The One Written Completely in Bizarro
Boy howdy, that would be annoying, right? Completely written in Bizarro? "Me am think this stink." And of course that would be for the good ones. And it would be torture to read!
Yeah, I thought about it. I thought about writing the entire thing in Bizarro. But I didn't do it.
And some people say I'm mean. There's your proof right there that I'm not. I didn't write this all in Bizarro.
Anyway, why the Bizzaro theme, no doubt you am not asking. Whoops. Something about the word Bizarro no make me want to talk like that. All right. I'll stop now.
I decided to do a Bizarro Floppy column because this will post the first Monday after the San Diego Comicon and probably three-quarters of the people who normally would be interested in reading about comic books on a Monday are going to be looking for anything other than comics to occupy their attention. If you went to the con, you're probably not even reading this. You're all comic-booked out. You scored your Movie Poop Shoot convention special and your heavy-as-a-Volkswagon copy of Blankets and you looked at all the girls walking around in next to nothing and you're, frankly, sick of it all. You want me to do an entire column of scone recipes. Well, you know what? I don't even know what scones are exactly. Some sort of rock-hard cookie-muffin. A cuffin. A muckie? Scones, who needs 'em?
Boy, I miss Title Bout, don't you? AK still posts all the time to the Pop Culture Bored and I honestly think someone should grab "TitleBout.com" or something and just paste his postings together and pretend he's still writing the column. You should do that. You should definitely do that. I'm too damned tired to do it myself. I'm exhausted. And frankly, I just got out of bed.
So what is bizarre about this installment of F is for Floppy? I'll tell you:
No floppy reviews.
That's right! Ha! You came here looking for reviews of those insubstantial pamphlet-like stapled thingies, man, you are OUT OF LUCK! FORGET IT! You get NOTHING!
Because on Bizarro World, F is for Floppy is about GRAPHIC NOVELS. Real, honest-to-Bob BOOKS. Weighty tomes, ponderous in their implications and much better paperweights than those mere monthly flyers.
That, and, I seriously had a stack of these babies piling up.
Onto the graphic novels.
I loved Brown's earlier graphic novel Clumsy and was really looking forward to Unlikely. It's subtitled "How I lost my virginity," and it's painful to experience Brown's raw confusion and unresolved despair over the failure of his first sexual relationship. It's also stunning to see how much visceral emotion he can bring to the story through his use of deceptively primitive storytelling techniques.
Unlikely, like its predecessor Clumsy, is a stark and seemingly unembellished narrative, like a long letter from a friend who chooses to communicate in pictures, but is not a terribly accomplished artist. Brown is an accomplished artist, though -- it's just that the form he's choosing creates a casual atmosphere that completely envelopes the reader in the smallest of details and the biggest of the emotional implications. Dan Clowes says it's "pretty much impossible to put down," and he's right.
In Unlikely, we follow Jeffrey as he meets Allisyn, a cute girl who he quickly develops an attraction to, but who warns him early on that she has a lot of "issues." These include a previous fondness for cocaine, a long list of former sex partners, and ongoing smoking habits both legal and not. She is, Jeffrey would have realized later in life, not going to be a good match for him. But he's young and before long he's in love and...
I've probably given away too much already. Suffice to say I love Unlikely. Brown has, in the space of two graphic novels, established himself as an emerging talent but a strong storyteller. Like he did with Clumsy, Brown has consulted with Paul Hornschemeier (creator of Forlorn Funnies) in the design of the book, and the result is a spare, elegant and enticing little package that contains one hell of a story, one with a haunting final moment. It won't be unfamiliar to readers -- these are pretty common experiences, I think -- but Brown's telling of his story is singularly addictive in nature. Grade: 4.5/5
This is a new format for The Norm, a slim, squarebound presentation that is different from previous releases but just as much fun inside.
The Norm Magazine: 12 Steps to Marriage is kind of a one-shot precursor to an ongoing magazine collecting Michael Jantze's whimsical, down-to-earth comic strips. In this special edition, he follows Norm in the run-up to his marriage to Reine, his longtime friend and newly-realized love. Jantze takes some existing strips and adds what appears to be a lot of new work to turn this into a true graphic novel rather than a collection of comic strips.
As you would expect if you're familiar with Jantze's work, he looks at the tiny details of Norm's life -- a life totally out of his control as he heads toward his wedding day, but out of control in that good way -- like you're jumping off into an unknown, but you know you're doing the best thing you could possibly do with your life.
The ongoing work Jantze has been doing in depicting the growing love between his characters has really been terrific, and this special issue serves as a great reward for longtime Norm readers. Along with Tom Beland's True Story: Swear to God, Jeffrey Brown's graphic novels and many other recent works, it's clear that many cartoonists are not only comfortable depicting romantic relationships in their work, but that they need to. It's gratifying that there's such diversity in the presentations, too. In The Norm Michael Jantze focuses on how the ordinary can be extraordinarily funny and touching, and with this and the promise of an ongoing Norm Magazine, readers are the ones who benefit the most. Grade: 4/5
He says it's a joke and we have to take him at his word; Warren Ellis does Star Trek, is what this is, with him as the captain.
If you think about it, the best of Ellis's books have all had himself as the lead. Jenny Sparks, Pete Wisdom, Spider Jerusalem, you could play the game all day of naming Ellis comics that feature ill-tempered chain-smoking would-be cynics with a nagging tendency to try to save the world. It may be a formula, after a fashion, but at its best it works very well.
Switchblade Honey isn't the best thing Ellis ever wrote, but he doesn't claim it is, either. He says it started as a bad joke, and all bad jokes should end this well, as a highly readable adventure story that plays with your expectations and has a ball while it does so.
McKinney's art is a large part of what makes this work -- he plays it straight and gives us a very nice rendition of a sci-fi future with big spaceships and interplanetary federations battling it out in the stars. McKinney's style is of a piece with other Ellis colleagues like Darick Robertson or Jacen Burrows, quietly spectacular but never getting in the way of the script.
As others have noted elsewhere, the resolution of the final conflict in the book's closing pages is extremely vague. This is either Ellis mocking the tendency of Star Trek to patch story deficiencies with pseudo-scientific gibberish, or it's poor storytelling. Either way it makes for a bit of an unsatisfactory conclusion, but Switchblade Honey is mostly rollicking good fun. Grade: 3.9/5
The Iron Wagon
By Jason
Published by Fantagraphics Books
There's something to be said for the way Fantagraphics is publishing Norweigan cartoonist Jason's oeuvre. The first volume, Hey, Wait... was a moving and deep exploration of a life from beginning to end. The second, Sshhhh was a collection of short stories that was not as effective as the first but which I've found has grown on me over time and re-reading. This new one sees Jason working in the same contemplative and measured style, but this time telling a Columbo-like murder mystery set nearly a century ago in Norway.
The Iron Wagon is Jason's adaptation of a detective story by Stein Riverton, only Jason reinterprets it with his trademark anthropomorphs, a daring move that might seem too bizarre by half in the hands of a less skilled cartoonist. Jason is master of mood and timing, though, and his characters by now are familiar and comforting. The story is told in black, white and rust and reproduced on top-quality cream-coloured paper, and the combination of technique and production lends an extraordinarily subtle pallette to the work, one much more powerful and affecting than you could expect from three colours and a choice of paper.
The mystery itself is lyrically paced, with long, languid periods of wry goings-on exploding into brief outbursts of strangeness and violence that spur a police investigation.
The novel celebrates misdirection, which itself turns out to be a form of deceit. Delightful as always, this new entry from Jason continues his reputation as one of today's best and most affecting cartoonists. Grade: 4.5/5
Project: Telstar
By Various
Edited and Designed by Chris Pitzer
Published by AdHouse Books
As with Unlikely above, Project: Telstar's creation included the design genius Paul Hornschemeier in the process, and the result of that and editor Chris Pitzer's creative vision ensures that this is fascinating to look at, if nothing else.
Numerous cartoonists, many of them quite noteworthy (including Hornschemeier), contribute stories of varying length on the subjects of robots and space. The elegant and unusual presentation (the right side of the book has curved edges, and metallic ink is used throughout) provide readers with something not quite like any other graphic novel. The use of black, white and metallic blue on the inside pages is breathtaking -- as with The Iron Wagon, one is amazed at how much depth can be added by the simple addition of one more colour to the pallette of an otherwise black and white work.
I do go on about the design, sadly because much of the content of the book failed to spark my interest. This is an anthology, and the usual caveats are in full effect about stories that vary wildly in quality and a few that perhaps should have been left out.
The good news is stories by Hornschemeier, Tom Gauld, Jeffrey Brown and the standout, Joel Priddy's "Long Slow Flight of the Ashbot," a stunning rumination on time as measured by inhuman calculations. Each of these creators really thinks through the parameters of the project and turns in something special. It's hard to be certain that the totality of the good work to be found here justifies the $16.95 price point, but overall I think this is an interesting experiment and if you're intrigued by the subject matter or interested in new designs in graphic novels, Project: Telstar may very well interest you. Grade: 3.5/5
Meat Haus #7: Love Songs
By Various
Published by Meat Haus Press
Here's a smart little anthology by some of the most gifted art comics creators around; Dash Shaw, Nate Powell and Farel Dalrymple are some of the standout talents that grace this issue, a thick collection centering around the theme of love songs.
Some of the pieces take their task fairly literally and craft images to accompany the lyrics of existing love songs, while others bear a more tangential relationship to the presumptive theme. Just about all the stories adhere to the urban/indy tone established by previous issues of the series, the obvious standard-bearer being Farel Dalrymple. His offering here is called "Centillion," and it is a gorgeous meditation on lonliness and loss of direction that spans a distance from the gritty streets of The City to the stars themselves. His cartooning style evokes Will Eisner and William Messner-Loebs even as his writing defies comparison -- a sui generis talent whose recent recognition for Pop Gun War is just the beginning of what could be a long and storied career. If you've heard about him but haven't seen his work yet, "Centillion" will be all you need to get hooked.
Brandon Graham is a new name to me, but his offering "Sugarless Candy" recalls Rick Geary as it paints a quick, convincing two-person character portrait that is a highlight of the collection. Dash Shaw's downbeat piece "no title" is extremely short but shows considerable growth and narrative focus over my previous exposure to his work in the exceptional Gardenhead. Nate Powell's "Invisibilities" continues the sharp, somewhat surreal style he demonstrated in Walkie Talkie, and I definitely want to see much more of his Dave Sim/Eddie Campbell-influenced material soon.
I know I've name-dropped a lot of creators in this review, but the artists of Meat Haus for the most part are standing well on the shoulders of giants. They are creating modern-day minor masterpieces here with clear inspiration from some of the best creators the artform has yet produced. As with all anthologies, there's some stories in here that will grab you more than others -- but there's definitely a lot of meat on Meat Haus's bones, lots of good reading that will expose you to the work of many significant new talents worth your attention. Some of these names will be genuine stars before long, so make sure you check this out so you can say you knew them when Grade: 4.5/5
Floppy as Hell -- Guest Review by Derek Martinez
Editor's Note: Yeah, I said there'd be no floppy reviews, but guess what? I lied! And that's okay because this is the Bizarro World! Ha!
Reload #3 (of 3)
By Warren Ellis, Paul Gulacy, and Jimmy Palmotti
Published by Homage/Wildstorm Comics
Well that was quick.
The second of Ellis’s forays into "pop comics" certainly ends much more enjoyably then the first one, Mek. That is to say, it doesn’t trip on the untied shoelaces of its high concept. It’s hard to do that when you have a story as straightforward as this has been. The President is assassinated by a former spook, spook is chased by main character Chris Ry- er, Royal, explains her motive (corrupt government) and prepares to unleash righteous vengeance. It feels almost like Tom Clancy by way of John Woo.
This issue is much like the past two have been. A fast paced, bullet filled story with nary any character development in sight. Also, all the Ellis-isms you’ve grow to love or hate are here as well: The cigarette smoker. The uber-confident and capable anti-hero. High and mighty villains (see: "bastards") and their pre-defeat speeches. If you read Orbiter and wondered where all the aspects that you’ve grown accustomed to in an Ellis book went to, well here they are. It doesn’t make for a less enjoyable story, just if those things bug you, be prepared. Otherwise, you have a well written action/political thriller comic with snappy dialogue and lots of dead people.
Granted, the book isn’t perfect. Each person in the book is more composite than actual character. There’s no real reason to root for anyone, so you’re emotionally detached from the story and find yourself basically waiting for the next gunfight (you won’t be waiting long). Plus, the conclusion seems a little low-key when compared to the rest of the story, and it’s not terribly satisfying either. Though in reality, that seems to be the whole point of something like this -- a summer blockbuster style comic. Still though, it never rises above the level of decent action story.
Of course, it should be noted that this kind of thing only works well if handled by a capable artist and Gulacy isn’t a slouch by any means. Utilizing a few different camera angles and montages, he rarely lets your eye rest for a minute during the action. As for the expressions, it seems as if he only had to draw three different ones: angry with mouth closed, angry with gritted teeth and angry while shouting. That’s not necessarily his fault, but the strength here is definitely in the action scenes themselves. Still, after seeing some of the rough pencils, detail is lost and just confirms to me that Palmotti isn’t the greatest inker in the business.
Overall, Reload the equivalent of the idea of the perfect one night stand: pretty, fast and once it’s over, there’s no strings attached. Even though I’m not sold on the other pop comics from Ellis, this one shows how the idea can work when there’s a decent story and an artist that fits the book. In addition, it’s sort of refreshing to most of the relatively slow story progression in most of the other comics on the shelves. So if you get tired of buying issue after issue of dialogue while waiting for your healthy dose of violence, then this is for you. Reload makes no apologies for what it is. However, if you’re looking for something deep and meaningful to be cherished and re-read, well you might want to look somewhere else. Rating: 3.5/5
-- Derek Martinez
Hello! This am the Introduction
Trolling the "comics news" sites for news from San Diego this past weekend, it really struck me that I don't miss the early days of Comic Book Galaxy when we had a comics news page. Actual, real news in the comics industry is really rare -- and the pages of the print version of the Comics Journal cover everything that matters quite well and in great detail. I got to thinking about this when I was looking for any news from the San Diego Comicon and, well, sentences like "The big news at Saturday’s DCU panel, was the word that Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo have a couple of projects in the works at the publisher, as well as the announcement that Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale are now exclusive with DC, and have a Catwoman project lined up," from Newsarama pretty much sum it up. I mean seriously, if either of those items strike you as being worthy of the phrase "big news," you seriously need to get out of the fucking house more. Althought I'm sure the New York Times will be all over that Catwoman news any minute now -- stay off the phone, Jeph, in case they call.
As I write this on Sunday morning the convention's been going since Wednesday night and I've yet to find a single story worth mentioning in my weblog, never mind justifying actual coverage as a news story. Tidbits such as Grant Morrison leaving New X-Men or Jeff Loeb and Tim Sale now being exclusive at DC are interesting as gossip -- is Marvel really losing as much ground as it appears to the casual observer? -- but it's difficult to see how any grownup could take anything other than minor, perverse amusement in such non-events.
One story worth mentioning is the well-deserved Eisner Award handed to Greg Sadowski for his unbelievably well-done B. Krigstein Vol. 1. The book set a new standard in comic book journalism, and it will be a long time before Fantagraphics and Sadowski's achievement is matched or exceeded. You can read the entire list of Eisner Winners right here.
Finally...
As you may be aware, last week I tried to raise some cash in part to help keep the site going. I can tell you that the near-crisis is past, and that's in no small part thanks to some of the great supporters of Comic Book Galaxy.
If you've been enjoying the site, I do ask that from time to time if you have the inclination and resources, you go to Paypal.com and direct your donation to alandaviddoane@yahoo.com . You can also use the Paypal button under the menu buttons on the upper left side of this page; that's set for donations of $5.00. Every little bit helps, honestly, and anything you can do is most appreciated and goes toward my ability to continue to keep this site online and free for everyone. With hundreds of pages of content and images, believe me, this is becoming a more expensive proposition every month. I obviously do it because I love it, and I'd love to keep doing it. You can help make that happen. You can also support the site by bidding on Comic Book Galaxy's eBay auctions. A new batch of comics and graphic novels went up over the weekend, so have a look at the bargains and see if there's anything you want to add to your library.
And so we conclude another exciting edition of F is for Floppy. My thanks to Derek Martinez for taking the time to share his thoughts on Reload. Make sure you drop by his weblog for more comics views and check out his eBay auctions where he's offering up some incredible bargains on comics and graphic novels to help defray the enormous cost of getting married. Next week we'll get back to normal with more floppy reviews and whatever other surprises I can cook up for you between now and then.