Category: Reviews

Book-A-Day 2018 #285: High Society by Dave Sim

I don’t have an accurate record of when Dave Sim first said Cerebus would run for 300 issues. But my guess is that his plans became real during this storyline.

The first volume of Cerebus, which I covered last month , saw Sim moving rapidly from an amusing Thomas/Smith Conan parody with an oddly funny-animal main character to something more detailed and particular, and those twenty-five issues moved from standalone stories to trilogies and ongoing continuous plotlines.

No one expected Sim would then embark on a new story that would be as long as all of Cerebus to date. My guess is that not even Sim knew, when he was writing and drawing issue #26, “High Society,” that that would be the title for a much longer story. Somewhere in those first few High Society  issues, though, it clicked: he wasn’t just making a somewhat longer story: his narrative would stick around the city-state of Iest for more than two years of serial comics, over five hundred pages, and more political machinations than anyone had ever seen on the comics page.

So it became High Society. And a storyline many times longer than the previous ones posed a problem to Sim in the mid-80s. He was already a pioneer in reprinting his comics in permanent book editions, with the Swords of Cerebus series. But the sixth volume of that was already longer than the previous ones, reprinting five issues instead of four. Swords of Cerebus Seven would either be five times as long as the previous book or would break in the middle of the story.

Obviously it didn’t. Instead, Sim invented the “phone book” format — one little-used by other creators since, mostly because very few comics-makers have series with multiple five-hundred-page long plotlines to begin with. (He also annoyed the comics distribution network by going entirely direct-to-consumer for the High Society first printing, an innovation that made him money immediately but caused hassles for a while afterward.)

We tend to forget all of the business things Sim pioneered in independent comics, but there’s no Image without Sim, without that model of doing your comics your way, and then collecting them permanently. And this is the era when Sim was still exciting and vital and fizzy and Zeitgest-y, telling his own story and making sarcastic comments on the current comics scene at the same time.

High Society is probably the single highest point of Cerebus: a graphic novel that can stand alone and that a new reader can come into cold. Cerebus is this guy arriving in a new city, and then stuff happens to him: you don’t need to know more than that, and the first page tells you that much.

“Stuff happens” gets very baroque very quickly: Cerebus is caught up in other people’s schemes, as had been more and more central as the comic Cerebus went on the early ’80s, and the ultimate mover of those schemes was Sim’s brilliant re-imagining of Groucho Marx as Lord Julius, ruler of Palnu. [1]

High Society is a story about money and power, and particularly the power of money. Palnu is the only fiscally sound city-state in the entire Feldwar valley; every other country is running massive deficits and getting further and further in debt to Julius. Cerebus is the perfect counterweight to Palnu’s soft power, since he’s instinctively a creature of hard power: he knows armies and mercenaries and war tactics deeply, and his first instinct in any situation is to find and army and conquer something.

(This is not a good impulse in a modern world, obviously. But that raises the question of how modern Cerebus‘s world is. Is it modern enough that wars of conquest primarily smash economic activity and leave everyone poorer, or is it still medieval enough that conquest can be lasting and profitable?)

So Cerebus is first the Ranking Diplomatic Representative of Palnu to Iest, named as such without his knowledge. And then there’s a confusing plot where he’s running to keep that title, even though it’s pretty obviously a role that is going to always be in the direct remit of the ruler of the sending country. (How could it be otherwise?)

But that campaign ends up being the warm-up for the real one: Cerebus runs for Prime Minister of Iest, a job that has first slowly and then suddenly transformed from being a minor adjunct to a theocracy to being the center of secular power in the city-state. And that “suddenly” is because of Cerebus personally, in the sideways complicated manner common to Cerebus plots.

Like the best Cerebus plots, High Society is a one-damn-thing-after-another story. Cerebus is always his own worst enemy; he’s never satisfied with what he has and is the epitome of the guy who hits on sixteen every damn time. And Sim was notably never on Cerebus’s side, which is rare for a creator so closely identified with a single character. Cerebus is a horrible person in a whole host of ways, and was like that right from the beginning: Sim made him that way, and kept putting him in plots that exploited his flaws and worst tendencies. For about the first half of his adventures, Cerebus is the greatest anti-hero in comics.

Alongside all of the politics and plotting is Sim’s characteristic humor: he was the most consistently funny comics humorist of the early ’80s, and this volume has a string of his greatest hits. Sure, a lot of that humor was odd adaptations of other people’s characters — every funny character in Cerebus is based on a comedian or outside source — but Sim turned it all into comics, made it all work in his specific invented world, and gave all of those characters new, setting-appropriate jokes to tell. It’s hugely idiosyncratic, but it works amazingly well.

If you’ve never read Cerebus, and you’re willing to give Dave Sim one shot, this is the shot to take. Some parts of it are more meaningful, or funnier, if you’ve read the stories in the first collection, but I don’t think anything will be incomprehensible or particularly obscure. This is a great story about a grumpy, self-destructive guy who falls into politics in the worst way, in a vaguely late-medieval world where parts are rapidly modernizing, and has a masterful mix of humor and seriousness. If any of that sounds appealing, give it a try.

[1] Julius would make an interesting contrast to Terry Pratchett’s Patrician: both rule completely and capriciously, and both are shown to be master manipulators who always come out on top. But the Patrician works by extreme clarity and veiled threats, while Julius is his world’s master obfuscator and equivocator and either is the most Machiavellian planner of all time or just extremely good at thinking on his feet.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #283: Descender, Vol. 5: Rise of the Robots by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen

In a serial medium, there’s always the need to make sure the audience keeps up. So each new installment needs to do some work to give backstory, either with the potted “who they are and how they came to be!” box or flashbacks or whatever.

And when the story is moving quickly, one of the ways to do that effectively can be to slip back in time slightly at the beginning of each new installment, so the end of Section X and the beginning of Section Y tell the same moment in time, and overlap.

Jeff Lemire does that for every single transition in Descender, Vol. 5: Rise of the Robots , which I’m taking as a sign that he’s stomping his foot down on the gas and charging towards an ending in the not-too-distant future.

(I might as well throw in links to my posts on the earlier books, for those of you who are lost or just want more details: one and two and three and four .)

If you haven’t read Descender before, it’s soft-ish medium-future SF (intelligent but not godlike AI, some kind of unexplained FTL, various alien species, a galactic scope) in which planetoid-sized robot “Harvesters” appeared mysteriously about a generation ago, killed a large proportion of the organic sentients in the galaxy, and then went away. Since then, the robots created by those sentients have mostly been hunted and destroyed, for understandable if not strictly logical reasons.

(It’s a second cousin of the Butlerian Jihad, I suppose.)

Our main characters are on the human/robot interface: one special robot boy who was in hibernation since the attacks, the man who was his human companion as a boy, the roboticist that created that robot boy. Plus, of course, a larger cast of soldiers and schemers and killers on all sides of the conflicts — what was a fairly unified, advanced multi-species civilization shattered into a dozen or more nastier shards in the aftermath of that attack.

And it’s all coming to a head now: the Harvesters may be coming back, the local robots have definitely organized and are ready for their own counter-pogrom, and more individual acts of violence are also happening quickly.

Descender is a strong, somewhat space-operatic comic, a little more conventional and action-oriented than I’d expect from Jeff Lemire — but, then again, I’ve never read his Big Two work. It shows every sign of having a real ending, and to be barreling at top speed towards that ending. It’s good stuff: if you like SF, you should check it out.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #282: Multiple Warheads,Vol. 2: Ghost Town by Brandon Graham

I don’t want to call Multiple Warheads just a stoner comic — for one thing, I’m about as far from a stoner as you can get, and I like it quite a bit. But there’s a definite free-and-easy, anything-goes vibe to it that will appeal to the cannabis-inclined among us.

Brandon Graham started Multiple Warheads as a sex comic — I was surprised, several years later, when reading the first collection to find that hardcore-sex scene embedded in the middle of it — but it mutated after that first story into something less gonad-centric [1], a medium-future amble through what seems to be the radically changed former USSR, full of weird technology and various kinds of sapient creatures and lots of dodgy schemes and little-to-no effective government.

After a hiatus, Graham came back with a second cluster of Multiple Warheads stories over the past year or so, and those were collected this summer as Multiple Warheads, Vol. 2: Ghost Town . (The cover seems to make that last bit “Ghostown,” but I think that’s just Graham’s design-style, which leans heavily on punny misspellings and similar wordplay.)

Our main couple, Sexica and Nikoli, are on an extended journey: Sexica is delivering “the warhead” somewhere for a reason that I don’t think was deeply explained in the first volume and definitely isn’t here. They’re “on vacation,” as they put it — Nikoli is definitely away from his usual work, though Sexica’s stealing and sneaking is the kind of thing she can do a bit of no matter where she is.

And so she does.

She connects with some people — both bipedal, neither anything like human, which is par for the course in Multiple Warheads — who want to get into a “wizard’s lair” to retrieve something ancient and valuable. Meanwhile, Nikoli wanders around, get roped into doing some mechanic work, and has a surprising transformation near the end. The staff of the place (hotel?) where they’re staying and the intersecting dancers at a club where Sexica has a meeting with her new partners also get some featured scenes — the whole thing is loose and flowing, with an extensive cast who have complicated interrelationships.

Graham presents this all a bit sideways: he is fond of puns and wordplay, and that comes up in dialogue and the names of things (the restaurant All’s Whale That Ends Whale, one guess as to the main ingredient; a local bodega-ish place is the Manticorner) as well as in labels and other “throwaway” text. So this is a world full of wordplay, where things are named quirkily and those quirks are important.

Ghost Town is, at its core, a caper story — assemble the small team of experts, learn the secrets of what they’re trying to do, and watch them go do it — but there’s a lot of other stuff going on around that. Graham gives Multiple Warheads an everyday, lived-in feeling: his world may be a weird mix of technology and what looks like magic, and his people may look like anything and everything, but they’re all still people, trying to make it through their days and get back to the ones they care about.

Despite the big caper stuff, Ghost Town is quieter than the first volume: there’s a lot here that could potentially have been overly dramatic, but that’s not how Graham plays it.

Multiple Warheads is an intricate delight, full of tiny details and silly sidebars. Each page is a moment to be savored…though some, occasionally, almost need to be decoded. This is definitely not a comic for everyone, but its joys are real, deep, and unique.

[1] Though the sex scene is still completely in continuity, and is referenced on the first story page here — the fact that Sexica got a werewolf penis through her nefarious activity and sewed it onto her boyfriend Nikoli is central to a lot of Multiple Warheads in general and Ghost Town in particular.

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

REVIEW: The Faithful Spy

The Faithful Spy
By John Hendrix
Amulet Books/368 pages/$18.99

Every time you think you’re done hearing amazing stories about individual acts of courage during World War II, another one comes along. In this case, the true story of the German plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler comes in a unique graphic novel that is compelling reading for Middle and High Schoolers.

Dietrich Bonhoffer was a devout Lutheran, a member of a large German family, and destined to be a leader. He went to school, became ordained and was a theologian, teaching and preaching while the storm clouds gathered around Germany. The Nazi Party took advantage of the diaspora surrounding the citizenry, instill outrage at their economic plight and hatred towards the ones responsible for their plight – the Jews.

Bonhoffer’s story is told parallel and intermingled with the rise of Nazi power, a primer to pre-World War II history. Once it became clear that Hitler and his part wanted absolute power, resentment grew in a select few who saw through the artifice. As Chancellor Hitler changed the national dialogue and rebuilt their war machinery in direct violation of the Paris Treaty that ended World War I. A weary Europe tried to ignore them until Hitler seized absolute power in the wake of President Hindenburg’s death. Then the war drums began beating.

Hitler’s actions within Germany are carefully detailed so we see how he incrementally seized control, with events not usually included in historic works, such as Hitler altering prayer so rather than praying to God above all, it was God then Hitler. Yikes.

Concerned, Bonhoffer found himself slowly drawn into a cabal that was determined to exterminate Hitler before he could not be stopped. Yet, while Hitler blitzed his way through Europe, the conspirators proved either inept or unlucky (perhaps both). Obviously, the conspiracy failed as we know, but that makes the book no less interesting. While he was never directly involved in planting failed explosives, he was close enough to eventually be captured and imprisoned.

Even while in jail his spirits and faith rarely flagged despite missing his family and his bride. The ending is somber as Hitler failed and Bonhoffer died a prisoner.

Hendrix works in a complex style, mixing long stretches of text with illustrations and graphic storytelling elements. There are wonderful sidebars that provide context for events and personnel and much of the dialogue comes straight from Bonhoffer’s own writings, giving the work authenticity. The work is visually interesting, printed in black, magenta, and cyan tones. His style is compelling and clear, just cartoony enough to avoid looking scholarly.

The creator provides notes on sources and a limited bibliography for those interested in learning more about Bonhoffer and his colleagues. By all means, check this one out.

Book-A-Day 2018 #279: Sebastian O/The Mystery Play by Grant Morrison, Steve Yeowell, and Jon J Muth

What do you do with the quirky minor failures of a major creator?

Well, you can ignore them, and that’s what happens most of the time. You can also try to spiff them up a bit, and get them walking two by two, in hopes that they’ll look more impressive in company. If the creator is major enough and his backlist extensive enough, you might find yourself doing that.

In this case, you did — if “you” are DC Comics and “the creator” is writer and self-proclaimed chaos magician Grant Morrison. And you probably made a bit of money out of it, which is the whole point of the exercise.

But these are still quirky minor failures, even twenty-five years later, and perhaps at this remove even more clearly show Morrison’s characteristic failure modes: a reliance on high concepts even when they don’t make narrative sense, a tropism to stylishness as an end in itself, an unwillingness to actually explain anything that might make his worlds actually plausible, provocative dialogue that neither sounds like human beings talking nor has any solid meaning, and, above all else, the love of flash over substance.

The book is Sebastian O/The Mystery Play . The two things collected are 1993’s three-issue alternate-Victorian serial-killer [1] frivolity drawn by Steve Yeowell (who also did the much better Zenith  with Morrison) and the 1994 spooky, sophomorically “philosophical” bad detective story graphic novel drawn by Jon J Muth (who later fled comics for illustrating children’s books, possibly because of tripe like this).

Both of them are stylish in their own ways; both are entertaining on their own levels. Both also fail on basic levels of plausibility, much like other Morrison works up to his famous JLA run. So maybe his fans will love these oddball early-90s stories, but I tend to think they’re not the right kind of weird — no superheroes, not set in a cool version of the modern world, not obviously transgressive.

Sebastian O is set in a steampunky alternate-Vistorian world that doesn’t seem to have any real reason to be alternate. The title character, a melange of Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, and Jack the Ripper, is supposedly a genius, but we only see him run around, murder people, and talk about his clothes. He escapes from jail at the beginning of the story, where he was incarcerated for what seem like vague and trumped-up “being gay and subversive” reasons. We readers would thus be on his side, if not for the randomly violent ways he does escape, and rampages through the secret gay-cult society that apparently betrayed him.

I say “gay,” because the narrative makes that clear, though in the usual Mauve Decade euphemisms. But neither Sebastian nor the people he chases show much affection for anyone who is not themselves, and their choice of sexual partners is not particularly important for this thriller-chase plot. Like so many Morrison stories, it seems like an affectation or a signpost rather than anything intrinsic to the story.

Anyway, Sebastian murders his way out of prison, murders his way through his former friends, and finds the fiend behind the whole thing, who frankly seems somewhat unpleasant but not nearly as bad as Sebastian. There is a Shocking Revelation at the end, which, as often with Morrison, doesn’t actually make any sense, and which is ignored anyway. So we’re left with the story of the murderous rampage of a Victorian dandy — if you’re looking for that, you are in luck.

The Mystery Play is more sedate and grounded. The small Yorkshire city of Townley, struggling for whatever reason, is putting on a large-scale production of traditional medieval mystery plays for the Christmas season, dramatizing what seems like most of the Bible for the entertainment of tourists. On the night of the debut of the first play, someone murders the actor playing God.

And, yes, every single person in Townley who talks about this event afterward refers to this as “the death of God.” Not the death of a prominent local doctor, who they all knew, but an amateur acting part that he just took and died in the middle of. And it is Ontologically Important to every single one of them. Morrison’s greasy thumb is particularly prominent with this element, and it overwhelms the entire story.

A single Detective Sergeant is sent from vaguely somewhere else, with no driver and no lines of reporting back to his superiors and no paperwork and no connections to the local coppers. This is of course A Whopping Great Clue, and only the dimmest readers will miss it. It’s also entirely stupid, and wouldn’t actually work for more than five seconds, even before “Detective Sergeant Frank Carpenter” spends all of his time in philosophical musings about God and the Devil.

Eventually, there is another play performed “on-stage” in the story, and it of course is the very end of the mystery cycle, in which Jesus is crucified. Nudge nudge wink wink!

It’s unfortunate that the story is such bullshit, because Muth delivers stunning work here — moody painted pages with stunningly real faces, a fantastic mix of levels of abstraction. Every single page here is absolutely gorgeous, and a masterpiece of the comics art. Shame about the words thrown on top, though.

So Sebastian O is an answer to the question “What if Oscar Wilde was a man of action?” and The Mystery Play similar investigates “What if God were killed during a mystery play?” Neither of those are particularly good questions, and Morrison’s attempts to imbue them with deep meaning fall flat. This is probably why they were quietly out of print for much of the last twenty-five years, and why they will probably slip back into that abyss once the stock of this 2017 omnibus are depleted. Morrison has some little-known gems in his backlist — I mentioned Zenith before, also with Yeowell, for one example — but these are not among them.

[1] Morrison’s main character is a serial killer, and a deeply unrepentant one. Some of the people he kills “deserve it,” but he’s also happy to just slaughter anyone in his way. Since he’s incredibly shallow otherwise, it’s the defining characteristic of his personality.

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

Winter is Coming as is White Walker Whisky

New York, NY — Send a raven— Scotch has officially entered the realm. In collaboration with HBO®, DIAGEO is unveiling the new White Walker by Johnnie Walker Blended Scotch Whisky and The Game of Thrones Single Malt Scotch Whisky Collection. The limited-edition whiskies are inspired by the iconic characters and the creative world of Westeros and beyond and are here to tide fans over during their wait for the eighth and final season. Even the most revered Maester couldn’t have predicted a collaboration of this monumental proportion.

“Groundbreaking partnerships continue to be a strategic initiative for Diageo as they foster exceptional creative collaboration and help showcase the breadth of our portfolio. We are very proud to have our collection of single malts and Johnnie Walker, the number one scotch whisky brand in the world, collaborate with HBO’s most successful TV franchise to develop these limited-edition offerings for fans to collect and celebrate the final season of Games of Thrones,” said Dan Sanborn, Senior Vice President, Culture and Partnerships at DIAGEO.

“We knew there was fan appetite for a Game of Thrones whisky and once we saw Diageo’s vision for a way to collaborate together we knew the idea was perfect and the time was now. From the beginning, they understood that we wanted to create something special, and they’ve accomplished that with both White Walker by Johnnie Walker and the single malt collection. We’re confident fans will enjoy sipping these delicious whiskies as they wait for season eight and beyond,” said Jeff Peters, Vice President, Licensing & Retail at HBO.

The first limited-edition offering available in the realm is White Walker by Johnnie Walker, inspired by the most enigmatic and feared characters on the show — the White Walkers. This blend was created by whisky specialist George Harper alongside the small team of expert blenders at Johnnie Walker. At the heart of this new, innovative blend are single malts from Cardhu and Clynelish – one of Scotland’s most northern distilleries where whiskies have endured long Scottish winters, not dissimilar to the climate north of the wall. This special blend has notes of caramelized sugar and vanilla, fresh red berries with a touch of orchard fruit and is best served chilled – the Night King would have it no other way.

The bottling brings you right to the Frozen North with its icy white and blue design along with the iconic Striding Man now fashioned in armor to fit in among the ranks of the Night King’s forces. Utilizing temperature-sensitive thermal chromatic ink technology, fans will be reminded that “Winter is Here” from an unexpected graphic icy reveal on the bottle when frozen.

The Game of Thrones Single Malt Scotch Whisky Collection features eight, scotches that are all new to the U.S., and are each paired with one of the iconic Houses of Westeros, as well as the Night’s Watch, giving fans an authentic taste of the Seven Kingdoms and beyond. Diageo’s unparalled diverse range of distilleries in Scotland, much like in Westoros, each have their own unique characteristics and produce a distinctive whisky representative of its local terroir. These similarities were the inspiration behind the collection, drawing an authentic storyline between each House and single malt pairing – from the power of water between both House Tully and The Singleton of Glendullan, to the legendary women behind House Targaryen and Cardhu, or the royal lineage of House Baratheon and Royal Lochnagar and more.

These limited-edition whiskies are certain to be as fleeting as the holder of the Iron Throne, so be sure to have White Walker by Johnnie Walker or one of the unparalleled Game of Thrones Single Malt whiskies on hand to toast to the final season before they are all gone.

White Walker by Johnnie Walker will be available nationwide starting October 2018 wherever fine spirits are sold. The Game of Thrones Collection Single Malt Scotch Whisky Collection will be available nationwide starting fall 2018 wherever fine spirits are sold. Suggested retail pricing is included below.

  • White Walker by Johnnie Walker SRP: $36 for 750ml; ABV 41.7%
  • Game of Thrones House Tully – Singleton of Glendullan Select; SRP: $29.99 for 750ml; ABV 40%
  • Game of Thrones House Stark – Dalwhinnie Winter’s Frost; SRP: $39.99 for 750ml; ABV 43%
  • Game of Thrones House Targaryen – Cardhu Gold Reserve; SRP: $39.99 for 750ml; ABV 40%
  • Game of Thrones House Lannister – Lagavulin 9 Year Old; SRP: $64.99 for 750ml; ABV 46%
  • Game of Thrones The Night’s Watch – Oban Bay Reserve; SRP: $62.99 for 750ml; ABV 43%
  • Game of Thrones House Greyjoy – Talisker Select Reserve; SRP: $44.99 for 750ml; ABV 45.8%
  • Game of Thrones House Baratheon – Royal Lochnagar 12 Year Old; SRP: $64.99 for 750ml; ABV 40%
  • Game of Thrones House Tyrell – Clynelish Reserve; SRP: $59.99 for 750ml; ABV 51.2%

Book-A-Day 2018 #276: Sex Criminals, Vol. 5: Five-Fingered Discount by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky

I have two ways I could start this, and I don’t know which one to take. So my indecision will instead be the actual starting point, and I will provide you with two options:

  • Last time out, I noted that Sex Criminals seemed to be sliding in the direction of being a superhero comic about people with sex-based powers, but that tide is now going out.
  • There might be a real honest-to-god ending coming up for Sex Criminals, and not just amusing sex-jokes and vaguely sex-positive character development.
Both of those things are positive, to my mind — the world already has too many superhero comics, and not enough comics that actually end well. So I’m reenergized, at least a bit, which is a nice thing to have happen five books into a series.
In case you’re lost, I’ll repeat the information in the title. The book is Sex Criminals, Vol. 5: Five-Fingered Discount , reprinting issues 21-25 of the Image series written by Matt Fraction and drawn by Chip Zdarsky. For some more context, see my posts on the earlier books: the unnamed first volume , Two Worlds, One Cop , Three the Hard Way . and Fourgy .

As the back covers explain amusingly, both Suze and Jon make time stop when they orgasm. They discovered their mutual secret the first time they had sex, and used it to rob banks for a while. Since then, they’ve learned that a bunch of other people can do the same thing, and even weirder things.

In the last volume, they broke up. (Um, Spoiler! I guess.) Since Sex Criminals is a reasonably mainstream serial comic with occasional superhero tropisms, we know both that “breaking up the team” is something that will happen every so often and that it cannot be permanent.

I’m not going to throw in a Spoiler! again, but guess what?

This is the volume where nearly the entire sex-powered cast (which is all but one or two of them) are slowly gravitating towards each other, slowly giving up their individual complaints and animuses, for the big team-up against the real villain: the rich guy.

(He is a real villain, too, and a complete asshole, but he’s also the one rich guy.)

From the end of this book, I had the strong opinion that there would be one more volume to get us to the big ending, and it looks like I’m right: random Googling told me that some random Internet guy says that is indeed the case. And if you can’t believe some random Internet guy, who can you believe? (He sourced it to the issue #25 letter column. Does that sound slightly more authoritative?)

So: this is mostly character stuff (plus sex jokes), and the threatened superhero-style all-hands smack-down has been averted, at least for now. There will be one more volume, to fix whatever can be fixed, and give whoever deserves it a Happily Ever After. Stuff actually happens that matters in this book, and it’s pretty much all decisions and thoughts — moments between people. And, again, a lot of sex jokes — what could be better?

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #274: Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 1 by The Hernandez Brothers

This week, I Love (And Rockets) Mondays leaves behind the lands of carefully tended and curated reprints and heads into the off-road weeds of messy serial comics. We’ll be back to carefully-tended a couple of times before the end, but Love and Rockets was a serial comic to begin with, and that’s how nearly all new L&R material has appeared for nearly forty years. So we were going to get there eventually.

The paperback Love and Rockets series, subtitled “New Stories,” was the third series. The original magazine-sized L&R ran from 1981 to 1996, was followed by a bunch of individual comics by the two Hernandez brothers (Gilbert and Jaime), and then by a triumphant reunion with the comics-format second series in 2001. After twenty issues of that over six years, it was time for another change, and so New Stories was born: it would come out once a year, with exactly one hundred pages of comics, evenly divided between the two brothers. [1]

That didn’t exactly happen — I keep getting the sense that behind the scenes Gilbert was more prolific than Jaime, which may have caused some stress to the model — but New Stories had eight big books from 2008 through 2016, and only skipped one year as the time between issues kept to twelve months most of the time.

So: this week’s book is Love and Rockets: New Stories, No.1 , which contains the first two installments of Jaime’s Ti-Girls Adventures, which we’ve already seen in revised and collected form in Angels and Magpies, and a collection of not-obviously linked stories from Gilbert, at least one of which is familiar from Comics Dementia. Again, we’re getting into the time-frame where everything hasn’t been collected cleanly yet — or, at least, where I haven’t figured it all out yet.

It’s structured as a sandwich: Jaime has two long (25-page) installments of a larger story, which open and close the book. In between are seven shorter Gilbert stories — including one, “Chiro El Indio,” scripted by his Halley’s Comet of a brother Mario — which feel a bit like palate-cleansers, without any obvious connections to Palomar or Maria’s three daughters.

Ti-Girls is choppier and more comic-booky in this original presentation — each of the two sections is one page shorter than the final version, and Jaime later moved the single “cover” image here and added a new one for the other installment. I have the sense that the dialogue might have also been changed between the two versions, but I’m not looking to do a panel-by-panel comparison. (I still think this is basically Jaime’s least successful story of his mature career.) Given that Love and Rockets was largely selling through direct-market comic shops, and those were (and still are) heavily superhero-centric, I can’t say this was a bad way to launch the new volume, and it might have pulled in new readers.

Gilbert’s stories include the creepy “Papa,” featuring that guy with holes in his forehead and long hair in back. I don’t remember if he comes back directly, but Gilbert rarely hits an idea only once, so I’ll be looking for him. Also a pleasure is “The New Adventures of Duke and Sammy,” a Martin-and-Lewis comic in Gilbert gonzo-space-epic style: it is unique and nutty and coo-coo. The other stories tend to be shorter and more allusive: there’s a full-on dream-logic piece titled “?;” “Never Say Never,” which is almost a fable, in a twisted Gilbert way; “Victory Dance,” which connects oddly to “Papa” and feels like it may be another brick in a much larger wall; and a single page of miscellaneous strips under the title “The Funny Papers” that are not as humorous as you would expect.

It was a decent relaunch for the series, showing what the two brothers could do, and bringing back Mario in a supporting role one more time. Interestingly, it was very much not the two brothers doing their usual kind of stories — Jaime was wandering off into the lands of superhero self-indulgence and Gilbert was making individual unconnected short stories in between longer epics. Maybe after almost thirty years they decided they didn’t have anything to prove this time. (And they didn’t.)

[1] This may be a spoiler, but that paperback-format series itself ended, and there’s now a fourth Love and Rockets series, back in comics format, which started in 2016. There is an unstoppable tropism to pamphlets in American comics; we stand against it at our peril.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #273: Henchgirl by Kristen Gudsnuk

Flipping the script is a great way to freshen things up. The standard take on Young People Today is that they’re poor and stressed out, so how about giving your heroine more income than she knows what to do with and a give-no-fucks attitude?

OK, sure, she still lives in a dumpy apartment with two roommates, because young people always do that, but she actually has a decent health-care plan. (Though she does have to see Dr. Maniac every time.)

That’s the kind of plan you get when you work for a supervillain: those are the pros and cons. You have to fight superheroes a lot, but you make a lot of money and get to steal really cool things.

This is Mary Posa’s life: she’s a Henchgirl  in the Butterfly Gang, run by Monsieur Butterfly. (The other members: Larry Va, Paladan Birdwing, Chris Calis, Katie Pillar, and of course Coco Oon.) She’s young and gleeful in Crepe City, in this offbeat and not-entirely-serious story about superpersons by Kristen Gudsnuk.

I said “not-entirely-serious,” but it’s not entirely silly, either. Henchgirl is neither parody nor straight superhero story, but something more particular, in-between. Mary’s world is silly, maybe even a little more so than your standard superhero world, but it’s taken as seriously as any of those. Mary lives in a town where the preeminent hero is Mr. Great Guy, and where we the readers can figure out pretty easily that’s he’s actually millionaire playboy Greg Gains. But that’s where she really lives: it’s not the basis for jokes. Crepe City is absurd in different ways than our world — ways that align with a lot of superhero-comics cliches — but who’s to say those absurdities are less likely?

Mary is flippant and frivolous and carefree — well, as carefree as you can be when you’re one of the top lieutenants of a major villain in a superhero universe. Luckily, this is the kind of superhero universe where the villains mostly get away with it and their henchfolks are rolling in the dough. Things blow up, buildings fall down, aliens invade and kill thousands — it’s a modern superhero world, and it would probably look pretty grim ‘n’ gritty if we were seeing it from Mr. Great Guy’s POV.

For Mary, though, it’s pretty sweet for a long time: she gets a boyfriend, Fred, who is also the not-terribly-effective superhero Mannequin, and uses him to leak her boss’s plan to rob an orphanage. (So the crew does her heist instead, and also she gets to feel good about the horrible thing they didn’t do.) The money’s great, the hours aren’t bad, and she can live with her roommates Tina and Sue complaining about her evil activities and lack of tax-paying work.

But then things start getting more problematic: Monsieur Butterfly is getting violent as he searches for the “mole” in his gang…and the gang is not that big to begin with. And her parents, the ’80s-era heroes Flame Girl and El Romancero, come to town on their big fancy book tour, accompanied by the daughter they did put in their book, the budding superheroine Photo-Girl.

And Mannequin gets a new crime-fighting partner in the cute but overwhelming Lovely Celestial Angel Amelia, and along the way gets a power increase from her magical gadgets and a new identity as the Time Baron. And Mary’s roommate Tina starts developing a weird superpower of her own. And Mary’s attempt at heroism, saving her parents from a supervillain, is successful but not particularly popular (or legal, for that matter).

Can one henchgirl make it through all of those problems and find happiness, fulfillment, and that one perfect mask? You’d better believe it!

Mary is an interesting character: a slacker villain henchwoman with vaguely good intentions and a random vague cluelessness that may be just not bothering with things that bore her. The world around her is filled with similarly interesting people — all pretty flawed, in various ways, but not necessarily bad people, even if they spend their time robbing banks and cheating orphans.

This is the complete Henchgirl, at least for now. There could be more stories about Mary, but Gudsnuk left her in a good superhero-universe ending spot, so I don’t think there will be any for at least a few years.

I think Henchgirl was creator Kristen Gudsnuk’s first major work — or maybe I think that because I didn’t hear of her before this. (And I hope I would have heard of someone doing work that’s this much fun!) She’s got a nice, easy line, in a modern style with some anime and western-animation influences and a loose-limbed ease with action and the lack thereof.

I liked Henchgirl a lot — example: while Googling Gudsnuk to type this, I found she has a new middle-grade graphic novel out this year, and I already have a hold on it at the library — and, if you actually read my blog, there’s a very good chance you will, as well. It’s that kind of off-kilter semi-superhero thing that uses the genre as a jumping-off point rather than a pit to wallow in.

Gudsnuk is funny and smart and tells good stories with good people. I hope she does a lot more comics, so I can read ’em.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #272: Oddjob by Ian and Tyson Smith

An indy comic with bold, dark-outlined computer art and a cast off oddballs investigating weird things…I smell the ’90s!

I kid, I kid. But Oddjob  does feel very much of a particular era in comics. This book collects the full Slave Labor Graphic series of the same name (which followed a series of minicomics, some in different art styles, under slightly different names) by Ian and Tyson Smith. The book was published in 2002, collecting comics from early 1999 through early 2001 — which is close enough to “the ’90s” for me.

I don’t know the Smith brothers otherwise: I found this book randomly in a store, many years later, and picked it up because it reminded me of a lot of other oddball comics from the ’90s and other decades. From a quick websearch, it looks like this was the way they broke into comics, and they had a couple of projects afterward, moved on into movies for a while, and have been quiet (at least on the places I saw) for about a decade.

On the other hand, there’s both a dead British politician and a live British comedian named “Ian Smuth,” and Tyson is only somewhat less common. So it’s entirely possible that they’re active doing something artsy but not plugged strongly into Google-Fu.

Anyway, this is the mostly-complete adventures of Moe, Investigator of the Odd! He has a mysterious, enigmatic origin, goggles that he never removes, a vault full of strange and quirky artifacts that he must keep from the hands of ordinary men, and an office above “the second freshest-smelling bar in Spiral City.”

His sidekicks are the tough Moose Mulligan, owner and tender of that bar I just mentioned, and the nearly-useless performance-artist Robin the Clown. His investigations include living Gummi creatures from another dimension, exploding echidnas, missing mystical tikis, and the bell that makes it recess forever. There is both a runawayMoe-bot and an Evil Moe within just eight issues.

It has to be said that Oddjob is aggressively wacky. I think it’s all honestly wacky: these are the stories these guys wanted to tell. But it is not unlike other very wacky things in comics and animation, from Flaming Carrot and Freakazoid on down.

Writer Ian has a knack for keeping it all going and making the pacing work — not a small thing in a story where literally anything could happen. And artist Tyson’s fat inky lines are delightful — there’s a note in the backmatter that he moved to computer art because he could finally get the really clean, thick lines he wanted that way, and it shows in his work.

Even in the history of quirky comics, Oddjob is just a footnote. But everything doesn’t need to be important or major: things can just be fun. And this is.

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

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