Author: NowReadThis

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Zombillenium: Volume 1: Gretchen


By Arthur de Pins (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-734-8

I’m feeling a zeitgeist coming on: seditiously mature and subversively ironic takes on classical movie monster madness presented as horror-comedies in the manner of the Addams Family (or assorted Tim Burton features in the vein of Corpse Bride) to be enjoyed by older kids as well as imaginative grown-ups.

Latest candidate for the swift-swelling category is a superb and deliciously arch Franco-Belgian cross between films like Hotel Transylvania and Igor and such graphic narrative masterpieces as Boneyard, Rip M.D. and especially The Littlest Pirate King which combine pop-cultural archetypes with smart and sassy contemporary insouciance.

Arthur de Pins is a British-born French filmmaker, commercial artist and Bande Dessin̩es creator whose strips Рsuch as the adult comedy Peccadilloes (AKA Cute Sins) and On the Crab Рhave appeared in Fluide Glacial and Max.

Zombill̩nium began serialisation in Spirou #3698 (2009) and has filled three albums to date courtesy of Dupuis Рthe first of which has just been released in English thanks to Canadian publisher NBM.

Rendered in a beguiling animated cartoon style, the saga opens with a morose hitchhiker in a hoodie, having no luck at all getting a ride. Eventually Aton is picked up by a vampire and skeleton who offer to take the dejected 5000-year old mummy back to the unique theme park which employs – and in fact owns – them all…

Zombillenium is a magical entertainment experience celebrating all aspects of horror and the supernatural, where families can enjoy a happy day out rubbing shoulders with werewolves and witches and all manner of bogeymen. Of course, they wouldn’t laugh so much if they knew all those monsters were real…

Bloodsucking Francis  and bony Sirius are still heatedly trying to talk the deceased Egyptian -who walked because he was fed up working the cotton-candy concession for what seemed like eternity – out of thumbing all the way back to Cairo when a moment’s inattention leads to their car mowing down a distracted pedestrian.

The mortal is a goner, and without a moment’s hesitation Park Director Francis Von Bloodt takes a bite and finds his new confectionery seller…

The reasons Aurelian Zahner wasn’t paying attention were many. His wife was cheating on him, and took their child away. He had just tried to rob a bar in broad daylight. His gun had somehow turned into a banana. Worst of all, the odd young British woman with the enigmatic smile had told him to grow up before glowing blue and making everybody in the bar forget him…

Later he saw her at Zombillenium, after the giant werewolf bit him too, saying the place had enough vampires already. Things got a bit hazy after that, what with Francis disagreeing and biting him some more.

Her name was Gretchen and she was a witch and she had finally stopped the wolf and the bat biting him in some bizarre game of tit-for-tat…

With nobody quite sure what kind of monster he now was, Aurelian signed his contract, was given the induction tour by Aton – who considered himself a bit of a joker – and set to work selling the sticky stuff to the oblivious punters…

At least they were oblivious until a little old lady smuggled in her little doggie and triggered a bizarre and barely concealable transformation in the terrified Zahner that took even the most venerable and jaded monsters by surprise…

Despite the incredible power of the Zombie trade union, the only way out of a Zombillenium contract is the True Death, and Francis is actually in the process of terminating Aurelian when a call from the park’s enigmatic owner inexplicably gives the hapless fool another chance…

Slowly Zahner adapts to his new indentured (un)life, with Gretchen – who is “only” an intern at the park – finding time to show him the ropes and bring him up to speed in this most inhospitable working environment. Moreover the conditions are about to get much worse: Zombillenium is one of the least profitable theme-parks in the world and the Board are threatening to make some draconian changes…

For some reason the Zombie shop stewards blame Aurelian and are determined to drive him out. A slim ray of hope lights up the mixed-up monster newbie’s life however, when Gretchen tells him her life-story, reveals what he has become and explains what she is really doing at the Park.

The big boob has no idea what and how much she still hasn’t told him…

Sly, smart, sexy and hilarious, Zombillenium achieves that spectacular trick of marrying slapstick with satire in a manner reminiscent of Asterix and Cerebus the Aardvark, whilst easily treading its own path. This is going to a big breakout comics series and you’ll curse yourself for missing out.

So don’t…
© Dupuis 2010.

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Angel: The Hollower


By Christopher Golden, Hector Gomez & Sandu Florea (Dark Horse/Titan Books)
ISBN: 978-1-84023-163-7

These days a ingenuous girl loving an undead bloodsucker is so trite and overused it is a subject of parody and jest, but not so long ago the concept was relatively fresh and enticing…

For an entire generation, their first brush with the idea came courtesy of a landmark TV show. Buffy the Vampire Slayer began her charismatic career after a clueless cheerleaderValley Girl teen suddenly turned into an indomitable monster-killer: latest winner of an unpredictable mystic/genetic lottery which transformed unsuspecting mortal maids into human killing machines and martial arts masters…

The cult series and its assorted media spin-offs refocused the zeitgeist and, since Dark Horse Comics’ clever, witty graphic interpretation is what interests me most, here’s a look at one of their earliest sidebar projects.

Once the company secured the strip licensing rights, they began generating an engaging regular series, a welter of original graphic novels, spin-offs, specials and numerous miniseries.

Buffy Summers lived in the small California hamlet of Sunnydale on the edge of a paranormal portal to the Nether Realms dubbed The Hellmouth, where she and a small band of friends battled devils, demons and every sort of horror inexorably drawn to the area and whom/what/which all considered humanity an appetiser and planet Earth an irresistible eldritch “fixer-upper” opportunity.

With Rupert Giles, scholarly mentor, father-figure and Watcher of all things unnatural, Buffy and her “Scooby Gang” began making the after-dark streets of Sunnydale safe for the oblivious human morsels, aided by an enigmatic stud-muffin referring to himself as Angel…

Eventually he was revealed as a good vampire – one who possessed a soul – and he and the Summers girl fell in love. Sadly that broke the spell which made a tragic hero and instead unleashed the diabolical vampire he had been – the red-handed Angelus who had turned Europe into his personal charnel house for nearly two centuries.

Although Angel was eventually restored thanks to the intervention of Buffy and Co, he had briefly carved a savage swathe through town – ghastly even by Sunnydale’s standards – and was left burdened with a double dose of paralysing guilt and faced every night the vigilant, fearful suspicions of his human allies…

Angel eventually won his own TV franchise, but long before that he had graduated from romantic interest/arch enemy into his own 3-issue tryout miniseries. Angel: The Hollower was released from May to July 1999 and detailed how, even after reverting to exquisite evil before being redeemed again, his past would always be there to haunt him…

This British Titan Books edition commences with an Introduction by scripter Christopher Golden (and ends with a light-hearted interview with original series cover-artist Jeff Matsuda) before the action opens with ‘Cursed!’ by Golden, Hector Gomez & Sandu Florea (originally seen in anthology Dark Horse Presents #141, March 1999) wherein the Brooding Bad Boy regales Buffy with the horrific events that followed his rebirth as a bloodsucker in Ireland circa 1753.

That handy origin recap concluded, the main event – set during the TV show’s third season – kicks off in present-day San Francisco where a pair of vampires is attacked by a monstrous tentacled horror. Veteran vamp Catherine barely escapes with her unlife and, having seen the horror before, knows there’s only one being she can turn to…

In Sunnydale, Buffy and Angel have resumed their after-dark partnership, even though Giles and the rest of her in-the-know friends are still wary of the recently re-redeemed night-stalker. However once their monster-killing “date” ends Angel is jumped by a band of fangers and sees a girl he slaughtered and “turned” over a century past…

Although their sworn enemy, his undead captors treat Angel with kid gloves. Catherine only wants to talk and she wants to talk about The Hollower…

In a flashback, the scene turns to Vienna in 1892 where Angelus and his pack-mates Spike and Drusilla were amongst many vampires preying on the populace in complete security, oblivious and immune to all threat or challenge.

However, soon after turning Catherine, Angelus was confronted by starving, terrified vampires fleeing from some unimaginable horror that actually preyed on bloodsuckers…

Back in the now, Catherine reminds her sire of the cost the last time the creature manifested and warns him the thing has undoubtedly tracked her to Sunnydale…

At last convinced, Angel agrees to a truce and prepares to battle the thing again. Unfortunately this is something he cannot share with Buffy…

In end-of-the-century Austria the first fight against the Hollower unsatisfactorily stalled with only a few undead survivors, whilst now in Sunnydale Angel secretly consults eldritch expert Giles and learns the truth about the beast. He also discovers that, blithely unaware, Buffy is already hunting a huge, subterranean tentacled horror that prefers vamps to human meals…

Watcher archives reveal a chilling scenario. Vampires are actually human corpses with the departed soul replaced by a reanimating demon, using blood to fuel the composite creature. The Hollower however, sucks out those demonic riders and ingests them. That wouldn’t be a bad thing, except once it’s full – about 3,000 demons is its limit – the horror explosively regurgitates them and the partially digested devils will infect the nearest LIVING body.

If the Hollower succeeds in satiating itself in vampire-infested Sunnydale and subsequently pops, most of the town’s mortal souls will suddenly become rabid, blood-crazed killers…

Engaged in the hunt, Buffy however can’t shift a nagging and unworthy notion: if the Hollower sucks out the vampire part of Angel, will she be left with a normal human lover…?

Fast and furious, this tale of two cities and times is a solid supernatural thriller big on action and intriguingly presented. Definitely prescribed for anybody suffering a surfeit of lovestruck face-suckers and kissypoo predators – which last really should know better at their age…
Angel ™ & © 2000 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

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Helter Skelter Fashion Unfriendly


By Kyoko Okazaki (Vertical)
ISBN: 978-1-93565-483-4

Following her debut in 1983, producing erotic material for the men’s markets, Kyoko Okazaki established a reputation for challenging, controversial, contemporary manga tales before gradually shifting her focus to produce stories specifically for and about women (such as Pink, Happy House and River’s Edge), focusing with unflinching intensity on their social issues and the overwhelming pressures of popular culture in modern Japan. You can find out more about this pioneering creator here.

From 1994-1995, and following her immensely successful strip Tōkyō Girls Bravo in mainstream fashion magazine CUTIE, Okazaki created a biting expose of the industry – and its casualties – in Shodensha’s Feel Young anthology.

Heruta Sukeruta took the author’s concerns, inclinations and observations into realms tinged with dark speculation, but the episodes never seemed too far-fetched or distant from what we all believed models and managers and clients actually experienced…

Liliko is the undisputed top model in Japan. The Lily’s face and body are everywhere, selling products and lifestyle to men, women and especially young girls. She is an unchanging paragon of look and style and has been so for absolutely ages.

In fact, nobody seems to know quite how long – except ruthless model agency president Mama Tada – and only Liliko’s long-suffering gofer/manager Hada and make-up artist Kin Sawanabe have any inkling of the real person under the gloss and glitz and glamour…

Despite her star status Lily is incredibly unhappy: bored, paranoid, burned out and increasingly obsessed with her inevitable usurpation by some fresh young “Next Year’s Model”…

Knowing her days are numbered, the fragile yet hard-as-nails supermodel is frantically chasing singing and acting gigs, capitalising on her celebrity. Sadly, lacking any discernible talent, she’s only getting ahead by sleeping with all the money-men involved…

When not drugged up, stressed out or screaming, she finds some measure of contentment in the arms of Takao, handsome, spoiled heir to the Nanbu department store fortune (and the man she plans to marry) or in degrading and debauching the obsessively devoted Hada.

Liliko’s biggest problem is an incredible secret that could shake the nation. All her beauty and success come from a series of cosmetic procedures, carried out by a renegade plastic surgeon at an exclusive clinic that caters to the most powerful and influential people in the world.

Long ago a desperate girl with a sordid past met Mama and agreed to a complete, full-body series of operations. Now only her bones and some meat is her – all that glittering skin and surface is a fabrication, maintained by constant use of addictive drugs supplied by the dowdy doctor in charge to fight implacable tissue rejection.

Sadly, after years of use even these experimental remedies aren’t as efficient as before and Liliko’s look is breaking down and fragmenting…

She is by no means the only client of the clinic, and following a spate of suspicious deaths and the trail of illegal aborted foetal organ traffickers, police prosecutor Asada has begun to put the pieces together. However even he is not completely immune to the Lily’s allure…

In the face of increasing breakdown, Mama brings Kin up to date and makes him part of the conspiracy, whilst arranging with “The Doctor” to perform still more operations on her fragile star…

Liliko’s damaged psyche endures even greater shocks when her fat and dumpy little sister turns up. Having impossibly tracked down her sublime sibling, little Chikako is sent away with stars in her eyes, a dream in her heart and newfound determination to be beautiful too, whatever the cost…

Chemically deranged, paranoid and alternatively wildly uncontrollable and practically catatonic, Lily goes off the deep end when Takao admits that he’s marrying an heiress for dynastic reasons but will still, of course, have sex with her in secret…

Having already seduced Hada and her boyfriend in a moment of malicious boredom, Liliko induces them to take revenge for her bruised pride and events quickly spiral into an inescapable crescendo of catastrophe that extends far beyond the intangible world of image and illusion into the very bedrock of Japanese society…

Harsh, raw, brutal and relentlessly revelatory, the author’s forensic examination of the power of sex, temptations of fame and commoditisation of beauty is a multi-layered, shockingly effective – if occasionally surreal – tale that should alarm every parent who reads it. It is also a superb adult melodrama, tense political thriller and effective crime mystery to delight all broad-minded fans of comics entertainment looking to expand their horizons beyond capes, and ghost and ray-guns…

Vertical are dedicated to bringing the best of Japan’s adult comics to English-speaking audiences and Helter Skelter is part of a line books targeting women readers with challenging material that breaks out of the genre ghettos usually attributed to manga. Helter Skelter Fashion Unfriendly certainly qualifies. The cautionary tale was collected into a Japanese tankōbon edition in 2003, winning a number of awards including the 2004 Osamu Tezuka Culture Prize, and was subsequently adapted into a film shown in Cannes.

Grim, existential and explicit, this is not a book for kids or the squeamish, but it is a dark marvel of graphic narrative and one well deserving of your attention.

© 2003 Kyoko Okazaki. All rights reserved.
This book is printed in ‘read-from-back-to-front’ manga format.

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Ghosts and Ruins


By Ben Catmull (Vertical)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-678-2

If you know the works of Sidney Sime and Edward Gorey and the horror comics of Bernie Wrightson and Michael Kaluta or love to peer through your locked fingers at the films of Tim Burton or the creepy backgrounds in Charles Addams cartoons, you’re clearly an aficionado of silly, spooky business and know mordant fantasy plays best when played for laughs.

With that in mind, you might be interested in a new black-&-white coffee-table art book from cartoonist Ben Catmull (Monster Parade, Paper Theater) which celebrates the stuff of nauseating, stomach-churning terror and sinister, creeping suspense in a series of eerie illustrated plates crafted in scratchboard on masonite for extra darkness!

All that arcane art is wedded to epigrammatic prose snippets to comprise tantalising skeletons of stories best left untold and consequences unimaginable…

This engrossing landscape hardback (268 x 222mm) combines gloomy gothic imagery with wry and witty updates on uncanny situations in a procession of locations best left well enough alone, beginning with six views of the dank domicile of diabolical ‘Drowned Shelley’ and a single glimpse of ‘The Buried House’.

A queasy quartet then divulges the doings of the ‘The Disgusting Garden’ after which one peek at ‘The Secluded House’ leads inexorably to a triptych revealing ‘The Woman Outside the Window’ and four frames of ‘Wandering Smoke’. ‘The Order of the Shadowy Finger’ – five in full – gives way to three glimpses of ‘The Lighthouse’, a visit to a domicile all ‘Hair and Earwigs’ and thence to numerous views of the masterpieces hewn by horrific revenant ‘The Sculptor’…

A demonic carpenter once concocted a ‘Labyrinth of Junk’, but that was as nothing compared to the sheer terror of ‘The Crawling House’ and the ghastly practises of a ‘Lonely Old Spinster’…

Mordantly blending bleak, spectral dread and anxious anticipation with classical scary scenarios, this terrifying tease is a sheer delight no lover of Dark Art could conceivably resist…

© 2013 Ben Catmull. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics. All rights reserved.
Ghosts and Ruins will be released on September 12th 2013.

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Blue is the Warmest Color


By Julie Maroh, translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger (Arsenal Pulp Press)
ISBN: 978-1-55152-514-3

There is already a large amount of chatter about the film Blue is the Warmest Color. Since winning the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival there will be much more. Sadly the buzz around the big screen interpretation – it is not an adaptation – will almost certainly concentrate on the excessive and prolonged lesbian sex scenes (decried and disowned by graphic novel author Julie Maroh) rather than the story.

We do comics here and, despite the undisputed boost a media-sensational movie provides, it’s the words and pictures on paper that matter to me and hopefully to you too…

And what a wonderful marriage they make in Maroh’s moodily pensive exploration of prejudice and acceptance in a straightforward but devastating coming-of-age love story.

Le bleu est une couleur chaude was first published in France by Glénat in 2010, five years after Maroh originally began the tale as a 19-year old student studying Visual Arts and Lithography/Engraving at the Institut Saint-Luc and Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts (Brussels).

The collected album won the fan-determined Fnac-SNCF Essential prize (Audience Award) at the 2011 Angoulême International Comics Festival, subsequently garnering many more international accolades.

The story opens as Emma returns to a house she was unceremoniously banished from decades ago. Beloved Clementine is dead, but her last wish was that her one true love have her journals; books which described the thoughts and fears, ambitions and dreams of a confused 15-year old girl who struggled to accept her nature in a toxic school and home environment where loving someone of your own sex was considered an abomination…

Emma stays overnight in a home scarred by tragedy and steeped in tension, repentance and still-undispelled animosity, reading of how, in 1994, fraught and frantic high schooler Clementine saw a girl with blue hair and just couldn’t forget her…

This is a beautiful, simple and evocative story about how two very young people fell in love and what eventually happened to them. It’s not polemical or declamatory and doesn’t have points to score. That the Romeo and Juliet are both female is sublimely irrelevant except in the ways and manners it shaped the problems the lovers had to overcome…

Depicted alternately in a beguiling wash of misty full colour and stark dichromatic tones, the images are subdued and enthralling, not dynamic or overblown, and although there are some explicit love scenes, they are vital to the tale’s context and utterly subsumed by the overwhelming tide of elegiac sadness, political and social turmoil and doom-laden mystery which permeates the proceedings.

This is a masterful and compellingly human story that will astound lovers, loving grown-ups and all lovers of comics narrative.

Yes, there is a movie, but for pity’s sake read this first…

English Language edition © 2013 Arsenal Pulp Press. First published in French as Le bleu est une couleur chaude by Julie Maroh © 2010 Glénat Editions. All rights reserved.
Blue is the Warmest Color will be released on September 12th 2013.

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TEOTFW


By Charles Forsman (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-667-6

What follows is perhaps the best graphic novel I’ve read this year. However it utilises the kind of uncompromising language almost every young person is familiar with and uses daily but which can still offend many others.

Although I believe you’ll be missing out on a supremely rewarding and exciting comics experience, if four letter Anglo-Saxon terms upset you, please stop reading here.

Each generation has its icons of rebellion with unique touchstones of self-expression. The stunning minicomics and creations of Charles Forsman (check out his wares at oilyboutique.bigcartel.com/artist/charles-forsman‎ or type Oily Comics into your preferred search turbine) are inarguably at the forefront of the 21st Centurians’ societally-challenging artistic outbursts…

In The End of the Fucking World Forsman has depicted a situation as old as the species but as fresh as this year’s daisies – tragically tinged with the savage nihilism and hopelessness that afflicts America’s – and the World’s – youngsters…

Forsman is a multi-award-winning gradate of Vermont’s celebrated Center for Cartoon Studies (founded at White River Junction by James Sturm and Michelle Ollie in 2004), and this darkly beguiling monochrome pocket paperback (166 x 128mm) collects a tale first serialised in the author’s self-published 8-page mini-comic Snake Oil between September 2011 and February 2013.

Delivered in a devastatingly subdued and underplayed cartoon primitivist manner, the tale for our times opens in ‘Hard to be Around’ with James relating when and why he realised how different he was as child: his behaviour, the things that interested him, the shocking way he self-harmed…

At sixteen he met Alyssa and established a relationship. It didn’t seem much like love but she wanted to be with him and tried hard. Then he violently left home with her in his dad’s car…

Alyssa’s internal monologue in ‘Fire on the Outside’ describes her burgeoning emotions after they crash the car and keep going on foot. They’re both searching for something intangible, but settle for another stolen vehicle…

James then takes back the narrative, matter-of-factly describing how they break into a professor’s house and set up ‘Home’. He recounts with equal detachment the horrific things he finds there…

Alyssa thinks they’re ‘Safe and Sound’ and begins to dream of finding her long-gone dad. She disastrously introduces James to booze and dances for him, but he still can’t connect with her physically…

Switching point of view with every chapter, the tale proceeds. When the owner at last arrives home Alyssa has no idea how much danger she’s in until James casually kills him in ‘Fast Friends’. She doesn’t react much when the boy performs a strange ritual in ‘Worse Probably’ and only when a policewoman shows up does James come truly alive.

For the love-sick girl, as she desperately flees with her man, realisation slowly dawns …

The hitchhiking fugitives are picked up by a creepy old man who soon learns how dangerous kids can be in ‘Mother’ after which Alyssa makes them change their appearance in ‘Tulsa Goodbye’.

James then takes on the wrong opponent in ‘Protector’ and learns a strange truth about his connection to Alyssa…

‘Forever’ finds the kids separated and Alyssa caught shoplifting before they implausibly reunite, after which ‘Drowned Deeper’ reveals the fate of James’ mother so long ago, but it doesn’t stop them searching for the isolated young girl’s ‘Dad, Father’…

That quest successfully accomplished, the three strangers cautiously settle in together, unaware that the policewoman is hard on their meandering trail. She had her own unique connection to James’ first kill and the manhunt is obscenely personal to her…

Despite every misgiving James is oddly satisfied ‘Living with Dad’ and Alyssa’s damaged old man tentatively accepts the boy, but then it all goes wrong in ‘Father Fucker’ and James is compelled to make an impossible gesture before fleeing the cops and the fanatical policewoman.

It ends as it always had to in ‘Forced Feelings’ but a kind of resolution is achieved in the untitled epilogue that closes the tale in unsettling anticipation of the future…

This is a magnificently dark, degraded and hopeless exploration of young love and the searching struggle of youngsters for their place in The Now, so often painfully gleaned through illicit glimpses of the experiences and actions of their progenitors.

Isn’t every kid hungry to understand the parents who made them, yet so often disappointed and even betrayed by them?

Not every kid does it like Alyssa and James…

Brooding, compelling and appallingly plausible, this is a book you and every 13-year old should read – even if it is the most adult graphic novel released this year and preachers, teachers, nuns and politicians tell you not to…
The End of the Fucking World © 2013 Charles Forsman. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics. All rights reserved.

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X-Men: Alterniverse Visions


By Anne Nocenti, Simon Furman, Mariano Nicieza, Kurt Busiek & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-0194-9

Although now commonplace in regular fiction media, once upon a time parallel worlds and alternate Earths were almost unilaterally the province of comicbooks, offering tantalising glimpses of intriguingly different yet profoundly familiar characters.

DC pretty much owned the shtick in the early 1960s but kept it separate from their other exploratory narrative strand “Imaginary Stories”, but over at up-and-coming Marvel Comics, Roy Thomas in particular had a notion to marry the twain…

To be clear: Alternate Earths are part of the overarching shared continuity and Imaginary Stories are just that – fanciful riffs and chimeras using established characters and scenarios, but never part of the nuts-&-bolts universe.

Thus, despite such surrogate Earthers as Thundra, Arkon, Mahkizmo, Gaard and the Squadron Supreme cropping up in regular Fantastic Four and Avengers issues, the House of Ideas followed their competitor’s lead until the launch of What If?

This was an anthological series wherein cosmic voyeur The Watcher offered peeks into a myriad of other universes where key “real” continuity stories were replayed with vastly different outcomes – the same basic idea as Imaginary Stories but with a back-handed acknowledgement that somewhere these epics were “real”…

The first volume (48 issues from February 1977 to June 1988) posed such intriguing questions as ‘What If… Loki had Found the Hammer of Thor?’, ‘the Fantastic Four had not gained Their Powers?’ or ‘Spider-Man’s Clone had Lived?’ and when the title relaunched in 1989 for another 115 issues including ‘What If Wolverine was Lord of the Vampires?’ and ‘What if Captain Marvel had not Died?’, the tales were all back-written into an over-arching continuity and began to be catalogued as variant but equally viable Earths/universes and alternate timelines.

There have been seven more volumes since and a series of “Alterniverse” tales…

In case you’re wondering, those gritty Ultimate Marvel sagas all occur on Earth-1610, the Age of Apocalypse happened on Earth-295, everybody got eaten in the Zombieverse of Earth-2149, the Squadron Supreme originally hailed from Earth-712 and mainstream Marvel tales take place on Earth-616, whilst we readers all dwell on the dull, dreary Earth-1218…

Keep calm then, but never forget that Reality is just a plethora of differing dimensions, and if things go awry in one it can have a cumulative and ultimately catastrophic effect on all of them…

Soon after designating this publishing idiom an Alterniverse, a selection of relatively recent What If? (all from volume 2) yarns starring a selection of X-Men were collected into a trade paperback which, despite then being closely dependent on familiarity with Marvel mainstream, might now – in the wake of all those various movies – be a little more accessible to a general readership…

The extra-dimensional dramas kick off with ‘What If… Wolverine Led Alpha Flight?’ (originally published in #59, March 1994, as ‘What If Wolverine Had Remained a Captive of Alpha Flight?’) by Simon Furman, Bryan Hitch & Joe Rubenstein, wherein the Feral Mutant was imprisoned by the Canadian Government after events in X-Men #119-120.

Once the X-Men are killed trying to get him back and depressed former berserker is left to lead a Canadian team against the Hellfire Club and their Dark Phoenix…

Next up is ‘What If… Storm Had Remained a Thief?’, courtesy of #40, August 1992 and first seen as ‘What if Storm of the X-Men Had Remained a Thief?’

This is a lovely and rare happily-ending tale by Anne Nocenti and Kirkwood Studios – AKA Steve Carr, Deryl Skelton & Rubenstein – which describes how instead of becoming a pickpocket in Cairo and weather goddess in equatorial Africa, the orphan Ororo Munroe is taken under the wing of benign grifter Herman Hassel. Years later when she meets the X-Men it is not as a friend…

‘What If… Rogue Possessed the Power of Thor?’ (#66, August 1994, by Furman, John Royle & Bambos Georgiou) takes a sharp left from a critical point in Avengers Annual #10 wherein the power-leeching mutant battled the team and Spider-Woman.

This time/space, however, Rogue doesn’t let go until the Thunder God is dead and drained and soon finds herself cursed with his might but still a pawn in a cosmic war between eternal Asgard and Loki‘s forces of Ragnarok…

From #69 (January 1995, by Mariano Nicieza, J.R. Justiniano & Roy Richardson) ‘What If… Stryfe Killed the X-Men?’ does what it promises and shows the catastrophic outcome after Professor X dies and his hapless students are left to face the homicidal future-clone of Cable as well as the mutant leveller Apocalypse, after which these walks on the wild side end with a visceral, dark thriller from Kurt Busiek, Ron Randall & Art Nichols who ask ‘What If… Wolverine Battled Weapon-X?’

From #62, June 1994, the grim chronicle details how the rogue Canadian science team that inflicted an Adamantium skeleton and experimental behaviour modification on secret agent Logan missed their mark in this universe and had to settle for a second-best human lab rat.

When their Weapon-X escaped to carve a swathe of slaughter through the country and wiped out neophyte superteam Alpha Flight, the grizzled veteran knew what he had to do, and to whom…

Action-packed, cathartic and just plain fun, these different strokes offer old-fashioned fun in vast amounts, and now that a wider world is filmically conversant with a (if not “the ”) Marvel Universe, perhaps it’s time to raid the vaults again and release similar collections starring Spider-Man, Thor, The Hulk, Fantastic Four, Iron Man and/or the Avengers…

© 1995Marvel Entertainment Group. All rights reserved.
A British edition by published by Boxtree is also available.

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Violent Cases


By Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean (Escape Books)
ISBN: 978-0-9509568-6-2

As this entire book is all about stories, memories, perception and self-deception, I’m concentrating on the original Escape Books release, although the tale has been re-issued a number of times. Moreover, difficult sod that I am, even though the artwork was created in a muted tonal colour-palette of blues, greys and browns, which were restored for those subsequent releases, I actually prefer the black and white version I first saw, so I’m going with that one rather than later, corrected as-the-artist-intended versions…

There’s actually very little to say about this enigmatic and compelling little teaser other than the basic facts.

Initially published by the aforementioned and sorely missed Escape outfit in 1987, it marks the first collaboration of two relatively unknown creators who shared a more literary aspiration for comics than traditional newcomers to the craft, married to a novel approach and genuine, raw, hungry storytelling talent.

It’s short, sweet, disturbing, utterly absorbing and probably impossible to translate into any other medium… and that is, of course, a Very Good Thing.

There’s this guy see, and he’s reminiscing about his childhood in the 1960s…

Years ago in Portsmouth a little lad hurt his arm rather badly whilst exchanging words about bedtime with his father. To fix the problem daddy took the 4-year old to see an osteopath. The elderly gentleman was an interesting fellow with an accent who told great yarns and mentioned that he had once treated somebody famous…

As the narrator tries to sort out the half-forgotten details – fragments of life and films and games congealed now with clearly conflated circumstances – the facts, fictions and shadily obscured misunderstandings concerning his difficult childhood, growing maturity and awareness and those hours with Al Capone’s bone-bender begin to emerge and coalesce… or do they?

Flickering back and forth, the narrative proffers a miasma of mixed memories and misapprehensions involving a memorably troubled old man, Men in Dark Suits, a party, a magician, unexplained appearances and subsequent disappearances, unforgettable physical discomfort as a young arm was coaxed back into correctitude, tales of tailors and gangsters and Tommy Guns… which were always carried in Violent Cases…

Most of all it deals with unsolvable mysteries – because even the things we recall, we don’t always remember…

Complete with an Alan Moore Introduction, this slight but unforgettable pictorial memento mori – or is that topica tragoedia? – beguiles and enchants and subtly distresses in ways no lover of the comics medium could possibly resist.

If you haven’t read it, you must. If you have, read it again – it’s not at all what you remember…
© 1987 Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean.

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Usagi Yojimbo Book 5: Lone Goat and Kid


By Stan Sakai (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-088-0

The wandering rabbit bodyguard Miyamoto Usagi began as a background character in Stan Sakai’s anthropomorphic comedy The Adventures of Nilson Groundthumper before indomitably carving his own unique path to graphic glory.

Creative mastermind Sakai was born in 1953 in Kyoto, Japan before the family moved to Hawaii two years later. After graduating from the University of Hawaii with a BA in Fine Arts, he pursued further studies at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design in California and started in comics as a letterer, most famously for the inimitable Groo the Wanderer.

Eventually the cartoonist within resurfaced: blending his storytelling drive with a love of Japanese history and legend, and hearty interest in the filmic works of Akira Kurosawa and his peers, into one of the most enticing and impressive fantasy sagas of all time.

And it’s still more educational, informative and authentic than any dozen Samurai sagas you can name…

The addictive period epic is set in a world of sentient animals (with a few unobtrusive human characters scattered about) but scrupulously mirrors the Feudal Edo Period of Japan – (the 17th century by our reckoning), simultaneously referencing classic contemporary cultural icons from sources as varied as Zatoichi and Godzilla, whilst specifically recounting the life of a peripatetic masterless Samurai eking out an honourable living as a Yojimbo (bodyguard-for-hire).

As such, his fate is to be drawn constantly into a plethora of incredible situations.

And yes, he’s a rabbit – brave, noble, sentimental, gentle, artistic, empathetic, long-suffering, conscientious and devoted to the tenets of Bushido, the heroic everyman bunny simply cannot turn down any request for help or ignore the slightest evidence of injustice…

This fantastically funny fifth monochrome masterwork gathers tales from Fantagraphics’ Usagi Yojimbo comicbook volume 1, #19-24 and offers a selection of complete adventures culminating in an unbelievably welcome and long-awaited spoof of Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima’s legendary samurai manga Kozure ÅŒkami, best known in the West as Lone Wolf and Cub…

Following a fulsome Introduction from Stan Lee, the restless Ronin takes on a paying gig with very little honour attached in ‘Frost and Fire’. On the recommendation of friend and occasional patron Lord Noriyuki, Usagi contracts with the cold and snobbish Lady Koriko to recover the priceless antique swords – but not the body – of her husband; recently expired in a distant village.

On arrival however Usagi finds a thorny dilemma: fallen and shamed samurai Nagao broke all class stricture and protocol by consorting with a peasant girl. Grief-stricken Atsuko wants to keep his family’s blades as the only reminder of the man she loved and who loved her in return…

This impossible impasse is only broken when Atsuko’s greedy brother intervenes, more concerned with the blades’ monetary value than their sentimental worth…

‘A Kite Story’ is an enchanting agglomeration of connected vignettes divided into four visual epigrams beginning with ‘The Kite Maker’s Tale’ in which master craftsman Tatsusaburo describes his process and motivation in building the largest Odako ever to challenge the clouds…

Next comes disreputable Hatsu who in ‘The Gambler’s Tale’ discloses how a long-eared Ronin exposed his cheating and ruined his business. Now, Yojimbo has returned and the games-man sees a way to pay him back, but fails in his scurrilous scheme due to the warrior’s ingenuity and the giant kite in ‘The Ronin’s Tale’ after which the elegant micro-saga comes full circle with ‘The Kite Maker’s Tale II’…

Although telling short stories here, everything is a fragment of a greater mosaic. Sakai is gradually constructing a massive overarching history and in the 2-part ‘Blood Wings’ the wanderer stumbles upon a man cut to ribbons by a flying killer. He soon discovers a village plagued by Komori ninja – a clan of bats trained in all the deadly tactics of Chi no Tsubasa – killing silently from above on “wings of blood”…

Although Usagi succeeds in helping the desperate villagers he has no way of knowing how the sky killers will affect his future, as the Komori are actually striving to prove themselves worthy replacements for the decimated Neko ninjas who have fallen from the good graces of scheming Lord Hebi since the end of the Dragon Bellows Conspiracy…

In the next tale the Yojimbo meets martial legend General Oyaneko but is distressed to learn the aged warrior is dying of a wasting disease. He’s even more upset when the General attempts to kill him, wanting to earn a clean end in ‘The Way of the Samurai’…

This volume concludes with ‘Lone Goat and Kid’ wherein former imperial official Yagi – who became an assassin after being framed by underlings of Lord Hirone – is tricked into fighting a certain rabbit Ronin who has no idea he is the latest pawn in a Machiavellian scheme to destroy the noble goat and his capable kid Gorogoro…

However, even though Usagi is tricked into fighting the doom-laden duo, the guilty impatience of the plotters soon reveals the true state of affairs…

Despite changing publishers a few times, Usagi Yojimbo has been in continuous publication since 1987, resulting in dozens of graphic novel collections and books to date. The Legendary Lepus has guest-starred in many other series and nearly had his own TV show – there’s still time yet, and fashions can revive as quickly as they die out…

As well as generating a horde of high-end collectibles, art prints, computer games and RPGs, a spin-off sci-fi series and lots of toys to promote popularity, Sakai and his creation have deservedly won numerous awards both within the Comics community and amongst the greater reading public.

Fast-paced yet lyrical, funny and scary, always moving, astoundingly visceral, ferociously thrilling and simply bursting with veracity and verve, Usagi Yojimbo is a cartoon masterpiece of irresistible appeal that will delight devotees and make converts of the most hardened hater of “funny animal” stories and comics.
Text and illustrations © 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992 Stan Sakai. Usagi Yojimbo is ® Stan Sakai. Book editions © 1992, 2005 Fantagraphics Books. All rights reserved.

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Batman: Haunted Knight


By Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-273-8

The creative team of Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale have tackled many iconic characters in a number of landmark tales, but their reworkings of early Batman mythology – such as The Long Halloween – certainly rank amongst their most memorable.

Set during the Batman: Year One scenario created by Frank Miller, and originally released as a 13 part miniseries (running from Halloween to Halloween), it detailed the early alliance of Police Captain Jim Gordon, District Attorney Harvey Dent and the mysterious vigilante Batman to destroy the unassailable mob boss who ran Gotham City: Carmine Falcone – “The Roman”.

However, before that epic undertaking the creators worked together on another All Hallows adventure – one that grew like Topsy and eventually became a triptych of Prestige One-Shot Specials under the aegis of Archie Goodwin’s most significant editorial project.

After the continuity-wide reset of Crisis on Infinite Earths, with DC still in the throes of re-jigging its entire narrative history, a new Batman title launched, presenting multi-part epics refining and infilling the history of the post-Crisis hero and his entourage. The added fillip was a fluid cast of prominent and impressively up-and-coming creators.

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight was a fascinating experiment, even if the overall quality was a little haphazard.

Most of the early story-arcs were collected as trade paperbacks – helping to jump-start the graphic novel sector of the comics industry – and the re-imagining of the Gotham Guardian’s early career gave fans a wholly modern insight into the ancient yet highly malleable concept.

As explained in Goodwin’s introduction ‘Trick or Treat’ the first Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Special began life as a story-arc for the monthly series before being promoted to a single, stand-alone publication released for October 1993. Its success spawned two sequels – and the aforementioned Long Halloween epic…

Collected in one spooky stripped-down paperback compilation, those three scary stories comprise a raw and visceral examination of an obsessive hero still learning his trade and capable of deadly misjudgements as seen in ‘Fears’ when, after spectacularly capturing terror-obsessed psychopath Jonathan Crane, the neophyte Caped Crusader leaves him to policemen ill-equipped to cope with the particular brand of malicious insanity cultivated by The Scarecrow…

It’s fair to say that the man behind the bat mask is distracted; still attempting to reconcile his nocturnal and diurnal activities, Bruce Wayne is helpless before the seductive and sophisticated blandishments of predatory social butterfly Jillian Maxwell. Faithful major-domo Alfred Pennyworth is not so easily swayed, however…

Left too much to his own devices, Scarecrow has run wild through Gotham, but when he abducts Gordon he at last makes a mistake the Dark Knight can capitalise upon…

A year later another Halloween brought ‘Madness’ as rebellious teenager Barbara Gordon chose exactly the wrong moment to run away from home: a night when her dad’s mysterious caped pal was frantically hunting Jervis Tetch – a certified nutcase abducting runaways to attend decidedly deadly Tea Parties orchestrated by a truly Mad Hatter…

Steeped in personal nostalgia as a maniac rampages through his city, inadvertently trampling upon some of Bruce Wayne’s only happy memories (of his mother’s favourite book), the pursuer almost dies at the hands of the Looking Glass Loon, only to be saved by unlikely angel Leslie Thompkins – another woman who will loom large in the life of the Batman…

The final fable pastiches a Christmas classic by Charles Dickens as ‘Ghosts’ sees a delirious Bruce Wayne uncharacteristically take to his bed early on the night before Halloween.

After socialising with young financier Lucius Fox, eating bad shrimp and crushing bird bandit The Penguin, the sick and weary playboy lapses into troubled sleep only to be visited by three spectres…

Looking like Poison Ivy, The Joker and the corpse of Batman and representing Past, Present and inescapable Future, the phantoms prove that only doom awaits unless the overachieving hero strikes a balance – or perhaps truce – between his two divergent identities…

Trenchant with narrative foreboding – long time fans already know the tragedies in store for all the participants, although total neophytes won’t be left wondering – these eerily enthralling Noir thrillers by Loeb perfectly capture the spirit of the modern Batman, supremely graced with startlingly powerful images of Mood, Mystery and rampant Mayhem from the magic pencil and brush of Tim Sale.

One of the very best Batman books you could read.

So, do…
© 1996, 1997 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.