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Breakdowns - Coalition of the Thrilling

March 6, 2003

The time it took to write that “How-To” column last week meant the reviews got short shrift—I haven’t reviewed just three books since my first Breakdowns for ‘The Shoot. So I’ve got a good-sized batch of books to cover this week, with a pretty wide range, from the humanity and romance of Tom Beland’s TRUE STORY, SWEAR TO GOD: CHANCES ARE and David Collier’s HAMILTON SKETCHBOOK to the spandex and skyfurnaces of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and THE RED STAR, and then the wildly divergent crime stories SHOT CALLERZ and PISTOLWHIP: THE YELLOW MENACE. And response to last week’s column was very strong, so I hope you’ll indulge just a couple more tips I thought of this week, in the Full Bleed section.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #50 by J. Michael Straczynski, John Romita, Jr. Marvel Comics. $2.25
Peter and Mary Jane finally get together for a heart-to-heart about whether they will get back together or split for good, and it’s frequently interrupted by Latverian rebels trying to assassinate Doctor Doom at the airport. I thought it was a smart move to keep the action plot rather brisk and light, and having a team-up with a Captain America not nearly as ponderous and intense as his own series was nice, too. I don’t think the Parkers’ separation up to this point, in retrospect, was that well-conceived, but JMS writes a good make-up scene, apart from a cutesy line or two, and a fine Mary Jane. Romita somehow continues to grow in subtle ways, changing his already excellent rendition of Peter’s face a little, and despite decades of work on the character, I detect few stock poses or familiar panels. Not a brilliant artist, but a very good, engaged craftsman. And frankly, I appreciated that this was a standard-sized anniversary issue, not padded out.

THE RED STAR (VOL. 2) #1 by Christian Gossett, Brad Kayl, Snakebite and Paul Schrier. Archangel Studios/CrossGen Entertainment. $2.95
I read the RED STAR ANNUAL: RUN, MAKITA, RUN! last week, and now this first issue under CrossGen’s new creator-owned imprint, and it’s like trying to recapture one’s youth. I started with the series in its beginnings, being an early supporter, and in fact Chris Ryall and I did a lengthy review of the state-of-the-art first trade paperback, a tabloid-sized wonder full of bonus production information and links to bonus Web material designed to enhance the understanding and enjoyment of this alternate reality Russia. The series has appeared very sporadically since then, but the Nokgorka storyline held together on the strength of the plucky Nakita, the liveliest character of the series. And so, the Annual was interesting throughout, though it is essentially a prequel to the events of NOKGORKA, and that trade probably should have been published later, including it. There may have been issues with keeping the Annual and subsequent material separate from previous publisher Image, I don’t know.

Anyway, starting the new story arc is at first a bit of a chore, frankly. The first page is clogged with expository text, and I generally prefer getting right into the story and explaining things as one goes. It also doesn’t help that the new story gives more attention to the spiritual conflict between The Red Woman who represents the soul of the country, and Imbohl, a kind of dark god who would destroy it. I may not even have a great handle on these two, to be honest. It shouldn’t be surprising that this is the direction for the new series, given the quasi-religious fantasy elements of many other CrossGen books, but it’s less appealing to one who prefers the human-scale, though still grandiose, stories of Maya Antares’ search for her beloved husband, or her brother-in-law Urik’s struggle to live up to that same man’s example.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. Aside from the Red Woman/Imbohl story, which is kind of like the Greek Gods manipulating events in the Trojan War, there is a dramatic sequence where two skyfurnaces (the massive ships both sides use) are flung end over end like matchsticks. Ulik is shown to be the better of the base Volkov by trusting his men and trusting in Nature, shutting off the corrective engines and letting the ship right itself. Volkov fights Nature and is lost. An interesting theme, especially for a book otherwise drenched in Communist iconography. In the end, despite the sluggish beginning, which is somewhat understandable given the series’ complexities and the fact this is a new #1, the issue does get going and, while a bit stilted with technobabble, nonetheless becomes dramatic, all the while visually as impressive as ever.

SHOT CALLERZ by Gary Phillips and Brett Weldele. Oni Press. $11.95
As they did with Greg Rucka, Oni Press once again taps a mystery novelist to pen a book for them, and Phillips is another welcome addition to the industry. This is a revenge story, following a homegirl named Nea as she tries to track down her former lover and heist accomplice Phil Tangiers, while trying to avoid “shot caller” Big Freight, the gangster they ripped off. It’s a gritty story, full of delicious slang and degraded sex, and Weldele’s intuitive style is well-matched to it, blunt as a cap to the knees at times, but with murky tones and sketchy lines symbolizing the ambiguities of a tale where one must root for a bad girl against the bad guys. The key to this is not sentimentality, as Phillips well knows (no tearful regret, no rape in Nea’s past) but to show that Nea is the most human, because she was the most trusting and loving. She has a kind of honor that Freight and Tangiers don’t possess, and it will cost them.

The plotting is not drum-tight; things are a little confusing at times, and the Kentucky Derby finale shows neither writer nor artist to have a great handle on it. This would have been a good place for Weldele to lighten up, showing the contrast of the smiling, rich white people (and all the women in outlandish hats) with these black criminals moving through them like an ill wind. And when a racehorse is worth millions, I doubt it would be that easy to sneak into a stable, though maybe we can assume this stable is not for the Derby horses. At any rate, it doesn’t do serious damage to the story, which is gripping throughout, and with some of the juiciest dialogue you’ll find in comics.

PISTOLWHIP: THE YELLOW MENACE by Jason Hall and Matt Kindt. Top Shelf Comix. $14.95
Jack Peril returns, quite the worse for wear, as does would-be private eye and flapjack addict Mitch Pistolwhip, in another attractive something or other some may call adventure or mystery.

There’s a sense of decency and history in Hall’s writing, and a playfulness in Kindt’s art, that are appealing, but so far, there is not too much else to recommend. I feel like they’re nice guys, and I’m happy for them for selling the film rights to MEPHISTO AND THE EMPTY BOX, but this, this just doesn’t cut it.

Despite a trio of florid back cover quotes from top reviewers and creators, I found YELLOW MENACE to be bloated and adrift in self-satisfaction, a thin mint wrapped in a ball of aluminum foil. The art direction is assured and smart, with aged-looking paper, Chinese ideograms and a different phony 40s-style book (comic, pulp novel, nonfiction) cover or movie poster between chapters. Kindt works hard to indulge Hall, with some painting, some silent movie titles, pulp novel spot illos and a stab at a Golden Age comics style, the last about as competent as R. Sikoryak’s in FANTASTIC FOUR: UNSTABLE MOLECULES, suggesting with composition and more controlled line rather than duplicating that era’s style of drawing figures and action. I think he’s got a decent enough style, not quite formed, but a little goes a long way, and this book is a long, long way.

Or so it seems, until the reader figures out that many of the pages, with meaningless silent action like a bird flying from one place to the next merely as a scene transition, are not necessary to read. Nothing happens. No clues are left. Oh, I read every page, believe me, but noted quite often how little it mattered. Kindt is asked to sustain interest through the filler scenes, and his style is not dynamic, pretty or atmospheric enough to handle it. He’s fine, but he’s asked to carry too much of the load, and the frequent digressions into the aforementioned homages feel like a shell game to make the reader forget the story problems.

There is a story in here, suffocating, and it is that Orson Lang, who is the radio voice in the popular Jack Peril serial, is believed dead. In reality, he’s only dead inside, due to the loss of his daughter. She was killed in front of him as he cowardly dove behind a couch, and his guilt and sorrow have made him retreat into the role of Peril in real life. The idea is a good one, but it was done to much better effect in Michael Chabon’s THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY. Should I knock Hall for not being as good as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist? Well, if he’s going to mine the same territory, and this book costs more than the paperback edition of the novel, why not?

By mining the same territory, I should elaborate that some of the intended charm of the book derives from the comic book elements Hall weaves in. In the first book, Jack Peril was a crimefighter like Green Hornet, not exactly a comic book character, but close enough. The gimmick there was in interspersing a conventional pulp crime story with radio scripts that exaggerated the “real” events the reader just saw. In this case, comics fans with a similarly developed sense of history as Hall will like that he basically casts Dr. Frederic Wertham, author of SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, the wrongheaded book that helped kill the gloriously violent EC Comics and put a label on the medium as juvenile trash in the minds of non-comics readers, as the heavy. Dr. Roderick Loom, ENTICEMENT OF THE NAÏVE. Funny idea as far as it goes, but Hall fails to give Loom any motivation or any layers of character. He’s just a prick, and the rest of the cast, while they aren’t well-characterized either, aren’t pricks. If you’re going to write a mystery, you need some misdirection, some red herrings.

What happens is that a calling-card evildoer called The Yellow Menace starts a murder spree, and Loom finds it a great opportunity to plug his book, which blames crime on lurid comics and pulp novels. Rather than crafting a credible mystery or exciting, pulpy crime story, an apparently unedited Hall just bounces lazily from character to character. Lang/Peril is the most promising, and with his insanity, the one who actually does things worth watching, but he’s not given much more space than the dull non-romance between a sappy cop and the sassy dame who evidently loathes him. Pistolwhip is almost a non-entity, a puppyish “detective” who does no detecting or anything else skilled or heroic. Again, the idea of a crappy but sweet detective is a good one, and it’s lamentable that not much was done with it beyond the obvious: unsuited for human relationships because he’s weak and childish, he’s left to eat flapjacks with the loyal and undemanding dog. Miss Minks was significant in the first book, but gets nothing to do here other than grate and stand around.

What we have in this book is a sort of diary of everything Hall (and maybe Kindt) digs about this era, from the vulgar noirs and ten-cent novels to the stalwart, snap-brimmed attitudes about good and evil. Mostly, though, these two are all about the artifice, the surface. Too much time spent on gimmicks like the phony covers and funny names and pulp novel excerpts in place of dramatic plotting and pacing, good characters, psychological depth and motivation, perhaps some exploration of blaming one’s own villainy on the scapegoat, little-understood Chinaman of that era. The one thing they get right is leaving Peril alive, but it will be another soggy PISTOLWHIP book if they don’t figure out how to feature both Peril and Pistolwhip with some sort of sensible relationship or reason for them to exist in the same book together beyond the fact that the author likes superheroes and private eyes.

HAMILTON SKETCHBOOK by David Collier. Drawn & Quarterly. $14.95
It has been said that interviews tell as much about the interviewer as about the interviewee. I think of this because Collier’s first two books were mainly about other people. The people he chose to write about and the way he condensed their lives into comics told a great deal about him, someone with great compassion but not overly sentimental, modest and patient but with a mostly bottled wildness.

This SKETCHBOOK then, is, though loosely structured, the most complete portrait of Collier yet, as well as a sustained and satisfying picture of rural and suburban Canadian life, taking the author, his wife Jennifer and young son James, from Combermere to the city of Hamilton. Not just drawings, it’s also a sort of journal, filled with observations and anecdotes about his family, friends and past, a man with strong opinions he doesn’t feel the need to clobber the reader with. Collier builds up some dramatic steam in spots, as we learn of his anxieties about leaving the comforts of country living for Hamilton, but these stop short, as he has arranged the book into thematic rather than chronological chapters. So we have a chapter of “Road Trips” that covers not just moving to Hamilton, but also a comics convention in Switzerland and a trip to Singapore. The lack of cohesion doesn’t really matter, though. I mean, what did I expect from a sketchbook? But the real values of the book are its insinuating wholesomeness and calming and inspirational qualities. By that I mean it makes you want to be as decent, mellow and non-materialistic as Collier, a guy who actually seems to feel a little guilty that he has a car. As for the calming qualities, aside from the serenity of the landscapes he draws, his countless sketches of Jennifer end up evoking a great sense of peace and warmth. Any man who would draw his wife this often must have found his soulmate. One interesting note, though: of the many strangers he draws, 90% of them are cute young women.

TRUE STORY, SWEAR TO GOD: CHANCES ARE by Tom Beland. AiT/PlanetLar. $14.95
Tom Beland, like many other great artists, has found a way to present a story of such unfettered emotion and romance that only the hardest of hearts would be unmoved by it. I’ll tell you how good he is; I know Tom, and know him to be prone to extremely contentious message board feuds now and then. I think that was how I got to know him, actually, telling him it was maybe a bit unfair to describe someone’s comic art as looking like a six-year-old on acid. As he says in his book, he comes from a family of hotheads, and I don’t mention any of this to “expose” the guy but to point out that good art exists separately from someone’s life. In other words, it doesn’t matter so much what he’s like in real life (and I consider a message board a very small part of real life, prone to much dramatization), if he can produce a sweet story like this.

What the book is, is a collection of the first four TSSTG issues, detailing Tom meeting his true love, Lily, while on a free trip to DisneyWorld, and how the distance between Napa Valley, California and San Juan, Puerto Rico is not enough to stop a love that is meant to be. “Magic” is their Magic Kingdom meeting, the kind of night people dream about, when everything happens just right and you find someone you can be yourself with right from the start. “Reunion” is when Lily comes to visit Tom in Napa, the chapter being mainly a setup for this event, with lots of Tom’s yearning and trying to tell those close to him how he feels about this woman. The scene with his fish-sandwich-tossing brother is funny, though, and Tom and Lily sending treasured books to each other to help the other person learn more about them rings true, and in fact seems like something I would do in that situation.

“Moments” is where things really kick in, with the reunited couple becoming intimate. That sense of anticipation and dread, the weird quality of sex when someone has come a long way to see you, like it’s expected but you can’t act like it is, all of that is in this scene, plus the unexpected revelation of Tom’s unreliable sex drive. While this may be unfortunate for Tom, it’s actually the kind of realism the book needs if one starts to weary of his reliance on heartfelt clichés like “her laughter fills the room,” “her voice is like music,” and so on. Perhaps just as good is the scene afterwards, where Tom presents Lily with “Moments,” laying out all his inner thoughts and creativity out to her after their physical intimacy. This is followed by the obligatory wedding sequence, a familiar scenario for almost anyone, that first time you bring your gal to meet the family, thereby letting them know she’s someone special to you. Tom (and I note that I’m calling him that rather than Beland, because you really can’t help but like the guy and feel a kinship with him) writes a little about his close-knit family, and how he lost both parents to cancer when he was young. This is supposed to have made the Belands rather sarcastic but more appreciative of life, and it’s here that Tom misses some opportunities to make his family distinctive, memorable supporting characters, though. I get the feeling he didn’t want to spoil the love vibe, but a few sharper jokes or a mild argument might have made one remember more about these people than that they’re all nice.

“Discoveries” finishes things, for now, with Tom flying to see Lily in San Juan. After some typical but amusing gringo escapades, he gets to know Lily’s family, and you’re glad for him that he fits in well. It’s also nice to see him gain in confidence from having Lily’s love, and you see that he’ll fit in just fine in this country when he moves here. It’s interesting, because I know Tom’s work first from the TSSTG strip he’s done online for a few years now. I was instantly taken with his fantastic line, just impeccable. When I changed websites, I even recommended he come along, which he did. The strip is sharper and funnier than this book, in fact, though the love for Lily still burns very brightly in it. What CHANCES ARE has in its place is a kind of growing snowball of love and romance you can’t help but get caught in, rolling with heartwarming abandon over its minor flaws. It’s rather amazing that, right in the midst of this all-encompassing love, he was able to produce comics at all, much less something that could practically revive the whole romance comics genre. Excellent book, for men and women alike.

Full Bleed: More Comics Reviewing Tips

Don’t Leave Your Game on the Practice Field
This may not apply to any of you, I don’t know, but I know one reason I don’t spend as much time on message boards is that, when comics are discussed, there’s a temptation to offer one’s thoughts before you’ve even done the review. It can not only take the juice out of the review when you write it, but also, it’s not a great forum for reflection. A message board is great for off-the-cuff thoughts, and sometimes these come out harsher than a more contemplative review would. For a short while, I also had a blog, and I tried to put up a new review every day, but it was the same kind of problem. It’s good to write a review in the heat of the moment, and then go back later and clean it up a bit, if possible. In a message board, you can’t.

Don’t Write to Be Quoted
It’s often painfully obvious that some reviewers write their reviews thinking about how their positive comments might be used by a publisher in advertising. Short, hyperbolic sentences with little insight are what I’m talking about. Things like, BLANK’s artwork is flat-out gorgeous,” and “Certain to make my Best of 2003 list!” It’s not that the comments are insincere; they probably are, or are at the time. But I think even excellent books usually have flaws, or at least require a depth of writing that challenges a publisher to find that ready-made quote. If it’s in there, it comes out naturally in the review, not wrapped in a bow proclaiming the book the “best” this or “perfect” or “brilliant” that.

That’s all for now, but thinking back to my comment last week about not taking too much space summarizing the plot, I have to include a link to someone who apparently has a different approach. I won’t go on and on ripping on this; I’ll just say I’m unclear as to why this was in the “Reviews” section of this site.

Next: No fixed plans, but I’m guess I’ll start looking at the QUEEN & COUNTRY hardcovers from Oni and the two-volume BOUNCER from Humanoids, among others.

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