Judge Dredd: The Pit

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 Judge Dredd: The Pit (Rebellion, 2009).



In January, Rebellion released the long-awaited collection of the 1995-96 Dredd epic "The Pit." This 30-part epic, written by John Wagner and illustrated by Carlos Ezquerra, Colin MacNeil, Lee Sullivan and Alex Ronald, was the subject of a Thrillpowered Thursday entry back in 2007, where I explained it as a "change in the status quo that sees Dredd assigned to new duties in one of the Meg's remote regions, where rather than doing the job of a senior street judge, he's assigned to the task of sector chief. It turns out that the Dredd formula works incredibly well as an ensemble police procedural, which was a huge surprise to everybody, including the writer."

"The Pit" is remembered, not because of an outrageous, high-concept plot like many of the big epics of the series, but because Judge Dredd lends itself astonishingly well to overlapping subplots and unique, individual judges with their own perspectives on the proceedings. It's an important story which introduced two of the more interesting recurring characters of Dredd's modern cast, Judges DeMarco and Guthrie, as well as providing further details about the criminal Frendz organization which would be an ongoing menace for the next few years. The entire cast is made up of interesting, sympathetic characters, and as events wind their way from a search for a rogue undercover "Wally Squad" judge to an all-out war with a powerful mob kingpin's forces, through a sector house full of flawed cops trying to do their jobs, it's easy to get completely caught up in events. It's a terrific story, with fabulous contributions from some great artists.

Long overdue for this new edition, "The Pit" has been unavailable for quite some time, since Hamlyn's old version went out of print, and Titan, the next company to issue collected editions, never put their own together. This is one that Rebellion should definitely keep around, and promote to new readers as a fine introduction to Judge Dredd. Whether you're new to the character or an old fan, "The Pit" is certainly a story that every bookshelf should have.

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday.)

Dennis the Menace vol. 5 and Searle in the Sixties

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, reviews of Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace 1959-1960 (volume five) (Fantagraphics, 2009) and Searle in the Sixties (Penguin, 1964).



A couple of weeks back, I was mentioning how Monkey Punch's linework on Lupin III in the sixties evoked both Hank Ketcham and Ronald Searle to me. And here are a couple of books from these two. Fantagraphics has been releasing Dennis the Menace in two-year volumes for a while now, and I said when they started, after having my mind blown by how remarkable the earliest stuff with this character was, that I doubted it would be worth following beyond the fifth book. Well, the fifth book is here, and I was mistaken. I should have stopped at four.

True, I laughed three or four times reading this, and there are certainly places where Ketcham kicks his reliably beautiful inking into overdrive and pulls out some eyepoppingly amazing work. I stared at a panel of Dennis and his dad fishing by a gnarled old tree for at least five minutes, marvelling at how gorgeous Ketcham made that scene look. But I also turned past several pages with my eyes rolled, not popped, as Dennis says his bedtime prayers and tells Mrs. Wilson how comfy her lap is. Dennis may have started his career so remarkably menacing that he'd have driven that British kid of the same name running in terror, but five books in and this little scamp is more Walter the Softy, to be blunt. Recommended for cartoonists and artists, and nobody else.



Ever since I read the complete St. Trinian's book (your Hipster Dad's Best Book of 2008), I've been keeping an eye out for old editions of Ronald Searle's work, and found this lovely Penguin paperback at the Book Eddy in Knoxville. This is one of my very favorite bookstores, and I'm already looking forward to stopping back by sometime in July. Searle in the Sixties is a collection of illustrations he'd done over a four-year period for magazines ranging from Punch to Sports Illustrated, ranging from bizarre caricatures to travelogues of everywhere from Las Vegas to Paris to Sanibel Island, of all places.

Searle's love of lines is evident in every picture, and I adore how his focus finds the most comical element of any situation and draws attention to it. A drawing inside a burlesque show is not about the topless cutie on the stage, but the table of old codgers with their noses in the air looking at her. The material from European travelogues and portraits is perhaps even more interesting. Even if I don't know who some of the players are, I really get the impression that Searle has illustrated the Swinging London of Ready, Steady, Go! and That Was The Week That Was better than anybody else.

This book is long out of print, and according to the back cover was never available in the US "for copyright reasons," but you can pick up a copy from used book dealers by clicking the picture above. If you like art or you like the sixties, I recommend you do so!

Jack Kirby's The Forever People

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 Jack Kirby's The Forever People (DC, 1999).



DC was very slow to follow Marvel's lead with thick, cheap black-and-white reprint volumes of old comics. Before they started their line of Showcase Presents, they tested the waters with four or five volumes reprinting Jack Kirby's early-70s line of interconnected "New Gods" features. Unlike the Marvel books, and the later Showcase books, these are not simply straight reproductions from uncolored films, but they've been given an interesting grayscale wash, for lack of a better term. I think the result is really nice, and the book looks fantastic.

The Forever People first appeared in a bimonthly comic that ran from 1971-72. It features a group of superpowered teenaged hippie weirdoes from the planet New Genesis, a world locked in eternal war with Apokolips and its evil ruler Darkseid, to find one of their number whom Darkseid has abducted. Since humanity holds some key to Darkseid's long-term plans, they stick around to protect us from the villain's varied schemes.

It really was a fun rollercoaster of a book, and I surprised myself by enjoying it more than the "parent" New Gods title. Kirby only completed the briefest beginnings of his projected long-running epic before poor distribution and low sales prompted DC to cancel the books, but what you've got here is almost three hundred pages of wild action and over-the-top adventure, with some very fun characters.

This collection is out of print, but available from some Amazon sellers and stores with a good backstock. It's since been superceded by a four-volume series that reprints all the "Fourth World" stories in color and in their original publication order, rather than collecting them by title. Whichever edition you find, this comes highly recommended.

Albion

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 Albion (DC/Wildstorm, 2006).



In a perfect world, Albion would have been a mammoth hit, sparking a fabulous revival of the wonderful characters of British comics' silver age and bringing all their old adventures back into print. But I suppose in that perfect world, Albion itself would have been more memorable and impressive than it actually is. It's the story of missed opportunities and a comic that reads like the rough draft of something that should have been so much better.

A quick recounting of the plot kind of goes like this: Danny, a young fellow who loves the same old British newspaper comics that I do, realizes that a newly-apprehended criminal is the villainous old Leo Baxendale character Grimly Feendish. He joins the mob outside the police station, calls out the rascal by his real name, is grabbed and spirited off by someone who turns out to be Bad Penny, the daughter of Eric Dollman, and pressganged into rebuilding Robot Archie and joining forces with Charlie Peace in order to free Grimly, Mytek the Mighty, Cursitor Doom, the Spider, the Steel Claw, Faceache, Captain Hurricane and a host of others from the remote prison where the former Eagle-Eye Junior Spy and Zip Nolan are keeping them.

This should have been the greatest comic ever. It's nowhere close.

A really big part of its failure is down to Shane Oakley's art. He proves himself, via the flashbacks, to be a talented fellow, able to use multiple styles, but the main narrative is one of the ugliest comics I've tried to follow. There's a disorienting flatness to the characters, and distortion and curvature where we should see solid objects. It's not just that the page is two-dimensional, but rather the world the characters inhabit is equally flat. It's incredibly frustrating, especially when compared to the simiarly busy, Easter egg-filled world of, say, Top 10, when you consider how good this book should have looked.

But Oakley could have turned out a world as rich as Ha and Cannon's and this book would still be a mess, easily one of Alan Moore's weakest stories. Alan only plotted the book, and gave it to the writing team of his daughter Leah and her husband John Reppion to script. They're said to have improved remarkably since this initial stumble, and their forthcoming Sherlock Holmes comic is much anticipated. Somewhere between the writing and the art, so much is fumbled, and tired comic cliches are wheeled out. It even begins looking boring, with a standard early-90s Keith Giffen nine-panel page of the same repeated image of a single character, with minimal lighting changes, while two other unseen characters talk around him.

The list of apalling storytelling just goes on. Scenes abruptly end after two pages, regardless of whether they've actually reached a sensible stopping point. New characters are dumped into the narrative without explanation or introduction. This is an enormous problem throughout the prison sequences, most of which are impossible to follow without Damian Gordon's online annotations. It's simplicity itself to just have characters refer to each other by name the first time we meet them in each issue, or in the case of a dramatic buildup, tell us who we're about to meet. The cliffhanger to issue two is one of the dampest failures in the book, when a character who, after a little chin-scratching, we conclude is probably Captain Hurricane is dumped on us with no drama or sting.

Yet I think even all this could have been overcome had Bad Penny not been the most baffling, illogical character I've ever been forced to follow. Acting like she's come from evening classes at Unfair Warren Ellis Stereotype Academy, all dyed hair, chain-smoking, tough girl attitude and a refusal to explain the situation to Danny, not one word of their "relationship" is at all believable. It doesn't make sense for her to rely on and confide in Danny purely because he recognizes Grimly Feendish, and it doesn't make sense for him to stick around. If this is detailed further in the last episode, when we learn more about Danny, it sailed over my head, and I didn't follow Gordon's annotations that far.

Albion's commercial failure was unfortunate, but it did have a pair of nice legacies. DC/Wildstorm commissioned a pair of miniseries about old IPC characters in its wake. One of these, Battler Britton by Garth Ennis and Colin Wilson, was simply wonderful and it wouldn't have existed without Albion. Additionally, Titan Books released a tie-in collection of some of these old stories, Albion Origins, which I'll be coming back to in a few weeks. And the collected edition of this story does contain a handful of old episodes of some of these comics, even if the Zip Nolan pages are reproduced disagreeably small. It's not a complete failure, even if my personal frustrations are so high as to overwhelm any of the good that might be here, but I would nevertheless only recommend this to Alan Moore devotees who've already tackled almost everything else that's available.

Apollo's Song

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 Apollo's Song (Vertical, 2007).



Since Vertical has been doing such a wonderful job repackaging some of Osamu Tezuka's more familiar comics in the last year or so, I decided to give some of their earlier efforts a try. Naturally, I would love to own them all, and wish I had the disposable income to get everything they've released, but for now, I just settled on Apollo's Song, a done-in-one omnibus edition of a strange serial that Tezuka penned in 1970 for the magazine Shonen King.

Over 500-plus pages, we follow the story of a young sociopath called Shogo, whose unhappy upbringing has made him violently enraged by anybody expressing love, and who takes out his wrath on animals. The court sentences him to a facility where he's given electroshock treatment, and hallucinates that he's been sent, helpless, to appear before a love goddess who has her own sentence on him. From there, Shogo drifts to other lives in other pasts or worlds where he can learn a lesson or two about being true to his emotions, and understanding what loss really means.

It's a very strange, but very engrossing story. Somehow, Shogo becomes a sympathetic character despite everything he's done, and the worlds where Tezuka dumps the kid are fascinating. Oddest of all is an island where Shogo and a photographer are stranded, alongside a menagerie of intelligent animals who have their own surprising take on discretion while mating... sort of a reverse elephant's graveyard.

I liked this a lot, and was completely taken by each of the new worlds Shogo is sent. The artwork is terrific and constantly surprising, both in concept and execution - a graveyard in the future story is a complete stunner - and there's so much going on under the surface that any reader will find a great deal of subtext to reconsider. On the other hand, I was displeased that Vertical flipped the artwork to read English-direction. Happily, they've stopped this practice. Although possibly not the very best first choice for your Tezuka library, this comes recommended for older readers.

The VCs: You're Hit, You're Dead!

In other news, while Rebellion tends to focus on releasing collections from more recent properties or big name characters, every so often they do head back to the comic's early days and surprise everybody with a great book full of thrillpower from the past. Such is the case with this new edition of The VCs. This is the original run of 32 episodes from 1979-1980. Most of the installments are written by Gerry Finley-Day, with a couple of fill-ins by Steve MacManus. The art is principally by Cam Kennedy, who contributed the cover, and Garry Leach. Mike McMahon drew the first episode and John Richardson the last five, but everything between them is by Kennedy or Leach. Probably nobody finds that as interesting as I do.

Anyway, The VCs is a pretty standard war story, just dressed up with aliens and spaceships in it. There's the green rookie, disliked by his new crew, and ugly enemies you can neither understand nor sympathize with, and trapped-behind-enemy-lines stories, and callous officers who probably interact with our heroes more than any other company in the military. That's not to say it's at all bad, but I reread this while continuing a once-a-week reread of Battle Picture Weekly produced during the same 1979-80 period and darned if this series couldn't have been flawlessly slotted into that comic. If you enjoy this style of comic storytelling, then The VCs will certainly please you, even if it's only rarely eye-opening.

Actually, I should probably qualify that: if you're coming to this from an American background, there's a lot more to this than simply "another war comic." I grew up reading DC's Sgt. Rock and The Haunted Tank, and later Marvel's G.I. Joe, with their casts of unkillable regular characters. Compared to these, British war comics are a complete revelation, with surprising fatalities among the cast. Any new reader coming to this collection will probably be pretty surprised by this story as it progresses.

There were 32 episodes of The VCs, but this is a pretty slim book, since the episodes were an unusually short 3-4 pages a week. It runs a little light on extras, since there were so few from the period. The strip was spotlighted on 2000 AD's cover only once, and there was a single star scan of the lead cast a few weeks after it finished, and those are included, but there are no other contributions from the period from any of the creators. In lieu of blank pages filling up too much of the back, the first episode of Finley-Day's better-known future war series, Rogue Trooper is included, but honestly, I'm hard pressed to imagine anybody buying this collection who hasn't already read the first Rogue episode plenty of times already. That's not to say that I don't think potential readers are out there, and I hope you'll give it a read, just that I'm not really sure this was the best use of the pages in the back when a new interview would have been very nice.

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday.)

James Bond: Polestar

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 James Bond: Polestar (volume seventeen) (Titan, 2008).



At last, we've reached the end of Titan's reprints of the James Bond newspaper strip. Well, not quite... while this edition finishes up the run with the strip's final two stories from British papers, and three others which had only seen print in Europe, Titan was forced to skip over two books which should have reprinted 1970s adventures because of some unspecified problem or other, and those are due out later on. But arranged sequentially, this is book seventeen, even though it's the fifteenth published.

You can tell I don't have a lot to say about this one, can't you? There's just so little of interest here. Lawrence's work on the strip was frequently patchy, with clever ideas offset by downright dumb ones, but there's nothing in these five stories worth remembering. The artwork is uninspired and even the reliable Yaroslav Horak, returning for his first Bond stories in many years, was on autopilot. The villainous schemes are eye-rollingly silly and the plots are childishly simple.

Put another way, the baddie in the title story disposes of his enemies by stripping them naked and kicking them into the arctic snow to freeze to death. But they somehow die standing up, so that Bond can find gorgeous naked ladies in blocks of ice. Add to this trained attack bats and fake sea serpents and a "punk" rock star who wouldn't have been out of place on Quincy but commands the biggest worldwide audience you ever saw, and I can't even recommend this mess to Bond fans, only completists.