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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Scott Pilgrim vs The World would have been the best video game movie if it was, in fact, based on a video game instead of on a comic book informed by video games. As it is, it’s a brisk and hilarious mishmash of comic book tropes, which work poorly, video game tropes, which work really well, and dreadful gender politics.

The comic book (which I haven’t read — maybe Big Josh will weigh in) introduced a video-game world that the movie faithfully reproduces. Chyrons spring up around characters and props, placing them in context and giving the viewer vital information as if about an opponent. When Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) fights each of his girlfriend Ramona’s evil exes, the fights are riffs on Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter and other arcade games from the period just following Q*bert and the collapse of my own interest (I will whup you at Ms. Pac-Man, but little else).

In addition to the video game stylistics, the movie also employs comic book stylistics, which suffer in comparison to the former. No movie has played with comic book aesthetics better than American Splendor. Ang Lee’s Hulk gave it a try, but Harvey Pekar’s story benefited from having the form address the content — it is the story of a man who tells his own life in comics. In Scott Pilgrim, the form and experience of video games is native to the original story, which (like The Hulk) happened to be told in comic book form. So effects like having visible ‘D-D-D-D-D’s come out of Scott’s bass, or animating the exit wound when drummer Kim pantomimes shooting herself, add nothing but clutter.

The style of the film is exciting in other, more light-handed ways. Director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) hopscotches through the first act, jumping from setting to setting while remaining in one linear conversation. I’ve seen it done before, but never so deftly or without care for suspension of disbelief, and it allows Scott’s world to be introduced visually without any expositional slowing.

Spoilers and gender politics-grumbling 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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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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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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How could I not get the comic called CBGB OMFUG with a cover by Jaime Hernandez? How could you not get it?

Okay, so Jaime Hernandez didn’t do anything on the inside. Doesn’t matter.

What is inside are two vignettes, each written and drawn by a separate pair of creators, about the early days of punk at CBGB. I’m guessing that since this isn’t advertised as a one-shot, each new issue will bring us a new pair of vignettes and the series will build up a local history of punk.

The first story tells about the club’s first days, in 1974, and features a music historian and a mythologist as dueling ghosts of punk past. The mythologist argues that CBGB was punk’s birthplace, while the historian claims it’s more accurate to say it arose in several places independently. It’s the kind of argument that’s pleasant to overhear because it doesn’t really matter.

The other vignette, set in 1979, has a teenager learn from the CBGB bartender that his recently deceased uncle was “The Helsinki Syndrome,” a one-man band that played one show—the single most “punk fucking rock” show the bartender had ever seen.

I like that BOOM is letting journeyman writers and artists create these things. None of them necessarily has the polish of a Jaime Hernandez, the One True Comics Bard of punk’s allure. (Who does, though? Seriously, there’s something wrong with you if you can read early Love and Rockets and not want to join Maggie and Hopey’s band.) But it’s more punk fucking rock that way.

PDF preview here.

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The other day in the comic book store I overheard a guy saying how it’s not fair for Alan Moore to complain about other people being unoriginal when he’s spent his entire career making new works with other people’s characters or by reworking other people’s tropes.

I’d never thought of it before, but it’s completely true: Watchmen, Miracleman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Swamp Thing, Supreme, Tom Strong, Lost Girls, Skizz, even to a certain extent From Hell. Which isn’t to say that this isn’t a stunningly original body of work (or that in other books, like V for Vendetta, Promethea, and Top 10 he hasn’t also shown he can invent whole-cloth with the rest of them). But for the most part he’s made his bones showing just how much you can do with recycled material.

In 2004 he applied himself to H.P. Lovecraft with The Courtyard. It was an interesting, slim book in which an unapologetically racist FBI agent tried to crack an impossible set of murder cases and was exposed accidentally to the underlying grammar of the universe, which happened to be written just like Lovecraft’s vowel-less gibberish. This destroyed his mind and he ritually murdered his neighbor in just the manner of the murders he was investigating.

Neonomicon, the new series of some undisclosed number of issues, begins six years later as a new pair of FBI agents undertake to investigate that same set of murders—along with the three committed by the agent from The Courtyard. They start their quest by attempting to interview him in a criminal psych hospital, but he only answers them in Lovecraftian grunts. Then they try to track down the dealer he’d been chasing when he went mad, but the guy slips away from them and escapes into a mural.

One of Moore’s great strengths, as always, is in the way he fleshes out his borrowed elements (and I haven’t read my Lovecraft, so I can’t pinpoint what’s borrowed and what isn’t) with original character details, communicated through dialogue. In this case, for example:

“Get the fuck out of here. You got job-related stress. You didn’t carve people into fucking tulips.”

“Well, it wasn’t all job-related, I had a lot of personal issues to work through…”

“What, you were dating too many guys, you were drinking a little, it’s not the same thing…”

“Listen, I had problems. The sex-addiction thing…”

“Merril, if that was a real illness everybody over thirteen would be in a hospital.”

Later, Merril’s superior asks how her leave went, and then tells her that it’s great she’s sorted things out, and if she ever wants to go back to how things were, she should let him know, huh?

If I was one of those screenwriter bloggers, this is where I would write something like “That, kiddies, is how you lay pipe,” as part of an ongoing pretense that you can reduce creativity to mere craftsmanship. But what’s impressive about Moore isn’t the craftsmanship. It’s the bottomless originality.

Preview here.

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I can’t remember if it was Dan Fienberg or Alan Sepinwall who pointed out that one major difference between The Wire and Treme is that The Wire, with a few details shifted, could have been set in any of a dozen cities, while Treme was very specifically about New Orleans and unimaginable set anywhere else.

Sweets wants to use New Orleans the way The Wire used Baltimore, as a source of coloring detail rather than an integral character. That’s the most interesting thing I can think of to say about it, and it’s not really about the comic.

It’s competent detective fiction (though I think Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans may have ruined the city for fictional detectives for at least the coming decade). There’s nothing overtly wrong with it.

But when in the author’s notes section at the end writer/artist Kody Chamberlain tells us that he’s been working on this script for years, I want to seize him by the t-shirt front, shake him, and demand to know why.

I feel bad about feeling this way. The guy’s currently trying to raise a small amount of money to promote the five-issue series, like $3,000. This must be a labor of love.

It makes me feel worse, though, that I got on Scott Morse yesterday for producing something I didn’t fully connect with. At least it was clear Scott Morse had something he wanted to show us that no one else was doing. Kody Chamberlain, what made you labor with love over this story?

See, it was fine that The Wire wasn’t about Baltimore the way Treme is about New Orleans because it had a lot of other big, important things to say. Sweets doesn’t seem to, at least not so far. It’s got an Angry Police Captain, a spree killer, and a cop battling drink and a broken marriage. If that’s what I’m getting from the plot, I need more local flavor than just pecan pralines and a mausoleum in place of a grave.

Especially from the art. The final page is a lovely landscape of a city street, but it’s in no way a recognizably New Orleanian street, plus it’s one of only a handful of exteriors in the whole issue. If you’re going to bill something as “a New Orleans crime story,” then I kind of want to see more of the city than the insides of offices, cars, and labs.

Katrina is ominously offstage, though. I may keep buying the series to see where things go after the storm hits.

Preview here.

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