Category: Graphic Novels

 

By Jason Aaron & Cameron Stewart (Vertigo)
ISBN 1-84576-561-3

Viet Nam scarred the American psyche the way the current Gulf War will. Depending on your politics you will either agree or disagree with that statement. What is indisputable is the effect Viet Nam still has on the American consumer. So it is intriguing to see an attempt to portray that earlier conflict less in term of “Us and Them” and more as “You and Me”.

This superb tale contrasts the journey from happy home to bloody combat of surly average teen Billy Everette, his counterpart, farmer’s son Vo Binh Dai, and their predestined clash at the Battle of Khe Sanh.

Drafted from his Alabama home, Everette is a reluctant screw-up turned into an average Marine by the sheer hell of Boot Camp, where even the terrifying and very real hallucinations and delusions he suffers from can’t keep him from that dreaded Tour of Duty. In contrast, the patriotic and dutiful Vo Dai enlists in the People’s Army of Vietnam, endures starvation and disease on this long march south, determined to sell his life dearly to free his country from oppression. He too is plagued both by doubts of his worth, and terrifying hallucinations.

This simple tale, powerfully told and subversively drawn is a sensitive, darkly magical, horrific parable about war, politics and insanity, if indeed, they aren’t all the same thing in the end.

This volume also contains sketches and artist Cameron Stewart’s photo diary of his research trip to modern Viet Nam, and hopefully that gentle counterpoint to history’s blunders can offer a shred of hope to soldiers and families currently reliving the traumas of another age.

© 2007 Jason Aaron & Cameron Stewart. All Rights Reserved.

 

By various (Marvel Comics)
ISBN 0-7851-0749-5

Extraordinarily poor example of how to cash in on a Big Budget Blockbuster, this slim adaptation of the first X-Men movie (47 pages), scripted by Ralph Macchio and illustrated by Anthony Williams and Andy Lanning, is augmented by trio of past tales to flesh out the characters and fill up the extra pages.

The adaptation itself is sound, if a little poorly paced, but the art is muddied by a presumed attempt to mirror the muted darkness of the film. If you don’t know the plot some humans are mutating to the next stage of evolution, the humans are frightened and the mutants themselves are splintering into two factions, one for co-existence the other for separation and/or conquest.

My major problem with this is confusion. If the reader is a newcomer fresh from the film, the radically different characters in the rest of the book – but with the same names – must be baffling. The costumes are different, the powers and histories don’t match, and even the four colour palette of ‘proper comic art’ is totally unlike the initial story.

Also included are the two-part ‘Magneto Triumphant’ story from Uncanny X-Men #112 and 113, by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, the story of Rogue’s joining the X-Men from #171 (by Claremont and Walt Simonson) and the first four chapters of the ‘Weapon X’ semi-origin of Wolverine from Marvel Comics Presents #72-75.

Irrespective of the quality of the reprints selected, these are not the same X-Men as the film features and not even the same kind of story. To leap from the stripped down film script where almost all the players are ciphers to Chris Claremont at the peak of his hidden history and extended sub-plotting phase of writing is cruel and self-defeating.

Surely The House of Ideas could do better than this?

© 1977, 1983, 1990, 1991, 2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved

 

By Jack Jackson (Kitchen Sink Press)
ISBN 0-87816-081-7

Comix legend Jack Jackson combined his love of historical documentary with the Lovecraftian horrors of the cosmic void for this wonderful period supernatural thriller, skilfully woven into the fabric and lore of the Southwest desert lands that we now know as Texas.

When a silvery entity crashes to Earth in a blazing fireball, it galvanises the fading dreams of Xotl, a young Faraone warrior who had lost faith in his gods. As the years pass, the natives worship the power of the thing, and when the mighty Apaches conquer them they turn to the newly arrived Europeans for help. This tragic mistake is revealed too late when the tribe finds that Priests and colonist might speak of God but only truly worship wealth. When they learn of the Cosmic Slug that fell from the stars, all they can see is the overwhelming wealth its silver mantle represents.

The decades long battle between the Apaches and the Missionaries to control the silver makes for a powerful if cynical tale, full of the superb artistry, spellbinding storytelling, and the powerful aura of authenticity that is Jackson’s most telling narrative tool. Based on the ancient Texas stories and legends of ‘Blanco’ and ‘Negro Bultos ‘(supernatural treasure mounds), this most fantastic story should be, has to be true, if only because he has drawn it.

Superb and compelling, this is a must-read item for any serious fan of both comics and horror fiction.

© 1986, 1987, 1989 Jack Jackson. All Rights Reserved.

 

By Geoff Johns, Amanda Conner, Paul Levitz & Joe Staton (DC Comics)
ISBN 1-84576-280-0

Back when DC’s continuity had multiple – one could almost say infinite – Earths, there were different versions of the same character. Before Crisis on Infinite Earths rationalised all that, and long before they changed it all back again, younger writers like Gerry Conway and Paul Levitz chose to emphasise the differences between versions. So if Superman of Earth 1 (“our Earth”) had a cute cousin called Supergirl, the Earth 2 Man of Steel would have a raunchier (at least eventually – in her initial appearance she was just plain jailbait) more aggressive counterpart, and with her own name.

Power Girl debuted as part of the ‘All Star Squadron’ in 1975, designed by Ric Estrada and Wally Wood, and promptly became one of the most prominent members of the team, literally burgeoning into a implausibly pneumatic Amazon, consequently becoming a huge favourite with the fans, editorially assessed as being primarily male, and mostly young teens.

The first tale in this volume is from her three issue run in DC try-out comic Showcase (#97-97) in 1978. This good old-fashioned super-hero yarn featured many Justice Society guest-stars and established a new secret identity, whilst clarifying her origins. Written by Levitz, the art was by the acquired-taste art team of Joe Staton and Joe Orlando, with Dick Giordano providing a more tradition inking style for the latter parts of the tale.

After Crisis on Infinite Earths, a new origin had to be constructed for her as the multiverse became one single cosmos, where popular properties were shoe-horned into one continuity. Secret Origins #11 (1987) featured Paul Kupperberg and Mary Wilshire retooled her into a magical refugee from ancient Atlantis, and left it at that, but the illusion of change is everything in comics and as she appeared in another miniseries (not collected here), the very popular Justice League and Justice League: Europe comics and ultimately in JSA her back story grew and fluctuated. By 2006 all the inconsistencies and contradictions meant that another overhaul was on the cards.

With Infinite Crisis looming large on the DC agenda Power Girl became a major factor purely because of her continuity flaws. Reprinting relevant extracts from JSA #32 and #39, the convoluted trail leads us into her starring role in JSA Classified #1-4 (which comprises the remainder of this trade paperback).

The stage is set for a delightful adventure that combines wit and humour with an obvious love of all the minutiae of this character when writer Geoff Johns and artists Amanda Conner, Peter Snejbjerg, Patrick Gleason, Jimmy Palmiotti and Christian Alamy employ the table-turning tactic of embracing all Power Girl’s multiple identities and origin’s in a bravura piece of creative showmanship that is a guilty joy for any super hero fan. But be warned, this doesn’t resolve much: the entire show is a prelude to Infinite Crisis (which I will deal with in due course).

On its own terms this is a passable piece of eye-candy for the faithful, but might be a little daunting for new readers. If that not a problem, the stories and especially the art has a lot to offer. And of course she does have really, really large breasts.

There, that’s much clearer now isn’t it?

© 1978, 1987, 2002, 2005 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

By Will Eisner (Kitchen Sink Press – Published most recently by DC Comics)
ISBN: 1-5638-9678-8

This thinly disguised diary of the early days of the American comic book industry might be short on action and page count but the strength of the aspirations shine through. Creative people seem to gravitate towards each other, and depression era tales abound with big dreams fuelled by desperation, against a backdrop of comradeship. The politics of revolution simmer in the minds and unfilled bellies of the poor. Characters we all should recognize make their choices and move on to become the gods of popular or even High Culture we all grew older with. Can you spot ’em all?

There is an added impetus for the afficionado of the strips. Not only engaging characters, not merely an insider’s perspective on the beginnings of our beloved obsession, not at last a direct link to history that the rest of world thinks worth remembering, but also a real glimpse inside the minds and hearts of the creative wizards that started it all.

Covering a period rife with daily human drama, and exploring an age where dreams were common and creativity unshackled, The Dreamer is a captivating reverie of how comics were, how they work and delivered in the best manner of one of comics’ greatest innovators and practitioners.

© 1986, 2004 Will Eisner.

 

By Will Eisner
Published most recently by WW Norton & Co ISBN: 0-3933-2803-1
DC Comics edition ISBN: 1-5638-9789-X

Eisner’s elegiac fascination with the ghetto culminated in this series of interlocking life stories set during the Great Depression. The tenement at 55 Dropsie Avenue, stage for so many of his later dramas, was the cohering force for a disparate crowd of survivors to come together. The lives of an aging carpenter and his family, a bankrupted gentile stockbroker, and an Italian illegal immigrant are welded together by the forces of poverty, political unrest and the rise of organised crime. This vast yet concentrated human melting pot provided Eisner with a microscope to examine the strengths of the human spirit during a time that shook and crushed many American Dreamers.

Eisner skilfully sets the grand passions of Love, Greed, Laughter, Ambition and Malice against his preferred backdrop of Jewish folk culture. His unquestioned mastery of the graphic form subtly understates and with the narrative enhanced by the canny selection and utilisation of headlines and quotes from newspapers of the period, he contrives to embed the reader in the grim, ferocious yet oh-so-ordinary world of 1930s New York.

A Life Force once again confirms his single-minded conviction of the overwhelming power of the Human Spirit to overcome adversity and his belief that the medium of comics was an ideal one to handle the big questions in life. This is one of those works that no real comics fan can afford to ignore. Do so at your own cost.

© 1983, 1984, 1985, 1988, 2004. Will Eisner.