Planetary - Issues #1-22

Written by: Warren Ellis
Art by: John Cassaday & Laura Depuy

This is hands down the greatest, most talented team working in comics today. Period. This isn't a case of a great narrative being discredited because the artist can't tell a story. This isn't a case where an artist does what he or she can to add some original flair to a cliché-ridden script. Quite frankly, you will find no better story, no greater art in any book out right now.


Here's some Matrix action from a page in issue nine.

It's difficult to describe even a plot synopsis for the book up to this point without resorting to the "it's kind of like this" or "...have you seen that" association link, so I'm not even going to try without references. The structure is like the early "X-Files" episodes, each issue being a stand-alone story. On the other hand, there are plot threads that continue from issue to issue. We flash forward, flash back and flash flashing as Ellis fills in a detail here, a memory there. The plots are something like...well, picture a cross-breeding of Godzilla, John Woo, Videodrome, Fantastic Four, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Yukio Mishima, The Invisibles, Mister X, Hellblazer, American 50's B sci-fi movies, Tom Strong, The Matrix and pretty much any other pop culture reference you can thing of. What I'm saying is that it's dense, baby. Dense and mean and exciting.


Hmm...this guy looks vaguely familiar...

And the art...oh, the fucking art! Cassaday's realistic style lends the book a kind of documentary style, a style perfectly suited for the absolutely unbelievable shit that happens in this book. Depuy's colors, too, ensure that no panel is flat and dull. The art isn't just perfectly suited for the narrative of the book, it's perfectly suited for the scale of the narrative of the book. Look at the page above. Look at the page below. These boys and girl know how to use an extreme long shot. The only other book I'm aware that even comes close to this kind of scale out today is The Ultimates, but even Hitch's scale is just a fraction of Cassaday's.


This is what some angels find inside a huge cylindrical ship the size of Manhattan floating undiscovered in our own solar system. Galactus, anyone? How about Rendezvous with Rama?

For those pop culture anthropologists who want to feel smart and--hey, why not?--read the best book currently being put out at the same time, pick up the trades of Planetary. Find the references. Love them. And love Ellis, Cassaday and Depuy for being so goddamned brilliant.

D


Like what you see? Drop us an email at: [Nick] bungalowjones@hotmail.com, [Drew] gronix@excite.com, [ESkalac] skalac@uiuc.edu or [Kate] katedickson@occultmail.com

Batman: Haunted Knight

Written by: Jeph Loeb
Art by: Tim Sale & Greg Wright

Haunted Knight represents Loeb and Sale's--the team that brought us Batman: The Long Halloween and its sequel Dark Victory--first collected collaboration of their Dark Knight work. The book contains three story arcs revolving around crimes committed around and inspired by the Halloween holiday. Surely this premise sounds familiar for those who've read The Long Halloween. In fact, says the writer of Haunted Knight's introduction, the stories collected in this book were actually the inspiration for Loeb and Sale to go on to create the later holiday-themed Batman crime story.


A variant of the Haunted Knight cover.

The three stories collected in Haunted Knight, however, don't have the same dark tone found in The Long Halloween and Dark Victory. In fact, the stories in Haunted Knight have a formulaic quality to them. The issue will start out with an exciting fight; the bad guy will get away; he'll go home as Bruce Wayne and have bad dreams about his parents; at some point the bad guy will be captured; Wayne/Batman will have some cheap revelation about his parents/childhood and why he must be Batman. How many times must one character keep asking the same question and arrive at the same answer?

While not nearly as kinetic as it could be for an action book, the art in Haunted Knight (and Long Halloween and Dark Victory, for that matter) derives its strength from its opulence. The look of the book is no better than when Bruce Wayne is attending a gala. Opulence should never be rushed, which is why the twelve-issue arcs of Long Halloween and Dark Victory work so much better at establishing a tone than Haunted Knight. I should mention that--while Tim Sale's artwork is certainly interesting and distinctive--it's the colors of Greg Wright that really establish such class for the book(s).

While not so impressive after reading Long Halloween and Dark Victory, Haunted Knight serves as an adequate introduction to the decadent world created by Loeb, Sale and Wright. Strangely, this superhero book actually calls out for less character development and more action. There's only so many times one can watch Bruce Wayne go to sleep with the cold sweats and wake up a new Batman.

D

Like what you see? Drop us an email at: [Nick] bungalowjones@hotmail.com, [Drew] gronix@excite.com, [ESkalac] skalac@uiuc.edu or [Kate] katedickson@occultmail.com

Smax

Written by: Alan Moore
Art by: Zander Cannon

It's rare that spinoffs match the quality of their inspirations, but Smax certainly matches the quality if not the tone of Alan Moore's Top Ten. Smax follows one of the characters from Top Ten as he travels back to his homeworld with his partner to attend his uncle's funeral. The funeral, however, plays a very small role in the story. It's simply an excuse to parody The Lord of the Rings and various other fantasy quest stories.


The cover of the first issue of Smax.

This story is accessible to anyone who's taken a stranger back to their hometown and been embarrassed by it. That is to say, this story is accessible to everyone. The humor of the story--and there is a great deal of genuinely funny bits--simply draw the reader into a story that's much darker than is initially expected. Moore somehow mixes hilarity with larger messages taking on everything from bigotry to incest to infanticide. Moore's comedy is the grain of sugar that makes the bitter, bitter medicine go down.


"Don't I know you?

The mixture of comedy to tragedy remains flawless throughout, however, and the pacing is absolutely dead-on. The story clips about at a perfect pace so that it feels as if a great deal of ground is covered in just a scant five issues. Indeed, a lot of ground has been covered in these issues that lend a greated depth to Smax, a character that clearly needs a psychological outlet in Top Ten.

While those familiar with fantasy quest narratives will undoubtedly derive greated enjoyment from the references in the book, there are enough references dropped to give even those tangentially familiar with pop culture a good chuckle. The weakest point of the book is the art, but under Moore's direction--his legendary "novels" of script--it does a decent enough job of telling the story.

Despite the backlash toward Moore from the overwhelming critical praise from his work on Watchmen and From Hell, he remains one of the premiere storytellers in the comic medium and deservedly so. His wit and scope and pace are virtually unparalleled in the medium and it's a boone to those loyal fans who stick with comics that he continues to put out quality work with his entire line of ABC (America's Best Comics) line.

D

Like what you see? Drop us an email at: [Nick] bungalowjones@hotmail.com, [Drew] gronix@excite.com, [ESkalac] skalac@uiuc.edu or [Kate] katedickson@occultmail.com

Lore: book one

Written by: T P Louise and Ashley Wood
Art and Design by: Ashley Wood

Lore: book one suffers from a common enough problem: though it looks hip, Lore doesn’t make a lick of sense. Art that is intended to elucidate remains gorgeous but unclear. The narrative gives no aid since the plot jumps perspective painfully and often. The result is a product that is at best intriguing in its promises, and at its worst simply nice-looking nonsense.





The cover of issue two.


What initially drew me to Lore was the book's intriguing format: the sequenced art of a classical graphic novel often gives way here to tracts of prose. At times this presentation seems a conscious attempt to clarify the almost impenetrable visuals. Other times this text reads like I imagine it was intended: as a short piece of prose fiction. These segments are accompanied by highly stylistic visual work that acts as illustration and serves to slow down the pacing of the book, forcing the reader to break the swift page-flipping of the more standard sequential art in Lore. Ultimately this prose remains in the minority, leaving the rest of Lore to the more standard sequential art.




The cover of issue one.

This is all well and good, the trick makes Lore a longer read than most. It’d be a fine formula if the two types of storytelling complemented each other harmoniously. And from time to time, okay, sure. But because of confusing visuals, because of a narrative style that gives the reader virtually no character to anchor themselves to, and because the underlying story is bewildering in its incorporation of mythologies from around the globe, Lore: book one just falls short.

It sure is an appealing aesthetic though. As testament and final comment most of Lore: book one will end up torn from the binding and taped to my walls.

Eric

Like what you see? Drop us an email at: [Nick] bungalowjones@hotmail.com, [Drew] gronix@excite.com, [Eric] eskalac@gmail.com or [Kate] katedickson@occultmail.com

The Sentry

Written by: Paul Jenkins
Art by: Jae Lee

The premise behind The Sentry unfortunately outshines the actual plot of the book. What if, the book supposes, there is a character from the Marvel universe that predates the Fantastic Four, the first superhero book put out by Marvel? What would make the Marvel universe forget such a hero? And why? And why has this plot to forget the character infiltrated the real universe?


The cover of Jenkins and Lee's The Sentry

The origin of the character is simple enough: Robert Reynolds--an average Joe--drinks a serum and accidentally becomes the most powerful being in the Marvel universe. His molecules have phase-shifted just slightly ahead of the current time and, in conjunction with a photosynthetic reaction, give him limitless powers. Think of The Sentry as Marvel Comics' Superman.

How could such a powerful character be forgotten, ask Jenkins and Lee? The Sentry TPB delves into this very question. As a marketing scheme--and a good one, I might add--Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada "interviews" Stan Lee about his recently discovered character. They go for a Blair Witch-type blur of reality and fiction. The discovery of The Sentry among some "lost files" in the Marvel offices reveals that even the references of The Sentry in our reality have mysteriously gone missing, just like the character in the story that all of the Marvel heroes have seem to have forgotten.

The premise reeks of ingenuity. The execution, alas, does not live up to the hype created around it. We don't spend nearly enough time with Robert Reynolds to understand how he suffers being merely an alter ego. The story explicitly states that the Marvel heroes need The Sentry to prevent a complete universal collapse, but the weight of such a happening simply isn't there. The story simply doesn't live up to the very hype it creates.

On the other hand, Jae Lee's art is outstanding. Lee's artwork has always been messy and dark and full of menace (check out his X-Factor work during the X-cutioner's Song era of X-comics). Lee's heroes stand with a perpetual slouch underlining the human frailties of the Marvel universe's superbunch. Looking at Lee's artwork, one can start to believe that the world is coming to an end and that the heroes standing in its way are truly scared that they won't be able to prevent it.

Unfortunately the end comes too fast and too easy. With so much build-up, we should get more bang for our buck, and we shouldn't be able to predict the ending so easily.

Despite all of this, the concept alone innovates a genre that otherwise relies on rehashing the same hero vs. villian concepts. Bringing the reader into the mystery was a brilliant marketing move by Marvel, but the book needs more than great marketing to make it a classic. If Jenkins had spent more time with The Sentry rather than with all the other heroes The Sentry had allegedly influenced, the story would have had the gravity necessary to push the book to classic status. As it stands, The Sentry resides with DC's Kingdom Come as far as concept is concerned. It simply lacks the grace and the gravity that the opposing company brought to its own end of times book.

D

Like what you see? Drop us an email at: [Nick] bungalowjones@hotmail.com, [Drew] gronix@excite.com, [ESkalac] skalac@uiuc.edu or [Kate] katedickson@occultmail.com

The Maxx - Volumes 1 & 2

Written and drawn by: Sam Keith
Dialogue by: Bill Messner-Loebs

Just as famous for being a monthly magazine that came out every six months, Sam Keith's The Maxx became an instant cult classic of the initial "superhero" line to come out of Image Comics. Overshadowed by the company's incredibly popular necro-hero, Spawn--as all of the other Image heroes were, too--The Maxx treated its readers to a story that incorporated elements of dangerously tangled friendships, prototypical dysfunctional families, the notion that phsical entities could occupy the intangible mindscape and dreams within dreams within other people's dreams.


"Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?"

Taking the notion that each human being occupies two spaces simultaneously--one called "reality" where we are what we have become and the other a place whose title is designated by the perceiver where we are what we have always wanted to be--and begins to question which of these worlds is truer. What happens when the world inside of us begins to shrivel and The City grows to fill the void? Who is The Maxx: a bum who believes he's a superhero or a superhero who thinks he's a bum? What secrets does his mask hold?


What's behind the mask that The Maxx is so afraid of?

Sam Keith's talent is to keep these questions unanswered but to make the reader believe the solution to everything is just beyond the border of the page. He grounds his topsy-turvy Wonderland in relationships so real--yet so dark--that it's difficult to decide what answers will be more satisfying: from finding out more about the Outback (the dreamscape created by Julie, to social worker) to whether Maxx and Julie will be able to liberate themselves from each other's fragmented psyches to figuring out just what the angle is on the delightfully evil Mr. Gone.


Sorta like Carrie, but with a .38 Revolver.

Needless to say, the artwork perfectly complements the prose as jagged frames of other worlds often pierce through the page. There is a primal urgency to every page and every frame, and there is a lot to be said of the kinetic look of the art and the vibrancy of the prose that the MTV version of The Maxx is a virtually direct translation of the first twelve issues of the book to animated form.


Waiting for wisdom from the head of a giant horse.

At its core, The Maxx is just another story about The Journey, except that this journey occurs not in space but in the mind. Characters don't need to physically travel for self-revelation. They occupy two spaces simultaneously--one of space, one of spirit. One space affects the other, and it's all coming apart. The boundaries of the worlds are becoming permeable, but what does that mean exactly. As always, the answers feel like they're beyond the boundary of the pages on the edge of our consciousness in the place where we dream.

D

Like what you see? Drop us an email at: [Nick] bungalowjones@hotmail.com, [Drew] gronix@excite.com, [ESkalac] skalac@uiuc.edu or [Kate] katedickson@occultmail.com

Daredevil Visionaries - Frank Miller, Vol. 3

Story and art by: Frank Miller
Additional artwork: Klaus Janson

Finally in volume three of Miller's Visionaries collection is where we start to see a more mature tone to Miller's writing. With Elektra dead, Matt Murdock (aka Daredevil) must learn to deal with the loss of his first love. The grief over his ex-lover's death makes this once squeaky hero shirk his career as one-half of New York's finest (or as the comic actually states, most expensive) law firm, break off regular contact with those closest to him and destroy the life of his new fiancee.


Daredevil and Elektra play nice on the cover of Visionaries 3

The highlight of the book, appropriately enough, is the last Daredevil issue in the collection. In the issue Daredevil plays a game of Russian roulette with a quadriplegic Bullseye--Daredevil's Lex Luthor--while examining the complex influence violent media has on a child's mind. Miller admits to such violence being culpable of influencing children to perpetuate violence, but he also illustrates that there is an interplay between how a child is raised and what kind of influence that this combined interaction has on an imaginative child. Miller doesn't come up with a solution to the problem of violence in American youth, but he also doesn't simplify the problem either.

Even the What If...? issues at the end of the collection are interesting pieces of work (as opposed to the "What If...Spiderman Had Been Bitten By a Radioactive Frog?" kind of stories). The issues pose entertaining possible alternatives to Murdock's life that are more than just curios. Rather, they reveal different layers to already existing narrative (for the better).

A notable improvement over the second Miller Visionaries volume--and also the first (unreviewed)--we see the mature themes originate here that Miller examines in greater depth later in his career (such as violence in the media in The Dark Knight Returns). Although these are only preliminary probes into this themes, the quality of writing and maturity of the work is astounding, especially considering the standard superhero fare of the other comics of the day.

D


Like what you see? Drop us an email at: [Nick] bungalowjones@hotmail.com, [Drew] gronix@excite.com, [ESkalac] skalac@uiuc.edu or [Kate] katedickson@occultmail.com

Daredevil Visionaries - Frank Miller, Vol. 2

Story and art by: Frank Miller
Additional artwork: Klaus Janson

Miller's Elektra story arc in the pages of Daredevil has often been romanticized by comic enthusiasts for years. There was an uproar when--comics being what they are--another writer resurrected the Elektra character.


The cover for the second volume of Miller's Visionaries collection.

Miller's work on these issues of Daredevil is most certainly the product of the era in which they were written. The artwork gives the impression of posed action figures rather than beings and objects caught in a state of motion. Despite the stiffness in Miller's art, however, he does have an eye for good frame composition. The influence of cinematic composition on Miller's style is obvious.

The story, however, is just simply not as good as its hype. Not even nearly. This is not the Frank Miller who wrote The Dark Knight Returns. This is campy Miller. Characters speak their thoughts aloud...even when they're alone. Plots are based around very simplified notions of good and evil. Relationships between characters have no depth or gravity. Even the Elektra storyline is all surface and camp. If we learn nothing about a character, why should we care if something bad happens to her?

The second volume of Miller's Daredevil Visionaries remains rooted in the kind of hokey fifties "golly gee" mode of storytelling. It's the kind of storytelling acceptable for a young audience, which was certainly the kind audience that superhero comics have always attracted. From Frank Miller, however, we have come to expect a certain level of maturity and sophistication of storytelling even from his superhero work. Sadly, the camp and simplicity of Miller's Daredevil really just makes it Superman with more spandex.

D

Like what you see? Drop us an email at: [Nick] bungalowjones@hotmail.com, [Drew] gronix@excite.com, [ESkalac] skalac@uiuc.edu or [Kate] katedickson@occultmail.com

Alias: Volume 1

Written by: Brian Michael Bendis

Art by: Michael Gaydos

The short review:

Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos’ story of a loud screwing, hard-smoking, knuckle tough anti-heroine is a story both full and complex, built from a host of characters fully realized by their deep and dynamic interiors.

The long review:

Mr. Bendis is on to something.

Alias is a series from Marvel’s “MAX” imprint that ran from Nov. 2001 to Jan. 2004, and that continues, to some extent, in the current series The Pulse. The story, roughly, regards the workaday life of Jessica Jones, an 80’s era Avenger that in times past donned white spandex and pink hair to soar the New York skyline as “Jewel”. Jessica left the Avengers after an event that creeps about the shadows of the series, only revealed explicitly in the final and fourth volume Purple. In the wake of this harrowing event Jewel “comes out” as Jessica Jones, puts away the cape and mask and becomes founder and sole employee of Alias Investigations.

"Jewel"


Beautifully, this is about as “capes and lasers” as the series gets. Though the story flirts with the high-powered Avengers and its members, even these larger than life figures are given human faces by Bendis’ crafty characterization and Gaydos’ crooked pencil.

In the first issue of the first volume (4 volumes in all) our dark anti-heroine gets lonely, gets drunk, and throws herself at Luke Cage, fellow C-list superhero and bulletproof tough guy once known as Power Man. The desperation, the tangible solitude rendered in the act and its visual representation is both repulsive and endearing. She isn’t the brightly-colored paper doll found in so much of comic narrative, the kind whose morality is pinned on like one more tight-fitting costume. Jones and the rest of the characters that populate Bendis’ New York are neurotic, they’re ugly, hell, even Jones’ run in with comic mainstay Captain America has him wearing a weary grin that conceals decades of worry lines. Bendis’ puts us right in the center of Jones’ lively network of insecurities and rough memories. And the payoff for the reader is that watching Jones do good in spite of her shit-colored sunglasses describes for us a character with a dynamic trajectory, something that goes miles towards convincing us to give a damn about Jessica and her blemishes.

"No shit, is that you?"

Michael Gaydos’ rendition of New York and its muttering denizens is smudged and minimalist; the colors are washed out and the lines are hard, providing the foundation for Alias’ visual grime. Frame repetition is common, minor changes are made to a frame and reused again and again alongside one another. It achieves an effect, anchoring the reader in the voice of the character while slipping exposition by beneath our noses. The technique is common to Bendis’ work, and for a story driven comic this strategy encourages the reader to follow plot, not simply float through flashy eye-candy.

Alias contains mature themes, earning its place in the adult-oriented “MAX” imprint. But like all great stories, Alias transcends mere gratuity into something far more gratifying.

If only the world was cool enough to make a television show about this Alias instead.

Eric

Like what you see? Drop us an email at: [Nick] bungalowjones@hotmail.com, [Drew] gronix@excite.com, [ESkalac] eskalac@gmail.com or [Kate] katedickson@occultmail.com

Wil Eisner: 1917-2005

My hero

Will Eisner died January 3, 2005 in the evening from complications following a quadruple bypass heart surgery. He was 87.

I am crushed by this news. I want to weep and wail. But mostly I want to sit down and read The Spirit.

I've had three periods as a comic reader. All three periods involve one or two different authors/writers of the medium. The first period involved the late Mark Gruenwald and the late Jack "The King" Kirby. The second was mainly a Morrison/Ellis/Moore/Gaiman kind of a thing. The third was all Will Eisner's fault. I had completely given up on comics. Will brought me back.

I am beyond grief. I've never known nor spoken to Mr. Eisner. And that is the worst part.

Do yourself a favor. Go seek out a copy of "A Contract with God." This is the bona vide first Graphic Novel. It isn't Will Eisner's best work, but it is the finest example of what Will Eisner meant to comics and what this medium has lost.


Somewhere in South Texas
Nick V.

Like what you see? Drop us an email at: [Nick] bungalowjones@hotmail.com, [Drew] gronix@excite.com, [ESkalac] skalac@uiuc.edu or [Kate] katedickson@occultmail.com