Category: Reviews

The cliche is that the happiest-looking people have the darkest secrets. I don’t know if that’s consistently true in real life — how would you design a study to test that, anyway? — but it’s a surefire winner in fiction, where contrast and irony are the go-to tools.

Nate Powell’s new graphic novel Come Again is about the secrets in a seemingly idyllic group of hippies on an Arkansas Ozark hill. Haven Station is where they live, an “intentional community” eight years into its life in 1979. They farm and garden and live off the land — what the land mostly provides is marijuana, but don’t say that too loudly.

Two couples were among the first to join up back in 1971; four young friends who had known each other since childhood: Haluska and Gus, Whitney and Adrian. Since then, they each had a son — Haluska and Gus’s Jacob, Whitney and Adrian’s Shane. Gus left Haluska, a year or so back, and went “downhill” to the local town, back to straight society and normal life. It looks like it was the usual kind of breakup, and they’re friendly with each other, still, for Jacob’s sake and because this is a small, isolated area and you can’t get too far away from each other.

Gus did not leave Haluska because she’s been having an affair with Adrian. He doesn’t know that. No one knows that.

But they have: they’ve been sneaking away together since at least 1971, since before they joined Haven Station. And Haluska is our central character here, the one who will have to confront those long-held secrets and those years of lying.

(I’m happy that the book focuses on a woman: we need more of that. I’m not as happy about how Come Again settles all of the weight of responsibility for this affair on her shoulders, letting Adrian stay vague and personable. He’s just as responsible, just as complicit, just as central, just as lying. And centering the story on her can look like slut-shaming from a lot of perspectives: that the woman bears the price for infidelity, and is the one who has to make everything right, because she’s the one who controls sexuality and child-rearing. It’s not a fatal flaw, but it’s noticeable. And that conception  — that this all is Haluska’s responsibility — is central to Come Again.)

Powell’s books often have supernatural underpinnings, particularly the magisterial Swallow Me Whole. Come Again follows in that tradition, but, as before, it’s nothing you’ve seen before, nothing with a name. On that Ozark hillside, there’s a door, which leads into some rooms and caverns. In that space — maybe also elsewhere; maybe everywhere — is an entity, a voice in the darkness that is sometimes quiet and half-forgotten and sometimes is demanding, feeding on secrets.

That set of caverns, of course, is where Haluska and Adrian run away to have sex together. We see them do so near the beginning of this book; we think they may have been doing this, off and on, every day or week or month for eight years or more. That’s a lot of secrets.

Most of Come Again take place over a couple of days. It’s Haluska and Adrian’s turn to take the farm’s produce — again, with the pot hidden under the table but the real draw for their customers — down to a farmer’s market in town. Meanwhile, Jacob and Shane, the two boys of these two couples, are out wandering around like boys do.

They find the door. They enter the caves. They go too far.

Meanwhile, Haluska and Adrian come back from town, in the middle of a fight. They break up, for what might be forever. They won’t need that door anymore, and prove it to each other.

But a boy is lost. And when he’s not found, he quickly drops out of memory — as if no one, except one person, can hold on to the secret of his existence.

And who cares most about secrets in this place?

Come Again has gorgeous, brilliant pages, equal parts seeped in the darkness of night secrets and dark caves and shot through with the glow of a late-summer day. Powell has some neat tricks with lettering as well, to show secrets and forgetfulness, to hint at the power of that strange voice underground.

I didn’t love Come Again as much as Swallow Me Whole, in part because of the embedded sexism of Haluska, in part because I don’t quite buy the logic of the supernatural deal at the end. But it’s a strong work, well-written and powerfully imagined and brilliantly drawn. And Powell is one of our very best comics storytellers in the modern world.

Don’t let my minor misgivings keep you away: this is a major book by a major creator, and if you’re not familiar with Powell, you’ve got a lot of great work ahead of you.

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

No one’s perfect, y’know? You’re always going to have to deal with some things that aren’t exactly what you’d want when you’re in a relationship with someone. Sometimes it’ll be a dealbreaker — there’s an entertaining double-page spread in this book headed “Douchebags I’ve Dated” with some examples — but some things you might just decide you can live with.

Say that you’re a young modern LA girl, with an unpleasant call-center job, taking abuse from people who didn’t realize they’d signed up for recurring payments for some useless software. Say you have run through those aforementioned douchebags, and even more, without finding anyone nice. And say you meet someone loving and cuddly and tender and only somewhat clumsy and prone to breaking things, and that he clearly loves you.

Would it be a dealbreaker if he happens to be a five-hundred pound American Black Bear?

Well, it wasn’t for Nora. And this is her story: My Boyfriend Is a Bear . You could probably read it as an allegory if you wanted to, but, really, it’s a fun romance comic about one girl and one bear against the world.

This is, as you might imagine, not entirely serious. Nora’s new boyfriend is just “the bear,” and the most articulate thing he ever says is “grah.” (Which can be more articulate than some people, granted.) My Boyfriend Is a Bear is not set in a world of sentient bears or uplifted mammals or anything exotic like that: it’s our world, our LA, only this one bear is in love with this girl. And vice versa.

Boyfriend is sweet and fun and goofy, and is probably playing with more genre-romance cliches than I noticed. Writer Pamela Ribon keeps Nora quirky and fun without making her a total dingbat, and artist Cat Farris makes all of the pages just as cute as a button.

And, if your own relationships bear some odd resemblance to Nora and the bear, well, that’s your own problem….

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

There is a great urban-fantasy comic from the Philippines called Trese. I’ve written about the first three volumes here a few years ago — and there have been three more volumes since then, plus a seventh in progress.

The books are difficult to find on this side of the Pacific, though. (Difficult to find in most of the world, from what I can see — that happens when you publish out of a smaller country.) And that’s a huge shame: this is damn good stuff, as fantasy, as detective stories, as modern reworkings of folktale material, and as comics.

Well, you’re finally in luck.

Trese creators Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldismo have launched an IndieGogo campaign for a global edition of Trese — starting from the beginning for those of you who haven’t seen it before.

A digital edition of the first comic is a measly two bucks. That’s a steal.

I’ve already backed it, and kicked in an extra donation to help out. (The least I can do, since I got the first few books for free as a reviewer.) Go check it out yourself , and I hope you’ll decide to back it as well.

My dream is that Trese will someday be as big as Hellboy — it may be a crazy dream, but I’ll settle for Trese books actually widely available in North America.

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

First up, the consumer note that I wanted but didn’t get: this is indeed Volume 1 of the books reprinting the 2012 Captain Marvel series written by Kelly Sue DeConnick. (It contains twelve issues and the second volume has five more.) That was preceded by comics called Captain Marvel (just by Marvel, with various people using that superhero moniker) in 2008, 2002, 2000, 1995, 1994, 1989, and 1968, and followed by further Marvel Captain Marvel series in 2014, 2016, and 2017 (that last one starting with issue number 125, to totally confuse everyone).

So this is nowhere near the beginning of anything. Being a superhero series from one of the Big Two, I shouldn’t have to mention that it’s nowhere near an ending, either.

But, there’s a Captain Marvel movie coming, vaguely sort-of based on this take on the character, so this is the book Marvel is hoping people will buy once they see and like that movie, and this series is also somewhat of a grand-mommy to the recent slew of “diverse” comics from Marvel. (Scare-quotes around “diverse” since a lot of it is just showcasing more women, who the numerically literate among us already know make up more than half of the human race.)

So, anyway: Captain Marvel: Earth’s Mightiest Hero, Vol. 1 . (I think that’s the correct order of the title elements. If not, I have another option in the post title.) These are the comics where Carol Danvers, ex-Air Force test pilot and possessor of strange powers granted her by alien beings (somewhat literally) changes her costume and name, casting off “Ms. Marvel” so it can be used by someone else and Marvel can sell more comics and make more money because she is better than that, and deserves to use the slightly misspelled name of an alien dead guy because blah blah legacy yammer yammer mantle yadda yadda please tell me you’re buying this?

The stupid speech I’m referring to above is given by Captain America on pages 8-10 of the first issue here, after they beat up a random bad guy in a museum for I’m sure what wouldn’t be a gratuitous fight scene if anyone bothered to explain it. It contains the kind of logic and rhetoric that exist only in superhero comics, and only there because the real reason Carol Danvers is going to become Captain Marvel is that 1) Marvel owns a trademark in that name, and expects that trademark to return it some cold hard cash on the regular and 2) there are several thousand fanboys consumers who will buy anything that says Captain Marvel on the cover, at least for a few issues. Danvers is just the most obvious person to do so.

So Captain Marvel exists as pure trademark-extension, for both “Carol Danvers™” and “Captain Marvel™.” Let’s stipulate that. And it doesn’t have to be all that good to fulfill that mission: Danvers punches someone new each issue, has some supporting cast with problems, bingo bango, it’ll last long enough to make us to the next crossover event where everything will change.

But DeConnick is actually interested in people and their relationships — well, let’s not go crazy here; she is to the extent anyone can be in the straitjacket of a Marvel Universe comic — and so she (and co-writer Christopher Sebela, on issues 7-8 and 10-12 for no obvious reason) has plots that mostly aren’t about punching the Villain of the Month, and which tie into Danvers’s backstory and history.

Now, again, I don’t want to oversell it: it’s mostly on the level of a decent made-for-TV movie or passable airport paperback, with the tough female test pilot still yearning to prove what she can do after she’s left that world, and her complicated relationship with the older woman who was something of a mentor to her, plus a friendship with another woman who used to be Captain Marvel and the guy who will probably be a boyfriend, eventually. (With added time travel and aliens, obviously.)

The art is also quite distinctive: Dexter Soy does six of the issues, in what I think is a full-painted look and which is brightly surreal in a good way. Emma Rios has a spiky take on more traditional comics pencil-and-ink look (colored by Jordie Bellaire) for two issues in the middle, and Filipe Andrade does the last four issues in a very angular, loose-lined (but with almost chibi faces) style that also goes all the way to color.

This may well have looked like something startlingly different, particularly to pure Marvel readers of 2012. And it is pretty different from most of what Marvel was doing, being actually concerned with women and their emotions. For me, it’s slightly more interesting than a standard Marvel comic, but only the same way sandstone is more interesting than a broken piece of concrete — one is a bit more real than the other.

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

It is pretty hard to have a team-up book where one of the two team members has no way to actually know the other one’s name. (Not to mention everyone else in the world, who know that name by some kind of comic-book-world telepathy, I think.)

And, on an entirely different level, it is hard for me to take seriously a book that seems to be the high-speed collision of “hey, don’t we need to do something with Moon Boy and Devil Dinosaur every so often to keep the trademark active?” and “hey, girls in STEM are hot right now, so we should do a comic about a nerdy girl.”

Don’t get me wrong, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Vol. 1: BFF  tells a pleasant story, tells it well, and has entirely positive messages to impart to what I think it hopes is a multicultural audience of mostly young, mostly female readers. But there seems to be a lot of product management going on in the background.

Anyway: Moon Girl! Actually the preteen New Yorker Lunella Lafayette, who is way too smart for her school already at the age of nine! [1] Picked on by her classmates for being a know-it-all with a huge air of superiority who doesn’t deign to even talk to them most of the time! Has the Inhuman gene, because this is a 2016 Marvel comic, and they were desperately trying to make that A Thing! [2] Makes weird science-y things out of random stuff, because that’s totally something that anyone actually does in any reasonable world!

Devil Dinosaur! Named that by an outcast monkey-boy in some vague past era where bright-red dinosaurs mingle with monkey-boys! [3] Has that name in whatever language monkey-boy speaks, which is definitely not English! Smarter than you’d expect a vaguely T. Rex-y thing to be, and better able to sneak away and hide in (a) a modern city that (b) he’s never been in before and (c) has nothing, as far as we can see, that he eats… than you’d expect! Also substantially more committed to fighting crime and not, y’know, eating things than you’d expect!

Luckily for her, because they meet wacky in the middle of issue 1, when the Maguffin the Nightstone (maybe) Kree Omni-Wave Projector (this time for sure!) burbles a hole in the space-time continuum and plops DD face to face with MG.

(Oh, and also lets loose a group of bad monkey-boys — and I think one monkey-girl, though I don’t want to judge anyone’s monkey-gender presentation. Which leads us to…)

The Killer Folk! Tougher than Moon Boy! (Whom they, um, kill (?) before running through the hole in the space-time continuum.) Tougher than the Yancy Street Gang! Basically evil hipsters by the end of the book! They want the Maguffin (oops) and don’t care who gets in their way! When they get it, they will…be happy they have it and maybe do some more minor street crime, I guess. But they’re our villains!

So MG somehow knows the big red dinosaur that grabs her in its teeth is friendly and named DD, and imprints on it like a baby duck. DD doesn’t talk and mostly just smashes stuff, but he seems cool with being her sidekick (or vice-versa). And the monkey-boy did tell DD to go stop the Killer Folk from doing their Killer-Folk thing, and I guess that’s what DD is doing, in his giant-red-dinosaur way.

The maguffin bounces back and forth between Killer Folk and Our Heroes, as the rest of the city gets more and more peeved at the giant red dinosaur breaking all kinds of things all over the place. Luckily, we readers are on the side of the giant red dinosaur, so we are really pissed when an actual superhero (well, the Amadeus Cho Hulk, so sort-of an actual superhero) shows up to be all superior, tell MG to go back to school, and arrests DD for being big and red and dinosaurian.

Does MG get her big red implement of mass destruction back? Do the two of them retrieve the Maguffin once and for all, and defeat the Killer Folk? Is there a Shocking Change that takes place on the very last page, to get us to buy Volume 2?

Reader, you know the answer already. [4]

[1] I was going to check to see what NYC magnet schools she would be eligible for, but that would just be mean.

[2] As opposed to The Thing, which they already had. And who isn’t an Inhuman. At least the last time I checked.

[3] Wait. Isn’t this supposed to be a comic for people who care about science?

[4] I forgot to mention who made this book, didn’t I? Brandon Montclare and Amy Reeder wrote it, and Natacha Bustos drew it. Tamra Bonvillain did the colors, which I thought were particularly strong.

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