Category: Reviews

Alan Moore famously has a love-hate relationship with superhero comics. Well, I mean, a lot of people love or hate superhero comics, and plenty do both. The difference is that superhero comics hates and loves Moore back.

In the late ’90s, after he’d cast a magic incantation cursing DC Comics and all of its wares, swearing never to work for them again under any circumstances, Moore started his own line of superhero comics, under the not-at-all-self-aggrandizing label of America’s Best Comics. And then his publisher sold the entire company to DC anyway, pretty much simultaneously with the launch of the ABC line.

(It’s almost enough to make one believe that deep Northamptonian magic doesn’t actually do anything!)

One of those ABC books was Promethea, with art by J.H. Williams II and Mick Gray. I read the first collection sometime in the early Aughts, and didn’t remember a whole lot about it. (I do remember that nothing I saw of America’s Best Comics, then or later, impressed me all that much. But I can be hard to impress when it comes to superhero stuff.) Since I’m reading giant stacks of comics-format books this year to feed the maw of Book-A-Day, I figured I might as well try Promethea, Book 1 again.

(I’m still not that impressed. This is not a surprise.)

Promethea the character is a legacy hero, one of many in Moore’s work — he’s been very fond of having his main character be one of a million versions of the same thing, from the Captain Britain multiverse to the Parliament of Trees. This time, the original of Promethea is a fourth-century girl in Egyptian Alexandria bodily transported to the realm of story by the god Thoth-Hermes, and somehow because of that gets to be the template for a series of mystically-powered superwomen starting at the end of the 19th century in the US. Since Moore always has miles of notes, I’m not going to ask what Promethea was doing for the intervening thirteen centuries, because he’d probably tell me in great detail in some tedious end-of-book text feature.

Our brand-new Promethea is Sophie Bangs — that name sounds much more like a camgirl than a superheroine, but OK — in a mildly science-utopian 1999, a slightly alternate comic-book-universey version of the real world her story was published into. She’s a college student researching the legend of Promethea, providing both the natural opportunity for a lot of infodumping and the reason why she gets saddled with the glowy caduceus staff and form-fitting bronze armor.

There are, of course, equally mystical evil people who want to snuff out this new Promethea before she comes into her full powers, and they try to do so. But most of the story here, from the first six issues of the Promethea comic, is an extended tour of the Immateria, the lands of story and myth, in the company of each of the recent dead Prometheas in turn.

That tour is not over at the end of this book; nothing is actually resolved by the last page here and Sophie/Promethea is heading out into a promised two more sections of the Immateria to learn more lessons from more dead predecessors. Why this is where the vast and cool intelligences of DC chose to end this particular book is beyond me; I suspect they believe that their target audience doesn’t understand the idea of stories “ending” anyway, and so don’t bother wasting time with such things.

But I am a well-known cynic.

Promethea is a perfectly adequate superhero comic, with powers and characters that make more sense than many of its competitors. Williams and Gray draw well, and get some inventive page designs out of it. You could certainly do worse than this.

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

I read the first volume of Martian Confederacy nine years ago, around the time it came out, but clearly didn’t love it enough to jump into the second book any time quickly.

But time wounds all heels, and, during a business trip recently, I remembered that I had The Martian Confederacy, Vol. 2: From Mars With Love  on a device, and so read it to keep the Book-A-Day streak going. (If you think that “streak” is filled with the book equivalent of a lot of bloop singles, well, you’re not wrong.) As with the first book, it’s written by Jason McNamara and drawn by Paige Braddock, and both of them will probably be very surprised to see this post pop up if they have the usual Google ego-searches active. (I’m sure they’ve done plenty of other stuff since this, and I like to believe that everyone gets better, too.)

Martian Confederacy has a veneer of seriousness and drama, but it’s a loose, ramshackle construction that fights against that seriousness every step of the way. (I called it “the Dukes of Hazard on Mars” the first time around, and I stand by that.)

As the cover gives away, central this time is a love story between our somewhat lunkish (but good-hearted) hero Boone and Lou, his android roommate (platonically, up to this point). They set off to investigate the abduction of the children of a friend of Lou’s — there’s a big hole in the side of their trailer and everything — and end up being shanghaied by the Alcalde into investigating a wider problem, and breaking his rules to get off the planet and find the culprits.

You see — and you’ll want to be sitting down for this — there’s a planet-wide child theft ring, which nobody has heard about for some reason, and the Alcalde (corrupt, the only law/government on the entire planet, no apparent thugs to actually enforce his edicts but he acts like someone will do what he decrees) tells Boone and Lou that they need to solve the problem before he (the Alcalde) comes back from his honeymoon. Oh, and they’re specifically ordered not to leave the planet, though the instant they start to think it about, it’s clear the kids were all kidnapped to somewhere other than Mars.

That’s how From Mars, With Love is the whole way: superficially plausible as long as you don’t think about anything for even a second, and full of very durable cliches mixed with random oddities. (The Alcalde’s new wife is two women, connected upside-down at the torso, and they flip around semi-randomly, taking over the personality and activity of the single person they seem to be legally.) The universe is pretty crapsack — slavery (at least of non-human sentients) is legal, kidnapping kids is pretty common, and everything is pretty beat-up and junky. And the plot is the usual combination of fighting and let-me-tell-you-what’s-really-happening, with the kind of ending you’d expect from a story like this.

I have a feeling the creators took it a bit more seriously than I did, but that’s OK: you should commit to the things you’re doing. As far as I can tell, this is where the series ended — two collections of outlaw medium-future adventures, sticking it to The Man on the red planet. It’s unique, I’ll give it that: it’s definitely one of a kind.

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

Hey, remember Minx? (Don’t worry, a lot of people don’t.)

DC Comics launched that imprint in 2007 to great fanfare, with a raft of interesting creators (many from outside the comic-shop) world and a focus on fiction for teen girls that was unusual for comics of the modern era. It flopped in barely a year, though: that’s why you might not remember it.

Other companies, before and since, have published plenty of very successful books for this audience — I need only mention the name Raina Telgemeier. But DC didn’t manage to do it: maybe because they were too locked into their usual distribution channels, maybe because “DC Comics” turned off those girls, maybe because the stars just weren’t right. But it did flop.

I’ve covered most of the Minx books randomly here — Re-Gifters and Clubbing, The Plain Janes and Good as Lily, Janes sequel Janes in Love , Kimmie66 , Water Baby , Confessions of a Blabbermouth , and Emiko Superstar  in a quick way during my Eisner-judging frenzy. But one of the Minx books I didn’t manage to read at the time was The New York Four, a graphic novel about four young women, all first-year students at New York University, by writer Brian Wood and artist Ryan Kelly.

But somehow, without realizing the connection, I had a publicity copy (in electronic form) of the Dark Horse book The New York Four , from 2014, which also included the aborted sequel The New York Five, which was done for Minx but never published by them. (And I mean literally not realizing; I figured it out while starting to type this.)

But now I’ve knocked off one more Minx: I think the only ones I haven’t seen now are Burnout and Token.

The New York Four (the original graphic novel) was also, in a way, a follow-up to Local , a Brian Wood/Ryan Kelly comic about an aimless young woman from a year or so before. But this one is more obviously made for the teen set: every one of these four women has A Problem, presumably one that some segment of the target audience would relate to. (I don’t think it was that mercenary, but we do have The Catfished Girl, and The Stalker, and The Sugar-Daddy Chaser, and The Outer-Borough Slut, if you want to be reductive.) The first story focuses almost exclusively on The Catfished Girl, Riley, who is also said to be a bookworm (we don’t see this) from a demanding family whose older sister ran away for mysterious reasons seven years before. The other three are supporting characters in the Riley story in Four, though the slightly shorter Five is more balanced. A different structure, one that let each woman have an independent story that the others supported, might have been better, but even this structure didn’t make it out into public unscathed, so I’m not really complaining.

The characterization is thoughtful but tends to be one-note — each of the Four is mostly her issue, which is underlined by one of the organizing principles of both Four and Five: they’re all taking part in an unlikely get-college-kids-to-take-high-school-exams-regularly program, which is also inexplicably well-paid, and they have to meet regularly with a psychiatrist as part of this program. It’s entirely possible that Wood is basing this fictional program on something similar or identical in the real world, but it seemed incredibly bizarre and unlikely to me, a convoluted way to get his characters into reality-TV style “tell your story into the camera” moments.

Kelly’s art is lush and detailed, with all of the people distinctive and real. He gives this book a lot of depth, down to body language — look at main character Riley on the cover! can’t you tell a lot about her just from that? — and facial expressions.

But it feels like there’s just too much here, and Wood ends up giving short shrift to the fact that these women are in college — we barely see them in class, and they don’t interact with other students at all. I suspect that he had a novel’s worth of ideas for a novella-length story. And I can’t help but compare it to the John Allison-written Giant Days , which started slightly later and was in pamphlet-format comics originally, which let it give each of its (only three) young women the spotlight in turn.

There’s a lot of good in The New York Four, and it could have been better if it and Minx had been a success: I expect Wood and Kelly would have done further stories, and maybe even followed these women all the way to graduation. Oh, well. Failure is the way of the world…and that’s a lesson you can also get by reading The New York Four.

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

This book came out of a particular moment, and a particular place — England, in the mid-80s, during one of its periodic frenzies about “offensive” material in comics form. But it’s more generally applicable, to any nation that claims a heritage from an Abrahamaic religion (which includes, I’ bet, 95%+ of the people reading this.)

It’s a book that was created to make a point. An obvious one, for people who actually knew the truth, but Bible-thumpers are regularly ignorant of many of the horrible lessons contained in the thing they thump.

The title gives it away, of course: Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament . All the murder and rape and war and human sacrifice and “take my virgin daughters instead of my male guest” that can be crammed into 68 pages, by a crew of major and semi-major names from the independent UK scene at the time. The book was edited and assembled by someone, but that person is never named — it’s some editor at Knockabout Publications at the time, but I have no idea who that is.

To be blunt, Outrageous Tales is pointedly saying the the source of a lot of people’s moral compass is full of horrible lessons and shocking stories and thoroughly evil deeds, many of them very much in the name of You Know Who. (Almost as if it were a collection of legends from a savage group of desert tribes from more than a thousand years!)

So Neil Gaiman writes a long section adapting a whole bunch of the book of Judges — one of the ones that doesn’t come up much in the modern day, since it’s full of horrible things and the main lesson is “do what God says or die horribly, and maybe die horribly even if you do” — turning it into something very much like an EC Comic. Mike Matthews does the very twisted “host” art for the opening and closing sections, with other artists (including Dave McKean) doing the bits in the middle.

Other greatest hits of the Bible include an Alan Moore/Hunt Emerson take on a long list of “kill people who have fucked in this incorrect way” from Leviticus, with Emerson gleefully depicting a rapidly shrinking Israelite tribe killing their fellow tribesmen who broke each rule in turn. Kim Deitch does a straight adaptation of the book of Job, without any of the rib-nudging of many of the other stories, and it’s still horrifying, since Job’s is a horrifying story. Brian Bolland has Elisha cursing forty-two boys to be eaten by bears for calling him “Baldy,” and Dave Gibbons turns the angels of Sodom and Gomorrah into something like aliens. (Which, in retrospect, seems to be slightly off-message.)

There are a few other stories tucked into the niches in between, but it’s not a long book — only 68 pages, as I said. And it is all pretty much the same tone: can you believe what’s in this old book of laws and stories?

I can believe it, but I am the guy who won the Bible Olympics as a teen two years running. (It was a very liberal church, so this material was never an emphasis — but what teen boy isn’t fascinated with the horrible Old Testament stuff?) You may not need this book to learn this lesson. In fact, that’s the real problem with Outrageous Tales: the people who most need to learn this lesson will never learn it from a book like this.

But most lessons are like that, aren’t they? If they were easy, they wouldn’t be real lessons.

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