Trotsky - A Graphic Biography [2009] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Trotsky - A Graphic Biography [2009]

Rick Geary does this 100-page biography of  Russian leader Leon Trotsky, published by Hill & Wang, a prominent publisher of history books which has had a small line of mostly non-fiction comics over the last two decades, including several other biographies. Geary also did one of longtime corrupt FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover.

If you're familiar with Geary's most famous work, the TREASURY OF (VICTORIAN)(XXth CENTURY) MURDER series (16 volumes to date, 1987-2016), then you know what to expect, well researched history of the topic, mostly told through captions with occasional dialogue, telling a complex story in a nice clean and casual manner, backed up by some excellent cartooning in Geary's unique style.

I'm not really too familiar with this history, any classes I had focused on Canadian and American history, and were also more years than I care to admit ago. So I only had the basics of the Russian Revolution and subsequent rise of the USSR, which was obviously a lot more complex than what I read about. I found it fascinating to read about it through the lens of this one key participant, seeing just how long it percolated, through various plots and plans ending in jail or exile, until the eventual outcome. Which was followed by more plots and plans and exile, of course.

Obviously I only got this because it's Geary, not any real interest in the subject matter, but I came out kind of curious to find out more. Maybe not enough to read an actual history book, but maybe if there's a documentary or something on the topic...

TV - Belgravia (2020)

So, finally got around to watching the 2020 6-part series BELGRAVIA, created by Julian Fellowes (based on his novel), the creator of DOWNTON ABBEY, and with much of the same production team as DOWNTON.

Now, I had a bit of a journey with DOWNTON, which lasted six seasons and 52 episodes from 2010 to 2015 (and to date two subsequent films). I started watching it just as it was ending, and it wound up taking me about three years to finish it. I'd usually watch five or six episodes at a steady clip, two or three a week, usually enjoying it, but it would take very little to distract me from that and I'd wind up not watching it for a few months until the next time I had nothing to watch and remember DOWNTON. I guess on balance I'd have to say I liked it, but by the end it was really a sense of wanting to finish what I started that kept me going at the end rather than pure joy (and of course now they keep doing movies, it'll probably never end).

So that was what I was expecting of BELGRAVIA, which is set in a similar milieu of British upper class society, although almost a century earlier. I expected to like it, and since it was only six episodes (with no sign of a second season two years later), under five hours, I was hoping it could hold my attention.

It far exceeded that. This was everything I liked about DOWNTON and almost nothing I hated about it, compacted into a tight little package. I was expecting it to take a few weeks to watch, and instead I ended up watching the first four in one sitting, and pretty much had to force myself not to continue on to the next two, and instead savour them the next day, with a few hours between them. Just a delight. About the only thing it was missing was someone like Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess character from DOWNTON, which was probably for the best since that would have invited unenviable comparisons.

Now, no illusions on the actual quality of the thing, it's obviously a soap opera about people with a ridiculous level of mostly unearned wealth and the problems they mostly create for themselves with their rigid class structure, and a few of the twists are frankly a little ridiculous in an effort to wrap everything up with a nice bow (I spent most of the last episode wondering if they were going to do something bold and out of left field before they mostly wrapped it up in genre conventions). But for what it was I enjoyed it immensely, far beyond what I had any right to expect. The cast was mostly perfect (as usual for such things I sometimes had trouble telling the endless parade of middle aged white men apart), the script had a lot of humour, the sets and costume looked great (I'm sure it was all anachronistically clean and polished, but I've got no way to judge). I think I might watch the whole thing again someday, and might even read Fellowes' novel.

Millennium [2008] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Millennium [2008]

This is a collection of the 8-issue weekly series by Steve Englehart, Joe Staton and Ian Gibson for DC comics, their big crossover event of 1987, with over three dozen labelled crossover issues over two months. Englehart and Staton were the regular team on GREEN LANTERN / GREEN LANTERN CORPS for over two years leading up to this (and Gibson did a short fill-in run in the months leading up to MILLENNIUM), so as you'd expect the concept of the book spills out of Green Lantern concepts, namely that a member of the Guardians of Oa and a member of their female counterpart group the Zamarons arrive on Earth to guide the next stage in human evolution through a small group of their Chosen. Their plan is opposed by the Manhunters, a group of robots that rebelled against the Guardians billions of years ago (as apparently established in some 1970s JLA issues by Englehart which had never been reprinted until recently), so they recruit various super-heroes to help them.

I got back into buying comics a few months after this ended, somehow wound up with the first and last issues of the crossover at some point. The first seemed promising, the last seemed confusing. A number of books that I ended up getting back issues of were involved in the crossover (WONDER WOMAN, JLI, SUICIDE SQUAD, LEGION, SECRET ORIGINS, OUTSIDERS, plus a few other single issues), so I have about half the crossovers, where I usually had to mentally gloss over the Millennium aspects when getting to those issues. Never felt motivated to get those middle six issues, until I saw this book on sale a few years ago, and then it's taken me a few years to get around to reading it.

Overall I'd say it's a mess. I run hot and cold on Englehart, but not usually this much in the same book. A handful of things I really liked, but he can never get any momentum going in here, where various scenes throw to an (unreprinted) crossover issue, and then the characters pop back in here an issue or two later without any good explanation of what happened to them. And on one hand I can admire his desire to create a genuinely diverse group for his Chosen, especially back in the 1980s, but his execution was... something else. If you haven't seen Steve Englehart trying to write a Jamaican accent, you haven't seen Shakespeare the way it was meant to be done. Maybe I'll try again in a few years with all the crossovers available to me (if I ever get DC's "Infinite" reading service I think most of the books I don't already have are available there), but I doubt it'll improve it much.

The art is also a bit odd. Not sure where the Staton/Gibson combo comes from, don't think I've seen Gibson inking another artist otherwise. It's uneven, better as it goes, then the ending looks kind of rushed. But with a weekly book with a single art team that's not surprising. A shame, I think Staton with the right inker and the time to do it would be perfect for this kind of crossover.

Can't really recommend this. It all ended up being a footnote in DC history, with Englehart leaving GREEN LANTERN CORPS within months of this series, and the Englehart/Staton spinoff book NEW GUARDIANS lost Englehart halfway through #2 and was cancelled after a year.

Daredevil - Born Again [Hardcover] [2009] (Random Comics Theatre)

 Random Comics Theatre

Daredevil - Born Again [Hardcover] [2009]

This is a collection of the 7-part "Born Again" story by artist David Mazzucchelli and writer Frank Miller that ran in DAREDEVIL #227-233 in 1986. Mazzucchelli had been the artist on the book for the previous two years, with writer Dennis O'Neil, getting steadily better as he went from just pencils to full art. Miller had been the artist then writer/artist on the book from 1979 to 1982, returning for a fill-in the previous year and then scripting the issue before this run.

It's a pretty famous story, so I won't get into the details much. Suffice to say that frequent Daredevil foe the Kingpin finds out, through a plot contrivance, that DD is really lawyer Matt Murdock. He then proceeds to ruin Murdock's life in a multi-faceted attack before almost killing him, only for Daredevil to rise from the ashes.

I'm not a huge fan of Miller, but this is probably my favourite of his works, certainly the one I come back to the most. The lion's share of the credit for that has to go to Mazzucchelli's artwork, of course, but Miller manages more than a few clever bits. Also a few absurd bits, of course. The ending falls apart a bit, definitely the weakest part of the story, with a few other super-heroes popping in and a convoluted storyline involving Captain America that seems to drop in from another series before getting an abrupt end to the story we've actually been reading. Really does feel like Miller thought he'd be on the book at least a little longer.

This was one of the first reprint books Marvel did when that became a regular part of their publishing line in 1987, with a barebones edition which they kept in print intermittently for the next two decades. This version was a significant upgrade, adding in a reprint of #226 after the main story (which has Dennis O'Neil co-writing and Dennis Janke inking), copies of Mazzucchelli's layouts for various issues and a copy of Miller's script for the finale.  A softcover version of the book came out shortly after, which I think they've done a slightly better job of keeping in print. IDW has also done a book reproducing Mazzucchelli's original artwork in a few different formats.

Boneyard Volume One [2002] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Boneyard Volume One [2002]

BONEYARD was a humourous fantasy/adventure comic by Richard Moore, published for 28 issues by NBM from 2001 to 2009, collected in seven volumes. Looks like they started a colour version of the books at one point, but that only got half-way through, and Moore did a oneshot at Antarctic Press in 2013, but nothing since, and the books seem to be mostly out of print (the one-shot is available digitally).

I heard some good things about the book over the years, but don't recall ever seeing the serialized comic when it was coming out (it's a pretty unusual format for the publisher, which mostly does European imports in deluxe formats), and very rarely saw the collections, usually stray copies of later ones, but somehow found this copy of the first one a few years ago, I think on a remainders table.

This collects the first four issues, setting up the series about Michael Paris, a young man who inherits a graveyard outside a small town, finding it inhabited by a variety of creatures, chief among them a vampire named Abbey. Hijinks, of course, ensue.

I thought this was pretty good, a bit rough around the edges but with a lot of entertaining bits, more than a few genuine laughs, a nice variety of character designs and decent storytelling in the art.

The format doesn't really do it any favours. It's about an inch wider and two inches taller than a standard American comic, and the artwork doesn't really need the extra size. It the whole series were available in a nicer format (say a dozen issues per book, standard comic size, maybe even large digest size) I'd probably check it out. 

Death Note Black Edition #1 [2010] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Death Note Black Edition #1 [2010]

In general my taste in Japanese comics runs to older material. Tezuka, Nakazawa, Kojima/Koike. I used to try a lot of modern stuff, especially as it's become so readily available from the library both in print and digitally, but a lot of it leaves me cold, and even stuff I start off enjoying I get a little bit tired of three volumes in, and looking at the vast expanse of thousands of pages it'll take to finish the series I give up. Sometimes I tell myself I'll try again when the series ends, but usually by that time I forget. I did enjoy some of Urawawa's work (MONSTER, 20th CENTURY BOYS) to the end, and should probably catch up on his other stuff. It's been a while since I've tried a new series

But my favourite modern Japanese comic is easily DEATH NOTE by Takeshi Obata and Tsugumi Ohba (originally serialized 2003-2006), enough that after reading it from the library I ended up getting these omnibus editions, which consolidate the twelve original volumes into six thicker books with a larger page size and smarter design (you do lose a few colour pages from the smaller books, but that's a fair trade).  I've probably read the series all the way through at least four times, and will sometimes just pick a volume up and read a random chapter.

For those unfamiliar, the series is about a Shinigami (God of Death) named Ryuk who decides to have some fun in the mortal world by dropping his Death Note for a human to find. It falls into the hands of Light Yagami, a high school student, who is alarmingly quick to exploit the possibilities of a notebook which can cause the death of anyone whose name he writes in it. While initially he's strict about only using it on criminals who "deserve" it, his actions quickly draw the attention of the police, including a famed reclusive investigator called "L", and Light unsurprisingly quickly drops all pretense of righteousness and shows he's the pure villain of the piece, nicknamed "Kira" by the public, willing to use the notebook on anyone who gets in the way of his goal to be the "God" of a world he'll mold to his desires.

Just a really enjoyable series. This first book quickly sets up the situation, including some of the intricate rules of the Death Note, and also sets up the investigation into Kira by "L" and the Japanese police. It's especially rewarding to re-read these early chapters knowing where things are going to end up. It's also, despite the dark subject matter, one of the funniest comics I've ever read, with the humour popping up in some unexpected places.

And that reminded me to check and I see that PLATINUM END, another fantasy series by Obata/Ohba recently ended, so I should give it a try. I tried their BAKUMAN series (non-fantasy about the life of Japanese comics creators), but it didn't grab me. If I like PLATINUM END I may give it another try. And I just saw that there's a short story collection for DEATH NOTE which was recently released. I'll have to give that a look. Fortunately my library has some copies, all praise and thanks to the concept of public libraries in general and the Toronto one in particular...

The Judas Coin [2012] (Random Comics Theatre)

 Random Comics Theatre

The Judas Coin [2012]

Walter Simonson did this hardcover collection of six original short stories looking at various DC characters throughout history, thematically linked by the presence of a cursed silver coin, one of the thirty that Judas was paid to betray Christ, as seen in a short prologue.

The book has its genesis in the 2004-2006 DC series SOLO from editor Mark Chiarello, where every issue a single artist was given the 48-page book to create a solo anthology (sometimes with other writers, letterers and colourists, other times living up to the title). The series only lasted twelve issues, although reportedly many other creators were approached to contribute to it. Not sure if any evidence of other issues ever showed up, but Walter Simonson's plans persisted, grew to over twice the page count and a considerably upscaled format by the time it came out in 2012, with collaborators John Workman and Lovern Kindzierski.

Following the biblical prologue, the first story goes to 73 AD and a tale of an aged version of the Golden Gladiator, a short-lived feature from the earliest issues of THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD. 

Jumping ahead to 1000 AD, the second story features another longer-lived character from the same B&B issue, the Viking Prince. Obviously Simonson's affinity for that subject matter can be seen in his earlier work on THOR, and continues on his subsequent work in RAGNAROK. Gorgeous looking epic story.

Pirate adventures next in the 1720 AD story of Captain Fear. This is a short-lived 1970s feature which Simonson had some history with in a few 1981 backups. Some great naval adventures here.

A western next, with popular scoundrel Bat Lash in 1881 AD. Only western I know of Simonson drawing, and it's some great stuff, my favourite in the book. Clever story very much in keeping with the original series, which I'm quite fond of. 

Back to a character Simonson has some history with, Batman, set in "The Present" and with the only choice for a story about a coin, Two-Face. Fun little story presented in a newspaper strip format in black and white with some red highlights.

Finally we jump to 2087 AD with an unexpected revival of Manhunter 2070, an obscure never-reprinted feature by Mike Sekowsky in a late-period run of SHOWCASE. I've never read any of those, but if this is any indication, it's very strange. Of course Simonson has some history with the Manhunter name, but this is a completely different character, and Simonson's art has an odd Japanese animation influence melded with his usual style.

Very enjoyable concept for a book and well realized, with Simonson exploring a lot of different genres.