Thinking Too Much About A Children's Comic, Possibly About Batman Also

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #13:
"Gotham City needs a Batman." It's a line that's repeated over and over through this comic like a religious mantra.

The Batman of the Brave and the Bold universe (and I suppose the cartoon as well) is the streamlined, look-out-crime-here-comes-the-Caped-Crusader version of Batman. Uncomplicated, square-jawed, universally respected, always with a smile on his face. The series is basically team-up after team-up with a hero of the week joining forces with Batman to defeat a villain of the week, with a punch, a pun, and Bat-ingenuity. Light and tight kid's comics. This issue is payoff from all those team-ups, with an array of heroes who Bats has presumably aided in the past all deciding to "become" the Batman that Gotham needs when they (and all of the city's criminal types) hear about the Bat's broken leg.

It's especially interesting, though, how the comic turns into a statement about Batman and the way he works. Throughout the issue the recurring theme is how Batman lets his reputation do his work for him. When news spreads among Gotham's criminal underworld about his injury, Batman loses a major psychological battle. The array of screens in the Batcave tell the rest of the story - Gotham's gone totally fucking bananas with criminal opportunity. And you can feel it in the air, too. Everyone knows the crimewave isn't a succession of organised hits. The newspapers everywhere immediately link it to lack-of-Bats. And so the heroes from neighbouring cities hear about this explosion of crime, and, knowing the cause of the problem, rush to help.

But they're all believers. Gotham City doesn't need a protector or a crimefighter. Gotham City needs a Batman. Plastic Man, Aquaman, Captain Marvel, they all know it. With the exception of Green Arrow, all the heroes punch six thousand weight classes higher than Batman, power-wise. But they all dress as him anyway, because holy shit, people are more afraid of Batman then they are of bulletproof superhumans. Notice how this is thematically emphasised in the comic. Individually, dressed as Batman, the four heroes foil crime across Gotham with relative ease. Then the Joker comes along with a big explosion, and all four of them arrive on the scene, and lose. It's implied that the Joker can see through their diguises (he recognises the real Batman right away when he shows up later), and at that moment they all stop being Batman. They're Green Arrow and Plastic Man again. And that's why the Joker beats them. Because the Joker only loses to Batman. And finally - the masterstroke - Batman shows up for real, and defeats the Joker by doing nothing much at all (one punch!). He won by showing up. As soon as the Joker knew he was back, his reputation did the rest.

Batman wields that mega rock star power like a mace. That's his crutch, his way of extending his monolithic shadow across the whole city. And it is a singular shadow. The moral at the end helpfully reminds us that "there can only be one Batman", because the kind of inhuman influence he swings around can't be seen to be shared. It would ruin his mystique, make him seem less of a force of nature, etc. And Sholly Fisch is keen to show that Batman isn't really a regular person. Bruce Wayne never shows up in Brave and the Bold. We're led to believe that Batman built the exo-skeleton for his broken leg by himself. And he spends a weekend in a quaint hillside place away from Gotham, and it's for a meeting of mystery analysts! You can believe that this is the kind of person who a bunch of powerful superhumans honestly believe does what they do better than them, even when he's doing very little at all.

Next week, it's Grant Morrison back on Batman and Robin. With Cameron Stewart. It is going to be great, and a terrific excuse for me to write about Batman even more. Batman! I love writing about Batman.

The Ten Best Comics of 2009

While you're here I will point you towards the real best of 09 list. Sandy over at I Love Rob Liefeld has put together the always interesting Meta-List for the best comics of the year. He's put an amazing amount of effort into it so go have a look. It's scientific! At the bottom there's also a huge list of other best of 09 lists from loads of comics internet people and that should make for good reading if you like best of the year lists as much as I do. And if you didn't catch it first time, last week I posted my list of the Best Superhero Comics of 2009.

Meanwhile! My list! The Best of the Year!

10) The Squirrel Machine (Hans Rickheit)
Hans Rickheit's story about the inventors and brothers Torpor is packed with the kind of haunting, disturbing imagery that stays with you for ages. It's all in the details, you see. The Squirrel Machine is meticulously rendered. The designs, like those of the complex musical instruments built around animal carcasses, are outlandish enough to be fascinatingly evocative, yet still functional-looking enough to have one foot firmly in the realms of plausibility, of what-ifs, to feel real enough to be horrifying. The mindboggling attention to detail doesn't establish an emotional tether between the work and the reader so much as serve as an invitation for exploration, because that's what the Squirrel Machine is about. The young brothers have permanent expressions of curiosity on their faces; their pursuit of art is really for the sake of pursuit itself. The art, meanwhile, brings no comfort, or perhaps the brothers simply don't let it. There's just exploration, often terrifying and so, so weird, of wherever Edmund finds himself waking, of the secret rooms within the house and the wild mess of stuff therein, of sex, of human relationships in general. Is that it? Does it even matter? The Squirrel Machine is a book that forces you to face it rather than passively observe, so that you can find out for yourself.


9) Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye (Grant Morrison, Cameron Stewart, Dave Stewart, Todd Klein)
Them haters'll tell you otherwise, but this was the best Morrison comic of the year. Nothing else had his authorial voice shine through as strongly; his rush of ideas spewing off the page, his deft characterisation, and his uncanny way of wrapping up a narrative, of convincing you, no matter how many hundreds of things are going on, that it all matters. Perfectly balanced, too: the cynicism about the futility of changing the system hits you just as hard as the careless optimism. There are the arguments for Final Crisis and the lovely first three issues of BatRob, of course, but those things all be damned: Seaguy had Cameron Stewart and with this miniseries he's proved that he can stand right next to Frank Quitely as the best thing to happen to Grant Morrison comics. His style is clear, very appealing, carefully detailed, and it makes Seaguy so easy - to understand, to love, to laugh at, to be quietly afraid of. Seaguy has got weird stuff in it, sure, but it's not just "weird". That word is dismissive and chucked around with annoying regularity as an excuse for not having an opinion. But fuck it - it's their loss. This is a fantastic comic.


8) Ōoku: The Inner Chambers (Fumi Yoshinaga)
In this comic, seventy-five percent of the male population are killed off within eighty years by an incurable disease and the gender roles have more or less been reversed, with women taking on traditionally masculine roles like farming, and men becoming a valued resource in the babymaking department. But that's not really what the comic's about. It's a behind-the-silk-curtain story of the politics of Edo Palace, an 18th Century Japan costume drama about history, romance, and gender roles. It deals with the gender roles very subtly, weaving its commentary in and out of another plotline. And as you read further you slowly get the sense that despite sweeping changes that appear to have turned everything on its head, gender expectations haven't changed all that much. Yoshinaga's cartooning doesn't draw attention to itself; it's formally not very inventive, but there's a palpable attention to detail, and pacing that's tight enough to get the sometimes exposition-heavy plot across as effectively and unintrusively as possible. And, hey, I quite enjoyed the faux-medieval speech patterns, actually. I found they flowed very nicely and continually functioned as a reminder that the characters were using formal language as part of their upper class upbringing. It's great once you get used to it and there's plenty of room for wit and sharp back-and-forths. And, no, there really isn't any manporn in here.


7) Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter (Darwyn Cooke, assisted slightly by Donald Westlake)
And here we have the baddest, hardest book of the year. Darwyn Cooke's take on the classic crime character is as cold and spartan as the prose that inspired it, his skill with clear, precise storytelling gelling nicely with Richard Stark's succinct style. The book is awash with Cooke's expressive brush strokes, but they're in a sterile, dated, steely blue, and it's through these tinted lenses that we see Parker flicker between being a man and a machine. It's subtle, though - maybe the harsh, metallic streets of Cooke's 60s New York City really is obscuring our vision. When he walks down the bridge and through the city he's a force of nature, an undeniable, mechanical figure fueled by anger and nothing else. Then he looks in the mirror - at you! at me! - and we can see that it's a human anger. And after that it becomes backwards. Now he's got a human goal - revenge - but he himself cleans up and goes about it like an efficient, polished machine. And he sets about severing his emotional connections one by one until his objective becomes something as cold as the manner in which he goes about it. He becomes the objective. No more face in the mirror, just the hands driving the car into the distance. And they know exactly where they're going.


6) The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror #15 (Jeffrey Brown, C.F., Jordan Crane, Sammy Harkham, Tim Hensley, Kevin Huizenga, Ben Jones, John Kerschbaum, Ted May, Will Sweeney, Matt Thurber, Jon Vermilyea, Dan Zettwoch, possibly Matt Groening also)
This. It astounds me how this works. And yet it's so simple! You've got a gaggle of dangerously skilled cartoonists doing work-for-hire for a successful commercial property and they're all forced to draw their comics in a generally similar style. In terms of aesthetic design you'll never mistake the flowers in this anthology for anything other than the Simpsons. And despite this restriction (or maybe because of it?) the cartoonists bounce wildly around in the boxes they're given to produce Simpsons stories that are also unmistakeably theirs. It's worth noting that this is helped by the creators here all seeming exceedingly comfortable with the Simpsons not just in aesthetics but also in what we've come to expect from different members of the cast and from the tone of the series in general. But what am I going on about? It's simple, too - this is the real deal, and it's fucking funny.

5) Ball Peen Hammer (Adam Rapp, George O'Connor)

Sharp, brutal, subversive, there was not a look at a post-apocalyptic future this year quite as harsh as this. Post-apocalyptic, now there's a blanket term. This story has got a more specific timeframe. I'd describe it as after the apocalyptic event, long enough that people are used to what's happening, and just before things start to get better. What would that be? Slightly-pre-post-post-apocalyptic? Whatever. It's a very depressing thing to read, mostly because of an almost claustrophobic scale. Most of the book takes place in either of two small rooms, with four characters with interconnected stories, and hints dropped here and there about the world outside through the very smooth dialogue, and we wind up knowing not very much, but enough to be able to fill in the blanks ourselves, enough that we think we do. And these people, they're all there is. They've got no control over the shitstorm outside. They've just got each other, and their art, and they watch their art evolve and harden like it's got a survival instinct of its own and take them to places they would never go, because the post-apocalypticism isn't giving them a choice. That crippling sense of insignificance, that hopeless inevitability, it's slopped generously throughout the whole book, and it builds up. The silent scream gets louder. And the ending is that much more of a crushing blow for it.

4) Phonogram: The Singles Club (Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson)

It took till the start of the second series for Phonogram to coalesce, for Gillen to focus his story, for McKelvie's art to look not just superbly competent but effortlessly pretty. And such! Focus! A single night in a club, and seven more or less related people. And it's the people that drive the comic, more so than the music or the magic, and it works because we know these people. The Gillen McKelvie unit tread on a carefully drawn line. The people we're introduced to come across as familiar; not stereotypical but alive - in their tastes in music, speech patterns, body language, fashion senses, decisions, dancing ability, everything. It resonates and engages and reminds us the things music can do to lift us up and fuck with our shit, in ways that make it timeless and dated at the same time. Let it dance with you. It'll be alright.

3) Asterios Polyp (David Mazzuccheli)

Read this any way you like. Mazzuccheli has created an entirely new graphic language in this single work and he's letting everyone in on it. It's extremely accessible. This is a comic that is going to be studied in classrooms and shit for its formal boundary-pushing. The choice of colour, the individual character designs right down to the fonts in their speech bubbles, the cartooning tricks that Mazzuccheli creates and begins to use as a visual shorthand within the covers of the book - it's all amazing. If "tour de force" means what I think it means, then Asterios Polyp qualifies. Probably nothing else this year has been so readable yet so endlessly fascinating, so rereadable, and examination of the art and the formal techniques end up being about how it works, how it appeals on such a broad level. Themes! Visual symbolism! If you want to read this sucker real close it's extremely rewarding, and as I said, you can do it however you wish. Me, I associate Asterios with Asterius, the mythical Greek minotaur, which makes sense since the book is structured similarly to a Greek tragedy. He's stuck in a dark labyrinth, you see, totally blind while pretending to be its master, with nothing to navigate with but the two horns - his ideas about strict universal duality. Of course, it's only by discovering the use of his third horn that he can truly be free. And that, my friends, is what Asterios Polyp is all about.

2) Pluto: Urasawa X Tezuka (Naoki Urasawa, with a bit of help from Osamu Tezuka)

This thing is many things. It's a balls-of-steel attempt to reimagine the most popular and beloved creation of manga's most revered creator. It's a science fiction story with touches of horror dancing about the edges, a suspenseful detective mystery with a political subplot about the Iraq War running deep through it. It's social commentary that, not wholly originally, uses robots as a tool, with the old "what it means to be human" thing popping up here and there. It's all of these things and none of them. It's Atom crying in a diner. It's the killer robot playing his song as he explodes in the sky. Urasawa demonstrates why he's a master of suspenseful page-turners, while making use of every tool he can in his not inconsiderable visual vocabulary to make you feel, and all this without feeling like he's simply unloading his arsenal or crossing off cartooning tricks off a checklist. From moving sequences of robots hanging on to a semblance of the idea of family, to the chilling image of a teddy behind the president's shoulder, to the ferociously rendered jagged lines of the villain-without-a-face in the form of a surrealist tornado, nothing else this year hit me in the face this much and in these many ways.

1) Prison Pit Book One (Johnny Ryan)

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland filtered through Johnny Ryan's electric brain and turned into a over-the-top drugtripping jizzpunching skullcracking brainmunching cocklicking bloodfest. In the third act our nameless hero utters the magic words, "I'm through fucking around", in the same way that other inhabitants of Wonderland did in the earlier chapters, and he becomes one of them. So did I. Prison Pit sucks you in but it never ever spits you back out. When I'm old and shitty and I look back at my teenage years, I'll be looking at Prison Pit and it'll be looking right back at me because it's gonna live forever.

The Best Superhero Comics of 2009

You know, Best Of lists are harder to make than I thought. It's fairly easy, I suppose, to objectively say "this comic is better than that comic", but when you've got a list of a dozen that you really liked and you're supposed to rank them in order of best-ness, it becomes a little tougher. Still, I can't complain too much. I was thinking today of other personal Best of 09 stuff - music and movies and things - and I got to thinking about sandwiches. My favourite sandwich of the year is probably the one with tomatoes, cream cheese and crushed Pringles in it. Other sandwiches in the Best Of list, though... god, what a nightmare. Is a steak-and-cheese sandwich better than a sausage-and-fried-egg sandwich? If you dip your sandwich into two different sauces while you're eating, does that make them two different sandwiches? For now, comics will have to do. I'm going to have a different list for comics in general up soonish - once I catch up on several 09 comics I've yet to read. I like superhero comics, obviously, and I suppose it's not really their fault that lots of non-superhero stuff is better, so they get their own list. So, the twelve personal best superhero comics of 2009 that I have read:


12) War of Kings (Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Paul Pelletier, others whose names I forget)
Marvel's other event comic ranks lowest on the list because it should be the minimum standard. It's textbook superhero stuff that can be described all around as "solid". From the DnA writing team we get a competent story with a couple of twists here and there, a big space epic with drama and explosions and even a change from the status quo, and from Paul Pelletier we've got flashy visuals with sharp storytelling and generally unexperimental but straightforward page layouts. War of Kings was good. Not spectacular at all, really, but it's a reminder of what other genre fare could and should be like.


11) Strange Tales #1 (Nick Bertozzi, Dash Shaw, Paul Pope, Nicholas Gurewitch, others)

This year Marvel tried the whole "let's get alt-comics creators to tell stories with our characters" thing and it didn't really go anywhere. This first issue was the best of the lot, with Bertozzi's MODOK story and Dash Shaw's Doctor Strange story standing out from the rest. It was an interesting experiment, this project. As an anthology it was bound to be hit-or-miss, and all the cartoonists went the gag route, which got old after a while. Personally it was great as a sampler for the work of cartoonists who I might not have heard of otherwise, and I liked more stories than I hated.

10) Final Crisis (Grant Morrison, J.G. Jones, Doug Mahnke, many others)Hugely divisive event comic that finished up and was collected into a nice hardcover this year. People didn't hate this for nothing. It got really confusing at parts, sometimes stretched itself way too thin, sometimes went all over the place for no real reason. But despite all that it was slowly terrifying in the first half and uplifting in the second and impossibly epic all round. Some people have made the argument that the inconsistent art matches the changing tone of the series as it progresses, but the middle bits of Final Crisis, where you've got like ten artists on a single issue or something, were horribly rushed and downright messy at times, and it's a shaky argument at best. Still, Mahnke and Jones, the two main guys, made it work as best they could, which was immensely helpful at the times when Morrison's ideas seemed overwhelming. A deeply flawed masterwork that's endlessly inventive and demands rereads (note to self: reread). This might have ranked higher if more issues had come out this year, though.

9) Captain Britain and MI:13 (Paul Cornell, Leonard Kirk, a couple of others) A neat little comic, cancelled before its time, quietly subverting your regular loud adventure-superhero team comic as it went with a sort of, well, Britishness, I suppose. I liked this. It reinvented the formulaic superhero monthly, getting better at it with every storyline. Generally believable cast of characters, above average pencils, this thing managed to be really good while still feeling like a conventional superhero story that wasn't trying to draw attention to itself.


8) M.O.D.O.K. Reign Delay (Ryan Dunlavey)

There's really something about MODOK's design, isn't there? Ridiculous enough to make for easy comedy, at the same time being menacing enough that he can at least pretend to be half-serious. But MODOK doesn't carry a joke all by himself. Ryan Dunlavey has got a fantastic ear for dialogue flow and he's a great comedy cartoonist. At thirty pages long I never found this comic unfunny. Not a comic that has much to say, but in this instance the gags stand up by themselves.

7) Batwoman in Detective Comics (Greg Rucka, J.H. Williams III, Dave Stewart, Todd Klein) God, what to say? The story itself is a bit questionable and very very standard. You've got themes of duality and struggles to balance a double life and religious death cults and even a long lost twin. Some of it doesn't make sense all that much if you haven't read 52. Of course, it does get better with the more compressed origin story, and Greg Rucka's never been any real slouch when it comes to character back-and-forths. Still, JHW3 and Dave Stewart are the stars here. It's not just that it's the most beautiful superhero comic art that I have ever seen. The art pair makes the fairly okay story better than it actually is, loads every page with thematic meaning and formally genius layouts, and effortlessly switch styles in direct service to the story, sometimes for wildly dramatic effect on the same single page. I do think that the gorgeous art has prevented people from seeing how average the story really is. But there's no getting round the fact that it is top stuff in terms of art and comics-making in general and if nothing else you should read it just so you can say you did. It's not a perfect superhero comic, but it's very very important.

6) Jonah Hex #50 (Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Darwyn Cooke, the guy who did the letters)This thing got to me. Gray and Palmiotti turned in a streamlined Western story, great genre stuff with emotions tucked into every corner, and Darwyn Cooke slapped us in the face with it. Cooke's skill as a cartoonist stems from his masterful storytelling, and this time he's left his usual heavy inks behind in service of the story given to him. The switches from high-adventure thrills to comedy to elements of horror all culminated in a powerful ending, controlled tightly by Darwyn Cooke's pacing. Maybe I am a sucker for powerful endings. This is very possible.

5) Dark Avengers: Ares (Kieron Gillen, Manuel Garcia, others)This year was the year of Kieron Gillen making fresh character examinations using "the awesome" and bombastic high concepts as a springboard, as he landed Marvel gigs all over the place. This three issue miniseries, though, was the best superhero comic he wrote all year long. The story made Ares a fully realised character in a hugely entertaining fashion, while standing on its own as a strong story with a very rewarding payoff at the end. Ares has always been about the balance of traditional Greek mythological ideas of warfare and big budget action movie military superviolence, and the two worlds were continually brought into thematic conflict here, and though it seemed hidden by the armour of snappy one-liners and excellent monologues, the surface elements more often than not pushed the story forward. Art was moody, dirty and rough, suitably badass. If you're trade-waiting for this it's going to be collected with the not-as-good-at-all Oeming miniseries, more's the pity.

4) Strange Adventures in Wednesday Comics (Paul Pope, Jose Villarrubia, Lovern Kindzierski) Delightfully metaphysical take on Adam Strange and the whole man of two worlds thing. Story and dialogue were very retro, as a sort of homage to comic strips and the pulp heroes of yesteryear. And it had that in common with the Kamandi strip from the same comic, which I was considering for this spot too. Kamandi isn't here, though. Ryan Sook had luscious and grand art on it, but Paul Pope on Strange was electric. The exploration of the man-of-two-worlds thing would be fascinating to read on its own if it also weren't so bloody fun to look at. His line, his designs, his staging on Rann, all crackle with this manic energy that's a fantastic thing to experience at the experimental newspaper size.

3) Dark Reign: Zodiac (Joe Casey, Nathan Fox, Jose Villarrubia)This was the best thing to come out this year with the words "Dark Reign" on it, because it used the same concept that the whole Marvel universe was dicking around with - evil person is now in a position of power as basically head of security for the country - and took it in a fresh direction. A sort of post-Dark Knight comic, in the sense that it features a charismatic, scary new villain who wants to shake up the existing system to create chaos. It's enjoyable reading. A sort of decadent enjoyment though. It's all about "no, see, these are the bad guys" and it's very satisfying to just see the Zodiac gang let loose and rip through shit, totally embracing their supervillainous identity. And Joe Casey has got the chops to nail Zodiac's dialogue, well enough to justify other characters being enamoured by his personality. Artwise, Nathan Fox explodes with energy and make it feel chaotic, in ways that sometimes makes the story difficult to follow, especially if you dislike Paul Pope-style art. Like Pope, Nathan Fox's lines are almost frantic, but he draws his people ugly, always slightly misshapen, even the usually square-jawed heroes, so you know that this is Zodiac's world. This is supervillainy.


2) "3 Jacks" from Daredevil #500 (Ann Nocenti, David Aja, Matt Hollingsworth, Letters Guy)

With this story Nocenti and Aja have exploited just about all the meaning and visual metaphors you can get from the "man dresses up as devil to do good" thing. I mean that in a good way! This 13-pager is dense stuff. Character stuff, too, but not your regular Daredevil "oh noes I am blind however shall I win" stuff. Daredevil doesn't have much of a personality at all in this story, other than his perseverance. It's more about the two side characters watching him fight Bullseye, and we see how they represent two different aspects of his character (and they represent... his parents? Really? I don't know what Daredevil's parents are like). You know what? I'll admit to not really knowing how this story works. On me. It's probably Aja; his panel layouts and compisition are killer. That page with the lie-detector trick was very moving stuff. It's good because it's so tightly scripted and layered with meaning and everything clicks into place by the end of the story. Plus David Aja apes Mazzuccheli a little in terms of style so the story takes on a timeless quality.


1) Batman and Robin #1-3 (Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Alex Sinclair, others)My favourite Batman story ever made. In the main Batman series, before this, Morrison methodically took Batman apart, and these three issues put the Batman concept back together. Remarkably simple - old Robin is new Batman, old Batman's son is new Robin. The handover was an excuse for Morrison to take Bats way into the past. This is Silver Age energy at its most crazy and creative, tinged with forboding nu-hurror. And, for a Morrison comic, really really light. The action scenes are prominent parts of each issue, and they work as prominent parts of each issue because Frank Quitely is unparalleled at executing action and capturing the perfect "pregnant moment" where you can work with it, fill in blanks. And his style does seem really static when you look at individual panels, but with his choice of layout (I'm thinking of that fantastic splash page from issue 2, as a particular example) lets the action flow organically. It's beautiful. And Quitely gets to let loose and just come up with these insane Batmobile designs and iconic new Bat-rogues and - dear God - sound effects as art. Read this how you want - slow, fast, whatever. That Morrison-Quitely magic doesn't discriminate.

Because We All Need A Little Christmas Cheer

Ball Peen Hammer:"That character on the cover is not holding a Ball-Peen Hammer. Should this book have been called "Lead Pipe" instead?" asks the first commenter on this page, with a smiley emoticon, the smug bastard. I'm pretty sure I Laugh-Out-Louded at the time.

I probably don't really like that guy, because, you know, it's not exactly the Done Thing to hop onto Newsarama, fireworks jammed up your arse, bend over and drop your pants, screaming "LOOK AT MEEEEE EVERYONE", doing a little Gollum-dance. "Ah, you know what? Fuck that guy" is the usual reaction, because nobody likes a smartass, right?.

The smartass is half-right, though, which is always funny, and I mean a more casual, tripped-over-a-suitcase-of-cash kind of right. Ball Peen Hammer ends up being great because of how it's like that, but not really. There's no imagery? What? Your book is called Ball Peen Hammer and yet said resident of the toolbox is not a recurring motif? Not even on the cover? Not scattered subtly into background details? Reactions I've seen towards Ball Peen Hammer stem from expectations, from what people think their art should give them. And lo: Its minimalist approach to staging doesn't means it doesn't need to be a comic. There's no optimism. We're not told everything about the story, which undermines characterisation. We're afraid we've seen this story before. And so on. Those weren't all criticisms, mind, and I'm only using them to illustrate the general trend of how people react to this one thing. What these points have in common is that they're applied based on experience of Something Else.

Ball Peen Hammer is Something Else, but, you know. Different. A post-apocalyptic disease story about survivors and violence, but not really. It's about how art can be simple and perfect inside an escapist underground tunnel and how it can evolve after the world goes to hell, into something mechanical and ritualised. Art in Ball Peen Hammer survives and becomes more brutal as a mirror to surrounding events, the particular details of which, Adam Rapp seems to be telling us, are pretty inconsequential. What happens outside of the two major stage sets of the story is Something Else, and we already know what's happening, don't we? A couple of throwaway lines of dialogue are all we really need. The focus is pulled right onto our survivors, in their respective little corners of disturbed hell. And it's about them, living as they feel the effects of their art changing. The art develops a survival instinct of its own. It's no longer something as spontaneous as careless, unprotected sex. That kind of art has died with the advance of the disease. There are no new songs to play, no new words to type. It's become rigid and cold and systematic, with a bit of child-murdering for good measure. And after a while everything starts to sound the same. "The Fellowship". "The Syndicate". One group is mentioned only in brief flashbacks, but they each represent an idea (once again because we're given casual references to Something Else) and then it's all subverted again because the ideas aren't really that far apart, even though that's what we may like to think.

The people in Ball Peen Hammer are insignificant in the grander scale of events; they're not even trying to find a cure or anything. They meet each other, in pairs, talk a little, and die. Ball Peen Hammer works beyond that because it creates the illusion of significance. By showing us how the two pairs of people are connected in the smallest of ways, we're fooled, on the first read at least, into thinking there's something more, that the story is something bigger than it is. The four characters are intertwined, mostly with help from the looming, mysterious Fellowship, and it's so fucking subtle how it's done. The silent, bald, fat guy with the black shades is such a fantastic plot device. George O'Connor was ace at nailing his posture to emphasise his stealth despite his size, in an almost comical way. It all builds up wonderfully, leading to that crushing revelation at the end. The paper stays blank.

And I can't believe there was no correspondence between the two collaborators. Motherfucker! Isn't that surprising? It's not just me, right? It's great! The rough, wobbly lines work great in creating this sense of hopelessness that hangs over the entire book, and they've got a deceptively fluid feel to them; the motion in the pencils feels as natural as the dialogue. The art lends itself so well to natural character interaction that it's hard to see how the book would work without them. There's great staging, too, but I'm guessing that might have more to do with Rapp's detailed script. The bleak outside world is all O'Connor, though, and the rain lashing out at buildings that seem to be huddled together in fear. We don't see much outside of the building, but when we do, it's enough, and our imagination is allowed to fill in the rest. In the same way, most of the violence is either implied or psychological. We're kept hooked by very strong storytelling.

I really liked Ball Peen Hammer. It skilfully worms its way past your defences and then beats the shit out of you. The last handful of pages were beautiful and heartwrenching and superbly done. Read it. Let go of your expectations and let it take you away. It's worth it.

And The Luggage Is Still Empty

I'll be on a week-long holiday starting tomorrow, so content will pretty much be dead till Christmas. Meanwhile, reviews of last week's comics, to tide you over. But you guys have better things to do than read strange comics blogs during the best time of the year. You do, right?

Daytripper #1: I dunno, I kind of really liked this. Seems to me like the point was to have a complete story in one issue. It was well-told, with good dialogue, and a smart, wry twist at the end finished everything nicely. I found it intensely satisfying in that sense, and I suppose it's worth more as a full $2.99 comic than the usual Vertigo deal of first-issue-one-buck, because it doesn't have a hook that makes you want to come back for more because of investment in the story. True, there's not a whole lot of depth beyond the already obvious, but that didn't mean it wasn't a single, capable story by itself.

Also, it resonated. Emotionally, I mean. And I suspect this had to do with the brothers Ba and Moon (sorry but I'm really lazy with the little letter-symbols) being capable of very beautiful art. They're ably assisted by Dave Stewart, who's pretty much the best colourist around. So my enjoyment came from the fact that the art made me feel more inclined to emotionally invest in the comic and the world it was presenting to me.

For all I care, Daytripper could be nine other issues of the same mold as this: ordinary person experiences extraordinary revelations, dies. And I would still get it, if it means Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon are continuing to deliver with lovely, striking visuals. Top stuff.

Punishermax #2: Steve Dillon is fucking magic with the Kingpin's eyes here. They work incredibly well throughout the issue as a sort of continuity device for the Kingpin. They work by themselves; the almost excited eyes he had as a kid and the terrifically savage ones he's got in the prison gangrape bit are each works of subtle excellence in character work, but it's the perfect contrast that pulls it together. After the scene in prison, his eyes are narrowed almost to slits, cold and dead. Those are our anchors for the next page or so, and it's oddly insightful into the Kingpin's character to reread the comic just looking at his eyes, expressionless in the comic's Now, even while he's having sex. And it's funny how, in the Now, that is, he betrays the most emotion with his eyes when they're closed. On the first page you see him remembering his painful past while he's getting ready for the day ahead. He's steeling himself, you see. That's the human part of the Kingpin. He's got to become coldly superior every single day. And then when he gets back to his son, possibly the only person he's got any actual affection for, he softens again, ever so slightly.

Jason Aaron's doing magnificent things with reinventing the Kingpin, and it's even more rewarding when you realise how he's playing with the regular Marvel U Kingpin's story. But it's all Steve Dillon what makes it work.

S.W.O.R.D. #2: I don't have much to say about this comic since it's general feel is so smoothly consistent with the first issue. Kieron Gillen continues with the witty action-comedy that manages to actually keep being funny without collapsing under the weight of its own effort, as some comics of the same vein seem to invariably do because of the inability to juggle the funny bits and a meaty plot. Kieron Gillen, though, finds a balance, and pretty effectively establishes the seriousness of the situation in a later scene by sucking all the funny out of it. What remains is gravity and a clear sense of This Bidniss Be Serious. The infodump interludes with the alien nabbing panels also help maintain that balance. The computerised exposition is a more feasible counterweight to the banter in the rest of the issue than, say, Gyrich being fed a progress report by a flunky or something. The other thing I really liked this issue was the Noh-Varr scene at the beginning. The internal monologue was honestly the closest thing to Morrison I've ever seen for Noh-Varr. Less than fifty words of captions, perhaps, but his voice was fucking nailed. Also sweet for that scene: Steven Sanders raised his game for the facial expressions on Noh-Varr basically to Jamie McKelvie levels. The combination of expressions and choice angles for said expressions were very well done indeed, from casual determination to cool confidence to sharp alertness to snappy annoyance. That page and a half was great.

Other things. Steven Sanders gets to stretch his design muscles a bit, with the different kinds of new S.W.O.R.D. spacecraft, and old ones that he accurately draws from different angles. The continuity of design is goooood, and I forgot to mention the lovely bulksuits that S.W.O.R.D. guard personnel have last month. Dig those. He also gets to pimp Death's Head out with lots of sci-fi gadgets; the guy is bristling with nasty metal stuff, which makes him much more of a credible threat than someone who we're just told is Not Very Pleasant.

Last thing. Page ten, I think. It's wordless, and occurs just after Beast executes his plan to rile up Death's Head. Beast has a really big gun fired at him, and then the whole of page ten is reactionary, and it's the motherfucker. The sequential storytelling and use of the widescreen form is bloody excellent. First panel, energy beam is fired. Beast is cleverly drawed jumping away from us, into the page and out of our attention. Our eyes are on the beam, right, and then they immediately follow the beam right into the second panel, only things zoom out so we see the whole ship, and a neat shot of open space. Where the hole's been ruptured in the ship by the beam you can see little whitish blobs, but you don't even have to wonder about those because the path of the beam leads the eye right to it. Becuase the beam's already been seen to rip through the ship and continue along the same path, it automatically rips right through the bottom panel border, BAM, and we're in the third panel, abrupt cut to our heroes in the opposite direction, with air currents to demonstrate this. It's an ace example of showing how things happen really really fast, and in terms of single standalone comic book pages this is one of my favourite in recent memory.

The Unwritten #8: The appeal of The Unwritten has usually been in the accessability of its content despite the restrictions of its themes, like a high-horse lit comic about other old books BUT FOR EVERYONE. It lives quite comfortably in the empty corner designated for its own genre - part painfully patient mystery, part metapunk.

This issue is an interlude, and could probably be better described as Potterpunk. It's basically Carey and Gross asking readers if Pottermania is healthy for kids or not, whether it should be encouraged, how far a child's imagination should be nurtured and developed, etc. And while execution is important and Peter Gross is excellent with execution, giving Governor Chadron some of the best facial expressions in the series, boring shit executed well is still boring shit (and that's pretty much my review of Robert Crumb's Genesis right there). The continued attempts to make the Governor more than just a side character distract from the "hard hitting questions" we don't really need.

Also helps: the scene where his kid rams her finger into the eyesocket of another kid. That's the Potterpunk I'm talking about.

Platina Is Always Going To The Science Museum, Because She's Dead, You See

Roman Dirge's Lenore: Noogies:
This is Roman Dirge's baby, a remastered edition of the first four issues of the original Lenore series, and it's basically a collection of gag strips, heavy on the macabre humour, mostly starring a cute little dead girl, Lenore, and her sadistic tendencies.

Because this is remastered and special and stuff, Roman Dirge has coloured it himself because according to the introduction he originally envisioned Lenore in colour and he didn't want to hire a colourist to do a "half-ass" job.

And I don't know. With an introduction like that you sort of expect something spectacular, you know? Dirge tells us how much effort and time it took to remaster these issues, and I can totally respect that, because I'd recently read a piece somewhere about the monstrous amount of work that went into making Absolute Watchmen look pretty, but maybe the introduction could have been done a bit more prudently. Put simply, I don't mind if an introduction to a book tells me about the effort that went into a book, but I get kind of iffy about it when said pimping is done by the guy who did the entire book. If you have an introduction by someone else, that's cool. Grant Morrison apparently loves the comics of Mark Waid and Geoff Johns and I don't agree with that (and I almost choked on something when I was reading a Johns-Morrison interview during which I'm at least thirty percent sure they were making out) but it's cool, because it's someone else dishing out the love. This introduction, a casual "oh, by the by, I worked really really hard on this because it's my baby" before you even read the first strip, is unfair, really. It makes you feel dirty if you happen to dislike the work. Either that or it makes you expect the work to be very fucking good.

So, yes, I had a point somewhere in there, and I was talking about the colouring, I believe. It does show that Roman Dirge does his own colouring, because there's a visible effort to preserve the original lines. That sounds like a bad thing, but it isn't necessarily; in Noogies, the purpose of the colouring is mainly for atmosphere. It's soft and is always secondary to the pencils and the story, but it helps make the tone that much darker than black-and-white because sometimes the content of the strip calls for a more textured atmosphere, and Roman Dirge does that blues-and-purples-y haunted house palette very skilfully.

While the colours can be dead on in select places, they are also just about redundant in other strips. One of my favourite uses of colouring is the Soylent Green strip in the first issue. It's an interlude-type thing, and there's a lot of negative space used for that whimsical, poetic feel. And Roman Dirge's murky colours go very very well with negative space. Unfortunately that strip is just about one-of-a-kind in Noogies. The rest of the colours look like they've been plonked down for the sake of colouring. It's amateurish stuff that can sometimes beef up the comedy value of the odd strip, but for the most part stands in the corner looking sheepish, existing only to draw attention from Dirge's brush strokes. His style isn't consistent and you can literally see him draw better as the book progresses, and sometimes the colours just cover up bits of that experience.

Some of the strips don't call for atmosphere, but the colours are lovingly rendered all over the place nonetheless, and more often than not it doesn't quite work. Lenore, as comic book art, would benefit from moderation in terms of colour. It would have been better served to hang on to the style used in Soylent Green, to bring focus to the figurework, and the wishy-washy colours could then be used for bold, dramatic atmospherics. Less is more, etc. I get that it's a labour of love, but the colouring isn't quite there yet. And I suppose it doesn't help that I'm not the biggest fan of the overtly digital colouring style.

Moving away from the colours, Roman Dirge is a fairly competent humourist and he has a good eye for staging things, and for comedic juxtaposition. He's good at the general, formulaic humour stuff, and it's a formula that works, so he holds the fuck onto it. The slightly surreal Burton-esque drawing style helps immensely to make his sense of humour very tangible and alive. His work has got tons of personality, which keeps things surprisingly light-hearted for a work that's about death and dead things and dark stuff.

It does sort of require you to have the same sense of humour as Roman Dirge to appreciate the book, though. It veers very dangerously towards a series of tasteless sight gags, with Roman Dirge's abilities as an artist reining things in a little. I'm assuming the goal of the gag strips are to have you laugh and then immediately feel guilty for laughing, because of the subject matter, a la Perry Bible Fellowship, but it doesn't always work. Sometimes Dirge's formula feels old and overused, sometimes the jokes are a bit tasteless even while trying not to be tasteless.

It's not for everyone, and it's probably a good comic for kids (I'm slowly starting to believe that all comics are good for kids). To be read slowly, in small doses, for maximum enjoyment, and do yourself a favour and skip the bloody introduction. If you're the sort of person who likes reading old Metal Men comics or Kubert-Kanigher war comics then I suppose that won't be a problem. I won't deny that this thing made me chuckle several times, and while not all the strips worked for me, you're going to find gems here and there. And I do think that Lenore would make an ace webcomic.

Apologery And Pimpery

Hullo, all. I'm not dead, exactly, but I haven't been active for a combination of reasons, many of which happened one after another and all that time (two whole weeks!) went away faster than anything. I know I'm not really obliged to, but I sort of promised myself that I would update the blog semi-regularly, and I've failed in that regard recently.

Anyway, I promise, promise for real totally that barring any unforseen fuck-ups, I WILL be back, with or without a vengeance. I've got loads of half-written and not-written reviews on hand, so you'll either get them in a furious barrage or a pathetic trickle. We'll see how the rest of December pans out, eh?

In other stuff, because of the aforementioned reasons for Internet absence, I totally deserted the blog email and I missed this one thing in my mailbox from Patrick Wensink (MEGA apologies, Patrick!) that I got over a week ago. Basically, it's a colouring contest in conjunction with his new book, the prize for which is, among other things, an autographed copy of Michael Kupperman's Tales Designed To Thrizzle (I have one of those, of the non-autographed variety, and Jesus on a stick it is brilliant shit so to get a autographed copy for free is in no way anything to sniff at). Quote-fu commences thus:

Patrick Wensink recently decided there’s only one way to celebrate the release of his book, “Sex Dungeon for Sale!”. And that is by holding a coloring contest.

He had a series of illustrations created based on some of the book’s stories, including a Kindergartener who thinks he’s French, a puddle of ketchup shaped like Elvis and something called, “Chicken Soup for the Kidnapper’s Soul.”

While the coloring contest sounded like fun, Wensink added a little excitement by offering an autographed stack of his favorite books from 2009 to the winner.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle – by Michael Kupperman
Fool- By Christopher Moore
AM/PM – By Amelia Gray
Help! A Bear is Eating Me! – By Mykle Hansen

The contest ends December 14.
For all the details visit www.patrickwensink.com/randomness

End quote. I'm pretty much the furthest thing from the right person for this contest, being as I haven't coloured anything since the coloured pencil era of my pre-teen-hood, but I figured it's a cool thing, so I'm pointing any artistic types in that direction.

There are only five days till the end of the contest, which might be a bit too late for some busier people interested, but hopefully a few of you have both the skill and interest for the contest (maybe? I honestly don't know what sort of people read my blog anymore). As I said, it's a neat-o prize, so you have nothing to lose.

Good luck, and see you all very very soon, I hope.