I hadn’t been reading webcomics for a bit, so I went back to Webtoons.com and skimmed through their fantasy section. I had previously enjoyed (and blogged about them here) Elf and Warrior and Cyko-KO. This time, I ran across Newman and immediately loved it.
After my first two films last Saturday, I left the large Hall Theatre to see a documentary in the 150-plus-seat De Sève Theatre across the street. The documentary was called Boiled Angels, and it presented the case of zinester and comics creator Mike Diana, whose transgressive work led to him being arrested and put on trial in Florida in the 1990s. I’d followed Diana’s plight at the time through reports in The Comics Journal, and was intrigued to learn more about it now. But if I personally was interested in the film as a look at comics history, I was surprised to find that much of the rest of the crowd was drawn by the chance to see new work by horror director Frank Henenlotter, creator of works like Bad Biology, Frankenhooker, Brain Damage, and Basket Case.
Boiled Angels is his third documentary, and boasts interviews with comics luminaries like Neil Gaiman, Steve Bissette (Taboo, Tyrant, art on Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run), Peter Kuper (The System, World War 3 Illustrated), and Peter Bagge (Hate). It’s narrated by Jello Biafra, and does a strong job in tracking down and interviewing people who were involved with Diana’s case nearly twenty-five years ago. We see and hear from Diana’s parents, from the prosecutors, from journalists, even from one of the women who protested Diana at the courtroom. They speak to an off-camera interviewer we don’t hear; we also see Diana himself, describing his background and life. Diana’s comics are dramatised by a live reading by the creator, the camera focussing on the panels as Diana reads out the dialogue. Other segments of the film, particularly early on, give background on things like the history of horror comics, underground comics, and early-90s zine culture. And there are clips of talk shows and news shows dealing with Diana’s case.
There’s not much debate over what actually happened to Diana. In the early 1990s, when he was in his early and mid 20s, he sold a few hundred copies of his obscure comics zine Boiled Angel through the mail. The content of the zine was brought to the attention of the Florida authorities (although there’s a minor dispute about how). Diana had written and drawn comics filled with horror, rape, mutilation, and various kinds of unpleasantness; seemingly as many kinds of unpleasantness as he could think of. For doing so, he was arrested, tried, and found guilty of obscenity. He was fined and put on probation. Drawing comics would potentially violate his probation and cause him to be thrown in jail. And he was subject to warrantless searches to ensure he was not in fact drawing. In other words: the legal authorities forbade an American artist from making art.
This week Image/Skybound Entertainment broke with new release tradition and dropped the first issue of an all-new series without preamble, by comics titans Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead, Outcast by Kirkman & Azaceta, Oblivion Song), Scott M. Gimple (Punisher: Nightmare, writer and producer for The Walking Dead TV adaptation on AMC), and Chris Burnham (Batman Incorporated, Nameless, Nixon’s Pals), with colors by Nathan Fairbairn who gets to use whichever one he wants as long as it’s red. The first issue of the series entitled DIE!DIE!DIE! went on sale Wednesday.
Kirkman himself made the rather gleeful announcement circulated Tuesday, which is rather last minute as these go, and entirely on purpose:
That’s right, in stores TOMORROW! We want to make going to a comic shop exciting again — a place for discovery! The internet has drained all surprise and anticipation from comics. Everyone hears about exciting new projects and then has to wait months or years for it to be in their hands… and half the time at the end of that buildup, the stories get spoiled in some lame attempt at getting wider media attention. So, surprise! Here’s a new monthly series. How cool is that?! This is literally the only way I can be like Beyoncé.
Gimple added:
I spend most of my time working in TV, the big Walking Dead programs keep me plenty busy, but I’ve had a burning passion for comics since I was nine. I used to go to panels to see Robert Kirkman talk. And now he’s writing quotes in a press release as me that I can read over and tweak!
Yes gentlemen – the euphoria is real and we feel it too.
News broke last night that Steve Ditko had passed away at 90 years old. Ditko co-created Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, the Question, Mr. A (and by those last two characters was the direct inspiration for Alan Moore’s Rorschach), all of Spider-Man’s classic villains and several DC properties. He was also ironically famously reclusive.
So there’s a weird thing that happens in superhero comics after they’ve been running for a while. No matter what sort of superhero we’re dealing with, how weak or powerful, eventually we start to see stories that begin with someone attacking them out of the blue, followed by the hero trying to figure out what’s happening. This happens even more often with superhero teams, since they tend to have publicly known headquarters. While these are sometimes set up as stories of revenge for some past defeat, more often it’s something along the lines of, “The hero is going to stop my evil plan, so before I even start the evil plan, I’m going to take out the hero.” Strangely, after the villain fails to take out the hero, they’ll just go ahead with the plan anyway. But in almost all of those stories, the hero wouldn’t even have KNOWN there was an evil plan if they hadn’t been attacked.
Kevin Matchstick is semi-retired at the start of Hero Denied. He has no idea that the Umbra Sprite has set up a new operation. He’s raising his kids and doing nothing that will cross his path with the Umbra Sprite. He’s not even looking for the Fisher King. Really, he doesn’t start moving until he’s attacked. And even then, he’s basically flailing about with no real focus until his wife and son are kidnapped.
So if the Umbra Sprite had just left Kevin Matchstick alone, he wouldn’t be coming after her. He wouldn’t even have known that anything was going on. Which I suppose is a lesson in how we often make bigger problems for ourselves by overthinking situations.
The issue opens with Kevin and Miranda driving through Fairy Land. Kevin’s got a dozen baseball bats in the backseat, ready to get charged up. I’m not sure how we’re meant to take that fact. On the one hand, it could mean that Kevin’s just getting ready for a lot of fighting. But since he can basically charge any object with magic energy, there is the question of why he’s chosen only to pack baseball bats instead of an assortment of weapons. Or why he doesn’t continue the habit he’s developed in the first half of this series of using improvisation to charge up whatever’s around. It might just be that he’s grasping for something familiar and comfortable as his world is torn apart.
I think I earned a new crown, folks! It took a lot of effort and waiting, but I think my patience has finally paid off: I am now officially the slowest book-give-away-runner at Black Gate! *And the crowd cheers!* I would love to say that a trip to Egypt and two to China were the cause, but honestly, I was one hundred percent channelling Tree-Beard. Let’s not be hasty! Ho-hummmmm.
All that being said, when ents decide to act, they can also be downright precipitous, so I’d better do something! More than a few weeks ago, I reviewed Les Klinger’s excellent new Annotated Watchmen edition, a giant coffee-table book. We had a slew of great entries, but alas, only one could win!
The entries consisted of one-line explanations of what the entrant thought the most influential element of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen. We present here the seven runners-up and the winner!
So I’m starting work on my review for Mage: The Hero Denied #9, when I realize that, while I wrote a rather lengthy review of issue #8, I never got around to posting it. Expect the next review in the next week or so.
See the previous reviews in this series here.
Being a fifteen-issue series, issue #8 is obviously the halfway point for the story and as such we expect it to be something of a turning point. And while some parts of the story are very predictable for a mid-point chapter, this issue did manage to surprise me a few times. The two starting points are Magda waking up in the villains’ lair and Kevin facing the ogre that trashed his house. Magda gets the stereotypical James Bond treatment, where her enemy sets her up in a luxury suite and promises to provide her with every comfort before killing her. And Kevin gets pummeled by a monster. But then both story threads go in unexpected directions.
It starts with the way that Kevin handles the ogre. His focus here is on finding his family and since killing the ogre won’t help him in that goal, he refuses to fight back. The result is that the ogre starts tossing him around while Kevin just keeps asking where his family’s been taken. This isn’t the strike-first and ask-questions-later approach that we expect from Kevin. It’s the tactic of a more responsible hero who is controlling his rage so that he can achieve a more important goal than just defeating the monster.
The scene switches to Magda demanding to see her children. And here we see another parallel between Magda and the Umbra Sprite. She’s told that the Umbra Sprite values her daughters as much as Magda values her children. She’s then reunited with Hugo. And we’re left to wonder what’s happened to Miranda.
Back to Kevin, who continues to get pummeled by the monster, refusing to fight back until his questions are answered. But then he discovers that only Hugo and Magda were captured. Miranda is hiding in the rubble. Once he realizes that his daughter is there and could be harmed, he makes very quick work of the ogre, revealing that he could have easily killed the monster at any time.
We’re back in the wild, ineffable chaos of the comic book in its infancy. Superman had debuted in 1938, an instant smash. The audience clearly wanted more Supermen, but what did that mean? The 1938 Superman barely resembles today’s omnipotent cosmic hero. He couldn’t fly, couldn’t see through objects, couldn’t move at super-speed, couldn’t freeze objects with his breath, couldn’t emit beams from his eyes, couldn’t survive in space. These gaping holes in his resume gave competitors openings to try to beat Superman at his own game.
Maurice Coyne, Louis Silberkleit, and John L. Goldwater, all veterans of the pulp magazine world though none was yet 40, yoked their first initials together to form MLJ Comics in 1939, launching four titles in four months: Blue Ribbon Comics, Top Notch Comics, Pep Comics, and Zip Comics, which would introduce Steel Sterling, the literal man of steel – a cyborg, though, not a robot. MLJ floundered at first. Blue Ribbon #1 started with Rang-A-Tang, the wonder dog, Dan Hastings, fighting the Mexidians on Mars, and Buck Stacey, young range detective.
When I wasn’t sneaking in front of the TV in the wee hours to watch B&W horror classics on the local public station, I was hiding Tales from the Crypt between my mattresses. Much to my parents’ dismay, I was never much into Barbie or the myriad fan-girl magazines of the time, but spent my allowance doing my best to scare the snot out of myself.
Horror comics were easy-to-manage contraband and I became a fan for life, which is why it was particularly exciting when my friends over at Image Comics sent an early notice about their new offering launching later this summer.
Cullen Bunn (Regression, Harrow County) and Mark Torres (Zombies vs. Robots: Undercity) unleash psychological terror, the undead, and a supernaturally bitter cold in a spine-tingling new series, Cold Spots.
Ten years ago, Dan Kerr turned his back on his wife and unborn daughter. Now, both mother and child have gone missing, and Dan must face cosmic terrors to find them again. He soon finds that ghosts stir when his estranged daughter is near. And as the dead grow restless, the cold deepens in… Cold Spots.
“The idea of a sudden drop in temperature accompanying the manifestation of spirits has always fascinated me,” said Bunn. “With Cold Spots, I couple that idea with a tale of very personal loss and dread. As the dead surround Dan and his missing child, the cold takes on a deadly, terrifying ‘life’ of its own.”
Cold Spots #1 (Diamond Code JUN180044) hits stores on Wednesday, August 22nd.
Are you a horror comic fan? What’s your favorite? Post a comment or drop a line to sue@blackgate.com.
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When I started collecting X-Men comics in 1981, there was one universe. There had never been a Marvel reboot, and DC had only had one — the 1956-1958 transition from the Golden Age to the Silver Age. By the time I left comics in the early 1990s, DC had brought us through the second major reboot in history, the classic and brilliant Crisis on Infinite Earths.
However, Marvel still hadn’t really messed up its continuity, although the reprint title X-Men Classics was retconning a number of elements into the early Claremont-Cockrum-Byrne stories.
By the time I came back to comics almost 15 years later, I was bewildered by the X-Men and didn’t know where to pick up. The Age of Apocalypse had happened in an alternate universe as far as I could tell, and while the Onslaught event had apparently killed everyone, they were somehow back in time for there to be not just a few dozen or a few hundred mutants, but over a million.