Category: Reviews

Tentacles at My Throat by Zerocalcare
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Tentacles at My Throat by Zerocalcare

You know how, when you’re a kid, there are rigid rules to life that just seem to be there: generated by the kids themselves, random, unquestionable and bedrock?

Zerocalcare’s graphic novels are set in a world – well, they’re memoirs, officially, so it’s the world inside his head, the real world as he sees it or the way he thinks it’s more entertaining to pretend he sees it – based on that logic. It’s a world full of internal voices – society, peer pressure, desires, the weight of kid opinion – demanding that the main character must do X or Y in this situation, and must never do P or Q, no matter what.

Most of us grow out of that kind of thinking, or at least build different obsessive-compulsive structures in our adulthood. But Michele Rech – the Italian cartoonist who works as Zerocalcare – is not most people.

Tentacles at My Throat  was his second graphic novel, after The Armadillo Prophecy ; it was published in Italy in 2014 and this edition, translated into English by Carla Roncalli di Montorio, came out in 2022. I’ve also seen Forget My Name , which I think was his third book. They’re all that sort of thing: mining the mindset of an obsessive, inward-focused childhood and young adulthood, a life intensely examined.

Of course, Zerocalcare constructs each one of these books carefully and deliberately; this isn’t just a rush of “how I really feel.” One major clue to that construction is that the specific internal voices are very different in each book – the internal voice, the superego if you will, of Armadillo was, yes, an armadillo. But here basically the same role is played by “David the Gnome,” the main character of the TV show based on the ’80s illustrated books. And the internal voices are much less central this time – they pop up to stop Zero from doing things, but aren’t the everyday companion the armadillo was.

So this one is a more typical memoir, made more dramatic and serious – in the way that kids do, when telling stories about their own lives – but mostly realistic and grounded. (There is what I think is a burst of fiction at the end, to tie off one loose end that I suppose Zero never learned the real history of, but nothing like the dive into pure fantasy at the end of Forget.)

Tentacles is a three-part story, centered on his school. The main characters are a group of kids, most centrally Zero himself, his friend Slim – who I suspect may be a composite; he’s appeared in every book so far and has been central in all of them – and their friend Sarah. The three sections are of equal length, taking place when Zero is seven, sixteen, and twenty-seven. The first two center on sneaking out of the school to do something – both in that vaguely transgressive and somewhat ritualized way kids have: “prove you’re brave by sneaking under the fence you’re never supposed to cross, and doing this specific thing to prove you did it.” And the third section is the usual reason former students come back to their old school: someone has died.

Of course Zero obsessed about what happened for years afterwards; that’s what he does. The fact that he “betrayed” one of his friends at the age of seven – as always with Zero, his internal dialogue obsessively focuses on that, on how horrible and unreclaimable he is, how everyone would hate him forever if only they knew the truth, and on and on and on.

And, of course, it’s never as bad as he assumes. That’s the point of this spiraling: it can’t possibly be as bad as the person spiraling worries. I do wonder if the “Zerocalcare” of his stories is going to move forward into that realization at any point, or if they’ll stay stuck in that childhood/young adulthood nexus of fear, doubt, and shame. My understanding is that he’s shifted formats over the past few years – moved from telling these stories in graphic novel form into telling them in animated TV-show form, so he can run through them all again and do the same thing over – but, eventually, the character of Zero will have to move out of the conflicted, neurotic twenty-something life, right?

As always with Zerocalcare, I find it’s a bit too overwrought for me. I want to reach into the page, shake Zero, and tell him to just mellow out – nothing is as earth-shaking or as central as he’s sure every last bit of it is.

(Or maybe he’s right, because this is the world he constructed. As far as I can tell, his group of friends have already utterly ruined the lives of two of their schoolmates, and that’s played for laughs. Ha ha! Lifelong trauma because they happened to be there, and aren’t the heroes! It’s funny!)

I guess I’m saying that I appreciate the skill and craft and energy of Zerocalcare’s work, but I hope he’s massively exaggerating a lot of this stuff, because otherwise he and his buddies come across, frankly, as a bunch of horrible little monsters. More than most kids, even.

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

REVIEW: Young Hag and the Witches Quest
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REVIEW: Young Hag and the Witches Quest

Young Hag and the Witches Quest
By Isabel Greenberg
272 pages/Amulet Books/$24.99

The Arthurian legends wax and wane through the years and 2024 is shaping up to be a year of revival. Specifically, on Tuesday, Lev Grossman’s new novel The Bright Sword, will tell of the days after Camelot fell. It follows the May release of this charming and witty graphic novel, also set in the years after Arthur.

The legend has morphed and changed and been retconned since the first stories were set in print. Some know the tales first from Disney’s 1963 Sword in the Stone and Theodore White’s Once and Future King. Others know it from the BBC young adult series Merlin or, more likely, Monty Python and the Holy Grail or its Broadway adaptation Spamalot. As a result, conflicting details have emerged giving contemporary writers license to be freewheeling with the various sources of material.

Here, Greenberg, a British creator who has been telling fanciful stories for years, tackles a generation after Arthur. Young Hag arrives to complete the required Mother, Maiden, and Crone triumvirate, and we discover that the Ancient Crone is an aged Morgan le Fay. As they journey across England, stories are told, cleverly filling readers in on what came before. Or at least the broad strokes. It’s interesting to see what was kept, what was ignored, and what was modified.

It’s a time when the magic, like Arthur, has gone, but the wicked remain. Babies have been stolen, and changelings have been left in their place. Young Hag is determined to help a few who have been victimized. This leads them to the Goblin Market, and from there, we are off and running.

I personally find Greenberg’s art very off-putting, spoiling my enjoyment of the clever writing and sharp dialogue. She does an excellent job with her characters and leavens the drama and action with wry humor.

The storytelling is wonderful, coupled with a fine limited color palette.

Greenberg nicely takes her time telling the story, letting it breathe and providing the scope an epic quest deserves. This will be a welcome book for young adults who know nothing about the Knights of the Round Table or are curious about what happens next.

Coin-Op Comics Anthology: 1997-2017 by Maria Hoey and Peter Hoey
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Coin-Op Comics Anthology: 1997-2017 by Maria Hoey and Peter Hoey

I should have realized they were commercial illustrators – their work has all of the hallmarks. The polish, the construction, the architecture of the comics panels. It all shows a deep insight into design and a deep concern for design, for telling stories precisely and sharply.

I didn’t quite realize that the first few times I read the work of siblings Maria Hoey and Peter Hoey – the full-length graphic novel The Bend of Luck  and the connected themed collection Animal Stories . I said that their work reminded me of other kinds of art – advertising, Flash games, informative pamphlets, and so on – but didn’t quite make the leap to say that’s because they do that other kind of work as well. They live in that world; they think in those terms.

Successful illustrators who make comics are rare, if only because comics are so vastly less remunerative than illustration. There’s a text appreciation in this book, by Monte Beauchamp, who “discovered” the Hoeys for comics as editor of Blab! in the ’90s, pointing that out, and doing a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation of just how much money they could have made with the same number of pictures for commercial clients.

Coin-Op Comics Anthology: 1997-2017  collects the first twenty years of their short comics work, in a quirky reverse order. So it starts with Coin-Op magazine itself, which they self-publish . Issue five comes first, then four, and so on. Before that – it’s unclear if it’s all structured in reverse-chronological order, or otherwise structured for a particular reading experience – are the earlier stories from Blab!

(This is no longer the complete Coin-Op. Issue 9 came out last year; they seem to have a new issue about every other year, plus the regular stream of longer works.)

There are a lot of stories here, and I’m not going to try to list them all. Some are straightforward narratives, but many are more dreamlike, or design-driven. There’s a series of illustrated “articles” about jazz musicians – all of them, I think, entirely fictional – and some pieces that seem to be mostly song lyrics (original, I think) turned into visual art. There’s another series about two sad-sack characters, anthropomorphic dogs or dog-headed men, named Saltz and Pepz who get into various scrapes during what seems to be the Great Depression. They also have a few stories in a twelve-panel grid, showing the same wide scene each page, as big events crash or break across multiple panels and characters.

Many of the stories are set in the vague past, what I think of as the ’30s or the ’50s – not during The War, not during anything major or notable – with boxy cars and people in constructed suits and all the furniture of a world that’s familiar and stable and entirely gone.

And even the pieces I call straightforward are very Hoey-esque: designed, often to the point of being schematic, telling stories as much in the ways the panels are laid out on the page as in the things that happen in those panels. None of it is obvious; none of their work is ever obvious, I’m coming to believe.

There’s a lot of depth and interest in Coin-Op: a lot of time and thought when into every panel here. Even the wordless, imagistic stories – which, as a Word Person, I had to admit I didn’t really “get” – are full of wonders and surprises. The Hoeys are as interested in how they tell stories, how they present moments visually , how those visually feel, as they are in the story being told.

They’re illustrators. It’s what they do. And they do it really well.

(I’ve hit the end here, and neglected to note that some pieces here – I think mostly older work, but not necessarily – were co-written by Charles Paul Freund. The song lyrics in particular seem to be mostly from Freund. It’s not really clear how the Hoeys work together – other than they both write and both draw, from opposite ends of the American continent, on what I assume are the same digital pages somewhat simultaneously – so Freund adds another layer of “how does this fit in” to the mix. That’s all unimportant, frankly: the work is the work, however it got made or whoever did what.)

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

Hedra by Jesse Lonergan
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Hedra by Jesse Lonergan

My skills as a reviewer don’t line up well with this book’s strengths, so this may be a mess. I apologize up front.

Hedra  is an Eisner Award-winning short wordless graphic novel by Jesse Lonergan from 2020, and I’m mostly a words person. It uses grids in a really interesting way, breaking up pages – especially at the beginning – into escalating arrays of little boxes, and masterfully leading the eye through complex layouts throughout its length. I usually write about what comics mean, but I don’t think I can do that here – I’ll have to instead just say what I see.

We open with a limited nuclear apocalypse – I say “limited” because we immediately see things rebuilding afterward. Some government builds a starship, and picks an astronaut to fly it. That is our main character: I assume her name is Hedra. (The title could mean something else, I suppose: maybe the name of the ship, of the other major character who shows up later, of the planet they investigate, or something even less likely. But let’s assume it’s our main character.)

She explores various worlds, presumably sending data back home. She’s clearly diligent and good at her work. And then she sees a giant robot (this is my assumption – it’s huge and humanoid and made of metal) flying through space, and follows it or coincidentally lands on the same planet next.

We see her exploring this world in more detail, and the giant robot doing the same, somewhere not too far away. We also see the planet’s inhabitants, who are hostile to the giant robot. (I guess we’re supposed to think of them as evil or enemies, but if a giant robot landed and started stomping around my planet, I don’t think my response would be all that happy.) Hedra finds the robot, and helps him escape the locals. Both flee this planet.

Now, here’s something I might have gotten wrong, or misunderstood. I thought the giant robot was roughly the same size as Hedra’s ship – i.e., substantially larger than she is. But when they flee, they’re the same size. Did one or the other of them change size through some skiffy mechanism? Or did I just misunderstand their initial encounter? (Is it just the locals who were tiny?)

Anyway, they fly off together, without Hedra’s ship, off to the robot’s home planet, where Hedra has a minor transformation of her own, and a substantial change in her mission going forward. We end with a very science-fictional iris-out.

Hedra is interesting and eye-catching and full of things to think about, told brilliantly through pure comics. I haven’t seen Lonergan’s comics since the very different (but also very good) All-Star  a decade ago, but I’m glad to see he’s still out there working, making great (and, I should mention, very Moebius-inspired) works like this one.

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

REVIEW: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
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REVIEW: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

The surprise success of Ghostbusters: Afterlife breathed new life into a moribund franchise, giving us a new generation of supernatural sleuths to cheer for. It was very touching to see the original quartet (Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, and the late Harold Ramis) suit up one more time and kick ghostly ass. But, it was clear the torch was being passed to Egon Spengler’s daughter, Callie) Carrie Coon, and her children Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), along with their science teacher Gary Gooberson (Paul Rudd). With her inheritance of the original Ghostbusters HQ, the stage was set.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the result, and the film, out now on streaming and disc, is a hodge-podge of characters, concepts, and conundrums that are so filled with characters the emotional undercurrents are given the shortest of shrift.

Phoebe is clearly the genius, the true heir to Egon, but her youthfulness gets her sidelined by Mayor Walter Peck (William Atherton), who has harbored a grudge against the team, regardless of lineup, since the 1980s. She is also struggling and uncertain of Gary’s role in their family since he and Callie appear romantically involved, but little is said.

Her thread has the most interesting possibilities, especially as she begins playing chess with Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), a ghost. Unfortunately, it is ignored for large stretches as the film tries to service everyone else, including the original team.

Instead, Stantz acquires an ancient artifact from Nadeem Razmaadi (Kumail Nanjiani), who has ignored his family’s history in favor of being a slacker. This artifact contains the trapped spirit of Garraka, an ancient being who wanted to destroy life on Earth. Conveniently, he has started to assert his control just as the containment unit has reached capacity and a new home for the trapped ghostly spirits is located.

Here’s where the story starts to fall apart. We have no idea how Garraka began to assert his control over people or how he knew to target Melody, using her as a pawn. Some new pseudo-science is introduced at  Dr. Winston Zeddemore’s upgraded facility in New Jersey, which also brought back Lucky Domingo (Celeste O’Connor) and introduced us to Dr. Lars Pinfield (James Acaster). See? It’s pretty packed. And that’s before we mention the return of Janine Melitz (Annie Potts) and Podcast (Logan Kim) or the unnecessary addition of Dr. Hubert Wartzki (Patton Oswalt).

The film looks great and is stuffed with callbacks to the first two films in the franchise, along with the reappearance of Slimer and Ghostly Librarian. But no one really gets a satisfying story arc; everything is done with shorthand, and believe it or not, some expected moments never come to pass.

It’s entertaining enough, but it lacks the charm and originality that set these films apart. Some of that can be blamed on Jason Reitman, whose father created the series. He and incoming director Gil Kenna share the script credit, so the blame falls to them for a lack of storytelling discipline, which is in favor of more and more spectacle. The $201.7 million worldwide box office may be the scariest part of the film, likely dooming the franchise from moving forward for some time.

Thankfully, the 4K Ultra HD transfer looks spectacular. Every icicle, proton beam, and ghostly reflection looks amazing on the home screen. The 2160p is sharp and amazing with an equally impressive 1080p Blu-ray, part of the Combo Pack, along with the Digital HD code.

The Dolby Atmos audio is up to the task of matching the superb visuals.

The Blu-ray offers all the Special Features and, while plentiful, feels more perfunctory than celebratory. We have  Audio Commentary – With director/co-writer Gil Kenan (also on the 4K); Return to the Firehouse (21:00)  Busting: Capturing the Ghosts of Frozen Empire (11:00) ; Easter Eggs Unleashed (7 minutes); Manifesting Garraka (3:00); New York, New Gear (7:00); Welcome to the Paranormal Discovery Center (4:00); Knowing the Score (7:00); and Deleted & Extended Scenes (9:00).

Fall Through by Nate Powell
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Fall Through by Nate Powell

This book is already dancing about architecture. So I worry that anything I might say would compound that – painting a picture of dancing about architecture. But here I am, and here I go.

Fall Through  is Nate Powell’s new graphic novel this year: it has what I think of as his trademark atmospheric, black-background, swirling pages and vaguely creepy, unexplained and deeply embedded fantasy elements. I found myself resisting it more than some of his earlier books: as always, I can only say how I reacted, and note that it’s as likely to have been me as the book.

This is the story of a punk band, Diamond Mine. They formed in 1994, recorded a 7″, did a bunch of touring, had a following. They lived together in a house, all seemingly in their early twenties. They were part of a wider punk scene across the Midwest and South, with clusters of more-or-less angry, more-or-less young people in every mid-sized town or larger, putting on mostly illegal shows in fields or backyards or wherever and running away when the cops came to break it up. None of that paid – if you actually made gas money, you were way ahead.

Punk, you know?

Jody was one of the four members of the band. She played bass and sang, at least some of the time. She wasn’t the leader and songwriter: that was Diana. She wasn’t the flashy guitarist: that was Napoleon. She wasn’t the quiet, solid-as-a-rock drummer: that was Steff. But she’s our viewpoint character.

Fall Through takes place mostly in 1994. But we also see Jody, seeming the same age, or just a few years younger, in 1978, back in what Gen X me thinks of as the actual age of punk. (Punk was a movement. It happened, and ended, like every other movement. Even early ’80s hardcore was something else. Everything later was revivals and different things, just like “rockabilly” now isn’t what it meant in the ’50s.)

How did Jody get from being 18ish in 1978 to being 23ish in 1994? Well, that’s the story here.

Most of the book is about a tour. It’s the summer of 1994, and the four members of Diamond Mine are in a van, going from town to town to play shows with local acts – again, mostly not legally, and the only way they get paid is if they sell some merch.  Like any tour, it seems to be endless, days stretching on and on, each one like the last. Like it never began and will never end, just a single day, over and over again.

And that may be true. Diana wrote a song – “Fall Through” – and when Diamond Mine plays it the right way, at the climax of a show, they seem to change worlds or times or something. The flap copy calls it “transported to alternate worlds in which they’ve never existed but their band’s legend has.” I don’t know about that: it all seems to still be 1994, and they have tour dates day after day, which implies their band exists and is known.

Really, it feels like a reset. Maybe different worlds, but not that different from each other. Certainly not the wild swings in time and space the description implies. All still that same tour, the same van, rambling through mid-America during the summer of 1994. More punk shows: one every night, potentially forever. Like August keeps resetting – this time St. Louis, the next time Louisville.

Diana seems to be doing this on purpose. Once there’s a frightening figure – coming out of a surrounding cornfield, like a horror movie, during their set – that she clearly triggers the song, the spell to get away from. And it’s taken a while, but the rest of the band knows something is wrong.

There are confrontations, but it’s all in vague language – “moving forward,” “sticking together,” that kind of thing. I expect punks to be louder, more demanding – to swear a lot more, for one thing. (I guess these are well-behaved, Southern, second generation punks.)

So the book never explains what’s happening or why. They talk around it a few times, but that’s all. There’s never even a “this band is going to break up” fight or possibility or option: it’s as if they’re all locked into this, no matter what they want or choose.

The situation does get resolved in the end, and we do circle back to 1978…but the ways and hows of it frustrated me. It’s all thematically appropriate, but not dramatically. The plot doesn’t go anywhere, the actions of the characters aren’t really important to the ending. It’s a book about an endless punk tour, about community and scene, rather than being a story about these things that happened to these people.

We never learn why this happened. We never learn how this song works. We never learn who that mysterious figure was, if he was actually chasing them, or anything. In the end, it all doesn’t matter, all those explanations are beside the point Powell wants to make. But I was here to find out all those things, and I don’t have any particular nostalgia for “wasn’t it awesome to be young and in a punk band?”

So I found this book incredibly frustrating: it avoided all of the things I wanted to know and focused entirely on things I found vague and trite. It’s lovely and thoughtful: Powell draws as well as ever and his people are real and precise. They just all waffle on about the least interesting things, and then go on to play another show as if none of that happened, which makes very little sense to me.

Your mileage may vary. If you’ve ever been in a band, particularly. And Powell is one of our best, so I won’t ignore the fact that I might have missed something major. But the Fall Through I read was not the book I was hoping for.

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

REVIEW: Dexter’s Laboratory: The Complete Series
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REVIEW: Dexter’s Laboratory: The Complete Series

I must admit that I missed Dexter’s Laboratory when it originally aired on the Cartoon Network from 1996-2003. Friends raved about its charm and humor and the brilliance of animator Genndy Tartakovsky. So, the arrival of Dexter’s Laboratory: The Complete Series is welcome. On sale today from Warner Home Entertainment, the set includes all 78 episodes plus the special Dexter’s Laboratory: Ego Trip.

According to the press release, the show is about half-Einstein, half-third grader Dexter.  This boy genius creates the most amazing inventions in the top-secret and highly advanced laboratory attached to his room.  But his genius can’t stop his space-brained sister Dee Dee from messing up and his work and pushing his buttons.  Or his annoying rival Mandark Astronomonov from constantly trying to one-up him.  Can Dexter use his intelligence to solve his problems?  Time to fight fire with…SCIENCE!

Well, who doesn’t love science?

What’s nice here is that Dexter and his rival are both very smart third graders, and the series celebrates smart people. Mom and Dad are somehow entirely clueless to the secrets hidden in Dexter’s bedroom, an annoying trope. However, Dee Dee finds the gadgets and gizmos and is clever enough to use them.

In addition to Dexter’s exploits, the first two seasons included segments featuring Monkey, Dexter’s pet lab-monkey, and the Justice Friends, a trio of superheroes sharing an apartment.

The show wasn’t afraid to experiment, such as the second season’s finale, the 25-minute “Last But Not Beast”. And after working on The PowerPuff Girls, Tartakovsky came back for Ego Trip, intending it to be the last word on Dexter.

Tartakovsky’s quirky sense of humor is clear in these seasons, especially when compared with the work of Chris Savino, who stepped in to run the series after the show seemingly ended and Tartakovsky moved on to Samurai Jack. The look and feel were okay but lacked the spark that made Dexter so funny.

The strong voice cast of Christine Cavanaugh, Allison Moore, Kath Soucie, Jeff Bennett, Kat Cressida, Eddie Deezen, and Candi Milo helped convey that sense of whimsy. After Cavanaugh died recently, Tartakovsky said he couldn’t imagine rebooting the show without her.

Interestingly, “Dial M for Monkey: Barbequor” and “Rude Removal” were banned from broadcast and are absent from the collection, making it a little less complete.

The 1080p transfer is just fine, retaining the sharp colors and images from the series; the Dolby Digital Audiotrack is equally good, so these are fine to rewatch at home.

No Special features were included.

Nancy by Olivia Jaimes
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Nancy by Olivia Jaimes

It’s not often that a syndicate gets praise for how they handle the transition on a legacy comic. This is the biggest example I can think of, and one of the biggest transitions in decades. By comparison, the new Flash Gordon artist this year is more typical: breathing new life into a beloved old feature by doing basically the same thing, just with more zip and energy.

Olivia Jaimes wasn’t doing the same thing with Nancy in 2018. What was once a finely tuned engine of precisely drawn gags by Ernie Bushmiller had devolved into a bland collection of glurge, drawn by Guy Gilchrist as the demented spawn of Precious Moments and Art Frahm. But Nancy had been through transitions before: it’s easy to forget that Bushmiller himself took over a strip then called Fritzi Ritz in 1925, added Nancy as a character, and shifted the whole strip based on what he wanted to do and what the audience wanted to see.

Jaimes – even today, her actual identity is a closely guarded secret; all that’s publicly known is that she had a webcomic before Nancy, is female, and is believed to be relatively young – looked backwards to Bushmiller in some things, like her fondness for meta gags and references to “the cartoonist.” She also dragged Nancy entirely into the modern world, something the very backward-looking Gilchrist had no interest in doing.

The syndicate seems to be pitching Nancy these days to actual kids, which is a major change from the last three or four decades. I don’t know how many actual eight-year-olds identify with Nancy – maybe, she’s prickly and demanding and self-centered and sure of her own righteousness like so many real-world kids of that age – but I guess that’s working for them.

This book – just called Nancy  – came out less than a year after Jaimes started the strip, back in 2019. I don’t know if it’s her complete first six months, but it’s something like that: this is how it started, what the big transition looked like from the other side. Compared to the work Jaimes is doing on the strip now – more than five years later – it’s simpler, starker in its drawing and more in-your-face Internet-meme-y in its gags, than the more organic, story-driven work she’s doing now.

I miss some of that anything-can-happen atmosphere of the early Jaimes years: it felt a bit more Bushmillerian then, since he was always a cartoonist who would draw absolutely anything in service of the best gag he had for that day. But this book is a good record of those days: a somewhat blockier Nancy and Sluggo, their eyes bigger and less expressive, their clothes more templated and old-fashioned, their dialogue more aggressively mentioning newer technology.

Even if you didn’t catch “Sluggo Is Lit” the first time around, check this out if you like smart gag cartoons. Nancy was always a great engine for them, and Jaimes tuned that engine back up and got it running beautifully.

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

REVIEW: Spider-Man: Cosmic Chaos!
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REVIEW: Spider-Man: Cosmic Chaos!

Spider-Man: Cosmic Chaos!
By Mike Maihack
Amulet/96 pagers/#1299 (hardcover), $9.99 (digital)

I like Mike Maihack’s artwork, which I find accessible and lots of fun. I feel bad for taking him to task for his popular Cleopatra in Space, but that was years ago, and lately, he’s been producing material far more to my liking.

Here, we have the third of his Spider-Man team-up books aimed at 6-9-year-olds. His storytelling sensibilities are sharp and approachable. Maihack told School Library Journal, “For a more established character like Spidey, it was about tapping into his friendly and neighborly disposition toward everything. Those are both things I could completely connect with. After that, I find it pretty intuitive to know how each character is going to react when you confront them with other characters or toss them into a giant mess of a situation. No matter where they come from, I discover ways of making them my own.”

So, we have a Spider-Man missing the angst who is adventuring in stories scaled to the readership, which includes simplified versions of the Marvel Universe’s denizens. In this story, he finds himself in space, trying to return the Silver Surfer’s surfboard to him. Along the way, he finds himself coming into possession of a vurbfzax, a cosmic talisman. Just seven were manufactured as rare premiums in Celestrio’s cereal and Rocket warns, “Combining all seven can have universe-shattering consequences!” (I suppose this is for readers too young to know about the Infinity Stones.)

Of course, all seven will be brought together, and cosmic wackiness ensures, bringing in Ego the Living Planet, Galactus, the Watcher, and the Collector. Things are looking pretty bad until the resolution presents itself in a surprising way.

There are some fine running gags about waffles and dolphins, and the core essence of the Marvel characters is nicely distilled for easy accessibility.

The packed story actually unfolds in a well-paced way, never crowding the artwork and making sure the characters each get a chance to shine.

This one makes for solid reading if you have someone looking for summer adventures.

Time Under Tension by M.S. Harkness
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Time Under Tension by M.S. Harkness

How do any of us choose the next book to read? Looking at a big list of possibilities – all things you don’t know well, all things new and different – what sparks the thought “that one”?

This time, it was hair.

On the cover of Time Under Tension , her major 2023 graphic memoir, creator M.S. Harkness draws her hair as a giant, swoopy, structural thing – almost a separate, solid object, like a shark’s fin. That said to me “this is a creator who is comfortable with caricature, who gets that cartooning is how to put complicated ideas down on the page. She’s going to be interesting to read on a craft and structure level.”

I don’t want to say “I was right.” Let’s say I accurately noticed some clear strengths in Harkness’s immediate, uncompromising work. Let’s say that she both has the drawing and page-layout chops to tell a difficult story well, and both the material in her own life and the mental strength to turn that into art to work from. Let’s say I was not disappointed.

This is autobiographical: I assume it’s true as much as any memoir is, that some characters may be somewhat fictionalized or events moved in time or dialogue reconstructed to work better on the page. It feels real. Harkness has an immediacy, in her bold lines and her in-your-face storytelling, that tells the reader she is not fucking around here.

We open just before her art-school graduation, in what turns out to be an extended prologue that jumps back and forth in time during that taut moment of almost that is the month before that big day. All of the work is done; the group show is being hung. Harkness knows she will graduate. There’s a moment where a teacher bluntly tells her “I had to keep everyone else from failing. I was never really worried about you. Your art career or whatever…you’ll be fine.”

This section sets up the tensions and issues Harkness will be working through during the bulk of the book, rolling out over most of the next year.

And, no matter what that art professor thought, she is not fine.

She’s organized, focused, driven. She has a plan and multiple goals. She’s working on her first graphic novel and studying to become a personal trainer. She has a sympathetic fellow-artist roommate as a support system, and is plugged into the larger comics world.

She’s also doing random one-off sex-work jobs to plug holes in her budget. The book description says she’s also selling weed for the same purpose, but we really don’t see that in the story. She has a messy relationship with an up-and-coming MMA fighter – she is, or was, his dealer, and a fuck-buddy for this guy who already has a “girlfriend.” She wants to be more to him than he’s willing to give, and he keeps coming back but is at least honest about what’s going on.

Behind all that is a horrible childhood: a sexually abusive father about to get out of prison and reaching out through some kind of reparations program to make an “apology” she wants nothing to do with. A mother who means well but who Harkness sees as weak and doesn’t have much in common with.

I don’t want to psychoanalyze her, especially based on her own presentation. But there’s clearly trauma there that she’s still trying to get away from, and a complex nexus of physicality: working out herself, helping other people’s bodies get strong as a trainer, the random paid sex, the toll on arms and back from hunching over a drawing board. Time Under Tension isn’t really about all of those physical demands on her body, and how they intersect with each other, but I wouldn’t be surprised if her next book was – or the book after that. 

Harkness seeks out therapists, which doesn’t go well. She knows she’s driven and goal-focused, but feels like she’s not connecting with people: they’re all just roles in this march forward, each one just a piece of one of her projects.

She has to work it out herself, the same way she does everything. More work, more pushing forward, one day at a time.

In the way of comics, it may be telling the story of a few years ago: I see that Harkness is now thirty-one. Time Under Tension was Harkness’s third book; the first two were also comics memoirs. She’s said that she intends to do five books in this “series.” But this one stands alone: it tells a full story brilliantly, with an unblinking eye on her own life and problems.

And her hair is magnificent. Harkness has a stark style with strategically deployed spots of black, and her hair is the most consistent large black element on most of these pages, drawing the eye to its complexity and unruliness. I wonder if we will see that hair settle down in future books, as Harkness moves forward in life and gets her demons more under control. I hope so. I’d love to see it.

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

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