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