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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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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