I’m just going to go ahead and say it: I think X-Men: Misfits Vol. 1 (Del Rey Manga) is the single best X-Men story I’ve experienced since Grant Morrison brought his run on New X-Men to a close.

Writers Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman and artist Anzu have a lot of definite advantages over the creators toiling away in Marvel Comics’ X-Men mines, of course—they’re not beholden to decades worth of continuity or the designs and characterizations of other creators, and they don’t have to line-up what they’re doing with what, say, the people over in the Avengers office are up to that month.

In this manga-style “remix” of the X-Men (to use the back of the book’s own word for this particular sort of reimagining), the creators are free to take whatever core concepts they think work best, and rebuild the X-Men franchise from the ground up as they see fit. They do an incredible job, and it was downright uncanny how they managed to make the X-Men into something that seemed completely new while still retaining much of their essential je ne X quoi.

Telgemeir and Roman retain the deep adolescent appeal of the mutants as stand-ins for kids who feel awkward, persecuted or alone (but, it turns out, are actually much more special than anyone else), and, if anything,  broaden the appeal beyond the normal metaphors and make it feel a little more universal.

They also retain basic elements that worked well from throughout the various eras of the comics: Xavier and Magneto’s differing views on on how humans and mutants relate, school-as-superhero team, Kitty Pryde as point-of-view character, and so on.

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It’s fitting that 28 Days Later has finally been made into a comic book. You can trace the current zombie boom straight back to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 2002 film, and while zombies have been increasingly popular in several media since, they’ve been particularly ubiquitous on the comics shelves, and show no signs of going away any time soon. After all, one of the best-selling super-comics at the moment is a zombie story grafted onto DC’s Green Lantern franchise.

So there’s a nice bit of symmetry to the very existence of Boom Studios’s 28 Days Later. It might be an even nicer bit of symmetry if it proved to be the ultimate zombie story, closing out our decade’s fascination with the living, shambling (and sometimes sprinting) dead and bringing a temporary end to the zombie craze.

I don’t see that happening though.

Not only is there no evidence that zombies are on the wane, but this comic doesn’t seemed poised to be the one that says everything there’s left to say about zombies for the time being. It’s not a bad comic, but it certainly doesn’t offer a revolutionary new take. Of course, given that it’s premised as a bridge between the original film and the 2007 sequel, it’s entire reason for being is to simply to keep the Later story going.

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The first issue of this new miniseries from Archaia read a great deal like the work of someone new to the comics medium. Which is a little shocking, considering it’s written by longtime comics artist and writer Phil Hester (who also provides one of the several covers) and illustrated by Frazer Irving, an artist who also has plenty of great comics work on his resume.

Hester gives way too much information about unimportant things on several pages (including two splash pages featuring static images of the protagonist with columns of text narration that seem more appropriate for a work of prose), and too little information about more important matters.

Presumably in an attempt to keep a little mystery about the protagonist and premise, Hester lets the entire first issue slip by without giving readers much more than hints of what may come in future issues, or even answering pretty obvious questions that arise in the course of the story. Not only do the creators tell when they should show, sometimes they’re a little too coy about even telling.

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When two nations go to war, neither one wins. Well, actually, one side usually wins, but that victory is fleeting. In the next encounter, the winner is just as likely to end up the loser, and that cycle of conflict can continue forever. That seems to be the message of Antonio Prohias’ Spy Vs. Spy strips: One day you’re clubbing/shooting/poisoning/bombing/dropping a boulder on your foe, the next you’re being clubbed/shot/poisoned/bombed/having a boulder dropped on you.

The late Prohias’ Spy Vs. Spy was, of course, a mainstay in Mad magazine, where it enjoyed a 26 year run under his pen (and where it still continues, currently under Peter Kuper). In that time, it was often the magazine’s most accessible feature: Silent, short and physical-comedy driven, one didn’t need to know anything about politics or pop culture to get it…hell, one didn’t even need to know how to read.

For those whose favorite part of Mad was Spy Vs. Spy, publisher Watson-Guptill has a couple of treats: Republications of three paperback collections, subtitled Danger! Intrigue! Stupidity!, Missions of Madness and Masters of Mayhem. Each is in the basic format of a manga digest, making them perfectly constructed to share shelf-space in libraries and book stores, and is around the cost of a manga volume as well ($12 a pop).

The collections aren’t divided into volumes, and it hardly matters what order one reads them in, or if one bothers with more than one—Prohias’ strips are all self-contained, and there’s no larger story that needs to be followed, no state of affairs that isn’t completely re-set with each new strip, beyond the fact that the black spy and the white spy are always trying to get the better of one another.

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“7 True Tales of Internet Horror” by Keith Knight

This apparently isn’t actually a story per se, but an introduction to the rest of the volume, although I did not discover that until I got to the final panel, in which Knight lists his seventh tale of Internet horror as “Finding out the intro you were asked to do for MySpace Dark Horse Presents was due last week!!”

So, poor job of introducing the introduction as an introduction, although it is a decent introduction of what follows in that it is a typical Keith Knight cartoon, and an anthology that contains a typical Keith Knight cartoon is one that’s probably going to include a great deal of variety, since no one has such a disciplined loose style as Knight, nor the ability to rely heavily on verbal wit without seeming to be trying to overcompensate at all (A word-less Knight strip would still be pretty hilarious, so adept is he at drawing funny faces, and moving from image to image).

Also, its inclusion demonstrates that whoever put the anthology together has pretty good taste, which is a good sign.

“Murderous Intent” by Mike Mignola and Ben Stenbeck

Your typical Mike Mignola story, which is either a good or bad thing, depending on the degree of affection you have for Mignola’s writing and the amount of patience you have with the endless variations of a government agent guy versus the supernatural (with the supernatural presented with enough historical detail that they feel genuine, or at least based on real historical facts, whether they actually are or not).

This one stars Edward Grey, star of Mignola’s Witchfinder series. Stenbeck is credited with art, but many of the panels look so Mignola-esque that I would not call you a liar if you told me he penciled or inked it himself.

That’s not necessarily a criticism of Stenbeck, by the way. Being able to do a very convincing Mignola impression is probably a virtue in drawing a Mignola-verse story.

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I usually try to review a comic or two here on the weekends, but my review stack has gotten pretty out of control, so I figured instead of shaving a little off the top, I’d try to make a more sizable dent in it. So below you’ll find reviews of five comics and graphic novels from the last few months.

Empowered Vol. 5 (Dark Horse Comics) Adam Warren’s one-man graphic novel series has reached the point where reviewing each new volume seems a little beside the point. You’re either reading or your not, and if you’re not, you should be. Or at least, you should be if you like, love or maybe even loathe superheroes.

Empowered remains not only the funniest superhero comic on the stands, but also the most mature and sophisticated, which itself seems like a joke given the series’ start in superhero parody, shameless cheesecakery and bondage gags that would make William Moulton Marston blush.

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I’ve missed writing reviews but don’t quite have it in me to write a long review of everything I bought this week. Instead, I bring you exactly Twitter-length comic reviews. (Be thankful they’re not in haiku. I might still do that someday.)

Hellboy: The Wild Hunt #5: Worth the wait, yet now I have to dig through piles of comics to remind myself what was going on. Still love Hellboy vs. Irish Myth, though.

DMZ #44: No Future: Ryan Kelly drew Zee! Also, the most haunting DMZ story in a while — deviations from the main story are often more compelling than Matty is.

The Unwritten #4: Shift to twisted Hitchcockian suspense-horror comic here. And killer line: “Stories that hit the world like bombs.” My favorite new series?

The main conflict at the heart of Kimi Ni Todoke (Viz) has a problem that will be familiar to anyone who’s seen very many American teen movies. Fifteen-year-old Sawako Kuronuma is extremely unpopular at school, and said to look like the scary little girl in Ringu, thus frightening all her classmates.

Yet just as Rachael Leigh Cooke with long hair and glasses is just as beautiful as Rachael Leigh Cooke with short hair and contacts, Sawako’s obviously drawn as a very pretty girl and, in fact, her attractiveness is part of the plot—Kazehaya, the most popular boy in class, is apparently secretly in love with her.

Manga-ka Karuho Shiina, who obviously has a lot more leeway than a Hollywood director, gets around that dilemma by keeping Sawako’s physical features consistent, but often framing her the way the villain or monster in another manga might be framed.

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Review: Big Funny

Big Funny Web site, 16″ x 23″, 48 pages, $5 US

(a co-production of Altered Esthetics, The International Cartoonist Conspiracy and Big Time Attic)

It doesn’t happen all at once. First, there is the longest silence, as if nothing has changed, followed by a cry inspired by nostalgia until, finally, we all wake up to a world without printed newspapers. Maybe there will always be some newspapers but it won’t be the same. However, through nostalgia, we can find ways to move forward. And so a comic strip anthology printed on an old timey oversized newspaper is welcome as something to enjoy and learn from.

The biggest thing about Big Funny is that it is a celebration of the comic strip art form and, by extension, of how it all came about it in the first place. We owe a lot to the comic strip pioneers. They set up the ground rules and, in a lot of ways, we cartoonists still follow them. And, in a broader sense, we all are influenced to some extent by the way the original cartoonists went about telling a story or joke.

The first comic strip in the collection is “Hey Kids, Comics!” by Terry Beatty. Here we find the very first star of the comic strips, The Yellow Kid, now quite elderly. In a quick and snappy fashion, as only comics can do, we’re given a brief history of comics. This is nicely followed up by “Little Emo in Slumbaland,” by Jesse Gillespie, which is one of the best you’ll find here. A landmark in comics is tweaked for a new generation. The title alone is clever but Gillespie delivers with a beautiful tribute to Winsor McCay. And no one can deny that Kevin Cannon provides an excellent tribute to the adventure strip with “Army Men.”

The goal of Big Funny, as it called for talent, was to seek out assorted views from various backgrounds, inside and outside the comics community. In that all-inclusive spirit, there are plenty of comic strips here that don’t look like comic strips. There’s the comic strip oil painting by painter Bjorn Rolvaag. There’s “Vis, Croatia: The Ride,” by printmaker Jenny Schmid. Some of my favorites that stretch comics quite nicely are “The Teenage Ghost Hunting Society,” by B. Sabo, “Pumpkinship” by Maxeem, and “Dear Friends,” by Britt Hammerberg.

With forty-five different views of what you can do with a comic strip, Big Funny is like your own personal tour of a comics festival. For my part, I contributed “Inkwellspring,” an offbeat take on today’s family comic strips. On the other end of the spectrum is “Living in Filth,” by Hawk Krall, a hilarious look at aging rebels whose routine these days includes a trip to Pottery Barn. If you like political satire, you’ll like the sharp wit of “Banana Republic,” by Kirk Anderson. All in all, a nice selection of comics anyway you look at it.

Last but not least, is “Ticket to Crickety Creek,” by the late William R. Ede. His son, Craig Ede, provides an essay in loving memory of his father. We find Will Ede to have been, like most cartoonists, very passionate and determined. We will never know what might have been had some editor, down the line, said, “yes,” instead of, “no.” William Ede kept his day job as a postman for 30 years. He may have complained from time to time but he remained persistent. He loved to draw trains and alligators and that’s what he did. Whether he should have succeeded then or whether his art should succeed now is not the question. He did what he had to do. If you look at the comic strip in Big Funny, you’ll see why.

No wonder artists count so much on posterity. It can be only after death, even if only on newsprint, that some art just begins to live.

Here is a list of the contributing artists to Big Funny. There will be an art show by the same name on August 7th at Altered Esthetics where the anthology will premiere and some of the artists will show their original work. This will also be the premiere of a bonus set of comics at the show, Little Funny:

“Hey Kids, Comics!” by Terry Beatty

“Little Emo in Slumbaland” by Jesse Gillespie

“Little Miss Mechanical’s Bedtime Amusement” by Diana Nock

“There is a Heppy Plonet” by Mike Sgier

“Captain Kleinbottle” by Jason Sandberg

“Hey Rube!” by Daniel J. Olson

“Army Men” by Kevin Cannon

“Classics Majors…in Love!” by Ursula Murray Husted

“Tommy Chicago and Jimmy” by Brian Bastian and Danno Klonowski

“Oil Painting” by Bjorn Rolvaag

“Banana Republic” by Kirk Anderson

“Citizen Participation in Hell” by Ken Avidor

“The Teenage Ghost Hunting Society” by B. Sabo

“Vis,Croatia: The Ride” by Jenny Schmid

“Residue Comics: Krack-Up” by Roger Lootine

“Middle Management” by Andy Singer

“Mark Droppings” by BIll Prendergast

“Dewey Dawner” by Madeline Queripel

“Post Modern” by David Sandberg

“Flying Boy!” by Lewis Tuck

“Authoritative Expert J. Wiggins” by Bud Burgy

“Squirrels and Pigeons” by Caanan Grall

“Eye of the Beholder” by Adam Wirtzfeld

“Uncle $achs” by Donn Ha

“The Madcap Shenanigans of Randolph & Sir Chirptrude, Esq.” by Lonny Unitus

“Gee, Whizzard!” by Kevin McCarthy

“Nate the Nonconformist” by Stephanie Mannheim

“Rampage!” by Erik Nelson

“Inkwellspring” by Henry Chamberlain

“Laffit Forward!” by Blake Himsl Hunter

“The Further Adventures of Vegan Ninja Cats (Who Ride Bikes)” by Mike Toft

“Living in Filth” by Hawk Krall

“Rocket Steven” by Earl Luckes

“Talewinds: Little Jimmy” by Steve Mason

“L’il Buddha and the Hungry Ghost Realm” by Ryan Dow

“Dear Friends” by Britt Hammerberg

“A Breast Abreast” by Lupi

“Uptown Girl” by Bob Lipski

“Underground Funnies” by D.C. McNamara

“Adventure!” by David Steinlicht

“Bongo the Monkey” by Steven Stwalley

“Pumpkinship” by Maxeem

“Look” by David Paleo

“Pickle-Head” by Paul Fricke

“Ticket to Crickety Creek” by William Ede

I think we can all agree that there are few things in this world as cool as comic books, and that one of those things is probably dinosaurs. This explains why comic books about dinosaurs tend to be fairly awesome, and Hitoshi Shioya’s Dinosaur Hour, a recent offering from the Viz Kids line, is no exception.

Yes, it’s a kids book (recommended for kids ages 9-12 on Amazon), and yes, it’s educational, but don’t hold any of that against it. It’s also a pretty funny sketch comedy starring various dinosaurs from various periods of prehistoric history. The comedy is all physical or character driven, to the extent that the dinosaurs are able to develop personalities in their few page appearances, and is otherwise pretty much realistic and naturalistic.

Basically, it’s a slice of life comedy starring a bunch of dinosaurs.

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The question: Can you really enjoy Blackest Night if you’re outside the fanbase?

I think so.

While I don’t see myself as part of the base, I feel that I’ve thrown myself into a different orbit than I’m used to and I’m not sure where I’ll end up. I’ll explain and I will offer up some other questions to which you, my friends, are welcome to offer back whatever insight you like.

The first thing that strikes me about Blackest Night #1 is how smooth it is. The story does not feel like it is trying too hard to explain itself which is a blessing if you’re coming to this, shall we say, cold and in the dark.

I felt welcome right from the start. Even more than I did by Green Lantern: Rebirth or The Sinestro Corps War. Maybe that has to do with the sense of urgency coming from all the talent involved, especially Geoff Johns, to finally deliver the goods. And yet it didn’t feel so much like a comics event as it felt like something that was working the way it should.

It didn’t matter to me anymore if I didn’t know every last detail and reference. It can be fun to go into this without any prior knowledge at all. But, I admit, the more you know, the more you’ll enjoy it. Just being able to refer back to the last issue of GL and reread the rise of Black Hand added something. And the same is true for going back to the now famous Free Comic Book Day Blackest Night #0. That special issue offered some interesting clues, I think, about how Bruce Wayne could hold the key to returning back to the light. This isn’t a spoiler, just my guess. Does that sound right?

I have to say that a little of the space opera aspect of GL goes a long way for my taste. I prefer character development, conversation and understanding motives. Growing up, I found the action scenes in Superman and Spider-Man to be cool but understanding what made them tick to be even cooler. Blackest Night is sensitive to this. For instance, I think the scenes with Hawkman are intriguing like when he goes into a rage over the phone with The Atom as he is attempting to shield him from harm. He tries to explain to Kendra why he must refuse The Atom’s wishes as we cut to a panel of a tiny speck of a superhero sitting on the edge of a gigantic desk, relative to his size, waiting by the giant phone. Hawkman saying, “She made The Atom feel small,” is corny and perfect in the spirit of Alan Moore.

Little moments like that add up nicely. But what about little continuity issues and the like? I just wonder what you all think about the many layers to the GL universe. On the one hand, I think it is fun to be challenged to follow the many paths in this narrative. On the other, this goes back to an older way of reading comics when you needed a program to follow the action not to mention a number of tie-in comics. Maybe it’s the best of all possible worlds since the flagship title is so strong you could do just fine to focus on it but, if you’re so inclined, you could also buy all the other related comics too.

So, why isn’t GL more popular? I mean, believe it or not, there are plenty of people inside the comics community who are not even dimly aware of what’s going on in the GL universe. When you have something as special as Blackest Night, people should pay more attention. I wonder if the problem with GL’s overall low profile goes back to its rather creaky origins. It’s only been after decades of development, that we find ourselves with something cool. GL simply does not resonate with people in the same way that Batman and Superman do. That may change. A major motion picture is no guarantee but we’ll have to wait and see.

Ironically, reading the retro version of GL in Wednesday Comics, all New Frontier style, was very refreshing to me. And I wouldn’t be surprised if something like that is what gets presented to the general public when the movie comes out.

Getting back to Blackest Night, the bottom line is that this series moves the ball forward considerably. In fact, if you really want to stir things up, forget about going back to Abin Sur, just make this into a movie and, if it’s done right, this would be your summer blockbuster.

My choice of image here probably gives you some idea of what I loved about the latest Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. And yes, watching Ginny Weasley turn into a confident, proactive woman is a treat–especially in a world that while created by a woman author, provides very few standout heroines.

I adore Hermione. I can relate to the girl who knows the answer to everything in school but feels left out by the attention paid to her male friends, who brushes off the male attention she gets because it’s not coming from the one person she wants. But the rest of the girls in the Potterverse are cackling villains like Bellatrix Lestrange–watching Helena Bonham Carter chew scenery here is a treat, but she’s a one-note character–or giggling girls like Lavendar Brown or Romilda Vane, who serve mostly to teach us that our heroes are indeed desirable, despite their endearing adolescent fumbling. (Molly Weasley’s moment of vengeance in the seventh book is sublime, but until then she’s largely relegated to worrying at home about her family.)

So Ginny Weasley, effortlessly skilled at Quidditch and Bat-Bogey Hexes, popular with the boys, who chooses Harry, not the other way around, is a wonderful character. I find myself for the first time hoping for a change from the books for the seventh installment, because Ginny was cruelly underused in Deathly Hallows.

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So as print media and especially print newspapers are dying, DC comics decides to put out a print comic that mimics newspaper funny pages. Is this brilliant, or ridiculous?

In this case, it’s brilliant. The comics are high kitsch, pure throwbacks to the heyday of newspaper comics. Highlights for me include the hilarious double entendre-a-line Metamorpho scripted by Neil Gaiman, Superman with Lee Bermejo’s utterly stunning art, and Ben Caldwell’s hallucinatory Wonder Woman. Really, though, there’s not a miss in here–and this is coming from a girl who is lukewarm at best on superheroes and has little to no healthy nostalgia for the days of yore.

But the media theorist in me wants to take this a step further. Wednesday Comics seems like an epitaph for newspapers in general and newspaper comics in particular, a tribute especially pulled together for a dying medium. The very fact that DC puts out something like this, on newsprint, is as loud a signal as any I’ve seen that we probably won’t be seeing comics in newspapers much longer. If we still had a vibrant newspaper culture, no one would find it deliciously different to buy comics printed this way.

I regret the death of the broadsheet print newspaper as a cultural artifact more than I do as a personal choice–I’ve never liked getting ink on my fingers and have never really been able to read a paper cover to cover. By the time I started jonesing for news, we already had the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet. But like most people, I remember reading the funny pages as a kid (Garfield was always my favorite).

Superhero comics carry that same kind of reassuring nostalgia for most of their audience. People grow up with Superman–life might change, fall apart, but there will always be Superman. The characters chosen for Wednesday Comics are those same classic characters, and the writers and artists are some of the biggest names in the business. The message of the whole project seems to be: Newspapers might be dead, kids, but Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman? They aren’t going to leave you.

It’s a well-done project, though, and the pure joy and love for the medium shines through and tosses some residual afterglow onto the newsprinted page. It won’t slow the shift to digital media, but it will certainly be an artifact worth keeping.

Low Moon, the latest release of one-named  Norweigian  cartoonist Jason from Fantagraphics, is a hard book to review, as the previous sentence probably tells readers all they need to know about it.

Jason is one of the relatively few working artists that even a jaded, cynical, complain-first critic like me will happily declare a true master cartoonist, without reservation. Jason is—how to put this?—good. Really, really, really good. Good enough that even the very worst of his work that I’ve seen, a handful of the early pieces he’s done, collected in Pocket Full of Rain and Other Stories, are fascinating in light of what he would come to do after those works, and how they signal and reflect his future work.

So, Low Moon? It’s Jason. It’s new. It’s obviously really, really good, you know?

(Can I get away with a three-paragraph review? Or does that look too lazy? It does? Alright, alright; more after the jump then).

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Kevin Cannon is one half of Big Time Attic, the art studio that’s worked with writer Jim Ottaviani on some of his best science-fueled comics, T-Minus: The Race to the Moon, Stuff of Life and, my personal favorite, Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards.

If the production of those books can be considered analogous to the work of a rock band, then Cannon’s Far Arden (Top Shelf) is his solo side project. Sure, he might have been a perfect drummer, keeping the beat while half obscured by his bass drum in the background, while Ottaviani and fellow artist Zander Cannon dominated the stage, but it turns out Kevin  Cannon can write, sing and play guitar just as well as his bandmates. And man, can he shred.

The story of Far Arden is a wild one, but there’s a structure to the wildness, so all of the seemingly random happenstances and coincidences, the betrayals, reversals and unlikely alliances, the big reveals and zany plot points ultimately make a sort of sense. Parts of Far Arden might seem completely, hilariously insane, but never just for insanity’s sake—Cannon’s gags all serve his story.

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Directed and Written by: Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Joon-ho Bong

Tokyo! is out on DVD and may I suggest it as a weekend rental or for the next chance you get.

Tokyo! is not only a thought-provoking showcase of three films by three talented directors but it has a very cool comics connection: Gabrielle Bell collaborates with Michel Gondry to bring one of her comics in Cecil and Jordan in New York to the screen in the first film, “Interior Design.” She also provides some charming opening credits artwork.

You don’t have to be familiar with Gabrielle Bell’s work to enjoy the first film but it does add to it. Just imagine a quirky creative New Yorker bringing you in close to what it can feel like struggling to just stay afloat in the sink or swim big city. If you know Gabrielle’s work, then all the better since the DVD special features have a couple of segments with her and Gondry discussing how tricky it was to take a New York sensibility and place it in Tokyo. Of course, some things are universal and that is made clear in this film. While site specific, there is an interplay between the general and the specific. These stories could occur just about anywhere on our fragile global village.

“Interior Design” is about a young couple, Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani) and Akira (Ryo Kase), finding their way in the big city. They start by crashing at a friend’s tiny apartment but they quickly wear out their welcome. Akira is promptly established to the viewer as a shallow opportunist. But it is Hiroko who can’t catch a break from anyone. Just as she spots a menial job tailor-made for her, Akira snatches it up. Having left herself in charge of all the drab details while Akira pursues being an artist, she finds herself quite literally fading away.

Ironically, Akira is capable of artful observation when he least expects it. On a walk, and avoiding a serious discussion, Akira talks about how all the buildings refuse to touch each other and how ghosts reside within the gaps. Hiroko, who should know better, is impatient with Akira’s poetic musings. And she’s very dismayed with herself. In a moment of clarity, Akira tells her she must find the one thing she excels at and do it better than anyone else. In a fantastical way, worthy of Kafka, that is exactly what Hiroko does.

“Merde!” the second film, is more than just the story of the latest viral video sensation. It certainly keeps getting darker and deeper than you can digest in a video clip. The opening scene blasts off like a rocket and, in itself, is a must-see: a manhole cover pops off and out jumps a filthy little man with wild red hair, a marble white eye, pointy beard, and a tight-fitting green outfit. He proceeds to slam his way through anyone and everyone down a busy sidewalk, grabbing flowers about to be delivered, snatching a crutch from a man in midstep, and licking the armpit of a young woman for good measure. The rampage is caught on video, off the cell phone from the licked young woman and a star is born.

Director Leos Carax attempts to create a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Godzilla and succeeds. The actor Denis Lavant is so out there as the “creature from the sewers” that he is The Other’s Other and brings up still unsettled issues for Japan and Otherness. It is only with the assistance of a prominent French attorney, wonderfully played by Jean-Francois Balmer, who suspiciously looks a little too much like the creature, that finally an articulate voice is given to insanity. In time, everyone will think they know the creature and have an opinion about him.

No one really knows anyone else in these three films. That disconnection leads to some highly unusual developments. In the last film, “Shaking Tokyo,” directed by Joon-ho Bong, the main character is a hikikomori, or shut-in, played by Teruyuki Kagawa, and so appears to have given up right from the start. He is quite content with his life of quiet routine although he realizes something is missing. It is not until an earthquake, and all the coming together that follows, that he clumsily crosses paths with a beautiful young woman who was just about to deliver to him a pizza when she’s bonked on the head during the quake. When she comes to, she is mesmerized by all the neatly stacked toilet tissue rolls, not to mention the temple created by empty pizza boxes. It moves her to go over and correct the placement of one of the boxes. A match has been made. More will transpire, as love is not so easy. It is a warm and delightful story of one man rebelling against the disconnection within him and around him. A wonderful way to conclude this study in alienation.

Today is Wednesday, which means one thing to me—It’s my own personal weekly holiday, known around the Caleb household as Comic Book Day.

Today is a special Comic Book Day though, as not only is it Wednesday, not only is it Comic Book Day, but it’s Wednesday Comics Comic Book Day, the Wednesday on which the first issue of DC’s Wednesday Comics is published.

Like a lot of folks who like great comics, I’ve been kind of looking forward to this book. It’s got several artists contributing who are on my own personal Will Buy Anything From list, including Joe Kubert, Paul Pope, Mike Allred and Kyle Baker. And those are just four of the, let’s see, 28 creators contributing 16 ongoing features starring DC’s biggest, most popular heroes (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash), weirdest, oddball characters (Metamorpho, The Metal Men) and pretty much everything in between.

But beyond that, I’ve been looking forward to this issue because I was so intensely curious about it.

I knew the facts regarding the book (if “book” is even the right word for it), that it would be the size and shape of a regular-sized comic book, but unfold into 14-inch-by-20-inch pages that look and feel like newspaper, thus evoking the sort of comics section that hasn’t even existed since before my life time. But I honestly had no idea how that was going to look, read and feel. Not until I had it in my hands, anyway.

And hey, now it’s in my hands!

I wasn’t quite sure the best way to go about reviewing it, so I figured I would just pseudo-liveblog my reading of it. That is, I’ll review it as I read it. Or rather, I’ll read it, and then review it as I re-read it, so it’s as if I’m reviewing it as I’m reading it. So join me after the jump to read me writing while reading over my own shoulder. Or something like that.

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The return of Peter Milligan to Vertigo just keeps on getting better. His take on John Constantine is going to new and interesting places–not easy for a character as old as Constantine–and now with this first issue of a new ongoing series, Milligan’s teamed up with Davide Gianfelice for a nasty little tale rooted in Greek myths and stories.

Anyone familiar with the story of Oedipus will recognize the plot of this first issue, but there’s no need to bone up on your classics to enjoy this story. You do need a strong stomach and a taste for the perverse–but if you’re a Vertigo reader, you already knew that, right?

Eddie is just a kid looking for his mom, but that goes about as spectacularly wrong as it can possibly go, and he runs off to Greek Street, the part of town run by criminals and other lowlifes, and watched over by gorgeous strippers who know all the dirtiest secrets.

This first issue sets up a bunch of loose ends will probably only get more tangled before any of them get resolved, and just begins to set up its world and its rules. There’s magic here, but how much and of what kind and how it will be blended with the gritty, cruel criminal underworld we just don’t know.

What we do know is that it’s vintage Vertigo, with Gianfelice’s luscious art making even the most gruesome scenes beautiful and otherworldly and at the same time making the horror truly gripping, visceral. If this book lives up to this first issue, it’s going to be a hell of a ride.

From DC Comics

Written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti

Art by Cristiano Cucina

Jonah Hex #45, Part Two of Six of “The Six Gun War” is an impressive page-turner and easily a great place to jump in. This series has gone through a number of artists since its relaunch with the shift in styles from one story to the next sometimes jarring. But the current story arc is looking quite good with the robust style of Cristiano Cucina. A dramatic page from the previous issue, a depiction of gunmen and horses swirling in a tornado, opens this multi-layered tale with a promising flair that delivers throughout.

Like any good Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, the beauty of the plot lies in its utter simplicity. Johah Hex has been wronged and he is out for revenge. And, like most Eastwood films, we are initially pushed away from an unlikable character while being pulled in as we become curious about what’s going on inside. Hex certainly has that push/pull dynamic. Half his face is hideously deformed from some past misadventure for one thing. He’s also a fairly ruthless bounty hunter.  And yet he does have a sense of justice, however rough it might be. And he may even have a heart.

In “Six Gun War,” it looks like we’ll get to explore a bit more of what makes Hex tick. The writing team of Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti have done a great job of capturing the feel of the old existential spaghetti westerns that you can just about here an Ennio Morricone soundtrack in the background. The series has gone from one adventure to the next. A lot of fools have attempted to kill Hex and he ends up killing them in the end. This time out, Hex has the help of a supernatural entity, El Diablo,who prods Hex to explain himself. But what really spices things up is the inclusion of Tallulah Black, a female desperado whose face and outlook on life is as twisted as that of Hex and she seems to be a little sweet on him, even though she adamantly denies it.

I have to admit that I never really gave Johan Hex much thought until Megan Fox but now I’m glad I’ve gotten to know the guy even though he’s a mighty hard fella to understand. If you get a copy of the first collected trade, Face Full of Violence, of the new Hex under the capable hands of Gray and Palmiotti, I’m sure you’ll find yourself reading the book in one sitting. The character, as odd as he is, grows on you.

I understand that the term “graphic novel” has some difficulties, particularly in the second half. After all, the term is used to refer to pretty much anything that is comics and has a spine, whether they’re actually the comics-equivalent of nonfiction or short stories.

To call a bound anthology of short, nonfiction comics a “graphic novel” might not be technically correct, so I can understand why someone might not want to use it.

I don’t understand what’s so wrong about the word “comics” though, or why anyone might think the word “picto-essays” is somehow preferable, as Brendan Burford apparently does, as he’s titled his extremely strong collection of comics Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays (Villard).

What does the term “picto-essays” really accomplish that that “comics” couldn’t have? Well, it makes the book seem incredibly pretentious, and the editor and/or publishers seem somewhat unfamiliar with and ashamed of the medium.

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