Who Could That Be At This Hour?

Daniel Handler and Gregory Gallant are teaming up for a new children’s book series that kicks off this fall. That sentence may not mean a lot to you, unless you know that Handler is the real name of Lemony Snicket, the author of the mega-popular, best-selling A Series of Unfortunate Events children’s book series, and Gallant is better known as Seth, the Canadian cartoonist who created Wimbledon Green, George Sprott and Palookaville.

Who Could That Be at This Hour?, the first book in the “All the Wrong Questions” series, arrives in stores Oct. 23. Here’s a description of the book from its Barnes & Noble listing: “In a fading town, far from anyone he knew or trusted, a young Lemony Snicket began his apprenticeship in an organization nobody knows about. He began asking questions that shouldn’t have been on his mind. Now he has written an account that should not have been published, in four volumes that shouldn’t be read. This is the first volume.”

Publisher Little Brown plans a first printing of a million copies and has set up a teaser site to promote the book.

Can you find the acclaimed comics creators behind The Death-Ray and The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists in this photograph by Adrian Tomine from their trip to the Miami Book Fair? Just be patient and keep searching — I’m sure you’ll see them in there eventually!

Move over, Ana Alexandrino’s photo of Killoffer — there’s a new sheriff of Awesome Pictures of Cartoonists-Town.

The Death-Ray (Drawn and Quarterly):

The first is highly personal. While I greatly enjoyed reading the issue in its huge, newspaper-sized, stapled format, as soon as I finished, I was faced with a problem: Where on earth do I put the damn thing? Obviously it wouldn’t fit in a long box or on any of my bookshelves, either laid flat or standing. If I simply set it on an end table or a coffee table, not only would it take up a lot of space, but it would collect dust and need regularly dusted. And it wasn’t like I had a lot of comics of similar size—only Lauren Weinstein’s Goddess of War, really—so I couldn’t stack it up with my other gigantic comics in a corner somewhere.

Ultimately, I stuck it in an oversized shipping envelope and hid it in the space between a bookshelf and the wall of my apartment, although even there it bothered me, as I knew it was there. And, of course, every time I moved I would pull it out, look at it, and realized I’d have to find a place to keep it in my new apartment as well, before I ultimately would decide to hide it behind a bookshelf in my new place. (It occurs to me now that while Clowes probably didn’t plan that experience for me, it does replicate the feelings of some of the characters in the story, who come into possession of something they can’t really get rid of, but can’t have others know about and have to secretly store for years).

But now that it’s got a spine and hard covers, now that it’s a book-book instead of a floppy, it can stand up on a bookshelf next to other similarly-sized books! The problem is solved! (Although I’m not quite sure I can bring myself to part with Eightball #23 just because I have the same story in an easier to store format now…)

The second reason I’m grateful for the re-release of this story in the new format is a more general one: It gave me another excuse to reread it, another excuse to write about how great it is and it will give a the world a new chance to read a truly great comic, one of the better superhero comics of the last decade, even though a lot of superhero comics fans probably didn’t consider it as such, given that it was published by two art/lit comics publishers and was created by the guy who did Ghost World and Wilson.

After a bold new cover of its star, wearing a Mike Allred-esque, vaguely Spider-Man like costume and clutching the titular weapon and a title page in which the tile glows in an explosion of pink radiation, we meet a middle-aged man named Andy in the year 2004. He talks directly to the reader, before he notices a man littering and confronts him.

When the man challenges him with “What are you going to do about it?,” the tale begins in earnest, as we learn the secret origin of Andy, aka The Death-Ray, who has the most terribly perfect weapon imaginable (Not only does it cause death, but it completely erases its target from existence, leaving not a molecule of physical remains for evidence, and it only works for Andy).

The panel-packed pages are mostly drawn in Clowes’ default style, in flat but brilliant colors that evoke maximum old-school superhero comics. The style gets looser or tighter here and there, but it doesn’t fluctuate as much or as intentionally as in some of Clowes’ more recent works.

The story does drift in and out of differently formatted comic strips though, so that the two page spread “The Origin of Andy” features him talking about his life and his default best friend Louie, the next page brings a series of headshot panels of Andy’s high school classmates following a title panel “What Do You Think of Andy?”, followed by newspaper Sunday strip-sized “Louie At Home,” in which we watch Louie have dinner with his family.

Andy’s story echoes that of Spider-Man’s and other post-Spidey relevant and relatable super-stories, as he’s the orphaned son of a famous scientist who secretly did experiments on him, and doesn’t discover them until he’s a put upon teenager just about to come of age.

The problems he faces are more real and more troubling though. He doesn’t have a single supervillain or rival superhero he ever has to trade blows with, but he does have to deal with a world full of damaged people hurting one another constantly, intentionally and accidentally, and figure out how to use his incredible power responsibly, or, at the very least, not make things all that much worse (“How the hell does one man stand a chance against four billion assholes?” is how adult Andy puts it).

It’s actually pretty terrifying, but it’s also pretty funny and a perfect example of a rather rare animal you probably here about all the time, but harldy ever encounter: A superhero comic book for grown-ups that is itself actually grown-up; one that doesn’t just add adult content like too much frosting on a child’s cake, or deconstruct superhero conventions in nihilistic or semi-sarcastic fashion, but is actually a piece of literature with aims beyond entertainment and time-killing.

Now in a more convenient format.

The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists (Drawn and Quarterly): Seth explains the province of this work in an introduction, an explanation alluded to in the banner along the bottom of the cover reading “A Story From the Sketchbook of the Cartoonist ‘Seth’.”

Apparently it began in his sketchbook, and it wasn’t something he had any intention of publishing, nor was it something he felt was entirely publishable at the time it began. He abandoned it to work on Wimbledon Green, a work with which it shares a worldview and tone, a fantasy version of comics in comics are the most exciting thing in the world; in otherworlds, a point of view that literalized the way a lot of us feel about the medium. In Wimbledon Green, it was the readers and collectors who were the focus; here it’s the creators.

Encouraged to publish, however, Seth returned to the story and finished it, reworking portions of it now that its audience was broader than just himself.

The resultant book is a guided tour—presumably conducted by Seth himself, as the few glimpses we get of our docent resemble the artist—of the The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists club headquarters. It’s an amazing place, something like the old 19th century explorers’ clubs of London and gentlemen’s clubs in the U.S., although it  is devoted to Canadian cartoonists, and it’s a little too amazing in its conception and design.

Essentially, Seth has created a fantasy Garden of Eden for himself, one full of so many quirky details, from an elaborate history to the sorts of niggling political and interpersonal problems that you’d find in a real place rather than an imagine paradisical one, that it all sounds, looks and feels completely real—or at least just on the other side of the line between realistic and fantastical.

In the process, the Seth character also gives the reader—imagined here as a guest he is leading through the rooms of the club–a guided history of Canadian cartooning and comics, and again the line between what’s real and is invented is a bit blurry. Real names and characters are in there, like Doug Wright and his creation Nipper, but so too are a lot of characters that seem like they can’t possibly be true, and some, especially among the cartoonists, who seem like they have an equal chance at being real and being invented by Seth for the purposes of this book. That’s how good he is at detailing and selling his fantasy world.

And it is a whole world. While the Seth and reader character never leave the grounds of the G.N.B. Double C. (as the club is called), it’s an entire world that is being imagined and evoked. It’s pretty much identical to ours, save for the place cartooning and cartoonists have in it.

I suppose part of the mysterious, almost magical effect of Seth’s blending the real and the ideal into such a convincingly told story, the appearance of a middle ground between obviously true and obviously not in which a reader is unsure of whether or not he is being told the true truth, relies on the Canadian setting, and the chance that the reader—like this particular reader—has never been farther into Canda than Niagara Falls, and thus it’s a place that is only slightly more real to me than, say, Narnia or Middle Earth or Metropolis and Gotham. “Canada” is a place I read about all the time, but never really see for myself.

I think this is at least a tiny, tiny part of the reason Scott Pilgrim hit as it did with readers—a Canadian could tell an American that Toronto magical land, and chances are the typical poorly traveled American can’t count on her own personal experience to refute it.

Basically, Seth could knock on my door and tell me that elves account for 2.5-percent of the modern Canadian population, and while I would be quite skeptical, I wouldn’t know for an absolute fact that he was lying, particularly if he lies as elaborately and convincing in person as he does in comics. (I can’t even look up some of the dubious-but-not-impossible characters and creators on the Internet as I write this, as I am doing so in a house without an Internet connection; I didn’t look anything up while reading the book for the first time in early October because I couldn’t put it down).

Beyond the considerable virtues of Seth’s abilities as an artist, world-builder and storyteller The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists should appeal to anyone who loves comics—for what they are, for what we wish they were, for what they could be and for what they will never be.

Nursery Rhyme Comics (First Second): We devoted a relatively large amount of attention to this hardcover anthology of short comics versions of nursery rhymes by some of the greatest cartoonists working today throughout the past month. Savvy readers will realize that this means it is probably a very good book, or, at the very least, one deserving of a great deal of attention, and would likely thus come to the conclusion that a formal review of it on Robot 6 is rather superfluous.

Savvy readers would be right, but I’m going to go ahead and review it anyway, as it is worthwhile enough to deserve all the coverage it gets.

There are 50 contributors, and chances are your favorite cartoonist is among them, as the list includes Jules Feiffer, Craig Thompson, Stan Sakai, Gahan Wilson, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Tony Millionaire, Kate Beaton, Gene Luen Yang, Richard Sala and so on. There are some somewhat surprising contributors as well, including two of the best artists working in the newspaper strip field at the moment: Mutts’ Patrick McDonnell, who draws “The Donkey,” and Cul de Sac’s Richard Thompson, who draws “There Was an Old Woman Tossed Up in a Basket.”

The contributions are all quite short—these are just rhymes, not whole poems, after all—ranging from one to three pages, and some containing as few as three panels. The great fun of reading it, in addition to its function as a who’s who of comics art and, I imagine, a great primer for who to read next for anyone interested in getting into comics, is seeing the various strategies the artists take in adapting sometimes non-narrative nonsense into a story of some kind.

This can be as straightforward as Stephanie Yue giving the mouse a reason to run up the clock in her “Hickory, Dickory, Dock” or Sala a reason for the mice in “Three Blind Mice” to chase after the farmer’s wife, or adding uniquely idiosyncratic interpretations to the starting point.For example, Lucy Knisley makes the old woman who lived in a shoe the tattooed proprieter of “Ruth’s Rock & Roll Baby-Sitting,” and when she “whipped them all soundly,” it was with rock and roll, as she leads them in a rock performance (the bass drum reads, “The Whips”). Meanwhile Tao Nyeu and Cril Pedrosa add wolves to “Rock-A-Bye Baby” and “This Little Piggy” to add some cartoon predator/prey conflict.

My favorite of these re-interprative riffs, however, is probably Dave Roman’s “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe,” in which a bearded professor uses ten clones to help him engage in a weird  extreme sport involving sticks of butter and a giant chicken, which is a genuine marvel of making something weird, cute, funny and original from next-to-nothing.

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Discussion Questions:

1.) Did you purchase Eightball #23 in 2004? If so, where and how did you store it?

2.) Who is your favorite cartoonist? Are they in Nursery Rhyme Comics?

Batwoman #2

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.

Chris Arrant

If I had $15, I’d first grab hold of my favorite of DC’s New 52, Batwoman #2 (DC, $2.99). J.H. Williams III has successfully kept up to the immense expectations he accumulated following his run with Greg Rucka, and the artwork seems to benefit even more by J.H.’s input into the story as co-writer. Next I’d dig down for two of my regular pulls, Northlanders #45 (DC/Vertigo, $2.99) and Uncanny X-Force #16 (Marvel, $3.99). For my final pick, I’d have to miss a bunch of other titles for the chance to get the CBLDF Liberty Annual 2011 #4 (Image, $4.99). I love the anthology format, and having that plus the good cause plus the a-list talent makes it a must get; seriously, can you imagine one comic book containing new work by Frank Quitely, Williams, Mark Waid, J. Michael Straczynski, Matt Wagner AND Craig Thompson? BELIEVE IT!

If I had $30, I’d return to my LCS for the one-two Jonathan Hickman punch of SHIELD #3 (Marvel, $2.99) and FF #10 ($2.99). After that, I’d get the coda to Schism, X-Men: Regenesis #1 (Marvel, $3.99) and top it off with Who Is Jake Ellis? #5 (Marvel, $2.99). This book is like a great cult movie; impeccable craftsmanship, but in a genre that the entire mainstream couldn’t get behind. Regardless, I’m looking forward to what Tonci and Nathan do next.

For my splurge, I’d lay it all on the line for Black Metal Vol. 2 graphic novel (Oni, $11.99). I’ve always thought metal meets sorcery is an ideal combination (so much so I did a comic about it once), and this Rick Spears/Chuck BB joint does it for me. I have high hopes for this book, and also to see Rick Spears do more work in comics.

Graeme McMillan

X-Men: Regenesis #1

If I had $15 this week and a compulsion to spend it on comics, I’d be thankful for the existence of The Shade #1 (DC, $2.99), which I’ve been looking forward to since it was first announced a long, long time ago; I missed out on James Robinson’s Starman the first time around–I picked it up through the highly-recommended Omnibus collections–but this slight return promises to be worth reading. I’m also curious about X-Men: Regenesis #1 (Marvel, $3.99); I thought that Schism‘s ending was very flat, and I’m wondering if Kieron Gillen can sell the new status quo in a more convincing fashion. Rounding out the haul, some second issues of New 52 books that I enjoyed the first time around: Superboy #2 and Batwoman #2 (Both DC, $2.99).

If I had $30, I’d pick up a few more second issues of New 52 books: I enjoyed both Demon Knights and Batman and Robin‘s first issues, and was on the fence about Mister Terrific, but find myself curious enough to want to see what happens next in all of them (All DC, $2.99). I’m also curious enough to pick up the first issue of Dark Horse’s Orchid; I’m not a Rage Against The Machine fan at all, but for $1, how much could it hurt? Finally, the CBLDF’s Liberty Annual 2011 is released this week (Image, $4.99), and that’s always worth supporting.

In terms of splurging, there’s a strong nostalgic pull from IDW’s Transformers Classics UK Vol. 1 collection ($29.99), but I think I’ll go back to another old favorite, and pick up the 17th volume (!) of 20th Century Boys (Viz, $12.99), instead.

Chris Mautner

Pope Hats #2

If I had $15: There’s a new issue of Glamourpuss, so that’s a must buy — can’t miss out on Sim’s continued tenuous attempts to explain how Margaret Mitchell led to Alex Raymond’s death. There’s also the second issue of Pope Hats by Ethan Riley, an amazing looking comic that could well up on a number of “best of” lists come the end of the year, methinks.

If I had $30: There’s a lot of great stuff out this week, so with $30 I’d have to put those two comics away for now and get one of two new books from Fantagraphics — either Gahan Wilson’s Nuts or The Cabbie by Italian cartoonist Marti. I’ve raved about Nuts before–it’s a piercingly accurate look at the pain and perils involved in growing up. Cabbie, on the other hand, is a uber-violent Dick Tracy homage by way of Taxi Driver.

Also out this week is Drawn and Quarterly’s new hardcover edition of Dan Clowes’ Death Ray, easily one of the finest comics of the past 10 years. I already own a copy, but if you haven’t read this story yet then it should be your immediate pick for the week, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Splurge: Oh jeez, so many books I want. Since I’m splurging I’ll grab the fifth volume of the Complete Bloom County, the 12th volume of the Complete Dick Tracy, the third volume of John Stanley’s Nancy, and Seth’s latest book, The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, which looks simply swell. I’d also pick up Alan Moore: Conversations from University of Mississippi, a collection of interviews with the great bearded one, including one I did with him back in 2006 when Lost Girls came out.

Brigid Alverson

20th Century Boys

If I had just $15, that would be OK because vol. 17 of 20th Century Boys, which is my must-buy comic of the month, is only $12.99. This series is long, but Naoki Urasawa’s unforgettable characters and twisted-yet-logical plot keep it from sagging. Then I’d beg, borrow, or steal one more dollar (or shop somewhere that gives discounts) so I can pick up Veronica #209 ($2.99), from Archie Comics, because despite the title it is actually the third issue of Kevin Keller’s miniseries.

If I had $30, I would add in Jimmy Gownley’s latest Amelia Rules graphic novel, The Meaning of Life and Other Stuff ($10.99). Amelia Rules is a children’s comic, but Gownley’s sophisticated storytelling makes it a joy to read at any age. That leaves enough for one more comic; I’ll make it issue #5 of Who is Jake Ellis?, which wraps up this stylish spy series.

Splurge: That’s easy: the third volume of Dark Horse’s Archie Archives ($49.99), pricy but filled with fascinating comics from the World War II era that would otherwise never see the light of day.

Michael May

Shade #1

With only $15, I’d start with a couple of favorites: Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE #2 ($2.99) and Alpha Flight #5 ($2.99). Frankenstein’s still new (even counting the Flashpoint issues, which I do), but it’s a solid book with a fantastic concept. And I especially can’t wait for Alpha Flight after the last-page reveal of #4. I only predicted that about two seconds before turning the page with hands that were literally shaking from giddiness. It’s hard to say that I’m enjoying Van Lente, Pak and Eaglesham’s run more than Byrne’s because they’re building on his foundation, but yeah … I’m enjoying it more. Next I’d add Shade #1 ($2.99). I didn’t stick with Robinson’s Starman long enough and lived to regret it, so I don’t want to make that mistake again. And the artist rotation sounds too good to be true. I’m also into Mike Carey’s X-Men, partly because, so far, I haven’t had to buy a bunch of other comics to enjoy it. X-Men Legacy #257 ($2.99) also goes to the register. I’d top off the tank with All-New Batman: The Brave and the Bold #12 ($2.99), because I love a Batman/Zatanna team-up.

If I had $30, I’d add a couple more single-issues to the stack. Marvel’s too-expensive, but fun-sounding Legion of Monsters #1 ($3.99) and the extremely cool, but in-reality-I’m-trade-waiting-it Super Dinosaur #5 ($2.99). And finally, I’d grab Little Jackie Lantern ($7.99), a Halloween board book published by IDW and illustrated by my friend Jessica Hickman who has a knack for combining cute and spooky in just the right amount.

I’m tempted to declare Clive Barker’s Abarat: Absolute Midnight hardcover ($24.99) as my splurge item, simply because I’ve been waiting so very, very long for it. But even though it’s being released through Diamond this week, it’s not comics, so my real pick is Archaia’s Immortals: Gods and Heroes anthology ($19.95). It’s tied into a movie that I don’t particularly care about, but I love mythology and the talent on this — Jock, Brian Clevinger, Francesco Francavilla, Ben McCool, Ron Marz, Jimmy Palmiotti/Justin Gray, etc. — is awesome.

Stan Lee

Creators | Some military personnel are upset that comics legend Stan Lee received the Honorable Order of St. Barbara award in July during the week of Comic-Con International, as the award is “traditionally reserved for career cannon cockers in the Army and Marine Corps who have made their mark on the field artillery or air defense communities.” While the award credited Lee, who served stateside in the Army during World War II, with writing “several training manuals and films for the artillery and all other branches of the service,” the co-creator of the Fantastic Four and other Marvel properties said he didn’t recall ever doing so. A spokesman for Maj. Gen. David Halverson, commander of the Army Field Artillery Center at Fort Sill, Okla., who signed off on the award, said it “was given to a former soldier and WWII veteran whose contributions, both in the Army and beyond, are in keeping with and representative of all the high standards of achievement and selfless service associated with the Honorary Order of Saint Barbara.” Lee actually missed receiving the award, as at the ceremony he also received an Army Certificate of Achievement and left before the second award could be given. [Air Force Times]

Awards | Cartoonist Seth has been chosen as the latest recipient of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize, which will be presented Oct. 29 at the International Festival of Authors at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. Seth is the first comic book creator to win the award, which is given to an individual whose work has substantially contributed to the state of literature and books in Canada. [CBC]

Kick-Ass

Creators | Mark Millar discusses Kick-Ass 2, both the film and comic versions, as well as the DC relaunch: “I’m delighted to see DC getting back in the game with their reboot. Making characters who are as old as Donald Duck relevant to a modern audience isn’t easy. I joked about how they were Botoxing these old dudes and squeezing them back into their tights, but in all seriousness it’s been good for retailers and after a long time of soft sales on the bulk of their characters they’ve really got people’s attention again. I love a lot of the guys over there and grew up with these characters. Creatively, it’s not where my head’s at, because I think we need to do what Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did in the ’60s and move forward, creating a new generation of characters and concepts for a 21st century readership. But I like the fact they’ve done something ballsy like this and it’s put money in the pockets of retailers. I don’t know how long it’s going to last in the medium term, but a nice little boost in the meantime.” [Hero Complex]

Creators | Jen Van Meter talks about writing Hawkeye in Avengers: Solo: “It’s a funny thing — I think that Clint sees himself as kind of a rebel within the Avengers, in the sense that no matter how much he may admire or respect a colleague, he’s always going to be willing to challenge any of them if he disagrees. It feels, to me, like an assertion of his belonging–his right to talk back–and also one of his important roles in that group– the guy will speak truth to power, any power. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about different presentations I’ve read of his joining the Avengers– did he want it with all his heart or was it a more calculated desire to get himself where the spotlight was? I tend to feel more swayed by that first notion, that even when he might say, “I don’t need this,” he does. This is the family he chose for himself, you know? And given his painful personal history, that chosen family’s safety and soundness are enormously important to him.” [iFanboy]

Science Tales

Comics | Darryl Cunningham posts a draft of the last chapter of Science Tales, in which he discusses why people choose not to believe scientific facts and how science really works. [Darryl Cunningham Investigates]

Comics | Larry Cruz looks back through the mists of time at a character that DC has chosen not to include in its relaunch, the garishly dressed crimefighter The Red Bee. [The Webcomic Overlook]

Comics | Hayley Campbell reviews Nate Powell’s new book, Any Empire, and winds up not quite getting it: “So at the end of Any Empire I felt like I had missed a point, that it was an embarrassing personal failure on my part that this book made me feel nothing at all. Over four weeks the cogs in my head have been deconstructing and reconstructing the whole thing, much like staring out the nightbus window, piecing together a badly told joke told in a pub and rewiring the punchline. But in the end we’re still left with a beautiful book with great ambitious ideas, and I just don’t know what to make of it.” [The Comics Journal]

Conventions | The Baltimore Sun previews this weekend’s Annapolis Comic-Con. [Baltimore Sun]

Coober Skeber 2 cover by Seth

Wimbledon Green creator Seth has joined in the call to boycott Marvel following the recent court ruling that Jack Kirby’s heirs have no claim to the characters he co-created for the publisher, saying, “I hope it catches fire and spreads. The corporation badly needs to be shamed into doing the right thing.”

Veteran artist and educator Stephen R. Bissette asked fans late last month to stop buying all “Kirby-derived” Marvel products in an effort to pressure the company to better credit the artist and fairly compensate his family for the properties he helped to create. Seth, like Bissette, takes particular issue with Marvel’s characterization of Kirby’s contributions, and the supporting testimony offered by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas and others.

“The corporate lie about Kirby’s role in the creation of all those characters is abhorrent,” Seth writes on his blog. “It’s a bold faced lie. Everyone knows it’s a lie. No one is fooled. Everyone lying for the company should be ashamed. Stan Lee should be ashamed. What the Marvel corporation is doing might be legal but it certainly isn’t right.”

Seth concedes a boycott isn’t a sacrifice on his part — he’s never worked for the publisher and can’t recall the last Marvel product he bought — but encourages others to “refrain from supporting the corporation until some form of justice is brought forth for Mr. Kirby.”

(via The Comics Reporter)

The subject matter certainly didn’t hurt coverage any, in fact it’s colorful and controversial nature drove a lot of coverage: Brown meticulously chronicles every time he patronized a prostitute between 1996 and 2003, in the process formulating and defending a particular point-of-view regarding the evils of romantic love and relationships and the relative virtues of paying for sex.

Between the first time I read it and the second time I read it (it’s that kind of book), I read somewhere around 50 million reviews of it and articles about it and Brown and his position. Two months after release, and all that ink and virtual ink spilled over it, a formal review from me seems kind of superfluous at this point.

Instead, here are a few thoughts about the book…

1.) The book opens with the cartoonist breaking up with his live-in girlfriend…sort of. She announces that she thinks she’s falling in love with someone else, would like to try dating that person. Brown gives his blessing, and they decide to keep living together and see where it goes.

Cut to a scene of Brown walking down the street with the little comics avatars of his fellow Canadian cartoonists Seth (Wimbledon Green, Palookaville) and Joe Matt (Spent, Peepshow).

The pair have fairly big roles in the story—Dwight Garner refereed to them as a “wise-guy geek chorus” in his New York Times book review—and when I saw their first appearance, I felt a sudden surge of a mixture of surprise, glee, excitement, recognition and comfort.

I imagine it must be something like what little boys must have felt like reading Marvel Comics in the 1960s, and seeing Spider-Man sudden swing into a Fantastic Four comic, or Daredevil or Dr. Strange bumping into one another on their shared streets of New York City.

There’s something undeniably cool about seeing comic book characters appear where you don’t expect them, or interacting with one another, although it’s a coolness that has been diluted to the point it probably doesn’t even register in superhero comics anymore, given that Superman started playing sports with Batman and Robin back in 1941, and the modern Big Two super-universes are in constant states of crossover (And hell, Archie can meet the Punisher or president or Kiss, and Mr. Spock run into Wolverine or Cosmic Boy).

As cartoonists who are also characters in other comics, Seth and Joe Matt have a peculiar status and, in this narrative, it was the Canadian art memoir comics equivalent of, I don’t know, seeing Johnny Storm and Bobby Drake in a Spider-Man arc, only you’re seeing it for the first time.

The book even rewards familiarity with these characters and their previous adventures, like in a scene where Brown brings up prostitute review message boards, and the Matt character says it’s too disturbing to which Brown replies “How can this be disturbing for someone who watches porn almost 24 hours a day?”

Which isn’t just a quip, of course—it’s practically the plot of Matt’s memoir Spent.

Aside from the crossover thrill, it’s worth noting that the scenes with the other cartoonists are among the most enjoyable to read in the book, because they tend to be the most funny; Brown shows himself debating with himself and friends and even some of the prostitutes (to some extent) about the ethics and morality of prostitution and love, sex and relationships in general, but he’s apparently most comfortable around his friend cartoonists, so those exchanges tend to be the most honest and amusing.

2.) In that same chapter, the trio are hanging out in a hotel room the night before a comics convention, and, looking at the program, they wonder what Playboy Playmates are doing attending a comics convention.

The next day, Brown sees a favorite Playmate, selling hugs, photos and autographs for $50, and though tempted, is too embarrassed by the thought someone might see him (Which is funny, as he puts his thoughts on the subject in this book, so everyone does see him, sorta—the magic of autobio comics!). It’s at this point he thinks, “For another fifty-or-so I could probably pay a prostitute,” and his odyssey begins.

It disturbed me to no end to think of these three, each a master of his craft, in a hotel room, at a comics convention, talking about Playmates, one of them even thinking of buying a prostitute.

Because, at that point, I realized that maybe there’s no such thing as comics creator groupies, and that the most talented, most famous cartoonist can’t simply go to a convention and have scores of women throwing themselves at them.

That completely dashed by 40-year-plan, hatched when I was 14 or so, to finally become super-popular with the ladies by growing up to be a famous cartoonist.

Damn it. I should have learned to play guitar. Or even drums! Brown’s last girlfriend left him for a drummer!

3.) Brown is not a bad-looking guy. Here’s his author photo in the back of the book:

There are even more handsome pictures elsewhere on the Internet.  He doesn’t seem like the sort of guy who would have to pay for sex, you know? But then, I guess I don’t really know that many johns in real-life, just the ones I see on various incarnations of Law & Orders, and in the occasional Batman comic, and johns aren’t glorified in either context.

Also, Brown draws himself as a grim, expressionless little bobble-headed skeleton, looking like Harold Grey drawing of the male half of the couple in Grant Wood’s American Gothic, so it was kind of surprising to see that he’s not really the undead little goblin I was reading about for the first couple hundred pages, you know?

4.) There’s a very big, very transformative twist at the end of the book, the sort that retroactively colors everything that came before. It’s not actually presented as a “twist,” but rather a plot point; it functions like a twist though.

Somewhat frustratingly, seems like the real story—from a dramatic stand-point, if not from the author’s intentions. I won’t say what it is, but…well, okay, I will: Chester Brown was a ghost the whole time! No, I’m kidding, the twist is that he and the prostitutes are really all the same person. No, actually Chester Brown is Keyser Soze, and he made the whole thing up. And “Rosebud” is the name of Brown’s penis.

5.) I really enjoyed the reading experience, and even wrestling with many of the issues Brown brings up in the back of my head while reading, but, months later, I still can’t shake the fact that there was a more interesting story to tell, and that Brown hints at it without getting into it. Maybe in Paying For It II: Pay Harder…?

It’s been a few months now, and I’m still not sure how I feel about the 30 pages of back matter, notes and appendices in which Brown expands on the arguments we see made in conversations throughout the book.

They seem sort of foreign to the graphic novel reading experience, but then, it’s Brown’s graphic novel; he can shape that experience however he wants.

It’s inclusion is definitely unusual, which makes it novel, which makes it sort of exciting, a great cartoonist using comics and prose to educate and argue larger social issues…

…but engaging it seems well beyond my job description as a comics critic, and I don’t think anyone really cares about my personal opinions regarding the legality or regulation or sadness of prostitution.

I imagine more readers are more interested in whether or not the book is good and worth reading, and it is at that. Beyond its qualities, it’s also unlike just about any other book-length comic you’ve probably read, which in and of itself recommends it as something to seek out.

Charlaine Harris

Publishing | Charlaine Harris, author of the “Sookie Stackhouse” novels on which HBO’s True Blood is based, says that after she finishes the last two “Sookie” books, she plans to work on a graphic novel with Christopher Golden. “I’m very excited about that. It’s called Cemetery Girl with Christopher Golden, and it’s a very exciting opportunity.” Harris had mentioned wanting to do a novel called Cemetery Girl back in 2009, about “a girl raised by ghosts in a cemetery,” but put it on hold when she found out the plot was similar to Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book.

Based on the description in the news report, it sounds like the story has been tweaked, as it says the graphic novel “centers on a woman who finds herself living in a cemetery with no memory of her past but a clear sense of a mysterious threat hanging over her.” This isn’t the first time Harris’ characters have found their way into comics, as IDW publishes comics based on HBO’s True Blood, and an adaptation of her Grave Sight novels has been published by Dynamite. [NBC San Diego]

Publishing | Former Marvel Comics editor and Transformers writer John Barber has joined IDW Publishing as a senior editor. IDW also announced the promotion of Tom Waltz to the company’s first senior staff writer position, in addition to his duties as editor, and the expansion of the company’s book department with longtime IDW employee Alonzo Simon becoming an assistant editor. [press release]

Publishing | Jim Shooter shares how Marvel’s Epic imprint, which published mostly creator-owned books like Groo and Dreadstar, came into existence. [Jim Shooter]

Creators | Back in the 1970s, long before there was Womanthology, Sharon Rudahl was editing the underground Wimmen’s Comix anthology. Robin McConnell talks to her about those pioneer days, and her more recent graphic novel Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman, in an hour-long podcast. [Inkstuds]

Creators | Matt Wayne posts the Dwayne McDuffie tribute that Comic-Con wouldn’t print: “I’m worried that Dwayne is going to be the industry’s ‘proof’ that we’re all post-racial and chummy, now that they can’t be embarrassed into hiring him anymore, and I don’t want to contribute to that absurd but inevitable narrative.” [Dwayne McDuffie Forums]

Batman: The Dark Knight #2

Creators | Rich Johnston talks to writer Paul Jenkins about joining David Finch as co-writer of Batman: The Dark Knight #2. [Bleeding Cool]

Reviews | Matthew J. Brady takes a look at Yuichi Yokoyama’s Garden: “… the imagery that Yokoyama has managed to pull from the ether and finely explicate on the page is, for the most part, gorgeously bizarre. There’s the occasional object or action that doesn’t quite read like it is supposed to, but most everything makes sense, from the houses on wheels to the giant wave of photographs, and they provide plenty of opportunities for meticulously detailed scenes, even within the uniform line weights and expansive white space that Yokoyama favors.” [Warren Peace Sings the Blues]

Reviews | Robot 6 contributor Matt Seneca examines Seth’s Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World. [Death to the Universe]

Reviews | John Parker looks at the comics of Joe Casey, “the most dangerous man in comics.” [ComicsAlliance]

Toronto Comic Arts Festival: Pencil it In from Toronto Comic Arts Festival on Vimeo.

The Toronto Comic Arts Festival, or TCAF, is coming up May 7-8, and to promote it some friends of the organizers have created this nifty video featuring many of Toronto’s talented comics folks — Chester Brown, Michael Comeau, Steve Charles Manale, Vicki Nerino, Michael Cho, Michael DeForge, Seth, Fiona Smyth and Britt Wilson.

George Sprott 1894-1975

Comics College is a monthly feature where we provide an introductory guide to some of the comics medium’s most important auteurs and offer our best educated suggestions on how to become familiar with their body of work.

This month we’re going to take a look at the bibliography of the Canadian cartoonist called Gregory Gallant, better known to you and me as simply Seth.

Why he’s important

Wimbledon Green

Along with such cartoonists as Chris Ware and Chester Brown, and Joe Matt, Seth was one of the seminal cartoonists of the 1990s, building on the work started by 80s-era artists like the Hernandez brothers and Daniel Clowes, and helping to bring attention to the medium by telling literate, emotionally complex stores that resonated with a variety of adult audiences. The cultural success that comics eventually received over the past 10 years is due in large part to the hard work that Seth and his contemporaries put into the art form.

Because he works in a style that so deliberately harkens back to the classic gag cartoonists of the early 20th century, and because his stories are frequently set in the past, some critics have made the assumption that his work is all surface nostalgia, a simplistic longing for a idyllic past that never really existed. It’s not. If anything, a closer reading of Seth’s work reveals that he is deeply suspicious of that sort of bygone wistfulness. More to the point, his work instead reflects a concern with the passage of time and mortality, and how our lives and memories can often quickly be swept aside by successive generations. More than just a valentine to the early 20th century, Seth uses that period to ask questions about how culture and the times influence and shape us, and vice-versa.

Where to start

Of all of his books, I think Wimbledon Green makes perhaps the best entry point, as it is easily Seth’s most lighthearted and whimsical work to date. What’s more, in many ways it marks a demarcation part for the artist towards a looser, more organic style.

Though a lark, the book, which tells the story of a mysterious, legendary comic book collecter who lives in a world where such characters can afford to have manservants and gyrocopters in their pursuit of that elusive issue of Green Ghost #1, carries a strong, melancholy undercurrent that keeps it from becoming too much of a trifle, and ruminates on a number of the afore-mentioned themes that resonate throughout the author’s oeuvre.

From there you should read

It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken

Continuing on the ground laid by Wimbledon Green, George Sprott offers a portrait of an elderly TV personality in a small Canadian city, as viewed from the perspective of various people who knew him at different times in his life. I reviewed the book for Robot 6 back in 2009 so I won’t repeat myself too much here except to say that it remains Seth’s strongest work to date.

Seth came to national attention (or whatever the alt-comix equivalent of that may be) in 1996 with the publication of his first graphic novel It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken, a seemingly autobiographical (but really completely fictional) account of the author’s attempts to learn about an obscure New Yorker cartoonist. The good news is time hasn’t dimmed this book’s quality much. It remains a rich, evocative work and the next, logical step for those who want to continue to reading more of his comics.

Further reading

Since 1997, Seth has been working on Clyde Fans, the story of two brothers with diametrically opposite personalities — one outgoing and abrasive, the other meek and overly sensitive. Though still unfinished, the first half of the saga has been collected as Clyde Fans, Book One, and while it certainly remains an affecting work so far, you may be forgiven for thinking that you’d like to wait until the series is finished and collected under one cover.

For about a decade, Seth collected various stories his father told him during his childhood about growing up in rural Canada during the Great Depression and collected, lettered and illustrated them in Bannock, Beans and Black Tea. Occasionally harrowing, sometimes heartbreaking, these stories portray a real, true, bitter poverty that hopefully few of us will ever know. While more straight prose than comics, it remains a haunting book, and should not be ignored simply because it is not sequential art.

Ancillary material

Those who have developed a special appreciation for Seth’s unique art style should definitely check out Vernacular Drawings, a lovely coffee-table sized culling of the author’s various sketchbooks.

Both Clyde Fans and It’s a Good Life were initially (and in the case of Fans, continue to be) serialized in Seth’s ongoing series, Palookaville. Never collected in a book, the first three issues are worth tracking down, especially since they show the artist trying his hand at (one assumes) autobiography. The first issue recounts a time where he was assaulted (and apparently had long white hair) while issues 2-3 reveals of how he lost his virginity to an older woman.

If you want to track down even earlier work, I recommend searching the back issue bins for early issues of the first edition Drawn and Quarterly Anthology (i.e., the thin, magazine format) where you’ll find him attempting a number of short, one and tw0-page fictional stories. If you want to see him trying his hand at a more mainstream type of comic, check out the Mister X Archives, where he does the art chores for a few Dean Motter stories.

Seth’s illustration work abounds, and can be found decorating a number of books, advertisements, CD packaging (Aimee Mann’s Lost in Space being a notable example) and DVD covers. He’s also had a second career of sorts as a book designer, most notably on the John Stanley Library and The Complete Peanuts series. Some critics have complained that Seth’s style is so overpowering that it tends to overshadow the work of the artist that’s supposedly the focus of the book. It’s a valid criticism as far as it goes, but I tend to feel that it’s something that only rarely occurs and that on average his art does a more effective job of celebrating the artist in question rather than shouting them down.

Bannock, Beans and Black Tea

Seth has always been something of an armchair historian and critic as well, as his attempts to bring artists like Doug Wright back into the spotlight show. It’s a role perhaps best examplified by the little chapbook, Forty Cartoon Books of Interest, which was bundled along with issue no. 8 of Comic Art magazine. It’s a charming little tour through some of the author’s most treasured books, most of which you’ve probably never heard of before. You can still find new copies of that issue of Comic Art — chapbook included —  on the Internet.

Finally, while he’s been interviewed a number of times, the best is probably the one he did with Gary Groth in The Comics Journal #193 (but good luck finding a copy).

Avoid

Last year saw Seth become yet one more alt-cartoonist to abandon the traditional pamphlet format with the release of Palookaville Vol. 20.  Designed as an annual as a small book, not unlike recent volumes of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library, the new format ostensibly gives Seth the opportunity to include different types of stories, art and writing and take more chances (in addition to continuing Clyde Fans).

Unfortunately, vol. 20 comes up a little short — the new chapter of Clyde Fans feels a bit to in media res even for those who’ve been following it all these years, and the concluding story, about a trip to Calgary, is the sort of self-loathing, solipsistic, navel-gazing nonsense that indie comics routinely and unfairly get flagged down for. It’s certainly not a book to be avoided per se, and I’m have the utmost confidence that future volumes will show him knocking it out of the park once again, but this is definitely not the best place for newcomers to start their journey.

Next month: Frank Miller

Batman: The Dark Knight

Publishing | Diamond’s December numbers for sales in comics shops are out, and the picture is grim. Diamond reports that it sold 89,985 copies of the top selling single-issue comic, Batman: The Dark Knight #1—the lowest number for the month’s top seller since ICv2 started tracking the numbers in 2001. In its more detailed dollar analysis, Diamond sees comics sales down and graphic novel sales up for a slight overall increase, both in December and in the last quarter of 2010 as a whole. [ICv2]

Publishing | Marvel Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada announced that Nick Lowe has been promoted to senior editor. Lowe edits Uncanny X-Men, Generation Hope and New Mutants, among other titles. [Comic Book Resources]

Publishing | Douglas Wolk boils down the 2010 comics sales data into some easily digested bullet points, for the benefit of those who don’t like to spend all day squinting at sales charts. [Techland]

Pop culture | Apparently inspired by Tiger Mask, a character from a manga popular in the 1960s, people in Japan have been quietly dropping off gifts for children in orphanages and other institutions. [Inquirer.net]

Digital comics | Johanna Draper Carlson tries out the comiXology app for the Android OS and is somewhat underwhelmed. [Comics Worth Reading]

Palookaville

Comics | Alan David Doane meditates on Palookaville #20 and the melancholy of Seth. [Trouble with Comics]

Awards | The American Library Association announced its annual youth media awards at its midwinter meeting this week, and the sole graphic novel among the honorees was Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty, by G. Neri and Randy DuBurke, which was a Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book, and [ALA]

Awards | In other award news, Barry Deutsch received the Sydney Taylor Book Award in the Older Readers category for Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword. This is the first time the award has gone to a graphic novel. Resistance, by Carla Jablonski and Leland Purvis, was also named a Sydney Taylor Honor Book. [Association of Jewish Libraries]

Creators | Brian Heater continues his interview with cartoonist Tom Hart, focusing mainly on his teaching activities. [The Daily Cross Hatch]

Pop culture | Life imitates art when chess-boxing, which first popped up in Enki Bilal’s Cold Equator, becomes a real sport. [Scientific American]

Coober Skeber 2 cover by Seth

Before Strange Tales, before Bizarro, before those pages in Ultimate Marvel Team-Up that Craig Thompson drew, before the past decade’s worth of alternative comics artists taking a crack at the spandex set, there was Coober Skeber 2. Published by Tom Devlin, who would go on to launch the hugely influential (if never quite financially successful) Highwater Books imprint, this anthology’s so-called “Marvel Benefit Issue” contained a galaxy of altcomix stars both famous (that’s a Seth cover above) and obscure taking on the heroes and villains of the Marvel Universe.

The book hit an unsuspecting Comic-Con International in 1997, as the ailing comics giant was cape-deep in bankruptcy. And though the “benefit” angle was dubious, since the book was handed out for free, the impact on readers who’d never seen the likes of future underground legends like Mat Brinkman or Ron Regé Jr. before, let alone working with characters like Spider-Man, was substantial.

The good folks at Comics Comics have posted the story behind the book. Here’s a snippet:

Tom Devlin: Joe Chiappetta was giving them away from his table sort of secretly and people knew to go over there. Because I didn’t have a table. I went down with my brother and I stayed at a youth hostel with my brother and Brian Ralph. And we just walked around. I’m not even sure, we must have kept the boxes in my brother’s car or something. Then we’d walk over to the convention center – it was a lot smaller then, it wasn’t where you’d have to walk two miles or something. We’d carry a box or two over and just put them behind Joe’s booth. Then we’d get a handful and walk around and give them to people. People loved it. People went crazy for it. I gave a copy to some guys over at the Marvel booth and one of the guys joked, “I’ll give this to our lawyers.” I think my intro was “I did this to help Marvel out in its time of need.”

That’s an excerpt from an oral history of Highwater assembled by Greg Cook and TD Sidell for the show catalog for “Right Thing The Wrong Way: The Story of Highwater Books,” an art-show tribute to the publisher featuring works by Cook, Regé, Jeff Czekaj, Megan Kelso, Brian Ralph, Marc Bell, Jordan Crane, and Kurt Wolfgang. The show opens on October 1st at Boston’s Fourth Wall Project. Meanwhile, you can check out some of the strips from the Marvel Benefit Issue at Again with the Comics.

Make Way for Tomorrow cover

Check out Seth’s latest illustration project, the cover to Criterion Collection’s edition of the classic Leo McCarey film Make Way for Tomorrow. I would imagine the interior booklet is just as superbly designed.

Nancy and Oona Goosepimple, by Seth

Man, that’s a knockout, huh? Feast your eyes on George Sprott author (and all-around Dapper Dan) Seth’s design for Nancy, Vol. 2, the forthcoming installment of Drawn & Quarterly’s gorgeous John Stanley Library.

The image hails from this post by D&Q’s Rebecca Rosen, which you really ought to read if the cult of Nancy has been a bit inscrutable to you like it has been to me. Just for example, the above image is a Seth drawing … which graces a book containing the adventures of a character created by, and best known through the work of, Ernie Bushmiller … but D&Q’s Nancy books collect John Stanley’s run on the character from her comic books, as opposed to Bushmiller’s newspaper strips … but those books were actually drawn by Dan Gormley, working off Stanley’s storyboard-format scripts. Phew! And then there’s the role that Mark Newgarden’s abstractified tribute to Bushmiller’s Nancy, “Love’s Savage Fury,” played in the character’s popularity with cartoonists…and ditto Newgarden and Paul Karasik’s landmark essay “How to Read Nancy” … ah, let Rebecca explain it to you, and why it all matters.

A black cat crosses Seth's path

Lately, acclaimed cartoonist Seth has mostly been busy delighting us with his designs for Drawn & Quarterly’s John Stanley Library. But with Halloween only a day away, the artist behind George Sprott and Wimbledon Green has decided to spook us instead. Seth has provided illustrations for a series of New York City ghost stories, reported by writer Lizzy Ratner in The New York Times. Created in ghostly blue and white, they’re like the artiest, most tastefully drawn episode of Ghost Hunters ever.

(Via Peggy Burns at the D&Q blog.)

The Wine King

Cartoonist Seth has designed a float for the Niagara Wine Festival Parade featuring the Wine King of Dominion City, a fictional city created by the Canadian artist. Details on where and when you can see it in the Niagara area can be found at the link.

Via

Prince Valiant Vol. 1

Welcome to another round of What Are You Reading. Our guest this week is blogger, critic, Comics Comics editor and expectant dad Tim Hodler. To find out what Mr. Hodler and the rest of us are reading this week, click on the link below. And be sure to let us know what you’re currently reading in the comments section.

Samurai 7

Michael May: I’ve tried, but I’ve not been able to become a manga fan. I’m just not fond enough of the specific things that make a book qualify as manga. I am, on the other hand, fond of great stories regardless of the way they’re presented, so it thrills me that I’m reading two manga right now that I’m digging the hell out of.

Samurai 7 was sent to me by the publisher, which is how I get most of the manga I read. Unlike most of the manga I get though, this one’s written above a middle-school level in terms of dialogue, characterization, and – well – just general sophistication. But it’s still a lot of fun too. It’s got fighting and humor and I’m loving the Seven Samurai plot with sci-fi trappings (like how one of the samurai is the disembodied head of a robot).

The other book, Anne Freaks, is something that I bought for myself. I was intrigued by the characters (a mysterious girl-assassin, a boy who’s just killed his mother, and another boy who’s just had his family murdered by someone else) and the plot (stopping a secret terrorist organization) that brings them together. I haven’t been disappointed. It’s a darker story than Samurai 7, but like that book it’s also very smart. I have no idea why the girl-assassin is gathering her emotionally wounded team, but going through the possibilities in my head is a delight. The translator has done a particularly excellent job of reducing the language barrier too, giving the characters Western voices that I can relate to without Westernizing what they’re actually saying, if that makes sense.

Children of the Sea

Brigid Alverson: Welcome to the fold, Michael! The range and sophistication of manga is constantly increasing, and I have high hopes for Viz’s Signature line and their Ikki website as sources for source of manga for grownups. They launched the Ikki site with Daisuke Igarashi’s wonderful Children of the Sea, which is worth taking a look at for the art alone. I’m not too far into it yet, but it is a supernatural story about children with a mystical connection to the sea. Igarashi’s art is wonderfully detailed and evocative — he really puts you into the scene.

I have spent more time writing than reading this week, but I’m really enjoying Warren Pleece’s webcomic Montague Terrace, on the Act-I-Vate website. It’s a familiar format—a series of short vignettes about the inhabitants of a single building. It has a bit of a Twilight Zone vibe to it, but it’s not as moralistic. He only has a few stories up right now, and each is only a few pages long, but the characters keep wandering through each other’s stories, which is kind of funny. There’s an ongoing story about a magician with a talking bunny that they keep coming back to, and the current story, about an elderly
former spy resisting relocation, is a hoot.

Bayou

John Parkin: This week I read Bayou vol. 1, which I’ve had sitting on the nightstand for awhile. It was kind of by accident, as I was just planning to look at the first few pages and see how the transition had worked from screen to print. But I ended up reading the whole thing, and had a hard time going to sleep because, well, it’s quite disturbing. Especially when you sit down and read it all at once, versus reading it on the screen as it’s released every week.

Also, Wednesday Comics … it seems like everyone’s made a comment about it, but just to reiterate … it’s a lot of fun. The format is cool, the stories are well done … I can’t wait for the next one.

Essential Dr. Strange Vol. 3

Tom Bondurant: I’ve been reading Essential Dr. Strange Vol. 3, which reprints the early-to-mid-’70s issues written by Steve Englehart and drawn by Frank Brunner and (later) Gene Colan. It’s really engaging stuff — Doc fights his way through a couple of different otherdimensional realms, often deprived of his magic, but with Wong and Clea always there for help. I’m almost to Englehart’s last two issues, the “Occult History Of America,” and I’m looking forward to them.

Because I got a haircut on the way back from the comics shop, I actually read the Superman strip from Wednesday Comics in the pages of USA Today. That was satisfying, although I know it was only a one-shot deal. The Batman strip might have been a better “first taste,” since it describes more of a plot, but I thought the Superman strip represented the book pretty well.

I’m not sure what to think about the big revelation at the end of House Of Mystery #15. Matthew Sturges hinted at such a thing ‘way back when the series was first announced, but it was still a little weird to see — kind of like when something similar happened in a recent Unknown Soldier. I liked the issue overall — I’ve always liked Luca Rossi and Jose Marzan Jr.’s art, and I enjoy the “embedded story” format — and I am liking the series more and more, but I don’t know if I’m responding to the mythology reaching a critical mass.

Finally, I have to say that I was shocked, in a good way, by that one page of Green Lantern #43. Generally speaking, I think Geoff Johns has eased up on the gratuitous dismemberments and other grisly fates over the past few years, and I think it’s served him well (vomiting Red Lanterns notwithstanding). Accordingly, he’s been due for some gore, and this issue was as good a place as any. Besides, Doug Mahnke and Christian Alamy draw a right creepy Black Hand. I like Ivan Reis as well as the next person, but I don’t think he could have pulled this off like Mahnke and Alamy did.

Batman & Robin #2

Tim O’Shea: I was on vacation last week, so I missed out on chiming in my two cents about Batman & Robin 2. The scenes between Dick and Alfred made this issue for me. Morrison has an understanding of Dick Grayson that is on par with Peter Tomasi’s work. Plus I really appreciated Morrison’s utilization of Grayson’s carnival knowledge in the story. Reading Morrison’s approach on Alfred, I find myself wishing that Alfred could get his own miniseries, written by Morrison.

What can I say about Wednesday Comics that hasn’t been said? OK, one minor complaint. As a longtime fan of Louise Simonson, I found it rather annoying that we were supposed to assume it was written by Walter Simonson, when they listed Simonson & Stelfreeze (last names only) on The Demon/Catwoman one-page installment. My favorite one-page of the astounding first issue, no doubt, was the art team of Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Kevin Nowlan (colored by Trish Mulvihill) on Metal Men.

As much as I miss Jeff Parker writing the adventures of the X-Men in their early days, I’m pleasantly surprised at how successfully writer Scott Gray juggles the cast of the Uncanny X-Men lineup (Nightcrawler, Banshee, Storm, Cyclops, Wolverine and Colossus). But Roger Cruz’ art is the real highlight for me, particularly the fact that the Inhumans (plus in-law Quicksilver) feature prominently in this first issue of
Uncanny X-Men: First Class.

Last but not least, Molly Crabapple draws exquisitely beautiful burlesque entertainers amidst late 19th century New York landscapes in her first graphic novel, Scarlett Takes Manhattan. If you have not checked out her work, be sure to visit her site.

Blazing Combat

Tim Hodler: Okay, well, like Don Quixote, I love books more than is healthy, and it’s damaged my brain. I’m always reading about a dozen or more things at once, so this will be a selective list, and my remarks brief will be brief.

In terms of prose, I’m going through a history kick at the moment. On Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog, I learned that David Blight’s lectures on the Civil War era are available on Yale University’s Open Courses Web site. Because I will always jump at the chance to follow along with any reading plan or list, I started watching the lectures and reading along using the syllabus. Currently, that includes two books: James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom and Bruce Levine’s Half Slave and Half Free. Battle Cry is amazing and actually often manages to get me really angry while thinking about various historical figures! This doesn’t usually happen to me when I read history. People are stupid in all times and places, but usually their particular vein of stupidity doesn’t seem quite so shockingly familiar. The Levine book is also good, and thought-provoking, but not quite so pleasurable in terms of style, and I wouldn’t recommend it to those who weren’t already interested in the subject already.

I’m also partway through book 8 of The Landmark Herodotus. This is my third attempt to get through Herodotus, and the first time I’ve made it past the halfway mark. I am going to do it this time, I can feel it. The Landmark edition makes the going relatively easy, as it includes a ton of maps and supplementary text. Herodotus is a tremendously enjoyable writer, even in this relatively staid translation, and his history of the Persian/Greek wars almost reads like an epic fantasy. (The part about the battle of Thermopylae—and the book as a whole, really—makes 300 seem kind of ham-fisted. I know: big surprise.)

I have also been reading E.H. Gombrich‘s art criticism, mostly just for his prose style. This all makes me sound more resolutely highbrow than I actually am, but it’s just a brief phase I’m currently going through: usually I read a lot more fiction, most of it not nearly so highfalutin. Lots of pistols and bricks and dimwitted behavior.

Humbug

My recent comics reading list has been boringly conventional. I am slowly making my way through three recent reprints from Fantagraphics. I’m making a concerted effort to control my comics spending, but that company is making it hard for me this year. This fall will bring some difficult choices. Anyway, the three books in question are Humbug, Blazing Combat, and Prince Valiant. Humbug’s easily the best of the three, as it includes so many all-time great cartoonists (Kurtzman, Jaffee, Elder, etc.) at the peak of their powers and ambitions, but the other two are worthwhile, too. With people like Wood, Toth, and Heath involved, I knew the art would be fantastic in Blazing Combat, but I’ve been surprised at the quality of Archie Goodwin’s writing. I mean, it’s still got a bit of Twist Ending Theater to it, but it’s much more satisfying than expected. I’ve barely begun with Prince Valiant, which I’ve always avoided previously, mostly because it looked so stiff and proper and wordy. So far, it’s much more fluid and enjoyable than I would’ve guessed — beautiful work — but I’m still not sure it’s really my kind of thing. I need more time with it. I am also partway through Frank Hamson’s “Operation Saturn” storyline from Dan Dare, published by Titan. American comics fans who enjoy pulp sci-fi should be more familiar with this strip.

In terms of current corporate comics, I’ve been following and enjoying the fluffy but fun Grant Morrison Batman stuff, as well as the debut issue of J.H. Williams III’s Detective Comics run. There isn’t much to say about these two titles that hasn’t already been said by a hundred other comics internetters, but I will echo what someone else already said about Williams in this issue—it’s pretty impressive when you can draw so well that you make Greg Rucka’s writing seem (almost) sophisticated.

I also picked up the first issue of Wednesday Comics, and mostly liked it. Most of the stories aren’t really breaking any new ground, but some of the art is gorgeous, and it’s definitely the kind of experiment the big companies would attempt more often in a better world. Kyle Baker in particular really kills it. He keeps getting better and better. Paul Pope’s Adam Strange strip is another favorite.

What else? I’ve more been just looking at it than reading it (I already read it when it was serialized in the Times), but Seth’s new book version of George Sprott is beautiful. I used to not really been into his work, but ever since Wimbledon Green, I’ve been really digging his comics. I’m not sure if he got better or I got smarter (or easier to please). Or all three. He and Adrian Tomine give a presentation at the Strand bookstore in New York, and Seth’s talk was really good and surprisingly funny. He gave a speech in thirteen parts or something like that. Every part he read was good, but in my humble opinion, it was still about two parts too long, and I started to zone out. But that’s petty. Eleven out of thirteen parts held my attention and I should be more adult about it.

Asterios Polyp

I am also planning to begin a re-reading of David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp. People are hyping this like crazy, and it’s not really a perfect book (what is?), but it’s the richest, most formally engaging one I’ve read in a long long time. That’s what everyone else is saying too, and it’s starting to get annoying. If it’s so great and complicated, maybe you should just say why instead of saying you need to re-read it. But Chris Mautner has explicitly instructed me NOT to write real in-depth criticism here, but just to talk off the cuff, so I would be breaking the rules if I tried to be more specific. Also, apparently there is some kind of pact everyone has taken and we all need to be mysterious when we discuss this book.

In terms of manga: I will eventually read A Drifting Life, but haven’t had the energy yet. I look at it for a few minutes sitting on my shelf before I go to bed every night though, and that must count for something. I am still following Kentaro Miura’s Berserk, and it’s still very good and wonderfully inventive, but 29 volumes in, it’s starting to feel like the right time for him to move towards wrapping things up. I’m not sure swords and monster stories are really meant to be this long. (The bookstore fantasy section would seem to prove me wrong.)

I think it’s time I wrapped things up too.

George Sprott 1894-1975

George Sprott: 1894-1975
by Seth
Drawn and Quarterly, 96 pages, $24.95.

My father in law passed away earlier this year. He was born in 1929, the son of immigrants, a first-generation American. I often wonder what it was like for him, watching his parents’ culture and way of life fade away as he grew up and then watching his own culture and everything he spent his adulthood embracing all but completely eradicated as he passed into old age.

That may be the great curse of the 20th century. Technology and the world has changed so rapidly that we often had little time to turn around and miss whatever was behind us before it got steamrolled over to make room for the new mini-mall. Not that there weren’t things that needed paving over, mind you, just that we rarely had time to reflect.

Nostalgia, loss and the unstoppable passage of time are just a few of the central themes to Seth’s latest book, George Sprott. Originally serialized in the New York Times in 2007, Seth has revised and expanded the original tale, and wrapped it up in a handsome oversize edition, ultimately forging a profound and moving .

The book focuses on the life of times of its title character, a Canadian TV host, whose sole claim to fame is a few trips he took up north to the cold Canadian wilderness, fancying himself an adventurer. Sprott managed to turn his adventures into a career and spent the rest of his life embellishing and rehashing them, either on his show or on the lecture circuit. By the end he was an obese, tired old man, given to falling asleep on camera and speaking to an increasingly dwindling audience.

We learn about Sprott mostly through the eyes of a variety of characters who talk directly to the reader, documentary style. Co-workers, family members, fans and acquaintances all offer up their stories, aided and abetted by a less-then-trustworthy narrator whose frequent apologies and forgetful lapses become something of a running joke (“As an omniscient narrator, I realize I leave much to be desired.”).

In between we get brief snippets from Sprott’s life, just enough to get a flavor of the man, such as when he receives the news of his father’s death. Sadly, Sprott ultimately comes off as a bore and more than a bit of a bastard. Though he engenders deep love from his niece and fans, his faults are plentiful and glaring (to list them would spoil the story).

It’s to Seth’s credit then, that Sprott remains a sympathetic and even at times likable character. He makes it clear how Sprott’s bad behavior arises from his own insecurities and unwillingness to allow any introspection or self-reflection. Plus, the guy has such a charming air about him that it doesn’t seem completely unreasonable that he’d be able to carry a TV show about the Canadian arctic for 30-plus years.

Naturally, a character like George Sprott would never have been able to become a minor celebrity today, a point Seth drives home again and again, reminding us how the modern world has rendered him all but completely forgotten. Sprott pays homage to a time when local TV was as essential as national, and kiddie shows and horror movie hosts were known entities.

Of course, a wistfulness for a bygone era is Seth’s stock in trade. He’s explored similar themes in works like Clyde Fans, Wimbeldon Green (which this book most closely resembles) and It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken. I admired, however, how Seth was able to enrich and explore those themes more deeply this time around — this isn’t a retread of a familiar tune, but a song given full orchestration until it sounds lush and full of subtle passages you hadn’t noticed before.

Seth attempts a number of narrative tricks that are worth noting. I already mentioned the odd narrator. He also, as he did in the recent, oversize Kramer’s Ergot, divides up the page into little sub-sections, so that a rumination on the history of the TV station Sprott worked for will have a short, nine-panel interview over to the far right side, while the bottom strip runs portraits of various co-workers. It’s an interesting way to break up the page’s rhythm. Indeed, Seth seems to be obsessed with making your eyes pause and he tries a variety of tricks — different colors, different sized panels — to break your flow. He’ll even slow down the book to a near halt to offer a lovely two-page vista or a photograph of one of his cardboard models, built to resemble the buildings Sprott frequents.

It’s important to emphasize that this isn’t some simpering “oh gosh, life sure was swell then” nostaliga piece — his wisftulness is well tempered with the knowledge of how such feelings can easily lead to a pathetic bathos, sentimentalism or worse. No, more than anything, George Sprott is a simple and eloquent reminder of how impermenent everything is; how, in the words of Sprott “One day you’re 30 years old, and the next, you look up and there’s an old man in the mirror.” No doubt my father-in-law would have identified with that line. It’s a shame I never got to point it out to him.

The Collected Doug Wright

Welcome to What Are You Reading. Our special guest this week is PictureBox publisher, Art Out of Time author and all-around top dog Dan Nadel.

Remember, we want to know what you’re reading as well, so feel free to share what comics you’ve been enjoying (or haven’t as the case may be) in the comments section.

And now, here what we’re reading …

War at Ellsmere

Tim O’Shea: Last week, I mentioned Faith Erin Hicks’ War at Ellsmere. Having finished it, I heartily recommend picking up this book. What appeals to me most about this private girls school tale featuring the haves and have nots, is the story strives to avoid afterschool special cliches. While I wish the angle of Jun’s loss had been more fully explored (in terms of flashbacks maybe), what really pleased me was the evolution of Cassie’s character growth. As time permits in the coming weeks, I may check out Hicks’ webcomics work, such as Ice.

Grant Morrison’s work for DC the past few years has been a great deal of hit and miss for me (mostly miss). Before you jump all over me, realize his Doom Patrol and Animal Man wor both reside on my short list of favorite comic runs. I’m not a full-time Morrison hater. So, I was pleasantly surprised to run across Morrison’s collaboration with Philip Bond on 2005′s Vimanarama for Vertigo. Away from complicated continuity and Morrison’s multi-tiered, subtextual happy world building (yea I am just throwing buzzwords together), tells a love story between Ali and Sofia (OK with a few demi-gods and mythology elements, admittedly). A trade paperback edition collects the three-issue miniseries and made me appreciate Bond’s art skills for the first time.

On the music front, I picked up Aqualung’s 2008 release, Words & Music. Frontman
Matt Hales’ keyboard work reminds me of Garth Hudson at times. Speaking of Hudson, I was pleased to see him pop up on Neko Case’s latest release, Middle Cyclone — a must by for the piano orchestra that appears on the CD.

Doom Patrol

Tom Bondurant: This week I read just about all of Grant Morrison and Richard Case’s run on Doom Patrol (issues 19-63, spread over a half-dozen paperbacks). I say “just about” because I am still kicking myself for not buying the Flex Mentallo miniseries when it originally appeared, and I have yet to read the Doom Force parody.

Anyway, there’s probably not much I could add to all the commentary this run has accumulated since its start almost twenty years ago. I’ve read these issues before, a few times each, and every time I seem to pick up something different. This time I appear to have blazed through the collections, but I did notice how much Morrison deals with the concepts of story, creativity, and reality. Such a departure for Morrison, I know; but I hadn’t really associated those themes with this series. (I am slow.) Nevertheless, characters routinely question, and/or change, the nature of their own reality, and sometimes everyone else’s. Furthermore, each of the main characters has a unique perspective on existence: Cliff Steele is the mind/body divide personified; Rebis is disconnected from hir human sides; and Crazy Jane’s viewpoint changes as her personalities do. The last issue even suggests that it’s all been a figment of one character’s imagination; but I prefer to think otherwise. Like I said, I don’t have much useful to add.

Still, there’s a lot of great stuff in these issues, most of it brought to life by the distinctive pencils of Richard Case. I’ve seen Case on other things, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much vitality in his work as I did here. His compositions and expressive figures give these characters an energy which other artists approach, but never quite capture. I sound like I’m trying to sell people on this series, and I’m sure I don’t — but this run of Doom Patrol never fails to grab me, just like it did twenty years ago. It may be the first superhero serial I read which ended on its creators’ own terms. Accordingly, while I’d love to check in with Cliff, Jane, Rebis, Dorothy, and Danny, I’m not particularly eager to. Morrison and Case ended their run on an ideal note, and one which doesn’t invite further scrutiny.

Now for a complete change of pace: it’s not really comics, but I finally got around to watching those DVDs of the 1990-91 Flash TV series. Since it followed the first Tim Burton Batman movie, the sets are all “Gothamized” and the Flash suit (designed by Dave Stevens) has built-in muscles. Danny Elfman wrote the theme music, and Shirley
Walker (who went on to score various DC cartoons) wrote much of the rest. The first episode tries hard, but ultimately it’s MST3K-worthy. Not helping in this respect is the villain’s moll, played by an actress who had been an over-eager engineer on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” I kept thinking, “Ensign Gomez, no!” The second episode is better, especially at the end, when the villain (named “Tanner”) turns out to be a parody of the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Hulk, right down to the glowing-eyed transformation scene. The third episode, which I just finished watching, is a definite improvement on
both, probably because it was written by story editors Howard Chaykin and John Francis Moore. Alas, not even they can save the cast from early ’90s fashion — mock turtlenecks and buttoned-up collars everywhere!

The Dresden Files

Chris Mautner: I haven’t had the chance to read much at all this week surprisingly enough. What little time I had was mostly spent perusing the lastest issues of Rolling Stone and The New Yorker (which, by the way, has a cool Joost Swarte illustration).

I did, however manage to speed through the latest onslaught in the Dabel Brothers’ ongoing deal with Del Rey, Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files: Storm Front Vol 1: The Gathering Storm, adapted by Mark Powers and Ardian Syaf. It’s pretty awful, or at least so far apart from what interests me as a reader that I really don’t have any way of interacting with or talking about it without seeming nasty. It’s like a graphic novel made explicitly for my evil twin.

I also thumbed through Yokai Doctor, a new Del Rey manga (there they are again) about a nerdy high school boy who ministers to ailing monsters and spirits. He finds a willing helpful assistant in a cute female student. It’s all pretty much rote, but relatively inoffensive and occasionally amusing.

Matt Maxwell: AGENTS OF ATLAS #4
My love for this comic is unreasoning. I can no more explain it than I can explain why the sun shines or gravity slows time. It’s filled with misfits who are okay with their misfit status. It fits within current crossovers while gently making fun of them. It understands that its purpose is to entertain and that it’ll never be featured on the national media. And you know what? That’s okay.

ALL-STAR SUPERMAN
I re-read this last week. It’s hard to believe that this is even by the same author that wrote FINAL CRISIS. ALL-STAR SUPERMAN is perfectly concise, the essence of the character divided into perfect moments that lock together and make one of the best reads of the last several years, superhero comic or not. It’s hard for me not to tear up at chapter 10′s heart and purity. The team at work understands what makes Superman tick, what makes him a compelling character even when he can take down most threats with less effort than it takes an ordinary human to lift a phone book. Hint: super-strength has little to do with it.

FINAL CRISIS: SUBMIT
Odd that I’d read this the same week I read ALL-STAR SUPERMAN. I know that the names of the authors are the same, but these books couldn’t be more different. And no, I didn’t really care for it. But I was hoping that this chapter would illuminate a little light on Morrison’s take on FINAL CRISIS. It didn’t. My opinion of the crossover remains fundamentally unchanged.

THE DEVIL’S FOOTPRINTS
There’s some nice moments in this book, but I find that there’s no way on earth that it could live up to the praise heaped upon it from the likes of Clive Barker and Alan Moore. It’s an intriguing story of New England and familial obligation, but the comic script comes across as thin and feels like it would’ve been better served in a prose format where the story would have had time to breathe and the setting would have really been able to take the place of a major character.

OMEGA THE UNKNOWN
Just started reading this. Read precisely as much as I’d read in monthlies (that being the first chapter.) More on this one later.

JACK KIRBY’S THE DEMON
Finished my reading of the collection of Kirby’s run on the book. There’s plenty of interesting visuals, but the stories are fairly perfunctory and there’s not much sense of the characters, particularly when you compare to contemporary works like KAMANDI and THE FOURTH WORLD. But, this being Kirby, there’s plenty of engaging design and dynamic action to keep me happy.

The Collected Doug Wright

Dan Nadel: Sometimes I enjoy reading about comics more than I like reading comics. Happily, I have the best of both worlds with The Collected Doug Wright Volume One. I wasn’t at all familiar with Wright’s work before the lead-up to this book. Seth designed and edited this massive book, which is the first of a pair to cover the work of Wright, who was a Schulz/Ketchum-esque cartoonist chronicler of mid-century Canada. Brad Mackay contributed an excellent essay and Seth’s editing, design and book concept are all impeccable. I love the “subjectivity” of seeing Wright’s work framed by another master cartoonist. Like a great historian/curator should, Seth expertly frames Wright’s ouvre so that I’m able to pass into the work through his eyes and then explore it for myself. So, I get the unique pleasure of seeing what Seth sees in the work, and then, expanding my knowledge as I read, understanding why it’s worthy within my own pantheon of cartoonists.

Original art is shown large and as documents, the context of Canadian comic strips is amply explained in prose and visuals, and, of course, there are the comic strips themselves. What a revelation! Wright was both an incisive, masterful draftsman of the 1950s crisp-line variety, but also a wonderful observer of modern life. His characters act human and have an internal life to them that I find compelling. Also, he’s a precise cartoonist — clothes, landscapes, cars, houses, rooms are all individualized and keenly observed. In his ongoing family comic strip “Nipper” I feel like I discovered a whole new cartoon world to visit. The parents are suitably exasperated, loving, patient, hard working and the kid(s) are full of personality and, particularly as the strip goes on, imbued with a warmth I rarely see in comics. From a U.S. point of view, I also get to have a peek at Canadian life, which I frankly know little about.

All in all a great cultural experience. The other part of this story is that Seth really has become one of our finest comics historians. I continually refer to his wonderful volume Forty Cartoon Books of Interest and always look forward to seeing what he’s discovering. And kudos to my pals at D&Q for making such a wonderful book. Anyhow, I’m going back to reading Nipper on this holiday weekend, before leaving snowy Canada to head off to the beach tomorrow.