American Vampire #1

Chapter One:  “Big Break” and “Bad Blood”

written by Scott Snyder and Stephen King

art by Rafael Albuquerque

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Skinner Sweet!  Already in its first issue, Scott Snyder’s epic ambitions for his American-Dream horror saga are evident, but its ambition takes a minor toll on the structure and pacing of its opening episode.  American Vampire #1 introduces so many characters—aspiring starlet Pearl Jones, her roommate Hattie, her amatory admirer Henry, leading man Chase Hamilton, vampire movie producer B. D. Bloch, vampire scoundrel and American outlaw Skinner Sweet, writer Will Bunting, Pinkerton agent James Book, his fiancée Ella Langum, Ronnie Jeeks and the rest of Sweet’s posse, deputy Felix Camillo, Henry Finch, vampire banker and European capitalist Percy—that none receives much nuance…yet.  Though the immediate characterizations of Snyder’s cast are sporadic and patchy, they betray a larger sense of history and detail underlying the episode’s action and characters.  The issue’s clutter of characters, then, ultimately becomes a strength, a tantalizing suggestion of a deeper history and a cast with complex motivations.

Without a doubt, bank robber and outlaw cowboy Skinner Sweet is the most instantly charismatic of the lot.  Introduced first as a pair of cowboy boots dangling from a folding deck chair, he spends “Big Break” lounging outside Pearl and Hattie’s apartment in shorts, a snugly fitting tank top, and a fedora and exchanging barbs with strong-willed Pearl.  While he quite easily could have remained little more than a leering, predatory stalker—and certainly his smirk maintains that possibility—Sweet’s body language instead invites attention, positioning himself as the object of the ladies' sexualizing stares more than the aggressor.  Sweet, no doubt, is fully aware of his cruel nature, and when he half-jokingly admits to Pearl that he's something "much worse" than an elephant man, he's not lying.  But his follow-through--"...but I'm pretty on the inside"--strangely doesn't come off like a lie either.

As he so often does, Snyder opens his series with a childhood recollection, a moment of innocence and wonder superimposed on the issue’s creepiest and most horrific sequence, the dumping of Pearl’s barely living body with a host of young female corpses.  The events that led to her disposal fully flesh out the underlying metaphor of Snyder's European vampires:  they are social, sexual, and economic predators, here feeding at will on the aspirations and Hollywood dreams of young, defenseless women.

The second act of American Vampire #1 offers a portrait of an alternative—or perhaps complementary—metaphor of the American variety.  Sweet is a fiercely independent, seemingly sadistic outlaw with a disdain for authority, a casual disregard for human life, and a predilection for candy.  His unintended transformation at the teeth of Percy solidifies him as something apart from them.  While the supporting cast of his backstory barely amounts to more than western stereotypes here, King—as Snyder for Pearl—offers great promise for the further unveiling of Skinner Sweet's saga as told by the train wreck's bystander, reporter Will Bunting.

[May 2010]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 1 (ISBN 978-1401228309)

Bigfoot #1

Bigfoot (1 of 4)
written by Steve Niles and Rob Zombie
art by Richard Corben

If a late-70s monster B-movie, complete with splatter gore and gratuitous sex, were re-imagined as a comic book mini-series, Bigfoot would be the inevitable result.  No doubt, its reception would be as polarized as its cultural pulp predecessors.

Like so many horror B-sides, Bigfoot begins with childhood trauma, and the first issue works primarily as the opening act to its re-emergence in the life of its young survivor.  It's a nightmare flashback to the summer of 1973, when the radio still played the Partridge Family and the Manson Family convictions were barely two years old, and Niles and Zombie don't shy away from allusions to either of these extremely disparate cultural touchstones.  Bigfoot's storytelling is equally as cinematic as its pop heritage would suggest.  It hits most of the horror tropes:  partial unveiling of the creature as it brutally slaughters a deer, the seemingly idyllic arrival of its human victims to an ominous-looking cabin, the touching family scene to establish character credibility and sympathy, an obligatory sex scene inevitably interrupted by the monster, a cover-up by ambiguously motivated local law enforcement, and a weirdly sexualized nightmare sequence embedded further in the flashback.  Bigfoot is, in other words, exactly what it seems to be.

Rough, weird, and slightly malformed, Corben's artwork hits just the right register for this off-beat horror comic, perfectly suited to its grotesque sensationalism and its nostalgia for its B-movie forerunners.  After making his career as one of the most imminent practitioners in underground comics, Corben's occasional forays into more mainstream comics bring with them his underground aesthetic and counter-culture sensibilities.  The humans are fleshy, bulbous caricatures, all feet and hands (and once, of course, boobs); the creature is all eyes, teeth, and black fur.  Whatever else it is, Corben's artwork is engaging, a kind of fascinating horror that keeps you looking and makes you wonder why.

[February 2005, digital]

Captain America #1

"Castaway in Dimension Z," Chapter One
written by Rick Remender
pencils by John Romita, Jr.
inks by Klaus Jansen
colors by Dean White

Opening the debut issue of a relaunched series with a startlingly visceral scene of domestic abuse is a daring move. His mother's proud, if perhaps foolish, defiance of his father, an unemployed, abusive drunkard, sets Remender's series' precedence for his hero's conduct against adversity, one that is rather predictably reiterated as Rogers later repeats his mother's advice, "You always stand up."  Despite its sobering beginning, most of Captain America #1 hits several solid, if not particularly clever, punchlines, significantly lightening the tone of overall issue.  Right on cue, as a cute young woman tries to flirt her way out of a speeding ticket by arguing the urgency of her date because "it's not like strong, sexy men...are falling from the sky," the Cap parachutes down, bad guy in tow.  Recognizing himself the inevitability of comic book timing, Rogers remarks to the police officer's question about the plane, "Give it a second," and as if summoned by the Marvel gods, it crashes precisely then.

Steve Rogers is exactly the kind of red-blooded American to stir a 40s-era, wartime imagination:  immigrant, blond and blue-eyed with an unexceptional, WASPish name, even if he's really Irish Catholic; blue-collar and wholesome; and, above all, doggedly upstanding and honorable.  He's the kind of hero whose weapon is a shield.  But he's also the kind of idealist who continually risks chronic naiveté.  The very characteristics which make him so admirable make it increasingly difficult to imagine him fitting in with contemporary sensibilities.  One of Remender's best achievements in the premier episode of his run, though he by no means the first to do so, is to make Rogers convincingly, rather than unbelievably, virtuous without abandoning his roots in a long-past era of American culture.  That, as Captain America, he has second thoughts about doing the right thing in saving Green Skull, the outlandish but deadly eco-terrorist villain of the first action sequence, is necessary to ground his character in a familiar moral territory, however simple a move it is.  Similarly, his relationship with Sharon Carter—though it's rather creepy that she has exactly the same hair as his mother—cutely plays with this cultural discrepancy:  Rogers' poorly executed innuendo, Sharon's marriage proposal, and jokes at the expense of his old age.

While most of the issue delivers reliable conventions, there are a few that gain a bit more traction.  It's not particularly original, but the idea of an inter-dimensional express train to Zolandia which uses abandoned subway stations—built, of course, during Rogers' lifetime—and actually deposits passengers is intriguing, and well-executed, culminating in Romita's beautiful, full-page alien-landscape of the Zolandia port.  Although the Captain's escape from Zola's lab was somewhat boring and predictable, the issue's final twist, an act in keeping with his rescue of Green Skull, is both surprising and promising.

[January 2013, digital]

Wonder Woman, Volume 1

Blood
written by Brian Azzarello
art by Cliff Chiang and Tony Akins

Certainly, gender has always been at or near the center of Wonder Woman stories, her very inception as a character being ideologically driven as model for an ideal woman.  And Azzarello further stirs them up in his opening arc of the rebooted series, sometimes walking a very fine and dangerous line.  As if the conventions surrounding a super-powered female hero weren't already troublesome and divisive territory in contemporary comics, immediately, Wonder Woman dregs up situations bristling with volatile gender relations:  spousal infidelity, woman-on-woman revenge, disparate cultural attitudes toward men's and women's sexual promiscuity, extra-marital pregnancy and single-parenthood, single-sex communities and their corresponding gender discrimination, and gender solidarity and its corresponding bias.  To the credit of Azzarello and his all-male artistic team, Wonder Woman is remarkably fair if not particularly insightful.  If Wonder Woman includes all of these unfortunate instances related to gender, it also offers alternatives.  Hermes' friendship with Diana and his intervention on behalf of Zola are welcome collaborations between genders.  Likewise, Diana insists that safe-keeping Zola from the vengeance of Hera is not siding with Zeus against his spurned wife nor necessarily condoning his infidelity but instead defending the hapless woman unwittingly caught between them.

Even more, Wonder Woman is fully credible as a warrior and a woman.  This is particularly true of her visual representation.  She retains many of the physical characteristics stereotypical of female superheros, which have long defined her and others, including thick, long hair, a finely cut and curvaceous figure, and delicate facial features—and if she's not wearing make-up, she might as well be.  However, Chang in particular has made her physically formidable, not only in her strong, broad shoulders and hips, but also in her easy athleticism.  Without making any dramatic changes, Chang and Akins have also redesigned her costume to accommodate her more robust physique.  Her top may remain strapless, but her bust is fully covered; her shorts may remain, well, short, but they are more reminiscent of MMA-wear than a bathing suit.  It's also notable that the newly textured top and the metallic ornaments around the waist and bust make her costume look more like armor than lingerie.

Though much of these newly tweaked aspects were necessary, the series itself seems less interested in them, once her credibility is established, than in its mythological backdrop.  To my knowledge, though there seem to be a variety of differently nuanced versions of Wonder Woman's creation, the one offered by Azzarello in issue #3 is unique, and for the first time I can recall, really makes sense in the larger scheme of the story.  Wonder Woman, a 1941 creation who showed up in star-spangled American glory to fight the Nazis, has always seemed so inextricably entrenched in her World War II beginnings that her place as an Amazon rooted in Greek mythology has always seemed, in comparison, to be haphazard and disconnected.  Here, Azzarello changes that.  Much like the dead and bloated hippocamp that surfaces from the Thames in issue #5, mythological characters—gods and their consorts—continually pop up in Wonder Woman's contemporary setting.  Their uneasy, if mostly resigned, relationship with the 21st-century human world—not a little indebted to their conceptual predecessors in novels like Gaiman's American Gods—is perhaps symptomatic of Wonder Woman's own former disjunction with her own past, but it is precisely this uneasiness that makes their inclusion in her world plausible.

Though it begins like a simple cautionary tale on the dangers of betraying one's wife, Blood becomes a second account of the division of the world among the progeny of Cronos.  Following Zeus's mysterious disappearance, which has been kept mostly quiet by his son Apollo, lordship over the heavens is seemingly vacated.  No longer satisfied with their inferior portions and their subordinate status, Poseidon rises from the sea and Hades from the underworld, each to claim his portion.  Unexpectedly for them, though it is fully in line with Azzarello's exploration of gendered power, their sister—and Zeus's repeatedly scorned wife—Hera also shows to stake her claim to his kingdom.  Although all of the gods in Wonder Woman are somewhat uniquely adorned--Apollo with his ebony skin and blazing eyes; Hermes with bird feet, a beakish nose, glassy black eyes, and sporadic feathers; Hera with her Argos-inspired peacock cloak; and Strife with her shredded black dress, gaunt figure, and buzzed hair--brothers Poseidon and Hades are more consumed by their mythological identity than the others.  Their unusual depiction, so vastly different and unexpected, is particularly refreshing.  Poseidon emerges as a behemoth, an oceanic hybrid beast, entirely without anthropomorphic form.  Hades arrives from the cavernous under-city drainage system with three-headed Cerberus, his head more a gothic candelabra, dripping with wax, than a face.

While the first six issues, which comprise the TPB edition, share several strong thematic ideas--many related to its given title--and continuity of storytelling, there is little at the end to suggest that it completes its arc.  Instead, Blood sets up the next act of a continuing story.  Unlike so many comics, which seem to anticipate collection in trade form, Azzarello has approached Wonder Woman as a true serial.

Collects Wonder Woman #1-6

ISBN:  978-1401235635

Deadpool Killustrated #1

Moby Dick
written by Cullen Bunn
pencils by Matteo Lolli
inks by Sean Parsons
colors by Veronica Gandini

Deadpool Killustrated's central concept is itself a mixed bag, simultaneously a brilliant stroke of literary metaphysics and a weak logical argument for the destruction of the worlds' superheroes by head-scratchingly oblique means.  And Bunn makes sure we get a full exposition sequence to explain, well, EVERYTHING.  It's full of gems, like "We are trapped in...the continuity.." and "metacidal," as well as clunkers, like "every idea spawning like salmon."  However, it's precisely what Bunn doesn't explain that delivers the issue's best narrative surprise, when in the final few pages, one of Mad Thinker's robots makes its way into the hands of Sherlock Holmes, who then stands poised to act as the series' hero and Deadpool's foil.

The issue might be logically porous but it's got several good jokes, which help buoy the story, most of them made by and at the expense of Deadpool himself.  The introduction of the New York Public Library as "the one place I fear" is a fine use of the page break, better if it required a page turn instead of just crossing the center gutter.  And for a man so adverse to reading, Deadpool can certainly bandy about some allusive barbs.  He quips as easily and knowingly over the dead bodies of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—"Consider the windmill tilted."—as he alludes to Jaws—"We're going to need a bigger boat."  Or upon being extended Ahab's hospitality aboard the Pequod, he introduces himself, "Call me...Ishmael," despite, of course, there already being one on board.  Though, to be fair, he might have covered that one in his ad hoc litany of famous first lines at the library. 

As its premise would suggest, Deadpool Killustrated is simultaneously an homage to previous generations of literary classics remediated into comics and a haphazardly deconstructed send-up of the clash between those two (usually disparate) literary media.  Nowhere does this first issue distill this meta-humor more succinctly than in Michael Del Mundo's spoofing cover illustration.  Much of the comedy in the story derives from Deadpool's unexpected and homicidal interruption of famous literary scenes, and riding Moby Dick like an unruly rodeo bull while trying to chuck a bomb labeled with a fish-and-cross-bones down his blowhole does just that.

Unfortunately, the interior of the issue is significantly more uneven.  When its jokes work, Deadpool Killustrated is quite funny, and consequently the ceiling for its comedic potential is high, but most of its jokes seem rushed, forced, and superficial.  Its engagement with the literary classics, which Deadpool wants to disrupt, equally so.  Despite the explanation provided—that these literary figures serve as inspiration for the authors/"progenitors" of Marvel's superheroes and that the former's destruction would preempt the latter's formation—none of the literary characters featured in #1 bear any notable resemblance to Marvel superheroes.  Ironically—and it's an irony that's unrecognized by Deadpool himself, as when he remarks to Don Quixote as he shoots him, "When it comes to impractical pursuits, I got ya covered."—Deadpool has far more in common with his literary companions (Ahab, Quixote, and Pinocchio) than they do.  He insists that "the metaphor isn't lost on [him]," though I suspect that it is.

The artistic team of Lolli (pencils), Parsons (inks), and Gandini (colors) contribute some really quality work in the issue.  As is necessary for a character whose costume conceals facial expressions, Deadpool emotes really well with his body language, usually a potent combination of sardonic resignation and familiar weariness.  Like Del Mundo's cover, they also deliver on the punchlines.  In particular, the pile of dead Spider-mans...[Spider-men?]...as Deadpool muses, "I kill and I kill and I kill but it's never enough.  There's always another Spider-man...", is particularly well executed among the Marvel hero carnage.  But for sheer beauty of the artwork, Moby Dick must take the prize in this issue.  His enormity, unsettling color, and watery home are all impressive and provide a visually memorable opening sequence for the series.

[March 2013, digital]

The Unwritten, Volume 1

Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity
written by Mike Carey
art by Peter Gross

No comic, perhaps ever, has been more rooted in the literary tradition than The Unwritten, Mike Carey's epic series on the power of story.  He has literally invested his world in the stakes of the literature that comes before him.  As a result, the boundary between the literary world and the real world is as porous in the comic as it is from the outside.  Carey blends together factual details from the known biographies of historical authors and the circumstances behind their most famous publications, fictional details from independent works of literature, and his own inventions, characters and story, into a single literary universe.  And his characters must themselves negotiate these treacherous and blurred borderlands.

The Unwritten's foundational premise is that story is a powerful cultural mechanism, one that can open up or control the way we think and act, even without our knowing it.  As Pullman, Carey's muscleman for the series' villains, so memorably puts it during his chase of aspiring author Lauren Sedgewick at the Villa Diodati:

"It does no good to run.  And it does no good to hide.  But I know what it's like.  Your brain shuts down, and you follow your instincts.  Or you think you do.  But you know what you're really doing?  When you flee through the night, or crawl into your little bolt-hole?  You know what's really guiding you?  Controlling you?  Pushing you on?  Genre conventions."  (The Unwritten #4, pp. 8-9)

All said, like the literature it recalls and invokes, The Unwritten points to a world on the brink of an apocalyptic endgame fueled by story, those who would use it to open up the world, and those who would use it to bind and control it.  Although this conflict undergirds most of Volume 1's main narrative, it only comes into sharp relief in the final collected issue, "How the Whale Became."  Featuring cameos by fellow authors Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde, it tells of Rudyard Kipling's recruitment by The Unwritten's antagonists, his subsequent regret, the personal consequences of his regret, and his final literary counterpunch, a short story called "How the Whale Got His Throat."

Peter Gross's artwork admirably tackles the task of turning large portions of Carey's prose "excerpts" of Wilson Taylor's novels into comic formats, a task the TPB's meager extra features does elaborate somewhat.  What's more notable is that visually sequences taken or adapted from prose are more interesting and more finely wrought than the artwork for the main narrative thread.  This is particularly true of "flashback literature," for lack of a more accurate term.  Gross's two-page introduction to Chapter 3, featuring Frankenstein and his monster, and his illustrations in the Kipling-centric "How the Whale Became" are easily Volume 1's finest art.  Even Tommy Taylor sequences, which fail to achieve this quality of representation, regularly exceed the standard.  While this discrepancy might be somewhat thematic and intentional—even within The Unwritten story is more "real" than reality—it still contributes to an overall disappointment in the series' artistic output.  Although most of The Unwritten's interior artwork is functional and, even if in keeping with the series' literary tone, not particularly interesting in its own right, something should be said for Yuko Shimizu's gorgeous cover illustrations, which get somewhat lost in the compact, continuous TPB format.  Her covers unfailingly feature fine sinewy lines, which give a lush texture to the page and along with the slight variation in color density, contribute to an general print aspect; rich, warm antique colors, even which derived from a cool palate; and delicate, finely articulated facial features on Tom Taylor, a stark contrast to the flat, line-less faces in the interior.


Collects The Unwritten #1-5:  Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity, Chapters 1-4; "How the Whale Became"

ISBN:  978-1401225650

Locke & Key, Volume 2

Head Games
written by Joe Hill
art by Gabriel Rodriguez

Following almost immediately on the events at the conclusion of Locke & Key's inaugural mini-series, Welcome to Lovecraft, Head Games begins as the dangerous and mysterious creature from the wellhouse—now, newly re-re-gendered, introducing himself as Zack Wells and staying with Ellie Whedon as her "cousin," formerly Lucas Caravaggio, nicknamed Dodge, and close friend of Rendell Locke—befriends the new generation of Locke siblings, insinuating his way into their confidence.  And Zack/Luke/Dodge makes a great villain.  Cold-blooded and ruthless, he continues (as before) to seduce and intimidate those he needs to use and kill those who pose a threat.  Among the latter is Joe Ridgeway, an aging teacher who recognizes Zack as Luke and whose memories of Caravaggio begin to illuminate further Zack's mysterious past in Lovecraft, Massachusetts.  Despite several important revelations about his history and character, by the time Head Games concludes and we discover how most immediately Zack came to be at the bottom of the well, we still don't know exactly who or what he is...or why their school production of Shakespeare's The Tempest was so magical.

As an independent mini-series, Head Games is primarily about memories, what we remember and how we relate to those memories.  Like Welcome to Lovecraft, its central narrative concerns are thematized by its most prominent key.  The Head Key itself, pulled out of the pond by Bode with his magnetic "treasure-hunting" fishing rod in the closing panels of Welcome to Lovecraft, is a golden idea, one that fellow comics writer Warren Ellis laments that he himself had not had in his introduction to the volume.  It literalizes the head-as-storage-chest metaphor for memory, which can be opened, rifled through, sorted, and most importantly cleaned out or filled.  And Bode, with his characteristic boyish unflappability, finds it fascinating, though his siblings—at least initially—find it gruesome and unsettling.  Each, though, soon finds ways to put it to use for them.  Following on Bode's success with The Chef's Bible and feeling the pressure of mounting school work and nearing deadlines, Tyler starts by shoving textbooks into his brain and quickly discovers that he can make use of it to gain social leverage with his peers and, most importantly, his crush.  Frustrated at her reactions to the Locke family's recent trauma, Kinsey chooses to rid herself of fear and the ability to cry, which she traps in an empty soda bottle with surprisingly comedic results.

On the whole, whatever is happening currently with the Locke family, Head Games spends much of its time in the past, directly or indirectly.  It begins to accumulate—and then eradicate—details of events twenty years prior, involving the drowning deaths of several high school students, including Lucas Caravaggio, in particular, a memory of Duncan's, in which he remembers following his brother and his friends into a cave below the cliffs.  The already shadowy history of Caravaggio continues to recede, falling away from the other characters just as they are recovered.  The exception here is Rufus, Ellie Whedon's mentally handicapped son, who unlike the others is invulnerable to the Head Key's powers.  Although, like the others who all code their memories differently, blending them as much with imagination as reality, Rufus's observations are re-coded into his own brand of military jargon.  However, he proves far more perceptive than Zack gives him credit for, and therefore flies somewhat beneath his radar and consequently is not treated as other threats.

Like its first arc, Locke & Key continues in its details to show a strong awareness of the larger mythology and of the long history of Keyhouse.  This is nowhere more evident than in Bode's hunt for his new key's matching door, during which the reader is treated to a series of so-far unused but mysteriously antique doors in all parts of the house.  Hill knows where he's going with this series, he isn't afraid to drop hints, and the story we get here is the better for it. 


The Keys:

Head Key allows its user to open his or her head—literally, as a cranium-box, whose keyhole appears magically at the nape of the neck when the key is nearby—and insert or remove whatever he or she wishes.

Echo Key, when used in conjunction with the Echo Door in the wellhouse, brings back a dead loved one as an echo, who must remain in the wellhouse or face fading away unless an alternate door is found.  As an echo, like a ghost from the Ghost Door, they possess all the associated characteristics, such as levitation and the ability to project echoes into empty spaces even far away.

Collects Locke & Key: Head Games #1-6
ISBN:  978-1600104831

Bedlam #5

"Time to Set Our Little Bird Free"
written by Nick Spencer
art by Riley Rossmo

For most of its early run, Bedlam has kept its feet in two different worlds—one in Fillmore Press's former life as Madder Red along with his unusual, to say the least, hospital stay under a mysterious doctor with Jack Nicholson eyebrows and the other in the present as Press attempts to help Detective Acevedo and the police with a new serial case—and "Time to Set Our Little Bird Free" takes significant steps in integrating these two phases.  After apparently ten years under the strange doctor's care and two years before the events of the present, Fillmore is released, after first demonstrating his rather extreme devotion to his new lifestyle.

From early in Bedlam #1, when Fillmore sees his masked alter-ego in the mirror, Press's relationship to his mask and the identity it curtails has always been a tense and ambiguous one.  Though after four issues I'd become lulled into trust in Press's rehabilitated self, his reluctance to part with it, which is so evocatively illustrated by Rossmo, is somewhat troubling, especially as he walks into his confrontation with former Archbishop Warton.

Once again, the best component of Bedlam remains the unexpectedly easy chemistry between Press and Detective Acevedo.  As prickly and determined to deflect Press as Acevedo remains, she continues to concede to Press's tactfully manipulative posturing, playing up his punched jaw and unofficial interrogation by the First, and yet she never seems genuinely displeased by it.  Press's casual wonder at little changes, such as Acevedo's computer in her police car, and his (perhaps affectedly, perhaps sincerely) naïve speculation about other changes, such as whether it also had its own ice machine, remain charming.  Much to Acevedo's expressed frustration, if quiet appreciation, Fillmore Press continues to be useful in their investigation.  With the First occupied with the shoot-out at the hospital begun at the end of #4, suggested by the cover but not shown in the issue, Acevedo and Press move closer to discovering the motivation behind the crimes and the true mastermind behind their perpetration.  Her wry smile, as well as Press's childishly delighted face, as she admits, "You've been a great help, Mister Press" (Bedlam #5, p. 17), is perhaps this issue's best payoff.

Dial H #10

"On the Side of the Angels"
written by China Miéville
pencils by Alberto Ponticelli
inks by Dan Green


One of the features of Miéville's writing style that I appreciate so strongly is his unwillingness to provide easy recaps and cheap exposition.  It may demand that its readers revisit earlier issues to recall details of its narrative threads, but it highly rewards those that do.  The unfortunate consequence of this is that it makes it all the more difficult for new readers to find their footing.  And Dial H #10's opening is disorienting as it is.  Without pause or summary, it picks up right where #9 left off, in the middle of a break-in to the Canadian headquarters for Dial military research by its protagonist Nelson Jent as superhero The Glimpse.  In a stroke of good luck, Nelson finds some unexpected help in stealing another Dial and escaping the Canadians, which is funny AGAIN as I type it..."escaping the Canadians."  The Dial itself is a bit of a revelation, a sidekick dial (7-4-3-3) to complement the hero dial (4-3-7-6).

I've said before that no current comic sustains the density of ideas that Dial H does.  This is particularly true of the slowly revealing Dial mythology, which is being pieced together by Canadian agent The Centipede and Roxie (presumably among others).  Miéville does a phenomenal job giving just enough information--both textual and visual--to begin reconstructing the history of the dials and the mysterious figure "O," the Operator, about whom there are references in telephone history, and who we see briefly here.  We also see a strangely alien relief sculpture corresponding with Nelson's observation, "Can't run an army just on generals, Roxie.  You need soldiers to obey them" (Dial H #10, p. 12), a further tantalizing clue to the history of the Dial.

However, the real surprise is the development of the relationship between Nelson and Roxie.  Possessed now with complementary dials, they first experiment as hero and sidekick with truly unexpected results.  Miéville also provides a refreshingly different dynamic between the two.  Nelson, acknowledging the validity of Roxie's concerns about him losing himself in his dialed identities, graciously defers to Roxie's authority and accedes that she is better suited, so to speak, as a hero than himself.  Their subsequent ease as a crime-fighting duo is all the more satisfying for it.

Despite the quality of its ideas and storytelling, Dial H's artwork continues to be underwhelming.  Issues without original artist Santolouco are sometimes awkward and rarely innovative.  They are often rich in scripted detail, and therefore worth close scrutiny, but as art they are stilted, particularly in their representation of the non-heroes.  As ever, the heroes themselves, however bizarre, are easily the most visually interesting and carefully characterized in the issue, but even then the interior work is somewhat shamed by Brian Bolland's excellent cover illustration of the Bristol Bloodhound.

Superheroes:  The Glimpse, Gunship

Sidekicks:  Bristol Bloodhound, Copter

[May 2013]

Animal Man #18

"Rotworld: The Red Kingdom Epilogue"
Rotworld
written by Jeff Lemire
art by Steve Pugh

Let it never be said that comics shy away from hyperbole.  As the #18's stark black cover proclaims, "This is the most tragic day in the life of Buddy Baker!"  From its beginning, the strongest part of Lemire's Animal Man run has been the Baker family, particularly since Buddy's one of the very few—startlingly few in retrospect—superheroes to have one.  Throughout the Rotworld arc his wife Ellen and his two children, Cliff and Maxine, have remained his motivation, the solid center in his increasingly concerned Ellen and especially her mother, ever the disapproving mother-in-law.  In the epilogue, this tension comes center stage when, separated from Swamp Thing in the time-travel Death portal, Baker returns to Louisiana, just at the point of Maxine's surrender to the agents of the Rot, in an attempt to save his family.

Like Snyder's Swamp Thing, Lemire's Animal Man eschews the completely happy ending, which the resolution could have provided.  In sending Baker back in time to the crucial moment of his family's destruction, all personal consequences of Arcane's maniacal plan could easily have been undone, fully restoring the Baker family to their pre-Rot state.  The cover's proclamation may be hyperbolic, but it is also likely true.  The tragic consequences of its events will, no doubt, reverberate for a long time in the series, both immediately and in the long view.  They also make revisiting the first few episodes of Lemire's run, which I did upon completion of #18, all the more poignant knowing the future of its characters.

William Arcane has been, for quite a while now in Animal Man, a foil for the Baker children.  His isolation and abandonment by his own family, including but not exclusively his elder sister Abby, has always made him a somewhat sympathetic character in my view, particularly in contrast to the gregarious and loving, if perhaps slightly unconventional, Baker household.  His desire to please Anton Arcane, the only of his relatives seeming to show an interest in his well-being, is all the more perverse for Cliff and Maxine's dedication to their father.  Despite the horror of such a young villain perpetrating such gruesome acts and terrorizing others for most of his story, both Snyder and Lemire have been, in my opinion, less inclined to judge William than they are to underscore the inherent tragedy in his decisions.  This is nowhere more apparent than his appearance here in the Rotworld conclusion, in which Buddy retaliates against a warrior of the Rot who strikes William—"Whatever he did, he was still a little boy!" (Animal Man #18: 12)—and then pays the consequences for his intervention.  Though his fate at the end of the issue is somewhat unclear, William remains one of the more interesting collateral characters in the arc, and even if not right away, I hope that Lemire might later return to him.

In addition to the personal tragedy, which weighs heavy and grounds the issue emotionally, Lemire provides a few surprises regarding the history of the Rot's recent conquest, as two of the Rot's warriors are revealed to be different than expected.  In the words of totem-turned-family-pet Socks, "I've no idea what to make of this" (17).  Though the direction the rest of the issue takes leaves their identity and the mystery of their possession by the Rot to quick speculation, their place in future Animal Man issues is delightfully suggestive.

[May 2013]

Northlanders, Book One

Sven the Returned
written by Brian Wood
art by Davide Gianfelice

Twenty years after fleeing Orkney and his sadistic Uncle Gorm, Sven returns to his birthplace and native people to reclaim his inheritance when news of his father's death and his uncle's tyrannical succession reaches him in the Varangian Guard at Miklagard, as the rich Mediterranean city of Constantinople is called by the Northmen.  And unsurprisingly, Sven the Returned is a tale about coming home to confront, willing or not, one's past and heritage.

"A very long time ago...in the lands we call home...these things happened" (Sven the Returned: 7 [1: 1]).  From the beginning, Northlanders is at once rhetorically restrained and yet elegiac.  It recalls with stoic distance an emotionally immediate story.  And it is not until the final episode's final few pages that we discover to whom Sven's story is addressed, or that it is even his to tell.  But the "we" of its opening resonates in the story's initial few chapters, because even as its text block sits on the Mediterranean Sea, it does not, it seems, belong there.  For a man determined to return to his adopted city, Sven is powerfully drawn back to his settlement home in the far North, from which—though he doesn't know it yet—he will never fully leave nor, really, has ever fully left.

Life among the Northmen is brutal.  Harassed by his Uncle, once nearly thrown overboard to drown by his father, chastised as a child for his unwillingness to die for his honor by his mother, Sven's hostility toward his birthplace is well understood.  He is, as he thinks himself, a progressive man living in the center of the world, and Orkney is a backwater place filled with backward and stubbornly superstitious fools.  And, more than not, he is right.  Unlike most of his Norse peers, Sven is not bound to the old ways.  He does not worship their, or any, gods; he does not find honor in adhering to their heroic codes, though he often grants those who do the chance to live and die within them; and he shows little affection for the harshness of the North.  But, as it turns out, Sven the Returned is more a paean of home and family than it is a reproach of their latent cruelty.  However much he may resist, Sven belongs in the North.  However painful he finds his own, he is willing to defend the family he makes.  Though it may cost him his inheritance, his position and not a little of his pride, Sven, unlike his greedy uncle, acts on behalf of his people instead of exploiting them.

The dialogue is unflinchingly anachronistic, infusing this story rooted in tenth-century Viking Orkney with a modern flavor.  And it sometimes implicitly responds to or engages with current perceptions of death, family, power and love.  But Northlanders is otherwise meticulously researched, and the details of the period—including dress, settlement history and construction, social organization and cultural practice, and waves of invasion history—are fastidiously reproduced.

Gianfelice's art is not particularly innovative in design or layout, but gloriously epic in scope and lush in texture.  He especially excels in full-page land- or seascapes and full-body portraits.  His graceful treatment of hair and clothing and his statuesque depiction of the characters lend an otherworldly beauty to the harshness of the setting and the brutality of the story.  However, due credit must also be shared with colorist Dave McCaig, who sets the tone of the series as much with his impressionistic, water-color-esque coloring as Gianfelice with his pencil.  His differentiation of the warm, sun-drenched city of Constantinople and the icy, snow-barren wilderness of Orkney is nearly tangible. 


Collects Northlanders #1-8:  "As High Summer Passes," "Caledonia's Hardy Sons," "The Drovers Lads," "The Chill Eastern Wind," "The Land of the Leal," "I Mourn for the Highlands," "Is Brônac Mo Cineamiun (Sad Is My Fate)," "The Return of the Exiled"

ISBN:  978-1401219185

Swamp Thing #2

"When It Comes A' Knockin'"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Yanick Paquette

With Swamp Thing #2, Snyder's brings his revised mythology for the rebooted series, which he began in the earlier issue, into much clearer relief.  As a defender of the Green, the power of plant life, Holland is the next in a long line of Swamp Things, warriors in a perpetual struggle to maintain balance with the Red and the Rot, the rapidly expanding threat of death and decay we saw mobilizing in Swamp Thing #1 and continuing here in its pursuit of Holland.

However, most of the issue is a conversation between a frustrated Alec Holland and the remaining consciousness of former Swamp Thing Calbraith A. H. Rodgers, who interrupted his destruction of the bio-restorative formula at the close of the last issue.  Now, this wouldn't normally sound like great comic book material, two people talking, but, as ever, Swamp Things talk so well, and Snyder's is no exception.  He is still and tall but not imposing, and in no way brutish.  He exudes patience and resolution, and as sincerely as he wants Holland to heed his warnings and follow his advice, he respects Holland's right to decide, just as he accepts fully the consequences of his own decisions.  And it is this humility and understanding, far more than any words he speaks, that calms Holland and persuades him, though feeling his inadequacy for the task, he does not yet acquiesce.

As in Swamp Thing #1, this issue offers several allusions and homages to Swamp Thing storytellers past:  Totleben's Motel, a "1971" safe combination, Abby's Bissette Motors bike, and a young Alan Moore drinking coffee at Wrightson's Diner.  None of them very subtle, but reverent to a history this new series is working both with and against.  Snyder's decision to reconstitute Alec Holland, to restore his human identity, is a potentially fruitful one, particularly in the context of the Green mythology.  Like Moore's inhuman creation, the one for whom retrieving a remembered human body was impossible, Snyder's Swamp Thing must also contend with the memories of a stranger and the inescapable sense of a far away if always immediate past, and the reintroduction of Abby Arcane, as she now calls herself, is a crucial piece of this continuity puzzle.

[December 2011]

Crossing Midnight #1

"The Shrine"
(Part 1 of 3)
written by Mike Carey
pencils by Jim Fern
inks by Rob Hunter

After their father prays, at the insistence of his mother, a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb, to a family shrine of a forgotten Kami for the healthy birth of his child, Kai and his entirely unanticipated twin sister Toshi are born, just on either side of midnight.  As the children grow older, magic seems to find them.  As young children, they lose their comrade Saburo in a magic world on the other side of the Torii Arch before it unexpectedly seals.  And a few years later, Toshi discovers her immunity to blades, which try as she might, will not pierce her.  Then, as a teen, a master of blades Aratsu, a figure Kai remembers from the magic world, appears to claim Toshi as payment for their father's prayer and promise.  Because she refuses him, he eviscerates the family dog, and favorite of Toshi, Sen, before warning her he will return.

Few comics writers show as much storytelling verve as Carey, and Crossing Midnight is no exception.  Make no mistake, issue #1 is mostly exposition, the story of their birth and childhood as told by elder twin Kai.  Until its final pages, it's all foundation, but it's a foundation that gestures at a detailed and nuanced mythology of battling Kami, humans stolen into magic worlds, and twins born into different worlds, with different powers and on either side of midnight.  Largely because Kai is our narrator, he is far and away the more sympathetic of the siblings, and if the other members of the Hara family are sensitive to the moods and feelings of the others, none seem to show it.  Yasuo's trouble at work, and it seems to be quite dangerous, makes him withdrawn, continually anxious, and subsequently dismissive of others.  Miya's frustration at her husband's withdrawal and apparent apathy makes her shrewish.  Toshi's physical invulnerability makes her edgy, aggressive, and defiant.  They are, in other words, a family, and recognizably such.

The relative success of Crossing Midnight's opening chapter will, as a consequence of its exposition-heavy storytelling, be dependent on how the details of its opening bear out in the next few issues.  As an art team, Fern and Hunter aren't particularly impressive in this one.  Faces are rendered beautifully, with fine and graceful lines, but backgrounds are flat and washed out.  The exception is the world through the Torii Arch, which is strange, expansive and with a depth not otherwise found in issue #1.  If, as I suspect, subsequent episodes of the series take place in this or other alternate worlds, the drabness of the human world may be as much as aesthetic choice as not.  Either way, the interior art is faced with the unenviable task of matching J. H. Williams III's wonderfully layered and colorfully lush cover illustration, which is daring in its perfect symmetry.

[January 2007]

Revival #1

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Revival begins shortly—though the exact duration is unspecified—after the eponymous event, a day on which the recently dead come back to life and (mostly) resume their old habits in full health.  Understandably, this has created a growing national concern and instigated media interest in the rural country around Rothschild and Wausau, Wisconsin, the epicenter of the reviving event.  And Seeley shows early interest in these disparate reactions to his fictional crisis.  Local law enforcement, under federal instruction and at the C.D.C.'s insistence, has established a quarantine and a highway barricade, already turning away religious zealots and other crazies using the incident as an excuse for whatever delusion.  Wisconsin radio features polemical talk shows with guests alternately demanding government withdrawal from Christian matters, greater restraint and temperance from media outlets, and scientific investigation into human biology.

No doubt, as the quarantine lingers and the event remains unexplained, these conflicting camps will come even further to the fore, but Revival's most immediate intrigue, and the features which fully belong to its self-proclaimed genre of rural noir, are its greatest strength.  Asked by her father and local police chief to investigate crimes related to or involving "revivers," Dana Cypress is sent to Wausau to investigate the death of a zorse—half-horse, half-zebra and the strange animal stumbling through the snow earlier in the issue—whose killer turns out to be one of the revivers, a particularly unstable one at that.  And it's through her first assignment as detective and C.D.C. liaison that some of the enduring questions about these revivers are raised, including, most importantly, whether or not—or perhaps to what degree—they are the people they used to be.

This question becomes personal when it is revealed, by her un-death at the hands of the berserking reviver, that her sister Martha is also among the revived, and therefore also likely the victim of an earlier murder, though she has no memory of how she died.  Combined with the strange ghostly creature her son Cooper meets in the woods, Dana Cypress finds herself in the very middle.  In its dense opening chapter, Revival seems to be both a meditation on death and the horror of a world without it, and layered thriller, one that hopes to piece together the lost memory of Martha, the lost identity of the ghost in the woods, and the reasons for the mysterious revival itself.

"We stood up on two legs
And raised our heads above golden grass
He was there.
We sharpened stone and steel
Used tools to harvest grass, beast and brother
He was there.
We clustered together
In brick and mud, swarming with rats and plaque
He was there.
We built nations and mistrust
Our fingers hovered over the red button
He smiled.
Still we build, to rise above the golden grass
Away from the reach of his scythe
For a day when he will harvest no more."
                            (Revival #1, pp. 1-2)

[July 2012]

Dial H #2

"Connection Lost"
written by China Miéville
art by Manteus Santolouco

Nelson Jent says it best himself, "Heroes is going on."  After blundering onto the Dial in issue #1, Nelson returns here to what he calls "research," dialing up as many different superheroes as he can.  Already his past time is showing some dangers.  Unhappy with himself, Nelson seems to enjoy disappearing into these new personalities, sometimes using them to thwart criminals in Littleville like more famous heroes in more impressive cities.  But after an encounter with another hero—the mysterious Manteau, mentioned in the first issue by thug Vernon—during a foray into the home of a coma victim, Nelson begins to realize he's losing track of himself, because all of his dialed personalities stay with him.

After spending most of the initial issue introducing Jent to the Dial, Miéville begins in issue #2 to develop the series' larger conflicts, including the connection between Nelson's friend Darren's breaking-and-entering job for a shadowy figure known to Darren only as X. N. and the recent epidemic of unexplained comas.  Perhaps best of all, Dial H doesn't yet have a clearly defined villain.  Instead, it proposes a network of independently self-interested characters threatening Jent, his friend Hirsch, and Littleville at large:  Vernon and his hired band of street criminals; the reptilian—and often masked—creature able to synthesize matter out of nothing, known to the others as the Squid; Ex Nihilo—X. N.—the doctor imprisoning, or attempting to imprison, the Squid and taking care of the coma victims while working to bring their cause to the city; and the mysterious force that touched those victims and which, according to the Squid, is on its way to Littleville.

Miéville continues his extraordinary character development and his refreshingly mundane depiction of ordinary life with all its little obstacles.  This issue's most poignant and believable moments are Nelson's failed conversation with his ex, Julie, who understandably wants to distance herself from her self-destructing former husband but leaves Nelson with no one to talk out his current disorienting problems with.  And unlike the bevy of heirs-turned-superhero-vigilantes, Nelson lacks the resources to conduct even the most rudimentary investigations, relying on internet cafés and local public libraries with shrinking hours of operation, or it appears much decent furniture.  Dial H is an oblique portrait of economic depression from a factory neighborhood rather than a family mansion or mayoral dinner party.

Superheroes:  Human Virus, Shamanticore, Pelican Army, Double Bluff, Hole Punch, Rancid Ninja, Skeet, Control-Alt-Delete, Iron Snail

[August 2012]

Swamp Thing #1

"Raise Dem Bones"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Yanick Paquette

As for many of the New 52 runs, a significant portion of issue #1's task is to establish its character in the continuity of its comic past as well as its place in the current DC universe.  For Swamp Thing, this is no small feat, especially since Snyder re-establishes Alec Holland as Alec Holland, not yet the hero he may become but with the memories of a Swamp Thing he wasn't, not entirely unlike the sentient plant creature of Moore's imagination with the memories of a human he never was and never could be.  This convoluted mythology makes fairly good sense, even if it does not yet explain Holland's mysterious reappearance.

Swamp Thing has always been somewhat incongruous with comic hero expectations, and Snyder doesn't shy away from his unusualness.  Immediately, Holland is juxtaposed with Superman, Batman and Aquaman, full-time defenders of their respective cities, professionals, and costumed superheroes.  Holland, the wayward Ph.D. botanist, is a blue-collar construction worker in Louisiana, a far less intuitive if no less deserving locale for a superhero home, living out of a motel and doing his best not to be exceptional and not to be found.  His conversation with the concerned Big Boy Scout is for these reasons delightful.  Despite his explanations, Superman does not seem ever to understand how being a hero might not be the most satisfying choice Holland could make, how helping could dangerously upset a delicate balance.  Though newly reborn or reappeared, Holland is the wizened sage, replete with understanding gleaned from some other creature's experiences, and Superman is the naïve, if well-intentioned, schoolboy.

As an introduction to the series' villain, the sudden and simultaneous deaths of birds, bats and fish is unnerving enough, but the reanimation and recombination of dead corpses is truly creepy.  And Paquette's illustration of the revivified monster is all the more so for its piecemeal depiction, never once showing it for what it is and allowing the reader to imagine the rest.  Paquette's artwork is, in fact, exceptional elsewhere as well, and particularly adept as scenes of lush vegetation, such as Holland's newly Edenic hotel room.

The finale of issue #1 is suitably momentous, and the appearance of a Swamp Thing other than Holland decently surprising, emerging from the foliage to warn Holland, "I wouldn't do that if I were you," a stern but subtle reminder of their similarity.

[November 2011]

Starman #0

"Falling Star—Rising Son"
Sins of the Father, Part One
written by James Robinson
pencils by Tony Harris
inks by Wade Von Grawbadger

Starman belongs in a comic-book world, in the kind of fictional place in which a single billionaire can build a city and name it himself, one for which a hero inevitably emerges to keep its denizens safe and its streets clean.  "For Opal City's champion, no longer young or strong or filled with the same sense of righteous purpose of late had put the costume and cosmic power aside—turning, instead, back to the heavens to study them all the more.  With the need for a new champion...one arose.  His father's son.  Pure and true" (Starman #0: 1).  Robinson's prose is crafted, though not stilted or purple, but his expansive epic beginning is, as it turns out, the postured, somewhat egoistic heroic self-fashioning of David Knight, Opal City's soon-to-be-dead Starman.

"Into the street the piper stept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while..."  ("The Pied Piper of Hamelin," Robert Browning)

Robinson's Opal City is a fictional city with texture and history, one that exists outside and beyond the titular hero of the series even if their destinies are often irreversibly commingled.  For this reason, David's reluctant replacement, his younger brother Jack, is a hero much better suited to Robinson's freshly imagined superhero world, one as absorbed by its history as his elder brother though not as self-important or preoccupied with his own legacy.  And though his ascendancy to his family post is inevitable, since he already appears in fully re-imagined superhero garb with his preferred cosmic staff on #0's cover, the bloody beginning to his tenure as Starman is amazing to watch.

Issue #0 is an account of loss, which for Jack Knight includes a mental inventory of all the beautiful old things burned with his store—50s Dali-designed fabric, railroad workers' jackets, Thorne Smith, et al.—and the rest of the antique remnants of a lost time.  It's also simultaneously the story of how the Knight family is hit:  David's death; patriarch, astro-physicist, and former Starman Ted's hospitalization and his house's ruin; and the destruction of Jack's shop Knights Past along with his (wrongfully) presumed death among his things.  In doing so, it strips away the things keeping Jack from assuming Starman's mantle.

It also introduces the other family, the Mist and his children, Nash and Kyle, responsible for the events of the current issue.  It is a family feud, one whose members are each as pettily absorbed in its outcome as the other, and whose parties are just as snidely convinced of their own victory as the other, even if this confidence vacillates.  By the end of issue #0, it is the Mist who shows the piper's smile.

[October 1994]