J. Caleb Mozzocco
Local boys make good (comics): Jake Kelly and John G’s The Lake Erie Monster #1
Cleveland is the city where Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman (and thus the very concept of the comic book superhero). It’s the city where Harvey Pekar spent his life and wrote his comics, including the recently, posthumously published valentine to his hometown, Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland. It gave the world writers Brian Michael Bendis and Brian K. Vaughn (we’re sorry and/or you’re welcome, depending on how you feel about those guys), and they even filmed the climax of a recently released and rather popular superhero summer movie there.
And here’s something else the city has going for it at the moment. It’s also home to Jake Kelly, John G and their self-published quarterly local horror anthology, The Lake Erie Monster.
Like most lakes of a certain size, Lake Erie has hosted reports of marine monsters over the decades, although sightings of lake serpents are much fewer, farther between and less credible than reports from, say, Lake Champlain (That didn’t stop Cleveland’s American Hockey League team from taking the name The Lake Erie Monsters, or The Great Lakes Brewing Company from naming a seasonal ale after one of ‘em, though).
The comic takes its name from the first of its stories, which features a smaller, less serpentine monster that dwells in the lake, however.
After an introduction by a punning, Cryptkeeper-like horror host character who calls himself The Commodore, and who resembles a red-eyed, rotting corpse version of Commodore Oliver Hazard “Don’t Give Up The Ship” Perry, Kelly and G. present the first part of the “The Lake Erie Monster,” a story created to go along with one of the ten imaginary movie posters they had previously created.
- May 10, 2012 @ 12:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
A Month of Wednesdays | Archie, Athos, All-Stars and more
Archie Meets Kiss (Archie Comics) Archie has proven especially adept at coming up with attention-grabbing — as in mainstream media attention-grabbing — storylines of late, and of all the “stunt” stories they’ve pulled off in the last few years, this one is by far the weirdest.
The closest thing I can think to which to compare it would be 1994’s Archie Meets The Punisher, although if that project worked by gleefully combining two funnybook polar opposites and letting that unlikely tension sell the book, having the eternal teenagers of Riverdale meet a rock band from the 1970s in the year 2012 is … well, it’s not so much the team-up you thought you’d never see, as it is the team-up no one could have imagined (except, I guess, for Gene Simmons, who apparently called up Archie Co-CEO Jon Goldwater and asked him to do the story).
Archie PR guy-turned-Archie writer Alex Segura and regular Archie artist Dan Parent (inked by Rich Koslowski) tell the tale: One night at a treehouse meeting of the Riverdale Monster Society, Sabrina (the Teenage Witch) is attempting to cast a protection spell over the city, but Veronica and Reggie accidentally mess it up, casting a projection spell that summons a quartet of monsters to town and, hot on their heels, Kiss.
The monsters—specific, teenage stereotype versions of the Universal monsters — set about sucking all of the fun out of Riverdale, threatening to make it an eternal land of lameness and tedium (Don’t worry, Segura makes the joke you yourself were just thinking of), and turning its residents into mindless zombies.
- May 3, 2012 @ 12:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
It yis what it yis: Popeye #1 offers a strong case for more Popeye comics
This week Fantagraphics shipped Popeye Vol. 6: Me Little Swee’Pea, the final book in the publisher’s thorough collection and handsome representation of the entirety of E.C. Segar’s comic strip starring the immortal, iconic sailor character.
So once that book has been read and enjoyed, what is an insatiable Popeye fan to do then?
Well, I’m glad I asked myself that, because it provides a perfect segue into IDW’s Popeye #1, which also shipped this week.
Like BOOM!’s recent Peanuts comics, there’s an aura of superfluity about the endeavor: Does the world need more, Segar-less Popeye comics when there are so many hundreds of pages of Popeye comics by Segar so easily available?
I honestly don’t know, and I suspect the answer to that question varies from potential reader to potential reader.
Certainly plenty of Segar-less Popeye narratives in various other media already exist, and certainly the character is familiar to folks around the world who may have never read a single one of the great cartoonist’s strips, thanks to decades worth of animated cartoons, a few video games and that Robin Williams movie.
Here’s something I do know, though: If there are going to be new Popeye comics, then I hope they are all as good as Popeye #1.
- April 26, 2012 @ 02:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
Two good old-fashioned, self-published comics for this weekend’s small-press shows
There are two regional small-press comics gatherings this weekend that should be well worth a visit, if you’re in driving distance to either.
There’s the Fluke Mini-Comics and Zine Festival in downtown Athens, Georgia this Saturday, and there’s also the long-lived Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo in my former home-town of Columbus, Ohio on both Saturday and Sunday.
Such shows often provide handy goals or deadlines for self-published creators, giving them a place to debut new work to an audience primed to receive it and thus incentive to get something written, drawn and printed in time to have it there.
Here are two such examples, one from each show.
- April 19, 2012 @ 11:00 AM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
Balloonless | Marjane Satrapi’s The Sigh
When you think of Marjane Satrapi, chances are you think of comics about her family and her native country of Iran. The Sigh is neither a comic, nor is it about her family or Iran.
Rather it is a short, illustrated prose fairy tale, and one that, while original, is heavily inspired by and contains elements of many other familiar fairy tales, although not necessarily Iranian ones, with Beauty and the Beast and the story of Cupid and Psyche informing much of the early part of the book.
While it’s not the sort of work Satrapi is best known for, it’s not exactly a departure either. Her 2006 graphic novel Chicken With Plums featured some fairy tale-like sequences embedded within it, even if it the overall story was inspired by stories of a real relative of hers, and that same year Bloomsbury published a children’s picture book of hers entitled Monsters Are Afraid of the Moon.
The Sigh was originally published in Satrapi’s adopted country of France, and Archaia re-published it in an English-language edition late last year. Edward Gauvin handled the translation, and it’s a very lovely-looking book the publisher has put together. I’m not speaking of the art, necessarily—we’ll get to that in a moment—but as in an object.
- April 12, 2012 @ 12:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
Tom Scioli’s American Barbarian is pretty much the best thing ever
I’m having a hard time making up my mind about something at the moment. I can’t decide if Tom Scioli’s American Barbarian the best thing ever, or merely the best comic book ever?
Granted, my critical faculties might still be a bit stunned from the red, white and blue uppercut of the reading experience. I did just mainline a 260-page dose of 100% pure comics into my eyeballs over the last hour or so, and I might not have quite come down from the high that accompanies the reading of the book.
Of course, the fact that Scioli’s American Barbarian can have such a powerful effect on even the toughest, most-jaded comics critic is a sort of review in and of itself. I rarely find myself tempted to gush, and I even more rarely find myself surprised by a comic book, yet here I am, knocked on my ass, my head blown and second-guessing myself for being this impressed as I struggle to find the right words to communicate the perfect power of this work, which distills the best parts of the many virtues of the trashiest, old-school American comic books into their very essences.
- April 4, 2012 @ 03:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
A Month of Wednesdays | Dinosaurs, Dahmer, Queen Crab and Kellerman
Dinopopolous (Blank Slate) Nick Edwards‘ Dinopopolous is the story of Nigel, a 13-year-old who loves comics, videogames and heavy metal and who solves mysteries with is best friend Brian, who is a talking dinosaur.
You have probably already decided that this is a comic book you would like to read, and I concur with your decision: This is a comic you will like reading.
When an archaeologist on the trail of the Miracle Bird of Ndundoo goes missing, Nigel and Brian are given a pre-pre-pre-historic artifact and tasked with finding the bird before Julian and His Evil League of Lizards, humanoid lizards that dress a little like the saiyans from Dragon Ball Z, and reminded me of the Tyrannos from DinoSaucers. And Brian reminded me a bit of a mount from the old Dino Riders toy line, wearing a saddle with guns mounted on it and all. And, tonally and visually, the entire book reminds me a bit of Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, all of which are farily positive associations in my mind.
The story itself is extremely straightforward. Our heroes find the trail, follow it, come into conflict with Julian and his League and then find the bird on the 25th and penultimate page of the book, which ends with a splash page reading “The End” in the middle of an explosion, while Nigel throws up some devil’s horns.
- March 29, 2012 @ 01:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
Stan Lee is mightier than his Mighty 7
Stan Lee’s Mighty 7 #1, which bears the logo “Stan Lee Comics” on the cover but is published by Archie Comics, is, as you may guess from the cover—which also features Stan Lee’s floating head exhorting one of the book’s virtues—is a new Stan Lee joint.
It is a pretty bad comic book, and I’d go so far as to say that it’s a remarkably, even exceptionally bad comic book. But there’s still an irrepressible, hard-to-hate charm about the entire endeavor.
That’s probably down to the magic of Stan Lee. At this point in his career, the guy’s entered into a sort of lovable old rascal phase, and I often find myself forgiving him a lot in the same way I forgive older relatives and relations a lot, putting negatives down to either “Well, he’s old” and “But think of what he’s done in his life, he deserves some slack.”
That, and there is a genuinely inspired idea here, although Lee’s floating head does a poor job of selling it on the cover (and Lee’s back-of-the-book editorial does a worse job of it). The contents of the book orbiting that one inspired idea are so completely generic and derivative that I kept wondering if they were intentionally so.
- March 22, 2012 @ 01:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
Welcome to Saucer Country #1
All politicians have skeletons in their closet, but New Mexico Governor Arcadia Alvarado has something even weirder and scarier than a skeletons in her closet, she’s got aliens.
If you don’t recognize the name, it’s not because you haven’t been paying enough attention to state politics in the southwestern United States, but because she’s the fictional governor of New Mexico, and the lead character in the new Vertigo series Saucer Country.
Susana Martinez is still the actual, real-life, female Latina governor of New Mexico, but she wouldn’t make as good a protagonist for a comic book series like this, as she is not currently running for president of the United States nor, to my knowledge, has she ever been abducted by aliens.
I am curious how much Martinez may have inspired writer Paul Cornell in his creation of Alvarado—Ryan Kelly didn’t seem to take any visual inspiration from Martinez in his character design—although I’m a bit more curious how heavily former Arizona Governor John Symington might have weighed in Cornell’s mind.
- March 15, 2012 @ 01:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
Supurbia #1 and the over-analogued superhero industry
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen—specifically Alan Moore’s side of it—was Topic A in comics circle for a few weeks after DC announced Before Watchmen a while back (10 years, in blog time). During that time, one of the many “arguments” anonymous online commenters were making against Moore’s expression that he wishes DC wasn’t doing Before Watchmen was that since the work featured characters somewhat inspired by the DC-owned Charlton characters, he should therefore be cool with DC continuing to exploit them.
Moore and Watchmen and that argument were all quite present in my mind while reading Supurbia #1, or Grace Randolph’s Supurbia, as it appears on the cover of the issue. The premise is “superhero Desperate Housewives,” and that premise is so strong in the first issue you can practically hear that very pitch ringing in your ears as you read.
The super-people are all obvious and, in the first issue at least, barely-extrapolated-from analogues of DC (and two Marvel) superheroes: Sovereign, the caped demigod in constant Superman Is A Dick-mode; Night Fox, billionaire playboy with an underground cave lair; Batu, warrior woman from an ancient culture of warrior women; Cosmic Champion, current member of the Cosmic Corps who inherited his mantle; and patriotic super-soldier Marine Omega and his grown-up sidekick, Bulldog.
It may simply be symptomatic of my having been reading superhero comic books for too long now, but when by the time writer Grace Randolph and her artist partner Russell Dauterman introduced the third obvious analogue, I started sighing. Moore didn’t invent the use of analogues, of course—Marvel and DC were using thinly veiled versions of one another’s characters to comment on them for fans’ sakes at least as far back as the last Silver Age—but Watchmen sure made the strategy more present for the generation of comics creators and readers that followed that work.
- March 8, 2012 @ 01:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
Bit player takes center stage in Ralph Wiggum Comics #1
When Disney bought Marvel Comics in 2009, much of the coverage of the move cited the publisher’s catalog of 5,000 characters. DC Comics, which was founded a few decades earlier and had gobbled up the character catalogs of many other publishers over the decades, must have a catalog of characters even deeper.
The cast of The Simpsons hasn’t grown quite that large, despite its 23 seasons and over 500 episodes, but there are an ever-increasing number of name characters within the city limits of Springfield, most of whom should be capable of supporting their own comic book. At least for one issue, right?
Case in point: Ralph Wiggum, Lisa Simpson’s dim to the point of zen nothingness classmate and the son of incompetent Police Chief Wiggum. The malapropism-spouting bit player usually only gets a cameo in episodes, when he appears at all, but those appearances tend to be the funnier bits of the episodes (and I say that as a lapsed fan who thinks the show might have climaxed a good 10 or 15 seasons ago, and started running on fumes a few seasons back).
Of course, on the show, Ralph works in small doses. Can he work in bigger doses? Bongo Comics gave us the chance to find out this week, with Ralph Wiggum Comics #1, a 25-page one-shot full of short stories starring Springfield’s most guileless resident.
- March 2, 2012 @ 11:00 AM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
A Month of Wednesdays | Rushkoff, Snyder, Forsythe and Wheeler
A.D.D. (DC Comics)
Writer Douglas Rushkoff repurposes the familiar acronym for the title of this original graphic novel, only here it stands for Adolescent Demo Division rather than Attention Deficit Disorder (although the association with the original definition is certainly attentional, and somewhat apropos).
The kids of this ADD are professional beta testers and something of a focus group as intentional society. They were raised from the cradle to test things, and to compete as the athletes of the near-future, where video game competitions are apparently the dominant professional sport.
Something’s a little off with these kids though, as civilians and their competitors all notice and never fail to point out, and they all seem to have some sort of developing superpower, as well. Protagonist Lionel can see through electronic information and codes of all kinds to the message and intent behind, his friend Takai can build and un-build just about anything, and so on.
When some of the kids themselves discover something’s off regarding their origins and the company that keeps them pampered prisoners, they try to escape. Rushkoff’s plot is well-structured, if quite familiar and predictable, and he obviously put a lot of care into crafting the near-future slang of the teens, most of which struck me more as funny than convincing (“Dekh” for decode, “Kopa” for cool by way of copacetic, “nexy” for a blend of new, next and sexy, etc).
Continue Reading »
- March 1, 2012 @ 02:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
Balloonless | Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist
Nancy Goldstein’s Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist suffers a bit from a lack of access to information.
While the author’s sources include Ormes’ sister and a cartoonist colleague, and her subject was, as she put it, “a saver,” she also notes early on that she didn’t have letters to or from Ormes, a traditional source for what’s going on in a biography subject’s head, nor, apparently, did she have any sort of journal or diary.
The resultant book then is, perhaps, imperfect. Goldstein makes quite clear what an incredible, colorful person Ormes was, and what a fascinating life she lead, but the biographical sections are tantalizing: One may find oneself wanting much more detail, to join Ormes in the newspaper offices or society functions she covered and put on.
And while there is an awful lot of comics art reproduced within its pages, but due to the special and financial limitations of this book (it’s not an archival project, after all) and the simple lack of availability of original art, original newspapers her work was published in, or even copies or microfilm of those papers, much (too much) of Ormes’ work is lost to history.
- February 23, 2012 @ 02:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
The two disappointments of Lily Renée, Escape Artist
I’ve found two major types of disappointment in my years of comics reading. The first, and most common, is one you’re probably all-too familiar with: the disappointment of reading a comic you fully expect to be good—because of the creators involved, the reputation of the publisher, the buzz among fans or at the shop, the positive reviews you’ve read, whatever—only to discover that it is not, after all, any good.
A rarer, and more stinging type of disappointment is when you come to a comic that you want to be good, only to discover upon reading that it is not, alas, any good.
I started thinking about this while reading Lily Renée, Escape Artist (Graphic Universe), a biography of woman who, as the subtitle reads, went From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer.
I felt a bit of the first type of disappointment, as this was written by Trina Robbins, a talented cartoonist and skilled and incisive writer of and about comic. But it was the second type of disappointment I felt most strongly while making my way through the book—which actually got to be a bit of a struggle after a while—and that type of disappointment only increased as I kept reading.
- February 16, 2012 @ 02:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
Kids comics these days!: Adventure Time, Batman: The Brave and the Bold #16 and SpongeBob Comics #7
You’ve heard it said that children are the future, and if that’s true—and it must be, since they’ll be around for more of the future than we adults will be—it’s as true for comics as it is for whatever else people mean when they say children are the future.
So what sorts of comic books are we providing for our children, our future these days? As it turns out, some pretty good ones—hell, some pretty great ones.
This week saw the release of three particular comic books–not graphic novels or tankobon, but good-old-fashioned 20-some pages and some staples comic books—that featured superior writing and art, some of that art coming from world-class cartoonists.
And all three of those comics, oddly enough, are based on cartoon series.
When I was a child, there were comic books based on cartoons (cartoons that were often based on toy lines), and while they were readily available in drug and grocery stores, and you could buy one with a dollar bill and get change back, they weren’t exactly the highest quality product.
But some of today’s based-on-cartoons comics can put to shame much of what the “Big Six” direct market publishers release for their grown-up audiences.
- February 9, 2012 @ 12:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco