This is one of my series of comic book covers to comics that don’t exist. It’s ink on 11″x17″ paper.
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I write reviews of comic books here every week. I do it for fun. But do you know what I don’t find fun? Writing bad reviews. I don’t write many of them because I’m picky about what I buy and often when I read something that I don’t like I want to forget about it. I have no interest in spending time thinking and writing about something that I didn’t like. Most of my bad reviews would go like this anyway, “I read a little bit of so-and-so and thought is wasn’t any good so I stopped reading and will never, ever, finish reading it”. That’s about the worst review possible for me but it isn’t very entertaining to read over and over.
Mediocre comics are also hard to write about. I just finished reading “Captain Britain – Hell Comes to Birmingham” and I decided not to review it. It’s not bad, some of the art is good (especially the splash page in issue 6) but overall I found the comic confusing and the writing stilted at times. I really don’t have many thoughts about it. To me it just sat there and didn’t come to life.
As I was reading the book I was reminded of a phrase I used to hear back when I worked in the offices of Marvel Comics. Someone would say “Remember, every comic is someone’s favorite comic”. I can’t even remember who used to say it or in what exact context but I remember it being said. I always thought it was a sweeping statement without much truth to it. I bet there are plenty of comics out there that are no one’s favorite.
But that remembered phrase got me thinking about this volume of Captain Britain and if it could be someone’s favorite. And who they would be? Like I said, it’s not a bad comic, I found it mediocre and it held no interest for me. But it might for someone else. But who? I’m sure there are people who like it but being a favorite is a different story.
Most of the world is filled with mediocrity. The law of averages says so. I prefer reading stuff that I think is really good but not everyone does. And still I have some mediocre comics that are favorites but they mainly com from my youth. Most people have a soft spot for things from their younger days when everything was fresh and new. It matters what age you see or read things at if they are to become favorites. If you start watching the TV show “Family Matters” at age ten it will be a favorite. If you were 23 when it debuted then it won’t be. Mediocrity can become really good if you’re too young to have ever seen something that’s actually really good.
It’s that way with comic books too. I was ten years old in 1976 so I grew up on mid to late 1970’s Marvel comics. A lot of people consider that a mediocre era of comics but most of the people I’ve heard or read state that opinion were around 20 in 1976. They had aged out of most mainstream comics then. There were probably a lot of mediocre comics in 1976, just like there are a lot of mediocre comics today and at any other time, but if you are ten and it’s all new to you they’re not mediocre. Hence, every comic fan I know has favorite comics from their childhood that are not very good but still a favorite of theirs.
But what about this Captain Britain volume? Y’see, comics back in the 1970’s were written with ten year olds in mind. And more ten year olds bought them then they do today. There were plenty of adults reading them back then but, I think, not in as large a proportion as today. There are even ratings on Marvel comics these days and this Captain Britain book is rated T+. That means it’s for teens and older. Ten year olds aren’t supposed to be buying this book. I doubt many of them read it.
A quick check of the internet lets me know that this series was cancelled back in 2009. That means it didn’t sell enough copies. I also see that there are passionate fans of it on the message boards lamenting its loss. But what about ten years from now? Will any of those fans remember it as a favorite or just a pretty good comic that they liked for a while? That’s the question that came to mind while reading.
If my notion that it takes a young person who has not read a lot of comics before to grow up and fondly remember a particular mediocre comic book as a favorite is true them there are a lot of comics that will be no one’s favorite comic book. Literally. But I could be wrong and in that case I wonder who’s favorite comic is this volume of Captain Britain? I have no idea.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got one new comic plus a hard cover collection:
And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.
“Moon Knight – The Bottom” by Charlie Huston and David Finch
A friend of mind dropped off a bunch of Marvel trade paperbacks for me back in August. A lot of stuff I usually don’t read so it gives me a chance to catch up on what Marvel has been offering over the last few years.
First up is this Moon Knight book from back in 2006. I was a Moon Knight fan as a kid and really liked the book during the Moench/Sienkiewicz run in the early 80’s. I don’t think I’ve read many stories featuring Moon Knight since then. I remember there being a revival of him in the mid 90’s that I never read but other than that I don’t think I’ve even noticed him.
I’ve never been a fan of origin stories. They’re all the same to me. First the person wasn’t a super hero, then something happened, and then he was a superhero. I’m just waiting around for the person to become a super hero so the story can begin. There’s a reason Stan Lee used to make his origin stories only eight pages long. Today they make them six issues long.
“Moon Knight – The Bottom” is a ‘Rebirth” story. Basically that’s an origin story told all over again. At the beginning of the story Moon Knight, in his civilian identity as Marc Spector, is washed up, injured, and no longer in the fight. It takes until issue six until he’s fully Moon Knight again. I found everything in between to be mumbo jumbo. But it’s that way with me and most origin stories.
Finch’s art work is highly illustrative and pretty to look at but hard to follow. I found his storytelling confusing a lot of the time. He likes to use a lot of close-ups and overlapping panels and I couldn’t always tell what the heck was going on. There were a lot of nice pin-up shots though.
This volume was a miss for me. I didn’t like the story or the storytelling. It’s nice to flip through and look at some pretty pictures but that’s about it for me. I hope some of the other Marvel TPBs are better than this because I don’t really like writing bad reviews.
This is a page from one of my Inkbooks (number 11 page 34). That’s where my images that I use in my paintings, drawings, and prints come from. It all starts with me drawing little drawing in ink just seeing what I can get out of my head.
When is a photographer not a photograph? That’s the question I have because I’ve been working on some photographs lately. By the time I get through with them they look much less like photographs than when I started.
Filters, airbrushing, and darkroom tricks have always been part of photography’s repertoire and some photographers have always pushed the boundary of “What is a photograph?” but now that we’re in the digital/Photoshop age the fence post is somewhere out in the mist.
There are certainly a lot of magazine covers that I wouldn’t call photographs. They’ve been touched up digitally so much that they bear only a resemblance to the original photo. They’re more akin to a painting than to a photo. Waists have been made outrageously thin, ribs removed, and all the skin tones have been replaced with smoothed out pixels. Those are usually referred to by detractors as “Barely a Photograph” but they’re in the photograph category none the less.
Earlier in the summer I was working on what I call my “Masked Photographs”. They are some of my photos of people in the streets except I draw masks on the subjects’ faces. They are not photo realistic masks but graphic ones. They’re not designed to make anyone think that the masks are real and actually in the photos but anyone looking at them would probably call them photographs. I call them photographs too.
What I was working on at the end of the summer is a bit different. There I was using an old Photoshop filter recipe of mine. Photoshop filters can radically alter a photograph and make it look like any number of things. They can make a photo look like a painting, a drawing, a bad photocopy, an old photograph, or any number of things. Most of the time I see Photoshop filters being used like a blunt instrument. A person takes a photo, runs it through a single filter, and it’s done. A radical change in appearance is what they were looking for and they got it.
Most old hands at Photoshop can recognize the exact filter that was used on a bluntly done photo. It’s not hard and we all tend to say, “That’s just a photo run through the Posterize filter”. That’s almost become a genre unto itself. No one questions if it’s a photo or not because we all know it is. Just a photo altered by a filter. One step away from an actual photo and easy to understand and categorize.
What I use is called a filter recipe. That’s when you use a series of filters and layer techniques to build up an image in whatever way you want. There is a lot of trial and error involved in finding exactly what you want but once it’s found it’s easily repeatable. An old hand at Photoshop will know in an instant that a filter recipe has been used to alter a photo but probably won’t know exactly how it was done. Hence it’s not in the photo altered by a filter category.
My own filter recipe that I use most often turns the photo into a graphic translation. That’s an old term for turning a shaded three dimensional image into an unshaded two dimensional one. The simplest way to do this is to make a black and white photocopy of a photograph. All of the various colors and shade in the photo are turned into two colors. Either black or white. The graphic translations I make are a little more complicated than that, I think I uses about eight shades of color, but are in that ballpark.
I also integrated type and writing into the photo. I like using words and images and have used them a lot in my art prints but now I’m also using them in my photos. If they are indeed photos. That’s the whole point of this rumination. I have no idea what to call them. For a brief time I was calling them photo mono-prints because I was only using one color to make them but then I stared making them using more than one color making the “Mono” in the name inaccurate. Plus the word mono-print is in use by another type of printmaking. So the name I’ve been using for them is completely wrong.
I don’t have any real philosophical reason to want to know what is a photo and what is not. I don’t really care because I’m not a photography purist. I just need a name to call these things I’m making. We humans name things so we can understand them and understand what each other is talking about. That’s why I need a name for them.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got no new comics nor any collections. Talk about a slow week!
And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.
“The Invincible Iron Man – Stark Disassembled” by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca
This is the latest volume of Iron Man from the most current series. I’ve liked the series but not without criticism. Though not really badly done this volume was pretty pointless. That has more to do with plot than execution. That’s because it’s a plot I’ve seen or read plenty of times on TV, in the movies, and in comics. Hackneyed if you will.
For the last two volumes of Iron Man Tony Stark/Iron Man has been slowly erasing his brain in order to keep certain information out of a villain’s hands. Yeah, it’s a dumb idea but I got over it. Now Tony is in a mindless vegetative state. But don’t worry he had a plan. Tony now needs Captain America, Thor, and a few others to reboot his brain from a backup hard drive.
The story plays out like every other tale where someone is near death and everyone gathers around to save them. Tony Stark is in some kind of dream like afterlife that makes no sense as he tries to figure out what’s going on. Meanwhile his buddies are gathered around him trying to save him and one of them (Dr. Strange) has to be his spirit guide. It’s easy to see it all coming.
Person near death – check, friends gathered around – check, person in dreamlike afterlife/limbo – check, spirit guide – check. All the clichés are there. And guess what? He lives in the end. Who would have thought? Just because he’s the star of the book. It was all a little tiresome.
Once again these were well done comics but I found them ultimately pointless. The story wasn’t interesting and it took them five issues to bring Tony Stark back to inevitable life. Five issues. When, I assume, everyone reading knew exactly how things were going to work out in the end. And the journey wasn’t very interesting. Not what I would call exciting plotting.
This is one of my modified photos.
I was a latecomer to the comic book series “The Savage Dragon”. The first issue of it that I bought was number 71. I was not a big fan of most the original Image Comics material but I did buy some of it here and there. I still have a soft spot for “Stormwatch” of all things. I also never took much notice of Erik Larsen’s work when he was drawing “Spider-Man”. I didn’t think it was terrible or anything it just wasn’t my thing. I don’t think I even read more than an issue or two of it. I didn’t read many mainstream Marvel, DC, or Image comics in the early 90’s so it’s no wonder I wasn’t on board with Dragon when he was launched back in 1993.
What eventually got me to by “The Savage Dragon” was the fact that my friend and co-worker at the time, Chris Giarrusso (of G-Man and Marvel Bits fame), was a huge fan of the book. Over the years he gave me a couple of issues to read but they left me cold. It was tough for me to take most mainstream super hero comics seriously so I could only see Dragon’s flaws and not its strengths. Image, along with the rest of the industry, were churning out a lot of crappy comics in the early to mid 90’s and it was easy to miss the better ones.
Chris’ enthusiasm for the book never diminished over the years. Finally, at the end of 1999, I decided to start reading it regularly just to really give it a try. It took me a while but I wanted to see if I could see what made the book such a favorite of Chris’. I generally like new things anyway and probably was looking around for some new comics to read so what the heck. “Savage Dragon” lasted longer than most titles so it must have something going for it, right?
I jumped on with issue 71 and was confused right away. That was no big deal to me because I expected it. I don’t mind not being in on the ground floor because it gives me a lot to discover. After all in the 1970’s, as a kid starting to read comics, almost every series had been going for years when I jumped on board. It’s only now, when comic book stories have arcs, that I hear people say that they don’t want to start reading things in the middle. When comics didn’t have story arcs it was always the middle so everyone I knew jumped on anywhere and didn’t mind having to catch up.
I continued to figure things out but was confused for a few more issues until, at the end of issue 75, Larsen blew things up. Literally. Dragon (he’s only called “Savage Dragon” on the cover) messes things up by killing a time traveling villain. This changes time and Dragon is thrown into a different Earth than the one he knew. The Savage World Larsen called it. It’s sort of the same Earth the dragon knew but it was an Earth where things went terribly wrong.
I could tell by the letters page that it was a shock to most regular readers. Imagine if with issue 76 of “Spider-Man” the book suddenly took place in the world of “Kamandi”. That’s quite a change but it was good for me, as a new reader, because Dragon was in a whole new world and there was less for me to catch up on. Dragon had to catch up on things himself. I liked it and I’ve been reading the comic regularly ever since.
I have to say that what I missed when reading the couple of issues of “The Savage Dragon” in the early 90’s, before I started buying it regularly, was Larsen’s enthusiasm for the book and for comics in general. He likes making comics, wants to have fun making them, and want his readers to have fun reading them. He takes “The Savage Dragon” seriously but it is not a serious book. Serious things happen all the time but that’s not what the book is about. The book is about adventure. In a super hero way.
So the reason I’m writing this piece now is because last winter I decided to buy the first 70 issues of “The Savage Dragon” that I didn’t have. After a couple of Ebay purchases I was was all hooked up. I now have every issue. Number 1 through number 163. Plus the original three issue mini-series. Since I had 73 new issues to read and had only read the other issues once I decided I was going to read through the whole series. It took until the month of August until I was able to sit down and actually read them all.
I don’t know that I’ve ever read 166 issues of any series all in a row in such a short period of time. I’ve always meant to do that with the 200 issues of “Usagi Yojimbo” that I have on my shelf but as of yet I haven’t. And besides “The Savage Dragon”, “Usagi Yojimbo”, and “Cerebus” I can’t think of a series offhand with 166 issues all written and drawn by one guy. That’s kind of special.
That’s one of the interesting things about “The Savage Dragon”. It represents one person’s vision of what a comic book should be. All of the trends and styles that have come and gone in comics over the last 18 years are not here as they would be with a work-for-hire book where creators come and go all the while trying to keep in the public’s and their editor’s good graces. Here we only Larsen’s personal trends. It resists embarrassing fads and styles in a way that work-for-hire comics can’t.
It’s tough to sum up 166 issues of a comic but I’d say that at its core “The Savage Dragon” is about Dragon’s personal world. And kicking ass. A lot of time is spent developing the myriad of super powered and regular people who surround the Dragon and they’re always fighting. Unusually for super hero comics there are consequences to the fights. Characters die or are maimed. Plus innocent bystanders can be killed in the melee. When a villain or our hero accidentally knocks down a building the people in the building die. And it’s mentioned. That’s Larsen’s mixture of serious and fun.
I’ve complained a lot about hating time travel and alternate world stories in general but Larsen uses them to good effect. He does kill off characters and brings back alternate world versions of them but not gratuitously for “Shock value”. Plus there is no guarantee in the Dragon’s world that alternate versions of characters will even be similar. Things change.
Anything can happen in Dragon’s world including it being totally conquered by super villains. Twice. And there is no wizard to make things magically go back to the way things were before. Even after the eventual defeat the consequences of a villain’s world conquest linger. That’s what makes “The Savage Dragon” unique and interesting. It’s a world created and controlled by one person. Unlike the work-for-hire universes of Marvel and DC things don’t have to be set back to normal at the end of every story. In “The Savage Dragon” there is always a new normal on the horizon.
Larsen’s art has also changed over the years. I wasn’t too fond of it at the beginning of the series as it had to much of that early 90’s Marvel/Image pointless noodling and/or cross hatching in it. That’s a taste thing since a lot of comics fans back then seemed to love it but I never warmed to it. Larsen experimented with a style here and there for an issue of two when it interested him but really his line has evolved over the years into a sketchier drawing line. By that I mean that his cross hatching has turned into a more spontaneous energetic gestural line. He’s spending less time on pointless noodling and I, for one, like it better that way.
There is one demarcation line I really noticed having to do with storytelling. With the “Savage World” story line Larsen started basing his layout on the classic six panel grid that Jack Kirby and so many others used. He used an early 90’s Marvel/Image pin-up storytelling style for most of the issues before then but he never went back to it. Even after the “Savage World” story ended. Not that he’s only used six panel layouts since then but he’s used variations on it and other classic layout techniques. His story telling has gotten much stronger for it.
So there you have it. One hundred and sixty six issues of one person’s vision of what a monthly super hero book should be. I was a little sad when I reached the last issue, number 163, and had no more to read. It’s a good thing 164 is coming out next month.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got two new comic plus two hard covers:
And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.
Having just read the original Wein/Wrightson run on “Swamp Thing” I got interested in reading the early part of Alan Moore’s run writing the book. These were the first comics I ever read that were written by Moore and I liked them a lot but haven’t checked them out since my college days back in the late 80’s.
They have held up well. As a matter of fact it’s easy to see that DC’s whole Vertigo line is based on the ideas in Alan Moore’s run on “Swamp Thing”. Moore not only redefines the character Swamp Thing but he redefines how DC’s mystical characters and their world is run. It’s a dangerous inhuman world that is outside the perception of normal people but it can bleed over and affect their lives in an awful way.
The artwork by Bissette and Totleben is also very interesting. It’s dark and moody like Wrighton’s work but has a totally different approach. What’s unusual about the art is that quite often things are not defined by their edges. Especially in close ups things are defined by contoured hatching. It makes things eerie. Tatjana Wood’s coloring is also very good.
“The Anatomy Lesson” is the first story in this run and in it Moore establishes the new paradigm for Swamp Thing. And it’s a scary one. Swamp Thing is not who he thought he was and there are monsters hidden in the nooks and crannies of the world where hardly anyone bothers to look. Old mystical foes are tapping into this new found pool of horror and becoming unstable. Things are not as they once were.
As good as the fist story was it is issues 29-31 where the series really takes off for me. That’s when Swamp Things’ old nemesis, Arcane, comes back to haunt him and Arcane is more twisted and nasty than ever. Except, much to Arcane’s regret this isn’t the Swamp Thing as he used to know him.
I remembered issue 31 being an all time classic issue and great ending to a story. Upon reading it again for the first time in twenty years I’d have to say that assessment still stands. It’s well written, well drawn, and just plain exciting. It would be in my top ten singles issues of all time if I had such a list. But I’m adverse to list making.
So if you’ve never read them or haven’t read them in ages go check out Alan Moore’s run on “Swamp Thing”. They’re as good as their reputation.
