Smallish week, but some good things...

AIR #1
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #568 NWD
ANNA MERCURY #3 (OF 5) PAINTED CVR
ARCHIE #588
BATGIRL #2 (OF 6)
BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS #10
BIRDS OF PREY #121
BRAVE AND THE BOLD #16
CAPTAIN AMERICA #41
CARTOON NETWORK ACTION PACK #28
CASEY BLUE BEYOND TOMORROW #4 (OF 6)
CHARLATAN BALL #3
CONAN THE CIMMERIAN #2
DARK IVORY #3 (OF 4)
DC SPECIAL CYBORG #4 (OF 5)
DC WILDSTORM DREAMWAR #5 (OF 6)
DOCTOR WHO FORGOTTEN #1
DRAFTED #10
FEAR AGENT #23 1 AGAINST 1 (PT 2 OF 6)
FINAL CRISIS LEGION OF THREE WORLDS #1 (OF 5)
FLASH #243
FOOLKILLER WHITE ANGELS #2 (OF 5)
GHOST RIDER #26
GUARDIANS OF GALAXY #4 SI
HACK SLASH SERIES #15 SEELEY CVR B
HELM #2 (OF 4)
INCREDIBLE HERCULES #120 SI
IRON FIST ORIGIN OF DANNY RAND
IRON MAN DIRECTOR OF SHIELD #32
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #24
KILLER #8 (OF 10)
MADMAN ATOMIC COMICS #10
MARVEL 1985 #4 (OF 6)
MARVEL SPOTLIGHT SPIDER-MAN BRAND NEW DAY
MOON KNIGHT #21
OKKO CYCLE OF EARTH #2 (OF 4)
PALS N GALS DOUBLE DIGEST #124
PS238 #33
PUNISHER #61
RANN THANAGAR HOLY WAR #4 (OF 8)
RED STAR SWORD OF LIES #3 (OF 3) (NET) (RES)
REX LIBRIS #12
REX MUNDI DH ED #13
ROBIN #177
SCALPED #20
SCOOBY DOO #135
SIMPSONS COMICS #145
SKRULLS VS POWER PACK #2 (OF 4)
SPIRIT #20
SQUADRON SUPREME 2 #2
STAR WARS KNIGHTS OF OLD REPUBLIC #32 TURNABOUT
STORMWATCH PHD WORLDS END #13
SUPER FRIENDS #6
SUPERMAN BATMAN #51
TANGENT SUPERMANS REIGN #6 (OF 12)
THICKER THAN BLOOD #2 (OF 3)
TRINITY #12
TRUE BELIEVERS #2 (OF 5)
ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #57
UNCANNY X-MEN #501 MD
WORLD OF WARCRAFT #10
X-FACTOR #34 SI
X-FACTOR SPECIAL LAYLA MILLER
X-MEN FIRST CLASS VOL 2 #15
YOUNG X-MEN #5 DWS

Books / Mags / Stuff
BIONICLE GN VOL 02
COMICS BUYERS GUIDE #1646 OCT 2008
DOCTOR WHO AGENT PROVACATEUR TP
DONALD DUCK FAMILY DAAN JIPPES COLLECTION TP VOL 01
EC ARCHIVES TALES FROM THE CRYPT HC VOL 03
GOOD-BYE MARIANNE GN
HERBIE ARCHIVES HC VOL 01
KATY KEENE SPECIAL TP VOL 01
MIDNIGHTER TP VOL 02 ANTHEM
MIGHTY AVENGERS TP VOL 01
NAOKI URASAWAS MONSTER TP VOL 16
PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL CLASSIC TP VOL 01
SANDMAN PRESENTS DEAD BOY DETECTIVES TP
SCORCHY SMITH AND THE ART OF NOEL SICKLES HC
SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE ATOM TP VOL 02
SILVER SURFER TP REQUIEM
SPIDER-MAN LOVES MARY JANE HC VOL 02
STAR WARS FORCE UNLEASHED GN
SUPERMAN CHRONICLES TP VOL 05
TOMARTS ACTION FIGURE DIGEST #168
TRIPWIRE 2008 ANNUAL
ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN TP VOL 20 AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS
VADEBONCOEUR COLLECTION OF IMAGES #10
VIDEO WATCHDOG #142
WOLVERINE LOGAN PREMIERE HC
X-MEN TP DIVIDED WE STAND
YOUNGBLOOD TP VOL 01 FOCUS TESTED



What looks good to YOU...?

-B

Labels: Brian, Shipping Lists

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I'll try to avoid spoilers and skip the Jump; sorry if I screw up.

THE ASTOUNDING WOLFMAN #7 by ROBERT KIRKMAN, JASON HOWARD, and RUS WOOTEN: I watched this video of Robert Kirkman the other day; he put out this odd video saying that established comic creators should focus exclusively on their own comics, and quit their jobs, and something-something-kids. But I had a weird time turning 30, too, so who am I to judge?

Anyways, it at least worked as a marketing video, and successfully reminded me that guy existed and that I didn’t really have an articulate reason why I don’t read his comics other than “Tony Moore stopped drawing them.” So, this WOLFMAN thing: it’s apparently about a werewolf who wears a drawing of a werewolf on his chest...?? Part of me wants to applaud, but it doesn’t get better than that: issue #7 is the BIG TWIST issue.

Having not read any prior issue, I had no emotional investment in any of what was happening. It’s funny to see a twist from that vantage point: it all seems so transparent, the things that writers do to push buttons. “Here’s a puppy with a gun to its head.” It makes the whole enterprise seem so mechanical. I don’t want to spoil this comic, but it’s drearily typical in terms of what it thinks is shocking.

There’s not much here of any noticeable interest besides the Twist. But if you liked INVINCIBLE, it's the same sort of thing. It’s similarly simple. The character design works. “Monster hero” is a decent character type no one else is doing very well right now. Characters explain their feelings at each other at numbing length and in precise detail. It’s easy.

Jason Howard is credited as “penciler, inker, colorist” instead of “artist." Which is kind of sad, if you think about it too much. Which I did. I think I spent more time thinking about that than any of the contents.

I’d rather watch more videos where Kirkman calls for the heads of the 5 Comic Families to assemble on a cruise-ship, though(?). That part was fucking excellent.

SECRET INVASON THOR by MATT FRACTION, DOUG BRAITHEWAITE, PAUL MOUNTS, VC’s JOE CARAMANGA, GABRIELLE DELL’OTTO, ALEJANDRO ARBONA, WARREN SIMONS, JOE QUESADA and DAN BUCKLEY: I don’t know about the story-- it takes Thor off the board, in order to service some unnecessary pregnant white woman subplot. Pregnant white women, puppies in danger, crying Chinese babies, cat up a tree, Jessica Tandy on a horse that's headed the wrong way, Michael Clarke Duncan crying while holding a decapitated teddy-bear, Meredith Baxter Birney dying of a Woman's Disease but making a video for the daughter she won't live long enough to see graduate—- sure, all those things work 99% of the time and get the audience on your side; I guess I’m just being a shit-bag, but the pregnant lady caught me in a bad, cynical mood. Not a good mood to be reading comics in, I guess. I’m not really a big fan of the Morgan Freeman narration, either; it's a little anxious to be taken seriously for a comic about Kirby gods fighting green aliens.

But: Doug Braithewaite, huh? That’s a reason to take a look at this comic; it’s a good looking comic book. Paul Mounts colors from his pencils, which is usually not a technique that I’m particularly enamored with. But here, it works: maybe because the unfinished feeling of the pencils somehow conveys these characters as being otherworldly, not part and parcel of our fully-inked reality, not just crappy Vikings with delusions of grandeur. I don’t think it would work on every book; besides, Braithewaite and Bill Reinhold on inks ala their PUNISHER run, say? That’s a pretty solid team I’d rather not see messed with.

I’d enjoyed the Jason Aaron BLACK PANTHER tie-in more, for going into the mindset of the enemy, and being more of a war comic. This one promises to be a little more epic in scale than that though, which might yield dividends in future issues. Heck, maybe the pregnant lady will work in the later issues, and this will end up being a weirdly moving Viking versus Alien comic about birth in the face of war or some shit. Who knows? Not me. Maybe Michael Clarke Duncan.

MUMBAI MACGUFFIN by SAURAV MOHAPATRA, SAUMIN PATEL, V. VENKATA SUBRAMANIAN, NILESH MAHADIK, REUBEN THOMAS, AND SETH JARET: This is the first time Virgin Comics has ever put out a comic I was willing to read. I’m not a huge fan of “Chief Visionary” Deepak Chopra, or I’m guessing “Chief Creative Officer” “Gotham” Chopra, either. I don’t really know much about Richard Branson, except I have the vague impression he’s some kind of doucher. Besides all that, they’re not a company that has me in mind. The company has been fairly open about being dedicated more towards pleasing Hollywood executives than comic book fans. I am not Ashton Kutcher’s agent.

The company employs Indian writers and Indian artists, but this is the first time I’ve ever noticed them putting out a comic about India, and not just peddling a watered-down version of the mythology. It was reasonable. Saurav Mohapatra’s scripts a dopey action-comedy in a mix of Hindi and English, and heaps together a Mumbai filled with gangsters, taxi drivers, hitmen, CIA operatives, spiritualists, and terrorists. It’s a silly mish-mash. It could be better-- the ending makes little sense, and it’d have been nice if they’d given the lead white character a personality, any personality at all. As for the art, the inexperience is noticeable, but it’s at least clear and the character designs are fun enough, even if there’s a definite need for improvement on composition, storytelling, and inking.

But it moves fast and it doesn’t take itself seriously, at least, and I guess I found it endearing despite its flaws, like a B-movie on at 2 a.m. on HBO that’s better than I’d have guessed: it’s not as good as REAL MEN or SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO, but I’d watch it all the way to the end. Light-hearted action-comedies set in the real world? I’m the audience for those. Indian comic creators, inspired by Japanese manga or French sci-fi comics, selling comics in America, swapping spit with Pico Iyer? It all sounds great in theory, before you add in Ed Burns or whoever pitching their shitty D-list movie ideas, or Chopra & Family hawking discount spirituality and crackpot nonsense to credulous westerners, or god knows what ridiculous business practices they’re almost certainly engaged in. There were Indian comic creators before Virgin, and if these guys can improve their game, let’s hope there’ll be Indian comic creators after these Virgin people are gone, gone, gone.

CRIMINAL #4 of VOLUME 2 by ED BRUBAKER, SEAN PHILLIPS, and VAL STAPLES: I don’t know. This arc, the main character is a cartoonist who sometimes visualizes his creation speaking to him-- hardboiled private-dick Frank Kafka. What do you make of that? I haven’t decided if I think it’s clever, or if I think it’s a Dabney Coleman vehicle. I guess we’ll find out.

Besides that, it’s the usual laughs and hi-jinks. As ever, the series’ dedication to un-cool, unpleasant fuck-ups is admirable, though the umpteenth lady character who’s an emotionally-damaged sperm-bank is maybe … I don’t know, maybe going to start getting weird eventually? There’s a fine line between “genre convention” and “skuzzy creep-o shit” that I don’t think has been crossed yet for this book, for me, personally, but… but that way lies Frank Miller, and, shit, I’d hate to see that happen to anybody.

TORPEDO 1936 VOLUME 6 by E. SANCHEZ ABULI and JORDI BERNET: IDW recently announced plans to reprint this classic gangster comic, but after I’d picked up a batch of the Bernet run from Bud Plant. Holy crap! Remember my hoity-toity line between “genre convention” and “skuzzy creep-o shit”? This book crosses that line, and the next line past that into “should I be embarrassed to be reading this?” territory. It’s not … It’s not as embarrassing as Wally Wood’s CANNON, say, but still: I didn’t know anything about TORPEDO besides that Bernet drew it, so I was surprised by what a cheerfully depraved comic it turned out to be.

For example: in this volume, the main character organizes a gang-bang—and that’s the least unpleasant part of what happens. You don’t root for the main character to win because you like him, so much as you want to see what horrible shit he’ll pull next. Bernet makes it all look beautiful, of course, but that fact that a dog with a boner playing with lit dynamite is being so well drawn? That sort of adds to the crazy of the whole thing.

I’m still trying to comprehend how Alex Toth worked on this series—how do you spot blacks for a gangbang? “Dear Steve Rude, Why didn’t you research the gangbang? Library card! Dedication! Silhouette! Dildo-play!” That’s not a letter you want in the mail.

SAMMY THE MOUSE #1 and #2 by ZAK SALLY: So, this is about an alcoholic rat either suffering from serious mental problems, or stuck in the middle of some kind of spiritual awakening— which is probably the same thing. The rat’s friends include other broke-down, alcoholic animal cartoons. The art’s got plenty of nervous energy, black & white with blue & brown accents—- the best bits summon up a sort of horrible run-down cartoon world broken down from neglect and mental illness.

The timing’s good; the storytelling’s fun; I’m clueless what any of it possibly means, but I like watching cartoon characters drinking, so I suppose it’s entertaining. Most of the comic’s been spent watching characters hang out; something larger seems to be happening, but there’s no telling what that is exactly. If the project is aiming for 300 pages though, at an issue a year… well, if I’m doing the geometry right there, which I might not be, there might be a pretty decent wait to find out what this is all about.

I don’t know how to judge it really, in the meantime. So far, it at least feels mysterious instead of random, but there’s no telling how long that’ll last. I liked #1 more than #2: #1 was funnier and had better drawings than #2. But I especially liked a panel in #2 where a hand’s absence is depicted by the vacuum it leaves in space. It’s a neat depiction of speed and shock: something should be there but it's suddenly not.

I’ve been re-reading old Jaime Hernandez comics though—early LOVE & ROCKETS stuff. I hadn’t been interested in his superhero half to the new issue (though Gilbert's Martin & Lewis bit was killer). But it got me revisiting things like Mechanics, 100 Rooms, The Lost Women— that brief rocket half of LOVE & ROCKETS. People dismiss that stuff since Jaime’s later stuff was better, but: the early Jaime work isn't exactly shabby. It’s not really fair to read stuff like SAMMY THE MOUSE at the same time; it feels so slow & under-populated by comparison.

That's not a fair place for me to be coming from, maybe. That maybe goes for all of the above. All of these reviews are so goddamn unfair. "Dear Steve Rude, Have you read Death of Speedy lately? Dildo-play!" He doesn't deserve that in his mailbox. Who deserves that? Nobody. Maybe Michael Clarke Duncan.

Labels: Abhay

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The Punisher MAX #60



I think it's useful to compare this comic -- the last of writer Garth Ennis' run on the series -- with another thing Marvel released this week: The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe, a reprint of material from 1995. That was Ennis' first work on the character; he was 25 years old, though already a professional comics writer for over than half a decade.

It's not a very good comic. The What If...? type concept is that Frank Castle's family is accidentally killed in the middle of a superhero battle (instead of a gangland firefight) and the opening pages do have some nasty kick, with various Marvel superheroes standing around in their rainbow-hued spandex regalia, annoyedly discussing the collateral damage caused by their adventures, the implication being that wifes and children and such get unwittingly killed in many of those happy adventures you (the reader) so enjoy reading. The same idea is present in Ennis' current The Boys, but the Punisher comic does benefit from having all those famous characters standing around, being irritable, until Frank Castle empties a gun into the crowd without warning.

The rest of it's a below-average Marshal Law storyline, and a fannish one at that; it's bratty fanishness, yes, focusing on superheroes getting killed, but that's still not substantively different from Batman Can Beat Hulk Because, and it grossly undercuts the meanness of those first pages of the comic, the critique inherent.

But it is there, and The Punisher MAX is here, and right now it's 180 degrees away.



What's been striking to me about this final storyline is how different it's been from even earlier issues of the series itself. Ennis' Punisher has always been evolving, of course. Marvel also recently reprinted Welcome Back, Frank, which marked the start of the writer's prolonged association with the character, at the dawn of the Jemas era in 2000. That was the 'Knights' Punisher, a comedic take on the character cracking polar bears in the kisser and making fools of superheroes, although there were more 'serious' bits too.

Eventually, in 2004, the Knights version of the character was scrapped and the MAX version officially began (although the 'Vol. 0' MAX miniseries The Punisher: Born was released in 2003); it marked a break away from all prior continuity, taking place in its own private universe, one with few Marvel characters. Nick Fury was there (or, the version of Fury Ennis devised for his 2001-02 Fury MAX miniseries), and characters from Punisher history were occasionally featured (or alluded to), but all of them inhabited a closed-off world that operated in quasi-realtime -- each new storyline 'occurs' at the time its first issue is published in the reader's world -- much like the old Hellblazer, the series that first brought Ennis' work to North America.

That's not to say the MAX Punisher did away with comedy altogether; it'd actually be a pretty big mistake to call it entirely serious. Rather, it embraced a type of 'heightened reality' approach, stretching the emotions and activities of 'realistic' characters to encompass wild deed and develop dryly absurd situations - it's all a bit like what manga writer Kazuo Koike does with some of his projects, though Ennis is more droll a writer, and I suspect far less inclined toward oddball improvisation. Still: the Punisher parachutes out of a nuclear missile! That stuff's right in there (Mother Russia, Vol. 3).

(and note that I'm leaving out the likely influence of prose crime writers, which I'm just not equipped to address, sorry)

Yet in the same way, there were long, cold, dark themes at work. Ennis has really used the longview well in this series - you can get a satisfying story out of the average collected volume (or even a given issue, although Ennis' skill with a cliffhanger doesn't always translate to individually great chapters), but the best effect is to observe how Ennis works his concerns over years of time, both in terms of his writing and the characters' fictional lives.

It's certainly the only way to fully appreciate one of the series' core themes, a very old one - that violence and retribution circle back to return to any given actor. I think it's something to note exactly how many supporting cast members get killed over the course of this series, and, on the flip side, how Ennis never allows any one villain to retain primacy for the whole run.

There's other concerns as well - the interrelationship between 'high' and 'low' crime, rich and poor (generally white and not-white), is a big one, reaching its climax in the extended The Punisher Shoots Enron saga of Barracuda (Vol. 6), which was chock-full of interracial, class-crossing chaos, in addition to the obvious satire. Note how Barracuda himself (by all rights, he shouldn't have ever worked outside of that storyline, so specific is his position) quietly shifts in Long Cold Dark (Vol. 9), still a tool of (different) powerful interests, but seen a little differently amidst the story's individual theme of parents creating Hell for their children.

That's just one way Ennis operates with a eye toward the expansive. But always, always, it's clear that his main character is doomed, no matter how great at killing he might be. We're all doomed, really, if you take the 2004 MAX one-shot The Punisher: The End as not the optional 'ending' for the character it was conceived as by its publisher (The End is a whole series of not-really 'final' stories for Marvel characters, in case you didn't know), but as the actual ending for the closed-off MAX Punisher world. There, international warmaking (a frequent motif in the MAX series proper) leads to a nuclear exchange with China, apparently wiping out most of the population of the US, and maybe the world.

"That's the trouble with a war you never want to end," remarks Frank Castle to a traveling companion, whom he'll later kill for his pre-apocalyptic crimes, regardless of how maybe people are even left in the world. It's a line that belied a total lack of self-awareness in 2004, but now seems just the opposite - Vol. 9 'ended' the story of this series, in terms of Frank's characterization, with his acknowledgement that he's done as much to create his horrible life as anyone else -- the people who shot his family, the Vietnam conflict that roused his taste for killing -- yet he still rejects any attempt to start over, and returns to The War.

Maybe, at the end of human time, he's making a little joke about how he'll be the last one left, burning in an irradiated city as he envisions a return to the place where his wife and children were killed, perhaps touching a bit of Morrisonian hyper-sanity and realizing that he's not going to Hell, but has always been there, because he's a Marvel comic book character that must have adventures into perpetuity, and so his wife and children will always be shot, and he'll always be mad, over and over, revival and revamp, new writers and artists, never, ever ending until they all blink from the culture's attention.

Man, that hits me a lot more than tossing Wolverine into an electric fence since his bones are metal and it'd totally melt his internal organs before he could heal... sounds kinda quaint, given the last 13 years of comics.



And so, here we are at the spectacularly-titled Valley Forge, Valley Forge: The Slaughter of a U.S. Marine Garrison and the Birth of the Punisher, Vol. 10, the last. Like I mentioned, Frank's story reached a sort of 'ending' in Vol. 9, so this one is a little different. It's the only one of Ennis' MAX stories missing the title character's famous narration; here, he's observed, puzzled over. We never once climb inside him, for what more needs be said? The action is often interrupted by text and 'photos' taken from a book written by the brother of a dead character from Born, and the chapters we read touch on prior themes of the series, though with a special emphasis on warfare waged on questionable grounds.

This is far and away the most political of Ennis' Punisher works; it's a little reminiscent of his Punisher-ish 2004-05 Avatar series 303, in that it functions on one level as a murder fantasy concerning men who start conflicts for poor reasons. It's also the most serious, concluding with no less than poetry appearing on the page as Nick Fury growls at television footage of wounded soldiers in Iraq. Poetry and song lyrics in comics are dangerous stuff, but Ennis -- so often pilloried as a fatally 'cool' writer prone to sneering at nerdy shit like superheroes while he makes his money -- seems intent on spending his final pages being as emotional as he pleases, no matter how silly he might look.

It works and it doesn't. The plot -- wicked Army and Air Force brass send good men to kill Frank so as to wipe out evidence of the nasty shit they've been pulling at varous points in the series -- operates well in accommodating Ennis' shift of focus away from the inside of Frank's head. There's little surprise that Frank copes with facing good men sent to defeat him by simply evading and disarming (due to his awesome skills) until they're forced to give up - when you're fighing a war that never ends, you're likely to outlast people with other aspects to their lives, after all. He runs circles around them for most of it, quick enough that the suspense seems lopsided, though I think that's attributable to seeing the Punisher how others see him, for once.

Additionally, by turning his gaze away from Frank, Ennis also redirects his grand theme. Here, Frank exists symbolically as well as physically, as the embodiment of Vietnam damage up and walking - it's something he's been known as at various points in the series, but in this storyline he's very much an instrument of delivering violence straight to the door of men looking to profit from bloodshed, what went around coming back around. That probably makes this one of Ennis' more pro-Punisher stories, although longtime readers know that Frank is just as doomed for his sins and everyone else.

Of course, those longtime readers will encounter some jarring shift in tone. I understand that Ennis wants to provide an immediately weighty capstone for his run, but all this rue and verse has a way of clashing with the actual details of the evil generals' scheme, which did involve a flesh-devouring virus, a sweet little girl, the aforementioned nuclear missile dive and the Punisher thrashing a miniature martial arts master to death by grabbing his leg and bashing him against things.

And it'll surely be up to each reader to decide if an in-story cultivation of a terrorist cell with the intention to execute a strike on foreign soil while covertly securing the use of a bacteriological weapon really synchs up allegorically to What Ennis is Really Talking About when he writes of "those who profited" from a shitty war started on shit grounds - and those prone to sudden explosions of racism in the Big Villain manner of the rest of the series at that! I'm not sure it comes across as convincing as it could; one of the benefits of writing 303 for Avatar was that he didn't have to speak so indirectly, with such potential for choking on those extra words.

Still, there's moments of some power in here, and a willingness to acknowledge the personal, human element inside grand moral flourishes. The artist, Goran Parlov, is excellent as always, his caricature-prone faces deftly wrinkling into pain and rage, and his action pages so sleek and hard you'll hear everything fine without sound effects. He's become sort of the series' 'regular' artist in the last few volumes, and he fits in well with Ennis' flowing tone, now gone over the falls to address real world concerns with unrestrained anger.

Feel free to query how any of this will look to someone hopping on at the end; I bet it'd seem a bit tinny, its super-character moving into combat with such assurance that inevitability seems at his back; longterm readers will get more kick out of the final issue's march of its villains to doom, because they know it's inevitable, from what Ennis has built from things he did not create. It's a GOOD final word for what's become a model of what a corporate-owned series can do, with a writer willing to glare so deep into its implications, ready to devote an awful lot of time and space to work-for-hire service, and renowned enough to get just what he wants away from the rigor of the shared universe.

It's work that'll inform the future incarnations, inevitably born again into that acknowledged perdition of further adventures.

Labels: Jog

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You can also consider this post a reminder that I still have no idea how to use a flash:



These and other fine books, only a quarter each. (I should mention I've got a box full of old Comics Journals, and I'm letting those go for only fifty cents each.) I'm on Cortland Avenue between Andover and Moultrie, 94110 (although this isn't the address use 515 Cortland to get a close enough fix on my location). We're going to be near the rubble of the old library, and next to the storage containmnent cube. Yes, it's a garage sale, Armagetto-style! And I hope you can turn out. We'll be there from 9 to 4.

See you there!

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You can find the newest Tilting at Windmills up right here. Go, read, give Jonah hits.


-B

Labels: Brian, retailing, Tilting

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As part of my relentless pursuit to understand all things secret and invasive (e.g. your dad's hands), I attended a symposium dedicated to SECRET INVASION comic books, held at the 2008 San Diego Film Festival or "Comic-Con" as it's sometimes called.

Within a half hour of arriving in San Diego, I was standing outside of the Hard Rock Hotel watching four bouncers rub a drunk, overweight, middle-aged Hispanic woman's face into the pavement while she yelled "Yo, why you gotta twist my thumbs? Why you gotta be twistin' on my thumbs?" But unfortunately, the entire weekend could not be that entertaining or make me feel that hopeful about my fellow man.

The way the panel works is about 20-30 gentlemen come into an auditorium, and sit behind a long table; each is introduced as having written or having watched someone write or having once had dinner with someone who wrote one of the SECRET INVASION tie-ins. Lead series writer Brian Michael Bendis, having won at comics, does not attend. The 20-30 gentlemen differ in various respects, though the majority of them seem to share an aversion for tanning parlors. Each is introduced in turn by a slideshow hosted by Panel Moderator and Marvel Editor-in-Chief, Joe Quesada.

Then, a pretty lady enters, and each man dons a Luchadore mask and gets in line to-- wait, no: then, the panel is immediately opened, without any delay, to a call for questions from the audience. The question-and-answer session begin, and a rather surprising fact quickly becomes apparent:

Despite the median age of these winners being about 27, apparently none of these people have ever read or even so much as encountered a Story before SECRET INVASION. In fact, they all seem confused if not maybe frightened by how stories work.

Here is my recollection of the question-and-answer session; these are all pretty nearly exact quotes, I think:

FAN #1: How does SECRET INVASION end?

JOE QUESADA: We can't say because the way a story works is that it has a beginning, a middle and an ending, and we usually try to tell you those things in a particular order. I can’t tell you the ending because we’re not done with the middle yet. Next question, please.

FAN #2: Joe-- at the end of SECRET INVASION, what will have happened to the characters?

JOE QUESADA: Aah, I see your confusion-- yes, sometimes people tell stories orally. In fact, this was the very origins of storytelling, and I'm sure anthropologists would assert that this tradition reaches as far back as to the Cradle of Civilization itself, that at the very Dawn of Man, somewhere in between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, that early, primitive man frequently indulged in oral storytelling. However, SECRET INVASION is exclusively being told through comics and is not being told orally. So I can't tell you what happens because words come out of my mouth, and not comic books.

FAN #2: I have a follow-up question. Will the heroes have defeated the villains by the end of SECRET INVASION, or will the villains have defeated the heroes?

JOE QUESADA: Aah, yes, that raises an interesting point. You "purchase" the comic books we sell using money that is contained in your wallet or pocket or grandma's purse. By "purchasing" our comic books, you get to find out the substance of the events that are depicted in the comic books you've "purchased". We are trying to make money by selling you the comic books. So if we tell you what happens in comic books that have not come out yet, we will not make any money. And that would be bad for us, financially. Next question.

FAN #3: First of all, I'd just like to say how you're all great, and this is great, and congratulations on being great. And I just think it's great that such greatness could be so great. It'd be great to rub your great bodies with a cheese greater [sic] and eat the great skin that I rip off. I think it's great that I said "[sic]" out loud.

JOE QUESADA: Thank you, sir. Do you have a question?

FAN #3: It's... there's... I want to know things.

JOE QUESADA: I think I see the problem. A question is a statement designed to invite a response from another person, with the expectation that the response will relate in some way to the original statement. Next question.

FAN #4: Heeeeey, how youse all doin’ today? I'm a huge fan of the Mighty Thor. Will he appear in SECRET INVASION?

JOE QUESADA: Yes, we are selling a comic called MIGHTY THOR'S SECRET INVASION FUNNIES which you should all buy. Thank you for that excellent question.

FAN #4: I have a follow-up question. What will the Mighty Thor be doing in the SECRET INVASION?

JOE QUESADA: Oh, I went a little fast there; my bad: if you read MIGHTY THOR'S SECRET INVASION FUNNIES, you will find out what the Mighty Thor will be doing in the SECRET INVASION.

[Disconcertingly Enthusiastic Applause]

FAN #4: I have a follow-up question. Will the Mighty Thor use his hammer at some point during the SECRET INVASION?

JOE QUESADA: I'm not sure if I'm allowed to answer that, but I will say this: maybe. Next question.

FAN #5: I don't want to know what happens at the end of SECRET INVASION. I don't want you guys to ruin it because I love the endings of your comics. But what will the middle of the story be like? What will happen in the exact middle? Also: will I like it?

JOE QUESADA: Good question. We haven't discussed middles yet. Now, the middle is the part between the beginning and ...

***********************

The overwhelming majority of fans didn't want to ask about SECRET INVASION-- they were there to "debate" the fact Spiderman wished his wife to the cornfield. Remember that? Apparently, dudes out there still care! Like: a lot!

The point of these debates as far as I could tell...?

On the one hand, fans want to provoke Joe Quesada into admitting that he made a horrible mistake of which he's deeply ashamed of, and then to cry and beg for their forgiveness, and then, for him to cry into the microphone "Spiderman is why my wife makes me pee sitting down" and then for him to hang himself from the rafters, and then for adorable children to beat his dead body with a stick until candy comes out, and then for one of the children to eat a piece and scream, “Oh, that is not chocolate after all, senor!”

Joe Quesada, on the other hand, does not want to do any of these things. Editor-in-chiefs typically won't admit they screwed up the flagship characters with whom they've been entrusted-- it's their weird little way of avoiding being fired from their jobs. That's my guess, at least-- one not shared by most Marvel fans, apparently.

I'd estimate that the Spiderman "debates" took up about 50 minutes of the 60 minute SECRET INVASION panel.

The other 20-30 people? For the most part, not invited or asked to say anything. Just there for decoration. Man-decoration.

At some point, Brian Michael Bendis was called on a cellular telephone. Some fan tried to ask "Why is POWERS being released on a quarterly basis during such an important storyline? The quarterly release schedule has destroyed the book's momentum-- when will that book resume a more timely schedule?" Unfortunately, in greasy dipshit language, that sounds like "YO, AY YO, WHY YOU SELL OUT POWERS, MAN? AAAY." Which just got a hearty "Fuck You" in response. Newsarama changed "Fuck You" in its panel report to ... "Boo You".

Boo-You.

*******************

So: sometimes, in observing Marvel comics from the lofty vantages of the internet, one wonders "Do they really think their fans are THIS stupid?" And the answer is: You bet, and they find out that they're right themselves, first-hand! I urge anyone complaining about Marvel comics on the internet: get thee to a nunnery, and watch one of these panels. The fact any Marvel comic features words that are polysyllabic-- Wow! They trust their audience that much!

So, the review of #5 after the jump.

AFTER READING ISSUE #5:

I don’t know about you, but my hope is this issue is a giant fake-out.

At least, that’s what I’d like to see happen: for the characters revealed to be Skrulls at the end to turn out not to be Skrulls after all. I think it’d be something if the Skrulls saw Reed Richards’s device coming, and figured out a way to use his brains / arrogance against him. I think that’d be a pretty funny twist, actually. I guess that’s what I’m rooting to happen after this issue anyways— for all of the Marvel Superheroes to be accidental murderers. I think it’d be super-funny to see fans react to that. Plus: it’d explain how the Mockingbird “Skrull” knew about the miscarriage (or was that explained in a stupid tie-in?)...

I think that’s plainly what they want fans guessing. It’s just hard to imagine Marvel would interfere with the White Queen from the ASSORTED X-MEN comics. I get the impression she’s a popular character for them. This entire enterprise would be a more entertaining series if it were easier to subtract those kinds of thoughts / considerations from the game, but...

Were you alive for CAPTAIN MARVEL? He was before my time, and that’s not material I revisited in my Marvel inquiries. That character’s most often linked to Jim Starlin, and I don’t rank Starlin personally, at least for the sort of thing I’m usually interested in. With Marvel, I’m most interested in Marvel’s geography, so the cosmic, outer-space stuff is usually completely lost on me. Anyways, I don’t really find that whole Captain Marvel stretch of the book terribly interesting. Plus, I think Leinil Yu’s space opera moments are the weakest he’s been on the series—for me, he definitely seems more “on” for the Savage Land sequences.

Speaking of Yu:
Maybe they shouldn’t let him draw tears anymore. Maybe it’s not right for kids to be looking at that.

Most of the things they promised last issue haven’t happened this issue, but those promises were made with respect to the events transpiring in New York City. I’m perfectly happy not to be stuck in New York for another issue.

The “Skrulls Offer World Peace” spread isn’t terribly interesting to me. I suppose an argument could be made that the finale of CIVIL WAR showed the Marvel populace eager to embrace fascism, and this could be that earlier scene playing out to its logical conclusion. Still: "evil aliens who claim to mean well" is too ancient a bit of business for me to get excited over. Besides the fact it’s another thing BATTLESTAR GALACTICA did already, there was the V, TO SERVE MAN, etc. It's a little familiar.

Plus, the prospect of the Marvel Universe being controlled by Skrulls for the next year or so-- it just doesn't seem plausible. It'd be too distracting for too many books.

I quite like that Maria Hill scene though. That’s the issue for me, personally. I think I’m a pretty easy audience—- any big let’s-all-cheer moment, I’m usually pretty happy to cheer along. Plus, for me, that scene’s about Hill forced to embrace being a superhero in a way I’ve never seen from that character before. Granted, I don’t read all the spin-offs; I’ve hardly read all of her appearances, by any means. But I always got a “I’m the grouch who doesn’t like superheroes and superhero craziness” vibe off how she’s been written before. So, I like that the character wins in this issue by kind of becoming a sort of legacy character for Nick Fury. Not the boring kind of 1:1 replacement character; “here’s the new Flash, just a little different from the old Flash, but with the same exact name, powers, costume, and hometown” legacy character, but as a unique character who’s filling the spy-superhero role that Nick Fury used to fill while he moves on to fill some other role.

I don’t know if I’d call it intellectually satisfying, but "intellectual satisfaction" is what’s tripped me up with FINAL CRISIS. If I find anything distracting to that series, it’s not that I’m confused as to what’s happening, so much as disinterested by how familiar the themes seem. The character imprisoned in human form who’s forgotten his true place in a larger universe, especially. I imagine the Monitor character will eventually “awaken” in some way that’s both thematically significant and of some confusing importance plotwise—- but I won’t really care when it happens, so much as be ticking off a box in my head. Flattering myself for recognizing themes I’ve already seen a half-dozen times before isn’t doing it for me, this round.

While with SECRET INVASION, right this second, I want that “Oh, No!” moment of watching Hawkeye realize he shot his wife to death. Or— or something bad to happen to somebody. This is a series I don’t want to end well for the characters in it; things have gone way too smoothly for everyone so far, and for me, it's absolutely built a hope that they're hanging onto some kind of ace card for issue #8, and that #1 to 7 have been rope-a-dope. That could just be wishful thinking, and this could just be ... well... dope-a-dope. This could all just be one giant Boo-You.

Labels: Abhay

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As always, my timing sucks because I'm so happy Graeme's got a post up that I hate the idea someone might miss it with all the following hoo-ha I'm about to throw your way. So please make sure to see Graeme's post below! Thank you.

So it's time for the annual hillwide garage sale in Bernal Heights this Saturday: that means people all over the hill will be having sales in front of their homes and apartments. And it means that, once again, I will be out on Cortland Avenue with a table, a bunch of long boxes, and some embarrassingly low prices: after much consideration, I've decided to hold my prices to a quarter a book.

Google maps is being kinda dicky without map links, but here's one to my rough location: 515 Cortland Avenue, 94110.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&
geocode=&q=515+Cortland+Ave,+San+Francisco,+CA
+94110&sll=37.739601,-122.412007&sspn=0.007772,
0.019312&ie=UTF8&ll=37.74296,-122.413852&spn
=0.007771,0.019312&z=16&layer=c&cbll=37.739054
,-122.416435&panoid=HLCG6xVb0K-nW0iBtW78qg

The Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center, which organizes the sale, hasn't told me the exact location, but it's somewhere on Cortland between Andover and Moultrie.

Interestingly but probably unsurprisingly, in the year since I've stopped working at CE, the number of books I've bought has diminished significantly: this is probably because not having them right in front of me for eight hours at a stretch has made them easier to resist. I'd made it a point to try and spend less on comix when I left CE but I don't think that influenced things much--more of my spending has moved toward trades, archives, and manga than the actual floppy/pamphlet/single format. (Fortunately, I'm a notoriously poor bellwether for the rest of the industry, otherwise I'd be worried for future of the singles market.) So whereas in the past few years, I've had something like eight longboxes of books for sale, currently it looks like it'll be at most five.

That said, I'm looking to get rid of a lot of duplicates and stuff that has been traded (or at least in good-enough Essential/Showcase format) from across the range of my collection. Here's three quick pictures to give you an idea of what I mean:







Although it's still a work in progress. I mean, having just picked up the HTD omnibus, I really don't need all my issues anymore, so I pulled them and put 'em in the to-sell pile. But those issues have a particular hold on me--some of them I can remember what I was eating when I read them for the first time, or where I bought them, or the quality of light in my room as I reread them for the third or fourth time--and I'm finding myself skittish about letting them go. I was always a reader, not a collector or a speculator, but I find myself wishing now I'd been more of one (I was flipping through my copy of Hulk #181 today and, sure enough, I'd clipped the stamp like a good little Marvelite), just so that the filthy lucre could provide a tipping point in this tug-of-war between my past and my present. Strangely, it's the more personal stuff--like Howard The Duck--I feel more like letting go for a quarter. It's like returning an animal to the wild or something.

Uh, anyway, that's all a long winded way of saying there are going to be some very good deals. Depending on how manic or depressive I let myself get about all this, maybe some very, very good deals. If you're in the city this weekend, please think about showing up between 9 and 4 on Saturday on Cortland between Andover and Moultrie. Introduce yourself and I'll try to press a free comic in your hands or something. Feel free to drop me an email with any questions, or leave 'em in the comments link.

Labels: garage sale, Jeff

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Here's the thing. When I got to the last page of Secret Invasion #4, and I saw Thor arrive and the glimpse of Captain America, I thought, okay, so #5 is going to see them getting involved and maybe something will finally happen in the series. Well, SECRET INVASION #5 made half of that come true, I guess. Just the less expected half.



The complete lack of Cap and Thor in this issue just made me concentrate on the incredibly weird pacing of this series so far: What was the point of teasing their appearance so blatantly when you're not going to show them at all in the following issue? Probably the same point as having nothing whatsoever happening for three successive issues, and then blowing your plot development wad on three climaxes this time around. And, while I'm asking questions, what point did the whole Savage Land plot serve whatsoever, apart from taking the Avengers out of New York? If all of the heroes who came off the Skrull ship were Skrulls - and if Reed Richards can just expose them all by building his Skrull Detector off-panel in a moment of prime McGuffin-ing ("They're undetectable! No, wait, I need someone to detect them now. Okay, Reed can build a detector, but I won't tell anyone what his discovery that changed everything actually was.") - then... okay, I guess? But what purpose did it serve, especially when the fake heroes didn't actually do anything apart from run around the jungle and get killed?

That's the problem with Secret Invasion, ultimately; it doesn't stand up to any real questioning. It's just a series of moments that probably looked cool in Bendis' head when he thought of them strung together in some semblance of plot without much thought to the mechanics of how they'd actually work (Of all the Skrulls on the Helicarrier, not one of them noticed that there was another Maria Hill hiding out watching the showdown? Really?). As a big summer blockbuster about explosions and people saying "Oh my God" to tell the audience that this is meant to be important, it works well, but as a story? It's just turning out to be kind of Crap.

Labels: Graeme

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Going through my stuff in preparation for my upcoming garage sale and came across this lovely number:



What amuses me about this issue of Comics Interview from 1987 isn't the boast that we'll be watching the Watchmen, but the corner claim about Alan Moore says farewell to comics "at least for now." No wonder Affable Al believes we live our lives over and over again!

Labels: Alan Moore, Jeff, Watchmen

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More line items than we've seen in a few weeks, hope you like SECRET INVASION...

100 BULLETS #94
2000 AD #1595
2000 AD #1596
A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #86 (A)
ACTION COMICS #868
AMAZING SPIDER-GIRL #23
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #567
ANGEL AFTER THE FALL #11
ARCHIE & FRIENDS #122
ARCHIE DOUBLE DIGEST #191
ASTONISHING X-MEN #26 MD
ATOMIC ROBO DOGS OF WAR #1 (OF 5)
BATMAN #679 RIP
BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #20
BATMAN STRIKES #48
BOOSTER GOLD #11
BPRD THE WARNING #2 (OF 5)
BROTHERS IN ARMS #3
BUCKAROO BANZAI THE PREQUEL #1 (OF 2)
CAPTAIN BRITAIN AND MI 13 #4 SI
CHECKMATE #29
CHUCK #3 (OF 6)
CTHULHU TALES #4 CVR A
DELPHINE #3
DOCTOR WHO #6
EVERYBODYS DEAD #5
FALL OF CTHULHU GODWAR #1 (OF 4) CVR A
FANTASTIC FOUR #559
FINAL CRISIS REVELATIONS #1 (OF 5)
FIREBREATHER SERIES #2
FRANK FRAZETTAS DRACULA MEETS THE WOLF-MAN
FREEDOM FORMULA #1
GALAXY QUEST GLOBAL WARNING #1
GEN 13 #21
GENEXT #4 (OF 5)
GOLLY #1
GOON #27
GREEN ARROW BLACK CANARY #11
GREEN LANTERN CORPS #27
GROTESQUE #2
HALO UPRISING #3 (OF 4)
HELEN KILLER #4 (OF 4)
HELLBOY THE CROOKED MAN #2 (OF 3)
HYPERKINETIC #2 (OF 4)
JUGHEAD AND FRIENDS DIGEST #29
KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE SPECIAL ED LAST MAN STANDING
LAST DEFENDERS #6 (OF 6)
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES IN THE 31ST CENTURY #17
LONE RANGER #12 (NOTE PRICE)
MACK BOLAN THE EXECUTIONER DEVILS TOOLS #5 (OF 5)
MAD MAGAZINE #493
MARVEL ADVENTURES HULK #14
MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #42
MINESHAFT #22
NECESSARY EVIL #7
PUNISHER #60
PUNISHER KILLS MARVEL UNIVERSE
RAMAYAN 3392 AD RELOADED #8
SECRET INVASION #5 (OF 8) SI
SECRET INVASION INHUMANS #1 (OF 4) SI
SECRET INVASION RUNAWAYS YOUNG AVENGERS #2 (OF 3) SI
SECRET INVASION THOR #1 (OF 3) SI
SECRET INVASION X-MEN #1 (OF 4) SI
SIMON DARK #11
SIRIANUS #1 (A)
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG #191
SPAWN #181
SPIKE AFTER THE FALL #2 (OF 4)
TALES DESIGNED TO THRIZZLE #4
TINY TITANS #7
TRANSHUMAN #3 (OF 4)
TRINITY #11
UNCLE SCROOGE #378
UNIVERSAL WAR ONE #2 OF(3)
WALKING DEAD #51
WELCOME TO HOXFORD #1
WONDER WOMAN #23
WORLDS OF DUNGEONS & DRAGONS #3 BALAN CVR A
X-MEN ORIGINS JEAN GREY
YOUNG LIARS #6
ZORRO #6

Books / Mags / Stuff
A TREASURY OF 20TH CENTURY VOL 01 MURDER OF LINDBERGH CHILD
ABANDONED CARS HC
ABSOLUTE LOEG THE BLACK DOSSIER HC
BLACK DIAMOND GET IN THE CAR & GO TP
CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED JOURNEY TO THE CENTER O/T EARTH
CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED TIME MACHINE
CREEPY ARCHIVES HC
DEATHBLOW AND THEN YOU LIVE TP
DISAPPEARANCE DIARY GN (RES)
FROM SHADOW OF NORTHERN LIGHTS TP
HEAVY METAL SEPTEMBER 2008 #118
HUSTLERS TABOO ILLUSTRATED #5 (A)
JUDGE DREDD COMPLETE CASE FILES TP VOL 10
JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #274
JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL HC VOL 02
KIDNAPPED GN
LEES TOY REVIEW #190 AUG 2008
MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST CRIME COMICS TP
MARVEL ADVENTURES HULK TP VOL 03 STRONGEST DIGEST
MARVEL HEROES 2009 PAGE A DAY CALENDAR
MEATHAUS SOS TP
MIDDLEMAN COLLECTED SERIES INDISPENSABILITY COMPENDIUM TP
MILLENNIUM TP
MOME VOL 12 GN
MOON KNIGHT PREM HC VOL 03 GOD & COUNTRY
NEW EXILES TP VOL 01 NEW LIFE NEW GAMBIT
NEW X-MEN BY MORRISON ULTIMATE COLL TP BOOK 02
NIGHTMARES & FAIRY TALES TP VOL 04
SFX #172
SIMON DARK WHAT SIMON DOES TP
SLAINE HORNED GOD GN
SPIDER-MAN TP KRAVENS LAST HUNT
SPIDER-MAN TP ONE MORE DAY
SUPERGIRL BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL TP
TESTAMENT TP VOL 04 EXODUS
THUNDERBOLTS BY ELLIS PREM HC VOL 02 CAGED ANGELS
TOYFARE #134 MATTEL SKELETOR CVR
WALT DISNEYS COMICS & STORIES #693
WHERE DEMENTED WENTED THE ART AND COMICS OF RORY HAYES
WOLVERINE TP GET MYSTIQUE
WORLD OF WARCRAFT HC VOL 01



What looks good to YOU?

-B

Labels: Brian, Shipping Lists

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For the dozen or so of you who care about such things, in our last installment I discussed taking some 1400 items off the racks when the POS system says "Hey, that doesn't sell!"

"But, Brian," some asked, "What are we going to do with 39 Avengers?!?" Er, no, wait, the question was about 1400 removed-from-stock books, same diff.

Well, we have a sale, I guess.

My wife gets invited to Nordstrom's "Customer appreciation sales" which is like a pre-sale sale for Nordstrom's "best" customers (she's not actually one of those, but my stepmother is, so...), and I thought it was a great idea to try and emulate.

So, we invited all of our subscribers (box customers, whatever you call them locally) to a private, pre-opening sale for two hours this morning. Half off the stock I wanted gone, and if you bought like 10 or more books, it could go up to 60% off.

The weather was deeply against us this morning -- SF has been ucky thick fogbound for the last 10 days or so, so when it was a GLORIOUS summer day today I knew we wouldn't have as many people as I would have liked. We only had about 20% of the people invited actually show up. Which, actually, is a good response rate, don't listen to my whining.

I was hoping for about 20% of this stock to go away during our two hour sale, and I think we got closer to 15%, so I can live with it.

That's still 85% left though!

I'm going to start filtering the remaining books into the Sale boxes over the next week or so (in fact, I think I'm going to temporarily remove the Starter Sets from the sales floor to accommodate the volume I want to put out at once), and I think I can get rid of another half of them within 60 days or so. The final, what is that, about a third, will trickle out over the next year or so. We're down to virtually nothing left of the "Let's not even count this in the first place, and remove it now" pruning I did BEFORE we put in the POS, so that seems like reasonable timing. And, because I'm using color coded labels, I'll know in a year what are the REAL dregs that should be donated away or even left on the curb for recycling, as need be.

It is NOT possible to deal in physical goods (retail or wholesale) and not have some spoilage and leftover and just plain unsalable junk. The key question is in MANAGING that junk.

I suddenly realized that I can get most of a column out of this, can't I, so I'll shut up there. In theory, expect to see more on this in TILTING on CBR on Friday...

Anyway, I'm hot and tired and sweaty, moving all of those boxes take a lot out of ya'! Off to the showers!

-B

Labels: Brian, POS, retailing

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Oh, NYX. You came and you took without giving. So I sent you away.

Fat lot of good that did.

Even after three years, NYX is still on my Top Five Embarrassing Marvel Moments list: a 7-issue series written by the EIC himself, with delays between issues that varied from nine months to over a year. The jokes would practically write themselves: it took Lance Bass less time to come out, we'd have to send our grandchildren to pick up NYX #8, Quesada was retconning every issue as he wrote it... the whole thing was one big fuster-cluck.

And now, here we are with NYX: NO WAY HOME #1, and all that baggage is... well, still around, really.

So what do we have here? It's a six-issue miniseries by Marjorie Liu and Kalman Andrasofszky. While this is (as far as I know) Liu's first work in comics, she wrote an X-Men novel called "Dark Mirror" a few years ago - it was kinda-sorta okay but lacked any real connection to the characters. It's pretty much the same here, but before we get to that...

Okay, here's the thing. NYX, at the time, was part of a whole movement at Marvel to deliver "edgy" variations on familiar properties. The high concept for NYX, as I recall it (it's been three years and, quite frankly, it's not worth the few seconds it'd take me to research - again, we'll get to that in a bit), was a different perspective on the Marvel Universe's mutant population. Not even street-level, like Bendis' ALIAS; more like gutter-level, as far below Charles Xavier's watchful eye as you can get. Of course, Marvel isn't very good at being deliberately edgy, so you got things like X-23 being a prostitute.



So Liu's not starting out from a great place here. And, more importantly, Marvel's not exactly into "edgy" material anymore. You can tell as much from page 6, where Kiden seems to be injecting invisible heroin into her arm (although, bizarrely enough, two panels later we get a full-frontal shot of Kiden slicing up her arm like an emogirl who's just discovered that Penance used to be Speedball).

Now, the research thing. You know, I've gotten pretty used to recap pages as a quick way of getting up-to-speed on any given series. And I'm honestly surprised there isn't one here: again, these characters haven't been around in three years, and that's assuming someone was still reading when NYX #7 came out in 2005. I'd certainly given up by then. Liu tries to give us a brief summary of what happened, but that doesn't tell us about any of the other characters. And because I don't know anything about the other characters, and there's no room in 22 pages to reintroduce all the players, I'm pretty much not interested in the cast.

(In fairness, this is a problem Liu had before - "Dark Mirror" ultimately failed to really get into the characters' heads, they were all written in a very generic and middling tone, which is pretty much what we get here as well. The characters are just sort of... there.)

Now, it's altogether possible that Liu and Andrasofszky will carve out a halfway decent story from this mess - they've got five issues to go, and the set-up is ostensibly finished (as opposed to Quesada's run, in which six of the seven issues introduced new characters to the "team"). But we're off to a EH start, because I think what this comic really needed was a reason to care about these specific characters and to be invested in their story, and it doesn't deliver that.

Labels: Diana

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AMAZING SPIDER-MAN itself has had two skip weeks in a row, but we've gotten three other Spider-Man books instead--the new FAMILY series, a SUMMER SPECIAL, and a BRAND NEW DAY EXTRA. Reviews of all three, plus INVINCIBLE IRON MAN and FINAL CRISIS, under the cut.



THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN FAMILY #1: The final page explains that this is the new identity of SPIDER-MAN FAMILY--the fat bimonthly title that includes vintage Spider-Man reprints and done-in-one new stories--now that it's been brought into the Stephen Wacker-edited Spider-Man group. Despite the Brand New Day banner on the cover, though, only one story here takes place in the current narrative--an 11-page Aunt May story. It's billed as "Aunt May, Agent of F.E.A.S.T.," which is a kind of promising idea (looking into what she does at the emergency-aid agency where she volunteers), but the story itself is a dire string of clichés. The lead story, by J.M. DeMatteis and Alex Cal, imagines what might have happened between AMAZING FANTASY #15 and ASM #1; setting aside the fact that it adds nothing but maudlin tedium to the original stories, there's the problem that there are already some perfectly solid comics about what might have happened in that period--the AMAZING FANTASY #16-18 miniseries that Kurt Busiek and Paul Lee did back in 1995. (It's also got an error that drives me bats: if something shows discretion, it's discreet, not "discrete.") Then there's a dozy little throwaway set in SPIDER-GIRL's continuity, and a five-page prologue to MARVEL APES that mostly consists of an unfunny riff on the famous Spidey-trapped-under-a-heavy-thing sequence from ASM #33 and makes me want to steer clear of the miniseries. (Maybe MARVEL APES was commissioned because MARVEL ZOMBIES did so well, but that at least had a funny premise; making Spider-Man Spider-Monkey doesn't appear to go anywhere interesting.) The issue's filled out by a reprint of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #300, which it's kind of alarming to realize was almost half the series ago. It hasn't aged well, and the new material is AWFUL stuff.

Meanwhile, a bunch of Nathan Cosby-edited material that I'm guessing was commissioned for SMF has ended up as KING-SIZE SPIDER-MAN SUMMER SPECIAL. I will happily read anything by the Paul Tobin/Colleen Coover team, and their collaborations here are as fluffy and charming as usual, starting with the six-word Spider-Man bio on the first page (reproduced by Chris Sims here). Their big story teams up Mary Jane, Hellcat, Marvel Girl, the Scarlet Witch, Clea, She-Hulk and Millie the Model, and also involves enchanted shampoo; they're also responsible for a two-pager about MODOK and his chair, which, you know, MODOK. The rest of the issue's filled by a Keith Giffen/Rich Burchett Spidey/Falcon teamup that seems to have been sitting in a drawer for a good long while and might just as well have kept sitting there forever, and a totally ridiculous but amusing Chris Giarruso Mini-Marvels story about Spider-Man and Venom as rival paperboys competing for the Osborns' account. Quite GOOD, on the strength of the Tobin/Coover stuff, anyhow.

On top of those, last week we got SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY - EXTRA! #1, three stories that actually are set in current continuity, more or less--actually, they're evidence of how far ahead the Spider-team is planning. #567 comes out next week, but Joe Kelly and Chris Bachalo's gory Hammerhead story (which takes 18 pages to get through what could've been many fewer pages of exposition) is a prologue to a sequence that apparently begins in October, and Marc Guggenheim and Marcos Martin's rushed-looking piece (Spidey on trial--well, at a pre-trial hearing, actually--and being defended by Matt Murdock) is an "interlude" in a story that doesn't start until #582, which if my arithmetic serves me will be the first issue of 2009. Nice to know that they're taking the long view, and it's OKAY--Bachalo's art makes me wish he'd find some project he could really make his own--but still doesn't convince me that they're going anywhere special with BND, maybe because none of the writers has license to steer the franchise anywhere unexpected.

Surprisingly, that's not the case with THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #4, in which Matt Fraction is treating Marvel's third-most-overexposed character like he's solely in charge of him. There's a scene this issue where Tony Stark announces that he's buying (a very thinly disguised) Coca-Cola to distribute antiretrovirals (not "retrovirals," despite Fraction's dialogue) in sub-Saharan Africa, and I have no idea where that's going--but it's hugely entertaining anyway. And the core of this issue is a handful of conversations between and/or about Tony and Pepper that run with the way their relationship worked in the movie. I still don't think Larroca & D'Armata's photo-based faces, CGI-type backgrounds and heavily computer-modeled coloring work too well, even though they're more appropriate for this series than most others--it just ends up looking like a higher-tech version of SHATTER--but this is my idea of a GOOD time, and I'm enjoying the chutzpah of Fraction's approach.

And I'm continuing to adore FINAL CRISIS. My annotations to #3 are over here, but I think my favorite thing about this series is the economy of its death-metal attack--Green Arrow's personality nailed in a single line of dialogue, Supergirl justifying her cover feature despite the fact that she appears in two panels (not counting the death of her Nazi alternate-world analogue), the way every big plot development happens scarily fast and every visual gesture and line of dialogue seems to have some kind of thematic resonance. (Libra's hood viewed from behind in the swamp scene sure looks like some kind of monster with too many consonants in its name.) Plus: Clark Kent spouting self-pitying exposition like he's on a Mort Weisinger-era cover! EXCELLENT.

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ALMIGHTY is a 140-page self-published comic book created by Mr. Ed Laroche (with lettering by Jaymes Reed) that I purchased on a whim off the internet, based on the recommendation of a blog entry by comedian Patton Oswalt. It’s a straightforward post-apocalyptic action comic. Here is the back cover text in its entirety:

“A girl has been abducted
and a killer hired to find her
and bring her home.”

For a self-published comic by an unknown that I purchased off the internet, it exceeded my (low) expectations. I don’t think the main character’s arc is entirely earned, but I thought the action scenes were surprisingly accomplished. The book’s best action set piece is a 20 page sequence involving the main characters’ escape from a group of soldiers: the action reflects a sense of geography; characters seem to occupy a physical space; bullets feel like they might have consequences. I don’t know how excited I am by post-apocalyptic action thrillers, but ALMIGHTY at least succeeded for me as a showcase for Laroche’s art & storytelling skills.

You know: it looks like a real comic book. I think Ed Laroche could have gotten a job drawing someone else’s comic if he’d wanted one. Instead, I had a 140 page self-published action thriller sitting in my lap. I approached Mr. Laroche for an interview to discuss that and his book ALMIGHTY.


1. What lead up to your decision to self-publish the comic? I found the fact it was self-published surprising since it seemed like fairly commercial material, at least as I thought I understood the marketplace; you know: it’s an action comic. I was under the impression comic publishers knew how to sell those. Did publishers ask for creative changes you were unwilling to make? Or I get the impression with a lot of publishers-- I'm not sure I'm their audience anymore because I’m not Ashton Kutcher’s agent. Were people asking you to give up rights or what have you that you weren’t comfortable with giving up?

I couldn’t get any publishers to read it. My idea was to create a story that was built on certain principles of what I think a comic should be. One of those principles is the long form comic story, an all-in-one, a comic that is designed simply and laid out clearly, a book that is timed out differently because it’s not a bunch of 22 page issues glued together, but also a story that didn’t depend on a lot of exposition. When I shopped it around I found out that most publishers don’t look at unsolicited work, and the few publishers that did never got back to me. But I guess what’s mostly true is that I didn’t know the right people that would get me past the gatekeepers.

2. What have been the consequences of self-publishing the book? I don’t know how many self-publishing success stories there have been in comics lately. Have retailers been supportive? Los Angeles stores are good about supporting local creators; I know a week after I bought your comic online, I saw it in the window of Skylight Books, over in Los Feliz. You’ve had favorable reviews-- the Patton Oswalt reference got me to buy it. Is it finding an audience? How has it gone for you?

The consequences are still playing out. All I can say for sure is that before I self-published, I was a frustrated artist that had ideas about how comics should be approached. As of now, it’s great to see that my execution of those ideas are being well received. It validates my efforts and gives me the confidence to continue.

As far as retailers are concerned the stores that currently stock my book (this is before being listed in Diamond) are places that I frequented. Not only were they Indy friendly, but because they knew my face they were more willing to seriously consider the book. But by the same token, I found that stores where I didn’t have that relationship were resistant to take on something like ALMIGHTY. I understand why-- they have more to lose. They want a sure bet, a guarantee of a return on their investment. But there are no guarantees-- all you can do is minimize your liability. Unfortunately, this is one of many factors that have nothing to do with whether a comic is good enough to be offered to a retailer’s customer base.

3. ALMIGHTY ends with a teaser page for what looks like a prequel entitled REMEMBER AMPHION (honestly, not as good a title as ALMIGHTY). Based upon your experiences with ALMIGHTY, do you expect to self-publish that as well?

Yes, I plan on self publishing all the titles that I’ve been developing for the past several years (at least their first initial runs). The next book that I’m working on is not the sequel to ALMIGHTY -- it’s called WAVEFORMS. WAVEFORMS will allow me to implement another aspect of my ideas on what comics should be, which is authorial. I want the emphasis to be on the creator and not the creation.

4. Did you ever think about releasing ALMIGHTY as a webcomic?

No.

5. Okay, enough business questions—let’s talk about ALMIGHTY. The part of the book that stood out the most for me was the 20 page gunfight in Chapter 4. A lot of American action comics don’t spend that many pages on an action sequence; long action sequences to me seem like they’re more the domain of manga. Was that a part of the book you knew early on that you wanted to create?

One of the advantages of creating a long-form comic is that if you need an action sequence to play out for as long as it needs to, you’re not restricted to the 22-page limitation of most comics and trade paperbacks.

I found that most comics would spend a lot of time on exposition, establishing motive and resolution (because these are the domain of the writer, not the artist), but virtually no time on the way things resolve themselves visually. This is a byproduct of having the writer be the lead creative on the project. In the best case scenario, you would be able to have these two creative elements complement each other, but most of the time, what you have is this weird disconnect between what you’re reading and what you’re seeing.

With Chapter 4, I had an idea of what needed to happen, but how it unfolded was very organic. The story told me ultimately-- it resolved itself.

6. I felt a strong James Cameron influence throughout the book. ALMIGHTY sort of shares Cameron’s interest in strong women fighting back horrors that are both physical and philosophical. How important were those themes to you when you were preparing the book, as opposed to just giving yourself interesting things to draw? The book is very straightforward in premise, but there’s a swerve late in the book—the final confrontation between the protagonists and antagonists swerves in a way I didn’t expect (and I’m not honestly sure not sure if it succeeds), but that suggested to me that you had something very particular in mind that you were trying to communicate thematically.

James Cameron’s handling of Ripley and Vasquez in Aliens was the first and last time we’ve seen authentic portrayals of the type of woman that could really pull off the action hero thing.

Fale (my main protagonist) isn’t some super-deadly, mid-drift baring model in high heels. That kind of super-female archetype doesn’t work for me. It’s inauthentic.

The “swerve” that you mention and the way that it plays out in the story will have a richer impact when the sequel REMEMBER AMPHION is released.

7. I’m pretty shitty at comparing artists to other artists. I think I see an influence of the early Gaijin Studios guys—Jason Pearson, Brian Stelfreeze, that crowd, but I’m not sure about that. I’ve seen comparisons in other reviews to Eduardo Risso and Dave Lapham-- I personally don’t see that, like, at all; you don’t shy away from a heavy use of black, but that’s as much as I can understand those comparisons. I guess my suspicion, based on the quality of the action choreography, is that you have some experience storyboarding, but—well, that would be a guess.

All those guys are great artist, and they have inspired me in a lot of different ways. ALMIGHTY is my first published work. I’ve made my own comics for a very long time for my own personal use. I make a “living” storyboarding animation and live action.

8. The lead character Fale is sort of in the mysterious anti-hero mold that American action comics tend to feature. In rereading ALMIGHTY for this interview, the first third of the book is especially quiet and opaque; ALMIGHTY only features three splash pages and two of those are in that first third, and are quiet landscape images. Most of the characterization is done through how Fale behaves in the later action sequences. Why did you keep that character at arm’s length?

I have reason for the way Fale comes off in the book but getting into the why of it doesn’t give an opportunity for the reader to form their own ideas. I can say this: you will never know what Fale is thinking; her actions will define her.

9. I was wondering if you could talk about how ALMIGHTY was made. After work? On weekends? And I guess I believe every interview with an artist should include some tool/technique talk, so: what did you ink with? Do you do loose pencils and draw more at the inking stage, or are you particularly precise with your pencils? Did you thumbnail the entire comic before drawing the first page, or did you thumbnail and draw it chapter by chapter? For a book you drew yourself, you didn’t really go easy on yourself. Those three splash pages aside, most of the book clocks in at somewhere between 5-7 panels per page. A lot of those panels are atmospheric panels—the drawings of crows in Chapter 6, say.

I pulled a Kerouac. I saved up enough money to move to Prague where all I did was work on the book and party on the weekends. I plan on replicating the process. Work hard, play hard.

I pretty much just started at the beginning and penciled all the pages. I drew pretty tight pages on 8-1/2 by 11 printer paper, then light tabled them onto Bristol board. Then, I inked them on my next pass -- it was easier for me to take it in sections.

It took my whole life to get to ALMIGHTY. I’m planning on picking up the pace.

10. Do you have goals for the future with respect to comics?

Yes.

Thanks to Ed Laroche for the interview. For more viewpoints on the book-- it has been enthusiastically reviewed by the Broken Frontier website here; positively reviewed by Mr. Steven Grant here. You can find a short preview of ALMIGHTY on the internet.

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