Out of Picture, Volume 2
Written and Illustrated by Andrea Blasich, Nash Dunnigan, David Gordon, Michael Knapp, Benoit le Pennec, Sang Jun Lee, Kyle MacNaughton, Peter Nguyen,Vincent Nguyen, Jake Parker, Willie Real, Jason Sadler, Daisuke Tsutsumi, and Lizette Vega
Villard; $26.00

If I’m going to talk about Out of Picture, I gotta talk about illustrators first. I always note the writers and primary illustrator at the top of my reviews, but I think I might be doing some of the visual artists a disservice by referring to them primarily as illustrators.

An illustration, whether it’s a picture or a verbal thing, is an explanation. It’s intention is to make your story or your point or whatever clearer. Yeah, visual illustrations can be beautiful pieces of work on their own, but they really succeed or fail based on how well they clarify the writing. And that’s a lot different from what we’re asking comic book artists to do.

A comic book artist (or cartoonist, if she’s drawing her own story) has to do a lot more than take a story and make it prettier or – ideally – more understandable. In comics, the visual artist is supposed to be part of the storytelling process. There’s acting to be done, with facial expressions and body language. Yes, the best illustrators do all that too, but it isn’t as vital to – as inextricably a part of – what the book is. That’s why I hate all the arguments about whether the writer or the artist is more important to the final product. It has to be both of them or it isn’t comics. The visual artist has to be every bit as much a storyteller as the verbal artist or your comic sucks.

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The Underburbs #1
Written by TJ Dort and Joe Haley; Illustrated by Joe Haley
Rolling Boil Press; $3.00

Halloween is my second favorite holiday right after Christmas. If we got presents and the day off from work on Halloween, it’d probably nudge Christmas right out. I certainly anticipate it as much as Christmas every year. I start watching horror movies in September as my son is figuring out what he’s going to dress up like. Leading up to the big night, there are hayrides and apple orchards and Jack O’ Lanterns to make. Then on the last day of October my wife takes the boy out into the crisp night air to collect his loot while I stay home to pass out candy and watch Bela Lugosi movies. What could be nicer?

Because I have all these fond emotions wrapped up in Halloween, I’m a sucker for comics like I Luv Halloween, Cryptics, and The Super Scary Monster Show. I love books about cute, little monsters or kids dressed as monsters. Anything that captures that Halloween atmosphere for me. So, when I saw TJ Dort and Joe Haley’s table at Wizard World Chicago, The Underburbs immediately got my attention and I had to stop.

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Atomic Rocket Group 66 #1
Written by Robert Curley; Illustrated by Will Sliney
Atomic Diner; $4.95

I thought I’d become skeptical of self-published comics. I thought I’d become jaded enough that if I didn’t know the publisher or hadn’t read some darn good reviews, I was going to be very careful about my purchases. Guess not.

But c’mon. I see in Previews a comic with a robot, a spaceman, a black-masked pulp adventure hero, and a gal wearing what looks like a ‘60s spy catsuit… I’m gonna be curious. Then I read that it’s set in ’57 and features characters named Space Phantom, Night Ghost, Lunar Girl, and a misogynist who turns into a woman named Minute Maid? You’ve got to work pretty hard to screw up a concept like that.

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Strangeways: Murder Moon
Written by Matt Maxwell; Illustrated by Luis Guaragña, Gervasio, and Jok
Highway 62; $13.95

Much like its main character, Strangeways has had a long, hard road. Matt Maxwell may not have encountered any werewolves or crooked sheriffs – at least I hope not – in his quest to produce his Western werewolf comic, but I still don’t envy him the headaches.

Strangeways first saw publication as a mini-series for Speakeasy. Sort of. One issue had been released when Speakeasy shut its doors and Maxwell, like all the other Speakeasy creators, had to figure out something different to do with his book. I don’t have any inside information as to why, but for whatever reason Maxwell chose not to pursue publication as a mini-series with another company. Instead, he decided to finish the entire story and publish it himself as a graphic novel. It meant that fans of that first issue had to wait longer to finish the story, but the wait’s over now. Sort of.

I remember being struck at how cinematic that first issue was. I’m often confused when comics creators use the word “cinematic” to describe their work, but it fits Strangeways. Comics and movies are two different animals and one doesn’t feel like the other, regardless of the comparisons the press release writers love to make. Still, there are several things about Strangeways that bring the word to mind.

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Christopher Mills recently mentioned on his blog that he and Eduardo Barreto have a Sinbad comic they want to do. That’s the fourth one that I’ve heard about lately, but you know what? The more the merrier. Swashbucklers are cool and Sinbad is one of the best. As long as the comics are good - and I’m confident that Mills and Barreto’s will be - there’s room for all.

And isn’t it a ripe time for an Islamic hero? I’d love to read a Sinbad comic created by someone with an Islamic faith, but until that happens I’m happy to check out what’s available. Unfortunately, of the four Sinbad comics I know about, I’ll likely only check out two of them.

One that I won’t be reading is BlueWater’s Sinbad: Rogue of Mars. As cool as it is to have a line of comics inspired by Ray Harryhausen stories, BlueWater’s Ray Harryhausen Presents comics are a case of too-good-to-be-true. The stories I’ve read aren’t very exciting and the color palettes they use are offensively dull and ugly. It’s a shame, because I was really looking forward to that line.

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“Fringe Benefits” has a double meaning this week. As usual, it means that we’re talking about cool comics you can find on the fringe of the mainstream. But today it also means that one of the side benefits to having this column is that I can occasionally talk about my own stuff.

For instance, If you’ll look in this month’s Previews, the one with this cover:

And if you’ll turn to page 326:

You might see a blurb like this:

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Christopher Mills is a pal of mine, but it’s an acquaintanceship born out of my fondness for his work. I hesitate to call him a pulp writer because I have some connotations that go with “pulp” that aren’t all positive. As fun and thrilling and yes, good as the best pulp can be, there’s a large percentage of it that just feels hacked out. The very name “pulp” refers to the cheapness that was associated with the original work in the genre and – rightfully or not – I’ve always connected that with stories that were more or less disposable. And that’s not Mills.

It’s not Lovecraft or Howard or Bradbury either, so I know my prejudice isn’t exactly fair, but I’d still hate for someone to hear me describe Mills as pulp and assume that he just wrote exploitative, sensationalistic stuff without any thought given to things like story and character.

My first experience with Mills’ work was his Gravedigger webcomic (later published in book form by Rorschach Entertainment). I wrote at the time that it “was not inspired by the pulp fiction of the ’30s and ’40s. It was inspired by the Pulp Fiction of 1994.” I was kind of spellbound by the main character and loved how, though he’s a villain (not even an anti-hero) and almost completely without morals, Mills gave me just enough to like about him that I could root for him anyway.

Femme Noir – coming in June from Ape Entertainment – isn’t as dark as Gravedigger. It’s got more of the traditional, pulp elements too. It takes place in Port Nocturne, a corrupt, perpetually rainy city with more than its share of organized crime, mad scientists, femme fatales, and mysterious vigilantes. One of the femme fatales doubles as a vigilante and there you’ve got your premise.

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Happy April Fools, I guess.

Sorry this week’s column is late. I’m being a swell joe and honoring an “embargo” on the first item I’m talking about. Lord knows why.

April Fools is my least favorite “holiday” of the year, mostly because of all the stupid fake news stories that come out around this time. Like the press release I got from Mohawk Media proclaiming, “Having recently launched their Mr. T: Limited Advance Edition Graphic Novel, publisher Mohawk Media have decided to celebrate April Fool’s Day with the announcement of Mr. T Versus, a series of comic magazines which see Mr. T doing battle with other famous characters.” The characters they tease on their website include Doctor Who, Wolverine, and Dracula.

The saddest part for me is that I’d actually really like to read a comic about Mr. T vs. Dracula. Instead of dreaming up an April Fools Day hoax with fake covers, why couldn’t they have just made some cool comics? That’s what the rest of these people did.

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I’ve almost made the complete switch to waiting for collected volumes of my favorite comics. Now that they’re released about six minutes after the final issue of the series comes out, they just make too much financial sense not to go that way. But there are exceptions.

One is my regular DC and Marvel superhero comics, but that’s because we’re not guaranteed trade collections for every series I like. Yeah, chances are that Wonder Woman will keep getting collected, but Green Arrow and Black Canary? I’m not so sure. But even if I knew a trade was coming for those, I’m not sure I’d give up buying the single issues. Maybe it’s just pure nostalgia, but when it comes to a certain kind of story – like superheroes – I like getting small, monthly doses.

And that applies to a very few, other adventure comics too. It has nothing to do with my ability to patiently wait for a collection. I’ve proven to myself that I can do that. The stories are just as good even if I don’t get to talk about them online the day after they came out. But damn it if there’s not something just thrilling about the format of a short, compact, little comic you can read and be done with in fifteen minutes or so. What I’ve lost patience with are the comics that aren’t making the best use of that format.

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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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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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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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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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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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