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.