Following up on yesterday’s feature review of Popeye Vol. 1: “I Yam What I Yam”:

Unlike me, Robert Dayton of the Discorder blog likes the bigness and deluxe packaging:

Designed by Jacob Covey, the hardcover package features a cut-out word balloon title—it’s literally cut out of the hardbound cover. Fantagraphics has made excellent use of digital technology to render these strips in crisp glory; the full page colour newspaper strips are lush, soft washes. As such an integral part of comics history, these strips should always be in print. Before this book, one had to desperately seek out Fantagraphics’ previous re-printings from the early 90s, unassuming volumes that, even in soft cover, were less economical and not as advanced in design and layout. This book is a steal at approximately thirty dollars, an investment of joy. … more

Bill Sherman likes the packaging, too, and declares it “book of the year“:

There’s a lotta reading in this volume of strips. Unlike today’s newspaper funnies, Segar had the room to tell each day in five to six panel offerings, which he crammed with colorful dialog. The pacing is subsequently much more leisurely than most modern comics readers are accustomed to, but it pays off in the strip’s delightfully quirky characterization. … more

Writing for City Pages, Zak Sally admires the badassedness and chaotic amorality of it all:

[F]ar from quaint and staid, these strips are badass. People insult each other, beat on each other, love each other, and screw each other over in a way that’s a little shocking in this day and age. There’s a scene—one among many, really—of a typical bad guy throttling the living hell out of Olive (note to modern cartoonists: Do not show women being beaten), threatening to “shake her teeth out.” Meanwhile, Castor sneaks up behind him preparing to unload a gunful into his head at point-blank range. Yeowch. Still—funny stuff. …more

On the other hand, Elgin Carver at RackRaids sees moral truth and epic scope:

If the animated version of Popeye the Sailor Man is the sum total of your knowledge about this misanthropic hero, then you know him not. Epic in scope, deep in moral truths, as imaginative as any character ever invented, Popeye moves through these strips with a grace that movie stars of that era could only envy. If you have never read any of these strips, or if you are so immersed in them that you can recite dialogue from memory, you owe it to yourself and posterity to stop reading this review immediately and either go on-line or to the nearest brick and mortar bookstore and buy this book. Remember, Fantagraphics has striven to bring us other works in their complete grandeur, Little Orphan Annie comes quickly to mind, only to fall into financial trouble due to slow sales. They deserve better. Popeye deserves better. This is as good as it gets. Do your duty. …more

Finally, Tom Spurgeon conducted a long and insightful interview with the book’s designer, Jacob Covey, who, it must be said, did a great job creating a beautiful and entirely appropriate object, given the apparent goals of this project — and my complaints were not meant to disparage his high level of craftsmanship and artistry in the least. I’d just have preferred a cheap little pocket-sized paperback.

But that’s apparently just, you know, my problem.

And I’m cool with that.

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It is impossible to overstate the influence of Elzie Crisler Segar (1894 – 1938) on the cartoonists who followed him. Take the underground comic book creators from the 1960’s for example, like r. crumb and Bill Griffith: their rounded, gravity-aware, cross-hatched, rubber-limbed figures, their wobbly lines that don’t always connect quite exactly where you’d expect them to, their off-balance character blocking and camera placement, etc., are all signs of Segar’s influence. But then, Thimble Theater (also known as “that comic strip with Popeye in it”) was probably still running, in some form, in the funny pages of their childhoods. So that explains that. Even today, though, when other cartoonists of Segar’s era have long been forgotten (quick — who drew Toonerville Folks?), young, up-and-coming figures ranging from Kevin Huizenga to Manu Larcenet have obviously studied, and internalized, his style. For the most part, the strips collected in Popeye Vol. 1: “I Yam What I Yam,”, originally published at the tail-end of the “flapper era,” appear as fresh and vital as if they had been drawn yesterday, by the hottest of the cool alternacomickers.

Which is not to say that a taste for Segar comics is a rarefied one. Quite the opposite. From his first appearance in Thimble Theater, about ten years into the strip’s lifetime, Popeye was, and has remained, a mass market phenomenon, popular with children and adults alike, almost as famous as his contemporary Mickey Mouse (who is, in turn, more popular than Jesus). His star has faded a bit since my own childhood in the late sixties and early seventies, due to changing cultural priorities and the emergence of more guilt-ridden (and therefore more intrusively concerned) parental units. Popeye, after all, smokes. He smokes a pipe. According to one panel collected here, he actually smokes his pipe while chewing tobacco. He beats people up. What’s worse: he beats people up in order to impress a woman and win her favors. And so on. Even so, except for the pipe smoking, the humorously violent understanding of courtship and love, and a small number of very unfortunate panels showing dehumanized monkeyfied African tribesmen hunting human prey in the bush, there is very little in these pages that will strike the modern reader as completely alien; there’s much less of that kind of stuff than you would find in just about any other specimin of popular entertainment from the era. These strips actually seem more contemporary than the much more famous and widely-distributed animated cartoons featuring Popeye, for example. For one thing, Popeye’s relationship with Olive Oyl, and his rivalry with her other suitors, is not at the center of the story (this may change in future volumes, I don’t know). There’s no spinach. There’s no Bluto. Or Brutus. Or whatever his name was supposed to be. There’s more than one, you know, plot. Characters have interesting motivations and relationships. And so on. The stories collected here are generally more complex, less predictable, and, well, just a whole lot better, than the animated cartoons — more like Seinfeld with a crusty, seafaring, middle-aged, super-powered protagonist, and without the urban focus and the laugh-track, than like anything else. Um. Yeah. I think that made sense. Anway, before Popeye came on board, Thimble Theater was apparently a kind of hybrid between an adventure strip, a family situation comedy (featuring the Oyls — Castor and his sister Olive, their parents and hangers-on), and a romance/dating gag strip — and at least through the duration of this volume, it remained so. That’s a good thing. If you like comics at all, of any kind, you’ll like these comics. They’re a lot of fun to read.

That said, I can’t recommend Popeye Volume 1 to the casual reader. The presentation and format are just entirely too damned deluxe. It’s a big, big book. You can’t take it to the coffee shop, or read it on the bus. It fits no bookbag. You can’t even easily carry it under your arm. If you sit it down on a table or a desk to read it, you have to kind of stand up and hover over the pages, leaning on your hands, craning your head left and right, like a navigator on a wooden frigate, contemplating a map of the stars (which, okay, I guess may be kind of appropriate). Leaning back in your Laz-E-Boy and propping it up on your lap is the only relatively comfortable way to read this monster, and even then you’ll find that it cuts off the circulation below your knees after a couple of hours. I’m totally serious. Or maybe I’m just getting old. I don’t know. Whatever. Given the historical value of the material, and its difficult-to-find status over the past several decades, I understand and appreciate the need to make Segar’s work available in a high-quality, archival, durable edition. Collectors, aficionados of the cartooning form, serious-minded cartoonists, historians, and, especially, libraries should not hesitate to purchase this edition. It is clearly intended for them, and serves their needs well. The oversize format is probably the only one that could have done justice to the Sunday strips printed in the back, for example, allowing them to be seen at their huge original size, along with the extra matter (a secondary strip of Segar’s) that originally accompanied them in the papers. I understand this. I know. Segar’s work must be made available to future generations in as faithful a manner as possible. But, yeah, the interests of the average reader would best be served by something smaller, more convenient, and maybe a lot less expensive. Popeye belongs to the people. The people demand their Popeye! Let’s hope that, in addition to continuing this fine, archival project, Fantagraphics, or someone else, is able in the near future to put out some reasonably-sized paperbacks collecting the same material. Yes, I know they did so in the nineties. Maybe they can release those again? Pretty please.

The image in this post, a detail from Popeye Volume 1 by E. C. Segar, is copyright (c) 2007 King Features Syndicate.

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Following up on yesterday’s feature review of Batman and the Monster Men by Matt Wagner.

The blogger who signs his work “Jeb D.” over at RackRaids.com liked the story more than I did (I liked the book, but pretty much only for the artwork). Here’s some of what had to say:

Wagner has an excellent grasp of story structure, and even though this series was originally released as four issues, the story unfolds in a nice three-act arc, reminiscent less of modern comics writing than a good action movie or mystery novel—and action and mystery are both elements that this story delivers big-time. It’s pretty rare for a comic to give us a sense that Batman’s truly in over his head—too many writers make him impossibly smug and ridiculously over-prepared. Wagner plays on Batman’s inexperience at this point in his career to make his eventual meeting with the Monster Men as gripping a fight as I’ve seen Batman get into in many years. …more

One of the Jones Boys didn’t like the book much. But it’s not Wagner’s fault. It’s Frank Miller’s. Apparently. See here:

Since [Miller's Batman: Year One], we’ve seen the early days of Robin, the early days of Batman and Robin, the early days of Commissioner Gordon, the early days of Catwoman, the early days of the Joker, the early days of Two-Face, and no doubt also the early days of Bat-Mite, Ace the Bat-Hound, the utility belt, and the aftershave Batman uses when he’s out on “patrol”.

And now, thanks to Matt Wagner, the early days story we’ve all been waiting for in Batman and the Monster Men, the early days of Hugo Strange.

Hugo who? …more

And … that’s all I found for Batman and the Monster Men reviews. I’ll bet there were more, and I just didn’t look hard enough. Surely.

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Like a movie director assigned the first film in a high-profile superhero revival franchise, Matt Wagner pretends to assume that you know nothing about Batman, which gives him a license to reinvent the character for his own purposes in Batman and the Monster Men, his (reasonably) recent graphic novel from DC Comics. Set one year after the costumed vigilante first appeared in Gotham (and therefore, presumably, a sequel of sorts to Miller and Mazzucchelli’s classic graphic novel Batman: Year One, though the connection has been left vague), this book stands pretty much alone. It does end on a note that promises a sequel, but that just makes it feel even more like a well-done Hollywood film treatment.

The original Batman stories have to be among the most amateurishly executed of any popular comics that came out of the late thirties and early forties, an era known to hardcore comics fans as the “golden age,” but not for any tendency toward visual sophistication or storytelling finesse: young, mostly untrained assistants cranked out the Batman feature under the “Bob Kane” byline in those days, for next to no pay, and zero recognition, and it shows. But even in the earliest, ugliest appearances of the character (when Kane — reputedly less skilled than many of his own assistants — may have actually drawn more of the pages than he did in later years), there was something just right about the crude visual style, a kind of thick, wavy-outlined, mostly-gray energy signal that drilled directly through the eyeballs and into the brains of our pre-adolescent grandfathers, forcing them to surrender their pocket change every month. Wagner picks up and magnifies and refines that signal, taking on, very consciously and deliberately, the clunkiness of the earliest Batman pages (the blunt, imprecise line, but not just that; the oddly “off” faces and bodies; the stiff poses; the goofball layouts; the heavy-figured, gravity-encumbered, muddy action sequences; etc.), imitating every one of Kane’s (or “Kane’s”) visual mannerisms perfectly, but transforming them at the same time, making them work and mean and move where Kane and his assistants could not, finally delivering something severely beautiful and new. The cartooning on display here is something that you just have to see — a bravura performance that only a true master of the action/adventure comic book form could pull off, or, for that matter, would even contemplate trying.

The story, about gangsters, a doting father, a mad scientist, and his monsters, also takes its cues from those Depression-era comics, but is not transformative in quite the same way, or, really, in any way. It’s predictable, boring stuff. An Alan Moore could have maybe created a silk purse out of the sow’s ear that was the source material (see Moore’s work on Tom Strong, for example, where he uses a different set of 1930’s pulp fiction conventions, for a different kind of character, making them vital and new, without actually “updating” them in any obvious way that you can put your finger on), but there aren’t a lot of Alan Moores out there, and it seems unfair to ask Wagner to be one, on top of everything else that he has proven himself to be.

I do recommend buying the book, and reading it slowly — but backwards, last page to first, so that you won’t be distracted by what passes for a story, and you can fully appreciate the magnitude of Wagner’s cartooning achievement here.

(The image in this post, a detail from Batman and the Monster Men by Matt Wagner, is copyright (c) 2007 DC Comics).

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Artwork by Cary Nord and Dave Stewart © 2006 Conan Properties International LLC

Because my mom had a late afternoon/early evening part-time job, and because my grandmother lived close to the high school (relatively close — three or four miles), I used to walk to my grandmother’s house after football practice. The walk took me across a recently-developed, mostly empty cemetery. Head wet with sweat, knees shaky from exercise, arms and back and shoulders sore (but in a good way), I used to imagine that I was Conan, whom I knew from his then-current Roy Thomas/John Buscema comics incarnation, and that the very, very occasional hard-edged, shiny, mass-produced headstone I came across was some sort of minor idol or runic sign, left there by, say, a sorcerer, to mark my path. Maybe this says something about how stodgy and slow the Conan franchise had become, in its latter days at Marvel, or maybe it was just a trick of my own weird mind, but, to me, that was what Conan the Barbarian did; that was what defined him: he walked places.

Even though Conan: The Tower Of The Elephant And Other Stories is the third volume in Dark Horse’s vigorous relaunch of the comic book franchise, there’s really no need to worry if you haven’t read the previous two. By definition, this character carries very little baggage with him (literal or otherwise) from story to story. Just in case you aren’t familiar enough with him to get your bearings right away, the authors, Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord, open the book with a brief, entertaining framing sequence — a bitchy courtier reluctantly reading the adventures of Conan to his master, the prince — which allows them to spell out Conan’s essense in so many words: a barbarian living in a sort of proto-Sumerian prehistoric culture, fighting, wenching, stealing, and running afoul of evil wizards, sneaky whores, and other civilized types. And that’s pretty much all there is to him. But you probably knew this much, at least, already.

Robert E. Howard’s most famous character made his first appearance in the December, 1932 edition of the pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales (per the exhaustive Wikipedia entry). Unlike other then-popular, now-faded pulp heroes, like Doc Savage and The Shadow, Conan’s pop culture currency still runs very high, in part because of the Marvel comic, and in part because of the film series that kickstarted Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie career. The casual graphic novel reader probably has Schwarzenegger’s version of Conan — slow-footed, thick-armed, thick-tongued — stuck in his or her mind. That’s not the character you’ll find in this volume. According to the chronology in the end-notes, which catalog Conan’s career over the course of the original Robert E. Howard stories, the Conan here is approximately seventeen years old, only recently set loose upon the world, and still learning the thieving trade. He doesn’t look seventeen — or, at least, I’ve never seen a seventeen-year-old with as much musculature as Nord has layered onto Conan’s body — but he is a flirty, quick-footed, quick-witted creature, more like Spider-Man, or (actually, more to the point) Joe Kubert’s classic comic book rendition of Tarzan, than the Governator.

The first half of the book is mostly comprised of original stories (the exception being the brief framing story, which is, itself, a partial adaptation of a longer Howard piece), the latter half represents Busiek and Nord’s adaptation of the beloved Robert E. Howard story “The Tower of the Elephant.” As you might expect from such an experienced handler of corporate comic book characters, with their twisted continuities and constant reinventions and reimaginings, Busiek manages to stick his own stories in front of Howard’s canonical tale with seemingly effortless grace, building on the character and the scenario in such a way that his originals actually add new levels of depth and meaning to the “official” Howard story that follows them. Besides that, he gets the Howard voice just right: the Busiek originals read like they were written by a dreamy-eyed, naive Depression-era Texas hick hopped up on his own vast imagination, just as they should (for example, the proto-Sumerian whores and thugs quip and snip at one another like they came straight out of an Edgar G. Robinson movie — but not in an intrusively irritating way — just as they do in Howard’s stories). I had to double-check on the Internet to make sure that these stories, too, weren’t adaptations of Howard originals, before I wrote this review, just so I wouldn’t make a fool out of myself.

In the first original story, “On Uskuth Hill,” we learn that Conan is not a superhero. I know that that sounds obvious; it’s not that I expected him to dress up in tights and patrol the city for crime; but in his 1970s Marvel incarnation, bound as it was by Comics Code Authority rules and by Marvel’s own house style, Conan often came across as too noble, and far, far too outrageously overcompetent against any challenge thrown at him — a superhero, in other words. In this story, on the other hand, Conan has been outwitted by a couple of whores when we find him in the opening scene. He beats up an innkeeper and slaps a child in frustration. Then willfully, out of spite and hurt pride, he puts himself — and the rest of the world, for that matter — in the way of harm. Not a superhero, in other words. Conan’s antagonists in this story, four demons, are maybe a little too discursive for their own good, which represents a pulp cliche I’ve griped about before: the villain who tells the hero exactly what he needs to know. In this case, Busiek plays with us masterfully, by setting up that expectation, then turning it around on us. It seems that Conan, too, has seen one too many James Bond films, and the easy solution he imagines that the villains have handed to him turns out to bite him in the ass.

The next two stories show Conan troubling himself over the ways of civilized men and wenches — probably inspired by a few throwaway lines in the Howard story adapted in the latter half of the book. These stories also introduce a couple of recurring characters, who fade away just in time for the adaptation (which occurs chronologically immediately after these stories), but who are liable to show back up in future volumes, given that Busiek has deliberately left a few plot threads dangling. The long adaptation of the Howard story itself is what it is. Interestingly, Dark Horse has also recently reissued a new version of the old Marvel Comics adaptation of the same story. If I were a bit more industrious, I’d have bought that one, too, and treated you with some sort of close textual comparison or something. Ah well.

Overall, the point to be made about the writing is that Busiek easily handles the difficult task of blending his own stories, and his own interpretation of the character, with Howard’s: the man is a pro. Yes, the prose is purple, the plots are melodramatic, the characters are thin. But, come on, this is Conan the Barbarian.

What really sets this version of Conan apart from the rest, though — and apart from almost any other action/adventure comic book being published today — is the mind-eatingly splendid artwork. That sort of thing gets said a lot, by graphic novel reviewers, when they’re talking about fantasy books. Usually, it means that the artwork is the kind of overly-rendered, photorealistic, pose-centric crap that you see on the covers of heavy metal albums and in posters for big budget fantasy movies. That’s not what this artwork is like at all. It’s something I’ve never seen before: scribbly, deliberately unfinished-looking, on the lowest level (the figure and the line), and yet gussied up at the highest level with the latest mainstream comics coloring techniques and painterly washes. It’s a strange, tense marriage of styles that works very well. As I mentioned earlier, there’s a bit of Kubert’s Tarzan to Nord’s Conan, but where Kubert puts his ink line in the forefront, making everything all about the line, Nord allows his line to fall to the back, in favor of pure shape and action, when necessary. In some places, the coloring by Dave Stewart swallows the line entirely, giving the characters and the settings a carved-in-soap kind of look. In other places, you get the sense that there was a tightly-pencilled line, which has been covered over by the coloring, and then one or both of the artists came back in with a Sharpie to just touch up a couple of key details with a thin black squiggle. I’m not sure if that was the technique or not, and I’m sure I’m not describing it well enough — suffice it to say that the style is distinctive and well-done. Together, Nord and Stewart have managed to breathe visual life into a character and an idiom that had become tired and old under the influence of geeky fan-favorites like Frank Frazetta, Barry Windsor-Smith, and John Buscema. I’m not saying that these artists weren’t masters — they were great, each in his own way — but that’s precisely the problem: they were masters. Their vision of the character and the world, bastardized by imitators and by imitators of imitators, like fifth and sixth generation mimeographs, had to be blasted out of our brains before we could actually “see” Conan again, with fresh eyes. Nord and Stewart have done that. This Conan is alive: he’s funny (his body language, I should say, is witty), he’s vicious, and he’s something else entirely. The fact that, toward the end of the book, another great fan-favorite, Michael Wm. Kaluta, actually draws a longish sequence in the middle of a story, in a completely different style, without putting the younger and less-well-known artists of the rest of the story to shame, or jarring us in any way, is another testament to their accomplishment.

Artwork by Cary Nord and Dave Stewart © 2006 Conan Properties International LLC

Usually, the highest compliment I can pay to a series of graphic novels (and so many of them are series, rather than standalone works, that the series structure is probably the norm, rather than the exception — grumble, grumble) is to recommend that you not only buy the current volume, but that you follow the series into the future, and purchase subsequent volumes as well. Not only will I personally be doing that (at least, as long as the current creative team stays on board, I will be doing that), I’m also planning, myself, to purchase the previous two volumes, even though this isn’t my favorite kind of story, or my favorite kind of character, by a long shot.

Title: Conan: The Tower Of The Elephant And Other Stories Creators: Kurt Busiek, Cary Nord, Dave Stewart, Robert E. Howard Publisher: Dark Horse

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