponentially - with the stories in this volume.

Having said that, DC's collected editions department, which seems to routinely manage twenty-nine belching mistakes for every moment of greatness, didn't win themselves any awards for the way that they collected The Invisibles. The first episode reprinted here ties up the loose ends and resolves the cliffhanger ending to the first book, and really should have been included there. Illustrated by Jill Thompson, it finally lets us watch the members of the team in their mystical, ass-kicking glory and it's a pleasure to read. Had it been included in Volume One, it would have ended things on a high note and left readers demanding more, rather than scratching their heads wondering what all that French Revolution time travel nonsense was.

Next, we've got the first moments of pure genius in the series, with three stand-alone episodes. These are illustrated by Chris Weston, Steve Parkhouse and John Ridgway, and flesh out the universe that we're seeing.

In any other book. Weston's and Ridgway's episodes would be duking it out for supremacy, but Parkhouse's is the runaway winner. It's called "Best Man Fall" and it's one of the best single issue comics ever printed. Period. Telling you why would ruin it. It's a tough guy lout's story, and it's completely captivating watching him try and hold a difficult life together, and if you're like me when I first read it - I was living in UGA's Family Housing at the time and for some reason, I felt like getting off the bus home and enjoying the sun and read this episode under a tree in the Myers quad - then it will be right at the point towards the end where it's revealed why you're following this character that you'll even start to wonder what his connection to the overall narrative is. It's so damn amazing that I clearly remember where I was when I read a funnybook almost fifteen years ago.

That, I think, would be the only real downside to starting The Invisibles with this book over the first. The payoff-PUNCH-payoff-PUNCH-payoff-PUNCH ending to "Best Man Fall" loses one punch if you haven't read the first book. So there's your tradeoff: if you start with the second book, you'll be more patient and understanding of why you might have to struggle through the first, but if you start with the first, then you get one extra punch from "Best Man Fall."

So anyway, Thompson returns to art duties as Morrison returns the story to the lead characters, focusing on the magical transvestite Lord Fanny and the international ass-kicker King Mob (Gideon) as the protagonists all try to track down their errant new member. Dane, the not-likeable-at-all audience identification figure, is mostly absent from this book, having told these terrorists to leave him alone at the end of the first.

This three-part chunk is really entertaining, and Thompson's art is much better suited to it than her previous work on the series. Despite the powerhouse story, the first episode reprinted here is a notable art stumble, with a bullets-n-fast cars pace that leaves her looking out of place. Thompson's much better able to capture Lord Fanny's present in a drag club and past in rural Mexico, and she pulls this off right at the point that Morrison's theories of time travel start to make sense.

In The Invisibles, and here's where it gets tricky, past and future are much closer to any point in the present than just about any other fictional construction (or world). Just as Lord Fanny is flashing back (for the reader's benefit?) and, shockingly and just for one panel, forward (for her's?), there's a grand page with King Mob consulting his eighty-something friend, Edith, about finding Dane and she makes a curious comment about she and Gideon having been intimate once when she was 26, long before he could have been born. I've said before, and I'll keep saying, that Morrison uses both flashbacks and foreshadowing better than anybody else in comics. Under him, they're two sides of the same coin, and he knows exactly where to place it, every time. When Morrison reached the payoffs - there are two, unforgettable - of this comment, I was literally in tears. It's that damn good.

The other thing Morrison does better than anybody else is cliffhangers. Part two of this story ends with Lord Fanny on her knees in one hell of a mess, and I think, when it was originally published, that the next thirty days were just about the longest in my life.

The book ends with Lord Fanny's and King Mob's stories unresolved, and Paul Johnson on art chores for a curiously low-key episode. This one finds Dane learning more about his powers and purpose just as the series' principal baddie, an ass of a toff called Sir Miles, catches up with him. At this stage, from the snatches we've seen in other episodes, Sir Miles is a real cardboard villain, and one of the series' few misfires. A scene in Ridgway's episode that sees him and his fellows unconcerned about a servant's death doesn't come across as monstrous or sinister, but unbelievable and comic. There's better in store for this character, but at this point, Dane becomes more interesting and sympathetic at the expense of Sir Miles. Also notable here, Johnson uses a really neat art trick to show off the manifestation of Dane's powers as we learn why the Invisibles want him to be called Jack Frost.

Overall... maybe I was wrong last time and readers really should suffer and struggle through book one first, but I think that it's almost what-side-of-the-bed-is-this close as to how I feel now that I've read both. I absolutely think that anyone who likes comics should read The Invisibles. Toss a coin and pick up either the first or the second book. Watching it unfold in either direction is an absolute joy. With, you know, occasional rough bits.

The Invisibles: Say You Want a Revolution

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 Invisibles: Say You Want a Revolution (Volume One) (Vertigo, 1994)



In the cold light of day, this is... a very, very flawed book. It's a story where I found myself apologizing for a full half of its contents for many years, assuring newcomers that it's "difficult" but it improves tremendously. That's not quite true. While Grant Morrison's Invisibles indeed improves hundredfold and presents some completely amazing stories by the time it winds its way to a remarkable conclusion in its seventh volume, this first book is more than difficult, it's a downright painful slog. Half of it is pretty good, a quarter of it is okay, and the last quarter is the pits, just dire. If I ever told anybody - oh, hell, I told many - to start reading The Invisibles with this book, I don't need to apologize for the story, I need to apologize to them.

That said, The Invisibles was a comic series written by Grant Morrison for DC's Vertigo imprint from 1994-2000. It ran for 59 issues which are collected in seven trade paperbacks with wildly divergent designs and no sense of uniformity, which I can't stand in book series. I suppose that puts me on the side of the villains in this tale. The Invisibles are a secret society of anarchists and chaos magicians who have been waging an underground war against... well, here it falls down a bit. Would it help if I explained that the villain in this comic is the same villain as in the TV series The Prisoner?

Mentioning The Prisoner is important, because much of The Invisibles' iconography is informed by British culture, particularly television culture. There are bits later on where we meet characters who are, effectively, Jason King and Detective Inspector Jack Regan, and a key moment in episodes two and three of the first story, involving baddies dressed like fox hunters, is pulled from the Avengers episode "Escape in Time." (The Invisibles is hardly the first comic series to pilfer Peter Wyngarde and Diana Rigg; just ask the Hellfire Club.) The first issue of the series, in which Dane McGowan rebels against his boring Liverpool life and vandalizes his school, features a teacher who echoes "Mr. Liberal" from a celebrated Grange Hill parody.

So there are lots of references which will appeal to fans of British TV, but readers unfamiliar with these programs will have a tougher time finding an entry point. Morrison structures this story in a very unusual way; the result is pretty tough to wade through. Having identified Dane McGowan, for some reason to be explored later, as their latest recruit, a British-based cell of magic-using terrorists and freedom fighters has to break him out of a sinister prison - slash - reindoctrination center and leave him on the streets of London for a few days in the company of a homeless magician. He gives Dane a crash course in a new philosophy before the cell is ready to take him on for his first assignment: traveling back in time to the Reign of Terror to rescue the Marquis de Sade from evil Cyphermen and bring him to the present.

To say that Morrison throws readers in the deep end is an understatement. The readers' identification figure, Dane, is a completely unlikeable jerk and most of the rest of the core cast don't even get introduced properly until halfway through this book and then this first mission is... well, it's a narrative mess and a huge miscalculation. That's a shame, because the series starts out pretty strongly, albeit uncompromisingly densely, before derailing.

The first four of the eight issues here are illustrated, gloriously, by Steve Yeowell. They contain some really amazing moments which are worth revisiting, and the fantastic way that Morrison uses foreshadowing and flashbacks means that readers who stick with the series do get to revisit them in surprising ways. There's a beautiful scene where Dane and his homeless mentor, Tom, are on a swingset and Tom sees a couple dressed in 1920s period clothing arguing. There's another great moment when a riot squad finds a grenade without a pin, and the whole series at its best is like this, a memorable story punctuated by unforgettable moments.

Yet "Arcadia," the four episodes illustrated, not as gloriously, by Jill Thompson, presents a mess that's far more dense than the story which preceded it, without the punctuations. The Cyphermen are groovy villains - like the Sheeda mentioned in this blog earlier this week, Morrison seems to specialize in creating Doctor Who villains for other projects - but the Invisibles' objectives in this story are muddled and unclear. Thompson's artwork - I won't criticize it overmuch as she's since developed into a quite remarkable painter - lacks the dynamics necessary to keep the events punchy, although she does create a really memorably grotesque image in the head of John the Baptist being used to power some phantasmagorial machine.

The problems here are mainly down to Morrison, who fails to sell what the purpose of the excursion is, and, among other things, what the darn head is doing as part of the narrative. While Morrison remains one of the most wildly imaginative voices working in comics, and often the most entertaining, he's inconsistent, and once in a while drops the ball badly when pacing a story's structure. During the climax of episode eight, bringing most of this book's events to some kind of resolution, Dane and his ally Lord Fanny are desperately fighting off an assassin in a fast-paced scene, while "simultaneously" in two other time zones, the other characters are involved in much slower-paced, almost languorous, dialogue-heavy sequences.

I certainly recommend The Invisibles as a whole; there are amazing sequences in the stories that follow this one. Honestly, though, I think newcomers might do better to start with book two, which I'll be rereading next, and plan to come back to this one after book four.

Joe the Barbarian # 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 Joe the Barbarian #1 (Vertigo, 2010)



The release of a new Grant Morrison comic should always be cause for curiosity. The release of a new Grant Morrison comic with competent artwork should be cause for celebration. After a few years of mainstream superhero features that look like the end of the world, Morrison has teamed with Sean Murphy for a new eight-issue series from Vertigo, Joe the Barbarian, and it looks completely terrific. I'm not familiar with Murphy, who apparently has drawn very few comics prior to this, but if somebody could get him to go back and redraw all those godawful issues of Batman and Final Crisis and the last Seven Soldiers that I couldn't follow and made my eyeballs bleed, I will gladly buy them again. This guy's great.

The story's nothing too spectacular yet, and that's probably for the best. The most disagreeable element of Morrison's recent comics is that there's far too much happening in far too short a time. We're never given an opportunity to get to know characters, and his artists never have a chance to establish a mood. Happily, the first issue of Joe the Barbarian is nothing but the establishment of the mood, a relaxed, slow burn about a kid living with his mom, dealing with bullies in graveyards, missing his late father and retreating to the sort of attic super-room that you wish you had when you were a kid.

What happens next seems to have elements of Kingdom of the Wicked, a very good book by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli from a few years back in which childhood fantasies, acted out with toys, seem to be reflected in a parallel reality. It looks promising if derivative, as Joe looks to be the savior of a kingdom made up of his action figures and dolls, but there's a last-page cliffhanger twist to that setup which had me grinning from ear to ear. Absolutely nobody in comics writes cliffhangers as well as Morrison. I can't wait to see what will happen next. Recommended.

Madame Xanadu: Disenchanted

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of Madame Xanadu: Disenchanted (DC/Vertigo, 2009).



Every few years, I think the lawyers at DC Comics have a minor freakout regarding trademark protection, and realize they're about to lose some characters unless they use them. If the characters are more known for sorcery than spandex, they'll let some writer pitch an idea and publish the result under their Vertigo imprint. So for the last twentyish years, the magic users of the DC Universe have all been isolated in one little ghetto where they won't bother the mainstream continuity much.

Don't get me wrong, Matt Wagner does this sort of thing better than just about anybody, and if you've got a little background in the universe that Neil Gaiman built in The Sandman and The Books of Magic, then nothing here will be lost on you. "Disenchanted" collects the first ten issues of Madame Xanadu, five two-part stories, at the incredibly nice price of $13. In it, we learn about the centuries-old conflict between the titular character, a Tarot-reading sorceress who was called Nimue in Arthurian times, and the Phantom Stranger, a moody weirdo who might, or might not, be the Wandering Jew that spat at Christ and has been acting as an agent of unknown forces ever since. (And who doesn't make half as much sense as when Jim Aparo draws him in a turtleneck punching somebody, but that's neither here nor there.)

Xanadu and the Stranger meet up in the English forest, in Kublai Khan, in the Reign of Terror, in Whitechapel and finally in New York in the thirties, each time getting Xanadu increasingly aggravated with the Stranger's obstinate refusal to explain his place in this thousand-year narrative. Gaiman's Death shows up, as does Kirby's Demon and Zatara the sorcerer and the Spectre, much as you might expect.

In fact, absolutely nothing happens here that's very surprising at all. The stories are as good as you might expect from Wagner, and the artwork by Amy Reeder Hadley is quite good, but it is a stubbornly inconsequential book, ending with the stage finally set for Madame Xanadu to become the Greenwich village fortune teller that she was when she was first introduced in comics thirty years ago, and, presumably, start some new adventures in the eleventh issue of her new Vertigo title. All this backstory is pleasant enough, but had I known that was all I'd be getting in volume one, I would have waited for volume two to start reading. It's a shame that Wagner and Hadley didn't actually start with Madame Xanadu's adventures in the present day, and save these little histories for interludes between the modern adventures. Recommended for Sandman fans.

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.

Time Lords and Showgirls

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Doctor Who: Agent Provocateur (IDW, 2008) and Nevada (DC/Vertigo, 1999).



In 2007, IDW got the license to make Doctor Who comics for the US market, and decided that six-issue miniseries were the way to go. They got Gary Russell, who's been writing Who novels for ages, and feature stories for Doctor Who Magazine since the mid-eighties, to be their first writer, and parceled his six scripts among four artist teams, only one of whom, Nick Roche, depicts the manic energy of the David Tennant series with anything approaching the job I'd like to see done. The other artists are at best passable.

"Agent Provocateur" is weighed down by a remarkably complicated plot and a giant cast of supporting characters, but where it is weighed down the most is in the dialogue. Certainly, Tennant is the Motormouth Doctor, but there has to be a better solution to accurately write for him than filling the most overpacked word balloons you've ever seen on a comic page, leading me to understand at last what the expression "tl,dr" means. Seriously, they were making editorial cartoons a hundred years ago that were easier to read than this mess. Not recommended.



Steve Gerber's fiction has been so important to me over time that, the first time I ever looked back at my own work and realized that I had unconsciously ripped off somebody's work for Marvel Comics - as opposed to intentionally cribbing from somebody like all kids learning to make comics do - it was this soul-crushingly embarassing eight-page proto-GMS Legion episode I did when I was thirteen. It had something to do with a character having a terrible nightmare for some forgotten but critically important reason, reminding him of some nebulous philosophical lesson. About two months after I wrote it, I realized I'd pulled it straight from one of Gerber's Adventure into Fear episodes about a nebulous philosophical lesson that I didn't understand then, either, but I'd somehow subconsciously come to understand that these were the sort of stories that comic books were supposed to tell. Ashamed of my theft, the notebook paper episode in question was crumpled into a ball immediately afterward.

Nevada has been the first Gerber story that I've reread since he passed away earlier this year. Originally published as a six-issue miniseries by Vertigo in 1998, and preceded by an oddball one-off episode in one of that label's periodic anthologies, it is the story of a Las Vegas showgirl and her pet ostrich getting caught between dueling cosmic forces with an interest in our reality, while the management of the hotel where Nevada performs deals with a rash of grisly murders.

Honestly, it's not a complete success. Episode five is really nothing but nebulous philosophical lessons, but you can certainly look at the many examples of Gerber working through his issues with our existence by putting comic book characters through an emotional wringer and railing at someone who claims to be their creator, and see a vision throughout his work quite unlike anybody else in the medium. While this stuff may be a bit heavy for many readers, Nevada herself is an oddly engaging character, despite her abrasive personality and distance. The police procedural stuff, from investigating the grisly murders to questioning a homeless, drunk former academic - a foreshadowing of the Dr. Fate revival he was working on when he passed - is really interesting stuff. Frankly, I found Nevada's cosmic resolution a small disappointment compared to the human possibilities and potentials that the plot promised, and I use "human" with the caution flag of one antagonist having a lava lamp for a head.

Nevada never returned after this outing; I suppose it didn't sell enough to warrant a follow-up, which is a shame. Despite her short shelf life and cosmic detour, Nevada was a classic Gerber character and we're better for having met her. Recommended for mature readers.

(Originally posted October 07, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Needs More Ezquerra

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Preacher: Ancient History (DC/Vertigo, 1998) and Strontium Dog: The Final Solution (Rebellion, 2008).



As I mentioned in Thrillpowered Thursday a few months back, I really don't enjoy Garth Ennis's Preacher and its uncensored, over-the-top brutality and ugliness, despite its wealth of incredible ideas. However, I decided to give a used copy of this a try to get even more Carlos Ezquerra on my shelves. The book compiles a mini-series and two lengthy special editions which tell stories of some of the main title's supporting cast. The mini-series looks at the violent history of the Saint of Killers, the first special gives us the pathetic origin of the tragic Arseface, and the last story recasts the loathsome Jody and T.C. as protagonists in a parody of an action film.

Steve Pugh is not my favorite artist, but he is perfectly suited to the violent western tale of the Saint and the incident that sent him to Hell. Pugh illustrates the first two episodes and they're fantastic, a studied mix of Western tropes and ideas that suggests he and Ennis would be well-matched on Jonah Hex. In episode three, the Saint awakes on the road to Hell. Ezquerra illustrates this episode, and man, does he ever bring his A-game. With the story now shifted from pulp Western to myth and fantasy, Ezquerra turns in some work that's so amazing that when Pugh returns for the final part and the return to the mortal world, it's an unfortunate and unfair disappointment. Still, it is a great story.

Arseface's tale, illustrated by Richard Case, is an oddly affecting parody of mid-90s suburbia, with outcast teens, uncaring parents and rock and roll. I'm not certain whether the story needed to be told, but I really enjoyed reading it, and any chance to see Richard Case at work is worthwhile. Ezquerra returns for Jody and T.C.'s story, and it's played for laughs. You can't call these two monsters "heroes," but the clever recasting of roles lets the superhumanly powerful jerks take control of a spiralling, ridiculous situation while Ennis mocks the tropes of modern action thrillers. If you enjoyed Ennis and Ezquerra's work on Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, you'll probably like this one.

Overall, I ended up preferring these escapades to the one in the main Preacher storyline. The collection is very reasonably priced, and the Saint of Killers story is so darn good that everybody should see it, regardless of your opinion of Preacher. Recommended for mature readers.



The story goes that in the late 80s, as the fight for creators' rights hit British comics, some of 2000 AD's talent and editorial and publishers all began crossing swords over royalties and loyalties, and it was decided that one of the comic's most popular features, Strontium Dog, would be cancelled and its lead character, the bounty hunter Johnny Alpha, killed. It was a traumatic event for many thousands of readers - see episode 2.6 of Spaced - and one which Alpha's artist and co-creator, Carlos Ezquerra, declined to draw, electing instead to work with Pat Mills on Third World War in the new biweekly Crisis. So Johnny's concluding storylines were taken over by writer Alan Grant and up-and-coming artist Simon Harrison.

There is probably a very good story in the mammoth, 28-part "Final Solution," but Harrison's artwork is so incredibly unappealing that we can't swear to that. To his credit, he's a novel and inventive artist, full of energy and the shock of the new. On the other hand, his anatomy and his faces are so poor, and his storytelling so confusing, that what could have been a great tale of Great Britain finding a terrifying solution to "the mutant problem" becomes a chore to decipher. It's a tragic missed opportunity.

At the time, "The Final Solution" was an even greater chore, as Harrison's workload only allowed him sporadic opportunities to complete the art, and his 23 episodes were printed in four chunks over the course of a year. There followed a thirty-week (!) break before the great Colin MacNeil was drafted to complete the story. So the last part of this epic looks remarkably superior to the first 100-odd pages. Rebellion has assembled the story in a very nice package along with three bonus episodes from old annuals and specials, including the incredibly fun story in which Alpha tries to collect a couple of bounties in Mega-City One under Judge Dredd's nose, but while it is nice to have a complete set of the original series in such nice editions, really, the only thing this book proves is that Strontium Dog without Ezquerra is like a day without sunshine. Recommended for completists.

(Originally posted October 03, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Rampaging Outlaws Nation

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Outlaw Nation (Image, 2007) and Marvel Essentials: The Rampaging Hulk (Marvel, 2008).



There are certainly elements of genius here, and the seeds of a truly great tale. For my part, I can't help but find Jamie Delano's Outlaw Nation, originally published by Vertigo in 2000-2002, a really aggravating read for what it didn't accomplish. The series concerns a family of exceptionally long-lived miscreants called the Johnsons, who reside here and there in the American badlands, and whose exploits have been fictionalized by one of their own, a cousin named Story who went MIA in Viet Nam and finally made his way home many years later to find out what a mess he left behind with his family and his writing. Pursuing them is a half-blood relation who goes by the name Mr. Gloves and is the most sadistic thug you can imagine. Unfortunately, Gloves and his Howard Hughes-esque father have a lot more resources than Story and his ragtag associates, and Johnson blood can keep the old man going for decades more...

It's not fair to Outlaw Nation to burden a writeup with complaints, but while I did enjoy it, and find it incredibly fascinating, I also found it very frustrating. First up, Delano made the very odd choice to keep everybody's dialogue very naturalistic, and none of the characters discuss their background or their place in this wonderful tapestry, until a very natural time to do so emerges. In some cases, this doesn't come along for quite a few chapters. One thing that comic books can, and need, to do is contrive an appropriate way to forward information to the readers as quickly as possible. Delano's approach is more realistic, but leaves much of the first few issues very confusing the first time through. Put another way, had I been reading this as a monthly, I'd have dropped it after the second issue.

There's so much threatening, without follow-through, in this book. I was actually reminded of The X Files around its third season, when every other week, Mulder would pull a gun on Krycek or the Cigarette Smoking Man and everybody would yell at each other, but all that Quantico training would vanish under some gobbledygook about Mulder's sister and nobody would get a bullet between their eyes like you were hoping. This is like that.

Anyway, after 15 issues, just when a new plot complication was introduced along with some new characters, Delano was told he was cancelled and had four months to wrap everything up. So the conclusion is rushed, and I can't imagine he was especially pleased with it, but I was quite satisfied. The full run was collected in black and white by Image last year, and very nicely priced. This was originally a Vertigo book, so it's recommended for mature readers. Not emphatically, you understand, but it's certainly worth consideration.



Why, why, why did I buy this? What was I thinking?

Well, okay, I know. See, around 1976, Marvel decided to challenge Warren, publishers of black and white horror mags like Creepy, Vampirella and Eerie, with its own line of black and white magazines, which included this title. I never read one, and now the whole fifteen-issue run is available in one book. And it stinks, but it was 30%-off week at Borders.

So the book gives you nine stories which recount previously untold Hulk tales set between The Hulk # 6 and The Avengers # 1, for all seventeen people in America who demanded those tales be told. Then, recognizing the success of the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno TV series on CBS, the magazine was rejigged to get rid of almost all the superhero elements, with only token weird science, lots of Banner being a sympathetic hero, and supporting characters including abused kids and elderly cancer patients. So there, half the book is retarded retconning of old Lee/Kirby material, stories so bad that Bill Mantlo later retconned the retcon into merely being a series of feature films on an alien planet, and the other half is the worst kind of mawkish million-dollar-movie melodrama. Don't buy this book during 30%-off week at Borders. Don't buy this book at 90%-off week at Borders, for that matter.

(Originally posted September 10, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Showcase Presents Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 2 and Sandman Mystery Theatre vol. 6

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews of Showcase Presents Legion of Super-Heroes volume two (DC, 2008) and Sandman Mystery Theatre volume six (DC, 2008).



This is the second Showcase collection of 1960s LSH stories and it's pretty fun stuff, although unbelievably dated. It's more than just the design, although that's quite problematic itself. The Legion's "clubhouse" - a mysteriously bigger-on-the-inside rocketship which is routinely drawn as not much larger than a port-a-potty - is probably the worst offender, but the whole book is full of these dorky 1950s visions of the world to come, where everything that flies has huge tail fins and interior cabins with a lot more open space than a rocketship would need. Actually, the fact that I've had to use "rocketship" twice in one paragraph probably tells you everything you need to know about how emphatically 1950s all this stuff looks and feels.

I'm a lot harsher on this than I should be; it's very much a comic for children and it's done with so much more enthusiasm and verve than many other DC books of its time. There's still a strong degree of innocence and ignorance in its presentation and pacing - rocketing to another solar system is done with as much complication and complexity as bicycling down to the corner store on a lazy spring afternoon - but you can tell the writers wanted to make something of this sprawling cast of characters. Around the same time these were being printed, DC was also employing a fellow named Robert Kanigher, who just proudly regurgitated the same repetitive plots and tropes in the pages of his comics. By contrast, LSH seems to have accidentally repeated the same storyline about the new member turning out to be a traitor, and you can almost feel the embarassment on the page, a sense that the characters know that their naive trust is not just misplaced, but exploited by their enemies.

Much of the book continues in this vein, and is of principal interest to people who've been LSH fans for quite some time. But towards the end, in 1966, things suddenly get very interesting when Jim Shooter arrives as the new writer. Shooter was a high schooler at the time, and I recall reading somewhere that he decided to pitch for LSH because he believed that was the book most in need of help at the time. I won't say that he makes a quantum leap in storytelling when he arrives, since he was, like, fifteen years old then, and the retention of these deathly-dull Dick and Jane illustrations prevents Shooter's vision from becoming "the shock of the new," but there's a marked and very interesting difference from what came before.

Across town, DC suddenly had a strong competitor in Marvel Comics, where Lee, Kirby and Ditko were crafting the best comics of the 1960s. That's where Shooter's mind was; that's where he'd later thrive. Shooter is much less wordy than his predecessors Edmund Hamilton and Jerry Siegel, using the comic space in a totally different way than they would. There are panels with only a single word balloon, with only a single sentence. That may seem unimportant to us, but after 450 headache-inducing word-filled pages, leaving as much room for the art as Shooter did really was novel. Unfortunately, the art is by the likes of Jerry Forte, Curt Swan and George Papp and not someone vibrant like Kirby, Colan or Heck, but at least Shooter is looking forward. (Actually, I see that Shooter actually did the layouts for these issues himself, and the final pages redone and inked by Swan, Papp and Sheldon Moldoff. Now that is interesting.)

The storytelling is massively improved. Shooter's emphasis is on the heroes and their interactions, rather than long-winded schemes of aliens who look like accountants and their thought-bubble recollections of recent villainy. Most surprisingly for the time, Shooter's three issues - a two-parter and a one-shot - feature bad guys who actually get away to fight another time. Baddies in these old DC Comics were always either arrested by the space police and taken to space jail, or they met an unfortunate end as a result of their misguided actions. I'm not calling this stuff essential or anything, but it's pretty fascinating from a historical standpoint, and recommended to people with an interest in books from the period. The next volume, set for the spring, will have a lot more Shooter and should be a real winner.



I did a writeup on Sandman Mystery Theatre a couple of years back, when four collections were available. Go check that out for more information on the series. The sixth book was released this year, and I'm a little ambivalent about it, to be honest. It features two stories, and the first is a real firecracker. It's illustrated by Guy Davis and in it, our hero matches wits with another costumed adventurer from the late '30s, a fellow who takes a drug that gives him remarkable strength and endurance for one hour. Davis's work is just amazing. It sure isn't pretty - he captures people at their most mundane and ugly, setting himself at a blissful polar opposite from most mainstream American comic artists, who just want to draw supermodels - but his pacing, his likenesses, his architecture, his use of shadow and foregrounding and period detail are just perfect for this kind of story. It makes you long for a feature film adaptation.

Unfortunately, it's paired with a second four-parter which has not aged nearly as well. "The Python" features early work from Warren Pleece, who has since done far, far better work, including Second City Blues for 2000 AD and the recent Life Sucks with Jessica Abel. His work here is very amateurish and while Davis draws good pictures of ugly people, everybody in Pleece's pages is just plain ugly. The story's not as compelling as I remembered either, although the stunning stumble in Wes and Dian's new relationship is the real draw, and not the mystery, which wouldn't fool anybody. But what disappoints most, especially in light of DC's breathtaking restoration of Starman, mentioned in the last What I Just Read, is how dull and no-frills this book is. This is not surprising, particularly in light of the last decade-plus of half-assed Vertigo collections, but when you know the company can do a bang-up job with nice paper, introductions, supplements, commentary and background, it's a little disheartening to see the closest thing to a bonus is the original periodical cover used as a chapter break. And heck, in Starman they just gave the original artwork without all the text and ad copy on the front. Here, they just laid the original comic on a flatbed scanner. Get it together, Vertigo!

(Originally posted August 15, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Constantine, Blaise and Rao

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. Today: reviews of Hellblazer: Tainted Love (DC/Vertigo, 1998), Modesty Blaise: Yellowstone Booty (Titan, 2008) and Sand Land (Viz, 2004).



In many of DC's contemporary collected editions, a little work on the part of some editors is sorely missed. This one, assembled before their line got so slapdash, is reader-friendly to the point of including an introduction, explaining recent events in the life of John Constantine, the powerful English mystic and con man, who, in these six stories by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, has hit rock bottom after his girlfriend Kit has left him. Constantine is easy prey for the vampires and demons who've got a grudge when he's homeless and drunk. I'm not sure that this is in any way a good introduction to the character - for Ennis-written Hellblazer, you want Dangerous Habits or Damnation's Flame, I think - but it feels like some effort and love went into this volume. The story about Kit going home to her sister in Northern Ireland is a truly beautiful piece of writing, glowing with a love of family and community. Recommended for mature readers familiar with the character.



Now I'm certain that all of you reading this have taken my advice and started reading Modesty Blaise, right? Good. Well, since there's very little continuity in the series, you can probably give this one a miss until later on. Oh, it isn't bad, don't get me wrong, but the second story, in which Peter O'Donnell gives a little too much credence to the "mystic powers of the martial arts" malarkey, brings an otherwise thrilling story of an old enemy springing a trap in Cambodia to such a damp climax that you can't help but feel a little cheated. Anyway, this reprints another 14 months of the strip, from 1978-79 and gives you the last two stories illustrated by Enric Romero before he took a hiatus to draw Axa, and the first one handled by John Burns, better known for his work painting Judge Dredd and Nikolai Dante. If you like Burns's painted art, you will really like his linework, which I find even more agreeable. Recommended for readers pretty familiar with the character.



Very, very fun stuff! Akira Toriyama is best known around the Hipster Pad for Dr. Slump, but he's best known everywhere else for Dragon Ball, a strip so phenomenally successful in Japan that it elevated Toriyama to the very rare position of being able to do whatever the heck he wants in comics and not have to sign long-term contracts to keep producing stuff every week in order to also sell the things his heart's really in. So from what I gather, he sold Shonen Jump the concept as a 14-week, fast-paced serial with a definite beginning and end. While I'm certain the magazine would prefer a 14-year Toriyama strip which they could then turn into a huge line of books, they ran the series in the summer of 2000. It's about a retired general in an arid wasteland ruled by a fat, corrupt king who asks a pair of wisecracking demons to help him find a fabled water source. The three of them steal a tank and make their way south while the military and some bizarre criminals try to stop them.

You can tell there's the background here for something that could have run a lot longer, but Toriyama resisted the opportunity for the long-winded "power-up" fights that made Dragon Ball so agonizing, and just kept to the meat of his story. It's lean, fast-paced and very funny, with goofball characters and unexpected comic twists, suggesting what Dragon Ball might have been had the pressure and the money not been so great as to keep him and his studio working on it so long past its sell-by date.

Wikipedia suggests that Sand Land has been the last comic project for Toriyama in some time, and the only one of his short post-Dragon Ball series to be collected in English, though I'm optimistic we'll see the mid-90s Dr. Slump Returns, But Only for a Little While after Viz finishes that series' original run. I understand he's wealthy enough to not have to draw comics anymore, but damn, he's too talented to stay retired, don't you think? Recommended!

(Originally posted July 04, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Golgo 13 and Doom Patrol

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



NO WAY. And this was first published in 1975?! Here's what I think: the first 150 pages of this book comprise a police procedural that starts with a multiple murder in 1946, moves forward 15 years, and then goes straight to HOLY FUCKING SHIT LAND. There are 26 stories to be found in the 13 volumes of Golgo 13 published by Viz. At least 22 are downright excellent, and then there's "The Serizawa Family Murders." Damn!! THANK YOU CARL HORN for getting these published. Now will SOMEBODY OUT THERE license the rest of these stories? I WANT MORE.



Well, it's a strange day indeed when the final issue of Doom Patrol, arguably one of the finest single issues of anything Grant Morrison has written and the conclusion to one of the two or three best American comics of the 1990s, gets knocked down cold-cocked by a thirty year-old Japanese book, but them's the breaks, Grant. Doom Patrol is sublime, surreal and surprising at every turn, but I think Vertigo really had their work cut out for them, as the last ten issues of the book formed one long continuity and there just wasn't any place to break it without making book five abnormally thin. As a result, this book starts one-third into an apocalyptic scenario without giving new readers a chance to catch up, lacking even a "story so far" page. The series is a work of complete genius and should be read by anybody who likes comics, but Vertigo's production really has been slapdash of late, hasn't it? They don't do the introductory essays and creator credits like they used to anymore. (I know what the great Sean Phillips is up to, but where the heck's Richard Case these days?) I'm willing to forgive any chance to get the final "Empire of Chairs" issue, both heartbreaking and life-affirming in equal measure, into readers' hands again, but they could have done just a little better on these editions, I think.

This book also includes the silly Doom Force Special, a needle-in-the-eye parody of Rob Liefeld's labored X-Men comics of the early 90s, full of intentionally awful anatomy, constipation faces, agonizing soliloquies and villainous ladies who wear next to nothing. Doom Patrol itself is absolutely recommended, but while you could pick up any of the first five books and get hooked, this one is best saved until later.

(Originally posted April 23, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

The Filth and some old Batman newspaper strips

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 reviewed this three years ago for my old Weekly Comics Hype, but this time around, I was not as engaged by Morrison's weird world than I had been. The narrative is occasionally very frustrating; I got lost wondering where some of the bizarre encounters with the Hand and its agents actually happen, and became aggravated by the multiple layers of the story. On just one level, it's one of Grant Morrison's very best stories, but it's too obscured by too many odd things to really resonate. On the other hand, some of the actual incidents are still pretty damn amazing, including one of the best death scenes ever, when Slade's fight with an assassin results in a neighbor getting... well, I shouldn't say. Chris Weston's art is amazing. Recommended if you like The Prisoner.



Oh, this is fun stuff. Originally published in 1990 by Kitchen Sink, Sterling Books last year reissued this in a low-priced hardback edition. It's the complete four-year run of Sunday Batman and Robin comics from 1943-46, back when the character was a detective adventurer for children, free from angst and the continuity of modern comics. Most of the stories are told over the course of two to eight dense pages, with lots of fun old art, mostly by Jack Burnley. Other contributors include Bill Finger, Dick Sprang and Bob Kane. The stories play like shorter Dick Tracy cases, and Batman's periodically lighthearted encounters with his foes are quite refreshing. They're not all whimsical, however. A great case where a "fortune teller" is murdered on a live radio show, only to curse his four killers with his dying breaths to cruel deaths of their own, is about as good as kids' entertainment can get. On the other hand, the old-fashioned art was an instant turnoff to the Hipster Son, who didn't stick around long enough to see Batman and Catwoman fight on the steps of the Parthenon in Nashville's Centennial Park. Seriously! Recommended for nostalgic readers.

(Originally posted April 22, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

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.)