Action Comics #5

Welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading. Our guest today is Marc Singer, author of the very excellent book, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics, which is an excellent, excellent book that you should read if you’re at all interested in Morrison and his work.

To find out what Singer and other members of the Robot 6 crew are reading this week, simply click on the link below.

Tim O’Shea: If Amazing Spider-Man readers were not already reading Daredevil before this two-part crossover (Amazing Spider-Man 677/Daredevil 8, both written by Mark Waid), the writer sure as hell gave them several

Daredevil #8

good reasons to start reading the book. And for Waid, this must have just been fun to write. In some ways, it read like a throwback to the 1970s Marvel Team-Up issues I grew up reading. In the first part, Waid worked in a scene where Spidey is confused about DD’s secret identity status. Spidey/DD banter is always fun to read, even when it’s marketing work intended to inform a non-DD reader. In the second part, we are given:

1. A Paolo Rivera cover that has me wanting the artist to do a 52-card playing deck of Marvel characters (and a great use of a fire escape for a cover)
2. An exquisite splash page by Kano
3. Waid writes the issue addressing previous plot threads and planting seeds for future issues (a risky approach considering the number of potentially new readers drawn in with this issue) but it works
4. A great billy club meets helicopter scene
5. A smidge more DD/Spidey banter

Amazing Spider-Man 678
This week’s Spidey (Christ, I feel absurd even saying that) offers readers another part one of a two-part story. In the world of neverending event comics (is Fear Itself over yet?), the fact that I get to talk about two two-part stories in one week is a refreshing surprise. If you look back at the number of writers of Spider-Man over the years, there were some writers that seemingly did not know how to write Peter Parker outside of his longjohns. Slott, on the other hand, relishes it. The cast of characters and the scenarios Parker finds himself in, thanks to his Horizon Labs job, allows Slott to stretch his writing muscles. This issue revolves around a time portal doorway that one of his lab associates has developed (Slott, ever the comedic writer, has it be the doorway for the lab’s break rooms. I appreciate Slott and Marvel editorials restraint on this story. A glimpse into the future where New York is destroyed could have easily been stretched out into six parts, so I am appreciative of the fact that this is a fast-paced (so far) two-parter.

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents 3
In the third issue of this six-part miniseries, I am pleased to say that writer Nick Spencer surprised me. Admittedly he’s been revamping the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. history throughout his run with the characters, but his reveal at the end of this issue is one I never expected. I have been often on the fence with this series (a fascination with things Wally Wood-related has made me hang in there though). But there is no doubt I would have bought this issue, no matter what, given that I saw Walter Simonson pitched in to do some scenes. (And yeah, I cannot believe I forgot to pick up this week’s Legion of Superheroes 5, a standalone completely drawn by Simonson). On a Simonson-related note, if you are a fan of his like I am, go read the brief interview Josie Campbell did with him for CBR. Even in that brief exchange, Simonson unleashes some great gems of details—about his dad and other things.

Approximate Continuum Comics

Chris Mautner: You know who’s great? Lewis Trondheim, the incredibly prolific French cartoonist. Evidence comes in two recent publications, both autobiographical. The first is Approximate Continuum Comics, an English translation of a six-part series Trondheim published in the 1990s concerning his struggles in the comics industry, desire for success and acclaim and just general angst, anxiety and feelings of self-doubt. It sounds all terribly self-involved to the point of tedium, but Trondheim is simply too skilled a storyteller to allow his own ego to override the quality of his work. Approximate is filled with wonderful visual inventions, like an early daydream about dealing with obnoxious passangers on the subway. More to the point, Trondheim’s self-effacing sense of humor is so charming and revealing that the book never becomes too solipsistic or insufferable. Time has dimmed its

Trondheim continues to reveal his life to readers on a weekly basis over at his Web site (and the NBM blog), most of which has been collected in his “Little Nothings” series. The lastest book, My Shadow in the Distance, offers more of the same, and such a wonderful same it is. The material in Shadows is more one-page humor strips, similar to, say, American Elf, but Trondheim hasn’t lost any of his angst or irritation at modern life and travel. If anything he’s become a more accomplished artist, especially with watercolor, which graces the content of Shadows in lovely wash tones. Plus, it’s really funny.

Do the Gods Wear Capes?

Marc Singer: I’ve just picked up a ton of books, scholarly and otherwise. Right now I’m in the middle of Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes by Ben Saunders (which is absolutely not about how superheroes are “a modern mythology” and is all the better for it). I’ve also been leafing through Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, a collection of essays about comics, television, video games, tabletop RPGs, and other media that lend themselves to huge, open-ended narratives. For fun I’ve been reading Kim Newman’s Mysteries of the Diogenes Club, a collection of short stories published by Chris Roberson’s MonkeyBrain Books. Newman has created his own “vast narrative” about the Diogenes Club, a group of occult investigators and secret agents that stretches from Mycroft Holmes to the present day. But I need to clear some of these out of the way, because the book I’m most looking forward to reading is Charles Hatfield’s Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby.

As far as comics go, I’m pretty much a lock for anything Grant Morrison writes, so I’ve been following Action Comics since the big DC relaunch. I have mixed feelings about this one. For all of Morrison’s pre-release hype about writing a working-class “Bruce Springsteen version of Superman,” the comic never really delivered on his promise of an old-school Siegel and Shuster superhero who takes on crooked contractors and greedy mine owners. Hints of that approach were wedged into the first two issues — just barely — before they were shoved out in favor of the kind of ‘definitive’ origin retelling that attempts to cram in Brainiac, Metallo, Steel, and as many other old familiar faces as possible.

On the other hand, social realism has never really been Morrison’s strong suit and he handles the fantasy elements with more confidence. Each issue has been better than the one before it, with the possible exception of the origin story, which manages to do in twenty pages what Morrison once did in four panels and eight words. Still, he writes a suitably heroic House of El and each issue adds some new details that are collectively adding up to a bigger picture. I just can’t shake the feeling that the book’s craft and its ambitions are moving in opposite directions. (And it’s never a good sign when you find yourself looking forward to the fill-in artists.)

Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes was much more to my tastes. I’m not certain this “corporate franchise” phase of Morrison’s Batman mega-narrative is going to amount to much more than a fast-paced team-up book, but with incredibly talented artists like Cameron Stewart and Chris Burnham on board, I don’t care. And Morrison’s compact, modular storytelling lets him work in a wide range of genres without losing focus: any book that can go from St. Trinian’s to Steranko is all right by me.

The Flash

The most pleasant surprise of the DC relaunch has been Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato’s Flash. Manapul’s approach to the Flash — using the character’s speed powers and accelerated perceptions as an excuse to experiment with different ways of representing time and motion on the page — is so perfect that you can’t believe nobody’s tried it yet. At the moment, Manapul’s still deeply indebted to his influences (the most recent issue trades Frank Quitely for J. H. Williams III) but I get the sense that when he fully absorbs their styles and starts creating his own visual idiom, this book is going to look even more amazing than it already does.

Flash radiates a pure joy in being a comic book that, among mainstream superhero books, is rivaled only by Mark Waid, Paolo Rivera, and Marcos Martin’s work on Daredevil. This is another one of those so-obvious-it’s-genius ideas—building a comic around Daredevil’s senses, which forces Waid and company to devise new ways to represent sound and texture on the smooth, silent page. It’s a testament to their skill that they make it look easy.

If you want to talk about sheer joy in comics as comics, it doesn’t get much more ecstatic than the crescendo of creatively designed, emotionally charged pages that Jaime Hernandez builds up to in his final story for the latest volume of Love and Rockets: New Stories. But Jaime’s command of his art—every aspect of his art, from lines to layouts to inks to body language to facial expressions—is so great that a single panel of Reno slouching away into the shadows can be just as breathtaking as the double-page spread that sums up the relationship of Maggie and Ray. A couple of years ago, I was hoping that Jaime’s foray into the loopy superhero sci-fi of the Ti-Girls would lead to a renewed freshness and vitality in his more realistic stories. “The Love Bunglers” delivers, big time. At this point Love and Rockets: New Stories probably doesn’t need any more rave reviews, but Jaime’s work is still the highlight of my comics pile.

from "The Love Bunglers" (top) and "The Death of Speedy Ortiz" (bottom) by Jaime Hernandez, assembled by Ng Suat Tong

As readers of this site are no doubt aware (to say the least!), Jaime Hernandez’s contribution to the recently released Love and Rockets: New Stories #4, “The Love Bunglers,” magisterially ties together some 30 years of history for its leading players, Maggie Chascarillo and Ray Dominguez. Now, the Hooded Utilitarian’s Ng Suat Tong has shown us exactly how.

His annotations for “The Love Bunglers” take the story’s many flashback panels, including all the scenes from the story’s centerpiece two-page spread, and place them side by side with the original scenes to which they’re flashing back, some of which were first published literally decades ago. It’s stunning to see how Jaime reinterpreted and re-interpolated his previous work– hifting our POV from one angle to another, showing moments that took place between the moments he depicted in the past, and of course re-drawing classic characters and scenes in his current style. Besides being a really useful post from a story perspective–surely everyone who read “The Love Bunglers” was hoping someone would do exactly this–as a demonstration of Jaime’s artistic intelligence and prowess, it’s tough to top. But then, so is “The Love Bunglers.”

I just wanted to end Robot 6′s impromptu weeklong celebration of Jaime Hernandez and Love and Rockets by posting this portrait of “The Love Bunglers”‘ lead characters Ray and Maggie during their flaming youth. We knew them when.

But what if you didn’t know them when? What if this is your first real exposure to the worlds created by Jaime and his brother Gilbert? Jaime’s been writing his “Locas” saga — about a loose-knit group of (mostly) Latino/Latina men and women who (mostly) first met as teens in the Los Angeles punk scene — for thirty years now. Gilbert’s been chronicling his own group of characters — first the residents of the fictional Latin-American town of Palomar, then the family and friends of Palomar’s former mayor Luba, and now the on-screen and off-screen misadventures of Luba’s B-movie actress sister Fritz — for nearly as long. What if you’ve got no idea who these people are, or where you could possibly begin to learn?

That’s fine too.

Love and Rockets has a reputation as one of the most intimidating comics to start reading, and that can cause many people never to try. Even if they do, it can skew their reception of the comics themselves. Trust me on this one.

Once upon a time I gave a bad review to Locas, a massive hardcover collection of many of Jaime’s stories. Written after a long period of intimidated delay on my part, I focused too much on the hype I’d heard, reacting to the sense that “you had to be there” by saying that since I wasn’t, these comics were no good. But years later I dropped all that baggage and started re-reading Jaime’s “Locas” saga from its first digest collection, Maggie the Mechanic, right on through to his most recent releases. Instead of worrying about what I’ve missed and whether my reaction lives up to the hype, I treated it the way I’ve treated the prospect of renting Season One, Disc One of various great HBO and AMC dramas from Netflix and plowing on through: as a chance to immerse myself for a while in a smart, serialized fictional world. Once I did that, the pleasures of Jaime’s writing and art really opened themselves up to me — much the same way that Gilbert’s had when I first cracked open his giant Palomar hardcover, and the way they did once again when I grabbed his first digest, Heartbreak Soup, for a marathon re-read/journey into undiscovered territory.

Tom Spurgeon’s fond of saying that comics’ current mania for “jumping-on points” is weird, because back in comics’ glory days, your only jumping-on point was whatever was stuck in the spinner rack that day. The mildly disorienting sense you got that the issue of Fantastic Four in your hands was just the tip of an iceberg of plotlines and character development was a big part of the thrill.

I’d say the same is true of Love and Rockets — or any great comic, really. It’s never a terrible idea to start from the beginning, if you can, and Heartbreak Soup (for Gilbert) and Maggie the Mechanic (for Jaime) make that really easy. But there’s also something to be said for starting with a story that makes sense as a starting point simply because it’s really good. With Gilbert, that could mean discovering the origin of his leading lady Luba in Beyond Palomar, or following her post-Palomar adventures in the massive Luba hardcover, or even discovering the raunchy and disturbing world of her sister Fritz in High Soft Lisp. For Jaime, that could mean skipping his early, sci-fi-influenced stuff and diving right into his soap-operatic slice-of-life material in The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S., or getting to know his leading ladies Maggie and Hopey as (more or less) adults in the giant Locas II hardcover…or, yes, starting with the emotionally climactic story of love and loss “The Love Bunglers” in the issue of Love and Rockets: New Stories that just came out.

The point is that both Jaime and Gilbert have produced massive, high-quality bodies of work, with multiple, affordable collections, each of which contains a story or two fit to knock your block off. If you love reading good comics, and chances are good that you do if you’re reading this blog at all, that’s not intimidating — that’s inviting! Don’t think of it as homework, or as a test to see if you “get it right” — think about it as one of those shopping-spree sweepstakes that TV networks used to do, where you’re standing with an empty shopping cart in front of a vast expanse of awesome stuff ready for you to grab and explore. If you do it that way, there’s nothing “intimidating” about it.

I read ["The Love Bunglers"] one evening while sitting at my drawing table. When I finished it, I turned off the lights in my studio (spare bedroom), and decided to spend the evening hanging out with my wife. I knew I was done drawing for the day. It reaches emotional heights I rarely encounter when reading comics and was not prepared for.

—Afrodisiac and Street Angel cartoonist Jim Rugg, himself no slouch in the comics department, on encountering Jaime Hernandez’s astonishing work in Love and Rockets: New Stories #4. Hmmm, Rugg left his drawing table, Adrian Tomine left a signing party…I really hope no cartoonists read this book while behind the controls of an airplane or something.

In all seriousness, times when a comic emotionally incapacitates you for however long are times to be treasured. Last night, in prepping for this post, I flipped through the book one more time, and came across pages that made me gasp and swoon. Hey, kids! Comics!

(Image by the great Alex Kropinak from text by yours truly)

I don’t think I’m advancing anything too controversial when I say that if there’s a Platonic ideal for the comic book page, it’s a piece of sequential art that works both as an assemblage of individual panels and as a single, unified artwork.  This, of course, is a lot easier said than done.  When gridded layouts are discarded to turn the page into a poster-style piece of op-art there’s always some readability being sacrificed, and the grid is all too often a vehicle for cartoonists to work inside without paying sufficient consideration to what sum their page’s parts are creating.

Jaime Hernandez squares that circle in the page above, a slice of comics that flows like fine wine from panel to panel but stands rock solid as a full-page unit.  The basic conceit of the page is that it isn’t unified by a dual identity as one single picture or any fancy layout tricks, but an immediate, cohesive sense of motion that every panel supports completely.  It’s not always beneficial for comics to be “pictures that move”, but Jaime is a classicist through and through, perhaps the purest one in comics right now.  Every panel here is story information above all, a drawing that communicates something of substance as clearly and crisply as possible.  That’s true of pretty much everything Jaime’s drawn for the past two decades, but on this page the story is bracingly simple, and every panel works toward a common goal: closing the perceived space between the characters inhabiting two separate frames.

That’s a lot easier said than done, considering there isn’t a great deal of space on even the largest of printed comics pages .  Certainly not the few miles Jaime wants his audience to feel here.  And the gutters between panels are a constant on the page as well: stacked two to a tier, the placement of the individual boxes themselves doesn’t do anything to bring their subjects closer together.  It’s the pictures that are doing all the work.  Panel one gives us two figures as far away from one another as they can get within this grid, with an expanse of white negative space between them that’s almost uncomfortable to dwell on too long.  Most panels don’t leave this much blank, and there’s a real shock to seeing two that do arranged so that the vast majority of the full tier they make up contains no drawing whatsoever.  The only lines bridging that area are the two verticals of the panel borders, rigid and non-negotiable.  The eye sees an immense chasm between the figures, about as much space as can be had on this page.  It’s a long way.

The second tier begins to close the gap by moving the figures closer to one another and pulling the camera back to show the space they’ve moved through.  The horizontal lines behind them and the pitch-perfect body language Jaime employs convey their closing of the gap; the addition of the horizontal line of the doors and door-frames still between them provides evidence of a large amount of space still to be moved through.  When those doors give way to the horizontals of the cars in the third tier, so close they almost form a single vehicle, we’re suddenly so much closer, though the figures have only moved a few centimeters.  The final tier is a beautiful bit of multitasking, bringing the figures so close together that they’re almost touching while also leading the reader’s eye onto the next page by providing a clear line from the pivotal center point to the extreme right of the final panel: we, like Ray, look over to see who’s talking.

It’s a beautiful example of comics achieving exactly what they set out to do, without a single line or formal gesture out of place.  The overall directionality of this page, like Jaime’s drawings, is both complex and refreshingly simple: a classic triangular composition that discards the left-to-right motion of just about every comics page under the sun for a focus on the center, everything rushing toward the axis provided by the gutterspace splitting the middle.  It’s a wonderful meeting of form and content: a completely unified page on the subject of unification, a single unit made up of eight perfectly chosen, gorgeously cartooned panels, each one complete in itself as a composed single drawings.  This is comics at the highest level, with nothing wasted and everything on the page done as well as it possibly could be.

I’ll freely confess that at the end of the new issue when I saw how Jaime had tied together the fates of Hopey, Maggie, and Ray I started crying like a baby. When I started burbling to Jaime about all this, he said that in working on his recent comics he was thinking that if he were hit by a bus tomorrow and killed he wanted to leave behind a story that would complete his life’s work. Having achieved that goal, the question now is what will Jaime do next.

–The Comics Journal‘s Jeet Heer on his recent conversation with Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 co-author Jaime Hernandez concerning the thought process behind his magisterial story “The Love Bunglers.” The only thing more striking than the fact that Jaime set this career-defining hurdle for himself is that he freaking cleared it.

But lest you think Jaime’s brother and co-author Gilbert’s getting no love out there, read the rest of Heer’s piece for (among many, many other things) an insightful defense of Beto’s much lauded but often divisive recent work, in which the sordid B-movies and equally sordid personal life of his buxom therapist-turned-actress character Fritz have taken center stage:

Recent Gilbert has been controversial in some circles because of its pitiless examinations of human perversity, its sardonic play with genre material and its sometimes savage violence. But I think the nay-sayers are so focused on the surface of these works that they ignore the deeper humanity that underlies them: Gilbert these days is often doing stories about damaged people, but he does so in order to lament the damage of physical and psychological abuse rather than to nihilistically revel in sordidness.

It’s worth noting that in his contribution to New Stories #4, Gilbert takes Fritz to a place of potential finality not unlike the one that his brother Jaime’s leading players occupy at the end of “The Love Bunglers.” Yeah, it’s really quite a comic.

…Hernandez’s comics are in many ways an antidote to all the things that drive comics fans nuts despite their seeming appetite for wallowing in such things for weeks, months, years on end. Sexism in comics is always worth fighting because sexism is pernicious and harmful and thus worth calling into question every time it’s encountered, but for many adult fans part of the solution really is to put down the terrible comic that enrages you and buy something like Love & Rockets: New Stories #4 for its fragile, sympathetic portraits of a wide range of human experiences.

—Tom Spurgeon, in yet another excellent piece on Jaime Hernandez’s Maggie & Hopey masterpiece “The Love Bunglers” from Love and Rockets: New Stories #4.

There’s a sense one gets when issues involving lousy or ugly or offensive comics are discussed on the comics Internet that the superhero genre is the extent of the comics experience. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good in the sense that for most of the North American comics market, superheroes are if not the only game in town then at least the Super Bowl compared to the Pee-Wee League games being played by other kinds of comics, so the numbers necessitate a serious engagement with the genre’s problems and the problems of its publishers. And if you treat superhero comics as paramount, then your critiques of its practices gain in urgency, an urgency that’s probably required if those critiques are to be heard and responded to.

But it’s bad because, well, it’s not true. If you’re looking for realistic and well-rendered women characters, or for women creators operating on an equal playing field, or for a serious examination of issues of gender and sexuality in all their glory and misery, then yeah, you can kick against the pricks and hope that someday an issue of Captain Copyright or the Teen Trademarks will deliver these things. Or you can put those comics down, walk a few aisles over or click on a different website, and discover things like Jaime’s “Browntown”/”The Love Bunglers” suite, which over the course of two issues of Love and Rockets packs in more quality fiction about love, aging, motherhood, fatherhood, marriage, divorce, adultery, sexual assault, queerness, mental illness, adolescence, friendship, and sex than the last half-dozen comics-internet contretemps–causing comics combined. It needn’t be an either/or choice, mind you — it never has been for me and it likely never will be either. But there is a choice.

The best thing about Jaime’s comics in particular, from a superhero-fan standpoint, is that like many of the best superhero comics, they play off decades of accrued continuity without being slavishly beholden to them. Jaime’s been working with his cast of Los Angeleno ex-punkers since the first Reagan administration, and “The Love Bunglers” brings the stories of several of them to places that are perhaps best appreciated by people who’ve followed them over the course of that journey. But as Spurgeon forcefully argues in his piece, there’s something refreshing about that, too. Hernandez is making precisely the comics he wants to make, without worrying if this makes him accessible to any particular kind of audience — be it an audience of theoretical “new readers,” or an audience that treats what has come before as a gospel never to be deviated from. The audience he cares about is the audience for good comics. Aren’t you a part of that audience?

Paying off thirty years of continuity and character development. Delivering shocks, gasps, cheers, and tears in equal measure, seemingly at the author’s whim. Offering a master class in everything from laying out a double-page spread to drawing clothes. Telling a story about beloved characters so emotionally engaging that even their most ardent fans wouldn’t mind if this were the last one ever told. Any way you slice it, Jaime Hernandez’s “The Love Bunglers” — his contribution to the recently released Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 and the conclusion to the already wildly acclaimed “The Love Bunglers”/”Browntown” suite from last year’s issue — is a hell of a comic. But you don’t have to take my word for it.

Dan Nadel, editor of The Comics Journal, has posted his own appreciation, and invited cartoonists Frank Santoro (Storeyville) and Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve) to do the same. (SPOILER WARNINGS in effect at those links, folks.) Nadel (like Jordan Crane on the first part of Jaime’s tale in issue #3 before him) minces no words: “This is not just Jaime’s finest work, but one of the best (at this moment I’d rank it in my top five of all time) works ever created in the medium.” Santoro calls Jaime “the greatest cartoonist of all time,” saying “No art moves me the way the work of Jaime Hernandez moves me.” Tomine talks of picking the issue up at a signing event for Jaime and being so moved by a two-page spread he encountered while randomly flipping through that he actually had to leave.

I posted my review at the beginning of August, after the book had started circulating at cons but long before it hit stores, but weeks and even months later people would still post comments on the review, like they’d been hungrily seeking out anything anyone had written about this remarkable comic. I’ve got a feeling that as more and more critics read this comic, they’ll never go hungry again.

I love these people in the stories more than any other characters in all of fiction, and I wouldn’t mind if I never see them again….That’s how good The Love Bunglers is.

—Bob Temuka on the remarkable work of Jaime Hernandez in Love and Rockets: New Stories #4. A continuation of the “Love Bunglers” suite of short stories that helped make last year’s issue one of CBR’s Best Comics of 2010, the issue sees the 30-year stories of Jaime’s “Locas” protagonists Maggie, Hopey, and Ray — all of whom have aged in real time as the series has progressed — come to what could quite easily be a conclusion, thrilling and upsetting and moving their many fans all at once. Temuka’s essay is filled with spoilers, so be warned, but it’s as good at conveying the unique nature of the “Locas” saga, the way its stories shift and grow and can be seen differently over time as we and Jaime and the characters all age and learn more about what happened, as well as any piece I’ve ever read.

(via Tom Spurgeon)

Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList, and tell us what you’re getting in our comments field.

Brilliant

Graeme McMillan

It is, thankfully, the last week of September which means that, if I had $15, I only have one more week of new launches from DC to pick out potential favorites, Sophie’s Choice-style. This week: Aquaman #1, Flash #1, Fury of Firestorm, The Nuclear Men #1, Justice League Dark #1 and Superman #1 make the cut (All DC, all $2.99 each).

If I had the chance to add some more money to take that total to $30, I’d go for some Marvel books: Brian Michael Bendis gets well-represented with Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #2 ($3.99); New Avengers #16.1 ($2.99), his “new readers jump on” issue with art by Neal Adams; and Brilliant #1 ($3.99), his new creator-owned book with Mark Bagley. Here’s hoping I’m in a suitably Bendis-y mood when I read all of these ones.

Splurgewise, it has to be Habibi (Pantheon, $35), Craig Thompson’s new graphic novel. I know a few people who’ve had a chance to read it already, and everyone has made it sound like a large leap ahead from Blankets, and something almost worth the many-year wait it’s been since his breakthrough last book. I’m really looking forward to this one.

Habibi

Chris Mautner

If I had $15:

There’s a lot of good, big-name books out this week, starting with the fourth volume of Love and Rockets ($14.99). Rumor has it that Xaime Hernandez’s contributions to this issue are even more exemplary and emotionally devastating than in Vol. 3, which seems almost impossible, but I’m eager to find out either way.

If I had $30:

I’d at least take a look at Kinky and Cosey, a South Park-esque gag strip from NBM, authored by one Nix, about whom I know nothing, but the online samples intrigue me.

Splurge:

Graeme already mentioned Habibi – I’m only a third of the way through it now, so I can’t really comment on the book yet. Frank Miller’s Holy Terror is also out this week ($29.99), but David Brothers’ review has put me off on purchasing the book, at least for now. That leaves either Matthew Thurber’s delightfully surreal saga 1-800-MICE ($22.95), Marc Bell’s equally strange and charming Pure Pajamas (an odds and sods collection of various comic work) ($22.95) or Brian Ralph’s first-person zombie apocalypse tale, Daybreak ($24.95). All are really worth getting, it’s just a question of which to buy first.

Holy Terror

Chris Arrant

Fifteen dollars in my pocket, and I’d still only have room for one of this week’s New 52 from DC: Flash #1 (DC, $2.99). Francis Manapul is a big-time artist, and seeing DC giving him the reins as writer-and-artist is an interesting play that I want to see work. Next up would be another #1, but not from DC: Brilliant #1 (Marvel/Icon, $3.95). It’s good to see Bendis doing more creator-owned work, and bringing in Mark Bagley is a novel idea, especially considering Bagley’s style is synonymous with super-heroes; I think the only non-super-hero book he did was The Pulse back in the day. Next up would be two installments of ongoing Marvel epics: Wolverine #16 (Marvel, $3.99) and FF #9 (Marvel, $2.99). Aaron threw me for a loop revealing a new brood of kids for Logan, and meanwhile FF is turning into the book I’ve always wanted for Marvel: smart-ass kids in over their head. Somehow, I think Kirby would get a kick out of this, too.

If I had $30, I’d double back and bet it all on DC with five #1s: Superman #1 (DC, $2.99) for George Perez; Voodoo #1 (DC, $2.99) for Sam Basri’s art (despite Voodoo being my least favorite Wildcat); All-Star Western #1 (DC, $3.99) for, well, everything and everyone involved; Aquaman #1 (DC, $2.99) to see this Hail Mary pass of revitalizing this guy; and then Blackhawks #1 (DC, $2.99) because I’ve been pining for years they bring this team back in a meaningful way.

If I could splurge, I’d still be in a jam, as there’s two big graphic novels I want to get this week. I’d have to choose Frank Miller’s Holy Terror (Legendary, $29.99) over Habibi just because of how curious I am to see what Miller is doing here. For Habibi, I’d put it on my pull list and swing back next week.

Superman

Michael May

If I had $15, I’d split it between DC, Marvel and a smaller publisher. From DC I’m extremely curious about Superman #1 ($2.99) to see how Lois Lane is handled beyond the couple of pages we’ve already seen. I love the idea of team of magicians using the Justice League name, especially one where Zatanna and John Constantine get to interact on a regular basis, so I’m all in for Justice League Dark #1 ($2.99).  From Marvel, I’d grab Spider-Island: Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #2 ($2.99) because Shang Chi, and X-Men Legacy #256 ($2.99), because I’m enjoying being reminded how good Mike Carey is for that book. Finally, I’d grab Moonstone’s That Man Flint #0 ($1.99) for some groovy super-spy action. Casanova‘s already scratching that itch too, but I’ve got room for more.

If I had $30, I’d quickly add the more expensive All-Star Western #1 ($3.99), which only got left off my $15 list because I couldn’t afford it. I’ve been wanting to jump on to Gray and Palmiotti’s Jonah Hex for a long time and that Moritat art looks very cool. Then I’d also get I, Vampire #1 ($2.99) because I like Josh Fialkov’s stuff. I wasn’t thrilled with Warren Ellis’ first issue on Secret Avengers, but I’m willing to give it another shot, so I’d also grab #17 ($3.99). I’d top off the pile with Abe Sapien: The Devil Does Not Jest #1 ($3.50) because Abe’s awesome.

There’s way too much to splurge on this week. I can’t not mention Habibi, but there’s also a new collection of All-New Batman: The Brave and the Bold ($12.99), Archaia’s Weird Western The Grave Doug Freshley ($19.95), and that Kamandi Omnibus ($49.99). If I had to pick one thing though, I’d support Marvel’s reprinting John Byrne’s Alpha Flight by buying Alpha Flight Classic, Volume 2 ($29.99). Any effort to get those stories out of my closet and onto my bookshelf is extremely welcome.

Big Questions

Hello and welcome to What Are You Reading?, our weekly column where we successfully answer the question in the title. Our special guest this week is Janice Headley, events coordinator, publicist and “ambassador of awesome” for Fantagraphics.

To see what Janice and the Robot 6 crew have been reading this week, click the link below.

*****

Michael May

Justice Inc.

A while back I got interested in the old pulp character The Avenger and picked up everything my local comic shop had on him starting with DC’s Justice Inc. They only had a couple of issues, numbers 1 and 4, but I felt like I got a good indication for what the series was like. The first issue was an adaptation of a the first Avenger story from the pulps and since I’ve also read that it was pretty rough reading Denny O’Neil try to condense it into a single issue. Given that impossible task, he did a pretty good job of it though. Much better, say, than M Night Shyamalan’s trying to condense an entire season of Avatar: The Last Airbender into a two-hour film.

Justice Inc #4 is an original story (also by O’Neil) with some fun Kirby artwork and a couple of nice set pieces featuring a zeppelin and a fight on a bi-plane. It’s too bad the villain’s scheme is a sad scam in which he blows up his own passenger-filled planes for the insurance. If you’re going to kill massive amounts of innocent people, at least have the guts to try taking over the world or something.

In the “more recent, but still not exactly new” category, I saw the old DCU out with Supergirl #67. I’d pretty much given up reading comics in single issues, but was making an exception for Kelly Sue DeConnick’s brief, but extremely enjoyable run. I almost missed the significance of Supergirl’s asking a new friend not to forget about her in the last couple of pages. A sweet end to not only a fun story, but this entire version of the character. I hope to see Kelly Sue on more superhero stuff soon.

A couple of other periodical-issue exceptions I’ve been making have been Mystery Men and Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown. I just finished the fourth issue of Mystery Men and am loving the team as it’s finally coming together. I feel like they’re only just going to form in time for the climactic fifth issue and then I’ll have to say goodbye, but hopefully the series is doing well enough to warrant a sequel. I understand there’s already plans for a collected version.

As for Frankenstein, the third issue wrapped up the Flashpoint era of Frank’s story very nicely and – just as important – completely. According to friends who’ve been keeping up, that’s more than can be said of the rest of the comics in the event. Jeff Lemire and Andy Smith finish the story they began without making me buy anything else, while just teasing the New 52’s Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE enough to get me to want to check it out. It’s one of several comics I’ll be buying as single issues again thanks to the reboot.

Marvel’s also benefiting from my renewed interest in single-issue comics. As long as I’m reworking that format into my budget, I decided to check in on some favorite Marvel characters starting with Rogue in X-Men Legacy #254. Though it’s Part One of a story, it’s very much continued from whatever long epic space search the Legacy X-Men have been on for however long they’ve been on it. Part of the fun though was diving back into the X-Men feet first without trying to catch up ahead of time. That’s how I got into them in the ‘80s and it worked pretty well this time too. There are some new characters I don’t know, but I had Rogue, Gambit, and Magneto to lead me around and it was just fine. Also, the story about the team’s getting accidentally split up and searching a giant space station for Havok and Polaris while dealing with factions of warring aliens was pretty cool.

Carla Hoffman

Batwing #1

Let me first publicly apologize to DC Comics and everyone who worked on Batwing because I am more than willing to eat my hat on this: Batwing #1 is everything I have wanted from a detective comic and some things I didn’t. That issue was awesome, from the smooth, emotional artwork to the very casual but directed level of storytelling, to the costume design in action… they even changed the logo to look more clear and less I-broke-it-with-a-hammer. Within three pages, we know everything we need and no one stops the whole book to repeat origins or bother with long exposition. The supporting cast range from ‘hey, African Alfred!’ to a cop who could be better and is slowly being fostered by Batwing’s alter ego to strive for more than what little justice they can get. I expected absolutely nothing from this book and it worked its little comic book butt off making me invest in it. I’m going to make sure we sell out of Batwing by the end of the week because this feels more like a new fresh start than anything I’ve read yet in the reboot.

Back in my home country of Marvel comics, the third issue of Greg Rucka and little mentioned superstar Mark Checchetto’s run on Punisher came out this week also and man, if that isn’t a good story. Checcetto is becoming the name I want to spell because his artwork is both strangely apt and far too beautiful for Frank Castle. A street level crime story has a certain look to it, or so we have dubbed in modern comics: there’s going to be a lot of blacks, shadowed faces, newspaper clippings, narrow panels of just someone’s eyes, etc. Things you don’t look for but know will be there when someone says “There’s been a murder.” Not only does Checcetta’s art fit the bill with some moody dark pictures, violence and artistic representations of pain, but people’s faces are remarkably beatific. It’s something in the eyes I think, but Frank Castle is probably the best looking I’ve seen him ever. Best of all, it doesn’t take you out of the story; Greg Land’s art might remove you because you’re trying to figure out where he took that photo reference from, but Checcetto’s work seems organic. Like all this darkness has some light within it as well? Man, that sounds corny, but it’s the best analogy I got.

Tom Bondurant

Batman Annual #1

I’ve been enjoying the reprints in the DC Comics Classics Library: Batman Annuals Vol. 1, and specifically the first Batman Annual (Summer 1961). These stories were collected around the theme “1,001 Secrets Of Batman And Robin,” and by and large they’re well-crafted little tales shedding light on particular aspects of the Dynamic Duo’s methods. “How To Be The Batman” finds Robin re-educating his amnesiac mentor; “Untold Tales of the Bat-Signal” strings together vignettes about the signal’s role in various cases, “The Origin of the Bat-Cave” takes readers back to the pre-Gotham frontier times, etc. Nothing too complicated, and each like catnip to the Bat-fan hungry for whys and hows. I was surprised at how many of these stories I’d read years, if not decades ago — not in the ’50s, of course, but in previous reprint collections — and they hold up pretty well.

Otherwise, I’ve been re-reading the first several issues of American Flagg!, simply because it had been a while, and there’s never really a bad time for Flagg!. I just finished the second arc, “Southern Comfort,” which spans issues #4-6. Not that I think the series peaked early, but this has always been one of my favorite Flagg! arcs. It opens up the book’s scope beyond the Chicago Plexmall, it introduces a few significant supporting characters (and Flagg’s standard disguise, Pete Zarustica), and it kicks off with a nifty, almost standalone story about Flagg and his friends foiling a blimpjacking. Flagg! went on the road a few more times, including to Canada, England, and Russia, but none of those stories were quite as tight and fun as “Southern Comfort.”

Brigid Alverson

Americus

Although I had read the first few chapters of Americus in webcomic form, for an interview here at Robot 6 last year, when the finished copy arrived I read it in one sitting. The story that drives the book is about a religious fanatic’s attempt to have a series of fantasy novels removed from the library of a small town in Oklahoma, but I found that to be the least interesting part of the book. The “Christian” character seemed like a caricature taken from internet postings, rather than a real person with thoughts and emotions (and even doubts), and in a book filled with quirky, nuanced characters, her lack of depth is noticeable. What makes this a great book is Hill and Reed’s portrayal of their protagonist, Neil, a teenage boy making the awkward transition from middle school to high school and losing his best friend (who is shipped away to military school) at the same time. Neil starts out being the Mikey of Americus, Oklahoma — he hates everything, and not without reason‹but as the book moves along he finds more and more kindred spirits. The authors intersperse sequences from their fictitious fantasy novel into the story, switching the drawing style to differentiate them from everyday life. Despite its one flaw, this book is a great coming-of-age story with a (mostly) likable cast and a host of small subplots. The book issue is resolved neatly (and predictably), but some of the other stories look like they will continue beyond the boundaries of the book, and I’d love to see an Americus 2 that leaves controversy to the side and simply continues to tell the stories of these characters.

Shutterbox, by Rikki and Tavisha Simons, seems like the sort of book that the fundamentalists of Americus would try to ban. It’s a fantasy tale about a girl who travels in her dreams to an alternate universe that is the home of the muses who inspire humans. Megan, the likable everygirl heroine, is a sort of supernatural exchange student who arrives at Meridiah University in pajamas and bunny slippers and encounters elf-like creatures, a ghost in her camera, and several handsome young men who don’t seem to be telling the truth. It’s a good example of an American graphic novel that picks up on the styles and tropes of manga and reinterprets them to make something completely new. The first four volumes of the series were published by Tokyopop, and the Simonses are now self-publishing them, along with volume five and an eventual sixth volume, digitally.

Tim O’Shea

Batgirl

So my regular comic book store since 1977 (Book Nook, no link because it’s an established Atlanta store that has no interest in the Internet) sold out of many of the DC new 52 fairly quickly–and I had been unable to make it to the store on Wednesday. Hankering to check out the new Batgirl, I called nearby stores on Thursday around 6 PM. The first store did not even pick up the phone. I dialed twice just to make sure I had not misdialed (and checked their posted hours, they were open for another hour). And the phone rang off the hook. I am not naming the store because, hey everybody can have a bad night. The second store I called, Galactic Quest, answered the phone on the third ring–and quickly I found out they had a copy of Batgirl.

Galactic Quest strikes me as the kind of store that will win a lot of new customers from the new DC books (and having just celebrated its 20th year in business, it’s a known business in that part of town). The clerk who answered the phone was even more helpful when I got to the store (it was a 15 mile drive in rush hour traffic, so I was pushing my luck just getting there). She directed me to the new releases and when I expressed pleasure that they had a copy of Batgirl, she immediately (but not in a pushy manner) informed me of their pull policy, if I’d like to sign up. When I explained I had a regular store–she backed off on the sell, but was still very friendly. When I noted that Stormwatch had sold out she snagged me a copy from the back that had been set aside, “but not spoken for.” When I thanked her and admitted I was afraid I was not gonna make it before closing, she offered (mind you, to a first time customer): “Give me a call if you are going to be five minutes late, I can keep the store open for you.” That is customer service that keeps a store open for 20 years, folks.

On to the books, Action Comics #1 was a pleasant surprise for me. Based on the advance art, my expectations had been lowered (and fortunately Rags Morales delivered a solid visual tale). But really this is a story that benefits from the reboot. Rather than being about the iconic Superman, this was a street-level hero Superman–and I like it. I will be back for issue 2.

As for Batwing #1, I concur with Carla’s assessment. And I have a hard time liking a Judd Winick story these days typically, unless it involves Barry Ween.

Stormwatch #1: I bought this because Paul Cornell is writing it, plain and simple. Cornell was really trying to cover a lot of ground and introduce all of the cast (a thing that Justice League failed to do last week), so that did win me into coming back.

Batgirl #1: “Feeling a creep crumble under my feet,,,I didn’t even know how much I missed it.” That line may alienate some, but for me it’s the Gail Simone written line that hooked me.

Janice Headley

Where do I even start?!?!  I’m a voracious reader and, as anyone who’s ever met me at the Fantagraphics table at a comic-con can attest, an excited chatterbox when it comes to books I love!  So, I was thrilled to be invited to share my recent comix loves for Robot 6!

So, I recently finished reading the gorgeous Big Questions collection from Anders Nilsen.  I followed the series here and there during its decade-long run, but admittedly missed out on a few earlier issues, so I’m grateful to Drawn & Quarterly for this incredible 600+ page book.  Honestly, I wish there were 600+ more pages to read.

Don't Go Where I Can't Follow

When I finished Big Questions, I still wanted more from Anders.  I’d already read his Fanta titles, Monologues for the Coming Plague, and his Ignatz title The End, but for years I had shied away from his acclaimed memoir Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow.  Y’see, I cry… easily.  I cry at commercials, I cry at video games, I cry when I’m doing long division and I have a remainder left over.  Mike Baehr (Director of Marketing at Fantagraphics, and Director of Being My Husband) reluctantly pulled the book down from the high shelf, and handed it over to me with great concern.  And yeah.  Of course.  I cried.  Who didn’t???  But, god, I’m glad I finally got around to reading it, and it was the perfect companion to Big Questions, whose title page has the owl simply saying, ” You must live every day as though it might be your last.”  Um… sorry… there’s something in my eye…

And while I’m on a teary-eyed thread, Love & Rockets: New Stories 4 pretty much wrecked me.

On a more chipper note, I picked up some new work from Esther Pearl Watson at the San Diego Comic Con. Her Fun Chicken booth with her husband Mark Todd is always on my “must-visit” list at any convention. This time around, I picked up their collaborative comic Nubbin & Nutz, a hilarious and wacky adventure at the grocery store.

I also picked up another collaboration Esther did with Martha Rich, the 2008 mini-comic Beauty Across America, which documents a cross-country trip they took, interviewing people along the way about their feelings on what makes a woman “beautiful.”  I’m bewildered that I had never picked this mini-comic up before, because the topic of “society’s definition of beauty” is one I tackled myself in an old issue of my zine, copacetic.  Their findings were truly inspiring, and, well, beautiful!

The Wolf

I thought I had caught up with the Invincible Summer series by Nicole J. Georges when I picked up Issue #18 at the Stumptown Comics Fest earlier this year.  But, apparently, she just released Invincible Summer #20, a split with Clutch, so I clearly need to get on it.  Speaking of Stumptown, I’ve been loving the “Living Things” series that I picked up there from PDX publishers Little Otsu.  My favorites in this series of mini-art books include Lilli Carré’s and Jo Dery’s.

And speaking of art books, Tom Neely’s “painted novel” The Wolf is a stunner!  We passed around a copy excitedly behind the Fantagraphics booth at San Diego Comic Con, and we’re over the moon that the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery gets to host his signing on his upcoming book tour.  If you live in Seattle, please join us for that on September 24th!

The San Diego Comic-Con is the gift that keeps on giving, this time in the form of an interview with Love and Rockets co-creator Jaime Hernandez by CBR’s Kiel Phegley. Ask anyone who’s reading the series in its book-formatted New Stories incarnation — including this autumn’s #4, which picks up where last year’s massively acclaimed “Browntown”/”The Love Bunglers” storyline left off — and they’ll tell you: Jaime’s making some of the best work of his career, some 30 years after L&R made its debut. Unfortunately, that left him floundering when it came time to come up with a story for next year’s volume:

I almost blew my wad on these last two issues. I was so proud of it, and I wrapped up so many loose ends, and I was so proud of myself. And I said ‘Okay, now it’s time to do a new issue’…and I was blank. I swear, I was blank! I was actually looking out the window, looking for something, some kind of inspiration, you know? That happens to me once in a while, but this time — I mean, big! I was just wandering around, asking my wife, ‘Do you need me to go do something out in the back yard, or…?’ I just felt like the most useless human being. It’s what I always call the post-comic withdrawal, where after I’ve just gone BANG on one issue, after it’s done, I feel so useless. I need to do something, but it’s like nothing’s there. It always comes, but I can’t make it come. It’s an organic thing with me, where it comes when it comes. Luckily, it’s always come within the deadline.

Watch the entire fascinating interview, which reveals a lot about Jaime’s creative process and his desire to do comics outside his usual “Locas” world, above.

The Death Ray

Apart from all the “new 52″ brouhaha, one of the more interesting and talked about bits of online  was Michael Fiffe’s essay on the delineations between mainstream (i.e. superhero) comics and the alt/indie comics scene. Spinning off of his essay, I thought it would be fun to list my own favorite super-styled tales by folks who usually don’t do that type of material, some of which Fiffe talked about in his essay.

Note: For the purposes of this article I’m deliberately avoiding any of the officially sanctioned productions from the Big Two, namely Strange Tales and Bizarro Comics, just to make it a wee bit harder.

1. The Death Ray by Daniel Clowes. Clowes’ rare dip into super-genre waters involves Andy, a withdrawn and awkward teen being raised by his grandfather who discovers his late scientist dad gave him the ability of super-strength whenever he smokes a cigarette, as well as a special gun that helps … get rid of unwanted things and people. Unable to find a good use for his newfound powers — his attempts at heroics fall flat on their face — things quickly spiral out of control. Yes, to some extent the book is a comment on the superhero genre’s inability to deal with or examine real life issues, but Clowes is not drawing on snark here; Death Ray is a haunting character study of a young man whose inner demons drive him to do horrible things. Easily Dan Clowes best, richest work to date, Drawn & Quarterly is releasing a spiffy new hardcover edition of the book this fall, so there’s really no excuse not to check it out.

Panel from 'The Ti-Girls'

2. The Ti-Girls by Jaime Hernandez. The Hernandez brothers have never kept their love for classic superhero stories a secret, so it really wasn’t that much of a surprise when Jaime opted to mark the debut issue of Love and Rockets New Stories in 2008 with The Ti-Girls, about a an older all-female superhero team that reunites to stop a newly superpowered Penny Century from running amok due as she tries to find her lost children. The plot’s a bit convoluted, but there’s no question Hernandez has a knack for delineating kick-ass fight scenes. Ti-Girls isn’t just an example of how alt-cartoonists can enliven the genre, it’s an example of how poorly the Big Two handle female characters in general.

Destroy!!

3. Destroy by Scott McCloud. McCloud’s oversize smash-em-up, done after completing Zot! in 1986, is the most obvious parody of the bunch on this list, but it’s a fun parody, winking with affection at the sheer ludicrousness of most superhero battles. One long fight scene from beginning to end, Destroy is nothing more or less than two overpowered musclemen laying complete waste to New York City. If that doesn’t tickle your fancy I don’t know what will.

4. The Amazing Life of Onion Jack by Joel Priddy. AdHouse’s Project Superior anthology — a thick book of superhero tales by alt-cartoonists — was successful enough that publisher Chris Pitzer briefly attempted to spin it off into a pamphlet series. That in turn led to Priddy contributing this story for AdHouse’s 2004 Free Comic Book Day, turning in what ended up being the best of the bunch. Jack is a charming, minimalist tale about a WWII-era superhero who really would prefer to be a fine chef, but keeps getting pulled into battle. Each page chronicles a different era in the hero’s life, which really plays nicely to Priddy’s spot-on comedic timing. Though the original issuemight be hard to find, the story, thankfully is also included in the 2006 edition of The Best American Comics.

5. Batman by Josh Simmons. Simmons is one of the pre-eminent horror cartoonists working in the field today, and in this unofficial “tribute” he applies all his creepy skills to the Dark Knight. Batman’s been portrayed as borderline psychotic in some past DC books, but never to the extent he is here, as his war on crime seems to have driven him completely insane, to the point where he’s sleeping on dirty roofs and preying on helpless junkies. Even Catwoman has lost interest in the poor slob. It’s an unsettling in the best sense of the word that never comes off as a simple “superheroes are dumb” screed.

6. High School Analogy by Ron Rege Jr. Not every story in the seminal Coober Skeber #2 (i.e. “the Marvel Benefit Issue”) was gold, but it contained enough stellar work (and more significantly, introduced readers to the Fort Thunder crowd) to be fondly remembered and highly influential. One of the highlights — arguably the best story in the entire anthology — was Ron Rege Jr’s take on Spider-Man. Drawing heavily on Ditko and Lee’s original stories, Rege plays up Peter Parker’s angst and isolation with a slightly modern spin (“I’m on edge every day when I come to this fucking place,” Parker thinks about school at one point), to really capture the sort of inner turmoil a lot of teen-agers go through. In a way, Rege got what Lee and Ditko were doing better than some of the artists and writers that followed the duo in the “real” Spider-Man books.

Doctor Who

Welcome to Food or Comics?, where every week we talk about what comics we’d buy at our local comic shop based on certain spending limits — $15 and $30 — as well as what we’d get if we had extra money or a gift card to spend on a “Splurge” item.

Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList, and tell us what you’re getting in our comments field.

Graeme McMillan

Let’s give all credit to IDW for their sense of timing. I’m so psyched up in advance of this Saturday’s return of Doctor Who to my television screen that this Wednesday’s release of Doctor Who Annual 2011 (IDW, $7.99) seems like the ideal way to prepare myself. If I had $15, I’d happily spend more than half of it on that particular anthology. The rest would go towards closing out the current incarnation of the DCU, as I’d be grabbing both Action Comics #904 and Batman: Gates of Gotham #5 (Both DC, $2.99).

If I had $30, I’d keep going with my DC Deathwatch: Batman Incorporated #8? Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors #13? Xombi #6? (All DC, $2.99)To me, my funnybooks! I’m also curious enough about Kevin Smith’s Bionic Man #1 (Dynamite, $3.99) – done by the same team who made his Green Hornet surprisingly enjoyable, Phil Hester and Jonathan Lau – that I’ll probably pick it up to see if that particular lightning can strike twice.

Splurgewise, I’m unsure whether I’ve actually read the stories in the Esperanza collection of Jaime Hernandez’ Love & Rockets stories (Fantagraphics, $18.99) – I tend to lose track of the material between the first L&R run and the new one, for some reason – but if I haven’t, then that, for sure. And if I have, then there’s always a new volume of Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys (Vol. 16, Viz, $12.99)…

Brigid Alverson

If I had a dollar…

In Sunday’s What Are You Reading column, I mentioned how much I enjoyed Tony Lee and Andrew Currie’s Doctor Who Volume 2 #1 (terribly unwieldy title) in which Rory’s spam e-mails come to life (holograms, actually) and infest the Tardis, and I was recommending spending two bucks on the digital edition. Well, scrap that: IDW is publishing a dollar edition and that, my friends, is the bargain of the week.

Spontaneous

Now, if I had 14 more dollars, the choices become more complex. Obviously I have to buy Kill Shakespeare #12 ($3.99), because that wraps up the series, and an excellent series it has been. Next into the basket is the third issue of Spontaneous ($3.99); I liked the first two issues, in which a misfit and an intrepid girl reporter go after a series of mysterious apparent cases of spontaneous human combustion, and Brett Weldele’s luminous art seals the deal for me. Then I’ll toss the latest issue of MAD Magazine ($5.99) on top of the stack and consider my comics buying a job well done.

At the $30 level, I’m tempted to pick up something for my nieces and nephew, as there are a lot of good kids’ books out this week in the $10 neighborhood. I’m a particular fan of Frank Cammuso’s Knights of the Lunch Table books-reading them is like watching an animated cartoon-so I’m going to go for the third volume, The Battling Bands ($11.95). That leaves just enough for an Archie comic, and this week’s Archie #624 features yet another story ripped from the headlines-Dilton Doiley goes head-to-head with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg-so include me in!

At the top of my splurge list this week are two very different vintage comics books, Blackjacked and Pistol Whipped: A Crime Does Not Pay Primer ($19.99), edited by Denis Kitchen and filled with vintage issues of that comic, and Drawing Power: A Compendium of Cartoon Advertising ($28.99). Both of these are reasonably priced, so I might just pick ‘em both up. And if I’m feeling indulgent, I’ll add the two new Kids Club graphic novels from Top Shelf, Okie Dokie Donuts and Pirate Penguin vs. Ninja Chicken, both $9.95, and BOOM! Studios’ Wordgirl: Coalition of Malice ($7.99) to cement my position as The Best Aunt.

Chris Mautner

Batman Inc.

If I had $15:

Issue 8 of Batman Incorporated is a given, but I’d also probably nab Okie Dokie Donuts by Chris Eliopoulus ($9.95). I really enjoyed his last comic, the effervescent Monster Party, enough to at least take a gander at this one.

If I had $30:

I’ve already got a copy, but let me recommend plunking down your entire $30 on the 301st issue of The Comics Journal. This brick of a … magazine? book? journal? features some great essays and interviews, most notably Tim Kreider’s lengthy analysis of Cerebus, and an extensive roundtable on R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis, including a thoughtful interview with Crumb hisself.

But if it’s softcore smut you’re looking for, there’s the Pin-Up Art of Humorama, which features gag cartoons by folks like Dave Berg and Brad “Marmaduke” Anderson about buxom secretaries being chased around their desks by portly, lustful employers and whatnot.

Splurge:

Certainly the $69.95 hardcover, signed and numbered edition of Anders Nilsen’s major, 15-years in the making, graphic novel Big Questions seems like the big splurge of the week. The book is thick; you could build your upper arm strength just by lifting this baby a few times. But the book’s well worth the price and weight.

JK Parkin

New Mutants #30

Allrighty, $15 … top of my list this week would be New Mutants #30 ($2.99), a Fear Itself tie-in that I’m getting it because Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning have made this title a hell of a lot of fun. They’re good at that. I’d then get four reliably good titles — Chew #20 ($2.99), FF #8 ($2.99), Northlanders #43 ($2.99) and Batman Inc. #8 ($2.99).

If I had $30, I’d also grab Xombi #6 ($2.99) … like Batman Inc., this is the last issue before the big DC relaunch next month, but unlike Batman Inc., we’ve had no indication that this one will be back. Which is too bad; it gets announced, it starts up, everything changes and once again we have no Xombi title. Hopefully we won’t have to wait so long to see it again. I’d also get Oni’s Spontaneous #3 ($3.99).

Splurge this week is pretty easy, since I’ve been waiting a long time for it — Kagan McLeod’s Infinite Kung-Fu ($24.95) from Top Shelf.

Michael May

Wonder Woman #614

If I had $15, I’d say good-bye to a couple of series with Xombi #6 ($2.99) and Wonder Woman #614 ($2.99). I have a positive outlook about Wonder Woman’s new direction under Azzarello and Chiang, but I hope that Xombi also eventually finds its way into the DCnU. Next, I’d pick up the penultimate, fourth issue of Mystery Men ($2.99), another series I’ll be sad to see end when it’s done. But it’s not all about farewells this week, because I’m also saying hello to the first issue of IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ongoing ($3.99).

If I had $30 though, I’d trade-wait TMNT and Wonder Woman to make room for the Marineman collection, A Matter of Life and Death ($19.99). I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the series in single-issues and can’t wait to read it again in this form.

As usual, I have a hard time picking one splurge item. Pirate Penguin vs. Ninja Chicken ($9.95) sounds like a lot of fun, but I’ve also been eagerly awaiting the collection of Josh Fialkov’s Echoes ($19.99). However, I’ve been waiting for the balance of Kagan McLeod’s awesome Infinite Kung-Fu ($24.95) for nine years, so if I had to pick just one, that would be it.

Elf World

Hello and welcome to What Are You Reading? Today our special guest is Fantagraphics’ Marketing Director Mike Baehr, who runs their indispensable company blog, Flog!, among other duties.

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

*****

Tim O’Shea

Thunderbolts

Thunderbolts 162: Holy crap, Jeff Parker. How long have you been holding onto to the Giant-Sized Man-Thing card? Best Thunderbolts moment in a long time. In the increased publishing schedule dynamic, I do not think I will ever see a more jarring shift than when the story shifts from Valentine De Landro to Matthew Southworth.

Supergirl 67: Really ashamed that we do not get to read more of Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Supergirl. But good lord, Chriscross’ penchant for drawing ugly-as-hell bone structured faces almost killed any enjoyment I had in this story. It astounds me how such an accomplished and talented artist utterly fails to make any effort to consistently draw character’s faces the same way. Extra points to DeConnick for ending the issue on a note that would have been a mild series gamechanger (a secret revealed) had the series continued beyond this point.

Venom 6: OK this whole Spider Island event. Am I the only person that sings Spider Island to the melody of that 1970s rock classic by Jay Ferguson, Thunder Island, whenever I see the phrase? I have one question was it writer Rick Remender or artist Tom Fowler who decided to have the Venom symbiote bond with a dog? Visually a great bit. There’s always a fun horror-vibe whenever the issues are drawn by Fowler.

Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors 4: The issue opens with a great battle scene (with beautifully vibrant colors by Carlos Carrasco), leading to, of all things, a study group session? (This series is like 1960s X-Men comics, but on acid, which is a good thing for me [the comic, not the acid, that is]). But what makes this issue a must buy for me is writer Mark Andrew Smith and artist Armand Villavert’s dead-on riff on Scott McCloud’s storytelling approach in Understanding Comics (special thanks to my friend Dugan Trodglen for pointing this out to me). An aside, the issue is dedicated to Scott McCloud (“one of the greatest teachers in comics”).

Power Girl 27: Matthew Sturges tells a 60-second story. With Power Girl’s speed, of course, there’s a lot to cram in that 60 seconds. But honestly, it must be hard to understand all that she says in that 60 seconds, because she says a lot. Matthew Sturges, another writer who writes females well. Curious to see where he’ll end up in the new DCU.

Cloak & Dagger: Spider Island 1: This actually came out last week, but my pal Dugan convinced me to pick it up this week. Glad I did. Writer Nick Spencer and artist Emma Rios clearly are taking a swing at an ongoing series with this miniseries. So far, the Spider Island connection is fairly mo’s second dular, they could have just as easily plugged in a Fear Itself moment and run the same story. I am not complaining, as the dual (Cloak & Dagger) narration that Spencer employs is really effective. Much of the first issue is a rehash of where the characters have been before, but the life recap actually served to draw me into the tale. I look forward to seeing what issue 3 brings. I’m really impressed with how much more confident and effective that Rios’ art has gotten since the Strange miniseries (with Mark Waid) from a year or so back.

Hulk 39: So my good pal (and I must add, damn fine writer) Carla Hoffman does not feel the love for Red Hulk (as documented in this week’s always must read Fifth Color) that I so clearly possess. This issue perfectly exemplifies why I find Parker and artist Gabriel Hardman’s Hulk to be a great exploration of Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross. Despite the fact that he cannot currently change back to his human form, Red Hulk is very much defined by the human that Ross is. No one else creates as cinematic-like and dynamic layouts as Hardman. The flashback to Ross’ childhood in this issue is some of the most compelling storytelling I’ve read in months. I want a whole damn arc with Thaddeus and his childhood pals. Hoffman, please read this issue.

Daredevil 2: In this issue, writer Mark Waid subtextually reveals that he wants to marry Captain America’s shield. But seriously, I think spending time as BOOM’s big editorial honcho gave Waid a chance to sit back and look at the dynamics of the Marvel universe (something he obviously had mulled prior to BOOM admittedly) and is allowing that inform his approach to this book. Dating back to the days of Waid’s second run on Captain America, I have clearly appreciated his basic concept of seeing Marvel heroes and their weapons as props to be explored (remember when Cap lost his shield for that run?). As issue 2 opens, Daredevil quickly gains control of Cap’s shield and Cap snags DD’s billy club. To see the way the two tacticians wield the weapons is a storytelling treat, particularly given artist Paolo Rivera’s complete commitment to the scenes. DD uses Cap’s shield as an urban boogieboard, for Pete’s sake. When Waid has DD say: “That thing (the shield) is beautifully balanced, by the way. It’s like touching a Stradivarious. High point of my evening.” I giggled in delight like my 10 year old self. In two issues this creative team has given me the DD I have not seen since the days of Karl Kesel’s short run (#353-357, 359-364 [thanks very much manwithoutfear.com])–a fun to read comic. Added bonus, editor Steve Wacker runs a letter column with letters from the 1960s issues.

Tom Bondurant

2001: A Space Odyssey

Finally, the magic of eBay has delivered unto me Jack Kirby’s Monolith-sized adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the combination of Kubrick, Clarke, and the King was pretty engaging. I had read some of the regular-series 2001, and of course I have seen the movie (and read the books) many times over, but this felt much more like ’70s Cosmic Kirby — much more in the spirit of The Eternals, say — than a straightforward adaptation. In fact, Kirby’s dynamism is diametrically opposite Kubrick’s cool, meditative style. Thus, the Dawn Of Man scenes are beefed up with insight into Moon-Watcher’s thoughts and feelings. Dr. Floyd and his colleagues get a little more attention. The Star-Gate sequence is translated into a series of breathtaking double-page spreads. Kirby does a pretty faithful version of the famous bone-to-satellite jump-cut, but he modifies the look of the Pan Am clipper to more closely resemble the (then-experimental) Space Shuttle orbiter. Ironically, the characters who suffer the most are Bowman and Poole, both of whom come across fairly generic. In a way, this was in keeping with Kirby’s plans for the regular series, in which a procession of ordinary humans were transformed by the power of the Monolith. Still, Kirby’s 2001 and Clarke/Kubrick’s 2001 share the same basic cautions about humanity’s development, and in the end that’s what matters.

I’ve also been catching up on John Ostrander and Jan Duursema’s Star Wars Legacy series, having bought a couple of paperbacks from the emptying shelves at the local Border’s. So far I’m through volume 3, and I like it pretty well. Cade Skywalker does have a somewhat predictable “you can’t make me” attitude, although I guess that’s one way of following in his ancestors’ whiny ways. Also, I can’t quite get past his relentlessly-coiffed appearance, which threatens to be more monsters-of-rock than a Star Wars character should be. Overall, though, it’s a good next-generation take on the Galaxy Far, Far Away, and it stands alone well enough that the occasional ties to the movies are just a bonus.

There’s something of an unfinished aesthetic to the first few years of “New Look” Batman stories (reprinted in color in Dynamic Duo Archives Vols. 1 and 2, and in the black-and-white Showcase Presents Batman Vol. 1). Mostly this is due to the relative lack of Carmine Infantino pencils. The Bob Kane studio (including Sheldon Moldoff) still drew the bulk of the stories, with Infantino only on covers and pencilling every other issue of Detective. (Inker Joe Giella gave everything a consistent feel.)

Among the memorable stories so far are November 1964′s “Zero Hour For Earth!” (Batman #167) and “Hunters of the Elephants’ Graveyard!” (Detective #333), and “Partners In Plunder!” from February 1965′s Batman #169. “Zero Hour” was written by Bill Finger, with pencils credited to Bob Kane, and features Batman and Robin on a globetrotting mission to stop the nefarious organization known as Hydra. (Yes, this predated Marvel’s Hydra by a couple of years, but the Bat-office might already have taken a shot at Marvel a few months earlier, when a megalomaniacal mutant threatened the world in “The Man Who Quit The Human Race!”) Anyway, “Zero Hour” is the kind of story that the hairy-chested love god of the ’70s would have found familiar; although Kane/Moldoff’s Batman was hardly hairy-chested. “Hunters” was written by Gardner Fox and pencilled by Infantino, and it is probably the last word on Batman vs. a herd of rampaging pachyderms. Specifically, it’s very effective at setting up the elephants as noble creatures, and then turning them into a giant mass of stampeding trouble. Most clever of this bunch is “Partners In Plunder,” written by Ed “France” Herron and pencilled by Moldoff, which finds the Penguin deciding simply to create random chaos with trick umbrellas, and then basing his future capers on Batman’s subsequent speculation. It’s a neat idea which plays perfectly off of the “Batman is never fooled” trope, and in fact it ends with the Penguin in prison and Batman never realizing he’s been duped.

Finally, I enjoyed the Batman and Wonder Woman ’90s Retro-Active specials, mostly because the creative teams of Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle and William Messner-Loebs & Lee Moder produced stories which didn’t miss any beats from their earlier work. The Wonder Woman story especially made me wonder why DC wouldn’t turn to Messner-Loebs and Moder more often. Sure, it was a quiet, character-oriented piece about Wonder Woman bonding with a group of mallrat girls, but the reprint was the start of Messner-Loebs’ outer-space saga, and that was plenty action-oriented. If anything lasting comes out of the Retro-Active experiment, I really do hope it involves more work for Messner-Loebs, who clearly still has the chops to handle these characters.

Brigid Alverson

21

I have started reading Wilifred Santiago’s “21″: The Story of Roberto Clemente several times, but I always wandered off: This time I pulled it off my stack and read it most of the way through. I love Santiago’s style and his depiction of Clemente’s childhood in Puerto Rico, but the story is hard to follow for a number of reasons. One is the huge cast of characters, who simply appear and start having conversations as if they had known each other forever, with no background on who they are. The story also moves around in
time in a confusing way, especially in the beginning, and seems to skip important events‹how did Clemente go from being voted 8th in the Most Valuable Player poll to having Roberto Clemente Day at Three Rivers Stadium ten years later? Still, Santiago really captures the feeling of listening to a ball game on a hot summer day, and his story is rich and complex, if flawed. I’m glad I read it.

Also on the stack this week was an advance copy of The Last Dragon, a gorgeous fantasy graphic novel written by YA author Jane Yolen (Foiled) and illustrated by Rebecca Guay, who is probably best known as one of the illustrators of the card game Magic: The Gathering. Guay’s style is a throwback to the Golden Age of children’s books, reminiscent of Maxfield Parrish and Arthur Rackham in its combination of pseudo-classical styling and luminous color. I usually find books like this boring, but Yolen pairs up a smart young woman with a blowhard Fabio look-alike to accomplish the central task of the story, killing a dragon that has been terrorizing a small village. It’s a fairy-tale type story that manages to feel fresh despite its traditional setting and tropes. It’s due out in early September, and it’s definitely something to watch for.

Finally, I picked up Doctor Who Volume II: The Ripper on a whim and I really enjoyed it. The book collects four of IDW’s Doctor Who comics featuring the Eleventh Doctor. In the first story, Rory uses a cell phone in the Tardis and as a result all his (and Amy’s) spam and social-networking contacts come to life. It’s very well done, and some of the anthropomorphized spam made me laugh out loud. The second story comprises three arcs of the comic and it’s a Doctor Who take on Jack the Ripper. You really don’t have to be familiar with the television program to enjoy these stories‹I have been away from Doctor Who since the 1970s, and I still could follow them. In fact, it
worked the other way for me: I started watching the show with my daughter and I actually knew who the characters are. Incidentally, all the stories are available via IDW’s digital app, for less than the cost of the trade paperback, and if you have an iPad, the two bucks you spend on that first story will be the best money you spend all week.

Mike Baehr

My to-read pile contains about 12 feet of graphic novels and comics right now, with about half of that being Fantagraphics stuff — we’re literally putting out books faster than I can read them. I’ll try not to be too much of a shill for my employers, but what kind of Marketing Director would I be if I didn’t love what we put out?

I just finished plowing through my stash of minicomics from the Stumptown Comics Fest. Elf World from Family Style is a fun anthology series of fantasy stories by independent and small-press artists, and the first 2 issues of the 2nd volume have the nicest production values I’ve seen in minicomics, with gorgeous letterpress covers illustrated by Sammy Harkham and Daria Tessler. Salad Days by Minty Lewis is another standout — no one depicts awkward conversations and the minor humiliations of life quite like her, and all with a cast of talking fruit, which gives it a sense of absurdity but somehow heightens my empathy for the characters at the same time. Too Dark to See by Julia Gfrörer is chilling for the way it depicts how the damage that we do to ourselves and each other is far greater than any supernatural threat. And after one issue I’ve completely fallen in wuv with Ed Luce’s adorable and hilarious Wuvable Oaf (soon to be seen in Fantagraphics’ forthcoming queer comics anthology No Straight Lines), which stars a big hairy metal-and-Morrissey-loving gay dude and his friends, plus a bunch of kitties. I definitely need to pick up the rest of that series.

The Box Man

At Comic-Con last month I finally picked up a copy of The Box Man by Imiri Sakabashira, published by our “Distinguished Qompetition.” It’s like a mashup of a Jim Woodring Frank story, Hans Rickheit’s The Squirrel Machine, and a Mat Brinkman comic (with maybe a dash of Brian Ralph) as the protagonist and his animal companion journey through an incredibly detailed detritus-strewn urban underbelly on a mysterious mission, encountering various forms of peril and bizarre debauchery along the way. It’s part maximum weirdness, part straight-up thrilling action, all depicted with breathtaking skill. I’m surprised I didn’t hear more about this book when it first came out.

My current favorite ongoing webcomic is Steven Weissman’s Barack Hussein Obama, which I have the privilege of posting on the Fantagraphics website every week. Steven’s work has undergone a really interesting transformation over the last few years, and he really cuts loose with this sketchbook strip, mashing up old-fashioned gag humor, Lovecraftian horror, bizarre nonsequiturs and absurd interpersonal drama. It’s a combination that could only come from Steven and it makes for a dizzying and thrilling reading experience. I also enjoy seeing the remastered reruns each week at What Things Do (the best webcomics site out there bar none), and I’m excited that we’ll be putting out a book collection of the strip next year.

There’s a ton of recent and upcoming Fantagraphics books that I’m chomping at the bit to read (Prison Pit 3, Michael Kupperman’s Mark Twain book, Gahan Wilson’s Nuts, Willie & Joe: Back Home, The Man Who Grew His Beard) but one that leaped to the top of the pile was the new 4th issue of the Hernandez Brothers’ Love and Rockets: New Stories. I actually first read this as a printout a few weeks ago but it’s been hard to stop picking it back up now that I have a bound copy. Pretty much everyone who’s read it has said that it moved them to tears, and I’m no exception. Jaime’s stories in the issue are some of the most emotionally powerful fiction I’ve ever read — as devastating as “Browntown” was in the last issue, Jaime takes it to the next level here. Brace yourself because Jaime takes you on a rollercoaster ride. So many “oh my god” and “holy crap” moments. And Gilbert is absolutely at the top of his game here too. The metafictional world he’s been building over the last few years is super-fascinating to me, and the new directions he pushes himself within that world are exhilarating.

To continue in shill mode for just a bit longer, another thing I just read is the Fantagraphics Spring/Summer 2012 distributors catalog, with all of our books slated for April-August of next year, which we just sent off to the printer. People tell me all the time that we put out too many good books, all I can do is agree and say HOO-EE, that’s not about to change anytime soon!

CBR and Comics Should Be Good contributor Sonia Harris’s report from the Love and Rockets spotlight panel — in which all three of Los Bros Hernandez, Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario, analyzed one another’s work with moderator Kristy Valenti of The Comics Journal — is pure L&R-nerd heaven for a whole bunch of reasons. But not least among them is the revelation that Gilbert will be returning to the streets of Palomar, the tiny fictional Latin American village in which the bulk of his acclaimed stories for the series were set for years, with next year’s Love and Rockets: New Stories #5 from Fantagraphics. It’s a welcome surprise — emphasis on surprise, given how Beto has talked about his Palomar-based material lately.

Gilbert left the village behind years ago, with the end of the first volume of Love and Rockets in 1996. Subsequent stories were set in the same world, but shifted to Los Angeles and largely centered on the American sisters of Palomar matriach Luba, who moved to the States along with several other Palomar characters. Since L&R Vol. 2 wrapped up in 2007, the bulk of Beto’s work has come in the form of “adaptations” of the Z-grade movies that Luba’s psychologist-turned-actress sister Fritz has starred in within the Palomar world. The resulting material has been much more genre-based than the naturalistic/magic-realist Palomar comics, and absolutely suffused with graphic sex and violence. The move has left critics divided, but Hernandez told our own Chris Mautner that he wouldn’t have it any other way: “The Fritz series frees me of any obligation to be a do-gooder cartoonist, something most regular L&R readers probably don’t want to hear. I felt straight jacketed with ‘Palomar’ and the like after a while, really. I have a lot more going on in my imagination than I’m expected to utilize.”

On the panel where he announced his return to the town, he was appropriately enough a bit more conciliatory about his older work. “People always compare my [current] stuff to the ‘Palomar’ stuff, but lately, my stories have been just a little colder edged because I’m more interested in that,” he said, later adding that creating the “Fritz-verse” of movie-based comics enabled him to go wild without stuffing too much weirdness into “Palomar” for it to work properly as a setting.

As for what, specifically, is in store for Palomar’s residents, Hernandez hinted that the story will involve the legacy mothers leave their daughters — which, if you know your Beto, is enough to make you very excited and very nervous.

from Love from the Shadows by Gilbert Hernandez

Interviews with Love and Rockets co-creator Gilbert Hernandez are increasingly rare treasures. It seems the man behind the decades-spanning Palomar/Luba/Fritz saga — a story at first centered on the people of a remote Latin American village, then on one of its more irascible and memorable leading ladies, then on her irresistible but troubled sister — has preferred to let his work speak for him. So I was delighted to discover that he’d opened up again, this time to our own Chris Mautner. And in Chris’s interview with Beto over at CBR, Hernandez is not mincing words. He speaks like a man fed up with restraints of any kind — those placed on him by his early, beloved “Palomar” tales, or by his fans and critics, or by the financial limitations of professional cartooning, or by the shape of the market, or by what he sees as the timid state of contemporary comics itself. None of this all that surprising given his ever more savage, unsparing work, particularly in the “Fritz” cycle of graphic novels ostensibly adapted from the low-budget films in which the character starred, but hearing him say it all in so many words makes for a bracing read. Take a look:

Exploitation allows for madness and obsession to be explored more deeply. I’m still surprised at how many adults are intimidated by sex in comics. Many L&R readers and critics don’t know what to make of that kind of material from me, and I tried not to emphasize the movie connection at first. But it seems many readers are interested in the tenuous link to the “Palomar” world. I’m one of the few left making crazy comics, it seems….

The Fritz series frees me of any obligation to be a do-gooder cartoonist, something most regular L&R readers probably don’t want to hear. I felt straight jacketed with “Palomar” and the like after a while, really. I have a lot more going on in my imagination than I’m expected to utilize. I do enjoy B-movies and comics, from their beginnings in the 1930s to the mid-1970s. Comics I like after that are few and far between. Non-superhero mainstream comics have become so conservative and dull to me; you can see the same thing on TV these days. And indy comics are so PC and precious, I have little interest in them as well. Comics used to be a place where you could only find what they were about in comics, now comics have to keep up with movies and TV, where it used to be the other way around.

Some sweeping statements in there (trust me, there are plenty of indy comics that aren’t “PC and precious” going on right now) and some accurate statements as well (The Comics Journal’s Tom DeHaven’s review of Beto’s latest, Love from the Shadows, offers ample evidence that some readers are indeed sick of Hernandez’s turn to the extreme) and some that are probably both at the same time. I’ll tell you one thing, though: The passion on display in this interview most definitely radiates out of every panel of Gilbert’s recent work, which is among the most powerful and uncompromising of his storied career. Read the interview, read the comics, witness one of the medium’s most fearless artists at work, and decide for yourself whether it’s all for good or ill.

In the year spanning Fall 2009 and Fall 2010, the Grand Old Men and Women of Comics unleashed what strikes me as an all but unprecedented onslaught of major graphic novels. Joe Sacco and Footnotes in Gaza. Robert Crumb and The Book of Genesis Illustrated. Gilbert Hernandez and High Soft Lisp. Daniel Clowes and Wilson. Jim Woodring and Weathercraft. Kim Deitch and The Search for Smilin’ Ed. Chris Ware and The ACME Novelty Library #20: Lint. Lynda Barry and Picture This. Charles Burns and X’d Out. Joyce Farmer and Special Exits. Seth and Palookaville #20. Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez and Love and Rockets: New Stories #3. Stretching from the underground comix era of the mid-to-late ’60s all the way through the great alternative-comics wave that first crested in the early ’90s, the O.G.s arrived en masse to show the whippersnappers how it’s done.

Unsurprisingly, the creators themselves seem aware of this, too. In the interviews with Daniel Clowes and Jaime Hernandez that closed out his excellent annual Holiday Interview Series, Tom Spurgeon got the two comics legends to talk a bit about their peers. In addition to talking about how the cancellation by their creators of Los Bros Hernandez’ Love and Rockets Vol. 1 and Peter Bagge’s Neat Stuff and Hate spurred him to continue his own Eightball series beyond the point where it was a practical mode of delivery for his comics, Clowes addressed the recent wave of major comics from his generation very specifically:

SPURGEON: One more thing I wanted to ask you about. You published a major work this year; a lot of guys in sort of your generation of cartoonists had major works out this year.

CLOWES: Yeah.

SPURGEON: Do you have a sense of being a part of this wider group of cartoonists?

CLOWES: I would hope. I sort of feel like it’s those great guys and then there’s me. [Spurgeon laughs]

I’m never surprised. I wasn’t surprised when X’ed Out turned out to be great. When the new ACME is great, you just presume that’s going to be the case at this point. That’s hardly fair for an artist to have that on his shoulders. Yeah, it was interesting to have all that stuff kind of come out all at once. And next year, Chester Brown’s thing.

SPURGEON: Is there a competitive streak that reveals itself in terms of you and your peers?

CLOWES: There used to be when we were younger. And in a good way. I think we were all just trying to show each other what we could do. “He did that; I can do that, too.” I certainly don’t feel it any more at all. I just feel a deep appreciation for the stuff and I love that it exists. I try not to take it for granted, the fact that it’s out there in the world and it very easily could not be. These guys can all decide to do something else, or could have decided that a long time ago. To have more new stuff that makes life better, I don’t want to feel anything but utterly appreciative of it.

Meanwhile, Jaime relates that when it came time to both create a new locale and delve into darker material than usual in his L&R stories “Browntown” and “The Love Bunglers,” his brother Gilbert, creator of the “Palomar” stories, was the person he turned to:

Gilbert and me always ask each other, “So, what do you got in the new issue? What’s coming up?” And I go, “Well, I got this one story about Maggie, blah blah blah…” and I called it “Maggie in Palomar.”

[...]

SPURGEON: Speaking of degree of difficulty issues, “Browntown” deals in straight-forward fashion with serial child sex abuse. There is a lot of bad art made about devastating issues like that. How wary were you having that be part of your story? How do you treat subject matter like that so it doesn’t get reduced to talking about an issue. Is it a focus on an individual character? Were you worried that it might be taken the wrong way or otherwise capsize the story?

HERNANDEZ: The one thing I was worried about I asked Gilbert’s advice on because he does this stuff every issue. [laughter] He’s a pro.

I was a little scared to do it. I wondered if all the pedophiles were going to be my fans. I was scared of that, because I’ve been removed from that stuff for a long time. My stuff has mellowed out a lot compared to Gilbert’s. Every once in a while I want to break free, and that’s how this came about.

I fully support comics’ great talents leapfrogging over one another to better and better books. If you do as well, you’ll want to read both interviews in their entirety. (SPOILER WARNING for the Hernandez one, so make sure to read Love and Rockets: New Stories #3 first!)

Love and Rockets New Stories #1

If you’ve been following What Are You Reading? or Sean T. Collins’ blog since October, you know he’s been conducting “Love and Rocktober,” which was “a marathon examination of the entirety of Love and Rockets by Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez.” Rocktober is finally over, and Sean has posted an index of all his reviews and analysis of the works of Los Bros Hernandez. If you’re a fan of the Hernandez Bros. or have been curious about their work since reading Chris Mautner’s Comic College on them last year, go check it out.

Daredevil: The Man Without Fear

Hello and welcome once again to What Are You Reading?, where the Robot 6 crew talk about the comics and graphic novels that they’ve been enjoying lately. Today our special guest is Chad Nevett, who talks about comics in several different places around the web — at his personal blog GraphiContent, at our sister blog Comics Should Be Good!, as a reviewer for Comic Book Resources and on the Splash Page podcast. He also writes about wrestling for 411mania.

To see what Chad and the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click the link below.

*****

Sean T. Collins

Luba in America

This week, my LOVE AND ROCKTOBER project reached the Luba Trilogy, three volumes collecting the post-Palomar misadventures of hammer-wielding, prodigiously endowed Luba and–more so than Luba herself, really–her sisters Fritz and Petra and her friend Pipo. Luba in America, The Book of Ofelia, Three Daughters are among the densest, sexiest, funniest, and bleakest work in Gilbert Hernandez’s oeuvre, which is saying something. Click the links for full reviews!

Michael May

There’s a right and a wrong way to read Eric Drooker’s Blood Song and I picked the wrong one. In spite of Drooker’s making it extremely clear right there in the title, I tried to read it as a straightforward narrative. Consequently, I spent a lot of time thinking, “That’s not very realistic” and “That character’s behaving very unnaturally” and “That doesn’t make any damn sense.” It wasn’t until I finished it that I thought about the title (and the subtitle: A Silent Ballad – sometimes I’m very dense) and realized that I should have taken it more seriously.

I’m enough of a snob to suggest that you can’t have a song without music, but Blood Song is certainly poetry at least, though it has no words either. Told purely in pictures, it’s the story of what happens to a young girl from a jungle village when a technologically advanced culture invades her island. Each of Drooker’s panels is a beautiful piece of art by itself, mostly in blue and black, but with occasional splashes of stunning, vibrant color. Put together and read, they paint a larger picture and – yes – tell a story, but not one that’s meant to be interpreted literally. It’s one that’s best experienced as a series of feelings: calm, appreciation, fear, shock, anger, despair, and ultimately…hope.

Chris Mautner

Brain Camp

I didn’t read these this week, but I did read them recently:

Brain Camp by Susan Kim, Laurence Klavan and Faith Erin Hicks — This follows the same basic plot outline as Susan Kim’s other recent book for First Second, City of Spies: Two young tweens, a boy and a girl, uncover a big, horrible adult conspiracy and nobody believes them about what’s going on so they have to foil the plan themselves (while saving time to share a first kiss). The big difference here is the setting is a modern-day summer camp, whereas Spies was involved WWII Nazis running around in New York City. I enjoyed Camp a good deal more than Spies, and a lot of that may be due to Hicks’ engaging art. Parents should be warned, though, about the ick factor, as there’s quite a lot of scenes of young campers vomiting up large, dead baby birds. Like, a lot.

Amulet Book Three: The Cloud Searchers by Kazu Kibuishi — Kibuishi makes his Miyazaki influence even more blatant in this third volume — several sequences seem completely lifted from Castle in the Sky. But then originality was never this series’ strong suit. The ability to function within some very well-trod idioms and genres, and still tell an engaging story, is. It all feels familiar, but it’s never boring.

Stone Rabbit: Ninja Slice by Erik Craddock — This is the second of these all-ages books I’ve read, and they really crack me up in the way that some of the better Cartoon Network shows circa 1998 did. This one’s about a pizza shop run by ninjas, hence the title. If you’re looking for something to read with the kids, it’s good for a laugh.

I am Here by Ema Toyama — Toyama clearly wants to say something about bullying and peer pressure and self-confidence in this shojo manga about a uber-shy girl who learns to come out of her shell thanks to a cute boy and some friends on her blog. But the main character is soooooo mousy, and the mean girls are sooooo mean, and the advice is sooooo treacly that it’s honestly hard to work up any enthusiasm.

Chad Nevett

Batman Inc. #1

This week, my Wednesday reading was dominated by the two Grant Morrison Batman titles. They were definitely the books I looked forward to the most and they both delivered a lot of entertainment. The energetic feel of The Return gave the impression of a ‘new chapter’ beginning, while Batman, Inc. took the offbeat fun feeling of the early Batman and Robin issues even further. Throw in some twisted, deranged laughs with Deadpool MAX #2 and a solid opening to its new arc in Avengers #7 and it was a good week for Marvel and DC. I gave Osborn #1 a shot, but it didn’t blow me away. I liked how so much of the issue centers around Osborn without him on panel much, but thought the ending was a little too coincidental/hokey and that Norah character was so obnoxious that I cringed any time she was on panel. Any reader of The Boys who’s been skipping the Highland Laddie mini-series missed out on Annie’s origin/history this week. But, I definitely would have preferred Darick Robertson drawing this one. An origin in this world not drawn by him just feels wrong.

Besides the usual weekly comics, I got a couple of trades this week. My shop has a bunch of Marvel trades for 50% off, so I finally picked up Daredevil: The Man Without Fear by Frank Miller and John Romita, Jr. I always love seeing how artists riff on Miller’s style whenever they draw his scripts. Jim Lee does it a bit in All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder and Romita definitely had a Miller look to his pencils. Elektra in particular was clearly Romita trying to emulate Miller. That panel where she’s driving the car and using the steering wheel as a pillow is fantastic. Miller’s writing is a little over-the-top with the prose, but that’s to be expected. He really sets firm the pattern that women around Matt Murdoch will die/get injured/come to harm in some way by making that a core part of the character: any time he enjoys himself or gets emotionally attached to a woman, she’s taken away (usually violently). One of those ideas that sounds good on paper until it becomes the guide to writing the character and his relationships. I was surprised that we never see the ‘radar vision’ of Matt — most of the time, he acts like he can see just fine and that’s an interesting approach. It effectively demonstrates how his powers work without throwing our face in it. There are a lot of little parts to The Man Without Fear that jumped out at me.

Hellblazer: The Roots of Coincidence

I also picked up The Roots of Coincidence, the third (and final) trade of Andy Diggle’s Hellblazer run. I’ve had the first two trades for a long time and never had the chance to get the third one. I took getting the third one as a chance to reread the first time and experience the run as a whole. I admire some of the ideas Diggle uses, like John being guided by synchronicity, and the two-issue opening story, drawn by Giuseppe Camuncoli, is pretty great. But, the run never follows through on the threats introduced. Every obstacle John faces crumbles too easily, which is unsatisfying. The final issue and the use of his unborn twin brother is meant to be another ‘big revelation that changes everything in John’s world’ moment, but just damages the character and the work others did before. John got cancer because of his twin? He fell into holes of despair and self-pity because of his twin? I don’t know how they let that actually get put out there. It minimalizes some of the best Hellblazer moments; it doesn’t enhance, it tarnishes. Okay, John Constantine fanboy tangent over…

Outside of comics, I just finished a run of Hunter Thompson books for pleasure (and for a project I’m working on) and have moved onto rereading some Raymond Chandler, beginning with The Lady in the Lake. I remember this one being one of the weakest of Chandler’s books, but I reread his first three books somewhat recently, so decided to begin there. I’m only a couple of chapters in, just enough for Marlowe to have gotten his case. Today, while eating lunch at work, I read an essay on a trio of Saul Bellow novels in the latest issue of Harper’s and enjoyed that quite a bit. I’ve never read anything by Bellow, but the essay was engaging and really sold me on the craft and thoughtfulness in Bellow’s writing. I may have to give his work a look. Hopefully, tomorrow, I’ll be able to read the Don DeLillo short story in the magazine.