Review: Glister, Clubbing

Glister issue 1, by Andi Watson, 64 pages of strip, Image Comics, August 2007, US$5.99
Features:
“Glister and the Haunted Teapot”
Skeleton Key “Rock, Scissors, Paper”

A young girl called Glister Butterworth acquires a teapot haunted by the ghost of Philip Bulwark-Stratton, a Victorian novelist, who keeps badgering her to transcribe his final, unfinished novel.

This is a delightful, if slight, tale for children, with much humour arising from Bulwark-Stratton’s convoluted melodrama, and from Glister’s attempts to rid herself of the teapot and ghost which are monopolising her time. The lead character is sparky, and the setting is full of little details that give the imagined world texture, and which can be explored later in the series. Adults can enjoy the craftsmanship and the parallels with the real Edward Bulwer-Lytton (though they might wonder what the point is of the Thomas Pynchon reference, "lot 49" - unless the mysterious postal delivery of the teapot is significant).


Watson draws his own story in a style pitched somewhere between Quentin Blake and Fred Banbery’s illustrations to Paddington Bear, producing the very appropriate feel of a classic children’s book.


The back-up is an addition to Watson’s series about a dimension-hopping girl and her friend, a Japanese fox spirit, in a story about an unusual type of vampire. The draughtsmanship is in a style similar to that on the lead feature, but the panel compositions are, appropriately enough, much more manga-influenced.

The whole thing is a neat little package in a slim, case-bound B-format paperback. I only hope that, as a periodical publication by Image Comics, its distribution is not confined to comics shops, but that copies make their way into regular bookshops, where children might actually find them.


Clubbing, written by Andi Watson, illustrated by Josh Howard, lettering by Travis Lanham, 142 pages of strip, Minx/DC Comics, 2007, US$9.99

Watson’s other recent publication, in collaboration with artist Josh Howard, is less successful.

Lottie Brook, a rich teenage goth, is sent to stay with her grandparents in the country after being caught trying to sneak underage into a nightclub. There she stumbles across a murder on the golf course.

Watson’s story is a slightly uncertain mix of genres – culture-clash comedy, teen romance and whodunnit, with another genre thrown into the mix at the twist ending. None of these aspects is really developed enough to be satisfactory.

Howard’s art is a major let down. I enjoyed his work on Dead @ 17, but this script demands greater subtlety, and Howard does not rise to the challenge: his characters are inexpressive and his layouts rather dull. The only thing that seems to have engaged his interest is Lottie’s goth wardrobe. Although the story is set in one of the most distinctive landscapes in Britain, the Lake District, Watson and Howard just give us generic countryside – this could be happening in Surrey or upstate New York. When they take us to a town, the results are disastrous.


This might be a failed attempt at a faux-naïf style, but after checking, I notice that Howard avoided any challenging perspective drawing in Dead @ 17, so it may be genuinely naïf. Either way, it is ugly stuff, and a stark contrast to the character with which Watson infuses buildings in his own artwork.

Something of a misfire on all levels, then. Oddly, Clubbing was the first of the Minx line of books to have a sequel announced, presumably following Lottie on the trip to Tokyo announced on the last page here. I hope that Watson and Howard find themselves more in sympathy with the world’s biggest city than they did with an English National Park.

So It Goes

Rest in peace, Tony Wilson. The world of music would have been much poorer without you.

Panels
Phonogram: Rue Britannia by Kieron Gillen (story) and Jamie McKelvie (art and lettering), Image Comics, 2007

Johnny-Come-Lately at the Fights

While I’ve been using my Friday night posts to witter on about Doctor Who, all the cool kids have been round at Bahlactus’s place, watching the fights.

So, let’s see. We need intense violence, devastating hand-to-hand-combat, that sort of thing.

I know: gladiators! That’s just the ticket.



Yes, this is what we want.




Er…


Hold on, that can’t be right.






Oh, dear, I don’t think I’ve got the hang of this.


Well, maybe next time.


Panels
Asterix the Gladiator, text by René Goscinny, drawings by Albert Uderzo, 1964, translated by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge, Brockhampton Press, 1969

Panel Games

What Do Elvis and Judge Dredd Have In Common?

The Judge Dredd story in this week’s 2000AD tells of a boy called Klein, rescued from his violent and abusive father by Judge Dredd, who grows up to be a violent and abusive Judge. Mostly, the story is told through fairly blatant captions (“He’d never realised how much he looked like his father”), but occasionally the art is allowed to make its own, more subtle, points. Here, Judge Klein tries out his hero’s trademark sneering lip, suggesting that it is not just his father who is the malign influence on his life.


Panel: Judge Dredd “Cycle of Violence” by Robbie Morrison (script), Cliff Robinson (art), Chris Blythe (colours) and Annie Parkhouse (letters), 2000AD prog 1549, Rebellion, 8 August 2007


Five-a-side What, Exactly?

Here’s a passage from this month’s Batman.


Now, five-a-side soccer is a common enough game, but I’ve never heard of five-a-side rugger. Did the Scottish writer Grant Morrison type that the English character the Knight was holding a football, meaning the round thing, only to be misinterpreted by American artist JH Williams III? Or is this a clue that the Knight may not be all he seems (one of several in the issue, such as Batman’s statement that his presence “seems so unlike me”, or the way that Williams draws Wingman’s hands with the same angular fingers he uses for the Saul Bass-style double-page outline of the hand of mystery villain the Black Glove)?

Panel: Batman issue 667, “The Island of Mister Mayhew” by Grant Morrison (writer), JH Williams III (artist), Dave Stewart (colourist), Ken Lopez (letterer), Peter Tomasi and Mike Marts (editors), DC Comics, August 2007

Light, Shade and Supergirl

Renato Guedes has been rightly praised for his artwork on the latest issue of Supergirl, chiefly for his convincing and non-exploitative depiction of its teenage heroine. And it is, indeed, refreshing to find an artist who can make figurative realism work on the pages of a comic book, achieving a readable fluidity and avoiding the lifelessness that often undermines photo- or model-referenced comic art.


What I find most interesting, though, is Guedes’s use of colour. Several comic book artists have, like Guedes, adopted a style of drawing that uses fine, unmodulated, clear linework with little chiaroscuro, in the realisation that computer colour now provides shading and depth in a way that the old, flat, ben-day dotted colours of newsprint comics could not. Scott Kolins and Pete Woods are good cases. But they generally work with colourists who provide fully modelled, mimetic colouring of the sort seen, for example, in the panels from 52 that I posted yesterday.

Guedes, on the other hand, does his own colouring, though he does not ink his own pencils. His technique is quite different from the norm. Generally speaking, he deploys each colour in two sharply contrasted tones, one light and one dark, rather than providing continuous modelling. The effect is as if everything was seen by bright sunlight, casting sharp shadows – or perhaps, since the darker tones often dominate, bright sunlight seen through sunglasses.


This technique does not always show Guedes’s drawing off to its best effect. In heavily shadowed panels, the fine linework can be swamped and hidden. But it is very distinctive, and, given his choice of which parts of the art process to undertake himself, it is presumably an important part of the way Guedes wants the pages to look.


I’m not sure what Guedes’s intentions are. Perhaps he feels that fully-modelled colour can deaden the image. Perhaps he just sees light that way. Whatever, I’ll be interested to see what he does with future issues.


Panels
Supergirl issue 20, “No Good Deed …”, written by Tony Bedard, pencilled and coloured by Renato Guedes, inked by Jose Wilson Megalhaes, lettered by Bob Leigh, edited by Matt Idelson, DC Comics, October 2007

Political Cartooning

Elliot S! Maggin, writer of many comic books, including the much-anthologised “Must There Be A Superman?”, is standing for Congress. Which prompts two questions – not about his platform, of course, because who pays any attention to that in American politics?* – but …

1) Will he include the “S!” (for “Shazam!”) on the ballot form? and

2) Will he cite as relevant experience his time running Oliver Queen’s campaign for mayor of Star City?





Panels
52 issue 24 “Just Imagine”, written by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka and Mark Waid, art breakdowns by Keith Giffen, pencils by Phil Jimenez, inks by Andy Lanning, colours by David Baron, lettering by Pat Brosseau, edited by Stephen Wacker, DC Comics, 2006, reprinted in 52 Volume 2, DC Comics, 2007

* Sorry. As an outsider, I really shouldn't make such remarks, but I couldn't resist.

Garth Returns?

This advert appears in Comics International 203, which has just gone on sale. (Click to enlarge.)


And that’s all I know at the moment. There doesn’t seem to be anything about it on the web-site of Hayena Studios, the company listed in the legal blurb up the side of the ad, and my limited Google-fu turns up no information from searches covering them or artist Huw-J.

For those who aren’t familiar with Garth, it was an adventure comic strip that ran for over 50 years in the Daily Mirror. The set-up was fairly perfunctory – Garth was a huge, heroic muscle-man who turned up, with little or no explanation, in all sorts of different times and places. Stories would veer from a western to an outer-space adventure to a contemporary horror story without taking a breath.

Peter O’Donnell, who created Modesty Blaise, wrote Garth for a while, but it is probably best remembered for the five-year run in the early 1970s when it was drawn by Frank Bellamy, who squeezed a remarkable amount of energy and dynamism into a single tier daily strip.

The International Catalogue of Superheroes has an entry on Garth here.

Update, 8 August See John Freeman's contribution to the comments section below for more information about Garth's planned return to the Daily Mirror (sort of).

Review: The Dandy

The Dandy issue 3426, 2 August – 15 August 2007, DC Thomson, 16 pages of comics out of 36, £1.99
Features: Jak & Todd; Captain Hookless, The Nice Pirate; Ollie Fliptrik; Red Hot Chilli Dogs, Snip 'n' Snap; Smasher, The Boy Blunder; Blubba and the Bear; Bananaman; Agent Dog 2-Zero; Cuddles & Dimples, The Terrible Toddlers; Desperate Dan

So this is the big relaunch: frequency halved, comics content halved, price up a third. It’s simplest to carry on calling this The Dandy, as the indicia do, though the masthead may possibly now read The Dandy Xtreme (or it could say “The Dandy - Xtreme New Look!”, it’s too muddled to be sure). The comics material is now a 16-page pullout section in the middle, called The Dandy Comix and confusingly labelled “No. 1”, though the publication as a whole retains the old numbering.

The appropriation of the old underground spelling of Comix doesn’t signal any great change in the comic strip content, which is much the same in style as recent issues of the old comic. The most noticeable difference is the absence of the revamped version of Desperate Dan, itself a much-ballyhooed element of the last relaunch. Instead, there is a reprint of a vintage episode by Dudley Watkins, whose premise – a meat shortage – is probably incomprehensible to young readers, and whose art style seems antithetical to the simplification, exaggeration and sugared-up hyperactivity of the rest of the comic, which reach a peak with the incoherent narrative and panel sequences of Agent Dog 2-Zero.


Though, having said that, the whole thing seems oddly old fashioned. Words like “Xtreme”, phrases like “Eat my goal!”, Ollie Fliptrik and his skateboard vocabulary (“totally tubular”) are surely dated by now. Where are the Wiis and PS3s? The mobile phones? The annoying trainers with wheels built in? (Smasher has in-line roller blades. How passé!) If The Dandy had to be revamped because kids are "too busy gaming, surfing the net or watching TV, movies and DVDs" to find time to read a comic, why are none of the characters featured in these strips doing any of these things? Surely, this is the world of 1993, not 2007?

Some of the plots and jokes are even older, of course. Sadly, so is the sexual stereotyping. Here are the Mum and Dad from Jak & Todd, for example.



Since neither Beryl the Peril nor Class Act appear this issue, none of the strips has a girl as a protagonist (unless either Cuddles or Dimples is a girl - does anyone know?).

I wasn’t going to comment on the magazine section, but one thing in it did disgust me. No, not the emphasis on farts and shit, but a section called “Kangaroo Court”. This features a reader’s accusation that his sister has BO – complete with her name, the county where she lives and her photograph. How shameful and irresponsible of the editors to publicly humiliate a child like that.

Update, 7 August Lew Stringer has produced a handy round up of reactions to the relaunch (as well as his own, considered thoughts). I've expanded this review a bit since joining in the discussion in the comments section of Lew's blog.

Martin Rowson on the State of Comics

While looking through old issues of Crisis to find The New Adventures of Hitler, I came across these two cartoons by Martin Rowson, editorial cartoonist for The Guardian, and comics adaptor of The Waste Land and Tristram Shandy. (Click to enlarge, as usual.)



Although those date from 1991, sixteen years ago, there’s not much that would need changing if they were to be published today.

Except, of course, that there’s no equivalent of Crisis to publish them any more.


Pictures
Cartoons by Martin Rowson to illustrate his article “Comics! Yeah! Comiiiics! Hey! Wow!” in Crisis issue 55, Fleetway Publications, February 1991

Reviews: Inanna’s Tears, Metal Men

Inanna’s Tears issue 1, “Tamer of the Me”, written by Rob Vollmar, illustrated by mpMann, Archaia Studios Press, August 2007, 27 pages of strip, US$3.95

Anyone producing fiction about the past faces the question of whether to emphasise the similarities with or differences from the reader’s present. Vollmar and mpMann’s comic is about the most remote era still accessible to us in history: the age of the city-states of Sumer in what is now Iraq, four to five thousand years ago.

They tackle that basic question by emphasising the continuity of emotion, while making the context alien. Thus, the story concerns the replacement of the En, the priest-king ritually married to the city’s titulary goddess, Inanna: alien enough. But it is also a story of a form of romantic triangle, of the tension between love and duty, and of political machinations. Language is formal, theatrical and archaic, but does not fall into Stan Lee pastiche. The art depicts convincing reconstructions of ancient styles, in a washed-out Mesopotamian light of earthy tones (only the apparent villain of the piece, Belipotash, wears anything as bright as brick red), but it employs a loose brush line and a cartoonist’s range of expression. Only the lettering and word balloons jar – too regular and computer-generated. But that is a very minor point.


This issue is essentially about establishing the situations and conflicts that will drive the remaining four issues. It ends with a dramatic twist. Unfortunately, the back cover blurb gives this away completely. If it’s not too late, don’t read the back first.


Metal Men issue 1, Chapter 1 “Et in Arcanium Ergo”, Chapter 2 “Theories of Realitivity”, Chapter Three “To Serve With Love”, by Duncan Rouleau (writer and artist), based on ideas by Grant Morrison, with Moose Baumann (colourist), Pat Brosseau (letterer) and Eddie Berganza (editor), DC Comics, October 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

By rights, I should have enjoyed this comic a lot more than I did. It fully embraces the preposterous silliness of the super-hero genre, juggles alchemy and weird science, and is delivered by a cartoonist in full command of his craft as a draughtsman. There is no need to have read any DC Comics before to understand what is going on, and the main tone being attempted is humorous, rather than portentous or shocking.

Unfortunately, the key word there is “attempted”, because this all falls a little flat. Look at the puns in the chapter titles – the meaningless Latin and the unpronounceable “realitivity”; try to make the repeated phrase “Hypo-Hyper Flux” trip off your tongue, rather than stumble. None of it quite works. Whacked-out Morrisonian pop-science-in-a-blender can be a lot of fun if integrated into the action, but not if delivered as a multi-page lecture, as it is here.


This isn’t a bad comic – it displays more wit, good spirits and artistic skill than most DC Universe titles – but it all does seem a little leaden, when it should be mercurial.

Uncollected: The New Adventures of Hitler

Now that Dare - Grant Morrison’s and Rian Hughes’s dystopian take on Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future - has been republished as part of Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Rian Hughes Collected Comics, maybe it is time for a reissue of Morrison’s other strip for the Revolver/Crisis stable of would-be mature comics from 1990: The New Adventures of Hitler.


Working with artist Steve Yeowell and a team of colourists – of whom, more later – Morrison tells of a visit paid by Hitler in 1912 to his half-brother, Alois, in Liverpool. The half-brother is real; the visit, fictional, a conceit already used by Beryl Bainbridge in her novel Young Adolf.

Where Bainbridge wrote black comedy, Morrison and his confederates produce something more bizarre. Hitler is in England to find the Holy Grail – which he does, after a fashion, with the aid of John Bull and his incontinent pet bulldog. He believes that a trolleybus is trying to kill him. He hallucinates constantly – not just the image of John Bull, but late 20th century pop singers in his bedroom closet, and men wearing tiny chairs for shoes.


It is not a wholly successful work. It certainly conveys an atmosphere of mental illness, capturing the shabby, mundane reality that permeates the grandiose dreaming. It is consistently amusing (Alois, for example, dreams of world domination … of the market for safety razors). But the parallels drawn between the Nazis and the British Empire are glib claptrap, and the details of Hitler’s delusions and hallucinations often seem arbitrary. Why are Morrissey and John Lennon singing in Hitler’s wardrobe? Are they meant to similar cases of provincial men with artistic ambitions, successes to contrast to his failure? Are they symbols of his ultimate irrelevance? Or just a piece of random wackiness?


So why am I so keen to see this reprinted? It’s the art, you see. A team of colourists variously credited as “the Spock Whitney Quartet”, “Brian, Dougall and Mr Rusty”, “your Mum”, or, more prosaically “Nick Abadzis, Steve Whitaker and John Buckle” plaster over Steve Yeowell’s drawings with thick, richly textured patterns. This adds to the air of hallucinatory mundanity: we see as through a lava lamp darkly, but the patterns are those of Edwardian endpapers and wallpaper, the lower middle class mechanical offspring of the arts and crafts movement.


Unfortunately, the printing wasn’t up to the job. In places, the patterns leave Yeowell’s drawings illegibly obscured (I've used Photoshop to make the scans here a little clearer). So what I want is not just a reprint, but a high-quality, remastered, art-paper reprint that doesn’t see the inks soak up and blend so much.


Fat chance of that, I suppose. But a man can dream. Or hallucinate.

Panels
The New Adventures of Hitler, written by Grant Morrison, drawn by Steve Yeowell, lettered by Gordon Robson, coloured by Nick Abadzis, Steve Whitaker and John Buckle, edited by Steve MacManus, Crisis issues 46-49, June to August 1990

Fun with Shelving

Belgians in the Congo
Taking their cue from Borders, Waterstone's bookshops have responded to the Commission for Racial Equality’s attack on Tintin in the Congo by reshelving it in the “graphic novels” section in the grown-ups' part of the shop - just in time for it to be eligible for the “3 books for the price of 2” offer currently applying to all graphic novels. So, thanks the the CRE, you can now get your helping of mid-century racial sterotypes cheaper than ever.

When the law of unintended consequences strikes, it really strikes.


Just tragic
WH Smith seems to have split its biography section in two. One half is still called “biography”. The other is called “tragic life stories”. Perhaps we could smuggle in some Joe Matt or Ivan Brunetti.


Moment of pride
This post is the ninth most popular search result for "her pet ocelot". My life is complete.


Okay, I lied about the “fun” part.