Yabba-dabba-do read this

So, as part of its series of adaptations of Hanna-Barbera properties, DC produced 12 issues of The Flintstones over the past two years; all 12 have been released in two trade paperbacks. I am not going to review this two-volume collection in detail, not even a 5 x 5; I am just going to say that you should read this. If you buy, read, or collect comics and graphic books, get these on your next trip to the local comic shop. If you don't, go to the library and borrow the collection or have them order it from another library. If you know me in RL, ask me to borrow it and I will lend it to you. It's just that good.

Here's one excerpt: Fred is directing a rescue mission for someone trapped in an accident at the Slate Quarry; Mr. Slate wants to call it off because it's costing him money.

 (Edited in format to better display the money quote.)

The series addresses materialism and consumer culture, politics and media, science and religion, gender roles and sexual preferences, and parenting and friendship, as well as hipsters and the ethics of using sentient creatures as appliances. The writing is smart and funny and the art is beautiful and clear. This is comics done well, but it's more than that: if you are human being alive in the 21st century in the USA, you should read this two-volume book.

Seriously. Just go find it and read it.

5 X 5 Waiting for the Trade: The Autumnlands: Tooth and Claw

1. So, I came about reading this trade paperback collection of Image comics in a different way: I didn't wait for it, I was introduced to it by a text from my pal John that went Reading Autumnlands: tooth and claw. 7 dollar collection on Amazon. Thought you'd like it. Maybe a lot. A few clicks on the computer later and it was on its way, even before I had finished my texting with John - hey, his recommendation is worth risking $7.42 (free shipping with Prime) - and I deliberately didn't research it any further or try to figure out ewhat it was about - totally sight unseen.

2. John thought I'd like it, and I did, but maybe not not as much as he had, or he thought I would, but enough to out this one in the win column. It has beautiful art by Benjamin Dewey - including what John had referred to as very well rendered dirigibles - and Kurt Busiek certainly knows how to build a plot and tell a story. In this case, the story is about a future-world, post-apocalyptic society of humanoid bipedal animals (of a wide variety of species) who use magic to hold their civilization together, and the conflicts that ensue after wizards reach back into time for a legendary Champion to help stave off the end of that magic and things (of course) go badly.

3. Overall, the conceit and the story both hold up quite well. My fantasy OCD quivered a bit at some of the choice made for for the different characters and extras - like having owls and dogs the same size, and the birds having arms and hands. Most often things seemed pretty random, which could be a deliberate effect,  but then we get a fox as the wily schemer, and it seems both obvious and out of place. The Champion himself seemed a little too competent, but I guess that's why he was The Champion. These sort of small quibbles aside, the story kept me turning pages until the end - of the trade, but obviously not the tale. I'll read the next installment, for sure.

One additional treat: each chapter begins with an "excerpt" from a pulp novel telling the story from a different perspective, with period art to match. Pretty cool.

4. John also mentioned that he thought the setting would make for a great RPG campaign, and I have to agree with him there: there's some excellent world-building going on, and the technology (flying cities as well as airships) and magic seem consistent and workable. The difference between the character species are enough to allow for customization of abilities - a dog-person announces that since he's a terrier, he can run all day - but overall the power levels seemed pretty compatible.

5. One last note: I can't review this without saying that if you squint, it seems like nothing more than a grim 'n' gritty Kamandi pastiche. I don't know if Busiek had that in mind,m but even if he did, it;s worth the read.

5x5 Graphic Novel(s): The Parker adaptations by Darwyn Cooke

1. A few years back (2009), Darwyn Cooke made a big splash with his graphic novel adaptation of famed crime writer Donald Westlake's The Hunter (written under the pen name Richard Stark), and I gobbled it up eagerly. When I was a young man, I read all the Stark books - the Parker series and the (much smaller) Grofield collection - and I had anticipated that Cooke's sensibility would be a perfect match for the series: that sort of Mad Men meets Goodfellas feeling. I was right.

2. The first book ended with a tease that there would be more Parker adaptations coming. Apparently I missed a memo or two - because there have been three more books already! I only tipped to the series after I ran across Books Two and Three at the library. The library copies still have the dust jackets (cellophaned, of course), but I removed the one on my copy of Book One because I like the retro flavor the binding so much.

3. Packaging aside, the quality of the books hold up across the series (or at least the 75% of it I have seen so far), and it's not just a matter of matching the art style to the subject matter. Cooke is not just a great cartoonist; he's also a good writer, who knows how to make an adaptation work. The pacing of the stories and the unfolding of the plots (including complex action) is flawless; Cooke knows when to use text and when to let the images alone carry the narrative.

4. A note from a formalist perspective, since this is me: Book Two diverges from its focus on Parker to show the activities of some of his criminal cronies as they rob syndicate operations. Each account is in a different style: an illustrated magazine article (with a lot of prose); fifties PSA cartooning; New Yorker-style cartoons; and what I can only call illustration sketchwork. The flavor these choices create move us out of the reality of the main story in the same way italics or margins or typeface might set off a secondary narrative within a prose book, but with many more layers of meaning added thanks to the art. Well-played, Mr. Cooke.

5. All that being said, after reading through a bunch of these in a row, I come up feeling a little bit empty. It isn't for want of content or execution, either in the original story or in the graphic adaptation. It's just that Parker is such a relentlessly amoral, brutal character that it is hard for me to sustain any sympathy for him, and without that identification, the books become nothing more than a series of beautifully rendered, grisly encounters. I read somewhere that Westlake wrote the anti-hero Parker stories on rainy days and the relatively light-hearted Grofield stories (and I'd guess the comic Dortmunder capers) on sunny days. I guess I would like to see a Darwyn Cooke take on a sunny day story.

Bonus: when I was describing Cooke's ability to visually capture early sixties motifs, a friend said "You mean like those big clocks with the spines and balls!" Precisely. And while there isn't actually one of those in any of the Parker books, we do get this

 and that's pretty close.

5 x 5 Bande Dessinée Critique: L'autre laideur, l'autre folie

Different Ugliness, Different Madness by Marc Males
Published byHumanoids/DC Comics, 2005

1.  This 5 x 5 review also has a late to the party tag: apparently it was part of a short-lived DC Comics venture into publishing French graphic novels about ten years ago; I found it in the mark-down bins of a comic shop while I was waiting to take Wonder Wife to her birthday dinner last month.  I picked up several sale items that evening and this was the best of the lot, by far.

2.  This is a comic that has the feel of a French art film: slow-moving, quiet, and living in its details. It tells the story of two lost - or at least displaced - souls encountering one another in rural 1930s America, and its narrative is driven by small steps, tiny gestures, and unhurried interactions as opposed to action and conflict. There is a story arc, and the narrative structure includes flashbacks and flash-forwards, but as a reader I was less interested in rushing the plot forward and more interested in just watching how these people would behave as their circumstances unfolded.

3. But this is not a movie, it is a comic, and it is a wonderfully technique-driven one. You could use Different Ugliness, Different Madness as a course text to accompany Scott McCloud's books: excellent controlled and effective examples of the six forms of transition from Understanding Comics and the five choices from Making Comics seem to jump off the page. Males makes comics the way Hitchcock or DePalma make movies: with a thorough understanding of exactly what strings they are pulling to manifest their vision. And we relish experiencing every manifestation of their craft.

4. One odd note: I don't know if this was part of the original art design or something that happened in the translation process, but the lettering is smaller than it needs to be for the size of the word balloons. The result is a proportionality that reads more like whispering in most mainstream comics, but that is clearly not the intent, for it is used consistently even when it is obvious that voices are louder. It took a while to get used to, but then it just reinforced the feeling of an old movie.

5. The French idea of what a Depression-era American farmer looked like seemed a little off to me, but I am a city boy, so what do I know.

Si vous rencontrez cette bande dessinée, l'acheter! 

Vous ne le regretterez pas.

5 x 5 Graphic "Novel": C.O.W.L.

So, while Wonder Wife was relaxing her birthday afternoon away in a Korean Spa, I had a chance to visit an actual comic book shop and get myself a few presents. This was one.

C.O.W.L. Volume 1: Principles of Power.

Kyle Higgins, Alec Siegel, Rob Reis.

Image Comics.



1. I was drawn to this book by its cover - specifically by the union logo it depicted. Here's a closeup:

With this design sensibility and a back-of-the-book blurb that reads Welcome to the Chicago Organized Workers League - the world's first superhero labor union, I was expecting a trade-unionist, maybe even socialist interpretation of the superhero trope. It's not. While C.O.W.L. is indeed a union, and much of the plot circles around contract negotiations, the ambience is much more Mad Men than it is Matewan. The members of C.O.W.L. are certainly not working class, and the personal and political agendas on display have little do with the relationship between capital and labor. That was the first disappointment.

2. The second disappointment was that this is not a graphic novel at all; it is a collection of the first five issues of an ongoing comic. I blame myself for this one - it's clearly stated on the back and I should have noticed - but after have some good experiences recently with true stand-alone GNs, that this one ended in media res was a bit jarring.

3. The story is pretty engaging and the writing is competent, although it sometimes reads like the early days of cable when formerly-banned language was first creeping into broadcasts: just keep dropping those f-bombs so we remember this is "realistic." The art is quite good; Reis reminds me a little of Bill Sienkiewicz.

4. Not for the first time, I thought that a comic was part of the who's-gonna-be-the-next-Walking Dead phenomenon: even in its best bits, I couldn't help but feel that C.O.W.L. was a pitch for a movie or television series. Some of the staging and a lot of dialogue just feels too cinematic and not at all comics-y.

5.  I am really tiring of the banality of powers. Superhero teams have become just another collection of stereotypes like any other overworked genre. Instead of the planner, the face, the tough guy, and the gadget man in an A-Team ripoff, we have the flying guy with energy bursts, the guy with the power glove, the girl with telekinesis. There's no wonder, in-story or out, that humans can do these amazing things. Listing the character names with their specialties in the front matter of the book evoked the rules set of a role-playing game more than it did the old school "roll calls" of team comic books.

Wow, that sounded more negative than I expected, but I guess that some good parts aside, I really didn't enjoy the book as whole and won't be looking for Volume 2. 

Bonus fun bit: I cannot hear or read the word cowl without thinking of this lettercol title. It debuted in World's Finest in 1964, when I was 6 or 7, and I am pretty sure it was my first understanding of the word's meaning.

I also remember wondering about the title itself, because Batman had a cape, too...

5x5 Graphic Novel: Ali Baba

1. So, the actual title of this graphic novel is Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Reloaded, written by Poulami Mukherjee and illustrated by Amit Taya, and produced by Campfire, a New Delhi publishing house whose mission statement is to entertain and educate young minds by creating unique illustrated books to recount stories of human values, to arouse curiosity in the world around us, and to inspire by tales of great deeds of unforgettable people. Yeah, I can get behind that. They have lots of other great-looking titles I am hoping to check out, based on how good this book was.



2. Mukherjee has taken the traditional story of Ali Baba and updated it totally while staying faithful to the story structure and keeping all the character beats. The story is usually set somewhere in Persia (although the tale may have originated in Cyprus), but Mukherjee places it in Mumbai with no trouble at all. Modernizing the story turns woodcutter Ali Baba into a minicab driver, magic incantation "open sesame" into a security password, and slave girl Morgiana into part-time housekeeper Marjeena. It all works, because the characters and their motivations and conflicts ring true to the original: Ali is still blandly earnest, the leader of the thieves still dangerous and revenge-obsessed, and Marjeena still the clever one who repeatedly saves the day. Mukherjee's writing gives us an action story that is both contemporary and accessible and yet which will deliver the same emotional experience as the original folktale (with the gore dial turned down just a bit).

3. Amit Tayal's art is the perfect vehicle for the story: realistic enough to capture the feel of a teeming urban environment and yet cartoonish enough to retain the sense of whimsy and wonder that comes with a fairytale, the illustrations can strongly convey action or menace when necessary. Kudos also to the letterer and especially the colorist.

4. Only one misstep from my perspective: Mukherjee and Tayal rely a bit overmuch on narrator caption boxes. Take these two panels, for instance - Ali Baba is picking up one of the thieves for the cab ride in which he will overhear the password:

It seems to me that this panel would have been much more effective had it been drawn so that we could see the bank robbery headline on Ali's newspaper - no captions would have been necessary, since we could have figured out the connection, given that we just saw the passenger hiding from a police car. It's a small nitpick, since the traditional structure of fairy tales calls for a very intrusive narrator, and the target market for the book could be considered young adult, but I think more experienced creators might have handled this balance more deftly throughout the work.

5. On of the most appealing aspects of the story was its multiculturalism. We see characters wearing Sikh turbans, Muslim skullcaps, and Arab headscarves, western dress and traditional garb. The sometimes confounding multi-faceted society of modern India is on view in very matter-of-fact way, and it is a refreshing change from the homogeneity of most American pop culture.

Pick this book up if you run across it; you'll be glad of it.

Spring Break Bargain Box Bonanza

Hey, kids! Comics!

So, it's Spring Break in my little corner of higher ed, and that means time to play. While I was out and about enjoying the first of my free days, I stopped by one of the comic shops in my area and found some goodies in the bargain box (what used to be called the quarter bin and is now functionally the dollar bin). Here's the haul:

Graphic Novels!

I'll get to those comics in detail as the week progresses, but I wanted to start with something from the bargain "graphic novel" box. (I think the term was actually used to designate "comics with perfect binding.") I grabbed this collection for cheap:

I had remembered running across a comic strip set in a D&D game; the characters in the strip interacted at the gaming table and as their characters within the game adventure as well, bouncing from reality to roleplay and back. I thought it was amusing and at least somewhat clever, so I picked up this TPB of Knights of the Dinner Table.

I don't know what strip I was thinking of, but this is definitely not it.

I'm not including any scans of the content because, frankly, I like you too much and this hurt to read. It's not just that the interior art is amateurish or even bad (although it kinda is both); it's not even that there's really no graphic storytelling going on (although the images are rarely used to carry any of the narrative or emotion); it's not at all that the depiction of the tabletop roleplaying game experience is inaccurate (it's pretty good, as a matter of fact). It's that all the characters are so throughly unlikeable - by turns mean, petty, and foolish - that wading through this collection of strips made me feel like I was gaming with odious, unpleasant people that I did not like. Furthering the foulness, the conceit of the strip rests heavily on the game master vs. players trope, a dynamic that flies in the face of the collaborative spirit my gaming cronies and I bring to the table.

I must be in the minority here: apparently, Kenzer & Company, the producers of the strip and books, are going great guns, generating card, board, and tabletop games (including an RPG based on the imaginary game from the strip) as well. Business seems to be thriving. Good on 'em, but I can't understand why. If this sample collection is any indication, I wouldn't want to spend any more time in this world than I had to.

Bonus pick-me-up: this is still a thing!

Yes,  Transcontinental Interglobe of Beauceville, Quebec is still printing newsprint copies of Comic Shop News for Cliff and Ward out of Marietta, Georgia and delivering them to comics shops. The best buy in comics (free!) is still available. Check out their first issue from 1987.

Half-price review: Space Dog

So, every so often I pick up graphic novels that catch my eye at the local half-price book store.

Space Dog by Hendrik Dorgathen. Published by  Gingko Press 2009; originally published 1993.

Part road movie, part sci-fi story, and part period piece, with just a little Flowers for Algernon thrown in, Space Dog is the picaresque tale of a little red puppy who leaves the farm to become a street hound, a jazz mascot, an astronaut, a global celebrity, and a contented family man - er, dog.

German illustrator Hendrik Dorgathen has crafted a wordless book. Most of the plot and character interactions are conveyed through strictly visual means, and the occasional 'word' balloons contain only symbols or pictograms to carry the ideas. Even diegetic text is obscured or incomplete in some way. Since the story is told mostly from the point-of-view of a dog, the device is inclined work in the first place (see Fraction and Aja's recent Hawkeye issue), and Dorgathen handles it so well that it eventually goes almost unnoticed - even when the characters are talking about talking, as the titular hero gains the power of speech.

In the absence of any words, the pictures of course have to carry all the weight of the narrative, and they do not fail. Dorgathen's illustrations are coarse and angular, almost like woodcuts with a hint of Crumb, but carry an enormous amount of detail. What carries the book over the top is the coloring: the book is filled with bright, full, saturated colors that can evoke a Harlem nightspot, a NASA lab, and a flying saucer with all the promise of plastic in 1950s America (© Tupperware). It is a visual delight, with one particularly stunning and effective two-page spread about 3/4 of the way through.

The story also succeeds, though perhaps not as well as the visuals. There is enough in details of the plot, the personalities of the supporting characters, and some throwaway bits to keep the narrative from becoming too formulaic, but the ending made me feel as if there were a page or two missing from the book. It wasn't exactly unresolved, but the coda needed a bit more to it.

For a formalist study of how comics work, it is fertile ground for inquiry or analysis. As a social satire on American values, it is not brilliantly insightful but does say what it says with some creativity and originality. And as the story of a red dog who has the kinds of adventures we all dream of, it worked for me. It's certainly worth picking up at half-price.