Avengers – The Initiative: Dreams & Nightmares

Creators: Christos N. Gage (writer); Rafa Sandoval, Jorge Molina (pencilers); Roger Bonet, Victor Olazaba, Andrew Hennessy (inkers); Edgar Delgado, Bit (colorists); Joe Caramagna (letterer)

Publisher: Marvel

On several occasions in Avengers – The Initiative: Dreams & Nightmares, there is a splash page or at least a large panel depicting an all-out combat between dozens of D-list Marvel characters. These scenes are riots of color and fists and chaos. Unfortunately, they are also a pretty fair representation of this book as a whole.

It’s a pity, because Christos N. Gage has a lot going for him. He’s got a real flair for dialogue, and his ability to get into his characters’ heads is truly excellent. The artists here do pretty good work as well. But there’s simply too much going on here; we switch scenes and characters about every three pages, and rarely come back to them more than once per chapter (or issue, or whatever). It’s hard to follow, and all but impossible to care about.

It was Dan Slott – The Initiative‘s original writer – who made things like this; Slott’s love for D-list Marveldom easily exceeds most peoples’ love for their own mothers, and his Initiative was a clearinghouse for stories about them. It was a joy to read, but then, Slott has a gift for pacing, and knows to give characters their time. The best story in this collection – “Even the Losers” – follows his lead, telling a warm, human story about two old, one-off “Dazzler” villains. And warm, human stories about Dazzler villains are extraordinary things. So take your time, Mr. Gage. Too much is too much.

Yearbooks

Creators: Nicholas Breutzman (writer/artist); Shaun Feltz (writer); Raighne Hogan (colorist)

Publisher: 2D Cloud

The graphic novel Yearbooks is the story of Ryan, a kid who is broken out of the haze of early high school by a series of increasingly disturbing encounters with one of his teachers. It is essentially a snapshot of a boy moving from the awkward unpleasantness of adolescence into the considerably greater awkward unpleasantness of adulthood. Ryan begins by floating through his life, barely even aware of his dumbass bullies and quasi-love interest. There’s a stiffness to the posing, a loose dirtiness to the art, and a jarring, sickly quality to the color that all produce an effective, and surely intentional, alienation. Breutzman plainly has a clearer memory than most of the disconnect that high school was for so many of us, and he conveys it expertly.

Small-press alternative comics such as this tend to make their trade in unhappy, dismal stories – a tendency not always welcome or, indeed, at all sensible in a narrative sense. But Yearbooks gets it right. The emotions it brings out in the reader are not so much inspired or explained as dredged. It speaks truthfully of universals or near-universals; a worthy goal indeed. And fully realized here. There’s a real discomfort in reading this, a discomfort felt in the gut, and there’s something oddly but potently satisfying in the reality of that. It’s a validation, a sharing of the experience with the creators, a realization that the awful parts of life are not as lonely as they seem.

Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites

Creators: Evan Dorkin, Sarah Dyer (writers); Jill Thompson (artist/letterer); Jason Arthur (letterer)

Publisher: Dark Horse

On one level, it’s easy to see why Beasts of Burden works so well. These stories of a group of dogs (and a cat)¹ and their encounters with the supernatural have something that human-centered horror stories can only dream of: protagonists that are totally innocent. Dogs are effectively members of our society, but are held to none of its standards. They are free of sin. And the person who isn’t heartbroken by the scene of a terrified dog, or worse, a dead one, most likely has a deficit of what is usually called the “soul.”

But to say that this is a great comic because of the sneaky brilliance of its central conceit is to sell it short. Those who only know of Evan Dorkin through his very popular aggression-comedy comic Milk and Cheese are missing out on the subtle and insightful grasp of emotion found in some of his other work. And it’s on full display here. Jill Thompson’s painted art is beautiful, particularly in her handling of the animals, which are anthropomorphized only so much as is necessary. Her only weakness is that her monsters are rarely that scary (with the exception of the zombie dogs, which are excellent), but then, horror with a visual aesthetic that skews toward the bright and pleasant is a nice change of pace. It may even be a superior position – here the ghosts and monsters don’t belong in the world, which is as it should be, and which is scarier in a lot of ways than the demons that seem to be inevitable manifestations of their dark and blighted worlds that we so often see.

Finally, it must be noted that this is a handsomely-bound hardcover, eight inches by twelve (oversized for comics), 184 pages, and it costs 20 bucks. Good on Dark Horse for that.

Icon: Mothership Connection

Creators: Dwayne McDuffie (writer); M. D. Bright (penciler); Mike Gustovich (inker); Steve Dutro (letterer); a list too lengthy of people too secondary, regrettably, to produce here (pencilers, inkers, and colorists)

Publisher: DC

The closest thing to frustration that this book offers is that it refuses to simply collect a run of the comic, but rather offers Icon issues 13, 19-22, 24-27, and 30. The common thread here is that most of these stories are not about the alien superhero Icon, nor even about his sidekick Rocket (whom the series is really about, normally), but rather about Buck Wild, Mercenary Man. Mr. Wild is McDuffie’s satire of/homage to the weird, pseudo-blaxploitation superhero comics of the 70s, and he is simultaneously absolutely hilarious and pathetic in a very sympathetic way. And this book is the ballad of Buck Wild; every single appearance of the character is here. McDuffie loves Buck Wild, and knows how embarrassing and absurd he is at the same time, and gifts this same wonderful combination of emotions to the reader.

We have elsewhere on this site praised McDuffie’s Hardware, for its intelligence, progressivism, and thrills. But McDuffie has implied that he was “half-assing” Hardware, and that the other title he wrote for Milestone, Icon, was his best work. More than that, that the arc presented here in Mothership Connection was its best story arc. Suffice it to say, he knows what he’s talking about. Hardware: The Man In The Machine was great; Icon: Mothership Connection is nothing short of beautiful. There’s exciting space adventure, comedy both broad and subtle, truly moving human emotion, and serious social commentary, all blended together seamlessly.

Superhero comics don’t get much better.

The Amazing Screw-On Head And Other Curious Objects

Creators: Mike Mignola (writer, artist); Katie Mignola (writer); Dave Stewart (colors); Clem Robins, Pat Brosseau (letterers)

Publisher: Dark Horse

In the notes in the back of this collection, Mike Mignola states that the original Amazing Screw-On Head one-shot comic was something that he did pretty much just to entertain himself. There’s a lesson in this. Screw-On Head became wildly popular, winning an Eisner award and inspiring a Comedy Central one-off cartoon,² which was alternately slavishly faithful to the comic and wildly unfaithful to it, apparently at random. All of this acclaim and attention was well-deserved. The Amazing Screw-On Head is incredibly hilarious. There’s broad physical humor, subtle linguistic jokes, weird conceptual stuff, the works. In the last ten years or so, Mignola’s writing has been earning a place among the greats. And his art was always bloody fantastic.

This collection, another handsome hardbound from Dark Horse, also collects the similarly Eisner-winning “The Magician and the Snake,” which Mignola co-wrote with his then seven-year-old daughter. It’s a surreal, simple, and remarkably heartbreaking story of the sort that only a child could produce. Rounding the book out is a number of other short, comic pieces, some of them without words, and while none of these are quite a Screw-On Head, there are at least a couple of things more hilarious than what you’d find in any six issues of Deadpool in every single one of them. Plus, it’s all Mignola art – an embarrassment of riches.

Usagi Yojimbo Volume 24: Return of the Black Soul

Creator: Stan Sakai

Publisher: Dark Horse

Usagi Yojimbo is the story of Miyamoto Usagi, a masterless samurai who walks the wanderer’s road in a richly detailed feudal Japan in which everybody is a humanoid animal. It is also possibly the longest-running continuous comic book narrative by a non-psychotic writer/artist in all of history.³ Sakai’s been at it for more than 25 years now, which is remarkable. Even more remarkable is the fact that it remains fresh, interesting, funny, moving, exciting, and meaningful. It’s got to be sorcery, maintaining this level of quality; how does he do it? The stories are usually pretty straightforward and uncomplicated; the art is deceptively simple. Sakai can coax from a handful of lines an expressiveness and beauty that most painters can only envy. Astonishing.

As far as how Return of the Black Soul stacks up against the reams of paper that have come before, well, one compares an Usagi Yojimbo story to every other comic book ever made, not to another Usagi Yojimbo story. Still, this particular one does revolve around Jei, the demonic anti-paladin and perhaps the most dramatic and exciting of all of Usagi’s villains. So that’s great. Not only that, but we here at last get the secret origin of Jei. This origin not only lends a strong note of tragedy to the most terrifying character in all Japan, but it spells out his background while only contributing to his mystique. Impossible. Impossible! Maybe Stan Sakai isn’t telling us how he does it because such power would be far too dangerous in the wrong hands.

The Bloom County Library, Volume Two: 1982-1984

Creator: Berkeley Breathed

Publisher: IDW Publishing / The Library of American Comics

Those under 30 may not remember Bloom County, which was sort of like a Doonesbury composed entirely of children and talking animals, with all of the incisive commentary and open-hearted whimsy so implied. It was cynical, and smart, and hopeful, and kind, and above all, it was really, really funny. Rejoice, then, that the Library of American Comics is compiling its entire run, in a series of sturdy hardcovers with those little cloth bookmarky things and all. This second volume gives us the early golden age of Bloom County; gone are the aimless hick-jokes, and yet to come is the weird unraveling at its end, with Donald Trump’s brain in Bill the Cat’s body and so on. Breathed’s art is at its tightest here as well, as he has recently abandoned his Jules Feiffer-esque sketchiness, and not yet moved into his Berkeley Breathed-esque loopiness. Here is the work of one of the great cartoonists in his prime.

As for those over 30, some already love Bloom County, and some don’t. This latter group is beyond help. But for those of the former group to whom these volumes do not sell themselves, consider: Here at last is a complete record of every single published Bloom County strip. Some of these comics have never been reprinted before for the clear reason of Breathed’s tendency to repeat himself. For others, however, the never-before-printed status is nearly impossible to explain. Some of this stuff is uproarious.

Breathed also provides some brief annotations here. These are regrettably sparse, but frequently very insightful; he points out, for example, that his penchant for pop-culture references was all but unheard of in comics in those times, whereas now, of course, nobody can seem to think of any other sort of joke. But no one has done it anything like Breathed since. It’s great to go back and see.

Krazy & Ignatz – Love in a Kestle or Love in a Hut (1916-1918)

Creator: George Herriman

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books

Breathed’s political side may have been obviously influenced by Trudeau and Feiffer, but the influence of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat on the whimsical and bizarre side of Bloom County is just as profound. Arriving in the newspaper funnies in 1916, Herriman’s ongoing tale of a black-hearted mouse, an ambiguously gendered cat who thinks the mouse loves him (or her), and an airborne brick was like nothing else on the comics page – which was as banal and repetitive then as it is now. Krazy Kat’s constantly-shifting backgrounds, bizarrely-spelled highbrow wit, and tendency to play with the conventions of the medium confounded newspaper editors all over the country, and it survived in part because it was defended by William Randolph Hearst (of all people). It did not, unfortunately, reinvent the comics page, but any modern comic with any trace of weirdness or anarchy owes it an immense debt.

But the hell with all that. Krazy Kat, here in 2010, is really, really funny, presumably as much so now as it was then. This is an almost impossible feat, as comedy tends to age terribly. It helps that Herriman mostly kept to the broad strokes of human (or cat, or mouse, or brick) nature. But more than that, the aforementioned inspired meddling with the form is endlessly diverting. And Herriman’s turns of phrase are frequently funnier than anything seen in newspaper comics since.

There was a brief renaissance of interest in Krazy Kat in the mid-1990s, when Eclipse Comics collected the first nine years of Sunday strips before that company folded. Fantagraphics here reprints the first three volumes of this series, complete with Bill Blackbeard’s indispensable annotations and essays, and it is a fine thing. If there’s any problem with this book at all, it is that, huge though the book is, the art and lettering still seems small and tight on the page; apparently newspapers in 1916 were about eight feet high. But this is stuff worth squinting at.

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