FirstWave #1 (of 6)
Written by Brian Azzarello
Illustrated by Rags Morales
Colored by Nei Ruffino
Lettered by Clem Robins
Covers by JG Jones or Neal Adams

This series promises to be one of DC’s most interesting and fun projects in a long while.  Perhaps since Brian Azzarello’s Dr. Thirteen serial.  FirstWave is basically a pulp hero mash-up.  It’s like when you were a kid, and you grew bored playing just Transformers or just Star Wars or just GI Joe, so you got out all your toys and invented scenarios in which everything co-existed. (Thankfully, Azzarello doesn’t face the scale problems I had when He-Man had to interact with Luke Skywalker!)  DC took several old properties they possess the license to but didn’t quite know what to do with, and they threw Batman onto the cover for added muscle in the marketplace (he’s not in the issue, anyway…), and they stirred them all together to create something interesting, and really, really fun.

As all of the characters originate in the old pulp magazines, or trace their direct inspirations to the pulp traditions, Azzarello’s able to mix the characters very effectively.  Their milieus aren’t so radically different from one another, so characters like Doc Savage and the Blackhawks exist comfortably in the same world.

This first issue devotes itself to setting the pieces in their places, introducing each and setting up their initial goal.  Consequently, it’s hard to say much about the series’ overall direction or its effectiveness in telling a story; I can tell you that Azzarello gives each character a distinct voice.  He seems to have a handle on the entire cast, and he juggles the page time very effectively, giving each one a chance to shine.  And he understands the violent, fast-paced, offbeat humor of the pulp heroes, giving the narrative a breathless feel.  So the initial returns are very positive.

Azzarello’s properly abetted in his fast-moving adventure yarn by Rags Morales, a veteran artist whose detailed, nuanced illustrations add emotional heft and physical reality to every page.  Morales accomplishes the impressive balancing act of maintaining the traditional imagery of these characters while still making each of them his own – it’s a feat to capture the caricatured aspect of Will Eisner’s Commissioner Dolan and make that feel at home next to the gritty, rain-worn Doc Savage.

FirstWave #1 shows a ton of promise.  It’s a good start, a rollicking fun time with the edge of danger and fun that I personally would’ve eaten up when I was a kid.  And it’s still pretty damn entertaining as an adult, too. (more…)

Want to get inside the head of the writer of Scalped and Wolverine: Weapon X? Jason Aaron has some amusing yet insightful comments about his process, including:

– I always aspire to have something memorable on every page, whether a line of dialogue or an action or what. I certainly don’t always achieve that, but I try.

– I try not to dictate camera angles or set up shots. I always figure that’s best left to the artist.

And my personal favorite:

– I write people throwing up a lot. I write sour looks and stern stares a lot. I use “fuck” a lot. Just making note of all that.

In retrospect, that last one does seem to pop up a lot. If you want to get inside Aaron’s head a little bit more, give his blog a click right here.

My lord, has it really been FIVE YEARS since the beyond senseless murder of metal guitar god Dimebag Darrell? The music community was rocked to its core this month in 2004 when a deranged “fan” shot and killed Pantera guitarist “Dimebag/Diamond” Darrell Abbott (along with 3 others) in a Columbus, Ohio, music club while performing with then-current band Damageplan.

In recognizing this tragic event’s 5-year anniversary, Revolver magazine is doing a cover feature in tribute to the accomplished and widely admired guitar legend (of which you can count your Reverend a fan). Of special note to comic book fans is the talent responsible for the original cover to this issue, graphic artist Tim Bradstreet. Along with work on the Punisher, readers are likely familiar with his lengthy run of covers of Vertigo’s Hellblazer series.

From Revolver’s press release:

REVOLVER Magazine has teamed with renowned and award-winning graphic illustrator Tim Bradstreet (The Punisher, Hellblazer, “Vampire: The Masquerade”) for a Pantera Vulgar Display Of Power commemorative issue, celebrating guitarist Dimebag Darrell on the fifth anniversary of his death. The issue–available only on newsstands from December 22 through February 22–captures the defining moment in Pantera’s career and features Bradstreet’s stark and powerful cover illustration of the classic 1992 album cover photo.

The REVOLVER Vulgar Display Of Power issue includes an additional Pantera illustration by Bradstreet, rare photos, as well as exclusive interviews with all surviving Pantera band members (Phil Anselmo, Vinnie Paul, Rex Brown); Dime’s longtime girlfriend Rita Haney; album producer Terry Date; musicians Rob Halford, Rob Zombie, Sean Yseult, Scott Ian, Zakk Wylde, Nick Bowcott; and other key friends and associates. In fact, this marks the first piece to include interviews with both Phil Anselmo and Vinnie Paul since the 2006 VH1 “Behind The Music” on Pantera.

In this issue, REVOLVER Magazine and writer Jon Wiederhorn debunk the myth behind the Vulgar Display Of Power album cover photo shoot and reveal the stories behind how “Diamond Darrell” became “Dimebag Darrell” and the origins of Dime’s signature “Black Tooth Grin” drink.

Each newsstand copy of REVOLVER’s Vulgar Display Of Power issue will include a special memorabilia pack with an authentic replica of a Vulgar Display Of Power tour backstage laminate and concert ticket, a Pantera show flyer, and sticker. In addition, REVOLVER will give away Tim Bradstreet’s original hand-drawn cover art for the issue, an Affliction Pantera Signature Series T-shirt, Dean Dimebag Dimebonics ML Electric Guitar with Case, Dunlop MXR DD11 Dime Distortion Pedal and DB01 Dimebag Signature Wah Pedal, Seymour Duncan Dimebucker Pickup, and ddrum Vinnie Paul Signature Snare. Look for contest details in this issue and enter online at www.REVOLVERmag.com.

Fans can also purchase a highly limited-edition (only 250 printed) Vulgar Display of Power Commemorative T-shirt featuring Bradstreet’s cover illustration at www.REVOLVERmag.com/store.

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.