Category: Graphic Novels

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.

By Wostok & Grabowski, translation edited by Chris Watson (Slab-O-Concrete)
ISBN: -1-899866-10-9

In the last decade of the last century independent, alternative and international cartooning really took off in the UK. It’s not that it suddenly got good, it’s simply that due to the efforts of a few dedicated missionaries the rest of the country finally noticed what Europe had known for years. Graphic narrative is as much about the art and the individual as it is about the money.

A superb case in point is this slim and eccentric tome produced in English by that much-missed Slab-O-Concrete outfit. Daddy is So Far Away… is the surreal and absorbing account of two-year old Poposhak and her faithful dog Flowers. The sad little lass stands at her mother’s grave and wonders where her father is. She sees the tip of his beard sticking out of the front door and rushes towards it despite wise Flowers’ words of caution.

She will not stop, but follows the beard, through rooms, down tunnels, across plains, under oceans and even across the Milky Way itself, finding friends and escaping monsters throughout time and space. Always that long white beard unfurls ahead of them, an enigma and a promise…

An eerie yet comforting blend of fable, bedtime story, shaggy dog tale, and vision-quest, this is a compulsive and brilliantly drawn epic more rollercoaster than narrative and encompassing the very best storytelling techniques of Eastern European animation.

Wostok and Grabowski, from the north Serbian town of VrÅ¡ac have worked together since 1992; both in the incredibly fertile Eastern European market but also internationally, and as is usually the case are criminally unfamiliar to the average comic punter. I hope you can find their work without too much trouble, because it’s well worth the effort.

© 1995-1998 Wostok, Lola & Grabowski. All Rights Reserved.

By Mike Grell (DC Comics)
ISBN: 1-56389-024-0

During the troubled 1970s the American comics industry suffered one of its periodic downturns and publishers cast about for other genres to bolster the flagging sales of superhero comics. By revising their self-imposed industry code of practice (administered by the Comics Code Authority) to allow supernatural and horror comics, the publishers tapped into the global revival of interest in spiritualism and the supernatural, and as a by-product opened their doors to Sword-and-Sorcery as a viable genre, with Roy Thomas and Barry Smith’s adaptation of R. E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian an early exemplar.

DC launched a host of titles into that budding market but although individually interesting (especially the fascinating Stalker, illustrated by Steve Ditko and Wally Wood) nothing seemed to catch the public’s eye until number #8 of the try-out title First Issue Special.

In that comic superhero artist Mike Grell launched his pastiche and tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar – At the Earth’s Core, which after a rather shaky start went on to become, for a time, DC’s most popular title.

In 1969 Colonel Travis Morgan, a U2 spy-pilot is shot down whilst filming a secret Soviet base, although he manages to fly his plane over the North Pole before ditching. Expecting to land on frozen Tundra or pack-ice he finds himself inside the Earth, in a lush tropical Jungle populated by creatures from every era of history and many that never made it into the science books. There are also cavemen, savages, mythical beasts, barbaric kingdoms and fabulous women.

Time does not seem to exist in this Savage Paradise and as Grell’s stated goal was to produce a perfect environment for yarn-spinning, not a science project, the picky pedant would be well advised to stay away. These are pure escapist tales of action and adventure, light on plot and angst but aggressively and enthusiastically jam-packed with fun and thrills. There is a basic plot-thread to hang the stories on, but you’ll thank me for not sharing it as the real joy of these tales (reprinting that try-out and issues #1-10 and #12) is in the reading. This is a total-immersion comic experience to be felt, not considered. Go for it!

© 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1991 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

By Greg Rucka

& Jesus Saiz (DC Comics)
ISBN 1-84576-436-6

In the aftermath of DC’s Infinite Crisis an international organisation to monitor and control meta-human affairs was developed, under the aegis of the United Nations Security Council. Originally an American agency, the new Checkmate is tasked with policing all nations, protecting them from superhuman dangers and terrorism, and also preventing rogue nations and regimes from weaponising their own paranormal resources.

This first collection reprints issues #1-7 as the organisation (composed of superheroes and traditional intelligence operatives) faces the loss of their charter due to a traitor on the Security Council, all the while tracking down the death cult Kobra and investigating a suspicious facility in China.

This is a dark and engaging blend of genres from writers Greg Rucka, Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir, pencillers Jesus Saiz and Cliff Richards, and inkers Bob Wiacek, Steve Bird, Dan Green and Fernando Blanco, with the murky world of espionage coldly and logically grounding the high-flying gloss of costumed super-doers. Moody and addictive, if perhaps a little too dependent on a working knowledge of the DC universe, this is worth a few moments of any serious fan’s time.

© 2006 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

By Steven Weissman (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN13: 978-1-56097-866-4

If there is such a thing as ‘Dark and Comforting’ then the weird and wicked cartooning of Steven Weissman is a perfect example. Following the success of such books as Chewing Gum in Church and Kid Firechief Fantagraphics have compiled earlier works from his self-published comic Yikes!, supplemented with other rare and even unpublished strips to create a lovely insight into the development of a truly unique graphic vision.

The 32 tales, created between 1993 to 2002, all feature his cast of peculiar children in a macabre tribute to Charles Shulz’s Peanuts strip, but are also literal embodiments of the phrase “little monsters”. In simple childhood romps such as ‘The See-Thru Boy’, ‘The Loneliest Girl in Town’, ‘Inevitable Time-Travel Story’, ‘No Kiss!’ and many others the bizarre cast of Li’l Bloody (a child vampire), Kid Medusa, Pullapart Boy and X-Ray Spence live an idyllically suburban 1950’s existence of school, fishing, skateboards, white picket fences, aliens, wheelchair jousting, marbles and weird science. Weissman’s seductive cast all have huge round heads and ancient bodies like graphic progeria-sufferers, but the drawing is lavish, seductive and utterly convincing.

These are great comics about kids (but categorically Not For Kids) that are a treat, a revelation and most definitely darkly comforting.

MEAN © 2007 Fantagraphics Books. All content © 2007 Steven Weissman. All Rights Reserved.

By Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Adam Archer & Peter Guzman (WildStorm)
ISBN13: 978-1-0-84576-625-2

I’m not the greatest fan of modern horror movies, especially the frankly daft and usually logical-integrity free “Slasher-movie”. I really, really don’t mean morality here; I can be as nihilistically cynical as any hormonally drenched teen, and what guy doesn’t like vicarious nudity, gratuitous sex and gory giblets everywhere?

What I have trouble with is the creation of unstoppable, inescapable, unkillable monsters as Brands. Fear isn’t going “boo!” or making audiences jump, it’s the build-up; the piling on of tension upon anxiety till you just want it to be over. For that you need at least the possibility that the brand-name can be defeated. Without engaging that hope and desperation all you have is an ever increasing spiral of baroque stunts and shallow effects, ultimately pointless and hollow.

For example: A group of teens are hired to renovate Camp Crystal Lake, the rural paradise where so many wayward kids have been chopped into liver-sausage by the ghastly hockey-masked ghost of Jason Voorhees. They’re obnoxious and they get naked and they die grotesquely. That really all there is to it.

Accepting that I’m not the target market, this book (collecting the first six issues of the monthly comic) has credible artwork but not even the usually excellent scripting of Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti can get me to engage with this disparate cast of cadavers-in-waiting. I can’t even dislike them enough to look forward to their inevitable deaths. Maybe if they were people you really want to see killed like bigots or celebrities…

Competent but limited, and absolutely and only for kids over eighteen…

© MMVII New Line Productions, Inc. Friday The 13th is ™ New Line Productions, Inc, (so7). © 2006, 2007 New Line Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

By Donald Rooum (Freedom Press)
ISBN: 0-900384-47-6

Donald Rooum has been fighting the good, reasoned, acerbic but never strident fight for his particular political and ethical standpoint since the 1960s. He has mostly used that most devastating of weapons, the pen, to deliver his payloads of reasoned integrity. This volume is no exception.

Culled from the archives of Freedom magazine, where the Wildcat strip has run for decades, this slim volume presents a number of views of not just The Enemy, exemplified as Governments, Police, Big Business, The Church and smug know-it-alls of all nations but also some telling glances at Anarchists themselves – who, as you might suspect, are often their own worst enemies.

Crammed with magical drawing and compelling reasoning, there’s also plenty of laughs on hand and some lovely additional pages of humorous factoids on and about the subject of cats; cartoon, wild or otherwise.

Donald Rooum’s work is a cartoon connoisseur’s delight: Incisive, reasoned, beautifully illustrated and lettered, and above all, passionate and honest. Everyone, of whatever persuasion, should see what he’s saying, and how.

© 1989, 2007 Donald Rooum. All Rights Reserved.