Inubaka: Crazy for Dogs Vol 14
Story and art by Yukiya Sakuragi
Published by Viz Media
Review by Julie Opipari

Inubaka: Crazy for Dogs is another series that always manages to wrestle some very real emotions from me. It’s due strictly to the subject matter, and people who know me personally know how much I love animals, especially dogs. A family isn’t complete without a slobbering, panting mascot to greet you every time you walk through the front door. The thought of not hearing a collar jingle is too awful to contemplate, and even when Buu is an obnoxious Greenie demanding brat, I still count my blessings he’s my dog.

 Suguri, the heroine of Inubaka, is absolutely nuts about dogs. She’s moved from the country to Tokyo, where she works at Woofles, a pet shop owned by Teppei. The series is comprised of short story arcs, centering around the various customers of the store. Suguri is a caring and friendly young woman, and she probably gets a little too involved in the lives of Woofles’ clients. Part of the enjoyment from the series comes from Suguri’s character development. She makes many mistakes because she thinks with her heart instead of her head, but she learns some valuable life lessons from her missteps.

This volume is a bit of a hot button for me. Teppei has a black lab, and it’s his dream to raise puppies to sell in his shop. Suguri has a mixed breed dog, Lupin. She and her family never bothered to get him fixed, and it’s Suguri’s dream to see Lupin’s puppies. Teppei is adamantly opposed to the idea; how will she find loving homes for a bunch of mutts? The two argue over the issue, and despite Suguri acknowledging that Teppei has a good point, she still wants Lupin’s puppies.

 Forgive me for a moment, as I ascend to my soap box. Both Teppei and Suguri need to reassess what they want for their dogs. There are tens of thousands of dogs and cats that are destroyed every year because nobody wants them and because nobody was responsible enough to spay or neuter their pets. I know. I have a dog that nobody wanted. Even being a purebred wasn’t enough to keep Buu in the good graces of his previous owners. He’s a good dog. He knows his basic commands, and he walks like a perfect gentleman on a leash. He knew how to do all of these before I rescued him. He was 50 pounds underweight, he had been abused, and he was very ill. He almost died before I could bring him home. This is a dog that somebody, somewhere in his past, cared enough about to teach him how to sit, stay, and heel. But not enough to provide a home for him for the rest of his life.

 Now, before you start calling me a psycho tree-hugger, let me remind you that a comic book unleashed this torrent of feelings. Inubaka has a very simple premise. It’s about a girl who works at a pet shop. It’s about her learning to become independent, while doing something that she loves. It’s about a cast of odd and wonderful characters, and it’s about that special connection you can have with a dog. Each of the fourteen volumes to date have managed to make me feel something; sadness, happiness, and now even a flash of disappointment. This is another series that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Sure, every now and again there’s that oddly placed bit of fan-service, but the art is engaging and the content is compelling. It’s easy to relate to the characters, even the few I don’t care for, and they all have one thing in common. They all love their dogs, and they all think they are doing what’s best for them. Even if the readers may sometimes disagree.

When Julie Opipari isn’t mucking around the barn, she can be found trying to make a dent in the massive pile of manga that keeps following her home from the bookstore.  Not wiling to admit she has a problem, she blissfully continues to anticipate the latest releases despite the cries of agony from her credit card.  She cheerfully blames her addiction on the stresses of college and post traumatic work disorder, and is grateful that her family grumbles only occasionally about the amount of time she spends buried in her books. In addition to reading Your Manga Minute every Wednesday, you can read more of Julie’s work on her blog, Manga Maniac Cafe.

Hey guys, do me a favor and imagine there’s a poorly-drawn, colored-pencil cartoon containing a lame gag about a comic book that’s shipping this week here, okay? Thanks; I ran out of time to draw one myself this week.

But I still had plenty of time to ponder this week’s shipping list!

Here are some things that  caught my eye…

1 For $1: Conan / 1 For $1: The Goon: This week’s “Only $1?!” reprints from Dark Horse consist of Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord’s 2004 Conan #1 and Eric Powell’s 2003 The Goon #1. Doing some quick math here, it looks like that adds up to…let’s see…yes, that adds up to two really good comics for just two bucks.

Batman: The Bat and the Beast: Like just about everything else that gets published in the pages of Batman Confidential, this swell little Peter Milligan-penned story about Batman fighting the Russian mob seemed to have gone mostly overlooked. Well, now it’s a $13, 130-page trade paperback, without the eyeball aversion-creating Batman Confidential logo stamped upon it. The art comes courtesy of Andy Clarke, but you can find it lurking under a Jock-drawn cover.

Batman: The Brave and The Bold #20: This month’s unlikely team-up? Batman and Big Barda, as written by Bob Greenberger and drawn by Robert Pope and Scott McRae. Mr. Miracle and the Female Furies are also involved.
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If you like what you’ve read so far (c’mon, how can you not?) totally check out more super cute comics at:www.sosuperduper.com!

Got Halloween plans? Well, you do now — October 31 is the date of the series premiere for AMC’s Frank Darabont-adapted The Walking Dead, based on Robert Kirkman’s Image Comics series of the same name, starring Andrew Lincoln as lead zombie apocalypse survivor Rick Grimes. It’ll cap off 14 days of the channel’s annual “Fearfest” programming.

AMC has also released the nearly five-minute trailer that has thus far only been seen at Comic-Con International: San Diego and in shaky videos shot from the crowd. It’s after the jump, and, wow.

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Walker Bean’s grandfather is an admiral in the navy, and his father is a captain in the navy, so it’s probably safe to assume there’s some sea water in the young, bespectacled boy’s blood, but his head and heart are full of inventions, not adventures.

Not that he’s adverse to a good bed-time story, of course, like the legend of the all-knowing, cursed Atlantean skulls jealously guarded by two titanic sea witches, that his grandfather tells him of one night.

The story becomes real for the Bean clan when the grandfather encounters such a skull at sea and comes down with a potentially fatal illness—in order to free himself of the curse, the skull must be returned to its rightful owner, something Walker is tasked with doing, despite the wishes of his own father, who would rather exploit it.

That’s the basic plot of The Unsinkable Walker Bean (First Second), cartoonist Aaron Renier’s new all-ages adventure story, primed to be the first in a very welcome series.

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High Soft Lisp
Written & Illustrated by Gilbert Hernandez
Published by Fantagraphics

Perhaps Gilbert Hernandez’s most graphic work since Birdland, High Soft Lisp tells dual narratives of longtime Hernandez protagonist Rosabla “Fritz” Martinez and her ex-husband, washed-up motivational speaker Mark Herrera.  Essentially paralleling their incredible vanity with their own descent into self-deluded excess, the book stands out for its depiction of extreme sexual proclivities of each lead character.

Fritz, as longtime Hernandez readers know, threads low self-esteem and extreme sexual adventures together with incredible rapidity, but High Soft Lisp stands out for the sheer bleakness of the narrative.  Wallowing in sexual degradation and alcoholic abuse, Fritz wanders through her life, disconnected from the family that gave flexibility to her life in the pages of Luba.  Mark Herrera, unwilling to climb out of the orbit surrounding his ex-wives, continues his own routine of casting judgments and proclamations without any tempering self-assessments.  This isn’t to say that the book is without its joys – Hernandez maintains a careful, but certainly very dark, thread of humor throughout the entire book, portraying his cast with a knowing irony.

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Many parents would consider the discovery that their son is a mental prodigy to be a blessing. But when young Robert Bruce Banner showed he was able to comprehend ideas and concepts years ahead of his age, his father Brian labeled him a freak and a monster. After years of living with the abusive and alcoholic Brian, Bruce’s mother Rebecca decided she and her son needed to escape. But Brian discovered the plan and killed Rebecca in front of their child, who was eight-years-old at the time. Traumatized, Bruce became an emotionally closed-off child, burying most of his anger and desires, believing that indulging in these things could lead him to be like his own father. As he grew older, Bruce showed signs of Dissociative Identity Disorder (what used to be called “multiple personality”), occasionally acting like a different person when people pushed him towards anger or fear, only to lose all memory of the incident moments later.

As an adult, Bruce proved to be one of the most intelligent scientists on Earth and was recruited by the military to design a new nuclear bomb, one which would have a more focused blast radius through the use of gamma radiation. Minutes before detonation, Bruce spotted a teenager named Rick Jones on the testing grounds, having gone there on a dare, unaware of a nearby bomb. Bruce told his assistant to delay the detonation and went off to take the boy to safety. But Banner’s assistant was actually a spy and did not stop the countdown. Just as Bruce ensured young Rick’s safety, the G-bomb exploded and Banner was caught in the radioactive blast.

But instead of dying, Bruce’s cells and brain mutated. Now, unlike other people with DID, he would physically change whenever an alternate persona emerged. The first of these was a brutish, self-serving creature with gray skin, incredible strength, and serious resiliency to injury. The second was a green-skinned, raging child who was even more powerful and desperately wanted the rest of the world to leave him alone. Each of these powerful alternates have answered to the same nickname: Hulk.

The Hulk was not, and is not, a superhero. He has often fought evil people and he is certainly super-powered. But he is not on a quest for vengeance nor is he dedicated to the cause of justice. He doesn’t go on patrol or have a signal-device of some kind that informs him of when people need aid. And half the time he’s wound up fighting heroes and causing destruction, either due to a misunderstanding or because he simply lost control. So naturally, he doesn’t wear a superhero costume. But he has had some distinctive looks over the years. So join me (and a friend) as we look over his many outfits. Due to the different personalities of the Hulk over the years, we won’t be staying strictly with chronological order.

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Over at ComicBookMovie.com, there are about a dozen shots of the set of Captain America: The First Avenger around the time of the VE-Day announcement. The costumes are very much of the 1940′s style, including some British military and just all-around exquisite. While Cap himself, Chris Evans, wasn’t pictured, director Joe Johnson was spotted on set.

But the fun doesn’t end there.

There are more set pics of the USO show and military base over here. Pretty neat stuff.

I don’t know about you, readers, but the more I see and know about this movie, the more excited I get. Between this and Thor, it’s going to be a marvelous Summer next year.

Bluewater Productions has made a name for themselves reently for their oft-controversial unauthorized celebrity biographies, and now they’re teaming up with someone familiar to comic book and genre entertainment fans: Walter Koenig, Chekov from the original Star Trek series.

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After coping with six rainouts and the headaches of rescheduling during the 2009 season, DC Bullet co-captains Sal Cipriano and Adam Schlagman kept two of the team’s precious field permits in reserve to cover any precipitation-based complications.  So of course, only one game – a non-New York Media Softball League game, which didn’t need to be made up anyway – was lost, and Sal and Adam found themselves racing to find an opponent to match up against the Bullets last Thursday.

Fortunately, Bloomberg agreed to step up to the plate, giving the Bullets one last tune-up before the NYMSL playoffs begin on Sept. 12.  In the early going, the game remained tight, but then the comic book makers started to pull away, building confidence for the playoffs.

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Halfway through their first arc together as the co-writers of Booster Gold and having completed several Gold Exchange interviews, Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis seem, based on my comments thread alone, to be pretty divisive among the Booster faithful. Comichron.com sales numbers seem to suggest that sales haven’t been affected one way or another by the shift in creative team and tone, but readers seem to have a strong preference, one that may or may not be exacerbated by the presence on the market of Time Masters: Vanishing Point, featuring Booster Gold and done by the title’s previous creators.

I’m hoping to put together a cross-section of reader responses, so I’d love e-mails letting me know whether you think the new direction and creative team is better, worse or no change…and comments explaining your response. I’ll also be talking to some notable Booster fans and friends of the title when I compile my results.

The e-mail is russ@jamesvilleny.com, and feel free to give as much or as little feedback as you’d like.

Hearty congratulations go out to American Splendor and The Quitter artist Dean Haspiel, who picked up an award at the Creative Arts Emmys Saturday night, winning “Best Main Titles Design” for his work on the opening of HBO’s Bored to Death. Haspiel shares the honor with Tom Barham, Marci Ichimura and Anthony Santoro.

Bored to Death stars Jason Schwartzman as a fictionalized version of writer Jonathan Ames — who collaborated with Haspiel on Vertigo original graphic novel The Alcoholic. Zach Galifianakis’s character on the show is based on Haspiel, who worked again with Ames for a promotional Bored to Death comic, “Super Ray.”

Read our recent interview with Haspiel here, and check out the award-winning opening below:

Fine art meets…pop art? Can we call Brightest Day pop art?: Usually when I mention variant covers in any context here, it’s simply to belittle the practice, which I think is helping to destroy the American serial comics industry, and God knows I’m not always so kind to super-comic crossover stories. But I wanted to take a moment to point out this fine piece of art posted on DC’s The Source blog today. It’s of the 12 Brightest Day Returnees, White Lantern-ized and sitting in thrones, while some sort of story tease occurs behind their heads, where heaven would be if this was a piece of renaissance art. Click that link to see the whole thing. So I guess “The Entity” is Jesus/The Word/Logos, and maybe the Returnees are the apostle of his/its Second Coming…?

“The stories and art, take it from me, they’re terrific, and this is an opportunity for you to introuce a whole new generation to the magic of superheroes”: That’s Stan Lee reaching out directly to retailers about the new superheroes he’s been working on with his pals at Boom Studios. You can watch the video here.  And you can watch it even if you’re not a retailer of course; it’s worth it just to hear Lee pronounce the all-caps and exclamation point in the official Boom logo.

“It’s very seldom really that there is even an obstacle to spinach eating; presumably Popeye refrains from it as long as he does because he doesn’t like the taste any more than anyone else does, testimonials to the contrary”: Well I like spinach. Maybe not straight from the can. Or taken like a shot, with the whole can swallowed at once. But cooked and seasoned, or raw in a salad, sure! Wait, what was I linking to? Oh! R. Fiore talks Popeye—specifically, the cartoon Popeye—at The Comics Journal. It’s a great piece, and I’ll have a hard time not thinking of spinach as a “Performance Enhancing Vegetable” for some time to come now.

If Great Expectations had a cover like that when I read it in ninth grade, I probably would have been more eager to do my homework: On Fantagraphics’ Flog blog, Mike Baehr shares a few New Penguin Classics covers, by the likes of Richard Sala, Ted Stearn and Killofer.

Not to jump the gun or anything, but: “Why X-Men: First Class Will Probably Be The Worst [Comic Book Movie] Ever!”

“Five Comics Worth Reading”: Ben Morse of The Cool Kidz Table reccomends five super-comics to check out this August.

“The central question here is, ‘What, if anything, has Superman meant, and does the character still mean?’”: Over at Comics Comics, Dan Nadel discusses Tom DeHaven’s book Our Hero: Superman on Earth, “the best surprise of 2010′s ongoing orgy of comics history.”

The subject line kind of says it all, as the impeached former governor of Illinois and the Flash: Rebirth artist met Saturday at Wizard World Chicago Comic Con.

The photo’s from a post by Ethan Van Sciver over at the Bendis board, detailing the story of the meeting. Rod Blagojevich talked about his convention appearance this morning on Fox News Sunday.

If you’re not familiar with Anthony Clark and the Nedroid Picture Diary, I recommend you do so.

That being said, this past week on his twitter, Clark had posted some rather interesting spins on everyone’s favorite teenage reptiles and supporting cast. The Krang one above especially tickled me.

There’s a few more after the jump.

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Booster Gold #35, out last Wednesday, was an action-packed issue, and regular readers will know what that means…not a lot of plot to comment on, so this month’s Gold Exchange will be a little short. Still, there were some major forward-motion moments for the plot, and some interesting, possibly foreshadowing bits of dialogue for writer extraordinaire J.M. DeMatteis and columnist mediocre yours truly to comment on…so let’s get right to it, shall we?

The Gold Exchange: OK, so seriously: What’s the deal with all the tentacles? Not only is there a tentacle monster attacking Booster on the cover of this issue with no tentacle monster inside…but there’s a tentacle monster attacking Booster on the cover of December’s #38 (with a different cover artist, yet)!

J.M. DeMatteis: Haven’t you heard?  Tentacles are in!  Tentacles are hip and happening!  Tentacles are—

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Gene Gonzales never seems to sleep apparently. There is always something on his blog everyday, whether it’s a layout of something, a progress on a sketch, or a series of sketches he just wants to do for fun, like the Martian Manhunter above. For a few days he’s been in a cartooning mood and has done Etrigan, the Creeper, and the team of Cloak and Dagger in this sort of style. Talk about characters who don’t get enough love.

I love Gene’s linework, and it’s fun to see an artist like this take a stab at something different.

In case it wasn’t clear that Wizard’s shows aren’t really “comic book conventions” any more, here’s the latest evidence: impeached former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich has just been added to the lineup of this weekend’s Wizard World Chicago Comic Con.

Yes, the same Blagojevich who just three days ago was convicted in federal court on one count of lying to investigators — a mistrial was declared on the other 23 counts, and a retrial is expected. Wizard took the opportunity to playfully reference the decision, opening their press release with “Rod’s appeal” and later starting “The verdict is in!”

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There are few conventions in comics as cherished as the gimmick weapon. Trick umbrellas, boxing-glove arrows, loaded boomerangs; these are all accepted and beloved staples of comic book storytelling. The “gimmick weapon” is also a fixture in martial arts films, and the godfather of all kung-fu gimmick weapons is a little piece of nastiness called the flying guillotine, a weapon brought to the height of prominence by the wildly influential classic Master of the Flying Guillotine (A.K.A. The One-Armed Boxer Vs. The Flying Guillotine).

The flying guillotine is kind of like a cross between a killer yarmulke and a yo-yo. It’s a beanie shaped decapitation machine attached to a chain, with sawtooth-edges on the outside rim and a ring of blades around its interior. It can be thrown like a giant throwing star to slice through an opponent’s neck or, if you’ve really got skills, you can throw the beanie over someone’s head like a lethal ring toss. The blades inside then drop down to the victim’s neck, and all you’ve got to do is give a little tug on the chain, and your quarry’s head pops off like a champagne cork. It also folds up to convenient pocket-size. It’s such a handy, obtuse little gadget, one can picture the flying guillotine being hawked by the Manchu dynasty equivalent of Ron Popeil or Billy Mays. “Decapitation is simple and fun with the flying guillotine! Order now and get a free Shaolin super-shammy!”

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Reminder: Kim Deitch can still draw like no one’s business. Check out these pages of the still in-progress Amazing, Enlightening and Absolutely True Adventures of Katherine Whaley which Deitch released to his Facebook friends, and Fantragraphics shared with Flog Readers.

“Weathered and deeply closeted P.I. Frank Grissel…takes on what appears to be a simple missing person case but ultimately gets sucked into a sinister, twisted, and very queer underworld conspiracy”: The Windy City Times interviews Andersen Gabrych and Brad Rader about their graphic novel “with a gay twist,” Fogtown. Gabrych has some interesting observations about old-school noir movies.

“The only thing that I am not able to do at all is help with the drawing because I’m really hopeless at art”: Jane Wiedlin talks to Spinner about her new-ish comic with Bill Morrison, Lady Robotika.

“Let’s face it, the only reason ‘Catwoman,’ ‘Elektra’ and the other pictures failed is because they were lousy”: If you read about comic books on the Internet at all—and something tells me you do—then you’ve probably already heard many variations of the “How come superheroines don’t get as many big-budget Hollywood adapations as superdudes do” argument before. This one, by Chris Hicks and appearing in the Desert News, is somewhat interesting in that it’s written by a non-comics person for a non-comics audience.

Aack attack: Shaenon Garrity surveys the usage of Aacks in Cathy for The Comics Journal. There are pie charts.