Now Read This!

 

By Judd Winick & Mike McKone (Marvel Comics)
ISBN: 0-7851-0833-5

This mellow piece of fluff takes Marvel’s What If concept up a level by having an amorphous team of young mutants from alternate universes team up to correct mistakes and clear blockages in the fabric of the multiverse.

Reality is a plethora of differing dimensions, you see, and if things go awry in one it can have a cumulative and ultimately catastrophic effect on all of them. Led by Blink (who had her own miniseries and starred in the X-Men extended storyline Age of Apocalypse) this team of rejects from their own realities, acting like the cast of the OC in fancy dress zap from place to place doing the Dyno-Rod thing.

Notwithstanding the hackneyed concept, however, it’s not a bad package, but this first volume – which rushes through an origin of sorts and sends them to an Earth where their great mentor is evil and another where they have to re-engineer the X-Men’s greatest tragedy – relies overmuch on a familiarity with the minutiae of Marvel continuity that might deter the casual reader.

If you’re prepared to accept the fact that you won’t get all the gags and references you might enjoy the light tone, sharp dialogue and lush illustration, and unlike most comics books, at least the dead stay dead here. I think. Perhaps. Maybe.

© 2001, 2005 Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

By Harvey Pekar & various (Vertigo)
ISBN 1-84576-452-8

Hopefully the brilliant Harvey Pekar will finally get some much deserved acclaim from the comics crowd now that his writings have appeared in ‘proper, mainstream’ comics. Or at least under the Vertigo imprint, which is nearly as good.

Kidding aside however, this collection of the four issues of new material published by DC Comics’ mature sub-division, and of course the excellent The Quitter graphic novel, should surely, at last, win him some fans amongst those dedicated consumers that have shunned him for decades.

Pekar has written another series of vignettes, asides, tales, observations and pictorial cathartics that are compelling and mundane, enthralling and ordinary, and made that quantum leap we all aspire to seem easy. He’s made comic strips something that civilians would want to read.

His collaborators this time around are Ho Che Anderson, Zachary Baldus, Hilary Barta, Greg Budgett & Gary Dumm, Eddie Campbell, Richard Corben, Hunt Emerson, Bob Fingerman, Rick Geary, Dean Haspiel, Gilbert Hernandez, Leonardo Manco, Josh Neufeld, Chris Samnee, Ty Templeton, Steve Vance, Chris Weston and Chandler Wood.

This book with all the shades, tones, textures and variety possible with black and white comics, is an absolute delight, but if you’re a colour junkie there is a section at the back with a solitary strip plus the captivating covers to ease you into the powerful world of monochrome. Buy this book!

© 2006, 2007 Harvey Pekar & DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

By Bruce Jones & Jorge Lucas (Marvel)
ISBN 0-7851-1221-9

Woefully disappointing psychobabble time-wasting from the usually exceptional Bruce Jones as the semi-feral mutant slash-meister finds himself trapped on a mysterious desert island. Somehow his mutant healing abilities no longer work. There’s a monster that keeps killing him. And most annoying of all, when he goes to the pub, everybody there ignores him as if he doesn’t exist.

Wolverine has come a long way from his babbling beserker days (he even has an adopted daughter in tow) but he was never stupid, but that’s the only possible answer for why it takes him five issues rather than eight pages to arrive at the solution to the puzzle that keeps him trapped in this lackadaisical plot.

Sadly not even the beautiful artwork of Jorge Lucas can save this slice of puff-pastry from the “ignore” pile. If you’re a returning reader or you’ve come direct from the numerous animated series or blockbuster movies , this is definitely not the Wolverine book for you to start with.

© 2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

By various and produced by Another Rainbow Publishing Inc. (Pantheon Books 1988)
ISBN 0-394-52519-9

Carl Barks is one of the greatest exponents of comic art that the world has ever seen, and he did almost all his work with Walt Disney characters. His work reached and affected untold millions of readers and he all too belatedly won far-reaching recognition.

One of his most talented associates, potentially even more influential and certainly much less lauded, is Floyd Gottfredson. Another strip artist who started out in the Walt Disney animation studios during the Depression of the 1930s, Gottfredson was asked by Disney himself to take over the fledgling Mickey Mouse newspaper strip. He would plot, occasionally write, but mostly draw the strip for forty-five-and-a-half years.

He took a wild and anarchic rodent from slap-stick beginnings, via some of the earliest adventure continuities in comics history as detective, explorer, aviator and even cowboy, through to the gentle suburban sitcom gags of a newly middle-class America that syndicate policy eventually forced upon him. Along the way he produced some of the most amazing strip adventures the industry has ever seen.

Mickey Mouse in Color is a lavish volume reprinting the best of the early strips with fascinating text and feature articles including interviews with the man himself, but the real gold is the cartoons themselves.

A mix of Sunday page yarns comprising ‘Rumplewatt the Giant (1934)’, ‘Dr. Oofgay’s Secret Serum (1934)’, the magnificent ‘Case of the Vanishing Coats (1935)’ and the whimsical ‘Robin Hood Adventure (1936)’ although superlative, are mere appetisers. The best stories and biggest laughs come with the rollickin’ comedy thrill-ride serials ‘Blaggard Castle (1932)’, ‘Pluto and the Dogcatcher (1933)’, ‘The Mail Pilot (1933)’ and the gloriously entertaining and legendary ‘Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot (1939)’.

Consistency is as rare as longevity in today’s comic market-place, and the sheer volume of quality work produced by Gottfredson that has remained unseen and unsung is a genuine scandal. Books like this should be welcomed, cherished, and most importantly, kept permanently in print.

© 1988 The Walt Disney Company. All Rights Reserved.