Probably the best part of being a comic fan is finding a diamond in the rough among trades as you’re perusing a shelf in a comic shop. It’s truly great to have the subtle enthusiasm from a shop owner over a book met with your own skeptical raised eyebrow and then be proven wrong once you get through reading it. My local comic shop owner sees me take home quite the haul over the course of a month and rarely tries to hook me up with a book he might think I haven’t heard about. Johnny Hiro, though, was one of those books. The book snuck under my radar due to the fact that it only had two issues published before being canceled and then had to be finished and resolicited as a trade paperback. The book is worth the weight. The title character is not a superhero or vigilante or warrior of any kind. No, Johnny is just your every day average busboy who is trying to make ends meet while living in New York City and running afoul of everything from rival restaurant sushi samurais or giant monsters attacking the city. At his side is his cheerful and loving girlfriend, Mayumi, who adores her boyfriend as much as she adores kittens and believing everything will work out in the end. Writer/artist Fred Chao delivers a book that’s fun and engaging and completely entertaining for all types of readers big and small. Guest-stars galore including NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg and the cast of an 80′s hit sitcom grace the same pages as Godzilla-wannabes fighting giant robots. The art is in black and white but still dynamic and full of life between the panels. The jokes come fast and furious but the humor is always overshadowed by the genuine charm of Chao’s writing of the Johnny and Mayumi. It’s their relationship that holds the book together between hilarious skits and well-drawn action. It’s like Chao knows this and makes every scene that he puts them in feel very realistic. Even when Mayumi’s broken English is played for laughs, it never feels derogatory or childish. He works it into the natural dialogue and counters it with Johnny’s own standard way of speaking. Johnny Hiro is definitely a book that I’m glad was recommended to me and I’m passing that recommendation on and hoping that others pick it up. It’s a great blind buy, I’ll tell you that.
Entries from October 2009
Blind Buys and Recommendations: Johnny Hiro
October 7, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Blind Buys and Recommendations, Comics, Reviews
Television’s Anti-Heroes
October 6, 2009 · 1 Comment
These days, we as an audience are appearing less and less interested in characters that play by the rules and follow a moral compass. Back in the television days of yore, we weren’t allowed to have dramatic leads that didn’t follow the letter of the law and show us that doing what was right should be done the right way. Perry Mason, Jim Rockford, Thomas Magnum, Joe Friday, MacGyver, and Ben Matlock are just a few of the classic icons that we as an audience came to love growing up (whether in release or in reruns). Nowadays, though, the landscape is… a little different.
Currently, the shows that seem to draw renewals from networks and scores of viewers are the procedurals and whatnot. We have our CSIs and our Law and Orders and they still keep churning out millions of viewers and millions of dollars. Those kind of concepts always will. But take a look at the other protagonists who are fighting for truth, justice, and Nielsen ratings.
Dr. Greg House, MD: He lies, he cheats, he pops pills and he risks lives all in the pursuit of being right. But not being right in the moral and virtuous sense. House just lives to be correct and manipulate people as if they were dancing to his tune. They’ve made many attempts over the seasons to humanize the character and dull his edge, but at the end of the day House will always be House. Hugh Laurie’s charming misanthrope will insult the strong and antagonize the weak, just to prove that everybody lies. Even when you’ve just recovered from nearly dying of a crazy combination of once in a lifetime symptoms, House doesn’t shake your hand or tell you he’s glad you’re okay. He mocks you and tells you to not be stupid again. He’ll go over the spouse’s head, lie to the administration, and kidnap a patient.
Dexter Morgan: A serial killer who’s on our side. Not sure if that’s as comforting as it’s supposed to sound, but it seems to work. The show is starting its fourth season of Dexter killing killers and then ritualistically carving up the bodies all the while providing his extremely creepy narration thanks to Michael C. Hall’s eerie intonation. Dexter spends his time faking a personality he can use to get by his job as a forensic police scientist and a husband, but as he himself will tell you, it’s all just hiding his “dark passenger” who is constantly itching to get out and kill. The only thing keeping Dexter on our side is his code of protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty set forth by his adopted father, a cop who saw Dexter’s impulses from an early age. Even when Dexter thinks he’s found an ally in his cause in the form of another dark killer, he always realizes that without this code, anyone would succumb to the dark passanger. Frankly, in terms of role models, I guess you can’t do much better than a sociopath who hunts the guilty.
Patrick Jane: The Mentalist is a procedural that seems like it’s going to be pretty run of the mill. A team of federal agents who work for the fictional California Bureau of Investigation solving high profile murders and kidnappings all over the great state of, well, California are aided by a former television psychic. The psychic, Patrick Jane, was using techniques of the mentalist trade to dupe audiences and convince them he could speak with the dead and read their minds. When a serial killer known as Red John showed up, Jane tried to curry ratings by “aiding” the investigations. Red John killed his family out of sport. Jane and the members of CBI take on the usual “case-of-the-week” and usually catch the bad guy, but the methods that Jane employs almost always break the rules of institution. Like House, he’ll do whatever is necessary to solve a case and he isn’t doing it for justice since like Dexter, Jane is also a borderline sociopath thanks to the death of his family. If the case happens to have anything to do with Red John? Then you’d better get out of his way. Instead of playing him in a dark brooding fashion, Simon Baker makes Jane charming, smirking rogue. An interesting choice that pulls off the sociopath angle very well.
Detective Vic Mackey: ”Mackey is Al Capone with a badge.” With these words, you get everything you need to know about the character that Michael Chiklis played for seven seasons on The Shield, a gritty cop show that was loosely based on the actions of the infamous LAPD Rampart squad. Mackey is an intense individual with a corrupted system of justice and morality that has him doing whatever it takes to enact justice while defending the interests of his family and partners. This includes stealing from street gangs, providing protection for mobsters, and even killing fellow cops who have turned informant. Mackey is a monster in the eyes of some, but the point to keep in mind is that he’ll also do whatever it takes to take down the worst of the worst in Los Angeles’ Farmington District. He may not seem like he has any scruples, but there are moments where Chiklis shows that the character has a code of honor and will break whatever laws stand in the way of him taking down those responsible for violating that code.
Jack Bauer: There are those that argue that Kiefer Sutherland’s protagonist from the hit action series, 24, is a shill for the Republican administration’s theories of “international relations” in terms of terrorists. For a majority of the seasons, this is hard to ignore what with any character who was an Arab incidentally turning out to be a villain and Bauer torturing everyone (including his own brother) in the pursuit of trying to stop a terrorist threat. Season 7 was, in my opinion, a great return to form for Bauer as he was forced to face the consequences of his actions and attempt to defend the nation against threats without resorting to old methods and old paranoia. While Bauer kills, detonates, interrogates and, yes, tortures his way through seven seasons of action, his results can’t be denied as he will sacrifice his own life and safety if it means innocents go free and bad guys get the shaft.
There aren’t “good guys” anymore fighting the forces of evil out there. They’re all anti-heroes, these days. Somewhere along the line the only way to make a character interesting was to inject a little bit of evil in them. You can’t argue the results haven’t been entertaining seeing as how these five characters have topped the charts in critics and viewers lists for years. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Television
Purchased on Wednesday: Tom Strong Deluxe Hardcover vol. 1, Showcase Presents: Warlord vol. 1, Secret Warriors vol. 1: Nick Fury Agent of Nothing HC, Salt Water Taffy vol. 3: Truth About Dr. True, Sleeper Season 2 TP
October 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Disclaimer: This is actually three weeks worth of books so that I can play catch up.
Tom Strong Deluxe Hardcover vol. 1: I own trade paperbacks in a variety of formats. There’s the standard trade format, digests, hardcovers, Absolute Editions (DC’s oversized slipcase collections of classics), etc. These formats range in quality from poor and flimsy (standard trades) to cumbersome and epic (Absolute Editions, but damn are they pretty) and that can make it hard to read them in a casual fashion. One format that has always stood out to me as practically perfect is the deluxe hardcover format that both Marvel and DC use for larger collections of classic works. Marvel did it with Runaways and Astonishing X-Men, for example and DC is doing it with Gotham Central and Grant Morrison’s JLA. This is why I’m glad I’ve waited so long to begin buying Tom Strong in collected editions: I just knew DC would find a great way to present the series for consumption. For those that haven’t read it, the series is Alan Moore’s take on the classic science heroes of pulp times like Doc Savage and Tom Swift with a bit of Tarzan thrown in for good measure. Moore takes these classic pulp icon tropes and updates them for the new millenium (Tom Strong’s hometown is even called Millenium City) and shows off some great art, amazing story-telling and endearing characters. Whether Tom is fighting his own rogue’s gallery of foes like the Modular Man or the Pangaen or traveling to distant worlds populated with a collection public domain superheroes from the 1940′s or having guest artists send him to the afterlife via a phantom autogyro, the series maintains a level of quality and charm throughout every chapter. Great collection of a great title.
Showcase Presents: Warlord vol. 1: Ok, I have a confession to make: I’m kinda a hypocrite with my proclamations regarding genre likes and dislikes. What I mean is that I can be known to swear up and down that I hate a particular type of material because I’ve never actually read anything in that genre that I liked before. Sword and Sorcery is one of those genres that I just can’t stand because I’ve never gotten into any of the material that people have told me was the creme de la creme of published works in that field. Lord of the Rings, for example, just didn’t do it for me. Neither did Conan the Barbarian. Hell, He-Man and Thundercats even left me cold. So you can imagine how red my face was when I discovered Mike Grell’s Warlord series from DC circa 1975. Now, in this case, what drew me to the book was the fact that it was Mike Grell working on it. I’m a huge fan of the man’s work including Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters and his own character, Jon Sable: Freelance. When I’d first read about Warlord in an old Who’s Who comic, nothing about it really intrigued me. It seemed like yet another “warrior against sorcerers and demons, etc” story and I didn’t go out of my way to find any issues. Then the Justice League Unlimited cartoon did an episode on this bygone character and suddenly, I was slightly interested. Lo and behold, after digging up a couple of freebie issues in a back issue been from the 70′s, I was hooked. Thank the reprint heavens that DC included this comic in their Showcase Presents series of black and white collections because it’s a great read. The book follows Travis Morgan, an SR-71 pilot and Vietnam war veteran, who accidently finds himself sent to the mystical land of Skartaris when his flight plan goes awry over the North Pole. Once he becomes familiar with the enchanted land, he learns that there is no one who will fight for the freedom of the besieged indiginous people and takes it upon himself to become their defender, thus earning the name Warlord. The book is packed with action, terrific art by Grell, and one of DC’s hopefully not forgotten characters. Currently, the company brought Warlord back for a new series written by Grell and drawn by Joe Prado. Once you’ve made it through this collection, go give that series a shot, too. Especially if you’re into this sword and sorcery stuff.
Secret Warriors vol. 1: Nick Fury Agent of Nothing HC: I love a good espionage comic. This is probably why I’ve been such a huge fan of Marvel’s classic super spy character, Nick Fury. The best part about Fury, to me, was that he wasn’t your usual dapper secret agent like Patrick McGoohan or Pierce Brosnan. No, Fury was a grizzled Word War II veteran who was still kicking ass in modern times with a cigar and a laser pistol. Fury’s charms came from his tough-as-nails nature and had little to do with the idea that this guy could be sly or sneaky. Imagine Kurt Russell doing a James Bond movie except he’s playing a character who’s a combination of his classic John Carpenter characters, Jack Burton (Big Trouble in Little China) and Snake Plisken (Escape from New York). Now for a long time Fury ran the largest espionage network in the Marvel universe, S.H.I.E.L.D. The acronymn has gone through many definitions. When last defined, it stood for Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage Logistics Directorate. Currently in the Marvel universe, S.H.I.E.L.D. has been shuttered and Nick Fury is on the outs with the federal government. After watching former supervillain, Norman Osborn (the original Green Goblin), put in charge of national security, Fury goes underground and assembles a team of young and inexperienced superhumans as his team of agents to perform missions that S.H.I.E.L.D. would have taken on had it still been in existence. Y’know, defending the world from the scum of the earth and such, since Osborn is really just making life safe for supervillains while he’s in charge. The series is written by Jonathan Hickman who is one of my personal favorite up and coming comic book creators. He’s had four books published through Image Comics, the first of which, Nightly News, is an amazing mixed media work showing off Hickman’s skills at characterization and suspense. Hickman brings those talents to writing this comic and it makes the twists and turns the plot takes work excellently alongside the expertly-rendered action scenes handed in by artist Stefano Caselli (Hack/Slash, Avengers: The Initiative). All in all, this is a great title filled with brand new characters (thus, you never know if they’ll survive the issue and genuine suspense is created!) and classic heroes and villains, side-by-side in the classic Marvel manner.
Salt Water Taffy vol. 3: Truth about Dr. True: There really aren’t that many comics for kids and adults. For a long time in comics, it was seriously either/or with very little that could be enjoyed by both sets of readers. Then writer/artist Matthew Loux showed up with Salt Water Taffy, his series of graphic novels from Oni Press. The series follows two young brothers, Jack and Benny, as they’re begrudgingly dragged to the New England coastal town, Chowder Bay for the summer. During their time there, Jack and Benny discover that there is a great deal of adventure to be had against the sleepy beach town. All of the volumes released so far are full of innocent and fun tales of taffy-stealing lobsters, hat-loving giant eagles, and, with the release of volume 3, ghosts with a mystery to solve. Loux’s art is fluid and dynamic while his story-telling style is both charming and well-paced. You never feel pandered to or patronized as an audience member mostly due to the fact that his art carries a very innocent and yet witty comic timing that can translate very well in sequence. It’s great to read a comic and then realize when I’ve finished it that I could pass it off to a friend’s kid and know that they’d enjoy it also.
Sleeper Season 2 TP: Ed Brubaker is one of the better writers working in the mainstream today. His Captain America is hailed as one of the best takes on the character to date and his run on Daredevil was one of my personal favorites. He can find the voice in any character and can add a genuine flavor of noir to the darker books he chooses to write. Sleeper, to me, was the best example of why Brubaker is an expert at his craft. The book takes place in the Wildstorm universe of comics which I’ve always felt peaked with Warren Ellis’s Authority series and has since been coasting on characters and concepts that need to come to a calm and satisfying conclusion. Within this world is an intelligence agency called I/O run by veteren spy, John Lynch. Lynch is a master puppeteer of espionage and had decided that the best way to take down a villain known as Tao, rising star in the world terrorism trade, was to send in Holden Carver, a deep cover operative armed with superpowers. In the mini-series, Point Blank (which can be picked up along with the two Sleeper trades), it’s revealed that Lynch was the only person who knew of Carver’s existence, but through the manipulations of Tao, Lynch is put in a coma and Carver is left in the cold to fend for himself. This is where the Sleeper series picks up. DC has made the wise decision to collect the series into two “seasons” (the story-telling is very similar to a television show) and has released them both as 12-issue trade paperbacks. The book’s art by master artist Sean Philips is dark, gritty, seeped in noir flavor and the writing is rife with twist after twist as we watch Carver try to get out of the mess that he has become stuck in while trying to serve the mission and his country. Sleeper is a great read for fans of Graham Greene-style spy novels and modern espionage comics.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Comics, Purchased on Wednesday, Reviews
Coming Attractions: Soloman Kane
October 2, 2009 · 1 Comment
First off, let me get this out of the way right away: No, this is not a remake or sequel or anything in relation to the craptacular flop from 2004, Van Helsing starring Hugh Jackman. As you’re watching this trailer, I want you to completely ignore every impulse you have to roll your eyes and go, “Dude, I saw this movie and it sucked except for Kate Beckinsale in a corset.” What you should keep in mind is that the character Soloman Kane has been around for as long as Conan the Barbarian (since they were both created by the legendary Robert E. Howard) as has been publsished in just as many forms. There have been books, comics, and even poetry chronicling the adventures of the dour, gloomy 16th century puritan warrior who battled the forces of darkness and the supernatural throughout Europe and Africa. Currently, the character has just enjoyed a brand new miniseries from Dark Horse comics and is having all of his earlier adventures that were published at Marvel during the 1970′s collected as well. The film stars James Purefoy (of HBO’s Rome) and I’m pretty excited to watch what should be a faithful adaptation of a classic pulp hero.
Synopsis: Armed with a rapier and flintlock pistols, Solomon Kane dresses in black, his pale face and cold eyes shadowed by a hat. He is a true rogue, blasting and slashing forward on a mission of pillage and plunder in war-torn North Africa in the late 1500s. When the devil lays claim to his hopelessly corrupt soul, Kane escapes only to face the sobering truth: in order to seek redemption, he must renounce his wicked ways and devote himself wholly to a pious life. His new-found piety is put to the test when he is forced to return to his murderous ways to save England from the grasp of evil.
Release date: TBA 2010
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Coming Attractions, Movies, Trailers
Like Kurosowa… But with Rabbits….
October 1, 2009 · Leave a Comment
I own a great many graphic novels. Some would argue too many. Awhile back, I dated a librarian so my books are now in some sort of library of congress set-up that she came up with when she helped me move. This means that there really is a method to the madness of the organization on the four shelves in my apartment. Some are Marvel, some are Oni, some are Dark Horse, etc. One shelf, though, contains its own dedicated area to a series that not a lot of people are familiar with: Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo. This classic series chronicles the adventures of Miyamoto Usagi, a wandering samurai (or ronin) who travels the countryside of ancient Japan performing his musha shugyo (warrior’s pilgrimage). Oh, and all of the characters are rendered as animals. I can say, without fail, that this is one of the best comics being published today and I happen to have five handy dandy reasons why you should be buying it.
1. 25 years and still going strong
Stan Sakai began publishing this book in 1984 with various anthologies until officially starting at Fantagraphics as the titles first home. The title then moved to Mirage Studios and finally settled in at Dark Horse Comics where it is still published today. Sakai has written and drawn every issue to date and has only built the level of quality that Usagi started with. It’s also constantly accessible. I personally started reading the series in trade paperback with book 8 and while I’ve gone back and read 1 through 7, it wasn’t hard to jump in and keep reading forward without feeling lost.
2. Cast of characters
The best part of the fact that the title has been going for so long is that the storylines have had time to develop one of the richest and most endearing cast of characters ever captured on paper. Even though versions of classic manga icons like Lone Wolf and Cub (in Usagi they’re referred to as Lone Goat and Kid) and Zato-Ino, the blind swordpig (in reference to the blind swordsman Zatoichi of Japanese film and television fame) to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crowd the pages, Usagi never feels like a parody since the characters are fully three-dimensional and written with respect. If the guest stars and pop culture-referenced characters are handled with that level of quality, then you can imagine what the rest of the cast is written like. There is no such thing as a throwaway guest star and Sakai never panders or insults his audience with simple personalities.
3. Based on actual events… kinda
Many of Sakai’s Usagi stories are based on actual Japanese history such as battles or political intrigue. Others are steeped in classic fairy tales and legends of the Japanese culture. Even when the original stories and continuity stretch through the book, Sakai’s dedication to authenticity has him citing facts and reference notes left and right in the glossary (yes, this comic even gets a glossary).
4. Kids can read it (and adults can love it)
The book never panders to the adults that read it, but at the same time it never becomes TOO adult that you couldn’t let your kids enjoy it also. In a day and age where super-villains rape and murder and Wolverine is the most popular super-hero on the shelves, a title that is universally appealing and safe is a rarity. Every issue is safe to hand off to a young kid without even needing to be sanitized and they’ll get to watch massive badass samurai battles with no gore. It’s like if Pixar made Seven Samurai.
5. One of the greatest comic book protagonists of all time. Yeah, f’real.
Miyamoto Usagi is a well-rounded, fully developed, and extremely memorable comic book character that stays with you from the moment you first meet him. Sakai writes him with a charm that helps you buy that one minute he can be lovable and caring and the next minute he can be a deadly warrior with a code of honor. This is handled not only in the writing, but also the art. The myriad of expressions that Sakai crafts show his skills as a master cartoonist and allows Usagi to come to life on the page making him memorable in appearence as well as personality.
I can’t recommend this series enough. I’ve been a fan from the moment I read my first issue of Usagi Yojimbo and every time I read a new trade paperback, I curse that I’ll have to wait another six months to grab the next few issues. One day, I know I’ll most likely break down and just start reading it monthly. Few comics can have that much versatility and maintain quality for so long with no end in sight of sliding off into the land of repetition and poor story-telling. We’re lucky to have Stan Sakai still working on one of the best comic book characters to ever be a guest star on a Ninja Turtles episode. More than that, we’re lucky to have Usagi Yojimbo when we need to be reminded just how great comics can be.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Comics
