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By Aaron Block, on March 28th, 2013 Writer: Brian K. Vaughan
Artists: Marcos Martín & Muntsa Vicente
2013, The Panel Syndicate
Filed Under: Graphic Novel
Find it at The Panel Syndicate
 The Private Eye #1
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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Last Monday the comics rumor/journalism site Bleeding Cool linked to a few teaser images that were posted to Spanish-language comic blogs announcing a new series from Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martín, who previously collaborated on Doctor Strange: the Oath, a mini-series for Marvel in the mid 2000s. The images were intriguing, and the names involved suggested a good read – Vaughan is the fan-favorite writer of Saga and Y: the Last Man, among other other celebrated titles, and Martín is best known for his work on Daredevil, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Batgirl: Year One. I anticipated learning more about the book in the coming weeks or months, the plot points and art from first issue gradually teased out in interviews and previews, dulling the surprise but confirming that it’s worth the three or four or however many dollars. That’s how comics are marketed today.
Then it was Tuesday, and suddenly the book, titled The Private Eye #1, was available, for however much I wanted to pay, through The Panel Syndicate (a new digital publisher started by Vaughan, Martín, and friends). All the excitement about The Private Eye was generated by its mere existence, and by the distribution method. Digital-only comics are nothing new, and neither is the “tip-jar” payment model (Radiohead’s In Rainbows is probably the most famous example, but there are many more across all mediums) but the two in tandem, and employed by high-profile creators, is novel, as is the minimalist promotional “campaign.” Vaughan and Martín trusted their audience to generate their own hype, something mainstream comic readers haven’t had to do very often in the past decade or so. …
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By Aaron Block, on February 18th, 2013  Author: Paul Pope
2013 (reprinted), Image Comics
Filed under: Graphic Novel
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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Paul Pope has never been prolific. But in the past decade or so, as he’s moved away from serialized storytelling to stand-alone works like Batman: Year 100, Heavy Liquid, and 100%, Pope’s comics output has reached “event” status – even a five or six page story in an otherwise forgettable anthology is worth celebrating. So the nearly 300 pages of material collected in The One Trick Rip-Off + Deep Cuts, from Image Comics, is almost an embarrassment of riches.
A little less than half of the handsome hardcover volume is devoted to a reprint of The One Trick Rip-Off (digitally recolored by Jamie Grant of All-Star Superman fame) and Dominic Regan, which was originally serialized in Dark Horse Presents in 1995 and 1996. The other half is a kind of memoir-bibliography, gathering together short stories that originally appeared in iconic 90s anthologies like Negative Burn and Dark Horse Presents. They’re arranged roughly chronologically, and represent Pope’s work as he moved from Cleveland to Toronto to Tokyo, and finally to New York City, where he lives today. The most recent of the “Deep Cuts” dates back to 2001; this is a younger Pope, the art a bit looser and more overtly manga-influenced, but no less compelling than his contemporary work.
Thematically, there is little difference between the Popes of then and now. The misadventures of youth, cityscapes with accompanying grime, and the vacillation between beauty and violence remain prominent in his work, and dominate “The One Trick Rip-Off”. The story follows Tubby and Vim, young lovers who plan to rob Tubby’s gang, the One Tricks, and run away together. Naturally, their plan gets contorted, and they face a violent climax that ends in a quiet, poetic pull up to the stars. There’s also a sci-fi/magical realist flavor to the story in the One Trick gang’s ability to distort anyone’s perception of reality using language – their one trick. The plot draws together spaghetti westerns, Donald Westlake’s Parker novels, and manga. It’s operatic, particularly the scenes between Vim and Tubby, and the heightened emotion makes the quieter scenes of Tubby wandering the desert, after being betrayed by his gang, all the more stunning. …
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By Aaron Block, on February 11th, 2013 In November, things looked grim for comics and me; I was unemployed, and making weekly visits to the comic book store had become an irresponsible expenditure. So I bid comics farewell, promised I’d be back when I’d found work and gotten back on my feet, and walked away.
Now it’s February, two months later, and I…am still unemployed. Well, underemployed. And definitely not making enough to subsidize my monthly reading. But while I may not have a steady job, I do have incredible friends and family. My Christmas and birthday were fraught with gift certificates to Crescent City Comics and invitations to share Comixology accounts, gifts from loved ones who thought a little more Batman in my life might be just the thing I needed. They were, of course, 100% correct because more Batman makes everything better.
And if I’m reading comics, then naturally I also want to write about them. This won’t be a standard Pull List column because I’m not quite there yet. Instead, I want to run through the comics I’ve kept up with, highlight the good, and brush aside the bad (of which there is little – budgeting makes me a savvy reader.)
 Hawkeye #6 Hawkeye
My favorite comic of last year, Hawkeye, is already shaping up to be my favorite comic of this year, too. Javier Pulido filled in for regular artist David Aja for issues four and five, and the slight change in tone helped highlight exactly what makes this book so special. Pulido’s art is flatter, yet more expressive, than Aja’s, and reading his issues I was reminded of watching Ralph Bakshi’s Spider-Man cartoon from the late 60s. That looseness accentuated the humor beats of the story, while still allowing for exciting action sequences. Pulido, who doesn’t employ Aja’s bravura layouts, still connects us to the heart of the story, Clint and Kate’s relationship and the risks one is willing to take for the other.
Aja returned for issue six, which has Clint attempting to juggle his personal life, his responsibilities as a landlord, and his duties as an Avenger. This is easily writer Matt Fraction’s best issue so far – he fractures the narrative, juxtaposes absurdity with a serious threat, and ends the issue with a panel that’s almost a mission statement for the entire series.
In issue seven Fraction tells two stories, one each for Clint and Kate, about the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. He and editor Stephen Wacker assembled the story shortly after the storm hit, and tapped two fill-in artists – Steve Lieber and newcomer Jesse Hamm – to complete the issue. It’s sincere and heartfelt, in a way that almost no other mainstream comics even strive for. But this is Hawkeye, which hasn’t been like other mainstream comics since its first issue. …
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By Aaron Block, on January 17th, 2013  Author: Alex Raymond
2012 (anthologized), Titan Books
Filed Under: Graphic Novel, Sci-Fi, Other
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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The only newspaper comic strips I read regularly or cared about were funny strips, like Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts, or one-panel gag comics like The Far Side. I hated the soap opera and adventure strips. In fact, the only adventure strip I read consistently was The Amazing Spider-Man, and then only because it featured a character I already knew from the comics. And still I hated it.
Funny comic strips began and ended within the span of those three to five panels. They’re like a fractal storytelling – part of the whole, and yet the entire concept exists within a single unit. The dramatic strips offered only the briefest fragment of a story, and never enough information to usher new readers into the plot. I never felt guilty skipping Prince Valiant, Apartment 3-G, or any of the others. But Flash Gordon: The Tyrant of Mongo, the second volume of Titan Books’ reprints of the original strips, has me reconsidering my clean conscience.
The Tyrant of Mongo collects the color Sunday strips drawn by Alex Raymond and co-written by Raymond and Don Moore from 1937 to 1941, each fully restored by Peter Maresca. The restoration is stunning – the palette shifts effectively between the muted earth tones of the planet Mongo and Flash’s bright costumes, and Raymond’s careful line work and shading are preserved. A disclaimer on the edition page asks for the reader’s patience with variations in quality considering the condition of some of the original art, but any differences I noticed were minor, and never distracted from the reading. And as each strip takes up a full page, the panels blossom to reveal the fine detail and control of Raymond’s art.
Raymond earned his place in the cartoonists and illustrators pantheon, along with Milton Caniff, Hal Foster, and Will Eisner, with his work on Gordon (not to mention Jungle Jim and the detective strip, Rip Kirby) and his influence on Golden Age comic book artists, most notably Jack Kirby, is evident in every strip. And the intricately designed machinery, fantastic clothes and costumes, and use of dynamic close-ups and panel composition on display in the Flash Gordon strips continues to define the look of comic books. And while Raymond’s art could be considered stiff, particularly in contrast to that of Kirby or any number of contemporary cartoonists, it’s just as compelling. Consider that Raymond was producing strips of this caliber on a weekly basis for close to a decade, and the resulting quality is all the more impressive. …
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By Aaron Block, on December 3rd, 2012 Author: Scott Tracy Griffin
2012, Titan
Filed Under: Graphic Novels, Other
Find it on Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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In November Dark Horse Comics published a one-shot comic titled The Once and Future Tarzan, which details the adventures of Tarzan in the future when the ocean levels have risen. I haven’t read the entire thing, but when an eight-page excerpt appeared in Dark Horse Presents #8, which I reviewed in February, I noted it was “terrible.” With hindsight I’d say it’s probably unfair to judge an excerpt so harshly, but the pages felt stiff, and the concept odd. Is a sci-fi reimagining of sorts the only way for a classic character to be relevant again?
At the time I didn’t know that the publication of the full issue would coincide with the 100th anniversary of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, and the release of several Tarzan and Burroughs-related materials, including Scott Tracy Griffin’s Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration. Knowing that, the revival makes more sense, but it doesn’t answer my central question: is the Tarzan property so moribund that it has to be drastically altered to reach an audience? …
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By Aaron Block, on September 20th, 2012  Comics! Towards the end of my review of all 52 titles in last September’s big DC relaunch I noted it was unlikely I’d be able to read all 19 comics I really enjoyed on a monthly basis, and that making the tough decisions about what to leave behind was part of the fun of reading comics. So as the New DCU celebrates it’s first birthday (with a slate of “zero issues” that I absolutely will not be reviewing in their entirety), I thought it would be interesting to look back at how those decisions were made, and how my thinking about the New 52 has evolved. How much of my speculation was accurate? What did I get dead wrong? Will I ever forgive myself for buying a Rob Liefeld comic? Let’s find out.
I should start with an updated tally. Last year I finished the New 52 with 19 titles in the “pull” column. A year later, I’m still reading 12 of those titles on a regular basis, which is a lot more than I’d expected would survive the cut. Out of the other seven I enjoyed, one – the much-missed Blackhawks– was canceled. So what happened to the other 6? …
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By Aaron Block, on September 17th, 2012  Author: Tom King
2012, Touchstone
Filed under: Fantasy, Graphic Novel
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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Superhero fiction, as a genre, has flourished in nearly every storytelling medium except prose novels. Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 in the spring 1938, and by 1940 there was already a radio program featuring the character, with film serials, cartoons, and television shows to follow. A novel, The Adventures of Superman did appear in 1942, but it would be another 30 years before the next one, Elliott Maggin’s The Last Son of Krypton (though it’s worth noting that superhero progenitors like the Shadow and the Spider first appeared in serialized pulp novels).
There have been several prose novels featuring Marvel and DC characters in the years since, but few stories featuring original characters, particularly in comparison to the glut of movies, live-action TV shows, and cartoons that introduced their own characters and mythologies apart from those owned by the dominant comic book publishers. The reasons aren’t difficult to piece together – superheroes were born in a visual medium, and so bright colors and dynamic action are essential to the genre. Which isn’t to say that a writer couldn’t simply describe a character’s costume, or the burst of energy exploding from a gauntlet, but the impact is somewhat muted in contrast to seeing the same thing rendered by Jack Kirby, or Wally Wood, or Frank Quitely. Novels about established characters work because we know what Superman and Batman look like and aren’t called on to invent so much – the world is established, and these are just more stories to populate it.
Debut novelist Tom King addresses that mismatch in A Once Crowded Sky by having comics veteran Tom Fowler draw comic book pages that illustrate key moments in the characters’ pasts. The pages serve as the prologue and appear at the end of each section, the artifacts of a would-be comic book world. Fowler is in fine form – his clean, bold line work recalls Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez’s era-defining work for DC in the 70s. And the character designs are like little museums of genre history, rich with signifiers that anyone who’s ever enjoyed a superhero comic can decipher. In the hands of a lesser artist it could all feel like a distracting gimmick, but Fowler makes the art necessary to the experience of the novel, even crucial to the plot at times. …
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By Aaron Block, on June 14th, 2012  Author: Jeffrey Brown
2007-2011, Top Shelf Productions
Filed under: Graphic Novels
Find these at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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8 |
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In some critical circles, giving in to nostalgia ranks among the worst artistic crimes. It’s the easy, cynical solution to a creative dilemma – instead of creating new characters and situations and taking the risk that the audience might not follow you, just give them a steady diet of what they already know and collect the receipts. The audience is complicit in this too, for not demanding more from their entertainment.
Is there any reason Ed Falco’s The Family Corleone exists except to remind people that they once liked Mario Puzo’s novels (or, more likely, brilliant movies based on his novels)? A remake of Total Recall twenty years after the fact seems unnecessary, but what about The Amazing Spider-Man, a relaunch of a successful movie franchise that’s barely a decade old? Redeveloping already beloved stories and concepts turns the audience into a de facto marketing team, and can turn the excitement and anticipation of a new movie or book into more of an inevitability, or obligation.
But there are ways to do nostalgia properly, to use it as a creative tool rather than a crutch for flailing ideas. Cartoonist Jeffrey Brown’s Incredible Change-Bots Vols. 1 and 2 are an effective counterpoint to summer blockbuster nostalgia, specifically the Transformers film franchise. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 24th, 2012 [This beautiful but traumatic graphic novel is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Craig Thompson
2011, Knopf Doubleday
Filed under: Literary, Graphic Novel, Historical
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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One of Thompson’s big influences for Habibi was obviously One Thousand and One Nights (or The Arabian Nights), a collection of stories framed by the tale of the sultan’s wife, Scheherazade, who tells the sultan a riddle or story every night, so that he will be entertained enough not to execute her. Habibi has several such frame stories, and dozens of anecdotes and parables inside them.
The outermost frame story concerns the traumatic life of a girl named Dodola. At the age of nine, Dodola’s father sells her into wifehood, which is not unlike sexual slavery. Soon, thieves attack her husband’s home and kill him, and then sell her into literal slavery. At the slave market, Dodola finds an orphan baby on the verge of death. She adopts him, or steals him, and escapes. She names him Zam, which means water. The primary storyline of Habibi revolves around the love between Zam and Dodola.
I wasn’t quite expecting this widely-hyped graphic novel to be a harrowing story about sexual trauma. Dodola spends almost the entirety of the story either selling her sexuality or having it stolen from her. There’s a lot of rape, and a lot of underage sex.
There’s also a whole lot more going on, an impressive array of nested stories and themes, including meditations on Islam and Arabic, stories from the Qur’an and the Bible, riddles, magic squares, alchemical formulas, and more. Throughout it all, Thompson’s beautiful visual style (see the gallery at the bottom of this post for examples) is nothing less than captivating. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 7th, 2012 [This intimate, intricate graphic memoir is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Alison Bechdel
2012, Houghton Mifflin
Filed under: Memoir, Graphic Novel, Literary
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
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This impressive graphic memoir is a great book, but not in any way I think I’ve read before. The bulk of the novel consists of Bechdel’s therapy-related endeavors. She remembers episodes from her childhood in terms of various infant-development theories, she recounts her own therapy sessions as an adult, she interprets her dreams, she recounts conversations with her mother, and she quotes frequently from academic papers about psychoanalysis. In fact, the act of creating the book itself might have been therapeutic for Bechdel, because, as she says, “for both my mother and me, it’s by writing… by stepping back a bit from the real thing to look at it, that we are most present.”
Are You My Mother? is not funny, and the events it recounts are never earth-shattering—especially not compared to the central events of her first book, Fun Home, about her father’s closeted bisexuality and his suicide soon after Bechdel herself came out to her parents.
Instead of relying on these more traditional elements of story, Bechdel indulges her considerable talent for eliciting Nabokov-like patterns from the randomness of the world. She weaves a web of interconnected narrative tidbits—plucked from the entirety of her own life, as well as the lives of her parents, the memoirs and novels of Virginia Woolf, the work and life of Donald Winnicott, and many others—that echo and expand the smallest narrative hiccup until it ripples across the entirety of her existence. …
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