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Breakdowns - Textmusic for Rantpeople

February 27, 2003

Stepping beyond my bounds this week, I’m going to conduct a loosely structured course in How To Write A Comics Review Column. Is it self-indulgent and unasked for by the readership? Maybe, but so are a lot of comics. I’m doing this at a good time, too, because I just went through an interesting experience where one of my graphic novel reviews created a mini-furor at the writer’s message board, so I can examine some of the pitfalls of doing what I do from personal experience. Also, while it was a good week for comics, with issues of SLEEPER, GHOST IN THE SHELL 2 – MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, FUSED and others, they’re mostly books in the middle of stories, or even ending, so I’ll skip reviewing them. I do have reviews of JACK STAFF #1, ASTRO BOY #11 and THE GOON: ROUGH STUFF

Now, the following represents what I feel are some of the things someone doing this kind of column should consider. I think a lot of it will relate to any kind of review column, single reviews, commentary column, or blog, and for any media reviewed, not just comics. And as I said last week, this isn’t meant to be the enlightened sage coming down from the mountain to dispense wisdom. It’s just the musings of a guy who’s done it enough to have seen some things that work and don’t work, to have screwed up and learned from the screw-up, and to have done enough decent work that creators, editors, publishers and readers have voiced their appreciation in some way that makes me feel I’m halfway competent.

Have a Voice
Listen, I’m not giving a course in writing instruction in general, so I won’t go into a lot of detail here. Let’s just say that there are a lot of people writing about comics who are just boring, no matter what comics they’re talking about. A Paul O’Brien is going to be interesting to read, even if you don’t follow the various X-titles he covers. Matt Fraction, while I don’t always agree with him, has a unique voice, as does Alan David Doane, both of whom are passionate to the point of sometimes foaming at the mouth, yet often with a mitigating sense of humor about the comics industry and themselves. I’m sure they wouldn’t like being compared to each other, actually, but don’t stop me, I’m rolling. Note that the three I’ve named all have an irreverence not so far removed from my own, but I also respond strongly to the more earnest and warm reviews of Johanna Draper-Carlson and Tony Isabella. I don’t mean this as my personal Cool List or anything, but these are some good examples of unique voices doing comics reviews and columns. A consistent voice that readers like will keep them coming back

Be Influenced But Individual
The names above could also be considered recommendations from me of those who know what they’re doing, and there are several more I could add. And there are some reviewers and columnists who are popular but, to me, are examples of what not to do. Read as much as you can and try to figure out what you like and don’t like about each writer’s stuff. However, and this is where the Not Influenced part comes in, don’t read someone’s review of a book before you review it, especially if it’s someone with whose opinion you often agree. You don’t want to read the same thoughts you have before you’ve even written them.

Be Confident But Not A Know-It-All
This is hard to define, but while you don’t want to come off like you think you’re the authority on all comics and the people who create them, you do have to project some confidence that the opinion you’re expressing has some weight and conviction to it. Self-deprecating is good, and I have plenty to be self-deprecating about. My views on comics art are more informed than “I know what I like”,, but I’m not apt to go on at length about negative space or what type of brush it looks like the inker’s using, or just which old Marvel comics Erik Larsen swiped from. So there, there’s a limitation in my reviews, and a pretty common one. Confident writing has the effect of taking the reader by the hand and taking them on an interesting and comforting walk to a destination that is in sight, not so far away. How far or how short is up to you, but I’ll admit these columns of mine can suffer from occasional Stephen King-like bloat. More than 3,000 words can really push the reader into MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) territory, so be sure to add some pretty art if possible, or break up the monotony of text in some other way.

Have a Point of View
Not the same thing as having a voice. Think about the best comics you’ve read and why they worked for you, what you think good comics must contain. You should know enough to have an opinion on any comics-related issue, but if you don’t know, don’t fake it. Find out first, and always try to keep your mind open for new information and a revised perspective.

Be Biased
This sounds like a negative, but it’s not. As an insurance underwriter in my day job, I know that discriminating is not a bad thing when it pertains to not writing someone who doesn’t fit the guidelines, someone prone to causing a claim. Be open and try as many different comics as your schedule and wallet permit, but be aware of what you like and don’t like. For example, for me, Spider-Man is like that saying about pizza being like sex: even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. Well, actually, there are plenty of bad Spidey stories I could name, but I do like the character enough that I might be kinder to a poor issue than I might be to, say, GREEN LANTERN, a title and character with which I have little connection to or history. Doesn’t mean I can’t find the strengths of GL or the weaknesses of a given issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN or PETER PARKER, and past reviews will show that. It doesn’t even mean I have more interest in the Spider-Man book succeeding, as I’m paying good money for both, you know? After my scathing review of Brian Wood’s CHANNEL ZERO: JENNIE ONE, which nonetheless pointed out that I had liked some other books of Wood’s, I found visitors to his message board accusing me of all kinds of biases. Some speculated that my mind was made up before I read the book, or that my disagreement with Wood’s politics forced me not to like the book. Not true, and I won’t go on about it, but feel free to read the REVIEW and check out the lengthy thread at his forum if you want. Even linking to it makes it seem like I’m trying to keep some feud alive, but there really wasn’t one to begin with.

Be Passionate But Not Personal
No time like the present. Try not to let any personal feelings about a creator (he was a jerk to you at a convention, you argued on a message board, he beat you out to write a mini-series, he's an albino, whatever) get in the way of whether the book in question is good or not. That's sometimes easier said than done these days, when the reviewer has access to online quotes and tirades that present a creator in a less favorable light. Don't be afraid to be pissed when a book goes sour, but keep your composure as much as possible. Chuck Dixon's homophobia, Doug TenNapel's religious intolerance, and the self-delusions of John Byrne, Brian Wood and Joe Casey have all annoyed me, but haven't prevented me from praising some of their work in the past year. Be passionate and personal in the way that you pepper your reviews with bits of your life and the conditions under which you read and reviewed the work. That's honest, unique, and hopefully, interesting.

Be Honest
A dishonest review helps no one. Isn’t this all about expressing your opinion, not sucking up to someone, even if they’re nice and usually produce good work? There are guys and gals (gee, wonder who those gals write for) who think it’s some sort of holy mission to push every underachieving indie book just because it’s an indie book, and the person doing it did a nice sketch for them. There are lots of people with great personalities, a decent premise, and not quite enough chops to pull it all together. Don’t humor them or enable them or spare them some constructive criticism. On the other hand, honesty shouldn’t be used as a cruel weapon, certainly not for those creators just starting out. Old pros putting out dross should be able to take their medicine a little better. As far as the harshest reviews I’ve given, stuff like both CHANNEL ZERO books, TRENCHES and XXX LIVE NUDE GIRLS all seem to fall into my blast area of having a lot of pretension but without the brains to back it. They also contain thoroughly unlikable, humorless characters, and pale in comparison to the short stories, war movies and science fiction novels that respectively inspired them. Not that all characters need to be likable, or capable of a joke now and then, or that every book has to have brand-new, shocking ideas, but all these things help. A book like PARADIGM is similarly pretentious, yet there’s a heart to it, and some humor, so I forgive the rough patches. But to hit on honesty again, I know quite a few editors who have taken both glowing and brutal reviews from me on books they worked on, and we’re still friendly because I explained where I was coming from on the negative reviews. Give your reasons and you’ll be okay.

Be Able to Back It Up
Don’t feel the need to take up every message board thread disagreeing with you (heh), but you have to be able to stand behind your work and explain what you mean. Reviews are not set in stone—you might change your mind about something down the road—but when you write it, it better be what you mean, and you better know what you mean.

That’s all some fairly philosophical column advice, so let’s give some more practical tips before getting to reviews.

Know Your Place
By this I mean to write with the place in which your review or column appears in mind. Editor-In-Chief Chris Ryall and I were on the same page as far as tailoring my column more towards graphic novels and trade paperbacks when I came here. A general pop culture site is not really the right place for a column full of monthly superhero comics reviews in the middle of story arcs, but if you’re writing for a site focused on every AVENGERS-related book it might work just fine.

Be Necessary
Necessary is a bit too strong a word, but what I mean is, give people plenty of reasons to come back. Be smart enough to realize that half the reviewers out there are going to cover the new DC and Marvel books, but not many are, say, covering the history of GRENDEL, or reviewing porn comics or something.

Mix It Up
I don’t know; I just hate to get in a rut. As much as I enjoyed reading those first two Ariel Schrag books, I just wanted to put some distance and a lot of other books between those and Schrag’s next two, which I have. I try to give each column a variety of reviews and different features that don’t overstay their welcome, hopefully.

Summarize
This is very simple advice, but sometimes hard to do. I try to take the tack that every review is someone’s first exposure to the book or creator. Just because WATCHMEN has been around sixteen years is no reason not to tell what it’s about in your review. The very fact someone’s reading the review suggests they might not know the work in question and are not just reading to have their opinion validated. Get the summary out of the way in the beginning, or weave bits of it through the review, but it shouldn’t take up for than a third of the review, probably less.

Give Reasons
The thing I hate most to read in reviews is someone lazily writing that so-and-so “continues to impress,” or does a great job, without any examples of what was so great. “Trust me, you’ve got to get this book” is not good enough. Make a case for or against the book.

Let the Book Inform the Review
This fits in with Mix It Up a little, in that it’s a suggestion to change your writing style to suit each book reviewed. I’m not saying you write like Brian Michael Bendis when you review a book he wrote, but I am saying that a review of THE GOON will probably be a little zingier or more off-the-cuff than a review of PROMETHEA, which I think would require either a more scholarly or more poetic approach. For example, I recently reviewed THE ANNOTATED MANTOOTH, an elaborate joke that stretched three short comics stories about a gorilla spy into the comics equivalent of a two-disc DVD, with commentary from the author, complete scripts and tongue-in-cheek valedictions from several comics luminaries. The book, to me, demanded a similarly elaborate joke of a review, so I prefaced it with a long, unrelated anecdote, before getting to the actual meat of the criticism. Trying different styles, and different formats, will just improve your writing and make a whole column of reviews more interesting.

Make It Look Good
Thankfully, we’ve got ace people here at ‘The Shoot’ to design cool logos and drop in art. Do what you can to break up that block of text. For example, this time, even though there are no reviews in this big section, I threw in some nice pics from a promotional package I received for Adhouse Books’ upcoming robot anthology book Project: Telstar, which features the likes of Dave Cooper, Renee French, Paul Hornschemeier, Scott Mills, Bernie Mireault, Joel Priddy, Paul Rivoche and a whole lot more. Yes, that was a plug. So what.

Expand Your Mind
How many times can you review SAVAGE DRAGON without wanting to kill yourself? That’s not a knock on the book—I’d hate reviewing POWERS every month, and it’s my favorite. There’s too much repetition when you’re reviewing each chapter of a story arc. Instead, why not try some different books. Listen, we all get into traps. Sure, in the 80s and 90s I was hip enough to pick up on HELLBOY and TANK GIRL and M and BEAUTIFUL STORIES FOR UGLY CHILDREN, but on the other hand, I had all the Texeira GHOST RIDERs and stuck with McFarlane’s SPAWN up to #50, despite not really caring after about #30. One great thing about reviewing is you get more opportunities to read books you might have skipped. And why is that? Because someone might be willing to send them to you FREE.

How To Get Free Books
Figure that out your own damn self! No, seriously, just find a contact person at one of the publishers great and small, and ask him or her. They might say no, but on the other hand, they’ve got books to move and might be willing to take a chance that, if they send you one, you just might like it enough to spread the word.

And as I get to the end, a funny thought occurs. Looking at the list of the Top 300 Comics Ordered for March, it's weird, inappropriate, and very sad that more of you are reading this column than, as Alan David Doane noted, ordering insightful work like James Kochalka's SKETCHBOOK DIARIES VOL. 3, or even more crowd-pleasingly violent page-turners like Warren Ellis' SCARS or INFINITE KUNG-FU. So why bother, right? Well, I've felt that there's just as much bad writing about comics as bad comics, if not moreso. And yet, despite the pathetic sales numbers for the vast majority of comics, there are many writers and artists who put their hearts, talents and intellects fully into their comics, whether they sell 100,000 copies or 20,000 or they hand them out to a dozen friends. Why should the reviewers and columnists be any different?

THE GOON: ROUGH STUFF by Eric Powell. Albatross Exploding Funny Books. $15.95
In 1997, one of the least-inspired periods in comics history, Eric Powell had a dream. His dream was to create his own book about a horribly scarred, buck-toothed mob enforcer who routinely dispatched not just gangsters but zombies, werewolves and other monsters who interfered with his job, all with a pervasive humor that spanned from deadpan one-liners to a Raimian grotesque zaniness. No humorless cyborgs with father issues here, no tough chicks with breasts so large they qualify for reduction surgery on their employee health plan, and any character who sold his soul for the power to exact revenge in this book did so gladly, and without any subsequent bellyaching about it. And so, of course, hardly anybody bought the book back then.

Fortunately, that didn’t stop the dreamer, only slowed him down a bit. Powell worked on various things and in 2002 he brought back THE GOON to a bit more notice and acclaim than the first attempt. Part of that may have been because he became a better writer, and even better artist. It turns out Powell was rewarded for taking a second chance, with the news that Dark Horse would be publishing Volume Three this year. So, flush with the validation of his crazy dream, Powell, under the guise of Dwight Albatross, has collected the three issues of Volume One in this volume, along with some sketchbook material my grandpa would call, cherce.

We meet said Goon and his little sidekick, enforcers for a zombie mobster, and they take on a few creeps along the way. The sense of nostalgic fun, and the art, is quite similar to Dave Stevens on THE ROCKETEER, though without a lot of babes. If Stevens had been more into FANGORIA, TALES FROM THE CRYPT and the Bowery Boys movies than Bettie Page, we’d be in the right area. Though Powell had enough of a vision to present characters and plot threads still at work in the book today, he does make some errors along the way, like an anthropomorphic chainsaw Goon uses to hack up some enemies. However, as with THE ANNOTATED MANTOOTH, there is a dvd-style commentary on each page that lets us know where Powell thinks he screwed up, and whatever else he thinks about the book. It’s not the most useful info for an aspiring talent, because it mostly ends up being goofy banter between Powell and his abusive alter ego/publisher Albatross, but it does add value to the proceedings. All in all, it’s a nice package, essential for any fan of the recent series, or fans of EC Comics or HELLBOY, and it’s also another example of a great, almost-lost 90s comic that survived the glut of crap to eventually take its place in the sun.

ASTRO BOY #11 by Osamu Tezuka. Dark Horse Comics. $9.95
When you read this column, the twelfth volume of this reprint series will be on the stands, but when you’ve got a 200-plus page trade paperback like this coming out every month, it’s hard to keep up. Especially when this work comes from a period—the late 50s to late 60s—prior to the influential decompressed style popular in more contemporary manga and European graphic albums. Basically, it’s a great series from one of the most important creators of comics, and I wanted to write about it.

As I wrote above, the four stories in this volume span almost a decade, and I’m not exactly sure why the books are not more chronological. There doesn’t seem to be a common theme other than perhaps the theme of false first impressions. In the first and longest (by far) story, “The Last Day on Earth,” Astro befriends a being called BEM who is actually an artificial lifeform—not exactly a robot—that was created to be the protector, and part, of a refrigerator-shaped bomb. Three scientists are looking for BEM, and Astro Boy is convinced by his own creator/father figure scientist to give up BEM’s location, as the scientists have convinced the Professor they merely want to conduct an experiment. The experiment, however, turns out to be testing the bomb on Earth’s sun, therefore dooming the planet. They’ve got another bomb for this, and only really need BEM because, as a conscience-stricken weapon, he’s a wild card. Astro has 30 days to find BEM and convince him to help Earth. Once found, in the form of a girl, BEM must get over his feelings of betrayal and make the ultimate sacrifice to stop the bomb and save Earth. Despite a couple plot holes, it’s a fairly touching and suspenseful story, and subtly conveys the drawback of trusting authority completely.

”The Subterranean Tank” is an adventure with supporting character Mustachio taking the hero role from Astro until the end. A technician rebels against a would-be world conqueror and takes his powerful underground tank, and the conqueror pursues him from the air before getting what’s coming to him. Even with Tezuka’s old Disney-style artwork, it’s pretty exciting. I wasn’t knocked out by “The Man Who Returned From Mars,” despite the promising title, but “The Blast Furnace Mystery” is a great short about a guy who thinks his father is a murderer, disposing of bodies in the furnace at his job. The revelation shakes the young man’s entire sense of self, but then ends up being all right. A great twist.

There are better overall volumes, but any of them are suitable introductions to Tezuka’s wild ideas, inventive storytelling, dynamic artwork and compassion. But despite the cute art and harmless design of Astro Boy, this is really a crazy, violent world, full of tyrants and Cold War Japanese fears of nuclear power and aggression, sweet and hopeful but ugly when ugliness is required.

JACK STAFF #1 by Paul Grist. Image Comics. $2.95
It probably makes good sense that Grist focus on this good-natured, old-fashioned superhero book for now, rather than the equally excellent KANE detective series. As good as it is, maybe his English reserve and cheer isn’t grim enough for readers. But JACK STAFF doesn’t have that possible problem, as most superhero books are still fairly upbeat and lacking in extreme violence, profanity, etc. Grist brings us this new #1 after a year or so of self-publishing, and has no trouble producing another introduction to the British hero for new readers without boring the faithful. One of Grist’s strengths, in fact, are well-designed splash pages that introduce both characters and plot points efficiently and stylishly. You’ve got Staff, very much a British version of Captain America, including the longevity, long period of inactivity, etc. You’ve got Q Division, who investigate weird happenings. And you’ve got Becky Burdock, Vampire Reporter, who is kind of a Lois Lane, but, you know, with that vampire thing. Aside from the zingy, tongue-in-cheek splashes, which serve to separate the issue into short chapters like British comics serials, it’s a very straightforward, sincere attempt at reviving Silver Age superhero comics values, and it succeeds admirably. This may be because it’s not overly earnest, though its humor is never snide, but the big reason may be because of Grist’s fine, open artwork, solid story sense, and wit. And Phil Elliott’s colors don’t hurt, either.

Chris Allen

Next Week: Lotsa Reviews, Less Pedantry

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