Young Avengers Catch-Up: Siege: Young Avengers #1 (2010)

This one-shot by writer Sean McKeever, pencil artist Mahmud A. Asrar and inkers Scott Hanna and Victor Olazaba was a brief check-in type story tied to Marvel's completely nonsensical event series Siege, a bizarrely written story by chief Marvel Universe architect Brian Michael Bendis that, as I've previously noted, doesn't make a lick of sense on its own.

The event was climax of the "Dark Reign" period of the Marvel Universe, in which former Green Goblin Norman Osborn has donned a red, white and blue Iron Man suit to become Iron Patriot and lead his own team of Avengers made up of villains-posing-as heroes and his own SHIELD-like government agency HAMMER. For reasons never explained, Osborn decides he needs to conquer Asgard, which he attacks in defiance of the his boss President Barack Obama, and ends up in an all-the-heroes vs. all-the-villains fight on the floating city of Norse-derived Kirby space-gods.

The Young Avengers special was apparently intended as a part of a suite of one-shots, as its cover is part of a single, multi-part image by Marko Djurdjevic, and it gets collected along with four more one-shots in Siege: Battlefield, which is where I found and read it. (We'll look at those other comics in a bit).

One rather admirable aspect of writer Allen Heinberg and artist Jim Cheung's creation of the Young Avengers characters is how many aspects of the wider Marvel Universe he was able to tie into the various characters, as it makes them incredibly easy to plug into just about every Marvel event series imaginable. This event, for example, revolves around Asgard, and one of the Young Avengers characters was inspired by Thor to kinda sorta pose as a Thor-like sidekick at the outset, even going so far as to go by the name Asgardian (Changed later, of course, to "Wiccan," which can't so easily be corrupted into "ass-guardian").

The plot consists entirely of what the various team members are doing during the Everyone Vs. Everyone fight on Asgard, specifically after the part of the battle (which was not a siege) where The Sentry knocked the floating city down.

Wiccan and Hulkling, whose magic and gross green veiny pterodactyl wings spared them from the crash, find The Wrecking Crew trying to super-loot the ruins for Asgardian treasure, and fight them. Patriot and Hawkeye, meanwhile, are trapped in the rubble and fighting for survival, ala Red Arrow and Vixen in that one Meltzer issue of Justice League of America, ala Nicolas Cage and The Guy Who Wasn't Nicolas Cage in World Trade Center. And Speed runs around looking for survivors in the rubble. No sign of Stature and Vision.

It's a fairly well constructed fight comic, with each of the three character or character groups going through a distinct arc in which they reach a point of hopelessness and than rally, the issue ending with a splash page of Speed leading the charge to have them rejoin the fight.

It's completely inessential of course, but then, that's what it was supposed to be all along, the answer to a question a certain sub-set of Marvel readers might have wanted to know the answer to (Hey, what were the Young Avengers doing during the Battle of Asgard?), and a bone thrown to the would-be Young Avengers audience awaiting the return of the characters creators/re-creators to finish up their story.

The artwork is quite impressive and, in certain panels, looks like the work of Cheung (particularly on a re-flip-through. If Marvel had decided to go forward with a Young Avengers monthly sans Heinberg and Cheung in 2010, this would have been a fine creative team to do so with.

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As I said, this issue was collected in Siege: Battlefield, which contained a handful of Siege one-shots, connected only by their interlocking cover images and the fact that they had something or other to do with Siege. These are they...

Siege: Loki #1 by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie

This particular creative team is of particular note for this particular series of reviews, as these are the guys who will go on to create the next volume of a Young Avengers ongoing series, the one that sparked this endeavor on my part.

The star is Loki, part of Osborn's cabal of villains secretly running the "Dark Reign", who is here restored to his original, male form, after having spent much of the previous "Dark Reign" cycle in the form of a buxom woman, for reasons I never understood (It happened in an issue of a Thor comic I didn't read, I imagine).

In the Gillen/McKelvie Young Avengers, he appears in the form of a little kid. I think they should probably keep him male and grown-up, personally because a) McKelvie draws him so well and b) all the ladies I know who dug the Avengers movie  really seemed to like sexy Tom Hiddleston's sexy Loki.

Their story is set before and behind the scenes of the battle that occurs in Siege,basically showing Loki as a wicked and clever manipulator moving in a world of Marvel's evil power players—we see him taking a call from Doctor Doom and meeting with Mephisto and Hel, for example—to get what he wants, which here seems to be the destruction of Asgard and release from his destined place in Hel's hell (which may be spelled "Hel").

It's pretty great stuff, light on the superhero business (Osborn appears on one page) and heavy on the mythological and, tonally, it felt like an early issue of a pre-Vertigo Vertigo series: Mature storytelling devoted to mythology and fantasy extrapolated from old-school trashy super-comics which were themselves inspired by classical mythology. While reading, I kept thinking this creative team would probably do a knock-out Doctor Strange series.

I can't say enough good things about McKelvie's clean, smooth, pristine, perfectly-acted artwork: That guy's the best. This is by far the best-looking chapter of the book.

Props go to the pair also for their five-panel sequence involving Loki and Osborn. That's the first time that it was made clear to me that it was Loki speaking to Osborn through his Green Goblin mask, as his Green Goblin persona, in an effort to convince Osborn to attack Asgard because that's what Loki wants him to do. In a lot of the other "Dark Reign" and Siege related comics I've read, this isn't at all clear, and Osborn is usually presented as either a complete lunatic attacking Asgard just-because, or being talked into it by Loki, who doesn't really offer any compelling reason to convince him to do so. Here, it seems the compelling reason is that Osborn thinks his dominant if buried persona is telling him to do so.

Siege: Spider-Man #1 by Brian Reed and Marco Santucci

Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel fight Venom, who, at the time, was former Scorpion Mac Gargan in the alien symbiote suit, who spent the majority of "Dark Reign" (and the Bendis-written series Dark Avengers) disguised as Spider-Man.

That, obviously, annoyed Spider-Man.

This issue, then, is devoted to the climax of their fight over that particular conflict, with the pair tumbling out of the still airborne Asgard to the city below (Broxton), where Ms. Marvel swoops in to give Spidey an assist and fly him back up to Asgard so he can participate in the events of Siege.

It's a decent enough story and the art is similarly decent. It is about as pure a fight comic as you can get without excising the dialogue, which hear consists mainly of Spider-Man quips and Venom's chatter about eating people.

The most striking and memorable image is a panel in which Ms. Marvel separates Venom from Gargan by sticking her hand down the former's throat and yanking the naked latter out its mouth.

Siege: Captain America #1 by Christos N. Gage and Federico Dallocchio

The artwork on this one made it very hard for me to read. It was clear enough that it was easily legible, I just didn't like looking at it. Very photo-reference-y, with poses and renderings that look, if not traced from photos, then at least rigorously imitating images of real people, with costumes and fantastic action set atop of them.

It's all very awkward looking, as in a terribly uninspired two-page splash page of a bunch of heroes fighting a bunch of villains. One of the Captains America, in this image, appears to be both simultaneously kicking Taskmaster's shield and firing his gun at the shield, and seems badly in danger of literally shooting himself. Also, Dr. Fate seems to be there, for some reason.

Gage deviates from the all-fighting, all-the-time mandate that dominates most of these stories by introducing a family of civilians on the outskirts of the conflict, who provide an element of extra danger for the Captains, as well as some folks to be inspired by them.

Then current Captain America James "Bucky" Barnes and returned-to-life former Captain America Steve Rogers are participating in the big fight on Asgard and, after Sentry knocks it down, they find themselves fighting Razorfist, perhaps the least believable of all of Marvel's many fantastical villains (He's the guy who has had both of his hands replaced with huge, razor-sharp blades, and his costume consists of a sort of skin-tight ski mask with ear holes that I can't imagine how he puts on—dude must have an intern to dress him. (Also, Razorfist...? Dude can't make a fist, as he doesn't have hands).

The Captains beat the shit out of him, and then run back to the crossover story. See a pattern forming? These are kind of fun in how straightforward they are, as the majority of them are little narrative cul de sacs, where the characters leave the events of Siege, run through the conflict of a single issue tie-in, and then return to the events of Siege, usually declaring, "Well, that's the end of our one-shot tie-in; back to the main series!" (I'm paraphrasing; here it's actually "Let's go... ...We're needed."

This one's followed by Siege: Young Avengers.

Siege: Secret Warriors #1 by Jonathan Hickman and Alessandro Vitti

This series, Secret Warriors, is a kinda sorta years-later spin-off of that weird Bendis-written Secret War miniseries that truly kicked off his Avengers and Marvel Universe writing, and ended with one of the worst and laziest issues of a comic book I've ever read.

The premise of Secret Warriors was that an off-the-grid Nick Fury was leading his own team of secret superheroes, all of whom eschewed costumes in favor of classic SHIELD uniforms, for maximum boring-looking character design. I never read any of it, but Marvel might have tempted me to read the first issue had they instead titled it Nick Fury and his Howling Secret Warriors (I'm a big fan of howling).

So did you read Siege...? If not, there's this one gross-looking panel where Sentry grabs Ares the god of war and rips him vertically in half, just like She-Hulk did to Vision in "Avengers Disassembled," except Ares isn't a robot, so there's a bunch of gore and viscera in the panel (Bendis wrote both scenes, so he's not stealing from another writer, just repeating himself).

Well, on of the Secret Warriors is Phobos, the son of Ares (who is also a little kid). The issue opens with him watching a bank of monitors in which panels from Siege appear, including the gross one of his dad getting torn in half.

While Nick Fury joins Captain America for the assault on Asgard, Phobos flashes back to hanging out with his dad, then picks up a couple of swords, enters the White House through a secret passage, and silently slaughters Secret Service agents throughout the issue in order to, as he finally explains once President Barack Obama is safely aboard Marine One and flying towards safety, "to deliver a message."

The message isn't metaphorical, but literal though, as the last panel of the issue sees him sitting down at Obama's desk, the Oval Office littered with dead agents, to write a letter:

It's not every day that a human finds himself responsible for the death of a god and then on that very same day escapes facing another...

But before you wash your hands of my father's blood, I would encourage you to reflect on what brought us to this point: You sacrificed honor for expediency. You traded intent for quick action. You were wrong...and we all suffered for it.

It's a pretty weird comic. At least when Garth Ennis had The Punisher threaten to kill President George W. Bush, he did so without killing a bunch of innocent guys, and the president was a little more directly tied to the crime.

Obama's guilt for the death of Ares is fairly indirect, in that he put Osborn in charge of the superheroes, Osborn hired Sentry and Ares and Osborn ordered them both to attack Asgard, where Ares rebelled against Osborn and got torn in half. I realize the buck stops with the president and all, but Siege made it pretty clear that Osborn had "gone rogue" and was acting against the will of the president and, um, the entire United States government when he attacked Asgard, acting on the advice of his Green Goblin mask/other personality/Loki.I'm not a fan of the art in this one, although there's nothing really wrong with it. The style just didn't do much for me. There is a pretty neat panel of Obama sitting behind a desk, his face in shadow, his hands calmly folded in front of him, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff lined up behind him and a small army of gun-toting Secret Service agents between them and the reader. It's maybe the clearest image of Obama-as-supervillain I've seen in a comic book.

You know, between Bush's handling of the events of Civil War, "The Initiative" and Secret Invasion and Obama's handling of "Dark Reign" and Siege, as horrible as the choices these guys make in our universe might so often seem, they're both a hell of a lot better than their 616 counterparts...

Meanwhile, at ComicsAlliance...

Hey remember last week, when I linked to that review of Steve Weissman's excellent Barack Hussein Obama I wrote for Las Vegas Weekly...? Well, I had a lot of questions about how that comic strip got made, so I asked those questions to Weissman, and you can read his answers at ComicsAlliance today, in a piece with an extremely generous amount of preview pages from the book. You can read it here. The above strip is one of my favorites, featuring Sasha and Malia meeting Obama's evil overlord...or whatever.

And while I'm linking to things, I neglected to post an exhortation to go read my contribution to Robot 6 this week, so let me do that now: Here's a post on Ghosts, which features the late, great Joe Kubert's apparently very last work, and the first issue of his Joe Kubert Presents.

Super-Endorsements 2012:

Meanwhile...

I have two pieces of writing about comics up on the Internet today that you can go read, if you like. First, at Las Vegas Weekly, I have a review of Steven Weissman's excellent Barack Hussein Obama. And then, at Robot 6, I have a review of the first issue of Brandon Graham's Multiple Warheads: Alphabet to Infinity #1.

The above image is the first half of one of Weissman's Obamastrips, in which the president is confronted in his bedroom by the ghost of President James A. Garfield. Speaking of Garfield, guess what I am doing this weekend...? One of my least favorite things to do! I'm pretty excited about where I'll end up this time, however, as I'll be within walking distance of President James A. Garfield's house. Sweet, huh?

Hopefully it won't interfere too badly with my EDILW posting schedule, as I really should get started posting this year's "Super-Endorsements" series, seeing as how the election's like, days away now...

On Obama in Flashpoint...

Yesterday USA Today published one of those weird articles they occasionally do in which a reporter talks to some creators and/or an editor and comes up with an article exactly like the sort you'd read on Newsarama or Comic Book Resources, with the only difference being more "civilians" will read it and whoever assembled the quotes probably got paid somewhere between 10 and 50 times more for their work than the good people at Newsarama or CBR do when they write similar articles.

The lead mentions the fact that President Barack Obama appears in the fourth issue (he did in the third too, actually):

Even in an alternate universe where iconic superheroes are wrecking the world, pizza, juice boxes and President Obama help ground DC Comics' event series Flashpoint in reality.

Ugh.

Obama is also mentioned in the post at DC's PR blog, The Source, that links to the USA Today article.

Glossed over is the infinitely more interesting (probably especially so to people who don't give a shit that Element Woman is a superhero with a sense of humor) question of what the inclusion of the real president in Flashpoint says about DC as a publisher (they haven't included any real presidents since the Clinton administration, with Lex Luthor winning 2000's presidential election) and the decision to put President Barack Obama into the narrative of Flashpoint, about a villain changing the real, true DC Universe from the way it should be to a fallen, wicked world where the greatest heroes either don't exist or are genocidal maniacs, suggests about their view of Obama.

I mentioned this in my review of Flashpoint #3; I'll reprint the salient part here so you needn't wade through my reviews of various aspects of that and a stack of super-comics if you're only interested in this aspect:

...what really stood out in this scene for me was what the accidental politics of it might be. Did you guys see Colin “Too Busy Thinking About My Comics” Smith’s post about gender and race in Flashpoint and Fear Itself last week? (Both Blog@Newsarama and Robot 6 linked to it, so I’m assuming there’s a pretty good chance you did).

Smith points out that while Cyborg seemingly has a plum role in the world of Flashpoint, as its Superman, the story is constructed to constantly remind us that the world is a fallen one, where things are wrong, and the thrust of the series is that the heroes must put the world back together so that it’s the way it should be, again, the right way.

That is, so that Cyborg’s back to being a B- or C-Lister whose best days are behind him, and who is usually relegated to babysitting the new generation of Teen Titans, if doing anything at all. (I know that Geoff Johns himself doesn’t think that, based on the many times he’s written the character, and the many different ways he’s tried to cram him in whenever possible, due to what seems like genuine affection, but that’s what the story he’s currently writing suggests).

Anyway, given the reading of Flashpoint as a fallen world, what does that say about the fact that Obama is president in the Flashpoint DCU, but not the “real” DCU…?

I don't think Geoff Johns or DC as an entity is actually anti-Obama; if they seem conservative as a publisher, it seems to be conservative in the avoid-political-attention-of-any-kind-at-all-costs sort, rather than making political statements.

When anyone does detect a whiff of political opinion in their wares—a lesbian Batwoman, a Muslim member of Batman Inc., Superman renouncing his citizenship in some dumb, non-canonical back-up story, etc.—they generally seem caught off guard by it and, lately, to actively avoid even potential controversy.

Still, when villainous Professor Zoom, The Reverse-Flash changed the heroic DCU into a darker world, where Bruce Wayne was killed by a mugger when he was a little boy, where Superman was taken prisoner by the government as a child and experimented on for years and where Aquaman and Wonder Woman have destroyed Europe and are responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent civilians, he also arranged it so that President Generic Fakeperson was replaced by Barack Obama.

That might have been a more interesting thing to talk to the writer and editor of the story about then whether or not the fourth issue was going to be awesome and, if so, how awesome?

Groundhog Day comes but once a year...

Monday night I turned to Google Image to help me find some photo reference of a groundhog emerging from his hole to see (or not see) his shadow, and I came across this cartoon from last year, by Rob Rogers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.It’s a really nice drawing of a groundhog completely freaking out, but it was strange to see a political cartoon from that long ago, divorced from the news of the day by almost a year, and realize it didn’t really make all that much sense any more…at least, not as much sense as it would probably have made when it was originally drawn and published. I guess President Obama proposed a pretty large budget last February…?

Another 2010 Groundhog Day cartoon I found mentioned a Toyota being unable to stop, which was still a big news story last year around this time.

As holidays go, Groundhog Day is a pretty fascinating one to watch America’s political cartoonists play with, as it features a set of fairly universal iconography that can easily be applied to pretty much any topic, but unlike say, Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving, the iconography is extremely limited: Groundhog, emerging from hole, shadow, seeing or not seeing it, six more weeks of winter, or not. Those are the puzzle pieces cartoonists have to rearrange, remix, or swap out for something.

Let’s head on over to Daryl Cagle’s Political Cartoonists Index which, of course, has a dedicated Groundhog Day gallery, and see what cartoonists came up with this year. Cagle’s own cartoon is…weird. It features President Obama either dressed up in an adorable little groundhog suit, or as some sort of mutant human/groundhog hybrid, emerging from a hole. Given the shortness of his arms, I’m assuming it’s the latter. Why is Obama a groundhog? I don’t know. Watching the ritual is a man with an elephant’s head. That’s probably the symbol of the Republican party, expressing his disbelief in the groundhog day superstition, but he looks so strange there, interacting groundhog with a man’s face, instead of a man with a donkey’s face. Henry Payne of The Detroit News similarly features Obama as the groundhog, but rather than groundhogizing the president, Payne simply has President Obama emerging from a hole in the ground, which struck me as much funnier, simply because of the absurd incongruity of the president emerging from a hole n the ground. (The mailbox seems kind of like unnecessary overkill, cluttering the message though; are any of Payne’s readers likely to not recognize who that man is supposed to be, or that he’s behaving in a groundhog like fashion? By naming him “Obama Hog,” it kind of raises questions about whether that is the president or, just some guy who looks like him and has his last name for his first name).

Bob Englehart of The Hartford Courant provides another cartoon inserting President Obama into the Groundhog Day ritual, but here he’s one of the top-hatted Inner Circle guys who pulls the groundhog out of the ground, rather than as the groundhog himself.This groundhog isn’t Punxsutawney Phil, but is instead named Health Care Reform, an unusual name for a groundhog, which he has apparently had branded across his torso. Given the torture he must have endured, perhaps the arrow that claimed his life in this image came as a relief…?

No, “Health Care Reform” probably isn’t his name; it’s what he’s supposed to symbolize in this cartoon, via the proud, lazy tradition of straight-up labeling something as something else in a political cartoon. Why is Health Care Reform being shot with an arrow, every time the president holds it aloft? I don’t know; the president’s health care reform hasn’t yet been shot down in a meaningful way. So far, House Republican’s passed a purely symbolic We Sure Don’t Like This measure, and a few federal judges in lower courts ruled it unconstitutional, but it will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court to make that call.

Of course, the arrow itself isn’t labeled, so we have no way of telling who it is that keeps shooting Health Care Reform to death.

Whoever it was, it wasn’t Sarah Palin.As we can see in Atlanta Journal-Constitution cartoonist Mike Luckovich’s cartoon, she doesn’t use a bow or crossbow, but a high-powered rifle.

Englehart isn’t the only cartoonist to prominently feature a dead groundhog this year.

John Cole draws one face down in the snow, its little legs sticking straight up in rigormortis, with a guy in a top hat asking another guy in a top hat, “What does it mean if he succumbs to hypothermia?”

Bill Schorr also drew a frozen-to-death Groundhog in this repeat from last year:I like this one a bit more, as the groundhog may have frozen to death, but he froze to death in a funny way, and his death seems easily reversible: Just thaw him out, and he’s good to go.

Jeff Darcy of The Plain-Dealer has a groundhog stuffed and mounted above some guy’s mantle:For some reason, this dude decided to not only mount the head as a trophy, as is usually the case with the taxidermied corpses hunters display in this manner, but he includes the forelegs as well, making it look like the groundhog died while trying to wiggle its way through a too-small hole in the man’s wall.

The weapon the fellow in the Darcy cartoon used was a shovel which, incidentally, is what the gentleman in Brian Duffy’s cartoon plans to brain the groundhog with: Are these before and after images of the same drama?

And if you find yourself wondering what happened to the rest of the groundhog’s body after the shovel guy cut off its head and forepaws to mount on his wall, it was, of course, roasted and eaten by hobos:Rick McKee of the Augusta Chronicle has the groundhog whispering to the Inner Circle that global warming is a crock:The Inner Circle top hats are obviously pretty freaked out about this; is it the message, or simply the fact that the groundhog is speaking to them? (This groundhog has something in common with Spider-Man).

My personal favorite of this year’s crop of groundhog cartoons is Larry Wright’s, which seems to feature a pissed off groundhog, with his few groundhog possessions tightly packed into two tiny groundhog-sized suitcases, moving out of his hole in the ground, presumably because it’s been foreclosed upon, or he can no longer afford payments to his, um, hole in the ground: Now that’s a true sign of a terrible housing market and worse economy—when even a hole in the ground is too expensive. Where is the groundhog moving too? Presumably somewhere not as nice, but what’s sort of living space is less nice than a hole in the ground?

Finally, there’s this one from Randy Bish of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which I believe may also be a repeat, as it looks very familiar:It raises a lot of questions, like, why are those top hats and the groundhog looking at a blank, black monitor screen? What is the dear’s computer plugged into? And who wouldn’t want to see see deer replaced with robot deer during hunting season? Wouldn’t hunting robot deer be sort of awesome? Hell, I’m a vegetarian and former member of PETA, and I’d take up hunting if I could shoot robots.

Actually, I was most curious about this hole robot groundhog thing. Is it for real? It is! Awesome.

What's wrong with this political cartoon?

Nothing at all, in terms of Salt Lake Tribune cartoonist Pat Bagley's drawing ability.

That is a really nice drawing of Parks and of Breitbart and of Sherrod—Bagley does a great job of making Sherrod look at once like an inanimate object of the sort one might push or roll around, yet she's just animated enough to display a surprised expression. I like the period details invested in each bus, indicating which time period each is from, and I even like the slightly messy, dashed-off look of the colors as seen above (although my hometown paper, where I saw the cartoon earlier today, ran it in black and white).

The connection between "back of the bus" and "under the bus" in terms of racial politics in America seems like a sensible kernel with which to start a political cartoon on the subject, but Bagley seems to have garbled something in the final execution.

The expression "to throw someone under the bus" means to scapegoat or blame an ally, or at least someone who can be seen as an ally or as on the same team as the person doing the throwing (or pushing or tossing). Whether the throw-ee is thrown under the bus with good reason or not, or whether the thrower was justified to be throwing them at all, doesn't really matter in the usage of the phrase. The sole requirement is that both the thrower or throw-ee were on the same bus, moving the same direction. It denotes a betrayal or abandonment of the person thrown under the bus.

So why is the man labeled "Breitbart" in this cartoon at all?

Conservative blogger Andrew Brietbart kicked off the fast-moving media storm that resulted in Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod being fired, yes. He did so by editing a March speech she gave in such a way to suggest, to Breitbart and those who, like him, are concerned that the NAACP, of which Sherrod was a member, may be for the Advancement of Colored People as their name suggests, but only at the expense of the Color-less People. That is, Sherrod, who is black, is racist against white people, and this was proven by a not-terribly-damning-even-out-of-context bit of a speech she once gave.

Long story (that you probably already know) short, the NAACP condemned Sherrod and USDA Tom Vilsack fired her, based on Breitbart's claims, which no one bothered to check out for a good 24 hours or so.

So one could say that the NAACP threw Sherrod under the bus. One could say that Vilsack through her under the bus. Or the USDA. Or the media. Or the Obama administration. Or Obama himself (assigning blame to him personally might not be accurate per se, but it would be accurate enough for a political cartoon, in which a president can symbolize his party or administration).

But Breitbart? He didn't throw Sherrod under the bus. He's just about the only person or institution mentioned in this post who didn't throw Sherrod under the bus. If he has a place in the bush-throwing-under metaphor, perhaps one could say he indirectly suggested she be thrown under the bus, but to suggest that he did the throwing himself suggests a closeness between he and Sherrod.

So despite some wonderful drawings, I think this political cartoon is "wrong"...not in the opinions it expresses (which I don't quite understand anyway), but in its reporting of the situation it uses as its basis.

Of course, that's assuming that the right half of the cartoon is meant to suggest the expression "to throw someone under the bus."

Maybe the message of the cartoon is simply that in in the past, much of white America was institutionally discriminatory against black ladies when it came to public transportation, whereas today we may have gotten past that, but Andrew Breitbart still runs around pushing down middle-aged black ladies, and the Fox News bus then tries to run them over.

If that's the case, then this political cartoon makes perfect sense.



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The above version of Bagley's cartoon was taken from Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoonists Index. Click here to see examples of the various ways various political cartoonists approached the Sherrod/Breitbart fiasco. More than one used bus imagery, and John Darkow even used a back of the bus/under the bus formulation, only he attributed the pushing of Sherrod under the bus to Obama and the NAACP.

I have just ten things to say to you.

1.) I don't have any snide remarks, salient criticisms or political points to make about the above political cartoon by David Fitzsimmons of the Arizona Daily Star at all. I just really like it. I noticed it—in black and white—at the top of an opinion page in an open newspaper on a table in a bakery the other day and was super-excited by design of whoever that woman was (I couldn't tell at an upside-down, walking-past glance).

I'm not so crazy about the elephant, whose face is oddly detailed compared to the other two figures (it's even got liver spots on the side of its human-like head!), but both the Elena Kagan and the President Obama are awesome. I love how few lines are used to make them each up, and the quick, sketchiness of the features (like how the oval of Kagan's nose overlaps with the line of her cheek, for example).

That's also a fine looking Obama...recognizably Obama, but unlike everyone else's version of Obama. I would love to have seen Fitzsimmons drawing his Obama on the page. Did he start with that severe straight line from the neck tie down to the hem of his pant legs, and build from there?

At any rate, it's a great drawing.

While looking it up online after briefly spotting it in the wild, I came across some more Kagan-related cartoons, two of which I thought worth mentioning.

First, here's one by Tom Toles, one of my favorite political cartoonists working today (As point of fact, one of the few who I know by name):
That is one gigantic label he's got Kagan wearing. Considering the context, it doesn't seem necessary at all, either...if you're aware a lady was just nominated to the Supreme Court, and there's only one lady in this cartoon with a building labeled Supreme Court in it, then you've gotta assume the lady is Kagan, right? Her label is so big, it can't even fit in that lion's mouth!

Finally, here's an interesting one from R.J. Matson of The New York Observer:

I'm sure most of you recognize the reference:

How well-known is that first Peanuts strip, do you think? I wonder how many of the folks who see the political cartoon will recognize the homage to Charles Schulz. It works either way, of course, but if the reference isn't apparent, then maybe it doesn't work too well as an homage...?

It was certainly a pleasant surprise to see this one though.

If you'd like to see scads more Kagan cartoons, and compare and contrast the various ways political cartoonists addressed the subject, you should definitely check out Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoonists Index "Nominee Kagan" gallery, which is where two of the above images were swiped from.


2.) New York Times columnist Ross Douthat seems like kind of an odd duck, at least judging from the few pieces of his I've read. Like that one about how Jews don't have their own Middle-Earth or Narnia the way Christians do, or the one about how CNN should be more like CNN already is or...well, best not to even get into the things he's said about gay marriage, birth control and the Catholic Church child rape scandals (It probably didn't help my esteem for Mr. Douthat that the first time I ever heard of him was in this gross story he told about his love life, which made him seem like a real creep. Or, as Wonkette memorably described him, a "Misogynist Neck-Beard.")

I know, I know, deadlines, pressure, you gotta have something to fill that space—I worked in newspapers before too, and I'm well aware of the fact that I still write a ton of dumb shit all the time because I have to have blog fodder to fill the blog. Of course, I'm generally writing about Batman comics and in-development superhero movies for the blog portion of a comics and nerd-culture website (and being compensated accordingly), not writing for The New York Fucking Times (and being compensated accordingly).

But this isn't about me. It's about Ross Douthat. And Iron Man.

Douthat's latest dumb column is headlined "Prisoners of the Superhero Movie," and is a sort-of-but-not-really response to that Matt Zoller Seitz superhero movie takedown on Salon that everyone who writes about comics has felt obligated to talk about this week (I'm working on mine now! I'll finish 'er up as soon as Law & Order:SVU ends!), and a comment from Chris Orr about how Iron Man probably would have been a fine movie without actually having Iron Man in it, due to how awesome Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark is.

Douthat:

[F]rom there, it’s an even shorter leap to questions like, “what kind of movies would a clean-and-sober Robert Downey, Jr. be making if he wasn’t already signed up for ‘The Avengers’ and ‘Iron Man 3’ and the sequel to last’s year ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (which was basically a superhero flick dressed up in Victoriana)”? Or “what kind of films might Jon Favreau/Bryan Singer/Sam Raimi/Christopher Nolan have directed if they hadn’t been sucked into the superhero vortex”? Or “wouldn’t it have been nice to see a Heath Ledger/Christian Bale confrontation in which they weren’t saddled with the grim conventions of the comic-book blockbuster?” Or … well, you get the idea.

Sometimes I try to imagine what the 1970s would have been like if comic-book movies had dominated the cinematic landscape the way they do today.

His basic point is...murky. Either he's just using the idea as a springboard for a round of decade-specific fantasy casting. Or, perhaps, simply that the films of the seventies would have been worse, and, given how influential that decade's films were, then perhaps modern film history as we know it would have been altered for the worse...?

I was intrigued by the launch point of his fantasy casting though, that last sentence in the block quote above.

What would the 1970s have been like if comic-book superhero movies dominated the cinematic landscape the way they do today? Well, there would have been a lot of cheesy movies with a lot of terrible special effects.

As someone who has a Google alert set for the word "superhero," I've read way too many stories about how the 21st century, post-9/11 zeitgeist is responsible for the rise of the superhero in pop culture. I'm sure some psychological /cultural forces in play with the phenomenon, but there are also much more likely explanations. As far as the rise of the superhero movie goes, however, clearly the computer-driven leaps and bounds that special effects technology have gone through since the '90s have been the prime factor.

Can you imagine an Iron Man movie in, say, 1975? Or a Spider-Man? The Hulk? Hell, could you imagine a series of Batman movies a decade or less since the Adam West show was a hit on TV? Running down the list of Douthat's fantasy seventies super-movies, the only one that seems do-able with the special effects technology of the time—somewhere between that which you could see on superhero TV shows like Lou Ferigno's Hulk and the Shazam! show on the low end and Star Wars on the high end—would have maybe have been the X-Men (lasers and lightning bolts could be drawn in during post, magnet and psychic powers would have been easy enough, etc). But then, why would anyone have made an X-Men movie in the seventies, or at any point before their early nineties super-popularity? (Similarly, why would anyone have made a Batman movie prior to the late-eighties, when Frank Miller and a few creators immediately before and immediately after him solidified Batman's new, serious, camp-free Dark Knight persona? The year 1989 was about as early as a Batman live action movie could have been made.

I can't imagine an animatronic or stop-motion Hulk or Iron Man in a big, successful movie, nor can I imagine a live-action Spider-Man swinging on a web line in a 1979 movie that would look like anything different than a guy in a funny costume swinging on a rope, in the same way Johnny Weismuller swung on vines as Tarzan decades earlier) and, of course, without a successful live-action Spider-Man, would any studio even bother with a Hulk or Iron Man movie?

Which is another big factor in the ubiquity of superhero movies—momentum. X-Men and Spider-Man got made, in large part, because Blade got made...and turned a profit. Everything we've seen since was made because X-Men and Spider-Man were huge hits. No matter how many misfires and (financial) disappointments there are, occasional hits like Iron Man and The Dark Knight provide momentum to make Green Lantern and Thor and so on.

If some unlikely visionary had made a superhero movie in the early seventies* to kick off an honest-to-God decade-long superhero movie trend, it would have had to also make a Scrooge McDuckian money bin worth of profit for there to have been a second or third superhero movie, as it takes more than one to be a trend.

Godammit Ross Douthat, you've made me think about this way too long!


3.) Yesterday Johanna Draper Carlson posted a link to this post on Collected Editions, regarding which key DCU trade collections are currently out of print. Of those discussed, I think the number of Geoff Johns-written Flash collections are probably the most head-scratching, as Johns is DC's most popular writer, and both Johns and DC have invested a lot in his work on the Flash (in a lot of ways, Johns' subsequent Green Lantern work used the template he used on Flash).

Final Night, like Zero Hour, is something it seems like DC should obviously have available for readers in some form given the primacy of Hal Jordan in the DCU and the sales charts at the moment—those are the stories where he sacrificed his life to save the galaxy in an attempt to redeem himself for unmaking and trying to remake all of existence while, it's since been retconned, he was possessed by Parallax.

Parallax and the events of those stories played a major role in the just finished Blackest Night, surely someone's going to read those comics and want to see what they were referencing for themselves, right? Why not make it easy?

Likewise, I was surprised to see how much Nightwing is out of print. The Chuck Dixon-written Nightwing, like all Nightwing, wasn't exactly great comics, but they were decent Batman Lite stories, and since the Dick Grayson-as-Batman Batman and Robin is currently one of DC's (and the direct market's) best-selling comics, surely there's more interest in Grayson than usual out there right now, right?

I'm less surprised to hear about Batman: No Man's Land, a story which is more of a branding effort/status quo a la "Dark Reign" than a story-story, and the related Bat crossovers like Legacy and Cataclysm. I read portions of those in singles, and I'd have no idea how you'd collect them into trades, or why you would. Maybe something like a Showcase Presents is the way to go...?

Showcase Presents definitely seem the best way to handle books like Underworld Unleashed and summer annual crossovers like Armageddon 2001, Eclipso: The Darkness Within and so on. Of course, they're of relatively recent vintage and I thought there were royalty issues which made cheap, phone book-format, black-and-white trades of such material undoable for DC, so maybe that will never happen. But since the way many of their big crossover events used to be written and sold—a short miniseries that crossed over into an issue or annual of everything—it seems to be the best way to do it. Particularly since they tend to not be the sort of thing anyone would wanna pay for to get in a fancy schmancy omnibus edition.

Anyway, there are a lot of trades out of print that you would maybe think should be in print. I mean, there are Magog and Red Circle trades being released as we speak.


4.) When I first saw this Joe Jusko cover image for a Boom miniseries, the first thing I thought was that maybe it was for a Marvel comic entitled What If...The Punisher Was Conan?. I want to read that comic. The comic it actually is—Hawks of Outremer, based on a lesser Robert E. Howard property—looks like something I might want to read as well, though.


5.) I have a review of Solomon's Thieves by Jordan Mechner, LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland at Blog@ if you're interested. It occurred to me after writing it that, based on my years of working in a public library, Solomon's Thieves is exactly the sort of historical fiction that is pretty popular among prose readers, but which I would never, ever pick up and devote the time to if it were told in prose. Tell a similar story with excellently cartooned images, however, and I'm all over it. Weird.


6.) I updated last Thursday's post about Rick Spears' illustrations for the prose book Tales of the Cryptids with a link to Spears' website. Apparently I'm not the first person to wonder if he's the same Ricks Spears who wrote Teenagers From Mars and Black Metal, since his homepage starts with the words "No, I'm Not the Comic Book Writer..."


7.) Here is an account of an actual conversation I had with a non-comics reader, age 56, earlier today.

"Batman," he says dramatically, picking up a copy of Batman #698 I have in a to-be-returned-to-the-library pile on a table near my front door. He idly flips through it, and starts offering a dramatic reading of a page he lands on at random: "'Someone's killed off three of your old friends. Or roommates, if that's more accurate. I just want to know why.' 'Hell if I know. People make enemies in this town. Anyway, it's none of my business.'"

He glances at the cover, then says, "Hey, I thought that the Joker was dead."

"That's the Riddler," I answer. "But the Joker's not dead. Batman's dead at the moment. That's not the real Batman in there. It's the original Robin. The original Batman was sent back through time, but I think he comes back this week."

"But no one knows this isn't the real Batman?"

"None of the bad guys know."

He flips the page and does another dramatic reading of a panel.


8.) After years of resisting temptation, I finally broke down and borrowed some Cromartie High School from the library (Why was I resisting? Well, I'd heard from so many people that it was so good that I imagined it must be good, and the covers all looked so cool that I assumed I'd buy it one day, so I'd just wait to read it after I bought it). I would just like to report that it is, as you may have heard from others, a really funny series. It took me about a volume to get used to the peculiar pacing and style of character design and joke delivery, but once I did, I've been enjoying each chapter more and more. I'm on volume five at the moment, so perhaps it takes a plunge in quality somewhere down the line, but so far? So good.


9.) Back in...geez, 2007? (I've been doing this that long?!)...I wrote a post about the Batman vs. Etrigan fight in Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle's Detective Comics #603, and mentioned that this was one of my favorite Batman panels:
Recently reader Thiago Fernandes wrote in to share with me a "cover" panel of that panel, from 1996 prestige format one-shot Batman/Demon #1, also written by Alan Grant and drawn by David Roach: And now I've shared it with you.



10.) Quick programming note: I'm going to go out of town to visit my not-so-local comics shop, pick up the last three Wednesdays worth of releases and, upon returning, read the hell out of them. It's therefore quite possible I won't have an update tomorrow, but, if that's the case, there should be a pretty huge one reviewing all those comics on Friday.



*I'm now racking my brain trying to think of a successful filmmaker of the era and superhero property franchise that would have matched up, but the early seventies seem too early for any superhero character I can think of. Star Wars didn't come out until 1977; how early would George Lucas have been able to roll, and what would he roll with? It's hard to imagine a New Gods film in the seventies...or at any time since, really...that wouldn't have sucked. Jim Henson didn't do his Muppet Movie until the end of the decade, but I bet he and his crew could have turned out a pretty sweet, partially animatronic movie, although what superhero properties would work with big, articulated Muppets? The only ones I can think of are minor heroes that wouldn't have been seen as worthy of investment at that point. Superpower-less superheroes like Batman, Daredevil, Wolverine and so on were technically possible as early as 1970, but none of 'em—even Batman—would have had the Q-rating to be worth anyone's trouble..

MLK Day "Special"

Holidays, like any major or potentially historical news events, are usually good times to check in on political cartoonists, as they usually occasion a certain uniformity in subject matter. For example, today was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so naturally a large swathe of our nation's top political cartoonist drew something on the subject of MLK, giving us the opportunity to see how different cartoonists interpret things differently (and how they differ in style and approach).

A lot of today's cartoons were not very good, although I suppose I could cut the drawing table jockeys some slack: Martin Luther King isn't exactly a side-splitting subject.

Let's turn to Daryl Cagle's invaluable Political Cartoon Index and see if we can't find some depressing and/or horrifying examples of political cartoons (ignoring completely the class of cartoons that simply show portraits of King or uses of his words to serve as simple "Hey, it's Martin Luther King Day!" illustrations instead of providing any additional commentary.)

Did you know that the Martin Luther King's initials are MLK? And that's practically the word milk?
Henry Payne of Detroit's Michigan News does! Here he's appropriated the long-lived "got milk?" ad campaign, misspelled it and attached it to King's massive stomach. (I much prefer the version on Payne's blog, which attaches the slogan to a place one's more likely to see advertising slogans, and I like the way he draws men in profile).

Is there a way to make the "got mlk?" joke, but be a lot grosser? There sure is, and Joe Heller of the Green Bay Press-Gazette has found it!
Martin Luther King believed so strongly in equal rights for all that he meticulously shaved his mustache to read "EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL," thus constantly advocating for just that any time anyone glanced at the lower half of his face.

Or wait, is his EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL-stache supposed to be like the famous milk mustaches of the "got milk?" ads, formed by the drinking of milk in a sloppy, child-like manner? Did King just drink a cup of black milk, which somehow stained his face with...You know what? Let's just move on. I don't really want to look at King's mustache any longer, whether it's his special day or not.

Aaaauuuggghhh! What...what's going on here?! What is Gordon Campbell trying to tell us? That King has now been dead so long that his tombstone has taken on the characteristics of the man buried beneath it? Is that why it's developed King's face and mustache? Can...can it talk...?

Wait, here's some more horror:
This image comes courtesy of Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (a cartoonist who has one of my favorite lines). It depicts the tiny, glowing ghost of the still-living President Barack Obama haunting the birthday cake of the long-dead Martin Luther King for...for some reason.

Happy MLK Day, I guess.

Ten things that occurred to me while I was reading Amazing Spider-Man: Election Day

—The blurbs chosen for the back cover reflected the collectible nature of the Obama cover, rather than the contents or quality of the book. There’s one from Geoff Boucher of the Los Angeles Times and another from David Colton of USA Today. The former simply states that Obama hangs out with Spider-Man, and was seemingly from a news story about the issue rather than a review; the latter states “In a growing world of Barack Obama collectibles, one item soon may be swinging above the rest.”

The “collectible” being referred to, however, isn’t this collection, of course, but one of the comic books that originally contained one of the stories found inside this book. There’s therefore something rather…tricksy about the blurb.

There are two more blurbs on the inside of the book jacket; these aren’t from mainstream media outlets like the LA Times or USA Today, which is probably why they’re relegated to the inside, but they do speak to the quality of the work. Adam Chapman of Comixtreme.com says something about writer Marc Gugenheim’s script, and Daniel Schmergel of IGN.com says something nice about John Romita Jr’s artwork (“He is the Spider-Man artist of his generation”).


—Someone really needs to declare a moratorium on the telling-the-story-through-news-anchors device in superhero comics. Marc Guggenheim relies on it extensively throughout the “Election Day” storyline that accounts for most of this collection’s 180-pages, and it’s beyond tiresome. Perhaps it didn’t read quite so cheap and hackneyed when experienced in a serial comic book, one scene every week or two, but man was it irritating to have the same two talking heads appear every 20 pages or so to re-explain what I just read.


—Guggenheim’s five-issue story arc that forms the bulk of this book was surprisingly enjoyable. I haven’t been following ASM regularly, but the plot was easy to follow, the execution was engaging, and the big events and revelations—the identity of Menace, the secret behind The Spider-Tracer Killer, the winner of the New York City mayoral election—still hit with impact.

Guggenheim doesn’t write the best Spider-Man fight chatter—his jokes are neither genuinely funny nor funny in their corny unfunniness—but because the arc was so plot-oriented, Spider-Man’s voice was much less important than what was going on around him.


—John Romita Jr. is awesome. As long as he’s drawing a Spider-Man story, it can’t help but seem right on some level. I can’t help but think “One More Day” would have went down infinitely more smoothly if he were drawing it instead of Joe Quesada.


—While the Spider-Man office has seemingly done a pretty good job of assembling a “brain trust” of comics scripters to keep Amazing Spider-Man going as a fast-paced, plot-driven soap opera comic, finding artist whose style work together quite as smoothly is infinitely more challenging.

Romita dominates this book, and draws almost the entirety of the “Election Day” arc, but there’s a brief, one-issue interlude drawn by Barry Kitson and a pair of inkers, and the style-shift is quite jarring.

The other, shorter stories feature art by Marcos Martin, Andy MacDonald, Todd Nauck and, in the worst example of style shift coming in a single issue penciled by Fabrizio Fiorentino, whose work looks like this:


And Patrick Olliffe, whose work looks like this:

Each artist in that story, “With Great Responsibility Comes Great Power,” were inked and colored by different artists too, so that the two portions of the story—Spider-Man at Night Nurse’s office and Peter Parker checking in with his friends after the events of “Election Day”—look like they’re from entirely different comic books.


—Marcos Martin should draw every Spider-Man story that John Romita Jr. doesn’t have time to draw himself. The story of his collected here, “The Spartacus Gambit” from Amazing Spider-Man: Extra #1, is a court room drama telling some of the events of “Election Day” in much greater detail, and it’s just beautiful, beautiful work. Whether it’s lawyers standing around talking, or a dozen Spider-Men bouncing around a courtroom, every single image is dynamic and fun.


—The “Spidey Meets The President” story in which Spider-Man meets Obama is greatly expanded, and comes across as perhaps too a-political, with Senator John McCain being written into the story, so as to achieve something approaching “equal time” I guess.

The extra pages don’t really add much, other than giving Todd Nauck further opportunity to demonstrate he doesn’t do political likenesses very well.

Here’s his Joe Biden, who doesn’t get all that Biden-esque until the very last panel…

…and here’s his McCain, who, um, doesn’t look a damn thing like McCain…



—Matt Fraction and Andy MacDonald’s six-page Presidents’ Day Special story, “Gettysburg Distress!”, which was originally presented online, is a lot more boring than I would have thought possible for a story featuring this cover. I mean, the first panel has Professor Abraham Von Lincolnstein, “The villain so loopy he steals five dollar bills and “corrects” them with his own twisted image!”—breaking through a band wall with his robot gang, and the last panel has Spider-Man offering Captain America a fruit pie, but in between it’s just Captain America watching President Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg dress.


—The book also contains the covers of the second, third, fourth and fifth printings of ASM #583, “The Obama issue.” They’re all pretty much the exact same image…the backgrounds are swapped out, and different dialogue bubbles pasted up next to Spidey, but it’s just the same drawing of Obama giving a thumbs up while Spidey takes a picture of the back of his head over and over.



—The “Decade Variant” of ASM #599 featuring President Nixon is not included.
That is a damn shame.

Recent children's books that may (or may not) be of interest

Legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer has provided the illustrations for a new children’s picture book, which he made with his daughter and occasional collaborator Kate Feiffer. It’s called Which Puppy? (Simon and Schuster), and deals with President Barack Obama’s election night promise to his girls that he would get them a puppy.

You may have heard of it already. A couple of weeks ago, USA Today gave it a front page write-up along with another kids book on the subject, First Dog, and Stephen Colbert mentioned it on his show when unveiling his own children’s book, You Spent 10 Trillion Dollars in a Day Just Buy a Goddam Dog Already.

Both Feiffers have made children’s books before, both together and apart. I scooped up as many as I could find from my library the other day after reading this one, and the one that seems most relevant is probably Henry, The Dog with No Tail, which, in addition to being written by Kate and illustrated by Jules, also dealt with dogs.

Which Puppy? begins on election night, with a view of Obama from behind, making his announcement:
From there it follows the news from the animals’ perspective. It gets passed on from animal to animal until “it seemed like everyone wanted to be that puppy.”

And not just puppies and dogs. A guinea pig named Sam wants in on the action, a turtle named Marple plans to take up barking lessons, a kitten named Keisha started pretending to be a puppy, and so on.

Eventually, “thousands of puppies, hundreds of reporters, and more kittens, skunks, turtles, raccoons, guinea pigs and rabbits than can be counted on two hands gathered together.” Wait, that’s only ten. That’s not that many.

Well, they gather together and argue about various methods of determining which will be the Obamas’ new puppy, and after some contests and a drawing, a big fat dog says that “ancient custom dictates that a true presidential puppy must have two rings around one paw, a heart on its face, an eye that winks, and a tail that tells time.”

No one animal fits that criteria, but they found one puppy with the rings, another with the wink and face-heart, and Sam the guinea pig’s tail could tell time. So the trio set off for the white house, only to discover that the Obamas already had a puppy:
(Not pictured: The actual puppy, as apparently Feiffer was drawing long before it was actually announced)

Bummed out, they turn to leave, but “the two girls who had just moved into the White House,” visible only from the knees down, ask them to come back and play. “We have a puppy who needs new friends.”

As a story, I found it rather meandering and uninteresting, but then, it’s recommended for kids ages four to eight, and I’m actually four times eight-years-old. The main reason I looked into the book was to see the ender Feiffer’s work.

And there’s plenty of it here. Using brush, ink and watercolor markers, he designs and draws dozens of loosely-assembled, somewhat scribbly dogs that look like they could be wiped off the page with a god scrubbing, they’re so delicately outlined and wet with watercolors-looking.

Human figures are kept to a minimum—those are the two instances in which he draws Obama himself above—and the focus remains on the dogs and other animals throughout.

I’m hesitant to recommend it, but it’s definitely worth a look from Feiffer fans.


In other recently released children’s book news, a couple of books I’ve talked about before here have gotten sequels. Melanie Watt’s Scaredy Squirrel returns in Scaredy Squirrel at Night (Kids Can Press), which fits snugly into the highly repetitive but still somehow kind of enjoyable formula of the first thiree.

As you’ll recall, Scaredy is a squirrel that seems to suffer from a variety of crippling mental illnesses, particularly agoraphobia and other anxiety-related disorders. In the course of each book, he conquers his phobia and makes a small step toward recovery. Only to have a different behavioral problem in the next book. Poor Scaredy!

This time, I’m unable to pinpoint the exact disorder, but it’s another fear/anxiety-based one:

Scaredy Squirrel never sleeps. He'd rather stay awake than risk having a bad dream in the middle of the night.

There’s a list of a few of the creatures he’s afraid might appear in a bad dream, and they are all extremely cute:
Although the fairies and unicorn look a little rough; I’m kinda scared of those spindly-armed, buck-toothed, ball-headed fairies Watt draws too.

There are, of course, side effects to Scaredy’s sleepless nights, including energy loss, moodiness and hallucinations. Once again, Scaredy suffers from a real-life problems, and it is ruining his day-to-day life. God these books are sad.

One night Scaredy, a Libra, sees in his horoscope that, “At midnight all your dreams will come true.” Fearing this means ghosts, vampire bats and dragons will team up with fairies and unicorns to come get him, Scaredy plans to face them a series of strange tools and plans (distracting the fairies with cupcakes, afan to blow away ghosts, molasses to slow down the unicorn, et cetera).

Instead of the various monsters, however, Scaredy is visited by a bunch of raccoons and other nocturnal creatures, including some super-cute bugs which I just now noticed and which I wish I would have scanned, on account of their cuteness.

Relying on his usual defense mechanism, Scaredy plays dead, and laying down with his eyes closed while exhausted, he falls asleep, making it through the night without suffering a bad dream an learning sleeping all night is awesome.

If you’ve read one of these books, if you read them all, but this one does have some better, cuter character designs then some of the previous ones, plus a cover with a glow-in-the-dark element that’s pretty cool. See Scaredy’s tooth smile on the cover up there? It glows.


Finally, Sara Varon of Robot Dreams fame just released Chicken and Cat Clean Up (Scholastic), the sequel to her excellent graphic novel-that-looks-like-and-was-sold-as-a-children’s-picture-book book Chicken and Cat.

I wrote a bit about Chicken and Cat Clean Up over at Blog@ already (you can read my review of it here), so I won’t repeat all of that here.

All I wanted to add was how weird Varon’s New York City is, particularly in the way it’s peopled with anthropomorphic animals, humans and normal animals, something that often takes me a little getting used to (It really freaked me out when I first started seeing Dragon Ball cartoons, for example, and I still haven’t come to terms with the fact that Goofy is Mickey Mouse’s friend while Pluto is his pet…and that Pluto is to Mickey as dogs are to humans in terms of size proportions).

It sits fine with me personally, but I’m not sure I could have dealt with it as a little kid.

Check it out. Here’s Cat waking up in bed, with what I assume is a teddy bear:
That is a teddy bear, right? A toy stuffed animal? And not just, like, a dead baby bear cub? Because that would be horrible. (I like the cover of the book Cat’s reading; is that Moby Dick, do you think?)

Once Cat joins Chicken in the kitchen for a breakfast of orange juice, doughnuts and coffee, Cat looks in the paper for a pet to buy:
A house cat wants to buy a pet? A pet with a pet?! The sheep looks like it may also be anthropomorphicized like Cat, but the fish and horse are to Cat as hey would be to a human being. Also, a cat with a fish for a pet? Wouldn't the cat just eat the fish?

This is the part that really bugged me:

Ha ha! Bugged! It's funny because look, there is a lady bug right there! Note that the bug and the mouse are roughly the same size. Is it a tiny mouse or a gigantic lady bug? It's weird and gross is what it is.

Cat catches the mouse, and turns him over to the police, as he's wanted for being a thief and a liar:
Lying is a crime in New York now? Wow, they really did crack down on crime! Now, note the fact that the mouse is an intelligent, clothes-wearing, anthropomorphic mouse, but he's nowhere near the size of Cat. In fact, he is to Cat as a regular mouse would be to a regular cat. But, fucking things up even further, there's a human being in the police station, and the person is not significantly larger than Cat or Chicken.

Finally, with the reward Cat received for catching the mouse, a pet is finally bought:
And the one animal owns another animal as its pet.

So weird...