BORROWED:
And that's something of a disappointment, because pairing book designer, author and comic book fan Chip Kidd with the phenomenally talented artist Michael Cho on a work celebrating the original Marvel Comics collaborations of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee sounds pretty much like a dream book, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, the problem is a deep one, seemingly coming at the point of conception, and with the involvement of the publisher Abrams (Instead of the company that, you know, actually owns and functions as caretaker for these characters, Marvel).
It certainly seems to start on solid ground. In its first 25 pagens, Kidd and Cho present an epic battle involving a team of some of the very earliest Avengers: Iron Man, Thor, The Wasp, The Hulk, Giant-Man Hank Pym and Captain America (I consulted comics.org to see if this line-up ever actually existed, as I thought Hulk officially left the team before Cap actually joined, but never mind all that; continuity is not important for this book).
The heroes are all "somewhere in Asgard", where the Avengers' first-ever villain Loki is commanding an army of monsters, none of whom are named in the book, but most of whom will be immediately recognizable to many a Marvel fan: Fin Fang Foom, Orrgo, Goom, Googam and so on.
If you've seen Cho's work on various Marvel covers in recent years you will know exactly what to expect. He's working with Kirby's designs, and somewhat in his style here, but with a more elegant, smoother rendering that is all his own. The art looks both classic (even classical) and fresh and new at the same time.
And these pages certainly show that work off, with plenty of splashes (some character-specific ones labeled "A Marvel Masterwork Pin-Up" and including the character's logo and nickname, like "the Golden Avenger, IRON MAN") and double-page splashes. None of these pages feature more than four panels.
While most of the Avengers show off their powers defeating the monsters in this sequence, Iron Man asks, "Where did Loki run off to?", and The Wasp chimes in, "More important, where's Thor?"
Gracie's Ghost (Image Comics) I originally checked this out thinking it might be a good candidate for review on Good Comics for Kids, but, after reading it, I wondered if it might be just a little too...bleak for some young readers. I mean, sure, the point of Dawn Brown's graphic novel is that her young protagonist Gracie is able to not only survive her many travails, but keep living her life despite them, but those travails? There are a lot of them, and some of them are rough.
Many will be familiar to most kids, including her hopefully well-meaning mom's inability to understand her, watching her spoiled little brother get whatever he wants, mean teachers and unsympathetic Catholic school administrators, relentless bullies and, rather often, just plain old bad luck. Throughout most of the book, it seems like the universe itself is against Gracie. (I think the stuff with her mom tends to hit the hardest, as she is generally opposed to enforcing rigid gender stereotypes on Gracie, and sometimes seems to take away the few things that give her daughter actual comfort and pleasure, like throwing away her box fort, for example.)
While most of the Avengers show off their powers defeating the monsters in this sequence, Iron Man asks, "Where did Loki run off to?", and The Wasp chimes in, "More important, where's Thor?"
The latter is in pursuit of the former and finds him in an extremely Kirby-esque "ancient temple", which also houses a large, humming ball of energy, emanating shafts of light and what we now call Kirby dots, although these are green rather than the traditional black.
Loki calls it his "veracity vortex" and warns his brother of its power. Thor hurls Mjolnir at it, and the vortex seems to absorb it. And so Thor reaches into it to retrieve his enchanted hammer and, in a pair of splash pages, Thor too is taken into it with a WHHOOOOM! that saps all the color away from him, breaking him down into black and white lines, then just faint blue pencils and, ultimately, the white nothingness of a blank page and, on the next page, WHHOOOOM!, spits him back out with his hammer, the whiteness now gradually turning back into a fully inked and colored page.
Thor falls to his knees, covering his face, and his allies gather around him.
"By the Gods!" he exclaims, " We are...not real?"
Loki calls it his "veracity vortex" and warns his brother of its power. Thor hurls Mjolnir at it, and the vortex seems to absorb it. And so Thor reaches into it to retrieve his enchanted hammer and, in a pair of splash pages, Thor too is taken into it with a WHHOOOOM! that saps all the color away from him, breaking him down into black and white lines, then just faint blue pencils and, ultimately, the white nothingness of a blank page and, on the next page, WHHOOOOM!, spits him back out with his hammer, the whiteness now gradually turning back into a fully inked and colored page.
Thor falls to his knees, covering his face, and his allies gather around him.
"By the Gods!" he exclaims, " We are...not real?"
What happened to The Mighty Thor, Prince of Asgard between those two WHHOOOOM!s, as the readers merely turned the pages? Apparently, he discovered that he and his fellow Avengers were actually comic book characters, as he rants and raves to them wearing a shell-shocked look on his face. Hulk exchanges glances with Iron Man, holding his index finger to his ear and spinning it in a circular motion, the universal gesture for "He's crazy!"
Thor's ranting, in which he explains the comic book creation process to the Avengers in language that is clearly written by a comic creator is genuinely quite funny at first. He starts:
Thor's ranting, in which he explains the comic book creation process to the Avengers in language that is clearly written by a comic creator is genuinely quite funny at first. He starts:
Nay, heed me, comrades. We exist in a sort of codex called a...comic book! It is considered by many to be literature of the lowest order!After explaining how someone "outside our realm" illustrates them using a pencil and paper, he goes on:
But Kidd keeps this going a bit too long, which is where we get to the crux of the problem:Then another hand takes those pages and completes the illustrations in ink! But they are no mere tracers!
And yet another party applies pigment to those illustrations, using something called a four-color process! They aren't paid nearly enough, but what choice do they have? They're still waiting for ad agency callbacks to work on actual accounts! I don't even know what that means, yet it was revealed to me as such!
We possess no free will! The stories of our lives are imprinted on wretched scrolls called newsprint, betraying visible chunks of wood pulp upon its curious surface!
The pages are gathered within a glossy covering and bound together with pathetic metal rivets called staples. And we are almost never in register! I don't know what that means, either.
The pamphlets of our adventures appear upon the dawn of each month, and they almost always end in cliffhangers so readers keep buying our stories.
You can probably see the problem here.
Never mind the fact that Cho himself is, in addition to co-plotting the story, penciling, inking and coloring it himself, rather than passing it on to various "hands." Never mind too the bit about comics being referred to as "literature of the lowest order" in 2025, so long after museums to the medium having been opened, college courses taught on it, graphic novels regularly becoming best-selling books, the fact that Marvel comics dominates modern pop culture and so on.
Everything Thor is saying in this case is obviously not true. This adventure isn't printed on newsprint, there are no chunks of pulp visible and the characters are clearly in register. The book isn't stapled together, but is bound, and in hardcover no less.
Hell, not only is this book not a monthly pamphlet with a cliffhanger ending, this book isn't even published by Marvel Comics, but by an imprint of Abrams, a long-lived and venerable publisher of, like, real books, not comics.
Everything Thor is saying in this case is obviously not true. This adventure isn't printed on newsprint, there are no chunks of pulp visible and the characters are clearly in register. The book isn't stapled together, but is bound, and in hardcover no less.
Hell, not only is this book not a monthly pamphlet with a cliffhanger ending, this book isn't even published by Marvel Comics, but by an imprint of Abrams, a long-lived and venerable publisher of, like, real books, not comics.
Thor's speech might have been cleverly metatextual had Kidd written it in a Marvel comic from the 1960s, from which these characters and the designs they are here rendered in all hail from. But in a modern, bound, high-quality hardcover original graphic novel from a respected publisher?
In order to truly be metatextual, doesn't the work really need to be in the same basic form as the text in which it is commenting upon? I mean, sure, this Veracity Trap is comics, or sequential art if you like, and thus the same medium, but by concentrating on the specifics of the physical format as Kidd does in Thor's speech, the book betrays itself as being so clearly not that.
At the end of the scene, Captain America looks off-panel and tells Hank and Janet that there's "only one way to find out" the truth of Thor's words. And then a turn of the page finds a trio of panels in which the "camera" zooms out from a tight black-and-white close-up of Cap's inked face, as we had seen it in that last panel, gradually revealing the previous page of uncolored, unlettered comics art in someone's hand.
The fourth panel, taking up the bottom half of the page, shows an artist sitting in a chair at a drafting table considering the page, while a man in glasses and a striped jacket leans over him.
"Hmmmmm..." the artist says aloud, "I don't know if this is working, Chip."
The fourth panel, taking up the bottom half of the page, shows an artist sitting in a chair at a drafting table considering the page, while a man in glasses and a striped jacket leans over him.
"Hmmmmm..." the artist says aloud, "I don't know if this is working, Chip."
The artist is, of course, Cho, and the man standing over him is Kidd, and, I have to say, upon first reading this book, I agreed wholeheartedly with Cho: I didn't think it was working, either.
Kidd doesn't agree, at which point Cho replies, "I'm still not sure about this whole meta take." He continues, "It's been done before."
Indeed it has and, I daresay, it has been done better.
Indeed it has and, I daresay, it has been done better.
The two comics creators, whom Cho gives an increased degree of shading, are then confronted by all of the Avengers (who are all also more shaded when in the "real" world). The team has all leapt through the veracity vortex which, of course, leads to the real world, and, specifically, to the creators of this story, Cho and Kidd.
"If the two of you created the vortex, then mayhap the two of you can destroy it!" Thor says, pointing a finger at them. "You are coming with us!"
And so they abduct the writer and artist, taking them back through the vortex to Asgard, where Kidd and Cho are little kids, for some reason. And then a giant Two-Headed Thing, much bigger than any of the earlier monsters (most of whom seem somewhat scaled down, probably in order to make them more compatible as opponents for the human-sized Avengers), stomps towards creators and characters alike. The Marvel heroes are on their backs, seemingly wrestling with existential dread and having their vigor sapped by the trips through the vortex.
Kidd and Cho decide to return to Earth, where they have the power to shape the story, and there are then some shenanigans with Loki, who boasts of the power of stories and himself as "the God of Stories!", which seems to be somewhat similar to what Al Ewing was doing with the character when he was writing him for Marvel a few years back (At least, according to what I read of Ewing's work with Loki in Douglas Wolk's All The Marvels; I didn't personally read any of those comics).
And so they abduct the writer and artist, taking them back through the vortex to Asgard, where Kidd and Cho are little kids, for some reason. And then a giant Two-Headed Thing, much bigger than any of the earlier monsters (most of whom seem somewhat scaled down, probably in order to make them more compatible as opponents for the human-sized Avengers), stomps towards creators and characters alike. The Marvel heroes are on their backs, seemingly wrestling with existential dread and having their vigor sapped by the trips through the vortex.
Kidd and Cho decide to return to Earth, where they have the power to shape the story, and there are then some shenanigans with Loki, who boasts of the power of stories and himself as "the God of Stories!", which seems to be somewhat similar to what Al Ewing was doing with the character when he was writing him for Marvel a few years back (At least, according to what I read of Ewing's work with Loki in Douglas Wolk's All The Marvels; I didn't personally read any of those comics).
Frantically working in what appears to be the "Marvel method," with Kidd telling the story to Cho as he puts it directly on the paper (and thus affects what's going on with the heroes), Kidd-through-Cap comes up with a plan to build a machine that does the opposite of the vortex, which Iron Man describes as "a machine that weaponizes...the imagination!"
Captain America, who is also an artist (as he reminds the creators), sits down at the drawing board and designs what Kidd dubs "The Imaginirritator", another extremely Kirby-ish looking design, a sort of giant super-tank bristling with weaponry, including an "X-trov cannon" which, as you might guess from its name, is especially designed to shut down the vortex.
As kids in Asgard again, the creators make a pair of speeches. Kidd reassures the Avengers that it's not just them, but that everyone is actually someone else's idea and that no one asks to be born or created, and that it is thus the choice of the individual what they do with the life they are given that really matters. And then Cho takes the opportunity to meet the Marvel heroes face to face to thank them, telling them, "Those comics weren't disposable pulp...they were our dreams."
As kids in Asgard again, the creators make a pair of speeches. Kidd reassures the Avengers that it's not just them, but that everyone is actually someone else's idea and that no one asks to be born or created, and that it is thus the choice of the individual what they do with the life they are given that really matters. And then Cho takes the opportunity to meet the Marvel heroes face to face to thank them, telling them, "Those comics weren't disposable pulp...they were our dreams."
In the end, the Avengers triumph, Loki and the monsters are defeated and receive just punishments, and Kidd and Cho finish their book on the penultimate page, the very last page being devoted to another splash, this one showing the team posing, apparently about to plunge into the fight scene that covers the book's endpapers.
It's beautifully drawn, and the high production value and the 8.9-inch by 11.35-inch, bigger-than-your-average-comics presentation flatters Cho's work nicely. I'm sure it was a blast for them both to make, presumably collecting a decent paycheck to create a love letter to comics characters they are obviously quite passionate about. It also made me think, as I dwelt on what they were attempting to do here, what they were saying, how they were saying it and how it might have been more effectively said.
I'm never going to complain about a gorgeous-looking superhero book that makes me think.
But that doesn't mean it really works, and thus as ambitious a project as it may be, I don't think it's quite the work its creators might have imagined it to be.
I'm never going to complain about a gorgeous-looking superhero book that makes me think.
But that doesn't mean it really works, and thus as ambitious a project as it may be, I don't think it's quite the work its creators might have imagined it to be.
Many will be familiar to most kids, including her hopefully well-meaning mom's inability to understand her, watching her spoiled little brother get whatever he wants, mean teachers and unsympathetic Catholic school administrators, relentless bullies and, rather often, just plain old bad luck. Throughout most of the book, it seems like the universe itself is against Gracie. (I think the stuff with her mom tends to hit the hardest, as she is generally opposed to enforcing rigid gender stereotypes on Gracie, and sometimes seems to take away the few things that give her daughter actual comfort and pleasure, like throwing away her box fort, for example.)
There's one person in Gracie's corner, though, and that's the second half of the title. She is often accompanied by a ghost who, Calvin and Hobbes-style, only she can see and hear, and who, true to being a ghost, can't really interact with the world in any real way, so that the line between "imaginary friend" and "ghost" is particularly thin. (There is one rather dramatic exception to this rule, of course, at the end of the book, when a bully finally gets her comeuppance thanks to the unseen actions of the ghost.)
Cartoonist Dawn Brown's book is black and white, and divided into short, discrete stories, kind of like a collection of a comic strip, although those strips might be a couple of pages long rather than a couple of panels long. There is an overarching story involving the ghost, who tries to explain who she was in life at one point and how she died, but the story doesn't really go anywhere. There are also occasional pages where we see the ghost checking in with an authority figure and learn that the ghost has to help someone and, well, "behave" in order to leave Earth and ascend to the next place.
Perhaps somewhat oddly given the title though, the ghost doesn't play too big of a role in the proceedings, is absent from plenty of the stories and, in fact, it's actually not hard to imagine this graphic novel with the ghost removed from it entirely (well, the climax wouldn't quite work without her, I guess...)
Perhaps somewhat oddly given the title though, the ghost doesn't play too big of a role in the proceedings, is absent from plenty of the stories and, in fact, it's actually not hard to imagine this graphic novel with the ghost removed from it entirely (well, the climax wouldn't quite work without her, I guess...)
Brown's art, presented in black-and-white throughout, has the look and feel of newspaper comics page cartooning, which seems quite appropriate given its apparent inspirations and format. I'm still not sure if it's necessarily a good comic for kids or not (I suppose it will depend on the kid), but adults should find some things to like in it.
Anyway, in addition to the usual focus on Komi and Tadano, this volume includes a passage wherein Manbagi has to impress her new boyfriend Wakai's father (who is alarmed to find out that she's a gyaru) and another involving Komi and Tadano's younger siblings.
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