Spaceman #5

"Acts and Man" (5 of 9)
written by Brian Azzarello
art by Eduardo Risso

More than any episode of Spaceman yet, "Acts and Man" feels genuinely medial, a chapter in a larger story that doesn't really hold up much on its own.  It does, however, bring into even sharper relief the mercenary media and opportunistic low-lifes that seem to overwhelm the series, foils to its outcast hero, Orson the Spaceman.

So, it turns out, Tara's got a tracking chip in her skull, which would be hugely helpful in the police search for her, but only the producers of her reality television show seem to know about it, and they're only interested in compelling and dramatic entertainment.  And, while camped outside Orson's apartment waiting to capture some film, they get more than they expected when Lilly and her armed thugs crash Orson's hoping to re-kidnap the celebrity girl to collect the ransom for themselves.  Instead, once again, Orson outwits his attackers, showing himself to be more resourceful and intelligent than his looks or his reputation, and explodes his own home, subsequently seeking refuge on his salvage barge among the other scrappers.  His friendship with Tara continues to develop nicely, particularly her sensitive insight into Orson's sadness and isolation.  Orson may feel intuitively protective of Tara, in whom he may see a little of himself, but Tara is the one who can articulate their similarities and their bond.  Her reluctant admission that she may need to be returned home, despite already acknowledging that she's enjoying her time on the lam with the spaceman, because she saw a producer of her show during their escape, was more poignant than I expected.

Azzarello often receives critical and fan admiration for his creative and expressive use of language, but I have to admit that five issues into Spaceman, I don't much care for the futuristic slang he's developed here.  He's certainly fond of wordplay, and some usage may be motivated by folk etymology—"ear" for "hear," for instance, or "funs" for "funds"—and analogy—"brain" for "think" on the model of ear/hear—but it's more distracting than illuminating.  However, and I have to admit surprise at this, Azzarello has turned this colloquial register into something more in the mouth of Tara, who more than once in the last few issues has stumbled in the slang and corrected herself:  "No, what I mean, I thought...I mean braind...Lilly was your girlfriend" (Spaceman #5: 6).  She doesn't always—"I think was Diana" (17)—but it shows a consciousness about language on the part of its fictional speakers that helps develop them rather than just give the series a futuristic aura.

[May 2012]

Locke & Key, Volume 4

Keys to the Kingdom
written by Joe Hill
art by Gabriel Rodriguez

The already stellar Locke & Key takes a turn for the more adventuresome and ambition in Keys to the Kingdom.  Joe Hill takes greater creative risks in his storytelling style in several of the issues in this collection, and he pulls off every one of them with spectacular aplomb.

"Sparrow," the first in the mini-series and a tribute to Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson, is a structural delight:  a collection of pages each with four syndication-style panels, which culminate in a mini-climax punch-line of their own.  It is, in other words, an exercise in writing a comic book in the style of newspaper comics, and it doesn't miss a beat.  Rodriguez does a striking job imitating Watterson's illustration style for Bode's world, in contrast with the style he's already developed for the series in panels told from the perspective of the other characters.  The episode's sad and quietly heroic ending proves just how much Hill can do within the considerable restraints he gives himself.

The second of these issues is "Casualties," an issue analogized to classic comic book forms, an imagining of Rufus's world from his perspective.  Locke & Key's Cassandra, able to see the truth—Keyhouse's ghosts and supernatural features as well as Zack's true character, and immune to the Head Key (and perhaps others)—but unable to communicate what he knows to others, Rufus is a delightful voice in the series.  His easy interaction with Bode, two boys with difficulty making friends, albeit for very different reasons, is a welcome, if brief, respite from the constant danger posed by Zack and his search for the Omega Key.  The titular casualty, however seemingly irrelevant, is actually quite touching, a loss felt as genuinely by the reader as by Rufus.

Keys to the Kingdom also raises the stakes considerably.  Zack's assault on the Locke family reaches a fevered pitch even in early issues.  His wolf attack in "Sparrow"—complete with the parasitic apparatus, first seen in his ghostly talk with Sam, on his back—is brutal and bloody and clearly fun for him.  By the end of "Detectives," Zack has accomplished the unthinkable.  Bode, always the heart and innocent center of Locke & Key and the Locke family, simultaneously its strongest and most vulnerable member, is seriously threatened, forced through the ghost door and re-inhabited by Zack himself.

But just as these events are growing more and more perilous for the Locke children, Tyler Locke is growing into a man capable of battling it.  He may be dealing with an angsty break-ups with both his girlfriend and his friend—same incident—and struggling to accept his sister's relationship with another friend Zack, but he also starts showing a lot of maturity in his school work and personal life.  Most importantly, however, he quietly and independently starts to suspect Zack of being the Dark Lady, begins systematically piecing together the details of her attacks in an attempt to solve their mystery.

The Keys:

Animal Key, when used with the Animal Door, allows its user to turn into his or her animal counterpart until he or she returns through the door.

Skin Key allows its user to alter his or her racial appearance with the attached mirror until it is changed back using the same key.

Jester Key, when used with the Jester Door, opens a secret closet full of key-related gear and paraphernalia, including the Hercules Necklace, Angel-Wing Harness, and the Music Box.

Angel Key (or Engels-Schlüssel), when used with the Angel-Wing Harness, allows its user to fly.

Hercules Key (or Herkules-Schlüssel), when used in combination with the Hercules Necklace, gives its user superhuman strength and pleasure in employing it.

Philosophoscope Key, when used with the Philosophoscope itself in Keyhouse's observatory, allows its user to discern the truth about a range of people:  Best Teacher, Truest Love, Usefullest Soul, Untrustworthy Ally, and Grave Hazard.

Music Box Key, when used with the Music Box, forces those who hear its song to obey the words it sings, controlled by the user of the key.


Collects Locke & Key: Keys to the Kingdom #1-6:  "Sparrow," "White," "February," "Casualties," and "Detectives," Parts I and II

ISBN:  978-1600108860

Colder #1

written by Paul Tobin
art by Juan Ferreyra

I may have no idea where Tobin is taking this mini-series, but I think I like it that way.  During a mysterious fire at an insane asylum in Massachusetts in 1941, in which maniacal doctors are apparently testing a new drug, one of the more menacing villains in recent memory steps naked through a glowing portal and familiarly greets one of its inmates.  He whispers intimately and threateningly into Declan's ear—"You will grow...colder" (Colder #1, p. 6)—and, as we soon discover, against all reasonable physical possibility or medical explanation, Declan complies, his body temperature slowly dropping, now at forty-seven degrees, preserving his state for more than seventy years.

Declan may be positioned to be the series' hero, or at least its protagonist, but Colder #1 belongs entirely to Nimble Jack, the Joker/Punch/circus-contortionist hybrid who climbed through during the fire.  He's always hungry, and he eats people.  Not their flesh, their spirits, which he draws out of them in swirls of color.  And he disguises their deaths as suicides, as with Declan's falling temperature, by simply suggesting it to them.  Colder picks back up when Jack smells Declan on his caretaker, the psychiatric nurse Reece, who assumed custody of him after their clinic folded five years earlier.  Following her home after a mugging, Jack confronts the comatose Declan once again, and in the issue's closing moments wakes him.

Ferreyra's artwork is exceptional and perfectly suited to Tobin's story.  There's a surprising degree of polish in both the lines and the colors, more pastel, pencil and charcoal than computer finish.  But it's Ferreyra's characterizations that are truly impressive.  His decisions for Nimble Jack, in particular, provide him with a extremely wide expressive range.  In addition to Jack's physical...well... nimbleness, his facial features—all eyebrows and wide grin—are equally so.

Note:  I have no idea why Tobin chose ergotamine as his evil drug of choice or, indeed, why psychiatric doctors or neuro-physicians in the 1940s might be using it on mental patients.  It is an actual drug, a vasoconstrictor most commonly prescribed to treat migraines.  To my knowledge, it has no effect on existing chemical imbalance or mental instability, nor can it trigger them, making its selection for Tobin's story seem arbitrary.

Deadpool Killustrated #4

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
"Chapter IV:  What John Watson Had to Tell"
written by Cullen Bunn
pencils by Matteo Lolli
inks by Sean Parsons
colors by Veronica Gandini

And the end...makes no real sense.  A summary:  Deadpool's mayhem in the Ideaverse is causing confusion about the literary classics, but after Deadpool and his Frankenstein-built partner's altercation with Sherlock Holmes's literary Dream Team—Beowulf, Natty Bumppo, Hua Mulan, and John Watson, ever the odd man out—alongside the Three (well, actually Four) Musketeers, Holmes and Deadpool face off in a Time Machine dead zone, in which Deadpool seemingly wins (and dies), but Holmes saves the day by remembering the stories and "keeping them alive".  What?!

I suppose, in the end, it's some kind of call for cultural memory, a challenge to Deadpool Killustrated's readers to pick up Moby Dick, The Iliad, and Great Expectations.  It's a tactic—if entirely too Reading Rainbow—that at least recalls its general patronizing attitude toward its readers' literary background.  Most of the short series has explained too many of its allusions far too much.  It has beaten any alluding detail like a proverbial dead horse, leaving very little incentive for the reader to pick apart its dialogue or illustrations for further jokes.  Some of this is Deadpool's fault, since he's never been a character particularly fond of subtlety himself, but mostly it reads as Bunn's insistence that his literary cleverness, which wanes significantly with each issue, be fully recognized.  The result is just the opposite.  Nor are his jokes all that clever anyway.  Beowulf ripping off Frankenstein-Deadpool's arm or Watson quipping to Holmes about why he would want to remember the details of The Metamorphosis are about as good as they get.  And none are particularly nuanced or meaningful.  Allusions remain superficial throughout, and it's genuinely disappointing.

Even the quality and ingenuity of the artwork dwindles as the series progresses.  Scenes in early issues, particularly Moby Dick, were impressive and quite beautiful, but Scylla and Charybdis are downright boring and Deadpool's trip to seventeenth-century Paris entirely uninspired.  The exception remains Mike Del Mundo's covert art, which continues to be the most clever and dense joke in each issue.  Turning a magnifying glass on Holmes himself, scrutinizing a collection of Deadpool comics with his own, and burning him like a six-year-old would an ant colony is both funny and ironic, and ultimately far too good for the content that follows.

East of West #3

Three:  The House of Mao
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

As promised by the final panel of East of West #2, "The House of Mao" begins with Death's wife, Xiaolian, captive in New Shanghai and, it is revealed, sister to Mao Hu of the Chosen, in attendance at Armistice for the meeting of the new President in the previous issue.  Death, newly informed of her captivity, begins his unforgiving assault on the People's Republic.  Seeking out their brother, the other three horsemen look to the hunter who aided them before, the Atlas bartender and, it turns out, the Pathfinder, and his treacherous eye.

All roads, it seems, point to events ten years prior, an ambush between Death and his grown apocalyptic siblings, orchestrated by at least some of the Chosen currently conspiring to end the world.  The former President of the Union, Chamberlain of the Confederacy, Hu of the People's Republic, Cheveyo of the Endless Nation, the hunter-turned-Atlas-barkeep hired to track him, and at least one other cloaked and shadowy figure above them were there looking on.  In East of West #3, we learn of another ambush preceding and perhaps precipitating the other:  Hu, flushed with religious fervor, betrays her sister, wife of Death, to War, Famine and Conquest, who, it is widely believed, killed her.  Instead, pieced together with prosthetics and medical regeneration, she is captured and held by mute guards in a garden for ten years.  Hickman continues to pack East of West with story, moving through both the current apocalypse and its precursory events with deliberate and well-timed alacrity.  He enhances his dense, rewarding storytelling with rich, savory dialogue and narration.  It is, in fact, Hickman's finest style, far exceeding his other current efforts in its lush restraint.

As always, Dragotta's artwork is impeccable.  His lines are clear, fine, and precise.  His compositions are cinematic in their variable use of close-up, distance, and dramatic angles.  He and colorist Frank Martin, who gives Dragotta's sleek pen-work both depth and texture, make an exceptional team.  Add to this Hickman's willingness to write important details into the illustrations, and East of West becomes a rewarding piece of narrative art, whose visual components are integral as much as complementary.

[June 2013]

Polarity #3

written by Max Bemis
art by Jorge Coelho

Polarity continues to be a slightly uneven but ceaselessly entertaining metaphorical romp through mental illness.  Bemis struggles with the superhero/supervillain twists in his metaphor, which are often awkward and stilted, but he excels in his character development and ordinary dialogue.

Tim's short-lived career as a hipster-hero "reluctantly making it safe to be a douchey indie rocker in a gentrified former ghetto" is delightful, a combination of wish fulfillment, and self-aware sense of humor more superhero stories could employ.  Tim is painfully aware that a large proportion of his fellow Brooklyn-ites and the rest of his generation are vapid and superficial, or at least so painfully insecure that they buy in to the vapid and superficial, but his superhero mission, whatever else it may be, is fundamentally optimistic and generous.  This attitude, seemingly jaded but actually hopeful, makes Tim—and Bemis—infinitely more likeable.

His burgeoning relationship with Lily is sincere, one which Bemis readily acknowledges is based on his own with his now wife.  Likewise, Tim's tumultuous friendship with his childhood bestie, Adam, who unfortunately has had to weather several of Tim's manic episodes, is perfectly rendered.  These two relationships anchor the entire series, as well as Tim himself.  The final few twists in Polarity #3 take the short series in an unexpected direction, one that jars the pace and potentially disrupts some of the very good things Bemis had developed.  Though I'm not certain I like these twists, which I certainly don't think Bemis fully earned, I don't want to entirely dismiss them.  After all, nearly every good superhero story—metaphor or not—needs a real villain, and, like them or not, I'm still eager to see how Bemis wraps up these rapid new developments.

[June 2013]

Dial H #13

"Tekel u-Pharsin"
written by China Miéville
pencils by Alberto Ponticelli
inks by Dan Green

THIS!  This is precisely what I'm going to miss so much about China Miéville's refreshingly erudite superhero world.  Other comic book writers tell smart stories with strong characters, and some are real masters of the form, but none match the depth of ideas and sophistication that Miéville has shown in his short run of this unusual comic.

The last few issues have been a little rushed, and the news of Dial H's cancellation ("announced" obliquely in the solicitation for #15) explains the accelerated pace, which has deprived recent issues of some of the quirky cleverness I've come to expect.  It's difficult to be deliberate and subtle when you have to cover so much story in so little page space.  But "Tekel u-Pharsin"—very literally, the writing on the wall from Chapter 5 of Daniel, and a trope for a predetermined future of imminent doom—recovers the pace and tone of earlier, smarter, and less action-packed issues.  And nevertheless, it manages to tell at least four (somewhat related) stories all at once.  Most of Dial H #13's textual content is exposition, but the context of this exposition elevates it well above a cheap device.  Having landed in a graffiti world, Open-Window Man relates the history of the Dials, the Fixer and his own transformation into a hero and subsequent involvement with the Dialers to a chalk-drawn, stick-figure alter-Batman-kid, while the rest of the "Dial Bunch" works with the graffiti-world Justice League to recover a J-Dial—a J-U-M-P Dial (again, presumably 5-8-6-7), used to travel directly between worlds—stolen by Captain Random from the Fixer and trapped as a chalk image on the graffiti wall.  Let me repeat that:  a superhero with a floral drapes-cape mentors a newly orphaned, would-be graffiti-Batman in how to become a superhero and draws him his own graffiti-Batcave.  And while, as expected, the Dialers do recover the J-Dial, it's the unexpected ending of this conversation that resonates so strongly, one that breaks convention and out-right rejects inevitability in favor of optimism, faith and choice.

Where some comics feel frail at the edges, a backdrop meant only to accommodate the center of the story, Miéville's world is so effortlessly nuanced, so rich in suggestive detail, that it invites further speculation and whets the appetite for the whole story.  Open-Window Man's concise descriptions of his comrades' first encounters with their Dials, for instance, could each easily sustain an issue or mini-series of their own, particularly Unbled, the minor devil whose discovery of his particularly damaged Dial and the heroes it calls out make him "forget to be wicked". 

Although I've generally been less than impressed with Ponticelli's artistic contribution to the series, his work here is solid.  His characters portraits are consistent, and his rendering of the graffiti world is very expressive, a perfect complement to Miéville's whimsical idea with unexpected gravitas.

Superheroes:  Open-Window Man, Boy Chimney

[August 2013]