Tagged: ComicMix

Review: ‘Scrambled Ink’

Review: ‘Scrambled Ink’

Scrambled Ink
Edited by Anonymous
Dark Horse, July 2008, $19.99

[[[Scrambled Ink]]] is the latest in the recent flurry of comics anthologies by animators, following the high-profile and very successful Flight series (which recently hit its fifth volume) and the slightly newer but still popular [[[Out of Picture]]] (which had a second volume earlier this year). It was published quietly a few months back, and doesn’t seem to have made much of a stir.

And that’s a real shame, since Scrambled Ink is more inventive and ambitious than the most recent [[[Flight]]] and Out of Picture books put together. (And that despite Scrambled Ink being a physically smaller book with only six stories in it.) I’m not sure why that would be – Scrambled Ink comes from animators who worked on [[[Bee Movie]]], not what one thinks of as an excitingly transgressive piece of cinema – but these DreamWorks animators are definitely doing something different from their Blue Sky compatriots from Out of Picture.

Two of the tales in Scrambled Ink – “[[[Kadogo: The Next Big Thing]]]” by David G. Derrick, Jr. and Ken Morrissey & Keith Baxter’s “[[[Greedy Grizzly]]]” – would have been right at home in one of the other anthologies: they’re morality tales, with animal casts, that could easily have been afterschool specials or “heartwarming” animated shorts. Both also have excellent art – Derrick with an earth-toned watercolor palette very appropriate to his African story and Baxter with an appealingly loose version of a cute-animal children’s’ book style. These stories could have fit in perfectly well in [[[Flight 12]]] or Out of Picture 9, but here in Scrambled Ink, they’re notable for seeming a little less refined and a little more obvious than the other four stories.

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Review: ‘The Lindbergh Child’ by Rick Geary

Review: ‘The Lindbergh Child’ by Rick Geary

A Treasury of XXth Century Murder: The Lindbergh Child
By Rick Geary
NBM/ComicsLit, August 2008, $15.95

Rick Geary has been chronicling in comics form the crimes of past ages since “An Unsolved Murder,” one of his earliest stories. Most of those stories have been funneled into his “[[[Treasury of Victorian Murder]]]” series – first an album-sized book of short stories in 1987, later an additional seven slim books, each chronicling one famous murder of yore.

Those “Treasury of Victorian Murder” books have been coming, one every year or two, since 1995, but Geary’s varied his approach this year – the book is the same size, the format is very similar, but the story this time is part of the newly-named “[[[Treasury of XXth Century Murder]]].” And the crime is one of the many claimants to the throne of “[[[Crime of the Century]]]” – after Fatty Arbuckle and Sacco & Vanzetti but before the Manson Murders – though it didn’t start out to be a murder (and some people, even now, doubt that the Lindbergh baby really died). So now Geary has an entire new century of murder to work through – the pre-WWII years alone could keep him busy for years. (Particularly if he expands his plan slightly to allow larger crime sprees – like Bonnie & Clyde and the various Prohibition-era gangsters.)

Geary tells [[[The Lindbergh Child]]] in his usual detailed, nearly deadpan style – though hints of the Geary wit sneak through, particularly in the faces of his characters – starting off with maps and plans of the important locations and swiftly moving on to set the scene and get into the kidnapping itself.

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What’s Wrong With Wonder Woman, by Mike Gold

What’s Wrong With Wonder Woman, by Mike Gold

  • News
  • September 8, 2008

In this space on Friday and Saturday, my esteemed colleagues Mr. Davis and Ms. Thomases waxed on about the political situation of the day. Whereas there is no more important issue facing us as Americans in this moment in time (and it has considerable impact on non-Americans as well), I will not follow in their wake this week. I’m sure I will in the future.

Instead, I’m going to take a point central to their themes, and those expressed to a somewhat lesser extent by Ms. Riggs last week, and talk about comic books. Specifically, about Wonder Woman.

Since I’m in a name-dropping kind of mood, I should point out that my comments have been heavily influenced by recent conversations with Ms. Adriane Nash, a frequent commenter here at ComicMix, as well as our new editorial proofreader (for those items that come in early enough to be proofread…). And, oh yeah, she’s my savvy and opinionated daughter.

So what’s wrong with Wonder Woman? Positioning. Not unlike what many people think the McCain campaign did by selecting a fundamentalist book burner as their vice presidential candidate, under the theory that women are so stupid they’ll simply vote for one of their own no matter what her position is on the issues. You know, just like the conservatives.

Ahem. Sorry. Back to comics.

Back in the 1940s, Wonder Woman was fabulously successful. She had as much exposure as any DC/AA hero (but not as much as, say, the real Captain Marvel). She had her own title, she starred in a monthly anthology book, she starred in a regularly published giant-sized star-studded superhero thing, and she briefly had her own newspaper strip. All she was lacking was a cheap movie serial.

By the time the 70s rolled around, DC had a hard time giving Wonder Woman away. As of this date, she’s undergone more revisions, reboots (one, quite literally, brought her original boots back), reinterpretations, and make-overs than Madonna. What happened?

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Sarah Palin: Storytelling, by Martha Thomases

Sarah Palin: Storytelling, by Martha Thomases

  • News
  • September 6, 2008

John McCain, in what is assumed to be an attempt to woo feminist Hillary Clinton supporters, nominated an inexperienced first-term governor of Alaska as his running mate. In state-wide office less than two years, Sarah Palin includes in her resume a term as mayor of a small town, and a stint on her local PTA.

But wait, he says. When you hear her story, you’ll love her!

As an aspiring novelist and a voracious reader, I love stories. I love well-developed, idiosyncratic characters, and I enjoy imagining their lives. My favorite comics have great characters whose human foibles make their adventures more exciting.

The Creeper? A great character. Rorschach? A great character. Peter Parker? A great character. I’m not prepared to vote for any of them. Aside from being fictional, they do not display the qualities I look for in elected officials.

Hillary Clinton’s story is very much like my own. Not that I’ve done as much as she has, nor have I been as successful, but we are close in age. We were the women who were the “firsts” – the first to wear pants to a restaurant, the first to juggle family and career, the first to demand to be considered as our own selves, not as adjuncts to our husbands. I admire her career, but I didn’t vote for her. We did not agree on the issues most important to me.

John McCain, who once joked that the reason Chelsea Clinton was so ugly was that Janet Reno was her father, would have us believe that his nomination of Sarah Palin is a testament to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Hillary Clinton has spent 35 years in public life. She has championed the Children’s Defense League. She has worked for universal health care. She has run for the Senate in one of the largest states, and been elected twice. She has an excellent reputation in the Senate among her peers, and has worked on several projects with her colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Although she was not my candidate, I respect her, and would have voted for her if she was the Democratic nominee.

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Manga Friday: Swords and Psychics

Manga Friday: Swords and Psychics

  • News
  • September 5, 2008

This week was going to be Samurai Week, but I threw in a book about psychics for spice – just to keep it interesting.

Dororo, Vol. 3
By Osamu Tezuka
Vertical, August 2008, $13.95

This is the third and final book in a samurai saga from Tezuka, the “godfather of manga.” (I’ve previously reviewed volume 1 and volume 2 for ComicMix.) I’ve seen references that say this series was truncated rather than continuing to its expected end, and that’s plausible from the book itself.

It does have something like an ending; the swordsman Hyakkimaru confronts and defeats his evil father, and parts from the young thief Dororo (whose secret he’s recently learned). But the stories of these main characters aren’t actually done – Hyakkimaru is not finished with his quest to become human again, and Dororo needs to grow up (and probably to battle some evil feudal lords on behalf of downtrodden farmers).

So this isn’t really the ending one would hope for – it doesn’t cut off, uncompleted, but there clearly were more stories to be told. (On the other hand, Tezuka left off work on Dororo in 1971, and lived for nearly twenty years afterward, which probably means something.) But the individual stories are still exceptionally well-told, in Tezuka’s characteristic clean lines, and the thematic undertones remain under, and deepen rather than threatening to sink the narrative.

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Country First, by Michael Davis

Country First, by Michael Davis

  • News
  • September 5, 2008

Martin Luther King was never a prisoner of war like John McCain. Nelson Mandela never flew a combat mission over Viet Nam like John McCain. Gandhi was never a commanding officer like John McCain.

According to right wing rhetoric, none of these people would be able to lead in America for they would be attacked for their lack of experience. What all of these people share with Barack Obama is the ability to inspire other people.

I am not suggesting that Obama is in any way in the league of those above, but there is something to be said for inspiring people.

Some people like the Republicans don’t see that. This from The party of Lincoln, as they like to say. The “party of Lincoln.” Wow, that is saying something. They always bring that up when they want to make a point.

Lincoln was President in 1861. It’s now 2008. That party is over.

How over? Lincoln is known for one thing and one thing only to the masses: he freed the slaves. He gave black people their freedom in this country. Did you see the sea of faces at the Republican convention? There were thousands of people there, and I’m not kidding when I say this: it looked like you could count the black people on two hands. How is it possible that the Republican Party frees black people from bondage and black people stay away from the Republican Party like Stevie Wonder stays away from driving the Indy 500?

I watched the “Country first” video that the RNC produced and showed at the convention. When images of Ronald Regan, Barbara Bush and McCain were on the screen the crowd went wild. When images of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks were seen… nothing.

No applause. No reaction. Nothing.

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Review: ‘American Widow’ by Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi

Review: ‘American Widow’ by Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi

American Widow
By Alissa Torres; Illustrated by Sungyoon Choi
Villard, September 2008, $22.00

Luis Eduardo (“Eddie”) Torres started a new job as a foreign exchange trader at Cantor Fitzgerald on September 10th, 2001. He was thrilled to get it – he’d been out of work for a few months, his wife, Alissa, was then seven months pregnant, and he was a Columbian national, so his immigration status could have been compromised by staying out of work too long.

Seven years later, we all remember what happened on September 11th, but perhaps only New Yorkers remember Cantor Fitzgerald as clearly. Their headquarters was at the very top of One World Trade Center: floors 101 to 105. That was directly above the impact site of the first plane; no one in Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices survived. Of the dead at the World Trade Center, nearly a quarter were Cantor Fitzgerald. Eddie Torres was one of them.

Alissa Torres quickly found herself a widow: one of the smallest of mercies was that her husband jumped, and so was identified quickly. And then she found herself a “9/11 widow” – alternately helped and hindered by charities, sought by the media, torn completely from her previous life. The fact that her husband had just started work – at a site whose records were utterly destroyed – only made things more difficult.

[[[American Widow]]] is Alissa Torres’s story, in her own words and presumably her own comics-panel layouts. The art is by Sungyoon Choi, a very young graduate of the School of Visual Arts; this appears to be her first major work. It’s also Torres’s first work in comics; before 9/11 she was an instructional designer for the New York City Department for the Aging and afterward she seems to have only written about herself and her late husband, with several essays on [[[Salon]]] and one in [[[Redbook]]]. (A search at Salon didn’t bring up those essays; nor does the Redbook essay seem to be online.)

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Getting Catty, by Elayne Riggs

Getting Catty, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • September 3, 2008

Humans have been fascinated by felines both big and small since the beginnings of recorded history. At times we’ve both worshipped them (as did the ancient Egyptians) and reviled them (as did medieval Europeans, thus opening themselves up to the spread of the Black Plague when the witchcraft-associated kitties weren’t around in sufficient numbers to keep the rats at bay). And they’ve probably always been a big part of our mythology and folklore, including making multiple appearances in comics, from superheroes like Catman and Kitten to adult stuff like Fritz the Cat to funny animal and anthropomorphic fare.

But lately two big-cat names have infiltrated our culture to the extent that we’re all probably sick of them by now. I’m secretly hoping for Matt Groening to include them in his Forbidden Words list for 2009 so we never have to deal with them again, because they — like a number of other catty terms (such as, um, “catty”) — are used to impart negative attitudes towards women. And being one of those women-types, I tend not to like negative things directed at me simply because of my internal plumbing.

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Review: ‘Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!’

 

Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!
By Howard Chaykin
Dynamic Forces, July 2008, $49.99

Science Fiction has never been quite as successful in comics form as it seemed it should have been. Oh, sure, there have been plenty of vaguely SFnal ideas and premises – from [[[Superman]]] to [[[Kamandi]]] to the [[[X-Men]]] to the [[[Ex-Mutants]]] – but they were rarely anything deeper than an end to the sentence “There’s this guy, see? and he’s….” One of the few counterexamples was Howard Chaykin’s [[[American Flagg!]]], starting in 1983 – that series had many of the usual flaws and unlikelihoods of near-future dystopias, but it also had a depth and texture to its world that was rare in comics SF (and never to be expected in even purely prose works, either).

American Flagg! suffered from Chaykin’s waning attention for a while, and then crashed and burned almost immediately after he finally left the series, with a cringe-making overly “sexy” storyline utterly overwritten by Alan Moore. American Flagg! limped from muddled storyline to confused characterization for a couple of years afterward – but the beginning, when Chaykin was fully energized by his new creation and the stories he was telling, is one of the best SF stories in American comics.

The series has never been collected well, though a few slim album-sized reprints were once available, and may be findable through used-book channels. This Dynamic Forces edition, reprinting the first fourteen issues of the series, is quite pricey. (Especially for a book with no page numbers, and one in which the pages are precisely the size of the original comics – not oversized, as those previous album reprints had been.) This book has a strong, thoughtful introduction by Michael Chabon – which has already appeared in his [[[Maps and Legends]]] collection, presumably due to the delay in the American Flagg! book – a gushing afterword by Jim Lee, and a new short story written and drawn by Chaykin.

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Getting Screwed, by Mike Gold

Getting Screwed, by Mike Gold

  • News
  • September 1, 2008

We’re all familiar with the story of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. They created Superman but nobody would buy it so it sat in a drawer for a few years until an editor remembered seeing the submission and thought it would fill out the first issue of a new title that was lacking a lead story. Siegel and Shuster signed away their rights for something slightly in excess of a hundred bucks, although over the next decade they earned hundreds of thousands off of the property. The trouble is, the publisher was making millions.

Siegel and Shuster were getting screwed. They raised a stink about it and found themselves out of jobs. Later, after several publishing failures Siegel limped back to the offending publisher to work-for-hire for page-rate; Shuster was blind and couldn’t work for anybody.

Batman co-creator Bob Kane saw what was going on and offered to negotiate a contract that would: a) cover himself financially, b) somehow guarantee him sole creator credit, and c) screw the people who made Batman truly unique, people like co-creator Bill Finger and artists such as Jerry Robinson and Dick Sprang. This scenario was repeated by a number of creators who became publishers or intellectual property owners years and years later.

So the moral standard is rather flexible. That’s business. That’s human nature – most businessmen aren’t all that different from Al Capone, who, in fact, was generally more appreciative of his end-users than he was of his competitors. Now, everybody cooperates benignly, being careful to operate out of a sense of mutual self-interest instead of an actual conspiracy that might constitute anti-trust. We’ve just endured eight years of a government that was totally dedicated to this concept.

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