One Coin Reads 29: Marilyn's Monsters, by Tommy Redolfi

Marilyn's Monsters, by Tommy Redolfi

2016, English edition 2018

A dreamlike biography of Marilyn Monroe? Not what I consider the Humanoids brand.

It's a kind of weird cover, but not out of line with the story

Just from seeing the front cover blurb by David Cronenberg, you would know this isn't going to be a normal book. The tone of Marilyn's Monsters isn't Cronenberg by any experience I've had of his movies, but it is very much in the tone of David Lynch. Normal people doing normal-ish things, but everything is off and everything is a little too intense. 

There are some parallels between Betty Book and Marilyn

The story is Marilyn Monroe's story, but it isn't. It's emotionally Marilyn Monroe's story told through a dreamy, fairytale style window. It wasn't what I was expecting, but even if I was told in advance what this was, I would have had a hard time grasping it. It's just outside of my frame of reference for comics.

Holy Wood isn't very glamourous

Whereas in the real tale of Marilyn Monroe, young Norma Jean Baker went to Hollywood to become a movie star, in this story, young Norma Jean Baker goes to Holy Wood, a series of cabins in the forest to become a celebrity. There is talk of movies, but they seem an export of Holy Wood the way oil is an export of the Middle East. 

Graphic shifts like this add to the atmosphere

After applying and getting through auditions, Norma Jean is approved and gets to make the transition to Marilyn, which involves being reconstructed. And she becomes a star, but also becomes an item, and has more and more difficulty being a person as the story goes on. If she isn't going to function as a movie star, what good is she to the people around her?

"36 days to M.M."

The theme of "famous people are people too," is one that carries weight. No doubt that the rich and famous have luxuries the common folk don't, but it doesn't automatically give them happiness, and in lots of ways, it can get in the way of a healthy life. Marilyn here is desired, not as a person but as an object, and her success brings a deep loneliness.

It's kind of gross

Writer/artist Redolfi is doing some really nice work here. The art style is a bit grotesque and it's not something I instinctively like, but it captures the mood nicely. Especially in the close up images, you can see great uses of shape, colour and texture. Throughout the book, he drops in shifts in style and colour to emphasize the atmosphere.

Another shift

When Marilyn finally is revealed, he bathes her in white light and often renders her only in colour without lines, to make her appear, well, not human the same way others are.

Whether you like this or not may come down to just how much you like the movies of a filmmaker like David Lynch. I like Lynch's movies, and have seen most of them... but in the 90s. Mulholland Drive was the last I watched. I thought they were really exciting, I watched them, and didn't have much desire to rewatch them or follow up on his work after a point.

Likewise, I liked this book a fair bit, and read it in two days or so. I wasn't so blown away with it that I looked up what else Redolfi has done though.  It's a good piece of work that isn't what I get excited at reading. I could imagine a lot of people, especially people who avoid mainstream comics entirely, really liking this.

As a Humanoids book, it is a world away from Jodorowsky. I know they put out a variety of books in France, but it's nice to see some of that variety in their English bookline as well.

One Coin Reads 28: Fear Agent volume 3, by Rick Remender, Tony Moore, and Matthew Hawthorne

Fear Agent volume 3, by Rick Remender, Tony Moore, and Matthew Hawthorne

2009-2011

Purchased at the same time I got the second collection, I finally finished off the book Fear Agent.

Grizzled

With this, I've read half of the run. I haven't bought the first, and there is a fourth odds-and-ends book, but Book 3 officially ends the story. With Book 2, I was a little confused as to what the whole concept was, as the first of the two arcs there occurred before the events of the first book. Here, I mostly understand the world and have a history with the characters, but it's wrapping up storylines I missed the first chapter of. As a result, perhaps some of the things don't hit quite as deeply. But for the most part, any praise or criticism I have for this isn't too connected to the bigger story.

Space cowboys

As a quick refresher, Fear Agent is pulp sci-fi, with the name and title font being a big hint of that. It's closer to 50's sci-fi in tone than to the "hard sci-fi" which is normal today. Humanity has largely been wiped out, and star Heathrow Huston is an alcoholic Texan floating from one crappy situation to the next, surviving by the skin of his teeth.

The best thing about this is that it has fun. It's full of dark, bleak situations, but tries to make the story pulpy and crazy. The flip side of that though is that when the book wants to have heavy emotion, it struggles because it's all so goofy.

There's a lot of flashback exposition in this run

The last collection had an arc by Tony Moore, and another by Jerome Opeña, and with that, I definitely preferred Opeña's. Here, Opeña was probably busy drawing X-Force or something, and the art is done by Moore and Matthew Hawthorne. Both are very competent artists, but they both lack the ability to give the book drama. The back cover has a blurb of praise from Jack Davis, of E.C. Comics and Mad fame, and he was a guy who could have pulled it off. A book like this requires some old school skills to ground the ridiculous.

It's a solid sequence, but the grizzle isn't grizzled enough for me

Moore and Hawthorne are doing fine work on this, but I don't think they are a perfect match for the material.

The collection contains two arcs, and the second works better than the first. In the first, I Against I, Huston crash lands on an alien planet with a Wild West style city filled with humans, some that he knows. The reason for this is very convoluted and probably what held it back for me. There is a time-displaced version of Huston there, a doppelgänger, and trying to make it make sense was too much for me. Remender had a vision of Huston fighting Huston, and a plot resolution of the story that was really inventive, so I understand why he wanted to get there, but the book creaks while trying to make this goofy sci-fi make sense. I would just as well have seen him do some hand-waving and go straight to the fireworks factory.

The fireworks factory

The second arc, Out of Step, worked better for me, with a winding yet coherent path to the end of the series. An aged, lonely Huston wanders the galaxy nursing an unhealthy degree of alcoholism. The book has had some time travel shenanigans in the previous arcs, and the final solution for the depressed Huston is to fix time itself.

This isn't a very honest portrayal of alcoholism as Huston is super high functioning. At this point, he should at least have puffy skin

The story is about someone on their last legs, having mostly given up, and it's decent. As an end to the series, the climax tries to make it both galaxy-altering and personal to Huston. This series has had so many shock endings and deaths of main characters, that there is actually a lot of doubt as to how it might resolve. A happy ending isn't a given in the world that's been set up here. 

At the end of it all, it was a satisfactory resolution. Not mind-blowing, but plot resolutions rarely are.

Overall, I liked this series. I didn't love it, but the idea behind it, to make a modern, expanded version of the old pulp stories, was nice to read.

Remender is one of the contemporary comic writers who I've been trying to get a better understanding of. I never quite love what he's doing, but I really find it compelling. With this series, I like the exploration of grief and alcoholism in a book with exploding space monsters. 

There's a lot more flashback exposition in the second arc too

I have a couple more series of his that I'm looking forward to digging into. I've read the first arc of Low and Black Science, and especially with Low, I felt like the art was capable of carrying the drama of the book. 

A book like Fear Agent though seems more fun than anything else. The pathos and the emotion end up being dressing for the blood and aliens.

Blast off!

That's okay though. I definitely got my worth out of these collections. They were enjoyable and worth revisiting someday.

One Coin Reads 27: Doctor Strange: Herald, by Mark Waid and Barry Kitson

Doctor Strange: Herald, by Mark Waid and Barry Kitson

2019

Marvel pumps out over 50 comics a month. A couple of them are pretty good, the rest are folks paying rent. Which is this?

The cover looks epic

I generally won't touch monthly Marvel and DC books anymore because they are so editorially driven. The books must exist to fill up space on the shelf, so they find some people to work on it. That's not a recipe for good books. Good books happen in spite of this system, not because of it.

I think Doctor Strange is a neat character, though I've never been deep into any of his books. This collection was marked down to ¥315 (less than the price of a single issue of this new!), so I figured it would be a chance to read some Doctor Strange and see what the state of Marvel's monthly books are like at the same time. Mark Waid is generally a reliable super-hero writer, but I haven't read much of his work in the past twenty years.

The art is competent yet bland for most of the book

Doctor Strange is pretty well-known at this point, as a B-list comic and movie character. Here, Waid wants to cross him over with Marvel's cosmic side for a fresh spin on the character. In the first issue of the five in this book, Galactus is transported to the realm of magic, where the realm begins transforming Galactus and putting the entirety of reality at risk. Doctor Strange must serve as the herald of Galactus!

Are you really the herald if Galactus doesn't proclaim it?

That was the first problem: you can't put reality at risk all the time, Marvel. Whether it's the M'kraan Crystal, the House of M, the Age of Ultron, whatever, after sixty years of this stuff, it's nearly impossible to establish convincing stakes at that level in a Marvel comic anymore. Four times a year, all of reality in the Marvel universe is put at risk. It isn't an epic situation in and of itself.  Make no mistake: not a single Doctor Strange reader hasn't seen the whole of existence threatened before (in a comic). This is nobody's first comic anymore.

The only time I liked the art was when Kitson was directly channeling Kirby

The second problem was that it was done in a five issue story which tells the danger of Galactus but doesn't show it at all. This story probably should have been done in two arcs, spaced out. Do a five issue story getting Galactus to the magical realm and solving a related issue. Let him putter around in the background in the next two arcs, and then have it out of control in a final arc, which would let it feel epic, like something that had built up. This story was just Doctor Strange saying Galactus can't handle the magic energy, then someone else saying it, then another person saying it. It was very tell-don't-show stuff. 

The third problem is that none of it is really exciting. Galactus is taken over by Dormammu for 12 pages, Dormammu monologues, then Galactus absorbs him. There are no stakes, nothing is really explored. Just a bunch of stuff happening without consequence. Before decompressed storytelling took over the mainstream, I think you could make a five-issue epic, but this story simply doesn't have the space to examine the ramifications of anything.

Kitson could draw any crazy shit he wanted to, and this was what he went with

I read all of this, as that's part of the challenge for me this year, to read everything, but it was bland. The art really didn't help. This is the first time I've ever read Kitson's work to my memory, but there was no joy in it. It really seemed like a guy drawing what he was paid to draw, and little else. There were some pictures of Galactus going power-crazy which had some passion, but it was hard to find elsewhere in the comic. I don't know his work, so it's hard to say if inker Scott Koblish helped or hindered it. At different points he draws dozens of Marvel characters, and I'm taken back to the days of Secret Wars II, where the best compliment I could make was that the characters were all on-model.

"Ah, yeah..."

The biggest disappointment with this was the lack of character. The book was so concerned with dishing out plot that there wasn't really space for Waid to make any of the featured characters people. That's probably the thing that I enjoy most when reading mainstream comics, the chance for characters to really take on a personality. When comics are being published at such a high frequency, we should really get to know the characters well, and I didn't get that here. It was focused on plot, and not a very interesting one.

The main value in reading this was so that when I go back to saying mainstream comics aren't worth sorting through on a monthly basis, I have a recent concrete example to back that statement up with, it's not just a blind statement.

Hey Marvel and DC, you want me to buy new books? Make something good and get it Eisner nominated. 

One Coin Reads 26: Black Kiss 2, by Howard Chaykin

Black Kiss 2, by Howard Chaykin

2012

This was not very good.

Chaykin does an interesting thing with cut out textures 

Purchasing this, even at a price of ¥428, might be a kind of trolling, as people had said it's not good. I just thought, for the price of a sandwich, why not?

Do you want pornography layered with blood and hate? This is it.

When they find out their babe is man, they decide to rape him and kill him, before all getting slaughtered. That's a complete story

I am definitely particular about the use of graphic sex in comics. In a mature comic, like a Hernandez Bros story, it's perfectly done. It's sexy and natural and tells a story. In some of the Italian erotica comics, like Manara's, it's sexy for the point of being sexy. In something like this, I don't get it. It's not erotic, and explicitness isn't necessary to the story, so I'm left with the idea that Chaykin just wanted to draw penetrations and make money off of it. And power to him, I'm all for creative freedom, but it doesn't make for an interesting comic.

Chaykin is not repressed

There is an over-arching story, told in ten-page vignettes. Beverly is a succubus that exists from 1900 to 2010, fucking and killing her way through... not high society exactly, but semi-glamourous locations. Along the way, people are as cruel and hateful as they could possibly be. 

As a plot, there's not much of one. Beverly finds a gay partner, anointed Dagmar, who transforms into her doppelgänger to help her live the lifestyle she wants. The gay partner gets killed, and is replaced by another gay man anointed Dagmar II. The next one is Dagmar III.  Beverly encounters lustful, cruel men who she kills.

The book uses gay identity interchangeably with trans identity, and that's not exactly the way the world is, but some people do have shifting identities, and in the past, there wasn't the space mapped out to differentiate. It's commendable that a book like this can recognize sexuality as a fluid thing. But then it's buried in decapitations, rape, slurs and other things which aren't compelling on their own.

I'm more comfortable posting explicit blood than explicit sex, because that's how society has programmed me

I have little experience with Chaykin's work. When I was twelve, I bought an issue of Black Hawk he did, because it was going to be the next Dark Knight Returns. I ignored his work after that, including the original Black Kiss, which didn't make it to my suburb. I mainly know him from the past few years where he had some controversy about The Divided States of Hysteria, but I'm reading this book as it is, without any baggage of him as an artist or an outspoken figure. And this isn't a good comic.

What am I reading?

The art is fine. I like the rendering in a lot of it. There are some janky pictures, but I like the overall aesthetic. The is a weird cut and paste vibe with backgrounds made interesting because there's a graphic element to them, they're not simply processed photos.  The story is not much of a story, but that's fine enough as well. I think you could take the content and make something aesthetically compelling with it. As a package though, it's such an emotionally stunted vision of a dark adult life, it's mind-bending. 

All the people in this talk in this highly eroticised misogynistic and homophobic way.  Almost every page talks about cocks or whores or cunts or faggots.  And I get it, the past could be cruder in the way people talked, but it wasn't every single person. It was how some people talked and thought. Okay, so Chaykin is telling a story about some folks in particular? No. He's doing twelve vignettes in twelve periods and locations, and it just so happens that the people he's telling stories about in every place and period talk the same way. Chaykin is choosing to make gross people the focus of his whole book. At a certain point, this is not Chaykin telling a story with characters who talk a certain way, it's simply him doing the talking.

And none of it is shocking. It's just unappealing.

For me, it doesn't have compelling ideas, the art is fine but unexceptional, and it's not sexy so it doesn't even work as pornography. Chaykin had fun drawing it at least.

One Coin Reads 25: Magnus, by Kyle Higgins and Jorge Fornés

Magnus, by Kyle Higgins and Jorge Fornés

2018

I can now say I've read a Dynamite comic.

That's a neat cover

Dynamite is a company that I know because of Zorro and Green Hornet comics, which was enough to avoid them up to now. I read comics, not property delivery vehicles. After I read this, I realized this was a property of sorts: This is a variation on the Gold Key character Magnus Robot Fighter that was revived in the 90s under Valiant. But this isn't the Magnus character, just the name attached to a new character that does stuff with robots. The book itself doesn't explain what it is either, I gathered that from ads in the back for the actual Magnus Robot Fighter. I get that I'm an outlier in comics: more folks will sample a character they've heard of than avoid a revived IP because it's just a husk that publishers think they can make a buck off of.

There's a metaphor to be had about corporate IP exploiters and the slave class of AI in this book

With this book, I bought it for its sweet clearance price of ¥441, and it was written by Kyle Higgins whose Dead Hand Image book I enjoyed. With this book, I'm confident to say: Higgins is a good writer.

I've only read the two books now, but both books had some things in common: they doled out information at a solid pace, they had a firm sense of the world they were in, and created ethical questions for the characters. And they told a complete story!  There is Philip K Dick heart to both, where the artificial life in the books have human qualities, and the humans in the book have substantial difficulties empathizing with them. I don't think he's a next-level must buy writer, but the books are reliable page-turners with interesting ideas. So I know his name and will give his books a second look if they cross my path and they aren't Nightwing.

A textbook example of dishing out world-building info without feeling like an info-dump

The book revolves around a murder on a future world where AI robots are a slave class. It navigates the world-building with the story nicely by having a protagonist that is at the center of this whole concept. Magnus as envisioned in this book is a woman with a special ability to live in the virtual space called the Cloud where AI spend their free time. 

AI in the Cloud can appear any way they like, this character lives in shadow 

The setting is complicated: AI were used as tools in this society, but achieved sentience. To make their slave class acceptable, they were given the Cloud to live their time off in. But they still aren't respected as equal to humans in the real world, and tensions are rising. The Cloud drives human minds mad, with Magnus one of the only humans capable of extended periods of time there, and she has become not a robot fighter, but a robot therapist.

Fornés art shifts in styles. Sometimes he channels Mike Allred

Once you have that established, things move at a brisk pace, as Magnus navigates both AI and humans. Neither side is going to see eye to eye soon, but the question becomes one of whether they'll try to meet in the middle or simply go to war. 

Fornés has some Steve Lieber, Dave Aja or similarly rough artists style too. It all looks good, but it's not all aesthetically consistent

I'd be lying if it didn't seem a lot like the racial tensions America can't escape from. We see the humans versus the AI, with most humans barely even able to admit there might be a problem despite every AI being frustrated. It echoes so much of what minorities in America have been expressing: not just a difficulty in addressing the problem, but even in getting mainstream America to admit it there is a problem. What's great about this is that the book isn't writing anything with a direct one to one parallel (a la "Have you tried not being a mutant?"), but just borrowing nuances from the frustration that occurs on all sides. The story tapped into the ethical problems that will occur if AI ever develops anything resembling a will.

People wouldn't really rally to hate on an underclass, would they?

Jorge Fornés has really solid art throughout the book, though it's not stylistically consistent. It didn't throw me off too much though. His storytelling is really good. Pages have a good movement from panel to panel, and characters are instantly recognizable. Like Higgins, he does incredibly solid, if not astounding work.

This two page spread is the most interesting of the book, as the action moves upward on the left page, and downward on the right. I can imagine Fornés was pretty pleased when he conceived of and completed this

I don't mean to sound critical. It's hard to make a good comic. This is a very good comic. We're inundated with sci fi comics these days, so it's getting harder and harder to map out your own space. This book is inventive, well-constructed, and enjoyable. It's also modest. It tells a complete story, but where I would be happy to see a sequel. It's not laying the groundwork for five years of comics they hope you buy. Sometimes I just want to read a good book. This was good.

Looks like he drew it, instead of copy-pasted. Nice!

One Coin Reads 24: Assassinistas, by Trini Howard and Gilbert Hernandez

Assassinistas, by Trini Howard and Gilbert Hernandez

2018

It's often easier to talk about a book you loved or hated, than it is to talk about one that didn't much move you either way.

I've tried to get into Gilbert Hernandez multiple times over the years, and it's been hard. I don't enjoy something in the way he draws. He's been doing lots of non-Love and Rockets work for years, and there wasn't much reason for me to check that stuff out if I wasn't into the art already. 

This year, I read his first L&R omnibus, and once I got into it, I enjoyed it a lot, but more for the writing and the density of the world building more than anything else. But I did like it, and I picked up the second omnibus after.

Then

That was some of my thinking before picking up this book, though this was marked down to very near my ¥500 sampling sweet spot, ¥487. It wasn't bad at all, but for a lot of the book, I kept thinking, Is this it?

I'm not well-versed in the work of Tini Howard at all. I know she's done or is doing some X-Calibur work, and I read two or three issues, but it didn't leave an impression either way. That's not a criticism of her work in particular, I tried reading most of the Dawn of X series when they came out and quickly dropped them all. I figured I would go back a year later and see what was worth reading after they were all collected rather than sort through the roughly infinity books they insist on publishing. I'll check her out in X of Swords when the collection is inevitably published.

Now

Assassinistas has a nice enough concept: three women lived a Charlies Angels like life back "then", and "now" it's twenty years later. Time is only referenced in terms of then and now. All the women kick butt, all the guys are nice family-oriented types, emphasizing the role-reversal already present in a concept like Charlies Angels. 

The Assassinistas are Octavia, Charlotte, and Rosalyn. Octavia has a son in college and is struggling to meet the bills, and has gone back to work, to the frustration of her son, Dominic. Domenic just wants a normal family life.

Now

Charlotte's baby is kidnapped, and the story is about Octavia, Domenic and his boyfriend doing a rescue mission.

There was definitely stuff I liked in this. The character work is pretty solid. Domenic makes a point about coming out to his mother Octavia, and the tension is complex in good way: he has tried to come out before, but his mother is too obsessed with her work to notice. He worries about her reaction to him being gay, but she's mainly upset he didn't share it with her sooner. These are strong traits to build characters from: two people who have are frustrated with each other, but for very different reasons than the other thinks.

 

The relationships of the Assassanistas themselves have their own dynamics, as they all have taken different paths in life, some more traditional than others.

Then

There are some sequences which work nicely as well, but for an action book, there was a lack of excitement. I can't lay the blame on the writing or the art, since I don't know where Howard's idea ends and Hernandez's contributions begin. In the best scenes, images build off of one another, but a lot of the action has little energy.

Whenever I'm not feeling Beto's art, he pulls out a pair of panels like this, which are flawless in design and execution: The extreme perspective in panel one, the boy half off-panel in two, and the shared floor line in both

Putting gore and sex and swearing in a book like this, but not exciting gore and sex and swearing is weird to me. The book isn't making any commentary on action tropes, it seems to be going for fun. This book feels more like an Archie version of Kill Bill, but it didn't work as humor, and it didn't work as action.

The colors by Rob Davis are nice and simple, subtly different between the past and present sections

I feel like the pieces are there for something better, but this book, collecting six issues, didn't do it for me. The overall feeling I had from this was of a very straight-forward action comic. Sure, it has women in the lead, non-traditional gender dynamics, and a legendary alternative cartoonist on art, but the actual story of the book, a kidnapping rescue, was very very traditional action, with art that didn't always serve the action well. It's not bad, but it's hard to say it's any better than any other mainstream comic out there.

I'm still just getting into Hernandez's work, and will probably stick with his Love & Rockets work for the time being. I imagine this was a fun project for him to work on, but it didn't carry over to my reading experience.

One Coin Reads 23: Infinity 8, volume five, by Lorenzo de Felici, Lewis Trondheim, and Davy Mourier

Infinity 8, volume five, by Lorenzo de Felici, Lewis Trondheim, and Davy Mourier

2017, English edition 2019

Normally, you shouldn't jump into an eight-volume series with volume five, but for a sci fi book about a temporal loop with a different artist and different lead character on each volume, it shouldn't matter.

There is a Captain America vibe to this character

This is yet another of the discount Lion Forge Magnetic Collection books I've picked up. At worst, they've all been pretty good, and at best, great. This one is different in tone to those in that it's science fiction, but I thought it a relatively safe risk. It's decent, but I probably like it the least out of all the ones I've read. It's an action story that's well done, but it doesn't seem to have as much below the surface as the other ones.

This guy can draw

The concept behind it is strong: a massive spacecraft is stuck between galaxies due to an anomaly, and Protocol 8 is put into effect. This protocol involves setting up eight timeline probabilities for eight super agents to investigate. Each of the volumes features a different agent and artist, with co-writer Lewis Trondheim keeping the stories harmonious with one another. It's a very cool idea for a series. 

I like the detail of her saluting her watch

This book features agent and mother Ann Ninurta who performs her job regardless of risk to herself. She carries a shield that doubles as a weapon and a hoverboard. She also endures what we'd call sexual harassment, but is treated in the world of the book as part of the job.

There's so much room in sci-fi to explore variations on inter-personal work space

Early in the book, she gets her mission to investigate an unexplained occurrence at a space-graveyard, and from there, the book is a non-stop sci-fi zombie rollercoaster.

Not a scene in the book but a pin up reflecting the contents

The art in the book is good. I especially like the colors. It has a tone of Jamie Hewitt, and the coloring is reminiscent of Jerome Opeña at times. The action is clear.

In the book notes, the artist notes on Ann's creation, he wanted a strong, attractive character without having her be sexualized. He gave her a shield like Captain America that could be used like the hoverboard from Back To the Future II. He's having fun with this, it's meant to be light.

That's a bit like Jerome Opeña, right?

The writing is good. It's a sort of "into the frying pan into the fire" kind of vibe, with Ann going from one deadly situation to the next. Where the book explains what's going on, my eyes glazed over and I filtered it out. Like so much sci fi, it can read like gobbledygook, but some readers might appreciate it more than me. But they manage to create a number of distinct locales in a small pocket of the galaxy.

More and more, it's the silent passages in stories which tell stories effectively for me, where characters show, they don't tell

Whether I would pay $20 each for all eight volumes to see how it all comes together is another thing. I liked this, but I wasn't dying to read more. It strikes me as being like a Marvel or DC crossover, but at half the length and double the price. Maybe it's a home run when read as a whole, but it's a heck of an investment for a new single story. I am interested in checking out another volume or two though. It's an interesting concept to build a story around, and maybe another book would add a layer to this one.