Delayed Reaction: Dogs and Water

Dogs and Water (Drawn and Quarterly), by Anders Nilsen

Why’d I wait?: You know, I’m not sure if this ever showed up in my shop or not, so I’m not positive I purposely chose not to buy it upon release. Amazon says it was an August release, and publisher Drawn and Quarterly lists it as a July release on their website, but I don’t recall seeing it in my local comic store over the summer, perhaps because they didn’t get it or perhaps because I wasn’t looking for it. I’d heard the title mentioned in connection to Nilsen’s name before, but didn’t know it came out already.



Why now?: Because I saw it at my local library, remembered how much I enjoyed the last Nilsen book I borrowed from there and, come on, who can resist that intriguing cover? I love the mysterious story it suggests, to the point where I immediately want to know what the hell is going on between this figure and this dog with the gun, yet at the same time kind of like just wondering about it and not knowing.

I should also point out that the book design itself is quite lovely. The book’s on the short side, about a hundred pages, but the pages are wider than your typical trade paperback, and it’s got a hard cover and spine that remind me a bit of old elementary school text books.



Well?: The very thing I found most off-putting about the book—and as I was reading, I didn’t much care for those first few pages—rather quickly became something I admired about it.

The style in which Nilsen tells this story is rather idiosyncratic, and though it reads like a comic book, it doesn’t look much like one, so immediately the reader is pushed off balance with that little surprise.

See, there are no panels in it. The images all appear as if there were, but there are no borders and gutters, no rectangles framing each image. The images simply sit upon the page, arranged more or less as if there were panels, but someone had come and taken them away. (For a sense of what I’m talking about, you can see some preview pages here and here).

Now I know Nilsen isn’t the first person in the world to use this sort of technique, but generally when you open a graphic novel, you expect to see some grids on the page, so any time you don’t, it can be a little surprising.

The lack of borders also draws attention to the setting, making the desolate, flat, nameless land seem like it goes on forever in every direction, which, as far as we can tell from the story or what we learn from the protagonist, it does.

There’s also a level of intimacy engendered by Nilsen’s panel-less pages, and the somewhat abstract black and white art. While reading it, there were a few times I got the feeling that it wasn’t even run through a printing press or anything, but that it was just a big sketchbook that Nilsen had hand-drawn and stuck on a shelf in my library.

That particular illusion is broken up during night scenes, in which (one) color is added to make things darker, and dream sequences, in which the colore of the ink lines change from black to blues or silvers or grays.

As for the story, we follow a young person backpacking along a highway in the middle of nowhere, talking to the teddy bear he has tied to his pack. The setting is purposely indistinct, but there’s a haunting post-apocalyptic vibe to it—it’s clear that people are now extremely few and far between, animal life is much more common than it is now, and cars are extreme rarities.

While our protagonist marches through this tableau, he encounters a small group of deer, he’s pursued by a pack of dogs with a somewhat unexpected agenda and eventually comes across signs of human civilization that evokes the modern Middle East (there’s some rubble that used to be buildings, a pipeline, soldiers, a downed helicopter and a little kid with an assault rifle).

Everything that isn’t explained only deepens the import and impact of everything that is, making Dogs and Water’s minimalism seem quite eloquent.



Would I Travel Back in Time to Buy it Off the Shelf?: I don’t know. It’s definitely a great read, but even knowing that ahead a time, I don’t know if I would have wanted to fork over $19.99 for such a quick experience, no matter how nice it would look on my bookshelf (That said, it’s a book that likely rewards multiple readings).

If your library has a copy, or take requests on what to order from patrons, definitely give it a look. And if you’re at least $19.99 richer than me, go ahead and buy it, I guess.

Thirty great sound effects from Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu Vol. 1: The Hellfire Apocalypse

Tak, Chup, Unch, Bkush, Tuft, Hump, Skukt, Hwukk, Shupt, Peesh, Swuft, Fwuft, Chud, Shudutf, Kump, Throkk, Hwunkk, Chudt, Kukt, Fwokt, Splam, Bakt, Fwakt, Tupt, Bampsh, Skokk, Swokt, Sapt, Frakk and, of course, Kunch

League Line-Ups That Never Existed (But Should Have) #6

While tooling around arflovers.com reasearching a book Craig Yoe put together, I came across this entry about an old "Songs and Stories" record featuring The Justice League of America.

I re-posted the image of the cover above, but you'll want to follow the link, as you can play the JLA theme song there, and hear the various heroes' voices when they do the roll call. Some of them are absolutely perfect—particularly Superman and Metamorpho—but Wonder Woman is clearly played by a man not trying very hard and Batman sounds...decidedly un-Batman-like. I don't know, maybe the Haney-written Batman of the '60s might have sounded like that. A little.

(A qucik aside: Someone's downloaded the totally awesome Metamorpho theme song onto youtube.com. Give it a listen. In a few verses it pretty much sums up his origin, powers and conflict in life. And here Dan Jurgens and company are spending six issues explaining what can be summed up thusly: "Rex Mason was his real name, a soldier of fortune, didn't care about fame/ Until fate took a hand in the game/ What a change! So strange!/ Trapped in a pyramid he saw a light/ It came from a glowing meteorite/ Shooting cosmic rays stronger than the sun/ Through his body and brain and when it was done ...there stood the Element Man." And goddam, that chorus will be with you all fucking day. I want to go reread the Showcase Presents with that playing in the background now).

Anyway, the good people of Power Records, a division of Peter Pan, seem to have come up with a pretty interesting League line-up there.

You've got your traditional Justice League second bananas The Flash, Aquaman and Wonder Woman, plus Plastic Man and Metamorpho, neither of whom would officially join the team for years and years (Metamorpho teamed-up with them back in the day and was asked to join, however). And, of course, Superman and Batman (not pictured), because who really wants to read about a group of superheroes that doesn't include those two?

All seven of them meet my personal criteria for what makes someone Justice League material—the terms "world's greatest heroes" could apply to them and nobody would snicker, they're somewhat iconic, they have a symbol that can be put on the back of a silver chair. Rex is probably the squarest peg, since he's only starred in, like, two episodes of one cartoon, and thus isn't likely to be recognized outside a comic shop like the rest of that line-up, and having two guys who can do that with their necks might seem a little redundant, but I'd let him in anyway on the grounds of general awesomeness. He'd bring a welcome infusion of zany slang and surly attitude to the group.

Are you ready for the most exciting return from a long absence since Mar-Vell was pulled through time from a point before his own death from cancer and given a job as like a prison warden or something in the Negative Zone concentration camp for good guys built by good guys Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic?

Because we’re back!

Kind of.

Sort of.

Thanks for your patience these last few days—and the kind words and well-wishes from those of you who left them—I was pretty bummed about not being able to post for a few days, as I was keeping a daily posting schedule (or at least seven posts a week schedule) for awhile there, and with a billion blogs in the blogosphere, the last thing I wanted was for anybody to get bored and go read something else and realize there are many better comics blogs out there than stupid old never updates Every Day Is Like Wednesday.

Anyway, I’m at the tail end of some wicked sickness (hopefully…fingers crossed…barring sudden ironic relapse caused by publicly declaring I’m almost over it) that has made typing, writing, thinking and leaving my house impossible-to-very, very, very hard for much of the last week, so, I didn’t snag too many comics on Wednesday and haven’t been able to spend any quality time with my local public library’s scanner.

As I may still be housebound for a few days, I won’t be able to scan, like, any crappy colored pencil drawings or pages of old Justice League comics for a while, but, hell or high water, I’m going to try to resume regular posting anyway.

What that basically means is you’ll just have to settle for my sterling prose instead of things about this week’s comics or image-heavy posts. I’ve got some books I’ve been meaning to review for a while that I’ll probably be getting too, and the one good thing about being sick was I managed to finally finish Showcase Presents: The Brave and The Bold Vol. 1, so, if worst comes to worst, we can spend the rest of the week talking about why Batman never uses the Whirly-Bat anymore.

But first, let’s play a little bit of catch-up, huh?

Here then are the three new books I did manage to secure and read this week, followed by your weekly link to the pages of Las Vegas Weekly…



1.) Abbreviated Weekly Haul




Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis #57 (DC Comics) It would be a bit of a stretch to call this a really good comic book or anything, but it was certainly an impressive one. Incoming writer Tad Williams had the depressing task of writing an Aquaman book without Aquaman in it (hey, if it didn’t work for Green Lantern or Green Arrow…) and dealing with a status quo established but unresolved by the previous writer. In fact, he’s the fifth regular writer for the series since it launched out of “The Obsidian Age” (I think; I might have forgotten one), and each previous writer had also set-up a bold new status quo for Aquaman…and then left it unresolved.

Well, Williams resolves them. All. In this issue, he even brings in the Lady of the Lake from Rick Veitch’s issues, the first time he’s addressed elements of Veitch’s run in a big way, plus he deals with the flubs between 52 and World War III and the OYL Aquaman.

It could have made for some pretty dull reading and, to be honest, some of it was a bit dull, but some of it is still rollicking fun, and that he manages to get any entertainment into an issue which dumps so much information and explanation on the reader impresses the hell out of me. He does so, for the most part, by packing things in like crazy. This is an issue that read like three issues.

The reveal of Aquaman II’s relationship to Aquaman I is so goddam long and complicated that a “Oh, he’s from Earth-2” would probably have been preferable, but at least its finally explained, which oughta cut down on scenes like the one in JLoA #12 where neither J’onn J’onnz or Aquaman II seemed to realize that there were two different Aquamen now.

I applaud Williams’ efforts with the book, and Shawn McManus’ always fun and expressive art, and look forward to more work from them both in the future. Maybe on the inevitable next Aquaman book, once DC figures out having the title character in the book is a bigger draw than a brand-new version of the title character in it instead, of course.




The Brave and the Bold #7 (DC) Well, there are two women alone in most of the scenes, but they do spend most of the time talking about men—Superman, whom Power Girl has been hypnotized to kill, and the villain who did the hypnotizing.

This is Mark Waid, George Perez and Bob Wiacek’s first issue after the six-part arc dealing with the Book of Destiny, and it seems to be a mostly done-in-one, with a little bit of an epilogue to the previous arc (or perhaps a tease to another arc) involving the new old Challengers of the Unknown.

On the script side of things, it’s nothing extraordinary—two heroes with little in common team-up and learn they’re not so different after all—but it’s still refreshing to see these two heroines handled so well. Power Girl and Wonder Woman both seem a bit one-dimensional—the former if headstrong and brash, the latter cautious and methodical—but at least it’s their one dimension. For a long time, whenever I’ve seen either of them pop up in a super-story, they didn’t exactly seem like themselves. (Or as much like themselves as fictional characters ever can). But this? This really felt like the “real” Wonder Woman and the “real” Power Girl.

They also looked that way too, thanks to Perez’s pencils and Wiacek’s inks, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, since Perez has really defined Wonder Woman’s look for the last generation or so. And as for Power Girl, at least she looks human, which is the extremely low bar for getting her right in a DC comic these days. The next comic looked especially bad after reading Brave and the Bold, and seeing all those little scrolls Perez and Wiacek packed into the backgrounds, or that bravura sequence where Superman gets hit my millions of shards of red kryptonite at once.




Justice League of America #14 (DC) The one good thing about last issue’s Joe Benitez art was that it was so bad, it actually made me miss the pencil art of Ed Benes, who was himself incredibly badly suited for the series (Particularly when Meltzer was in the writer’s chair, and it was a bunch of talking and subtle emoting among a bunch of different characters, drawing attention to Benes’ character design and “acting” abilities). This is Benes’ first pairing with new writer Dwayne McDuffie (and the New DC being the New DC, it’s also McDuffie’s second issue, but the third part of the four-part story arc).

At first blush, they seem to work a lot better together, although that’s not necessarily great news for the book. Benes’ strong-point is drawing supermen and –women with action figure physiques and no pants, and McDuffie’s script has so far been nothing more than playing with the characters as if they were action figures.

Each previous part of the story has had a little something I liked, like the Meltzer parody in the Wedding Special or the talk about Black Lightning’s hair in JLoA #13 (of course, I would find that conversation amusing), but this issue I’m having a hard time finding anything to point to and say, “Well, at least that part was nicely done.”

For the most part, all we’ve got is a game of supervillains vs. superheroes, and at this point, if you’re going to tell a story about that and nothing else, would it hurt to come up with an interesting twist? (Grant Morrison, for example, pulled the Lex Luthor-forms-a-team-of-villains-to-fight-the-heroes twice during his run; the first structured as a corporate take over and the second featured a team made up exclusively of League-level threats, rather than just the opposite number of one of the heroes. And he also set those conflicts in the middle of much bigger apocalyptic conflicts).

The one thing that does distinguish this from your average game of HeroClix is the level of superhero decadence in it, to borrow Dirk Deppey’s term for the dirtying up of superhero comics. Not much happens in this issue, other than Luthor telling Superman and Black Lightning he’s captured the rest of the League and is currently torturing them, and then Superman flying to the rescue and getting captured in the cliffhanger climax.

You know, the thought of torture makes me a little sick, personally, and if it’s gotta be used in entertainment, I sure as hell hope there’s a point to it. Because when I crack open a comic book about the Justice League, I don’t really want to see a helpless Geo-Force being beaten (And I hate that guy!) or seeing Lex fucking Luthor instigating it. What happened to renegade scientist Luthor? Or former President Lex Luthor? What’s his goal here? What’s his motivation now?

I don’t mind big, dumb superhero comics one bit, but it always rubs me the wrong way when creators and companies give us big, dumb superhero comics with simplistic plots suitable for children, and then try to make them seem more adult with sex and violence and swear words, as if mature or sophisticated storytelling could be measured simply by the check list the MPAA uses when deciding if PG a movie should be rated PG-13 or R instead.

The art by Benes, while stronger and less-lazy than Benitez’s, remains rather generic and lazy, and he seems to think he’s drawing an entirely different story than the one McDuffie’s writing.

First up, note this is a $2.99, 22-page comic book, right? And it opens with a one-page splash panel, closes with another one-page splash panel, and contains two two-page spread splash panels, neither of which are images that require anywhere near that space to show you what’s going on.

One is simply of the Hall of Doom from the Superfriends, which might be more exciting to see if the JLA didn’t just visit it in “The Lightning Saga.”

And the other?


Say what you will about Benes, he’s shameless, and DC doesn’t seem to mind much. Nine justice Leaguers are captured, and the bulk of the page devoted to just three of them—the women of the group. You’ve got Wonder Woman spread eagle, Vixen is some kinda crazy back-arching device, and Black Canary with a fucking ball gag in her mouth, probably to keep her from using her sonic scream, but coincidentally fetish gear. The rest of the League is just kinda crammed in the corner, and Geo-Force is off-panel (we see him getting beat later).

I don’t know what the script called for in that two-page panel, but it’s apparently pretty different than what cover artist Ian Churchill was given to draw for the cover. The highly-sexualized, bondage-esque image Benes drew, appearing in the middle of a scene where Luthor brags about torturing the League and lets it be known he’s just trying to rile Superman, gives the whole issue a sick feeling, leaving readers to wonder what that torture entails (It doesn’t help that Dr. Light is there, and it’s been pointed out twice already that he’s a rapist).

And check this out. The very next panel following the spread is a close-up of Luthor’s head in front of the captured Leagure hologram. And what’s behind him?


Not what was behind him in the previous panel, but another image of Wonder Woman’s boobs.

How exactly did Justice League of America get to be the DCU’s skeeviest book?







2.) Meanwhile, in Las Vegas…

This week’s, er, I mean, last week’s Las Vegas Weekly comics column features a review of James Sturm’s James Sturm’s America: God, Gold and Golems. Go check it out, you poor Caleb-talking-about-comics-starved readers.





3.) People still like comics about superheroes dying, right?

Oh, and before I go collapse again, I wanted to point out one thing regarding this week’s death of a hero in the DCU.

Now, I decided to pass on Death of the New Gods because of the stink of Countdown that clung to it (and the fact that I don’t really want to pay to see a bunch of characters I like get killed just to be resurrected en masse in a few months time), but the big (Big?) death at the end of the first issue that the blogosphere’s a-buzzin’ about struck me as odd:


Okay, they’re both in costume, and there are groceries on the floor. So either Big Barda just got back from grocery shopping in her costume to get killed by the Infinity Man (that’s my guess of the culprit, anyway), or Mister Miracle just got back from grocery shopping in his costume to find his wife murdered on the kitchen floor.

Why were they grocery shopping in their costumes?!

Marvel's January previews reviewed

DC Comics isn't the only big comic book company with books being released in the month of January. Oh, no. There's also this other company called Marvel Comics, and today we take a look at their New Year offerings. Feel free to follow along with the full solicits posted at Newsarama.com, and while you're there, check out this latest example that DC doesn't have any idea what they're doing from month to month.

Now let's see if the House of Ideas has any good ideas for the first month of '08...




AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #549 Written by MARC GUGGENHEIM. Pencils & Cover by SALVADOR LARROCA. Variant Cover by DAVID FINCH. Saddle-up Spider–fans as the thrillingly thrice-monthly adventures continue! In this issue, meet the villain from the fifth Spider-Man movie today! Marc (Wolverine, Blade) Guggenheim and Salvador (newuniversal, Uncanny X-Men) Larroca bring you the next great Spidey Villain... MENACE! But that's not all! The mysterious JACKPOT makes her "Brand New Day-Debut!” Plus the mystery of the Spider-Tracer Killer deepens. Not nearly 'Nuff said!


With all due respect to the grand Marvel tradition of hyperbole, I would bet their ASM solicitation copy writer my life savings that the fifth Spider-Man movie will not, in fact, feature a villain named Menace.

I would be doubtful if a thirty-fifth Spider-Man movie featured a villain named Menace.





BLACK PANTHER #34
Written by REGINALD HUDLIN
Penciled by FRANCIS PORTELA
Cover by SALVADOR LARROCA
"GANGSTA LEAN," PART 3
It's clobberin' time—in the arena and in the streets, between the Gangsters and Panthers, and between the Fantastic Four and the elusive, malicious Golden Frogs!


I’ve been reading Black Panther monthly for awhile now, and I have absolutely no idea what any of that means.





CABLE & DEADPOOL #49
Written by FABIAN NICIEZA
Penciled by REILLY BROWN
Cover by SKOTT YOUNG
Deadpool and his ragtag group of cronies travel to the Savage Land in search of a device that will help rebuild the nation of Rumekistan in Cable's honor. But things go amiss when they discover that the device is already spoken for…and not even the swarthy KA-ZAR or his sabretooth sidekick ZABU have been able to intervene! Ferocious action and raucous hijinks ensue!


A “swarthy” person has a dark complexion. Ka-zar is a blonde, blue-eyed lily white Tarzan-type. Maybe they meant “sweaty?" Because I'm sure he gets pretty sweaty climbing trees and fighting mutates and stuff.








I like the concept for the cover. But the rendering’s not so hot.

You know what would have been better than a Captain America comic by the guy who made up Rambo? A Captain America versus Rambo comic book. Doesn’t Dynamite or someone own the rights to him yet?






See, you can tell those are the the Fantastic Four’s future counterparts because Reed and Johnny have facial hair and Sue has…bangs…? And maybe two tiny wrinkles on her face…? Or no, those are just dimples, I guess.

Nice background and feet too. (Ha ha! That shit never gets old!)





INCREDIBLE XXXX #113 (Note: Not Actual Title)
Written by Greg Pak & FRED VAN LENTE
Penciled by Khoi Pham
Cover by Art Adams
CLASSIFIED
32 PGS./Rated A …$2.99
Order Using This Code: OCT072102
FOC – 12/27/2007, On-Sale – 1/16/2008

HULK #1
Written by JEPH LOEB
Pencils & Cover by ED MCGUINNESS
Variant Cover by OLIVIER COIPEL
Superstars JEPH LOEB and ED MCGUINNESS will change the way you see THE HULK! In this startling origin epic, the breathtaking events that ended World War Hulk rocket into this brand-new Hulk title. When one of The Hulk's oldest cast members is murdered, everyone turns to the team of IRON MAN, SHE-HULK and LEONARD SAMSON to solve the grizzly case. All the evidence points to the Hulk as the killer—but {CLASSIFIED}! Join us for a brand--new story and a brand-new team who loves the Hulk as much as you do!


"Hey, Greg Pak, thanks for all your hard work making World War Hulk into a huge moneymaker for us, one that is, unlike Civil War pretty much universally liked by fans and critics, in addition to selling like hot cakes. To show our appreciation, we’ve invited Jeph Loeb to come in and wreck the joint, is that cool with you?"

This is…just weird. McGuinness may be born to draw the Hulk, but I haven’t read a decent Loeb story this decade, and I don’t expect that to change now that he’s hot on the heels of the months worth of crying Fallen Son specials and what was, by all reports, one of the worst Wolverine stories ever written.

I don’t know what to make of the name change for Incredible Hulk either. If you’re going to change the name of your comic, shouldn’t that be a #1, not a #113? If each “x” represents a letter, than Incredible Rick seems like a good bet…and also a really dumb name for a comic book.








Aww, cowboy Thing is adorable!






I like this cover a lot.






MIGHTY AVENGERS #8 Written by BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS. Pencils & Cover by MARK BAGLEY. It’s the Mighty Avengers versus the New Avengers who have been overtaken by a symbiote virus. So, yeah, it’s Avengers versus Avengers symbiotes!! Janet gets new powers!! And the Mighty Avengers declare war on a foreign country!! All this and Mark Bagley too!!


Hey, I remember this series! A bit behind schedule these days, huh?




NEW AVENGERS ANNUAL #2 Written by BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS. Penciled by CARLO PAGULAYAN. Cover by JIM CHEUNG. Continuing directly from the pages of NEW AVENGERS #37: The Hood's gang of super-criminals takes the fight right to the Avengers’ door!! Its wall-to-wall action and the end of an era for one Avenger and a major defection for another.This double-sized issue ties into or wraps up threads from Civil War, World War Hulk, both Avengers titles and the upcoming Secret Invasion!! Avengers writer Bendis welcomes rising star Carlo Pagulayan on his Avengers debut...

Psst, Marvel! You do know that “annual” means “once a year,” right? And since New Avengers Annual #1 came out in June of last year, and this isn’t due until January of next year, it’s really more of a biannual, isn’t it?






I don’t know if Omega is fighting that eagle or trying to ride it, but I love the look on the eagle's face regardless.






SILVER SURFER: IN THY NAME #3 (of 4)
Written by SIMON SPURRIER
Penciled by TAN ENG HUAT
Cover by PAUL POPE
Phase-crucifixions! Astral squid-beasts! Conniving aristocrats! Tangled in all the obstacles and oddities of an exotic Empire, the Silver Surfer finds that his toughest test—to soothe the hatred of ancient enemies—is beyond even the Power Cosmic. But is he prepared to commit the ultimate atrocity to secure a chance for peace…? Cosmic craziness turns to darkness and death, as Spurrier and Huat's galactic extravaganza takes an unexpected turn with the surprise appearance of a looming figure from the Surfer's past…


Wow, a Paul Pope cover…over interiors by Tan Eng Huat? This is going to be one awesome looking book.




WHAT IF? SPIDER-MAN VS. WOLVERINE
Written by JEFF PARKER & PAUL TOBIN
Penciled by CLAYTON HENRY
Cover by JOHN ROMITA JR.
Spider-Man is a killer.
In 1987, Peter Parker followed Wolverine to Russia, who was on the trail of a friend working for the KGB. Realizing that the KGB would eventually kill his friend, Wolverine wanted to put her out of her misery. Peter tried to stop him, but accidentally killed the friend instead. Haunted by his actions, Peter fled home into the waiting arms of Mary Jane.
But WHAT IF…Peter never went home? WHAT IF…the Spider never came out of the cold?

Um, is there a question in that title somewhere…?





ULTIMATE HUMAN #1 (of 4)
Written by WARREN ELLIS
Pencils & Cover by CARY NORD
It's the Ultimate war between the Hulk and Iron Man! Desperate for a cure to his dark disease, scientist Bruce Banner begs Tony Stark for a release from the curse of the Hulk! Stark agrees, but in the midst of the experimentation, something goes horribly wrong. And you know what happens next: man and monster collide! Be there as writer Warren Ellis (ULTIMATE GALACTUS) begins his next Ultimate epic—and is joined by amazing artist
Cary Nord (Conan)!


I’d expect an “ultimate” human to be a little bigger. You know, down there.





ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #118
Written by BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS
Pencils & Cover by STUART IMMONEN
It begins here…"Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends!" Things are changing in the young life of Peter Parker: Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four is now his buddy---and the hot–headed super hero has taken a liking to Peter's classmate, Liz Allen! But something is horribly wrong with Liz—something that will soon affect the life of every student at Midtown High—including Peter's ex-girlfriend, Kitty Pryde!

Hey, if they’re implying what I think they’re implying, then this sounds like a plotline Bendis has been foreshadowing for, like, 115 issues now? Wow.

DC's January previews reviewed

Yes! It's that time of the month again—super-easy, this-shit-writes-itself content time! Just what a comics blogger currently running on fumes needs!

So, DC has released their solicitations for comics shipping in January today. You can see them in several places, but I'd reccomend doing it here, which is conveniently located near this week's Best Shots column. And you can see what caught my eye and drew my scorn here...




BATMAN #673
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Tony Daniel & Jonathan Glapion
Cover by Daniel
In the wake of Ra’s al Ghul’s recent resurrection, Batman’s body lies near death in a heart-stopped coma. Meanwhile, his delirious mind travels back to a defining adventure in the life of young Bruce Wayne…the hunt for his parents’ killer! This special flashback tale also revisits Batman’s life-changing Thogal ritual in the caves of Nanda Parbat!

Well it’s about time that someone did something with this particular Infinite Crisis retcon…




BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #13
Written by Tony Bedard
Art and cover by Rags Morales & Mark Farmer
Beginning the 4-part arc "Wrath Child," with art by Rags Morales (IDENTITY CRISIS)! Batman and Nightwing become embroiled in the return of a major nemesis who was thought to be dead long ago: The Wrath has returned!


Oh man, this is going to be a tough decision, come January. The fact that it’s an issue of Confidential and that it’s written by DC’s go-to fill-in arc writer Tony Bedard makes me think “pass,” but the fact that it’s drawn by Morales (Fun Fact: I own a complete run of Forgotten Realms) and will feature The Wrath makes me think “awesome!”







I've only seen a handful of episodes of the animated series this book is based on (one featuring The Joker, another The Penguin), but in general I've disliked the character designs its employed for villains. But I really like this Poison Ivy...she looks cuter and more floral than usual. In general, Ivy's played as a vampy femme fatale type, and looks all elongated and curvy, even in the other cartoon series. Not that there's anything wrong with it. This design just really stands out in how different it is from all the other Ivy designs. I think this might be my second favorite Poison Ivy of them all, right below Tim Sale's scary-ass version.





BIRDS OF PREY #114
Written by Sean McKeever
Art by Nicola Scott & Doug Hazlewood
Cover by Stephane Roux
Oracle delves into the mystery of Misfit while Lady Blackhawk and Huntress hash out their differences!


If that’s Blackhawks villain and super-pirate Killer Shark, pilot of the triphibious Shark Jet and co-emperor of the Empire of Death, color me excited. No, super-excited. I wonder why he looks so young, though….





BOOSTER GOLD #6
Written by Geoff Johns & Jeff Katz
Art and cover by Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmund
“52 Pick-Up” concludes as Booster Gold journeys back in time to save the best friend he ever had – the Blue Beetle! But can Booster stop Maxwell Lord before someone else dies in Ted Kord’s place? And will Ted Kord let that happen?


I really hope Blue Beetle does get saved thanks to Booster and company's time-traveling shenanigans. Mostly because someone’s going to bring Blue Beetle back somehow eventually, and this would probably be the best way to do a resurrection of Ted Kord story.




CONNOR HAWKE: DRAGON’S BLOOD TP Written by Chuck Dixon. Art and cover by Derec Donovan. In this volume collecting the 6-issue miniseries, an archery contest beckons Oliver Queen's bow-bending son Connor Hawke to the far end of the globe. Accompanied by his old pal Eddie Fyers, Connor accepts the invitation. But a much darker game is afoot, and Connor's life will never be the same!

Come on, Whoever's Responsible For DC’s Trade Collection Program. No one bought this thing in singles (except for me and 22 other people), and I’m pretty sure it’s not because the rest of the Direct Market was waiting for this trade. Nor is this something that’s going to take the bookstore market by storm. If you had to release a Conor Hawke story in trade, shouldn’t you maybe have started at the beginning of the characters’ fictional history, like when he and the other Green Arrow were in the same stories at the same time? And if you had to release this book right here in trade, couldn’t you at least have retitled it Green Arrow: Dragon’s Blood?





CRAYON SHINCHAN VOL. 1
Written and illustrated by Yoshito Usui
CMX. The star of the hit late-night Adult Swim series comes to CMX. He’s rude, he’s crude, and adults tremble whenever he’s around. His inappropriate comments and obsession with body parts and bodily functions make life stressful for his struggling parents.
No one is safe from Shinchan’s verbal outbursts…and now, neither are you! Fans around the world have been following Shinchan’s offensive adventures for years, and now he’s enjoying wider exposure here in the USA. CRAYON SHINCHAN will appeal to fans of The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy. CMX brings you the original manga in all its uncensored glory.


What?! DC has acquired Crayon Shinchan? There’s a cartoon of it on Adult Swim? Why wasn’t I informed of this? I like how the solicitation totally anticipated my major concern to, as they go ahead and say “uncensored” right in the copy.




DIANA PRINCE: WONDER WOMAN VOL. 1 TP Written by Dennis O’Neil & Mike Sekowsky. Art and cover by Sekowsky & Dick Giordano. In this volume, featuring stories that have never been collected before from issues #178-184 and SUPERMAN’S GIRL FRIEND LOIS LANE #93, Wonder Woman faces Mars, god of war, the murderous Dr. Cyber, and more! Advance-solicited; on sale February 6 • 176 pg, FC, $19.99 US

Aw man, I was hoping these would appear in an eventual Showcase collection, not on their own for $20. Wonder who the audience is for this, exactly…





GREEN ARROW/BLACK CANARY #4
Written by Judd Winick
Art and cover by Cliff Chiang
The second story arc of this hit new series begins with a tragedy for Oliver Queen!


Words cannot express how incredibly pissed off I’ll be if that’s going to end up being the corpse of Connor Hawke in the white space on that cover. Of course, it looks like Connor Hawke is in the background of the same cover, but since they changed Roy Harper's costume to resemble Connor's from the shoulder up, and most of Roy’s current teammates are on the cover too, Connor seems like a safer bet for the white space. Plus, they’d totally kill Connor before Roy. And not bring him back to life later. Like they’ve done to Ollie. Twice now.

If it is a dead body, that will make it twice in less than five months that Winick has resorted to seemingly killing a character in the pages of this very series.

And if it is the corpse of Connor Hawke, that will mean Judd Winick will have brought Jason Todd back to life, and killed off Connor Hawke , which will make me despise his DC body of work even more than I already do ("Hmm, what our comics need is for a guy who died 20 years ago and whose death and mourning has been an integral part of decades worth of Batman comics to come back as a sort of retarded version of Nightwing, to be written as either the Punisher or a quippy Spider-Man type, depending on the book he appears in...but this half-Asian, vegan, raised-as-a-monk, awkward around women kid who provides a counter-balance to the Green Arrow cast and all the other heroes his age in the DCU? Him we can do without").

And I'm already convinced Winick is the absolute worst thing that's ever happened to DC Comics*.





JLA CLASSIFIED #50-51
Written by Roger Stern
Art by John Byrne & Mark Farmer
Covers by Joshua Middleton
The first two parts of a 5-part epic reuniting the legendary Roger Stern/John Byrne team! The Justice League faces a new foe who seems to remember them well enough to want revenge. But when have they faced off before? Meet a mysterious new foe again…for the first time!
Issue #50 on sale January 23


Covers not matching the interiors are nothing new in super-comics of course, but good God, can you have a bigger mismatch than Joshua Middleton art on the cover, and John Byrne art on the interiors?





JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL HC Written by Keith Giffen & J.M. DeMatteis_Cover by Maguire & Austin_Art by Kevin Maguire, Terry Austin and Al Gordon_A new hardcover collecting the classic JUSTICE LEAGUE #1-6 and JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL #7 from the late 1980s! Can an unlikely new Justice League line-up work as a unit to stop terrorists at the U.N., a brigade of Rocket Reds, the Royal Flush Gang, and other threats — or will they succumb to in-fighting and bad jokes?_Advance-solicited; in stores March 12 • FC, 192 pg, $24.99 US

This is kind of a weird animal.

I already have this is in trade, and probably won’t buy this version, but at the same time, I hope it sells like gangbusters (which it would be more likely to do in a trade paperback than a hardcover, I think), because this handful of issues are the only ones from the JLI period so far. And it’s such a damn shame. Giffen and DeMatteis’ run, drawn by a series of great artists, many of whom you rarely see doing interior work anymore (I mean, Adam fucking Hughes on pencils!) crafted probably the best, biggest and longest Justice League run ever, and they did it without the benefit of being able to use the heroes we typically think of when we hear the words “Justice League” (although Batman’s around through much of it).

Their work on JLI, JLE and the sundry spin-offs (Annuals, Justice League Quarterly) comprises a gigantic page count, and most of them are really good pages—funny, yes, but they did melodrama and action as well as any of their peers. I know fans of some characters bristle at the way Giffen, DeMatteis and company may have portrayed their favorites, but it's thanks in large part to these guys that Booster Gold, Blue Beetle and Guy Gardner weren't just New Blood-like a footnotes in DC history, or that Oberon, Big Barda and Mister Miracle appeared somewhere other than a quickly aborted attempt to make Kirby's New Gods work without Kirby, or that Ralph and Sue Dibny remained players in the DCU after their Detroit Era bow. The world-building they did, the new characters they added...the DCU of the '90s was pretty much built by these guys, and for all the editiorial attempts to move the fictional universe back into the Bronze Age of late, the DCU still owes a lot to the work Giffen and DeMatteis put into molding it back then**.

The fact that the whole JLI run isn’t readily available in trade is pretty sad—particularly since so much of the universe-wid story of the DCU since Identity Crisis has been centered on the characters made popular in these runs—is, from a sell more comics to more people stand point, ridiculous. Is this the start of correcting it, finally? I sure hope so.

And that cover image? That's one of my all-time favorite comic book covers, in large part because of how much mileage Maguire and others have gotten out of doing riffs on it. Every new JLA line-up should really be required to pose for a cover like that.




JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #17
Written by Dwayne McDuffie and Alan Burnett
Art by Ed Benes, Jon Boy Meyer and Sandra Hope
Cover by Ethan Van Sciver
Double trouble for the League! First, in the lead story written by Alan Burnett, a mysterious and familiar team from beyond time has infiltrated the Hall of Justice looking for a weapon. Will Black Lightning be their first victim? And wait 'til you see who they are! Plus, writer Dwayne McDuffie begins a very special back-up story exploring what's wrong with Vixen's powers. And when her condition worsens, it leads to a new arc and major change for the Leaguer!

A fill-in story...already?!?! And DC's hasn't had much creative success with stories written by Alan Burnett or ones involving mysterious and familiar teams from beyond time lately, so this doesn't look very promising. Meanwhile, the series' "regular" writer, who will by January have only four issues under his belt, is relegated to a back-up story, batting clean-up for previous writer Brad Meltzer's Challenge-style I-have-no-intention-of-resolving-this plotting.




JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED #41
Written by Grace Randolph
Art by Dario Brizuela
Cover by Zach Howard
The Joker is tired of waiting for Batman to show up, so he’s taking the fight to the Watchtower! But just because Batman’s not there, it doesn’t mean it’s unguarded!

Hey, this one looks like a good one! Will that be the debut of JLU Harley, or have we seen her somewhere else already?




NIGHTWING #140
Written by Peter Tomasi
Art by Rags Morales & Michael Bair
Cover by Michael Bair
Guest-starring Batman & Robin! A new era of Nightwing begins from writer Peter Tomasi (Black Adam: THE DARK AGE, Light Brigade) and the incredible art team of Rags Morales and Michael Bair (Identity Crisis)! When the bodies of nefarious villains and fallen heroes begin to disappear from their final resting places, Dick Grayson is drawn into a mysterious, life-altering adventure!

Hope this is better than the last few new eras of Nightwing by the last few creative teams. Morales art makes this an instant buy though, so Tomasi will have to work really, really hard to make this unreadble. I'm curious why Morales' star hasn't been on the rise more dramatically since Identity Crisis. Brad Meltzer went on to JLoA, paired with a pretty bad artist instead of his IC co-creator, while Morales did Wonder Woman fill-ins, was announced as the new TEC penciler before DC quietly changed their minds, and a (pretty damn good) JSA: Classified arc, and apparently a Batman Classified arc. Why isn't Morales on one of DC's top books yet, like, oh, I don't know, JLoA? He'd certainly have been a better fit than Benes, and, unlike Benitiz, Morales can really draw.




ROBIN #170
Written by Chuck Dixon
Art by Chris Batista
Cover by Freddie E. Williams II
With the return of new series writer Chuck Dixon (Robin, Nightwing, Batman) and art by fan-favorite Chris Batista (52, Legion of Superheroes), Robin #170 is the start of a new era no one will want to miss! After a life-changing battle with Ra's al Ghul in Nanda Parbat, Robin comes home to Gotham to find there's a new girl in town, wearing a color he can't ignore. The new vigilante calls herself Violet, and she steals from the rich to keep for herself…and Robin's going to find out that's not all she's playing for. Plus, the return of an old friend with something to hide!


Hope this is better than the last few new eras of Robin that no one will want to miss. As I may have noted before, there's never been a Robin creative team I've really, really liked, with the pre-monthly, series-of-miniseries team of Dixon and Tom Lyle being by far my favorite to work on the character consistently. Dixon sure is teasing the return of Spoiler awfully hard here, isn't he? If it's for real, I hope DC has Dean Trippe on the horn about costume design already...







SHOWCASE PRESENTS: ENEMY ACE VOL. 1 TP Written by Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert_Art by Kubert, John Severin, Howard Chaykin, Neal Adams and others_Take to the skies in this thrilling volume collecting OUR ARMY AT WAR #151, 153, 155, SHOWCASE #57-58, STAR-SPANGLED WAR STORIES #138-152 , 158, 181-183, and 200, DETECTIVE COMICS #404, MEN AT WAR #1-3, 8-10, 12-14, 19-20, THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER #252-253, 260-261, 265-267 and DC SPECIAL #26!Advance-solicited; on sale February 13 • 552 pg, B&W, $16.99 US

SHOWCASE PRESENTS: SUPERMAN FAMILY VOL. 2 TPWritten by Otto Binder, Jerry Coleman, Leo Dorfman and others_Art by Curt Swan, Wayne Boring, Kurt Schaffenberger and others_The spotlight shines on Superman's girlfriend Lois Lane and pal Jimmy Olsen in this volume collecting stories from SUPERMAN’S PAL Jimmy Olsen #23-34, Showcase #10 and SUPERMAN’S GIRL FRIEND Lois Lane #1-7!_Advance-solicited; on sale February 27 • 520 pg, B&W, $16.99 US

I buy all of these—save the Green Lantern, Green Arrow and Hawkman ones (I hate those guys!)—and am so far behind that my To Read stack of them are literally a small tower in my living room. And I’m totally putting these two on top of that tower.





THE SPIRIT #14
Written by Sergio Aragones & Mark Evanier
Art by Mike Ploog
Cover by Jordi Bernet
Join the new SPIRIT creative team of writers Sergio Aragones & Mark Evanier (MGroo the Wanderer) and Mike Ploog (Abadazad) for a case of murder! A string of killings is plaguing Central City…and the Spirit — with Commissioner Dolan — is on the case!

I’m kind of surprised that DC is going to keep publishing this without Darwyn Cooke, since the fact that an Eisner-less Spirit worked at all, let alone worked as well as it did, is completely due to Cooke. The odds of it working were like a million to one, but it did work, and work well—now, what are the odds of it working again, with a different creative team? I like the work of all of the people involved with this, certainly enough to give the first few issues a trie, and yet I can’t help but despair—already we’ve got from one cartoonist writing, penciling and producing the covers for the series to two writers, an interior artist and a cover artist. That alone seems like a pretty big step away from the Eisner and Cooke versions of The Spirit.




SUPERGIRL #25
Written by Kelley Puckett
Art and cover by Drew Johnson & Ray Snyder
Supergirl and Superman must work together to defeat the nuclear menace of Neutron! But when Superman tries to teach her the hardest lesson of all, he learns that Supergirl has something to teach him! And wait until you see the startling new direction the book takes!

A startling new direction for Supergirl? Is it just me, or does every single solicit for Supergirl mention a startling new direction?





SUPERMAN CONFIDENTIAL #11
Written by B. Clay Moore
Art and cover by Phil Hester & Ande Parks
B. Clay Moore (Hawaiian Dick) teams with Phil Hester & Ande Park (GREEN ARROW) to shed light on the origins of the Jimmy Olsen/Superman relationship in Part 1 of a 3-part story, in which Superman invents a way for Jimmy to signal him, and Metropolis deals with giant, murderous...toys?


Origins of the Jimmy Olsen/Superman relationship, Superman invents a way for Jimmy to signal him…didn’t I just read this exact same story in one of the main Superman books?

(And shouldn’t that be “the Jimmy Olsen/Superman friendship” instead of “relationship?” Sounds a little gay this way, if you ask me.)





SUPERMAN/BATMAN #45
Written by Michael Green
Art and cover by Shane Davis & Matt Banning
The Man of Steel’s and the Dark Knight’s quest to rid the world of Kryptonite hits a roadblock when they realize not everyone’s willing to hand over the deadly substance. One of those unwilling is Aquaman — and the result is a brutal undersea battle!

Hmm…that doesn’t look anything like Aquaman II (the hair’s too short, the costume design is off), but Aquaman I is dead. Soooo what the fuck DC? Is this just a terrible drawing, or is Aquaman’s status quo still a complete mystery to you guys? Is all to be revealed on Wednesday, when the current Aquaman book wraps up?




TEEN TITANS #55
Written by Sean McKeever
Art by Eddy Barrows & Rob Hunter
Following up the epic "Titans of Tomorrow" storyline, we catch the Titans in a moment of quiet before the next storm. As one Titan leaves forever, Wonder Girl and Robin explore their newfound feelings for each other as Ravager enjoys herself by pitting Blue Beetle against Kid Devil. And watch out for the introduction of the new Clock King, a modern-day Fagin out to create a villainous team of his own. Fan-favorite writer Sean McKeever continues to deliver his own special blend of excitement and angst sure to keep this book on the top of your must-read pile!

Hmm, I haven't seen enough of McKeever's Titans to form a real opinion on it, but I feel a little nervous that it's not going to be good. "Art by Eddy Barrows" doesn't sound too promising—are there no monthly artists left in comics?. That's at least three different artists on McKeever's just-started run so far. I'm not feeling the words "new Clock King" (you can't beat a classic), and "modern-day Fagin" makes me think of that great Runaways two-parter where Molly was almost inducted into a modern-day Fagin's gang. And "out to create a villainous team of his own" is especially depressing, since we're currently reading a story by McKeever about the Titans fighting a villainous team, and a few issues before that we saw Deathstroke creating a villainous team of his own, for what was easily the worst Titans story of all time.





TEEN TITANS: YEAR ONE #1
Written by Amy Wolfram
Art by Karl Kerschl & Serge Lapointe
Cover by Kerschl
Writer Amy Wolfram (Teen Titans animated series) joins rising star artist Karl Kerschl (ALL-FLASH #1, ROBIN) for a colorful reimagining of how the Teen Titans came together! See how these teammates bonded, and overcame the sheer awkwardness of being teenagers in this explosive 6-issue miniseries that guest-stars the Justice League of America! You may think you know Robin, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash and Aqualad…but you don't really know the original Teen Titans!


The last time a writer from the Teen Titans toon started working in the DCU, it lead to a series of disasters, so that parenthetical credit really sort of sinks my heart (particularly since any origin of the Teen Titans is going to mean dealing with one of the stickiest wickets in the DCU, Wonder Girl's history...and how that's changed again now that Wonder Woman's history was changed again hasn't been addressed anywhere).

But even if Wolfram turns out to be the second comicng of Adam Beechen, Kerschl's doing interior art on this thing and man, just look at that cover! This thing is going to rule!

(Plus, the Titans as a franchise have had pretty good luck with writers possessing the syllable "wolf" in their surnames...)





TEEN TITANS: THE LOST ANNUAL
Written by Bob Haney
Art by Jay Stephens & Mike Allred
Cover by Nick Cardy
Don’t miss the TEEN TITANS LOST ANNUAL, featuring the original Teen Titans: Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Speedy and Aqualad! Classic Teen Titans writer Bob Haney sends the Titans into space to rescue President John F. Kennedy in this story illustrated by Jay Stephens (The Land of Nod) & Mike Allred (Madman, X-Statix)! Meet new alien races, witness a startling betrayal, and more! It’s a secret space adventure that couldn’t be told…‘til now!


See Christopher Hitchens, there is too a God, and he loves awesome comics.





Wow, Geo-Force is everywhere all of a sudden, isn't he?

Oddly, his is one of the few superhero costumes that is so terrible that adding cargo pants to it actually vastly improves it.





TIME MASTERS TP Written by Bob Wayne & Lewis Shiner. Art and cover by Art Thibert & José Marzan Jr. Collecting the often-requested TIME MASTERS #1-8 and material from SECRET ORIGINS #43, featuring 52’s Rip Hunter! Hunter forges alliances with DC heroes including Cave Carson, Metal Men creator Doctor Will Magnus, Dr. Fate, the Viking Prince, Arion and others to stop the threats of immortal super-villains including Vandal Savage and his Illuminati. Advance-solicited; on sale February 13 • 224 pg, FC, $19.99 US

Behold the power of 52!

I bet you could get the contents of this $20 trade in back-issue bins for $4-$8, if you look through enough of 'em.




TRIALS OF SHAZAM #11
Written by Judd Winick
Art & Cover by Mauro Cascioli
The trials continue with Freddy losing ground in his quest for the ultimate abilities and power of Shazam…to the now equally powered Sabina! To find Mercury he may need the help of Shadowpact and the Justice League!

Fun fact: This 12-part monthly maxiseries launched in October of 2006. So it should have wrapped up this month. Now it looks like it will wrap up in February of next year, at the earliest.

Does this entire thing take place before the start of Countdown?






*Oh sure, go ahead and bring up Chuck Austen or Erik Larsen or Brad Meltzer or Countdown or Amazons Attack or "War Games"/"War Crimes" if you want; those other bad writers (on DC Comics; I've enjoyed things Austen and Larsen have written outside the DCU) and those terrible stories certainly did their damage to the structure of the DCU as a shared setting, but nothing and nobody has done more longer and sustained damage than Winick.



**This isn't nostalgia speaking. The Morrison/Porter/Dell run was my first introduction to the wonderful world of the Justice League. I found all the Giffen/DeMatteis books in back-issue bins at Mid-Ohio Con. And let me tell you, sitting down to read, say, all of Justice League Europe or all of "Breakdowns" in an evening is the perfect way to experience these stories.

The blurbs of Jonathan Lethem: A long, vague, meandering post about talking about comics

There's been plenty written about Jonathan Lethem's comics writing so far, the first issue of his Omega The Unknown remake/reimagining for Marvel. And there's been much more written about his prose fiction writing over the years. But today, I'd like to focus on another, very specific type of writing that Jonathan Lethem does, one that doesn’t get nearly as much attention—his blurb writing for the backs of other people's comics.

Here’s what Lethem wrote of Adrian Tomine, the Optic Nerve cartoonist currently being written about everywhere for his brilliant graphic novel Shortcomings:



Tomine's genius is to strip his medium of every possible type of grandiosity or indulgence, and the result is that life itself floods in. His mise-en-scene rivals Eric Rohmer's in its gentle precision, and his mastery of narrative time suggests Alice Munro. Shortcomings, as near as he'd get to a grand statement, is as deceptively relaxed and perfect as a comic book gets.

—Jonathan Lethem



I’m not sure I entirely agree with the first two sentences.

What I found most remarkable about Tomine’s Shortcomings work wasn’t how it was filled by real life reacting to a vacuum of filigree, but that it so thoroughly simulated real life in its realism, both in the art and the writing (I’m not quite sure how Tomine could strip the entire medium either; is Lethem saying that comics/comix/sequential art is predisposed towards grandiosity or indulgence?)

And as for the second sentence, well, it’s been a while since I’ve sat down and paid attention to the mise-en-scene of any French New Wave directors, and I freely admit to never having read a single Alice Munro story (That I know of. Do they teach her in school? If so, I might have read her and forgot her name—I was forced to read a lot of things I don’t remember in school).

So I can’t really agree or disagree, but I know when I was reading Shortcomings, I wasn’t thinking, “Day-umn, check out that mis-en-scene!” or “Oh snap! This guy’s mastery of narrative time is the bomb!” And noticeably strong mise-en-scene and mastery of narrative time seems to contradict the statement that Tomine’s comic is stripped down to an indulgence-free negative space which real life may more easily occupy.

But “deceptively relaxed?” Yeah, I’ll second that. And “as…perfect as a comic book gets?” I’d second that too, as long as Lethem means it literally, as in “this is as good as it gets” and not “this is as good a comic book gets.”

But whatever, my intent here isn’t to argue with what Lethem said or the way he said it (Because he’d win easy; I mean, his job is to say things well, and his business is good). Rather, what interested me was this brief piece on The Quill blog, the blog supplement to Canada’s Quill & Quire, which uses Lethem’s blurb as a starting point for what may be a completely imaginary conflict between Tomine and Lethem.

Under the heading “Tomine to Lethem: butt out, smartypants,” the blog entry refers to an interview in The Believer in which the introduction mentions the praise Tomine has gotten from Lethem and Charles McGrath, and runs this quote from Tomine:



I also am trying to think —and I hope other people will start to see it this way —that sometimes a comic can be a great thing because it’s a comic, not because it’s almost as good as a movie, or as good as a prose novel, which I think is the way a lot of people are now trying to process it …. You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium.



The blog post also says that Tomine “raises doubts that long-form graphic novels are the ne plus ultra*of comics art, and says that comparisons to masterworks in other mediums are implicitly degrading” and that the extended quote from Tomine “could be a veiled reference to the immodest praise of Jonathan Lethem.”

Yeah, it could be, but the post kinda makes it sound like it is doesn’t it? (I first noticed this article after Tom Spurgeon pointed it out on his blog, with the smart-ass link “Maybe He Simply Meant What He Said.” Reading the Believer interview Tomine’s statement isn’t prompted by anything…what the ellipsis in the quote cuts out is the part where he says he wishes people would equate comics to other visual arts as much as movies or prose, because the time it takes to produce a graphic novel is so much longer than it takes to read it. That is, paintings we can go back and look at over and over and see new things in, whereas novels are something we think of as to be plowed through, with each page a part of a whole rather than a work to be regarded on its own (I am, by the way, super-generalizing).

But what Tomine says and what Lethem said, whether the former was responding to the latter or not, is interesting in any case, because I think it speaks to the way people think and talk about comics and, since I spend so much time thinking and talking about comics, well, that sort of thing interests me.

If you boil criticism, comics or otherwise, down to its base essence, it amounts to little more than a series of comparisons—this is good (defined only when compared to bad), this is bad (defined only when compared to good), this is better than that, this is worse than that, here's why.

So comparisons are absolutely necessary in comics criticism. Whether comparisons to other media are necessary depends on large part to who is writing the criticism, and who they are writing it for.

There's definitely a great deal of freedom that comes in knowing your audience as completely as you can. When I review a comic book for Newsarama.com, or here on EDILW, I know this much about just about everyone reading—they also reads comics regularly, and will know the terms and lingo used in discussing comics, as well as just about all of the names or works I could possibly cite when making a comparison.

In that regard, I think a place that hosts writing about comics exclusively, by someone who knows a lot about comics, for an audience of people interested in comics, is probably going to give a review that matters most to someone like Tomine, one that won’t ever need to think too hard about works in other media in order to discuss his comics.

To use an example of someone I read about 400 reviews by today, if Tom Spurgeon were to review Shortcomings at The Comics Reporter, for example, he's free to compare it exclusively to Tomine's past work, cartoonists whose work it resembles and/or other Drawn and Quarterly publications, knowing (or at least feeling fairly certain) that his audience will be familiar with Optic Nerve, Summer Blonde, Los Hernandez Brothers, James Sturm or Rutu Modan and whatever else might come up in the review. Spurgeon can write about Tomine's work without having to compare it to other media because of his depth of experience with the comics medium, and the assurance that most of the people reading his site share a certain degree of interest and experience with the field.

But when you're writing about comics for a more general audience, a phenomenon that’s been ever increasing ever since publishers who aren't exclusively comics publishers have started publishing graphic novels, you can't always assume that the reader knows all the terms. Thankfully we're past a point where we need to explain the word "graphic novel" or "manga" or point out that comics, in fact, aren't just for kids anymore (At least, I like to think we are, and all those local newspapers still writing a "Bam! Pow! Holy Voltron Batman, Manga Is Kinda Popular, Isn't It?" articles are simply way behind the times), but a writer for a venue outside the comics press can’t as easily assume everyone of their readers is an afficianado.

It's in those instances when comparisons to other media are invaluable. When I write comics reviews for Las Vegas Weekly, for example, I write them for a more general audience then I write for here or at Newsarama, and I don’t assume that everyone reading it is exactly like me (as I do when I write about comics here or for Newsarama.com...where, increasingly, I find not everybody is exactly like me...or even all that much like me at all). But the more I think about it, wherever I’m writing about comics, I constantly compare them to works in other media.

Brad Meltzer writes JLoA like it's a novel. DC has a tendency to treat its superhero properties like they were 10 p.m. cop dramas. Marvel's Max line is basically R-rated versions of their formerly PG characters. The characters in Black Metal are designed like those in a Cartoon Network original series. Scott Pilgrim and Sharknife read like video games play. And on and on.

Now, Tomine's certainly right about value judgments—in assessing his work, we're better off comparing it to the comic book canon and what's currently on the shelves now than against works, good or bad, in other media to figure out or communicate how good or bad it is. Because if you start saying things, like "this is so good it's practically a movie," then that's ranking the media, and I would like to think we're well past that point as a society, although comics history itself is littered with stories of that prejudice, of the grand masters of the Golden Age being ashamed of what they were doing, and hoping they could get into something more respectable, like newspaper strips or advertising. Even today, there seem to be a lot of (or, at least, too many, with one being "too many") creators who look at comics as something that movies are adapted from, and I know I've read far too many comics that read like someone's screen play broken up into four or six issues for a miniseries. So perhaps that sentiment is still present in comics to a certain extent, but hopefully confined to a handful of creators, and doesn't exist at all among comics critics.

But there's nothing wrong with comparing a particular comic to a particular work in another media, as long as we're not weighing the media against one another**, and in fact not ever comparing works of one media to works from another would likely make criticism kind of hard to do, not to mention less effective. Consider the influence the works of non-comics media may have on comics writers and artists, for example. I can't imagine talking about Kelley Jones work as a writer/artist without mentioning Hammer films, discussing the art work of Osamu Tezuka without mentioning Disney films (Just to pick two wildly divergent examples, based on my current To Read piles).

While thinking about all that stuff, prompted by the Lethem quote on Tomine and where that lead, I saw this on the back of a copy of James Sturm's America, which I was preparing to review:



Sturm's America is the one glimpsed through the holes in the flag: rooted, grim and enduring. The line of his drawings has a pure grain like that of the voice in William Carlos Williams' epic poem
Paterson, or the singers on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. Fables like these are an antidote to
cultural amnesia."

—Jonathan Lethem



Oh, Jonathan, what are we going to do with you! So, here's another three-sentence blurb from Lethem on a D+Q book, one that also compares a comic book to two different works of other media. It sounds like a very nice quote, but again, if I stop to think too much about it, it ultimately sounds meaningless to me.

The first sentence, as gripping a visual image as looking through the holes in a flag might be, is really just nonsense—having read the three tales in Sturm's book now, I suppose you could say it presents a country that is rooted, grim and enduring, but what does that have to do with the visual image Lethem starts that statement off with?

Then it just gets crazy, as he extends metaphors to their breaking points. He compares Sturm's line work to the voice in a William Carlos Williams poem and the sound of the voice of singers I've never heard of…? But regardless, what does it even mean? A case could be made for the ways in which linework evokes sound, or the same feelings that the sounds might evoke, but Lethem doesn't really go into it here, so it just seems like namedropping, and it's namedropping to the same effect as his Shortcomings quote…which the Quill & Quire blogger interpreted as something that Tomine didn’t like…which sent me on the weird, rambling tangent that comprises most of this interminably long post.

As for that last sentence in the America blurb, I don't agree with it. If you use a broad definition of fable, broad to the point where it doesn’t strictly mean “fable” but could be applied to other literary terms just as easily, like “a fictional narrative used to enforce a useful truth,” then it could certainly apply to these stories to a certain extent, but Strum doesn't bluntly lay out "useful truths" in the manner of a fable. Maybe Lethem's reading just varied greatly from mine, but it seems to me that Sturm suggests vague truths and leaves it to the reader to contextualize them, rather than making straightforward pronouncements along the lines of "Racism is bad, but inherent to the American spirit," or "Faith is for crazy people" or "killing Chinese people for gold is bad."

Nor do they really do much in the way of addressing cultural amnesia, since they're fictional stories. Based on and inspired by history, yes, but they're not reminding us of things we've forgotten so much as introducing us to stories that haven't yet been added to our cultural memory.

So, Jonathan Lethem—Reportedly a great prose fiction writer, seemingly a pretty good comic book writer, but not so hot at blurb writing.






*Is there a superhero called Ne Plus Ultraman yet? If not, I’m calling it right now.

**And I don't know that anyone actually does that, but apparently Tomine's heard enough of it to make the statement he did to The Believer; given the circles he runs in, he'd be much more likely to hear that sort of thing than I ever would.