Love and Rockets: New Stories No. 2


By The Hernandez Brothers (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-168-8

Like clockwork the second volume collecting the latest creations of Los Bros Hernandez appeared and proved well worth the wait, once more leading with the cleanly classical visual sophistication of Jaime’s ‘Ti-Girls Adventures Number 34.

This enchanting super-heroine homage bookends the volume beginning with ‘Part Three: Daughters of Doom’ and concluding with the delightful ‘Part Four: Mothers of Mercy’ which finds time and space for poignancy and (rather surreal) family relationships amidst a joyous, vicarious avalanche of costumed mayhem of the type we loved as kids in the 1960s. Not since Scott McCloud’s delicious tribute ‘Destroy!’ has the poetry of gauntleted fisticuffs been so memorably celebrated…

The central portion features Gilberto who contributed two longer pieces this time: the challenging ‘Sad Girl’ wherein young and pneumatic Killer takes an unorthodox and oblique revenge reminiscent of the heady days of Palomar whilst the boldly experimental graphic mime ‘Hypnotwist’ follows a lost and vulnerable young woman on an astonishingly bizarre voyage of discovery…

As with Love and Rockets: New Stories No. 1 these tales form part of an unfolding work-in-progress, and I’m praying that just as with the original series thirty years ago, some unseen connections will reveal themselves to my hungry eyes in the months to come. And even if they don’t, these are still some of the best drawn and intriguing comics tales of the last few years.

A mature fan’s secret delight, don’t miss these books…

© 2009 Gilberto, Jaime and Mario Hernandez. This edition © 2009 Fantagraphics Books.  All Rights Reserved.

Love and Rockets: New Stories No. 1


By The Hernandez Brothers (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-951-7

In the 1980s a qualitative revolution forever destroyed the clichéd, stereotypical ways different genres of comic strips were produced and marketed. Most prominent in destroying the comfy pigeonholes we’d built for ourselves were three guys from Oxnard, California; Jaime, Mario (occasionally) and Gilberto Hernandez.

Love and Rockets was an anthology comics magazine that featured the slick, intriguing, originally sci-fi tinted larks of punky young things Maggie and Hopey – las Locas – and the heart-warming, terrifying, gut-wrenching soap-opera fantasy of Palomar. The Hernandez Boys, gifted synthesists all, entranced us all with incredible stories that sampled a thousand influences conceptual and actual – everything from Archie Comics, kids TV, the exotica of American Hispanic pop culture to German Expressionism and masked wrestlers. There was also perpetual backdrop displaying the holy trinity of youth: Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll – or at least alternative music and punk.

The result was pictorial and narrative dynamite.

Mario only officially contributed on rare occasions but the slick and enticing visual forays by Jaime explored friendship and modern love whilst destroying stereotypes of feminine attraction through his fetching coterie of Bright Young Things and Gilberto created the super-hyper-real landscape of Palomar: a playground of wit and passion created for the extended serial Heartbreak Soup. Here was a poor Latin-American village with a vibrant, funny and fantastically quotidian cast.

Everything from life death, adultery, magic, serial killing and especially gossip could happen its meta-fictional environs, and did, as the artist mined his own post-punk influences in a deceptively effective primitivist art style incorporating the mythologies of comics, music, drugs, strong women, gangs, sex and family using a narrative format informed by everything from Magical Realism to Saturday morning cartoons.

Despite gaining huge critical acclaim but little financial success the brothers temporarily went their own ways but a few years ago creatively reunited to produce annual collections of new material. This initial volume of 112 pages finds Jaime once more pastiching female superheroes and the Mexican Masked Wrestler phenomenon in the captivating ‘Ti-Girls Adventures Number 34 Part One: The Search for Penny Century’ – an extended whimsical romp featuring Maggie and clashing dynasties of lady crime-fighters all trying to subdue an old friend crazed by her gifts and the pressures of modern motherhood. The second part ‘Penny is found’ closes the volume but the story is so big that it continues into the 2009 volume…

Brother Beto opted for a selection of shorter tales ranging from the quirky newspaper strip parody ‘The Funny Pages’, the graphic parable of ‘Papa’, whose Job-like faith and determination were singularly tested and ‘The New Adventures of Duke and Sammy’ – a broadly absurdist spoof of the Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis team, whose outer space exploits are as wacky as any of their 1950s DC comics outings.

‘Victory Dance’ is an enigmatic, obscurantist offering on one of life’s Big Questions, after which Mario returns to script ‘Chiro el Indio’, a barbed satire on Catholic/white treatment of native South Americans cunningly disguised as a cartoon sitcom for Gilberto to draw, whilst ‘Never say Never’ is another highly adult cartoon spoof from Beto alone starring a gambling kangaroo, which acts as palette-cleanser for the sheer graphic exuberance of ‘?’; a free-ranging, visual free-association trip.

With the aforementioned ‘Ti-Girls Adventures Number 34 Part Two: ‘Penny is found’

closing out this volume on a cliffhanger, it’s only fair to state that initial response to this new work was mixed and guarded when it first appeared. However with the hindsight of a second edition released and a third on the way it’s safe to assume that Los Bros still know exactly what they are doing and that the magic is unfolding as it should…

Stark, charming and irresistibly seductive, Love and Rockets: New Stories is a grown up comics fan’s dream come true and remains – just as it predecessors have been – the forge of the cutting edge of graphic narrative.

© 2008 Gilberto, Jaime and Mario Hernandez. This edition © 2008 Fantagraphics Books.  All Rights Reserved.

Jack Kirby’s OMAC: One Man Army Corps


By Jack Kirby with D. Bruce Berry & Mike Royer (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-84576-922-2

There’s a magnificent abundance of Jack Kirby collections around these days (‘though still not all of it, so I’m not completely happy yet) and this slim hardback compendium re-presents possibly his boldest and most heartfelt creation after the comics landmark that was his Fourth World Cycle.

Famed for his larger than life characters and gigantic, cosmic imaginings, “King” Kirby was an astute, spiritual man who had lived though poverty, gangsterism, the Depression and World War II. He had seen Post-War optimism, Cold War paranoia, political cynicism and the birth and death of peace-seeking counter-cultures. He always looked to the future and he knew human nature intimately. In OMAC: One Man Army Corps, he let his darkest assumptions and prognostications have free rein, and his “World That’s Coming” was far too close to the World we’re now in…

In 1974, with his newest creations inexplicably tanking at DC, Kirby tentatively considered a return to Marvel, but ever the consummate professional he scrupulously carried out every detail of his draconian DC contract. When The Demon was cancelled he needed to find another title to maintain his Herculean (Jack was legally expected to deliver 15 completed pages of art and story per week) commitments and returned to an idea he had shelved in 1968.

That was to re-interpret Captain America into a distant future where all Kirby’s direst prognostications and fears could be made manifest. In 1974 he returned to those re-imaginings and produced a nightmare scenario that demanded not a hero but a warrior.

Dubbing his Day-After-Tomorrow dystopia “The World That’s Coming”, Kirby let his mind run free – and scared – to produce a frighteningly close appreciation of our now, where science and wealth have outstripped compassion and reason, and humanity teeters on the brink of self-inflicted global destruction.

OMAC #1 launched in September-October 1974 and introduced the Global Peace Agency, a world-wide Doomwatch police force who created a super-soldier to crisis-manage the constant threats to a species with hair-trigger fingers on nuclear stockpiles, chemical weapons of mass destruction and made-to-measure biological horrors.

Base human nature was the true threat behind this series, and that was first demonstrated by the decent young man Buddy Blank, who whilst working at Pseudo-People Inc., discovers that the euphemistically entitled Build-A-Friend division hides a far darker secret than merely pliant girls that come in kit-form.

Luckily Buddy had been singled out by the GPA and genius Professor Myron Forest for eternal linkage to the sentient satellite Brother Eye, his atoms reconstructed until he became a living God of War, and the new-born human weapon easily destroys his ruthless employers before their murderous plans can be fully realised. ‘Buddy Blank and Brother Eye’ was followed by a truly prophetic tale, wherein impossibly wealthy criminal Mister Big purchased an entire city simply to assassinate Professor Forest in ‘The Era of the Super-Rich!’

Kirby’s tried and trusted approach was always to pepper high concepts throughout blazing action, and #3 was the most spectacular yet. OMAC fought ‘One Hundred Thousand Foes!’ to get to the murderous Marshal Kafka; terrorist leader of a Rogue-State with a private army, WMDs and a solid belief that the United Nations couldn’t touch him. Sound familiar…?

That incredible clash concluded in #4’s ‘Busting of a Conqueror!’ and by #5 Kirby had moved on to other new crimes for a new world. The definition of a criminal tends to blur when you can buy anything – even justice – but rich old people cherry-picking young men and women for brain-implantation is (hopefully) always going to be a no-no. Still, you can sell or plunder some organs even now…

Busting the ‘New Bodies for Old!!’ racket took two issues, and after the One Man Army Corps smashed ‘The Body Bank!’ he embarked on his final adventure. Water shortage was the theme of the last tale, but as our hero trudged across a dry and desolate lake bottom amidst the dead and dying marine life he was horrified to discover the disaster was the work of one man. ‘The Ocean Stealers!’ (issue #7) introduced Doctor Skuba, a scientific madman who had mastered the very atomic manipulation techniques that had turned feeble Buddy Blank into an unstoppable war machine.

Joe Kubert drew the cover to OMAC #8 ‘Human Genius Vs Thinking Machine’; an epic episode that saw Brother Eye apparently destroyed as Skuba and Buddy Blank died in an incredible explosion.

But that final panel is a hasty, last-minute addition by unknown editorial hands, for the saga was never actually finished. Kirby, his contract completed, had promptly returned to Marvel and new challenges such as Black Panther, Captain America, 2001, Devil Dinosaur, Machine Man and especially The Eternals.

Hormone treatments, Virtual Reality, medical computers, satellite surveillance, genetic tampering and all the other hard-science predictions in OMAC pale into insignificance against Kirby’s terrifyingly accurate social observations in this bombastic and tragically incomplete masterpiece. OMAC is Jack Kirby’s Edwin Drood, an unfinished symphony of such power and prophecy that it informs not just the entire modern DC universe and inspires ever more incisive and intriguing tales from the King’s artistic inheritors but still presages more truly scary developments in our own mundane and inescapable reality…

As always in these wondrously economical collections it should be noted that the book is also stuffed with un-inked Kirby pencilled pages and roughs, and Mark Evanier’s fascinating, informative introduction is a fact-fan’s delight. And as ever, Jack Kirby’s words and pictures are an unparalleled, hearts-and-minds grabbing delight no comics lover could resist.

Jack Kirby is unique and uncompromising. If you’re not a fan or simply not prepared to see for yourself what all the fuss has been about then no words of mine will change your mind. That doesn’t alter the fact that Kirby’s work from 1937 to his death in 1994 shaped the entire American comics scene, affected the lives of billions of readers and thousands of creators in all areas of artistic endeavour around the world for generations and still wins new fans and apostles every day, from the young and naive to the most cerebral of intellectuals. His work is instantly accessible, irresistibly visceral, deceptively deep whilst being simultaneously mythic and human: and just plain Great.

© 1974, 1975, 2009 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

For a Few Troubles More – A Crisis Graphic Novel


By Garth Ennis & John McCrea, with Wendy Simpson (Fleetway)
ISBN: 0-85386-208-8

After the moving odyssey of Tom Boyd in Troubled Souls and chilling sardonic disillusionment of True Faith, the third Crisis epic from Garth Ennis again broke entirely new ground with a mini-masterpiece of eternal fraternal comradeship and raucous, bawdy profanity that touched all the classic keystones of masculine comedy: women, booze, toilet humour and the trouble your best mates get you into …

For a Few Troubles More shows another, more joyous side of Belfast, and features the antics of Dougie and Ivor, two peripheral characters and drinking buddies from the story of Boyd, who stole centre-stage and ran off giggling with it (think “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Schmucks”…)

Dougie Patterson is getting married. His fiancé’s extremely imposing father insists on it. He doesn’t actually like Dougie but no grandchild of his is going to be born out of wedlock. It’s not so bad, really. The wayward lad loves Valerie, and his fearsome father-in-law-to-be is finding him both a job and somewhere to live. All Dougie has to do is learn to think before he opens his mouth and lose the bad influences in his useless life.

Beat mate Ivor Thompson is the fleshily overabundant epitome of a bad influence. Crafty, stupid, and a fabulist far too fond of the “Brilliant Idea”, this failed terrorist (who shot himself in the foot on his first mission) is fresh out of prison and looking to make a little cash when his uncle Shuggie lets him in on a family secret: the elder Thompson runs the most diabolical Poteen still in the city. (Pronounced “Puh-Cheen,” an illicit, illegal and unwise homemade spirit made from things better left unsaid, inexplicably beloved by Sons of Erin everywhere. I tried some in 1975 and to this day my skull pounds and my vision blurs whenever I move my head too quickly).

With the wedding day looming and no-one better available, Dougie unwisely lets Ivor be his Best Man, stupidly forgetting his old pal’s passion for practical jokes, and the fact that’s he’s cursed by all the gods of good taste there have ever been.

Ivor’s a survivor. Nothing gets him down for long: not Shuggie’s sudden death, a gang of criminals who want the vast quantity of Poteen they were promised or an imminent beating by the biggest bully in Belfast. In fact it takes the return of his uncle as an entirely different kind of spirit to give him even a moment’s pause, and he’s determined that Dougie’s honeymoon will be one he’ll never forget…

This blend of viperish one-liners and classic slapstick shows all Ennis’s later themes in full display: friendship, male bonding, studied suspicion and mandatory disrespect of any authority that thinks itself sacrosanct. It is a paean of praise for the little guy, starring two of the most ordinary heroes ever seen.

Clearly the lads struck a chord, as they have periodically returned as the “stars” of the occasional series Dicks, but this first tightly disciplined slice of chaos is still, for me at least, their greatest moment – particularly because of the superbly evocative colour art of John McCrea and Wendy Simpson.

A riotous, uproarious tawdry delight for grown-ups with a sense of vulgar absurdity, these are not troubles you can do without.
© 1990 Fleetway Publications. All Rights Reserved.

Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms


By Fumiyo Kouno (jaPress/Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-721-1

First published in 2003/2004 in Japan’s Weekly Manga Action YÅ«nagi no Machi, Sakura no Kuni (Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms) is an award-winning (2004 Grand Prize for manga, Japan Media Arts Festival and the 2005 Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize Creative Award) collection of interlinked, generational short stories dealing with the aftermath of the atom bombing of Hiroshima, and particularly the treatment of bomb-affected survivors (“hibakusha”) by a culture that has traditionally shunned imperfection and studiously ignored unpleasant truths. The tale was made into an award-winning feature film and radio serial in 2007.

The project was instigated by an editor rather than Fumiyo Kouno, who is a native of modern Hiroshima, but never considered herself as being affected by the ghastly events of August 6th 1945.

The first story ‘Town of Evening Calm is set in 1955, and follows teenager Minami Hirano as she goes about her daily life in the slowly recovering city. She lives with her ailing mother and sister in a seedy shack, and thinks of those she’s lost: father and two sisters to the bomb and baby brother Asahi who was mercifully staying with rural relatives when the bomb hit.

She hasn’t seen him since: her aunt thought it best to keep the healthy boy away, and subsequently adopted him. The surviving family bravely struggle as seamstresses and clerks, trying to save enough money to visit him. Minami has an admirer; a shy young man named Yutaka Uchikoshi, who tries to shower the quietly independent girl with presents, but ten years after the bomb, the explosion is inexorably still claiming victims. As tragedy looms Minami is unaware that her long-lost brother is coming to see her…

The follow-up ‘Country of Cherry Blossoms’ is divided into two separate tales. The first is set in Tokyo in 1987 with tomboy schoolgirl Nanami Ishikawa railing against her life. She is Asahi’s daughter – a second generation victim – and has never met her hibakusha relatives, but when her brother Nagio is hospitalised she sneaks into his room with new friend Toko Tone and showers him with cherry blossom petals to show him the spring he’s missing, unaware that his asthmatic condition is considered by many to be the taint of the bomb…

Admonished by her grandmother she goes on about her life, but as the family moves nearer the hospital she abruptly loses touch with Toko…

Part two takes up the story in 2004. Asahi has recently retired and moved in with Nanami, when medical graduate Nagio mentions that he has seen Toko at the hospital where he works. Nanami has other things to worry about: Asahi is disappearing for days at a time and she thinks he might be senile…

One day she follows him, and just as years before with Nagio, Toko, a virtual stranger, appears and shares her journey and revelations. The troubled old man is travelling to the rebuilt Hiroshima, driven by an irresistible impulse, and as they follow him Nanami discovers that real reason Toko stopped seeing her family…

Pensive, serene and deftly sensitive, almost elegiac, this book deals with uncomfortable issues by advocating tolerance, understanding and endurance rather than the bombastic unyielding defiance of Keiji Nakazawa’s landmark Barefoot Gen, and the message hits home all the harder for it.

Initially reluctant to produce a work about Hiroshima, Fumiyo Kouno found a strong voice within – and her own unrealised, unexpressed attitudes – when faced with the behaviour still directed toward hibakusha more than five decades later. As she states in the afterword of this superb commemorative hardcover it was “unnatural and irresponsible for me to consciously try to avoid the issue” and she decided that “drawing something is better than drawing nothing at all.”

This quietly magnificent tribute to the truism that “Life goes on” and the proposition that even polite and passive intolerance should always be resisted is a book every politician in the world should read. It also holds a harsh lesson every cosy, comfortable family in existence needs to absorb.
© 2003 Fumiyo Kouno. All Rights Reserved.

True Faith – A Crisis Graphic Novel


By Garth Ennis & Warren Pleece (Fleetway)
ISBN: 978-1-85386-201-0

Following on from a startling debut with Troubled Souls the barely weaned Garth Ennis first hit the controversy circuit with this brilliantly dark and nihilistic exploration of the corrupting idiocy of religion that also catapulted him to the forefront of “must read” comics writers.

Nigel Gibson is a student with a problem. He really fancies Angela Hyman, but she’s a devout Christian, and the only way he’s getting anywhere near her knickers is by hanging out with her ghastly Scripture Union pals. It doesn’t help his hormone-fuelled mood that the teachers are all bullying dicks, his mates are actually brain-dead thugs and that television lobotomized his family years ago.

Terence Adair however was a man with everything: loving wife and baby on the way; successful plumbing business, and the comfort and security of the Lord’s love to keep them all. But when his wife and child both die in the delivery room his world comes apart and he determines to kill the one responsible: God.

With outrageous, magical, cynical wit Ennis engineers the meeting of the horny, disaffected youth and the man of broken faith, and the lad is sucked into Adair’s world of insanity, horror and rage as God’s houses are systematically torched, and his priests shot. Thatcher’s government reels, the SAS are called in and then things get really strange and out of hand…

The manic humour and dialogue is amazingly polished for a wee lad of 19, and Ennis’ deft skill at switching from situations of utter ridiculousness to Byzantine tragedy and stomach-churning horror is a delight. Moreover, coupled with the uniquely enticing, understated art of Warren Pleece this tale becomes an unforgettable experience that only cowardice stopped from becoming a byword for comics creativity.

Please allow me to elucidate: this inexorably captivating yarn for grown-ups was originally serialized in the ground-breaking “comic with a conscience” Crisis (#29-38, October 1989-February 1990) to great acclaim, and was swiftly collected into a graphic novel upon completion. Within days it became the victim of a concerted and organized Christian hate-campaign, and withdrawn – apparently by order of the publisher: that notable ne’er-do-well and chocolate fireguard Robert Maxwell.

Most copies of the original publication were destroyed (as an occasional employee at the time I felt duty-bound to keep my comp-copy in lieu of a pension) but thankfully Vertigo released an edition in 1997, which, if you’re not prone to religious intolerance or offence you should be able to track down fairly easily.

Go on: you know you want to…
© 1990 Fleetway Publications. All Rights Reserved.

Troubled Souls – A Crisis Graphic Novel


By Garth Ennis & John McCrea (Fleetway)
ISBN: 0-85386-174-X

Aged 19, Garth Ennis dropped out of college to become a writer in 1989, and certainly kicked off with an enviable bang by creating a mini-masterpiece in the thoughtful and engaging Troubled Souls: a multi-layered and wonderfully even-handed exploration of coming-of-age in Belfast during the undeclared civil war euphemistically called “the Troubles.”

Crisis (63 issues from 1988 to1991) was an experiment in socially edgy adult comics launched by Fleetway Publications during the Dog Days of Thatcher’s regime, and it paved the way for many a starry career in its day. After science fiction series New Statesmen and Third World War concluded the magazine became more experimental, reflecting a more contemporary worldview, and new strip Troubled Souls quickly became an unmissable fortnightly treat.

Tom Boyd is a young Protestant man in Belfast at the end of the 1980s. The constant sectarian bloodshed and British occupation have largely left him untouched, except for the economic cataclysm that has made Northern Ireland a place of no jobs and no hope for the young. He lives with his parents and yearns for something better; girlfriend, career prospects, hope.

At least he’s got enough dole money for bevies with his mates…

One notable night in the pub his friend set him up with a blind date, and that’s fine, but when a British Army patrol comes in on a search, a total stranger surreptitiously dumps a gun in his lap and surrenders himself. Shocked and startled, Tom can’t understand why he doesn’t shop the gunman, but his bewilderment turns to rage when he sees what the Squaddies do to the suspect…

Later Catholic terrorist Damien McWilliams reclaims his gun, and insinuates himself into Tom’s life, challenging his cosy preconceptions, terrorising and blackmailing the lad into participating in a bombing. Through it all Tom is the helpless pawn of powerful, corrupt and hate-filled forces, but still finds time for first love, real life and a true friend, but the centuries of hate that have plagued the country can’t be denied or thwarted and a wholly unique and personal tragedy is going to occur whatever he does or doesn’t do…

Poignant, engaging, genial, funny and scary, this richly moving human drama, set on a stage everybody only thought they knew, is still one of the best stories Ennis has ever written, and fellow neophyte John McCrea has seldom produced such varied, evocative, sensitive art since. Because of the subject matter I can understand why it hasn’t been republished, but with twenty years distance and original copies fetching $50 or more isn’t it about time somebody thought about a new edition? Perhaps combined with its more broadly comedic sequel For a Few Troubles More (coming soon to a review blog near you…)?
© 1990 Fleetway Publications. All Rights Reserved.

Pim & Francie: the Golden Bear Days (Artifacts and Bone Fragments)


By Al Columbia (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 9781-60699-304-0

Al Columbia is an incredibly innovative creator who has been pushing the boundaries of what we call narrative art since his earliest days in the industry, and one who has always seemed to generate the wrong kind of “press”. From the days when he assisted and then succeeded Bill Sienkiewicz on Alan Moore’s experimental and unfinished Big Numbers, through Doghead, From Beyonde and the astonishing The Biologic Show Columbia has sought out new ways to tell stories and never shied away from potentially controversial scenes, imagery and even styles of working; equally conversant with highly observed photorealism and the eccentric and economical symbolism of animated film. He has rather unfairly gained a reputation for not finishing what he’s started…

His later works, especially in this oddly disturbing hardback collection, are clearly based on the early cinematic imagery currently in vogue with the West Coast art movement known alternatively as Lowbrow or Pop Surrealism, but although the content may appear similar the intent is radically different. The line and design similarities to the landmark Fleischer Brothers cartoons here create a subtle sense of trusted familiarity that the antics and situations expressly and terrifyingly contradict and overwhelm.

Pim and Francie are pixy-ish waifs resident in a 1920s halcyon neverland, and first appeared in the chilling short story ‘Tar Frogs’ (originally published in Britain’s ’90’s lifestyle driven Deadline magazine and then retooled for The Biologic Show #0 in 1994). They resurfaced in the still uncompleted Peloria Part One (The Biologic Show #1 in 1995) and most recently in Mome #9 (Fall 2007).

In a collection that appears more sketchbook than story, and which calls itself a “broken jigsaw puzzle”, grisly, grotesque images and characters cavort and proceed through a familiar wonderland of fairytale Americana, but look more closely and you can see a story unfolding: a tale of two rascals and perils beyond imagining…

Columbia’s nightmarish, recondite scenario hints at a deeper profundity but his beautiful, clear, dark drawings are open, simple and fiendishly accessible to even the youngest reader so beware who you expose to these amazing astonishing adventures. Appetising, intriguing and addictively profane, this is a delightful excursion to a very wrong place.

See you there…
© 2009 Al Columbia. All Rights Reserved.

Things Undone


By Shane White (NBM/ComicsLit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-563-4

The sheer variety of themes and species in modern cartooning can be quite breathtaking to an old coot who grew up with the severely restricted comics fare of a baby-boomer in Britain – and I wouldn’t have it any other way. These days I can peruse a graphic novel on any subject in any style and incorporating any number of converging genres – and this compelling lit gem comes pretty close to defying categorisation.

Things Undone is a little bit romance, a little bit alternative biography, a little bit punk and a whole lot of terrific. Young Rick Watts is an artist and world-weary peon in the art-consuming field of video games graphics. He’s just moved to Seattle for a new job, but nothing’s really changed and relationship-wise things aren’t going so great either. Long-distance never works so he dragged his girl-friend clear across the country, and his seven year hitch with her couldn’t have ended more badly…

When you can’t catch a break and the new life proves no better than the old one, what can a guy do? And it’s only a matter of time before somebody notices that Rick is a zombie, what with him leaving decaying extremities and eyeballs and such all over the place. Maybe he should just get a gun and do the job right…?

This sharp and bittersweet examination of modern life is funny and poignant, using the populist imagery of the walking dead as an effective metaphor for modern life, but it’s the amazingly comforting art and production (the book is printed in black, white and shocking orange, in a kind of skate-punk cartoon style) that underpins this tale, making the tragic comedic and using confusion as the means of exploring the mundane horrors of urban living.

Clever, witty and one of the most sensitive funny/sad, real/imaginary stories you’ll ever read: so you should.

© 2009 Studiowhite LLC.

Strange Suspense: the Steve Ditko Archives vol.1


By Steve Ditko and various (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60669-289-0

¡Perfect Christmas Present Alert! – For the discerning comics fan

Steve Ditko is one of our industry’s greatest talents and probably America’s least lauded. His fervent desire to just get on with his job and to tell stories the best way he can, whilst the noblest of aspirations, will always be a minor consideration to commercial interests that for so long controlled comics production. So it’s a sublime joy to be able to look at his work from a more innocent time when he was just breaking into the industry, relentlessly honing his craft with genre tales for whichever publisher would have him, unrestricted by censors or intrusive editors.

This superb full colour hardback collection reprints his early works (all of them from the period 1953-1955) comprising stories produced before the draconian and self-inflicted Comics Code Authority sanitised the industry, and although most are wonderfully baroque and bizarre horror stories there are also examples of Romance, Westerns, Crime, Humour and of course his utterly unique Science Fiction tales, cunningly presented in the order he sold them and not the more logical but far less revealing chronological release dates. Sadly there’s no indication of how many (if any) were actually written by the moody master…

Ditko’s first strip sale was held for a few months and printed in Fantastic Fears #5 (published by Ajax/Farrell with a cover-date of January-February 1954); a creepy, pithy tale entitled ‘Stretching Things’, followed here by ‘Paper Romance’ an eye-catching if anodyne tale from Daring Love #1 (September 1953, Gilmor) and a couple of captivating chillers from Simon and Kirby’s Prize Comics hot horror hit Black Magic. ‘A Hole in his Head’ (#27, November-December 1953) combined psycho-drama and time travel whilst the more traditional ‘Buried Alive’ (#28 January-February 1954) was a self-explanatory gothic tale drama.

Stylish cowboy hero the Utah Kid stopped a ‘Range War’ in Blazing Western #1 (January 1954, Timor), and the artist’s long association with Charlton Comics began with the cover and vampire shocker ‘Cinderella’ from The Thing #12 (February 1954). The remainder of the work here was published by Charlton, a small company with few demands.

Their diffident attitude to work was ignore the creative staff as long as they deliver on time: a huge bonus for Ditko, still studiously perfecting his craft and never happy to play office politics. They gave him all the work he could handle and let him do it his way…

After the cover for This Magazine is Haunted #16, (March 1954) comes ‘Killer on the Loose’ a cop story from Crime and Justice #18 (April 1954), and the same month saw him produce the cover and three stories for The Thing #13, ‘Library of Horror’, ‘Die Laughing’ and ‘Avery and the Goblins’. From Space Adventures #10 (Spring 1954) comes the cover and the witty cautionary tale ‘Homecoming’, followed by three tales and a cover from the succeeding issue: ‘You are the Jury’, ‘Moment of Decision’ and the superbly manic ‘Dead Reckoning’.

This Magazine is Haunted #17, (May 1954), again featured a Ditko cover and three spooky tales ‘3-D Disaster, Doom, Death’, ‘Triple Header’ and the intriguingly experimental ‘The Night People.’ That same month he drew the cover and both ‘What was in Sam Dora’s Box?’ and ‘Dead Right’ for mystery title Strange Suspense Stories #18.

He got another shot at gangsters in the licensed title Racket Squad in Action (#11, May-June 1954) producing the cover and stylish caper thriller ‘Botticelli of the Bangtails’ and honed his scaring skills with the cover and four yarns for The Thing #14 (June 1954): ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘The Evil Eye’, the utterly macabre ‘Doom in the Air’ and grisly shocker ‘Inheritance!’

He produced another incredible cover and five stories for the next issue, and as always was clearly still searching for the ultimate in storytelling perfection. ‘The Worm Turns’, ‘Day of Reckoning’, ‘Come Back’, ‘If Looks could Kill’ and ‘Family Mix-up’ range from giant monster yarns to period ghost stories to modern murder black comedies , but throughout, although all clearly by the same artist, no two tales are rendered the same way. Here was a true creator pushing himself to the limit.

He drew the cover and ‘Bridegroom, Come Back’ for This Magazine is Haunted #18, (July 1954), ‘A Nice Quiet Place’ and the cover of Strange Suspense Stories #19, plus the incredible covers of Space Adventures #12 and Racket Squad in Action #11 as well as the cover and two full stories in Strange Suspense Stories #20 (August 1954), ‘The Payoff’ and ‘Von Mohl Vs. The Ants’, but it was clear that his astonishing virtuosity was almost wasted on interior storytelling.

His incredible cover art was compelling and powerful and even the normally laissez-faire Charlton management must have exerted some pressure to keep him producing eye catching visuals that would sell their weakest titles. Presented next are the mind-boggling covers for This Magazine is Haunted #19 (August 1954), Strange Suspense Stories #22 and The Thing #17 (both November 1954) and This Magazine is Haunted #21, (December1954).

The Comics Code Authority began judging comics material from October 26th 1954, by which time Ditko’s output had practically halted. He had contracted tuberculosis and was forced to return to his family in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, until the middle of 1955. From that return to work come the final Ditko Delights in this volume: the cover and a story which originally appeared in Charlton’s Mad Magazine knockoff From Here to Insanity (#10, June 1955). A trifle wordy by modern standards ‘Car Show’ nevertheless displays the sharp, cynical wit and contained comedic energy that made so many Spider-Man/Jonah Jameson confrontations an unforgettable treat a decade later…

This is a cracking collection in its own right but as an examination of one of the art-form’s greatest stylists it is also an invaluable insight into the very nature of comics. This is a book true fans would happily kill or die for…

This edition © 2009 Fantagraphics Books. All Rights Reserved