Now Read This!

By Neil Gaiman & John Bolton (D H Comics)
ISBN: 1-84023-411-3

This pretty but slight romantic horror story features a modern spin on the Commedia dell’arte scenarios performed by the travelling players of Italy’s 15th century. If you’re interested in the details, the history of the art form – which can be traced back to ancient Greece, if not further – are readily researchable on the internet and in many, many books, but for our purposes the cast (archetypes for different characters, drives and philosophies) perform dramas of the most primal and human sort and resonance for the delectation of paying crowds, each in a highly proscribed and defined form. If you get this book there is a very useful Dummies guide by Gaiman at the back.

Possibly the most well known character today is Harlequin the clown (although Punch would come a close second if we still had Punch and Judy men) and this character opens our proceedings by telling we readers directly (in the accepted manner) that he is in love…

Missy is thoroughly modern lass, and her pursuit by the tricky, ruthless supernatural Harlequin makes for a clever exercise but is oddly lacking in passion for such a torrid subject. As ever John Bolton’s photo-realistic art is beautiful and technically brilliant, but it too seems devoid of any emotionalism. Is that perhaps the point? Am I missing something really obvious here?

I’m always happy to see any comic material that breaks out of the mould and these are two of the industry’s most high-profile creators. I’m just a little worried that this one isn’t as clever as it thinks, and after all, nobody likes a smart-ass or a show-off…

Harlequin Valentine™ © 2001 Neil Gaiman. Illustrations © 2001 John Bolton. All Rights Reserved.

By Rick Veitch (Vertigo)
ISBN 1-4012-1059-7

The terrorist atrocity of September 11th, 2001 changed the world and in our own small corner, generated a number of graphic narrative responses of varying quality not to mention deep emotional honesty. Rick Veitch’s Can’t Get No is as powerful and heartfelt as any, but benefits also from a little time and distance.

Chad Roe’s company sold the world’s most permanent and indelible marker pen, the “Eter-No-Mark”. Everyone was flying high but then the lawsuits hit all at once. A cheap, utterly irremovable felt-pen is a godsend to street-artists and the most virulent graffiti weapon to building owners. As his universe collapses on him Chad goes on a bender, picks up two hippie-artist-chicks in a bar and wakes up a human graffiti, covered literally from head to toe in swirling, organic, totally permanent designs.

Even then he tries so very hard to bounce back. A walking abstract artwork, he is ostracized by mockery, unable to conceal his obvious “otherness”, and neither self-help philosophies, drugs, nor alcohol can make him feel normal again. Defeated, reviled and ultimately spiritually crushed, trapped in a downward spiral, he meets the girls again and find solace and uncomplicated joy in the artist’s world of sex, booze and dope. Lost to “normal” society, he goes on a road-trip with the women but they haven’t even left the city before they’re arrested. It is morning on September 11th. As the girls violently resist the policemen an airplane flies overhead, straight towards the centre of Manhattan…

With no-one looking at him, just another part of the shocked crowd, he watches for an eternity, and then no longer anything but another stunned mortal, he drives away with an Arab family in their mobile home.

And thus begins a psychedelic, introspective argosy through America’s philosophy, symbolism and meta-physicality. With this one act of terrorism changing the nation, Chad is forced on a journey of discovery to find an America that is newborn both inside and out. His travels take him through vistas of predictable cruelty and unexpected tolerance, through places both eerily symbolic and terrifyingly plebeian, but by the end of this modern Pilgrim’s Progress, both he and the world have adapted, accommodated and accepted.

Rick Veitch is a criminally undervalued creator, with a poet’s sensibilities and a disaffected Flower-Child’s perspectives informing a powerful social and creative consciousness – and conscience. Can’t Get No is landmark experiment in both form and content which deserves careful and repeated examination.

Black and white in a landscape format, and eschewing dialogue and personal monologues for ambient text (no word balloons or descriptive captions, just the words that the characters encounter such as signs, newspapers, faxes etc.) this graphic narrative screams out its differences to usual comic strip fare. But the truly magical innovation is the “text-track”, a continual fluid, peroration of poetic statements that supply an evocative counterpoint to the visual component.

Satirical, cynical, strident: Lyricism employed for examination and introspection, in perhaps occasionally over-florid, but nonetheless moving and heartfelt free verse and epigrams don’t make this an easy read or a simple entertainment. They do make it a piece of work every serious consumer of graphic narrative should attempt.

© 2006 Rick Veitch. All Rights Reserved.

By Milton Caniff (Kitchen Sink Press)
ISBN: 0-87816-026-4 (hc) ISBN: 0-87816-027-2 (sc)

As well as being one of the greatest comic strip artists of all time, Milton Caniff was an old-fashioned honest American Patriot, from the time when it wasn’t a dirty word or synonym for fanatic. The greatest disappointment of his life was that he was never physically fit enough to fight. But during World War II he not only continued the morale boosting Terry and the Pirates newspaper strip seven days a week, he also designed art, brochures and posters (unpaid) for the War Department and made live appearances for soldiers and hospital residents. But even that wasn’t enough.

Again unpaid, he devised a comic strip that could be printed in the thousands of local military magazines and papers around the world. Originally using characters from Terry he swiftly switched (for reasons best explained in Robert C Harvey’s wonderful Meanwhile… a biography of Milton Caniff (ISBN: 978-1-56097-782-7) to a purpose built (and was she built!) svelte and sexy ingénue that would titillate, amuse but mostly belong to the lonely and homesick American fighting men away from home and under arms.

Funny, saucy, racy but never lewd or salacious, Miss Lace spoke directly to the enlisted man – the “ordinary Joe” – as entertainer, confidant and trophy date, building morale and giving brief surcease from terror, loneliness or boredom. Although comparisons abound with our own Jane (created by Norman Pett in 1932, she ran in the Daily Mirror until 1959 and was famously reputed to lose her clothes whenever the war effort needed a boost – always resulting in huge Allied successes), Miss Lace was different. She spoke to and with the soldiers, and she wasn’t in normal papers. She was simply and totally theirs and theirs alone.

Long out of print, this complete collection of strips and articles is a fascinating insight into a forgotten world and a parlous time, and a beautiful example of the humorous talents of a truly great American.

Male Call © 1987 Milton Caniff. Collection © 1987 Kitchen Sink Press, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

By D.G. Chichester, Scott McDaniel & Hector Collazo (Marvel)
ISBN 0-7851-0024-5

Daredevil is a lawyer in his civilian identity, and as a crime fighter his blindness is compensated for by his hyped-up remaining senses and a sixth “radar” sense that gives him a supernatural awareness of events and objects around him. It’s safe to say that none of these talents are available to we mere mortals, and they’d probably be of little use to the Man Without Fear in unravelling the unnecessary convolutions of this overly complex thriller.

Collecting issues #319-325 of the monthly comicbook, this tale is a good example of everything good and bad about 1990’s Marvel comics. In 1963 (this storyline was designed to celebrate Daredevil’s 30th anniversary so there’s lots of in-jokes and pictorial markers for veteran fans) telepathic secret agent Eddie Passim was distributing vials of a super viral weapon throughout the New York Subway system when an accident occurs and he loses one. Thirty years later Daredevil subdues a deranged bum who screams that someone named Eddie has put pictures into his head. He’s the twelfth person to claim so…

Meanwhile, in the Louisiana Bayou a voodoo ceremony is enthralling Hellspawn; a magical evil doppelganger of Daredevil…

Meanwhile the insane Cyborg SHIELD agent John Garrett recalls the surreal adventure he had with the ninja assassin Elektra…

Meanwhile Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich is reviewing the case of US General Kenkoy who admitted in 1975 that the military were testing nerve gas on unwitting metropolitan commuters in the ’60s…

Meanwhile a Snakeroot ninja is breaking into the Pentagon and stealing the file on an old project, a viral agent called “About Face”…

Meanwhile millionaire Harry Kenkoy has hired Super-mercenary Silver Sable to find a man missing for thirty years. His name is Eddie…

All these threads are ambitiously but bewilderingly drawn together in an action-packed hunt for the lost agent and last vial, involving not only DD and Elektra, but loads of then-hot guest-stars (such as Venom and Morbius), and every modern bogeyman from Ninjas to gangsters to the Government.

Scott McDaniel’s art is phenomenally good but looks oddly crushed; crowded, small even, but the real problem here is narrative clarity. There’s simply too much going on in the mix, and the tale is desperately in need of a savage editing.

Despite – or perhaps because of – a number of attention-grabbing stunts such as revealing DD’s secret identity to the world, a new costume, and the apparent death of Matt Murdock, this is a floundering beast of a tale which was so nearly another masterpiece. Pictorially powerful, this is a little too much everything for all but the most dedicated Fan Without Fear.

© 1993, 1994, 2005 Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.