Coming Back to Comic Books | Pinhead Presents Strange Adventures

As I outlined in my introduction to this semi-regular new feature, much as I love the comic book medium, its nature is such that - short a collection or an accumulation of monthlies, for instance, or some other thing I feel warrants discussion - there's not really enough meat about most single issues to justify full-blown reviews, a la the pieces you're seen on Conan and The Frost Giant's Daughter and Red Sonja: Blue so far.

But that isn't to say I can't have a bit of a burble about the comics I've been reading of late, before I forget all about them as I'm prone to, so today... today we're going to try a couple of quick hits.

How d'you like them apples? :)

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First up, so as to ease you strictly bookish sorts in all gentle-like, maybe a month or so ago Vertigo put out the first bumper-sized issue of Strange Adventures, an anthology featuring a fairly astonishing array of talent -- including none other than Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner Lauren Beukes, whose batty but brilliant Zoo City was among my highlights of last year. Now her contribution to Strange Adventures, "All the Pretty Ponies," didn't turn out to be my favourite of the nine short comics gathered together in these pages, but it's entertaining enough, and I think reminiscent of Beukes' thematic preoccupations.

The tale of a technology called MindRide, which essentially allows anyone with the credits to take a temporary time-share in another person's life, "All the Pretty Ponies" is a decidedly familiar fable about identity: about yuppies who want to get down and dirty with the poor, and poor people who would give anything - literally anything - to trade places with the upper-class asshats who rent out their minds to see and feel and smell how hard the other half have it. Beukes packs a lot of ideas into what is a very short space, in truth - Beukes' ambition is a credit to her - while artist Inaki Miranda bestows upon "All the Pretty Ponies" pencils so clean as to seem... oddly sterile.

More satisfying, I think, are the humbler, self-contained stories in Strange Adventures -- for instance the curious, heart-breaking beauty of "Ultra the Multi-Alien" by Jeff Lemire of Sweet Tooth fame (more on which in another instalment of CB2CB), and "Partners" by Peter Milligan, who I have fond memories of for his time on Human Target and Animal Man before that, and who invests in "Partners" - the bittersweet story of a friend like no other - an earnest, back-to-basics sensibility that really rang true with me.

On the other hand, I didn't find a lot to like about "Spaceman" by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, the creative team behind 100 Bullets. In fact I don't think there's really not a lot to it to like. If the pair mean to develop "Spaceman" into a series, which for some reason I'm under the impression they do, I'll say they've got their work cut out for them, turning this ugly thing into something people could actually care for.

Then again, I didn't appreciate 100 Bullets immediately, either, so perhaps the last story in Strange Adventures doesn't close out the anthology on such a down note after all. Even if it had, I'd still strenuously recommend that you hunt down a copy of this value-packed first issue. A couple of minor disappointments aside, it certainly makes for a stonking good start to a series I can only hope lasts longer than most such multiplicitous endeavours.

From a comic I have my fingers firmly crossed for, to another new series whose fate I feel almost totally apathetic about: from Boom! Studios, Clive Barker's Hellraiser. There've only been three issues to date, and one brief prelude which you can read for free here, yet already I feel like this is not an ongoing for me. First and foremost, I really, really, really don't like the artwork. Though I understand that there are some who would and will champion it, the work of former Hellblazer penciller Leonardo Manco reminds me a great deal of Barker's own paintings, and truth be told, I don't much appreciate those, either. Much as I can get behind the idea of such authenticity, in practice Manco's lurid dirty/filthy/nasty roughs leave me, alas, entirely unmoved.

Tim Bradstreet's covers, however, are incredible. Go on - embiggen that thing!

As to the tale itself, well... this might surprise you, but I'm actually a pretty devout fan of the Hellraiser franchise, not to mention the other work of Ser Clive Barker. I know the sequels got pretty terrible, particularly after the Hellraiser series went direct-to-DVD, but all the same, I had my modicum of repulsive fun with them, and that was alright. I even met Doug Bradley once, and that was alright too.

Anyway!

In and of itself, the premise of this comic book is interesting enough. It wisely disposes of the mythos beyond the second Hellraiser flick, Hellbound, and sets in motion two interconnected narratives. In the first, twenty years after the events of that film, Kirsty Cotton has become a bit of a crazy Cenobite obsessive. In fact she's gotten a whole gang of survivors together, and when someone tips them off as to the location of a certain Cenobite artefact, off they pop - but of course they do! Meanwhile, back at the hell-ranch, Pinhead seems to have tired of the myriad pleasures of forbidden flesh. He wants to be a man again; just a dude without a thousand needles stuck in his skull, you know? And that's not a lot to ask, is it? Sadly, the other Cenobites don't seem particularly pleased about Pinhead's surprising change of heart...

Particularly given Clive Barker's seal of approval and indeed input in the plot, I'm nominally interested in seeing where all this funny business is headed. Sure enough it's a novel direction for the comic to take, but I'm afraid that three-and-a-bit issues in, the execution (no pun intended) of Boom! Studios' Hellraiser ongoing leaves me quite, quite cold, all told.

So I'm not in. But I'm not out just yet either. What I'll do is hang about till the end of this first arc, at the least... see if Monfette and Manco's collaboration grows on me at all. I just can't say I'm holding out a hell of a lot of hope.

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That's it for this edition of Coming Back to Comic Books, everyone. The good and the bad, eh? Maybe next time we'll do the ugly, make it three for three!

Book Review: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /

IndieBound / The Book Depository

"Zinzi December has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit, and a talent for finding lost things. But when a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, she's forced to take on her least favourite kind of job - missing persons."

***

Who here remembers urban fantasy? Hands up.

No, no, no. Those of you waving your arms in the air at the thought of some forbidden affair between a tough female protagonist and a gentleman of the night, think again. Of late, there's been a largely regrettable insurgence of such fiction: a counter-culture of wish-fulfillment fiction bearing transparent elements of the fantastic and set against one urban environ or another has arisen - if only to be subsumed itself by the zeitgeist. Paranormal romance by any other name (the vast majority of which smells as sour as the likes of Laurell K. Hamilton and Stephanie Meyer have taught us to expect) has thoroughly co-opted urban fantasy in recent years, and the genre, as is, bears only a trifling resemblance to the mature and sophisticated fiction it once espoused. In short, an overabundance of Twilight wannabes and screeds of sexy vampires have given urban fantasy a bad name. With Zoo City, South African author Lauren Beukes is taking it back.

Meet Zinzi December. Animalled after murdering her own brother, Zinzi serves out her penance in a district of Johannesburg where "Zoos" such as she and sometime-significant other Benoit can live in relative peace, zoned off as they are from the rest of the world. With a Sloth slung over her shoulder, an externalisation of her fratricidal guilt and a constant reminder of her crime, life isn't easy for Zinzi. Against her better judgment, she works as a 419 scam artist in order to repay the staggering debt she has accumulated thanks to a past-tense drug addiction, making ends meet in the erstwhile by "finding lost things" with the supernatural talent she acquired as a by-product of being animalled. Only ever things, though - never people. But Zinzi's fallen on hard times. When one of her clients ends up mercilessly slaughtered and an opportunity to pay off her crippling debt once and for all arises, she puts her principles to the side and sets about her unusual charge: the rooting out of a missing Afropop starlet.

You simply wouldn't credit that Zoo City is only Lauren Beukes' second novel. She doesn't put a foot wrong for the duration. With endless verve and a cynical wit, she carries off a concept so audacious as to beggar belief, an inspired riff on the daemons of His Dark Materials which has humanity reevaluating its roots in the aftermath of the Zoo Plague, or AAF (Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism). "It's a fragile state - the world as we know it," Beukes warns us. "All it takes is one Afghan warlord to show up with a Penguin and a bulletproof vest, and everything science and religion thought they know goes right out of the window." Relevant and revelatory, the ghettoisation of the Zoos in the pockmarked and unrelentingly urban landscape of Johannesburg also recalls the quandary of the slumdog prawns of District 9, yet Beukes confers on the animalled of her novel a murky sense of depth Neill Bloemkamp could only imply.

The Zoos are tragic creatures, one and all; some hateful, others haunted - Zinzi most of all. A recovering journalist, as Beukes has it, and "master builder in the current affairs sympathy scam," Zinzi is an embittered anti-heroine living, as all Zoos do, in fear of the Undertow, an unknowable terror which suffuses the fringes of her existence. She has, of course, more immediate concerns, foremost amongst them the everyday dangers of life in a city bereft of (conventional) order. Singularly the most disturbing of all her encounters in Zoo City, short perhaps its truly gruesome dénouement, is with a gang of junkie tunnel rats who have stolen her phone. Zinzi has fallen so far, yet she still has her pride, and so she makes the mistake of confronting them. Realising her mistake, she runs; they tear through the sewers after her with a rusty, sharpened screwdriver and such unadulterated hate that we see it is the city, in as much as the Zoos, that she need fear.

Zinzi is not so easily dissuaded. She washes the stink of the sewer off her and immediately follows up on her next lead: could Songweza, the absent half of Afropop sensation iJusi, have taken up with a burly bouncer working the doors of Counter Revolutionary? Zinzi is a strong female protagonist in every sense; and she is strong in the face of violent crime, betrayal and a city that seems to want her dead - not just a bit downtrodden until she attracts the attention of a devilishly handsome werewolf, as in the mode of many so-called "urban fantasy" narratives. Her Sloth, meanwhile, is more than a glorified pet: it has its own personality, its own desires - often at odds with Zinzi's - and yet it is a part of her that she must come to terms with, however much she despises what Sloth recalls, for the Undertow comes for all those who are separated from their animal companions.

Zoo City is lean and mean urban fantasy in the best and most respectable sense of the thing. In Zinzi Beukes gives us a truly compelling character: strong, centered, flawed just so and brilliantly intertwined with her world. In the titular district of Johannesburg, the South African author offers up an environment so desperate and evocative it puts innumerable paint-by-numbers fantasylands to shame. Hard-bitten, deliciously vitriolic and utterly engaged, both with the city and what the city means to those who call it home - for want, one intimates, of anywhere else to - Zoo City is, in short, the best thing to happen to urban fantasy in years.

***

Zoo City

by Lauren Beukes

September 2010, Angry Robot

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /
IndieBound / The Book Depository

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