FF Re-read: The Fantastic Four #3 (March 1962)

"The Menace of the Miracle Man"

Script by Stan Lee 

Pencils by Jack Kirby 

Inks by Sol Brodsky 

Letters by Art Simek 

Something really amazing happens this issue, as the book and its characters take over the book in the last half and start to run away with it, leaving behind a pretty pedestrian plot.

But first, there is some interesting stuff to talk about early on in this issue, starting with the cover, which announces the arrival of both the Fantasti-Car and the superhero costumes. It also is the first issue to feature the famous slogan “The Greatest Comic Magazine in the World!!” And for some reason, I’ve always been aware of a major anatomical error in Jack Kirby’s drawing of the Human Torch that was mentioned in the Overstreet guide listing for this issue. Before I had a reprint or chance to look at a copy of this issue, I was always curious what it was and a bit unimpressed when it turned out to be that the Torch has two left hands. I’m sure this was just a mistake on Kirby’s part, not caught by him or Stan Lee due to the speed with which they were cranking out material at the time. 

It’s also interesting to note that this was not the original cover. The rejected one — reproduced in a lot of places, including the second Marvel Masterworks volume of Fantastic Four — was more in line with the monster-hunters, investigators of the unknown vibe of the first two issues. There also are original, inked pages that show Sue and Reed wearing masks as part of their costumes, which sported a different logo with a stylized “FF” instead of the numeral 4. (You can see those images here.) These images make it clear that there was a lot of back and forth going on about how far to take Fantastic Four into superhero territory.

Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day!

Tomorrow is the first Saturday in May, which means it's Free Comic Book Day!

It's hard to believe this is the ninth Free Comic Book Day — or how radical the idea seemed way back when it started.

Now, we've got this cool video ad with voiceover from Kevin Smith, plus almost every shop (in my area at least) is doing some kind of event or signing.

Of the local events, I have to say Collector's Paradise in Canoga Park has an impressive lineup of creators signing, including a bunch of Top Cow folks (including Marc Silvestri), Bongo Comics' chief Bill Morrison and writer Marv Wolfman. Earth-2 Comics also has some top talent, with writer Mark Waid appearing at the Northridge store. Closer to home, Comic Odyssey in Pasadena actually scored a signing with Stan Lee from noon to 2 p.m.  Tumble Creek Press is taking part in a FCBD Festival at 4 Color Fantasies in Rancho Cucamonga. Meltdown in Hollywood is working with Archaia Studios Press with Fraggle Rock comics creators Sam Humphries and Jeremy Love. And Golden Apple has signings all day with folks like Hulk writer Greg Pak and Manhunter writer Marc Andreyko.

I don't know if I'll have time to hit more than one or maybe two of these, but I definitely will be getting free comics from somewhere!

The freebie I'm most looking forward to is the Dark Horse Magnus/Dr. Solar preview. If you've been reading this blog for a while, it shouldn't surprise you to learn I was a big fan of Jim Shooter's work on the early Valiant titles, and I look forward to seeing him return to these characters.

Beyond that, I hope to come across a few surprises. If you need to find a participating comic shop near you, visit www.freecomicbookday.com, and they'll help you out.

'Kick-Ass' and 'The Losers': A Tale of Two Comic Book Movies

We’re just about exactly ten years into the wave of comic book movies kicked off with the surprise success of Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie in 2000, and the number of comic book movies both set for release and in development still appears to not have peaked.

The most-recent one-two punch of Kick-Ass and The Losers (with Iron Man 2 just around the corner) shows both how far comic-based movies have come while also demonstrating their limits. Having caught both movies the past few days, it’s clear that Kick-Ass is the superior film of the two, though The Losers is not without its charms.

Of course, Kick-Ass was always meant to be movie. The comic book first hit about two years ago (read my review of issue #1 here) and it took until just recently to bring “Book 1” to a conclusion at eight issues. When this book came out, Millar was riding high on the then-upcoming release of Wanted, the movie based on his Top Cow series. Wanted was a hit, and it was made clear in a couple of interviews that the experience on Wanted made Millar want to develop more creator-owned material that he could sell to Hollywood. Kick-Ass was the first such series, with the Image series War Heroes also cast in the same mould, and now his most-recent series, Nemesis.

Millar loves to push buttons, and arguably does it quite well. His comics take rather obvious premises and then takes them to an extreme. Wanted, for example, was about what if the villains won? War Heroes is about superheroes in the military. And Kick-Ass is the obvious what if some kid really did try to become a superhero? This works much better when Millar is playing with his own creations as fanboys are remarkably resistant to anyone messing too much with established icons.

The movie version of Kick-Ass, as adapted by director Matthew Vaughn and his co-writer Jane Goldman, sticks really closely to the comic and successfully retains its subversive tone and Millar’s button-pushing antics. The way the film plays with and subverts the conventions of the superhero genre works for movie audiences now that superheroes have become standard Hollywood fare. Movie audiences are now as familiar with the standard superhero arc as Dave Lizewski is in the movie, and you don’t have to be a comic book obsessive to understand that by becoming Kick-Ass, Lizewski is trying to live out the same arc as Peter Parker, Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne have: finding the hero within as a way to find purpose in life, save the world and get the girl — even if nobody else can know about it.

Anaheim Comic Con makes a play for the mainstream

It was a big weekend for comic conventions this weekend, with the inaugural C2E2 landing at last in Chicago. While most of the comic book publishing industry was there, I was heading south from L.A. to the Wizard World Anaheim Comic Con, which was more full of pop culture celebrities than comic book folks

Let me talk about Chicago first. This was the first show in Chicago put on by Reed Exhibitions, a sister company to Reed Business publisher Variety that has extensive experience putting on trade shows all over the world. It’s best known to comics types for putting on Book Expo America and New York Comic-Con, which has shifted from chilly February to fall for this year’s fifth annual gathering.

By all accounts, this was a show very much like New York — focused on the publishing side of comics. Pretty much all the top writers, artists, editors, publishers and retailers in the comic book business were at Chicago, and it sounds like anyone who loves and reads today’s comics would have had a total blast. As you would expect from a company like Reed, the show appears to have been very professionally run and I particularly like that photos of the main hall showed large windows that let in some natural light to the place, which is always nice at these shows. The usual comic book news sites — Newsarama, CBR, Bleeding Cool, The Beat, Comics Reporter, etc. — were all there and extensively covered the industry announcements.  Few of those announcements struck me as particularly fantastic — there’s always creative churns on long-running titles, a few new titles to announce, etc. But it does sound a like a terrific show that I hope to catch one year soon, especially since I’ve never had the luck to visit Chicago and would like to do so.

Since I wasn’t going to Chicago, I was already planning to spend a day at the new Anaheim Comic Con, when Newsarama’s Mike Doran emailed with some panels they needed covering. If you haven’t seen them already, head over to Newsarama and you can see what I live blogged from a joint Stan Lee and Avi Arad panel, as well as the 1960s Batman TV show cast Q & A and writeups on the Empire Strikes Back 30th anniversary panel, the William Shatner panel and a panel with Superman movie producer Ilya Salkind.

I was unsure what to expect from the new Anaheim convention. I had been to a number of previous Wizard World shows — two in Long Beach, two in Los Angeles and one in Texas about five years ago — and found them varying widely in quality. The first show in Long Beach was quite good, but each subsequent year seemed to slide a bit as the programming never developed beyond publisher promotions and the number and quality of exhibitors appeared to be either static or declining.

But this is a new version of the Wizard World shows. It is less focused on the comic book publishing industry and more about celebrity appearances, collectibles and cosplay. If you must have your comic book industry presence, this model is not going to be satisfying for you. But for the vast majority of people who attend shows like Comic-Con International: San Diego or New York who are less interested in comics and more interested in an overall pop culture experience, this kind of show is going to scratch that itch perfectly.

L.A.'s Comic-Con Bid Looking Up

It looks like we can expect an announcement soon on whether Comic-Con will be moving from San Diego and if so, where.

The field has been narrowed down to either Anaheim or Los Angeles, with advocates for both sides (as well as keeping it in San Diego) making their cases on various sites and on Facebook. (I think Las Vegas in the summer is a poor choice for a consumer-driven, family-oriented event. It has lots of hotel rooms, but with 100,000 people coming to town they won’t be cheap. Also, its convention center is isolated and has outdoor areas that won’t be comfortable to anyone in 105 degree July heat.)

Last week, a pretty impressive Facebook page promoting Los Angeles as the new home of Comic-Con was launched. It features some nice color drawings from Doug Davis, who does the editorial cartoons for The Downtown News. It also lays out a very confident and compelling case for Los Angeles as a good home for the convention. They did a good job of dispelling myths about the area that are easy to believe if you haven’t been in the area in a while.

I have spent a fair bit of time down at L.A. Live in the past six months, seeing movies at the new and excellent Regal Cinemas (all digital screens, great 3D), visiting the Grammy Museum, eating at the restaurants (The Yard House, Trader Vic’s, Fleming’s Steakhouse) and heading over to Staples Center to cheer on the Kings, who take on Vancouver in the first round of the NHL playoffs. Yes, this spot that once was a dirt parking lot next to the freeway has, especially with the opening of the new J.W. Marriott Hotel and the Ritz Carlton hotel and residences (I hear Hayao Miyazaki bought the penthouse for $10 million and made the builders customize the column placement to accommodate his feng shui requirements), is on its way to becoming a world-class entertainment district.

San Diego meanwhile has responded with movement on a plan to expand the convention center and add the space Comic-Con has been requesting.

But it seems to me that the Los Angeles bid is gaining momentum, with the professional Facebook page, my gut feeling that the San Diego move is too little too late and a comment from AEG Group President and CEO Tim Leiweke at a civic event late last week about pending announcements for major new conventions coming to town.

FF Re-read: The Fantastic Four #2 (Jan. 1962)

"The Fantastic Four
Meet the Skrulls From Outer Space!"
Script by Stan Lee 

Pencils by Jack Kirby 

Inks by George Klein (again, that’s the best guess from Mark Evanier, whose opinion in such matters is eminently trustworthy) 

Letters by John Duffy 

The second issue picks up pretty much where the first left off, developing and adding certain themes and motifs the series would repeat endlessly. It’s also a wildly uneven story, but one whose highs outweigh the lulls.

The Fantastic Four continue to be anti-superheroes in this issue — eschewing costumes and hanging out in everyday settings such as Reed’s apartment and a hunting lodge. Apparently, they are already quite famous by this point — the cops all know the FF on a first-name basis and, in an early scene, Sue is given high celebrity status by a jeweler who, frankly, should have known better than to let the Invisible Girl see his famous jewels. But at the same time, they’re also freaks that people are quick to turn against at the slightest provocation. (Apparently, the polarized opinions of 1960s Marvel Universe foreshadowed the current political discourse in the United States.) This dichotomy more than any other has come to define the Marvel style, from these early years through the present day.

This issue begins with the Fantastic Four having apparently gone bad. The Thing destroys an oil-drilling platform off the Texas shore; Sue steals a valuable gem; Johnny melts a marble statue; and Reed reaches into the power station and shuts off the city’s power. These latter two stretch plausibility. If Johnny could get hot enough to melt marble (more than 3,000 degrees), the crowd of onlookers would have been incinerated. And electric utilities are too complicated to just “turn off” with one switch. 

FF Re-read: The Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961)

"The Fantastic Four!"
Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby

Script by Stan Lee

Pencils by Jack Kirby

Inks by George Klein (at least that’s the best guess from Mark Evanier, whose opinion I trust in such matters)

Letters and logo execution by Artie Simek

Colors by Stan Goldberg

Production and logo design by Sol Brosky

Fantastic Four #1 is a fascinating comic, as much for the ways in which it doesn’t stand out as much as for the ways it does.

Let’s start with the cover. First, I love the logo. Every time Marvel decides to change the FF logo, it’s an unspoken strike against the current creative time. Which is not exactly fair, to be honest, but it inevitably reverts to this original version and to me it’s as much a part of the book as the Baxter Building, Willie Lumpkin and all the rest. The lettering style is very much of the times, but at the same time wholly suited to type of book this was to become and very different from the style in vogue at DC and other publishers. Plus, whoever decided to print it as large as possible and in that awesome red ink against the white background was a genius. It was one of the major drawbacks of the original Masterworks and the Marvel Milestone Edition to change the logo to black. The image of the monster is fairly typical for what Marvel was putting out at the time. There’s a weird bit of copy in the blurb about these characters being “together for the first time,” which is true. But it also implies that they’ve appeared separately before, which is impossible since three of them never appeared in any form before this very issue.

Public panic over superheroes would be a running theme through Silver Age Marvel, reaching its heights in J. Jonah Jameson’s diatribes against Spider-Man and the anti-mutant public sentiment in X-Men.

Fantastic Four re-read: Introduction

Being a busy adult means that it is much harder to find the time or willpower to re-read long runs of favorite comic books. In my mid-teens, I often would pick about 10 or 12 comics to read each night before going to sleep and could easily power through a year’s worth of the old Marvel Star Wars or The New Mutants or Alpha Flight in a couple hours before turning out the lights. Most of the runs of comics I know by heart are still ones from those days, in large part because I was reading and re-reading them. I also used to devour new comics as soon as I got them home each week. These days, they often sit around in stacks waiting for me to carve out some time on the weekend or the occasional evening to get to them. Rarely do I find time to go back and re-read much. Because of that, there are some classic runs of comics I have accumulated slowly in recent years that never got a complete run through, and that’s what I’m going to rectify. I fully admit to lifting the idea from other blogs (Tor.com in particular, where they’ve been re-watching Star Trek and re-reading The Lord of the Rings).

I’m starting with The Fantastic Four by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The reasons why should be obvious: this was the superhero comic book that launched what came to be known as the Marvel Universe. It was the backbone of Marvel's rise to prominence in the Silver Age. It also was one of the best lengthy series that Lee or Kirby ever contributed to. And it remains essential and very good comic-book reading to this day.

Amazon kicks in $25 credits in omnibus apology

Looks like Amazon is doing something to make up for the all the canceled Marvel Omnibus orders.

I and many others have received a follow-up email in which the internet bookseller apologizes by bestowing a $25 credit for future purposes. Which is not bad result, considering the deals were too good to be true anyway. And with the discounts Amazon normally applies on the Omnibus books (about 35 percent), everyone should be able to get one of the books they wanted at a really good price. Or at least they will once Amazon restocks.

I have to add a rather nice little addendum to this story. Today, I stopped off at Legacy Comics in Glendale on my way home from a business meeting to pick up this week's new comics. This is a really good comic shop — they're well stocked in just about everything and had a pretty complete selection of Omnibuses, Marvel Masterworks, DC Archives, trades, etc., on the shelves. But they also have a pretty good sale shelf, which just happens to include a number of Omnibus volumes at half off, including Spider-Man Vol. 1, X-Men Vol. 1 and the one I happened to pick up, Secret Wars.

It was not as cheap as what I thought I'd get on Amazon, but I was able to make the decision to buy it with the actual book in my hand and a price tag on the shrink wrap that guaranteed the price. Plus, I got to chat with the clerk about the series — we agreed it was in many ways a Marvel must-have — and how I once owned the full set of comics but sold them at some point and regretted doing so.

So, thank you, Legacy Comics. I hope anyone in the area who wants to get their hands on those books at a real discount stops by your lovely establishment.

Amazon omnibus orders canceled

So the cancellation order finally came for my dirt-cheap Marvel Omnibus order. Here's what they said:

Hello,

Our records indicate you recently ordered 'Secret Wars Omnibus

Secret Wars II Omnibus

Golden Age Marvel Comics Omnibus Volume 1 HC Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic Cover

The Death of Captain America Omnibus

Madman Gargantua (Madman Comics)'. Unfortunately, due to a pricing error, we sold many more than expected. In fact, we completely sold out — we don't have any in stock right now, and we're not even sure if we'll be able to get more.

As a result, we've had to cancel your order. I realize this is disappointing news, and I'm so sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

You may want to check our website from time to time to see if this item is available. If anyone is selling it, you'll see a "More Buying Choices" box on the product detail page; if it's not available from any sellers, you might see an "Order it used" or "Alert me" link. "Order it used" allows you to place a pre-order for the item in case another seller lists the item for sale later. "Alert me" allows you to sign up so we can e-mail you when Amazon has stock available for purchase.

I'm sorry I don't have better news. We hope to see you again soon.

Not that this was unexpected, but it's not like Amazon never runs such sales. Ain't It Cool News frequently posts news of flash DVD sales on Amazon featuring huge discounts for short periods of time, so it was worth a shot to get a chance at those books so cheap. 

It's interesting that their reason for canceling the order is they sold out of those books, not the glitch itself. It sounds like some people are getting at least some of the books they ordered. Maybe if I'd ordered huge quantities they'd have honored at least a few of them.

Maybe next time. 

Go buy Marvel omnibuses from Amazon right now!

Thanks to a tip from Bleeding Cool, go to Amazon as quickly as possible and scoop up the Marvel Omnibus titles you've been putting off buying. Normally priced anywhere from $75 to $100, tons of these books are currently selling on the site for $14.99 all the way down to $8.49!

Titles include X-Men Omnibus Vol. 1, Wolverine Omnibus Vol. 1, The Ultimates Omnibus Vol. 1, Secret Wars and Secret Wars II, Golden Age Marvel Comics and even the non-Marvel $125 Madman Gargantua! I picked up a few of these myself, as these prices are almost too good to be true .... so let's hope this isn't a glitch that will result in the worst-case scenario of Amazon not honoring these prices.

DC Decision on Rumored New Watchmen Comics Will be Telling

The comics blogospher has been abuzz over a report from Rich Johnston over at Bleeding Cool about plans within DC to publish new prequel and sequel comics to Watchmen. The report states this initiative to capitalize on the success of the original graphic novel — now reported to be DC’s best-selling title ever — is a pet project of Dan Didio and made possible by the departure of publisher Paul Levitz, who resisted previous efforts to sequelize Watchmen.

Johnston has a pretty good track record on this kind of thing, so I’m inclined to think there’s something to this. And with announcements pending on Warner Bros.’ plans for the new DC Entertainment, such a project being the first thing out of the gate for the post-Levitz DC will tell us a lot about the company’s future.

To start with, publishing more Watchmen comics makes perfect sense from a purely business point of view. After nearly 25 years in print, the potential for new products that exploit Watchmen has been pretty much tapped out now that we’ve had the movie version, the motion comic and all the merchandising that came with that project.

And looking at the history of sequels to classics — for example, there have been multiple sequels to Casablanca in print and even on TV that flopped and are remembered pretty much not at all — if new Watchmen comics flop it’s unlikely to diminish people’s affection for the original. We’ve already got the movie version, so there’s no way a controversy would damage the property’s chance of being made.

But without additional material, there are few options for DC and WB beyond collectibles for die-hard fans when it comes to new product. You need something new on which to base another videogame, or DCU cartoon, or toys or T-shirts and books. Everything’s already been played out with the original material.

$7 Lois and Clark: A good deal or no deal at any price?

My, how the DVD market has changed.

Yesterday, I was standing in the express checkout line at the Von's grocery store just down the hill from my house in Eagle Rock when I saw this racked next to the cheap celebrity mags and Soap Opera Digest: 

The price? $6.99. I can't say I wasn't tempted by the idea of getting an entire season of a superhero TV show for about the price of a couple of comic books. But then I remembered that I watched some of these when they first came on the air and didn't really care for it then — and I don't think I'll like it any better now.

But still. $6.99! 

Blogging update: New design, new blogs, new dilemmas

If you come to this blog a lot you've probably noticed the redesign. I used a program called Artisteer to create the template, and it worked really well. It cost a bit of money to license, but having a good wysiwyg editor for this kind of thing is worth it because I have hated writing code since I had to write typesetting code by counting lines on a piece of graph paper to layout newspaper pages on the Atex sytem back in the mid-1990s.

Now that I've lived with the new design for a while, I am pretty happy with it, but may still tinker with it a bit as time permits. I definitely need to update the blog rolls and links, so send me your suggestions for additions and I'll take a look.

One site that I've come across that is definitely worth your time is Fanboy Wife. It is the funniest comics site I've seen in a long while.

Of course, this all comes just as Blogger makes an announcement about ending its FTP support. I'm still figuring out if this will be a hassle and I'll just have to move to Word Press or not. I think I can do that pretty easily if needed, but I hope I don't have to.

Off the shelf: The Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures — Deluxe Edition

The Rocketeer is something of a legendary comic book, one that I’ve heard lots about but only had a chance to read small pieces of before now. If you’re unfamiliar with this comic, here’s the basics: The Rocketeer was a throwback to the pulpy, serial adventures of the 1930s written and drawn with incredible love and attention to detail by Dave Stevens. It may have seemed like just another indie comic when it hit the stands in 1981, maybe even like just another knock off of the successful movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, which made hard-luck heroes of that era very popular.

But there’s this character, Betty, the girlfriend of the somewhat hapless hero Cliff Secord. Based on Betty Page, who at the time was largely forgotten except to a few folks like Stevens, the character focused Stevens’ incredible talent and helped make this a comic few who read it would ever forget.

Looking at this new edition, which is the first time all Stevens’ Rocketeer stories were collected in one volume and features some amazing new coloring from Laura Martin, it lives up to its reputation as one of the finest examples of popular comic book artwork. It’s also a blast to read — Stevens is mostly known as an immaculate artist, but this wouldn’t be the classic it is if he also couldn’t work up a good story to hang it on.

Turning comics fans into comics dealers

Comics used to be full of ads for jobs that kids could do to make a little cash. Like learning electronics or selling subscriptions to something called Grit. But I think the ad below is unique in that I don't remember ever seeing another ad urging kids to become local comic dealers before I stumbled across this 1974 gem in the Marvel Milestone Edition of The Incredible Hulk #181 (click for a closer look):

The basic idea is to get kids to buy a dozen comics for $2 and then sell them at cover price to their friends and family. If they sold them all at a quarter a piece, they'd make a whole buck. Having never heard of this, I can't imagine it got a great response or inspired a generation of fans to get into the comics retailing business. But this was around the time the direct market was being formed. I wonder if Marvel thought they'd get a better deal from kids than from stores, which I'm sure got a greater discount than one third.

On another note, I always liked the Marvel Milestone Edition comics, which were reprints of a single comic that included all the original ads, letter cols, Bullpen pages, etc. The first ones came out in 1991 and were reprints of X-Men #1 (the 1963 version) and Giant-Size X-Men #1, both in honor of the release of X-Men #1 (the 1991 version). When they arrived in the shop, I was a bit disappointed these were printed on modern, glossy paper as I had imagined them being true reproductions of some kind on old-fashioned newsprint. But the owner of the store I frequented at the time said I was in the minority, and he had sold far more than he expected to sell because fans liked the slick production values.

Anyway, I wonder why Marvel doesn't consider a special format for collectors, maybe a box set of fairly accurate reproductions of the original periodical comics on vintage style paper, perhaps oversize to set them apart from the originals. I recall seeing this idea done for some German-language reprints that made it over to Meltdown Comics a number of years back. I would be among the fans who would dig such an idea, should Marvel decide to reprint its classic comics in yet another format.

Super heroes in Cirque du Soleil's Viva Elvis!

I went to Las Vegas last weekend for the first time in several years, and caught the new Cirque du Soleil show, Viva Elvis!, at the new Aria Hotel and Casino in the CityCenter complex.

The show was, as usual for Cirque du Soleil, impressive and fun. The show is a celebration of the life and music of Elvis Presley, and as such features more straight musical numbers and fewer circus elements than most of the troupe's shows.

But the best acrobatic sequence by far was based on a line Elvis once uttered about loving super hero comics when he was a kid — which opened the door for Cirque to do a full on trampoline act with performers dressed in generic superhero costumes. Using a set that featured multiple trampolines, about a half-dozen superheroes bounced off the ground, ran up walls and leaped over each other and various obstacles. It was many people's favorite segment in the show and a good example of how you could do some superheroics on a live stage. It makes me more optimistic that Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark could be more than just another musical.

It also opens up some interesting possibilities. Wouldn't a Marvel Cirque show be incredible? I'm not sure how into the idea Disney would be, especially in Las Vegas, but they do have those theme parks and resorts that are dying for Marvel content and need live entertainment in addition to just rides.

You really don't want to "read" Hulk's "Grab Bag"

You won't like him when he's angry, but you'll like him even less if you make him angry by messing with his "grab bag."

Off the Shelf: The Great Outdoor Fight

There’s a lot to like in Chris Onstad’s webcomic turned graphic novel, most notably the absurd sense of humor and the faux history that forms the core of The Great Outdoor Fight (Dark Horse, $14.95).  This book is a collection of the webcomic Achewood, which Onstad has been working on since late 2001.

Like a lot of the better comics, the premise sounds kind of absurd on the surface: A strange tradition called The Great Outdoor Fight, in which 3,000 men gather to duke it out over three days in a three-acre pitch draws the interest of a strange guy named Raymond Quentin Smuckles. I can’t tell what he’s supposed to be — teddy bear, cat, unknown type of dog — but I do know he wears glasses and a thong worthy of one of those Marvel swimsuit specials of the 1990s. Ray’s father entered and won the 1973 fight, and Ray sets out to do the same with the help of his equally strange pals Roast Beef and Barry. 

Onstad’s invented a whole history for this fight, complete with strange traditions and rules, that’s convincing and perhaps the most fun part of the strip. The humor’s absurd, stemming from the obsessions and tortured thinking of the characters. That their plots make sense, that a lot of folks will see people they know in these characters is both hilarious and down right frightening given their single-minded inventiveness in achieving the oddest goals for the strangest of reasons. 

My first reaction to the art was somewhat offputting — its intentional amateurish quality was my least favorite part of the book. But I’ve since come around and like the fact that this weird story looks like the kind of comic the strange tough-guy kid who only listens to AC/DC in the back of your middle school class would draw to prove how much more hard cord fucking weird he is than you could ever hope to be. The reaction is much the same: this is some sick stuff, but it’s also undeniably funny.

Off the shelf: Chew, Vol. 1

One of the great things about comics is their ability to surprise you, to come up with an idea too strange for other media and make it work completely.

That’s the case with Chew, Vol. 1: Taster’s Choice (Image Comics, $9.99), which is most definitely one of the weirdest and coolest comics I’ve come across in a while. None of this will be news to the many folks who picked this up in periodical form. (It’s interesting that this series caused an old-fashioned back issue run when it came out last summer, with prices rising quickly as folks caught on to the series. There’s still some life in the old ways after all, it seems.)

This is the story of Tony Chu, a police detective with the unusual gift of cibopathy — he can obtain information on objects by eating them. This has obvious drawbacks, and Chu takes the vegetarian route to avoid constantly being exposed to the fate of most proteins.

All of which would be interesting enough, but writer John Layman and artist Rob Guillory add an extra layer of strangeness by putting Chu in a world where the bird flu has made chicken illegal and made the Food and Drug Administration a major law enforcement agency akin to the FBI. Since “food crimes” are now serious, Chu’s talent comes in extra handy. And it just gets weirder and more fun from there.

Trailers: Planet Hulk and Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths

In case you missed it, last week Marvel premiered its upcoming original animated movie Planet Hulk at the Paley Center in both New York and Los Angeles. I live-blogged the post-screening panel out west for Newsarama, which you can read here.

I quite like these animated movies, especially the ones that are wildly inventive like Batman: Gotham Knight or adapt specific comic stories like Planet Hulk. I will confess to not being terribly familiar with Planet Hulk prior to seeing the screening, but I came out wanting to pick it up and read it. (It'll have to wait until I find a deal — the trade I spotted at Comics Factory in Pasadena this week cost $35!) And I just got the Blu-ray to check out for Animation Magazine.net (you're all checking out that site, right?)

Here's the trailer to Planet Hulk, which comes out on DVD and Blu-ray on Feb. 2, and is well worth checking out.



If there's one area where the Warner Bros. folks solidly beat Marvel on these things, it's in the animation. It's just too hard to top the crew they have over there, loaded with guys like Bruce Timm. My knowledge of these Crisis stories isn't very deep, but I still am looking forward to checking out Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths and figuring out how close it is to the comics. Plus, there's a cool-looking Spectre short on this disc written by Steve Niles that also should be fun.

Here's the trailer for JL: COTE, out Feb. 23.

Webb on Spidey; AMC taps Walking Dead — a turning point for comics and Hollywood?

It’s kind of interesting to note the attention that’s paid to comic book movies and TV shows these days because the tone of everything shows just how deeply comics have penetrated the culture and business of Hollywood.

The classic example is the announcement by Columbia Pictures that Marc Webb has been hired to oversee the next Spider-Man film, which will reboot the franchise and focus on a Peter Parker still in high school.

By coincidence, I watched Webb’s current movie, (500) Days of Summer, almost simultaneous to the announcement (and thanks to the magic of awards season DVD screeners). It's doing quite well on the awards circuit, though not well enough it seems to win too many of the awards its nominated for — it is, after all, a comedy.

What struck me the most was a scene after the lead character of Tom Finn, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, has had sex with and fallen in love with Zooey Deschanel’s Summer Finn and he walks though downtown Los Angeles, seeing himself as Han Solo in a window reflection and dancing in synch with a large crowd to the tune of Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams.” My first thought was to compare it to a nearly identical scene — minus Han Solo and the animated bird — from Spider-Man 2 in which Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker walks through the park and everything goes wrong to the tune of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”

There’s a bunch of questions to ask about this film, not the least of which is why reboot and the second being whether it’s reasonable for Columbia or the fans to think Webb can deliver a satisfying film on a budget rumored to be about $80 million.

Off the shelf: Captain Canuck, Vol. 2

Growing up in Canada as a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I always knew about Captain Canuck. When I was in Grade 3 or 4, a friend of mine used to have a yellow T-shirt with the artwork from the first issue’s cover on it that was very cool and the envy of the rest of the boys at Grandview Heights Elementary School. Given my interest in Canadiana as well as comics, you’d think I’d be an expert on this comic.

But the truth is, I have never read a page of Captain Canuck until now. And I have to say thanks to IDW Publishing for putting this one back into print, even though I missed that they'd published it all up until now.

I’m starting with Vol. 2, which just came out, and collects the Captain Canuck Summer Special and issues 11-14. These are from, according to John Bell in Invaders from the North, “the period that saw Captain Canuck become of the finest superhero comics ever published.” And while that claim may be a bit over the top, there’s no arguing that these are some damn fine superhero comics.

The best stuff is in issues 11-13, a three-parter called “Chariots of Fire” (this came out before the 1981 Oscar winning movie of the same name). This story has a dual plot, one in which Canada has, in the 1990s, become a world superpower due to the value of its natural resources and leads the world’s efforts to repel an alien invasion. Meanwhile, Captain Canuck, who exposed the invasion and was set to lead it, stumbles back in time about a thousand years in an encounter with one of the aliens. The modern world believes the good Captain dead and simultaneously mourns him while using his death to rally the world to the impossible cause of defeating the aliens.

Christmas comics: Sin City: Silent Night (Nov. 1995)

Writer and artist: Frank Miller
Cover colors: Lynn Varley
Editor: Bob Schreck

There's not much to say about the story in this issue, which can be summed as follows: Marv walks through a snow storm to a barred doorway that leads down to some kind of dungeon. He gives some cash to a woman dressed like a Nazi, who shows him a cell where a small and very scared young girl looks back at him. He turns on the woman and her armed thugs, shooting them dead right quick. He opens the door, tells the girl, Kimberly, that it's OK and she'll be home with her momma soon. He scoops her up and carries her out and back into the snowstorm.

This story is told completely in silent splash pages, with only one dialog balloon in the whole issue. That prompted a lot of howls at the time this was released since "reading" this black and white comic takes only a few minutes and it cost a then-whopping $2.95. But that belies that fact that it's 26 or so pages of Frank Miller Sin City art, which has always been worth the price of admission alone. I always thought this was Miller's attempt to do for snow what he did for rain in the first Sin City story. Was it a cash grab, as some have charged? Maybe, but again it's Frank Miller art and there are few comics at the time where the entire package was worth $3, let alone just the art.

Of course, this ain't the most happy, touchy-feely holiday story ever — but Marv's good deed does stand out as a worthy gift considering how tough and hard-boiled every day is in Miller's "town without pity."

Christmas Comics: Star Trek: The Next Generation #2 (March 1988)

"Spirit in the Sky!"
Writer: Mike Carlin
Pencils: Pablo Marcos
Inks: Carlos Garzon and Arne Starr
Letters: Bob Pinaha
Colors: Carl Gafford
Editor: Robert Greenberger

I can't recall many other Star Trek stories that dealt with Christmas — there was a Picard Christmas dream sequence in Generations — probably because the series' humanistic point of view just doesn't mesh well with the rituals and religious underpinning of the holiday. (Of course, Patrick Stewart's one-man stage version of A Christmas Carol from the 1990s was extremely popular.)

This is still a really hard story to swallow and to judge because of the circumstances. This was the second issue of the first Star Trek: The Next Generation series DC published. It was released to coincide with the debut of the TV series itself in the fall of 1987. While DC's classic Star Trek comic and the movie series were quite popular, no one knew if TNG was going to be a hit or a massive flop. So DC hedged its bet with a six-issue miniseries. And given the time frame of comic book production back then, the first few issues of the comic had to be completely written, drawn and ready to go to press long before the first episodes of the TV show were finished or aired. So all the comic creators had to go on were things like the series bible, early scripts, photo reference and the overall guidance of the Paramount licensing office.

So it kind of makes sense to do a Christmas story in this second issue, as Christmas stories can get away with a lot and it would buy DC another issue to try to figure out the new series.

Christmas Comics: The Uncanny X-Men #230 (June 1988)

“’Twas the night …”
Writer: Chris Claremont
Pencils: Marc Silvestri
Inks: Josef Rubinstein
Colors: Glynis Oliver
Letters: Tom Orzechowski
Editor: Ann Nocenti
Editor in chief: Tom DeFalco

When they reprint classic merry mutant tales, they usually omit this one (more on the more popular X-Men holiday stories soon). Perhaps because this tale is tied into the Australian outback era of the The Uncanny X-Men, which is both admired and reviled, depending on who you listen too. This is easily the goofiest X-Men Christmas story, but it’s also not without its charms.

The story begins with the X-Men on a typical training session in the outback town they took over in the previous issue from The Reavers. But Longshot is absent, lured to a room filled with “haunted treasure” that wants to return to the owners The Reavers “liberated” it from. This is a weird idea, that these objects have some kind of sentience and, even more, an emotional attachment to their owners. This is ascribed to Longshot’s power of psychometry, which was an ability outlined in his original 1985 miniseries. Haunted by the pleas of these items, Longshot’s tales prompt the X-Men to try to return every item to its rightful owner.

The ridiculousness of the idea is commented upon extensively in the story — Claremont’s halfway successful technique for selling the idea to an audience most likely too "cool" to take the concept at face value — with Havok and Wolverine noticeably scoffing at the idea. But like most good Christmas stories, the season's good points melt away the skepticism and everyone joins in whole-heartedly. Even Wolverine gets in on the act, wearing a Santa hat and carrying a big bag of gifts over his shoulder — all of which is pretty out of character and most likely not "cool" with the average late 1980s X-Men reader, but it is Christmas.

Christmas Comics: Power Pack #20 (March 1986)

“Turning Point”
Writer: Louise Simonson
Artist: Bob McLeod
Letters: Joe Rosen
Colors: Glynis Oliver
Editor: Carl Potts
Editor in chief: Jim Shooter

Power Pack always was a book I really enjoyed and, for a time, was one of the best books Marvel published. This issue has a Christmas tie-in, but there’s a pretty convoluted plot to wade through, not to mention a fair bit of continuity that’s not well laid out for new readers.

This story began in Power Pack #18 — a Secret Wars II crossover! — when mom Maggie Power is badly injured by the rampaging Kurse while picking up poster board for her son Alex to use for a school science project. That lead to a crossover with Thor #363 (which was written and drawn by Louise Simonson’s husband, Walt) and a double-size Thanksgiving issue in #19 that guest starred Cloak and Dagger and, of course, Kitty Pryde and Wolverine.

There’s also a bunch of continuity from The New Mutants to deal with, as Illyana had somehow lost control over Limbo in another Secret Wars II-related storyline I don’t exactly recall at the moment. And that’s where this issue starts: with a bunch of Limbo demons running through New York looking for innocents to sacrifice so they can move the entire island of Manhattan to Limbo.

Cooke's Hunter is a stylish, hard-core crime tale

Things don't get much  tougher on the crime fiction front than The Hunter (IDW Publishing, $24.99, 2009), Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of the classic Richard Stark novel introducing the iconic criminal character Parker. This is easily the most hard-boiled crime comic to come along since Frank Miller founded Sin City in the early 1990s.

Set in 1962, this is a tale of a truly unrepentant criminal who is out for revenge on the woman and men who double-crossed him and set him up for dead. And it’s that setting — 1962 Manhattan — that makes Cooke the ideal match for this project. His style, which evokes classic animation, captures the style of the era in a way few other artists could. It’s abstract at times, vividly concrete at others and always powerfully focused on its story.

Done in a lovely two-color format, the narrative does run out of steam just a bit by the end, partly because Parker never really becomes anything more than a one-dimensional vehicle for the kind of mayhem that must have really stood out in 1962 but is a bit more common now. That small quibble aside, it’s a very stylish and highly entertaining thriller that will surely wow hard-core fans and casual readers alike.

Stumptown makes tough tales fun again

Stumptown #1 (Oni Press, $3.99, Oct. 2009) is a pleasant surprise, mostly because it’s so great to see a writer with the talent of Greg Rucka take time out from writing superhero comics (although his Batwoman stories in Detective Comics are really, REALLY good) to do the kind of indie project that got him noticed in the first place.

Stumptown is an old-fashioned private eye story starring an unusual sort of private eye (for comics, anyway) in Dexedrine C. Parios, a smart-ass with a gambling problem who looks after her younger brother, Ansel, who has Down syndrome.

This is a smart book that’s tough but still fun. The art by Matthew Southworth and colors by Lee Loughridge are attractive, clear and a great match for the story.

Planetary ends better than it began

It took ten years, but Planetary #27 (Wildstorm, $3.99, Dec. 2009) is finally out and finishes up the popular series by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday.

Not having read or re-read any Planetary since #26 came out about a year ago, the specifics of the series’ plots were not fresh on my mind, but I still found it an interesting denouement.

Planetary is one of those series that I always had trouble really connecting to. I loved the second issue, with the dead giant Tokyo monsters all rotting away on an island, but found too many of the early issues weakened by being essentially riffs on various popular comics genres. Because of that, I preferred Ellis’ short but pitch-perfect run on The Authority, which began about the exact time as Planetary, and, of course, Transmetropolitan as the writer’s definitive works.

As for Cassaday, I go back and forth on his art. At times, it’s beautiful and subtle and others too minimalistic and reliant on a good colorist (which Laura Martin most definitely is). At least Planetary finally — after many long production interruptions — has made it to a satisfactory end, something few series can claim.