Ennis, et al. | THE BOYS & HEROGASM
By Tyler Curtain
Like the comic it reviews, this piece contains a good deal of profanity.
First, a bit of backstory. It’s almost 2010 and by my watch we’re nearly twenty five years into the trope that superheroes are bastards. Or, if not bastards exactly, then at least more like us than us--and therefore, for what it’s worth, bastards. If for the ancients the gods started out powerful, though petty and small, in the early part of the last century, our paper gods started out larger-than-life and good, and all the more powerful for it. Morality tales in black-and-white are rarely compelling, however. Now we have reverted to the tropes of the ancients and draw our heroes petty and small. Isn’t that one of Alan Moore’s more convincing twists of the tale in Watchmen? The conflicts, and thus the narrative arcs, of Golden Age Superman’s stories were generated by the Kryptonian’s commitment to the his ideals, which is itself the source of many problems in a fallen human world. Superman’s creators, Siegel and Shuster, wanted a costume drama about social justice and the defeat of corruption. An early avatar of left liberalism’s rage and moral strength, Superman’s crisp lines and tight suit cut sharply and satisfyingly across the early twentieth century America’s fears about rapacious capitalism and a gangster-faced underworld alike. The 1930s ethos was, of course, that crime doesn’t pay, and the James Cagney character gets it in the end. Perhaps more importantly, Superman was the hand of that justice. It’s a sociology where need or want doesn’t drive one to crime, but failures of character and chance. It’s a working class vision of what it takes to fight the world and win. People ate it up.
Webcomics of the Month (August)
Mann & Lewis | SOME NEW KIND OF SLAUGHTER
By Elizabeth Hewitt
I wanted to love this book. Despite its absurdly byzantine title, I was delighted by the conceit of spinning a tale around the variety of diluvian myths used to describe godly disappointment with human life. A quick glimpse through its pages revealed the gorgeous art and style that I’ve come to expect from Archaia. I ripped it from Mr. Guttergeek’s hands and announced, “I’ll review it. Let me review it!”
Rapp and O'Connor, BALL PEEN HAMMER
By Jared Gardner
First things first: if you’ve gotten in the habit of picking up the latest First Second trade for the literate young comics fan in your life, stop right now! This one is adults-only. Rapp’s dystopian urban wasteland drama is ugly, brutal and deeply sad. It is also very, very good. But as a dad who regularly lets his kids read all kinds of things that makes my local comic book retailer blanche and contemplate calling social services on me pretty much every time I’m in the store, I will not be passing this one on their way. True: they have read more violent post-apocalyptic books (Walking Dead, Wasteland, DMZ, Y: The Last Man... actually, that’s pretty much all they read). But all those titles are centered around a kernel, however sugary and translucent, of hope--in the future of the characters, in human nature, in an ultimate turning of the tides. Not Ball Penn Hammer. This is a sad one-act graphic drama that ultimately feels like far too convincing a portrait of what our lives would be like if all the things likely to go horribly wrong really do go horribly wrong. It’s enough to make me look for something new to recycle or a tree to hug.
continued...Johns, et al | BLACKEST NIGHT
By Alex Boney
There are many very good reasons to be skeptical of the Blackest Night storyline currently unfolding in the DC Comics Universe. One reason is that Blackest Night has turned from a relatively contained story running through the Green Lantern titles into a much larger crossover event stretching through much of the DCU. In the Free Comic Book Day Blackest Night #0, writer Geoff Johns admits as much: “I know that comics dubbed events can disappoint, both on a retail level and a fan level. I know the frustration of delays and accessibility” (p. 13). It’s not just delays and accessibility that plague crossover events, though. In recent years, comic book readers have been compelled to buy scores of tie-in books more out of obligation and completism than enjoyment. But the main reason why I was skeptical of Blackest Night is that its central focus is death. Death is essentially a revolving door in mainstream superhero comic books—a cliché that readers now meet more with a collective roll of the eyes than with shock or loss. It has become difficult to take characters’ deaths (and inevitable resurrections) seriously. But if there is one mainstream comics writer I trust to make an event comic book about death meaningful, it’s Geoff Johns. Thus far, Johns and the crew he has with him have managed to turn my skepticism and cynicism into excitement and pleasant surprise. Halloween II may be hitting theaters in a couple weeks, but Blackest Night is already the most important pop-culture horror story of the summer. Because it’s more than just a horror story, just as it’s (hopefully) more than just an event. At its core, this series actually has the potential to redefine life in mainstream superhero comics.
continued...Stark & Cooke | THE HUNTER
By Jared Gardner
In the dog days of summer I generally go on a crime spree, and I’m delighted to see plenty of new crime comics out there this season of which to partake (in the coming days and weeks, I’ll be surveying a few of them). By far the most glamorous new crime book this summer is the story of one of the least glamorous criminals in the history of hardboiled fiction: Richard Stark’s (Donald Westlake) Parker. If you’ve never read a Parker novel, you probably still know the character, albeit by a different name. From Lee Marvin’s “Walker” in the 1967 John Boorman film, Point Blank to Mel Gibson’s “Porter” in the 1999 mess, Payback, Parker has been adapted many times, but never under his proper name (only fitting, perhaps, since the man spends much of his time in his novels under an alias). However, right before his death in 2008, Westlake agreed to let Darwyn Cooke adapt the Parker series straight. With The Hunter, released this summer from IDW, Cooke begins what promises to be the first in a gorgeous series of adaptations, with The Hunter.
Lefévre, Guibert, et al. | THE PHOTOGRAPHER
By Jared Gardner
I have spent a long time thinking about how best to review this book, so long that it is in fact now been out for a couple of months and has now received many glowing reviews from those who were not rendered as tongue-tied as I was by this book. I am still not sure why I have found this a more challenging book to write about than most. In part, I am certain, it is for the most personal (and therefore, for the rest of the world, least interesting) of reasons: memories of a lost friend who did the good work in Afghanistan at the same time that Lefévre was there with Doctor’s Without Borders, documenting their struggles to bring medical care to those living with endless war in an unforgiving landscape; self-questioning as to my own failures to do anything nearly half as brave or as selfless as the remarkable people portrayed in this book. But in the end, I feel, my silence is the best testament to the power of this book. It is a heroic book without any heroes, in the traditional sense of the term; it is a war story without any shooting and killing; it is a travel narrative that takes place largely in the dark, in the snow, in a fog of malnutrition and adrenaline. And it is the most eloquent book I have read in a long time about all that cannot be told about heroes, war and journeys
Burdord, ed. | SYNCOPATED
By Jared Gardner
It is hard not to begin with the subtitle of this interesting but ultimately very mixed collection. “An Anthology of Picto-essays,” Burford calls it—a term which has a wonderfully late-19th-century feel about it, summoning up a time when modernity was just breaking upon Victorian interiors everywhere in the form of “horseless carriages” and “telegraphy.” In truth, there is something quaintly old-fashioned about the whole affair here, and I don’t mean the individual “picto-essays” themselves, but Burford’s insistence that they need to be sold as something other than what they are. Surely we are past that? These are comics, and we all know comics can tell important stories. I’d rather Burford spent less time coming up with a new olde timey name for the medium and more time coming up with important stories.
continued...Webcomics of the Month (July)
continued...
Yang & Kim | THE ETERNAL SMILE
By Jared Gardner
I have been looking forward to this one for a while now. Yang’s first book, American Born Chinese, was one of the very best books we have ever reviewed here at guttergeek, and it has held up over numerous rereadings in the past few years. Kim’s first book, Same Difference and Other Stories, is tragically out of print at the moment, but it unveiled a talent for graphic short narrative that promised great things in the years to come. So the thought of these two remarkably talented young creators teaming up for a collection of three stories had me all a-twitter, especially knowing it would be coming out from First Second, which had done such a beautiful job with Yang’s first. Unfortunately, I was in for a disappointment here, one which I must ultimately lay at Yang’s feet as the one responsible for the writing in this collaboration. Try as I might to fall in love with this book, I could not ultimately shake the deep conviction that the writing was a series of false notes followed by still more discordant and overlabored twists at the end of each story.
Michael Kupperman | TALES DESIGNED TO THRIZZLE
By Jared Gardner
Michael Kupperman has defeated me once again! I set out to convince the world that he was overrated, not nearly as funny and talented as he thinks he is. I set out to prove that the wacky ideas in my head—“Badger and Egg cream!” “Ex-lax and Sandpaper!”—were even funnier than the crazy team-ups he comes up with for each issue of Tales Designed to Thrizzle: Snake & Bacon; Twain & Einstein; Sherlock Holmes & Jungle Boy. But, no, it was not to be. I am fated to be Salieri to Kupperman’s Mozart, Twain to his Einstein. In truth, I never had a chance from issue one when Picasso’s life was narrated by a hamburger, Kupperman has been dazzling all who love a good story narrated by fast food, and all who love a good twist at the end of their story (SPOILER ALERT: in the end, the whole story of Picasso and the Hamburger turns out to have been narrated by a fried fish sandwich). I give up: as the first Tales book, bringing together issues #1-4, makes abundantly clear, Kupperman is brilliantly funny and maddeningly brilliant.
thrizzl
Jordan Crane | UPTIGHT #3
By David B. Olsen
There is a curious tension between the two stories that comprise Jordan Crane’s latest installment of Uptight, and it is not because they couldn’t be more different. One, “Vicissitude,” is a dark meditation on boredom and betrayal set in the shadows of almost entirely artificial light. The other, “Freeze Out,” is a seemingly whimsical addendum to Crane’s trippy all-ages graphic novel, The Clouds Above. So one is about sex and the other about school, but they both attest to the strength of Crane’s versatile linework and are therefore entirely at home in the same book. So, this issue is interesting instead because it asks some serious questions about seriality. One story is definitely the first chapter of something and one story is maybe the last chapter to something else (or maybe not), and their concomitant achievement is greater than the sum of two otherwise pretty good parts.
Hal Foster | PRINCE VALIANT
For the lover of classic comics, this is indeed a golden age, as I’ve said in these virtual pages many times. Fantagraphics has of course been leading the way for many years in bringing long-lost comics art back to print. One of their earliest ventures in this area was the Prince Valiant series they began reprinting in the 1980s in partnership with a Danish publisher, at a time when few if any publishers were risking such material following the demise of several important ventures in the previous decade. At the time, these were tremendous accomplishments, putting on display the remarkable storytelling and even more spectacular art of Hal Foster. But there were limitations, technical and economic, to what such a reprint could accomplish at the time in bringing Prince Valiant back to life in all its technicolor glory. This summer, however, Fantagraphics is starting over with Prince Valiant, beginning with the Sunday pages from 1937-38. This is a truly remarkable achievement, as close as we are going to come to experiencing the original vibrancy of the comic. They have returned to the original proofs wherever possible, and as someone who has spent time reading the original Sunday pages in the Cartoon Museum and Library I was amazed at how well they captured the color. We also get some of the original scale, as Fantagraphics uses the same oversized format they have used to very different effect in their remarkable Popeye reprints. I know many comics fans have remained skeptical of Prince Valiant, in part for its refusal of the dominant conventions of the form, often disparaging the strip as “illustrated story” as opposed to comic. No doubt such detractors have felt justified by the labored experience of reading previous reprints, but their days are numbered now. The new Prince Valiant crackles from the page with an energy and enthusiasm that positively dares anyone to deny this strip’s rightful place in the history of the form. Yes, this is another great day for comics history and most definitely a venture worth supporting into the future.
Ellis & Ryp | NO HERO
By Jared Gardner
Last year’s Black Summer was typical Ellis—a great concept, a weak, wishy-washy finish. With all the grandiosity of middle-age, Ellis sees himself as the man who discovered superhero comics were essentially political, and he wants to make sure you know it by spinning out a series of ethical half-finished meditations on the overlabored “what if superheroes were real?” premise. Black Summer was at its best in the opening issues, following the assassination of the president by an increasingly omnipotent member of a team of surgically enhanced heroes. Ellis clearly enjoyed (too much?) executing his comicbook standin for George W. Bush, and his heart was clearly with Ozymandias John even though he ultimately didn’t have the guts to end the series without bringing John to a tiresome, monologuing justice. But the real visceral pleasure of Black Summer was the team-up with Spanish artist, Juan Jose Ryp—and I really mean “visceral.” No one does viscera better than this godson of Mobius and the original [French heavy metal], and Ellis makes sure to give him all kinds of decent reasons to scatter the stuff like silly string. No Hero, the latest collaboration between Ellis and Ryp, promises more of the same in every way.
continued...Smith & Weldon | NEW BRIGHTON ARCHEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
The New Brighton Archeological Society came out this spring, but as the dog days of summer begin to stretch out upon us I wanted to mention it for all who are looking for a good summer read for their precocious rapscallions. Unlike many graphic novels geared at younger readers, this one is crafted both visually and verbally with a great confidence in the intelligence and graphic literacy of its readers. Weldon’s visual style borrows a lot from the world of children’s book illustration and Smith borrows heavily from the style and feel of classic adventure literature, and so the book as a whole somehow magically combines the feel of Harry Potter or Spiderwick Chronicles with the visual energy and strange creatures of a Hellboy adventure (unlike Hellboy, however, it will definitely pass the litmus test of all but the most puritanical of parents). Let’s face it, we have seen an explosion of brilliant, smart books for younger readers in the past ten years or so, but we have yet to find a similar renaissance in graphic literature, particularly in American comics. Smith and Weldon’s New Brighton Archeological Society promises a serial adventure that will do for the pre-teen graphic novel what Rowling and Pullman did for the young adult novel. This is a gem of a book and it did not get nearly the attention it deserved when it came out in March. Grab it for your little explorer, or for yourself.
J T Yost | OLD MAN WINTER
By Jared Gardner
J. T. Yost’s Xeric Award-winning first collection of short stories is a splendid promise of good things to come. The title story is the gem of the short collection and the one new piece in the book, and by itself it is worth the price of admission. It is a quiet, gentle story about the efforts of an old man in his final days to make human contact, to find the much-needed warmth he increasingly finds himself missing since the death of his wife. It is restrained and touching without ever being maudlin or manipulative.