We3 Deluxe Edition Arrived in August (Morrison and Quitely)

I get nervous when I come home and Lucy, Scout and Jeff are all sitting around in their armor.

If you were to tell me that I would one day read a very Rated-R comic book about cyborg house pets armed to the teeth and on the run, written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely (the team behind All Star Superman and Flex Mentallo), I would start wondering exactly how long you'd been scanning my brain while I slept to learns all my hopes and dreams.

But after Morrison fled Marvel back in the mid-00's, he returned to DC/ Vertigo where he went into a creative tornado, spinning out stuff I absolutely loved like Vimanamara.  But more importantly, he and Quitely created We3, likely one of my top ten or so favorite comics.  

August saw the release of a new, Deluxe Edition of We3, which I recently read.  It has more pages than the original collection or issues, fills in a bit more of the story, and it made me cry a little bit again, even if this is at least the 12th time I've read that comic.

Not only is the story terribly heartbreaking, but to me, Quitely is one of the brilliant artists working in any medium right now.  We're just lucky to get him working in comics.  I don't know who designs these pages, but... man.

For such a great package, the We3 book is very reasonably priced.

 U R a Gud Dog

Signal Watch Watches: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Anyone who brings up the Planet of the Apes franchise around me is going to regret that slip of the tongue. I love the Apes. I love not just the premise of Cheston landing on a strange planet where Apes evolved and man did not (ahem, SPOILERS) but the twist ending that lets you know this was a Rod Serling Joint.

I love that there are four more Apes movies of varying quality with a bizarre and twisted time-travel logic to them. I love Roddy McDowell as Cornelius and Caesar, and Kim Hunter as Zira. I love Cheston as Cheston on a planet full of intelligent Apes. I love the fact that Beneath the Planet of the Apes stars James Franciscus, who is sort of a mini-Cheston AND Cheston.

I'm not old enough to have participated in the Apes phenomenon the first time around, and while I watched the movies as a kid (and liked them), it was in college that I became obsessed. Like all good sci-fi, it was a terrific inversion of our world and our way of looking at our fellow beings.

Signal Watch Reads: Brubaker and Phillip's "Last of the Innocent" - pure noir on the rocks

Holy smokes.  This week saw the release of another issue of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phllips' creator-owned but published by Marvel title Criminal.  Criminal is an ongoing series, but Brubaker tells different stories every few issues with new characters, etc...  in short, its not an ongoing series following a single character.

I picked up the first issue or two and about that time i was changing comic shops, etc... and lost track of the title.  With issue 1 of the recent story, Last of the Innocent, I decided to pick up the comic again.  And I'm absolutely pleased I did so.

As someone who enjoys his crime fiction as much as his heroic fiction, Last of the Innocent hits all of the noir criteria, following stand-ins for the Riverdale High gang of Archie comics in familiar faces such as Archie, Jughead, Veronica, Betty, Moose, Reggie and others.  But to see Jughead's gluttony explained as part of an addictive personality, Veronica's rich-girl self-centeredness taken to the logical extreme, etc... by the character's 30's sets up the perfect noir scenario.

I'm making this sound like something it isn't, which is an unoriginal, cutesy exploitation of the original Archie material.  Instead, the story reads much more like straight noir with flashbacks and reflections of Riley Richard's past remembered through rose colored glasses.

The series has a few more issues to go (this week saw issue 3 hit the stands), but each chapter does what a good noir does with each twist, and ratchets up the tension around Riley and the supporting characters.

The artwork, flipping between Phillips' now trademark rough-and-tumble style and a cartoony, kids'-book feel for flashbacks, is a huge pleasure.

Highly recommended.

Signal Watch Watches: Attack the Block

A while back SimonUK mentioned he'd somehow already seen Attack the Block at a festival, and vouched for it, stating that when it came to Austin this summer, we really needed to go see it.  Some of the producers and talent involved are from the group that brought us Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, some loving takes on familiar genres, infused with smart-alec humor and a fan's know-how enough to both play with conventions and know what's important about retaining some of those conventions.  But all without getting too precious, I think.

Attack the Block does not, I repeat, does not feature Simon Pegg, but I promise you it is still a very good movie.

Signal Watch Reads: Power Lunch (by J. Torres and Dean Trippe)

Power Lunch
First Course
by J. Torres & Dean Trippe
lettered by Ed Brisson
designed by Keith Wood
edited by James Lucas Jones

So, one tough thing about running a comics blog is that sometimes we are asked to preview materials and write a review.  And sometimes we read something and we try to be as fair as possible, even when we know that the item we're reviewing isn't something we'd normally read because of genre, topic, etc...  or worse, sometimes its something we didn't like.

I'm happy to say that I just don't have that problem here in any way, shape or form. I just straight up dug this fun, well written, well designed/ drawn all-ages book. 

Signal Watch Reads: Superman 713

Superman 713
Grounded: Part 11
Written by Chris Roberson
Art: pages 1, 4-10: Diogenes Neves @ Oclair Albert
pages 2 & 3: Eddy Barrows & JP Mayer
pages 11-20: Jamal Igle & Jon Sibal
Colorist: Marcello Maiolo
Letterer: John J. Hill
Cover: John Cassaday & David Baron (Jeff Smith, variant)
Editors: Wil Moss & Matt Idleson

Two notes before talk more about this issue: 
(1) This is the issue that follows the kitty/Muslim controversy that got Roberson's issue #712 frozen and replaced with an inventory story from Kurt Busiek's post-Infinite Crisis run on Superman. 
(2)  This is the penultimate issue of the Roberson run on Superman, and while we've got one more issue, I'm a little bummed that there's only 20 more pages of Roberson's work (for now).

Just as its annoying when networks show episodes of a TV show out of order, we could have been very, very lost with the release of this issue had Roberson not done so much to make each issue episodic.  We may have missed a few story and character beats, but we're not utterly lost as Superman wanders into Oregon.  We've just missed a leg of Superman's walk, and we can only hope that the division running collected editions will see fit to include the missing chapter in the collected run.

Its unfortunate that we have to keep an odd editorial decision in mind in approaching the story, but (as we say almost daily at my office) "it is what it is".  And what it is is a really fun issue, and an appropriate one to lead toward a conclusion of Grounded, but to put a bow on the conclusion of this volume of Superman. 

Signal Watch Watches: Aliens (1986) at the Paramount!

The first time I saw the film Aliens, I was in a middle-school academic writing competition.

Somebody anticipated that a bunch of bored kids were going to destroy the school unless properly amused between events, and so they set up a bunch of chairs in a tiered music room, and a few big TV's all playing the same movie.  And some genius put in Jim Cameron's Aliens and then turned off the lights.

Now, Aliens is an R-Rated movie, which used to kind of mean something, especially to a herd of middle school students, and I believe we silently agreed, as kids do, that we all wanted to watch this movie and the only way to do that was if absolutely nobody said one word to the adults and teachers running the event that we all knew perfectly well we weren't supposed to see this movie.

It's called Super-Social Networking: The Kryptonian

Hey, ya'll!

As much time as I spend on The Signal Watch, we're just one site.  There are all kinds of nice folks out there doing good work, and, sure, there are Superman fan pages out there, but this is 2011, the age of Friendster (Tom is still my only friend... ) and whatnot.  Alone, the Signal Watch is but one site.  Together, we are a full-on-barrage of Superman, comics and pop culture information!

Let me introduce you guys to The Kryptonian, a Super-Site from right here in sunny Austin, Texas!

Anyway, somehow I missed this, but it seems our friends at The Kryptonian recently spotlighted The Signal Watch on their site.   We are completely flattered, and we want to make sure we're highlighting their work a bit more than the link we've made permanently under the Superman-related sites over there in the menu bar.

Aaron covers Superman news, manages a Super-forum, talks comics and movies and generally has put together a site we're visiting now on a daily basis.  He's building a neat community, and I look forward to watching and participating in the site.

Website
Facebook
Twitter

Signal Watch Watches: The Hustler

So, I finally watched The Hustler.  Oh, I've tried to watch it before.  I've rented the movie at least three times, put it on the DVR, etc... and failed to watch it every time.  I have missed screenings at The Paramount, etc...  but Thursday evening I joined Jason, Amy and PaulT (aka: "The Commodore") for a viewing.

this is how people crowd around when I'm blogging

Noir Watch: The First issue of Brubaker's "Criminal: Last of the Innocent" is great comics

Confession time:  As weird as it might seem, somehow I didn't get past the second issue of Brubaker's creator-owned series, Criminal.  I don't even remember what happened, because I don't recall having ill-feelings toward the series.  I suspect that I always planned to pick it up in TPB, and then just... didn't.  Likely because its being published by Marvel, and I don't really scour the Marvel solicits too hard these days (oddly, my Marvel purchases are limited to only a few things, including Brubaker's Captain America, so its not like I've had an embargo on his work).

Brubaker's series, as I understand it, tells a new story with new characters for each storyline.  Gien the nature of crime movies and stories, it seems really how it should be.  Different tales from the mind of a guy who knows his territory. 

Yes, if you're going to evoke pulp-noir nostalgia, start with the cover

Signal Watch Reads: Superman 711

Superman 711
Written by:  Chris Roberson (with nominal input via JMS)
Penciller:  Eddy Barrows
Inker:  JP Mayer
Colors:  Rod Reis
Letters:  John J Hill
Editors:  Wil Moss & Matt Idleson

insert "gets a real charge out of" or "finds this shocking" joke here

With each passing issue, you can only hope that DC realizes what they've got on their hands with Chris Roberson's Superman. I am certain editors Idleson and Moss know, and I can only cross my fingers and hope that after this Grounded storyline is in the rearview mirror, they have plans to let Roberson bring his magic back to Metropolis.

Signal Watch Reads: iZombie Volume 1 - Dead to the World

I'm not so much worn out on actual zombie movies and comics as I am on the "let us beat this meme into the ground until its an embarrassment" that has come along with the past five or six years in the geek-o-sphere. At the end of the day, I really liked Dawn of the Dead when I finally watched it last fall (it was also about 8x better than Snyder's remake, which people raved about, much to my confusion), I really liked TV's Walking Dead, and I only recently learned that CSPAN is not actually a network dedicated to showing the droning, rambling undead, but until that point, I'd been quite a fan.

So I was a bit skeptical of hopping onboard DC/ Vertigo's new series iZombie, despite the art being handled by Mike Allred, one of my favorite comic artists. Marvel kick started the whole zombie phenomenon with the one-note joke that was Marvel Zombies (and which was a funny good idea for, maybe, a one-shot, not 5 years worth of comics), and virtually every other publisher picked up on the fad, culminating in DC's Blackest Night series, which wasn't really zombies, but that's splitting hairs.

Still, the comics internets really seemed to LIKE iZombie, which means almost nothing on a typical day. I didn't know if this was more "oh, Zombies! He he he!" geekdom just leftover from the zombie craze, if this was one of those cases of the tastemakers seemingly randomly picking a comic or character to champion as seems to be SOP in the comics internets (ex: lets all suddenly love Thor!), or if there was something genuinely to the raves.

As I mentioned above, I really like Mike Allred's work, but I've not always been a fan of the comics he actually works on. I burnt out on X-Force pretty quickly, and I never could stick with Madman (which was weird, because it seemed like it should have been exactly in my wheelhouse). But the comic was written by Austin-local, Superman-scribe and much-buzzed-about Chris Roberson, and I figured that was at least worth a shot.

I'm happy to report that the money spent was well worth it. Yes, Allred seems to just get better, and he seems like he's having the same fun here I felt he was having on those early issues of X-Force. He and his wife, colorist Laura Allred, are hitting on all cylinders here. The body horror of the comic is toned down through the Allreds' style to keep the focus on the story, and to push the story along (one can imagine what this book would have looked like under, say, Juan Jose Ryp - who does what he does well, but it would have been a much different comic).

Of course an Allred-drawn female protagonist looks like a very pretty girl with a migraine, or perhaps working on two days without sleep.  In this case its "Gwen", our protagonist/ not-shambling-mess zombie of the title.

yes, brains will be consumed

Gwen is dead, yes.  But she can avoid becoming a Night of the Living Dead-style zombie by consuming a human brain every 4 weeks or so.  Inbetween...  she's just kind of pale and can eat whatever she pleases.  No, we don't see monstered-out Gwen in this book (spoiler!).

Roberson isn't out to create a horror anthology with iZombie, and he isn't exactly playing to the same tone as, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but he is out to create a fun and and surpising book that manages to defy expectations in enough places that it does feel like Roberson is doing something new and different using very familiar tropes.  The first volume's true climax includes the imparting of essential knowledge to push the character (and, one imagines, the supporting cast) forward and out of what's become routine for the undead of the cast.

In many ways, I'm much more interested in the world Roberson puts on the page, and exploring how that world operates than I would be in building toward some big-boss fight.  If he can manage to make the concept of a zombie novel in the middle of 2011, then I've got high hopes.

Here be spoilers

I'd be lying if I didn't say I'm concerned about cliches appearing.  An ancient religious order dedicated to wiping out the paranormal has become so common, its now a standard down at SyFy Network original programming.  Let alone "the hunter and the hunted feel a mutual attraction" is a standard trope in any genre.

I'm not here to offer Roberson advice.  The man knows what he's doing, and for all I know, he's got some off-the-wall plans for what looks like a "been there, done that" storyline.

Endeth the spoilers

The Monster Squad

In a few issues, Roberson has created a memorable cast, and its going to be the "community" feel of the book that will see this title sink or swim.  From Gwen to her ghostly BFF to the hangdog "Scott" (an unfortunate were-Terrier), a clique of vampires and a mysterious, bandaged stranger...  its a good little group that Roberson and Allred have put together here.

There are plenty of seeds planted for at least two years' worth of stories, and I hope Roberson gets a chance to explore them all.

The book manages to pull off an interesting balancing act of bringing to life horror monsters in an almost "day in the life" approach, and makes them likeable without resorting to getting twee or overtly cutesy, defanging the concept utterly, or transporting the concept to another genre in order to make it "relatable" (see:  Monster High).  In short, it never gets turned into kiddy material just because its also not a horror book.

I'll definitely be picking up the next volume, and I'll put this on the "recommended list" if the next volume can maintain the spirit and style.

Signal Watch Reads: Superman #709

SUPERMAN 709
Written by J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI & CHRIS ROBERSON
Art by EDDY BARROWS & J.P. MAYER
Cover by JOHN CASSADAY

For the record:  I suspect The Flash is quite a bit faster than Superman

One of my favorite comics is the original Superman/ Flash race, and I keep a copy of that issue in a frame on my wall.  You aren't going to get an objective review out of me when you add The Flash and Superman together.  And you will then see me suggesting you check out:

• Superman Vs. The Flash
• Any and all Showcase Presents: The Flash collections
• And just the same for the Showcase Presents: Superman collections

In this issue, Superman's trek takes him to Colorado where we find Superman wrapping things up after an off-panel team-up with Super-Chief.  And here I'd like to digress...

I'd love to see a new Superman Family book like we had back in the day, including the B-listers, supporting casts and to give creators a chance to work on characters like the aforementioned "Super-Chief" (and I find the idea that Green Bay has a super-hero pretty awesome/ hilarious).  Why DC hasn't launched anthology books for the Super and Bat-books is a puzzle wrapped in a mystery...

But if Roberson is wondering - yes, I'd pay money to see more of Super-Chief (but will not pay to see Supertramp).

Anyway...

Superman enters Boulder, Colorado where the world around him begins changing to a replica of Krypton.  Squinting, Superman's supervision detects that its Barry Allen/ Flash working at super-super-speed to construct costumes and replicas of Krypton's past so quickly, the full scale changes are happening in the blink of an eye, while Barry recites Kryptonian history at super-super-speed.

I'm not really interested in spoilers or rehashing the plot, but there is a bit of a Flash/ Superman race in the story, and that is a good thing.

I've commented before how Roberson's stories seem to harken back to the Elliot S! Maggin and Cary Bates stories I've only really become familiar with in the last four years or so (thanks, back-issue bins!), and the splash on page 4 of this issue just screams "Bronze Age" to me.  And that is a good thing.  

As I grew older, had a job, etc...  something I liked about the line of DC characters was that: where Marvel's books (especially X-Men) maintained the feeling of getting jammed together like high schoolers, DC's characters had an interesting collegiality about them, especially when Morrison and Waid were handling the JLA title.  Sitting at the JLA conference table with coffee while talking about how to deal with a crisis actually made complete sense to me, and seeing them call one another by their first name was always a reminder that these characters knew and trusted one another, but that they could be honest with each other (how many other people get to call Batman "Bruce" when he's in the mask?  There's something to that.).

A civil conversation between Flash and Superman is a welcome moment in the story, just old friends having a bite - even if its at superspeed.  Even if I felt that Marvel's characters were a bit high-school-ish, Marvel always understood that unless you have those character moments, the stories don't matter.  DC definitely tilts toward plot-driven tales, but if we can't see who Superman and The Flash are...  why would anyone care?  And isn't it easier to speak in the broad terms found on message boards and comment sections if you can't point to the specifics found in these sorts of scenes?

Its refreshing to see Flash just be up-front with Superman about his recent trauma, and how he's not surprised if Clark is a bit off.  As much as the JLA can be about bringing together a strategically superior fighting force (which... okay, that's every team book) it can also be a place to acknowledge the similarities and differences of these icons as characters.*  This was something Brad Meltzer was about to do with his JLA re-launch, but, man... did people not get what he was up to. 

The issue also gets bonus points for references to Barry's awakening to his own powers (the first use of his superspeed was catching a falling tray of food in a diner), but will likely be best known for the already-famous insertion of the internet meme "Lex Luthor took 40 cakes" directly into the story.  And that is terribly awesome.

Also, this issue may go down in history as being the one who's preview featuring a Superman/ Flash race got so heated in the comment section that DC finally killed the comments on their own blog.  Slow clap, comics fans.

Roberson does what he's done remarkably well since taking over the title:  he's repurposed the Grounded storyline and actually played off the weaknesses in JMS's original plan, addressing where JMS went wrong "in story" and made it part of the narrative. 

I suspect that this issue, which drops a few hints at the "and something is very wrong with Superman" is the breather en route to the conclusion of Grounded.  We don't have all that many issues left to go, and one would suspect that with the Doomsday storyline happening in Action and other titles, we're due for a big conclusion here. 

I mentioned in a previous column (not a Superman review) that I had written DC a letter asking that they consider keeping Chris Roberson on the Superman title after the conclusion of Grounded.  I'd reiterate that sentiment here.  Roberson gets the character of Superman as well as any I've seen handed the keys to the kingdom, and it would be a shame to see DC pull the plug on he and Paul Cornell in Action Comics when those books are as strong as they've been in decades.


*which is one of my primary reasons for believing JLA should always feature a team that includes a minimum of 4 of the original 7.  Otherwise its a band touring as The Beach Boys, but without a single founding member.

Science! (we get no aliens - this time) and DC Comics' REBELS

Science! and aliens and not science

The other night I saw an article that led me to believe that SCIENCE had found evidence of extraterrestrial life.  I posted about it here, and then set about wondering why this wasn't front page news.

I thank Leaguers Fantomenos and Horus Kemwer for chiming in and helping out a bit in the comments section.

In the past 20 years, America has turned on its scientists as those lab-coated jerks keep (a) telling us things that are personally inconvenient to our butter-soaked, gasoline chugging lifestyles (b) refuse to just say "because of magic" and (c) keep finding new and amazing ways to kill us.  But I'd guess the number one reason we hate science is that it doesn't work in the way we were led to believe by the Professor on Gilligan's Island and cold remedy commercials.

While The News would lead you to believe that all scientists are equal, and that if they can find two scientists to disagree on front of cameras that it must mean that we just don't know, that's not really true either.  It means that they managed to find a scientist who disagreed, but that may be one scientist in a field of thousands.  Which is why SCIENCE relies upon peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, which basically give a few experts in the field a chance to review conclusions of a study before a scientist has a chance to make a jerk of himself and confuse the public.

This isn't to say that everyone who ignores the usual scientific channels is wrong, but its worth looking long and hard at the credentials of both the author and published journal before saying "these are facts".

Now, as Joe Public, I generally guess that when the usual news outlets report on "studies" in "research journals", they mean that they're looking at journals with a reputable peer-review and an actual research institute backing the journal.  I do not assume that the news is just looking at some dude's website and declaring "Science!".  However, that appears to be exactly what happened with the "hey, aliens!" story from the weekend.

It does occur to me that if we DID know of alien life, it might also be true that shadowy forces would try to cover up our knowledge of aliens.

they're making another one of these dumb movies, btw

So its not entirely outside the scope of possibility that President Obama spent Saturday afternoon being debriefed about some Omega Protocol being put into play to discredit the "alien bacteria" story.  But, until someone produces an actual alien, I'm going to go with the fact that the journal carrying the alien bacteria story looks about as professional as the average Office Admin's first attempts with DreamWeaver (download Open Journal System, Cosmology) and has an agenda to prove the existence of aliens.  So, there you go.

REBELS

I only read the trade collections, and the series just got canceled, but you know what book I loved from DC Comics?  REBELS.

I think in this issue are heroes are more "running away" than "saving the day"

The basic premise of the series is that Vril Dox is a clone of Superman mainstay-baddy Brainiac, and using the intellectual might at his disposal, Dox set up an interplanetary PAX-for-hire.  Unfortunately, his use of robot drones as enforcers means that his forces are co-opted and used to subjugate the very planets they were intended to protect.  On top of this, the droids are used to keep the population docile while an interplanetary parasite known as Starro invades whole sectors of the galaxy.

Our man Vril joins with a ragtag band of pirates and thugs (and Vril is no Dudley Do-right himself) in order to take back the galaxy and get back to making gobs of money.

Its a really well written and well-paced story, even to the point that a two-issue diversion tied in with Blackest Night fits neatly into the plot.  It also manages to explore DC's oft-neglected outerspace cultures and characters in a away that feels natural, even if the interplanetary jumping feels a bit like people moving from town to town inside of a single state.

And as far as amoral anti-heroes go (who might still have some tiny, on-life-support bit of conscience left), Vril Dox makes for a pretty great central figure.  The writers have to remain two or three steps ahead of the readership and the other characters.  And, in fact, they manage to pull off pretty definite characterization for most characters, which is no small feat with a sprawling cast like you see in REBELS.

No matter who he's dealing with, Vril is always one step a-head

Sadly, REBELS did not feature any DC staple characters, and no comic company seems to be able to deal with the mass conversion of its readership to trades and illegal scans.  Just last week, the series was canceled.

I have to say - I think DC would do well to get on the same printing schedule as Boom! and others, printing the trade collections of an arc within weeks of the release of the most recent issue (ex:  issues 1-6 finish in March, the trade arrives in April).  Frankly, they seemed to be on that schedule but recently backed off for reasons I can't begin to fathom.

The REBELS books read very well as trades, and the first three trades will actually bring you through a very satisfying story arc.  I'm on the 4th trade right now, and I'm a little sad that I can only expect a couple more collections before we call it a day.

Signal Watch Watches "The Big Heat"

Gloria Grahame cannot just come over to say "hi"

For Christmas Jason got me two Noir collections, and I kicked off watching them by, oddly, turning to the one movie I had previously seen, Fritz Lang's The Big Heat. I remembered having had watched this on cable a long time ago, that it had Gloria Grahame* and that I'd really liked it it, but I didn't remember: The Big Heat is a startlingly good movie, and not just in a "wow, that was a fun thing to watch" sort of way.

I don't think I need to tell anybody here that Fritz Lang knows how to put a movie together, but, holy smokes... if you're looking for a movie that fits together like the innards of a Swiss watch, its going to be tough to beat this one. Even the humdrum domestic situations shown are part of definite narrative and character arcs. And for a film from 1952, there's some pretty tough stuff that happens to all of our characters.

The movie follows the course of what happens when a good/ virtuous cop in a corrupt department investigates the suicide of a high-ranking police official. There's dames, gangsters, Lee Marvin, Glenn Ford and all kinds of good stuff in what's almost more a good cop thriller than true Film Noir.

Across the board, the actors playing our main characters put in solid performances.  Ford and Grahame have a lot of territory to cover from the start of their arcs to film's end, and you always believe them.  A young Lee Marvin shows signs of the ass-kicking Lee Marvin we'd all come to know and love.  Like a lot of Noir, but different from a lot of other movies of the era, the women in the movie are sharply written and are as much a part of the story as the men.

The Big Heat is a popular movie among a certain crowd, and so its no huge surprise that almost 60 years on its been imitated to the point where some of the shock value of the original is diluted.  But that doesn't mean it doesn't hold up to a viewing today.  And a darn good one at that.

Anyway, recommended.

Clark Kent's Dad will choke a lady for getting in his way!

*always a good reason to watch a movie

Reading Comics: The Damned

The Damned, Volume 1: Three Days Dead
Writer: Cullen Bunn
Artists: Brian Hurtt



On Free Comic Book Day this year, I was fortunate enough to interview and then meet the creators of The Sixth Gun from Oni Press. At that time I picked up their previous effort from Oni, The Damned Vol. 1. I do want to acknowledge the generosity of writer Cullen Bunn and artist Brian Hurtt in previously submitting to an interview.

The Damned takes place is a world where the demons of the underworld (horned, bestial, but mostly roughly humanoid) are alive and well and have integrated seamlessly into the criminal underworld of a Prohibition-era America. Crime bosses tend to have ram-like horns and sign deals in blood. The narrative leaves it unclear in this volume exactly how long demons have been up to no good in the mortal world, or exactly how much John Q. Public knows about who, exactly, is running rackets in their city as "mortals" are seamlessly integrated into the mob. It's an open question, but the treatment of the topic is so matter-of-fact, exploring those issues was obviously planned to be left to later stories.

Our protagonist, a more-or-less-mortal named "Eddie" employs a unique talent, acquired when Eddie sold his soul for some favor and became cursed. He can be killed, and die, but the instant someone touches him, they take on his latest wound. Death has become an inconvenience for Eddie, and occasionally a useful tool in his profession. Hired by a mob boss to track down a missing demon in town to negotiate a deal between two gangs, Eddie stumbles onto a bit of a mystery that could result in the eruption of gang war.

Fans of The Coen Brothers film, Miller's Crossing, or readers of the works of Dashiell Hammett, will very quickly begin to recognize the style employed by Bunn, in structure, dialog and the types of characters that dominate the story. It's a risky choice to reflect works as beloved as Continental Op stories, or a film as well known as Miller's Crossing. Fortunately, Bunn's narrative doesn't simply follow the beats of better-known works, especially as the mix of plots includes a supernatural bent, and a distinctly supernatural B-plot you aren't going to find in a Hammett novel.

The tale isn't quite as overly complicated as, say, Red Harvest or The Dain Curse. It would be interesting to see Bunn flex his muscles and see how close he could get, but in comics there's always a page-count per-issue to worry about, as well as how many issues the publisher is willing to support. In the pages he's got, and with all of the balls that Bunn is juggling in the story, with multiple plots, characters and their relationships to detail, I think he does pretty darn well.

The dialog follows the snappy patter of the genre, including homage to the tough guy slang in other works, and I do like most of the characters, given the amount of time most have to establish themselves. Eddie is a bit of an open book, and its clear Bunn intended for his story to unravel in subsequent volumes. Like many crime-novel protagonists, he's an insider, and its hard not to like Eddie's cynical, world-weary (even in a world with horned mob bosses) acceptance of his lot, but, of course, Eddie's got a past and something of a heart, and those things don't usually help characters in stories like these.

As a guy who likes to doodle, I can't really say how much I envy Brain Hurtt's style. While I have no doubt his work is slightly more detailed in The Sixth Gun, I continue to be wowed by his ability to stay on model with characters that skew cartoony (in comparison to, say, an Ivan Reis) while using the looseness of the style to articulate more with his characters than 90% of the heroic posing of DC's B-list hero books. I'm just a big fan of this guy, and need to re-crack my Queen & Country collections as he was responsible for art chores on some rotations through the series.

As a fan of the crime/ gangster genre, and someone known to read a fair amount of fantasy work, I found the book a fun read. While enough of a puzzle to keep it interesting, the story never feels bogged down by what could have been lots of exposition or set-up. The world Bunn and Hurtt create is an enticing one, and one that seems could carry on for a few more tales. The story seems to be arching its way toward a series by the conclusion of the first collection, and with or without Eddie along, its not too hard to imagine how Bunn and Hurtt could expand on the premise.

While they're currently set to work on The Sixth Gun, one must assume that a trade of the second run of The Damned comics is coming, which I look forward to picking up.

In the meantime, I recommend hitting your local comics shop to check out Bunn and Hurtt's comic for yourself.

Reading: The Sixth Gun

So, around Free Comic Book Day, I had a great opportunity when Austin Books hooked me up with an interview with Cullen Bunn (writer) and Brian Hurtt (artist), the creators of The Sixth Gun.

Well, I figure I should probably talk about the actual comic now that I done read it.

You can check my policy regarding how I review stuff, but I basically am going to promise to go ahead and give you my honest opinion, even if the writers and artists were very kind to me.

So... It's very nice to say: this comic is really, really fun.

And well written and drawn, too.

The basic plot is a mix of fantasy/horror and post Civil War old west, complete with Pinkertons, Mexican-style missions, haunted trees of the damned, and a cursed six shooter (our titular Sixth Gun). We meet at least four primary characters, get a hint of the set up and characters, and a look at Hurtt's visual style for the series.

I don't know why the mix works, but the issue had the rare quality of making me curious to see "oh, geez... what happens next?" not so much because of any particular plot point, but because the world Bunn and Hurtt have developed feels rich enough, and the characters at once new and iconic enough, that I want to see how things unfold.


No idea why, but I liked this guy immediately.

I should note, as strong as I found Bunn's story, I really liked Hurtt's style. (a) All of the characters are visually unique, and detailed in a way. (b) He's got a great eye for design on the supernatural elements in a sort of mid-20th Century horror comics style.

Anyhow, I'm glad to be able to recommend issue #1. You can read a free preview (FREE!) online right here.

Your local comic shop may well have copies remaining from Free Comic Book Day. If you can't find a copy, issue #1 and issue #2 are being released simultaneously! Look for them both on 7/14. (thanks to artist Briann Hurt for the info on the release dates!)

Rick Geary and Murder Most Foul Makes for Good Comics!

So let’s discuss some comics, shall we?

In addition to super-heroics, last year I picked up Rick Geary’s “The Lindbergh Child” from NBM’s ComicsLit imprint. Outside of a few pop-culture references and a barely remembered Wikipedia reference I’d one done, I knew very little about the actual Lindbergh case.

For the past few years, cartoonist Rick Geary has devoted a bulk of his work to the creation of non-fiction accounts of very real life murder. Wacky fun, I know, but Geary's skillful storytelling makes for some great comics.



The murders, while infamous, are not romanticized, and the details around the case are relayed in much the same manner as classic Dragnet “just the facts”, rather than any sort of case-building-by-way-of-historical-fiction, that it’s not hard to imagine most other creators might pursue in order to convey the story. Geary knows that the facts stand on their own; and while it’s almost unavoidable that he might focus on certain specifics he finds engaging, he lets the reader’s inference draw the horror of the murder scenes between text and his well chosen images. That said, Geary's dry delivery isn't without snarky observation or a bit of well-phrased sarcasm.

Because Geary relies upon well documented, true-life crimes, which occurred during the 19th and early 20th Century (many fall under the banner of "A Treasury of Victorian Murder"), the stories often come to confounding and messy conclusions which are hard to imagine in the age where a simple telephone call and running a driver’s license could be enough to corner a suspect. The stories are filled in as much as possible in these regards, including theories, false leads, and fates of major players.

The cartooning style (and it is cartooning, mixed with fantastic bits of illustration when it comes to important details, such as the blueprint of, say, Lizzy Borden’s house), may take some getting used to for the uninitiated. However, the exagerated cartooning enables Geary to draw distinct and representative characters for each person involved, with tremendous expressive quality.



Of the books I've read so far, the tales where I knew little to nothing have been most rewarding. "The Beast of Chicago" and the aforementioned "The Lindbergh Child" kept me up for hours after reading them, following up with additional web research, as the stories were so incredible, but completely true. ("The Beast of Chicago" was particularly fascinating as I knew literally nothing of the case until page 1.)

NBM Publishing has placed several pages of "The Beast of Chicago" on Google Books for review. Take a look!


From "The Lindbergh Child"

Geary has done several of these books, and I'm still picking them up here and there. Many will be available at your local comic shop. You can also find them online, including at the NBM site.

Sometime this year I'll also be looking for Geary's Trotsky biography.

These comics are definitely the sort of thing I'd put in the hands of someone looking for a good read, comics or otherwise. With summer coming, feel free to swing on by and borrow one from The Signal Watch Library.