Marjorie Liu is the sort of writer other writers envy. We in the comics world know her for her Marvel work, including X-23 and Black Widow and, most prominently, her just-announced gig as writer for Astonishing X-Men, but she has a whole other life as a prose novelist. Her latest books are Within the Flames, the tenth in a series of paranormal romances about shape-shifters, and The Mortal Bone, an urban fantasy novel about a woman whose body is covered with demonic tattoos that come to life. I talked to Marjorie this week about her work in all three genres, and her plans for the near future of the X-Men.

Brigid Alverson: You were writing prose novels before you wrote comics. What sort of adjustments did you have to make to your writing (both style and process) when you moved from one medium to another?

Marjorie Liu: I had two great mentors when I first started: my editor, John Barber, and editorial assistant, Michael Horwitz. Both of them “held my hand” through the process, giving me sample scripts and a lot of wonderful advice. What I found that helped (sometimes, not always) was focusing just on the dialogue. I’d imagine these characters caught in the moment, and write down their conversations. Then, I’d break it into panels.

But yes, it was an adjustment. When I write a novel, I’m responsible for every aspect of storytelling: I have to provide the visuals, all the emotion, through my words. Plus, the story is a lot longer—upward of 100,000 words. Comics are much shorter, and I have a partner-in-crime: the artist, who tells the story through his or her illustrations. It’s such a privilege to participate in that kind of storytelling.

Astonishing X-Men

Alverson: What have you learned along the way—how would you say your current comics are different from your earlier ones?

Liu: That’s hard to say. I’m still terrible at plotting ahead, so maybe nothing has changed!

Alverson: Listening to you describe your prose novels, I got the feeling that there are a lot of parallels between your novels and superhero comics. The types of characters and the action you describe don’t seem that different from superheroes, yet paranormal romance and urban fantasy are perceived as totally different genres from superheroes. As someone who writes in all three genres, how would you compare them?

Liu: Paranormal romances and urban fantasies are seen as totally different genres even from each other (though, in my opinion, there’s quite a bit of overlap), so I’m unsurprised that parallels to superhero comics aren’t typically drawn. The most basic and superficial difference between a paranormal romance and urban fantasy rests within the focus on relationships—in one genre, the relationship between hero and heroine is of paramount importance—while in the other, it’s the personal journey of a singular protagonist that matters most.

In both genres, however, the characters are usually not human, and must learn to deal with immense power (and obligations) that make them total outsiders. For example, the heroes and heroines of my Dirk & Steele paranormal romance series are psychics, mermen, shape-shifters, witches, gargoyles….basically, humans and otherworldly creatures who inhabit our modern day world and struggle to keep their existences secret. Similar to the struggles of some superheroes in comics.

Alverson: How did you first become acquainted with the Marvel universe in general and the X-Men in particular? What do you like about them?

An early appearance by the Marauders

Liu: I became familiar through the X-Men cartoon of the 90′s, which I suspect inspired a lot of kids to take a rather feverish look at the comics. What I loved then, and what I still love, is that strong sense of family that ran through all the stories and relationships. This wasn’t just a team of random superheroes, this was a group of men and women committed to one another despite their dysfunctional relationships, occasional insanities, and the added burden of a world out to get them. Along those same lines, the X-Men were always outsiders, on the fringe. I identified with that.

Alverson: As a novelist you invent your own characters, but when you write for Marvel you are working with pre-existing characters who have their own histories and personalities—and who will continue to exist after you move on. How much control do you have over the Marvel characters you write about, and how have you made them your own?

Liu: As a writer who has a great deal of respect for Marvel’s superheroes, my goal is to stay true to the spirit of who these characters are. If I had decided to give X-23 a bubbly, talkative personality—obsessed with boys and clothes—that would just be odd and wrong. In fact, it would be a slap in the face of all the trauma she’s endured.

On the other hand, I’ve been given tremendous opportunities to make these characters my own. Being allowed to write Black Widow as a young mother was huge, and no one has ever pulled me back from putting a twist on relationships—making Gambit a mentor to X-23, for example, and exploring how that might change them both. That’s the key part, I suppose…that I’ve been able to explore.

Alverson: What about your storytelling style—are there ways in which you consciously depart from the other comics you have read?

Liu: Not consciously, no. I just sit down and write. My storytelling style is continuing to evolve.

Alverson: Now that you are taking over on Astonishing X-Men, which characters are you looking forward to writing about most?

Liu: Every single one of them listed on that roster. If I’m not excited about a particular character, I won’t waste my time on him or her.

X-23

Alverson: Were there any plot threads you didn’t get to in X-23, any stories left untold? And if so, will you be looking for ways to pick them up in Astonishing X-Men?

Liu: Oh, sure. I wanted to follow up with the NYX kids (Kiden, Bobby, etc), and also bring Black Widow into the book as a female mentor to X-23. Those aren’t story-lines that will be making it into Astonishing X-Men, though.

Alverson: Your first story arc will involve The Marauders, who are a pretty bad ass team of villains. Given their history and their power, how do you plan to portray them as menacing while holding back enough to keep the story balanced and interesting?

Liu: That’s difficult to discuss without giving too much away. What I can tell you is that no member of this new X-team will come away unscathed. I’m not talking physical wounds, either. The scars will go deep, and the Marauders will be part of that. On the other hand, the Marauders are not the main focus of the story — and they might not even be the ultimate villains.

Alverson: I’m impressed by the number of books and comics you have written in a relatively short time. What does your work day look like? Do you usually focus on one project at a time, or do you switch between novels and comics when you want a break?

Liu: This has been a particularly crazy month. I’ve had two novels come out—Within the Flames, which follows the adventures of a young pyrokinetic who rescues a beautiful dragon shape-shifter from the witches hunting her—and The Mortal Bone, part of my Hunter Kiss series, about a woman covered in living demonic tattoos that peel off her body at night to form her own army. On top of that, I’ve been writing my next novel, working on the last issue of X-23, and hammering away at Astonishing X-Men. I need to start using a kitchen timer to keep track of my hours!

So, my work day. Basically, I get up early—around first light—eat breakfast, feed the poodle and cats, then sit down and get to work. I usually work on two different projects at once—I’ll write one in the morning, and then switch gears to tackle the second project (novel or comic) after lunch. When I take breaks, I watch television, read, go for walks.

Alverson: As a writer, are you still able to enjoy reading comics for pleasure? If so, which ones do you like?

The Fire King

Liu: It’s completely random. Not long ago I picked up Christian Slade’s Korgi (Vol. 1-3), which is wordless, adorable, and full of flame-breathing dogs, aliens from outer-space, faeries, swamp monsters, and other delights. I love it! I also read Jason Aaron’s Wolverine and the X-Men (because it’s red hot fun), and Bill Willingham’s Fables. Also, recently—Love & Rockets: Poison River by Gilbert Hernandez—breathtaking, brilliant and totally traumatizing.

Alverson: Have you considered adapting your prose work to graphic novel format?

Liu: Yes. Every now and then Kalman Andrasofszky illustrates scenes from the Hunter Kiss series, which is fun because it gives a hint at what the books would look like as graphic novels. You can see two scenes here and here, as well as a sample “cover” he worked on for one of my romance novels, The Fire King.

Alverson: What about doing a creator-owned graphic novel with new characters?

Liu: I would love that. It’s been on my mind for quite some time.

Officer Downe

Hello and welcome to a special birthday bash edition of our weekly “What Are You Reading” feature. Typically the Robot 6 crew talks about what books we’ve read recently, but since it’s our anniversary, we thought we’d invite all our friends and colleagues from Comic Book Resources and Comics Should Be Good! to join in the fun.

To see what everyone has been reading, click below …

*****

Timothy Callahan

Uncanny X-Force #1

Uncanny X-Force #1-19, by Rick Remender, Jerome Opena, Dean White, and others. I’ve been reading — and enjoying — this series since the first issue debuted, but I carved out a couple of hours recently to reread the entire run to see the whole Archangel saga play out as a single story. I wondered if this was, perhaps, the defining run for the character — the way the Brubaker/Fraction Immortal Iron Fist defined Danny Rand, or the way Jason Aaron provided the definitive Ghost Rider. And upon rereading, I have to say “yes.” This first year-and-a-half of Uncanny X-Force is the definitive Angel/Archangel story, and what’s so great about it is that Remender built upon the mythology of the character’s past instead of trying to revert him to some oversimplified version of the original Lee/Kirby creation. Also, this series is just packed with characters and plot points and yet maintains a deep emotional core. Good stuff, all around.

The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner. I’m only about 50 pages into this novel so far, and though I’ve read a decent amount of Faulkner — and plenty of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the other two Big American Moderns — I’ve never taken the time to read this acclaimed masterpiece. I’ll reserve complete judgment on it until I’ve finished it, of course, but I already know that it lacks a direct through-line like you’d find in my favorite Faulkner book, As I Lay Dying. When I used to teach that novel, we would explore Faulkner’s use of heteroglossia — basically, the multiplicity of narrative voices — and he’s clearly up to the same tricks in The Sound and the Fury. My prejudice against this novel, and the reason why I’ve avoided it for so long, is that I assume it will be more of a portrait of a time and a place than an actual, compelling story. I have always been more of a story guy than a portrait guy, personally, but we will see what treasures this novel holds.

Tom Spurgeon’s Holiday Interview series. Every year, during the Christmas season, Tom treats us to daily interviews with some of the most interesting people in and around the comic book industry. From Kim Thompson to Jeff Parker to Tucker Stone, we get a profile of the current state of comics from all angles, and the interviews go far deeper than the standard online promotional pieces. These are actual conversations with people who have things to say. Every one of them is worth reading, even if you don’t think you’re interested in the topic at first.

Timothy Callahan writes CBR’s When Words Collide column. He also writes about comics for Tor.com and has his own blog.

Chad Nevett

1. A bunch of Joe Casey comics. Anyone who knows me probably isn’t surprised by that statement, but, look at December: Doc Bizarre, the Officer Downe hardcover, new issues of Haunt and Gødland, and the conclusion to Vengeance. All that was missing was a little Butcher Baker… Any month with that much Joe Casey is going to seem a little crazy. Doc Bizarre is some madcap fun, Officer Downe manages to be even more fucked up, and Vengeance ends on such a crazy high note that I think I need to send Mr. Casey a big thank you letter for writing a comic book series so squarely aimed at yours truly. I know I’m not the only one who marked out at Z making a cameo appearance at the end…! I’m still not entirely sure about Haunt (aside from loving Nathan Fox’s art). Casey obviously has some plans, but it’s hard to see where they’re heading. I dug the new issue, though. Ending the year with that small stack of December Joe Casey comics is pretty nice.

The Visible Man

2. The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman. Probably the last book I’ll finish in 2011 (I finished reading it late Friday night) and it was a big leap from his first novel Downtown Owl. I’ve really enjoyed Klosterman’s non-fiction (or semi-fiction, maybe?) work for years. Funny, insightful, and always interesting in his essays on pop culture in all its forms. I tend to blow through his books, because they’re so damn enjoyable. His fiction, on the other hand, hasn’t always grabbed me. Downtown Owl was entertaining and had its moments, but it was definitely something that I read because I like Klosterman’s writing. The Visible Man has me thinking that Klosterman may have some strong fiction chops. It’s a novel framed as a non-fictional account of a therapist and her (failed) treatment of a man who wears a suit that renders him virtually impossible to see by reflecting light in such a way that you see what’s on the other side of him. The protagonist ‘Y____’ reminds me a lot of a character who has stepped out of a Paul Auster book. Forceful and strange with a strong and unique perspective on the world and himself. Some of the ideas discussed are wonderful. The stories he tells of observing people in their homes without detection are rather engaging — to the point where the novel suffers a little when it moves away from those stories. The ending is what it is… it doesn’t live up to the potential the book or Y____ showed, but… entertaining book that made me stop and think from time to time. And has me wondering what Klosterman’s next novel will be like.

3. Banner by Brian Azzarello and Richard Corben, and Filthy Rich by Brian Azzarello and Victor Santos. A couple of Azzarello books that I’ve been meaning to get for a while. I read Banner years ago on Marvel’s website and it’s both very like and very unlike Azzarello’s other writing. The language games are there in spots, but his dialogue is very sparse — he really steps back and lets Corben run the show to a degree. Filthy Rich had its moments, but is so rooted in being ‘pulp’ that it doesn’t do much more than work within the confines of the genre. It’s a fun little exercise. Santos’s art is wildly inconsistent — but, when he’s on, he does a mean Frank Miller impression.

Chad Nevett talks about comics in several different places around the web — at his personal blog GraphiContent, at Comics Should Be Good! and as a reviewer for Comic Book Resources. He also writes about wrestling for 411mania.

Bill Reed

These days I’ve found myself reading more and more webcomics, and as someone who still hasn’t figured out how an RSS feed works, that involves me remembering to read a strip on a specific schedule, and then clicking or typing myself over to the designated webspace from which the particular comic springs forth. I would totally pay real dollars for the following:

Al’Rashad, from Christopher Bird and Davinder Brar, which goes up weekly at Mightygodking, a clever, funny, and superbly drawn fantasy adventure comic that features pirate action, bizarre bazaars and the wiliest mop-haired street orphan since Flim-Flam from The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo.

Bearmageddon

Bearmageddon, artist Ethan Nicolle’s other, non-Axe-Cop webcomic, which has been slowly building its way to the titular Grizzly apocalypse, and has just recently leaped into the Kodiak carnage we’ve been waiting for, with well-meaning hippies versus nature’s hungry killing machines. Nicolle’s gorgeous cartooning and Noah Maas and company’s vibrant colors give the series the most beautiful mayhem since, well, Axe Cop.

Bucko, by Jeff Parker and Erika Moen, a freewheeling (actually, fixed-gear) epic for our times, populated by hipsters, cyclists, Juggalos, and fartmongers, the strip turns Portland into a magical, madcap fantasy land filled with delightful, deranged characters, the true Oz of the Northwest. Moen’s lines have been getting sparer and more confident, the art style becoming more refined, like the evolution of a newspaper comic strip, only at hyperspeed.

Lady Sabre & the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether by Greg Rucka and Rick Burchett, a beautifully realized space pirate cowboy adventure serial that opens with a tremendous swordfight on a space zeppelin before segueing into Sam Elliot kicking ass. I shouldn’t have to say any more, but I will: it’s the best artwork of Burchett’s career, and the included script with each new installment provides a great insight into the collaborative process, specifically in terms of how artwork interprets and diverges from the narrative skeleton.

Bill Reed contributes regularly to Comics Should Be Good! and has his own personal blog.

Ryan K Lindsay

11.22.63

11.22.63: I’m a massive Stephen King fan. Always have been and always will be. Most of his recent fare hasn’t been anything compared to his late 70’s stuff (but what is?) though his short stories continue to thrill and I enjoyed Under The Dome right up until the cop out ending. I am, however, thoroughly enjoying 11.22.63.

There might not be any subtext to this book but you must cast that aside and revel in the fact King is one of the premiere storytellers when it comes to sinking you right into the narrative. There are some King tics that’ll stand out (constantly naming songs to set the tone and you’ll hear his unmistakable voice coming through some of these characters) but the swell of this tale is captivating. King turns a phrase well but mostly he just wants to tell an enjoyable tale and he really is.

There has been more than one occasion in this book where I have stopped because the events have floored me. That’s the sign of a good book to be read. Oh, and this is my first novel read on the iPad and I’m completely digging the way it goes. I have no issue with it at all.

The Cape: This is the sort of comic that makes me excessively proud to be a comic fan. Just by tangentially knowing this product through purchasing, reading, enjoying and reviewing this book, my life is better and I’ve spread the love out into the world. This book started with the acorn of an idea from a Joe Hill short story, and now Jason Ciaramella and Zach Howard have grown it into a mighty tree with a canopy of rich ideas and a nasty lead character at the peak.

If you haven’t picked up The Cape then you need to do it. If you have any member of your family who digs on subversive fare then buy this for them. The level of amazing this comic goes to will win you over completely. Comics need to try this hard more often.

The Mighty Thor Omnibus

Simonson’s Everything: I listened to Walt Simonson on Word Balloon, and it’s put me in a spin. I’ve owned the SIMONSOMNIBUS (The Mighty Thor Omnibus) for half a year and my New Year’s Resolution is to burn through it all. I might even annotate my thoughts. I also found some Simonson Fantastic Four issues on ComiXology for only $1.99 so I snapped those up. And I’ve also pulled down my old Havok & Wolverine: Meltdown issues for another spin through.

I’m a big back issue fan, as a kid I loved coming back from the comic shop (an hour train ride to and back) and spreading all my swag out on the bed and spending the day losing myself in old Marvel U history. It’s now nice to have my pick of them in authentic old school issues, a massive omnibus presentation, and crystal clear on my iPad. We do truly live in the future – here’s to 2012.

Ryan K Lindsay is a reviewer for CBR and a podcaster with Kurtis J Wiebe and Jeremy Holt on The Process, where they talk about comic writing. He is planning to have a very big 2012 in all things comics.

Greg McElhatton

Kushiel's Dart

Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey: I still remember when Kushiel’s Dart was published in 2001; I was living in Falls Church and the local Borders had copies of it everywhere. Clocking in around 700 pages, it looked interesting but daunting at the same time. There are nine books in the series now, and I’ve still never gotten around to reading them. Fortunately for me, my book club picked it as the January 2012 book, which means I finally have an excuse to dive in. I’m still in the early pages and it’s slow-moving, but Jacqueline Carey’s prose is comfortable and I’m interested in what I’ve seen so far about this alternate history. Half of the fun is piecing together what’s different when it comes to an alternate history, and this one is no exception.

Embassytown by China Mieville: I’ve put Embassytown temporarily aside so I can finish up Kushiel’s Dart, and already I’m dying to get back to China Mieville’s latest novel. Mieville’s ideas are always wonderfully huge and crazy, and Embassytown is no exception. What starts out as a simple “humans co-existing with aliens on another planet” story has rapidly turned into a mixture of social dynamics and linguistic oddities. Similar to his novel The City & The City (with its two cities that exist side-by-side where the inhabitants have learned to block out the opposite side), it’s hard to describe the joy and wonder of Embassytown without giving away a lot of the wonderful surprises, but if you can make it to the point where you first meet the Ambassadors, you’ll quickly learn just why Embassytown is in a class of its own. If you’ve never read a Mieville book before, Embassytown is a great place to start.

Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes

Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes by Carl Barks: I’m a little mortified to admit that Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes is my first exposure to Carl Barks (after decades of being interested in finally seeing why he’s so revered as a comic creator), but it definitely won’t be my last. Fantagraphics’ first volume of Barks material is a great place to start; a mixture of epic quests, short stories, and gag strips that are all impressively funny and awesome. There’s something wonderfully evil about a strip where a witch is forcing the Duck nephews to cry so that she can turn their tears into a potion to destroy all Christmas trees, only to turn around and have a hilarious transformation sequence to break up the gloom and make you laugh.

A friend once said, “Everything good in the DuckTales cartoon was first done by Carl Barks” and I can see that now. This is one of those rare comics that really is meant for all ages, or for that matter all interests; the only reason it took me a few weeks to finish the book is that halfway through, my non-comics-reading boyfriend started flipping through it and then temporarily claimed it as his own so that he could finish it first. Trust me when I say, that’s high praise indeed.

Greg McElhatton writes reviews for Comic Book Resources and Read About Comics, and he has a cool personal blog as well.

Dave Richards

Beautiful, Naked & Dead and Out There Bad by Josh Stallings: If you’re like me, you love a great crime story regardless of whether it’s published in four color or prose formats and these two prose novels which I recently discovered were some of the best crime stories I read all year. In Beautiful, Naked, & Dead, Stallings’ stellar debut novel, you’re introduced to Moses McGuire; an ex-marine, ex-con, and strip club bouncer as he goes on a quest to avenge a friend’s murder. In the even better follow up novel, Out There Bad, Stallings sends Moses to Mexico for a confrontation with human traffickers. If you love the work of Ed Brubaker, Jason Aaron and Greg Rucka pick these two books up. You won’t regret it.

Batman: Noel

Batman: Noel by Lee Bermejo: I got this as a Christmas present and read it Christmas eve. I don’t think I really need to say a whole lot about Bermejo’s art. It’s beautiful, breathtaking and speaks for itself for the most part. His renderings of Gotham City and the Joker were especially impressive in this. I believe this is Bermejo’s first book as a writer though and he does a pretty great job with it. He tells a fun story that does a nice job working the framework of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol into a Batman story. Bermejo also did a great job with characterization, especially Superman who serves as the Ghost of Christmas Present. All in all this was a fun holiday read and might just become a Christmas Eve tradition for me.

Hellboy: House of the Living Dead by Mike Mignola and Richard Corben: House of the Living Dead is a tale that involves Hellboy, a Frankenstein style monster, a werewolf, a vampire and Mexican Lucha Libre style wrestling. That’s a pretty awesome recipe, and Mignola and Corben cook it up very well for this original graphic novel. In the story it’s 1952, and an alcoholic Hellboy is working as a masked wrestler. Thanks to the machinations of a mysterious foe he has to wrestle a scientist’s monstrous creation to save a young girl. The result is a fun, strange, exciting tale with a lot of heart.

Dave Richards covers all things Marvel for Comic Book Resources.

Greg Hatcher

Kamandi

Well. I’m sort of reading all three of these at the same time, alternating.

1. The new Kamandi omnibus, because it arrived recently and Kamandi is awesome. I could go on and on but Alex Cox really said it all here a couple of years back…

2. The Green Hornet Casefiles. I love the Moonstone prose anthologies and already own a bunch of them– the Avenger, the Phantom, Kolchak, the Domino Lady. But I think the ones featuring the Green Hornet may be my favorites and this is the new one. Full disclosure– editor Win Eckert and I occasionally correspond and he asked permission to use a quote of mine for a cover blurb on the deluxe edition. But I went out and spent my own money on this because I enjoyed the first one so much. New, original prose adventures featuring the Green Hornet and Kato– and it’s clearly MY Hornet and Kato, the Van Williams and Bruce Lee version from the mid-sixties. What with Kevin Smith and Matt Wagner and Seth Rogen and God knows who else doing versions of the Hornet these days, it can get confusing. But this version’s mine. Rocking it old-school.

Rider of the Rifle Rock

3. For Christmas my wife Julie found me Bennett Foster’s Rider of the Rifle Rock, a vintage Western hardcover from 1939. It’s a great story of how young Chet Minor learns how to be a real man again after a riding accident that leaves him crippled. I love old westerns and I’m a sucker for a redemption story. This actually is pretty easy to find–reprinted in hardcover under the “Sagebrush Western” imprint not to long ago–but mine’s the original one. Because my wife is even more awesome than Kamandi.

You can read more from Greg Hatcher every Friday at Comics Should Be Good!

Pól Rua

Infinite Kung-Fu by Kagan McLeod (Top Shelf Publishing): First, read that again… Infinite. Kung. Fu. Roll it around inside your head for a bit. Give it a bit of reverb. Now try saying it out loud, feeling each syllable thunder off your lips. That’s some serious righteousness right there, and a comic book would have to be pretty damn good to live up to a name like that. So, it’s damn lucky that Kagan McLeod has the chops (and the kicks, stomps and strikes) to do just that and exceed it.

Infinite Kung Fu

First of all, he’s good. Crazy good. He has a kinetic, graphitti-inspired art style that leaps, glides and dives across the stage like righteous combat lightning. But, in conjunction with that, he’s also a hell of a storyteller. He effortlessly translates the classic style of 1970′s Hong Kong Kung Fu cinema into comic form, using an incredible degree of craft, draftsmanship and skill to convey all the style, dynamism and impact of martial arts combat into pictures which seem to come alive on the page. And what’s more, he knows his stuff, combining bone-shattering kung fu, Taoist mysticism, bloodthirsty zombies, ruthless villainy and funky blaxploitation-fuelled grooves seamlessly together without the disparate elements clashing with each other. In short, this is an amazingly good comic, and Top Shelf have really put it all together into a gorgeous package.

Moriarty and the Hound of the D’urbevilles by Kim Newman (Titan Books): Kim Newman is one of my favourite writers. He’s an incredibly literate pop culture critic and commentator and an astoundingly skilled storyteller. He uses similar techniques to Phillip Jose Farmer (in his Wold Newton stories) and Alan Moore (in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) in a way that’s playful, frequently funny as hell and always utterly captivating.

In this collection of short stories, we are introduced to Professor James Moriarty, a genius obsessed with the “mathematics of crime,” who has made his life’s work the imposition of pure reason onto the chaotic realm of criminal endeavor. Our point-of-view on this extraordinary criminal is Colonel Sebastian Moran, big game hunter, ex-soldier and rapacious scoundrel, as a kind of anti-Watson. Like many of his other stories, most notably the Anno Dracula series (an alternate world in which Count Dracula became ruler of the world in the late 19th Century) and the Diogenes Club (about an organization of paranormal investigators stretching from Victorian London to
Thatcher’s Britain), Newman liberally sprinkles his stories with obscure and not-so-obscure references to various historical and literary character. These don’t impede the storytelling–each story is an engaging and entertaining work of fiction in its own right–but they provide an additional layer of entertainment, where the stories can also be read as a fascinating literary game.

King City #1

King City by Brandon Graham (Image Comics): If there is any justice in the world, Brandon Graham is one name you will be hearing a lot of in the upcoming years. He is ridiculously talented, and has an undeniable style and energy. Imagine, if you can, a story that combines the freewheeling whimsy and character-driven
storytelling of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim with the streetwise neo-futurism of Ellis and Robertson’s Transmetropolitan or Paul Pope’s Heavy Liquid or THB, and you have the world of King City. It’s a world of costumed spy gangs and giant atomic monsters, alien pornography and Sasquatch inn-keepers, but it’s more than that…

It’s a world where our hero, arriving back in town after a long stretch, dreads seeing his ex-girlfriend as he re-connects with old friends. It’s a world where a young woman worries about her lover, a recently returned war veteran whose only solace for his night terrors is a drug which may be slowly killing him, but it’s more than THAT…

It’s a comic where the creator throws in puzzles and games even, in one place, a board game all of which are actually parts of the story and serve a plot purpose. This is GREAT comics. Playful comics. Fun Comics. All delivered with a charm, verve, wit and skill that deserves wider attention. The trade paperback collection should be out in February which I’m as excited as all get out about.

Pól Rua is an artist and occasionally contributes to Comics Should Be Good!

Kelly Thompson

Warren Ellis’ Secret Avengers run (Secret Avengers #16 – #20): There’s still one more issue left in Warren Ellis’ wonderful Secret Avengers run, but he has been blowing my mind with these amazing superhero comics. With incredibly smart standalone stories with limited casts that all feel like they tie together even though they don’t depend on one another to make sense Ellis has been creating some of the best superhero comics I’ve read in 2011. It doesn’t hurt that he’s got a rotating cast of amazing artists helping him bring these stories to life. Reading this short run reminds me how great a wonderful 20-page superhero comic can be. I wish comics could do more of this and I will be decidedly sad to see this run end. I’ll be first in line for the trade when released as well – it’ll make for a hell of a strong collection.

Hinges

Hinges by Meredith McClaren: I’m been reading Meredith McClaren (artist for Jen Van Meter’s upcoming Hopeless Savages Volume 4) excellent webcomic Hinges for a while now and I am just constantly blown away by her beautiful haunting work. The mastery of craft in her pages – from the well-developed drawing style, to pitch perfect color choice, to even her stylized execution of word balloons – is just phenomenal. The story of Hinges is frequently text free, relying on McClaren’s strong artistic chops to tell the story – but even without words it’s emotional and haunting. McClaren is a major new talent in comics and I simply can’t wait to see what she does next.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season 9 by Andrew Chambliss and Georges Jeanty: The first arc of Buffy The Vampire Slayer‘s new series has wrapped and I have to say, I’m pretty enchanted with it. The end of Season 8 had me frustrated and confused, but as always with Joss Whedon, he’s managed to bring things back around to a place where I’m re-engaged and highly intrigued by where he wants to take these characters that I adore. The comics have been a funny animal, since they’re able to do things and go places that the television show never could and because of that they have different boundaries and rules, but somehow, thanks to great creators and a strong guiding hand from Whedon, the characters, which are the important part in all of this, remain as fascinating and as emotionally engaging as ever. Steve Morris’ stunning covers aren’t hurting the series any either!

Kelly Thompson writes (and podcasts) for Comics Should Be Good! and reviews comics for CBR. You can also read more from her on her personal site.

Brian Cronin

This week saw the release of two noteworthy Vertigo issues, one an ending and one a beginning.

DMZ

The final issue of DMZ gave a powerful conclusion to Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli’s excellent series. Wood chose to use the “leap forward a bunch of years” approach to a finale, which I am always a fan of. I especially enjoyed how Wood decided to give the focus of the final issue to New York City itself…it was a very satisfying goodbye to the book. Much like the tributes within the comic, the subtly of the farewell worked beautifully.

As we say goodbye to the DMZ, we say hello to yet another fascinating new character in Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque’s American Vampire. One of the most impressive aspects of Snyder’s work in this series has been his ability to quickly develop compelling new characters. This was on fine display in the start of the new American Vampire storyline, where Snyder gave a brilliant take on the 1950′s greaser hood archetype.

Brian Cronin runs our sister blog, Comics Should Be Good! and was part of The Great Curve team way back in the day, before we were ever Robot 6. He’s also the author of Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed.

Sonia Harris

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diáz: I initially picked this paperback up because I liked the cover art and the grainy texture of the coating they had used on it. Then when I flipped it open, the quote on the first page is “Of what import are brief, nameless lives… to Galactus??”, which is from the Fantastic Four, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966. How could I resist? Inside the book chronicles the life of an unattractive geeky boy and his oddly endearing family life. I’m half way through and so far I’m loving the constant references to comic books which I know and love. It gives me another way to understand the environment the author is describing and I am more involved than I might otherwise be. The book is heavily peppered with long footnotes, explaining all of the cultural and historical references the author makes, which gives the book a conversationally tangential air. So far the author has mentioned Gilbert Hernandez’ Love & Rockets characters enough that I am basically imagining this as another “Palomar” story, not so much as a visual reference but as a way to understand the mood and feel behind Diáz’ immigrant story.

JLA Vol. 3, Deluxe Edition by Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell: Along with Vol 4, this was a thoughtful holiday gift I received after I read the first two volumes of Morrison’s groundbreaking JLA run and wrote about them in my column. It is lucky I received this, since I don’t know if I would have bought the book myself as I felt like I’d just read a ton of this run and didn’t want to risk spoiling it. Of course once I started reading I was extremely happy about it. The groundwork Morrison initially laid, now builds to great effect. He continues to develop and elaborate on the storylines of the team and individual characters to the point where I found myself actually wanting to read the crossover stories that were referenced (and I usually hate crossover stories.) In amongst his complex and gloriously random storylines, there is a basic humanity to the character’s conversations which is terrifically endearing, it works to anchor and ground the fantastic stories. As it began, it continues, with Morrison giving everyone their own voice and distinctly relatable character. Now I’ve still got volume 4 to read next and I’m excited to get to it.

Sonia Harris writes her column–Committed–every Wednesday on Comics Should Be Good!

Hello and welcome to What Are You Reading? Our special guest today is Andy Burns, editor-in-chief of the pop culture site Biff Bam Pop!, which is doing a holiday gift guide with giveaways through Dec. 24. You can follow them on Twitter for more information.

To see what Andy and the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click below …

*****

Tim O’Shea

Super Dinosaur

Super Dinosaur #6: I appreciate the fact that Robert Kirkman is writing a smart kids book with this series. What I mean is the villains are not easy cardboard stand-ins that get the crap kicked out of them by the heroes. The villains in Super Dinosaur, look in the metaphorical rear view mirror and actually say, “Hey, this guy is dragging us down, let’s dump him” as happens in this issue. It’s refreshing to see villains that conduct (off panel, thankfully) lessons learned meetings. Also, it is intriguing to see how Maximus poses more of a challenge to the heroes as their prisoner versus when he was free.

FF #12: In between Fantastic Four #600 and FF #12, apparently Dragon Man was transformed into a creature that thinks he’s part monkey. How else do you explain why new series artist Juan Bobillo (who loses an “l” in his name in the actual credit page, but they get it right on the cover) has Dragon Man walking on his hands and feet? In general, if I was not still interested in Hickman’s plot, I would not return for FF #13. Bobillo is a great artist, and in fact this issue he renders the kids with some great facial reactions and moments, but he just does not strike me as a good fit for this story. Case in point, the issue opens with Val translocating (Val’s word, not mine) part of the Baxter Building into the side of a mountain. A great visual storytelling opportunity for an artist, but with Bobillo, he went with a faraway shot to convey the scope of what had occurred…that just left me feeling unimpressed.

Wolverine #19

Wolverine #19: Anytime where I get to write “Logan saves a bar in this issue” is a win for me. I will be curious to see if in the next arc writer Jason Aaron maintains the whimsical tone prevalent in this arc. I hope so, but most may not see that as the proper vibe for the main Wolverine book. Time will tell.

Thunderbolts #166: Time travel allows writer Jeff Parker to throw this Thunderbolts cast into any era he wants to. And thus, placing the team in 1888’s London in a tale titled “The Ripper Tour” is fine choice. I have a sneaking suspicion that Parker and artist Declan Shalvey (the latter being perfectly suited to draw a story in this era) are leading us to think one thing about certain ‘Bolts that will be revealed otherwise in the next installment of this arc.

Herc #10: The series that I enjoyed (but sadly not enough folks joined me in the fun) comes to an end with this issue. As I read this issue, I found myself wishing I could read 10 issues of mortal/bloated Zeus serving as a sidekick to his son, Herc. Writers Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente try to squeeze in as much as they can (sans kitchen sink) with appearances by both Kingpin and Elektra. What I appreciated about the use of these two characters is that it made sense in the larger scope of current Marvel continuity to use these characters. Added bonus? You get to see Elektra smile in this issue, something I do not think I have ever seen. The end to the series is quite satisfying, if all too soon for my preferences.

Daredevil #6

Daredevil #6: I hope whomever replaces Marcos Martin on the alternating arcs understands as well as he did what Waid is trying to do with this series. When approaching Marvel characters in particular, Waid seems to like to consider the physical mechanics of the characters. I recall the writer discussing during his Fantastic Four days how it might sound when Reed stretched, or what the noise Ben would make when he walked (the stones of his body crunching against each other). In the instance of Daredevil, Waid is having a field day exploring the nuances of what the hero’s heightened senses can detect. Also,I think Waid is building Matt as a character going through recovery, trying to reclaim a great deal of what he has lost and regain the ability to smile again–and mean it (even though often he may not feel like smiling). If you are not reading Daredevil (and Waid admits in the must-read Tucker Stone interview with him that it is not selling as well as he would hope a critically acclaimed book would [“It's doing okay sales wise, but it's not blowing the roof off the joint.”]), you are missing out on the strongest, and most refreshing, approach to the character since Frank Miller.

Andy Burns

Morning Glories

Morning Glories – When it comes to this series from Image, I’m really just a raving fanboy. I was a little behind on picking it up, but I wound up getting the first 12 issues via a comiXology sale a few months back (note: I read the majority of my monthlies digitally at this point). By the end of that first issue, I was completely hooked on the story of the students entering Morning Glory Academy. Joe Eisma’s art is wonderful to look at, while Nick Spencer’s writing is seriously special. He’s got unique voices for all the characters and is clearly building his tale in each issue. The common refrain you’ll hear about Morning Glories is that it’s a cross between Lost and Runaways–I think it’s a fair comparison, but it’s also one that puts a hell of a lot of pressure on the creators to deliver monthly. Amazingly, Spencer and Eisma seem to be doing so with ease. Hands down my favourite series at the moment.

Ultimate Spider-Man – I consider myself a Spidey fanatic, but I’m not a fan so entrenched in the mythos that I get up in arms when great change occurs. For example, when “One More Day” went down I wasn’t screaming bloody murder (and I actually really enjoyed “One Moment In Time”). So when it was announced that we’d be getting a new Ultimate Spider-Man, well, that didn’t phase me either. Instead, I wanted to see what Brian Michael Bendis was going to come up with Miles Morales. Four issues in and honestly, I love the book. I love Bendis’ writing–the language just feels right. The conversations between Miles and his buddy Ganke sound genuine and real. Even better, Bendis isn’t rushing the story at all. It’s not just throw on a suit and instant superhero. He’s taking his time to make Miles Morales a believable hero, which means as a reader I’m becoming more invested in the character with every issue.

This Haunted World

This Haunted World – This apocalyptic supernatural thriller from Sea Lion Press is a digital exclusive, written by Mark Powers and illustrated by Rahmat Handoko. Something to consider for creators and companies working in the digital realm–make sure your descriptions for a given title are solid and evocative. I wound up taking a chance on This Haunted World because the description was really interesting and evocative. The 99 cent price point didn’t hurt either, mind you.

Legends Of The Dark Knight: Marshall Rogers – Just because I’m a digital comic geek doesn’t mean I still don’t enjoy holding a nice hardcover collection in my hands. A few weeks ago on our site, writer JP Fallavollita recommended our visitors check out this new hardcover compilation of artist Marshall Rogers’ Batman stories. I wound up picking up the book a few days after the recommendation and I’m glad I did. There’s some classic moments in the hardcover, including Hugo Strange auctioning off the secrets of Batman/Bruce Wayne and appearances by Rupert Thorne, all stuff I’ve never read before. Rogers’ art holds up nicely decades later, as does the writing of Steve Englehart, Denny O’Neil and others. It’s definitely of a certain moment in time, but one worth revisiting.

Dead of Night

Dead of Night – This is the latest novel from Jonathan Maberry, who has done lots of work the last few years with Marvel, including the two mini-series, Marvel Universe Vs The Punisher and Marvel Universe Vs Wolverine. Dead of Night is the story of a zombie outbreak that occurs in the small town of Stebbins County, Penn. It’s a quick-moving read that never sacrifices character development for cheap scares. I’ve known Maberry for a few years now and what amazes me about him is that as good as he was with his first novel (2006’s Ghost Road Blues), he legitimately keeps getting better with every piece of work he puts out.

Amazing Fantasy #15

Comics | While going through a box in his attic, a Grange Park, Illinois, man discovered a copy of Amazing Fantasy #15, the first appearance of Spider-Man, that he had bought as a kid. While other copies of the comic have fetched as much as $1.2 million, Chimera’s Comics is selling it for $12,000 due to its condition. [LaGrange Patch]

Comics | Brian Truitt profiles Marvel’s Fantastic Four, talking to Mark Waid, Tom Brevoort and Tom DeFalco about the long-running comic. [USA Today]

Publishing | Janna Morishima, formerly of Scholastic and Diamond Comic Distributors, has joined Papercutz as its first marketing director. [Papercutz]

Creators | Alan Moore discusses his friendship with Harvey Pekar: “We developed a friendship, because of a mutual love — an obsession, really — of old books. Harvey loved looking around the old tomes in my library, and Joyce told me I only enabled Harvey. They hadn’t got a spare inch of space, and Joyce would blow a fuse if he brought home a slim volume of poetry. He would smuggle them into the house by stealth. He’d slip them in among the old dusty books, and leave them there for about six weeks, then one day, walk over to the shelf and open them like they were cherished artifacts. The fact that this would take weeks showed his level commitment to great literature. He did everything short of wrapping them in plastic and hiding them in the lavatory.” Moore wrote the introduction for the forthcoming Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland, a posthumous graphic novel due in March. [Fast Company]

Art by Cameron Stewart

Creators | Andy Khouri talks to writer and artist Cameron Stewart about his work on B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Exorcism, part of a flurry of upcoming B.P.R.D. comics due out next year. [ComicsAlliance]

Creators | Author Marc Singer discusses his book Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics. [Mindless Ones]

Creators | Just a few months after winning the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, Mike Keefe has accepted a buyout offer from the Denver Post. Keefe plans to “semi-retire” and will continue to draw cartoons for the Cagle Syndicate. [Comic Riffs]

Commentary | Alex Woodward looks at Steve Duin and Shannon Wheeler’s Oil and Water. [Gambit]

Review | Manga newbie Jeff Jackson Ian Johnson reads Breathe Deeply, a new indy manga from small publisher One Peace Books that mixes medical ethics, suspense, and wistful romance. [Comic Attack]

Analysis | Kristy Valenti looks at Osamu Tezuka’s use of theatrical techniques and motifs in two very different books, Princess Knight and The Book of Human Insects. [comiXology]

Dragonflight #1

Anne McCaffrey, creator of the Dragonriders of Pern fantasy novels, passed away Monday at the age of 85. The multiple award-winning author died in her home in Ireland after suffering a stroke.

McCaffrey’s first novel, Restoree, was published in 1967, and was followed by the first Dragonriders of Pern novel, Dragonflight, in 1968. Nearly 100 of her books were published in her lifetime, and she was the first woman to win a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award. Eclipse Comics published an adaptation of Dragonflight in 1991, and a film adaptation by Watchmen and X-Men screenwriter David Hayter was announced earlier this year.

“She was an incredible world-builder,” comics creator Derek Kirk Kim wrote on his blog. “I also remember being blown away when she used ‘fuck’ repeatedly in a fantasy novel. It was the first time I’d seen that when I was a kid, and taught me the importance of keeping true to a character no matter what the genre or its conventions.”

Author Neil Gaiman remembers meeting her both through her books and, later, in person. “I met her as a person in the late 80s, when I was a young writer, at a convention, where she was the Guest of Honour,” he wrote on his blog. “It was a small convention, and she decided that I needed to be taken under her wing and given advice I would need in later life, which she proceeded to do. It was all good advice: how to survive American signing tours was the bit that stuck the most (she wanted me to move to Ireland, and I came close). I liked her as a writer, and by the end of that convention I adored her as a person.”

Justice League #2

Comics | John Jackson Miller slices and dices the October numbers for the direct market, noting that overall dollar orders for comic books, trade paperbacks, and magazines topped $40 million for the first time since September 2009. Orders rose 6.9 percent over September, the first month of DC’s relaunch. “While that may sound counter-intuitive, it isn’t when you consider that all those first issues continued to have reorders selling through October,” Miller writes. “Retailers with an eye on the aftermarket may also have some sense that second issues are historically under-ordered — something which goes at least back to the experience of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #2 in the 1980s, which wound up being much more valuable than its first issue.” [The Comichron]

Passings | Tom Spurgeon reports that author Les Daniels has passed away. Daniels wrote horror fiction and nonfiction books on the comic industry, which include Comix: A History of the Comic Book in America, Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics and DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes. [The Comics Reporter]

Action Comics #2

Creators | Grant Morrison talks about coming back to Superman after his work on the character in All-Star Superman: “After I‘d done that story, it was kind of the end of Superman’s life, and I was interested in going back to the roots of the character, and his social and political roots, and maybe doing a take that dealt with him as a young man, but I didn’t really have any plans for that until Dan [DiDio] came over and then when he gave me the opportunity, and he said that they were willing to even change the continuity, and to let some new ideas and energy into it, it seemed perfect for that.” [CNN Geek Out]

Creators | Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang discuss their work on the relaunched Wonder Woman and her recently revealed new daddy.”If you went to the average person on the street and showed them a picture of Wonder Woman they would recognize her immediately,” Chiang said. “Ask those people her origin story and some of them might know the clay story but many, many others would not know that at all. That’s not a problem you have with Superman or Batman; everyone knows their origin. By making her the daughter of Zeus, we’ve gotten a big driving force behind our story. It gives her a motivation and it’s a key to character that we now feel is very important. She’s a child of the gods who defends us from them, in the same way that Superman is from another planet trying to save humanity and Batman is the orphan who is protecting us from the criminals who killed his parents.” [Hero Complex]

Creators | The student-run Observer reports on a lecture given by Notre Dame alum and Marvel editor Bill Rosemann: “The comic books industry is many fields coming together at once. It’s never been just about art. Instead, it’s this glorious American collision of art, commerce and history.” [Observer]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 9 #3

Creators | Andrew Chambliss discusses his work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 9 and Dollhouse. [TFAW]

Creators | Ian Flynn talks about his approach to writing the New Crusaders, the Red Circle reboot due from Archie Comics due next year: “The Red Circle characters are brimming with untapped potential. We’ve seen how other super hero properties have grown and matured from their silly, sometimes zany origins into the blockbusters they are today. The Red Circle heroes are no different. They have powers, desires and stories that can be fascinating when run through today’s filter of modern sensibilities. Everything is so wild and free, it’ll be a lot of fun to make it all work in one coherent world.” [ComicsAlliance]

Conventions | Dave Roman reports in from Quai des Bulles, the second-largest comics convention in France. [The Beat]

Manga | Deb Aoki talks to Hikaru Sasahara, the CEO of Digital Manga Publishing, about his company’s acquisition of Yaoi-Con and the progress of the Digital Manga Guild, their experiment in online publication using amateur translators and editors. [About.com]

Review | Jocelyne Allen reviews Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One, which won the Lynd Ward graphic novel prize earlier this year. [Brain Vs Book]

Awards | Irish Comics News appears to have only been around for a few months, but they have already given their first awards, which were based on a popular vote. And here’s a nice touch: The award for Best Mainstream Published Irish Writer went to Garth Ennis, who won by a single vote—and that vote was cast by another nominee, Nick Roche. [Irish Comics News]

Welcome to Shelf Porn, the column that features a comic fan’s shelves. Today’s Shelf Porn comes from Greg Farrell, cartoonist and drummer living in Brooklyn, New York.

If you’d like to see your shelves featured here, have I got a deal for you — just send a write-up and pictures to jkparkin@yahoo.com, and we’ll make your dreams come true. As long as your dreams are to see your shelves featured here.

Now let’s hear from Greg …

*****

It’s a little blurry but there is some good stuff here. This is the extent of my Japanese stuff on the top shelf. Mostly Tezuka.

Shifting our view to the right, more comics all the way through that shelf. Top shelf is comics-related books (bios, histories etc.), a speaker with the only DVDs I own atop it. On wall: Gay Son Vs Angry Dad print by Will Varner. Original cover art for Yo! Burbalino Comics #6. An old screen print I found in the trash. Those brown boxes at the top contain some zines and minicomics but mostly store junk. On the right hand side there is a collage I made of medical drawings of phalli and a drawing of the Scream guy.

Shifting view down, closer: More comics. Bottom shelf mostly DC/Vertigo/Batman stuff. Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, etc. Sandman three volume signed boxset that I traded weed for. Dash Shaw poster for MOCCA 2010. Black bag in foreground contains bristols of comics project in the works.

Shifting a little more to the right: Dancing Batman (I forgot the name of the artist), Jaime Hernandez cut out cover of the village voice from a while ago. Peter Kuper MOCCA 2011 poster. The cat loves to play with that yellow shoe lace on the doorknob. some more comics there on that small shelf, and some ink and erasers on that table.

These are some of my “real” books, in another room. I feel like people get judged more on their reading tastes in “real” books than they do their taste in comics, so…don’t judge me. On the wall is a drawing of a cute superman by Chris Giarusso and a dancing Robin, companion to the Batman, the artist of which I have forgotten.

More real books. Top shelf is some hardcover stuff of mine that I haven’t read yet. Limited edition hardcover of Big Questions that I got for $17, and some lotion. Bottom shelves are some of my girlfriend’s books and her comics, many of which are doubles of mine, which I convinced her to buy before we started living together. (Note
the three-volume Lost Girls set) She has not read or purchased a comic since.

My prized possession, a promotional Dark Knight vacuform. Not sure if you can tell, but It is three dimensional and very brittle. This is the last photo of it intact, as it fell over and broke right after I took the picture.

You can follow me on Twitter at @doctormobogo or see some of my work here: http://lunkbook.tumblr.com/ or here: http://www.yoburbalino.com/.

Supergods, his new prose book on the subject of superheroes, isn’t the least bit confusing. It is, however, slightly confused.

While the book eventually earns its self-help book-sounding subtitle of “What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human” in its closing chapters, that subtitle is a poor distillation of the actual contents of the book, which are a bit scattershot.

Supergods is partially a history of American superhero comics (and their British reflections). It’s partially a biography of Grant Morrison and his career in the comics industry, which naturally overlaps with the first concern at a certain point. And it’s partially a cultural history of the concept of the superhero in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, with the Promethean subject of what superheroes can teach humanity shining through here and there.

Morrison is an excellent writer, in prose as well as in comics-scripting it turns out, and the pages of the book are fiercely passionate, vibrating with authority and conviction on their subject, and thoroughly encrusted with often lyrical sentences and clever, even brilliant turns of phrase.

Despite these considerable virtues, the wandering mission makes it a frustrating read, as does the fact that Morrison’s many tics come to the fore almost immediately, and can make for a rather uncomfortable read (perhaps especially for those of us who have heard versions of many of these stories before, and from different perspectives).

Spending so much time with Morrison’s words, without an artist acting as intermediary and without a month or so wait between chapters, Morrison’s tics are here inescapable. He has an unfortunate tendency to slip into talk of drugs, not just the many, many drugs he’s done and his experiences with them (two of the book’s key literal epiphanies come while he’s on drugs, whether or not they were the cause of his visions), but also in his metaphors. These he also tends to repeat quite a bit.

Morrison also has a tendency to look backward at comics history from its future, our present, and claim that comics predicted broad cultural trends or specific pop culture products, which may or may not be true, but feel true, even if it’s easier to spot these things in hindsight (like assigning real-world events to fit Nostradamus’ predictions, for example).

Worse still is his Stan Lee-like tendency to, if not quite take credit for something, to at least point out he thought of it first, or did something like it first, or had a hand in it.

You’ve probably heard of his strange, strained mentor/friend-turned-alienated-rival relationship with Mark Millar; some of that gets mentioned in passing, including that Morrison got Millar many of his original jobs and essentially co-wrote much of Millar’s earlier, better work (Morrison even mentions recommending Millar to Marvel for The Ultimates, and to point out that Millar’s takes on Thor and The Hulk were Morrison’s ideas). He also shared a story with Neil Gaiman that ultimately inspired Coraline, calls Warren Ellis’ The Authority his JLA meets his Invisibles meets Kingdom Come, says Ellis’ Planetary followed his Flex Mentallo point of view, Civil War his Zenith work (an early Morrison comic discussed at length, but, sadly, not excerpted at all — the book is badly in need of images and samples) and he even wrote an unused screenplay that was similar in basic plot to Batman Begins.

I don’t challenge any of this, and Morrison is obviously ahead of the trends in many cases and his work has inspired other creators, but it seems gauche to keep bringing it up. Perhaps that’s because the many creators Morrison discusses are his peers, rivals, colleagues and bosses — it’s nice to get a book like this that’s unafraid to engage in industry gossip from a working creator, but, at the same time, it makes one suspicious of the writer, who becomes an unreliable narrator of his own career. This is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that early on in the book, Morrison says he was acting a part, an invented persona as a sort of demonic, enfant terrible punk early in his career, publicly sneering at Alan Moore’s work and engendering animosity. How does a reader know he’s not still playing a part?

There are comparable weaknesses in each of the major elements. Morrison’s discussion of comics history, particularly before the part where he started engaging it as first a reader, then a participant and then a driving force, is at its best when he discusses it in broad metaphorical terms, like saying National Comics had chained Shuster and Siegel’s original anti-establishment socialist Superman and enslaved him, or implying that the rise of Marvel was a sort of curse from Fawcett’s Captain Marvel placed on National for their suing him off the newsstands.

But the scholarship here is shaky (and unsourced), the handful of “Books on Comics” in the “Suggested Further Reading” section of the back of the book consisting of the work of classic writers on comics history. This lack of sourcing leads to some rather impolitic statements (at least one of which has already been notably aired out in publicity interviews).

When Morrison discusses his own biography and career, however, the only real weakness beyond the occasional discomfort of hearing him diss Moore or praise Jim Lee and wondering whether he means it, is how little detail he can go into.

For example, at the dawn of his interest in the occult, he mentions his performance of his first ritual:

Skeptical but willing to try anything that might improve y luck, I performed a traditional ritual and on cue witnessed the appearance of a blazing, angelic lion head, which gave me quite a jolt when it started growling out the words “I am neither North nor South.”

I would kind of like to hear more about that particular miracle, but Morrison talks more about the sorts of drugs he used, the clothes he wore and how much he and Peter Milligan drank at conventions. Later he states, “I performed rituals of all kinds to see if they worked, and they delivered every time.”

Few of these are given much attention or discussion in the book, even when a voodoo-summoned scorpion entity attacks his aura and almost kills him (until he’s visited by Christ in the hospital and bargains away the deadly bacteria in his body).  The most attention goes to his infamous Kathmandu visitation by angels/aliens/entities, which enlightened him (and gave him his own superpower, “5-D” vision).

It’s not as crazy as it sounds in summary, and Morrison acknowledges various interpretations, but what matters most to him is that the effect was real, and it changed his life for the better. He occasionally even slips into a weird, guru-like argument that these beliefs have made him both famous and a lot of money, as if the invisible hand of the free market has validated his shamanic experiences.

Essentially, Morrison narrows his discussion of the occult and his experiences with it to the points where it intersects with superheroes, and his conception of the DC and Marvel universes as real, what his visitation from Superman through a cosplayer reveals about his process (you can’t argue with the results of All-Star Superman!) and what the 5-D aliens taught him about the universe are all fascinating, even important insights — particularly to superhero comics and the creation thereof.

So, too, are his insights into the way in which superheroes seem to be marching toward us (from comics to more realistic media like film to the rise of real-life superheroes) at the same time we’re marching toward them (through technology and worldview).

It’s well worth immersing yourself in the book then, whatever your level of interest in comics and superheroes (and if you’re reading Robot 6, you’re going to get a lot out of this, as you already know all the players), even if it is at times a frustrating read.

It’s a frustrating read because Morrison seems to be trying to write two or three different books at the same time, between the same covers, because of his controversial appearance within the story itself and because he suggests dramatic, more exciting stories and events by mentioning them in passing or offering only cursory descriptions, leaving it to the reader to imagine them in full in their own heads.

So I guess it’s not all that different from his superhero comics writing after all.

**********************

Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God From Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human by Grant Morrison, Spiegel & Grau, 465 pages, $28

Ziggy

Passings | Tom Wilson Sr., creator of the long-running comic strip Ziggy, passed away Sept. 16. According to a press release from Universal Uclick, Wilson, 80, had suffered from a long illness and died in his sleep. For more than 35 years, Wilson served as a creative director at American Greetings. Wilson first published Ziggy in the 1969 cartoon collection When You’re Not Around. The Ziggy comic panel, syndicated by Universal Uclick (formerly Universal Press Syndicate), launched in 15 newspapers in June 1971. It now appears in more than 500 daily and Sunday newspapers and has been featured in best-selling books, calendars and greeting cards. Wilson’s son, Tom Wilson Jr., took over the strip in 1987. [Universal Uclick]

Awards | The Chill by Jason Star and Mick Bertilorenzi won an Anthony Award this weekend at Bouchercon, the annual mystery convention. The Vertigo Crime selection won in the Best Graphic Novel category, while Birds of Prey writer Duane Swierczynski took the Best Original Paperback category with his novel Expiration Date. [Examiner]

Comic strips | Ken Paulson, president of the First Amendment Center, comments on last week’s choice by The Chicago Tribune and other papers to not run a series of Doonesbury strips that featured excerpts from author Joe McGinniss’ upcoming biography of Sarah Palin. “The First Amendment guarantees that a newspaper can decide what to publish — or not publish. The Tribune is entirely within its rights, but it’s certainly an uncomfortable position for any news organization that aspires to reflect the full marketplace of ideas.” [First Amendment Center]

MetaMaus

Creators | The Montreal Gazette profiles Maus creator Art Spiegelman, covering the upcoming MetaMaus, his stint at the New Yorker and the state of the comic book industry. [Montreal Gazette]

Creators | Terry Moore discusses his latest comic Rachel Rising. [Suicide Girls]

Creators | Box Brown talks about his new publishing venture Retrofit Comics. [The Morton Report]

History | E. L. Bell explores the sources for the giant typewriters, cash registers, and other huge props that used to pop up in Batman comics (particularly those written by Bill Finger). [Oz and Ends]

History | Letterer Todd Klein looks back at a 1950s Famous Artists College cartooning lesson, specifically the chapter on lettering. [Todd's Blog]

Conventions | Sean Kleefeld recounts his adventures at the Cincinnati Comic Expo, including meeting Jim Steranko and chatting with a retailer who is concerned that sales of DC’s new 52 comics will plunge in January, when the story arcs all slow down at the same time. [Kleefeld on Comics]

The Sigh

I completely missed this in the latest Previews and when Michael noted it last week — Archaia Entertainment will publish an English-language version of Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi’s The Sigh in November.

The illustrated book has already appeared in France and Spain, and is a fable about the daughter of a merchant. “One day Rose asks for the seed of a blue bean, but her father fails to find one for her. She lets out a sigh in resignation, and her sigh attracts the Sigh, a mysterious being that brings the seed she desired to the merchant. But every debt has to be paid, and every gift has a price, and the Sigh returns a year later to take the merchant’s daughter to a secret and distant palace,” the press release Archaia sent out today reads. The 6” x 8” hardcover will feature 56 pages of text and hand-drawn color illustrations.

“The Sigh is a timeless fairytale that promises to capture the imaginations of readers both young and old,” said Mark Smylie, chief creative officer of Archaia Entertainment. “Marjane is one of those rare writers who has the ability to connect with readers on a global scale and we are proud to bring this story to the U.S.” The release also hints that The Sigh is the first of many new English-language translations coming from Archaia, noting it is “the vanguard of a new wave of foreign titles it will be publishing in the next several months.”

Penguin Skateboards

Over the last few years, Penguin Books has gotten various cartoonists to draw covers for classic books, like Tony Millionaire, who drew the cover to Moby Dick, or Richard Salas, who drew the cover to Great Expectations, and so on.

Now via Flog comes word that some of those covers have made their way onto skateboards. Yes, classic literature covers, drawn by some of alt.comix’s best, featured on skateboards.

As you’ll see above, Penguin created some limited edition skateboards using the covers by Jason for Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, Lilli Carré for Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Thomas Ott for Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. These were given away in a photo contest on Facebook, which unfortunately is over, but they’ll be showing them off on various college campuses this month and next. Hopefully they’ll be available to purchase at some point … not that I’m coordinated enough to skate.

Robert Crumb

Creators | Robert Crumb pens a letter to The Sydney Morning Herald, explaining why he pulled out of the Graphic 2011 festival: “I was quite alarmed when I read the article in the Sunday Telegraph. I showed it to my wife, Aline, who said, ‘That’s it, you’re not going.’ She got a very bad feeling from the article. She feared I might be attacked physically by some angry, outraged person who simply saw red at the mention of child molesters. She remarked she’d never seen any article about me as nasty as this one.” Sunday Telegraph staff writer Claire Harvey, meanwhile, responds to Crumb’s comments and criticisms lobbed at the newspaper: “Crumb seems to be living in fear of the reaction he once sought to provoke. It seems a sad place for any artist to be.” [The Sydney Morning Herald]

Passings | Kim Thompson eulogizes Argentina cartoonist Francisco Solano López, who passed away on Friday. [The Comics Journal]

Conventions | Reporting from this weekend’s Wizard World Chicago, the Chicago Tribune talks to former comic shop owner Gary Colabuono, who displayed rare ashcan editions of comics from the 1930s and 1940s featuring Superman, Superwoman, Superboy and Supergirl at the show. Blogger Matthew J. Brady has pictures of the ashcans, as well as a report from the show. [Chicago Tribune]

Comics | The Portland Press Herald profiles Renae de Liz, who’s coordinating the Womanthology charity anthology. Dan Nadel, meanwhile, calls the project “the most expensive comics anthology I’ve ever heard of.” [Portland Press Herald]

Creators | Brian Truitt talks to Michael Coulthard, a.k.a. Shaky Kane, about the November re-release of his “graphic road movie,” Monster Truck, by Image Comics. [USA Today]

Watchmen

Comics | NPR revealed the results from their Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy survey, which saw 60,000 people vote. Watchmen and Sandman made the list, coming in at No. 15 and No. 29 respectively, while several of Neil Gaiman’s prose books also made the list. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien topped the list. [NPR]

Comics | John Parker looks back at Peter David’s long run on The Incredible Hulk. [ComicsAlliance]

Creators | Paul Gravett posts an appreciation of Marjane Satrapi, whose first book, Persepolis, was inspired in part by Art Spiegelman’s Maus: “I realised that comics is not a genre, it is just a way of telling a story where I could feel exactly what was going on. Drawing is much closer to a human being than a photo, because you create the world in your own image, it’s very personal, it’s an international language. Before humans started talking, first they started drawing.”. [Paul Gravett]

Manga | Manga bloggers are celebrating Fumi Yoshinaga in this month’s Manga Moveable Feast, a sort of bloggers’ round robin, and David Welsh kicks things off with a review of a yaoi manga that avoids most of the pitfalls of the genre, Yoshnaga’s Ichigenme: The First Course Is Civil Law. [The Manga Curmudgeon]

Publishing | Bikya Masr profiles Marwan Imam and Division Publishing, “the Middle East’s first true comic book publisher.” [Bikya Masr]

Reviews | J.L. Bell reviews Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes, 1936-1941, which takes a look at the dead branches on the evolutionary tree of comics, superheroes who for one reason or another didn’t make it. [Oz and Ends]

Analysis | Daniel BT looks at cases where artists have reused the same scene in different panels, not cut-and-pasted but completely redrawn. [Sunday Comics Debt]

Events | Montpelier, Vermont’s City Hall will host a 24-Hour Comics Day event Oct. 1. [Times Argus]

Conventions | Perhaps as a result of the March earthquake, attendance at this year’s summer Comic Market (Comiket) was down by 20,000 compared to last year. [Anime News Network]

Fandom | “Whoever knows fear burns at the touch of …  hey, get off my lawn!” [Eye on Comics]

Star Wars art by JH Williams III

LucasFilm and Abrams Books have teamed up for Star Wars Art: Comics, a collection of artwork from “the entire history of Star Wars comics publishing,” from the first Star Wars adaptations published in 1977 by Marvel to the present day.

According to the press release, the artwork has been “hand-selected and curated” by George Lucas and will feature interior pages and fully painted covers from artists such as Al Williamson, Howard Chaykin, Adam Hughes, Bill Sienkiewicz, Dave Dorman, and many more. It will also feature newly commissioned art by 20 creators, including John Cassady, Sam Kieth, Mike Mignola, Paul Pope, Frank Quitely, Jim Steranko and, as seen above, J.H. Williams III.

“I wanted something that was a new character of my creation,” the artist wrote on his blog. “I had been told that George was a longtime comics fan. So I also wanted to go for this classic giant monster versus hero idea, like stuff you might see in old [Jack] Kirby comics, but here it needed to be a mechanical weapon that looked like a creature, giving a sense of story beyond fighting a giant monster. This gives more weight for the snippet of a bigger unseen plot idea. And the scene had to have a strong design sense to it, so it could have a signature look that could be identified with my sensibilities, but still felt like Star Wars when you look at it.”

This is the second book in Abrams’ Star Wars Art series; the first one, subtitled Visions, was released last year. Star Wars Art: Comics has an introduction by Virginia Mecklenburg, a foreword by Dennis O’Neil, and a preface by Douglas Wolk. It features a cover by Dave Dorman and is due in October.

In our last edition of Shelf Porn, Eric Jaskolka shared his massive collection of X-Men merchandise — action figures, jackets, Hot Wheels, cups, statues, toys — this guy has it all. But several folks in the comments section asked about his comics.

“Many have asked to see the comic book collection,” he said over email. “I have attached pictures of the boxes as most people, like myself, keep the comics bagged and board and put away.” He also included more shots of some of his merchandise, including hats, toys and even a Wolverine pizza box. Initially he asked if I could add these to the original post, but hey, we’re talking about the X-Men here — how could I not do a spinoff? If the first post was Uncanny X-Men, consider this one New Mutants or X-Factor.

If you’d like to see your collection here, it’s easy, and it doesn’t even have to be mutant-related. Just send a brief write-up on your collection and some pictures to jkparkin@yahoo.com.

And now take a look at more of Eric’s collection …

Jack Kirby

Legal | Brent Staples pens an editorial for the New York Times on the legal battle between the Jack Kirby estate and Marvel: “The Marvel editor Stan Lee sometimes offered general ideas for characters, allowing the artists to run with them. Mr. Kirby plotted stories, fleshing out characters that he had dreamed up or that he had fashioned from Mr. Lee’s sometimes vague enunciations. Mr. Lee shaped the stories and supplied his wisecrack-laden dialogue. And in the end, both men could honestly think of themselves as ‘creators.’ But Mr. Kirby, who was known as the King of Comics, was the defining talent and the driving force at the Marvel shop. Mr. Lee’s biographers have noted that the company’s most important creations started out in Mr. Kirby’s hands before being passed on to others, who were then expected to emulate his artistic style.” [New York Times]

Awards | Writer Neil Gaiman (Sandman, The Graveyard Book) and artist Shaun Tan (The Arrival, Tales from Outer Suburbia) are among the winners of the 2011 Locus Awards. Gaiman’s “The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains” won for best novelette, while “The Thing About Cassandra” won best short story. Tan won for best artist. [Locus Online]

Legal | Jeff Trexler reviews the legal battle between Warner Bros. and the heirs of creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster through the filter of the Neil Gaiman/Todd McFarlane decision, where a judge ruled Gaiman has copyright interest in Medieval Spawn, Angela and other Spawn characters. [The Beat]

Creators | Nicole Rudick has an in-depth interview with Jim Woodring about his odd visions and the inspiration for Weathercraft and Congress of the Animals. [The Comics Journal]

Retailing | The Boston Globe’s John Dyer talks to two local retailers, That’s Entertainment and Comicopia, about DC Comics’ move to day-and-date digital publishing. [Boston Globe]

Witch Doctor

Creators | Witch Doctor writer Brandon Seifert discusses his Image/Skybound series about a supernatural doctor: “…Morrow’s sort of character archetype — the occult doctor — is a very old idea in horror fiction, but I’ve never seen it played straight,” he says. “Characters like Van Helsing are generally treated as generic monster hunters, and I wanted to see a doctor who approached the supernatural the way a [real] doctor would. And then last in the concept was the idea that all the monsters needed to cause actual diseases from biology.” [io9]

Creators | Tom Field looks back at the life and career of the late Gene Colan. [The Comics Journal]

Comics | Paul Gravett picks the comics he’s most looking forward to from the June Previews. [Paul Gravett]

Comics | Sebastian Strangio looks at several comics — or “gruim-chaek” — produced by the North Korean government. He says the comics are “unabashedly propagandistic, serving up outlandish plots that help inculcate reverence for Great Leader Kim Il Sung and the regime’s perennial battles against imperialists of all stripes.” [Slate]

Retailing | After 16 years in business, Empyre Comics in Glen Burnie, Md. will close its doors on June 30. [The Capital]

Retailing | The American Press profiles Lake Charles, La. comic shop Paper Heroes. [American Press]

reMIND

Webcomics | Lauren Davis spotlights Jason Brubaker’s webcomic-turned-graphic novel, reMIND. “… there’s a lot to enjoy in this online version, from the beautiful, animation-inspired artwork to the epic backstory of love, betrayal, and neurosurgery. And that’s before we get to a mecha-enhanced Victuals fighting his way through a city of lizard men,” she writes. [io9]

Fandom | To help celebrate the birthday of Smurfs creator Peyo, more than 4,800 people dressed as smurfs gathered in Brussels, London, Athens, The Hague, Dublin, Mexico City, Panama City, Warsaw, Moscow, Johannesburg and New York Saturday to break the Guinness World Record for the “largest gathering of people dressed as smurfs within a 24-hour period in multiple venues.” That’s a lot of smurfs. [Metro]

Fandom | Matt Alt translates a 1983 essay from lolicon magazine Manga Burikko telling the otaku it’s time to drop their idealized notions of puberty and grow up. [Neojaponisme]

Hello and welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading? Today’s special guest is Shannon Wheeler, New Yorker cartoonist and creator of the Eisner Award-winning comic book Too Much Coffee Man, Oil & Water, the Eisner-nominated I Thought You Would Be Funnier and the upcoming Grandpa Won’t Wake Up.

To see what Shannon and the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click below …

*****

Tom Bondurant

Superman Family #203

Last week my brother-in-law was in a used bookstore — actually, I guess “used-book store” would be more accurate — and called me asking what random old DCs and Marvels I’d like. One of the fruits of his labors was September-October 1980′s Superman Family #203, a decent little anthology inked mostly by Vince Coletta (so they all tended to look the same) and written and penciled by various DC stalwarts. The lead was a Supergirl story, “The Supergirl From Planet Earth,” written by Jack C. Harris and penciled by Win Mortimer. Seems there’s a formerly-comatose blonde teenager in Kara’s old hometown Midvale who suddenly starts manifesting Kryptonian powers and zipping around in a certain blue-skirted super-suit. Moreover, when questioned by Supergirl, the new kid pretty much recites Kara’s first speech to her cousin, about the destruction of Argo City, etc. Naturally I was reminded of Peter David and Ed Benes’ “Many Happy Returns” storyline, but Harris and Mortimer only have 12 pages to introduce another complication and then resolve everything — and resolve it they do, using X-Kryptonite, a medallion made of lead, and some conveniently-placed acid. It’s a neat little story which, although inconsequential in the greater scheme of things, is still entertaining.

Since I’m always interested in how a Lois Lane solo series might work (once more), I read “Lost,” another 12-pager, written by Marv Wolfman and penciled by Bob Oksner. As with the Supergirl story, there’s a lot of plot in these pages: Lois is kidnapped and mind-wiped, escapes, gets picked up by a helpful widower, falls in love with same, and then uses her (unwiped) martial arts skills to fight off the goons who eventually catch up with her. The story ends with an amnesiac Lois wandering off into the woods, Bruce-Banner-style, so I’ll have to seek out #204 to see how it ends. Here, I’m not sure the format does this story many favors (especially with regard to Ted, the widower). It might do better played out over a few issues of that hypothetical solo title. (That would also leave room to cross over and/or be mentioned in the main Superman books, too….)

Finally, “The Critic Killer” (written by E. Nelson Bridwell and penciled by George Tuska) is a tale of the Earth-2 Lois and Clark, set in the early ’50s when the two were newly married — and when TV was still new enough that the Daily Star didn’t have its own critic. Along comes Lana Lang, daughter of a professor Clark knew from Smallville, seeking to carve out some column space for just that purpose. Clark (editor of the Star, like you didn’t know) gives her the job, and she promptly goes all scorched-earth on the new sitcom from a notoriously thin-skinned writer. Lois realizes nothing good can come of Lana’s scathing review, and sure enough, the writer traps Lana and Lois in a specially-modified elevator car. Because Lois — in what strikes me as a bit of Earth-2 Superdickery — is wearing a “mood ring” which telepathically alerts Clark to sudden changes in her emotions, Superman saves them (of course). However, we learn that the writer bought his elevator-trap from Luthor, still in prison but still scheming about taking down Superman. Dun dun dunnnn! Again, it was a clever little tale whose eight pages were more concerned with establishing Lana’s bona fides (this was apparently the retcon introducing Lana to Lois and Clark) and maybe making Lois a little jealous, than with a straightforward adventure/suspense story. Along those lines, it laid the groundwork for future stories involving Lana and/or Luthor, and I’m now curious to see how fleshed-out the “Mr. And Mrs. Superman” stories got.

And speaking of Earth-2, I read Invaders Classic Volume 1, written by Roy Thomas (who else?), penciled mostly by Frank Robbins, and inked by Vince Coletta and Frank Springer. This paperback reprinted the first several issues of The Invaders, plus ancillary issues, and it’s pretty much non-stop action from page one. Essentially, the Invaders — Captain America and Bucky, the Human Torch and Toro, and the Sub-Mariner — fight Nazi super villains, as depicted by Robbins’ hyperkinetic pencils. What I took away from this book, though, was that even though he was working at Marvel, and even though DC was, at the time, doing contemporary Earth-2 stories featuring the Justice Society, Roy Thomas desperately wanted to write a wartime JSA book. I have no idea how much Thomas drew from those old Timely comics to come up with the various Axis bad guys and the heroic Liberty Legion (although reprinted text pages help out in this regard) — but there sure are conspicuous references to moving “faster than a speeding bullet” and being part of “seven soldiers” of something-or-other. Actually, I take part of that back — the first baddies the Invaders face are a trio of faux-Teutonic godlings, and I thought “oh, here’s a riff on Evil Thor.” Still, though, the Liberty Legion contains 1) a speedster, 2) a guy who stretches, 3) a superheroine with black hair and a red-and-blue costume, 4) the Blue Diamond, who kinda looks like Green Lantern if you squint, 5) a flying guy with big bird-wings on his back, 6) Jack Frost, an ice-based hero who looks like he’s got Aquaman-style scales, and 7) the Patriot, another red-and-blue-clad figure who’s the group’s moral center. Maybe it was just me, but I had more fun looking for those kinds of references than I did reading the stories themselves. Lucky for the series, though, the last couple of issues introduce Union Jack and Baron Blood, a British hero and his undead foe, and The Invaders starts to build its own little corner of Marvel history, instead of reminding readers of others’. Lucky for Roy Thomas, too, that it wouldn’t be long before he was writing DC’s All-Star Squadron — otherwise, I suspect his brain might have exploded.

(By the way, I’m not up on Marvel history as much as some — but doesn’t Union Jack’s debut in World War I make him Marvel-Earth’s first costumed hero, preceding the Human Torch by at least 20 years?)

Michael May

Lois Lane and the Resistance

As I said in this week’s Food or Comics, I wasn’t sure if I was going to buy Lois Lane and the Resistance or not. I flipped through it in the store though and decided to get it for its visuals and action sequences. It looked like fun. And there were some exciting parts, but unfortunately, this still isn’t the Lois Lane comic I’m waiting for. Lois spends the entire issue running around doing the bidding of other people. The story opens with Perry White’s sending her on a fluff piece instead of covering the impending war. The Lois Lane I want to read about doesn’t get sent to cover Fashion Week. She doesn’t have to whine and argue that she’s a serious reporter; everyone should know that she is and treat her that way. But this Lois…even when the story gets going she’s still acting as someone else’s agent, and not even a particularly competent one. This isn’t the story of a strong, empowered reporter that I’ve been craving.

I also read Mystery Men #2 and liked it, but it reminded me why I became a trade-waiter. The first issue got me all excited to continue the story, but now I’m growing impatient with its being rationed out in small chunks. Some cool stuff happens this issue — another masked hero joins the investigation and there’s a major revelation about the villain — but it’s hard to say that I enjoyed this particular chunk of the story as its own, self-contained unit.

Finally, I read the first volume of Jason DeAngelis and Aldin Viray’s Captain Nemo, a manga re-telling of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. There are some cool, imaginative things going on in it, like the story’s taking place in an alternate timeline where Napoleon won at Waterloo and has taken over the world. The 19-year-old son of the original Captain Nemo is operating the Nautilus II in rebellion against the French Empire, providing this version with an actual plot (something that Jules Verne’s novel lacks). Viray’s obviously had a great time creating the steampunk world for the story; the environment of the book looks great. And I like how it’s still hitting major beats in Verne’s story, but reworking them enough to keep them exciting and follow DeAngelis’ plot.

But the book falls victim to some standard manga tropes and the characters are boringly familiar. Nemo is the classic manga hero: handsome, but stand-offish, but really very gentle at heart. Camille Pierpont (who stands in for Professor Aronnax, Conseil, and Ned Land by ending up prisoner on the Nautilus II after Nemo saves her from drowning) is the traditional manga heroine: headstrong, judgmental, entitled, but supernaturally gifted with wild animals and really just one good kiss away from calming down into someone likeable. Even the characters’ designs are unimaginative; something that Aldin admits to in the sketchbook section where he says that he gave Nemo “the standard Harlock look” and Camille “the typical female lead character look.” The other crew members of the Nautilus II are just as immediately recognizable: Smart and Cocky Guy With Glasses, Bad Attitude Girl, Plucky Kid, etc.

Brigid Alverson

Treasury of Victorian Murder

This week was murder, at least in terms of what I have been reading. I got an advance copy of Rick Geary’s latest Treasury of Victorian Murder book, The Lives of Sacco and Vanzetti, which will be debuting at San Diego Comic-Con this year. Like all of Geary’s books, it’s cool, almost clinical, with the timelines and details carefully laid out in a heavy-bordered grid and a narrative voice straight out of a PBS documentary Geary’s objective voice suits the story well, because the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti is a matter of some controversy, but it does make the book seem rather dry.

Also on the stack is The Green River Killer, written by Jeff Jensen and illustrated by Jonathan Case. Jensen’s father was a detective on the case, and the story is told from his point of view. The story gets rolling with Gary Ridgeway’s confession and skips back and forth in time as the police bring him to the sites of the murders and then flash back to their first encounters with the same scenes. The art is straightforward and linear, but there are some nice atmospheric moments.

And in the prose realm, I’m reading The Poisoner’s Handbook, which would be more aptly titled “The Toxicologist’s Handbook.” Set in 1920s New York, the book follows the work of pioneering medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler as they investigate various murders — grouped by the poison involved. Some they solve, some they don’t, and sometimes they are simply frustrated by the difficulty of proving their toxicological case in court. It’s a bit overly dramatic but a good read nonetheless, and I’m learning a bit of chemistry from it too.

Tim O’Shea

IDW’s Rocketeer Adventures #1

Rocketeer Adventures #1 and #2: OK, I have to admit, I completely missed the first issue’s release. So I picked up issue #2 this week, Mark Waid teamed with Chris Weston, Darwyn Cooke, Geof Darrow, Lowell Francis with Gene Ha (all colored by Dave Stewart) and realized: “you were a fool to miss issue #1.” Fortunately I snagged the last copy of issue #1 at my local store. And I am torn which is my favorite from that issue, it’s a close race between John Cassady colored by Laura Martin or Kurt Busiek teamed with legendary Michael Kaluta (honorable mention Mike Allred colored by Laura Allred). But after serious consideration I have decided that Kaluta (inked by Stewart) is my favorite. There’s not a bad story in either issue–and I am looking forward to issue #3.

Thunderbolts #159 is a double-sized issue with multiple creative teams on different tales. But all you need to know is this: Jen Van Meter writes a team-up (of sorts) between Ghost and John Walker. I really hope that Marvel announces some more work for Van Meter at San Diego, because she deserves a monthly assignment.

Captain America: Given Bucky’s current status quo (given the Fear Itself event), I am confused as to why I would care what happened to James in this issue. But all my annoyance washed away when I got to see Chris Samnee draw more Nick Fury in the second half of the issue.

Did you catch my interview with Roger Langridge about the preview of his new Kaboom book, Snarked #0, which will sell for $1 in August? Did I convince you to tell your retailer to get a copy for you? You have until June 30 for the Previews deadline (Diamond Code: JUN110963). I mean it when I commit to this series being destined for my best of 2011 books.

Shannon Wheeler

Paying for It

There’s a narrow road to success if a creator already has a lot of good books. If it’s too different from what came before, I’ll hate it, and if it’s too similar to what came before, then I’ll hate it, too. Chester Brown created my favorite comics: Ed the Happy Clown and The Playboy. So, of course, I was disappointed with Paying for It.

It’s an autobiographical book about Chester Brown’s decision to satisfy his sexual needs by being with prostitutes. The best part of the book is when he details his internal conflict and anxiety when he first hires women to have sex with him. Unfortunately, the book drags as he uses his friends as characters to stage pro and con arguments regarding prostitution. The books drags even more when he reiterates his beliefs for the third… and fourth time. He avoids talking about his final relationship in respect for her desire for privacy. This could have been an emotional resolution in the book — Chester finding a relationship that he’s comfortable with. They are both happy with monogamous, but independent, lives where he continues to pay for sex. Any editor could have trimmed 20 percent of the redundant ranting to make it a smoother read and then pushed for a conclusion with emotional depth and acute observations similar to the book’s beginning. Chester Brown could have had a book that matched or succeeded his earlier work. As it stands, the book is a vaguely interesting read as a political diatribe and an okay read as an emotional journey, but is redundant as one and unresolved as the other. Chester is still a great creator; it’s too bad his editor hasn’t kept pace. It’s a good book that could have been a great book.

Okko

Okko

It’s a solid read that takes place in old Japan with demons, ronins, monks and magic. The book is skillfully put together with natural storytelling, attractive drawings and pretty coloring. It’s not a book you’ll ponder much after putting it down. As a book in the same genre as the great Usagi Yojimbo, it holds up as a solid and entertaining read.

New Yorker: On the Money

I always grab collections of New Yorker cartoons. This one has the strength of being assembled by the New Yorker’s current cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff. By choosing financially themed comics from 1925-2009, Mankoff shows an economic history of our country through humor. It’s telling that the rich-screw-the-poor is a recurrent theme that doesn’t change from the earliest comics to the recent ones. The repetition left me a little cold. Maybe not cold – but depressed. If the economics of this country could change the way families, gender roles and race relations have changed, I might like the book better. But I guess that’s not really the book’s fault.

Cowboy Wally

Always funny. I’m constantly amazed at how well this book has held up. I consider it one of the best comics created.

Underground

I just picked this one up, but the first issue shows potential. I love the art and story. Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber are great comic creators. I’m sure they’ll deliver.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #50

Hello and welcome to What Are You Reading? This week our special guest is Ross Campbell, creator of Shadoweyes and its recent sequel, Shadoweyes in Love, as well as Wet Moon, Water Baby, The Abandoned and “Refuse,” a short story in the recent Strange Adventures anthology from Vertigo.

To see what Ross and the Robot 6 crew have been reading lately, click below.

*****

Tim O’Shea

Avengers Academy #15

Avengers Academy #15: As much as I love the teen stars of this series, Christos Gage is writing the best dang Hank Pym since the days of Kurt Busiek’s Avengers. At the heart of most comic book series I enjoy, there’s a soap opera element. And artist Tom Raney pulls off the soap opera angle in this issue, showing the anguish in Pym’s face, when faced with certain hard choices.

Last week I avoided contributing to WAYR, because all I could think to write about DC comics was “What the hell is the point of recommending these any DC main titles, given that the series–no matter how great they may be–will end in a few months?” Well, Bryan Q. Miller’s Batgirl coming to an end is a prime example of a comic and creator who I will hate to see go. I expect Gail Simone’s Batgirl will be a big hit with folks, but I was dismayed to see Miller has not been tapped (to date) to work on any new DC projects. Here’s hoping that’s not the last I will see of Miller’s writing in comics.

Hulk #35: I love Jeff Parker for writing a scene where Thunderbolt “Red Hulk” Ross opines on his admiration for George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Few other mainstream comics are as equal parts quirky and entertaining as Parker’s Hulk.

Michael May

Alpha Flight #1

My enjoyment of Alpha Flight #1 was unfortunately tainted by paying an extra buck for two story pages and a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff I’d already seen online, but the story itself was a welcome return to what I originally liked about the team when Byrne created the series. I’m even digging Marrina’s new personality now. Van Lente and Pak sold me on it in three panels that simultaneously made me laugh and suddenly, totally get why Marrina would be exactly the way she is now. I’m still a bit sad about innocence lost, but they’ve found the silver lining in the storm clouds of Marrina’s history. Also, hell of a cliffhanger.

I don’t know what it was, but I just couldn’t stop adding periodical issues to my stack this week. I’m a stubborn trade-waiter by nature, so that surprised me. Cullen Bunn’s (The Sixth Gun) writing a Defenders vs Atlantis story in Fear Itself: The Deep was too tempting to pass up and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s gotta be hard to make a team starring Doctor Strange, Namor, and a Hulk feel like underdogs, but Bunn pulls it off and makes it look easy.

I also read Kelly Sue DeConnick and ChrisCross’ Supergirl #65 and it reminded me that there are still great comics being published by DC that don’t tie into a larger story. This is the first of three issues that have Supergirl going undercover for Lois Lane at a college to investigate some student disappearances involving robots and possibly faeries. Maybe even robot faeries. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s only going to cost $12 to read.

I did pick up another event-related comic though: last week’s Flashpoint: Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown #1. (I think it was last week. Two weeks ago?) It’s sort of the perfect Flashpoint tie-in because it starts during WWII and drops its heroes into the present, Captain America-style, so that readers can learn about the Flashpoint world along with them. Unlike Grodd of War, which I also read, I didn’t feel like I needed to have purchased Flashpoint and World of Flashpoint and three other mini-series to understand everything that was happening. It’s just Frankenstein and a bunch of monsters whooping up on some bad guys and trying to figure out what’s going on. Cool characters, great action, and a nice mystery.

Carla Hoffman

Batgirl #22

I gotta go with Tim on this one: I love Batgirl so much. Batgirl #22 was just as good as the issues that came before it and was totally bittersweet because I just don’t know if we’ll ever see its like again. The art was clever and fast paced, the writing was swift and adventurous, never leaving you too long to explain anything but connecting all the dots along the way. Stephanie Brown is fun, funny and confident in her role, a fantastic female character without having to be The Best Female Character, if that makes any sense. However, this is the killer part: you get a full story in that one issue. It’s one of the reasons I’ve kept up with Batgirl as much as I have: each issue tends to give you the most bang for you buck and requires very little from me but to kick back and enjoy. I kind of want to go back and read the Knight and Squire mini-series thanks to the fun I had with this book.

To show my true colors, I also read X-Men: Prelude to Schism #3 and have deemed it the best of the prelude books out thus far. I still don’t know what’s going on plot-wise besides the obvious (there is a threat! there is a decision!), but this week we took a peek inside the head of Scott Summers as he makes the decision to fight … something. Jenkins hasn’t been this on for personal storytelling in awhile, at least for me; I enjoy a good quiet moment where we really look at the motivations of why a particular hero is the way they are and he nails it for one of the quietest load-bearing characters of the X-Universe. Scott, even in his new souped up position as the leader of Utopia, remains reserved and thoughtful and it’s easy to see why in this issue. He is, in effect, a blind man leading people who are in a whole new phase of existence, which is a neat little way to look at this event, whatever this event may be.

I also read Avengers #14 because I have a streak of masochism. It’s embarrassing how much I don’t enjoy a book I actively seek out every month, like I should have learned by now not to do this because I’m just not the person Brian Michael Bendis is writing these books for. There are plenty of people who enjoy this flagship book of the Marvel Universe, its sales are consistent and the story is popular, so they don’t need me as a reader. But yet, here I am. Whereas X-Men: Prelude to Schism #3 is giving me one quiet character moment, this tries to give me several with a variety of talking heads, some living, some dead, being interviewed. At the same time, the main point of the story is that the Thing fights the Hulk. Not only that, but the Godly-Hammer-Chosen Thing fights the nigh-unstoppable Red Hulk! And it’s drawn by John Romita Jr. who, from his work on World War Hulk, kind of sort of declared himself Artist King of Hulk Fights(tm) in my humble opinion. Why didn’t I like this? Why won’t you let me love you, Avengers!? Because it’s slow. There’s a whole lot of tell-not-showing in the issue, some beautiful shots that have these little head shot boxes dotting their margins telling you how awesome this picture is. Because they destroy Stark Tower and I can’t say I’m worried for where the Avengers will live now, nor is Stark Tower so endeared to our hearts as the Avengers Mansion was when it also was destroyed by Bendis. Because at the end of the book, Jarvis tells us that this moment was more terrifying to him than having his life threatened in front of Captain America in the classic “Under Siege” story line. This is just, what, two issues in? He tells me this point blank, instead of showing me a moment that tops the classic panels from the Avengers’ past and, as a reader, I don’t feel like that’s really happening between the panels.

Ross Campbell

Remake Special

Remake Special by Lamar Abrams: The first Remake is hilarious but this second book is without a doubt the funniest comic I’ve ever read. Being a connoisseur of poop humor, I was delighted to see that Remake Special features hero Max Guy and his pals Magma Boy and Sick Rick going up against people made of poop.

Happyface by Steve Emond: Emond is most known for his comic Emo Boy from SLG Publishing, but he really shines in his first novel. It does include artwork, though, which is interesting, I’ve never read a book quite like it. Anyway it’s really good, I saw a lot of my younger self in the main character, a self-absorbed, angsty, whiny, sometimes delusional hopeless romantic high school boy, which isn’t something I look for in fiction but which turned out to be entertainingly embarrassing. It starts off kind of superficial seeming but it unfolds really interestingly and unexpectedly, and ends up being honest and unflinching.

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor: I only just started reading this the other day but I had to include it! I’ve been reading Nnedi’s books for a while and they’re all great, and her last book Who Fears Death, about a powerful mystic girl in post-apocalyptic North Africa, was amazing but it looks like she may top it with Akata Witch, which is about an albino black American girl, Sunny, living in Nigeria, who discovers she has magical powers.

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson: Man, this book sucked me the hell in, I was so absorbed in this. It’s about a girl dealing with anorexia and it’s brutal and sad and compelling.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: City At War by Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird and Jim Lawson: I grew up on the old Mirage TMNT comics and felt like reading City At War again, and I’d forgotten how awesome it is. Issue #50, all wordless, is super awesome. I love when Leonardo says of Splinter “I would gladly die for him… but I don’t know if I can give him my life.” DANG.

Athos in America

Welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading?, where every week we talk about the comics, books and other stuff we’ve been reading lately. Today our special guest is Kim Thompson, co-publisher, editor, translator and AutoChatter at Fantagraphics … and world traveler, as you’ll see below.

To see what Kim and the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click the link …

Chris Mautner

The Horror, The Horror

The best thing about The Horror, The Horror: Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read by Jim Trombetta is the accompanying DVD containing a 1955 episode of the TV show Confidential File, directed by none other than Irving Kershner of Empire Strikes Back fame. The show is all about the evils of comic book publishing (despite the fact that the comics code had by this point already been established) and panders in the most frothy, exploitative way imaginable, with a lengthy scene of young boys reading a batch of horror and crime comics and then tying up and torturing one of their younger playmates. A Current Affair never tried anything like this.

As for the book, it’s a bit of a mess. Trombetta seems more interested in psychoanalyzing the themes and subtext of most of these comics than exploring their history and worth (or unworth as the case may be) as literature, and he does so in a rather agonized, tortured manner. More to the point, he seems content to discuss mainly the covers of these comics and doesn’t spend much time talking about the stories found within. All in all, it’s a bit of a frustrating read, all the more so for the occasional appearances of genuine insight and spot-on analysis.

Tom Bondurant

Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown

Appropriately enough, Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown (written by Jeff Lemire, drawn by Ibraim Roberson) continues a concept which refuses to die. Successfully reproducing the fusion of horror and giddy mayhem which characterized the Grant Morrison/Doug Mahnke Seven Soldiers miniseries, this Flashpoint spinoff casts the monster as a Superman-style inspirational archetype, heading up the WWII-era Creature Commandos. In this case, though, after single-handedly defeating Hitler, he runs afoul of the military’s next supernatural-soldier project, and … well, it’s just the first issue; it’s mostly prologue. Very entertaining stuff, though, as you might expect from the high concept of “monsters fighting Nazis.” Now carry that into the present, add a healthy dose of paranoia, and you’ve got the makings not just of a diverting three-issue miniseries, but most likely of a promising ongoing series come September.

As it happens, another monsters-fighting-Nazis miniseries started this week, the American Vampire spinoff Survival of the Fittest. Written by the busy Scott Snyder and drawn by the fabulous Sean Murphy, it too is a good introduction to what should be a fine four issues. Our protagonist is Felicia Book, able literally to sniff out vampires (among other things) thanks to her late father’s encounter with AV‘s head villain, Skinner Sweet. Her back story is contrasted against that of Cash McCogan, himself the father of a vampire-infected child who wasn’t as lucky as Felicia. In turn, they’re both part of a secret anti-vampire society that’s uncovered some potentially game-changing information. Anyway, this first issue lays out the world of American Vampire pretty efficiently, mostly through Felicia’s encounter with a newspaper editor who’s been unwittingly drawn into the vampires’ plans. AV:SOTF is therefore reliant on its own paranoid perspective, and that almost spoils the plot before it even gets started. (If Felicia and Cash succeed, the series pretty much loses its reason for being.) However, Snyder and Murphy combine for a no-nonsense, tight-lipped, unflinching mood which makes the reader want to saddle up with Felicia and Cash regardless of the outcome.

Finally, I know Birds Of Prey will continue after Gail Simone leaves, and with current regular artist Jesus Saiz to boot, but this week’s issue #13 (drawn by Diego Olmos) is solid evidence it won’t be the same. This time it’s Black Canary and Dove versus Junior, with the rest of the Birds taking on various henchmen, just to get out of Junior’s headquarters alive. Like Saiz, Olmos’ work is clear but moody, and he has good layout and pacing skills. Naturally, Simone knows these characters so well by now, they spring pretty much fully-formed from her scripts. Whether it’s Black Canary trying to figure out how to hold off Junior while still ministering to Dove, or Huntress and the Question playfully renewing their partnership, the dialogue rings true and the plot proceeds from their motivations. If these are the last few issues of Birds Of Prey I read for a while, it’ll be because they can’t get much better.

Brigid Alverson

Black Butler

I was really disappointed when I read the first volume of Black Butler. I liked the idea of combining an action story, an attractive hero with superpowers, and a Victorian England setting with touches of refinement. I didn’t care at all for the execution, though—I thought the art was sloppy, the story was nearly incoherent, and the side characters, three clumsy servants, were so terrible that they really marred the book. Despite what I think, Black Butler has consistently made the New York Times manga best-seller list—this week there are two volumes on the list, vol. 1 and vol. 5. So, thinking maybe I was missing something, I went back and read the last four volumes, which include a Jack the Ripper story arc that is… incoherent and overacted. I guess there’s no accounting for taste, but the extreme popularity of this series continues to elude me.

Much more pleasing was Kevin Keller #1, the first issue of Archie Comics’ Kevin Keller mini-series. Kevin is re-introduced to the readers, and the fact that he is gay continues to be treated in a matter-of-fact way. This first issue includes his account of how he came out to his parents and his desire to pursue a career in the military. All this is handled in a very idealized way, but that’s Riverdale for you. And there’s a goofy segment about a pie-eating contest gone wrong as well.

Kim Thompson

My reading this past few weeks has been heavily influenced by a trip to Scandinavia to attend a Norwegian comics convention.

The Devil's Star

(1) Jo Nesbø’s latest thriller, The Devil’s Star, which I picked up in Copenhagen (in Danish; I thought it would be more faithful to the Norwegian original than the American translation) and which succeeded in making the endless flight back (three stopovers) much, much shorter. Creep-out bonus: Two of the characters meet in the Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo in front of the same painting my wife and I had just stopped at just three days earlier.

(2) The first book of the complete works of Jan Lööf, a Swedish cartoonist whose Felix is a great classic, sort of like a cross between V.T. Hamlin and Kim Deitch, which I’d never had a chance to check out before and which is genuinely amazing.

(3) Xeroxes of the entire upcoming volume of new short stories by the Norwegian cartoonist Jason, Athos in America, which he handed me in Oslo and I am now pretty much the only person in the world to have read—the perks of being a publisher.

(4) An amazing book of illustrated memoirs by the great Norwegian cartoonist Olaf Gulbransson (whose life was chronicled in the graphic novel Olaf G., easily one of the best new European graphic novels of the new millennium), given to me by its Norwegian publisher.

(5) Geniet (“The Genius”), a fascinating new biography of Lars Von Trier which I was reading even as that Cannes controversy erupted, and which shows that he is one genuinely fucked-up dude in addition to being my favorite living (although apparently barely) movie director. Skaal!

Any Empire

Welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading? This week our special guest is Robert Stanley Martin.

Robert writes for his blog Pol Culture, and is a contributing writer to The Hooded Utilitarian. He is a past contributor to The Comics Journal, and his essays on R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated and Eddie Campbell’s Alec: The Years Have Pants are featured in the soon-to-be-released The Comics Journal #301.

To see what Robert and the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click on through …

*****

Great Darkness Saga

Tom Bondurant

This week, some unplanned, unexpected free time gave me the opportunity to read the new edition of Legion of Super-Heroes: The Great Darkness Saga. Now, I have been an on-again, off-again Legion fan throughout the years, reading the book sporadically in the ’70s and ’80s, and pretty steadily in the ’90s, and am slowly catching up with the original stories via Showcase Presents. I read “GDS” originally in its 1989 paperback edition, which reprinted only the particular issues themselves (#s 290-94) and the epilogue revealing Darkseid’s subtle revenge. I thought it was a good adventure story, and certainly a good blend of the Legion with the Fourth World. The new hardcover reprints a lot more material — issues #284-96, plus Annual #1 — but that pushes “GDS” itself into the last half of the book, with not a lot of buildup in the first half. Thus, as I was reading, I kept wondering what Chameleon Boy’s mission to Khundia, Princess Projectra’s political intrigue, or the new Invisible Kid, had to do with the fireworks to come. The answer, I think, is “not a lot,” at least in story terms. Those plots and subplots are, at most, background for where we find those characters in “GDS.” Perhaps more importantly, though, the non-”GDS” issues seem like a pretty good sample of early-’80s Legion comics: multiple interweaving plots, the needs of a huge cast (and some significant supporting characters), and of course healthy doses of superhero space opera. Overall I think the collection works pretty well, as long as you don’t expect to see the Fourth Worlders too early on.

Since it was the first week of the Flashpoint onslaught, naturally I picked up FP #2, plus the first issues of Batman: Knight of Vengeance and Secret Seven. Honestly, I could see B:KOV working just as well as a garden-variety Elseworlds, at least at this point. It’s as moody as you’d expect from Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, although the Thomas Wayne here is a lot more beefy (and Miller/Janson-esque) than the one in FP Proper. It’s also about what you’d expect from a Batman Elseworlds: familiar faces in unfamiliar roles, including the Penguin working for Wayne Casinos and Gordon as the Alfred-esque confidant. It’s pretty violent, too: there’s some cannibalism, and an injury-to-the-eye scene just for good measure. Otherwise, it’s a pretty noirish, entertaining Batman story.

Secret Seven

Secret Seven I am less enthused about, which is too bad, because I am a fan of both Peter Milligan and George Perez. To put it bluntly, I don’t think Perez is entirely right for this material — which, again, is too bad, because if he had channeled some of the old post-psychedelia ’70s mojo, he could really have done something special with it. The story doesn’t help much, though: Rac Shade, disgraced leader of “the Seven,” gets called home to an alternate dimension where he’s alternately tortured and debriefed. This is where all the psychedelia comes in (or, more accurately, could have been amplified.) Meanwhile, June Moone, the Enchantress, is out in the real world looking for him. Fernando Blanco takes over the art for the book’s last few pages, and inker Scott Koblish ties together his work with Perez’s to make everything flow together, but it’s a lot of setup without much payoff. I’ll probably end up getting the whole thing, and I think there’s some potential here; but it doesn’t thrill me like I thought it would.

On the other hand, Secret Six was the start of what may be Gail Simone’s farewell tour/victory lap on this book. It’s an extended epilogue to the team’s adventures in Hell, starting with the fate of Scandal’s exotic-dancer girlfriend (and the creep who abducted her) and ending with Bane going on a very weird (but apparently very fulfilling) first date. Ultimately, everyone affirms everyone else, and the team generally; and it’s about as feel-good as this book gets. I know Simone’s not going to be on Birds Of Prey past August, and I hadn’t heard anything about this title — but if these are her last few issues, I’m going to miss her a lot.

Oh, and Flashpoint #2 was decent — perhaps not as good on its own as issue #1, because it spent a lot of time with Wonder Woman, Deathstroke, and Aquaman, sailing the death-choked seas of the commingled Mediterranean/North Atlantic. Each of those characters gets his or her own character moment, with Deathstroke perhaps being
the most sympathetic. Wonder Woman and Aquaman are basically introduced to show how hardcore they are, which I suppose serves to put a couple of scowly faces on the carnage described in issue #1 (and, here, in a stark two-page spread of the wrecked Eiffel Tower). Back with Batman and Barry, the discussion centers around restoring Barry’s speed, and — SPOILER ALERT — that turns out to be the cliffhanger for this issue. I hope this miniseries picks up the pace with subsequent issues, or issue #5 is going to feel pretty cramped.

Finally, I thought the Dwayne McDuffie tribute issue of Static Shock was quite good, and obviously very heartfelt. There’s a story about Static dealing with loss, but there’s also a more pointed commentary on McDuffie himself, saying point-blank that the people who held him back in life now get to eulogize him. Not to worry, though, Static and Rocket tell McDuffie — now he’s a legend, like them.

Brigid Alverson

It’s hard to imagine a book that could make me happier than Craig Yoe’s Archie: A Celebration of America’s Favorite Teenagers, not just because I love Archie comics but also because Yoe is a genius for finding odd little tidbits and bits of ephemera that relate to whatever comic he is writing about. So not only do we get the history of the company, biographies of the three principals, character overviews, and a generous selection of full-length comics, both old and new, we also get to see unpublished work by Bob Montana and Dan DeCarlo, a photo of Elvis reading an Archie comic, and even a photo-comic from a girlie magazine (published by an affiliated company, MLJ Magazines) in which a model visits a comics studio‹starring real members of the Archie staff. It’s like he went rummaging around in Archie’s attic and put all the cool stuff he found on display.

Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors #1

This week, I read the first two issues of Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors, which is an all-ages comic about a school for super villains. I felt it was pretty well done, with the all the usual aspects of school‹tough teachers, gym class, crushes, bullying‹nicely handled in the budding-super villain context. I also thought it was interesting that the creators make it clear from the start that the school is a hothouse where students are sheltered from the realities of the actual superhero/super villain world, and in issue #2 (which comes out on June 15) those realities are threatening to impinge on it. It’s nicely drawn and parts are quite funny (especially the origin story of the school itself), and I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops in future issues.

I picked up vol. 13 of Black Jack to relax with after a tough day this week, and I’m glad I did. This is one manga I can read for pure enjoyment. Osamu Tezuka was amazingly consistent in these stories, each of which is complete in about 20 pages and includes a dilemma, some sort of moral angle, and a really outlandish medical procedure. It’s highly entertaining and manages to be a bit literary without making the reader work too hard. With summer coming on, I’m looking forward to diving into my stack and pulling out a few more for hammock reading.

Chris Mautner

Strange Adventures — The only decent story in here is by Ross Campbell, who provides a nice bit of body horror that would make David Cronenberg proud. Everything else here is awful. Worse, it’s largely by talented people that really should know better.

Sidekicks

Sidekicks by Dan Santat — This is an all-ages comic about a superhero that has pets that, in turn, gain superpowers and attempt to fight crime. It’s cute, though a little short in the storytelling department — I felt like some of the cast could have used a bit more exposition, or at least screen time. Still, kids, especially kids who are into pets and superheroes, will likely dig it.

American Vampire Vol. 2 by Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque and Mateus Santolouco — Stephen King isn’t around this time, but that’s OK by me, as I really didn’t care much for King’s contributions in the first volume. Having said that, I had two big problems with this collection: 1) It’s not even the least, littlest bit scary. or even thrilling really; b) the cultural anachronisms really seemed to slap me out of the book time and again. Considering the story takes place eighty years ago, it has a modern gloss and feel that doesn’t really seem to fit. My goodwill from the first volume is enough to make me hopeful about the next collection, but I sadly found this entry to be rather lackluster.

Robert Stanley Martin

A major focus of my time right now is the International Best Comics Poll for The Hooded Utilitarian website. The poll, which is modeled after the one Sight and Sound magazine conducts on film every ten years, is being voted on right now by comics creators, reviewers, and others in the field. We’ve received over 100 top-ten lists so far, and I’m having a blast logging them. The best part is seeing the votes for work with which I’m not familiar. I’m having enormous fun finding out about these comics online; it’s just extraordinary stuff. Before this, I considered myself pretty erudite about comics and cartooning. It turns out I didn’t know the half of it when it comes to the field and what it has to offer. I have no idea what the response will be when the poll results are published in August, but I hope people will use the voting lists as a starting point for expanding their horizons. Comics is a wonderfully rich and diverse field, and if the poll gives people new opportunities to fall in love with the form all over again, I couldn’t ask for more from it.

The New Dinosaurs

My reading is generally a pretext for writing, and my big writing project at the moment is a critical appreciation of the wildlife art of William Stout. Stout is one of the most diversified artists around, and his work in comics, illustration, and film production design is nothing less than outstanding. However, the glory of his career is his wildlife art, particularly his Antarctica and dinosaur paintings. His depictions of the animals and their environments are stunningly realized—thoroughly researched and absolutely gorgeous in terms of picture composition and color design. At their best, they have a metaphorical richness that ensures one will never look at the subjects in quite the same way again. My sources include Stout’s book The New Dinosaurs, John Arcudi’s copiously illustrated interview with him in The Comics Journal’s Winter 2003 Special Edition, and the websites for such places as the San Diego Natural History Museum, where one can see even more of his breathtaking murals and other paintings. I’m having so much fun looking at this material that it’s a major act of discipline to write about it.

On the novel front, I just wrapped up Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule, which won the National Book Award for Fiction this past year. I was really rooting for this book going in—Gordon is a fellow Michigander, and it’s always nice to see a small-press effort win a top literary prize over such heavily promoted major-house offerings like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. (I haven’t read either the Franzen or Egan books in their entirety yet, but they’ve gotten their fair share of applause elsewhere.) Unfortunately, I didn’t care much for Gordon’s novel. It’s set in the lower rungs of the horse racing world, and she displays a fine eye for the milieu along with an extremely conscientious approach to characterization. However, the book ultimately seems more a work of effort and will than one of passion. The fiction-writing skill on display is astonishing, but the material never really takes flight.

Speaking of Jennifer Egan, I recently finished her short story “Safari,” which is one of the linked tales that makes up A Visit from the Goon Squad, this past year’s most honored work of fiction. (“Safari” was first published in the in January of last year; I read it as one of the selections in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s The Best American Short Stories 2010.) The story is about the vacation in Africa a father takes his two children and his grad-student girlfriend on. Egan is a breezy prose stylist, and she does a hilarious job of rendering the tensions between the four principal characters. I especially liked her use of the grad student’s theoretical frameworks—the character is researching the links between social structure and emotional response—as a commentary on the characters’ behavior. The story is marred a bit by the use of flash-forwards in its penultimate section—the telling of how the characters turn out years down the road seems rather heavy-handed—but all is forgiven with the delightful note of irony on which the story ends. A Visit from the Goon Squad is going to have to be extraordinary in order to live up to the hype surrounding it, but if the rest of the book is as good as this preview, it just may pull it off.

I always read a short story alongside a contemporary poem—the pairings are completely random—and the companion read to “Safari” turned out to be Laura Hope-Gill’s “Jonah.” (Click here to read.) Laura was a classmate of mine while we were growing up in Florida. She’s now based in North Carolina, and has published two books of poetry in collaboration with local photographers. “Jonah” is my favorite of the poems by her I’ve read. Its retelling of the Old Testament story of the reluctant prophet seems informed by the famous bit from Isaiah 11:6: “a little child shall lead them.” Laura portrays Jonah as a young boy rather than a grown man, and he spends much of his time after being swallowed by the fish reliving his trepidation over having to grow up too soon. What makes the poem such a beautiful piece is the concluding epiphany: God’s interest in Jonah is precisely that he is not an adult; his innocent love of life, as embodied by his singing, is what delights God, and will presumably bring others to follow when God frees him. Laura’s name doesn’t tend to come up when people talk about the better contemporary poets; she’s never had a piece featured in Best American Poetry annuals, or been nominated for one of the major U.S. poetry prizes. However, poems like “Jonah” leave one thinking that her relative obscurity is something of an injustice.

I haven’t forgotten that this is a comics site, so I’ll close by discussing the last full-length comic I’ve read: Nate Powell’s Any Empire. The book isn’t scheduled to be released until July, but the folks at Top Shelf were nice enough to give me an advance look at it. I was very impressed by Powell’s last book, the Eisner-winning Swallow Me Whole, and Any Empire is another terrific effort. His cartooning is gorgeous; no one else working has his talent for capturing the rhythms and atmosphere of a story’s setting, and few can match his command of character nuance. The first half of Any Empire, which depicts the lives of three elementary-school kids in the late 1980s, is note-perfect. Powell expertly dramatizes the childhood interests that can either fall away or grow into adult preoccupations, as well as the unlikely rivalries and bonds that develop. My feelings about the book’s second half are unresolved. After a brief stop in adolescence, we follow the same characters into early adulthood, and my initial impression is that it’s a bit too abruptly developed. However, the problem may just be that I was a little thrown by the stark shift in the pacing. The individual scenes are well executed, and the problem with their not quite adding up for me may be that I found the rapid-fire tempo disorienting. I’m certainly going to read the book again, because even if the second half still doesn’t come together for me, Powell is such a brilliant talent that the initial pleasures can be counted on to retain their luster, and new ones will certainly be found. He’s the sort of artist that makes comics perhaps the most exciting art form there is today.

Welcome once again to Shelf Porn, where we help fans show off their stuff. Today’s submission comes from Harold Yoingco from the Philippines.

If you’d like to have your collection featured here, email me a write-up and some pictures at jkparkin@yahoo.com.

And now here’s Harold …

*****

Hi! Harold Yoingco here. I’m 21 from the Philippines. I usually do my browsing through the internet for some inspiring photos. Shelf porn is one amazing blog post that inspired me to.. Well collect more and make my own.

Here’s a view of my table where you can see I have a few figures Union Jack and Wolverine (Hammer files). These two are the most favorite figures of all time. I seldom collect figures. As you can see on the right side there’s an original sketch of Ken aka Gorilla man from Agents of Atlas. Sketched by the artist Carlo Pagulayan.

Here’s a closer look of my figure factory thing.

A closer look of the sketch.

A closer look of my shelf I only have a few books… Mostly Stephen king’s books.

A sketch from Harvey Tolibao. Weapon X baby.