Review: Joe The Barbarian by Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy

My review on the Deconstructing Comics website:

http://deconstructingcomics.com/?p=2311

Review: Johnny Cash – I See A Darkness by Reinhard Kleist

New review up at Deconstructing Comics:  http://deconstructingcomics.com/?p=2263

Review: Orc Stain by James Stokoe

New review up at Deconstructing Comics:  http://deconstructingcomics.com/?p=2169#more-2169

Review: Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

New review up at Deconstructing Comics:  http://deconstructingcomics.com/?p=2139#more-2139

Deconstructing Comics website reviews…

I have started to write weekly (or approximating that schedule) review columns for the Deconstructing Comics website.  As such I will have less time for this blog, though I will probably be making posts here linking to reviews as they are published on that website.

So far I have published reviews for Kagen McLeod’s Infinite Kung Fu, Alan Moore’s Smax, Jacques Tardi’s The Arctic Marauder, and Steve Gerber’s Howard The Duck MAX series.

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.

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.

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.

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.