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Breakdowns - Ernest Hemorrhagingway

June 26, 2003

Arturo woke with torn sheets. It was a bad night. He had nearly been gored the day before. The sun shone on his blood as it poured forth from the wound in his side. There were no flowers from the senoritas thrown that day. He felt cold and the tequila did little to warm him.

In the pen the bull paced. Foam at its lips and nostrils. It was still angry. The eyes shining with dumb hatred. Arturo left and walked slowly to the cantina. He knew he would never return to the ring and that he was not a man anymore. He ordered a tequila and it was then he noticed some of the younger bullfighters taunting him, calling him coward and puta. He ignored them and began reading from the stack of floppies he brought. What does it matter anyway, he thought.

Forgive the self-indulgent intro, as it actually does have a couple purposes. First, the best “floppies” of last week were given reliable but brief reviews by Alan David Doane, so I don’t need to add much there. I don’t remember the “Molverine” joke as being mine, but any reader of the column can tell I like to jam words together to come up with a new title each week, so I’m preconditioned to look for similar sounds and how to fuse them. Also, the bad Hemingway above does have the benefit of segueing into a plug for the upcoming Scott Morse graphic novel SOUTHPAW from AdHouse Books, which is inspired to some degree by Hemingway’s work, though Papa never wrote about tigers fighting robots. Not even James Kochalka has done that yet.

Hey, I understand Newsarama now shows links to my column and Scott Tipton’s COMICS 101, so a thank-ye-kindly to Matt Brady & Co for the synergy. If any of you are reading this column due to that link, why don’t you let me know (e-mail is at the top and bottom of the column). I’m just curious. Next week is sort of a special event for me, and a good time to give a sort of recap of what the column is about, what my tastes are and such, so come back then.

Firsts

OUTSIDERS #1 by Judd Winick, Tom Raney and Scott Hanna. DC Comics. $2.50
In a recent column, Steven Grant pointed out that while the Jeph Loeb/Jim Lee BATMAN is a good book, it’s not so good that people should be praising it to the heavens (I’m paraphrasing), that it in fact should be the baseline of acceptable quality in superhero comics. This is a great rule to remember, as it keeps one from getting too carried away praising good but not otherwise outstanding or superior books. OUTSIDERS is a good example. There’s nothing really new going on here—Arsenal wants to form a new super team in the wake of the Titans and has to convince Nightwing to go along and co-lead with him, as Nightwing is still getting over the death of Donna Troy a week or two ago (it’s been three months in this book). The reason that Arsenal uses to hook Nightwing is that this new group would be made up of new people and run without the emotional ties involved with the Titans. It’s a sketchy premise, as you just know the teammates will come to care about each other, but whatever. It works all right. We meet the rest of the team, a surprising four women (including the android responsible for Donna Troy’s death, though she’s since been reprogrammed) and Metamorpho, whose resurrection has left him with little memory. Usually, putting a veteran on a team of newcomers forces that character into the familiar role of crusty mentor, so the tabula rasa approach is novel and promising. So far I’m happy with Winick’s writing, as new character Grace Choi is legitimately tough and sexy even without any significant powers to speak of, Nightwing is, well, the straight man, and consistent with what’s gone before, and Arsenal, as counterpoint to Nightwing, is a wiseass horndog, so he’s instantly more interesting than the spandex equivalent of “Cats in the Cradle” I’ve seen of him over the years. Where Winick has fallen down for me in the past is the plotting, not the characterization, so the jury is still out whether he does anything special with the latest assault by Gorilla Grodd. At least he’s got the underrated Tom Raney on art, who draws a fantastic Grodd, as well as everything else. The women all have different features and (believable) proportions, and he makes Metamorpho imposing, disturbing, sympathetic and comical all in the same scene. Excellent work all around for Raney, and so far, very good work by Winick. I was going to give the book a pass, actually, but for a friend’s recommendation. It’s a good time to pick up a team book like this or LEGION, since so little is going on with the A-list team books these days.

PUFFED #1 (OF 3) by John Layman and Dave Crosland. Image Comics. $2.95
If one is in the habit of reading between the lines, one can say that John Layman knows an awful lot about being trapped in something and suffering all manner of abuse for it. After all, he edited THE AUTHORITY until he had had enough interference and company politics and chose to exit for the freedom and fear of the life of a freelancer. So it’s not surprising he’s able to bring a certain drama and horror to what could have been entirely a light farce: an amusement park worker is trapped in a giant, stifling dragon suit and then dropped off in the ghetto. He tries desperately to get someone to help him take off the suit, which only leads to misunderstandings. Things get worse when that pepperoncini-and-egg-salad sandwich has made its way through his digestive tract, and this isn’t the first bit of toilet humor in the book. It’s all rather desperate and appealingly disgusting, actually, until a somewhat shocking cliffhanger ending that replaces the skuzzy misadventure tone for something a little more horrific, and I commend Layman for taking the risk. Crosland is making his comics debut here and has a good style already, somewhat influenced by Jim Mahfood though not as refined, using lots of lines where fewer but thicker ones might have been more dynamic. I liked how he skewed perspective to create an atmosphere of danger, though, like how the tenement building’s windows are all at different angles. I read this as a black-and-white preview, and I do think some of the art’s effectiveness at showing just how out of place the suit is will rely on the coloring of it. The lines of the suit should perhaps have been simpler, to stand out better against the obsessive linework depicting the grimy city. It’s a good start, though, for the book and for Crosland’s career.

Other Stuff

GUILTY PANCAKE by Bob Fingerman. Out Of My Pocket Press. $10.00
No, this is not a new story from the Eisner-nominated creator, but a limited edition, self-published collection of drawings of naked girls and little devils. That’s it. And I have to say, the singularity of focus actually gives the book some weight, like a gallery show. Every picture is a different woman next to a different devil, the women realistic and of various body types, most tattooed, and the devils all cartoonish and non-threatening. There’s almost no interaction between the subjects, so this isn’t porn of any kind. It’s just an interesting little art book, where one can appreciate Fingerman’s gift for posed figure drawing, finding the natural beauty in everday women, and his gift for less-realistic, more fanciful cartooning. I liked it a lot.

THE BRADLEYS by Peter Bagge. Fantagraphics Books. $14.95
I’m a big Bagge fan, and have been supporting the HATE ANNUALS and the SWEATSHOP miniseries, but rereading this last week brought back just how goddamn funny the guy used to be. I don’t mean to criticize the newer work, which after all has a commendable level of maturity and social observation to it, but if you want to bust a gut, this is the place right here.

For a few years starting in 1984, Bagge drew short stories in NEAT STUFF featuring the Bradleys, a family more dysfunctional than the Simpsons and often as funny. Buddy, the acne-ridden, out-of-step and obnoxious high school graduate, was always the star, and it’s no wonder, as he would seem to be the best instrument for angry young cartoonist Bagge to take shots at the world and himself. The first story is familiar stuff—Mom needs the kids to help out around the house more, so of course the chores are done in the laziest and most creatively stupid ways possible, leading to a house fire. After that, though, Bagge’s real interests start coming through, with Buddy discovering British Invasion music while his best friend is caught up in trends of the day like Duran Duran. Still, torturing little brother Butch, the future Republican, or boy-crazy Babs, is always in fashion. The Bradleys are played broadly, though Bagge rises above average shtick with good, three-dimensional moments for Mom and Dad. It’s as if in considering story material, writer Bagge had to consider his own parents in a new light. And while Babs and Butch don’t have the same layers, they’re at least written with a keen ear for age-and-interest-appropriate dialogue, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Bagge didn’t have some siblings himself.

By 1988 and 1989, Bagge had not only achieved a fluid, instantly recognizable art style, but he was fully in command of his storytelling powers. Babs and Mom Bradley have a temporary closing of the generation gap in a scene that is funny, moving and even a little disturbing, while in “Buddy the Weasel” the lead misanthrope hits a kind of rock bottom of loserdom, his smart mouth and rebelliousness quieted for a moment as he’s forced to live on a toxic beach. Bagge, too, seemed to feel he’d mined the suburban family sitcomic for most of its worth. The next step was HATE.

CLIVE BARKER’S HELLRAISER: COLLECTED BEST by Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, Alex Ross, Mike Mignola and Others. Checker Book Publishing. $21.95
No author has made a bigger splash in comics than Clive Barker did in the early `90s, the man seen as the horror successor to Stephen King finding Eclipse Publishing producing high-quality adaptations of short stories from his BOOKS OF BLOOD in their TAPPING THE VEIN series, while Marvel Comics’ EPIC imprint had other top talents create new stories based in Barker’s HELLRAISER universe. Checker has been busy collecting the best of both series, and while I really enjoyed the VEIN volume, I was curious just how good this one might be, since Barker didn’t actually write any but two of the original stories here. My worries weren’t entirely baseless, but with a couple exceptions the stories here are worthwhile, and at times even enhance the world on which they’re based.

“Dead Man’s Hand” by Sholly Fisch and Dan Spiegle is a Western-era story with a mysterious man playing poker for a man’s soul. Other than the Lemarchand box from the HELLRAISER films on the table, there’s little connection here, especially as it turns out to be a rarity in this mythos—disaster averted. Still, it does read as a fine Western short, and it’s nice to see the late Spiegle’s work, a very good artist who doesn’t have much in print anymore. “The Harrowing Parts 1 and 2”, with art by Alex Ross and Tristan Shane, respectively, was apparently an attempt by Marvel to not only get Barker to write something original for them, but have it provide some connective tissue between issues of the series. I remember buying the first several HELLRAISERS myself and then missing some here and there, depending on which creators were in the book. It was an expensive book at the time, especially monthly or bimonthly as it was. Regardless, Barker’s attempt to create an ongoing story is ambitious but ultimately a failure. It seems there is a goddess of Order who has always stood between the Lord of Chaos, Leviathan, and his Cenobite underlings. She is Morte’ Mamme’, which I think means Mother Death or something. Despite the name, she’s not a far cry from Glenda the Good Witch, drawing to her seven average people who will be her avatars standing against the Cenobites. It’s eminently readable, especially with Ross already doing strong work, and some of his creepiest, and Shane is very good himself, but it just feels too corny by the end, or maybe I just wanted a batch of self-contained horror stories and nothing that smacked of ongoing superhero comics.

Frank Lovece’s and Bill Koeb’s “For My Son”, in which a poor immigrant dooms himself with some desperate choices, is disturbing, suspenseful, and quite moving in the father-son relationship and the father’s shame over not being able to provide better for the son. It makes me want to find out what, if anything, Lovece has done, as he’s not familiar to me as a comics writer. Bunny Hampton-Mack and Scott Hampton go Gothic for “Like Flies to Wanton Boys”, as a man reemerges from seven years of isolation due to an horrific experience with The Box, only to find he wasn’t gone quite long enough. Hampton is always good, though it seemed like the ending could have been a touch more dramatic. “The Girl in the Peephole” by Del Stone, Jr. and Marc Hempel, about a “rehabilitated” sex offender working in a mental hospital and having to feed a beautiful and dangerous young girl, has an utterly unsurprising outcome, but succeeds because of the depraved gusto Stone and Hempel bring to it.

Gaiman and/or McKean fans will enjoy “Wordsworth”, though I found it a beautifully illustrated but somewhat empty style exercise. A man has to complete some hellish crossword puzzle that requires all manner of degradation and murder in order to know the answers. It’s unsettling and very clever, but never really felt like a story to me, just a brightly polished fragment of something, though that’s better than most. Mark Nelson’s “Mazes of the Mind” suffers a little for being traditional comics art after McKean, but is a solid tale told by a Cenobite of how he goes about creating avenues to lure people to Hell. D.G. Chichester and a pre-Hellboy Mike Mignola deliver a nasty first person serial killer story, the red-hues of Mark Chiarello in the Hell scene and the black gutters showing just where Mignola was taking his art. “Dear Diary” by Fisch and Colleen Doran is a well-drawn curiosity, about a teenaged girl’s regret over her sister being taken to Hell by the Box when she should have been the one to solve the puzzle. There’s no horror to speak of here, except perhaps the horror of a foolish girl being jealous of her sister rather than missing her.

The quality dips a little for the last two stories, “Deathy, Where Is Thy Sting” by Malcolm Smith and Paul Johnson, and “Losing Herself in the Part” by Doug Murray, Dwayne McDuffie and Gray Morrow. The former brings back one of the seven Harrower characters for a confusing mix of modern and Gothic horror, with demonic Pilgrims and possessed bees. I couldn’t get much out of that one, whereas the last story’s plot can be easily guessed from the title alone. Actress takes a part for the next big film from a Spielberg type, has to do some strange character research with the Lemarchand Box, and finds all the pain and terror she could ask for. It’s formulaic but fine, and there are enough stories in the collection pushing the envelope a little harder to make up for the familiar ones.

The second volume is out some time in July.

COMIC BOOK LETTERING THE COMICRAFT WAY by Richard Starkings and J.G. Roshell. Active Images. $9.95
So I’m thinking the column is going to be a little shorter than usual, and what can I read in a hurry and review? The lettering book? Who cares about that, right? Besides, of the two reviews I’ve read, the guy who liked it is a known word criminal, and the guy I respect didn’t care for it. Well, what the hell, I’ve got a half-hour before bed.

As it so happens, I liked this book a lot. Admittedly, the design of the book is very busy, lots of different fonts and effects and such, but it wasn’t hard to read, and I forgave the excess on the basis that it was like Starkings and Roshell were taking you on a tour of the office and wanted to show you all their toys.

More than just the instructional manual the title implies, the book is also a short history of Starkings’ career, with the reprinting of a charming letter he sent as a youth to a British comics letterer he admired, as well as that pro’s helpful reply. The personal tone continues throughout, with Starkings picking his ten favorite letterers and why, as well as a defense of Comicraft’s use of digitized fonts rather than hand lettering. These were the bits I enjoyed the most.

The actual instructional material, however, is quite interesting even if one has no aims to pursue a lettering career. That is, if you have some interest in writing and/or drawing comics, there is a lot of good advice about storytelling and how the right font, balloon shape and balloon placement are crucial to a reader’s full enjoyment of the story. Don’t be fooled by the cover’s promise of stories by Busiek & Immonen and Loeb & Churchill, as these are just a few pages meant to show examples of lettering, but the fragments aren’t bad in and of themselves. Just like a director should take an acting class and an actor should be aware of what the lighting director does, anyone interested in the craft of comics should learn more about the almost invisible craft of lettering, and this is a good place to start.

HELLBOY: THE CHAINED COFFIN & OTHER STORIES by Mike Mignola. Dark Horse Comics. $17.95
I know, I know, normally I would say if you’re curious about just what this Hellboy guy is about and want to pick up one of the trades, you start at the beginning, SEED OF DESTRUCTION. Perfectly valid suggestion, especially as the upcoming movie is heavily based on that story, and it’s a good one. But after reading this book, I’m thinking this makes for just as good an introduction, if not better. Let’s see why:

First, it’s got “The Corpse”, widely considered the best Hellboy story ever. A mixture of more than one folktale, it finds Hellboy trying to retrieve a stolen baby for a worried couple, the baby stolen by some sort of faerie or wicked imp, he having taken the babe’s place for fun. In order to get the baby back, Hellboy agrees to help some other faeries by finding a grave in which to bury their dead, but talkative, buddy. Hellboy finds two graves with no vacancies but plenty of angry ghosts, until he finally finds the right one and gets the baby back. Excellently paced, surprising, and always dryly hilarious.

“The Iron Shoes” is a simple but fun fight story, while “The Baba Yaga” and “Almost Colossus” are each “lost scenes” from WAKE THE DEVIL, the latter originally a two-issue miniseries that gave some room for supporting characters Kate Corrigan, Liz Sherman, and Abe Sapien to establish themselves more strongly in readers’ hearts and minds, while also acting as an origin story for Roger the Homunculus, an artificial being who resembles Frankenstein’s Monster in some respects but chooses Good over Evil.

“A Christmas Underground” has the usual Kirbyesque monster-smashing action, but also contains moments of ethereal beauty ranking with Mignola’s best work, and this was just something he cobbled together for a Christmas-themed special! “The Wolves of Saint August” was Mignola’s first scripting job, and has maybe a couple off moments, but also some indelible imagery such as the girl with the wolf head. And while most Hellboy stories consist of our laconic-and-demonic hero putting inhuman or half-human monsters out of their own or someone else’s misery, “The Chained Coffin” mixes things up a little by being Hellboy’s long-awaited origin story, and kind of a sad one. And really, though most of the stories do follow some kind of basic formula, Mignola always brings so much energy, atmosphere and craft to each effort that I never tire of it. In fact, I find the stuff restorative and timeless.

Full Bleed: Chris’ Comics Carousel Creaks Again

It’s impossible to cover everything noteworthy I read in a week, so let’s just drop a few notes—rather than full-scale reviews—on these books:

SLEEPER #6 by Brubaker and Phillips - The book goes from strength to strength, currently as tense and uncomfortable as some of the best films about undercover cops, Feds and spies. It just happens that this guy’s superpowered.

THE TRUTH #6 (OF 7) by Morales and Baker - I’m a bit disturbed that Morales hadn’t already paced this out better—what luxury to get an extra issue for a miniseries, especially a commercial flop. I’ve been moderately enjoying it but kind of wondering just what the point has been. There hasn’t been much heroism shown, the black serum recipients mainly heroic just because they’re not as racist as the white characters, which just isn’t good enough. Unlike many, I’ve got no complaint about Baker’s art, which to me seems as committed as his previous work, just intentionally rougher.

GABAGOOL #4 by Mike Dawson and Chris Ratdke - one of the funniest and best-drawn minicomics I’ve read graduates to normal comic dimensions and no real change in quality. Web geek Christopher Vigliotti gets laid off with a nice severance and he and his friends go to Hedonism Resort in Jamaica, hoping to experience a lot of easy sex, but it wouldn’t really be a humor book if things worked out, would it? The story continues next issue, and the rest of the book is taken up with a “Lil’ Gabagool” story of the guys as boys, playing D&D. Funny stuff.

HERO #5 by Will Pfeifer and Kano - A new arc starts with a seriocomic look at just how addictive having the H-E-R-O device might be, as an office worker blows his home life and career on his all-too-frequent costumed jaunts. The daughter inherits the device at the end, so we’ll see where that goes. Kano’s style has loosened up in a really appealing way, and I wouldn’t mind him doing something with Ed Brubaker down the road, as they would seem to be a good match.

THE CREW #2 by Priest, Bennett and Miki - I mildly complained Bennett wasn’t an exciting enough artist to make this book take off commercially, but I’ve warmed to his style, especially the cool White Tiger design (helped by the coloring). I’m not sure why the book had to start before the BLACK PANTHER series was over, though, as the ending has been largely given away already, as respects Kasper Cole. Still, I like the character pretty well and am pretty pleased with the direction of this book so far.

Next week will mark by 51st official BREAKDOWNS for Movie Poop Shoot—there were two fill-ins written by buddies and one or two “Extras” that weren’t in this format—so I’ll do something special, maybe. Or maybe I’ll just read a bunch more books and do that thing, that reviewing thing, with looks at CRACKURZ, BROAD APPEAL and more.

Chris Allen

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