I’ve read a couple of round-up pieces – the one in Grantland was very good, for instance, and took the reasonable line that this gigantic relaunch talks the “new readers” talk but doesn’t really walk the “new readers” walk, blaming self-delusion as much as cynicism. This is surely true but just as surely unsurprising: superhero comics are too far down the fan-service rabbit hole for dramatic change to be tried or accepted. We’re looking here at renovation rather than innovation and the relaunch should be judged as such. But even on those terms some interesting patterns emerge from the blur of fists, explosions, lycra and first-person narrative.

One obvious issue with launching 52 titles at once is that the slow accretion of detail over time is replaced by the introduction of a lot of simultaneous stuff: the entire architecture of a fictional universe thrown up overnight. The result is that you can tell a lot about the line’s collective priorities by seeing which parts get most detail.

So you have a glut of secret organisations and conspiracies, but more than that you have a universe where loving attention to detail has been paid to its corporate structure. After reading the New 52 you might or might not be able to guess where Qurac (good old Qurac) is on the map but you could have a fair stab at reconstructing the upper ranks of the DCU’s Fortune 500. Waynecorp features strongly, of course, but much of the character work in Green Arrow seems to revolve around the conflict between his role as a tech innovator at “Q-Core” (a sort of DCU Apple I guess) and his crime-busting night job. Mr Terrific has a multi-billion dollar company too, and a big chunk of Superman #1 pivots on a new corporate HQ and owners for the Daily Planet.

Even leaving the fully corporate superheroes out, our protagonists are often pretty one-percenty, gilded youth for sure – one former Robin has a spiffy penthouse apartment, which he casually blows up; another is a self-styled outlaw but one with plenty of time for beach parties. What’s mostly absent, it seems to me, are underprivileged heroes, characters having a rough time of it*: there’s a break, conscious or not, from the 50-year Marvel tradition of hard-luck heroes. Superheroing in the new DCU is something the rich, gorgeous and smart do. Of course it would be remiss not to mention Grant Morrison’s ‘socialist Superman’ in Action Comics, but that’s set a few years behind the main titles: by Superman #1 Clark Kent is having high-level strategic conversations over print v digital media with the best of ‘em.

There’s rightly been a lot of critical attention paid to how these 52 comics frame and use their female characters, but the portrayal of masculinity is just as interesting. This is a universe whose Peter Parkers won: a post-Zuckerberg DCU stuffed with sexy entrepreneur geniuses who put on costumes in their spare time. Everyone’s clever, everyone’s well-connected, almost everyone’s a scientist. There are a sprinkling of gritty, regular-joe types but even they aren’t immune to upward mobility: Corporal Rock (soon to be Sergeant) wants to stay grounded with the men but his story opens with a high-up accusing him of basically slumming it.

Maybe this all comes back to those new readers. I wonder if DC are responding to – or just buying into – the fantasy marketers have constructed around the “Millennial”: a generation of makers, agile and self-sufficient (there are an awful lot of self-conscious “look it is THE INTERNET” bits in these comics). Whether that’s the case or not, it’s a weirdly shiny world they’ve built, one that feels bright and modern but also a little adrift from the times.

*EDIT: One of the four books I hadn’t read was Firestorm, half of whom is an underprivileged-ish guy. He’s also a genius who’s been given a world changing magic item science experiment and keeps it in his locker.

(This was originally posted on my Tumblr)

Full images under the cut…

There is a similar sequence in Whiteout, the South pole crime thriller whose trailers pretended it was potentially a horror film. In the Whiteout sequence the camp Doctor gets some newbies to take their jackets off outside, to explain to them how quickly the cold will effect them. There are no happy smiling faces on buckets, just a man vaguely injuring people to tell them how much they would be killed if they were to do something as stupid as what HE TOLD THEM TO DO. It is symptomatic of Whiteout’s stupidity and lack of conviction that this sequence exists to tell the audience that “The South Pole is cold”. We knew that.

Herzog’s documentary is another of his “isn’t nature wonderful – but you know it wants to kill us” films he does so well. There is a terrific section when he realises that the kind of people drawn to working in Antarctica are just travellers, telling more tedious travellers tales about the time they were in Guatemala. He manages in that one sequence (where he cuts a very long story, very short) to humanise everyone on the base. Whiteout, with its flashbacks to Kate Beckinsale’s US Marshall past, doesn’t manage to humanise its characters beyond twinkly eyes or moody frowns. I quite liked the Greg Rucka comic it was based on, a hard boiled crime thriller whose mystery was enliven by its setting. It also helped that the art took full advantage of the very name of the book, on a white page, a few white panels really does convey blindness perfectly, it is something comics rarely does, the white panel*. The same should be true of cinema. Its black canvas is the white cinema screen, though notably a all white sequence of film will still be considerably brighter than a blank screen. But Whiteout never has the conviction of this simplicity, it rarely attempts to represent the Whiteout of its title, and even then we get powdered snow and shades of white thrown at the screen with a cacophonous volume. I doesn’t help that the mystery which just about sustained a few comics, is pretty obvious, or indeed that one characters sex has changed to remove one intriguing aspect of the original. Frankly there is more suspense in Encounters At The End Of The World, albeit waiting for Herzog to go stir crazy and kill one of the hippies he finds himself locked up with!

*Except when multiverses end. Then they are de rigeur.

Superhero Perfume Ad

Saw this in a comic last week. Had to be scanned it is so preposterous.

I cannot for the life of me imagine who this is aimed at. Except children. And children
a) don’t buy comics anymore
b) don’t buy eau de toilette

But putting aside the pointlessness of the product, lets consider what each of these fragrances should smell like if the attached hero is involved.

Eau De Spider-Man : Considering he wears an all-in-one body stocking made of what seems to be some form of rubber, and is very athletic it is no surprise Peter Parker developed a fragrance. Notoriously unlucky in love, Peter possibly realised this is because he smelled like a five day old jockstrap whenever he had been web slinging. One assumes this has a strongly antiseptic smell.

Iron-Man After Shave: For the Iron Man who doesn’t have to try too hard. He has machines doing all the trying for him. Tony Stark is rich, suave and probably hates smelling of WD-40 and Swarfega. Again there is the likelihood that the tin can he rides around in reeks of his own body, plus the smell of a newly upholstered car and depending on which plotline he is embroiled with, bouze too. So I imagine this smells like Denim or Old Spice – and also can be swigged if you are out of Iron Man;s favourite vodka.

Hulk: Big, green and agressive. The irrepressible ID, adolescent rage incarnate. That’s simple then. Hulk perfume is the Great Smell Of Brut(e). Hulk Splash! (it all over).

This idea of the malleability of Batman is one that DC Comics had thrust upon them about the time of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and was a well they drained next to dry in the nineties with endless “Elseworld” tales of a slightly different Batmen. There was the Victorian Batman (Gotham By Gaslight), Batman as a vampire, Batman as caveman etc etc…and they would all end up in pretty much the same way – telling the same story of the self-made hero saving a city by dressing up as a bat*. Its also a theme that Grant Morrison in his recent Batman RIP has leant on heavily. Because the question he asked was, what if all of Batman’s adventures really did happen to the same man, what would that do to them? (Answer, drive them nuts). What he could conveniently try to ignore is what if all these different tonalities, these different ways of telling Batman stories, were about the same man. That would prove that they were nuts – if not subject to some pretty major mood swings (or Swing The Moods if you will).

At the heart of all of this is DC Comics clutching on to their USP in the comic book world. Marvel has the soap opera, DC has the original superheroes, the archetypes. It is a drum that has been almost banged to death. Batman and Superman (and Wonder Woman though they have never been quite as successful in stressing her unique status) are really only as archetypal as DC wants them to be, BECAUSE THEY KEEP TELLING US THEY ARE. In Trinity, the current DC weekly comic, Supes, Batman and Wonder Woman are presented as the fundamental trinity that holds the universe together. When they are destroyed, the Universe changes to try and compensate. In Morrison’s Final Crisis Superman is seen to be so important that there is a suggestion that the entire Crisis takes place because Superman popped off to the future for a bit. So not only are the ways various characters are handled a metaphor for jazz in the DC Universe, but so is the repetition of the same stories over and over again. This is not all DC Comics fault, the fans do keep clamouring for the greatest hits (aka bringing back characters from the dead). And whilst some retelling is inevitable in a serialised comic, the number of ways we can be told that Superman represents hope dwindles. Jazz is not all about reinventing the standards after all, ask anyone whose seen a lousy jazz funk band break into Take Five.

(I found that article via this bit on Brad’s Blog, which was linked to FT via the photo which was linked to this article here Tom wrote a couple of years ago about the comic Batman: Jazz. Everything connects.)

This awesome comment however perfectly indicates why there’s still some way to go before the Dictators of Zrag are fully purged from the US market: “Call me crazy but I’ll take a “story” over a “thrill” any day.”

In terms of current comics discourse, here’s where I think thrill-power fits in: there’s a divide between “grown-up” (for which largely read: adolescent and post-adolescent) comics and “all-ages” material, and a lot of people lamenting the fact that the market isn’t set up in a way that allows the latter to sell very much.

Thrill-power is the giant scorpion in the room, reminding us that what kids are given to read and what kids want to read are very different. It’s the inner 11-year-old boy of comics howling to be let out, the imitation Freddy Krueger glove, the secret alternate version of Amazing Spiderman 583 in which Obama fist-punches a hole through the Chameleon’s stomach and splatters the press corps with gore. It’s Jack Kirby, sure, but it’s also Rob Liefeld – the mad structureless free-for-all of early Image titles, a new superteam every 3 pages….which was also the post-60s commercial peak for comics. It’s audacious and stupid and disposable, except somehow it never quite gets disposed of, it lodges in your mind like pop songs and old TV shows, a glorious flaw in the diamond of the adult you who wants your comics to have “stories”.

*By the way, I recently found a blog taking up where Mike Daddino’s US-equivalent-of-Popular project left off, but I’ve completely lost the URL. It was called “No Tape Errors” or something similar. If this is your thing (or if you know whose it is!) get in touch so I can link it!

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. He’s lived instead as a farmer in Sacramento. The West Coast is now run by the Hulk Gang, descendants of Bruce Banner, and they are leaning on him and his family for overdue rent. Cue the aged Hawkeye, now blind, with some important mission, asking Wolverine to drive across country with him as his minder. This means crossing the territories as divided up by the top villains – segments owned by the Kingpin, Dr Doom and others. It’s a wonderful setup rife with possibilities, and Millar exploits them well. This is the fifth issue, and Logan finally explains why he won’t fight (they have stumbled as far as the Midwest, entering Dr Doom territory, by luck and Hawkeye’s skills), what happened on that day 50 years ago. Plenty of action, as Wolverine recounts the desperate battle with a host of major supervillains (including Dr Octopus, the Green Goblin, the Absorbing Man, Sabretooth, Bullseye) – and this ends with a really devastating twist, featuring a very surprising villain and the fate of the rest of the X-Men, and a full explanation of his withdrawal since that day. This is one of the best and strongest twists I’ve ever read in a superhero comic, and I’ve read tens of thousands of the things. If that emotional charge wasn’t enough, he ends the issue in the future narrative, with a panel providing a scary upgrade for an already major villain – I won’t give it away, but it’s a terrific moment, packed with real thrill power, and once more it leave me looking forward to the next one.

I’m neglecting the artist here because I want to extol the surviving art of the single comic, and the artist has the same job however the story is broken down. Having said that, Steve McNiven does a good job, drawing action and conversation with skill and mostly sound decision-making. The inking is good too – I particularly like Logan’s stubble and wrinkles.

There is no doubt that all of the above contribute to the Spirits’ awfulness, but at the same time the film has a gusto and energy missing from many movies, something which could be down to the writer directors singular vision of the titular character. Which unfortunately boils down to “What if Miller’s Batman moved into Sin City?”. So we get endless voice-overs of how “The city” is The Spirit’s wife and life – which is somewhat ironic as the choice of filming technique leaves us with little image of the city itself except as a black silhouette and a few bricks.

So to take those criticisms above:
a) Frank Miller is not a film director. That co-directing credit on Sin City was a vanity to Robert Rodriguez, which luckily – via Miller’s choice of almost identical shooting style shows who the real director was there. The other criticism of Miller is that he had taken Eisner’s distinctive character and turned him into a stock Miller caricature also holds, but then its not as if anyone outside a small circle knows the backstory of The Spirit.
b) Superhero fatigue has set in already, that was clear well before this summer. What this summer did differently was give us superior films in their genres. And good actors. Which Gabriel Macht is not, even without stupid flapping tie, no motivation and a rubbish mask.
c) The Spirit is stupendously, cartoonily violent. Some of this violence if plenty fun (my views on the use of toilets in fights has been documented elsewhere) but when it is all the film has to offer in the way of conflict resolution it really gets dull quickly. My views on fights between indestructible protagonists are also well documented.
d) Why is it that blue screen digital set building has led, on the whole, to an aesthetic which can only really be called grimy. Every hue of desaturated blacks, greys and browns are enlivened only by the flappy red tie and Tennantesque waffle pattern of the Spirit’s Converse.

What (questionably these days) works for Miller on the comic page, fails him on the big screen. Cinema, even blockbuster cinema, has no room for his unnaturalistic dialogue, and the characters find it hard to move from one set piece to another with motivation and demeanour intact. So in the end what is left is a flapping red tie and the images which luckily do burn themselves into your memory. So not terrible if just for the memory of:
a) Samuel L.Jackson dissolving a kitten whilst dressed as a Nazi
b) The Spirit escaping from a precarious situation with his trousers down
c) The hosts of sixties Batman henchmen with their punning names on their tops.

In all other ways, terrible!

Anyway, this article reminded me that recently I picked up my first SHOUJO MANGA (manga for gurlies, typically published by Shoujo Beat over here)! My decision to Try It (given that I hates all comics) was provoked by intense lolz from recent jdrama Yasuko to Kenji, which featured boyband drummer Masahiro Matsuoka as an ex-biker gang leader turned awesome shoujo manga artiste (each episode would feature him dressing up his two goons as eg swooning schoolgirls, cheerleaders, puppy-walkers etc).

I picked up “Absolute Boyfriend”, as I have familiarity with the jdrama (‘Zettai Kareshi’) based on the manga, which turns out to come with two further ‘stand-alone’ comics, “I Won’t Let You Become A Star” and “Aromatics”. I’m not sure if each ‘book’ has one ‘serial’ in each instalment, followed by two standalones or whether this is a one off as it was the last episode of ‘Absolute Boyfriend’, mind. As AB is the finale of a long-running story, it’s actually quite hard to say anything about it without talking about the drama which is a different kettle of cream-puffs. So I shan’t bother!

I Won’t Let You Become A Star! is not in fact about someone jealous of their lover’s X-Factor rising success, but the following: A girl with psychic powers meets a cute boy on a train! Girl with psychic powers called to exorcise ghosts from local boy’s only high school! Haunting boys are former student council members! Student council president is the cute boy from the train! OH NOES BUT HE IS DEAD!! OR IS HE?? Psychic girl ends up on rubbish dates with the ghosts at the flicks! The least subtle subtext ever as 3 boys take turns ‘possessing’ physic girl’s body and they stay up all night ‘painting the gym’!

Aromatics features the story of a high-schooler who can ‘smell pheromones’! It’s easier to have this as ‘identify’ pheromones, as he uses this ‘talent’ of his to match up couples with compatible smells. Well, I guess it’s as good as Blood Type matching agencies. In this story, there’s a saucy librarian and a sweet’n’shy glasses-wearing girl who’s the librarian’s helper… which do we guess will eventually end up winning the incense heir’s heart? Murder attempts! The ‘smeller’ catches a cold!!

Did I like any of them though? The answer is… yes!! Whilst both are big-hearted “and they call it, puppy looooo-ooo-ve” stories, what do they have? Absolute Boyfriend has a ROBOT LOVER! IWLBAS (phew) has a PSYCHIC GIRL and an ambiguously-living love interest! Aromatics has super-intuition based on traditional family institutions and wearing a smelly kimono! Whilst the end of the line is always boy-meets-girl (or ‘boy meets boy’ if you L your BL), the only way this could be Sweet Valley High (say) is if Jessica Wakefield found forbidden love with a boy from the future who could only appear in her dreams and would leave a single red rose by her door every night to prove that he really WAS THERE! Ie awesome of course. Unashamedly romantic in every ridiculous sense!

SO WHERE ARE MY PRETTY-BOY ANGST-RIDDEN VAMPS?? Not in this one – I am not denying for one second that this genre doesn’t exist, but if we’re looking at that, don’t we look at Buffy, Stephenie Myer’s Twilight series and Anne Rice? Oh, so western-centric, but yeah – if the ‘manga’ traditionally conceived of by your western peeps is the shonen stuff (Naruto, Jump, Bleach <– I have read none because they are comics for BOYS and probably rub, although Shokotan is just so goshdarned cute she almost makes me want to give some a go?!), saying that the shoujo stuff is ‘pretty boy vampires’ is as inward looking as all get-go, looking specifically towards your gothic subbacultchas, your gosurori and you know – who cares huh??

But yet! The front page of the Shojo Beat magazine features a story called ‘Vampire Knights’ – the tagline? Cross Academy is attended by two groups of students: the Day Class and the Night Class. At twilight, when the students of the Day Class return to their dorm, they cross paths with the Night Class on their way to school. Yuki Cross and Zero Kiryu are the Guardians of the school, there to protect the Day Class from the Academy’s dark secret: the Night Class is full of vampires.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK! OK, busted. We has vamp, and it’s shoujo manga, of course they will be pretty. Anyway, shut up!! Pretty-boy vampires are awesome!! Tssk. Yet, making this and yaoi the only girls interest stuff is missing – well – EVERYTHING else! There can be plenty of thrill-power in a story which concludes with wistful sighing and holding hands too! Stupid nerds. I wonder what shoujo manga I should read next!! YAOI YAOI YAOI. Seeing as the books are £6ish each it had BETTER BE GOOD. Bear in mind, a book doesn’t even contain a whole story! Is it too western-centric yet again to say that if it looks like a book it should quack like a book and eg GIMME THE WHOLE STORY? Oh, I’m so greedy! Anyway it’s definitely better than “Hulk Vs Predator” or whatever silly musclefest boy comics you all like. Yeah!

The comic always featured our Earth too, thanks to dimensional travel and Zot getting friendly with an Earth girl named Jenny. Her and her friends and family grew in importance, and while there were some awkward and leaden moments of ‘wow, on THIS Earth…’, it wasn’t long before his depiction of this world became more and more thoughtful and artistically honest. Eventually, after 27 issues where the centre of attention was Zot’s glittering Earth, he was stranded on this one. No supervillains, almost no ‘action’ as superhero comics understand it, just the people, focussing on sometimes apparently negligible members of the supporting cast. The surprising thing was how much better the comic became. A good friend of mine, Nigel Fletcher, cites #33 as a contender for his favourite comic ever, and he is totally right, a very beautiful and moving tale about being different in school – and with an inspired and wholly original formal trick at its end, intelligently preserved in this collection. My friend is right in describing it as a masterpiece (see The Slings and Arrows Comic Guide for his full review). A few of the other issues in this nine-issue run on Earth are nearly as good.

I’ve always been a huge admirer of people who can do different styles so well (Hawks or Wilder in movies, Tezuka or Kirby or Kurtzman in comics, for instance), but it’s rare for someone to change tone so completely in a comic book, from superhero SF adventure and fun to human drama – and not just for one issue between fight scenes, but for a lengthy run. To do this with a wonderful and delightful title is even more extraordinary, and to do it and produce far better comics from it is amazing. This is a great series, and I highly recommend it.

Footnote: McCloud is returning to fictional comics, after all those big comics about comics, plus the recent online comic accompanying Google’s new browser. I’m very much looking forward to this, but it is hard to imagine him topping Zot!

* By the way, Tezuka provided a key moment when I interviewed McCloud many years ago (1990 or ’91, I think). He was very guarded at first, and clearly trying to work out how much of his attention I was worth. When I realised his mention of Jack Kirby was testing my knowledge, it gave some idea of the kind of comic fans he must have talked to; he tried Spiegelman next, and I knew who he was too; then he tried Osamu Tezuka, and when I said I was an admirer and had written an obituary for him not so long before, I was in, and he was an enthusiastic participant in the interview from then on.

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.

It’s that art job that makes this so exceptional. I thoroughly recommend reading the whole thing here. He uses some terrific and original tricks, such as the repetition to suggest fast, flickering movement, for instance at the end of the first page – and contrast the execution of this with the same device used at the end, to understand how much control he demonstrated over his fresh artistic inventions. He was also a great draughtsman, clean and sharp – sadly, he got so frustrated by comics that he left the form a few years later to draw for book covers, magazines and so on, and to teach art. His uses of perspective in the later parts of this are among the most effectively dramatic that I ‘ve ever seen, and his willingness to use a sequence of narrow panels for a moment that anyone else would show in a single panel provides wonderful control of pacing and tension. The sequence I shows here may be the most reproduced in comic history.

It’s rightly seen as evidence of how much comics can do, as an artform. The story is a little lurid, though smart in toying with its readers’ expectations, but the art shows that, like a movie director with a less than great script (best ever cinema example: Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (me on that film)), nearly anything can be transformed into something very special. It’s sad how few comics in over half a century since this story have made any attempt to achieve so much.

It’s been reprinted a bunch of times, in comic reprints of Impact 1, and in the lovely big hardback collections. I’m sure most comic shops could provide a copy, but since you can read it online you may not want to bother. I do recommend a couple of big, classy books on Krigstein, especially B. Krigstein Comics, which has lots of other great stories, including another wonderful EC story featuring lots of keys.

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.

It’s worth noting that after a quarter of a century away from comic books, Eisner returned in the late ’70s and became a prime mover in the creation of graphic novels, with a series of volumes based around Jewish characters in New York – these are rather sentimental, but superbly crafted.

Lots of greats worked on The Spirit: Eisner, Fine, Wally Wood, Jules Feiffer, Joe Kubert, Jerry Grandenetti and others, but the one who rivalled Eisner’s work at the time was Jack Cole, creator of Plastic Man. He was the first successful stretchy superhero, and that power gave Cole enormous opportunities to play with the design of the panels. He was one of the great cartoonists, energetic and endlessly fun, and while the stories are far less intense than Eisner’s best, they are very entertaining.

The Spirit has been extensively reprinted. Since the rights are with DC these days, I hope that we will eventually get cheap Showcase reprints, but I’ve no idea if that will happen. Plastic Man and the other Quality titles are owned by DC now, and there are expensive reprints, but no indication of Showcase reprints so far – again, I live in hope. (Actually, the same is true of Fawcett, who published the Captain Marvel titles, but DC have shown no sign of reprinting any pre-Silver Age comics yet in their bargain editions.)

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.

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.)

Mad has also featured two of my other all-time favourite funny cartoonists. Don Martin was a Mad regular for over 30 years, producing a vast number of hilarious strips starring ugly characters and a wildly energetic style, plus the best sound effects anyone has ever given us. There have been few comic artists with as instantly and widely recogniseable a style – I’m sure just about everyone knew who drew the Mona Lisa illustration here.

Sergio Aragones is one of the most charming people I have ever met, and a lightning-fast, consistently funny cartoonist. His ‘Mad Marginals’, tiny silent cartoons, have been in all but one issue of Mad since 1963 (that issue’s were lost in the post). He has also worked extensively for DC, and created the barbarian comic Groo the Wanderer for Marvel. This comic, co-written with Mark Evanier (Aragones is Spanish, and his English needed help), starred the dumbest and most accident-prone warrior available – but Groo is also an unbeatable fighter. Most issues end with him fleeing from a huge angry mob. Because Aragones is so incredibly fast (I’ve watched him work), he can’t resist putting in loads of detail, packing in background gags.

Obviously other funny comic strips have been covered here – newspaper strips, undergrounds, indies, children’s – but there’s one other odd one I want to mention here. Gregory is an institutionalized small child, who has a couple of words and lots of expressively meaningless sounds. He’s mostly in a straitjacket, his only friend is a rat and he is sometimes mistreated by the asylum staff. This may not sound a recipe for comedy, but it’s genuinely delightful and very funny, largely thanks to Marc Hempel‘s bold, strange and confident cartooning.

Early Mad issues have been collected in reprints, and there are collections of Don Martin’s work, in the small paperback reprints and in large, luxurious volumes. Aragones has had his own paperback Mad collections, and there are lots of Groo collections. Kurtzman’s Jungle Book and Goodman Beaver may be found, if you’re lucky. I found some Gregory on Amazon easily enough – his Tug & Buster is well worth reading, too. You may even find some of the above in libraries – Groo may be the best bet there.

Adventure isn’t a terribly fashionable genre (it’s generally been better represented in newspaper strips – see link at right), but it contains another genuine giant of comics. Some friends of mine, whose judgement should be trusted at least as much as mine, would answer that opening question with Hugo Pratt. The bulk of his work is a long series of graphic novels chronicling the semi-historical adventures of Corto Maltese, a sailor. I remember having a fairly long conversation with Dave Gibbons about his compositional abilities, many years aho – Pratt’s drawing is a touch rougher, even scratchier, than Toth’s, but he’s his one rival for composing an image. Corto’s rangy frame is particularly well used. I don’t love his art quite as much as Toth’s, but he’s a much stronger writer, and the Corto tales are complex and interesting as well as being exciting adventures, with some very memorable characters. Anything by Pratt is worth seeking out, and the Corto books are available, but pricey on Amazon – overdue for a new series of reprint translations, I think. The Corto Maltese magazine is great too, featuring many of the other greatest European comic artists – Crepax, Manara, Bilal, Toppi, Battaglia, plus South American greats like Munoz and Pellejero – mostly giving us adventure stories of one kind or another. I have a bunch of Italian editions, despite not being able to read the language, because I love the art so much.

I’m not a big fan of Moebius’s SF, but I do like his art on the Lieutenant Blueberry series (pictured). It’s written by Jean-Michel Charlier, and drawn under Moebius’s real name, Jean Giraud, and the feel is more like a classy late Clint Eastwood than any earlier US or European westerns. The angle is interesting: our protagonist is a Southerner who fought for the North in the Civil War due to his conversion to anti-racist beliefs, and the stories focus on this. They are compelling and muscular, and Giraud’s art matches this – none of the flash of his SF, just superb comics art. There are lots of volumes in English – the series names are varied (Lieutenant, Marshall, Young…), but the word Blueberry is your clue.

When DC started its Showcase reprint series, I was kind of surprised that Jonah Hex was one of the first they announced, and I almost didn’t buy it. That would have been a mistake, as it’s among the most consistently excellent collections. The character is a deformed and angry wanderer, not that long on morality, but still ending up on the heroic side. The art, mostly by Tony DeZuniga, is suitably grainy, particularly well drawn in a realistic style.

I’m also quite fond of occasional Hex artist and co-creator of Jonny Quest Doug Wildey‘s western work. He was in his ’60s when he did a few volumes of a western character called Rio in the 1980s. The drawing is lovely, the storytelling fluent, and it has some of the best use of zipatone I’ve ever seen. The style is a little more dated than the other two series I’ve mentioned, but it’s classy work by a veteran craftsman.

Showcase Presents Jonah Hex should be pretty easy to find, but I’m less sure about the Blueberry and Rio books. Having checked Amazon, Blueberry books are pricey, Rio volumes are cheap. You’ll be lucky to find any of these in libraries, but you never know.

1. The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Omnibus comes out on September 20th, a real bargain at 624 pages (over a third in colour), featuring all the stories ever. I recommend it very highly.

2. Gilbert Shelton will be at Gosh Comics (39 Great Russell St, London, almost opposite the British Museum) on Saturday, September 13th, 2-4pm, to sign copies (so you can also get yours early). It’s very rare for there to be a signing by a veteran artist of his calibre , especially one not UK-based – well, except he will also be in OK Comics, Leeds, the day before (3-5pm),  and Dave’s Comics, Brighton, the day after (don’t know the time).

The other writer I follow most faithfully is Mark Millar. Again, I should declare a bias, as many years ago I gave him his start in comics, with Saviour (i.e. I had enough sense to recognise an obvious genuine talent when it showed up in my mailbox). In recent years he’s been one of mainstream US comics’ biggest stars, and deservedly so. His Ultimates series, with Bryan Hitch art, was particularly superb. Marvel’s Ultimate line is a fresh universe, starting from scratch with new versions of their biggest characters; The Ultimates is that world’s equivalent of the Avengers, and they are wonderfully reimagined. His Ultimate X-Men was also excellent. He does a lot, mainly for Marvel, and it’s all at least worth a look. I particularly recommend, from their regular universe, his Wolverine story ‘Enemy of the State’, in which the character, who I’ve always been much less keen on than most, is brainwashed into a deadly assassin; and the current ‘Old Man Logan’ story, set in a future after the supervillains have won, which is exciting me as much as any superhero book in years. There is plenty more – he’s currently writing an astonishing number of comics, and I’m enjoying them all.

I’d also recommend The Authority, a title that started under Warren Ellis, another writer well worth trying, and he was followed by Millar. This is another superteam book, featuring characters who are new takes on a lot of the archetypical superheroes in something like a Justice League. I love the stories in this, Ellis’s and Millar’s, perhaps especially Millar’s inspired casting of a Jack Kirby analogue as a supervillain.

I have some friends, good judges of comics, who hate Brian Michael Bendis, but I’m a big fan. His long Daredevil run was exceptional: revealing his secret identity was a motor for countless gritty stories. His strengths had always been dialogue (he’s one of the best ever at that) and the fringes of the superhero world – cops in that world in Powers, a retired superhero and would-be private eye in Alias, a magazine about superheroes in The Pulse – and characters with low-level powers, like DD, so even his fans had doubts about his abilities on the Avengers titles, but they have been tremendous, and the big Secret Invasion crossover event now happening cements that, though he still sometimes loses momentum with his digressions.

Darwyn Cooke has made his way into comics from the animated Batman and Superman shows. His New Frontier was a wonderful work, reimagining the start of the Silver Age (late ’50s into ’60s) DC superhero revival. It’s beautiful to look at, but also very smartly constructed, introducing the characters in the same order that DC first published them in this period (some were revivals). His Catwoman stories, written by the very fine Ed Brubaker, are also terrific, and he is to produce a series of adaptations of Richard Stark’s great ultrahardboiled Parker crime novels, which could easily be great.

Daniel Clowes gained fame when Ghost World was made into the best comic book movie ever. His work generally focusses on odd outsider characters, alienated and often kind of grotesque, written and drawn with a cool clarity, with a huge enthusiasm for pop culture. I find his work compelling and often shocking (he edges towards horror at times), with genuinely memorable characters. As well as Ghost World, any of his collections (mostly previously serialised in his Eightball comic) are worth reading – I’d particularly recommend David Boring and Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron.

Peter Bagge is an exceptionally funny cartoonist, drawing exaggerated figures and expressions in a bouncy, vicious style. His characters tend to centre on middle-class slacker youth into punk and grunge and the like. The Buddy Bradley stories seems to be almost autobiographical: a young man with no great purpose in life, no hopes, and with rubbish friends. His territory isn’t so far from that of Clowes, but his style is very different. Any of the Buddy Bradley collections are worth having, as is just about anything else, though I’ve not liked his more recent work so much.

Chris Ware‘s Acme Novelty Library comic book is expensive, though beautifully made. The main storyline was collected as Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth, one of the most praised comics ever, and understandably so. Its formal qualities are particularly thrilling, exploiting countless possibilities of the medium that have hardly been seen before, and never handled and combined as well. The story, of a timid middle-aged man, is also rather moving, though working out what is real and what isn’t is not easy.

I suppose I should declare bias when mentioning Eddie Campbell, in that he did a series of stories for my comics years ago. He made a name, in a small way, with his autobiographical Alec stories. His art is rather scratchy, realistic and deceptively sophisticated, largely from a grasp of some very old illustrators and cartoonists. His writing is exceptional, full of insight and gentle humour, and moved on from Alec to stories of the Greek god of wine, Bacchus, in the modern world. He also illustrated From Hell, a Jack The Ripper tale written by Alan Moore, made into a pretty dull movie.

Everything I have mentioned here should be available in comic shops, and you are very likely to find Jimmy Corrigan and Ghost World, maybe more if you’re lucky, in libraries.

Koike is as superb a craftsman as you’ll find writing comics anywhere. You get very substantial characters, thematic content, motif and strong stories. His knowledge of Japan’s history has immense breadth and depth – he gets at the motivations and circumstances of the times with genuine insight, as well as doing his research thoroughly. Best of all, he creates some extraordinary characters, and drives the story from them.

Kojima was a world class comic artist, immensely powerful and exciting – think of the battle climax of Seven Samurai. His work is gritty and flowing, fast and as muscular as it gets, with exceptional control of the very different pacing Japanese comics offer. He also provides great moments – there’s a shot of a pair of eyes in one Lone Wolf & Cub story that I’ll never forget.

Lone Wolf & Cub is their greatest work: around 8,500 pages about the shogun’s executioner. His family is assassinated, missing only his infant son. He places a colourful ball and a sword on the floor, and waits to see which his child approaches. He is going away, on a path of obsessive, long-term revenge, and if his son chooses the plaything, he is not suited to this life, and he will kill him. He chooses the sword, and accompanies his father on the road to hell. There’s a large range of stories, often episodic but looping back to the main point. My favourite focus on the son, who grows into a unique child. In one story where he is separated from his father, after almost being burnt to death he finds himself face to face with a ronin. This small child picks up a stick and readies himself for combat, and the look in his eyes makes the ronin back off. This is one of the greatest comic series I’ve ever read, magnificent on every level.

There are two more translated series. Samurai Executioner features as disciplined a character as in LW&C, the shogun’s sword tester – he tests them by executing criminals. The stories are episodes, but some of them are among the best shorts I’ve ever read, close to perfect. Some notes on one story.

Reaching its final volumes as I write is Path Of The Assassin. This centres on Ieyasu, who became the shogun who created Japan’s longest period of peace after over a century of wars, and his bodyguard, a ninja who grows up with him. It’s a great setup for the political and military manoeuvring into and during the climactic civil wars that united the nation, and for individual ninja action. The relationship between the two central characters and their different worlds is particularly superbly handled, though this may lose something if you have a less deep interest in that period of Japanese history, and Ieyasu’s totally original governmental methods (which this series may not reach) than I do – it’s kind of hard for me to keep track of it all, and I am fairly familiar with the major players, at least.

I also write about these two on my own site, including a page on one very strange LW&C story.

All of the above should be pretty easy to find, in small-format paperback translations from Dark Horse. They’re good value too, something like £7.50 for 300 pages a book. Samurai Executioner is the only one where you can sample a random individual volume with no risk of losing anything by not having read predecessors. If you want to try one, go for #6, as discussed in that linked review.

He started at DC around that time. On his own recommendation, I have never read the first four issues of Animal Man, but the fifth, centred around a version of Wile E. Coyote, is dazzling, and the meta elements of the rest of the highly imaginative series are extraordinary. His Doom Patrol run may be even better, bursting with strange ideas and breathtaking stories, and some great characters, not least Danny the Street, a superpowered street.

My favourite comic of his is probably his run on the Justice League of America, and it showcased one of the qualities he has shown on major titles, an ability to identify what makes a comic special or distinctive, and run with it. He centred it on DC’s biggest stars, and gave them the most gigantic challenges available. The climactic story, where the thing that destroyed the last universe attacks at the same time as World War III breaks out and all the participants are activating their nukes, and the alien Queen Bee takes over New York City and turns everyone into slaves, and Luthor attacks the JLA, blowing up their base and killing one of the members, to mention a few highlights, is magnificent. There are no superhero comics since Kirby’s Marvel prime that I have reread so often.

Many people prefer his X-Men, and this is not unreasonable – again, there are wonderfully built-up megathreats, and great use of the school. This also has better artwork than the DC series I mentioned, which helps, though I found the run a bit patchy. His Seven Soldiers project for DC was patchy too, with variable art quality and some of the seven mini-series much better than others, plus an overcrowded final issue – but some of it was glorious, including one of my favourite moments in comics ever. The page in the final issue of the final mini-series, Frankenstein #4, that reveals the nature of the enemy, and the following spread gave me a kind of thrill and glee that I’ve experienced only a couple of times in the medium.

Since then he has been writing DC’s two biggest stars. I’m particularly loving his Superman run, which plays with much of Superman’s rather ludicrous history, recreating some of the pleasures of the character’s silly stories of the late ’50s and ’60s. This also has lovely art, from Frank Quietly – Grant has not been blessed with this too often. He’s now writing Final Crisis, another mega-event title, which is immensely dense and rich so far.

Most of this stuff is pretty easy to find, bar St Swithin’s Day, probably. There are many, many collections of his best and most high-profile work, and I could have mentioned lots of other things well worth reading – some people like his big Invisibles series better than anything I’ve mentioned, for example, and the Seaguy mini-series was a total joy.

The only place to start is with what was by far the dominant humour strip of that era, Peanuts. Charles Schulz throughly earned his place in the hearts of millions around the world, with one of the great casts of characters and some wonderfully subtle comedy writing. Some great humour writers would take pride in a strip being taken as against both sides of an argument; Schulz felt that way about one strip that was taken as in favour by both sides, the issue being prayer in school – I guess this is the difference between a satirist and someone with as much human warmth in his work as Schulz. Perhaps his artistic limitations would have been more exposed in earlier decades, when comic strips were a lot bigger, but he found a style that worked very well for him. Peanuts was a magnificent strip, particularly so soon after he’d found his stride, in the ’60s especially. In Charlie, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy and Peppermint Patty in particular he created some of the best known and most loved comic characters ever.

Even better, for me, is a strip with some similarities, Calvin & Hobbes: again, a small boy and an animal, and again lots of regular riffs. The two leads are great characters, as is Calvin’s dad (was it Schulz who thought he’d take over the strip?), and Bill Watterson was a far better artist, genuinely brilliant a lot of the time, both in spectacular colour Sunday fantasy sequences and in precise expressions, especially for Hobbes’ appalled and ironic moments. He was also tremendous with words – a real feel for language’s possibilities. Contrary to Schulz, he would never license merchandising. I suspect an unwillingness to fix Hobbes in one form, to make a decision between his being alive and it all being Calvin’s fantasy world, was behind this: there are strips supporting and denying both interpretations. It doesn’t really matter – it was a glorious strip, and he stopped before any significant decline in quality, so its run is perhaps the most perfect ever.

Cheating a bit, but I also want to mention Gary Larson. He rarely ventured into the strip form, generally offering a panel gag, but the Far Side cartoons are among the funniest ever produced. He made dazzling use of animals of every kind, but seemed to be able to create hilarity from nearly any territory.

And if I am mentioning single-panel series cartoonists, let’s fit Giles in here too. His political points were sometimes rather tedious, but the raw chaos of some of his best panels, most often those centring on the large family he depicted so beautifully, is irresistible, and the mighty grandmother is an unforgettable creation.

Collections: you still see those lovely old Peanuts paperbacks around some, and now there are prestige collections appearing of all of it, in order. The Calvin & Hobbes collections should be easy enough to find too. Far Side collections are easily available. Those lovely Giles books are sometimes found in charity and secondhand shops, but they have become more collectible and therefore expensive, and the late editions are much less appealing.

“I think people need to be cautious,” warns Dr Roberta Ferrence, director of the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit. “It’s an unknown.”

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