It is pretty hard to have a team-up book where one of the two team members has no way to actually know the other one’s name. (Not to mention everyone else in the world, who know that name by some kind of comic-book-world telepathy, I think.)
And, on an entirely different level, it is hard for me to take seriously a book that seems to be the high-speed collision of “hey, don’t we need to do something with Moon Boy and Devil Dinosaur every so often to keep the trademark active?” and “hey, girls in STEM are hot right now, so we should do a comic about a nerdy girl.”
Don’t get me wrong, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Vol. 1: BFF tells a pleasant story, tells it well, and has entirely positive messages to impart to what I think it hopes is a multicultural audience of mostly young, mostly female readers. But there seems to be a lot of product management going on in the background.
Anyway: Moon Girl! Actually the preteen New Yorker Lunella Lafayette, who is way too smart for her school already at the age of nine! [1] Picked on by her classmates for being a know-it-all with a huge air of superiority who doesn’t deign to even talk to them most of the time! Has the Inhuman gene, because this is a 2016 Marvel comic, and they were desperately trying to make that A Thing! [2] Makes weird science-y things out of random stuff, because that’s totally something that anyone actually does in any reasonable world!
Devil Dinosaur! Named that by an outcast monkey-boy in some vague past era where bright-red dinosaurs mingle with monkey-boys! [3] Has that name in whatever language monkey-boy speaks, which is definitely not English! Smarter than you’d expect a vaguely T. Rex-y thing to be, and better able to sneak away and hide in (a) a modern city that (b) he’s never been in before and (c) has nothing, as far as we can see, that he eats… than you’d expect! Also substantially more committed to fighting crime and not, y’know, eating things than you’d expect!
Luckily for her, because they meet wacky in the middle of issue 1, when the Maguffin the Nightstone (maybe) Kree Omni-Wave Projector (this time for sure!) burbles a hole in the space-time continuum and plops DD face to face with MG.
(Oh, and also lets loose a group of bad monkey-boys — and I think one monkey-girl, though I don’t want to judge anyone’s monkey-gender presentation. Which leads us to…)
The Killer Folk! Tougher than Moon Boy! (Whom they, um, kill (?) before running through the hole in the space-time continuum.) Tougher than the Yancy Street Gang! Basically evil hipsters by the end of the book! They want the Maguffin (oops) and don’t care who gets in their way! When they get it, they will…be happy they have it and maybe do some more minor street crime, I guess. But they’re our villains!
So MG somehow knows the big red dinosaur that grabs her in its teeth is friendly and named DD, and imprints on it like a baby duck. DD doesn’t talk and mostly just smashes stuff, but he seems cool with being her sidekick (or vice-versa). And the monkey-boy did tell DD to go stop the Killer Folk from doing their Killer-Folk thing, and I guess that’s what DD is doing, in his giant-red-dinosaur way.
The maguffin bounces back and forth between Killer Folk and Our Heroes, as the rest of the city gets more and more peeved at the giant red dinosaur breaking all kinds of things all over the place. Luckily, we readers are on the side of the giant red dinosaur, so we are really pissed when an actual superhero (well, the Amadeus Cho Hulk, so sort-of an actual superhero) shows up to be all superior, tell MG to go back to school, and arrests DD for being big and red and dinosaurian.
Does MG get her big red implement of mass destruction back? Do the two of them retrieve the Maguffin once and for all, and defeat the Killer Folk? Is there a Shocking Change that takes place on the very last page, to get us to buy Volume 2?
Reader, you know the answer already. [4]
[1] I was going to check to see what NYC magnet schools she would be eligible for, but that would just be mean.
[2] As opposed to The Thing, which they already had. And who isn’t an Inhuman. At least the last time I checked.
[3] Wait. Isn’t this supposed to be a comic for people who care about science?
[4] I forgot to mention who made this book, didn’t I? Brandon Montclare and Amy Reeder wrote it, and Natacha Bustos drew it. Tamra Bonvillain did the colors, which I thought were particularly strong.
Comics has not been a terribly fertile ground for good science fiction. Oh, there’s been a lot of space opera, since comics are excellent at depicting coruscating beams of lambent force striking overwhelmed ray-screens and control panels exploding with showers of colorful sparks. But actual stories about people and their societies, in which the details of the future world are both carefully designed and important? That’s not something comics gets into all that often.
Nexus is one of the towering exceptions. It was one of the first wave of “ground-level” comics in the late ’70s and early ’80s, part of the flood that eventually became “independent comics.” And, like a lot of things in that wave, it clearly was derived from popular ideas in mainstream comics, taking a different look at the costumed superpowered hero as Elfquest and Cerebus did the same with the fantasy adventure.
Nexus was a first — the first comics work published by writer Mike Baron and artist Steve Rude, the first comic published by Capital Comics, the brand-new publishing arm of a growing regional comics distributor, maybe the first serious long-form SF in comics form. It came out first in black and white, for three large issues in 1981 and 1982, and then switched to color for a second volume in 1983 as the story continued without interruption. With the seventh color issue, in the spring of ’85, publication switched to the more established and stable First Comics (based in Chicago, and a reasonably close indy-comics neighbor to the Madison, Wisconsin base of Capital, Baron, and Rude).
First would publish Nexus, and a few spin-off series, through issue 80 in 1991. First then went under, and Nexus landed at Dark Horse for a series of one-shots and mini-series that were intended as a continuation of the main story from the First series. (And they were quietly co-numbered as issues 81, etc. to indicate that.) That petered out in 1997, but there have been some Nexus stories, here and there, since then.
Dark Horse has reprinted Nexus in a serious way twice: first with the Archive volumes, classy hardcovers in the Marvel/DC mode. Twelve volumes of those came out from 2005 to 2011, collecting the whole Capital/First run but ending there. And then they started again with the cheaper, fatter paperback Omnibus series, which collected the entire ’80s-’90s Nexus into eight volumes.
I personally started reading Nexus in the fall of 1986, when I went off to college, discovered the (then obligatory) good comics shop near college (Iron Vic’s, sadly missed) and got a bunch of interesting-looking indy comics. And I lost track of it at the end of the Dark Horse years, though I saw the Archives and Omnibus books coming out and vaguely planned to collect them to re-read. Eventually, I got the first nine Archives books, which collected up to First issue 57, and spent a lot of pleasant time in my late-August vacation reading them.
So what I can talk about today is about the first half of Nexus: most of the main continuous phase, and the bulk of the Baron-Rude days. Rude didn’t want to spend his entire life doing this one comic, and so this stretch has a number of issues with art by other people, and the end of the First run would be almost entirely drawn by other hands.
In a vaguely Legion of Super-Heroes way, Nexus is locked onto a pan-galactic multi-species future five hundred years ahead — the late twenty-fifth century. In most of the issues here, it’s not entirely clear what the year is or how much time is passing, but it’s clear time is passing, more quickly than usual for a monthly periodical comic. One year of Nexus comics is roughly equal to one year of time in Nexus‘s universe — people will grow and change, and the world will not stay the same at any point.
That seems like a small point, but it’s crucial: in 1981, comics really didn’t do that. Even by 1991, when the First Nexus series ended, continuity didn’t mean that anyone got older, just that old stories (or some of them, at least) counted. But Nexus was a place where time was real, death was real, people were individual and quirky and never blandly heroic or evil, and everything would get more complicated and difficult over time, just like the real world.
Nexus is a man: Horatio Hellpop. The rest of the universe does not know that name — they just know that he appears, as Nexus, to assassinate various people. (All humans, all mass murderers…but that may not be clear to everyone.) He harnesses vast energy powers, through fusion sources that are the subject of frenzied theorizing.
His base is an obscure, out-of-the-way moon called Ylum. (As in, and pronounced to match, asylum.) That world is filling up with refugees fleeing a thousand tyrannical regimes, people of all races and nationalities, with no real infrastructure and, as yet, no government other than the vague presence of Nexus himself.
As Nexus opens, Sundra Peale, a reporter from the Web — a large, mostly democratic and free polity centered on Earth and extending to its colonies across the solar system and elsewhere — has arrived on Ylum, to learn Nexus’s secrets and broadcast them to her audience. She has another, secret reason for chasing his secrets as well, and we’ll learn that quickly.
Many characters in Nexus have secret motivations, or just ones that they don’t clearly explain. Again, this was not common in comics in 1981 — and still isn’t as common as I would hope, even today — but it’s the basis of any kind of real literature. People are complex, and never do things just for simple, obvious reasons. Nexus is full of complex, often infuriating people, from Nexus and Sundra on down: they all do things that are what they need to do at that moment, even if they’re not what the audience wants, or what would be the obvious next step in a piece of genre fiction.
In between assassinations and other intrigues, Sundra learns Nexus’s truth, and becomes his lover. His father, Theodore, was the military governor of Vradic, one of the planets ruled by the Sov, a successor state to the Soviet Union. (We all though it would last forever, and expand into space, in 1981.) Theodore fled a coup with his wife and infant son, destroying all human life on Vradic as he went, following his orders as he saw them. They landed on Ylum, and found it empty. But the world had a huge network of livable spaces underground, with attractive plazas and rooms nearer the surface and endless caverns and utility networks further down, plus fascinating artifacts that hinted at an ancient alien presence there. They moved in; Horatio grew up.
He had two alien playmates, Alpha and Beta, who his parents never saw. His mother disappeared when he was young, only to be found, much later, dead in one of those endless lower levels. He had headaches that got worse and worse as he got older. Eventually, he started to dream of his father’s crimes. And he knew that the headaches would keep getting worse, that they would kill him, if he didn’t kill his father first. Nexus’s first assassination, his first time using that fusion power, was to kill Theodore, the only other living human on the planet.
That ended the dreams about Theodore. But there are many other mass murderers, and Nexus started to dream of them, one by one or in groups. And the situation was the same: use the fusion power to kill the murderers he dreams of, or die himself from the escalating pain those dreams cause.
(The first time we see Nexus perform an assassination, he says he kills out of self-defense. And this is absolutely true.)
That’s only the beginning, obviously. Many factions across the inhabited galaxy want to kill or co-opt Nexus, use him to accomplish their aims or exploit the vulnerable refugees of Ylum. We quickly learn that the fusion power Nexus exploits is not unknown, if stronger than usual: unscrupulous folks have discovered that decapitating sentients and putting the heads in life-support systems generates massive telekinetic powers, which can be harnessed to, among other things, pull fusion power from stars to create energy blasts like Nexus’s.
Nexus is on the side of the oppressed by instinct, but he’s not naturally a killer. One of the most important threads of Nexus is that Horatio only kills when he absolutely has to: he kills the people he’s forced to. His life, and that of Ylum, would be much simpler if he were less philosophical, more inclined to just destroy anything in his path.
Before long, we will learn the source of Nexus’s power. And Baron and Rude will continue to explore all of the implications of these ideas — of the kinds of scams and tricks that will arise if turning people into heads is a profitable business; of the government intrigues that will ripple out from spying on Nexus, and from ongoing issues with being able to deliver enough energy to a growing, technological population; of the politics of Ylum, a world filled with refugees from a thousand different worlds with no common tradition; and with what kind of a power a nation of Heads would be, and what they would want to do once free.
And, eventually, that Nexus is a title and a source of power. Horatio Hellpop is not the only person who can have that title and source of power, and he won’t be the only one. Even if he’s the best possible person for it, if he has a chance to give it up, he will — the pain, both physical and moral, is overwhelming.
I haven’t even talked about some of the other great characters: Dave, Nexus’s closest friend and advisor, a Thune with great pain in his past and a quietly stoic outlook on life; Dave’s long-separated son Judah the Hammer, a hero inspired by Nexus and using power similar to his, provided by vengeance-seeking Heads; Tyrone, the grumpy refugee first President of Ylum, sneakier than he seems and not as dismissive of politics as he appears; the seeming parody of a grasping merchant Keith Vooper, who is quirkier than that; the budding musical genius Mezz; Ursula Imada, a Web agent sent to seduce and control Nexus whose naked ambitions will drive many plots for many years; the three Loomis sister, who swear to destroy Nexus for assassinating their General father; the two Gucci assassins Kreed and Sinclair, both from the odd Quatro race; and many more.
Nexus is a big, smart, interesting SF series, full of fascinatingly real characters who bounce off each other in increasingly baroque ways and set in a complex universe with no easy answers and a lot of hard questions. Steve Rude, though he starts off a little shaky, very quickly draws like a dream, in a mode influenced by Toth and Kirby. The work Baron and Rude do together on this series is their very best work, and they’re both among the very best in comics.
If you haven’t taken a look at Nexus, and you have any interest in comics SF at all, you really need to try it.
I haven’t read Dave Sim’s Cerebus in years. At least ten, probably more like twenty. I fell off the horse sometime before the big ending — Cerebus famously was a self-published series whose creator declared he would do three hundred issues, monthly, and by gum he did it — during what I think of as the Sour Years.
(As far as I can tell, Cerebus ended as planned in 2004, but the Sour Yearsdid not. There’s a lesson for all of us, as we get older.)
Before that, though, Cerebus was one of my favorite comics. More importantly, it was an exemplar of what comics could do, one of the first comics I picked up at Iron Vic Comics in Poughkeepsie sometime in the fall of 1986, when Young Andy went to see what these “new comics for adults” were all about.
I must have come in with a list of some kind, at least a mental one — I almost always have lists — because I know I didn’t ask for anyone’s advice. Or maybe I just grabbed what looked the most different on the racks. It was 1986; there was a lot of different available, especially in a comics shop near a college.
In any case, I know I got Flaming Carrot and Nexus that first trip. Maybe Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen, but I don’t think so: I think it was all indies, that first time out.
Other comics had different things going for them: Flaming Carrot was the most bizarre, with a beating heart of pure dada. Nexus was smart SF of a kind I didn’t yet realize was vanishingly rare in comics. But Cerebus was easily the most impressive. Sim was a great artist, a masterful letterer — the least-appreciated of the comics arts — and a master of fizzy, funny dialogue. He also clearly had a master plan and knew how to pace a story. (Even then, I was looking for storytellers who knew how to do endings. Sim has his flaws — they are huge and un-ignorable — but he always knew how to close a story.)
Sim eventually fell into the Autodidact’s Curse: swallowed whole by his own self-inflicted cranky explanation of everything in the universe, which of course also took over Cerebus, because that’s what happens with autodidacts who live and work alone: their work is the way to reach the world, so it fills up with everything in their heads. And what was in Sim’s head, starting in the mid-90s, got pretty vile.
But I’m not in the mid-90s today. Cerebus, the book, is the first of sixteen big fat “phone books” — Sim pioneered the complete book-format reprint series, the way he pioneered self-publishing, by just doing it damn well and inspiring others to follow. It starts with the very first issue, from the end of 1977, and collects that along with the next twenty-four issues, up to just before the beginning of his first really long story, High Society,in the spring of 1981.
The Cerebus book has four years and about 550 pages of comics, starting with a cartoon aardvark (the title character) in a fantasy story that sits uneasily somewhere between parody and homage of the Roy Thomas/Barry (Windsor-) Smith Conan but rapidly turns into its own distinctive blend of comics-industry parody, comics versions of various old comedians (and some others), sword-swinging realpolitik, every cultural influence that hit Sim in nearly real-time, convoluted scheming among various strains of serious and silly fanatics, and just plain gleeful joy in overcomplication.
At the center of it all is Cerebus: an aardvark in a world of men (this will be explained, sort of, much later, and not necessarily in a way anyone will be satisfied with), and a person who relentlessly hides his depths, and any trace of nuance, in pursuit of being the bluntest of blunt objects. Cerebus primarily is a force of need and demand — mostly, in these early stories, trying to get as large a pile of gold coins as he possibly can, and generally losing what he has in his greed for more. He’ll come to want bigger things later, but that essential nature remains: he’s smart, but not thoughtful, and insightful about the weaknesses and exploitable flaws of others, but never introspective for a second. Those traits lead him to fail, over and over, in interesting and frequently funny ways.
As I said above, the story will all go sour, in various ways, later on, as Sim’s hobby-horses and the bludgeon of Cerebus’s personality combine badly into histrionic misogynistic stories and endlessly tedious text features. But that’s a long way in the future from these stories. These stories see Sim expanding from single-issue stories to first two and then three-issue plots, and threading background details into launching points for the next ideas. By the end of this book, Cerebus has changed from a comic about a cartoon aardvark who has a somewhat humorous fantasy adventure each issue into a comic about a big, quirky world, full of conflict and modernizing in a vaguely late-medieval way, across which travels a deeply flawed but very interesting grey-skinned fellow.
This is the rising curve of Cerebus: Sim got noticeably better with every issue, and was doing entertaining and intriguing fantasy adventure from the first page. He got very funny very quickly; his drawing improved immensely from what was already a nice Windsor-Smith follower; and his plots and dialogue filled with amusing and fascinating complications as he built out that complex world.
There are hints of the later attitudes towards women here — women do not come off well in any era of Cerebus, except maybe the Jaka storyline. There are two major female characters in this book: Jaka, a dancer that Cerebus falls in love with when drugged and abandons immediately afterward, and the Red Sonja parody Red Sophia. Jaka does eventually get more emotional depth than the standard beautiful, loving, loyal girlfriend role she gets here, but that’s still far in the future. And Red Sophia is very funny, but no deeper than any of the other parodies, like the Cockroach or Elrod of Melvinbone.
(Though I have to say that I was reminded again, reading this, just how amazingly funny Elrod is. It’s a bizarre combination that shouldn’t work for any logical reason — an incompetent, self-important version of Moorcock’s Elric who speaks in the tones of Foghorn Leghorn — but it kills, and every time Elrod appears again it’s a high point of the book.)
I don’t think any of this is “you had to be there.” It definitely will work better if you are of the male persuasion, and doubly so if you don’t know where it all ends up. But there’s well over two thousand pages of really good Cerebus comics, and they start here. You can always jump off the ride before it crashes. You’ll have plenty of time and warning. Comics has few enough geniuses: we can’t afford to ignore the crazy ones.
It can be annoying to catch up on something you’re enjoying. Doubly so if “caught up” means “read up to the stuff published in 2009, which just sort of stops.”
But I just caught up with Paul Grist’s quirky British superhero comic Jack Staff, with the back half of the collections — the third book was Echoes of Tomorrowand the fourth one was Rocky Realities. They’re both roughly a decade old at this point, and I don’t think there’s been any new Jack Staff material since then.
(See my posts on the first two volumes — Everything Used To Be Black and White and Soldiers — for more background and details. In general, since those posts are from earlier this year, I won’t talk about anything I mentioned then, like the tropism to have a splash panel and logo every time the focus shifts to another major character. [1])
Creator Paul Grist is still having massive amounts of fun with the various things he can do with a superhero universe in these stories from 2004-09, bouncing from plotline to plotline and character to character with glee and verve, throwing ideas up on one page to catch them ten pages later. It’s a whole mini-superhero universe, contained in one comic and centered on one minor British city, with multiple heroes (each with their own complicated histories) and villains and others, plus vampires and vampire hunters and plain cops and spooky cops just to keep it all interesting.
The last plotline even introduces a time cop, in the person of spacesuit-wearing chimp Rocky Reality. [2] And I have to imagine that Jack Staff‘s world would continue to grow and proliferate for as long as Grist wanted to keep it up.
Actually, I can’t prove he didn’t stop Jack Staff out of ennui or boredom. I can say that it doesn’t feel that way: the series doesn’t really have any sort of ending. The particular villain in the last issue (#20) is captured, but, as usual, the last few pages see Grist throw some more balls up in the air…and he hasn’t had a chance to catch them since then.
With that caveat in place, I’ll still recommend Jack Staff. It’s goofy and more-or-less serious and full of smart dialogue and quirky situations and energetic art. I usually hate superhero stuff, and I think this is a hoot, and wish there were five or six more volumes full of the stories Grist would have made over the past decade in a better universe.
[1] Saying that I won’t mention something and then mentioning it reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:
“Everything in science fiction should be mentioned twice — with the possible exception of science fiction.” — Samuel Delaney
The only problem is, I haven’t been able to source that quote. I have a vague memory of reading it in a book about SF: I used to think it was in Tom Disch’s The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, but I poked through that extensively and didn’t find it.
So it is entirely possible one of my favorite quotes is either horribly mangled or entirely false. I’m OK with that.
[2] He, too, gets a logo and a jingle: “If normality is out of whack, Rocky Realitywhacks it back!”
You can almost hear Grist chortling as he draws these pages: that’s how much he’s having.
I’m just focusing on the work in this series of “I Love (And Rockets) Mondays” post, and not getting into any behind-the-scenes stuff. But it’s clear that Gilbert Hernandez, for whatever reason, just generates more Love And Rockets-related material than his brother Jaime in the same amount of time, which I can imagine is an issue for a publisher that wants to keep things even.
This reprint series has alternated Jaime books and Gilbert books, except for the everything-else collection Amor Y Cohetes, which gathered all of the stories from both brothers (and their early occasional compatriot, third brother Mario) that didn’t fit into their respective main sequences. I had the sense that book had more Gilbert than Jaime, though I didn’t count pages.
But this twelfth volume, Comics Dementia, also breaks the sequence — it collects the Gilbert stories after the end of Love and Rockets volume one that don’t fit into the “Palomar” continuity in any way. (There are a couple of linked stories set in a small Latin American town that couldbe Palomar, but the possible connection is never made.)
Comics Dementia includes sixty-four mostly short stories — many of them are single pages; a number are three-panel gags like a daily newspaper strip, placed at the bottom of another comic that doesn’t user that full page — over 224 pages. They originally appeared in all sorts of places: many in the second series of L&R, but many in other publications as well. And this 2016 book has comics from as early as 1996 (right after the end of the first L&R series) and as recent as 2015.
These are all experiments or trials of one form or another: surrealism, exercises in visual storytelling, jokes, contributions to anthologies, and a lot of religious and semi-religious questioning. (I wouldn’t try to characterize Hernandez’s personal religious convictions, but he’s been wrestling with the questions of sin and redemption and the nature of evil since the very beginning — those are important concerns throughout his work, and surface more obviously here in short strips that are all about those concerns.)
It also has to be said that nearly all of this is aggressively weird: the Candide-esque turmoils of the preternaturally positive Roy; adventures of the Leaping Elite, women whose highly-trained thighs let them semi-fly; several appearances by the destructive and frequently giant-sized Love Gremlins; murderous attacks by the fearsome Froat, the brain-sucker of Delaware; three completely different consecutive stories all titled “Heroin;” philosophical musings; vaguely SF and fantasy-tinged strips that tend to end in horrifying violence; a collection of profiles of Catholic saints; random bits of non-fiction; and strips I can’t even describe.
Comics Dementia also more-or-less forms a single world — Roy battles the Froat, and meets the Leaping Elite, who capture Love Gremlins. Or maybe it’s just that there’s a loose “Roy” world that a lot of these strips fit into, since the more surreal or philosophical strips here don’t really fit into anything else. (And there are a bunch of those.)
This is a book for serious Gilbert Hernandez fans, the ones who want to dive into his quirky, one-off strips and are OK with the fact that a lot of them just end in death and dismemberment the way that old Monty Python skits would often end with a meta-joke about not having a punchline. Comics Dementia is the furthest reaches of the land of Love and Rockets, far out on the border with pure-art comics and stranger things. It’s an interesting journey, if you manage to travel there, but it’s not for everyone.
Dave McKean is a deeply classy cartoonist, the kind whose work is as likely to be first shown on the walls of a gallery as in a publication somewhere. And even his comics that do appear alongside other comical funnies are more serious and elevated than their peers — aiming to be Works of Art and not just entertainments.
Sometimes this can be exhilarating, since creators working at a high pitch can bring audiences up to their level. And sometimes it can be annoying, as when you’re trying to read over two hundred pages of far-too-stylized Dave McKean lettering on a tablet, with the pages just that little bit smaller than they would be on paper.
McKean is never going to go out of his way to make it easy for you to read and understand his work — not physically (just understanding the words and images) and not conceptually. He’s simply not interested in an audience that isn’t going to work at least as hard as he does.
Pictures That Tick 2 is a 2014 collection of McKean’s short comics; it’s so classy that it’s subtitled “Short Narrative Exhibition.” Set your expectations appropriately.
It’s also so classy, or so heavily designed, that it has a short comic even before the table of contents, and a title page that primarily consists of squiggles laid out to look like words but which cannot be ready, on a typically moody McKean background. You know, I like his work, but often a little of it goes a long way.
Oh, and another short strip interrupts the title/copyright page — McKean is never not futzing around with book design if you let him.
Finally, about a dozen pages in, you’ll finally get that table of contents, in a small scripty font on a red-and-black mottled background. (One suspects no one ever actually explained the importance of legibility in book design to a young and impressionable McKean, but instead expounded the virtues of drama.)
There are about five substantial stories here — two creation myths from an aborted project where McKean would be a showrunner for a third incarnation of the Storyeller series for Jim Henson Productions, and three projects that were art exhibitions/installations converted into comics. Also included are about a dozen shorter pieces — dreams, posters, wordless pieces, evocative comics for a jazz CD, and other random stuff.
The two creation myths are fairly straightforward: they’re very Dave McKean-ish comics, so the words are sometimes hard to read and the virtuosity of the art sometimes obscures the meaning, but the story isn’t difficult to follow or deliberately obscure.
The three gallery pieces are more evocative, designed to be fragments or moments that gallery-goers will experience probably but not necessarily in this order, and so the bits have to be more independent and separate. One is a journey around part of England’s coast, as a woman chases her runaway husband and finds the art he has inspired in his wake. Another is a series of bits of dialogue related to a true story from McKean’s youth, about something bad he did that he doesn’t quite explain or detail. The other one, “The Blue Tree,” which comes first in the book, is the closest to a conventional narrative and relates pretty closely to the two creation myths — McKean’s notes say he was explicitly trying to combine religious and scientific ways of looking at the world, from his two immediately preceding projects.
I’m not sure what size Pictures That Tick 2 is in the physical world. I hope it’s as large as possible: McKean’s work is best the more you can submerge yourself into it, to have it surrounding you on all sides. (So he’s probably best at gallery shows, and second best making movies.) These are comics to think about and ruminate on and read slowly, teasing out nuance and detail. But they will probably be slightly annoying, at least at moments, even to readers who like and enjoy McKean’s work, just because of the barriers McKean puts up between his work and the audience. So make sure you know that going in, if you do decide to go in.
One good joke can you pretty far. Ask anyone who’s ever headlined a sitcom or had a popular stand-up act. [1]
Or a big comic strip, more to the point.
The early days of newspaper strips are a treasure trove of great examples: the same artists would have dedicated space in their paper, but not always be producing the same strip. So if a guy had a funny-kid joke that day, it might be one strip, and if he had a two-Irish-guys joke, it might be a different strip.
(I can’t see modern audiences standing for that, but modern audiences have been spoiled horribly.)
Frederick Burr Opper’s most famous strip was Happy Hooligan, but that was mostly just his hook to hang “jokes where someone tries to help, and it turns out badly.” He had plenty of other strips to be hooks for other jokes, too — but this is the one his audience loved best, so he tried to tell it as much as he could.
I should admit that I didn’t actually know most of that: Allan Holtz’s informative introduction to this recent selection of Happy strips (edited by Jeffrey Lindenblatt, containing about ninety strips from the high years of 1902-1913) gave me the background, along with a quick sketch of Opper’s life and career.
Happy is the kind of old-timey that’s still funny quite a lot of the time, but the cartooning expectations are different enough — a frozen “camera,” lots of wordy explanatory dialogue, drawing that looks a bit stiff to modern eyes — that the reader needs to settle into it and get used to it before it starts to be funny.
Well, there’s one other thing: you have to find that joke funny. That is the problem with a one-joke strip, whether it’s Happy Hooligan or Cathy or Garfield.
In Happy‘s case, the joke generally involved Happy getting pummeled by someone — usually a policeman — after trying to do something nice and inadvertently causing havoc by his clumsiness. Many fewer people in 2018 think violence is funny than did in 1902, so Happy has not aged as well as it might have. (On the other hand, a lot of strips of the same vintage are horribly racist, and Happy sidesteps that by mostly makes fun of British people, at least in the strips reprinted here.)
Happy Hooligan is an important milestone in the development of the American comic strip — Holtz’s introduction is good at making those connections, tracing the developing single-panel in Punch (where Opper worked before starting Happy). Now, “important” is not always the same thing as “still entertaining to read,” but Happy still largely works, if you’re willing to meet it half way and get used to its older rhythms and expectations. And that’s pretty impressive for something that appeared in a disposable newspaper more than a hundred years ago.
[1] You might be a redneck if. What’s the deal with. Watermelon. Seven words. Yo mamma.
This book looks very much like it’s going to be a parody of The Family Circus. There’s a male cartoonist, his beautiful and pearl-wearing wife, their four chibi children, and the round single-panel that encompasses all of them.
But creator Benjamin Frisch apparently wasn’t interested in a re-run of the Dysfunctional Family Circus, and so The Fun Family is a more free-floating parody — maybe of self-actualization and the search for meaning in life, maybe of just life itself.
Robert Fun’s family mimics the Family Circus closely: wife Marsha, sons Mikey and Robby, daughter Molly, baby J.T. Robby even takes over the comic strip, as metafictionally the Keane kids have the Family Circus and in real life Jeff Keane has actually done. [1] It even begins with a famous Family Circus trope: Robert Fun’s mother, “Grandma Virginia Fun,” has just died, and almost immediately appears as an angel.
But there’s no grandpa alongside her, and this dead grandma is a lot more demanding and specifically religious than in Family Circus. In fact, everyone here is spikier and quirkier than in the soft-focus Family Circus. Dad has a strange collection that he’s obsessive about, Mom abandons her husband and falls under the spell of a succession of gurus as she tries to find happiness, and both of them seem to ignore the fact that these kids seem to be no older than six or seven, leaving them to fend for themselves most of the time.
(But this is not a particularly realistic world to begin with: Frisch lampshades the children’s ages by pointedly noting that they do not age over the year or so that this graphic novel covers.)
Things spiral out of control after Grandma’s death, in several directions. I’ve mentioned the two parents’ obsessions, but the kids are nearly as crazy, building religious monuments or burying themselves in comics-making. The kids just want their parents back together, but instead they all just go further apart.
Eventually, there’s a break, and a confrontation. But it doesn’t go the expected way. Fun Family has a “happy” ending — everyone has things they want, everyone is successful, and so on — but it’s not at all the happy ending we expected, or the ending we would get from Family Circus. (Where, of course, nothing ever changes to begin with — nothing like this story could ever happen there.)
I’m not entirely sure if Frisch had a point in Fun Family: it feels like it’s trying to say something about family and work and happiness and self-understanding, but he’s throwing blows in all directions, which obscures anything positive he might be trying to say. Maybe there is nothing positive; maybe this is exactly what Frisch meant: happiness is based on delusions and monomania, so find the things that can make you ignore the outside world (which will only give you grief).
Fun Familylooks a lot like the book I thought it would be — cute, rounded, with a great eye for classic cartooning and lots of dot eyes. But it reads like something darker and more savage, underneath all of the happy talk. It implies a deeply nihilistic view of life, for its its gospel of wealth and angelic dead grandmas. Perhaps it’s best Bil Keane was safely dead before Frisch took up his pen.
[1] I can’t imagine what it’s like to have your career be drawing cartoons about your own fictionalized fifty-years-ago childhood, following in the footsteps of your dead father. But “Jeffy” lives that.
I don’t know why the story reprinted in I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League so obviously positioned itself as a one-time one-off. As a former editor and current marketer, I’m strongly against interrupting customers while they’re buying your stuff, but I’m not DC Comics.
And this book does make it clear, in little ways all the way along, that this will be just as much of this silliness as we’re going to get, so you’d better enjoy it now while you have it. (“Now” being 2005, in this case: and it’s true, we haven’t gotten any more, in the more than a decade since then.)
Maybe that was because writers Keith Giffen and J.M DeMatteis realized the high bwah-ha-ha style was harder and more demanding than they remembered, and wanted to get back to simpler punch-fests. Maybe this was all the time for penciller Kevin Maguire that they would ever get again, and they wouldn’t dream of doing it without him. (I think inker Joe Rubinstein was game for more of this, but maybe not?)
But, still: generally, during a story, you don’t look askance at your readers and mutter things like “are you actually reading that?” under your breath. Unless you’re DC Comics, obviously.
If that kind of thing annoys you, you probably don’t want to read I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League. Other things might trigger that reaction: superheroes who crack jokes, running gags, repeated extreme facial expressions, sitcom-level character comedy, naivety and assholishness equally played for laughs, and lots of dialogue. (You can’t have character-based comedy without letting your characters talk.)
This follows immediately on the heels of the prior story: the Super Buddies still haven’t had a first case, but are caught up in dram with their new neighbor, a bar being run by a former (very minor) supervillain…and his partner, who turns out to be everyone’s least favorite Green Lantern, Guy Gardner. (I think at this point he had some other kind of power ring, but the story doesn’t explain — he has a ring, he can do stuff, that’s good enough.) He and Power Girl — the superhero with the famous “boob window” — are our new characters here, replacing Captain Atom, who is quietly recuperating from the events of the prior story and will not return.
The plot, such as it is, sees the Super Buddies first go to hell, and then to the usual alternate world populated by evil versions of themselves. (Is that Earth-3? I can never remember. This is probably pre-Flashpoint, so I don’t think there even was an Earth-3 in those days.)
They run around, complain, yell at each other, make jokes, and occasionally do something heroic when they’ve exhausted all other options. It’s gloriously fun and silly in an over-the-top way, in the way that superhero comics are rarely allowed to be. (The silly comics of this decade tend to be much smaller scale, for whatever reason.) Maguire is still one of the very best artists at depicting facial expressions, and he has a lot of scope here — these folks are making allkinds of faces all the way through. He has a funny script to work with, of course, which definitely helps: these are broad characters, pushed to be silly, and Giffen/DeMatteis have long experience making them funny.
You might prefer your big superheroes to be serious: it happens. If so, this is not a comic for you. You can pick, oh I don’t know, literally anything else featuring any of these characters.
You know, I think Gabby Schulz may just be a tad bit dramatic.
It’s a feeling I have — partially based on my readings of his earlier books Monsters and Welcome to the Dahl House
, partially because he can’t seem to decide if he is “Ken Dahl” or “Gabby Schulz,” and partly because Sick is possibly the most self-dramatizing book I’ve ever seen in my life.
Admittedly, it’s the record of a time Schulz thought he might be dying, which does tend to concentrate the mind. (But, then again, says the contrarian part of my mind — didn’t he recover from this fever without any medical intervention? Isn’t it possible that he’s just really, really whiny when he’s sick?)
And, of course, it’s a book: the only record we have of Schulz’s sickness is what he tells us himself, on large comics pages soaked in bile and misery, full of jaundice yellow and starless black. It could all be fiction. Just because it’s by someone named Gabby Schulz and about someone named Gabby Schulz doesn’t mean it’s meant to be taken literally.
But I think it is. I think Schulz means every word, every pen-stroke of this book, and that’s the way he works in comics: heart on the sleeve at all times, everything out there and exposed, all raw nerves and naked emotion and pure pleading about what he thinks are the most important things at every moment. It would be an exhausting way to live; it can be overwhelming even in a short graphic novel like this one — particularly one so oversized and focused on the negative as Sick.
Gabby Schulz is negative. Everything I’ve seen of his work, under either name, is all about the things he loathes and can’t stand — himself always first and foremost among them. Schulz is the kind of left-winger who is both contorted into knots by his unearned privilege as a white American man and sent into a frenzy by the horrible treatment he continuously endures as an unskilled worker in that clearly hellish American society. His getting sick seems to mostly be of interest as a way to ramp up the self-loathing to ever greater heights — to show how much he can really hate things when he gets going.
Sick is a book in which there is nothing good. There can be nothing good. To be Gabby Schulz is to be cursed: the most horrible human that ever lived, worthless and pitiful and also complicit in the worst society in the history of the world, a pyramid of horrors piled on top of each other without end.
Schulz realizes this, in a way: the book is in large part his own arguments to himself that life — his life, specifically — is worthless and horrible and better ended, and his feeble occasional moments of fighting against that sense.
It’s not a book to read if you are in any way depressed, or suicidal, or unhappy about life. Only the sunniest of Pollyannas could read Sick without flinching, or worse.
All this is presented in vibrant, eye-catching, torn-from-his-heart art — glorious in its hideousness and spleen. And his words are precise if not measured: always pushing further and always obsessively circling that same central conceit: that to be Gabby Schulz is a horrible, terrible, worthless thing, even more so when he has a fever.
I can’t exactly recommend this book. It’s so far over the top there’s cloud cover obscuring its lower reaches. It is absurdly strident about its every last thought. But it is hugely impressive, and uniquely powerful, and utterly itself. It is Sick. Take that word in whatever sense you like.
