Category: Reviews

OMNIBUS REVIEW: Giant-Size Steve Ditko

OMNIBUS REVIEW: Giant-Size Steve Ditko

As we await Jonathan Ross’s BBC4 documentary “In Search Of Steve Ditko," I suggest reading Marvel’s Amazing Fantasy Omnibus; it’s one swell way to pass the time.

Sure, Ditko will be remembered forever as the creator and co-creator of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and maybe The Creeper and Shade the Changing Man. Jonathan’s documentary will help cement his role as comics’ most famous recluse, and many will continue to regard Steve as a man of principle, even if some disagree with that principle. The Amazing Fantasy Omnibus shows us what the man was up to the day before he co-created the Web-slinger.

In a sense, this hefty (416 page) tome is oddly named. It reprints the entire 15-issue run of… well, a book that was always titled “Amazing” and usually titled “Fantasy,” but was only once called Amazing Fantasy. And that was its last issue. The one that introduced Spider-Man.

Originally titled Amazing Adventures, the book was little more than an addition to Marvel’s dominant monster and mystery line – Tales to Astonish, Journey Into Mystery, Strange Tales, and Tales of Suspense. And like its sister titles, Amazing Adventures offered the efforts of writer/editor Stan Lee and artists Don Heck, Jack Kirby (inked by Dick Ayers) and Paul Reinman – on a series called Doctor Droom, no less. But with issue #7, the book morphed into Amazing ADULT Fantasy (emphasis mine) and it became pure Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. And it became magic.

A month earlier, I would not deign to pick up what we now call a Marvel comic book. I had just turned 11 and I didn’t care for monsters and mystery – at the time – and Patsy and Hedy didn’t do much for me either. At the time. But at the end of August in 1961 out of sheer boredom I picked up the first issue of a superhero-looking book called Fantastic Four, so I was open to their efforts.

But the title confused me. “Amazing ADULT Fantasy”? Would kindly Pharmacist Herman Orlove even sell this comic book to me? It said “The Magazine That Respects Your Intelligence” right there on the cover. Well, I was intelligent. Intelligent enough to hide the issue in the middle of my stack of comics, each and every one priced at 10 cents. Orlove never knew, and my place on his junior league baseball team remained safe.

The art … staggered me. I had seen nothing like Steve Ditko. It wasn’t good, in the sense that Kirby was larger than life and Curt Swan was life itself. But it was perfectly suited for the creepy stories in this comic book. I couldn’t explain it, and I still can’t. But I learned the lesson.

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TV REVIEW: Flash Gordon

TV REVIEW: Flash Gordon

Okay, I’ll get this over with real fast. Sci-Fi Channel’s new Flash Gordon show really sucks. I sat through the 90-minute pilot, and I sat through the next episode. No more. Life is too short.

Here’s the first tip-off: Flash Gordon creator Alex Raymond is not in the opening credits. Hell, he got better (far better) treatment in that campy movie from 1980. Say what you will about that movie, compared to this waste of time that movie was [[[Citizen Kane in Outer Space]]].

Second tip-off: No rocketships. Rocketships are not “dated.” In fact, we launched one into space with a whole bunch of people in it right when this show debuted. Doing Flash Gordon without rocketships is like doing The Lone Ranger without horses. Hi-yo, moccasins!

Third tip-off: They only refer to Dr. Zarkov by name once in the 90-minute pilot and once in the subsequent episode. That’s crazy. Dr. Zarkov is to Flash Gordon what Dr. Watson is to [[[Sherlock Holmes]]].

Mind you, if there were a real Hans Zarkov, he’d sue. The real Zarkov was a genius; this guy is a bumbling fool. The real Zarkov was driven mad by the fact that he could save the Earth from destruction but had no way to do it; once Flash appeared on the scene and they got to Mongo (in their rocketship!) he got better.

Fourth tip-off: No longer merciless, Ming is a dick. He’s about as threatening as [[[Garfield]]] after a place of lasagna. I understand they wanted to update the character – these guys should have taken a cue from the way Russell Davies updated The Master on Doctor Who. Ming wouldn’t even make it as a member of George Bush’s cabinet, and from the first (and for me, only) 150 minutes of the series, he’s not even that competent. Plus, he looks about seven weeks older than his daughter.

So here’s my question. Why the hell did these people pay King Features for the license? They could have saved themselves a bundle and called this limp and lame pile of fly-feed “Bill Jones.”

If you’re a fan of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon or of the 1930s serials, avoid this teevee waste like Chinese toothpaste.

Artwork copyright King Features Syndicate, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

STRIP REVIEW: LoserPalooza

STRIP REVIEW: LoserPalooza

First, the consumer report: LoserPalooza is a treasury-sized collection, which means it’s larger and more expensive than the usual run of comic-strip collections, and also that it collects strips from two previous smaller collections. In this case, LoserPalooza has the comics from Say Cheezy and Scrum Bums. LoserPalooza does have the Sunday strips in color, though, so it’s not entirely twice-baked beans. (It’s also rarely clear whether a strip is being reprinted in its entirety to begin with, or if all of the strips from the smaller collections make it into the Treasuries; specifically, it’s not clear in this case.)

Get Fuzzy is one of the most successful new strips of the past decade, and possibly the most successful strip launch since Dilbert in 1989. (The competition includes strips like Pickles, Baby Blues, and Adam @ Home, which aren’t as edgy as Get Fuzzy and so are probably in more papers daily. On the other hand, Get Fuzzy seems to be one of the most successful comics when it comes to selling reprint collections, so it’s hard to tell which strip actually makes the most money or has the most readers.) In any case, it’s still fairly young, for a daily newspaper strip, and it’s grown to a lot of papers pretty quickly.

As the characters note in a storyline mid-way through this book, Get Fuzzy could be seen as a Bizarro-world version of Garfield. A man of indeterminate age (Rob Wilco) lives with a cat (Bucky) and a dog (Satchel), and funny stuff ensues. Except, in Get Fuzzy, we don’t identify with the cat – Bucky is clearly insane (as all cats are). Satchel is lovable but dim, also like most dogs. And Rob isn’t quite as much of a loser as Jon Arbuckle. Well, he is a vegan rugby fan who hasn’t had a date in years, does something unspecified involving crunching numbers, and roots for the Red Sox – so maybe I should say that he’s a more realistic loser than Jon is. Get Fuzzy doesn’t have the ground-into-the-turf running jokes Garfield does – and I hope it won’t, even if it runs for thirty years – but it’s vastly younger than Garfield is, and hasn’t had time to get stale.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Shenanigans

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Shenanigans

Yes, the title is “Shenanigans,” with quotation marks already in place. No, I don’t know why. It’s not a direct quote, there’s no place named Shenanigans in the story, and it doesn’t seem to be an ironic “air-quote,” either. (There’s more than one bar in this book that could easily have been named Shenanigans, but none of them actually are.) It’s just an annoying, unnecessary tic.

“Shenanigans” is pleasant but unexceptional, a frothy romantic comedy that I suspect started off as a screenplay and probably would have worked better in filmed form. It takes place in St. Louis, where our creepy main character, Holden, gets kicked out of his girlfriend’s apartment at Christmas-time for obsessively playing videogames instead of going out to dinner with her. I’m not sure how old he is; he seems to be a student, but we really don’t get a sense of his normal day-to-day life or a solid idea of what he does for a living. The one thing we see him doing seems like a college work-study program: teaching kids to play hockey. Although…he does seem to sponge off the women in his life, which may be a clue as to his lifestyle.

Holden meets a young woman named Casey, and moves in with her that night. (Help me out here: is that as weird and unrealistic as I think it is, or are twenty-somethings really that friendly these days?) They also sleep in the same bed the night they meet, but don’t have sex, which is just a bizarre combination, especially since the story takes pains to point out that they didn’t have sex. Between the scenes that we see, they drift into something like a normal boyfriend-girlfriend relationship (except for the fact that he’s sponging off her as he did with his last girlfriend), and presumably they start having sex at some point…though the story doesn’t feel the need to explain that point.

Then the story finally starts: Casey has been working as a waitress, but decides to start tutoring college students in math instead. Her qualifications: she’s really really good at mental arithmetic, and she’s totally hot. (No, seriously. There’s no sign that she has a math degree, or anything of that nature. So she seems to be coaching college students in, at best, high-school algebra. My opinion of the fine colleges of St. Louis is still diving as I type this.) Since she’s totally hot, all of her clients are horndog young men who think they’re going to score with her, so her tutoring sessions consist mostly of her edging away from them. She doesn’t seem to realize this, which I suppose makes her some sort of idiot savant…or maybe not a savant. Speaking of not realizing things, her advertisements are clearly based on those for prostitutes, which Holden instantly realized (well, he would, wouldn’t he?), but Casey just doesn’t see.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Notes for a War Story

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Notes for a War Story

In its original Italian form, Notes for a War Story won the 2005 Goscinny Prize for Best Script and was the Best Book of the Year for 2006 at the Angouleme comics festival, so I have to assume that it’s one of the very best European works of recent years. Which is unfortunate, since I found it only moderately successful.

It’s set in an unnamed European country, during an unnamed conflict among unspecified groups, in the vaguely recent past. All the non-specificity is meant to give it an aura of timelessness, or of dislocation, or something like that, but it left this reader feeling as if I were wandering about in a fog. Compared to the specificity and closely-observed detail of a book like Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, Notes from a [[[War Story]]] is thin and ineffectual, unwilling to commit to being for anything, or against anything other than the very abstract idea of war.

The plot follows three young men – Giuliano, Christian, and Little Killer – who are scavenging in a region of small villages being bombed by enemy forces. They’re not in the armed forces, and they never encounter anything like regular armed forces, not even as much as seeing a bomber in the sky. They’re supposedly in the middle of a war, but they are actually seen in a mostly-depopulated landscape, drifting into gangsterhood.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Laika

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Laika

This graphic novel is pretty good just on its own terms, but it’s an excellent object lesson. If you know of anyone who thinks that comics are essentially limited in scope to brightly-clad folks punching each other with great vigor, this will help to expand their horizons. It’s the story of Laika, a Russian dog who was the first living creature from Earth deliberately sent outside the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s an impressively-researched story braiding a fictional back-story for Laika (and several other characters I believe are also fictionalized) with the story of the “Chief Designer” of the early Russian space program, Sergei Korolev. And all that is told in comics, and, I suspect, primarily aimed at the grade 6-12 audience.

I’m not familiar with Adadzis’s work, but the note on him in [[[Laika]]] calls him an editorial consultant who “creates words and pictures for a living and loves both equally.” According to his website, muck of his work has been for children, especially recently, though he did something called Millennium Fever (with Duncan Fegredo) for Vertigo in 1995 and [[[Children of the Voyager]]] (with Paul Johnson) for Marvel in 1993.

Laika is a dense book; we start off with a flashback to Korolev’s release from the gulag in 1939, stop briefly at the first successful Sputnik launch in 1957, and then dive back into a long account of the life of a dog. (Who, as we all can guess, eventually becomes Laika.) This graphic novel is about two hundred pages long, and each page has about ten small panels, in shifting grids with occasional snippets of white space. And there’s quite a lot of dialogue along the way, in what I’m tempted to call the Russian manner. It’s not a quick read by any means, and the panels can get quite cramped at times. It’s never difficult to read, but there is an awful lot here. Those who judge books by how much time they take to read should enjoy Laika.

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D2DVD REVIEW: The Film Crew

D2DVD REVIEW: The Film Crew

 

Okay, I admit it. I’m still a fan of [[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]], the long-running teevee series that featured four robots and a loser riffing on a couple hundred B-flicks… if you’re feeling particularly generous about that “B” part. Michael J. Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy were among the show’s writers and producers. They were also performers – Corbett with the eighth season, Murphy with second season. Nelson, who was head writer from the start, played odd parts for the first four seasons and took over the lead when creator Joel Hodgson left the show at the beginning of season five. The show ran from 1988 through 1999 and begat a feature film.

And I miss it a lot. Particularly after a presidential press conference.

So it was with missed emotions that I popped the first D2DVD by The Film Crew, [[[Hollywood After Dark]]], into my machine. This can’t possibly be as cool as Mystery Science Theater 3000, I thought. And I was only barely right. Nelson, Corbett and Murphy did what they do best: use a contrived reason to sit in a darkened theater and make jokes about a really horrible movie… but without the trademarked silhouette.

If the phrase “sexy Rue McClanahan” sounds like an oxymoron, Hollywood After Dark certainly provides the proof. It is perfectly horrible; it was made for Nelson, Corbett and Murphy to eviscerate. They were fully up to the task, and since the three were also the voices of the featured riffers in MST3K’s last three seasons, if you close your eyes it seems a lot like the original. They only have about half the number of writers, so the material isn’t quite as sharp.

The presentation was bisected by one studio bit, and here’s where I’m having a hard time shaking off MST3K. The ‘Bots had wonderfully wacky and occasionally evil personalities; the Film Crew enjoys its work and is perfectly fine with their environs. No tension, at least not in this first offering.

Shout! will be releasing three more Film Crew D2DVDs this year, and I suspect they’re already looking at their orders and deciding if there will be more. I have great confidence in the Film Crew, and Hollywood After Dark was a good if not great first offering. They will settle comfortably in their new roles.

I recommend this to my fellow MSTies. Yeah, there’s no ‘Bots. Deal with it.

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Screw Heaven, When I Die I’m Going to Mars

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Screw Heaven, When I Die I’m Going to Mars

Shannon Wheeler (no relation, as far as I know) is, of course, the creator of Too Much Coffee Man, and also the possessor of the world’s greatest surname. (Trust me: I know.) This is his new book, which is not another TMCM collection, though TMCM does show up in a couple of strips.

Screw Heaven is copyright 2007, and doesn’t contain any information about previous appearances of any of the strips collected in it. That either means that it’s all completely new and never-before seen (plausible, but I’d expect the book would hold together more coherently if that were the case) or that Dark Horse neglected to mention that these are from Wheeler’s previously-published comics, or website, or magazine work, or something else entirely. I’m a suspicious, pessimistic, grumpy guy, so I’m assuming that the latter is actually the case – though I have no evidence either way.

Screw Heaven opens with an introduction by Jesse Michaels (singer of something called Operation Ivy, of which I have never heard) and then dives into twelve “chapters,” each with between one and twenty single-page cartoons. Some of the chapters collect cartoons that clearly go together; chapter three, for example, is nearly a complete narrative. Others are more general, and only tied together by a theme.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: A Pair of Minxes

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: A Pair of Minxes

DC Comics caused a bit of a ruckus late last year when they announced their new Minx line of comics. Minx was avowedly an attempt to drag the large audience – mostly young, mostly female – for translated Japanese [[[manga]]] back to American creators by giving them books in formats and styles similar to manga. Some feminists took an instant loathing to the name, and to the fact that most of the announced creators were male, but everyone seemed to think that the idea was a good one. (Though I’m still surprised that no one has done the obvious thing: spend the money to start up an American equivalent of Shojo Beat. The manga system works so well partly because the periodicals act as try-out books and party because popular series can be sold twice, as periodicals and books. Trying to create a manga-like market with only collections is like trying to ride a bicycle on one wheel – you can do it, if you’re Curious George, but it’s difficult and slow.)

I’ve recently read two of the four Minx launch titles, and thought it would be interesting to look at them together. (The other two, which I haven’t seen, were Good as Lily by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm and [[[The P.L.A.I.N. Janes]]] by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg. And more books have already been announced to follow.) I’ll admit that I’m not the target audience for Minx’s books – I’m about twenty years too old, and sport the wrong variety of wedding tackle – but I am definitely the audience for a new book by the creative team behind My Faith in Frankie, and for a new book written by Andi Watson. And I’m certainly part of the audience for interesting, new American comics done well, no matter who they’re supposedly aimed at.

Let’s start with Re-Gifters, which is both more essentially conventional in its story and more successful in the end. It is a reunion of the crew behind [[[My Faith in Frankie]]], down to the publisher and editor – and the story has certain parallels to Frankie, as well. Our main character is a dark-haired young woman (Jen Dik Seong, aka Dixie), with a blonde best friend (Avril, who starts to narrate the story but is stopped quickly). Dixie thinks she’s crazy about a blonde boy (Adam), who turns out to be not quite as all that as our heroine at first thought. The narration, in Dixie’s voice, is also a bit reminiscent of Frankie’s. But that’s about the end of the parallels: Dixie’s story is completely down-to-earth, without any gods or other supernatural elements. (It’s also aimed at a younger audience than Frankie’s, so there’s no sex, either, and Dixie is a couple of years younger than Frankie was.)

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: The Professor’s Daughter

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: The Professor’s Daughter

According to their publisher, First Second, Sfar and Guibert have had very complicated careers. Both of them write and draw, separately and together, so they each have individual works, and they each have illustrated the other’s scripts. The Professor’s Daughter – originally published in France in 1997 – was their first collaboration and their first notable success. It’s just now made it to the USA, trailing some later works by Sfar (such as The Rabbi’s Cat, which attracted a lot of favorable attention two years ago) and by both of them (the children’s series Sardine in Outer Space).

The Professor’s Daughter is album-length – 64 pages, plus some sketches and background materials as an appendix – but has a small trim size, about 5” x 8”. It’s a generally handsome book, with French flaps, cleanly white pages, and sizable margins.

The story begins without any exposition: a young woman is going out for a walk with a walking, talking mummy. We quickly learn that she is Lillian, the professor’s daughter of the title, that he is the Pharaoh Imhotep IV (and the property of her father), and that it is sometime late in the reign of Queen Victoria. We never do learn why Imhotep is mobile and active now – or why he wasn’t in the past – that’s the premise, and we have to take it for granted.

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