Detail from De:Tales © 2006 Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba

The authors of De: Tales: Stories of Urban Brazil, fraternal twins Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, take themselves — their daydreams, their art, their sexuality, their drunken enthusiasms, their more sober hopes and wishes, and even (or maybe especially) their twinship — very seriously, in the same way that, say, a fourteen-year-old girl takes herself very seriously. This is not meant as an insult. I grant that it is an odd thing to say, especially given the explicitly macho content of many of the short stories contained in this collection, their first book to enjoy widespread US distribution. The boys, it seems, are always on the prowl for female companionship, usually in bars, usually while drunk. But unlike homegrown comics in the same genre (the webcomic Butternut Squash, for example), the process of attracting and securing a one-night-stand isn’t played as a cynical frat boy joke. Here, any random encounter at a singles bar can become an opportunity for existential crisis.

In the book’s most emblematic story, “Reflections,” which is presented back-to-back in two different versions — one drawn by Fabio, with his smooth flowing brushwork, another by Gabriel, whose sharp, clean-line pen stylings remind me of 100 Bullets illustrator Eduardo Risso’s best — one of the twins (or maybe each of the twins, separately, at different times), afraid to talk to a girl across the bar who has been watching him, flirting with him, ducks into the restroom to take a piss, where he meets a couple of different future versions of himself: a mopey one who never worked up the nerve to talk to the girl, and a happy one who did. And they talk about the main character’s quandary. A lot. “There you are,” says the happy, about-to-get laid version of himself, “thinking about your encounter, freaked out … can’t even take a leak … and the girl outside is gonna get tired of waiting … and she’s gonna find another loser. I didn’t freak, but went right back … it’s already happening. It’s in your eyes. There’s no other way.” By the end, it becomes clear that the protagonist, himself, will become/has become the mopey version seen previously, the one who never went back outside to talk to the girl. This is treated as high tragedy. In these stories, the struggle to get laid for the night, any night, is as deeply convoluted, as momentous and perilous, as the adventures of any contemporary grim’n'gritty superhero. Again, that is not meant as an insult. Moon and Ba redeem their penchant for melodrama, their self-absorption, and their, let’s face it, celebration of a fairly careless and promiscuous lifestyle, with some valuable coin indeed: sincerity. Even when one of their protagonists, in the story “All You Need is Love,” ducks out on a one-night-stand with a lie and an excuse the morning after, consciously hoping that he will never see this woman again, he still has his head in the clouds: “And the boy-nothing left the girl-nothing with whom he’d had sex-nothing the previous night and spent the rest of the day thinking about love-everything.” It’s difficult to read that unironically — but I’m fairly certain that that is how it’s meant.

To be fair, it’s not all about drinking, carousing, and one-night-stands. One of my favorite stories, “Happy Birthday, My Friend!” is about how the boys resurrect a dead friend of theirs (by peeing in a circle on the floor of their studio with some of their other friends, while thinking of him) for one last night of — well, okay, drinking and carousing. Once again, there’s a charming sweetness here, a lack of guile, that would not stand up to any sort of ironic reading.

Moon and Ba demonstrate a tremendous amount of artistic skill and storytelling talent. I hope that their next works might, maybe, be a little less self-indulgent. Ba is working on the latest Matt Fraction project, Casanova — and I think that’s probably where both of these guys will find their biggest success: illustrating the work of other writers with less personal stories to tell. Maybe that’s an evil thing for me to say. One shouldn’t discourage personality, or even selfishness, in artists, surely? I dunno. Their writing isn’t incompetent — it’s just too, well, twee, in a strange, “macho dude who gets too huggy with his man-pals when he’s drunk, and he’s drunk a lot” kind of way.

Ultimately, whether you will enjoy this book or not depends a lot on your own tolerance for and/or appreciation of, people who wear their hearts on their sleeves. You might find it charming. But it could just as easily be grating to the nerves (I can imagine hating it utterly, if I hadn’t been in exactly the right mood — on vacation, hanging at the beach, very relaxed, mostly drunk myself — when I read it). It’s good for what it is, I guess, but it’s definitely not the kind of book that I would press into the hands of my best friends, demanding that they read. And that’s what it seems to want, very much, to be.

Title: De: Tales: Stories of Urban Brazil Authors: Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba Publisher: Dark Horse

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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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