Coming Back to Comic Books | WTF, Batman RIP?

I came back to comic books - was it three, or four months ago? - for a number of reasons. Because I finally took the plunge and bought a tablet with a beautiful, backlit LCD screen that makes art on paper look bleached by comparison. Because with the much-ballyhooed about New 52 from DC in the middle distance, it seemed like as good a time as any. Because I'd never really meant to leave them behind in the first place, truth be told...

That said, there were things about the medium that I had been happy as Larry to be free of: foremost amongst them the publisher-wide tie-ins which only seem to have intensified in the time I took out... the desperate grasping attempts to get folks who want to read about Batman to buy Robin and Nightwing and Birds of Prey and The Outsiders to see a complete story told for instance. Disgusting practices, to my mind, which only serve to foreground the deficiencies - the disharmoniousness - of serial narrative in the comic book.

As such, Batman: R.I.P. has been a real test of my tolerance.

But I couldn't very well not read it, masterminded as it was by one of the most distinctive talents in the industry today: Grant Morrison, of The Invisibles and All-Star Superman renown, whose Arkham Asylum stands today as one of the definitive texts in the Batman canon. Never mind that I do dig me my The Dark Knight.

So. I started reading R.I.P. pretty much the moment I came back to comic books. It's taken me this long to get through it. Says a lot, doesn't it?

What happened was... I started reading the core storyline of R.I.P. - six issues of the monthly - and realised, not even a single in, that I hadn't the foggiest as to what was going on. So I went before Wikipedia, and Wikipedia said unto me, You fool! You must also read Batman and Son, The Resurrection of Ra's Al Ghul, and The Black Glove... only then will you understand! Maybe!

Well, of course. Grant Morrison does nothing by half measures, after all, and I'd been an eejit to think I could appreciate Batman: R.I.P. without some grasp of The Dark Knight's new status quo, not to mention the groundwork Mr Morrison had been laying all the while. So I went back. And back and back.

I won't bore you with the details of that belaboured introduction to the characters and the conflicts at the acid-high heart of R.I.P., except to say, as of that story, The Caped Crusader has a kid - the brat Damien Wayne, born of Bruce's dalliances with Talia Al'Ghul, the demon's daughter - and a new arch enemy in the shape of The Black Glove, a secret organisation of super-rich individuals intent on bringing down The Dark Knight. These three stories were tolerable enough, but not at all remarkable in the sense I'd been expecting... all melodrama and false jeopardy. Business as usual, basically.

Still I figured they'd resolve into something more, if not as things themselves then as parts of the whole; when their place in the grand design Grant Morrison went on and on about while writing R.I.P. was revealed. I know now that this was rather charitable of me.

When I finally caught up to the events of R.I.P., I found, not entirely to my surprise, that I still hadn't the slightest what was happening... but this time, I pushed through. This time I understood that it wasn't meant to make a lick of sense, because R.I.P. isn't, in fact, about the death of Batman - although in a manner of speaking Batman dies both before and after the events related in this arc, for whatever that's worth.

Rather, R.I.P. is about Batman losing it. It's about the inherent madness of what Batman does finally getting the better of Bruce Wayne. And no-one does madness better than the madman Morrison.

As a narrative, R.I.P. is an absurd, fractured, fearsome thing. Don't go into it expecting a quick fix: a breaking of the Bat a la Bane's five minutes of fame circa Knightfall. This is an elaborate deconstruction of heroism's very premise, by way of one man in and out of tights; an hallucinatory interrogation of the cost of living as Bruce Wayne has endeavoured to live, which is to say in two: split down the middle his entire adult life, and coming apart now (with a little help from his friends) at the seams.

Sadly, or happily, depending on your perspective - Grant Morrison certainly has his detractors - R.I.P. is neither the beginning nor the end of Batman's torturous undoing. Never mind what all comes before it - a mixed bag of overwrought nonsense juxtaposed with moments of marvelous clarity make these establishing arcs something of a zero sum equation - what happens after is as much as part of R.I.P. as the core storyline: from Last Rites to Final Crisis to The Battle for the Cowl and beyond.

Now on the one hand I'm impressed that DC had the sheer gall to follow through on the events of R.I.P. so resolutely; only now that they've hit reset via the New 52 is the fallout properly behind us... and I'm not completely convinced that there isn't more of Morrison's mad Batman to come. However, on the other: I've been longing for this story to come to a close for months. God knows how it must have felt for those poor souls buying the monthlies as and when they came out.

The Dark Knight is dead.

Long live The Dark Knight?

Well, I guess. Plenty good has come of R.I.P., assuredly, and plenty bad. So I guess we're basically back where we started... beginning again, but with Bruce Wayne's midlife crisis behind us, at last. I wouldn't say Grant Morrison's run on Batman was a long road to nowhere, exactly, but nor did I find the journey contained or restrained enough to reap much meaning from.

On the bright side, I had some fun, and at least now it's done. But whatever the pull of the core story - and there is a power to it (now you see it, now you don't) - I don't think I'd recommend R.I.P. to any but the most devoted Batman fans, or Grant Morrison admirers.

And new readers be warned: this vast event may be the exact opposite of an ideal jumping-on point. You can't go wrong with Frank Miller's wonderful Year One, or the aforementioned Arkham Asylum. With Batman: R.I.P, you can.

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? :)

***

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.

***

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!

Coming Back to Comic Books | The Coming of Conan

I've lost track of how many times folks have told me to give Robert E. Howard a shot. Why I haven't yet, it's hard to say.

Actually, no - I suppose it's not so hard. Just embarassing, in an odd sense: because I haven't read the Conan stories for the same reason I haven't read A Game of Thrones... for the same reason I haven't progressed any with The Malazan Book of the Fallen since reading and needless to say adoring Gardens of the Moon while on holiday a while back. Much as I would like to spend a week or a month or even a year catching up on all the classics and sagas I have every reason to believe I'd love... that moment when the postman comes, and in his sack he has an early copy of some new release I've been looking forward to -- that still excites me. Damn it all, I can hardly help myself. I'm practically powerless at the prospect of the new.

Maybe it's finally come time to admit I have a problem.

But not today! In fact, while we're talking about powerlessness, and problems - oh I do enjoy a good segue - what with my computer out for the count last week, and my opportunities to blog thus reduced, I finally read some Conan.

That is to say, some Conan... comic books.

Had you going for a minute there, didn't I? :)

In all seriousness, however hard it can be to square away enough time to read one dusty tome or another, the first collection of Dark Horse's revitalised Conan comic book has only redoubled my enthusiasm to dig out the original stories by Robert E. Howard, and dig in -- if only to see if I enjoy them half as much as I did The Frost Giant's Daughter and Other Stories.

For obvious reasons, I cannot speak to how faithful this series is to the canon of Conan, such as it is... though I am given to understand that this first ongoing at least - as opposed to the two which have succeeded it: Conan the Cimmerian and the current Road of Kings - takes the majority of its cues from Howard's work. Certainly a healthy amount of respect for the source material - indeed the source of the source material - is evidenced. All exposition, for instance, is rendered in typewriter-esque lettering, and one need look no further than the newspaper-style strips featured at the rearmost of each individual issue. The Adventures of Two-Gun Bob are insightful adaptations of episodes in the life and times of Robert E. Howard, rather than the low fantasy of his foremost creation.

But what of the comic proper?

Well, judging solely on the basis of The Frost Giant's Daughter and Other Stories, which for the larger part chronicles everyone's favourite Cimmerian's imprisonment in the creepy dream kingdom of Hyperborea... Conan is fracking fantastic!

Having trawled through the related Wikipedia pages since, I know that the only Robert E. Howard story retold in this first Dark Horse collection - though other details were lifted from here and fleshed out there - is the titular one; of the Frost Giant's alluring wee lass, and her habit of leading horny warriors into the maw of her monstrous father, like lambs to the slaughter. Conan is himself seduced by this wicked but beautiful creature -- though of course the beast at the end of the long journey she leads him on is surprised to find our once and future King more than a match.

Now the tall tale of "The Frost Giant's Daughter" is certainly a fine one, but I'll be honest: I didn't find it particularly representative of the finest this collection has to offer -- more a neat diversion on the red-brick road to Hyperboria. In fact, I couldn't tell when Howard's Conan ended and Kurt Busiek's began, and that's testament not only to my aforementioned ignorance, but also to Busiek's tremendous wordsmithing. Whatever my myriad other failings, I have read most (if not all) of Astro City, and I wouldn't have pegged that and this as the work of the same author in a million years, had I not known it to be the case.

Cary Nord, meanwhile, is as ideal an artist to give life to Conan and his kin - and all the lands they live and breathe in - as any I can think of. I hadn't come across his pencils before now, and though there's a loose quality to them I could live without, I'm be looking out for them from here on out. Together with Thomas Yeates on inking duty and a wash of gorgeous colours from Dave Stewart, Nord's art evinces a painterly quality utterly on-point, brilliantly capturing the fantastic landscapes of Cimmeria and its surrounds -- as well as Conan himself, and those unlucky souls whose path he crosses. Nord seems pretty much made for this book, all told.

It'll be a relief, I imagine, to hear the artists are also dab hands at action scenes. It's as well, I guess... but in truth, much of what I love about The Frost Giant's Daughter and Other Stories is that it is resolutely not - as I expected - just fight after fight after fight, with perhaps a breast here and there, or some gore, to break up all the swordplay.

There's heart to these tales, in the words and the art. Moreover, there's real character, and whether that's thanks to Robert E. Howard or the creative team behind Dark Horse's first Conan comic, I haven't the slightest. Nor am I much fussed exactly where Conan's essential spark comes from. It's here, in this series, and that's enough -- at least it is for this returning, and ever more-bolstered admirer of sequential art.

Saying that, I might just have to muscle in some quality time with my copy of The Complete Conan before delving into the second volume of this excellent series...

Coming Back to Comic Books | Red Sonja: Blue

If you've been reading Peter V. Brett's blog like a good fantasy fan, I expect you'll have heard more than enough about Red Sonja: Blue already - he's been talking about it since last April, after all - but bear with me: the story of how the author of The Painted Man and The Desert Spear made the leap from books to comics is actually pretty interesting.

And the resulting one-shot... well, it's pretty diverting too.

Originally intended to be a four-issue arc in the ongoing late last year, for some mysterious reason - publisher interference perhaps? - Brett's take on the one ginger warrior woman to rule them all was delayed, then disappeared, then condensed, eventually, into this single, supposedly "standalone" issue. All of which made me more than a little suspicious that there'd been fundamental problems behind the scenes.

Perhaps there were. Perhaps Dynamite were less than enthused that Brett meant to take Red Sonja out of her signature chain-mail bikini and drape something a little less demeaning around her ample bosoms. Because that's what Red Sonja: Blue is all about, truth be told: it's the story of how Conan's most attractive mate got herself a sweet new outfit.

And thank the lord for that, because - I'll be honest - the first half of Red Sonja: Blue was nearly enough to put me off the second. Assuredly, I have not come back to comic books in order to look at nearly nekkid ladies defy gravity above and below the belt.

Evidently Brett shares my concern, since in short order he has Red Sonja out with the old in favour of something new... not to mentioned borrowed, and blue. With her mighty endowments safely ensconced in a second-hand monster pelt, Brett even goes so far as to take a time out in order to suggest a neat rationale for her previous scanty cladding.

Thereafter, Red Sonja: Blue is business as usual. And that's no ill thing. Brett's love for the form is very much in evidence in this, his first comic book bow - though you wouldn't know it to read it. He doesn't, for instance, make that classic crossover novelist mistake of overloading panel after panel with exposition more suited to a book. Red Sonja: Blue talks the talk and walks the walk; it looks and reads and feels like a Red Sonja comic. And for what it is, it's pretty impressive.

Which is to say, standard heroic fantasy, cleavage meets cleaver: Red Sonja fights some monsters then takes a moment to bemoan her oath to never love a man unless he can best her in mortal combat, which of course no-one can.

And then it ends. Alas, it ends - just as Brett, having proved himself good and capable of scripting a solid sword and sorcery comic book, seems set to spread his wings, and let loose the dogs of The Demon Cycle. Shame, that.

I wouldn't have looked twice at Red Sonja: Blue were it not for Peter V. Brett's name on the title page, and in truth I wasn't immediately taken by it either - for one thing Walter Geovani's art, though perfectly competent, stresses all the wrong aspects of this brave new take on the character - but at the end of the day Brett demonstrates himself as sharp and witty a comic book writer as he is a novelist. And given the troubles this would-be four issue arc has had to overcome in the year it's been on the drawing board just to make it onto store shelves, that's really something.

Welcome to comic books, Peter V. Brett. I hope you stay a while.

***

By way of a brief postscript, I wanted to draw your attention to what could very well be the most offensive and/or hilarious (delete as appropriate) single panel I've seen since coming back to comic books:

Right?

A sequence made doubly ridiculous/brilliant because at the time of this writing I'd just seen an episode of South Park in which the art of queefing was once again discussed.

I'm sorry. I've really brought the tone down, haven't I? :P

Coming Back to Comic Books | An Introduction

I used to read a lot of comics. I mean, a lot. The local comic book store guy would pull a precarious stack of singles from the racks for me every week, and every Thursday, without fail, I'd find myself practically penniless till the gods of pocket money - remember them? - next heard my prayers.

Then I grew up.

I hate to say it - I really, truly do - but I did. I got older; I got busier. I went to Uni; got a job; met the woman I aim to spend the rest of my life with, if she'll have me - not necessarily in that order. There are hundreds of things I could point to by way of explanation for my decision to leave behind a medium I'd held very dear. How I wish there was a single one that I could point to and say, "Of course! That's why I stopped reading comic books!"

But there's not. It just... kinda... happened.

I didn't go cold turkey, not quite. I read Lucifer and Y The Last Man through to the bitter end. I kept up with Fables for a while longer than anything else, and when everyone started exploding over The Walking Dead, I invested in the first few trades. There have been other odds and sods since, but not many, and less of them with every passing year.

But I never fell out of love with the medium completely. Though before this it'd been much too long since I devoured an issue of this or that ongoing, in all that time I'd have gladly mounted an argument in favour of comic books as an art form, and an equally viable means of mature storytelling as any novel or splodge of colour on a canvas - if someone had only asked.

Anyway, to make a long story less long, a little while ago I got myself a tablet, and quickly discovered the wonders of reading gloriously backlit graphic novels on my eee Pad Transformer. Marvel were (and still are) offering a free month's subscription to their Unlimited digital comics service, and though Marvel comics were never my particular poison, it was enough, in short, to get me to give a shit again. Since then, I've heaved the dusty longboxes out of storage... reread a few former favourites... I've even been back to the comic store! My old haunts are all gone, alas, but in their place others have risen - others, and the internet.


With which, the scene was set. I couldn't not blog about my experiences, now could I?


Coming Back to Comic Books is going to be a chronicle of my return journey into a medium much overlooked, and by me these past few years as much as anyone else. Going forward I mean to treat those comics I read with every inch of the respect I'd pay a given book, or movie.


Not to immediately contradict which statement, I have to admit that I don't know that there's enough meat in many single issues to justify individual reviews, but going forward, expect quick hits on anything and everything I read on a semi-regular basis, either grouped a couple at a time or covered 1:1 when the occasion calls for special treatment.

We're going to go in gently - as much for my own benefit as anyone else's - but already I've a backlog of comic books to talk about, and I'm rearing to get this show on the road before it gets as scary as my tower of regular books to be read.


Man oh man, what a lot of catching up I've got to do...


That is to say, man oh man, what a lot of catching up I've got to do! :D


Just to whet your appetite, over the next couple of weeks we're going to be talking about The Walking Dead - but of course we are! - as well as Batman: Hush, which I only just now read, and a couple of comics featuring scripts by writers we should all be familiar with, namely Strange Adventures, wherein Zoo City author Lauren Beukes makes her mark on a new medium, and Peter V. Brett's much ballyhooed-about Red Sonja: Blue, which I might as well tell you now would be better known as The Book of Breasts.


Exciting, right? And no, I don't just mean that last.