Author: Andrew Wheeler

I’m pretty sure this has been published in one volume, at least once. But the current edition is two volumes, and that’s what I read. (Long before that, it was published as fifteen comic book issues, and I had those as well, before my 2011 flood. But all things must pass.)

“This” is the first volume of Matt Wagner’s epic transmuting-his-life-into-heroic-adventure trilogy Mage. Mage: The Hero Discovered was one of Wagner’s first major comics projects in the 1980s and was followed by The Hero Defined at the end of the ’90s and, eventually, by The Hero Denied, planned to wrap up by the end of this year.

Since that third volume is about to finish up, and I expect to read it, I thought I might as well go back for the first two: when a creator takes 15-20 years between installments, you can do him the favor of reminding yourself of the old pieces before coming to the new ones. So I re-read Hero Discovered this month (Volume One , Volume Two ), plan to hit Hero Defined next month, which should get me ready for the first Hero Denied collection…which I see was published a few days ago. (I doubt I’ll be able to hold off until the second half of Denied is published as a book in February, but I did skip buying all of the floppies, so maybe I will. As I get older, the appeal of story-pieces has gone down precipitously.)

Very early in the life of this blog, I had a breathless review of Defined , which I’m linking here for completeness’s sake — I really hope you don’t go back and read those burblings, which I am now embarrassed by. Otherwise, I’ve mentioned it, but not gotten into any depth.

It starts with overwriting two guys meeting on a city street — one may be drunk, and pretends to be happy, and one may be a bum, or pretends to be one. (Their dialogue is wince-inducing: if you decide to read Mage, you need to remember that it was nearly the first thing Wagner did in comics, and that he got better quickly — though ponderous unbelievable dialogue is an occasional hazard throughout the Mage stories.)

The not-drunk guy is Kevin Matchstick, who is so sad because he’s all alone. The not-bum calls himself Mirth, and he’s the mage of the title — there will be a different one for each series. Right after their conversation, Kevin sees a man attacking an actual bum in an alley, and surprises himself by running to intervene. He’s even more surprised to find the assailant is a hairless pale-skinned humanoid with sharp points on his elbows and that Kevin suddenly has super-strength and speed. The bum dies; the humanoid gets away.

And Kevin goes back to his apartment, confused, to find Mirth, who starts the official Hero’s Journey by explaining (well, a little) who he and Kevin are. Mirth is the World-Mage, opposed to the evil Umbra Sprite and his sons, the Grackleflints (the humanoids), who do the usual evil thing of corruption and destruction. Kevin has another fight with three (of five) of the Grackleflints in a subway car before he gets the next round of explanations from Mirth.

I’ll be blunt here, though Kevin doesn’t find this out for a long time: he’s The Eternal Champion King Arthur kind-of King Arthur, in that he’s the latest incarnation of a mythic hero and was once little Wart. He will gather allies — a teenage girl with a bat and a dead public defender — and, together, they will help him battle the Umbra Sprite and all of the supernatural creatures that the Sprite can summon and throw at him. The Sprite is searching for the Fisher King — another reincarnation, though not a hero — and if his Grackleflints can kill the Fisher King, it will bring a new era of death and destruction to earth.

And that’s the story of Discovered: this is explicitly a Hero’s Journey book, so Kevin learns bits and pieces of the setup over about four hundred pages, punctuated with fights against dragons and giants and redcaps and other mythical beasties, and occasionally broken up by attempts to actually figure out what the forces of evil are doing, where they’re headquartered, and how to stop them.

Before the end, there are major sacrifices so the Hero can stand alone, quite a lot of epic fight scenes, and a surprisingly nuanced view of the relationships among the forces of evil. Wagner started this series a little shakily, but it had great bones right from the beginning, and both his drawing and writing skills got stronger very quickly. It’s unfortunate that the two very worst pages in the whole Mage saga are the first two, but at least you can know that going in.

Somewhere along the line, the original 1980s-era coloring disappeared and was replaced by a more modern treatment by Jeromy Cox and James Rochelle — I think this is from the Defined era, but don’t quote me. I should also note that Wagner is inked by Sam Kieth, starting with the sixth (of fifteen) chapters, and that lines up with one of several leaps forward in the strength of the art. (So it’s not all Wagner, as the cover makes it seem — very few comics are that much of an auteur medium; there’s always some collaboration going on.)

Mage is a strong urban fantasy story in comics form, clearly in a mythic vein but with a lot of individual touches. It’s classy enough to have titles from Hamlet (and never say so, or explain them), and street enough to be about the reincarnation of King Arthur beating up monsters to save the world. And, if you’ve been waiting for the whole Mage saga to be done, you are nearly in luck.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Some historical moments date much faster than others, and that can be deeply amusing if you lived through them. Y2K is the great recent example: it was a huge deal before it happened, and was forgotten and ignored almost immediately afterward when the popularized apocalypse failed to actually happen.

Kyle Baker’s graphic novel I Die at Midnight  is one of the small breed of Millennial Thrillers, set on New Year’s Eve of 1999. Amusingly, it was even published in a Y2K style, with a big “V2K Vertigo” imprint at the top left that everyone has since forgotten that DC’s Vertigo ever used at all. Interestingly, it has a copyright date of 2000, which makes it a late entry in this derby: most of your Millennial Thrillers came out in 1997-1999 to capitalize on the hype beforehand and promise horrible world-ending terrors on that fateful night.

Baker, though, is working on a smaller canvas: I Die is the story of one man, one evening, and the race to get an antidote to the overdose he just took.

Larry is that man: Muriel left him recently, and so he’s going to end it all on New Year’s Eve. But then she returns to him, right after he swallows the whole bottle of pills. And since nothing can go right in a comic thriller — which is definitely what I Die at Midnight is — he can’t get those pills out of his system until it’s too late, and his only hope is to meet up with a doctor acquaintance with that antidote before midnight, when it will be too late to save him. Midnight, of course, is only forty minutes away. And the only way they can meet in time is right in between where they are…which is, coincidentally, Times Square.

There are other complications, of course. There have to be. They are funny, and at least plausible, and they keep this story barreling forward exactly the way they need to. And the story ends the way it needs to.

I Die at Midnight is not a major Baker work. But it’s fast and funny and full of amusing moments and Easter eggs in the art. (Times Square in particular is awash in billboards for various Baker properties, mostly but not all in their imagined movie versions — I wished the book was physically larger so I could get a better look at all of the goofy stuff there.) And it will be funnier the more you remember the Y2K hoopla.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Here’s a lesson I could stand to learn: if I pick up a book in a field I’ve been following reasonably closely for my entire adult life, and that book came out during my adult life, and I can’t remember hearing anything in particular about it, it’s very likely that’s because the book is not actually all that good.

But let me pretend to change the subject!

Today I’m here to talk about American Century, a Vertigo series from around the turn of the millennium, written by Howard Chaykin and David Tischman and with art by Marc Laming and John Stokes. I found the first two collections of this series randomly a couple of months ago, and, since I’m reading everything I can get my hands on for this Book-A-Day run, they went into the hopper before too long.

I had, as far as I could remember, never heard of American Century. Now I know why.

Our Standard Chaykin Asshole this time is named Harry Block, and he’s the usual mid-career Chaykin hero: unsatisfied with his quiet suburban life in 1949, cheated on obviously by his mouthy, demanding, hot-to-trot wife [1], and called up for the growing conflict in Korea. So he bugs out, and American Century sets up to be the story of how he wanders through various unpleasant episodes in history over the next however-many years. In the end — I see from looking it up on the Comic Book DB  — there were twenty-seven issues, but only the first nine were collected into these two books.

And that’s probably because this is dull, difficult-to-follow, and boring. Harry Block should have been the American Harry Flashman , but Chaykin-and-Tischman aren’t Fraser, and even pure Chaykin would probably have gone in the same direction.

The two books are Scars & Stripes  and Hollywood Babylon ; I do not recommend that you seek them out.

In the first one, Harry changes his last name to Kraft and flies planes for smugglers in Guatemala during a simmering civil war between the American-backed government and Communist insurgents, with a side order of the evil profiteering US Fruit Company. Chaykin and Tischman make this boring, and Laming and Stokes manage to make a naked woman look unrealistic, which I thought was impossible for a mainstream comics team.

Hollywood Babylon brings Harry back to the states, to LA obviously, and to more Chaykinesque intrigue, this time among movie stars and a US Senator and a gossip columnist. This is also dull, and Harry only peripherally involved in any of it. (He also doesn’t narrate the stories as strongly as I think he’s supposed to: his voice isn’t distinctive and it isn’t pervasive.)

You’ve probably never heard of American Century. There’s a reason for that. I recommend you let it be forgotten once again.

[1] Remember that all of those things are bad in Chaykin-land: women should do what men tell them to do, and only be sexpot with the hero when he demands it.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Anyone who does a graphic novel about his father’s secrets and history has a long shadow to contend with. (It’s art spiegelman’s Maus, in case you’ve forgotten.) The closer that father was to WWII, the clearer the parallels. If the father was Jewish…even more so.

Now, a creator doesn’t have to engage with that at all: it’s probably best if they don’t, actually. But it’ll be there in the back of every reader’s head, just like any story with a  whale will evoke Moby Dick and a guy wandering around Dublin Ulysses.

Michael Kupperman’s father Joel was a child prodigy, nationally famous at the age of five for appearing on the radio show Quiz Kids. He was shoved into it by a domineering mother, and basically lost his childhood to performing as a child genius. And, once he got out, he tried to ignore it for the rest of his life, never talking about his time in show biz. And, obviously in retrospect, Joel Kupperman was guided and “controlled” in his career as a boy genius in part because it just made a good story and partly because he was Jewish.

Michael always wondered about that history, and finally dug into it in the last few years, as his father retired, slowed down, and slid into dementia. All the Answers  is the result: as much as he could pull together fifty years later from the memories of a reticent, failing old man, from yellowing hidden scrapbooks, and from his own research.

Kupperman has a stark, almost blunt art style, with a look of being based closely on photos and other reference. That gives a documentary air to the proceedings most of the time, though he draws himself subtly differently than the other characters, with hooded, staring eyes. (Is that just how he draws himself? Or is a particular metaphor for this book? I’m hoping the latter, since it’s a subtle, ingenious device if deliberate.)

There’s a framing story set in the current day, but most of All the Answers tells the story of young Joel during WWII and the years right afterward. Since Joel never did talk about those days, Michael was left to piece it together from news reports, family stories, and the scrapbooks he discovered while searching his father’s office. That also adds to the documentary feeling: this isn’t a story Joel is telling us — he couldn’t tell it to anyone, and spent his life trying to forget it — but a story that had to be figured out by others. This is a reported story rather than an eyewitness story.

What Joel had seems pretty nice from the outside: adulation, minor fame, hobnobbing with the  famous and glamorous. But he seems to have hated it almost from the start, and did any of it purely because of his mother. And then there’s the whole question of how honest any of those early quiz or game shows were — Quiz Kids seems to have been on the relatively honest side, which is to say they didn’t actively hand answers to the kids they preferred. But all of those shows had things that were more important than honest games — making a good show, excitement, promoting the right kind of people — and even Quiz Kids fell into that.

All the Answers isn’t the story of who Joel Kupperman was as a kid: that’s lost forever. It’s not personal; Michael Kupperman had to pull this all together from secondhand sources. Joel is himself the hole at the center of his own life, the thing his son is trying to fill and understand. So this book will tell us what happened, and something of what it might have meant. But it can’t tell us what Joel felt; there’s nothing in the world that can tell us that anymore, since Joel himself is incapable of it.

But this book will tell us what we can know. And that’s going to have to be enough.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

This is not a collection of the Squirrel Girl comic. Somehow, in 2016, while I think they were also putting out the regular comic monthly, creators Ryan North (words) and Eric Henderson (pictures) also created this unpaged-but-clearly-at-least-a-hundred-pages-long OGN as well.

I’m not totally clear on where it fits into continuity, if you’re looking to read it in sequence with the regular comic — I came to it after Vol. 5 , which feels a little late. (Doreen’s newish friend Brain Drain is completely missing, through Koi Boy and Chipmunk Hunk are here.)

What is this thing? Well, it’s The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe , and SG’s tone is much closer to Fred Hembeck than the Punisher in the piling-up-the-bodies-on-the-cover competition. (Deadpool, as usual, wants to have it both ways: to be gritty and funny.)

And there is an asterisk: it’s not our Squirrel Girl, the indomitable Doreen Green, who beats up all of the heroes in the MU, but her evil twin.

Well, maybe not evil twin. Will you accept misguided? Single-minded? Squirrel-obsessed? Well-meaning but unwilling to compromise? Maybe all of those things.

Anyway, that’s the deal: there’s a mysterious science artifact, which of course Tony Stark is poking at, since that’s what he does. And it sucks in our heroine Doreen Green and spits out two of her.

Foiling the usual expectations, they both know which one is the original: the one on the right. (Because they both remember being the one on the right, and one of them is now on the left.) Similarly, the duplicate, swiftly calling herself Allene from their shared middle name, is not obviously evil, and the two of them joyfully team up to fight crime…and then hatch an even bigger plan to use squirrels to make the world a utopia, using the language of computer programming.

(It all makes sense in context, trust me. Though the context is “a Marvel Universe book substantially sillier and more obsessed with computer science than its peers.”)

But, inevitably, Doreen and Alleen fall out over means and ends, as good and evil twins always must. And Alleen is possessed of all of the spunk and gumption and unbeatable-ness of the original, so she does — as the title promises — defeat ninety-nine-point-something-or-other percent of the heroes in the MU and send them into the Phantom Zone Negative Zone. And all seems lost.

But all can’t be lost for the heroine of an ongoing series, so you know it works out right in the end, with all of the MU folks brushed off and returned to their rightful places in time for the next issue of their own comics, never to speak of the time they were banished to the Negative Zone by Evil Squirrel Girl.

This is a pleasant exercise in the “my character can beat up your character” derby, but the superhero-furniture stuff (oh, no! all looks blackest before the dawn! how can I manage to defeat {insert overwhelming villain here!}) has always been the weakest and least interesting part of Squirrel Girl, and that’s the core focus of this book. We don’t get a lot of characterization of the main cast, since Ryan and Henderson have to shoehorn in every MU character they were approved to mention, and the book is a long collection of short fight scenes.

They’re funny fight scenes, granted. Beats Up is amusing in the Scintillating Squirrel Girl manner; it’s just not as good as the heights of the regular book. It’s just that we’ve seen this “everybody fights” plot so many times before, and there’s only so many changes North and Henderson can ring on it.

If you like Squirrel Girl, grab this in the middle — I’d suggest trying it after Vol. 4 of the regular series. But it’s not the place to start and it may be faintly disappointing.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

This will probably be the last time you see me grumble about Ms. Marvel. I just checked the local library system, and they do not have the next volume — the NYPL might, since it is vast and contains multitudes, but I don’t have the easy access to that system that I had when I actually worked in NYC. [1]

And that’s fine, because Ms. Marvel seems to have lost whatever was particularly distinctive about it in the beginning, aside from the bare fact that the heroine is brown and Muslim. (And even that is mostly stated at this point, rather than actually being germane to the plots and characterization.) Yes, Kamala Khan is officially a teenage Muslim girl from Jersey City, but the stories here don’t feature her family at all, her community is shown in very generic ways, and it’s leaning much more into the teenager-ness than anything else — which, as you know Bob, does not particularly distinguish Kamala from other teen-genius heroes like Nova and Spider-Man.

Anyway: Ms. Marvel, Vol. 7: Damage Per Second . Written as always by G. Willow Wilson, and collecting issues 13-18 of the 2016 series, with art by Mirka Andolfo (#13), Takeshi Miyazawa (#14-17) and Francesco Gaston (#18).

In which the stretchy Jersey girl drives voter turnout (in an issue cover-dated January 2017?), battles the ultimate Internet troll, and then briefly cedes the spotlight to her former best friend Bruno Carrelli.

That first story…well, it means well, I suppose, but it is very comic-booky in all of the bad ways, from a transparently villainous plot by transparently villainous actors to a happy ending based entirely on the fact that Kamala is the title star of the book. And its message — that you can stop all of the bad political things you hate and get the perfect snowflake candidate you absolutely love — is stupid and wrong-headed and entirely contrary to the actual world of real politics. But, yeah, vote for the librarian who has no chance of winning if a girl in a mask tells you to….

The long title story is one of those standard superhero exercises: how do you fight someone you can’t punch? And for a girl who is supposedly really smart and going to a super-sciencey school, Kamala has a really hard time coming up with any strategies to fight this new dastardly villain (a sentient computer virus, basically). Of course it all works out in the end, and of course it will have no effects on anything — it is a superhero story.

And then the book wraps up with a solo adventure of Bruno at Golden City Polytechnic Prep, Wakanda, where he is apparently both the token White Guy and the token Dumb Guy. Sadly, this issue tends to argue against my fervent hope that Bruno will turn up in another dozen issues as a super-villain with a gripe against Kamala, but I suppose I can keep hoping for a lucky lab accident. Instead, he learns Lessons About Life, mostly that every important character in a superhero comic is rich, powerful, connected, or some combination thereof.

With this volume, we see that Ms. Marvel can be dull and mediocre even without a crossover, which had been the initial source of the dullness in the title. I suspect, at this point, the stories inherent in this setup have been exhausted, and it’s time to actually let life move on for Kamala and her friends and family. But, since this is a Big Two comic, I’m sure instead we’ll get a Shocking Reversal, with someone dead or depowered or Superhero No More! or gender-swapped. But it’ll have to happen without me; I think I’m done here.

[1] I do still have a NYPL card, because every self-respecting reader knows that you never give up a library card unless forced to.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.