Weird Heroes

Harbinger Volume 1: Omega Rising: written by Joshua Dysart; illustrated by Khari Evans and others (2012): Enjoyable reboot of the early 1990's Valiant line's entry in the telepathic superman sweepstakes. Joshua Dysart keeps things moving while also supplying quite a bit of background and characterization, along with a likeable protagonist who does one truly awful (but understandable) thing early and then tries to make up for it ever afterwards.

Thankfully, there's an emphasis on the science-fictional and political aspects of the whole 'secret race of telepaths' concept, with more traditional superhero battles taking a back seat. The art, mostly by Khari Evans, is clean and straightforward, and he seems to have a nice command of panel-to-panel continuity. Recommended.


　

The Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom: written by Mark Waid; illustrated by Chris Samnee (2012): Waid and Samnee try their hands at what I think is the first multi-issue Rocketeer storyline since late creator/writer/artist Dave Stevens' second Rocketeer serial of the late 1980's. Waid captures the breezy, 1930's pulp quality of Stevens while adding a couple of new characters to the cast.

Waid also brings in yet another established pulp character to the Rocketeer's world without ever quite naming said character due to copyright concerns (Doc Savage and his assistants Monk and Ham appeared this way in the first Rocketeer adventure, with the Shadow and his associates following suit in the second; Disney replaced Doc Savage with Howard Hughes for the 1991 Rocketeer movie). Here, it's Doc Savage villain John Sunlight. Also dinosaurs. Samnee's art reminds me more of Steve Rude than Dave Stevens, but that's fine -- it still looks pretty good, and pretty much period-appropriate. Recommended.

Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo: written by Joe R. Lansdale; illustrated by Timothy Truman and Sam Glanzman (1993): Long-time horror and Western writer Joe Lansdale's first outing on DC's Western anti-hero Jonah Hex is a lot of grimy fun, with Tim Truman and Sam Glanzman supplying suitably gritty, violent visuals.

Looking to avenge the murder of a fellow bounty hunter, the disfigured Civil War veteran fights what may or may not be a supernatural threat hiding within a travelling carnival. Can the boss of the carnival actually animate the dead, or are his tricks explainable through rational means? In any event, Hex finds himself stuck between Apache raiding parties, a bounty on his head for a murder he didn't commit, and what appears to be Zombie Wild Bill Hickok.

The Truman/Glanzman art team is squarely in the tradition of Hex's longtime illustrator Tony deZuniga without being imitative, and as this miniseries was aimed at adults, they're allowed a lot more leeway to depict violence and its consequences. Jonah Hex himself is, as always, oddly noble. He may have started life as a knock-off of Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name, but he's his own character now. Recommended.

　

　

Tomorrow Stories Volume 2: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Melinda Gebbie, Kevin Nowlan, Jim Baikie, Rick Veitch, Hilary Barta, and others (2000-2002): One of two books in Alan Moore's ABC Comics line of the early oughts that resurrected the anthology title, with this one leaning more heavily on comedy and pastiche than the other (Tom Strong's Terrific Tales). Kevin Nowlan's art on the Jack Quick series won him an Eisner Award for art, and it is a heckuva performance from an artist who doesn't do that much pencilling.

The different strips that appeared over the course of 12 issues tended to be parodies and/or homages to either very specific antecedents (Moore and Rick Veitch's Greyshirt is a stylistic homage to Will Eisner's Spirit both in writing and in visuals) or more general comic-book and pop-culture sources (Jack Quick parodies 'smart kid' strips and books, The First American parodies patriotic superhero strips, Splash Brannigan homages both Plastic Man and the Mad comic book of the 1950's). The Cobweb, with its sexually adventurous female crimefighter, spreads a wider net, allowing for everything from 19th century woodcuts to fumetti with talking action figures. Recommended.

　

　

　

Porno for Pomos

Comic:


Lost Girls, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Melinda Gebbie (2006): Moore and partner Gebbie worked on Lost Girls for over a decade. The end result might be the oddest book of Moore's career. It's certainly the most pornographic, though 'meta-pornographic' might be a better word -- this is an extremely graphic book of pornography that's about pornography, why people consume pornography, and the inter-relationship of fantasy and reality. I use the word 'pornography' rather than 'erotica' because it seems as if that's what Moore is aiming for here -- even the poetic sections are pushed so far into the explicit and the purple of prose that the whole enterprise really seems to be about What Gets People Off.

Moore's over-riding conceit here is that three women whose adventures resemble 'real-world' versions of the fictional adventures of Wendy from Peter Pan, Alice from Alice in Wonderland, and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, meet as adults at a sexually exotic resort in Europe in the days leading up to World War One and proceed to have a variety of sexual adventures while also recounting their sexual histories, which themselves vaguely resemble the adventures of the fictional heroines, only without magic and with an awful lot of sex.

A couple of hundred pages of sex, primarily rendered in Gebbie's art-nouveau-influenced art, with periodic side-trips into imitations of various other illustrative styles. In the event you somehow miss the connections between 'real life' and fiction, most of the 30 or so chapters contain a full-page spread which makes the parallels between a sexual incident and an incident from the fictional adventures of one of the characters explicit in pretty much every meaning of that word.

Much of the hardcore material is somewhat undercut (or, to use a crappy lit-crit word, 'problematized') by several discussions of the relationship of pornography to the real world (fantasy, one character suggests, is in many cases never meant to be enacted in real life, and cannot thus be judged as if it were an idea about a 'real' incident. This commentary occurs during an orgy scene intercut with a particularly filthy bit of incest-pornography). In many ways, Moore has succeeded in doing for pornography what he did for superhero battles in Miracleman: he's pushed them logically to the point of fictional apocalypse while at the same time maintaining distance as a commentator throughout. Or, 'If this is what you like, what happens when we push it all the way to its logical conclusion?'

While it sometimes seems as if Moore has succeeded in creating the world's longest and most expensive Tijiuana Bible (and in a way he has), the super-saturation of sex scenes and the sheer wackiness of much of the conversation in the book makes it hard to take this seriously: it really seems more like a joke, despite the somewhat ham-handed epilogue that attempts to ground the book in the horrors of war. Or is that some sort of joke as well? Moore's such a cheeky bugger that it's impossible to figure him out sometimes. In any event, not for the squeamish or easily offended. Recommended.



Book:


The Cleft and Other Odd Tales by Gahan Wilson (1998): Gahan Wilson was the natural inheritor of Charles Addams' title as "world's most macabre popular cartoonist", and he wore that title well for decades. He was also a writer of short stories and an occasional movie reviewer; it's products of the former occupation that The Cleft collects. It's a dandy bunch of short stories, reminiscent of the sort of droll horror of writers like John Collier or Roald Dahl, with the added bonus of illustrations by Wilson for each story. The collection spans more than 30 years, but Wilson's narrative tone remains remarkably consistent throughout. You may not be scared by any of the offerings here, but as with Wilson's best cartoons, you will be disturbed even as you laugh or at least chuckle. Recommended.