Joshua Malbin

Toward the end of the premiere of Boardwalk Empire, a Mafia boss is murdered while listening to opera on his Victrola, blood pooling around his body as Caruso sings an aria. TV critic Alan Sepinwall wrote about this scene that Martin Scorcese is one of only two living directors still allowed to do something like that (the other being of course Francis Ford Coppola).

That sums up well my feelings about Speak of the Devil, the new Gilbert Hernandez hardcover that collects a six-part series you probably missed in 2006 and 2007. If anyone else tried to pull it off I’d hate it. Because it’s Gilbert Hernandez I’m trying hard to give it the benefit of the doubt.

The story centers on teenaged gymnast Val and her stepmother Linda. Val has started dressing up in a devil mask and sneaking around the rooftops of her suburb, peeking in at the neighbors. Nearly every time she does it she spies on Linda, often while Linda has sex with her dad. Linda often catches her and is clearly as excited to be watched by this masked peeping Tom as Val is to watch her.

Then Val’s boyfriend Paul catches her in her mask and things start to change. Voyeurism turns him on too, and they have hot sex in a graveyard. Val injures her ankle and can only go watch her best friend triumph at the state championship. She comes home to find that Paul donned her mask in her absence and slept with Linda. She attacks the two of them with a knife.

He survives. The three of them, now with a taste for blood, murder Paul’s parents and gouge out their eyes. They steal a car and flee, wantonly murdering as they go, in a multistate three-way orgy of sex and blood.

Now as I say, I wouldn’t remotely buy this from anyone else. The characters are paper-thin, essentially motivationless. They murder for basically no reason other than excitement—sometimes they murder on a whim, or out of exhaustion. So the question is, should I take it from Gilbert Hernandez merely because I think he’s a genius.

For an answer I had to turn to some of his early work, when he employed cheerful violence and mayhem in a magical realist vein. I am excluding here most of his Palomar stories, because those were deeply character-based, and thinking instead of some of his short-shorts. The difference, I ultimately decided, is that that violence felt cartoonish and this edges closer to feeling real, which lends me to want realer motivation for it, if not from the characters then at least from Hernandez himself. I want all these murders to mean something, to be saying something about the world, or making me feel something other than confused. I want to understand what he’s saying about voyeurism and exhibitionism.

Preview here.

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Congratulations to Big Josh, who in a beautiful and personal ceremony down under the Manhattan Bridge yesterday was wed to Rachel Spector.

(continue reading…)

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There are a lot of things I like about Drew Weing’s Set to Sea. I really respect the way he’s manipulated the comic form, for one thing. The book is small—just 5 inches by 6.5—and each panel takes up a full page. As a result it can feel more like reading a children’s picture book than an adult graphic novel, and Weing uses that effect cunningly. The reader feels like he’s reading an innocent child’s story? Good, now let’s have the hero beat a man to death with his bare fists.

It’s a spare little story about a 19th-century lug of a struggling poet who gets knocked on the head and pressed into service aboard a merchant ship. The vessel is attacked by pirates and visits exotic ports, and the nameless hero comes to feel a part of the ship and its crew. All along he continues working on poetry in his little notebook, and in the end the authenticity reflected in his nautically themed work gets him published and appreciated.

There’s very little in the way of character development or plot. There’s very little dialogue. Weing’s strength is his art. His line drawings, shaded almost entirely with crosshatching, are something like old Gasoline Alley cartoons, although the exaggerated figures in them are more like the original Popeye. (The book’s jacket copy claims Popeye and Gustave Doré, which is a bit of a stretch.) The pages are incredibly expressive, able to convey longing, panic, rage, camaraderie, mourning, and ultimately peace. Weing manipulates whole compositions to achieve these effects, not merely the expressions on characters’ faces.

That compensates a lot for the lack of complex characterization through dialogue.

(It’s like the exact opposite of Peter Bagge, whose compositions are all flat and inexpressive but whose characters speak everything on their minds, or at least spell it out explicitly in thought bubbles.)

This is Weing’s first book. I’m intrigued to see if in future works he can put this considerable artistic talent to work in the service of more complex tales.

PDF preview here.

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Attorney General: Kathleen Rice is completely unacceptable. Eric Schneiderman is acceptable. Eric Scheiderman is the only candidate in serious contention to defeat Kathleen Rice. Schneiderman it is.

For most of the ultralocal races, it matters most who’s most willing to take on Kings County boss Vito Lopez. So I’m following The Brooklyn Paper and going with Chris Owens for male District Leader over Jesse Strauss and Steve Williamson; and Jo Anne Simon over Hope Reichbach for female District Leader. (I’m breaking my personal rule of thumb here to always do the opposite of what Gatemouth wants.)

And Velmanette Montgomery over Mark Pollard. Montgomery is one of the guys with her heart in the right place. She stood up against the Atlantic Yards project and so as far as I’m concerned she gets to go back to Albany until I see a strong reason why she shouldn’t.

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Zack Whedon, Joss’s considerably younger brother, seems like a faintly tragic figure. For one thing, when I bought Dr. Horrible and Other Horrible Stories I assumed he must be Joss’s son, nepotistically handed the Horrible franchise to make a few comic book bucks. But in fact he co-created Horrible (along with third brother Jed, a composer), and has been gainfully employed as a writer for a couple of TV shows. It must be rough to be the younger brother in a family in a profession, following the footsteps of one of the most famous auteurs in the medium, especially when you share such a distinctive name. (Though according to Wikipedia, Joss and Zack’s father and grandfather were also both screenwriters, so what do I know.)

On the other hand, he seems to have banged out this Dr. Horrible book without putting a huge amount of thought into it. There’s exactly one new idea in the whole of the book that really tickled me: Evil League of Evil member Fake Thomas Jefferson insists he’s the real thing and defeats a low-rent hero with a quill. Some of the rest was good but basically rehashed, extensions of what we already knew from the Web series. The remainder was blah. Certainly there’s no attempt to make the comic anything more than a pale reflection of the video version.

Dr. Horrible on the Web was an inspired half-hour of funny, earworm-inducing, ultimately heartbreaking story. This offers nothing of the kind. Skip it.

Preview here.

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Cuba: My Revolution comes close to being a very good, affecting book about one woman’s disillusionment with the Cuban revolution. But it’s missing a section, and that one little defect ends up making the whole book kind of frustrating rather than enjoyable.

The missing section should come at the beginning. As it stands, the book opens with the fall of Batista and Castro’s triumphant arrival in Havana, and we proceed to see all the ways the revolution failed to live up to its promise. But for that to be satisfying, we readers first need to believe its promise a little ourselves. We need to experience heroine Sonya’s disgust with the Batista regime, her idealistic belief in Castro, and most of all her first love with Flavio, a fellow revolutionary sympathizer whose family forced him to flee with them to Miami.

Without making apologies for Castro, for Sonya’s story to work we really should feel, in our readerly guts, why so many Cubans embraced him. Because Lockpez never gives us that I was usually just annoyed at Sonya for being so dumb. This became even more acute after about halfway through the book, when she’s falsely accused of being a CIA spy and tortured. After that I completely lost patience with her apologetics for Castro. Look, you stupid girl, he tortured you. What more does it take?

It’s the simple old writer’s workshop dictum: show, don’t tell. As much as author Inverna Lockpez tells us about Sonya’s revolutionary fervor and her love for her missing Flavio, that exposition can’t stand up to all the reasons we are shown why her faith should be shattered. If at the start of the book I’d been allowed to sympathize with her faith in Castro, I could appreciate better her struggle to retain it in the face of the truth.

I don’t blame Lockpez for this deficiency in her book, by the way. I blame her editor. One of two things happened here: 1) Lockpez wrote a section like the one I’m missing (and its existence is strongly implied) and someone stupidly convinced her to excise it. 2) The section never existed, perhaps because Lockpez’s life history fairly closely mirrors Sonya’s and she couldn’t remember past her own knowledge of how the story turned out. In which case a competent editor should have seen immediately what was needed and told her.

Preview over here.

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It’s been a little tricky to figure out which of the many candidates to replace Andrew Cuomo is the best.

Fortunately, three of them just ruled themselves out of serious consideration in my book:

Candidates Eric Dinallo, Sean Coffey and Richard Brodsky say they would investigate funding for the $100 million Park51 project a few blocks from ground zero. Kathleen Rice would investigate if there was evidence of wrongdoing, and Eric Schneiderman says he would probe funding if a concern were raised or as part of a broader investigation into funds moving through New York to support terrorism.
…
“The mosque being built in that area is offensive to me, as a matter of my role as a citizen,” said Brodsky, saying he would investigate its funding sources. “The law will be applied to those folks as it would be applied to any other group … without fear or favor.”

Dinallo said the funding “needs to be looked at” but just because it’s a mosque “is not a reason to put in such a deep investigation for that purpose alone.”
…
“I would go ahead and permit it to be built,” said Coffey. But he added: “I would also pursue investigation of the funding … I’d pursue it very aggressively.”

Investigating the funding of an Islamic community center merely because it became the focus of a Fox News Two Minutes’ Hate is completely offensive and ridiculous. So for those keeping score, that’s a big fat no to Dinallo, Coffey, and Brodsky. Which means it’s down to Rice and Schneiderman–and essentially, for me, Schneiderman.

Thanks, guys! The primary is after all just around the corner. I was worried about how to make that decision.

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I haven’t reviewed many second issues. Possibly none in the year-plus I’ve been writing comic reviews. I keep buying the series whose #1′s I like, but there doesn’t seem much point in writing about them.

In this case, though, I want to take another opportunity to urge those of you within the sound of my metaphorical voice to start buying Scarlet. As I described in my review of #1, the main character Scarlet is a young woman undergoing a moral origin story, on the path to becoming a revolutionary. For that alone you should get the book. How many pop culture products out there are willing to say straight out that our society is rotten and in need of a revolution? Not some sci-fi society used as an allegory of ours. Ours.

But #2 also begins to showcase something that has always been a great strength of Brian Michael Bendis’s other series Powers: the page layouts. Brian Avon Oeming realized Bendis’s script directions for those layouts very differently from the way Alex Maleev does it here, of course, but the spark of originality feels the same.

Scarlet’s weeks of staking out the crooked cop who ruined her life are shown in a two-page spread of wide panels just big enough for the car rear-view mirror in which she watches him. When an ex-officer has to make a long speech to her, Maleev breaks a single large image of him into three different-sized panels to avoid an overwhelming block of text. To show time passing in her recovery from a gunshot to the head, we get a two-page spread of square panels, all with Scarlet addressing the reader in the same pose, against a succession of different backgrounds, as her shaved hair gradually grows back and lengthens to her shoulders.

I am a little worried that Scarlet will end up like James Lee, because her complaint against the world is so broad: there’s evil in it and no one cares. A “revolutionary” who thinks like that could well end up just being an insane person. I hope that’s not where Bendis is going. Until then, anyway, I’m 100% on board.

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The Strange Tales trade paperback is the result of a brilliant marketing gimmick: Marvel revived a classic title and under its banner invited many of the most popular indie comic book authors in the country to create very short stories featuring the company’s superheroes. As far as I can tell, they let the authors do whatever they wanted.

The results are about what I’d have expected. Authors I liked a lot from their other work produced the vignettes I liked the best here.

Peter Bagge’s Spider-Man stories alone are worth the cover price, for example: Spidey finds out his saintly uncle Ben was really just a petty crook, and in his disillusionment reads Ayn Rand and decides to use his great power selfishly. He becomes a corporate tycoon and spends his time tormenting JJ Jameson, now his underling.

By contrast, Johnny Ryan, author of Prison Pit, is exactly as puerile doing superheroes as he is in his own work.

Fortunately, there are a lot more good authors in the mix than bad ones. Tony Millionaire does Iron Man; James Kochalka does The Hulk (of course); Jason does Spider-Man; and Max Cannon does The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man.

A good gift book for someone who likes comics, especially if you’re not sure what type he or she prefers.

Preview here.

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