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Breakdowns -- Don't Eat Strangers

December 5, 2002

The title of this week’s column—which I usually don’t like to reveal—comes from my (almost) three-year-old son, who misremembered some parental advice. He’s on my mind often, but especially at this moment, wrapping up the column after earlier this evening pulling a plastic bead out of his nose with a pair of tweezers. Oy, these kids. Anyway, pretty good, diverse crop of books this week, only one of them actually new, but I don’t think you’ll mind that. In fact, there are so many reviews—fairly long ones at that—that there’s no space for a Full Bleed, not that I have anything pressing there, anyway. Kind of taking that space is the third part of my GRENDEL SAGA, looking in more or less chronological order (the stories, not publication dates) at pretty much every GRENDEL story Matt Wagner & Co. have given us in the last 20 years. So let’s get started.

BEG THE QUESTION by Bob Fingerman. Fantagraphics Books. $24.95
Hey, you know how these little pocket-sized books with one panel per page of a guy sitting on the can and thinking can be called a graphic novel these days, and how a mediocre Batman story gets stretched to 64 pages, given painted art and a hardcover and it’s called a graphic novel, too? And you know how you hate that? Well, every year, one or two people, maybe, are able to produce a work of length, scope and depth to legitimately qualify for “novel, graphic variety” status. This is this year’s effort, a 200-plus-page hardcover that looks like an honest-to-God respectable book on the outside, and with art clear and attractive enough not to freak out or bore the non-comics-readers who crack it open.

Rob Hoffman is something like a younger Bob Fingerman, I gather -— a bright NYC cartoonist hustling to keep the work coming, and unfortunately stuck mostly hacking out erotic comics for a third-rate porn mag. Like many of us, what pays the bills takes up the time we’d rather use to do something more fulfilling. What keeps Rob going is the love and hothouse sensuality of his girlfriend of two years, Sylvia. We follow many months of their relationship (watch the changing hairstyles on Sylvia) through some ups and downs, a marriage proposal, and finally, the Big Day. They’re only 22 —- is Rob ready? Did Sylvia’s occasional neediness push the nurturing but somewhat controlling Rob down a path he shouldn’t be on yet? Hey, read the book.

What Fingerman reminds us, if it was necessary, is that aside from our tastes in music and movies, under our goofy haircuts, clothes, tats and piercings, we all pretty much have the same concerns. Did I find the perfect mate, or will another come along? Do our families curse us to follow their paths? Can I get her friend to join us for a threesome? Or in other words, no matter how offbeat or alternative your lifestyle might be, you’re still going to have to come home for Christmas, or have to put on a tie and/or yarmulke for a family member’s funeral. Through it all are not just the fully-realized, funny, sexy and recognizable characters of Rob and Sylvia, but a supporting cast of friends, family and coworkers who are all distinctive, rarely played for mere one-dimensional laughs. One standout is Rob’s cartoonist friend and former roommate Jack, probably the most sensitive of Rob’s friends, but ambivalent in his support of Rob’s impending marriage. Plus, his obsession with novelist Martin Amis, while a digression from the story, is so funny you won’t care.

It’s a lengthy read, owing to grid layouts packed with hilarious and knowing dialogue, but you really don’t want it to end. We can be grateful that Fingerman, unlike Rob, did find the time to do more than porn (though there’s a LOT of sex in this book). He found time to produce a masterpiece.

GO GIRL! By Trina Robbins and Anne Timmons. Dark Horse Comics. $15.95
It’s one of the unfortunate facts about comics that there are few comics geared towards girls or equally appealing to boys and girls, and still fewer of them are any good. ALISON DARE, maybe? HOPELESS SAVAGES and MAGIC PICKLE? And it’s also unfortunate that I can’t add GO GIRL! to this short list. Wisp-thin yet calcified, Robbins’ story of a teenaged girl with the power of flight, who takes up the superhero career her mom left behind reads like a good-natured delusion that the past can be recaptured simply by regurgitation. Hey, we’d all like more girls and boys to read comics, and for their comics to have good moral lessons and a minimum of violence, but they should also be interesting. This new Go Girl!—she gets along with her mom. Nice, but what’s interesting about that? Her new superhero career causes major problems with her friends—she insists on wearing her dated Saturn Girl-style costume when she’s “off-duty.” Whoa, don’t pile on the angst all at once. Again, the intent and the tone of the book is fine, but it’s a shame Robbins couldn’t come up with anything worth turning the pages for. A back cover quote says GO GIRL! “…departs from contemporary comicdom’s redundant repertoire of male power fantasies.” Great—what did it give us as a substitute? A sweet, uncomplicated girl who flies around, stops minor villains, and gets home in time to do her homework. She has no interior life; there’s no humor; nothing to do with adolescence that the target audience might relate to. More likely, the few who have this book foisted on them will be wondering why this girl wears such a short skirt to fly around. The cluelessness extends from the obsolete hairstyles right to the crucial back cover blurb, citing semi-retired Go-Go Girl Mom as giving her daughter “a leg up.” Who among the demographic would even know what the phrase means?

THE CASTAWAYS by Rob Vollmar and Pablo G. Callejo. Absence of Ink Press. $5.95
I read this book quite some time ago —- actually read the original issues of ABSENCE OF INK THEATRE in which it appeared —- and yet for various reasons I haven’t reviewed it until now. In fact, I actually thought I had reviewed it, but I think that was just some mental rehearsal I never typed. I feel especially bad because I know Rob Vollmar from when we both wrote for Comic Book Galaxy, so let’s be done with this personal stuff and on to the review, quickly making clear that while I know and like the guy, if the book was bad, I’d say it.

This book is great.

Illustrated by the estimable Callejo in black and white, with a bluish gray tint added, THE CASTAWAYS is about young Tucker Freeman, a thirteen-year-old boy in 1932 rural Missouri whose hard, miserly aunt tells him that he’s just a burden, a mouth she can’t afford to feed. A shiftless layabout like his no-good father, who abandoned the family a few years back. Tucker leaves home right away, figuring to ride the rails and seek his fortune. After getting into a scrape with a railroad worker, he meets a whip-thin, elderly African-American man, one Elijah Hopkins, who takes a shine to Tucker, educating him on the unspoken rules by which a hobo must abide, and protecting him from some of the predators who walk among them. Though Tucker is often beset by heartache over his father and mother, Elijah keeps his spirits up with compassion and simple wisdom. Elijah knows Tucker can do better than this life, and finds redemption for his own mistake by an act of kindness that will see Tucker reunited with his family.

Vollmar chose his setting well, a more romantic, wide-open era for America, where the disenfranchised could still find their own kind of decent society, and where it wasn’t so hard to find a trustworthy soul ready to lend a hand. He also taps into rich themes. What is an American story without a son losing a father or losing a connection to him? A boy wanting to make his mother proud. The author chooses well in his artist, too, as Callejo brings an earthy richness to every panel. You can smell the train and the sticky pines it rushes past, feel the wind and the sere grain brushing your cheek. Hear the crackle of the campfire and the hum of the engine roaring down the track. The inside cover calls it a “maudl-o-drama in five parts,” but no, the earnestness is winning and never gets maudlin. The only complain I would make is I wanted it to be longer. Well worth it at twice the price.

CATHEDRAL CHILD by Lea Hernandez. Cyberosia Publishing. $10.95
This is a tale of star-crossed lovers in a parallel world, science fiction setting. Sumner Stuart is the adopted son of a ruthless businessman named Parrish, who wants to exploit a steam-powered, living machine called Cathedral, for nothing more than money and power. Sumner wants to be a good son, but from childhood he’s had a strong bond with Glory, the beautiful Cuerpo girl. Cuerpo are natives of the area, in this case the town called Heaven where Cathedral is located under, appropriately, a church, and they are not unlike Native Americans or Mexicans in their closer connection with nature and spirituality, and in the way they are degraded and abused by whites like Parrish. It’s no wonder, this, as Hernandez is a Texas resident, where she would have observed some of this for herself. The self-described “Texas steampunk” tableau is a fairly unique one, and lends charm to what is a somewhat familiar set of class conflicts. I also liked the idea of Cathedral/Camille, with “her” musical way of communicating and her staggering ability to make the character’s thoughts into reality. As Hernandez writes in her notes afterward, she shares the belief with Grant Morrison that thinking about a possible outcome helps bring it about. A heady concept, and the author deserves credit for the ambition and for bringing it mostly off, with a sweet, appealing romance and some suspense in the last third. The only problems are that the vast amount of thought that went into these characters and concepts (large amount of symbolism, from art to character names) doesn’t always come across on the page. I didn’t have a great feel for Cathedral/Camille, why they were somehow different, or what the supporting character Dona’s motivation was, and some parts were visually confusing in the storytelling. Drawing in a manga-inspired style, with most characters almost boneless and feminine, dampened some of the dramatic impact, and some characters like Sumner and Tesla looked too much alike. I did like it overall, and have a feeling maybe some of the bugs were worked out for the sequel, CLOCKWORK ANGELS.

THE COMICS JOURNAL LIBRARY VOL. 1: JACK KIRBY Edited by Milo George. Fantagraphics Books. $18.95
You can’t sing Jack “King” Kirby’s praises too loudly or too often, but this book will let you rest your voice a while. In an oversized, coffee table book format, Milo George, Gary Groth, R.C. Harvey and the rest of the contributors present a respectful and admiring portrait of Kirby, but with enough top-notch journalism and critical analysis to balance the book and keep it from sycophancy. There are several interviews with Kirby, most not originally conducted for the THE COMICS JOURNAL, which provide fascinating insight into his creative process, his solo work and collaborations with Joe Simon and Stan Lee, and personal history and philosophy. Kirby emerges as a kind man and dynamo of ideas, though increasingly bitter as he gets older about only being recognized as the preeminent Marvel artist and not the co-plotter or storyteller. This view is no doubt exacerbated by his 1986 lawsuit against Marvel for the return of his original artwork, thousands of pages which had been held from him for decades. TCJ news editor Michael Dean covered the story, and indeed, a petition circulated by TCJ to comics professionals to shame Marvel into giving Kirby back what was unequivocally, legally his played a role in Kirby eventually getting back some 1,900 pages. Not nearly all of it, as much had been stolen and sold over the years, but far better than the insulting original offer of some 88 pages if Kirby would sign a cruel agreement to not only give up any claim of character authorship but to also agree never to help any other professional suing Marvel for those reasons. That Kirby had such a demeaning fight on his hands at the age of 67 was a travesty, and the book makes no bones about that, though they also don’t let that excuse some of the attacks on Stan Lee and the preposterous claims that Lee never wrote anything at Marvel.

In addition to the interviews and news, there is an insightful essay on Kirby’s contributions to the medium by R.C. Harvey, note-perfect Introduction and Foreword by Groth and Barry Windsor-Smith, respectively, and an impassioned essay by Frank Miller about the Marvel artwork lawsuit, written while it was going on. There’s also a provocative and compelling analysis of Kirby’s art, including convincing defenses of less-admired work like Kirby’s mid-70s series for Marvel based on Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. And, as in the TCJ Specials inaugurated last year, there is a color section, with diverse examples of Kirby’s vibrant art, from 50s war comics to his experimental late 60s FANTASTIC FOUR work, and the rest of the book has excellent selections of black-and-white art, which looks much better here on heavy paper stock than Marvel’s ESSENTIALS newsprint. It’s a wonderful record of the most important comics creator, necessary for any student of the medium.

In 2003, Fantagraphics will publish THE COMICS JOURNAL LIBRARY VOL. TWO: FRANK MILLER.

The Pornhound Part One
No, this isn’t a look at cartoonist Joe Matt, though I’m hoping to look into a couple of his books for you soon. Rather, it’s the first of a series of reviews of comics and graphic novels whose primary function, arguably, is to arouse and titillate. In other words, porn. But is that all they are?

I got to thinking about this quite a while back, as I was first getting into the work of Dave Cooper through his strangely erotic “Ripple, A Predilection for Tina” story in his own WEASEL #1-5, and in Gilbert Hernandez’ sex-filled Fritz and Petra stories in various LOVE & ROCKETS-related titles. What I was thinking was that, while the Eros imprint of Fantagraphics obviously was less focused on “art comics,” could not some of them be artful? They published or reprinted the work of cartoonists from all over the world, so I had to figure some of it was bound to be compelling beyond just the sex scenes. Could there be good stories, with art as good as the “acceptable” art comics? That’s what I wanted to find out, and the folks at Eros/Fantagraphics were only too happy to indulge me, which means you may expect one or two of these reviews each column for quite some time.

A couple other things before I run down the first three books I read. First, in addition to the question outlined above, I also wanted to do this because I don’t think anyone else is doing it, almost certainly no reviewers/columnists of my prominence or greater. So that makes this kind of an amusing challenge, as it already seems the criteria and the reviewing style will be a little different than normal. Is the book successful even if it doesn’t turn me on, or vice-versa? Is that something I even want to discuss? Well, we’ll see. These are not premeditated reviews in any way, very off-the-cuff.

The other thing to mention is that, sure, there are other companies publishing comics erotica as well. NBM, like Fantagraphics, has an “art side” and a “porn side,” so to speak, and I’m sure if I got the DIAMOND PREVIEWS ADULT EDITION I’d find a lot more. But this is not meant to be an exhaustive, balanced search. Maybe I’ll look into the other companies another time, but for now, Eros will do just fine.

We’ll start off with Bruce McCorkindale’s BOFFY THE VAMPIRE LAYER, a $14.95 trade. I think we can tell from the title that this is not likely to be something mistaken for art. No, it’s like countless adult movies, parodying the title and basic premise of a popular piece of mainstream entertainment and adding tons of sex. For it to work, it should be funny, finding humor from specific elements of the source material, and the artist should be good with likenesses, thrilling the reader by showing him these characters he knows now engaged in acts he might already have fantasized about. I’m not a huge BUFFY fan, but I’ve seen the show a few times and keep up on bits and piece of it, which is about what I expect McCorkindale does. There’s a bit of reference to Boffy’s social life and that she’s the “Chosen One” and all the supporting cast makes an appearance. It’s probably best the references are kept fairly superficial. The first story sets the tone for others, as Boffy is seduced by a vampire and his wife for a few pages of action, before she comes to her senses and kills them. Or in other words, first she lays them, then she slays them. It’s a serviceable premise, but McCorkindale is barely a serviceable artist, pretty good with anatomy and composition but the faces are indistinct or interchangeable. Boffy hooks up later with both “Sabreena the Witch” and “Brittany Spreads” and it’s not as fun as it could be because they all look so similar. He comes close to getting a likeness right here and there, just as he comes close to a good joke once or twice, but it’s all pretty disposable.

SMALL FAVORS GIRLY PORNO COMIC COLLECTION: BOOK ONE by Colleen Coover. 14.95
Sort of an x-rated cross between STRANGERS IN PARADISE and PETER PAN, SMALL FAVORS is about Annie, a nice young woman who lusts after her female neighbor. But she soon forgets about it when a horny little Tinkerbell type named Nibbil seduces her in several imaginative ways, due to her tiny size. And then it turns out she can become human-sized as well, which makes those parts of the book more straightforward porn, but still enjoyable enough. What makes this more interesting than the usual is the upbeat, carefree feminine perspective. As Coover says on the back, pretty girls make her happy, and there’s not much more to be said about it. She marries this outlook with simple but attractive art not far removed from Terry Moore or Jeff Smith. Not something I’ll follow from now on, but good.

THE GRENDEL SAGA
Part Three: Devil in Her Heart
In this installment, we look at two stories spinning out of the Hunter Rose Grendel era, GRENDEL: DEVIL CHILD and GRENDEL: DEVIL’S LEGACY. While published over a decade apart, they’re being reviewed in this order as it best approximates the chronology of the Grendel Saga.

GRENDEL: DEVIL CHILD was just a two-issue limited series from 1999, written by Diana Schutz, Matt Wagner’s longtime editor, friend, and sister-in-law, and illustrated by Tim Sale, with Teddy Kristiansen providing colors. Wagner obviously realized Schutz knew and understood the Grendel mythos inside and out, and so he entrusted her with this story of the post-Hunter Rose life of his ward, Stacy Palumbo, the first time another writer handled anything set in the Rose era. In fact, Wagner himself had been reluctant to revisit the tragic events of Stacy’s life.

Schutz rolls up her sleeves, probably doing damage to the heart she’s pinned there, in this punishing story of Stacy’s adolescence spent in a mental institution. When Stacy discovered that her father figure Hunter was the assassin Grendel, and that her best friend Argent was Grendel’s nemesis, bent on bringing him down, it undid her, pulverizing whatever foundation on which her sanity rested. The events of DEVIL BY THE DEED showed how this revelation led Stacy to engineer Hunter’s and Argent’s final, deadly battle, but aside from a sad and brief denouement, Wagner did not delve into what happened to Stacy after that. Schutz does, and establishes that the fragile Stacy logically latching onto the next man to care for her, her therapist, Dr. Erik Olliver. The impropriety of their relationship presages trouble, but it’s still quite shocking to find Olliver turn brutal, assaulting Stacy on their wedding night before hanging himself. That tragedy comprises the first issue, while the second involves an older Stacy losing even more of her mind while simultaneously making a fleeting connection with her daughter Christine, now a haughty, hot-tempered woman reminding Stacy painfully of Hunter. By the end, she realizes in a gut-wrenching way that her life has never been her own, and that her only purpose seemed to be to breed the heir to Grendel’s legacy.

This is probably the most thoroughly depressing story in the Grendel Saga, and one of the grimmest comics stories I’ve ever read. But what makes it worthwhile is the sensitive work of Schutz, Sale and Kristiansen in concert. Schutz takes Wagner’s source material and adds dramatic touches the equal of his work, from starting the first issue with Stacy’s first period and ending it with her equally sanguine deflowering by Erik, to Stacy’s sinister black cat, the scar over his eye reminding one of the Grendel mask, never too far from her. She understands Stacy fully, on a level that suggests she spent some time thinking as Stacy in preparing the story. Her takes on Christine Spar, as a young woman and then shortly before writing DEVIL BY THE DEED, are brief but well done, retroactively laying the groundwork for the resentment and anger behind the character.

Sale himself is most popular for his superhero work, but really excels at quiet, grounded drama like this, and his recurring use of a red silk bookmark in the left margins of several pages is a great device to make the reader identify with the story as sort of a dark fable. In fact, it is revealed in a letter column that the story was written years before release, delayed by Sale’s superhero work and by his discomfort at spending more than short periods with such an oppressive, affecting story. Kristiansen, an excellent artist himself, complements Sale’s work perfectly, subtly softening and deepening Sale’s bold, shadowy work.

While not collected, Dark Horse lists the issues as being available. If that’s not the case, I would think this would be collected eventually with the Wagner/Mireault THE DEVIL INSIDE three issue miniseries, but that’s just speculation.

GRENDEL: DEVIL’S LEGACY is a $29.95 trade collecting the twelve issue Dark Horse limited series by Matt Wagner and The Pander Bros, the longest GRENDEL story, yet one of the most gripping, a sustained piece of suspense and mounting evil. Years after she recounted the lives of Hunter Rose and her mother, Christine Spar is a fairly happy woman, with friends and her beloved son, Anson. A trip to a San Francisco kabuki performance changes all that. Here she meets Tojiro, the flamboyant star of the production, who surreptitiously plucks a lock of hair from Anson. Later that night, he uses some sort of magic to call a somnambulant Anson to him, and he feeds on the boy as some sort of vampire. Anson never comes home.

Christine is getting little help from the police, so she does her own homework, connecting similar disappearances with performance dates for the kabuki troupe. She knows Tojiro is the one, and she’s not going to let him slip away. It is here that she lets her love for her son turn her towards vengeance, and she takes the Grendel mask and weapon from a museum. Fashioning her own costume, she goes about trying to find Tojiro. The theft of the Grendel artifacts, and subsequent murders by Christine of some of Tojiro’s thugs, gets the police and our favorite crime-stopping wolf, Argent, involved. And working alongside Argent is Detective Wiggins, a tough cop with a cybernetic eye. I believe he and Pellon Cross from DEVIL TALES are the same character, but I’m not sure why the name changed. In the midst of her grief, rage, determined search for Tojiro and a persona turning more and more to games of power and manipulation, Christine manages to find love with Tojiro’s stage manager, Brian Li-Sung. It’s a love strong enough to withstand her revelation to Brian that she is the murdering Grendel everyone’s looking for, and it’s a love that redeems the character even as a reader’s morality demands she is stopped. Coming full circle to the fateful battle in DEVIL BY THE DEED, Christine fights Argent to the death.

After the carefully composed, inventive and moody art of Wagner, the Panders take some getting used to, with more conventional composition and a somewhat dated 80s look, many of the women having slick, mannish hairstyles. Other than hair color, Christine and her friend Regina are almost identical. And there is a definite change when Jay Geldhof steps in frequently to ink the Panders’ pencils, perhaps to keep them to deadline. When he inks, the pages are less stylized, more realistic. It’s only a minor distraction, and the characters are always consistent enough. The art also benefits from the glossy paper and modern recoloring by Jeromy Cox.

Wagner again shows his range in the writing here, presenting Christine as utterly different from Hunter, but just as fully realized. Having her narrate into her tape recorder is effective, getting both exposition and character across, often quite subtly. What she doesn’t say is just as important as what she says. As she takes on the role of Grendel, very little time is spent grieving for her son, the very reason she took on the role in the first place. It’s a game of cat-and-mouse, a thrill for her. Bluffing the police and Argent is likewise entertaining for her, and her love for Brian is clearly the only thing keeping her remotely human. Her doomed struggle is all the more fascinating because the reader doesn’t share her delusions and know the fall is just around the corner.

With this, Wagner almost closed the door on this era of Grendel, except for a short but brilliant tale dealing with Brian Li-Sung, GRENDEL: THE DEVIL INSIDE. I’ll cover that next week, as well as the second-longest story collected, the ten-part GRENDEL: WAR CHILD. And forget last week’s comment about the BATMAN/GRENDEL one-shots. It’ll be another week or two before we get to those.

Chris Allen

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