The Factual Opinion

The Return of The Virgin Read

A note from The Powers That Be:

Nina is a bit irritated that a kibosh was thrown down on any new title for her columns that featured the word "rape" in them, even after it was explained how creepy your google results get when you start tossing that one repeatedly into the can. The title "Virgin Read" may have lost a bit of its accuracy--as has been pointed out before by, you know, those people--but it's still got a bit of accuracy that should be obvious, and so it has made a return.

And with that, here's this, and her.

Okay, so I think my husband picked this as my comic this week because he thought I’d find it sweet.  

Sure. I guess it’s sweet.

But for the most part?

I found it stressful.

Now, look - I am not going to be talking shit about this comic. That is not what is about to happen. I’ve got nothing bad to say about it. I am just going to tell you what my honest response was to it. My reaction. It isn't a reaction to the art, and it isn't to the method of storytelling used. My reaction is about one thing, and one thing only: reading about the planning of wedding.

See, I’m a girl. A married girl. I lived through this already. And I lived through it in New York City, which is where I believe this comic takes place.

Everything in Scenes is so close to what actually happens that I couldn’t find it funny or nostalgic at all. (Hey, we’re just coming up on our 3 year anniversary, and this still wasn't some kind of happy skip down memory lane. It just reminded me of that entire year of stress that went into planning the wedding - from the guest list to the music to a million other things I don't feel like revisiting.  

There were a few specific things that were just too similar to our experience that it became impossible for me to get any distance. Like:

1. The whole guest list thing. Especially the part where my parent’s list was 3 times as long as me and my (then) fiancee’s list put together. That happened to us, it happened to this couple and it was a totally real thing that drove me crazy. (And sometimes still makes me mad!) 
2. The invitation. Unlike the book, we didn’t have the whole thing about designing our own invitations happen, but we did have a whole thing go on with finding save-the-dates and then creating our own.  And then most of them never being sent. (See....I’m still kind of angry. It’s not good for me to be revisiting any of this! It’s done! That shit is OVER! We are blissfully MARRIED!)
3. D.J. - We had a band, not a DJ. But these two kept getting DJs that would include “Love Shack” on their samples. Our most-annoyingly-overused-song-on-wedding-band-sample-CD was “Dancing in September.” (I know! Right?!)
4. OH - that one part where he says, “Did you see what those idiots did to my suit?!” Dude - ask my friend Tucker Stone about his suit on his wedding day. Ask him. It was so bad that he kept it from me until the Honeymoon. And I still cried, even though he and his friends fixed it!
5. And craziest of crazy coincidences - we too were starving when we got back to our suite. We too tried to order room service and couldn’t get any. WE, TOO, ORDERED BURGERS AND FRIES FROM A 24 HOUR DINER AND SAT ON THE FLOOR EATING THEM IN OUR WEDDING ATTIRE. (See, now I’m actually just angry because I’m a bit of a brat and I’m all like, “that’s OUR memory! Not YOURS! I can be such a 4 year old sometimes.)

So, that’s my deal with this. It sort of tired me out because it brought it all back to me. If you’re not married yet, this is a totally cute thing to read and see the comedy in being part of a couple who is planning a wedding. If you are married, and you’ve been married for a while, it might be fun for the two of you to read this together and laugh nostalgically at over how cute the two of you were back in those pre-wedding days.

But perhaps you’re in the situation that I’m in, where you're still close enough to that big day and all that planning. In that case, you might want to buy a copy of this comic and give it to your loved on on, say, your 5th anniversary. Or 10th. Yeah 10th...that’d be good.

-Nina Stone, 2011

New Character Parade

New Character Parade
By Johnny Ryan
Published by Pigeon Press

This is what looks to be the first "book" to arrive from Pigeon Press. Similar in format to Ryan's Comic Book Holocaust and Klassic Komix Klub, New Character Parade is a collection of one-page gag strips--many of which were previously available online--which stretch the boundaries of what some might find tasteful. (There's a few rape jokes, plenty of racial slurs, the occasional fecal/penile/clitoral humor.) In keeping with his non-Prison Pit/Blecky work, Ryan's gag comics are a hit-or-miss kind of experience, with the ratio on this one skewing funnier than it was in Holocaust or KKK. The misses need little introduction, you can usually just check the last panel: if it seems clever or odd, it's a good one; if neither, it probably isn't.

The big change to be found is in the hits. Whereas the most spot-on strips in the previous collections derived their zing from the painful accuracy of their victim's satirization (Art Spiegelman's attempts to "borify" his comics even more, the politically correct update inherent in giving Captain America "AIDS breath"), the best moments in New Character are when the comic takes bizarre left turns, abandoning the offensive for the strange. The first time it happens--when an attempted chainsaw rape results in an absurdist shout out to "generation stink", complete with fist bump--the pace built by the prior pages is thrown off, leaving the reader completely unprepared for "The Chris Benwah Story", which might be the darkest piece of comedy in Ryan's entire career. Here's a taste of that:

There's no comparison, even to Johnny's 9/11 strips: this is harsh. From there, the book jarringly reverts to form, with the next page delivering a lazy (and toothless) attack on the Pope. And while nothing else in the book ever gets as dark as "Benwah", Ryan's contempt for "popular" humor quickly returns, with a one panel punchline focused on the idiocy of Larry The Cable Guy that contains such withering disgust ("git 'r done" being the obvious byproduct of castration) that one questions whether Ryan just isn't as irritated by the Catholic Church as he is by a comedian who eats out the lowest common denominator. But as the book continues, the strangeness starts to dogpile. 

The comics above have nothing in common in terms of "plot", they don't share the same punchlines, but what they do all have is an unbelievable weirdness, a wholesale rejection of the types of jokes that Ryan's done so often before in this type of work. Oh, you'll still find plenty of funny, mean shit here: Ronald Reagan's Oval Office assault on Q-Bert will fill a gap that most would take to their graves, and there's something inherently satisfying to the concept that Kenny Loggins lives inside everyone's toilet. But then there's "Casino Splatz", with a street hustler (dressed like a silent movie villain) being forcibly inducted into the Maggot Brotherhood by way of a Prison Pit style body possession, or an openly desperate plea that Americans never forget their inalienable obligation to "kick it up a notch". The joke in "Neato Keitho" isn't that he was trying to rape the infant descendent of Hitler, it's that he used his last breath to apologize to the American flag for failing to give it the revenge he knew it deserved.

In mainstream comics, there's no reason to concern oneself with intent: they exist to make money, they have no other purpose. But in the outskirts, in something like this, where Ryan's reputation so far precedes him (and his content precludes so many of the regular channels)--intent and motive become an active component of the work while reading it, no matter its unknowability. "Why did he go that far" might be the popular one, but that's usually a sham question, designed just so that his critics can smugly respond "because he's not any good". The better question, the interesting one: Why is he doing it like this, now?

The change could be Prison Pit, it could be Angry Youth # 14, but more likely, those are mere outgrowths of a more exciting development: he's moved on. He's written the best shit joke, his best rape gag, his funniest story about two kids who kill one another. What he's doing now--toying with a formula he arguably perfected back in the early pages of Comics Book Holocaust--is exploring the tangential gags that made that last issue of Angry Youth such a revelation. (You might not remember how Boobs Pooter's joke finally ended, but few forget that throwaway moment in the middle, when a paramedic looked at his partner and said "Are you crying?")

It doesn't seem to have totally caught on. For some reason, Ryan includes two painful strips near the book's conclusion--one made up from the ceaseless stream of negative comments left on his Vice comics, and the final strip, where a man happily abandons suicide after hearing that Ryan has shut the project down. Both the strips aren't funny, worser still, they seem a bit clueless, as if Ryan was disappointed that he failed to find a large audience for hyper-offensive shaggy dog stories, anti-jokes, and a gleeful depiction of a horrible double murder.

He'll never be everybody's cartoonist--there's too much he does that people will get turned off by, too little time for his fans to continue the fruitless conversations about why dangerous comedy enthralls them more than observational bullshit and corny pop cultural referencing. But the truth is that he could've kept going, dropping a yearly Prison Pit and a couple of self-published "Fuck Spiegelman, Wolverine Too" comics, and the praise would have kept rolling in. Instead, he's letting his past triumphs stand behind him, and plunging forward. And if it seems clumsy at times, even embarrassing, it's a price worth paying.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Advanced Common Sense

The latest episode of ACS is now freely available for those of you with the time and interest to spare. If you'd prefer watching it in HD--god help you, he doesn't get prettier--it's available in that format on the Youtube and comiXology pages.

The Virgin Read: Chris Ware, Tough Words, Her Longest Piece To Date, Just Different

Acme Novelty Library # 19
By Chris Ware
Published by Chris Ware

This is my first experience with the work of Chris Ware.  This is old school Virgin Read.

Let me begin my saying how much I love this art.  If you've read this column at all before, you might remember that the only other art I’ve raved about is Michael Avon Oeming's art for Powers.  Something about these two artists--who have nothing in common–is just so smooth, and creamy.  I just want to drink the art off the page. 

Acme Novelty is the truest art of storytelling with pictures I've seen.  There’s text, yes.  But the quietness and loneliness portrayed throughout the pictures in the first few pages is the hook.  I just knew that this was a sad man.  Something was wrong…but what?  And even more engaging was after being led through the quiet sadness of this man’s daily ritual, he walks outside to face the huge silhouette of a rocket ship.  Huh?

So, I kept reading.  I definitely enjoyed it.  I initially didn’t think I’d be able to finish it in time to write my weekly review.  (And, well, I didn’t.  I’m a day late! )   But I’m torn now by my need to please all of you comic folk who know way more about this stuff than me, and my desire to tell you my most visceral reaction to this experience.

Tearing over. Here goes nothing. 

My most visceral reaction is that I kept getting really irritated by the bleakness.  Irritated at the author of this bleakness.  I guess that could be a testament to how "good" the art is.  The story of the dog and the perimeter, followed by the perceived deception and betrayal of his “friends”….it wasn’t just that all that stuff was "well told."  It was the illustration of the dog as she died, or the illustration of our protagonist as he desperately ran through the night to find an extra suit in the pod.  It was all so painful, but in this encompassing way that honestly, I wasn't prepared for, never would have expected, and am not really sure I wanted to go through.

But I hung in anyway, through the irritation, through the bleak portrayal of this sad man and his pain.  I hung in because after such a set-up, and such a conflict, I wanted the pay off of a resolution.  I wanted it to end, to climax, to--not a happy ending.  Just an ending.

BUT THERE ISN’T ONE.

Which is TOTALLY irritating.

There I was learning that this story is just a story inside of a story.  I had to put the book down--and this was days ago--and I couldn’t pick it up again for awhile.  I'll be honest--I felt gypped. And tricked.  I felt used.

I got over it.  Wanted to read more.

So there I was, and there it goes: story within a story number two.  (Which had a flashback in it.)  And again, yes, the pain and desperation and discomfort of our young “hero” (hardly!), was palpable and well depicted.  But things just got worse and worse.  There’d be an upswing and then a downturn again.  Oy.  After a while, this became almost totally repellent.  There’s some humor thrown in, sure--this guy likes to randomly pull his pants down to his ankles and expose himself when he is by himself.  Ha Ha.  I’m not sure I understood this joke, and probably had the same quizzical expression on my face every time I came across this--is it just another part of the storytelling, where the joke stands in stark contrast to other things around it?  It just seemed so "male."  Not in an Alpha-dog, macho kind of way.  It's just all wrapped up in sex and lust and what male people do when male people are by themselves and feeling, um,sorry, lame.  It was like reading the diary of an extremely wimpy younger brother.

You know what came to mind for me?  The Moth’s Story Slam instructions.  Yeah.  Let me explain.  A few years ago I heard about these Story Slams at a café in the West Village in NYC.  I don't know why, but it sounded really interesting.  People get up and tell a story, and the audience votes.  And the whole thing is like a tournament with big winners at the end.  They win the big story slam prize.  I don't know what it is.  They get to be king of stories.

Anyhow, I never attended one, but I thought about it and thought about telling a story there.  Here’s some of the key points from their “how to” page.  (The stuff in italics is there words.)

First:  Start in the action.  Have a great first line that sets up the stakes or grabs attention.

Not This Way: "So I was thinking about climbing this mountain. But then I watched a little TV and made a snack and took a nap and my mom called and vented about her psoriasis then I did a little laundry (a whites load) (I lost another sock, darn it!) and then I thought about it again and decided I'd climb the mountain the next morning."

Yes This Way: "The mountain loomed before me. I had my hunting knife, some trail mix and snow boots. I had to make it to the little cabin and start a fire before sundown or freeze to death for sure."

I think Acme started just as suggested.  Like I already mentioned, in the first few pages it started in the action, set up the stakes – lonely guy with dog, sad – and they seem to be there (wherever "there" is) due to this giant spaceship sitting in the field.

Here's the next Slam tip:

Steer clear of meandering endings.  They kill a story!  Your last line should be clear in your head before you start.

Now, sure, they’re talking about when you’re telling the story.  But I think it goes for any book too!  And this seems to be almost the style Chris Ware kept using.  The stories would trail off with one ending and then start telling another story.  Look, I understood how "they are all connected" and that "it's part of the storytelling," but the meandering definitely had the power to lose me.  And it did lose me.  And sometimes it threw me out of reading it completely.

There are several other Slam tips, but the last two that I want to mention are:

Contestants are judged on ……sticking to the theme and having a story that sticks—one that has a conflict and a resolution.

and

No rants!  Take up this anger issue with your therapist, or skip therapy and shape your anger into a story with some sort of resolution. (Stories = therapy!)

I felt like I was reading a lot about conflict and very little about resolution.  And when there was a resolution it didn't feel like it was any kind of choice--it felt like random happenstance.  This character is a classic victim – at least that’s how it felt, to me, to read.  It was like hanging out with that friend who only knows how to complain.  They want things to be different, but jeez, if things would only go their way for once!  It's exhausting.

Which brings me to the final tip up there, “No Rants.”  There’s no anger issue here, but there is a whiny, wimpy issue.  Enough already.  It's really boring.  I mean, you really are "catching him with his pants down" over and over again.  Now, sure: we all have plenty of these moments in our life, but god, it doesn't really make for great entertainment.  It's therapeutic for the writer, for sure, but not for this reader.  I just felt uncomfortable.

All that being said – this is unlike any other comic I’ve read to date.  I recently wrote about Punisher and how I wish the artist would have taken a little more time with the moments that could really have shown some difficult emotion, any difficult emotion.  That’s something I'm not coming across in comics, and I'm starting to wonder if it just doesn't happen that often.  And here’s an entire work that deals so well with art and emotion in a totally unique way.  I should be standing up in my chair applauding.  One could argue that this is true blue, honest to god, Big Bold Letter Art.

But honestly, you know what it reminded me of?  It reminded me of that actor or actress who is really good at crying.  Crying in a scene is hard to do.  It's not merely making your eyes water.  The impressive part is in witnessing an actor so committed to a role, and so committed to buying fully into the desires and objectives and obstacles of the character that they are playing, that they truly react as if they are that character.  That takes true talent.  But even though it takes skill, and even though it takes talent, going to watch a great actor or actress to a series of unconnected monologues in which the actor/actress cries every single time?  Well, that’s boring.  I don't care how talented the actor is with that skill.  When there’s no distinct conflict and resolution, well, there’s no drama.  And if there’s no drama? 

Then you’ve just got someone crying on stage for a couple of hours.  It's not entertainment.  It's not art.

Now, that comparison right there, that isn't really fair.  Acme Novelty Library isn't extemporaneous public storytelling.  It's an exquisitely drawn piece of work, an emotional comic book by a legendary artist who I know very little about, and the very little I know comes from one other person.  I feel, and I felt, completely over my head in this task of "reviewing" it.  I don't pretend that I've got any expertise in talking about this, in reviewing it.  I've never read a comic like this, I've never spent time with one of this caliber.  I don't even know what to call it--comic book doesn't even feel right, it's nothing like what I've read before for these columns.  I'm glad I read it.  It took a while, and it...hurt.  You understand?  This hurt to read, and it's hard to explain.

I didn't know that they could do them like this.  Okay?  I didn't know.

-Nina Stone, 2008

Capacity by Theo Ellsworth

Capacity
By Theo Ellsworth
Published by Secret Acres, 2008

What is Secret Acres going to do when they run out of amiable, likeable cartoonists?  Eventually, these guys are going to have to find an author who is just a straight up prick.  Capacity is their third "official" publication this year, following the release of Samuel Gaskin's Fatal Faux Pas (reviewed here by Nina) and Eamon Espey's Wormdye, and it continues the trend of publishing well designed collections of mini-comics adapted or extended to "graphic novel" length.  It also continues the trend of publishing characters that, even if they're killing cats, come across as being birthed from friendly artists who seem genuinely excited to have found an outlet that allows their work to leave the ramshackle hall of hand-stapled mini-comics and join their brother and sisters at Barnes & Noble in the heavy softcover collection category.  Theo Ellsworth, more so then Espy or Gaskin, exemplifies these amiable traits at it's finest--while it's doubtful that a man could be anywhere near as whimsical and gentle as his fictional substitute in Capacity, it seems a hell of a lot less ridiculous than to imagine him as an embittered cartoonist lost in the fog of narcissistic solipsism that is so often the setting for the type of stories that Capacity seeks to tell.  Simply put, Capacity is a collection of one cartoonist's attempts to nail down his own creative process, to fill in the gaps between his artful depictions of his own imagination with an honest explanation of the motives behind them, and yet, at no point does one get the sense that he's a self-deluded prick who would be much happier doing just about anything other than drawing cartoons based around his own thoughts.  On top of that, despite blurring the lines constantly about who the man is behind the cartoons, despite off-handedly mentioning that he lived out of his car or created a work of cartoon art that, due to it's cumbersome size, is unlikely to be seen by anyone who doesn't show up at his home, Theo Ellsworth completely fails to come across as someone with a trace of foolish arrogance.  He's just an artist, and he's completely content to let the work stand on its own.

The Capacity collection consists of Theo's various Capacity mini-comics, along with a interweaving bridging story that consists, for the most part, of a substitute author who leads another character (one that is constantly referred to by a blank line that the reader is supposed to fill in with their own name) through the various chapters, most of which consist of reprints of the mini-comics.  From a weight of sheer page count, the longest official "story" in Capacity is probably the bridging sections which also serve as bookends to the narrative.  For what they are, the bridging sections are probably the true test of the reader--they end up being more baldly honest then anything else in Capacity, and their very nature could end up being more precious then some readers can handle.  This reader didn't have a problem with them--but still, it's completely understandable that some comics fans may have reached their limit of how much time they want to spend with this kind of sincerity. 

The remainder of Capacity though--and here's where all that time in the 20-something tea party of whimsy pays off--is the mini-comics themselves.  Theo's greatest strengths lays in his cartooning, and when the guy starts drawing these gigantic fantasy structures, these gargantuan Aztec-looking statues covered in slides and highways, it makes for a brilliant experience.  It helps that Theo embraces one solid fact throughout, a simple one that would benefit anyone who tries to spend their time creating fantasy architecture: make sure that the fantastic has logic.   No matter how easy it would be for Ellsworth to just draw his intricate structures with no rhyme or reason, he takes the time to construct some kind of convoluted--yet wholly accurate--Rube Goldberg structure, often by way of the smooth plastic of the old Mousetrap board game.  Sure, these mazes, these slides and pennywhistle compounds that end up looking like some kind of alien oil rig on Jack Kirby's Apokolips--they couldn't ever be "real."  But they've got weight to them, and the path the little substitute character takes is one that makes sense.  You can trace it with your finger--and if the odd little pieces of text are to be believed, Ellsworth would probably like it much better if you did.  On top of that, there's pages of the things, and yet he's smart enough to split them up between his own renditions of the classic indi-comics anthology staples--here's a couple of unfunny gag panels about a He-Man type character named Voltan, here's his rejected anthology submission (an overwrought anti-war poem that's as frankly honest as it is lazily repellent), here's his random take on commercials for fake products--and then it's back to the structures.  By the time Theo gets around to telling stories--odd dream riffs about a seven year party that was over in seconds, or an attempt by the heart and brain to meet separately to plan the capture of dreams--the overall weight of the book's honesty becomes apparent.  More then just an attempt to capture the mundane fancy of a meal, or a boring relationship, Capacity makes the entirety of its author's mind the focus, and then chooses to tell the story as frankly as possible.  While it's a comic that probably won't end up making it to the home of as many readers as it deserves, it's a damn fine one, and it's a testament to good taste that the Secret Acres company is putting this much care into something that too few care about.

-Tucker Stone, 2008
This review was based on a complimentary copy from the publisher.

Off The Shelf: Alex Robinson Versus Alex Kim, For All Of David Malki's Beards

Beards of our Forefathers
By David Malki
Published by Dark Horse Comics, 2008

This is David Malki's first collection of his Wondermark webcomic to be published by Dark Horse Comics. While Wondermark has appeared in print before, in various other collections, Beards is a clear step-up--a high quality hardcover volume that certainly brings the work a level of product importance that any self-published paperback might lack. While, like any compendium of gag strips, the book turns out to be a bit hit or miss, Malki is pretty damn clever when he wants to be. Taken as a whole, the entire enterprise suffers from a bit of exhaustion--besides the strip themselves, there's a constant stream of self-referential text, silly throw-away gags that are either clever or irrritating, and an overload of prosaic narration that begins to grate even after a short amount of time. When the strips are funny, they are spot-on, but the additional material screams of trying far too hard, and of having far too little faith in the work itself. For the strips, and the presentation of them, the book is certainly rewarding--but it would do the reader well to avoid anything that isn't attached to pictures.

Too Cool to be Forgotten
By Alex Robinson
Published by Top Shelf, 2008

A meandering piece of work resulting from what at first sounds like a clever idea, Too Cool is one of those comics that exists solely so that it can be praised for being created. The story follows the tiresome, and altogether predictable, adventures of a middle-aged man transported into his teenage body while under hypnosis, and proceeds to behave like a boring middle-aged man wandering around as a teenager, dispensing the sort of homespun wisdom that could conceivably cause a school shooting: "You shouldn't drink, or, whatever, date, until you feel like you're ready." Of course, all of that drops away like a sack of claw hammers when it's time for the comic to dive into full tear-jerking mode for a scene that reads like a grade school retelling of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, specifically the scene where Tom Cruise used the power of Scientology to cry a lot. Once again, here's another comic from a semi-talented artist who figured that since Top Shelf would publish whatever he came up with, he mine as well come up with something. The something he came up with? Sentimental tripe, presented in a gauzy autobiographical style that only grows more obnoxious with every simpering page.

Wall City
By Alex Kim
Published by Alex Kim & The Vermont School of Cartooning, 2008

It's of some interest that the offices at the Factual happened to come across another story about the loss of fathers so quickly on top of Too Cool to be Forgotten--while Wall City has it's own failings, and it certainly doesn't have the money behind it that will end up propelling the far lesser Too Cool to greater heights and exposure, both books take a similar theme and go in completely different directions. Mr. Kim hasn't built up much of a body of work yet; unless we're severely mistaken, this 103 page graphic novel is the longest he's done yet--yet he's already built a readily identifiable personal style. Wall City is predominately full of flat, at times featureless characters, consistently dressed in clothing that is drawn with a strange liquid appearance, making all of them look both similar in expression as they are in their satin jackets. The story, what little there is, follows a confused, young EMT named Minty as he struggles through memories of loss, a failed relationship and a painful, gut-wrenching job--all of which he internalizes so extensively that he seems to learn his own problems at the same rate the reader does. All the action takes place amongst black, heavily designed buildings and clumsy apartments--by the time the book veers off into a static empty clearing outside of the city, the book has become so thoroughly oppressive that even the strangeness of a giant pit filled with interlocking industrial equipment (what looks like air conditioners and televisions, for the most part) is a weird sort of quasi-relief. From there, the story completely abandons itself from attempting to meet an exact explanation--wherever it is that Minty plans to go, and how long he plans to be there is left unexplained.

While Wall City might not be the next step in a full-fledged comics-as-career for Mr. Kim--the works internal design could use a bit more of the heart that is given so freely to the language--but for a young cartoonist, fresh out of school, it's unassailable accomplished work, and far more rewarding than the similarly themed work from Alex Robinson. Considering that it was put together by hand and placed in the marketplace with little promotion beyond appearances at conventions by a young cartoonist just out of school, it makes the future projects of Mr. Kim something to look forward too.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

Wondermark is readable for free online at the Wondermark website. You can also pick up Beards of Forefathers there.

Too Cool To Be Forgotten will be released by Top Shelf this month.

Wall City is available through the artists website.

Off The Shelf: Hey, And Take Public Opinion With You

The Essential Fantastic Four, Volume 2
By Stan Lee & Jack Kirby
Published by Marvel Comics, 1999
Originally Serialized by Marvel Comics, 1963-1965

The Essential series is, for those who don't already know, a cheap black and white reprint series.  Depending on how you want to check out old Fantastic Four, Marvel offers an expensive and impossible to read anywhere but at home Omnibus, an expensive and easy to carry around short Masterworks edition, or if you don't give a shit, but figure hey-why-the-hell-not, these Essential things.  Continuing around 20 full length comics, it's either a great way to check out the "classics" or it's a great way to immerse oneself in a bit of mildly irritated ennui.  Sure, you're supposed to respect old super-hero comics, you're supposed to shit your pants and talk about how Stan Lee's writing is on the Shakespearean level with his mastery of tragic heroes, you're supposed to look at whatever the Fantastic Four is doing now (exact same shit) and talk about how it's not as good as what was done before (exact same shit) and how today's comics are totally decompressed and not as deep, or smart, or point out that's why todays comics aren't as popular, because this shit is gold, it's unimpeachable brilliance, it was what made the Hernandez brothers want to write, so it must be perfect, so on, so forth, babbling endlessly, like a river brook.

Some of this is entertaining.  Most of it is just long-winded and tiresome.  Some of Kirby's panels and pages are totally fucking great.  Most aren't.  None of this is dramatically anything.  When it came out, yes, it totally was.  Yes, it was innovative, and different, and compared against the stuffed suit corporate fatcats over at DC--fill in the blank with what you always hear, insert something with the word renegade if you must.  But the ongoing rapture for this?  Born out of nostalgia.  Bred by snobbery.  Would you rather read 100 Bullets now?  Would you rather watch The Wire?  That doesn't make you any less intelligent, any less classy, or anything else.  Just because Marvel and DC are reprinting everything they've ever published, that doesn't mean it's worth a second of your time.  Would it be better in color?  In a hardcover that weighs 14 pounds?  Maybe it would be.  But it would still be long-winded and only intermittently not boring. 

Rising Stars, Volumes 1-2
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Art by Christian Zanier, Ken Lashley, Livesay, Steve Nelson, Mario Alquiza, Alp Altiner, Danny Miki, Stuart Immonen, Brent Anderson, Keu Cha, Jason Gorder, Edwin Rosell & Victor Llamas
Published by Top Cow Productions, Image Comics & Joe's Comics, 2001-2002

Most of the time, when Rising Stars gets mentioned, it's to say that the beginning was pretty great, and then it all went south due to legal fights and bad art.  Not true!  It was never great.

End of review.

The Trial of Colonel Sweeto And Other Stories
By Nicholas Gurewitch
2007, Published by Dark Horse Comics

Although it's never been easier to go to the Perry Bible Fellowship website, which is where all of these comics can be found, that doesn't mean that it isn't a fabulous! wonderful! hilarious! pleasure in being able to buy this candy-colored hardcover edition of Gurewitch's work.  There's not enough nice things in the world that can be said about Perry Bible--it's really fucking funny, and it's really fucking funny all the time.  Whether you're watching an old alkie lose it all at the track after betting on a flying cartoon pony, or the greatest marriage proposal of all time, Nicholas Gurewitch is a guy who hasn't just earned your money, he's owed it.  The laughter here is worth hundreds of dollars, yet Dark Horse wants less than twenty.  These are great times.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

Off The Shelf: You Are About To Witness The Strength Of Adrian Tomine's Street Knowledge

Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus, Vol. 3
By Jack Kirby
2007, Published by DC Comics
Originally Serialized by DC Comics, 1972

It's tempting to just copy and paste what was said here previously about the second volume of he Fourth World--Kirby's work didn't suffer from a lack of consistency until the issues near the finale of the series.  The only thing that stills the temptation is that this happens to be the volume containing "The Pact," otherwise known as Jack Kirby's favorite of the 4th World saga--and if the introduction is to be relied upon, one of the favorites of his long career.  It's easy to see why--even knowing the basics of what's coming, it's still a resoundingly enjoyable story.  There's a lot of great, intelligent stuff out there being written about Jack Kirby's work in this series--and while the Fourth World will always be overshadowed in cultural impact by the King's work on the Fantastic Four, everybody who's spent any time in the Factual's satellite office in Manhattan knows full well that, if it came to a desert island choice, we'd chose Kalibak, Mister Miracle & yes, even Jimmy Olsen over the Stan Lee Angsty Quartet.  There's just too much going down in Fourth World for it not be loved. 

Sundays
Various Authors/Artists
2007, Published by the Center for Cartoon Studies

There are plenty of comics worth checking out here, but one has to be ready and willing to deal with the ridiculous size of the publication itself, and one has to be ready to wash their hands if they plan to do anything afterwards.  (Unless you like pretending you're a newspaper printer and like rubbing ink all over your family.)  Nothing in this volume is long enough to be anything but a brief sample of what's being taught over at the Center for Cartoon Studies, a Vermont school that probably won't be producing any future Spider-man artists anytime soon.  Instead, it's all the sort of comics that come from people who grew up in the shadows of alt-comics anthologies like Raw and Rubber Blanket.  Thankfully, the volume is short on autobiographies of it's mostly white contributors, all of whom probably grew up in the sort of boring suburbs that most boring white people grow up in.  If this volume were expensive, it would probably be deserving of some scorn, but taken for what it is--a cheap compilation of a bunch of young cartoonists who will soon be out of school and struggling in the free market, it's not that bad.  If it hadn't been for the existence of MOME and Kramer's Ergot, it might even be great. 

Sgt. Rock: Between Hell & A Hard Place
Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Joe Kubert
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics, 2003

The only real problem with a "realistic" Sgt. Rock is that, as much as it tries for believability, the consistent survival of Rock, and his near preternatural ability to find himself in pretty amazingly bad circumstances, drives the the story to strain credibility.  Where other war comics (like Two-Fisted Tales and Garth Ennis' War Stories) succeed by embracing the fickle nature of armed conflict by allowing the death to be totally indiscriminate and rarely using characters more than once, Sgt. Rock's adventures always include people who can't seem to die.  Is that a petty complaint?  Sure.  But it's a petty complaint that's true--Sgt. Rock books can't compete in the tension arena against books where everybody might end up losing.  If anything, that prospect of failure is what makes war books, if not more well-written, than at least more exciting, then super-hero comics.  No matter what, no sniper is ever going to shoot Robin in an issue of Batman--but you can't predict what's going to happen to anyone, even the narrator, when you're dealing with a war comic.  Except, of course, if the war comic is Sgt. Rock.

Bringing Azzarello on board as writer lends the work some authenticity--if there's one thing Azzarello is impeccably talented for, it's lending a distinctive voice that speaks to the man's research.  (Obviously, that's an assumption, as this reader doesn't have first hand experience with World War II.  Still, this comic certainly sounds real enough.)  Having Joe Kubert as artist means it's going to look like a Sgt. Rock comic should look--chock full of dusty faces and snarls.  But is it any different than any other Sgt. Rock comic, after one gets past Azzarello's chunky, man-heavy dialog?  Not really.  It's a beautiful book, it's handled by some talented people, and it still ends up being little more than a pretty standard book--albeit one that's a bit pricey and more than a bit in love with itself.  There's nothing here that can't be found cheaper somewhere else.

Sleepwalk & Other Stories
By Adrian Tomine
Published by Drawn & Quarterly Publications
Originally Serialized in Optic Nerve, 1995-1998

This is the Adrian Tomine collection that includes "Pink Frosting," otherwise known as the-story-where-Adrian-Tomine-curbs-motherfuckers.  Although it was too early in his career to be seen as a response to critics who hate the Tomine style of comics, it's always fun to imagine that.  If you've ever seen a picture of the guy, just picture Tomine sitting back with a dog-eared cigar reading online where a 12 year old is calling him "a boring fag" and saying to himself "Goddamn I'd like to put that bitches teeth to the concrete."  There aren't a lot of classic curbing stories in the world--but Pink Frosting is one that puts the American History X one to shame.

Other shit happens too, mostly about dating.

-Tucker Stone, 2008