Excitement over Gideon Falls

So far, I've been loving the covers of Jeff Lemire, Andrea Sorrentino, and Dave Stewart's "Gideon Falls" from Image, here they are all together:

The overhead view is awesome.

Inside issue 4 I saw adouble-page spread from Sorrentino that blew me away, and shows off the abilities of the medium of sequential art. I showed it to my wife and we marveled at the execution:

This supernatural/loss of faith story is intriguing and deliberately paced. I was waiting for a few more months of cool map covers before talking about it, but this spread is incredible.

The narrative spreads up and down simultaneously in two places shown on different faces of a cube. A master class could be done on art like this.

In Defense of "Niourk"

I was reading some reviews of the French graphic novel newly translated into English "Niourk." They were unkind at best.

It didn't seem like the writers took into account the historical setting of the original novella---written by a Frenchman during the Cold War. Should that matter? Should you be versed on geo-political history of the setting of the time of a work's creation as a prerequisite? I haven't answered that well enough for myself, but because I did have that background, I knew what I was getting into.

And still I was surprised! It was an original tale, even with a little shark-jumping at the end. One of the female characters is scantily clad for a large portion, and this was taken as issue by one critic as well. All I can say to that is: 1) the French have less hangups on the nearly nude female form; and 2) the character is recovering from some crazy injury during the time of the mostly-naked scenes, and it isn't outside the realm of justifiable.

Anyway, the sweeping deep-time imagery would paper over an awful story, and this is far from awful. Look at this:

In four panels we travel through thousands, if not millions, of years. And that's in the very beginning.

Later we see Manhattan like we never see today:

And again:

I'm a sucker for images like the following, the arteries and veins of today turned into crumbled relics of a bygone era:

And seeing the East River as a meadow makes me smile:

And a sweeping image at the end of the story, a double page spread that would give away too much if you knew what to look for or what you were looking at:

And like I mentioned earlier: imagery like this would make up for some of the story deficiencies if those story problems were severe. The story here isn't the issue, at least not with this reader.

Old Quesada Find

Quite possibly my favorite superhero artist from the 90s when I was a kid was Joe Quesada. He runs Marvel now, but he stared out doing covers for Valiant and minor DC titles like The Ray, but moved to the more important Sword of Azrael mini-series, helping to create Bruce Wayne's replacement as Batman during the Knightfall storyline.

Quesada went on to create Ninjak for Valiant, and eventually went and created his own company with his inking partner, Jimmy Palmiotti, called Event Comics. I was so excited when that was announced, and their first creation, Ash, about a firefighter/superhero, was even more awesome.

After 9/11, I figured that Brooklyn's favorite comic team-up, Joe and Jimmy, having created a firefighter-superhero, would have garnered more attention. Maybe there's still time...

Anyway, at my LCS the other week I came across this, priced for $3.99:

Not a bad mark-down...originally $14.99.

I picked it up and thumbed through it and saw images that I'd forgotten about. The Event guys give shout-outs to other popular independent titles of the day, showing off their own tastes:

Evil Ernie and Sin City. Rock and roll.

Also Jae Lee's Hellshock:

And the first shout-out in the series goes to the indie-superhero godfather, brilliantly acting as the logo for the whole enterprise, Spawn:

My Disney uncle has met plenty of famous people, but one story my mom was telling me about how my uncle had gone to Cuba with an artist and help reunite that artist with his family, had been very meaningful.

With and artist? I asked. 

Yeah, she'd said, that comic book guy who works in the offices now, that guy who drew that poster I got signed for you...

Joe Quesada? I said, Yeah, yeah, the Q...the one with the Q...

It was a rare star-struck moment for me.

Uncle Tom and Joe Quesada traveled to Cuba? Together? To help reunite their family?