Author: Andrew Wheeler

This is the end; this is not the end.

This volume finishes up Fantagraphics’ decade-plus reprint project covering the entirety of Charles M. Schulz’s fifty-year run on Peanuts, with the last full year of strips and the few in early 2000 that Schulz completed before his health-forced retirement and nearly simultaneous death. (Sunday strips are done six to eight weeks early; his last strip appeared on the Sunday morning of February 13, and he died the evening before, in one of the most perfectly sad moments of timing ever.)

So that’s the end.

It’s also the beginning: also included in this book are all of the Li’l Folks strips that Schulz created for the St. Paul Pioneer Press from 1947 through early 1950, and which he eventually quit when his attempts to move it forward were turned down, freeing him to rework much of these ideas (and even specific gags) into what would become Peanuts.

But it’s also not the end: there is one more book in the Fantagraphics series, the inevitable odds & sods volume with advertising art and comic-book strips and several of those small impulse-buy books from the ’70s and ’80s that Schulz wrote and drew featuring his Peanuts characters.

So The Complete Peanuts, 1999 to 2000 is the end of Peanuts. And it’s the pre-beginning of Peanuts. But it’s not the end of The Complete Peanuts.

Since we’re talking about a fifty-year run by one man on one strip, and a publishing project that spanned more than ten years itself, perhaps some context would be useful. Luckily, I’ve been writing about these books for some time, so have a vast number of links back to my prior posts on the books covering years 1957-1958 , 1959-1960 , 1961-1962 , 1963-1964 , 1965-1966 , 1967-1968, 1969-1970 , 1971-1972 , 1973-1974 , 1975-1976 , 1977-1978 , 1979-1980 , 1981-1982 , 1983-1984 , 1985-1986 , 1987-1988 , 1989-1990 , 1991-1992 , 1993-1994 , the flashback to 1950-1952 , and then back to the future with 1995-1996 and 1997-1998 .

By this point in his career, Schulz was an old pro, adept at turning out funny gags and new twists on stock situations on a daily basis.  But maybe his age had been catching up to him: there’s a wistfulness to some of the gags from the last few years of the strip, and something of a return to the deep underlying sadness of the late ’60s and early ’70s. But Peanuts was always a strip about failure and small moments of disappointment, and that kept flourishing until the end.

And, if his line had gotten a bit shaky in the last decade of Peanuts, it was still expressive and precise. And there’s no sign of his illness until in the the very last minute: the third-to-last daily strip, 12/31/99, suddenly has a different lettering style in its final panel — maybe typeset based on Schulz’s hand-lettering, maybe done by someone else in his studio to match his work. Then the 1/1/00 strip is one large, slightly shakier panel with that different lettering. And 1/2/00 is the typeset farewell: Schulz, as far as we can see in public, realized he couldn’t keep going at the level he expected of himself, and immediately quit. There was no decline. (The last few Sunday strips, which came out in January and February of 2000 but were drawn earlier, don’t show any change at all until that final typeset valedictory — the same one as the daily strip to this slightly different audience.)

In the book, that loops right back around to the earliest Li’l Folks, which had typeset captions. And then we can watch Schulz take over his own lettering and get better at it over the three years of that weekly strip, hitting the level he maintained for fifty years of Peanuts after not very long at all.

We can also see Schulz’s art getting crisper and less fussy as Li’l Folks goes on, as he turned into the cartoonist who would burst forth with Peanuts in the fall of 1950. Li’l Folks is minor, mostly — cute gags about kids and their dog, mimicking adults or pantomiming jokes based on their shortness — but there are flashes of what would be Peanuts later. And I mean “flashes” specifically: Schulz re-used many of the better ideas from Li’l Folks for Peanuts, so a lot of the older strip will be vaguely familiar to readers who know the early Peanuts well.

Perhaps most importantly, putting Li’l Folks at the end keeps this 1999-2000 volume from being depressing. It’s already shorter than the others, inevitably, but putting the old strip back turns the series into an Ouroboros, as if Schulz was immediately reincarnated as his younger self, with all of his triumphs ahead of him (and heartaches, too — we can never forget those, with Schulz and Peanuts).

Peanuts was a great strip, one of the true American originals. And it ended as well as any work by one creator ever could, having grown and thrived in an era where Schulz could have control of his work. (If he’d covered the first half of his century, that probably wouldn’t have happened: Peanuts is the great strip that ended partly out of historical happenstance and partly because Schulz and his family wanted it so.) So there is sadness here, but there’s a lot of sadness in Peanuts anyway: it’s entirely appropriate.

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

I tend not to give up on things, so in my head Zander Cannon is still in the middle of a really long hiatus from his early and excellent fantasy series The Replacement God. (Yes, that hiatus is now twenty years long. But Mage: The Hero Denied was finally announced recently, so decades-old thought-dead things I really like do come back.)

For everyone else, he’s more likely best known as the artist of Top 10 and Smax in Alan Moore’s most recent stab at a superhero universe, back in the early Aughts. And his most recent solo book was the dark adventure Heck , which I liked a lot: Cannon is a real talent, both as a writer and a draftsman, so I wanted to see more from him.

So why did it take this long for me to get to his not-all-that-new-anymore ongoing series? This collection — Kaijumax, Season One: Terror and Respect — is nearly a year and a half old at this point, and a second series has had time to come out and get collected since then.

Well, I was looking for it. I wanted to poke through it in person before buying it, and I’d never seen a copy in front of me. Finally, I just broke down and ordered it through the library — have I mentioned that I have a NYC library card these days, and that system has a ridiculously large number of books that they’re happy to deliver to a location less than a block from my office? And so, now, I’ve finally read it, and am almost caught up with Cannon.

The title explains the premise: this is a world full of giant monsters (kaiju, in Japanese), of many different types, and they seem as hard to kill as in most monster movies. So there needs to be a place to put them after the army, or Ultraman, or whoever, has stopped them from destroying the other half of Tokyo and more-or-less captured them. That place is an unnamed Pacific island, now just called “Kaijumax” — a maximum-security prisoner for monsters, guarded by guys and gals in Ultraman-style super-suits that let them instantly grow to monster size for smackdowns when needed.

So, yes: it’s a prison story about giant monsters. In comic-book form. Cannon’s afterword notes that many people would find all three of those things silly, but he loves all of them, so sucks to their assmar. (He’s somewhat more polite and felicitous in his phrasing.) But a reader does need to be ready for that — Cannon isn’t joking or goofing around; there are silly things here but they’re taken basically seriously, in a world where they’re not as silly as they would be in ours.

As usual in a prison story, our focus is on the new guy — the innocent guy. This time, it’s Electrogor, a sea-dwelling giant monster who was trying to find food for his two kids when he ran into a human ship and things went bad. He never attacked a city, he never tried to destroy much of anything. But he was found, and caught, and now he’s in monster prison. And those two kids are outside, and the best case is that they’re still at home and getting really hungry. Electrogor wants to be helpful and nice and get out quickly…which never works in a prison story.

He learns better, more or less, and plenty of other things go on around him in the six issues it takes him to learn what he does. Terror and Respect has an ending that fits that “Season One” note — not a real end, but a good place to break for the summer, to come back for more stories with a somewhat different emphasis.

Kaijumax is another fine comic from Zander Cannon, and I hope it’s a huge success: the season structure means it can’t run forever, right? And that means, once it’s a massive crossover bestseller and millions are lining up for the next Zander Cannon joint, the time will be right for that Replacement God revival!

Well, a man can dream, can’t he?

This is a fun series: serious but not self-serious, with vivid characters, interesting dilemmas, and a quirky and unique world. I’m going to enjoy it for as many seasons as I can get.

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

I don’t keep up with superhero comics anymore — I have to admit that. Astro City was probably the last thing in that vein I read regularly, and even that was only as “regularly” as Astro City itself was…and that’s not very. Eventually, I even soured on that comic.

At some point in your life, you either realize that punching people is not the solution to problems, or you become a full-blown psychopath. For all my flaws, I’m on the first path.

All that is to explain why I never bothered to read the Hawkeye run written by Matt Fraction and mostly drawn by David Aja, despite it being pretty much assumed to be the best superhero comic while it was coming out (2012-15). Even if something is the obvious best sushi in the world, it doesn’t matter if your taste for seafood has gone.

But time marches on, and curiosity keeps building. And there’s always time for one more book, especially one that’s a few years old and no longer the hot new thing. So I finally did get to the hardcover collecting the first half of that Fraction-Aja Hawkeye run — eleven issues of that series, plus a loosely related issue of Young Avengers Presents as a kind of flashback.

(That Young Avengers Presents issue comes off very badly by comparison, even with strong art from long-time expert ink-slinger Alan Davis. It’s very much Yet Another Superhero Story, in the middle of a big stupid story that people didn’t even care that much about at the time, with the bog-standard angst and drama and Whining About the Relationship. It’s everything “good superhero comics” usually are, and a major exemplar of why I stopped reading that crap. In a nutshell, it’s a story about costumes being moved around a chessboard, not about people or real relationships.)

The main Hawkeye story, though, is about people. Mostly Clint Barton, the least of the Avengers, whose origin is a bizarre amalgam of Robin I and Green Arrow and whose “power” is just being good at shooting arrows. And who isn’t actually all that good at the living-normal-life thing, for reasons Fraction wisely doesn’t explore — he just takes Barton as the overgrown boy he is, stumbling through his own life like a bull in a china shop, getting into trouble just because that’s what he does when left to his own devices. The trouble here is mostly about a Brooklyn tenement that he semi-accidentally bought (with stolen money from the Marvel Universe’s biggest gangsters), to drive away a low-rent Russian gang he calls the Tracksuit Draculas. Again, his plans mostly don’t work, or don’t work right, and he needs to be saved repeatedly by the women in his life. Which brings us to….

There’s also a newer, younger, female Hawkeye — always have to have a non-cishet-SWM person in the costume these days, and pretend that person will “always” be the “real” holder of the shiny superhero title, as if we haven’t seen a million “always” melt away in a million comics. (I think that’s mostly cynical audience-pandering, but it’s hard to tell in individual cases — and every superhero-universe character gets handled by so many people that they turn into river-stones, rubbed down to an essence that no one person intended.) She’s Kate Bishop, and I have no idea why she’s so good at shooting arrows, or why she went into the superhero game — she seems to have as few powers as Barton, and many more options. (She’s some variety of rich girl, as far as I can tell.)

But this is a superhero universe, so dressing up in tight spandex to jump around rooftops and beat up thugs is just what you do. Apparently no other entertainment media exist in this world, so this is the only thing to do to keep oneself occupied.

These are, as I said, mostly low-level superheroics. Neither Hawkeye saves the world, and the globe-trotting is more spycraft than Galactus-defeating. Aja’s art is perfectly suited for that level, and tells the story brilliantly, well aided by Matt Hollingsworth’s colors. (There’s also a two-issue story by Javier Pulido and a single issue by Francesco Francavilla here — both are good, but flashier than Aja and so they stand out too much for my taste.) Aja reminds me of nothing so much as David Mazzucchelli’s classic superhero period, particularly Daredevil and Batman: Year One. There’s a similar grounded-ness, with thin lines that frame often violent action without rationalizing it — keeping it shocking and unexpected even in the middle of a story designed to showcase violent action. It’s strongly compliments Fraction’s similarly grounded writing: both of them are committed to telling a story about people in a real world, moving through real space, whose actions have consequences and who bleed and feel and curse and laugh and wryly shake their heads.

Aja also delights in complex page layouts — or his ability energizes Fraction to create them, either way it’s a strong collaboration — which make the world part of the story, and not just flat backdrops for more punching. An issue told from the POV of a dog is particularly impressive, and probably hugely well-known by this point.

You don’t need to read Hawkeye. You never need to read any superhero comic, no matter what they tell you. But, if you do want to read about superheroes., this is miles closer to the real world than most.

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

Everybody’s got to eat. And if you want to make a career out of creative work, you’re probably going to find yourself, more and more, telling stories that people want to hear. That’s not a bad thing — people are your customers and audience, and most creative folks want both of them — but it does mean that early idiosyncratic work tends to smooth into more genre-identified work as a creator matures and lives and wants to stop eating ramen noodles every single day.

Maybe that’s why Hope Larson moved from the near-allegory Salamander Dream and dreamlike Gray Horses to the more conventionally genre Mercury and Chiggers, and followed those up with writing a script for the adventure-story Compass South, first of a series. (In comics in particular, there’s a tendency for cartoonists to turn into writers over time, since a person can generally get done more units of writing-work (than art-work) in the same amount of time.)

Compass South is an adventure story for younger readers, in which red-headed twins (and orphans, more or less) Alexander and Cleopatra start off as petty criminals in 1860 New York and go on to get involved with pirates, secret treasure, and another set of red-headed twins of a similar age on their way to San Francisco, where they hope to pose as the long-lost redheaded twin sons of a rich man.

It’s a genre exercise, but a good one — Cleo dresses as a boy, of course, and there are swordfights and chases through jungles, long-lost mysteries and potential new love. Alex and Cleo get separated, as they must, and mix with the other team of would-be fake San Francisco heirs, each becoming friendly with the ones they’re thrown in with, and somewhat making common cause as young poor redheads all alone in the world.

And I expect those young readers will like this better — most of them, anyway, that vast conventional audience — than Salamander Dream or Gray Horses. It’s a fine book, exciting and fast-moving and colorful and gung-ho. If I didn’t like it quite as much, well, you have to remember that I’m not a redheaded young person.

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

I had something like five hundred words typed about this book — pretty much the whole post — but I deleted it instead of cut-and-pasting, and then saved over the place I was typing it.

So I’m not going to try to recreate that thought process: it’s too frustrating to contemplate. Instead, I’ll run through the high points of Raina Telgemeier’s 2016 graphic novel Ghosts in a more telegraphic way: it won’t be as pretty, and probably not as coherent, but maybe I can hit the same points, more or less.

First: Telgemeier is huge. Probably the best-selling creator of comics stories in the US right now, the center of gravity for a whole area of the industry. I think most people know that by now, but the insularity of the Wednesday Crowd is legendary.

Second: whether on purpose or not, Telgemeier has been on a memoir-fiction alternation for her recent career. This is the second work of fiction, after memoirs Smile and Sisters and previous fiction Drama .

Third: it’s the story of Catrina, a tween who moves with her family up the California coast, to the cold and windy town of Bahia de la Luna from somewhere near LA. Yes, that means leaving all her friends and surroundings; that happens just before page one.

Fourth: the family did this for the health of Cat’s kid sister Maya, who has cystic fibrosis. Maya’s condition is progressive, degenerative, and incurable: she will get worse and worse over time. Running, exerting herself — normal kid stuff — will progress it more quickly. Bahia’s cold chilly climate is better for her than the southern heat, but that’s at best a delaying tactic.

Fifth: Bahia is a town full of ghosts, says local boy Carlos. The girls meet him on their first day in town. These are the nice, friendly, dead-relatives kind of ghosts, happy to share time with you, not the haunting or angry kind.

Sixth: Cat is a rationalist, like me. She insists that ghosts aren’t real. This is true in the real world, but, unfortunately for her, is not true in this story. I’m personally not entirely happy with stories — especially those for young people — that show smart rationalists being proven wrong by inexplicable supernatural stuff, but I guess this is OK, because….

Seventh: Ghosts is, in a quiet, unobtrusive way, about the inevitability of death and the need to make one’s peace with that. Maya understands this better than Cat, and so embraces the ghosts more willingly than Cat — even though doing so runs her a huge risk of advancing her condition seriously.

Eighth: the ghosts in Ghosts are intrinsic to that theme, obviously. How better to accept death than to make friends with people who have already experienced it? I still wish Cat wasn’t so obviously proved wrong, but this story had to go this direction.

Ninth and final: Telgemeier is a thoughtful and interesting comics-maker who shouldn’t be left  entirely to be enjoyed by pre-adults. I do think her memoirs are her strongest books, still, but Ghosts has its own energy, point of view, and story to tell — it’s well worth reading.

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

Sikoryak has made his comics career out of taking words and pictures from other people and mashing them together — most notably collected in Masterpiece Comics. His thing generally is to redraw famous comics pages — sometimes new pages in the style of someone old and/or dead, but usually the famous art itself — and put different words into the balloons, for amusing, satiric, and or artsy purposes.

A couple of years ago, he decided, for whatever reason, to abandon high literature and take his text from much duller reality — Apple’s iTunes Terms and Conditions, a legal document that millions of us have accepted without actually reading. The book Terms and Conditions explains, in a short postscript, how he went about working on this project, and which iterations of the changing legal document were used for various versions of these pages, but it never actually tells us why he did it.

The book also never mentions that Sikoryak replaced the main characters in all of this redrawn art with what looks like a Steve Jobs figure — the name Jobs is never mentioned, nor the fact that this book has a single main character throughout all of its hundred art styles. But it’s what he did, and you can see many of the styles of Job on the front cover.

Sikoryak’s postscript also notes that he worked on his book in batches of pages, a dozen or so at a time. He would draw those page and then shoehorn some T&C onto them, and then go onto the next batch. So he didn’t pick pages to coincide with the text; he just redrew a bunch of famous comics pages to star Steve Jobs instead, and then tossed what is essentially lorem ipsum text onto those pages.

It’s all very arty. But I don’t really see the purpose or use of it. Terms and Conditions can have no artistic unity in any way — each page in completely independent, and the text is pure legal boilerplate. The enjoyment in reading it is primarily in recognizing each page (if you do so instantly) or in trying to figure out the source if it’s vaguely familiar. It is a cold and pointless thing, of interest primarily to people who like conceptual art.

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

Blechman has been making comics and related art for six or seven decades now, going back to 1953’s The Juggler of Our Lady. Most of that stuff was collected a few years back in Talking Lines — but Blechman is still around and still making art.

(If anything below ends up sounding critical — I never know which way my fingers will tend — let me say up front here that it’s really damn impressive that Blechman is still around, still working, and still getting books published. This is a man who was born in 1930 and got into the Art Directors Hall of Fame nearly twenty years ago…and he had a new book out in 2016. I only hope I can be around when I’m 86.)

Amadeo & Maladeo is a historical graphic novel, something of a compare-and-contrast about two musician-composers in the late 18th century, loosely inspired by the life of Mozart. And it looks like it will have a crisp, defined contrast between the two of them, but then…wanders off into specifics on both sides that make that comparison muddied.

I’m torn on whether that makes this book stronger or weaker — on the one hand, the book it seemed to be heading towards could have been dull and obvious, with the rich prodigy brought low in the end and the poor kid finding fame and success in America. On the other hand, their careers aren’t particularly parallel, and there’s a moment where something bad happens to a middle-aged Amadeo — a carriage accident of some kind — that Blechman never quite explains.

But, anyway, Amadeo is a prodigy, performing for the crowned heads of Europe in the 1750s, before the age of ten. Maladeo, born on the other side of the blanket to a servant girl who had a happy night with Amadeo’s violin-teacher father, performs on street-corners and is shanghaied to New York at a young age.

In the end, we are with Maladeo as a happy old man, which I suspect is the big clue — Blechman himself lived to an impressive old age, and he had Amadeo die at an age similar to Mozart’s. Neither man could choose his life, of course, and both had successes and happiness along the way — but Maladeo is still going at the end, and that has to count for something.

So there may not be a moral here, just the story of two contrasting lives. The world has enough morals, though, so the lack here is not a problem. And Blechman’s trademark “shaky line” is as expressive and wonderful here as ever — note that it’s not because of age; he’s always drawn like that on purpose. If you’re not expecting something stark and classical in its construction, you’ll likely enjoy Amadeo & Maladeo a lot.

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

I will keep telling you to read John Allison’s comics until either you do so or you stop listening to me entirely. So take that part as read — like Scarygoround and Bad Machinery , Giant Days is a lovely mix of smart dialogue and real characters and quirky situations. Though Giant Days, being set away from Tackleford, those quirky situations are less likely to involve dimensional portals and selkies and alien potato creatures. (At least so far….)

Volume Two finishes up the first term at an unnamed British University for our three main characters — Susan and Daisy and Esther — who have a big formal dance, and a big visit back to Susan’s hometown during the break, and the big finals, and then…um…a big new boyfriend for Esther? (Parallelism can only go so far, it seems.)

These four issues also see the big art hand-off, as original artist Lissa Treiman bows out after what was supposed to be the six-issue mini-series and Max Sarin steps in. To my eye, Sarin’s lines are a bit thinner than Treiman’s, and his art seem to have less depth…but, then, when does anyone ever think the new artist on a favorite comic is an improvement? He does a good job, and I’m sure I’ll bitterly resent it if he ever leaves Giant Days and someone else takes over.

So: female-focused writing, with believable people and real-world situations and some of the best dialogue available in comics anywhere. What are you waiting for?

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

This series does not necessarily have to be connected to Allison’s webcomics, if the reader doesn’t know of that connection. One of the three main characters — gothy center-of-all-drama Esther De Groot — was a major character in Allison’s strip Scarygoround, but Giant Days is a mildly alternate version of that Esther, who went off to college in about 2004 from that strip and landed in college in about 2013 in these comics stories. (That’s one long road trip on the way to school!) And this comic is set entirely at college so far, with no excursions back to the Tackleford of Allison’s webcomics, and I don’t expect there to be any.

Giant Days is about three female friends: Esther, tightly wound Susan, and happy-go-lucky Daisy. Allison is amazingly good (particularly for a man) at writing about young women and their friendships and daily life — Giant Days is all about the small moments in life that don’t feel small at the time. These three freshmen at an unnamed UK university study (or don’t), have crushes and dates and boyfriends and friends who are boys, get angry and happy, and just talk to each other. It’s the moments they’ll remember fondly ten or forty years from now, presented cleanly and with truth, the story of three specific women and their lives.

Allison is joined here by Lissa Treiman on art — he draws his own webcomics — and she has a great energy and vigor that works well with his story. (But don’t get too used to her; she’s only on this series for these stories and the first two issues of the next collection.) Look, I’m clearly in the tank for Allison, but this series is a lot of fun — particularly for young women, who don’t get to see people like themselves in comics all that much.

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