Review: Luna Park

It must be demoralizing to be a wannabe comics writer these days. Well, not if you just want to write comics for the sake of writing comics, because the Internet, print-on-demand publishing and other technical innovations have made doing that easier than ever before.

But if you want to make a living as a writer of comic books? Like, say, series or original graphic novels for major publishers, like DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint?

Then it’s gotta be demoralizing to know that even though the graphic novel is a “hot” format in the publishing industry at the moment, and there’s a bigger and wider market for comics work since God knows when, many of the new writers getting their work published are successful writers (or musicians or actors or whatever) who bring with them built-in name recognition.

I wonder, is it easier to go to the trouble of becoming a successful crime novelist just to get your foot in Vertigo’s door than it would be to just become a graphic novelist?

Kevin Baker is one of the many (many, many, many) successful prose writers to make the jump to graphic novels. Bakre is responsible for four books (none of which I’ve read), including 2006’s Dreamland, set in part in turn-of-the-century Coney Island.

His comics debut, Luna Park (Vertigo/DC) apparently made good use of the research Baker put in to that book, as it too is set mostly in Coney Island and its surrounding environs. It’s Coney Island as it is in 2009 though—with some flashbacks to its glory days—but that place is one of the book’s main characters, given the most attention and fullest development (The other main character is Russia, which the human characters who are nominally the protagonists of the story come from).

The title comes from one of the amusement parks on Coney Island, part of the turf Alik works for his two-bit gangster boss. Alik is a former Russian soldier who served in Chechnya, and left it and the war under tragic circumstances. Now he lives in New York, beating people up and collecting money for his boss while waiting for his boss’ more powerful rival to crush them and someone to buy up all of Coney Island.

His only pleasures are heroin, poetry and the company of his mysterious-even-to-him girlfriend. Baker’s narrative is quite sprawling, beginning in New York in 2009, where it seems a fairly typical Russian-flavored crime story, but it flashes back to Alik’s experiences in the war, his girlfriend’s experiences in Russia, and, as the story goes on, more and more times past, with greater frequency and greater distances backward.

We see Alik’s father’s experiences in the war and his grandfather’s and his great grandfather’s. We see Alik’s dreams…or are they past lives? We see his future life. We see stories and legends and poems that, because comics are a visual medium, are shown just as clearly and with just as much weight as any of the flashbacks or the current narrative that’s happening for “real.”

As that no doubt implies, for all the gritty realism and historical research that went into Luna Park, there are a few flights into the fantastic that attempt to transform the work into something bigger, deeper and more ambitious than the crime melodrama it starts as.

I’m not entirely sure how successful it is. Baker’s climax and conclusion are equivocal enough that the results are hard to discern, let alone appraise. I’m not sure I want to hold even that against the story though—it’s conclusion is certainly surprising and exciting, whether or not its good in the traditional sense.

Because this is Baker’s first comics work, it’s worth noting that it comes across as rather accomplished. It’s certainly novelistic in some key ways, particularly in the amount of story told by the third-person narrator, but enough storytelling is left to the artwork that it never seems entirely like a prose novel jammed into panels.

Plenty of credit for that no doubt goes to Baker’s collaborator, artist Danijel Zezelj, an experienced hand when it comes to comics creation. Zezelj has a fairly unique style that is both highly representational and highly evocative at the same time. His buildings and people look as real as the ones you might see walking down the street, but he’s able to capture that reality in a more organic way than a lot of his peers who over-rely on photos and filters in their digitally created art, and to carefully choose the moments of story he freezes in each panel so that the actors always seem authentic instead of awkward.

The coloring, by Dave Stewart, is dark, perhaps it’s not going too far to call it murky, and the palette is depressingly limited to grays, blacks and browns, the occasional flash of red for blood or white or green for sky used conservatively.

Given the dreary subject matter, I suppose it’s appropriate, but given Vertigo’s tendency toward a rainbow of browns in the bulk of their books (historically as well as currently), it’s not a terribly inviting book to pick up. It looks quite typical of modern crime comics and quite typical of the stereotype of Vertigo comics.

It’s not, not really.

And that must make it even more depressing to be a wannabe comics writer. Some of these guys seemingly trading on their names and success in other media in order to write some comics? Some of them turn out to be pretty good at it, and thus are probably going to be welcome to stick around and do as much work as they’d like.


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Oh, and I couldn’t find a place to stick this in the review, but I thought I would note that I think the original graphic novel is the ideal format for a prose writer making their comics debut. There’s an art to properly, suspensefully, satisfyingly pacing a serial comic book, in which each 22-pages has its own beginning, middle and end—even if that end is simply a cliffhanger filling a reader with a sense of urgency about the next issue—and its an art that a lot of people who grew up reading and now make their living writing comic books have a great deal of trouble mastering (Not to pick on Brian Michael Bendis, but I think he’s successful enough that I won’t wound him—that guy’s written literally thousands of pages of serial comics, and is one of the direct market’s favorite writers, and he is terrible at pacing comics stories over the course of multiple issues).

So doing an original graphic novel like Luna Park instead of attempting a serial miniseries or, worse, jumping into an ongoing superhero title, seems like a nice, simplified way for a prose writer or other comics-outsider to ease into the medium.

Some old first issues I've recently read

Captain America: Dead Men Running #1 (Marvel Comics) I was pretty excited to finally find a copy of this comic, as I somehow missed it the first time around, despite the fact that it featured cover art by Derek Hess, the Cleveland-based rock poster artist (and avowed Captain America fan). The interior art comes from Danijel Zezelj, and while there's obviously a bit of a gulf between the two men's respective styles, they're at least close enough on the spectrum that a reader shouldn't get whiplash when they open the cover and start reading.

I was pleasantly surprised by the comic, perhaps because I was expecting it to not be very good—I guess I've mentally sorted modern Captain America history into Brubaker and pre-Brubaker, with the former being the good stuff, and the latter the bad. But this issue read an awful lot like a Vertigo style comic that just so happened to feature a Marvel character in it (quite a few of the Marvels from the first years of this decade read like that actually, on account of Marvel hiring Vertigo editors, writers and artists to work on their comics; these creators among them).

Darko Macan scripts this one, and the focus is on a small group of American soldiers and some little kids lost in a jungle, surrounded by enemies, and beginning to despair tha they're not going to get out of this alive. That's when a U.S. military plane drops a single man in a parachute off, not far from where they're lost. But of what help can a single man really be in their dire straights, they wonder aloud. Ha ha, buck up guys, that one man is Captain America! Hooray!

After a middle section in which Captain America is viewed through these soldiers' eyes, there's a few twists near the end that flip the script in an intriguing way. I wanted to get the next two issues in the miniseries, not just because there were two more Hess covers on them,
but because I wanted to see what would happen next. And in serial comics storytelling, that's exactly what you want your readers to feel like when they get to that "to be continued" in the last panel.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Marvel ever collected this into a trade, either because it's only three-issues long, or because Macan and Zezelj don't have names that move trades the way other cover credits do. Collect this book Marvel. I promise to buy it!


El Diablo #1 (DC/Vertigo) Speaking of Zezelj and Vertigo comics, here's a Veritgo comic illustrated by Zezelj from 2001. Brian Azzerello handles the script, in which DC's old Western hero is kept off-panel for the bulk of the first issue, appearing as little more than a silhouette when he appears at all. They play up the otherworldy aspects of the original iteration of the character, to the point where he seems to almost certainly be a ghost or spirit of some kind—or at least a super-sneaky dude who is a really, really good shot.

The protagonist is a former bounty hunter who settled into a new role as the sheriff of a town, and he finds himself being forced to go back to hunting men when El Diablo rides into town and slaughters a bunch of outlaws.

There's obviously something in the sheriff's past that links him to El Diablo, but Azzarello teases it with a few sensational clues without revealing it in this first issue. Again I found myself eager to see what happened next, although this time I'm in luck—there is a trade collection of the miniseries, although no local library has it.

It can be pretty weird reading a Vertigo comic from the late-nineties or early-aughts and thinking of how incredibly tame they are, even compared to mainstream DCU books these days. For example, last week's Batman: Widening Gyre #1 featured several pages of Etrigan the Demon eating severed heads and other body parts and a Poison Ivy whose entire costume consists of a leaf over her vagina. I didn't see any mature readers stamp on that. El Diablo #1 did have a little "suggested for mature readers" tag on the cover, but the only "mature" bits I noticed were one instance apiece of the words "fuck" and "pussy," and a sex scene in which you can see part of a man's ass in one panel.


The Hood #1 (Marvel/Max) Now is probably a poor time to try reading the first issue of this 2002 miniseries by Bryan K. Vaughan, Kyle Hotz and Eric Powell. Over the past few years, Brian Michael Bendis has used Vaughan's character extensively in his Avengers comics, first building him up as a sort of Kingpin of super-crime, then involving him in some sort of magical storyline (I'd dropped New Avengers by this point), and making him a key player in the post-Secret Invasion, "Dark Reign"-branded Marvel Universe, where he sits at a table with such archvillains as The Green Goblin, Loki and Dr. Doom.

If his current ubiquity and the primacy of Bendis' flatter, more generic bad guy version of the character taints the original Hood story, this first chapter gets off relatively easy, as The Hood isn't The Hood yet, but still just Parker Robinson, a low-level crook and pretty scummy individual who nevertheless loves his ailing mother and girlfriend enough to lie to them and try to make enough fast money to help them out.

This issue is pretty much all Parker actually, and there's relatively little Marvelous going on. A plainclothes Electro shows up at a bar, and a Hydra recruiter gets a beatdown from Parker and a friend as payback for 9/11 (Not that Hydra was responsible, but they are a terrorist organization, and Vaughan uses the incident to draw a line between Parker and really evil pricks).

We basically follow him through a night in his life. He visits his mom in a hospital/sanitarium, he meets a friend at a bar and learns about a smash-and-grab job, he visits a prostitute, he visits his pregnant significant other, he goes to rob a warehouse but finds instead of a shipment some kind of monster wearing a red cloak and boots, he kills it and takes its clothes, and he then discovers they hold some kind of power while he tries to flee muggers.

Vaughan's pretty good at this sort of character-focused work, and he can be a very clever writer when it comes to dialogue and setting up certain scenes (I was struck by how he out-Bendises Bendis when it comes to a street-level Marvel Universe crime story; the subject matter and situations are familiar to the sorts of stories Bendis has often written for Marvel, but the dialogue is all much more natural sounding).

He's also lucky enough to be working with some talented artists with unique styles. Hotz has a cartooniness to his work, but not a silly or child-like sort of cartooniness. His work is a bit abstracted, but it retains a hard edge. It's loose and fun, but perfectly effective, and serves Vaughan's script well.

This is a Max series, with a big old "explicit content" warning on the front, but all that's explicit is the language. The only difference between this and, say, a Bendis-written Marvel book is that when a character says "fuck" or "pussy," it appears as "fuck" or "pussy," instead of "@#$%" or "@#$%&." It's also only $2.99, rather than the $3.99 price tag that Marvel's Max books were the first to carry.

I was eager to see how the magical boots and cloak would effect Parker's life, but I didn't have the next five issues. There is a trade of it, although not anywhere nearby.


Ruse #1 (CrossGen) I bet there's a fascinating and funny book to be written about the short-lived publisher CrossGen, although I don't know if anyone will ever write such a book, because a) I have a feeling all of the employees may have signed some kind of wacky non-disclosure form gagging them from talking about what went on in the CrossGen Compound and b) comics professionals seem to hate to say anything bad about one another and/or their employers, on account of how small the industry is.

My own exposure to the publisher's work is extremely limited (although I've got a whole stack of Sojurn with art by—ugh—Greg Land sitting there in the corner now, thanks to the same collection from which all of the books in this post came from). I think I read a few issues of something involving swords and a boat drawn by George Perez, and at least one other issue of Ruse.

I remember kinda liking that issue, although I think CrossGen imploded shortly afterward. I did kinda like this issue too.

The premise is on the simple side, but it's extremely well executed. What if Sherlock Holmes lived in the CrossGen Universe, and Dr. Watson was a hot chick with a time-stopping super-power she's trying to keep secret? That's it, really. Maybe writer Mark Waid's version of Sherlock Holmes, Simon Archard, is a bit more of a total cock than Holmes though. As someone who's only read a couple of Doyle's original stories assigned in school, I'm most familiar with Holmes from various movies, and his cock-ishness seems to vary from film to film. But Archard? Total cock.

Of course, you might be a total arrogant prick with no social skills if you were as smart as Archard is. (Batman's a real asshole, for example, and like Archard and Holmes, he's a master of detection and deduction).

In this over-sized first issue, we meet him and his blonde assistant Emma during the drawing room climax of a mystery we weren't privy too. The murderer attempts to make his escape, and Archard kicks his ass and saves a helpless hostage in a pretty dramatic action scene in which stopping the bad guy and saving the girl seem completely impossible to everyone but Archard.

From there, we learn a bit more about our protagonists, including the fact that Emma has some kind of crazy super-power that she's not supposed to use under any circumstances, since once she uses it she'll expose herself and/or lose a bet or something.

The pair then attend a fancy party, take on an extremely difficult case, solve it and determine there's much more to said case than was originally apparent, the comic ending with a cliffhanger climax in which another lady with another crazy super-power appears.

The crazy super-powers are a bit jarring at first, as is the setting, which looks like Victorian England under a different name, but it's actually some sort of sci-fi facsimile, I guess (also, there are a little race of gargoyles that flie around, which no one seems to pay too much attention too). The sci-fi elements seemed to come out of left-field to me, but I put that down to my own unfamiliarity with the CrossGen line. Perhaps if I was reading this as it was originally released and intended to be read, I'd know it's set on a particular planet or in a particular dimension or whatever.

Anyway, if you can roll with that, it's solid, solid work. Waid's Archard is a fun character, the sort that's 50 steps of everyone in certain arenas, but at the expense of being socially inept (Emma is as much as social buffer for Archard as she is his assistant), Emma is an appealing point-of-view character, and Waid's presentations of various mysteries and their solutions is clever.

Butch Guice's art, inked by Mike Perkins and colored by Laura DePuy, is gorgeous, maybe more gorgeous than usual. I'm having trouble recalling where I've seen it look brighter and sharper.

Congorilla: Who He Is, And How He Came to Be

During Wizard World LA, DC announced that critically acclaimed writer James Robinson would be writing a second Justice League title called simply Justice League and featuring a rather unusual line-up: Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Green Arrow Oliver Queen, Batwoman, Superman, Whatever They End Up Calling Captain Marvel Jr., a Starman and a character I think it’s fairly safe to say no one would have expected.

In the Newsarama panel coverage, Robinson said that last character was an "old, 90-year-old man named Bill… People are going to love this character by the time I'm done with him.”

The Comicbookresources.com coverage was a little more clear on Bill’s identity, saying Congo Bill, and quoting Robinson as saying, "He's 90 years old. He's seen it all. He's done it all. And within six issues you will love this character. I guarantee it.”

And then in a follow-up interview with Newsarama, it was made crystal clear just who we’re talking about here. Said Robinson:

“This was a character that Dan [DiDio], Eddie [Berganza, editor] and everyone else stopped cold when I suggested him (and Geoff [Johns] was appalled). I didn’t let up, and they and finally said, ‘Okay, we trust you James, if you’re that passionate about the character, then use him.’ And then, after reading the pages devoted to him in the first issue, they’ve all told me that I was able to make them care about him. He’ll be the oldest character in the book – he’s 90 years old, his human body has been destroyed, and he’s trapped in the body of a gigantic, magic, golden gorilla. Congorilla will be on the team.”

This news shook the Internet to its very foundations, with opinion sharply divided. Some fans (the cool ones) responded with a hearty “Woo hoo!” Others (the lame ones) responded with a “Wah, I don’t don’t want silly old characters in my very serious and important stories of children’s characters in tight costumes committing acts of violence against each other and crying about their emotions!” But the overwhelming majority simply thought, “Wait, just who is Congorilla, and how did he come to be?”

Well, I’ll tell you.

Now, I was only negative 19-years-old when 1958’s Action Comics #247 hit newsstands and dime stores, containing within its pulpy pages the first appearance of Congorilla, in a story entitled “The Amazing Congorilla!”

But DC did re-publish that story, along with the origins of five other of their characters, in 2004’s Weird Secret Origins.


If you see this in a back-issue bin, be sure you snap it up. It cost $5.95 off the new-books rack when I bought it, but it contained six re-colored stories—including the origin of Enchantress back when she was super-cute and the gorgeous Carmine Infantino-drawn origin of Animal Man—plus the origin of Bizarro World and a brief piece on Metamorpho, an original Jerry Ordaway cover and no ads, save for house ads on the back-covers and little ads for Archives where ads originally appeared at the end of most of the stories. (And by the way, the heroes pictured on the cover above? That’d be, like, the greatest Justice League line-up ever, wouldn’t it?)

But back to the subject at hand, “The Amazing Congorilla!” by writer Jack Miller and artist Howard Sherman.

It opens with a splash panel of a golden gorilla trying to start a plane, with a trio of white guys running up behind him, one saying, “Now look at that gorilla! He’s starting our plane! I—It’s incredible! What can a gorilla know about flying?”

There’ s only one way to find out! By reading on!

This story is set in the Congo, “land of superstition and mystery,”where “Congo Bill, famous jungle-hunter” (and star of 1954 series Congo Bill, which featured a golden gorilla in the first issue) is approached by an excitable native, telling him that one of his best friends, medicine man Chief Kawolo has fallen off a cliff and is currently lying on a ledge.

Our dauntless hero rappels down the cliff face against Kawolo’s protests, and carries him back to the village, where he passes on. But not before he bestows upon Bill a great gift:



Gorilla strength, huh? What a bunch of hooey! Bill doesn’t buy it, but wears the ring out of sentiment for his friend. Besides, what’s the likelihood that he’d ever need gorilla strength?

Then, two panels and one avalanche later…



Still doubting the magic, but with nothing to lose, Bill rubs the ring and suddenly, Bill finds his mind in the body of the golden gorilla, while the mind of the gorilla enters Bill’s body…!



Yes, they switch bodies! So not only can readers thrill to the adventures of a super-heroic gorilla with the thoughts of a man, but there is the endless comedy of seeing a grown man act like a gorilla!

So now Bill-in-the-gorilla must find and rescue the-gorilla-in-Bill from the caved-in cave. Along the way, however, he stumbles across a Hollywood movie company making a weird sci-fi movie about a woman dressed like a witch…and a meteor…and rocketship?

He saves the actress from a leopard, but is rewarded by being captured and caged by the men working on the film. Using his human wiles, he maneuvers his wheeled cage into the line of fire of two real laser tanks with real, working laser guns that are part of the film, blasting away his bars.

From there, it’s a simple matter to start the plane


fly it away, parachute to safety—using three chutes—when the plane is shot down, and then lifting the boulders away from the cave entrance, where he’s greeted by the sight of himself, growling like a gorilla.



The end!

What happened next? Well, I sure as hell hope there’s a Showcase Presents: Congorilla in the works to let us know. (Or if there aren’t 500 pages worth of Congorilla stories to fill up such a book, maybe Showcase Presents: Gorillas Vol. 1. I know DC has more than 500 pages worth of gorilla stories.)

More recently, there was a 1992 Congorilla miniseries by Steve Englehart and Neil Vokes, and a 1999 Vertigo miniseries called Congo Bill by Scott Cunningham and Daniel Zezelj, the most memorable feature of which was the cover work by Richard Corben.




Related: Mike Sterling answers the all-important question of, “Congorilla?”

Gluttons for punishement (with punishment being defined as hearing me drone on about comics), can read my initial reaction to the Robinson book (along with Troy Brownfield’s) here, as part of Shotgunreviews.com’s new Con Job feature. My reservations haven’t changed much since; it sounds like it has the potential to either be a great comic or something of a horrible disaster. Much will ultimately depend on the artist. I really like to see Rags Morales, the guy who shoulda been teamed with Meltzer on the JLoA relaunch, or Robinson’s old Starman collaborator Peter Snejbjerg, but who knows. DC’s given out some plum art assignments to some pretty mystifying choices lately—Benes and Joe Benitez on JLoA, Tony Daniel on Grant Morrison’s Batman, Ian Churchill on the upcoming Titans—so who knows.

Based on the con coverage, it’s apparently going to be a “name” artist that will excite fans, since Robinson was about to mention the artist but was cut off by DiDio, who said they were saving the announcement. I haven’t even got a decent guess.