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Ultimate Comics Iron Man: Demon in the Armour


By Nathan Edmondson & Matteo Buffagni (Marvel/Panini UK)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-526-0

The upcoming third Iron Man film has naturally inspired a few new releases and this one, following the latest refit of the alternate Ultimate Marvel Universe (in the Divided We Fall/United We Stand publishing event), is a pretty good place for new or returning readers to get acquainted with the franchise…

The Marvel Ultimates project started in 2000 with a thoroughly modernizing refit of key characters and concepts to bring them into line with contemporary “ki-dults” – perceived to be a completely different buying public to us baby-boomers and our declining descendents.

Eventually even this streamlined new universe became as crowded and continuity-constricted as its predecessor, and in 2008 the cleansing publishing event “Ultimatum” culminated in a reign of terror which apparently (this is comics, after all) wiped out loads of heroes and villains as well as millions of ordinary mortals.

Even after, slowly rebuilding this darker, grimmer continuum, it had to happen again in 2012 as a perilously destabilised world sank into international metahuman anarchy and America succumbed to a mass secession of rogue states resulting in a second Civil War before the remaining heroes, surviving mutants and a new Spider-Man brought a measure of peace and stability to the planet…

From this latest aftermath comes a post-apocalyptic thriller (reassembling issues #1-4 of Ultimate Comics Iron Man from October 2012-January 2013) which simultaneously explores the past and future of Tony Stark: über-genius weapon-smith, world-class philanderer, amiable drunk, cancer victim and the latest arrogant financial Master of the Universe from a dynasty of armaments manufacturers and profiteers.

Demon in the Armour (and yes, it has been spelled differently for this British Edition) opens with the Golden Avenger spectacularly stopping a railway theft of super-guns before flashing back to earlier times when the rebellious son broke away from his overbearing father Howard Stark and attempted to set up his own company with cherished pal and partner Josey Gardner.

It was one of the last times he defied his dad’s demands.

Despite everything Tony tried, Stark senior was determined that his son would assume control of the family business, and as always, what the old man wanted he got. Six months later, Josey died in a plane crash but by then Tony was too busy in his new role to notice much…

Howard Stark was a complex man: over four decades he had built his small firm into a globe-girdling colossus, and although he never had time for family or sentiment there was always room for one more lesson on how Tony should run it once the old boss was gone…

Back in the present, the current owner is apprised of a brutal sabotage attack which masked a hacking attack. When Iron Man investigates the multi-pronged security breach he is completely outmanoeuvred by a mysterious “Mandarin” organisation which has infiltrated the company databases and even overridden control of Stark’s impregnable armoured suit.

The enigmatic ghost company claim they now own Stark Industries, just as they always have…

With the grudging assistance of ex-girlfriend, former boss super-spy and current White House Insider Carol Danvers, Tony and his major domo Jarvis track Mandarin to shell-company South Pacific Financial in Hong Kong, but the group has such strong ties to the Chinese Government – and the clout to make almost any problem go away – that even the USA officially considers them too big to mess with…

None of which matters one iota to Stark who, hot for answers and payback, ignores advice from friends, orders from the government and simple common sense to invade the company HQ in Hong Kong, only to again fall victim to the mal-ware and unlimited resources of Mandarin…

Barely escaping intact and with China personally suing him, the unrepentant Stark calls in a favour from military man James Rhodes (pilot of the US Air Force iteration of Stark armour dubbed War Machine)… who cheerily refuses…

A dedicated patriot, Rhodey has no time for the self-absorbed inventor and his headstrong manner, but when the latest Mandarin ploy compromises America’s Stark-built automated drone-system and causes untold damage, he joins Carol in a last-ditch scheme to destroy the sinister phantom cabal.

Stark and S.H.I.E.L.D. satellite data pinpoints an uncharted PacificIsland as the probable home base of Mandarin, but when Iron Man blazes in, Tony is easily overwhelmed. Mandarin has him exactly where it has always wanted him and the overmatched, outfoxed inventor subsequently discovers the family secrets and appalling obligations he could never have imagined as well as an unobtrusively all-pervasive foe unlike any other he has ever faced…

Luckily the unlikely hero always had plans and allies to match his impulsive nature and selfish indignation…

Cunning, devious, fast-paced and action-packed, this sharp, straightforward thriller perfectly fills the bill as a place to jump on to the Iron Man experience as writer Nathan Edmondson & artist Matteo Buffagni (ably augmented by colourist Andy Troy) fill in some questions about Tony Stark and reboot the Technological Titan just in time for the next movie…

With covers and variants by Frank Stockton & Gabrielle Dell’otto, this is a deliciously wry, cynical shocker: another breathtakingly effective yarn only possible outside the Marvel Universe and one which will resonate with readers who love the darkest side of science fiction and superheroes as well as casual readers who know the company’s movies better than the comicbooks.

Heavy on attitude and action and over almost too quickly, this is another splendid tale that leaves the reader genuinely hungry for more…

™ & © 2013 Marvel. All rights reserved. Licensed by Marvel Characters B.V. A British Edition published by Panini Publishing, a division of Panini UK, Ltd.

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Complete Crumb Comics volume 2: Some More Early Years of Bitter Struggle – New Edition


By Robert Crumb & Charles Crumb, edited by Gary Groth with Robert Fiore (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-0-93019-362-1

This book contains controversially clever ideas, outrageously rude drawings, intemperate language, positive drug references and allusions, godless questioning of authority and brilliantly witty, culture-reshaping, personal accounts and opinions.

If you – or those legally responsible for you – might have problems with any of that, please skip this review and don’t buy the book. I’m sure we’ll all know better next time…

Robert Crumb is a unique creative force in the world of cartooning with as many detractors as devotees. His uncompromising, excoriating, neurotically obsessive introspections, pictorial rants and invectives unceasingly picked away at society’s scabs and forever peeked behind forbidden curtains – and all apparently for his own benefit – but he has always happily invited us to share his unwholesome discoveries with anybody with the time and temperament to look…

Way back in 1987 Fantagraphics Books began the nigh-impossible task of collating, collecting and publishing the chronological totality of the tireless artist’s vast output and now, after far too long out-of-print, those engrossing cartoon compendia are being reissued. The earliest volumes have been constantly described as the least commercial but now, with Crumb at last an acknowledged global art-treasure, those volumes are back for your perusal…

The son of a career soldier, Robert Dennis Crumb was born in Philadelphia in 1943 into a functionally broken family. He was one of five kids who all found different ways to escape their parents’ shattering problems, and comics were always paramount amongst them.

As had his older brother Charles, Robert immersed himself in the strips and cartoons of the day; not simply reading but also feverishly, compulsively creating his own. Harvey Kurtzman, Carl Barks and John Stanley were particularly influential, as were newspaper artists like E.C. Segar, Gene Ahern, Rube Goldberg, Bud Fisher, Billy De Beck, George (Sad Sack) Baker and Sidney Smith as well as “straight” illustrators like C.E. Brock and the wildly imaginative, frantically surreal 1930’s Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animated shorts.

Defensive and introspective, the young Robert pursued art and torturous self-control through religion with equal desperation. His early spiritual repression and flagrant, hubristic celibacy constantly warred with his body’s urgently growing base needs and desires…

Escaping his stormy family, Crumb married young and began working in-house at the American Greeting Cards Company. He also found like minds in the growing hippie and counterculture movements where he discovered LSD. In 1967 he upped sticks to California to become an early star of the burgeoning Underground Commix scene. As such he found plenty of willing “hippie-chicks” eager to assuage his fevered mind and hormonal body whilst he gradually reinvented the very nature of cartooning with such creations as Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, Devil Girl and a host of others.

The rest is history – or perhaps, sociology…

The tortured formative years provided meat for the first collection (The Early Years of Bitter Struggle) and those revelations resume right here, right now as the second volume continues the odyssey to acceptance after ‘The Best Location in the Nation…’; a comprehensive reminiscence and introduction from lifelong confidante Marty Pahls who describes the swiftly maturing and deeply unsatisfied Crumb’s jump from unhappy home to the depressing, dispiriting world of work.

‘Little Billy Bean’ (April 1962) reprises the hapless, loveless nebbish of yore whilst ‘Fun with Jim and Mabel’ revisits Crumb’s first bulky, morally-challenged domestic amazon, after which the focus shifts to her diminutive and feeble companion ‘Jim’. Next, an almost fully-realised ‘Fritz the Cat’ finally gets it on in a triptych of saucy soft-core escapades from R. Crumb’s self-generated Arcade mini-comic project.

From this point onwards, the varied and exponentially impressive breadth of Crumb’s output becomes increasingly riddled with his often hard-to-embrace themes and declamatory, potentially offensive visual vocabulary as his strips grope towards the creator’s long-sought personal artistic apotheosis.

His most intimate and disturbing idiosyncrasies regarding sex, women, ethnicity, personal worth and self-expression all start to surface here…

Working in the production department of a vast greetings card company gave the insular Crumb access to new toys and new inspiration as seen in the collection of ‘Roberta Smith, Office Girl’ gag strips from American Greetings Corporation Late News Bulletins (November 1963-April 1964), followed here by another Fritz exploit enigmatically entitled ‘R. Crumb Comics and Stories’ which includes just a soupçon of raunchy cartoon incest, so keep the smelling salts handy…

A beautiful 10-page selection of sketchbook pages comes next and then a burst of black-&-white and full-colour covers: the satirical 1960 election duel of Kennedy and Nixon, an Arcade gag, 13 letters to Pahls and Mike Britt disguised as ‘Farb’ and ‘Note’ front images as well as a brace of Arcade covers and the portentously evocative front for R. Crumb’s Comics and Stories #1 from April 1964.

The rest of this pivotal collection is given over to 31 more superb pages culled from Crumb’s sketchbooks; a vast and varied compilation that ably displays the artist’s incredible virtuosity and proves that – if he had been able to suppress his creative questing – he could easily have settled for a lucrative career in any one of a number of graphic disciplines from illustrator to animator to jobbing comic book hack.

Crumb’s subtle mastery of his art-form and overwhelming drive to expose and reveal his most hidden depths and every perceived defect – in himself and the world around him – has always been an unquenchable fire of challenging comedy and riotous rumination, and this evocative tome is crucial to understand the creative causes, if not the artistic affectations, of this unique craftsman and auteur.

This superb series, charting the perplexing pen-and-ink pilgrim’s progress, is the perfect vehicle to introduce any (over 18) newcomers to the world of grown up comics, and if you need a way in yourself, seek out this and all the other books in this incomparable sequence as soon as conceivably possible…

Art and stories © 1969, 1974, 1988, 1996, 2013 Robert Crumb. All rights reserved. Introduction © 1988 Marty Pahls.

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Atalanta: The Race Against Destiny


By Justine & Ron Fuentes and Thomas Yeates (Graphic Universe)
ISBN: 978-1-58013-317-3

The heroic tales and beliefs of ancient cultures have for centuries formed an integral part of children’s educational development – and a good thing too. These days though, those magnificently inspiring and unforgettably visual yarns are as likely to be disseminated via graphic novel as through the sparsely illustrated prose books which had such a formative influence on my early days.

Atalanta: The Race Against Destiny was released in 2007, one self-contained chronicle in a large series which similarly retold through sequential narrative many other myths and legends such as Jason’s Quest with the Argonauts, the Labours of Hercules or the Saga of King Arthur.

Illustrated by the brilliant Thomas Yeates (Saga of the Swamp Thing, Time Spirits, Zorro and more) and adapted from traditional sources by Justine and Ron Fontes, the tragic tale of the World’s first feminist and a ferociously independent woman opens in heaven as the gods of Olympus observe a king railing at his wife, furious that she has given him a useless daughter instead of the son and heir he needed.

Ordering the infant to be ‘Abandoned’ on an exposed hillside, he thinks of her no more, blithely unaware that the baby has been found and adopted by a she-bear…

Nurtured and reared by her ursine protector the child grew strong and tough and exceedingly swift. Nothing could match her speed.

One day, years later, she was ‘Found’ and adopted by hunters who civilised her and gloried in her might and skill with a bow. These simple folk had no time for traditional women’s work and Atalanta grew with no knowledge of a woman’s traditional role in Greek society. She could not spin wool, weave or sew and knew nothing of cleaning or keeping a man’s house in proper order. Moreover she had no time or need to idly make herself pretty for a man…

As she grew to womanhood she often pondered her role and fate. Eventually she was advised by her adopted family to consult an oracle and journeyed to Delphi to seek ‘Answers and Adventures’ from the oracle of Apollo, where her shocking manner, dress and attitudes scandalised the refined citizens.

Sadly the responses of the closeted, drugged seer were far from helpful. The Oracle merely mumbled “avoid husband… can’t avoid… keep life… lose self” and the interpretations and rationalisations of the male priests were little better.

Atalanta returned to a life of hunting and lived day to day until an invitation came to enter a great competition to destroy a fearsome boar ravaging distant Calydon, kingdom of Oeneus and his son Prince Meleager.

Invitations had gone out to the greatest heroes of Greece and en route Atalanta met fabled Jason, and many Argonauts including Castor and Pollux, Theseus, Nestor, last survivor of the Trojan War, and Telemon who was once companion to Hercules himself. All hungered for glory and readily accepted her amongst their company as they discussed the fearsome beast they were to fight against.

Legend had it that the boar was a divine punishment sent by Artemis to punish a slight accidentally perpetrated by Oeneus, but as the champions talked the huntress realised many of the heroes also thought of her as a beguiling quarry…

The hunt for the boar was a disaster. Although she easily outdistanced her companions and drew first blood, many heroes died that day and when Meleager finally slew the beast he wanted Atalanta to share in the triumph. Her skill had indeed led to his killing stroke, but his jealous uncles refused to let a woman share in his glory and a fight broke out.

Besotted with her – and she with him – the Prince slew his uncles in a rage and called upon himself the final, fatal vengeance of the gods as well as his own mother.

Heartbroken and uncomprehending of the sheer spitefulness of celestials, Atalanta returned to the wilds, convinced that her love would ever doom any man she favoured…

Her legend grew however and in a far away kingdom her father pieced together the details and realised the celebrated huntress must be the daughter he had tried to kill. Seeing an opportunity he invited her into his household and the dutiful, curious young woman complied.

It was a disaster. She hated the rules and confinements of a palace princess and her sire only saw her as a means of gaining power, wealth and prestige. When he proffered the famed huntress in wedlock, many suitors came forward. Although the horrified, prophecy-haunted Atalanta knew that any man she married would die, she soon realised her greedy father did not care…

Thus she desperately devised a cunning competition to warn the fools away, demanding that only a man who could catch her would have her hand. To deter them further she insisted that any who failed must die but she had greatly underestimated the arrogance, greed and lust of princes…

A beautiful suitor named Hippomenes did get the message however and acted only as judge for ‘The Race of her Life’, watching the beautiful girl easily outdistance and thereby doom a host of potential husbands. Seeing her run though, he too was smitten and began his own campaign to win the lonely, tragic princess.

A great grandson of sea-god Poseidon, he made Atalanta feel she could beat her oracular curse and then petitioned love goddess Aphrodite to aid him in beating the unbeatable girl in a second race…

Equipped with the gleaming Golden Apples of the Hesperides, the wily youth distracted the fleet huntress enough to cross the finishing line first and won ‘A Bride After All’ but in his elation Hippomenes forgot to properly thank Aphrodite and the outraged deity promptly planned an awful vengeance for the slight.

At the moment of her greatest joy Atalanta learned the true power of prophecy when Aphrodite tricked the happy newlyweds into desecrating a shrine to Zeus’ mother Rhea for which sacrilege she furiously transformed them into a lion and lioness.

For the rest of eternity the lovers would remain together, keeping their lives but losing their selves, becoming the divine beasts pulling Rhea’s chariot across the world…

All religious stories are devised to explain away contemporary unsolved questions, unknowable mysteries or established social structures.

The liturgical history lesson retold here was one proudly patriarchal people’s attempt to rationalise their lives whilst explaining how and why such laws and customs exist and, although grossly simplified here, works in an engaging manner that should certainly tempt readers to go and find out more.

Engrossing, dynamic, pretty and blessed with a light touch, this splendid introduction to mythology is designed for kids with a reading age of nine or above – that’s Year 4, I suspect – and also contains a full ‘Glossary’ of characters and concepts, suggested ‘Further Reading, Websites and Films’, background on ‘Creating Atalanta: The Race Against Destiny‘, creator biographies in ‘About the Author and the Artist’ and an ‘Index’.

Packaged as full-colour, 48 page, card-cover booklets, they were designed to introduce youngsters to the magical riches of human history and imagination.

Although this particular saga retells a rather tragic and indubitably unfair tale of sexism, oppressive destiny and the costs of attempting to defy fate, it does read very well as sequential narrative in its own right and serves not just as an educational aid or social warning but as a smart way to get your youngsters into comics.
© 2007 Lerner Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Star Trek: the Further Adventures of the Starship Enterprise – Marvel Illustrated Books


By Alan Brennert, Martin Pasko, Tom DeFalco, Luke McDonnell, Joe Brozowski, Mike Nasser, Tom Palmer & Klaus Janson (Marvel/)
ISBN: 0-939766-00-0

The stellar Star Trek brand and franchise might not have actually reached any new worlds, yet it certainly has permeated every civilisation here on Earth, with daily live-action and animated screen appearances appearing somewhere on the planet and comics iterations generated in a host of countries long lying fallow and unseen.

If only somebody could sort out the legal and logistical hassles so we could see again those stunning UK strips which appeared in Joe 90, TV21, TV Comic and Valiant from such fabulous creators as Angus Allan, Harry Lindfield, Mike Noble, Alan Willow, Ron Turner, Jim Baikie, Harold Johns, Carlos Pino, Vicente Alcázar, John Stokes and others, I might die a happy, nostalgia-drowned boy…

In the meantime however, here’s a little-seen lost artefact and another early glimpse at how our industry gradually became mainstream literature or “graphic novels”: a pulse-pounding paperback package for action fans, fantasy freaks and movie-lovers alike.

After a few abortive attempts in the 1960s to storm the shelves of bookstores and libraries, Marvel made a concerted and comprehensive effort to get their wares into more socially acceptable formats and, as the 1970s closed, purpose-built paperback collections and a string of new prose tales tailored to feed into their burgeoning brand began to emerge as the company continued its crusade to break into regular, real-world bookshops.

The company’s careful reformatting of their own classic comics adventures were generally excellent; a superb series of primers and a perfect new venue to introduce fresh readers to their unique worlds. In addition, by judicious partnerships with major film and TV properties, they expanded the market share for their little books in real shops and stores.

In this particular case the fact that the mighty Star Trek franchise’s comicbook requirements were being serviced by a stridently ascendant Marvel (after years with the commercial diffident Western/Gold Key Comics) made for an ideal repackaging opportunity…

The Further Adventures were all set in the days after Star Trek: the Motion Picture (which rebooted the long-dormant phenomenon and allowed Marvel to produce a vastly underrated 18-issue series) and recounted new exploits of the starship Enterprise and older, wiser, re-united Federation voyagers James T. Kirk, Spock, Dr. Leonard McCoy, Hikaru Sulu, Montgomery Scott, Nyota Uhura and Pavel Chekov.

This full-colour delight reformatted three of very best comicbook episodes and begins with ‘Eclipse of Reason’ by Alan Brennert, Martin Pasko, Luke McDonnell & Tom Palmer (originally seen in issue #12, March 1981) wherein the comrades are reunited with former Yeoman Janice Rand.

She has since married Kadan of Phaeton, an alien being composed of pure thought and volunteered for a one-way trip with him and an equally disembodied crew beyond the energy barrier that seals off our galaxy from the rest of the universe. However as in the TV episode “Where No Man has Gone Before”, collision with the barrier produces terrifying psionic anomalies and the exploratory starship U.S.S. Icarus turns back, its conceptual crew driven mad and determined to return home at all costs.

With the anti-matter powered ship on a collision course with the densely populated planet, Kirk, Spock and Rand must overcome extraordinary perils to save an entire world and a unique, extraordinary love…

Pasko, Joe Brozowski & Palmer collaborated on ‘Like a Woman Scorned’ (from previous issue #11, February 1981) wherein the Enterprise was despatched to evacuate a cult leader from a radiation-drenched colony world and Scotty was unhappily reunited with bitter old flame Andrea Manning – and her charismatic guru Carl Wentworth.

Even as the reluctant evacuee began exerting an uncanny persuasion and fomenting actual rebellion aboard ship, the downhearted engineer and his beloved ship began to suffer impossible attacks from creatures out of dark fairytales, leaving Kirk, Spock and Dr. McCoy to divine the incredible secret to the inimical invasion…

Last included is the marvellously twisted ‘Tomorrow or Yesterday’ (Tom DeFalco, Mike Nasser & Klaus Janson from #7 October 1980) wherein a landing crew beams down to doomed world Andrea IV to rescue the indigenous primitives from a devastating radiation cloud only to find the natives welcoming, aware of the danger but strangely unworried.

To make matters worse the encroaching Rad-storm has made return to the enterprise all but impossible.

In the great square the mystery deepens as destruction looms, when Kirk, Spock and McCoy observe the natives praying to statues of the Saviours destined to save them all: perfect likeness of the Federation Officers sculpted 24,000 years previously…

With time running out, the desperate heroes find themselves trapped amongst blithely unworried masses, all patiently waiting for the prophesied messiahs to save them – just as they have already done…

Smart, effective and lovingly executed, these classic yarns are long overdue for a compilation re-release (as far as I’m aware the stories from this comics series were only ever available in this paperback and as part of a CD-Rom package), and Trekkies, Trekkers and comics aficionados alike should rowdily unite to agitate until some publisher gets the message…
© 1980, 1981 Paramount Picture Corporation. All rights reserved. At that time Star Trek was ™ Paramount Picture Corporation.

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The Wasteland


By Dave Louapre & Dan Sweetman (Piranha Press/DC Comics)
No ISBN, ASIN: B000UE4MBE

During the anything-goes 1980s the field of comics publishing expanded exponentially with new companies offering a vast range of fresh titles and ideas. To combat the upstart expansion, Marvel and DC also instigated innovative material for those freshly growing markets with the latter colossus especially targeting readers for whom old-fashioned funnybooks were anathema …or at least a long-abandoned childhood flirtation.

DC pioneered new, more mature-oriented niche imprints such as Vertigo and Helix, but undoubtedly some of the most intriguing treats came out of their Piranha Press line, formed in 1989 and re-designated Paradox Press in 1993.

When DC founded this off-key, adult special projects imprint, both the resultant releases and reader’s reaction to them were passionately mixed.

It had long been a Holy Grail of the business to produce comics for people who don’t read comics and, despite the inherent logical flaw, that’s a pretty sound and sensible plan, but the delivery is always problematic.

Is the problem resistance to the medium? Then try radical art or narrative styles, unusual design or typography, and use talent from outside the medium to fill your books: you get some intriguing results, but risk still not reaching a new audience whilst alienating those readers already on board…

This superbly eclectic and overwhelmingly effective collection partially mitigated that risk by using new creators with an already established pedigree outside the comics industry and material which had found a fan-base elsewhere in publishing…

It’s also was one of the best and most wickedly addictive books Piranha produced…

Dave Louapre & Dan Sweetman had worked together since college, producing self-published illustrated stories which they sold direct to local bookstores. This led to a macabre and deliciously dark panel-gag series published in the L.A. Reader and movie magazine Fangoria and the creation of stunningly off-kilter, ironically post-modern and media-celebrated cartoon-fiction analect Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, which winningly combined outré, edgy domesticity with the aesthetic sensibilities of Jean Paul Sartre, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Charles Addams, Aubrey Beardsley and Gahan Wilson. It was not your average comicbook…

The Piranha Press experiment was always a tenuous dream in a cutthroat business, and though BSFUC was undoubtedly its greatest triumph – 41 delirious issues, some specials and a “Best Of” collection – the imprint was radically restructured in 1992 and Dave and Dan moved on and out to Hollywood.

Before they finally left, however, the company published also The Wasteland: a compilation – with some new material – of that aforementioned gag feature…

Produced as a single captioned panel, the strip offered the trademarked weird ideas and compelling, alluring prose rendered (sur)real via lovely, sketchy, scratchy, frantically evocative monochrome illustrations with the same skewed worldview, supplemented with a heaping helping of mordant Gary Larson wryness added to the mix.

There’s no point my trying to relate the contents of this superb, tragically out-of-print but mercifully still available tome: 128 pages of graphic imagery blending the cute with the grotesque, the mundane with the bizarre and the unexpected with the cheerily distasteful which you just have to see to believe.

All I can do here is tease you with a few atypically typical sample subject-lines such as ‘Men without Women meet Dogs without Snouts’, ‘The Little Cyclops Puppy Nobody Would Play With’, ‘Cheerleaders on Fire’, ‘Lover’s Hop, for the Less-than-Devastated’, ‘The Substitute Executioner’, ‘My Dinner with Medusa’, ‘Jump-Starting the Dog’, ‘We Got Along Swimmingly Once I Learned They Hated Me’, ‘A Day at the Nun Jousts’ ‘Rudolph the Red Light Reindeer’, ‘Zero-Gravity Autopsy’, ‘The Gas Chambermaid’ and ‘Rumble Monks’, and rest assured that some of you will now be unable to rest until you experience the sheer creative anarchy for yourselves…

Happy Easter, comic fans…
The Wastelands © 1989 Dave Louapre & Dan Sweetman. All Rights Reserved.

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The UmbrellaAcademy volume 1: Apocalypse Suite


By Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá (Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-1-59307-978-9

Superheroes have been around long enough now that they’ve been able to evolve into different sub-sets: straight Save-the-World continuity types as championed by DC and Marvel, obsessively “real” or realist iterations such as Marvelman, Masked Man, Crossfire or Kick-Ass, comedy versions like Justice League International, Ambush Bug, Deadpool or She-Hulk and some rare ducks that straddle a few barstools in between.

Cut from the same cloth of Edgy, Catastrophic Absurdism as Scott McCloud’s Zot!, Brendan McCarthy’s Paradax or Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol and Flex Mentallo, the archly anti-didactic antics of The Umbrella Academy offered readers a subtly subversive take on the idiom which impressed the heck out of everybody and lured many disillusioned fans back to the pitifully tired and over-used genre when first released…

This debut collected volume gathers the initial 6-issue miniseries as well as a 2-page online tease from MySpace Dark Horse Presents and an introductory short story from the company’s Free Comic Book Day issue in 2007.

Once upon a time a strange event occurred. All across Earth 43 babies were unexpectedly born as the result of apparent immaculate conceptions – or perhaps some kind of inexplicable parthenogenesis. The births even surprised the mothers, most of whom abandoned or put up for immediate adoption their terrifying newborns.

Seven of these miracle babies were acquired by esteemed inventor and entrepreneur Sir Reginald Hargreeves. The inventor of the Levitator, mobile umbrella communicator, Clever Crisp cereal, Televator and a process which enabled chimps to speak was in actuality an over-achieving alien with a secret plan, and he raised the children to become superheroes to enact it.

He was not a good or caring parent…

The callously experimental family, after a number of early spectacular successes such as ‘The Day the Eiffel Tower Went Berserk’, soon proved to be unmanageable and the Umbrella Academy – created and trained “to save the World” – sundered in grief and acrimony, but not before poor Ben, Number 6 or “The Horror”, pointlessly lost his brave young life and Number 5 “The Boy” took a short trip into the future and never came back…

An utterly dysfunctional superhero team, the children parted, but now, twenty years later, the surviving members of the squad gather again at the news that Hargreeves – whose nom de crime was The Monocle – has died…

In the interim, Number 1 son Luther became an off-earth defender and pioneer, but was hideously damaged on a doomed journey to Mars. To save him, The Monocle grafted his head onto the body of a colossal Martian Gorilla but the “Spaceboy” found it far easier to live alone on the Moon than stay with his saviour.

Poor, neglected Vanya however, whose musical gifts Hargreeves deemed utterly useless, became a drop-out and wrote a scandalous tell-all book before becoming a voluntary exile amidst Earth’s lowest dregs…

In ‘We Only See Each Other at Weddings and Funerals’ the disparate clan gathers and Luther discovers The Boy has returned, looking not a day different. He isn’t – but his mind is sixty years old and has experienced horrors beyond all imagining…

Made welcome by technologist, housekeeper and talking chimp Dr. Pogo, Luther is startled by the return of Allison (Number 3, The Rumor). She’s changed a lot since her marriage – although she’s now single again – but Diego (Number 2, The Kraken) and Klaus (Number 4, The Séance) are just the same: physically mature but still completely, scarily demented…

The interment ceremony is a complete fiasco and descends into a brawl, but the savage bitterness the family exhibits towards each other is as nothing compared to the carnage caused by the arrival of merciless robotic Terminauts tasked with stopping the Umbrella Academy reforming at any cost…

Across town, poor forgotten Vanya has an audition with some very special musicians. The Orchestra Verdammten need only the best if their unconventional maestro, The Conductor is to perfectly premiere his latest opus – The Apocalypse Suite…

As the reluctantly reunited Academy fall into old habits and dash off to save innocents from slaughter, The Boy drops his last bombshell: in the future he’s returned from, Earth was destroyed three days after the Monocle died…

Built by a long-vanquished foe, the killer mechanoids are ‘Dr. Terminal’s Answer’ to the pesky kids who ruined his plans, although they don’t fare well against Spaceboy, Rumor Séance and The Kraken.

Dr. Pogo has stayed to examine The Boy and finds him exceedingly strange: a 60-year old mind wearing a 10-year old body that hasn’t aged a single second since it reappeared. There’s even stranger stuff going on which the monkey medic can’t detect, though…

Diego never stopped fighting monsters and has become a darkly driven vigilante, who even now has ignored the flamboyant threat of the robots to save imperilled kids. However when Vanya – fresh from fleeing the deranged Conductor – stumbles into the conflagration he disparages her; calling her useless, just like Hargreeves used to.

As her strange siblings wrap things up and return to the puzzle of exactly how the Earth will end in a matter of days, the dejected, rejected Number 7 returns to The Orchestra Verdammten…

Subjected to outrageous experiments in ‘Baby, I’ll be Your Frankenstein’, Vanya is quickly transformed into a finely-tuned instrument to shatter reality, even as Pogo and The Boy stop for coffee and meet time-travelling trouble.

…And at the Icarus Theatre, the once disregarded and discarded White Violin makes her deadly, devastating debut…

At a certain Diner, distressed waitress Agnes tells Police Inspector Lupo how a veritable army of futuristic thugs were reduced in seconds to scarlet shreds and tatters by a little boy who politely said ‘Thank You for the Coffee’ before leaving with his chimpanzee friend. Lupo has endured a long and difficult unofficial association with ruthless avenger Kraken which has kept the city’s worst criminals from running riot, but when the old cop casually remarks that a lot of violinists have suddenly vanished even he is quite unprepared for the vigilante’s reaction…

The family gathers at the Academy: Luther and The Rumor slowly rekindling a long suppressed relationship even as The Boy makes the huge mistake of looking through Hargreeves’ trademark Monocle just as prodigal sister Vanya knocks on the door – with shattering, killing force…

The shocked stunned survivors quickly marshal their forces for ‘Finale or, Brothers and Sisters, I Am an Atomic Bomb’, but even though they achieve some sort of victory and save reality, it’s at a terrible, World-shattering cost…

Following Editor Scott Allie’s Afterword on the trials, tribulations and triumph of working with a big-name rock-star (yes, that Gerard Way: the multi-talented musician/writer/artist/designer who fronts the band My Chemical Romance…) whilst trying to maintain a comicbook schedule, illustrator Gabriel Bá and the author then reveal a host of production secrets in ‘Designing the Umbrella Academy’.

But that’s not all: the introductory ‘Short Stories’ – with notes and commentary from Bá – follow, revealing a lighter side to the team in ‘“Mon Dieu!”’ and a surprisingly deft surreal murder mystery in‘…But the Past Ain’t Through with You’ (first seen in MySpace Dark Horse Presents and Dark Horse Free Comic Book Day 2007 respectively).

Whilst happily swiping, homaging, sampling and remixing the coolest elements from many and varied comics sources, The Umbrella Academy created a unique synthesis and achieved its own distinctive originality within the tired confines of the superhero genre. Maybe because it stylishly combines the tragic baroque tone of a La Belle Époque scenario with an ironic dystopian fin de siècle sensibility and re-presents it all as a witty post-modern heroic fable, or perhaps more likely simply because it’s all just really damned good, darkly sardonic fun, conceived with love and enthusiasm and crafted with supreme skill and bravura by extremely talented people who love what they do…?

Read The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite if you’re smart, read it if you’re bored, read it because I said so, but if you too love the medium and the genre, read it, read it, read it.
™ © 2008 Gerard Way. All rights reserved.

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Wolverine Origins: Romulus


By Daniel Way, Scot Eaton & Andrew Hennessy (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-3539-5

Ever since his glory days in the All–New, All Different X-Men, the mutant berserker known variously as Wolverine, Logan, Patch and latterly James Howlett has been a fan-favourite who appealed to the suppressed, put-upon, catharsis-craving comic fan by perpetually promising to cut loose and give bad guys the kind of final punishment we all know they truly deserve.

Always skirting the line between and blurring the definitions of indomitable hero and maniac murderer, Wolverine soldiered on, a tragic, brutal, misunderstood hero cloaked in mysteries and contradictions until society changed and, as with ethically-challenged colleague the Punisher, final sanction and quick dispatch became acceptable and even preferred options for costumed crusaders.

Debuting as a foe for the Incredible Hulk in a tantalising teaser-glimpse at the end of issue #180 (October 1974) before indulging in a full-on scrap with the Green Goliath in the next issue, the semi-feral Canadian mutant with fearsome claws and killer attitude rode – and maybe even caused – the meteoric rise of the reconstructed and rebooted X-Men before gaining his own series, super-star status and silver screen immortality.

He hasn’t looked back since, although over the years many untold tales of the aged agent (since the original miniseries Origins revealed the hero had been born at the end of the 19th century) have explored his missing exploits in ever-increasing intensity and torturous detail.

Thus Wolverine’s secret origin(s) and increasingly revelatory disclosures regarding in his extended, conveniently much-brainwashed life have gradually seeped out. Cursed with recurring and periodic bouts of amnesia and mind-wiped ad nauseum by sinister or even well-meaning friends and foes, the Chaotic Canucklehead has packed a lot of adventurous living into his centuries of existence – but doesn’t remember most of it.

This permanently unploughed field has conveniently resulted in a crop of dramatically mysterious, undisclosed back-histories, so from June 2006 to July 2010 supplementary series Wolverine Origins, for a 50-issue run, began revealing certain discrete pockets of that rich but occluded seam of comicbook gold.

Short and feisty, Logan has always threatened and promised an explosion of visceral, vicarious ultra-violence and grim, gritty justice at every moment and in this slim, savage collection (gathering issues #37-40 of Wolverine Origins from), the panting comicbook public once again gets what it’s never stopped clamouring for…

Wolverine is the ultimate tracker and for months has been hunting for his own past. His search has revealed one inescapable, horrific fact: for most of his life the mutant has been repeatedly manipulated and tortured by a madman. Over decades a mysterious mastermind has been invisibly moving in and out of his life: even exerting complete mental dominance over the wandering warrior.

Only recently has Logan realised this and by setting all his prodigious instincts and tracking skills to the task, is at last closing in on the sadistic phantom he only knows as Romulus…

The infinitely patient phantom is the force behind numerous programs such as Weapon X (which first agonisingly bonded miracle metal Adamantium to Wolverine’s skeleton) and is dedicated to manufacturing and augmenting appalling human killing machines.

Of late Logan has been confronted by many of Romulus’ greatest successes, overcoming walking tragedies and monstrous atrocities such as tortured US super-soldier Nuke, old associates Wildchild and Sabretooth, foes Cyber and Omega Red and even his own, now-adult, psychotic son Daken.

Crisscrossing the globe, the implacable stalker has gradually come closer to finding his ancient tormentor, discovering ever-more chilling details about his shadowy opponent. Now he is ready for a final showdown…

The eponymous 4-part ‘Romulus’ opens with Wolverine in Russia following the mastermind’s trusted factotum Victor Hudson to the brutal Vutluga Prison, where a modern pestilence is plaguing hope-starved, desperate inmates and warders alike. As the infuriated mutant moves in for the long-deferred confrontation he’s been hungering for he realises he’s been set up in another stupid test… just as the life-leeching Omega Red ambushes him…

The staggeringly brutal battle goes to Wolverine – but only just – and as the exhausted victor staggers outside he falls prey to fellow feral mutant Wildchild.

Dragging the battered hero to a steel mill and a doom even Wolverine’s legendary healing factor can’t overcome, the boastful brat reveals a shocking truth.

Inhuman Romulus is apparently thousands of years old and considers himself the planet’s absolute apex predator. Logan’s quarry has spent centuries creating, shaping and honing his own successor. To this extent he has bred, if not actually farmed, Wolverine’s bloodline – among others – for generations: constantly improving human killers through technology and the crucibles of torment and combat, even killing Logan’s first wife Itsu and stealing the son the X-Man never knew existed…

Moreover, although Logan was the preferred option to succeed him, Romulus has always had other prospects in play and is content to stand well back and let the very best killer win…

Wildchild’s plan comes undone when the seemingly unstoppable Omega Red intervenes, resulting in one more cutthroat clash as another of Romulus’ frontrunners falls. Soon after, with the aid of Russian super-spy The Black Widow, Wolverine’s last rival falls and the master manipulator finally reveals himself for the climactic last battle…

It doesn’t end in the way you’d expect…

With covers by Doug Braithwaite & Art Lyon, variants from Mike Mayhew, Herb Trimpe and Simone Bianchi, fact-files on Omega Red and Logan and a comprehensive bibliography in ‘Wolverine: the Reading Chronology’, this plot-light, carnage-driven collection of gory delights is a vicarious thrill for the devoted but might well be hard to follow for new or returning readers.
© 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.

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New Crusaders: Rise of the Heroes


By Ian Flynn, Ben Bates, Alitha Martinez & Gary Martin (Archie Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-936975-31-0

In the dawning days of the comic book business, just after Superman and Batman had ushered in a new genre of storytelling, many publishers jumped onto the bandwagon and made their own bids for cash and glory. Many thrived and many more didn’t, relished only as trivia by sad old blokes like me. Some few made it to an amorphous middle-ground: not forgotten, but certainly not household names either…

MLJ were one of the quickest publishers to jump on the mystery-man bandwagon, following the spectacular successes of the Man of Tomorrow with their own small but inspirational pantheon of gaudily clad crusaders, beginning in November 1939 with Blue Ribbon Comics, soon followed by Top-Notch and Pep Comics. The content was the standard blend of two-fisted adventure strips, prose pieces and gag panels and, from #2 on, costumed heroes…

However, after only a few years Maurice Coyne, Louis Silberkleit and John Goldwater (hence MLJ) spotted a gap in the blossoming market and in December 1941 nudged aside their masked heroes and action strips to make room for a far less imposing hero; an “average teen” who would have ordinary adventures like the readers, but with triumphs, romance and slapstick emphasised.

Pep Comics #22 featured a gap-toothed, freckle-faced, red-headed goof who clearly took his lead from the popular Andy Hardy matinee movies starring Mickey Rooney. Goldwater developed the concept of a youthful everyman protagonist, tasking writer Vic Bloom and artist Bob Montana with the job of making it work. The 6-page tale introduced Archie Andrews and pretty girl-next-door Betty Cooper as well as his unconventional best friend and confidante Jughead Jones in their small-town utopia of Riverdale.

The feature was an instant hit and by the winter of 1942 had won its own title. Archie Comics #1 was the company’s first solo-star magazine and with it began the gradual transformation of the entire company. With the introduction of rich, raven-haired Veronica Lodge, all the pieces were in play for the comicbook industry’s second Genuine Phenomenon (Superman being the first)…

By 1946 the kids had taken over, so MLJ renamed itself Archie Comics; retiring its heroic characters years before the end of the Golden Age and becoming, to all intents and purposes, a publisher of family comedies. Its success, like Superman’s, changed the content of every other publisher’s titles, and led to a multi-media industry including TV shows, movies, and a chain of restaurants. In the swinging sixties the pop hit “Sugar, Sugar” (a tune from their animated show) became a global smash: their wholesome garage band The Archies has been a fixture of the comics ever since.

Nonetheless the company had by this stage blazed through a rather impressive pantheon of mystery-men who would form the backbone of numerous future superhero revivals, most notably in the High-Camp/Marvel Explosion/Batman TV show-frenzied mid-60’s…

The heroes impressively resurfaced in the 1980s under the company’s Red Circle imprint but again failed to catch the public’s attention and Archie let them lie fallow (except for occasional revivals and intermittent guest-shots in regular Archie titles) until 1991, when the company licensed its heroes to superhero specialists DC for a magically fun, all-ages iteration (and where’s that star-studded trade paperback collection, huh?!).

Impact Comics was a vibrant, engaging and fun all-ages rethink that really should have been a huge hit but was again cruelly unsuccessful…

When the line folded in 1993 the characters returned to limbo until DC had one more crack at them in 2008, trying to incorporate the Mighty Crusaders & Co into their own maturely angst-ridden and stridently dark continuity – with the usual overwhelming lack of success.

Now at last the wanderers have returned home to Archie for a superbly simplistic and winningly straightforward revival aimed squarely at old nostalgics and young kids reared on highly charged action/adventure cartoon shows: brimming with all the exuberant verve and wide-eyed honest ingenuity you’d expect from an outfit which has been pleasing kids for nearly seventy years.

Released initially online in May 2012 – and followed by a traditional monthly print version that September – the first story-arc even made it to full legitimacy in this thrill-packed collection, equally welcoming to inveterate fanboys and eager newcomers alike.

The first 6 issues collected here offer grand old-fashioned Costumed Drama and modern teen-targeted Fights ‘n’ Tights action that begins with the 2-part introduction ‘From the Ashes’ by Ian Flynn, Ben Bates & Gary Martin.

Red Circle is an idyllic, storybook American town – now. That wasn’t always the case however, and as Mayor Jack Sterling hosts a party for some very old friends and their kids in ‘Reunions’, that dark past horrifically resurfaces as the festivities are cancelled due to a murderous attack by a manic super-villain.

One minute Ralph Hardy, John Dickering and wife Thelma, John and Rose Raymond, Ted Tyler and Kim Brand are watching their respective teenagers mooching about and not getting along and the next they’re all dead at the hands of alien overlord the Brain Emperor…

Only late arriving Joe Higgins is left to shepherd the kids from the burning Mayoral mansion, operating under a long-practised escape plan devised by the heroic Mighty Crusaders…

Debuting way back when in Pep Comics #1, January 1940, Higgins was an FBI scientist who devised a suit which gave him enhanced strength, speed and durability, battling the USA’s enemies as The Shield in the days before America entered WW II. He also devised a serum which enhanced those powers, smashing spies, saboteurs, subversives and every threat to Democracy and well-being. A minor sensation, he is credited as comics’ first Patriotic Hero, predating Captain America and Quality’s Uncle Sam in “wearing the Flag”.

In the sixties he and many of his lost cohorts returned to battle crime and craziness once more…

After accomplishing the impossible and wiping out super-crime he, Steel Sterling, Jaguar, Comet, The Web, Pow-Girl, Fireball and Fly Girl happily retired from action. Unable to settle or relax, Higgins became a virtual recluse and, as Evil Never Dies, laid contingency plans with his old comrades.

Now with all his nightmares come true, he sequesters the traumatised kids in his high-tech bunker and relates the truth about the seemingly dull-and-boring dearly departed in ‘Birthrights’.

The Red Circle tragedy is covered up by Federal spooks from the Military Logistics & Jurisdiction Bureau and dubbed a freak storm on the Impact City news, but orphans Johnny Sterling, Alex Tyler, Greg Dickering, Kelly Brand, Wyatt Raymond and Hardy’s young apprentice Ivette Velez know the truth. They just can’t come to grips with it.

Once Old Man Higgins had saved them from the monster-maniac, he locked them up in his subterranean wonderland – with the full approval of the MLJ – and started talking nonsense.

He claimed their folks were the world’s greatest superheroes and expects them to take up their identities and mission. It’s crazy and totally impossible to believe, but he has all kinds of evidence and gadgets in his bunker. There’s even a mutant talking monkey named Dusty, and somehow he makes more sense than his snarky, impatient boss…

It’s too much and the kids rebel, so Higgins lets them go. All they have to do is get out of the bunker alive…

The terrifying gauntlet proves to the shell-shocked teens that they are far from average and they elect to stay. ‘Legacies part 1: Growing Pains’ then describes the mandatory training process wherein the neophytes, through determination, pre-prepared inheritances, sheer dumb luck and rash stupidity become a second generation of heroes, privy to all the secrets and responsibilities of a world hidden from most of humanity.

Kelly is dispatched by Dusty (or Dr. Uruk Ak’ahk to give him his proper title) to a trans-dimensional space station operated by veteran Crusader Bob Phantom to pick up the alien gimmicks which will make her the new Fly Girl, whilst timid low-esteem-plagued Ivette is given the magical Jaguar Helmet of Ai Apaec, discovered by her boss Ralph Hardy and intended for her alone. However no-one realised it would put her into deadly contact with and at the mercy of a terrifying, possessive, savage lost god…

Puny Wyatt is as smart as his parents The Web and Pow-Girl ever were but has none of their physical gifts. A high-tech combat suit handles the muscle, speed and agility deficit, and the psionic power he’s hidden since infancy more than makes up for his lack of combat experience.

The real problems come with the three alpha-males. Impetuous and rebellious, Alex and Greg hastily misuse the serums intended to duplicate the pyrokinetic and lethal light-wielding power of Fireball and the Comet – nearly dying in the process – whilst Johnny just can’t bring himself to submit his perfect Jock’s body to the nasty nano-surgical procedure that will make him a second Steel  Sterling…

As ‘Legacies part 2: Inheritance’ (illustrated by new regular penciller Alitha Martinez) opens only Fly Girl is willing – or indeed able – to embrace her destiny, but fate takes charge as the implacable Brain Emperor strikes again, just as a poignant message from his departed dad inspires Johnny Sterling to take up the metallic mantle of a champion.

The Brain Emperor strikes in ‘Trial by Fire part 1’ raiding the penitentiary holding the original Crusaders’ greatest foes and causing a deadly ‘Jailbreak’ forcing the junior heroes and their aged tutor into action far too soon. Nevertheless, the kids do alright and the Cerebral Conqueror has made a crucial error: the prison held not only an army of vicious super-freaks but also three rogue heroes in special isolation.

The Black Hood, Hangman and Deadly Force are a remorseless Riot Squad just itching to get their merciless hands on more criminal scum ‘Caught in the Flames’…

As the alien Emperor gathers selected villains for his next enterprise, the New Crusaders’ blistering trial by fire proves to be an education for all, but not every hero survives…

To Be Continued…

Full of vim and vigour, this no-nonsense superhero saga is a slick and smart return to tried-and-true comicbook bombast and action which manages to feel brand-new whilst somehow still remaining faithful to all of the many iterations and re-imaginings of the assorted superheroes – even the two produced in conjunction with DC Comics.

This delightful exercise in recapturing the straightforward excitement of a genre also includes such special features as a variant cover gallery by Bates, Mike Norton, Ryan Jampole & Matt Helms, ChrisCross & Thomas Mason, Sanford Greene, Rich Buckler, Francesco Francavilla and Fiona Staples plus bonus featurette ‘Dusty’s Files’ on ‘The Pitch’, ‘The Cast’, ‘The Braintrust’ (creators Ian Flynn & Ben Bates), ‘The Legacy’, ‘The Villains’ and ‘The Future’.

Fast, fulfilling and fun, New Crusaders might just be Archie’s long-awaited superhero “one that didn’t get away”…
© 2013 Archie Comics Publications. All rights reserved. NEW CRUSADERS and RED CIRCLE COMICS ® ACP, Inc.

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The Initiates – A Comic Artist And a Wine Artisan Exchange Jobs

Initiates front 2
By Étienne Davodeau, translated by Joe Johnson (NBM/Comics Lit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-703-4

Throughout 2010 Bande Dessinée author/artist Étienne Davodeau (Friends of Saltiel, Lulu femme Nue, Un monde si tranquille, The Poor People: A History of Activists), noted for both brilliant fiction and moving factual comicbook novels, participated in a fascinating life (or perhaps vocation) swap experiment.

The artist, writer and designer was born in 1965 and, whilst studying art at the University of Rennes, founded Psurde Studios with fellow comics creators Jean-Luc Simon and Marc Le Grand, AKA “Joub”. His first album The Man Who Did Not Like Trees was released in 1992 and he forms an integral part of the modern graphic auteur movement in French and Belgian comics.

Released as Les Ignorants in October 2011, this lyrical and beguiling cartoon documentary reveals the year when the artist and independent specialist wine-maker Richard Leroy shared the secrets and mundane realities of each other’s insular, introspective and fearsomely philosophical solitary professions.

Davodeau knew absolutely nothing of the ferocious demands of the elite, experimental grape-growing game nor the oenophilic secrets and mysteries of tasting wine, but similarly the bluff, irascible son of the soil had barely read a comic in his entire life. The journal of discovery opens with ‘To Pruning, Then (Plus One Belgian Printing)’ as the artist is put to work in icy winds on the terroir of Montbenault, cutting and shaping the lianas which hold such glorious potential. Then Leroy is taken on an eye-opening tour of a Belgian print-works where Davodeau is summoned to sign off his latest album…

In ‘Wood’ a trip to a cooperage dissects the role of barrels in the slow fermentation process, as the new friends discuss the imponderables of judgement. It’s hard to define, but in their own fields each knows right and wrong, good and bad and most especially “not perfect yet”…

Leroy’s extra-curricular work includes reading lots of comics and graphic novels, as well as being introduced to the peripheral joys such as signings, collectors fads and so forth, but when he is introduced to major creator Gibrat a fascinating discourse on the aesthetics of the medium ensues in ‘Jean-Pierre (and Jimi, and Wolfgang Amadeus and a Few Others)’, liberally lubricated by the vintner’s ever-present samples of his own form of creative expression…

A charming interview and guest appearance with Lewis Trondheim graces ‘The Art of the Portrait and its Vicissitudes, or “The Theory of the Beak”’ even as the spring brings terror, confusion and greater back-breaking toil as the artist has his first brush with tractors and even more obscure specialist technologies, ‘What Goes Without Saying’ offers personal history and raking in the hot sun, after which ‘In Praise of Manure’ focuses on subjectivity as he learns the pros and cons of the controversial vintners’ heresy of “Biodynamics”…

Ploughing and accidental self-immolation features in ‘A Question of Proximity’, whilst the arrival of the world’s most influential wine critic opens a whole new area of discourse in ‘New York/Montbenault/New York’, and the tables are satisfactorily turned in ‘Saying Something Stupid: (Sometimes) a Good Idea’ as Richard attends an editors’ meeting in Paris in July before a little break at a Bistro reveals the true depth of the naïve comic-consuming artisan’s liquid gifts…

Wine-making is a 24/7 occupation and as storm season hits the terroir ‘The Blunder’ offers moments of genuine tension and apprehension for this year’s crop before a successful “disbudding” of the vines leaves time for a taste-training session for the novice drinker and reluctant reader alike.

In ‘Blacks and Whites’ the never-shy Leroy meets a creator whose work deeply affected him, and the pleasant hours spent with author/artist Marc-Antoine Mathieu lead to deep thoughts all round before ‘Wherein, When Certain Vintners Suffer Sulphur’ covers the raging debate in the wine industry on the use of elemental additives to “manage” fermentation, which leads inevitably to the frantic camaraderie of the grape-picking and constant cry for another ‘Bucket!’

October, and with the year’s harvest pressed and in barrels there’re a few quiet moments to disparage foolish ‘Label Drinkers’ at Wine Exhibitions, happily contrasting the snobs with Leroy’s first experience of a Comics Festival, before November brings the first tentative tastings of the new vintage and a long-awaited epiphany moment for reluctant reader Leroy in ‘Montbenault/Paris/Kabul’…

The Photographer (“Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders”, by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre and Frédéric Lemercier ) was the book the vintner responded to on a purely, frighteningly visceral level, so Davodeau takes the bemused convert to meet the lead creator and consequently discovers a tenuous connection between his life-swap partner and the documentary graphic novel’s subjects…

In ‘A Teetering Statue’ the quiet winter weeks allow breathing space to learn the travails of shipping and export, as well as encompassing a visit to the Paris Cartier Foundation’s Moebius Exhibition and some deliciously piquant home truths for comics cognoscenti before returning again to pruning vines, whilst ‘Savagnins, Poulsards, and Company’ takes us almost full circle as Leroy takes the artist to the vintner’s own personal promised land and a fellow elite wine maverick, whilst a trip to Corsica takes in the Bastia Comics Convention and the unique vineyard of the “Patrimonio Arena” in ‘Nielluccio, Vermentinu, Bianco Gentile and Oubapo’…

The magnificently elegiac and languorously evocative account wraps up in genteelly seductive manner with one final excursion as The Initiates head for the Dordogne to follow up on Emmanuel Guibert’s introduction to the survivors of The Photographer. One last gracious day of cross-fertilised booze and books conversation in ‘Final Revelations under a Cherry Tree‘ then leads inevitably back to where and how it all began for both participants…

Of course all I care about is comics, but even on my terms this rapturous, studious yet impossibly addictive account of two open-minded, deeply dedicated artists’ tentative exploration of each other worlds – at once tediously familiar and utterly unknown – is a masterpiece of subtle education, if not benevolent propaganda and, like good wine or a great book, takes its own sweet time to hook you.

Also included in this surprisingly compelling hardback chronicle is ‘Drunk/Read’ – a list of wines and graphic novels introduced to each novitiate; an intriguing bucket list for readers to aspire to and complete our second hand education into the greatest arts on Earth…

This dazzling display of harsh fact and the theosophical fervour of the grape-growers art, seamlessly blended with an outsider’s overview of our whacky, cosy world of cartoons and funnybooks, is enchanting beyond measure and should figure high on any fan’s list of books to seduce comics non-believers with. It might also be the perfect gift for all those people you thought you couldn’t buy a graphic novel present for…

Europeans excel at making superb comics which simultaneously entertain and educate (check out the sublime On the Odd Hours or The Sky over the Louvre to see what I mean) and the seductive, evocative, eclectically human monochrome illustration and dialogue perfectly capture the sensorial effect of wine and work and weather, and the backbreaking, self-inflicted artisan toil and ineffable rewards of making comics or creating wine…

Every so often a book jumps our self-imposed ghetto wall of power fantasies and rampaging adventurism, and I pray this elegiac documentary of a bizarrely fitting experiment makes that sort of splash in the wider world.
© Futuropolis 2011. © 2013 NBM for English translation.

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A Treasury of Victorian Murder Compendium


By Rick Geary (NBM/Comics Lit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-704-1

Master cartoon criminologist Rick Geary has been sifting through humanity’s dark drives for years: researching and presenting a compelling cavalcade of corruption with his series of graphic novel/true-murder mystery reconstructions, each beguilingly combining a superlative talent for laconic prose, incisive observation and forensically detailed pictorial extrapolation with his formidable fascination for the darker aspects of human history.

Geary’s unblinking eye has of late been examining the last hundred years or so in his Treasury of XXth Century Murder series, but first began his graphic assignations with Mankind’s darker aspects in a delicious anthologised tome entitled A Treasury of Victorian Murder in 1987. Now that initial volume and three of the eight that succeeded it (Jack the Ripper from 1995, The Fatal Bullet from1999, and 2003’s The Beast of Chicago) have all been re-issued in a splendid morbidly monochrome deluxe hardback – because, after all, bloody murder is always a black and white affair…

Geary’s fascination with his subject is irresistibly infectious and his unique cartooning style a perfect medium to convey the starkly factual narrative in a memorable, mordant and undeniably enjoyable manner.

The basic premise is simple. The feel and folklore of Queen Victoria’s evocative era is irredeemably ingrained in the psyche of the contemporary world, and that first flourishing of social modernity invested crime and especially murder with a whole new style and morbid appeal to the general public. Each of the cases the author adapts was big news at a time when burgeoning technologies, rising literacy levels and crass populism first began to stoke the fires of an insatiable hunger for gory news. Moreover, many of the cases still resonate with today’s catalogue of atrocities and will stir familiar feelings in readers of a later century – especially the unsolved ones.

The eponymous first volume begins with a stunning background feature depicting ‘Celebrated Events of the Victorian Age’, ‘Illustrious Personages’, ‘Statesmen, Explorers and Innovators’, stars of ‘Literature and the Arts’ and naturally many of the most notorious ‘Murders and Murderesses’ before setting the scene and tone with compelling illustrations of ‘Picadilly Circus, London 1887’ and a dissertation on the Victorians’ obsession with death.

Following the text page ‘Introductory Remarks to the First Three Murders and Bibliography’ the still-unsolved case known as ‘The Ryan Mystery’ is diligently laid out, wherein a brother and sister were brutally slain in Lower Manhattan in 1873, after which ‘The Crimes of Dr. E.W. Pritchard’ outlines the deadly narcissism and fraudulent career and just deserts (the last man to be publicly executed in Scotland) of a very nasty physician who outraged sensibilities with a campaign of genteel slaughter in 1865 Glasgow, before concluding with an early fully-documented account of that now-common miscreant, the child-killer in the salutary tale of ‘The Abominable Mrs. Pearcy’, whose atrocities in Hampstead, Hertfordshire dumbfounded the Empire in 1890…

Geary chose a novel methodology for the next, book-length saga – presumably because the case has been the subject of so much investigation and bowdlerisation over the years.

Jack the Ripper – a Journal of the Whitechapel Murders 1888 -1889 is “compiled from the journals of an unknown British Gentleman… who closely followed the increasingly savage killings” and wittily narrates a day by day account of the horror that stalked Whitechapel and gripped the world as it became the first media-led, press-fed cause célèbre.

Following a comprehensive map of ‘Whitechapel and the Crimes of Jack the Ripper, 1888‘, Geary – producing some of the most moodily inspired art of his prodigious career – unravels, reworks and remixes all the myths, facts and exploitative stunts of assorted participants. Also included are some potential early murders missed by the police and possible copy-cat crimes from that frenzied period of London life, in a truly captivating take on the most famous murder-mystery in history.

With an Introduction and full Bibliography this graphic exposé is still one of most engaging of expeditions into the legend of Saucy Jack…

If the Ripper has moved far beyond the realm of cold, hard plain facts, the next tale is its very antithesis: a phenomenally well-documented and demystified political assassination that allows the wryly witty Geary to fully exploit his ironically charged talents…

The Fatal Bullet – a True Account of the Assassination, Lingering Pain, Death and Burial of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States begins with a simple comparison of ‘The Two Roads’ which led the politician and his killer Charles J. Guiteau to their respective fates, before ‘The Journey Home’ begins the sorry tale with the interment of the nation’s lost leader.

From there the story harks back and simultaneously examines both participants’ oddly ‘Parallel Lives’, tracing their different responses to their nation’s call during the War Between the States whilst in ‘A Deadly Campaign’ as Garfield is literally called by duty to public office, his increasingly delusion stalker Guiteau insinuates himself into the politician’s orbit before at last shooting the great man on Saturday, July 2nd 1881.

‘The Long Summer’ then describes the nightmarishly bizarre and appallingly prolonged death throes of the President – including many of the positively baroque remedies and solutions prescribed by a phalanx of eminent physicians and inventors, all desperately seeking to find and extract the shell lost somewhere in the fallen leader’s body…

When Garfield finally passed on September 9th all that was left was the trial of his clearly deranged killer, as remarkably recorded in ‘Conclusion: At the Bar of Justice’…

This stunning compilation then concludes with a genuinely terrifying tale of modern murder with The Beast of Chicago – an Account of the Life and Crimes of Herman W. Mudgett, known to the world as H.H. Holmes, H.M. Howard, D.T. Pratt, Harry Gordon, J.A. Judson, Edward Hatch, A.C. Hayes et al. – a jolly catalogue of criminality and carnage describing the astounding killing career of a bogus doctor and mesmerising psychopath whose official body count was twenty-seven souls, but may well have topped two hundred.

Attributed as America’s first documented serial killer, Mudgett/Holmes seemingly did it all first: a serial bigamist and conman, he hunted and slaughtered for fun and profit, lured victims to a purpose-built killing ground in the placid heart of a quiet suburb, seduced women, abducted children, corrupted and controlled entire families – making them his accomplices and even proxy killers – and, when finally caught, cultivated notoriety with an aplomb that guaranteed him a place in history…

His worst recorded atrocities took place during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition; a vast trade fair in Chicago where he had constructed a unique hotel and guest house dubbed “The Holmes Castle”…

Following maps of the sites, floor plans of his Castle and the 1894 escape route that revealed ‘The Desperate Journey of H.H. Holmes’, Geary treats us to a elucidatory Prologue ‘This is Chicago!’ to set the stage , before beginning the horrific tale of woe in ‘Dr. Holmes Comes to Town’ wherein the dapper, personable medical charlatan and insurance fraudster’s early life is disclosed before he inveigles himself into a position of respectability in suburban Englewood and commences to build his dream palace…

‘The Castle’ was an incredible, insane machine designed to lure in travellers and generate missing persons, and although its unique amenities were never fully understood or its death toll confirmed, Holmes’ secondary business – selling display skeletons to medical institutions – did extremely well in the four years that it was open for business, after which time Holmes took his incredible seduction and slaughter show on the road, or rather rails, during ‘The Desperate Journey’.

With events and disappearances spiralling, Holmes made a rare mistake and was briefly imprisoned for fraud. Unable to help himself, he then cheated his cellmate – a professional train-robber – who exacted vengeance by telling the authorities the truth about his boastful bunk mate…

With only a hint of the true extent of the bogus doctor’s crimes disclosed in ‘The Castle Revealed’, Holmes remained ‘The Prisoner’ for the rest of his short life, but even incarcerated with every day bringing fresh revelations of his horrific crimes, the first American Psycho succeeded in taking hold of his story and skilfully manipulating his own legend and myth…

As ever, Geary presents facts and theories with chilling pictorial precision, captivating clarity and devastating wit, and this still broadly unresolved mystery is every bit as compelling as his other homicidal forays: a perfect example of how graphic narrative can be so much more than simple fantasy entertainment.

With the inclusion of highly informative pictorial background essays and maps throughout, this big book of death is a sublimely readable successor to that era’s “Penny-Dreadfuls”: a startling yet accessible read that will engross fans of graphic narrative and similarly entice followers of True Crime thrillers. This merrily morbid murder masterpiece should be mandatory reading for all comic lovers, mystery-addicts and crime-collectors.
© 1987-2003, 2012 Rick Geary. All Rights Reserved.