Once again, I need to lead with the obvious disclaimer: I am not the person to tell you about stories of female friendship, not being female and not overly thrilled with friendship, either. But Lumberjanes is not a comic just for young lady-persons, so I can read and enjoy it as well. You can, too, and perhaps you will.

(See my posts on the first and second volumes for similar disclaimers and thoughts.)

The third collection is Lumberjanes: A Terrible Plan , written still by Noelle Stevenson and Shannon Watters. This time out, the bulk of the art is by Carolyn Nowak, though the first issue here has a lot of short pieces — campfire ghost stories told by various girls — from a number of other artists, including Antick Musings favorite Faith Erin Hicks. As before, this book reprints four issues, and it forms (more or less) one larger story.

Well, the first issue here (number 9 [1]) is a standalone, with those individual ghost stories, told around a campfire, as is traditional. But the rest of the book reprints three issues that tell a connected narrative.

Thought I should admit it’s not really one story: this is the “split the party” story, which any series about a close-knit group of people must have eventually. Mal and Molly are off in the woods together, in a totally not-a-date kind of way, to be together because they’re really good friends and…OK, it’s really a date, a cute one, when they’re not being pursued by bears and trapped in an alternate universe ruled by dinosaurs.

The rest of the girls are left in camp, and don’t want to get into anything too fun while Mal and Molly are away. So they decide to use this free day to get at least one “easy” badge. This is not as simple as they think, obviously.

As usual, the real draw of Lumberjanes is the relationships: all of the characters are real and interesting. Their conversation is zippy and truer, and their exploits are unrealistic in the way a good TV cartoon show is — there’s a close enough relation to real life that you can see it, but this world is better and more exciting.

And, of course, they’re all women (or girls, I suppose, if you want to put it that way). That’s still unusual for comics for stupid historical reasons.

I’ll end the way I started: this is a great comic for young lady-persons, and if you are in charge of any of them, you should give them the chance to read it. If not, you still might like it yourself, if you like people and ladies and youth and friendship and camping and hi-jinks and endless possibilities.

[1] Number 9. Number 9. Number 9. turn me on, dead man

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

There once was a novel called Flughunde: written by Marcel Beyer in German, published in Germany in 1995. John Brownjohn — I feel so sorry for someone saddled with that name all his life — translated it into English, and The Karnau Tapes was published in the UK in 1997.

Almost twenty years later, German cartoonist Ulli Lust adapted Flughunde into comics form — it was published in 2013 as by Beyer and Lust. And, finally, in 2017, the comics version of Flughunde was reunited with the Brownjohn English translation — somewhat adapted by Nika Knight to work as comics — and published under a third title, Voices in the Dark .

(By the way, Flughunde means “Flying Foxes,” for an important thematic element of the story — it’s a literary-novel title, and this is a literary “graphic novel.” I have no idea why none of the English translations were willing to translate the title.)

That’s what this is, but what’s it about?

Hermann Karnau is a German sound engineer in WWII. Helga is the eldest of the six children of Joseph Goebbels. He is fictional; she is not — and, if you might possibly read this book, do not google her first. Trust me.

If you go into Voices in the Dark thinking it’s Hermann’s story — and it does appear to be his story; he gets most of the page-time, and the narrative goes deeply into his thinking for long periods — you’ll expect something like The Conversation mixed with Hannah Arendt’s famous comment about the banality of evil. Hermann is neurotic and obsessive, and it’s not clear for a while quite how twisted those obsessions have made him, until that Nazi machine gives him unexpected opportunities. He records speeches in public, Goebbels in private, sounds of battle on the Eastern front, and then is part of less definable, less sane experiments before being called back to record the last days of the man the narrative only calls “him.”

But this is not Hermann’s story. It is Helga’s, even though she is young and her life constrained. Even though she gets less time on the page, and we don’t know as much of her thoughts. Even though we don’t meet here until we’ve seen a lot of Hermann. She’s more important — Hermann is essentially an observer.

I won’t talk about the events of Voices in the Dark. It takes place in Germany, during WWII, mostly towards the end, with short scenes set before and after. You can guess at what that could include: you may be right.

Lust tells this story in mostly small, cramped panels — the white gutters between panels disappear entirely for some scenes, making them that much more intrusive and claustrophobic. Her colors are earth-tones, mostly monochromatic on a single spread — there are reddish scenes and brown scenes and grey scenes, some oranges and dull greens. And the panels themselves are close-ups more often than expected — again, tightly focused on this story, as obsessive a viewer as Hermann is a listener, close and constrained and inescapable. It’s very appropriate, and I only noticed it in retrospect.

This is not a happy book, or an uplifting one; stories about Nazi Germany rarely are. It is based on a literary novel, and it’s pretty literary itself — concerned with people’s deep emotions, and with investigating the extreme things they do, without standing up and making explanations or excuses for them. It’s a strong book: I expect it was a strong novel, and Lust has adapted it into a powerful comic.

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

I did this before.

Halfway through this book, it started to feel awfully familiar, and so I committed the sin we all do these days: I googled myself.

And so I found that I covered this book with a mouthful of a title, Astro City: The Dark Age, Vol. 1: Brothers & Other Strangers , in my Book-a-Day run back in 2010, where I was not entirely positive .

I’ll try to say different things about this superheroes-done-right comic this time out, though I find that I’m less and less in sympathy with the idea of doing superheroes right every year. Kurt Busiek is a skillful writer who knows superhero universes inside and out, and Brent Eric Anderson is a great artist with superb page layouts and great action. But why do they waste those obvious talents on this third-hand tripe?

Now, it’s reductive and wrong to turn Astro City into a game of who-is-this-really? — The First Family is not actually the Fantastic Four, the Apollo Eleven are only vaguely X-Men-ish, and the Honor Guard are neither the JLA nor the Avengers — but they’re all generic and dull in their own ways, all standard superhero furniture under new names and with costumes designed with far too much care to look authentic to the era Busiek and Anderson want to religiously recreate.

The whole point of Astro City is to validate and nurture the nostalgic identification far too many comics fans have with the childish entertainments of their youth (or, even more these days, other people’s youth), by creating a unified, not-as-embarrassing version of those stories to be loved. If it didn’t rhyme with the real comic-book 1970s — if it didn’t make comic readers want to play this “who is this really” game — then it would have failed at what it set out to do. Even worse, this is explicitly the story about the era when “normal people” lost faith in superheroes — which they were totally wrong to do, since superheroes are by definition better and smarter than normal people, and thus the natural lords of all creation — and how mopey they were for a while until they just let the Ubermenschen do whatever they want again. (This is barely subtext: it’s right there on the surface.)

I’ve never read the second half of the Dark Age story: I probably never will. But, from the hints here, I think there’s some Reaganite bullshit “morning in America” where we all let superheroes be awesome and perfect again coming for the climax of that story. I’m sure Busiek and Anderson made it plausible. I don’t want to know.

Everything I said eight years ago is still true: this is a world ostensibly about normal people, but where only superheroes matter. Only what superheroes does affect anything. Only superheroes change the world. Everything important has a super-person behind it, every time. Everyone else are just sheep, usually with a wrong-headed view of things and always three steps behind.

There are no Astro City stories about Joe Schlabotnik, who helped foil the Counter-Earth invasion of the Solarians. Katie Random did not give vital aid to the Superior Heroes when Lord Evilocity brought hell to earth. Astro City is about what being a mere human is like in a world where mere humans don’t matter. All human beings do is run away, hide, and get in the way. Oh, and get killed — probably in vast numbers. Let’s not forget that.

If real superbeings actually existed in our world, we would all be on the side of whatever draconian Registration Act was proposed: they’re violent, uncontrolled, compulsive law-breakers who destroy nearly everything they touch. Their only positive feature is that the “villains” are even worse. All superhero universes are crapsack universes; we just like to ignore that because we focus on the aristocrats. Astro City pretends otherwise, but it really shows how horrible a life in such a universe must be.

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

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.