You Keep Me Hanging On

Having purchased a graphic novel for a friend I got to reminiscing. The gift is a collected miniseries/first volume of one of Black Mask's offers.

I have only read four titles from Black Mask, but they have been among my very favorite sequential art productions ever, as well as some of the finest examples of the hidden masterpieces of the margins of the medium.

I was ignorant to the Black Mask company until I first learned of 4 Kids Walk Into A Bank:

The story is not usually something you see in comic form---four pre-teens planning to rob a bank in order to thwart their leader's father's possible relapse into a life of crime. The art and the coloring fit so well together that the muted palette dazzles somehow.

It was so good that you waited. And waited. And felt guilty that you got angry when you learned Matt Rosenberg's father had a heart attack and that had caused the delays.

Since Black Mask is pretty much one dude, Matt Pizzolo, the realities shift.

One of their next big projects publicity-wise was Calexit:

Great badguy, great map and flag background, and nice recognition of the real California. Also, the treatment of the day-to-day experience of both an occupying force and a resistance force is not forced or contrived.

It's no real SPOILER to say that Zora kills fascists, but one of my favorite memories of an experience reading a comic has to do with Zora killing fascists.

It never mattered that it took 10 months for the three issues to come out. 10? I must have been busy; it felt like 15 months.

By that time, Black Mask was responsible for two of the most important comic properties of the times for me. One day I saw Gravetrancers up at the register, and the dude behind the register nodded, "Yeah man, that's, liked, fucked up...it's awesome." Are you kidding me? SOLD:

This is all true: there's a drug produced by certain compounds found in a dead body, and the fresher the dead, the stronger the drug.This drug is also highly addictive, because, of course it is. The story writes itself. It's got everything: syringes full of psychedelic corpse drugs directly to the eyeball; a dude being thwarted from having sex with his mom by someone other than his mom; and Shovel, a boy of 40 who wears a shawl over his face because he has no lower jaw. It's now cannon in the badass-underground-horror-drug-masterpiece genre.

The next title, Young Terrorist, was actually released before the 4 Kids... series, but I picked up the collected series a few months ago, having been thumbing through for too long.

It poses as a "daughter-of-an-American-oligarch-rebels-and-joins-a-terrorist-cell" story while turning out to be closer to superhero comics at the end. That marriage is the real star and story.

These are just four of their titles. I haven't even gotten to Black yet, where black people are gaining superpowers, and they're the only people on earth who are:

Or Kim&Kim, where two chicks are interdimensional cowboy bounty hunters, one's queer and one's trans:

What about Space Riders:

While I was writing this I remembered seeing in one of the sale bins Ballistic, the collection of the four issue series, and buying it on the spot:

Butch is an air-conditioning unit repairman in an dystopian future independent floating city-island of technology mixed with DNA. He aspires to be a criminal, and has a living gun as a sidekick, a gun that spends equal time between being attached to his right hand, and chilling on couch getting loaded.

The pencil work is Darick Robertson, and who doesn't love Transmet? And at $2.99, what risk was there?

But I still haven't finished it.

Black Mask is responsible for some of the great artifacts of era in a medium, and that's pretty cool.

They've earned my continued attention.

Before the Big Two: Part 1

I named this blog "Beyond the Big Two" as a way to signal that I'd like to mention lots of comics that are outside of the DC/Marvel umbrellas. I had/have a whole series of ideas that I wanted to write about concerning the different eras of comics, and I'm not really sure how I wanted to do that.

Today, the Big Two are, as mentioned, Marvel and DC. But, back in the Golden Age of comics, the Big Two, if anyone cared to call it that, were probably National and Fawcett, or, and this is likely more accurate, it was a Big Three, with MLJ added in.

At that time, Timely and Quality and Fox did okay, with one of Fox's main characters outshining everyone until Fawcett's big reveal.

Today only three of these six companies remains in operation: Timely Comics took the name of their most popular line and became Marvel Comics; National Comic Publishing took the initials of their most popular line and became DC Comics; and MLJ, reeling from having their second most popular character ripped off and being overshadowed by the new character, went in another direction, leaned into the popularity of their beloved character and changed their name to reflect that, and became Archie Comics.

DC Comics bought the rights to Quality, Fox, and Fawcett over the years, and characters that had been independent and popular, and rivals, even surpassing the sales of giants like Superman and Batman, have been absorbed into the DC Universe.

Two I wanted to briefly point out got their starts as outside the umbrella of what today are considered established companies, but, at the time in 1939 and 1940, everything was just starting out. This first character was wildly popular for a time, and predates all Golden Age heroes except Superman (1938) and Batman (March 1939):

Blue Beetle had a radio show and a park day and popular costume. 1939 was a good year for comic heroes, as we get, in this particular order: Batman, Blue Beetle (Fox), Human Torch and Namor (Timely/Marvel), Captain Marvel/Shazam (Fawcett), and the Shield, the forerunner to Captain America (MLJ).

In 1940, before Captain America debuted, before Archie and the Spirit showed up, Quality released a character who could absorb sunlight to various ends:

The Ray, as a character, is still around the DCU, as is a new iteration of Blue Beetle, as well as a whole cast of characters purchased from their early rivals.

While I like the history of BB and the Ray, neither were remotely as popular as the heights attained by Captain Marvel and Archie and Superman and Batman. Blue Beetle may have been trending that direction, but Captain Marvel ended that.

It takes 80 years to fully appreciate how wild the origins of an entire artform's medium and commercial market were.

Shazam and Archie deserve their own posts...

We Get OUR Movie, and Possibly a Cinematic Universe

Reports are that the possible Valiant Cinematic Universe are wrecked, and if that's the case, then bummer.

But at least we're getting a Bloodshot movie.

It stars Vin Diesel as our titular anti-hero, and while I don't have a hate-on for Vin, it seems like plenty of fans, and the general chatter in the dark recesses online, are firmly anti-Vin.

He may not have been the first person I would have chose, but he's certainly not a bad choice. And look, THIS IS HOW MOVIES GET GREEN-LIT TO GET MADE. You need a star's name.

To paraphrase David Simon, co-creator of "The Wire," if given to opportunity to make a movie/television show based on your written content, YOU DO IT, even if the movie/show is garbage. It will always raise awareness of the source material.

And hey, the trailer doesn't look bad, which is a good sign.

Spawn Hits Major Milestone

Congratulations to Todd McFarlane and Spawn, one of the all-time independent comic titles of all time, and, hell, one of the all-timers full stop. They made it to issue #300. This is the variant cover I picked up at my LCS:

I remember when Image was founded, and Spawn was the flagship title. I remember when it was a huge deal that someone named Greg Capullo was taking over the pencil work on Spawn.

I remember these things because they were big deals, but not because I was an avid reader or collector of Image content. I was a Valiant fan and appreciated the writing of those stories over the flashy visuals and slick paper of the Image books.

I have certainly grown to appreciate what Image does for artists and can fully support their success.

The variant cover I only learned about this evening is the one I would have preferred. I have set it up against the cover that upon which it is based:

Both by McFarlane.

As Spawn comes to surpass Cerebus with issue #301, I may post a retrospective on the title.

Explaining it is Difficult

Andrea Sorrentino and Jeff Lemire are up to their usual tricks:

These are the last two issues of Gideon Falls, for which I've heard they're making into a television show.

One of the workers at my LCS was asking about it, saying that it was getting close to time for him to start reading it. "What's it about?" he asked.

"Well..." I started, and then paused. He mentioned that it was probably a good sign that it's hard to describe. It's sci-fi, and horror, and something else wrapped up into one beautiful and unsettling story. He said someone told him it was like Twin Peaks.

I said, well, kinda, yeah, it's partially like Twin Peaks, but it's so much more, and different in weird ways. It's like a Murakami book in the sense that, after sixteen issues, I still barely know what's happening.

By the Cover

I bought a comic based on its cover the other day:

I'd been planning on checking out Vault Comics for a while, but as real life has ratcheted up, my energy for comic shopping has dwindled.

But then I saw this, an obvious homage to one of my favorite books and characters ever, the first issue from the Helix imprint (before Helix was swallowed up by Vertigo and one of the Big Two) of Transmetropolitan:

It was labeled as an ode to Geoff Darrow, which I can understand.

The comic itself follows a self-proclaimed professional guinea pig, a person who subjects themselves to drug testing from pharmaceutical companies as they try to search out a mythological city that...is special...I can't remember that well.

I used "they" as a pronoun instead of "she" or "he" because neither the character nor the writer nor the artist is transparent about the gender of the main character, and that's pretty interesting from my standpoint. Maybe not for everyone, but for someone who'd never purchased Vault comics before and did solely based on the Transmet cover homage, there's a good chance that reader wouldn't be turned away by that.

FCBD Haul 2019

My LCS had far less variety this year, and I labored to find the cool bizarre things I like. But I've come to terms with that, because Free Comic Book Day isn't about me and other long-time comic collectors, it's about bringing in the occasional fan or the non-fan-but-fan-of-Marvel movies and Star Wars.

My shop gives a free book for coming, and one for each can of food or dollar donated to the Long Beach food bank. I give a ten spot, and leave with 11 books. I'll start bringing my son when he knows not to destroy the colorful paper.

The Interceptor from Vault was the closest thing to Valiant that I could find. I grabbed Spiderman for my son (destroyed), I grabbed the Captain America history magazine from 2016 for my son (nearly destroyed), I grabbed the DC Essential TPB catalog to replace the original one my son destroyed...The Star Wars, Avengers issue, Year of the Villain, tiny Catwoman thing, all for my boy in due time.

I did thumb through that Avengers issue and saw the pages of a new Savage Avengers team, with Wolverine, Elektra, Venom and Conan teaming up?

Birthday Sharing

Happy Free Comic Book Day!

I got my books today in a sadly lackluster offering from my local shop. I love the place, certainly, and came to the realization that the free stuff was going to be for casual fans and not hard-core sequential art heads like me.

Anyway, I have a colleague who is also a fan and who shares my (our) birthday. Each year we get each other books for the day, and this year he gave me the anthology "Where We Live," the artifact that is the grieving process for Las Vegas and the survivors of the attack back in October of 2017. It's sobering, fantastic, and HEAVY.

I got him a book about Louise Michel, a leader of the French Commune in 1871, a civil uprising and taking over of Paris and French government. The Prussians had marched into Paris, and the government capitulated and cut deals to hold power, and this pissed off the commoners. When the Prussians party ended, the split, and the people tossed out the collabortors and set up the Commune.

That this happened ever intrigues me to no end.

Anyway, Louise Michel wore red, and became known as the Red Virgin, and while she was a feminist revolutionary leader, she was also a teacher and a writer of Utopian fiction, an early kind of speculative fiction, like sci-fi.

Hence the name:

Both are worth the time.

Coming Home to Roost

My girlfriend (and later wife) was studying abroad during college in India and met an artist named Tejas. His father was a professor at the university our school was associated with in Pune, two hours outside of Mumbai. My girl sent me some of his drawings and shared with me his love of sequential art and comics, but also his annoyance that virtually no comics outside of Superman, Batman, and Spiderman were available.

I asked for his address and made my way from our bucolic college town back to my brother's place and my dusty boxes of early '90s comics and started sifting. I grabbed twenty or thirty books and started typing up explanations about the minor companies, the context of the artists, the art, the time period before the fall in the mid '90s, the trends during the time...I enjoyed the hell out of sharing the knowledge and history.

That was in early 2004.

My girl (now wife) let me know that she found the artist on LinkedIn and sent him a note, trying to refresh his memory of the trip fifteen ears before. He responded within a day, finding amusement in her attempts to refresh his memory: of course he remembered her, how could he forget? he said. Have you see the comic I made, he asked.

Um, no?

Don't worry, it's in the mail, he said.

And then it arrived.

Tejas wrote, drew, and watercolor painted a very expressive noir-ish private eye graphic novel based on a character he created while in graphic design school in 2006, a few years after getting the package of comics I sent him.

I enjoyed it very much, and especially the ability of the story to work for me, a westerner, but also a story that hit cultural mores that would make sense for to an Indian.

Thanks Tejas! And thanks for the kind note of recollection.

New Voices

As a homer for Valiant, I support things I like as Art while recognizing the good a company can do for the media of sequential art in who creates the stories. As a teacher in a rough neighborhood in South LA, I am keenly aware of social inequities that many of my students encounter daily.

One of my favorite characters in the Valiant stable is Amanda McKee, AKA Livewire, a techno-path, or, a powerful telepathic being who can remotely control any electronic device.

The series starts up after the events of a cross-company major event that saw Livewire use her powers to shut down the entire United States. Planes crashed and people died in other ways, and Livewire became Public Enemy No. 1. She loses her powers by the end of the first issue, and regains them after a few issues.

Anyway, I always offered Valiant the benefit of the doubt when it came to why an awesome black woman hadn't helmed her own title---that The Story didn't lead to a Livewire title yet and not because a black woman could carry a title.

Now that have a black woman leading a title written by, in a shocking twist of events, a black woman. Score one for equity in sequential art and Valiant.

Here are the first four issues with the pre-order covers that my LCS orders for me:

Go Vita Ayala!

Days of Hate Finishes

The speculative fiction story about an armed insurrection within the United States has finished up.

Called Days of Hate, the story was created by Ales Kot and Daniel Zezelj, two Slavic dudes who grew up separately during the dissolution of Yugoslavia and watched how normal society can break down into sectarian warfare and ethnic cleansing.

They've mentioned that they were beginning to see the same rumblings here in the US, and were inspired to create.

The story follows four characters, two of which are a seemingly estranged lesbian couple. One is being routinely interrogated by a smarmy, Trumpian acolyte, slick-haired and oozing evil like a fifties-era movie-Nazi. The other half of the lesbian couple is busy in the underground, setting bombs and blowing up fascist meetings. Her partner is a non-white dude, apart from his family, whom he misses badly.

The first six chapter were split up from the second six by a few months.

When I saw a preview of issue 1's cover, I immediately recognized Daniel Zezelj's work. I became a fan of his back when Starve was released. I'm not exactly sure what it is about his compositions, but I dig it.

There is a level of comeuppance near the end and a murky future going forward, and the point is made: the kinds of feelings and statements that lead down the road to sectarian warfare and ethnic cleansing can only be faced and addressed by sane and sober people with differences talking about those differences.

It's good and a cultural marker, like its spiritual sibling, Calexit.

The Things That Get Made

On a winter break trip to my LCS I found the following collection:

The artist Carlos Ezquerra was the original artist for Judge Dredd, which was created a few years after this, from 1977.

Yes, that's correct, El Mestizo, a boy born enslaved, one parent black, one Mexican, only to return to the States to play Yojimbo with the Union and the Confederacy, is the creation of a pair of Englishmen.

Reading it is weird as well, since at that time in the UK the dialogue and copy is all printed instead of handwritten.

I'll return to comment more once I've finished it. It's an interesting look at "America and American," and very like the Italian comic Tex in that way.