Author: Andrew Wheeler

So, there’s a world where all of the superheroes get their powers from food. It’s not actually weirder than any other superhero universe, to my mind, but it’s definitely weird in a different direction. I like that, since superheroes tend to be all too much of the same thing all the time, but I know mine is a minority taste in the vast land of ComicShopia.

(Oh, and I’m sure a lot of people — maybe even the creators — would object vociferously to my characterizing bizarre and impossible food-related abilities as “superpowers.” Those people are wrong, and probably too uptight, as well.)

Anyway, there are “food weirdos,” as one character calls them. They have long, silly, Latinate terms to explain what it is they can do, which are often dangerous or violent and are also, of course, silly. John Layman and Rob Guillory told a long, funny comics story in that world, and called it Chew. That comic ended a couple of years back, but I’m still catching up.

(If you are also catching up, I started off by reading the smaller paperback collections: see my posts on volumes one and two and three-through-five and six . I’ve now switched to the medium-sized hardcovers, which each collect what would otherwise be two paperbacks, and have discovered there are now jumbo-sized hardcovers, making the just medium-sized ones difficult to find.)

So this one is Chew: The Omnivore Edition, Vol. 4 , at the roughly two-thirds point in the overall story. If you’re new to Chew, don’t start here.

A very sad thing happened to our central hero, Tony Chu, at the end of the previous volume — I’m not going to say what it is, because many of you reading this might actually want to read Chew yourselves. I will instead be vague. The aftermath of the very sad thing permeates this entire volume — all ten issues reprinted here. The overall plot — the search for the evil “vampire” who has been hunting other food weirdos and killing them to harvest their powers, the secret behind the bird flue epidemic that is this world’s immediate divergence point from our own, and various interpersonal and inter-departmental squabbles involving Tony and his friends and the various government organizations they work for — is also charging forward, in its own weird and quirky way.

So, frankly, there’s not much I can say about this volume. Lots of stuff happens, and it is generally silly and/or goofy stuff — though it can all be taken seriously within the deeply quirky world of this story — but it’s all stuff that follows on from stuff that happened earlier.

Don’t start here. But do read Chew, if you haven’t before. You can probably get the first collection cheaply, in print or electrons, and this is a book that definitely continued as it began. It is weird from top to bottom, in a lovely, fun way.

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

Continuity is a bitch.

For example, how old is Patsy Walker? She first appeared as a teenager in 1944’s Miss America Magazine #2, which would make her an octogenarian in 2018. If we use her in-universe high school graduation date — 1964, after twenty years of high school — she’d still be in her early seventies.

Even the superhero version of Patsy should be in at least middle age, given that she was on the Defenders in the mid-’70s. Admittedly, she’s been dead at least once, which might have provided some rejuvenation — but, still, there’s no reason she should be running around like a crazy Millennial when she’s clearly Greatest Generation.

But Marvel Comics has a powerful interest in keeping Patsy Walker as a property they can exploit, and they know well that the Wednesday Crowd doesn’t buy comics about old ladies. [1] And there are creators with inexplicable fondness for any random character you could name, which of course includes ol’ Patsy.

(And Marvel did realize, not all that long ago, that women are actually half of the human race, and so making more comics by and aimed at women might not be as stupid an idea as they’d insisted for the past four decades. We all know about the backlash to that, because superhero comics fans get really shirty when they get an inkling the world does not revolve around them.)

So, yes, we got a rebirth of Patsy Walker, befuddled Millennial, who seems to have been born no earlier than the first Nirvana album (as opposed to Benny Goodman) and who somehow is still clueless about life despite being a superhero for forty-five real-world years. Hey, it’s a living, right?

The first collection of the recent Patsy comics is Patsy Walker A.K.A. Hellcat!, Vol. 1: Hooked on a Feline . It’s written by Kate Leth, with the first five issues here drawn by Brittney L. Williams and the last drawn in a radically different style by Natasha Allegri.

It apparently launched out of a She-Hulk series that had Patsy as a supporting character, since she’s just been laid off as an investigator as this series starts. (Which is fine, since my understanding is that law firms tend to contract for investigative services as they need them, not keep people on staff as full-time snoops.) And, I guess because “comics for women” these days means “young and free-spirited,” Patsy’s life is in turmoil — she was living in a broom closet and has essentially no possessions.

But the young and free-spirited young female protagonist is also indomitable, and so Patsy is equal to all of her obstacles — quickly finding a new place to live with a new roommate, reconnecting with old friends, and hatching a plan to start a superpowered odd-jobs service. (I frankly find it hard to believe that business services companies and tech start-ups haven’t already leveraged superpowered individuals into multiple billion-dollar businesses, but nothing actually happens in the Marvel Universe unless the star of a comic makes it happen.)

Meanwhile, the comics that Patsy’s now-deceased mother wrote about a fictionalized version of Patsy and her friends — which are now, what? the equivalent of The Babysitter’s Club in this timeline? — are being republished, because Patsy’s old frenemy Hedy owns the rights. This deeply annoys Patsy, not least because she isn’t getting a cent from them.

There’s also some actual super-heroing, mostly against a supervillainess who even the plot admits is a cut-rate Enchantress and whose plot is basically to gather a bunch of lousy brand-new powered villains, have them break stuff, and then profit through the miracle of Underpants Gnomes. It doesn’t work, of course — funny, isn’t it, how naughty dentists always make that one fatal mistake?

Patsy Walker A.K.A. Hellcat  is fun and zippy and youthful and energetic, even if I personally think Ms. Walker should be a lot less youthful than she’s shown here. The art is crisp and very colorful — Allegri has a different, almost chibi-esque style for the last issue here, but the coloring ties it all together and it’s art with a similar feel and bounce to it.

Very little of this had to be about Patsy Walker — any minor superhero with a complicated past would do, and they pretty much all have complicated pasts by this point. But it’s a fun story, and doesn’t take any of the superhero furniture seriously, and actually tries to find a socially useful purpose for people who can do weird things. That’s all good stuff. So, of course, this series only ran seventeen issues.

[1] Although a superhero midlife crisis comic — where the main character isn’t drawn to look late-twenties like everyone else all the time — could be interesting. We get the “why do I spend my time punching guys with panty hose over their heads” Superhero-No-More! plotline regularly, but it’s never tied to the fact that Random Hero X has been doing this for decades like a treadmill.

Patsy Walker could be a good choice for a Lady of a Certain Age comic, with her long history of never being that major and actually being divorced from the Son of Satan — that catty dialogue writes itself. It’s a good question: is she really supposed to still be in her twenties after everything that’s happened to her in seventy-four years of comics?

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

I can’t prove this is the best strategy, but I tend to read a book first and then research it afterward, when I’m trying to figure out what to write here. As you may have noticed, I can be opinionated, so I try to minimize the chance of having strong opinions about something before I read it — oh sure, it never entirely works, since you have to know something about a book to even want to pick it up, but I think it helps.

So when I tell you that I had a suspicion that The Last Dragon was based on something, I mean exactly that: a suspicion, lurking in my head as I read the book and particularly Neil Gaiman’s introduction. The book itself just said that it was a graphic novel, written by Jane Yolen and painted by Rebecca Guay.

Now that I have finished reading it, I can google away. And so I find from Yolen’s site that it was based on something: her 1985 story “Dragonfield.”

Does that change anything? Well…not really. I don’t think I’ve ever read the original story, and it’s not like Last Dragon is set in a wider fantasy universe or anything. This is just one story about one place and one group of people. But if you’re a huge Jane Yolen fan, you might know the story — so think of this as a consumer notice.

Last Dragon is vaguely medieval, in the sense that things seem to have been the same way for a long time. There’s no sign of lords or wars or that kind of thing — it’s the usual fantasy medieval world, with only as many details as the story needs. There’s an archipelago where dragons used to live, long ago before men came. When men came, they killed all the dragons, of course — that’s what men do.

It’s now two hundred years later, and dragons are barely a memory in the town of Meddlesome, far out at the end of those islands. But we the readers know one lost dragon’s egg has emerged and hatched, and that there is one dragon, growing and eating, not too far from Meddlesome.

But in that town, there’s a herbalist who has three daughters — a serious, hardworking one; a dreamy, wool-gathering one; and an inspired, driven one. That third daughter, Tansy, is our heroine, as of course she must be — it’s always the youngest child of a matched set.

Eventually the dragon is found and the threat understood, but it takes a while: meeting the dragon is generally equivalent to being eaten by him, so there are only rumors and fear for a while. Meddlesome knows it must slay the dragon, but those skills are long dead. A few young men set off to find a hero, and come back with someone who looks like a hero.

And, eventually, the heroine becomes part of a plan that bears an odd resemblance to the plot of A Bug’s Life. (But, again, the original story here was from 1985; much earlier.) And the title is both true and, in the end, not true, when there is no longer a “last dragon.”

This is a relatively simple fantasy story, with a dragon that is a destructive force but nothing more. It doesn’t talk, like those of Tolkien or Le Guin, doesn’t hoard treasure, doesn’t have old secrets. It’s just a big, destructive animal that’s difficult to kill — but “difficult” is not the same as “impossible.” There are moral lessons along the way, but fairly benign and positive ones.

Guay brings a painterly feel to this story — the cover doesn’t well represent her work inside, for whatever inexplicable reason. Her work here is generally realistic, but becomes flatter at times, perhaps for that fairy-tale feel. It’s evocative art that grounds the world well — these are real places and people, and a dragon of flesh and blood and fire.

Last Dragon is a perfectly nice little fantasy story: I didn’t love it, but I liked and respected it. It may just be that I have seen far too many stories about dragons for far too many years to be able work up much enthusiasm for this fairly basic version. If you’ve read much less fantasy yardgoods than I have, it shouldn’t bother you.

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

Alan Moore is a deeply self-indulgent writer, always wallowing in his particular obsessions and loves. He gained huge fame for the times his obsessions lined up well with those of a wide audience — and, of course, for being really good at making compelling stories out of those obsessions.

But the downside of being a writer driven by obsessions is that they can leave you vulnerable to making a major work hinge on something really trite.

For example, the central premise of the three-part third major “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” story, Century , is essentially that everything in the western world went to hell about 1969. To put that another way: the world is now a fallen place, utterly broken from the paradise it was when Alan Moore was younger than sixteen.

Well, duh. Most of us call that growing up. It takes a Baby Boomer to apply mystic, cosmic significance to his personal adolescence.

(A quick consumer note: I read Century as the three individual volumes — 1910, 1969, and 2009. They’re squarebound, and I had them on a shelf, but I’m not totally confident they would count as “books” to most people. The series has since been published as a conventional single volume, though, and that’s what I’m linking to.)

Now, admittedly, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has been extraordinarily self-indulgent from the beginning, and that was the point. This is a world stuffed full of Moore’s versions of everyone else’s characters and ideas, all done his way, so that everything makes sense in his mind. (I said something similar at greater length recently when looking at the LoEG spinoff Nemo Trilogy . And, ten years ago, I was less positive about the second-and-a-half League story, Black Dossier.) Very few fictional worlds develop wikis by third parties to explicate all of the background details, but LoEG demands them: I doubt anyone but Moore actually knows at first-hand what all of his references are, but just reading the story requires that you catch at least a third of them.

That can be entertaining or tedious. Which it is depends partially on the reader’s fondness for outbreaks of cryptic crossword clues in the middle of a piece of fiction, and partially on the creators’ deftness in weaving those clues in. It also depends, I’d say, substantially on the tone of the story — the first two League stories were Victorian adventure tales, somewhat modernized but still with the pace and energy of a story told for young and rambunctious boys. Black Dossier replaced that with reams of metafiction, and was vastly less successful.

Century comes about half the way back: it’s inherently episodic, since it takes place in three discrete years over the course of a century. But the core of the plot is a relatively straightforward “stop not-Aleister Crowley from midwifing an Antichrist,” which is very Boy’s Own. (It does make Century oddly resemble a Hellboy story a lot of the time, which can be a bug or a feature.)

But Century has a League focused entirely on the menage surrounding Mina Murray, perhaps because characters invented much later than 1910 are still owned by someone else. And, frankly, Alan Quatermain was always boring, and never more so after being rejuvenated as his own son. Orlando is deliberately shallow and trite, and a little of that goes a long way. That leaves Mina to carry the whole story herself, which is too much pressure for a character Moore wants to use as the 3682nd installment of that trite tale, The Immortal With Ennui.

So Century is one part spot the reference, one part rolling ones eyes at Orlando, one part realizing Alan is on panel but so bland one failed to notice him, and about five parts wondering if Hellboy could just appear and punch the evil magician already. (Oh, and one part Threepenny Opera, often staged as if this was an honest-to-God musical, with Jack the Ripper dancing fronting the whores he hasn’t killed yet — have I mentioned yet how deeply self-indulgent the whole thing is yet? It’s deeply self-indulgent.)

Alan Moore has a remarkable mind, full of dazzling ideas and connections that he can sometimes make clear to the rest of us. And Kevin O’Neil is an incredibly simpatico artist for this series, able to draw everything Moore throws at him across the course of a century of history. Century has some remarkable scenes and moments, but they don’t quite cohere into anything like a single plot. If you can accept that for the sake of the ideas and connections — and nearly every fictional character of the 20th century, stuffed in around the edges somewhere — go for it.

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

Some books are “about” something obvious and clear — maybe because they’re genre entertainments, maybe because the author has Something To Say and is going to say it loudly. Maybe because the author is all about clarity, maybe because it’s a screed. Maybe maybe maybe.

But some books are about everything and nothing. They don’t tell you how to understand them — they might not tell you enough to understand them. That doesn’t necessarily make them better — or worse. It might just mean that they’re easier books to argue about.

Dave McKean’s big graphic novel Cages would be excellent to argue about: it’s long and meaty and visually inventive in a dozen different ways and about Art in several different forms and full of events and elements that are either unexplained or explained in a way our world would call insane.

The plot is loose and wandering, very appropriately for a book that came out in ten individual installments over a period of seven years. (For two of those years, in the middle, there were no issues, and we had no idea if Cages would ever come back again.) The final book is five hundred pages long — big and solid, with evocative art that stays in an angular inky register much of the time and then darts, suddenly, into entirely different styles or media for dream sequences or other major events.

At the center, more or less, is Leo Sabarsky, a painter who arrives on the first pages to take a flat in the building that is one of the two centers of this story. (The other center is a jazz club-slash-bar.) He’s looking to get away from his old life, to find a place to do some new work. Already living there, below him, is novelist Jonathan Rush, in Rushdie-esque hiding for what seems to be the Christian equivalent of a fatwa. And above him is the musician Angel, who has his own tragedies and mysteries. Circling around is a black cat.

This is all in England, somewhere, in a city never named. It’s clearly some kind of city, but not anywhere famous or central — it’s a place you go to get away, or stay because you’ve been there for years.

Leo paints, and meets a woman, who becomes a friend and a model and a lover — but this isn’t the story of their relationship.

Jonathan is tormented by a group of fat men in masks — seemingly sent by the government agency that is keeping him safe — who invade his apartment randomly, stealing away the things he loves one by one. This isn’t the story of the why or how of that, either.

Angel claims he can make stones sing, and gives one such stone to Leo. It’s not the story of those stones, either.

It may be the story of the cat, though. It’s his story as much as anyone’s.

Cages is a book “about” creativity and how that interfaces with life, on one level. On another, it’s a somewhat magical-realist look at some ordinary lives. It’s a fundamentally positive book, told like an independent movie — a book that shows and talks and wanders about but never tells.

It’s the major comics achievement of Dave McKean, otherwise most famous for illustrating other people’s stories (Arkham Asylum ) or making covers for those stories (The Sandman). It is quite artsy, in several ways — if you’re not fond of that kind of thing you’ll probably want to stay away. But if you know who McKean is to begin with, you likely have a higher tolerance for artsy-ness than most.

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

German cartoonist Mawil was not very good at talking to girls when he was young. So far, so typical. (I suppose there are people out there who were immediately good at conversation with their preferred sex, but they’re probably also all tall and thin and rich, so we hate them anyway.)

Mawil (real name: Markus Witzel), though, turned that youthful gawkiness into art, which most of us don’t manage to do, in his wistful early graphic story We Can Still Be Friends .

Mawil, when he made these pages, was still young and mostly unable to talk coherently to the girls that he liked — this book was his “diploma,” as the acknowledgements puts it, which I think means it was the rough equivalent of a thesis for a MFA. (It’s dated 2002, which would make him 25-26 when he completed it.) I also think the “relationship” documented in the last section was actually going on at the time he was making these pages, or that it ended just before that: this is a comic made in a moment, looking backward to contextualize where its maker was right then.

I say “relationship” in quotes because Mawil didn’t actually date any of the women he tells us about here. He knew them from school, or other activities, and they hung around together…but, after he built them each up hugely in his head and finally got around to the “do you want to go out” stage, he was let down easily. This book shows the slow process by which he got through a number of “we can still be friends” conversations as he gradually learned how to have that conversation at all, and maybe even to move it up earlier in time.

So these are autobiographical comics, of the “I’m no good at this thing” subcategory, with an emphasis on personal relationships. Mawil is funny, and his style works well for both young gawky people and young attractive people. And his point is that he did get better, if slowly, and that this kind of thing is part of growing up. We all meet people we’re crazy about; the trick is finding the ones where it’s mutual.

This was very early in Mawil’s career, but it looks a lot like the later books of his I’ve seen — Home and Away and Sparky O’Hare and Beach Safari . His style seems to have crystallized early, which is really interesting: it’s an idiosyncratic, very cartoony style, but I guess he came to it quickly and naturally. (Or worked at it for years on things that will never see the light of day — which seems the same on the outside.)

We Can Still Be Friends, despite the rejection inherent in the title, is a fundamentally positive book — Mawil’s frame story has him telling these stories to a group of friends, who encourage him and push him forward. This is not a book about how women hate him; it’s a book about how it took him a while to figure out how to talk to women, and how he’s still getting better at it. Getting better at talking to people is a good thing: I love books that encourage that.

P.S. This book’s title always reminds me of this bit from the 1996 song “Eddie Vedder ,” by Chicago’s greatest two-man band, Local H:

Okay I understand
But I don’t want to be your friend
I don’t need another friend
I’ve got too many friends
If I was Eddie Vedder
Would you like me any better? 

That has absolutely nothing to do with the book. But, hey, what good is a blog if you can’t make random pop-cultural connections there?

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