Meanwhile...

You guys probably aren't going to believe it, but this week? I wrote about comics. On the Internet. I know, right?

You can read a piece I wrote about All Star Section Eight's continuation of Garth Ennis and McCrea's making-fun-of-DC-comics-in-DC-comics here at Comics Alliance. You can read a short review of Jeremy Baum's very, very weird (and all-around beautiful) Dorfler here at Las Vegas Weekly. And, finally, you can read my review of IDW's Ghostbusters: Get Real #1 here at Robot 6. The above image of Batman blowing off a parking ticket is, of course, from Section Eight.

Three new-ish comics

Ghostbusters: Tainted Love #1 (IDW Publishing) Please note that writer Dara Naraghi and I both lived in the same city at the same time for about a decade, and have previously communicated via email and in person during that time, so it’s possible that some sort of Go Columbus! boosterism was affecting me on a subconscious level while I was reading this issue (I don’t think so; I’ve never had a problem identifying whether or not I found a creative work sorely lacking, no matter who created it, before).

This one-shot is a Valentine’s Day special and, in keeping with the spirit of the holiday, I loved it. As some of you know, I tried out some of the more recent Ghostbusters comics, and, despite some virtues, found them both somewhat wanting.

This comic isn’t exactly a perfect one, but I thought Naraghi had done the best job so far of distilling the characters’ voices to the point that they sounded completely like “themselves” throughout; of the three different Ghostbusters projects I’ve read recently, this one hewed closest to the characters as they existed in the first movie. Also, Naraghi did a nice job of focusing on the love lives of all four characters to a certain extent, even if Winston and Venkman get the most panel time (Egon and Ray, meanwhile, boast of a date with science).

The art is by Salgood Sam, and he met the main challenge of the franchise—keeping the three white brunettes distinct from one another and recognizable form previous appearances in other media, without falling into strict celebrity likeness. He also lettered the work, which gives it a really nice, rather home-made feel, particularly when compared to Big Two super-comics and many of the other licensed comics out there at the moment.

If you’d like to hear a little bit more about the book, I’ll have a brief Q and A with Naraghi on Blog@ tomorrow morning.


Muppet King Arthur #1 (Boom Kids) The various Muppet miniseries adapting classic tales are, pretty much by necessity somewhat formulaic—re-tell the familiar story, but casting various Muppets as if they were actors playing the major parts and imbuing their performances with their personal quirks and schticks.

This one, obviously, takes on the King Arthur story, with Kermit in the role of Arthur, at this point still a lowly page serving Sir Sam the Eagle. I suppose it will be interesting to see where the series goes after this first issue, given the all the variations on the Arthur myth (unlike, say, Peter Pan, the basis of the previous Muppet adaptation), but this first issue doesn’t stray far from the sword-in-the-stone stuff.

Janis is Lady of the Lake, Rolf is Merlin, Miss Piggy is a (good version of) Morgan Le Fay and Fozzie seems to be the first knight of the eventual roundtable. Paul Benjamin and Patrick Storck’s script was rather hit or miss for me, the Muppets and Arthurian business not always blending all that smoothly (Fozzie as a jester knight, for example). When the gags hit though, they’re effective enough to make up for those that don’t quite hit the mark.

Artist Dave Alvarez’s style is probably this book’s greatest attribute, though. His artwork is stripped-down, flat, bright and highly kinetic. Like Roger Langridge, he’s perfectly able to draw the characters so they look like the Muppets and simultaneously look like his characters, and seeing the familiar characters filtered through his expressive, kinetic artwork is a treat in and of itself.


Zombies Vs. Robots Aventure #1 (IDW) I think it’s safe to assume that we all know what a zombie is and what a robot is, but what is “aventure?” Is it simply a rather embarrassing typo?

Well, according to online dictionaries, it’s an obsolete term for an accident, chance or adventure, which makes it sound like an overly pretentious way of saying “adventure,” but a second, also obsolete definition is “a mischance causing of a person’s death.” Given that this is yet another comic set during a zombiepocalypse, perhaps that’s fitting.

Ashley Wood provides the cover art, and gets a credit for presenting the book, an anthology of three serialized stories by three different cartoonists, each dealing with the subject matter of conflict between zombies and robots (With humanity in there somewhere as well).

Menton Matthews III’s story “Kampf” opens with a one-page explanation of the cause of the zombiepocalypse and the fact that humans turned to un-infectable robots to help them fight the zombie menace. From there it plunges into a tense domestic drama in which a scarred sergeant argues with his wife about whether he should go and try to fight the zombie war or stay home and spend time with her before they die. It’s more of a scene then a story, and so hard to judge, really; Matthews has some nice, wide horizontal layouts, and the robot designs are pretty cool, but the last panel looked depressingly like a still from a shoot ‘em up videogame of the sort I have no interest in (If you do, though, that might actually be an awesome panel).

Paul McCaffrey’s “Masques” has a janitor stumbling upon a pack of little helper robots and the body of his dead boss, and starting to think about what he should do with the roots. It’s devoid of zombies so far. Again, the story isn’t even complete enough to get a good sense of where it might be going, but the art is appealing—McCaffrey does very nice work with textures, making for an impressive invocation of visual-to-tactile synesthesia.

The final story, Gabriel Hernandez’s “Zuvembies Vs. Robots,” offers the most intriguing premise—I think. If I read it right, it seems like a voodoo priest, his friends and a clunky old robot are going to attempt to raise a zombie or zombies of their own, perhaps to fight off the “bad” zombies? That is something I’ve never read before, and, in the tired zombiepocalypse genre, that’s a precious thing.

Another Ghotsbusters comics project

I recently took a look at Tokyopop’s efforts to bring The Ghostbusters to comics, via the so-so 2008 anthology Ghost Busted, so I thought I’d see if other publishers had fared any better.

IDW Publishing took their turn with Ghostbusters: The Other Side, a four-issue miniseries that launch late last year and was collected into a trade paperback back in May.

It’s a more organized, accessible and straightforward effort than Tokyopop’s—rather than a multi-team anthology, it’s a single story by a single creative team. It’s story and art are far weaker than the strongest stories in Ghost Busted, but they’re also far stronger than the weakest story in Ghost Busted. So if Tokyopop’s effort was a mixed bag, IDW’s is at least consistently mediocre.

Artist Tom Nguyen, who is somewhat unevenly assisted on inks by Drew Geraci and John Alderink, does a pretty fine job on the character design of the principals though. Here are the four main characters:
As with the various Tokyopop artists, Nguyen seems to be avoiding using either the likenesses of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and the other actors from the movies or the character designs form the cartoon series.

The designs seem to be of the movie characters, but not the actors, if that makes sense.

The above panel may not be the best example of each, but it was the best one of all four (and I didn’t wanna waste too much time scanning). Ray, Peter and Egon are all easy to distinguish from one another, despite their similarities.

Ray has big ears, slightly puffy cheeks, mussed, fikle hair and a goofy, boyish look, reflecting his often over-eager attitude.

Peter’s hair is longer and pushed back, he’s either starting to bald or has a dramatic widow’s peak, and he often has the half-sleepy expression of Bill Murray, if not Bill Murray’s actual facial features.

Egon’s got glasses to distinguish him, but beyond that Nguyen gives him spiky hair and thing, pointed facial features.

His art may lack some of the personality of Maximo V. Lorenzo or Chrissy Delk in general, but his main character designs have personality to spare.

The rest of the characters that appear in the book are infinitely more blandly designed, but none are really given any personalities by the story anyway—they’re merely props for the Ghostbusters to interact with.

Writer Keith Champagne draws on the well-established characters from the films to power his narrative—Peter’s sarcastic, Ray’s enthusiastic, Egon’s smart, Winston is personality-free—and the story seems positioned as a third movie, although the specifics of the plot seem more like one of the one-off little adventures the team was always having on the cartoon show.

Apparently a life of crime can lead to an afterlife of crime, and some of America’s most notorious gangsters have continued to devote themselves to organized crime now that they’re ghosts.

Their new racket is smuggling souls from Purgatory back to the land of the living, and when the Ghostbusters try to bust them, they all end up dead and on the, um, other side (hence the title). Teamed up with some equally famous crime-fighters, they have to bust ghosts while themselves little more than ghosts.

It’s not bad work at all, and definitely has its moments, but it’s certainly not great comics, and seems sub-par compared to the films it’s based on…and even many of the cartoons that were based on those films.

Part of the problem may simply be that it’s going to take either an extremely skilled cartoonist or creative team to be able to replicate the particular charms of the half-dozen or so actors who originally brought the characters to life in addition to continuing the premise and extending it into a horror/comedy/adventure of equal size and shape. But spending so much attention on various dead historical figures instead of the protagonists certainly didn’t help any, nor did IDW’s presentation.

The Other Side is thoroughly decent, cheap, time-wasting entertainment, but the painted, off-model covers on $4, 22-page books or, in this particular case, on an $18 trade with a fancy raised logo tries telegraphs a better, more important work. It’s probably not fair to single The Other Side and IDW out for this here, as it’s a problem among a lot of comics and publishers these days—presenting mediocre entertainment as respectable art often ill-serves the material, making it seem all the more disappointing.

In other words, a $12, pulpy, paper-paper stock trade is probably what The Other Side deserves; the glossy paper and “art gallery” of shitty covers and black and white versions of certain unimpressive pages just makes the trade collection seem arrogant. That would be fine…provided it had a reason to be arrogant. It doesn’t.


…


Yes, I know I am projecting human emotions into an inanimate trade paperback collection. Shut up.