McCloud signing

Decided to go down to the Scott McCloud tour signing at the Beguiling today. It was nice to get a chance to say hello to McCloud and get a few things signed. I brought along my first issue of ZOT! (background here), my copy of UNDERSTANDING COMICS (old-school first print Tundra edition) and the tabloid sized DESTROY!! (explaining how I only recently got that edition, after suffering for years with the 3-D edition that doesn't quite work with my wonky eyes). McCloud is very friendly, and I recommend catching him if possible during his on-going tour.

As luck would have it, they also had a package of Matt Feazell's mini-comics from the Beguiling's stock there, including the ZOT #10 1/2 (which I already had, though this is the rarer first print) and a whole lot of others, only a few of which I already had, so I picked that up. I suppose that pack might have been in the store for a long while, but if you've been in the Beguiling you know they have 50 pounds of books stuffed in a 10 pound sack, so it's easy to miss stuff there. Especially if you only go there two or three times a year.

FABLES: 1001 NIGHTS OF SNOWFALL by various

FABLES: 1001 NIGHTS OF SNOWFALL
by Bill Willingham, Charles Vess, Michael Kaluta, John Bolton, Mark Buckingham, James Jean, Mark Wheatley, Derek Kirk Kim, Tara McPherson, Esao Andrews, Brian Bolland & Jill Thompson

I've read a handful of the on-going FABLES series over the years, never really got too much into it. The art was usually really good, but the writing was uneven. Clever bits every now and then, but rarely as clever as it felt like the writer thought they were (I can never quite put my finger on it, but Willingham's writing is the type that sometimes just exudes an air of smarminess), and irritating stuff just as common as the good stuff.

Anyway, last year they put out this book of short stories based on the series (which, for those who don't know, is that characters who inspired all the old public domain fables, fairy tales and fantasies are real, with a large group of them living in exile in modern day Earth after being driven out of their native lands by a mysterious Adversary). This collection is set in the early days of that exile, when Snow White goes to warn and enlist the aid of Arabian fables in their cause. In this framing sequence (prose illustrated by Michael Kaluta and Charles Vess) she finds herself cast in the role of Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, telling the Sultan stories night after night to avoid execution. The stories she tells are about herself and the other FABLES characters, generally in the form of "What really happened" or "What happened next" on the stories everyone knows, or what happened when the Adversary attacked.

I had a slightly better reaction to this than I did the on-going series. The art was excellent, with each artist being well suited to their individual story, and well-handled in production (not always a given in comics, alas). No surprise on a lot of the familiar names (the Kaluta/Vess illustrations on the framing sequence are as gorgeous as you'd expect (see this page for a look at how they collaborated)), but the artists who were new to me were great as well.

The writing still had the mix of clever, not-as-clever-as-it-thinks and just plain irritating, but leaning more towards the first.

"A Most Troublesome Woman" is the framing sequence, and my favourite art in the book. I'm just a sucker for Vess's work, and he's a good combination with Kaluta (I think the only previous time the worked together was on some minor STARSTRUCK related stuff). The writing strikes a few sour notes, and I'm not sure on the chronology at all (I'm pretty that in the real world the story of the 1001 Nights far pre-dates when this story could take place, but I'm not quite up on my Fables-logic of what influenced what).

"The Fencing Lessons" is a long story that combines the "what happened next" and "what really happened" concepts for the story of Snow White. It's kind of predictable, and I'll give Willingham the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn't intend for the ending to a surprise to anyone. John Bolton's art it pretty good, although a disappointment considering how much I like some of his older work.

"The Christmas Pies" takes off from animal fables, showing what happens in the forest when the Adversary tries to take over. Nicely designed by the ever-versatile Mark Buckingham and a smart story with a twist I didn't see coming.

"A Frog's Eye View" is a short bit drawn by James Jean, who also does the covers to a lot of FABLES stuff. Gorgeous little story about the aftermath of a princess kissing a frog, though the actual story didn't really interest me.

"The Runt" is my overall favourite story in the book, with some great art by Mark Wheatley, and presenting the origin of the "Bigby Wolf"/"Big Bad Wolf" character in the series. In typical FABLES fashion, he's the source for virtually every wolf character in any public domain fantasy story, and there are some clever twists on some of those. Wheatley's expressive style really sells it.


"A Mother's Love" is a short little story about fighting rabbits and a reverse of the usual "Frog Prince" type curse. Fortunately short at just three pages, so it makes its point quickly and doesn't wear out its welcome. Attractive artwork by Derek Kirk Kim completes the package.

"Diaspora" is another tale of Snow White, this time with her sister Rose Red (mixing a few fairy tales together), on the run from the Adversary and encountering a witch in the ruins of a house made of gingerbread. This one is pretty much just a story fragment in the larger FABLES tapestry, so doesn't work as well as I imagine it would knowing the series. Some nicely off-kilter art by Tara McPherson, though.

"The Witch's Tale" takes place in the middle of the above story, as the Witch gives her life story in a story drawn by Esao Andrews. As it goes in FABLES, she's the Witch character in any number of stories, although with far darker twists.

"What You Wish For" is a two-page story by Brian Bolland, which I guess fills his quota of non-cover and non-Mr. Mamoulian comic book art for at least a year (is anyone else surprised that we aren't still waiting for CAMELOT 3000 to end?). No real point to the story, but it's pretty enough to look at.

"Fair Division" is drawn by Jill Thompson and explores another region of the Fables lands under attack, this time that of King Cole and his talking animal subjects. Nice little piece, although the ending is another one of those that probably only makes sense if you read the series.

So a pretty solid book, well worth taking a look at. Doesn't really convince me to read the on-going series, but I'm more inclined to give them a look someday.

Free Comics overview

Went to a Free Comic Book Day thing for the first time, mostly because there was a particular comic shop that I'd been meaning to check out. It was a pretty good store, with a good selection of tradepaperbacks (I picked up one of Tezuka's PHOENIX books I didn't have, and the collection of Charles Schulz's sports strip IT'S ONLY A GAME) and well located for me in some ways, so I might be going there more.

Anyway, the store had about two dozen of what I gather are over 40 of this years free comics. I'm not sure if they just ran out of the others or didn't get them (I was there fairly late in the day, but they still had a lot of the ones they had). Looking at the FCBD website it looks like some of the missing ones where ones I might have been interested in, like Eddie Campbell's upcoming book. But I guess it doesn't matter much since I already know I'm going to buy Campbell's book.

I picked up 10 of the books they had. Some quick thoughts on them:

UNSEEN PEANUTS, a selection of over 150 Peanuts strips not reprinted until the current COMPLETE PEANUTS series (including some scheduled for an upcoming volume), along with some notes and speculation about why those strips were "lost". Interesting to read in this context. A lot of those are the ones that struck off notes reading them in context of the full run. Kind of makes me wish that they included some sort of notes in the COMPLETE books.

LITTLE ARCHIE had a pretty decent story by Bob Bolling of the mini-versions of the Riverdale gang at camp. Not quite as good as the older Bolling work I've read.

LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES IN THE 31st CENTURY, a comic based on the cartoon. I really don't like the character designs for this show, and I found this story kind of confusing and unfunny.

NEXUS has a selection of short bits from older NEXUS issues (some in colour for the first time), with some notes on why they were chosen, and then a 7-page preview of the upcoming new series. Pretty good sampler of Baron and Rude's work, and I'll probably pick up the collection of the new stuff.

GUMBY is suitably strange stuff from a variety of creators, some from the regular GUMBY book, some others. Lots of weird art jokes. Felt a bit barren in black and white, pretty sure it was drawn for colour.

WHITEOUT #1, a reprint of the first chapter of the Rucka/Lieber comic of a few years back, being re-released in a fancy new edition. I'm almost certain I've read this before, but have no memory of it. Really good art, story doesn't do anything for me.

BONGO COMICS FREE-FOR-ALL has various Simpsons and Futurama stories. Evan Dorkin writes the lead story, which is pretty good (and even has a Milk and Cheese cameo...). The shorter stories are okay, and the art is nice throughout, but overall it satisfies my Groeningverse comics itch for a long while to come.

SPIDER-MAN has a new story by Dan Slott and Phil Jimenez, who have both done some work I thought was okay in the past. Not really the kind of Spider-Man story I want to read more of, and if that was in fact Mary Jane as a super-hero named Jackpot, well, that's wrong on many levels. Jimenez has changed a lot from the George Perez clone I remember of years past, but not always for the better. If this is the future of Spider-Man, I'll be sitting it out.

COMICS FESTIVAL has various short bits from some Canadian artists. A few were pretty funny, most weren't really to my taste. Whoever proofread the bios needs to learn the difference between "Joe Shuster" and "Simon&Schuster". Darwyn Cooke does a story that's about Alex Toth, in a roundabout way, and I'm not sure about it at all.

MICKEY MOUSE has some goofy reprints of the Floyd Gottfredson strip from 1936. A long adventure that starts with Mickey experimenting with plant growing and shrinking formula, which somehow leads to him meeting Robin Hood, and a short adventure with rival Mortimer Mouse. Good fun.

So not a bad haul for free. I liked about half of what I got, and really had no reason to think I'd like some of those I didn't like and probably should have just left them on the table.

DESTROY!!

Zot and Jenny find themselves stuck between Captain Maximum and the Red Basher. McCloud did some fun covers for the fan magazines back in the day. His AH Preview Special cover was great fun, and his cover for AH #200 was brilliant ("Can comics be ART, Dad?" / "Only if it's got BIG DOTS, son!").

I probably won't get around to seeing him, but Scott McCloud takes a detour from his 50 State Tour to visit a province this weekend, specifically Ontario, more specifically Toronto, with a lecture Sunday and signing on Monday. Maybe I'll try to go to the signing. Details here and here (the latter being where I stole the graphic below from). And remind me some day to post about MAKING COMICS.

THE QUITTER by Pekar&Haspiel

In case you're curious about the odd selection of some upcoming posts, I've decided to sample a bunch of the holdings in my library's "graphic novel" section, both on the chance that there's a gem I'd missed and as a way to encourage them to expand that section.

THE QUITTER
by Harvey Pekar and Dean Haspiel

I never really got into the whole "Harvey Pekar" thing. I read the occasional thing from him back in the 1980s and 1990s, usually liking a few short bits in each book I read, most of the others not making a major impact on me, nothing really blowing me away. Saw a few of his Letterman appearances, too, but have to say I thought he came across as more an amusing crank than anything else.

I got around to seeing the 2003 AMERICAN SPLENDOR film last year, and I thought it was a pretty impressive bit of film-making, with a unique structure and some bold choices that were pulled off with considerable skill. Some of the more obvious divergences with reality kind of bugged me more than they should have (hey, I know who drew OUR CANCER YEAR, okay). And as an actor, I thought Pekar himself was probably in about third place in terms of playing a plausible "Harvey Pekar" character in the film.

Anyway, in the wake of the the film's relative success, Pekar got a couple of book deals, including for this 100-page volume from 2005 published by the fledgling graphic novel house Vertigo. I guess there was some licensing reason why it wasn't published under the AMERICAN SPLENDOR banner, but like SPLENDOR it's autobiography by Pekar. In this case a single long story drawn by Dean Haspiel, tracing his life from childhood until his early twenties, with a brief segment skimming through a few later highlights until the present day.

It's not really something that's changed my mind about Pekar, I'm sorry to say. Haspiel's art is nice and clear, doing a good job of capturing the mid-century setting of most of the story, but just didn't seem as smooth a match for Pekar as some of the old-school SPLENDOR illustrators (Crumb, Zabel/Dumm, Stack). It was just a bit too slick, I thought. As for the writing, I liked parts of it, especially the bits about his appreciation for old jazz and his record collecting (which also tended to be my favourite topics in the older SPLENDOR books I read), but a lot of it just didn't interest me. It's mostly about his problems fitting in through his whole life, from school to family to jobs, and his inability to commit to things and tendency to be a quitter (hey, that's the title of this book!). I found the narration by present-day Harvey a bit overly analytical at times, and found myself wishing he told more of the story through the dialogue and voice of young Harvey. Even that young Harvey voice I often found a bit unrealistic (I really don't think that when he picked up the mail he said "Oh, man! Another letter from Ira Gitler. Great! They're so substantive").

I was also really disappointed with the ending. Five pages from the end, after only getting up to the early 1960s and the start of his jazz writing taking off, and then he finishes the book with the abridged history of AMERICAN SPLENDOR (meeting Crumb in 1962, starting his comic in the 1970s, the movie coming out and his current life) and then just stops. It almost felt like he got close to the end and said "Man, people are gonna wanna hear about Crumb and the movie and stuff. Damn, no space to mention being on Letterman". It was really disappointing, and unfortunately seems to rob this story of having a proper resolution in favour of a "Pekar's greatest hits" selection.

ITEM: I post some links

The internets are a big place, so here are some posts of interest from various parts of it that you might like if your interests are anything like mine (and if they aren't, why would you be reading this?). I'm going to try to be better about marking these things to show up over on the "Recent Readings" box on the sidebar in the future.

ITEM: Steve Bissette talks to Bryan Talbot about the British underground scene and other things. And posts many other things. His site feed still seems to be dead, so catch up if you've missed out

ITEM: Mark Martin comments on the comics market and the end of his RUNAWAY COMIC

ITEM: Harry Mendryk explores some of the inking on old Jack Kirby romance covers

ITEM: Craig Yoe talks to Kirby Museum board member Randy Hoppe

ITEM: Mark Evanier looks at some filmed versions of one of my favourite plays, INHERIT THE WIND.

ITEM: I look at one of the greatest Beanworld guest shots ever

ITEM: Craig Boldman draws his character Tailipoe as Yoda.

ITEM: Tom Brevoort explains some of the changes in comics distribution from the 1970s and 1980s

ITEM: Alison Bechdel commences posting her early "Dykes to Watch Out For" strips online, starting at the beginning

ITEM: Bully examines a later day non-Barks Scrooge tale. Or does he...

ITEM: Kevin Church explains Superboy's most recent personality shift

ITEM: Mike Sterling focuses on the mystified residents of Lulu's town

ITEM: Michael T. Gilbert doesn't seem to have permanent links to his journal posts, but he has some great art there. Look down on April 28, 2007, for a nice Mr. Monster / Heap drawing.

ITEM: Vincent Colletta exposes the dark underbelly Marvel in the 1980s

ITEM: Stephen DeStefano kills the Venture Bros. whoever they are

ITEM: Fist-a-Cuffs declares its tag team champ

ITEM: Pat praises one of the more unheralded Silver Age heroes

ITEM: I post something with art by Jack Kirby. Go figure

ITEM: J.M. DeMatteis remembers Kurt Vonnegut

ITEM: Dennis O'Neil does too

ITEM: Neil Gaiman doesn't need any kind of link from me to get attention. But it'll be interesting to see what this "interesting device" is.

ITEM: Michael Ryan runs some of the coolest photos and links for dinosaur fans

ITEM: Wolfman visits Oz, brings photos

ITEM: Eddie Campbell chronicles his adventures in courtroom sketching

ITEM: Steve Thompson ponders how Sheldon Mayer turned a gorilla into a bear

ITEM: Dr. Scott examines the questionable techniques of Dr. Dan

ITEM: I post some stuff about Ditko. Go figure

ITEM: Steve Cohen writes about Russ Manning. And Leonard Starr. And Neal Adams. And Joe Staton. And...

THIS WILL ALL END IN TEARS by Joe Ollmann

THIS WILL ALL END IN TEARS is a 168-page collection of five short stories by Joe Ollmann published in 2006 by Insomniac Press (PDF samples of two of the stories can be downloaded at the linked sites). Apparently Ollmann has a few previous books, but I'd never heard of him until I saw this book in the library the other day. From the "Littlest Hobo" reference in one story you can probably guess that he's Canadian...

It's a great little book, with each story presenting a little slice in the life of a different working-class character. In general very depressing slices, but with some touches of humour to soften it a bit. The art is a nice, solid expressive style, and the scripting is excellent, very naturalistic and smooth. Most of the stories are built around contrasting the internal thoughts of the main character with the actual dialogue, showing how they hide things, second guess themselves and interpret the actions of others.

It reminds me a lot of some of the alternative press comics I enjoyed back in the 1990s, in particular Jessica Abel's ARTBABE and Roberta Gregory's NAUGHTY BITS. Actually, thinking of what to compare it to, I'd almost put it right in the middle of those two in a lot of ways. The characters are less pretty than Abel's, not quite as ugly as Gregory's, both in looks and personality.

The Roberta Gregory comparison really comes across in the first story, "Big Boned", about an overweight young woman whose internal monologue of bitterness and contempt for herself and those around her contrasts with the actual dialogue, where she's afraid to express herself and always puts the worst possible interpretation on what the words and actions of others mean. That kind of structure was pretty common in Gregory's Bitchy Bitch stories, and I remember at least one which was built entirely on Bitchy's cynical interpretations of what everyone really means. It's quite a bit different in effect from Gregory's work. You tend to laugh at her characters, while for the most part you just feel sorry for Ollmann's.

"Day Old" is a bit of an anomaly in the book. The shortest story, it's also the only one without a running narrative of the inner voice of the main character, so for the most part we just get the story through the dialogue and actions (although it's also the only one where Ollmann resorts to thought balloons in a few places). It's a simple enough story about a bagel store employee bending some rules to show some kindness for a mother with a sick child, and the consequences of that.

"Oh Deer" is the most comical of the stories. It starts off oddly, with a man trying to sell a fired-once gun at a pawn shop. As the story goes on we find that the man allowed himself to be pressured by people at work to go on a hunting trip, where he shot a deer, and now has to deal with its carcass. The humour gets almost slapstick at times, but there's quite a bit going on beneath the jokes.

"The Filmed a Movie Here Once" is the longest story in the book, at 52 pages, and features a young waitress in a small town, and all of the characters who intersect with her life, including fellow employees, her father, her priest and her boyfriend. It ends up being a very complex story about love, religion, trust and betrayal, and Ollmann does a great job of creating three-dimensional characters in very little space.

"Hanging Over" is another long story to close the book, and might be my favourite. In this one, a man has to deal with taking care of his intellectually disabled older brother after their mother has an accident. The lead character is anything but an angel, and most of the story is spent with him trying to duck out of his responsibilities and justifying his actions both to himself and to others. A lot of great little scenes that are entertaining on their own right and also serve to demonstrate and advance the relationships between the characters.

Despite being one of the most depressing collection of comic book stories I've ever seen, finding this book was a very pleasant surprise. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a good example of this kind of slice-of-life drama that I'm not sure anyone else is doing anymore (I guess Adrian Tomine still is in OPTIC NERVE, although I never really got into his stuff beyond the original short work).