Assumption: people expect cartoon entertainment (static or animated) to be out of the ordinary. I’m not just talking about hardcore comic book readers, who, as a group, tend to be more appreciative of otherworldly genres and whacked-out premises than the average entertainment consumer (though that’s changing over time; we’re at the earliest stages of a geekification of all culture, which is a subject for another day). Even non-fans expect a wild ride from a comic book or graphic novel. Comic books just do things a little more strangely than other storytelling forms, and they always have. Imagine a prose novel about a family of ducks who dress in sailor suits, live in houses, drive cars, eat at the dinner table with forks and knives, and are best friends with a couple of mice. Without the existence of Disney cartoons and Carl Barks comics running in the background, as points of reference, such a work would be impossible — or, at the very least, extremely avant-garde. A writer would have to work pretty hard to set up a world where that kind of thing could be taken for granted. A cartoonist, on the other hand, can just put it on the page. The reader sitting down with a comic is almost always in the mood to test the limits of his or her disbelief suspension skills. Barks doesn’t have to make us believe in anthropomorphic ducks. They’re just, you know, there. And we expect no more, no less. That’s comics.

You don’t have to buy into my assumption. I’m perfectly willing to be wrong. But let’s run with it for a minute. Let’s say the above holds true — not just for habitual comic book readers, but for anybody who picks up a comic. And let’s say you are a writer with a relatively non-fantastical set of crime stories to tell, the kind of violent, edgy, but still artfully character-driven “caper” stories, for example, that fill up the programming schedules of IFC and most independent film festivals, made by the kinds of young directors who hope to go on to produce big-budget thrillers later in life. You want to reach out to the comic book reader, who hasn’t generally bought into that kind of material. What do you do?

Well, you say to yourself. Hm. Let me see. Let me think. Let’s make everybody a robot.

I’m making this sound bad. I don’t mean to. In the case of NYC Mech Volume 1: Let’s Electrify by Ivan Brandon, Miles Gunter, and Andy Macdonald — a crime book set in a version of New York City where everybody is a robot — this little trick actually works very well, mainly because it isn’t explained or explicated. There’s no “world-building.” This is the same New York City we know from a million television crime dramas: tenement buildings, pizza joints, bodegas, trendy nightclubs, crazy cabbies, etc., etc. Just as Disney and Barks don’t try to make us believe in the world that Donald Duck inhabits — they don’t really imagine the society that ducks would create if ducks could talk — NYC Mech doesn’t try to explain its own weirdnesses and inconsistencies. In fact, these weirdnesses and inconsistencies provide much of the texture of the book. For example: why would robots eat eggs for breakfast (a key plot point in the first story arc)? They wouldn’t. But these do. And that’s fine. I can imagine some “real” science fiction author setting up a scenario like this and wasting a lot of pages, and energy, figuring out every detail of how a robot version of New York City would operate. In NYC Mech, the robots, like Barks’ ducks, serve as simple stand-ins for humanity (and for other animals — robotic dogs and sharks both make appearances). That said, the surface non-humanity of the characters does provide a bit of distance between the reader and the material — which, ironically, makes the work even more believable. It’s a subtle effect, and one that I can not describe in great detail without spoiling some of the best moments in the book (like the denoument of the first full story), but, basically, in too-simplified form: anything that might have seemed over-the-top or outrageous in a crime comic about human beings becomes much more easily digestible in a crime comic about robots. The robot conceit also makes the violence easier to watch, which doesn’t matter to me, but might help with marketability, especially if there’s ever a movie. And, finally, it’s just, you know, a cool visual effect, seeing robots in hipster clothes, lounging around their filthy, tiny New York apartments, smoking cigarettes and crank. That’s comics!

There are two complete stories here, spread out over six chapters (originally six issues of the comic book). The first two chapters serve mostly as an introduction, but also give us a cute little revenge story with a twist ending. The second story, the last four chapters of the book, is the real thing, though: a “secret identity” tale that has us rooting for the bad guy, which is as gripping as any genre comic I’ve read since Sleeper (and that’s really, really good). Ivan Brandon and Miles Gunter share the writing credit. Andy Macdonald’s artwork is adequate — really good in places, a little confusing in others (especially the action sequences).

I liked it.

Title: NYC Mech Volume 1: Let’s Electrify (NYC Mech) Creators: Ivan Brandon, Miles Gunter, Andy Macdonald Publisher: Image Comics

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It’s not set in stone, but the routine I’m trying to develop here at GNR is to offer a substantial review of one graphic novel at some point over the weekend, then, mid-week, link-blog the same book — that is, post links to other people’s reviews, along with creator interviews that have been done in support of the book, and so on.

The idea is to put my own review in context, and to provide a broader, maybe more objective, sense of what the book might be like than I can possibly offer in my own, necessarily subjective, review.

In some cases, (La Perdida, for example), there’s so much information and conversation out there on the web that I am able to be very selective in my linkage, pulling only the deepest and most intriguing stuff out of the ether for you to consider. I don’t want to just feature the books everybody’s always talking about, though — where’s the fun in that?

Night Trippers by Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor, the subject of this week’s feature review, hasn’t been as widely-discussed as many of the other books I review here. In fact, I had a hard time finding anything at all about it out there in the blogosphere. Most of the mentions of the book I did find took place before it came out: bloggers saying that they were looking forward to it, etc. Now that it’s hit the shelves, there’s not much being said. This may be because I’ve picked up this book more quickly, in terms of its conversation-generating lifecycle, than some of the others (La Perdida has been out a good, long while, for example). Or it may be that the book has had a fairly flat response all around, and the general politeness and supportiveness that “team comics” (maybe rightly, maybe wrongly) observes for non-corporate productions is mandating the silence. “If you can’t say something nice …” I dunno.

Here’s what I did find:

The Fourth Rail:

“[T]hose looking for something different in comics literature that sacrifices nothing in sheer entertainment value ought to take a look” … read more.

IGN:

“Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor’s Night Trippers offers a refreshing take on nosferatu, one that should delight every blood-sucking fan” … read more.

WordBalloon Podcast

“We turned the WordBalloon show over to Ricketts to produce this psychedelic pastiche of music and our interview to promote his new GN Night Trippers” … read more or download the MP3.

There’s a 22-page excerpt of the book over at Newsarama.com.

Mark Ricketts was interviewed by fellow comics writer Robert Tinnell (Sight Unseen) on the Image Comics blog. Surprisingly enough (to me, anyway), Ricketts says that his primary motivation wasn’t the desire to tell a vampire story, or to create a quasi-superheroic franchise:

When I started this book, I mostly wanted to write the story of a fabricated pop idol. Not like the corporate creations of today, but the artistic visions of some Svengali. Like when Justin De Villeneuvre transformed a skinny young schoolgirl into a world-wide sensation named Twiggy. Or like Brian Epstein who packaged four scruffy, leather-jacketed, working class Liverpool lads as tailored, mop-topped teen dreamboats. … read more

Title: Night Trippers Creators: Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor Publisher: Image Comics

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The first time I read Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor’s Night Trippers, three days ago, it slid without friction across my consciousness so smoothly that, flipping through it again this morning, preparatory to writing this review, I found that I had pretty much forgotten everything about it, except for the largest details. It’s about vampires in London during the swinging sixties. The characters have big heads and big eyes, but otherwise look more P. Craig Russellish than mangaesque. And, um, well, that’s about all that I could remember.

Detail from Night Trippers © 2006 Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor

Even re-reading random pages to try to catch the drift of the story again didn’t help. What was supposed to be happening here, and here, and here? It’s not that the story was too complicated. It’s that the story wasn’t complicated enough to make any lasting impression. To be fair: the problem might be mine. I’ve been reading too many graphic novels lately. For every one I actually end up reviewing, I’m reading four or five that I can’t think of anything to say about. So there’s that. Reading the book all the way through again a couple of hours ago, I found it reasonably enjoyable, just like I think I did the first time, but I’m still not sure that I’ll remember it in three more days (except that I’ll remember writing this review, which will probably cause it to stick out in my mind more than it would otherwise).

There’s novelty packed into the edges and margins and interstices of this book, cute ideas and miniature high concepts that sound cool when described, but which don’t really serve any purpose within the larger (fairly predictable) story, except, well, to sound cool when described. For example, vampiric Beatles, mumbling “All you need is blood. Blood is all you need.” Or a bumbling octogenarian pair of vampire-hunters, who stumble out of the nursing home, and onto the scene, long enough for one of them to get killed, performing no real work in the story that couldn’t have been handled more efficiently without them. Even the most interesting character, the quasi-superhero, a vampire-killing “teddy boy” who idolizes Elvis and talks in a sort of Lenny Bruce “beatnik hip” patois, when he’s not just shouting rockabilly lyrics verbatim, is, like the two old guys, only interesting because of surface characteristics — specifically, the surface characteristics I’ve just listed. That’s pretty much all there is to him. The protagonist (or, at least, the character with whom we spend the most time throughout the course of the story — I’m not sure if she can be called a protagonist, because she’s entirely too passive and unreadable to do any agon-ning, pro- or otherwise), a working-class girl who finds herself promoted into a Twiggy-like pop star by an ancient, wealthy vampire, for reasons that are never entirely clear (he says he wants to create a legion of undead superstars for the kids to emulate, so they’ll beg to be made vampires; but then he never bothers to make our heroine a vampire — he deliberately avoids doing so, as a matter of fact), fails to engage. Until the very end, she’s nothing more than a MacGuffin for the other characters to fight over. Inexplicably, in the last couple of pages, she becomes a vampire hunter herself, complete with an unusual weapon, and an outfit that doesn’t really qualify as a superhero costume — but only just barely doesn’t qualify.

As in the very weakest of Warren Ellis (whose work, I should mention, I mostly adore, but who does misfire occasionally), the high concept and clever conceit, the “hey, look, I’m playing with genre conventions while standing above them — here’s a cool scene, explodo, whatever, and look how funny this character talks while making the fisticuffs” attitude, though cheeky enough to divert one’s attention briefly, cannot stimulate the mind longer than it takes to read through the book.

Detail from Night Trippers © 2006 Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor

Other than that, there’s nothing in particular wrong with Night Trippers. And there’s quite a bit that’s right. On a moment-by-moment, panel-by-panel basis, you’ll find yourself more or less pleased, while you’re reading it. The pencil-and-paint artwork, though it has its awkward moments, also possesses a kind of angular stylishness that works nicely for the vampire genre. One especially outstanding little touch is purely formal: the way that interior monologues are handled — inset panels, colored in a reddish tone to distinguish them from the “real-time” story, featuring the characters speaking directly to the camera about what they are thinking, like they’re in a Shakespeare play, or a reality television show — allows the use of verbose and expository “thought balloon” language without coming across as cheesy or old-fashioned (imagine the scene above if the thoughts were coming out of the old man’s head in the form of a thought balloon — it would have been too much, Stan Lee City all the way, daddy-o).

There’s something here, to be sure. It just hasn’t quite come together yet. It’s entirely possible that, freed from the demands of introducing their milieu and creating an “origin story” for their quasi-superhero, Ricketts and Farritor could potentially return to their franchise (if such it is to be) and enlarge, expand, and deepen it so that it could become very interesting indeed (in the same way that Bill Willingham’s Fables, for example, has become a much more well-written, engaging series, over time, than its first volume — an easy-to-solve, cliched murder mystery with a fairy tale twist, complete with an Ellery-Queen-like “parlor scene” — seemed to promise).

If you read a lot of graphic novels (like I do), there’s no reason not to pick up this one. It’s a decent enough way to spend some time; it’s not very expensive, as color trade paperbacks go; and the creators are probably going to go on and do even more interesting work in the future, either together or separately, either within this series or not. Otherwise, if you’re only going to read one graphic novel this year — or even this month — this isn’t necessarily the one I’d recommend that you snatch off the shelves first.

Title: Night Trippers Creators: Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor Publisher: Image Comics

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The setup for Battle Hymn: Farewell To The Golden Age is the stuff of fanfic: obvious analogues for well-known Marvel and DC superheroes are placed in a more realistic world, where morality is always gray, and people are always fallible, even if they wear costumes and have super-powers (or inhabit high political office). I do not mean to insult the creators with this observation. B. Clay Moore and Jeremy Haun are clearly professionals; the work has every bit as much surface polish and pop virtuosity as the best contemporary “mainstream” comic. It’s not amatuer hour, by a long, long shot. I’m just speaking to the apparant motivations and goals of creators, as exposed in the work itself, which seems solely to exist in order to tell a story “tweaking” established superhero characters in various ways (most of them harsh). Of course, by my lights, contemporary “official” comics featuring well-established superhero characters are also fanfic. The average Marvel or DC creator isn’t shy about telling you that his or her motivation for working in the field is to tell stories featuring beloved characters from his or her own childhood, and maybe, just maybe, reinventing them for a new generation. There’s nothing wrong with that, really, as far as it goes. There are far worse things to want to do with one’s life. Besides, the impulse to take a character like, say, Captain America (even if he’s going by the name “Proud American”) and reinvent him in a grittier, more realistic and cynical context, is one that has given us plenty of good stories in the “official” comics (Steve Englehart’s Nixon-era run on the character comes to mind). Marvel and DC would never quite be able to go as far with their icons as Moore and Haun have, though — I can’t imagine Captain America hitting a whore, or even calling her one — which is probably why this book wasn’t published by them, and why thin disguises had to be draped over all the characters. Readers who are familiar with the templates upon which these characters are based (Captain America, The Sub-Mariner, The “Golden Age” Human Torch, The Flash, Dr. Mid-Nite, Hourman, and so on, and so on) will immediately “get” what Moore and Haun are doing. And those are probably the only readers who have any chance of enjoying this book. Unfortunately, those same readers will have seen this kind of thing before, at least a hundred times, since the publication of the seminal Watchmen miniseries by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons way back when. Marvel’s own The Ultimates and DC’s Identity Crisis, to name just two very recent examples, mine similar veins. Even the mostly-happy animated Hollywood hit The Incredibles played with some of Watchmen’s darker tropes.

So, in conclusion: Battle Hymn is a well-wrought and reasonably entertaining example of the grim-n-gritty superhero sub-genre, and a slick piece of professional pop in its own right — but it’s neither original enough, nor an interesting enough variation on familiar themes, to make it recommendable to the hardcore fan, and it relies too much for its effect on a knowledge of existing superhero mythologies to make it something the casual reader would find meaningful or enjoyable. So I can’t recommend it. That is not to say that Moore and Haun don’t have great books in them: they clearly do. I’m looking forward to whatever they put out next.

Title: Battle Hymn: Farewell To The Golden Age
Creators: B. Clay Moore and Jeremy Haun
Publisher: Image Comics
Cover Price: $14.99 (softcover)

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Whenever somebody tries to sing, say, a Whitney Houston song on American Idol, the judges wag their fingers and gripe. “You’re not Whitney — you shouldn’t try to be.” They’ve got a point. It’s probably always safest for the young artist to avoid direct comparison with an established master stylist: even if you do a passing job, or, for that matter, an outstanding job, nobody’s going to give you any real credit for it, because everybody will be thinking about how much better it was in its original form. In some cases, of course, the original wasn’t all that great, really, but we think we remember it was — and the brilliant version we’ve got stuck in our heads is enough to spoil our enjoyment of any new version.

Jack Kirby, the artist who, among other things, worked with Stan Lee to create many of the popular characters in the so-called “Marvel Universe,” including The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The Incredible Hulk, is widely considered to be the premier visual stylist in the history of the superhero genre. Ask any illustrator working in “mainstream” comics today about his or her influences, and you’re way more likely than not to hear his name. Most of these artists limit their debt to Kirby to his layouts, though, or his action sequences and foreshortened poses, or the way he drew energy crackles, or, most importantly of all, the dynamic way he moved a story along, panel by crazy panel. Very few, if any, imitate the outward characteristics of his style, his uglier mannerisms. Kirby was never a “realistic” artist, not really, but especially toward the end of his career, he moved further and further from any attempts at naturalism, and evolved his own visual language for representing the world — a bizarre, baroque world that didn’t resemble our own very much at all, and which wasn’t especially or particularly pretty. For example: in Kirby’s world, people’s fingers are square, even box-like, broken by hard lines, thick, stiff-looking, flat, as though they’re made of bricks and mortar.

Tom Scioli, the artist of GØDLAND, goes all the way in his imitation of Kirby — down to the kinds of details that might be considered, well, weaknesses in the Kirby style (or, at the very least, personal flourishes that are best left alone by those artists who follow). Like the hands. Scioli isn’t just influenced by Kirby, he is trying to look as much like Kirby as possible. This is the first thing you notice about GØDLAND, and it is the thing that sticks with you and colors your entire reading of the book, no matter how hard you may try to put it out of your head. Here’s a sample page. Note the bizarre, only-believable-in-Kirby-world hands, especially in panel two:

I am not saying that this is a bad thing. It’s actually kind of cool. And very brave. Scioli can’t imagine that his work will avoid comparison with Kirby’s, and he surely can’t imagine that anybody will declare him Kirby’s superior (even if he were superior to Kirby, which he isn’t, the combined forces of Kirby’s historical importance and our own fannish nostalgia would make Scioli’s superiority invisible to us). If we’re tempted to say that his work suffers in comparison to actual, you know, Kirby pages (and we are so tempted), we have to remind ourselves that almost every contemporary comics artist’s work would suffer in comparison to the master of the superhero idiom. We don’t bring up that comparison most of the time, when looking at most artist’s work, because they aren’t quite so brazen in their efforts to mine the style of the master. And that’s what I believe he’s doing: mining. He’s not “ripping off” or “swiping” so much as imitating in order to understand. The art, to this reviewer, anyway, feels too honest to be cynically motivated. Whether or not Scioli’s mining of the Kirby idiom pays off will depend on his progress in the future. It’s not something that can be known now, based solely on the volume currently under review. If he manages to internalize the Kirby style to the point where he actually evolves past it — going through imitation into a unique style of his own, the way that Bill Sienkiewicz famously digested and refined and eventually outdid the Neal Adams style when he was younger — then he may become a master in his own right. For now, he is only an echo, albeit a sincere and interesting echo, of Kirby himself.

Like the artwork, the story is also an import directly from Kirby world. This turns out to be less problematic. For one thing, Kirby just wasn’t as good a writer as he was an artist, so it’s much easier for a writer to come along, take the best of what Kirby had, and yet still be better. Everybody knows that Kirby was great on the big concepts — creating a fantastical world and populating it with fantastical superheroes — but he fell down on the final, finishing stages: his dialogue was almost always hokey and wooden; his narrative captions were melodramatic; his characters, too often, two-dimensional (in the non-visual sense, that is). It’s no coincidence that the most famous Kirby creations were the products of collaboration with a slicker, less revolutionary soul (even before he met Stan Lee, Joe Simon filled the role of finisher/polisher/packager for Kirby’s concepts, like The Newsboy Legion and Captain America). Joe Casey, the writer of GØDLAND, demonstrates strength after strength specifically where Kirby showed weakness as a writer. Many of the most memorable parts of this book are made memorable by snappy dialogue, for example. That’s not something anybody would ever say about a Kirby solo effort. At the same time, Casey manages to reproduce the psychedelic, world-building glee that marks Kirby’s brand of action-adventure. Casey is further along in his career than his artist, Tom Scioli — he’s already had the TCJ interview treatment, for example, which is a rarity for a “mainstream” comics creator these days, especially one who isn’t a bona-fide writer/artist — and he’s easily a much better writer than Kirby even on Kirby’s best day and Casey’s worst. There’s no question that, by revisiting Kirby tropes, he is improving upon them (which is what I expect and hope that Scioli will do someday, visually).
That’s not to say that the story doesn’t have its problems.

Here’s the thing: if the intent was to produce a fun throwback to Kirby’s late career — the New Gods/Kamandi/Eternals/Detroyer Duck era — while putting a little bit of a contemporary spin on the “Kirby genre,” then the book is an unqualified success, in large part because of Casey’s cleverness as a writer and Scioli’s sincerity as an imitator/reinventor of the Kirby style. It is for this reason that I plan to read all the GØDLAND trades as they come out, personally. But I’m certain that that is not the intent — that Casey and Scioli mean to do more. Here’s a podcast interview from Wordballoon.com, where Casey mentions that GØDLAND is supposed to be more than a nostalgia kick, specifically pointing to the relationships between the protagonist, Adam Archer, and his sisters, as an example of the complexity and contemporary nature of the work. Yeeks. If anything, the relationships between Adam and his sisters remind me of the weak, childish characterizations you might see in any typical Silver Age comic book — there’s one sequence, between Adam and his sister Neela, for example, that reminds me of the poorly-done “feminist” version of Lois Lane from the late 1960’s/early 1970’s (if you’re not familiar with those books: the only difference between the feminist Lois and the pre-feminist Lois was that pre-feminist Lois was always grateful when Superman rescued her; feminist Lois was always pissed off by the rescue; neither of them, though, was able to survive on her own, without rescue of some sort or another). When I was reading it, I thought: “Fun! He’s playing with that old campy helpless-but-bitchy pseudo-feminist stuff.” But, well, in light of his statements about the book, and about his goals — it seems that, maybe, um, he wasn’t. If the real intent is to step beyond pastiche into something that stands on its own, outside of its references to old comics (Kirby or otherwise), and can be taken seriously as a character study, or even as a meaningful action-adventure, then Casey and Scioli have a long way to go.

They have plenty of time to get there. That’s the good news — sort of. Like the first volume of Grant Morrison & co.’s Seven Soldiers of Victory, which I reviewed a while back, this book doesn’t contain an entire story. Unlike Seven Soldiers, GØDLAND doesn’t even pretend to want to have an ending. This isn’t a “graphic novel” in any real sense of the term: it’s just a collection of comic book issues. If you’re signing on to GØDLAND as a reader, you’re committing yourself to a never-ending, cliffhanger-driven serial, even if you only read the thing in trade paperback form, as I plan to. The only difference between reading the monthly comic books and the trade collections is that the trades have bigger chunks of story — but they’re no more complete than any individual issue. I’m personally signing on: it’s a lot of fun; I have a great deal of appreciation for the Kirby comics that serve as the primary influences on this work; and I have a sneaking suspicion (or maybe just a “sneaking hope”) that Casey and Scioli have got what it takes to actually surpass the source material and provide us with something the likes of which we’ve never seen before. But I imagine that this might take years, maybe even a decade or two — if the series manages to last that long. Are you up for such a long payoff? If you, like me, have a high tolerance for comic book nostalgia, and a particular fondness for late-era Jack Kirby, you’ve got to get in on GØDLAND. But, honestly, I’m not sure if I could recommend this book (which, ultimately, means recommending the series, because it doesn’t make sense in any context other than the never-ending serial which it serves to kickstart) to the casual reader. I dunno. Maybe.

Title: GØDLAND Volume One: “Hello Cosmic!”
Creators: Joe Casey and Tom Scioli
Publisher: Image Comics
Cover Price: $14.99

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