If you can read the stories of a whole bunch of women pioneers — such as the ones in the book I’m about to discuss — without being at least a little bit annoyed at men in general, frankly there’s something wrong with you.
And you can take “men in general” as expansively as you want, o dudes who insist “man” is always and ever a perfectly good word to mean “humanity.” There’s enough shittiness and negativity in the world for at least two genders.
But damn did every single advance for women come because a woman demanded it, fought for it, and faced down multiple men who insisted that not only shouldn’t she do that, it was physically impossible for her to do it, so she should just go back her knitting and housekeeping.
(And if I hear a single “not all men,” I’m going to smack you so hard. Nothing is all anything, you bozos.)
On the other hand, reading a bunch of stories like these is also energizing — sure, a lot of horrible people tried to stop nearly every woman in the book, but horrible people are ubiquitous (insert reference to the political figure of your choice here), but every one of these women did the thing they’re known for, despite that opposition.
So, yeah, people in general are the worst, but some individual people are the best — that’s the story of humanity from the beginning.
Penelope Bagieu has thirty individual stories to tell in Brazen — all individual people, all women, and generally of the best. (There are some debatable candidates here, like the awesome but also pretty bloody Wu Zetian, Empress of China.)
Each story gets a title page, a three-to-seven page comic (nine-panel grid) telling the story of her life in as much detail necessary for the story Bagieu has in mind, and then a lovely two-page spread, more evocative than purely illustrative, of the essence of what make that woman great.
The comics are good: text-heavy, but snappy and quick-moving, setting the scene for each of these women in their very different places and times. But those spreads are even better: if there was a gallery show of them, I’d want to go to see them large and in person.
Bagieu casts a wide net here, from modern US and Europe (Giorgina Reid, Betty Davis — yes, that’s the correct spelling, it’s not the woman you’re thinking of — Tove Jansson, Christine Jorgensen, Temple Grandin, Jesselyn Radack, Katia Krafft) to slightly more historical figures from the same places (the amazingly kick-ass Nellie Bly, Hedy Lamarr [1], Clementine Delait, Margaret Hamilton, Josephina van Gorkum, Delia Akeley) to women from further afield in time and space (Nzinga, Lozeb, Wu Zetian, Agnodice, Leymah Gbowee, Sonita Alizadeh). Unless you have really eclectic knowledge and tastes, some of them — maybe a lot of them — will be unfamiliar to you, which is a big plus.
Every story taught me something I didn’t know, which may say more about me than the book. Every one was zippy and fun: Bagieu is focusing on women who succeeded at something. (No Joan of Arc here, for example — the closest thing to a martyr is Las Mariposas, three rebel sisters from the Dominican Republic in the 1950s.)
It’s all true, it’s all good comics, Bagieu’s closing spreads for each woman are wonderfully iconic, and you might learn something, too. Brazen is a total win all around.
[1] True story: recently, in a work meeting, the ice-breaker question was “What Hollywood star, past or present, would you want to have dinner with?” I was having trouble thinking of anyone until I remembered Hedy: she was my easy choice.
The parade of odd would-be world-conquerors continues in this collection of Squirrel Girl’s exploits — I almost said “latest collection,” but I’m still running almost two years behind, so it’s not. She hasn’t turned grimdark in the meantime, has she? That would be sad.
Anyway, in the five issues from late 2016 collected in (deep breath) The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 5: Like I’m the Only Squirrel in the World (exhale), our intrepid Squirrel Girl, Doreen Green, spends three issues battling a supervillain who breaks apart into smaller versions of himself when punched — something which makes it very difficult for the heroes of the Marvel Universeto apply their usual problem-solving heuristic [1] to.
Doreen occasionally uses other solutions to problems — oh, she can punch, too, she wouldn’t last long in a Marvel comic if she couldn’t — so this becomes her problem to fix. Also, it’s her comic, but that’s pretty meta.
(By the way, this is volume five — I’ve written about the first four here
and here
and here
and here
.)
And, yes, she does save the world: that’s the point of a superhero comic. She does get some help from Ant-Man — the ex-criminal one, not the movie one, or any of the three or four dozen others — but more fun is Brain Drain, her friend/protege/sidekick/coincidentally also an ex-villain, who is a brain in a jar in a robot body and who is more nihilistic than anyone in a Marvel comic is generally allowed to be.
Well, that takes up three of the five issues collected here. What else? Doreen fights the Taskmaster — whose power of “understanding how to do something perfectly by seeing it once” is always vastly overrated, since he doesn’t actually get the superpowers to fly or shoot eyebeams or punch someone through the side of a building [2] — in an issue entirely from the point of view of her cat.
And then issue #16 is the amazing 25th anniversary celebration of Squirrel Girl. And, since it’s a big anniversary, it’s entirely taken up with a retelling of her origins…well, actually, her entire career, more or less.
It’s all fun and amusing in the Stunning Squirrel-Girl Manner, but it’s all the same kind of thing as previous Squirrel Girl stories by writer Ryan North and artist Erica Henderson. [3] It’s still somewhere in that nebulous middle ground between “like a normal Marvel comic, only funny and not entirely serious” and “science and girl power for parents and their pre-teens,” and it does manage to avoid any crossover events that might have been cluttering up its universe at the time.
It’s just more of the same: that’s what I’m saying. If you liked it before, you’ll probably like the reprise. But, at some point, you might want to hear a different song. [4]
[1] Is opponent attacking? Then punch. Is opponent resting? Then declaim. Is opponent defeated? Then monologue about justice.
[2] Squirrel Girl defeats him because she has a tail, which he can’t replicate, and that would be cool if we didn’t see him on previous pages fighting Hulk (superstrong), Iron Man (flies, shoots force beams), Spider-Man (shoots webs), and Ms. Marvel (stretches), every single one of whom can do at least one thing Taskmaster cannot replicate. But none of them is the star of this comic, which is Doreen’s real superpower.
[3] Thought I was going to forget to mention then, didn’t you?
[4] HA! I may be overly optimistic here: eighty years of superhero comics, and the neckbeards are still obsessed with their one song.
I debated whether to categorize this post as “Horror.” At the moment, I haven’t, but maybe I’ll change my mind as type. Let’s see how that goes.
Fran Krause has been making a comic called Deep Dark Fears online called 2012, working from the submitted worries and fears of mostly anonymous contributors. (He’s also an animation teacher at Calarts.)
There have been two collections of the strip — the first one was Deep Dark Fears (unsurprisingly) in 2015, and a second book, The Creeps, came out in 2017. I’ve been reading the strip for a few years — I’m not sure exactly how long — but I missed the first book, and just read the second.
Each comic is generally four panels in a grid, with text underneath each panel — he’s illustrating the fear, in something like the words it was submitted to him.
And everything here was the worst fear of at least one person in at least one moment — something that person needed to share right then, when prompted. Not all of it was scary to me, not all of it will be scary to you — and none of it is designed to outright frighten you. There are no jump scares here, no fake-outs. Krause is illustrating things that other people are scared of…and seeing that, or thinking about that, may turn your mind down those paths.
So the title is is a good choice: these are comics more likely to “creep you out,” to make you feel uneasy, to make you think, than to actually on-purpose frighten you.
The Creeps also includes a couple of longer stories, also based on fears and stories about fears from contributors. They’re laid out with more flair, taking advantage of the full book page here. (I suspect the format of Deep Dark Fears is partly driven by how the individual panels will appear on various social platforms, especially on mobile. [1])
Krause has a simplified but sophisticated art style for these stories: people have dot eyes, limbs are close to rubber-hose quality, ears and noses are mostly geometric shapes with blocks of color, and backgrounds tend to be minimally sketched. He pulls it all together with blocks of subdued colors — I think primarily watercolor, and occasionally has a larger page-like structure underlying the four panels — but, usually, they’re designed so each one can stand alone in a string. (And, in fact the book plays with that: sometimes having two strips on facing pages, sometimes having one strip on the right and the title on the left, and sometimes running one strip across a spread, two panels on each side.)
Deep Dark Fears is an interesting and diverse crowdsourced comic, focused by Krause’s art, his selective eye, and the relatively narrow subject matter. It has the pared-down simplicity of the best comics or Zen koans, a sense that these are the fewest, most precise words to express this particular feeling. And it is quite likely to give you The Creeps.
[1] Can I be a Luddite for a second and mention that mobile has blown up a lot of good, sophisticated design on the web? There’s no going back, since you have to go where the users are, but a desktop window is a better platform for many media — any video with a decent quality, long-form text, comics with any kind of page design, etc. — than a mobile screen is. Oh, well — grump, grump.
First up: I’ll repeat what I said when I looked at a Nancy volume
by John Stanley, also part of “The John Stanley Library”: these are handsome, well-designed packages that badly fail at telling the reader where they fit in the overall picture. This is the third Tubby volume in the series, but that number 3 only appears in small-print “indicia” on page ten; this book doesn’t even have a copyright page.
(Also, they have comics pages reproduced with a yellowed, age-faded look: I don’t know if that’s a deliberate design decision or forced on them by the age and condition of the materials they have to work from. So I’m not going to complain about it, but I will note it: I always find it distracting, and it is often used as a design decision to show that “this stuff is old.”)
Anyway, if you dig down to that tiny type on page 10, you’ll discover that this book is actually Tubby, Vol. 3: The John Stanley Library and that the stories in it were all written and laid out by Stanley, and that some of them were drawn by Stanley and some were drawn by Lloyd White. You will also learn that these stories originally appeared in issues 9-12 of the Tubby comic — and you’d have to do other research elsewhere (on the Internet, perhaps) to find out that the comic’s title was actually Marge’s Tubby, that “Tubby” started off as “Joe” in the syndicated Little Lulu strip by Marge (the professional name for Marjorie Henderson Buell), and that it was Stanley who turned him into a major character in his Little Lulu comics in the early ’50s, which is why Tubby got a spin-off.
This all annoys me, because reprints of archival material are supposed to explain stuff like that — at least quickly in an editor’s note somewhere. This book is going to sit on the shelves in a thousand libraries for possibly dozens of years, and who knows how many people will stumble across Tubby through this book? A publisher has a duty to explain the basics. (Drawn & Quarterly is usually really good about the publishing stuff, but their Stanley books have basic information entirely missing.)
Anyway, Tubby is a fat, scheming kid, living in that vaguely utopian post-war suburbia that so many comics/movies/TV shows presented for twenty years or so. Kids have lemonade stands, there are zoos and live theater and woods within walking distance, and the kids mostly live in their own world — there are parents and other adults, who get involved now and then, but there’s no serious demands on these kids’ time. So the stories are about clubs that keep girls out, and birthday parties, and liking that one girl who likes the rich boy better, and low-key fighting, and similarly low-key playing tricks or schemes on each other. Oh, and then there’s Tubby’s miniature alien friend who can do just about anything plot-driving with his tiny ray guns, because it was the 1950s.
Stanley is good at keeping these stories moving and making them funny, but they are all very frivolous and low-stakes, even within their own world. Tubby’s not in danger of getting spanked, or grounded, or seriously beat up — just of being embarrassed by being seen in public without his pants or kicked out of his boys-only club by taking his beloved Gloria on a canoe ride.
I suspect it all would seem like very weak tea to the Younger Generation — and I count myself and most of Gen X in that category. Oh, it’s definitely funny, but it’s the kind of funny based on an artificiality that we’ve seen an awful lot of for a long time.
Your mileage may vary, though — and these are definitely squeaky-clean stories, so appropriate for readers of any generation or current age. (Assuming they don’t consider the title fat-shaming, which I guess could happen.)
But that miniseries was itself explicitly a throwback to the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire Justice League series, which launched in 1987 — so that’s another fifteen-ish years further back, for a total of thirty-one years.
So we’re looking back at something that was itself looking back; revisiting a throwback.
The ’87 Justice League was a reset: the previous series had gotten serious in ways that weren’t resonating as well with the audience, and the core membership of the League had dwindled to a bunch of characters who couldn’t be called third-string only because they were invented for that series and didn’t have much of a life before or after it. Writers Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis got permission to use at least some of DC’s bigger characters — Batman, most notably, plus Captain Marvel in the Big Boy Scout role usually reserved for Superman, and the Green Lantern no one liked, Guy Gardner. Otherwise, this League consisted of more also-rans and never-wases, like the Martian Manhunter (whose claim to fame was that he was always in the JLA), the lightly rebooted Doctor Fate, the brand-new Doctor Light, the freshly arrived from lands of Charlton Blue Beetle, and always-seemed-like-he-should-be-bigger-than-he-ever-actually-was Mister Miracle.
Giffen and DeMatteis gave their adventures a somewhat lighter tone than was common at the time — or has been common since — which worked very well, and the series was very popular. And Maguire cemented his status as a hot artist by showing an equal facility for broad comedy and standard superhero action.
(Honestly, the tone was more an update of the standard Silver Age goofiness of a whole swath of DC Comics than anything entirely new — DC has always had a silly streak a mile wide — but it seemed new and different, and that was what mattered.)
It was successful enough that a lot of characters were part of that version of the League — everyone from Animal Man to Captain Atom to Tasmanian Devil.
But eventually it became the ’90s, and the Giffen/DeMatteis Leagues — there were separate teams for America and Europe by that point, plus a one-off really jokey Antarctica version — were getting passe. Grim and gritty was in, also pouches, also gritting your teeth really hard, and artists who couldn’t draw feet. And so the goofy era of Justice League ended, as all things end, with a whimper and the birth of something much sillier in its own way.
But everybody’s nostalgic for something, and enough people remembered fondly the bwa-ha-ha era of the League that the old band got back together for a reunion concert not quite ten years after they broke up. And this is the souvenir tour CD of that concert.
The story is set in something not quite congruent with then-current DC continuity; Maxwell Lord, the once and future businessman/leader of the JL, is seen here as his old pleasantly conniving self while he was simultaneously gleefully murdering superheroes and getting killed in turn in Identity Crisis.
But that’s just fine: this continuity is better than the “real” one, anyway. And the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire team hit the ground running from the best of their old work and don’t let up — this starts from as silly as the old series got, but basically stays on that level the whole time. Again, it is a more-or-less serious superhero comic, with worlds being saved and all that jazz, but they’re all odd people, who bicker and complain and obsess about things like normal human beings do.
Giffen and DeMatteis make the dialogue sparkle and pop, like the world’s least likely screwball comedy. And Maguire’s crisp linework and knack for expressions sells the action — his people are deeply physical, and not just in the usual superhero punching-people way. They shrug and raise eyebrows and smirk and gloat and pace and sigh. (Inking him this time out — and, as one credit box implies, drawing all the backgrounds, is Joe Rubinstein.)
There is superhero stuff, as there should be, but the story here is one-half “putting the band back together” and one-half “and then unexpected stuff derails your plans.” Again, a lot like life.
This is not high art. It might not even count as “great comics.” But it’s fun, and funny, and if superhero comics were more like this more of the time, I’d still read ’em like I used to in 1987.
I don’t know if superhero conflicts are required to be based on the stupidest possible interpretation of premises, but it certainly seems that way. Subtlety or nuance don’t exist in superhero universes; in a world where people can punch each other through brick walls, that’s the only way to do anything.
Ms.Marvel Vol. 6: Civil War II is another piece of crossover, which means it’s substantially stupider than a standalone Ms. Marvel story. I’m not claiming they’re brain-teasers in the best of situations, but they generally consist of believable characters doing understandable things for plausible reasons.
Before I go on to talk about the story, here’s who brought it to us: writer G. Willow Wilson continues as usual, with original series artist Adrian Alphona taking the first issue and flashback scenes in the next four, Takeshi Miyazawa doing the non-flashbacks for those issues, and Mirka Andolfo drawing the last one collected here.
Those first and last issues (numbers 7 and 12 of the 2015 Ms. Marvel series, for those of you scoring at home) are standalones, and I’ll get to them later.
The main story here spins out of the big dumb [1] crossover Civil War II, which apparently triggered when someone discovered a new Inhuman — yeah, they were still on that kick in early 2016 — named Ulysses, who, well, I’ll let Captain Marvel [2] do the honors:
It’s more like mathematics — he can determine, to within a fraction of a percent, the probability that certain events are going to take place.
As described, this covers any event, of any kind. And, since it’s a superhero power, it’s declared to be absolutely, totally reliable all of the time. Extremely improbably, Ulysses is not already the richest man on Earth from stock-picking or craps or sports book. Nor will his powers be used to, oh, predict earthquakes and hurricanes for the betterment of all mankind. Nor to fiendishly predict the weak spots in other nations or corporations for the power-enhancement and enrichment of his friends and bosses. Nor to turbo-charge scientific development by focusing attention on the areas most amenable to breakthroughs. Nor to do a million other things that you need to actually take five minutes to think through.
No, instead Ulysses’s vast powers will be used to predict street-level crime in Jersey City, New Jersey so a group of teen vigilantes can go beat up people a day before they would have done something bad, and/or vaguely “citizen’s arrest” them, holding them down until after the time they were going to do the thing they were just stopped from doing.
Mere human language cannot adequately convey how deeply, utterly stupid an idea this is, nor now vastly it undervalues Ulysses’s powers. I am in awe of the weapons-grade idiocy here, and wonder if Ulysses is actually some idiot-savant who is just endlessly shouting out things like “John Smith of 331B 25th Street, New York, has a 37.562% chance of shoplifting a fun-size Snickers bar from the Sunny Day bodega on the corner of 24th and Market at 4:52 PM local time today.” The story would almost make sense if he had no control of his power and was psychologically focused on stupid minor crimes close to him for some plot-sufficient reason.
So, yeah. Ms. Marvel, the girl of stretch, is brought in by the senior Marvel, Carol Danvers, to supervise a random group of gung-ho crime-fighting teenagers in her neighborhood, because of course that’s how serious government projects work. (The other crime-fighting teens are all people we’ve never seen before, and probably mostly people we will never see again: utterly plot furniture.) They get random updates from Ulysses, run off, and punch people generally mere moments before they’re about to do something naughty. These updates only come in when they’re not in school or sleeping or doing homework — they’re foiling convenient crimes.
Their MO is wildly inconsistent: one actual supervillain who stole a government tank is told he’ll be held for fifteen minutes until the unfoilable super-security system blows up the tank, because they apparently can’t arrest him for stealing a tank, or driving it down a city street, or attacking civilians, but only could stop him if it blew up with him in it when he didn’t realize it would. But then when an otherwise honor-student teen boy might — Ulysses’s supposed “fraction of a percent” predictions are never actually cited; everything is a sure bet every single time — cause a power surge the next day that would start a fire, they grab him and throw him into some kind of black-box high-security private prison.
This makes no fucking sense. Not for a second. Ulysses isn’t providing percentages for anything, and the focus on teenagers in Jersey City is deeply ludicrous. And the outcomes go so far beyond arbitrary and capricious that they turn into the opposite of anything reasonable. Even assuming crime-fighting was the best use of these powers — and, again, it totally isn’t — this is quite possibly the single worst way of doing so.
But wait! The whole stupid plot seems to be designed to make our Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, realize that, hey, y’know, maybe beating up people and locking them up without due process just might be a bad thing…as long as it’s purely based on something they haven’t done yet, of course, since doing that to people otherwise would be totally fine! And that realization is purely to fuel her break with Danvers, the current Captain Marvel.
Danvers is a former military test pilot and big fan of the chain of command…except when an ill-defined group is using a random superhuman for bizarre crime-fighting activities, but it’s her ill-defined group, and crime-fighting is the only thing these caped lunatics know, so let’s go with it — and so barks out the kind of cliche conversation where she talks down to “junior” superheroes and calls them things like “soldier” using random Army jargon picked up from Full Metal Jacket.
Because military people in comics are all about “shut up and do as you’re told,” since the question of legal and appropriate use of force never comes up in fictional universes. Obviously.
So The Lesson Kamala learns here is that your idols sometimes assholes who aren’t going to do what you want them to, and also that semi-fascist panopticons are not as cool an idea as they might seem. I know! Who would have thought! (Presumably somewhere in the actual Civil War II series it all ended when we learned that Ulysses’s powers can’t handle vibranium, or he’s a Skrull spy, or some such stupid bullshit, so everything could go back to normal.)
Oh! Also another Lesson: it is your fault if your best friend does something you warn him is really dangerous and gets seriously injured, because you are A Superhero and should be able to make everything nice all the time. (Well, maybe there’s also a bit of “You went along with something that didn’t smell right and it turned out horribly and crippled your best friend.”) But, as a bonus, Wilson is totally setting up ex-best-friend to return as a supervillain in another 5-10 issues. So we have that to look forward to.
This book also contains two single issues untainted by crossover, and so therefore relatively intelligent. The one up front is a cute science-fair story, with a side order of Millennials Have It So Much Worse Than Other Generations (Even the Ones That Had to Go To War and Stuff) Because Student Loans, and guest appearances by Spider-Man and Nova, to underline how much they are all basically the same damn character.
And the closing story sees Kamala take a trip back to her native Pakistan. This seems unlikely to happen during the school year for a student as much of a grind as Kamala, but it’s not clear when any of these stories take place during the year, so maybe it’s suddenly summer? And there she Learns Things, though she doesn’t notice that her new friend is also totally that local superhero she runs into. Oh, and the local society is corrupt and riddled with bad actors in multiple ways, but she shouldn’t be judge-y about it! Let the locals deal with it!
I’m beginning to think I only read Ms. Marvel because the different ways it annoys me amuse me. It may also be that I had all the superhero bullshit I could stand about twenty years ago, so even “good” superhero comics are so full of crap they make me break out in fits of swearing. Either way, my relationship with this comic is not particularly healthy. Luckily, I just get collections of it from the library about two years late!
[1] I haven’t actually read anything else from Civil War II, so it’s possible that I’m maligning its intelligence. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
A couple of weeks ago, writing about the previous Gilbert Hernandez Love and Rockets book Human Diastrophism, I said that those stories came from a ten-year span, because Hernandez was busy with other things as well during that time.
Well, Beyond Palomar collects two of those things between one set of covers: two full-length graphic novels originally serialized in Love and Rockets, both of them related to the “Palomar” cycle of stories but not directly part of that main stream. First up is Poison River, originally appearing from 1988 through 1994, which tells the story of Luba’s life up to the point she arrived in Palomar in Heartbreak Soup. Then there’s Love & Rockets X (from 1989-1993), which is more complicated: it was the first of Gilbert’s stories to show some of his Palomar characters in Southern California — traditionally his brother’s Jaime’s turf [1] — but also featured a mostly new cast, most of whom would not return in any of his later stories. (Though two of them, seen in minor and mostly-comic roles here, turn up both in the not-exactly-canonical pornographic miniseries Birdland (from the same era) and then, a little later, as Luba’s sisters in stories collected in Human Diastrophism.
That’s a lot to unpack. It’s probably best if I tackle the two stories separately.
Poison River is substantially longer: a seventeen-part, nearly two-hundred-page cross between a family saga and a gangster epic. And it is very much the story of Luba’s life up to her mid-twenties: it opens with her as a small baby, at the point where her official father — the rich man her mother Maria was married to — realizes that Luba is actually the daughter of the field hand Eduardo. (Presumably, this is more obvious because Eduardo is Indio — native or mostly native — and the unnamed rich guy is of purer colonial stock.) Maria is cast out, with the baby, Eduardo, and her maid Karlota. They take refuge with Eduardo’s family, and live in semi-happy poverty for a while until Maria gets fed up and runs off.
(Maria is a deeply self-centered sensation-seeker who is never satisfied; she would have run off eventually. That’s just who she is.)
Luba bounces around the fringes of Eduardo’s family for her childhood, as part of the underclass of whatever Latin American country this is. (Hernandez deliberately keeps it unclear, but there are echoes of El Savador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and so on — it could be any of them, or a fictional melange of all of them.) And then, as a teenager, she meets the middle-aged conga player Peter Rios, who falls for her hard and marries her impetuously — right at the moment he gives up playing music and goes into managing a club.
The club is owned by gangsters, and Peter’s ambitions push him upward into their ranks — along with his former bandmate Blas, who follows him into that world for reasons that seem murky to begin with. The bulk of Poison River is the intertwined stories of the various power struggles among those gangsters, mostly having to do with their unreasoning hatred of mostly-unseen “leftists” who they fear will take over and ruin the country and with conflicts over sexual partners [2], and Luba’s growing up and sexual acting-out.
Well, everyone is sexually acting out, so she’s not alone. There’s a lot of sex and violence before Poison River is over. Hernandez combines them occasionally, which may upset some readers, but the sex is mostly consensual, even if often in secret between people whose partners will react horribly when the secret comes out. It’s also all R-rated sex; Hernandez was making Birdland around the same time, and that story is full of insertions and fluids and really bizarre combinations. Poison River is more cable-TV than porn: we see some flaccid penises, and we can tell people are having sex, but we don’t see body parts interlocking.
All of those plots eventually link back to the past — Maria was part of the same circle of gangsters a generation before, until she fled with that rich husband, and she slept with more than one of them during that time — so we get flashbacks and various realizations of whose daughter Luba is and an occasional view into Maria’s life in the “now” of Poison River. (“Now” covers, if I had to guess, from Luba’s birth around 1950 to her entry into Palomar in the late 1970s, with most of the gangster plot taking place in late ’60s and early ’70s.)
The body count piles up, as it usually does in a gangster story. And, in the end, Luba is alone with her infant daughter Maricela and cousin Ofelia, about to enter Palomar for the first time. Poison River is entirely an origin story: telling us the secrets behind the things we already knew. It’s sordid and occasionally nasty and full of bad people doing bad things, but Hernandez makes it compelling.
The back quarter of Beyond Palomar, though, is less serious. The sixty-page Love & Rockets X takes an Altman-esque collection of overlapping plots (not that different from the Palomar stories, though each individual story there tended to be a bit more linear) to tell a less serious story of teens, rock bands, spoiled rich people, racial tension, and various love triangles (and more complicated shapes).
It does loop back to Palomar eventually, so we see a much older Luba and her growing family, but the most important Palomar character is a grown-up Maricela, who fled to Southern California with her girlfriend Riri. The two of them get caught up in the various plots — which are mostly driven by white Californians, particularly those connected to a lousy garage band called “Love and Rockets” — that all collide at a “big Hollywood party” where Love and Rockets is supposed to play.
This is Hernandez mostly in a lighter mode, though he still takes all of his characters seriously — and some of them have real problems. (At least one eating disorder, some white-power terrorists, Maricela and Riri’s relationship problems and worries about La Migra.) But, even in lighter mode, there are undertones: this seems to take place in 1989, but the racial tensions hint at riots to come and one character ends up in Iraq, which is explicitly mentioned. Love & Rockets X is an example of that old saying: if you want a happy ending, you have to know when to stop telling the story; all endings are sad if you go on long enough.
So we have two major Gilbert Hernandez stories here, either or both of which would be decent introductions to his work. Poison River gets quite plotty and continuity-heavy, but it’s all continuity within the one story, and that’s what he does anyway — if you don’t like that in Poison River, you won’t enjoy a lot of Hernandez’s work. Love & Rockets X might be an even better first Hernandez story: short, often funny, full of quirky characters, enough sex to keep it interesting, and that basically happy ending.
[1] Though, if you recall that Jaime’s main character Maggie was mostly in Texas during this time, you could work up a silly theory about geographic coverage and brotherly competition.
[2] This gets really complicated, with basically hetero men, openly gay men, and men who seem to mostly have sex with the presenting-as-women-but-physically-male dancers at Peter’s club, and I couldn’t begin to map it out or guess how they would all identify themselves. I couldn’t even tell you if those dancers — some of whom are quite important to the story — think of themselves as women or men or trans or each something different. Oh, and Peter himself has a fetish for bellybuttons, and not a whole lot of interest in “normal” sex, which frustrates the hot-to-trot Luba.
There are some comics that look like they should be broadly popular, but aren’t really. I don’t mean everyone’s favorite parlor game, Why My Favorites Should Be Everyone’s Favorites. I mean that there are comics that look like the kind of stories Americans love: broad, funny, with sturdy vaguely stereotypical characters, easy-to-follow plots, clean lines, and heart to spare. And those comics feel like they’re similar to the kinds of things Middle America likes in other media: movies about sports teams that win despite the odds, TV shows about a bunch of co-workers who make the world better, songs with way too much melisma and emotion to match, news stories about pets who cross continents to get back to their loving owners.
Those comics usually aren’t all that popular, because the broad Middle American audience isn’t the one reading comics, mostly. But they feel like they’re a popular thing, even when they’re not.
It collects a three-issue 1996 miniseries, Roswell, Little Green Man, and a four-part follow-up (“How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down On the Ant Farm?”) that was a backup in Simpsons Comics soon afterward, all written and drawn by Morrison with colors by Nathan Kane and letters by Tim Harkins.
The main and title character is the guy on the cover, an alien journalist from the planet Zoot who got stuck on a spaceship to Earth by accident and then stranded here when that ship blew up at an inopportune moment. (This may make him sound particularly accident-prone, but neither of those things was his fault.) Oh, and his real name is *#@!!#, which — since this is a comic book — is a horrible swear-world on Earth.
Anyway, he ends up in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, and wacky hijinks ensue. In fact, the story starts with the wacky hijinks, and only later doubles back to explain Who He Is and How He Came To Be.
He’s chased by rednecks and befriended by a hot redheaded waitress (Julienne Fryes) who is also a world-class inventor, as well as the giant-rabbit-riding cowboy (Jasper Kudzu) who wants to get into the pants of that waitress — or would if he were less well-mannered and this were less of an all-ages comic. The Army wants to capture him, of course, and they have a particularly histrionic ex-Nazi mad scientist who will do fiendish experiments on Roswell if they do.
There is quite a lot of running about at top speed, as you might guess. It is all good-hearted, and Roswell has a clean, pleasant line in a Simpsons Comics/Disney/animation-inspired style. And it does all feel like the kind of things that Mr and Mrs Middle America would lap up if it were in a medium that they paid attention to.
It is nice and pleasant and good clean fun and not all that much my kind of thing. Your mileage may vary.
If you had asked me “is physics more interesting than history?,” I’d probably have to think about it. Both are fascinating in their own ways, full of convoluted intricate stuff that’s fun to learn about or think through. It wouldn’t be obvious at all.
So when I saw that Larry Gonick, author of multiple volumes of The Cartoon History of the Universe (and its follow-up, ...of the Modern World) had a book called The Cartoon Guide to Physics, created with physics teacher Art Huffman, I thought that was a book for me.
(And then it sat on my shelf for at least a decade, because that’s what always happens.)
I finally read it recently, and it reminded me of something I learned back when I worked in publishing: a truism that I wanted not to be true but, eventually, accepted that definitely was.
The truism is this: Every equation in a book reduces its potential audience by half.
The Cartoon Guide to Physics has eight equations in the first chapter alone.
So this is a book primarily for people seriously interested in learning physics — not learning about physics, or science in general, or general knowledge. It’s for people who want to start with F=ma, understand what that means, and go on from there. My guess is that it’s primarily used on the highschool level, and I could see it being a lot of fun for students who are learning this stuff anyway — it’s definitely more interesting and dynamic than a textbook.
But it’s much less interesting and dynamic than, say, a random graphic novel, which is what it might be shelved next to. So if you pick up a Gonick Cartoon Guide book, take a look inside it — they can vary a lot.
This one is divided into two large sections — the first covers Mechanics, with the laws of motion, starting with speed and acceleration and moving on to cover orbits, momentum, gravity, inertia, collisions, and rotation (and several dozen equations). The second half of the book is Electricity and Magnetism, which has slightly fewer equations but just as many numbers and technical details.
I read this book casually, which really isn’t the point. You should read each page carefully, think through the equations and implications, and only move on once it all makes sense to you. (I’m going to pretend that I already knew all of this stuff, and that’s why I read it straight through. Yeah. That’s the ticket.)
Gonick draws this is in a very loose, expressive style, and his main characters this time are a young woman (who is unnamed as far as I could see) and a Gonick-esque mustachioed man called Ringo. Like his other books, it’s not really comics — there are drawings on the page, but there’s also a lot of words, mostly arranged in block around them, and the drawings only rarely form a sequence of action. But it’s a first cousin of comics, and could be of interest to comics people for that reason. But the primary audience, again, is people trying to seriously learn physics, either as part of a regular course of study or just for themselves.
I wouldn’t say that all of modern mainstream comics comes from Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. Frank Miller’s work on Daredevil and The Dark Knight was just as influential, alongside the Claremont X-Men and the event frenzy kick-started by the Wolfman/Perez Crisis. And there have certainly been major developments in the thirty years since then. But our modern adventure-story comics world was formed in those days of the mid-80s when the Direct Market was strong and growing, when the outside world was reading “comics are growing up” stories every few months (with new examples each time), and the expectations of both readers and publishers started to bend to shocking revelations and long story arcs and Worlds That Would Never Be the Same. And that world was strongly molded by Alan Moore, starting with Swamp Thing in late 1983.
Thirty-plus years later, those Moore stories are both shockingly modern and shockingly old-fashioned: cold-eyed about humanity and the place of superbeings alongside it, but utterly besotted with their own wordy narration. These are intensely told stories: Moore in the ’80s was the culmination of Silver Age style, all captions and explanations and background and atmosphere, cramming all of his ideas and poetic descriptions into each twenty-three page issue, exhausting every concept as soon as he introduced it.
Swamp Thing, the character, was a scientist named Alec Holland, working on a “bio-restorative formula” with his also-scientist wife in what looked like a barn deep in the Louisiana marshes. (This all made sense in the early 1970s, when ecology and back-to-the-land were huge.) The usual evil forces of international business sabotaged his work: his wife was killed and Alec, permeated with the formula and burning to death from an explosion, fell into the swamp. He arose, a few days later, as the slow-talking Swamp Thing, to stop those evil businessmen and battle weird menaces around the world for at least the duration of the early-70s horror boom. His first comics series ended after 24 issues of slowly dwindling sales and quickly increasing gimmicks to try to reverse the sales drop, and was revived about a decade later when a cheap movie adaptation came out. The same slow-death started setting in, with similar results, and the second series began to look like it would run only about as long as the first.
And then Alan Moore took over writing what was then Saga of the Swamp Thing from Martin Pasko with issue #20. His first outing was a clean-up effort, tying off “Loose Ends” from the Pasko run, like a concert pianist running a few scales to warm up before diving into the meat of the program. A month later, he delivered one of the most influential and iconic single issues of any comic, “The Anatomy Lesson,” where he carefully explained that Swamp Thing’s origin and explanation made no sense whatsoever, and started the path to what he declared was a better foundation for the character. (He was right, and he shouldn’t be blamed that a thousand others have tried to do the same thing to a thousand other characters since then, with not necessarily the same level of rigor or success.)
Before long, the title had simplified to Swamp Thing — the same as that original Len Wein/Bernie Wrightson series a decade before — grown the tag-line “Sophisticated Suspense,” and quietly become the first Big Two comic to ditch the Comics Code seal. It was also a huge hit, both critically and commercially. By the time Moore ended his run on Swamp Thing with #64, almost four years later, the Crisis had come and gone, he was in the middle of Watchmen, and the landscape of American comics had been radically changed.
(As a sidebar, it’s interesting to note that the editor on those early Moore Swamp Thing issues was Wein himself — it’s a fantastic example of a creator nurturing stories that reinterpret, even replace, the work he did earlier.)
That Swamp Thing run was one of the first to be collected in a comprehensive way soon after periodical publication, as the comics industry started to realize what the book industry had known for several generations: a creative property you can keep selling in a fixed form for years is vastly more valuable than creative properties that you need to refresh every month. The complete Alan Moore run is currently available as six trade paperbacks, under the overall title The Saga of the Swamp Thing, reprinting all forty-five issues with introductions by various people. (Not including Moore, though, as anyone who has heard about his contentious relationship with DC Comics since will expect.) If you’re looking for those books individually, have some links: one
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The first thing to note is that the divisions between books generally make sense: they each collect eight issues, except Book Five has only six, and they tend to break at important moments. This is partially an artifact of comics-storytelling norms of the time: then, a three-issue story was an epic, and anything longer than that was remarkable. (Of course, subplots would run longer than that — I mentioned Claremont up top, and he’s one of the major originators of the throw-in-hints-of-the-next-four-stories-in-each-issue plotting style — but the actual conflict in any issue would be done within fifty or seventy pages nearly all the time.) But Swamp Thing also tended to run to story arcs, more and more as Moore wrote it; it’s one of the origins of that now-common structure. So it’s partially luck, partially planning, and partially the nature of these stories that makes them break down as cleanly as they do into volumes. It means that a reader can come to this series thirty years later — it’s now impossible to come to it any earlier, if you haven’t already — and take it one book at a time, as her interest is piqued. (Or you can run through all of them quickly, as I did.)
Book One leads off with #20, “Loose Ends” — not generally included in Swamp Thing reprints for the first decade or so, as DC presumably wanted to start with the bigger bang of “The Anatomy Lesson” — and runs through the continuation of that story with Jason Woodrue and then a three-part story featuring Jack Kirby’s The Demon. These are the foundational stories, in which Moore resets everything about the series: tone, cast, mood, atmosphere, even genre. (There were horror elements in the earlier stories, obviously, but Moore moved it definitively from “superhero story with horror villains” to “horror story with a muckmonster hero.”) The Woodrue story also has a nice cameo by the Justice League, cementing Swampy’s place in the “real” DC Universe. Swamp Thing, and the Vertigo imprint that eventually grew out of it, would have a complicated relationship with that continuity over the next few decades — as that continuity itself got more complex and self-referential, in part driven by the work Moore did here and other writers did in a similar vein — but, when it began, it was just the weird corner of the same universe.
Book Two is anchored by the return of Anton Arcane, Swampy’s greatest villain, who Moore made even more infernal as he threw Arcane into Hell and brought him (briefly) back. I’m not sure if this is the first time we get an extended look at DC Comics Hell — there were a bunch of vaguely Satanic comics in the ’70s, though mostly on the Marvel side — but Moore’s vision of Hell, as amplified and extended a few years later by Neil Gaiman in the early issues of Sandman, was the model for DC for a generation from this point. This second book also has the first visual breaks from the main look for the Moore run: the majority of the early Moore issues are pencilled by Stephen Bissette and inked by John Totleben, but they have a very detailed, intricate style and Swamp Thing also tended to have heavily designed pages — which all added up to mean that getting twenty-three pages done, at that level and in that style, tended to take longer than the month between issues. So this volume has two issues drawn by Shawn McManus: the first a coda to the storyline of the first volume, the second a homage to Walt Kelly’s Pogo. And another issue reprinted here brings back Cain and Abel, the mystery hosts from DC’s horror-anthology comics of the early ’70s, in a framing story drawn by Ron Randall to showcase the original short “Swamp Thing” comic by Wein and Wrightson that served as a tryout and model for the ’70s series.
Book Three is the bulk of the “American Gothic” storyline, introducing John Constantine — who has gone on to fame on his own, with a very long-running comic and a movie that was at least higher-budget than any of Swampy’s — and sending Swampy cross-country to see and confront growing horrors in the world: nuclear waste, racism, sexism, and (of course) aquatic vampires. Here the art continues to move around a small team: Rick Veitch pencils one issue (he also helped out on some pages in two issues in the first volume), Alfredo Alcala inks another, and Stan Woch pencils a third. The team is clearly moving resources around to maintain a consistent visual look and at the same time maintain that punishing monthly deadline. These stories are the heart of Swamp Thing as a horror comic: Moore is taking individual concerns of the then-modern world (mostly; the aquatic vampires aren’t particularly emblematic of anything) and showing how they can be twisted and made horrible.
Book Four finishes up “American Gothic,” which leads into the double whammy of Crisis and Swamp Thing‘s own fiftieth issue, which was explicitly positioned in the story as a crisis after the Infinite Earths one. (Evil South American wizards — the same ones mentioned in Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, which I coincidentally read recently — knew the whole “worlds will live, worlds will die” thing was coming, and planned to summon Primordial Darkness to take over Heaven in the tumult.) This is one of Moore’s largest-scale stories, and from that era when he aspired to write big superhero-universe crossovers: Watchmen started out that way, and the aborted Twilight of the Superheroes project from 1987 was an even bigger take on the same idea.So Swampy almost becomes a supporting character in his own book, with the Demon and the Phantom Stranger and Deadman and the Spectre and Dr. Fate and John Constantine with a roomfull of minor DC magicians all demanding their time in the spotlight. It does all come together, and tells a strong story — even if the ending is strangely muted, with characters explicitly saying things like:
Happened? Nothing has happened. Everything has happened. Can’t you feel it? Everywhere things look the same, but the feeling…the feeling is different.”
One can admire Moore’s writing and plotting and still think this is a remarkably deflating denouement.
Book Five is another group of transitional stories. First, because the art team switches to Veitch and Alcala, except for one issue in the middle drawn entirely by Totleben. And, more importantly, because it moves from the aftermath of the “spiritual Crisis” through the arrest and prosecution of Swampy’s girlfriend Abby in Gotham City — and Swampy’s subsequent assault on that city through a massive green-ification project — before Swampy sets off, unexpectedly and not by choice, on his next story arc. At the risk of spoiling thirty-five year old stories, he’s catapulted off into space, where he needs to learn how to modulate his wavelengths (more or less) to get back home.
And Book Six is when he does so. By this time, Moore was also working on Watchmen, and was getting to the point where he’d nearly said all he wanted to say with Swamp Thing. So this last volume has stories explicitly planned as transitions to the story-sequence that would follow: Rick Veitch would take over writing (on top of pencilling), and so he writes one story here. Bissette writes another, a sidebar set back on Earth, in which Abby is reunited, for one last time, with her ill-fated father. One issue has a quite experimental art style from Totleben, all chilly mecanico-organic forms, and the big conclusion is something of a jam issue, with art from nearly everyone who contributed to the Moore run: Bissette, original Saga penciller Tom Yeates, Veitch, and Alcala, under a Totleben cover.
It all ends on a happy note: Swampy is back where he belongs, having learned more about himself and the universe and having found something like peace. If the series had ended there, it would have been an ending — but popular comics didn’t end in 1987 just because they had a good place to do so.
Instead, the next month there was a Veitch-Alcala issue, launching a new plot arc. Veitch continued the concerns and manner of the Moore run — though with somewhat less of the overwrought narration, which was becoming outmoded even in the late ’80s — but ran afoul of DC brass a little over a year later, during a time-travel storyline that was to culminate with Swampy meeting a certain religious leader in Roman-occupied Palestine.
But that’s all another story: a story not collected in the books I’m writing about here, and in fact never collected, since it was cancelled and twisted and broken in the process.
Moore wrote forty-three issues of Swamp Thing over a four-year period, including at least three double-length issues (and, again, Veitch and Bissette also each contributed one script as part of the overall plot line). He worked with a team that ended up being fairly large — Bissette, Totleben, Veitch, and Alcala most of the time, McManus and Randall and Yeates and Dan Day stepping in here and there. But the whole thing does hang together — it’s not quite one story, but it’s a closely related cluster of stories, with consistent themes and concerns, that took a fairly conventional “weird hero” and turned him and his world into something new and strange in American comics.
Others have built on this foundation since then: most obviously, Neil Gaiman with Sandman, who got the luxury of a real ending and who was able to take a stronger hand at choosing art teams to go with specific story sequences. But Sandman could not have happened without the Moore Swamp Thing, as a thousand other comics could not have happened — all of Vertigo, for example, and most of what Image currently publishes, and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe, among many others.
Modern readers might find the Moore Swamp Thing much wordier than they expect: he was the last great Silver Age writer, a decade or two out of his time, when he wrote these comics. They’re all good words, deployed well and to strong effect — but we have to admit there are a lot of them. The coloring is also clearly ’80s vintage: very strong for its time, and pushing the limits of what could be done with newsstand comics in those days long before desktop publishing, but still clearly more limited and bold than what we’re used to today.
All those things are inherent in reading older stories. And all stories are “older” before too long. The strong stories are worth the effort — frankly, even new strong stories require some effort, since that’s one of the main things that makes them strong.
You should read the Alan Moore Swamp Thing, if you have any interest in comics or horror or superhero universes or ecology in literature or spirituality or transcendence. If you’re not interested in any of those things, well, it sounds like a dull life, but good luck with it.
