Category: Reviews

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Was That Normal? by Alex Potts

Philip is about forty. He has one of those jobs you can do from anywhere, on a laptop, so he does it from his apartment, alone. He lives in a British city, probably mid-sized – not very specific, not very special. His apartment is garden-level, which means he looks out his window, while typing on that laptop, below the street. He doesn’t have any long-term friends, or any connections with colleagues that we see – the closest person in his life is his landlady/roommate, an older woman who intermittently tries to engage Philip and be friendly with him.

Philip isn’t all that good at being engaged and friendly. He’s wrapped up too much in his own head, the kind of person who obsessively thinks about what’s he’s doing, what he should be doing, and if there’s anything that he wants to be doing. (There usually isn’t..) He goes out to the pub now and then, because he thinks he should or because he thinks he’ll have a good time this time, but he inevitably ends up drinking too much to be social and pays for it later.

Was That Normal?  is a graphic novel, by British creator Alex Potts . It covers a few months in Philip’s life – how he starts from that point of being stuck, how he’s searching for connection, what happens to him, and where he ends up. There are no major epiphanies, no huge revelations, no amazing transformations – like all of us, Philip is deeply embedded in his own life, and all changes will be gradual and incremental.

But he does want more, want something different. He does try, in his fumbling, uneasy way, to open up to experience, to look for things that would make his life brighter. He gets dragged out to a concert, and is struck by the singer, Gina. He sees her around town, and strikes up a friendship.

He obviously wants more, but things are messy – Gina has a volatile not-quite-ex and doesn’t seem terribly interested in anything more serious than friendship with Alex. But she is friendly, and it looks like it’s been a long time since Philip had a friend.

He’s uncomfortable with a lot of the day-to-day of life, the kind of person who over-thinks everything and then has trouble just doing even the little bits of social interaction that more thoughtless people never waste a moment on. That might not change – or not entirely. He’s going to stay Philip. But he might be able to be a Philip a little more comfortable in his own skin, a Philip who tries more things, a Philip who spends more time with people and gets better at it. I do say “might” – Potts, again, is not going for epiphanies or transformations here; this is a realistic, grounded story about a real person in a real world, and nothing is guaranteed. 

Potts draws Was That Normal? with a slightly rumpled, indy-esque line – immediate and grounded, with his people not quite as pretty as a reader might expect. His panel borders are hand-drawn, just a bit uneven. The colors feel just a tone or two off from purely realistic – slightly more of a picture than the thing itself, usually in earthy tones, with lots of yellows/tans, browns and dull reds for backgrounds.

Was That Normal? could be a little hard to take, particularly for readers with a lot of Philip in their own makeup – but it’s well-observed and thoughtfully true, and does provide some hope for this Philip…and, by extension, for all of the rest of us.

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

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Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol. 3

Credits are always a tricky thing for assembly-line comics. Projects tend to have a particular, clear breakdown of responsibilities – this guy writes, that other guy draws, a third guy inks – but those comics tended to be monthly, and monthly deadlines lead to messiness. (Ask the guy who spent sixteen years in a business that had a minimum of seventeen “months” a year.)

And creators want to work with each other – sometimes the same crew for a while, sometimes a one-off with that idol of theirs or the new guy doing interesting stuff.

When it comes to gather all of that messiness into a book, sometimes the publishers err on the side of simplicity. The first time the “Frank Miller Daredevil” was collected, it was under roughly that title, even though Klaus Janson drew the vast majority of those stories. For the second go-round, Marvel decided they needed to add Janson to the title, which makes a lot of sense.

But it meant that there was a first book with stories mostly written by or with other people, one of them inked by Frank Springer, and most of them drawn by Miller and inked by Janson. And then a second book that really was all Miller/Janson, the core of the run.

And this third, concluding volume gets messy again, with Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol.3  collecting not just the climax of their run together – Daredevil issues 186-191 – but several odder and quirkier things, several of which Janson had nothing to do with. So it’s yes Frank Miller, as before, and some embarrassed shuffling of feet about how much Janson there is.

There are three quirkier things, so I’ll take them first, in the order they appear in the book and in increasing order of importance and strength.

Miller and Janson did an issue of What If…? in 1981, with co-writer Mike W. Barr, asking the comical question “What if Matt Murdock became an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.?” It would be a very standard late-’70s, early-’80s Marvel comic, much like the stories in the first Miller/Janson volume, is what. Talky, obvious, full of cramped panels and way too much narration from that boring bald giant on the moon. This is included, I assume, for completionists.

Miller returned to Daredevil for a one-off issue, #219, in mid-’85 (about a year before the Born Again sequence with David Mazzucchelli), apparently in large part to work with John Buscema. The credits are a bit vague – the splash page credits everything to Miller (with an asterisk), Buscema, and inker Gerry Talaoc – but I assume Miller wrote this story and did layouts that Buscema finished. This is a hardboiled “crooked town” story in twenty-ish pages, with Matt Murdock (out of costume) wandering into this Jersey hellhole and incidentally (and almost accidentally) cleaning it up on his way back out. This story has many of the weaknesses of both Marvel comics of the era and Miller in particular, but it’s a solid piece that works on its own level.

And the last eighty pages or so of this book incorporate the 1986 graphic novel Daredevil: Love & War, written by Miller and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz, in what ended up being a try-out for their Elektra: Assassin project almost immediately afterward. This is very much a one-off, but it’s glorious and energetic, with Sienkiewicz at the height of his ’80s inventiveness and Miller’s multiple-narrators captions working quite well. Daredevil himself doesn’t actually do a lot in this story, actually – he is necessary to the plot, I’ll admit, but he also sets off for a whole lot of derring-do that fizzles entertainingly.

I’ve left the meat of the book for last: issues 186-191 is the big ninja storyline, the single most important vector for their takeover of American culture (particularly comics culture) later in the ’80s. But we can’t blame Miller and Janson for that. The stories are muscular and taut, with Miller dialing down his wordiness and telling this story visually a lot more than was standard for Marvel at the time. It includes all the greatest hits of the Miller Daredevil: Matt’s mentor Stick and the small band of good-guy ninjas he leads, his dead-but-gets-better global-assassin ex-girlfriend Elektra, the super-evil ninjas of The Hand and their world-domination plots, the Kingpin, and a cameo by currently-paralyzed assassin Bullseye.

Those issues, though, in the best Marvel Manner, actually starts with some hugger-mugger about Matt’s current girlfriend, Heather Glenn, and the family company she supposedly runs that has gotten involved with…gasp! horror!…some kind of munitions work. As usual with Big Two comics of this era, both the legal and the business details are ludicrous and unbelievable to anyone who is not twelve, and all of the characters talk about it in mind-numbing detail that only proves how little any of the creative team involved understood law or business. But, eventually, the Heather subplot ends and we get to the ninjas, who are thankfully much quieter.

My takeaway from this, and the whole mass of Miller/Janson Daredevil stories, is that everything is part of its time and place. The best of this material is as good as any adventure stories in comics form anyone has made over the past century. But a lot of it is dull, cliched and obvious, rolling out wallpaper-like standard plots, themes, and concepts that are third-hand at best and threadbare if you look too closely. The three Daredevil books have nearly a thousand pages of comics: three to four hundred of that is pretty darn good. The rest you need to slog through to get to the high points.

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

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Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: Donald’s Happiest Adventures by Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas

About a decade ago, writer Lewis Trondheim and artist Nicolas Keramidas made a bande dessinée for Éditions Glénat, the French arm of the global Disney octopus, about Mickey Mouse. It was called Mickey’s Craziest Adventures  and pretended to be rediscovered pages from an obscure (probably American) 1960s comic, telling a long, convoluted and all-adventure story on its big pages. It didn’t entirely make sense, but that was the point: it was supposedly roughly half of the pages of a decade-long story that was all cliffhangers and hairsbreadth escapes to begin with.

A few years later, they did it again, though in a slightly less breathless register: Donald’s Happiest Adventures  similarly pretends to be a serial from an incredibly obscure ’60s comic. But, this time, they happily state that they found the whole thing, and can present the full story of how Donald was tasked by his Uncle Scrooge with finding the secret of happiness. Happiest was published by Glénat in 2018, and an American edition followed in 2023, translated by David Gerstein.

The structure is the same as the Mickey story: Trondheim and Keramidas pretend that each page stood alone as a monthly installment of the story, so the story leaps forward regularly, with each page being a moment or a thought or a particular place. Trondheim’s Donald has the standard irascibility, though he doesn’t break into full-fledged tantrums here as he sometimes does in stories by other hands. He’s also more philosophical than Donald often is, a lot like other bird-coded characters in other Trondheim stories, like Ralph Azham or Herbert from Dungeon or Trondheim’s self-portrait in Little Nothings .

But if you’re going to have a story about Donald Duck searching for the meaning of happiness, you need to have a version of Donald who is capable of finding happiness and of talking about it coherently – not always a guarantee in every version of Donald.

Like the Mickey story, this one ranges widely – Donald is summoned by Scrooge to go retrieve a fabulously valuable artifact from an obscure corner of the world, but unwisely questions Scrooge’s motivations and finds himself instead sent to find the secret of happiness. In particular, the secret of making Scrooge happy, which is even more difficult than doing so for Donald. (Donald has moments of happiness throughout the book, as a careful reader will notice – but he’s not happy all the time, which is what he thinks he’s looking for.)

Donald meets and talks with a vast array of other characters – the fabulously lucky Gladstone Gander, the down-to-earth Grandma Duck, the genius Ludwig von Drake, and so on – as he asks each of them in turn what happiness is. Along the way, he gets into adventures that span the globe, including a stint in a nasty totalitarian country where, luckily, the shackles are all made of cardboard. He also runs across Mickey several times, helping capture Pegleg Pete each time and getting a reward from the police forces who pop up, always right after the hard work is done.

It’s a fairly talky story, because it’s about finding happiness, and Donald needs to talk to nearly every character about it. (He doesn’t have any conversations with Pete, which is a possible miss, since Pete has always seemed quite content with his lot in life, despite having all of his schemes fail miserably.)

As he must, Donald does eventually make it back home to Duckburg, and has an answer for Scrooge that makes the old miser happy, at least for that moment. It’s not the secret of happiness, but that of course is Trondheim’s point: there’s no such thing. Along the way, Happiest is thoughtful and adventurous in equal proportions, a good story for people who are willing to do a little thinking during their Donald Duck adventures.

As in the Mickey book, Keramidas draws it in a style that I can’t quite call off-model but doesn’t quite look right. (Though I mean that as a compliment: purely on-model is boring.) His characters are energetic in that cartoony way and his pages crisply laid out to accommodate all of Trondheim’s long speeches – and to look as if each one could have been a full entry of this serial. 

Some reviews of this book have missed the fact that the ’60s origin is…how do I put this delicately?…not actually true. But you, my dear readers, are smarter and more perspicacious than that, so I’m sure the metafiction here will be no trouble for you. If you’re looking for a combination of philosophy and Disney adventure – and why not? it’s a fun mix – Donald’s Happiest Adventures will provide a lot of enjoyment.

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

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Kiosco by Juan Berrio

I didn’t know this was wordless going into it. Wordless books pose a challenge to the critic, for all the usual dancing-about-architecture reasons, but this is sweet and lovely and expressive, so let’s see what words I can dig up that Juan Berrio didn’t need.

Kiosco  is a horizontally-formatted graphic novel, generally one big wide panel to a page, originally published in Spain by DIBBUKS in 2014 and published in this edition for the US market by Europe Comics in 2017. It doesn’t credit a translator; it didn’t need one. Someone wrote the descriptive copy in English, but then I bet someone wrote descriptive copy for this in Spanish, French, and German earlier, and we don’t credit those people, either. (No offense: I’ve written descriptive copy for books, back in my misspent youth. It’s a skill, and a necessary function, and I didn’t get credited, either.)

The main character is a young man. We see painting apparatus in his apartment, and him working at it, so we think he’s an artist. But the way he makes his living, we think, is by running a little coffee-and-pastry stand in a local park, in whatever city this is he lives in. A kiosk, we might say in English. I gather “Kiosco” is the Spanish equivalent.

This is the story of one day. He gets up, gets ready, pokes at a painting briefly, and then sets off on his bicycle to work with a tray of croissants. He opens the shop, the sun rises, and he’s ready to greet the day.

But though the park is full of people passing through, no one is spending money at the kiosk. Berrio shows time passing, with some wonderfully expressive pages in soft earth tones – I’m not sure if it’s watercolor or colored pencils. He goes back and forth between the hubbub of the passing crowd – different every time, a fascinating array of different faces and body language and gesture, all going somewhere else to do something else – and our main character, standing and fidgeting and cleaning the stand and tables yet again to keep himself busy.

There are a few scenes of someone almost shopping at the stand, but no one actually does. It even rains, to make this a comprehensively bad day.

Eventually, though, he does have a customer. I won’t spoil it. It’s lovely and bright and happy, and that ends his day in the kiosk and, soon afterward, the book.

I don’t know if Berrio typically works wordlessly; I found this book randomly and the only other Berrio book I see available in North America is similarly wordless, for kids. (But he has a long list of previous works on his Spanish site , and wordless comics famously travel the most easily.) This is a sweet little book in a lovely cartoony style, and I’d love to see more of Berrio’s work make it over to my side of the Atlantic.

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

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REVIEW: Human Nature: Book 1

Human Nature: Book 1
By Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel, and Jeff Welch
208 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$29.99

When an inventive filmmaker like Darren Aronofsky produces a graphic novel, it warrants attention. His work on Black Swan, The Wrestler, and Requiem for a Dream, among other movies, shows an inventive director but also an inquisitive storyteller, examining different aspects of the human condition. Here, without budgetary limitations, he tackles the biggest issue of them all: life after death.

Here, he partners with his frequent screenwriting collaborator Ari Handel, along with screenwriter Jeff Welch (Bet Your Life), who first conceived the idea in 2011, although none of them could craft a script that secured studio funding. (George Clooney was considered for Duke, which would have been an interesting approach.) This is a first for them all, which may be why the story takes so long to ramp up.

We are introduced to Duke, a self-made success who leverages his poultry business to become one of the world’s richest men. He seeks a way to cheat death, taking the Walt Disney route of cryogenics, hoping that the brain tumor slowly killing him can be cured at some future date. He finds such a company but decides it costs too much, so he buys it out and grows it into profitability through scale by offering to freeze the near-dead for a mere $99.99.

Duke is not a pleasant person, letting the bottom line dictate his choices, refusing to acknowledge people’s frailties. The only glimmer of kindness emerges when he discovers the existence of Pembroke, an adult daughter he never knew. He’s frozen before he can search, thanks to the unscrupulous actions of his number two.

His search for her drives some of the story. When he awakes, Duke discovers an unrecognizable world, one where aliens have invaded and remain unknown, their motivations and actions unexplained. We see him slowly learning to please his captors by singing whatever songs he can recall, and trying to engage with his neighboring captives.

We learn all of this as an elderly Duke tells a group of initiates his story sitting around a campfire. Most of the book is then an extended flashback.

It’s billed as a satire, and it’s a very subtle satire, more about the human failings and corporate greed – so far. We’ll have to wait and see. It’s also billed as Book 1 of a trilogy and utterly fails the reader by ending on a cliffhanger. For $30, I would think the reader deserves enough story to feel satisfied, welcome to return for the next installment. Here, we are forced to buy Book 2 to continue the story.

Martin Morazzo is best known for Ice Cream Man, a title I am unfamiliar with, but I really enjoyed his work on 2018’s She Could Fly. But his art is richly textured, and the writers give him plenty of space for vast vistas or thousands of chicks. He doesn’t skimp on detail and invites us to immerse ourselves in this new reality. He is ably supported by the subtle colors from Chris O’Halloran and Aditya Bidkar’s lettering.

Overall, it’s a breezy read with plenty to look at and enjoy. As for giving us much to consider, well, that will just have to wait.

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REVIEW: The Undertaker Volume One

The Undertaker Volume One
By Xavier Dorison and Ralph Meyer
112 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$25.99

While the Western has risen and fallen in favor here in America, it has continued to fascinate European creators, who have produced works set in an era they know only from history and movies. Among the more interesting offerings has been the Undertaker series from French-born Xavier Dorison and Ralph Meyer. They have been producing multiple story cycles since 2015, and last week their English-translated stories (by Tom Imber) finally reached us.

“The Gold Eater” cycle introduces us to Jonas Crow, who is, in 1868, an itinerant undertaker, arriving in Anoki City to collect the body of mining tycoon and grade-A asshole Joe Cusco. Rather than bequeath his wealth, he has decided to take it with him, swallowing gold nuggets. He has contracted with Crow to bring his corpse to the spot of his first gold strike and bury him there. His faithful assistant, Rose Prairie, is blackmailed into assisting him because if she doesn’t, some unknown innocent will be killed in three days’ time.

As they set out, they collect the Chinese governess Miss Lin, and the three are beset by Cusco’s former employees, led by McKullen, the town’s sheriff,  who learn of the gold and want it. Add in American soldiers seeking Crow, wanted for murder and known as the Butcher of Skullhill, and we’re off to the races.

Meyer wanted to write a Western, and Meyer conceived of the Crow to subvert the traditional notion of the Western hero. Here, he’s closer to Jonah Hex than John Wayne, cynical and solitary, uncomfortable with sharing the hearse wagon with the women. He is accompanied by the injured vulture Jed, whom he speaks to more than the women.

Once we’re off, the action is fast-paced as Crow and company have to contend with a harsh environment and with men willing to risk everything to get the gold their families need. There’s desperation to spread around, along with violence.

Working within the tried-and-true Western conventions, the story also addresses universal themes of loyalty, responsibility, and, of course, greed. Justice and morality are examined in the actions the Undertaker takes to protect the women and fend off the men, as he tries to honor his obligation.

Meyer’s Franco-Belgian art is rich in period detail and paces the action sequences quite well. He colored the work with Caroline Delabie in subtle tones, subduing the harsh glare of the sun and desert.

Each cycle is in two parts, so we can hope this does well enough for the remainder of the series to come to the States.

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Girl in the World by Caroline Cash

Caroline Cash took over the Nancy comic strip at the beginning of this year, after a try-out run (before and after a couple of other creators) a year before. Her predecessor was Olivia Jaimes, a female creator who rejuvenated the strip in 2018 and is shrouded in mystery. Well, slightly more mystery than any other name on a national media entity where you never see the human being behind it – she’s pseudonymous and has guarded her privacy, though the assumption is she’s also known as a cartoonist under her real name, whatever that is. [1]

I liked the Jaimes Nancy; so far (it’s January 31 as I write this) I’m liking the Cash Nancy; and I liked Cash’s brief run in 2024. So I figured I should see what else Cash has done. She was best-known, pre-Nancy, for her ongoing comic PeePee PooPoo, with a confusing numbering scheme that has so far gone 420, 69, 80085, and 1. (I may have the order wrong, for obvious reasons.) Before that, though, she had a standalone graphic novel, Girl in the World , as her comics debut in 2019. So I took a look at that.

Girl follows a large cast, almost all female – there’s one gay man I remember, and possibly other men in minor roles as passers-by, but it’s a story about a lose friend group of women, during one long night. (Yes, there is a Bechdel Test reference at the end.) They’re all young, and I guess to complete the cliché I should say they’re all restless, too. They’re all part of the same set in whatever city this is – Cash herself is from Chicago, but the city here is unnamed but mostly low-rise, rowhouses and buses and dark late-night streets.

These girls – I guess I should call them girls, from the title? – have different things they can do this night: the organized ones are Facebook events, to make this even more 2019, but the characters mostly ditch organized frivolity early and spend their time traveling with each other to the next thing, talking and just hanging out.

There’s no larger plot: this is a book about those conversations, about what this group of young women are thinking about and worried about and unhappy about in this random night in 2019. They’re different people – Cash does, I think, give them all names and personalities, but the names don’t get used much, as friends don’t dialogue-tag each other all that often.

Cash’s art style shifts and alters – at first I thought she was creating looks for each cluster of characters, but I think, in the end, it’s more a new creator working on her first long work – trying new things, using all of the tools she has, pushing in every direction she can, using each new blank page to learn something new.

Girl is a very “indy” book – that art style, that kind of storytelling, that feeling of a young creator trying things out in public. I find that kind of work energizing, and this is a great example of the type.

[1] I would love to work up a conspiracy that Cash is actually Jaimes, and this is a complicated double-fakeout to go public and switch her art style. But Cash is barely thirty, and I think was still in art school when “Jaimes” took over Nancy, so the timeline really doesn’t work. Sad, because that would be an awesome thing to at least pretend to believe in.

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

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REVIEW: Looney Tunes Collector’s Vault Vol. 2

Since the first animated short in 1929, the Looney Tunes brand has signified creative genius and unusual freedom for its animators, who were not required to follow the vision of one man: Walt Disney. Instead, producer Leon Schlesinger oversaw a long run of entertaining eight-minute cartoons that introduced a stressed nation to live-wire characters, beginning with Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and, of course, Bugs Bunny.

As a child of the 1960s, I was raised with the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons on constant rotation, mainly on WNEW. They ran at all hours, it seemed, and then even more could be found on Saturday morning cartoons. By the time I was old enough to go to the movies, animated short features had mostly been discontinued, so I never got to see them in their intended environment.

When I was raising my children, there was a movement against violence and chaos in animated fare, with some worried about imitative behavior. I saw nothing wrong with exposing my kids to the shorts I grew up on, and they turned out just fine. But they have practically disappeared from cable and are relegated to various streaming services. One would think Max would celebrate hosting these cultural treasures, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

As a video collector, few things have irked me more than the lack of a definitive collection of Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies, either by character, director, or era. As a result, they have been packaged and repackaged in numerous ways, none of which has them all. So, the best thing about the newly begun Looney Tunes Collector’s Vault is that dozens of these cartoons are coming to Blu-ray for the first time.

“A-Lad-In His Lamp”

Volume One was released last year with 50 shorts, 24 of which had never been remastered for DVD or Blu-ray. Volume Two was delayed as Warner Archive focused instead on Tom and Jerry: The Golden Era Anthology, but it is finally being released on March 24. Disc one offers up 26 never-before-remastered on DVD or Blu-ray, and the second disc has 25 making their Blu-ray debut. All of this is cause for celebration.

Each disc is a hodgepodge of characters and eras, organized alphabetically. Neither disc offers a single Special Feature, which is a disappointment. It does offer audio commentaries, from previous editions, on selected shorts.

What you do get, though, are shorts directed by Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Robert McKimson, Tex Avery, Maurice Noble, Norman McCabe, Phil Monroe, Hawley Pratt, Frank Tashlin, and Richard Thompson, with Mel Blanc’s vocalizations, and music from Norman Spencer, Carl Stalling, Milt Franklyn, and William Lava.

“I Taw a Putty Tat”

The packaging warns us that the content is “intended for the Adult Collector and May Not Be Suitable for Children.” The discs remind us that they represent attitudes and stereotypes specific to their time and do not reflect contemporary attitudes.

With the ass covering out of the way, you can settle back to healthy doses of Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Sylvester, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety, Ralph & Sam, Coyote & Road Runner, Speedy Gonzales, and Pepe Le Pew. There is a sprinkling of shorts with unique characters such as “Bone Sweet Bone” featuring the dog Shep (not the same Shep as seen in other cartoons), Conrad Cat, Spike and Chester, and several Goofy Gophers.

Rewatching these was an interesting experience because some evoked memories, assuring me I had seen them before, while others felt brand new to me. The earliest is from 1935, and the latest is 1963, so you can see characters evolve along with art direction, and the ever-limited animation to fight the budget. I remain a fan of the earlier works, thinking the 50s and 60s shorts get overly stylized, looking locked in a time and place, rather than the more universal look of the first decade or so.

“Boulevardier from the Bronx”

The all-new-to-Blu-ray disc opens with 1948’s “A-Lad-In His Lamp,” a Bugs Bunny feature from McKimson, and features a funny take on the genie.

You can see those changes as you move into the 1950s, such as the spy caper “Boston Quackie” (1957), a Daffy and Porky satire reflecting Cold War tensions. Most definitely recall their era, sometimes requiring footnotes for context, such as “Boulevardier from the Bronx” (1936), which parodies baseball’s Dizzy Dean and Babe Ruth. (The cartoon is noteworthy as being the first to use “Merrily We Roll Along”, as well as the blue color rings and a blue WB Shield in the opening titles.)

“Little Blabbermouse”

Conrad the Cat arrives in “The Bird Came C.O.D.” (1942), the first of the three shorts to use the short-lived character. Another first is “Dr. Jekyll’s Hide” (1954), the first of three that Frend borrowed from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And we get to hear Sylvester speak for the first time in “I Taw a Putty Tat” (1948), using Tweety’s well-known phrase (also a remake of 1943’s ”Puss n’ Booty”.) We also get the first “Little Blabbermouse” cartoon, the last one written by Ben Hardaway, who left to write for Walter Latz. The character was another short-lived creation, although this one featured caricatures of popular celebrities W.C. Fields, Jerry Colonna, Marian Jordan, and even George Washington.

“Bone Seeet Bone”

Another departure seen here is that of Milt Franklyn, who died shortly after completing “Mother was a Rooster” in 1962. He began with Stalling and then succeeded him as music director in 1954. He was scoring a Tweety cartoon at the time of his death, so this is his final full score.

It’s also clear that gags get repeated, as do some of the backgrounds, and they don’t always stick the landing, but more or less end after the antagonist has received their comeuppance. That said, incredible visual inventiveness is required for the mostly silent Ralph, Sam, and Road Runner cartoons. You know what’s coming, but laugh anyway because the setups and payoffs are just so funny. You also see inventive pairings such as the Gophers vs. Elmer Fudd, which creatively challenge the animators and refresh the characters.

Having these restorations almost makes up for the lack of a complete library, and they are well worth repeat viewing.

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Man’s Best by Pornsak Pichetshote, Jesse Lonergan, and Jeff Powell

If I were cynical – and I am, a lot of the time – I’d think of this book as “We 3, but with a happy ending!” or maybe, more vaguely, “We 3 in SPAAAACE!”

That might be reductive, but, really, how many other comics about three uplifted and cyborged animals fighting to save their humans can you think of? Sometimes, the precursor is glaringly obvious.

Man’s Best  is a 2024 SF comic, originally five issues long and then collected into a single book-sized volume, written by Pornsak Pichetshote, drawn and colored by Jesse Lonergan, and lettered by Jeff Powell. (I don’t usually credit letterers, but Powell is on the cover, and I try to defer to the book most of the time.)

There is a starship, heading to an alien planet to test a terraforming device. Earth, of course, is falling apart in the background, for thematically important but non-specific “people are fighting” reasons – it’s not quite the ’70s-standard population-bomb argument, but maybe a revised and updated version of that. Among the humans, there is a Captain and a Doctor, and then an undifferentiated mass of everyone else.

The Doctor – a woman, and very feminine-coded, with big fluffy hair and huge circular glasses – has three animals, said specifically to be for emotional support on this journey. (The Captain is similarly masculine-coded, all craggy features and eyepatch.) But the animals also are heavily cyborged, or maybe just lightly cyborged (one definitely has a new leg) and live inside exoskeletons that augment them. They are Athos, Porthos, and….Lovey; two dogs and a cat, with the cat as the leader in a twist that will amuse anyone who has ever met a cat.

For some reason – this really isn’t clear – the Doctor is running the animals through training sessions in what seems to be a Star Trek holodeck, in which they fight giant robots they call Klangers. This is the beginning of the story, so they do not work well together, and fail. This clearly sets up Narrative Tension for when the animals have to battle robots for real later in the book.

Anyway, the planet they’re supposed to test the terraforming doohickey on is missing, which leads to some doomy speeches from the humans. But a planet suddenly appears, and the ship crashes into it. The animals wake up, somewhat later, in the wreckage. The humans are all gone.

So they decide – not without squabbling, because we need to see them squabble a lot for aforementioned Narrative Tension reasons – to save the Doctor and the Captain, somehow, using their various technological enhancements and The Power of Friendship. (Well, they don’t say the latter.)

The planet they landed on is some kind of third-generation copy of the Well World, with various regions separated by some kind of gates – we don’t see big walls around the hex-equivalents, so it might be implemented somewhat differently, but it’s the same idea: a big planet full of sentients from lots of other planets all over the place, each in their own habitat. And, of course, there are robots that run the whole thing, which are hostile to Our Animal Heroes. Plenty of the inhabitants of the individual regions are somewhat hostile, too, so there’s a lot of running and fighting and squabbling, as the animals see their tech enhancements get degraded, destroyed, or removed along the way.

They also learn a bit about the purpose of this world, and do, of course, eventually get to the Doctor and the Captain, where there is a Shocking Revelation and a big Boss Fight with a robot that looks just like the one from their training. In the aftermath, the animals need to make a decision about The Fate of Earth, and we readers think they make a pretty good one – but it is a bit of a “Lady and the Tiger” ending as to whether their decision will work.

For all of the “Earth is doomed because people Can’t Get Along” talk and the eternally-squabbling animals, this is a fairly positive story: it does come down on the side of humanity being salvageable, which could be a bit of a stretch in a story about uplifted animals made to fight robots. I found it a bit talky but pleasant, and didn’t argue with the premises (how are these animals uplifted? they seem to be just plain shelter rescues who can magically talk to each other in clear idiomatic English and eventually communicate with humans, too) as much as I normally would. And Lonergan is a great story-telling artist, particularly for SF stories like this one: he gives the action sequences a lot of punch and energy.

I found Man’s Best to be somewhat lighter and fluffier than I think it wanted me to, but it’s just fine for what it is. And if you want cyborged-animals-fighting-robots action, it can’t be beat.

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

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REVIEW: Star Trek Deep Space Nine Omnibus

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Omnibus
By Various
384 pages/IDW Publishing/$24.99

While Star Trek: Deep Space Nine may never achieve the commercial success of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, it is, for many, the best of the many series. Produced while the focus was on TNG and the development of Voyager, it allowed the series to delve deeper into characters and themes that its predecessors had not explored. It really found its point of view once the Dominion was introduced, followed by the multi-season war, which led to some of the franchise’s strongest writing. 

It’s little surprise then that IDW waited three years after acquiring the license from Paramount Pictures before publishing any DS9 material. There have been miniseries and one-shots, which are now nicely collected into this omnibus.

Collected are Fool’s Gold, Too Long a Sacrifice, and The Dog of War, along with five short stories. These have been written by Scott Tipton, David Tipton, Mike Chen, Cecil Castellucci, Cavan Scott, Dave Baker, and Thom Zahler, with artists Fabio Mantovani, Emanuela Lapacchino, Francesco Lo Start, Greg Scott, Ángel Hernández, Megan Levens, Josh Hood, Nicole Goux, and Andy Price.

Fool’s Gold (clearly set between seasons three and four) focuses on the space station being a gathering spot for thieves and bounty hunters, testing Constable Odo and Colonel Kira, and delighting Quark. Too Long a Sacrifice (set late sixth season) is an Odo murder mystery, while The Dog of War (a 30th anniversary tribute) is a delightful romp as Quark brings a corgi aboard the station. What no one noticed is that the dog has some Borg components wreaking havoc in its wake.

While this provides entertaining stories, they all lack the real feel of the series, its busy population and numerous subplots dealing with nearby Bajor, the wormhole, the mysterious Founders who dwell within it, or Sisko’s spiritual journey.

These are serviceable and respect the characters and their actors; they don’t really explore anything new or delve deeper. Certainly, the short stories work well given their length, with “The First Year” being the best of the bunch.

Much of the writing is solid and serviceable; the art captures the look and feel of the station and its varied population, along with some nice cameos from races from other corners of the franchise.

Since we’re not getting a movie or even new novels, we have these to provide us with some reading comfort, and if these are new to you, this volume does a good job packaging them together, although there are just a few bonus pages.

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