Best Comic of the Week:
Unknown Soldier #21
W
ritten by Joshua Dysart
Art by Rick Veitch
Every month for the last two years, I’ve gone on and on about how much I love this title, and it has frequently impressed me with its ability to be better with each new issue.
For this month’s issue, Dysart has done something completely different, moving the story away from Moses, and instead choosing to focus the whole book on one Kalashnikov rifle. The story starts in WWII-era Russia, as Mikhail Kalashnikov comes up with the general design of this most versatile of assault rifles. Once mass production begins, the story shifts focus, and we realize that is one particular rifle that is narrating this issue.
This particular AK is first owned by a Cuban soldier posted in Ethiopia to help fight Somali separatists. It then is owned by a poacher in Kenya, slowly making its way into Uganda, where it is owned by a farmer, and then a number of different people before coming into the possession of a young Karamojong herder. Eventually, the gun makes its way into the possession of a number of different children in Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, which brings it into the series’ continuity.
This type of thing has been done before, but I appreciate this approach to African reality and conflict. Dysart’s research and insight into Uganda and its troubles has been one of the biggest draws of this book to me, and I like the way in which he works to develop peoples’ knowledge.
Rick Veitch is the perfect choice to fill in on this issue. This is the more realistic Veitch that we don’t see that much of these days, as he eschews the lighter style he used on his incomparable Army@Love
Other Notable Comics:
Captain Swing and the Electrical Pirates of Cindery Island #2
Written by Warren Ellis
Art by Raulo Caceres
Two super-late Warren Ellis books in the same week make for a bit of a treat. In this issue of Ellis’s steampunk flying pirate story, our policeman protagonist wakes up on Captain Swing’s flying boat, and is treated to a whole lot of dialogue about the nature of flight, piracy, and the existence of a piece of space rock in the possession of the Free Masons that provides them with a lot of power.
This is pretty typical Ellis stuff, although it’s always entertaining to see how he keeps returning to some of the same ideas and dresses them up differently to tell a new story. I like the text pieces that break up the comic pages. They are narrated by the Captain, and provide more insight into who he is.
Caceres is doing a nice job on the art; his style is typical of Avatar books, with a high amount of detail and realism, even when drawing some pretty fantastical things.
Elephantmen #26
Written by Richard Starkings
Art by Andre Szymanowicz, Vince Lee, Moritat, Boo Cook, Axel Medellin, and Marian Churchland
I find it odd that the main reason why I dropped Brightest Day from my pull-list is the same reason why I like this latest issue of Elephantmen: the way in which it is telling a number of different, interconnected stories, in a very episodic manner. I find it doesn’t work at all in BD, but here it does.
This issue slowly continues the recent plot about the two SIMM androids that have shown up. Vanity Case discovers that she was manipulated by one, while Sahara, on a ‘Coming to America’ style walkabout, gets stalked by another. The main characters of this book – namely Hip Flask and Ebony Hide, barely get any screen time at all, instead giving the spotlight to the aforementioned characters, as well as checking in on Miki.
The longest segment of the issue is given over to Janis Blackthorne, the new partner of our two favourite transgenics. Blackthorne has an interesting past, and while the narrative explains her history, the artists (Moritat and Cook) show us what she was up to during the war. It’s a very nicely done sequence.
In fact, the art is pretty strong throughout this issue. I love Churchland’s pages the best, but was also happy to see Szymanowicz, Moritat, and Cook on the book. The only artist I wasn’t particularly fond of was Medellin’s Sahara pages, which were fine, just a little more cheesecake-y than I usually like.
Ghost Projekt #3
Written by Joe Harris
Art by Steve Rolston
This slightly odd post-Soviet supernatural bioweapons story is moving along very nicely. This time around, we learn a lot more about Konstantin, who has been set up as the villain of the story, and we learn a little more about the Militsiya inspector who has been assigned to work with Will.
I like how so many seemingly disparate threads – the Mongols, the hypnotism using folk dolls – are starting to come together to give the narrative structure. This is a very well paced comic.
The story has been pretty cool, but it is frequently upstaged by Rolston’s wonderful pencils. He should be doing a lot more comics work, and would do wonderfully on an off-beat superhero title (something like Birds of Prey I think).
Northlanders #29
Written by Brian Wood
Art by Fiona Staples
Some of my favourite issues of Northlanders have been the ‘done-in-one’ stories that Wood has used between longer arcs. This issue, with art by the highly capable Fiona Staples, is the story of Dag, an aging Norse sailor who, in 760, decides to abandon the usual ‘sea roads’ on which he has spent twenty years carrying cargo and strike out west in search of something to provide his life with meaning.
This would predate the discovery of either Iceland or Greenland by the Vikings, and so Dag is the first to see these lands. He shares with Storri, his first mate, his frustration with his life and industry, complaining about growing competition and population, and of the fact that the world seems increasingly small to him. Wood has often managed, in this series, to show modern issues like globalization from an ancient perspective, and it is one of the things that I like most about this book.
Staples conveys both the madness that infects the men as their small company continues to cross the ocean in what is basically a row boat, and also the immensity of the ocean. Her picture of volcanic Iceland is stunning.
Turf #2
Written by Jonathan Ross
Art by Tommy Lee Edwards
While I enjoyed the first issue, I found that this second one was a massive improvement. You can see that Ross is learning how to write comics as he goes, this month doing away with the massive amounts of exposition and gigantic blocks of text that cluttered up Edwards’s wonderful art in the first issue.
Don’t get me wrong – he’s still overly wordy in parts, but he is now letting the story tell itself in a more natural way. And it’s an interesting story.
Turf has a vampire clan squaring off with Prohibition-era gangsters for control of New York, which on its own is a strong concept, before you toss in vampiric prophecy, a plucky reporter, and a crashed alien ship. It’s like a big genre blender, and the disparate threads are being balanced out much better now.
For me, the big draw was Edwards’s art. I’ve been a fan of his for a long time, and his style suits this story quite well. I am pleased that I am enjoying the story more than I expected to.
Quick Takes:
Astonishing X-Men #34 – I think it’s pretty much universally accepted that Matt Fraction writes the best Cyclops ever, but his Summers/McCoy arguments of a couple months back are nowhere near as good as the one that Ellis writes in this issue. “If I have to assert dominance in the feline terms of my mutantcy, then I’m going to have to urinate on you..” Classic. There’s some other stuff that happens too, but the first four pages are what’s worth the price of admission.
Captain America #607 – This book is so consistently good, I have nothing new to say about it. I like how Brubaker has Bucky slowly learning the ropes of super-heroing, and I like how casually Steve Rogers and other Avengers wander through the book. Breitweiser is a good choice on art. The Nomad story is as forgettable as last month’s.
Flash #3 – This newest Flash series is giving me a powerful sense of deja vu. I know that a lot of commentators on-line have mentioned recently how much DC is trying to return to the 70s in their books, and this is a perfect example. Barry Allen acts like a dork at work, drinks tons of coffee with his wife (who he seems to be courting like they just met), and fights the Rogues. Sure, there are some updates and changes, but there’s nothing tremendously new. Were it not for Manapaul’s incredible artwork, I would dump this book. I am probably going to stick around until Flashpoint, mainly because I like all the other speedsters better than Barry. Where are they, anyway?
Green Lantern #55 – I’m not feeling this book so much any more, as Brightest Day has Jordan and the other members of the Rainbow Squad colliding into each other all over the place, and the plot is advancing pretty slowly. This issue has a mostly meaningless fight with Lobo, wherein Jordan suddenly starts boasting about having had his city destroyed. It doesn’t fit with his character or with the scene, and feels very random. On the other hand, the origin of Atrocitus’s cat is brilliant, as Shane Davis expresses his inner Frank Quitely, causing me to pine for a We3/Dex-Starr one-shot.
Invincible #73 – One of the best things about Kirkman’s writing is the way in which he embraces the unpredictable. The Viltrimute War has started, but Mark, Nolan, and Oliver are sitting it out on some planet while Mark heals from the wounds he got fighting Conquest. It gives Nolan and Oliver a chance to bond (the healing process takes months), while meanwhile the war rages across the galaxy. Tons of good character work here.
Invincible Iron Man Annual #1 – I almost didn’t buy this comic ($5!), but am so glad that I did. Matt Fraction and Carmine Di Giandomenico (whose work looks a lot like Camuncoli) give us a long Mandarin story, with no real Tony Stark in it at all. The Mandarin pulls a Kim Jong Il, and kidnaps a famous Chinese director (whose other movie is about Pinghai Bay, from Fraction’s Iron Fist days) and his wife to force him to make the movie of his life. Of course, making movies to order for insane dictators is never easy, even when your wife’s life hangs in the balance, and the director is forced to make some difficult choices and to find new methods of resistance in order to survive. This comic is a great study in human nature, and well worth the purchase price for such a long and involved story. More proof that Fraction is one of the best writers in comics today.
Secret Avengers #2 – Things take a downward turn with this issue, which has almost no character development or strong character work in it at all. I get it that Brubaker is telling a big epic story (because a proactive black ops team should be going into space for their first mission), but for a new team with some questionable characters on it, everyone seems to be getting along really well and are all pretty generic. I expect more from this writer.
X-Men: Curse of the Mutants Saga #1 – I can’t say this does anything to generate interest in me for next week’s X-Men #1. I don’t see why we need a new X-series, or why a team like Gischler and Medina warrant such special treatment. I love how Marvel’s hype machine keeps referring to it as being like the Claremont/Lee X-Men #1. I think it’s going to be more like Claremont’s X-Treme X-Men (ie., quickly forgotten at best).
Comics I Would Have Bought if They Weren’t $4:
Captain America 1940s Newspaper Strip#1
Death of Dracula #1
Doomwar #5
New Avengers Luke Cage #3
The Week in Graphic Novels:
Stuffed
Written by Glenn Eichler
Art by Nick Bertozzi
First Second really are unique publishers, putting out books that are quite different from the vast majority, and most minorities, of the comics world. Stuffed
In Stuffed, our protagonist is Tim Johnston, a typical suburban nice guy family man. He learns that his cantankerous and rather unliked father has died, and has left him very little. While managing his estate, Tim learns that his father had held on to his museum of oddities, which had not been in operation for over twenty years.
Tim begins to obsess over one item in the museum – a statue of an African ‘Savage’, which the father had used to terrify Tim as a child. He feels that the statue is of actual historic merit, and attempts to donate it to a museum. As this process begins, he learns that the statue is in fact a stuffed, or taxidermied (I don’t think that’s a word) African man. Tim now feels strongly that the Savage (now called the Warrior) should be repatriated, and works with an African-American curator to achieve this. Things are going well, when Free, his half-brother arrives on the scene.
Free is the type of guy who should be played by Bill Murray. He is an aging hippie who has a scar on his forehead from his self-trepanation experiment. Free (née Ollie) mucks things up, and is the cause of much of the humour in the book.
And this book is quite funny. There were more than a few scenes that were surprisingly amusing, as the two estranged brothers come to terms with the memory of their father and their own resentments towards each other. This would make a great movie.
Bertozzi’s art works really well here, as the story is perfect for a cartoon-style approach. His dream sequences are quite funny.
Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter
Written by Donald Westlake
Adapted by Darwyn Cooke
I’ve never been one to read a lot of crime novels, especially ones that are in a series, like the Parker books
Cooke has an understanding of the early 60’s and its design aesthetic that suggests he should really be much older than he is. His lush penthouse suites are spacious, and filled with low-lying couches and chairs, and futuristic-looking coffee tables. He is able, in drawing a room, to convey the optimism of the time, in the last stretch of years where nothing could touch the superiority of white male America.
Entering into that is Parker, an angry thief who was double-crossed in his last big job, and is now looking for revenge on the man that crossed him, his wife who betrayed him, and the syndicate that has employed them. Parker is a brutal man who thinks nothing of wading through bodies to get what he wants. One particularly chilling scene involves him casually tying up a woman in a hair salon that provides him with a good vantage point on his prey.
The book begins with difficulty. It shows Parker arriving in New York, but there is no real explanation as to what is going on. It’s not until the second quarter of that book that Cooke starts to fill us in on who the characters are and what their deal is. It is at that point that the book began to pick up for me.
Of course, the story in a Cooke book is almost secondary to his wonderful art.
The Hellboy Project: B.P.R.D. Vol.8: Killing Ground
Written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi
Art by Guy Davis
What I like best about BPRD is the strong focus on the characters and their interactions with each other. This volume
Johann is now inhabiting one of the soulless bodies that Abe found in Indonesia, and he has become a bit of an unstoppable hedonist in the bargain, which has caused him to completely ignore his responsibilities to the team. Liz is crippled by her ongoing dreams in which she speaks with a mysterious stranger who seems to know a lot about what the future holds. She really only feels safe now when she is with Panya, the immortal Egyptian mummy woman.
And then there is Daimio, the central figure of this arc. Since he first arrived, there have been a number of questions about his background, and the mysterious Asian man who provides him with massages and other strange-looking treatments. All of this is explained, as Daimio runs afoul of the Wendigo character introduced in the previous arc.
This is a pretty exciting and fluid story, with typically brilliant Guy Davis art.
The Hellboy Project: Lobster Johnson Vol. 1: The Iron Prometheus
Written by Mike Mignola
Art by Jason Armstrong
Lobster Johnson, the pulp hero character that has been haunting the Hellboy and BPRD series almost since their beginnings, was finally given his own book
The Lobster has been a mysterious character throughout his time in the Mignola-verse, and this five-issue series does very little to shed any light on his background or motivations. This story, set in 1937, has as it’s ‘big bad’ the guy who has been haunting Liz Sherman’s dreams in the BPRD trades I’ve been reading lately (which is why I’m glad I’m reading all of these in order). This character, referred to here as the Devil, is looking to acquire the Vril Energy Suit – an Iron Man like device which harnesses Vril power, which is some sort of godly Hyperborean thing.
Lobster Johnson gets involved in helping out, and there are ghosts, Nazis, and big snakes (in other words, the usual Mignola stuff). Little is done with the Lobster’s character, although Jim Sacks, the man wearing the VES suit, does get developed quite well. It is obvious that the Lobster is being kept as somewhat of a cipher on purpose, and hopefully this is something that will be explained as the larger story progresses.
Jason Armstrong was a wise choice of artist for this title. His art looks a little like a marriage of Mignola and Davis’s sensibilities, although with a much looser, relaxed approach. This was a good book, and I really enjoyed the joke text-pieces included outlining the pop culture career of Lobster Johnson in comics, pulps, and movies.
The Hellboy Project: Hellboy Vol. 7: The Troll Witch and Others
Written by Mike Mignola
Art by Mike Mignola, P. Craig Russell, and Richard Corben
As I’ve been trying to read the different Hellboy stories in the order in which they were originally published, this volume
Most of the stories in this book are structured around Mignola re-writing or adapting a myth or legend from some part of the world. Instead of just worrying about British and Celtic folklore, he casts a wider net, encompassing Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. This results in a wide variety of stories, although most of them have a similar simple structure of: Hellboy encounters monster; Hellboy destroys monster. The differences are in the settings.
This volume is also unique because, for the first time, Mignola has allowed other artists to work on Hellboy. Not one for half measures, the two artists employed here are P. Craig Russell and Richard Corben. Russell illustrates an interesting vampire story set in Prague, where he spends a large number of panels illustrating the statuary that adorns that city.
The Corben story might be the most unusual Hellboy story I’ve read yet, as Hellboy imagines himself as the lead player in the African legend of Makoma, and his quest. This is a gorgeous story, as anyone would expect.
The Hellboy Project: Hellboy Weird Tales Vol. 1
by too many people to list here
I’ve been reading a lot of Hellboy (and Hellboy-related) comics lately. I’m trying to get caught up with the current issues now coming out, and so I’ve accelerated my ‘Hellboy Project’ a little. Reading this was a nice way to recharge a little.
The Weird Tales books collect the mini-series of the same name. It features stories starring Hellboy and his BPRD friends, but Mike Mignola’s name is nowhere near this project (except on the logo – I just noticed that). Instead, the stories are done by a number of different people from the comics and animation industries, and while the results are a little mixed, the book is never boring.
The highlights are stories by John Cassaday, Alex Maleev, Jason Pearson, Eric Powell (young Hellboy!), Steve Lieber, and Steve Parkhouse (w/ Joe Casey).
Perhaps the most impressive story is the one that involves Hellboy dealing with a haunted hot spring in Japan. It is written by Randy Stradley, and features the first published work of artist Seung Kim, whose black and white pencils are gorgeous.
I’m not one for cutesy comics, so the contributions by Bob Fingerman, Roger Langridge, and Ovi Nedelcu did nothing for me, although I kind of liked Eric Wight and Andi Watsons’ stories.
In all, it’s always fun to see different takes on a favourite character, and the editors of this book did not disappoint.
Album of the Week:
Talib Kweli + Hi-Tek are Reflection Eternal – Revolutions Per Minute
