Category: Graphic Novels

UK EDITION

By Brian Michael Bendis & various (Panini Publishing UK)
ISBN13: 978-1-905239-68-9

Although wearing the trappings of the new, darker, more in-your-face Marvel Universe, this tale is at heart an old fashioned “Who Can Save the World?” tale featuring the latest – possibly most sales-savvy – team of superheroes to carry the fabled Avengers ID card.

Reprinted from Giant-Size Spider-Woman #1 and issues #14-20 of the monthly New Avengers comic book, illustrated by Frank Cho, Steve McNiven, Mike Deodato Jr., Rick Mays, Jason Martin, Dexter Vines and Joe Pimentel this story by Brian Michael Bendis clarifies – or perhaps further muddies the true allegiances of double-agent Jessica Drew who, as the Avenger Spider-Woman is also an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the terrorist organisation Hydra.

As if that’s not grief enough Captain America and Iron Man go public with possibly the least popular roster in history comprising the mutant Wolverine, Spider-Man, Luke Cage and the mysterious all-powerful basket-case known as the Sentry. At least Carol Danvers (Ms. Marvel, Binary, Warbird and probably a bunch more code-names by the time you read this) is on hand to pitch in when necessary…

Couple all that with a positively hostile US Government and a new S.H.I.E.L.D. boss who’s ruthless when defied, then the unstoppable threat from space that is cutting a swath of death and destruction across the planet seems almost the least of the team’s worries.

Sharp, entertaining, competent if a little complex for the newcomer or returning fan, this disaster-movie style follow-up to the House of M crossover event is an unassuming and amiable read for fans of the “fights ‘n’ tights” scene.

© 2006, 2007 Marvel Characters Inc. All Rights Reserved.

By various (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-872-5

The latest volume of the alternative cartooning and graphic arts series is truly autumnal in tone despite the addition of many more brightly coloured pages. The experimental nature of the features is often challenging but the rewards are great for the devotee prepared to work with the material rather than slavishly absorb. It also helps to let go of style preconceptions.

This volume features a fantastic variety of work by Ray Fenwick, Tim Hensley, Al Columbia, Eleanor Davis, Gabrielle Bell, Andrice Arp, Joe Kimball, Tom Kaczynski, Kurt Wolfgang, Brian Evenson, Zak Sally, Paul Hornschemeier and Sophie Crumb. There’s also a frankly astounding art feature on the multi-media illustrator Mike Scheer, but the real gem is the first instalment of a wordless and surreal epic ‘The Lute String’ by Jim Woodring.

Mome is as much magazine as book and each one is a graphic event. The earnest and dedicated creators make intense and often hard to read comics which are then reproduced to the highest print standards. It is well on the way to achieving its goal of becoming the twenty-first century successor to Art Spiegelman’s seminal Raw. This one, as always, is challenging, diverting, pretentious, absorbing, compelling, annoying and wonderful.

If you love our art form and think without moving your lips you need to see this series.

Mome © 2007 Fantagraphics Books. Individual stories are © the respective creator. All Rights Reserved.

By William Messner-Loebs & Phil Winslade with Patricia Mulvihill (DC Comics)
ISBN: 1-56389-301-0

This slim oversized all-original tale was produced under DC’s Elseworlds imprint wherein characters are freed from their regular continuity’s shackles for adventures that test the limits of credibility and imagination.

Amazonia posits a world where a tragic fire destroys the entire British Royal Family in the 1890s and a very distant cousin becomes ruler of Victoria’s Empire. Under this aggressively male sovereign the Empire goes from strength to strength and the rights of women wither and die. Once more and forever they are playthings and possessions, to the point of having to wear chains in public.

Enter Steven Trevor, late of His Majesty’s Air-Marines, and trying to make a living as a music-hall impresario. His actress-wife is a foreign beauty, dark, tall, statuesque, able to jump huge distances and strong enough to wrestle lions. When she saves the royal heir from an assassin it begins an inexorable and bloody series of events that will liberate half the Empire and end half a century of cruelty, abuse and atrocity.

This is a powerful and challenging fable of sexual equality, blending the Wonder Woman mythology with Steam-punk fantasy and the legend of Jack the Ripper with cracking effect. William Messner-Loebs writes with convincing authenticity and Phil Winslade’s Victoriana-style artwork, beautifully reminiscent of both penny-dreadful engravings and the lovely sweeping line of Charles Dana Gibson is utterly captivating.

Often the Elseworlds variations come off as ill-conceived or poorly executed, but when it all comes together as it does in Wonder Woman: Amazonia the result is pure gold.

© 1997 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

By various (DC Comics)
ISBN13: 978-1-84576-585-9

Most comics these days – at least from the larger publishers – have artwork of good to great quality. It’s no surprise, as there are a lot of artists, new and experienced, chasing relatively few jobs. Unfortunately it’s not so easy to drive up the quality of writing, and often people who can draw are just assumed to have the equivalent skills necessary to tell a tale well.

A sobering case-in-point is this collection of tales combining the biggest-guns of the oldest surviving comic book empire and one of the newest successes, which originally saw print as The Darkness/Batman, JLA/Witchblade, The Darkness/Superman #1-2 and JLA/Cyberforce between released in 1999 and 2005 and in which plot and character were continually sacrificed to the sales potential of empty fights and posturing.

The Darkness is Jackie Estacado, a Mafia hit man who has complete control of a supernatural force that manifests as demons who carry out his every wish and command. He’s in Gotham City to expand the Organisation’s power-base. And of course, Batman is not going to let him. Irrespective of Estacado’s self-doubts and avowed desire to change, there is no way on Earth an obsessive like Batman would allow him to leave without being sure that he would never kill again. But he does…

This is the responsibility of a huge cast of contributors including scripters Scott Lobdell and Jeph Loeb and artists Marc Silvestri, Dave Finch, Clarence Lansang, Joe Weems V, Danny Miki, Victor Llamas, Batt and Livesay but despite looking glitzy this is rushed and vacuous fare.

Written by Len Kaminski and illustrated by Mark Pajarillo and Walden Wong, JLA/Witchblade is a tale of Sara Pezzini, a New York cop bonded against her will to a supernatural, semi-sentient ultimate weapon. The Witchblade is as much her prisoner as her tool but when it escapes her control and possesses Wonder Woman, not even the Justice League can stop it from destroying the Universe.

Still looking for new territory Jackie Estacado hits Metropolis (are they really telling us that Superman’s home-town is more tempting than any other US city? Seriously?) where he starts killing mobsters, causing a gang-war. The second-rate threats of Metallo and Lois and Jimmy as hostages (because that’s never happened before) are enough to convince the Man of Steel to join forces with The Darkness and once again the mass-murderer gets off with a warning to leave town. The Darkness/Superman is written by Ron Marz with art by Tyler Kirkham and Matt “Batt” Banning, who should know better: I certainly do.

JLA/Cyberforce by Joe Kelly, Doug Mahnke and Norm Rapmund is by far the best of these unlikely team-ups. Here a team of cybernetically augmented individuals, once corporate mercenaries, wander the world looking for their lost leader, now possessed by an awesome alien force and a foe of all life. Their search leads them to a lost tomb deep below Budapest where the dead walk again, a threat certain to catch the attention of the Justice League.

This is a tale with some thought behind it for the fans of both series, a credible use of the characters and even some welcome and plausible character interaction. It’s nice to know that some one still recognises the value of a Story as well as a Property.

There will always be inter-company team-up comics as long as there’s more than one publisher. Let us hope future commercial exploitations realise the difference between comic strip art and comic strip-mining. One for collection completists only I fear.

© 1999, 2000, 2005, 2007 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

By Terry Pratchett & Graham Higgins (VG Graphics/Gollancz)
ISBN: 0-575-05699-1

Us old codgers have always maintained that a good comic needs a good artist and this superb adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s fourth Discworld novel proves that point. The Discworld is a flat planet supported on the backs of four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle swimming across the universe. Magic works there and the people are much too much like us. This, of course, makes it an ideal location for spleen-venting, satire, slapstick and social commentary…

Scripted by the author and brilliantly illustrated by Graham Higgins it tells a complex and darkly witty tale of Death (big grim chap, carries a scythe) and the hapless, literal-minded, sort-of-useless young goof Mort, whom he hires as his apprentice.

Of course that’s not all there is to it, with sub-plots including an orphaned princess and her dangerously ambitious guardian, Death’s vacation, the daughter he adopted and the mystery of his most peculiar servant Albert to season a very impressive spin on a very familiar myth.

Higgin’s light, dry touch adds volumes of texture to the mix and the leaden slavishness of the first graphic adaptation (The Colour of Magic – ISBN: 0-552-13945-9) is utterly forgotten in a superb mix of Pratchett’s acerbic dialogue and the artist’s deft sense of timing and comedy pacing, which is most reminiscent of Hunt Emerson.

If you have to have adaptations of great novels this is how it should be done.

Text © 1994 Terry and Lyn Pratchett. Illustrations © 1994 Graham Higgins. All Rights

By Noel Sickles (Nostalgia Press)
ISBN: 0-87897-029-0

Noel Sickles had a very short and barely acknowledged career as a newspaper cartoonist. He worked as a jobbing illustrator in the features department of the Associated Press – an organisation that provided cheap high-quality filler material such as cartoons, ads, comic strips, recipes, horoscopes, puzzles: All the pages that local newspapers needed but couldn’t afford to produce themselves.

In 1934 he took over the inexplicably popular aviation strip Scorchy Smith from John Terry, who had contracted a terminal illness. The publisher’s required him to emulate Terry’s style, which he did until the artist’s death, when he was invited to make the strip his own. A driven experimenter, he replaced the scratchy cross-hatched and feathered method of Terry with a moody impressionism that used volume, solid blacks and a careful manipulation of light sources to tell his tales. He also made backgrounds and scenery an integral part of the story-telling process.

A very straight adventure series, Smith is a stout hearted, valiant Knight of the Skies, complete with trusty sidekick, ‘Heinie’, flying about and Doing Good. That’s it.

Sickles famously never worked to a plan when writing the strip, he just made it up as he went along to avoid boring himself. (For an extended exploration of his process read R C Harvey’s Meanwhile… a superb biography of Sickles’s friend and studio-mate Milton Caniff published by Fantagraphics Books ISBN: 978-1-56097-782-7).

Stories abound that the two collaborated often. Certainly Caniff admitted to helping out with deadlines and story-polishing but the bold visuals were always the product of a driven and dedicated seeker of artistic truths. The Chiaroscurist style developed by Sickles was adopted by Caniff, although he largely eschewed the lavish use of photo-mechanical dot-screens that Sickles used to create a different flavour of Black in his monochrome masterpieces.

Reprinted in this slim tome are three of the thrillers from that brief period. ‘Lafarge’s Gold’ (10th October 1935-January 30th 1936), ‘New York, N. Y.’ (January 31st 1936-March 18th 1936) and ‘Desert Escape’ (March 19th 1936- August 14th 1936) come from the very end of Sickles’s strip career, with a pretty girl swindled out of a goldmine, big-city conmen, and Tuaregs and the Foreign Legion providing the admittedly lacklustre narrative maguffins. But the bravura vivacity and artistic flair employed by Sickles to tell the tales elevate these B-Movie plots into breathtaking high art drama by the sheer magnificence of the drawing and design.

Noel Sickles left the restricted and drudge-work world of newspaper strips in 1936 for the greater challenge of higher education and eventually settled into the more appreciative and challenging magazine illustration field, making new fans in the Saturday Evening Post, Life and Readers Digest. His few months in narrative story-telling changed our entire industry, not so much with what he did but by the way he did it and who he shared his discoveries with. He is an unsung immortal, and his brief output deserves a commemorative, retrospective collection more than any other creator that I can think of. Until then lost gems like this will have to suffice.

© 1936 The A. P.