Spot the Difference

Go to: Ty Templeton's ART LAND!! (via Laura Hudson)

Blog: You're All Just Jealous Of My Jetpack

Go to: You're All Just Jealous Of My Jetpack by Tom Gauld

Minicomic: Girl Apocalypse

Go to: Angie Wang, Illustrates (via Tom Spurgeon)

Strong Female Characters 2

Go to: Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton

The King's Revenge

Go to: Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling (via Tom Spurgeon)

Supercrooks #1, America’s Got Powers #1, Brilliant #3

I got to read a a few superhero comics with a high concept attached to it this week. On to the reviews.

Supercrooks #1
By Mark Millar, Nacho Vigalondo, Leinil Yu, Gerry Alanguilan, Sunny Gho, Virtual Calligraphy, Dave Gibbons

Mark Millar's and Leinil Yu's new series Supercrooks is another examination of the superhero genre, this time from the POV of the supervillain. Based on reading the inaugural issue, it looks like it's shaping up to be a heist story. The idea sounds interesting, although the playing with genre tropes makes the plot feel kind of obvious. The big eureka moment is when someone figures out that a successful robbery can be carried out by going to a place not patrolled by superheroes. Ya think? The crooks are the usual assortment of losers and lowlifes, while the costumed crime fighters are smug pricks who probably abuse their status. Reaaally? In a Mark Millar comic? Off course, the main protagonist is forced by extenuating circumstances to return to a life of crime.

The art is gritty and attractive, as expected of the mainstream-honed talent working on the comic. The costume designs go for the bold and iconic. If there's a weakness to Leinil Yu's character designs, it's that his people tend to look generic. This caused a bit of confusion when a Las Vegas crime boss and the main protagonist were drawn so alike they might as well be twins separated at birth.

America’s Got Powers #1
Jonathan Ross, Bryan Hitch, Andrew Currie, Paul Neary, Paul Mounts, Chris Eliopoulos, Leinil Yu

America's Got Powers is the superhero genre meets Reality TV. To be more specific, talent-based shows like the wildly popular Idol franchise. But instead of singing and dancing, there are gladiatorial games featuring super powered youths who gained their abilities in utero during a freak event 17 years ago in San Francisco. The TV show was created to channel their energies to less destructive avenues. But it now seems that the show's organizers are beginning to rethink their methods.

AGP isn't particularly subtle with its social satire. The military-industrial complex pulling the strings is obviously a nefarious entity that intends to use the contestants for its own selfish goals. The public that watches the spectacle is bloodthirsty and callous. And the contestants who succeed on the show become self-centered celebrities. There's some commentary on how mass entertainment is a way to distract the populace and a way for the privileged to wage class warfare on them. By contrast, the main protagonist is exceedingly kind to a fault. He also happens to be the one person left inexplicably powerless despite meeting all the conditions that gave the other youths their abilities. The only character who is hard to categorize is the scientist trying to understand the true nature of the super powered generation.

The art pencilled by Bryan Hitch is beautifully detailed in the grandiose, panoramic manner he's become known for. It can also get a bit distracting when he tries to base his characters of real-life celebrities, which is another Hitch affectation.

Brilliant #3
By Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Bagley, Nick Filardi, David Mack, Michael Aoan Oeming

College-age slackers invent superpowers. Nothing about my critique of the first issue has changed. The pacing is slow, and the characters still speak in a kind of shorthand that reveals nothing important, especially about the actual nature of the superpowers in question. The art is still mostly composed of talking heads. Events finally reach a crisis point at the end of the issue, when one of the characters is caught by the authorities using his powers for illegal gain. Three issues in, and the only guy who gets to use superpowers is the story's resident SOB? So no, the perky girl on the cover does not get to shoulder press a sedan. But with an erratic publishing schedule and only two more issues left, this series has pretty much lost any traction for me.

Cosmic

Go to: Zen Pencils by Gavin Aung Than (via Lauren Davis)

He just ripped-off Carl Sagan's star child statements!

Velveteen & Mandala

There's a lot in Velveteen & Mandala, which I believe is Jiro Matsumoto's official introduction to English speaking audiences, that's hard to stomach. It's a veritable series of creepy and disturbing episodes involving gratuitous nudity, violence, mutilation, rape, and defecation. It's a kind of otaku-laden phantasmagoria starring two sailor-suited teenage schoolgirls fighting zombies when they're not too busy making each other's lives miserable. All the while, Japanese society crumbles around them. And that's a strangely upbeat feature of the book. When everything and everyone else is dying, these two symbols of fanboy perversity somehow endure, inexplicably resistant to the forces of decay surrounding them. What does that say about humanity if the freaks and geeks are the people who inherit the Earth?

There's not really a great deal to be said about the plot, as it meanders about from chapter to chapter for 300+ pages and ends up explicating very little. Every so often, bombers drop corpses onto the riverside of Suginami Ward, Tokyo. And into this latter-day Sanzu wander two runaways - the violently antisocial Velveteen, and the ditzy Mandala. They both seem mentally unhinged as they take up residence in an abandoned tank and go about foraging for food. But the story takes a dark turn when the two are drafted into what appears to be an organized effort to process the corpses, which have turned into undead hordes that walk and talk like they're still very much alive. Where they originated from is unclear, but it seems that Tokyo's residents are being overwhelmed by war.

This is a visually dense book. After awhile the pop cultural references start to pile up: The vaguely reminiscent WWII setting, Hayao Miyazaki films, video games, RPGs, etc. As the violence and repellant behavior ramps up, Matsumoto gleefully captures all this with a frenetic drawing style that is both scratchy, yet detailed and accurate. Everything is covered in a texture that exudes a layer of dirt and grime. And the man loves portraying many scenes from the distorted perspective of a fish-eye lens. It's hard for me not to admire his virtuosity, even as I balk from some of the more upsetting subject matter.

What's the point of all this? Not much, actually, beyond Matsumoto exercising his artistic prerogative to shock or titillate. This is a work that actually breaks the 4th wall more than once to admit to the creator's lack of taste. And its social critique doesn't run particularly deep. Its nerd-centric focus seems more a twisted joke than embodying anything seriously-minded. But against my own better judgement, I found the final fate of these two unlikeable characters emotionally affecting. It's a strange, little book, though, which many readers will find unpalatable.

Photography: Off the Grid

Go to: Eric Valli (via Robert T. Gonzalez)

Sketchblog: This Nonsense

Merida

Go to: This Nonsense by Faith erin Hicks (via Tom Spurgeon)

Hm. Interesting title....

Generation Gap

Go to: Sam's Infatuations by Sam Hiti (via Michael May)

Happy May Day!

Hicks the Avatard

Go to: Tor, by Faith Erin Hicks (via Brigid Alverson)

Zutara! Zutara! Zutara....

Frank Miller's Holy Terror

"I hope this book really pisses people off... It's a reminder that we are in the midst of a long war. The enemy we are up against is pernicious, deceptive, merciless and wants nothing less than our complete and total destruction." - Frank Miller

I've heard the label "propaganda" attached to Frank Miller's latest graphic novel Holy Terror, his personal response to 9-11. To me, this conjured up old fashioned images of America's overwhelming military might, Captain America socking Adolph Hitler in the jaw, or Chen Zhen kicking the Japanese occupiers in the face to the adulation of Chinese audiences. But Miller's own stylistic predilections don't lend themselves to that kind of obvious flag waving and chest thumping. Anyone familiar with his proficiency with pulp conventions or his libertarian leanings will not be surprised to learn that Holy Terror is a noire revenge fantasy were the resolute anti-hero single-handedly takes down al-Qaeda instead of the usual powerful crime syndicate. There's not a whole lot that's subtle about the premise or in Miller's execution. But one question I had coming to the book is how much of this is meant to be taken seriously as being applicable to the real world?

Reading Miller's own public statements, he seems determined to be taken seriously as a provocateur. His over-the-top approach to storytelling has already split reader opinions down the middle. And that's when he was mainly sneering at superhero tropes. When exercised on actual events, the results are no less controversial. It also makes a literal reading of Holy Terror problematic. The narrative is bare bones - Analogs for Batman (Fixer) and Catwoman (Natalie) go after al-Qaeda after someone commits a suicide bombing. They torture a member for information and infiltrate the enemy lair. They kill them. The end. The bad guys are ludicrous evil archetypes: Cobra Command led by a preening James Bond villain. Unlike the real al-Qaeda, they're well-equipped to launch a succession of rapid, coordinated attacks. Heck, one of the good guys has the Star of David tattooed to his face in case no one could figure out where the book's politics lies. These action movie cliches might make unsympathetic readers roll their eyes at the whole thing. But despite this exaggerated portrayal, Miller's reactionary ideology is evident throughout. One that's underlined by the angry, snarling tone permeating the book. At no point does he distinguish between religious extremists, Islam, or Arabic and Middle Eastern culture in general. Unlike Craig Thompson, he isn't here to understand. He isn't here to bridge cultures. Miller's "postmodern diplomacy" just wants to search and destroy.

And the fantasy of Holy Terror is oddly seductive because Miller's art is more kinetic than 99% of the art found in American mainstream comics. Holy Terror is drawn in the panoramic format that made 300 an effective visual showcase. But the sweeping compositions are contrasted with sometimes awkward figures and some of the ugliest caricatures I've ever seen Miller draw. The ugliness affects both good and evil characters alike. And it's something that blunts the black and white morality of much its supposed propaganda. Actually, the curious experiments in color and odd background details more often seem to be virtuoso display for it s own sake. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Miller has often referenced his own works and of his colleagues in the past, but Holy Terror's metatexuality seems designed to avoid constructing a complex narrative. It's kind of a lazy shorthand. The emotional resonance of the main characters comes entirely from readers investment in Miller's interpretations of Batman and Catwoman. These characters grunt unoriginal lines like "my city" or "not in my watch". There's the impact of 9-11 itself, the common stereotypes of Muslims and Arabs. And there's the mute portraits of various public figures being counterposed next to panels depicting miscellaneous acts of violence, as if they were ineffectually reacting to these events. The apparent point of relying on these metatextual devices is to facilitate the revenge fantasy. The reader is exposed to familiar images of terrorists doing bad things, then they see Batman going out and killing them.

And in the end, Holy Terror doesn't necessarily deliver a cogent message. On one hand, there's the grim satisfaction of hurting the bad guys who to tried to hurt us. An eye for an eye and all that. But at the very last page is the portrait of a lone man forever terrified by the prospect of fighting an endless war with an enemy he cannot see and cannot understand. He only knows that they want to annihilate his way of life. There doesn't seem to be much hope in this version of the post 9-11 world with a fantasy that both empowers and tyrannizes.

Yoorp!

Go to: Lipstick and Ligature (via Andrew Wheeler)

Cartoon Diary: Ryan Cecil Smith

Go to: The Comics Journal, by Ryan Cecil Smith

Habibi

Habibi is a work of hefty proportions from Craig Thompson. Part Oriental fantasy, part environmental alarm, part religious discourse, and part love story. The book represents a huge leap in Thompson's own artistic ambitions. It's troubling use of of what has been labelled "Orientalist" imagery needs to be mentioned, and has been discussed in other reviews. Anyone who casually glances at it will surmise that Thompson is working in the idiom inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, which puts him in the same tradition of Western works such as Neil Gaiman's Ramadan, Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia, or Disney Studio's Aladdin. Anyone who remembers the controversy surrounding that film due to lyrics that characterized Arabia as a land "Where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face" or the caricatures employed for the cast, will understand the problematic nature of Thompson's undertaking. And those concerns are borne out to varying degrees from his unironic use of certain stereotypes: Ornate Islamic designs, luxuriant palaces, slave markets, questionable ethnic portrayals, harems of naked, languorous concubines, a lecherous and vindictive sultan, jinns, sorcerers, and the vast expanse of the desert dominating the landscape. This is undoubtedly an exoticized view of the Middle East.

And yet there's something genuinely sweet-natured about Habibi. It certainly doesn't cancel out the worrisome aspects of the book, or the fact that Thompson has knowingly participated in an anachronistic storytelling tradition. But Thompson has suffused the graphic novel with emotion and tenderness. His romanticism is the (admittedly controversial) justification for his use of the Orientalist idiom. At the center of the book is the relationship between by Dodola and Zam. They are separated from each other and endure great misery. But the almost insurmountable obstacles they face serves to get the reader to root for their reunion. And the fantastical setting only intensifies the romanticism. The reader is maneuvered into hoping for a certain emotional payoff, which didn't bother me as much as I would have expected. But your mileage may vary.

Thompson continues to explore the same themes found in the sometimes controversial Blankets, particularly when dealing with religion and faith. Whereas that book's autobiographical approach has been criticized for being self-indulgent, Habibi takes on a more an uncharacteristically formalist approach. Blankets was attacked by some for stereotypically portraying religion as buttressing the ignorance of the citizens of small Midwestern towns. This is an understandable reaction, though I myself am sympathetic to Thompson's rejection of this part of his upbringing. Habibi represents a rapprochement with faith through the lens of Islam. Islamic and Arabic culture inspires the narrative structure. And the book is full of digressions ranging from alchemy, mathematics, numerology, medicine, calligraphy, legends, Hadithic teachings, Quranic tales, comparative religion. There's an element of obsessive fascination combined with virtuosic display, and the end result is a sprawling narrative that often threatens to upend the central story. A lot of this tangential material has to be accepted on its own terms if the book is to be enjoyed. Thompson's own formalism isn't exactly subtle, as he often moves from using metaphors to just straight out telling the reader what to think. But this obsessive pedantry results from time to time in some stunning and gorgeous imagery.

The other overarching theme of Blankets and Habibi is the schism between love and sex. A particularly urgent concern for Thompson is how to reconcile physical longing with a deeper spiritual union. The two works betray a certain kind of Christian-based self-loathing, as sex is crucial to much of the misery the main characters experience, whether it's the lust Dodola inspires in men, or the futile sexual abstinence Zam practices. Habibi pulls the reader two ways by fetishizing the decadent imagery of the harem, and particularly Dodola's often uncovered body, while negatively portraying the many depredations she suffers. It's a duality about the treatment of female characters that seems to crop up often in American comics. But the resolution at the end of the book is the kind of mystical communion that doesn't often present itself in mainstream entertainment.

Despite its ambiguous fairy tale setting, the book often comments on more contemporary issues, such as Islamophobia, ecology, and racism. This attempt at relevance isn't itself problematic, but these sections often reveal Thompson's own limitations as an outsider talking about an alien culture. For all the research he's put into the project, the manner in which the book addresses these issues often feels closer to the generic observations most Westerners make about them. There's an omnipresent pessimism about humanity's future. What's lacking is a certain historical specificity and nationally inspired impulse engendered by the intimate knowledge of a true native. And this limitation is only vitiated further by the Orientalist setting Thompson trades in.

This is the paradoxical and flawed nature of Habibi. Behind it is an earnest desire to bridge cultures and civilizations. To find broad human commonalities. And in some ways, it does succeed in its goal. But the image of the East it ultimately settles on is in many ways more quintessential than real. Many will find Habibi too unwieldy or retrograde. I also find that Thompson has written a beautiful and provocative book that I can't help but admire and continue to wrestle with.

Nagraj meets Superman, Spider-Man, and Batman

Go to: io9, by Cyriaque Lamar

Drawing Roulette

Go to: Lucky by Gabrielle Bell

I've lost the love for drawing.

I'm Leaving You

Go to: The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch

Poster Design: Philographics

Go to: Society6, by Genis Carreras (via Robert T. Gonzalez)