I have to say I sort of miss the days when Brian Wood did his own DMZ covers, but there was something about JP Leon’s cover to #45 that really struck me. I’m the furthest thing from an art critic, but there’s something oddly intense about the shadowy back here, the broad shoulders–funny how I never pictured Matty Roth looking threatening, menacing, but suddenly he does here, and it’s not just the gun.

Joshua Dysart’s Unknown Soldier is featured in the New York Times today.

Unknown Soldier is unflinching in its depiction of violence, and that comes across even more strongly in the collected edition, without the monthly break between issues. One particularly horrific scene deals with the disfigurement of the title character: an inner voice navigates him through the violence, but when he reaches his breaking point, he hacks at himself to try to silence it. That gruesome episode came from Mr. Dysart’s imagination; some details he learned from his trip, he said, were too awful for the comic.

[snip]

“I witnessed people at the lowest point of their lives, and I came back and turned it into an action-packed war comic,” he said. “We try our best not to be exploitative, but in my heart I don’t know if this is the right way to do it.”

I’m a fan of Unknown Soldier; I think Dysart’s efforts to bring attention to an area of the world through comics are worthy and I appreciate his own conflict about whether he’s doing the right thing. It’s nice to see the comic getting this kind of recognition.

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.

Before I go off to find fireworks and some sort of food on a stick (which I maintain is truly American) I’m going to give a quick shout to my favorite patriotic comic book.

It’s not Captain America. It’s certainly not any of the opportunistic Barack Obama comics to hit in the last few months.

It’s Transmetropolitan.

Yes, it’s filthy-mouthed sci-fi written by the British master of filthy-mouthed sci-fi, Warren Ellis. Even so, Transmet is indisputably American the same way Watchmen is. It’s a rough-and-tumble take on American politics, through the lens of a loathsome yet idealistic journalist and his slightly less loathsome Filthy Assistants.

And it’s the only comic I can think of that actually embodies some of the good things about America (and our politics).

Sure, Spider Jerusalem’s real loyalty is to the Truth, rendered in caps to make sure you understand that there is a truth and Spider’s telling it, but he also believes in democracy, free speech, and several other things that certainly aren’t uniquely American values. So why set the comic in the USA instead of in England?

The villains, if anything, seem more American–vile presidential candidates who want to slash at the Constitution or shit on poor people. And what could be more American than taking them on headlong with little backup and nothing more than a hunch that they’re the bad guy–and ultimately succeeding? That’s really the American dream, right?

Maybe it’s just me, but I see dissent as a value to be upheld. We were founded on it, weren’t we? And so for the Fourth of July, I’ll celebrate the right of journalists everywhere to make public officials lives’ hell for fun and righteousness.

And I swear I’m not going to inject heroin into my eyeballs.

With all the content that their blog the Source puts out, it’s perhaps no surprise that DC Comics would expand their online exposure for their other brands.

So you should take a look at Graphic Content, their new blog for Vertigo, as well as their Wildstorm blog, the Bleed.

Already announced on Vertigo’s end is that not only will Bill Willingham create a prose novel for Fables called Peter & Max, but Grant Morrison (of Batman and Seaguy fame) is hard at work on a title called Joe the Barbarian with artist Sean Murphy. Meanwhile, the Bleed has confirmed that Planetary #27 will ship in October, complete with a color page as proof.

Apparently in the latest Wizard magazine, Shia LeBouf says he doesn’t want to play Yorick in the upcoming Y: The Last Man movie:

“You take Sam and you put a monkey on his shoulder,” said LaBeouf of Yorick’s sidekick Ampersand. “I don’t know if it’s that big a differential. It seems like he’s the ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation again.”

That’s Shia LeBouf, saying that Sam from the Transformers movie is the same character as Yorick. Please, please, please let this be the end of any talk of him playing Yorick. It all stemmed from director D.J. Caruso, who had a firm movie relationship with LeBouf, making the suggestion years ago. This quote right here should say all anyone needs to about why he’s wrong for the role. To think that any of the nuance, emotion, and growth that ‘Rick displays throughout the story of Y could be portrayed by someone who thinks he’s the same character as “human 1″ in a robot action movie is quite simply nonsense.

So, that’s that. Shia LeBouf is not going to be Yorick (hooray!). So, who SHOULD be Yorick? I’d like to officially throw my hat in the ring, despite not having acted in about 9 years (call me!). Anyone else you’d like to see be the last man on earth?

[via Coming Soon]

It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m working and packing, so I thought I’d share with you all the fun things I stumbled across this week in the comics Web.

And since I mentioned webs, you have to check out the winners of Warren Ellis’s Spider Queen Remake/Remodel contest. From Ryan Kelly, Pia Guerra and Paul Sizer, three totally different and totally fabulous visions of a character from a one-paragraph description.

Comics come with teaser trailers now? Apparently so, and this one, for Jeff Lemire’s upcoming Vertigo book, The Nobody, is pretty cool.

Figures the night that I don’t watch Rachel Maddow she talks comics. From Comics Worth Reading, Archie’s Marriage on Maddow.

I’ve always got to have one overly academic link, don’t I? These are notes on a paper titled “Harshin Ur Squeez:Visual Rhetorics of Anti-Racist Work in LiveJournal Fandoms.” It sounds like a mouthful, but if that’s your thing, check it out.

And to wrap things up, a nice little post on “Growing up Vulcan” inspired by the new Star Trek movie (duh).

A month ago, I wrote of The Unwritten, “I haven’t been this stoked for a new series since I first read about DMZ.”

The first issue hits tomorrow, and I can assure you that my first (and second) instincts were correct.

The story starts with an excerpt from one of the Tommy Taylor books, which in the course of the story are prose but here are illustrated, panels fading into one another with text overlaid, bringing the first layer of the story–the novels–right into the main layer.

We’re swept from the novel into a comic convention, watching Tom Taylor defend his existence, first to actual writers who doubt his reasons for being there, then his fictional existence to an overexcited cosplayer (or is he?) and finally quite literally, to a fan who’s done some research and wants to know exactly who Tom is.

Far from just an existential crisis, Tom is thrown into a real crisis–his livelihood and even life are in danger.  Peter Gross’s art subtly underlines this point, spinning its point of view around Tom from panel to panel, leaving you off balance.

Insets of a Web news story and TV panels add more and more layers to Tom’s story, pulling every mass medium into the narrative and leaving the reader stuck with Tom, trying to figure out what’s really going on before a flying brick or an overintense fan or perhaps a villain straight out of fiction steps in to end Tom’s story for good.

This oversized first issue has more twists than entire series do, but unlike most first issues, it doesn’t define the rules of the world we’re reading. Instead it offers up rules only to shatter them, introduces characters only to turn them around.  The only rules it gives us are the rules of stories, and the rule there is that you can get away with anything if you can tell it convincingly. You can even start a religion if your story is good enough.

A lot of books have been offered up as spiritual heirs to Sandman, but The Unwritten, like Gaiman’s classic work, is a story about stories, though perhaps in a bit more concrete fashion–a story that explores the medium as well as the nature of stories.

Plus, it’s a dollar. So why not try it?

We’re all trying to make our comics dollars go farther in the recession, with prices going up and all. G. Willow Wilson has an offer to give you even more incentive to spend your money on her Eisner-nominated comic, Air.

From her blog:

Whacky as it is, AIR is a book with a message. So, for every copy of AIR bought this May Day (Friday, May 1st), I will donate $1 to the Koru Foundation, a UK-based charity that helps impoverished communites the world over develop low-cost renewable energy projects, bringing climate-friendly electricity to villages without a single light bulb. Ironically, the people most threatened by climate change are those who had the least responsibility in creating it. I saw this firsthand in North Africa, where desertification is already destroying ancient farming cultures. By acting now, we can help ease the burden on our planet while bringing power to communities without it.

Here is what to do:

1. On Friday, May 1st, click here to purchase a copy of AIR: Letters from Lost Countries from Amazon.com
2. Email info [at] gwillowwilson [dot] com. Write ‘May Day AIRlift’ in the Subject line. In the body of the email, copy and paste your Amazon order number. Do NOT include any financial information, your address, or anything else! Just the order number.
3. Sit back, wait for your book to arrive, and feel good about having done something for our planet.

She doesn’t mention buying from your local comic shop, but since we all also want to support our local businesses while money is tight, maybe there’s a way you can figure out to do that too?

Either way, if you’ve been waiting for a push to try Air, this is a good one. I personally highly recommend the book–it keeps getting better with each issue, and the first trade will certainly be worth your money no matter how you spend it. But why not do it when it’ll do something good for the world as well?

I’ll have more to say about this soon–now I feel guilty for only being spurred to read it recently.

I want to say this much about the book and why I think it was cancelled. It’s a very, very well done comic–the art is excellent, the writing is excellent, and the characters are compelling even when they’re being completely, horrendously awful to each other.

But it’s a very dark book–it leaves me feeling almost dirty in a way even Scalped and Northlanders, with their regular horrors, don’t. At first you think that it’s going to be a wild, fun ride–the mixtapes, the craziness–but soon you realize that there’s something far stranger going on beneath the surface, and within the shifting characters and plots only one thing is certain: none of these people are very likable, and something really twisted is going on underneath it all.

The book is meaner than the other two I’ve mentioned. Sure, people do awful things to each other in most Vertigo books, but this one seems to laugh at them when horrible things are happening. I wouldn’t want to keep reading if I didn’t think that this itself was a commentary on society, on what goes on in the book and on us all.

I have a pretty twisted sense of humor and it takes a lot to unnerve me. I love Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis and giggle mercilessly at things that my friends are shocked by. Yet I don’t like shock value for shock value’s sake, or gross-out for gross-out’s sake. I have little use, for instance, for Wanted. So the fact that Young Liars both gives me the creeps and compels me to keep reading, makes me want to run for the showers and makes me very sad that it’s canceled, is an impressive feat.

The train brings me strange thoughts sometimes.

Today, reading something academic and completely unrelated to Vikings, violence, conquest or comics, I started thinking about the Northlanders arc that just wrapped up, The Cross + The Hammer. Since each arc on this book has been drawn by a different artist, I’ve taken to referring to them by the name of the artist. This was “Ryan Kelly Northlanders,” and it was shaped by Kelly’s art. I’ve loved everything Kelly has done with Brian Wood, and this story was no exception, but thinking about it today brought me sharply back to the similarities and differences from those previous books (Local and The New York Four, for you heathens who don’t read good comics).

On the surface, The Cross + the Hammer is a cop drama set back in Viking-occupied Ireland, with a rebel Irishman murdering any Norsemen he can lay his sword, axe, or bare hands upon. At first glance, it looks like CSI: 1014, but there’s far more depth to this book than David Caruso could ever hope to achieve with sunglasses and smirk.

(Tried to keep this relatively spoiler-free, but just in case…you’ve been warned.) (more…)

Ever since the Vertigo panel at NYCC, I’ve been waiting impatiently for The Unwritten, Mike Carey and Peter Gross’s new Vertigo series.

Carey, in his Newsarama interview, said:

Emotionally, it’s the appeal of going back to the wellspring - the source of the Nile. We all have stories that colonise and inhabit bits of our minds, and there’s a kind of magic in turning our vision inwards to look at them directly. Conceptually, it’s like making a story that’s a moebius strip, angling away from the fictional reality and then feeding back into it from an unexpected angle. A very post-modern thing, to use that loaded phrase, but if it’s done right it can be both fun and revelatory.

This month’s Bang! Tango came with a preview of The Unwritten in the back, and ratcheted my excitement up another notch–I haven’t been this stoked for a new series since I first read about DMZ.

The Unwritten promises to be metafiction in the best way–a story about a story. The tagline on the cover of the preview is “Stories are the only things worth dying for,” and it gave me chills.

The story starts off in a fan convention much like the comic-cons we all love, with Peter Gross’s beautiful art rendering Tom Taylor an attractive, uncomfortable-looking man easily thrown off his game by his own inner discomfort. Taylor isn’t a writer or an artist–he’s a character. More specifically, he’s the real person upon whom his father based a series of books oddly similar to the Harry Potter books.

The meta starts with a reference to Harry Potter and similarities to The Books of Magic–on which Peter Gross worked. It quickly twists back in another direction, though, with a question from the crowd implying that Taylor is actually a fictional character. With just a few words, we’re out of the familiar world of cons and questioning the rules of the world Carey and Gross have pulled us into, wondering where we’re going next.

The preview doesn’t offer much more than that, but what it does give is more than enough of a teaser for me to be salivating for next month’s #1. I’ve called Mike Carey the heir apparent to Neil Gaiman several times, and like Sandman and many other works, this will be a story about stories, about the nature of fiction and characters. You hear writers talk time and again about their characters having their own ideas, and this takes that conceit another step. What if enough investment into a character actually brings them to life?

We’ve seen these ideas before, but the layers present just in these few pages had me wondering which new directions Carey and Gross might find. The literature geek in me thrills to the promise of a trip through various works of fiction, and the comics nerd loves the insider references as well as the potential for great art.

It seems that I joke about things on this blog and they magically happen. In the DC solicitations for June, you’ll find this little bit of information:

DMZ #42
Written by Brian Wood
Art by Ryan Kelly
Cover by John Paul Leon
You’ve seen them countless times in the pages of DMZ. Violent killers – anonymous and silent – behind gas masks and heavy clothing. Always the vanguard of death and destruction. But who are they and where do they come from? What would cause a man or woman, even in a warzone, to completely surrender themselves to oblivion? “No Future” is a 3-part story probing an infamous DMZ death cult housed in the city’s tallest building.
On sale June 10 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • MATURE READERS

Yeah, that’s right, Ryan Kelly is drawing a DMZ arc.  I asked for it back in January and look what happens. Thrilled, though. Kelly’s New York backgrounds in The New York Four were just insanely gorgeous, and I can’t wait to see what he’ll do with the broken-down cityscapes of the DMZ. Plus, as we’ve seen on three separate books now, Kelly and Wood just get each other and their work together has been across-the-board excellent.

Now, can I get Gaiman to do another Sandman story?  (I mean, if it worked before…)

As promised (I hope), this should be my last offering related to the recent WATCHMEN release.

In a GQ issue with a little something for everyone (trying to make it in the publishing biz with Lenny Dykstra sounds more awful than any horror story I’ve caught in recent years about the comics industry), the April 2009 issue of GQ has a feature entitled “The 20 Graphic Novels You Should Read (After “Watchmen”).”

The men in tights are kept to a minimum (Batman doesn’t even get a mention that I’m aware of, save for citing Ed Brubaker — Superman and Madman earn high marks one time each), and it’s a respectable look at how comics aren’t just kids stuff, a noble venture by a magazine geared to get male consumers everywhere to buy $300 Hugo Boss t-shirts.

Of course 20 items isn’t even going to scratch the surface, but what additional suggestions would YOU make to a mainstream publication like GQ?

I’ve been having a grumpy day. Rather, a series of grumpy days. There’s a lot of Very Serious Stuff that I should be dealing with and writing about, but I’ve got a responsibility to my Blog@ folks too. So I was eating dinner and thinking–what can I write about that will put me in a better mood, and my readers, too?

And then it hit me. A highly subjective list of my favorite comics characters! I don’t claim to have read everything out there, or even a decent cross-section. So this list contains no superheroes, only one super-villain, and is mostly drawn from Vertigo. I will not apologize for that–it’s what I like. But I WOULD love to hear everyone’s favorite characters and why they love them. There will be no “right answer” here.

Everybody ready? OK….

(more…)

The Vertigo panel at NYCC left me fairly salivating for new upcoming books, but even among the awesomeness promoted there (new Mike Carey series! New original Peter Milligan series!) there was one book that stood out for me as something I had to have, ASAP.

Dean Haspiel announced an original graphic novel written by the woman he described as his “second mother,” Inverna Lockpez. Lockpez, an artist, is from Cuba, and there was a lot Haspiel didn’t know about her past. So recently, when he asked her to “purge” after reading some of his works, he found out a lot of her incredible story–and brought her to Karen Berger to pitch a comic.

I’m fascinated by this for a lot of reasons. One, of course, is that I really like Dean Haspiel. As an artist, and as a person, and when he says this will be his most personal project, I really want to see what he’ll turn out. But more than that, I am fascinated with the story. Here in the U.S., what we hear about Cuba is pretty simplistic. I am thrilled with the idea of getting a story from the ground, from a person who saw good and bad, but lived through it all.

And yes, part of me is even more thrilled that it’s a woman. Because stories like this one–Lockpez was a surgeon, and in Castro’s militia–so often revolve around men. And while I don’t think fundamentally the story is that much different, I still like to see women’s stories told.

Learning history on a grand scale, the themes and political actors, is of course important, but I think that we only really feel history when we see the events through one person’s eyes. Comics and graphic novels offer a unique way to tell these stories, providing visuals as effective as the biggest Hollywood blockbuster, but on a scale that’s accessible and feels more intimate, somehow.

I don’t want to wait til 2010!

According to my email from Planned Parenthood this morning, it’s National Condom Week. They sent out a link to their playlist of their favorite condom videos on YouTube, but I found something even better:

This is from Neil Gaiman’s “Death Talks About Life,” a PSA comic about HIV and condom use, from 1994. It’s out of print now, but was collected in Death: The High Cost of Living, which was one of the first comics I ever bought. Or you can read the whole thing at that link. (Also will soon be in an Absolute Death from Vertigo, so for those of you who are fangirls like me, rejoice!)

While I’m referencing holidays and comics writers, it is my duty to repost the sentiments of the wicked Warren Ellis:

Happy Valentine’s Day to all. And to those who hate the day, I say this: Valentine’s Day is a Christian corruption of a pagan festival involving werewolves, blood and f***ing. So wish people a happy Horny Werewolf Day and see what happens.

What’s better than one Vertigo writer?

One Vertigo writer interviewing another. Over on the Standard Attrition blog, G. Willow Wilson interviews Peter Milligan, and awesomeness ensues.

You’re welcome.

In reading Neil Gaiman’s journal, I stumbled upon a link to a quite excellent essay about Sandman and the 90s.

Dream, on the other hand, and not just Dream but also Orpheus and Delirium and Lyta and Remiel and Duma and Haroun al-Rashid and Robespierre and Wanda, cannot go with the flow.  To the postmodernists they reply that some things are too important simply to accept as impermanent, that our lives may be brief but that for them to be worthy they must hang on a strong nail of meaning.  Dreams’s duty, Delirium’s openness to all experience, Orpheus’s sorrow, Remiel and Duma’s God, Haroun al-Rashid’s Baghdad, Robespierre’s revolution, Wanda’s female gender, cannot be cast on the flowing waters and said a mere good-bye to.  Identity is what we refuse to give up; I can only change so much before I am no longer me.  And if I go to work at a job I hate, I cannot be me; but also if I quit the job that I hate I cannot just decamp to the country with my dog and paint pictures, I must still engage with the world on my terms.

I agree mostly with the blogger’s reading of Sandman, and of Gaiman’s characterization of Dream as someone who finds he must change or die, and would rather die.

The one thing I would point out, though, is that Dream does indeed change, and his death comes because he has changed enough that he realizes he can change no more. He dies because he HAS changed and cannot forgive himself for it, as much as because he will not change. (more…)

If you haven’t checked out the book that Sarah called “The Definite Bush Era Fiction” Khepri.com is ready to help you out. Right now, they have the first five volumes (all that have been released to date) for 43 bucks and change. That’s less than ten bucks a volume, and a real steal to get you up-to-date on this awesome Vertigo series. If you’re caught up and waiting for Vol. 6, which comes out next month, they’ve got it available for pre-order at a hefty discount, as well. Check out the deals here, and don’t say we never gave you anything.