I do like titles that end with “by {insert author};” they save me time and space on my post titles. Perhaps I should do a year where I only read books like that.
(I rely on you readers to talk me out of patently stupid ideas like that one.)
I have a feeling Liz Prince has a more interesting and full cartooning career than I’ve managed to keep up with: I can be obtuse like that. I have read and liked her books Tomboy and Alone Forever
, but I bet there’s more out there. I should probably take a look.
But right now I’m here to tell you about Look Back and Laugh, a collection of her journal comics from 2016. If I have this right, Prince started a Patreon sometime around then, and one of the rewards was a monthly printed collection of daily diary strips. (I’m not clear why she didn’t just put them online daily and password-protect them for backers, but I bet the reason has something to do with the romance of ‘zines.) She also seems to have at least sometimes gotten behind on “daily” comics and had to catch up by doing a week at a time, which is totally endearing and something I’d be likely to do if I was in a similar circumstance.
(Assuming a world in which I could actually draw, obviously. Which is not this world.)
Look Back collects those 366 comics, along with a new comic-strip introduction by Prince, and they’re very much journal comics — mostly done in a quiet moment at the end of the day, sometimes about one big thing that happened that day, sometimes about two or four little things that happened, and sometimes about how she can’t think of anything particularly notable that happened. This was a pretty eventful year for Prince and her partner Kyle (I didn’t see a last name for him in the comics; I presume Prince’s audience already knows who he is): they got married, they bought a house, and they moved from outside Boston up to Portland, Maine. (Those latter two are obviously related.)
But, mostly, it’s about what she did that day. That’s the joy of journal comics: they’re about the everyday and the mundane. Some days are sitting and drawing, some are frenzied cleaning the new house and trying to find that one random thing in a sea of packed boxes. This turned out to be a good year for Prince to start making journal comics about, but the hidden secret is that they’re all good years.
Prince is working on a small canvas here, and trying to fit in enough words to explain what’s going on. But even with those constraints, she has a bouncy, cartoony style and a good eye to lock in how she draws the people in her life. You may not be interested in anyone’s journal comics, and that’s fine — but, if you are, Liz Prince does them really well.
AHOY Comics is on a tear. The second issue of their debut series, The Wrong Earth, sold out and went back for a second printing. Comic shops increased their orders for issue #3. The quantities ordered were more than those for the first issue, which ‘never happens’ with new series in today’s comics market.
After reading The Wrong Earth #3, It’s easy to see why.
The main story picks up the pace in this adventure. This issue brings secondary characters to the forefront and, surprisingly, shuffles other characters offstage. The premise of this story is both traditional and cutting edge at the same time: the adventures of the gritty Dragonfly and the campy Dragonflyman as they switch places. Each character must navigate the absurdity of their doppelganger’s setting. Conventions are skewered on both sides of the narrative.
The Wrong Earth is a judgement-free zone. Readers aren’t scolded or lectured. For every “the old days were better”, bit, there’s a counterpoint example of how today’s fiction makes the vintage stuff look dated. Instead, readers are invited on an adventurous romp that highlights the absurdity of it all.
The series also embraces a sense of urgency and surprise. Just when you think you know what’s going to happen, writer Tom Peyer pulls the rug out. Peyer is a master of zigging when you thought the only option was zagging.
Jamal Igle’s artistic talent pushes the story along at a frantic pace. His solid artwork is almost humble. There are no showy, “look at me” scenes. But at the same time, his thoughtful page layout, unexpected camera angles and detailed backgrounds leave the reader wanting more.
As with every AHOY series, there’s more to the comic than just the main story. Paul Constant and Frank Cammuso offer up another fun Stinger “Golden Age adventure”. This time, the young hero investigates mysterious hijinks at the Sidekick Museum.
As with all AHOY Comics, this issue is rounded out with clever short text pieces. The real magic of them, for me, is how they prolong the reader’s time with the comic. Like the signature articles in a Brubaker/Phillips crime comic, these short stories ensure every fan feels as if they are getting their money’s worth.
It’s all fresh and fun. Longtime comic fans seldom have that “I can’t wait to find out what happens next” feeling, but that’s exactly where The Wrong Earth #3 will leave them.
I will admit that I skipped Teen Titans Go! since I was far beyond their target audience, I was happy to see a scaled down, entry-level animated series succeed so well on cable. It honored its Marv Wolfman/George Pérez roots and had a nice run. What I never expected was to see it make the leap to the big screen and succeed as well as it did.
Back in the spring, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies was among the least anticipated summer films by theater owners at Movie Con but then arrived to superlative reviews (91% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes) and stronger than anticipated box office with $51.8 million earned worldwide against a $10 million budget.
On the five season series, the young heroes were seen having ordinary every day adventures, focusing more on pizza than the Fearsome Five. One recurring theme seems to be that the adult heroes looked down on them as being far from ready. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, out on disc now from Warner Home Entertainment, goes meta as the kids worry about their shot at a feature film. They’re told they’re just too goofy to be taken seriously enough for a film so Robin (Scott Menville) leads the team — Cyborg (Khary Payton), Beast Boy (Greg Cipes), Raven (Tara Strong), and Starfire (Hynden Walch) — to Hollywood to prove them all wrong. Hilarity ensures for the next 84 minutes.
Taking a cue more from 20th Century Fox’s Deadpool than any heroic film Warner has released, the movie is a rapid-fire collection of wit, comical asides, and recurring gags including, yes, mistaking Deathstroke (called Slade here given the target audience) as Deadpool. Writers Michael Jelenic and Aaron Horvath clearly had a lot of fun with this and were well-served by director Aaron Horvath. For knowing adults in the room, you can appreciate that Superman is voiced by Nicholas Cage (fulfilling his dream). There is additional fine voice work from Will Arnett and the ubiquitous Kristen Bell. Nothing is sacred, notably the flawed DCEU films.
The transfer to Blu-ray is just fine, with strong visuals and audio. The simple style is deceptive and the colors pop here. Being a kids film, the special features appear more geared to them than the parents buying the disc. There’s a Lil Yachty Music Video (2:09) and three Sing-A-Long songs — Rap (1:56), Inspirational Song (2:41), My Super Hero Movie (2:23) — featuring Starfire’s pet Silkie, who was left out of the film proper. WB Lot Shenanigans (3:56) features costumed adults as the Titans making noise around the film studio. Red Carpet Mayhem (2:10) has some of the cast have fun at the premiere. We also have a DC Super Hero Girls Short: The Late Batsby (4:14). Interestingly, Teen Titans GO!: Translated (2:18) shows scenes translated for international audiences. We have two Storyboard Animatics: Time Cycles (1:07) and The Final Battle (1:34). Finally, there’s a one-minute deleted scene.
I recently finished reading Book Three of March, the graphic novel autobiography of Atlanta Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis. I had never heard of Lewis prior to encountering March, but having now read it, I’ve gained a better picture of not only his life, but of the internal and external obstacles that the Civil Rights movement navigated in the 50s and 60s. Living today at a time when white supremacists have actually managed to gain an inexplicable foothold back into the mainstream—something I never thought I’d ever experience in my lifetime—reading March, isn’t just a gratifying reading experience. It’s a reminder of where our country has been, and the direction from which that pendulum has swung. As we reel from the horrors of Charlottesville, religious travel bans, mass child abuse inflicted upon brown children, and the continued practices of voter suppression, March serves as a warning of what it may look like if it swings back too far.
Lewis played many key roles in the civil rights movement, and the end of legalized racial segregation in the United States. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders, and one of the “Big Six” leaders of groups who organized the 1963 March on Washington. He was the fourth person to speak at the March (Dr. King was tenth). Only 23 at the time of his speech, he was the youngest of the speakers, and is the only one still living.
The author’s photo of the creative team, from left to right: Nate Powell, Andrew Aydin, and Congressman John Lewis.
I first became acquainted with March in 2013, when Book One was published by Top Shelf Comics, and I covered the signing held at Midtown Comics in Manhattan as a photographer for Wikipedia. Congressman Lewis was in attendance, along with his Digital Director and Policy Advisor Andrew Aydin, who conceived the idea for the book and co-wrote it with him, and artist Nate Powell, who illustrated and lettered the book. Book Two followed in 2015, and Book Three in 2016.
While March obviously isn’t the first work dealing with the history of the civil rights movement, and is not the first autobiography Lewis has written (his prose memoir, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, was published in 1998), March is unique in that it is a graphic novel, a medium chosen for its ties to the history of the movement, and to Lewis’ role in it. Lewis first heard of Rosa Parks, Dr. King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott through his mentor, James Lawson, who worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (F.O.R.), an interfaith organization dedicated to promoting peace and justice. Lawson gave Lewis a copy of Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a 10-cent comic book published by F.O.R. that demonstrated in clear fashion the power of nonviolence. The Montgomery Story served as one of the guides used at student meetings that Lewis began attending, and influenced other civil rights activists, including the Greensboro Four. Aydin repeatedly suggested to Lewis that he write a comic book of his own, bringing him back full circle to the medium that got him involved in the movement.
And what a story it is.
The story opens in media res on March 7, 1965, as the young Lewis stands on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama with fellow civil rights activists during the Selma to Montgomery marches, which serves as a framing sequence that bookends the trilogy. The activists are confronted by Alabama state troopers, who order the protestors to turn around. When the protestors kneel to pray, the troopers attack them, before the narrative cuts away to Lewis’ beginnings.
Lewis grew up on his sharecropper father’s farm in rural Alabama, tending to the family’s chickens while entertaining dreams of becoming a preacher. Eventually, his eyes were opened to the state of race relations in the United States by his school studies, and by his maternal uncle Otis, who took Lewis on his first trip up North in June 1951. Lewis describes the careful planning that had to be made for such trips in order to avoid places where black people were not wanted, and the caution Otis observed as they drove through Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky. Their relief comes only when they make it to Ohio, which is accompanied by the image of their car driving across another bridge, a fitting recurring motif.
Although his parents had raised him to stay out of trouble, the experience of seeing whites and blacks living side and by side in the unsegregated North changed Lewis so much that home never felt the same to him. When he started school again, the segregated bus he rode to school was a daily reminder of what he had learned about the two worlds that existed in the United States. When Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka outlawed public school segregation, Lewis thought it would improve his schooling, but his parents continued to warn him, “Don’t get in trouble. Don’t you get in the way.” Lewis also noticed that the injustices against blacks were not mentioned by local church ministers, and that his minister drove a very nice automobile. Profoundly inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s social gospel and the Civil Rights movement that he heard in a Sunday sermon by King on the radio, Lewis preached his first public sermon just before his sixteenth birthday, garnering his first publicity. While attending American Baptist Theological Seminary Lewis sought to transfer student to Troy University, and when he was rejected because he was black, it led to his first meetings with civil rights leaders Ralph Abernathy and Fred Gray, and then Dr. King. Lewis was told they would have to sue the state of Alabama to change this, but since Lewis was still a minor, he would have to get his parents permission for this. Lewis was heartbroken when his parents refused, but he would continue his work in Nashville, where his moral philosophy on racism, poverty and war was shaped by other activists there like Diane Nash and Jim Lawson, and those far away like Mohandas Gandhi. From here, Book One of the trilogy depicts Lewis and the Nashville Student Movement’s lunch counter sit-ins, and the tactics they learned to employ in response to racists who inflicted abuse and beatings upon them, and how they dealt with arrests.
Book Two depicts the expansion of the Nashville student movement’s respectful protests, Lewis’ involvement with the SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Freedom Riders; their confrontations with opponents like Bull Conner and George Wallace; and the resulting beatings, shootings, firebombed buses and imprisonment. Their activities caught the attention of the initially equivocal Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and that of others who decided to become Freedom Riders themselves—swelling the movement’s numbers so that even imprisonment wouldn’t be a feasible way for the white establishment to stop them. As Lewis put it, “The fare was paid in blood, but the Freedom Rides stirred the national consciousness and awoke the hearts and minds of a generation.” The SNCC also faced a schism between those who favor their effective direct action campaigns and those who favored Dr. King and Robert Kennedy’s urging to focus on registering blacks to vote. When Jim Bevel and the South Christian Leadership Conference organized Birmingham’s black children to protest, a thousand children were arrested, and the televised images of fire hoses and German shepherds being used against kids horrified the nation. As Lewis is elected chairman of the SNCC, he is moved by the surreal nature of being invited for a meeting with President John Kennedy and other black leaders at the White House, where the March on Washington is first announced.
Book Three opens with the September 15, 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The SNCC continues its work amid the assassination of JFK; and continued violent resistance to the Civil Rights movement, which includes the murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. President Lyndon Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but it does not ban “literacy tests” and other voting restrictions. What remains to be achieved is a voting rights bill, but Johnson’s need to court Southern voters in the upcoming election spurs him and his supporters to put pressure on civil rights activists to stop the protests. This gives cause for conflict between Roy Wilkins, who favors ceasing the protests, King, who suggests a moratorium on them, and those like Lewis and James Farmer, who are adamant that protests must continue. The murder of activists like James Reeb and 26-year-old Army veteran Jimmie Lee Jackson seem to threaten to shatter Lewis, but also seem to steel his resolve for the Selma to Montgomery marches, which brings him to the Edmund Pettus bridge, and back to the scene that opened the trilogy. Chaos breaks out as state troopers brutally beat and tear gas activists, which becomes known as “Bloody Sunday.” Lewis’s skull is fractured, but amazingly, he escapes across the bridge to safety, and appears on television to call for Johnson to intervene before he even goes to the hospital, bearing scars from that beating to this day. The photo of the unconscious Amelia Boynton Robinson, pummeled nearly to death, so shocks the world that it raises the public’s consciousness on the need for lawmakers to act. It’s probably not for nothing that the crowd crossing the Edmund Pettus bridge is the cover image of the slipcased three-book set, beautifully silhouetted against the Sun.
What I appreciate about this story is the genuineness of the conflict among not just racists and civil rights activists but among the various individuals and groups of the movement. While multiple layers of conflict is part of writing fiction, this is often not possible when telling a non-fictional story authentically, and can result in writers either fabricating events and conflicts that never happened, or telling a story in a way that seems flat and boring. Neither occurs in March. Preparations for the March on Washington, for example, which one may think, with the auspiciousness granted to that event by the hindsight of history, was brought about by winds of inevitability, was anything but. Behind the scenes, arrangements are marked by tension over passages in Lewis’s speech that are seen as anti-Catholic, and possibly pro-Communist. This is a clash that I never knew took place prior to the reading this book, and its inclusion makes the read both entertaining and educational.
I also appreciate that Lewis does not make the movement about him, and gives space to discussing figures I had previously heard little or nothing of, like Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin. While evaluating a work of non-fiction is more difficult than a work of fiction, in part because one can’t be certain how much is accurate, the fact that Lewis explains who everyone else is goes a long way to conveying a feeling of authenticity, and the sense that I’m learning much I never learned in high school, or even during the boilerplate television programming we get every February. Lewis doesn’t skimp on the emotional moments either, and there are plenty in this book. Particularly powerful is a moment when Robert Kennedy cements Lewis’s respect for him when he pulls the young activist aside and says to him, “You, the young people of SNCC, have educated me. You have changed me. Now I understand.”
Nate Powell’s art is perfectly suited to this type of book. Using a combination of ink and ink wash, with an adeptly varied line weight, the greyscale art does a good job of evoking a sense of time and place. Powell knows when to apply his technique judiciously, making competent use of shadows, silhouettes and high-contrast black and white compositions during dramatic moments, and even rendering some panels in a light, all-pencil technique.
The power of Powell’s depiction of historical figures lies not in fealty to standards of photorealism, but from his ability to elicit feelings with his visuals: Characters set against completely black background, their figures rendered in the sparse areas illuminated by a lone light source, convey a feeling of their isolation, while a farmhouse drawn in one or two light tones of grey against an all white background transport the reader to the sun-drenched fields of the rural South. While I like color, even prefer it, one never feels cheated when looking at the art in this book.
Praise also needs to given to Powell’s excellent depiction of each character’s features. In an industry where artists often have one or two stock “faces” that they use on every character, to illustrate 445 pages of a story featuring dozens of real-life people, many of which have to be distinguishable to the reader page by page, is a considerable undertaking. Powell wisely chose not to go the photorealistic route by constantly referring to photos, which for some artists, can result in stiff, lifeless characters. Instead, he developed a visual shorthand “master drawing” for each character, one that emphasized their skull structure, to serve as a reference for their features. One need only look as far as any number of licensed comics, like some of the Star Trek books, which look like they’re drawn by artists who simply copy publicity photos, to see how well Powell avoided this problem. His characters are historically accurate yet vibrant and fluid.
The only criticisms I have is that in some instances, Powell’s designs deviate a bit too far from the person’s actual likeness, as with the portraits of FDR, JFK and Truman hanging above the stage at the 1964 Democratic convention, which look nothing like those men, and would not have been recognized out of context, or without the labels that Powell placed above each portrait (which were not at the actual convention). Kennedy seems to be a particular problem for Powell in other places in the trilogy. This required me to go back and re-read dialogue to verify who he was, and when that happens in a comic featuring one of the most beloved figures of the 20th century, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Powell also seems to have the same problem that some other artists have when rendering the human face at an angle, apparently not having mastered how the eye and eye socket looks in three-quarter view, or in perspective. There’s also that bizarre line Powell uses on Page 126 of Book Three to connect the ground seen in Panel 2 with the top of Lewis’ head in Panel 3. Nonetheless, these issues are few and far between, and overall, the book is a triumph for Powell.
Since comics are a visual medium, I should also talk about how the visuals are nicely balanced with the text. This book is an autobiography dealing with the various political and cultural conflicts of the civil rights movement, and by necessity, entails much discussion among characters. This can be tricky for comics, and for that matter, any visual medium, including film, television, etc.. Do it right, and you have masterpieces like Sidney Lumet’s enthralling 1957 feature film adaptation of Twelve Angry Men, easily my favorite black and white film, which set almost entirely in a small jury room and driven entirely by dialogue. Do it poorly, and you get the last couple of historical dramas by Steven Spielberg, which I found flat and sleep-inducing. March, however, gets it right. Rather than publish a smaller book by omitting important details that explain what the challenges that Lewis and his colleagues faced, the book’s size allows space to be given to the important discussions and arguments that occurred among different groups in the movement, and does so in a way that does not come across as overly heavy with word balloons. Lewis, Aydin and Powell manage to do this in a way that the story and dialogue is seamlessly incorporated with the art, so that the amount of space given to each scene feels appropriate. Six pages are devoted, for example, to Lewis’ speech at the March on Washington, and as a result, it both reads well and looks good.
The fact that Powell lettered the book too may also help explain its narrative success, and one gets a sense of how closely the three creators worked together to effect what seems like a genuine shared vision rather than an assembly line product. While lettering isn’t something I often notice, it’s an unsung hero of comics, and Powell’s unique approach to it, incorporating it into the book’s landscape stands out. A Bible verse being read by the prepubescent John sitting in silhouette on his porch is written out in the black area of his back, conveying out the words penetrated his very soul. An important announcement heard on a radio aren’t depicted so much as the typical floating clouds rendered above the device as it is jagged billows of electricity spit out by the radio, as if it is as much a character as those listening to it.
I can’t stress enough what an important work this is. If you love to read, buy it. If you want to expand your comics reading list with more non-superhero works, buy it. And if the re-emergence of David Duke and the murder of Heather Heyer horrify you, then buy several copies and give some to your friends.
And above all, VOTE.
Better than men than you and I have had their skulls cracked open for that right.
Gilbert Hernandez is a cartoonist of extremes. Just looking at his work related to the Palomar/Luba set of stories, he ranges all the way from the joyous porn of Birdland to the (equally joyous, in very different ways) kid-friendly stories from the turn of the century about Venus.
Venus also appeared in stories that aren’t kid-friendly, which could make sharing a book like Luba and Her Family (which has the bulk of those Venus stories) with an eight-year-old somewhat problematic. But, luckily, there is a just-the-kid-stuff Venus collection:The Adventures of Venus.
As far as I can tell, this small book — it has half-size comics pages, and less than a hundred of them — entirely consists of stories also in Luba and Her Family, so most people will not want to buy both of them. (Some people, naming no names, might have bought both of them thinking they were different things.)
The long, weird story about the “blooter baby” was original to this book, which otherwise collected all-ages material by Hernandez from the late-90s comic Measles. (It was a multi-author anthology, so he had just one Venus story each issue.)
Venus is fun and spunky, but these are mostly the lesser stories about her — concerned with normal kid-activities like soccer and with her social interactions. The other Venus stories, the ones not specifically aimed at kids, give her more depth and make her more interesting, though they probably are unsuitable for this age range — she’s exposed to knowledge of a whole lot of the illicit sexual pairings going on in Hernandez’s work in that era. (Including her own mother.)
So this is a perfectly nice book for a young audience. The only place it leads, though, is somewhere its target audience can’t follow, which could be a problem for a household that combines inquisitive young readers and copies of those other Hernandez books. And anyone older than that should just get Luba and Her Family, which has all of these stories and a lot more.
The second wave of Batmania was ignited in 1989 when Tim Burton finally got a big screen adaptation of the comic book hero into theaters. It was such a wild success in terms of merchandising that Warner Bros wanted more and quickly. Since features take two to three years, they needed something sooner and the success of their Tiny Tunes and Animaniacs encouraged them to bring the Dark Knight back to television.
Thankfully, the project was placed in the hands of Alan Burnett, Bruce Timm, and Paul Dini who were not only fans of the character but the earliest cartoon fare. Taking a visual cue from Burton and a stylistic one from the Fleischer Brothers Studio, they produced a Batman cartoon unlike anything from the 1960s or 1970s. Batman the Animated Series was sampled on prime time in September 1992 before launching on Fox Kids and for three seasons, there was nothing quite like it.
The episodes have been collected before; including a beautiful DVD box set in 2008, but now, Warner Home Entertainment has remastered the files for high definition and gifted us with Batman: The Complete Animated Series. This lush 12-disc collection has not only every episode of the series but the two feature films – Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero — it spawned as well.
Not only did the series look grim and gritty, it was blessed with a Danny Elfman theme, further connecting it with the features. The stories were far from kiddie fare as the writing staff took the gruesome, tragic, and mentally deranged rogues and reinvented them for the small screen. This is where Mr. Freeze got an origin that made you feel for the scientist, and benefitted from the Mike Mignola redesign.
One of the series’ greatest strengths was in its voice casting, led by Kevin Conroy (Batman), Clive Revill and Efrem Zimbalist Jr (as Alfred), Melissa Gilbert (Batgirl), Brock Peters (Lucius Fox). The villains were led by Mark Hamill’s Joker, Richard Moll (Two-Face), Arleen Sorkin (Harley Quinn), Adrienne Barbeau (Catwoman), Paul Williams (The Penguin), Ron Perlman (Clayface), Ed Asner (Roland Daggett), and Roddy McDowall (The Mad Hatter). The show also paid tribute to the first era of Batmania with Adam West portraying The Gray Ghost.
Dini and Timm struck a nerve when they created Harley Quinn, designed as a one-off character but everyone fell in love with her, from the design to Sorkin’s voice. She has become DC’s answer to Deadpool in terms of ubiquity and is getting her own series on the DC Entertainment streaming service (although Sorkin is being replaced with Kaley Cuoco).
There was something for children, teens, and adults in every episode with visuals taken from the comics, stories adapted from the comics by scribes including Len Wein and Martin Pasko. It was such a well-crafted show that it earned multiple Emmy Awards and critical acclaim while the features, in lesser hands, crashed and burned.
The Blu-ray scans of the film negatives means we’re presented with the original 1.33:1 aspect ratio but the look is cleaner and clearer than ever before. This series was among the last to be predominantly hand animated and you can enjoy every frame. The video accompanying this review demonstrates the differences. The audio is offered as a 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio lossless audio track and sounds tremendous.
The 12-discs are lovingly packaged with fine graphics and offer viewers the 109 episodes in production order, including the ones entitled The Adventures of Batman & Robin and The New Batman Adventures. Most of the Special Features from previous editions are replicated here so you get commentary from Timm, Dini; writer Michael Reaves; directors Glen Murakami, James Ticker, and Dan Riba; and producers Eric Radomski, Boyd Kirkland, and Kevin Altieri. (Missing are the Timm intros from the 2008 box set but it’s a minor quibble.)
Shades of the Bat: Batman’s Animated Evolution is absent with the 22-minute featurette replaced with the three-part Heart of Batman, hosted by Dini. Reunited for the discussion are Dini, Timm, Radomski, Burnett, Fox’s Jean MacCurdy, now-retired voice director Andrea Romano and her finds, Conroy and Strong. Hamill’s is included via welcome archival footage.
The feature film discs are replicas of previous editions so some animated episodes are repeated as bonus features.
The Limited Edition box set also includes seven lenticular animation artwork cards, and a set of three Funko Pocket POPS figures: Batman, Joker, and Harley Quinn. There is also a Digital Copy code and initially, there was a problem with SD not High Def versions available and Warner has been working on the issue, promising an upgrade in the future.
Andi Watson, I think, started off expecting to tell stories of action and adventure in comics, with a fantastic flair, but kept finding those stories turning more personal and character-focused as he told them. (I could say “more mundane,” but that sounds like an insult. It isn’t: life itself is mundane. But it sounds that way.)
That happened on a large scale with his first major series, Skeleton Key, which I re-read earlier this year. And it happened on a smaller canvas with Geisha, the four-issue series that he created in between the main run of Skeleton Key and the four-part “Roots” coda in 1999.
The Complete Geisha is the 2003 book that collects all of the Geisha work up to that point — I think there might be some later short stories, but this could be it. It collects the main four-part story from the fall of 1998, a one-shot follow-up from 2000, and a few short related stories.
There’s no geisha in the book — at least, not any obvious one. Jomi Sohodo is an android raised in a human family — this seems to be rare, if not unique — who wants to be an artist, even though it’s heavily hinted that her line was designed as sexbots. She doesn’t want to work in the family bodyguard business, as her three human brothers do, but it’s paying work, and she has a hard time selling her paintings, so she ends up, over the course of the original story, in the family business. And that leads to drama and complications, as the body she guards is a top model with an angry ex-manager/boyfriend and her new art patron is a nasty gangster.
I don’t know if Watson expected to tell a story of androids in human society, or if the sexbot thing was ever supposed to pay off. But Jomi is the only android we see, in a society that I think is supposed to be full of them, and he seems less interested in the running around and bodyguarding than he is with Jomi’s struggles to get into the art world and the compromises she has to do along the way.
The one-shot, two years later, is in Watson’s softer mature style — and I could mean both the art and the story. There’s more shading in the art, rounder edges , and very little “action” in the usual comics sense. And it’s about Jomi as a person, particularly her relationship with one brother starting a new band, rather than anything plottier.
So this is transitional Watson, starting from the story he thought he wanted to tell (or that he thought the market wanted, or someone told him to make for that market) towards more individual stories like Love Fights or Little Star. Transitions are quirky, individual things, and Geisha shows some of that in its shape, but it’s still a good Watson comic about art and family and finding your place in the world.
I’m pretty sure this has been published in one volume, at least once. But the current edition is two volumes, and that’s what I read. (Long before that, it was published as fifteen comic book issues, and I had those as well, before my 2011 flood. But all things must pass.)
“This” is the first volume of Matt Wagner’s epic transmuting-his-life-into-heroic-adventure trilogy Mage. Mage: The Hero Discovered was one of Wagner’s first major comics projects in the 1980s and was followed by The Hero Defined at the end of the ’90s and, eventually, by The Hero Denied, planned to wrap up by the end of this year.
Since that third volume is about to finish up, and I expect to read it, I thought I might as well go back for the first two: when a creator takes 15-20 years between installments, you can do him the favor of reminding yourself of the old pieces before coming to the new ones. So I re-read Hero Discovered this month (Volume One, Volume Two), plan to hit Hero Defined next month, which should get me ready for the first Hero Denied collection…which I see was published a few days ago. (I doubt I’ll be able to hold off until the second half of Denied is published as a book in February, but I did skip buying all of the floppies, so maybe I will. As I get older, the appeal of story-pieces has gone down precipitously.)
Very early in the life of this blog, I had a breathless review of Defined, which I’m linking here for completeness’s sake — I really hope you don’t go back and read those burblings, which I am now embarrassed by. Otherwise, I’ve mentioned it, but not gotten into any depth.
It starts with overwriting two guys meeting on a city street — one may be drunk, and pretends to be happy, and one may be a bum, or pretends to be one. (Their dialogue is wince-inducing: if you decide to read Mage, you need to remember that it was nearly the first thing Wagner did in comics, and that he got better quickly — though ponderous unbelievable dialogue is an occasional hazard throughout the Mage stories.)
The not-drunk guy is Kevin Matchstick, who is so sad because he’s all alone. The not-bum calls himself Mirth, and he’s the mage of the title — there will be a different one for each series. Right after their conversation, Kevin sees a man attacking an actual bum in an alley, and surprises himself by running to intervene. He’s even more surprised to find the assailant is a hairless pale-skinned humanoid with sharp points on his elbows and that Kevin suddenly has super-strength and speed. The bum dies; the humanoid gets away.
And Kevin goes back to his apartment, confused, to find Mirth, who starts the official Hero’s Journey by explaining (well, a little) who he and Kevin are. Mirth is the World-Mage, opposed to the evil Umbra Sprite and his sons, the Grackleflints (the humanoids), who do the usual evil thing of corruption and destruction. Kevin has another fight with three (of five) of the Grackleflints in a subway car before he gets the next round of explanations from Mirth.
I’ll be blunt here, though Kevin doesn’t find this out for a long time: he’s The Eternal ChampionKing Arthurkind-of King Arthur, in that he’s the latest incarnation of a mythic hero and was once little Wart. He will gather allies — a teenage girl with a bat and a dead public defender — and, together, they will help him battle the Umbra Sprite and all of the supernatural creatures that the Sprite can summon and throw at him. The Sprite is searching for the Fisher King — another reincarnation, though not a hero — and if his Grackleflints can kill the Fisher King, it will bring a new era of death and destruction to earth.
And that’s the story of Discovered: this is explicitly a Hero’s Journey book, so Kevin learns bits and pieces of the setup over about four hundred pages, punctuated with fights against dragons and giants and redcaps and other mythical beasties, and occasionally broken up by attempts to actually figure out what the forces of evil are doing, where they’re headquartered, and how to stop them.
Before the end, there are major sacrifices so the Hero can stand alone, quite a lot of epic fight scenes, and a surprisingly nuanced view of the relationships among the forces of evil. Wagner started this series a little shakily, but it had great bones right from the beginning, and both his drawing and writing skills got stronger very quickly. It’s unfortunate that the two very worst pages in the whole Mage saga are the first two, but at least you can know that going in.
Somewhere along the line, the original 1980s-era coloring disappeared and was replaced by a more modern treatment by Jeromy Cox and James Rochelle — I think this is from the Defined era, but don’t quote me. I should also note that Wagner is inked by Sam Kieth, starting with the sixth (of fifteen) chapters, and that lines up with one of several leaps forward in the strength of the art. (So it’s not all Wagner, as the cover makes it seem — very few comics are that much of an auteur medium; there’s always some collaboration going on.)
Mage is a strong urban fantasy story in comics form, clearly in a mythic vein but with a lot of individual touches. It’s classy enough to have titles from Hamlet (and never say so, or explain them), and street enough to be about the reincarnation of King Arthur beating up monsters to save the world. And, if you’ve been waiting for the whole Mage saga to be done, you are nearly in luck.
Now, I know that I tend to focus on the negative, even when the positive is much larger and objectively more interesting. I usually blame that on “editor brain” — when you spend years pulling apart stories for a living, it forms a habit that you just can’t break.
So let me say up front that Finder is pretty damn awesome, a smart series of graphic novels with real character depth, a quirky and involving world, tricky plots, and sharp people-oriented art. But it’s got some elements in its SFnal setup that people like me obsess about and complain about more than they deserve.
I’ll try to keep those quibbles minor, since they are minor. This is a great world that basically hangs together; it just has a central flaw that’s very common, very understandable, and yet often very annoying (to people like me who can’t just let it go).
Finder is supposedly set a few thousand years in the future, on an Earth hugely depopulated, devoid of any obvious larger governments than pseudo-zaibatsu “clans,” with people either living crammed into domed cities or roaming the outside wastes as nomads very much modeled on the American Indian in ways that are deeply unlikely. It’s not clear if massive numbers of people left the planet in the meantime, if there was at least one apocalypse to kill billions, or if population just dwindled for a long time. (The current society seems to above replacement rate, and so growing, but maybe only slowly.) And popular culture is, as far as we see, primarily devoted to digging up ephemera of the 20th century.
So, yes, to tick off the obvious SF-geek issues: that feels like much too far in the future for the focus on modern pop-culture; there’s no clear path from here to get to this world; there doesn’t seem to be any infrastructure to feed those people, let alone provide them with industrial goods; and the lack of any structure to society outside/above/between the clans seems unlikely at best — how do clans resolve conflicts, living together in their tight little cities?
Let me stipulate all that: those are issues with the world-building, and maybe creator Carla Speed McNeiltackles them eventually. In the first three storylines of Finder, collected as the 2011 omnibus The Finder Library, Vol. 1, though, she doesn’t. This book has what was the first 22 issues of Finder the print comic — sometime later it turned into a webcomic — originally published between 1996 and 2001 and then collected into the first four trade paperbacks. (Sin-Eater, the first storyline, took up two books.)
Sin-Eater introduces the world through Jaeger, a roguish “finder” from one of the many tribal “Ascian” cultures that live nomadic lives in the Empty Lands between those domed cities. He has a lot of strangeness of his own, for a 20th century reader, but he’s an outsider in the city of Anvard, so he’s our viewpoint for the strangeness there.
Jaeger is the on-and-off lover of Emma Lockhart Grosvenor, a married woman in Anvard. That is to say: she lets him live with her when he’s in town, but he’s only in town randomly, at long intervals, and utterly without notice. McNeil does not show Jaeger having similar arrangements in other cities — and I think she finds him more appealing than I do — but I see no reason why a man like him wouldn’t have a semi-regular fuck-buddy in all of the places he wanders through.
Emma is part of a mixed marriage that went bad. She’s from the artistic, ultra-feminine Llaverac clan; her husband Brigham Grosvenor is from the military/police clan Medawar. [1] Brigham was a military leader who took his family to the frontier outpost where he was stationed (and where Jaeger was something like a native scout and Brigham’s aide/pet) and there descended into what Finder doesn’t actually call paranoid schizophrenia. Emma got away with her three “daughters” — all members of Llaverac are referred to by feminine pronouns and tend to present as female in public, even if they are biologically male — Rachel, Lynne (who is male), and Marcie (Marcella) with Jaeger’s aid a few years ago, and has been hiding from Brigham since then.
Sin-Eater is the story of how that hiding eventually falls apart, how Brig finds his family again, and how it affects all of them. Jaeger, in what I think is his usual style, is both too clever by half and has a a strong restless tropism to do stupid random things, so it’s all mostly his fault. It’s also the story that introduces the world and explains, as much as McNeil wanted, how it works and what these people do.
The second story here, King of the Cats, is more self-contained and focused more tightly on Jaeger. He’s worked his way to another city as an armed guard on a giant armored bus — the wilderness is quite dangerous, with all of those native tribes and no farmlands — carrying members of the Steinehan clan to an amusement-park city (unnamed, as far as I can find), and wants to get inside mostly because they won’t hire him or let him inside. Jaeger is motivated, as always, but spite and whim as much as anything else.
Camping nearby is a large group of Nyima, an intelligent non-human race with pretty serious sexual dimorphism — the females are lion-headed humanoids and the males a a big question mark. (We learn that most males are semi-intelligence quadrupedal lion-types, but each group has a King, whom all of the females are “married” to, and who has bipedalism and increased intelligence because of a specific intervention by the females. This seems unlikely to be stable or natural, but I can only shrug.) They have an onerous contract with the unseen owners of the amusement park, which they can’t fulfill without destroying their culture and becoming essentially slaves there for the rest of their lives, and which they can’t break without incurring massive financial penalties. (Again: this is a warlike group of nomads in a world with no apparent larger government. McNeil makes the dilemma plausible, but the heavily armed and well-positioned Nyima appear to have a much stronger hand than the weak, unarmed locals.)
Jaeger, in his meddling way, solves the Nyimas’ problem, answers his own curiosity, causes a larger amount of trouble than usual even for him, and leaves at the end, happy and ready for another opportunity to meddle somewhere else.
And last in Volume 1 is Talisman, which I read before a few years back
. This is Marcie’s story: she’s growing up from the little girl we saw in Sin-Eater, and I won’t repeat what I said then. (This post is long enough already.) The background details do make more sense if you come to Talisman in series order, though. Talisman is a story about the youth of an artist, which many artists are compelled to tell — McNeil does a good job of it, and her quirky world makes it specific and individual.
The most important thing for me to note at the end here is that I’m going to be actively seeking out Finder Library, Vol. 2. Some of the world-building might annoy me, but that always happens. McNeil’s people are real and have complicated flaws, her world is big and intricate and clearly is full of details she already knows that might never make it into a story, and her drawing is crisp and evocative and sophisticated. It’s good, real SF in comics form, which is rare, and it’s SF focused on people (often women) in a complex world, which is even rarer.
[1] How can there be a clan that specializes in “police” if there’s no government above them? They’d just be the street gang that runs the town, from their monopoly on violence. I’m hoping McNeil eventually explains the governance of this world, because so far I see nothing to keep one clan from eliminating another, or any mechanisms other than violence to solve inter-clan disputes.
A few years back, the idea was that every new comic publisher would establish a cohesive interconnected universe. Every one of their comic series would be just one part of a larger grand tapestry.
Times have changed.
Since it burst onto the scene, AHOY Comics has boldly said they want to make every comic different and surprising. They certainly deliver on that promise with Edgar Allen Poe’s Snifter of Terror #1, available today in stores right on time for Halloween.
This comic is witty, creepy, gross …and so much fun. It’s packed full of content that, like a rotting corpse, it seems a little bloated. But in a good way.
The first story- and adaptation of Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” – is grim stuff. Tom Peyer opens the story with Poe serving as our horror host. But there’s so much fear and self-loathing. Just when you think it’s too far over the top, it goes over the top again. This chilling story is also an excellent tool for those dieting and seeking appetite suppression tools.
And no sooner is it finished that Edgar Allen Poe again takes center stage to introduce, again in a very unpleasant manner, the second story.
This is the one that really shines for me. At first glance, “Dark Chocolate” looks like a straightforward vampire story. But in reality, it’s a satirical farce of everything that’s near and dear to every kid who grew up watching Hammer monster movies and eating cereal for breakfast.
Mark Russell, who’s recent Flintstones series for DC Comics has been an unexpected, breakout hit, delivers a story that’s sweetly surprising on so many levels at the same time. It’s been too long since I’ve read a comic story by artist Peter Snejbjerg, and I worry I’ve forgotten just how talented he is.
The comics are rounded out by other features. Included is a short gag comic featuring Poe and a humorous Interview with Mark Russell. However, the poem “The Scallop and the Barnacle” by Celia Madrid is the one not be missed. It’s a grisly tale told with a dash of gallows humor and inappropriate language. Not what I was expecting, but so happy to have read it.
Next issue looks great too. The cover is very much in the lines of the “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman”, but starring Edgar Allen Poe in that iconic pose, of course. It’s nutty, silly and kooky – so it makes all the sense of the world for this comic.
