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Archive Page 4

June 22, 2006

BatMud : Zach Howard

COMIC BOOK BRAIN
BAT MUD

MUD: The shape-shifting character of the Catwoman book reminded me of what is my favorite superhero story from 2005. A very unserious Batman "back up" tale from Detective Comics #805 featured an "unstable" Clayface creature that Batman brings back to the cave as a sample, which escapes and slightly loony mayhem ensues. Written by Kimo Temperance and drawn by Zach Howard, the 8-page story accomplishes everything is sets out to do and on those terms is as perfect a comic book story as I have ever seen.

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June 18, 2006

COMIC BOOK BRAIN
Corben's BORDERLAND & other General Notes

Vertigo published House on the Borderland in 2000. This is one of those instances when "graphic novel" actually comes close to being an accurate descriptive. Too often a "graphic novel" is at best a novelette, lacking the length (or depth, really) to be compared to even an actual novel. 'Graphic Novel' is more a marketing term, and certainly a positive one with good-intentions. For a medium that requires a great deal of labor to produce something (good or bad) that will have any length, "graphic novel" hardly fits but may be the best alternative at present. The comic book industry seeks to become a mainstay of the bookstore world, and this term has established a lot of currency.

If "graphic novels" successfully outlive their status as a trend but continue to grow (as they have over the years since Will Eisner used it originally in 1978 for A Contract with God – you can read about Eisner, the term and more at Time Magazines website here) it is probable that many more terms will come into common use to differentiate the many kinds of "long" comic books that there are: fiction, non-fiction, journalism, memoirs, poetry and of course the superhero field, which is its own world and easily recognizable to fan and most non-fan alike. This has to happen in both the vernacular of the chain bookstores and among the book reviewers who publish in newspapers (and, I guess, online and in blogs). I can see that "Graphic Novel" helps to get comics foot in the door; but more vocabulary is going to have to develop. Calling a memoir a "graphic novel" does not have much accuracy, and certainly infers the wrong thing to readers who are not familiar with the breadth of quality material that has been produced in this medium. Does "graphic memoir" work as a term? I don't know. Is the medium doomed to be a literary sub-genre (like poetry, or drama, et al, not that this would be that bad considering from where comics have come from) I don't know. But it doesn't make a lot of long-term sense for La Perdida to be next to Maximum X-Men on a shelf - - unless developing a broader following for the medium is the goal, versus the individual voices that work in the medium.

[Below] Richard Corben Artwork from BORDERLAND

HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND
Corben hardly needs introduction to comic book fans. He has been one of the major independent talents of the industry for at least three or four decades now. His style is immediately recognizable once you have seen it, and it is a style that is different from whatever current trend you compare it too, whether at this present time or 20 years ago. Corben's emphasis on "rounding" his figures with inky dark shadowing, and his meticulous stippling are very individual. He caricatures heads and figures, and in general employs distortion and dramatic theatrical effects to tell a story. In this instance of the 1908 story by William Hope Hodgson, the adaptation by Corben and Simon Revelstroke operates on multiple levels of time progression, as various characters from different eras interact with a particular Irish geographic location. The story is similar to the later tales by H. P. Lovecraft in which ugly beings from another dimensional plane seek to enter the physical one of earth, to wreak havoc and make suffering in general. This horror story is skillfully scripted and handles the chore of differing, overlapping time periods clearly. Corben sticks in little gags and jokes here and there in the details of his panels, as if telling the reader "it's all a bit of fun, isn't it?" even though the story itself is concerned mostly with loss, horror, and the siege-like atmosphere of a house encamped by something worse than an army of zombies. I found it touching how Corben resurrected the dead Mary in the vision on page 56, and it is these very human touches that distinguishes Corben's art to me.

DC Comics has a page about the book here.

Comic Book Resources has an interview with Matt Wagner which spawned a talk on cooking (Wagner's a chef). The interview has an accompanying comic pages which tell how to make chicken Parmigiana. Another example of how flexible the comic medium is (and perhaps, how under used that flexibility is).

Batman Face to Face

Caryn Tate at Silver Bullet Comics says DC is finally handling the Batman character 'correctly' in the "Face the Face" 8-part series running in Detective Comics & Batman Comics (and collected for trade paperback by DC here). I have a number of complaints about the series. The incongruity of separate artist teams is jarring (the series runs back-to-back between the two main Batman books) and there are plot points that do not make sense for me. The tale is essentially another retelling of Harvey Dent's conflicted bi-polar personality (or his dual personality: through severe dissociation., i.e., one personality does not remember what the other personality has done.) Dent keeps up a pretense of reformation while the scarred side foments a return to criminal activity. There is some nice artwork, for example; Dent's trashed out apartment; and other instances of a well rendered Gotham City - - this stood out to me and helped a great deal toward creating a "real" physical world in which these characters scamper about. I wish the tale had given more prominence to those parts. The inking finishes on the Leonard Kirk artwork by Andy Clarke and Wayne Faucher is intricate and at times beautiful, shadowy stuff. A list of my complaints vis-a-vis this story is here.

THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE
This book on "hypergraphia" could apply to comic books as well as writing in general. In it, the author Alice Flaherty discusses the compulsion to create and about writing specifically, particularly as per mental illness. Famous personages as Poe, Ezra Pound, Kafka, Plath, Stephen King and many, many others are brought up in reference to an ailment suffered by the author herself. The book is partially a memoir from her stay in a mental institution, but is also from the point of view of a trained neurologist, which she is. The creative mind and the creative process is dissected, and temporal lobe epilepsy and manic depression (which are shown to be quite similar) are covered, along with trips through a catalog of other ailments, all part and parcel of a small but famous coterie of writers. The not-famous but institutionalized are discussed also, and how alike they can be with many "literary giants". I have not finished this book yet and may have more later. Nonetheless, quite fascinating. An interview with Flaherty concerning the book is at identitytheory.com.

June 12, 2006

COMIC BOOK BRAIN
JACK JACKSON DIES

Jack Jackson, the writer/artist who produced a number of historical comics (I am not sure how many altogether) and is usually credited with being the "first" underground cartoonist, died June 8, 2006. The newspaper Austin American-Statesman published an obit on June 10th which suggests his death may have been a suicide. (Screenshot of the page here.) I have a page on Jackson's Comanche Moon and Los Tejanos, two historical comic works at Art and Artifice. Both volumes hold up as history (Jackson nicely documents his work with appendix), though infused with Jackson's cartoon humor, and both works hold up as entertainment, though the text becomes quite dense in places and requires some dedication. I think Jackson's resolve to create legitimate historical work was achieved, and through a medium often (and justifiably) regarded as too prurient for 'serious' efforts. Not many comic book artists have aimed toward such heights.

Review: I happened to see the X-MEN III ("X-Men United") motion picture. It's a silly film but for the first quarter or so it holds together quite well as a suspense and action tale. After that there are many, many fine action tableaus but the transitions between these big scenes and the manner in which characters are introduced (and there are a lot of news faces being put onscreen) was clumsy and had little human feeling. Tremendous special effects, many peppy and funny one-liners, but just not much story once the plot mechanism is set up at the beginning. The costumes and superpowers are well done but eclipse characterization. To met, you can't have a good superhero movie without all three.

COMIC BOOK BRAIN
KRAZY KAT & The Eternal Middle of the Comics

The Immediate Experience is a collection of essays by Robert Warshaw, who died at the age of 37 in 1955. He is probably best known for his film analysis (particularly gangster movies) but he also took up comics on a few occasions. This 2002 collection from Harvard University Press contains Warshaw's writings about George Herriman's Krazy Kat and the EC horror Comics. The quotes below are from his essay "Woofed with Dreams":

"Where no art is important, "Krazy Kat" is as real and important a work of art as any other – it is only supposed to divert its reader for two minutes at a time. (While the intellectual has to 'discover' Krazy Kat," the comic-strip audience just read it.)"

"'Krazy Kat' is perhaps the best that the comic strip has produced. But it would be a mistake to think of it a 'higher' development of the comic strip. 'Higher' development brings in the whole apparatus of respectable controls and produces 'Joe Palooka' helping to sell the country on conscription, or the hygienic, progressive-school fantasy of 'Barnaby.' 'Higher development makes 'Krazy Kat' impossible. 'Krazy Kat' is 'pointless' and 'silly,' it comes from the peripheral world where the aims and pretensions of society are not regarded.'"

"Something should be said also about the comic strip's dimension of time. 'Krazy Kat' started before I was born, and it ended in 1944 only because Herriman died and the King Features Syndicate decided there was no one who could continue the work. This was accidental; the usual practice is to appoint a successor to the dead artist – there is no internal reason Orphan Annie, for instance, should not continue to face up to her troubles for ten million years. Thus the comic strip has no beginning and no end, only an eternal middle."

The Coconino County site has Krazy Kat pages here.

June 7, 2006

COMIC ATOMIC REVIEW
DARWYN COOKE SELINA'S BIG SCORE

Darwin Cooke

Selina's Big Score by Darwyn Cooke is a comic-noir self-contained story in which Selina/Catwoman goes broke on a faulty heist in Morocco, and heads back to Gotham in order to put together a more profitable venture stealing $24 million from the Falcone mob family. The cast includes P.I. Slam Bradley and James Stark, an aging criminal accomplice from Selina's past who has basically put himself out to pasture in Miami Beach. There are a half-dozen equally interesting noir-type characters populating this tale which is fashioned along the lines of any number of heist movies from Hollywood, though Cooke has distinguished the main characters with inner emotional lifes which is half of the tale in itself. Cooke's writing is to the point and the story is fleshed out well. I wish the regular stories running in DC's monthly books had this much attention to rounding out a story. Cooke's artwork is amazingly economical and the fat, curving ink brush strokes he uses are quite beautiful. He also has staged scenes from the story well, giving us Miami Beach, Las Vegas and Morocco in effective vignette's around the main action which is set in Gotham City and at the Canadian border. The noir formula of the 40s and 50s Hollywood movies made sure a good portion of the cast die before the end, and Cooke's story and art both reflect that 1950s sensibility. Two random pages from the 96 page book below:

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There is an interview with Darywn Cooke at the Silverbullet site here.

Critical Eye discusses Cooke's animation work via interview here.

June 2, 2006

GENERAL NOTES

An Axe Fell is a parable about the trauma and expectations of the "Corporate Rat Race" in which Brian Musikoff recounts a disastrous layoff. I've had this beautifully produced 4-color mini-comic for well over a year but I wanted to mention it in case any reader has not already seen this. You can read the "eComic" version at Musikoff's Manual Comics web site.

Garry Alanguilan (who has the extensive Philippine Comic Art Museum here) has updated his pro web site with a new "splash" page for his art efforts at Komikero Comiks.

Batman : Pull My Finger! I dare ya!

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