Category: Graphic Novels

By Mark Millar & Tommy Lee Edwards (Marvel/Panini UK)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-406-5

There’s an old saying in our business that “the Golden Age of comics is ten” (or eight or eleven or… you get the picture). Simply stated it posits that there’s a perfect moment when dawning comprehension and sophistication meets childish wonderment and imagination head-on and whatever you’re reading at that time suddenly transcends Art, Entertainment, Every Thing: it becomes all-encompassing magic.

And no matter what, nothing that follows – cars, sex, extreme ironing – absolutely nothing can touch or tarnish or diminish that Road to Damascus moment.

Hold that thought and consider this collection of the 2008 miniseries from Mark Millar and Tommy Lee Edwards – two superb creators more commonly associated with the older end of the marketplace. In 1985 cynical young Toby Goodman is just getting seriously into comic-books. His local comic store has just turned him on to the maxi-series Marvel Super-Heroes: Secret Wars and the four-colour madness he’s increasingly drawn into acts as a welcome respite from his personal life.

His parents are getting divorced and he’s embarrassed that his cool dad can’t get his life together while the yuppie whiz-kid his mom’s living with seems to be an obnoxious “Mr Perfect.” The old ramshackle Wyncham House where his dad and that weird kid Clyde used to play and collect funny-books twenty years ago has been taken over by a strange bunch of oddballs. They offer Toby’s dad the pristine collection of comics in the cellar – left untouched since Clyde Wyncham was put in a sanatorium – but honest fellow that he is Jerry Goodman tells them to sell the stash to the comic store – just like you or I would…

And then things start to get weird. Toys that don’t exist start appearing. People dressed like Marvel Super-villains start appearing around the tiny town. A giant green monster who looks and talks like the Incredible Hulk catches Toby snooping…

This intriguing tale recounts what happens when a fantasy world invades our real one, and the everyday actions of comic life become gritty horror as all the villains of the Marvel Universe are brutally unleashed on a Small Town USA. As the carnage escalates only Toby knows what to do. Using a portal in Wyncham House the boy goes into the Marvel Universe to fetch the super-heroic cavalry…

This tale reads like a movie plot seeking to marry the way-out world of comics to our world, and has some pleasant echoes those Gardner Fox days of Infinite Earths as well as a flavour of Marvel’s own boldly innovative Nth Man series (by Larry Hama and Ron Wagner, from 1989-91 if you’re interested) and it won’t be to everybody’s taste, but if you’re a casual visitor or lapsed fan this well-executed yarn might tickle some old fancies.

© 2007, 2008 Marvel Entertainment, Inc. and its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. (A BRITISH EDITION BY PANINI UK LTD)

By Carl Barks (Gladstone)
ISBN: 0-944599-27-3

Carl Barks is one of the greatest storytellers America has ever produced, and was finally beginning to get the recognition he deserved when he died in 2000, a few months shy of his hundredth birthday.

His early life is well-documented elsewhere if you need detail, but briefly, Barks worked as a animator at Disney’s studio before quitting in 1942 to work in comics. With studio partner Jack Hannah he adapted a Bob Karp script for an unmade cartoon short into the comicbook Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold which was published as Dell Four Color Comics Series II #9 in October of that year. Although not his first published comics work, it was the story that shaped the rest of his career.

Until the mid-1960s Barks worked in productive seclusion writing and drawing a vast collection of comedic adventure yarns for kids, creating a Duck Universe of characters such as Gladstone Gander (1948), the Beagle Boys (1951), Gyro Gearloose (1952), Flintheart Glomgold (1956), John D. Rockerduck (1961) and Magica De Spell (1961) to augment the stable of cartoon actors from the Disney Studio. His greatest creation was the crusty, paternalistic, money-mad bajillionaire Scrooge McDuck.

So magical were his creations that they actually influenced the animation output of the parent company itself, although his work was actually done for the licensing company Whitman/Dell/Gold Key, and not directly for Disney.

Throughout this period Barks was blissfully unaware that his work, uncredited by official dictat as was all the companys output, was nevertheless singled out by a rabid and discerning public as being by “the Good Duck Artist.” When some of his most dedicated fans finally tracked him down, his belated celebrity began. As well as only being fair it meant that an awful lot of great work was now able to be conscientiously reprinted, by an adoring and grateful band of well-intentioned aficionados.

Gladstone publishing began re-releasing classic Barks material, and a selection of other Disney comics work, in a variety of formats beginning in the 1980s and this album is one of my favourites.

In glorious oversized format it reprints Uncle Scrooge #5 (1954) wherein Donald and his nephews are bullied and bamboozled by the miserly mallard into finding the sunken city of Atlantis. It’s a stirring blend of timeless slapstick comedy and fanciful Boy’s Own adventure that entrances and captivates, and it supplemented by a couple of single-page gag strips that still deliver a chortle today.

These are followed by the contents of Donald Duck Four Color #256 from 1949. “Luck of the North” features another duel of wits and fortitude between the irascible Duck and his good-for-nothing but preternaturally lucky cousin Gladstone Gander, which leads to the pair going treasure hunting to Alaska: with Huey, Dewey and Louie in tow to keep the grown-ups from acting too childishly.

This is a epic yarn fit for Indiana Jones himself, full of action, hardship, fantastic discoveries and rip-roaring spectacle – all delivered in the mesmerising line style that so elevated Barks above his peers. Topped off with another gag-short from Donald Duck Four Color #178 (1947) this album perfectly shows why Barks is so revered and influential.

Thankfully even if you can’t find this particular volume, Barks’ work is now readily accessible through a number of publishers and outlets. So if you’ve never experienced captivating brand of magic, no matter what your age or temperament you can easily experience the wonder of what Will Eisner called “the Hans Christian Andersen of Comics.”

© The Walt Disney Company. All Rights Reserved.

By Dean Motter, Judith Dupré & Sean Phillips (Vertigo)
ISBN: 1-56389-145-X

From the early days of DC’s Vertigo imprint comes this disturbing reworking – or more accurately contemporary sequel – to one of literature’s greatest stories of mystery and gothic imagination. Dean Motter is a creator with a singularly unique voice and style and his collaboration with Judith Dupré on this moody script adds a chilling edge to a fantasy which is suitably sub-titled “a love story”.

Released as an original hardcover graphic novel it tells of Sandra, who spends a fateful night tending bar at a New York Gallery opening paid for by the rich but creepy celebrity plastic surgeon Dr. Andrew Wright. Even in the supremely decadent world of the Art Glitterati the surgeon is infamous, with dubious connections to the high and mighty and the down and dirty.

So Sandra is surprised when she meets the beautiful, sensitive Victor, a poetic rose among crass, wealthy thorns. Despite herself she is drawn to the mysterious paragon who seems so much more than Dr. Wright’s factotum and dogsbody.

A man of many secrets, Victor is almost the ideal lover, but his devotion to the shadier side of the doctor’s dealings with gangsters and art forgers augers nothing but disaster for their budding relationship. Furthermore there is some hideous secret he is keeping from her – an obstacle not even the truest love can overcome…

I’ve tried to keep the origin of the source work as vague as possible here since the unfolding secret is well-handled and adds to the dawning horror of the situation. The love-story spirals to a tragic conclusion that echoes that of the classic novel, and the beguiling painted art of Sean Phillips heightens the mood, evoking the distant past and spotlighting the harsh modern world with equal skill.

This tale failed to find a large audience when first released, but it’s a solid story superbly told and I’m convinced it would do well if released today – especially in a more economical paperback edition.
© 1994 Dean Motter & Sean Phillips. All Rights Reserved.

If the 1980s was the decade where anybody with a pencil and a printer’s phone number could enter the business, the 1990s saw the rapid rise – and very often swift fall – of the small corporation publisher. Lots of businesses opened or acquired a comics division to augment or supplement their core business: like the Nintendo Comics that were packaged by and published in conjunction with Valiant Comics.

Jim Shooter founded Valiant with Bob Layton, and later went on to launch the short-lived but highly impressive Defiant Comics of which this book is – to my knowledge – the only collected edition.

That’s a great pity as the range of talent that briefly worked there as well as the titles themselves showed great promise. The legal war of attrition with Marvel that caused their early closure is well documented elsewhere, so I’ll swiftly move on to the product itself.

The Flagship title Warriors of Plasm was a powerful alien intervention tale set mostly in an alternate universe where a single race had taken genetic science to such extremes that their homeworld had become a voracious planetary organism which continually fed on the biomass of other worlds.

Society on The Org was hierarchical, imperialistic and ritually sadistic, where the credos of “survival of the fittest” and “evolve or die” had the force of fanatical religion. Ruled by a weak Emperor, the court lived a life of brutal hedonistic luxury, revelling in decadence, relentlessly jockeying for advantage.

Lorca is a Seeker, high in the court and charged with finding new worlds for the Org to consume, but something within him defies the official doctrine that personality is an aberration and that all bio-matter belongs to the greater whole. Bodies are mulched and recycled whilst individuality is an anti-social aberration, yet all organisms clearly would do absolutely anything not to die.

Spurred on by his corrupt rival Ulnareah, Lorca forms an illegal relationship with Laygen, a girl created without state-approval, and when caught he is forced to recycle her to preserve his own existence.

Bitter and discontented he returns to work, but when he discovers Earth beyond the transdimensional veil he sees an opportunity to overthrow the Org and take supreme control. The humans are strong, individualistic, fierce warriors, and with his genetic augmentation could to defeat any force the Org could muster. He teleports 10,000 test subjects to his private vats but something goes wrong.

Only five humans survive, mutated into superhuman beings, but the Seeker is unaware of this since he’s been arrested by the authorities who never stopped watching him…

How the transformed humans escape and the uneasy alliance they form with the unlikely liberator Lorca makes for a refreshingly novel spin on the old plot of revolution and redemption, and Shooter’s dialogue and characterisations of what could so easily have been stock characters adds layers of sophistication to this fantasy drama that many “adult” comics would kill for even today.

David Lapham’s incredible art and design inked by Mike Witherby, simultaneously understated and outrageous, captivates and bewilders, adding a moody disorientation to a superb, action-packed thriller, especially in the incredible, climactic four-page fold-out battle scene.

Originally produced as Warriors of Plasm #1-4, ‘The Sedition Agenda’ was preceded by an issue #0 daringly released as a set of trading cards and supplemented by a prequel tale outlining the social relevance of the gory global sporting phenomenon known as Splatterball, written and drawn by Lapham with inks by Bob Smith, and all these tales are gathered here for your delectation.

I have no idea where you can find a copy of this terrific little book but I hope you do, just as I wish that some smart publisher would pick up the rights for all the Defiant material: and then we’ll get the entire band back together and finish all the other stories and…
© 1994 EEP, L.P. All Rights Reserved.

By Frank Thorne (Ken Pierce Books)
ISBN: 0-912277-31-9

Frank Thorne is one of the most individualistic talents in American comics. Born in 1930 he started his comics career drawing romances for Standard Comics alongside the legendary Alex Toth before graduating to the better paid Newspaper strips to illustrate the Perry Mason adaptation for King Features Syndicate. He went to Dell/Gold Key, where he drew Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim, The Green Hornet, and the seminal sci-fi classic Mighty Samson.

At DC he did some unforgettable work on Tomahawk and Son of Tomahawk before being hired by Roy Thomas at Marvel to illustrate his belated breakthrough strip Red Sonja, a fantastic fantasy strip that would shape the rest of his career.

Forever connected with feisty, earthy, highly sexualised women, in 1978 he created the outrageously bawdy (some call her vulgar) swordswoman Ghita of Alizarr for Warren’s adult science fantasy anthology 1984/1994 as well as such adult satirical strips as Moonshine McJugs for Playboy and Danger Rangerette for National Lampoon. He won the National Cartoonists Award for comic books in 1963, an Inkpot Award and a Playboy Editorial Award.

In 1984 he crafted this enchanting moody hard-science detective thriller for Heavy Metal, foregoing swords and sorcery for star-ships and ray-guns, but the sassy, compelling strong woman figure is still present in the darkly sexy police agent Lann. Fresh from a rejuvenation treatment that literally takes years off her she’s sent to the decadent Neon-Six to investigate the kidnapping of two girls – apparently the children of the most notorious gangster in the system. But as is always the case things are not what they seem…

With the frankly useless droid Glitch and her old partner and bed-mate Shard (who’s still awaiting his youth treatment) she negotiates a maze of lies and blaster-fire to uncover a dastardly plot that affects the entire system in this very adult, very entertaining romp reminiscent of both Barbarella and Blade Runner.

This slim oversized tome also includes a couple of photo-articles of the artist and his many lovely models plus a fascinating piece on the storyboarding of the (sadly never released) concept video. The accompanying sketches and notes provide a revealing glimpse of how a true original makes it all happen.

Thorne is much more appreciated in Europe than in English-speaking countries but with modern sensibilities we should re-examine the writing and incredible art of this superb comics all-rounder. This is definitely a book any broad-minded, grown-up aficionado will adore. Let’s hope somebody revives it soon…
© 1984, 1986 Frank Thorne. All Rights Reserved.