The Secret Origin of Caleb, Comic Book Reader (A Gary Gygax appreciation...of sorts)

Aside from a few stray issues of Marvel’s G.I. Joe and Transformers purchased from drug store spinner racks as a little kid, this was my first comic book.

I was eleven, going on 12, and was home sick for a while with pneumonia. My mom was buying orange juice and saltines and other sick child supplies, and picked me up something to read—Advanced Dungeons & Dragons #2, as I played the game back then (actually, I spent more time reading the manuals and compendiums and the trashy fantasy novels based on them and Dungeon and Dragon magazines than actually role-playing, as I only had two friends who were at all interested in the game). She may have gotten me a Mad or a Cracked too, that part I don’t recall.

The story was okay, it had something to do with a paladin (a word I always liked saying out loud) who had withered little arms and had become a drunk, an evil sorcerer that looked like a demon, and a buddy-cop type team consisting of a pissed-off dwarf and a gentle centaur with glam eye make up and an ermine stole…vest…thing.

A few months later, I ran across this in a local magazine store, where my dad had stopped to chat with his friend, who ran the place:



Only five issues had passed, but things were very different. The paladin, who seemed to be the hero of the series, was gone. The blond elfin magic-user was now a brunette. There was a middle-aged thief no one trusted who wasn’t in the earlier issue. Everyone had changed clothes. They were in a different city now. And they were fighting a giant skeleton of a jester.

I was seized with curiosity about what I had missed, how the characters had gotten from that Point A in #2 to such a different Point B by #7. Now I know part of it was that the writer had changed, even though the artist stayed the same (after the first arc, Dan Mishkin would most the series, with Jan Duursema handling the pencils on every issue, save a few by her husband Tom Mandrake). And I also know that the long-since canceled AD&D, part of a short-lived partnership between DC Comics and TSR that resulted in a mini-line of comics based on the role-playing games, was somewhat unlike superhero comics in the way the characters and stories changed. They didn’t have costumes, they didn’t have multi-media franchises built upon them—Mishkin, Duursema and company were free to kill them off, fill-in their back stories, and alter them as they saw fit from story to story.

It was my first experience with comic books as a serial narrative, and my desire to find out what I missed lead me into a comic shop for the first time, to buy back issues. It didn’t take long to get hooked. Those issues of AD&D would feature checklists for other DC books, wherein I could read a sentence or two summary of exciting goings-on involving something called Suicide Squad, Checkmate and a Justice League full of characters that had never been on Superfriends. And then there were, of course, the house ads.

I remember the impression one for the Batman/The New Teen Titans crossover “A Lonely Place of Dying” left on me. That ad featured Nightwing standing atop a building looking pretty angsty, the Bat-signal in the background, and his Robin uniform clutched in one hand. The tease said something like, “In Gotham City, The Batman is giving in to madness and violence. Can Nightwing help? Will he help?”

That too filled me with curiosity, as I felt I had a decent handle on Batman from TV, but I had no idea that Robin had become Nightwing, or that Batman was going crazy. At the time, I thought Nightwing was a villain—based on the name and costume—and thought he was the second Robin, the one I had read about dying in newspapers and magazines.

Between such promotional materials and all the shocking stuff on the shelves of the comic shop—Man, I could barely process what I was looking at when I lifted a copy of Arkham Asylum off a shelf to look at it—more and more allowance went to comics. There was AD&D’s sister title, Forgotten Realms (drawn by Rags Morales); Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which I was also interested in via role-playing games, as one of my friends and I were really into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness at the time; then Armageddon 2001, Batman: Year Three, Batman: A Death in the Family, “A Lonely Place of Dying,” The Sandman, Anima, more and more Bat-books, more and more Vertigo, until, eventually, here I am.

I mention this because I’ve been reading, and thus thinking, quite a bit about Gary Gygax these last few days. As one of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, and the modern role-playing game, Gygax was obviously something of a patron saint of geeks, and its no wonder that his passing has generated the sort of attention it has. I wanted to take a turn to stand up and share some thoughts of my own at this, his Internet wake, in which obituaries and anecdotes ping around cyberspace from various places.

As I mentioned, I played D&D when I was younger, mostly from about 11-14 or so, with a few campaigns for old times sake one summer in my early 20’s. My first exposure was when I was very young, seeing my older cousins, whom I only saw a couple times a year, with their books related to the game. To someone who watched He-Man cartoons and played with Masters of the Universe toys, you can see how the cover paintings of red dragons and swordsman would be fascinating. Then there was the Saturday morning cartoon, in which the kids enter the world of D&D through an amusement park ride (Eric the cavalier was a dick).

I started actually playing it with a friend about the time we stopped playing our early-80’s versions of cops-and-robbers, which was usually more like G.I. Joes-and-Cobras or Ghostbusters-and-ghosts or superheroes-and-robots or whatever. In fact, when we first started playing role-playing, we ignored the math, and would just imagine the fights and stuff, so we kind of transitioned into the formal play of the game from the more chaotic playing of childhood.

There was nothing about the game that didn’t appeal to me. Being the “Dungeon Master” or “Game Master” (depending on the company who published the games we were playing), was pretty much just writing. I spent a lot of time in those days writing scenarios and drawing characters and monsters, with the D&D booklets and magazines sort of guiding me, and good God, did I learn a lot from those things. Most of the mythology and folklore I know, I first encountered in passing in a D&D manual. Long before I had read any Robert E. Howard, or H.P. Lovecraft, or made it more than one-fourth of the way through Fellowship of the Ring (I tried reading that damn book like six times before I finally made it all the way through), I encountered their work in D&D.

I heard of Tiamat and a vorpal blade there years before I’d read any middle-eastern mythology or Lewis Carroll. I learned of fairies’ aversion to iron there before I’d read The Secret Commonwealth, and heard of Tengu, Kappa and Kirin before I’d ever read an Asian fairy tale. And on and on.

I was as interested in monsters and mythology as any little boy, and I’m sure I would have gone on to read about it without ever having rolled a four-sided die just as I’m sure my interest in both writing and art would eventually have lead me to the medium of comics at some point if it weren’t for Dungeons & Dragons, but that was the path I did take, and so I have a lot of fond feelings about the game and the much-maligned culture of it.

I remember when that awful live-action movie came out in 2000, more than one critic took time to note that not only was it a terrible movie, but it seems to be about 20 years too late to capitalize on the strength of its name. More recently, either DC or Marvel (or maybe both) were carrying ads for the game trying to point out its superiority to computer role-playing games, and I remember being struck by how weird and desperate the ad campaign was.

It really does seem like the time for paper, dice and imagination-only role-playing is at an end, but I don’t necessarily think that signals a failure on Gygax’s part, or a weakness in the original concepts. From Magic the Gathering and the card game craze to the entire video game industry to the prevalence of fantasy as a genre in our pop culture, you can trace the success of Dungeons & Dragons not only in how well the game sells or how many people still play it (or will admit to having ever played it), but by how much influence it has had.

Of the various eulogies and obituaries I’ve read this week, I’d recommend Jonathan Rubin’s for Slate as one of the best. In addition to the biographical and business information, he really crystallizes what Gygax and his game did best:


The game's stew of swords, sorcery, and mythological beasts was mostly appropriated from pulp writers and fantasy greats like H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R. Tolkien. Gygax's skill in integrating fantasies, however, was unparalleled—the world of D&D may have medieval trappings, but its creatures were unbound by time or place. He took monsters from every culture and folklore, from the Greek Pegasus to the Japanese Kirin dragon to the Egyptian sphinx, and made them coexist in a single aggregate world.



It's an aggregate world I spent a lot of time in, and a lifetime exploring all the other worlds that it lead too, which is why, though I never met him and never knew much about him, I'm really glad that Gygax lived, and a little sad to hear that he's died.

This week's links

—I realized while watching this latest trailer for Iron Man that it was probably the first time I’ve ever been genuinely excited about Iron Man as a superhero or interested in Tony Stark as a character. I do hope this silly Skrull business is able to de-douche-ify and un-neo-con the character successfully enough for the comics Iron Man to capture some of that roguish Robert Downey Jr. charisma.


—Speaking of Iron Man, I found it interesting that in Tom Spurgeon’s last “Five For Fridays” feature, the subject was to name things that should always be a certain way in the Marvel Universe. There were several opinions about Stark—he should be cool, he should have a heart condition, he should be an Avenger—but the most common one was that he should either always be drunk or always be dealing with being an alcoholic.


—It must be great to be Dan DiDio. He could surf the Internet, see something cool like this or this, and then turn to a flunky and say, “See this idea for a comic on Monitor 3? Make it so!”

The former looks beautiful, and would make for an interesting read, I bet. The title is probably about as good a one as you could come up with for a comic starring Batman’s mom. Like, Lady Gotham certainly sounds a lot better than Batman’s Mom. The latter would make for an awesome single-issue special, or an entry into a future Bizarro Comics anthology. Speaking of which, where the hell is a third one of those?


—Nooooooo! John Rogers is taking a sabbatical of indeterminate length from writing Blue Beetle, with Will Pfeiffer coming on in the mean time? Man, it looks like I’ll be taking a sabbatical of indeterminate length from Blue Beetle too then.


—Newsflash: David Rees is funny.


—This Chick Tract about the evils of Dungeons & Dragons, the link to which I found at Beacoupkevin.com, is way off the mark about the reality of the fantasy-based role-playing game. I mean, there are no less than four hot chicks playing it, compared to the three dudes.

Anti-D&D propaganda of this sort—and I’ve been exposed to a lot of it, both as silly as this and slightly more serious in more reputable media, since I went to Catholic school in the ‘80s—always makes me think that maybe I bought the wrong edition of AD&D. Was I doing it wrong? Was I missing out on something by not being approached by Satanists or possessed by demons with 20-sided die for eyes?


—How smart is it to release this the same week as an issue of this?


—I was really looking forward to the Brian K. Vaughan/Eduardo Risso Wolverine miniseries Logan that launched yesterday. And then I saw the cover price. Marvel was charging $3.99 for it? I flipped through rather thoroughly to drink in all that Risso art, but I didn’t actually count the story pages. It didn’t feel like it was an oversized book…were they really charging an extra dollar for a 22-page story? I ended up putting it back on the shelf. Why spend $12 bucks over the course of three months to read it in installments, when, right after the third one comes out, I know I’ll be able to get the whole thing in trade, without having to look at ads for Iron Man cake-decorating kits between pages?

And that’s how to drive single-issue readers toward graphic novels.

RELATED: Jog points out the insanity of Marvel’s packaging of Sky Doll as a serial comic book.


—I’ve hoped and prayed that the Watchmen movie would never actually get made, but at this point in the process, it now seems inevitable. They’ve even released images of most of the protagonists today. They’re depressingly…wrong. Rorschach and The Comedian both look okay, but the rest? I’m surprised how heavily influenced by the Batman movies the Nite-Owl and Ozymandias costumes are. And the fact that the Silk Spectre’s costume seems to be completely devoid of silk. Sigh. Oh well, I guess I just have to accept that this movie will exist. I had best turn my hopes and prayers toward the Justice League movie never getting made now…

Weekly Haul: March 5th

DC Special: Raven #1 (DC Comics) Let me reiterate the surprise about this book’s very existence that I expressed when I first saw it in DC’s solicitations: Why oh why does this book exist at all, and why is it being released in spring of 2008? Wouldn’t a Raven miniseries have been a better idea back when the character was featured on a Cartoon Network cartoon series, as well as Geoff Johns’ Teen Titans series, rather than in semi-limbo, having not appeared in Teen Titans since Infinite Crisis, and not set to appear regularly anywhere until the upcoming, awful-looking Winick/Churchill series Titans?

Having read the first issue, I’m only further perplexed. The setting is the high school that Raven is going to under her new secret identity as teenager Rachel Roth, something you may have completely forgotten since her status quo as occupying a new teenage body and attempting to live as a normal teenager hasn’t been mentioned anywhere for a few years. A major plot point, revealed in the climactic cliffhanger but spoiled in the solicits and on the cover, is the fate of Psycho-Pirate’s Medusa Mask, and where it ended up after he was killed in Infinite Crisis. So this kinda sorta follows up on a plot point from Infinite Crisis, a series which wrapped up in spring of ‘06.

The creative team is also something of an odd one. It’s written by Marv Wolfman, who co-created Raven and wrote more Raven stories than anyone; certainly he’s a guy a lot of the characters’ fans from back in the New Teen Titans days would most want to see writing her. But the artist is Batgirl artist Damion Scott, paired with inker Robert Campanella, and Scott is working a style closer to the one he used during his short Robin run and some of the stories in his Solo issue (which I hope all those Girl Robin fans read, as there was a pretty cool Batgirl and Stephanie-as-Robin team-up in it).

Personally, I dig Scott’s style quite a bit, and think it’s perfectly appropriate for the teenage characters and the emotional chaos subject matter of the story. But I think it’s fair to say that many of Wolfman’s fans aren’t Scott’s, and may have a hard time acclimating to it. Scott’s style is far, far away from that of Perez’s, after all, and when you think Wolfman’s Raven, that’s who you see drawing it.

As for the comic itself, it’s not bad. It does seem rather 2006, and I don’t really understand why it has the DC Special tag above it (especially since it’s five issues long). As for the plot, Raven is seeing a school shooting—or assassination?—in her dreams, and is seemingly overwhelming her classmates with her emotional powers (and vice versa). Meanwhile, a mad scientist type is doing some sort of mad scientist business, and is hoping to use the Medusa Mask for medical purposes.

Wolfman does a fine job writing teenagers, avoiding anything as wince-inducing as some of Millar’s teenage-isms in the recent Kick-Ass , although it’s nothing terribly inspired. I’ll definitely check out #2.




Green Lantern #28 (DC) Writer Geoff Johns has done such a thorough job of foreshadowing and laying down the groundwork for the war of the rainbow of Lantern Corps that seeing some of those things actually occurring now seems more inevitable than exciting. Here, for example, a Green Lantern becomes a Red Lantern, and the Orange Lantern Corps’ Guardians appear, but much of it is too heavily telegraphed to be interesting to those of us who can’t tell Boodikka from Laira. Nice pencil art by Mike McKone, and a trio of inkers lend their pens, but the art flows rather smoothly from page to page nonetheless.





Justice League Unlimited #43 (DC) Keith Giffen, the man who popularized by Booster Gold and Blue Beetle as heroes and as the comedy duo “Blue and Gold” team, bangs out a done-in-one issue featuring the untold origin of the animated versions of the characters. Booster appeared in one of the better episodes of the JLU TV show (“The Greatest Story Never Told”) and has appeared surprisingly frequently in the comic; Blue Beetle never made it onto the screen, but has been among the heroes occasionally featured in the comic series.

In this story, entitled “Wannabes,” the pair are making their debuts as heroes, trying to impress Wonder Woman, Batman and Green Lantern John Stewart by taking down The Demolition Team. They want to get on the League for less than noble reasons—money, fame and girls.

Giffen focuses on the back and forth pitter-patter dialogue between the characters, and the Leaguers’ disdain for the B-listers, and, while its hardly his best Justice League work, it’s not a bad valentine to fans of JLI.

The art comes courtesy Christopher Jones and Dan Davis. Jones seems to veer farther from the Bruce Timm designs more than most JLU artists, with his characters seeming thinner and less balloon-like—his Booster, Beetle and Wonder Woman are particularly thin. That’s not a bad thing; it’s actually kind of refreshing to see a slightly different look in the book.




Justice League: The New Frontier Special #1 (DC) I haven’t gotten a chance to see the New Fronteir direct-to-DVD special just yet, and I’m pretty leery of it, as reducing such a huge story to just 75 minutes (hell, trying to tell any film in less than 90 minutes) isn’t a promising sign (Nor was the rather dreadful first of DC’s new direct-to-DVD adaptations).

But, whether the film is fantastic or awful, I’m glad they made it, if only because it afforded us another opportunity to visit creator Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier-iverse. Much like Cooke’s Solo issue, this oversized, almost ad-free book reads a little like a dream title, Darwyn Cooke Does Whatever The Hell He Wants With DC Comics Characters.

The main attraction is a 24-page story by Cooke telling an untold portion of the original series, in which Superman tries to take Batman down, and vice versa. Batman vs. Superman is always fun—even more fun that Superman Vs. Captain Marvel—and Cooke makes it seem pretty fresh, despite the fact that this is probably the 4,768th time I’ve seen the World’s Finest come to blows.

That’s followed by “Drag Strip Riot,” written by Cooke and illustrated by David Bullock and Michael Cho, who boast a style that’s Cooke-like enough to feel perfectly consistent with the story that preceded it (the fact that Dave Stewart colored it no doubt helped a lot). In it, Robin and Kid Flash both infiltrate the same hot-rodding gang, and meet President John F. Kennedy. For those keeping track, this is the second story this year in which Robin and Kid Flash met JFK. And it’s only March.

The final story features art by Cooke’s Spirit inker J. Bone, and despite Stewart and Fletcher’s contributions, this one looks more radically different in terms of design (This is, for example, a larger, more muscular Wonder Woman than pretty much anyone else has ever drawn). Stewart’s story here is, additionally, a lot sillier that the rest of his New Frontier pieces, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

The story? Wonder Woman and Black Canary (whose avian-derived logos here look awesome together) team up and, once Wonder Woman sees a Playboy of the era, move on to another mission—convincing men at the grand-opening of the Gotham Playboy club to abandon their practice of humiliating women by forcing them to serve men while dressed like rabbits and instead embrace a message of Amazonian love.

Guest-stars include Bruce Wayne and Jayne Mansfield, dialogue includes “Mercury’s Codpiece!” and “Hola, dogs!” and the climax includes the origin of the burning bra and someone other than Superman winking at the reader.

Book-ending the special are, at the end, eight-pages of production art from the DVD, and, at the beginning, a one-page introduction by pipe-smoking manly man Rip Hunter explaining what continuitiverse New Frontier exists on. It’s a funny sequence, and refreshing to see a creator like Cooke dissing the silliness of numbering fictional settings, particularly since the folks who sign his paychecks were, just a few weeks ago, selling readers comics in which characters were plucked from the New Frontier-iverse to fight to death against characters from other people’s comics.

I know Cooke has said publicly and repeatedly that his next few projects will be original graphic novels featuring original characters and concepts but, man, between this and his Solo, I would kill to see a Cooke ongoing, even a quarterly or annual, perhaps also featuring help from the likes of Bullock and Bone.




Nightwing #142 (DC) Yep, still good. I’m kinda disappointed the al Ghul family is involved again so quickly—they’re also central to this week’s fill-in-tastic ‘TEC—but the Peter Tomasi text is still well above the Nightwing series average, and the Rags Morales and Michael Bair art is well above the super-comics average.




Secret Invasion Saga (Marvel Comics) This was completely fair and came on top of my pull stack—the UPC symbol box even reads $0.00—but having struggled through some of it, I think perhaps Marvel should have paid me to look at this weird-ass ad campaign shaped roughly like a comic book.

The first page is two completely different looking pieces of art—one a dynamic image of Iron Man rocketing into space, the other a photorealistic-ish image of Maria Hill standing over a computer—and a long conversation between the two which doesn’t match up with the unchanging images. It’s talky as all hell, but the voices sounded so consistent with the way Secret Invasion mastermind Brian Michael Bendis writes them, that I checked back to see if Bendis wrote this himself. He didn’t. A John Rhett Thomas did.

What follows is Iron Man narrating a summary of just about every Skrull story ever, the customized iron Man narration boxes laid out over clips of Marvel art culled throughout their publishing history—or at least the part that follows the introduction of the Skrulls.

I sometimes enjoy these sorts of Marvel books—I thought the Atlas was a ton of fun for example, and liked the Civil War Files, which were presented as a briefing given to President Bush by Tony Stark—but this was just deadly dull stuff.

In addition to all the Skrull business from the Bendis books, also highlighted was the current She-Hulk story and the history of The Young Avengers, and what I think was the Max Wisdom series. Oddly absent was any mention of Runaways, which has a Skrull in it, or Avengers: The Initiative, in which Skrull hero Crusader just started appearing, or anything from Ms. Marvel or Captain Marvel. But maybe Tony doesn’t know about any of that Skrull business?

What I found really interesting was the fact that he referred to Spider-Woman giving him Skrullektra as having occurred “last night;” the time line in the various Bendis books really seems broken. Oh, and in recalling the events of New Avengers: The Illuminati #1, Stark jumps right from visiting the Skrull’s homeworld and their capture; he leaves out the whole part about The Illuminati straight up slaughtering a ship-full of Skrulls.

Oh well, I guess you get what you pay for, huh?





Teen Titans: Year One #3 (DC) Half-way through the miniseries, writer Amy Wolfram has kinda sorta finished the Teen Titans’ origin story—the first five have all met, they solved their first case together, and they’ve got their team name. The mysterious villain has sworn revenge, however, and Batman doesn’t seem quite ready to let Robin form a super-team just yet, so there’s still plenty to fill up the next three issues.

I don’t have anything to say about Karl Kerschl, Serge LaPointe and Steph Peru’s art that I haven’t already said about it—It’s just beautiful stuff. Kerschl’s designs are great, with the characters completely distinct from one another, and there are a dozen clever little touches. Aquaman and –Lad’s shirt-scales standing up, the design on Robin’s hankerchief, Green Arrow’s chin experimenting with a goatee, Aqualad’s reaction to the Big Bad villain and, best of all, Aqualad’s reaction to Wonder Girl’s tears.

Soon the modern DCU will have two Titans related titles, one featuring the current teenage sidekicks, and another featuring the grown-up versions of some of these characters. Oh how I wish either of them could look half as good as this, and be anywhere near as fun to read…




The Twelve #3 (Marvel) I was a bit disappointed with the first few issues of this series, and with the third issue sI think I’ve put my finger on part of the reason. J. Michael Straczynski’s story falls squarely into the 25-year-old tradition of revisiting comics’ simpler times, turning over the rocks at their foundations, and showing us all the bugs and worms. Things might have seemed cool back in the day, but they weren’t really, and now that there aren’t any kids reading these things any more, we can show you that the world of super-people is just as nasty and fucked-up as our own world. This type of story isn’t peculiar to comics, of course, and is see perhaps even more in film, where the differences between, say, the two 3:10 to Yuma movies, or Dead Man and Unforgiven and pretty much any of the Westerns our fathers and grandfathers used to watch are strong illustrations for genre deconstruction.

Comics has been full of this stuff since at least the ‘70s, and it’s driven a lot of the most popular comics, some great, some terrible: Squadron Supreme, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns,The Killing Joke, Arkham Asylum, Astro City, Marvels, The Golden Age, Sandman Mystery Theater, Civil War, Identity Crisis, the Marvel work of Brian Michael Bendis, and on and on.

In general, I don’t care for the impulse, since deconstruction has become the status quo in super-comics, that further deconstruction often involves going to extremely dark places (rape, for example) and dragging in lighter-hearted characters (Superman, Elongated Man and the Justice League, for example).

In The Twelve, JMS is presenting his Golden Age heroes with the problems of the 21st Century, but also flashing back to their own times to show the negativity that existed in it. In this issue, for example, we learn that Mister E. was a self-hating Jew who changed his name to avoid prejudice and get into country clubs. The Laughing Mask and Rock-Man are mentally ill, the former murderously so. And Black Widow works for Satan. Previous issues showed us that Dynamic Man was a racist, and others were down on queers and/or Blue Blade, who seemed queer.

In the ‘80s, this stuff might have seemed cutting edge. Now, it’s just normal. That JMS is playing with characters from the so-called Golden Age, you would think there would be something subversive to this, and perhaps there would be, if Captain America were a self-hating Jew or dry-heaving at the site of an interracial couple. Because Captain America is an icon, a household name. But The Fiery Mask? Dynamic Man? Laughing Mask? No one knows or care who these people are, so there’s nothing terribly subversive to the tale; in that regard, JMS would have been better off working outside of Marvel Universe continuity with brand-new characters, ones anagalous to corporate-owned superheroes (As in Watchmen, Astro City or Squadron Supreme).

It may also be worth noting that it’s a lot harder to deconstruct Marvel heroes, even pre-Marvel ones, in Marvel comics, as their flaws are built into their DNA. Iron Man was an alcoholic. Spider-Man an ineffectual, arrogant jerk who got his uncle killed. The Hulk is a monster. Namor was an unmitigated prick that was as likely to attack America as resuce it. And so on. Getting mud on Superman’s cape is always going to seem more dangerous than getting it on Captain America’s shield, simply because of the worlds they live in and the comics histories they represent.

I really like Chris Weston’s art. And I’m still really disappointed by the covers, this one featuring extremely un-vintage computerized fire effects.

A surprisingly long-winded report on SPACE 2008

The Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo, neatly acronymed into SPACE, is one of several reasons I really like living in the city of Columbus, Ohio, despite some of my adopted hometown’s glaring deficiencies (Another nice thing about living here? Every four years or so the national media and presidential campaigns can’t stop talking about you and hanging around—it’s kinda nice to know that not only do our votes matter, but they matter a lot more than just about everyone else’s. Suck it New York and California!).

The annual show is often modest in size, although it’s grown pretty large in the last few years, to the point where founder and organizer Bob Corby has experimented with different locations and added regular convention things like panels into the mix. My first year in Columbus, I covered it for one of the two alternative weeklies that existed at the time—it and its major competitor have since both been bought out by larger media interests—which afforded me the opportunity to interview Corby and his perennial special guest Dave Sim, who was then still a year or two away from finishing up Cerebus.

It was at and through SPACEs that I first got to know the work of John Porcellino, Jeffrey Brown, Farel Dalrymple, Paul Hornschemeier, Brian Maruca and Jim Rugg, Sean McKeever, local comics collective Panel, and, of course, Sim’s signature work Cerebus, which I previously knew only from the aardvark hero’s crossovers with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Spawn. Plus, I always find a lot of things I like. Sure, I’ve bought a ton of terrible mini-comics there over the years, but it’s usually well worth the couple bucks wasted on something that ends up being terrible for something that ends up being awesome, you know?

I had skipped last year’s SPACE because, as the first sentence in the “ABOUT ME” paragraph in the upper right-hand corner of the page no doubt indicates, I’m not what you’d call a wealthy man. Since the main pleasure of SPACE is being in a roomful of cartoonists you’ve mostly never heard of, giving a bunch of them a bunch of money for comics you’re not quite sure the quality of, and then spending a Sunday afternoon and evening reading comics, thinking “awesome,” “okay,” “eh, I could do that,” “sucks,” and so on as you set each of them down.

I was actually planning on skipping this year’s space too, as I didn’t have the money to spend gambling on comics.

There was also the fact that this year SPACE would be occurring at a Shriner complex out near Easton Town Center off Morse Road. For those of you who aren’t from around here and have never had the displeasure of visiting Easton, it is the worst place on earth.

It’s a horrible “concept” mall set up as a fake small town downtown Main Street. So there’s, like, a mall-mall, and then these little streets around it, with wide sidewalks and lamp posts, fountains, and a bus shaped like a trolley, and an Easton Town Center police force and vending carts and look I know it sounds charming but it is the worst place on earth I swear!. (Especially at Christmas). I’ve heard it compared to a mixture of The Truman Show and Hell, and that sounds pretty accurate.

Morse Road is sort of like 28th Street in that story from Kevin Huizenga’s book Curses.

Luckily, there’s a back way into Easton taking the highway, and thus avoiding Morse Road, and the Shriners place ended up being a turn before you get into Easton proper, but it was still a good twenty minutes of highway driving from where I live in Columbus, and it takes a lot to get me to brave the Easton area.

The final nail in the coffin of my desire to go to SPACE this year was the fact that I was working at my job that isn’t freelance writing this weekend, and thus there were only two hours during which SPACE was occurring and I wasn’t supposed to be at work.

But then there was this Dave Sim Secret Project #1 business, Sim’s post-Cerebus, pre-Glamourpuss one-shot that was to debut at SPACE, where it would be accompanied by a little gallery-like show of the original pages from it. The details made it on to the Internet earlier in the week—it was called Judenhass, it was about the holocaust, it made Neil Gaiman cry—and I felt a twinge of journalistic responsibility. Well, not journalistic responsibility so much as bloggeristic responsibility.

Folks around the industry are probably going to be pretty curious about Judenhass, one of the very first places it was going to be available for a looksee was 20 minutes away from my house, I wasn’t going to be doing anything important during those two hours on Sunday morning anyway—didn’t I owe it to the tens and tens of Every Day Is Like Wednesday readers to report on this book?

So, half-conscious at 9:15 a.m. on Sunday morning, I decided that I would go to SPACE after all. I had to be to work at noon, and the show didn’t open until 10 a.m., which gave me about an hour and forty minutes time to spend at the show. If it’s a quick in and out operation, I’ll be less likely to spend grocery money on comics. I’ll just drive out to Easton, give Bob my $5 to get in—and really, I’d pay $5 a year just to keep SPACE going on every year, whether I attended or not; if Columbus city put a SPACE tax issue on the ballot, I’d totally vote for it—take in Sim’s pages, buy a Judenhass, and read and write it up later.

That was my plan.

It was gray and windy but pretty warm out as I followed my Google map directions to the complex, sighing in relief as I noticed SPACE was at a place on the way to Easton, but not actually within the unnerving, fake-ass confines of Easton.

The Shriners place had a big, stone statue of a man in a fez and vest holding a child aloft, with a quote on the base saying something along the lines of, No man is so tall as when he stoops to help a child. Or something like that. My favorite SPACE location was at the Ohio State fairgrounds, which, in addition to being much closer to me, had a better statue—that of a gigantic cardinal, the state bird of Ohio.

As I walked across the small parking lot to the door pointed to by the little signs bearing arrows and the head of Cosmo the SPACE mascot, I checked the ticking wind-up alarm clock in my man-purse (I don’t own a watch, so this is what I have to do in the rare instance in which I need to keep an eye on the time). Okay, it was only 10:22, so I had about an hour or so to spend at SPACE.

On thing I hate about SPACE, and cons in general, is the often awkward relationship between the creators seated behind the tables and the visitors walking down the aisles. Creators—and their friends, family, significant others or whoever else they could rope into helping them—have different approaches to interacting with potential customers. Some ignore you, some act like salespeople or carnival barkers, some stare silently at you. In all cases, I almost always feel horrible, as I keep my eyes on their wares and try to avoid eye contact. See, no matter how good or bad the books they made look, I know they worked damn hard on them, and spent a lot of time on them, and I always feel like a heel when I don’t buy them or, worse, don’t even stop to at least flip through the books. It just feels like such a rejection, you know?

Shopping is usually a completely anonymous experience. When you go to the grocery store, the farmer who grew the produce isn’t standing right there, when you squeeze the melons or turn the apple around in your hand, looking for brown spots. When you shop for clothes, the designers aren’t usually lurking in the racks, looking wounded if you turn up your nose at their latest line.

Since I was trying to spend as close to zero dollars as possible, this SPACE threatened to be more even more awkward than most, as I would pass up as much as I could, even the stuff that looked fairly interesting.

A lot of the usuals were there: Matt Feazell, Pam Bliss, Max Ink, Panel, and, of course, Corby. Bodega Distribution had a booth set up, which I didn’t even look at, for fear I’d end up buying something from them.

At the end of one aisle, my eyes fell on a couple of familiar covers—Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History, Macedonia, Wizzywig—prompting me to look up, “Oh, hey, are you Ed Piskor?” I asked the young-looking guy behind the table.

He was Ed Piskor, the artist responsible for illustrating Pekar’s Macedonia and one of the better-looking portions of SDS. I chatted briefly with the Pittsburgh-based artist about his new, self-published project Wizzywig (while secretly calculating whether I should buy it here and how much that would dent my wallet or wait until said wallet was a little fatter and buy it online) and asked about the book he was doing with Pekar about The Beats (It’s done, and should see release by the end of this year or beginning of the next).

I saw something at another table called Break-up Bots which appeared to be a well-put-together mini-comic featuring a drawing of a robot and a bubble of dialogue on each page, with one reading something like, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.” This intrigued the hell out of me—were they robots breaking up with humans, or robots breaking up with each other, or robots one human could program to break up with another human on their behalf?—but it was $4. I’ll buy almost anything for $1, and anything pretty good looking for $2, but when you get up to $4, you’re asking for a buck more than the average full-size comic book, and 1/4th a Showcase Presents.

Further temptation came from Joanna Estep’s table, where I found two very attractive looking volumes of a Tokyopop manga series called Roadsong. I decided I could get those at some future point, but should first see if any local libraries carry them (Unfortunately, it turns out they don’t). Estep had a mini-comic for sale, but I didn’t see a price, so I didn’t buy it.

There were several artists who had big signs and suchlike, and several others who were selling or giving away sweets like Dum-Dum suckers or brownies. The most unusual such incentive I saw was a half-eaten sandwich on a paper plate with a sign reading “Take a bite of the community sub.”

The most successful incentive I saw was the brilliantly-bright paper toys at artist Matt Hawkins’ table. He had a lot of neat looking things on his table, and lingered over a book featuring a perplexed-looking cowboy that read “Cowboy Clyde & The Pirates.”

Hawkins leaned over and explained it was about a cowboy who gets a job on a pirate ship, and laughed as he said this. I find it charming when people laugh at their own comics. I noticed artist J. Chris Campbell laughed a lot when talking about his own comics when I spoke with him briefly for a Comics Journal piece on a SPACE past, and his comics all turned out to be pretty great (Check out his Zig Zag comics from AdHouse).

The first comic I actually bought at the show was a $1 mini-comic called The Lone (Red) Ranger, which featured a cute little, almost-super deformed version of a Power Ranger on the cover. I liked the title. (I used to love Power Rangers…at least the first two seasons of it on Fox. I lost interest after the original Pink Ranger was replaced.)

I returned to Piskor’s table for a copy of Wizzywig; I figured I might as well buy it while the book and I were in the same place. By this time, the previously empty table next to Piskor was full of comics an manned by a Pat Lewis, also of Pittsburgh.

I was eyeing something called One-Horse Town featuring a very cool cartoony horse on the cover (looking vaguely like the one who used to say, “No sir, I don’t like it” on The Ren and Stimpy Show) when I asked for a recommendation. They suggested the most expensive item on Lewis’ table, an IDW-published hardcover entitled The Claws Come Out. The subject matter—and the quality and style of the art—looked familiar, and I asked Lewis if he had drawn a mini-comic about a werewolf that fights aliens.


He had, and I had bought that at a previous SPACE. In fact, it was one of my favorite SPACE finds.

So I bought the hardcover. I was way over the $0 I had hoped to spend already. Lewis said the IDW book had been released last December, and I was a little surprised and disappointed that I didn’t know that, as I would have liked to have covered it for LVW or “Best Shots” if it was as good as Prowl was. Did my shop just not order any copies of it? Did IDW make a big enough deal out of it? Did I just never connect Lewis’ name, that book and that old mini-comic in my brain last December?

Someone at the Killjoycomics.com table asked if I read web comics, and I answered, “Not really,” as Achewood was really the only web-only comic I read. He made a pretty good pitch for web comics—“They’re free!”—and handed me a card. I took a brief look around the site; there’s one about a garbanzo bean, which sounds like a good idea in theory, but wasn’t terribly funny. I liked the art for the one called Killjoy, but it wasn’t any funnier than any of the strips you could find in the paper.

Suzanne Baumann had a lot of neat things at her table, including lots of magnets, and hers was a table I would have bought something from in a previous year. She did hand me a very tiny mini-comic, called The Blokes of Ball Point, featuring pen-drawings of the busts of men with funny names, like The Bee Keeper, Spaghetto and Vasquez Scenario.



A brief visit to the Panel table to pick up their latest anthology, and I’d been through the whole show and was ready to go, when I remembered I didn’t see any Sim’s exhibit anywhere. I knew Sim himself wasn’t going to be there, as he was scheduled to appear at SPACE on Saturday only, but I assumed the Judenhass exhibit would be there both days.

I asked at the check-in about it, and it turns out the men in charge of the display had just arrived and were just then setting up, over an hour after the show started. I asked them if they were selling copies of the comic, but they weren’t. Judenhass was going to be available to be read at a reading table there, which they hadn’t set up yet either, but they weren’t selling copies. Maybe Sim really supports that whole no-early-convention-sales position paper that ComicsPRO put out, kicking off all that blogosphere babble?

Whatever the reasoning, I ran out of time before they were assembled the display of Sim’s original pages or the reading table, so left Judenhass unread or even looked at.

Here’s what I did get at the show, though…




Hawkins has a wonderfully cartoony style, evoking a touch of old-school Hanna-Barbera and John Kricfalusi, and his black and white strip comic is rectangular, with a strip on each page. It apparently originally appeared in newspaper The Kansas City Star back in 2005.

The story is, just as Hawkins said, the story of a cowboy that gets a job on a pirate ship. There’s a great deal of genre culture clash—Clyde has trouble swearing, and using “be” instead of “is,” “as” and “am”, et cetera—but more of the humor is played as a sort of office comedy, with everything being pirate-ized. For example, the captain asks his employee to step into his office, and leads him up to a meeting in the crow’s nest, and talks about their new medical plan, which covers hooks and peg legs, but not scurvy, (“So eat yer limes!”).

Being a cowboy in a pirate’s world is a clever metaphor for anyone with a particular dream making compromises to make a living:


It’s a point driven home by Hawkins’ bio in the back, which says “he works as a production artist by day and he draws cartoons and plays banjo by night.”

It turns out you can read the whole thing online here. I’d recommend you do so, and keep an eye on this Hawkins fellow. The man is good at what he does.





The Lone (Red) Ranger is a 24-hour comic by Phil Skaggs Jr. and, like most 24-hour comics, it’s pretty rushed and random. That is, after all, kind of the point of 24-hour comics.

In addition to a great title, it has a pretty great concept, at least for Power Rangers fans. It opens with a funny panel of four Rangers in their crazy-Ranger poses staring blankly at the Red Ranger, who shrugs “What?” They tell them they’re sick of him, so he gets on his Mega-Zor—er, Zor-Bot and goes, striking out on his own.

He soon meets Anura, who I guess might be a parody of something, although I’m not sure who or what (He resembles a Kamen Rider-type character, but reminded me of Sgt. Keroro’s race, due to the super-deforemd like design. Then they meet another character named Bob whom I suspect may also be a parody of something, but again, I don’t know of what:





Wizzywig Vol. 1: Phreak is a 110-page graphic novel, so may require a little more digestion before I offer a very well thought-out review, but I really dug it.

As I mentioned before, I really dig Piskor’s art and style, but haven’t read any long-form work of his before this. (I’m playing to get to Macedonia pretty soon though). The book is in a square format, with just about every page divided into four-panel grids.

The subject is hackers, something I don’t have much prior knowledge of or interest in (the extent of my knowledge on the subject comes from that movie where young, upcoming actress Angelina Jolie teams up Trainspotting’s Sick Boy to fight Fisher Stevens). Our hero is Kevin “Boingthump” Phenicle, a notorious hacker we’re introduced to via a series of talking heads repeating rumors they’ve heard of him, and a radio host talking about him. He’s apparently a composite character, made up of parts of the stories of several real-life hackers.

In this first volume, Kevin is a middle school kid, an orphan who lives with his grandma and is mercilessly bullied. He’s very smart, but in a very weird way—he’s obsessed with puzzles and figuring out how things work, and we watch him essentially become a pre-computer hacker, messing with the phone systems and gaming the public transportation system and a local pizza parlor. He doesn’t even get a computer until almost the very end of this volume.

It’s pretty fascinating stuff, and Phenicle is an interesting character, with a big wig of hair and Little Orphan Annie eyes. Piskor divides the story up into individual strips, taking a sort of cubist approach to the story, showing different parts of it from different angles and taking pauses to focus on ancillary characters or elements of the story.

Guest-starring Harvey Pekar as the counter guy at Rocko’s Pizza:



Piskor’s a great letterer, too, by the way.




The Claws Come Out is a handful of short stories written and drawn by Pat Lewis, each of which pits a young woman against some element of the supernatural, for a highly expressive, cartoonily drawn comedy adventure. He’s created an Elvira-like character named Lily St. Dead to act as Cryptkeepr-style host, introducing the various short stories.

These include a naïve girl’s date with a vampire in a sweater vest, a research scientist-cum-musician’s gory battle against a defrosted Yeti, the werewolf vs. aliens story from the Prowl mini-comic, a voluptuous gypsies battle against a zombiepocalypse, and some bonus material also dealing with girls and monsters (including a very inspired way of destroying dinosaur-like monsters).

I really love Lewis’ art, and the straightforward simplicity of his stories, he doesn’t get distracted or hung-up on any of the many pitfalls that tend to come with horror comics. And cool-looking as many of his simplified monster designs are, he really shines at people. The date story was particularly great showcase of Lewis’ gift for cartooning human expressions, with each six-to-nine-panel page often featuring the same characters with six-to-nine different expressions.

It’s a seriously fun book, and I’m pretty bummed I missed it when it was originally released a few months back. I’d definitely recommend it, and I’d also recommend checking out his site too; there’s a lot of great stuff on it.




This isn’t a comic, but I did get it from SPACE, on a table where people set out free things. It’s a postcard for the upcoming Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond show at the Wexner Center. In addition to 75 Smith drawings from Bone, Rasl and Shazam!, it says here it will feature work from artists who influenced Smith—meaning Walk Kelly, Charles Schulz, Will Eisner and George Herriman (!)—plus Smith will be creating an original mural for the Wex’s lobby (!!!), plus the catalogue for the exhibit will include essays by Neil Gaiman and Scott McCloud. Wow. Speaking of reasons I like living in Columbus, Ohio, huh?



Finally, there’s the eleventh Panel anthology, Panel: Work. They generally publish two books a year, one timed for Mid-Ohio Con and one for SPACE. Because SPACE was a earlier this year then usual, they didn’t have time to put together a book proper, so here’s what they came up with


See, the theme for this anthology is work, so they were selling the anthology as a one of those inter-departmental mail envelopes, the ones with the string clasp thingees like this


full of mini comics and suchlike, with the contributors’ names all over the enevelope.

Pretty clever, guys.

Inside I found…

—A duet jam comic called Goby from Steven Russell Black and Tim McClurg, in which they trade off every other page to tell a silent story dealing with a fish and tentacles. I didn’t get it, but I liked the pictures.

—All in a Knight’s Work, a wordless comic written by Dara Naraghi and drawn by Matt Kish, about a knight’s quest, complete with a punchline ending. Kish draws lots of neat-looking fantasy characters and monsters, although I felt a little sad reading it, given the sad news today regarding the death of Gary Gygax. Kish draws excellent dragons, skeletons, bats, and spouts of flame.

—Craig Bogart provides a pretty literary Weird Tales sort of zombie story in his five-splash page long A Strange Farewell to Reginald Everbest.

—Brent Bowman strives for economy in a one-page story called Broken showing a five panel story of domestic violence occurring in panels made by the windows of an apartment building, Eisner-style.

—Someone going by the acronym M.A.D. provides a story of an awkward job interview entitled Wink! Wink!: An Interview Gone Wrong. I’m afraid I didn’t understand the punchline it ends with. (Actually, “M.A.D.” is apparently Molly Durst, according to the memo that came with the envelope).

—Sean McGurr and Brent Bowman collaborate on a mini-comic called Pyramid Scheme, which is a piece of clever packaging within the clever packaging of the envelope, as it’s shaped like a triangle, and when you open it up to read it, the two open pages are shaped like a diamond you read from point to point.




OTHER SPACE REPORTS:
Comics Related
Frank Sonotoro
Eric Adams
Joanna Estep
Max Ink
Tony Goins
Tony Goins again

Golden Age Green Lantern says, "Don't forget to vote today...

...Or else!"

Why isn't there an Invasion! trade yet?

DC owns the publishing rights to thousands of comic book stories in a staggering number of genres from as far back as the late 1930's, so the decision of what to collect and re-release is probably a pretty complicated one, governed in a large part by the formats the company is comfortable with and their understanding of what their markets will support.

I can understand that some of these decisions might be difficult, and the company wanting to take as few risks as possible. One thing I don’t understand, however, is why in God’s name 1988 crossover event series Invasion! isn’t available in trade.

The main part of the story was told in three 80-page, ad-free issues (that’s 240 pages right there!), though it also stretched out into plenty of ancillary tie-ins, some of which were completely unimportant, others of which were fairly integral (And at least one of which has already been collected, in Vertigo's Animal Man trade series).

The size of the thing might be one of the factors making a collection difficult—Armageddon 2001, Eclispo: The Darkness Within, War of the Gods and Millennium aren’t available in trade either—and putting a book together would likely mean making some decisions regarding what tie-ins to include and which to axe, and if they should include just pats of certain books (a la the DC One Million trade).

Perhaps it’s also that the series no longer seems relevant. Like all of DC’s big event series, it was used to lay the groundwork for future series and new directions for older titles, and I don’t think any of these directions are at all still in play in the modern DCU (Although I guess it does explain why Black Lightning, Fire and other characters now have powers they didn't have before Invasion!).

The series did, however, if not create many of the most prominent of DC’s outer space alien races, then at least popularize them—races like The Dominators and The Khunds, for example, have been appearing pretty regularly in DC comics ever since Invasion!.

But what really surprises me in terms of this book not being collected is who was responsible for making it. The book was plotted and laid out by Keith Giffen, a creator whose star has risen and fallen a few times in the years since, but seems to be on the ascent at the moment (A space story from someone so heavily involved in the modestly successful Annihilation books for Marvel ought to get some newer readers to give it a look, right? Particularly since you can say “52’s Keith Giffen” in the solicitation copy?) The actual scripting was handled by Bill Mantlo, who knew a thing or two about crazy-ass space stories.

But it’s the artists involved that should have made an Invasion! trade a slam-dunk. Bart Sears penciled the third book and Giffen the second half of the second book, but they’re not the marquee name involved. No, the first half of the story was penciled by none other than Todd McFarlane.

Perhaps you’ve heard of him?

Now I don’t want to go off into a tangent about the quality of McFarlane’s work, in part because I’m hardly an expert. I haven’t seen any new work from him in well over a decade, and didn’t follow any book he did religiously (Maybe the first dozen issues of Spawn, a trade from the library of his Spider-Man, some back issue bin finds of his Infinity Inc. work). In general, I like his style and figure work but have a hard time actually reading books he's drawn and/or written.

Whatever your own thoughts on McFarlane's abilities, I think it's quite safe to say that the work in this book isn’t his best. For an example of the not-so-hotness, take a look at this panel and tell me what you think is happening in it:



If you said Peacemaker appears to be shooting a flare gun at The Creeper, whose shin The Atom was pretending was a bucking bronco that needed to be broken, then you’d be wrong. But I could see where you’d get that. No, actually those three heroes are actually fighting off an alien invasion. Obviously.

But his best work or not, DC had some 100 plus pages of one-time super-star artist Todd McFarlane drawing their biggest heroes in an epic story just…sitting there. And they've been sitting there for almost 20 years now.

Once McFarlane hit it big with Spawn, why didn’t DC release an Invasion! trade to capitalize on his fame and gigantic fan base? Or how about when Spawn and Batman met up in those two 1994 Batman/Spawn crossovers? (The DC one drawn by Klaus Janson, and the Image one written by Frank Miller and drawn by McFarlane). Or a few years back when Joe Quesada was publicly calling McFarlane out for never drawing anymore? Or a few years before or after Quesada’s stunt, since new McFarlane art was so hard to find? Or how about, you know, right now, since new McFarlane art is still hard to find, and the guy’s at least popular enough that Spawn is still being published, despite the fact that it hasn’t ever really been any good at all?

I would assume that an Invasion! trade would sell pretty well on the strength of fans of the era (JLI, Suicide Squad, etc.), the other creators involved, and McFarlane’s name, which DC could be sure to highlight on the cover and spine. I mean, the fucking Tangent event is available in trade now; what has that got that Invasion! doesn’t?

Well, since DC stubbornly refuses to reprint Invasion!, for any Todd McFarlane fans in the reading audience who may have missed it the first time around (and/or haven’t found it in the dollar bins like yours truly), here’s late-80’s McFarlane’s versions of some of DC’s biggest heroes...


















While McFarlane seemed to do okay with the characters who had giant-ass capes, cool-looking masks, or interesting means of locomotion—all of which his brand of expressionism could latch on to, he clearly had a little trouble with some of the other DC characters, particularly these poor bastards...





I guess Countdown isn't the home of the worst drawing of Jimmy Olsen ever after all...

A strong candidate for next year's "Best Of 2008" lists: The Last Musketeer

If you've read any one of one-name Norweigian wunderkind Jason's books, then you've probably already got a pretty good idea how good a cartoonist he is.

If you've read any two, then you've probably already realized the guy's a straight-up genius when it comes to high-concept, short-form comics, his often expressionless anthropomorphic animal characters wandering through nine-panel grids in stories that the humorous concepts themselves should be more than enough to carry—famous early 20th century writers is a Parisian heist narrative, I Killed Adolf Hitler, silent romance set during a zombiepocalypse, etc.—but he adds new dimensions to these off-kilter pitches with his wry, dry sense of humor and surprisingly affecting melodrama.

His latest, The Last Musketter, is another example of high-concept comic as hight art that reads like a just plain funny funny book.

One might think that the characters from Dumas' oft-adapted adventure novel set in the 17th century would be quite dead of old age by the 20th century, let alone the 21st century. Or, if not dead, then at least doing something different with their lives and, indeed, some of them are. But Athos is still keeping it real, dressing in Musketeer gear, wearing his sword, and waiting to be needed again. His chance finally comes when Martians attack France, and he takes one of their rockets back to Mars, where he battles the skull-faced Martian emperor, woos a green-skinned princess, introduces his cellmate to the joys of smoking cigarettes, and proudly represnets the old Hollywood swashbuckler genre in a symbolic war against the old Hollywood science-fiction genre.

Obviously, it's both a lot of fun to read and quite hilarious, but, once again, it's much deeper than it has any need to be (Isn't Musketeers vs. Martians more than enough fuel to power most comics?), and I was honestly choked up at the end of it.

As great as The Last Musketter was, however, I have to admit—two panels of it just completely freaked me out.


See, Athos himself a housecat or... possibly a dog, or an anthropomorphic animal of some kind, like those animals from 1930s black and white cartoons or a Sega video game character. At any rate, whatever he is exactly, he's some kind of giant, bipedal, talking, clothes-wearing mammal sitting on a bench, and up comes a normal, tiny, walking-on-all-fours, meowing and naked cat. It makes for such a weird conceptual tension that, if I think about it too long, my brain will shut down and I'll faint. It's like whenever Mickey's dog pal Goofy and Mickey's pet dog Pluto are in the same scene at the same time—what goes through Goofy's head when he sees Pluto on all fours, chained to a doghouse, you know?

But in addition to expected scenes, like this



there are scenes of brilliant awkward humor, like this



I honestly can't recommend The Last Musketeer highly enough.

Now if you'll excuse me, I suddenly find myself in the mood for whipped-up fluffy chocolate nougat covered in milk chocolate for some reason...

Norm Breyfogle Should Draw JLoA (Pt. 2)

For further evidence to support last Saturday's assertion that Norm Breyfogle should totally start drawing JLoA, please enjoy some instances of Breyfogle drawing various Justice Leaguers...



Wonder Woman, from a drawing for Wonder Woman Day (nicked from normbreyfogle.com)




The Elongated Man (in his best costume), from Silver Age: The Flash #1




The Flash, from JLA: Incarnations #5




The Sattelite Era Justice League, from JLA:I #5




The Watchtower Era JLA, from Anarky #1

Monthly-ish Manga Reviews, or, Damn you Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, you evil, evil jerks I hate you so much I could just ghaahh!!!!!1!!

A while back I decided once a month I’d post a round-up of reviews of all the manga I read during that past month, either links to books I reviewed elsewhere, or brief, rambling reviews original to EDILW. And then, after making that decision, I promptly proceeded to read less and less manga (Even at the wonderfully affordable popular $9.99 price point, those digests are expensive, and review copies seem to few and far between for stingy readers/reviewers like me).

So, it’s the first of a new month, and a good time to post reviews of all the manga from the previous month. Except I didn’t really read any manga in February, save one particular series.

Death Note has been pretty much consuming a lot of my manga reading time the past few weeks—in fact, it’s been consuming a lot of my reading time in general (I think a spider has actually decided to start spinning a we off the pile of neglected prose books sitting on my end table).

As I mentioned in the early February post about super-popular comics I took my sweet time finally getting around to reading, I was kind of luke warm on Death Note up until the very end of the first volume, at which point I was rather curious about what happened next.

And then I checked out the second volume, and that mild curiosity turned into something more urgent. Holy crap, was this story exciting all of a sudden! Once “L” fully enters the series, and the crazy intense high-stakes game of cat and mouse between he and Light develops in earnest, the story got about as thrilling as any comic I’d ever read, and Ohba and Obata just kept upping the stakes, getting L and Light closer and closer, until they are literally spending all of their time in one another’s faces.

Things seemed to stumble a bit once the first two Kiras lost their memories, which seemed like a bit of a cheat (both on the part of the creators and on the part of Light) since the potential memory-loss wasn’t laid out to the same degree as the other “rules” of the Death Notes in the earlier volumes. I was even a little disappointed in the introduction of the third Kira at first too, since it distracted from the Light vs. L fight, but the longer that plot progressed, the more clear it became that it was actually central to their duel, and the conclusion of volume 6 was seriously intense. I kept catching myself sitting up and getting more and more anxious as the protagonists closed in on the third Kira.

And then, about half way through volume 7, The Event happened, and I could not actually believe it actually happened. Years of reading superhero comics have made me somewhat suspicious of such events, but the weird shift in time did make The Event seem pretty final.

And, man, it just sucked all the adrenaline out of the story. I can’t remember the last time I was so bummed about the fate of a fictional character, and I caught myself being a bit angry at Ohba and Obata for doing that to me—which is a good thing, for creators to get a reader that invested in a story that you can be that pissed off at them doing what they did. Damn them.

On the downside, at the close of Volume 7, I’m kinda back where I was at the end of Volume 1. I’m curious about where the story ends up, but the urgency of the narrative seems to have drained out of it, and it’ shard to believe there are five more whole volumes to go, despite the fact that what has so long been the central conflict has been so altered.

So goddam you Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. Damn you for creating such an awesome fucking series and making me like it as much as you did, and then doing what you’ve done. I hate you both. And look forward to reading the rest of the series. And your other work. Jerks.