I swear I didn’t read A Thousand Crows’ review of Supermarket, before writing my own. I especially didn’t read the comments below the post, where somebody named AngelVision wishes that the series had been six or eight chapters. Honest. Anyway, here’s an excerpt, with which I’m in complete agreement:

The story itself has a anti-consumerism tilt to it, but it’s mostly violence, action, and humor. I really loved the world that everything was set in, with all it’s towering buildings and beautiful toxic sunsets, and I could look at Kristian Donaldson’s depictions of it forever. What didn’t feel as strong to me were the characters inhabiting that world: they didn’t make a huge impression on me. That’s not to say that Supermarket isn’t entertaining – it’s awesome – but there are better examples of Brian Wood’s writing. …more

Chris Arrant, on the other hand, liked the book a lot — enough to place it at number six in his top graphic novels of 2006 list.

Like me, Ian Brill was taken with the book right up until the very end, and has particularly interesting things to say about Wood’s ability to build a character, and then to build a story and a thematic structure around that character’s, um, characteristics:

There’s a scene early on in Supermarket that defines the book’s star, Pella Suzuki, and the book itself. Coming downstairs for breakfast the teenager lectures her mother about the plight of farmers who never see any real money from the billion-dollar coffee industry. After taking that first sip in the morning Pella’s sermon is interrupted so she can ask her mother “Is this Sumatran? S’good.” That uneasy co-existence of two contradictory notions, enjoying the spoils of the industrial world while still knowing the injustices behind those spoils, is at the heart of both Pella’s character and the book. Brian Wood and Kristian Donaldson have created a comic that stars a would-be revolutionary who decries her urban surroundings while reveling in the almost sci-fi aesthetic of today’s cities and their cultures.
…more

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

A while back, I loaned my fifteen-year-old niece a copy of Demo: The Collected Edition by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan, and she loved it. She loved it, loved it, loved it (as did I). Or, at least, she said she loved it. Who can know? Maybe she was just humoring me. I had been trying to foist Western comics on her for several years, with no success. In her natural habitat, undisturbed by unclish enthusiasms, she’s a fan of xxxHOLiC and Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, etc. Now I’m wondering if I’ll give her my copy of Supermarket, by Wood and Kristian Donaldson (who is sort of a latter-day Cloonan, drawing the same slouching, sneering, manga-influenced-by-way-of-Paul-Pope, too-cool-to-be-hip cigarette smokers with consciences, utilizing the same fat, confident linework that Cloonan and Pope made famous, all elegant and choppy, realistic and design-y, Vertigo and Kodansha, at the very same time).

I think I probably won’t.

It’s not that the thing doesn’t have its moments and its qualities. The first chapter, in fact, rocks. In it, we meet our protagonist, Pella, a self-righteous, cynical, but unselfaware teenaged girl from the richest side of a scary future metropolis, the “Supermarket” of the title, rendered by Kristian in gorgeous neon noir, a place and a time exactly halfway between right now and Blade Runner. By the end of that chapter, Pella finds herself homeless and in hiding from the most dangerous criminal gangs in the city, cut off from her fundage and her family, and required, simply, to stay alive. On the last page of that chapter, she’s rolling into the worst parts of town on a dark, crowded bus, with the drunks and the punks and the other anonymous losers who populate all “less than Platinum” levels of this socioeconomically segregated city, trying to figure out what has happened to her, and what she should do next. We have been given a glimpse at just enough of her spoiled self-righteousness to want to watch her suffer and learn. We have been given a glimpse at just enough of her intelligence and conscientiousness to want to watch her thrive.

“Oh boy,” I said to myself. “This is going to be good.”

And for a while, it is.

From a certain point forward, though, you find yourself watching a third-rate Quentin Tarantino film on paper, this agonizingly choreographed action sequence after that agonizingly choreographed action sequence, and then another and another, each ratcheting up the artificial “Oh My Fucking God” factor one mechanical notch at a time. There’s a lot of raw material here — the kind of High Concept Hollywood pitch fodder that works well when described in the most nugatory way, but only then. The Yazuka with a Samurai sword who poses, and says, calmly, “Submit to me,” before he charges, not waiting for a response. The bloodthirsty underworld gang comprised of Swedish porn models. Etc. Blah. High Concept can’t always carry the day. High Concept can’t ever carry the day. Just ask the guys who made Snakes on a Plane. It’s always about the execution.

Don’t get me wrong: on a moment-by-moment basis, every page, every panel, is eye-poppingly well-crafted, even the most violent ones (maybe especially those). The fatal flaw here is hardly a lack of what we call, in the technical parlance, chops. Wood and Kristian have both, assuredly, got chops, and chops to spare. On the strength of his other projects, Brian Wood is one of my favorite writers. Kristian Donaldson, whom I’d never heard of before this, knocked me out. That’s an artist I’ll be watching in the future, for sure. If the last chapter or two of Supermarket had been stretched out into, say, three or four more, allowing for better character development and more thoroughly extrapolated stakes-raising, if the slam-bang action sequences had been less archly imagineered, if the ending hadn’t been entirely too easy and abrupt after all that rigamarole, etc., then I’d probably have been able to recommend this book to you with enthusiasm.

It’s not, I should mention, a complete load of crap, like so many contemporary action-adventure comics. There was almost something very special here, it just wasn’t given the space it needed to come together at the very end.

(The image on this page is a detail from Supermarket, copyright (c) 2006 Brian Wood, Kristian Donaldson, and Idea and Design Works LLC)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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).

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!