Fragile Prophet
Written by Jeff Davidson; Illustrated by Stephen R. Buell
Lost in the Dark Press
$9.95

I’ve got a couple of special needs kids in my life. My niece was born prematurely and had other developmental complications that have put her behind other kids her age. My wife is a nanny for a teenaged girl with severe cerebral palsy, amongst other challenges. And like anyone else who’s been touched by children with special needs, I’ve felt both the challenges and the extreme blessings that come with knowing them. My niece, for example, never fails to make friends wherever she goes. She’s as exuberantly joyful as any five-year-old, but even more so considering the obstacles she has to overcome every day.

In the intro to Fragile Prophet, Jeff Davidson writes, “The purpose of this comic is neither to make light of nor shed light upon the intricacies of Fragile X syndrome.” It’s a good disclaimer, because it lowers your expectations right away. This isn’t a story about people dealing with a mental disability per se. It’s an urban fantasy/mystery that just so happens to feature a main character who has a mental disability. But it does that with sensitivity and class. (more…)

Last week, I talked to Alex Ness about his illustrated book of narrative poetry. This week, I’m talking to some the artists involved, most of whom are recognizable names from the comics industry. Gathering around the table are A Life of Raven’s Art Director and publisher Bob Giadrosich, Mike Grell (Green Arrow, Warlord), Alex Sheikman (Robotika), Peter Bergting (The Portent), Joel Vollmer (Dust to Dust), Cynthia Cummens (Star Wars trading cards), David Yurkovich (Less Than Heroes, Death by Chocolate), Rich Koslowski (Three Fingers, The King, The List, Marvel Comics Presents), Kurt Wilcken (Aztec Anthropomorphic Amazons), Tony Caputo (Vespers), Josh Howard (Dead @ 17, Black Harvest, Clubbing), and Jason Copland (Empty Chamber, Kill All Monsters!).

First though, I asked Bob how he came to be so closely involved with the book.

Bob, what went into your decision to not only help illustrate Life of Ravens, but to publish the book as well?

Bob Giadrosich: One thing that has attracted me to the project from the beginning was the strength of the words. I love to read poetry because it’s a heart language. It operates on a completely different level than a short story or novel. I believe that Alex has written some fine, fine poetry in this collection. One of my favorites is “Feeling Lucky,” illustrated by Jeff Fairbourn.

Many publishers we approached liked the material, but reacted with…“Poetry?” After that, in my mind, I was determined that the material be given access to the marketplace. Too many people had put together too much excellent work to not let people have the opportunity to read and view it. 

The next question’s for everyone. How’d you all get involved in the book? 

Kurt Wilcken: Alex kept sending me poems until I agreed to illustrate one.

Giadrosich: Initially, Alex asked me to illustrate two poems (“The Golden” and “Burning Perfection”) in early- to mid-2006. I think “Red Snow” followed soon after that. As I was slammed with other deadlines at the time, I did some rough sketches to set down the ideas and moved on. In subsequent phone conversations and through email with Alex, it became evident that more and more illustrators were becoming involved. 

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This isn’t really comics, but there’s a lot of comics talent attached, so I wanted to draw your attention to it. Alex Ness is the founder of PopThought.com; he’s also a poet who’s just released a book of narrative poetry called A Life of Ravens. Illustrating the poems are some names you know. Folks like Mike Grell, Josh Howard, Rich Koslowski, Paul Harmon, Alex Sheikman, and Peter Bergting.

Later this week, I’ll post a roundtable with those guys and some of the other artists involved. And art. There will also be art. Today though, I talked with Alex himself about the book and — in typical Fringe Benefits fashion — a ton of other stuff.

(Incidently, Alex is also a friend of mine and we’ve co-written a comic that should be coming out next year. Also, the monsters/robot book with Jason Copland he mentions below ended up being Kill All Monsters! with me as the writer, so, you know… full disclosure and all that.)

Tell me about the source of A Life of Ravens. Where did these poems come from?

I’ve written poetry since my earliest writing memories. So writing poems, that in itself isn’t unusual. But in this case it was inspired.

I’d been in a deep funk. Creatively speaking I knew I would never be in comics media as a paid reporter, so that led me to wonder what the point was. I had many contacts but I didn’t see myself as talented enough to do anything in the comics industry. So there was that.

But that was actually the least of things. In that year my mum had learned she had Alzheimer’s, which she took with the trauma such a discovery causes, my mum-in-law had cancer that was incurable, and then my brother had a massive heart attack; then another.

Looking at him unconscious, I saw myself, knowing he’s just a couple years older than me. I thought, “What legacy of work will I leave behind if I was to have a similar heart attack?” The only thing I’d ever done that people liked was my poetry. So I thought maybe.

But to begin with you have to blame Jason Copland. In 2005, he asked me to write a story that had monsters and robots fighting.

I said, “I don’t do creative writing.”

He said, “Sure you do.”

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The Phantom: Death in the Deep Woods
Written by Ben Raab; Illustrated by Pat Quinn and Nick Derington
Published by Moonstone
$14.95

I was talking to my local comics retailer one time about Phantom comics and we agreed that the value of the stories varies greatly based on a hard-to-define quality. Basically, either the creators “get” the Phantom, or they don’t.

I don’t say that as some sort of Phantom scholar. ‘Cause as I’ve said before, I’m not. But I do know pulp adventure and the creators who get the Phantom are the ones who best tap into that aspect of him. I mean, the guy’s Batman and Tarzan rolled together in one, beautiful, purple package for crying out loud. He’s supposed to be exciting and adventurous.

Ben Raab, Pat Quinn, and Nick Derington totally get the Phantom.

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Joshua Fialkov (Elk’s Run) and Kody Chamberlain’s (Tag) much-anticipated Punks: The Comic finally hits stores this week. They were nice enough to answer a few questions about it and even nicer to answer all the personal questions I tossed in as well.

Who’s your personal hero?

Joshua Fialkov (JF): Kody. No really. He’s so charming and pony-tailed.

Kody Chamberlain (KC): Fist. He’s able to say so much with so few handheld signs.

What’s your morning routine?

JF: Wake up, get out of bed, drag a comb across my head. I’m usually up and working by around 8:00 or 8:30 when the wife-to-be heads off for work. Aside from that, it’s just bagels and sugar-free juice.

KC: I crawl out of bed around 7:15am and make my way to the shower, and drive to work around 8:00 am. Sometime around 9:30 am I wake up and start working.

What’s your favorite item of clothing?

JF: My Country Music Western shirt. It’s got “Country Music” stitched in the back for chrissake!

KC: I have an old, yellow, leather jacket. It’s worn out and my cat clawed all the way up the sleeve once leaving little holes, but I still wear it every winter. I’m in Louisiana; that’s about a week and a half.

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The Phantom: The Graham Nolan Sundays, Volumes One and Two
Written by Claes Reimerthi, Tony DePaul, and Graham Nolan; Illustrated by Graham Nolan
Moonstone
$16.95

I keep telling people that I first discovered the Phantom when I saw the Billy Zane movie, but that’s not quite true. We didn’t have Phantom strips in my hometown newspaper, but my grandmother did and whenever we’d go to visit her for Christmas or something, I’d check out the funnies and see what the Phantom was up to. I was never able to follow a story for more than a week or so, so I didn’t understand much about the character, but I loved the idea of a costumed superhero who spent most of his time in the jungle. It was Tarzan and Batman combined and I thought it was genius.

The movie filled me in on a lot of details about the character and I’ve been following Moonstone’s monthly series pretty faithfully, but there’s still been this kind of enigma around the newspaper strips that never have found their way into my local papers, regardless of where in the country I’ve lived. Because the Phantom was created as a newspaper strip, I’ve always felt like I’ve been missing out on something essential about him by not reading him in that format. Enter The Graham Nolan Sundays.

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Sorry this is a couple of days late. I had it written before I went to Chicago, but recovering from the con got the best of me when I got back and I’m just now getting around to posting it.

The Lost Colony, Book 2: The Red Menace
Written and Illustrated by Grady Klein
First Second
$16.95

And I thought the first volume was daring.

In “The Snodgrass Conspiracy,” Grady Klein introduced us to a colony of people who are remarkably integrated for a nineteenth century U.S. community. All wasn’t well though, especially after a slave trader found his way onto the island and folks started getting jittery. There were plenty of ethnic stereotypes, but the characters so successfully transcended them and the story was so about race that you understood that Klein was being purposeful in his presentation of White bigots, Black folks who sit in a bar all day, the Native American who runs the bar, and a Chinese mystic.

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AKA Comics

Miscellaneous Adventures of Stykman #3: I’m picking my copy up in Chicago this weekend. Who wants to wait for it to hit the stores? But if you can’t get it at a convention, it’ll be worth the wait. This comic is fun and funny and deserves a long life.

Archaia Studios Press

Killer #5: It’s a great story. I’m entranced.

Okko: The Cycle of Water: I’ve been looking forward to the first collection of this wonderfully illustrated, beautifully realized fantasy series.

Boom! Studios

X Isle, Vol. 1: Another great series collected. Perfect blend of modern-day suspense and ‘50s scifi-horror.

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The Lost Colony, Volume 1: The Snodgrass Conspiracy
Written and Illustrated by Grady Klein
First Second
$25.00 (hardcover edition)

The Lost Colony wasn’t at all what I expected.

I should clarify that though by saying that my expectations were pretty base. I heard “lost colony” and “secret island” and saw pictures of a robot and people in nineteenth century clothes and my imagination flew to something like Mark Twain meets Jules Verne meets J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Carlton Cuse.

I was just looking for a fun adventure/mystery, but Grady Klein had loftier ambitions. There is a secret island and a lost colony on it. There’s also a robot. But of all the influences I expected to identify, the strongest is Mark Twain. Or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, at least.

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Jimmy Palmiotti has been a regular fixture at Marvel and DC the last several years, but hopefully I’m not stretching the boundaries of this column too much by re-posting this (it originally appeared on Comic World News). After all, the main creative stuff we talked about was related to Painkiller Jane, particularly the script he wrote for the July 13th episode of the TV series.

Who’s your personal hero?

That would be my parents who are no longer with me unfortunately. They somehow inspired me to be a good, honest, caring individual and managed to instill in me the attitude that I can do anything I would like to do if I put my mind to it and be good at it. They were generous, kind and giving and had a lot of fun all the time and really, in any life it’s all you can ask for to have parents like that.

What’s your morning routine?

Wake up, get a bowl of cereal and introduce it to some low fat milk, check my ever expanding e-mail and then start writing, always with some music playing. Usually I wake up with an idea so I throw that in a separate file on my desk top. Its pretty funny how many stories were based on dreams I had. Jonah Hex #25 is exactly a dream I had, put into comic form.

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Monkeys & Midgets!
Written by Mike Gagnon
Illustrated by Nelson Danielson
Smash! Comics
$11.99

In the introduction to Monkeys & Midgets!, Jason Marcy half-jokingly claims credit for the story’s high concept saying, “Monkeys and Midgets! You can’t go wrong with them. Monkeys and Midgets are always good for a laugh!” I’m gonna have to disagree with him though.

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Graphic Classics, Vol. 13: Rafael Sabatini
Eureka Publishing
$11.95

I loved Rafael Sabatini before I ever even read him.

I’ve always been a big fan of charming, courageous, athletic, swashbuckling characters like Robin Hood and the Three Musketeers and I knew that those were the kinds of guys Sabatini wrote about. The kind of guys that you needed Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power to play in the movies. When I finally read Captain Blood, I wasn’t disappointed.

So, it was with a lot of excitement that I opened and read volume thirteen of the Graphic Classics series: the Sabatini volume. It opens very well, with an adaptation of Captain Blood. Or most of it anyway. You might be able to adapt the whole Captain Blood novel if you were willing to spend your entire page count on it, but that’s not the purpose of Graphic Classics. The purpose of Graphic Classics is to expose you to as much new material by classic authors as they can, while not skimping on the familiar favorites. And that’s what happens with Captain Blood. This version was cleverly written by Rod Lott to highlight the exciting parts and lovingly illustrated with nice, clean lines and realistic details by Carlo Vergara.

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Couple of things before we get into my picks for the month. First, you’ll notice that I’m posting this the month that the comics actually come out rather than when they’re solicited. Believe it or not, that’s not laziness-related. It’s about creating buzz when it might actually make a difference at the cash register rather than two months before so that readers have forgotten what’s coming out when. If I thought discussing solicitations two months early would actually drive readers to pre-order titles, I’d do it then, but all evidence seems to say that’s not the way it works.

Also, I’m rethinking the way I buy comics lately and that’s going to affect the way I create this list every month. I’m running into more and more series that I really want to see collected on my bookshelf. Now that publishers seem to take the wait-for-the-trade crowd into account as they’re making decisions to support or cancel series, I’m more willing to move over to that crowd. I haven’t completely figured out yet how that’s going to affect my listing or not listing certain books here, but I know that there are some books coming out this month (the new Mouse Guard mini-series or the latest issue of Athena Voltaire, for example) that I didn’t mention because I’m going to bring them up once the collection comes out. That doesn’t mean that I won’t talk about any monthly singles at all though. Some of IDW’s Star Trek stuff interests me, but I don’t necessarily need easy access to it on my bookshelf.

But even though I’m sort of explaining my thought process here, I’m not pretending to be fair about the way I apply any of these guidelines. At the end of the day, I talk about stuff that tickles my fancy and that’s the ultimate decider about what makes it into the column. If I missed out on something (whether purposefully or not), pointing that out is what the comments section is for. (more…)

Fox Bunny Funny
Written and Illustrated by Andy Hartzell 
Top Shelf
$10.00

We all rebel in our own ways.

When I was a teenager, my rebellion wasn’t over anything monumental. My folks were pretty conservative, so we battled over hair length, ear piercing, and curfew. Standard stuff, but it felt important at the time. It felt like there was this person whom I really wanted to be, but wasn’t being allowed to become.

Fox Bunny Funny is about that feeling. In a wordless story, Andy Hartzell depicts a culture of anthropomorphic, “funny animal” foxes that’s largely like any middle-American community. A young boy rides his bike into town to pick up a couple of things for his mom, gets into some mischief with his buddies, plays video games with his little brother, has some dinner, and goes upstairs to his room. But along the way, we learn something disturbing about fox culture: they love dismembering the rabbits.

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The Clarence Principle
Written by Fehed Said; Illustrated by Shari Chankhamma
SLG Publishing
$12.95

I was once madly in love with this girl. I’m talking about the kind of passionate obsession that keeps you from eating and sleeping because those things just distract you from what you really want to be doing, which is thinking about Her.

Truth be told, that’s happened to me several times in my life, but in this particular case, she just wasn’t having any of it. (Okay that’s happened a couple of times too, but just bear with me.) On this occasion, with this girl, I could tell that she liked me, but she always had one excuse or another why it wasn’t meant to be “right then,” and before long she’d found someone else to be in love with. My heart was broken and it took me a while to move on, but we were able to stay friends. I kept up with her for a while, which is how I eventually learned what a bullet I had dodged. (more…)

Journey into Mohawk Country
Written by Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert; Illustrated by George O’Connor
First Second
$17.95

For reasons not important right now, I once found myself in the position of needing to read Captain Woodes Rogers’ A Cruising Voyage Round the World: The Adventures of an English Privateer. Pirate story, right? Bound to be interesting.

And to some extent it was. There was pillaging and plundering, scheming and plotting, mutiny, and even a dramatic rescue of a stranded sailor on a deserted island. You just had to trudge through all the manifests, crew lists, geography lessons, and accounting to get to it. In the end, I’d much rather read Treasure Island.

So, it was with cautious interest that I picked up Journey into Mohawk Country, George O’Conner’s adaptation of the journal of a Dutch trader. H.M. van den Bogaert set out from New Amsterdam in December of 1634 with the sole mission of getting up into Indian country and solidifying the Dutch colony’s relationship with the Iroquois trappers on whom they relied to stay in business. Apparently the French were putting up some stiff competition and something drastic had to be done. Apart from some economic drama, that plot doesn’t even sound as interesting as A Cruising Voyage Round the World. Enter George O’Connor.

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