Perky art, story keep up interest in Sex

Joe Casey is at his best when he’s experimenting. That’s why his explicitly subversive comics like Automatic Kafka and Butcher Baker stand out so far ahead of his work on Marvel or DC superheroes despite their short runs.

So, what could be more subversive than a comic titled Sex (Image Comics, $2.99 each), which evokes instant interest but is also vague enough that there’s no clue in it to what the book might actually be about.

What it’s definitely not is a traditional “adults-only” tale in the style of late-night weekend programming on Cinemax. There is sex in the book, and it’s relevant to the story. But there’s a lot of other stuff going on here, starting with Simon Cooke, a retired and repressed superhero who returns to run the mega company his family started in futuristic but kinky Saturn City.

Simon’s repression is tested by Annabelle LaGravenese, who was formerly a Catwoman-like villian to Cooke’s Batman. Now owner of a sex club, her appearance confuses Cooke as to what exactly it is he’s repressing — the desire to play superhero or just plain sex.

The art by Piotr Kowalski is terrific. This has a very European look to it, very much owing a huge debt to the works of Moebius in both art style and coloring. Even the lettering evokes Moebius’ work, with colored highlights used instead of bold copy to emphasize certain words.

I’m still not exactly sure a lot is happening plot wise in this book, but after three issues, I’m still interested in Sex, so I’ll be back for the fourth.

Back to our regular program — and Moebius!

Oh, my. It’s been a while since I posted on this blog, but I didn’t think it was THAT long.

Why so long away? Simply put, I’ve been busy with other things — work things that pay money, such as editing special advertising supplements for the local major newspaper. And some of this coincides with a dearth of comics material I was excited about enough to write about.

Anyway, I’m back and plan to do as much with this blog as I can in the near future. Don’t expect daily updates, but I’ve been plowing through some of the massive stacks of graphic novels and comics that have accumulated around me and want to talk about them and some of the overall trends of interest I’m seeing in the medium.

I’m also thinking about some regular features that I’d like to do, including an issue-by-issue re-read of the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby run on Fantastic Four and some critical looks at individual comic-book movies that I’m thinking of calling "The Essential Comic Book Movies." But, we’ll see …

To start off, let’s look at some of the latest books, both old and new, that I’ve cleared off my reading pile the past couple of week. I've got a few of these written up and will spread out the posting dates over the next little while to give everyone a reason to come back.

By far the most impressive comic I’ve read in ages is Epic’s 1980s reprint of Blueberry 2: Ballad for a Coffin (Epic, $14.95, 1989), by Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean “Moebius” Giraud. It’s a crime against art that these stories are not in print constantly for readers to take up. I’m not an expert on Westerns in comics (though Kirby and Simon’s Boys' Ranch is on my list of to-acquire books), but this is an astonishingly excellent series. Paced somewhat like a classic comic strip, though without the constant need to recap the story, these two volumes see the anti-hero Mike Blueberry assigned a secret mission to recover a half-million dollars in Confederate gold thought hidden over the Arizona border.

The story is detailed in the way a good novel is, standing in stark contrast to the slack movie-style plotting of most modern American comic books. Each page of these books, printed in the old Marvel graphic novel style, could be split in half much like the old Carl Barks duck stories were. And something actually happens in each half page — there’s plenty of script and story crammed into each segment, and it’s all well researched and full of believable character-defining script and art.