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Frank Quitely & Mark Millar's 'Jupiter's Legacy' Examined From Top To Bottom [Review]

David Brothers — 2013-04-24T14:00:00+00:00

I have a love/hate relationship with Mark Millar's work. When I was getting back into comics as an adult, his work with Frank Quitely and Bryan Hitch on The Authority and The Ultimates were fairly instrumental in keeping me reading. As time went on, though, and his books descended deeper into pandering to the lowest common denominator, I began losing interest. But he keeps working with artists I dig, so I'm routinely tempted to at least flip through. Jupiter's Legacy is out this week, and it's his first book with Frank Quitely since The Authority ended and the first long form work Quitely has done without Grant Morrison in forever. I like Quitely's art work a lot, and Peter Doherty's colors are generally a treat.

So I sat down with Jupiter's Legacy and tried to figure out what works, what doesn't, and how I feel about that. This is a thorough autopsy, so grab your comic and read along.When I first read them, I thought that the first five and a half pages of Jupiter's Legacy were the best pages Mark Millar's written in ages. It's a familiar scene -- one person convincing another person to let him borrow a boat for a dumb idea -- but well-told. Millar does a good job of setting the stage, and the fact that it was set in 1932 made it even more interesting to me, though I can't quite put my finger on why. I think it's because 1932 forces Millar out of his usual setting, and seeing him stretch new muscles would be very interesting.

The dialogue on these pages feels honest and pulpy in a way that fits Quitely's art well. The pages are lacking in Millar's greatest asset and biggest weakness: his fondness for sensationalism and spectacle. These pages feel desperate and handcuffed in comparison, like someone pushing against his prison walls and finding no give. Jupiter's Legacy opens with desperation and mysticism, the last hope of a once-great man, and then, halfway through page six, it turns into Lost, with a magical island and a mystery for mystery's sake. The island gave people powers, but how?

On the one hand, I get it. The idea that people went to an island, got powers, and then came back and never talked about it suggests that their powers have a dark source. It's effective foreshadowing, but like the rest of the scene, it's pretty cliché. Instead of being "Whoa, a mystery?" I'm feeling more like "Oh. A mystery." There's no excitement there, even though I can tell there's supposed to be.

Luckily page seven comes and we're back to Millar-as-usual! Jupiter's Legacy is another variation on Millar's "What if superheroes were in the real world?" trope, like Ultimates, Nemesis, Wanted, The Authority, Kick-Ass, Supercrooks, and War Heroes. It's worked extremely well in the past, but this go-round just feels tired. This time the focus is on the spoiled children of the original superheroes, and the way their generation has utterly forsaken their heritage. Which, again, is familiar, but okay.

Page eight is where Millar gets really Millar-y. There is no one on this page that isn't a dick, from the weird superheroes groupie to Jupiter's Legacy's main character Brandon Sampson. The dialogue here is excruciating, because it isn't dialogue so much as people talking past one another. It's Brandon Sampson telling us all we need to know about another character, Chloe, who is another superhero and his sister. Meanwhile, a super-groupie tries to fawn her way into his presence, and he rejects her in the most cold-hearted manner ever.

I should explain what I mean by "Millar-y." I've used it as shorthand for ages, and some people instantly know what I mean, but I don't think I've ever defined it properly. Here's a stab:

Mark Millar has a few very remarkable tics in his writing, and they're so noticeable that you can generally spot a Millar comic without looking at the credits by the time you finish the first three pages. There's a certain specificity to the dialogue he puts in his character's mouths that doesn't feel like real life at all and a sneer in his characters.

He deploys diminutives like little missiles of condescension. "Darling," "sweetheart," "little lady," "bud," and "honey" have all been weaponized. Characters are also very specific about numbers, which is strange and even more subjective. You know the end of Watchmen, right? "I did it thirty-five minutes ago?" Millar creates sentences like that often enough for it to be a distraction when reading his work. It's not just the fact that he uses numbers in his dialogue, so much as how they are used and how often, that makes me think it's a tic. It never feels natural.

The secret to recognizing a Millar book is to look for the scum. It'll be somewhere in there, whether it's Kick-Ass jerking off to his crush texting him pictures of her going down on her black boyfriend (a marriage of miscegenation, cuckolding fears/fetish, and basic racism, any way you slice it), Captain America lecturing people in Ultimates, or the incest-related antics in Nemesis. It's that point where a Millar-written comic goes from action/adventure tale to something grosser. It's that feel-bad moment that makes you either pump your fist or cross your arms and shake your head. You can find it on page nine, panel five, when the nameless barely-clothed black chick returns to tell Brandon Sampson that her white friend is in the bathroom and she's DTF, just like he said she would be. The black chick, and her white friend by proxy, is deferent and humble in the face of insulting behavior.

There's the scum.

Pages ten through twelve are the first real action scene, and it works as a Frank Quitely and Pete Doherty showcase. One thing I dig about Quitely's work is that he tends to do a really interesting job when it comes to depicting architecture and rubble. He has a way of depicting wilderness, wasteland, stone, and rubble that's very appealing. The panels on pages ten and eleven are on the same side of a single hill, and that hill slopes downward from left to right in each panel. Quitely maintains that point-of-view for the duration of the scene, though he zooms in and out over the course of the fight. Though the backgrounds are fairly light, there's still a sense of place. Everyone's playing in the same field. It's small, but it counts.

Page twelve has what I've seen described as the killer panel for the comic, when Walter, a psychic hero and brother to the Utopian (our Superman-alike), takes psychic control of Blackstar, the villain of the issue. This psychic control manifests itself as Walter yanking Blackstar into a "psychic painting," essentially a memory that has been turned into a mental "place." Quitely and Doherty's way of visualizing this is to show the blueline art and pencils and such beneath the finished and colored art. It is a cool visual effect, sure, but it's not necessarily new or groundbreaking. It's a variation on a technique that's shown up in Looney Tunes and even in Animal Man.

No, what's really killer about this panel to me is more subtle. Part of the reason why I think Quitely is such a good artist is that he draws everything, and the small touches are sometimes more amazing than the more sensational touches. The incline of the hill that all the heroes are fighting on in the real world is reflected here in this psychic painting. The memory that these two men are walking around in maintains visual continuity from the fight beforehand. There's something fascinating about that to me. I'm no Frank Santoro, so I couldn't tell you what it means exactly. If I had to push, I would say that it has something to do with establishing place and realism for a world, and that maintaining those rules when you change locations keeps the reader believing in this world you've created. That incline is a small thing, but it's more visually interesting than people fighting in a city or on a plateau. It adds just a little more flavor than normal to the fight scene, and that carries through to the psychic painting as a kind of transition from the real world to the mental one.

These pages are also a great way to see what exactly Doherty's bringing to the book. There's a nice symmetry in there between art and plot that I like a lot. Millar's world is our world, but it's treated in the text as a fallen, cynical reality. When a character creates a psychic painting of a beach holiday he took as a kid, it shows up as a bright and happier location. Doherty renders the mountains and sky of Vermont as dark and gloomy, with bluish greys and flat greens. When the scene flips to the psychic painting, he uses brighter versions of the same colors. The green is verdant, instead of muted. The blues are the same shade of blue you'd use as a child when asked to color the sky. They aren't depicting the same place, but there's a visual continuity between the places that I like a whole lot. Quitely excels at establishing a sense of place that feels real, regardless of the action on the page.

In the real world, on page thirteen, the superheroes are fighting dirty. The art doesn't match the text here -- either that or Walter is a sadistic liar, which doesn't seem likely -- but the art is clear enough. The capes are beating the bone marrow out of Blackstar, who they say "killed that entire alien race." He has an anti-matter battery in his chest, but he never gets a chance to use it.

Millar uses the beating to teach us more about the world. Going by the dialogue, the superheroes are supposed to fight in a clean manner as a general rule, but had to break bad this time to get things done. But that's okay, because this guy they just brutalized leveled "half of Missouri" last time he broke out, so they had to ante up. That raises a lot of questions to me. That off-hand mention of massive destruction is frustratingly common as a way to show exactly how bad someone is. Even if "half of Missouri" is an exaggeration, it makes me wonder how their world could possibly be so similar to ours if beings of that power are capable of destroying so much.

Pages fourteen through seventeen are basically an argument between Walter and his brother, Utopian, with occasional input from the rest of the cast. The older capes are disappointed in the younger capes to varying degrees. Utopian's wife Grace -- and Sampson and Chloe's mom -- is grateful her nephew showed up, even if he didn't take part in the fight, and frustrated her children didn't. Utopian is an old fuddy duddy who likes to talk about how "having these powers comes with certain responsibilities." Walter is cool with it, though. Kids will be kids, and they never asked to be born into the family business. He doesn't get along with his brother, and he's chafing under Utopian's influence.

Quitely doesn't have a lot to work with in these pages. The incline is maintained, which is cool, but the fight is over in three panels and three punches. Most of the people on-screen just sorta stand around and watch, and the argument? It's between two bearded white dudes. It's not that visually interesting, honestly, though I do like Walter's jaunty pose on page seventeen, panel five.

One thing that's strange about this scene, and the comic itself, is that everyone looks either terrible or boring. Quitely can be a pretty great costume designer, and an especially great costume redesigner, but I'm not seeing it here. I was particularly struck by his comments in this interview with TJ Dietsch at CBR:

Of course, trends in fashion do tend to be both evolutionary and reactive, so we needed costumes for the younger generation that had grown out of their parents' tradition but also kicked against it. The older generation have a look that grew out of ideas of mythical godliness, monarchy, idealism, authority, altruism, the flag. The younger generation have a look that grew out of consumerism, pedigree, elitism, social status and label-culture.

That sounds like the Quitely I know and love, but Jupiter's Legacy simply doesn't look it. The casual clothes are straight out of today, not tomorrow or a fictional alternate history. Most of the superheroes are wearing the same kind of utilitarian suits that we saw the evil Avengers wear in The Authority. A few characters share an emblem of a hawk with a halo, and a couple oldsters rock capes, but that's as far as the flash goes. The men get boring body suits. The women get boring body suits and an option to reveal their cleavage, belly button, butt, or all three simultaneously.

There's something not working here. A large part of the appeal of superheroes is that they're larger than life. They're vibrant and bright and amazing in a way that normal people are not. Quitely is a great superhero artist because he gets that. He knows that these people, even in street clothes, need to be glorious. His thoughts on design make me think we're going to see something really compelling and forward-thinking and new. But these superheroes aren't new and they aren't glorious.

There's no real spectacle here, outside of the fairly interesting psychic painting idea. There's no cool shot of Utopian using his powers, nothing interesting about the people wearing fancy clothes. We see a dozen or more heroes, and the most any of them do is... punch a dude. There's not even any cool time dilation work like you've seen in Quitely's more recent projects like Batman & Robin or All-Star Superman. The work is just... standard. Quitely is still very good, and his small touches are as great as ever, but this isn't the leap forward I've grown to expect from the guy. It's still good, obviously, but not as good as you'd hope.

Pages eighteen through twenty feature the daughter of Grace and the Utopian, who we previously saw at a charity shindig with her brother. She's doing space-coke with two people who look like they should be speedsters and flamethrowers but are actually probably just really good at punching people. The most interesting thing on these pages are the images that flash across the TV while these characters talk. It's more "world in decline" stuff, and it isn't actually that interesting.

Killing Them Softly, written and directed by Andrew Dominik, had a similarly overbearing gimmick that ended up paying off huge in the end. Here, though? I don't know if I buy it. Millar's done a remarkably poor job of establishing what the world is like. If a hero can drop a one-liner about a guy leveling half of a state, then that makes me wonder what the supervillains are like these days. If the daughter of a hero can snort a bunch of space-coke her friends got from an off-world dealer, I want to know what happened there. How did that influence change the world?

There's a line in the series where the heroes explain that they haven't actually interfered in anything major, like governments and stock markets, and have instead chosen to let humanity chart its own destiny. But if you buy the premise of the series -- "superheroes won us the war, still exist now, and their kids are dicks" -- then that doesn't work to handwave away the question, does it? The world would be different, vastly different, than the world as we know it. Which really screws with the idea of the series, at least for me. The world we've seen thus far is a reasonable facsimile of our world, only more girls wear booty shorts and more dudes are dicks.

Jupiter's Legacy falls short. Millar's characters talk past one another, and Quitely and Doherty don't even really get a time to shine the way I know they can. There are some interesting ideas in here -- I like the island thing, as cliché as it is, Quitely will always be a draw, I'm digging Pete Doherty but wish he had more to work with -- but as a whole? As a book Millar has hyped as the summer event of 2013? It's missing the spectacle that makes Millar's work go, the characterization is tired, and the art's good, but not good enough to overcome the problems with Millar's script. The most interesting parts of the book at this point is the relationship between the old and new generation, and that's relegated to purely expository declarative statements instead of conversation or real conflict. I'm interested in seeing how the division between the generations shakes out, and more of the world's status quo, but I can't say as I was particularly hooked by this issue. I could see them sticking the landing toward the end of the ten-issue bimonthly series, but the first issue isn't a good omen.

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I'm David: 'Johnny Wander' Is Charming & Who Should Own The Rights To Superman?

David Brothers — 2013-04-24T12:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Opinion, Digital Comics

Like most of you, I've got a to-read stack that kills me every time I look at it. Friends laugh at it, small children cry at it, and the police keep giving me the stink eye. I've also got a to-read list for those things that I want to read in digital form, but haven't yet. There's a lot of webcomics in there (Chris Onstad returned to Achewood last year, you say?) and I've been remarkably lax about getting caught up because I've got a never-ending reservoir of excuses when it comes to not doing things. But I found myself with three volumes of the webcomic Johnny Wander, an inexplicably long commute to work, and a (very rare) lack of excuses. So I read it. And I loved it.

I'm David, and I want to talk to you about Johnny Wander, a comic drawn by Yuko Ota and written by Ananth Panagariya, about Yukond Ananth. It's autobio, it's funny, and it's great.

The word for it is "charming." That's as good a starting point as any. Let's look at the first strip, just so you can see what we're working with. Personally, I'm already in my comfort zone. We're starting with an art style that's enjoyably cartoony and very emotionally expressive. Ota's mouths and body language are particularly good, and the difference between panels one and five is proof positive. I love Yuko's nervous fingers, Ananth's disaffected cool posture, and especially that wobbly word balloon Yuko has -- this is good stuff, right? You're seeing what I'm seeing here.

The character cards remind me of video games and trading cards, and they work as a great shortcut to get you introduced to these characters (people!) without burying you in exposition. They're fast, they're cute, and they work well. They also serve as great shorthand. I've read Johnny Wander front to back at this point, and Yuko's nervous sweat and Ananth's even gaze certainly seem pretty accurate.

Ota's cartooning stands out, obviously, but the writing is equally as good. Johnny Wander is a collaboration, and Ota and Panagariya both have input on the words and pictures that make up the comic. It can be hard to tell which jokes are Panagariya's and which are Ota's, but here's the thing: it doesn't matter. They work so well together that Johnny Wander feels like the product of one mind. The writing and art are never at odds, and instead mesh very well.

For me, that's one of the best things about comics. It's easy to find comics that feature words that say one thing and the art another, or (even worse) words that explain what's going on with the art. Panagariya knows how to get out of Ota's way when he needs to, leaving her to come up with killer visual punchlines. Panagariya's no slouch, either, and his dry sense of humor is right up my alley. The two of them together work extremely well. I can't find the seams in their work, and that's lovely. It makes me appreciate the comic on a craft level, as well as a basic "did this tickle my funny bone?" level.

The strip is about Panagariya and Ota's life post-college. Instead of being a drag, or about how hard life is, it's more like Seinfeld. Where Seinfeld is funny because every single member of the cast is the worst person ever in different ways, Johnny Wander is funny because everyone in the cast is normal, but funny. No one's a comedian, or anything, but Ota and Panagariya's strips are often just about them finding the funny side of life, or pointing out something funny that happened. A cat scratching something isn't necessarily funny in and of itself, but pointing out that cat's behavior when it gets caught is genuinely funny. Where Seinfeld was about nothing, but secretly about the lives of four incredibly selfish people, Johnny Wander is about nothing, but secretly about the lives of four pretty cool people.

"This is our life. Watch us live it. Laugh with us."

We all know pretty cool people, and I can't think of a single strip that isn't grounded in real life. Speaking as a dude who recently bought a couple bookcases for the first time, I can totally relate to the strip about buying a coffee table and being really excited about it.

That grounding works, because then you buy into the rest of the comic. You believe in the world that you're reading. You laugh at the zooLOLOLogy jokes because you get that they're funny because they're goofy. The grounding invites you to let your walls come down and invite the cast in, and you enjoy the strip all the more because of it.

Johnny Wander is charming. That's the one word I keep coming back to when trying to figure out how to tell you how much I like this series. I tore through three volumes in two sittings, and I'd be hard pressed to name a better comic to read outside on a sunny day. It feels warm, the jokes never try too hard, and by the end of it, you'll wish your life was just a little bit more like their lives.

It's very good, is what I'm saying. You can pick it up midstream, at the beginning, or in book format. Let this comic into your life.

stavner from tumblr asked: What would happen if the Siegel estate got 100 percent of the rights to Superman?

To paraphrase a wise man, if all the coke and crack in the nation is collected in a top hat and force fed to the children of every CIA agent, and dust heads get an angel and an acre's worth of rainbow, and the projects turn to clouds and the stupid aren't so proud, that is still the least likely thing that will ever happen... ever.

That aside, I tend to agree with Kurt Busiek that Superman should be public domain.

If you have a question, let me know by leaving a comment or hitting me on Twitter @hermanos. Let's talk comics, movies, music, video games... anything goes.

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I'm David: Chris Sims Is Wrong About Jim Lee's X-Men

David Brothers — 2013-04-17T12:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Marvel, Opinion

When I was a kid, there were two comics franchises that meant everything. The first was Spider-Man. He was my entryway into comic books, courtesy of Todd McFarlane and David Michelinie, and he made an indelible impression. The second franchise was the X-Men, especially the comics drawn by Jim Lee. While Spider-Man comics often had soap operatic elements, X-Men was soap opera through and through. It felt adult in a way that appealed to a kid who wasn't even ten years old yet, the stories were filled with world-shaking import, the drama was incredibly sexy, and the art ranged from good to utterly amazing.

I'm David, and I want to talk to you about why Chris Sims is wrong about Jim Lee's X-Men.
What's hard to understate about the Jim Lee-era X-Men is just how enjoyable it all is. From the Chris Claremont-written first issues on through to the end of the Mojoworld saga, the X-Men were having adventures that felt much, much bigger than they actually were. Lee kept mostly to the X-Men's Blue team -- the cool team, for the record, and you know I'm right -- but still managed to hit outer space, another dimension, Cold War Germany, regular Germany, Russia, and New Orleans. The X-Men were international, and under Lee's pen, they looked incredible.
X-Men is a comic where everyone in the cast is about as hot as your average supernova, and the entire run has this very slick, just short of realistic look. Lee's style at the time defined how I think of the superheroic figure, both male and female, even to this day. There is something about his heroes that I find very clean and iconic. They look right in a way that's hard to describe. It's partly nostalgia, sure, but it's also the fact that Lee made sure that his cast was pretty first, and realistic second.

You can see it in the cover to issue seven -- Battle Damaged Wolverine and Omega Red don't look like they've been beaten up. They look like Clint Eastwood with somebody else's blood on his face. Lee didn't create this type of portrayal, but he's by far my favorite example of it. Deep inside my jaded heart, I want superheroes who are perfect and light and fun, even when they're going through serious situations. Lee's art nails that feeling in a way that really appeals to me.

Omega Red is another great example of the classic approach to action Lee pursued in X-Men. Omega Red is Wolverine's bizarro, in a way. He has a death factor that lets him kill people at range, and he has tentacles that let him strangle you. He's brought back to life by the Hand, who are working in concert with Andrea and Andreas von Strucker. As a kid, all of this was new to me. I didn't figure out who the Hand were until years later, and the Struckers weren't interesting until Andreas became Swordsman a few years back. But they were presented in such a way that they were a Big Deal, which made Omega Red a big deal, which made the whole story a Big Deal.

But one thing that this run was good at was switching from darkness to light, and vice versa. Immediately following the bloodletting that heralds the return of Omega Red, we're treated to a two-on-two basketball game between Wolverine & Rogue and Gambit & Jubilee. It's dumb, but fun, if you're willing to accept it. It's dated, thanks to the "gotta be da shoes" reference, but you know what? It's also unbelievably charming. Gambit getting in Rogue's face with a smile, Wolverine being a dick about basketball, and Jubilee playing hype man for Gambit -- there's a lot here to enjoy, and I'm glad I'm old enough for "gotta be da shoes" to be sweet, instead of just corny. (It's definitely corny, though.)

It tells you everything you need to know about these people. Jubilee's a teenager and cooler than a polar bear's toe nails. Gambit's a rogue, and Rogue is totally into it, but too smart to fall for him. Rogue herself is a straight-shooter, but not to the point that she's a stick in the mud. Wolverine might not be as flashy as the others, but that's just because he is apparently better than everyone at everything, including being too modest to admit how good he actually is.

The basketball game should put a smile on your face, especially how it ends. It's the kind of bombastic superheroic action that I honestly feel like we don't see enough. On the other hand, there's this image of the Strucker twins, Andrea and Andreas, who kinda sorta bring me down:

It's a ridiculous image, pretty much from top to bottom. The chain garters, the clear desk, that chair, Andrea's cloak, Andreas's shoulders, and his awful cigarette case affectation... it's too much. It's the part where Lee's style trips over itself, because suddenly he's trying a little too hard to make his people pretty, and they just trip from pretty over into sighhhhhhh. The Strucker twins suck anyway, especially when you compare them to basically anything else in X-Men comics, so this was kind of a no-win situation. Swing anna miss.

This panel of Cyclops talking to Psylocke and ignoring Colossus is a good example of something that I love about X-Men comics. The X-Men are always doing something. They're never just sitting around, waiting for someone to show up. They're always playing chess, or moping in the dark, or swimming, or painting. I mean, the first cliffhanger in this tale is Omega Red bumrushing the X-Men while Wolverine, Beast, and Jubilee are trying to crash Gambit and Rogue's date. (Gambit, at one point, says "There are some things I prefer not to do in a group!" Bravo, Jim Lee.)

You learn a lot about the X-Men by what they get interrupted doing and how they spend their down time. I'm really into that, because it makes the characters feel more real. They do the same things that we do when they aren't off being from the future or immortal or whatever the heck they do. It's like eating in movies. You don't necessarily notice it as being significant, but it definitely affects how you see the characters.

For a while, it seemed like everyone who captured Wolverine had a set of these X-shaped restraints ready to go. I think Wolverine always broke out of them in the same way, too: by just doing it. But these restraints, and this excerpt in general, are an interesting example of something that I really dig about this era of Lee's work. When Lee was on, his pages gave you a lot to look at. He was never a Geof Darrow-style detail artist, but his pages always had a lot going on. They're dense, with their big splashy panels to set the stage and extreme close-ups.

Sometimes there's so much going on that things stop making sense. If you look closely at this image, you might find yourself wondering where everyone in the room is standing. Andrea is twenty feet away, there's a canal between Matsuo and the doctor, and the entire room comes to a point, like a church's steeple. Matsuo's cigarette is out of control, too. Andrea's cleavage window is another good example:

The stories had a lot going on, too. This arc is theoretically about Omega Red, but includes the Upstarts, the Hand, the von Struckers, a lot of Weapon X nonsense, a flashback to the Cold War and yet another dead woman in Wolverine's past, pages of Longshot and Dazzler gallivanting around Mojoworld, a summary of a story going on in Uncanny X-Men, a Super Soldier Program, a bunch of Moira MacTaggert and Sean Cassidy stuff, too many references to Wolverine's past, a flashback taking place simultaneously with the present, and what I'm pretty sure is a panel of Cyclops murdering a man by severing his upper torso with close quarters eye beams.

Oh, and Maverick is in it, I guess.

Can't win 'em all, you know?

The Omega Red arc, and really Lee's entire run on X-Men, still manages to be a satisfying experience in and of itself, in part because all of this stuff made the comic feel full. It suggests that the world outside of the pages of this comic is vast and full of dangers and intrigue. It can be clumsy -- I'm thinking of the "here's where all the X-Men are for this arc, continuity-wise" pow-wow scene specifically -- but these comics are meaty. Things go down, Jack.

Below is another image that's emblematic of the Lee era. These comics sold a jillion copies because they were cool. It's cliché now, but back then? X-Men comics gave you a cool moment every few pages. Sometimes it was basketball games and tripwire slung across roads. At other points, it was looking grim and gritty while saying jokes that don't quite measure up. Everyone, including Wolverine, is witty, some more than others. Jubilee and Beast are non-stop quip machines. Gambit and Psylocke have a dry sense of humor, in addition to their weird seduction tactics. Cyclops doesn't make jokes, but will if everyone else is, and they won't be very good.

It's so easy to get swept up into these comics. The world that Lee & friends created is so vibrant, so full of things that they want you to know about, that you can't help but buy into it. It's this weird little world with a lot of charm. It's telling that Lee's style has gone on to become almost the default superhero style. Jim Lee's take on Batman in Hush was a big moment for comics, and you can spot artists that were greatly influenced by his work by closing your eyes and throwing a dart at a wall full of cape comics.

There's a reason for that. It's because Lee was the real deal, despite his faults. He made comics that feel great and are fun to read. The angst never felt like a chore, and the action never felt perfunctory. These comics are in a constant state of exploding with excitement, from soup to nuts. I wouldn't trade them for the world.

Your move, Sims.

No question this week, since I ran long. But if you want to pick my brain, leave a comment below or hit me on Twitter @hermanos.

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I'm David: 'Bulletproof Coffin Disinterred,' The Cut-Up Technique, & Comics Pricing

David Brothers — 2013-04-03T13:00:00+00:00

Don't ask me why -- I'm just a writer -- but humans are programmed to see patterns. It's why we see faces on Mars, religious figures in food, and conspiracies where there are none. Something in our brains wants to make that connection for us, no matter how insane it may seem to an outsider. (It's great if you're a blogger -- you can make a post out of any old thing if you can make a solid connection.) A different way of putting it is that we like stories. We like being able to follow a narrative, and when that narrative disappears, or wasn't even there in the first place, our brain makes a leap to connect usually unrelated dots.

I'm David, and one of my favorite comics last year was David Hine and Shaky Kane's Bulletproof Coffin Disinterred #4, a short story called "84." It's a comic that invites you to create a narrative for it and is, as a result, amazingly creepy.

One of my favorite blogs is a tumblr called Decapitate Animals. It's NSFW in general, horrific on occasion, but always interesting and more than a little uncomfortable. It's a mixture of a quote from a book or movie, a clip from a different movie, and then several dozen pictures. The pictures are interesting in and of themselves. In addition to your omnipresent female nudity ("Welcome to tumblr, please be aware that you're never more than two clicks away from naked people doing naked things..."), there are pictures of war zones, protests, skate boarders, snippets from magazines, actors, actresses, smokers, drinkers, old men, old women, and even more. The proprietor of the blog has a good eye when it comes to image curation, so Decapitate Animals is a great image blog, if you choose to look at it like that.

When you look at the images within the greater context of Decapitate Animals, though, patterns begin to emerge. Sometimes the pattern -- or theme, or connection -- is obvious, like a number of images that utilize a 3/4 overhead view or children holding guns. Where things get really sticky is when you look at the post as a whole. I find myself constantly trying to figure out how the proprietor of Decapitate Animals connects one theme to another. I want to dig in and make something that's ethereal concrete. I understand how A relates to B, and how B relates to C, but I have trouble figuring out how what began in A becomes what's present in C. I don't understand it on a macro level, but love it on a micro level. So I study and I look and I think about each new post like it could save my life.

Solving Decapitate Animals is a mug's game. It's impossible for me to ever accomplish, short of actually asking the person that runs the blog, and I enjoy the chase too much to ever stop. I always feel like I'm on the verge of getting it. Decapitate Animals is inspirational, because it forces me to think harder than I ever do when scrolling past reams of tumblr posts.

David Hine and Shaky Kane's Bulletproof Coffin series is a weird one. It's part-pastiche, part-celebration, and part-condemnation of a certain type or era of superhero comic. It's creepy and weird and Joe McCulloch and David Allison do a better job describing what it's like than I could, and you can read the first issue for free right here anyway.

Bulletproof Coffin Disinterred is the follow-up to the original miniseries, and issue four is even more weird than the rest of the series. Kane and Hine created it by producing 84 individual panels of art and then randomly arranging them with four panels to a page. The finished result: a phenomenally creepy comic.

It's creepy because it refuses to let you read it like a traditional comic. It's a collection of symbols and images that allow you to reach and stretch and glean some deeper meaning just before up-ending everything with an image or symbol that forces the story into a place you weren't expecting. It's unsettling and weird. It's matter and anti-matter.

"84" is storyless. But it isn't. Is it? There are panels that appear to lead directly into one another. One page features a religious figure, a person peering into a peep hole, a meteor impact, and then a group of men chanting "Big Two!" while watching a film. There's just enough tissue there to connect the four disparate panels, and you can do it without even making any leaps. The meaning of the page suggests itself, in a way.

Some pages feel like nonsense, a random grouping of images that don't quite cohere. But the other pages? The others crawl into your head like a parasite. You start to notice motifs and elements that repeat, like a hairy man who appears a few times throughout the issue or a key of mysterious origin and purpose. You notice the recurring trend of people looking at things, but we never get to figure out exactly what they're seeing.

"84" is unsettling. If you buy into it -- the cut-up technique is too annoying/pretentious (ugh)/whatever for some people, I'm sure -- then you're going to be treated to a nightmarish smear of a story that ends on a desperate exhortation. It's tremendously effective, particularly if you've followed The Bulletproof Coffin and its slippery approach to reality and continuity.

Give it a chance. Give yourself a thrill or chill.

baconx3 from Tumblr asked: What's the ideal price for a 20-page single issue comic?

In a perfect world, twenty pages would cost you no more than ninety-nine cents. Twenty pages for three or four dollars basically sucks, as far as I'm concerned. Just about every story is going to be collected at some point, and it shows when reading comics. You're getting a slice of story for four bucks, and that's kinda crazy to me. Add a couple bucks to that and go to a matinee instead.

There are exceptions to every rule, but by and large, four bucks? That's entirely too much for a twenty page comic. Two bucks is more reasonable -- I generally buy digital floppies a month late for that exact reason -- but a dollar is prime.

If you have a question, let me know by leaving a comment or hitting me on Twitter @hermanos. Let's talk comics, movies, music, video games... anything goes.

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'BPRD: Vampire' #1 Is A Beautiful Start, But Thin

David Brothers — 2013-03-28T14:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Dark Horse, Reviews, Opinion

On sale this week is B.P.R.D.: Vampire #1, a direct follow-up to B.P.R.D.: 1948, written (with an assist by Mike Mignola) and drawn by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, colored by Dave Stewart, and lettered by Clem Robins. "Is it pretty?" you ask, curious. "Obviously," spits Chris Sims. He's right, though, curmudgeon that he is. This is a remarkably pretty book, which should come as no surprise to people who are familiar with Bá and Moon's work on books like Daytripper or Casanova, their super-spy series with Matt Fraction. B.P.R.D.: Vampire #1 is full of extremely pretty moments, but it doesn't quite work for me as an introductory issue.Vampire #1 is largely a setup issue. We're introduced to the cast, both villains and heroes, given a bit of motivation for everyone, and then sent on our way. It's moody and dark, but feels thin. If I weren't already on the hook for the B.P.R.D. franchise, I'd be left a little perplexed. The vast majority of the dialogue feels like exposition, which makes me feel like this issue is building toward something else rather than being that something else from jump. Which is great for a first chapter of a complete work, but less great for the first issue of a miniseries.

While Vampire lacks a story that makes me eager to go out and grab up every issue I can find and wait impatiently for the ones I can't, it makes up for that lack on the art side of things. It's hard to argue against Moon, Bá, and Stewart as an art team. The cover by Moon alone is pretty great, once you take a closer look. The vampire women only being visible in the blood, the way the blood emanates from the man's feet, and just the fact that he's literally stepping into darkness is great and evocative.

Basically, Vampire is filled with remarkable images. The opening is text-less and feels like a slo-mo pan over a number of dead bodies floating in a river. You see close-ups of their wounds and dresses, but their faces are obscured. The river itself is black stained red by unseen violence. A streak of red through a forest. A monster with a bloody mouth. A man descending down a stairway into the darkness.

My favorite touch comes early on. A character, her dress stained red and her skin deathly pale, drops her hand into the river. The blood on her hands trails off-panel. It's a small moment, but it leapt out at me. I'm used to seeing people attempting to wash blood (and therefore their guilt) away in rivers, lakes, sinks, and rainstorms -- I've read a lot of crime fiction -- but this feels significantly different from those scenes, despite being the same in terms of basic mechanics.

Where the other scenes were defined by their guilt, this one feels like something else. It's so casual and off-hand that it almost feels like appreciation. The woman just wants to see what the blood looks like in the river and dips her fingertips. There's no grief, no stress, nothing but callous curiosity. It's a great way to set the stage for the rest of the book and establish a certain mood overall. Bá, Moon, and Stewart absolutely stick the landing there. I feel like I mention this every time I review a book he colored, but Dave Stewart's approach to blood? It's unbeatable.

B.P.R.D.: Vampire #1 feels like the first chapter of a book, rather than a satisfying chunk in and of itself. I'm very, very familiar with BPRD as a franchise, and the prior work of the creative team, so I'm willing to trust Moon and Bá to deliver something killer over the course of the next four issues. But as a first issue, something intended to set the stage for what's coming and what came before... this is for the lifers, the folks who love the art team, and anyone who doesn't mind checking out something that's beautiful and spooky, but thin.

B.P.R.D.: Vampire #1 is available now at your local comic shop, and digitally via Dark Horse Digital.

[Click images to enlarge]

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I'm David: Trusting Your Taste and 'Love & Rockets'

David Brothers — 2013-03-27T12:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Opinion, Culture

I'm a simple man with simple tastes. I'm also a critic, and that means that I obsess over my simple tastes in an attempt to both quantify them and convince myself that they aren't simple. But at the same time... they are simple, and that's a wonderful thing. I know that I can find something to enjoy in anything that hits a few check boxes. I like stories about crime and violence. I like stories where the gang gets back together for one last job, but one or all of them plans to betray the rest of the team. I like stories where people smoke cigarettes and shoot guns in dark alleys.

I'm David, and I'm easy.Part of my job requires thinking about comics -- and by extension, everything else -- a lot. Pulling them apart, figuring out who contributed what, learning how to intelligently talk about art as a writer, and generally just figuring out how to translate the language of comics into plain text so you can read it. It's natural at this point. I use the screenshot function on my iPad like other people use a highlighter when they read. If something catches my eye on a page or in a book, I'll save it to either study or write about later.

I like knowing why I like things. It can be hard to explain the appeal of something like Akira Toriyama's Dr. Slump or Inio Asano's solanin without truly understanding why I like them. (I would start with the buckshot approach to jokes, and the picture-perfect depiction of a quarter-life crisis, respectively.) Figuring out that appeal means interrogating not just the work, but myself. Why do I like Inio Asano's slice-of-life work, but not Craig Thompson's? Why am I open to all types of violence and criminal behavior in my books, but not really into romance comics? (Please don't say it's because I'm emotionally stunted. I'm sensitive.)

Past a certain point, despite my best effort, there are some things that can be hard to quantify. That's what happens when you're too close to a subject, or when it floats your boat in a certain way. I could try and tell you why Frank Miller's Sin City: The Big Fat Kill is a great -- or at least a favorite -- comic, but deep inside, I think it's a great comic because it was my introduction to comics for adults and I read it when I was a teenager. I can intellectualize my interest and talk about Miller's use of spot blacks, the killer action scenes, and how the narration gives the book a certain pace that works very well for that story, yeah. But I could never tell you why I've read it fifty-eleven times since my uncle gave it to me. It just works for me on a level that most things do not, and nostalgia, craft, novelty, my personality, Miller's personality, and more all add up to this perfect storm where I sit there like a dummy and talk about how "We gotta kill every last rat-bastard one of them" is one of the best payoffs I've ever seen in a comic to someone who has clearly stopped listening to me speak.

I've learned to roll with it. Having a weird dead zone, a critical blind spot, used to bug me, but I've learned that if it's there, it's there for a reason, and I shouldn't be so uptight about wanting to quantify everything I like and crystalize every idea I hold. If I like something, I like it. And now, when I realize that something has flipped that switch? I go for it.

This is a still from the movie Outrage, written and directed by Takeshi Kitano. It's about explosive drama in a yakuza organization, but it's also a clip show of gangsters dying in inventive and sometimes cruel ways. People die often, bloody, and ugly. It's a good movie, but this scene -- both the still and the sequence itself -- leapt out at me as being one of the highlights of the film. It flipped that switch. Kitano's passionless expression, the fact that his target is at peace, and the sheer vulgarity of invading a peaceful place with violence scorched itself into my mind.

I could talk about it for ages, but my interest in this scene is something deeper than I could ever properly explain. I can get in the ballpark, but that's it. But since I like this scene so much, I'm susceptible to things which bring this moment in time to mind. Case in point: this preview image from Michael Lark & Greg Rucka's Lazarus (longer preview here) I found on Rucka's tumblr:

There are several obvious differences between the still from Outrage and this clip from Lazarus. I mean, the setting, cast, approach, and everything else is different... but there's the gun, the position, and the implied cold-bloodedness. There's something in this that makes my throat tight, my eyes widen, and my brain go, "Yes, please."

I generally like Greg Rucka and Michael Lark's work, whether they're working apart or together. I was interested in Lazarus, simply on the strength of the creative team, but that one panel? More than anything else I've seen from the upcoming series -- with all due respect, of course -- that single panel sparked something in me I can't explain without sounding crazy. Something went click and I was trapped.

It feels weird sometimes, but getting lost? Not being able to explain why I like something to the extent that I do? That can be valuable, too. Don't turn your brain off for anything. Your brain knows what you like, and can draw connections between things that you wouldn't necessarily draw consciously. Let it work for you.

sizzlecraft from tumblr asked: What's the best way to introduce a person to Love and Rockets?

I don't know! I tried to jump on with Love and Rockets: New Stories #3, which won all types of awards and was widely described as being the best comic of the year it came out, but it was almost impenetrable without having read the prior stories. I could recognize the craft on display, but had a harder time with the story.

I'm planning on reading Love and Rockets eventually. I like the way Los Bros Hernandez draw (With the exception of the weird big boobs thing. What is that about?), and it's a certified classic, so I should get to it sooner, rather than later. My plan, such as it is, is to start at the beginning and read until I get bored or the series is over. That'll probably work for you. In lieu of that, Fantagraphics has a suggested reading list.

If you have a question, let me know by leaving a comment or hitting me on Twitter @hermanos. Let's talk comics, movies, music, video games... anything goes.

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I'm David: Milligan & Allred's 'X-Force' Is Amazing; So Are Air Force 1s

David Brothers — 2013-03-20T12:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Marvel, Opinion, Culture

I began rereading the Mike Allred and Peter Milligan era of X-Force on a lark, and here's something that's true: these comics might be the crown jewel of NuMarvel, even above my beloved New X-Men. They feel like genuine classics, the sort of tales that should be reprinted forever and forced on new readers. They're remarkably consistent on just about every level, and they approach sensitive subjects -- race, identification, sexual orientation, and more -- with an absolutely fearless vigor. In X-Force, the X-Men formula of addressing things via obscured metaphor is ripped to shreds, as Milligan and Allred turn subtext to text and have some fun doing it.

I'm David, and I want to talk to you about some comics that are much, much better than I remembered them being.I own every X-Force/X-Statix trade, but I'm just halfway through the second X-Force trade at the moment. I vaguely remember the broad strokes of the series, but it's been long enough since I read it that I don't remember the specifics. It doesn't feel like a new comic, but it's just unfamiliar enough that I keep finding myself surprised by the twists and turns it takes. I don't mean that in the sense of plot twists, those big swerves that define so many cape comics, either.

I'm talking about Tike Alicar, alias The Anarchist, having a conversation with a reporter where he says that being a black mutant in America is like "being black with a little black added." Later, Alicar is afraid to let another black guy on the team, because the rules of the genre only allow for one black character on a team at once, and the old guy is always the one that gets the boot.

The X-Men have long served as a metaphor for a variety of oppressed groups. As metaphors, the X-Men often traffic in the trappings and culture of oppressed groups, but generally stop short of actually addressing the real-life oppression that inspires the stories. Storm, for example, is hated for being a mutant, but rarely deals with anti-black oppression. In the real world, she'd get it from both barrels. In comics? Just the one. You're a mutant first, and then you're black, gay, or something else entirely fourth or fifth. That always bothered me, like they got to have their cake and eat it, too. They got to triumph over all of the signifiers of oppression, but never actually got to the pain oppression causes.

In X-Force, Milligan and Allred turn subtext into text. Explicitly. Alicar is as conscious of his blackness, mutation, and the combination of the two as I am of my own blackness. It shows in his gallows humor, his reluctance to air certain sensitive grievances, and his own insecurity. His blackness matters in X-Force in a way that Storm's own blackness has rarely mattered.

"Who cares?" says some dude. "Why does this matter?"

It matters because characterization counts. Yes, X-Men characters were well done before Milligan and Allred. But Allred and Milligan just found a new, relatively unexplored facet of how X-Men characters are characterized and went all in. They understand that identity isn't just any one thing. You aren't just (race). You're (race), (religion), (orientation), (personality), and more, and all of that matters when it comes to you. When you flirt with a thing, but stop short of acknowledging everything around it, you're leaving a character incomplete.

This isn't just a black thing, either. We talk a lot about white being the default when it comes to storytelling in America, and that's true. But even that is needlessly simplified. There's a lot of different types of white people, even in small communities. The better fleshed out a person is -- this character is a white Texan who grew up poor, this one is old money and insecure about it -- the more believable they are and the easier it is to buy into their story.

Everyone in X-Force is wrestling with a lot of different things when it comes to their identity, instead of just their status as a mutant and whatever frustrating soap opera they're currently involved in. Edie Sawyer, U-Go Girl, is an addict and an absentee mother. Mr Sensitive is suicidal. Phat is hungry for fame, but secretly not who he says he is. Alicar is obsessed with being clean and, by extension and implication, white.

There's a lot to like about Allred and Milligan's X-Force. This is just something that came to mind today. These are comics that appear to be weird, but when you dig just a teeny tiny bit, they're not weird. They're just excellent.

brettpunk from tumblr asked: Does a single pair of shoes exist that will go with literally any outfit? If so, what is it?

Of course there is. It's the almighty low Air Force 1, created by Bruce Kilgore in 1982 for Nike. It is the prettiest sneaker you ever did see, and if you're smart about picking up several different colorways, you can rock it with anything. These are the only non-dress/non-running shoes I wear these days, and they range from casual to dress-y, depending on what colors you're rocking. Today they're tan, to go with my blue and tan shirt. A couple days ago, they were purple and grey, to match my polo. At Emerald City Comicon, they were blue on silver to match a shirt that was blue on white.

Air Forces are the greatest shoe of all time. They're all I wear now. They get dirty too easily for my tastes, but I can't deny that there's nothing like a clean pair of white-on-whites.

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I'm David: Garth Ennis, Heroes, & Assumptions

David Brothers — 2013-03-13T13:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Opinion

I'm starting to get the feeling that Garth Ennis doesn't like heroes very much. I don't mean superheroes, either. His ambivalence toward the spandex set is well-established and can easily be taken as read at this point. But heroes? The men and women we've built up to be larger than life and forces for good, immaculately moral and righteous? I'm starting to notice that he's pushing away from that concept in his work more and more often. He treats heroes like we would treat stereotypes or urban legends. He wants to debunk our idea of a hero, and it shows in his work.

I'm David, and I want to talk to you about a specific strain of anti-heroism in Garth Ennis's work.The thought first occurred to me while I was reading Battlefields: The Green Fields Beyond, his collaboration with legendary artist Carlos Ezquerra. Sergeant Stiles, the focal point of the book, is a World War II veteran and tank commander in the Korean War. He's made it through a lot, and you could easily call him a genuine hero. He certainly fits the type, having led more than a few crews to safety, fought like mad to save the lives of his men, and generally survived one of the worst meat grinders the planet's ever seen.

The Green Fields Beyond is the third and final entry in the story of Stiles. At this point, he's a quiet man, worn well down by life and war. He's meek, honest, and he knows what he's doing. A young man joins his command by the name of Frankie Robinson. In World War II, Stiles saved Robinson's older brother from a burning tank. The elder Robinson lost a leg in the conflagration, but his younger brother picked up on one part of the story: Sergeant Stiles is a hero. Stiles saved his brother's life. So why wouldn't he leap at the chance to serve with the man?

We like heroes because they give us faith in reality. Life is hard, right? Having someone there that you can point to and go "He did it" or "I look up to her" is a good feeling. It's a sign that life may be as random and stupid as we think it is, but that we can still make it through. Robinson joins up for dangerous duty, and he does it because he believes that Stiles can keep him alive.

Stiles wants no part of it. The first thing Stiles does after Robinson spills his story is to seek out a superior and try to get the man transferred. He doesn't want the pressure, and he doesn't want to be responsible for another dead body. He knows that there are no such things as heroes, merely men who are trying to get by. His request is rejected, of course. In times of war, there is precious little space for personal problems. But he made the effort.

Billy Butcher in The Boys is another guy who fits the profile, though he's more in the hard-hitting hero realm than the purer type represented by Stiles. He's the hero who does the hard thing that needs to be done, and even that is a comfort. He's the bogeyman who fights bogeymen, but by the end of The Boys, the rot in Butcher's soul has become crystal clear. Butcher is savage, selfish, and more than willing to destroy anything to make sure he gets his way.

Butcher is the lone man who rides into town and makes things right by any means necessary. Ennis just takes his story to the logical conclusion. If you have a hero who is used to getting his own way because might makes right, what happens when his might is applied to your rights?

In The Shadow, Ennis presents a clean-cut All-American type character who is explicitly called out as being the blueprint for an espionage hero. The character is worthless, continually screws up basic tasks, and is entirely out of his depth on every single page. The Shadow himself is darker, more cynical, and well aware of the ways of the world. He doesn't pretend to be a hero. He is simply Death, and he understands that he has a job to do. He knows that heroes are smokescreens.

You could look at Preacher as being both the indulgence and exorcism of heroic tropes. Jesse Custer isn't complete as a human being until he sheds the ridiculous macho trappings he grew up idolizing. Ennis's take on Frank Castle in The Punisher is that of a man who is utterly and irrevocably broken, who has given himself over to making things right at the expense of any genuine human interaction.

The closest Ennis has come to scripting a true blue hero are when he co-created Tommy Monaghan and Natt the Hat in Hitman. They were moral men, but hitmen nonetheless, and whenever one of them got big ideas about being a hero, they were quickly and immediately shot down. They don't get to have those thoughts, because those thoughts get people killed. It's a trend that runs through many of Ennis's major works.

I almost feel like Ennis is actively trying to address how we view heroes, and his way of doing that is to take a heroic type (Butcher, The Shadow) and show us their feet of clay or souls of rot. The heroes in his stories either run screaming from that description, as in Sgt Stiles, or luck into it by simply refusing to be an awful person, as in Hughie from The Boys.

Ennis generally doesn't focus on characters who are as innately good as Superman. He keeps throwing these flawed and broken characters at us, characters who succeed in spite of their own massive shortcomings, and leaving the typically heroic characters broken and discarded in the gutters.

It's fascinating to me. I'm curious about Ennis's motivations here, because I don't think I've ever seen him address pure heroism in his comics. But I enjoy reading these characters and his relentless interest in breaking down mythology in favor of humanism.

Santiago Killing from the comments section asked: When you start reading a book and you don't have any way of knowing what the main character is supposed to look like or if it's a man or a woman, do you imagine a black male in your mind?

I honestly laughed out loud when I read this question, because it's so good and I don't think I've seen anyone ever talk about it before.

I do! If there are no details in a novel, I do tend to imagine a black dude as being the main character, though I mean that in a very general sense. He doesn't look like me, though. He doesn't look like anyone, really. Just a generic guy that gains definition as the story goes on. I don't do it consciously or even really think about it at all.

There's only been one time where this actually paid off, at least as far as I can remember. I was reading Colson Whitehead's Zone One a couple years ago. I don't know anything about Whitehead and I'm not particularly into zombies, but a friend recommended it to me. A few pages before the end of the book, Whitehead reveals that a certain character is black. It doesn't mean anything, spoiler-wise, it's just another bit of the character's tapestry.

I had to put the book down for a minute before I finished reading. I couldn't believe that a character I'd assumed was black just because actually was black. It was the first time that ever worked out in my entire life. It was a good feeling.

It helps that it was a really good book, too.

If you have a question, let me know by leaving a comment or hitting me on Twitter @hermanos. Let's talk comics, movies, music, video games... anything goes.

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Kickstarted: Mark Andrew Smith & 'Sullivan's Sluggers', Round Two - Artist James Stokoe Breaks Silence

David Brothers — 2013-03-07T11:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Indie, News, Opinion

I talked about some of the pros and cons associated with Mark Andrew Smith's Sullivan's Sluggers Kickstarter in November. Since then, he's been abusive to backers, failed to deliver comics to consumers while fulfilling orders to retailers, and has just recently launched a second Kickstarter with an extremely low goal in an attempt to raise further funds to ship books from the initial Kickstarter. I'm going to run down the Sullivan's Sluggers status quo after the jump. Spoilers: it's ugly, strangely personal, long, and ends with the book's illustrator, James Stokoe, confirming his disagreement with Smith's handling of the Kickstarter and that he wishes his name to be removed from future Sullivan's Sluggers products.Sullivan's Sluggers, featuring art by James Stokoe and color by Rodrigo Avilés, is a comic that trades in the same vein of comedy/horror as movies like Evil Dead 2. The plot is familiar, with a group of baseball players coming to a small town to take part in a game, and the twist is that the town is full of monsters who like to eat baseball players. Smith ran an extremely successful Kickstarter for it last year, which included the comic being announced as being in production as a film, and earned almost $100,000 for the production and distribution of the graphic novel.

In between my post in November and now, I noticed that Mark Andrew Smith had copies of Sullivan's Sluggers for sale online -- through his personal shop and Amazon both -- as well as in comics stores. I thought this went against his promise that Sullivan's was going to be "exclusive only to Kickstarter backers," so I sent him a message asking if it was a new edition or if plans had changed. He asked if I was stalking him, despite the fact that a) I wasn't, and am not, and b) it was the first time I ever sent him a message.

That smelled fishy to me, so I started paying more attention. The comments section on the Kickstarter are full of people who have yet to receive their books and people who are upset that comic shops have received copies of the book before backers, in addition to fulsome praise.

The most notable comment, to me, is actually one left by a friend of mine. Josh Richardson laid out his problems with the Kickstarter on January 8. Richardson included several details, explained his points without coming off angry or upset. A brief quote:

It's not that I want to air all this out in the comments section, but I can't help but notice these issues aren't being addressed. As someone who champions the Kickstarter and self-published movements, I hope you understand why folks would want to have this conversation about accountability. But now you say "it's not the same book" and "the focus really is the creation of more new and original comic book projects." The book is exactly as you said it would be (by increasing the features as more backers pledged funds), and the focus was on printing and delivering this comic from what I read right here on Kickstarter.

Shortly after Richardson posted, Smith replied with this:

@Josh This is my first time publishing and learning on the job. A private message to me would have been appropriate. This is not. You accuse me of a lot of things here, many of which are not true. I've Flagged your comments as Spam and will ship your books to you next week and be done with you.

Obviously, seeing a friend get a response like this stings, but even if I remove my friendship with Richardson from the situation, this is an appalling response to a paying customer. There was nothing spam-like about his comment. In fact, he was using the comment box exactly as it was created to be used. But since it was negative, he wanted to disappear the comment. That's not a good sign.

I wrote about the Kickstarter again, this time on my personal site, and focused on Smith's lacking approach to communication and slippery idea of what his backers gave him money to do. My feeling back then was that Smith was being shady, but within the letter of the law when it comes to Kickstarter.

I was content to put it out of my head, but a reader let me know that Smith is running another Kickstarter. This one is intended to raise funds to facilitate the international shipping on the prior Kickstarter. There are several things wrong with this. I'm going to try and be as comprehensive as I can.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the original Kickstarter earned $97,626, though Smith initially only asked for $6,000. That's an enormous windfall, and Smith upgraded the book to an Absolute-style slipcased hardcover as a reward for the fans. That was cool of him, and Sullivan's Sluggers is a handsome package.

In addition, the original Kickstarter declares that "This book is exclusive only to Kickstarter backers and available here for a limited time." If you backed the Kickstarter, the odds are overwhelmingly good that you thought you were getting something exclusive, instead of something that would be shipped to stores, sold online, and made available elsewhere. Smith is more than free to sell his book as he pleases, but there's a bait and switch in there that I do not like at all.

In fact, I'm certain that Smith never meant it in the first place. Here's two photos of the boxes that the book ships in. You can see the quantity per box (six books) and the total number of boxes (1000). That suggests a print run of 6000 copies. I did the math, and the number of Kickstarter backers per tier suggests that he's only required to provide 2706 copies of the book. Even if you round it up to 3000 copies to account for lost or damaged volumes, that seems extreme. No one doubles their print run just in case something happens. That's cartoonish.

Expensive shipping costs happen. I more than understand that. But it seems strange to blame shipping costs for the reason why many of your backers have yet to receive their books, especially books that were initially promised to arrive in September of 2012. I also understand that international shipping charges are, frankly, absurd.

What I don't understand is Smith's rationale for the new Kickstarter. A quote:

This is an extension Kickstarter for the original Sullivan's Sluggers Kickstarter because I goofed and hugely underestimating international shipping costs for international backers. By doing this Kickstarter I can adjust and get books out for international backers at just $10 a book for shipping and handling and send the books out at the original price.

There are times when your reach exceeds your grasp and you're left holding the bag, to mix two extremely relevant metaphors. My problem with this is that it's very much not cool to pass those costs onto the consumer when they weren't responsible for the mistake, the price increase, or the revamped plans. No one asked for them.

The responsibility for calculating international shipping costs and producing the books sits on Smith's shoulders. There are tools to ease that calculation, ways to get a loose, if not firm, idea of what's required to ship books to domestic and international locations. Making that mistake on an expensive and incredibly important part of the production process is fishy. But if my suspicion about the size of the print run is correct, that and the fact that the Kickstarter was wildly successful makes the whole affair feel shady and suspicious.

This week, comics creator Dustin Harbin asked Smith about the problems with the Kickstarter on Facebook. Smith responded with vitriol first, saying that Harbin was a "HUGE bully" and decrying a "nonstop orchestrated online bullying campaign." Harbin defends himself well in the thread, and Smith's response is another thing that makes me question his behavior and motivations. He's extremely defensive and paranoid every time someone asks him anything but a soft question, and that's not good.

Finally, Kickstarter is not a store. It's not meant to help someone sell backstock of pre-produced material. It's meant to fund a project that will result in the production of a thing. Mark Andrew Smith has set the goal for this new Kickstarter at $1. That goal means that he has gamed the system and ensured that no matter what happens, he's guaranteed to make money off the project.

That's not how Kickstarter is supposed to work. You come to Kickstarter with a project and a firm goal in mind. Smith claims that he made a fifteen thousand dollar mistake by screwing up the shipping. Why isn't the goal for this project $15,000, or $15,000 plus whatever is required for the shipping of the books that he's selling on Kickstarter? Again: shady.

I've received and seen several messages from backers of the original Kickstarter who still don't have their books, including people who live in America and aren't subject to international shipping charges. I saw a few booths at Emerald City Comicon last weekend that had copies of the book, even. To top it all off, Smith is currently pushing to sell more copies of the book by advertising on Pirate Bay. In any other situation, this would be a great example of lateral thinking. In this situation, though? It tastes sour.

Smith has utterly failed to deliver on his promises as a project creator on Kickstarter, engaged in abusive and untrustworthy behavior against his backers, and is now abusing Kickstarter to make up for his own mistakes. As a fan, I'm annoyed that I ever gave him my money. As a writer, I'm incredibly frustrated that just talking about this in public is going to make people lose faith in Kickstarter, a service that I think has very real value for the comics industry and has led to the production of some incredible work. As someone who pays attention to the comics industry, I'm angry that Smith is engaging in the same abusive and exploitative behavior that we've spent years battling big companies and slimy creators for doing. Even if I'm wrong about the print run -- it's an educated guess based on evidence provided to me, not fact -- there's still everything else to take into account.

I e-mailed Smith and requested an interview on this subject to clear the air. He hasn't responded as of press time, but he has released a tumblr post about the situation. I spoke to Stokoe, artist of Sullivan's Sluggers, and he expressed a desire to be kept out of the whole ordeal. He's since released a statement on his personal blog. It's remarkable, and definitely must-reading if you're curious about the Sullivan's Sluggers situation. Stokoe confirms he was uninvolved with Sullivan Sluggers Kickstarter from the beginning, citing disagreements with Smith. Here's a quote that I believe says quite a bit about the project:

Lastly, I've asked The Writer to remove my name from any future Sullivan's Sluggers related product. It's not a book that I feel good about endorsing, and I'd prefer not to be associated with it any longer.

I can't tell you whether or not to back Smith's Kickstarter. But I can point all of this out to you and let you decide on your own whether this is a project that is worth supporting.

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I'm David: Yuuki Kodama's 'Blood Lad' & Kitty Pryde The Rapper

David Brothers — 2013-03-06T12:00:00+00:00

True story: I bought Yuuki Kodama's Blood Lad almost entirely because of its cover. I was in my local Kinokuniya and noticed what looked suspiciously like a Gorillaz comic on the shelf. It wasn't, of course -- the closest we'll get is Rise of the Ogre -- but it did have an art style that tickled the same part of my brain that digs Jamie Hewlett's work. I was shopping with friends, and they gave it a cautious recommendation. I was a little skeptical, on account of how fan service-filled the book seemed to be at first glance, but a friend offered to buy it off me if I didn't like it, so, hey: why not?

(I also thought that Yuuki Kodama was the same person as Yuki Kodama, creator of the comic Kids on the Slope, which was adapted into a fantastic television series last year. That was an extra impetus to pick up the book. As it turns out, Yuuki Kodama isn't Yuki Kodama.)

Blood Lad stars Staz, an extremely powerful vampire who is a district boss in the demon world. He's also a super nerd, thanks to the fact that he is utterly infatuated with human culture, with a particular emphasis on pop culture trinkets from Japan. One day, his goons bring him a surprise: a human girl named Fuyumi somehow made her way into the demon world. Fuyumi doesn't know where she is or how she got there, which makes her fresh meat for the denizens of the demon world. Instead of going full-vampire and taking a bite out of her neck, though, Staz looks at her, falls in love, and then begins to act like a real teenaged boy about things.

Before Staz has a chance to process what's happening, he's forced to leave his apartment to fight someone who wanted to take his throne. He easily handles the interloper, but by the time he gets back, Fuyumi's been eaten by a monster, with just her bones and clothes left behind. That would normally be a huge deal breaker, but things work differently in the demon world. Fuyumi turned into a ghost instead of just being eaten alive, which only compounds her confusion. Staz, ever the gentleman, decides to try and bring her back to life and then bite her, in addition to taking her back to the human world.

The cover of Blood Lad 1 is pretty cool. Staz looks kind of like Murdoc from the Gorillaz, and his pink shirt really pops on the cover. The supporting cast -- a mix of subordinate goons, friendly rivals, and friends -- are standing in the background in shadow, but have glowing yellow eyes that work nicely with the dominant yellow of the cover. Of course, if you flip over the book, you finally get to see Fuyumi, who has cartoonishly large boobs and spends most of her time in a schoolgirl outfit when she isn't being manipulated into wearing other sexy gear.

The fan service in Blood Lad is tiresome and predictable, but just restrained enough to not turn me off. Fuyumi has big breasts, and is just slow-witted enough to put up with having to wear a bunny costume so she can be a ring girl or boxers and a boy's shirt after waking up from the dead. The jokes are all ones you've seen before, too. There's nothing new there, and if you're looking for fan service? You could honestly do better.

But the two things that kept me reading Blood Lad are Kodama's interest in fashion and the fast pace. Characters in Blood Lad wear real clothes. Polos, jackets, jeans, and everything else are genuinely designed, rather than simply being a solid block of color with precious few details. They appear about how you'd expect them to appear in real life, and as characters move around, their clothes shift positions and drape differently. Kodama even created an in-universe fashion line called Oniqlo, a demonic homage -- the word "oni" refers to demons, monsters, and worse in Japanese folklore -- to the popular Japanese fashion brand Uniqlo.

Fashion can be a great way to build verisimilitude in comics, and Kodama certainly demonstrates a facility for fashion in Blood Lad. If the clothes are believable, then there's one less thing that can eradicate your suspension of disbelief. You buy into the story in part because the fashion doesn't get in the way. In fact, the fashion makes it stand out amongst a sea of people wearing generic solid colors and lackluster leather jackets.

The fast pace of Blood Lad is another boon. Instead of wasting a lot of time setting things up, Kodama just goes for it. From the time Fuyumi arrives in the demon world to the end of the first volume of the manga, things happen and keep happening. Staz chooses to go to the human world for kicks and to join Fuyumi's school, but that's merely a pit stop on a raucous trip through the demon world. Kodama lets the first chapter set the stage, and then takes off on a dead sprint toward the action.

Blood Lad has mildly clever fights, a solid dose of creepy horror when it counts, and solid-but-predictable emotional beats. It isn't extraordinary, but it is pretty good. It's like comic book comfort food. Vampire boy meets human girl, things go wrong, vampire boy wants to make amends, and then they road trip around the demon world while interacting and battling various teenaged-takes on classic monsters. It's a fun time.

fujoshirobo from tumblr asked: You mentioning her the other day reminded me that I wanted to ask about your thoughts on Kitty Pryde (the rapper). Awesome? Dumb? In between?

She's interesting. I tend to dig rappers who are all about technical proficiency, often at the expense of content, right? The spherical lyrical miracle pinnacle dudes that tend to sell about sixteen CDs a year. But Kitty is something else entirely, I think, and more in line with a Big Sean or Jim Jones. They're at their best when they're kicking solid punchlines over strange or indie music-y beats (especially Jim Jones), and she is, too.

I like how airy and open her songs seem. They don't feel like freestyles, and I don't think they're incomplete, but (for example) a lot of her Haha, I'm Sorry EP feels like second or third drafts, instead of a carefully smoothed and sanded down product. That isn't a knock or a complaint, either -- I like how her songs end up sounding in general.

Does that make sense? I like the songs for more than just their musical and lyrical aspects. There's a je ne sais quoi to her work that makes it really click with me. I feel similarly about Los Angeles MC Blu, who keeps releasing un-mastered work that I just can't get enough of. I like how that stuff sounds, sometimes more than the finished and mastered products.

Kitty's listenable, though, and that's really all that matters. Her punchlines are good, her beat selection is pretty solid, and her "Call Me Maybe" flip "Give Me Scabies" is fantastic. She's clever and she's got a sense of humor... hopefully the music industry doesn't grind that out of her.

So, I figure my answer is "in-between." The streamable preview of her DAISY Rage EP is way more awesome than dumb, if that helps.

If you have a question, let me know by leaving a comment or hitting me on Twitter @hermanos. Let's talk comics, movies, music, video games... anything goes.

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Jimmie Robinson's 'Five Weapons' #1: Killer Execution, Satisfying Package [Review]

David Brothers — 2013-02-28T13:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Image, Reviews, Opinion

The short version: Jimmie Robinson's Five Weapons is a textbook example of how to create a first issue that leaves readers wanting more as soon as possible. Robinson introduces the main character, uses his unfamiliarity with the setting as an excuse to drop a lot of information on us, gives us brief and evocative descriptions of the cast, seeds a few mysteries, delivers a good amount of action, and then leaves you wanting more. It's a good comic, with an absurd idea played perfectly straight for a setting, with a good protagonist. The art is engaging and the story shows promise. It's well worth your time.

Now, the long version:There are two major twists in Jimmie Robinson's Five Weapons. The first one comes fairly early on, and is what convinced me to stick with the comic through its run. The second twist comes later, and it's not so much a plot twist as a plot twist of the knife -- it takes what you think you know and holds a knife to its throat in a dark alley. The second twist is killer. But I'm not going to ruin that for you.

Five Weapons features a school for the children of assassins as a setting. The school has five clubs: knives, staves, archery, exotic weapons, and guns. Each club is supervised by a teacher who specializes in that weapon, and led by a student who serves as class representative. There's no fighting allowed in the halls, but during a test or challenge? It's on.

Tyler Shainline is your hero, and he's the son of one of the most respected families of assassins ever. People react to his name with shock and awe. You would think that Tyler would be stuck-up, arrogant, or even just violent, but nope -- he's more Ferris Bueller than Wolverine, more Jason Bourne than James Bond. He pays attention to things, he keeps a sense of humor about everything, and he's smart as a whip. He also doesn't appear to use a weapon, which you would think is a huge mistake, considering that every single other student in the club is packing something, or sometimes even several somethings.

As near as I can tell, Robinson is working from the idea that it ain't the tool, but it's how you use it. Having a knife, gun, or baseball bat is all well and good, but it doesn't mean much when someone can out-think and out-maneuver you.

The first issue is largely a getting-to-know-you affair, as Tyler meets the staff and the students, and Robinson manages to stuff the issue with a lot of info without it ever feeling like an exposition dump. It feels more like a travelogue of a place that you're about to have free reign of, rather than a guided tour that's determined to tell you everything about a setting in the name of "world-building."

Tyler is the most normal person in the book, in terms of appearance and temperament. The rest of the cast are a mixture of people that are crazy, mischievous, liars, unhinged, or worse. But, they're crazy in a way that makes Five Weapons feel like a Young Adult comic, rather than something as extreme as Robinson's Bomb Queen or even most modern cape comics.

Mixing kids and violence can go south in a big way, especially when you're as specific about things as Robinson is, but he sticks the landing very well. Five Weapons isn't bloodless or neutered, but it definitely features guilt-free violence. It's pop comics, essentially -- Ryan Ottley and Robert Kirkman's Invincible is leagues more extreme than Five Weapons, but both share a "This is a comic book, so let's have some fun" flair.

That follows through to the art, as well. I dug Robinson's art on Bomb Queen, but this is more stylized, more like a really high budget cartoon, than I expected. Robinson's linework feels very clean, free of overcomplicated hatching or spotted blacks, and the colors by Paul Little gives everything a sunny, daytime kind of feeling.

The character design gives me the same feeling. Robinson uses each character's specialty to influence their outfits, but there are also flourishes beyond that. Joon the Loon, class rep of the exotic weapons club, wears her clothes backwards and is really, really weird. Ms. Featherwind, teacher of the archery club, has a costume that includes an arrow embedded in a target. That makes sense, right? Only the target is attached to her face and the arrow is coming out of the back of her head.

It's a visual joke, one that explicitly calls to mind the fake arrows that Steve Martin used to use in his act, which softens the blow when you realize that, wow, this lady really has an arrow that punched through her skull. It's a good way to defuse the tension and keep the book light.

I said there were two twists. The second is too good to ruin, and the first is a lot of fun, but a staple of adventure tales. I'm not going to blow it for you, but let's say that someone, or several someones, is keeping secrets they shouldn't, and they seem like the kind of secrets that will backfire spectacularly, perhaps somewhere near the end of the series?

Five Weapons really worked for me. It's a good comic that blends a goofy but intriguing idea with strong workmanship. It does a good job of sparking my imagination, making me very curious where Robinson is going to go with it. But more than that, it's just a pleasing comic book experience. The pacing, density, art, and dialogue are all on point, a combination that can feel rare in adventure comics these days. TJ Dietsch of ComicBookResources interviewed Robinson to great effect if you're curious about his approach. Look below for a quick preview of the comic. It's on store shelves, both physical and digital, now.

Five Weapons is available now at your local comic shop, and digitally via Comixology.

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I'm David: Writing While Black and 'One-Punch Man'

David Brothers — 2013-02-27T13:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Marvel, DC, Reviews, Opinion, Culture

It's weird being black sometimes. People have expectations that they just assume are true, you know? People at parties want to discuss race relations and Obama all the time for some reason, your non-black friends will grade your blackness, people want to touch your hair, and worse. There are all these little things that don't mean much on their own, but taken together, it paints a pretty decent picture of how Americans approach race. White is treated as the default experience, and being black, Japanese, gay, or anything else but straight and white is a Special Experience, one that needs explanation. It's true in comics, too. A lot of fans -- not all, but enough to be loud on the internet -- expect black writers to be angry revolutionaries first and writers second, and treat them accordingly, regardless of the story the writer actually put down on the page.

I'm David, and I want to talk to you about a phenomenon we're gonna call writing while black. It's a downer, but we're also going to talk about a funny comic called One-Punch Man, courtesy of Yusuke Murata and ONE, so stick with me.Let's mix things up a bit, because I got a good question that I couldn't boil down to around two hundred words.

Alex Price asked: Will you be addressing internet "Black Supremacist" criticism of writers like [Dwayne] McDuffie and [Reginald] Hudlin when on [Black Panther]?

What Alex is referring to here is something I'm going to call "writing while black," because I honestly don't know if there's a proper term for it yet. In short, there's a tendency for a certain subset of comics fans to view books written by black writers with a suspicious eye. The motivations of the writers come into question. Sometimes that suspicion manifests itself as viewing a book as a "black book" instead of a regular old comic book. Other times, it's a kind of defensive, twisted white guilt, like when fans declared that Black Panther and Storm were only getting married because they're black, and how offensive that is. (They didn't. It's not.) And other times, it's just straight up racism, of course.

The specific thing that Alex is getting at, though, are the times when fans look at a book written by a black writer that feature a black character winning at something (or even being present, which I suppose is a type of win in and of itself) and go, "Hmmm... I dunno about all this. This seems pretty anti-white/preachy/political/angry/etc." The accusations tend to reveal more about the complainer than the complained, in my experience. Nine times out of ten, it isn't what they say it is.

I've got a couple particularly horrendous examples. Walk with me for a little bit here before you hit the comment box.

Reginald Hudlin wrote Black Panther: Who Is The Black Panther?, which included a scene where a prior incarnation of the Black Panther beat Captain America in a fight. The book features a very cool John Romita Jr-drawn spread of the fight, but a lot of fans didn't take it well. It was seen as an insult to Cap, because how could anyone, especially some black dude, ever beat up Captain America? I mean, this is a guy who regularly fights a French dude whose only power is jumping well and another guy whose entire gimmick is that he's a regular Nazi dude with a skull for a face, and Black Panther gives him trouble?

In the eyes of fans, Hudlin had the Panther beat Cap as some type of get-back for... something (I honestly don't know what) or as an indicator of his black supremacist views. The fact that racist white characters -- not a lot, but a few -- showed up in the book was another sign that Hudlin was on his soapbox. It was unfair that white people were being treated like bad guys while the black guys got to win.

If you think of the history of cape comics, of how often generic black or latino muggers/rapists show up in alleys in basically everything ever, the irony may kill you. I should have warned you beforehand. Sorry.

But the scene wasn't a get-back. It wasn't a soapbox. It was simply a story where one character won over another in his own comic and other characters said stupid things before being admonished by other, smarter characters. It wasn't a statement or a line drawn in the sand. Who Is The Black Panther? is just like every cape comic ever, but this time, the lead was black and the primary villain was white.

These accusations are often couched in rhetoric that includes the utterly fake and obnoxious term "reverse racism." Sometimes people express concern that the author is using his soapbox in an untoward manner, which usually means "I don't think this person agrees with me politically and I wish they'd stop it." For a good example, check out the letters page of Black Panther #4, where Reggie Hudlin answers a letter writer's question on the subject. It's too long to excerpt in full here (you can read the entire thing over here), but here's a choice quote:

Regarding your assertion that the whole story was saying "all black people are good, all white people are bad," all I can say is, this remark says more about you than the comic I wrote. Aren't the first "bad guys" in the book black invaders with body part trophies from previous raids? If you think I'm vilifying the administration, isn't that a black woman in charge? Clearly, all black people aren't "good" in this issue. So maybe the problem, in your eyes, is that there aren't enough "good" white people? Why? Captain America may have lost the fight with the Panther, but he certainly doesn't say or do anything to betray the principles he stands for. And when one guy in the meeting says something stupid, everyone looks at him like the fool he is, and once he is dragged away, intelligent conversation resumes -- so why brand the entire room as racist because of one guy's comments? I wouldn't presume that about them, so why would you?

People suspecting creators of writing while black is much, much more common than you might expect, and it's never pretty. Dwayne McDuffie got it bad, particularly when he was working on Justice League of America for DC Comics. Here's a couple of choice quotes from fans, from a now-deleted preview of Justice League of America #34 that ran on Newsarama:

"...how many blacks did McDuffie manage to sneak onto the team this time-five? (I bet DC editorial gave him the same order as Burger King in that lawsuit-to "lighten things up around here.")"

"Couldn't they get Static, Black Lightning, or one of his daughters instead of Dr. Light on the cover of BET League of America? Ha!"

"Maybe they should establish a separate league for all the negro superheroes. I'm not saying kick them ALL off. One would be okay. (Doesn't Hollywood have some kind of law that says every movie has to have at least one black in it?) I just think they're going overboard with all this diversity stuff. I mean, how many comics do minorities read anyway?"

There's no exaggeration here. No edits, no jokes. No photoshops. These comments are real. I found them when they were quoted by McDuffie himself in 2009, and they really struck me as being vile in a way I didn't expect to see in public. Some comics fans are very, very interested in pointing out when writers are "blackifying" (not my word, though I cherish it) comics.

It comes from the thing I mentioned earlier, when people look at books featuring black characters or black creators working on black characters as a "black book." That sets up certain expectations, for better or for worse. When a black writer comes onto a book and suddenly the black cast doubles -- or goes from zero to one -- some fans cry black supremacy. 'Cause what else would a black dude do when he gets on a book, other than "urbanize" everything? Being black is different from being white, the logic appears to go, so obviously they won't write comics like we do. We like normal comics -- they like black ones. (It goes without saying that being black is different from being white, but near as I can tell, we all like the same types of stories, right? Just so we're clear.)

Here's the thing, though: McDuffie was, in fact, writing Justice League of America when several black members were added to the cast. Sometimes they talked to each other. Sometimes they talked about being black. But here's the rub: adding Black Lightning, Firestorm, and John Stewart to the cast wasn't McDuffie's idea. DC editorial, in addition to getting him to tie into other stories and shuffling the cast on a whim and telling him at the last minute a few times, wanted to diversify their cast. As a result, McDuffie was simply the hired gun in charge of making sure that the stories were good. (They were, though the art left a whole lot to be desired for most of his run.)

But from the perspective of the fans, McDuffie is the guy driving the boat, and he gets the blame. The fact that he's black is only icing on the cake. It's an explanation for what you perceive to be an injustice, an excuse for why a writer was allowed to transgress against the natural order of which superhero can beat up another or how many brown faces a team has to have before it needs a BET or Univision sponsorship.

Alex asked if I'm going to be addressing the "writing while black" criticisms. Despite what the thirteen hundred words before this sentence suggest, I don't know how to address it. I could talk about how it makes me feel like an unwanted stranger in my own hobby. I could talk about how it poisons the conversation and sucks the air out of the room. I could talk about how it ties into American culture, where black things are black and white things are merely normal. I could talk about how mad it makes me when I see it, every single time, and how impotent that anger feels. But we've had that conversation before. We're always having that conversation. I'm tired of that conversation.

Instead, I'm just going to point it out. This happens. You cannot deny that it happens. It happened yesterday and it'll happen tomorrow. (It'd happen today, but good luck finding a black writer at the Big Two. Win some, lose some.) Some people (idiots, let's call them idiots) are going to read this and think that I'm saying that any criticism of black writers or black characters is verboten. Some people are going to think I hate white people.

That's cool with me. I'm not talking to them. I'm talking to you, the person reading this who just went, "Oh. OH." and started looking inside their hearts a little bit. I'm talking to the person who is looking to learn, the person who may be guilty but doesn't realize it, or maybe just the person who was looking for a something good to read on their lunch break. I'm not preaching to the choir, but I definitely want to connect with that person who might join the choir in the future and ask them these questions:

Why is it cool and natural for Kitty Pryde to have a romance with Iceman but Storm and Black Panther are apparently an "only because they're black" relationship?

Why is it cool for Uncanny Avengers to launch with an exclusively white team, but if you add three black men to the Justice League -- all three being characters or concepts with a history of serving with the JLA over their forty-some years of existence -- some fans treat it like they just walked into a Mau Mau rebellion?

This column is inverted, on account of my utter inability to run short lately. So, in lieu of our usual Q&A, here's a few quick thoughts on a recent comic debut that's currently impressing me: ONE and Yusuke Murata's One-Punch Man.

One-Punch Man is a gag comic about a superhero named Saitama who has managed to train himself to the point that he defeats every single bad guy he meets with a single punch. He's the ultimate protector, but there's just one problem: Saitama's bored. He wants excitement, he wants action, but all he ever gets is one punch and then a lonely walk home. He daydreams about alien invasions. He fantasizes about having trouble during a battle. He loves the idea of being in a real pinch and fighting his way out of it. But when the chips are down and things are serious... one punch is all it ever takes.

ONE and Murata are telling a story that wouldn't be out of place in any adventure comic, but that one twist turns it from a fun adventure comic into a funny adventure comic. It's goofy and dumb in all the right ways. It's running in Weekly Shonen Jump on Vizmanga.com, and believe you me: you want it.

If you have a question, let me know by leaving a comment or hitting me on Twitter @hermanos. Let's talk comics, movies, music, video games... anything goes.

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I'm David: Tobin & Ferrerya's 'Colder' is Creepy, And Should White Writers Work On Black Characters?

David Brothers — 2013-02-20T12:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Dark Horse, Opinion

You should judge books by their covers. That's what they're there for, right? Covers are designed to catch your eye, interest you in the contents of a book, and to set the tone for a book. Kids' comics tend to have bright covers with a lot of simple action. Covers for grown-ups may be abstract or concrete, violent or sexy, and those descriptors set the stage for what's inside the book's pages. When you look at a comic's cover, you should be able to accurately tell what kind of story you're going to get inside. When I saw the cover for Juan Ferrerya & Paul Tobin's Colder, published by Dark Horse, my first instinct was to close the tab, uninstall my web browser, and hit my computer with a hammer, just to make sure none of its poison got inside me.

I'm David, I'm a big fat crybaby when it comes to eyeball trauma, and Paul Tobin & Juan Ferrerya's Colder is a really good comic.
I have an eye thing. Back in the day, I think it was third grade, I got a papercut on my left eyeball. Some kid was doing something stupid with paper in art class and I paid the price for his fun. I had to wear an eyepatch, which wasn't as cool as you would think, and I can still see a marked difference in how my eyes perceive light and vision quality. It's not a big deal, in part because it happened forever ago, but it has had one lasting effect: I'm a total crybaby about anything to do with eyeballs in movies and comics. The Aeon Flux intro? Nope. That bit in the otherwise execrable 28 Weeks Later when the guy pokes out that one lady's eyes? NOPE. The cover to Paul Tobin and Juan Ferrerya's Colder, published by Dark Horse? Hmm, let's see:

NOPE. NO WAY. NO HOW.

I saw this cover online back before the book came out and had two thoughts. The first thought was unsuitable for print and polite company. The second thought was something along the lines of "I wonder if they can live up to the cover? Not that I'll ever read this terrifying-looking comic book."

To make a long story short, I put on my big boy pants and read it, because Paul Tobin is a pretty good writer and I was curious to see what he would do with the story. I'm less familiar with Juan Ferrerya's work, but that cover is striking enough to get me to dip my toes a little.

Colder is good. I expected it to be good, but it's actually good in a way I didn't expect. I hadn't read any solicits or interviews, so all I had to go on was the cover and creative team. The cover led me to believe that it would be the kind of horror that I don't particularly dig, the kind that's bloodthirsty and full of emotional trauma for the victims and the reader. Instead, it's something more like Silent Hill in tone -- creepy crawly and sinister, rather than horrific. Colder is a skeleton quickly running its fingertips up your back while whispering the day you die in your ear. Colder is about things being wrong. It's about reality being a thin veneer that sits on top of our worst nightmares.

The villain of the piece, Nimble Jack, is an otherworldly being who eats craziness and misery. In the first issue, he persuades a man to hang himself in his prison cell and then, once his feet stop kicking, he absorbs the pain. He eats it. Years ago, Nimble Jack encountered a man named Declan while Declan was in a mental hospital seventy years ago. When we pick up the story, Declan has been completely out of it for decades. He doesn't speak. He doesn't laugh. He doesn't cry. He's just blank. On top of that, his body temperature has been steadily dropping over the years.

Reece, our point-of-view character and Declan's caretaker, is more normal than Nimble Jack and Declan, but she's not quite right, either. What kind of nurse takes a patient home for live-in care after the clinic he was checked into closes? What kind of nurse takes care of a catatonic stranger for years and just lets him sit in her front room? When Declan wakes up, she rolls with it. Her curiosity outweighs her common sense, clearly, and then things begin to go south.

That strain of wrong continues into the art. Juan Ferrerya's palette wouldn't be out of place in a comic from the Big Two. It's not quite full-on pop comics, but it's the next best thing. The visual style is on par with Jill Thompson and Evan Dorkin's Beasts of Burden, up to and until the point that the horror aspects of the story begin creeping in.

Ferrerya's great at body language and facial expressions, but it's his use of color that gets my motor going the most. When Nimble Jack is watching the prisoner die, the scene slowly fades from full color to something closer to greyscale. When he sucks the emotions out of the corpse, they appear as a burst of colored light against a depressing grey. When we see the crazy world of our unconscious, it looks like a noir-tinged nightmare, not a bright hellscape.

The wrongness of the story and wrongness of the art are perfectly matched. Tobin's giving you a story where nothing is quite right, where evil lurks behind every muttered conversation on the street. Ferrerya is playing tricks with the visuals to reinforce that feeling, changing reality as we perceive it into something else. Together, they're creeping me out.

If you wanna be creeped out, you can pick up Colder in your local comic store or online.

Forgotten Dialect asked: What's your take on white writers working on/creating solid black characters?

I'm all for it! 'Cause here's the thing: I don't own the black experience. There are several million different black experiences in this country, each of them unique, and it's not my place to say if someone can or cannot give their take on it. I can look at their take and figure out whether or not it jives with my experience or if it falls into certain ugly neighborhoods or whatever, but past that? Writers get to do what writers do.

Some of my favorite black characters have been written by white writers. I'll follow Garth Ennis any where he goes. Fred Van Lente did an incredible job on Shadowland: Power Man. I dug Jen van Meter's work on Black Lightning Year One. Grant Morrison's writing in Seven Soldiers: Manhattan Guardian was great.

I'm all for it! Write those dudes! Good writers tend to write good things, whether their leads are black, white, or something else entirely. The only thing that matters is care. Do your research as best you can, understand the culture you're writing about, and generally treat writing black characters the same as you would treat anything else: put your best foot forward and do your due diligence.

This doesn't mean that every portrayal is, or will be, perfect, but I'd rather take the chance that some jerk might make me mad instead of locking off a certain segment of the population from writing a certain type of character. (That would be hard to enforce, anyway.) Like most things, I'm with Malcolm X when he says, "I, for one, will join in with anyone, I don't care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth."

Do your thing.

If you have a question, let me know by leaving a comment or hitting me on Twitter @hermanos. Let's talk comics, movies, music, video games... anything goes.

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I'm David: Welcome to Black History Month

David Brothers — 2013-02-13T12:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Opinion, Culture

I've been black since the day I was born, reading comics since before I could properly read, writing about comics since 2005, writing about the intersection of race and comics since 2006, and purposefully writing about the intersection of race and comics since 2007. I spent February 2008 through February 2011 doing a series of daily, and then frequent, posts on black history in comics, specifically mainstream comics. I've done black history-oriented pieces for Marvel.com, CBR ran a selection of my posts one year, and ComicsAlliance has run some commentary from me on the subject, too.

I'm David. This is my new weekly column. I want to take you on a brief walk through black history.

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One hundred years ago this October, George Herriman launched Krazy Kat, a comic strip about Krazy, an impressively innocent cat; Ignatz, a brick-throwing mouse; and their colorful collection of cartoony friends like Gooseberry Sprig, the Duck Duke, and Bum Bill Bee, a hobo bee. Depending on who you ask, Krazy Kat is either the best comic ever or the bestest comic ever. It has a simple high concept -- there is a cat, there is a mouse, there is a mouse throwing a brick at a cat -- but the execution, much like Charles Schulz's Peanuts or Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes, goes so far above and beyond the call of duty that you can't help but be entranced by Herriman's work.

Comics critic Joe McCulloch once described Krazy Kat to me as something closer to poetry than prose, and I agree. There's an airy feel to these strips, and Herriman's idiosyncratic writing is lyrical more than it is literal. Krazy's patter is rife with misspellings, meant to illustrate Krazy's own strange way of talking, but it doesn't come across as forced or weird. It simply is, and you can take it or leave it. If you choose to take it, you'll experience some of the funniest comics ever put to paper. If you choose to leave it, you'll miss out on some of the funniest comics ever put to paper.

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All-Negro Comics came a few decades later. Word is that two issues were produced, but only the first was ever released. The comic debuted in 1947 and was the brainchild of Orrin C. Evans, an influential and historically significant journalist. The comic came with an interesting mandate: it was for us, by us. Instead of just being a fun anthology comic like other titles on the shelves, All-Negro Comics was meant as a work of social responsibility, as well. In the words of Orrin C. Evans, president of All-Negro Comics, Inc., "All-Negro Comics will not only give Negro artists an opportunity gainfully to use their talents, but it will glorify Negro achievements."

Glorifying Negro achievements isn't just a matter of spotlighting one or two people from history. It's about legitimizing -- or at least paying homage to -- the full spectrum of the Negro experience. It's about giving time to the rich and the poor, the country and the urbane. It's about black being beautiful, and representing every shade -- or several shades, more realistically -- of blackness.

All-Negro Comics was intended to serve as a tonic for its black readers. It would show the children that life is more than Jim Crow and lynchings, and in so doing, enhance our future. Our pop culture is defined by us, yes, but it also defines us. It's important to have that foundation, to be defined as something other than the villain, the token, the sidekick, or the absent voice. All-Negro Comics slotted black voices into the detective story, the adventure tale, the fairy tale, the slice of life tale, and even the jungle tale, one of the most reprehensibly and indelibly offensive genres out. It's a small move, just a shift in perception and point of view, but a valuable one.

Billy Graham came later still. He was born in 1935, died in 1999, and was "just" a comics artist like Muhammad Ali is "just" a boxer. He touched every single issue of the first run of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, and his work was invaluable in defining the character and mannerisms of one of the longest-lasting black heroes. He made a character that could have been absurd in the wrong -- or even the right -- hands into someone you could believe in.

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Graham's work on the Black Panther proto-graphic novel Panther's Rage, written by Don McGregor, is what elevated him to my own personal pantheon, though. He owns the look of the Panther, even more than co-creator Jack Kirby. Panther's Rage was about failure, misery, and hard-won success, and Graham delivered. Even if you somehow manage to discount the fact that Panther's Rage is an all-time classic and historically important in terms of comics storytelling, you can't deny that his splash pages were stunning, his integrated titles were impressive, and his approach to acting and body language were incredible.

There are a lot of guys we miss when we talk about black history. They weren't the first to do something, or the most popular. They were just really good at what they did, and they quietly did their thing. These are our mothers and fathers who hustled so their kids could believe in a Santa Claus, our grandfathers and grandmothers whose strength gave our parents spines of steel in the face of terrorism.

Twenty years ago this month (2/24/1993, to be specific), Denys Cowan, Michael Davis, Derek Dingle, and Dwayne McDuffie unleashed Hardware #1 on the comics industry. Written by McDuffie and drawn by Cowan, Hardware #1 introduced Curtis Metcalf, a gifted young scientist whose smarts gave him opportunities that his skin color and background did not. He was groomed by Edwin Alva, the head of a major corporation, as he grew up. Metcalf's college career was paid for with one caveat: come work for Alva.

Metcalf grew up and did just that. When he asked to share in the massive profits he was bringing to his mentor's company, he was informed that he was not family, merely an employee. "You are not respected, Curtis," said his mentor. "You are merely useful."

Hardware isn't just a parable about workers' rights. It's about taking responsibility for your actions, owning your creations, and learning to be your own man. It's about the consequences that come with having a history, be they good or bad.

Milestone was bigger than Hardware, but I like how Hardware itself is a little microcosm of what Milestone represents. McDuffie, Cowan, Dingle, and Davis didn't get a chance to make their own mark on the world while they worked at Marvel and DC. They did the smart thing: they left and then they created work on their own terms. Call it "separate, but better."

Today, Marvel and DC are still exploring where and how their black characters fit into their universe -- from a biracial Ultimate Spider-Man to a newly A-list Cyborg in Justice League to new push for the Black Panther -- and doing it largely without the input of black writers. The first black people to get to guide the destiny of the X-Men heroine Storm, the destiny of what is arguably the biggest black character in comics, were Eric Jerome Dickey and Reggie Hudlin in 2006, 31 years after she was created. No black woman has gotten a chance to sit down and redefine the character for a new era. As near as I can tell, about 18 black writers have ever gotten a chance at making a stamp on Marvel and DC at all.

While they're still gatekeepers of a certain type, Marvel and DC don't matter as much as they did in the past. Spike Trotman, creator of Templar, AZ, is a black woman. She's doing things her way, from her webcomic to Iron Circus Comics, her publishing project. Marguerite Abouet, writer of the Aya series published by Drawn & Quarterly, has written a series of comics about what life is like for a young black girl who lives thousands of miles away from my hometown. Kyle Baker and Jamal Igle, both artists who've spent a lot of time working with Marvel and DC, have set out on their own quests to not just fully control their work, but to make the type of work they want to make. Keith Knight's definitely the funniest dude in your newspaper.

Black History Month exists to address an inequality. It's an institutional inequality, rather than a personal one, but it's an inequality nonetheless. A side effect of the media in America being controlled by and aimed at one demographic is that any other demographic is left feeling like a second class citizen. Black History Month exists to partially fill the gap. It's to remind you that black people have been in America for centuries, that we are a vital and vibrant part of the culture, and that, more than anything else, we exist.

We've always been here. We're not going anywhere.

QUESTION TIME!

I'm answering one question a week. First up is a familiar face:

Chris Sims asks: Let's see you write 2000 words about the Batmobile. BALL'S IN YOUR COURT, BROTHERS.

This isn't even a question. Can you believe the nerd of this guy? If you have a real question, not whatever this is, let me know by leaving a comment or hitting me on Twitter @hermanos. Let's talk comics, movies, music, video games... anything goes.

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Garth Ennis & Craig Cermak's 'Red Team' Is A Good Start For a Dark Tale [Review]

David Brothers — 2013-02-08T11:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Reviews, Opinion

Some people deserve to die. They're so vile or anti-life that leaving them alive would only result in misery for everyone they meet. At the same time, is it right to kill them? In Red Team, Garth Ennis and Craig Cermak are exploring this conundrum. The titular Red Team are a small squad of elite police in New York City, and one day they decide to murder a criminal they can't collar the normal way. Instead of telling a high-octane story about cops who have been pushed too far, Ennis and Cermak are telling the other story, the one where breaking the law has consequences and hard men and women doing hard things aren't welcome.Americans love vigilantes. Maybe not the real deal, but the idea of vigilantes? We can't get enough. One man or a small group of men -- they're almost always men -- up against the system, or drug dealers, or bankers, or terrorists? We eat it up. We like vigilantes because sometimes life isn't fair. Drunk drivers get away scot-free, drug dealers operate with impunity, and the police get to kill innocents and walk away heroes. Why isn't there someone out there who can rescue us from the people we can't stop? Where's our John McClane, Frank Castle, Bruce Wayne, Matt Murdock?

In Red Team, Ennis and Cermak give us our vigilantes, but with a twist: there's no glory here. The four members -- three men, one woman -- of Red Team don't fire twin submachine guns with a quip and a grin. They don't get into high-speed car chases. They don't lay a big fat kiss on the girl at the end. They're at the end of their rope, upset, and willing to do the unthinkable.

I wasn't familiar with Cermak's art prior to reading Red Team, but I can see why Dynamite chose him for this story. The vast majority of Red Team #1 is composed of a series of conversations, essentially, and Cermak handles them well. Characters that are troubled, angry, and tired look it. Cermak has a fairly realistic style that puts me in mind of frequent Ennis collaborators like Jacen Burrows and Steve Dillon, instead of John Pugh and Goran Parlov.

Cermak's realistic flourishes, and Adriano Lucas's dulled palette, are crucial to Red Team's tone. There's no glory here, and Cermak never glamorizes the leads or the action on the page. I never felt like I wanted to be these guys, or that what they were doing was justified. The art goes a long way toward making sure that tone stays consistent. Cermak never goes big, for lack of a better term, and the book is better for it. He may go big later in the series, when things begin to spiral down the drain, but the first issue is the one that sets the tone for the rest of the series, and Cermak does a pretty good job of making this feel like an intimate, low-key comic instead of an action/adventure tale.

Red Team is Ennis working in a mode similar to Punisher MAX, but even more restrained than that. In Punisher MAX, Ennis still needed to feed the beast, so we personally witnessed the Punisher murder dozens, if not hundreds, alongside the moments when the series flashed dark or brilliant. Red Team feels like a cross between Punisher MAX and Ennis's war stories. We have the frank exploration of violence and vengeance that made Punisher MAX such a fantastic comic, but it's tempered by the muted, melancholy tone that often shows up in his war tales.

Ennis's story is simple and familiar. The four members of Red Team have been pushed to the limit by a local kingpin called Clinton Days. After the death of a cop, and the subsequent murder-by-cop of that cop's assassin, they decide that they've had enough. Something has to be done, and if that means stepping outside the law, so be it.

I expected Red Team to be about the team getting away with murder, but that doesn't appear to be the case at all. The first page features a member of the team being interrogated, and he explains what happened to them in the past tense. There's an air of finality and melancholy to the first issue, as if there's no hope left to be found.

Ennis and Cermak are building up to something big and ugly and inevitable. They cover enough ground in the first issue to open up several avenues of destruction, and I'm curious to see where the story goes over the next six issues. The first issue defied my expectations. I figure the next six will, too.

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'The Boondocks' Creator Kickstarts Uncle Ruckus Film Based On TV's Funniest Racist

David Brothers — 2013-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Video, Opinion, Culture

Uncle Ruckus -- no relation -- is one of the funniest parts of Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks cartoon. He's the ultimate black white supremacist, as eager to appease every caucasian he ever met as he is to denigrate any non-white who steps within an eighty-eight mile radius of him. He's thrown a brick at Martin Luther King Jr., tried to exorcise a black ghost with tactics straight out of 1955, and starred in his own reality show. This week, McGruder and friends have launched a Kickstarter for The Uncle Ruckus Movie, a live-action take on everyone's favorite racist starring Gary Anthony Williams, who provides the voice of Ruckus.

You would think I'd be excited to get more Ruckus in my life, but I'm not. Not yet. Right now, I'm cautious.

The thing about racial comedy is that there's a very, very fine line between people laughing at you and people laughing with you. Chappelle's Show mined racial humor to great effect for years, but Dave Chappelle, while working on a sketch about racist fairies, found himself in a situation where he realized that people were probably laughing at his racial humor instead of laughing with him. The stereotypes became the funny part, instead of the situations those stereotypes were put into. He did the only sensible thing a man can do in that situation: he hit the eject button and left the show to find some semblance of peace and re-center.

Uncle Ruckus is brutally funny. I've been rewatching The Boondocks, and as far as character concepts go, he has a stunning amount of depth. But he's also the character who most needs the context of The Boondocks -- the effortless satire, the fearless approach to humor, the wide variety of black characters -- to make sense. Removed from that context, Ruckus isn't much but a white supremacist's wet dream.

McGruder and company have a big challenge in front of them. The Uncle Ruckus Movie is, at the moment, an idea. There's no studio involved, and their hope is to raise $200,000 to produce and release an "R-rated theatrical comedy" written and directed by McGruder and starring Williams.

I won't lie: I'm a little worried about how this movie will end up, assuming it gets made. These guys have walked the tightrope with Ruckus for three seasons now, so I should have more faith, but I can't shake the feeling that The Uncle Ruckus Movie could very much end up being the racist fairies moment for The Boondocks. The line between a really good joke and a really ugly joke can be thin, and giving Ruckus his own spotlight seems like an almost-surefire way to tilt things toward ugliness.

Backing the project for $25 (the "Clint Eastwood" level) earns you a DVD of the movie, a backer button, and a selection of photos and music featuring Uncle Ruckus. Backing it to the tune of ten grand, the "Ronald Reagan" level, gives you a co-producer credit, a spot in the movie, tickets to the premiere, a signed script, and more.

Hopefully they can stick the landing on this one. I feel like if they don't, I'm going to have to deal with another few years of dudes quoting the movie at me at parties in an attempt to show how cool they are. If they do stick the landing... well, it wouldn't be the first time I cried with laughter while watching The Boondocks. Just check out the video below, which is absolutely NSFW.

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'R.O.D Read Or Die Official Archive' Is The Best Kind of Fan-Service [Preview]

David Brothers — 2013-01-24T14:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Previews, Opinion

I really dig behind-the-scenes stuff and process books for comics and cartoons. It's not that I want to learn how to make my own so much as I enjoy seeing how things are put together. It can lead to a deeper appreciation of the work in question, which is always cool. Sometimes you like something more after you get to see how it's put together. And in the worst case scenario, checking out an art book gives you a chance to look at some cool art that builds on the original work you liked, right? A great example of the modern art book is R.O.D Read Or Die Official Archive, recently translated from the original Japanese and published in English by UDON Entertainment.Read or Die is a franchise composed of three short original video animations (OVAs -- think short films or long episodes) and one twenty-six episode television series. It follows the exploits of a small group of Paper Masters. What's a Paper Master? It's basically like air bending, only instead of bending air, you're bending paper. Each Paper Master has a specialty, and that affects their personalities and fighting styles. Some create monsters, others sharpen them to a razor's edge, and others tend to use overwhelming force.

The series hinges a lot on how the music, humor, and action build on one another, resulting in a stylish characterization-oriented blend. Once you watch the show or the OVAs, you'll get it. It's similar to Cowboy Bebop in that respect. It's more than the sum of its parts, and the parts actually sound pretty silly when taken on their own, but it's a very easy series to fall in love with.

So picking up UDON's official archive on a whim was a great choice. It provides a fun look at the creation of the franchise while simultaneously explaining where basically all of the random-but-official-looking Read or Die images you'll find online came from.

My favorite aspect of the Official Archives is how thorough it is. There are pages upon pages of charts of the various costumes that characters wore, including references to the episode they came from. Adjacent to that are explanations of each character's physical attributes, characterization, and special talents.

It's easy to lose sight of where these characters we enjoy come from, but this art book does a great job of showing the nuts and bolts of Yomiko Readman and the rest of the gang. It's also a fun trip down memory lane. I haven't watched Read or Die or R.o.D. the TV series in several years at this point, and half of my experience with the art book was marveling at familiar art and being stunned at how much about the series I've forgotten. R.O.D Read Or Die Official Archives is the total package, a combination of nostalgia-sparking images and process-oriented content. It's great. If you like Read or Die, or if you're just curious, it's well worth picking up.

Check out a quick preview below (and don't forget to click to check out the images in a higher resolution!) and make sure to visit UDON's official site for a longer preview. R.O.D Read Or Die Official Archives is in stores now.

(Click images to enlarge)

R.O.D. Read or Die Official Archive is available now at your local comic shop.

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2000 AD's 'Trifecta' Crossover Is Hereby Declared The Best Event Comic of 2012

David Brothers — 2013-01-11T14:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Reviews, News, Opinion

Let me be the first to apologize to you, on behalf of the entire comics press. We screwed up. We were too focused on the wrong events in 2012. We spent tens of thousands of words on Avengers vs X-Men, Before Watchmen, Night of the Owls, and we missed the fact that there was a bigger, better, and extremely satisfying crossover sitting right under our noses. Not all of us -- a few of our ranks were on the ball enough to realize what we had, but too many missed this. But it's okay. I've seen the error of my ways. I've seen the light. I had my road to Damascus moment, and now I'm here to spread the word about the spectacular crossover that ran in 2000 AD late last year and ended up being one of the year's best stories. What's the name of it, you ask? Well, here's the thing: it didn't have one.The crossover ran between three strips in 2000 AD. Writer Al Ewing and artist Henry Flint's "The Cold Deck," beginning in prog 1806, focused on Judge Dredd attempting to pick up the pieces after the events of the apocalyptic "Day of Chaos" story. Millions are dead, Mega-City One is in ruins, but life goes on. The guilty must be judged and justice must be served.

Artist Simon Coleby and writer Simon Spurrier began "The Simping Detective: Jokers to the Right" in prog 1804. It stars Jack Point (Point as in "held at gun...", of course), a clown-faced private eye with a bag full of chips on his shoulder. He works out of Angeltown, and Simons Spurrier and Coleby have created a story that feels like a down and dirty sci-fi Los Angeles that sits next door to the good old days of films noir, from Point's narration (Point, as in "get to the") to the locales he spends his time drinking, sleeping, and crawling through.

"The Cold Deck," written by Al Ewing, drawn by Henry Flint, lettered by Annie Parkhouse, and colored by Chris Blythe.

The last piece of the puzzle is "Low Life: Saudade" from prog 1805, which comes courtesy of artist D'Israeli and writer Rob Williams. It stars Dirty Frank, a genuinely unhinged undercover agent for the Judges. He speaks in the third person, he narrates his own life, he's not too quick on the uptake, and boy oh boy does he spend all of his time confused by everything. One day, he wakes up (wait for it) on the moon (keep waiting, that ain't it) where he's become massively rich (nope) and a shareholder in a company run by a human being who is so dedicated to a gimmick that he had his genes spliced with a great white shark... he's got a shark head, boy dudes and lady dudes (there we go). Frank, of course, not only has no memory of how he got there and why he's rich, but he has no clue what he's expected to do. It's an undercover assignment like no other, and Dirty Frank is an undercover agent like no other. What could go wrong?

Notice how none of these stories even remotely sound like they should cross over? The tones are different, for one thing. Ewing's Dredd reads a little like Frank Miller's Batman circa Dark Knight Returns. Spurrier's Jack Point is a hard luck hero, but only if your definition of heroism includes craven selfishness, permanent exasperation, and taking advantage of people. He's got bad luck, at least. And Frank? Frank is weird. Let's leave it at that.

Now, if you read comics, you know how events work by this point. Sometimes they get announced a year ahead of time and sometimes they get announced six months out, but you always know they're coming. Once they hit, you get ugly banners on your comics, and series that interact with the event are often stripped of their own voice or plots, so as to better tie in with the presumably record setting sales of the event. After that, we have the epilogue or aftermath period, where we read about people reacting to that thing that just happened. The aftermath, at this point, is often setup for the next event, or a clunky way to set up the official post-event status quo. YUCK, right? Sometimes you'll get a good story out of one of the tie-ins, but by and large, these kinds of events aren't really what I'm looking for in comics.

"Low Life: Saudade," written by Rob Williams, drawn by D'Israeli, and lettered by Ellie De Ville.

The creative types involved skipped all that rigamarole. The crossover wasn't announced, though once it hit, there was some light press coverage. Instead of leaving flyers and leaflets all over the internet, the event just happened. The stories involved in the crossover began in separate issues. One of them's black and white, another is black and white with bursts of color, and the other is full color. They began in separate issues, too. While they share a setting and context -- Dirty Frank and Jack Point are Dredd spinoff characters -- there's nothing that suggests they'll crossover until you turn a certain page and realize that the story that you just finished leads directly into the story that you just began.

I knew the crossover was coming, though I was behind on 2000 AD when it happened. It's hard to avoid comics news, says the guy who writes for a comics news site, so I knew the broad strokes of the crossover going in. But I avoided reading any further, because I knew I'd be getting there on my own. I tend to read 2000 AD in chunks, and I caught up with a couple months' worth of thrill power over the course of a few days. Even knowing that at some point two other series were going to intersect with Dredd, I was still caught by surprise.

It was the elegance that did me in. I know a little bit of Dredd lore, but I don't know anything about Jack "What's the" Point or Dirty Frank. But Spurrier, Ewing, and Williams did a great job of making this crossover new reader friendly. They dig deep into Dredd lore, introduce characters I didn't know existed, but they don't act as if we should instantly know the import of every character who is introduced on a "to be continued" page. Us newbies get the context we need to understand why certain characters are meaningful. It feels like the writing team treated every character like someone new. I still don't know if a few of the named judges were previously established or brand new, and I'm pretty happy about that.

"The Simpering Detective: Jokers to the Right," written by Simon Spurrier, drawn by Simon Colby, and lettered by Simon Bowland.

I mentioned earlier that each of the series looks completely different. It's true, and that's part of why the crossover is so good. Flint's Dredd is grimy and dirty, D'Israeli's work on "Low Life" is just this side of cartoony slapstick at times, and Coleby's style on "The Simpering Detective" puts me in mind of artists like Gabriel Hardman. The raggedy clothing, the approach to faces... "The Simpering Detective" may actually have my favorite art out of the entire crossover.

The crossover ends in an issue-length blowout story called "Trifecta," scripted by the three writers of the crossover and featuring all three threads coming together at once. It's drawn by Carl Critchlow, and it's fascinating to see his take on the cast. Rather than trying to ape D'Israeli, Coleby, or Flint, he does his own thing. Dirty Frank lives up to his name. He looks filthy, instead of lovably dirty. Dredd is pretty similar, but that's a look that really works for Dredd. Jack Point's part of the trifecta reminds me of... imagine a Frazer Irving comic, right? That visual style? Keep the kinetic energy and creepiness and acting, but color it with a more muted palette. That isn't quite what Critchlow is working with, but that's as close as I can get to explaining it. Regardless: it looks good.

It reads good, too. There's no trade or anything available yet, but you can buy progs 1804-1812 and get the full story and more besides. I read it in 2013, but it was one of the most enjoyable comics to be released in 2012. Now I'm looking to see what everyone else does next, which is probably the best result you can expect from reading a comic. Bravo, gentlemen.

More stories like that, please.

2000 AD issues are available at your local comic shop, on iTunes, and on the 2000 AD website.

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Moto Hagio's 'The Heart of Thomas' Is A Dense, Heartfelt Read [Preview]

David Brothers — 2013-01-04T14:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Fantagraphics, Manga, Previews, Opinion

Moto Hagio's Heart of Thomas, recently translated and released by Fantagraphics, is my first proper introduction to the shounen-ai, or "boy's love," genre of manga. I have friends who are into yaoi and boy's love, and they have been remarkably generous with their time, knowledge, and gag gifts of yaoi versions of comics I like, but it isn't quite my thing. I generally like comics that are all about cigarettes and guns, and there isn't a lot of that in Heart of Thomas. What there is, though, is drama. No -- it has melodrama. It opens with a young boy, a student at a boarding school for boys in mid-20th Century Germany, committing suicide. That is sad enough, but he leaves a note behind, as a way of confessing his love for another student and praying that he can make one last connection. Things... go south from there. Check our exclusive preview and a quick review below the cut.I was a little worried going into Heart of Thomas, since I'm unfamiliar with shoujo manga, or girls' comics, and boy's love. But I like Moto Hagio, the author of the book, and I'm open to new things. I'm glad I gave it a chance, because the sheer level of theatrical drama in this book is enough to keep a skeptic hooked. I burned through the book, partly out of a desire to see how dramatic things were going to get, but mostly to see how the story played out.

The boy who committed suicide, Thomas Werner, confessed his love to Juli, an upperclassman, six months before he died. It was part of a game between him and another student. They were racing to see who could seduce the strait-laced Juli first, but Juli found out about their plot and shot Thomas down in front of his class in the cruelest way. Six months later, Thomas is dead and Juli has received his last letter.

Thomas's death haunts Juli, as he seems to feel partly responsible at first. But that haunting soon turns to outright resentment. Juli had no interest in Thomas, so why should he be burdened with the weight of Thomas's death? On top of that, everyone else believes that Thomas's death was an accident, not suicide. Juli knows the truth, and it sits heavily upon his shoulders.

The resentment eventually turns to malice. Juli rips up Thomas's last note at his gravesite and refuses any responsibility for what Thomas did. Things get worse when a transfer student, Erich, joins the school. He's the spitting image of Thomas, which sends the school into a proverbial tizzy.

Erich resents Thomas due to the expectations placed on him by people who knew Thomas. Juli resents Thomas, and sees Erich as a shadow of Thomas. The rest of the school is wrapped up in their own petty dramas, from tea parties to simply attending class and having fun.

Everything is heightened in Heart of Thomas. Juli doesn't just resent Thomas. He has dreams about him that end with Thomas exploding into flowers. Erich steps into Thomas's place in the school by accident, and finds himself the latest curio and showered with attention. He's spoiled and unruly, even going so far as trying to strike a teacher who corrected him. Characters scream, throw things, and have the most sparkly eyes you ever did see.

It's a girls' comic, a romance comic, and drawn accordingly. All the boys are drawn to be very traditionally girly -- one of the boys is nicknamed "fräulein," which threw me off initially -- and flowers, sparkles, and several other shojo manga tropes are in full effect across the book's five hundred pages. I still feel like an outsider, someone peeking in the window of another person's favorite genre, but I do feel like I get it. The apocalyptic twists and turns are engaging, to put it lightly. It's like a soap opera that's been all the way turned up. No one has subtle emotions. Even seething anger or grief manifests itself through dark shadows and gloomy spotlights. Joy or rage? Those explode onto the page.

My previous high watermark for melodrama was Chris Claremont's run on X-Men comics. I wasn't prepared for how far Hagio was going to take her story, but I'm totally into what she came up with. It works so well because Hagio is telling a story that's almost entirely character-driven. There's not really a big important plot to follow, or villain to defeat. She's just packing a boarding school full of characters and letting them bounce off each other. It's that simple. Heart of Thomas is a trip, and a good one. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did, and it was nice to enjoy something outside of my usual comfort zones.

Check out the preview below, and then hit your nearest bookseller for a copy of your own.

'The Heart of Thomas' is available now at your local comic shop or on Fantagraphic's website.

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Atmosphere, Comedy, and Art: Breaking Down Mignola's 'Hellboy In Hell' #1

David Brothers — 2012-12-06T11:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Dark Horse, Reviews, Opinion

Pulling apart a good comic is like trying to figure out the secret ingredients in a great dish. You have to go on taste and feel alone. The dish's sharp bite could be basil or pepper, and the juicy taste could be thanks to primo meat or a long-term brine. You'll never know for sure, but trying to figure it out? That's a lot of fun. I read Hellboy In Hell -- impeccably drawn by Mike Mignola, fantastically colored by Dave Stewart, and wonderfully lettered by Clem Robins -- and was struck by how Mignola chose to tell that story. There's something weird about it, a little off-kilter, and I realized that's true of a lot of his Hellboy stories. I want to crack this puzzle, and I think I narrowed down two of the main ingredients in Hellboy in Hell: atmosphere and comedy.

ATMOSPHERE

You could say that Hellboy in Hell is "atmospheric" and leave it at that, but that's no fun. It's maddeningly vague, isn't it? What atmosphere is it evoking? "Horror" isn't a good answer. I've never found Hellboy all that scary. Heart-rending, sure, but that's not an atmosphere exactly. I think we need to take a deeper look past the surface level and see what the art suggests. Every line was laid with a purpose, so we should begin by trying to discover that purpose.

What does Hellboy in Hell feel like? Even when it's open and airy, it's dark and cramped. There aren't any blue skies or sunny days, just shadows with monsters waiting for their chance to strike. It isn't that danger lurks in every shadow so much as each shadow is a danger all its own. You don't get a chance to catch your breath or collect yourself. You have to keep going.

Hellboy in Hell feels like the story of a man that is lost and on the verge of being crushed by an unavoidable weight. That sounds about right to me. But why?

Mignola does this thing I like a lot, and other artists who've drawn Hellboy have picked up on it. He'll throw in inset panels of strange details into the middle of a story. It has the effect of drawing your eye, and attention, to that specific action. It becomes part of the tapestry in a way that a punch or kick to the face of a giant monster doesn't. As a result, that action is magnified in your mind. It seems more important, because otherwise why else would Mignola focus on it? So you pay a little more attention to it, unconsciously perhaps, as you move through the book.

He also likes to take a single action and stretch it out over the course of a few panels. (Don't tell anyone, but that's how decompressed storytelling works. It ain't just making a story six issues long.) This has a similar effect as the inset panels, though instead of taking in one image, you're now focusing on one event. When you see Hellboy crumble to dust, it's not just a single moment in time. It's a moment that has been stretched over a period of time. You see Hellboy go from a being to mere dust in the wind. The importance of the scene is communicated by how much real estate Mignola dedicates to it, and this is obviously a tremendously important scene, right?

Mignola's got a few other tools in his box. He'll use a tall black panel to indicate not just the passage of time, but the passage of an unknown amount of time. The kind of time that passes when you aren't paying attention, leaving you unaware and discombobulated. He'll show you a panel with something, a hand or a sound effect, that won't mean anything until later in the book. Is this friend or foe? Where is that ticking coming from?

Sometimes he goes literary with the atmosphere-building. At one point in the book, there's a waterspout with a demon's face. It's drooling a stream of water that's a sickly shade of green. Etched across its forehead is the word "lethe," the name of one of the rivers of Hell. Anyone who drinks from that river is doomed to forget everything. My introduction to the river Lethe came from John Keats's "Ode on Melancholy." Here are the first four lines:

NO, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kist
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

It's about wanting to escape from sadness by giving up yourself, your memories, and your life. It's also an apt poem to connect to Hellboy in Hell. Proserpine, or Persephone, was kidnapped and taken to the underworld to be the bride of the ruler.

If you know a little bit about a little bit, then that single panel takes on a sinister tone beyond its fearsome face. Mignola isn't beating you over the head with it -- I'm bringing my experience with Keats to Hellboy in Hell, not vice versa -- but it's there, if you're willing to let your mind dial in. And once you dial in? You're trapped. You want to know what it means and how it relates. It unsettles you.

Hellboy in Hell wants you to be just as dazed and trapped as Hellboy. Mignola isn't going to spell things out for you. Even the exposition is shrouded. You just need to pay attention, keep moving, and trust that you've made the right decision.

Mignola is intentionally putting you off-balance while simultaneously avoiding spelling out where his story is going. Does that add up to feeling lost and compressed? I think it does.

COMEDY

Okay, so let's say Mignola has built up this foreboding and claustrophobic atmosphere, one where Hellboy is beset on all sides by the slings and arrows of demons and worse. That makes Hellboy in Hell something that could be skin-crawlingly creepy. There would be a firm and easily identifiable strain of "This is wrong" running through the book. That would be impressive work. Scary comics are few and far between, and properly done creepy ones even rarer.

But, the second ingredient is comedy. The proper Hellboy tone is somewhere between Benjamin J Grimm and John McClane. He's not Spider-Man, but he's not exactly reverent, either. He's an American action hero, through and through. Even when he's confused, he's ready for a bit of pointed humor or self-deprecation.

Hellboy in Hell is as irreverent as Hellboy himself. The recap quickly recounts Hellboy's history before saying, "Shortly thereafter he fought a dragon and was killed." It's glib, undeniably glib, but it fits. It fits the tone of the series and the character. There are amazing things happening everywhere, but Hellboy, a regular guy despite going up against tremendous forces that attempted to transform him into anything but, has kept his sense of humor and confidence.

On the page after, as a segue into the story at hand, the Baba Yaga simply says, "I never liked him, but even I have to admit he ended well." The way Mignola drew the Baba Yaga on the page -- framed in a tall rectangle, her name printed below, the only element on the page -- reminds me of nothing more than an E! True Hollywood Stories interview, or a particularly catty documentary about a rock star. "I didn't like him, but he could play guitar, you know?" Is that any kind of epitaph for a man who just saved the world? Apparently so.

The jokes continue as the issue goes on. The tall black panel comes about because Hellboy fell down a hole and hit his head on a rock and got knocked out. Later, after waking up, he asks someone where he is. After being told exactly where he is, he replies "Oh. Sorry I asked." Still later, while being menaced by a giant dude with an even bigger hammer, Hellboy lets him know that he's "got the wrong guy, pal."

Hellboy died hard, huh? Yeah.

Hellboy in Hell isn't laugh out loud funny. It isn't that kind of comic. But Mignola definitely punctures the gloomy atmosphere with a lead character who can't help but take the proceedings half-seriously. You get the feeling that Hellboy does a lot of grimacing and sighing when it comes to getting the job done. He's the type of guy who would say "This again?" when faced with floating vampiric heads and "C'mon, seriously? We have to go through this?" when he battles a giant troll.

It's a weird choice for a comic that could easily dip into full horror, isn't it?

TRAPPED

How do you reconcile Hellboy in Hell's creepy aspects and funny aspects? On paper, they don't seem like something that would work well together. A hero who keeps making fun of his predicament? What sense does that make?

It makes perfect sense if you look at it like this: Hellboy in Hell #1, and most Hellboy comics, are adventure comics first and foremost. The comedy keeps us firmly on the fun side of things. Mignola gives us something we can recognize as being scary, but instead chooses to show us the action-oriented side of things, rather than going for skin-crawlingly horrible terror.

But the atmosphere is a veiled threat. It's a statement. "This can stop being funny at the drop of a hat." Mignola can throw Hellboy into the pit, shut it and seal it over him, and you can't do anything about it. By that point, you're well along for the ride and have no hope of turning back. When Hellboy stops being funny, everything hurts.

Hellboy in Hell is great. It's mean and packed and funny in all the right ways... but after I finished it, I couldn't help but find myself wondering how Mignola is going to rip my guts out this time. Dig into it a little and see how it makes you feel. You can buy it now.

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