Girls!

Or Clark Kent when Lester wears glasses

The Trouble with Girls Volume 1 (1987-1988/Collected 2006): written by Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones; illustrated by Tim Hamilton:

The Trouble with Girls Volume 2 (1988/Collected 2006): written by Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones; illustrated by Tim Hamilton:

Apparently, one of my local dollar stores just got a crate of 10-year-old comic-book collections from Checker Publishing. And lo, the two collections of late 1980's/early 1990's superhero satire The Trouble with Girls  were among them!

The two volumes collect most of the initial B&W run of The Trouble with Girls from Malibu/Eternity. Only an annual is missing, which is a shame. But what's left, while occasionally a work of reprinting ineptitude (somebody dropped a slip of paper on more than one page...), is also a lost work of comedic comic genius from writers Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones and artist Tim Hamilton.

The Trouble with Girls (the name riffs on an early Elvis Presley movie) features the adventures of globe-trotting superspy/superguy Lester Girls, who is hyper-capable in everything he does, from sex to combat to protecting the world from a wide variety of super-villains and secret cabals.

But Lester doesn't want any of this. He just wants to settle down with a nice woman in suburbia, have kids, and maybe finally get the last page of John Steinbeck's The Red Pony read. But this is never to be. Whether it's a high-school reunion or a trip to the store, Lester's life will always erupt into high-action pandemonium.

Tim Hamilton really was a pleasing cartoonist, capable of comic moments with just enough superhero sheen to keep the satire running. And Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones are very funny writers, especially once they expand the satire from spy movies to pretty much Anything Goes. 

You'll almost certainly wince at some of the jokes, at least a few of which may seem somewhat sexist, though I'd argue that the sources they're satirizing are sexist and the commentary in The Trouble with Girls attacks the sexism of superheroes, Hollywood blockbusters, and the James Bond universe by foregrounding the absolute horror certain action-loving fans (and writers, and creators) have of the female body when it's de-objectified. I'd have loved to see the comic's take on the recent Ghostbusters kerfuffle that ignited fandom's terrible constituency of the He-Man Woman-Hater's Club.

There's more than a whiff of Seth Macfarlane's much-later American Dad! in the DNA of Lester Girls. But Lester is funnier, more charming, and weirdly sympathetic in his endless quest to save the world, discover his secret origins, and read the last page of The Red Pony. 

There's also a special guest appearance by James Joyce's Stephen Daedalus at Lester's high-school reunion, among other literary characters that also include The Great Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan. But then we're right back to the nefarious, miasmic depredations of the super-villain known only as The Wind-breaker. It's that kind of humour. Highly recommended.

There Is Strength In A Union

On the Ropes: written by James Vance; illustrated by Dan Burr (2014): The late-1980's graphic novel Kings in Disguise was also written by James Vance and illustrated by Dan Burr. It was an unapologetically Steinbeckian work set during the Great Depression in the United States. Realism and melodrama combined in that graphic novel to make for one of the lesser-known great graphic novels ever produced in the medium. 

It took about a quarter of a century, but Vance and Burr return here to the Great Depression, and to the youthful protagonist of Kings in Disguise, the now-17-year-old Fred Bloch. And it's great to have them all back.

The main narrative takes place in 1937, though Bloch narrates the events from an undisclosed but seemingly distant future time and there are also copious flashbacks. Fred Bloch now travels through the American Midwest with a carnival funded by FDR's federal Work Projects Administration to provide both work and entertainment in Depression-era America. 

Across the country, workers are unionizing. And across the country, businesses are hiring people to break up strikes, unions, and attempts to unionize, often by any means necessary up to and including murder. That last part isn't melodrama -- violence and even murder was often a tool used by businesses and the State against unions in 19th- and early 20th-century America. The Pinkerton Agency, for example, was at least as well-known during that time for its union-busting activities as it was for anything remotely resembling detective work.

Fred works for an escape artist with a tragic past, romances a fellow young carnival worker, gets a WPA-funded reporter interested in labour's battles with Big Business, and covertly helps organized labour by acting as a 're-transmitter' of union communications through the post. Mail was often intercepted if it were believed to be union-related (yes, this is also historical fact and not melodrama), so Fred's help is invaluable so long as he remains the unknown link in a chain of communication. Unfortunately, two murderous thugs hired by a steel company are on his trail. And one of them has a history with Fred's escape artist.

Vance's writing is solid, involving, and certainly heartfelt. If the climax of the story strikes me as being melodramatic -- well, it is sometimes nice to see a battle between good and evil in a graphic novel that doesn't involve bright costumes or muscular hyper-competence. Fred, navigating now more intellectually between the problems of the mundane world and the communal aspirations of socialism, remains a finely drawn and sympathetic character. 

Burr's art suits the material perfectly -- it's nicely rendered, skilfully laid out, and refreshingly normative in its depiction of the Depression era and all its characters, good or bad or humanly in the middle. Like Kings in Disguise, On the Ropes is work of admirable and quietly beautiful craftsmanship. Highly recommended.