THE ROCKETEER: CARGO OF DOOM by Samnee & Waid

THE ROCKETEER: CARGO OF DOOM collects a recent mini-series of the continuing adventures of the Dave Stevens creation. Yeah, I know I said "I'm not the market for non-Stevens Rocketeer stories", but I kind of liked the look of Chris Samnee's artwork, and have occasionally liked Mark Waid's writing in the past, so I figured I'd give it a look.

Samnee is much more to my liking for this material than the artist of the previous book I read. He doesn't try at all to draw like Stevens, but he's close enough on the spectrum that the characters and setting look recognizable. His style is closer to the old adventure strip artists like Frank Robbins and Noel Sickles, which nicely suits the subject matter. Unfortunately, I didn't like the writing as much. It did the required bits of business to get Samnee some neat stuff to draw (airplanes and dinosaurs), and the required bits of thinly disguised period pop-culture homages that characterize the series (a Doc Savage villain and the dinosaurs coming from the Skull Island of KING KONG fame, and I assume the distant villain Trask set up for a sequel is also some pop culture reference I don't recognize), but other than that it didn't really feel like the series Stevens set up.

So I guess what I want is to combine Roger Langridge's writing in the HOLLYWOOD HORROR series with Samnee's art in this one.

FAIRY TALE COMICS by Chris Duffy (ed)

FAIRY TALE COMICS is a recent anthology of 17 comic book adaptations of traditional fairy tales, about half from the Brothers Grimm and the balance from a variety of other sources, edited by Chris Duffy as a follow-up to his earlier NURSERY RHYME COMICS (2011). I thought there was some cute stuff in the prior book, but nothing too memorable, as the short length of the stories (mostly 2-3 pages) and the inherent nonsense of most of the source material didn't really work for me, although I'd have no trouble recommending it to someone a few decades closer to the target age group. FAIRY TALE COMICS was much more satisfying to me. Most of the stories are pretty familiar, of course, but a few of them were new to me, and pretty enjoyable.

I think the highlight was David Mazzucchelli's "Give Me the Shudders", one of the more obscure of the Brothers Grimm sourced stories (or at least the only one I hadn't heard before). Really makes you wish Mazzucchelli did more than one book every decade. He packs a lot into the story, with some nice subtle facial expressions and a lot of funny slightly creepy imagery.

Also high on the list, Raina Telgemeier does some nice stuff with the familiar "Rapunzel" story, Ramona Fradon provides some of the funniest scenes in the book in "The Prince And The Tortoise" and Luke Pearson's "The Boy Who Drew Cats" is a great little off-beat adaptation of the Japanese story which will definitely get me to check out his HILDA books.  Same for Joseph Lambert's Br'er Rabbit story "Rabbit Will Not Help", which has me looking forward to reading some more work by him soon.

Really solid book, with more than a fair share of excellent stories, and just about everything else at least interesting and with a distinctive style.

DAN SPIEGLE: A LIFE IN COMIC ART by Coates

DAN SPIEGLE: A LIFE IN COMIC ART is a recent book by John Coates about the now 93-year-old artist whose career stretches back to a long stint on the Hopalong Cassidy comic strip from 1949-1955, followed by a long stretch as one of the main adventure artists for Western Publishing until the 1980s, working on many film adaptations, Tarzan stories and his co-creation SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON. I'm mostly familiar with his work from the 1980s, where he drew long runs on BLACKHAWK and CROSSFIRE (both with Mark Evanier) and the "Nemesis" backup feature in THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD (with Cary Burkett). While he hasn't been as active in mainstream comics since the early 1990s, he has stayed busy with several projects (a lot of which I didn't know about until I read this book), as well as doing commissions for fans (his art agent's site is here).

The bulk of the text of this book is a recent long interview of Spiegle by Coates (plus a reprint of an earlier short 1972 interview by Dan Gheno), which provides a timeline for the illustrations.  There are some great recent drawings in the beginning where he provides the layout for the chicken farm his family owned in 1930 and the pharmacy his father opened in 1934. Those show a great flair for realism and establishing an accurate sense of place that served him well in the type of comics he'd draw. There's nothing too deep in the interview, a few amusing anecdotes but mostly just Spiegle doing a professional job, sometimes on scripts he wasn't that enthusiastic about.

It was good to see a lot of examples of his pre-1980s work, which I'm only slightly familiar with. It would be great to see some sort of reprint of some of the best of those (as far as I know the only real reprint has been some over-priced books of SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON stories, which I hope Spiegle is getting something for, although he didn't even know they existed until Coates mentioned them). I'll definitely need to get a few more samples of that stuff. It was also interesting to see bits of his more recent work, including a TERRRY AND THE PIRATES strip and a western story published in a 2011 book that I didn't know about.

In addition to the interview, the book also has a few short essays by Spiegle, his wife Marie and their children, which gives a nice peek as the part of his life off the page, pieces by Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragones about how they went from fans of his work, without knowing his name, to friends and colleagues.

There's also a good selection of his recent work on commissions for fans, featuring samples from all the big highlights of his career. I especially like a few of the Blackhawk pieces.

Overall a very enjoyable book, although unfortunately far too short to really give more than an overview of a career as vast as Spiegle's. I know it's given me a few books I have to dig up.

RAGEMOOR by Strnad & Corben

RAGEMOOR collects a four issue 2012 series by Richard Corben and Jan Strnad. It's Loveraftian horror, and sometimes I'm kind of tired of comics going to the Lovecraft well too often, but few do it as effectively as Corben. There wasn't that much new in the writing, but it was an effective vehicle for some creepy Corben images. I'm not quite sold on the grey toning on the artwork, which seems to be an attempt to replicate on a computer what Corben used to do with an airbrush. I think I'd have preferred pure black and white.

SAGA v1 & v2 by Staples & Vaughan

SAGA VOLUME ONE and SAGA VOLUME TWO collectively reprint the first dozen issues of the currently on-gong series by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan.  I read the first issue when it came out and thought it was okay and figured I might check it out later, but was a bit surprised at how enthusiastic fans of the book seemed to be. Vaughan's usual trend always seemed to be that his books didn't live up to the promise of his first issues. Anyway, these two books are a nice and pleasant quick read. Staples artwork is definitely the highlight, with a lot of imaginative and distinctive designs and crystal clear storytelling. For the most part Vaughan holds up his bit, with a few stumbles (I especially don't like his tendency to do the big cliffhanger ending, often with a much less satisfying resolution, which probably works better reading the book serialized with a month between cliffhanger and resolution). The biggest problem is that his writing seems vast and expansive on the surface, but so far seems to be a mile wide but about an inch deep. It's quite possible that he's thought through a lot of his concepts and will reveal those things in time, but a dozen issues in and there's not much evidence of that, and given his history (including my regrettable and I'll admit somewhat inexplicable decision to watch every episode of UNDER THE DOME this past summer) I'm not sure I have faith in that. At this point the Staples art still makes it worth reading, and if I can get future volumes from the library or buy them for $5 digitally (both of which I ended up doing for these two) than I'll stick around.

MIND MGMT v1 - THE MANAGER by Kindt

MIND MGMT v1 - THE MANAGER collects the first 7 issues (1-6 & 0) of the currently on-going series by Matt Kindt. I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I'd read the first issue back when it came out, and wasn't really that taken with it. I liked the artwork, and the whole package was very well designed and stylish, but I don't think I got enough of the story. Fortunately the "#0" issue (made up of three short stories) was available free digitally, so I tried that and it made the series look much deeper and more interesting than I thought, so I figured I'd try it again with a bigger chunk. It still starts off a bit slow, but slightly more satisfying knowing the bits of backstory presented in the short stories, but by the third chapter it really picks up, once all the concepts are in place, and it's suddenly a fast moving and intriguing adventure.

The basic story here is that a writer named Meru is investigating a flight from several years ago where all the passengers and crew lost their memories. The trail leads her to similar occurrences, and eventually into a massive secret world of paranormal activity and conspiracies that she may have been involved in all along. I look forward to reading the future issues and seeing if any of this resolves in a satisfactory way (and sprawling stories of conspiracies and secret organizations do have a history of not paying off, which having LOST co-creator Damon Lindelof writing the introduction kind of underscores). I'll also have to try some of Kindt's other comics.

It's also one of the best designed books I've seen in a while, which is very nice compared to the cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all school that applies to most modern comic book collections. You get the feeling that every aspect here was carefully considered, and it doesn't look like any other book.

THE ROCKETEER: HOLLYWOOD HORROR by Langridge & Bone

THE ROCKETEER: HOLLYWOOD HORROR is a collection of a recent 4-issue series by Roger Langridge and J. Bone, continuing the adventures of the Dave Stevens created character. I thought Langridge did a decent enough job on the story, adding a few more pop culture references to the mix that Stevens started, but I'm really not sold on Bone's cartoony art style for the series. I don't expect or even want an artist on the series to slavishly copy Stevens' art style, but I think I'd prefer someone to at least be on the same side of McCloud's pyramid. Overall pretty unsatisfying, but to be fair I'm not sure I'm the market for non-Stevens Rocketeer stories. I did think the Walter Simonson covers were terrific, though.