Bookshelf #30

This week's bookshelf is the penultimate of the four on this particular tiny white unit, upon the small shelves of which only the smallest of books can be held. The best represented publisher here is probably Top Shelf, but more so of their relationship with a particular cartoonist at the particular point of time these books mostly came from rather than anything else.

If there is a cohesive organizing principle here, other than the small size of the books, it is probably that all of the books left of that Dennis the Menace collection there are works of comics as literature...or the cartoonists who make comics as literature having fun with genre silliness.

To the farthest left, we have the 2005 Salamander Dream from AdHouse, which I believe is cartoonist Hope Larson's first published work, aside from appearances in anthologies and online. She's certainly come a long way since, with 2012's A Wrinkle in Time graphic novel adaptation seemingly being a particular milestone, after which her work became increasingly popular and mainstream, and her biography began to fill with "real" graphic novels from "real" publishers (That is, those that had traditionally published book-books and gotten into the comics business, rather than comics publishers). 

Oh, and until I just looked her up a few minutes ago, I had completely forgotten that she wrote a Batgirl series for a while (The 2016-2018 "Rebirth" series, which I think I only read a single issue of, as it was really hard for me to care about a lot of characters after The New 52, the magically un-paralyzed and de-aged Barbara being prime among them).

Next is the 2003 version of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, followed by James Kochalka's The Cute Manifesto from Alternative Comics and then Daniel Clowes' Ice Haven, also from Pantheon. All three are great books and I would recommend all of them if you haven't read them, but at this very moment I find The Cute Manifesto the most significant. It demonstrates Kochalka working both within and without his signature "cute" style, explains how and why he makes comics the way he does and, I think, is a fairly valuable book for a young cartoonist or artist still finding their way to check out.

The next three books feature another wide variety for shelf-mates. First, there's Kazimir Strzepek's The Mourning Star from Bodega, a wonderfully cartoony apocalyptic fantasy epic that I see the Amazon write-up says combines "the depth of Lord of the Rings with the showmanship of Star Wars" which...well, that's one way to sell a comic, I guess; I appreciated the book design, the cartoony characters and the scratchy, homemade aesthetic. I would definitely recommend it if you can find it anywhere (Sadly, as I flipped through it, I noticed the binding on my copy was falling out). Next is Scott Morse's Noble Boy, a biography of sorts of animator Maurice Noble, in an extremely interesting format that suggests nothing so much as a more rectangular than usual board book for the youngest children (albeit with many more words than such books typically feature). And then we have Alex Robinson's Lower Regions from Top Shelf, a 56-page mini-comic about a sexy barbarian lady with a battle axe fighting her way through a dungeon full of monsters, from the creator of Box Office Poison and Tricked. 

Between that and Dennis the Menace, we have a bunch of early Jeffrey Brown books from Top Shelf. These are the books through which I first encountered Brown's work, and why I still can't get over the fact that the cartoonist has now produced a shelf full of Star Wars books, as well as comics starring Batman, The Hulk, Thor, The X-Men and The X-Files. In order, these are Miniature Sulk (although the spine reads "Mini Sulk"), a collection of short, funny scripts; Any Easy Intimacy ("AEIOU" on the spine), a serious autobiographical novel about his relationships, like much of his early work; Sulk 1 and 2, an apparent anthology series, as the first follows his superhero parody creation Bighead and the latter is a mixed martial arts fight story drawn in a far more realistic style than most of his work; The Incredible Change-Bots, his full-color parody of the original Transformers cartoon which was my favorite Transformers comic until Tom Scioli's Transformers vs. G.I. Joe came around; Every Girl Is The End of the World For Me, another relationship comic; and, finally, Unlikely, the story of how Brown lost his virginity and one of his "girlfriend trilogy" of books. I think that was the first work of his I ever read. (Sadly, the sunlight has taken a toll on it, as the part of the back cover that towers over its neighbors is faded to a lighter red than the rest of the book.

And, as mentioned, there's a Dennis the Menace collection from Fantagraphics, Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace 1951-1952. Like Fanta's Peanuts work, it's a great collection and I also found it somewhat revealing at how different the single-panel cartoon felt in its first year vs. what it had become by my lifetime, where I would regularly encounter it in the funnies (And then, later, on The Comics Curmudgeon). I won't say these were necessarily brilliant comics or anything, but they were certainly funnier back then, and, I think, more sharply drawn.

Fun fact: I also have the second volume, although it is sitting amid a pile of stacks in the middle of the floor in my "library", as I have more books than I do bookshelves. (The obvious place to put it would be next to the first volume, but, as you can see, there is no room there). One day years ago my mother was stuck for an afternoon in my ancestral home, where I currently live and where all these shelves are, and she wanted something to read to pass the time. The only books in the house were mine, though, and were 99% comics rather than book-books. She ended up choosing a Dennis the Menace collection. 

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

I have reviews of the following comics:

You can then by clicking here.

Membership has its privileges.

Like, for example, a membership card.

Meanwhile...

I have a review of Bryan Lee O'Malley and company's Seconds in this week's issue of Las Vegas Weekly. Spoiler: I liked it a whole lot.

I also have a review of Jeffrey Brown's Good Night, Darth Vader and Star Wars: Jedi Academy: Return of the Padawan at Robot 6 today. Those are both pretty good in their own ways, too. I thought Good Night the least good of the three Vader cartoon books, though.

Meanwhile...

I reviewed Jeffrey Brown's new Star Wars: Jedi Academy comic/prose hybrid book for kids (and Star Wars fans of all ages) for Good Comic For Kids. Above is the page in which our young protagonist, Roan Novachez, meets one of his instructors: Yoda. My favorite bits involved Yoda's interaction with the students, and the ways Brown chose to depict the communication of the Wookie gym teacher and resident astromech with the students.

Here are two things I didn't mention in my review.

First, I was struck by how racist Roan's comic strip Ewok Pilot scanned to me, as its premise is that a primitive, spear-chucking savage who can't speak space-English is a fighter pilot; I'm positive it wasn't Brown's intention, but imagine its Earth-bound equivalent, like, say, Pygmy Cavalryman, about an African pygmy who joins the British cavalry and the hilarity that ensued. That would have been wildly offensive were it published anytime after, like, the 1940s, wouldn't it....?

Second, I kept wondering how close this was set to Episode III, and if Roan and all his classmates were going to be massacred by Anakin Skywalker shortly after the events of the story.

Elsewhere, I reviewed Paul Pope's Battling Boy for Las Vegas Weekly today. It is a very good comic, and I liked it a whole lot.

If you'd like a second, longer, more thorough opinion, might I suggest Charles Hatfield's review for The Comics Journal...?  I agree with much of what he said, although I did not find the size of the book—typical First Second trade size—to be any sort of detriment. It was manga-sized, or thereabouts, which seemed to fit Pope's pacing just fine (On the other hand, I didn't read that chapter that was previously published in a larger format, so I didn't have something to compare it to the way Hatfield did).

Worth noting? It's a very Kirby-influenced work, with the title character being the son of a character that Pope seems to have arrived at my meshing Jack Kirby's Fourth World hero Orion (and the character's setting and cast) with that of Jack Kirby's Thor (and that character's setting and cast).  So I couldn't stop thinking about Keith Giffen and John Romita Jr.'s Marvel/DC "Amalgam" comic Thorion of the New Asgods, which literally amalgamated those characters together as part of the two publisher's line-wide crossover/event.

These "Ligons" from Hinterkind annoyed me so much. Almost as much as the zebra on top of the skyscraper. Everything else was pretty good though.

And, finally, today at Robot 6 I reviewed the launches of a quartet of the Vertigo imprint's new series—Coffin  Hill, Collider/FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics, Hinterkind and Trillium—and I finally got to use a dumb headline joke I've been dying to use for longer than I want to admit.

In other, non-Caleb news...

—When I mentioned Marvel's plans for finally releasing Miracleman serially via over-priced, variant cover-laden floppies the other day, I barely took the time to note that good God that's a lot of variants, and to laugh at how weird Alan Moore's "Written by He Who Shall Not Be Named" credit looked, so I'd recommend Mike Sterling's thorough post dissecting that solicitation and Marvel's apparent plans. Not only is it never not a good idea to check out Sterling's blog (well, almost never), but as a guy who sells comic books for a living and as someone very familiar with the original series (I've never read a panel of it), Sterling's thoughts on the matter of what might be the best way and what might be a not-so-good-way to make that material available for today's market place are probably worthy of consideration.

—And hey, speaking of Miracleman, Tom Bondurant's column at Robot 6 this week is all  about the character and how he's similar and different to Fawcett-then-DC's Captain Marvel, the character he was created to take the place of. One of the striking things I noticed while reading Bondurant's column is that DC doesn't seem to have ever just tried to do Captain Marvel "straight" (Ordway's attempt being probably the closest). Rather, they are always trying to reinvent the character in some way to make him work, but they don't seem to have really ever tried the path of least resistance, despite having had several continuity reboots in which to attempt doing a DCU version of the character as he was originally created. As with Wonder Woman, I really don't see what's so damn hard to "get" about the character, but (again) like Wonder Woman, he seems to be a character the publisher is constantly trying to fix.

—I'm going to have to assume that this post on Comics Reporter, in which Tom Spurgeon solicited his readers to suggest books that are perhaps in danger of going under-appreciated this year (and with only about two months left until we're neck-deep in best of 2013 lists) is a good one, as I personally have only read and reviewed two of the 35 on the list (and I had only heard of, or remember hearing of, maybe a half-dozen or so more, one of which I only remember because someone, I think Spurgeon, ran a picture of its cover before, and that cover features a naked lady, which is a pretty good mnemonic device). Spurgeon offers additional commentary here.

Note: Last year's Incredible Change-Bots Two is just as incredible as 2007's original volume

The other day I was in a dollar store and was amused to find this Transformer robot in the toy section:So amused that I almost bought it, but ultimately decided I would rather have more money in my wallet than another Transformer toy I'm too old to play with collecting dust. As you can hopefully tell from the cellphone pictures I took, his name is Ejector, and he transforms into a toaster.

I don't remember seeing him in any of the movies, but I assume he was in one of the first two, probably during one of the "funny" bits I blocked out of my memory.

I tried to remember if there was a robot that turned into a toaster in Jeffrey Brown's strange nostalgia parody/celebration of the original Transformers cartoon/pleasure of playing with toys as a kid, The Incredible Change-Bots, as it seemed like there probably should be one: I know he had a microwave character named Microwave who, like the Decepticon tape recorder Soundwave housed smaller robots within himself, although Microwaves robots were little robots who could turn into a package of microwave popcorn and a bowl of soup, and they were named Poppy and Soupy, respectively.

That's when I realized that by some strange oversight I never actually read Brown's sequel to The Incredible Change-Bots, The Incredible Change-Bots Two.

So I ordered it and, upon its arrival, I sat down to read them both back to back.

There is no toaster character. The only robot that can transform into a common household appliance to appear in the second volume that wasn't in the first volume is Laptopor (You can probably guess what he turns into).

As someone who grew up watching Transformers every day after school at 4:00 p.m. (and G.I. Joe every day at 4:30), and whose birthday and Christmas wishes revolved around their toy line (along with those for G.I. Joe and He-Man), I was a big fan of Brown's original book. The situational humor and gags were funny by themselves, although the many digressions spent on exploring questions the cartoon raised were certainly the highlight for me. You know, why were the Transformers fighting in the first place, why didn't the Autobots ever give chase to the Decepticons after defeating them, why were fleets of random vehicles with no drivers considered "disguises" and so on.

Brown further gave his characters the sorts of names and designs that made them seem like they came out of his childhood notebook—there's a Megatron analogue named Shootertron, for example, and a race car named Racey—that gave the endeavor a refreshing naive quality. While the characters were analogues to Transformers characters, they weren't analgoues in the way that, say, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen characters were inspired by the Charlton characters, or even the more obvious and clumsy ways that some of Mark Millar's more recent high-concept, "twist" characters are stand-ins for Captain Marvel and Batman.

The best, most touching part of the Change-Bots, however, was the way Brown captured a sense of play in his narrative, from the sound-effects ("Bew! Byew!") to characters calling time-out in a battle because their arm is stuck or because it takes a while to set up their accessories.

The original was a pretty complete story, and did all of the above in a satisfying manner, ending with the warring robot tribes leaving Earth forever. It didn't exactly scream for a sequel, but hell, Michael Bay made three Transformers movies so far, and they've all been just awful, so why can't Brown do a sequel to a good narrative featuring warring robot clans on earth?

In the sequel, the heroic Awesomebots and the evil Fanstiscons are traveling through space together, looking for a new home (having long ago destroyed their home world of Electronocybercircuitron). The only Change-Bot left on earth is the evil Shootertron, who was seemingly destroyed after a climactic battle with his brother, Awesomebot leader Big Rig.

He's survived, but is now amnesiac, and is taken in by a kindly old couple in the Midwest, and they raise him as their own. He eventually recovers his memory though, just as the Change-Bots re-crash on planet earth, and their ages-old struggle begins anew.

Brown's art is slightly sharper in this volume, although it retains enough of it's primitive, home-made quality that it doesn't lose any of the charm of the original's slightly rougher art. With the broad, foundational elements of the inspiring franchise addressed in the first volume, here Brown is free to indulge in more awkward humor, faux melodrama and cycle through various, distinct elements of the Transformers, including the Headmasters, the ineffectiveness of fighting human beings with laser beams (mirrors thwart them...at least until they decide to use their giant robot fists to pound the puny humans), the badges/decals used to differentiate Decepticon from Autobot, the later addition of giant robots to the line and, to my great personal excitement, Change-Bot analogues for the Insecticons......here called "The Fantastinsectors," and Dinobot analogues......the, um, "Awesomesauruses."

Though the ending of this volume seems pretty final, and Brown has a lot on his plate these days, including work on a feature film (sadly, it's not an adaptation of Incredible Change-Bots), it does end with a "Probably to be continued...!" box, so there will probably be more some day. Brown hasn't even made any combining robot team jokes yet, so there's certainly more for Brown to cover.

Review: Fraggle Rock #1

Fraggle Rock is a pretty tricky property to approach as the source for a comic book spin-off.

Fraggle Rock was a live-action, almost all-Muppet half-hour children’s television program produced by Jim Henson and company, beginning in 1983 and lasting four seasons (With at least one season of a Saturday morning animated spin-off to follow).

Unlike the more pervasive Muppet television projects, The Muppet Show and Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock rarely if ever looked at the fourth wall, let alone broke it, and took itself much more seriously. If Sesame Street’s Muppet segments were lessons disguised as comedy sketches addressing split audiences of kids and parents and The Muppet Show was a Vaudeville-style variety show, Fraggle Rock was part fantasy adventure, part character drama and part situational comedy.

It was also had a rather amazingly imaginative and elaborate setting and cast of creatures, particularly when looked at through adult eyes. It was titled after the subterranean home of a race of little, tailed creatures that evoked a colorful, bug-eyed version of the sort of creatures that populated things like The Littles cartoon (and John Peterson novels before that) and Mary Norton's The Borrowers (And I suppose they roughly correspond to kobolds and house fairies and the like, if you want to think about it too hard).

They lived alongside normal humans, although humans were unaware of their existence (The only Fraggle who ventured out of the Rock into the “outer of space” of our world was explorer Uncle Traveling Matt, whom as completely ignored by all the human beings he encountered). The had a weird symbiotic relationship with a race of tiny humanoid creatures called Doozers that shared their home, but had a different worldview (Fraggles were like the grasshopper in the Aesop fable, while the Doozers were like the ant—luckily for Fraggles, Doozers spent all their time building things that the Fraggles could eat). On the other side of the Rock was another race of creatures that were roughly human-sized—The Gorgs—which tried to eat Fraggles.

If you’re around my age, having grown up or at least been pop culturally aware in the 1980s, you probably know all of this already. I’m stating it all here simply to emphasize how peculiar a property Fraggle Rock really is. (One-off Henson/Muppet fantasy worlds like those in The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, despite more dramatically unusual creatures, don’t seem quite as strange as that of Fraggle Rock to me, perhaps because the former is a completely self-contained alien world, and the latter is a familiar normal kid-in-fantasy world set-up, whereas Fraggle Rock imagines its fantasy world right alongside and interacting with our own).

The most obvious comic book to compare Archaia’s new Fraggle Rock adaptation is, of course, Boom Studios' Muppet Show Comic Book. I think that’s probably unfair in two notable ways. First, Roger Langridge’s work on that title is pretty incredible, and stands as one of the best examples of a comic based on a licensed property that I can think of. Secondly, is some ways Langridge’s source material was a bit easier to work with.

As I said above, the Muppet Show never took itself as seriously as Fraggle Rock; I mean, one of main Muppet Show Muppets’ defining characteristics was that he was a terrible comedian (Fozzy Bear); others were defined by how weird they were (Gonzo), how terrible they were in the fields they were presumably on TV as experts in (The Swedish Chef, Dr. Honeydew), and there were even two characters whose role in the program were to make fun of how terrible the program was (Waldorf and…The Other Old Guy In The Balcony).

Well, I hope the Jim Henson Company is pleased with what Archaia has done with the license for Fraggle Rock comics adaptations, because the first issue was surprisingly great—it’s a fine adaptation and a fine comic book in its own right. I don’t think it has the same transcendental qualities that Langridge’s book did, but, again, Fraggle Rock is a pretty thorny form of source material, and one without a lot of room to personalize.

The first issue features a lead story by Heather White and artist Jeff Stokely entitled “A Throne of My Own,” which is more or less a comic book version of an episode of the TV show, missing only a performance of the theme song and that old guy talking to his dog for a few minutes (the dog, knows of the existence of the Fraggles, does appear in a panel though).

Red gets sick of hearing Gobo (whom I just noticed wears a Middle East war correspondent vest for some reason) brag about his bravery and adventures and ends up daring him to spend a night in the Gorg garden. He accepts, and she spends it there with him. Unfortunately, there’s a complication, and the pair end up stuck in the garden, so their friends must rally the Rock to help get them out before they’re discovered. The Trash Heap is consulted, and a lesson learned.

Stokely’s art work is…strange. Like most Muppet characters, the Fraggles don’t lend themselves to two-dimensional drawing adaptation too well, and, in fact, are probably a little more difficult to render than other Muppets, given the relative lack of detail they have.

Stokely does a pretty exceptional job of rendering the characters and making them seem at once Muppet-like and not Muppet-like, although the characters can look quite eerie. Gobo’s unblinking eyes, for example, almost never show a trace of lid, so in most of the images of him he looks, well, dead…or at least asleep with his eyes open. It’s also kind of weird seeing so much of the Fraggles’ legs and feet, and in a lot of ways they seemed like different creatures then the ones I remember from my youth.

There’s a computer-generated looking slickness about Stokely’s art as well, which is often a turn-off for me, although there’s no sense of photo-referencing (or –tracing) here, and the storytelling doesn’t suffer at all.

So, like I said, it was strange. I liked it and thought it was extremely effective, but at the same time I realized it was in a style that I don’t normally like.

White’s story is structured perfectly to reflect that of the show, or, at least, my memory of the show (unlike The Muppet Show and the Henson movies, Fraggle Rock isn’t something I’ve returned to since I originally outgrew it), and she must have gotten all of the voices right, because every line of dialogue “sounded” right to my mind’s ear. In fact, I was pretty shocked to discover that I was “hearing” the original voice actors’ voices in my head as I was reading the dialogue of the characters they once played. I suppose that speaks to how effective they played their roles,that I still know what Red, Gobo, Mokey, Boober, Wembley and the Gorg-with-a-speech-impediment sounded like over 20 years ago.

So A-plus as far as the adaptation goes. I can’t say I’d want to add this to my pull-list or anything—I found it engaging enough and would consider all-ages more than kid-specific, but I think I’ve experienced all the stories about Fraggles that I need to experience, personally.

But then, that’s not the whole comic. Far more exciting for me were the back-ups, which allowed for a couple of cartoonists whose work I admire play in the Fraggle Rock sand-box. The stories were shorter, and thus didn’t make any attempt to replicate the format of the show, and, I think, freed the characters up a bit so that the artists could do what they liked with them.

The artists? Katie Cook* and Jeffrey Brown.

Cook’s story is a six-pager in which the Gorg who can’t pronounce R’s drops a pocket watch down the well, and Red uses the instrument of keeping time in order to organize a not-very-fun game that rubs against the Fraggles’ natural resistance to work. Her Fraggles, like pretty much everything she draws, are darling, and I was pretty impressed with how much personality she is able to imbue them with, especially considering that her versions are even more abstract that Stokely’s more-faithful designs.

Brown’s is a four-page story about how he once dated a Fraggle, but she broke up with him and broke his heart. No, actually it’s about Red inventing a Fraggle-scaled Segway that she calls the F.R.A.G.G.L.E.W.A.Y. The joke—or two—of the strip is—or are—slight, but it’s a weird pleasure to see Brown filtering the Fraggle’s through his style, and his pages work perfectly well as images, with or without the words on them. (Great lettering though, particularly when Red says “Preesenting…” before unveiling her invention).

I’m glad Archaia featured these back-ups, as they sort of saved the project for a reader like me, who doesn’t feel a great need to read comic books about Fraggles necessarily, but am a fan of Cook and Brown and am always interested to see what they’re doing. Such strips provide a little extra weight to tip the scales toward picking up future issues.



*Warning! If you’ve never been to Katie Cook’s site before—and it’s a place on the Internet you should totally go—make sure you visit when you’ve got some time on your hands, because it is chock-full of fantastic art of all kinds, and you're going to want to see all of it. That makes it very easy to click over there expecting to spend a few seconds and then look up and find an hour has passed.

Meanwhile, at Blog@Newsarama...

If in case you don't read Blog@Newsarama every day for some mysterious reason, then you may have missed some of the many reviews I'd posted there over the course of the last few days. If that is the case, and if you're starved for Caleb-generated content (and hey, who isn't?), then you might like to know that I kinda sorta reviewed Jeffrey Brown's Funny Misshapen Body here (although it's not much of a review really), I reviewed Fred Chao's excellent Johnny Hiro Vol. 1 and Lamar Abrams's also excellent Remake here and I reviewed Neil Swaab's predictably completely fucked-up Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles Vol. 3 here.

Review: Sulk #1-#2

You know, at this point, I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I used to think Jeffrey Brown was just a one-trick pony.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked that one-trick he seemed to have perfected, the painfully revelatory, episodic books about his sometimes sweet, sometimes pathetic love life. It’s a trick any pony could be proud of, and admired for having.

Then I read Brown’s Be A Man parody of his own “girlfriend” book Clumsy, his humor collections (Feeble Attempts, Minisulk, I Am Going To Be Small), his superhero parody Bighead, his bizarre Transformers parody/celebration The Incredible Change-Bots (a true landmark in nostalgia-driven comics, being one of the few that tries to capture the pleasures that lead to the nostalgia rather than revisiting the actual source of the nostalgia) and Cat Getting Out of a Bag (a comic I love despite not even being all that fond of cats, which I’ve never actually shared a place with). Heck, Brown even draws a pretty great Dr. Doom.

Now that pony that I once regarded as a one-trick pony has proven itself to be one of the more versatile ponies working in comics today—okay, I’ve taken the “one-trick pony” thing way too far by this point, haven’t I? Sorry. The point is simply this: Jeffrey Brown? That guy is one versatile comics creator.

His latest project for Top Shelf Productions, the publisher of most of his stuff, capitalizes on that versatility, being an ongoing series of nicely-designed, digest-sized, spine-having mini-graphic novels, with each issue/volume being devoted to a different subject. It’s called Sulk, but it’s basically Jeffrey Brown Does Whatever He Wants For However Many Pages He Wants. The contents are standalone, but I imagine once you try one you’ll want the other—and any future issues.

Sulk #1 is entitled “Bighead and Friends,” and features 64 pages of Brown’s pretty lame superhero Bighead, who always makes me think of a humanoid penis wearing a condom and a cape.

The contents should be familiar, if you’ve read Bighead or caught any of his prior appearances. Basically, it’s just superhero comics in Brown’s signature style, although this time around the parody seemed a little sharper and the gags a little funnier to me.

Bighead meets his greatest villain, The Author, a la Animal Man, we see the adventures of Little Bighead (the adventures of Bighead when he was a boy), we see the death and resurrection of Bighead, Jesus punches out the devil (Brown really needs to do a full-length Jesus project some time), and goofy heroes (I really like Sunflower, actually) and villains (Beefy Hipster?) appear and disappear.

It’s $7, which I remember giving me a bit of sticker shock the first time I saw it on the shelves of my shop, but I guess that’s actually quite a value for 64 pages, in an ad-free, “prestige format” comic (even if it is black and white). Seven dollars only gets you about 51 pages of DC Comics’ standard $2.99 books, or 38 pages of Marvel Comics’ $3.99 books.

Sulk #2 is a little pricier at $10, but it’s also 96-pages long, and probably the least Jeffrey Brown Jeffrey Brown book I’ve ever read (and I’ve read ‘em all, save Little Things). This one boasts the best story title of any comic in recent memory: “Deadly Awesome.”

It’s sub-titled “A competitive mixed martial arts match from the S.C.F.C.L. (Superior Cage Fighting Championship League),” which I assume is a fictional version of a real MMA league or ultimate fighting whatever that they show on cable and that an old roommate of mine used to be pretty into but I never watched because it seemed too much like sports to me.

The book is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek (tongue-slightly-in-cheek, or tongue-in-cheek-but-just-barely-in) drama about a match between veteran fighter Haruki Rabasaku and younger, bigger, more powerful Eldark Garprub. A few pages is spent on the fight commentators/announcers/whatever they’re called in this sport setting up the story, introducing us to the fighters and the rules, and then the bulk of the book is devoted to the match—an 80-page fight scene.

The fight has the size and scope of a manga battle, yet aside form the black and white imagery and some occasional speed lines, Brown’s storytelling remains Western in style, the two fighters more or less narrating their strategies in thought bubbles, with the announcers and Brown chiming in to describe what we’re looking at.

This is the most realistic I’ve seen Brown’s work look before, at least for a sustained work, and it’s pretty nice stuff. It looks much more polished and fussed-over than usual, with lots of lines on the page, giving the surfaces a grittier feel.

The story is more or less all sports story cliché, but Brown livens it up with a lot of extremely weird touches, and a wild use of various layouts that give the book a surprisingly fluid look. (My favorite part is probably a two-page spread that, on the left page features a 12-panel grid, chopping up a splash of Eldark straddling a fallen Rabasaku and trying to punch his face repeatedly, and, on right, two small panels of Eldark freaking out about how Rabasaku keeps blocking his punches, and a big panel showing a close up of Eldark’s face, with tiny little Rabasaku faces floating all around his head, the caption reading: “His face, not a bloody pulp, mocks me!”)

The back flap functions as a next issue box, and it shows a picture of a Godzilla-ish monster menacing a trio of tiny human figures. It bears the title “The Kind of Strength That Comes From Madness,” and promises, ahem, “Giant Robots! Pirates! Elves! Giant Monsters! Time Travelling Infants! Science fiction and fantasy filled fun!”

Admittedly some items on that list are pretty played out, but elves? Time traveling infants? That sounds pretty promising—particularly if Sulk #1 and #2 are indicative of the quality.



RELATED: For a second opinion on Brown’s first two Sulk issues, I’d highly recommend you check out Dick Hyacinth’s review here; in addition to being an incisive comics critic and damn good writer, Hyacinth knows more about this MMA fight stuff than any human being I’ve ever crossed virtual paths with, and thus offers a valuable view point on “Deadly Awesome” (Not that I’ve crossed virtual paths with many MMA fans, of course).

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.

Thursday night links

I said links, not lynx, dammit!

(Note: Every Day Is Like Wednesday is getting on the green bandwagon, starting with recycling. Specifically, recycling old jokes).



1.) I could Harley resist: I felt honest-to-God temptation to pick up this week’s issue of Countdown yesterday. Not because it looked very good—Did I see what I think I saw? Batman’s satellite took over Apokolips?—but because the back-up origin did. It was that of Harley Quinn, drawn by Bruce Timm.

That was the second time I had to talk myself out of dropping $2.99 for two pages during the series’ run; the last was Kyle Baker’s Mr. Myxyzptlk origin.

I believe that might have run in the issue in which this happened:



Oh hey, when I just clicked over to dccomics.com to see if they had the Harley origin up yet, I noticed they had The Scarecrow by Kelley Jones already too, and I totally missed it. One of my favorite characters by one of my favorite artists would have been particularly hard to resist, so I suppose it’s just as well it ran in an issue I neglected to even flip through.

Well, I’m sure they’ll collect all of the origin back-ups form both 52 and Countdown into a big Secret Origins trade at some point…


Related: I finally found someone other than an anonymous Newsarama poster or four who likes Countdown. Or at least likes it enough to tell people not to complain about it on his blog: Mr. Dorian Wright.

Wright’s wrong about one thing though—there’s no way in hell Salvation Run is going to have much of anything at all to do with Final Crisis.

If it were, then Morrison would have had a co-plotting or “based on concepts and ideas by” credit in it (and likely Countdown too).

And while I know a lot of us have a tendency to deify Morrison, I’m sure that even if he isn’t the genius I sometimes make it sound like he is, I’m quite confident he’s not so stupid as to come up with a plot like that of Salvation Run’s, which I complained about last Thursday, and probably shouldn’t get into again.

But I suppose we’ll all see if reading SR was a complete waste of time for those just interested in Final Crisis in a few months.



2.) Ask, and I shall receive?: After reading Jeffrey Brown’s incredible graphic novel The Incredible Change-Bots, I wished aloud that publisher Top Shelf had a Top Shelf Direct arm to produce toys based on their comics.

Well, according to Blog@Newsarama, Devil’s Due is granting my wish—and the wishes of Incredible Change-Bots fans everywhere. Click here for Brown’s designs, which call for an eight-page mini-comic to be included (!!!).



3.) Please buy this trade so they’ll keep putting more out: I was pretty excited to see the solicitation for a second collection of the seminal Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League run in DC’s solicits on Monday. They’ve released the first few issues as a trade on several occasions, and trade-collected both of the reunion special type series (Formerly Known as the Justice League and the second-best arc of JLA: Classifed, “I Can’t Believe it’s Not the Justice League!”), but the middle of their run has remained some of the best DC comics never collected for a ponderously long time.

If you didn’t read these books the first time around—or find ‘em in quarter or dollar boxes since—I can’t recommend this highly enough. This is from pretty early in their super-long run, back when Maguire was still drawing most of it and the team had yet to transition into a predictable sort of sitcom set-up. It always had a mixture of serious drama, goofy humor and superhero action, but at this point in the run, the superhero action was higher than it would be later in the run.

This collection will include Justice League Annual #1, Justice League International #8-#13 and Suicide Squad #13.

That’s the moving day issue that establishes the Justice League embassies (and has that sweet cover), two issues of Millennium crossovers (Eat it, Secret Invasion!), two issues dealing with The Construct and the fact that Max Lord is a cyborg (later to be Superboy-punched away just so Rucka and company could use Lord as their villain for some dumb reason)*, the crossover with Ostrander’s Suicide Squad (featuring the Batman vs. Flag battle that totally ruined one of Batman’s cowls), and this story



from back when Bill Willingham used to be a penciller. So you’re definitely going to want in on this.



4.) I would have preferred a Welcome Back, Frank adaptation: I was kinda surprised to hear that The Boys was being optioned for a film adaptation, although I guess I shouldn’t be—Hollywood will have to release some incredible flops based on comic books before the current trend subsides for a while. I haven’t kept up with The Boys since the first arc, figuring I’ll read it in trade eventually if I ever find myself without a Garth Ennis book to read (not likely, considering the man’s output).

I didn’t think it was terribly good, personally, but that’s not what surprised me about it being potentially adapted to film. Rather it’s that the book is so heavily dependent on analogues to other superheroes with their own movie franchises. For example, the one arc I did read dealt with a Justice League-type super-team and (a less closely modeled) Teen Titans-type super team.

Movies heavily relying on brand-name analogues have been successfully made before, of course—The Incredibles and Sky High spring most immediately to mind—but I can’t help thinking of Wanted here, which seems to be a situation in which they removed all the superhero analogues from the comic and ended up with a movie that bears very little resemblance to the original.

If The Boys is about the Justice League and Teen Titans being sexually deviant assholes, or Batman and Robin being totally gay, or Iron Man fucking anything he sees (I’m guessing on those last two, as I haven’t read the arcs, just reviews of ‘em), and they take out all the superhero stuff, will The Boys lose that which makes it exciting in the first place?

I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud here. It should be noted that since DC once published the book until they grew uncomfortable with the jokes at their characters’ expense, then there’s not much chance of a movie getting made without their lawyers taking note of any similarities between their heroes and the analogues potentially being lampooned.


5.) Good start, but needs work: This week’s Lying In The Gutters column had an interesting (albeit only “amber,” meaning it’s of the second of three stages of incredulity) dealing with DC’s new approach to dealing with their late book problems:

Sources close to freelancers inform me that DC Comics has a new in house policy for pencillers. Aside from very specific contracted creators…any penciller contracted to work on a monthly book must deliver complete turnaround of 22 pages of work in four weeks. Not a month, four weeks. If that schedule isn't maintained, they'll pull pages and assign them to other creators. And you may run short of future work. A reduction in quality is more acceptable than a reduction in quantity.


Rich Johnston went on to site the recent issues of Wonder Woman in which Ron Randall helped the Dodsons out, with Randall drawing some pages and the Dodsons others.

In theory it sounds like a great idea—if nothing else, putting out there that deadlines should be treated as just that is a step in the right direction—but in practice, the results of those particular issues weren’t all that great. It would have been far better to have simply had Randall draw all 22 pages of those books, and save the Dodsons for a Wonder Woman annual or miniseries or special or something.

I said my piece about how DC should address late books in an illustrated piece last summer, and don’t think anything I can say here now will necessarily improve upon what I said there.

Johnston’s summation that “a reduction in quality is more acceptable than a reduction in quantity” is kinda scary; like I said in response to Matt Idelson’s DC Nation column soul-searching about DC’s late books, the choice between good work and on time work is a false choice.

There are plenty of artists capable of delivering 22 pages a month, and it’s those artist who should be getting the plum assignments.

I’m sure there are some people reading Batman and Wonder Woman because they like Tony Daniel and the Dodsons, but far, far more of ‘em are reading it because of Grant Morrison and Gail Simone and Batman and Wonder Woman. (One of the lessons of 52 and Countdown, I think, is that DCU readers and fans place a greater emphasis on the writers, events and punctuality more so than the quality of the art).

As for the “name” artists with some amount of perceived market heat, save them for stuff other than the regular DCU books that need to keep their schedules.


*According to commenters in the comments for this post, these two issues dealing with Max and the construct aren't actually about him becoming a cyborg or whatever. I think it's the start of the story seed that will eventually lead to/inspire the whole cyborgification story much later on, but this isn't that story at all. Sorry for the mistake; I could have just doublechecked what those issues were actually about if they weren't filed away in plastic bags in a long box in a closet. One more reason why DC should totally trade-collect the hell out of this series!

September 6th's Meanwhile, in Las Vegas...

This week's Las Vegas Weekly column features a review of Jeffrey Brown's incredible new offering, The Incredible Change-Bots.

I highly reccomend it to anyone who grew up with the Transformers toys and cartoons. If your exposure to a warring race of giant transforming robots is more limited, say to only the Michael Bay movie or Beast Wars or something, I'm not sure how much sense Brown's book will make on it's own, but I found it an absolute blast.

It makes me wish Top Shelf had a Top Shelf Direct arm cranking out toys based on their comics like certain other comics publishers, because a Change-Bot toy line of little plastic Gobot-like transforming figures would rule.

Friday Night Fights: Autobio Cartoonist Grudge Match!

James Kochalka is probably best known for his black and white autobio comics, which usually fall under the American Elf title. This Wednesday, he had a new book out, and it was quite a departure from that work—it's a full-color all-ages book about a squirrel entitled Squirrelly Gray.

Jeffrey Brown is probably best known for his black and white autobio comics, like Unlikely and Clumsy. This Wednesday, he had a new book out, and it was quite a departure from that work—it's a full-color book about a race of warring robots that can transform into vehicles entitled The Incredible Change-Bots.

Seeing these two works from these two artists arrive on comic shop shelves in the same week raises an interesting question: If Kochalka fought Brown, who would win?




It looks like Kochalka would win.






Yeah, definitely Kochalka.

If you would like to hear more of their artsy-fartsy discussion of the creation of comics, you'll probably want to check out their 2005 collaboration Conversation #2, available from Top Shelf Productions.

If you would like to see more panels of people punching each other in the face, you'll probably want to check in with Bahlactus.

And don't worry about Kochalka and Brown, they ultimately worked everything out just fine: