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comickal: recently read, death of nextwave edition (belated)
Reviews of graphic novels and individual issues, including: Captain Gravity and the Power of the Vril; Captain Gravity; The American Way; Sam Noir: Ronin Holiday #1; Fell #7, Nextwave #12, 7 Brothers #5. No big spoilers this time (except for the one as noted), but in order to keep from hammering friends lists, everything is behind the cut.
Captain Gravity and the Power of the Vril. Penny Farthing. 2006. 193p. pap. $19.95.
Captain Gravity Penny Farthing Pr Inc (September 1999); 112p pap.
Creator: Stephen Vrattos
Writer: Joshua Dysart
Pencils: Sal Velluto, Bob Almond & Joe Rubenstein
Letters: Richard Starkings & Albert Deschesne
Colors: Mike Garcia
Combine The Rocketeer with Raiders of the Lost Ark, early Kyle Raynor-era Green Lantern (sort of), and maybe very early Spiderman (again, sort of), and you'll have something of the flavor of Captain Gravity. Taking place back in the late 30s and early 40s, it recounts the adventures of Joshua Jones, a young black man who is the personal assistant for the studio producer, and also crew on the set of the movie serial "Captain Gravity". Through a series of events, Joshua winds up working with a Captain Gravity crew on a set in a real Mayan pyramid in Mexico. It turns out that the film set, although real, is also being used as a cover for more nefarious activities involving the Nazis, and the question becomes whether or not Joshua can keep the bad guys from fulfilling their goals while dealing with unexpected things that happen to him.
The feeling is very much matinee serial storytelling, with the same sort of breathless pace and surprisingly natural feeling cliffhangers everywhere. An important part of the story concerns what it's like to be a young black man in 1930s America, working in an industry that has comparatively little use for him as such, and working for people who understand, to some degree, the difficulties he experiences in his day to day life. You also have Joshua's almost-romance with his best friend Chase Dubois, an up-and-coming young starlet. Unfortunately, Chase is white, so "almost-romance" is as close as they can let themselves get in that day and age. Joshua also has horrific events in his past that have shaped him into the person he is, that both hold him back at times and that eventually push him into becoming Captain Gravity, and into understanding more about the people involved (which is as much as I can say without seriously compromising Joshua's personal storyline of the first volume).
Captain Gravity and the Power of the Vrii is in fact a direct sequel to the first volume; despite that, the writers fill in well enough that it pretty much stands alone, without having tons of "last time, in Captain Gravity" stuff. (In fact, I read the second volume first, and then went back to read the first volume only because I wanted to, and not because I was at all confused.) The frame of the story is from many years later; Joshua seems to have retired Captain Gravity from public life, and the story is told entirely in flashback. In the flashback story, Joshua winds up fighting the Nazis again, a consequence of the fight he had with them the last time. The sequel is a good bit darker, as Joshua experiences the realities of war up close and personal. What he winds up doing at the end is somewhat shocking, followed by actions sad and appalling, if entirely understandable.
The writing is very good, and works well for the stories being told. The artwork is seriously gorgeous, evocative of period comics, but with a more modern feel and flow somehow.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Penny Farthing's distribution system seems to be kind of awful. I've never seen the first volume in Chicago Comics, although they had the second, and the first is still available from Amazon (barely), while the second volume is already out of stock at Amazon. Still, it may be worth it to try Amazon, work through your local store if they take special orders, or even go directly through Penny Farthing itself for volume 1 and for volume 2 -- that said, I have no idea how good or bad their order system and direct fulfillment is.
The American Way, writer John Ridley, artist Georges Jeanty; Wildstorm, 2006.
Imagine a world filled with superheroes.
Now, imagine that they're mostly, but not entirely, fake.
That's part of the premise of The American Way, an alternate history take on the 1960s. An eager young ad man is hired by the government, after a superhero fight destroys a significant chunk of New York and incidentally the ad campaign for the slightly smushed car his company was trying to introduce. It turns out that he's been hired to do something to make the superheroes more relevant, more interesting. They've been having the same old staged fights, again and again -- interspersed with quite real rescues -- and they're just going through the motions. Before he can do anything, an accident kills Old Glory, the superhero who is basically a symbol of the US, and he needs to figure out a way out of that mess. He decides that he can do three things at once: he can give the heroes something new to fight for, he can create a new symbol, AND he can make a first step to making the country something more, some place he'd like his children to grow up in. And he does that by creating the first black superhero. Needless to say, this being the time it is, it starts well, then goes horribly, disastrously wrong. The new superhero winds up exposing the fault lines not only between the heroes, but within the country itself. Everything gets worse when a super-powered serial killer goes on a tear, killing with seemingly wild abandon, but actually with specific targets in mind. All of this gets wrapped into the civil rights movement with variously lethal and violent results. And more than that I shall not say about the story.
I will say that the one point that I had difficulty with -- and in the shape of things, it's generally pretty minor -- is the god-point that in 1960s America, we had really good gene therapy; that's how most of the heroes are created -- although at least one of the heroes was born that way, and one of them appears in fact to be an actual god, come to watch and play with the humans because it's fun. Strangely, it's not difficult to buy super-powered people, because we're used to that; it's very nearly impossible to buy the concept of 1960s gene therapy. There's also this: gene therapy aside, given that superpowered people are, in fact, being born or being created by the world itself, given context, there's also a curious silence about any African, South American or Asian heroes (although there is an Asian villain, sort of). Surely there are some; has knowledge of them been supressed, one wonders? A black superhero simply shouldn't be that surprising.
The art work could have distinguished between a few of the minor characters more clearly; there are a couple of places where people speak, and because they haven't said much to that point, and they look somewhat like other characters, you're not entirely sure who they are. That said, there's one nifty character who seems to have relatively few powers of his own, aside from a thoroughly startling apparent immortality. You first see him, and you think, "Oh, that can't be who it looks like." It's not clear until near the end, when he tells another character about something he's done and you realise that it really is him! (No, I'm not telling you who.) And in fact, he can only play the role that he does because it IS him; there are things that he says to a particular character that nobody else could have said.
Small caveats aside, definitely worth the read. I have to admit, I wish there's been a 10-20 years later epilogue. What did Tannis decide to do? What happened to Pharos? Did anyone really believe that absurd story?
Sam Noir: Ronin Holiday #1
story ERIC A. ANDERSON & MANNY TREMBLEY
art & cover MANNY TREMBLEY
24 pg • BW • $2.99
Yeah ... OK, see, here's the thing. In the original Sam Noir, what kept me buying was not the story, which honestly was fun but sort of standard noir. What kept me buying was the fun story combined with the utterly gorgeous, gorgeous artwork. In this one ... well, not so much. The artwork feels much less detailed, sort of rushed, in comparison to the first series. It's really doesn't grip me at all. Which is sort of sad, because, even though this story is also sort of standard noir, I think it might be better than the last one. But it's the artwork that pulled me in for the first series, and this time, the art just isn't there.
Fell #7
story by WARREN ELLIS
art & cover by BEN TEMPLESMITH
24 pg • FC • $1.99
This issue is kind of perfect, really. In TV terms, it's a "box" story; except for the very beginning and very end, it all takes place in the Snowtown PD interrogation room. And it all depends entirely on Fell, who did his usual thorough, meticulous investigation, who found what he needed to catch the bad guy. And then he does something interesting.
What I wonder is what sort of exposure British people have to British procedurals. As soon as Fell does his One Interesting Thing, I knew exactly what the result would be; I didn't need to see the end of the story. It was solidly inevitable.
It's still a really great character study, and everything that happens is entirely plausible, given the character we've seen in earlier issues. He does more or less exactly what we would expect that character to do.
Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. #12 (Warren Ellis/Stuart Immonen)
Let there be weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of clothing, ashes descending on the head. For there shall be, at least in the near future, no more Nextwave.
Weird thing is, I'm not especially fond of fight comix. I am on record as not being fond of fight comix. And Nextwave was basically nothing but fight comix -- one issue was essentially one long fight, for heaven's sake! And yet, I loved this series with a love that is pure, because it was such incredibly demented fun. It might have helped to know these characters' pasts in the Marvel Universe, but you didn't need to. You just got to watch them fighting and cursing and throwing pithy lines around (the android was especially good at that).
But still. The smile on Monica's face when she asks the villain of the piece the ultimate question and he says "Oh". (Very "Bloom County", that sequence.) The smile on Tabitha's face when she says: "'Splode." That very last panel, in which there may be hope. So really very perfect. We shall ne'er see their like again.
Unless Marvel figures out how to afford Immonen for the title, that is.
Spirit/Batman #1 (Jeph Loeb/Darwyn Cooke)
Spirit #1-3 (Darwyn Cooke)
I have to admit, I'm kind of surprised. I thought I'd hate these stories; I did in fact cordially dislike Eisner's original Spirit. (Largely due to the character of Ebony, who is an utterly vile creation in his original form.) But I really do like these stories. Essentially, Cooke takes Eisner's Spirit and brings him into the modern day. Issue #1 just sort of throws you into things, without really telling you where the characters come from; issue 2 gives you the (quite understandably) seriously revised origin story for P'Gell, and issue 3 gives you the only moderately revised origin of the Spirit himself. The P'Gell story works very well, for all that it's kind of a traditional "woman done very wrong" story. The revision was necessary, since it's hardly reasonable that her much beloved first husband was both (a) a high ranking Nazi and (b) still alive, hale and hearty at this point in time. The revision to the Spirit's story, on the other hand, although minor, does make it sort of interestingly darker -- allowing that the whole death thing means it's pretty dark in the first place. The story itself uses alternate viewpoints, which is mostly if not consistently successful -- it does require one or two characters to know something that they simply couldn't have, and to assume a very heavy load of guilt. That said, the Spirit's current origin story has the same problem that I noticed in the original: a curious lack of autopsy or embalming. Apparently, Denny Colt is buried maybe the day after he died, never autopsied despite being murdered as a result of a crime, and never embalmed. Otherwise, the mystery potion is so good that it manages to reconnect and replace disconnected and disposed-of internal organs, replenish a completely depleted blood supply and flush out the toxic embalming agents, and ... well. No. Just ... no.
That aside -- and as origin stories go, that's a fairly mild god-point -- you'll probably enjoy reading The Spirit. Ebony has been rehabilitated from a thoroughly obnoxious stereotype (which Eisner did regret, and try to repair himself, but there's only so much you can do with stuff that's already in print) into a perfectly reasonable character. It's really a surprising amount of fun.
7 Brothers #5 (John Woo/Garth Ennis/Jeevan Kang), Virgin "Director's Cut" series
And, alas, we bid farewell to 7 Brothers, which was all kinds of fight comix fun, although not the absurdist fun of Nextwave. After the thoroughly startling events of issues 3 and 4, we get the even more startling events of issue 5, wherein everyone's machinations are revealed. We discover what long dead Fong had planned, and how he wanted to take advantage of the situation. More than that, I will not say, except that if you don't mind having A MAJOR PLOT POINT SPOILED, you can see one of the most perfect frames of comics ever over at beaucoupkevin.com. And no, he really didn't alter anything; that is exactly the frame as it appears in the book. (I'm guessing that this frame might indicate -- actual character drawing aside -- that someone may have been thinking of Samuel L. Jackson for that character in the inevitable movie, because I really can't imagine anyone else delivering that line quite the way it needs.)
Seriously, is that not perfect? The only thing possibly more perfect would be the two previously mentioned Nextwave frams.
The one thing wrong with this issue is purely technical -- there's formal italic text you need to read in the last two pages, and I think the letterer must have either misread the instructions, or the instructions were flat out wrong, because the text is so tiny you need a microscope to see what they're saying.
Other than that ... my word, that last fight is SO MUCH FUN. SO VERY MUCH FUN! Although I do wonder what the people of New York told themselves the next day.
Captain Gravity and the Power of the Vril. Penny Farthing. 2006. 193p. pap. $19.95.
Captain Gravity Penny Farthing Pr Inc (September 1999); 112p pap.
Creator: Stephen Vrattos
Writer: Joshua Dysart
Pencils: Sal Velluto, Bob Almond & Joe Rubenstein
Letters: Richard Starkings & Albert Deschesne
Colors: Mike Garcia
Combine The Rocketeer with Raiders of the Lost Ark, early Kyle Raynor-era Green Lantern (sort of), and maybe very early Spiderman (again, sort of), and you'll have something of the flavor of Captain Gravity. Taking place back in the late 30s and early 40s, it recounts the adventures of Joshua Jones, a young black man who is the personal assistant for the studio producer, and also crew on the set of the movie serial "Captain Gravity". Through a series of events, Joshua winds up working with a Captain Gravity crew on a set in a real Mayan pyramid in Mexico. It turns out that the film set, although real, is also being used as a cover for more nefarious activities involving the Nazis, and the question becomes whether or not Joshua can keep the bad guys from fulfilling their goals while dealing with unexpected things that happen to him.
The feeling is very much matinee serial storytelling, with the same sort of breathless pace and surprisingly natural feeling cliffhangers everywhere. An important part of the story concerns what it's like to be a young black man in 1930s America, working in an industry that has comparatively little use for him as such, and working for people who understand, to some degree, the difficulties he experiences in his day to day life. You also have Joshua's almost-romance with his best friend Chase Dubois, an up-and-coming young starlet. Unfortunately, Chase is white, so "almost-romance" is as close as they can let themselves get in that day and age. Joshua also has horrific events in his past that have shaped him into the person he is, that both hold him back at times and that eventually push him into becoming Captain Gravity, and into understanding more about the people involved (which is as much as I can say without seriously compromising Joshua's personal storyline of the first volume).
Captain Gravity and the Power of the Vrii is in fact a direct sequel to the first volume; despite that, the writers fill in well enough that it pretty much stands alone, without having tons of "last time, in Captain Gravity" stuff. (In fact, I read the second volume first, and then went back to read the first volume only because I wanted to, and not because I was at all confused.) The frame of the story is from many years later; Joshua seems to have retired Captain Gravity from public life, and the story is told entirely in flashback. In the flashback story, Joshua winds up fighting the Nazis again, a consequence of the fight he had with them the last time. The sequel is a good bit darker, as Joshua experiences the realities of war up close and personal. What he winds up doing at the end is somewhat shocking, followed by actions sad and appalling, if entirely understandable.
The writing is very good, and works well for the stories being told. The artwork is seriously gorgeous, evocative of period comics, but with a more modern feel and flow somehow.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Penny Farthing's distribution system seems to be kind of awful. I've never seen the first volume in Chicago Comics, although they had the second, and the first is still available from Amazon (barely), while the second volume is already out of stock at Amazon. Still, it may be worth it to try Amazon, work through your local store if they take special orders, or even go directly through Penny Farthing itself for volume 1 and for volume 2 -- that said, I have no idea how good or bad their order system and direct fulfillment is.
The American Way, writer John Ridley, artist Georges Jeanty; Wildstorm, 2006.
Imagine a world filled with superheroes.
Now, imagine that they're mostly, but not entirely, fake.
That's part of the premise of The American Way, an alternate history take on the 1960s. An eager young ad man is hired by the government, after a superhero fight destroys a significant chunk of New York and incidentally the ad campaign for the slightly smushed car his company was trying to introduce. It turns out that he's been hired to do something to make the superheroes more relevant, more interesting. They've been having the same old staged fights, again and again -- interspersed with quite real rescues -- and they're just going through the motions. Before he can do anything, an accident kills Old Glory, the superhero who is basically a symbol of the US, and he needs to figure out a way out of that mess. He decides that he can do three things at once: he can give the heroes something new to fight for, he can create a new symbol, AND he can make a first step to making the country something more, some place he'd like his children to grow up in. And he does that by creating the first black superhero. Needless to say, this being the time it is, it starts well, then goes horribly, disastrously wrong. The new superhero winds up exposing the fault lines not only between the heroes, but within the country itself. Everything gets worse when a super-powered serial killer goes on a tear, killing with seemingly wild abandon, but actually with specific targets in mind. All of this gets wrapped into the civil rights movement with variously lethal and violent results. And more than that I shall not say about the story.
Purely a side note: in the racial attitudes on display, it's possible to draw a line directly between The American Way and the late, lamented Emissary. They would be quite ... familiar to each other. Of course, Emissary posits a world without superheroes into which an unexpected black man appears, and The American Way posits a world lousy with superheroes, into which an unexpected black man appears ... but still, you can see the shape of the connection between the alternate-then and the alternate-now.
I will say that the one point that I had difficulty with -- and in the shape of things, it's generally pretty minor -- is the god-point that in 1960s America, we had really good gene therapy; that's how most of the heroes are created -- although at least one of the heroes was born that way, and one of them appears in fact to be an actual god, come to watch and play with the humans because it's fun. Strangely, it's not difficult to buy super-powered people, because we're used to that; it's very nearly impossible to buy the concept of 1960s gene therapy. There's also this: gene therapy aside, given that superpowered people are, in fact, being born or being created by the world itself, given context, there's also a curious silence about any African, South American or Asian heroes (although there is an Asian villain, sort of). Surely there are some; has knowledge of them been supressed, one wonders? A black superhero simply shouldn't be that surprising.
The art work could have distinguished between a few of the minor characters more clearly; there are a couple of places where people speak, and because they haven't said much to that point, and they look somewhat like other characters, you're not entirely sure who they are. That said, there's one nifty character who seems to have relatively few powers of his own, aside from a thoroughly startling apparent immortality. You first see him, and you think, "Oh, that can't be who it looks like." It's not clear until near the end, when he tells another character about something he's done and you realise that it really is him! (No, I'm not telling you who.) And in fact, he can only play the role that he does because it IS him; there are things that he says to a particular character that nobody else could have said.
Small caveats aside, definitely worth the read. I have to admit, I wish there's been a 10-20 years later epilogue. What did Tannis decide to do? What happened to Pharos? Did anyone really believe that absurd story?
Sam Noir: Ronin Holiday #1
story ERIC A. ANDERSON & MANNY TREMBLEY
art & cover MANNY TREMBLEY
24 pg • BW • $2.99
Yeah ... OK, see, here's the thing. In the original Sam Noir, what kept me buying was not the story, which honestly was fun but sort of standard noir. What kept me buying was the fun story combined with the utterly gorgeous, gorgeous artwork. In this one ... well, not so much. The artwork feels much less detailed, sort of rushed, in comparison to the first series. It's really doesn't grip me at all. Which is sort of sad, because, even though this story is also sort of standard noir, I think it might be better than the last one. But it's the artwork that pulled me in for the first series, and this time, the art just isn't there.
Fell #7
story by WARREN ELLIS
art & cover by BEN TEMPLESMITH
24 pg • FC • $1.99
This issue is kind of perfect, really. In TV terms, it's a "box" story; except for the very beginning and very end, it all takes place in the Snowtown PD interrogation room. And it all depends entirely on Fell, who did his usual thorough, meticulous investigation, who found what he needed to catch the bad guy. And then he does something interesting.
What I wonder is what sort of exposure British people have to British procedurals. As soon as Fell does his One Interesting Thing, I knew exactly what the result would be; I didn't need to see the end of the story. It was solidly inevitable.
It's still a really great character study, and everything that happens is entirely plausible, given the character we've seen in earlier issues. He does more or less exactly what we would expect that character to do.
Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. #12 (Warren Ellis/Stuart Immonen)
Let there be weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of clothing, ashes descending on the head. For there shall be, at least in the near future, no more Nextwave.
Weird thing is, I'm not especially fond of fight comix. I am on record as not being fond of fight comix. And Nextwave was basically nothing but fight comix -- one issue was essentially one long fight, for heaven's sake! And yet, I loved this series with a love that is pure, because it was such incredibly demented fun. It might have helped to know these characters' pasts in the Marvel Universe, but you didn't need to. You just got to watch them fighting and cursing and throwing pithy lines around (the android was especially good at that).
But still. The smile on Monica's face when she asks the villain of the piece the ultimate question and he says "Oh". (Very "Bloom County", that sequence.) The smile on Tabitha's face when she says: "'Splode." That very last panel, in which there may be hope. So really very perfect. We shall ne'er see their like again.
Unless Marvel figures out how to afford Immonen for the title, that is.
Spirit/Batman #1 (Jeph Loeb/Darwyn Cooke)
Spirit #1-3 (Darwyn Cooke)
I have to admit, I'm kind of surprised. I thought I'd hate these stories; I did in fact cordially dislike Eisner's original Spirit. (Largely due to the character of Ebony, who is an utterly vile creation in his original form.) But I really do like these stories. Essentially, Cooke takes Eisner's Spirit and brings him into the modern day. Issue #1 just sort of throws you into things, without really telling you where the characters come from; issue 2 gives you the (quite understandably) seriously revised origin story for P'Gell, and issue 3 gives you the only moderately revised origin of the Spirit himself. The P'Gell story works very well, for all that it's kind of a traditional "woman done very wrong" story. The revision was necessary, since it's hardly reasonable that her much beloved first husband was both (a) a high ranking Nazi and (b) still alive, hale and hearty at this point in time. The revision to the Spirit's story, on the other hand, although minor, does make it sort of interestingly darker -- allowing that the whole death thing means it's pretty dark in the first place. The story itself uses alternate viewpoints, which is mostly if not consistently successful -- it does require one or two characters to know something that they simply couldn't have, and to assume a very heavy load of guilt. That said, the Spirit's current origin story has the same problem that I noticed in the original: a curious lack of autopsy or embalming. Apparently, Denny Colt is buried maybe the day after he died, never autopsied despite being murdered as a result of a crime, and never embalmed. Otherwise, the mystery potion is so good that it manages to reconnect and replace disconnected and disposed-of internal organs, replenish a completely depleted blood supply and flush out the toxic embalming agents, and ... well. No. Just ... no.
That aside -- and as origin stories go, that's a fairly mild god-point -- you'll probably enjoy reading The Spirit. Ebony has been rehabilitated from a thoroughly obnoxious stereotype (which Eisner did regret, and try to repair himself, but there's only so much you can do with stuff that's already in print) into a perfectly reasonable character. It's really a surprising amount of fun.
7 Brothers #5 (John Woo/Garth Ennis/Jeevan Kang), Virgin "Director's Cut" series
And, alas, we bid farewell to 7 Brothers, which was all kinds of fight comix fun, although not the absurdist fun of Nextwave. After the thoroughly startling events of issues 3 and 4, we get the even more startling events of issue 5, wherein everyone's machinations are revealed. We discover what long dead Fong had planned, and how he wanted to take advantage of the situation. More than that, I will not say, except that if you don't mind having A MAJOR PLOT POINT SPOILED, you can see one of the most perfect frames of comics ever over at beaucoupkevin.com. And no, he really didn't alter anything; that is exactly the frame as it appears in the book. (I'm guessing that this frame might indicate -- actual character drawing aside -- that someone may have been thinking of Samuel L. Jackson for that character in the inevitable movie, because I really can't imagine anyone else delivering that line quite the way it needs.)
I DID SAY THAT THIS WAS A MAJOR PLOT SPOILER, RIGHT? Just checking. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page for the picture.
Seriously, is that not perfect? The only thing possibly more perfect would be the two previously mentioned Nextwave frams.
The one thing wrong with this issue is purely technical -- there's formal italic text you need to read in the last two pages, and I think the letterer must have either misread the instructions, or the instructions were flat out wrong, because the text is so tiny you need a microscope to see what they're saying.
Other than that ... my word, that last fight is SO MUCH FUN. SO VERY MUCH FUN! Although I do wonder what the people of New York told themselves the next day.