Wed Jul 22, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler

Review: Two Post-genre superheroes from AdHouse

Mike Dawson's Ace-Face and Lamar Abrams's Remake

Superheroes have been the default setting for American comics for so long – more than forty years; long enough for two generations to grow up – that they’ve been hybridized and cross-pollinated more than wheat, with not just the usual revisionist, retro, neo-retro, counterrevisionist, revolutionary, postmodern, primitivist, and reactionary strains from the usual sources, but odder, wild strains growing far from the fields of Marvel and DC.

I have two books like that in front of me now; two books from AdHouse that never could have existed without that long long-underwear mainstream, but which also never come close to that mainstream themselves.

Ace-Face: The Mod with the Metal Arms
By Mike Dawson
AdHouse Books, April 2009, $6.95

Ace-Face is close to that “mainstream,” with stories about the exploits of Colin Turvey, the British-American costumed adventurer called Ace-Face. Colin has the requisite silly “secret origin,” being born without arms but with a mad-scientist uncle who fitted him with hulking, superstrong mechanical arms. But then most of the stories about Colin here – they’re mixed in with other stories, which I’ll get to in a moment – don’t focus on his exploits as a superhero, but use that superhero status – as if we’re already intimately familiar with Ace-Face – to delve deeper into his psychological life, dramatizing scenes from his childhood and retirement.

Dawson also intersperses slice-of-life stories (based on his own life, I suspect) of Colin’s son Stuart, and his travails as a Park Slope apartment-dweller. And then there are also a couple of stories about the superpowered kids Jack (a telekinetic) and Max (a teleporter), who – in the typical fashion of brothers – use their powers almost entirely to annoy and fight with each other.

So the book Ace-Face is mostly made up of stories set in a world with superheroes, but which don’t focus on superheroics. That’s nothing new, of course – the “ordinary person in superhero society” has been an undertone of spandex comics since at least Marvels (and possibly much longer, depending on whether we want to think about Snapper Carr). Dawson doesn’t seem to have planned this book as a coherent work – there’s no listing of previous publications, but I’m sure I’ve heard of the “Jack and Max” stories appearing elsewhere first – and so there’s no real continuity from one story to the next. Colin bounces around in time, and his story never really comes into focus. Jack and Max are simpler characters, so they work better in one-off stories; like the Looney Tunes, they exist to cause havok and then have the curtain dropped down on their heads.

Remake
By Lamar Abrams
AdHouse Books, May 2009, $12.95

Remake is an odder thing, one part Scott Pilgrim, one part attenuated anime, and several parts indy oddity-for-the-sake-of-oddity. That kid on the cover is Max Guy, the hero – he can fly, and he has a gun that transforms things semi-uncontrollably, but he’s not really a superhero in the normal sense. He is a kid, with a pre-teen boy’s lack of impulse control and mercurial interests. At the same time, he’s living in an apartment with a robot (or maybe a cyborg) named Cardigan.

His stories are meandering and usually short, in that traditional slacker indy-comics style, where anything can happen and usually does. Max Guy fights crime, hangs out, makes friends, up-slaps mean people, fights with various people (some of whom are villainous, and some of whom aren’t, really), and just generally runs around like a boy with superpowers. He isn’t quite the brat that Dawson’s Jack and Max are – but, on the other hand, Max Guy looks to be a little bit older.

So the stories in Remake are odd little things, not fully rounded, like spiky bits of stone. The relentless oddities – such as the girl with unicorn horns for arms, and the undead deliveryman – drive the reader to try to make sense of them, but they’re not supposed to make sense. Remake tales place in an arbitrary, weird world, one where things just happen. And these are some of the things that just happened to Max Guy.

Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He's been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.

Publishers who would like to submit books for review should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.

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