I Read Spider-Man: The Manga #27 So You Don't Have To

The Spider-Man manga is a really odd beast. Serialized in Monthly Shonen Jump by Shueisha in Japan in 1970 and 1971, it tells a story more or less loosely based on the American comic being published at the time. It was also apparently really bloody weird, with graphic violence and sexual situations obviously not present in any form of Spider-Man published before or since. Beginning in 1997, Marvel began serializing the manga in North America, though largely expurgated and with a rather cruddy translation. Marvel skipped a bunch of stories and pretty much gave up mid-arc with issue 31 in 1999.

Spider-Man: The Manga 27, by Ryouchi Ikegami
1971 Shueisha / 1999 Marvel

Working at JHU I'd long since seen the Marvel issues floating around our epic mountain of Unsold Shit from the 1990s that we have since mercifully unloaded when we moved stores last month. There were a few stragglers that stayed behind, though, and among them was issue 27.

I picked up the issue with no knowledge of the potential contents or the history behind the original series. What drew me to it was the very Brendan McCarthy-esque cover, which, as you can see, is pretty weird. It's hard to glean anything from the cover aside from the nifty trade dress on the left, which is about the only thing the comic has going for it.

Largely by Ryoichi Ikegami, the series stars high school student Yu Komori, who like Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider and is raised by his Aunt Mei. He's got your standard Spidey Powers, wall crawling and Spider-Sense and the like. The issue opens with Komori crawling up a wall and then rather quickly falling into a really bizarre nightmare. After a striking double page spread where Komori looks at a mirror image of himself in full Ditko-classic Spider-Man regalia, over 6 pages or so Komori has an existential conversation with himself. "Ths Spider-Man in this mirror is me. To think that my shadow could disobey me... It's impossible!" Making monkey-like movements for his reflection to mimic, he continues, "My shadow imitates my every movement." (Yeah, dude, it's a mirror, it'll do that.) "It's supposed to obey me. My shadow would never defy me... but... why this fear?" Then out of nowhere a narrator breaks in telling Spidey the mirror he is looking into tells the future. Spidey starts freaking out, and then this happened:

... Whoah.

Out of nowhere Ryoichi sticks a stunningly illustrated horror comic into a Spider-Man tale, creepier than any Doc Oc possession. Komori freaks out, punches the mirror and wakes up in a cold sweat, a thunderstorm atmospherically happening outside. After a clunky transition (the segues here are amateurish at best), Komori (not as Spidey) saves the life of pretty Yukiko who was absentmindedly crossing the street without looking. So appaently Yukiko's brother Mitsuo is falling into a life of crime, as evidenced by his use of cigarettes and hanging around poorly drawn street thugs. Not only that, but he also seems to have Spider powers of his own.

I know it's probably unfair to judge the storyline and the series on one random issue, but the whole thing is pretty damn goofy. Between the stilted conversation with Yukiko (maybe a result of the translation) and Spidey resolving to face Mitsuo, there is a fairly ridiculous segment where inartfully produced newspaper headlines detail Mitsuo as "The Mystery Thief" as he scales large buildings stealing a couple of dollars at a time while leaving notes mocking the police and Spider-Man. "Miracle Methods!! Two hundred meters above ground!! For a haul of twenty dollars!!." (Actual punctuation.)

While the unusual nightmare segment and the cityscapes are amazingly rendered, the rest of it is pretty bad. Though the bits with Komori surrounded by floaty Spidey-heads are pretty awesome:

But my favorite part of the comic? The ad on the inside back cover, featuring a very earnest Mark McGwire at the height of his roided-up home run powers:

Every night, five to seven million kids around America wet the bed.

Remember parents, it's not their fault. It's Mark McGwire's.

Musings On Superman on the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the Superhero

I love superhero comics as much as I love comics as a glorious whole.

The dual demise of Wizard Magazine and The Comics Journal (as a regular periodical) in 2010 was a symptom of the often ballyhooed "death of print" that continues to this very moment. While I don't completely buy the mass extinction of print, when it comes to comics news reporting, journalism and commentary, the vanguard had long since migrated to the internet and the death of Wizard and The Journal were inevitable. And while few seem to equate Wizard and The Journal as similar entities, I contend that their mutual folding was also a symptom of their mutual narrow world views: Wizard represented coverage of the lowest common denominator of comic entertainment, in their substandard and pop-focused coverage of the comic artform and their inveterate speculation and profiteering; The Comics Journal in their snobbishness, a lowest common denominator of a more insidious kind that excludes vast swaths of a medium for no other reason than lots of people like it, ignoring their own publisher's long history of inartful smut-peddling. Wizard and The Journal were two sides of the same coin, a coin that comics as a medium and a culture are mercifully better off without.

Of course The Comics Journal still exists as an occasional print publication and more frequent online one¹, and its attitude towards the medium is unchanged. Interspersed with decent commentary on various independent and international works and in-depth interviews with a certain subset of creators is its ceaseless snobbery and willful ignorance of superhero comics. I like superhero comics. I also like art-house comics and strips and international material and mini-comics and monthlies and OGNs and webcomics. I like good comics in whatever form they take. Websites like The Hooded Utilitarian² and The Comics Grid³ and The Comics Reporter⁴ are more reflective of my tastes and of, what I believe, is the reality of the average modern comic consumer, who are increasingly seeing the potential of comics as a storytelling medium beyond but inclusive of superheroes. Perhaps my viewpoint is skewed by my location and profession: I have for many years worked for one of the America's most progressive comic retailers - JHU Comic Books in New York City⁵ - an early and continuous pioneer and evangelist of the entire broad range of the comics language. My biggest personal influence as a comic consumer and thinker is JHU's co-owner Nick Purpura, one of the industry's most well-read and well-informed figures, and my experience working for JHU has repeatedly shown me that, at least in our customer base in Manhattan, that comic readers are adventurous and omnivorous.

Of course I also see many cases of folks unfamiliar with the comics medium who only know of comics as superhero fare, and just as many who are into comics and stick to just superhero material. I always strive to direct people to good comics regardless of the genre, but I completely understand those who stick to superheroes (the Wizard crowd) and those that avoid it (the Journal crowd). Both limit themselves, of course, and most, I believe, can and do embrace the entire spectrum of comics. So what of superhero comics? Superheroes, that uniquely American and uniquely odd genre of storytelling, are 75 years old this year. The comic book as a mode of storytelling delivery is just a few years older. (It is a natural assumption for many to assume that superhero comics are comics, but of course that is not the case.) Superheroes and the comic book would go on to influence the comic medium and eventually all of pop culture to an astonishing degree over the next seven-plus decades.

Though they were not my gateway drug into comics (that would be Tintin), I have always enjoyed superhero comics. Superhero comics as a genre are terribly flawed, there are veins of sexism and stupidity and bad art. Certainly Sturgeon's Law⁶ applies to superhero comics (and it applies just as equally to non-superhero fare despite what publishers like Fantagraphics or D&Q would like you to believe): most of what is out there is complete crap; the goal, the thrill of the hunt is in finding and celebrating that which is not crap, that which is better than what can be and what is elsewhere. And I love the damn things, the good but not the bad or the ugly. And superhero comics all started with one character, one idea, one ideal: Superman. But I have never really liked Superman.

I love superhero comics. I don't like Superman.

(Perfunctory Action shot.)

I've always been a Marvel guy, that is, when it comes to superhero comics I prefer those published by Marvel comics. It's not that I don't read DC superhero books, I do, but there is something about Marvel that has always appealed to me over DC. I know many people who like both equally or one over the other (or neither, preferring independent or strictly no longer extant superheroes). Now, I don't discount my preference of Marvel over DC could be the result of simple branding. But after my first exposure to superheroes at a young age I very quickly gravitated towards Marvel. There are decided differences of style between the two companies: Marvel, especially with the foundation of the Marvel Age of comics in the early 1960s, has tended to feature flawed, grounded heroes approached with suspicion by those not similarly powered, where DC's heroes tended to be more straight-laced. But after the widespread darkening of mainstream superhero fiction following the mid 1980s, one could argue that there is little difference in the books put out by both companies. I disagree, of course. Maybe this is some sort of misplaced brand loyalty, but Marvel Comics just feel different, as patently ridiculous as this may seem, more realistic in the sense that the events we see take place in a world more recognizably like our own, just a science fiction infused superhero mirror of it, whereas DC tends towards more unrealistic idealism. Marvel - as a fictional universal entity and as a company - is certainly flawed, and is not immune to producing shitty comics or treating its creative talent with contempt. But its creative output just tends to be better than DC, more interesting and engaging with more relatable characters. But perhaps the biggest difference is the persistent existence of the nearly all-powerful, largely bland and disinteresting Superman.

In June, 1938, Action Comics 1 from the company that would become DC Entertainment saw the debut of a new type of character, the costumed superpowered crimefighter in Superman. Created by Cleveland high-schoolers Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster five years prior with the intent of comic strip syndication, they eventually sold the comic to DC. The newly exploded market would produce thousands of variants on the idea, and the sudden proliferation of superhero comics would prop up an industry which included funny animal comics, pulp heroes, adaptations, war comics, sci-fi, and strip reprints - but predominantly superhero material (which remains true to this day). The superhero was revolutionary, but much like Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, it wasn't created from a vacuum and owes its creation to a variety of preexisting ideas while elegantly distilling those concepts in a fairly original concept of its own. Superman and the superhero and pulp-hero comics that followed in its wake would eventually forge a new American mythology and create a multi-billion dollar industry. And the creation of Superman would also start the precedent of criminally underpaying the creators of these fictional heroes, comics' Original Sin.

Superman, the fictional character, is extremely powerful. He can do pretty much anything - indeed his powers are nearly godlike, with very little he cannot do. His personality is also very dull. Is it wrong to equate his straightforward midwestern American decency with dullness? Maybe - but there are many characters in superhero fiction who are decent and always strive to do the right thing but have the same human flaws that we all have, doubts and mistakes made, flaws Superman often lacks. (And Superman is inhuman, not just in his alien nature, but in that where the best heroes are humans who wear a colorful mask, Superman's mask is Clark Kent. The fiction he weaves is that of a human, and there's a certain dishonesty more insidious than the dishonesty of putting on a mask.) Now Superman has not always been so perfect - his initial appearances by Seigel and Shuster feature a much less powerful, more personally gruff man of the people. But thanks to various economic pressures from licensors, he quickly morphed into the godlike being we know him as today. This all-powerful nature is what sells Superman to many, and what is a turn-off to some, like myself.

Many would argue that Superman's powerset, his status as the ur-hero, is what makes him special. Many would point out that the proliferation of the Superman "S" exemplifies the inspiration the character gives to millions (though maybe that proliferation really just exemplifies the cultural penetration of a valuable trademark). No, I shouldn't be so cynical... Superman is a powerful trademark, but he is also a powerful and ubiquitous inspiration for many.

But on the eve of the release of release of Man of Steel - just seven years after the last attempt at a Superman movie - we are reminded of the difficulties of translating the character to a different medium. (As I write this, I have not seen the film though I intend to.) But I see this as a failure at the root of who and what the character is, a failure reflected in the vast majority of the comics he appears in. I can't claim to be well-read where it comes to Superman by any measure, but I have read many key works and am familiar enough with many others to be consistently and thoroughly unimpressed. Perhaps I have preconceived opinions of the character that interferes with my potential enjoyment of the works, but I don't think that's the case. Many Superman comics are mediocre to awful, with few rising above the fray. Just look at this week's new Superman Unchained, a much heralded new release from two of DC's top-flight creators - Scott Snyder and Jim Lee - set to capitalize on the release of the new film... It is a silly story that creates an action set-piece to capitalize on the artist's talents that comes off as a ridiculous gimmick. What nonsense.

But then there's All-Star Superman, frankly one of the finest comics ever created. All-Star's incontrovertible status as a masterpiece only seems to highlight the lack of similarly achieved quality from prior and subsequent Superman stories... but then maybe it's unfair to compare All-Star Superman, a transcendent work with few peers, to anything else which can't possibly measure up. Written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Frank Quitely & Jamie Grant, All-Star Superman was published in 12 parts between 2005 and 2008. Not taking place in the shared DC Universe (which helps), All-Star chronicled Superman's final days. The elements that make All-Star work, the specific embracing of the inspired silliness of prior Superman stories and the unapologetic utilization and expansion of his godlike abilities, things that would turn me off in any other context, were executed to such perfection by Morrison and Quitely that I found myself embracing those selfsame elements. Grant Morrison is someone who is a true believer in the inspirational, aspirational potential of the superhero genre and Superman in particular, and he crafted a tale that not only celebrates but exemplifies everything that is possible in superhero comics. Superman for so many people is a shining example of the possible, of the heroic and the good, and for the first time with All-Star I felt it. It is one thing to know that people think a certain thing, it's another to completely grokk it yourself, and like a religious awakening All-Star did that for me. All-Star Superman 10 is the perfect superhero comic which accomplishes volumes in a short 22 page space: Superman is dying, dead really, and he rushes to save the day, again and again, no matter the sacrifice; he cures the sick, gives hope to the lost, gives purpose to those affected by his greatest failure, accepts defeat to his greatest foe, confronts his mortality, decodes his DNA, and creates the universe that created him. Like many Morrison comics it is a classic and layered meta-work of science fiction, but it is also a powerful, moving, transcendent achievement in not just the superhero genre but in the comics medium.

But that so few creators could achieve what Morrison and Quitely do is more a credit to Morrison and Quitely than a credit to Superman. My rapturous feelings to All-Star Superman do not translate to Superman, but to superhero comics as a genre and comics as a medium. This is a work that takes my breath away, not because of the character, but because of the creators.

Superman just still doesn't work for me. A character who can do anything within a shared fictional universe lessens that universe. That All-Star succeeds is because it is not in that shared universe, but in a self-contained bubble. Otherwise, that superiority diminishes everything else. I look at the other great superhero stories of the last thirty years, and can only imagine that the presence of a character like Superman would ruin it. The stakes are lowered and the structure of the conflicts fall apart when a character who can do anything is introduced. Many of these best superhero comics of the last three decades are not actually Marvel comics... But I still enjoy the shared setting of the Marvel Universe over that of any other shared universes. (Again, preference and general joy of experience plays a big role.) And it is a joy that would be diminished by Superman's presence.

Superman is in my DNA, and I reject him nonetheless.

Superman is the archetype, the first, and many (though clearly not I) would argue the best. He's certainly the most well-known, beloved and influential character of his type ever created. He inspires millions, his existence fuels a multi-billion dollar multimedia empire. Humanity had never seen anything like Superman because there had never been anything like Superman. Without Superman, comics as we know them simply would not exist. There would be no recognizable mass comic industry, the vibrant and extraordinary culture that exists around superhero comics wouldn't be. Whether or not the alt-comics of today would exist, from the Hernandezes and Wares of the comics world, is simply unknowable. The strip format would certainly still exist largely unchanged (i.e. a pale shade of its former glories with the cutting edge of creativity largely on the internet), and the rise of comics in Japan and Europe are largely unconnected to American superhero comics, though they certainly penetrated those cultures.

I love comics as a medium and language, I love the stuff covered by the Wizards and Journals of old, I love superhero comics, the stories and the format and the genre and the culture. Comics are my life. Comics are my bread and butter, they are what inspire me, they entertain me and sustain me. I spend my days thinking about comics and talking about comics and evangelizing comics and selling comics for a living and writing about comics for a past-time. And I have to owe it all to Superman, at least for being the seed that bears the fruit of my passions. I just don't love Superman. I can't, I never will. I recognize and reject Superman in the same thought, like a man recognizes and rejects the religion of his forebears.

Long live Superman. To hell with Superman.

The How and Why of The Bomb: Trinity by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm

Trinity by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm
Hill and Wang, 2012

In the early 1940s, The Manhattan Project was a perfect storm of a multitude of varied scientific genius, government will, funding and secrecy. The goal was to utilize the cutting edge of theoretical physics being developed around the world to develop a nuclear bomb for the United States before Germany and the Axis Powers came up with it. While there was no real threat that Germany could come up with an atomic bomb, the fear of that happening was enough to set into motion on of the largest and most complex scientific and military endeavors achieved by the human species. The final product was ultimately used to bring Japan to its knees and bring one of history's most brutal conflicts to a fiery close.

Trinity by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, a historical graphic novel now in softcover, is a straightforward, competently produced, fairly comprehensive (if brief) history of the science and the events that lead up to (and follow) the development of the U.S. nuclear weapon program at the height of the Second World War. There have been hundreds of volumes of material published about the Manhattan Projects, both on on the individual minds that developed the bomb and on the complex history of the project itself. Trinity does not get bogged down in detail - biographic or sociopolitical - and breezes through the scientific developments that lead up to the creation and aftermath of The Bomb.

The trap of preaching about the pandora's box of nuclear weapons or moralizing about The Bomb's effects is an easy trap to fall into, one that Fetter-Vorm avoids. The horrors of The Bomb are undeniable, and Fetter-Vorm does not shy away from depicting them, but this is not the book's focus. He makes clear that the United States had limited options regarding Japan - if they didn't do something drastic then the War would have dragged on for years more as Japan was completely intractable. They didn't blink as the United States repeatedly firebombed their cities (which Trinity dutifully notes) killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. The Bomb happened, and Fetter-Vorm clearly explains how and why in a very short space.

The volume's brevity is not a weakness but a strength. Fetter-Vorm eschews over-focusing on the mercurial personalities of those involved, allowing him to be broadly comprehensive about the whole subject. Using his clear black-and-white illustrations he very cogently details how the nuclear science works and the innovations that lead up to the field's utilization and weaponizing. There is a refreshing clarity to Fetter-Vorm's explanations of the complicated science behind the bombs.

By no means is it a definitive treatise on the subject(s), but is most definitely engaging, fascinating and a very well-made look. There probably isn't a better starting point for learning about the Manhattan Project (and, like the biography Feynman - also new in softcover in the past month - presents an interesting counterpoint1 to Jonathan Hickman's popular mad-scientist alternate history sci-fi Image series The Manhattan Projects). There is almost a documentary quality to Trinity in its clarity, comprehensiveness and lack of fictionalization or preachification that should give it a space in every library or science teacher's desk, and may ultimately be the perfect tool to start learning about the complex history and science of the nuclear bomb and everything it entails.

Buy Trinity online here. Comics provided by JHU Comic Books, New York City's Premier Comic Book Store, Where Art and Literature Meet.

Grief, Up Close: Anders Nilsen's The End

The End by Anders Nilsen
Fantagraphics, 2013

Neil Gaiman's Sandman Endless Nights is a bit of a mess. I only bring this up for the 15 Portraits of Despair sequence realized by Barron Storey (with Dave McKean). Storey's despair is noise and violence and repulsiveness, part a reflection of the immortal wave-function god-thing Despair previously established in Sandman proper, part a reflection of the reality of despair the emotion - it's ugly and hard to get through, it overwhelms. Sometimes despair is like static that takes over your life, like in 15 Portraits... and sometimes it is a spotlight, a laser that hyperfocuses your new reality isolating you in the bright light of ceaseless sadness, like in Anders Nilsen's The End.

Nilesen's last completed work is the truly monumental Big Questions, his decade in the making masterpiece of mythology and people and birds and snakes and things, falling from the sky. The End (in stores today), in comparison, is very slight. It is a brief read, less a graphic novel than a hodgepodge of odds and ends, short stories and snippets of sketchbooks from a year in the life of the author. But the specifics of the why of that year and the why of the work itself are important - it chronicles, in words and images, the author's attempts at processing the slow and painful death of his fiancee. This isn't a non-fictional description of grief written after the fact, this is grief, unfiltered and complete.

There are stretches of material where Nilsen talks to the ghost of the deceased, or at least some mirror of his lost love locked in his own psyche ("I don't know, I'm dead, I'm just saying what you're thinking" 'She' says). There are stark almost gag-illustrations of the author struggling to get through the mundanities of life only to repeatedly break down. There are airy explorations of life beyond grief bounded by unflinching textual portrayals of a human life ending, withering away in a mess of tubes and disease and torment. Nilsen presents it all in his distinct, minimalist style, with almost no use of visual literalism, instead almost entirely relying on empty, indistinct humanoid figures interacting in spare, empty environments.

But despite the artifice of the artistry, the grief and pain and despair on display is simply too real. Such undiluted human emotion is difficult to process; reading The End is like seeing someone wail in grief. Whether you like it or not you are being confronted by an intractable pain you cannot hope to assuage. It's almost uncomfortable. The End is remarkable in the way the emotions are so fiercely on display that Nilsen's completely nonliteral cartooning may as well be photographs of the deceased on her death bed. It succeeds so wildly in translating the all-encompassing pain of grief, in a way that audiovisual documentary or prose memoir cannot. But there is decided discomfort in reading the comics, discomfort compounded by the fact that it is about a very, very real person.

Talking to the memory-fragment of his love, Nilsen asks "Do you wish I would stop doing all this work about you dying?" 'She' answers, "It's not about me dying. It's about you." Which is of course completely razor-sharp accurate. Funerals are for the living, not the dead, and The End is Nilsen using his art and the language of comics to come to terms with his grief. And we are exploring his open wound with him.

The acuteness of the despair make the more artistic, more interpretable sections stand out, and maybe I would have preferred more of them. The best sequences are where Nilsen breaks away from the heartbreaking emotional literalism and opens out into almost abstract expressions of the nature of grief. Here we see the human figure devolved by their grief and broken math, splitting out into fractals of loss that form into unsolvable mazes. The abstract imagery allows the reader to think about and mull and contemplate loss itself. But when presented with the specificity of Nilsen's loss, it takes you out of the work, from the realm of intellectual participant to uncomfortable observer.

But my views and yours really don't matter. The End is a vehicle for Nilsen to come to terms with his grief, and in that it succeeds (we just get to watch - I still don't know if that's a good thing or not). Grief and despair never really goes away, you just get to a point where it doesn't take over your life any more. And by the end of The End that happens, the abstract image of the lost disappearing along with the navel-gazing image of the author. The End ends and you are happy, because Nilsen doesn't have to go through this anymore, and thankfully neither do you.

Buy The End online here. Comics provided by JHU Comic Books, New York City's Premier Comic Shop, Where Art & Literature Meet.

Six Perfect Panels, One Perfect Comic

Last summer we at JHU Comic Books had a special Kids Comics Day. We gave away free comics, had games and activities, food, the works. It was a big success, and I personally always love when kids are in the store. Sometimes, as The King foretold, comics can break your heart, but seeing all the kids in the store then (and every time) just makes you feel good about comics... it can mend that inevitable break (until the next time, anyway).

As part of the festivities we had coloring pages for kids and adults to illustrate at their heart's content, as well as blank panel pages for kids to create short little six-panel strips. There were many comics and illustrations created that day, many wonderful expressions of creativity not bound by known color schemes or desire for conformity or even logic. But there was one stand-out six-panel comic, one creation that on reflection is nothing less than a perfect comic.

This is the comic, by a ten-ish year-old fellow named Nate (I don't know his last name, I only have this scan of the piece and the memory of its discovery). The first thing that jumps out is the beautiful simplicity of the piece. A (presumably) human figure, simply yet extremely effectively drawn in basic crayon, jumps into a toxic vat of some sort. But what is, at first blush a humorous trifle, a brief little illustration dashed off by a child on a lazy Saturday at the comic shop, is in actuality nothing short of a transcendent piece of interpretive graphic narrative that elegantly, simply and powerfully tells a number of stories while being a stunning example of the very mechanics at the heart of the language of comics.

If you sense hyperbole, be assured I am quite serious. Now, to be certain, Nate likely had no intention other than to tell a brief, funny story about someone falling into a toxic pit. But in doing so he reveals a deep, almost inherent understanding of how comics work as a visual storytelling medium - a telling example of the universality and accessibility of the language of comics. And even if it wasn't the artist's intent, the finished piece evokes multiple interpretations, something that can only be achieved by the graphic narrative.

The first and easiest interpretation is the figure - I'll call him The Blue Man - jumps in to the toxic vat on the final panel. But there is something immediately striking about how the author chose to tell this story. The tale - "The Blue Man jumps into the toxic vat" is something that can be done in two panels sequentially, or even in just a one panel gag-illustration. But the author chooses to stretch the events out across six panels. The effect is profound: assuming we are watching a single event, putting it across multiple panels stretches out the action, like a tragedy happening in slow motion. The author instinctively recognizes that the panel gutter can represent any time period, be it centuries or seconds, and he breaks down the action of a few seconds across many panels. If the intent is humor, the effect creates - upon multiple rereadings and replayings of the comic in the mind - a funny sequence easily replayed and broken down and replayed again. If the intent is tragedy, the prolonging of The Blue Man's ultimate fate into a slow-motion drama heightens the calamity, each panel another blow to The Blue Man, each panel a tease of redemption, each panel an illustration of Schrodinger's Cat in its box, only for the box to open in panel six with all quantum possibilities coalescing into one final end for The Blue Man.

But the character's fall may not be a fall at all. The comic's uniquely interpretive nature may represent a slow-motion drama of The Blue Man being flung into the toxic abyss. The overall structure of the piece makes it very clear that The Blue Man is on a platform (or maybe plank?) of some sort above the toxic vat, as revealed by the vat's sudden appearance in panel six. (Any number of things could have been happening to The Blue Man until the vat's appearance, an appearance which enhances both the tragedy and humor of the piece.) But The Blue Man's descent is rigid. Do the first three panels represent the character's deliberate, stiff fall over the edge, only to be hastened by his jumping in panel four? Or do the motion lines in panel four represent the character being flung from the platform by some unknown force down into his fate? No matter the interpretation of the first four panels, panel five is brilliantly framed: how best to minimalistically represent the character's fall then to have him hang, half out of frame, from the top of the panel, in obvious downward motion as evidenced by the speed lines flanking his figure. The empty space in the panel created by the framing brilliantly creates a sense of the unknown - the emptiness a representation of what could be. There is space between The Blue Man and his fate, a fate that could be anything, and ultimately is his doom as illustrated one panel later.

But is the toxic vat The Blue Man's doom? Or is it the end of the beginning of The Blue Man's story? Through any modern window, falling into a toxic vat is hardly a beneficial activity. But what about through the frame of reference of superhero comics' Silver Age? With Marvel Comics specifically, beyond the artistic and narrative innovations initiated by the House That Jack Built in the 1960s, there was Stan Lee's old stand-by origin of nuclear rays or toxic waste or some similar mechanism endowing some unassuming individual with fantastic powers. The Fantastic Four were created by Cosmic Rays beyond the shielding of the Earth's magnetosphere, The Hulk transformed from Bruce Banner after being exposed to a Gamma-Ray burst, Matt Murdock being given the extraordinary senses of Daredevil after being doused with toxic waste. That these things didn't kill all of them, as would actually happen, is part of superhero comics' gloriously ridiculous fantasy. Hardly an obscure element of a peculiar genre, these origin stories are, thanks to movies and television and products and the proliferation of the comics themselves, an ingrained part of American popular culture. The foundation of many aspects of the new American myth-space is in toxic accidents. The Blue Man's descent, be it intentional, accidental, or as a victim, is not an ending, but an origin in the modern-neoclassical sense. In six panels, Nate gives us a representation not just of this character's origin, but the origin of hundreds of the gods and monsters that populate so much of the contemporary popular American fictional sub-conscious.

And my final interpretation, just as possible though likely far outside the artist's intent - each panel is not representative of one figure falling through time. Indeed, each panel is a singular illustration of different characters in their commonly shared fall into apotheosis, the panel gutters not just the space between moments in time of a sequential event but moments in time separated by years or decades or entire universes. This isn't a single illustrative example of one commonly shared origin but an illustration of every origin of that type ever told. It is the Red Hood and it is Daredevil and it is The Blue Man, all separate, all at-once.

No matter the interpretation or whatever over-analysis I bring to the work, in the end it is a perfect illustration of the language of comics. Story through sequential art, distilled into six simple panels. Comics are intuitive and powerful as a force for telling a story. The human brain is hardwired to understand language, and comics are a unique pictorial language all their own. This piece illustrates the universality of the comics language.
 
But more than any of that, it is a brief little cartoon, dashed off by a child on a lazy Saturday at the comic shop. And that is pretty awesome.

Repost: Silence & Co.

In April I reviewed Silence & Co., the new original graphic novel written & published by Gur Benshemesh and illustrated by Ron Randall, which is released today to comic shops.

To read my original review, as well as Mr. Benshemesh's comments about my review and my response, click here.

For more reviews and commentary, follow me on Twitter: @B5Jeff.

As always, comics provided by JHU Comic Books, New York City's Premier Comic Shop, Where Art & Literature Meet.

Creating the Universe: The Incal by Jodorowsky and Moebius

The Incal Classic Collection  
by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius
collects the six albums of Les Aventures de John DiFool
Humanoids, 1981-1989, 2011

Moebius, the late Jean Giraud, is probably the most influential comic artist whose work you've likely never seen. Most of Moebius's expansive catalog is criminally out of print, not just in the United States but also, apparently, in his home country of France. After years of developing his clear, hyper-dense artistic style in his western strip Blueberry for Dargaud, Moebius co-founded the publishing house Les Humanoïdes Associés (Humanoids) and the magazine Metal Hurlant (Heavy Metal) in 1974. Best known for his mind-bending science fiction works of the last thirty years, most notably Azrach and The Airtight Garage, it was with his occasional collaborator Alejandro Jodorowsky that he created one of comics' most important works, Les Aventures de John DiFool - better known as The Incal.

Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of the most eclectic and important creators in the history of comics. A Chilean born to Ukranian Jewish parents, Jodorowsky made his name in Mexico and France in the 1950s and 1960s as a mime and surrealist playwright & filmmaker. In the six albums that make up The Incal, published between 1981 and 1989 by Humanoids, Jodorowski presents the foundation of the Jodoverse, an expansive series of dozens of graphic novels set in a trippy, metaphysical sci-fi/fantasy universe. And the best books in the Jodoverse are of course the first, where Moebius sets the stage for some of the most influential science fiction imagery since Jack Kirby forged a universe (and a visual language) out of paper and pencil fifty years ago.

Page one quickly introduces us to our hero, of sorts, John DiFool, a "Class-R licensed Private Investigator" who is getting curb-stomped by a band of thugs. In front of a large crowd in a very large subterranean city, he's thrown over the edge, plummeting to his seeming death past level after level of hyperdensely packed city, teeming masses of colorful and depraved humanity (some gleefully jumping to their deaths after him), layer after layer of gleaming fantasy future-tech and garbage, to a bottomless end beyond the field of vision. Saved at the last second in the first of many near-deaths and actual deaths, DiFool is frequently the victim of machinations far outside his control (or comprehension). But this isn't a hard-boiled detective drama in space, it's re-creation myth on mescaline.

DiFool finds himself in possession of The White Incal, some kind of weird mystical whatsit that was given to him by a dying alien from an aggressive species most thought apocryphal. His bird, Deepo, manages to eat it and, after gaining sentience, becomes an instant religious icon to hundreds of people crowding into DiFool's tiny apartment. DiFool wrestles his way back into his home, only to have different forces blast in try get to the Incal. Then all hell breaks loose. Really, really breaks loose. It seems every major governmental, scientific and religious power in two full galaxies are going after the Incal, all while the city riots on all levels by every conceivable faction of humanity against the ruling order. Then the Metabaron, the universe's most epic assassin shows up to take out DiFool. Then the nuclear bomb goes off. And that's just the beginning.

The future Moebius and Jadorowsky paint is a filthy, crowded, corrupt mess. Moebius packs a ton of detail into every panel, and the details are a crowded, dirty future, the slums of the overpopulated supercity extrapolated into the future to the extreme. As DiFool, entirely against his own wishes, accumulates a motely band of compatriots all doing the Incal's bidding, the story bounds forward into the farthest reaches of space and time, and into the completely metaphysical. There is a significant amount about fate and the future and a whole lot of sci-fi mysticism, none of which the reader is really prepared for expositionally. Just like DiFool, the reader is thrown head-first willy nilly into a rediculously vast universe, the seeming pawn of a plot that involves an all-powerful Emperroress, bloody coups, mad bands of Techno-Priests trying to turn every sun in the galaxy black, aliens invading from another galaxy to fulfill a twelve million year old prophecy, a psychotic Prezidential robotic jeggernaut, a star-child, and so much more. The sheer amount of trippy shit DiFool is put through (and that the reader breathlessly, relentlessly experiences) is enough to fill a dozen graphic novels.

Relentless is a good descriptor. This is divine, sci-fi ridiculousness dialed to eleven and pumped at the characters and the reader in a non-stop flow of visual astonishment. Far from taking itself too seriously, this novel is really, really funny. Moebius and Jadorowsky don't really find a balance between self-seriousness and irreverence as much as they don't give the reader a chance to take a breath between transitions. There's no delicacy to the exposition, and it seems they abandon all attempts at explaining a bloody thing pretty early on. The characters just know shit, alright, stop asking questions. Why devote time to basic standards of story construction when motherfucking Moebius can be drawing absolutely crazy shit instead? And there's some sociopolitical commentary woven into the psychedelic sci-fi for good measure.

The Incal should be required reading, there is just the matter of how. As it stands, Humanoids has published a superbly designed omnibus edition that they too often periodically let go out of print. The price point (the unmarketable $44.95) and lack of descriptive text on the back cover don't do it favors, but as a deluxe presentation of one of comics' supreme masterpieces, the quality is both exceptional and appreciated, the forty five bucks a relative bargain. I think reasonably priced reprints of the original albums would do well. In lieu of that, if you can manage to find them, Humanoids is about halfway through publishing absolutely astonishing eighty dollar massively oversized limited hardcover editions of the individual albums. No matter how you consume it, consume it. Soak in every panel of every page, witness the hallucinatory magic that is Moebius in the Jodoverse, experience the madness that is The Incal. It is one of fiction's most gloriously unhinged reading experiences, one of the graphic canon's truly required works.

And when God ultimately shows up in the story and Creates the Universe, it is not a story point but a self portrait of Moebius at work, metacommentary on the divinity of Giraud through the lens of Les Aventures de John DiFool.

You can't find The Incal Classic Collection online, but you can find it at finer comic stores throughout North America such as JHU Comic Books in New York City - ask for Diamond Code MAR111170.

Rutu Modan's The Property

The Property by Rutu Modan
Drawn & Quarterly, 2013

The Property is the first full-length graphic novel by the Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan since Exit Wounds, her 2007 debut that made her a bestselling critical darling. She released one short story collection and had a serial in the New York Times in 2008, but aside from a Toon Books comic for young readers, she hasn't released anything since. The Property is thus a highly anticipated test if whether or not Modan, who started cartooning in earnest in her 40s, is a one-hit wonder or a rising star.

Like Exit Wounds, The Property isn't spectacular, but it is quite good. It is simply the straightforward story of one Israeli-American family's possible inheritance of a property in Poland long thought lost. Under Polish law, land taken from Jews during the Second World War remains the property of those individuals or their descendants regardless of the amount of time that has passed. Mica and her grandmother Regina, a colorful and realistic elderly expatriate Polish Jew, travel to Warsaw to reclaim land apparently taken away from their family decades ago, land that could be worth a fortune. But Regina has alternate motives for visiting Warsaw, reasons that involve a secret from her past and a recent loss coming back to haunt her now. And in her one week in Warsaw, while unraveling the mysteries of her family's past and rebuffing the machinations of a scheming relative, Micah falls for a local, a tour guide slash cartoonist very interested in Micah's family story.

Both Exit Wounds and The Property deal with the legacy of loss that can be so specific to the Jewish experience, Exit Wounds in the nearly daily exposure to terrorism in Israel, The Property in the quickly disappearing generation of survivors' losses from the Holocaust. Both deal with the societal expectations Jews have for each other. And both deal with the universality that familial secrets play in all of our lives. Modan's accessible ligne claire art and the simplicity of the story make this a light, easy read. This has art-house trappings to snag the NPR crowd, but rest assured this is the opposite of the intellectual or aesthetic challenge the packaging suggests. This is no game-changer, Modan no master, but it is still a quality, interesting read. I don't mean to damn this with faint praise, but this is alright, a nice, light summer read. If you've got twenty-five bucks and an hour to kill, go for it. There's worse you can do, but there's far better, too.

Buy The Property online here. Comics provided by JHU Comic Books, New York City's Premier Comic Shop, Where Art & Literature Meet.

Building a Franchise: The End of Geoff Johns' Green Lantern

The 500th issue of Green Lantern, and Geoff Johns' last

This week's giant sized Green Lantern 20 saw the final issue written by Geoff Johns, the creator who revitalized the moribund Lantern franchise in what was the first step in his rise to the creative top of DC Comics. The book is that rare thing in superhero comics: an ending. You get the ultimate fates of multiple human and alien lanterns of all spectra, and some rather specific hints of what is to come some years down the line. Johns pulls this off by doing the issue from the future, in flashback. These elements really have that Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow kind of feel to it, but you have to slog through the final chapter in Johns' latest Lantern crossover whatsit first.

Johns' run with the franchise is marked by the deft way he brought the greatest Green Lantern, Hal Jordan back, energizing one of DC's coolest concepts in a way that hasn't been done since the re-creation of the character at the dawn of the Silver Age. His run is also marked by neverending crossovers and tiny retcons in what ultimately transitioned the book from superhero work to expansive space opera. (Well, it's always been a space opera, just one where Jordan murders half the universe.) His introduction of the Sinestro Corps and the elevation of Sinestro to one of DC's best villains was the critical and popular turning point for many, including myself. I have never really been into the DC Universe in the way that I have been the Marvel Universe, but my first exposure to Johns' Green Lantern - the epic spacewar crossover The Sinestro Corps War - had me hooked. I read everything that came since Rebirth, and became a devoted monthly follower of the franchise, a DCU first for me. I'm a sucker for space sci-fi, and the Green Lantern books - like its contemporary, the criminally out of print Abnett & Lanning Guardians of the Galaxy in the Marvel Universe - told fun outer space action adventure tales largely removed from the shared universe it inhabited. Johns would introduce the full spectrum of heretofore unseen Lanterns as his Green Lantern books began to build their own distinct mythology.

But Johns would again and again go to a familiar formula of introducing a retcon which would trigger some massive crossover. Blackest Night, which focused on c-list DC characters coming back from the dead and a massive war of the various Lantern colors, was the largest of these, encompassing the entire DCU in the process. My frustrations with the quality of the story (it just wasn't very good, at all) as well as having to put up with yet another Event Series (this time in a shared setting I had no affinity for) pretty much put a nail in the coffin of my DCU reading. I was wary of the increasing complexity of Johns' space opera and of ceaseless crossovers. I love space operas, I really do, but Johns' tired formula just wasn't doing it for me.

Shortly enough, though, the editorially mandated last-second clusterfuck that was the DC New 52 happened, and with it the opportunity for me to try some new DCU books, including jumping back onto Green Lantern. For better or worse, like the Bat-family of books Green Lantern actually kept its prior continuity, and with it the ongoing space opera. There would be more tired crossovers, and I'd like to think Johns had some great design, but honestly it always felt like yet another yet another. The latest storyline, Wrath of the First Lantern was the yet-anotheriest (hey, it sold books, so why stop?) and hardly felt like the end of an influential and apparently distinguished run. But it is the final chapter by Johns and once we get past the requisite and frankly incomprehensible nuttiness made bearable by the usually amazing art of Doug Mahnke (and about a dozen others for good measure), we get the various unexpected endings.

Johns, April 2009

(At this point I was going to summarize the proceedings of Wrath of the First Lantern but I just realized I wasn't really paying attention and probably couldn't recount it even if I was. So here's a picture of Johns I took from the JHU signing/panel we ran a few years ago. He's kindof dreamy in that boyish never-takes-his-hat-off kind of way, and honestly, he's a really nice fella.)

The endings were somewhat refreshing. Johns clearly loves the characters. But naturally, the way superhero comics generally work, those endings are valid for as long as anyone decides not to change them, which won't be long. Next month gives us new creative teams across the board on all the Lantern books (five titles in a market that once couldn't sustain one, if anything the most obvious metric of Johns' success), and with the fresh voices a chance at doing something different. I have been saying for some time that I would really like a Green Lantern book where a Green Lantern went out and did Green Lantern stuff - explored deep space with funny looking aliens, defended the whole sector from any number of varied and high concept threats in nice short arcs, original voices, original ideas... but then I realized that that was a pipe dream and not representative of any previously established status quo. As far as anyone familiar with the character in recent years, including myself, a Green Lantern book where a Green Lantern goes out and does Green Lantern stuff is just what Johns has been giving us. I hardly expect much different going forth. DC has been shown a formula that has worked, so why break it? And with rare recent examples (almost entirely from Marvel), different doesn't necessarily sell as much as the same old shit. Superhero comics are entirely predicated on the same old shit. Like in all the shared universes from all the major publishers, their responsibility is maintaining an IP, not creating art, and its not exactly like Johns is being completely extricated from the franchise - he is the DC Chief Creative Officer, after all. 

So we get to the end of an era, one that saw an almost forgotten space hero elevated to the A-List complete with multiple merchandise lines (Collect all seven nine rings!) and a blockbuster movie. Sure the movie was a bomb, but it wouldn't have happened in the first place without Geoff Johns. There are many ways to thank someone, and in this issue DC goes to the odd step of spending page after page with canned congratulations from their various contracted talent and several others. It reads like employees thanking their boss for being a genius when he was only doing his job... which is exactly what that is, actually. He did it well, with help of course (stand up and take a bow, Peter Tomasi) but there was nothing revolutionary to it, certainly not to the level we see here (Johns even got a Hollywood party). When creators die they don't get this much praise in print. The best creative minds in comics that actually deserve such effusive praise can't even get a gig. This guy got an executive position, an exclusive contract, plus carte blanche to do as he pleased ultimately producing safe, pedestrian superhero work on a bunch of titles that sold very, very well for which he is well payed. Do we really need the fellatio?

Next month, new creators producing executive-mandated stories while committing unpaid rewrites to bend to every tiny last second editorial whim all in the vain hope that someday various underlings can be cajoled into thanking them for page after page. Or, a bold, original vision. Or maybe, just maybe, a Green Lantern book where Green Lantern goes out and does Green Lantern stuff.

Green Lantern is ongoing from DC Comics. Comics provided by JHU Comic Books, New York City's Premier Comic Shop, Where Art & Literature Meet.

A Lungful of Melancholy: Justin Madson's Breathers

Breathers by Justin Madson
Just Mad Books, 2011

Breathers is a 2011 graphic novel written, illustrated and published by Justin Madson, collecting his mini-comic serialized between 2007 and 2011. Two things immediately jump out: Madson's illustration style and the size of the graphic novel. Both a strength and a weakness, Madson's art style, as far as human characters go, is fairly unique: in stark black-and-white art, the characters have gangly appendages, long faces above the mouth, and Harold Gray-Orphan Annie Eyes. It's not as extreme as another recent graphic novel inhabiting the language of sadness, Chris Wright's Black Lung, which almost borders abstraction, but it does make facial identification difficult in places. His draftsmanship is competent enough that the novel holds together visually, though, and despite the length - 425 pages - it is a fairly breezy read.

Breezy in terms of time, though certainly not in tone. Despite it's high concept and aims, the most striking feature upon reading it is the pervasive melancholy that is infused into every character, every interaction, every fiber of the book itself. Forty years ago, a virus is loosed upon the Earth in the very air we breathe, so all humans are required to wear special "breathers," apparatus that allows people to go outside. There is a fear of the air which is quite deadly, though some think the virus may be dissipating and the whole breather thing is a giant conspiracy theory. The sadness felt by the characters isn't because of the virus, though. They are all just really, really sad.

Ostensibly this is a character piece about a bunch of unrelated people in a smallish town and the tangential ways some of their lives interact. The novel is divided into chapters with each chapter featuring a shorter sequence focusing on one character or group of characters. Some of the story arcs intersect and some don't. It's hard to juggle characters in a shared setting like this in an interesting enough way without getting gimmicky, and the characters need to be compelling enough on their own. Unfortunately they aren't. There are a few interesting things done with the concept, but there is largely nothing done in Breathers that can't be done without the sci-fi hook. That wouldn't be a bad thing if the characters' various arcs were interesting, except, again, that they really aren't. There are decidedly supernatural elements sprinkled throughout that just don't quite fit, and there is some attempt made at overexplaining things as far as the virus is concerned.

Overall it doesn't quite work, but even through it's narrative messiness, Madson's art style is interesting enough to stick with it. You can do worse for thirty bucks, and if you don't want to get the hard copy you can download it for five dollars direct from the author. If read in small chunks, the lack of cohesion and silliness - and the ceaseless gloominess, which might just be the real virus of the story - will be a lot more bearable.

Breathers is available for purchase or download on the author's website here, as well as from finer comic shops just like JHU Comic Books, New York City's Premier Comic Shop, Where Art and Literature Meet.