Weird Science Romance Bukkake

Young Romance 2: The Early Simon & Kirby Romance Comics (1947-49/ Collected 2014): edited and restored by Michel Gagne; written and illustrated by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby: A second beautiful job of restoration here by Michel Gagne and friends, rescuing Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's tremendous, tremendously popular romance comics of the 1940's and early 1950's from obscurity.

It's a whole different side of Simon and Kirby (co-creators of Captain America, among many other things), one filled with domestic melodrama and solid depictions of the mostly normal. Entertaining as all Hell -- one can see how these comics rapidly became best-sellers. If it weren't for the Comics Code Authority's implementation in the 1950's, comics like these would have helped the American comics industry mature faster by about four decades. Highly recommended.

Crooked Little Vein (2007) by Warren Ellis: Or, Michael McGill and Trix Search for the Secret Constitution. Seriously. Burned-out PI McGill gets himself hired by the President's heroin-addicted Chief of Staff to find the missing Secret Constitution. It's not just a document. Read aloud, it causes people to obey it -- but only when heard in person, not reproduced electronically. And the Chief of Staff wants to make America great again by hypnotizing people back into a 1950's mindset.

OK! The Chief selects McGill because McGill is a self-described "shit magnet." Weird things happen to him, constantly, a fact the Chief believes will lead him inevitably to the Secret Constitution. So off McGill goes, soon to be accompanied by avant-garde grad student Trix, whom McGill meets at a Godzilla Bukkake Night he's stumbled into.

Yes, Godzilla Bukkake: people who are sexually aroused by giant, filmed Japanese monsters to the point of simultaneous release. Hoo ha! And that's not the weirdest thing in the novel.

Warren Ellis, crackerjack comic-book writer and futurist, has a lot of fun in this novel with strange incidents and people and a book-length parody of the standard hard-boiled-detective novel. His narrator is hapless and generally more acted-upon than acting, with sidekick Trix getting him going at various points in the text. 

It's all provided within a narrative that satirizes Bush 2-era America and the Republican obsession with "family values." The Secret Constitution could conceivably cause gay people to 'turn straight,' all part of 'making America great again.' There's even a reclusive, insane billionaire who made a failed presidential run -- think Ross Perot by way of an X-rated Monty Python skit.

Sure, the novel's not deep. But it's fun and diverting and pointedly satiric. The events recall Hunter S. Thompson; the prose style recalls the hard-boiled school of Chandler and Hammett. It's 21st-century picaresque. Recommended.

Love in the Time of Machines

I like big boots and I cannot lie

Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface (1991-2003/ Collected 2005): written and illustrated by Shirow Masamune; translated by Frederik Schodt and Toren Smith: Well, it's interesting, the sequel to manga-become-anime hit Ghost in the Shell. The seemingly endless, technobabble-heavy monologues, dialogues, conversations, and footnotes about philosophy and technology slow everything to a crawl in between the action set-pieces, which are themselves well-rendered and staged. 

The Major from the first Ghost in the Shell now works for a massive multinational. Or is it the Major? The cybernetic police officer for Section 9 has a slightly different name and look. But as she's pretty much entirely an AI inhabiting cyberspace and a host of different robotic bodies, her identity isn't necessarily clear. And Shirow Masamune ultimately puts a cyberspace spin on a Borgesian short story, making questions of identity both paramount and oddly moot.

The technobabble and philosophy are something of a slog after awhile -- one wishes for an editor to give some shape and clarity to it all. Instead, the big unwieldy philosophy pill is sweetened by a seemingly endless series of drawings of naked women with those creepy little-girl manga heads. But they're not really naked because in the real world, when they're naked, they're artificial bodies that lack nipples and genitalia. Ditto the cyberspace world, with one important exception late in the narrative.

It's as if we confront again and again some NuRuskin aesthetic, a world where the female body lacks body hair, nipples, and genitalia. And as the cyberspace renderings of such represent how the various characters 'see' themselves, this is a choice, conscious or sub-conscious, of the minds inhabiting those hairless bodies unblemished by messy body hair or genitalia. Make of that what you will. That those gobs and gobs and gobs of techno-philosophy are delivered by those mechanized bodies is part of the point. Maybe the whole point. 

It's not all that enjoyable a narrative (when it bothers being a narrative), with its action moments existing almost independently from the babble. In a way, it anticipates the problems of the second and third Matrix movies, only on a somewhat more thoughtful level. Moments of tee-hee levity make everything even more problematic, as if the 12-year-old boy inside Shirow Masamune were periodically erupting into the text to ogle the nude/non-nude girlies who occasionally flirt like teen-age stereotypes. Lightly recommended.

Young Romance: The Best of Simon and Kirby's Romance Comics (1947-57/ Collected 2012): written and illustrated by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby; restored and edited by Michel Gagne: That time in the late 1940's and early 1950's when Joe Simon and Jack Kirby invented the Romance comic book for an under-served audience of teen-aged girls? Remember that? No? Well, it happened.

And those comics were immensely popular. But then the Great Disaster of American comic books, the Comics Code Authority, came to pass. America's rapidly evolving species of comic books for teens and adults were neutered, rendered into stories primarily of interest only to children.

But during that brief flourishing, Romance comics were huge. And Simon and Kirby demonstrate in these pages, lovingly restored by Canada's own Michel Gagne, that they were masters of something other than superhero comics. 

The dozen or so pre-Code stories collected here are a lot of fun -- pulpy, full of emotion, and often dealing with quite adult characters and situations. One can see why they were so popular. They're models of narrative economy. But they also hew quite close to realism in Simon and Kirby's art, with carefully modulated bursts of melodrama and bombast. As with a lot of other pre-Code comics, these suggest an American comic-book industry and readership unencumbered by the ball-and-chain of the superhero. It's like catching glimpses of a lost, better world. Highly recommended.

Trillium: written and illustrated by Jeff Lemire (2013): Enjoyable, time-twisting science-fiction story from the increasingly prolific Ontario, Canada writer-cartoonist Jeff Lemire. Humanity faces extinction at the 'hands' of a sentient virus in the future. A species of Trillium (yes, the provincial flower of Ontario) may hold the key to humanity's survival. The problem is getting to it inside an alien city. But that city is more than it seems -- it links past and future, and can perhaps rewrite reality. 

Lemire keeps things moving briskly while also playing with lay-out and comic-book story-telling conventions. It's by no means a great work -- and feels padded by at least 25%, to be honest -- but it's certainly worth a read. And Lemire's scratchy, often grotesque art-style makes for an interesting take on what are mostly Old-School, Golden-Age science-fiction conventions. Recommended.