Hey folks, Harry here with another of Lizzybeth's hypnotically well done reports on the comics of our lives. Read and realize just how lonely we all are and how absolutely wonderful Lizzybeth would be in our lives. She really really knows the good stuff, all you folks headed for San Diego, keep an eye out for Junior Mintz and Quint... they'll be separate (long story about Quint being too seamany with Ms. Mintz... filthy sailor bastard! Anyways, read on... and then go shop!
Most people I know who read comics got started one of two ways: 1) as a kid, trading books like Archie or Uncle Scrooge with their little friends, graduating to Superman and Justice League and taking off from there. 2) As a grown-up, through a girl/boyfriend who insisted that they read a copy of STARMAN or STRANGERS IN PARADISE or other grown-up books of that sort. So, which one of these is the way that I got started with comic books?
Neither, actually. I started when I was 12 or so, breaking into my brother's stash of X-Men comics. I think he did it on purpose. Little Bro started leaving Chris Clairmont X-Men comics on the coffee table, knowing that curiosity was bound to get the better of me. Sneaky lil guy. Of course, I thought that comics were for babies and I turned my nose up at them for awhile before actually picking one up. People in silly costumes grimacing on die-cut gatefold covers – really, not very appealing to your average 12-year-old girl. But they got me anyway. I picked up one of them (this was right around when X-Men was relaunched at #1, and Uncanny X-Men was in the late 200's) intending to make fun of it, and ended up thinking it was actually kinda good. I mostly liked the superheroines, the fact that the X-Girls were really way more powerful than the guys. Storm could throw lightning bolts, Jean Grey could read minds and scramble your brain (and potentially destroy universes, but I didn't know that story yet), and Rogue could really do about anything she wanted. There were adventures, and romance, and.. well, let's face it, X-Men is really a big ole superpowered soap opera when you get right down to it. I got hooked right away. And within a year I was looking around to see what else was out there, moving on to SANDMAN, and Frank Miller, and the decidedly grown-up books.
And that's where the trouble was. I've never had a bit of trouble being the girl in the comic store, but being a kid in the store sucked. All the good books were for grownups, and quite a few comic store owners weren't too eager to sell me copies of SIN CITY. "Adult" books are kept in separate cases because of kids like me who had noticed that they were the best stuff around, and the shop people that didn't want to hear from angry parents. And then there was the money problem. Try keeping up with X-Men these days on a weekly allowance. What with the specials, and the new titles, and the special appearances.. it's just impossible to follow some of those superhero titles without a lot more money than I had to spend. Superman and Batman alone have several separate titles of their own, plus the team titles. And when all these titles start crossing over collecting becomes a giant headache. And it was worse for the younger kids who had parents buying for them, usually with no clue which titles were which.
My point (I do have a point) in all of this, is that kids can sometimes get left in the cold in the comics industry. And that's a shame, since they have always been the strongest fanbase you could get – they're loyal, they're imaginative, and if you treat them right they'll be hooked for life. Comics at large are thought to be for kids, but the truth seems to be that companies tend to produce books for adults, assuming that the kids will read them anyway. Because they always have in the past. Now, when the younger audience is eroding, and many not sticking around past adolescence, comics could be putting out more intelligent, creative, well-illustrated books aimed at the younger crowd. Fortunately, in some cases, they are.
AKIKO, for instance, is a wonderful comic for readers of all ages, and if there had been a book like this around when I was a little girl I would have started reading comics a lot sooner. Not because it's a girl book, although it does have a cute little 4th grade girl hero, but because it's a creative, beautiful fantasy book. Mark Crilley's AKIKO presents a fully realized fantasy world that both kids and adults can enjoy, much in the same vein of Frank Baum's "Oz" books. In fact, anyone who's read and enjoyed the Oz books, not the movie but books like "The Emerald City of Oz," will love AKIKO – and vice versa. Both creations have a rich background of strange and wonderful characters and places that you wish you could really visit, but have to settle for seeing through the eyes of the protagonist. Both take a normal Earth girl, and send her to a strange new world that we get to explore along with her.
The art tends to be black-and-white, but with warm tones that bring it dimension and character. The people and creatures, though "cartoony" in detail, are surprisingly three-dimensional looking. The landscapes can be breathtaking (This page from Mark Crilley's homepage shows some examples of this -- CLICK HERE). The stories are uncomplicated, but engaging. Once Akiko is whisked away to the planet Smoo, her adventures are easy to follow and with definite beginnings and endings instead of one unending string of events. The current storyline "The Battle of Boach's Keep" focuses on Spuckler, Akiko's impulsive and somewhat bullheaded companion. Akiko is published by Sirius comics, and should be carried in your local store (and if it's not, tell them to!).
Also published by Sirius is Jill Thompson's annual Halloween special, SCARY GODMOTHER. There have been a number of SCARY GODMOTHER releases by now, including a hardcover book, a few one-shots, and a miniseries ("Wild About Harry," from last year). You do know who Jill Thompson is, right? She's been the artist for a number of Vertigo and superhero titles, including SANDMAN, THE INVISIBLES, and WONDER WOMAN, and she put out the ENDLESS STORYBOOK that I reviewed two weeks ago (also a good book to share with kids, with lovely watercolor art). SCARY GODMOTHER is her own title intended for all ages, which she writes and draws, and it's full of the quirky humor readers have come to expect from Thompson's work. The Scary Godmother introduces herself to little Hannah Marie in the initial full-color hardcover book, along with a growing cast of creepy/funny characters including her cat Scardey, the vampire neighbors Max and Ruby, and Mr. Boogeylegs the dragon who guards the famed horde of treasure. The title, beautifully illustrated and often with Thompson's trademark watercolors, also tends to include an activity page, with crafts and games for kids to try out. The books are genuinely, laugh-out-loud funny, and I know adults who swear by it.
Astonish Comics is a new imprint dedicated to all-ages comics, best known for its HEROBEAR AND THE KID title. It reminds me of Bill Waterson's CALVIN AND HOBBES for a few reasons. The panel layouts sometimes resemble Watterson's more creative Sunday strip arrangements. Mostly, it's the plot. Tyler's stuffed bear, inherited from his grandfather, comes to life when noone's looking. Instead of turning into a philosophical tiger, Tyler's bear turns into a 10-foot tall super-powered polar bear called Herobear, but it's still fairly reminiscent. It's like giving Calvin's Stupendous Man his own comic. The good part is, HEROBEAR does manage to capture some of the magic of young imagination that CALVIN once did.
In the current issue, #3, Tyler tags along with Herobear to stop a destructive giant windup toy, signing autographs for the crowd in swim goggles and a cape while Herobear flies around battling X-5. Tyler sounds like a real kid when he talks, but the narration is a real problem. It tries too hard for the nostalgia angle, insisting to the reader, "remember when you were a kid? Remember? Don't you? Don't you want to be a kid again? Remember?" Well, we'd remember it with a lot less annoyance if the narration would quit telling us how. Still, it's a fun little book, with black-and-white (and red for Herobear's cape) art that looks quite a bit like animation cells from a movie you might have seen as a kid. Appropriate, considering Mike Kunkel, artist and writer, is another deserter from the Disney Animation department. Take a look at Kunkel's webpage (CLICK HERE) for a look at some pages from HEROBEAR.
The other Astonish title, ZOOM'S ACADEMY FOR THE SUPER GIFTED, written and illustrated by Jason Lethcoe, looks so similar at first glance that I had to check the names a few times to see that they were different artists. With further study ZOOM's art does start to look different, with a softer pencil style and more careful use of shading, but there still seems to be a definite style developing from Astonish books. It's very nice to look at, but I'm going to make a comment I don't make often with indie books - a little color would be nice. The first issue follows a bespectacled girl named Summer who's terribly unhappy at school, until she is taken to a new kind of school for kids with special abilities. Some kids will mention Tim Hunter – I mean, Harry Potter – right off the bat, and ZOOM will have to avoid that comparison if it can. Still, younger readers will probably enjoy the school for super-kids, and ZOOM looks to meet the same high standard for kids books that HEROBEAR has already set. A third Astonish title, FLIPPED, will be making its first appearance at the San Diego Comic Con, which I hope at least a few AICN readers will be stopping by and reporting from, since I won't be able to attend.
Here's some other titles:
ULTIMATE MARVEL- Marvel comics has been relaunching superhero titles, which at least saves kids the trouble of learning 30-odd years of character history.. then again, there goes 30-odd years of character history. Then again, Spiderman as written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Mark Bagely in ULTIMATE SPIDERMAN is very entertaining. Whoops, did I just recommend a Marvel book? There goes my indie cred.
THE ATOMICS – I've heard Mike Allred's superhero team book out of AAA Pop Comics is coming to an end, which I hope isn't true, but even so it's not too late to pick up this incredibly fun title. Allred, well known for his studio-hopping superhero MADMAN (scheduled to hit the screens as a Robert Rodriguez production), started this team book in the same Snap City universe to put together characters like Madman, It Girl and Lava Lass. Why will kids dig it? Young people have incredible bullshit detectors, and this is a book free of BS. It's not self-important, convoluted, issue-laden, or gimmicky. It's just a fun, retro-traditional 4-color superhero title. They'll also identify with the acne-prone 17-year-old time traveler and like the colorful costumes and creative baddies (mutant beatniks?).
(By the by, the new Oni Press Color Special features a really cool "Who Killed Madman?" story guest starring the detectives from POWERS and parodying a number of comics titles. Pick it up!)
PATTY CAKE, by Scott Roberts, SLG Publishing – I haven't seen much of this title, but I managed to grab an issue on a recommendation from Talkback and it looks like a fun book. The art reminds me of every original Cartoon Network offering, but it has its charm. And the title character is a cute little heck-raiser. Check out this page (CLICK HERE) for the official PATTY CAKE site, where you can order back issues and read a full PATTY CAKE story.
And there's always Bongo comics SIMPSONS line, with a number of titles including THE SIMPSONS, RADIOACTIVE MAN, and ITCHY AND SCRATCHY. The drawings look exactly like the animation on the show, and the humor is *sometimes* intact.
Of course these are only a few of the good titles out there.
PICK OF THE WEEK - PAUL AUSTER'S CITY OF GLASS
Not a kids title, in case you don't recognize that name right off. I didn't even know this graphic novel existed until a few months ago, when I was wandering around Listmania! at Amazon.com. This Neon Lit adaptation of the first novel of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy takes a confounding book and turns it into a graphic novel that is in its own way even more confounding. In the book, post-modernist author Auster takes the typical noir private detective figure and turns it on its head, taking the story in a direction you couldn't have expected from the initial events. This graphic novel adaption does not deal with the noir aspects to the same degree as the book, but focuses in on another theme that is a natural subject to tackle in this format – the nature of language.
It's the problem with transforming a novel to comics form, what to do with all those words. After all, novels are prone to long, expository explanations, detailed speeches, that may be necessary to understanding the plot. There is no room for this kind of wordiness in your typical comic, and when a writer tries to force it in it can become awkward and frustrating (see Chris Clairmont's latest run on X-Men, for example). But if you want to adapt a work and preserve the author's prose, especially with someone like Auster, you have a lot of words to deal with. To transpose a long speech, what do you show in the images? 20 frames of one person talking? Or do you separate out the text? The script adaption, by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli (who also did the artwork), does a terrific job of translating CITY OF GLASS into another medium, hitting all the right notes with their words and images. The best example is the artwork accompanying a long and haunting speech by the psychologically damaged Peter Stillman with a tour-de-force string of imagery. Stillman spent many years with no speech at all, locked away by his father so that he would grow up free of language and learn "God's Speech." Years later, after being rescued and reeducated, his manner of speech is strange and unnerving. We don't know this because we are told, we can tell by the way the speech balloons trail literally out of his mouth, from somewhere in his gut, unlike the traditional bubbles that float in midair. Throughout his speech the frame pulls us into extreme close-up, up to his face, down his throat, following the train of speech bubbles to his mind, where words come from television sets, ancient drawings, phonographs, a marionette.
" I am Peter Stillman. I say this of my own free will. That is not my real name. No. Of course, my mind is not all is should be, no. But nothing can be done about that. This is called speaking. The words come out for a moment and die. Strange, is it not? I myself have no opinion. If I can give you the words you need it will be a great victory. Thank you."
And that's only 9 pages of this interesting and often bewildering 138 page work. The ending, I'll let you know, is not one that ties things up neatly or really explains much of anything at all. It's an ending that made me turn back to the beginning and read the whole thing again. Personally, I like it that way. I don't need to know why, when I can think about it for myself. Just like I don't need to know why it rains frogs in Magnolia – it makes sense, in a way that you don't really need to explain. This isn't a traditional comics story, it's more of a meditation on ideas, and for me an exploration of the form.
One more thing you should know about this book – the primary advisor for "overall look, feel and design" is Art Spiegelman, better known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning MAUS. CITY OF GLASS, does have much of the same layout and style of that essential work, but its own unique flavor. It was published in 1994 by Avon books, and is currently out of print. Some comics stores may have it anyway, or you could order it online (CLICK HERE)
Next time I'll be heading back to the grown-up side of the store to look at POWERS, THE RED STAR, and whatever other interesting comics I come across.
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Lizzybeth
