Read Comics

Lot’s of stuff to write about! 1)Last christmas Florence, and Marty got me the first volume of Absolute Sandman.  It was awesome, the second volume is even better.  The Absolute line (yes the name does make it sound like a promotion for Vodka) from DC is basically a repackaging of some of their most acclaimed series, in oversized, beutifully designed hard covered books.  Usually the art is recolored, and the back of the book is jammed with extra content.  I usually don’t think it is worth buying a second copy of something if the story has not changed, and other Sandman I don’t think I will (although Kingdom Come is tempting).  With Sandman they have reprinted three tpbs, per volume.  Volume 2 contains the Seasons of Mists, a Game of You arcs, and most of the short stories from the Fables and Reflections collection.  Though volume 1 had some really great issues, this is the period in Sandman in my opinion where it came into it’s stride both with the story and the art.  SoM, is an epic that feels like an ancient myth that no one had transcribed yet.  Lucifer decides to quit being the adversary, kicks everyone out of Hell, leaves locking the door behind him.  He gives the key to Dream, whom he had previously vowed to destroy but now just hopes it will make his life a little difficult.  Which it does, as figures from many different pantheons (religious as well as comic book) arrive in the Dreaming seeking the deed to Hell.  Reading it again now, it is amazing how a few small interactions in these early issues set in motion the conclusion of the whole series.   At one time Season of Mists was my favorite arc, but now I feel a Game of You surpasses it.  It is a much smaller scale story than most of the other large arcs, and though Morpheus id in it, he is mostly periphery.  The main character is Barbie, who was a periphery character in the Dollhouse (collected in volume 1).  She had at one time had a very vivid dream life, in which she was a princess in a magic world of talking animals called the Land.  She has however stopped dreaming, and no longer remembers the Land.  In her absence the Land has started to die and is under the thrall of a monster called the Cuckoo.  Barbie does eventually return to the land and the it causes serous damage to the waking world.   The story could just be another “magic land ” like Oz, or Wonderland, but the conclusion id entirely originally.  The supporting cast Barbie’s neighbors: sweet transvestite, Wanda, lesbians Hazel and Foxglove, and the witch Thessaly (the only one to have any importance to the bigger story of Sandman), as well as the Land’s animals, giant dog creature Martin Tenbones, and Wilkinson a cynical rat wearing a trench-coat, are some of the most memorable in the whole series.  These are the stories that where the art  finally moves away from the typical horror comic style (overly lined faces, and colored in sickly purples and greens) .  Despite having some of the most horrific  scenes in the whole series, a man chained to rock in Hell having his chest repeatedly torn open, a pile of decapitated heads singing, the face torn from corpse nailed to wall happily chatting away with it’s wagging tongue.  It was well worth spending seventy dollars for this excellent new printing. 2) I also read echo number 1.  It is Terry Moore’s new creator owned comic.  It appears to be his take on super heroes.  Of course the heroine is one of his beautiful girls.  the first issue is a simple origin story.  Girl taking pictures in the dessert, inadvertently finds herself in the path of a explosion, gain a super powered suit.  That is all that has happened so far.  Except that we know that the owners of the suit seriously nasty, killing the previous wearer of the suit (hence the explosion) just to test it’s durability.  I know in few issues this is going to have completely sucked me in, and the story will be any thing but simple.  This is from the creator of Strangers in Paradise after all. 3) I have totally fallen in Love the album Super Secret from the band Ookla the Mok.  They are by far the geekiest band I have every encountered.  Nearly every high energy song song is a packed with references to comic books, old school science fiction, or alien abductions.  A sample of one of there lyrics from the song Theme from Super Skrull “He can turn one leg invisible, which is not all that practical. Unless you are quite gullible, you won’t get fooled by Super Skrull!”  My favorite song on  the album is called Stop Talking About Comic Books or I will Kill You, but the one I can not stop humming is Guggenheim Love.  The songs are not only catchy, they are hilarious. 4)  In a couple of hours i will head over to my local comic shop and pick up a months a worht of issues.  Including issues of, Buffy, Angel, Runaways, Fables,  Astro City, and the first issue of Serenity: Better Days!  Woo hoo!That is all. 

Alison Bechdel spoke Thursday night at the University of Minnesota campus, and fortunately I found out early enough to attend, along with a nearly full auditorium of fans. Also, fortunately, I got to go with a good friend who had an awesome appreciation for her and her work. I’ve read Dykes to Watch Out For for years, while it was published in our various gay publications in Minneapolis. I don’t remember the last time it was running here, but I know that, sadly, it hasn’t run for a few years. More the pity us, who even hosted Alison for a few years in the ’80s. She spoke about how much she loved it here, working for Equal Time, and that she misses it, but that she’s very happy in Vermont. Again, the Twin Cities are that much poorer for her absence.

She started her presentation talking about her comic strip, which she’s worked on for over twenty years now. She spoke a bit about the evolution of the strip, and how when she started, it was part of an effort to change the world. That the characters weren’t part of the mainstream, and were never meant to be. Funny thing was, the mainstream changed around the characters. She talked about how gay books weren’t carried in mainstream bookstores, gay news wasn’t carried in the mainstream press, and gay characters weren’t shown realistically on television. Well, two out off three ain’t bad. She included a presentation featuring characters from the strip and how they’ve changed over the years. Projected onto a large screen, we got to see just how good her line art is. The detail that she puts in every strip amazes me. From her characters, each of whom is distinctive, to the objects and backgrounds, her panels are interesting but not cluttered. I particularly love the way she draws hair, swirling around like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Seeing the art blown up with a hi-def projector spoils you for seeing it in any other way.

She followed this with readings from Fun Home, her graphic autobiography (as opposed to novel). I haven’t read the whole book yet, but I took the opportunity to buy a copy and get it signed. (Amazon Bookstore was there selling copies) Between the two readings, Alison showed us a video of her techniques for working on the book. She uses herself for most of the photo-reference for all of her characters, including her mother and father. Her technique starts with rough sketches, which she then places on a lightbox and uses tracing paper to get continuously more detailed, until her final inking. For Fun Home, she decided to change her normal technique of shading. In the strip, she uses crosshatching, but for the book, she took a last piece of tracing paper and used watered down ink to do her colouring. She scans in both images and combines them for the final pages.

She hosted a final Q&A at the end, where she fielded questions from her artistic influences (Norman Rockwell, Mad Magazine, Edward Gorey, and Herge) to why she left the Twin Cities (the oldest of reasons–for a girl) to how she’s getting by with the diminishing number of papers carrying gay strips (she’s still exploring that issue–but she does have a paypal button on her website). All in all, she was extremely well-spoken and entertaining. And I’m glad I read about the event in the City Pages before it was too late.

Written and illustrated by Jeff Smith

Wow. A new comic from the creator of Bone. And it’s stunning. The artwork is beautiful. Jeff’s style is evocative of the best animators in the business. It’s a cartoon in still-life, making you want to forget that Pixar ever came into being. In an interview, he said that his primary influences have been Carl Barks, of Duckburg fame, and Walt Kelly, the creator of Pogo. You can see a definite evolution from Uncle Scrooge to Pogo to Fone Bone, and while RASL isn’t anthropomorphic animals (or Bones), that same sense of design is there.

RASL (first name? Initials?) is a thief, a cat burglar, with a taste for fine art, not so fine hooch, and cigars. He’s also good at getting out of tight spots, which he appears to have no trouble getting into in the first place. This is a noir story, where we’re coming in after a lot of the action has occurred. RASL is injured, but appears meditative, and then we’re taken back to what happened to him. Or at least a part of what happened to him. In fact, RASL and Kick-Ass both kind of start the same way. The heroes of our stories are injured, in danger, something dire has happened to them, and we start finding out what, piece by piece. This was a common trope of noir films, such as D.O.A, Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, where we know the ultimate fate of the protagonist, and the unraveling mystery is how they got there. And how did RASL get to the desert? We’ve barely begun to find out, but what was revealed in this first issue is enough to hook me. There’s a combination of the fantastic and the mundane, a combination of noir and sci-fi, a little bit of Chinatown and a little bit of Blade Runner, with a touch of Looney Tunes thrown in for good measure.

The next issue comes out in May, according to the last page of this one. It’s going to be a tough wait.