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The Clockwork Girl #1 (Arcana Studios)

By Adam Prosser

Let me throw a headline at you:

“Blam! Pow! Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore!”

Chances are, if you’re an adult who’s at all passionate about the medium of comics, you just flew into a homicidal rage and threw your computer monitor across the room. Sorry about that.

My point, for anyone who might possibly have missed it, is that the mainstream media has been writing essentially the same article about comics for a couple of decades now, an article that usually bears a variation on the above title. It’s still a bit of a frustrating cliché…and yet “that” headline has been notably scarce in the early years of the 21st century. Is it because the mainstream has finally digested the fact that there are other genres of comics besides superheroes and kiddie humor books? Have comics begun to garner something like cachet in the wake of numerous high-profile movie adaptations?

Possibly. But it probably also has a lot to do with the fact that, these days, comics don’t seem to be for kids at all anymore.

In today’s twisted comics paradigm, an old fashioned, issue-by-issue floppy comics pamphlet intended strictly for kids (that isn’t labeled “Archie” or “Disney”) is an absurd rarity. So something like The Clockwork Girl #1, from Arcana Studios, requires a moment of mental readjustment before you can even begin to judge it objectively.

At “The Haraway Fair”, where mad scientists have come from all over some nameless fairy-tale cartoon land to compete, two particular creators are renewing an old rivalry. Dendrus the Grafter, a Frankenstein-like biologist, has brought his creation Huxley the Beast Boy, and is overseeing a number of students, each with their own projects. But the show is quickly stolen by his archrival Wilhelm the Tinker, a prickly technophile who, in classic mad scientist fashion, is obsessed with building an artificial life form so that people will take him seriously. This year he’s finally come through with the titular creation, a sweet-natured robot girl, with whom Huxley falls instantly in love.

That’s virtually all there is to the plot; the appeal of this book lies mostly in the whimsical details and character interactions. Creator Kevin Hanna and artist Grant Bond are part of a burgeoning number of animation artists who are dabbling in comics–see also the “Flight” guys–and they bring with them a storytelling sensibility much closer to the world of feature-length cartoons. (The script was co-written by Sean O’Reilly, who is apparently the head of Arcana Studios.) The story flows at a gentle pace that allows us time to meet the characters through their exaggerated (one might say “animated”) facial expressions and body language. Likewise, the world of the comic is crammed with Bond’s renderings of weird, stylized architecture and costumes and experiments gone amok. In both style and tone, it’s essentially like reading the first ten minutes of an animated movie in comic book form.

While I’ve often complained about decompression in comics, here the pacing seems a natural fit with the material and the creator’s sensibilities, and besides, this issue is a mere 99 cents. While I do suspect it’ll read better collected in trade format—the better to fit on school library shelves—it won’t tax your child’s (or your younger sibling’s) wallet.

Unfortunately, I’m forced to deduct a Viking from this book for something that seems trivial, but has an unmistakable impact: there’s an air of amateurishness about it, in particular the prose. With two, count ‘em, two writers on board, you’d think that someone would have caught the various grammatical errors scattered throughout this book, but apparently not. Dropped commas and misplaced apostrophes are legion here, and it does have a negative effect on the reading experience. I hate to sound like a meanie, but just because the book is aimed at kids doesn’t make this kind of thing OK. In fact, it makes it all the more important. If comics, even indie comics, are going to make an attempt to repopulate the pool of juvenile readers, wouldn’t it behoove us to put our best face forward?

THREE OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS

The Boys Vol 1: The Name of the Game (Dynamite)

By Adam Prosser

When a genre dominates a medium as thoroughly as superheroes do comic books, it’s hardly surprising that some comic artists would strive against it, especially those who work outside the mainstream. Flat-out parody of costumed crime fighters goes back to the very beginning of the funnybooks, but some have tried to deconstruct, satirize, and criticize the genre from within. Even those inane Silver Age Superman comics had a strong element of self-loathing (which is hardly surprising, if you ever read about the behind-the-scenes goings-on under editor Mort Weisinger), but the high watermark for this sub-subgenre is, of course, Alan Moore’s “Watchmen”. The success of this comic introduced a whole new strain of metatextual awareness to superheroes, one which has become virtually inextricable from the genre; while plenty of writers and artists labor mightily to make “classical” superhero stories that are simple and fun, they’re doing so as a deliberate response to the iconoclastic and deconstructionist strain of superhero comics that took over in the late 80s. It’s no longer possible to make a superhero comic without the specter of Watchmen hanging over it—you can fight it, but you can’t ignore it.

Moore and his fellow iconoclasts Warren Ellis and Frank Miller are frequently accused of hating superheroes and trying to destroy them, a charge that I don’t think is born out by their work. Garth Ennis, on the other hand, is a different story; this is a guy who once killed off the entire Marvel universe. He’s been pretty vocal about his dislike of superheroes, and in The Boys, he gets to have his shot at destroying them.

Hugh Campbell, aka Wee Hughie, is sharing a romantic moment with his girlfriend Robin when she’s unexpectedly flattened by a costumed character thrown at high velocity into a wall. In his grief, Hughie is approached by a smiling, seemingly sociopathic Englishman named Bill the Butcher, who tells him he works for the titular team of operatives. Their mission is to protect the interests of the regular folks, and (more importantly) the government, against the increasingly reckless and arrogant superhumans who are multiplying across the globe. Butcher’s team was disbanded after some unspoken tragedy, but now the strongly anti-“supe” president has asked him to reconvene The Boys, and Butcher wants Hughie on the team.

No sooner had the basic premise of The Boys been leaked before the internet resounded with the moaning of a million overprotective superhero fanboys…but that was nothing compared to the hue and cry when the first issue was released. It’s hardly surprising, since Ennis seemed to be very deliberately aiming at tweaking comic fans. One complaint I heard a lot was that Ennis was being blatantly unfair, and that superheroes didn’t act the way he had them behaving here. Well, of course they don’t. Ennis basically turns the superheroes into a riff on the culture of celebrity, with one superteam indulging in rampant hedonism behind closed doors, and another as a group of manipulative authoritarian figures who demand sexual favors from a new recruit. Butcher’s also alert to the possibility that the supermen may simply decide to set themselves up as rulers of the Earth—which is exactly why The Boys are necessary in the first place.

This may be extreme, but is it unfair, strictly speaking? Whenever one gets around to asking “What if superheroes really existed?” one inevitably starts to consider the inherent dangers of a group of fantastically powerful individuals with secret identities, operating outside the law to enforce their own brand of justice, unconstrained by any higher authority beyond their own moral sense (which, fortunately, *just happens* to be highly developed as well). Ennis’s portrayal of superheroes as a bunch of self-entitled jerks may be extreme, but so is the relentless glamorization of morally superior vigilantes enforcing the status quo. Plus, if we see superheroes as a reflection of the industry and the community that maintain them, the “boy’s club” attitude, mercenary machinations and general arrogance don’t seem misplaced either. In a world in which “Civil War” is a mainstream Marvel event, can we still argue that “real” superheroes have the moral high ground?

That’s not to say this book succeeds on all counts. As usual, Ennis’s taste for juvenile shock tactics drags down what is otherwise relatively nuanced character work, and it remains an open question whether he’s likely to explore the moral quandaries inherent in the story. In the first issue, Butcher strides into the headquarters of the CIA director and has sex with her; he disgusts her, but she can’t help herself. It’s an obvious metaphor for the legitimate government’s tetchy relationship with this shady mob of operatives. Later, Butcher casually refers to some of the atrocious people he’s done business with in the name of bringing down the supes, and by the end, one of the team members muses that maybe the superheroes aren’t all bad. On the other hand, Butcher’s portrayed as the kind of relentlessly awesome and supercompetent antihero Ennis has used in the past, a superhero in his own way—in fact, Ennis draws some obvious parallels between The Boys and their superpowered antagonists, possessed as they are of costumes, nicknames and even a strength serum. (Honestly, the fact that The Boys have superstrength is a bit of a sticking point with me—thematically speaking, shouldn’t it just be a bunch of regular joes against the superpowered types?) At the end of the book, after relentlessly painting the supes as twelve different colors of bastard, one of the team members muses whether there might not be some decent superhumans, to which Butcher replies, “Well, if there are…F*** ‘em.” Is this a sign that the moral universe of The Boys is about to get more complicated? Is Ennis deliberately manipulating our sympathies in order to yank the rug out from under us later? I’d like to think so, but his prior work doesn’t point to any such level of subtlety.

Nevertheless, I think we need books like this just as we need fun, escapist superhero titles, and any healthy genre should have an impulse to destroy its idols at times. The Boys is the modern iteration of this, if nothing else. It may even end up being Ennis’ masterpiece, if he embraces the complexity of the issues he raises. But if he doesn’t…F*** ‘im.

THREE OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS

Marvel Zombies 2 #1 (Marvel)

By Eric Cordo

After it’s debut in 2005, Marvel Zombies became a phenomenon within the comic book community. It brought people into comic book stores like few other events had in recent memory thanks to the popular culture fascination with the living dead, and the curiosity fans had in contemplating what would happen if the most powerful beings became merciless eating machines. The biggest problem with the Marvel limited series? It was a hit. For the next two years the comic publishing powerhouse milked the concept, that was originally the brainchild of Mark Millar, with inane crossovers and variant covers that even the early 1990’s became embarrassed. Whether it’s film, or music, or literature, the worst enemy of a novelty is burnout. Would Robert Kirkman and Sean Phillips’ book suffer the same fate?

Short answer: Not yet. Credit should be given to Kirkman and anyone else who collaborated on the story for Marvel Zombies 2 for not just putting out a carbon copy of the first arc, but giving the series a new dynamic. This issue is set forty years after the original Marvel Zombies took place, and the people of Earth were completely devoured by the superheroes that swore to protect them. At this point they’ve searched the universe, and they realized that they have in fact eaten every life form that can sustain them – in the known universe. To be completely honest, that’s as far as I want to divulge the plot to those of you considering picking this up, because it’s worth reading and being surprised a little bit at what happens. If that’s the case you should stop with this review, and constantly refresh your browser for about ten minutes to up our hit count, because you love us. Thank you.

So, in the world of Marvel Zombies, once infected you don’t become a mindless drone, you are still aware of your surroundings and thoughts, but with the insatiable hunger for flesh and brains that will last until you eventually expire. Or do you? Deep in the jungles, Black Panther is still king of his people, with the few survivors of the zombie attack under his watchful eye, and The Wasp is his assistant. The Wasp you say? Yes, the last time we saw her she was a zombie, and yes she had no qualms about eating people. What you find out in this issue is that the hunger you feel is more the equivalent of a drug addiction than a physiological and permanent dependency. With a month of so of detoxification you can recover, but it is like any alcohol or drug addiction where with just one slip you can fall back into your habit. It’s an interesting take on the zombie genre, and one that we shouldn’t be surprised with coming from Robert Kirkman, who’s Walking Dead all but saved the living dead in funny book form.

This book was good, not great, but it has the potential to not be a typical event retread, and the revelation about the zombies will help keep readers interested enough to pick up issue number two. Sean Phillips does what he does and his gritty art lends itself terrifically to this series. There’s nothing different from the first series, but with at least the art it doesn’t need to be. Also worth mentioning is another fantastic cover by Arthur Suydam. With the mass of zombie covers Marvel has piled in his lap over the last year, he still keeps his best for this series. While Marvel Zombies 2 #1 has a great cover, after Michael Turner’s Civil War #1, they will only get better as the series progress. Hopefully like this series, because I wouldn’t mind if it captured the magic of the original, while giving us something new in the process to “feed” on. Get it?

THREE AND A HALF OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS 

Suburban Glamour #1 (of 4) (Image)

By Graig Kent

Here’s the thing about music: some musicians or bands sound so fresh and inventive when they arrive on scene that you can’t help but take notice, you can’t help but become a fan. A celebrated first album, a much anticipated follow-up, a breakthrough third effort…. But after a while, no matter how fanatical you are, they will lose your favor, replaced by something new, something more modern… if anything at all. It’s not that we love them any less (or maybe we do?), but as time wares on, as their sound and style stagnates, it’s really only the things that got us interested originally that keep us interested. The seventh album will rarely get played more than the third. There are few acts that can constantly redefine themselves before they render themselves obsolete. It’s why when bands have reunion tours they tend to play mostly their old stuff rather than strive for anything new or fresh (I’ll not even bother on a diatribe about artistic bankruptcy at this point).

Jamie McKelvie is an artist whose work I fell in love with from the first preview page I saw of Phonogram, the Image series he did with Kieron Gillen that completed earlier this year. His absolutely spotless, flawless clean-line art with digital greyscale shading and a deft sense of style and design stunned me, and thanks to his coupling with an excellent story and storyteller, I knew this was an artist I was going to seriously keep my eye on. While I know McKelvie has some previous works available (a review of 2006’s Long Hot Summer is in the pipe), I will always consider Phonogram his breakout work, his mass-market debut.

Suburban Glamour is McKelvie’s follow-up effort to Phonogram, this time doing it all himself (almost). The story is set in suburban England, where high-school hipsters Astrid, Dave and John are far too self-aware to be considered the cool kids, and bored out of their skulls by their daily living yearn for something, anything else. A new clothing boutique opened by a former New Yorker is a bout as exciting as it gets. But one night after a party Astrid begins hallucinating of stuffed toys come to life, the surreality hitting only once Dave starts seeing things too.

Though not nearly as inventive or surprising as Phonogram (let’s be honest, he won’t escape that shadow for a while), McKelvie does prove to have chops at least where dialogue is concerned. The characters and setting of Suburban Glamour exist because of writing, the illustrations, pretty as they are, can’t do it alone. The repartee between Dave, Astrid and John, and how they interact with their peers-of-a-different-clique tell us everything we need to know about them without need of lazy exposition. Aside from a few abrupt scene transitions, the story flows nicely and there’s an intriguing hook that will easily bring me back for a second issue (as if that was in doubt).

The only thing I’m uncertain about with this book is the colors. It would be nice to see McKelvie’s work in more of a duo-tone or spot color as on the covers, but here it’s full-color all the way. Although provided by the always reliable Guy Major, it puts McKelvie’s work into a different context than his black and white efforts. It’s vibrant and attractive, but with McKelvie’s smooth and unencumbered linework it does take on an airplane safety manual aesthetic. It’s pleasing in design, no doubt, but I guess it’s something I need to get used to for storytelling.

Like many a sophomore outing, Suburban Glamour is pleasant and engaging, if not as immediately gripping or laudable as the work which preceeded it, but then sometimes these things can grow and surpass what came before. In either case, it’s going to be quite some time before McKelvie’s art gets stale.

THREE AND A HALF OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS

Ray Harryhausen Presents: Sinbad, Rogue of Mars #1 (Blue Water Productions)

By Adam Prosser

Now I ask you: has there ever been a more awesome title for a comic in the history of the universe? If there has, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.

In all seriousness, the idea of Ray Harryhausen tackling a John Carter-type pulp story of savage combat on Mars ought to be enough to cause geekgasms visible from orbit. If it were a movie.

Unfortunately, this is a comic book.

Now, comics and movies have been enjoying a somewhat uneasy relationship for decades, but it’s really come to a head in the last few years. For a variety of reasons, a lot of comics have been written as “movies that aren’t movies…yet”. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—“cinematic” is generally a complimentary thing to say about a comic—but it seems to cause some comics makers to forget their medium, or even worse, to begrudge it. The long and the short of it is that “Sinbad of Mars” writer Greg Thompson and artist Jeff “Chamba” Cruz are too in love with film to make a really satisfying comic.

The plot is very simple: Sinbad (bearing no particular resemblance to either Kerwin Matthers or John Philip Law) has somehow found himself on the red planet, a place which proves to be inhabited by a variety of savage but mostly humanoid races. Sinbad is being held in a gladiatorial arena and forced to battle at the whim of a pair of sadistic royal siblings, but his triumphs in the arena are inspiring the oppressed people to rebel. Turns out they believe Sinbad is here to fulfill an ancient prophecy, and…well, you can probably figure out the rest yourself. OK, there’s one potentially interesting twist to the “prophecy” aspect of the story, which I won’t spoil. But otherwise, it’s your classic pulp story which you’ve read dozens of times.

And there doesn’t have to be anything wrong with that. When you pick up a comic with that title…that awesome, awesome, title…you expect certain things, and Thompson and “Chamba” are delighted to give them to you: gladiatorial combat, exotic alien backstory, royal intrigue, and a foxy alien babe in a bikini-type thing (she pops up at the very end of the issue). If anything, the story tilts more towards the John Carter aspects, with Ray Harryhausen’s influence being felt almost exclusively in the presence of Sinbad and a few giant monsters that you could easily imagine as stop-motion.

Given the baggage that a project like this is going to carry, it may seem a little mean-spirited to criticize them for not being comic-booky enough. It’s true that, in the past—let’s say, the early 70s, when sword ‘n’ sorcery books were legion—what we see here would have made for a perfectly adequate comic book, maybe as a tie-in to one of Harryhausen’s own movies. But the fact of the matter is, this is a different era for comics. Not only has the storytelling paradigm changed, but outside factors have conspired to make this kind of thing obsolete. Comics now cost a hell of a lot more than they used to (I’m sure you’ll be surprised to hear) and the kind of budget-free spectacle they used to provide has long been topped by Hollywood’s CGI revolution. As a result, comics are, I think, better suited to smarter spectacle, to taking advantage of the density of information and the interplay of words and pictures that only they can provide.

Except for the fact that we open in media res, with no idea how Sinbad ended up on Mars, everything about this book is pretty much of a piece with how it would have been done as a Harryhausen movie. The story is mostly just an excuse for cool monsters, and the pacing is such that the plot has barely begun as the comic ends. The writing is workmanlike but solid enough, with the only thing approaching unique flair being Sinbad’s prayers to Allah in voiceover captions and that twist I wrote of earlier. “Chamba’s” art is kind of neat, with a very animation-inspired look that stylizes and distorts the characters in interesting ways, though he relies on extreme perspective a bit too often (including one bird’s eye view of the evil ruler raising his hand, wherein his arm appears to be about ten feet long). The coloring (also by Cruz) relies on what’s quickly becoming the de rigeur style for sword ‘n’ sorcery books, the “paint over pencils” Frank Frazetta look perfected by Cary Nord and Dave Stewart on Dark Horse’s Conan, though it given a simplified look here that I find generally appealling.

It all makes for an entertaining enough trifle. But it’s also a comic that’s constantly reminding me how much more fun it would be as a movie. These days, being merely a fun bit of fluff isn’t really good enough for comics; like overshadowed siblings everywhere, they have to work twice as hard just to get noticed.

TWO AND A HALF OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS

#1's: The Deadlander, Graveslinger, Omega Chase

By Jeb D.

Once, it’s a particular artist’s inspiration. Twice, you think perhaps there’s something in the air. But three times within a week? Three brand-new comic series? This is what we call zeitgeist. The time has come for cowboys and zombies.

Leading the way is the book of the three that would absolutely warrant a review of its own: Kevin Ferrara’s The Deadlander (Dark Horse). I’ve not run across Ferrara’s work before, but this is as strong a major-label debut I’ve seen for a new writer-artist since Jay Boose’s The Chemist. Ferrara’s story of undead bounty hunters and mystical Native American forces in the Old West ranges from clearly derivative to muddy and oblique, and his use of a couple of modern jokes doesn’t flow particularly well (there’s also one really dumb instance of breaking the fourth wall): it feels as though Ferrara is trying to break narrative rules he hasn’t fully absorbed yet. But this is, after all, graphic storytelling, and from that point of view, this is one of the most beautiful, dynamic comics any of the major publishers have given us in a long time. The story panels are set in a faux-parchment frame, embellished with images of death and rot, and the bloodthirsty story frequently breaks free of the panels, rolling and tumbling across the page. In fact, the art’s nearly the opposite of the story, as Ferrara clearly knows exactly how comic illustration works, and can either run with convention, or stand it on its head, with equal ease.  Ferrara’s style will remind readers of Eric Powell—he draws from the same inspiration as Powell, a similar blend of Bernie Wrightson, Gene Colan and Jack Davis. Where Powell usually goes for the dank background of a vintage horror film, though, Ferrara’s characters operate in a beautifully detailed environment that draws the eye fully into a scene, with detail work that makes re-reading the book more pleasurable than we expect from most comics today. Given that it’s just the first issue, the story elements may yet fall into place more effectively, but the artwork is already standing head and shoulders above most of what’s out there today. If nothing else, you owe it to yourself to sample the first issue from a guy who’s already a major talent.

FOUR OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS

Graveslinger (Image)) is almost the opposite of The Deadlander: the story is more conventional and straightforward, with Frank Timmons, our hard-bitten protagonist, coming to the aid of a frontier family beset by outlaws—though these particular bad ‘uns just happen to be zombies. But because writers Shannon Eric Denton and Jeff Mariotte have grounded themselves fully in Western conventions, they’re able to riff off them in unusual ways, without ever losing the story’s direction, adding layers of mystery to Timmons. John Cboins’ art, on the other hand, is competent, in the kind of sketchy, washed-out way that’s becoming an indie trademark these days, but it’s not at all striking, and while it does its job of telling the story, it lacks the touch of genius that we find in The Deadlander. Not a bad start, but I assume it’ll read better in trade.

THREE OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS

Omega Chase (Th3rd World Studios) is, in its way, both the most and least conventional of the three books. It begins by stating its premise pretty broadly: in 1881, on a deserted dirt street, Sheriff Mack Baron is about to engage in a classic Western shootout, against a zombie gunman. But the zombie is the least of Baron’s problems, as he’s also somehow unstuck in time. Unlike your typical time traveler, though, he’s unclear on just what and where his starting point is: he knows about things that will happen a century later, is certain that he’s lived other lives, but has no actual memory of anything but the moment he’s living in now. And once this first gunslinging corpse has been dispatched, he begins a journey that both clarifies, and muddies, his situation, with barfights, gunplay, a beautiful frontier spitfire, a quick peek at some folks that may actually have a few of the answers, and an ending that promises even more mayhem next issue. Writer Keith Dallas has grounded his tale in some actual Texas history, but his added touches (and not just the zombies) make this an effective blend: the structure of the Western has been a foundation for a lot of fantasy and sci-fi storytelling over the years, and Dallas here brings it full circle. The art by Julio Molina-Muscara, unfortunately, isn’t particularly distinguished, lacking even the crisp storytelling of  Graveslinger, and the coloring of Mike Kowalczyk and Joel Harris seems to weigh it down. Still, I’d have to say that, of the three books under consideration, it has the most story meat on its bones. Omega Chase is the rare debut that balances the requirements of serialized storytelling: it gives you just enough information to be drawn into the story, while keeping enough secrets in reserve to bring you back for more.

THREE AND A HALF OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS