Obsolete Your Idols

I buy comic books.

Sometimes I buy a few. Sometimes a lot. Sometimes I read them. Sometimes I don't. I'm probably part of what's wrong with the comic book industry today; I am inconsistent in my habits, fickle in my devotion and create a weak secondary market by giving comic books away to people who might otherwise buy books.

But today I want to mention three comic books which are ongoing titles. They're probably also announced in trade-bound editions but since I picked these up as part of my current trend of having a stack to read through in order of anticipated enjoyment fortnightly, that's not how I read them.

The first one is a title I've stopped reading. It's the Blue Beetle. I have fond memories of a character of that name dating back to the early seventies, thanks to The Electric Company.

I'd read some comic books with appearances by a character of that name over the years and probably the most satisfying was a character of a very different name, Nite Owl 2. But, still, fundamentally the things I liked about the character were present. Similar to Batman but less deranged.

So I picked up the new Blue Beetle title and read it. For four issues. I'm not sure if it's the feeling that ethnicity is simultaneously ubiquitous and irrelevant or that the cultural mores seem questionable or if I'm hitting an overdose of magic-based characters but it's just boring me.

So that's one I'm not reading anymore.

Another one is Elephantmen. It's a title from Image Comics which, yes, I know better. I learned years ago [roughly, at the company creation] to not expect plausible artwork, interesting characters or plausible story from them. But this time I let the clerk at the counter convince me to give it a try.

I made it to issue #2, which has text entirely constructed of quotes from the Bible super-imposed over a fight as clearly presented as if it had been directed by Michael Bay. The other serial narrative in the book is a parody of Howard Stern. Only, with less class.

But I said I'd talk about three titles. The third one is going to seem odd. It's a title from Marvel. It's yet another retread of a character from thirty years ago. It's Moon Knight. And it's awesome.

Here's why

• it is a revenge story
• it preserves the entire fucked up canonical Moon Knight back-story
• including the parts which were already self-contradictory
• did I mention it's a revenge story?
• revealing new depth and complexity to canonical characters
• fabulous [new?] villain, The Profiler
• it's totally a revenge story

Moon Knight, along with Baron Winter, Ghost Rider and Iron Fist are my guilty childhood comic book pleasures. So I was nervous about how this new series would hold up to my memories. I even made it worse for myself by picking up the Essential Moon Knight phone-book and reading through it.

This new incarnation of Moon Knight not only does my memories justice, it enhances the whole experience in retrospect and makes me eager for more.

There's some really zany stuff out there and this is one of my favorites: Cat Town. It's essentially captioned found images of cats in clothes, as near as I can tell, done with the sensibilities you'd expect of tv's Spatch. So go, read, download the musical accompaniments, laugh, love and, then, shop. Or the terrorists will have already won.

Here's a pretty cool webcomic story by someone whose career path gives me the creeps.

Let's see. Social commentary, madcap violence, drugs, prostitution, secrets, schemes, dark shadowy authority and monstering. Yup, it's a Spider Jerusalem collection.

If you like this sort of thing, you'll like it. If you've never read Transmetropolitan, this is not where you want to start. It's a climax of the arc and without context, you'll wonder what is actually going on here to a level which will distract from the story. However, if you've started reading Transmetropolitan and begun to wonder if it's all obtainable to trade paper bound collections, very nearly. There are only six issues not in tpb at this point. So you might as well pick this up when you get the rest of the tpbs.

It's got a number of cackle-worthy gems in it and it's, at worst, fun.

Collecting the StormWatch/WildC.A.T.S. crossover and the end of the second StormWatch series.

Let's see. How to summarize.

Warren Ellis kills a whole bunch of characters. Everybody left goes on to be in The Authority.

There. That's all there is to it. I wasn't interested the first time I read the crossover, never having read WildC.A.T.S. nor particularly getting wood over Aliens, and it wasn't any better in this form, though it was more cost effective, I suppose.

Recommended only for the absolute compleatist or the Alien fetishist. Really not that interesting taken as a work on its own.

Character focused stories for Jack Hawksmoor, Jenny Sparks, Jackson King. That's worth the price of admission. The rest of the book is some more scary background stuff with Rose Tattoo and then a sort of Lovecraft Light bughunt.

Probably worth it for the compleatist but there's nothing here you'll need to read. The Jackson King story is an interesting look at militias from someone who doesn't rub elbows with them.

This collection reads like a bridging sequence, fleshing out characters, winding up to something interesting, which turned out to be the second StormWatch series.

I am extremely delighted by Bone and have loved every bit of it I've read. This most recently includes Rose, written by Jeff Smith and illustrated by Charles Vess.

My goodness. What to say? It's pretty. It's a great prelude, with hints of the future storyline. But it also stands alone. So you don't need to have read the rest of Bone to dig this. I don't want to spoil any bits of this for anyone so suffice to say that if you like stories with princesses and dragons, you'll like it. If you don't like this, there's something wrong with you. Get with the program, monkeypants!

So if you've known me for any length of time, you'll have realized I like porn. Pr0n, erotica, smut, et cetera. This includes comic books of what is laughably termed an 'adult nature'. Don't get me wrong, these are quite often awesome, hilarious, titillating and stunning. But I was far more in to them long before I was legally termed an adult.

Probably my favorite artist is consistently Michael Manning and I've got most of the books of his from nbm Amerotica. The latest to fall in to my hands is In A Metal Web II. It appears to be part of a sequel to Hydrophidian, itself a sequel to The Spider Garden.

So, the question you want answered first is: is it hot? If you like black and white fetish sex of beings of ambiguous, fluid gender, yes. Yes, it is.

Less important questions:

• Does it make sense? Not really. But aside from Tranceptor, none of his works make much narrative sense.
• Can I enjoy this book without reading any of the others? Of course. You're not reading it for the story.
• Is there anything other than kinky inhuman sex in this book? Yes. There is some political intrigue, some involuntary drug use and some alien tek.
• Who is this book best for? Someone who likes sex and coloring books, though the paper stock is lousy for crayons. If the binding is similar to past Manning books from the Amerotica line, after four or five readings, pages will be coming out, suitable for marker coloring and putting up on the refrigerator of your mum's house.
• Is there anything to not like about this book? It's too short. It feels like the thinnest of his Amerotica work.

If you've read Spider Garden and Hydrophidian and [one presumes] In a Metal Web, you'll probably want this. If you're asking yourself, "Why have I never heard of this Michael Manning fellow?" you're better off picking up Tranceptor, first, or even Cathexis. The former is a co-created work of science fiction with pony girls and lethal psychic hot chicks which possesses the present flaw of being the only work of the story, and the latter is a collection of short stories which possesses the flaw that they make no sense, though they're awfully pretty to look at and usually a good litmus test for his stuff. If you find them hot, you'll enjoy much of the rest of his work.

Before I get in to the rest of this review, I want to make sure you realize that if you read this one, you shouldn't just read it. Look at the artwork on 100 Bullets: First Shot, Last Call. Look at every freaking panel, follow the stories happening only in pictures, see how the pictures and words play together. The dialogue is strong, meaningful, impacting. But the dialogue is only half the story. The expressions of characters reacting, the small events that twine around the centerpiece, it's exquisite.

Now. Gushing aside. Years ago I picked up 100 Bullets #1 and flipped through it and had such a visceral reaction that I put it on my pull list and I kept getting it in single issues for years. But I never again read it. I couldn't tell you why. I suppose it was a lower priority than my job or the people I spent time with or the ways I wasted my time. During my renewed efforts to convert my single issues to tpbs, I picked this trade up and now I am very, very sorry that I didn't actually read 100 Bullets in all that time I was buying it.

I like dark, twisted, noir stories where the happiest possible ending is surviving another day of your shitty life. That's what this title offers. There's a sinister conspiracy underneath, alluded to from the beginning of this book, but that's not the story I'm reading. I'm reading about the choices between family and honor that Dizzy Cordova faces. I'm reading about Lee's attempts to win back the life that was stolen from him. I'm reading about people trying to do right up to their waist in a sewer. It's never easy but it's often poignant.

This tradebound collects the start of the series [the first five issues and a story from Vertigo: Winter's Edge] and is a visually rewarding, emotionally compelling read. No super-powered goofs in spandex, here. Just realistic people facing tough choices and armed to the teeth with the ability to do physical and emotional damage to themselves and those around them. Go read this one. Don't wait like I did.

Sooo, if you've jumped in to Preacher late, buying up later tradebounds or not even read it yet, just had someone recommend it to you [and here it belatedly occurs to me that I owe Dan Wojcik a debt of gratitude for first telling me I had to read Preacher; thanks, Dan!] you will at some point wonder what the hell is going on here. Ordinarily I would recommend one start at the very beginning, read until the end, and then you'll know as much as you're going to know about what the hell was going on there.

Barring annotations, of course.

But if you think you want to read Preacher but don't want to commit to hunting up the first tpb, you might want to start with the fourth, Preacher: Ancient History. The book collects three stories, originally published as Specials. So they're not part of the published run of Preacher, proper. But they are part of the story. In point of fact, these are Story Before the Story works. So you don't need to have read them. You can get the meat of Preacher off the run itself. But if you really want to crack open the bones and suck the marrow, here's a good thick femur of it.

It's got Saint of Killers, the biography of that ominous presence. Reading this won't spoil any of the regular title for you and it's awfully pretty to look at in parts [and gory in places, sometimes the same places] and has some nice riffs on the fictional West colliding with the genuine West. A fun read.

It's got the Story of You-Know-Who, which is prettier to look at, but more revolting to think about, if one has reached the Kids These Days stage of life. A tale of squandered youth and bad decisions and climbing up out of the wreckage of one's own life. Charming in places but not as interesting for me as Saint of Killers. Yes, I really am recommending a story about cowboys over a story about teenagers. But that's okay, you get both for the same cover price.

Additionally, you get the gem of the piece, Good Old Boys! Now, if you read Preacher, you already know and hate Jody & T.C. in equal measure to adoring those lovable inbred muppets of gleeful immorality. They're funny and disgusting and this story is about them meeting up with a girl in trouble and her would-be protector. There's lots of brutality, lots of over the top mayhem and lots of laughs. I just love rustic perverts and this story has at least two of them.

Read this one if you don't know anything about Preacher and don't want to commit to the regular run without knowing something about it or if you've already read the regular one but ignored the Specials. It's full of death and, in the last story, sex.

Here's a good, dark comic book full of grubby successes and glorious failures. Hellblazer: Fear and Loathing.

You can find itemized summaries of the nerdy details on the web, though the page is theoretically about Swamp Thing. The continuitypages seem to be one of the few good resources for people late to the comic reading game, so I'm glad for the work presented there.

But I didn't know any of the things documented there before I read this comic book and after found them out, it doesn't really change my sense of this comic book. Hellblazer: Fear and Loathing is a nice set of stories. I think the core story line here is about the degradation of the angel Gabriel. It might not be. The core story line might be about John Constantine's failure to maintain his romantic relationship and subsequent descent in to despair. But there are other story lines which cross over these two threads with flourishes and fancies.

There are themes of family and friendship and disappointment, with bits of magic to remind you this is a fantastical narrative, not some kind of soap opera, that you're reading. Angels get laid. Swamp Thing accelerates the growth of a pot plant. There's a talking rabbit, a disappearing lesser god, an immortal bastard gets his head chopped off. That kind of thing.

In the final assessment, it's a fun book with a pretty look but if you haven't heard of Hellblazer by now, you're probably going to have more fun reading Preacher. If this were your first exposure to Hellblazer, you might think it's all about failure and despair. That wouldn't do.

Stormagnet says I would like Under Power and I'd sure like to, but the site is freaking timing out for me. So I saw the current comic and it made no sense to me [but not in the way that Some Guy Named Paul makes no sense to me, nor even in the way that exploding dog makes non-sense to me] but more in the way that Michael Manning's Cathexis made no sense to me. Pretty pictures. Words that were seemingly the output of some mad Markov Chain generator.

So this is a reminder to myself to go back and try to read Under Power again sometime.

Years ago, I fell in love with Warren Ellis's writings in Transmetropolitan and soon scurried out to pick up all of the stuff by him I could find, including the superhero team book, StormWatch. So I've had it all in single issues for the longest time. In an effort to consolidate, I've been buying tradepaper back editions so I can rid myself of the single issues.

Which brings me to Stormwatch: Force of Nature. This is the tpb covering Ellis's first story arcs on the title, though not the first tpb to be printed. Picking it up allowed me to re-read these arcs and remember what excited me so much about it in the first place. Here's an international superhuman police agency, deciding that they've had enough of running after escaping villains hollering, "Stop or I'll ... say stop again!" So the group's leader, the Weatherman, Henry Bendix, makes a number of team changes.

He fires characters who, one presumes, Ellis hated. He changes roles for characters, gives them new tasks, new responsibilities, shuffles the love stories out of the spotlight, and gets serious about making a difference. Changing the world, as it turns out, is hard work. Hard, bloody, sardonic dialogue laced work, to be exact.

I gather this tradebound is being marketed to people who didn't notice Ellis until The Authority as it touts this being the first appearance of Jenny Sparks and Jack Hawksmoor, who continue on in that title. [Yes, yes, I know that I'm one of those people who didn't notice Ellis until Transmetropolitan, put away your nerdier than thou pitchforks.] Which is fine, it's true, this is where we first meet the Spirit of the 20th Century, the girl who is electricity, as well as the God of Cities, involuntary recipient of alien organs. But there's more here than that.

There're screeds about the imposition upon the normal majority by the paranormal minority, a Nietzsche quoting ubermensch with no face, an eyeless Japanese doomsday cult, drinking, sex, poor work attitudes, the New World Order, and high order bluffs. It's a breezy little rip through the countryside with the goggles off and well worth reading, but if you're not already an Ellis fan, it probably won't make you one. So if you're looking to join the cult, start somewhere easier, like The Authority.