Delayed Reaction: Marvel Zombies Vs. Army of Darkness

Marvel Zombies Vs. Army of Darkness (Marvel/Dynamite Entertainment), by John Layman, Fabio Neves, Fernando Blanco and Sean Phillips

Why’d I wait?: I had tried reading Dynamite’s series of Army Of Darkness series somewhat fitfully—the first mini, the first issues of the second mini and the crossover with Re-Animator, the crossover with Darkman—before coming to the conclusion that as much as I might have liked the Evil Dead trilogy, it had more to do with those movies as movies rather than stories. A large part of what makes Bruce Campbell’s character Ash so fun is seeing Campbell play him, and I quickly tired of the repetitive AoD comics.

That said, I did try the first issue of this series too, but was so turned off by the art, which has the photo-reference-y artificiality and airbrushed-looking coloring of a Greg Land comic that I just couldn’t take it. The first 22 pages of John Layman script wasn’t awful or anything, but didn’t offer me anything worth trying to suffer through that art for.


Why now?: Thinking about how much I’m turned off by this sort of art (which is all-too common at Marvel these days) while reading the Salvador Larroca illustrated Invincible Iron Man this week reminded of how turned off I was by this book, and the fact that, given the popularity of the Marvel Zombies, my local library probably had a hardcover collection of it.

And they did!

(Above: See this art style? I hate it. This isn't, like, the worst page or anything, it's just one I was able to find through a Google image search.)


Well?: Well, the art didn’t get any better since they published the first issue of this in a serial format.

Although it’s worth noting that, towards the climax, Marvel Zombies artist Sean Phillips shows up to draw a few pages, and they look so great that I didn’t understand why they didn’t just hire Phillips (or someone with a more “drawn” looking style) to illustrate the whole story.

I can sort of understand that, since they were using a character from the movies who looks exactly like Bruce Campbell in a blue shirt, they might have thought the slick, photo-like style might be appropriate (although, oddly, Ash doesn’t look much like Campbell in most of these panels), but, at the same time, those first AoD comics Dynamite were putting out had some seriously cartoony art by Nick Bradshaw, and it looked great. I would have loved to see what Bradshaw might have done with the Marvel universe.

I was able to make it through the book despite the deficiency of the art, however. As depressing as it is to put down in writing, I’ve actually gotten accustomed to reading comic scripts illustrated so poorly that I have to sort of mentally edit and re-imagine the art in my head to make some sense of them. (Thanks Ed Benes, Tony Daniel and Larocca!)

Perhaps because Robert Kirkman and Phillips used so much of the Marvel A-List in their Marvel Zombies comics, Layman got to work with some of the more interesting characters in the company’s catalogue, and it was a kick to see such unexpected characters show up in cameos (Zombie Power Pack! Zombie Runaways! Zombie Howard the Duck! Non-zombie Nextwave!) or even pivotal roles (Dazzler, in her original disco look, essentially co-stars for most of the adventure).

While the lifeless art and wax-dummy character designs spoils plenty of gags—I can only imagine Ash trussed up in Spider-Man’s webbing from the neck down trying to inch worm his way out away from a superhero argument would have been funny

under the pen of a different artist—plenty of the scenarios still get through and manage to be amusing.
(Above: What appears to be an actual drawing)

I snickered at the effects of a chainsaw on a zombie Howard, and there’s a fun scene wherein Ash and his allies interrogate the talking evil books in Dr. Strange’s library for info on the Necronomicon (all of which have Necronomicon-like evil faces). And Phillips showed up in time to draw the last few pages, a punchline ending that puts in print a lot of readers’ half-serious consideration of what might be the next “Marvel Zombies.” (Peter David is guessing Marvel Mummies and Marvel seems to be betting on Marvel Apes, but I’m telling you guys—Marvel Hobos).



The hardcover ends with a section featuring eight of Arthur Suydam’s covers for the five-issue series, each of which is a zombified version of a classic Marvel cover. I was kinda disappointed in the way they all kind of just shoe-horn Ash into them, generally just lurking around in the background rather than replacing a figure in the original covers.


Would I travel back in time to buy it off the shelf?: Nah. The art and story pretty much just cancel each other out as far as I’m concerned. As long as there wasn’t any money involved, I didn’t mind reading it, but it wasn’t anything I felt was worth paying for the privilege to have read.


Anything else? I thought it was interesting that the cover credits say “Layman, Neves, Suydam,” which says a lot about how integral Suydam is to the Marvel Zombies books, as he essentially gets co-billing with the writer and the primary artist.

Delayed Reaction: Cat Getting Out of a Bag

Cat Getting Out of a Bag and Other Observations (Chronicle Books), by Jeffrey Brown

Why’d I wait?:“Wait, $12.95 for a 100-page, hardcover book full of wordless strips about Jeffrey Brown’s cat, plus some splash-page portraits of his cat? That’s not too bad a price for a hardcover, but that just means if this were a softcover it could have been even cheaper. I’d definitely buy this for $10, but $12.95? I don’t know…”


Why now?: “Oh sweet, the library has that Jeffrey Brown cat book I never got around to buying!”


Well?: So, are you a cat person? Because the answer to that question will likely tell you everything you need to know about his book.

Personally, I’m not (Allergic, grew up with dogs and could never quite wrap my head around the litter box concept). I do, however, have friends who have cats, and I’ve spent an awful lot of time with those cats, which gave me the necessary bare minimum amount of cat familiarity I needed to enjoy the book.

The crazy-ass things your cat does, like wiggling its butt before a running pounce, or doing laps around the house for no reason, or going crazy for the plastic rings around milk jugs, or falling off a ledge after having fallen asleep on it are, it turns out, the exact same things Brown’s cat Misty does (and, I imagine, all house cats everywhere).

One of the chief joys of reading the book is seeing these things performed for your enjoyment. The bulk of the little square book are nine-panel, page-long strips involving Misty going about her strange, cat-like business. Brown and/or other characters appear and talk to each other or Misty, but we never see their faces, giving readers a cat’s eye view.

And as common as the cat-behavior is, it’s still mysterious and alien; cat concerns have almost always struck me as trivial, and yet they clearly take this stuff deadly seriously. I have a hard time relating to a lot of what cats do beyond the obvious, and at times it seems to me as if the whole species had some form of OCD.

And it’s this sort of behavior that seems to fuel some of the best strips. For example, in one,


Misty is atop a desk. She swats a pen off of it in one panel, and then, in the next, she looks at its new resting place on the floor. Then she paws at a stack of papers for a panel. Then she goes to sleep. In the next panel, here eyes snap wide open. And then she puts one paw on a piece of paper. And then she closes her eyes, the paw still resting on the piece of paper. In the final panel, she begins purring. Apparently, she had to rearrange herself and the desk just so to reach that perfect, purring state.

Brown draws a wonderfully cute, highly abstracted cat, a cartoon version of a cat obviously refined from a lot of attempts at drawing cats. The panels look like a lot of Brown’s work, but he seems to use a lot more shading and a thicker line throughout. The choreography seems a lot tighter than in his “girlfriend” books too, perhaps due to the fact that the stories he’s telling here are wholly dependent on the actions of the figures, rather than their dialogue.

The one nine-panel strip per page rhythm is broken only rarely. There are three strips on the first page that serve as an introduction, two of which feature the Brown avatar his readers are familiar with from the neck up. The other breaks come from the aforementioned full-page cat portraiture, which sees Brown working in a realistic style, pictures seemingly there just to let cynical readers who hate his style know that he can draw for real too, thank you very much.

While Brown’s working with a bigger publishing outfit than usual here (not to mention one that’s focused on publishing book-books in addition to graphic novels), the production and design don’t really vary from his Top Shelf releases. The lettering of the entire book—the cover, the about the author page, the small print on the title page—is all done in Jeffrey Brown hand-writing style, and the package has the same intimate, one-man show feel of his girlfriend books.

It struck me while reading this that it’s too bad newspapers are so rigid in their strip format these days, as a weekly or daily cat strip by Brown of this sort would no doubt kill a regular newspaper audience. The universality of the subject matter, coupled with the charming way Brown renders it and the endless well of inspiration available to him as a cartoonist (so long as he has a cat to follow around the house) make this not only Brown’s most accessible work, but also seem to indicate it could be one he could do forever and find a market for.

Truly Brown is now the reigning champ of cat-based sequential art humor. Although, to be fair, the competition isn’t exactly stiff.

You can see previews of some of the strips here.


Would I travel back in time to buy it off the shelf the week of release?: Hmm, can I take $12.95 back into the past with me to buy it with?

At the very least, I think this would make a perfect gift for my friends with the cats—in fact, this seems like a good comics evangelism type of book, so long as the recipient is a cat person—and then I could borrow it whenever I wanted to reread it.

Delayed Reaction: The Wall

The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux ), by Peter Sís


Why’d I wait?: I wasn’t even aware of this book’s existence when it was released last August.

Why now?: I saw it on that Young Adult Library Services Association list that I apparently can’t shut up about, which made me curious. I see it was also mentioned more recently as a Caldecott Honor book. I’m not exactly sure what that means—is it like, a runner-up?—but I’m pretty sure it’s a pretty desirable honor.


Well?: This is a rather difficult book to talk about critically, for a couple of reasons.

First, its form is highly unusual, in the “Is this a graphic novel or not?” kind of way. I know I, and many, many people far, far smarter than I have talked about the inadequacy of the term “graphic novel,” and this is an instance in which it really doesn’t seem quite right. In The Wall’s dimensions, it really seems more like a children’s picture book, all that it is much more complex than a lot of picture books. But it’s only 56 pages long—can you really consider it a novel of any kind, graphic or otherwise?

Additionally, there are several different types of narrative going on, with the words and the pictures not quite interacting the way they normally do in what we consider comics or graphic novels. On a few occasions, the pictures completely give way to text of a sort.

So I don’t know; maybe it’s a hybrid graphic mini-memoir?

This brings me to the second part of what makes it difficult to talk about. I don’t think it is a very good comic. Or, if it’s not comics, I don’t think it’s a particularly good picture book for older kids, or whatever you want to call it.

And by “not very good,” I simply mean it doesn’t seem to work on every page. Yet it is a beautiful book—well designed, imaginatively drawn—and I learned a lot from it. Which is what makes it kind of difficult to criticize—I really liked it, but I didn’t think it was very good, if that makes any sense at all.

Here, let me show you what I’m talking about:


This is a typical page of the book. There’s a grid full of panels, and the flow sequentially into one another—if you removed all the words, these images would still tell a somewhat vague but linear and legible story all by themselves. However, there’s prose along the bottom of the page, a phrase or sentence per page. Meanwhile, another thread of verbal information can be read top to bottom on either side of the panels. All in all then, there are at least three different sources of information, each to be read in a different direction and different manner. And keep in mind this is just one page; if the book were actually open in front of you, this would be the page on the right-hand side, on the left hand side would be a page laid out the exact same, with the second half of the sentence beginning at the bottom of this page over there.

It makes for a rather unusual, and sometimes kind of frustrating read.

These would occasionally give way to two-page spreads, of single images (“splash pages” in the funnybook vernacular, I guess), and other spreads that are nothing but prose (with smaller images framing them).

These are marked “From my journals,” and will list particular years, with a sentence or four about what was going on in Sís’ life and in his country at the time.

And it’s a hell of a life’s story. Sís was born in Czechoslovakia during and grew up through the Cold War; his life’s story roughly coincides with the story of the Eastern Europe’s time behind the Iron Curtain.

The writing is elegantly simple; Sís talks directly to the reader as if they’ve never heard of the Cold War—and I imagine some of them haven’t—but he never seems to be talking down to his audience. It’s a kids’ book that doesn’t insult one’s intelligence, and considering some of the very difficult topics he covers, that’s quite an achievement.

It’s a great example of the universality of the personal, as this is essentially his own story, and his struggles with his interest in art, something that was more often than not at odds with Soviet rule.

I can’t really say anything about the art that you can’t see for yourself by clicking on the image above. Sís’ designs are lovely, and rather simple, although the number of lines and complex shading and image constructions he embeds them in are bewilderingly sophisticated.

There’s a base palette of airy black and white, punctuated with a lot of Soviet and communist red, with other colors standing in for the world beyond the state’s control. In the image above, for example, not the yellow and blues in little Sís’ drawings, and how it stands out on the rest of the page.

Here’s a detail from one of the splash pages, this one focusing on the Prague Spring of 1968, when Western cultural influences were pouring into the country, which was heavily flirting with opening up—at least until Soviet tanks rolled in.


That little square is about two-thirds of half of the image (the splashes are way too big for the scanner); note the little black and white Sís running joyfully through the color landscape.

Here’s half of a spread which is one of the more comic book-y sequences. Across the bottom of the pages are the word, “Everyone wanted to draw. They painted a wall filled with their dreams…and repainted it again and again.”



The images are two columns of stacks of five panels, in which the Czech youth surreptitiously paint a wall, the pig-nosed Communist police paint it white, and the kids re-paint it.

While those confusingly arranged pages, the splashes and the journal entries account for most of the page count, there are several other pages that break that pattern, often quite beautiful images, like a map of the city accommodating Soviet tanks, or the spirit of ’68 winding in a huge spiral, and, at the end, a huge brick wall being chiseled away by tiny little figures with pickaxes and flags, symbolizing the end of the Cold War.

It’s a really lovely book; even the cover design, which makes it look like Sís personally made the thing out of corrugated cardboard and string, and hand-drew the title and cover image right on it.

The only way it could be a cooler design would be if he actually did hand-make every copy of this book in exactly that manner.



Would I travel back in time to buy it off the shelf the week of release?: Nah. It’s a great book to read and/or look at, but it’s not one that I feel a need to own. I don’t know that I can recommend everybody run out and buy a copy of their own a $18 a pop, particularly given the occasionally over-complicated and counter-intuitive storytelling on so many of the pages, but it’s definitely worth borrowing form the library.



Anything else?: Yeah, I was amused to see one of the characters who appeared in the first two-page spread. The image was of a young black-and-white Sís in his red Young Pioneers kerchief walking down the street, with a gigantic thought cloud representing his imagination looming above him. Within it is a giant figure of Stalin emerging from a Kremlin, with Lenin, Khruschev and Brezhnez before him. Flying through the sky are planes and missiles, a rocket labeled “Gagarin” and, of course:


Man, between this and Nick Abadzis’ Laika, 2007 was a great year for the first earthling in space, huh?

Sís mentions the heroic canine cosmonaut twice in the first of his journal entry spreads, as well:



Aw, isn't that just darling?

Delayed Reaction: Cairo

Cairo (DC/Vertigo), by G. Willow Wilson and M. K. Peter

Why’d I wait?: Trying to look at things from the publisher’s perspective, I think the original graphic novel format makes a lot of sense for Vertigo to explore, and possibly even become their main focus within the next few years.

From the perspective of a reader, however, they often times make for less attractive purchases. And when I say “reader,” I mean a Vertigo reader in the original sense—someone who’s been reading their books before the line congealed into a formalized imprint, when the graphic novel revolution had not yet arrived; someone who still goes to the comic shop weekly to pick up the 22-page, stapled comics.

This book in particular didn’t boast the strong hook of name creators, “I must own that!” art or a huge promotional push in the way that other recent Vertigo OGNs have. (Think Sloth, Can’t Get No, Pride of Baghdad, Sentences or Silverfish, for example).

Writer G. Willow Wilson was still a pretty much unknown quantity, her only prior published comics credit being Outsiders: Five of a Kind—Metamorpho/Aquaman #1 (which I rather liked). The fact that she was female, Muslim, 26 and a journalist all piqued my curiosity (Simply put, those aren’t the sort of vital stats one usually sees on Vertigo writers, let alone DC fifth week event writers), but she was a writer I was more, say, $2.99 interested in hearing from, rather than $24.99 interested in hearing from.

The artist is M. K. Perker, an artist and illustrator I’ve never read or even seen anything by. The cover image he provides is rather striking, but a quick flip through didn’t suck me in the way, say, Niko Henrichon’s lush Pride of Baghdad art would have.

Finally, the book seemed to lack the sort of buzz that demanded it be read as soon as possible. Doing a very quick and very lazy search, I see that quite a few bloggers and online commentators have mentioned it, but it never seemed to reach the sort of critical mass that other original graphic novels have, not even among the feminist super-comics fan portion of the blogosphere, who would naturally seem predisposed to championing the work of a young female writer capable of telling good super-comics featuring the likes of Rex Mason and Aquaman II (Gail Simone can’t write every comic her fans want her to, after all).

Oh, and also, I’m both poor and cheap. So why spend $25 on a literary graphic novel, the sort that my local libraries usually order?



Why now?: Because if finally showed up at my local library.

That, and the online chatter regarding the future of format, particularly in regard to Vertigo’s low-selling monthly pamphlets vs. their long-lived trade collection, moved this Vertigo OGN way up my “to read” list.



Well?: At the risk of oversimplifying my reaction after such a long, rambling answer to the first question in this “Delayed Reaction” format, I liked it.

I really liked it.

The art is rather unusual, to the extent it took me some getting used to. Perker’s story-telling chops are fairly well developed, and there were only two instances in the entire 160 pages where it got a bit muddy.

I dug his style, which at first struck me as rather amateurish. I’m not quite able to articulate it, but it evoked self-published work to me. Not that it wasn’t polished at all; it may be nothing more than the fact that the style he employs is similar to that of a lot of self-published artists I’ve seen selling minicomics at cons.

The character designs are quite distinct though, and he does a beautiful job on the places they occupy. The architecture, the street scenes, the vehicles and backgrounds—it’s all quite accomplished.


I can’t discuss his strongest points without getting into plot specifics, but suffice it to say he does a great jinn, a very distinct but incredibly cool-looking devil (it’s the insect liked crouched posture and scuttling that gets me) and a really neat scene where the hero grabs the sword (You’ll know what I’m talking about when you read it).

The art is also all black and white, which is an interesting choice. It carries the mood of the one-color cover throughout the entire story, and the interior art is shaded to the extent one doesn’t really miss the color, but now, thinking back, I wonder if it really was the best way to serve the story.

It does reduce the need for special effects sort of art. There are many points where the mundane and the magical cross paths in this story, and what of its greatest attributes is the rather matter-of-fact way it happens. If a jinn transforms from human shape to a more abstract, gaseous shape in a color comic, it adds a dimension to the act, a dimension that here isn’t necessary.

One of my favorite aspects of the book is that the characters can just turn a corner and find a demon, or that a reader can turn a page and see two characters in flight on a magic carpet all of a sudden.

The story features a small ensemble cast of a half-dozen or so protagonist who all share an antagonist, their paths criss-crossing until six plots become three plots which ultimately become one.

There’s Ashraf, an Egyptian drug smuggler and all-around rogue; Kate, a young American woman from California traveling to the city to escape her own, Shaheed, a Lebanese-American coming to the Middle East to do something few Americans feel the need to have to do; Tova, a wounded Israeli soldier who finds herself smuggled into the city; Ali, a Morroccan newspaper reporter and columnist in love with Ashraf’s sister; and Shams, a jinn bound to a hookah that’s changed hands between a few of the characters, and who is charged with protecting a box containing the word “East” from a wicked and powerful gangster/magician.

It’s a fairly big cast and complicated plot, but Wilson juggles it all rather deftly, mixing elements of Middle East culture and mythology in such an incredibly naturally way that they never seem the least bit affected. (And any story involving devils, demons, genies and magic swords is going to lean very hard in the opposite directon of “natural”).

It’s not a perfect story, and there’s a panel or two near the climax where things get a little too goofy in terms of the Hollywood coalition of demographic stereotypes marching off together to do battle, but it’s a very well-crafted and, more important, enormously entertaining one.



Would I travel back in time to buy it off the shelf?: If I had $25 to blow, sure. I wouldn’t mind having this on my shelf at all, both to loan out to friends or occasionally reread.

I also kind of wish I had read it back in November so I could have done my part to talk it up, as Willow and Perker are both exciting talents with bright futures in the field, and I think this is a book that should naturally appeal to Vertigo’s traditional, 1990’s fan base in a way relatively few of their newer books do.



One more thing: If you’re interested in Cairo, my “Best Shots” colleague Michael C. Lorah interviewed Wilson last summer for Newsarama. You can read it here.

Delayed Reaction: Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born

Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born (Marvel Comics), by Peter David, Robin Furth, Jae Lee and Richard Isanove

Why’d I wait?: It was with some trepidation that I read the first issue of the seven-part series. Marvel’s relentless hyping of the book was a huge turn-off, but it was the sort of case where the publisher saying it was an event so often and so loud genuinely made it an event, and as a critic I felt I needed to check it out for myself.

Despite having no previous experience with the series of novels it’s based on, or any great affection for the work of the artist or the writer (at least, not when he’s in paycheck mode), and despite being sick of hearing about Marvel’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series long before I even cracked the cover, the first issue was pretty enjoyable.

It just wasn’t anything I felt I need to drop a couple bucks on every month, and so I stopped at #1.



Why now?: I recently saw it on a Best of 2007 list from a fairly reputable source, and was surprised to see it there, given the solid-but-unremarkable nature of the issue I’d read (And the complete silence of the comics press and blogosphere on the book).

Of course, now I can’t remember whose list it was, or where I saw the link to the list. So maybe there was no list; maybe it was all a dream.

Anyway, I began to wonder if it was actually great after all, and my local library had a copy of the hardcover, so I was able to read the whole series with zero financial risk.



Well?: Well, it’s not that great, and, despite the obviously high production value and extra care taken in it’s presentation, as a graphic novel, it’s not even a very good one.

But before I get into the story part of the book, I did want to say a few things about the overall package, which is a pretty nice one, especially by Marvel standards. Things that will probably drive this post way off topic, so bear with me (and/or just skim until you hit something that interests you).

Marvel has always been pretty terrible at graphic novel design, and if you’ve ever encountered their books in a big box bookstore, you’ll know exactly what I mean. A shelf or six full of Marvel books, shelved spine out, look almost identical—it’s a wall of black, with the identical Marvel logo and the title of the book on the spine, completely uniform, no matter what the book is or what the format is.

There’s some variation—glossier hardcovers will have gold lettering as opposed to the trade paperbacks’ red and white Marvel logo and individual title logos—but they all bleed together, with nothing jumping out. (The only exceptions are the digests, which are more colorful and often shelved with the manga, and the Essentials, which have a spine fat enough to accommodate a clearer presentation of the books’ logo, although they’re also always black).

Compared to the DC/Vertigo/WildStorm books, in which many series have their own trade dress and design, or the Fantagraphics and Drawn + Quarterly and AdHouse books, in which great care has been put into ensuring that the books look good from all angles, or especially the manga, which is a veritable candy-colored rainbow of eye-grabbing design, Marvel graphic novels look like small press text books for an economic class you have to take if you want to graduate.

Nothing particularly flashy is done on the spine of this trade—other than leading off the title with a bigger “Stephen King’s,” which may actually be all it needs to fly out of bookstores—but the overall package is a nice one.

The cover has the words “The Dark Tower” super-imposed over a much bigger “Stephen King,” which makes his name clearly visible, but without comically eclipsing the title of the actual books (as in Brad Meltzer’s first Justice League trade or Jodi Picoult’s Wonder Woman trade, for example. (Also, if you didn’t really scrutinize the fine print, you might even think King actually wrote the book, instead of serving as its “Creative Director and Executive Director,” as the credits page says).

Inside is a one-page introduction from Ralph Macchio, and an afterword by King, plus a brief How-I-Made-This-Comic-Look-So-Shitty section by Richard Isanove, and 24 pages of covers and variant covers, seemingly by every artist in Marvel’s employ: Joe Quesada, David Finch, Stuart Immonen, Leinil Francis Yu, John Romita Jr., Steve McNiven, Billy Tan, Olivier Coipel, Greg Land and J. Scott Campbell all contribute what amount to cowboy pin-ups.

All the extra material, particularly the text pieces, reminded me of the good old days of Marvel and DC trade paperbacks, when the graphic novel market was barely in existence (back when Watchmen, Maus, The Dark Knight Returns were the only things you were guaranteed to find in a bookstore; anything else was just gravy).

I’m old enough to remember when Marvel and DC generally only published trades of books that were so popular that there was no way for new readers to find the comic books themselves anymore, and that the trades existed to meet exceptional demand, and/or keep stories in print that were important in some way, stories that new direct market customers would want to read throughout the next several years, and “civilians” might pick up if they saw it in a bookstore or library.

In a way, that’s how you could tell a book was good. Sandman must be a much better series than Shade, The Changing Man or Doom Patrol, because it was in trade. Batman: A Death in The Family and A Lonely Place of Dying must be more important Batman stories than, say, Batman: Blind Justice or Batman: Year Three, because DC put the former out in a trade but not the latter.

These trades were treated as special occasions, and usually had introductions by name writers in other fields, or even other prominent comics writers, telling you how awesome they were in the beginning.

Now, introductions seem rare to the point of non-existent, and trades have lost that sense of the special. In fact, DC and Marvel seem to publish everything in trade now, without much thought for what audience might exist for it. (Teen Titans: Titans East is a trade, for example, and I was genuine surprised DC printed that once as a monthly comic book, let alone again as a book-book. Paul Dini’s Detecive Comics run is being collected along with non-Dini fill-in stories that were only solicited and published the first time to fill gaps in the monthly book’s schedule, not because they had anything to do with Dini’s story). For some reason, often time The Big Two seem to print their trades, like their comic books, for direct market readers who prefer that format, rather than for a wider audience.

So even if I wasn’t aware of all the relentless hype The Dark Tower received prior to the first issue’s release, if I was a customer flipping through this in a book store, it would certainly seem like it was a special occasion, compared to all the other Marvel and DC graphic novels on the nearby shelves.

What’s that?

Oh yeah, I used the word “shitty” to describe the way the book looks a few paragraphs back, didn’t I? Okay, that was pretty crass, and maybe a little mean-spirited, but this is not a very well put together comic book story, something which is even more remarkable when you consider the amount of effort that went into it.

The weaknesses in Jae Lee and Isanove’s art, and their failure to compliment or even match up with Peter David’s script throughout the story, isn’t quite the same as Ed Benes not being able to draw a single background in 22 pages or refrain from drawing a woman’s mostly-bare ass every six panels or so in Justice League of America; it’s not even Steve McNiven not drawing an actual big fight in the climax of Civil War, a story Marvel geared a majority of its comics line around.

This is worse. This is Marvel hyping a book like it was the second coming, this is Marvel garnering almost Death of Captain America non-comics-press attention (at the outset, anyway), this is comic shops opening at midnight to sell the first issue of a comic book!

Now, who actually does what on this book is a little mysterious, as the credits are so weird. What was King’s contribution, beyond the source material? I don’t know. There’s no “based on” credit for King, just the cryptic “Creative Director and Executive Director.” Robin Furth is credited for “Plotting and Consultation.” Third down the line with “Script” is Peter David.

I’ve no complaints on the story side of things really. I’m not a real fan of narration in comics in general, as it’s almost always unnecessary, but the narrator’s voice here is an interesting one—folksy and friendly and conspiratorial, it feels like the story is being told to you by an older relative, or someone sitting on a log across the campfire from you. I’m assuming the voice comes from the novels, as it’s peppered with the same slang that fuels the rest of the dialogue.

The names of places, charachters and conflicts are flung around with little to no introduction, and I felt a bit like I did watching a not very well-made sci-fi movie like, say, Chronicles of Riddick or Phantom Menace, where the characters seem to know a lot more than I do about everything, and I feel like I should know what they’re talking about.

While this happens as much in the seventh issue as in the first, it’s actually kind of almost a sort of pleasure, as I felt my way toward familiarity. I had no understanding of the setting in the first few issues—and kind of wished there was a recap page like in most Marvel comics—but by the end, I began to feel my way toward understanding. Is this in some post-apocalyptic future, I take it?

Part of my wrestling with the setting came down to Lee and Isanove’s art, as there is precious little in terms of addressing the setting. The book is almost devoid of establishing shots, a pretty basic tool in the comic book (or film…or TV) toolbox. It’s especially important in a book like this, set in a time or world not our own.

Lee’s panels are all pretty sparse, and I never really got a sense of where anything was taking place, or what if anything differentiated Roland’s home town from the city to the east he spends most of the adventure in, or the wilderness around it, or the trails between them. Likewise, the interiors all looked the same, be they hut or witch’s house or mayor’s house, rough roadside bar or classy inn, Roland’s mom’s bedroom or hell itself.

The result was a little like watching a stage play, with much of the setting left to the imagination of the reader. That approach may not always be wrong for comics, but I think it usually is—one great and oft-cited advantage of comics over film, for example, is the ease with which the set is built. A Dark Tower movie would have had to build all these locales, scouted landscapes and sent helicopters with cameras into the air to capture them, while Lee could have delineated them with pencil and ink, if he so chose.

Compounding the problem is Lee’s relatively weak sequential storytelling abilities. I don’t know if it’s peculiar to this project, which likely had more cooks in the kitchen and higher production demands than some of his past work (fewer folks had to vet his Fantastic Four: 1, 2, 3, 4 or G. I. Joe/Transformers crossover, I’m sure), but Lee chooses extremely close shots of his characters in every scene, with long shots being few and far between. All are horizontal, perhaps going for a cinematic feel, and closely cropped, cutting out backgrounds and other characters.

It’s a bit like watching a movie composed completely of close-ups—when new characters enter a scene, it’s disorienting, because you’ve no idea who else is in the room or how many of them there are (There are a few times where this is particularly noticeable, as when our three young heroes attack a supposedly vastly superior force, and we see no more than two or three of their foes at a time, or when they supposedly face 200 men, and we see no more than ten or tenty).

While great comic book art will tell a story, even a large part of the story, through the imagery alone, Lee’s art makes no sense without the words, and in a lot of cases makes little sense with the words, or even seems to contradict them in little ways here and there.

Many of the panels seem like the covers of comic books or prog rock albums or cheap mass market paperback novels, but they don’t flow into one another very well, or at all. They’re highly posed, and don’t reflect the passage of time in the same way that the dialogue does.

In other words, it’s really beautiful looking terrible comic book art, if that makes sense.

Maybe it's easier to show some weak bits rather than simply describe them.


In the above section, the middle panel states that the two characters kiss. In that panel, however, they seem like they're about to kiss, or, perhaps, have just finished kissing. But in neither the preceding or following panel do they kiss. Lee apparently chose to draw around the significant event of the page, which the narration explicitly points out.



What happened to the dude on the right's horse's head? Or did he dismount, run over, jump up and punch the other dude? And given how much time it would take him to clear the distance between them, on his own horse or off, why was the other dude still caught off guard?



According to the character, he's holding a "long" knife, which appears to be about the size of his thumb in that panel. We don't see any other images of the knife in the scene to indicate it is, indeed, a long knife.




The script makes clear within the next few pages what just happened, but it's impossible to tell from the part of the comic in which the event acutally occurs. Does that dude say "No, Dave?" because Dave is crumpling from an unseen, unheard blow from the person in the hat and coat? Or does he say "No, Dave" to keep Dave from maybe attacking that person?



What Isanove does to the art exactly isn’t entirely clear. Instead of being listed as colorist, he’s credit under “art” with Lee, and this seems in large part due to the degree of his contribution. Is he digitally inking Lee’s pencils? Trying to interpret the four-page “The Painted Process” segment at the end, that seems to be the case.

In eight steps, that feature demonstrates how Isanove constructed the first two-page spread on pages three and four from Lee’s “line art.” He starts with a photograph, tweaks it, adds Lee’s art, tweaks that, and keeps tweaking aspects until he gets to the finished product. That finished product is simply the grown-up Gunslinger posing on a rock, with a vulture flying nearby. It’s apparently dawn or sunset, as the sky seems aflame. It’s not a bad piece of art, but it’s damaging to the book as a whole, since almost every image is so luxuriously covered.

In that opening shot, for example, the sky seems to be aflame. In the book’s second-to-last panel, also a two-page spread, a character is burned to death at the stake, I think. The background looks identical to the original one, though, and the only reason I think the character is on fire is because the words mention her hair and clothes being in flames, which is not the case in the art itself.

Clearly a ton of work went into putting this book together, and it’s really a shame that so much work must be done in the eye and the mind of the reader to make sense of it.



Would I travel back in time to buy it off the shelf?: No, this is actually a much better package to enjoy the story in than the monthly installments would have been. Each of the seven issues is structured so that there’s a cliffhanger at the ending, and an awful lot occurs in each issue, so I imagine it would have read just fine in monthly installments. But this version is free of all those super-irritating ads Marvel runs for Spider-Man fishing poles and Wolverine candy action figures or whatever, and includes what appears to be every single version of the one million variant covers.

I don’t know if this is the case or not, but it seems to me that variant covers encourage waiting-for-the-trade purchasing in direct market customers. I’m sure there must be a segment of the consumers who do actually speculate on variants or collect them (or at least, retailers speculate that such a segment exists, and thus buy enough copies to justify publishers continuing and increasing variant cover publishing), but to the rest of us whose only interest in variants might be seeing different artists draw the covers, it certainly makes more sense to wait for a trade which is more likely to have all the variants.

Take the Marvel Zombies series for example; the fresh variant covers on each new printing was a large factor in each issue selling out. But why re-buy each new printing for a new cover, if you can just wait a few months and get them all at once in the trade?

Anyway, this is hardly a must-own graphic novel for me, and I don’t think it’s a must-own for anyone who’s not a Dark Tower fan already, but, in retrospect, if I were going to have bought the series, I’d prefer to have the graphic novel, where I can at least get a neat John Romita Jr. pin-up of the Gunslinger in the back, without having to pay extra for it.

Delayed Reaction: De: Tales

De: Tales (Dark Horse Comics), by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba*

Why’d I wait?: I actually bought a copy of it when it was first released, but as a birthday gift for a friend who speaks Portuguese and had taken a few trips to Brazil to visit his friend, who happened to be a twin (like the creators of this book). But I didn’t buy a copy for myself (or read the gift copy, before or after giving it to my friend).

Why not? I don’t know, exactly.

I remember being really drawn to the cover in the shop (I like drawings of telephone poles and wires), and the nature of the art when flipping through, as it had a Paul Pope-like (Paul Papal?) vibe to it. But I’d never heard of the creators or anything about the book before, and I remember finding the title annoying. Was it a Portuguese thing? Or a lame-ass play on words, of the sort College-Aged Caleb might have made in a bad poem and thought was really clever?

Whatever the reason, I didn’t buy it at the time, and hadn’t thought much of it again until more recently.



Why now?: Having read and immensely enjoyed the first issue of the Ba-drawn The Umbrella Academy, I was eager to read more from him. The fact that De: Tales is co-created with his brother Fabio Moon, whose Casanova work with Matt Fraction has received pretty much unanimous praise online, sealed the deal.



Well?: This book contains a dozen short stories, some by one brother, some by the other, some by both of them in various capacities, and, after reading, I went back through and took great pleasure in trying to untangle who did what in the stories without credits, trying to find differences and distinguishing characteristics in the art styles and writing styles of the pair. It’s actually a lot harder than I thought it would be, especially considering they make it easier by both drawing the exact same five-page story, presented back-to-back, accentuating the little differences in their rendering and staging.

All but one seem to be set in Brazil (one is set in Paris), and each seem to feature the brothers themselves in some capacity. The Parisian adventure is presented as autobiography, and the young, male protagonists in the other stories (who are sometimes artists), bear striking resemblances to the characters in the Paris story.

Not that the book is straightforward autobio. The vignettes within may be inspired by real stories and the characters based on real people, but Ba and Moon take interesting little twists in several, a dollop of fantasy on top of the slice-of-life stuff that, ironically, makes them feel more real.

For example, in “Happy Birthday, My Friend!”, a group of young men summon their dead friend back to life for his birthday, and take him out to a bar for a night of drinking, the act of magic that got the story rolling adding deepening the emotions in the smallest gestures and most innocuous dialogue shared with the visiting friend.

In “Reflections,” the story both artists draw back to back, a young man meets a girl in a club, and retires to the bathroom to take a piss, and meets different versions of himself from different times that very same evening.

My two favorite stories are probably “Late For Coffee,” a 24-page story in which a shaggy-haired young man meets a young girl and they share an impromptu date, full of lots of dramatic, silent pauses and meaningful looks, and “Outras Palavras,” a completely wordless story which draws a simple, romantic parallelism between two characters, which gets so much mileage out of the male character’s smile on the last page it’s unbelievable how much story power Moon packs into a simple series of images.

Most of the tales deal with romance on some level, and all have a lived-in, comfortable feel to them. Whoever’s drawing whichever story, they all boast a stark black and white color scheme, with no shading or grays, giving all the panels a lot of visual punch and accentuating the fact that they’re drawings, rather than trying to fool the eye into thinking it’s looking at real life (if that makes sense).


Would I travel back in time to the Wednesday of release and buy a copy for myself off the shelf?: I think so, if only to have gotten on the Moon/Ba bandwagon a little earlier, and thus not have slept on Casanova.

For more of their work, check out their website, 10paezinhos.com.br. You can read most of the first story in the collection here. (Note: I think that first story, despite it’s fun ending, which you can’t read on the site, is probably the weakest in the volume, so, if you hate it, don’t judge the rest of the book on it).



*The “a” in “Fabio” and the “a” in “Ba” have accents over them, but I can’t figure out how to make them. So I guess I’ve misspelled the artists’ names throughout this entire post. Sorry about that.

Delayed Reaction: Dogs and Water

Dogs and Water (Drawn and Quarterly), by Anders Nilsen

Why’d I wait?: You know, I’m not sure if this ever showed up in my shop or not, so I’m not positive I purposely chose not to buy it upon release. Amazon says it was an August release, and publisher Drawn and Quarterly lists it as a July release on their website, but I don’t recall seeing it in my local comic store over the summer, perhaps because they didn’t get it or perhaps because I wasn’t looking for it. I’d heard the title mentioned in connection to Nilsen’s name before, but didn’t know it came out already.



Why now?: Because I saw it at my local library, remembered how much I enjoyed the last Nilsen book I borrowed from there and, come on, who can resist that intriguing cover? I love the mysterious story it suggests, to the point where I immediately want to know what the hell is going on between this figure and this dog with the gun, yet at the same time kind of like just wondering about it and not knowing.

I should also point out that the book design itself is quite lovely. The book’s on the short side, about a hundred pages, but the pages are wider than your typical trade paperback, and it’s got a hard cover and spine that remind me a bit of old elementary school text books.



Well?: The very thing I found most off-putting about the book—and as I was reading, I didn’t much care for those first few pages—rather quickly became something I admired about it.

The style in which Nilsen tells this story is rather idiosyncratic, and though it reads like a comic book, it doesn’t look much like one, so immediately the reader is pushed off balance with that little surprise.

See, there are no panels in it. The images all appear as if there were, but there are no borders and gutters, no rectangles framing each image. The images simply sit upon the page, arranged more or less as if there were panels, but someone had come and taken them away. (For a sense of what I’m talking about, you can see some preview pages here and here).

Now I know Nilsen isn’t the first person in the world to use this sort of technique, but generally when you open a graphic novel, you expect to see some grids on the page, so any time you don’t, it can be a little surprising.

The lack of borders also draws attention to the setting, making the desolate, flat, nameless land seem like it goes on forever in every direction, which, as far as we can tell from the story or what we learn from the protagonist, it does.

There’s also a level of intimacy engendered by Nilsen’s panel-less pages, and the somewhat abstract black and white art. While reading it, there were a few times I got the feeling that it wasn’t even run through a printing press or anything, but that it was just a big sketchbook that Nilsen had hand-drawn and stuck on a shelf in my library.

That particular illusion is broken up during night scenes, in which (one) color is added to make things darker, and dream sequences, in which the colore of the ink lines change from black to blues or silvers or grays.

As for the story, we follow a young person backpacking along a highway in the middle of nowhere, talking to the teddy bear he has tied to his pack. The setting is purposely indistinct, but there’s a haunting post-apocalyptic vibe to it—it’s clear that people are now extremely few and far between, animal life is much more common than it is now, and cars are extreme rarities.

While our protagonist marches through this tableau, he encounters a small group of deer, he’s pursued by a pack of dogs with a somewhat unexpected agenda and eventually comes across signs of human civilization that evokes the modern Middle East (there’s some rubble that used to be buildings, a pipeline, soldiers, a downed helicopter and a little kid with an assault rifle).

Everything that isn’t explained only deepens the import and impact of everything that is, making Dogs and Water’s minimalism seem quite eloquent.



Would I Travel Back in Time to Buy it Off the Shelf?: I don’t know. It’s definitely a great read, but even knowing that ahead a time, I don’t know if I would have wanted to fork over $19.99 for such a quick experience, no matter how nice it would look on my bookshelf (That said, it’s a book that likely rewards multiple readings).

If your library has a copy, or take requests on what to order from patrons, definitely give it a look. And if you’re at least $19.99 richer than me, go ahead and buy it, I guess.

Delayed Reaction: Schulz's Youth

Schulz’s Youth (About Comics), by Charles M. Schulz

Why’d I wait?: Thanks to Fantagraphics ambitious Peanuts reprint program, I’m already spending an awful lot of money on Schulz cartoons a year now, and I have to draw the line somewhere.

Why now? Because you can read books from the library for free, and the local library I frequent just acquired this June publication.

Well?: I found this book to be something of a revelation, if not the source of an an out-and-out freak out. Because my previous experience with Charles Schulz’s work is restricted solely to his Peanuts strips and their various animated and advertising incarnations, which so closely followed his design and rendering style, to see Schulz drawing something—anything, really—other than Charlie Brown and company was…different. Even wrong. And I imagine that this will be true for a lot of readers too.

See, the world of Schulz’s Peanuts is such a particular, peculiar place, with such rigid rules enforced, that it’s unsettling, even somewhat scary to see those rules seemingly broken.

Schulz’s Youth collects his Young Pillars cartoons from The Church of God’s youth publication, Youth, which he created between the mid-fifties and mid-sixties. This is Schulz drawing teenagers and teenagers are, obviously, all over three feet tall, so I went in expecting things I’d never seen before. But it’s not just teens Schulz draws in Young Pillars. Oh no. Schulz draws their parents, pastors and sundry other adults too.

That’s right, Schulz drawing grown-ups. Feel free to join me in freaking out.

Ready?

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

The weird thing about the sight of Schulz-drawn grown-ups, aside from the fact that they’re, you know, Schulz-drawn grown-ups, is just how natural and, well, Schulz-esque these grown-ups look. Clearly, if we ever saw Charlie and Sally Brown’s or Linus and Lucy van Pelt’s parents, they’d look just like this. And yet, we never did. The adults’ absence from Peanuts was a defining characteristic of the strip (and, to a lesser extent, the cartoons, which featured adults’ vocal presence—even if only as the wa-wa-wa-wah-ing, saxophoney sounds).

So, in a sense, this book reveals to us something we’ve never seen and which maybe we shouldn’t be seeing, and is thus pervaded by a feeling of wrong-ness.

(Almost as disturbing are the instance in which the teens have faces and hairstyles that look familiar from Peanuts; more than once I seemed to spot grown-up, teenaged bodies with the heads of Marcy, Lucy or Peppermint Patty atop of them).

These are also all one-panel gags, which Schulz apparently has some experience with, according to the supplementary material (there are also some illustrations and other old, non-Peanuts work included), but which are obviously quite alien to his best-known work. And yet, these one-panel cartoons still read like that work. Here, each panel is like the last panel of a Peanuts strip.

You know what else seems alien and wrong? Leveling anything other than effusive praise at Schulz, but I have to confess, most of these cartoons aren’t really all that funny. They’re religious, and not even Peanuts-religious (which, when it would strike a religious note, would be one that kept the general nature of the audience in mind, and would thus tend towards a vague Christian humanism instead of particular point-of-view that could easily be assigned to, say, a particular denomination or way of thinking).

The audience for these strips were obviously already ready fairly religious, so although there’s no real preaching or proseletyzing in them, they certainly take for granted the Christianity of the audience. This can make the topics for so many of the cartoons seem kind of obscure, and footnotes are needed to explain a couple of the jokes. (Even after 17 years of Catholic education, there were a few Bible references I didn’t get at all).

But more than the religiousness of the characters and the messages, it was the culture that seemed hard to relate to. Christian youth groups, youth picnics, teenagers working hard to be lead religious lives—it’s a culture that is so far out of my frame of reference that the gags rarely let me in, and I always seemed to be looking at them from no closer than arm’s length (And, like I said, I grew up in a series of religious schools).

With all that said, it’s still a rather pleasant read, and Schulz’s line work is just lovely here as it is in Peanuts (as freaky as it may be to see him drawing things other than the same characters and settings, it’s also kind of refreshing to see a great artist flex his skills on something new…new to us, anyway).

Honestly there were a couple of times I just stopped reading to trace characters’ heads with my index figure, just to see how Schulz have moved his pen over the paper to create these characters.

The teen characters who fill up the books—while adults appear, they do so only occasionally—are all long and lanky figures, almost giraffe-like in their proportions. It’s a wonderful evocation of that particular age, when kids have overnight growth spurts, their limbs grow gangly, and they seem to tower over the rest of the world.

These may not be Sculz’s best cartoons, but they’re beautifully drawn and, let’s face it, even the very worst work of a master is worth a look.

Would I travel back in time to buy it off the shelf?: No. As interesting as Schulz’s Youth is, it’s not really an essential read. Definitely something to borrow from the library or read in the book store though, and to consider adding to your own collection after Fantagraphics has finished publishing Peanuts.

Delayed Reaction: Mister i

Mister i (NBM), by Lewis Trondheim

Why’d I wait?: I didn’t even know this book existed. According to the not 100% reliable (particularly where comics are concerned) Amazon.com, this book came out in January of this year, but I don’t remember seeing anything about it anywhere, nor do I recall seeing it on the shelves of my local comic book shop. So, clearly, NBM needs to do a better job of letting me know when they’ve got great books coming out. Or I need to do a better job of paying attention to what’s being released. Or maybe we can meet somewhere in the middle. Whatttaya say, NBM?

Why Now:? I saw it on the shelf at one of my local libraries, and recognized the name “Lewis Trondheim” on the spine as that guy who does all those great comics with Joan Sfar that First Second has been importing (though not fast enough for my liking; I’d like a new Dungeon gn once a week, if possible).

Well?: This is apparently a sequel of sorts to another Trondheim book published by NBM which I’ve never heard of, Mister O.

Mister O’s protagonist is a little pink “O” shape with stick figure arms and legs, two dots for eyes, and a line for a mouth. I’m assuming he’s named for his shape, just as Mister i is named for his. He looks kind of like a hotdog with two dots for eyes and the same stick figure arms and legs. “Mister Hotdog” doesn’t sound as good as “Mister i" though, nor does it fit with Mister O, so Mister i it is.

Trondheim, whose work you may now from Tiny Tyrant, A.L.I.E.E.E.N. and Lil’ Santa (in addition to the Dungeon books) has reduced his art style to about as minimal as it can get while still conveying enough information to let us know that this is a person, or that’s a tree, or that’s a bull, and so on.

Each page is a complete stand-alone story with a beginning, middle and satisfying end, a trick Trondheim accomplishes by dividing every single page into sixty panels. Yes, sixty.

The stories are all wordless, and all involve our hapless protagonist trying to acquire something to eat. His favorite seems to be a pie cooling on a windowsill, but he also tries picking apples and berries and garden produce, and fishing and hunting. His means of acquiring the food generally involves dastardly acts—stealing the pie, stealing candy form a baby—but crime never pays, and at the end of each story Mister i dies horribly (There’s quite a bit of blood, but it’s hardly gory, considering the abstract nature of the character doing the dying, and the world in which he dies).


(Above: One of the stories from Trondheim’s Mister i. Click here to read it)

The slapstick is wildly inventive, and Trondheim indulges in some scatological humor that left me laughing with disbelief that he’d even attempt visual gags so gross. It adds up to a book that tells the same story over and over without ever feeling repetitive. Rarely has horrible violence been so hilarious, but beyond the pure entertainment value of the book, I found myself increasingly fascinated with how it was made.

Every story is exactly sixty panels long, meaning every single story, as different as they all are, has been so rigorously, mathematically planned out, and yet they feel completely effortless and capricious, with no signs of Trondheim stalling or delaying the action to make sure Mister i dies in panel 59 and his blood pools around his corpse in panel 60.

But not only is the book funny, brilliantly created comics, it also has an important message. And that message is: don’t steal pies left to cool on windowsills. Because you never know if the person who baked the pie will catch you in the act and force the still scalding hot pie, pan and all, into your mouth and down your throat, choking you to death while your mouth and throat swell and burn from the inside.

Would I Travel Back in Time to Buy it Off the Shelf?: Hmm, this is a tough one this time out. It’s priced at $13.95 for a book that’s only 32 pages long. But then, it’s a nice format, sized like a children’s picture book and featuring a hard cover. And 32 of these pages are certainly constitute a lot more reading time than, say, 32 pages of a super-comic or manga. Sure, I’ve already read it for free from the library, so the question becomes is this something I would have liked to have owned in January? Or is this something I’ll want to read again and again over the years?

I’m thinking it will reward re-readings. Particularly after a few months or years when I’ve forgotten the exact happenings of each story.

So I suppose if time travel were possible, but only to purchase books new that I missed the first time around, I might go back and pick this up eight months ago, depending on how sound my finances were that week.

Since time travel’s not possible, I think I’ll simply add this to my “To Buy When I’m Rich or Reasonably Well Off Enough to Blow $14 on a Book I've Alread Read” list.

Delayed Reaction: Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment

Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment (Marvel Comics), by Roger Stern, Michael Mignola and Mark Badger


Why’d I Wait?: As far as I can tell, this original graphic novel was released in 1989, which was actually a few years before I started reading comics. So unlike a lot of the books I feature in these “Delayed Reaction” segments, I didn’t wait to read it so much as I completely didn’t know it existed until fairly recently. It’s unfortunately long out of print, despite the fact that it features pencils by Mike “King of the Hellboy Multi-Media Empire” Mignola.



Why Now?: Synchronicity, I guess.

A few months back I re-read Cosmic Odyssey and kept thinking how crazy it was to see a big-deal artist like Mignola drawing the likes of the J’onn J’onnz and Orion for DC.

Retailer Mike Sterling at EDILW favorite Progressiveruin.com recently mentioned Triumph and Torment in the context of, “Hey, wouldn’t it make good business sense for Marvel to have this book available for sale?” (With a Dr. Strange direct-to-DVD ‘toon in the works and another Fantastic Four film just months away, the book seems like one that it would be easy to foist on all sorts of readers, not just Hellboy/Mignola fans).

Then last weekend I was selling some old comics to my local Half-Priced Books, I found it sitting among the graphic novels for a scant $8.50 (Also scored: A Killraven graphic novel with art by P. Craig Russell for just $3).

Clearly the universe wanted me to read this story, and who am I to argue with the universe?



(Above: Doom's very nice fire place, as drawn by Mignola and Badger. Richards may be smarter and more virtuous than Doom, but Castle Doom is much more tastefully appointed than the Baxter Building)



Well?: It’s actually a pretty strange artifact, from the days when graphic novels were still pretty brand new. It’s relatively short—only about 80 pages—but it’s a hardcover, and an oversized, album one at that. This is the biggest I’ve ever seen Mignola art, and it’s quite a treat (if Marvel ever gets around to reprinting it, though, I suspect it would sell better as a traditional-sized trade paper back).

Roger Stern handles the writing, and it’s a fairly simple story, with the most complex part being the portrayal of Doctor Doom as a less evil guy than his name might imply. He’s actually a pretty complicated guy.

Stern opens in the Himalyas, where a crazy old mystic by the name of the Aged Gehngis is ranting and raving to his Wong-like servant, and then off he flies to do the work of The Vishanti, whom turn out to be actual deities, and not just an empty swear word Strange uses when frustrated or excited. Once every 300 years they declare a worldwide magic contest, and the winner gets the title “Sorcerer Supreme,” as well as a sacred task—to grant a boon to the runner-up.

Strange wins, naturally enough, but it’s Doom who comes in second, and so Strange must help Doom.

What he wants isn’t any magical assistance getting revenge on Richards or anything so pedestrian. Rather, he needs Strange’s expertise in the realms of the mystic to help him free his sorceress mother’s soul from Hell, where’s Marvel’s Devil Mephisto keeps it.

The rest of the book basically consists of Marvel’s two baddest doctors in Hell, shooting beams at hordes of Mignola-designed demons, while a gigantic Mephisto lounges on his throne in the background.

There’s some very nice melodrama in here, as the title promises there will be, and while I’ve read very little of Stern’s writing in the past—certainly not enough to get excited just by seeing his name on the cover—I was quite pleased with how it reads here. Clearly he approached working on a graphic novel as something a little more special than just another comic book script, and he really upped his game.

Mignola is inked by Mark Badger, and his art has yet to be refined down to the bare essentials that it’s currently at, but it’s awfully close to the style on display in his Hellboy stories (And it’s more Hellboy-esque thant it was even in Cosmic Odyssey).

Mignola’s characters have always had a thickness and a blockiness about them, something which I’ve always felt makes him and ideal artist for Marvel characters, as you can draw a line from the work of Jack Kirby to that of Mike Mignola.

His Doom is therefore unsurprisingly utterly perfect, and his Mephisto is probably the best I’ve ever seen.

I didn’t care for Minola’s Strange all that much, however, in part because Steve had a more ‘80s/Metallica-looking moustache here instead of the Vincent Price one I so like, and, in greater part, because Marcos Martin so spoiled me with Doctor Strange: The Oath that I don’t think I’ll ever like a visual interpretation of the character as much.



Would I Travel Back in Time to Buy it off the Shelf?: Well you’d pretty much have to in order to buy it now, wouldn’t you? In the mean time, you can see several pages of it (and some very colorful color commentary on those pages) at Scans_Daily.

Delayed Reaction: Monologues for the Coming Plague

Monologues for the Coming Plague (Fantagraphics), by Anders Nilsen

Why’d I Wait?: Because I had no idea it existed until I saw it on the “new” shelf of graphic novels at a local library. According to Amazon.com, it came out in July of ’06. And despite reading the Fantagraphics catalogue, reading the Diamond shipping lists several times a week and visiting one to two comic shops once a week, I still missed it. I have no excuse for my obliviousness.



Why Now?: A flip-through should be all you need to pique your curiosity. Here, take a virtual flip-through, on me:






Well?: Nilsen’s art is of the “Hell, I could do that…in fact, my seven-year-old daughter could do that?” Well you know what? I don’t think you can. And I’m pretty damn sure your daughter can’t either.

Nilsen is a very talented draftsman (Go here and click on anything with the initials “A.N.” next to it to see what I mean…and confidential to you Chicagoan cartoonists: Your website is very, very hard to use), and the quick, scribbly style he uses here belies his sequential art chops. The images repeat over and over, but they’re all unique, all placed just so and all bleed into one another pretty flawlessly—whole sequences of the book work like an animated-cartoon-in-process (the bit with the changing heads on the trip to Pittsburgh, for example, or the part where the guy with a scribble for a head pulls a dead dinosaur out of his pocket), so that you can flip quickly through the book and see ‘em move. If you wanted. But you don’t really want to do that. You want to read the thing.

It’s an epic of artst-fartsy philosophy cartooning, and I readily confess that I may not have “got” it all, but I did find my self laughing quite a bit, so I got something out of it. The narrative skips around, but every seemingly disconnected element of it informs the whole, and the various threads intersect in surprising ways.

There’s a sequence of repeating images of a woman feeding a wild bird, with either the bird or the woman saying something incongruous to one another (a running gag that’s simply a fill-in-the-blank cartoon); another where a man with a scribble for a head talks to another about semiotics and goes on a “trip” with him that ends in a horrible car accident (there is no car though); the guy who doesn’t have a scribble for a head talking to an indifferent dog about career choices; some riffing on what you should do if you meet the Buddha on the road and the consequence of such action and some frank philosophical talk involving what life is like in heaven with Jesus and God.

Oh, and it introduces another philosophy, one that isn’t semiotics—it’s called The Mediocrity Principle and it sounds depressingly like my life right now. Is it a good thing? A bad thing? I don’t know. A character travels to the future to do a study on the matter, but his results are inconclusive. “It’s super hard to do studies in the future,” the scribble-headed man says.

If you like Adult Swim’s 12 oz. Mouse or some of David Rees’ odder comics, definitely buy the hell out of this. Not that it’s like either of those, other than the strange absurdism, sparse graphics and the weird evocation deep in your brain that the work your experiencing is either brilliant and deep or just kinda funny.

If you don’t like either of those things, or actively hate them, and think any book that bills itself (on the back cover) as containing “absurdist art comic,” “stream of consciousness image generation,” “automatic writing,” and “dinosaurs” is your idea of personal hell, well, you may want to check it out from the library and read the hell out of it anyway. Just in case it blows your mind.

Don’t you think that’s a risk worth taking?


Would I Travel Back in Time to Buy it off the Shelf? Nah, it has a long shelf-life, and is still readily available. As soon as I have an extra $18.95 that I don’t have anything more important to spend on—like food, shoes, medicine or Showcase Presents: The Brave and the Bold—he Batman Team-Ups Vol. 1—this book will be mine.

Delayed Reaction: Captain America: Red Menace

Captain America: Red Menace (Marvel Comics), by Ed Brubaker, Mike Perkins, Javier Pulido and Marcos Martin

Why’d I Wait?: I’ve never been a Captain America fan, so not reading his monthly is my, like, default status. I didn’t realize how good Ed Brubaker’s take on the character was until I tried out a trade (Winter Soldier Vol. 1) on a whim one doay, and so here I am, reading it in occasional trade collections rather than monthly installments.

Reading Marvel series in trades verus in monthly installments is something of lose-lose situation for me, I'm afraid. On the one hand, their ad sales got so out of control last fall that its awfully refreshing to be able to read three or four consecutive pages of a Marvel Comic without an ad for Marvel Underoos, superheroes made out of candy or Honda Civics.

On the other hand, I hate, hate, hate their typical trade design. The spines all look the exact same, the front and back inside covers are crowded with ads and ISBN numbers, and the covers are usually reprinted unencumbered with logos and text, but they stick the goddam issue numbers on top of the art.

Why now?: After seeing the human flag so often in the many Civil War corssovers, I just felt like reading about a Captain America who wasn’t completely off his rocker all of a sudden for no reason.

Well?: The bulk of the book is devoted to Captain America #15-#17, by Brubaker and Perkins. I don’t know the history of Cap’s rogues very well, so the first story, which amounted to Crossbones de-programming sin (while cleverly retelling her history), didn’t do a lot for me, but it was a nice brutal introduction to two villains who would become a sort of supervillain Bonnie and Clyde in the very next issue.

From there, Cap and his handler/girlfriend go looking for them and the possibly resurrected Bucky simultaneously, and stumble into the bad guys’ plot to take over an A.I.M. lab, one which has devoured a whole small town.

I’ve seen the “Oh my God, the whole town is in on it!” plot before, but Brubaker makes it seem pretty fresh, and he does a great job portraying Cap’s tumultuous emotional responses to Bucky being out there alive after all these years.

Perkins is just a knock out. He pencils and inks everything, and does so in a photorealistic style that reads like a less labor-intensive version of Brian Hitches. It looks about as realistic (if slightly less meticulously detailed, and sans Samuel L. Jackson’s likeness), but Perkins is obviously a much faster artist (he pencils and inks these three issues). Reading this, again found myself wondering if Ultimates might not have been better off kicking Hitch to the curb in favor of Perkins.

The real highlight of the book though is the Captain America 65th Anniversary Special, which is illustrated by Pulido (Human Target, Robin: Year One) and Martin (Dr. Strange: The Oath, Batgirl: Year One), trading off chapters.

This story was exactly what I think a Captain America comic book should always be like— World War II-era adventures mixing light superheroics with espionage and combat.

Brubaker presents it as a flashback, but one that ties into his story in the monthly (as he did with flashback tales in Winter Soldier). Cap, Bucky, a two-eyed Sgt. Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos are sent behind enemy lines to figure out what the Red Skull wants with a particular scientist and a ruined castle, and stop him from doing whatever he’s doing.

Along the way, Bucky beats Dum Dum at poker, saves everyone from a machinegun, gets wounded, almost dies and falls in love with a resistance fighter. And Cap fights a giant, 15th century robot. It’s a fun story that mixes an old school Saturday matinee serial-style plot points with sophisticated character work. And Pulido and Martin both provide smooth, clean, slightly cartoony art work that feels appropriately comic book-y (as much as I appreciate Perkins’ work, Pulido and Martin’s is closer to my personal aesthetic preference); stylistically rooted in the Golden and Silver Age of comics art, but with fresh, modern storytelling.

Would I Travel Back in Time to Buy the Individual Issues Off the Shelf?: The Anniversary Special? Definitely. The other three? Eh, I’m fine reading ‘em in trade when the mood strikes me.