Martin Skidmore
11 January 2009
This is the first novel of his I’ve read since his death on New Year’s Eve, aged 75. I’ve read around half of his 100+ books under lots of pseudonyms (Wiki lists eleven).
This is a reasonably representative Westlake novel – it’s one of his stories of John Dortmunder, a criminal planner of considerable flair and not much luck. In this case, a psycho old cellmate is released after three decades in jail to find his large stash of stolen money is now under a reservoir. He comes to John with the plan to blow up the dam and recover his cash, not giving a damn about killing hundreds in the process. more »
Martin Skidmore in FT • 5 Comments
8 January 2009
I’ve not even opened it yet (it’s a collection of 1950s DC SF comics) – I just wanted to show everyone the cover.
Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • 8 Comments
6 January 2009
Almost all the talk these days in comics is of graphic novels, mostly meaning collections of the continuing traditional 24-page monthly comic. Writers create story ‘arcs’, i.e. they write for later collecting, most often in six-issue chunks. I have nothing against this, but I want to celebrate the monthly comic, too, and the writers who make really good ones, who, without sacrificing the longer story, write great single issues that make you desperate for the next one.
Mark Millar’s previous run on Wolverine, collected as ‘Enemy of the State’, was fantastic, but this current run may be even better, and the latest issue was one of the best I’ve read in years. The setup: it’s set in a future 50 years after just about every Marvel villain somehow got it together to team up and massacre all the superheroes and take over the world. Wolverine hasn’t fought anyone or popped his claws since then. more »
Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • 3 Comments
18 November 2008
I’d never watched any of the ‘ultimate fighting’ stuff, bar a little in a pub once. It looked very boring to me. I’m a big WWE fan – as silly as it is, I am hugely entertained by that. At the weekend I saw an ad for the next big Ultimate Fighting Championship event, and the main match seemed to be a world title fight between someone called Randy Couture (who inexplicably seems not to have a line of clothing to promote) and Brock Lesnar, who used to be in the WWE. This intrigued me: fans of UFC will often regard the WWE superstars with contempt. Obviously it’s all fixed, and the wrestlers help sell their opponents’ moves to a very blatant degree, so those who dislike the WWE deduce from this that the stars are just showy bodybuilders with gimmicks, and wouldn’t last five minutes in a fight with, for instance, a top ultimate fighter. (A couple of top ultimate fighters had tried their hand in the WWE, but never amounted to much as far as I am aware – obviously it demands somewhat different physical skills, and to get to the top it helps to have some sort of distinct personal style too, of course.) more »
Martin Skidmore in TMFD • 3 Comments
30 October 2008
I mentioned this in one entry in my Beginner’s Guide series, and rereading it now in this big collection, I think I may have undersold it a little. This volume collects all McCloud’s B&W Zot!s: it therefore omits the first 10 colour issues, a two-parter with a guest artist (to give McCloud time for his honeymoon), and some very funny stick-figure addenda strips by Matt Feazel. It started as a charming superhero adventure series, one that felt more like Astro Boy than any US series. Zot is the top superhero on an alternate-Earth, a utopian pick-and-mix blend of the history of SF. Zot flies with jet boots and has a ray gun, but his greatest assets are his unshakeable confidence and total optimism. It’s smart and bright, with the best use of speed-lines since Infantino’s heyday, and has some terrific villains – 9-Jack-9 in particular is magnificent, looking like no one else ever, unbeatable and very sinister. McCloud has demonstrated his deep formal understanding of comics in a series of book-length comic analyses since then, so it’s unsurprising how beautifully executed, despite the odd moment of clumsiness in some of the draughtsmanship. These are some of the most delightful and entertaining comics you’ll find this side of Osamu Tezuka*. more »
Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
11 September 2008
I usually start with my favourite work under consideration, but for the last entry in the series, I am saving the best for last. Crime is obviously central to countless comics, but I am not really talking about the superhero comic, not Alan Moore’s excellent Top Ten, a superhero Hill Street Blues, or even things like Ed Brubaker’s Gotham Central, which is still in that world, almost constantly conscious of the existence of Batman. Frankly, comics have given us very little centrally placed in the genre to match up to the many great crime novels or movies – though actually I have high hopes for Darwyn Cooke’s upcoming adaptations of some of Richard Stark’s tremendously hardboiled Parker stories.
Really, this heading is just for me to talk about one eight-page story, which only loosely belongs here. It’s widely considered the best short-story ever in comics – this may be a fair assessment, though I mention a couple of other contenders in the War and Koike & Kojima entries in this series. Whatever, ‘Master Race’ is a genuine masterpiece. You will often find no mention of the writer – it’s just discussed as Bernie Krigstein’s comic. The script in itself is daring: in 1955, the Holocaust was not much referenced in popular culture. I imagine it was still too raw, too hard to assimilate into anything but the most serious coverage, so writer (and editor of Impact, which ran this story in its first issue) Al Feldstein was taking a risk in including details of its horrors. Krigstein for once got permission to do things more or less his way – he had had regular battles with EC about changing the panel layouts he was given (EC habitually had the borders and copious caption text all set before the artists got at it). This time, he even got to stretch a 6-page script to eight pages, though I have seen it said that he had wanted 12. more »
Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • 5 Comments
8 September 2008
Frankly, there wasn’t so much in the early years of superhero comics that holds up well now. Jack Kirby’s early work, including Captain America, is worth a look, but he got much better later on. There’s some good art on some of DC’s ’40s heroes – notably some early Alex Toth (Black Canary is his best of that era, I think), Joe Kubert and Carmine Infantino here and there, and some nice work from Sheldon Moldoff on Hawkman and Jack Burnley on Starman, for instance. Elsewhere, C.C. Beck’s childlike Captain Marvel comics, and Mac Raboy’s art on Captain Marvel Jr, hold up pretty well. These are all hard to find, as is Lou Fine’s lovely art on Doll Man or The Ray for Quality.
Lou Fine is the artist Will Eisner always talked about most – Fine had worked on Eisner’s The Spirit, which is perhaps the best comic work of that era. It ran in a newspaper supplement, 7-page strips from 1940-1952. Eisner was an immensely accomplished and expressive cartoonist, who also had a talent for memorable characters, including some femmes fatale to match Caniff, and tightly wound short stories, but I think his biggest contribution to the comics of the time was his sense of design, which was like nothing else seen in comics then, and rarely matched since. His splash pages in particular are often highly original and memorable. One warning: there is a comedy black kid in it, and Ebony obviously looks rather distasteful all these decades later. more »
Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • 2 Comments
3 September 2008
I remember talking to comics giant Will Eisner a long time ago (1990 or so, I guess) about his experiences while working for the US army. He would produce instruction materials for soldiers in comic form. Every few years, a new boss decided he didn’t like that medium for such a purpose, and a new study was commissioned to prove that text and illustrations was the better approach – and every time it showed the exact opposite, that in fact comics were the best way to pass on information and instruction.
This point hasn’t been picked up an awful lot, but now we have as high a profile use of that idea as I’ve ever seen. Google has just launched a new browser, which looks pretty impressive. To explain it, they brought in the perfect choice for the job: Scott McCloud (who I happened to cover in the context of his great comic Zot! a few weeks back)(and he even responded!). I assume his Understanding Comics, a comic explanation of the medium, showed them how useful this approach was. He’s produced a lovely, clear and highly readable comic explaining and promoting it, explaining new features and elements of its internal architecture superbly. I have no idea if Chrome is as good as this makes it sound – new computer software is never bug free, and the potential problems from browser bugs can be huge, though it sounds as if they have taken sensible decisions to minimise the hazards – and this isn’t any kind of endorsement of the browser, which I haven’t tried, just an expression of delight that they chose this method, and the perfect person to execute it. I can’t imagine how many people will see this, but I hope it inspires others.
Martin Skidmore in Proven By Science /The Brown Wedge • 4 Comments
2 September 2008
Although those who know it in recent years might be surprised at this, most of the best humour comic artists link back to Mad. Don’t let the formulaic banality of so much of the recent material deter you. Mad was started by EC Comics in 1952 – I’ve mentioned their horror, SF and war comics elsewhere in this series. The editor was Harvey Kurtzman, one of the greatest cartoonists ever, and featured art by EC regulars such as Wally Wood, Jack Davis and Will Elder. These early issues were terrific, with some extraordinary strips – there’s an unlikely and jaw-dropping appearance by Bernie Krigstein (who’ll come up again in a couple of entries).
Kurtzman’s humour material is almost all well worth finding: Hey Look! and Help! are erratic but never less than magnificently executed, but his best comedy is in Goodman Beaver (beautifully inked by Elder) and especially The Jungle Book, one of the all-time great comics, it comprises four parody tales – a private eye story, a business satire, a cowboy tale and a Southern sheriff strip. It’s genuinely funny, and, for me, a genuine masterpiece of cartooning. (I would recommend skipping Kurtzman and Elder’s long-running Playboy strip, Little Annie Fanny, lovely as it looks.) more »
Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • 1 Comment
28 August 2008
Who is the greatest comic artist ever? Obviously that is unanswerable, but my top choice would be Alex Toth. This is partly because he was magnificent in every style he used, and he did it all – superheroes, romance, horror, funny animals, war, SF, westerns, pirates and anything else you can think of. I think his heart was most in swashbuckling adventure, harking back to Flynn and Fairbanks. He did great work on various such comics, and his fine Zorro work is collected in a couple of volumes, but I guess the work to point anyone to is Bravo For Adventure, starring dashing aviator Jesse Bravo. This is collected in one mag, which you might be able to buy if you’re lucky. The first story is particularly astonishing – for 16 of the 17 pages Jesse is unconscious, and in pages with three tiers of two panels each, Toth shows off his mastery and brilliance with a series of breathtaking black and white compositions and the best grasp ever of where to put in detail and where to go minimal. It also features a small tribute to Hugo Pratt (see below). Absolutely anything by Toth is worth grabbing when you see it – even on the most throwaway pieces of work, his peerless craft and compositional ability is unmistakeable. I’ve never really been interested in buying original comic art, but if there is one page I would choose, it would be this from a car story in DC’s Hot Wheels. There are a couple of lovely art-book format collections of some of his work, if you can find them, but it’s not always his best. more »
Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • 5 Comments
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This is the first novel of his I’ve read since his death on New Year’s Eve, aged 75. I’ve read around half of his 100+ books under lots of pseudonyms (Wiki lists eleven).
