Category: Graphic Novels

 

By Various (Burlyman Entertainment)
ISBN: 1-84023-806-2

You’ve probably heard this before, I suspect, but I wasn’t overly impressed by the Matrix movies. This made the arrival of these two books something of a surprise to me.

The folks at Burlyman have gathered a pretty impressive crowd of comic creators to produce tales set in and spinning out of the filmic universe for their website, and these are now available in a format you can read on a bus or in the bath. And, believe me, you will want to.

Volume 1 expands the universe first seen in the movies, starring Neo and a brave band of human survivors battling against an oppressive computerised tyranny in a deadly cyber-reality with a series of telling short tales in a variety of styles and formats.

Under the editorial eye of Spencer Lamm and the auspices of original creators Larry and Andy Wachowski – who kick off proceedings with the Geof Darrow illustrated ‘Bits & Pieces of Information’, followed by Bill Sienkiewicz’s ‘Sweating the Small Stuff’, and Ted McKeever’s ‘A Life Less Empty’.

Neil Gaiman contributes the prose vignette ‘Goliath,’ with spot illustrations from Sienkiewicz and Gregory Ruth, ‘Burning Hope’ is by John Van Fleet, and Dave Gibbons recreates a Japanes parable in ‘Butterfly’. Troy Nixey and Dave McCaig combine for ‘A Sword of a Different Colour’ and alternative legend Peter Bagge crafts the truly disturbing ‘Get It?’

David Lapham’s black and white thriller ‘There are No Flowers in the Real World’ skilfully counterpoints Paul Chadwick’s oppressive ‘The Miller’s Tale’, whilst Ryder Windham and Killian Plunkett explore creativity in ‘Artistic Freedom.’

Greg Ruth returns to conclude the volume with the painterly comic strip fable ‘Hunters and Collectors,’ a contemplative finish to as funny, thrilling, frightening, distressing and rollicking a bunch of tales as I have not seen since the glory days of 2000AD.

In comic book terms at least this book is a fan-boy’s delight.

© 2003, 2004 Burlyman Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved

 

By Alan Moore & various (WildStorm)
ISBN: 1-84576-617-2

A few weeks back I moaned that a short Moore WildC.A.T.S tale (in Alan Moore: Wild Worlds – ISBN 1-84576-661-X) was confusing, out-of context and shouldn’t be there. Well I’m happy to report that the tremendous power I wield in the comics world has been of some use as it’s also in this volume covering the writer’s tenure on Jim Lee’s flagship WildStorm titles (issues # 21-34 and #50, previously collected as WildC.A.T.S: Homecoming in 1998 WildC.A.T.S: Gang War, 1999), where it belongs.

Seriously though, this companion volume traces a nearly three year’s worth of drama and adventure illustrated by the likes of Travis Charest, Kevin McGuire, Ryan Benjamin, Jason Johnson, Dave Johnson, Kevin Nowlan, Scott Clark, Aron Wiesenfeld, Mat Broome, Pat Lee, Rob Stotz and even Jim Lee plus a horde of inkers and colourists and combines cosmic drama with bloody super war in the streets of New York.

Believing the original team killed in a space battle, Superman knock-off Majestic forms a new team of heroes to fight the good fight, but with a more pragmatic strategy – getting the villains before they commit any crimes or mayhem. Despite the sound logic the situation deteriorates into an all-out war between criminals, and even rival teams of good guys. Is it all simply bad luck or is there another agenda in play?

Meanwhile the original team aren’t really dead. With their powers coming from genetic mingling of two alien races that had battled for millennia, the heroes had no idea what to expect when they made planet fall on the home-world of the good guys. They certainly didn’t expect that the intergalactic war that spawned them was long concluded and nobody had bothered to tell the combatants on Earth.

What seems like a benevolent paradise, however, is anything but…

Alan Moore’s deft hand with superheroes is somewhat lacking in these tales, although I suspect much of that could be simply that the stripped down, posturing Image art-style doesn’t leave him his accustomed room to develop the characters – and I suspect that once or twice what he scripted didn’t get drawn at all! There are an awful lot of big, vacuous full-body poses and action shots in this book.

Another point of potential confusion is the inclusion of two –but only two – chapters of the company crossover event ‘Fire from Heaven’ and as those are parts 7 and 13, there’s little chance of getting the big picture no matter how hard Moore tries to cover with expository dialogue.

Perhaps a trifle hard going for the completist Moore fans, and not that great for the die-hard super-crowd either.

© 2007 WildStorm Productions, an imprint of DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

By Donna Barr (A Fine Line Press)
ISBN: 1-89225-317-8

Donna Barr is one of the comic world’s most unique talents. She has constructed a fully realised fantasyscape to tell her stories and tells them through a style and voice that are definitely one-of-a-kind. Her most well known creations are The Desert Peach, which features the humorous – if not rampagingly Camp – adventures of Field Marshal Erwin Rommell’s homosexual brother in the deserts of World War II Africa, and the star of this particular volume, Stinz Löwhard, the Half-Horse.

Using an idealised Bavarian agricultural landscape as her starting point, Barr has been taking good-natured pot-shots at humanity with an affable centaur soldier-turned-farmer and his family, since 1986 when she adapted characters from her own book into the lead strip in Eclipse Comics’ fantasy anthology The Dreamery.

The stories here, mostly printed from her postings on www.moderntales.com, occur in a universe that has expanded enormously from the simple life in the idyllic Geisel Valley. Stinz’s world has bloomed into a full blown tapestry of drama, politics, war and wild adventure, and the characters have aged accordingly.

The warmth and surreptitious venom of Barr’s sallies against contemporary society are still in evidence here, but, as always the sly commentary is stiletto tip not battle axe. This volume also contains the third (and final?) chapter of ‘Bosom Buddies,’ a new yarn about an American G. I. and German Officer transported from World War II to another dimension where they are transformed into centaurs and enslaved by humans with horse’s heads.

Barr’s work is distinctive and honest but not to everybody’s taste, which is a shame as she has lots to say and a truly wondrous way of saying it.

© 1st March 2004 Donna Barr. All rights reserved.

By Brian Azzarello, Marcelo Frusin & various (Vertigo)
ISBN 1-84576-453-6

The mysteries continue and deepen as the spiritually bereft and morally bankrupt town of Blackwater further festers under Union occupation in the days and months after the American Civil War. The freed slaves are no better off under Northern rule, returning southern men have taken to wearing white sheets whilst exacting bloody reprisals and the ordinary citizens are terrified that their lives and their secrets will be found out by either the Yankees or worse yet, returned Confederate hard man Wes Cutter.

Nobody is sure what Cutter wants. He’s asking uncomfortable questions about the fate of his missing wife, and he doesn’t want to be anybody’s friend. Moreover, since the military commander and his Carpetbagging bosses have made Cutter the sheriff of Blackwater he’s a traitor with the authority to get away with whatever he wants.

How the guilty-as-sin townsfolk react to Occupation Forces, former slave/Union soldier and now bounty hunter Atticus Mann, the rabble-rousing, murderous renegade Confederate returnees let alone despised the sheriff is chillingly and graphically depicted by Danijel Zezelj, Werther Dell’edera and Marcelo Frusin when the citizens become victims of a campaign of murder.

Combining classic Western themes with contemporary twists such as flamboyant serial killers and protracted murder mysteries, Brian Azzarello even manages to include hot-off-the-presses political metaphor in this twisted, stark and uncompromising series (collecting issues #6-12 of the monthly Vertigo comic book). A brilliant Western; a dazzling comic strip. Get it if you’re old enough and tough enough.

© 2006 Brian Azzarello & Marcelo Frusin. All Rights Reserved.

By Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson (Titan Books)
ISBN: 1-84576-494-3

Writer Garth Ennis takes his utter disregard of the super-hero genre to a whole new level with this series about a team of dedicated professionals in a world more than over-flowing with super-powered individuals.

Billy Butcher is an old soldier. He knows how the world works and what powerful men and women are really like. He also sees how super-heroes get to do what they like and get away with it, cloaked as much by influence and celebrity as they are by godlike powers and abilities.

Striking a Devil’s bargain with the CIA and other establishment authorities he forms a team to watch the metahumans, and, when necessary, to give malefactors a bit of a slapping to remind them who really runs the planet.

Told from the point of view of Wee Hughie, an inoffensive little lad whose dismembered girl-friend was just one more incident of collateral “accountancy” during a super-powered tussle, The Boys is a dark, sardonic, vulgar, wickedly brilliant, funny and touching satire on super-heroes in a real world setting. Ennis’s ability to show us the inner workings of “the other side” often means you feel more sympathy for the devils than for the angels, but that just serves to make clearer his theme that you don’t just need a costume and a Press Kit to be a hero. In a morally ambivalent society there will always be a need for solutions like ‘The Boys.’

Subtle and intense, and subversively underplayed by the excellent Darick Robertson on art, ably augmented by Tony Aviňa’s colouring, this very adult fable for discerning readers is an absolute delight.

© 2007 Spitfire Productions, Ltd , & Darick Robertson. All Rights Reserved.

 

By Troy Hickman & Various (Top Cow)
ISBN: 1-5824-0436-4

At first glance this little gem appears to a wry and savvy blending of Cheers, Friends, and Astro City, but a closer scrutiny reveals a rather unique viewpoint and talent working here. The premise is simple enough. In a universe awash with the standard clichés of superheroes ‘Common Grounds’ is the name of a chain of Coffee Shops that caters to the ultra-powered, the drastically mutated and the hyper-enhanced.

The six issues collected here feature a series of short vignettes that concentrate on the quiet moments, the down-time and the back-stories of the many varied denizens of the super-heroic and super-criminal communities.

Illustrated by a pantheon of the industry’s top talents such as Dan Jurgens, Al Vey, Michael Avon Oeming, Ethan Van Scriver, Chris Bachalo, Carlos Pacheco, George Perez, Angel Medina and Sam Kieth among others, it’s wonderfully easy on the eye, but the real pay-off is the scripting by Troy Hickman. Here is someone who can tell a fully realised story in a remarkably short amount of space and with a deft and incisive ear for dialogue.

That in itself would make this a treat, but just when you think you’ve got the measure of the thing Hickman pulls all the seemingly disparate little sit-com skits into one highly emotive and cohesive human drama that takes your breath away. Without realising, the reader has been putting together a jigsaw puzzle, unaware even that that is what they’ve been holding.

Marvellous, charming and enthralling: track a copy down and become a different kind of coffee addict.

© 2004 Top Cow Productions, Onc.

By Rullier & Stanislas (Humanoids/DC Comics)
ISBN: 1-4012-0385-X

I carp on about the overwhelming predictability and numbing sameness of the American comics industry an awful lot. In fact I sometimes wonder if I’ve become bigoted and provincial in my old age. After much soul-searching I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not me, but everything else in the universe that’s wrong.

Seriously though, when it comes to comics and strips, America has historically had an unforgiving attitude to the non hero/horror/SF material, or even the just plain foreign. And before you mention Manga, think about just how many strips the Japanese (and Korean and Hong Kong Chinese etc. etc.) produce in an unbelievably broad number of genres and formats that we never see flopped and translated, especially without the support of a blockbuster toy/TV/card fad to give them a big push.

Huge kudos are then due to DC for linking up with the European publishers Humanoids (Les Humanoides Associes) on another attempt to bring some quality and variety to a fearfully moribund and declining market.

Laurent Rullier has been relating the human adventures of thrill-addicted accountant Victor Levallois since the 1980s. This first translated tale relates how a bored young office worker in 1948 find himself embroiled in a money-laundering scheme and ends up as a dissolute émigré in Indochina just as the Vietnamese begin their war against the occupiers of their country.

Artist Stanislas renders the real word in a powerfully engaging Naïve-ist style (which the back cover blurb laboriously likens to Hergé’s Tin Tin) to create a sharp, and compelling human drama that successfully plays against a powerfully iconic period of history.

I regret that even DC’s market clout couldn’t bring this sort of work to a broad enough comic community to sustain itself and generate some variety in the home crop, but maybe a few concerts might eventually open wide those floodgates..

English version © 2004 Humanoids Inc., Los Angeles (USA). All rights reserved.