Tune In! Turn On! Exterminate!

For this week’s Doctor Who-related post, I had planned to bodge together a brief history of the Daleks in comics. But the fine fellows at Altered Vistas have already done that – and a much more thorough job than I could have managed, too. They also have a history of Cybermen in comics.

The greatest of all these comic strips was, without a doubt, The Daleks from TV21. The strip was written by David Whitaker, who was the first script editor for the Doctor Who TV series – a much more important post then than now. As a freelance, he wrote two of the best Dalek TV serials ever for Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, and a whole wodge of ancillary fiction, including the novelisations Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Crusaders, the stage play Curse of the Daleks and The Dalek Book.

In the comic strip, Whitaker and his artistic collaborators, Richard Jennings, Eric Eden and Ron Turner, traced the history of the Daleks from their original war with the Thals, which mutated them from small blue smurf-like humanoids into nasty green blobs in armour, through to their discovery of the Earth. Along the way, they delineated a richer and more detailed Dalek society than anything we ever saw on screen – and they did it in just a page a week.

As a boy, I preferred Richard Jennings’ artwork, because his Daleks were more faithful to the appearance of those on TV, and such things mattered a lot to me then. Now I am swept away by Ron Turner’s dynamic layouts, lush colours and smooth chromed finish.

Turner was a veteran comic strip and cover artist. There is a splendid gallery of his book and magazine covers here.

By the mid-1960s, Whitaker and Turner were both middle-aged, and must have been as bemused as any by developments in popular culture. But they did the sensible thing and built it into their comic strip. Obviously, Daleks couldn’t grow their hair, smoke dope or listen to rock music. But flower power? Now, that was a possibility.

One day, the Dalek Emperor is giving orders for a new construction project when the unthinkable happens – a Dalek questions him.



Unsure of which Dalek questioned the order, the Emperor has their “rest-compartments” searched (and I just love the idea that Daleks have bedrooms, don’t you?).



But the rogue Dalek has been gathering followers as well as flowers.



He tries to stage a coup.



But his support literally wilts away.



So there you have it: a culturally relevant political thriller, all done in four pages. And it carries a point that is relevant to the 2007 TV series of Doctor Who. At the end of last week’s episode, we saw the Daleks apparently abandon their age-old mission of racial domination. But as Whitaker and Turner remind us, it doesn’t matter what Daleks are trying to achieve, if they remain devious, murderous conformists. If the means are bad enough, the ends are irrelevant.


Panels
The Daleks by David Whitaker (story) and Ron Turner (art), TV Century 21, 1966, reprinted in The Dalek Chronicles, Marvel Comics UK, 1994

Moments of Pleasure

As you might expect (nay, demand) from an art-comics anthology, Mome issue 7, Spring 2007, is a mixed bag. But even if it sometimes seems that contributors are just sending in their failed art-school assignments (“today, class, I want you to transcribe your dreams in a faux-naïf style”), it is still the case that almost all of them are trying to make full use of comics as a medium; to do things that can’t be done as well, if at all, in other media. Here are three examples from strips I liked.

Eleanor Davis’s “Seven Sacks” builds mounting disquiet as a succession of even larger and more menacing creatures hire a ferryman to take them across a river. In this panel, Davis conveys both the looming presence of one of the creatures, its bulk threatening to unbalance the ferry, and the nervousness that is building in the ferryman.


There is no need, here in comics, to break away from the narrative to describe the creature and its effects, as would be necessary in prose. And, unlike in film or video, the picture can be focused on the elements the author wants to get across, with no distractions from movement or sound.

In this sequence from “Now Then”, Paul Hornschemeier makes use of the way that we see both the page and the individual elements of the page at the same time. In a play by Beckett or Pinter, long silences tend to be tense because the audience does not know when they will end and how. Here, though, the reader cannot help but be aware that the initial space will soon give way to ordered panels with clean colours, even if we have yet to learn the details of what those panels contain. The effect is a calm, clean sort of pause.


Hornschemeier also makes use of comics’ ability to present multiple strands of narration at once. Here he undercuts his somewhat pretentious caption boxes with humorous ballooned dialogue. Video and audio media can attempt this, as in the overlapping dialogue of Robert Altman films, but they risk disruption or confusion. In comics, the reader can hold several registers in mind without mixing them.

Lewis Trondheim uses a similar effect. The role that the comics form plays in his “At Loose Ends” is, to a large extent, that of sugaring the pill. Want to read a disquisition on ageing as illustrated by the unhappy lives of Franco-Belgian cartoonists? Probably not. But wait! It is told by a cute anthropomorhic parrot. And our interest is held by the introduction of a diversity of images, and even of styles of narration (at times, we get transcipts of e-mails, at others, the monologue becomes a conversation) in a way that would seem forced or distracting in another medium, but is entirely natural to comics.




Panels
“Seven Sacks” by Eleanor Davis

“Now Then” by Paul Hornschemeier

“At Loose Ends”, part 2, by Lewis Trondheim

All published in Mome issue 7, Spring 2007, Fantagraphics Books

Review: Wonder Woman – The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Wonder Woman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, 187 pages of strip, DC Comics, 2007, US$19.99
Features: “The Origin of Wonder Woman” by Paul Dini (writer) and Alex Ross (artist)
“Wonder Woman Comes to America” by William Moulton Marston (writer) and Harry G Peter (artist)
“Villainy Incorporated” by William Moulton Marston (writer) and Harry G Peter (artist)
“Top Secret” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Ross Andru (penciller) and Mike Esposito (inker)
“Wanted – Wonder Woman” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Ross Andru (penciller) and Mike Esposito (inker)
“Giganta the Gorilla Girl” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Ross Andru (penciller) and Mike Esposito (inker)
“Wonder Woman’s Rival” by Denny O’Neil (writer), Mike Sekowsky (penciller) and Dick Giordano (inker)
“Wish Upon a Star” by Elliot Maggin (writer), Curt Swan (penciller) and Phil Zupa (inker)
“Be Wonder Woman … and Die!” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Jose Delbo (penciller) and Dave Hunt (inker)
“Who Killed Myndi Mayer?” by George Pérez (writer and penciller) and Bob McLeod (inker)
“She’s a Wonder!” by Phil Jimenez (writer and penciller) and Andy Lanning (inker)
Cover by Alex Ross


DC’s post-Infinite Crisis relaunch of Wonder Woman has been faltering badly. In such circumstances, creators often try to reconnect with some earlier, definitive version of the character in question. Want to get the Fantastic Four right? Go and read some Stan and Jack. For Batman, the basic vision created by Bob Kane, Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson can be filtered through lenses provided by O’Neil and Adams, Englehart and Rogers or Miller and Mazzuchelli, but it remains consistent. For Superman, the version of choice at present is the one overseen by Mort Weisinger, rather than Siegel and Shuster’s original, but the principle is much the same.

So what do past versions of Wonder Woman have to offer the present? The latest volume in DC’s presumptuously titled Greatest Stories Ever Told series might hold some clues.

Under the deeply boring cover by Alex Ross (a particular disappointment after two decades of fine and often iconic covers by the likes of Brian Bolland and Adam Hughes) lies a rather erratic selection of stories. We get almost 50 pages by the character’s creators, William Moulton Marston and Harry G Peter, but there is way too much Robert Kanigher. True, he was a very long-serving writer, but the inclusion of four of his stories means that there is no room for anything by, for example, Roy Thomas and Gene Colan, who provided the last remotely successful version of Wonder Woman before the 1980s reboot. The O’Neil/Sekowsky story features a conventionally super-powered version of the character, rather than the depowered Emmapeeled Diana Prince who followed shortly after. There are only two stories from the last twenty years, with nothing by Greg Rucka, who seems to be the best-regarded writer the series has had in recent times.

The eccentricity goes beyond the choice of creators to the choice of specific stories. For example, we get two versions of how Wonder Woman came to adopt her Diana Prince identity, but the rest of her origin is treated only in a few panels by Dini and Ross culled from a much longer story.



The earliest stories, by Marston and Peter, are, of course, quite batty, with a fairy tale logic and Marston’s strange belief in improving society through bondage and “loving submission” to authority. It is hard to see how they could be used as the basis of a mainstream DC superhero comic book nowadays. But they are more purely entertaining than anything else in this book, and, stripped of their BDSM elements, might form the basis of an all-ages read of similar tone to Jeff Smith’s Shazam!, or alternatively something akin to “magical princess” manga.

Kanigher and Andru’s stories are at the dull end of typical silver age superhero fodder. They are also marked by an increased sexism. Marston had written Wonder Woman in the days when Katherine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell were playing witty independent women on screen and Rosie the Riveter was heading to the factories. Kanigher was working in the age of Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe and happy homemakers. Little wonder that he assumes that, if Diana were to marry Steve Trevor, she’d have to give up her super-hero career. After all, she’d be too busy cooking his meals and ironing his shirts.



Mind you, it is almost tempting to envisage Wonder Woman in a comics version of Bewitched, trying to keep Steve and the neighbours from learning that she has been using her powers surreptitiously to defeat those pesky super-villains. With Agnes Moorhead as Queen Hippolyta.

The O’Neil/Sekowsky story is worse. Steve Trevor is tried for murder. Here’s what happens in court.



From here on, Steve’s conviction for the crime is blamed on Wonder Woman: it’s her fault because she’s so emasculating and had the presumption to tell the truth under oath. This isn’t just the view of the prosecutor, it’s the view given throughout by Steve Trevor and even by Wonder Woman herself, so it was presumably Denny O’Neil’s opinion at the time too. Wonder Woman makes no criticism of Steve’s neanderthal behaviour, or even of the reason his alibi is so flimsy – at the time of the killing, with Wonder Woman off fighting criminals, he was busy chatting up the first available blonde, whose name he didn’t bother to get. Perhaps O’Neil thought that was Wonder Woman’s fault, too, for not being on 24-hour call for sex. Vile stuff, and definitely an approach to be avoided by modern creators.

The Maggin/Swan story is so forgettable that, even though I looked it up before starting this sentence, I can remember nothing about it now that I reach the end.

Wonder Woman was completely restarted after Crisis on Infinite Earths. The two post-reboot stories here are decent enough, and “Who Killed Myndi Mayer?” is quite a good little single-issue mystery story. But both Pérez and Jimenez make the mistake of trying to convince us that Wonder Woman is a paragon by having their narrators – Detective Indelicato and Lois Lane respectively – tell us so. The result is that their lead character is remote and uninvolving. Virtue need not be boring, but we need to understand and internalise the difficult decisions and choices that a virtuous character has to take. That is missing here. But, to be fair, with modern soap-operatic superhero comics it is hard to find stand-alone stories, so these two might not be representative.



All in all, this book suggests the rather bleak conclusion that there are no prior versions of Wonder Woman that could provide a solid grounding for a new one. Alternatively, before Gail Simone takes over Wonder Woman and Adam Hughes launches All-Star Wonder Woman, they might need to take inspiration from a completely different set of stories from those presented here.


Panels
Wonder Woman “Villainy Incorporated” by William Moulton Marston (writer) and Harry G Peter (artist), Wonder Woman issue 28, March/April 1948
Wonder Woman “Top Secret” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Ross Andru (penciller) and Mike Esposito (inker), Wonder Woman issue 99, July 1958
Wonder Woman “Wonder Woman’s Rival” by Denny O’Neil (writer), Mike Sekowsky (penciller) and Dick Giordano (inker), Wonder Woman issue 178, September/October 1968
Wonder Woman “She’s a Wonder!” by Phil Jimenez (writer and penciller) and Andy Lanning (inker), Wonder Woman (second series) issue 170, July 2001


All reprinted in the volume under review

Who Does Mary Love?

Sleestak wants to know.



Zirk likes what he likes, and it isn’t Mary. Still, I’m sure they’ll thrash it out.

Review: The Salon

The Salon by Nick Bertozzi, 179 pages of strip, St Martin’s Griffin, 2007, US$19.95

There was quite a fad, a few years ago, for detective stories starring historical figures. People as diverse as Edward VII and Leonardo da Vinci were made to don their metaphorical deerstalkers. Some brave souls even pressed the likes of Jane Austen and Samuel Johnson into detective service, requiring the writers to tell first-person whodunnits in the ventriloquised voices of some of the finest and subtlest of English prose stylists. It was not a pretty sight.

Nick Bertozzi’s The Salon is a supernatural murder story involving the members of Gertrude Stein’s salon in 1907 Paris: her brother Leo, her lover Alice B Toklas, the poet and pornographer Guillaume Apollinaire, the composer Erik Satie and the painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Thankfully, the only attempt Bertozzi makes to mimic any of these artists is on the cover. Although the sinuous bulk of his figure work has traces of Gauguin, whose paintings feature heavily in the plot, it resembles Paul Pope rather more, so that is probably just coincidence.

The storytelling, though it deals with fantastic events, is linear and straightforwardly chronological, using a rigid four-panel grid on landscape-format pages. The artwork supports and supplements the story. For example, one of the motors of the plot is Leo Stein’s hatred for Alice B Toklas. To judge by her words and actions, this is under-motivated. But just look at the creepy face and body language Bertozzi gives her (she's the blonde woman, right of centre in this panel).


Would you want to share a house with those eyes?

The plot begins with the murders of several modernist painters, all apparently decapitated by a blue-skinned woman. This is linked to the use by the Steins’ circle of a special brand of absinthe that allows them to enter paintings – and, it later transpires, to allow the images in paintings to acquire real existence.



While these macabre events unfold, Braque and Picasso invent cubism. This is handled a little clumsily, in the manner of a Hollywood bio-pic, with “Eureka!” moments inspired by a picture of Braque in front of a mirror, or by a drawing crumpled up without thinking.



As in real life, according to most accounts, it is Braque who does all the thinking and most of the hard mental work, and Picasso whose grasp is instinctual and opportunistic.



Indeed, the whole story can be read as discussing the roots of creativity: native talent, the artificial inspiration of drugs, and rationality. At the climax of the story, the absinthe threatens to overwhelm everything, but is finally trumped by Picasso’s flamboyant, instinctive skill. That his efforts would have been impossible without the intellectual underpinnings provided by Braque is completely overlooked by most of the characters, but not by the reader. Indeed, it is impossible not to put down the book feeling a little sorry for Braque.

There are lots of incidental pleasures to reading The Salon. I liked the sequence in which Apollinaire assesses the pioneering photography of motion brought to him by Eadweard Muybridge for its value as pornography – in reality, it would be a significant source of inspiration to the cubists, because it showed a subject simultaneously at multiple points in time - rather like a comic strip does. And, indeed, Bertozzi shows us Picasso enthusing over the comics.



So perhaps the comic strip form of this book is not so far from the modernist painters’ intent after all, without requiring slavish imitation of technique.

Overall, this a cracking adventure story, with plenty to engage the brain too.

Sequential George

Before it became economical to distribute printed comic strips in the eighteenth, and more especially nineteenth, centuries, the best way to get a lot of people to read stories told in sequences of pictures was to put them on display in a public place.

Many of those public places were owned by the Church, and in Western Europe the Catholic Church had a rich tradition of using, to borrow Will Eisner’s preferred expression, “sequential art” to tell stories from the Bible and the lives of the Saints.

Today is the Saint’s day of England’s favourite Anatolian (or Libyan, or whatever), St George. There are lots of tellings of St George’s story in pictures, and some of them are collected in Samantha Riches’s book St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth.

Over the centuries, the St George legend accumulated a number of apparently incompatible elements, requiring him, in some versions, to be killed twice. In these first three panels (of six) from the La Selle Retable, an English alabaster altarpiece now to be found in Normandy, St George is brought back to life by the Virgin Mary after his first death, armed and sent off to fight the dragon.




In the subsequent three panels, George is put on trial by the Emperor Dacian for refusing to worship the old Roman gods, tortured, and executed. It was this martyrdom, rather than his wyrm-slaying heroism, that earned George his sainthood. Many sequential artists seem to have dwelled lovingly on the torture scenes, as in the fifteenth-century stained glass windows of St George’s Church, Stamford, Lincolnshire, recorded here in the sketches made by William Sedgwick around 1641.








The windows themselves no longer exist, for if the artists worked with the glee of an Al Feldstein or Graham Ingels, then the seventeenth century equivalents of Dr Wertham were a lot more thorough and successful than he ever was.


Pictures
from Samantha Riches St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth, Sutton Publishing, 2000

Groin Strain

Alex Ross’s cover for an upcoming issue of Justice Society of America has caused a bit of a kerfuffle because of the bulge in Citizen Steel’s pants. As Dick Hyacinth says, there have been “several arguments that Ross painted [Citizen] Steel with a bulge only because his model had one.”

Piffle. Let’s start with another Ross painting, done for the animator JJ Sedelmaier, and reproduced in Comic Book Artist.



I trust that no-one doubts that that composition was designed to draw attention to the foreground figure’s package. Ross has placed us, as we look at the picture, below groin level, looking up, so that bulge is almost literally “in your face”. Now let’s look at the Citizen Steel painting.



The whole composition seems designed to draw the eye down to Steel’s dick. The raised arms make his torso a triangle pointing down to it. This is reinforced by the way the musculature has been painted, emphasising diagonals converging on the groin, by the folds in Steel’s strained pants, and by the “Y”-shaped design on the costume, which acts as a pointer. None of that is accidental, surely.

So what is Ross up to? Perhaps he’s just having a joke. Perhaps it’s a plot point, and the Citizen’s steely erection will save the day from Star Sapphire’s radioactive vagina. Perhaps it’s tit-for-tat (as it were) for all those cheesecake covers of DC superheroines – so common that DC has just put out a 200-page hardcover book of them. Perhaps, after 70 years of homoerotic superhero comics featuring scantily dressed musclemen wrestling with each other, Ross feels that it is time to move one stage closer to the money shot.

I wonder how it will sell?


Digression
I assume that, for American readers, the name Citizen Steel brings to mind Citizen Kane or Citizen Robespierre or some such.

But I’m a middle-aged Englishman, so I just think of Citizen Smith. Freedom for Tooting! (Or wherever Steel hails from.)


Pictures
Ambiguously Gay Duo Comics, cover by Alex Ross, JJ Sedelmaier Productions, 2003, reprinted in Comic Book Artist volume 2 issue 2, October 2003

Justice Society of America issue 7, solicitation image by Alex Ross, DC Comics, 2007

The Spirit Goes Manga

Well, not quite. But look at the difference between these two pictures.

The first is the cover image that DC Comics used to solicit orders for The Spirit issue 5.



The second is the cover on the issue as it actually appeared this week.



So why the change? I’ve got no inside information, but I’d guess something like this: Darwyn Cooke probably finished the first version of the cover before he completed the interior art of the comic. The story revolves around Mr Carrion marketing ex-Russian army rations to children under the “Spirit Pork & Beans” brand. At some point, Cooke must have realised that, if it was supposed to appeal to children, then the label shouldn’t look like traditional American cartooning and lettering, but like that manga and anime stuff the kids love. Note, too, that the second version of the cover makes more use of non-black outlines than the first: this is a characteristic of a lot of recent children’s animation.

It’s a shame, in a way. The first cover not only showed you that there was a “Spirit Pork & Beans” product, but also told you the Spirit’s reaction to it, in a humourous way. The revised version is still an entertaining and striking cover, but there are fewer layers to it.

I wonder if anyone bought this issue expecting the story to be drawn in a manga style, and if so, what their reactions were.

The Bellamy of the Daleks

The Daleks are back again on Doctor Who on Saturday. Their appearances are now so frequent that they are in danger of overexposure.

They hadn’t been on screen for the best part of six years when “Day of the Daleks” aired in 1972. The Radio Times marked the event by putting this Frank Bellamy drawing on the front cover. It is, perhaps, my favourite piece of Doctor Who artwork ever.


(In case you're wondering, the band around the Doctor’s head is part of the mind probe the Daleks used to establish that this Doctor was the same person as the others they had met.)

I wasn’t the only one to be impressed. A year later, Target Books acquired the rights to reprint three Doctor Who novelisations written in the 1960s, and they chose to copy Bellamy’s design for their covers. They couldn’t get Bellamy himself to do the work, so they hired the younger Greek artist, Christos Achilleos, to impersonate him. The reprints were a hit, and Achilleos went on to draw a couple of dozen more covers in the same style, as Target started commissioning new novelisations. But here is that first cover.



Frank Bellamy wasn’t Achilleos’s only inspiration. He must have lacked photo-reference, because those two Daleks are swiped from Ron Turner’s 1966 artwork for The Daleks comic strip in TV Century 21.



The Radio Times commissioned a good deal of Doctor Who art from Frank Bellamy in the 1970s. The listing for each Saturday’s episode was accompanied by a small, postage-stamp sized, illustration, like these from the six-part “Planet of the Daleks”.



The most striking of Radio Times’s commissions from Bellamy was a four-page comic strip adaptation of the opening of part 1 of “Colony in Space”. The page layouts were startling even by Bellamy’s standards.



After Jon Pertwee left the part, Radio Times cooled on Doctor Who, and the show was only given the cover once in the last fifteen years of its original run. So this terrific illustration for “Terror of the Zygons” appeared on an inside page.



By the time of the 1996 TV movie with Paul McGann, attitudes had changed again. Not only did it make the cover, but Radio Times commissioned a half-page comic strip, written by Gary Russell and drawn by Lee Sullivan, which ran for the best part of a year. The strips can be found at the Doctor Who Cuttings Archive.

Today, Doctor Who can count on being on the RT cover several times each series. But it’s all photographs nowadays, inside and out.


Pictures and Panels:
Doctor Who illustrations by Frank Bellamy, Radio Times, 1971-1975, reprinted in Timeview: The Complete Doctor Who Illustrations of Frank Bellamy, Who Dares Publishing, 1985

Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks by David Whitaker, 1964, cover illustration by Christos Achilleos, Target Books edition, 1973

The Daleks by David Whitaker (script) and Ron Turner (art), TV Century 21, 1966, reprinted in The Dalek Chronicles, Marvel Comics UK, 1994

Review: Stagger Lee

Stagger Lee, written by Derek McCulloch, drawn by Shepherd Hendrix, lettering by Richard Starkings & Comicraft’s Jimmy Betancourt, Image Comics, 2006, 215 pages of strip, US$17.99

Stagger Lee was published last year, so this is a little late for a review. But I wasn’t blogging then, and this is a book worthy of notice.

You have probably heard one of the many songs. As Lloyd Price roared in his 1959 hit, “Stagger Lee shot Billy.” It was, as most commonly described, an argument over a hat. McCulloch and Hendrix examine the roots of the story, discuss how it has developed, and weave their own historical fiction around Stag’s trial for murder.



The fictional narrative makes up the largest part of the book. It identifies Stagger Lee as one Lee Shelton and his victim as Billy Lyons, killed in 1895. It begins with the shooting, and then examines Lee’s arrest and trial chiefly through the eyes of a lawyer’s clerk who works for his defence, and of a cathouse pianist who begins to compose one of the first Stagger Lee songs. Both men are competing for the affections of the same woman, who is trying to escape from the underworld that Lee represents.

McCulloch places this story squarely in the middle of the party and racial politics of St Louis in the 1890s. Lee and Billy were both black, and such a murder would normally have been neglected by the police. But Billy’s family had powerful Republican allies, while Lee was a Democrat activist. Political machinations ensured that Lee was tried, but also that he got a first class defence.

Interspersed with this main narrative are a number of other fictional tales set before the shooting, which flesh out the backstory and give more insights into the black underworld of the time and its relation to white authority.



Hendrix draws these narrative sections of the book in a solid, sober, clear-outlined style that lends them the nearest comics can manage to documentary neutrality. This gives the account an added degree of authority. I have written elsewhere about my qualms over presenting historical reconstruction this way. In the case of Stagger Lee, however, McCulloch concludes the book with a text appendix which explains what he has changed from the historical record, what he has made up, and even what he got wrong but still incorporated into the story.

The appendix effectively turns the narrative sections of the book into a special, extended, version of the multi-faceted variations of the Stagger Lee story that are examined in the remaining comic-strip chapters of the book (and it might perhaps have been better if McCulloch and Hendrix had examined their own story in the same way, rather than switching to prose). These are essays on how the tale of Stagger Lee developed in folklore and popular song, paying attention, for example, to the different motivations given to Stag and Billy, including the introduction of pity (or otherwise) for Billy’s family; to the fates Stag meets or escapes at the hands of the hangman or the devil; and to the ways in which the story changed when sung by or to black or white performers and audiences.

In these discursive chapters, which are intercut with the narrative, McCulloch’s authorial voice, hidden elsewhere, is upfront and captioned. Hendrix’s artwork here is more varied, with looser and more playful styles of drawing and composition. A nice touch to tie it all together is that, throughout their many transformations, Lee and Billy are each shown wearing clothes with the same distinctive patterns, so that they can be easily recognised.



Taken as a whole, the book is engrossing, well-balanced and satisfying. The only slight drawback of this comic book is that there is no way of hearing the songs as they are discussed. But McCulloch thoughtfully appends a play list, so you can always go and hit iTunes.

One last thought. In his essay on Stagger Lee in his book Mystery Train, which drew upon some of the same academic sources as McCulloch and Hendrix, the American pop culture pundit Greil Marcus proposed a completely different (if less convincing) candidate for the original of Stagger Lee – a white man who served in the American Civil War. Room for a sequel?

Addendum (20 minutes later) I've just seen on The Beat that Stagger Lee has been nominated for an Eisner award for "Best reality-based work".

To the Bat-Phone!

Annoyed by shrill, insistent ring-tones? Exasperated by incessant blether on the train? Calm yourself. Remember the main advantage of mobile phones …



… you can now be sure that, while you were out, Batman has not had to smash through your window to make an urgent call.


Panels from:
Batman “How Many Ways Can a Robin Die?” by Frank Robbins (writer), Irv Novick and Dick Dillin (pencillers) and Dick Giordano (inker), Batman issue 246, December 1972, reprinted in Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told Volume 2, DC Comics, 2007

Review: Empowered

Empowered Volume 1 by Adam Warren, Dark Horse Books, 2007, 239 pages of strip, US$14.95

In which Adam Warren attempts to have his cheesecake and eat it too.

“Empowered” is the heavily-handedly ironic name of a superheroine, whose powers derive from a skin-tight suit. If she wears anything over it, it doesn’t work. If she wears anything under it, her super hero colleagues mock her visible panty-line. The suit shreds easily, and shrinks as she draws on its power. As it gets smaller, her powers decrease, leaving her helpless. Most of the villains she fights seem to carry S&M bondage gear round with them, so she spends much of her time three-quarters naked, tied up and ball-gagged.

Put like that, it sounds like a mere stroke book for superhero fans. But Warren also makes the book a commentary about the pressures on women to conform to impossible images, and about their undervaluation by society.

His main tactic is to make us empathise with, and feel sorry for Empowered. She is desperately insecure and needy. She is convinced that she’s fat. Her few achievements are constantly overlooked and belittled by the other superheroes. On the title pages for each chapter, she directly addresses the reader, trying to capture his sympathies.



Warren cleverly builds on this by depicting himself as a failure with low self-confidence too. He doesn’t like drawing, but can’t get work just as a writer. He had to accept commissions to draw bondage comics for private collectors, from which he developed this book. The chapters are too short. Manga fans think his work is too superheroic. Super hero fans think his work is too manga-esque. And how do we learn of his self-deprecation? Empowered tells us, neatly fusing character and creator.

The artwork also helps to add some distance. Warren is a stylised cartoonist, and he has chosen to emphasise the artificiality of his comic strip by having it reproduced directly from his pencils. A more highly rendered finish, or a more realistic style of drawing, would tip the balance back towards pornography.

There is a little story progression here, as Empowered gains a boyfriend, a drinking buddy, and custody of a caged demonlord. There is also some foreshadowing of the appearance of a major villain is subsequent volumes. But mostly the book builds up a composite picture of Empowered and her social circle through a series of short vignettes. Warren’s storytelling – both writing and page layout – is a lot more straightforward than in his later Dirty Pair stories. In a way, Warren has taken the structure of something like Ghost World and applied it to an S&M superhero comic.

So this is a technically impressive piece of work. I can’t quite shake the feeling that I may just be giving myself an intellectualised excuse to look at dirty pictures. But, hey, is that necessarily a bad thing?