Hell Girl
Written and Illustrated by Miyuki Eto
Created by The Jigoku Shoujo Project
Del Rey Manga; $10.95

I gotta admit: I didn’t get all the way through Hell Girl. I don’t know if that means this isn’t a “real” review or whatever, but that’s for someone else to decide. I gave it a shot, read the first two chapters, then skimmed through to the end.

Hell Girl, Volume 1 is divided into five “chapters,” but they’re really more independent short stories than connected parts of a greater whole. The first one is about a girl named Mari who gets caught shoplifting and is blackmailed by one of the mean, popular girls from school. The blackmail gets out of control and Mari can’t handle it any more. When she hears about a website called Hell Correspondence where you can enter an enemies name and they’ll be immediately taken to Hell, she decides that’s her way out. The only catch is that you have to also give Hell your soul when you die, but like these stories always go, Mari doesn’t care about that in the face of relieving her immediate trouble.

There are lots of problems with this story. First, it’s never really clear whether or not Mari actually stole what she was accused of stealing. From the rest of the story, she doesn’t act like a thief and she certainly never admits to having done it. Apparently, her actual guilt or innocence is supposed to be secondary to her concern over the very accusation of having shoplifted. So, when the girls from school threaten to tell on her if she doesn’t do all their homework and buy them things, she caves easily.

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Midnight Sun
Written and Illustrated by Ben Towle
SLG Publishing
$14.95

Midnight Sun is two parts drama; one part adventure story. Ostensibly, it’s about the real-life disappearance of the airship Italia shortly after its successful arrival at the North Pole, but it goes deeper than that. Ben Towle has fictionalized most of the crew, condensed events, and freely speculated to fill in holes, but the gist of the incident is intact. In May 1928, the Italia sent a message home saying that it had reached its destination; then went abruptly silent. A massive, multi-national rescue operation ensued and eventually ended almost two months later. I’ll leave it for you to discover how successful it was.

Most survival dramas focus on the attempts of the survivors to stay alive. And most survival dramas are boring as hell. Ice, wind, freezing, frostbite, hunger, do we eat the dead or don’t we? Seen it all a billion times. Towle does something different though.

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Graphic Classics, Volume 14: Gothic Classics

Written by Jane Austen, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Rod Lott, Ann Radcliffe, Antonella Caputo, Edgar Allen Poe, Tom Pomplun, Trina Robbins, and Myla Jo Closser.

Illustrated by Molly Kiely, Lisa K. Weber, Carlo Vergara, Leong Wan Kok, Anne Timmons, Shary Flenniken, and Trina Robbins.

Eureka Productions; $11.95

I’m sort of a big fan of Gothic Romance. I say “sort of” because I discovered the genre by backing into it from Horror. After loving books like Frankenstein and Dracula, I wanted to learn more about the novels that inspired them, so I checked out The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Otranto is awesome with its giant helmets, decrepit castles, graveyard meetings, spooky forests, and hall-wandering ghosts. It’s also nice and short, so it really got me hungry for more like it. Unfortunately, Udolpho nearly turned me off the entire genre for good. It’s about half-mystery/horror; half-travelogue. For every page with a creepy room, secret passage, or black-veiled painting, there are endless descriptions of mountains and forests and views from carriages and people sitting in rooms waiting for things to happen. Also, the mystery/horror angle is considerably less satisfying than your average episode of Scooby Doo.

But still, I love the idea of gothic romances. The genre’s defining elements — innocent, young girls in peril; dark, foreign counts with evil intentions; dashing heroes with mysterious pasts; old castles and woodland graveyards — are all awesome, thrilling things that make any story better.

Gothic Classics is a great primer on the genre. I really wish that it included The Castle of Otranto, but c’est la vie. It starts with two of my favorite Graphic Classics regulars — Rod Lott and Lisa K. Weber — adapting J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Weber’s whimsical, gothy illustrations are a natural for this volume and Carmilla as adapted here is a great story. It’s the one with the most supernatural element to it and is exactly what I hope for when I think of gothic romance.

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Hasbro’s Goldner talks G.I. Joe

MTV.com has an interview up with Hasbro’s COO Brian Goldner on the G.I. Joe movie:

“We all really loved what G.I. Joe was about in the ’80s; we loved that story arc and the concept of Joe vs. Cobra,” said Goldner, explaining that the people who created those characters will return, even if some of their creations won’t. Comics writer Larry Hama, Goldner confirmed, “is onboard, and he’s working with us on the script.

“And you may see him in the movie,” he added.

Noting that the flick, directed by “Mummy” mastermind Stephen Sommers, will largely sidestep the TV show and be more “about the comic books,” Goldner revealed some of the major characters and plotlines the film will explore. “We all know of the Arashikage [ninja clan], and we all know of Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, but we need to build that story,” he explained. “We all know the story of Duke, and the story of the Baroness. … We know the story of Destro, but do we really? We need to go back and tell the origin story of how you get a Scottish arms dealer, who comes forward in history — how does that happen?”

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Graphic Classics: Free Comic Book Day
(Eureka Publishing)

Written by Edgar Allan Poe, Rod Lott, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alex Burrows, Mary Shelley, Antonella Caputo, Lord Dunsay, and Milton Knight.

Illustrated by Gerry Alanguilan, Mark Dancey, Simon Gane, Anne Timmons, and Milton Knight

This Free Comic Book Day is shaping up to be pretty cool. First there’s news of an Atomic Robo offering, and then I got word that Graphic Classics is also getting into the fun. Better than that, I got a preview of the Graphic Classics FCBD issue and it’s worth getting excited about.

Unlike most Graphic Classics volumes, the 64-page FCBD issue doesn’t focus on a single author or even a single genre. Instead it presents a cross-section of the kind of stuff Graphic Classics puts out, which is what a FCBD offering should do. There’s a horror story by Poe, a one-page fable by Ambrose Bierce, a supernatural tale by Arthur Conan Doyle, a gothic love story by Mary Shelley, and a whimsical tale of world destruction by Lord Dunsay.

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Chip Kidd’s got an… interesting way to promote his new book The Learners.

Where the Wild Things Are

Catwoman writer Will Pfeifer’s day job is the movie critic for The Rockford Register Star. He’s got some concerns about the live-action version of Maurice Sendak’s classic Where the Wild Things Are. That picture there makes me feel really good about the movie, so hopefully the rumors causing Pfeifer to worry are untrue.

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening

I’ve enjoyed all of Shyamalan’s stuff more than the average person, but there’s a part of me that’s still wanting to recapture the experiences of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. I’d love for this to be it.

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Leslie Nielsen makes everything better.

Superhero Movie. The question is: did they clear the name “superhero” with Marvel and DC?

Indy’s hat and jacket

IndianaJones.com has a new featurette about Indy’s iconic look and trying to recreate it for the new movie.

Indy’s trailer

Apparently, the teaser trailer for Indy and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be attached to The Spiderwick Chronicles when it hits theaters on Thursday. You can catch it earlier than that though on Thursday’s Good Morning America, sometime between 8-9 am. After that, it’ll be available on IndianaJones.com and Yahoo! Movies.

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Less Than Heroes
Written and Illustrated by David Yurkovich
Top Shelf
$14.95

In an essay in the back of Less Than Heroes, David Yurkovich claims that his book was inspired by the simpler, more fun- and adventure-filled comics of yesteryear. Comics that were made before Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen left their permanent influence on everything that came after. Which is kinda ironic since it was Watchmen that I kept replaying in my mind as I read this book.

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Peter Segal on Shazam! movie

The Shazam! director doesn’t have a script yet, but he talks about the characters and the Rock as well as the general tone he’s going for:

“…It’s going to have a very serious tone with moments of humor and I think it’ll be somewhere in between Spider-Man and Fantastic Four.”

If ever there was a place for a light-hearted superhero movie, you’d think it would be Shazam!. Nervous.

Sequels and spinoffs

IESB reports that a Venom movie may becoming to a theater near you. And MTV.com says talks of a sequel to the Simpsons film is on hold until the writer’s strike is settled:

Talks on the sequel should begin whenever everyone on both sides of the picket line is satisfied, but since it is a cartoon and all the “Simpsons” talents will still be working on that pesky little TV show, we’re talking several years before a green light gives us an actual movie to watch.

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Andromeda Stories, Volume 1
Written by Ryu Mitsuse and Keiko Takemiya; Illustrated by Keiko Takemiya
Vertical
$11.95

When I was a kid, I would’ve loved to get my hands on a book called Andromeda Stories. Just knowing that there was a galaxy full of solar systems and planets next to ours nearly killed me with the story possibilities. What kind of people lived there? What fantastic worlds existed?

Unfortunately, I missed the boat or the boat missed me; the English translation of Andromeda Stories comes about fifteen years late and I’m not able to appreciate it as much as I might have as a kid.

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–MTV had a couple of Watchmen-related items yesterday; first, Carla Gugino talks about playing the Silk Spectre:

“It was really one of the craziest, most fun roles I’ve ever gotten to play,” marveled the “Sin City” star, cast as the burlesque dancer who proves to be the most PR-savvy of the complex superheroes. “I start at 25 years old in the 1940s, and I age to 67 years old with full prosthetics in the 1980s. [Sally] is a larger-than-life character. She’s a costumed crime fighter, but her idea of a costume is very Bettie Page-meets-[Alberto] Vargas.”

And Watchmen director Zack Snyder wrote a guest column for the site … about Cheese:

At the moment, I’m in the final weeks of shooting “Watchmen,” in Vancouver, British Columbia. Since “Watchmen” is a dissection of the superhero genre and forces it to take a long, hard look into the pop-culture mirror, it only makes sense that it’s where my head is at these days. With that in mind, I started thinking about music and whether there were any parallels that could be drawn. Enter Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine. Although tonally they are vastly different in many ways, the film and the Cheese-y music share an in-your-face look at the world, calling bullsh– on pop culture in an unapologetic way.

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Fables cover artist James Jean has pictures up from XOXO, the postcard art book he’s doing through Chronicle.

According to James:

“There is some nice foil stamping on the cover and on the little tab that will keep the cover in place, and all the images will be printed stochastically, just like in Process Recess vol. 2. As you can see, there will be some new and never-before- published images in the book, in addition to some old favorites.”

XOXO should be in stores either late summer or fall of 2008.

Astronaut Dad, Volume 1
Written by David Hopkins; Illustrated by Brent Schoonover
Silent Devil
$5.95

I wanna talk about Horrorwood for a second before I get into Astronaut Dad, if that’s okay. Brandon Terrell’s script for Horrorwood was an engaging homage to the horror movies of the thirties and forties, but another artist might have been tempted to focus on its darker elements and create a straightforward horror story out of it. What made Horrorwood really special was Brent Schoonover’s simple, expressive illustrations. Letting the script communicate the mystery of those old films, Schoonover’s cartoon-like drawings ran against expectations and captured their fun.

So, I was pretty excited to see what Schoonover was up to next. When I heard it was a book called Astronaut Dad, I immediately thought of shows like Lost in Space and My Favorite Martian. Something about family, but with a space-adventure hook. But, in what’s becoming a recurring theme in this column lately, I was surprised to read a book that was pleasantly different from my expectations for it.

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Continuing our 2008-oriented top ten lists, here are the top ten “middle-brow” comics we’re looking forward to this year. I can’t decide if I love or hate the term “middle-brow,” but it’s the closest thing I can think of to describe indie adventure comics right now.

1. RASL (Cartoon Books): Jeff Smith has already set the bar pretty high for himself with his epic Bone and the delightful Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil. But after seeing the preview of RASL from San Diego , I don’t think we have anything to worry about. My only dilemma now is deciding if I’m buying the regular-sized comic or waiting for the oversized collections. — JK Parkin

2. Tiempos Finales 2 (Sam Hiti): The first volume of Tiempos Finales was an amazing, luxurious bit of storytelling. It also left some unanswered questions that I’ve been dying to learn the answers to. Sam Hiti’s announcement that he was continuing the story this year was the best piece of news I heard in 2007. — Michael May

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Vampire Loves
Written and Illustrated by Joann Sfar
First Second
$16.95

Since I liked The Professor’s Daughter so much, I was in the mood for some more Sfar. Conceptually, Vampire Loves comes from the same place as The Professor’s Daughter, since they’re both more or less romance books featuring classic monsters. I say “more or less” though because The Professor’s Daughter is a traditional romance with a star-crossed couple we’d like to see get together, but Vampire Loves takes more of a Jeffrey Brown approach.

This is to say that it’s romantic in its own way, but that way is kind of sad and pitiful. It’s also more relatable since most people I know have had way more experience with sad and pathetic love lives than they have with successful, happily-ever-after ones. And that’s the essential difference between The Professor’s Daughter and Vampire Loves. The Professor’s Daughter puts our lovers through the ringer, but we never doubt they’ll end up together. Ferdinand, the nosferatu protagonist of Vampire Loves, doesn’t inspire that kind of confidence. In that way, he and his stories are much more real.

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The Professor’s Daughter
Written by Joann Sfar; Illustrated by Emmanuel Guibert
First Second
$16.95

Knowing that it’s about the romance between a mummy and the daughter of the man who discovered him, I expected The Professor’s Daughter to be whimsical. And it is.

What I wasn’t prepared for was for it to go beyond whimsy and into ridiculousness. That’s not a bad thing, but it caught me off guard when I thought I was reading one kind of book and it turned out I was reading another.

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Paul Jenkins’ Sidekick
Written by Paul Jenkins; Illustrated by Chris Moreno
Image
$16.99

I don’t usually like superhero parody a whole lot. It’s an overdone subgenre and most of the parodies I’ve read just repeat the same tired jokes endlessly. I’d list a couple of examples for you, but honestly it makes my head hurt to think about. I actually am pretty fond of superhero comics and dwelling on their worst qualities isn’t something I enjoy. If I find a particular aspect of superhero comics unappealing or ridiculous, I’ll just quit reading comics that have that trait. I certainly don’t want to read a parody comic that highlights it and makes it the center of focus.

Sidekick isn’t that kind of parody. I actually had to think about the word “parody” for a bit to decide if it even applies to Sidekick, but I think it does. Certainly there are some fun, silly superhero comics that get inappropriately labeled as parody, but they’re more celebrating the genre than making fun of it. It’s the difference between laughing with someone and laughing at him. Let me repeat that it’s certainly valid to laugh at superhero comics; I’d just prefer that comics that do that be, you know, actually funny. And that’s what separates Sidekick from the usual parody.

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MW
Written and Illustrated by Osamu Tezuka
Vertical
$24.95

There’s a line in Citizen Kane that’s haunted me ever since I heard it. The reporter researching Kane’s life observes to Kane’s general manager that Kane made an awful lot of money. The manager’s response is what gets me. “It’s no trick to make a lot of money,” he says, “If what you want to do is make a lot of money.”

That was the first time I’d ever come up against the idea that you really can do whatever you want as long as you’re willing to sacrifice everything else to get it. And it’s the American Dream, really. If you just work hard enough and sacrifice enough, you can achieve anything, right? Hold on to that thought for a second, ‘cause I’m coming back to it.

MW is the story of a guy with a single-minded goal. He’s willing to do whatever it takes to achieve it. The trouble is that his goal is the death of a lot of innocent people. Nearly seven billion of them, actually.

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Hawaiian Dick Volume 1: Byrd Of Paradise
Written by B. Clay Moore; Illustrated by Steven Griffin
Image
$14.95

I’d forgotten how much I liked Hawaiian Dick. Because both the inaugural mini-series and its follow up The Last Resort had problems coming out on time, it’s been tough to keep enthusiastic about Danny Byrd mysteries. In fact, after The Last Resort, I promised myself that I’d wait for the trades on any future installments of the series.

But my fondness for the concept must be deep-rooted because my resolve to wait for trades was severely tested by the arrival of the new Hawaiian Dick ongoing. And though I’m still skittish about buying it in individual issues, the new series got me thinking about revisiting the original. And doing that has me even more tempted to start picking up the singles again.

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