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Breakdowns -- Nice Parapersona You’ve Got

August 28, 2003

So much to get to that I’ll just roar right into it. Lots of reviews, including Chris Ware’s latest classic, QUIMBY THE MOUSE, first issues like HUMAN TARGET and SMAX, curious objets d’art like Chad Michael Ward’s BLACK RUST, and look, some CrossGen comments.

The Scion, The Rich and The Poor Drones

CrossGen Entertainment has been stirring up more press since they started, and unfortunately, none of it has been good. Read the exhaustive Newsarama report by Matt Brady for all the details. The gist, however, is that CrossGen has money problems, has failed to pay freelancers for work commissioned and published, and has countered their public complaints over the situation by attacking the complainants’ reputations and talent (or implying same) and even accusing them, according to publisher Mark Alessi, of “blackmail”, an inaccurate and possibly actionable term Alessi later recanted slightly, though he still says the freelancers are “threatening” him. A simple apology and promise to set things right would work wonders to eliminate the schadenfreude that people are feeling over the possible collapse of CGE, but I don’t expect Alessi to be able to suck it up and do it. We’ll just continue the transparent spin. It’s Tampa, Jake. Don’t try to understand it. I was surprised at the stupidity of Alessi’s statements, but other than that, and a hope that the talent is paid soon and ends up on their feet if CGE goes down, I don’t care all that much. I’m not rubbing my hands together in fiendish glee, but the statements don’t exactly make me want to hold a vigil for Sigil, if you know what I mean.

What the CrossGen news did do, though, is quickly take folks’ attention away from Chuck Austen’s whiny-ass Pulse interview. Look, Chuck, you’ve got some great gigs going and plenty of offers, so don’t worry about getting respect. You seem nice enough, you work hard, and a lot of people don’t like your stuff. So what. Some may have some good points—even the biggest idiot might have something you could learn from—so don’t make excuses and talk about twelve people complaining and shut yourself off from engaging with the public. That’s how mediocre writers become true hacks.

Couple very good first issues reviewed here, plus one I forgot to review last week but felt it was worth talking about.

The Firsts
FRANK MILLER’S ROBOCOP #1 by Frank Miller, Steven Grant and Juan Jose Ryp. Avatar Press. $3.50
Screenplays—even good ones—often go awry in Hollywood, subjected to change upon change that weaken and distort and ruin. Most of the great scripts were written by individuals or a two-person team working together. The same is true of comics, where there is precious little good work done when written by committee (see ORIGIN).

Miller’s script for ROBOCOP II was barely recognizable once it was translated to film, the few good moments in the film clearly his. But Avatar has wisely rescued the original material, and they made two other smart moves in accordance: 1) hiring Grant, who in addition to being a proven talent, has similarly satirical sensibilities, and 2) Avatar gave the story nine issues to breathe.

This first issue reintroduces us to the hell of New Detroit, corporate controlled and with its degraded citizens worshipping trash TV. Gosh, that’s not so hard to swallow, is it? Ironically, the only one resolute in his commitment to order and basic decency is the less-than-human Robocop. Ryp has fun with lots of carnage, and there are no punches pulled in the script, which isn’t afraid to have a child killed. It’s not all bleak, though, as Miller and Grant achieve a good deal of black humor from the situation, the media satire much in line with what Miller did back on THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, which was somewhere around when this script was originally written. A surefooted beginning to what looks like a strong adaptation.

SMAX #1 by Alan Moore and Zander Cannon. Wildstorm/America’s Best Comics. $2.95
Fans of TOP TEN, from which this miniseries spins off, will be very happy. Narrowing his focus from an ensemble cast to just police officers Smax and Toybox, Moore loses not a bit of entertainment value. The story goes that Smax has to return to his home dimension, a “backworld” embarrassing to him as a big, tough, rational cop, because the world is based on Tolkienesque fantasy, with cuddly dwarves and physics-defying magic, and the same old generation gap every child feels. Cannon doesn’t provide the rich detail of his TOP TEN partner Gene Ha, but his softer lines are well suited to the fantasy setting, and he’s more than capable of clearly depicting the numerous in-jokes Moore provides, relating this time more to well-known fantasies than the superhero comics jokes of the other series. Great fun.

HUMAN TARGET #1 by Peter Milligan and Javier Pulido. Vertigo/DC Comics. $2.95
I’m a bit of a latecomer to Milligan’s work, only getting into it with X-FORCEand VERTIGO POP! LONDON, but it’s clear he rarely takes on a genre unless he has higher goals in mind. In this case, it’s the theme of identity, how difficult it is in this age to know who we are and what we want and need. This is shown in the mental instability of our Human Target, Christopher Chance, who spends much of the issue literally afraid of, and searching for, himself. With the slick, minimalist stylings of Pulido, Milligan wraps the human mystery not in sentimentality but in an astringent gauze of slick scene transitions and misdirection until the stinging conclusion. It’s a fascinating blend of POINT BLANK cool and modern soul-searching, with Chance, like all of us, his own hero and villain.

The Other Reviews

BLACK RUST by Chad Michael Ward. NBM Publishing. $18.95
Ward takes what would essentially be an art book of digitally altered photographs and punctuates it with brief prose chapters describing a decadent, erotocentric future where it’s become impossible to tell the difference between robots and humans, and their existences are focused only on sensual pleasures. I liked the prose, but it’s hard to call Ward a good writer just on this, as the pieces are so brief and not part of any real story. It sounds good and adds some flavor to the art. A modest goal but one successfully achieved.

The art itself is uneven, nearly unforgettably disturbing and erotic in some images, more wholesomely sexy in others, but unconvincing elsewhere in the digital alterations. On several pages I found myself immediately picking out what had been changed on the model, whether it looked fake or not. The cover is a good indication—everything works but the fuzzy robot arm, which not only doesn’t look like real metal but seems poorly designed, too close to the body. And yet the pointy-eared fetus (or whatever it is) is a knockout, the more Ashley Wood-type shots excellent and the more straightforward photography and movie poster stuff in Chapter Five all successful.

Ward makes a decent start here and I would expect the art to continue to evolve. It would be interesting to see if he pursues a project where he wrote a full-fledged story to accompany the pictures, and with the art a bit more carefully selected to highlight his strengths.

PLANETARY #16 by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday. Wildstorm. $2.95
There aren’t that many ongoing comics that are good enough to be this late and have each issue be an event. This issue picks up on the Hark storyline with Elijah Snow coercing Ms. Hark into an alliance with Planetary instead of The Four, who mean only ill for the planet. The tense verbal gymnastics come after an exhilarating flashback martial arts battle dating back to the earliest days of the Hark dynasty. It’s another beautiful showpiece for Cassaday, whose work is flawless in this issue, though even he can’t make the staredown near the end of the issue have quite the impact that was intended. Still, this is one of those riveting, involving little pieces of wonder where one flips it open, standing up in the kitchen, and can’t move until it’s over. The Old Bastard still has this book locked down.

C S I: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION: THICKER THAN BLOOD by Jeff Mariotte, Gabriel Rodriguez and Ashley Wood. IDW Publishing. $6.99
IDW is going full throttle with the CSI license now, following SERIAL with another miniseries and some one-shots for both the Las Vegas and Miami shows. This is the first effort from Mariotte, and despite having written some perfectly fine books like DESPERADOES for Wildstorm, this is uninspired fare.

The “A” and “B” plots are fine—Elvis impersonator disappears and a mobster’s life is threatened—but Mariotte doesn’t have the space that Max Allan Collins did in SERIAL, so the cut corners end up diluting dramatic tension and basically dumbing things down. But what’s more annoying is the dialogue. Collins himself can get corny at times, but at least he had the right feel for the show’s characters. Mariotte saddles Grissom with one terrible one-liner after another—either Elvis-related groaners or jaunty gallows humor inconsistent with the character. I’m only a semi-regular viewer, but what’s wrong comes through very clearly.

The art is unchanged from the same two artists’ work on SERIAL: Rodriguez is very good with character likenesses and an adequate storyteller; Wood’s more abstract style adds punch to the reenactments while not being anywhere near his best work. At $7, this one is mainly for diehard fans of the show.

ANOTHER SUBURBAN ROMANCE by Alan Moore, Antony Johnston and Juan Jose Ryp. Avatar Press. $7.95
I was in a Borders bookstore the other day to buy my kids some books, and there was an Eric Carle display. If you’re a parent of young children and don’t know Eric Carle, please let Child Protective Services know where they can pick up your kids.

The display did not have Mr. Carle’s books, which were in the regular kids section, but it was stacked six feet high with stuffed animals based on characters from the books, as well as a wooden dominoes set with his collage animals instead of numbers. Lovely stuff, seemingly well-made (we play the dominoes all the time now), but no substitute for the actual story, you know? I had the same thought after reading this.

Not really stories (and contrary to the back cover, this is no graphic novel by even the loosest definition, except that it’s squarebound), the three pieces here were, I believe, originally songs, later adapted into a play of some sort. Johnston drags them further from their source, recasting them as three basic, violent narratives, with no characters or dialogue and very little in the way of plot. “Judy Switched off the T.V.” depicts a horrible day of extreme heat, riots, explosions, nerve gas and walking dead as if it’s business as usual, not worth getting excited about. Neither is the story, though it’s a nice showcase for the manic pop thrills of Ryp, who relishes drawing chaos but is just as adept at capturing the look of a German shepherd.

“Old Gangsters Never Die” is a series of cool 1920s shots of gangsters getting their Tommy guns ready for action, stepping out of slick black Packards, and finding their archetypal grace and savagery has given them a messy immortality. Again, it suffers from just being narration and art, but it’s the most controlled, interesting piece here. The finale is where the collection gets its name, and it’s just an illustrated lyric describing how horrific everything has become, with an obvious Moore analogue wandering the streets and making the observation. It’s slight but the lyric has a strong rhythm to it, and Ryp draws the best crashes since Geof Darrow, an obvious influence. The overall impression is that there’s just not enough here to qualify this as a real Moore effort, and I would rather Johnston had been given some room to develop the stories a bit more himself, if Moore wasn’t going to revisit them. As it is, it looks good and the prose is nice, but that doesn’t make it good comics, and the price is too high for the contents.

Now for a new feature. My friend (and former MPS columnist) Tom Grozan got me doing a short list of current favorites at the bottom of the column a week or so ago. Great idea, as the good stuff can be forgotten so quickly and there are probably lots of readers who can’t keep up. And this got me thinking a little further, coming up with the idea to review the absolute classics of the comics medium, and to label them as such. I mean, there are graphic novels that are great this week that I’ll never read again, and then there those few that I’ll read for years to come. The following is one of the latter, and it works out nicely that it’s a very recent release as well.

Comics Library Essentials #1:
QUIMBY THE MOUSE by Chris Ware. Fantagraphics Books. $14.95 SC or $24.95 HC
There are lots of fun, diverting comics out there. Quite a few thought-provoking, personal ones, too. But the work of Chris Ware is at the very highest level of writing, cartooning and design, and has been this way for over a decade now. This new volume collects issues #2 and #4 of his sporadically published series ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY into an oversized volume, along with some new material that pulls everything together into not just a legitimate graphic novel, but one that ranks with Ware’s previous JIMMY CORRIGAN, THE SMARTEST KID ON EARTH as among the very best the medium has to offer.

The preponderance of strips involve the misadventures of a hapless mouse, Quimby, but they only look like strips from the ‘20s and ‘30s. What’s happening on these pages are explorations of Ware’s sensitive childhood, his angst over the confusing demands of adult relationships, and his pervasive, unrelieved grief over the growing senility of his beloved grandmother. As exercises in control and/or self-immolation, Ware creates the strips in a variety of styles, with Quimby sometimes like early Mickey Mouse, sometimes other early animation, Felix the Cat, Heckle & Jeckyl, even a New Yorker one-panel cartoon. In one of the most elaborate series of strips, Quimby is reduced to a near-stick figure for use in extremely small panels of the most punishing strips about codependence one is likely to read. Essentially, Quimby discovers a living, severed cat head, falls in love with it, but is quick to abuse it. After all, it’s not going anywhere.

In the original work collected here, Ware is a master at achieving emotional weight in even the most abstract premises. There is a series of strips where Siamese twin mice share two legs until one falls ill and dies, at which point his brother—possibly Quimby, if it matters—simply cuts away the dead sibling and goes on with his life. And yet, the loss does affect him, not just in quiet moments but when he attaches a female torso to his body, for sexual gratification but also perhaps to remember in some way what it felt like to be connected to another. The quaint old typesetting, language and design of some of the material only suggests an archness and distance, but the painstaking, obsessive nature readily apparent in every page makes clear how deeply felt the work is.

But beyond the hilariously downbeat fake ads and luxurious abstraction Ware never loses sight of what he wants to achieve, wallowing in his grief brilliantly in the beautiful “Every Morning” strip, wherein Quimby regrets having discarded an old sheet of aluminum foil his grandmother had used in the bottom of her toaster oven to collect crumbs. It’s touching and so pathetic it’s almost embarrassing. Ware explores a fascination with Joe Schuster’s rendition of Superman in several places, even some excellent Jimmy Corrigan strips, but most ambitiously in what appears to be a Golden Age superhero story, only the narration and dialogue are all an essay about Ware’s grandmother, having nothing whatsoever (as far as I can tell) to do with the illustrations.

And it’s in the new material—notably a lengthy piece of prose—where Ware displays not just a gift for moving writing without art to bolster it, but a new sense of maturity. All the details of his sorrow for his grandmother and his disappointing visit to his old hometown are there, and they’re riveting, but there is a real sense that the author is embracing these feelings for this one last time, as a coda to unify and elevate this rich project—as well as surprising bonus for fans who haven’t seen his work so emotionally naked before--before moving on with his life. A masterpiece.

More Stan Lee Media

Last week I reviewed Jordan Raphael’s and Tom Spurgeon’s definitive new Stan Lee biography, STAN LEE AND THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN COMIC BOOK, and after the review I discovered the authors have a swell site set up to promote the book. Of particular interest are the reproduced letters and memos from Stan—a new one every week. See Stan get pissed at Marvel’s distributor when he meets the owner of 7-11—at the time the largest purchaser of comic books--and learns the guy has never been approached about stocking Marvel titles. Fun site.

And speaking of…fun…or maybe we’re speaking of a public service here, one of those dirty jobs that I know won’t go over well with everyone. And that’s okay. People don’t always know what’s good for them.

Full Bleed: Recall the Rage
I’m glad the unwelcome return (a fill-in) of one Ian Ungstad to All The Rage was deleted within twenty-four hours. This is, like the superior Lying In The Gutters, a comics industry rumor column, but other than coming up the possible news that Frank Miller is doing another Batman graphic novel, Ungstad did nothing but dredge up lurid sex and drugs gossip with some thinly-veiled blind items. You know, I don’t really care what indy comics girl likes anal…all that much. And it’s well-documented Neal Adams dated Jeanette Kahn like, 30 years ago, so what they got up to back then are just unimportant details. They were single, they had fun, great. I don’t need the blow-by-blow. Anyway, the column got a lot of complaints from readers, possibly DC (Ungstad claimed Marvel asked for it to be yanked, which I understand is not true. Not much dirt on Marvel in there, anyway, other than Ungstad’s vague claim that the company is “a mess.”), and also possibly from some of the pro columnists sharing site space, and it was pulled.

Since they pulled the column, I don’t have much of a closer, huh? Hmm. Okay, well, let’s run down a few of the series I’m really enjoying.

JACK STAFF by Paul Grist and Phil Elliott, Image Comics. Grist is one of the clearest, most enjoyable storytellers working today, his layouts rock-solid in their construction, plus he has a rare gift for superhero writing that’s witty but nearly innocent, free of grimness and morose soap opera.

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley. Marvel Comics. Still one of my favorite reads and I don’t talk about it enough. #45 was excellent, mainly a therapy session for Aunt May that presents an utterly contemporary, realistic take on the character that establishes her worrying over Peter without making her the somewhat pathetic, fragile woman the original version has always been.

Next Week: A SMALL KILLING, UNLIKELY, THREE BORING BRITISH TWATS TALKING ABOUT WHY COMICS ARE AS BORING AS THEM, and more.

Complaints? No, thank you, Milady. But if you have a book you’d like reviewed, please send to:

Chris Allen
BREAKDOWNS
1451 River Crest Rd.
San Marcos, CA 92078

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