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Wednesday, November 30, 2005
In my country Simpsons bans you!
Russian lawyer wants The Simpsons banned from his country.
"Mr Smykov wanted to have the cartoon series taken off the air in Russia, or at least shown at a later time, claiming it promoted drugs, violence and homosexuality."
Usually a country waits for the Simpsons family to visit them before they get pissed off at the show but one brave man has decided not to wait until then.
The lawyer is taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights. I wonder if recent epsiodes such as the one with 50 Cent and the last Treehouse of Horror count as human rights abuses (hey, I love the show but let's not kid ourselves here)?
For a more positive take on The Simpsons read writers and former show runners Bill Oakley & Josh Weinstein answers questions from the fans on NoHomers.net.
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Tuesday, November 29, 2005
The end of semester blues
Finals are wearing this boy down so blogging here is going to be very slow. Don't worry, I promise to come back with a rousing and riveting post about Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers project now that we're half way through it (here's my article on the series when things were just heating up. My mind's changed on a lot of aspects of the project now).
There's plenty of good comic book blogging going down anyway so I don't think me taking a break should worry anyone. Johanna runs down the good stuff, as well as writing a blog that's worthy of being checked out daily itself!
If you want to be where I'll be, hear what I hear and see what I see then you should be at the Isotope Dec. 2nd at 5:00 p.m. That's when J.H. Williams III will be doing a signing at the store! The man's one of the best artists working in mainstream comics today, as the most recent issue of Desolation Jones certainly proves. Be there!
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Monday, November 28, 2005
Something Cool Monday 11-28-05
That's Johnny Ryan's drawing of Man-Thing. You can feast your eyes on plenty of custom art from one of the funniest cartoonists in the world right here (dig that Spider-Man drawing). You can also order Comic Book Holocuast 2 for plenty of copyright infringing fun (the cover alone is worth the price). Get it if you love or hate comics.
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Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Spanksgiving
I’m flying home tomorrow and won’t be near a computer until Monday. I felt I should leave you with a post of what I’m thankful for concerning comics (and a few other things thrown in). You’ll probably read a lot of posts like this during the week but that’s probably a good thing.
I’m thankful more comics are being archived than ever. Anyone can now familiarize themselves with the works of by Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, Alex Raymond, Frank King and so many others.
I’m thankful that Kevin Huizenga is putting out incredible work.
I’m thankful BeaucoupKevin, Mark Fossen and Dave’s Long Box are blogging.
I’m thankful that when I tell people on campus that I work in comics I get into an interesting conversation about comics with someone, no matter how large or little their knowledge of comics is.
I’m thankful for The Isotope, Comix Experience, Comic Relief, Ralph’s Comic Corner and Meltdown Comics.
I’m thankful I can listen to Jonesy’s Jukebox over the Internet.
I’m thankful I’m around for and participating in what could very well be known as the best time to be a comic book fan.
I’m thankful you read this blog.
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Monday, November 21, 2005
Link Wray 1929-2005
"Rumble" perfected the sound of an electric guitar through an amp with overdrive. It had no words at all but it still got banned from radio stations in the '50s because it sounded so bad ass. Now he is Rock 'n' Roll Heaven.
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Something Cool Monday
Mondays suck for me and probably for you, too. It's hard for me to think of something interesting on this day so I think I'll single out the start of the week with something cool for you to read or look at. I must warn you that I probably won't have something cool every Monday, but I'll try (and if you have something cool to share don't be afraid of e-mailing me).
For now I suggest you check out Todd Barry's piece for New York Times Magazine (you will need BugMeNot to get in). Barry is damn funny, with his CD/DVD Falling Off the Bone being a comic treat. Read the article, buy the CD!
"I don't remember punching him in the face, but if this were a perfect story, that's what would have happened."
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Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Eight word All-Star Superman review*
Two Scots.
One icon.
Pure imagination.
Already fascinating.
*I really hope no one's thought of this yet.
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Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Are you dense? Are you retarded? This is the face the Goddman Graeme McMillan makes when he break the internet in half.
Almost a month ago Graeme McMillan closed down his blog Fanboy Rampage. It was one of the most popular blogs about comics there, in part because of Graeme's eagle-eye talent for spotting the ridiculous and bizarre in fan behavoir as well as the comments section which many times could become ridiculous and bizarre.
I thought FBR and Graeme himself were interesting enough that I interviewed him the weekend after his blog shutdown. I try to understand a little what happens when you become one of the hubs for Internet comic fandom. Listen to the interview and decide if I was successful or not. It starts out calmly then gets really loose near the end, kind of like a long thread at FBR. If you're interested in comic fandom or just want to hear two comic fans chew the fat I suggest you give the interview a listen.
Ian Brill interviews Graeme McMillan
Thank you to Graeme for doing the interview and thank you to Chris Hunter for hosting the file and helping me with the audio.
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Friday, November 11, 2005
You're trying too hard
I didn’t pick up Infinite Crisis #2 on Wednesday, but perhaps I should have. It and the previous issue have led to some great punditry found on the internet. There’s Jim Roeg’s personal and political take on it and the original Crisis. Mark Fossen ponders the point Geoff Johns might be making with Earth-2 Superman’s speech at the end on the second book. Abhay Khosla, the Lester Bangs of comics, sets his targets on the book (scroll down) and comes away with “not completely bad.” The funniest post goes to one Tim O’Neil and his recommendations for new superhero to populate the DC Universe (who doesn’t want to see Greg Rucka work Gotham Central around Shamus O'Flatfoot, Police Leprechaun?).
Fossen’s post got me thinking the most. Is the point of Infinite Crisis going to end up being this meta-commentary of the “darkening” of superhero comics in the past 20 years or will it be something else? It got me thinking of other comics that have decided to take on the purported “maturity” of superhero comics that arose in the 19080’s. The term I came up with (and if you have a better one please share, this one needs improving) is active re-constructionist.
One of the first and so far the best of active re-constructionist books is Alan Moore and Don Simpson’s “In Pictopia,” which was first published in Fantagraphics benefit book Anything Goes #2 and reprinted in Best Comics of the Decade 1980-1990 and the Moore interview book The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. If I recall the story correctly, understand that most of the books I’ll be taking about didn’t make the move I recently made, it features a character not unlike Mandrake the Magician combing a town that fictional comic strip characters inhabit. He sees the city go to ruins, such as where the funny animals live. He meets up with a Plastic Man stand-in but is shocked to see that the second time they meet the rubbery fellow has now joined a gang of superhero thugs that now rule Pictopia. Simpson anticipates the Image art revolution of Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld in the visual change of the character. Jose Villarubia re-colored the comic for its inclusion in Extraordinary Works and his in intro for the story he declared it just as relevant now than when it first appeared in 1986, a claim that doesn’t seem hard to back up.
(It is curious that, as far as I can tell, Moore wrote this story before The Killing Joke. On a BBC interview program Moore talked about how he didn’t like The Killing Joke because it plunges into the dark psychology of Batman and The Joker but doesn’t come up with anything meaningful for all its seriousness. It sounded like Moore was describing the stories he took to task in “In Pictopia.”)
Many thought that Mike and Lee Allred’s story “Batman A-Go-Go” was a commentary on modern superhero comics but I thought it was about the generation gap and culture war of the 1960’s. For a story that does take the William Dozier Batman show to question what directions superhero comics are going in I suggest you see Neil Gaiman and Bernie Mireault’s story “When is a Door…?” from Secret Origins Special #1, reprinted in the quickie movie tie-in book Batman: Featuring Two-Face and the Riddler. The Grand Comics Database Project dubs it “a somewhat goofy version” which is one of putting it. The Riddler is evasive during an entire interview with a television news crew and only seems genuine when he laments no longer seeing villains like Egghead or having sidekicks based on punctuation marks.
Those were just short stories appearing in anthologies. In 1996 Mark Waid and Alex Ross produced Kingdom Come a fully-painted, prestige-issue mini-series that got plenty of hype from DC and Wizard when it arrived. The commentary wasn’t hard to see. Waid and Ross were pitting the classic heroes of the DC Universe, all of them showing the wear of time, against younger “heroes” who acted ruthlessly in their roles of protectors of society. If “In Pictopia” anticipated the early years of Image, Waid and Ross are all but explicit in their dissatisfaction with superhero comics like Youngblood and Spawn. The sequel The Kingdom, which Waid wrote but didn’t have any involvement from Ross if I remember everything correctly, even trots out our man Earth-2 Superman as this excellent analysis of Infinite Crisis #1 from Newsarama points out.
Waid and Ross might have decried Image, which has since become a much different publisher, on a grand scale but an even more effective damnation of this era of superhero comics was in Judgment Day by Moore and various artists. Published by Liefeld’s Awesome Entertainment and featuring Liefeld drawing much of the story itself Moore employs a courtroom drama to scold the Youngblood characters for being the degenerates they were always written as being. The book reveals that a disturbed young man took a book that creates reality and ended up turning himself into a superhero that followed his own brand of justice, surrounding himself with others who felt the same way. Moore was stating that the Awesome Universe was the creation of a dysfunctional, immature mind. It was Liefeld who drew this sequence.
Perhaps the reason that active re-constructionist stories appear from time to time (just recently Drawyn Cooke created one for The Toronto Comics Art Fair’s Free Comic Book Day issue) is that the deconstruction of superhero stories betrays so much of what is appealing about superheroic fiction. No doubt there can be great dark superhero stories but so many try to appear mature by absolving themselves of the over-the-top style and charm that abounds so many comics from the Silver Age of superheroes. One exception, and the reason why this book is so good, is Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Many creators tried to replicate its success by re-creating established corporate properties in a darker mold but most didn’t get that the grim ‘n’ gritty 1986-ness of DKR was only half of what made the book good. Miller also infused his tale with plenty of smirking comedy and operatic sensibility to create a story that celebrates the superhero as much as it subverts it. Where’s the comedy, intentional that is, in “A Death in the Family” (which Miller declared in The Many Lives of Batman as one of the most cynical things he’s seen a major comic publisher do)?
Could Infinite Crisis become, like Kingdom Come, uses high notoriety to put back a brighter world of superheroes? We’ll have to wait and see now, won’t we?
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Thursday, November 10, 2005
Are you now or have you ever been...punk'd?
My class on noir was discussing Abraham Polonsky's Roce of Evil and the fate of Polonsky and star John Garfield when they were called in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The film's wonderful and the HUAC story is heartbreaking and infuriating but it got me thinking. Thinking about something random and bizarre.
What, in these conservative times, Congress set up a committee to find out those in Hollywood who could be undermining the United States by belonging to certain political groups. What would happen if the Republicans called Ashton Kutcher, Nicole Ritchie, Jessica Alba or directors Uwe Boll and Paul W.S. Anderson to testify on the what they have seen in the dark corners of the Hollywood Hills? Would the relationship of Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vuaghn still stand after Vaughn rats out Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller? What kind of episode of Entourage could this make?
So yeah..people's lives were ruined fifty years ago and then I go and write a silly post about it on the internet. Welcome to Hell.
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Wednesday, November 09, 2005
What are politics doing here?
Schwarzenegger hold expensive special election and puts his support behind four propositions, California voters say no to all of them.
On a completely petty level I must tell you that feels good to see my state's Governor, one of the biggest pawns of the Republican machine, fail this hard. All that smug confidence about being the people's Governor now has no credence at all, if it ever did. This just exposes what a waste of tax money this whole shebang was with the election alone costing, from the figures I've heard, between 50 to 70 million dollars.
I'm glad that threats to women's privacy (Prop. 73), teachers (Prop. 74), and unions (Prop. 75) have been stopped but I would have preferred if we just didn't have to go through all this in the first place. Schwarzenegger likes to quote his movies to us thinking it passes for something like charm. Now here's one that best describes his situation: Last Action Hero.
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Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Mr. No Name
Three posts in one day, what is the world coming to?
From Publisher's Weekly Comics Weekly (sign up through the link at the sidebar) here are some interesting excepts from Heidi's interview with Alan Moore:
A recent conversation with Moore showed that things are no better: he now wants his name taken off all of his published work that he doesn't own, including V for Vendetta.
While admitting that his stance is extreme, Moore feels strongly about it, to put it mildly. "It got to the point where I'd become very, very distanced emotionally from a lot of the work which I didn't own. If I don't actually have the moral right to declare myself the author of the work, does that mean that I should have the moral right to declare myself not the author of the work?"
Further down:
But taking his name off the work? Isn't that like throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Moore has a ready answer. "I don't own the baby anymore. The baby is one I put a great deal of love into, a great deal of passion and then during a drunken night it turned out I'd sold it to the gypsies and they had turned out my baby into a life of prostitution. Occasionally they would send me increasingly glossy and well-produced pictures of my child as she now was, and they would very kindly send me a part of the earnings. This may sound melodramatic, but I've been writing for 25 years, and I think that the passion with which I write is probably evident—it's not faked. I really do feel intensely passionate about nearly everything I write. I could sit back, of course, and say all right, just let anything happen, and take the money, but I don't think that would be very honest. It wouldn't feel honest to me, and at the end of the day, I'm the only person I'm concerned about. That is selfish, I know, but at the end of the day, it's whether I'm waking up at four in the morning in a boiling rage or not, and there is no amount of money that can compensate for that. "
On a much happier note, Moore is working on a new novel, which he is "in love with. It is marvelous. It's a book about a subject that is not next to my heart, it is my heart—it's right from the very core of me and what I'm all about. It's the best thing I've ever written. I don't care if it sells or not. At the end of it, I will own this. "
If DC grants Moore's wishes that means the name "Alan Moore" will not appear on further printings of Watchmen, Swamp Thing or the upcoming trade DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore.
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See Brian Posehn killed in a comic book store
I've already made it clear here that I thought The Devil's Rejects was one of the best films of the year. Rob Zombie is on the way to become the Joel and Ethan Coen of horror films in the way he can replicate the style of a certain time, here it's '70s gindhouse films, that both pays tribute to a more organic way of making scary films as well as telling a new and interesting story. The film is "hyper-'70s" in the way it uses the music of bands such as The Allman Brothers and David Essex as well as casting actors like Sid Haig (Black Momma White Momma) and Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead). It's brutal as Hell and also a great pop culture spectacle.
Tomorrow you can see the film for free because Nov. 9th is Rob Zombie Appreciation Day down there at the Isotope. That includes a screening of Devil's Rejects as well as some of Zombie's videos (I hope they play my favorite, "Living Dead Girl." Zombie does as wonderful a job with silent film horror as he does with the '70s horror in Rejects). You can pick up some new comics, drink something nice and watch a great film. Now doesn't that sound like a nice way to spend a Wednesday?
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I want everyone to be happy
Kevin Chruch is reading David B.’s Epileptic which I have just finished. His comments about the book make for smart companion reading to the text. A certain comment of his did stick out for me: “This is truly a mature, thoughtful work that makes the maudlin spandex drama of latter-day Marvel and DC seem like Sesame Street Does Pinter.” At first that comment bothered me a bit because I didn’t see a need to compare Epileptic to current superhero stories. Like Mark Fossen I believe that with so many great works coming from so many different areas it makes no sense to continue having, as Mark wrote, “Marvel/DC frame the debate.”
I then commented on Kevin’s post, writing of attending Beauchard’s panel at San Diego and being a bit glum about how few showed up. I later spoke to a woman who is now entering the graphic novel business after being in the business of publishing books for young adults for many years. When I told her I attended Beauchard’s panel she thought it must have been packed, after all Epileptic was getting write ups in all kinds of prestigious publications. I was sorry to disappoint her and perhaps I should have told her that since Beauchard is not showcasing the latest in “maudlin spandex drama” he isn’t going to draw a big crowd at Comic-Con.
Now I think I know why Kevin decided to invoke Marvel and DC’s books. It can really be frustrating when you see a great piece of work that fills you with so much confidence in the comic book medium, as Epileptic and Black Hole which I’ve also recently read did for me, and see it be ignored in certain communities for work that is deliberately aiming its achievements much lower. It’s no secret that there are a lot of comic book readers who are only interested in superhero fiction. I know many people like these and count friends of mine among them. I’ve met them while living in the suburban outskirts of Los Angeles as well as living in the city of San Francisco (expect an essay on the difference between being a comic fan in the two areas coming soon). I have found the vast majority of them to be bright people and smart readers and have had a lot of great conversation with them about the comics they like. I like some of those comics as well. A part of me also reads comics to follow what’s happening in the world of super-fiction. My frustration sets in because these smart people I know aren’t aware of such books published by Pantheon, Fantagraphics, Top Shelf and other publishers who are presenting us some of the most exciting comics of our time. I know that if given exposure to a comic that is multi-layered and coming from an artist’s personal side they wouldn’t run away screaming while raving that the art is too weird and wondering where The Flash. Instead they would consider it and come away with a valid opinion on the book. That opinion could go in any number of different directions, that’s the way it should be, but the fact that a smart reader can read a smart book and got in some kind of discussion with someone else about it, even if that discussion is just with one other person, is a fine example of the grand things that can come about from the varied and remarkable world of comics we have now.
I share two classes with a friend who I discuss comics with because we both share an admiration for the work of Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns and other popular superhero writers. Bringing in Epileptic one day he said he had never heard of it but he certainly seemed interested when I let him go over it. He’s one of the brightest people I’ve met lately and I would love to hear his opinion on such a book. The sheer luck, or rather “luck,” of sitting next to a contributor to The Comics Journal in a class about John Milton and Ben Johnson is one way to get exposed to different books but it’s a fairly specific way to do so. I wish there was some way that many of these people enthusiastic for the latest superhero titles coming in every Wednesday could be compelled to find out about a variety of books, not as a replacement to what they already read but just further investigation into the interest in comics they already have.
Many of my friends who are super-fiction followers follow Wizard to stay up to date on their favorite titles. I read Wizard when I was younger that was actually the publication that made me seek out my first “indie” books such as Evan Dorkin’s work, a cartoonist that remains a favorite of mine. The days of Palmer’s Picks are over (a column I now have great respect for in retrospect) but I know of people working for the magazine who do want to put lesser known works into the magazine. I remember one editor being proud of getting Kramers Ergot No. 5 mentioned there, which I thought was cool myself. One day at The Isotope everyone was excited about one of the owners Kirstin Baldock getting a two page spread featuring her book Smoke & Guns. I think it’s awesome that someone who would have never otherwise have heard of Kirstin, Fabio Moon, Larry Young or AiT/Planet Lar would perhaps check out something just a little bit off the beaten path because of that article or the other coverage Wizard has done for Ait/Planet Lar books such as Demo. But Wizard is and what it is and there isn’t much point of expecting it to bust open wide the limited world of comics many superhero fans have.
That’s the frustration I feel. Perhaps some of you reading this share that frustration. It is only softened when you resign yourself to the fact that people only have to read what they want and shouldn’t have to change their taste for anyone. That is absolutely true and that’s not what I’m out to violate when I get that feeling of grabbing someone I know browsing the latest Wednesday arrivals and sputtering out “there are so many of books out there that will make you think and will benefit you as a reader! You should just give one a shot just to see, just to expand your horizons a little because you are a wonderful person and as a reader you will enrich yourself and the work you are reading with your interpretation of it! Don’t you want to be enriched!? Don’t you!?” It would be awesome if that reader does check out a piece of work that communicates thought provoking ideas to them. If after that they still want to just stick with the Mighty Two then that’s awesome, too. As long as they know of the many experiences the comics form holds for them.
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Monday, November 07, 2005
My present to you
Mondays can be harsh so that's why I've decided to give you a dose of comics joy. Here you've DC go-go-checks, a '60s Batman, Carmine Infantino artwork and a friggin' house that is made up to look like the Joker's face! That means when Joker's henchpeople were building this thing someone had to say to someone else "make sure you get the green eyebrows over the bricks just right!" Oh well, I can think of worse ways to spend a Sunday.
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Friday, November 04, 2005
"For, if I fail, all life falls with me!'
Joe Casey's column on '70s cosmic comics has updated with a look at Jim Starlin's Warlock. The chracter was overexposed in the '90s with the whole "Infinity Gauntlet/Crusade/War/Watch" business (I guess DC is glad Marvel didn't have a book called Infinity Crisis) but back in the '70s when Starlin was kicking ass on Stragne Tales and later Warlock he was coming up with some great space opera. I like how Casey goes over Adam Warlock's tortured soliloquies which I always felt were one part Hamlet, two parts Flash Gordon. If you can find the "deluxe" editions of these stories (one series came out in the '80s and another in the '90s) I suggest you pick them up.
One issue that I always felt was special was Strange Tales #181, collected in the second issue of the deluxe edition. It's a testament to how freewheeling Marvel was at the time when Starlin could come up with a damning statire on Marvel right in one of their own books. If I remember correctly the plot concerns Warlock encountering a bunch of clowns whose job it is to go through these mountains of sludge and when they find a diamond in the cosmic rough they throw it out. The story is dedicated to Steve Ditko.
The comics also features one of my favorite credit boxes. The bottom of the opening splash page reads: "Al Milgrom -Inks, Tom Orzechowski -Letters, Len Wein -Editor, Jim Starlin -MADNESS" You know you're reading a good comic book then.
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Thursday, November 03, 2005
What the Hell am I doing here?
I covered the Yaoi-Con 2005 over this weekend (sign-up for Publisher’s Weekly Comics Week to see it). I’ve been reading comics since I was grade school and have been covering it since 2004 but this was a unique experience for me. It was the first time I got a taste of what it is like to be completely on the outside of a genre’s scope. I did have a good time at the convention and met a lot of nice, smart people but I also came away wondering what makes up a comic fan.
I’m no stranger to manga so I was all set to enjoy a popular title like FAKE. Reading over some of that book and others I kept thinking the same thing: “I can see why people like it and I can recognize the artistic merit but this just isn’t for me.” I’m a straight American male so there’s no way I’m the target audience. I wondered if that something about me that halted the power of these books from seeping in was either nature, nurture or both.
I was reminded of Lea Hernandez’s excellent article in The Comics Journal #269 where she praised shoujo manga for finally producing works where really spoke to her as a woman. She praised such aspects like “internal emotions expressed visually,” the concentration on costuming and the “visual flash” of “feathers, swirls, plus speedlines, bubbles, flowers, a shot of landscape or other setting.” At the convention, yaoi was described to me as “post-shoujo” and it was Kristy L. Valenti’s article on yaoi in the same issue that helped me leading up to the convention.
Am I in the opposite position of Hernandez? Am I just hardwired to prefer Tokyo Tribes (my favorite on-going manga title) over Gravitation? Certainly it’s not as simple as what gender you are born as (Hernandez doesn’t make it as simple as that in her article) but maybe all the deciding factors concerning what art we gravitate to (no pun intended) are already made by those influential years of birth to three-years-old. I like to examine all aspects of comics in my role as critic (I give Tramps Like Us Vol. 1 a mostly positive review in that same issue of TCJ) but when it comes to reading for entrainment perhaps I’m always drawn to the outlandish grotesque-as-beauty style found in the works of Jack Kirby, Taiyo Matsumoto, Charles Burns and others for some psychological reason.
If that is so, and yet again I must state I’m not sure it’s that simple, I’m glad that there is a bigger selection for everyone, no matter what you are into. When almost every other aspect of popular culture is aimed at my demographic (did I mention I’m in that precious 18-34 range?) seeing a growing convention giving women, as well as a growing number of male readers, a reason to celebrate a genre created by women was a great thing to see.
Of course I still had to bring it all back to me, didn’t I? That’s being part of the problem for you.
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Wednesday, November 02, 2005
The Reject's Guitar
I really enjoyed The Devil's Rejects but I still find it pretty amusing that it would spawn a guitar (by Schetcer). It seems pretty random and might look a bit odd when someone plays it five or so year in the future. I can't imagine seeing someone now playing a guitar with a Jason X theme to it.
This does make me wonder why not more movies have guitars as tie-in products. Why not promote The Weather Man with Nic Cage's sullen face painted across a Gibson Explorer? Don't the producers of Jarhead realize images of soldiers in the Iraq desert is perfect for the sweet, chiming sounds of a Rickenbacker 12-string (made popular by The Byrds)?
We can only hope that these "guitpromos" become such a hit that soon enough you might hear someone strumming a few chords in the seat behind you at the local movie place.
Permanent Link: 8:38 AM |
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Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Solo #7
A few months ago I wrote about the history of my comics reading with Mike Allred’s Madman book being one major discovery. For some older readers it must have been a joy to see Allred celebrate the style and charm of Silver Age books while still delivering an original creation. I was in my pre-teen years when I started reading Madman and hadn’t had much exposure to Jack Kirby or Alex Toth’s art or the stories of Stan Lee and Gardner Fox. Instead I was seduced by all the power that cool looking monsters, pretty women and nutty superheroes realized with only a few well-placed lines could have. For as many years as I had been an American comic book reader here was the promise of a superhero comic finally kept.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve found reprints those original books that inspired Allred and absorb them much the same way I did when I first read Madman. In his issue of Solo Allred takes full advantage of the DC characters he has the chance to use and pays tribute to those books that gave him such a joy when he was younger. It’s a thread throughout the entire book making this anthology feel much more cohesive than other Solo issues. As positive as the book is there’s also a sense of heartbreak over leaving that world behind and now dealing with the less romantic world of adults and their corporate structures instilled in these stories, co-written with wife Laura and brother Lee.
The Hourman story is full of that snappy cool that Allred excels at. Here’s a character that’s basically a drug addict but Allred instead sees it as a chance to have a superhero become this helpful, confident and kind of ditzy do-gooder. He fills the hours by delivering pizzas way ahead of schedule, giving us my favorite line in the book “don’t you want any of this terrific tip?” A superhero who is happy to make a mass of paper boats for some kids is a superhero I can stand by. It’s a slight story that prepares you for what’s coming next but it’s also the closest to the Madman books.
“Doom Patrol vs. Teen Titans” is the books first great story. The ‘60s feel is amped up even more with Laura Allred bringing out the Ben-Day dots. Like the Hourman section it’s about showcasing the (stylized, off-the-wall) human side of these characters rather than saving the universe. The superheroics are there but it’s all in the service of a comedy of DC manners. The Bob Haney/Nick Cardy-era Teen Titans emphasize the first part of their name by throwing a loud party complete with Bobby Sherman records. This leads to the Arnold Drake/Bruno Premiani-era Doom Patrol to complain and Robotman in particular to cry “It’s Clanking Time!” Reading this story I asked myself “why can’t more superhero stories be written like this?” It’s not just pointless nostalgia for comics read as a youth, it’s a genuinely funny story that makes for great comfort reading.
The centerpiece is Mike and Lee Allred’s “Batman A-Go-Go!” It takes place in the William Dozier world of Batman (although certain likenesses are still obscured, notice the whites on Batman and Robin’s eyes). It’s a fascinating story that falls just short of being a great satirical piece. The Pop Art Batman is confronted by Commissioner Gordon, Dick Grayson and Grayson’s new gal pal about the changing world of the 1960’s. I’ve seen other reviews like Jog see this as “industry comment” about the darkening of superhero comics. While there is a bit of that in Batman’s pondering I see the majority of the story’s ideas being about the generation gap between the Baby Boomers and their parents’ disappearing society. Gordon tells Batman “The world’s changed. It’s Haight-Ashbury, not Main Street,” and the gruesome murders in the books are described by the police as “A real Manson Family job.” The story takes the pinnacle of the affluence and irony Boomers reveled in and sticks it next to the real issues of the day like civil rights that more people were into paying lip service for than actually participating in. If this story appeared in Playboy in 1969 it would have received great praise but Lee Allred commits one fatal mistake in the story. When Batman and Alfred are going over the situation they find themselves in the discussion becomes a plodding philosophical debate with long quotes being thrown around. By the time the Riddler arrives declaring “The only thing needed for evil to triumph…” it was clear the brothers Allred were taking something deep and trying to bring as much to the surface as they could. Which is a shame because the story did have a cool idea behind it and features some of Allred’s best artwork, with a splash page of Batman tearing up Gotham’s bad guys in front of a blue spiral, a great late ‘60s touch.
The Fourth World story is a nice joke and also speaks to the Kirby influence in Allred’s work, both as an artist and someone who understood the power of imagination. Yet again it stars fantastic characters but the story’s just a simple wager a bunch of friends would share albeit blown to larger-than-life proportions.
The greatest story of the book is also the last. “Comic Book Clubhouse” stars the Allred brothers and third brother Curtis. It’s the greatest declaration that this book and most of Allred’s work isn’t just one old fanboy speaking to a bunch of other old fanboys but that Allred really loves the world of children’s superhero stories on a personal level. The story isn’t just about the books the young Allreds read. It’s about how the memories of those years can mix with the world of make believe to create such a life-affirming experience. That’s what Allred tries to do in his issue of Solo and he succeeds for the most part. More than any polemics spout out by the characters in “Batman A-Go-Go” this entire books proves that great art can be uplifting and joyful by simply being what it is.
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