A Few Words on Love and Capes

Thomas F. Zahler's Love and Capes is a fun superhero romantic comedy. Volume 1 is available now and volume 2 will be out shortly. About the first half of the first book is online, so you can sample it for free.

The characters are sensible and interesting to spend time with. They're also rational even when they're emotional. The conflicts don't arise from carrying the idiot ball, which in itself is reason enough to recommend a rom-com. The superheroing is not bogged down in its own self-importance. it's just there to make an effective contrast.

The cartooning is enjoyable. I like the size difference between the leads Abby and Mark; it makes romantic gestures easy, as well as concretizing the difference between normal Abby and super Mark.

I also like Abby's impressively Roman forehead. You don't see too many characters with an obtuse facial angle. Combined with her hair, her head points forward and up, which makes directing the action in a panel easy; Abby just points in the direction you want the eye to take.

That Is Some Art

If you're following Questionable Content -- and who among us isn't -- then I commend to your attention panel 3 of this strip. One of the pleasures of following QC is the evolution of Jeph Jacques' art. Day to day or through the archives, he's gotten better, more confident; he's never coasted, never been afraid to try something new.

Panel 3 in this strip is, I think, just amazing. I expect her to start moving like a rotoscoped character in an animated film. The posture, the proportions, it's astonishing. You would never have imagined that the artist of strip #1 would ever be able to produce art like this. I am in awe.

This is the second Golden Age of comic strips, and Jeph Jacques is one of its masters.

More on the Pogo Delay

Ah, finally found a statement from Kim Thompson of Fantagraphics on Pogo:

Although Ohio State U has scans of all the Sunday strips, some of them are missing one central panel (because the "vertical" format version has one panel less than the "horizontal" and OSU has only the vertical versions) and literally no collector in the world appears to have the horizontal version with that panel. Fortunately Walt Kelly's daughter, who is helping us with this, has BW repros of the first year's Sundays with those panels, which we're going to have to scan, insert and digitally color to match the rest of the strips (faking the blotchiness and resistration problems of the surrounding strip as needed).

(Nov 16, 2009)

Tracking back on 2009 predictions

To kick off 2009, Doug asked us, "What Lies Ahead?". I responded with ten predictions, tongue firmly in cheek. Still, considering all sorts of odd things occurred this year, I wondered how did I do?

Why They Lost Their Powers

Podcast of Jess Nevins' paper: "Those Who Cannot Remember Doc Savage Are Condemned To Repeat Him: The 20th Century Backlash Against Posthuman Bodybuilders".

Jess knows WAY a lot more than anybody else about the popular culture of the fantastic that led directly to the superhero comics we love. In this paper he talks about the broader cultural backlash that led to the depowerment, deemphasis, or domestication of superheroes that we're all familiar with from the end of the Golden Age, among other things.

Rowrbazzle

Oh, for !@#$ sake.

The Complete Pogo has been delayed until September 2010, making it three years overdue.

Whatever Happened

Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?, Deluxe Edition, by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert, in bullet points:

• Comparisons to Alan Moore are pointless, because Alan Moore is incomparable.
• There are no !@#$ page numbers.
• The Catwoman on approximately page 3-6 is probably different from the Catwoman of "The Cat-Woman's Tale" -- different bangs, and grey streaks -- but I can't tell for sure, and I'm not even sure if it's important or relevant.
• Because the whole !@#$ thing is a farrago of metaphor and surrealism, with nothing concrete.
• Narrative is for suckers.
• So skip absolutely everything up and including to the Superman appearance, about page 7 of the second part. It's meaningless noise.
• The last eighteen or twenty pages, however, is pretty good and the ending is effective. It's not original or anything, it's the familiar epiphany with the dead merged with a rip-off of a classic children's story, but it works.
• There should have been a callout to Alan Brennert's classic "To Kill a Legend", because it provides a counter-example to the Waynes' always dying.
• I don't know if David Mazzucchelli originated the pose of young Bruce kneeling at the center of the triangle formed by his dead parents' bodies, or if he was imitating someone before him. But that shot -- and the broken pearl string from Frank Miller -- are so identified with the origin now that artists everywhere should be paying them a design fee.
• Andy Kubert, I have little to say about. He did his job. He doesn't stand out for good or bad. He alludes to other artists' styles without copying them, mostly, which is pretty nice.
• Story. Sto-oory. Say it with me. Gaiman, you made your bones writing stories about a guy whose entire thing was stories. You should know from stories. I would have liked to have read a story here.

Punch That Crotch

All things considered, I was impressed with how nicely Titan Maximum built over the course of the season, and I was really impressed with the first nine minutes of the finale with the way everything was coming together, and then I was baffled at the story choices made in the last minute.

This is the finale. This is the ending your audience is left with for the next year (assuming you got renewed). This isn't anti-heroic like the Venture Brothers or anti-narrativist dada like Aqua Teen Hunger Force; you've been steadily strengthening the heroic narrative across the course of the season and peaked it in the finale. And then that ending? I just don't get it what good it's supposed to do.

[Oh, pleasepleaseplease someone come at me with a "it's more realistic and interesting when the heroes aren't perfect and don't always win" argument. My card in our Invalid Response to Criticism Bingo game depends on it.]

Enchantment in the Cards

Madame Xanadu: Disenchanted collects the first ten issues of the Vertigo title by Matt Wagner and Amy Reeder Hadley, telling the origin of the erstwhile mystery host created by Michael Kaluta in the 1970s.

A note: The book appears to take place in some sort of unusual parallel dimension where women's noses become invisible except when viewed in profile. Just nares perched above the lip and below a great flatness reaching up to the hairline. Odd.

I enjoyed it. Xanadu is immediately revealed as Nimue, lover of Merlin and younger sister of Morgana and Viviane (the Lady of the Lake), and descendant of the elder folk who inhabited Britain with the Celts. We see her at the fall of Camelot, in Kublai Khan's China (whence her nom de la mystere), at the fall of the French monarchy, back in England in 1888, and at the birth of the Golden Age. Throughout, she interacts with the Phantom Stranger.

I groaned when I realized that Xanadu was getting mixed up in the Ripper case. Bah, humbug.

Otherwise, however, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It is refreshingly without writer's ego; it is meant to entertain, not to shock or confuse or draw admiration for transgression fannish or otherwise, and it has no apparent intention to give the character the exclusive brand of this particular writer to preclude all others. It's just a story about this character, created by hands before and, one expects, to be continued by hands since.

The art, discounting my jocular aside above, is attractive, clear, expressive, and pleasant to read. I note that the Stranger is depicted with a style distinct from all the other characters;* this is a nice touch.

*But one, and there are sound arguments for the similar depiction of this character, who appears only in a single panel at the end of the book.

Another thing I appreciated were the many callbacks to DC continuity. The Demon of the fall of Camelot is obvious, of course (though Morgana herself is not the Kirby model). More pleasantly surprising was a certain jade lamp that needed to begin its journey from China to the west. I thought Death's appearance mildly off-character, and Xanadu was mistaken about her order of birth. But I'm a sucker for John Zatara, so the book ended on a high point.

Verdict: The book exceeded my expectations, and I recommend it.

Yōkai 妖怪

Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo: Yokai is an original 56-page watercolor graphic novel done to mark Usagi's twenty-fifth anniversary.

There, that ought to be sufficient recommendation.

Well, OK, just a bit more. It is Oborozuki-yo, the night when yokai, haunts and monsters, walk the land.

The rabbit ronin Miyamoto Usagi encounters a ghost story, and with his acquaintance Sasuke, a wizard, must turn back the monsters' attempt to subjugate the mortal world. Their skills and powers will be tested and their endurance strained to the limit.

One of the virtues is Sakai's imaginative monster creations, most traditional and some original.

As for the story, well, I have read a lot of stories, and this one is familiar to me, from Usagi's own history and from folklore in general, with nothing particularly startling or unusual. Still, I am a jaded curmudgeon, and you should not worry too much about whether I have read too many stories to appreciate another one, and in any case, the road through the story is certainly enjoyable enough. Sakai is a master cartoonist, too talented to disappoint. It's also a fun, spooky, scary story I'd think you could easily share with your tween. If I could read through those eyes again, I know that I would consider this just amazing.

I do not feel that the watercolor added very much. Usagi in color is always nice, but standard coloring technology has long since equalled or surpassed what's shown here. Don't get me wrong; I like color comics when the color is done well, and it is done well here. It's just that watercolor in particular doesn't add very much beyond what I expect from well-done standard coloring. (Much standard coloring is, of course, muddy crud, but that is another rant.)

Anyway, what it boils down to is an original 56-page watercolor graphic novel; if you're an Usagi-fan, you want this.

The Brave and the Uncomfortably Adolescent

More Brave & Bold. This is from #17, by Marv Wolfman and Phil Winslade. The story, which concludes in #18, is pretty good, aside from being pretty repetitive. It features a callback to Triumph, the widely-loathed post-Zero Hour JLA continuity implant, which is an interesting choice, and it's done in an interesting, if meta, way.

Really quite nice art. Winslade does full art, which allows him some extra freedom to mix it up a bit; there's some pencil-only work, some fully-inked stuff, some CGI. The pencils-only stuff reminds me of Gene Colan in a good way. There's a lot of digital stuff in the second half, including a nice effect using a blown-up pixilated greyscale icon.

That character who, if I've remembered my 1994-era HTML correctly, is over to the right? That's Raven. This is not the Raven I'm familiar with! But then I'm probably a solid twenty years off being current with Titans continuity. This is a scene from the halls of "Strages Academy, a private school in San Francisco". "Strages" sounds like a bird pun, but a quick search didn't turn up anything obvious. The closest I got was the strigiformes, but those are owls, not corvids. I am a bit doubtful that a private school would permit students to dress like that, but perhaps this is conservative for San Francisco. Also, Raven's in several other panels on this page, in which the details of her outfit are consistent. Note that Raven's boot-to-hem length is about half-a-head longer than her hem-to-crown length. Ah, comic book anatomy, how we are ... well, kind of creeped out by, often.

The Brave and the Buttheads

I'm sitting down and reading a stack of the new The Brave and the Bold. I have an interlocutory remark: George Perez's art sure is pretty.

I took a break after reading #8. I read it back when it was new, and rereading it just refreshed my opinion: This is a truly repugnant book, written deliberately to make virtually everyone in it appear to be as pathetic or unpleasant as possible. Good job, Mark Waid. I sure can see why everyone's such a big fan, especially of your Flash work.

June and Linda are ineffectual, as is Larry. Rocky, Red, Wally-Flash, and Niles Caulder are assholes. Cliff enjoys scaring kids. Rita is creepy and venal. The kids are ... not written well. They're doing their best, I guess, with weird powers and surrounded by adults who are assholes. But they're not individualized or interesting, nor am I drawn to care, except to sympathize that they don't have better adults.

And, of course, it is the kids' weird powers that is at the core of the so-called story. It is nonsense, dressed in histrionics. Wally goes from loathing and fearing Caulder to agreeing to subject the kids to his experiments in between two panels, making me wonder nothing so much as "Why, among all possible writing choices, did you choose to write this?" The experiment is, at least, consistent with Caulder's characterization -- ill-prepared, reckless, and mad. And, of course, when it goes wrong, the blame lies anywhere else than with Caulder, and in fact the participants are eager to blame innocent Metamorpho, yanked away by the metaplot.

Come to think of it, Metamorpho is the only character in this comic who is any way worth the ink it took to print him. He volunteers to help the kids by catalyzing the experiment, and he does so willingly and cheerfully. Him, I want to read more about.

Anyway. I quite enjoyed the first arc, featuring the book of <spoiler>. That was fun, and a nicely plotted story. The next arc, featuring the alchemist Megistus, started iffy, with an overly-exaggerated Power Girl, and then hit a brick wall with #8, which as noted above is deeply loathsome, and which you have now had the benefit of my ranting about.

[Edited to add credit where credit is due.]

The Sinister Secret of Astra's Name

Astro City: Family Album hardcover pg 82: The milk carton indicates that Astra's full name is Astra Nadia Furst-Zorus.

Astro City: Astra Special #1, page 1: The voiceover indicates that Astra's full name is Astra Jeannine Majestros-Furst.

I will merely note that the Astro City Who's Who page, as out-of-date as it is, does have the old full name. If one were looking for resources.

Bat-annuated

Back in the day, Denny O'Neil, who knows rather a lot about writing all three characters, wrote an excellent trilogy of annuals for Batman, Green Arrow, and the Question.

This year, Fabian Nicieza wrote a pair of annuals for Batman, Azrael, and the Question.

The contrast is stark.

Denny would often leave story elements unresolved or, especially with Vic Sage, unanswered, but this was deliberate and the reader was rewarded by the elevated mood and complexity.

I just don't get the same sense of satisfaction or craft from this year's story. To quote Homer Simpson, as one so often does, "it was just a bunch of stuff that happened". Perhaps I lack valuable context; I am wholly, and willfully, unaware of what's going on with the Azrael character, and that is probably the most fertile direction for theme and unity to derive, given the villain and motive.

There are ample unanswered questions, but rather than appreciate them as meat to chew on, I am left with a sense of ennui; why should I care?

I will note, in Fabe's favor, that at no point was I unaware that this was a different Batman; the characterization was effective in that way.

However, Harvey Bullock recognizing the Question's secret identity, by recognizing her ass, through her coat, is certainly a low point. The Question used to work closely with both the original Batman and Nightwing, so her ability to distinguish that the latter is now the former is not surprising. But, if Identity Crisis taught us nothing, it is that the notion of "secret identity" is fragile in the modern superhero genre, and one does not preserve a fragile thing by roughly handling it; it must needs be eschewed or dealt with delicately from afar.

Anyway, the point is, I suppose, that I really, really liked Denny's work on The Question, especially when Rick Magyar's inks made Denys Cowan's art look better than before or since, and there's not anything that gives me the same juice today. Of course, I'm twenty years older. That probably has something to do with it.

The title of the post, incidentally, is a pun on "superannuated". 'Cause it's a Batman Annual, not a Superman Annual, and my tastes in comics are probably too old for today. Yeah, OK.

New Web Comics

Here's something that's been getting a bit of notice lately, so I might as well jump on the publicity storm.

Todd Allen, comics columnist, author of The Economics of Web Comics, and most importantly, longtime member of the Chicago Comic Con trivia team, is working with Trollords' Scott Beaderstadt on a new Web comic. Chicago readers may be familiar with the exploits of Drew Peterson, a man whose third wife died mysteriously in a bathtub and whose fourth wife disappeared without a trace--non-Chicago readers may have even seen Peterson (or his lawyers) on a few national programs, such as Larry King or The Today Show. This isn't about him, although nobody will blame you if the series seems somewhat reminiscent of that situation.

Go take a look at Allen and Beaderstadt's Division and Rush, featuring Stu Peterman, the Murder Professor. And while you're at it, read some local coverage and Allen's own account of how it all came together.

They're Ba-aaaaack...

The latest news from DC is that as a special Blackest Night skip month treat, they're bringing several titles back from the dead. The titles:

• The Power of Shazam! #48 by Eric Wallace
• The Question #37 by Greg Rucka
• Suicide Squad #67 by John Ostrander
• Phantom Stranger #42 by Peter Tomasi
• Catwoman #83 by Fabian Nicieza
• The Atom and Hawkman #46 by Geoff Johns
• Weird Western Tales #71 by Dan DiDio
• Starman #81 by James Robinson

I'm sure some of these will be complete misses (and I'm sure we can all agree on some of those predictions), but a new Ostrander Suicide Squad and a new Robinson Starman are worth the risk.