Comic Creator Screen Credits

If for some reason you're like me, and find the following clip to be possibly the best 8 seconds of any super-hero movie ever made:

Then you'd probably be interested in the page I just started on Tumblr:

http://screencredit.tumblr.com/
http://screencredit.tumblr.com/archive/
http://screencredit.tumblr.com/random

(note I started it mostly to have a place to play around with on Tumblr for another page I want to put up, so expect the design of it to change frequently and drastically over the next few weeks)

I'm going to try to put up as many examples as I can of the screen credits that comic creators get for screen adaptations of their characters and stories. Mostly screen captures, but the occasional video clip like above where appropriate. I'll also include the unfortunate cases of films and shows that lack any credit to the creators:

http://screencredit.tumblr.com/tagged/No-Credit

I'll put up all that I have access to over the next month (my local library has most things released within the last decade, and Netflix should come in handy), and then put up a list of those I don't have for anyone interested to submit after that.

Groo vs. Image

When Groo was being published by Image back in 1994-1995, one regular treat was how Sergio Aragonés incorporated Groo into the Image "i" logo on the top left corner of each issue, following the classic Marvel style character illustration in the corner box which had been used for the Epic series. For all but one of them Aragonés found a way to use the design of the logo for an extra little gag. Here are all the logos, and you can check here to see them in the context of the full covers.

The Valiant Groo

With the long delayed GROO VS. CONAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE coming out soon (and a return of solo Groo promised soon after), I've been reading a lot of old Groo comics from the Aragones/Evanier/Luth/Sakai team. So lacking anything else to post, expect a few scans of panels that especially tickled me in the next few weeks.

Like this one from the Epic GROO THE WANDERER #16 [1986]:

If you don't get the reference, from Hal Foster's Prince Valiant strip in 1937:

And it was actually a goose, not a duck, but impressive that Groo got it that close.

There might also be another reference related to Mark Evanier's one-time employer.

Links, Books I'm Looking Forward To and More

Mark Evanier has a tale of coincidence in the preparation of the upcoming THE ART OF THE SIMON AND KIRBY STUDIO book. And seriously, early contender for book of the year. A large sized 384-page book featuring reproductions of the original artwork of Kirby, Simon and some of the other artists they worked with in the 1940s and 1950s? If anything better than that comes out than it'll be a great year for comics.

And speaking of the S&K Studio, one artist who passed through there very briefly (three published short stories and some background work on some 3-D comics, some possibly unpublished) is still very much active in creating new comics, and has a Kickstarter campaign going on right now for his newest work, titled #20, which is a pretty on-the-nose description for the 20th release in the series of 32-page Steve Ditko releases that he and Robin Snyder have published since 2008.

Here's a pretty decent interview with Dave Sim from 1998, mostly about actually creating comics, conducted by Michael Cohen and Jimmy Gownley.  Sim also has a Kickstarter going on, which seems to be doing okay.

And Jimmy Gownley has a new book, his first since wrapping up AMELIA RULES a few years ago. I need to pick that up. Wait, I think I never did get that last AMELIA RULES book, either. I'll have to pick them both up.

Al Feldstein and Dick Ayers passed away recently. Rest In Peace, gentlemen. Lots of links around for them, a few I liked were Evan Dorkin on Feldstein and Nick Caputo on Ayers.

And you could do far worse than checking out Dorkin's recent ELTINGVILLE CLUB #1. Can't wait for #2, and the eventual collection which will have a few things I haven't read before, and all the things I have read before in a much larger size.

CAPS' auctions for Stan & Sharon Sakai continue, always some good stuff to look at there, and maybe buy if you've got the funds.  You can also donate directly here. And of course there's always buying Sakai's comics. Just read the recent NILSON GROUNDTHUMPER AND HERMY collection, which had one story new to me, and all of the stories in colour for the first time, that was great. Going to read the 47 RONIN book he drew soon. And fortunately it'll soon be easier to read USAGI YOJIMBO, with Dark Horse announcing a new series, SENSO, following the upcoming colour special reprinting some DARK HORSE PRESENTS stories, as well as the first USAGI YOJIMBO SAGA volume collecting the complete Mirage and early Dark Horse issues of the series. It's good to see some activity after the extended USAGI hiatus since 2012.

And a random list of other books sitting here waiting to read in the near future:
NOAH
MOLLY DANGER v1
THE FIFTH BEATLE
BANDETTE v1
MONSTERS & OTHER STORIES
RED HANDED
FPB: FEDERAL BUREAU OF PHYSICS v1
FIVE GHOSTS v1

Recently Read and Re-Read, 2014.04.26

SPACE USAGI [1998] collects the three 3-issue SPACE USAGI mini-series from 1992 to 1996, plus a few other short stories. In this book, Stan Sakai translates his long-running samurai rabbit character into a science-fiction setting, apparently because he wanted an excuse to draw Usagi fighting dinosaurs. This is a nice little stand-alone book, especially for those who find the over 200-issue and counting run of USAGI YOJIMBO too daunting a challenge to jump into without a warm-up. Sakai brings all his usual skills at writing and art, and quickly lays out a new scenario and plays it out over almost 300 pages.  The plot will probably remind you of the Star Wars films, either due to a direct influence or common earlier influences (one particular plot twist is right out of the Star Wars prequel films, except it pre-dates it by seven years).

THE PROPERTY (2013) is the latest book by Rutu Modan. It chronicles a week long trip by an Israeli woman who returns to Warsaw for the first time since before World War II, accompanied by her grand-daughter, for reasons which she may not be completely honest about. It's an entertaining little book with a little bit of everything, some comedy, some romance, some history, some mystery. Modan's work is clear and detailed when it needs to be, still in the "clear line" school of Hergé, but developed in a few ways from her earlier work EXIT WOUNDS.

FRAN (2013) is the latest silent epic from Jim Woodring, "continuing and preceding" his 2011 book CONGRESS OF THE ANIMALS and featuring his long-running character Frank. I'll have to go back and re-read that, and the other Woodring work, since I think it's all starting to make some sort of sense. Always fascinating to see Woodring's world, where every little detail might be a clue or might mean nothing at all, possibly both at the same time. The standouts in this one are the weird pets(?) Pupshaw and Pushpaw. I saw once that Woodring had a solo book about them that I unfortunately didn't pick up and doesn't appear to be that easy to find at a decent price.

ATTACK ON TITAN Vol 1 & 2 (2012) are the first two books of Hajime Isayama's on-going science-fiction adventure comic, which has been getting a lot of attention lately as it's been adapted to a successful cartoon about to be translated into English, which is the most sure path for a Japanese comic to become a sales success in English. There are some interesting ideas in here, a future where the world has been taken over by monstrous giants called Titans, forcing the few remaining humans to retreat behind elaborately built barrier walls, which work great until an even larger Titan appears, able to destroy the walls. A little bit silly, but with the potential to provide some light fun. Unfortunately, I didn't find a lot of Isayama's storytelling to be at all clear, often I'd have keep reading to see the characters explain what I had just read. There are a few interesting designs, and the second book closes with what appears to be an interesting revelation which might make the series much stranger than I imagined (but because of the storytelling problems, I can't really be sure until I read the next book to see what the characters say). I'm getting them free from the library and they're quick reads, so I might stick around for a few more books.

THE G.N.B. DOUBLE C (2011) by Seth

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I recently re-read Seth's WIMBLEDON GREEN (2005), which is among my favourite modern comics, in preparation for reading THE GREAT NORTHERN BROTHERHOOD OF CANADIAN CARTOONISTS (2011), a second sketchbook comic by Seth on some similar themes, which I somehow missed when it was published.

I've now read THE G.N.B. DOUBLE C, and it's an interesting companion piece to GREEN, although a very different book. Interestingly, Seth's introduction outlines the creation of the works, and it turns out that the initial work on this book actually began before GREEN was created, and picked up again after GREEN was done (all as a sideline to Seth's other work in that period). It sort of makes sense when you think about the two works, with GREEN being much more open and fanciful, less shackled by the bonds of reality than the much more melancholy world of THE G.N.B. DOUBLE C.

For those unfamiliar with the works, GREEN is a pretty broad comedy adventure about a world where vintage comic book collectors are rich and fanciful characters who engage in elaborate and unlikely escapades in the pursuit of rare back issues, most of which are fake golden age books created, sometimes in great detail, from Seth's imagination. THE G.N.B. DOUBLE C is, I guess in theory, set in that same world (or at least uses some of the same fake creators that Seth created for GREEN), but looks at the creators of the comics, in particular the members of the association of the title, of which Seth's stand-in is number 650. In his tour of their clubhouse in the fictional town of Dominion (plus an extended description of their off-site archive far in the north), Seth traces the history of cartooning, both real (Doug Wright's Nipper) and fictional (Bartley Munn's Kao-Kuk, Eskimo astronaut). It's a fascinating presentation, especially when the subjects are so obscure that it takes a few page to realize which are real (I'm still not sure about a few of them, and am resisting the urge to Google non-brand-specific web search for confirmation).

It's also kind of funny that I only read the book now, since a few months ago I would have had no clue that one of the last major "cartoonists" discussed was loosely based on Martin Vaughn-James and his fairly obscure 1975 book THE CAGE, which was only just republished with an introduction by Seth.

This is the type of book it's going to take me a few readings to fully digest.  At some point I want to re-read it, WIMBLEDON GREEN and Seth's earlier, more "serious" book IT'S A GOOD LIFE, IF YOU DON'T WEAKEN together, since I realized half-way through that these two are sort of cousins to that book, which revolves around Seth becoming fascinated with an obscure NEW YORKER cartoonist who turned out to be just as real as Albert Batch of "Trout Haven" fame (I assume).

A good companion piece to WIMBLEDON GREEN, or worth checking out as an independent book, especially if you find comic book history fascinating, whether real or imagined.

GRENDEL OMNIBUS #1 [2012] by Matt Wagner & Co.

Matt Wagner's GRENDEL was always a bit of a blindspot for me in terms of the long-running major 1980s independents. I started shopping at direct market supplied stores in the late 1980s, just as the original run was wrapping up. Most long-running independent books that were in progress I either tried and liked, so I ending up getting at least the first long run of issues, or tried and dismissed as not for me. I know I read a few issues of GRENDEL, but while it seemed intriguing, it also seemed very hard to jump in the middle, and the early stories weren't readily available. Everything I heard about the series seemed like I would like it, especially the stories of the original incarnation of the character, Hunter Rose (which pre-dated the stories I sampled), but there never seemed to be an easy entry point when I was interested.

A few years ago I did finally get the 1986 collection of the original Hunter Rose story, the prose/comics hybrid "Devil By The Deed" that ran as a back-up in MAGE, as well as the two Grendel/Batman crossovers Wagner did in the 1990s. "Deed" was great, as was the first Batman story, the one which featured Hunter Rose. The other one I didn't quite get, and I think needs more knowledge of later Grendel tales than I have. Still, getting more at that point seemed to involve navigating a hodge-podge of back-issues and often out-of-print collections. Fortunately, that changed with the recent publication of four volumes of GRENDEL OMNIBUS, which seem to collect most of the Grendel stories Wagner wrote and occasionally drew over the years, except those with Batman.

The first volume, subtitled "Hunter Rose", collects "Devil By The Deed" by Wagner and Rich Rankin, now in a black-white-and-red format matching the rest of the contents, two short-story anthology books, "Black, White & Red" (1998) and "Red, White & Black" (2002), written by Wagner and drawn by various artists (plus a few other scattered short stories from various publications), and "Behold The Devil", the 8-issue miniseries by Wagner solo from 2007-2008.

"Devil By The Deed" is still a powerful work. It looks pretty good in this duo-tone format, except that the typeset lettering is way too small in this more compact size (6x9 instead of the 8.5x11 of the 1986 book). It was an fascinating way to begin the story, pretty much starting with the death of your lead, and then going back and telling his life story from a skewed perspective (the conceit of "Deed", for those who don't know, is that the narration is from a book written a generation later by Christine Spar, the child of one of the characters, who becomes a main character in the next story, based primarily on the diary of Hunter Rose plus other research, though the images sometimes show a version of events not evident in the text). There's a lot of story, some of it glossed over quickly, but creating a solid foundation to build on.

That building came with the 45 short stories that take up almost 400 pages in the middle of the book, a few drawn by Wagner but mostly by other artists, exploring various aspects of the life of Hunter Rose. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but mostly high quality, as Wagner is very clearly writing to the strength of each artist, and playing with various storytelling styles to flesh out the original story, looking at how Hunter Rose became the person he is, how he rose to power in his criminal empire and how he ultimately fell, often by exploring the lives (and frequently deaths) of those affected by his actions, including lawyers and literary agents and the other supporting characters. A few times I thought Wagner was explaining a bit too much, robbing the story of the elegant simplicity of some of the passages in "Devil By The Deed" (I didn't really need to know the names and circumstance of death of each of the 23 crime bosses Grendel killed in one night), but for the most part he explains just enough and treats Hunter Rose more as a force of nature in the stories. There's some exceptional art in there, a few stand-outs include Stand Sakai, Michael Zulli, Tim Bradstreet, Paul Chadwick, Jill Thompson and Cliff Chiang.

The final chunk of the book is the most recent major Grendel story that Wagner has done, "Behold The Devil". It's kind of a jarring transition from the tight, compact and efficient storytelling in the previous 400 pages of the book, this time there's a single story that takes almost 200 pages to tell. This is presented as a time covered in Spar's "Devil By The Deed" only by outside evidence, as the period is missing from Hunter Rose's diary. We're privy to much more detail than Spar is, as Wagner follows Grendel during that period, as well as a reporter and a detective who are trying to find him. There's a lot of good stuff in the story, but I found it to be the least satisfying part of the book, as the main purpose of the story in the end seemed to be to place Hunter Rose firmly in the the larger legacy of Grendel, an aspect of the character that is mostly absent from the other stories in the book. My feelings on that aspect might change if and when I learn more about that larger legacy from the later volumes. I haven't decided if I'll continue yet, but right now I'm leaning towards reading the next book at least.

So definitely recommended, a good block of entertaining reading for $25, with frequent moments of excellence.

Recently Read and Re-Read, 2014.04.14

Quick thoughts on a few things I've read or (mostly) re-read lately. I'm on a bit of a paper acquisition moratorium lately, with a few key exceptions I want to avoid getting any new print comics until I've made a good dent in reading or re-reading everything I own, and hopefully finding a way to productively discard some of it. I am still getting stuff from the library and digitally, though. I won't write about all of them, of course (especially not the stuff I decide to dispose of), but here are a few from the last couple of weeks.

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WIMBLEDON GREEN [2005]

This has long been my favourite work by Seth, which I know is something that might horrify him. I mean, I read the total published (still unfinished) "Clyde Fans" serial that he's been working on for over 15 years recently, and I thought it was okay, but I didn't like any of it as much as any given chapter of WIMBLEDON GREEN, a book he tossed off as a throwaway in his sketchbook during a few months in the middle of that 15 years. Anyway, I somehow missed the fact that he did a sequel of sorts in 2011, THE GREAT NORTHERN BROTHERHOOD OF CANADIAN CARTOONISTS, so I have a copy of that here ready to read, but decided to re-read WIMBLEDON GREEN first. If anything I like it even more than I did before. Seth creates an odd but fully realized world where golden age comic collectors are eccentric rich adventurers in pursuit of rarities, and even creates some great throwaway concepts for the comics they collect. Seriously, I would read a full comic of Seth doing the hoboing misadventures of Fine & Dandy much more quickly than another chapter of  "Clyde Fans". There's a lot of unfettered imagination mixed in with some genuine heart in these stories. Looking forward to reading GNBCC to see if that carries over.

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BUZZ & BELL, SPACE CADETS #1 [1991]
This is a collection of pantomime strips by Sergio Aragonés, which from the biography in the back were published all around the world before getting an American edition. This collects 44 single page comedy adventures of the hapless human and monkey astronaut duo of the title. If you're familiar with Aragonés work from MAD, you have a good idea of what to expect, as he manages to get in every kind of sight gag fitting the theme across clearly. It was published at the same time as SMOKEHOUSE FIVE, another pantomime book of single page stories, that one with a fireman theme. I'm not sure if the single books published in America for each represent all of the work Aragonés did on the characters, some searching around indicates some foreign publishers had two volumes of each, but I can't find page counts so they might have just have been thinner books. If there are more I wouldn't mind a nice thick book of every strip of both features, and any other little-seen Aragonés work there might be.

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BIKEMAN #1 - #5 [2011-2013]
I really liked Jon Chad's first LEO GEO book (and should have the second one soon), so when I saw him at TCAF last year I picked up a set of his "minicomic" BIKEMAN. Well, "minicomic" is what he calls it, but they're actually pretty large and pretty long, with about 50 pages of story each. It's a fascinating elaborate fantasy world with intelligent bikes, a bear-masked Bikeman who shepherds them, a long-standing war between intelligent bears and wolves and the villager named Pedl who gets involved in that world. It's a weird and fast paced story that gets increasingly more complicated, and if there's a new issue out soon I'd make an exception to my paper moratorium to get it.

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LITTLE NOTHINGS #1 [2007]
This is the first of four published English language translations of Lewis Trondheim's diary strip "Les Petits Riens", which is apparently still going on and up to six published collections in the original French. This is my favourite series by the very prolific M. Trondheim. Each page is a complete unit, and could be anything from his life, from travel stories to family life to work tales, and sometimes even, as the title notes, absolutely nothing. Everything is filtered through Trondheim's slightly quirky perspective, and drawn beautifully in his clean but detailed funny animal style and with a lush watercolour finish. After I re-read the four published books I think I might brush up on my French to read the on-line version.

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SMITH BROWN JONES - CALM, COOL & COLLECTED [1997]
I really enjoyed Jon "Bean" Hastings' second series of SMITH BROWN JONES from 1998-1999, but never could find the last issue of that, or the self-published 1996-1997 series. It was a nice goofy book about an alien accountant working undercover on Earth, along with his floating robot companion and other friends, dealing with other aliens and everyday life. Recently I finally tracked down both the missing issue of series two and this collection of series one, so I read this one first (and it's the only book in this group I'm reading for the first time). It was pretty good, but not as good as I remembered the second series being. I'll see how that holds up soon, but my memory is that Hastings got a lot more polished in his scripting, the story moved along much faster once the set-up was out of the way and the artwork was much more accomplished. I don't want to sound too down on it, there's a lot to like in this book, but after all this time I guess I was hoping for more. Maybe combined with the second series I'll like it better.

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FAIRY TALES OF OSCAR WILDE #4 [2004]
P. Craig Russell adapted eight of Oscar Wilde's nine prose fairy tales to comics in five volumes published between 1992 and 2012. This is the only one I have, adapting "The Devoted Friend" (OP. 49) and "The Nightingale And The Rose" (OP. 54), though I've read a few of the others. I keep telling myself I'll get a single omnibus volume of all of them when he's finished, even if at the rate he's going that might not be for another decade. I see they are available digitally now, so that might suit me until a single volume paper edition is done. It's pretty much what you'd expect from Russell, a faithful adaptation of Wilde's short stories told with Russell's clean and expressive style. I especially liked "The Devoted Friend" of these two, with some nicely humourous bits with the animals telling the story.

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BOOKHUNTER [2007]
I've been reading Jason Shiga's new webcomic DEMON, and that gave me the push to re-read my first and still favourite exposure to his work, BOOKHUNTER (though DEMON is off to a good start). What I wrote years ago still stands, only to add that it gets better every time I read it. There are lots of clever little things that I missed the first time around, and I'm still impressed by how he put out such an insane premise (library police) and just rode it out in a perfect pastiche of procedural crime fiction.

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HEROBEAR AND THE KID - THE INHERITANCE [2003]
This is a collection of the five issues of Mike Kunkel's introduction of his characters, which made a big splash when first published from 1999-2002, but sadly didn't continue back then except for an apparently unfinished crossover with a book called DECOY and a solicited but unpublished second series. In 2013 Kunkel finally returned to the book, with a serialized reprint of the original book and two new comics, a "Special" and an "Annual", with a new mini-series set to start soon. I've got the two new books ready to read digitally, but figured I should re-read this one first. I still like it, but not as much as I did when it was new and I read it out of order (as I recall, I started with #4, liked it a lot but couldn't find the earlier books, got #5 when it came out and then later got #2 and #3, and only read #1 when this collection came out). Still very good, and I'm definitely in for the new material.

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THE TALE OF ONE BAD RAT [2010]
This is the current hardcover edition of Bryan Talbot's comic which I first read when it was serialized in four parts back in 1994-1995. This is the story of Helen Potter, who we meet as a homeless teen in London and follow on her journey to put her life back together and deal with the sexual abuse in her past. All of this is intertwined with a lush visual look at the English Lake District and the works of Beatrix Potter, including a dead-on allegorical pastiche of a Potter book. Talbot's afterword explains the fascinating way that the story grew organically from a number of interests and events. This and ALICE IN SUNDERLAND are probably tied as my two favourite Talbot works, the winner being whichever I've re-read most recently, and guarantees I'll give anything he writes a try, like his upcoming book (with Mary Talbot and Kate Charlesworth) about suffragettes in Edwardian England.

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BIGG TIME [2002]
This is an original graphic book by Ty Templeton, about a homeless man named Lester Bigg who finds out his bad luck is due to his cruel and somewhat incompetent guardian angel Stavros, who he can suddenly see. Bigg coerces Stavros to use his powers to make Bigg famous, and comedy ensues. This is always an amusing book, few comic book artists can manage wild slapstick as effectively as Templeton, and there are a lot of clever bits of dialogue and bizarre plot twists. It also has an odd surprise connection with an earlier unfinished Templeton work.

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And some books I'm in the middle of reading (generally I'm trying to limit myself to 10-15 pages at a sitting for each, every few days):

THE VIKING PRINCE [2010]

MAGNUS ROBOT FIGHTER ARCHIVES #1 [2010]

COMPLETE NEMESIS THE WARLOCK #1 [2006]

SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING [1987]

GRIMJACK OMNIBUS #1 [2010]

SPACE USAGI [1998]

THOR VISIONARIES - WALTER SIMONSON #1 [2000]

LEAVE IT TO CHANCE - SHAMAN'S RAIN [2002]

GALAXION BOOK 1 - THE JUMP [2009]

SCARY GODMOTHER [2010]

GRENDEL OMNIBUS #1 [2012]

DOUG WILDEY'S RIO - THE COMPLETE SAGA [2012]

Will the Shadow get his body back, 25 years later...

So, Dynamite recently published a reprint of Howie Chaykin's SHADOW series "Blood and Judgment" from DC in the 1980s, and followed up with the subsequent Andy Helfer/Bill Sienkiewicz "Shadows & Light" story that launched the on-going series.  Now it looks like they're going on to "Seven Deadly Finns", where Helfer teamed up with Kyle Baker for what's probably my favourite Shadow story ever.

Which means we might get more Helfer/Baker in the almost as good "Body & Soul" some time after that.  Which is going to beg the question, the last issue of the series, #19, ends (spoiler alert) like this:

With the Shadow in a similar condition. And because I'm a man who owns too much paper, we were promised this for "Nuts And Bolts" in 1989:

Never published, of course, and instead a few months later we got a more traditional take on the character in THE SHADOW STRIKES.  I don't have the early issues of that book, but I've heard that there's some mention of the abandoned storyline there, maybe a promise of a special to wrap it up? Can anyone confirm? Anyway, now 25 years later I doubt we're going to see a continuation of the story by anyone, much less the original creators. But one can dream. Presumably something must have been written and maybe drawn before the plug was pulled.

Remarks on recent comics (2014.02.21)

More recently read comics, or if you prefer, graphic novels.  No, no one prefers that?  Okay, comics. In particular, these:

BATTLING BOY (2013) by Paul Pope
HILDA AND THE MIDNIGHT GIANT (2011) by Luke Pearson
BAD HOUSES (2013) by Sara Ryan & Carla Speed McNeil
PUNK ROCK JESUS (2013) by Sean Murphy
A WRINKLE IN TIME: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL (2012) by Hope Larson, adapting Madeleine L'Engle
STAR WARS. VOLUME ONE, IN THE SHADOW OF YAVIN (2013) by Brian Wood & Carlos D'Anda

And, if you missed them, I recently had slightly longer comments in separate posts on these:

JOE KUBERT PRESENTS (2013) by Joe Kubert (editor)
THE BOJEFFRIES SAGA (2014) by Steve Parkhouse & Alan Moore

Around the web

Evan Dorkin has a two-part one-shot (or something like that) concluding his long-running ELTINGVILLE CLUB series coming out this year.  Cover to #1 and cover to #2.

Jason Shiga has a new webcomic, DEMON.

Neil Gaiman has a book coming out reprinting his short story THE TRUTH IS A CAVE IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS with illustrations by Eddie Campbell (enough illustrations that Gaiman describes it as "almost a graphic novel".  Time to pull out the old "not a graphic novel, Percy" bit). See the cover here. I've read the original short story, and it's pretty good, not great, and has a couple of visual hooks that Campbell could exploit. While looking for info on that, I found out that Gaiman is apparently also writing HANSEL AND GRETEL with artist Lorenzo Mattotti for editor Françoise Mouly's Toon Books line later this year. That could be interesting.

Brian Hibbs has his annual look at comic sales reported through BookScan.  With the usual caveats about what those numbers actually represent, it's still a fascinating snapshot of a particular market for comics. For direct market figures, John Jackson Miller has your fix.

Todd Klein looks at the connection between a 1942 Stan Kaye Superman drawing and a painting which hung in the DC offices. Part one, part two.

Steve Bissette has a great new colour TYRANT print. Hopefully news on new TYRANT comics soon.

I briefly fell into the rabbit hole of reading about Dave Sim's adventures in trying to get the early editions of his CEREBUS books in print, now that his old printer is gone and his old printing methods are obsolete, over at A Moment of Cerebus. I don't recommend trying to follow the whole discussion, but this post comparing different reproductions of the tonework on one image is kind of fascinating.

JOE KUBERT PRESENTS by Joe Kubert (editor)

JOE KUBERT PRESENTS (2013) is a collection of the six-issue anthology published in 2012-2013, edited by Joe Kubert and almost completed before his death in 2012. Each issue includes work from Kubert (both solo and with various collaborators), Sam Glanzman and Brian Buniak.

Sam Glanzman's contributions are a return to his USS Stevens war stories, a staple of the 1970s DC war comics (also mostly edited by Kubert). Glanzman served aboard the naval destroyer in the Pacific during World War II, and used both his own experiences and those he heard from others in a series of back-up features that primarily ran from 1970 to 1977, plus a few subsequent stories in a pair of graphic novels published as A SAILOR'S STORY and short stories in SAVAGE TALES. For this series he did a series of 10-page stories telling a variety of events, from the oddball to the comedic to the tragic, as well as looking at some of the major events of the war. Beautifully rendered work as always, drawing on memories still vivid after over a half-century, and a nice reminder of a major but mostly unappreciated milestone in comics history. Hopefully someday these pages will serve as the conclusion to a full collection of Glanzman's WWII stories. In addition to the six stories, there's also a feature where Kubert comments on Glanzman and shows a few of the actual illustrations Glanzman drew while serving on the USS Stevens in the 1940s.

Brian Buniak is represented in every issue with a serialized adventure of Angel and The Ape, reviving the short lived 1960s feature. I thought the concept was cute enough for a single story, with a sort of 1980s era MAD/CRACKED look to the work, but it wasn't really strong enough to sustain a six part story. The two-page spread of classic chicken-fat in-jokes, slapstick and non sequiturs is pretty cute, with some interesting cameos (pay close attention if you missed it, Mike Sterling...).

Other than those two features in every issue, Joe Kubert himself provided the rest of the material in each issue.

His first story, as seen on the cover, features Hawkman and is set in Africa. It has some really good artwork, evoking both his earlier work on that character and his well-regarded 1970s work on Tarzan but The story is a little bit preachy and disjointed, though.

The major Kubert work is the long-lost series THE REDEEMER, which was scheduled and widely advertised and previewed back in 1983, but never actually published.  This book has some concept artwork and what would have been the first three issues of that series, as well as some preliminary artwork for the future issues, which is as far as Kubert got before realizing he couldn't fit a monthly book with the other demands of his schedule. The concept is a history spanning story of redemption and reincarnation, giving Kubert a vehicle to draw a variety of settings, a science-fiction future and the American west of the 19th century in the two stories he got to and planned stories of Roman gladiators, cavemen and pirates among those planned. It's all a little strange, but an entertaining concept, and good to finally have some closure three decades after seeing those ads for the book.

The other serialized Kubert contribution to the book is "Spit", a series of vignettes about an orphan boy who ends up aboard a whaling ship around 1850, inspired by, as Kubert explains, his childhood fascination with MOBY DICK.  This is probably my favourite Kubert art of the book, mostly drawn in the pencilled style he used for a few of his later major works like YOSSEL and DONG XOAI. His passion for the subject matter really comes though in the art, and I just wish there was more room to flesh out the story.

Kubert also does a short ghost story "The Biker", which I enjoyed, especially the horror elements drawn in that pencil style. Paul Levitz writes what is sort of a Sgt. Rock story for Kubert to draw, and it was far better than I was expecting, and Kubert co-writes a few short stories for other artists that are an interesting change of pace.

Overall it's a nice thick collection with a wide variety of material at a great price, well worth picking up for a sample of one of the greatest comic book artists.

THE BOJEFFRIES SAGA by Parkhouse & Moore

Just reprinted by Top Shelf and Knockabout in both print and digital formats (this review from the digital version), the classic Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse creation THE BOJEFFRIES SAGA, featuring the original nine stories, serialized in various publications from 1983 to 1991, and a new 24-page story by The Original Writer and The Original Artist.

The series presents the comic misadventures of the Bojeffries family of the English Midlands, as they try to live a quiet suburban life, despite the fact that the family includes a vampire, a werewolf, an elder god and some other members who are even stranger.

If you don't have all the original stories in one or another of their original printings, this is a must have. Some of the funniest stuff Moore ever wrote, and strong distinctive art by Parkhouse. If only the new 24-page story is new to you, it's still highly recommended. The new story doesn't have any chance of being as dear to me as the originals which I've been living with in my head for over half my life, but it has a lot of funny bits and clever callbacks. Plus you get the classic stories nicely reproduced in the original black&white (with red highlights in the case of one story) instead of the colour of the previous single-volume edition.

The original stories still hold up nicely, even after at least a dozen readings over the years. The highlight, as always, is "Sex, With Ginda Bojeffries", wherein our heroine goes out armed with dating advice from Flirt Magazine to find a man not intimated by her. I won't reveal if she succeeds, but I always enjoy the journey, and can't believe how hard I still laugh at the "premature evacuation" line. Of the rest, I especially liked the vacation special, "Our Factory Fortnight", this time around.

The new story is "After They Were Famous", catches up on the family in the modern day, which finds them estranged from each other in the wake of the unwanted attention from a tell-all biography by son Reth and now dealing, sometimes quite poorly, with 21st century life. Naturally events (in the form of reality TV) conspire to bring the back together.

I was pretty happy with the new story, though I don't expect it'll ever match the original run to me (offhand I can't think of any sort of generation-later follow-up which has). Parkhouse's work hasn't lost a step, although I did find the computer rendered greytone work more than a little distracting at times. It was an odd contrast with the classic linework. Other than that, his faces are expressive and funny, and he does a good job with some of the physical comedy bits. For the script, Moore gets to do some of the playing with language that he's always shown a facility for (though I found a few of his attempts to render accents phonetically a loitile deffacalt to entoiprat). He still shows a good feel for the characters, and gets in a few nice updates to the original stories. I did think the "reality" TV target of some of the parody felt a bit dated (but as I understand, this was scripted a few years ago), but even there he gets off some good gags.

So definitely worth a look.

Remarks on recent comics (2014.02.07)

That's recently read, not recently published.

Time for one of those semi-regular attempts to get back to writing here...

Some things I've read lately a variety pack of comics from the last few decades:

PREACHER by Steve Dillon, Garth Ennis and others
OMAHA by Reed Waller & Kate Worley with James Vance
GODZILLA: THE HALF-CENTURY WAR by James Stokoe
YOU'RE ALL JUST JEALOUS OF MY JETPACK by Tom Gauld


PREACHER (Steve Dillon, Garth Ennis and others)
I began reading PREACHER a few years ago, but didn't get that far. I figured it was a good time to change that with the recent movement on the possibility of a TV series (and it seems the business background of the deal are far more interesting than I thought. It would be fascinating to have some more digging into that. Did DC keep the publishing rights to the book while giving up the media rights?). I read all nine books (collecting 75 comics published between 1995 and 2000) over about a month.

For those unfamiliar, the series is about a preacher named Jesse Custer who finds himself bonded with the offspring of an angel and demon, giving him powers to rival God, leading him to various adventures with his girlfriend Tulip and vampire friend Cassidy. And, by the way, I do love that Ennis goes out of his way never to use the word "vampire" to describe Cassidy, and then DC liberally used the word on the backcovers and other supplemental material.

Overall, I'd say that parts of the book are really good, mostly in the first half, but the whole thing doesn't hang together. There was maybe 25 issues worth of story, and the rest was padding and sidetracks that didn't serve the story (I'm not sure we needed even one full issue of Jesse's father's Vietnam adventures, we definitely didn't need two). All of that stuff really watered down the main story...

And ultimately, that main story doesn't even end well. Maybe it would have been more effective without the meandering path, but I'm not really sure. I don't know if Ennis has ever talked about it, but I'd be fascinated to know if the ending changed a lot from the original conception, since that did not feel like an ending that fit with the first dozen issues of the book (it might have felt differently to people who read it over 5+ years as opposed to 5+ weeks). A lot of times it felt like Ennis fell too much in love with his main characters and spared them a more brutal fate.

In the end, glad enough I read it for the good parts (including Dillon's artwork, which looks so natural that it's easy to underestimate, but was top-notch throughout), really glad I read it from the library, since I doubt I'll want to read it again any time soon (I figure I'd have made it about a third to halfway in before giving up if I was buying them). First book is worth getting (the current version collects the first dozen issues, which are a nice solid run and close to a complete story before most of the drifting begins).

By the way (and more spoilery stuff here), was it just me, or was it kind of odd that they never got around to acknowledging what seemed like the blindingly obvious hinting that Billy Bob and Lorie were part of the bloodline of Christ, perhaps one that the Grail had forgotten about? Am I way off base, or was that just something left for the reader to pick up in an uncharacteristically subtle move by Ennis?

OMAHA (Reed Waller & Kate Worley with James Vance)
Maybe more on this when I get a chance to re-read the whole thing, but I did want to note the recent publication of the long awaited eighth and final volume of the long running erotic underground comic OMAHA THE CAT DANCER, collecting material serialized from 2005-2012. It wasn't quite the wait for me as it was for some (I read a few issues of the book when it was being published in the 1990s, but only read the whole thing a few years back when I got the first seven books), but I'll say it was a very satisfactory wrap-up of the major plot-lines and character arcs, not in any way clean or final (since life isn't). Vance's writing fits pretty seamlessly with Worley's (he scripted the story based on her notes from before her death in 2004). Waller captures most of the old look in the artwork, especially after the first few chapters. The main difference there is that the greytones are now done digitally, which took some getting used to, and was really jarring when some more complicated textures were used. That's a minor quibble, though. The publisher has a set of all eight books for a ridiculously cheap price, and they're also well priced for digital versions.

GODZILLA: THE HALF-CENTURY WAR (James Stokoe)
Though it's probably been over thirty years since I've seen any Godzilla movie other than the 1954 original, I do have a lingering affection for the big guy, and while I didn't get too far into James Stokoe's comic ORC STAIN, he seemed to be a great choice to draw a comic featuring Godzilla and all the associated Toho monsters.

And indeed he was.  Nothing too profound in here, of course, but it's a comic that does what it sets out to do, tell a story about a Japanese soldier who was on-hand for the first attack of Godzilla in 1954 and continues to encounter Godzilla and other monsters in an ever-escalating world-wide conflict over the next fifty years, all as an excuse for some lovingly rendered artwork of the various creatures. Stokoe's art is a nice sort of intersection between underground comics and Japanese comics, not like anything I've seen before, and suiting the subject matter. If I had one quibble, I think the colouring was at times too deep and detailed, obscuring some of the linework. Anyway, makes me want to revisit some of those old multiple monster mid-period Godzilla classics.



YOU'RE ALL JUST JEALOUS OF MY JETPACK (Tom Gauld)
This is a collection of single page gag cartoons done by Gauld for the Guardian newspaper. Some of them also appear on his website if you want a sample. The comics are a typically irreverent and sometimes absurdist takes on literature, culture and history. I generally liked it, although it was the rare one that I actually laughed at (one of them was "Henry David Thoreau and Friends"). The reaction I was mostly likely to get was "oh, that's clever". More than occasionally it was "I don't get it", maybe more often than I should admit, because it likely means I didn't get the literary reference. So maybe not in line to be an all-time favourite of mine, but clever and sometimes challenging is a nice diversion. I probably should have read it in smaller chunks than I did. I read it in two sittings over two days, and I think if I'd have read five or ten at a time over a few weeks the good ones would stand out more.

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.