A few words about every single story in MySpace Dark Horse Presents Vol. 4

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Always Darkest" by Joss Whedon and Jo Chen

Jo Chen is by far the best of the Buffy artists I’ve seen, able to strike a perfect balance between celebrity likeness and original art that stands, lives and breathes on its own. Her tendency to give characters played by actresses with small breasts remarkably larger bra sizes aside, her covers tend to be the very best part of the (admittedly terribly few) Buffy books I’ve read, and I can say with some confidence that my BTVS TV series virginity aside, I’d certainly read an ongoing comic if Chen drew the interiors.

So in that Chen drew this whole story, it is awesome.

On the other hand, it’s only three pages long, and it took you far longer to read the last few sentences than it will take you to read this story. It’s a dream sequence most notable for Spike and Angel going all yaoi, with a little punchline ending.


"Rapture" by Michael Avon Oeming and Taki Soma

This is an eight-page sample of Soma and Oeming’s vaguely-Christian post-apocalypic adventure, which I believe is currently being published as a miniseries.

There’s this gal flying around with a scarf and a magic spear (The Spear of Destiny…maybe…?), fighting cannibals at the behest of a flying, cloaked character called The Word who probably isn’t actually Jesus Christ, but man, isn’t weird to have a character named “The Word” and a Christian post-apocalyptic fantasy story?

He looks kinda like a spooky superhero and has an upside-down pentagram on his chest.

Oeming’s art is, as always, a pleasure to read, but this sample didn’t make me want to read Rapture comics. I wouldn’t mind reading a review of the eventual trade paperback though, if only so I can understand what the book is actually about.


"Dreamstar" by Gilbert Hernandez

So, is DC ever going to hire Hernandez to do a Power Girl comic?


"Penny: Keep Your Head Up" by Zack Whedon and Jim Rugg

Unlike a lot of the stories herein, this one doesn’t seem to be attached to any sort of larger comics series or franchise. Instead, it’s just a well-made, sweet little eight-page story about a lonely young woman trying really, really hard to save the world through acts of social activism, and having trouble getting a date in the process.

By the time I closed the book, I think this remained one of my favorite stories in the volume.


"Martha" by Dave Chisholm

It’s two old men in a little car vs. a young woman on a motorcycle in this weird little Road Warriors kinda story with a twist ending. I love Chisholm’s art.


"A Day at the Zoo" by Carolyn Main

This is actually my very most favorite story in this volume. It’s about a grade school field trip to a zoo, and the many crazy things that happen to poor Violet and her pet gerbil while they’re there. It’s…it’s kind of hard to describe exactly. You can read it for yourself here (please do!), and then proceed to her website where it’s quite easy to burn an hour or more taking in all her great art and comics.


"Em and Gwen: Magic Spell" by Farel Dalrymple

Dalrymple is an artist who, like Jim Rugg from a few stories ago, is one whose work, style and line I admire so much that it hardly matters what he’s drawing, so long as he’s drawing it. Like, whatever the actually story is supposed to be about, whatever the events in it or the dialogue, I just like looking at the way Dalrymple draws fists and faces and curbs and walls and telephone poles and fences and the corners of buildings and so on. Also, he’s a fantastic letterer.

This is one of the several stories in this volume that I have no idea if it’s connected to something else or is supposed to be a standalone story.

It’s about two girls named Em and Gwen. We meet Em winning what looks like a prearranged fight with a boy from a private school. Then she goes to a magic tree that Gwen apparently lives inside to get the sweatshirt she left there. And that’s, well, that’s it, really.

As literature goes, it ain’t great, but there are some nice moments of comics working as only comics can, and it is all drawn (and lettered) by Dalrymple.


"Flower Mecha" by Angie Wang

Okay, here’s another one that is on my short list of favorites. The plot? A girl is on a picnic, when she’s attacked by pollen. She retaliates by getting inside her Flower Mecha, but then she’s attacked by a bird, a bee and a butterfly, which necessitates upgrading into a different mecha.

While there’s some funny word play, and the story is rather amusing, it’s the way that Wang tells it that is important here.

Each of the eight pages is divided into three rectangular panels stacked vertically. The style is old-school fine art Japanese, and everything depicted is highly-stylized to fit with that aesthetic, even the more modern stuff like goggles and racing gloves employed by our heroine when she’s seen within the cockpits of the mechas. The action in each sequential panel whips in alternating opposite directions, making for a exhilaratingly, violently kinetic work. It’s only 24-panels long, but God is it action-packed.

Actually, don’t listen to me try to find the right words. Just go read it. And if, like me, you were unaware of Wang’s work, you should check her and it out here and here.


"The Secret Files of the Giant Man in Paris" by Matt Kindt

The format of Kindt’s graphic novel 3 Story: The Secret History of Giant Man played such an important role in the story, that an eight-page, side-story would seem all but impossible. But Kindt does it, and does it well.


"Tickets" by Mike Lawrence

Eh, I did not care for this story at all. It’s well drawn, but way too precious, with narration that makes the fairly obvious beats of the story over-obvious.

Also, I thought the old lady exploded during the panel with the SPLATHOOM!! sound effect in it.


"Piper’s Pet" by Nicholas Kole

A little kid using a piece of delicious-looking pie as bait in an attempt to catch a pet. Why kind of fish are attracted to that particular bait? This two-page, 16-panel story provides the answer.


"Face of Evil" by Tory Novikova

The moral of this story about a mysterious pirate is, if I’m reading it correctly, that girls are evil. I thought so.


"R.J. Jr., The Dragon’s Librarian" by Alec Longstreth

I quite enjoyed this short story about a book-hording dragon, his own personal librarian, and by the latter for get new reading material by the former.

Longstreth’s art is very simple in design, but the panels are all very busy and detailed, which is sort of a neat trick the more I think about it.

I didn’t much care for the backwards name gags though. They’re just kind of there.


"The Origin of Man" by Kate Beaton

This is a two-page, full-color comic strip in which Charles Darwin thinks he’s discovered which animal man has evolved from (Hint: it’s native to the Galapagos), but is laughed at by his fellow scientists, who embrace an even more ridiculous theory.

The great thing about Beaton is that almost everything she draws because of the way she draws it, a two rare but completely invaluable talent in a cartoonist. The look on Darwin’s face in each of these panels is honestly enough to crack me up, devoid of context.


"An Early Sunset" by Joseph Lambert

Genius.


"The Catch!: A Wondermark Tale" by Dave Malki

I admire the hell out of Malki’s Wondermark and the way the strip’s constructed, both in regards to the imagery and the plotting, but this story seemed to go on a page or two too long for my tastes. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty funny, and at least two disparate threads are brought together in a satisfying conclusion, but I think Wondermark works much better in smaller bites.


"Sinfest: Street Poetry"

Tatsuya Ishida, doing what Tatsuya Ishida does best.


"Achewood: The Garage Sale" by Chris Onstad

This is an eight-page, full-color story that deals with the familiar subject matter of Teodor having a grage sale, and Roast Beef showing him how it’s done.

It’s a fine example of Onstad’s considerable virtues as a writer, including a random assortment of fully realized, highly idiosyncratic characters that belong to an unusual subculture (i.e. garage sale regulars), and his regulars essentially just being themselves, interacting with a specific set of circumstances (Asks Ray, “What’s the chick scene at a garage sale? Pretty bad?”).


"Werewolves on the Moon: Versus Vampires—Bad Blood" by Dave Land and the Fillbach Brothers

I didn’t much care for this one. It’s actually a sort of prologue to the Werewolves on the Moon Dark Horse published, but because of that they aren’t actually on the moon at all during this eight-page story, nor do they fight vampires…in fact, there are no vampires at all. So the title doesn’t do much to prepare one for the story, which is essentially a light-hearted crime story wherein all the participants are werewolves for a reason that is never made apparent.


"The Goon and Ann Romano: Gone Dishin’" by Ann Romano and Kristian Donaldson

This Romano character showed up in the previous volume, writing the introduction and appearing in a not-very-good-at-all story full of lame celebrity gossip jokes.

This one’s a lot better, in large part because it involves The Goon, Franky and the weird world of the Goon.

There’s a bar fight involving fish-men, and a giant octopus cook holding a cooking utensil in each tentacle and neither of those are the best part—the bartender is a monstrous fish-person who has lost each of his hands and had them replaced with hooks, and yet he’s still—successfully!—in disguise, wearing a fake beard.

The Romano character doesn’t really add much other than pop culture references and a Lindsay Lohan joke (Is it cool making fun of Lohan? It just seems kind of mean to me at this point), but Romano the writer does a pretty decent Goon story.


"The Marquis and The Coachman" by Guy Davis

Davis’ dark, bizarre-looking, alternate history hero stars in a short eight-page story in which he encounters and battles some of Davis’ typically strange monster designs. It’s been a long time since I read the original Marquis comics, and I’ve sort of forgotten the exact premise, but I enjoyed this short little peek back into that world, and Davis’ art is always a pleasure to read, perhaps especially in a case like this, where it’s in service of a story that is all Davis, from the words to the settings to the character designs to the architecture.


"And What Shall I Find There?" by Mike Mignola, Joshua Dysart and Patric Reynolds

Migonla simply co-writes this Hellboiverse story about a very young Trevor Bruttenholm in 1939 rural France, where he seeks the supernatural answer to an obscure art folklore mystery. It’s a typically pleasant horror story of the sort Mignola is now known for, and while Patrick Reynolds art lacks the high degree of stylization present in that of Mignola himself or many of his collaborators (Guy Davis, Duncan Fegredo, Richard Corben, etc), it’s certainly effective and pleasant enough.


"Star Wars: Dark Times—Blue Harvest" by Mick Harrison and Douglas Wheatley

I could count the number of Star Wars comics I’ve read on one hand, and my interest level in the franchise at this point is probably at the lowest point it’s ever been in my life (I was born in 1977, and thus quite literally grew up with Star Wars), so I was expecting this to be rather hard to get through.

I was therefore quite pleasantly surprised that it was a fairly engaging read, and by the time if was over I found myself wanting to know where the story it sets up continues so I could find out what happened to the protagonist, a retired Jedi knight forced to become a bounty hunter.

I suppose that has a lot to do with Harrison’s skill as a writer, and the fact that he is basically telling a story that would make just as much sense in ancient Japan or the American Old West as it does in space. That is, it’s not contingent on the setting or, at its heart, a Star Wars story. It’s just a story that happens to be in space, and happens to bear the Star Wars brand name. (In fact, if it weren’t for the presence of some alien species—whatever race Hammerhead is from, the Asian stereotype banker aliens of the new trilogy—I recognized from the movies filling up the crowd scenes, I probably wouldn’t even known this was a Star Wars comic).

It also has to do with how lush and fully realized Wheatley’s artwork is. Richly colored by Dave McCaig, they achieve the more beat-up, lived-in aesthetic of the original trilogy, which seems appropriate given the subject matter.

So I guess Michael Jackson is dead,

which means I have thought about Michael Jackson more in the last 12 hours or so than I have in the last twelve years. As is likely the case with most people alive today, I have plenty of very specific memories in which he played some small role, many of them happy memories. I remember closing my eyes when he would start to turn into a werewolf in the beginning of the "Thriller" video, roller-skating to cuts off Thriller at the Roller Den in grade school, playing that terrible "Moonwalker" video game at a bowling alley, listening to a cassette tape of the Jackson Five's greatest hits over and over in my best friends car, having a hard time wrapping my head around the existence of The Wiz co-starring Michael Jackson ad the The Scarecrow, and so on.

He wasn't a vital part of my life though, and his passing certainly won't create a hole in my life the way the deaths of some famous strangers I've never met might (like, say, Tim Russert's death did; I used to spend a solid hour a week with that cat). Jackson did cross over into comics in a few small ways here and there, but not in the sort of way that I think his passing requires a response from me as a comics blogger. (And besides, better bloggers have already covered the various Michael Jackson's comics connection angles already.)

So what's the point of this post?

Well, I basically just wanted to link to some of the cartoonist's reactions I've seen so far that deserve to have attention paid to them. Tom Spurgeon has a helpful link-dump here, and it's well worth clicking on all of those.

James Kochalka, who has a song called "Show Respect to Michael Jackson," has a typically cute American Elf strip paying a sort of tribute to that particular song's muse here, and Kochalka also has a pretty elegant, to the point two paragraphs worth of obituary here.

Also well worth a read is "On the Sudden Passing of Michael Jackson," written by Achewood cartoonist Chris Onstad in the voice of his character Ray Smuckles. It's a typically funny piece of writing, and, again, a pretty elegant address of Michael Jackson's output and the world's relationship with him ("Try wakin’ up tomorrow and writin’ We Are The World. See what you come up with.") I liked the piece, which reminded me again just how amazing Onstad is. In addition to his cartooning, he's created these characters that are so strong that he can sit down and write an insightful, heartfelt blog post that one of his characters would have written, in reaction to news happening in real time. Jesus Onstad is good.

Finally, it will probably be well worth keeping an eye on Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoon Index over the next few days, if only to see how many different uninspired variations of the obvious Michael Jackson-meets-Saint Peter, Michael Jackson-moonwalking-in-the-afterlife and Michael Jackson-probably-wants-to-fuck-the-cherubs gags our nation's political cartoonists will come up with.

Review: Achewood: The Great Outdoor Fight

The undisputed champ of webcomics finally gets a hard copy version in this slick hardcover collecting the entirety of the 2006 arc about the titular battle royale, described thusly: “Three days! Three acres! Three thousand men! Only one will win.”

From a pure publishing perspective, it’s a really nice project. The book is more square than rectangular, a more individualized size than the standard graphic novel format, and its cover is austere, almost stately. There are a couple shades of brown emblazoned with the words “Great Outdoor Fight” and two silhouettes of men—not anthropomorphic cats or bears—apparently fighting before a crowd. Looking at this thing in the shelf, you’d probably have no idea what the hell it actually was.

The insides are the original strips, moved around a bit here and there so that the entire thing reads like a graphic novel, rather than a collection of comics strips. This is a great (and pretty obvious, although I never really considered it until now) advantage of web comics over their newspaper brethren: When they’re ultimately collected into a book, the format need not be so severe as a collection of newspaper strips.

Generally when I read strip collections—be they the gag panel kind or the sequential adventure kind—the books are necessarily assembled so that one moves one’s eye across the page like the roll on the back of a typewriter: Mechanically across the row of three to four panels in a set rhythm till you reach the end, and then your eyes travel back all the way to the left to start the process all over again. Maybe every two pages or so there would be a full-page Sunday strip to break the monotony.

Here each panel flows right into the next without the fact that this is a collection of strips ever even becoming apparent. This is in large part because Chris Onstad can make his daily strips as long or as short as he wants, rather than confining himself to the same number of panels in the same small space six days a week, with a larger, more square format on Sundays, as he would if Achewood were a newspaper strip.

As nice as this collection from Dark Horse is though, and as glad as I am to finally get a book version I can loan to friends to evangelize Achewood with, I still found it somewhat frustrating. Mostly in the way that Achewood remains Achewood, even on paper.

Firstly, I’m not so sure this is the best place to start getting to know the strip. Having read through the archives over the course of a few weeks online, the Great Outdoor Fight definitely seems to be one of the biggest and most action-packed stories, but a lot of the humor comes from just how uncharacteristic it is for our heroes Ray and Roast Beef to be involved in such a manly event, let alone excel at it. Hell, it’s hard to imagine either of them even getting in a fistfight, let alone ever succeeding in beating down 2,998 other dudes. I’m not sure either the drama—a kind of inside out ironic melodrama that is actually dramatic despite itself—nor the humor work as well if this is your first exposure to the two cats.

And there’s no real attempt made to introduce them either. I was somewhat bemused to see that among all of the add-ons Onstad makes to the book, including a history of the Great Outdoor Fight, profiles of past champions, and recipes, nothing is done to ease new readers into the world of Achewood; all of these things just makes that world more full, more realized and more hilariously deadpan.

There’s no key to the characters, no “Previously in Achewood” synopsis at the beginning, no afterword or foreword, not introductions or postscripts from Onstad or another cartoonist or celebrity endorser explaining just what the hell Achewood is.

Think of the first page of every Marvel comic book, for example, or the character charts that appear in some multi-volume manga series. That’s the sort of handholding I assumed would factor into an Achewood book like this.

Wait, I said this frustrated me, didn’t I? Maybe frustrated isn’t quite the right word; perhaps I should say it chagrined me—the connotations on that word are closer to what I mean.

See, here I was looking forward to a book that would perhaps make it easier to try and spread love for Achewood beyond emailing links to certain strips to friends, and when the book finally arrived, the spirit of the online version was completely intact: It’s something you can’t really have explained to you, but something that you have to just dig into until you reach the point where you decide, “Wow, this is not for me,” or you’re laughing your ass off and no longer care why it’s so popular despite the poor drawing, or why Ray is wearing a thong, or how come there are so many objects scaled to cat size.

And that’s actually pretty admirable on Onstad and Dark Horse’s part—even in a new format, they let Achewood be Achewood.

I’m extremely interested in how this ends up doing as a book, for a couple of reasons.

There’s the traditional “Will people pay money to own something they can look at on the Internet for free any time they want?” question, which I imagine the answer to will end up being yes. (In my experience, it seems that as long as the comics are good, I don’t think people mind buying them after they’ve read them online; it’s only shitty comics that creators and publishers have to worry about people never buying after they’ve read them).

There’s also the question of whether people who shop in book stores and borrow graphic novels from the libraries will embrace Achewood, or if there’s just something about it that makes it a strip enjoyed primarily by people who relate to it online, as a site and a community and an experience as much as a comic strip to be read.

And, of course, there’s the question of whether it does well enough to lead to more, similar books. If it were up to me, I’d like to see a Complete Achewood sort of program, but a story arc-focused publishing plan like this, in which the various big continuing stories each get the trade treatment, wouldn’t be so bad, either.

I think you get to know the characters best in a lot of the little standalone strips in which they talk about what they look at on the Internet or blog about their days or whatever, but because Achewood is a web strip, you can always hang out with and get to know the characters at achewood.com, so maybe the main point of Achewood books would simply be to relive the big moments, like Great Outdoor Fights, road trips, weddings, kidnappings and run-ins with magical realism cameras made in Mexico.

Poorly organized thoughts on Virgin Comics, the decadence of DC and some links

So, Virgin Comics, huh? Word on the street (and by “street” I mean “Internet”) is that the company’s calling it quits. Here’s a Publishers Weekly story. Here’s retailer and Savage Critic Brian Hibbs on the collapse from his perspective. Here’s Dirk Deppey. And here’s Dirk Deppey again.

From my perspective, I thought Virgin did a very good job of selling their comics, and if they failed to be sell enough of ‘em to keep doing it, it seems to be simply because not enough people wanted to buy them vs. some fault of the publisher’s staff.

When I was writing weekly comics reviews for Las Vegas Weekly, the PR folks at Virgin were all extremely easy to work with, and were always volunteering review copies of all their new series and offering whatever assistance I might need.

The books had the benefit of being extremely easy to write about for a mainstream, outside-of-comics medium, too. There was the initial novelty—Richard Branson, Deepak Chopra, Indian mythology, blah blah blah—and then the matter of the names tied to them. A book “created by” Nicolas Cage or Guy Richie or John Woo might not be any good at all, but it’s something that your average, civilian reader might care to hear more about. “John Woo? Doing a comic with John Woo fan Garth Ennis? Tell me more…”

The production values and the art were also extremely high. The books looked good as serial comics; certainly better than, say, Boom or Dynamite books (just in terms of trade dress and production value). The art was in many cases extraordinary, certainly better than the bulk of DC’s output over the last two years, and in a more comic book-y style than a lot of Marvel’s MU content over that same period of time.

That said, the comics tended to not be very good. I tried the first issues of the bulk of the series Virgin put out, and would usually lose interest by the second or third issue. I lasted maybe five issues of Snake Woman and Seven Brothers, and four of Dan Dare; those were the books I stuck with longest. I liked those series, but I’d inevitably miss an issue or two, realize that I’d forgotten to buy them and didn’t really miss-miss them, and thus never put in the effort to catch back up.

Most of them, however, were just pretty straightforward; nothing I wasn’t already getting from DC or Marvel or Dark Horse or Image or Tokyopop or Viz, with the exception of featuring characters I was less interested in than Batman or Spider-Man or Conan or Empowered, or with less visual snap and aesthetic appeal than in whatever manga series I happened to be reading.

Additionally, I think there was something noticeably “wrong” about a lot of the comics, which was apparent by their peculiar branding. John Woo and Garth Ennis collaborating on a comic sounds like a dream come true, but it wasn’t clear how much Woo was contributing (Seven Brothers sure read like any other Ennis comic, of which there were quite a few available concurrently). What exactly did Nic Cage and his son contribute to Voodoo Child if Mike Carey was credited as the writer?
And so on.

I’m still curious how some of these celebrity-branded comics were created exactly, and if that process had anything to do with Virgin’s overhead. Like, were each of the Cages getting paid as much as Carey for each issue of the book?

I’m also curious why Virgin went down so fast, but Boom and Dynamite Entertainment are both still around; both of those companies did pretty good jobs of getting their books in front of critics, and offering books that folks outside the Direct Market would conceivably be interested in hearing about as well. I think Virgin’s production values tend to be higher, however, the art more polished, and they had bigger name creators—not just the Hollywood folks, but the comic folks as well. Did Virgin just start out bigger than Boom and Dynamite, with a line that wasn’t sustainable unless the comics started doing big numbers right away? (I only single out Boom and Dynamite because they seemed to occupy about the same place in the publisher hierarchy as Virgin, and started making noise around the same time).

I think Deppey’s original sarcastic remark about “the Wednesday Crowd” (hey, that’s me!) not being interested in books not featuring Batman and Wolverine is true to a certain extent; if I’m going to read a book about a caped, masked vigilante crime fighter, I’m definitely going to choose Batman over a brand new Indian Batman (probably a bad example, as I don’t think Virgin had a Batman-like character; a couple of Witchblade-like characters and at least one Constantine-like character, yes, but not really a Batman). I do tend to follow Batman in the same way that my dad follows the Cleveland Browns or grandfather followed Jesses James and Wyatt Earp in Western movies.

Hibbs also had a good point in his original reaction, noting that it was somewhat unclear what exactly Virgin was doing and what the Virgin brand meant. Call it the Wildstorm problem.

But I think there’s a simple explanation for why Virgin Comics has failed that I haven’t heard anyone else suggest yet: Divine retribution for having published Jenna Jameson’s Shadow Huner.


—Speaking of virgins, Nina Stone’s Virgin Read column attempts to explain Achewood, a big chunk of which is now available in hard copy thanks to Dark Horse’s publication of The Great Outdoor Fight.

As someone who’s tried very, very hard to articulate how great a comic Achewood is, I appreciated Stone’s review attempt. By most objective criteria, Achewood doesn’t appear to be good at all, but there’s…something ineffable about it, some weird alchemy that makes it click at a certain point, a line a reader has to cross to get from “What the fuck is up with that cat in the Speedo blogging about his day while wearing a crown?” to laughing one’s ass off and embarking on the seemingly impossible task of explaining the series to others.

I didn’t pick up the trade yet, although I’m anxious to see what Achewood is like on paper rather than on my computer screen. I do plan on getting it though, despite having already read it for free. The book should make Achewood evangelism much easier, as its easier to lend someone a book and say, “Here read this, you’ll love it” than to ask them to go to achewood.com and read 10-30 strips.


—Here’s Jog reviewing Final Crisis: Superman Beyond. It’s a sharply written, dead-on review, which also happens to be full of some pretty funny imagery of the author in his car in a parking lot reading his comic with 3-D glasses.

I just used my 3-D glasses from the League of Extraordinary Gentleman: The Black Dossier graphic novel; is that cheating? Did I miss something by using those instead of the “4-D Overvoid Viewers?” I imagine I would have been more disappointed in Superman Beyond if I had devoted five to ten minutes cutting out and assembling a pair of 3-D glasses just to be able to read it…


—Today was Jack Kirby’s birthday. Several folks have nice tributes up; I really like Tom Spurgeon’s, which is simply a collection of Kirby covers, panels and details, showing the man’s unparalleled visual power and versatility.


—At Eye On Comics, Don MacPherson reviews DC Universe: Last Will and Testament, and posts both of the covers. They’re identical save for one difference; the one on the right has a foreground image of Geo-Force posing behind a giant rock hand. The one on the left is the one that was originally solicited, and it has a big, fat lighting bolt occupying the center of the image. When it was originally solicited, I assumed that space would be filled in with something later; that it was intentionally left empty to keep a surprise a surprise.

Was the surprise simply that this is a Geo-Force-centric comic, and DC didn’t want to tip their hand on its contents too early, assuming it would hurt orders for the issue since no one likes Geo-Force?

I don’t know; that’s what I was thinking when I saw the Geo-Force variant though. They’re both pretty terrible covers; the one with the empty lightning bolt seems too lightning bolt-centric, and the one with Geo-Force crams his figure on top of the other image, which also features Geo-Force.

What a weird cover…


—Colleen Coover draws a naked lady for Eric Reynolds. (Via Blog@Newsarama)


—Tuesday night I mentioned Sean McKeever and company’s introduction of Super Friends’ Wonderdog into DCU comics continuity, as a springboard into a brief discussion about Alan Scott’s wonder dog Streak, and in the comments section for that post, and for yesterday’s weekly haul, several of you mentioned how awful the issue introducing the new Wonderdog actually was.

Well today at Comicsworthreading.com Johanna Draper Carlson has a brief discussion of the issue (in a post entitled “Teen Titans #62—Wonderdog Did What?!?”) that links to scans of the issue’s climax. Between those scans and those at Newsarama.com, you can read 16 of the issue’s 22 pages, including the what the fuck is wrong with you people?! ending.

And man, it is awful. I dropped the book somewhere in the middle of the “Titans Tomorrow” arc because it wasn’t very good then, but it’s gotten much, much worse. On top of just how juvenile and nasty the Wonderdog bit is, it’s also extremely poorly assembled—the dialogue is mostly just references to other books, Eddy Barrows anatomy and costuming are a series of bad choices, and characters appear and disappear from panel to panel, with no sense of visual continuity.

It really makes the blurb in Teen Titans: Year One encouraging readers to check out Titans and Teen Titans for more Titans stories that I made fun of yesterday seem even more tragic. The only things Teen Titans: Year One and Teen Titans seem to have in common is two words in the title; in every other respect, they are completely antithetical to one another.

Anyway, if you didn’t read this week’s Teen Titans but are interested in the state of DC’s animal sidekicks, check out Carlson’s post to see just how far into superhero decadence DC continues to descend. At the rate they’re going, I’m predicting Robin turning tricks on the street for the sheer thrill of it, Wonder Girl joining the pornography industry and Blue Beetle coming out as a cannibal by the 75th issue.

Catching up on comics everyone else in the entire world has already read

Like most everybody, I really like to be on top of things when it comes to pop culture, or at least the elements of it I’m interested in. I like to see movies the weekend they’re released (if I haven’t already seen ‘em for review purposes), I like to hear about the cool bands before they sign their big record contracts and appear on Letterman or Saturday Night Live, and, whenever possible, I like to read comics and graphic novels on Wednesday afternoons.

However, there’s certainly something to be said for coming to something—particularly serial entertainment like comic strips, books or TV series—long after the rest of the world. Sure, it might mean that you can’t always participate in the water cooler conversations at work the next day, and you might lose some with-it points or geek cred, but, on the other hand, the thing you’ve been missing out on for years has had time to pile up, so that when you’re ready for it, there is a lot of it to be enjoyed.

For example, my lack of interest in/ability to afford premium channels meant I missed Curb Your Enthusiasm until five seasons of it were available on DVD, but I could watch it pretty much all at once—an episode or two or three a day. I was too young to “get”Twin Peaks when it was on TV, but on DVD, I could follow the entire Laura Palmer investigation in the course of a week or three. The instant gratification that comes from being able to watch, say, Neon Genesis Evangelion or Boston Legal without having to wait for commercials, week’s between episodes or new seasons to start is a wonderful, wonderful pleasure.

The same goes for comics. Some of my favorite reading experiences have involved catching up on completed series I’ve never read a bit of, like Preacher, which I didn’t even start reading until after the last issue shipped, or Starman, which I started reading in trade as the last arc was winding down in the monthlies. It’s a neat feeling, knowing the cliffhanger between stories or volumes will last only as long as you allow it to, and being able to read a single, complete, several thousand pages long story in the course of a few weeks, you know?

This past month, I’ve set myself to catching up on a few comics, of varying kinds and off varying degrees of my being way behind of. The four comics below have pretty much nothing in common, except from the fact that they’re all things I took a little too long to sample for myself, and that I’m cramming them all into the same long-winded post.

The first is the biggest work, and the one I was farthest behind on and, not coincidentally, the one I’m the most embarrassed—hell, ashamed—it took me so long to experience and appreciate. Particularly considering that one of my jobs and one of my—I don’t know, what is this site? A hobby?—hobbies is talking about comics.

But here goes: I never really read Achewood until the dawn of the new year.

(Ray, Onstad and Roast Beef, in an image that ran with this Onion AV Club interview)

I have an excuse, of course, but it may not sound like a very good one, particularly since I’m making it on a web log, but I’m a straight-up old-fashioned Luddite, and have a pretty strong aversion to web comics. The problem with web comics, you see, are that they’re on the web. And thus reading them involves using a computer, and that’s something I associate with work, not comics reading.

As much time as I spend in front of computer screens, when I want to read a comic, I want it to be something I can hold in my hands, or take in the bathroom or bathtub with me. I want it to be something I don’t mind eating while reading, or falling asleep with my face on. And I’d like it to be something that won’t give me cancer or hurt my eyes.

My resistance to computers is slowly breaking down, of course.

There was a time (the late ‘90s), when I still did all my writing with pen and paper, and would later transcribe it on my typewriter, or, later, a computer, although I’ve since learned to write right on the keyboard.

I used to read newspapers, now I get all my news from the computer.

And the fact that none of the papers around me carry some of my favorite comic strips has slowly gotten me used to reading strips online.

The other thing that kept me from Achewood was that it was a little overwhelming—look at how much information there is available on the page and, also, that I didn’t have a clue what it was about.

I’ve heard about how awesome it was for a long time, of course, and would occasionally follow links back to it. I remember the Comic Sans strip making the rounds, for example, and the one about Ray’s nephew's little pants, but I was having some conceptual difficulties.

Why was it called “Achewood,” for example? What were the various animals…bears or cats? Why did Todd not have any features? If he was a squirrel and Roast Beef was a cat, how come Todd was so much smaller, as if Beef were human-sized? And how come everything is scale to the cats, except when it’s not? And what’s up with that all-white, angel thing that’s sometimes with Todd? If Phillipe is only five, why doesn’t he live with his mom?

I tried reading several strips in a row on a couple of occasions to make them make sense, but these questions still bugged me. (I’ve similarly tried to force myself to enjoy a lot of newspaper strips over the years in this same way; like, “If I just read Mary Worth long enough to know who everyone is, it will eventually start being entertaining.” It never worked).

Okay, yes, these are all stupid-ass questions, and, looking back, I can see thinking about these things casts me in the befuddled old man role of, say, my grandfather trying to make sense of an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force he’s just walked in on, or, I don’t know, Walt Disney’s grandfather having his mind blown by his grandson’s day job (“Why isn’t that duck wearing any pants? Why’s the mouse have pants, but not shirt?”)

The critical mass of critical praise Achewood and its creator Chris Onstad was racking up as ’07 turned into ’08 inspired me to give it another try and this time really work at it. It was ultimately Lev Grossman’s top ten list for Time that framed it in a way that dispelled all my lingering confusions:



Achewood defies categorization or description, but a brief, futile attempt at a synopsis would go something like this: A bunch of cats, some robots, a bear and an otter who's 5 years old, live together in a fictional neighborhood called Achewood, which you might usefully think of as a grown-up, suburban, stoned version of Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood.



Man, it was light bulb city after I read that description, and armed with that and Dirk Deppey’s statement in his best-of the year list that “Achewood’s strengths are also its biggest drawback, as you really won't get much of the humor without reading six months or so of archived strips,” I returned to achewood.com, clicked on the “Jump To Story Arc” buttons, and spent the better part of my January evenings reading every goddamned strip I could.

And now ? Well, I’ve seen the light. I hate to even waste anybody’s time here talking up Onstad’s strip, particularly since I’m apparently one of the last people with an interest in comics and a web connection to get into it, but it truly is an incredible achievement in sequential art, serial narrative and funny-ass jokes.

It’s almost scary how fully-realized Onstad’s world is—I mean, ten of his characters have blogs that update more regularly than most comics blogs—and how realistic all of his characters are, despite the fact that they may be, for example, a cat in a thong Speedo and sunglasses, or a squirrel with a drug problem and a tiny little van.

It’s as powerful an argument as you can make for comic strips, I think, regarding the idea that spending a little bit of time on a regular basis with the fictional characters slowly, gradually increases the effectiveness of the entire endeavor. For an extreme example, think of Peanuts—some of us have been reading it our entire lives; some people have read it for fifty years. That shit all added up, to the point where Snoopy could just walk on-panel and you’d crack a smile.

And Onstad’s not working with every day things like dogs and kids, he’s working with a bunch of cats, teddy bears and robots; that is, rather than starting with the familiar and making it more and more familiar, he’s starting with the out-there and making it seem everyday.

If he quit making Achewood tomorrow, I imagine comics historians would look back on it as an astonishing achievement. If he keeps it up as long as Bill Watterson did Calvin and Hobbes or Schulz did Peanuts? My God, man. Future histories of comics are going to have a lot to say about Achewood.

Me, I’m insanely late to the party, but I don’t much mind—after all, I got to spend the last month or so reading them all at once, and it’s made for a great last month or so.

I’m only a few months rather than a few years late when it comes to reading Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (Levine Books) which is, I’m sure you’ve heard elsewhere, really, really good.

I’m not sure if it would have cracked my top ten from last year if I’d managed to read it before December 31st, but it definitely would have made it into the bigger, to-be-considered-for-best-of-the-year list. Tan did an incredible job telling the rather oft-told, classic immigrant story, using essentially the American version of the experience, albeit by inventing a bewilderingly alien culture to plunge the reader into, making the experience easily relatable to American readers, despite the fantastic nature of so much of the story.

I’m of two minds about the art. The designs of the new land our immigrant hero starts his new life in are incredible, and after reading it, I quickly started over, just following Tan’s linework, and sitting in mute amazement at the way he shaped all those little marks into such incredible images. (The pages of the giants with the vacuum guns are really haunting; check ‘em out below).



At the same time, I didn’t much care for the human characters. The expressions often seemed too much like photographs, as if they were more photo than drawing. They’re exceptional drawings, but, as a matter of personal aesthetic taste, I find drawings that look too realistic off-putting sometimes. I do see how this served the story well though, putting all of the fantasy elements in sharper relief.


On the eve of a recent Wednesday, a couple of bloggers mentioned how incredible it was that Dark Horse Comics’ reprint program of the old Little Lulu comics had reached Volume 18 already. Clearly, it’s a publishing initiative that’s working pretty damn well, and it’s high time I at least gave the comics a look.

I checked one out from my local library more out of curiosity than anything else, and I was immediately hooked, racing through all the volumes they carried (Vols. 7, 12 and 13) and then pointing my browser to the next nearest library to find more. Not only are they well-made, fun comics, they’re incredibly addictive (And at the standard manga price point of only $9.99 per volume, they’re a pretty good value, too).

John Stanley and Irving Tripp’s cartooning is incredible and, like those Essential and Showcase Presents reprint volumes, I think the black and white format really accentuates that (although, I should note, the Little Lulu collections are on higher quality paper).

While the character designs of the kids and their parents are sharp, what I really dig about the cartooning is the random adults passing through the panels, the passersby and their reactions to the outsize emotions of the kids and their often strange behavior.

And the expressions on the characters’ faces are just amazing. They all have plain old dots for eyes, but Stanely and Tripp wring an amazing amount of emotion out of them, by merely adding slanted eyebrows, just like you learned to draw mad people when you were a little kid. (Mike Sterling had a great post accentuating the kids’ angry faces recently).

The childhood that Little Lulu, Tubby and the gang share is one I have no real first-hand experience with, and I suspect neither do my parents—I’m removed from it by more than one generation, if it ever actually existed. It seems to be the same golden neighborhood childhood you see in Peanuts, Dennis the Menace and some of the old Archie comics.

And yet I still felt a tinge of nostalgia while reading it. Maybe it’s nostalgia for those other works that the Little Lulu comics reminded me of, or maybe it’s that no matter how different the specifics of their childhoods vs. my own, Stanley, Irving and company capture the essential relationships and emotions of being a little kid.

As much as I enjoyed the kids’ adventures—particularly those involving Tubby as a detective busting Lulu’s dad for some crime, real or imagined—I hate the chapters in which Lulu tells stories to little pest character Alvin. I don’t know why, exactly, as these often give Stanley and Tripp the opportunity to draw dragons, dinosaurs, giants, monsters and the like, but they bug the hell out of me, and I have a hard time getting through them. Maybe it’s the often redundant narration, or just the lack of Tubby action, but I don’t cotton to the imaginary story sequences.

Finally, I finally got around to reading Death Note Vol. 1 (Viz), fully realizing I’m, like, years behind on this multimedia juggernaut. It’s popularity alone always made me curious about it, but there always seemed to be a manga series I was more interested in, and so I just managed to not read it until a couple weeks ago.

Having done so, I’m a little surprised to hear it’s supported a dozen volumes, as the premise doesn’t immediately seem like it would lend itself to too long a series—although I suspect there’s quite a bit of growth possibility in extending the mythology involving the death gods and other character’s touching Light’s notebook.

And I can also see exactly why it’s so popular. Light is a fairly unique-ish protagonist for a manga series (or, you know, any kind of serial fiction), and the fact that it’s so hard to root for or against him (or any of the other characters in the first volume) makes it a very interesting read.

It also has a set of simple “rules” governing it, like a lot of the more popular manga/anime imports (Cardcaptor Sakura, Dragon Ball, Yu-Gi-Oh!, etc.), and is pretty damn suspenseful. By the time I finished the first volume, I was really curious about what happened next, and how the high-stake game of wits between Light and “L” turned out.

Now I think I’m going to go look into this “Watchman” book by Alan Moore and Dave something-or-other I’ve heard so much about…