It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi
This book by the French illustrator/master draftsman Jacques Tardi does not follow a traditional narrative structure but operates through the narrative of several short sequence and impressions of the subject. What is the subject? Why the Great War itself. Instead of following a character or group of soldiers Tardi chooses to draw out several of the more troubling fates of individuals on the French side of the war.
Tardi does a great job in rendering muddy trenches, artillery craters and the No Man’s Land moonscape. His art shines in the black and white detail and texture of his images. Tardi has an amazing sense for depth and light and his work is truly a pleasure to behold. I would like to provide some more words about his great style, but I will just attach a sample of his work in this book at the end of the post.
The writing is strong as well. The selections of those various moments is refined, even the shortest of sequences contains emotional depth and range – and always reinforcing the final analysis that war is stupid, wasteful and of no use to no one except arms manufacturers. The book presents the inhumanity of war from the trenches and the lower class foot soldiers who had to bleed and die in the insanity that was the Great War in a variety of situations, from being executed as a deserter to having to open fire on civilians. The constant stupidity of those giving the orders and there total disregard for the lives of the soldiers they are responsible for is a central element of the book and a way that Tardi characterizes war as folly.
Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising’s Image of Women
Released in 1999 by Media Educational Foundation, this is a film of a presentation by Jean Kilbourne about how media advertising has portrayed women in sexualized, objectified, submissive and negative ways. This is not a knee jerk reactionary feminist esoteric reading of print and television ads, but a prima facie matter of simple deconstruction. Her readings are straight forward, and she supports these readings with a recognition of the purpose of advertising as well as some quotes from the inside from professional marketers and trade publications.
She utilizes several different domains of advertising for her discussion. She also presents how the depiction of the female has changed in advertising since the late 1960s until now. Of particular note is how she approached female sexuality through the form of various food and “homemaking” ads. She also approaches the topic of women in alcohol ads with a scathing sarcasm that underpins the futile oxymoron of using sex to sell alcohol, a substance which increased usage of decreases your ability to perform the other.
Kilbourne approaches the topics with occasional humor, and though her jokes are occasionally the groan worthy the practiced quips of a college professor’s stale lecture. Not all of the jokes are that way, some of them are genuinely funny…just not all of them. It is a good presentation and should be eye opening to people who have not been exposed to such criticism of the marketing machine. There is the unfortunate truth that this video was produced in the late 1990s, and as sophisticated as marketing was then we have the added dimension of the internet, social media and the increasingly difficult to read method of using ironic posture and self-depreciating truths to develop a virtual authenticity that can sometimes be more powerful than a direct sell of a products attributes (such as the turn that smoking advertisements took in the late 1990s).
You can watch the whole thing on Google video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1993368502337678412
Jack Kirby’s Black Panther Volume 1
Jack Kirby wrote and drew the original Black Panther series in 1977. It lasted for 15 issues, of which Jack Kirby did the first 12. This trade collects issues #1-#7.
Readers are introduced to a plot where the Black Panther teams up with a diminutive artifact collector who is in search of a brass frog which enables the user to travel in time. They are not alone though and in conflict with another collector they drop the frog and bring a super-powered telekinetic evolved human from the “sixth era”. They manage to defeat this thing and a tenuous peace is reached between Black Panther and the competing collector. I would characterize it as von Daniken inspired futuristic technology from the past, though aliens are not involved much as civilizations forgetting lost science (I guess that is more Atlantian).
A group of collectors threaten to destroy the Black Panther’s homeland if he does not journey to a remote temple and secure for them waters that will restore them to youth. The Panther and his diminutive sidekick endeavor to liberate them from the samurai protectors that guard them.
In the later issues of the trade a military coup in underway in Wakanda while the Panther is away, plotted and executed by the Panther’s half brother – a sickly man with a definite Napoleon complex. The trade ends in the middle of this storyline, but a second trade is available.
The Jack Kirby art is top notch, but what did you expect me to say? The colorful machines, futuristic and bizarrely rendered, are all over the place. The Black Panther’s battles are dynamic and gymnastic in the classic Kirby sense. The fact that the story goes on for so long before Wakanda is even mentioned is an interesting writing choice for Kirby. Most stories about the Black Panther are based in Wakanda and the relationship of this nation to the outside world or the internal politics of the African kingdom.
It is a pretty good read and I would probably put it somewhere in the middle of a list of great Kirby stuff. As far as late period Kirby it is pretty high up there.
Proof That John Stewart Is A Cooler Green Lantern Than Hal Jordan
Not a real comic page, but still funny…
Petrograd by Philip Gelatt and Tyler Crook
Petrograd may be the best book I have read this year. I understand that January is not even over, but this year will have a hard time putting anything else in front of me this good. Indeed, if I read this in 2011 I would say that, though the Whitehead and Ferguson edited volume War in the Tribal Zone was pretty damn good, as was Cultural Materialism by Marvin Harris and Reclaiming A Scientific Anthropology by Lawrence Kuznar. None of those book were written or released in 2011, and none of them were graphic novels. The best graphic novel I read last year wasn’t even from last year, Jodorowsky and Moebius The Incal collected editions. Number 2 for 2011 was probably Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1969. Any year that Alan Moore makes comics is a special year these days.
What makes this book immediately stand beside such indie masterpieces as Skyscrapers of the Midwest and Funhome is the masterful engagement of an interesting subject with a stylized look and a great delivery. Petrograd is set in 1916 Petrograd and concerned with the plot to assassinate Rasputin. It is historical fiction divorced from tropes of the autobiographical that you find in many indie graphic novels. It is also not a historically driven piece such as one would find with Pekar’s work. It is an intrigue tale set in the visually rich world of winter in a Russian city on the eve of a singular revolution.
The narrative follows the actions and reactions of a British intelligence officer named Cleary, who is charged with the mission of making sure that the Russians do not make peace with the Germans, thereby removing an important front of Allied support during World War I. To this end he gets pushed into a situation where he must carry out a plot to kill Rasputin, though he has no desire to do so and is pressured into it only to be abandoned by his field office. He also makes friendly relations with a member of a revolutionary communist underground, who becomes not only his lover but the source of his salvation when the Russian government wants him arrested (so they can kill him) and the British government that wants to return him to the German front since he has been classified a rogue agent. The rock and a hard place situation keeps the intensity up, and the character makes a sympathetic hero who is just trying to survive in a situation of politics and war that has decided that he, by name, needs to take the blame for the sins that espionage commits as the matters of its practice.
Crook’s art is great. Clean black and white panels with a bit of roughness. The drawing belie a relative simplicity that propels the reading of the panels and the movement to the next page but are quite beautifully textured pieces. The black and white rendering of the art is aided by a sepia shading that adds to the readers lens of age on the events as well as establishing a historical framing for the context of pre-revolutionary Russia. Visually all these factors build up to a striking underpinning for the text that makes this an above expectation package of text and art. A winner on all counts and a perfect book…at least I had no complaints.
What I Did For My Summer Vacation…
This summer I had a brain tumor removed. It was benign, no cancer, but I now have a titanium plate in my head. Here is a photo from a week after surgery…
It was an epidermoid tumor, a benign tumor that is a result from abnormal cells clustering in the cranial vault during fetal development. It grows very slowly, and then at sometime during a person’s 30s they have motor function problems from the pressure that the growth puts on the brain. In my case it had become so advanced that it nudged my brainstem to one side and grew around some nerves that were responsible for swallowing and breathing. The tumor also caused some pressure to a nerve cluster that resulted in hearing loss in my right ear, though having visited an audiologist I found out that it is a perception problem, not mechanical. The tumor also caused some nerve damage in my right hand which makes fine motor functions more difficult.
The analogy my be crude, but an epidermoid tumor is kind of like how an oyster grows a pearl from a grain of sand. Except that I grew the pearl in my skull.
Marvel Zombies Return by Fred Van Lente
Jump the shark? Was it Marvel Zombies Return that really jumped the shark? Some would argue that shark was jumped a long time ago. After Kirkman left the enterprise, Marvel Zombies 3 or maybe Marvel Zombies vs. Army of Darkness. Really depends on if you can accept the level of humor that entered the books after Kirkman left.
Sure, Kirkman had hilarious moments in his contributions. The look on the face of Galactus after the zombies ate the Silver Surfer stands out. So does the way that the Hulk transforms into a bloated Bruce Banner after his zombie feeding. Later Marvel Zombies contributions differ though in the way that Dawn of the Dead differs from Day of the Dead, especially if you see the cut of Dawn… with the pie fight in it.
Marvel Zombies Return features the zombie Spider-man trying to do the right thing and stop the zombie plague that has spread to a new alternate dimension. The tale takes a far more humorous take on the zombie subject that Kirkman’s at times creepy portrayal. Van Lente rustles up more continuity and in-world references for Returns, and as such the book has a strong parody feel since it commands so much self-referential content. Van Lente also writes some crazy ideas, which are the things I read comics for in the first place. The series also ends perfectly by pulling a Finnegan’s Wake where the end to this book is the beginning of the first Marvel Zombies series. It was a great way to end the story and bury (pardon the pun) the franchise. You also get zombie Moonknight, which is awesome and you know this. Add to that a zombie Wolverine versus a regular Wolverine while in the middle of a melee with Hand ninjas, including a reanimated ninja attacking and screaming “brains” in Japanese. There is some great material with Tony Stark and World War Hulk. A longtime Marvel reader will enjoy all this playing (and death) of supporting characters and continuity. Those readers without those resources and knowledge will be lost and might not enjoy this work beyond the splatterpunk aesthetic.
This book collects Marvel Zombie Return issues #1-#5 and the Spotlight one shot of interviews. The Spotlight material is ok, but it can also seem a bit unnecessary padding. You also get a gallery of all of those zombie variant covers that you have come to expect whenever a new Marvel Zombie series is coming out.
Batman: Rules of Engagement by Andy Diggle, Whilce Portacio and Richard Friend
Collecting Batman Confidential #1-#6, this trade presents a “lost” story of Batman’s early career (though resetting an early Batman period in a technologically and computerized modern world). Lex Luthor trys to take over the US, again but for the first time as far as this story is concerned, with a mechanized robot drone army by a military coup. The story also features the genesis of the Batplane and the Wayne Foundation.
The story is an interesting view of technology and the role of military weaponry in the maintenance of peace in the technologically driven industrial military complex. It makes some points about the needs for human agency in the state of war in order for human morality to be maintained. Diggle questions the shift to the drone version of mechanized war, similar to the way that the Iron Man 2 movie approached the subject.
Portacio does some great art. His Batman is a gritted teeth version, much how Frank Millar’s Year One presented the character. His layout are solid, action oriented and smooth. Sometimes he has an Image feel, in my opinion, especially in the way that he draws Jim Gordon’s mustache.
It was an alright yarn. I have not read a lot of Diggle’s work, so I reserve judgement of whether this is representative of his style. It was not a great story, but it was pretty good and had a lot of fun things going on.
It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken by Seth
Seth writes interesting, evocative stories that deal with how various characters interact with the media that shapes their lives. It’s A Good Life…explores a subject that many comics fans will understand all too well: a collector’s addiction that makes them search out things that most people consider old and worthless paper ephemera, a nostalgia for times and media past, and an obsession with esoteric creators and there forgotten contributions.
This book follows a main character, autobiographically named Seth, as he researches and searches out information about an obscure 1950s gag cartoon creator who signed his work “Kalo”. The book follows the search for more information about this forgotten cartoonist and some meditation on the subjects of nostalgia, failure at relationships, and some self-examination of the motives that comes with a man who lives in modern Canada but collects old issues of The New Yorker from the 1950s.
The narrative, in synopsis, is nothing too spectacular. The way Seth handles the story shows its great literary merit despite this. Several moments in the book have an impact that belies the simple story of the search for an identity of Kalo. Seth makes emotive sequences out of the worry over sick pets, the realization over how pathetic one feels at the recognition that no one really cares about things that seem terribly important to you, the inability to maintain a relationship because of avoidance of emotional entanglements, the subtle hypocritical way we often fail to listen to others about the things that interest them but expect them to take an interest in what we are into – that gentle egotism that we build up around all of our hobbies that we fold into our conceptions of what our identities are.
Seth describes short gag cartoons as an interesting device in the narrative. The choice to describe the strips in a visual narrative as text based anecdotes is an inspired choice, drawing the situation metaphor to what is visually occurring but expressing it verbally in what is felt like a stale, bad joke. This is mirrored in the character of his brother, who appears mentally challenged and is constantly telling bad jokes that Seth has contempt for.
It was a really interesting and complex read, has a lot of heart and is entertaining as well as conceptually enchanting. Seth has a style that really appeals to me, and this book is a good example as any of how he blends a deceptively simple art style and panel layout to make a very readable and engaging narrative.
