Meanwhile...

Remember last week, when I said I wouldn't be contributing to Blog@Newsarama.com anymore, but hoped to find a new home at a comics-focused site on the Internet for my online-writing-about-comics-that-I-don't-just-post-here?

Well guess what?

I did.

Head on over to Robot 6 at ComicBookResources.com, and you'll find my first contribution, a piece about Ralph Cosentino's children's picture book (that is actually pretty much just a comic book in the format of a picture book), Wonder Woman: The Story of The Amazon Princess.

(The plan is contribute weekly-ish there, a much less demanding schedule which will hopefully allow for me to produce slightly longer and greatly improved pieces than those I was producing the last few weeks for Blog@, after the daily blogging schedule started to grind me down. )

And, when you're done reading that Robot 6 piece, you might also want to visit Las Vegas Weekly's home page, where you'll find a short review of Fantagraphics' new Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Vol. 1: Race To Death Valley . (Even shorter review? It's really, really good).

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I reread Cosentino's Wonder Woman book with Niece #1 (now aged 7), and we took turns reading it to each other, each of us doing a page turn a piece, and then alternating back and forth.

She's not really into superheroes at all—she has an irrational hatred of Batman, which I may have mentioned at some point before—but she seemed to like it okay, going back to reread it quietly by herself after we read it together, and she lingered on some of the pictures.

I guess it shouldn't really be surprising that a 7-year-old girl might be mildly interested in a character who is a princess that talks to and befriends animals and beats up monsters and bad guys. There were an awful lot of words that were brand new to her in it, though, and she stumbled over a lot of pronunciation, including the word "Inuit" and a lot of Greek names, like Hippolyta, Heracles, Aphrodite and Circe.

This was her first exposure to Greek mythology, as far as I know.

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Cosentino's Wonder Woman book, like his previous superhero storybook, Superman: The Story of The Man of Steel, had a cameo in it specific to his own body of work. Let's take a look at them, shall we?

On this page/in this panel, Wonder Woman narrates that part of her mission is "to teach peace and respect to all," and she's pictured hanging out with four people:The little boy on the left looks slightly out of place, doesn't he? Perhaps because he has dots for eyes, unlike the other characters in the scene. Or perhaps because he's Cosentino's Fun-Boy, from his book The Marvelous Misadventures of Fun-Boy.

In Superman: The Story of The Man of Steel, there's a page/panel devoted to the "Look, up in the sky!" routine, and the crowd seems to be full of more-detailed-than-usual characters, which makes me wonder how many of them are supposed to be modeled after real people. I definitely recognized the characters on this lady's shirt:It's Swella-Bow-Wow and Honk-Honk Ashoo, from Cosentino's The Story of Honk-Honk Ashoo & Swella-Bow-Wow!

That same scene also included this guy——who you may recognize from the cover of, like, every issue of Mad magazine ever.

Ralph Cosentino's The Marvelous Misadventures of Fun-Boy

I realize this is my third post this month about a work by Ralph Cosentino, but I swear I'm not trying to turn this into a Ralph Cosentino fan blog or anything*. It's just that I'm really excited about his art, and every new book of his I check out seems well worth spending some time talking about. Take, for example, The Marvelous Misadventures of Fun-boy (Viking; 2006), a book you'll likely find shelved with the children's picture books at your local library or book store, but which is actually a short collection of a dozen comic strips.

It's a rather unusual book in that respect, as it's essentially a comic strip collection of a comic strip that seemed to have been reverse-engineered from the collection in order to fill the collection, if that makes sense (Which it probably doesn't).

The book is a six-and-a-half-inch high, eleven-inch long hardcover rectangle. When you open it up, the picture space doubles to 22-inches long. Across this huge horizontal space are stretched a series of four-panel comic strips. Each opens with the title of the strip, Fun-Boy in the upper right-hand corner, followed by the name of an episode.

Each stars the main character "Fun-Boy," an imaginative little dark haired boy who gets into little adventures and misadventures that end with gentle punchlines. The strips aren't terribly funny, but still funnier than about nine-tenths of what you'll find in the funnies pages on any given day. They're also silent, so the jokes are all completely visual in nature.

This suits Cosentino's work just fine, given the strength of his visuals. The level of abstraction here is somewhere between that of The Story of Honk-Honk-Ashoo and Swella-Bow-Wow and Batman: The Story of The Dark Knight.

The designs are stripped-down and super-cute, but still contain plenty of detail—it's just that the details are themselves stripped-own and super-cute. It's a flat, flat world, where every shape looks a bit like a piece of colorful paper cut out and reassembled into the big, square panels seamlessly to create a new comic strip reality.

I'm well beyond the target audience for the book, and I honestly didn't laugh, chuckle or even smile once at any of the jokes (unless you count the identification of one of the little kid characters on the inside front cover as "Pirate Steve," who, for some reason, has five o'clock shadow). But I still found it well worth my time just to see what Cosentino was doing here.

Here's an example of one of the strips. Because of the shape of the book, I had to chop it in half to fit it on the scanner. Just bear in mind that these four panels would stretch across the 22-inch length of the book in a single row if you were holding the real deal in your hands:

By the way, does that joke seem a little familiar? If so, you may remember that Cosentino used a version of it in the comics strip Scaredy Cat that Honk-Honk-Ashoo was reading in the paper.

Cosentino engages in quite a few allusions to Honk-Honk-Ashoo in this work, actually. For example, Fun-Boy's slippers above look an awful lot like Honk-Honk-Ashoo's bunny slippers, don't they?

In the first strip in the book, Fun-Boy is shown in a library in the first and fourth panels. In the first, there's a spine that reads "Honk-Honk-Ashoo & Swella Bow-Wow" on the bookshelf in the background. And here in the fourth, you can see the book's cover:


The book appears again in the fourth and final panel of one of the Little Nemo-esque strips, in which Fun-Boy awakens from an exciting scene only to find it was all a dream. It's on the floor near Giant Iron-Man and Spider-Guy:
I didn't notice that until my second or third time through the book. The first time I was way too distracted by a disturbing detail of this panel. Look at what Fun-Boy is using as a pillow! It's the severed head of Honk-Honk-Ashoo!

Severed heads aside, I would understand if you think this book looks a little too childish to engage your more mature, sophisticated interests. After all, Amazon recommends it for ages four to eight. So I would just like to point out that there's a little something in here for grown men too (beyond all the great art, of course). Fun-Boy's mom?
Totally hot.


Okay, I swear this is my last post about Cosentino, as Fun-Boy brings us to the end of his bibliography. Well, at least until April, when his Superman: The Story of The Man of Steel is due, and I have a feeling I'll probably have something to say about that too.



*Although if I were, I'd be sure and point out this awesome Batman vs. Godzilla painting of his, and let you know that you can see details of it here.

Ralph Cosentino's Batman: The Story of the Dark Knight

Curlicue-shaped gusts of wind blow a few stray autumn leaves past an imposing wrought iron gate, framed by two scary, demonic-looking gargoyles. In the background, a huge, dark mansion rises up into the deep blue sky, every window illuminated with yellow light, but no exterior lights playing upon it. Bare, leaf-less black trees point their branches like jagged fingers in the direction of the house, and a large flock of bats flying in an undulating cloud pass over the bright, white full moon in the direction of the house.

The image is stretched across the first two pages of Ralph Cosentino's Batman: The Story of the Dark Knight (Viking; 2008). In a rectangular box in the lower right-hand side of the image floats what looks like a perfectly rectangular scrap of paper. It reads: "Wayne Manor is where most people think I live, but only bats know my true home."

Turn the page and you see that true home. Under a spotlight in the background, a familiar figure with pointy ears and a flowing black, serrated cape sits hunched in front of a massive computer of indeterminate vintage. The big open space looks a little like a sewer, a little like a cave, and a little like an industrial space. Under spotlights are a giant penny, a dinosaur, a Batmobile and Batplane with furious expressions, and suits of armor in glass cases.

This is Cosentino's Batman, and it's an All-Star approach to the character similar to Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's approach to the other most popular superhero in All-Star Superman—a contemporary take which cherry-picks the very best elements from decades worth of different interpretations of the character and synthesizes them into something that is at once modern and relevant, but also classic and iconic.

Obviously, Cosentino's book—shaped, formatted and priced like a kids picture book recommended for ages three and up, but in the medium of comics—is a shorter, less-ambitious and more straightforward story than Morrison and Quitely's 264-page series, but the method and approach are the same.

That story? Simply who Batman is and how he comes to be.

He's summoned from the cave by the Bat-signal, hops in the Batmobile and catches a crook while narrating about himself: "I fight all crime and evil. I am a creature of the night. I am...Batman! This is my story."

A strip of four panels tells of his parents and their death, a splash page introduces Alfred, a strip of three panels covers his training...

...and he tells us a bit about his villains, each of whom is introduced with a one-page splash followed by a series of four panels on the next page showing them in combat with Batman (The Joker, The Penguin, Two-Face and Catwoman, if you're curious).

"There will always be a criminal to stop... A victim to save... A monster to fight...and a crook to catch," Batman says of his life. That really pretty much sums him up, doesn't it?

The villains are mostly patterned after Dick Sprang's versions...Two-Face so much so that in a different context, I might have thought that was a Sprang drawing. Cosentino's design throughout owes an acknowledged debt to Sprang and, to a lesser degree, Bob Kane. Each panel, each page is a bold punch in the face of design, and Cosentino quite deftly references classic Batman images throughout, proving the power of them even while making them his own.

The cover, for example, probably looks awfully familiar. Here's the cover of Detective Comies #27, for comparison's sake:


Inside, there's a similar version of it:

(Sorry about the poor scanning; the line to the left is the border between two pages, as that image is another of the many two-page spreads).

Here are a few more images from Batman's origin sequence, and the original Bob Kane (I think...?) images they're based on:





The book ends with an image parallel to the one it opened with. The flock of bats fly over the moon again, while in the foreground there are two different menacing figures. To the left is a bat-winged gargoyle, and to the right is Batman himself, assuming a gargoyle-like position, and announcing his name again:


Wow. That is, like, and ideal Batman. If this looks like something up your alley, here's some good news: Cosentino has a companion book entitled Superman: The Story of The Man of Steel currently scheduled for release in April.

"There once was a pillow head who snored his name: Honk-Honk-Ashoo."

That's the first line in Ralph Cosentino's The Story of Honk-Honk-Ashoo & Swella-Bow-Wow (Viking; 2005). Usually it's the art on the cover of a children's picture book that catches my eye, but in this case I found the onomatopoeia-derived name of the title character to be just as attractive as Consentino's super-simplified, super-cute art.

So, what the hell's a pillow head? Well, it's obviously a person with a pillow for a head. And Honk-Honk-Ashoo's world is one in which sentient humanoid creatures sometimes have objects for heads (when he hears the new word "Marvelous," for example, he looks it up in the head of his friend Smarty Pants, who has a dictionary for a head), or are objects with faces and/or limbs and the ability to think, walk or talk.

Frankly, I don't get it. But it sure is cute!

Here's Honk-Honk-Ashoo's bedroom, on the first page, for example:

His clock has a face (a face-face, not just a clock face), his lamp has a face and arms, the star outside his window has a face, and so do his bunny slippers, which you can see are sleeping next to his bed.

(You can tell this is a library book that gets taken out frequently by kids by the scribbling on this page. Note the scribble in the lamp's face, and someone went over Honk-Honk-Ashoo's eyes and mouth with a pen.)

The first few pages of the book detail Honk-Honk-Ashoo's day, he gets up when the alarm clock rings, he does his exercises, he reads the funnies while having breakfast,
he does his chores and then he plays.

(Please note the funnies that Honk-Honk-Ashoo's local paper carries. They're pretty huge......but not very funny).

One day, his routine is interrupted by a strange sound, which enrages his alarm clock:
The barking is coming from the little brown dog on the cover, which is being menaced by a dog catcher.

This dog catcher is a gigantic house cat, bigger than Honk-Honk-Ashoo, in a blue coat and matching hat that reads "Dog Catcher." It also has a soul patch.

Now, the fact that about half of the objects in Honk-Honk-Ashoo's universe are anthropomorphized, and to different degrees, was already giving me some conceptual difficulties. But the fact that there's a dog who's just a totally normal dog, while there's a cat that wears clothes, drives a truck and has a job, catching dogs? That completely blew my mind.

Well, short story shorter, the dog is taken to the pound, Honk-Honk-Ashoo feels bad and adopts him, they do everything together, a walking, talking soda bottle named Soda tells Honk-Honk-Ashoo that his dog is "marvelous," Honk-Honk-Ashoo names his dog "Swella-Bow-Wow" and then they go to bed "nice and early, together," with Swella-Bow-Wow getting his own pair of slightly smaller sentient bunny slippers and curling up to sleep in the middle of Honk-Honk-Ashoo's face which, you'll recall, is a pillow.

When I was in high school, this is the exact sort of thing I would describe as "trippy."



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If you get a chance, please visit raplhcosentino.com and check out some of the artist's work, especially the portfolio section. Of particular interest to comics fans will be his 2008 picture book Batman: The Story of the Dark Knight, which I plan to cover here in the near future.

In the mean time, behold Cosentino's Batman: