Ok, it appears we might be back in full force, as I was able to upload images today. Yay! We shall see how long it lasts! For now, I’m still breaking these down into more discrete chunks, because … well, it would be really frickin’ long if I didn’t!!!!
Dick Tracy volume 1 (January) by Alex Segura (writer), Michael Moreci (writer), Geraldo Borges (artist), Mark Englert (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer), and Chas! Pangburn (editor). $17.99, 112 pgs, Mad Cave Studios.
This is a fairly standard cops-and-gangsters story, which doesn’t mean it’s bad, just that it’s … a fairly standard cops-and-gangsters story. You love ’em, you know you do! Segura and Moreci give us all the colorful Tracy villains (killing some of them, which is surprising, unless they’re just new Tracy villains created specifically for this story and they’re just in the tradition of old-school Tracy villains, because I doubt if you can just kill off old-school Tracy villains any more than you can kill, say, the Joker), but tempered just a bit by the more “realistic” storytelling and the more “realistic” art of Borges (which is quite good, by the way). The twist seems to be that Tracy has more PTSD than you might expect, but it is post-war ‘Murica, and I don’t know if this is an innovation of these writers (I don’t read a lot of Dick Tracy stories), but it’s done pretty well. Other than that, we get all the beats of a standard cops-and-gangsters story, with Tracy having to go outside the law because there’s a traitor in their midst, and all sorts of twists and turns as he unravels the mystery, and it’s done with nice verve, so even though it feels a bit less like a standard Dick Tracy story simply because it’s not quite as wacky as your standard Dick Tracy story (from what I know of standard Dick Tracy stories, which, as I might have mentioned, isn’t much), but it’s still a pretty good comic. I don’t know if this creative team has continued with this (I don’t think I’ve seen new issues in Previews, but I might be wrong), but I wouldn’t mind reading more of it. [Edi: Yep, there’s more. Okey-dokey!]
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
The Department of Truth volume 5: What Your Country Can Do For You (January) by James Tynion IV (writer), Martin Simmonds (artist), Elsa Charretier (artist), Tyler Boss (artist), John J. Pearson (artist), David Romero (artist), Alison Sampson (artist), Jorge Fornas (artist), Jordie Bellaire (colorist), Aditya Bidikar (letterer), and Steve Foxe (editor). $16.99, 125 pgs, Image.
I, of course, have no idea what goes on behind the scenes of comic book creation, so I don’t like to speak about it too much with any authority, but I do wonder about The Department of Truth. It took several months (over a year?) off, and I don’t know if it was Tynion trying to take over comics by writing literally everything or Simmonds just being slow or something completely different (health problems, family problems, Trump anxiety – it’s a thing!), but it was fine – I don’t mind too much when a comic, especially an indie one, goes away for a while, as I am patient. Then it came back. Huzzah! This trade is five issues long, and Simmonds … draws two full issues and most of the third. Um … what? Again, I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes, and Simmonds’s art does seem like it would take a while, and that’s fine … but it’s still strange. In the third issue, the guest art fits well into the narrative, and that’s fine, and Sampson is a wonderful artist who draws the last two issues, which are a complete little story that does work with her style, but still … what? Did Tynion really want to get it going again and Simmonds just wasn’t ready? Did something happen during the production of the issues? Is Simmonds just slower than I thought? As I noted, Tynion does make the narrative fit nicely into the different styles of the artists, it’s just … odd. C’est la vie!
It doesn’t help that this is probably the weakest trade of the series so far. I mean, do we really need another granular examination of the Kennedy assassination? Tynion is 16 years younger than I am, and I don’t care about the Kennedy assassination (it happened eight years before I was born) as much as people who experienced it, so why does Tynion (and others who are too young to have been alive when it happened)? I mean, the Stones had the final word on it, so why do writers obsess over it so much? Tynion doesn’t really tell us anything new about it – he puts his own Dept. o’ Truth spin on it, of course, but he still doesn’t say anything new – and it’s just the same stuff we’ve seen so many times before. The Marilyn Monroe story that Sampson draws is a bit more interesting, but not by much. I knew it would happen, given that Oswald is such a big part of the series, but man! this is a chore to read at times. Kennedy has been dead for 60 years. Can’t we let him rest? Did popular fiction in the 1940s obsess over Charles Guiteau? Sheesh.
This is still a nifty series, because Simmonds is really good on it and the overarching story is still interesting, but let’s hope Tynion got this out of his system and we can move forward. That would be nice!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
Duck and Cover (March) by Scott Snyder (writer), Rafael Albuquerque (artist), Marcelo Maiolo (colorist), Bernardo Brice (letterer), and RAD (letterer). $19.99, 104 pgs, Dark Horse.
Snyder asks himself, What if those old films from the 1950s in which the authorities tell kids in school to hide under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack actually was … good advice? It’s 1955 in Schellville, Colorado, and a group of mismatched kids who end up in detention (just like The Breakfast Club!) survive a nuclear attack and find out that the world has gone a bit wonky. Our hero, Del, is a black kid living in Colorado, so we already know he’s a misfit, and he’s friends with Oliver, who’s Asian, and they like to make movies. Del is getting ready to leave town for Hollywood, but the destruction of the U.S. gets in the way. Along with them is Junior, who used to be friends with them until he grew up and got good at football; Pugg, the big football star, and Willow, his girlfriend; plus Jack, who’s in a hot-rod gang and is a girl, so she’s doubly a misfit! After the attack, they have to figure out what’s going on and how to survive, as we go from The Breakfast Club to Red Dawn pretty quickly, as the other survivors have been herded into detainment camps and the kids are the only ones who can save anyone. It’s also a big ol’ mash-up of everything people were worried about in the Fifties, from giant monsters to Commie spies, and Snyder just chucks it all in there to create this stew. Honestly, it’s tons of fun. Snyder doesn’t do his father-son thing that permeates so much of his work – Del has a good dad, but he dies in the attack just like so many others, and Del doesn’t really have time to mourn him. There’s a very weird scene in the beginning where Del is attacked by a dog (he loses an eye) and is forced to apologize … to the dog. It feels like something that had to have actually happened and Snyder read about it, because it’s too bizarre to be purely fictional, and in the world of racism, I can believe small-minded white people have forced black people to apologize to an animal that attacked them. It sets something up later in the story, so it’s fine, but it’s still a weird way to show how racist America was in the 1950s. Anyway, all the kids have secrets, of course, that come out during the course of the book, some wackier and some more clichéd than others, but overall, Snyder does a nice job moving things along, and the way the kids figure out how to stop what’s happening is pretty keen.
Albuquerque is phenomenal, as usual. Without giving too much away, he’s called upon to design some neat things and make them campy enough to fit in what we think of a 1950s genre movie (whether sci-fi or horror) but still be scary, and he does a nice job with it. He’s always used blacks nicely, and he does here, giving us nice, chunky shadows for when things get a bit heavy, all while his lines remain crisp and clean. Albuquerque is always good at knowing when to drop holding lines, and that and his nice use of hatching helps soften his lines well when he wants to change the tone of the book. The colors are terrific, too – the book is not dark and Maiolo uses a lot of hot tones because of the violence in the book, but he also uses lighter green-ish tones a lot to imply the sickness of the world as it spirals out of control. It’s an interesting contrast.
I know some people have dug Snyder ever since he ruined Batman, but while I’ve always liked his work, his poor endings and obsession with father-son relationships have always bugged me. Recently, however, he seems to have gotten better at endings, and while he’s still obsessed with fathers and sons, he’s done better at using that motif in his stories. So, recently, his work has gotten much better. Duck and Cover has clever hook, but Snyder manages to elevate the subject matter nicely so that it’s not just a genre mash-up. Which is keen.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf pane:
Falling in Love on the Path to Hell volume 1 (January) by Gerry Duggan (writer), Garry Brown (artist), Chris O’Halloran (colorist), Joe Sabino (letterer), and Virginia Duggan (editor). $9.99, 99 pgs, Image.
I don’t love this comic, which bums me out, because I like Duggan and Brown, and the art, at least, is very nice – it’s crinkly and crusty and scruffy and suits the subject matter nicely and Brown keeps it grounded even when our heroes come across freaky-looking monsters in the afterlife they’re stuck in, and he’s good enough to make some of the more esoteric stuff look ethereal (the luminescent coloring helps, too) even though most of the book feels “heavy” – and the story isn’t bad. It just feels a bit inert, unfortunately. It’s 1877, and two rough warriors – MacRaith in Los Angeles and Ogata Asami in Japan – are killed in fights. MacRaith is after some rich dude with whom he has some problem, while Ogata was part of the samurai rebellion against the emperor and she decided to die with honor than live in shame. When they died, the woke up on a strange island populated by dead warriors, ruled by a man who calls himself Mohan. Basically, he claims they have to fight the corpses that invade the island every day, and if they don’t, he will have them killed. MacRaith and especially Ogata want no part in this, and toward the tail end of the arc, MacRaith discovers that maybe they won’t have to, but getting there is a bit dull. Mohan is a dull dictator, and while, yes, it does seem that the corpses will overwhelm them, he doesn’t really give much more justification for slaughtering them except, “I say so.” Ogata knows only a little English, so she and MacRaith don’t communicate very well, and there’s not much chemistry between them, so the fact that they’re meant to fall in love feels like a hard sell. It just feels like Duggan had a fun idea – two people from wildly different cultures fall in love – and tried to cram it into a genre story, but he didn’t really flesh it out too much. Presumably there’s more to the island and what’s going on, but the preamble just isn’t interesting enough for me to wait until we find out what it is. I guess I won’t be back for volume 2. So sad!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
Finders/Keepers #1 (January) by Vita Ayala (writer), Skylar Patridge (artist), Jason Wordie (colorist), Becca Carey (letterer), Will Dennis (editor), and Pornsak Pichetshote (editor). $3.99, 26 pgs, Image.
These “Horizon Experiment” issues have been interesting, and there’s a trade coming out that would probably be a good buy, but they final three haven’t been quite as good as the first two. As usual, the less the creators actually write about their agenda, the more interesting their agenda becomes, so the first two – about the Chinese “James Bond” and the Muslim “John Constantine” – were better simply because the writers didn’t call too much attention to it, just put them through their paces and that made the skewering of the “Western-ness” of the tropes come out and be more interesting. With the last three, the writers seem to want to bludgeon us over the head with their point, and that never makes for good fiction, although I guess it’s pretty good propaganda. This issue is better than the previous one, as Patridge is a good artist and the story – about an “Indiana Jones” trope who takes stuff from museums and returns it to its homeland – is a good hook. But Ayala gets out her cudgel early and begins beating, as on the first page – the first page! – Ines, our hero, gets yelled at by her grandmother for wanting to go to a university away from her home in Puerto Rico. Of course, it turns out that Ines should have stayed at home because that’s where the heart is, or some such bullshit, but man, it’s annoying reading yet another story in which the hero actually wants to do something with his/her life outside of the small place they grew up in, yet they’re always wrong. This is Hallmark channel bullshit, and it’s annoying. Plus, the villain of the story is so ridiculously over-the-top that it makes it hard to take him seriously. There’s a reason for it (not the best reason, but a reason), and I know Ayala doesn’t have a lot of time to make him too nuanced so she has to put a big neon sign over him that reads, “He’s a REALLY BAD GUY, y’all,” but he says such goofy bad-guy stuff about the natives of Puerto Rico that it makes him far less scary. There are angles here that could be interesting: the bad guy, even if his family was part of the Spanish invasion of Puerto Rico centuries ago, claims he got the artifact that Ines wants back as a “gift” – perhaps that could be true, in which case, who really “owns” the artifact? As much as it’s a good idea to not take artifacts from their native lands, which Western countries have been doing for a long, long time, it’s also true that some artifacts are destroyed by political instability in places (which, of course, is often the result of First World meddling), and perhaps they are safer in the British Museum, which doesn’t appear to be in much danger of getting bombed any time soon. Like most things in real life, the politics of artifact possession and repatriation is far more complex than “They stole it, we want it back,” and it would be interesting to see Ayala – or anyone – tackle that. I know this is only a single-issue story, so we’re not going to get any of that, but instead, we get a fairly dull story with a dull villain. It looks good and for just a story about a bad guy with a dark secret, it’s not bad, but like the previous two stories, it feels like the message gets in the way of the story. That’s a bummer.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
Fishflies (March) by Jeff Lemire (writer/artist), Shawn Kuruneru (flashback art), Beatrix Green (background art assistant), Steve Wands (letterer), and Greg Lockard (editor). $44.99, 359 pgs, Image.
Lemire returns to his roots, sort of, with Fishflies, which is set in the town of Belle River, Ontario, which happens to sit in Essex County (it’s almost directly to the east of Detroit, on the south shore of Lake St. Clair, in case you want to know). The book begins with what looks like typical teenager shenanigans, as three boys are about to enter a convenience store, and two of them dare the other to walk to the store without his shoes on. Why? Well, along the coast of the lake, every year millions of flies arrive (in the afterword, Lemire says they’re from Lake “Eerie,” but, I mean, Lake St. Clair is right there). We might call them mayflies, but those wacky Canadians have to be cool, so Lemire calls them fishflies. They arrive to mate and die, and they cover the town. The boy, Paul, is dared to walk across the parking lot, which is covered with flies. Then, it becomes a crime drama, as someone is currently holding up the convenience store. The robber, Lee, shoots him in a bit of a panic, then flees the scene. Somehow he has a gunshot wound himself (it’s unclear how he got it; I suppose the store owner shot him, but he’s incapacitated when we first see him, and Lee doesn’t look injured at that point), and he staggers into a barn, where Franny finds him. Franny is a kid whose mother “left” (presumably she died, but Fran just says she “left”) and whose father sits around and drinks a lot and who deals with constant snot flowing from her nose (so she has no friends, because everyone at school thinks she’s gross), so when she finds Lee in the barn, she decides to help him. Of course, it’s not that easy, as during the night, he … well, he turns into a giant bug. Oh dear.
Fran doesn’t worry about the fact that he’s now a bug, as he can leap long distances, which she thinks is cool. Meanwhile, Danny Laraque, the police officer in charge of the case, is having trouble finding Lee, which isn’t surprising as he’s now a giant bug. Plus, there’s some old guy who seems to know what’s going on, but his sister doesn’t want him talking to police. And Paul is in a coma, and his mother is in despair, and she thinks it has something to do with the bugs, so she’s checking things out, too. In case you weren’t clued in when Lee turned into a giant bug, this becomes a weird horror story in addition to everything else. Something strange happened to Lee, after all, and a lot of people want to know what. Fran doesn’t, though – Lee the bug is her friend, so she just wants to make sure he’s safe. Unfortunately, you can’t be a giant bug and live among humans, so we know things won’t end well for Lee. So sad!
This is a terrific comic, as Lemire does with horror what good horror does – uses it to examine facets of society that might bother some people. Lee the bug is just more of an outcast from society than Lee the human, and while he did shoot a kid, Lemire does make him sympathetic through the book because he’s, you know, a giant bug now. Fran turns to him because her father is a jerk, but interestingly, Lemire doesn’t make the dad one-dimensionally evil. Yes, he’s a jerk, but it’s also clear he is despairing, probably because his wife is dead, and he can’t get out of it. It doesn’t excuse his behavior, but it does make it a bit more nuanced. Danny, the cop, is seemingly the only black person in town (except for his wife, who shows up only briefly), and some of the racism he experiences is subtle and some is not, but it’s still done well, as Lemire shows it’s, sadly, just how some people think. The mystery about Lee the bug isn’t complicated, but it does unfold well, so that when we find out what’s going on, we have a lot of context to feel it more forcefully. As with a lot of Lemire’s works, the book is filled with sad people who struggle to find small moments of joy, and when they do, it hits pretty hard. Lemire’s art, which is definitely an acquired taste, has become more subtle over the years, as he’s softened his lines just a bit and used a bit more shading, so that we get some really beautiful moments. He can still use harder lines, of course, which is why Lee the bug, with his carapace and spindly wings, looks so out of place in the landscape. The southern Ontario scenery can be bleak, but it still has a tragic beauty to it, while Lee feels like an alien presence, which of course he is.
Lemire has been doing books like this for a long time now, and he always tries to figure out a new way to show how people can overcome the sadness in their lives. Fishflies is a good example of that, plus, you know, it has a giant bug. Nothing wrong with that!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
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Haven’t read this volume of Department of Truth yet (and my memory of the previous volumes has faded), but I think Tynion is just a guy fascinated by conspiracy theories and UFOs and likely grew up watching X-Files and Unsolved Mysteries. He’s got another one, Blue Book, about similar topics. I’ve mostly enjoyed Truth so far– it reminds me of the weird old-school Vertigo comics that would take detours about philosophies or cultural histories, while being tied into a salient contemporary political theme, of groups of people seemingly living in different realities/narratives about the world around them.
I like Dept. of Truth quite a bit, but I am kind of over the Kennedy assassination!
I read V1, liked the concept but thought it spent too much time just discussing the various conspiracies. Plus the art was awful — there was a key reveal where I stared and stared before admitting I had no idea what I was supposed to be seeing.
I have to say that part me is interested in that Snyder/Albuquerque joint, but I read Snyder’s “Clear” after you reviewed it and found it beautiful but kind of disappointing. I have enjoyed some non-superhero stuff from Snyder in the past, but maybe he’s just not for me these days.
I will have to check out Fishflies – Lemire runs very hot and cold for me, but when he’s drawing his own script it is usually quite ginchy.
I’m sorry you didn’t like Clear – I hate it when someone gets something because I liked it and they don’t. I hope you like Fishflies!