Nexus Archives vol. 9
Written by Mike Baron
Illustrated by Steve Rude, Paul Smith, Neil “Spyder” Hansen and Adam Hughes
Published by Dark Horse

The greatest superhero comic of all time hits one of its most controversial eras in this volume, which collects issues 53-57 and issues 2-4 of the concurrently published Next Nexus miniseries. Among Nexus fandom, the first fifty issues are nearly universally beloved, and rightly so. Baron and Rude create a universe far more complex and nuanced than that of any other superhero comic, stuffed to the gills with immigration concerns, energy shortfalls, religious zealotry (and they were writing these stories twenty-five years ago!), massively complex moral quandaries, enticingly realized alien culture, political parody as good as any you’ll find in the papers, and yes, awesome and bombastic action sequences.

Nexus Archives vol. 9 deals with war and assassination. It shows presidential politics and the struggles of humanitarian missions. Angry little girls are confronted by dedicated younger ladies, and sci-fi military antics abound during the chaotic assassination attempt on Sundra Peale. Capitalism runs out of control. It’s a superhero comic, with plenty of balls and a brain, and it’s a rare breed that manages to have both.

Despite alternating issues of the standard Nexus comic and the Next Nexus spin-off (ironically, classic Nexus artist Steve Rude is the illustrator on the secondary title, not the main series), the story flows quite smoothly in this Archive. Credit to Mike Baron, who deftly juggles the war on Ylum, as well as Ylum’s presidential election, the blindly vengeance-driven quest of the replacement Nexuses, and ex-Nexus Horatio Hellpop’s establishing of a medical clinic for the impoverished of Flatlandia.

Operating as an ensemble piece more than ever before, Nexus moves quickly between scenes, giving readers snippets of conversations and high points of action. Baron’s clearly a believer in starting the scene as late as possible and ending it as early as possible, because there’s not a wasted panel here. While Next Nexus focuses on Horatio’s clinic and the immature, desperate rage of the Loomis sisters, Baron still offers peeks into the political climate of Ylum. When Nexus deals with Zeiffer Meird’s assault on Ylum and Sundra Peale, mentions of Horatio’s quest are frequent. Baron juggles all the balls extremely effectively. Nexus is a title whose consequences are always on the minds of its characters.

His writing of Lonnie Loomis, the objector to the Loomis sisters’ vendetta, is some of his most convincing. The conflict and denouement between Sundra Peale and the Merk (a fitting irony to the assassination attempt on Sundra herself) is both surprising and effective, and the pages devoted to Tyrone and Dave continue to round out the picture of Ylum society. Horatio’s story is quieter, slower, and more difficult, but such is the condition of missionary medical work, and Baron deserves credit for giving time to the emotional cost of the work on our hero.

Steve Rude and Paul Smith handle three issues of material each, so you know the comics look great. Rude’s the visual architect of the Nexus universe, and Next Nexus gives him plenty of chances to shine. Multiple missions for Stacy and Michana Loomis as they establish their tenure as the new Nexus, each building their legitimacy as a threat to Horatio – the man who killed their father. Rude’s work is a little too slick to handle the sickly masses of Flatlandia, but he exhibits his usual élan when drawing the lush palace of Ursula X.X. Imada on Procyon or the brutal executions perpetrated by the Loomis sisters.

Paul Smith’s work doesn’t match Rude’s design work, but Smith, even then, was a precise cartoonist, setting scenes with clarity and keeping the drama high on each page. Spyder’s clumsy pages show some talent, but it’s very raw here, offering a passable if uninspiring penultimate chapter to the book. Adam Hughes, like Smith, an artist who went on to much higher profile work but showed talent from the very beginning, handles the finale, and his illustrative prowess is obvious from the get-go. He doesn’t provide the backgrounds and trappings of Smith or Rude, not yet, but the character work is very strong and clearly a sign of better work to come from Hughes.

This volume also introduces one of my favorite Nexus characters: Stanislaus Korivisky, the man who replaces Horatio as Nexus (after the Loomises prove untenable). Stanislaus is only glimpsed here, but his respect for Horatio and the responsibility of his position is well handled, setting up some of Baron’s most compelling character work ever over the next two or three volumes of the Nexus Archives.

Nine volumes into the series, the quality remains very high. Steve Rude’s art is going to be sorely missed in the coming volumes, but Baron’s scripts remain politically and socially relevant, dynamically paced, gilded with exciting action but woven with dozen of threads of human existence. No exception to the rule established by previous editions, Nexus Archives vol. 9 is a true must-have comic for fans of intelligent sci-fi and/or superhero adventure.

The Simpsons: The Uncensored, Unauthorized History
Written by John Ortved
Published by Faber & Faber

Conducting dozens of interviews with writers, producers, cartoonists and executives whose lives have been connected to the development of the forever-running television series The Simpsons, John Ortved’s book attempts to untangle the web of the series creation and provide a glimpse at how it all came to be and who fathered the show’s, and the family’s, many startling and hilarious facets.

As might be expected, a network television show doesn’t truly have its origins in a phrase as simple as “created by Matt Groening.” Dozens of writers have passed through the show’s writers room, each drawing from different experiences, divergent senses of humor and completely individual expectations for the series itself.

Curiously, Ortved doesn’t speak to the three major players: Matt Groening, whose comic strip Life in Hell was noticed by producers on The Tracey Ullman Show, who in turn asked him to come up with a concept for interstitial cartoons to run between their skits; James Brooks, the movie and TV mogul, who produced and protected The Simpsons at Fox; and Sam Simon, the show’s lead writer during its formative years. Brooks’ company, Gracie Films, opted not to cooperate with the book’s creation, leaving Ortved to fill in his history from the outside in. Thus, readers are left with an interesting view into the world of the show’s three-headed initiators.

The effect creates a multi-faceted perspective that enables backers and detractors of each of the three to put forth their own experiences as to what occurred, as well as offering other theories as to how the show found its unique satirical voice and visual design. Readers can examine the evidence presented and look for something close to the “truth,” if such exists, in the cross-section of the testimony given.

Ortved is able to speak to many of the important figures, including the show’s original animation executive producer, Gabor Csupo; former writers and producers like Brent Forrester, Jay Kogen, and Josh Weinstein, among many others; one-time writer and current talk show host Conan O’Brien; former creative consultant Brad Bird; Matt Groening’s long-time friends and fellow cartoonists Lynda Barry, Art Spiegelman and Gary Panter; and FOX CEO Rupert Murdoch and other FOX execs like Barry Diller and Charlie Goldstein. Also, the administrator of fan sites like NoHomers.net are able to weigh in. So readers will definitely get a well rounded picture of how things occurred.

Probably the most distracting element of the book is when Ortved breaks from the “oral history” style and inserts his own thoughts. Often, he’s providing valuable and factual background that sets the stage from the interview segments, but sometimes, Ortved drifts into editorializing. His comments on others’ quotes are occasionally valuable, but often unnecessary. More disconcerting is his penchant for slagging off the show’s later years. It’s not that he’s wrong (not having watched the show in close to a dozen years, I can’t say myself), but it seems unnecessary and at times even petty when cast against his own fawning over the undeniably massive influence of the show on current pop culture and comedy.

That’s a fairly minor complaint, as most of the book conforms to the “oral history” format, using quotes and only context-providing paragraphs from the author to set the scene for each person’s story. All of those people providing their perspectives on the founding of The Simpsons builds a multifaceted history of a television revolution and institution. If anyone has any interest in codifying the building of one of the most important pieces of American pop culture, The Simpsons: The Uncensored, Unauthorized History is a very effective, very worthwhile read.

Today saw the release of the DVD for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, the much-maligned summer blockbuster based on the enduring Hasbro toy line. I resisted seeing this when it was in theaters over the summer because the previews made it look like baby vomit, and I had no desire to spend ten bucks and a couple of hours in a movie theater to have my intelligence insulted, no matter how desperate I was for air-conditioning. Thank goodness for Redbox, because I only had to pay $1 to have my intelligence insulted in the comfort of my own home.

Actually, I didn’t think G.I. Joe was really all that bad. Don’t get me wrong, it was still a lousy film, it just wasn’t the crime against humanity I was expecting it would be. It helped a bit that I didn’t go in to the movie expecting to see the G.I. Joe from my childhood. Director Stephen Sommers and crew aren’t interested in that G.I. Joe, they would prefer to create a G.I. Joe for the new generation. And that’s fine, and in that sense, they’ve mostly succeeded. I can see kids going street rat crazy for the movie, what with the nonstop violence, copious amounts of explosions, not-very-funny one-liners and hot ninja-on-ninja action.

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Dark Corners
Written & Illustrated by Caitlin Plovnick, Jeff Lok, Mario Van Buren and Denis St. John, with Steve Bissette and John Nicoll
Published by I Know Joe Kimpel

The crew at I Know Joe Kimpel has been pushing out their four-square anthology books for a while now, and I’ve enjoyed every one of them. Minicomics aren’t exactly my forte, because I just don’t have the time to pursue them like I should (and because many I’ve sampled have been amateur in too many respects), but I’ve reached the point where I’m honestly looking forward to their latest anthology offering.

The most recent, Dark Corners, marks the group’s first major foray into horror comics, and the first of their four-square books wrapped around a single theme. Of course, not being a horror fan, per se, I came to the book with a little trepidation.

Well, the Joe Kimpel crew hasn’t completely turned me around on horror, but they’ve at least acquitted themselves professionally. Caitlin Plovnik’s strip deals with an imaginary friend and a twist ending that I’m not sure how to read. One reading doesn’t work for me at all, but the other kind of does. The story’s a little under-drawn, but not to the point that it’s distracting. Solid piece, if I’m reading the ending correctly.

Mario Van Buren follows with the second installment of “Jenny, the Marsh.” Of course, I haven’t read part one, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. Mario’s strip is the best drawn strip in the book, employing an open, bigfoot style for the characters. However, Van Buren layers on the shadows to amp up the atmosphere for Jenny’s cornfield encounter, and the dreamy, reality-challenged nature of the vision adds a haunting element.

“Of the Matters that Occurred on the Road to Carlyle County,” by Jeff Lok, is a peculiar beast. The art is cartoony, with large areas of cross-hatching to add depth and shadow, and the character designs are great, totally adorable and a nice contrast to the story’s dark tone. That said, the story meanders too much, using five panels where two would suffice. Rather than building the moment, I found myself struggling to keep my attention on the pages.

The final piece, Dennis St. John’s, is the most traditionally horror-oriented. Losing teeth, fangs, vomit, creepy sexual encounters, etc., not really my thing, but I can see where others might find it creepier than I do. The art’s pretty solid, a little loose and sloppy, but much better than most other minicomics.

Steve Bissette, the Swamp Thing and Tyrant dude, provides interior illustrations between each of the stories, and those are really cool.

I had read all 44 pages of FVZA: Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency #1 (Radical Comics) before I began to understand why the comic book existed at all and why it felt like a very solid premise from which a story was being reverse engineered, rather than a story that needed to be told.

That realization didn’t come from the comic book itself sadly, but from an interview with writer David Hine, printed after this first third of the story ends—he was apparently brought in to turn the website fvza.org into a comic book. (This also explains the wonky credits. David Hine and Roy Allan Martinez are the only creators with their names on the cover; on the title page the former is credited as “writer” and the latter as “illustrator,” but there are also two people given a “conceived by” credit and two more people given a “painted by” credit).

The premise is an alternate history of the United States, in which both vampires and zombies are real, and have posed existential threats to the nation since at least the time of the Civil War. Eventually, a federal organization was formed to protect the country from these two supernatural menaces. At present, they’ve both been seemingly stamped out, and the agency is in decline, the way that perhaps the Department of Homeland Security would be if the threat of terrorism were somehow almost completely erased.

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Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer

Written by Van Jensen

Drawn by Dustin Higgins

Published by Slave Labor Graphics

Who knew Pinocchio was such a badass? Well, he is in this 128 page graphic novel. Just released in time for Halloween, “Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer” is a treat combining horror and humor. This isn’t coming from the Disney “Pinocchio” either but a far more earthy version in keeping with the original 1883 tale by Carlo Collodi.

This Pinocchio has a sort of Scott Pilgrim energy to it. When his father/maker, Geppetto, is killed by vampires, that seals the deal: a wooden puppet vampire slayer is born. All he has to do is tell some lies, watch his nose grow and then snap it off to instantly dispatch any blood sucker. And if he needs back up, there’s always his faithful surrogate dad, the other carpenter, Master Cherry. With his own modified machine gun, “The Monsterminator,” he’ll get anything that might try to get away. And no cute cricket in a top hat here. This cricket gets routinely stomped on within an inch of its life.

Dustin Higgins sure knows how to create a world. His live wire brush work is crooked, jaggy and sharp. The buildings themselves have character. And he is certainly in tune with Van Jensen’s writing as each balances the laughs with the spooky stuff. Within this world, tension mounts and the vampires do feel like a real threat.

Speaking of Scott Pilgrim, there are hints that we may see more of a growing boy’s life in future installments. In this first book, Pinocchio is caught in a bashful moment as he chats it up with a girl he is sweet on. But, of course, he is mostly concerned with killing vampires.

By the end of the book, there have been a whole lot of changes and a whole lot of issues dealt with so it will be interesting to see what happens next. “P:VS”  began as a one panel gag by Higgins and was transformed by Jensen into a full-fledged serious, yet funny, work.  One thing is for sure, the creative team of Van Jensen and Dustin Higgins are two to keep an eye on. You can pick up a copy here.

Marvel Masterworks: Fantastic Four vol. 3
Written & Illustrated by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Published by Marvel Comics

Man, I really appreciate that Marvel’s putting these old classic Marvel titles in affordable, quality editions. I appreciate why people like getting a giant chunk of story in the Essential or Showcase format, but I strongly prefer a color edition that represents the work as it was intended to be seen (“intended to be seen” is a loaded phrase, I admit, but the approach to the line work does change when the artist expects the work to be seen in black and white). So to my mind, Essential equals unacceptable, and the traditional hardcover Marvel Masterworks/Archive is, with very, very few exceptions (see Eisner, Will’s The Spirit), beyond what I’m willing to spend. But $25 for eleven issues of classic Stan n’ Jack, that’s a good deal and as long as Marvel has Stan n’ Jack Fantastic Four or Thor issues to publish, or Stan n’ Steve Spideys, I’m aboard.

As for this, the collected edition of the second ten regular issues and the first annual, Marvel Masterworks: Fantastic Four vol. 2 is – summing this up is harder than I expected; let’s say – intriguing. If you’ve read any amount of Silver Age comics, particularly DC stuff, you can really see why these issues blew people’s minds. The taunting between Ben and Johnny is extremely subversive in comparison to anything that had been done before, and the characters’ ability to exhibit less-than-heroic traits gave them a palpable humanity rarely shown before in adventure comics.

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Spider-Man: The Short Halloween

Written by Bill Hader and Seth Meyers

Art by Kevin Maguire

Published by Marvel Comics

This one passed me by when it first came out earlier this year. As a special Halloween treat, let’s look back at this delightful one-shot. How often is it that you have “Saturday Night Live” veterans writing a superhero comic? Is it possible that Bill Hader and Seth Meyers are the first? I think so but I’d be happy to learn that there’s like some Chevy Chase script about Wonder Woman out there or maybe Al Franken’s take on Wolverine.

Hader and Meyers opt to be respectful and even include a reverential recap on how Spider-Man got his powers just in case you’re from some other planet. The story finds Spider-Man in typical fashion, pursuing a baddie. But that’s perfectly fine as we ease into some offbeat and often hilarious writing. It’s easy to see that Hader and Meyers love comics and the people who read them. The title itself, “Spiderman: The Short Halloween,” is a geek in-joke referring to Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s “Batman: The Long Halloween.” And the story, well it’s not some obvious satire. No, it’s actually a little masterpiece involving mistaken identity and, in the bargain, a clever juxtaposition of the weird world of superheroes and us average citizens.

In some ways, you feel like you can’t cross a line with Spider-Man. Peter Parker is as average as you can get. He’s forever fighting for his well-earned cash from The Man, J. Jonah Jameson. Who can’t relate to that? And, as Spider-Man, the guy gets no respect. What’s not to love? Hader and Meyers appear to feel the same way and give you a story where Joe Average gets to take center stage and we consider his problems. And the villains, they’re average too. Actually, they’re below average. And Spider-Man is totally enmeshed in this.

You can really take this mistaken identity thing to new heights. What happens is that the real Spider-Man is quite accidentally knocked out while confronting a third-rate wannabe villain. At the same time, a drunk in a Spider-Man costume, who happens to have a great Spider-Man costume and a credible build, is being hauled around by two of his buddies after a Halloween night that has gone wrong. As the drunk Spider-Man careens down a corner and collapses by a dumpster, the real Spider-Man heroically falls out from the sky and crashes into a heap nearby. So, the buddies haul the real Spider-Man into their apartment. And the awkward villain makes off with the drunk Spider-Man to show off to the rest of his crew of lame baddies.

I love it every time New York gets to be a character in a Spider-Man story. I  prefer the offbeat and the more domestic and talky stuff and how it can play off the superhero stuff. That’s always been an important part of Spider-Man and it’s carried off here with a lot of authentic dialogue and some very natural action. For example, the drunk Spider-Man’s life is a mess with his girlfriend ready to leave him. Finally getting past his friends, she is more than ready to go through “the talk” with him as he lays on a couch. Having said what she needs to say, she feels some regret and goes to kiss his hand. And, with perfect comedic timing, that’s when Spider-Man’s webbing shoots into her face. It’s a scene done with such skill since it’s so in the moment.

What keeps the writing so in the moment too is the amazing art by Kevin Maguire. His realism mixed with cartoony flourish is a perfect match. From the start, you know that Fumes, the clumsy villain, is more like us than Doctor Octopus. He has that face. And the guys out on the town with the drunk Spider-Man, elicit sympathy. You’ve been in that same cab with these guys as they agree with their pal that’s he’s Spider-Man– or at least you feel like you have.

How often does comedy mix with comics? Well, within superhero comics, there’s some of that in the current run of Marvel’s “Strange Tales” which includes Peter Bagge’s hilarious sendup of The Hulk. Of course, superhero comics can have a sense of humor but strictly comedic, not so much. Then again, it all depends on where you look, like for instance, “The Metal Men.”

That said, comedy is certainly as viable as anything else in comics. As reported here at Newsarama, American Original’s Jeff Katz, in connection with Top Cow, will gather a lineup of star comedians to create their own comics. They will be collected into graphic novels under the series title, “Comedy Death Ray.” It will be an impressive roster including Sarah Silverman, Zach Galifianakis, Patton Oswalt, Bob Odenkirk, David Cross, Paul Scheer, B. J. Novak, Janeane Garofalo and another SNL talent, Fred Armisen. The proposed first four issue run is scheduled to come out this winter.

“Comedy Death Ray” probably won’t have that much to do with superheroes. The series editor, comedian/writer Scott Aukerman, is more of a fan of stuff like Dan Clowes’s “Eightball” and Peter Bagge’s “Hate.” But maybe he’s read “The Short Halloween.” If so, that’s a good thing since it’s a great example of comedy writers writing comics.

Joe and Azat
Written & Illustrated by Jesse Lonergan
Published by NBM

Cartoonist Jesse Lonergan traveled to Turkmenistan with the Peace Corps, and his experiences there are filtered through exaggeration, fiction and personal creative whimsy to craft Joe and Azat: the story of a young American cartoonist Joe and his unlikely friendship with an idealistic Turkman named Azat.

Joe and Azat is a fairly surprising work. Joe’s raison d’etre for being in Turkmenistan, his mission with the Peace Corps, is referenced only obliquely, and the country’s political circumstances get even less page time. Joe and Azat is the tale of two young men’s culture-clashed, and culture-crossing, friendship.

To anybody with immigrants in their life, Joe’s experiences with Azat’s family will ring immediately true. Lonergan’s ability to show Azat’s meddling mother, drunken brother and idealism about capitalism works because he doesn’t cast any judgments. Every character is delivered with warm humanity, building the palpable reality of their existence.

I appreciated how Azat, overwhelmingly defined by his naïve love of capitalism and his unreasonable expectations for marriage, provides a range of personality. He embraces his opportunity to befriend Joe, he looks for the silver lining in his stumbling business ventures, and he believes fully that he’s found the love of his life. Joe’s dissociated window into Turkmen society allows us to peer into their world with a healthy degree of skepticism, but also an eye toward learning

Lonergan’s depiction of Azat’s mother, a what-will-the-neighbors-think immigrant mother, treads effectively (as Art Spiegelman lamented his own ability to do in the latter pages of Maus) the fine line between cliché and cliché-truth.

Artistically, Lonegran’s bigfoot cartoon style suits his upbeat, affectionate writing style. Occasionally, characters are difficult to distinguish; the thickness of Azat’s brother Merdan fails to come across, leaving the reader confused as to which sibling is angrily berating Joe and which is doggedly devoted to him. Actually, it’s obvious which is which, but the confusion does lead to some momentarily jarring sequences.

Joe and Azat is a warm, humorous comic, solidly crafted, and well worth picking up if you’re at the comic shop this week and find an extra $11 in your pocket.

Red Snow
Written & Illustrated by Susumu Katsumata
Published by Drawn & Quarterly

Drawn & Quarterly’s importing of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s “gekiga” manga to English-speaking shores has been very welcome in many quarters, particularly my home. My appreciation for comics from the East is blunted somewhat by the focus on genre-centric titles and incredibly long running serials. Tatsumi’s short stories and human gravitas really hit the mark for me, and I looked forward to D&Q’s latest gekiga “discovery,” Susumu Katsumata.

Well, Mr. Katsumata’s work isn’t quite on part with Tatsumi’s comics, though the short story collection Red Snow does have several positives. Setting all his stories in the pre-industrial Japanese countryside of his own youth, Katsumata’s comics are securely anchored in the details of rural life. Permeated with a sense of melancholy and small-town corruption, each tale beckons readers to explore the darker side of small town life.

Infused with an exceedingly dry, black humor (a village of women whose husbands have gone away to work keep a monk in a sack and pass him from home to home each night) and Japanese folklore (kappas abound), the tales in Red Snow are perhaps a little far removed from the experience of many Western readers. That distance may prevent Katsumata’s work from reaching the same level as Tatsumi’s work has achieved on these shores, but each story reveals intentions that reach across cultural barriers when you take time to explore it.

Katsumata’s illustration has certain limitations, with spotty anatomy and inconsistent faces, but his use of exaggeration to convey emotional qualities is very effective. The backgrounds are much more consistent than the figures, establishing each scene in a specific pre-industrial reality. Clear and structured, Katsumata’s page layouts are easy to read for even a novice comics reader.

Susumu Katsumata’s Red Snow is a solid collection of gekiga stories. The work doesn’t muster the same snap as Tatsumi’s comics, but readers interested in darkly humorous manga that explores the underbelly of rural life will likely find several gems in Katsumata’s book that justify the time spent exploring his work.

Mercy Thompson: Homecoming
Written by Patricia Briggs and David Lawrence
Illustrated by Francis Tsai and Amelia Woo
Published by Del Rey

Based on Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson novels, Homecoming is a collection of Dabel Brothers’ four-issue prequel to Briggs’ first book. Without having read Briggs’ prose, I can only treat this book as a stand-alone narrative, without any insight into the affectionate nods to the character’s core story or insights gained to her motivations.

That said, there’s little in Homecoming to make me want to seek out Briggs’ novels to learn more. A fairly standard modern fantasy, with its requisite sardonic heroine of limited supernatural power but plenty of chutzpah, Homecoming feels like it’s just going through the motions. Our heroine, Mercy, arrives in the Twin Cities, encounters some mysterious beings who alternately take a dark interest in her and pursue a vaguely antagonistic agenda, finds some unlikely allies, and plays the villains in the end.

Thematically, there’s simply nothing here. It’s pure plot, a mystery driven by secondary characters surrounding Mercy. Much of the book’s failure stems from Lawrence’s (and Briggs’? the writing breakdown isn’t very clear, but it seems the Briggs operated in a more supervisory capacity, if the interview in the back of the book can be trusted) inability to infuse the secondary characters with any compelling motivations or subtleties. They’re bad, thus Mercy needs to thwart them. Her allies are predictably surly, as she is, but they develop an inevitable grudging respect.

The closest we come to any sort of quietitude or character bits is a clumsily paced and terribly drawn scene in which Mercy attempts to establish some semblance of a normal life, which apparently involves spending an entire page on her expositioned meeting with an old hardigan with a Puritanical fear of tattoos. Not necessarily an impossible scenario, but one delivered with poorly posed figures and not even a sliver of warmth or humanity.

Francis Tsai handles art for the first two chapters of the book, with Amelia Woo taking over for the last half. Both provide fully painted pages, and they show considerable potential. Which isn’t the same as delivering excellent pages, but the art would not be distracting if the story delivered on any level at all. Tsai’s delivers very strong work in the area of mood and shadows, and some very nice panel compositions. His page layouts, like the figure work, are rigidly stiff, however. By comparison, Woo’s pages are softer, with less oppressive coloring that lets the characters pop off the page and – occasionally – allows hints of nuance in the faces and postures. Alas, the layouts are overly posed, often excessively so, and “overacting” abounds.

All of which is 400+ words that can be easily summed up as this: Avoid Mercy Thompson: Homecoming.

Essential Dykes to Watch Out For
Written & Illustrated by Alison Bechdel
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I recently talked about reading Gilbert Hernandez’s Luba, noting that the book is effectively the sequel to Palomar, one of the two most affecting comics I’ve read in my life. The other most-affecting comic is Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a staggeringly literate memoir of her coming out and her relationship with her deeply closeted father. After reading Gilbert Hernandez’s follow-up to his masterpiece, I went back to read Alison Bechdel’s creative lead-in to her own masterwork.

Dykes to Watch Out For, a newspaper strip that ran in independent gay and lesbian newspapers and online from 1983 until 2008, when Bechdel put the strip on hiatus to focus on her follow-up to Fun Home, chronicles the lives of a group of (mostly) lesbians. It balances political commentary against a long-running, often humorous, occasionally sad soap opera of romantic, professional and personal entanglements.

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For compiles the majority of the post-1986 strips, when Bechdel began introducing her extended cast and moved the strip away from its early gag-a-day format. Now, those early strips … well, they’re a little choppy. Though Bechdel had been penning the strip for three years already, her art remained stilted. The character work showed some charm, but only occasionally rose above ordinary. It was a slow build, but by 1990 – with 18 more years worth of strips in the book, so there’s lots and lots of good stuff left – Bechdel had captured the elusive voice of an artist with something true to say.

As the strip grew more assuredly artistically, the depth of the characters grew exponentially. Perhaps the quality of the line work allowed Bechdel to show ideas that had always been brewing in the strip but never communicated clearly. Her ability to depict characters across the entire spectrum of experience added humanity to their storylines. Many comic book artists can illustrate highly detailed scenes, moments of exquisite carnage and impossible perspectives, but through it all, most of their characters continue to shout obscenely or cry melodramatically.

Bechdel’s lines are simple, but deep. Reactions come through with subtlety and nuance, and she’s able to balance her artistic accomplishments with characterization that is apparent without having to explain itself. When Clarice becomes enraged at Toni, the character’s sniping ire manifests that rage in clear, simply human terms.

Dykes to Watch Out For is unapologetically political, and anybody who doesn’t lean left as Bechdel does will probably feel put off reading it. Yet the characters each exhibit diverse and fairly argued perspectives within the strip’s liberal outlook. Mo and Sydney frequently argue everything from gay marriage to patriarchal standards of beauty, and both viewpoints are presented fairly and levelly. In fact, one of the strip’s most interesting and challenging moments comes when Bechdel introduces a conservative-leaning lesbian into the group’s community, and despite a few jokes at her expense (though no more than any other character is subjected to during the strip’s twenty-year run), she shows an intelligent and rounded vantage point on the world herself.

Fun Home is perhaps the greatest and most important comic book ever published. (Yeah, that’s maybe a bold statement, but the book is. Read it if you haven’t. Read it again if you have.) That level of brilliance doesn’t develop overnight, and the progression of strips during its twenty-plus year evolution shows that Alison Bechdel experimented, stretched and transformed herself into one of the most important cartoonists working today in the page of Dykes to Watch Out For. Essential Dykes to Watch Out For is absolute must-read comics.

Luba
Written & Illustrated by Gilbert Hernandez
Published by Fantagraphics

After the conclusion of Love & Rockets vol. 1 in 1997, Fantagraphics compiled all of co-creator Gilbert Hernandez’s “Heartbreak Soup” stories in a single hardcover edition, titled Palomar (named for the small town “somewhere south of the border” in which the stories unfolded). The Palomar hardcover edition is, with maybe only one other serious contender (Alison Bechdel’s impossibly literate and moving Fun Home) the most powerful and humane comic book experience of my life.

After a few creative side-trips and explorations, Gilbert returned to his most famous characters, focusing on one-time Palomar bathgiver and mayor Luba and her family as they settled in southern California. The sum-total of Hernandez’s “Luba” comics were assembled this past summer in the hardcover collection Luba. It’s probably not fair to expect Hernandez to issue another creative virtuoso like Palomar, but in the pages of Luba, he comes closer than might be expected.

Palomar’s success comes from Hernandez’s ability to spotlight, sometimes only briefly, sometimes for extended sequences, dozens of divergent citizens in the small village. Combining humor, drama, surrealism, family and community, all drawn with aplomb, Palomar’s denizens provide Hernandez the opportunity to explore and examine the range of humanity. The end result is a fully realized, morally complex, beautifully joyous and tragically sad portrait of human community.

In Luba, the focus is similarly broad, yet also more centered. With her move to America, Luba is united with two half-sisters she’d been unaware of. Helping the family acclimate and hiring Luba’s daughter Doralis as host of a children’s television program is another olden Palomar resident, kittenish, vain Pipo. With this core cast, including Pipo’s son, a soccer star, and their own families, Hernandez sets out to explore the concept of family.

Like Palomar, Luba was created serially and is, as a result, prone to bizarre digressions. In many ways, it is these side-tracks that give Hernandez’s work its power, however. Our lives don’t follow clean storylines, and nor do his characters’. Certain themes repeat frequently, notably Luba’s sister Fritz’s low self-esteem-fueled sexual antics, which manage to be both titillating and occasionally overwhelming. Even Hernandez seemed to realize that Fritz’s lascivious lifestyle smothers other storylines, as late in the narrative Luba explains that she dreamed about her other sister Petra trying to steal the spotlight while Fritz paraded nakedly. Luba was always one of Palomar’s most lusty residents, but she never achieved the degree of debauchery Fritz manages repeatedly during the more prurient side-logs found in this book.

Luba’s stand-out character, and seemingly the character primed to take the central role if Hernandez continues to follow the family line, is Petra’s daughter Venus. Precocious, intelligent and utterly unwilling to let anybody’s bull slide, Venus provides perspective on the family’s many dysfunctions. Her youthfully innocent observations regarding Luba’s inability to accept her daughters’ homosexuality, or regarding her mother’s desperate clinging to youth and inability to forgive, provide consistent context throughout Luba.

After exploring the many connections of the family dynamic and shining a bright spotlight on the most destructive qualities of the family, Hernandez builds the book to a tragic crescendo, then shifts into a more sublime depiction of the family’s most balanced members. The calmness and maturity of Guadalupe, Hector and Venus’s lives in the time after tragedy is offset by the bizarre, family-fracturing career shift for Fritz, leaving Venus and Guadalupe effectively in the eye of a potential hurricane, providing stability as the family’s unstable parts no longer interact with one another. In many ways, this section is its highlight, offering more even-keeled perspectives on life and love.

Although Luba doesn’t hit as hard as Palomar, it remains a compelling portrait of family in all its messy glory.  Alternately sexy and vulgar, beautiful and mean, optimistic and intolerant, Luba and her family encompass all the ugliness and amazement that comes with being part of the human entity.

Dungeon: The Early Years vol. 2: Innocence Lost

Written by Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim

Illustrated by Christophe Blain

Published by NBM

NBM’s English translations of Sfar and Trondheim’s humorous fantasy series, Dungeon, continues to prove that I enjoy fantasy far more than I ever suspected. Two more adventures of Hyacinthe, the future Dungeon Keeper (seen in the Dungeon: Zenith series), are compiled in this book, including the finale of his time as the avenging Night Shirt of Antipolis.

With Christophe Blain aboard as The Early Years‘ illustrator, “Dungeon” continues to look sharp, filled to the gills with imaginative character designs, fast-moving action, a magnificent sense of scope, and truly impressive use of shadows and light. Blaine’s ability to communicate details of the characters through their nuanced posture and facial expressions adds considerable depth and emotion to the witty and twisted script by the European masters Sfar and Trondheim.

Sfar and Trondheim are, of course, legends, and their combined writing showcases all their individual strength and more. The smart and witty dialogue keeps the story bouncy, yet they’re also able to pull back and allow the art to carry the narrative and establish the mood in multiple, high effective sequences, including the first story’s finale. In opposition to Dungeon’s overall light-hearted tone, the writing tandem also provides several dark twists, while jamming surprise after surprise into each scene. Dungeon has elements of parody, but its creators’ obvious love for the adventure-fantasy genres keep the characters real and the circumstances compelling.

Dungeon: The Early Years vol. 2: Innocence Lost is the latest reminder of the great work being done in comics, a testament to the fun, adventurous style of storytelling many readers claim to want from their sequential arts entertainment.  Although Dungeon seems to be a successful series for NBM and its creators, it’s the type of high-quality, creepy, funny, startling fantasy that deserves an even wider audience.

There’s no faulting The Anchor #1 (Boom Studios) for a lack of scope. It opens in Hell itself, where the mysterious title character is single-handedly responsible for beating back the hordes of hell with his big, pink fists.

It then jumps to downtown Reykjavik, Iceland, where a giant ice monster is on a rampage. The title character, referred to as God’s anchor to hell by a member of the demon horde and Clem by a volunteer worker who notices he’s wearing a symbol of Saint Clement, is there too, fighting the monster.

“My soul is in hell,” he explains. “It wrestles with demons there…the wounds my soul suffers are borne by my earthly body.”

Writer Phil Hester doesn’t delve much deeper into who The Anchor is, how he came to be, or why his memory seems so addled and he sometimes talks in psalms without even realizing they’re psalms (Actually, the fact that the ice monster hits him with a truck might explain those last two, come to think of it).

And while all that is usually welcome in a first issue (especially see this is a $3.99 comic), that all that info isn’t present certainly isn’t because Hester’s dragging his feet or anything. He does establish plenty of intriguing clues and suggestions, introduces and half-introduces some characters, sketches out a concept and, most importantly, establishes an appealing tone that teeters between supernatural melodrama and comedy.

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The first graphic novel I ever bought was Death: The High Cost of Living. I was a teenage gothette just figuring out that there were all sorts of strange and wonderful things out there that I hadn’t discovered yet, and then one day my friend came to school with a little thing called the Death Gallery, full of these gorgeous pictures of this little goth girl that sorta even looked like me (if you squinted and washed out the color).

What the heck was that? I’d seen plenty of comics but nothing that looked like that. Her copy of The High Cost of Living was worn and well-read and I looked through it and it was a real story, not a jumped-up excuse for people in ridiculous costumes to beat things up. Comics, eh?

Well, DC/Vertigo has given my inner teenage goth girl a gigantic gift with this Absolute Death . That was fifteen years ago–literally half my life–and yet opening this huge slipcased hardcover with its thick, glossy pages is nearly as thrilling as that first look inside. The High Cost of Living and Time of Your Life are in here, as is the full Death Gallery and lots of additional art, the first-ever Death story from Sandman (though not every Death story from Sandman) and additional Death stories from Vertigo: A Winter’s Tale, The Sandman: Endless Nights, and a beautiful tale from a 9/11 themed anthology. There’s sketches and the script to the Sandman #8 (The Sound of Her Wings, the first appearance of Death) and an introduction by the fabulous Amanda Palmer, and even the short comic where Death and John Constantine explain how to use condoms.

Absolute editions aren’t cheap, but us comics people are nuts for them anyway. And really, when you’re in love with a medium that is half literature and half visual art, you can’t make it too big or beautiful. For while we all love Neil Gaiman and I read each book that comes out, the writing is only half the story here. The art, mostly from Mike Dringenberg and Chris Bachalo but also luminaries like Dave McKean, Jill Thompson (whose Death: At Death’s Door mini-manga is not included, sadly), P. Craig Russell and Colleen Doran, deserves these bigger, shinier, fresher pages that I’m afraid to touch except round the edges.

And Death deserves the attention–the morning spent with the book spread across my lap, remembering the first time I read these stories and saw these pictures, remembering what she meant to me then and means to me now, as an adult with a career and little free time for indulging. She understands, I think.

 The secret in the title of A Family Secret (Farrar Straus Giroux) isn’t the sort that is being deliberately kept from others as much as it simply goes un-talked about for years.

And who could blame Helena Van Dort, an elderly Dutch woman who lived through World War II and the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, for not talking about the war years all the time? It makes for a pretty unpleasant topic.

Comics artist Eric Heuvel’s crystal-clear storytelling, beautiful draftsmanship and open, inviting and expressive design makes for a pleasant reading experience, however, as unpleasant as the subject matter might be.

A Family Secret is Heuvel’s graphic novel about Helena’s war-time experience, written from a scenario credited to Heuvel, Ruud van der Rol, Menno Metselaar of the Anne Frank House and Hans Groeneweg of the Resistance Museum of Friesland. That sounds like a lot of experts to have in the room, and it shows in the book’s educational focus.

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The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My

Written & Illustrated by Tove Jansson

Published by Drawn & Quarterly

D&Q’s done very nice work collecting Tove Jansson’s trippy and delightful comic strip Moomin into a series of high-quality hardcovers. Every successive edition has been a treat of silliness, whimsical logic, family values and bizarre rural landscapes. Moomin, however, did not begin life as a comic strip. Rather, Ms. Jansson’s odd little hippopotamus-like family had their origins in children’s books. Later, picture books followed, and in 1954, the comic strip finally debuted. Justified by the success of the charming comic strip archives, D&Q has begun creating replica editions of the Moomin picture books, starting with 1952’s The Book of Moomin, Mymble and Little My.

For readers familiar with Jansson’s Moomin comics, experiencing Moomin’s travails in the form of a picture book is likely to be somewhat familiar – the whimsical tone and uplifting outlook remain unmolested – and jarring – the reliance on rhyme and rhythm make for a very different reading experience. Whether the experience is better, worse or simply different is going to be entirely on each reader. I found the simply rhyming scheme slightly distracting, repeatedly losing any sense of what was occurring. Yet Jansson’s language, marked by references to unusual creates like the Hattifatteners, flows confidently, moving Moomin and Mymble (and My) from one surprising circumstance to the next with certainty and inimitable style.

Jansson’s loopy illustrations seem to benefit from the format, as her use of simple color schemes and the larger canvas afforded by the page size offer a more perplexing and delirious vision of MoominValley. The book’s most obvious feature is that every page has a cut-away section, allowing peeks into the preceding and succeeding pages. The windows into the future don’t provide much story value other than to play off each page’s final rhyme, inevitably a suggestion to guess what zaniness will occur next, but certainly many young readers will enjoy the game.

Although the picture book does not match the dream-logic, wandering stories of the Moomin comic strip (which comes thoroughly recommended), D&Q’s first replica edition of Tove Jansson’s picture books, The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My is still a trippy good time, and suggested reading for anybody with young children who enjoy adventurous tales in fanciful lands.  And it’s a treat to see comics publishers expanding their repertoire with diverse graphic storytelling projects.

As a comics critic, I’m not terribly fond of the anthology format. They’re extremely difficult to write reviews of, and I’m hardly ever satisfied with the reviews that result any time I do try to tackle one.

That’s due mostly to the very nature of anthologies (Well, that and the fact that I’m not as good a writer as I’d like sometimes, but I prefer to blame the format). Even those with strong, unifying themes will involve different creators on each story, and inevitably some creators will be better than other or, in the rare case where they’re all excellent, they will all be excellent in very different ways.

So every time I sit down to write a review for an anthology, I generally end up walking away from my laptop disappointed with the results—they always seem to be some variation of “This is an anthology consisting of stories tied together by this particular theme. Some of these stories were good, and some of them were not.”

As a comics reader, however, I’ve found that anthologies can be a lot of fun, introducing you to new creators and/or characters in rapid succession after a relatively low-risk investment of time and money.

Among my favorite to read are the sorts of holiday specials that mainstream publishers occasionally put out, for these very reasons. And for the Halloween ones, the grab-bag nature of anthologies seems particularly apropos, as reading them can parallel the experience of trick-or-treating. One stop you might get a little box of Dots or a York peppermint patty, the next you might get a Tootsie roll or one of those hard, brown blobs that come wrapped in plain black or orange wrappers and smell vaguely of peanuts.

Yesterday’s new comics day brought two such Halloween-prompted anthologies—DC/Vertigo’s House of Mystery Halloween Annual #1 and Image Comics’ The Perhapanauts Halloween Spooktacular #1—so I thought I’d try trick or treating in those two particular neighborhoods. Both books were also promoted as good jumping-on points for the various serials, and since I have yet to read a single issue of either House of Mystery or The Perhapanauts, I thought I might be well-positioned to serve as a test case for how effective they were at meeting those goals.

So grab your metaphorical costume and metaphorical treat bag and join me after the jump for some metaphorical trick or treating. (The “jump,” by the way, is also metaphorical).

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Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics and Zot!, has written an interesting post up on comics criticism — specifically, looking at negative reviews.

For myself, I always consider reviews useful—even the hatchet jobs. It makes my heart sink a little when I hear other artists dismiss all reviews as irrelevant to their process. A common claim is that reviews tell us “only about the reviewer” and tell us “nothing about the work,” but I disagree. Yes, reviewers have biases. Yes, they miss the point sometimes. But there’s always some kind of information embedded in any reaction to any creative effort.

As someone who writes reviews on a fairly regular basis, I think the idea of how the industry sees these things is really important. The best reviews — the way they should work, or at least the way I hope they work — is not only to give notice to like-minded consumers of whether or not it’s a praiseworthy effort, but to also be an advocate for readers, to respectfully let creators know what works and doesn’t work for us. In a perfect world, reviewers’ reactions to the work — even if they’re off the mark — give everyone some perspective.

But it doesn’t always work that way. Are there some reviewers with an axe to grind out there? Oh, yeah, I’d believe it — I’ve seen plenty of industry folks I know and respect have calls to be fired, have streams of invective sent their way because someone didn’t like — or worse yet, didn’t get — the work in question. Sometimes, nostalgia wins out — I’m sure you can think of status quo changes that are more controversial than others. Other times, things are lost in translation. Sometimes that’s the reviewers’ fault — other times, it’s a question of clarity on the creators’ part.

But, similar to what McCloud says at the end of his post, the most important thing — the only important thing — that a reviewer needs to have is that regardless of who you’re reviewing, regardless the character or status quo, the thing that’s most important is that a reviewer should want the industry to succeed and keep moving onwards. The story and its presentation — not the politics or inside baseball — is all that matters in comics criticism. What do you think? Fans, industry people, let us know what you think!