Category: Graphic Novels

 

By Rick Geary (NBM/Comics Lit)
ISBN 1-56163-498-0

Quirky crime-historian Rick Geary presents another captivating slice of morbid fascination in this subtly engrossing account of one of the biggest unsolved mysteries of the nineteenth century, via the vehicle of his graphic novel series ‘A Treasury of Victorian Murder’.

In unsettled Kansas, in the period immediately following the American Civil War, a family of German speaking immigrants settled near the Osage Trail and built a General Store-cum-Hotel equidistant between the nascent townships of Cherry Vale, Parsons and Thayer. By the time they vanished four years later, as few as ten but probably many, many travellers and settlers had been robbed and murdered, before the Benders simply vanished from the sight of man.

Geary, with supreme style and dry wit, presents the facts and the best of the rumours in his inimitable cartoon style to create yet another unforgettable masterpiece of Gothic whimsy.

© 2007 Rick Geary. All Rights Reserved.

 

By Carol Lay (Last Gasp)
ISBN 0-86719-659-9

During the creative boom of the late 1980s, a vast outpouring of comic material found its way onto the shelves, much of it excellent, dealing with a variety of topics and genres in a number of styles. When the boom became a bust lots of great strips died along with the trash – of which there was an incredible amount. Also a casualty was the spirit of innovation and expectation.

Good Girls, published by Fantagraphics (and later Rip-Off Press), featured two series by professional and underground cartoonist Carol Lay. Along with the tribulations of Miss Lonely Hearts – an agony aunt of sorts – was the ongoing saga of a lost baby heiress (“Richest Woman in the World”) raised by African Tribesmen who practised female ritual disfigurement. Eventually the adult Irene Van de Kamp is returned to modern western society, where even her billions cannot buy her acceptance and piece of mind.

To Western eyes she is truly hideous. It is to the credit of the character, that she endures cheerfully, however, eschewing any kind of corrective surgery or procedures. By her own deeply held aesthetic lights, she is beautiful and wants to remain that way.

Using the art and narrative style of traditional romance comics as a vehicle, Lay examines social mores and aesthetic taboos, and especially power of conformity to affect the most primal of emotions, Love and Desire (with a huge side order of Greed). Don’t let my pomposity fool you, though. This is a romance, and a daring, funny charming one at that.

Her skill as artist and storyteller in relating the picaresque tribulations are subtly subversive, and you will soon lose any reservations you might initially have been inflicted with. This is wonderful example of grow-up comic literature. The initial series never reached a conclusion, and this volume also contains all-new episodes that conclude the saga of the beautiful, irrepressible and indomitable Irene.

© 2007 Carol Lay. All Rights Reserved.

 

By Various (Bongo Comics)
ISBN: 1-85286-669-1

The Simpsons phenomenon quickly fed back into its cartooning roots, and Bongo Comics was formed as an adjunct to the television show, to provide extra Springfield madness for the masses.

It is a credit to all concerned that the comics (issues #6 through #9 of which are reprinted here) manage to capture much of the tone, quality and thankfully, humour of the series, whilst paying their own eccentric tributes to the comic industry via the vehicle of ‘including’ comic books that Bart Simpson would be reading.

In this volume are: ‘Be-Bop-a-Lisa’ as the smart one sells out her musical integrity by creating “Speed Jazz” or Spazz music, whilst ‘Chief Wiggum’s Pre-Code Crime Comics’ provides the cautionary tale ‘The End of El Barto’. Homer stars in ‘The Greatest D’oh on Earth’, a tale of the worst circus in the world, and Rainier Wolfcastle stars in ‘Dead to the Last Drop’ from the highly dubious McBain Comics.

The entire cast feature in the Fantasic Voyage parody ‘I Shrink, Therefore I’m Small’, and the spoofing continues with Mrs Krabappel’s adventure as ‘Edna: Queen of the Congo’. The publishing business itself gets a cartoony kicking when Lisa’s “sexed-up” diary (courtesy of Bart, naturally) becomes the latest tell-all best-seller in ‘The Purple Rose of Springfield’, and the merriment concludes with a Popeye pastiche selection from ‘Barney Gumble Comics’entitled ‘Asleep at the Well’.

It’s difficult to judge creative input when producing work for such a highly defined and recognised licensed property, but the excellent work of Bill Morrison, Andrew Gottlieb, Gary Glasberg, Tim Bavington, Phil Ortiz, Luis Escobar, Stephanie Gladden, Steve and Cindy Vance and Nathan Kane, under the presumably beady eye of Matt Groening, keeps the gags coming and the pace frenetic, so all concerned deserve a group pat on the back.

This is another timeless piece of comic ordinance that we should use to get kids of all ages into comics. And of course, once we have them, we need stuff of this quality around to keep them.

© 1994, 1995 Bongo Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.

 

By Mike W Barr, Adam Hughes & Rick Magyar (IDW)
ISBN: 1-9332-3906-9

Once upon a time there was a TV show called Moonlighting. It featured the antics of a detective agency and mostly dwelt on the travails of a vivacious blonde lady who owned the place and her relationship with the chief crime-solver, a streetwise good looking guy with oodles of charm.

And that really is the sum total of the similarities between that show and one of the best little comics of the late 1980s. Writer Barr has a wonderful touch with a fair-play mystery story and the characterisation and interplay of ultra-cool sleuth Jennifer Mays with part time consultant, and nerdy true-crime writer Gabriel Webb as they race to solve crimes before you do is a delight of understatement in an era well-known for over-blown pomposity. The art by soon to be super-star artists Adam Hughes and Rick Magyar was fresh and engaging then, and still is now.

The volume at hand was pretty rare for decades but thanks to the perspicacious people at IDW, the series is once again available, in a series of trade paperback collections. If any series was crying out for rediscovery and reprinting, especially in this time of successful and popular crime comics, this was it. You might want to start your investigations immediately.

© 1990, 2006 Mike W Barr. All Rights Reserved.

 

By Alex Raymond (Checker BPG)
ISBN: 0-9741-6643-X

By many lights Flash Gordon is the most influential comic strip in the world. When the hero debuted on Sunday January 7th 1934 (with the superb Jungle Jim running as a supplementary “topper” strip) as an answer to the revolutionary, inspirational, but clunky Buck Rogers of Philip Nolan and Dick Calkins (which also began on January 7th, but in 1929) a new element was added to the wonderment; Classical Lyricism.

Where Buck Rogers had traditional adventures and high science concepts, Flash Gordon reinterpreted Fairy Tale, Heroic Epics and Mythology, spectacularly draping them in the trappings of the contemporary future, with varying ‘Rays’, ‘Engines’ and ‘Motors’ substituting for trusty swords and lances – although there were also plenty of those – and exotic craft and contraptions standing in for Galleons, Chariots and Magic Carpets.

Most important of all, the sheer artistic talent of Raymond, his compositional skills, fine line-work, eye for unmuddled detail and just plain genius for drawing beautiful people and things, swiftly made this the strip that all young artists swiped from.

When all-original comic books began a few years later, literally dozens of talented kids used the clean lined Romanticism of Gordon as their model and ticket to future success in the field of adventure strips. Most of the others went with Milton Caniff’s expressionistic masterpiece Terry and the Pirates (which also began in 1934 – and I’ll get to him another day).

The very first tale begins with a rogue planet about to smash into the Earth. As panic grips the planet, polo player Flash and fellow passenger Dale Arden survive disaster when a meteor fragment downs the airplane they are on. They land on the estate of tormented genius Dr. Hans Zarkov, who imprisons them on the rocket-ship he has built. His plan? To fly the ship directly at the astral invader and deflect it from Earth by crashing into it!

And that’s just in the first, 13-panel episode. ‘On the Planet Mongo’ ran every Sunday until April 15th 1934, when according to this wonderful full-colour book, the second adventure ‘Monsters of Mongo’ began, promptly followed by ‘Tournaments…’ and ‘Caverns of Mongo’. To the readers back then, of course, there were no such artificial divisions. There was just one continuous, unmissable Sunday appointment with sheer wonderment.

The machinations of the utterly evil but magnetic Ming, emperor of the fantastic wandering planet; Flash’s battles and alliances with all the myriad exotic races subject to the Emperor’s will and the gradual victory over oppression captivated America, and the World, in tales that seemed a direct contrast to the increasingly darker reality in the days before World War II.

In short order the Earthlings become firm friends, and in the case of Flash and Dale, much more, as they encounter the beautiful, cruel Princess Aura, the Red Monkey Men, The Lion Men, The Shark Men, Dwarf Men, King Vultan and the Hawkmen.

The rebellion against Ming begins with the awesome ‘Tournaments of Mongo’, a sequence from November 25th that ran until February 24th 1935 – and where Raymond seemed to simply explode with confidence. It was here that the true magic began, with every episode more spectacular than the last. Without breaking step Raymond moved on, and the next tale, which leaves this book on something of a cliffhanger, sees our hero enter ‘The Caverns of Mongo’.

Don Moore assisted Raymond with the writing, beginning soon after the strip first gained popularity, and Moore remained after Raymond departed. Alex Raymond joined the Marines in February 1944, and the last page he worked on was published on April 30th of that year. Mercifully, that still leaves a decade’s worth of spectacular, majestic adventure for Checker to reprint and us to enjoy. Why don’t you join me?

© 2003 King Features Syndicate Inc. ™ Hearst Holdings, Inc.

 

By Robert Kirkman, Phil Hester & Ande Parks (Marvel)
ISBN 0-7851-1962-0

Although something of a one-gag story, this re-tooling of one of Marvel’s oldest, if not most successful, characters has a lot to recommend it. The art team of Phil Hester and Ande Parks are always a joy to see and the script by Robert Kirkman is sharp and snappy, but the initial premise just doesn’t sit comfortably with me.

Let me make clear, the mini-series collected here was designed to be played for laughs, as well as fitting into modern Marvel continuity. That being said, when veteran super hero Henry Pym designs a new super suit, tricked up with loads of gadgets and capable of shrinking the wearer to ant-size and gives it to super-spy organisation S.H.I.E.L.D., nobody expected it to be stolen by the security men guarding it. Of course nobody expected such a prestigious and efficient organisation to employ such a worthless, shiftless, useless slacker of an agent as Eric O’Grady.

When, after a series of improbable mishaps he acquires the suit, despite the attendant tragedy that always accompanies this sort of origin, he uses his new-found gift to spy on the women’s showers, score with chicks he rescues and generally act like a selfish ass.

With S.H.I.E.L.D., Dr. Pym and just about everybody else after his diminutive butt, O’Grady goes on the run, leaving the field clear for a sequel, but despite all the action, the great pacing, superb visuals and wonderful dialogue, its just doesn’t work. This wishy-washy also-ran just isn’t that likable or empathetic enough. I just don’t care what happens to him.

From a company that pretty much invented the modern comics anti-hero, that’s a pretty damning conclusion to come to. Hopefully any further usage will give him some depth as to augment his lack of height.

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