Best Of Times/Worst Of Times: Cinematic Storytelling!

Right now is the absolute best and worst time to be reading comic books, for a myriad of reasons.  The best books I've ever read in my now 30+ year career in reading these damn things...I'm reading now.  And yet it never fails that each week I find my blood pressure rising and throwing something down in disgust.  Sometimes I'll declare the same comic genius and also throw it down in disgust at some point in the reading process.  


If there's an over-arching, primary, 600-pound-gorilla-type-problem in the industry currently, it's the problem of value.  It's hard to scientifically clarify what we mean by a comic with that exhibits good "value", although having the page count to flesh out the stories does help.  I think we can all think of shorter comics or even back-up features that have entertained and earned the cover cost, and I believe we've all read longer works that didn't pay off with a visceral response.  Which had greater value?


I suppose we know it when we experience it, but also I think lost in the potential nitpicking is the very obvious and demonstrable claim:


Today's comics are the least efficient and most expensive comics in the history of the medium.


With very few exceptions, there are no comics that leave one feeling they've received good value - even the comics one enjoys.  I'm going to talk about two examples I read this evening; Last of the Greats # 2, and Cloak & Dagger: Spider-Island # 3.  Here's the thing.  I genuinely enjoyed both books, and in fact, I thought what was there in LOTG was pretty fantastic.  But here's the other thing:

This is Charles at the end of his presser, explaining to the world that the last remaining great is perfectly willing to fix the world as they know it, but he's going to require a serious adulation commitment.  Then he walks away from the mic.


Now, I'm not a complete rube.  I intellectually understand an attempt at poignancy when I see it.  But what does that PAGE, and what is pictured above is an entire PAGE of the LOTG # 2, actually accomplish?  I imagine that Joshua Fialkov sees us slowing down our eyes and fully digesting this, his most dramatic of all moments.  Because he has ordered Brent Peeples to fill a largely empty page with a microphone and a grim, statuesque figure, we are now understanding the true and pregnant implications of the people's decision.


And you know what?  If this kind of thing happened in a comic book series once every six months, these little tricks might have that kind of power.  The problem, or one of the big problems, is that today's writers think every little scene they write is the BIGGEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED IN COMICS.  That scene where Charles walks away from the mic is actually a waste of everyone's time.  We only get twenty pages a month to move these forward, gents.  You can't waste them with a line of dialogue and a smear of blue watercolor for a background.  That's a waste of time, and a waste of my money.


This scene to me is even worse:

What is the point of the first three panels, and why couldn't that have been conveyed in one panel, about half the size used?  Here's the story beat: the angry child is running away.  That's it.  Why does that require 70% of a page to illustrate?  We're not breaking new ground here or pushing the medium forward.  This is a waste of space, a waste of my time, and a waste of my money.


Comics are not television or movies, and I dearly wish they'd stop trying to be.  The juice in comics is what happens between your ears between the panels.  It's about connecting dots, not throwing still shots of film cells on a page.  Take this gun scene, as an example:

Charles is depressed. We know this.  It's fine to re-establish that, to show a grim despondency and set the scene emotionally again.  But why do we need a play-by-play of the gun inching toward his head?  "Sad look with gun on table" + "gun at temple" in next scene is more than enough for us to get the idea.  These panels don't need to be that big, either.  Not to tell the story.  

My conclusion upon finishing Last of the Greats # 2 was that it was an outstanding little chunk of a story I'm enjoying very much...that I also overpaid for.  And this one was one of the $2.99 books!  I didn't clock myself reading it, but completing the issue took closer to five minutes than ten. 

Joshua Fialkov is a smart writer.  He's not afraid to cut to the heart of the dark part of human nature, but he does it with some elegance instead of hitting you with a sledge hammer.  Last of the Greats has an outstanding hook - dirt simple with lots of layers.  I don't want to ruin anything by just blurting out all the plot details, but issue # 1 had me flip-flopping on where I invested my sympathy twice, and then at the beginning of the second issue, the remaining Great pulls a maneuver that makes you question everything again.  

A child is fed to sharks at some point, and its not just for Mark MillarianFialkov is good to the point where it pays to think about these things, because you can bet he has.  It means something.


This is a story with both theme and purpose, something more comic books should take note of and do likewise.  I really enjoy this story.  


But does Last of the Greats # 2 have good value?  No, it does not. It has better value than a dull comic of the same length, width, and efficiency, but that doesn't mean it's a good value.  Not enough happened.

And this isn't an isolated occurrence.  In the same pile I read Fialkov's I, Vampire # 2.  Also a good book with a wicked hook.  Star-crossed lovers in an unhealthy supernatural co-dependent relationship, ready to take the vampire nation to the next level, in inevitable opposition with the superhero community.  But if you break I, Vampire # 2 into its basic ingredients, what you have is a lot of poetic posturing, one vampire fight where the protagonist in never in any actual danger, and the realization that Mary set him up for it just to make life tougher for him down the line.  It could have been done in five pages, easy.  In the golden age, it probably would have been done in two pages at most.

And I'm not positing that we need a return to the golden age by any stretch.  Not enough sophistication there to satisfy modern sensibilities.  But neither do we need a page to show a many walking away from a microphone, either.  Surely there's a middle ground in there somewhere?
  
It's self indulgence of the highest order.  It's the assertion that these scenes are all of such magnitude that each sublime moment must have a double splash page for the masses to properly digest the galactic implications.  It's absurd.  


But Fialkov is by no means alone or the worst of his kind.  No, the King of Self Indulgence is the divinely conceived Nick Spencer.  And I'll show you how Cloak & Dagger: Spider Island # 3 blows the doors off LOTG in terms of inefficiency when next I pontificate at you.


- Ryan

Market Spotlight: House of Mystery # 290!

House of Mystery # 290

Once upon a time House of Mystery ran a vampiric soap opera for 24 issues starring one Lord Andrew Bennett.  It was called "I, Vampire."

Some chicks can't handle their vampirism

If that sounds vaguely familiar, that's probably because I, Vampire is one of the 52 new launches from DC in September, one you weren't thinking of getting.  That might be a mistake.

For starters, the hook isn't bad, as these things go.  Bennett becomes a vampire, and decides to bring his lover Mary Seward into the undead fold.  No point in eternal life if you're just going to watch everyone you love die on you, right?  The hitch is that much like Jagermeister, vampire blood is not a liquid just anyone can handle properly.  Sometimes it turns you evil.

So poor Andrew is stuck, because as much as he hates what Mary has become, he's responsible and he still loves her.  Much like herpes, vampirism just goes on forever with no goddamn cure.  So if we've learned anything, we now know that Vampires are just Jagermeister soaked herpes.

So there's your story, and it will be scripted by Josh Fialkov, who's really quite good.  After reading Echoes, I can certainly see why DC would tap Fialkov for a dark project with some emotional punch.  He's got that shit down cold, and I'm reasonably excited about the series.  I think if DC has the good sense to keep these stories out of their inevitable Duskiest Mid-Morning crossover, we should be just fine.  But sometimes the brass can't help themselves but to meddle in a writer's kitchen with that crap.  Ask Grant Morrison and Batman, Inc. about that.

Long story longer, I see this as an underrated series with a potential cult following, and interest in I, Vampire should result in a spike on the first appearance of Bennett in HOM # 290.  Maybe.  As always, the market, she is a fickle temptress.  Wagner's critically acclaimed run on Madame Xanadu didn't really set Ms. Xanadu's house on fire, so these things don't always pan out.

Overstreet rates a 9.2 copy of this issue at $24.  I just purchased one in VF condition for $6, so the Overstreet mark is probably high as compared to the actual current market, and probably quite low if Fialkov can put I, Vampire on the map again.  I think anything in decent shape for $10 or less is an interesting play.


- Ryan

Chronic Review: Marvel Girl # 1!

Marvel Girl # 1 (one-shot)

Marvel Comics

Script:    Josh Fialkov

Pencils:  Nuno Plati

22 pages for $2.99

The new Marvel Girl one-shot is a kind of origin story embellishment set in the X-Men: First Class end of the universe.  The capsule situation is this:  Jean is frazzled.  The boys at Xavier's are fighting over her or clinging to her, and she lets loose with her powers in a dangerous little fit of exasperation.  Xavier scolds her a bit before sending her packing from the school until she gets her act together again.

Back home, mom and dad are a welcome sight until they get over-emotional about the whole deal and Jean runs off to the mall to decompress again.  Once there she discovers that everything is just like she left it...in fact, far too much like she left it.  Everyone she used to hang out with at the mall is still there, doing the same things, stagnant and arrested in development.  The source of this weirdness appears to be the ghost of Jean's best friend Annie.

Fialkov's wheelhouse appears to be psychological drama and subtle weirdness, and this book has both elements.  Unlike his stellar work on Echoes, however, Marvel Girl falls incredibly flat.

The moral of the story is about moving on and growing out of the past, and losing a close friend for any reason is a powerful catalyst.  Perhaps it's because Fialkov is constrained by his X-Men: First Class audience, or perhaps it's because he's constrained by getting the whole story told in 22 pages, but this particular tale feels like a geared down shortcut to a much better story.

Given more space to breathe, I think the full ramifications of Annie's "curse" would have made more sense and felt more threatening.  And if we had more time to actually care about Annie and Jean's relationship, the loss would feel more profound.  As it stands, Marvel Girl # 1 reads like an X-Files after school special.

The art by Nuno Plati seems to be very anime inspired, which will often chafe me. In this case I found it mostly tolerable, although the characters look awfully thin.  The ghosts of the past are represented in bright pink hues, which worked for me, and might not work for everybody.  I'm thinking that the book is aimed at a younger audience steeped in modern animation, and I'm guessing that group will feel right at home here.  The cover by Roger Cruz is absolutely gorgeous.

Ultimately, there isn't enough emotional punch or character insight between these covers to justify it for me, but I think I might be demanding the book be more sophisticated than it intends to be.  I would have like to have seen what Fialkov could have done here with 4-6 issues while shooting for a more adult audience.  But that's just me wishing it could be something it's not, which is probably unfair. 

- Ryan

Chronic Review: Echoes # 1 and Memoir # 1!

Echoes # 1

Minotaur imprint of Top Cow

Script:      Joshua Hale Fialkov

Pencils:    Rahsan Ekedal

22 pages for $2.99

Before I get to Echoes the story, perhaps it's worthwhile to acknowledge that this is the first book of Top Cow's "Minotaur" imprint.  That's what the bull looking guy at the top left hand corner is about.  It's Top Cow's way of telling you that this is a Vertigo book.  They would probably find such a simplification slanderous, but it makes it no less true, and I don't think it's a bad thing to be a Vertigo book at all.

”We’ve been looking to expand Top Cow’s publishing line for some time with a brand that focused on self-contained, cerebral stories,” explained Top Cow Publisher Filip Sablik.  Of course Sablik is scripting the next addition to the Minotaur line: "Last Mortal".  I don't know if qualifies as arrogance to refer to your own work as "cerebral" or not...but it might be.  I'm certainly guilty of worse, and I'm getting off topic.

The point is that it's a pretty good idea, as most Top Cow ideas are.  Speaking of, this is actually not Echoes' first appearance.  That happened in the ridiculously affordable Top Cow First Look TPB, which included this issue and five other #1s for $4.99.  It's very rare that you find a comic publisher committed to walking the customer value walk, and not just talking it.  Top Cow is a customer value walker.  And if Echoes is any indication of the quality we can expect from the Minotaur imprint, it should be very successful indeed.


Joshua Hale Fialkov is the guy that brought you the very acclaimed Elk's Run.  His penciller is one Rahsan Ekedal, and there is no colorist on the book.  They left it in black and white, and that was a very wise choise.  This is noir country, and blacks and greys suit it very well.  Ekedal has been asked to draw a lot of haunted faces, and you do that with the eyes.  Ekedal does it very well.  And when I say "haunted", I don't mean to imply that this is a ghost story.  This is all painfully, plausibly real.

I suppose I should probably say what the story is now, instead of what it isn't.  Your main character is a carefully medicated man trying to hold things together with a mental illness, a wife, a child.  He probably has enough problems to deal with, but his dying father tells him to retrieve a box from a crawlspace in one of his final lucid moments.  Some of his mutterings suggest that there might be some dead bodies involved.

Our main character (a nurse calls him "Mr. Cohn") visits that house and investigates that crawlspace.  Whatever problems dad had....might have been passed to the son.  As he finds the box, his watch tells him it's time to take his anti-psychotic.  But the water in this abandoned house is fetid, undrinkable.  Cohn waits on the pill and dives into a very dark piece of his father's past.  Echoes would appear to be an exploration of that past, and how deeply the sins of the father dig into the son.

And it's really goddamn good.  This is very cutting horror.  It cuts as deeply as Crossed, without the heavy axe strokes.  Echoes allows you to sip the evil smooth and subtle.  Most of the juice is the mood, and in the helplessness of it all.  There might be evil you just can't beat whatever your best intentions, and that's scary.  That there is something out there, not rampant but prevalent enough that you know somebody who knows somebody who has this kind of illness.  They have an illness, and they can't stop themselves from making little dolls out of the bones of little girls.  That's creepy.  That's Echoes.

Fialkov does not reinvent the wheel, but the car sure does drive nicely, and isn't that mostly the point?  We've seen killers, we've seen sickness, and this is not literature's first unreliable narrator.  (until Cohn gets straight with his medication, you really can't trust a damn thing he shows you)  We've seen all that stuff, but we rarely experience a man rolling in the bones of his father's victims with such an unflinching grace.  My prose is probably getting to purple here, but this is a very dark but coordinated dance, where Ekedal provides perfectly eerie music for Fialkov's steps.  

If you like horror at all, I don't know how you could be unsatisfied with Echoes.

Memoir # 1

Image Comics

Script:      Ben McCool

Pencils:    Nikki Cook

22 pages for $3.50

Memoir is also in the creepy mood business.  About ten years ago a sleepy little town named Lowesville experienced a traumatic....something.  Nobody in town seems to recall exactly what.  Reporter Trent MacGowan is writing a story on the incident, hoping to finally get to the bottom of things.  Things are really damn weird.

Nobody is shaped like this

Trent MacGowan is a bit dodgy, the people of Lowesville are impossibly hayseedy and bizarre, and Nikki Cooke refuses to draw anything with correct or consistent proportions.  On something like the JLA that would be exceptionally irritating.  Here on Memoir that style seems to fit right in.

There's some potential in McCool's writing.  I found MacGowan's introduction delightfully odd.  He's taping an interview on a local television show. As the attractive reporter spews the usual nonsense, MacGowan undresses her with his eyes, reads her body language, and his running inner commentary is completely self-absorbed, betraying no concern about what's happening except as it feeds his libido or pads his bank account.

Trent The Playa

MacGowan has the world so thoroughly cracked he can't even be bothered to sweat the spotlight of a television interview.  He's like a highly tuned self-interest machine, calculating his advantage at all times, and the people around him are not fellow players so much as props.  There's a little unrefined freshness in there, McCool's got some real chops buried in there somewhere, I know it.

Some of the townsfolk prod Trent into visiting "The Butcher", who is beyond bizarre.  Butcher warns him about the meat, and about the dead people.  Good to know, good to know.  Other than that, nobody is feeling particularly talkative, and some are positively hostile.  Just when it seems that the trail is going to dead end MacGowan receives a mysterious and anonymous email asking to meet and claiming that he or she remembers everything.  And that's when the weird dude who was digging in the middle of the street uncovers what may or may not be a whole stack of mutated alien bodies.  And that's your Memoir!

The Butcher

I gotta be honest with you.  I can nitpick a whole heaping stack of issues with this book.  The art is wildly quirky, and this book probably isn't served by it's blacks and whites.  I think it's paced too slowly, and the story could have been moved along twice as efficiently.  There is exposition that could be handled in smaller panels, or fewer panels.  I'm not sure we need a giant computer screen panel in which our intrepid reporter replies "NOT UNTIL YOU TELL ME WHO YOU ARE AND WHY YOU WANT TO MEET".  There's a lot of wasted space in this issue. That first splash page showing a sketchy aerial view of the town is particularly egregious, in my opinion.  What does that communicate that the other panels showing the town atmosphere didn't?  

We miss you, Bill Hicks!

There's a blatant lift of an Old Bill Hicks joke, but I can't be too upset about that, since I've built about 40% of my on-air persona on Mr. Hicks.  I don't like Trent MacGowan, (we're not supposed to, really) I don't have any empathy for the people of Lowesville, and I have no easy spot to invest in this story other than being curious to know what's happening next.


The thing of it is, I do want to know what happens next.  It's too weird!  And I want to know enough that I fully expect to pay $3.50 next month to find out.  And if that isn't an endorsement, well, I don't know what is.  Memoir is an odd duck, and just odd enough to keep you staring at it.  It's not a genius duck, or a particularly polished duck.  But sometimes I'll bring an odd duck home if it waddles with some moxie, and Memoir does.


- Ryan