I still feel like there’s something wrong with a forty-nine-year-old man reading the Tintin books for the first time, but it’s not like I can go back and read them any earlier now, can I?
The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 3 collects three WWII-era Tintin stories: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Shooting Star, and The Secret of ‘The Unicorn’. I say “WWII-era,” but there’s no indication at all in the stories themselves that a global war was going on. It’s the same world of adventure and derring-do as the earlier books (see volumes one
and two
), full of smugglers and pirates and ruffians, all of whom must eventually fall to the legitimate authorities (though the villains of Shooting Star are state-backed; it’s a fictional South American state and they’re explicitly nasty capitalists).
These books came in quick succession: serialized one after the other (1940-41, 41-42, 42-43); and all were published in color book editions by the end of 1943. Herge was clearly a powerhouse — remember this was in Belgium, in the middle of the war, with all of the related shortages and controls.
But, again, none of that shows in the stories: they’re adventure tales about criminals: drug smugglers, sharp-elbowed capitalists from fictional countries, murderous hunters of lost treasures. And they are after strange and mysterious things, mostly: a strange meteor that crashed in the North Atlantic, a pirate’s treasure. (Though Golden Claws, and from Tintin’s side Unicorn, are both cases where he gets caught up in something and has no idea what nefarious plot is going on, just that something is obviously wrong.)
Golden Claws introduces Captain Haddock, who I gather becomes a major supporting character from that point forward. His character has not aged well, and it takes the previously wince-inducing scenes of Tintin or his dog Snowy “accidentally” getting drunk and sloppy in the earlier books and makes them even bigger, more violent and stereotypical when it’s a big, bearded guy doing the drinking. I hope that he develops a character other than “alcoholic who is stupidly combative when drunk” in later books.
This omnibus series makes an interesting — that word here means “inexplicable” — choice by ending with Unicorn; that book apparently leads directly into the next book, Red Rackham’s Treasure. Or maybe the publishers figured their readers would be hooked anyway by volume three, so a little cliff-hanger wouldn’t hurt anyone. In any case, this book ends very obviously with a “buy the next book” message.
The Tintin stories have been the formative adventure tales in comics form for several generations of young people by this point — more in Europe than on my side of the pond, obviously, but he’s still a treasure of world literature. And the stories do still mostly hold up, aside from the comic drunkenness. If you have young people in your orbit, they might still find this exciting: it’s got all of the good stuff.
If a story has a moral that says, basically, “stories like this one are not as important or good as other kinds of stories, which are more special,” is that enough to make you throw it across the room in disgust?
In this case, it didn’t…mostly because it was a library book, and I don’t want to damage someone else’s things. But Michael Chabon’s The Escapists has a severe case of wanting to eat its cake and have it too, even though The Escapist is a pretty unappetizing cake to hang onto.
Perhaps I should explain.
Michael Chabon wrote a novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, almost twenty years ago, a fictionalized version of the Simon/Kirby team (or maybe not — that was one piece that went into it, and influenced the title, at least). In that novel, the main characters created a Golden Age superhero called The Escapist.
For some reason, The Escapist turned into a real comic book, with various people doing new fake versions of the various fictional phases of his invented comics career. I read a collection of those stories earlier this year, Amazing Adventures.
Michael Chabon’s The Escapists, the book I have today, is from that same publishing burst (originally serialized in 2006 and republished in this edition about a year ago), but is even more metafictional: it’s the story of some people in modern-day Cleveland who get the rights to The Escapist and make up new adventures of this old, mostly-forgotten minor hero. And, of course, in the end they learn that they should make up their own stories, and not just extend old stories. (Before that, they get other cliches to fill up the book: the shy nerd who can’t tell the punky girl he loves her, the strong silent type who looks good in a supersuit, the eeeevil corporation who will stop at nothing to buy back the mostly worthless thing they sold by accident, and so on.)
On the one hand: yes. Comics desperately needs the make-your-own-stuff message, even though it will never heed it. On the other hand: did you just get me to read two hundred pages of comics about a fake legacy character and then say that stories about legacy characters are crap?
Really?
I’m sure writer Brian K. Vaughan would object that he’s not saying legacy characters are crap, exactly — he’s done a bunch of them over the years, after all — but that new ideas are better. But, OK, if that’s your message, why tell it in a story about someone else’s character? There is a huge disconnect here between medium and message, to put it mildly.
Artistically, The Escapists mixes the fictional world of its silly hero with the real-world exploits of its dull protagonists, giving work to a variety of different artists (Steve Rolston, Jason Shawn Alexander, Philip Bond, and Eduardo Barreto; none of them credited to specific pages) and allowing the story to have both kitchen-sink drama and pulse-pounding action. So, yes, more cake-eating and -having is going on there, as well.
Frankly, The Escapists is best used as an object lesson in the art of Having It Both Ways.
Some people read The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl for the girl power, the body positivity, the overall positivity, the young-readers friendliness, the focus on computer science, or the kooky take on the Marvel Universe. Not me, though.
(Other people may read it because they are crushing hard on Koi Boi, obsessed with Eric Henderson’s art, or totally in love with writer Ryan North’s bottom-of-the-page notes. But those aren’t what does it for me, either.)
No, I’m all about Brain Drain. Give me an existential brain-in-a-vat-in-a-robot-body, teetering on the edge of total nihilism and trying to live in the modern world, and I’m happy.
This sixth book of Doreen Green’s adventures, titled (not all that compactly) The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 6: Who Run the World? Squirrels, has a whole bunch of Brain Drain in it, and so I like it very much. I trust the creators will take this to heart and choose in future to exclusively please this one random Internet dude who gets these books two years later from the library, instead of listening to everyone else who they are actually trying to reach and who pay money up front. [1]
(How did we get to volume six? Good question — check out volumes one
, two,three
, four,five
and the hardcover OGN
.)
The five issues reprinted here (#s 17-21 of the ongoing series) include, as has been the norm for the last few volumes, one big epic story (four issues) and then a smaller story (the last issue). The big story is fun and all, with a new villain who has a nefarious plot and a very sneaky way of getting around Doreen’s defenses. But it’s the same kind of thing as most SG stories: new threat seems unstoppable, but then she stops it.
No, the single issue is where it’s at, with a concentrated dose of Brain Drain action. While SG is off visiting her evil twin in the Negative Zone (see the OGN if that sentence makes no sense), Koi Boi and Chipmunk Hunk and my man Brain Drain have to stop crime in Manhattan single-handedly. [2] They do succeed in the end, of course, but along the way we get great moments like this:
I would be firmer, for my part: I won’t apologize for my cool dude protocols at all.
This collection is obvious pretty deep into Squirrel Girl-dom; no one should start here. But the series is still doing the stuff it does well, and even if you’re way outside of the target audience (girls 5-15, I guess, particularly those with an interest in science) it is quite swell and a lot of fun. I am still surprised Marvel allows North and Henderson to be in the MU but not of it, but I suppose I shouldn’t be looking gift horses in the mouth, should I? They could ruin this in a second any time they feel like it, and probably will, eventually.
But it’s here for now: enjoy it.
[1] This argument is used straight-faced by a lot of other white guys on the ‘net, so why shouldn’t it work for me, too?
[2] Because even though there’s a Marvel Universe, with Spider-Man and several Avengers teams and the Fantastic Four and Doctor Strange and Daredevil and several dozen other heroes in the same place, in any specific comic all of the crime is the responsibility of the title hero, to foil directly or delegate said foiling as she sees fit.
I was ten when I was taken to see 2001: A Space Odyssey for a friend’s birthday. I was coming to love all things science fiction by this point, but the film both dazzled and baffled me. I got most of it up until the final twenty minutes or so and was left utterly confused. I next encountered it at college and appreciate it, as a filmmaking milestone but still didn’t love it, largely because I realize how cold and sterile the future was when I wanted something to look forward to. The star child ending was, thankfully, less a conundrum.
I haven’t seen it all the way through since then, but Warner Home Entertainment changed that with the gorgeous new release, lovingly restored and available in a deluxe 4K, Blu-ray, and Digital HD boxset. There are two Blu-ray discs, one for the film and one for the bonus material plus a small booklet with stills and several gorgeous cards.
The film’s influence on the genre and filmmaking cannot be underestimated since so many revere director Stanley Kubrick’s vision and meticulous approach to production. Where many SF films go from concept to screen in a year or two, this took four and involved the brilliant Arthur C. Clarke, building off his short story “The Sentinel”.
We are taken from the Dawn of Man to the bright future and the evolution of man. Present throughout the millennia are black Monoliths and when one is found on the Moon, broadcasting a signal to Jupiter, things get interesting. The Discovery is sent to explore the newfound alien object and we’re off.
Interestingly, Kubrick and Clarke were trying to be as realistic in examining how space travel in the near future would work as the same time producer Gene Roddenberry was looking a century or two further ahead with vastly different results. Of course, Kubrick had Hollywood film money and Douglas Trumbull on his side while Roddenberry had to feed the weekly prime time maw. (Still, Roddenberry did beat them at the computer going mad four months earlier than the film in “The Ultimate Computer”, take that HAL.)
We follow astronauts Frank Poole and David Bowman (Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea) resemble the NASA ideal as they exercise, work, and recreate aboard the giant, white spacecraft. Their interactions with HAL 9000 look fanciful a decade or more earlier and today look entirely plausible (thank you, Siri).
I wish the characters were wearer and more human but that was not Kubrick’s style (the same could be said for his final outing as well). DO I better understand the final sequence? Sure because in the intervening years it’s been written about extensively. I still possess the ten year old’s sense of awe at the sheer spectacle of the film even if it is not my favorite SF film of all time.
The new 4K editions was scanned from the original camera negative in 8K resolution reduced to a brilliant 4K in the proper 2.20:1 aspect ratio, graded for high dynamic range in both HDR10 and Dolby Vision. The time and effort that went into perfecting the visuals makes this edition a far cry superior to the one overseen a few years back by Christopher Nolan. The fine detail captured here along with the superb color balance makes this an entirely new film watching experience (I envy those with a nice home theater to watch this in).
The audio comes as a pair of 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio lossless mixes, the 1999 restoration and re-mix and the original 1968 6-track 70 mm theatrical audio. Both are wonderful to hear and make you appreciate the classical sore all the more.
The Blu-ray version is remastered from the new source making it a quantum leap better than the previous edition, alone making it worth purchasing.
The sole bonus feature on the 4K disc is the 2007 Audio Commentary from Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, which you can also find on the Blu-ray. The second disc contains a plethora of materials gathered from the various previous releases. These include 2001: The Making of a Myth (43:08), Standing on the Shoulders of Kubrick: The Legacy of 2001 (21:25); Vision of a Future Passed: The Prophecy of 2001 (21:31); 2001: A Space Odyssey – A Look Behind the Future (23:11); What Is Out There? (20:42); 2001: FX and Early Conceptual Artwork (SD – 9:33); Look: Stanley Kubrick! (3:15); 11/27/1966 Interview with Stanley Kubrick (76:31), and Theatrical Trailer (1:51). Material from the MGM video release is not present.
Spider-Man unknowingly wearing an alien symbiote was perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of Secret Wars but it also thrust the character into a decade of increasingly unfortunate stories as Venom inexplicably proved a popular monster, giving us the even worse Carnage. As a result of the commercial interest in the character, Sony insisted the third film from Sam Raimi include Venom but when the director is told to include something he’s disinterested in, the results are rarely good. With a renewed Spider-Man franchise, Sony is back to milking the cow and offers up a Venom solo film that lacks everything that made Spider-Man: Homecoming so welcome.
The violent, messy film has arrived on disc from Sony Home Entertainment including the popular 4K, Blu-ray, and Digital HD combo pack. Ruben Fleischer directed, which makes sense given the tonally similar Zombieland with a script by Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg, and Kelly Marcel (never a good sign).
We get journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), now relocated from New York in the comics to San Francisco, where his failure to interview billionaire Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) somehow costs him both his job and his relationship with fiancé DA Anne Weying (Michelle Williams). Instead, he stumbles across an even bigger story: alien symbiotes are on Earth and one bonds with Brock, turning him into Venom.
Brock has to warn the world of the threat while Venom has other ideas until they come to a meeting of the minds. Meantime, there are symbiotes aplenty, chaos, mayhem, and wanton destruction by the ton.
The only reason any of this works is Hardy, who never gives less than 100 percent to a role and while he’s less interesting here than he was as Mad Max, at least gives us a Venom to care about. He pairs okay with Williams who took on a superhero franchise to push herself as a commercial actress and should have considered other roles despite her desire to be a she-Venom in the inevitable sequel. Speaking of which, we sadly get foreshadowing of Carnage (Woody Harrelson, who should know better) in the mid-credits sequence.
The 4K disc shines with great detail for Venom, thanks to superb SFX and you get to enjoy every byte of mucous and slime. The film overall is adequate with solid Dolby Vision (making San Francisco shine) in the HDR transfer at a 2.39:1 aspect ratio; and Dolby Atmos and core 7.1 Dolby TrueHD Master Audio tracks, but not overly superior to the Blu-ray disc (for the budget conscious).
The Blu-ray contains the various special features, pretty much by-the-numbers behind-the-scenes material. The best part is “Venom Mode”, essentially a pop up trivia track when watching the film a third or fourth time.
That said, “From Symbiote to Screen” does have 20 minutes of fan love thanks to the involvement of Kevin Smith, so you can get much of the background you’d want. Then there’s “The Anti Hero” (10:00), “Lethal Protector in Action” (9:00) focusing on stunts; “Venom Vision” (0:00) with Fleischer discussing directing the movie; “Designing Venom” (5:00); “Symbiote Secrets” all about the comic book Easter Eggs; two music videos: “Venom” by Eminem and “Sunflower” by Post Malone, Swae Lee (from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse); and four deleted and extended scenes (the best being the mid-credits sequence). For those who purchase the iTunes version of the movie, you get the exclusive bonus “Friends of Venom” (7:00) with Smith talking about the supporting players.
The 4K disc does have one neat bonus: the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse post-credits scene.
You have to love Venom or Hardy or be a collector to genuinely want this on your shelf. Otherwise, it’s a fairly standard comic book adaptation at a time when the stakes have been raised considerably.
Grendel was an adventure-story anti-hero in an anthology before anything else. He later became an idea, or a project, or a grandiose vision, or a symbol. But, in the beginning, he was a cool idea from a very young creator, a crimelord with a shock of white in his hair and a unique weapon who could have awesome fight scenes and overly dramatic dialogue.
Those very early Grendel stories, by a very young Matt Wagner, don’t appear in any of these books. They’re apprentice work, and Wagner later reworked the bones of those stories, and that initial idea, into the first “real” Grendel story, Devil by the Deed. This series of omnibuses collect the legend, not the false start that was the raw material for it.
(You can find those early all-Wagner Grendel stories in the 2007 book Grendel Archives, if you like. They’re not as good as anything in the main series, obviously.)
In the version of Grendel continuity in these books, the first Grendel — that we see, at least — was a boy from the American midwest named Eddie. He’s was preternaturally smart, collected, and good at fencing, in the way of a comic-book hero, but he was also almost completely devoid of any human feeling. Somehow, at the age of fourteen, the fencing team he was on went to London for a championship, where Eddie deliberately lost in his final match. A beautiful trainer for a rival team, with the unlikely name of Jocasta Rose, found Eddie and seduced him because of that, whisking him away for a whirlwind few months before she died of the usual popular-fiction Ali McGraw Disease.
Somehow Eddie got back to the US, took up the name Hunter Rose, became an immediately best-selling author under that name at the age of eighteen and simultaneously became the mysterious masked mob assassin named Grendel. Within a year or so, he’d taken over the New York mob he worked for, and not much longer afterward, he controlled crime on the entire Eastern seaboard.
(The details of Hunter Rose’s career were locked in by Wagner when he was 21, and are about as believable as most of the fictions any of us make up at that age. You may notice my description has a lot of “somehow” in it. But they’re baked into Grendel. And we’ll see Wagner tack hard in the opposite direction with later Grendels — if Hunter is the Grendel who makes no mistakes, several others are Grendels who make little but mistakes.)
All of the stories of that first Grendel are collected in the first omnibus, Hunter Rose. Devil by the Deed is the essential story, those early stories distilled down to an illustrated storybook format. It is overwritten, much like Wagner’s straining-for-significance dialogue in the contemporaneous first Mage series, but that’s only to be expected of comics writers: they’ve been overwriting madly since Stan Lee discovered adjectives. The later stories collected in that omnibus (mostly written by Wagner and drawn by others, in two different mini-series from 1998 and 2002) are only occasionally overwritten, like the tedious “Devil, Deed, Denouement,” which is written in bad verse to boot. Most of the short pieces are solid crime stories, only slightly flawed by having the can-never-loose Hunter Rose in them: the better ones treat him as a force of nature or an evil god, giving a noirish mood.
There are two later all-Wagner stories in Hunter Rose as well. First is the very short and question-begging “Sympathy from the Devil,” from some benefit anthology or other, in which we learn that Grendel is a murderous evil crime boss who slaughters innocents for no reason but is not prejudiced against homosexuals, so he’s actually a nice guy. Yes, exactly. Last up in this book is Behold the Devil, a nine-issue series from 2007 in which a policewoman and reporter chase Grendel a few months before his inevitable fall and end up the same way as everyone else who encounters the Hunter Rose Grendel in any of these stories.
Hunter Rose is a boring character: he can’t grow or change, since hie entire story arc was baked into that very first story. I’ve called him “evil Batman” before, but he’s even more than that –in the ’80s, he was already the evil version of the omniscient Grant Morrison Batman, able to not only do everything but already knowing everything. Literally nothing can harm or foil him, except that inevitable final fight with Argent (a large wolflike and semi-immortal being affiliated with the local police and with a vague and possibly racist Native American origin), so every later Hunter Rose story boils down to “see this new character get crushed by Hunter in some new and inventive way.” It’s a lot closer to horror than I’m interested in.
The remaining three volumes collect material mostly in between the stories in Hunter Rose, which is slightly odd. Wagner launched Grendel as an ongoing series in 1986 with a series of artists working from his scripts, following the idea of “Grendel” into the future from Hunter Rose’s death. That comic lasted for forty issues, until 1990. Two years later came Grendel: War Child, officially a ten-issue miniseries but internally following the issue numbering of the main series. Omnibuses two to four reprint that material — in a slightly different form as reprinted by Dark Horse a decade or so later, but that material, with a few later additions.
The Legacy, the second book, picks up with “Grendel’s granddaughter.” Christine Spar is the adult daughter of Grendel’s ward, Stacy Palumbo. Palumbo had her own tragic story, partially explained in Devil by the Deed and expanded in Devil Child, a 1999 mini-series written by Wagner’s long-time editor Diana Schutz and drawn by Tim Sale, the first story in Legacy. Next up is a twelve-issue story, Devil’s Legacy, featuring Spar, a journalist and single mother famous for writing the definitive book on Hunter Rose, puckishly titled Devil by the Deed in-universe. She runs into a small group of vampires, who kidnap her son almost immediately. Since the true message of all the Grendel stories is that the authorities are at best useless and usually corrupt functionaries of evil, the police are not only no help, but actively hostile to Spar, who turns herself into the second Grendel to get vengeance. Since she is not Hunter Rose — and I think Wagner was deliberately working against those superhero expectations he’d set up with Hunter — it does not go very well for her. Devil’s Legacy has dynamic, angular art from the Pander Brothers, and starts the transformation of Grendel from the vaguely mid-century mobster feel of the Hunter Rose stories to the various flavors of dystopian SF that it became from that point.
Next in The Legacy is a shorter story, The Devil Inside. Brian Li Sung, who had a brief relationship with Spar in Legacy, is the next, even lesser incarnation of Grendel, and is pretty much the opposite of Hunter Rose. His story has cramped, claustrophobic art by Bernie Mireault. Last in the second volume are a few transitional stories drawn by Wagner under the title Devil Tales, as Wagner sets up a substantially more dystopian world a few hundred years in the future for his next major story.
The third volume, Orion’s Reign, collects the two long storylines that ended the late-80s Grendel comic, but starts with four more transitional issues of the ’80s Grendel first, under the title The Incubation Years. (These loosely continue from the transitional stories from the second book, and continue seeing Wagner using lots of captions to set the stage for his crapsack twenty-fourth Century world.) Art for those stories is by Hannibal King and Tim Sale.
The first major storyline in Reign is God and the Devil, in which the local American incarnation of a Balkanized Catholic Church is the particular evil oppressive authority. This time, though, Wagner separates Grendel in two — first there’s the obvious costumed figure (the anarchic, violent destructive impulse) and then there’s a cooler, corporate-based opposition to the Church, which will eventually lead into the next story. This piece is drawn mostly by John K. Snyder III and Jay Geldhof (swapping out pencils and inks, and working with Mireault as well), and is less dense than the transitional and Li Sung stories, coming back to more of an adventure-comics style.
The rest of Reign is the much denser Devil’s Reign storyline, drawn by Tim Sale, in which the text boxes explode and the action stretches over years without any single incarnation of Grendel to follow. (In retrospect, far too much of Grendel was made up of long stretches of text talking about political struggles and social upheavals just to set up another story with someone in a neat costume actually doing things.) This is the story that sets up the end-state of the Grendel universe: a loose global confederation, run by a militaristic somewhat merit-based warrior class of Grendels, which in practice seems to be less “government” and more “local thugs.” From that, Wagner launched a new series of miniseries, entirely by other people, under a Grendel Tales title…but I’m not here to talk about those stories today.
The last volume of the Wagner Grendel Omnibus series is Prime, collecting stories of the superpowerful cyborg Grendel-Prime, his contribution to the grim & gritty early ’90s. Prime contains the main Prime story, War Child, in which he abducts the young heir of the dead Grendel-Khan and the two take a violent tour of how horrible Wagner’s world is at that point. (Art by Patrick McKeown with Wagner inking.) Then there’s a short prose novel by Greg Rucka, Past Prime, which I’ve never read and didn’t read now. (There’s enough endless text from Wagner earlier in this series, and I’m not particularly fond of two hundred pages of prose interrupting my two thousand-plus pages of comics.) It ends up with two shorter all-Wagner stories. The longer, directly related one is Devil Quest, a very episodic, very violent, very dark set of events that ran as backups in a bunch of Grendel Tales comics and served mostly to winkingly explain this universe’s end of the Batman/Grendel Prime crossover.
And then, at the very end, is A Grendel Primer, a short abecedary summing up the entire series.
Grendel, at is core, is a deeply pessimistic, cynical concept: people are horrible, evil creatures, and (even without the occasional supernatural elements of the series) will kill and destroy and exploit each other all of the time as much as they possibly can. Grendel itself is possibly some kind of semi-sentient spirit — it seem to be so in the Spar/Li Sung/transitional era, but that disappears in the later stories, possibly because the spirit has by that point incorporated itself into every living human. Along the way, Wagner made some great comics out of that concept — the Legacy, God and the Devil and War Child stories are the best — but also spent a lot of time filling a myriad tiny text boxes with all of the minutia of how the world went from Horrible State B to Horrible State C, which I might suggest is not necessarily the best use of anyone’s time.
There’s also a lot of good art in this series — in particular, a lot of Wagner’s most interesting and formally inventive stuff is in the odd transitional issues and sidebars — not so much the late Hunter Rose stories, which are crisp noir exercises. A lot of his collaborators do very good work as well — The Panders, Mireault, Snyder and Gedlhof, and Sale all have strong work here.
There’s a lot of good stuff in Grendel. My only caveat is that you need to wade through a lot of words about the specific ways this world has gotten really lousy — and do so repeatedly — to keep getting to the good stuff.
I have to admit this: I’d never read Beanworld until now. Maybe you’re the same: I obviously can’t judge, if so.
Larry Marder’s Beanworld has been around since 1984, perhaps the quintessential quirky comics series, lauded and awarded regularly and loved by lots of comics creators but looking really, really weird to a general comics-reading audience. It’s the kind of book I expect to like — and, not to bury the lede, but I did, once I finally got to it.
Beanworld Omnibus, Vol. 1 collects the twenty-one issues of Beanworld‘s original run, from 1984 through 1993, when Marder took a full-time job running Image Comics. (I gather that there are new Beanworld stories since 2007, when Marder left Image, and I’m now trying to figure out where to pick them up. There is not an Omnibus, Vol. 2 yet, sadly, and I’m trying to figure out how this Omnibus lines up with the smaller collections.)
Beanworld was unlike any other comics on the racks in 1984, and there’s very little like it even now. It’s fiction, with a slant towards metaphor or allegory, and no obvious relationship to any of the genres dominant in any part of American cartooning up to that point (superheroes, westerns, horror, romances, or the strip staples of gag-a-day, soap opera, and adventure). Instead, Beanworld is about an entirely separate world with its own complex rules and systems, and the story of the comic is how the inhabitants of that world work through those rules and systems, interact, and live together.
There is conflict, in the sense that different characters want and need different things, and some are thoughtless or selfish or just trouble-makers. But there are no villains, no one that needs to be defeated. There is a hero, though — that’s Mr. Spook, the guy in the center of the cover with the fork. Being the hero doesn’t mean he’s always right, or even the center of the stories: just that his role is to be the strong, assertive leader of his people when strong, assertive leadership is needed.
Since Beanworld is the story of a world, let’s take a look at it — this image shows the immediate surroundings. (There’s a wider world further away, which will come into the stories eventually. But we start here.)
The Beans live on an island, in the shade of Gran’Ma’Pa, a tree-like living thing that is their ancestor and provider and center of their lives. That island floats above a sea, topped with water. Under the water are first The Four Realities, containing four different basic items — slats, hoops, twinks, and chips — that can be combined to make useful tools by someone with the skill and knowledge to do so. Below that is another community, the Hoi Polloi.
The Beans and the Hoi Polloi are dependent on each other: the Hoi Polloi need the “sprout-butts” that the Beans bring, and the Beans need the “chow” that the Hoi Polloi break the sprout-butts down into. But, even though Beanworld is something like an ecological fable, there’s not going to be a peaceful, happy, let’s-all-sing-Kumbaya solution: Marder has set up this world so that the Beans need to fight for the chow every time. It all works — and he spends time as these stories goes on examining various ways it could work better or worse — but it doesn’t work in a simplistic, “nice” way. It’s complicated and competitive, like life itself.
All of the aspects of the Beans’ lives are like that: superficial simplicity over deep complexity. Not just anyone can combine the building blocks of The Four Realities: that’s another specific role among the Beans, like Mr. Spook is the hero. Their tool-maker is Professor Garbanzo. And we see other specific Beans “break out” to be something more particular in these stories, with a particular focus on Beanish, their first artist.
Beanworld is not a formal allegory: it doesn’t line up to anything else. But it is deeply metaphorical in its use of simplified characters and objects, telling a widely applicable story that is both entirely its quirky specific self and parallel to a thousand things in our real world. The tag line since 1984 has been “a most peculiar comic book experience,” and that’s very apt — but “peculiar” doesn’t express how smart and deep and thoughtful Beanworld is. Marder’s drawings look simple, but they’re very precise, just like his writing. Beanworld is a comic with vast depths, simple enough on the surface for readers as young as grade school but implying and suggesting vastly more for those with more experience.
You probably shouldn’t wait as long as I did to read it. That was not my smartest idea. But the great thing about a good book is that now is always the right time to read it. And now is a great time to read Beanworld.
There are days when I think that Evan Dorkin exists so I can be regularly reminded that I’m not the most cynical, negative person in the world. But most days I manage not to be that solipsistic.
Dorkin is probably the most cynical, negative person in comics — I could remove the “probably” if I limited that to creators. (Otherwise he’d be fighting with Gary Groth for the throne, and who wants that?)
He’s best-known for creating Milk and Cheese, the reductio ad absurdum of ’90s hyper-violent comics heroes, but he’s done a lot of other work over the years, starting with his early Pirate Corp$! ska-fuled adventure stories in the ’80s and running through a lot of projects in comics and animation.
One of the spines of that long career has been his occasional (yearly, optimistically) solo comics series Dork, from the company that was once named Slave Labor. (And which I will keep calling that, since I am old.) Dork is a big new collection of the stories from the comic of the same name, leaving out stories already collected in Milk & Cheeseor The Eltingville Club and matching the format of those books. It’s large, almost album-sized, and has sturdy paper-over-boards covers and nice glossy paper.
So now Dorkin fans can have a trilogy of bile on their shelves, collecting pretty much all of his central work, which is nice for us. We can wish that he did more work over the years, was less obviously conflicted about working in comics at all, and that he made several more boatloads of money along the way, but those would be as futile as all of our wishes.
Dork starts off with a new two-page introduction (in comics format, of course), and then seems to reprint the eleven issues of comic Dork more-or-less chronologically, starting with the first “Murder Family” story from 1991 and running through about two hundred pages of black and white comics and then twenty-seven pages of color comics before hitting a final supplemental section of covers from the comics and previous collections, plus similar stuff. At some point, material from the 2012 one-shot House of Fun — which was not Dork #12 for some reason I didn’t know, then or now –is included as well, though there’s no way to know where unless you have those comics and pull them out to compare. It’s a lot of good comics, organized well to read, but there’s no explanation of where else any of this stuff originally appeared.
This is probably the complete Miscellaneous Dorkin to date, as far as I can tell. It’s definitely almost three hundred pages of comics full of bile and spleen, featuring all of the appearances of the devil puppet and those late ’90s stories that made us all worry whether Dorkin was OK or not. (He seems to have been about as OK as he could be, which can be good or bad, and is maybe somewhat more OK these days.)
The work is is very mixed: there’s a lot of very short gag strips, mostly organized into pages of “fun” with seven four-panel pseudo-strips, each with one (generally dumb) joke. Longer pieces include several “Murder Family” stories, his early “Fisher-Price Theatre” pieces, his work from the early-’90s book Generation Ecch (the Gen X version of today’s self-hating millennial websites), and a bunch of semi- or fully autobiographical stories, culminating in those ’90s pieces about what looks really close to a nervous breakdown.
Dorkin’s comedy is usually aggressive, about sex and violence and anger and fear and hatred, no matter what the length. Nothing is nice, and if Dorkin has ever been happy in his life, it doesn’t come out in this work. It’s also deliberately dumb humor a lot of the time: obvious jokes told in boundary-pushing ways. It is really funny a lot of the time, and regularly creepily true — his more ambitious longer stories are really powerful.
Since this collects work from twenty or more years, the reader can trace the evolution of his art: he started pretty “punky,” possibly self-taught, with lots of little lines and and a mania for details. His line has strengthened and simplified over the years — he got very precise starting in the late ’90s, and has kept that look since. I’ve said in the past that the early look was great for Milk and Cheese, but this book shows the real strength of his mature style: he definitely got better as he got more disciplined and worked on laying down that one right line.
All of the coloring here is provided by Sarah Dyer, who is also married to Dorkin. It is traditional here to use the word “long-suffering,” or to make a comment about Dorkin’s struggles with depression, but none of us really know anything about other people’s relationships, and doubly so when we’re experiencing someone else’s life through art. So I’ll just say she does good work, and it’s more obvious with Dorkin’s later work, where the cleaner lines give more space for the color to work well.
Dork is primarily for readers who are already fans of Dorkin, since it’s so miscellaneous. Most people would be better off starting with The Eltingville Club (if you have a love-hate relationship with comics) or Milk & Cheese (if you have a love-hate relationship with the entire world). But, if you like confessional cartooning and sick humor — maybe you’re a fan of Ivan Brunetti or R. Crumb, and haven’t encountered Dorkin yet — this could be a good place to dive in.
I don’t think anyone’s hired Kyle Baker to write screenplays for romantic comedies yet. But, from the evidence of books like Why I Hate Saturn and I Die at Midnight and this book, I think he’d be really good at it: he has a knack for screwball complications and the kind of dialogue that only tangles up a complicated situation more, no matter how much his characters try to be clear.
You Are Here is a romantic comedy with thriller elements, or maybe a comedy-thriller with romantic elements, published as an album-format graphic novel in 1999. It’s in what I think of as Baker’s “cinematic” style, with mostly wide panels over captions and dialogue and sound effects, looking like storyboards more than a traditional comic. His art is vibrant and full of color, with a painterly feel most of the time; I think it was mostly achieved through digital tools.
I have the sense that Baker’s work failed to hit its audience in this era, despite high-profile publications and some really good work. (I remember not-loving the “cinematic” format and Baker’s shift to glossier art and computer drawing tools art at the time; maybe that was part of it with the wider audience.)
But You Are Here is manic and zippy and fizzy and total goofball fun from beginning to end; it might not be old enough to be a “lost classic,” but it’s a damn good book that got very little attention, from a creator who I don’t think has ever gotten his due.
Noel Coleman is happy: he’s been living in bucolic splendor somewhere in upstate New York [1] with Helen Foster for the last year, blissfully in love and doing good work on his paintings. Unfortunately, he’s also lied entirely to Helen about his past, making himself out to be some kind of choirboy when he’s actually a longtime minor criminal who only recently went straight by painting scenes from various crimes and events he witnessed.
Now he needs to head south to the city to sell his apartment. If he does that, he can get rid of the last vestiges of his old life and return to Helen unencumbered and ready to completely live the lies he’s been telling her.
But she follows him. And a maniac killer, Vaughan Dreyfuss, is also after him: Dreyfuss killed his wife after finding out she was having an affair with Noel, and has now announced, on a live TV spot for his new bestselling book Yes I Did It and I’ll Kill Again, that Noel is next. And all of his old friends refuse to believe he’s gone straight. And the cops are no help with the Dreyfuss thing, because Noel is still sort-of wanted himself.
And so Noel is running frantically around New York City, trying to keep Helen from realizing he isn’t who he said he was, trying to keep away from Dreyfuss, trying to avoid as many of his old crime acquaintances as he can, and trying to just get back out of the city to peace and quiet.
That leads to nearly a hundred and fifty pages — big pages, with lots of action and activity and screwball dialogue and unlikely situations — of complication, before the inevitable collision of Noel, Helen, Dreyfuss, and Noel’s past. It all smashes up gloriously, and Baker spins out both a great confrontation/hostage scene with those core three characters, but a witty denouement after that, too.
Frankly, I think You Are Here is too big and too overstuffed to be turned into a movie, and the random nudity and violence of Noel’s lowlife NYC hangouts might be a problem as well, but it could be a glorious one if anyone ever did it right. Even if that never happens, it’s already a glorious romantic/thriller/comedy on the page. You might have missed it; a lot of people did. It’s worth looking for, these almost twenty years later. And, luckily for you, there’s a new edition, straight from Baker himself, just waiting for you.
[1] Upstate in the NYC sense — maybe Putnam county, maybe the Catskills, maybe the Hudson valley. Definitely no further north than Albany, which means not really “upstate” to anyone who lives there.
When it ran on CBS, Mission: Impossible had zero internal continuity. Missions came and went, agents were tortured, battered, and bruised and the next week they’d be hale and hardy, ready for the next assignment.
Since the film franchise began in 1996, the movies have gone in the opposite direction with film to film connectivity, just enough to show the films have consequence but work on their own so you don’t need one of DK Publishing’s patented guidebooks to understand what’s happening.
You’d almost think there was some grand plan and strategy ala Marvel for these films since everything builds to a head in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, out today on disc from Paramount Home Entertainment.
Recently, the first film, from director Brian DePalma has been making the rounds on cable and I was reminded of how much larger and richer the cast of agents were. Since then, there has been precious little mention made of operatives other than the core cast that seemingly winnows per film. There was the pre-credit nod to the past with Keri Russell in M: I III.
So, here we are again with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), the only holdovers from the beginning, with the addition of Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), who interestingly joined in M:I III. That’s it. The IMF apparently has faced attrition and budget cuts. Cruise and Director/Producer/Screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie have stitched together elements from all the films to create a taut, suspenseful and ultimately very satisfying sixth installment in the series, which has yet to run out of steam.
We pick up with the remnants of Solomon Lane’s (Sean Harris) The Syndicate (a wink to the anonymous organization Jim Phelps battled almost weekly on television), The Apostles. They are searching for three plutonium cores and when the first gambit fails, are stuck with political shenanigans between the CIA in the form of Erica Sloane (Angela Bassett) and the IMF, now championed by Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin). With trust absent, she insists August Walker (Henry Cavill) work with Hunt’s team.
As they seek the cores, the encounter “The White Widow” (Vanessa Kirby), a black market arms dealer and the returning Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), who finds herself allied with and in competition with Hunt. There are the usual death-defying car chases, running and jumping, and mass mayhem but leavened with some deadpan humor.
We see Hunt and Walker fight in the trailers so we’re not sure if the CIA shadow is a good guy or turncoat but his stiff, diffident performance pretty much gives things away. Cavill can be easy on the eyes, but he really needs to loosen up to remain interesting on screen.
Everything builds up to Lane threatening more than the world; he’s targeted Julia (Michelle Monaghan), Hunt’s one true love. The climax in Kashmir may be drawn out, but is pulse-pounding and emotional. The status quo has been modified for future installments and viewers will be fine with a repeated viewing at home.
The film is available in the usual formats including the 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and Digital HD package. As one would expect, the 2160p resolution displays a native 4K image in the 2.39:1 aspect ratio, although there are exceptions with two opening sequences having been shot in a 1.90:1 IMAX ratio. Given the scenery, notably the Kashmir section, we are treated to fine detail, clarity, and sharpness, superior to the Blu-ray. The Dolby Atmos audio track is strong and pairs well with the 4K disc.
A glossy, full color booklet titled Stunts: Raiding the Bar is included inside the embossed case, featuring slight commentary regarding several key sequences.
The 4K disc comes with Audio Commentary: in three flavors: McQuarrie and Cruise, McQuarrie and Editor Eddie Hamilton, and Composer Lorne Balfe. As is increasingly common on 4K releases, we’re treated to an Isolated Score in Dolby Digital 5.1 audio.
The Blu-ray disc with the feature carries the same bonus features but then there’s a second Blu-ray disc with an additional hour’s worth of goodness. The majority of the disc is filled with the seven-part Behind the Fallout (53:32) which exhaustively covers the film’s development and production. Broken down, these include Light the Fuse (11:10), giving you an overview; Top of the World (10:48), all about the HALO jump sequence; The Big Swing: Deleted Scene Breakdown (3:44); Rendezvous in Paris (7:21); The Fall (5:57), all about how a man falls from a helicopter and lives to tell the tale; and The Hunt Is On (11:08), a spotlight on the helicopter chase; Cliffside Clash (4:02).
Rounding out the disc are Deleted Scenes Montage (3:41), complete with optional commentary by McQuarrie and Hamilton; Foot Chase Musical Breakdown (4:50); The Ultimate Mission (2:51), Cruise on his love of the series; Storyboards, and the Theatrical Trailer (2:33).
