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Superman/Gen Thirteen

Superman/Gen 13

By Adam Hughes, Lee Bermejo & John Nyberg (WildStorm/DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-84023-328-5

The hoary old amnesia/mistaken identity plot gets a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek dusting off in this far, far above-average cross-company team-up when the highly proper Man of Steel meets the wild and wooly super-powered drop-outs of Gen 13.

Freefall, Burnout, Rainmaker and Grunge are pretty typical Generation X teens – apart from their superpowers – and they’re pretty bummed that the stiff and prissy Fairchild gets to choose their next vacation destination. But they’re frankly appalled when she decides to take them to Metropolis, home of the biggest boy-scout in the universe.

When the team stumbles upon a super-battle and the “nearly” invulnerable Fairchild gets a formidable shot to the head from a gigantic robot Gorilla, their troubles really begin. Confused, the pneumatic leader wanders off, and deducing that she’s actually Supergirl, causes swathes of destruction whilst trying to remember how to use her “other superpowers.” And then her friends realize with horror that she was holding all the spending money!

Unable to find her and getting pretty peckish, the team has to swallow their collective scorn and actually ask the Stiff of Steel for help, and the World’s Most Perfect Hero comes to realise that even he isn’t invulnerable to the mockery of the “Cool Kids” in this brilliantly funny generation gap comedy from scripter Adam Hughes and artists Bermejo and Nyberg.

Fast, funny, action-packed and loaded with brilliant one-liners that hark back to the glory-days of the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire Justice League International this slim tale is as fresh and delightful a confection as any jaded, angst-laden fan could wish for. Track it down and cleanse your palate before the next braided-mega-epic rumbles along.

© 2000, 2001 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Two Will Come, Book 1

Two Will Come, Book 1

By Kyungok Kang (NetComics)
ISBN: 978-1-60009-116-2

This is a rather gentle suspense – and potentially, horror – story for older kids which has a lot to offer adult readers. Jina is a young Korean Girl with all the usual problems of the comfortable modern miss, but her family is keeping a big, dark secret from her.

Hundreds of years ago her ancestors were rulers and one vain and foolish king ordered the death of a magical serpent called Imugi, just as it was preparing to ascend to Heaven. It cursed the family for eternity, decreeing that in every generation one of them would die, because of the actions of two people close to them. The fear, distrust and misery of this most subtle pronouncement has blighted the family through the centuries and for all their attempts to forestall their doom with priests, fortune tellers and exorcisms, nothing has worked. Long ago they decided to keep all knowledge of the curse from the children, only revealing the secret when – or if – they reach a certain age.

Jina doesn’t have many friends but as her birthday approaches her school rivalry with that obnoxious boy Jaesuk looks to be turning into something more, the girls in class seem less aggressive and distant and her cousin Myunghyun has returned from America after three years, bringing with him a gorgeous and enigmatic young man named Yoojin Lee. As the days progress she grows closer to them all but her new relationships are troubling her parents. The latest soothsayer has determined that Jina is the most probable target of this generation’s curse which means that two people close to her will cause her death…

More teen-soap than thriller, this undemanding manhwa fantasy has a subtle undercurrent to it which promises much. I for one will follow this pretty eye-candy to see if there’s a bitter bite beneath all the saccharine…

© 2007 Kyungok Kang. All Rights Reserved. English text © 2007 NetComics.

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Superwest Comics

Superwest Comics

By Massimo Mattioli (Catalan Communications)
ISBN: 0-87416-035-9

Writer/artist Massimo Mattioli was born in 1943 and grew up in an Italy rapidly rebuilding after cataclysmic social and military upheaval. He started his comic career in 1965 with the strips Il Ragnato Gigi, Ipo, Rita e Pino and Vermetto Sigh in Italy’s Il Vittorioso magazine. Before the end of the decade he was in “swinging London” working primarily for men’s magazines such as Mayfair, Penthouse and Plexus.

He moved to Paris and created M. le Magicien for Pif and worked on Le Canard Sauvage before settling again in Italy. For the newspaper Paese Sera he created Pasquino and was a regular in Il Gionaliono for more than two decades. But his work wasn’t only safe and mainstream. He co-founded the alternative magazine Il Cannibale and created Lucertola, Gatto Gattino and the impressive SF strip Joe Galaxy, which migrated to his own magazine Frigidaire alongside his Friske the Frog and the infamous Squeak the Mouse.

One day I’d like to review some of those series if they ever make it to an English edition, but until then let’s content ourselves with another contentious and controversial Frigidaire alumni: Superwest Comics.

Released to America at the end of the 1980s, Superwest is a broad but incisive parody of superheroes and anti-capitalist treatise from an insightful and bold stylist with a highly subversive, wickedly funny point to make. Looking like a blend of Disney villains and the gentle Disney superhero parody SuperGoof, but rendered in thirties animation style, our rat-like hero swallows a power-pill and gains incredible abilities to defend the masses.

Boldly experimental, iconoclastic with scant regard for scary copyright lawyers and strictly for adults, this volume translates and presents ‘Panic in the City’, ‘Porno Massacre’, ‘Cartoons Hold-Up’, ‘Scanner’, ‘The Shadow’ and the wildly experimental ‘Very Hot Dogs/100 Werewolves/The Wild Night’, with faux covers and feature pages tossed in for free. It is ironic, brash and wickedly funny.

I want more and so I suspect will you…

© 1987 Massimo Mattioli. All Rights Reserved. English language edition © 1987 Catalan Communications.

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Superman: Time and Time Again

Superman: Time and Time Again

By various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-129-8

When Superman was re-imagined after Crisis on Infinite Earths, many of his more omnipotent abilities were discarded. He was a limited hero, more in touch with humanity because he wasn’t so far above it. One thing that was abandoned was his casual ability to travel through time.

Indeed, rather than being able to navigate the chronal corridors with ease, in this splendid epic from 1991 (originally published as Action Comics #663-665, Adventures of Superman #476-478, and Superman volume 2 #54-55 plus epilogues from #61 and 73) he is trapped in a cataclysmic temporal warp, bounced around from era to era and unable to return to his home and loved ones.

When a rogue Linear Man, (self appointed guardians of the Time Stream) tries to return the hero Booster Gold to the 25th century he originated from, Superman intervenes, but a tremendous explosion sends him careening through time. Each “landing” leaves him in a significant period of Earth’s history and only gigantic explosions can launch him back into the time stream.

As well as the mandatory “walking with dinosaurs” the Man of Steel also meets the World War II Justice Society of America, fights Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto, tussles with a mammoth, fights The Demon during the fall of Camelot and encounters the Legion of Super Heroes at three critical points of their career.

This hugely enjoyable epic is by Dan Jurgens, Jerry Ordway, Roger Stern, Bob McLeod, Brett Breeding, Dennis Janke, Tom Grummett, and Jose Marzan and is both highly readable and cheerfully accessible for both returning and first time fans.

© 1991, 1992, 1994 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Caught Short

Caught Short

By Brian Howard Heaton (Grub Street)
ISBN: 978-0-95881-760-1

Here I go again bemoaning the gradual loss of the cheap ‘n’ cheerful cartoon paperbacks that were so ubiquitous in the past but are now fast fading as the much more important sounding Graphic Novels and Trade Collections carve a niche in our psyches and on our bookshelves. And here’s another disturbing thought – how many people these days even have bookshelves and any sort of tome to put on them?

None of which matters a jot or tittle as I call to your attention a relatively late entry in the field from Brian Howard Heaton subtitled “89 ways to pee in public without being spotted”. This sort of themed gag-book was the last commercial gasp in a tradition of pictorial entertainments that began with Punch, and evolved into a saucy standby of British life.

Heaton is a competent artist in the modern style and the gags range from contrived to fiendishly clever, all delivered with easy charm and utterly without text – never an easy job in cartooning. If you find this book or anything similar give it a try; this sort of thing use to be bread ‘n’ butter in our game, and you really will mess them if they disappear forever.

© 1992 Brian Howard Heaton. All Rights Reserved.

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Eden: It’s An Endless World! Vol 4

Eden: It's An Endless World! Vol 4

By Hiroki Endo (Titan Books)
ISBN: 978-1-84576-502-6

After the deadly ‘Closure Virus’ decimates the world the survivors have to cope with the global power-grab of the paramilitary secret society Propater. Elijah Ballard is one such survivor, searching for his mother in the ruins of a still un-pacified South America. Falling in with a rebel unit lead by the ominous Colonel Khan, Elijah is unaware of just how important he is, and just what part his mother now plays in the bloody new world order.

This volume of Hiroki Endo’s gripping, brutal post-apocalyptic thriller splits the action between the contemporary battle with a disturbing back-story origin for the compelling young rebel Kenji; a cold, psychotic killer who seems as alien and inhuman as any cybernetic monstrosity devised by the world-devouring Propater forces. By exploring Kenji’s violent past and unconventional relationship with older brother Ryuichi, the author also offers a glimpse at the origins of the Conquerer’s technology. It appears that the Closure Virus is the basis of the Cyborg technology now decimating Khan and his unit…

Eden is a brutal, savage epic, meticulous and compelling: This volume ends with a seemingly unconnected vignette showing what’s happening to Mana, Elijah’s missing sister – absent since the first book. How this sweet, innocuous interlude will fit into the dark, apocalyptic mosaic of this drama is something for another time…

And you really should stick around for it. This book is printed in the ‘read-from-back-to-front’ manga format.

© 2007 Hiroki Endo. All Rights Reserved.

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Superman: Exile

Superman: Exile

By various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-438-1

When Superman was re-imagined after the epic Crisis on Infinite Earths, one of the major aims was to add drama and tension by reducing his god-like abilities. As well as making him more vulnerable, many of the more charming, but just plain daft stand-bys of the Man of Steel were abandoned. So goodbye flying off to the next galaxy and being back by lunch-time, and no more drop-kicking planets; Superman was now tough but still had the capacity to be shocked and awed by the very concept of deep space. He was also more human and flawed in his personality.

This collection is a superb slice of pure comic wonderment for fans of action and adventure and collects stories from a period when DC was trying to reach new readers with their oldest icon, so the material here can be enjoyed by anyone, and there’s no need for a vast and specific knowledge of the character.

Collecting Superman (volume 2) #28-30, #32-33, Adventures of Superman #451-456, Action Comics Annual #2, and Action Comics #643 written and illustrated by Dan Jurgens, George Pérez, Jerry Ordway, Roger Stern, Kerry Gammill, Mike Mignola, Curt Swan, Brett Breeding, Dennis Janke, John Statema and Art Thibert, it sees a traumatized Man of Steel forced to abandon Earth as a result of a psychotic break.

When trapped in a pocket dimension he had been forced to execute three super-criminals who had killed every living thing on their Earth and were determined to do the same to ours. Although given no choice, Superman’s actions plagued him, and on his return his subconscious caused him to stalk the streets in a fugue-state dealing out brutal justice to criminals in the guise of Gangbuster. When he finally made aware of his schizophrenic condition Superman banished himself before he could do any lasting harm to Earth.

And thus the door to a fabulous saga of action and adventure opens. In the more than 300 pages here we see an endearingly human hero rediscover his purpose, revel in his sense of cosmic wonder and even discover some dark secrets about the lost planet Krypton. The epic concludes with a rapidly weakening hero (deprived of Sol’s rays his powers quickly fade) battling as a gladiator and overthrowing the monstrous Mongul and the hordes of the giant battle-planet Warworld, before returning to Earth with the most powerful device in Kryptonian history.

If he had only known how much trouble The Eradicator would cause he would have left it where it was, but since he didn’t we get to enjoy even more thrills and chills in subsequent collections as brilliant and engrossing as this one…

© 1988, 1989 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Tell Me, Dark

Tell Me, Dark (Vertigo)

By Karl Edward Wagner, Kent Williams & John Ney Reiber (EP Board Books 2003)
ISBN13: 978-2-70247-888-2
Also ISBN: 1-56389-032-1 (DC hardcover) ISBN 1-56389-088-7 (Vertigo softcover)

Originally released as a DC original graphic novel, this slight but effective urban horror thriller had something of a troubled genesis with Wagner apparently leaving the project before completion, giving John Ney Reiber his “big break” by completing the script for Kent Williams. I don’t know – or care, really – as the real import of this book is the role it played in the separation of the mature imprint Vertigo from the greater DC universe.

At the time of release the company was preparing for its boldest venture in five decades, hiving off its supernatural heroes and embarking on a series of projects targeting an audience that had moved away from, or beyond, mainstream comics. The success of this dark tale of sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll ‘n’ demons would prove the astuteness of the decision to separate.

Tell Me, Dark

Minor rock star Michael Sands is recovered and back in London. He’s looking for answers and maybe payback. He especially wants to reconnect with Barbara Flick, to relive that frantic, deadly, all-consuming love they shared. He wants to know if he jumped off that bridge into the Thames, or if she tried to kill him?

Following a dark and debauched trail he finds an overpowering satanic evil thriving in the city’s bowels and in the souls of far too many people. He doesn’t know what it wants. He doesn’t know what he wants. He doesn’t know how it’s all going to end.

Badly, he suspects…

Tell Me, Dark (Board book)

The bleak and despondent story is a vehicle for the controversial art of Kent Williams, whose fans and detractors are equally passionate, and his painterly efforts here will certainly astound or annoy depending on your stance. Indisputably though, he’s at his most typical here, so if you’re not a fan don’t waste your time.

Re-released in 2003 this graphic horror breakthrough is apparently still available and offers something a little different for the discerning adult fan.

© 1992 Karl Edward Wagner, Kent Williams. All Rights Reserved.

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Oh My Goddess! Vol 6

Oh My Goddess! Vol 6

By Kosuke Fujishima (Titan Books)
ISBN13: 978-1-84576-509-5

When geeky engineering student Keiichi Morisato dialled a wrong number one night and connected to the Goddess Technical Help Line his life changed forever. A gorgeous, powerful goddess named Belldandy materialised in his room, and offered him one wish. He jokingly asked that she would never leave him…

Trapped on Earth and unable even to move too far from his physical proximity Belldandy became part of his life. Unfortunately her life increasingly became part of his, too. All Keiichi wants is to pass his exams and live a quiet life but as more and more of Belldandy’s powerful and weird family turn up and move in, life keeps on getting more wild – and dangerous!

In this volume mischievous sister Goddess Urd has been possessed by the Lord of Terror and has activated the celestial Ultimate Destruction Program. The Great Fenrir Wolf is free and the World is about to end unless our hapless goof does something about it!

Although the trademark humour is still in evidence, this is a more action-oriented adventure, with moments of genuine suspense and the mandatory massive destruction one expects from manga thrillers. All of which shows just how adaptable this series can be, and the book even has room for a delightful and poignant change-of-pace tale to close. ‘Urd’s Fantastic Adventure’ is a bittersweet tale wherein the depowered and diminutive Urd reverts to a child’s body and experiences a doomed first love with a lonely young boy.

In a structured society like Japan there’s plenty of scope for comedy with fantasy and gender role-reversal. It’s a sign of Kosuke Fujishima’s great story-telling ability that this comic take on Bewitched travels so well in our less strictured world, and remains one of the most readable and engaging of manga properties. It’s great but you will need to read them all.

This book is printed in the ‘read-from-back-to-front’ manga format.

English language translation © 2008 Dark Horse Comics, Inc.

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Crooked Smiles: Punch on Villains

Crooked Smiles: Punch on Villains

By various (Grafton Books)
ISBN: 978-0-24613-242-0

Punch began in 1841; a magazine dedicated to satire and humour, and swiftly became a national – and international – institution. It ran more or less non-stop until 2002 before finally closing its jolly doors, featuring sharp, witty writers such as W. M. Thackeray, P.G. Wodehouse, P.J. O’Rourke and Alan Coren among so very many others. Many of these writers’ efforts were illustrated by brilliant draughtsmen and artists. It was a social force, an astute historian and its contents could even influence governments.

Punch probably invented, and certainly perfected, the gag and strip cartoon. The list of brilliant cartoonists who graced its pages is something I couldn’t live long enough to relate. Name a cartoonist; if he or she were any good they will have been published in Punch.

With such a wealth of material, it’s truly surprising how very few collections have been generated from its pages. The one under the glass here is from 1987, selected by Editor William Hewison and features mostly British gag-men doing their bit in the War on Crime. The cartoons range from the comfortably familiar to the just plain weird, and if humour is in the eye of the beholder, the wealth of ability and talent is certainly less open to debate.

This book isn’t really what I’m recommending here, it’s the type of book. These gags and many like them by the likes of such luminaries as David Langdon, Heath, Brockbank, Graham, Honeysett, Bill Tidy, Stark, Thelwell, Larry, ffolkes, Sally Artz, Mahood, McLachlan, Raymond Lowry and all the wonderful rest are sitting idle when they could be filling bookshelves and making us all a little happier…

© 1987 Punch Publications Ltd. All Rights Reserved.