A sharp dressed Man...hunter

As I mentioned in the post-mortem I wrote up on last December's theme month, I was awfully surprised about how much love J'onn J'onnz's current look got in the comments on the post in which Batman tried to trick him back into his old look. And by "how much love it got," I just mean "that it got any love at all," because I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate it. In that same post, I mentioned that in the near future I should really devote a post to looking at the many other look's of J'onn J'onnz, Manhunter From Mars, and, well, a month and a half later, I'm ready!

Are you? Cool. Then let's go!

Now, the Martian Manhunter is a pretty old character, created way back in 1955. In all that time, he's only really had one dramatic costume redesign, and has, in fact, changed the shape of his head more often than his clothes.


In the above image, in which we see J'onn giving Superman a tasty knuckle sandwich, imported all the way from Mars, we get a pretty good idea of his original look. Blue cape, boots and undershorts, held up by a belt, Superman-style. Pluse a red X-shaped harness across his chest, either to make him look slightly less naked, or to let us know, "Hey, I wear a harness. All the time. I'm totally up for whatever you earthlings want to do in the bedroom."

His head shape is at its most human at this point, too. Basically, he's got my head atop the body of Johnny Weissmueler. Only green.

Eventually, he'd get slightly more alien, looking, as seen on the cover of his 1996 one-shot:


Basically, his brow grew more prominent, and his eyes redder. In JLA: Year One, that's the look he had as soon as he went public, so that the smooth, human-shaped head didn't really exist Post-Crisi. In generaly, J'onn's look was explained as being a variation of Superman's and other superheroes, so that he wouldn't intimidate earthlings with a more alien look.

In John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's Martian Manhunter monthly, they explained that the head-shape above was J'on's "public" form way back in the day when he lived on Mars. Martians had public and private forms; the public ones are what they wore to work and to meetings and grocery shopping; the private ones are what they wore around the house with their loved ones.

His look would change slighly from artist to artist and book to book, but only slightly. Sometimes he had human looking eyes, sometimes he had all red eyes, sometimes he had red eyes with black pupils. Whether his cape collar was folded under or pointed straight up may vary, as would the size of his boot cuffs, or his height (There doesn't seem to be any standard as to how tall characters are in relationship to each other in the DCU; of course, J'onn's shapechanging ability might render that moot anyway).

In the wake of Infinite Crisis' "One Year Later" drastic-changes-for-drastic-changes sake, J'onn got his new costume, the one I really dislike:


It keeps the color scheme of his original costume more or less in tact; in the first appearance it appeared black, but has gradually grown bluer and bluer.

The change seemed sudden and arbitrary to me, especially consdiering Ostrander's explanation of the original, as a Manhunter uniform from Mars, grown from the Zo'ok plant. Besides, the head-shape was wrong, a variation of his "private" head-shape, and the pointy ears and wrinkly chin looked a little too much like Marvel's shape-changing alien race the Skrulls, which we should all be quite sick of in two months time, thanks to the Skrull-centril Secret Invasion event series.

The new look was accompanied by a terrible eight-part miniseries, and a new bad-ass, grumpy attitude. Eventually it was explained that this attitude adjustment and costume change was the result of J'onn touching Black Adam's mind in World War III.

Now, while these are the main looks J'onn's sported during his career,he has adopted other looks, usually on a very limited, short-lived basis. Personally, I think they're all superior to his current neckbrace and bodysuit combo, but I'll submit them now for your approval. What do you think, should J'onn maybe switch to one of these looks permanent-like?

First, there's this charming little number:


That's his "J'oann J'onnz" look from a wonderful two-part arc in Justice League Task Force, courtesy of writer Peter David and penciller Sal Velluto. In it, a team of scientists stumble into a hidden underground world ruled by warrior women, and J'onn must lead an all-female task force in to retreive them. Of course, he'll have to disguise himself as a woman as well. Hilarity, naturally enough, ensues.

The advantage of this particular look should be quite obvious, particularly given DC's proclivity to sex their books up all of a sudden. If that were J'onn J'onnz's new look, it wouldn't be long before he was back on the Justice League, and Ed Benes was putting him front and center in each and every panel composition.

Ostrander and Mandrake's Martian Manhunter ongoing introduced quite a lot of new concepts to the character and his background, fleshing him (and the history and culture of Mars) out like never before. One of their innovations was that J'onn maintained more than one secret identity, which was traditionally that of Colorado policeman or private eye John Jones. He used his shape-changing and mind-reading powers to pose as lots of different people with lots of different backgrounds, in part to better understand humanity and in part to fight crime on a variety of different fronts (For example, one guise was as an agent within the Department of Extranormal Operations, another was as a dim-witted supervillain, others were actually the secret identities of other superheroes).

For example, J'onn was sometimes Japanese businessman Yuchiro Takata, who was secretly Bio Armor Jade Warrior, a gigantic, metallic superhero who defended Japan, and gave rise to a popular manga adaptation.

Here's J'onn in Japan, adopting the Bio Armor Jade Warrior look and tactics he saw in a manga to attack giant robot menace Antares, in Martian Manhunter #2:





As Bio Armor Jade Warrior also comes in gray:



Another identity of J'onn's from that series was The Bronze Wraith, a superhero who served on the half-forgotten team The Justice Experience, a retcon-created super-team that existed between the disbanding of the Justice Society, but before the founding of the Justice League. One the Wraith's teammates was Acrobat, a superhero who was the father of DEO agent Cameron Chase, form the even-shorter-than-Martian Manhunter-lived series Chase. She and The Justice Experience popped up in Martian Manhunter. Here's Mandrake's drawing of J'onn as The Bronze Wraith, from #17:



The costume itself isn't too bad. It's a tad dorky, and even less cool than J'onn's normal look, but I've certainly seen worse. What really bugs me about it is the name. If he were The Green Wraith or possibly The Blue Wraith, I could see that, but Bronze? I don't see any bronze on that costume. Maybe he's usually really tanned? The thing is, I can't really see that costume working on J'onn in his normal, non-disquised form. Because it's essentially just a costume that looks like his scantily clad costume, and would look super-goofy.

One of my all-time favorite J'onn appearances came in JLA, back when the Justice League comic wasn't horrible. The climactic story arc in Joe Kelly, Dough Mahnke and Tom Nguyen's run on the book was the six-part "Trial By Fire," in which J'onn quit the League for some much-needed rest and relaxation, which involved conquering his fears of fire and enjoying a romantic relationship with former Superman villain Scorch.

In JLA #84, Superman pays the vacationing J'onn a visit, and the latter grills them up some big steaks, while kicking it in his vacation clothes:



I love that image, off J'onn's crazy-huge biceps just exploding out of that orange golf shirt. (That is orange, right? It's not one of those colors that is kind of pink, is it?). Here's a full-body shot of what J'onn wears around his backyard:




Man, that's awesome. And something I didn't even notice until I scanned this panel:



Behold, the f'lipp f'loppz of J'onn J'onnz!

How cool would it be if J'onn started dressing like that all the time? Instead of the dark body suit and cape he's sporting these days, he started kicking ass and taking names while wearing a pastel golf shirt tucked into his dockers, rocking white flip flops? I think it would certainly make him a more menacing looking opponent. I mean, if he shows up to fight Despero dressed like he's headed to a Memorial Day picnic, Despero's gotta be thinking J'onn's not sweating bullets about the prospect of having to deal with him, you know?

A much less drastic redesign of J'onn's work clothes can be seen in "New Maps of Hell," the six-part story arc from JLA: Classified #10-#15, by Warren Ellis and Butch Guice. This was the last really good story arc in the now-cancelled JLA:C series; I remember being pretty down on it when I originally read it, but returning to it in trade recently, it was much, much, much better than I remembered. I guess that holds true for most of Ellis' writing though; when he writes for the trade, you're much better off waiting for the trade.

Anyway, here's what Guice put J'onn in throughout:



I imagine this is just an art mistake more than a conscious decision to change his look, but it's a pretty dramatic mistake, giving him those big, gold wristbands. Of course, Guice had Kyle Rayner wearing some weird-ass ring-generated armor throughout too. I like Guice's art in this story, and I like the way he draw's J'onn's shorts there, but I don't think the wristbands add anything of value to the costume. Other than making him look like a Wonder Woman wannabe (Sorry, Power Man!)

Finally, for another great alternate J'onn look, we need to look to an alternate continuitiverse, that pocket continuity where just about everyone is better designed than they are in the regular DCU, Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier.

When the captive J'onn J'onnz is finally released by his friend King Faraday, here's what he shape-changes into, once Faraday tells him that real men wear pants:



It can be complimented with a pair of sunglasses,



and, the tie and collar can be loosened in especially stressful situations.



Looking sharp, J'onn!

And those are most of J'onn's alternate looks. Tomorrow, we'll look at his very best one. Don't miss it!

Five fairly random thoughts that occurred to me while reading Manhunter Vol. 4

1.) There’s an astounding amount of connectivity to the DC Universe and its recent past in this book. I’m not talking about the number of villains who appear, although Dr. Psycho, Dr. Trapp, Circe, Everyman and The Madmen all pop up in this collection, or even the one-off guest-stars who appear for particular plot reasons, which this time include Batman, Superman, Sasha Bordeaux from Checkmate, Iron Munroe of The Young All-Stars and Wonder Woman, who practically shares the title with Kate for the duration of the book. It deals with Kate defending Wonder Woman in court for the murder of Maxwell Lord, a storyline that ran through the Superman books, Greg Rucka’s Wonder Woman and miniseries The OMAC Project.

I mean, okay, yes sure, there is all that, but I’m really talking about the regular, month-in, month-out supporting cast of the book. You’ve got D.E.O. agent Cameron Chase from the short-lived monthly Chase; former Infinity Inc. character and current D.E.O. director Mister Bones; former member of Infinity Inc., former Justice Leaguer and more recent JSA heavy Obsidian and former Manhunter Mark Shaw, who is dealing with a plot from the 90’s Bat-books and the old Azrael book.

That’s a lot of stuff picked up from other books. I think it all works quite well, and that’s pretty remarkable, considering.

Please note I don’t bring this up as a negative, only as something noteworthy. Personally, I think universe comics should exploit their connectivity and their universe setting—that is the main thing that sets them apart from non-universe comics, after all—and as long as it's done well, it’s more of a virtue than a drawback.

And Marc Andreyko does it well.


2.) Given all that, I’m pretty disappointed that Tony Bedard was named the new Birds of Prey writer instead of Andreyko, but that’s really a lose/lose/lose situation. I have no idea what happened with that particular bout of who's writing what chaos, but DC really shouldn’t have even put Sean McKeever on the book if he wasn’t going to be there for a long time.

I liked the one issue of Bedard’s fill-in run (which will end up being about as long as McKeever’s “regular” run) that I had read okay, and I liked the Black Canary back-up he did earlier on, but now there’s a real stink of second choice about him, which can’t be healthy for a book that’s already sliding down the sales chart since it lost Gail Simone. (Add to that the suspicion that Bedard being the regular writer on BoP might be like Bedrd being the regular writer on Supergirl and Batman and the Outsiders).

Andreyko handled the character of Barbara Gordon pretty well in Nightwing Annual #2 (I believe the title to that particular story was, “Here Marc, Try To Make Some Goddam Sense Out of The Random Status Quo Changes Done To These Characters in the One Year Later Jump”), it was a decent enough story with some funny lines, and he even slipped in a joke about Dick Grayson trying to hide a boner from Batman.

But mostly I think he would have been a good Birds of Prey writer based on the rather effortless way he integrates the detritus of cancelled books and unfinished storylines into Manhunter. That’s pretty much what BoP is anyway; a handful of supporting characters from other franchises sharing a book that none of them could carry on their own.



3.) Art Adams does some of his worst work ever on a piece in here. I usually love Art Adams’ drawing, and it’s really too bad he doesn’t do much more than covers these days. I know he’s got quite a rep as a “babe” artist—if you’re an editor and you want a sexy, buxom woman and/or a gorilla on the cover of your comic, Adams’ name should be at the top of your list—but man, this is a pretty bad drawing for Adams.

Usually his exaggeration makes sense within the construction of the image, but his shapely, butt-and-boobs-out, walking-on-her-toes Wonder Woman really doesn’t look like she should be fighting. Her left breast looks like it’s coming out of her neck here, which, obviously, makes for a cover that’s a lot uglier than it is sexy.

Unfortunately, this is the cover of the whole damn trade, too. Not only is it a weak image, but it doesn’t really capture what’s going on in the interiors at all. The two women spar in one issue, but that’s about it. This makes it look like a comic about Wonder Woman and Manhunter fighting. And the latter is in the background, with the former in the foreground, making this look more like a Wonder Woman comic than a Manhunter one.



4.) I love Phil Jimenez’s art. The most thunderously disappointing aspect of Infinite Crisis for me was that Jimenez wasn’t able to draw it all, either due to his not being given enough lead time, or him not being fast enough, or because it was being rewritten underneath him (I suspect all three).

I can’t really make sense of the alternate cover he did of Manhunter #26, which appears in the back of the trade, though.

Okay, we’ve got Manhunter and Wonder Woman, obviously, and, in a strip along the bottom, every Manhunter ever (and look, there’s Thor!) and, just below that, just about every Amazon, but I can’t really make sense of any of the faces in the upper right hand corner. Like, why is Donna Troy there in her Darkstar costume? Because Manhunter wears a Darkstar costume? I know Jimenez likes Troy, but that’s really reaching. I couldn’t even identify some of the others.


5.) Obsidian’s role in this book doesn’t quite fit in with his (usually off-panel) role in Justice Society of America.

I think he works pretty well in both books, and Andreyko even jokes about how little he’s had to do in JSoA so far in one panel here, but the two roles don’t seem to work in concert at the moment.

Manhunter is set in L.A., where Obsidian and his boyfriend both live. JSoA is set in New York City. Now, I’m sure Obsidian has access to teleporters and jet planes or whatever, and he may even be able to teleport himself via his powers (I forget the specifics on that), but in JSoA his job with the team is that of the HQ’s guard. So unlike Sandman, another little-seen satellite member with specific function who spends most of his time “in the field,” Obsidian’s the one member of the team who pretty much not only has to live in the HQ, but be there 24/7.

I don’t think it much matters, since DC has put Manhunter is some kind of weird not cancelled, but not being published either limbo and Obsidian’s so rarely in JSoA it’s easy to ignore him, but if any of that should change in the future, it might start to be problematic.

His lack of things to do in JSoA is, on the one hand, completely understandable (Geoff Johns has a huge and ever-growing cast in the book already), and on the other is kind of odd, considering what a natural fit for the team Obsidian is, being one of the first DCU heroes directly descended from one of the JSA members (I’m just sorry he and Atom-Smasher were never on the JSA at the same time as they were on the JLA).

If I had to guess, I would assume that Johns knows the DCU and its characters well enough to realize Obsidian should totally be on the team, even though Johns himself might not really like him (or at least not like writing him).

It might have been nice to have Andreyko do an Obsidian story for JSA: Classified instead of squandering the title switching back and forth between Dr. Midnight and Wildcat solo stories for so long, but I guess it’s too late to plan smart stories that have something to do with the massively successful parent title now that JSA:C is canceled.

Captain America, lesbian superheroines, Spoiler, X-Men and hobos (but no kitchen sink)

—Waste not, want not. Here’s a piece on the latest issue of Captain America that got bumped out of the paper for space, and won’t be relevant any more before the next issue. So I figured I might as well post it here, rather than let it go to waste. It’s written for a general audience, rather than the regular EDILW readers, who tend to consist of Newsarama readers and contributors and women with crushes on The Winter Soldier...




Marvel's Captain America comic got another jolt of mainstream media attention—Good Morning America! NPR! The Colbert Report!—with last week's release of #34, the issue in which a new character inherits the still-dead Steve Roger's shield and superhero identity.

It's often amusing (and sometimes cringe-inducing) to watch the “civilian” media react to the goings-on within the wonderful world of comics in the occasional instances that they notice.

In the case of last April's "death" of the original Captain America, it lead to tons of media coverage and a rush of people to comic shops snapping up what they were sure would be a collector's item, the last issue of the 67-year-old superhero Captain America's comic book.

Of course, superheroes die pretty regularly, and they tend to come back to life. Death has relatively little meaning in stories in which superpowers, clones, time travel and magic are so heavily involved.

When a big-time superhero does die, he of she is often replaced by another hero using his or her name, and often times the new character is a darker version of the original. Rather than a noteworthy event, then, the intro of the new Cap is really just Marvel following the well-established formula in the superhero cycle of death and rebirth.

What is fairly unique about this case, however, is how well writer Ed Brubaker has been able to maintain the quality of the monthly book after the title character was removed from it.

Almost a year has passed and, if anything, the book's gotten stronger and stronger, as Brubaker focused on Cap's traditional second bananas and antagonists, making it more of an ensemble drama. Brubaker’s completely mastered potboiler thriller and espionage, to the point where even when things happen exactly as one expects them to, they’re still exciting anyway.

Captain America #34 sees Cap’s former sidekick Bucky finally becoming the new Captain America, something that seemed a foregone conclusion the second the original was declared dead. The new Captain has a new costume, and a gun, which he uses to kneecap his terrorist enemies.

While the symbolism of a guy named “America” switching from a defense-only shield to a shield and gun combo may be groaningly obvious, this same issue sees Brubaker proving himself eerily prescient.

It opens with CNN talking heads decrying the price of oil, the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and the sudden sharp downturn in the economy. In the Marvel Universe, this has all lead to street demonstrations and rioting outside the White House.

What's behind this economic chaos? Captain America’s archenemy, the incredibly well preserved Nazi villain known as The Red Skull. Considering the lead time in comics—generally six months—Brubaker is either damn good at trend-spotting, or the real world is more and more following the gloomy imaginations of fiction writers purposely trying to think of melodramatically negative scenarios. Either way, it’s disturbingly in tune with today’s headlines.

In the ‘40s, Captain America used to punch out Hitler on the covers of his comics. I look forward to a cover in which the new Captain punches out the sub-prime mortgage crisis.


—Okay, anyone who wants to give Matt Brady and crew shit for laying into creators during profiles and interviews at Newsarama, please turn your attention to this Advocate article on all the lesbian superheroines in the DCU (Link totally stolen from Dirk Deppey’s Journalista).

It starts out on the wrong foot, mentioning Judd Winick’s gay-bashing issue of Green Lantern as the start of gay characters in super-comics in the DCU (I probably would have mentioned Vertigo easing super-comics readers into it, but whatever).

Most of it consists of talk about Renee “The Question” Montoya and Kathy “Batwoman” Kane, who appear in little-read miniseries Crime Bible: The Five Lessons of Blood, and some questions with Dan DiDio.

The writer does seem passably familiar with the DCU, saying this:


Batwoman and the Question aren’t the only sapphic superfolks stalking the streets of the DC Universe, either. Lovers Knockout and Scandal are both members of the Secret Six, while Amazonian powerhouse Grace and the density-altering heroine Thunder have a sexual relationship in the pages of The Outsiders. And when Catwoman, now more of an antihero than a villainess, retired to raise her newborn child, her lesbian friend Holly took on the guise of the ferocious feline.

Are these queer avengers here to stay—and stay gay? Knockout was recently murdered and, in a recent issue, it looked like Thunder was evicted from the Outsiders. But DiDio promises both Question and Batwoman will have "prominent roles" in 2008, after the current Crime Bible series wraps in February.


Hmm. I don’t know that Batwoman and the Question are exactly terribly prominent. Batwoman in particular seems to have disappeared. Cameos in Countdown and a guest-appearance in Crime Bible aside, she has a very low-profile for a hero who was set to appear in her own monthly, one that two different writers worked on at some point and a logo was already designed for. It’s odd that a character with a bat on her chest is less-seen in the modern DCU than, say, Booster Gold or the Metal Men or Geo-Force or Mogo the Green Lantern who is also a planet, you know?

Knockout and Scandal appeared in two miniseries; the former is at least temporarily dead (Although, unlike some of the Fourth Worlders, she’s a minor and modern addition, and not exactly guaranteed to return in the same way that, say, Orion and Mr. Miracle are). There are no plans for another Secret Six series announced at this point, and the team’s writer seems too focused on Wonder Woman for other books at this point, having dropped the rest of her workload.

Grace and Thunder are pretty awful examples of lesbian heroes, as both were just suddenly announced as gay; the former having had several sexual relationships with men prior, and a rather icky sexual history that I don’t imagine many gay advocates would be happy to hear about (“What are you trying to say, DC? That being repeatedly raped as a child turns you gay?”). They’re also both being written by one of the few mainstream super-comics writers who has actually came out and announced he foun gay content in super-comics to be completely inappropriate.

And Catwoman II was only temporarily carrying the Catwoman monthly; she’s been stripped of her cat-suit and sent to co-star in Countdown, a rather severe punishment for any DC superhero.

So, I don’t know…hooray for Sapphic superheroes?

As Deppey also snidely points out, they’re all buxom, Barbie doll-figured women in skintight costumes, with the exception of Montoya, who is a buxom, Barbie doll-figured woman in a trenchcoat. I was pretty disappointed to see how poor Holly swelled up into a cookie-cutter smexy super-girl in the pages of Countdown and in Adam Hughes’ Catwoman covers, as she used to be short, thin and rather gamine.



—Speaking of Dirk, everybody already read this essay of his, right? The one about the comics blogosphere’s sometimes misplaced feminist causes and superhero decadence and the super-comics markets? I’m afraid that a lot of the good points he makes are going to go unread or undiscussed simply because it is a long piece which a few pundits who should know better seem to have either not read or not understood and/or because some of the people who get name-dropped are going to take some personal offense to it, and respond to that stuff instead.

I think, for the most part, Deppey’s analysis is right…or at least seems right to me. However, Lisa Forturner, who provided the quote that got Deppey’s rhetorical ball rolling, is right about something too—DC is definitely paying attention.

Between Dan DiDio’s Christmas list, Chuck Dixon’s current Robin story arc, complete with memorial case gripe, and Grant Morrison and Tony Daniel’s one-panel case appearance in a dream sequence, it’s pretty obvious that DC hears this group of fans and is making attempts to respond.

Does it matter? I suppose that depends on who’s answering the question. (I said my piece on it here). Certainly it’s a drop in a bucket, and perhaps not a very important one, but, again, it depends on the person. Personally, I’d be happier to see less of Ed Benes drawing Wonder Woman and Black Canary, and a gradual shift towards returning more of the DCU line to books that are truly all-ages, with perhaps a couple reserved for more grown-up stories (Like, remember when New Titans, Green Arrow, Legends of the Dark Knight and a few others were kind of more for grown-up fans, but most of the line would be fine for a ten-year-old to read?)

See, I don’t mind people being torn in half in the comics I read, or rape being a plot point, but I really don’t think Superman, Robin or Mary Marvel need to be in those comics. I think it’s rather telling that probably the two best comics that DC published featuring superheroes last year were Grant Morrison and Frank Quiteley’s All-Star Superman and Jeff Smith’s Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil, both of which were all-ages in the truest sense of the word.



—If I were the person at DC responsible for deciding what old comics get released at what point in time, I would have made damn sure 1988 miniseries Millennium was in comics shops just before Marvel’s big Secret Invasion storyline kicked off.

I don’t remember Millennium being a terribly good story, and like Armageddon 2001, it’s really weird to read it this deep into the 21st century, but despite its disastrous ending (Has any new initiative ever fallen as flat as fast as The New Guardians?), it’s still head and shoulders above the worst of the DCU crossovers (Genesis and Countdown, by my reckoning). Plus, Ian Gibson does the finished art, and man, you haven’t seen the Martian Manhunter until you’ve seen Ian Gibson draw him.

The plot involves a centuries old scheme by the Manhunter robots, the Guardians’ first attempt at a universal police force before they decided on the Green Lanterns, infiltrating the DCU with sleeper agents, all timed to strike at once, so that the supporting characters that our heroes had come to trust over the years suddenly revealed themselves to be alien menaces.

In addition to the eight issues of the main miniseries, I believe just about every single DC comic at the time tied into it, even All-Star Squadron, which was set 40 years in the past. So a trade would have a lot to choose from, but I’m sure there’s a lot of unimportant chaff that wouldn’t be needed (Maybe a trade would look like the one for DC One Million, with the main series and then the more important tie-ins included).

Now, I don’t think Brian Michael Bendis found these in a dollar bin and was suddenly, “Hey, a great idea! Yoink!” or anything, but the surface similarities are such that DC could give their rival a good nose-tweaking by getting it out there and letting the partisan crowd draw their own conclusions. (And, besides, DC’s hardcore fans are all atwitter about things involving the Guardians, GL Corps and suchlike at the moment, aren’t they?)

Of course, if I were in charge of those things, I would have rushed to make sure Legends, in which the U.S. government outlaws superheroes, was available in trade ASAP as soon as I heard the first rumors about Civil War, and that The Flash: Hell To Pay was in trade as soon as I heard the first rumors that Peter Parker was contemplating selling his marriage to the devil in “One More Day.”



—This new X-Men cartoon looks pretty cool. My introduction to the characters was in an episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and then that pretty awful ‘90s one, which I loved in the way that one loves horrible cartoons. Like, every single character’s voice in that show was absolutely hilarious to me…it was a guranteed twenty-minute giggle-fest.

I thought X-Men: Evolution was pretty great. It took me a while to get used to it—or else it got more awesome towards the end.

This looks like a neat mixture of the two.




The ‘90s version had much better music, though:




In fact, the only way to improve upon that theme song would be, I don’t know, to sing something in Japanese, and set a bunch of images of speed-lines and gravity-free battles to it:





—Wonkette column “Cartoon Violence” is always worth a read, but this hobo-centric column is triply so. I may not know much about comedy (as the attempts at humor on this page should readily attest), but I do know that there is nothing funnier than hobos. Hell, just the word is hilarious.

Speaking of which, I believe this is a very strong contender for my occasional attempts to isolate the greatest Captain Marvel cover of all time:

Weekly Haul: February 6th

Detective Comics #841 (DC Comics) Paul Dini’s Bat-title seems to have finally fully recovered from the “Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul” damage, turning back to done-in-ones with a focus on the Dark Knight solving mysteries. And artists Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs knock the issue out of the park; particularly the former on the cover. Take a moment to drink that in; the one you’ll have bought form your local comic shop will have covered up some of the good bits with the logo and UPC symbol.

This story focuses on an alliance between some of Batman’s oldest foes who share an affection for Lewis Carrol—Jervis “The Mad Hatter” Tetch and the Tweedles. They’ve built up a small army called The Wonderland Gang, including March Harriette, The Carpenter, The Walrus, The Lion and the Unicorn.

Some of the designs for these villains are less-than-inspired—the March Hare-inspired villain is just a Playboy bunny for example, and there’s something just wrong with the Tweedles wearing hoodies, track pants and tennis shoes—but some of that lame-ness is intentional (the final confrontation between The Carpenter and the Batman is played for laughs, for example).

With a strong story and probably the best artist he’s worked with since taking over the book, this may be the strongest issue of Dini’s since his first, drawn by J. H. Williams. Finally, TEC is turning into the superior Bat-comic it should have been. So naturally the next issue is a fill-in story by Peter Milligan dealing with more “Resurrection” baggage.

Sigh.



Justice Society of America (DC) Wow. Just…wow. Does Geoff Johns do his best writing when he’s working with a co-writer (like Jeff Katz on Booster Gold or Alex Ross here), or is his game more noticeably stepped up when he’s working on a book he’s clearly all fired up about? Because the first three to six pages of this story are among the funniest and most fun of the billions of pages Johns has written in his career. These focus on the return of Jakeem and his Thunderbolt to the fold, and their meeting the many new recruits to the team.

As with the pancake breakfast issue, it’s a disappointment when Johns and Ross actually start focusing on the plot of the book. As for that, Gog is continuing to bump off obscure bad guys (see Showcase Presents: Batman and the Outsiders Vol. 1 to see the first appearance of these victims) and the JSA is continuing to recruit.

I really disliked Amazing Man III, in large part because he seemed so unnecessary; Amazing Man II might have died, but his death was so equivocal, he seemed super-easy to resurrect. While the original Amazing Men has a rather uncool costume—as I’ve said before, green and gold are just a hard color combo to work with—it’s a hell of a lot better than III’s African-inspired outfit. I kinda dig the alternate history retcon regarding his grandfather, which seems logical for the DCU, but this Amazing Man, which is actually spelled “Amazing-Man” for some reason, like that other guy’s name (Actually, the hyphen seems to come and go throughout DCU history; I say lose it…it’s more Spider-Man than Superman, though, you know?). But his attitude seems like it could get pretty annoying pretty quickly. Like, I just met him, and he’s already by least favorite A.M. ever.

His creation also seems to follow a somewhat unfortunate pattern of Johns’ character creation—the relative that no reader’s ever heard of suddenly appearing.

Speaking of which, remember in Judd Winick’s Outsiders, when Black Lightning Jefferson Pierce suddenly had an adult daughter you never knew existed before? Well, he’s got a wife too, I guess? And another daughter, who looks like Kingdom Come cameo-er Lightning. (I dropped Outsiders a long time ago, so maybe the blanks of Pierce’s personal life have since been filled-in? I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it though, as he would have had to have both of his daughters almost a decade before he even became a superhero).

The final new character introduced is, as far as I know, a brand-new character with a really unusual legacy, a soldier who got his powers from an artifact he came into contact while protecting Baghdad museums from looters at the start of the Iraq War. Huh. Whoever replaced Major Samuel Lane as President Luthor’s Secretary of Defense apparently planned a much better Iraq War then our Pentagon did…



Metal Men #6 (DC) Wow, Chemo is a lot more eloquent when he’s writing memos then he is when he’s speaking in person, huh? Still, no one says “Glah!” with more authority.



Nightwing #141 (DC) It’s guest-stars galore as Dick Grayson continues to settle into a new status quo—comparing notes with Superman, doing some home improvements with the JSA and Green Lantern John Stewart, a couple of neat interactions with Bruce Wayne and Alfred, and a very welcome scene of Dick and his best friend Wally “The Flash” West catching up. Writer Peter J. Tomasi and artists Rags Morales and Michael Bair juggle them all well and, most admirably, keep them from overwhelming the story; it never loses focus on its star, Nightwing. Plus, Dick goes on a date and has his first day on his new job. That makes two great issues of Nightwing in a row…when was the last time that happened?



Teen Titans: Year One #2 (DC) Aqualad is by far the most dramatic deviation from the DCU history you thought you knew, both in his more fish-like, buck-toothed appearance and his frightened, anxious personality. Personally, I don’t mind a bit—the original Teen Titans didn’t really have any personalities anyway (I think Wonder Girl’s desire to frug was the only thing distinguishing any of the original five from one another, for example), so grafting one onto Garth seems a-ok to me, especially since it’s both logical and a lot of fun to read about.

The sidekicks’ mentors continue to go rogue—Aquaman attacks a sub, Flash ruins vacations and Green Arrow pulls an armored truck robbery—prompting Robin, Kid Flash, Aqualad and Speedy join forces. Karl Kerschl, Serge LaPointe and Steph Peru do fantastic work on the drop-dead gorgeous art, turning out simply fantastic designs for not just the teens, but also Aquaman and red-glove, clean-shaven Green Arrow. Amy Wolfram’s ability to write for the artists is quite admirable considering her TV background, as the creators do an awful lot of characterization in the images. The boys’ reaction to the appearance of Wonder Girl for example? Perfect.

Now comes her greatest challenge though—making sense out of Wonder Girl and her relationship to Wonder Woman, one of the greatest challenges of DCU’s ever-changing fictional history.



The Twelve #2 (Marvel Comics) The art’s still great, the characters are still appealing weird and the little moments featuring them all are all competently handled, but things still seem off, as if this would be a more compelling story if we knew who the hell the characters were at this point (J. Michael Straczynski’s clumsy intro of them all with a sentence or two narration last issue doesn’t count). It’s still not a badly done comic, but it’s not exactly a well done one either—I have a feeling that the odd structural choice, jumping all around the Blue Blade’s murder, will read a lot better in trade than it does in single issues.

The Uses of Candy

And besides Di, candy is good for a heck of a lot more than just eating! Why, it's also good for



having fun,



making people strong and beautiful,



distracting German sentries,



knocking things out of people's hands,



helping break bad news,



making an unreasonable man reasonable,


soothing wedding day jitters,


jamming gun barrels,


liberating hydrogen atoms to isolate the life vitamin,


luring deer,


and even reviving victims of drug-induced paralysis.

Oh candy, is there anything you can't do?

Oh, so that's how Gail Simone landed the Wonder Woman gig...

Apparently, Wonder Woman herself must have put in a good word for Gail with her bosses at DC Comics.

She probably felt like she owed Gail after that one time in 1943 when the young writer betrayed her boss The Cheetah to the Amazon heroine, and then Wonder Woman neglected to rescue Gail until after she dealt with the Japanese military.

Delayed Reaction: The Wall

The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux ), by Peter Sís


Why’d I wait?: I wasn’t even aware of this book’s existence when it was released last August.

Why now?: I saw it on that Young Adult Library Services Association list that I apparently can’t shut up about, which made me curious. I see it was also mentioned more recently as a Caldecott Honor book. I’m not exactly sure what that means—is it like, a runner-up?—but I’m pretty sure it’s a pretty desirable honor.


Well?: This is a rather difficult book to talk about critically, for a couple of reasons.

First, its form is highly unusual, in the “Is this a graphic novel or not?” kind of way. I know I, and many, many people far, far smarter than I have talked about the inadequacy of the term “graphic novel,” and this is an instance in which it really doesn’t seem quite right. In The Wall’s dimensions, it really seems more like a children’s picture book, all that it is much more complex than a lot of picture books. But it’s only 56 pages long—can you really consider it a novel of any kind, graphic or otherwise?

Additionally, there are several different types of narrative going on, with the words and the pictures not quite interacting the way they normally do in what we consider comics or graphic novels. On a few occasions, the pictures completely give way to text of a sort.

So I don’t know; maybe it’s a hybrid graphic mini-memoir?

This brings me to the second part of what makes it difficult to talk about. I don’t think it is a very good comic. Or, if it’s not comics, I don’t think it’s a particularly good picture book for older kids, or whatever you want to call it.

And by “not very good,” I simply mean it doesn’t seem to work on every page. Yet it is a beautiful book—well designed, imaginatively drawn—and I learned a lot from it. Which is what makes it kind of difficult to criticize—I really liked it, but I didn’t think it was very good, if that makes any sense at all.

Here, let me show you what I’m talking about:


This is a typical page of the book. There’s a grid full of panels, and the flow sequentially into one another—if you removed all the words, these images would still tell a somewhat vague but linear and legible story all by themselves. However, there’s prose along the bottom of the page, a phrase or sentence per page. Meanwhile, another thread of verbal information can be read top to bottom on either side of the panels. All in all then, there are at least three different sources of information, each to be read in a different direction and different manner. And keep in mind this is just one page; if the book were actually open in front of you, this would be the page on the right-hand side, on the left hand side would be a page laid out the exact same, with the second half of the sentence beginning at the bottom of this page over there.

It makes for a rather unusual, and sometimes kind of frustrating read.

These would occasionally give way to two-page spreads, of single images (“splash pages” in the funnybook vernacular, I guess), and other spreads that are nothing but prose (with smaller images framing them).

These are marked “From my journals,” and will list particular years, with a sentence or four about what was going on in Sís’ life and in his country at the time.

And it’s a hell of a life’s story. Sís was born in Czechoslovakia during and grew up through the Cold War; his life’s story roughly coincides with the story of the Eastern Europe’s time behind the Iron Curtain.

The writing is elegantly simple; Sís talks directly to the reader as if they’ve never heard of the Cold War—and I imagine some of them haven’t—but he never seems to be talking down to his audience. It’s a kids’ book that doesn’t insult one’s intelligence, and considering some of the very difficult topics he covers, that’s quite an achievement.

It’s a great example of the universality of the personal, as this is essentially his own story, and his struggles with his interest in art, something that was more often than not at odds with Soviet rule.

I can’t really say anything about the art that you can’t see for yourself by clicking on the image above. Sís’ designs are lovely, and rather simple, although the number of lines and complex shading and image constructions he embeds them in are bewilderingly sophisticated.

There’s a base palette of airy black and white, punctuated with a lot of Soviet and communist red, with other colors standing in for the world beyond the state’s control. In the image above, for example, not the yellow and blues in little Sís’ drawings, and how it stands out on the rest of the page.

Here’s a detail from one of the splash pages, this one focusing on the Prague Spring of 1968, when Western cultural influences were pouring into the country, which was heavily flirting with opening up—at least until Soviet tanks rolled in.


That little square is about two-thirds of half of the image (the splashes are way too big for the scanner); note the little black and white Sís running joyfully through the color landscape.

Here’s half of a spread which is one of the more comic book-y sequences. Across the bottom of the pages are the word, “Everyone wanted to draw. They painted a wall filled with their dreams…and repainted it again and again.”



The images are two columns of stacks of five panels, in which the Czech youth surreptitiously paint a wall, the pig-nosed Communist police paint it white, and the kids re-paint it.

While those confusingly arranged pages, the splashes and the journal entries account for most of the page count, there are several other pages that break that pattern, often quite beautiful images, like a map of the city accommodating Soviet tanks, or the spirit of ’68 winding in a huge spiral, and, at the end, a huge brick wall being chiseled away by tiny little figures with pickaxes and flags, symbolizing the end of the Cold War.

It’s a really lovely book; even the cover design, which makes it look like Sís personally made the thing out of corrugated cardboard and string, and hand-drew the title and cover image right on it.

The only way it could be a cooler design would be if he actually did hand-make every copy of this book in exactly that manner.



Would I travel back in time to buy it off the shelf the week of release?: Nah. It’s a great book to read and/or look at, but it’s not one that I feel a need to own. I don’t know that I can recommend everybody run out and buy a copy of their own a $18 a pop, particularly given the occasionally over-complicated and counter-intuitive storytelling on so many of the pages, but it’s definitely worth borrowing form the library.



Anything else?: Yeah, I was amused to see one of the characters who appeared in the first two-page spread. The image was of a young black-and-white Sís in his red Young Pioneers kerchief walking down the street, with a gigantic thought cloud representing his imagination looming above him. Within it is a giant figure of Stalin emerging from a Kremlin, with Lenin, Khruschev and Brezhnez before him. Flying through the sky are planes and missiles, a rocket labeled “Gagarin” and, of course:


Man, between this and Nick Abadzis’ Laika, 2007 was a great year for the first earthling in space, huh?

Sís mentions the heroic canine cosmonaut twice in the first of his journal entry spreads, as well:



Aw, isn't that just darling?

Catching up on comics everyone else in the entire world has already read

Like most everybody, I really like to be on top of things when it comes to pop culture, or at least the elements of it I’m interested in. I like to see movies the weekend they’re released (if I haven’t already seen ‘em for review purposes), I like to hear about the cool bands before they sign their big record contracts and appear on Letterman or Saturday Night Live, and, whenever possible, I like to read comics and graphic novels on Wednesday afternoons.

However, there’s certainly something to be said for coming to something—particularly serial entertainment like comic strips, books or TV series—long after the rest of the world. Sure, it might mean that you can’t always participate in the water cooler conversations at work the next day, and you might lose some with-it points or geek cred, but, on the other hand, the thing you’ve been missing out on for years has had time to pile up, so that when you’re ready for it, there is a lot of it to be enjoyed.

For example, my lack of interest in/ability to afford premium channels meant I missed Curb Your Enthusiasm until five seasons of it were available on DVD, but I could watch it pretty much all at once—an episode or two or three a day. I was too young to “get”Twin Peaks when it was on TV, but on DVD, I could follow the entire Laura Palmer investigation in the course of a week or three. The instant gratification that comes from being able to watch, say, Neon Genesis Evangelion or Boston Legal without having to wait for commercials, week’s between episodes or new seasons to start is a wonderful, wonderful pleasure.

The same goes for comics. Some of my favorite reading experiences have involved catching up on completed series I’ve never read a bit of, like Preacher, which I didn’t even start reading until after the last issue shipped, or Starman, which I started reading in trade as the last arc was winding down in the monthlies. It’s a neat feeling, knowing the cliffhanger between stories or volumes will last only as long as you allow it to, and being able to read a single, complete, several thousand pages long story in the course of a few weeks, you know?

This past month, I’ve set myself to catching up on a few comics, of varying kinds and off varying degrees of my being way behind of. The four comics below have pretty much nothing in common, except from the fact that they’re all things I took a little too long to sample for myself, and that I’m cramming them all into the same long-winded post.

The first is the biggest work, and the one I was farthest behind on and, not coincidentally, the one I’m the most embarrassed—hell, ashamed—it took me so long to experience and appreciate. Particularly considering that one of my jobs and one of my—I don’t know, what is this site? A hobby?—hobbies is talking about comics.

But here goes: I never really read Achewood until the dawn of the new year.

(Ray, Onstad and Roast Beef, in an image that ran with this Onion AV Club interview)

I have an excuse, of course, but it may not sound like a very good one, particularly since I’m making it on a web log, but I’m a straight-up old-fashioned Luddite, and have a pretty strong aversion to web comics. The problem with web comics, you see, are that they’re on the web. And thus reading them involves using a computer, and that’s something I associate with work, not comics reading.

As much time as I spend in front of computer screens, when I want to read a comic, I want it to be something I can hold in my hands, or take in the bathroom or bathtub with me. I want it to be something I don’t mind eating while reading, or falling asleep with my face on. And I’d like it to be something that won’t give me cancer or hurt my eyes.

My resistance to computers is slowly breaking down, of course.

There was a time (the late ‘90s), when I still did all my writing with pen and paper, and would later transcribe it on my typewriter, or, later, a computer, although I’ve since learned to write right on the keyboard.

I used to read newspapers, now I get all my news from the computer.

And the fact that none of the papers around me carry some of my favorite comic strips has slowly gotten me used to reading strips online.

The other thing that kept me from Achewood was that it was a little overwhelming—look at how much information there is available on the page and, also, that I didn’t have a clue what it was about.

I’ve heard about how awesome it was for a long time, of course, and would occasionally follow links back to it. I remember the Comic Sans strip making the rounds, for example, and the one about Ray’s nephew's little pants, but I was having some conceptual difficulties.

Why was it called “Achewood,” for example? What were the various animals…bears or cats? Why did Todd not have any features? If he was a squirrel and Roast Beef was a cat, how come Todd was so much smaller, as if Beef were human-sized? And how come everything is scale to the cats, except when it’s not? And what’s up with that all-white, angel thing that’s sometimes with Todd? If Phillipe is only five, why doesn’t he live with his mom?

I tried reading several strips in a row on a couple of occasions to make them make sense, but these questions still bugged me. (I’ve similarly tried to force myself to enjoy a lot of newspaper strips over the years in this same way; like, “If I just read Mary Worth long enough to know who everyone is, it will eventually start being entertaining.” It never worked).

Okay, yes, these are all stupid-ass questions, and, looking back, I can see thinking about these things casts me in the befuddled old man role of, say, my grandfather trying to make sense of an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force he’s just walked in on, or, I don’t know, Walt Disney’s grandfather having his mind blown by his grandson’s day job (“Why isn’t that duck wearing any pants? Why’s the mouse have pants, but not shirt?”)

The critical mass of critical praise Achewood and its creator Chris Onstad was racking up as ’07 turned into ’08 inspired me to give it another try and this time really work at it. It was ultimately Lev Grossman’s top ten list for Time that framed it in a way that dispelled all my lingering confusions:



Achewood defies categorization or description, but a brief, futile attempt at a synopsis would go something like this: A bunch of cats, some robots, a bear and an otter who's 5 years old, live together in a fictional neighborhood called Achewood, which you might usefully think of as a grown-up, suburban, stoned version of Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood.



Man, it was light bulb city after I read that description, and armed with that and Dirk Deppey’s statement in his best-of the year list that “Achewood’s strengths are also its biggest drawback, as you really won't get much of the humor without reading six months or so of archived strips,” I returned to achewood.com, clicked on the “Jump To Story Arc” buttons, and spent the better part of my January evenings reading every goddamned strip I could.

And now ? Well, I’ve seen the light. I hate to even waste anybody’s time here talking up Onstad’s strip, particularly since I’m apparently one of the last people with an interest in comics and a web connection to get into it, but it truly is an incredible achievement in sequential art, serial narrative and funny-ass jokes.

It’s almost scary how fully-realized Onstad’s world is—I mean, ten of his characters have blogs that update more regularly than most comics blogs—and how realistic all of his characters are, despite the fact that they may be, for example, a cat in a thong Speedo and sunglasses, or a squirrel with a drug problem and a tiny little van.

It’s as powerful an argument as you can make for comic strips, I think, regarding the idea that spending a little bit of time on a regular basis with the fictional characters slowly, gradually increases the effectiveness of the entire endeavor. For an extreme example, think of Peanuts—some of us have been reading it our entire lives; some people have read it for fifty years. That shit all added up, to the point where Snoopy could just walk on-panel and you’d crack a smile.

And Onstad’s not working with every day things like dogs and kids, he’s working with a bunch of cats, teddy bears and robots; that is, rather than starting with the familiar and making it more and more familiar, he’s starting with the out-there and making it seem everyday.

If he quit making Achewood tomorrow, I imagine comics historians would look back on it as an astonishing achievement. If he keeps it up as long as Bill Watterson did Calvin and Hobbes or Schulz did Peanuts? My God, man. Future histories of comics are going to have a lot to say about Achewood.

Me, I’m insanely late to the party, but I don’t much mind—after all, I got to spend the last month or so reading them all at once, and it’s made for a great last month or so.

I’m only a few months rather than a few years late when it comes to reading Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (Levine Books) which is, I’m sure you’ve heard elsewhere, really, really good.

I’m not sure if it would have cracked my top ten from last year if I’d managed to read it before December 31st, but it definitely would have made it into the bigger, to-be-considered-for-best-of-the-year list. Tan did an incredible job telling the rather oft-told, classic immigrant story, using essentially the American version of the experience, albeit by inventing a bewilderingly alien culture to plunge the reader into, making the experience easily relatable to American readers, despite the fantastic nature of so much of the story.

I’m of two minds about the art. The designs of the new land our immigrant hero starts his new life in are incredible, and after reading it, I quickly started over, just following Tan’s linework, and sitting in mute amazement at the way he shaped all those little marks into such incredible images. (The pages of the giants with the vacuum guns are really haunting; check ‘em out below).



At the same time, I didn’t much care for the human characters. The expressions often seemed too much like photographs, as if they were more photo than drawing. They’re exceptional drawings, but, as a matter of personal aesthetic taste, I find drawings that look too realistic off-putting sometimes. I do see how this served the story well though, putting all of the fantasy elements in sharper relief.


On the eve of a recent Wednesday, a couple of bloggers mentioned how incredible it was that Dark Horse Comics’ reprint program of the old Little Lulu comics had reached Volume 18 already. Clearly, it’s a publishing initiative that’s working pretty damn well, and it’s high time I at least gave the comics a look.

I checked one out from my local library more out of curiosity than anything else, and I was immediately hooked, racing through all the volumes they carried (Vols. 7, 12 and 13) and then pointing my browser to the next nearest library to find more. Not only are they well-made, fun comics, they’re incredibly addictive (And at the standard manga price point of only $9.99 per volume, they’re a pretty good value, too).

John Stanley and Irving Tripp’s cartooning is incredible and, like those Essential and Showcase Presents reprint volumes, I think the black and white format really accentuates that (although, I should note, the Little Lulu collections are on higher quality paper).

While the character designs of the kids and their parents are sharp, what I really dig about the cartooning is the random adults passing through the panels, the passersby and their reactions to the outsize emotions of the kids and their often strange behavior.

And the expressions on the characters’ faces are just amazing. They all have plain old dots for eyes, but Stanely and Tripp wring an amazing amount of emotion out of them, by merely adding slanted eyebrows, just like you learned to draw mad people when you were a little kid. (Mike Sterling had a great post accentuating the kids’ angry faces recently).

The childhood that Little Lulu, Tubby and the gang share is one I have no real first-hand experience with, and I suspect neither do my parents—I’m removed from it by more than one generation, if it ever actually existed. It seems to be the same golden neighborhood childhood you see in Peanuts, Dennis the Menace and some of the old Archie comics.

And yet I still felt a tinge of nostalgia while reading it. Maybe it’s nostalgia for those other works that the Little Lulu comics reminded me of, or maybe it’s that no matter how different the specifics of their childhoods vs. my own, Stanley, Irving and company capture the essential relationships and emotions of being a little kid.

As much as I enjoyed the kids’ adventures—particularly those involving Tubby as a detective busting Lulu’s dad for some crime, real or imagined—I hate the chapters in which Lulu tells stories to little pest character Alvin. I don’t know why, exactly, as these often give Stanley and Tripp the opportunity to draw dragons, dinosaurs, giants, monsters and the like, but they bug the hell out of me, and I have a hard time getting through them. Maybe it’s the often redundant narration, or just the lack of Tubby action, but I don’t cotton to the imaginary story sequences.

Finally, I finally got around to reading Death Note Vol. 1 (Viz), fully realizing I’m, like, years behind on this multimedia juggernaut. It’s popularity alone always made me curious about it, but there always seemed to be a manga series I was more interested in, and so I just managed to not read it until a couple weeks ago.

Having done so, I’m a little surprised to hear it’s supported a dozen volumes, as the premise doesn’t immediately seem like it would lend itself to too long a series—although I suspect there’s quite a bit of growth possibility in extending the mythology involving the death gods and other character’s touching Light’s notebook.

And I can also see exactly why it’s so popular. Light is a fairly unique-ish protagonist for a manga series (or, you know, any kind of serial fiction), and the fact that it’s so hard to root for or against him (or any of the other characters in the first volume) makes it a very interesting read.

It also has a set of simple “rules” governing it, like a lot of the more popular manga/anime imports (Cardcaptor Sakura, Dragon Ball, Yu-Gi-Oh!, etc.), and is pretty damn suspenseful. By the time I finished the first volume, I was really curious about what happened next, and how the high-stake game of wits between Light and “L” turned out.

Now I think I’m going to go look into this “Watchman” book by Alan Moore and Dave something-or-other I’ve heard so much about…

I read some manga.

King of Thorn Vol. 1 (Tokyopop) A few days after mentioning the YALSA list of “Top Graphic Novels for Teens” in a post, I was able to track down one of the manga that made the list, King of Thorn.

It wasn’t what I was expecting at all.

It’s a fine action-adventure manga, with nice, easily readable art, cool character designs and a serviceable melodrama about a shy young girl finding the courage to live her life at its heart, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary. It’s simply a baseline manga series and, unlike The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, Laika and some of the other books on their top ten, I’m really not sure what it’s doing on this list at all.

This page has a longer YALSA list, going under the name of “Great Graphic Novels For Teens,” with a sentence or two of commentary and a bit on the criteria. As far as I can tell, it seems to be the list is composed of books that are popular and encompass the full range of teen graphic novels (a lot of manga, some superhero books, some fantasy, some Minx, some pleasant surprises like Robot Dreams, Houdini: The Handcuff King and Notes for a War Story).

I wouldn’t put too much stock in the list, as it does credit the Sam Kieth-created Batman series Secrets to “Sam Kieth, Bob Kane and others.”

At any rate, it got me to read the first volume of King of Thorn, which was an inoffensively told genre story that I didn’t mind killing an hour or so reading, and, by the time I reached the last page, I was intrigued enough by the central mystery to want to check out future volumes (From a library, if not from a bookstore at $9.99 a pop…or my local comic shop for $9.99 minus my pull-list discount).

In the near future, a horrible, deadly, incurable disease nicknamed Medusa is ravaging the world’s population. It gets its name from the manner in which it kills people, practically petrifying them until they crumble like an old statue.

An eccentric aristocrat has financed the building of a huge research center inside an old castle, outfitting it with cryogenics chambers for infectees chosen by lottery.

They’re to be frozen and eventually awoken once the cure is found. When they are awoken, it's seemingly by accident, and it’s certainly not by doctors ready to give them a cure. Instead, they find the castle in ruins, completely covered in thorns (an allusion to the old Sleeping Beauty story), and patrolled by monsters.

How long have they been asleep? Long enough for nature to evolve bird-sized dragons, horned velociraptor-looking dinosaurs, and a huge, eye-less beast that can eat a dozen people in a single gulp, apparently.

Our protagonist is Kasumi, a shy, bespectacled twin who was separated from her sister, and seems to long to join her in death, but images of her sister keep her going. The other survivors are so thoroughly generic they seem pilfered from a Hollywood screenwriter’s notebook. There’s a mysterious stranger covered with tattoos; a fat, old, rich, contrarian senator; a big black dude for fisticuffs; a smart, little white guy with glasses; a motherly young woman whose not long for this world; and a little boy to cry in fear or say something encouraging, depending on the situation.

Together this ragtag group of survivors have to find their way out of the thorn-filled castle, avoid all the monsters and figure out what the hell happened while they were out. Adding tension is the fact that they’re all still dying of the disease they were dying from when they went to sleep, and they’re wearing wristbands that indicate exactly how close to death they all are.

Despite the generic nature of the characters—seemingly more generic in that they are Hollywood stereotypes more than manga stereotypes, making them less exotic to cynical Western readers like me—Yuji Iwahara’s narrative is definitely full of suspense, and rather deftly raises mysteries within mysteries, so that new questions arise while one reads.

While I don’t think this belongs on anyone’s top ten list, if YALSA was just going by popularity among teen readers, then I can see why this made it there. As a jaded 30-year-old, I found it engaging enough; I imagine I would have loved it when I was a teen. I mean, the horned raptor monsters are really, really cool-looking.

A second volume has already been published, and it looks like a third is due any day now.



Kitchen Princess Vol. 1 (Del Rey) The credits for this book confuse me. They read “Manga by Natsumi Ando” and “Story by Miyuki Kobayashi.” I don’t know what that means; is the former the artist and the latter the writer? Ando does the little biographic pieces in the borders of each chapter, like Yû Watase and others do in their manga, and an afterword from Kobayashi mentions that Kobayashi writes for a series of Japanese YA books, so I think that’s the right division, but the who does what on this book kinda confuses me, and I hate that.

I’m pretty far behind on this series, an impulse borrow from the library, as I see it apparently began last spring and is already up to four volumes. There were a lot of elements to the story that seemed pretty derivative of other manga I’ve read, so I doubt it’s a series I’ll make a point of following, but it’s pleasant enough, and I found myself pretty disappointed when I got to the end of the book and realized I had reached it already.

Our heroine is the orphan Najika, who has just been accepted to Seika Academy, an exclusive boarding school that she was only able to get into due to her wizardry in the kitchen. She’s in a special class, in which everyone has an exceptional talent in a different field—hers is cooking.

She became such a good cook, in part, due to a mysterious childhood memory. Crying over the loss of her pastry chef parents, she’s rescued from drowning by an older boy, who gives her a dessert he’s carrying to cheer her up. Her only clue as to the boy’s identity is the silver spoon that was in the dessert, which came from…Seika Academy!

Well, that and her memory of the taste of the flan. Najika never forgets a taste.

Already we’ve got a bit of a Cinderella story going on, and the search for her destined love she only cloudily remembers, as in Love Hina (and probably other manga, but that’s my favorite to use that particular conceit).

At the academy, she meets moody Daichi and his popular older brother Sora, the two prime suspects for princehood. They befriend her, but the rest of the student body isn’t so kind, particularly the Mean Girls-style Queen Bee model Akane. I really liked this last character, because while she’s thoroughly evil, she’s deviously so, and her evil isn’t telegraphed in the way bad guy characters usually are presented—we’re as shocked as Najika at Akane’s cruelty. (Well, I was; you won’t be if you read it now, because I’ve spoiled it. Sorry).

This first volume chronicles Najika’s first semester at the school, her difficulties with the other girls, and the gentle flirtations with the two brothers, and the mysteries of the series, like who her prince is and why Sora and Daichi are no longer as close as one would expect brothers to be.

Also included are recipes of all the foods Najika whips up in the book, which is kinda neat. Unfortunately, my being mostly vegan will prevent me from trying to make any of these except possibly the Christmas cookie recipe, which actually doesn’t sound all that great anyway, but, had I read this, like, a decade ago, I would have been all over this section.

Otherwise, it’s pretty much your standard manga high school dramedy, with some cooking thrown in, and a few surprisingly touching words of wisdom (translated by Satsuki Yamashita and adapted by Nunzio DeFilippis and Christinia Weir).

At one point, Najika is crying about the latest act of cruelty, and wishing she could move back to her hometown of Hokkaido, where the night sky is so much clearer.

Sora tells her, “You know, small stars, large stars…they shine equally bright in the night sky. I don’t think you need to be the same as [the other girls]. You have… …your own way of shining.”

Awwwww!

Also, early on, the mysterious Flan Prince tells Najika that “When you eat something good, you smile,” and we learn that informs her philosophy of cooking—the greatest pleasure in cooking is seeing the smile on the face of the person who eats and enjoys your cooking.

Awwwwww!

It’s not quite as elegant as the bit in Raymond Carver’s short story “A Small, Good Thing” wherein the baker explains the importance of food to the mourning parents—which is the story I always think of when it comes to food philosophy—but it’s not bad from such a frivolous little story.

Come to think of it, a two “Awww!”-inducing book with nice enough art, entertaining enough storylines and recipes in the back might be something worth following into future volumes after all…