Category: Reviews

Look, I don’t think I can describe it better than I did a couple of weeks ago when this book entered my house, so let me quote myself:

Twenty years or so ago, everything in corporate comics had to be an event. (Not all that different from now, then!) The Vertigo “line” at DC was actually a bunch of entirely separate comics with a rough shared audience and stance, but they had to have a big Event in their annuals (which they also had to have) in 1993. It was called The Children’s Crusade, and there were bookend standalone comics that the various individual comics’ annuals slotted in between, more or less. It was not the most successful experiment. After a couple of decades, though, someone at DC realized they had a couple of issues written or co-written by [Neil] Gaiman that were sitting uncollected and not making them any money. So they commissioned a new team (Toby Litt and Peter Gross) to create a new middle, and then put out the end product as a book with a new Gaiman introduction. I can’t imagine it all comes together well, but I’m fascinated to see just how jury-rigged and bizarre it is.

This book is the result. It starts out with The Children’s Crusade #1, a comic written by Neil Gaiman, pencilled by Chris Bachalo, inked by Mike Barreiro, and colored by Daniel Vozzo in 1993. The middle was created in about 2014-15, and was written by Toby Litt (and, in smaller letters for no stated reason, Rachel Pollack), drawn by Peter Gross (and, in smaller letters, Al Davidson), and colored by Jeanne McGee. The end is 1994’s second issue of The Children’s Crusade, possibly somewhat altered to appear here, written by Gaiman, Alisa Kwitney, Jamie Delano and Toby Litt; drawn by Peter Snejberg and Peter Gross; and colored by Daniel Vozzo and Jeanne McGee. Explaining all of the above, in a more positive and optimistic light, is a new introduction by Gaiman

OK. The good news is that Vozzo and McGee colored the whole thing between the two of them, giving it some visual consistency that way. The third section, though, does see-saw back and forth between the Snejberg pages and the Gross pages, which look very different. And that third section does contain rather more plot and action — as Gaiman notes in that introduction — than it’s really able to hold together.

First it was an interesting idea that didn’t quite come together. Then it was an opportunity to salvage that idea into a book that could continue to make money for DC Comics, and, maybe, for the contributors. That got us Free Country: A Tale of the Children’s Crusade in 2015.

(And the cynic in me wonders if this came to being then largely because Karen Berger left DC and Vertigo in 2013, leaving the Powers That Be to cast around for easy ways to keep exploiting the properties she’d midwifed over a long career there.)

Someone noticed that all of the Vertigo comics of that era had child characters — Tefe, the daughter of Swamp Thing; Maxine, the then-budding goddess and daughter of Animal Man; Dorothy Spinner, an actual full member of Doom Patrol; Suzy, the young Black Orchid; Tim Hunter, whose series Books of Magic had not actually gotten started yet; and, representing Sandman, the two Dead Boy Detectives, Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine.

Well, I say “all.” Gaiman said “all” in his introduction. I trusted him, but then I checked.

That list of Vertigo titles ignores Hellblazer, then Vertigo’s second-biggest seller. And Shade the Changing Man, another strong title that was subsumed into the Vertigo launch earlier in 1993. And Kid Eternity, one of the initial launch titles. I’ll ignore the 1993 and 1994 Vertigo mini-series like Enigma and Sebastian O, since those wouldn’t make sense in a crossover. And Sandman Mystery Theater was set fifty-plus years earlier…but it crossed over with other titles at the time and later.

So not so much “all” as “all of the creators DC could cajole or demand to do it.”

Anyway, the story was that first all of the children from one small English village disappeared, and then, at an increasing rate, children all over the world. We the readers quickly learn that they were spirited away to an other-dimensional land called Free Country, ruled by a cabal that seem like they should all be familiar from other stories but aren’t, quite. There, the children will live forever in childlike splendor, never to grow up. We are given to believe that this may not entirely be a good thing, and that there may be sinister hidden reasons behind this plot.

The Dead Boy Detectives were hired to investigate the initial disappearance, and the other five main characters (Tefe, Maxine, Dorothy, Suzy, and Tim) were the special super children who had to be lured to the place the other kids went to make the secret plot — for there always much be a secret plot — work. The first issue sets it all up and sends the DBDs out looking, the middle replaces all of those issues where the individual kids made their ways to Free Country (and, in some cases, left again), and the last issue gets the DBDs to Free Country to finish up everything eventually after many more very plotty pages.

It’s still pretty much a mess here, even with all of the extraneous middle from all of the other annuals left out. And it’s annoying that most of the “special” kids are girls, but that none of the girls are allowed to be active or particularly heroic. Instead, the boys save them, as always — how boring.

Free Country has some nice bits, and it’s a fun time capsule of the very early days of Vertigo, when it was the oddball corner of the DC Universe. But it does not hold together all that well as a story, lurching around almost randomly among the too many things it’s trying to keep track of. But it made some money for DC at the time and then again in 2015, which I have to imagine was the whole point of the thing.

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

I’ve stopped reading the letter columns entirely at this point. Sorry, Ryan and Erica, but they don’t make much sense in a collection to begin with, and I don’t really care to see lots of stories about your young fans, cute though they may be. For what it’s worth, I do glance at the pictures to see various people’s cute daughters dressed up in homemade Squirrel Girl costumes, and I love that that is a thing that happens in the world.

But I’m here for the stories, so I’ll focus on that. I hope you understand.

Here in the fourth volume — under the run-on title The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 4: I Kissed a Squirrel and I Liked It — I started to realize that this is more obviously an all-ages comic than I’d pigeonholed it as. (Marvel has been running so hard in the opposite direction for so long — making everything grimmer and grittier and darker and so much more the kind of “adult” that appeals to grumpy twentysomething men — that I assume they’ve entirely forgotten that children, and particularly girls, even exist.) But writer Ryan North and artist Erica Henderson have snuck a girl-positive, female-centric comic into a quirky little corner of the Marvel Universe, and hooray to them for that.

(See my posts on the first three volumes, if you care — one and two and three .)

I realized that because this is the collection of stories all about the love life of Doreen Green, our titular Squirrel Girl. No, she doesn’t meet someone who she falls in love with — though the reverse is true, mostly because she’s polite and pleasant in ways that person is not used to — but she does decide to start dating in the middle of this run of issues, mostly because she’s never done it before and thinks dating is something a college girl should do at least a little.

Her love life is shown in an entirely all-ages-appropriate way, pitched in a tone even those elementary school girls in hand-made costumes will understand and enjoy. She has the obligatory montage of bad dates, which is amusing but much like every other obligatory montage of bad dates. And there’s the aforementioned person who falls in love with her because she apologizes for things and doesn’t immediately turn to punching as a solution to conflict, unlike every other human being in the Marvel Universe. (Which provides a lesson to those girls, who may have similar people in their lives who need to be told firmly that she is not interested in them.)

Doreen does somewhat damage her series title in this volume, taking a dive in a fight. I admit, it’s for a very good reason, but, still, it tends to make “unbeatable” less true. On the other hand, the whole point of this version of Squirrel Girl is that she’s Unbeatable because she’s not someone who turns to fighting as a first resort. Sure, her motto is “eat nuts and kick butts,” and every costumed person in the MU is quite fond of punching, but she’s about as pacifist as it’s possible for a human being in a costume in Marvel NYC, always looking for another solution to every problem.

North and Henderson also continue to teach random computer-science concepts to their audience, which, again, makes more sense the more you realize that audience is largely young girls.

Kissed a Squirrel is really just a specific case of the general rule: everything becomes more like itself as it goes on, focusing down on the central, intrinsic elements and pushing aside the less important stuff. I suspect at some point Unbeatable Squirrel Girl will speciate enough that I’m not longer a good reader for it, and I’ll stop reading it then. But we’re not to that point yet: this may be mostly for smart girls and their parents, but there’s still room for the rest of us. I hope it stays that way for a good long time.

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

Punk is one of the greatest impulses of humanity: that “oh, fuck it” sense of just getting out there and doing the thing even if you don’t know how. Making noise or art or both, getting out there in public and maybe making a fool of yourself and definitely not caring.

(Maybe I admire it since it’s so opposite to who I am, but that’s a different point.)

Tank Girl is one of the great punk comics — probably the greatest. (I’m trying to think of other examples — early Flaming Carrot is the other major one for me, but Tank Girl mainlined punk attitude in the story as well as embodying it in the style.)

Jamie Hewlett wanted to make some comics. He had a chance to get them published. And he had a random character — well, really, just a name — that amused him. So he drew some damn comics, and dragged his friend in Alan Martin to do the lettering and (eventually) most of the writing. That is punk.

Tank Girl, Vol. 1 reprints that first burst of stories, which originally appeared mostly in Deadline magazine in the late ’80s and turned into a book around 1990. This particular edition is from Titan Books, from 2002, so it has historical introductions from both Hewlett and Martin — but it has been, in its turn, superseded by a newer “remastered” edition from 2009.

These stories have very little continuity: each one is what Hewlett (or, maybe, later on, Martin) wanted to do that particular month, and, from their accounts, the stories were mostly started and completed at great speed right at deadline time. So they start from the same point, with a heroine who is a loud, raucous, hard-drinking soldier (??) in a mildly apocalyptic version of the Australian outback, and then head off in whatever direction for the five or eight or twelve pages they had that issue at high speed, only to crash at the end. Details accumulate, like Tank Girl’s sapient kangaroo boyfriend Booga and her counterparts/friends Jet Girl and Sub Girl, but stories don’t lead from one to the next or connect directly.

Tank Girl is punk. Each story is a separate three-minute single. You’re not getting some prog-rock arty-farty rock opera here. If you’re not comfortable with that, Tank Girl is not the comic for you.

I love the energy and enthusiasm and raw power of these early stories, even if I have to squint to read some of the lettering before Martin took over. (And even if the first few stories tend to flail around semi-randomly before stopping at the end of their page count.) I see that various folks including either Hewlett or Martin kept doing Tank Girl stories after I stopped paying attention — I think I drifted away around the time of the horrifically bad movie — so I might have to catch up, to see what punk did when it grew up this time.

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

I feel bad picking on Jon Sable. He’s a favorite of the ComicMix team, and they’ve been very nice to me over the years. In fact, the book I have here is a limited edition for Baltimore Comic-Con 2008 — number 96 of 100. [1] It makes me wish I liked it better.

But we can’t choose to like things, can we? I’ve never been any good at that. (I read four Jon Sable collections two years ago, which I was not able to choose to like, and buried my thoughts about them in a belated round-up post .)

Jon Sable Freelance: Ashes of Eden was a new story about the ex-big-game-hunter turned freelance security expert and bestselling kids-book writer, appearing on the ComicMix site before being collected into book form a decade ago. (That was a model that had a lot of promise in those days. And people do buy books of comics that appear online first, it’s just that they only seem to buy them if the books and comics can creditably claim to be self-published.)

Ashes of Eden has got some big-white-hunter stuff — you have to expect that with Jon Sable Freelance; it’s baked into his origin as deeply as possible — but I didn’t find it particularly racist, maybe because this story takes place mostly in the US. It’s a bit sexist, but if we’re going to complain about that in mainstream comics we’ll be here all day.

Jon is hired to guard a fabulous diamond and a fabulous dame, both coming from South Africa to NYC for an auction. (The dame is going to MC the auction, more or less.) The diamond is massive, and is expected to be world-famous once it’s cut. The dame is a fictional Iraqi version of Sharbat Gula , somewhere in her mid-20s and oozing sex and neediness the way such women always do in stories about tough gun-slinging men told by other men. There are, of course, nefarious forces that want to hijack the diamond, which is why it needs guarding. The dame — I might as well give her her name: Bashira — needs guarding because she’s the kind of recovering addict who has no self-control but looks absolutely perfect at all times. (She’s addicted to drugs, obviously. Grell also makes the obvious hints that she’s addicted to sex and danger, as all such fictional women must be.)

Jon gets Bashira and what’s eventually called The Maguffin Diamond to the auction, where of course further nefarious actions happen. Some of them are the obvious ones, and some of them are slightly less obvious. Jon’s old nemesis/lover Maggie the Cat — the obligatory gorgeous female cat burglar — also becomes involved, hint hint nudge nudge.

And, yes, in the end Jon saves those worth saving and kills the rest. That’s what he does. He has a confusing dream sequence along the way, in which the spirit of death (in the form of a sexy mostly naked African woman, of course) runs him through the kind of breakthroughs that usually costs a few thousand dollars and takes several years in therapy.

I find it difficult to take Jon Sable Freelance seriously; if he were anything like real, he would have been dead a hundred times by now. Luckily for those who enjoy reading his exploits, he is nothing like real. Grell tells a good adventure story in the standard style, and draws it equally well — especially the many, many naked women who stalk and lounge around these pages.

[1] The cover at right is completely different from the book in front of me — it even has different styles for the “Jon Sable Freelance” and “Ashes of Eden” logos. But the one shown here is the book you could find if you looked for it, and it’s the one that exists online, so it’s the picture you get.

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

There are a lot of quirky comics out there — and the point of quirkiness is that isn’t not for everyone. Any particular quirk will only appear to a particular subset of readers. And even someone who, like me, thinks he’s fond of quirk in general can find a particular instance just doesn’t work.

I wanted to like Strangehaven: Brotherhood . I love the story behind it: how creator Gary Spencer Millidge did all the work himself, writing and drawing, and how it was deeply English and full of his influences and ideas. I appreciate the fact that it’s exactly the comic he wanted to make, influenced most obviously by The Prisoner and Twin Peaks but to a lesser degree by a host of very specifically British works. I admire the fact that he worked on it for so long, telling just the story he wants to tell.

And the set-up is intriguing, too: Alex, a middle-aged Londoner with a broken marriage behind him, goes on a vacation in the West Country, has an ambiguously ghostly encounter, and ends up stuck in the small town of Strangehaven, full of colorful characters and odd secrets.

(Although, parenthetically, I would personally loathe every second of that — being stuck somewhere I don’t want to be, loads of chatty people who won’t shut up, barely any mod cons, and the most exciting thing to do is walk around a bunch of grass and hills.)

Brotherhood is the second Strangehaven collection, but Millidge has a thoughtful introduction from Alex’s point of view that brings the reader up to speed, and, even more importantly, explains who the characters are with pictures. (Another reason I wanted to like this: Millidge is doing it all right.)

But…you knew there was a “but,” right?

I didn’t much like Alex, and, as I said just above, my personal reaction to “stuck in a somewhat supernatural way in a small town of quirky people” would be to burn the whole fucking thing down with cleansing fire until the bastard town let me out. So I was not so much in sympathy with his point of view as I might have been.

This is a talky comic, and I found it a chore to read a lot of the time — only a scene where Basil Fawlty talks, from the TV screen, directly to a character really sang for me. (That was laugh-out-loud funny, I’ll admit. I expect more things here are equally funny to actual British people.) Millidge also has a very heavily photo-referenced art style, particularly for people, and that struck me as fussy.

I guess “fussy” is the one word that hits me about Strangehaven. It felt like one of those claustrophobic rooms where an old person has been collecting bric-a-brac for fifty years, and then the old bag decides to tell you about every last piece of it.

There are certainly American readers who will love — or already have loved — Strangehaven. You yourself may even be one of them. But it didn’t work very well for me, which means I’m not nearly as much of an Anglophile as I think I am.

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

America is more Christian than a lot of the rest of the world realizes. It’s not just a right-wing thing, either — the King James Bible is as central to the language of the USA as our Constitution is, and the question of what church someone belongs to [1] is important in hard-to-describe ways across a lot of this country.

It shouldn’t be a surprise: most of the founding myths of the USA boil down to “Those People wouldn’t let us do our weird Christian sect the way we wanted to, so we got the hell out of there and started in a new land, where We could be the ones oppressing everyone else.” That got baked in early, and deeply. It’s not a Christian country, officially — because, when it was founded, trying to pick a flavor of Christianity would have torn the nascent country apart — but it’s a country dominated by Christianity in a million flavors…though most of them these days are much more sure that a rich man will get into heaven than that a camel can pass through the eye of a needle.

Thus Gilbert Hernandez’s bizarre biblical sex-fest Garden of the Flesh . Thus R. Crumb’s textually rigorous Book of Genesis . And, more than a decade before either of them, Kyle Baker’s 2002 graphic novel King David.

As is typical for major comics-makers turning to biblical matters, King David is weird. It’s from that era where Baker was shifting from making comics that looked traditional — ink on paper, in separate boxes drawn on a page, and then colored by someone else — into a more painted look that I think was mostly done electronically, and looks like the images might have been created separately and later assembled into pages. (Baker, then and now, had tremendous chops, so it’s not easy for my eye to be clear on what tools he used to do whichever particularly impressive thing. ) That’s not particularly weird, though.

How about this? King David is presented in a format more like a picture book than a comic: large pieces of art arrayed on the page in loose layouts, with text floating around them (often in very large passages) in a fussy italic font. There are a lot of words to read here, and a text that does not make that easy.

OK, and what about the tone? King David bounces back-and-forth from a relatively respectful style that echoes some Jacobean language without trying to sound Olde Englishe to snippy, snappy dialogue that would be more at home in Baker’s What I Hate About Saturn. That’s pretty weird, too.

For those of us brought up at least nominally Christian in America, most of King David will be familiar — it’s telling us a story we know, with a uniquely Bakeresque twist. (I have no idea how any biblical story plays out to someone unfamiliar with it, but at least this part of the Bible is relatively light on random massacres, plagues, and general horrible Bronze Age morality.) We start out with David as a cute kid, and see him first soothe the crazed King Saul, and then battle Goliath. The wars with the Philistines go on, and David grows into a popular hero, which of course does not sit well with paranoid, still-crazy Saul. Eventually, David becomes King, and we see him fall himself at the very end, cause the death of Uriah the Hittite so that he can take Uriah’s wife Bathsheba for his own.

Baker calls out some of the problematic material in that occasional snarky tone — the ancient Israelites were much more fond of one rich guy having a lot of wives than we are, for example — but the religion at the core of it is taken seriously. I don’t know what Baker believes, or what he did believe in 2002, but this is a book about faith in God and doing the right thing. None of the showy miracles come in, so it’s all people talking about faith in God and doing the right thing, but they firmly believe it, and Baker presents that belief honestly.

Again, this is a biblical comic by a serious comic-maker, which means it’s weird: it’s neither a proselytizing work nor one that mocks religion, but nods in both directions alternately, and occasionally simultaneously. It may be the quirkiest work in Baker’s career, which is saying something about the creator of Special Forces .

[1] Or, in the case of the lapsed or strayed, would have belonged to or used to belong to. Cultural markers aren’t removed that easily.

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

This is not a graphic novel. It’s not even graphic non-fiction in a narrative form. It’s related to Lynda Barry’s last few books, What It Is and Picture This , but it’s less conventional and concerned with telling a story than those two books were.

Luckily, it has a title that tells us what it is: Syllabus .

Barry has taught courses in storytelling and creativity — that sounds vague, because they were inter-departmental courses that were about brain science as much as how to draw and write — for several years, mostly at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This book is something like a blended experience of being in those classes, or perhaps particularly “The Unthinkable Mind” class from spring of 2013. It contains what seem to be Barry’s actual handouts and worksheets from that course, along with exercises from the students that year, organized chronologically to cover that whole semester. There are also some pages, especially near the beginning, that set the scene and explain her process and and overall plan for the class — but, as the book goes on, more and more it is a record of what that class did.

So it’s possible for a devoted student to follow most of the instructions here, and make for herself a one-person version of that course. (She couldn’t do everything, since there are some exercises where work gets handed around the class, with each person adding something new.)

Syllabus is a much denser book than What It Is and Picture This were: those aimed to entertain while touching on profound ideas, while Syllabus aims to document an entire teaching method and program. It’s all related — Barry’s ideas on art and life have been basically the same through the past decade — but Syllabus is the operationalization of those ideas, if you’ll let me descend into bafflegab for a moment.

I frankly was surprised by Syllabus: I wasn’t expecting a book so dense and so school-book-y. (Perhaps I should have read the title a few more times! It was not hidden.) I appreciate a lot of Barry’s work and enthusiasm, while still fervently believing that I would hate every second of being in a class like this…and not just because I’ve never liked or been good at drawing. But be aware: this is deeper and denser than her previous work, and is for a more rarefied and self-selected audience of people really interested in the sources of creativity and how to teach stimulating those sources.

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