By Captain Sean Fahey and his merry band of Raiders

Come visit our sister site, Rack Raids (www.rackraids.com), for expanded comic book coverage. A hearty welcome aboard to our new reviewers, Max Patterson, Eric Cordo and Adam (Prankster) Prosser. These lads are amazing, as in the coming weeks you will soon bear witness and no doubt agree. Now, onto reviews:

1The Umbrella Academy #1 (of 6) (Dark Horse)

By Graig Kent

If you’ll permit me to be over-generalize for a minute, there are going to be two types of people who pick up this book: there will be the My Chemical Romance (”MCR”) fans who are eager to lap up any peripheral output from the band’s members (whether it’s this, written by MCR frontman Gerard Way, or an episode of L.A. Ink), and there will be those that buy it in spite of the fact that MCR is in any way affiliated with this book, based on the strength of the Free Comic Book Day preview back in may, or because James Jean (Fables) does the covers, or fans of Gabriel Ba following him from Casanova.

I’m firmly in the latter category, as apparently is the series editor Scott Allie and the bulk of the comics bloggerati out there. Fandom can make one fickle, and one’s dislike of something, whether it be an artist, a character or something completely irrelevant to the work at hand can shape our opinion of the product long before we are ever truly exposed to it. To be honest, these reactions are generally valid, and they protect us as individuals from wasting our time, leaving us to pursue things we know we’ll like, or at least be less annoyed by. But every now and then there are surprises, like the Matrix excelling despite the inclusion of the little wooden boy Reeves, or here, The Umbrella Academy surviving the stigma of My Chemical Romance.

It’s genuinely entertaining. A fun, wild book in the madcap vein of Warren Ellis or Matt Fraction, where one crazy idea after another is thrown to the wall like strands of cooked spaghetti to see what’ll stick. Thankfully for Way and Ba, most of it does stick, ideas like the Eiffel tower rocketing to the moon or an alien adopting superpowered babies to train them to save the world (theoretically). There’s a lot of bizarre in the Umbrella Academy, this first issue taking place over two time periods, giving us a glimpse into their first youthful adventure, and updating us on their current status, normalcy making distance at every turn.

The inside page fills us in on the children, with Sir Reginald Hargreeves’ notes (their adoptive “father”) giving us unique insight into each of their characters and abilities, as well as his own. The set-up finds only seven children of a potential 43 adopted into the academy, given domino masks from day one and assigned numbers (from 0001 to 0007) instead of proper names. There’s something insidious about the entire these children have been brought into, and yet, at the same time, the book brings us to believe they’re truly bred to be heroes, with perhaps a larger mission looming.

There is, in tone, a similarity to Mike Mignola’s spirited B.P.R.D and Hellboy books, and Ba’s Mignola-influenced art doesn’t help dispel the comparisons, but Way manages to create a superhero adventure that would fit as nicely beside the Powerpuff Girls as it would Nextwave. I can see children enjoying this, even if they aren’t the direct target audience (it would be nice, though, if Way and Ba maintain the whimsy throughout).

So cheers to Dark Horse for looking past Gerard Way’s day job and giving this book a chance. Let’s hope more of the comics-reading audience can do the same.

1
FOUR OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS

2Muse #1-5 (James Chase Arts)

By Graig Kent

As more popular culture - cinema, books, comics, television, music - is made perpetually available thank to Amazon and eBay, youTube and BitTorrent, the general awareness of story and structure grows (if not necessarily understood), complexity and maturity are expected at a younger age, and, especially in sci-fi and fantasy, rules and believability are demanded. The works of Stan Lee in the 1960’s, for all their notoriety, are difficult to digest. The science fiction films of the fifties are laughable and often not even enjoyable by nostalgia. Television from the 1980’s, by and large, is horrendously generic, oversimplified, and often sub-intelligent by today’s standards. For every Twilight Zone or Planet of the Apes that are as enjoyable today in the same context as they were when they first appeared there are dozens of others that can only be enjoyed ironically, if even. There aren’t many Harryhausens or Hensons these days, creating works that are overtly simplistic, willfully ignorant, and enjoyable for it.

Jamie Chase’s Muse is such a book. A simple fantasy that would feel right at home with stop-motion animation, Muse follows a wanderer, Jamil, chased into an unfamiliar town by a great beast, where he comes to battle a dragon, match wits with the town’s dark magician ruler, and court his daughter. Jamil finds himself embroiled in village politics, the disruptive outsider who both the people and the powerful are wary of. The main crux is the dark sorcerer who plays his daughters, each powerful in their own right, off each other in order to keep his stranglehold on the town. Obviously he must be stopped, and we know the man to do it.

Flying monsters, fire breathing dragons, and sea creatures abound, illustrated by Chase with thick markers and computer gray scaling to give them an unnaturalness, like a herky-jerky Harryhousen beastie. There’s a roughness to Chase’s work which brings out exactly what this story needs, an incompleteness that allows the reader to build the world a little more in their mind, to let the imagination fill in the shadows. Muse has the feel of a forgotten public domain fantasy story from the 1940’s, where comic book art was less refined, more sketched out, with shapes and shadows filling the page more than refined details. The atypically modern dialogue is, however, the most noticeable falter in maintaining the illusion of bygone fantasy, and never does entirely relax into the genre Chase is working, which at times makes for awkward reading.

Muse will prove a tough sell for the typical comic book reader who needs Morrison-esque metatext or Perez-style artwork. Chase isn’t even working with “retro” or irony in his favor, as he’s crafted a genuinely base fantasy/magic-and-monsters story that can’t match the drama and depth of Harry Potter or the vibrant kid-directed Masters of the Universe nor does he try. For the right audience (perhaps the Classics Illustrated crowd or adventure strip reprint audience?) Muse should prove an exciting find.

2
THREE OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS

3Super Spy (Top Shelf)

By Graig Kent

For every James Bond and Jason Bourne, Emma Peel and John Steed, there’s a Willie Caine, Tara Chase or Sharlink “The Shark”. Where The Man From U.N.C.L.E. or the double-oh agents may glorify the life of spies as a sexy, almost cartoonish existence, it’s series like Queen and Country or Matt Kindt’s Super Spy that bring things back to reality, showcasing a tense and fragile, deadly and/or scarring existence to the men and women that serve their nation, hopefully for the better good.

Super Spy is a deceptive title for this collection of 30+ interlocking stories about WWII espionage, the missions, the people undertaking them, and the toll the job takes on the individual, their family and the bigger picture and not the glorious Bondian action it insinuates. Compiled in a non-linear fashion, each story is self-contained but also a part of the bigger picture. Paths cross, stories interweave, some come to abrupt halts while others seem to dangle, the ending uncertain.

There’s a sadness to the life of the spy that Kindt emphasizes, a distance and loneliness from true relationships, a perpetual distrust of the people around you, a lack of comfort in one’s surroundings, a lack of support for superiors, and often a complete lack of understanding one’s objectives. It’s not a life the bulk of the many characters we meet in Super Spy choose with an informed mind. In many cases it’s out of necessity, in others it’s just to discover that it’s not all gadgets and glory. Still others never realize exactly how much danger they are in, even to the bitter end.

Kindt’s stories are the sobering antidote to hyper-active, testosterone driven spy films like XXX, restoring a humanity to the profession, or a the very least, in some respects, clinically observing the chilling effects of the job on the psyche of the people who perform them.

That’s not to say it’s a dour work. Far from it. There are still spy missions, which regardless of their physical requirements - whether it be extracting information or transporting it from one location to another, eliminating one’s enemy, or blowing up a manufacturing plant - are still damn engaging. There’s inherent tension of covert operations and both the individual stories and the larger picture are engrossing and addictive.

The entire book is printed with a pulpy-yellowing sheen, giving the air of aged stories, the aesthetic of of-the-era printing. The coloring varies between sepia tones, black and white with blue washes and full color (with a four-color sensibility). Kindt’s art serves the stories well, with a roughness of line and edge, generally, that has a tense and rushed feeling, giving into the characters and their often desperate plight. Kindt also switches up his style from time to time, refining his lines or colors to suit the calmer stories. Unfortunately there are a few occasions where Kindt’s characters blur indistinguishable from one another and the sheer number of characters and their somewhat random appearances makes them a little hard to keep track of while progressing through the stories. But it’s a minor quibble, as overall, it’s a gripping work on both an artistic and entertainment level. A must-read for any fan of espionage stories.

3
FOUR AND A HALF OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS

4The Complete Terry and The Pirates (IDW Publishing)

by Elgin Carver

Believe it or not, newspapers were once worth reading. Not just because they had columnists of great talent. Not just because the editors were generally wiser and smarter than today. But mainly because the comic strips were so superior to the strips (and the comic books) of today that any comparison is inane. In the 1930s and 1940s comic strips were larger, not just in physical scale, but in scope of image, psychology, artistic vision, and content. The physical size of the strips allowed mush of the other to exist, but, with the exception of Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side no truly great comic strip has begun in the past generation. Nor is likely to in the future. In fact the vast majority of the strips worth remembering began in the 1930s and 40s. Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, The Phantom, Gasoline Alley, Krazy Kat, Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, Mickey Mouse, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, The Spirit, and on and on, all began during those decades or earlier. The great sadness of the matter is that they are by their nature ephemeral. Some of the greatest American artwork ever created has been practically unviewable by the culture as a whole since their publication. In the past few years a completely welcomed sea change has been underway and it should be embraced by comic fans everywhere.

Most of the strips listed above are in the process of being reprinted or are about to begin (the complete Little Orphan Annie will begin publication this Fall) and Terry And The Pirates can now be added to the list. Originated by Milton Caniff in 1934, it was not his first strip, nor his last. Several earlier strips, Life Is Like That and Dickie Dare came first, and Steve Canyon later were noteworthy, but incomparable to Terry. A major part of what has been called The Adventurous Decade by Ron Goulart in his history of comic strips in the 30s, Terry and the Pirates involve a young boy, Terry, and his guardian, Pat, take on an extended experience in China. China seems to have been chosen as a foreign local was needed for an exotic flavor, and Hal Foster had staked out Africa in Tarzan and Alex Raymond was using Southeast Asia in Jungle Jim. Their nearly constant companion is a native interpreter named Connie. Some of today’s readers with their highly developed PC radar will no doubt object to the caricature of a Chinese man in the manner used by Caniff. A more reasonable reader will realize that Connie is used as comic relief, like Jingles and Frog in Saturday morning westerns, and that Terry and Pat, and therefore Caniff, considered him a valuable and trusted companion, often the hero through the decades.

And the strip did run for decades. Caniff created it in 1934 and wrote and drew it until 1949. The syndicate would not let such a valuable commodity simply fade away, and hired George Wunder to take over and he did so until 1973. This is particularly noteworthy as Wunder had never drawn a comic strip but was chosen because of his work on backgrounds he produced for the AP news pages (back when newspapers understood the value of illustration). This was deemed particularly important because of the more than excellent artwork of Caniff. His unqualified ability with the brush ultimately gave the strip a look unrivaled enough to earn Caniff the sorbriquet, “Rembrant Of The Comic Strip.” Who first called him that is unclear, but it rightfully stuck. The first half of this book doesn’t clearly demonstrate his talent, but by 1935 he got his sea legs and the quality never wavered after that.

As for this volume, it is superior to the other reprint series now being done. It is substantially larger, and the Sunday strips are printed in full color. For a year or so the Sunday strips did not follow the continuity of the daily strips and those are printed in the front section of the book and then, when they join the daily continuity they are printed with those strips. High quality paper and printing make the contrast of the blacks pop, a necessity when the values of the contrast is so important to the artwork. Size, print quality, additional information, the place of the strip in comic and cultural history, quality of the strip itself in both writing and artwork, and most other qualities one can ascribe to such a publication can be checked off in the affirmative for this volume.

This is an exciting time for comic strip lovers to be alive. Every series of reprint books mentioned in this review are not just worthy of purchase but should be bought before any other comic publication out there. This one noses out a hard run race. Miss it and one day you will be very sorry.

5
FIVE OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS

6Forever Nuts: The Early Years of Mutt and Jeff (NBM Publishgin)

by Elgin Carver

The greatest writing and artwork in comic history is that of the comic strip. Nothing in comic books can compare with Hal Foster’s Tarzan and Prince Valiant, or Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, nor certainly not George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. Many others could be listed but by no means should all comic strips be listed.

The first successful daily strip was A. Mutt, soon known as Mutt And Jeff. It was a daily joke strip, with some hint at continuity, though only a hint. However it was highly prosperous and set the tone for every comic strip that followed. It’s success created the success of the comic strip as a genre and thereby created the comic book, originally just reprinted collections of strips. It made it’s creator Bud Fisher an extremely wealthy man but is today mainly interesting for it’s historical value. (However it is far more readable that previous strips and many other strips from that era, The Yellow Kid comes quickly to mind.)

Dated humor and relatively crude artwork gives the strip an antique feel. This is well earned of course as the strips in this collection are nearly 100 years old. The clothing, situations, and humor is all obsolete, but the importance of the strip cannot be denied.

If you are a fan of the comic strip, are a comic historian, or are a fan of comic books trying to find your roots, this is a nice little volume containing about a years worth of the strip selected from 1909 through 1913. It belongs on your comic shelf. Collections available for Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley (Walt and Skeezix), Krazy Kat, and Terry and the Pirates, and the much anticipated Little Orphan Annie coming this Fall are superior in artwork and story and should be further up on your buy list. Still, you don’t ignore your Grandpa just because he moves a little slower than your kids.

5
THREE OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS

7Empowered Vol. 2 (Dark Horse)

by Devon Sanders

Earlier this year I read and reviewed Empowered Volume One. I was incredibly impressed with the context and care creator/writer/artist Adam Warren lavished upon its protagonist, Empowered, a novice superheroine whose skintight super-suit gives her as many problems as it does solutions.

For instance, her suit bestowed upon her super-strength… as long as it stayed on her… butt…

or breasts…

You know… her body.

High concept stuff, I know!

Warren, through sheer force of will, a wonderful supporting cast and massive amounts of characterization, managed to pull it all off, leaving you with a heroine one could sympathize with.

I just finished reading Empowered Volume Two.

This go-around, Empowered leaves with my sympathies. She deserves a little better. Where Volume One left her endeared, Volume Two leaves her solely endangered.

Where Volume One focused on others’ pre-occupation with her anatomy, Two forgoes taking a look at her abilities and focuses pretty much on her repeated victimization at the hands of “friends” (The Super Homeys) and foes, alike.

There is some kind of plot involving her repeatedly being kidnapped, bound and gagged but the thread connecting it all is as bare as ones covering her backside. There just didn’t seem to be much for the book’s protagonist to do this time around other than be the catalyst for commentary for her supporting cast comprised of her boyfriend, Witless Minion, the spunky Ninjette and “devil-imprisoned-in-a-belt,” Demonwolf.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate Empowered Volume Two. There were bits of genuine hilarity. The Schrodinger’s Catgirl bit was enough to endear me all over again but this moments like this were simply what they were, moments.

Warren’s art is, as always, beautiful. The grace of his line easily pulls him into a category occupied by the likes of Adam Hughes. Warren has that inexplicable ability to render a line to the absolute point of suggestion and charm over laciviousness.

With Volume Two, Warren’s writing takes over and asks us to ignore the page and it’s hard to do. The line wasn’t necessarily crossed but it was repeatedly boot-scooted upon.

Empowered Volume Two left me a bit befuddled. Based on reading Volume Two I left to wonder; “Was Volume One a happy post-feminist fluke?”

I don’t know.

What Empowered Volume Two is is much like its lead character: a good intentioned, perplexing, beautiful mess.

One I’m not willing to give up on.

6
THREE OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS