Reading Through 2021 25: Daredevil by Bendis and Maleev, vol 1

Daredevil by Bendis and Maleev, vol 1

2010

Alright, let me get this out of the way first: I don't hate Brian Michael Bendis. To the extent that I follow mainstream talk, I'm aware that whenever his name comes up, a lot of people are compelled to explain why he's terrible, and it's a pretty boring thing for Internet folks to insist on sharing with the world over and over again. He must have really hurt their feelings somewhere. My thoughts on him are this: he writes dialogue well, works well with artists, and is good at coming up with novel concepts. I've mainly read his Daredevil, Ultimate Spider-Man and X-Men, and it seems that his thing on books is shaking them up with outsider thinking. This isn't like John Byrne, who would come into a book with a "I always thought this was so stupid, so I'm going to fix it," mentality, but rather, "what if..." It means that his books tend to have a very fresh vibe. Once the novelty wears off, that's another story. But this book is mostly novelty.

I've just been talking about DD recently, and it made me feel like going back to see what this was like. I read it one time, probably around 2012, when Bendis came on to the X-Men. I liked it enough to pick up all three collections, but I also had a number of issues with them. I didn't love them. This book collects a four issue arc drawn by David Mack, a twelve issue arc drawn by Alex Maleev, and a three issue arc drawn by Manuel Gutierrez and Terry Dodson. In this collection, the "What if..." hook is "What if Dardevil's identity was made public?" And it was a great hook for the run.

Years later, some of the old problems remain, but others have disappeared. Right off the bat, I have to say it's a good read. The strength is in the storytelling.  The story is decent, but Bendis uses time jumps to let story beats play against each other and make a decent story into a very compelling one. The main arc, about a douche mafia guy named Sammy Silke trying to make his way to the top of Kingpin's empire, is really compelling. Silke is a disposable character, and in my first read though of it, I was confused that he was made to be a main character, then just gets removed, but it really works on the reread. Daredevil's life is going to go to hell, and it's not because of his arch-enemies, it's not because of his own hubris, but because of some lowlife has oversized ambitions that make Daredevil a convenient target. It wasn't the storyline I was expecting when I first read it, but knowing how it went, it all works really well. Silke is like a two-season supporting character on the Sopranos, who makes a mess for the main characters, but was never intended to become a feature player.

This is a pretty good-looking sequence. Daredevil is surprisingly not in the book that much. Matt Murdock probably has twice the page space, but it's not a big problem. 

Maleev has generally good pacing, and a good atmosphere for the book. It's gritty. Sometimes the coloring wore me down, but I liked it more than I didn't. But it did bother me just like it did when I first read it: there is way too much panel repetition and photo use in the book. Every few pages, I'd swear under my breath seeing the same photo background repeated, seeing the same faces used multiple times. This technique of repeating panels, I can accept it here and there to show a stunned character beat, but that's not what this is. This is like in the Flintstones when they repeated the backgrounds over and over to save the animators time and money. It sucks, it's boring, and I can't believe it has become an acceptable technique on mainstream books. 

A car that might simply be a stock image with a Photoshop filter, the guy on the left has two faces drawn, the guy on the right has three, plus two illustrations of the hand on the wheel. I don't know why this makes me so irritated.

It's not that I need the artist to draw every little thing on the page, but noticing how much they aren't drawing sure yanks me out of the narrative. And when the artist draws every little thing, I respect them as an artist. What Maleev does here is making comics, but I don't know that I have any interest in him as an artist.I've seen sketches he's done, so I know he can draw, but he doesn't interest me as an artist based on this Daredevil work.

When this was coming out, comics were at the point that they were already being collected and analyzed to death, and Maleev cut so many corners art-wise. Compare that to the work of previous generations, who expected the art to disappear the month after it came out, yet they drew every damn page.

I'm not a fan of David Mack either. He's super talented, but I just don't like his comic work. He slaps so much noise on the page. I know for some people it looks like art, but it ends up being filler to me. It's artsy as opposed to art. I just wasn't into the art here. I liked the story itself though!

This book did not have Mazzuchelli power going on.

Mack is quite happy to use the exact identical pic over. If folks liked it once, they'll like it twice, right?  Only the most obsessive nerds would even notice, anyway.

The other thing I noticed is that between Maleev's arc and the fill-in by Gutierrez, the text balloons switched to lower-case, a famous feature of Bendis-era Marvel. Will that carry over to book two? I think I want to read the whole run again, so I'll see when I squeeze it into my reading list in a month or two! I might rant about the quality of the art in this run, but it is still very readable stuff and very enjoyable overall, and at the end of the day, that's what's most important to me in a Marvel book. I know I've seen way worse art in a Marvel book and still loved it.

Reading Through 2021 24: Seeds and Stems, by Simon Hanselmann

Seeds and Stems, by Simon Hanselmann

reprinting stories from the 2010s, published 2020

Is Simon Hanselmann the most successful indie creator out there right now? He's prolific, self-promoting, and it seems like his work is all over. If he's not the most successful, he's one of them at least. I've enjoyed his work since his days over on Tumblr and have got each of his books through Fantagraphics, so it was an easy choice to pick up his newest release, Seeds and Stems.

Without the slip cover

Upon getting it, I was a little disappointed. The page count is higher than his other books, but the book is a smaller size. Putting them next to his hardcovers, it's not a huge difference, but it feels like a pocketbook rather than a small book.

I like his work a lot, but I just had some apprehensions with this one. The size, but also it's a collection of odds and ends, leftovers, or seeds and stems as a disappointed stoner might say in the days before legal weed. The book collects work from anthologies and minicomics from the past decade. A lot of it is single color printing on colored paper, not the full color of his other books. One of the earlier appearing strips was originally printed as a poster, and man, my old eyes couldn't read it. Chris Ware makes tiny writing, but it's intentional. This is just shrunk down for economics. 

Actual printed size

But I burned through this book. I really, really enjoyed it. Maybe more than his longer stories in the other books. I don't know what it was. Probably because everything is so short, if you're not enjoying one story, you're quickly onto the next one. The thing this reminded me of most was those fat comic strip collections that were so popular in the 80's. I'd read a Calvin and Hobbes or Bloom County collection, and just lose myself in them. With this, it's 350 pages, and I probably read 70 pages at a time. That's a lot for me.

I relate to the choice of drugs, but yeah, drug rut, that's a real thing

There's a sitcom quality to it, but it's also got a newspaper comic strip vibe as well. The characters are constant, the setting is constant, and there are lots of jokes. Probably that's a major part of Hanselmann's success, that these strips are, despite the depression, drug use and fistings, very digestible. These are peak Megg, Mogg, and Owl strips. For the majority of these, he's in the zone. 

Hanselmann is always good with his silent panels and reaction shots

Personally, I relate to a lot of these strips. I spent a few years on the sofa like Megg, Mogg, and Owl. They watch How I Met Your Mother and Young Sheldon, I watched the Simpsons and Everybody Loves Raymond. The type of depressive antics of that lifestyle, you can't even tell what you honestly enjoy and what you ironically enjoy. There's just extreme boredom and a wish to escape it. Hanselmann has made a thousand pages capturing this weird nichey lifestyle and I'm all there for it.

He uses a variety of page colors in the book. It's an interesting production value

I don't know that I recommend this book above any of his other collections. It's good, there's a lot in it, but the others are good too, and lots are in them too. It's like those old newspaper strip collections. Some folks will want to own each and every one, but probably most people will be satisfied with a book or two. This one is as good as any of the others. I laughed.

Reading Through 2021 23: Or Else, by Kevin H(uiznega)

Or Else #1, by Kevin H(uiznega)

2004

I miss Drawn and Quarterly's textured paper covers!

This comic was one of the last indie "issues" I bought. I know Fantagraphics and Drawn And Quarterly occasionally print some at the request of the artist, but those companies have pretty much moved to the graphic novel format. For me, I remember enjoying this issue at the time, but not being blown away by it. After a decade of reading Eightball, Palookaville, Black Hole, Hate, and Peepshow off the stand, this didn't resonate too strongly with me. 

The art stood out though: a simple, classical cartoonist style; and Huizenga has stuck with this character, Glenn Ganges. I saw some of his work on his Tumblr some years back and really was blown away. I read Glenn Ganges in: the River at Night last year and was immediately convinced it was a Great Comic. That's a book that every reader should own.

So I had my eye on revisiting this book. What first stood out is that this wasn't original work; it was a collection from his mini-comics and anthologies around that time. D&Q must have been quite taken with his work to republish it.

There are three longer pieces, and some one pagers here. The first full story, NST '04, is indie fare, trying to find poetry in daily life in a slow town. It works because Huizenga is somewhat formalist in his construction, cutting between scenes from panel to panel, creating a patchwork experience of life. I don't love it, but it's different from what was being produced at the time and manages to stand out.

The final page of NST '04 is quiet and poetic

By its length, Chan Woo Kim is the meat of the comic. It's, again, a formalist comic, overlaying adoption agency notes over Asian ink paintings (I live in Japan, it's called sumi-e here, I'm guessing Huizenga is following a Korean tradition in his piece). The art is refined, and shows that Huizenga has skills outside of simply cartooning. I don't know that it's a great comic, but it's an interesting experiment at the very least. 

I don't think this is a must-own comic that people need to track down, but it definitely shows the seeds of an artist who is interested in exploring beyond the established boundaries of comics. In his later work, he has very good linework, but it is in story construction, abstract concept illustration, and the use of repetition and tropes where I think he shines. This book shows some of the promise of that work yet to come.

Reading Through 2021 22: X-Men Reload Volume 1 by Chris Claremont and Alan Davis

 X-Men Reload Volume 1 by Chris Claremont and Alan Davis and others

2000s, collected in 2018

Is this series remembered well by people who didn't grow up with Chris Claremont X-Men? It was a weird time for X-Men to try to go retro. 

I don't remember Alan Davis drawing women's necks so long

In the mid-2000s, I started getting back into mainstream comics, and I read a trade of the first six issues of this, issues 444-449, and it was okay, but I'd just read Brubaker's Captain America and the Grant Morrison New X-Men run. Whedon's Astonishing X-Men may have been coming out at that time as well. Alan Davis is one of my favorite mainstream pencillers, so I was expecting to love the book, but I just didn't. In comparison to those other books, there just didn't seem to be much going on in these issues, and I never read beyond issue 449 of UXM until Brubaker took over writing duties.

Recently, this collection of 444-461 was at a discount, so I decided to give it another shot. Over a decade had passed, and I've been reading a lot more older comics, so I just had very different expectations going in.

You get the feeling Davis could draw these characters from any angle

And I liked it better! There were some problems with it, some major problems, but on the whole, it was enjoyable to read. The thing is, it still wasn't great, so I don't know that its high points made up for the lows.

I want to start with the praise: Alan Davis kills it. Every page has love and attention to detail. Claremont's strong point is character work, and Davis draws every emotion on everyone's face. Davis might be the guy most capable of realizing Claremont's talent. I especially enjoyed the conversations between characters, the smiles and the facial expressions. Davis can draw action well too, but it's not where he shines. He's given all different locations to draw as well, and each come out fully realized. It's exceptional work.

That's a ridiculously well-rendered night club

Claremont does do great character work... with Davis. His work with other artists falls flatter. They try, but that's just not what they're good at, and it can be hard to look at. Davis draws most of the book, but three other artists draw short 2-3 issue arcs between Davis' longer arcs and they all suffer in comparison.

I had remembered Claremont's writing in this as being too wordy, and it really isn't. Narration is limited to a point of view character, and isn't too obtrusive. I actually liked the pace of these stories quite a lot. Breezier than the 80s, and meatier than most modern books.

That's the main stuff I liked and I enjoyed it a great amount. I was buying Claremont and Davis Excalibur off the stands, and it's pleasurable to see them write and draw characters they both seem to have enormous affection for.

The bad stuff though...

This is the worst looking page I saw in a Marvel comic in quite some time

As I wrote, the other artists just aren't up to the task. It's not bad work, but it's pretty bland. 

And Claremont isn't giving them gold to work with either. In four of six arcs, the X-Men lose their powers, and two of those times it's because of nanites. I just shrugged my shoulders and powered ahead. 

The villains aren't what pretty much anyone wants to see. The first story has the Fury from the old Captain Britain comics, followed by the Viper taking over Murderworld from Arcade, a mutant mafioso named Geech, Sebastian Shaw, and finally some evolved dinosaurs in the Savageland and the Savage Land Mutates! Nobody likes the Savage Land Mutates, do they? But Claremont keeps bringing them back. It's like the book is a nostalgia series for Claremont himself, the things he misses writing. I suppose he should be writing stuff he's passionate about, but sometimes...

Claremont is forced to juggle a lot of continuity in this. He brings Psylocke back from the dead, Colossus is brought back from the dead in Astonishing, Jean Grey is killed off in adjective-less X-Men, Wolverine goes rogue in his own title, and I think X-23 is brought in from somewhere else. I don't know if he chose to deal with it all or if the editor forced him to reconcile all this continuity, but he ends up doing it. It is a noble effort, but, as a reader, that's a lot of other titles you're forced to discern the happenings of. And at the end, House of M is teased, so it is only going to get worse in the next collection.  

Finally, he loves Sage. I kind of know who Sage is, she's been used a bit in the current HoX/PoX run, but she is Claremont's Poochie here. When she's not the center of the story, other characters are talking about her and trying to figure out what she's doing. And at the end, I had no real idea of who she was, and wasn't interested in it either. Her use was a prime example of tell, don't show.

Nobody was asking for this

The other disappointment in this was the use of Psylocke and Captain Britain's brother Jamie Braddock as a subplot, which would seem to be resolved in the next collection. I think he's as uninteresting a character as it gets: a malicious reality warper that generally treats characters as playthings. In a series with a roster of villains like Mr. Sinister or that Shadow King, Jamie 
Braddock just isn't bringing much to the table.

I enjoyed reading the book overall, because I enjoy the experience of Claremont and Davis doing X-Men so much, but it's not a great book, and I probably would never recommend it to anyone not already partial to the X-Men. Now to see how much that second collection currently is selling for. I can't stop myself.

I Really Should Read This 8: Battle Angel Alita Deluxe Edition 1, by Yukito Kishiro

Battle Angel Alita Deluxe Edition 1, by Yukito Kishiro

1990's, deluxe edition 2017

I've lived in Japan 18 years, and I love comics, but I've had a pretty small appetite for manga in that time. In 2020, I tried to remedy that with deep dives into Kentaro Miura's Berserk and Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira. After finishing Akira, I told a friend I was going to get Ghost in the Shell next, and he suggested Battle Angel Alita.

This book collects the first two Alita books in an oversized hardcover package. It's a good looking collection with strong production values.

I bought it, and left it up on the shelf for months. I didn't really want to read it. On the outside, it seems a natural companion to Ghost: sexy robo-woman with a gun, a futuristic sci-fi setting, and coincidentally both had big budget Hollywood flops within a few years of each other. I'm just wary of sexy lead characters in books made by guys these days. I read a lot of that stuff in the late 80s to early 90s.

I read Ghost a few months ago, and while I could appreciate it, it felt like a book that I had to be reading at the time to really get its impact. It's visually incredible, but the complicated story is buttressed by an excess of footnotes and jargon. It's a dense book told in a single volume (with later sequels) made up of short stories. Alita is really different in execution. The focus is much narrower: there's Alita, her savior Dr. Ido, and a third character is introduced in the second book. And the story is manga paced, meaning there is relatively little story in its 400 pages. Fights can last 100 pages. At the end of the collection, the characters have been fairly clearly established, but not a whole lot has happened.

What year is this?

What's good in here? The art is exceptional. It's tight and clear, but you can see the human hand involved in most of the art. It doesn't suffer from the mechanical lines of manga that often turn me off.

My favorite thing in the book is the rendering of her leather suit. It looks like it was done with Sharpies 

While there isn't much of a story, it's interesting nonetheless. Akira and Ghost are established to take place on a future Earth, but Alita is much closer to a fantasy world. Probably it is future Earth, but it doesn't necessarily have to be, and it isn't relevant to the story as of yet.  They live in a dark, industrial place called the shipyard, with a massive floating city, Zalem, above them. They never go there, and people talk about how nobody goes there, and that is something I want to see. If I read more, that's the hook for me: I want to see what life on Zalem is like. Kishiro builds up the world really well as it is so that Zalem is a mystery.

There's a lot of this

There's nothing about it that is bad, but some of it is merely perfunctory. Most of the first book is a long fight scene with a super cyborg, and calling it a story would be generous. The character Yugo introduced in the second book would have had more narrative weight if he'd appeared in the first book. All the arcs are pretty standard tropes of sci-fi/fantasy. But, it was an enjoyable read.

Ultimately, this story does what it's aiming to do really well, and lays just enough groundwork to make me interested in the larger world. My worries about the sexiness of it were pretty unfounded. Alita is attractive, but this isn't a cheesecake comic.  I'm looking to pick up the second deluxe edition when I can.

Reading Through 2021 20: The Woman Who Loved Life and Other Stories, by Johnny Craig

The Woman Who Loved Life and Other Stories, by Johnny Craig

2019, reprinting material from the early 1950s

I know some of the EC artists by style, but one I really don't know is Johnny Craig. I even have another book of his work from a Fantagraphics EC box set I bought five years ago, but, honestly? I've never sat down and read one of those books cover to cover. I usually read a story or two and just start looking at the pictures. So with this, I decided to actually sit down with it; I read about two stories a day for a week and a half.

At the end of it, I still don't have a handle on Craig as an artist, not like the artists who went on to have broader careers, such as Jack Davis, Al Williamson, or Wally Wood. I can look at those guys' art and recognize it. Craig is more like a Hal Foster type artist to me: very realistic, very clear, but not a lot of stylistic flourish. This is my first time with his work, so I'm sure there are fans of his out there who completely know him at a glance, but I had trouble with it myself.

It's the feet off the ground that makes this work

The book collects about 25 stories by Craig, from between 1950 and 1955, mostly in the crime genre, but some horror stories turn up too. At first, I was quite disappointed with the stories. EC is famous for tight stories with twist endings, and the early stories have almost none of it. The book begins with a lot of "true" crime stories which follow a pretty standard pattern: escalating, tempting criminality resulting in the inevitable death of the criminal. It's amusing, but not so compelling to read in large doses. 

Stew and banshees: I can laugh at this because I have some Irish blood in me

There are always the odd panels that stand out, and Craig really uses the comic trope of bodies in mid-air to great effect. And the antiquated way of thinking is amusing, be it in repeated "happy" endings about the death penalty or the political leanings of the day, but they're not all that special or unique to Craig.

So many stories have cops happily shooting crooks or laughing about the death penalty, I have to imagine the attitude toward death was a lot more cavalier in the 1950s

About the halfway point though, I started to pick up the vibe of the book a bit better, and Craig was showing development as an artist as EC Comics refined its formula. Stories started having twists instead of merely inevitable endings, and Craig's line work became bolder. The panels became more arresting, and the inking on characters, especially on foregrounded characters, used strong flowing lines. It wasn't perfect, and I wasn't blown away by it, but the amount of cool images per 7-8 page story certainly increased. At the very least, I started appreciating it.

 

Great use of silhouette 

There were lots of cool sequences that, if they appeared in comics today, people would take note of. Craig had solid dramatic fundamentals.

I love this sequence, especially panels 1-3

I could imagine some influence on the panels of Charles Burns and Art Spiegleman. Those guys are probably Craig fans.

Taking the text out of this, it's just potent images

So, I have another eight of these EC books I haven't read. I stopped buying them because I just never got around to reading them due to them being relatively hard to read. They're dense, and they aren't meant to be binged. They were monthly stories in color originally, dished out in small amounts. I'll have to make an effort to finish a few more this year though. There are treasures inside. 

That is a great picture

I Really Should Read This 7: Hellboy Omnibus 3, by Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo

Hellboy Omnibus 3, by Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo

2017, reprinting work from around 2005 to 2010

I used to be a huge Mignola fan... until Hellboy. His work at Marvel and DC stuck out so much, and around 1990, I would buy comics if I saw he drew them. It was usually just the odd issue, but I liked the style so much. I was a reader of John Byrne's Next Men when Hellboy first appeared, and I was into it... Then I read Seeds of Destruction and dropped it in the middle of the second series. I can't go back in time to 1995 and see what I was thinking, but I imagine it was two things: 

1. Image Comics had killed my appetite for art-based comics. I had been so on board with Image and felt so ripped off and embarrassed for reading them that I was aggressively avoiding books with "no story".

2. I was around 20, had just moved to the city, and a lot of books just didn't feel worth my time as a young adult (I've been doing a read of a number of late '90s books that I missed out on at the time).

In a comics forum, I was told, "No, Hellboy is good!" a few times, so I decided to jump in, skipping the first two omnibuses and hopefully getting on when the story was in gear.

Mignola on the cover, Fegredo on the inside

Right up front, the verdict: It's solid. This collects three story arcs (Darkness Calls, The Wild Hunt, and The Storm and the Fury), though according to Wikipedia, the third of these are two separate ones. 

It's sometimes hard to start reading a book that has been praised a lot, because you're expecting it to be awesome from page one. With this collection, Darkness Calls is definitely the least of the three. The first few issues, I couldn't even understand what was going on. There are a lot of characters that look similar (grizzled is a common adjective I'd use for the cast) and a lot of portentous speech. Hellboy walks through a door that's a portal to old Russia and has to get back for three issues while fighting an undying bad guy.  Once it was set up, I could follow what was happening, but the mechanics of getting it going didn't make much sense to me.

Lots of pages like this, sometimes small bad guys, sometimes big, always monochromatic

Anyway, by the end of the first arc, I was on top of enough things to follow the second arc. It was full of portentous talk and a lot of similar characters too, but the main villain was very clear and I could follow the broad strokes, and that carried over to the final arc as well.

I certainly enjoyed this more than the series I read in the mid-90s. The story at that time (that I haven't read in 25 years, mind you) was more of a monster of the week with references to something bigger. This actually was getting to the meat of Hellboy's story and his destiny.

One of the interesting things about this book and character was that Hellboy is both a passive and active hero. He's being thrust into situations and told over and over again what he was born to be, but he also makes his own decisions and actively wrests control of his so-called destiny. That's a pretty cool character arc and not something you commonly see in a protagonist.

These two characters stood out a lot. The pig is probably the most interesting character in the book, just an angry, frustrated thing

The weak part for me is that there are a lot of characters that are there to spout exposition, and you just can't know who they are or distinguish them easily. Lots of withered witches, and I can't tell if they're good witches or bad witches or what. It's just a page of exposition. The colors are nice, but only Hellboy, Nimue (the big bad), and the red haired girl (who pops up in the second arc and is suddenly important) get standout color schemes. Everyone else is a shade of brown or gray. After a while, you just roll with it, and enjoy what is good, but it's not great design.

The art is excellent. I know Fegredo's work, but I hadn't seen any of it in a long time. It's bold and he has a real flow to his storytelling. I found it interesting just how dark images could get and still be understandable. Some pages are almost black. It's an interesting choice.

So, I ordered omnibus four. I doubt I'll feel the need to go back to one and two to read the entirety of the epic, but I enjoyed this collection, and read it about three issues at a time. That's a brisk, solid read.

One thing I want to mention is that this was such a good price. Over 500 pages on a beautiful heavy stock for about $25. In comparison, Marvel's Epic Collections are about 400 pages on cheap, thin paper for $40. Marvel made their money on their comics when they were printed and don't pay royalties on much of it (to my knowledge), while Hellboy is creator-owned, so Mignola and hopefully Fegredo are making money off these collections.  Marvel is printing cheap, selling high, and Dark Horse is printing expensive and selling low. It makes me think about what a fat company Marvel is. They definitely have higher overheads, but I can't help but think that buying a Marvel Epic Collection puts gas in the tank of an executive's Lexus, while buying a Hellboy omnibus simply puts dinner on the table for Dark Horse staff. I have no actual numbers to back that up, I just think the difference in price and print quality is ridiculous, especially considering Marvel's advantage of scale. Dark Horse should probably add $5 to the price and put it in the bank.

One Coin Reads 2: RETCON, by Matt Nixon and Toby Cypress

RETCON, by Matt Nixon and Toby Cypress

2018

Here's another Image story book that I picked up at a discount (this one at ¥346). Was it worth it?

Sure, it was fine. I have this complicated feeling about Image books these days. It really is a space for creators to do their best and control their own work, but it seems like a lot of creators want to do something quite similar to each other. It makes sense: there are industry trends which occur organically and many creators are in a similar age bracket and have overlapping influences. But as a reader, especially a jaded old one, it can be numbing.

A bear for your Image bingo sheet

The stories are some sci-fi/fantasy hook, they tend to be a little quippy (kind of like the MCU films) but with adult words, and the art is generally a kind of Paul Pope lite. Of course some Image books break that mold, but a lot fall into group. RETCON is well-done enough, but the plot is like Image Comics Madlibs: An ex-military guy with a demon inside has to stop an alien from blowing up Earth to fuel its ship. The hook of the premise is established in the last few pages; they're going to go back in time to redo it all if/when they fail, to retcon reality, if you will.

It's all totally fine. If it were to come on TV on a lazy Saturday, I'd watch it, but I don't know how I could get excited about it. The back cover blurb sure is excited for it: "RETCON is fucking amazing and the best thing I've read in ages!" says someone. I didn't feel that. 

The thing is, it's not bad, it's very competent. And I love competent comics. I've been reading through Marvel Epic Collections the past few years, and enjoying them way more than I expected. A bland '80s Silver Surfer run that I had no nostalgia for was utterly compelling. I'm reading a totally average '50s EC Comics collection right now and enjoying, though not loving, it. This is the quality of what this team is doing. Totally solid contemporary work. 

An alien in a suit says a quip

I have to wonder though. There's a market for EC comics among people who have no nostalgia for the original comics. The draughtsmanship of it makes it of interest. Arguably the market for Marvel Epic Collections is rooted in nostalgia, but when I read comics from the 60s to the 80s now, they're really dense and some of them read a lot better to me as an adult than they did when I was a kid. I don't know that the contemporary school of Image books have the same median level of quality that those books did. Four issues read like one old Marvel, and the art is way less developed. Like, this artwork has vitality and a solid vibe, but it also feels dashed off. Will people want to get a big book of these kinds of Image titles in 30 years? Possibly, I don't own a crystal ball.

So was it worth ¥346? Yes. I read it, it was fine. The twist of the final issue should have been in the first issue. You have a book called RETCON and there's no retcon. Why wait till the end of the book to start the story? That's totally what makes so many Image books frustrating: the first collected edition is merely an appetizer for the main course, it's not much of a meal.

I Really Should Read This 6: Parker, The Outfit, by Darwyn Cooke

Parker, The Outfit, by Darwyn Cooke

2010

I've read and enjoyed some of Cooke's work, but I haven't put much effort into getting a hold of it. The number one reason is DC is generally uninteresting to me, and that's where a lot of his work has appeared. Last summer, I decided to try out his Parker series, and after reading the first one, I promptly ordered the second (and third and fourth after that, just because I realized I wanted to have them).

The first Parker book took me off guard. I knew nothing about it other than it was based on a series of novels. The main character is not a good guy. He kills people. He's not a killer, he's just a thief, but when he needs to, he kills people. Once I adjusted to the notion that it was an anti-hero story, I was totally with it.

This is why I'm only buying the hardcover versions.

The story in this, and in the first book, are good. They are classic hard-boiled tough guy tales with manly men, sniveling men, stunning women, bad choices, and lots of money. As a genre, it's not my cup of tea, but when it's done at the top of its game, like in the Soderbergh Oceans 11 film or in Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips' Criminal series, it's great. 

And it's great here. Cooke was known as a storyteller, and he's completely stripped down to the essentials here. None of this computer-gradient skylines or sterile lettering. This is him and his brushes and Rapidographs (I'm guessing), and two tones of ink. It's completely refined, but it feels a little punk at the same time.

The wordless sequences sing. You follow the action intuitively. The pages with lots of dialogue can't be equally intuitive, but he shifts angles and lets the characters "act" enough to never let it become talking heads. This was Cooke at the height of his powers.

I don't even know the style he's referencing here, like a 1950's Esquire?

There's a weird break in the book about halfway through, where he does a massive stylistic change. I was going with it when it happened, but I wasn't really sure why it was there. When I got to the parts after that, and understood why he was doing that, it was great and 100% I understood what he had done. That's a good experience with a comic. Not merely to be surprised by it, but to get to the end and say, "Ah yeah!" with it. 

"I wasn't asking."

I'm not all that interested to become a Cooke completist. I'm sure his Batman issues are solid, but I just don't care that much. I have the New Frontier, that covers me for DC action books. And I'm not crazy about buying the stuff that's been expensively repackaged after his death.

These Parker books though, I need to get them. The storytelling, the aesthetic... I'd love to add a third aspect, but it's mainly those two things. Cooke was so good at what he did, that that is enough.

Reading Through 2021 16: Daredevil: The Devil in Cell Block D, by Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark

Daredevil: The Devil in Cell Block D, by Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark

2006

Someone was asking me about Daredevil runs the other day, about Frank Miller vs other folks' runs, and I surprisingly had lots of opinions. Daredevil is not a favorite character of mine, but I've read a lot because so many writers do inspired work with the character. Maybe it's the legacy, maybe it's how unlike most superheroes he is, but regardless, there are a lot of good books.

The storyline is The Devil In Cell Block D, so the trade is called...

I think this is my favorite run. Not even the whole of Brubaker's run, which I never quite completed, but this specific collection. When this came out, I had stopped reading Marvel comics for ten years. I had been reading online that they had improved a lot since I gave up on them in the '90s, but it was Ed Brubaker's name who got me to try them out. Brubaker had been a C-list indie comic artist in the '90s, and I was really curious how he was as an A-list mainstream writer. And at his high points, he was pretty incredible. 

I still read some relatively new Marvel work 15 years later, so he was a good re-introduction to it.

This storyline was directly following Brian Michael Bendis' run, which I only read a few years ago, and wasn't required to understand this story despite the shake up in status quo. The hook is immediate: Matt Murdock is in jail, after having been arrested for being the vigilante Daredevil. He claims innocence, but the feds are sure it's a front. As a blind man, Murdock should be in protective custody, but the feds want Daredevil in general pop.

So gritty! This is how Kingpin is introduced to the book. Do you need prior knowledge of him to get a feel for the character?

Right from the start, it's all character, playing out what would so and so do in each situation. There are a number of characters at play: Daredevil, his nemesis Kingpin, his friend and lawyer Foggy, his friend and reporter Ben Urich, and new to me at the time, investigator Dakota North, the warden, and the fed in charge. All have their own motives and moral system, and Brubaker just lets them play out against each other. Each of the six issues, he adds a little something to the mix to ratchet up the tension. One issue has the extremely restrained assassin Bullseye, who is told he will have access to nothing, not even a spork, and effectively becomes Chekov's Bullseye. Another sees the Punisher turn himself in just so he can go to prison and see what's up there. I don't think I've ever liked the Punisher as much as in this book.

Daredevil's powers are used to illustrate what a coldblooded tough guy Kingpin and Punisher are in one scene. 

The storytelling is so organic that it all comes together to a crescendo, however it's not like strings are being pulled by the writer to get there. It's more like kindling is placed on a slow burning fire that starts to rage.

The art is great too. I don't know Michael Lark except that he's done a few things with Brubaker. He fits into the mold of artists like Steve Epting and Sean Philips, both folks who've done a lot with Brubaker.  Does he use photo reference? Most definitely, but there doesn't seem to be tracing going on. It's weighted in reality, but with an artistic looseness. There are definitely points where the backgrounds are photos dropped in and computer edited, it just doesn't bother me as part of the whole though.

I laughed to see Patton Oswalt and Brian Posehn cameo as lowlife thugs 

At the time I first read it, I was quite into the grittier HBO shows like Oz and Sopranos, which were dark and violent, but could also be humorous, and were very clearly character-based. That's what Brubaker was able to do with Daredevil. I love Brubaker's other work, like Criminal or the Fade Out, but those are more novelistic, concise stories with endings. With Daredevil, it was written in arcs, and was just trying to make you turn the page, much like a TV show wants to get you thirsty for the next week's episode.  Brubaker, at this point in time, was just so good at what he was doing (probably he is still, I just haven't read anything new from him in a few years).

Michael Lark on the left, David Finch on the right. Finch, to my mind, was in the "everything wrong with comics" boat in the '00s. Seriously hard to look at work.

The nature of Marvel publishing is that it's disposable, in that they perpetually want to focus on the new and the now, but they also want to make old comics accessible in increasingly expensive packages (Marvel is thinking about the bottom line more now than ever since they became 1% of Disney's business). So stories like this are pretty lost. It's probably ten years out of print. You have to find it used or in digital. Until Disney adapts it for something and it's repackaged as a classic. But it's a good read regardless.