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.
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?
Contradictions are inherent in any work of fiction, like they are in the real world. Nothing is pure and clear and exactly what it is — everything contains the seeds of its opposite.
But it’s still really weird that what’s supposed to be the great late 20th century poetic ecological comic, a story about impending doom and inevitable biosphere destruction, is all about a guy hanging out in what is shown as a lush wilderness, full of lovingly-rendered large animals at the top of the food chain, who all look really healthy and active. It’s almost like the idea of impending doom is more interesting than telling a story of that doom — just assume the doom and use it in phantasmagorical ways.
This may be another case of a book that I either neglected to read at the right time, or that I’m utterly the wrong reader for. It happens.
I never read The Puma Blues
when it was running as a periodical comic, in the late ’80s. My kid brother was a fan, I think, but I don’t remember more than glancing at his comics. I knew it was there, and I respected it — it came out of the Renegade/Aardvark-Vanaheim/Aardvark One International “stable” of Dave Sim’s Cerebus — but I had some sense that it wasn’t really my thing.
Thirty years later, creators Stephen Murphy and Michael Zulli finished up the unfinished story for this big fat hardcover from Dover — over five hundred and fifty pages of comics. And I think I was right not to jump into it, back in the day — it isn’t really my thing, as interesting and compelling and distinctive as it is.
Gavia Immer is a young murderer — literally the first thing we see him do in the comic is mope around and straight-up kill a bum, in a scene that is never referenced again — who gets a vague game warden-esque job at the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts, where he’s free to wander around and muse about stuff apparently all day long. The world around him is seriously crapsack, we’re told (though we mostly don’t see it until near the end of this book): white supremacist terrorists murdered President Kemp and detonated a small nuke in the Bronx in 1995, and the biosphere may be on the verge of a complete collapse. The main story takes place in 2000, in a world Murphy says has been going straight downhill in the intervening fifteen years.
All that is vague — we know the world is horrible and getting worse, but the comic is about one guy wandering around what looks like unspoiled nature obsessing about his dead father and that father’s various loony-tune conspiracy theories. (I am afraid aliens are deeply involved, because Puma Blues is from the ’80s, before ubiquitous good photography definitively nailed shut the UFO coffin.)
In fact, Puma Blues is almost two different comics: Zulli’s evocative drawings of nature and quiet visual storytelling is one thing. And Murphy’s script — more allusive than literal, prone to fly off on wings of attempts at prose poetry, besotted with its own words and wordiness — is a base for that Zulli art, but not always a script for it, the way two jazz musicians interweave their separate lines without ever actually harmonizing.
There are events in Puma Blues, but it’s a comic of tone and atmosphere and mood more than a story — Gavia mopes around a reservoir, watches his father’s paranoid apocalyptic rants, and occasionally interacts with his superiors. It’s not a story meant to go anywhere; the charitable explanation is that the world is falling apart, so where is there to go?
Puma Blues ended, unfinished, in 1989, its apocalypse still imminent. This hardcover collects all of the ’80s material plus a jarring new forty-page final chapter — which is even wordier, particularly in the early pages, than the original series — in which Murphy merges the Puma Blues alternate history with our real history to give him every possible real and imagined horrible thing in the world. Puma Blues was already ornate and overwrought; this ending pushes that up to eleven, than cracks off the knob in trying to amp it even higher. The good news there is that the new Zulli pages are just as impressive as, and thematically consistent with, his earlier work. But, as an ending, it’s loud and shrill and haranguing, and this reader was mostly happy to finally get to the end of it.
The hardcover collection of Puma Blues also features a long introduction by Dave Sim, who shows that even when he’s trying to be polite and positive in public, he’s still a crazy autodidact with deeply confused ingrained notions about the universe which will never be swayed by mere facts or logic. Similarly, Stephen Bissette uses a long afterword to tell the story of Murphy’s and Zulli’s subsequenct careers and to re-litigate Puma Blues‘s and Dave Sim’s fight with Diamond that was the proximate cause of the title’s collapse in the ’80s.
What all of that has in common — Murphy’s prose, Zulli’s images, Sim’s insistence that the Earth was formed when one cosmic sphere fucked another, and Bissette’s loving description of Murphy’s years writing Ninja Turtles stories — is that it’s all deeply inside baseball. Which particular baseball game it’s calling balls and strikes for varies by person, and Zulli’s work is the most accessible, but it’s all hermetic in its own way. Puma Blues does not open out to the world; it closes in to form its own world. It’s a unique world, and deeply interesting in some ways, but you have to make the journey to go there — it will not meet you halfway, or even one step towards where you are now.
If you’re interested in that world, though, there is nothing else like Puma Blues.
I’m not generally positive about superhero comics here, for the obvious reasons. They’re disconnected from reality, providing artificial solutions to artificial problems. They’re obsessed with their own continuity and history, and with ringing ever more complicated changes on that history, at the expense of clarity and storytelling. They privilege a dumbed-down moral universe in which punching solves everything and violence can be controlled precisely to keep unwanted damage from occurring. They tell endless and-then [1] saga, divorced from real stories with beginnings and ends. And they’re run by and for the benefit of rapacious multinational corporations, which just want more IP to exploit.
The Vision doesn’t manage to avoid every single one of those traps. But it’s a startlingly good comic in a superhero milieu, one that takes on large moral questions and doesn’t try to give them simple answers…or any answers. It’s a single story told in twelve issues, with the ending inherent in the beginning, like the best stories. And it uses comics continuity in ways to strengthen itself, to tell this story about these people in this world.
So now I think I need to dig up what else writer Tom King has done.
I read this story in two trade paperbacks — Little Worse Than a Man
and Little Better Than a Beast
— but it was also published, subsequently, as a single hardcover
, which may provide a slightly better reading experience. (And the hardcover probably has some extra gewgaws, because that’s how the comics market works.)
But it’s one story, and my guess is that King wanted it to be about this length when he started. From what little I know about life inside the superhero factory, I doubt he got a contract guaranteeing that length at the beginning, and he might have had pressure towards the end to keep a popular/critically-successful thing going. (I wonder if he originally had an even darker ending in mind: there are hints of that in the early narration. The Vision does have a mild case of the required “putting all of the toys away neatly” superhero miniseries ending.)
Whatever the behind-the-scenes machinations, The Vision does tell one story, and tells it well. That’s vanishingly rare in Big Two comics these days: this doesn’t cross over with anything, or tie-in to anything. It neither launched out of nor led into an event. It does require a certain level of knowledge of the Marvel Universe — you have to have some sense who this Vision guy is, who claims to have saved the world thirty-seven times — but it will tell you most of what you need to know along the way.
The Vision is the story of a robot trying to live in human society — the many-generations-removed descendant of a thousand Eando Binder and Asimov stories, along with dozens of similar later works. The robot, in a story like this, must be as smart as humans but not think like humans — he must have a problem with emotion, with metaphor, with uncertainty, with purpose and teleology. He must do things that make total sense to him — usually for intricate logical reasons — but which cause problems with the human society around him.
The Vision (the character) is a synthezoid — another, fancier, word for “robot” that Marvel can own, because one of its sharecroppers made it up many years ago. He was built as part of a cunning destroy-the-world plan by Ultron, a much less conflicted and more obviously emotional robot himself created by one of the early Avengers. (Which Avenger? Well, do you mean comics-Ultron or movie-Ultron? I’m also being vague because I’m not 100% sure the origin of comics-Ultron is still what it was the last time I cared, back in the ’80s.) The Vision talks without contractions to show that he’s a robot, and is notably more logical and less emotional than a normal person.
He’s also bright red with green highlights and glowing yellow eyes, of course. And he has superpowers, because Marvel. (How can you save the world thirty-seven times if you can’t lift a bus and shoot power beams from your forehead? Don’t you know that no non-superhero has ever saved the world even once?)
The Vision, for reasons that are sufficient but not covered in depth, created a “wife” — another synthezoid like himself, in female form, using a copy of his ex-wife’s brain as her model. (Not to get too deep into the rabbit hole, but his ex-wife is the Scarlet Witch, and they had two children, or maybe they eventually didn’t, and then she went crazy and destroyed the world before both she and the world got better.) There doesn’t seem to have been any possibility that the creature Vision created to be his wife from the imprint of his former wife could have had any choice in the matter. Well, she’s not a superhero — she’s to be part of his normal life, so she can’t rebel against her creator like he could.
(Well, the premises of any superhero story get creepy and shaky the more you look at them. Let’s move on, shall we?)
The Vision — the book repeatedly calls him “The Vision of The Avengers,” as if that were his Homeric epithet — and his new wife Virginia want to settle down and be normal. So they combine their minds and built two smaller “teenage” synthezoids, Viv and Vin, who will need to go through something like robot adolescence to integrate into being new and unique people. And all four settled in a leafy Virginia suburb, close enough for Vision to fly to the White House for his unpaid job as Avengers liaison to the President. (The narrative hints that lack of income for the Vision family may eventually become an issue, but it doesn’t. It’s not that kind of story. In the end, it’s a superhero story.)
Can a “family” of superpowered synthezoids live among normal humans? Can they have normal lives? Will they find fulfilling pastimes and contribute to their community in the small ways everyone else in the world does?
What do you think? I said this was a single story. It’s set in a superhero universe. I think you can connect the dots from there.
King turns in a strong version of the Tragic Attempt at Normalcy story here, one of the major required events in the Superhero Olympiad. We know it will end badly, as we know Oedipus was in trouble as soon as he married Jocasta, but we watch to see how badly, and in what ways. And to see what the tragic flaws are this time, and who will have them, and who will be broken by them. We are rewarded here by a fall that begins practically on the first page — very classical, very well done.
King also has suitably ominous narration, which turns out to be not just narration, in a strong twist. And the logical/philosophical issues the Vision and his family grapple with are real and interesting…if slightly diluted by the fact that the MU has at least a dozen other kinds of robots that don’t have these problems at all.
The visual storytelling, from Gabriel Hernandez Walta, is equally strong, though my vocabulary is not as good at describing that piece of comics.
This is as good as superhero comics get this decade: that’s both a blessing and a curse. It is pretty good. It is worth reading. But the millstone around its neck holds it back in a dozen different ways as well. And The Vision of The Avengers will be back, in some radically different form, in some other comic, as if this story didn’t happen. He will be back, every month for as long as he can make some money for Marvel…which is the real point.
[1] “And then Thor was a woman for a while, but she died. And then Superman didn’t have underwear on the outside of his costume for a while, and it was a huge controversy until he went back to the red shorts. And then Galactus threatened to eat the Earth again.”
Once again, I need to lead with the obvious disclaimer: I am not the person to tell you about stories of female friendship, not being female and not overly thrilled with friendship, either. But Lumberjanes is not a comic just for young lady-persons, so I can read and enjoy it as well. You can, too, and perhaps you will.
(See my posts on the first
and second
volumes for similar disclaimers and thoughts.)
The third collection is Lumberjanes: A Terrible Plan
, written still by Noelle Stevenson and Shannon Watters. This time out, the bulk of the art is by Carolyn Nowak, though the first issue here has a lot of short pieces — campfire ghost stories told by various girls — from a number of other artists, including Antick Musings favorite Faith Erin Hicks. As before, this book reprints four issues, and it forms (more or less) one larger story.
Well, the first issue here (number 9 [1]) is a standalone, with those individual ghost stories, told around a campfire, as is traditional. But the rest of the book reprints three issues that tell a connected narrative.
Thought I should admit it’s not really one story: this is the “split the party” story, which any series about a close-knit group of people must have eventually. Mal and Molly are off in the woods together, in a totally not-a-date kind of way, to be together because they’re really good friends and…OK, it’s really a date, a cute one, when they’re not being pursued by bears and trapped in an alternate universe ruled by dinosaurs.
The rest of the girls are left in camp, and don’t want to get into anything too fun while Mal and Molly are away. So they decide to use this free day to get at least one “easy” badge. This is not as simple as they think, obviously.
As usual, the real draw of Lumberjanes is the relationships: all of the characters are real and interesting. Their conversation is zippy and truer, and their exploits are unrealistic in the way a good TV cartoon show is — there’s a close enough relation to real life that you can see it, but this world is better and more exciting.
And, of course, they’re all women (or girls, I suppose, if you want to put it that way). That’s still unusual for comics for stupid historical reasons.
I’ll end the way I started: this is a great comic for young lady-persons, and if you are in charge of any of them, you should give them the chance to read it. If not, you still might like it yourself, if you like people and ladies and youth and friendship and camping and hi-jinks and endless possibilities.
[1] Number 9. Number 9. Number 9. turn me on, dead man
There once was a novel called Flughunde: written by Marcel Beyer in German, published in Germany in 1995. John Brownjohn — I feel so sorry for someone saddled with that name all his life — translated it into English, and The Karnau Tapes was published in the UK in 1997.
Almost twenty years later, German cartoonist Ulli Lust adapted Flughunde into comics form — it was published in 2013 as by Beyer and Lust. And, finally, in 2017, the comics version of Flughunde was reunited with the Brownjohn English translation — somewhat adapted by Nika Knight to work as comics — and published under a third title, Voices in the Dark
.
(By the way, Flughunde means “Flying Foxes,” for an important thematic element of the story — it’s a literary-novel title, and this is a literary “graphic novel.” I have no idea why none of the English translations were willing to translate the title.)
That’s what this is, but what’s it about?
Hermann Karnau is a German sound engineer in WWII. Helga is the eldest of the six children of Joseph Goebbels. He is fictional; she is not — and, if you might possibly read this book, do not google her first. Trust me.
If you go into Voices in the Dark thinking it’s Hermann’s story — and it does appear to be his story; he gets most of the page-time, and the narrative goes deeply into his thinking for long periods — you’ll expect something like The Conversation mixed with Hannah Arendt’s famous comment about the banality of evil. Hermann is neurotic and obsessive, and it’s not clear for a while quite how twisted those obsessions have made him, until that Nazi machine gives him unexpected opportunities. He records speeches in public, Goebbels in private, sounds of battle on the Eastern front, and then is part of less definable, less sane experiments before being called back to record the last days of the man the narrative only calls “him.”
But this is not Hermann’s story. It is Helga’s, even though she is young and her life constrained. Even though she gets less time on the page, and we don’t know as much of her thoughts. Even though we don’t meet here until we’ve seen a lot of Hermann. She’s more important — Hermann is essentially an observer.
I won’t talk about the events of Voices in the Dark. It takes place in Germany, during WWII, mostly towards the end, with short scenes set before and after. You can guess at what that could include: you may be right.
Lust tells this story in mostly small, cramped panels — the white gutters between panels disappear entirely for some scenes, making them that much more intrusive and claustrophobic. Her colors are earth-tones, mostly monochromatic on a single spread — there are reddish scenes and brown scenes and grey scenes, some oranges and dull greens. And the panels themselves are close-ups more often than expected — again, tightly focused on this story, as obsessive a viewer as Hermann is a listener, close and constrained and inescapable. It’s very appropriate, and I only noticed it in retrospect.
This is not a happy book, or an uplifting one; stories about Nazi Germany rarely are. It is based on a literary novel, and it’s pretty literary itself — concerned with people’s deep emotions, and with investigating the extreme things they do, without standing up and making explanations or excuses for them. It’s a strong book: I expect it was a strong novel, and Lust has adapted it into a powerful comic.
I’ll try to say different things about this superheroes-done-right comic this time out, though I find that I’m less and less in sympathy with the idea of doing superheroes right every year. Kurt Busiek is a skillful writer who knows superhero universes inside and out, and Brent Eric Anderson is a great artist with superb page layouts and great action. But why do they waste those obvious talents on this third-hand tripe?
Now, it’s reductive and wrong to turn Astro City into a game of who-is-this-really? — The First Family is not actually the Fantastic Four, the Apollo Eleven are only vaguely X-Men-ish, and the Honor Guard are neither the JLA nor the Avengers — but they’re all generic and dull in their own ways, all standard superhero furniture under new names and with costumes designed with far too much care to look authentic to the era Busiek and Anderson want to religiously recreate.
The whole point of Astro City is to validate and nurture the nostalgic identification far too many comics fans have with the childish entertainments of their youth (or, even more these days, other people’s youth), by creating a unified, not-as-embarrassing version of those stories to be loved. If it didn’t rhyme with the real comic-book 1970s — if it didn’t make comic readers want to play this “who is this really” game — then it would have failed at what it set out to do. Even worse, this is explicitly the story about the era when “normal people” lost faith in superheroes — which they were totally wrong to do, since superheroes are by definition better and smarter than normal people, and thus the natural lords of all creation — and how mopey they were for a while until they just let the Ubermenschen do whatever they want again. (This is barely subtext: it’s right there on the surface.)
I’ve never read the second half of the Dark Age story: I probably never will. But, from the hints here, I think there’s some Reaganite bullshit “morning in America” where we all let superheroes be awesome and perfect again coming for the climax of that story. I’m sure Busiek and Anderson made it plausible. I don’t want to know.
Everything I said eight years ago is still true: this is a world ostensibly about normal people, but where only superheroes matter. Only what superheroes does affect anything. Only superheroes change the world. Everything important has a super-person behind it, every time. Everyone else are just sheep, usually with a wrong-headed view of things and always three steps behind.
There are no Astro City stories about Joe Schlabotnik, who helped foil the Counter-Earth invasion of the Solarians. Katie Random did not give vital aid to the Superior Heroes when Lord Evilocity brought hell to earth. Astro City is about what being a mere human is like in a world where mere humans don’t matter. All human beings do is run away, hide, and get in the way. Oh, and get killed — probably in vast numbers. Let’s not forget that.
If real superbeings actually existed in our world, we would all be on the side of whatever draconian Registration Act was proposed: they’re violent, uncontrolled, compulsive law-breakers who destroy nearly everything they touch. Their only positive feature is that the “villains” are even worse. All superhero universes are crapsack universes; we just like to ignore that because we focus on the aristocrats. Astro City pretends otherwise, but it really shows how horrible a life in such a universe must be.
Look, I don’t think I can describe it better than I did a couple of weeks ago when this book entered my house, so let me quote myself:
Twenty years or so ago, everything in corporate comics had to be an event. (Not all that different from now, then!) The Vertigo “line” at DC was actually a bunch of entirely separate comics with a rough shared audience and stance, but they had to have a big Event in their annuals (which they also had to have) in 1993. It was called The Children’s Crusade, and there were bookend standalone comics that the various individual comics’ annuals slotted in between, more or less. It was not the most successful experiment. After a couple of decades, though, someone at DC realized they had a couple of issues written or co-written by [Neil] Gaiman that were sitting uncollected and not making them any money. So they commissioned a new team (Toby Litt and Peter Gross) to create a new middle, and then put out the end product as a book with a new Gaiman introduction. I can’t imagine it all comes together well, but I’m fascinated to see just how jury-rigged and bizarre it is.
This book is the result. It starts out with The Children’s Crusade #1, a comic written by Neil Gaiman, pencilled by Chris Bachalo, inked by Mike Barreiro, and colored by Daniel Vozzo in 1993. The middle was created in about 2014-15, and was written by Toby Litt (and, in smaller letters for no stated reason, Rachel Pollack), drawn by Peter Gross (and, in smaller letters, Al Davidson), and colored by Jeanne McGee. The end is 1994’s second issue of The Children’s Crusade, possibly somewhat altered to appear here, written by Gaiman, Alisa Kwitney, Jamie Delano and Toby Litt; drawn by Peter Snejberg and Peter Gross; and colored by Daniel Vozzo and Jeanne McGee. Explaining all of the above, in a more positive and optimistic light, is a new introduction by Gaiman
OK. The good news is that Vozzo and McGee colored the whole thing between the two of them, giving it some visual consistency that way. The third section, though, does see-saw back and forth between the Snejberg pages and the Gross pages, which look very different. And that third section does contain rather more plot and action — as Gaiman notes in that introduction — than it’s really able to hold together.
First it was an interesting idea that didn’t quite come together. Then it was an opportunity to salvage that idea into a book that could continue to make money for DC Comics, and, maybe, for the contributors. That got us Free Country: A Tale of the Children’s Crusade
in 2015.
(And the cynic in me wonders if this came to being then largely because Karen Berger left DC and Vertigo in 2013, leaving the Powers That Be to cast around for easy ways to keep exploiting the properties she’d midwifed over a long career there.)
Someone noticed that all of the Vertigo comics of that era had child characters — Tefe, the daughter of Swamp Thing; Maxine, the then-budding goddess and daughter of Animal Man; Dorothy Spinner, an actual full member of Doom Patrol; Suzy, the young Black Orchid; Tim Hunter, whose series Books of Magic had not actually gotten started yet; and, representing Sandman, the two Dead Boy Detectives, Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine.
Well, I say “all.” Gaiman said “all” in his introduction. I trusted him, but then I checked.
That list of Vertigo titles ignores Hellblazer, then Vertigo’s second-biggest seller. And Shade the Changing Man, another strong title that was subsumed into the Vertigo launch earlier in 1993. And Kid Eternity, one of the initial launch titles. I’ll ignore the 1993 and 1994 Vertigo mini-series like Enigma and Sebastian O, since those wouldn’t make sense in a crossover. And Sandman Mystery Theater was set fifty-plus years earlier…but it crossed over with other titles at the time and later.
So not so much “all” as “all of the creators DC could cajole or demand to do it.”
Anyway, the story was that first all of the children from one small English village disappeared, and then, at an increasing rate, children all over the world. We the readers quickly learn that they were spirited away to an other-dimensional land called Free Country, ruled by a cabal that seem like they should all be familiar from other stories but aren’t, quite. There, the children will live forever in childlike splendor, never to grow up. We are given to believe that this may not entirely be a good thing, and that there may be sinister hidden reasons behind this plot.
The Dead Boy Detectives were hired to investigate the initial disappearance, and the other five main characters (Tefe, Maxine, Dorothy, Suzy, and Tim) were the special super children who had to be lured to the place the other kids went to make the secret plot — for there always much be a secret plot — work. The first issue sets it all up and sends the DBDs out looking, the middle replaces all of those issues where the individual kids made their ways to Free Country (and, in some cases, left again), and the last issue gets the DBDs to Free Country to finish up everything eventually after many more very plotty pages.
It’s still pretty much a mess here, even with all of the extraneous middle from all of the other annuals left out. And it’s annoying that most of the “special” kids are girls, but that none of the girls are allowed to be active or particularly heroic. Instead, the boys save them, as always — how boring.
Free Country has some nice bits, and it’s a fun time capsule of the very early days of Vertigo, when it was the oddball corner of the DC Universe. But it does not hold together all that well as a story, lurching around almost randomly among the too many things it’s trying to keep track of. But it made some money for DC at the time and then again in 2015, which I have to imagine was the whole point of the thing.
I’ve stopped reading the letter columns entirely at this point. Sorry, Ryan and Erica, but they don’t make much sense in a collection to begin with, and I don’t really care to see lots of stories about your young fans, cute though they may be. For what it’s worth, I do glance at the pictures to see various people’s cute daughters dressed up in homemade Squirrel Girl costumes, and I love that that is a thing that happens in the world.
But I’m here for the stories, so I’ll focus on that. I hope you understand.
Here in the fourth volume — under the run-on title The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 4: I Kissed a Squirrel and I Liked It
— I started to realize that this is more obviously an all-ages comic than I’d pigeonholed it as. (Marvel has been running so hard in the opposite direction for so long — making everything grimmer and grittier and darker and so much more the kind of “adult” that appeals to grumpy twentysomething men — that I assume they’ve entirely forgotten that children, and particularly girls, even exist.) But writer Ryan North and artist Erica Henderson have snuck a girl-positive, female-centric comic into a quirky little corner of the Marvel Universe, and hooray to them for that.
(See my posts on the first three volumes, if you care — one
and two
and three
.)
I realized that because this is the collection of stories all about the love life of Doreen Green, our titular Squirrel Girl. No, she doesn’t meet someone who she falls in love with — though the reverse is true, mostly because she’s polite and pleasant in ways that person is not used to — but she does decide to start dating in the middle of this run of issues, mostly because she’s never done it before and thinks dating is something a college girl should do at least a little.
Her love life is shown in an entirely all-ages-appropriate way, pitched in a tone even those elementary school girls in hand-made costumes will understand and enjoy. She has the obligatory montage of bad dates, which is amusing but much like every other obligatory montage of bad dates. And there’s the aforementioned person who falls in love with her because she apologizes for things and doesn’t immediately turn to punching as a solution to conflict, unlike every other human being in the Marvel Universe. (Which provides a lesson to those girls, who may have similar people in their lives who need to be told firmly that she is not interested in them.)
Doreen does somewhat damage her series title in this volume, taking a dive in a fight. I admit, it’s for a very good reason, but, still, it tends to make “unbeatable” less true. On the other hand, the whole point of this version of Squirrel Girl is that she’s Unbeatable because she’s not someone who turns to fighting as a first resort. Sure, her motto is “eat nuts and kick butts,” and every costumed person in the MU is quite fond of punching, but she’s about as pacifist as it’s possible for a human being in a costume in Marvel NYC, always looking for another solution to every problem.
North and Henderson also continue to teach random computer-science concepts to their audience, which, again, makes more sense the more you realize that audience is largely young girls.
Kissed a Squirrel is really just a specific case of the general rule: everything becomes more like itself as it goes on, focusing down on the central, intrinsic elements and pushing aside the less important stuff. I suspect at some point Unbeatable Squirrel Girl will speciate enough that I’m not longer a good reader for it, and I’ll stop reading it then. But we’re not to that point yet: this may be mostly for smart girls and their parents, but there’s still room for the rest of us. I hope it stays that way for a good long time.
Punk is one of the greatest impulses of humanity: that “oh, fuck it” sense of just getting out there and doing the thing even if you don’t know how. Making noise or art or both, getting out there in public and maybe making a fool of yourself and definitely not caring.
(Maybe I admire it since it’s so opposite to who I am, but that’s a different point.)
Tank Girl is one of the great punk comics — probably the greatest. (I’m trying to think of other examples — early Flaming Carrot is the other major one for me, but Tank Girl mainlined punk attitude in the story as well as embodying it in the style.)
Jamie Hewlett wanted to make some comics. He had a chance to get them published. And he had a random character — well, really, just a name — that amused him. So he drew some damn comics, and dragged his friend in Alan Martin to do the lettering and (eventually) most of the writing. That is punk.
Tank Girl, Vol. 1
reprints that first burst of stories, which originally appeared mostly in Deadline magazine in the late ’80s and turned into a book around 1990. This particular edition is from Titan Books, from 2002, so it has historical introductions from both Hewlett and Martin — but it has been, in its turn, superseded by a newer “remastered” edition from 2009.
These stories have very little continuity: each one is what Hewlett (or, maybe, later on, Martin) wanted to do that particular month, and, from their accounts, the stories were mostly started and completed at great speed right at deadline time. So they start from the same point, with a heroine who is a loud, raucous, hard-drinking soldier (??) in a mildly apocalyptic version of the Australian outback, and then head off in whatever direction for the five or eight or twelve pages they had that issue at high speed, only to crash at the end. Details accumulate, like Tank Girl’s sapient kangaroo boyfriend Booga and her counterparts/friends Jet Girl and Sub Girl, but stories don’t lead from one to the next or connect directly.
Tank Girl is punk. Each story is a separate three-minute single. You’re not getting some prog-rock arty-farty rock opera here. If you’re not comfortable with that, Tank Girl is not the comic for you.
I love the energy and enthusiasm and raw power of these early stories, even if I have to squint to read some of the lettering before Martin took over. (And even if the first few stories tend to flail around semi-randomly before stopping at the end of their page count.) I see that various folks including either Hewlett or Martin kept doing Tank Girl stories after I stopped paying attention — I think I drifted away around the time of the horrifically bad movie — so I might have to catch up, to see what punk did when it grew up this time.
