Right then, what else do we have here?
BEST COLLECTION: ABSOLUTE SANDMAN VOLUME ONE
The Absolute editions are a bit on the hit and miss side as far as which titles deserve to get the treatment are concerned - while Kingdom Come and Crisis might not be great stories, the artwork certainly benefits from the larger scale, and the stories themselves are certainly important enough to DC in general that they merit the format. Batman: The Long Halloween, on the other hand, while it's a good enough story and very pretty to read, isn't quite on the same level. One book which most certainly is on that level is Sandman, and the handsome huge first volume bodes well for what's to come in the planned four-book series. The main difference from the original comics and trade paperbacks is the colouring, which is a gigantic improvement over the previous splodgings, and the whole story reads a lot better as a result. Not cheap, not light, but definitely worth it.
MOST WELCOME ANNOUNCEMENT: THE RETURN OF MADMAN
Having been off doing his adaptation of The Golden Plates and having spent a few years at Marvel working with Peter Milligan on X-Force/X-Statix, I was beginning to doubt whether Mike Allred would ever return to the character who made him famous. Joyously, it seems that this coming April we're to be treated to a new Madman ongoing series by Allred, returning to the ginchy, wacked-out denizens of Snap City. Interestingly, an Omnibus-style volume of the previous Madman series (entitled Madman Gargantua) is on the cards for February, so I heartily recommend you pick up that particular doorstep of a book to discover the skinny on the grooviest hero in comics, then take a month to let your back and your wallet recover before diving into the new series.
MOST AMUSING CLEAVAGE: MISTY KNIGHT/RICADONNA
MOST IMPRESSIVE ACHIEVEMENT: SEVEN SOLDIERS
Okay, so it took six months to get the final issue out. When you sit down with all 30 issues of Grant Morrison's incredibly ambitious "mega-series", you see how much it was worth the wait. A year-long story of a team of heroes who never meet, but whose actions all nonetheless have drastic effects on each other, 7S (as Ver Kids call it) is an amazing example of what one writer's vision can achieve, and it's something we haven't seen since the early days of the interlinked Marvel Universe under Stan Lee. Reading the individual issues, it's hard to get a handle on exactly what's going on all the time (and some of the component minis themselves, notably the Mister Miracle section, are below the quality curve for the series as a whole), but in collected edition the pieces all fit together - with a bit of deductive reasoning, anyway. The fact that it works as well as it does is incredibly laudable.
MOST USELESS REFERENCE WORK: THE MARVEL ENCYCLOPEDIA
There's a game in our flat called "mistake racing". It's where you skim through this year's Marvel/DK Encyclopedia and try to find a mistake, and the first to do so is the winner. It tends to be quite a short game. What's that? The entry on Slingers directs you to also check out the entry on one of the team's members, Prodigy, but when you get to that entry it's actually for the other character named Prodigy, the one from the New Mutants? And it claims his first appearance is Captain America Comics #1, 1941, a full 61 years before his actual debut? Well, I'm glad I spent £30 on this book, otherwise I might never have known that Fantastic Four #1 came out in 1965 and featured the Inhumans (thanks, profile of Black Bolt!) and certainly wouldn't be able to identify Beak from the picture of his great-grandson which appears next to his description.
BEST INDIE: SCOTT PILGRIM AND THE INFINITE SADNESS
Is it a bit 2005 to praise Scott Pilgrim? If it is, I'm not bothered, because Bryan Lee O'Malley's story of strange romance and the fight to get it is still super three volumes in. This time round, we get a guy who has strange powers he gained through veganism, and a fight where one girl punches another girl so hard the highlights come out of her hair. You know the drill with Scott Pilgrim by now, though, so you can pretty much make the rest of the review up in your head - yayaya video game references yayaya great characters yayaya audaciously skewed logic yayaya go and buy it. So go and buy it already.
Right, that's all for now, because I have to go and make dinner, and then I have a party to put on here. I hope you had a good 2006, and that you have a good 2007 too. I'll be here for the next 65 days - see you tomorrow.
Well, everyone else is going to be writing these things, so I figured I might as well too, y'know? So if you've been wondering (and I know that you have, deep in the stringy depths of your flinty hearts) what I liked and disliked this year, here it is. The categories are a bit random and are in the order they're coming into my head so bear with me if I accidentally name two different people as Best Writer or something.
BEST NEW WRITER: CHRISTOS GAGE
Now, I have no idea whether he's a new writer or not, but I only started reading things he'd written this year so anyone who says he's not a new writer is going to be shadow-boxing, to be quite honest. All I know is that he's managed three things this year that speak very well to his skill. Firstly, he managed to make Stormwatch interesting for the first time since before it became The Authority. Secondly, he not only made Union Jack into a character who could credibly carry his own miniseries, but turned out a mini that manages to nearly make me forget the rotten Ben Raab series. Thirdly, and most importantly, he wrote the best Civil War-related issue published so far, in the form of the Captain America/Iron Man one-shot. This book actually managed to make both characters' motivations credible, all while maintaining the relationship and interactions between them both to date. And speaking of which:
BIGGEST FLABBERGHASTING DEVELOPMENT: FRANK TIERI WRITES GOOD COMIC
Honestly, it's the truth. Tieri's previous work has ranged from solid to poor, but his Kingpin-themed Civil War: War Crimes was a great wee story about what exactly all these bad guys are doing while the good guys are pounding on each other. Stark goes to Fisk and asks him for his help - but what's really in it for the big fat bloke? It's never a good idea to shake hands with the Kingpin, and Tony finds that out as Fisk plays both sides against the middle. It's self-contained, it's clever, and Lee Weeks does a great job on the art. I know, I'm as surprised as you.
BEST BIT OF COMICS-RELATED TAT
This thing, specifically the Thor one. Best stocking filler ever. Three inches tall and three tons of cute.
Michael Avon Oeming should be writing Thor. After the last few books Marvel have published by J Michael Straczynski, including the painful grinding-to-a-halt of Supreme Power/Squadron Supreme and the completely pointless Doctor Strange origin mini, why JMS gets the nod to bring back the thunder god and not Oeming is a mystery. From Ragnarok to Stormbreaker to Blood Oath, Oeming has repeatedly shown that as far as Marvel's gods go, he's the man with the tools for the job (specifically, a great big magic hammer). Ares was no exception, as Oeming and Travel Foreman knocked out a story of fathers and sons which was tucked away inside a tale of immortal blokes smacking other immortal blokes really hard like a toy inside a Kinder egg. There's action bursting out of every page, with some severely cool gunfights in particular, but at the core of it Ares is a series about family.
BEST ART ON A MINI-SERIES: SKOTTIE YOUNG ON NEW WARRIORS
The collection of this came out in 2006, so it counts, okay? Anyway. Before they became the fall guys for Mark Millar's lack of imagination, Zeb Wells and Skottie Young did a thoroughly entertaining New Warriors mini featuring the team as the stars of their own reality TV show. Young's art was one of the best things about the series, as you can see:
One more for today, I think...
MOST WELCOME RETURN: CASTLE WAITING
Linda Medley's charming series about life within the walls of the eponymous castle made its long-awaited comeback this year, with a collection of the entire series to date and the relaunch of the ongoing from Fantagraphics. The "chapbook" style of publication which the new book is being treated to is a nod toward its more natural format (i.e. collections rather than singles) and the returning storyline of the parentage of Jain's baby Pindar is a welcome one. It's great to have it back, and hopefully it'll be around for a good while to come.
More tomorrow, although no less arbitrary, as we head toward 2007 like drunken sailors on a boating pond.
I know, it's a little gauche to be plugging comics produced by folks who I'm friends with, but sometimes you have to make a bit of an exception, particularly when it's a great piece of work.
Last week, Oni Press put out issue one of Maintenance, a new ongoing series written by Jim Massey and drawn by Robbi Rodriguez. It's the story of Manny and Doug, a couple of ordinary working schlubs, who fill their nine-to-five day cleaning up spills, fixing machinery and counting down the minutes until lunch. Manny and Doug have it a lot worse than most of us, though, because most of us don't work at TerroMax, the world's leading provider of evil science and evil scientific products, and if we have to clean up a spill it usually doesn't try to eat us.
The first issue of Maintenance follows an average day in Manny and Doug's lives, as they try to avoid getting too much nasty gunk on them, worry about what the cute girl who works in reception thinks of them and wrangle with carnivorous kittens in vending machines. When they meet up with the bipedal death machine ManShark, though, things take a turn for the worse, what with their taking him out drinking an' all. The guys have to work out how to keep a drunk fish-man-death-thing from eating a bar full of curmudgeonly patrons, or even whether that's something they can be bothered to do.
Like the previously-mentioned Tick, Maintenance is one of them there funnybooks that's actually funny. The scene where ManShark decides he needs a new name is a good example of the type of belly-laugh moments to be found in the first issue, as he discards "Manny" (already taken) and "Sharky" (too obvious) in favour of the more macho "Cobra McPunch". Other characters, such as freeloading alien K'Arl, get similarly grin-raising scenes as the issue progresses, and we're introduced smoothly to a lot of characters and situations which will no doubt come into play in the months to come.
Massey's well known in online comics circles for his comedic talents, which many will have experienced via his Death Takes a Holiday strip, and this is his first gig with a big-name publisher, and also his first gig where he's not also the artist. That's perhaps one of the slight drawbacks of this book - involving another person as part of the creative team immediately leads to a one-step disconnect from the original intention, and there are occasions where the timing of a gag will feel slightly off. It's definitely a very minor complaint, because for the most part Rodriguez's illustrations do an excellent job of translating script to page, and hit the right tone spot on.
The world of Maintenance is obviously one which has a lot of potential for exploration - after all, evil scientists are never going to run out of evil things to invent, and ordinary guys like Manny and Doug are never going to run out of ways to throw a frequently figurative, possibly occasionally literal spanner in the works. You should probably check it out before they break something too important.
It struck me, having looked back at the archive, that on the very first day of this blog I mentioned in passing the singalong theme tune to the 1966 Thor cartoon. However, I don't appear to have stopped to think that maybe not everyone has seen this before. The time has come to rectify that.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Thor cartoon intro.
Actually, you know what, here's a whole episode. Aficionados of the original Lee/Kirby stories will see that the stories adapted into the series, ahem, owe a lot to the source material. Let's just say that the guys who wrote the cartoons might not have had the most creatively demanding jobs in television. The animators may also not have been working at peak capacity - you'll note that the animation is rudimentary to say the least, and that it appears to have been done by cutting up old Kirby issues and moving them around in front of a camera. This all said, these are charmingly hokey toons, and while they might not be the sort of thing that you would necessarily want to own DVD box sets of, they're engagingly daft. The episode below (in two parts) deals with Thor revealing his secret identity to his girlfriend Jane Foster, and having a bit of a barney with guest-starring Marvel hero Hercules. Enjoy.
Second time lucky, eh? Let's see.
It's been a little while since I last praised something Brian K. Vaughan wrote, so it's probably safe now to touch on something else of his, and it's yet another of his books which has met with praise from diverse corners. Unlike Runaways, though, this particular comic isn't aimed at younger readers, isn't based in either of the Big Two superhero universes, and doesn't even feature human beings.
In April of 2003, four lions were accidentally freed from Baghdad Zoo during a bombing raid which formed part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In September of 2006, DC Vertigo published Pride of Baghdad, a harback graphic novel by Vaughan and talented Canadian artist Niko Henrichon, telling the story of pride leader Zill, half-blind elder female Safa, young ideologue Noor and innocent-minded cub Ali as they make their way through the ruined streets of the city.
Make no mistake - this isn't Disney. These lions act like animals - they're interested in food, mating, fighting, sleeping and freedom. There's no Tim Rice/Elton John duet between Zill and an antelope here. The simplicity of their urges and their straightforward personalities mean that their reactions are stripped of all the usual rationalisations we have to apply in order to justify war and other pointlessness to ourselves. Their appalled incomprehension at the brutal overkill of the bombing raids and the destruction that follows presents an uncomfortable point of view for those of us who are more usually able to put such things to the back of our minds.
Vaughan draws parallels between the lions' freedom and the allied forces' "liberation" of the Iraqis. The unpreparedness which became so obvious in the weeks and months following the toppling of Saddam's regime and his statue is mirrored in the difficulty the lions have in adjusting to life on the outside of the zoo. The point may not be particularly subtly pressed home, but that doesn't diminish its impact - the central question the book poses is whether "freedom" is something which can be gifted to another, or whether the transition is one which will do more harm than good if brought by force.
The powerful nature of the plot would be undercut if the artwork weren't up to scratch, of course, but this is where Henrichon comes into his own. His art manages to be sketchy and intricate at the same time, as if Mike Kunkel had decided to give up kids' comics and strike out toward a more realist influence. The delicacy of the linework is a contrast to the often savage events portrayed in the story, and on a purely symbolic level this helps get across the fact that humans, lions and anyone else who gets caught up in war suddenly become fragile things which are easy to damage irreperably.
The story's conclusion is, as you would imagine, not a glowing scene of joy. Indeed, anyone familiar with the way the true-life event on which Pride of Baghdad is based will know the sad details of how things ended up. On the way to those final moments, however, Vaughan and Henrichon manage to make their four protagonists seem both genuinely animalistic and tragically almost human. This is one of the very few essential graphic novels of last year, and cements both writer and artist as names to follow with interest.
This is going to be another short post. Not because I'm pressed for time or anything, but because I've just written a much longer post only to have the whole thing disappear with a computer crash and I'm just far too angry with the infernal machine to sit in front of it for more than a few minutes.
As a replacement for what I had originally written about, here's a substitute which will mean you get to read someone else's words rather than mine, which at the moment are likely to be curt and snippy. Luckily, one of my favourite new comics of the year has had its first issue put up online, and so you get to extend your run of free funnybooks for an extra day. Tomorrow there will be no free stuff, just me waffling on.
Warren Ellis's comic Fell, his collaboration with Ben Templesmith from Image Comics, is in a format which is getting a bit of attention. Instead of 22 pages or so of story, interspersed with a ton of ads and costing three dollars, the Fell format sees comics being published which contain 16 pages of story, no ads whatsoever and a considerably lower price point. I've not read Fell, what with not being a massive fan of Templesmith's art, but the second title launched in this format has been a winner since day one.
Writer Matt Fraction, currently to be seen every month at Marvel writing Punisher War Journal and co-writing Immortal Iron Fist, has been producing (with artist Gabriel Ba) a Fell format book by the name of Casanova for the last six months. It tells the story of Casanova Quinn, thief whose estranged family run an spy organisation called E.M.P.I.R.E.. When their top agent, Casanova's sister Zephyr, is killed, it sparks a series of events which lead to Cass being transported to a parallel universe where it was he who was the super-spy who popped his clogs, and his sister is in bed (literally) with Xeno Newman, genius head of the international group of evildoers known as W.A.S.T.E.. Press-ganged into service by Newman, Cass now has to deal with both his own family's treachery and his duties as a double agent of both groups while playing them off against each other and trying desperately to stay enough jumps ahead of all the other parties to let him stay alive for long enough to have another cocktail.
Casanova is essentially Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius grafted onto Jim Steranko's 1960s S.H.I.E.L.D. stories, with Cass in the Nick Fury role. Each issue is stuffed to the gunnels with story, and the huge number of panels per page and the massive amounts of bonkers ideas being thrown around at every turn means that this isn't the kind of comic you can read in five minutes in the loo. If you were to try to read it in the loo, your legs would go numb and the fire brigade would have to come and help you. This is absolutely the antithesis of the decompression style that's been so popular for the last few years, and is all the better for it. There may be only 16 pages in any given issue, but those pages contain enough story to fill an entire Ultimate-line miniseries.
Image comics have thoughtfully given the entire issue away free online, via Newsarama. To read it, just click here and check it out yourself. Once you've done that, get down to your local comic book emporium and order the collection of the seven individual issues which form the first story arc, soon to arrive in stores. The future of more than one world may depend on it.
Tomorrow: wildlife, and a second run at the post I spent ages writing earlier this evening.
Last day of free Internet comics today, I think. It's also going to be a very quick one because we're currently in the 25-minute period between my Christmas dinner finishing and Some Like It Hot starting on Channel 4, so I'm afraid you're not getting a link to some secret leaked version of Mighty Avengers #1 or anything. No, today's free comic is one which was made by someone with little to no comic writing skill whatsoever - me.
In 2003, Comic Book Resources poster/moderator Brandon Hanvey and I worked on a short strip for an anthology called Caravan, which was put together and featured contributions exclusively from CBR posters. He and I collaborated on a story called The Adventures of Stuart and Jamie, featuring a pig and a hedgehog who talk in a mixture of every kind of dialect, argot and slang I could put together. Stuart and Jamie are aware that they are comic strip characters, and in this story, they have a comedy sidekick foisted on them in order to increase their mass-market appeal.
It's a bit rough around the edges, and if I were writing it today I think I'd certainly try to make the dialogue a little self-consciously "wacky", but I like how Brandon drew it and to be honest it's fine as it is.
The strip is online here. Brandon remains an artist and graphic designer, who's currently working on a new book for APE (the Alternative Press Expo) 2007, and he can be found more generally here.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night. Back to normal operations tomorrow.
Being as I'm so full of the Christmas spirit at the moment (eight and a bit hours to go! Whoo!), I'm going to carry on doing what I've been doing for the last couple of days, and pass on free comics by the magical power of the electric wind-up interweb. Having said that, today's comic is perhaps the least Christmassy of the lot so far - I mean, at least Barry Ween has some heart-warming moments. On the other hand, you'd be very hard pressed to find any tender yuletide feelings in Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' new book for Marvel's Icon line, Criminal.
Telling the story of a career lowlife by the name of Leo and his involvement in a heist which goes badly wrong, Criminal is straight-ahead Brubaker. No X-Men in space, no Civil War, no blind lawyers in trouble. It's a very dark, noir-influenced story which is closer to Scene of the Crime than anything he's done since he started working for the Big Two, more so even than his previous street-level crims book Gotham Central.
Leo is a pickpocket, but he has an organisational mind which makes him a perfect planner for a big job. When it all goes wrong, however, Leo turns tail and escapes with what he believes to be the loot. Given how his luck runs, you won't be surprised to learn that it turns out to be something much bigger and much worse, and he has to fend off both cops and robbers to stay alive, with only an aging con-artist and a recovering junkie for help.
Brubaker's teamed with artist Sean Phillips, with whom he previously worked on Wildstorm's spy super-hero book Sleeper, and who's recently had success with the, ahem, sleeper hit Marvel Zombies series with Robert Kirkman. Phillips' forte is character interaction, and he succeeds in turning each of the series' players into individuals with their own body language and mannerisms - although he's no slouch when it comes to putting across the firefights and chases that a book like this deserves either.
If you fancy checking it out (and I heartily recommend that you do), Marvel have put the entire first issue online here. After you've read the first few pages or so, it'll ask you to register with Marvel.com, but even that irritating step is worth it to see one of the best crime books on the market at the moment. If, on the other hand, you think Marvel.com are going to come in the night in their big Torchwood vans and steal your children if you give them your information (or, as is more likely, start sending you the Mighty Marvel Mailer), Brubaker himself has hoisted a pdf format "trailer" for the series onto his website.
Enjoy the book regardless of what option you choose. Merry Christmas to the lot of you, and I hope Santa brings you all chocolate-covered Oreos.
Over the last few years, certain comics have received quite a lot of attention in the mainstream press, such as Sin City (on the back of its movie) and Persepolis. One of the most interesting phenomena in this area, though, was the vast amount of column inches dedicated to Guardian First Book Award winner Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. It was interesting for a few reasons, not least of which was the fact that while it's a technically very accomplished work, it's very dull indeed. The two other major quibbles where Chris Ware's ponderous tome is concerned are that for a book which purports to be about Jimmy Corrigan, the Spectre isn't in it at all, and that its claims to feature the smartest kid on Earth haven't reckoned with the mental might of Judd Winick's foul-mouthed mental Goliath Barry Ween.
The high concept pitch for Barry Ween is that it's Dexter's Laboratory meets South Park. Barry himself is a world-class intellect, able to knock together technological marvels far beyond the state of the art at a moment's notice. The fact that he's ten years old is just something which he has to work around, which he does while swearing like the proverbial drunken sailor the whole time.
Barry is... well, "assisted" is perhaps too strong a word, and implies some kind of actual beneficial effect, so let's settle for "accompanied" by Jeremy Ramirez, his best friend and sometime guinea pig. Barry's scientific experiments and technologically breathtaking innovations are scuppered by Jeremy with predictable frequency, and most of the stories in which Barry features centre around his attempts to sort things out following another world-threatening snafu. All the while, he has to keep his advanced intellect a secret from the world in general, cope with aliens and government black ops teams, and try not to get too tongue-tied around Sara Tan, the girl he has a crush on. Pretty much the same things as we all remember getting up to in our pre-teen years, then.
What might sound like a one-gag book (it's a really brainy kid inventor but, get this, he swears a lot!) actually turns out to be, if not incredibly deep, then at least more layered than the premise suggests. Barry may be world-beatingly smart, but that doesn't mean that he's happy. As the series goes on, it becomes clear that Barry and Jeremy are friends because although Barry could make small talk with Stephen Hawking without breaking a sweat, he's still just a kid. Jeremy accepts Barry for who he is in a way that someone who was less of a simpleton might not, and for Barry that's staggeringly valuable - Jeremy is the only person who can stop Barry from feeling crushingly lonely on a continual basis. The series is sprinkled with awkwardly touching moments of emotional exposure on Barry's part, and the warmth of unconditional friendship that Jeremy is willing to share. Jeremy's too stupid to make it through a day without Barry; Barry's too intelligent to make it through a day without Jeremy.
This same stealthy approach to affectingly heart-breaking scenes is in full effect in the second half of the series, in which Barry and Jeremy travel to another dimension to rescue Sara from a Planet of the Apes-style scenario. Unexpected emotional gut-punches pop up more than once, and the series ends with genuine sadness. A further Barry Ween project, Barry Ween In Space, has long been rumoured to be on the cards, but with Winick's full slate of work at DC keeping him busy, it could well be some time before we hear any more inventive cursing from the genuine smartest boy on Earth.
For those who are interested, publishers Oni Press have made the whole first issue available here and here. Be warned - not for the easily offended. If you can take South Park, you can take Barry Ween, but it ain't the Beano, let me tell you.
Guess what, folks? It's nearly Christmas! That means food, drink, and oddly throwaway Christmas specials produced by major comic book companies.
Marvel have been producing what they now non-denominationally dub "holiday specials" now for a couple of years, and these have generally tended to be about 100% better than they really have any reasonable right to be. This year, the holiday special includes a Seussian A-Z by Mike Carey and Mike Perkins and an Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entry for Santa Claus (who knew he'd crossed paths with so many Marvel characters?). The highlight, however, particularly for anyone who read the excellent Fin Fang Four one-shot published last year (obtainable now in the Marvel Monsters hardcover, which is well worth your money), is the story of Doctor Strange's loyal manservant Wong and the shrunken alien dragon Fin Fang Foom taking on an evil robot Santa constructed by perpetual terrorist also-rans Hydra.
Fin Fang Foom is one of the greatest creations of Marveldom. His ridiculous name to his purple underwear, he's a shining example of great, odd Marvel goodness. He's an alien dragon with a bad case of Shakesperean diction and a monumental chip on his shoulder. He'll be getting his own entry on this very blog before too long, have no fear, but for now all you need to know is that he's a monster with a massive arrogance issue.
As an early Christmas gift to you, here's a link to the entire Roger Langridge/Scott Gray Fin Fang Foom story from this year's Marvel Holiday Special for your delectation and delight. Don't ever say I'm not good to you, kids.
