Joshua Malbin

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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As former Bush chief of staff Andrew Card educated us all when it came to the Iraq War, ”From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” That’s my excuse for falling silent, anyway: there hasn’t been anything new to review.

But we have hit the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and for that we get Dark Rain, set in New Orleans during the flood. It’s an edifying contrast with Sweets, which I panned not too long ago: it is possible use a caper plot and relatively stock characters to explore an interesting landscape and have the result turn out well. But you need to do the work to make the landscape vivid.

The caper is this: a couple of ex-cons team up to rob a bank in the middle of the flooded Ninth Ward. One is a greedy, weaselly former bank employee, the other an ex-paratrooper who just wants enough to settle his child-support debts. They’re in a race with the mercenaries of Dark Rain (i.e., Blackwater), and as they motorboat through New Orleans’ watery streets they interact with many of the disaster’s iconic scenes: People trapped and dehydrated on rooftops. Dead bodies face down in the floodwaters. The overpass from which some people were lifted by helicopter. The chaos and abandonment of the Superdome. The blockade on the bridge to Gretna.

They don’t just pass these incidents by in the background, either. The main characters, or at least characters who end up in the story, interact with each event. Think of it as the Titanic approach to storytelling: work a conventional plot into a well-known disaster and invite your audience to enter it through your characters.

It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that Mat Johnson is sadly one of the few successful indie comic writers in America who writes about race and racism at all. It’s like him, Adrian Tomine, Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, and that’s about all I can think of. So check this out, and check out his earlier, really fantastic Incognegro.

Brief preview below the fold.

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I can’t say right now whether the movie based on Morning Glories will be any good. But I can say, just based on the first issue (which sold out on its first day) that there will definitely be a movie. For all I know there may already be a deal in place; the new trend seems to be to make deals for movies and comics simultaneously.

Morning Glory Academy is basically the Bizarro version of Hogwarts or Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. It’s not clear from the pre-credit sequence—erm, opening pages—whether the children there are extraordinarily gifted in paranormal or merely normal ways. What we see is extreme facility with chemistry, gymnastics, and martial arts. But it is clear that the school is eeeeeeeeeviiiillll. A student tries to escape and the teachers let this ghost thing eat his brain. Or maybe his mind, since it just seems to be sticking a hand through his head.

Then the story steps back to focus on a new set of kids as they say goodbye to their families, some more dysfunctionally than others, and prepare to leave for Morning Glory for the first time. The rest of issue #1 deals with them settling in and making certain initial discoveries about the place, one of which is that it’s eeeeeeevil.

It’s totally entertaining and about an inch and a half deep. I’m fine with that.

One preview here. Another below the fold.

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Here’s how I imagine what Matt Kindt (author of 3 Story, among other books) did in writing Revolver. At least, when I’ve ended up with results similar, this is how I’ve gotten there.

He had a great concept. A series of terrorist attacks shakes America, with conventional, biological, and radiological bombs exploding in multiple cities at nearly the same time. Fleeing the newspaper offices where he works, Sam ends up in a car with Jan, his boss. He kills a man, the world is in flames.

And then he wakes up to his ordinary life with his girlfriend Maria, who wants to go shopping for a new table set. Jan treats him just as contemptuously as ever. He can’t figure out what’s happened to him until the clock hits 11:11 and he finds himself back in Armageddon.

So there’s the concept: every day, the main character switches back and forth from world to world, on the run with Jan in one, at home with Maria in the other. He begins to prefer the crisis world to the ordinary one, because there he feels like he’s doing something important every day.

I had a few geek-level sci-fi issues with this setup. Like, it established that his body isn’t the same between the two worlds. Injuries sustained in one don’t carry over to the other. So what happens to him in one world while he’s conscious in the other? Does he go limp? No one around comments on it if he does. Does his body keep performing tasks without his being aware of it? He never remarks on things being different from the way he left them so that too seems unlikely, and anyway it would raise more unanswered questions about the consciousness in charge when “he” is absent. Or does he somehow experience simultaneous events in alternating fashion?

Whatever. It’s basically a solid conceit.

Then Kindt had to find a plot to fill out the concept, give it the shape of a story. So he kept writing until he found one that fit well enough, retconned the beginning, and wrapped up the end. At least, as I say, that’s how I imagine it happened, because that’s how I’ve done it myself.

You end up with an antagonist introduced only midway through the book and an explanation for what’s going on that doesn’t fully track. (For example [SPOILER ALERT], the villain confesses to Sam that he’s caused all the chaos in the one world by exploiting knowledge gleaned in the other. That doesn’t make any sense. Wouldn’t the hard part of building a biological or radiological bomb no matter where you got the blueprint? And how is it easier to gain access to deadly secrets in one world rather than the other before the bombs go off?)

Oh well. A solid premise an an 80% satisfying resolution still puts Matt Kindt ahead of nine of ten other comic book authors out there, and makes the book worth buying.

Preview below the fold.

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Look, I appreciate it’s his normal desire to have things all ways, but David Paterson is being an even bigger weenie than usual:

Gov. Paterson said Tuesday the developers of the mosque near Ground Zero might consider moving the project – and even floated the idea of offering them state land.
…

Paterson said the anxiety felt by mosque opponents was “not without cause” and that New York still suffers from the Sept. 11 attacks.

Paterson stressed however that he has no objections to the proposed center, which houses a mosque, and that there is “no reason” why it should not be built.

Unacceptable. There is no legitimate “cause” for 9/11 victims to be upset here. Any equivocating on that point implies that there is a legitimate connection to be drawn between crazy terrorists and the world’s 1 billion Muslims, even if in the next breath you say the opposite explicitly.

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I raved about Joe Kelly’s book I Kill Giants, and while the first trade paperback collecting his series Four Eyes doesn’t quite pack the same emotional punch, it’s still very good.

It’s set in New York during the Great Depression, where the most exciting illicit activity isn’t booze, but dragon fighting (think cockfighting rather than bullfighting). To obtain dragons for the ring, teams of men enter dens to steal dragon eggs. Young Enrico, maybe nine or ten, watches his father die doing this, and as a result he hates dragons. He goes to the fights because he wants to see dragons die, and then for the princely sum of four dollars joins a crew of “beaters” (the disposable workers who distract a dragon while the professionals go for her eggs).

Kelly sets himself a hard task here. He lets us know from the beginning—by setting protesters around the fringes of the action and by letting us peek into newspapers—that dragon fighting is just as cruel and evil a bloodsport as any in our real world. But he puts his protagonist on the wrong side of the moral divide, letting him remain the tough little boy who hates dragons and wants to see them suffer and die, and asks us to sympathize with him anyway. (Amores Perros succeeded, for example, only by shutting its eyes to the immorality of dogfighting. Joe Kelly has denied himself that escape hatch.)

A big part of what makes that sympathy happen is Max Fiumara’s art. Fiumara draws Enrico bottom-heavy, a scrawny upper body atop oversized pants and shoes, his hands often hidden inside giant gauntlets that reach to his elbows, and a scowl on his triangular, big-eyed face. In other words, he uses every visual trick there is to make the boy look like an adorable pixie acting tough and taking on responsibilities too big for him.

At the end of this first volume Enrico rescues a runt dragon, the titular Four Eyes, and bonds with it. But he bonds with it as a survivor, a fighter like him, and it’s not hard to see what’s coming in future issues: Four Eyes will have to enter the arena. Meaning the series will continue to be a tricky pleasure.

Preview below the fold.

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So it’s been more than six months since I posted a new story, I know. I’ve been working on a long revision. But I finally did have time to write a new one, and it’s now posted.

Check it out.

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Okay, I know Dan Clowes’s Wilson was published in April, but I only discovered this week that it exists, so I don’t care, I’m writing about it. Clowes has done something remarkable here, and it’s worth comment.

It starts with Clowes’s understanding very well how his readers perceive him: as an unforgiving, hilariously acid misanthrope. You start reading the book and find a series of full-page funny-paper strips with approximately the same comic beats as classic Peanuts. There’s a setup and then a punch line that doesn’t so much complete the joke as derail it. With Charles Shulz that derailment was usually gently satirical, while Clowes’s takes the form of unexpected bile. Just like Peanuts, it’s genuinely funny.

The art varies from page to page: on some, Sally Forth–style semirealistic figures; on others crude, round-headed caricatures; the rest somewhere in between.

Just as you begin to relax into that rhythm, though, after a dozen of these pages, you begin to realize that these aren’t just disconnected jokes. A story is taking shape. And that story is kind of sad, as Wilson flies to his dying father’s bedside.

Then the story gathers steam. Wilson tracks down his ex-wife. He learns he had a daughter put up for adoption, and tracks her down too. He goes on a road trip with his daughter and ex-wife. He goes to jail for kidnapping his daughter. He gets out of jail and starts a relationship with a new woman. His daughter visits to tell him he has a grandson.

The episodes don’t string together into a single narrative arc. At each stage there are the makings of plot—characters have desires and conflicts that prevent them from fulfilling those desires immediately. But those conflicts never build to anything unified or coherent.

Clowes is well aware of this. “We like our stories to end with a promise of hope,” Wilson says. “‘Happily ever after’ and all that. Too bad real lives don’t have that structure.”

Then immediately—like two panels later—he does have an explosion of hope, and in the final six-panel page that follows, a moment of serenity. So he gives the audience what it expects, but in a way that defies the audience’s wants by leaving the moments of triumph unearned. The structure of the book makes earned triumph impossible.

I can’t overemphasize how impressed I am by all this. For a book to defy narrative convention, that’s not so hard. To do it while remaining an enjoyable read, though, is one of the hardest things an author can try to do. Clowes pulls it off gracefully. He even continues to draw Wilson in different styles page after page, keeping him recognizable and showing him aging at the same time.

PDF preview here.

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Well this is an extremely big deal.

No, not the legislature finally passing the budget. That’s just hugely overdue.

This part:

Lawmakers also passed a controversial measure requiring that prisoners be counted as residents not of the mostly upstate prisons where they reside, but of the areas where they lived before they were incarcerated.

This was a long time coming. As long as people can’t vote from prison, their numbers shouldn’t be transferred to a new district.

For more on why this was important, see here:

In New York State one out of every three people who moved to upstate New York in the 1990s actually “moved” into a newly constructed prison. The State bars people in prison from voting, but their presence in the Census boosts the population of the upstate districts whose legislators favor prison expansion. Without using prison populations as padding, seven state senate districts would have to be redrawn, causing line changes throughout the state.

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Yes, guy standing directly in front of me, bringing a pipe to a rock concert does make you a bit of a douchebag.

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