2007: We like short shorts

“Best of the year” lists have been mushrooming, but, understandably, most of them tend to emphasise longer, more substantial works: graphic novels, collected editions and ongoing series. Here, by contrast, are some of the shorter pieces of comics I have enjoyed through the year, none of them long enough to fill a single issue. (But you can, at least, click the pictures below to make them bigger.)

”You’re A Good Man, John Stuart Mill” by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey. Not all of van Lente and Dunlavey’s Action Philosophers (Evil Twin Comics) worked for me, either as entertaining comics or as potted accounts of the thought of major philosophers. But this spot-on Charles Schulz pastiche hit both targets perfectly.


Mark Waid’s super-hero origin stories from 52. As superhero comics sank into a congealed mass of stodgy continuity, Waid performed small miracles every week by boiling down the essence of each of DC’s main cast and presenting it in just two pages. It didn’t hurt that the series attracted artists like Brian Bolland and Adam Hughes, long lost to the more lucrative field of cover illustration, back to telling stories instead. Here are Waid and Hughes on Wonder Woman, from 52 issue 12.


My Own Genie by Jamie Smart. British children’s humour comics have long been refreshingly free of moral didacticism. If My Own Genie was a TV series, Lula, after wishing for something selfish and irresponsible, would have to put it right, while learning a Valuable Life Lesson. In The Dandy, she can just compound the mayhem, while having a good time. It helped that the once-staid publisher D C Thompson is willing to publish artwork as wild as that provided by Smart. This example is from The Dandy Summer Special 2007, as the strip was sadly missing from the regular title for most of the year.


”Maggie La Loca” by Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets Vol 2 Issue 20, Fantagraphics). If brother Gilbert is the Gene Kelly of comics, all flash and effort, Jaime is the Fred Astaire: he makes it all look so simple that it’s easy to underestimate the amount of talent, skill and craft he employs. Plus, I’ve got a soft spot for long-running fictions that age their characters in real time.


Tom Gauld’s letter column illustrations from The Guardian. Weird little flights of fancy that brighten my Saturdays. This one is from 1 December.


Eleanor Davis’s pieces in Mome (Fantagraphics) are often the highlights of this consistently interesting and well-produced anthology. Their unsettling charm makes me wonder if this is how the first generation of comfortable burghers felt when reading the earliest, unbowdlerised Grimm folk tales. These panels are from “Stick and String” in Mome issue 8.


Bryan Talbot’s 3-page History of British Comics, using his Alice in Sunderland style and published by The Guardian to accompany the BBC’s Comics Britannia TV series. I missed this when it came out. For the next few days, my every conversation began, “You didn’t happen to buy The Guardian on Saturday, did you?”


The Mini Marvels, by Chris Giarrusso, appear seemingly at random and often unheralded in various Marvel comics. Really, they should get the cover every time, because Giarrusso’s kiddy versions of the Marvel superheroes are a charming delight, matched only by Jeff Parker’s occasional short X-Men strips with Colleen Coover. This panel comes from “Hulk Date”, which appeared in Spider-Man Family issue 3.


Jack Black from Viz comic. Of all Viz’s parade of grotesques, nothing quite captures the true, vindictive, self-righteous, Daily Mail-reading face of modern Britain quite like Jack Black.


And a Merry Christmas to you, too

Reviews: Buffy, Hunter & Painter, Jack Staff, Viz

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, issue 1: “The Long Way Home”, part 1 by Joss Whedon (script), Georges Jeanty (pencils), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings and Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters), Scott Allie (editor); cover by Jo Chen. Dark Horse Comics, March 2007, 24 pages of strip, US$2.99

Yes, it’s Buffy by Whedon, so you already know if you like this recipe or not. This is setting up a 4-issue story, and has the pacing, incident and patter you’d expect. The only drawbacks – Great Muppety Odin aside – are Whedon’s use of homebrew-phonetic spelling for some of the Slayerettes (after some pondering, I decided to read Leah as Irish and the other girl as Danish, but who knows?) and the return of the “US military versus Buffy” trope. Because the Initiative didn’t give us quite enough hours of dullness back in Season 4, I suppose.



What I really want to draw attention to is Georges Jeanty’s artwork. His compositions are spot on: there were no occasions anywhere in reading this issue when I felt myself having consciously to decide where my eye should go next, either within a panel or across a page. He has managed to incorporate likenesses of the TV actors without making them either unrecognisable or obvious tracings of photographs. A good test is that the one new character who gets significant face-time, General Voll, looks neither more nor less real and fully-rendered than Buffy, Xander and Dawn. Jeanty has a solid command of anatomy, facial expression and perspective; and with inker Andy Owens he provides craggy lines and shadows that give bite to the finish. Top stuff.



Dark Horse lets the package down a little by printing a Jo Chen cover which depicts Buffy as at least six feet tall, and by putting four successive pages of adverts in the middle of an action sequence.


Hunter & Painter by Tom Gauld. Buenaventura Press 2007, 18 pages of strip, US$4.95

The eccentricities of this little booklet start with its format – 24cm wide by 10cm high, bound on the short side – but don’t end there. Gauld gives us the story of a caveman who has hunted every animal he knows, and a caveman who has painted every hunting scene he can think of. The tone is mundane, mixing the cheerful and the melancholy. The art is as lumpy and stylised as cave art itself. Here is Painter, trying something new:



But don’t worry, there’s a happy ending. A very engaging oddity.


Jack Staff volume 2 issue 13 by Paul Grist (writer/artist) and numerous colourists. Image Comics, February 2007, 27 pages of strip, US$3.50

This is an all-cliché issue: a parallel world where the good guys are bad guys, characters stepping outside the panel borders, a chimp, undead versions of British sit-com characters (what? that isn’t a cliché? Well, it should be!); but Grist handles proceedings with his customary grace, charm and good humour, and the chimp has his own theme song, so I’m happy enough.



Viz issue 163, with contributions by Alex Collier, Simon Ecob, John Fardell, Robin Halstead, Jason Hazeley, Alex Morris & Joel Morris, Paul Palmer, Cat Sullivan, Barney Farmer & Lee Healey, Christina Martin & James MacDougall, Will Freeman, Tony Coffey and Robert Doyle. Dennis Publishing, March 2007. 21 pages of strip (out of 52), £2.60.

Viz has now been around long enough to be easily overlooked – and, indeed, sales have fallen from its million-plus heyday to a circulation of about 150,000 or 250,000 depending on who you talk to. But Viz’s contents have a consistent reliability about them: it’s the same mix of crude sexual and scatological humour and sharply topical social and cultural references, served up in the style of Beano-esque comic strips and pastiche tabloid articles.



The highlight of this issue is “Jack Black and the Crack Continuum”, in which Jack and his dog Silver spend their summer holiday in the countryside, helping Aunt Meg defend her class-A drug dealership from an unwelcome intruder. Pedallos, a submarine, a bullet to the head and almond and sultana cake all feature in this parody of cozy boy’s adventure stories.