Review: Teen Titans Lost Annual, JLA Classified, The Spirit

Last week was retro week in American comics, or at least it was in those periodicals that I bought.

Teen Titans Lost Annual Issue 1 (how many of these do they have lying around?), “President Kennedy Has Been Kidnapped!!” by Bob Haney (writer), Jay Stephens (pencils), Mike Allred (inks), Laura Allred (colours), Gasper Saladino (letters), Dan Raspler & Steve Wacker (editors), cover by Nick Cardy, coloured by Dave Stewart, 48 pages of comics plus 6 pages of sketches by Nick Cardy, US$4.99, DC Comics, March 2008

In 1962, the Teen Titans learn that John F Kennedy has been kidnapped by aliens and brainwashed by them into acting as their war leader.

This story – neither lost nor an annual, but an Elseworlds special which DC initially decided was unsuitable for publication – was the last comic to be written by Bob Haney before his death in 2004. Haney has become something of a cult figure among comic bloggers, who have mined for humour the preposterous illogicalities of his plots, the inconsistency of his portrayals of characters with those of other writers, and, above all, his clunky attempts to write hipster dialogue. For this special, Haney consciously pastiched himself, playing up those aspects of his old work that have been the target of so much ridicule. In that way, this is his very own All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder; only, blessedly, over and done with in one go. There is something dizzying about watching an old man trying to caricature the way that his middle-aged self hoped to write like a teenager for the entertainment of children: all the ages of man in one pamphlet.

Stephens and Allred capture the spirit of 1960s DC art all too well: tasked with drawing such self-consciously absurd ideas as mods in outer space and flying hairy rockers, they give us designs as dull and flat as anything that Curt Swan or Sheldon Moldoff would have produced.



JLA Classified Issue 50, “High Frontier: That Was Now, This Is Then” Part 1 by Roger Stern (writer), John Byrne (penciller), Mark Farmer (inker), Rob Clark Jr (letterer), Allen Passalaquia (colourist) and Mike Carlin (editor), cover by Joshua Middleton, 22 pages of comics, US$2.99, DC Comics, Early March 2008

A big, arrogant monster attacks the JLA Watchtower on the Moon and beats everyone up. No, really, that’s all that happens.

More proof that you can’t go home again comes from this story by Roger Stern and John Byrne, which recaptures the style of their work in the early 1980s, before superheroes ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge proffered by Miller and Moore. A straightforward beat-em-up story, with plodding dialogue in which heroes explain their powers as they use them, characterisation is by thought balloons, and there is even one of those big round-shouldered creatures with which Byrne used to fill the pages of Alpha Flight and Superman. But enough decompression has set in to make this more inconsequential than, for example, any of the issues of Captain America that Stern and Byrne did together. Nothing much happens here: the villain attacks and knocks out most of the League, and J’onn J’onzz thinks he remembers him; and that’s it. Perhaps it will read better when all the parts have been published, but at the moment, this seems like half a 45 RPM record playing at 33 and a third (hey, I can be retro too).



The Spirit Issue 12, “Sand” by Darwyn Cooke (script, pencils and flashback inks), J Bone (inks), Dave Stewart (colour), Jared K Fletcher (lettering), Ben Abernathy (editor), 22 pages of comics, US$2.99, DC Comics, January 2008

The Spirit meets his long-lost childhood sweetheart, Sand Serif, now a hardened criminal.

Darwyn Cooke bows out of the Spirit revival with what Will Eisner would have called a “refry” of Eisner’s two-part story from January 1950. That, in itself, was a salvage job on the lead story from Eisner’s abortive comic book, John Law, Detective, and replacing Law with the Spirit produced a rather unconvincing retcon at the time. Cooke’s story, appearing only 12 issues into the run rather than 502, does less violence to the existing backstory, and the page-to-page and panel-to-panel flow is better than Eisner’s cut-and-paste job. But Eisner realised something that Cooke seems to have ignored. For we readers to care, we must not just be told that Denny Colt loved Sand Serif, we must ourselves see something in her that could justify that love. So Eisner made her an ambivalent character, with a ruthless shell but a conflicted conscience. Cooke makes her hard throughout. A telling example: in both versions of the story, Sand’s associate Dr Vitriol kills a man. In Eisner’s version, Sand deducts $50,000 from Vitriol’s share of the loot “for the widow of the cop you shot last night”. In Cooke’s version, she withholds payment altogether and keeps everything herself because Vitriol’s killing of Hussein Hussein of Interpol may have “brought down [heat] on us”.

What makes this issue affecting, though, is not so much the story it tells, as a touch Cooke uses in the telling of it. In the flashback sequences, he (and colourist Dave Stewart) beautifully evoke the feel of Eisner’s later works: the fluid, whole-page layouts, the misty cityscapes, the loose strokes of thickly-brushed hatching, and a muted brown colour-scheme to recall the sepia-on-cream printing of A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories. This was the way that Eisner looked back on his own life, and it is a fitting way to end a series that could never help recalling him.

Review: Tamara Drewe

Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds, 126 pages of comics, Jonathan Cape, 2007, £16.99

Unlike Woody Allen, Posy Simmonds has had no problem moving away from the early, funny stuff to more complex, serious works. Of course, it helps that she hasn’t left the humour behind. If her portrayal of defunct Britpop band Swipe in Tamara Drewe is much less broad than that of Hugh Janus and the Dropouts in Mrs Weber’s Diary, there is still plenty of sly social observation here, as well as an appreciation of the farce of everyday life. Key revelations are overheard from the toilet. One of the two tragedies with which the book ends flirts with the absurd (and involves a herd of cows). And although Simmonds told the Comics Journal recently that she regretted ending her previous book, Gemma Bovery, with a joke about Jane Eyre, she still brings Tamara Drewe to a close with a punchline.

Like Gemma Bovery, Tamara Drewe is based on a well-known work of nineteenth-century literature, in this case Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, with Tamara herself as a counterpart of that novel’s heroine, Bathsheba Everdene. The plot revolves around the disastrous effects of her relationships with two unsuitable men, while ignoring the virtues of a salt-of-the-earth local (Andy Cobb, here standing in for Hardy’s Gabriel Oak). But Simmonds shifts the emphasis away from Tamara, by presenting events from the viewpoints of three other characters – Beth Hardiman, the wife of one of the men Tamara becomes involved with, Casey Shaw, a local teenager, and Glen Larson, an academic who wants to be a novelist, who resembles Joubert in Gemma Bovery in both physical appearance and narrative role – the apparent outsider whose tangential involvement may be crucial to the plot (he also shares a name with the American TV producer responsible for The Six Million Dollar Man and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, but I assume that is a coincidence).

All three of these characters contribute extensive prose monologues, whereas Tamara’s inner thoughts are revealed only partially through excerpts from a vacuous column she writes for a newspaper (none of which we see whole). A wide range of other devices is used to convey information alongside the conventional comic strip sections: magazine articles, e-mails, texts, mobile phone photos ... All are seamlessly integrated, helped by the compatibility of clear bodytype and Simmonds’ meticulous hand-lettering and her calm, measured compositions and fluid lines. Even effects such as blurring out text have been achieved without the jarringly different style that would be produced by recourse to easy Photoshop filters. Simmonds is able to deploy complicated layouts using these diverse elements on the broader-than-usual pages without creating confusion about what to read next. (Gemma Bovery was on narrower-than-usual pages, each being the product of the column widths in The Guardian newspaper in which the stories were originally serialised.)


Throughout, Simmonds displays her familiar virtues: sharp observation, impeccable draughtsmanship, a rare ability to convey character though the details of expression and dress, speech pattern and body language. The plot is meticulously constructed and paced. I have mentioned before, though, that while I admire Simmonds’s craft, I am often left cold by her subject matter.

And Tamara Drewe is, like Gemma Bovery, a tale of the privileged urban English engaging in adultery in what they hope to be a rural idyll. But Tamara Drewe broadens the social perspective by drawing in a group of local teenagers with nothing to do all day but hang around in bus shelters and throw eggs at passing cars. It can be hard to sympathise with the self-destructive self-absorption of the more familiar middle-class characters here, but the way that boredom and romantic fantasy play out for their younger, poorer, less experienced counterparts is much more affecting.


The later, humane stuff. And still funny.

Review: Angel – After the Fall

Angel: After the Fall Issue 1, “After the Fall” Chapter 1, plotted by Joss Whedon and Brian Lynch, scripted by Brian Lynch, illustrated by Franco Urru, coloured by Ilaria Traversi, lettered by Robbie Robbins, edited by Chris Ryall, cover by Tony Harris, 27 pages of comics, IDW Publishing, November 2007, US$3.99

It’s probably unfair to reach judgements after just one issue, but it’s still harder to resist the temptation to compare IDW’s new Angel series, After the Fall, the first to show us what Joss Whedon thinks happened after the end of his TV series, with Dark Horse’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8: The Long Way Home, which did the same for its big sister (and which I rather liked).

And the similarities are striking.

First, there is a shift of scale and setting to something that could not be managed on a TV budget. Buffy is now leading an army of slayers based in a Scottish castle; Angel is riding a dragon over a Los Angeles that has been sucked into Hell.


Second, there is an excess of recurring characters and a reluctance to move on from those already left behind. So, in the last TV episode, Wesley Wyndham-Price was killed as decisively as any character could be. He’s back here, admittedly as a ghost, but with more dialogue than pretty much anyone else. Gunn is back too. And we get Connor. And Electro-Gwen. And Angel’s werewolf girlfriend. And Wolfram & Hart. True, Spike is being held back for next issue, and Illyria and Harmony haven’t turned up yet, but that may just mirror the structure of The Long Way Home, in which Giles and Willow only appeared in later issues. It’s odd that a professional writer should seem to be writing fan fiction about his own creations, but then Joss Whedon often comes across as his own biggest fan (if we discount the outright certifiable).

Third, like Buffy, Angel seems now to have discarded the idea of an overarching metaphor. This is a particular shame in Angel’s case, as it was only in its last season on TV that it settled upon a satisfactory approach, using supernatural stories to address the compromises of adult working life.

But alongside these similarities are major differences in the level of craft on display.

The big change from Buffy is that the Angel comic only has Whedon as a co-plotter. He shares the plot with Brian Lynch, who also writes the script. Lynch gives us page after page of macho posturing and dull threats, with only a smattering of wit. Odd touches of quirky originality – a telepathic fish, apparently carried over from Lynch’s earlier Spike comic – are counterbalanced by such tired clichés as a harem of women in chains and a group of men forced to fight as gladiators. Lynch is a television writer by trade, but, unlike his colleague, he does not seem yet to have mastered writing in his new medium. It’s often unclear who is providing the first-person narrative caption boxes, for example, and their relationship to the pictures is unsteady, neither juxtaposed nor properly supportive. The shock ending is undermined as much by bathetic final words as by the difficulty of recognising the character in the last panel (it took me two reads, and I am not the most casual and inattentive of readers. Perhaps it would have helped if artist and colourist had followed the script’s hints about co-ordinated clothes).

Franco Urro’s artwork is often sketchy, but mostly serves the narrative, apart from a curious addiction to panels showing characters standing in straight lines left-to-right, looking out at the reader. Perhaps this is some sort of parodic reference to the “power shots” that always ended the TV show’s title sequences, but it is so artificial as to pull you right out of the story.





The big problem with the art – as has been the case on most IDW comics that I have seen, apart from those with colour art produced by Ben Templesmith – is the crude and muddy Photoshop colour and effects that quite overwhelm Urro’s already non-too-robust drawing. This seems to be a house style, so I am not inclined to blame Ilaria Traversi too much for it.


Altogether, not an inspiring start. I’ll give it another issue, but I remember watching the dismal, incoherent and leaden fourth television season of Angel (the one with Cordelia giving birth to an evil goddess) as the biggest act of misplaced loyalty to a TV show that I’ve committed since mid-1980s Doctor Who, so I am reluctant to repeat the mistake in comics.

Review: Paris

Paris, written by Andi Watson, drawn by Simon Gane, SLG Publishing, 2007, 128 pages, US$10.95

Juliet, an American art student in Paris in the 1950s, is hired to paint a portrait of Deborah, an English debutante. The two girls fall in love.

With a plot outline like that, you probably have a good idea of where this is going: either Juliet and Deborah will defy society, but end up living happily ever after, with Juliet recognised as an artistic genius; or they will defy society but be crushed by stifling bourgeois conformity, possibly with one of them dying. It all depends on whether the switch is set to “romance” or “tragedy”.

Actually, the story takes a rather different tack. Juliet’s portraits are not recognised as great art by anyone, and when she switches to the dominant American mode of abstract expressionism, that isn’t a great artistic success either, though it serves to reunite her with Deborah. Deborah, in turn, seems to acquiesce in an arranged marriage of convenience, which will leave both her and her husband free to pursue their own romantic interests. It seems to be a story of finding happiness through accommodation with an unsympathetic society, rather than through rebellion, which is a refreshing change. This point is, however, ambiguous: Deborah’s decision is not shown, and thereafter she is drawn with gloves, so that we cannot tell if she is wearing a ring. If you prefer the heights of romance, you can read the story as if she rejected the marriage and ran off to America to find Juliet. But that would be so much less interesting.

The main themes of the book are nicely anticipated by Watson and Gane in the opening sequence. Juliet walks through boulevards packed with mid-century Parisian clichés, all marked by sprays of small, sharp, pointed leaves.


Then we get our first sight of Deborah. She is wearing a bodice decorated with patterns of flowers with short, sharp, pointed petals, connecting her visually with the leaf motif we associate with Paris and Juliet. Her aunt then tells her to cover up her underclothes (and thus, to conceal her relationship-to-be).



A drawback of the book is that neither Juliet nor Deborah comes across as a strong, distinctive character. The supporting characters – Deborah’s ghastly traditionalist aunt and louche brother, Juliet’s bohemian friends – come across more powerfully: they are one-dimensional, but their single dimensions are clear and familiar.

But the strongest character is the one in the title: Paris itself, as limned by Gane’s quirky, blocky line. There are frequent splash pages in which Gane suppresses perspective, giving all the bustle and activity of the city equal status with the action of the lead characters. The lettering, too, reinforces the line and mood of the drawings.


So strong is the association of drawing style and location that it actually becomes something of a liability in the final chapter, in which Deborah returns to England and Juliet to America. Boxy, modern Manhattan, in particular, looks wrong laid out in the crooked lines of the Old World. But this is a small price for the visual pleasure provided by the book as a whole.

Review: Eduardo Risso’s Tales of Terror

Eduardo Risso’s Tales of Terror
Features eleven stories written by Carlos Trillo, art by Eduardo Risso, translation by Maria Barrucci, lettering by Jason Ullmeyer, no original publication details given, Dynamite Entertainment, 2007, 154 pages of comics, US$14.99

At first, it seems unfair to put only Eduardo Risso’s name above the title, as every one of these stories is written by his frequent Argentine collaborator Carlos Trillo. But then again, it is probably not the stories themselves that will lead anyone to buy this book. They are efficient little shockers, of the school of EC Comics, with ironic O Henry twist endings, but without EC’s air of moral retribution. Most of the characters are pretty nasty, and many of the set-ups are clichéd (a marriage between a vampire and a werewolf, for example). The most affecting tale concerns a mummy’s boy forced by his mother into becoming a torturer’s assistant – and I’m sure you’ve already guessed who he will end up having to torture.


No, it is Risso’s art that provides the best reason for buying this book. It is an art that thrives on the tension between fluid shapes and precise delineation, between fine line and solid shadow. When Risso draws a wobbly line, we know that it shows not uncertainty, but the clear edge of a wobbly shape. The composition contains the same dynamic pull. Sometimes, Risso uses a simple grid, but the panels are out of balance, their contrasts of dark and light, weight and emptiness spinning the reader giddily across the page. More often, the panels float more freely, but they are always perfect rectangles, anchoring the moment.


All of this benefits enormously from being reproduced in crisp, unadorned black and white. Something of the strength of Risso’s draughtsmanship is diluted in the colours of 100 Bullets or Batman. But here, he can show his mastery of chiaroscuro, with displays such as this page, on which an invisible woman performs a striptease.


So perhaps calling it Eduardo Risso’s Tales of Terror is only fair after all.

Review: Marvel Masterworks – Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD

Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, Volume 1
Features:
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The Man for the Job!” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (artist), Dick Ayers (inks), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Find Fury or Die!” by Stan Lee (script), Jack Kirby (layouts), John Severin (art), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The Prize Is … Earth!” by Stan Lee (story), Jack Kirby (layouts), John Severin (art), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Sometimes the Good Guys Lose!” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (layouts), John Severin (art), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The Brave Die Hard!” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (layouts), Joe Sinnott (art), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The End of Hydra!” by Stan Lee (story), Jack Kirby (layouts), Don Heck (pencils), Joe Sinnott (inks), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Operation: Brain Blast!” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (art), Frank Ray (inks), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Who Strikes at – SHIELD?” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (pencils), Mike Demeo (inks), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “To Free a Brain Slave” by Stan Lee (story), Jack Kirby assisted by Howard Purcell (art), Mike Demeo (inks), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The Day of the Druid!” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (designer) Howard Purcell (pencils), Mike Demeo (inks), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Lo! The Eggs Shall Hatch!” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (designer) Don Heck (pencils), Mike Demeo (inks), Sam Rosen (letters)
Captain America “Them!” by Stan Lee (words), Jack Kirby (art), Frank Giacoia (inks), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “When the Unliving Strike!” by Stan Lee (script), Jack Kirby (layouts) Don Heck (pencils), Mike Demeo (inks), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The Enemy Within!” by Stan Lee (script), Jack Kirby (layouts) Don Heck (pencils), Mike Demeo (inks), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Death Before Dishonor!” by Jack Kirby (script and layouts) Don Heck (pencils and inks), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The End of AIM!” by Jack Kirby (layouts), Denny O’Neil (script), Ogden Whitney (art), Artie Simek (letters), Stan Lee (editor)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Hydra Lives!” by Stan Lee (script), Jack Kirby (layouts) John Buscema (pencils), Frank Giacoia (inks), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Overkill!” by Stan Lee (script), Jack Kirby (layouts) Jim Steranko (art), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The Power of SHIELD!” by Stan Lee (script), Jack Kirby (layouts) Jim Steranko (art), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The Hiding Place!” by Roy Thomas (script), Jack Kirby (layouts) Jim Steranko (art), Sam Rosen (letters), Stan Lee (editor)
Fantastic Four “The Hate-Monger!” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (artist), George Bell (inker), Artie Simek (letterer)
reprinted from Fantastic Four issue 21 (1963), Tales of Suspense issue 78 (1966) and Strange Tales issues 135-53 (1965-1967), 281 pages of comics (including cover reprints), Marvel Comics, 2007, US$54.99

That’s a huge and cumbersome contents listing, but the credits bring home two things: first, that Nick Fury went through a widely fluctuating set of artists in its first two years, and, second, that Jack Kirby never gave up on it, always proving layouts, sometimes providing full pencils, and once even providing the script (in a reasonable pastiche of Stan Lee’s style, rather than the fractured dignity of his scripting and text pieces of the 1970s). Kirby had been happy enough to pass the parent series Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos over to other artists, just as he had done with so many others. Was there something in SHIELD that he wanted to nurture? As things turned out, he hung on until the most worthy of his replacements on any of his series was available.


Colonel Fury the spy was introduced as a CIA agent in the Fantastic Four issue for November 1963, two months after OSS agent Reed Richards had cropped up in Sgt Fury. That story appears at the end of this volume, though it is omitted from the index. At this stage, Fury has two eyes and no gadgets. It’s tempting to see this version as a response to Connery-era Bond, while most of the volume takes its cue from the slightly wilder tone of The Man from UNCLE, and Steranko is, by the end, just starting to nudge in aspects of his exercise in style which we can see as a response not just to pop-art and op-art, but to The Avengers. That’s The Avengers where the long hair is worn by Mrs Peel, not by the Mighty Thor, of course.

Steranko’s version is what dominates our image of SHIELD nowadays, but this volume kicks off with a very different look, with the solidly realistic draughtsmanship and lush but controlled linework of John Severin as the first artist to work over Kirby’s layouts. Fury, Tony Stark, Dugan and their cohorts never looked more at ease in ordinary street clothes and on ordinary streets. But Severin only lasted three issues, and the rotating teams of artists who succeeded him never managed to give the strips a character of their own.


The stories floundered too. After a strong start with SHIELD’s initial confrontation with Hydra, things just got silly. Exuberantly daft inventiveness can be one of the glories of comics, but it is harder than it looks. When subterranean druids start attacking their enemies with flying mechanical eggs, the result is as clunkingly unamusing as a fourth series Monty Python sketch. Things perk up a little with the AIM plotline, but it is uncomfortably close to a rerun of the initial Hydra story.

Steranko turns up for the last three stories here, but is constrained by working over Kirby’s layouts and to scripts by Stan Lee and Roy Thomas. With the next issue, Kirby would be gone and Steranko would take over plots and layouts and, soon after, scripts, turning Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD into one of the most distinctive and memorable pieces of entertainment of its times. But that’s a story for subsequent volumes.


Reproduction in this volume seems fine, crisp and clear. Colouring uses flat tones. I don’t know how faithful they are to the original colour guides, but certainly the Steranko issues look more consistent and coherent than they did under the rather overwhelming modelled computer colour of the 2000 reprint volume of his Strange Tales run. Marvel is to be commended for including not just the Fantastic Four Fury story, but also the Captain America crossover which forms part of the AIM storyline.

Review: The Last Fantastic Four Story

The Last Fantastic Four Story issue 1 (!), “World’s End” by Stan Lee (writer), John Romita Jr (penciller), Scott Hanna (inker), Morry Hollowell (colourist), VC’s Joe Caramanga (letterer) and Tom Brevoort (editor), Marvel Comics, October 2007, 48 pages of strip, US$4.99

There is something distinctly morbid about this comic. It’s not the story, which (SPOILER ALERT!) ends with the Fantastic Four alive and well and flying off into the moonrise. It’s not even the cover, with its funereal black edging and sombre serifed type. It’s the feeling that, taken with the recent Stan Lee Meets … series, we are seeing Lee, at the age of 85, taking his leave of the characters who made his name.

Of course, being an old showman, Lee would probably be as happy to make as many farewell appearances and comebacks as Old Blue Eyes himself. Let’s hope that he gets the chance to do so, because The Last Fantastic Four Story would not be a good note on which to end.

The plot concerns a technologically superior power, the Cosmic Tribunal, who decide, on the basis of faulty intelligence, that the human race is worthless: so they decide to invade and kill us all. This may be a stab at relevance – something Lee used to pride himself on – as the parallel with the US invasion of Iraq is fairly obvious. That may be why Lee refers to the members of the Tribunal as “good guys”; because he sees them as analogous to his own country. But in the context of this story, it makes no sense. Good guys do not commit genocide, let alone unprovoked genocide. Worse, in another stab at relevance, the Tribunal is bringing about mankind’s destruction by accelerating global warming, killing lots of entirely innocent animals in the process.


This is not a good showcase for the Fantastic Four. Ben and Johnny's attempts to fight back are wholly ineffectual, while Sue does, quite simply, absolutely nothing throughout. “Invisible Girl,” indeed.

In an attempt to update his style, Lee has dropped a lot of the polysyllabic bombast. He has also attempted to embrace decompression, by cutting up his captions into smaller blocks, spread across more panels. But this lays bare the lack of sophistication in story and sentiment, and leaves the narrative and dialogue to read like an extended issue of Spidey Super Stories.

In one respect, John Romita Jr was a good choice to provide the art for Lee’s valedictory story. Like some of Lee’s favourite collaborators, his father John Romita Sr and John Buscema, Romita Jr is a consummate craftsman, a solid and accurate draughtsman with the talent and skill of telling stories with crystal clarity. But like theirs, I find his work unengaging: these are the Volkswagens of comic art: well-engineered, reliable, but nothing to get excited about. In a comic which will always stand in the shadow of Jack Kirby, that is a problem.

As the story ends, the Fantastic Four are in unconvincing retirement, and so is Stan Lee. Let us hope that he gets the chance to write The Last Spider-Man Story, and that it provides him with a more fitting swansong.

Review: Lucky

Lucky volume 2 issue 1, “My Slideshow” and “My Affliction” by Gabrielle Bell, 32 pages of strip, Drawn & Quarterly, May 2007, CDN$4.25

In this issue of Lucky, Bell presents two inter-linked stories. The second, slightly longer, tale “My Affliction”, is a dream-like narrative of giants, dogs and sudden emotional attachments. The first, shorter, story is a directly autobiographical piece in which Bell presents “My Affliction” as a slideshow and attends a comics convention in the United States.

The two stories share a common presentation. Each uses a regular and invariable six-panel grid. Almost all panels show full-length figures in medium shot. The exceptions can be seen as reinforcing this rule. For example, in one panel, we see a close-up of a hand holding a wooden doll, but the doll itself therefore takes the place of a full figure, foreshadowing its later transformation into a person. Throughout, Bell draws with a largely unmodulated, even line, adding shading and weight with hesitant patches of black.


The effect of these techniques is that both stories proceed at a steady, even monotone, like a passage of prose made up of sentences of similar length, all beginning, “And then…”. But this has different effects in the two halves. In “My Affliction”, it makes the bizarre events and transformations seem mundane and plausible, while in “My Slideshow”, the unnatural regularity creates a sense of unease and tension. Thematically, the two stories also seem to take complementary tacks: “My Slideshow” is predominantly about Bell’s internal state and insecurities, while “My Affliction” externalises her emotions onto her relationships with the dream characters she meets.

The result conveys to me more mood than meaning, but that’s no bad thing. Normally, I find little interest in accounts of a cartoonist’s day to day life, and less in the recounting of dreams, but by linking the two, without drawing blatant parallels, Bell has produced something much more engaging.

Review: Superman 666

Superman issue 666, “The Beast from Krypton” by Kurt Busiek (writer), Walter Simonson (artist), John Workman (letters), Sinclair and Loughridge (colours) and Matt Idelson (editor), 38 pages of strip, US$3.99, DC Comics, October 2007

It’s a dream! It’s a hoax! It’s not an imaginary story! (Except that, you know, aren’t they all?)

The last demon from Krypton’s Hell – destroyed along with the planet and its inhabitants – arrives on Earth and tries to corrupt Superman as he dreams, gaining strength from Superman’s descent.

I’m tempted to quibble with the universality of American Christian concepts in DC’s cosmology: a hell with demons tormenting sinners is not even a part of all of Earth’s religions, let alone a necessary component of those of other planets; and the idea that Superman has only to sin in his heart for it to be real is oddly reminiscent of Jimmy Carter. But that would be unfair. After all, this story owes its very existence to the fact that its issue number matches a cryptic crossword clue in the Book of Revelations.

And the story is, mostly, a lot of fun, with an increasingly surly and sulky Superman (amusingly cartooned by Simonson) dealing unrestrainedly with the frustrations of his life: all those people demanding protection, Jimmy Olsen and his screeching signal-watch, the parade of pointlessly aggressive super-villains. In doing so, he produces an array of ever-sillier silver-age super-powers.


(Hmm. I’ve never been able to dictate the rules in my dreams. But then again I’m not Superman, so we’ll let it ride.)

Eventually, of course, the real, pure-hearted Superman reasserts himself in a manner that recalls the best bit of the movie Superman III.

Busiek paces the story nicely, with an ominous build-up and a nicely graduated slide into corruption, and keeps a decent handle on exposition by the device of having Zatanna trying to work out what is happening. The story can be taken as a counterpoint to his ongoing “Camelot Falls” arc, in which Superman is confronted with the possibility that his selfless heroism is holding back humanity’s development. Here, in contrast, we see the consequences if he gives in to selfishness. There are oddities – I’m not sure why Hawkman, Animal Man and Aquaman should make portentous announcements to thin air as the demon passes, and I was strangely distracted by the fact that Clark Kent is still using a manual typewriter in 2007 – but the only part of the story that really failed for me is that it goes out of its way to raise the question of whether, in the current version of the continuity, Superman has killed (as he did in John Byrne’s 1980s run on the title). Really, is there anyone who regards this sort of guessing game as entertaining? It’s not as if we can engage with it: we can merely await an arbitrary decision by DC editorial.

Wholly on the positive side of this issue is Simonson’s artwork. It’s not strikingly developed from the mature style he was already using by the time of his work on Thor or New Gods (except, perhaps, by adopting a touch of Ted McKeever for the demonically-possessed versions of Batman, Wonder Woman and Supergirl), but it’s good to see it again. Simonson seems to have been devoting more time to his writing lately: it would be nice if he got his pencils out more often, as in many ways, he is an ideal superhero artist.

Simonson’s artwork reconciles a number of apparently opposing traits. It is monumental, but massively energetic. It is loose, but makes extensive use of rigidly geometric shapes, circles and straight lines. It is sculptural, but flat – an impression reinforced by John Workman’s lettering, which never leaves the two-dimensional picture plane. The result is like some mad Assyrian bas-relief, only livelier, more colourful, and a good deal less vile.

Overall, an entertaining one-off issue. On this evidence, stepping aside from long arcs and crossovers can clearly make for good storytelling.

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.

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.

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.

Review: Phonogram - Rue Britannia

Phonogram: Rue Britannia by Kieron Gillen (story) and Jamie McKelvie (art and lettering), Image Comics, 2007, 138 pages of strip, US$14.99

David Kohl is a phonomancer, a magician whose power is focused in music, particularly, in his case, the Britpop movement of the 1990s. Kohl learns that someone is planning to resurrect Britannia, goddess of Britpop, but in zombified form. As events progress, Kohl finds his memories and tastes changing, putting his very identity at risk.

The first chapter of this story – which was originally issue 1 of the pamphlet series – is a glorious tribute to the power of popular music. It refers at length and explicitly to a batch of singles by Sunderland popstrels Kenickie (who were strangely omitted from Bryan Talbot’s otherwise comprehensive tour of Mackem culture in Alice in Sunderland). But even if you are wholly unfamiliar with “Come Out 2Nite” - a state you should change as soon as possible - you can understand what this sequence means by reference to any pop songs that have ever spoken directly to you.


Then it all takes a turn for the worse. Well, a couple of turns, really. One is in the artwork. Jamie McKelvie’s art has a quiet, clear-line style that is fine for the more mundane parts of the storyline, a visual equivalent of the dry, deadpan voices of Luke Haines (of the Auteurs) or Damon Albarn (of Blur). But as Kieron Gillen’s script turns more to the mystical, McKelvie’s only recourse is to use grey tones instead of black for the more hallucinatory aspects, such as the “Memory Kingdom” where Kohl talks with Britpop idols. It’s a missed opportunity, especially when Blur turn up and you start to wonder what Albarn’s flatmate Jamie Hewlett might have done with this material. McKelvie is also none too strong on likenesses: I spent several pages wondering why Kohl was being guided through the Memory Kingdom by a young Elton John, before realising that this was supposed to be Luke Haines, songwriter and singer of the Auteurs.

And this is indicative of the second wrong turn: Phonogram becomes too specifically about Britpop, and, in particular, about the interpretation of Britpop favoured by Kohl.

For those of you who missed it, in the early to mid 1990s, the pallid boys with guitars in Britain started to produce songs with whistleable tunes and audible lyrics. In part, this was a reaction to the popularity of American grunge a few years earlier. Hence “Britpop” – British, not American, pop more than rock. Hair was shorter, clothes sharp in the mod tradition. For a while, this caught the mood of the public, and Britpop bands, most prominently Blur, Oasis and Pulp, thrived in the record sales charts and the playlists of BBC Radio 1. And then it ended. Fickle public taste moved on; the pallid boys were accused of selling out and decided to make their music more wilfully obscure and difficult; and, most catastrophically of all, the new Blair government tried to co-opt Britpop for political ends. The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport even published a book called Cool Britannia. No pop movement could survive that.

Phonogram’s perspective on this period takes its cue from the so-called “inkies” of the time: the NME (formerly the New Musical Express) and Melody Maker, two music magazines published weekly on low-grade newsprint. Their target readership was pop music snobs, more concerned that their record collections should be credible than danceable. I know, dear reader, for I was that snob – but ten or more years older than most readers, so less likely to be taken in by the inkies’ latest round of hype, scorn and scene-building

Much of Phonogram’s plot revolves around Kohl’s attempt to defend this perspective against an assault by a rival group of music-centred magicians called retromancers, who want to produce a simpler version of the memory of Britpop which they can peddle at 1990s nights at clubs and theme pubs. This, it seems, threatens Kohl’s own memory and, indeed, identity. It seems that, in Phonogram, there is only room for one, definitive, memory of the past, and this is something to be contested.


This is where I part company with Phonogram. “But it wasn’t like that. Blur vs Oasis and nowt all else.” Well, indeed, to Kohl and Gillen and me. But possibly not to those who preferred The Sun to the NME, and certainly not to schoolchildren of 1995, shouting the names of their favourites at each other the week the two bands released their new singles simultaneously. And their views are as valid as ours, especially given that one of the defining traits of Britpop was that it was actually popular, unlike so much indie guitar music. I remember once, browsing in HMV, Oasis’ “Wonderwall” came on the in-store radio. Every single person I could see was singing along under their breath. Would they have sung along to the Auteurs’ “Unsolved Child Murder”? Probably not. That doesn’t mean that they misremember Britpop, but that it was always something different for different people. By championing a more complex picture of Britpop, Phonogram favours a less complex picture of culture and memory.

And, for that matter, a less complex picture of the longer-term development of British pop music. Phonogram describes Britpop as “the second flowering of British guitar pop”. So what was the first? The sixties? It’s hard to dispute the claims of the Beatles and the Stones. But, hold on, the first issue’s cover is a pastiche of the sleeve of Elastica’s debut album, which was heavily influenced – to say the least – by 1970s punk and new wave bands like Wire and the Stranglers. Was there no flowering then? And if no further flowerings are to be allowed, where does that leave the current wave of commercially successful guitar pop bands like Franz Ferdinand or the Arctic Monkeys? (Kohl does at least mention the last of these, though in condescending terms.) It is hard to esacpe the impression that this is just special pleading on the part of a music scene that happens to be the one that meant most to the character.


Several times in Phonogram, Kohl’s fellow phonomancers warn him that it is a mistake to hang his own identity on a long-dead phase in music, and you expect that the resolution of the story might involve him learning and growing past this. But instead, he reaffirms this narrow definition, mellowing only to the extent that he now accepts that he always did like some songs by unfashionable groups like Echobelly and Sleeper. So a story that starts as a hymn to the potency of cheap music become something more crabbed and cliquey, a defence of hipster superiority and a denial of the right of people to enjoy music however they may. Perhaps, when Gillen was writing about those Kenickie singles, he should have heeded the mickey-taking of “Punka” (lyrics taken from Lyrics Download ):

Hey Punka (hey!), how're you doin'?
Hey Punka (hey!), are you staying true to you?
Cos that's what Punkas do.
I wanna be a Punka too.
And if your friends all bitch, you're a Punka (Punka!),
If your life is kitsch, you're a Punka (Punka!).
I'm a Punka too.

Hey Punka (hey!), I've got ambition.
Hey Punka (hey!), my one wish is to
Be as punk as you when I grow up,
If Punkas ever do grow up.
And if your hits all miss, you're a Punka (Punka!),
If you dance like this, you're a Punka (Punka!).
I'm a Punka.

P-U-N-K-A (Punka!)
Lo-fi songs are great (Punka!)
P-U-N-K-A (Punka!)
We never learnt to play, cos we're Punka!
I wanna be a Punka too,
When I grow up if Punkas ever do,
I wanna be
P-U-N-K-A (Punka!)
Underground cliché (Punka!)
P-U-N-K-A (Punka!)
We always want to stay, hey! (Punka!)
I wanna be a Punka too,
When I grow up, if Punkas ever do,
And play guitar like
[Guitar break]

1-2-3-4!
P-U-N-K-A (Punka!)
P-U-N-K-A (Punka!)
Lo-fi songs are great (Punka!)
P-U-N-K-A (Punka!)
Don't you want to play, Punka?

I wanna be a Punka too,
When I grow up, if Punkas ever do,
I wanna be like you.

Even so, Phonogram is not a complete loss. Gillen is good at creating simple but memorable supporting characters, such as Kohl’s oblivious friend Kid-with-Knife, or the hermit Indie Dave, who keeps himself warm by burning old seven-inch singles. And there is a major sub-plot about a woman who has given up listening to music, leaving behind as a ghost her old obsession with the Manic Street Preachers and their guitarist and lyricist, Richie Edwards, which is much more touching, humane and uplifting than the main plot. The resolution of the subplot closes the book. If the rest of it had maintained the tone of the first chapter and the last few pages, I would have been much happier.