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Breakdowns -- Love, Acridly

November 13, 2003

Ah, comics, I love ya so. Give me more. Give me more of your minimum wage slaves spending more on weed than books, ink and Bristol board. Give me more of their narrow thoughts and anti-stylish drawing, more of their sub-RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE-level politics. More drawings of t-shirts with changing logos and more name-dropping of bands. More attempts to make superheroes as boring as we are. More hype and more bold new directions, more subcontractors remodeling or razing old franchises. More dreamers who’ll sign anything, and more old men in Hawaiian shirts trying to keep interested in doing the same thing they did twenty years before, and better. More low-rent anecdotes and less complete stories, more slices of lives barely lived. More new universes to explore, or more likely, ignore. More attempts to unite four or more mediocre books instead of making one really good one. More untenable ideas for activism, and less honesty about the results. More publishers shouting down fans who care, and more sycophants to applaud them when they do. More Photoshop and less life drawing. More sophisticated packaging and desiccated contents. More American imitations of manga from people who can hardly imitate being artists. More webcomics, more theories about webcomics, and more than three people to read them. More comics about monkeys who are pirates who are ninja robots who are desperately in search of a story. More porn-addicted misanthropes and more porn that doesn’t have the decency to call itself porn. More morbidly obese childmen writing for other morbidly obese childmen. More adulation for the loudest voices and the smallest ideas. More reviewing scales citing four out of ten as somehow “mildly recommended.” More “all-ages” comics fit for no age, too bland to interest even a PAX network programmer. More compromised news and reviews. More artists honing their art into the most beautiful way to convey their willfully juvenile thoughts. More blog twat have-not clogged slots shop talk. More whores and fewer Moores. Come on, I can take it.

In that spir—well, not that spirit at all, actually, here’s a handful of reviews as per usual. A shorter column than usual, though, which might be a relief for some of you. I’ve decided one night of non-column writing a week just isn’t enough, so I’m going to try to devote more time to that, so I can make comics myself and some smartass can write stuff like the above about me. I’m not that obese, though.

First Issues

RUULE: GANGLORDS OF CHINATOWN #1 by Jeff Amano, Ivan Brandon, Mike Hawthorne and Rick Remender. Beckett Comics. $2.99
Beckett has been slowly but steadily adding to its lineup of titles with some young talent, consistently high production value, and a recognizable and attractive “house style” of art and design. This debut issue is, like GENE-FUSION and the TERMINATOR 3 licensed books, another action-packed tale set in an alternate reality where confrontation is essential for survival. In what appears to be a Biblical update, a San Francisco ganglord named Baal has roving bands of motorcycling thugs terrorize the populace and bring him the spoils. It seems the people of Chinatown are not paying him enough tribute, and they’ll need to be squeezed even harder.

Into this vile milieu steps our mysterious young hero, a lithe Asian man with a talent for throwing weapons, and an absence of fear, though he’s plenty uneasy talking to the girl he saves and takes a liking to, Cue. He quickly bonds with her precocious kid sister, so he’s got that going for him, at least.

After a wonderfully enigmatic silent prologue, rife with symbolism and portent, the striking artistic union of Hawthorne, Remender and colorist Giulia Brusco downshifts into less interesting caricature, with too many rainy shots of mountains and every thug in the gang vying for “Lumpiest Head” or “Most Obscene Leer,” though our hero and damsel look good. At forty-eight pages, it feels a bit stretched, and we’ve only just introduced the setting and characters, with no indications as yet that the story will be more than the hero killing, killing, killing the thugs until he gets to Baal and kills him. We’ll see. And it’s not like drawing out the story will dent the wallet, as this still only costs $2.99 for Prestige Format on glossy paper. Worth a look, and one hopes it will get a whole lot more complicated and rich, as the prologue suggests it could be.

DEMO #1 (OF 12) by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan. AiT/PlanetLar. $2.95
A quick review, as this came in just hours ago. In the first of this series of twelve “mini-graphic novels,” teen lover Mike and Marie run away, driving to New York City, where maybe things will be different. But things are different already, because Marie decided once and for all to stop taking the government-prescribed meds that kept her mental powers from exploding. Soon enough, they do explode, but maybe everything will be okay from now on.

A thin story without much of a resolution, but Wood has a good feel for the characters and creates convincing tension and young love. It’s mainly a lot of driving and talking, but the dialogue is good, and Cloonan’s rough mangachelli style (she plans to change her art with every issue) is almost as appealing as her slicker, darker work in CHANNEL ZERO: JENNIE ONE, with Marie’s discharge of power being particularly effective. Worth a look, and the individual issues sport extras like storyboards and essays that won’t find their way into the probably eventual collection.

Trades and Graphic Novels

MEATCAKE COMPILATION by Dame Darcy. Fantagraphics Books. $22.95
The title of this book is one of the best things about it; it signifies the sweetness and airiness of cake, and the flowing blood and gristle of a piece of meat, and yes, it's a really odd combination not for many tastes. Like Tony Millionaire's SOCK MONKEY, Darcy draws heavily upon children's stories and the trappings of a dead age--in this case the silent film era--and creates new work marrying that naivete with gleeful perversion, gender confusion and dream logic nonsense. If The Brothers Grimm came back as lesbian sisters living in San Francisco, you might get something like this.

The artwork is very fine, with a preciousness that could be cloying if the stories themselves weren't full of disturbing images of dismembered fillies and babies with glass eyes. The book is a visual treat, right down to the charming hand-lettering, and it’s a beautiful package, the pages edged in silver. But other than a handful of tales, particularly in the last couple issues, the results are mostly so spasmodically plotted it’s hard to keep interest or build up to anything. It’s a unique lunacy, to be sure, but without any discernible meaning or point to make.

ISAAC THE PIRATE VOL. 1: TO EXOTIC LANDS by Christophe Blain. NBM Publishing. $14.95
Isaac is a wonderful but nearly starving painter, sustained by his loving wife. He lives for her and his art, but not in that order, unwisely spending their miniscule wages on paintings. He stumbles into an offer to join a rich ship owner on a long voyage, where he will document the journey through sketches, later to be turned into a series of paintings. While at sea, his wife takes a job with a nobleman who soon falls in love with her, and she must fight her own feelings as well as her need for the job. Meanwhile, the crew experiences a number of adventures and misadventures, including a real pirate boarding, though the loneliness takes its toll.

This collects two 48-page European graphic albums into one smaller format trade, and the story is only beginning, but already rich. Blain, whose THE SPEED ABATER is one of the notable graphic novels this year, also from NBM, moves away from the oppressive brilliance of that book, adopting a more freewheeling approach closer to his contemporary Lewis Trondheim, and it’s no surprise Blain will be doing a prequel series based on the the Joann Sfar/Trondheim series DUNGEON early next year. The storytelling is just as accomplished, but a little more cartoonish, though he convincingly portrays adventure on the high seas. The coloring is also exquisite. So far, a very strong mélange of swashbuckling adventure and Old World romance, a brand new Classics Illustrated adaptation of a novel never written.

Go here for a preview

ESSENTIAL TOMB OF DRACULA by Marv Wolfman, Gene Colan and Tom Palmer. Marvel Comics. $14.95
Marvel has made plenty of mistakes this year, but at least they rectified one with the resolicitation of this long-awaited volume, and they even got it out in time for Halloween. For the still-unchanged low ESSENTIALs price, readers get the first twenty-five issues of this series, plus a couple crossover stories from other Marvel horror books from this time.

It often happened with Marvel books in the 70s that an idea was hatched between Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, or Thomas and others, with a book being put into production almost immediately thereafter, with little thought of “story arcs” and the like. One gets that feeling here, that with the Comics Code Authority relaxing a bit on horror comics, Marvel throw one out, then another and another, before thinking things through. That could be why the writing credit changes three times in the first six issues, from Gerry Conway to Archie Goodwin to Gardner Fox. What’s interesting is that these stories still hang well together, with the changes in writing style not that noticeable. Conway (or perhaps Thomas, who knows?) brings Dracula into the present day in the first issue one of his descendants, Frank Drake, claims Castle Dracula as his own. He is joined by his fiancée Jeannie (was this Thomas’ then-wife’s name?) and friend Clifton, but Clifton has his own ideas, and ends up pulling the stake from Dracula’s bleached ribs and reviving him, which soon leads to Dracula making Jeannie a vampire. Drake has to kill her himself, so all in all it’s a ripping start to the series, with the general approach being that this is just a long Hammer Dracula film with some characters wearing bell-bottoms and talking slang.

Goodwin makes Drake briefly suicidal, and adds a couple significant supporting players: Rachel Van Helsing, sexy descendant of the guy who killed Drac the first, er, second time, and her lumbering assistant Taj. He also pays more attention to Dracula himself, giving him the agenda of finding another coffin to sleep in, as well as settling some scores. Fox presents a kind of devil’s bargain story, with a rich, vain woman wanting to be undead so that she’ll regain her youth and keep it forever, but it doesn’t work that way. Next, Drake, Van Helsing and Taj take the fight to Dracula again, but he turns into a bat, mist, etc., etc. This will get old soon.

The Wolfman run begins with issue #7, and he agreeably keeps on Drake and Van Helsing, who are generally about as boring as the couple in most old horror movies. Wolfman also adds Quincy Harker, son of Jonathan Harker, Dracula’s slayer from the novel by Bram Stoker. Quincy stays out of the action for the most part, but has a wheelchair equipped with spring-loaded wooden stakes. Wolfman has a fondness for updated the time-honored vampire-killing tools, and really, that’s about all his character Blade has going for him; that and some atrocious white man jive talk. Oh, and some goggles. He also has a girlfriend, and while she gets no development as a character, the one refreshing thing about Marvel’s non-white characters from this time is that it’s obvious they get laid a lot more. That is, there’s no attempt to hide the fact that Blade and Saffron share a bed.

Blade doesn’t have a bad origin/motive: mother murdered by vampire while giving birth to him, but Wolfman can’t get a handle on his personality other than to make him a sort of loose cannon of vampire-slaying, “loose” meaning he actually follows all the rules, but is obnoxious about it.

Where Wolfman excels is in his characterization of Dracula. It’s not extraordinary at all, but in fact successful for giving the people what they want, the Lord of Vampires as charming, resourceful, powerful and with an indomitable will and survival instinct. One doesn’t exactly root for him, but he’s easily the most charismatic of the characters, and Wolfman and his predecessors never did anything to make one care about the good guys here. Wolfman’s dialogue has often been corny and overwrought, but that’s just fine for the melodramatic, scenery-chewing ol’ Transylvanian.

Colan is the glue that holds this together and his work is pretty excellent from day one, despite the occasional damage done to his pencils by inkers like Frank Chiaromonte, Jack Abel and most especially the sterile and reductive Vince Colletta. Fortunately, Colan is mostly inked by his best inker, Tom Palmer, who realizes the key to Colan’s appeal is to preserve the mood of foreboding. It actually takes Colan a while to settle down on Jack Palance as the facial model for Dracula, but though his face changes constantly in earlier issues, all the depictions are valid. Though it is a crossover with TOD, readers are cautioned to skip right past the Mike Ploog-drawn WEREWOLF BY NIGHT issue reprinted here, a kind of awful they just don’t make anymore.

When Wolfman deviates from the slayers’ dogged pursuit of Dracula, he gets in trouble, including a preposterous and inappropriate storyline involving Dr. Sun, a living brain who wants to be the new ruler of all the vampires, and to enslave Dracula and force him to bring more fresh blood. Wolfman also tries more than once to humanize Dracula with him showing some pity to a living human, but in this case the attempt at adding a new layer to a character is a mistake, the concept of Dracula as the immortal predator being just enough to keep the character popular for the past couple of centuries. All in all, the work still holds up as entertaining, good-looking cheese, the art mostly overcoming the silliness.

Next Week: No idea, really. I may have said last week I’d be covering ONE PLUS ONE, but it turns out that review may turn up elsewhere, like in one of those old-fashioned stapled things they call a magazine. Maybe some STEVE CANYON, as I’ve never read Caniff and am eager to finally start. If you liked the tone poem misery above, well, that’s your problem, but go here for something legitimately good, Chris Ekman’s hilarious PREVIEWS demolishing, from NinthArt. I actually contributed something there last month, but you’d have to hunt for it.

I leave you with another beautiful image, from the Schuiten/Peeters graphic novel CITIES OF THE FANTASTIC: THE INVISIBLE FRONTIER, from NBM.

Chris Allen

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